The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (22 page)

Read The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn Online

Authors: Eric Ives

Anne Boleyn certainly thought so. Like her father before her, she decided that the greater percentage was in becoming a client of the cardinal. Despite her increased role in affairs, all through the first half of 1528 her effort was to stand well with the man who would give her what she wanted. The brunt of this fell on Thomas Heneage, newly arrived in the privy chamber from Wolsey’s own household.
6
At dinner on Tuesday, 3 March, Anne complained to him that the cardinal was neglecting her, and when at supper Heneage was sent from Henry with a special dish for Anne’s meal, she prevailed on him to join her at table — an act of the greatest condescension which Heneage well knew was not aimed at him. As the meal progressed, Anne’s overtures became even plainer. How pleasant it would be during Lent, she mused, to have some carp or shrimps from Wolsey’s famous fishponds. Heneage offered a wry masculine apology when passing on the request: ‘I beseech your grace, pardon me that I am so bold to write unto your grace hereof, it is the conceit and mind of a woman.’ However, not for nothing had the cardinal put one of his best men to ‘mind’ Anne, and a fortnight later Heneage was writing again to thank Wolsey for his ‘kind and favourable writing unto her’ — whether accompanied by a parcel of fish is not stated - and to pass on her ‘humble’ request for Cheney to be forgiven.
7
In June Heneage reported on the news of Anne’s health after some ailment: ‘Mistress Anne is very well amended, and commendeth her humbly unto your grace, and thinketh it long till she speak with you.’
8
Wolsey marked Anne’s recovery from the much more serious sweating sickness by ‘a kind letter’ and a ‘rich and goodly present’, which she acknowledged directly along with her indebtedness to Wolsey for his help:
of the which I have hitherto had so great plenty, that all the days of my life I am most bound of all creatures, next the king’s grace, to love and serve your grace: of the which I beseech you never to doubt that never I shall vary from this thought as long as any breath is in my body. And as touching your grace’s trouble with the sweat [in his household], I thank our Lord that them that I desired and prayed for are scaped, and that is the king and you.
 
