The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (21 page)

Read The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn Online

Authors: Eric Ives

What had Anne Boleyn to set against the queen, backed by the weight of canon law, popular sentiment and the support of a powerful faction at court? At first sight, perhaps, less than she would have had two years earlier. In June 1525 Sir Thomas Boleyn had at last achieved his peerage, but this had meant giving up the vital court post of treasurer of the household. Seven months later, Anne’s brother George lost his formal position in the privy chamber as a result of the Eltham reorganization.
40
Both men, however, remained part of the king’s intimate circle, and although the earl of Northumberland carried little weight and was, in any case, usually on duty in the north, another former admirer, Wyatt, had returned from Italy and was in high favour with the king.
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Yet three men, however much in the king’s graces, were not enough, and Anne set out to gain more. She did everything she could to secure the support of her brother-in-law, William Carey — hence the business of the appointment to Wilton. Another of the gentlemen of the privy chamber was Sir Thomas Cheney, whom Anne may already have encountered as a fellow resident in Kent. She first intervened on his behalf in March 1528, when he was in disgrace with Wolsey.
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A more serious problem over Cheney arose some months later, when the sweat carried off the stepson of another privy chamber gentleman, Sir John Russell. The young man, John Broughton, had been in service to Wolsey and had left £700 in chattels and substantial lands in Bedfordshire, so that his two sisters were considerable heiresses.
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The younger, Katherine, was under age, and already her wardship had been granted to Wolsey, but Russell’s wife was frantic to keep her daughter, and Sir John went to work at once to get Wolsey to sell the wardship to the family. He had good hopes - he was very much a Wolsey man and the cardinal had liked Broughton — but Cheney and another gentleman of the privy chamber, Sir John Wallop, were pressing the king and Anne Boleyn for support in securing both girls. Russell, therefore, mobilized Wolsey’s contact man in the privy chamber, Thomas Heneage, and Thomas Arundel, one of the minister’s closest aides, to intercede on his behalf and so secure from the cardinal the wardship of Katherine Broughton, as well as confirmation that her elder sister, Anne, was now of age. Cheney and Wallop, however, carried the day (after, apparently, insinuating that both girls were under age and in the king’s gift), and Henry promised Anne Broughton to Sir Thomas and Katherine to Sir John. This put Wolsey in great difficulty — he was already in the king’s bad books over the Wilton affair — but fortunately for him a blazing row broke out between Cheney and Russell and the king decided that his candidate had gone too far.
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Richard Page, another of the gentlemen of the privy chamber, wrote to Wolsey:
His grace answered that he [Cheney] was proud and full of opprobrious words, little esteeming his friends that did most for him, and did the best he could to put them to dishonesty that were most glad to do him pleasure and in such wise handled himself that he should never come in his Chamber until he had humbled himself and confessed his fault and were agreed with Mr. Russell.
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What part Anne played in all this is not known, but she was active on Cheney’s behalf when the matter erupted again in January 1529 in a confrontation between him and Wolsey. No doubt insisting that the king’s promise of Anne Broughton should be honoured, Cheney offended the minister and was rusticated, only to be brought to court by Anne, with many harsh words against the cardinal.
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In May Wolsey gave up his effort to direct Anne Broughton’s marriage, and she apparently passed into Cheney’s control, eventually becoming his wife.
47
The cardinal did retain the wardship of the younger sister Katherine, and the king paid Wallop £400 in compensation.
48
Yet if this was the compromise it appears to be, it did not last long. On Wolsey’s fall, Katherine’s wardship was granted to Anne Boleyn’s grandmother, and not long afterwards the girl was married to Anne’s uncle, Lord William Howard.
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Anne and her protégés now had everything, and Russell, who seems only to have wanted the happiness of his wife and stepdaughters, had nothing. A long feud with Cheney ensued, and it is no surprise, either, to find Russell less than enthusiastic for Anne Boleyn.
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Anne was beginning to collect allies among existing members of the king’s immediate entourage, and it may be that she also had some influence on admission to the privy chamber.
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This can hardly have been so as early as June 1527, when a post as gentleman of the privy chamber was given to Richard Page, who was later to be one of her loyal supporters and barely to escape with his life in 1536. In January 1528 Nicholas Carewe was recruited; a long-term boon companion of the king, he would be one of Anne’s bitterest enemies. On the other hand, Wallop was appointed at the same time, and we have seen how he turned to Anne over Katherine Broughton. Thomas Heneage, whom Wolsey had insinuated into the department some weeks after Carewe and Wallop, was clearly
persona grata
with Anne, and this was probably a factor in his selection. Then there is the case of Francis Bryan, whom the king ‘took into his privy chamber’ on 25 June. As brother-in-law both to Carewe (and like him a victim both of the 1519 expulsions and the Eltham redundancies) and to Henry Guildford, the controller of the household, Bryan had every credential for court office already, and Anne was away from court when he was appointed. Yet one must note that Bryan was a replacement for Anne’s brother-in-law, William Carey, who had died of the sweat, and he was soon on the way to France to escort (and accelerate) the impatiently awaited Campeggio.
