Tudor Queens of England (23 page)

Catherine had now become a cause but she was not a leader and her supporters were at a loss. They could not complain of evil counsel because the policy was obviously the King’s and they had no desire to depose Henry because there was no plausible alternative. They could (and did) endlessly remonstrate with him and urge him to change his mind, but he could afford to ignore such representations. In July, Catherine was formally deprived of her title and told the delegation of peers that was sent to urge her to submit that she would do no such thing because her conscience took priority over all earthly considerations.

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That position she was not to change but she had effectively been shunted into a siding. Anne (and her family) had won, but it remained to be seen what use they could make of their victory. On 7 September she was delivered of a daughter and although this was in a sense a disappointment, the omens were good. She had conceived promptly, had an easy labour and the child was healthy and perfectly formed. The Christening, which took place in the Church of the Observant Friars at Greenwich on 10

September was another political demonstration. Many of Catherine’s friends were pressed into services that they would no doubt have preferred to avoid. The Marchioness of Exeter stood Godmother, whereas the Marquis bore the taper; and Lord Hussey helped to carry the canopy. Cranmer was the Godfather and the ceremony was dominated by the Boleyns and the Howards, but no one

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was allowed to stand apart from this celebration of the King’s new heir. The Parliament, which met early in 1534, duly placed its seal of approval on these proceedings. The submission of the clergy to the royal supremacy was confi rmed; annates and applications for dispensations were no longer to go to Rome and it became high treason to deny the validity of the King’s second marriage. A second session, later in the year, fi nally abrogated all papal claims in England.

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It could be argued that it was Thomas Cromwell rather than Anne who emerged as the victor from these political battles and that the Queen was a mere pretext or catalyst. However, that would be to underestimate her power. Of course her whole position depended upon the establishment of the royal supremacy but it was the King’s will that counted in these matters, not Cromwell’s, and her opportunities for access were absolutely unique. Anne later acquired the reputation of being an early Protestant, and a patron of reformers such as John Frith and Robert Barnes. John Foxe saw her in that light and so did George Wyatt (Sir Thomas’s grandson) who, writing in the 1590s, spoke of the ‘thrice excellent Queen Anne Boleyn’, whom he saw as a key promoter of the ‘blessed splendour of the gospel beginning then to shew her golden lustre upon our world’.

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She is supposed to have shown Henry a copy of Tyndale’s
Obedience of a Christian Man
, which elicited the response that this was a book for all king’s to read, and Mathew Parker was one of her chaplains. The ‘evangelicals’ as they were called, were Henry’s natural allies against the Pope, and that was probably the main reason why Anne patronized them. Her position might have been one of conviction but it might equally have been calculated. The fact that she was clearly not a Lutheran suggests that she was matching her religious position carefully to the King’s and there is no indication that she was ever reluctant to attend mass or any of the other religious ceremonies in which Henry took part. It must be remembered in this context that despite his break with Rome, the King continued to see himself as an orthodox Catholic prince, so his wife could not have afforded to disturb that conviction. There is no doubt that evangelical preachers and writers looked to her for promotion and support, or that her infl uence in that direction was effective, but she never stepped outside the parameters that Henry laid down. It was her enemies who tried to claim that she was a heretic.

Chapuys, who never ceased to describe her as ‘the concubine’, also blamed her for the sufferings of the Lady Mary but in that respect, too, he may have exaggerated. Henry had at fi rst been inclined to be indulgent towards his daughter and when Catherine was provided with a diminished but still honourable household as Princess Dowager, he prepared to do the same for Mary. On 1 October 1533 a generous establishment of 162 persons was decreed, headed by her old governess, the Countess of Salisbury. However, when the royal commissioners visited her 122

