The Boleyns (10 page)

It would be difficult to say who was the more angry: Henry, whose expectations had been so cruelly abused, Anne, who was again cheated of her expectation, or Cardinal Wolsey who had been deliberately deceived by his colleague and was now left to face the wrath of the King and the Boleyns without any visible means of support. Wolsey was notoriously the first victim, because the weakness of his position was that he had always been exclusively dependant upon the King. Unpopular in the country at large, he had been actively hated by the leading nobles on the grounds that he had usurped their confidential relationship with their monarch. This had been the theme of John Skelton’s attacks several years before, when he had been in the pay of the Duke of Norfolk, and it was revisited now.
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They had thought that they had him in the summer of 1527, when the King’s confidence was visibly slipping, but he recovered because he seemed to offer the only realistic prospect of getting an annulment through the Rota. Now that hope was gone and Anne, who had hitherto maintained amicable relations with the Cardinal, turned against him. The failure of the Legatine court was the principal reason for this, but it was not the only one. Preoccupied with the King’s Great Matter, Wolsey had failed to take the Franco-Imperial peace negotiations going on at Cambrai seriously, so that England, although technically a belligerent, was not represented at the conference table. Too late he realised his mistake, and rushed a delegation out, which arrived in time to sign the ‘Ladies Peace’ on 5 August, but not to make any input into its content. England’s interests were effectively ignored, and the diplomatic backing which had been guaranteed by the continuing war, now seemed likely to be withdrawn.
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When the Cardinals arrived at court on 19 September for Campeggio to take his leave, Henry dismissed them briefly and then went off hunting with Anne. Two days later, Wolsey was commanded to hand over the Great Seal, and on 9 October
praemunire
charges were filed against him. He confessed and was pardoned, but rehabilitation was still a long way off.

Lord Rochford’s role in these proceedings is unrecorded, except that he was a member of that aristocratic group in the council, headed by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, that was most opposed to the Cardinal. His son George was sent in embassy to France on 8 October as replacement for Sir Francis Bryan, and that is probably an indication of his continuing influence within that group.
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On 8 December, perhaps to demonstrate that all was well with the machinery of State in spite of Wolsey’s abrupt departure, Henry promoted a new batch of peers; George Lord Hastings became Earl of Huntingdon, Robert Ratcliffe, Viscount Fitzwalter became Earl of Sussex, and Viscount Rochford became Earl of Wiltshire and of Ormond. The creations took place, perhaps symbolically at Wolsey’s former residence of York Place, now in the King’s hands, with rituals similar to those which had accompanied the elevation of Henry Fitzroy in 1525. Significantly, these were all ‘new men’, without peerage ancestry, promoted exclusively for services to Henry VIII, and they were political allies.
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The elevation of Rochford to the earldom of Ormond was particularly significant, representing as it did the end of a protracted legal and political argument. Sir Piers Butler had been defeated, and was constrained to accept the earldom of Ossory in lieu. However, it was no bad deal for him, and it is unlikely that he regretted losing patience over the marriage negotiations. This group of new peers also constituted what might loosely be described as the ‘Boleyn party’ within the council, who had recently worked with the two dukes against the Cardinal. The following month, when the King decided to translate Cuthbert Tunstall from the see of London to the distant posting of Durham, he handed the Privy Seal to the new Earl of Wiltshire. For the first time Thomas Boleyn was a senior officer of state, and a member of the inner ring of the council.
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Meanwhile, in spite of his disappointment, Henry had not given up on his search for an annulment, and pressed by an increasingly frustrated Anne, decided to try some new initiatives. One of these was to take advantage of the anti-clerical mood of the House of Commons to pass acts against probate and mortuary fees, and another was to canvass the theological opinions of the universities. This latter was originally suggested by an obscure Cambridge don named Thomas Cranmer, in conversation with his old friend Stephen Gardiner (the King’s secretary) during a visit by the court to Waltham Abbey during the late summer of 1529.
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On being told of this conversation, Henry was interested, and summoned Cranmer to court for consultations, at the end of which he instructed him to write down his suggestions in the form of a treatise. To facilitate this process, he referred him to the household of the Earl of Wiltshire, where he was instructed to take up residence. Years later he was accused of having been a Boleyn chaplain at this time, either to Anne or to her father, but this seems to be a misunderstanding based upon his having lived for several months in the Earl’s house.
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The treatise (which does not survive) clearly pleased the King when it was written, and Cranmer was added to the team of advisers desperately seeking a way out of the impasse which continued diplomatic failure in Rome had created. At some time in 1530 he joined with his fellows Nicholas del Burgo and Edward Fox in drawing up a
consulta
for the King, usually known as the
collectanea satis copiosa
, which argued, among other things, that the King was entitled to seek a solution within his own realm, using the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
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This idea appealed to the King, but he was not yet ready for its more radical implications. Consequently his envoys in Rome were instructed to look for evidence that the ancient customs of England exempted her king from all but the doctrinal authority of Rome. Of course they found none, and this way ahead turned out to be a blind alley. Meanwhile, Henry was advancing his cause in various indirect ways. Emissaries were sent out to collect the opinions of the theological faculties, and in May of 1530 the King summoned a conference of bishops and university representatives to St Edward’s chapel at Westminster. To this council he presented various English theological works, including Tyndale’s New Testament, inviting their condemnation, and lectured the assembled clergy on their preaching responsibilities.
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This was a grey area in which princes had operated before, but he was also feeling his way towards some kind of ecclesiastical authority. A proclamation issued on 22 June condemned certain named works as heretical and forbade their circulation, which was an infringement of the prerogatives of the Church as those had previously been understood.
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By mid- 1530 a total of eight universities, including Paris and Bologna, had registered favourable opinions of the King’s cause, but the objective of all this activity remained unclear. It seems that at this stage Henry was mainly concerned to apply additional pressure to Clement, rather than to strike out on his own.