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That this was not uncongenial is clear from his letters later in the year, when he was sent to get further concessions from the pope. These reveal a strong supporter of Anne, confidently presuming on his family relationship with her.
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Bryan may not have needed Anne’s help to become a gentleman of the privy chamber again, but there is at least good reason to suspect that Henry knew that Anne would be pleased at the appointment of a man who would later write to him:
I pray God my fortune may be so good to come with the tidings. Sir, I would have written to my mistress that shall be, but I will not write unto her, till I may write that shall please her most in this world. I pray God to send your grace and her long life and merry, or else me a short end.
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There is no similar insight into Anne Boleyn’s relations in the 1520s with other powerful groups and individuals at court, such as the king’s sister, Mary, and her husband, Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk. The possible exception is her uncle, now duke of Norfolk. He had, after all, wanted to exploit Anne in 1520-1 to extricate himself from his job in Ireland, and it would have been obvious for a man like Thomas Howard to see what he could gain from the king’s interest in her.
55
He was already finding it less easy to accept Wolsey’s frustrating dominance than had his father, the old duke, who had died in 1524, and in 1525, when royal taxation had provoked unrest in Suffolk, he and Brandon had made joint, if half-hearted, attempts to bypass the cardinal and get their instructions directly from Henry.
56
Anne Boleyn might, as
The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey
suggests, appear a lever ready to hand.
George Cavendish is, however, somewhat premature in his dating of Anne’s arrival on the factional secene. He claims that an attempt to use her against the cardinal was made some time before the rebellion of the duke of Bourbon against Francis I became public (in September 1523). That is far too early for any noble grumblings there may have been to have involved Anne. The next opportunity, according to Cavendish, was in the summer of 1527, when the international situation made it important to send an embassy to France.
You have heard heretofore how divers of the great estates and lords of the council lay in wait with my lady Anne to espy a convenient time and occasion to take the cardinal in a brake [thicket]. [They] thought it then that now is the time come that we have expected, supposing it best to cause him to take upon him the king’s commission and to travel beyond the sea in this matter... Their intents and purpose was only but to get him out of the realm that they might have convenient leisure and opportunity to adventure their long desired enterprise. And by the aid of their chief mistress (my lady Anne) to deprave him so unto the king in his absence that he should be rather in his high displeasure than in his accustomed favour, or at least to be in less estimation with his majesty.
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That is far more probable. If we are to believe the new imperial ambassador who arrived in March, there was much feeling against the French alliance that Wolsey was pushing, and in May he was able to name Norfolk as one of those principally involved.
58
During the cardinal’s absence, as we have seen, Anne did agree to marry Henry, and Wolsey had hardly been gone a month before he learned that the king was quite unexpectedly hosting an enormous house-party at Beaulieu in Essex, with both the dukes, Exeter, several other peers (including Rochford) and their wives - all the aristocratic heavy mob the cardinal feared most.
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Even worse, he found the king listening to them. Henry’s regular supper companions were Norfolk, Suffolk, Exeter and Rochford; and Dr William Knight, whom Wolsey was expecting to hold the fort for him, reported: ‘This is to advertise your good grace that my lords of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Rochford, and Mr. Treasurer [Fitzwilliam] be privy unto the other letter that I do send unto your grace at this time, with these [i.e. this one], after the open reading whereof the king’ - and Wolsey must have breathed a sigh of relief at this point — ‘delivered unto me your letter, concerning the secrets.’
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There were, then, still some secrets between the two!
The minister nevertheless felt he had to begin a counter-bombardment of flattery. The grossness of this demonstrates how scared he was — ‘there was never lover more desirous of the sight of his lady than I am of your most noble and royal person.’
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And when Wolsey returned to court on 30 September he had a worse shock. The long-standing custom had been to warn the king that he had arrived, and to ask for a private appointment in the privy chamber to report on his mission. When the cardinal’s man arrived it was to find, as the imperial ambassador reported, that ‘the king had with him in his chamber a certain lady called Anna de Bolaine who appears to have little good will towards the cardinal, and before the king could respond to the message she said, “where else should he come, except where the king is?”’
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Henry indulgently agreed, and Wolsey found himself playing gooseberry to a courting couple and trying to talk diplomacy at the same time. He also realized how wrong he had been. He had gone to France ignoring Anne as a flirtation, and confident that a divorce would free Henry to marry a French princess; he now knew things were serious, for him, perhaps deadly serious.
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ANNE BOLEYN AND THE FALL OF WOLSEY
 
