The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (12 page)

Read The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn Online

Authors: Eric Ives

The three principal embassies in England during Anne Boleyn’s career were from Venice, from France and from the Holy Roman Empire. Venetian ambassadors were primarily concerned with trade questions and international relations. They tended to have short tours of duty (less than five years), and in 1535 representation lapsed to secretary level.
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The French had a greater interest in English domestic affairs, and for much of the time they might hope for the chance to exploit Anne Boleyn in order to keep Henry VIII from allying with Charles V. Anne, indeed, was sometimes wholly identified with French interests, almost another ambassador in residence. Yet the reports of Francis I’s representatives in London are frequently disappointing. Various reasons can be put forward for this. The French diplomatic service, if that term is not premature, was (like the English) still in its infancy, and it has not received the editorial attention from modern historians which its reports need and deserve. What is more, the relative ease and greater safety of communication between the French and the English courts may have encouraged the use of messengers for more difficult matters, rather than lengthy coded letters.
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Relations between London and Paris may, in any case, have been mainly at an official level, with the French ambassadors, representatives of the traditional enemy, finding it difficult to penetrate to non-government sources. In February 1535, when English suspicions of French treachery were running high, apparently even Anne Boleyn herself felt it unwise to talk freely with Francis’s envoy, Gontier.
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There was also a sense in which the French took Anne Boleyn for granted. She was there by Henry’s will and they would use her, but policy was not determined by the need to support her position. Even more important, perhaps, was the brevity of French ambassadorial tours — the 1533 resident was complaining after six months!
32
This did not impede the ambassador’s representative duties, but it did limit his usefulness as a news-gatherer. Ambassadors tended to get better the longer they stayed. As a result in, for example, 1532, the year most critical for the English Reformation and for Anne herself, we have very little first-hand evidence from French sources. The ambassador, Giles de la Pommeraye, was new to the job but was gone within the year, and from 5 May to 17 June he was away in Brittany ‘consulting with his government’.
33
He was a strong supporter of Henry’s wish for a divorce; he worked hand in glove with the king and his ministers, even helping them to put out the official explanation for the anti-papal statute conditionally ending the payment of annates to Rome; above all, he was close to Anne. Yet none of this do we know from La Pommeraye himself.
34
No contrast could be more marked than with the third of the principal foreign embassies resident in England. The Burgundian-Habsburg diplomatic service was the oldest in northern Europe and the best organized — essential in view of the far-flung territories which the Emperor Charles V had inherited and the issues he had to cope with. Furthermore, Charles was not simply interested in affairs in England because of their possible impact on his chronic rivalry with Francis I. He had a family interest in the treatment of his aunt, Katherine of Aragon, and the legitimacy of his cousin Mary. Thus, when it was suggested that the reports he received might contain too much about Henry’s marital problems, the emperor requested even more information.
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Not that Charles was allowing himself to be governed by sentiment; the traditional alliance with the Burgundian Low Countries would have powerful backing in England as long as Katherine could be supported as queen and Mary as the acknowledged heir.
This sophistication of diplomatic technique and depth of interest goes some way to explaining the fullness and utility to historians of reports from the imperial embassy in England. Yet what really makes the difference is the identity of the ambassador.
36
Eustace Chapuys, a lawyer from Annecy in Savoy, was not merely a highly efficient and assiduous envoy, writing between thirty and forty reports a year to the emperor, plus letters to his officers. Far more important was the length of time he spent in England; he arrived in 1529 and remained until almost the end of Henry VIII’s life, retiring only in 1545 at the age of 56. This continuous residence enabled Chapuys to overcome many of the obstacles in the way of an ambassador seeking news.
