Wolsey, even more obscure and orotund in Latin than in English, had failed to name names. But his words were all too easy to gloss. The 'injurious remedies' or 'the spark of opposition' were the Lutheran heresy. And the person 'frequently instilling [them] into the King's mind' was the individual best placed to do so: Anne Boleyn.
* * *
Anne Boleyn's religious preferences, like most other aspects of her character, seem to have been formed by her years in France. France, in common with the rest of western Europe, was undergoing religious ferment in these first decades of the sixteenth century. There were three key figures: the scholar and humanist, Jacques Lefevre d'Étaples; Guillaume Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux; and Marguerite of Angoulême, Francis I's beloved sister.
Lefevre was the creative spark. Like Luther, he became convinced that true Christianity could reach the people only if they could read and hear the Word of God in their own language. Accordingly, in 1523 he published a translation of the
New Testament
in French. Like Luther again, he attached particular importance to the
Epistles
of St Paul, from which he also derived the doctrine that faith, not works, saves mankind. Unlike Luther, however, he trusted to reform from within, and never formally broke with the Catholic Church. Briçonnet, for his part, put Lefevre's theory into practice in his own diocese of Meaux, while Marguerite supplied the high-level political patronage that was needed to protect the reformers against the highly conservative Faculty of Theology in Paris, known as the Sorbonne, and its allies in the powerful and quasi-independent law court, the
parlement
of Paris.
But the main events in all this had happened late in Anne's stay in France or after her departure. It was only in 1518 that Briçonnet invited Lefevre to Meaux and only in 1521 (the year of Anne's return to England) that the bishop began to correspond with Marguerite. Nevertheless, Anne seems to have got a real sense of what was underway. And certainly she kept up with developments, from England, and came to regard Marguerite, whom she had met, as a role model.
2
The evidence comes from the early stages of her relationship with Henry. In January 1530, Louis de Brun, a French teacher resident in England, gave her a French treatise on letter writing as a New Year's gift. Addressing her as Madame de Rochford (the title she had acquired, rather irregularly, by her father's elevation to his earldoms the previous month), De Brun commended her reading habits.
One never finds you [he noted] without some French book in your hand . . . such as Translations of the Holy Scriptures . . . And principally, last Lent and the one before last . . . I always saw you reading the salutary Epistles of St Paul that contain the complete teaching and rule of good living according to the best moral principles.
Paul's
Epistles
were, as we have seen, the prime source for Lefevre's religious revolution. And, no doubt, Anne paid particular attention to the passages the great Frenchman highlighted. 'Therefore being justified by faith', Anne would have read in the
Epistle
to the Romans, 'we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.' But this faith, she would also have learned, was not dead or passive but a living, breathing thing: a 'faith', according to the
Epistle
to the Galatians, 'which worketh by love' and which, according to the
Epistle
to the Corinthians, revealed itself by 'charity'. Indeed, it was empty without it:
Though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing
.. . .
And now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
Now there is nothing accidental about this. Anne's Scriptural readings were noticed and were, of course, intended to be noticed. And she continued this practice of conspicuous piety throughout the days of her prosperity, reading improving works herself and encouraging her ladies to read them as well.
3
There is every reason to think that these activities of Anne's were sincere. But she was also following the example set by Marguerite in France. And she had another role-model nearer home in England. For Anne's rival Queen Catherine was also notably devout. But Catherine's piety was very different. It was Catholic, orthodox and Spanish. Anne set herself up as a sort of equal and opposite force to Catherine, in this as so much else. In place of Catherine's unbending conformity she embraced Reform. She was not Protestant of course (even the word had yet to be invented). But her passionate attachment to the Scriptures shows her to have been an evangelical. And if Catherine's piety was Spanish, with Spanish devotional practices, Spanish books and a Spanish confessor, Anne's was proudly and consistently French.