I
T is tempting to draw a straight line — and a short one — from the events of July-September 1527 to Wolsey’s fall in 1529. The battle had been arrayed: Wolsey against Anne and her allies, the cardinal between the Scylla of Anne Boleyn as queen, and the Charybdis of a king furious at being baulked of his divorce. That was how Cavendish saw it in retrospect, and others had thought that at the time. In October 1527, in language much as Cavendish would use, the imperial ambassador reported that Norfolk, Rochford and their friends had made a league against the cardinal and had been trying to ruin him in his absence.
1
Inigo de Mendoza was equally clear what a threat to Wolsey’s power Anne would be as Henry’s wife, unlike the present queen ‘who can do him little harm’. The French ambassador reached a similar assessment, and some months later reported that the cardinal was planning to retire, knowing that his influence would not survive the marriage.
2
Mendoza suggested two reasons for Anne’s hostility: Wolsey’s assumption that the next queen would be French, and an earlier move by him which had deprived her father of ‘a high official post’. This latter could refer to the pressure put on Boleyn in 1519 over the post of controller of the household, but more probably to Boleyn having, in effect, to pay for his peerage by giving up the treasurership without an equivalent post in compensation.
3
Mendoza was sure that Wolsey was doing his best to sabotage the divorce and was proposing to call a conference of experts in the hope that they would convince the king that the law was against him.
Mendoza, however, also reported that several courtiers thought differently. They believed that once Wolsey became convinced that Henry was adamant, he would execute a volte-face and support Anne rather than lose royal favour. This was the more perceptive analysis. Had not Wolsey risen to power on the principle (as Cavendish put it) that ‘to satisfy the king’s mind ... was the very vein and right course to bring him to high promotion’?
4
Opposition in the spring and summer of 1527 thus turned out to be yet another brief testing of the cardinal’s place in royal favour, the sort he faced periodically during his period in power. It certainly did not commit Anne against him. There was much to be said for her (and Henry) deciding, as they did, to stick with a man who knew his way about the international scene and who exuded the confidence that, so long as they trusted him, all would be well. Wolsey had quickly re-established his psychological dominance on his return from France in a number of grand set pieces, culminating in the splendid ceremony of 1 November 1527 in which a French delegation invested Henry as knight of the Order of S. Michel, and as news filtered back to England of the failure of the king’s go-it-alone attempt to get papal support, the cardinal seemed even more the man to turn to.
5

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