As ‘the other woman’ in a difficult, public and unpopular divorce case, Anne Boleyn was in no enviable position. Despite Henry’s promise to marry, she had nothing but his affection to rely on. For the moment that was a powerful resource, and all the evidence is of the king’s increasing commitment. Du Bellay, the French ambassador, wondered whether the relationship would survive a sudden separation in June 1528, when one of Anne’s ladies went down with an attack of the sweating sickness, a highly contagious and frequently fatal disease (probably a virus infection akin to the Spanish flu of 1918).
23
Henry took off on a flight from safe house to safe house at a speed which demonstrated his paranoia about infection.
24
Accompanied by Katherine, he began a most meticulous round of religious observances. Yet the king still wrote to Anne, in quarantine at Hever, to tell her he was safe and to reassure her that ‘few women or none have this malady.’
25
When this proved a false hope and Anne did go down with the sweat, Henry reacted with real anxiety. Off went William Butts, his second-best doctor — ‘the physician in whom I put most trust is now at this time absent when he could most do me pleasure’ - carrying a letter of sympathy and support from Henry, once more signed with the initials ‘H’ and ‘R’ flanking a heart and ‘AB’.
26
Care and sympathy worked, and by 23 June Anne had recovered, while Henry was wallowing in the excitement of danger at a safe distance, averted by his own prompt response. Brian Tuke, one of the counsellors in attendance, was treated to a lecture on the subject. Wolsey had sent advice on precautions to take as the epidemic ran its course. Not to be outdone, the king, Tuke reported:
thanked your grace: and showing me, first, a great process of the manner of that infection; how folks were taken; how little danger was in it, if good order be observed; how few were dead of it; how Mistress Anne, and my lord of Rochford, both have had it; what jeopardy they have been in, by returning in of the sweat before the time; of the endeavour of Mr. Butts, who hath been with them, and is returned; with many other things touching those matters, and, finally, of their perfect recovery.
27
Perhaps a month later Anne was able to return to court and du Bellay noted that separation had made no difference: ‘the king is in so deeply that God alone can get him out of it.’
28
Despite this, Anne faced powerful opposition. Katherine of Aragon had much support in England; apart from her wider popularity, many powerful courtiers and nobles held her in real affection. Beyond them was the Emperor Charles V, and the traditional English sentiment in favour of an alliance with the Low Countries rather than the old enemy, France. Even among those recognizing the need for a divorce, some looked for a more suitable second queen: most probably a foreign princess who could do what royal brides were expected to do — cement international alliances, not satisfy royal passions. A different woman might have responded by ignoring the critics and trusting to her own attractions and her ability to nag or persuade the king into marriage, but not Anne Boleyn. Instead, she entered politics.
The first sign of this is her increasing readiness to exploit an influence over Henry. Given the realities of personal monarchy, the evidence that a person enjoyed royal favour was the ability to secure benefits, and since the hot money of courtly support flowed to where the rate of return was highest, securing benefits attracted clients. George Cavendish remarked of Anne that it was ‘judged by and by, through all the court, of every man, that she, being in such favour with the king, might work mysteries [wonders] with the king and obtain any suit of him for her friend.’
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How near he was to the truth was made apparent when, in April 1528, Cecily Willoughby, abbess of Wilton, died.
The nunnery of St Edith at Wilton was a large Benedictine house with a number of aristocratic connections, which were not always conducive to the life of prayer and domestic duty.
30
To be blunt, it was the sort of community where a well-born woman who could not be found a suitable husband could retire to live the genteel life to which she was accustomed, without too irksome a religious routine. The obvious successor to Cecily was the second-in-command, Prioress Isabel Jordayn, whose sister was head of the even more prestigious nunnery at Syon. However, among the Wilton nuns were two sisters of William Carey of the privy chamber, husband to Mary Boleyn and thus brother-in-law to Anne, and William was determined to see the younger one, Eleanor, promoted and to block the elder and anyone else.