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to receive her formal submission, they were treated to a tirade of dissent, and on 2 October Mary wrote to her father, lecturing him on the error of his ways. Even Chapuys was apprehensive at such an act of defi ance. Yet when Mary’s whole establishment was dissolved and she was consigned to a supporting role in the household of the infant Princess Elizabeth, the ambassador was quick to blame ‘the concubine’. No doubt Anne was hostile to Mary and may well have urged severity but no such infl uence is required to explain the King’s decision. He was very angry – as well he might be. Whenever she got the opportunity, which was usually when Anne was visiting her daughter, Mary went out of her way to be as offensive as possible. The Queen seems to have made several attempts at conciliation but was consistently rebuffed and eventually became angry in her turn. Whether she ever urged Henry to execute her, as Chapuys believed, we do not know. If so, her advice was ignored, because despite her outrageous behaviour, the King continued to be fond of his daughter and in the event she survived to (metaphorically) dance on the Queen’s grave.

Anne was by this time about 33 but, unlike Catherine at the same age, had kept both her fi gure and her physical attractiveness. Whereas four or fi ve pregnancies had exhausted the latter’s fertility, Anne conceived again within about three or four months of Elizabeth’s birth. By February 1534 this was generally known and in April Henry ordered his goldsmith to make an especially elaborate silver cradle for the anticipated prince. Then, during the July progress, and perhaps assisted by the strains of travelling, the Queen miscarried. We know very little about the circumstances, which were deliberately concealed, but she never got as far as a lying in (which would have necessitated withdrawal from the progress) and we do not even know whether the foetus was male or female.

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What we do know is that Henry was bitterly disappointed, and began to entertain doubts about his second marriage. Could his critics have been right all along? Was God now punishing him again for a similar offence? Anne was put on her mettle because her relationship with her husband was in danger. Chapuys was highly gratifi ed and immediately began spreading rumours that Henry was having an affair with ‘another very beautiful maid of honour’. The ambassador was probably exaggerating a very superfi cial attraction – or perhaps not, the evidence is not clear. What is clear is that Anne reacted badly. Catherine had put up with numerous such fl irtations but Anne’s position was different. She had relied for seven years on her feisty sexuality to keep the King in line and up until now she had succeeded. So instead of shrugging off such an affair as an adolescent prank she became shrewish and threw tantrums. On this occasion her reaction seems to have worked because a marriage that was as purely emotional as hers was bound

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to be affl icted by such spats, and Henry knew that perfectly well.

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child, he still loved her and did not want to upset her.

Nevertheless, this incident was a sign of a deeper malaise. Despite her intelligence, political shrewdness and considerable intellectual powers – or perhaps because of them – Anne had never learned to be a conventional wife. She did not know how to be meek, submissive or long-suffering. So she continued to hold on to her husband in the same way that she had done during their prolonged courtship – with emotional outbursts and passionate reconciliations. Henry, who was extremely conventional in this respect, was fi rst puzzled and then irritated by this behaviour. Did she not realize that a wife and a mistress were different things and their behaviour was governed by different rules? The fact seems to have been that as long as Catherine was alive and Mary still allowed to bait her, Anne was never able to relax into her role and her lack of a son made the situation worse. It would be an exaggeration to say that their marriage began to deteriorate after the summer of 1534 but it did become more erratic and Henry’s sexual performance, which had always been inclined that way, became even more so. It was the summer of 1535 before Anne conceive

d again.24

This situation, and her own peace of mind, was not helped by the fact that she continued to be very unpopular. With the promotion of Catherine’s cause now prohibited by law, her friends and supporters built up their whispering campaign against the Queen. Every indignity, real and imagined, which was suffered by the ex-Queen and her daughter, was blamed upon the malice of ‘that whore Nan Bullen’

.25 She became the equi
valent of the medieval ‘evil councillor’, the scapegoat for all the King’s unpopular actions. When the London Carthusians, John Fisher and Thomas More, were executed in the summer of 1535: ‘The people, horrifi ed to see such unprecedented and brutal atrocities, muttered in whispers about these events, and often blamed Queen A
nne …’26