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In the first place, how was a stranger speaking no English to find informants? It took time to discover sensitively placed individuals who would supply information, or servants who could go out freely enough to be able to verify reports. Moreover, funds did not stretch to the employment of many agents and, in any case, the real secrets were at court. How was an ambassador to succeed there? The answer Chapuys adopted was the answer of the diplomatic manuals: speak French, make yourself
persona grata
with the elite, and news and contacts will come to you. And this is where his training and experience came in, and especially his standing as a humanist and a friend of Erasmus. A man of address, he was worth conversing with and very soon passed everywhere. Even in times of Anglo-imperial tension when another envoy might expect to be cold-shouldered, Chapuys continued to be welcomed as an individual. Henry VIII clearly enjoyed sparring with this shrewd, brilliant, cynical cosmopolitan. And Chapuys soon discovered something else as he worked tirelessly for the cause of Katherine and Mary. He became the focus for all those who disliked what was going on, who believed as he did. Here was a ready-made set of contacts as anxious to give him news as he was to collect it. His ear became almost the confessional for the king’s critics, and Chapuys dabbled a good deal more deeply in English politics than the emperor either knew or would have sanctioned.
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The professionalism of Charles V’s envoys, and especially the personality of Eustace Chapuys, come to us clearly over the centuries, and it is easy to succumb to their authority. Friedmann went as far as to write that: ‘the agents of Charles V... spoke the truth, or what they believed to be the truth. Now and then they took a little too much credit for ability and energy; but they never gave an essentially false idea of the events they had to report.’
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We must remember, however, that there were pitfalls awaiting even the ablest ambassador, and disadvantages as well as advantages in Chapuys’ ready acceptance by English society, and especially by Anne’s opponents. In the first place, his reporting on the court tends to derive from individuals who share a single point of view and, what is more, pass news on with the gloss which that view gave. Thus, when Chapuys reports bad feeling between Anne and Henry he is relying on informants who wanted to believe that Anne was falling out of royal favour and were ready to see hopeful signs in almost anything. What is more, many of those who spoke to him were out to serve their own agenda. That was certainly true of his official contacts. An instance of this which is specially relevant to Anne is the series of conversations Cromwell had with Chapuys during the crises of 1536. Of course, the envoy was well aware that Henry and his ministers would be trying to ‘feed’ him — and he reciprocated — but evaluating private individuals was more difficult. Courtiers might regularly express to him their loyalty to Mary, but this could reflect everything from genuine affection for her, through a desire to hedge bets or disguise true feelings, to a wish to stand well with a popular court figure or merely to be polite to his known prejudices. An ambassador could also let his own feelings mislead him. In the early 1530s certain conservatives sought to precipitate action by Charles V by claiming that the country was a powder-keg of resentment against Henry and Anne which awaited only the spark of an imperial invasion. Chapuys reported this enthusiastically because this was exactly what he himself wished to believe, and precisely how he wanted his home government to act. Ambassadors with Chapuys’ level of commitment can easily find themselves in the business of self-fulfilling prophecy. It is also true that however long he remained in England, Chapuys continued to see things through Habsburg eyes — even when pink-spectacled. Thus his continual description of Anne Boleyn as ‘the concubine’ completely missed the point that to appreciate the situation in England as it actually was, it was vital to recognize that to Henry his marriage with Katherine had been, and would always be, a nullity. The ambassador’s failure to see this cost Katherine’s daughter dear in the summer of 1536.
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The inherent dangers in ambassadorial reports have led some scholars to play down their utility.
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The difficulty with this is that, denied these reports, much early Tudor history becomes seriously, on occasion impossibly, opaque. The diplomatic reports of Eustace Chapuys, in particular, provide the only relatively continuous commentary on English politics and the royal court during the lifetime of Queen Anne; on particular episodes they are often the only evidence. Thus to dismiss them as inherently unreliable is to accept that we shall never know. An example is the agreement among ambassadors that Anne was involved in the attack on Wolsey. They could, of course, have all been misled by court gossip, but giving up on them leaves us in ignorance. It certainly does not allow us to assume that if their evidence is rejected, this establishes that she was not involved! The sources determine the limits of history - what can be explored, what cannot be explored. Hypothesis and speculation must not take the place of carefully evaluated evidence. The professionalism of the historian lies in reading such partisan material critically.