31
He secured Wolsey’s support and then went for the bigger prize of the king’s approval, which was given as a favour to Anne. Everything was going well, but at this point Eleanor Carey’s past caught up with her. She had been the mistress of and had children by two priests, and more recently had lived with one of the entourage of the Willoughby family. It is not known whether this was before becoming a nun, in which case the late abbess had probably been helping to resolve a family scandal, or whether it was afterwards, in which case one might suspect some aiding and abetting, but the fact was clear enough.
32
When faced with it, Henry wrote to Anne that Eleanor Carey was quite impossible as a candidate and asked her to drop her support. However, he added that ‘to do you pleasure’ he had ordered that neither Isabel Jordayn nor the elder Carey sister should be appointed, ‘but that some other good and well-disposed woman shall have it’.
33
In the event, Wolsey slipped up and nominated Isabel Jordayn, which precipitated one of those rare and terrifying letters in the king’s own hand, and a display of grovelling submission by Wolsey. It was clearly a bad thing to cross Lady Anne, even if you were the king’s chief minister and had right on your side.
Anne Boleyn’s hand thus begins to be seen in the key political area of patronage, control of which was essential if a minister was to maintain his prestige and command the support of the court. Cavendish also tells us that she began to play a part in that other key activity, faction. The passage is crucial to an understanding of Tudor politics:
The king waxed so far in amours with this gentlewoman that he knew not how much he might advance her. This perceiving, the great lords of the council, bearing a secret grudge against the cardinal because that they could not rule in the commonweal (for [because of] him) as they would, who kept them low and ruled them as well as other mean subjects, whereat they caught an occasion to invent a mean[s] to bring him out of the king’s high favour and them into more authority of rule and civil governance, after long and secret consultation among themselves how to bring their malice to effect against the cardinal. They knew right well that it was very difficult for them to do anything directly of themselves, wherefore they perceiving the great affection that the king bare lovingly unto Mistress Anne Boleyn, fantasying in their heads that she should be for them a sufficient and an apt instrument to bring their malicious purpose to pass; with whom they often consulted in this matter. And she having both a very good wit, and also an inward desire to be revenged of the cardinal, was agreeable to their requests as they were themselves, wherefore there was no more to do but only to imagine some pretended circumstance to induce their malicious accusation, in so much that there was imagined and invented among them divers imaginations and subtle devices how this matter should be brought about.
34
Belling the cat was, however, difficult so long as Henry kept his confidence in Wolsey, and Wolsey his ‘wonder wit’.
Faction in Tudor England is a phenomenon frequently misunderstood, but it was crucial in Tudor politics and vital to an understanding of the career of Anne Boleyn in particular.
35
It is easy to dismiss it as mere backbiting and self-advantage, but generically, faction is the form politics habitually takes when its focus is the will of one man — whether in Byzantium, medieval Japan, Stalinist Moscow, Tudor England or elsewhere. Direct opposition to that individual will is impossible. Only the rebel attempts to force policies on the ruler; only the conspirator attempts to force himself into place and profit. The loyal way to compete for benefit and for authority over policy is to seek to gain the ruler’s goodwill, to achieve what men recognized Anne Boleyn had achieved with Henry VIII — royal favour. That opens the way to advance particular policies which, if accepted, the ruler will make his own and give the authority to execute. Necessarily, only a very few people reach a position to compete directly for royal favour, but because in sixteenth-century England a monarch’s decision was relevant to so much, that minority was pressed to solicit favour for third parties, which they were willing to do, partly in return for material rewards and partly for status and prestige. Third parties could lead to fourth and fourth to fifth until the resulting pattern of clientage resembled nothing so much as a multilayered root system. By the nature of things, too, those who were in direct contact with the king were not of equal importance, and thus also had their own pattern of connection. The result was that these wider systems came together at court into a limited number of groups for mutual support and advantage, the test of sufficiency being the ability to persuade the king.