Embassies continued to be sent to plead and cajole. George, Lord Rochford, Anne’s brother, attended the meeting of Clement and Charles at Bologna early in the year, at which Charles was belatedly crowned as Holy Roman Emperor. This was ostensibly a mission to congratulate the Emperor, but was in fact aimed mainly at the Pope. A further mission was sent in March, led by the Earl of Wiltshire in person, or, as he was disparagingly described ‘the father of the king’s sweetheart’, the purpose of which was to declare that the King would insist upon an annulment, and that his patience was almost exhausted.
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Absence in Italy explains the fact that when Henry called upon his council and other dignitaries to sign a final plea to the Pope for a swift and favourable judgement, Wiltshire’s signature is missing. It was not until August that he returned from his fruitless embassy. The employment of the Earl in this fashion, which was not the most tactful of gestures, was almost certainly due to the urgings of Anne herself, whose will was ‘law to the king’, according to an Italian account of the following year.
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1531 was a year of Boleyn ascendancy, but it brought the King no nearer to a solution of his problem. In June, Thomas was receiving letters directly from the English ambassador in Spain, presumably on the grounds that he was ‘most in credit’ with the King, and in October he was granted certain lands in Kent, lately belonging to the Duke of Buckingham. These were given to himself and his heirs, with the curious proviso that if he failed of heirs male, the property was to go to his daughter Anne, again signalling the real reason behind the favour. In November a Venetian report of the councillors most influential with the King listed the Earl third after the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk. The same list also includes Stephen Gardiner, the King’s secretary, and Thomas Cromwell.
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Cromwell had been recruited from the service of Cardinal Wolsey at some point before the latter’s death in November 1530, and had risen rapidly in Henry’s confidence thereafter. Seeing the way ahead more clearly than his master, he was closely allied with the Boleyns at this juncture, and was adding his voice to theirs in urging the King to take the law into his own hands.

As we have seen, the Earl of Ossory had given up his claim to the Ormond title in Ireland in 1529, but there was clearly still some legal dispute on going, perhaps raised by one of Ossory’s Irish clients. At some stage in 1531 a challenge was mounted which required a search through the records of the Court of Common Pleas and the Petty Bag Office. There is no trace of this coming to judgement, if it was ever sued, but the expenses of the search were paid by the Crown, which indicates that it was the propriety of the King’s action which was being called in question.
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As far as we know, Thomas was not called upon to defend his position. Meanwhile, as Lord Privy Seal, the Earl was named to the majority of Commissions of the Peace in England, although it is unlikely that he sat on any of them, and at New Year 1532 the entire family received gifts from the King; not only Anne and Wiltshire, but George, Lord Rochford, his wife Jane and his sister Mary. As 1532 advanced the Boleyn/Cromwell ascendancy was expressed in a series of tracts arguing that the papal jurisdiction was a human artefact, and its claims usurped. The time had come for a long-overdue restoration of a true Christian polity in England.
The Determinations of the moste famous and mooste excellent universities of Italy and France
had appeared in 1531, initiating this wave of propaganda. There followed in the summer of 1532
The Glasse of the Truthe
, and other works, confirming that the ancient councils of the Church, starting with Nicea, had all decreed that causes should be adjudged by the metropolitan of their province of origin.
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In other words the issue of the King’s marriage should be settled by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and any appeal beyond him was
ultra vires
. As far back as Michaelmas 1530 a select group of prelates had been charged with
praemunire
, basically for accepting Wolsey’s legatine jurisdiction, which the King, of course, had approved at the time. The selection included most of Catherine’s known friends, such as John Fisher, and seems to have been chosen for their obstructiveness to the King’s purposes. In other words it was another expression of the Boleyn ascendancy. The charges were not proceeded with, not because of any softening in Henry’s attitude, but because he was persuaded, probably by Cromwell, that such a piecemeal approach made no sense. Either the whole clerical estate was guilty, or no one was. As a result both Convocations were charged with the same offence, and towards the end of January 1531 they submitted to the King.
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The charges were dropped, a whacking fines accepted – £100,000 in the case of the Southern province – and the submission was subsequently confirmed by statute. It looks as though Henry at this stage was treating the English Church as a hostage for papal compliance, but that is probably too simple a way of interpreting the complex signals which he was sending out. In the summer of 1531 he finally dismissed Catherine from the court, and that surely reflects another step in the painful evolution of his thinking.
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By the summer of 1532 he was almost prepared to grasp the nettle. Unfortunately, the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, was being uncooperative, and Henry was not yet sure enough of his ground to order him to act. Consequently it was the death of Warham in August which provided the final incentive to turn words into deeds. As late as March, the Earl of Wiltshire had spoken in the House of Lords in support of the ecclesiastical autonomy, which he would hardly have ventured to do without the King’s consent, yet only weeks later the ‘Supplication against the ordinaries’ was received, and Sir Thomas More resigned the Great Seal.
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Perhaps the Boleyn party was trying to mend fences, but it seems a little late in day for that, and the Earl’s intervention, supposing Chapuys’s report to be accurate, remains something of a mystery. Probably Henry was speaking with forked tongue, hoping even at this late stage, to extract the concession which he so much needed.