'She was', her former Chaplain, William Latymer, recalled many years later, 'very expert in the French tongue, exercising herself continually in the reading of the French Bible and other French books of like effect and conceived great pleasure in the same.' 'Wherefore', he continued, she 'charged her chaplains to be furnished with all kinds of French books that reverently treated of the whole Scriptures.'
Latymer can hardly have seen De Brun's treatise, but his testimony is an almost word-for-word echo of the earlier tribute.
But of course the books that Latymer and De Brun had seen Anne reading were not only in French, they came from France. 'I remember', the daughter of William Lock, King Henry's silk merchant, recalled in her memoirs, 'that I have heard my father say that when he was a young merchant and used to go beyond sea . . . Anne Boleyn . . . caused him to get her the Gospels and Epistles written in parchment in French together with the Psalms.'
Some of these books, or their first cousins, survive. One is Anne's splendidly illuminated
Psalter
. It is decorated with Anne's arms, badges and mottoes, and gives the text of the
Psalms
in a new, radical French translation probably by Lefevre's disciple, Louis de Berquin, who was burned for heresy in 1529. Another is Anne's French Bible, in Lefevre's own translation. This is printed rather than written, but it still has its original binding, gold-tooled with Henry's and Anne's cipher, 'HA', and evangelical mottoes.
4
This trade in foreign religious books was illegal. Lock, no doubt, was able to use his status as a royal merchant to conceal books among his bundles of precious silks. Even more impudent was Anne's brother George. He went on five diplomatic missions to France and seems to have used his diplomatic bag to smuggle back increasingly controversial works that were banned in France as well as England. They were small, cheaply produced volumes, and were designed for concealment, not display. But, taking advantage of the immunity conferred by status and family connexion, George had two turned into magnificent presentation manuscripts for his sister.
The original works on which the manuscripts were based were again by Lefevre. The first was his
Epistres et Evangiles des cinquante et deux
sepmaines de l'an
(The Epistles and Gospels for the Fifty-two Weeks of the Year). This gives the Biblical reading for each day of the liturgical calendar, followed by a commentary. The second was also a Biblical text and commentary – the text in this case being the Old Testament
Book of
Ecclesiastes
or The Preacher with its refrain of 'Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!' In both books, the texts and readings were in French, while the commentaries emphasise, in clear and vivid language, the need for a living Faith in Christ as opposed to the moribund practices of the orthodox Church. Finally, the books were the product of the same printer/publisher, Simon du Bois, who had fled from an increasingly hostile Paris and found refuge with Marguerite in Alençon, the capital of her husband's duchy.
When George Boleyn had Du Bois's modest volumes turned into magnificent manuscripts, he left the Scriptural texts in their original French, but he gave the commentaries in English, in his own translations. George also prefaced
The Epistles and Gospels for the Fifty-two Weeks of the
Year
with a dedicatory letter to Anne, in which, as 'her most loving and friendly brother, [he] sendeth [her] greeting', and invoked as well 'the perpetual bond of blood' between them.
5
And it was blood that was to be spilled, at least in part, because of their joint commitment to religious reform.
* * *
But it is time to return to De Brun's treatise and its date. 'Last Lent' was Lent 1529 (10 February–13 March), while 'the one before last', when De Brun had first seen Anne reading the Pauline
Epistles
, was Lent 1528 (26 February–4 April).
It was in January 1527 that Anne and Henry had exchanged their pledges of love. Now, a mere thirteen months later, Anne was advertising her piety conspicuously, and in ways which were heterodox at least.
And soon she moved from advertisement to action.
* * *
It was probably in the autumn of 1528 that Anne added a postscript to a letter to Wolsey. 'My lord,' she wrote, 'I beseech your Grace with all my heart to remember the Parson of Honey Lane for my sake shortly'.
The request seems innocence itself; in fact, as Anne well knew, it was acutely provocative. For the 'Parson of Honey Lane' was up to his eyes in a programme to import religious books that were more radical and more dangerous than anything Anne's agents handled: they were in Latin or English, not French, and their author was not the carefully moderate Lefevre, but the firebrand, Martin Luther himself, or some or other of his disciples.