These were insinuations that Eustace Chapuys was only too keen to encourage. Chapuys was also alert to the popular implications of Anne’s Francophilia. Given her background, and the nature of her position, she was bound to favour a French alliance but anti-French sentiment in England ran deep and particularly in the City of London, which depended for so much of its prosperity on trade with the Low Countries. Unfortunately the Anglo-French friendship was based on nothing stronger than a mutual antipathy to the Emperor, and the only way to strengthen it was by resurrecting the old proposal for a marriage between Mary and the Dauphin. This must have been Henry’s own idea, because Anne was mortally offended, and the King’s rather clumsy attempt to redeem the situation by offering instead a marriage between Elizabeth and Francis’s second son, Henri, was poorly received. It seems that despite all professions of friendship, the French 124

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were still reluctant to accept the Princess’s legitimacy. The offended Queen contributed notably to a chill, which began to affl ict Anglo-French relations in the summer of 1535, but diplomatically she had nowhere else to go, because any understanding between Henry and the Emperor would have been even worse news from her point of view. Whatever the realities of the situation, the Council continued to regard her as a pro-French adviser with access to the King’s ear. And not only to his ear; by November 1535 the Queen was pregnant again and if her relations with Henry were ‘on/off ’, they had certainly been ‘on’ during the late summer. It was far too soon to regard Anne as a spent force. At the beginning of 1536, her position again appeared to be strong. Her father was Lord Privy Seal, her brother a nobleman of the Privy Chamber and the Archbishop of Canterbury was her staunch friend. At the same time her enemies had disappeared or had been weakened. The Duchess of Suffolk, one of her most implacable critics, had died in 1533, leaving her husband encumbered with debt, and on 7 January, Catherine died at Kimbolton. If the child that she was carrying should be a son, then her position would be assured for the foreseeable future. However, with hindsight we can see that all was not entirely well. Catherine’s death cut both ways. Although it removed any possibility of pressure on the King to take her back, for that very reason it made her successor more vulnerable. If Henry should tire of Anne, he could now start again with a clean sheet. At the same time Thomas Cromwell, the King’s powerful secretary and her erstwhile ally, was becoming ambivalent. Catherine’s death opened the possibility of a rapprochement with the Emperor, to which Anne was an inconvenient obstacle. As the year advanced, Cromwell became increasingly keen on building bridges to Brussels. Finally the Duke of Norfolk, another erstwhile ally, had drawn back and was keeping a low profi le. Probably he was offended with her patronage of evangelical clergy and scholars. He himself favoured the most conservative interpretation of the royal supremacy, and had no time for Cranmer, Cromwell or Anne, who all seemed to be tarred with the reformist brush. There is no reason at all to suppose that Henry and Anne were on bad terms at the time of Catherine’s death. In October 1535 there had been the usual rumours that when pregnancy made his wife unavailable, Henry started turning to other women. There was probably no substance in them, and by the end of the month the royal couple were apparently ‘merry’ together. In November the Queen was described by one well placed observer as having more infl uence with the King than Thomas Cromwell, which was praise indeed.

Nevertheless, it seems that Anne’s reaction to Catherine’s death was a good deal more complex than the King’s. He was just relieved, and declared that there was now no more risk of war with the Emperor. She was having a diffi cult pregnancy,

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and had become depressed and fretful. It is very unlikely that, as Edward Hall declared, she ‘wore yellow for mourning’. It was also reported later that she was distressed by her husband’s relationship with Jane Seymour, and had bitterly reproached him for it, which is plausible because Jane represented just the kind of threat that she had now most to fear, but it cannot be substantiat

ed.27 W
hat did happen was that Henry had a heavy fall in the hunting fi eld on 24 January, and was left unconscious for two hours. He recovered quickly but was badly shaken. Five days later Anne miscarried of a son. The king, still not fully recovered, was distraught, and is alleged to have given vent to his anguish by abusing his wife. He had been seduced into this marriage; it was null and void and he would take another wife. He had clearly offended God again – was his punishment to have no end? The trouble with this graphic account is that it comes from a suspect source