The danger of distortion is much less acute with administrative records, always assuming these were not prepared for public consumption. They are, however, sadly uninformative. Anne only became important in her mid-twenties and until then such material tells us no more about her than about other women of her age and class; nor should we expect it to. Even when she did become prominent, even when she was queen, we continue to know almost as little of her day to day as we do of the other women in Henry VIII’s life. There are two significant exceptions to this lack of official data. The first is the account of Henry’s private expenses which survives for just over three years from November 1529 to December 1532.
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This gives a lively picture of the king’s disbursements on Anne’s behalf in the crucial period during which she was moving from being a recognized rival to Queen Katherine to being queen herself in all but name. The loss of similar accounts for earlier years does deny us valuable confirmation as to the date when the king first began to pay marked attention to ‘the lady Anne’, but the absence of later accounts is less significant. From the autumn of 1532, Anne was in receipt of a regular direct income — first as lady marquis of Pembroke and then as queen - and many of the costs previously borne by Henry would have gone through her own accounts (now, unfortunately, also lost). The second important official source is, somewhat surprisingly, the inventory drawn up after Henry’s death. Despite the decade and more since Anne’s execution, and all the intervening consorts, it provides substantial evidence of her lifestyle, vivid details found nowhere else.
43
Where significant information about Anne Boleyn is to be found, as so often for her contemporaries, is in judicial records. The most important is the material covering her trial and that of her alleged accomplices. This includes commissions, writs, lengthy indictments detailing the supposed offences, jury lists and verdicts. After the trials these were all put in the
Baga de Secretis
— the Tudor equivalent of the file marked ‘Top Secret’ - and they survive virtually intact.
44
Other judicial material of value is the evidence which the Crown assiduously collected with a view to possible prosecution of Anne’s critics, evidence which provides a clear indication of her general lack of popularity and the gossip which circulated about her. Even post-mortem material can be of use. In the autumn of 1539 the reformer, George Constantine, was fighting off a potential prosecution under the Act of Six Articles, and in evidence to Thomas Cromwell. he set down his first-hand memories of the execution of Anne’s supposed lovers three years earlier.
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As in all such evidence, it must be remembered that the deponent has an ulterior motive — in Constantine’s case, to gloss a past conversation so as to remove all hint of criticism of the Crown — but as a confession was subject to factual checking, variation is likely to be more in spin than in content.
Another obvious resource for the biographer might appear to be correspondence. Anne’s own letters are disappointing. Few have survived and most are strictly concerned with practicalities — for instance, announcing the birth of Elizabeth. There is, admittedly, the remarkable letter which she is supposed to have written to Henry VIII on 6 May 1536, after her committal to the Tower. It exists in many copies, but none is contemporary, and although the tradition is that it was originally discovered among the papers of Thomas Cromwell, its ‘elegance’ (to use Herbert of Cherbury’s word) has always inspired suspicion. It would appear to be wholly improbable for Anne to write that her marriage was built on nothing but the king’s fancy and that her incarceration was the consequence of Henry’s affection for Jane. Equally it would have been totally counterproductive for a Tudor prisoner in the Tower to warn the king, as the letter does, that he is in imminent danger of the judgement of God!
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There are practical objections, too. The ladies who watched Anne night and day in the Tower were charged with reporting all she said and did, but they made no mention of any such missive and it certainly could not have been smuggled out.
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Similar improbabilities must also rule Anne out as the author of the lament
O Death, O Death, rock me on sleep,
even though it existed at least by the start of Elizabeth’s reign and contains such apt lines as:
Defiled is my name full sore
Through cruel spite and false report,
That I may say for evermore
Farewell my joy, Adieu comfort.
 
 
For wrongfully ye judge of me
Unto my fame a mortal wound
Say what ye will, it will not be
Ye seek for that cannot be found.
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