But why was Henry persuadable? A monarch should have been able to exploit competition for his favour on the divide and rule principle; Henry’s daughter Elizabeth would turn this into an art. Some scholars have argued that the father too was adept at this, others that he was so dominant that factions simply followed his lead. But the story of his relationship with Anne Boleyn says otherwise. Henry was always in authority; he was nobody’s fool; at times he did lead and he could not be taken for granted. But he was also significantly dependent on those around him, for reassurance and very often for ideas as well. He was also vulnerable to pressure. This does not mean that he was a puppet. His will remained dominant; when he decided, that was final. But the crucial question was, ‘Who had he been listening to?’ Factions did not always get their way, but on the right issues and in the right emotional circumstances he was vulnerable and men calculated accordingly. So did Anne Boleyn.
The ties in Tudor faction were organic, not ideological. They emerged from the realities of family relationships (good and bad), friendship and antagonism, locality, sponsorship, upbringing. Such relationships were not exclusive, so that factional alignments intersected like sets in mathematics, with an individual having principal loyalties to one group and ancillary (but not contradictory) links elsewhere. Furthermore, depending on context, links could exist in three dimensions, with superiors, with inferiors and with equals. Factions also varied in durability. Some groupings, some antagonisms, lasted for years, yet because the ultimate concern was to promote objectives in and through individuals, calculations could alter as circumstances changed. As we shall see, Anne Boleyn’s fall was a consequence of precisely such a recalculation among some of her supporters.
Issues of principle and policy did, of course, impinge on faction, but they were not, as in a modern party, expressed in open political alignment and debate. Rather, they were personalized. Thus, since Wolsey’s policies had been endorsed by the king, opposition to them took the form of efforts to undermine the royal favour the cardinal enjoyed, and, contrarywise, the desire to replace him in that royal favour encouraged the promotion of alternative policies. Similarly, as Henry’s pursuit of a divorce produced increasing tension between Church and State in England and between England and Rome, support for traditional religion came to be expressed as support for Katherine and Mary, and again vice versa. Likewise, acceptance of Anne meant hostility to Rome and (eventually) acceptance of royal supremacy over the Church.
36
In 1527 Katherine of Aragon enjoyed the support of one of the most enduring factions of the time. Its origins went back to the reign of Henry VII, and although it is sometimes referred to as ‘the Aragonese faction’ it is better described as ‘the Stafford-Neville’, later ‘the Neville-Courtenay’ connection, after the principal families involved. In the early years of Henry VIII’s reign its members were among the most prominent courtiers, with Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham, Henry Stafford, his brother (later earl of Wiltshire), George Neville, Lord Burgavenny, and his brother Sir Edward Neville, always around the king and his young wife.
37
Towards the end of the second decade of the century, George Neville married Buckingham’s daughter Mary, a former waiting-woman to the queen, and at the same time both families contracted alliances with another important group, the Pole family. The matriarch of that family, Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury, was a close friend to Katherine of Aragon; her second son, Reginald, was being groomed at the king’s expense for high office in the English Church; her cousin, Henry Courtenay, earl of Devon, was one of the king’s intimates, having ‘been brought up of a child with his grace in his chamber’, and his second wife, Gertrude (also one of Katherine’s ladies), was daughter to William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, chamberlain to the queen, by his wife Inez, one of the attendants who had come with her from Spain.
38
The faction had lost ground to Wolsey after 1514 and in 1521 had suffered a massive blow when Buckingham was executed and Burgavenny, Edward Neville, the countess of Salisbury and her eldest son, Henry, Lord Montagu, all fell into disfavour. But the faction survived and recovered somewhat as the 1520s progressed; the countess became governess to Princess Mary, while Henry Courtenay was raised to the rank of marquis of Exeter and appointed as one of the two noblemen serving in the privy chamber.
39
As Queen Katherine came under threat, the Neville-Courtenay connection was in a position to give her very powerful support, and Exeter and Montagu would live to be among the peers who condemned Anne to death.