6
Thomas Forman was a Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge, where Erasmus had studied. He took his Doctorate in Divinity in 1524, and in 1525 was given the rectory of Allhallows, Honey Lane in the City of London. The same year, he was also elected president of his college. He had fallen foul of Wolsey because of the activities of his curate, Thomas Gerard or Garrett.
7
Garrett is a figure straight from R. H. Tawney's
Religion and the Rise of
Capitalism
: he was part missionary and part entrepreneur. And it was in this double role that he arrived in Oxford on Christmas Eve 1527 as a sort of travelling salesman for radical reform. There he won souls for God, and also turned in a nice profit by selling his converts the key works of the New Learning. His catalogues, neatly arranged and marked up with the prices, included Luther's
De captivitate babylonica
(The Babylonian Captivity [of the Papacy]), William Tyndale's
New Testament
in English, and the key source book,
Unio dissidentium
. The
Unio
is an anthology of extracts from the Church Fathers, which covers the main topics of Reformation controversy, including Faith and works, the Eucharist, the veneration of saints, and the Antichrist.
Garrett had brought a full selection of such books with him in his luggage; he also seems to have replenished supplies by getting 'two fardells [parcels]' shipped from London to Oxford that were 'very heavy', as the servant who bore them to the carriers testified. To Wolsey's genuine distress, Garrett had particular success with the students of Wolsey's own great new foundation of Cardinal College – like bright young men everywhere, they were eager for the latest thing.
A two-pronged investigation was launched in both Oxford and London. In Oxford, Garrett was first arrested; then escaped in disguise after picking the lock of his prison; only to be recaptured, interrogated and forced to recant. In London, Forman, an altogether weightier figure, was also picked up. Interrogated by Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, he denied sending suspect books to Oxford, but freely admitted having several in his own possession. When Tunstall asked him why, he replied smoothly that it was 'to the intent that he might see what opinions were among the Lutherans and be the more ready to impugn them, for the defence of the Church'. Tunstall was unconvinced and advised Wolsey to take sureties of Forman for good behaviour. 'I think he might find a great sum to be forthcoming', he observed meaningfully.
8
It was presumably at this stage, while Wolsey was pondering Forman's fate, that Anne intervened on his behalf.
Her intervention came at a crucial moment. Hitherto, England had been the vanguard of the resistance to Luther. Henry himself had written his
Assertio septem sacramentorum
against the heresiarch and had been rewarded with the title of
Fidei Defensor
by the grateful Pope Leo X in 1521.
And Wolsey had not been far behind. According to Henry himself he had 'moved and led' him to write the
Assertio
and therefore deserved to be the 'partner of all honour and glory he had obtained by that act'. More particularly, while the King strutted on the European stage, the Cardinal-minister concerned himself with enforcement in England. Correctly, the Church had identified imported heretical books as the prime source of 'infection' (as the inquisitors themselves called it) and Wolsey, as legate, set himself to stamp them out. He presided, in the full panoply of his legatine rank, over the first public burning of heretical books in St Paul's churchyard on 12 May 1521. And another bookburning, in the same location, took place a few months after the first publication of Tyndale's
New Testament
in 1525.
Wolsey was equally active against individual dissenters and, at the opening of the first trial of the proto-martyr Thomas Bilney, he made a formal declaration of his legatine jurisdiction over heresy. Tunstall, as Bishop of London, objected to this encroachment on his power as diocesan. But the matter was quickly smoothed over and the two co-operated effectively in matters such as the Garrett/Forman investigation.
9
Of course, the persecutions were not as successful as the orthodox would have wished. For every book that was burned another dozen seemed to get past the searchers at the ports. And though some recanted, many evangelicals quietly and quickly reverted to their real beliefs.