Game of Queens (30 page)

The plans meant that Marguerite of Navarre had to make a difficult diplomatic decision. The French queen, Eleanor, Katherine of Aragon's niece, never wished nor was expected to attend. But at the last minute, Marguerite too withdrew. She may have been ill – the diplomatic excuse – or she may, as one report said, have come to see Anne not as a fellow reformer but as a figure of scandal. The decision may not have been wholly her own: although French reforming thinkers believed their country should stand with Henry and Anne, there was a strong and divisive counter-opinion.

Chapuys reported to Charles V that Henry VIII was ‘vexed that Madame d'Alençon will not come' and that François instead suggested bringing another lady, who might be accompanied by some of the more disreputable elements of the French court. ‘These people [Anne and Henry] cannot see the mountains in their own eyes and wish to take the straw from the eyes of others', added Chapuys acidly.
¹

Perhaps, in the last resort, Marguerite of Navarre was more of a royal than a reformer. It was a pity, Anne recalled looking back two years later: ‘there was no one thing which her grace so much desired . . . as the want of the said queen of Navarre's company, with whom to have conference, for more causes than were meet to be expressed, her grace is most desirous.' As queen, Anne would not forget her goal of contact with Marguerite of Navarre; would send word to Marguerite herself that ‘her greatest wish, next to having a son, was to see you again'.

When October came Anne Boleyn was greeted in Calais with every sign of pleasure (and a very valuable diamond) when François and the men of the French court visited from Boulogne, where the bulk of the encounters between the two kings had taken place. She had, after all, known these men a decade earlier. And it was almost certainly either at that meeting in Calais or on the way home, forced by a massive storm to dawdle for days after the formalities had ended, that Anne and Henry VIII started sleeping together. It was perhaps Anne's throw of the dice; a pregnancy would force an end to all delays.

Anne was indeed pregnant by the time she and Henry married, at the end of January 1533, in a secret ceremony. In February Anne, surely intentionally, let the cat out of the bag with a public joke about her great longing to eat apples; a fancy for a particular food being known as a sign of impending maternity. By end of the month Chapuys was spreading the news. Katherine of Aragon was informed that she was no longer to be addressed as queen and her state and income were to be greatly reduced. That Easter, Anne was prayed for as queen. In the Netherlands there was a rumour that the emperor, with certain English nobles, would go to war for Katherine; would ‘assist her from field to field . . . with her crown upon her head'. But short of that, there was nothing anyone could do.

The old Archbishop of Canterbury had died the year before, and on 30 March Thomas Cranmer was consecrated in his place. In April, the Act in Restraint of Appeals forbad appeals to Rome on any matter, which meant Katherine's fate was now entirely in Henry's hands. On 23 May, Cranmer used his new power to declare Henry's marriage to Katherine of Aragon void and five days later, to validate that of Henry and Anne Boleyn.

On 1 June Cranmer was able to crown Anne in a deliberately resplendent public ceremony. The official entry of a queen into her city was supposed to reflect the assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven, and this one did. The new emphasis on classical, as well as biblical mythology, however, may have been something Anne had gleaned from the French court. Anne was dressed in the French fashion, and in white, for the procession to Westminster Abbey; a procession headed by the French ambassador's servants, in blue velvet and white plumes. The report Chapuys sent to the Netherlands declared that the crowd had withheld any sign of pleasure. But the crown of St Edward, hitherto used only for monarchs, was placed on her head.

‘Queen Anne, when thou shalt bear a new son of the King's blood; there shall be a golden world unto thy people!' the pageants at the coronation declared and both parents seemed confident in the prophecy. But when Anne's child was born on 7 September, at three o'clock in the afternoon, it was, disappointingly, a daughter, who was nevertheless named Elizabeth after the king's mother (and Anne's).

The official line was that the birth of a healthy daughter was surely a pledge that a healthy son would follow. Although the tournament planned for the arrival of a prince was cancelled, the pre-written letters of announcement were sent out with ‘prince' altered to ‘princes'[s], and the French ambassador was once again guest of honour at the splendid christening.

 

If Anne Boleyn's baby had been a boy, her position would have been unassailable; she would have won. With only a daughter in the cradle, everything was still to play for.

A daughter was certainly enough to ensure Anne's unremitting hostility to that other mother and daughter who might stand in her, and Elizabeth's, way. She sent orders not only that Katherine of Aragon's daughter Mary should come to attend on her daughter Elizabeth, when the baby heiress was given her own household, but that if Mary should insist on being called princess, Elizabeth's attendants were to box her ears ‘as the cursed bastard that she was'.

No doubt her aggression sprang in part from fear. ‘She is my death, and I am hers', Anne is reported to have said. On several occasions Anne made conciliatory gestures towards Mary, which would always be rejected; an attitude very actively endorsed by Katherine of Aragon. Perhaps Henry, and Anne, were right when they were both separately, credited with attributing Mary's obstinacy to her ‘unbridled Spanish blood'.

On 23rd March 1534, ironically the very day that the pope tardily declared in Katherine's favour, parliament passed the first Act of Succession, declaring Anne Boleyn Henry's lawful wife and their children the heirs to the throne. Everyone of consequence was asked to swear to it. Princess Mary had been bastardised, and mother and daughter knew that Mary would be asked to renounce her title.

‘Daughter, I heard such tidings today that I do perceive, if it be true, the time is come that Almighty God will prove you; and I am very glad of it', Katherine of Aragon wrote, in terms that reflect her belief their very lives might be in jeopardy. ‘If any pangs come to you, shrive yourself; first make you clean; take heed of His commandments, and keep them as near as He will give you grace to do, for then you are sure armed . . . we never come unto the kingdom of Heaven but by troubles.'

That November the Act Respecting the Oath to the Succession required swearers ‘to be true to Queen Anne, and to believe and take her for the lawful wife of the King and rightful Queen of England, and utterly to think the Lady Mary daughter to the King by Queen Katherine a bastard, and thus to do without any scrupulosity of conscience'. It also required that they abjure any ‘foreign authority or potentate'.

At the end of the year Henry opened parliament to pass the Act of Supremacy, declaring that Henry VIII was and always had been ‘the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England'. Henry, and Cromwell, were determined to crush any opposition but Anne has certainly got much of the blame.

For a woman to be the scapegoat was perhaps the reverse side of a queen's traditional intercessory function; the same distancing of responsibility from the monarch that had allowed Margaret of Austria and Louise of Savoy to make peace more easily than their men. But in June 1534 Chapuys reported fears that if Henry went abroad Anne swore – were she left in authority during his absence – she would have Mary's life.

The interesting thing is that Anne Boleyn assumed she would be given these regent's powers; that she would follow in the footsteps not only of Katherine of Aragon, but of the great and potent European women she had known.

24

‘inclined towards the Gospel'

France, the Netherlands, 1533–1536

Across the English Channel, as in England, religious divisions had hardened in the year or so that followed the deaths of Margaret of Austria and Louise of Savoy. In France, when Gerard Roussel, chaplain to the king's sister, Marguerite of Navarre, preached a Lenten sermon at the Louvre he became an overnight star, to the fury of the Catholic conservatives. But Roussel (as the French-born reformer John Calvin angrily wrote to him) was, like his patroness, treading an impossibly fine line between evangelical ideas and continued loyalty to the Catholic church.

As both sides carried placards through the streets, moderates blamed the University of Paris for the hysteria of their response, while conservatives spoke of Lutheranism and accused Marguerite and her husband Henri of Navarre alongside Roussel. King François intervened but Roussel was arrested. Marguerite had to rush to his defence, eventually finding him a bishopric safely within her husband's territories. Nothing Roussel had said was heresy, she protested. How could it be? He was in her service and she would never have listened to ‘such poison'.

When Marguerite of Navarre was viciously mocked in a farce at the university, François took the insult on himself. When, in February 1534, an orator accused her of being the spokeswoman for the reformers, François demanded the speaker's imprisonment. Marguerite's first instinct was not to sound the retreat; instead, she pressed for a political alliance against the emperor with the German princes, Protestant as well as Catholic, and attempted to bring to France the scholar Philip Melanchthon, Luther's close associate. But the French court was splitting along religious lines.

One unlikely recruit to the reformist faction was a new arrival in France; the pope's young niece, Catherine de Medici. In the autumn of 1533, escorted by the Duke of Albany (who was married to her mother's sister), Catherine arrived in Marseille to marry François I's second son, Henri.

An entire district of the city was blown up to make way for the accommodation of her retinue and that of the pope, her uncle. Catherine brought with her a staggering wardrobe and an unparalleled array of jewels, as well as Marie the Moor and Agnes and Margaret the Turks, captured ‘in expeditions against the Barbary'. For the marriage ceremony, she wore gold brocade and violet velvet, trimmed with ermine and thick with gems; a handsome enough figure despite her strong features and protruding eyes. ‘She is a beautiful woman when her face is veiled,' said a courtier later, ungallantly.

The holiday atmosphere of this seaside wedding reputedly had a loosening effect on the already lax morals of the French court but Catherine de Medici and her spouse Henri must have found the wedding night an ordeal: François insisted on remaining in the nuptial room and afterwards (Brantôme writes) declared that both the fourteen year olds had performed well in ‘the joust'.

Catherine received a more understanding welcome from Marguerite of Navarre, but her early years at the French court were difficult. When in September 1534 her uncle the pope died, the value of the Medici alliance plummeted, causing François to complain in horror, when the new pope refused to pass on Catherine's promised dowry, that his son's bride had come ‘
toute nue
' (stark naked). All too obviously uninteresting to her youthful husband, she was sneered at by the French courtiers as the descendant of merchants.

Marguerite of Navarre's position, too, was becoming ever more challenging. October 1534 saw the ‘Placard Affair', when the inhabitants of Paris and a handful of other cities woke up to find placards nailed in the streets attacking ‘the horrible, great, and insufferable abuse of the papal Mass'. Legend says there was even one affixed to the king's bedroom door. When the reformers (or, as Marguerite later swore, conservatives trying to discredit them) began insulting even the sacraments, it was war. Amid widespread panic, a special commission was set up to try suspects, and when in January 1535 the protesters managed the dissemination of a radical tract, the authorities clamped down yet further. Marguerite, perhaps wisely, had by this time withdrawn to her husband's estates in Béarn, and though she clearly distanced herself from those behind the ‘
vilains placards
', her closeness to her brother seemed, in the years ahead, to go into slight eclipse.

The publication of ‘Lutheran' texts was banned, although many of the dissidents now followed not Luther's teachings but those of the far more radical Swiss, Ulrich Zwingli.
¹
Many of Marguerite of Navarre's former associates found it prudent to flee abroad. Those who harboured heretics were to be punished as severely as they. One who suffered the ultimate penalty, burning at the stake, was the man who had published the second edition of Marguerite's
Miroir
. The book had attracted hostility from the University of Paris, although when it was briefly placed on the list of banned books, François once again intervened.

In July 1535 François ordered an end to the persecution, and the release of all religious prisoners (who had, however, only six months' grace in which to renounce their views). He and his sister were soon back together again, and united in trying for Marguerite's old dream, an alliance with the German princes against the emperor. At the start of 1536, when the pope (still in pursuit of that Christian alliance against the Turk) organised peace talks – which ultimately failed – between François and Charles V, Marguerite attended as France's representative.
²