The letter ends with a promise of what she will do for Wolsey when, as she puts it, ‘this matter’ is at ‘a good end’, a promise she repeated in another letter soon afterwards.
9
Most striking of all is a third letter at the start of August, when the ending of the epidemic allowed Anne to rejoin Henry.
10
In the first part she sent good wishes to the cardinal, expressed her debt to him ‘never like to be recompensed on my part’, and mentioned the anxious waiting for Campeggio. Then she handed the letter to Henry and nagged him to complete it: ‘The writer of this letter would not cease till she had caused me likewise to set my hand; desiring you, though it be short, to take it in good part.’ The king also made clear why the couple was writing — they were in a state because no news had reached England about Campeggio arriving in France. Very probably ‘your loving sovereign and friend, Henry K’ and ‘your humble servant Anne Boleyn’ got the reassurance they wanted by return of post.
11
Wolsey had an excellent professional manner.
Not everyone has read the correspondence of 1528 in this way. Some have seen evidence of Anne’s volatile moods. Others, convinced by Cavendish that she bore a settled resentment following the Percy episode, have accused Anne of blatant insincerity But Wolsey was suspected of that too. The imperial ambassador suggested in September 1528 that the more difficult the divorce could be made, the more Henry would need the cardinal, and the longer the suit could be strung out, the longer it would be before Anne could destroy his influence.
12
Wolsey was certainly keen to ingratiate himself with Anne. Cavendish remembered how he ‘ordered himself to please as well the king as her, dissimulating the matter that lay hid in his breast, and prepared great banquets and solemn feasts to entertain them both at his own house’.
13
We may note too that Heneage’s letter following his supper with Anne was written at eleven o’clock the same night, despite an exhausting day when the privy chamber had been exceedingly short-staffed; fish or no fish, Heneage clearly understood the priority Wolsey placed on news of Anne. By November the imperial ambassador was reporting that Wolsey had done a deal with Anne and her father, and stating as his own opinion that Wolsey would, in the end, go the way the king wanted — exactly what the more acute courtiers had told him a year earlier.
14
There was, indeed, no reason not to trust Wolsey. The year 1528 did bring progress: first the commission brought back by Fox in May, and then the progressive news of Campeggio’s preparations and eventual departure for England. What frayed the couple’s nerves was the time it all took. Wolsey’s nerves, though, were frayed by something different: not as ambassadors thought, fear for his own future once a divorce was achieved - he was sanguine enough to believe that he could cope with that, however much he affected a desire to retire. His fear was that he would not be able to secure a divorce on the terms Henry demanded. It was perfectly clear that the divine revelation to Henry about the meaning of Leviticus 20 would get nowhere. Campeggio would arrive fully and firmly convinced that the king was wrong in law, and Wolsey could share this with no one.
15
As early as July 1527 he had been accused by the king of being lukewarm on the divorce because he suggested an alternative line of approach; in June 1528 the king lost his temper when Wolsey again tried to explain the problem.
16
All this forced the minister to concentrate on two outside chances, either to try to bring about a French hegemony in Italy which would then make the pope the prisoner of an ally of England, or to deafen him with pleas to grant the divorce somehow and horror stories of what would happen if he did not. So long as that policy seemed to produce results, as it appeared to do in 1528, so long Wolsey seemed to justify the trust Henry and Anne had in him. The question was, how long would the impossibility of success by that route remain a secret?
It would be satisfying to be able to point to a single event, a precise occasion that broke the illusion of progress behind which Wolsey sheltered for so many months, but the realization was slow to dawn, especially on Henry. Campeggio wrote a very revealing report on 9 January 1529, showing that despite what he had tried to explain, the king had supreme confidence that ‘his merits and the urgency he uses therein’ could not fail; assurance of divine revelation is not always an advantage.
17
Wolsey, by contrast, was brutally pragmatic. ‘I speak freely with his lordship to know his mind, and he generally ends by shrugging his shoulders and has nothing else to say but that the only remedy is to satisfy the king’s wish in some way or other, and let it stand for what it is worth.’
Perhaps it was Anne who got to the truth first, possibly at the time when she insisted on being brought back to court, where Henry was soon, in the words of Campeggio, ‘kissing her and treating her in public as though she were his wife’.
18
She had been frustrated by the legate’s slow journey; she had been suspicious at being kept out of Campeggio’s way and ignored by him; she had been expecting rapid progress once he did arrive on 8 October, and a month later all that had been achieved was the ruin of Henry’s self-confidence. Already on 1 November, Wolsey had warned the pope that ‘many people were again and again insinuating to the king’ the necessity of adopting policies which would inevitably threaten the authority of Rome. Nor was he bluffing. At the end of the month the king did send Anne’s cousin, Francis Bryan, to Clement VII, along with Peter Vannes, his Latin secretary, with instructions personally approved by Henry to force the Holy Father into submission, if necessary with the threat that otherwise England would withdraw its allegiance to the see of Rome.
19
About the same time there was the first sign of another policy that would also be very definitely associated with the Boleyns — the preparation of a monster petition to the pope from the English political elite, urging him to grant the divorce in the national interest.
20
It may, of course, be premature to see in all this the evidence of a serious rift between Anne Boleyn and Wolsey in November 1528, but if so it is premature by only a month or so. It was about the third week of the following January that Anne had her second brush with the cardinal over Cheney, and when the French ambassador reported her victory in this, he also noted that Norfolk and his faction (‘
le duc de Nortfoch et sa bande’
) were already ‘talking big’.
21
A few days later Mendoza had picked up the news. Anne had decided that Wolsey was trying to frustrate, not assist, the divorce, and had formed an alliance with Rochford and with both Norfolk and Suffolk.
22
The naming of Suffolk for the first time as one of the group attacking Wolsey is significant, and so too is the mention of Anne as an equal party, indeed, an instigator - in the brief 1527 skirmish, Mendoza had treated her as an adjunct of her father. The confidence of the group increased as letter followed letter from Rome. Sending Bryan, a man committed to Anne and Henry, and renowned for his plain talking to the king as much as to lesser mortals, had placed in Rome a source of information quite independent of Wolsey.
23
And it was not only Henry who now received the unvarnished truth; Bryan wrote direct to Anne, although when the news was particularly grim he asked her to consult the king:
I dare not write unto mv cousin Anne the truth of this matter, because I do not know your grace’s pleasure, whether I shall do or no; wherefore, if she be angry with me, I must humbly desire your grace to make mine excuse. I have referred to her in her letter all the news to your grace, so your grace may use her in this as you shall think best.
24
 
From the start the news was bleak. Bryan had arrived on 14 January, but because of the pope’s ill health he had not even presented his credentials before Gardiner arrived a month later to strengthen the team, and it was a further month before they achieved their first substantive session with Clement.
25
Their reports were full of despair. On 20 March Henry read to Tuke, the treasurer of the chamber, the letters which had just arrived from Rome, and Tuke warned Wolsey:
Mr. Bryan’s letter, for as many clauses as the king showed me, which was here and there, as his grace read it, was totally of desperation, affirming plainly that he could not believe the pope would do anything for his grace, with these words added: ‘It might well be in his paternoster, but it was nothing in his creed’ [i.e. the pope might well pray that Henry would have his problem solved, but he would not commit himself to doing anything about it].
26
 
Bryan also communicated from time to time with ‘my masters and fellows of your grace’s chamber’, and although he was no doubt discreet, his failure to announce the great breakthrough could be interpreted by everyone, partisan of Anne or not.
27
Very soon, too, we find that one of the most brilliant of the king’s advisers, Stephen Gardiner, had swung to Anne’s support. A protégé of Wolsey and noted in August 1527 as a supporter of Katherine, the future bishop of Winchester had decided, with that acute political ‘nose’ which would desert him on only a couple of occasions in his life, that Anne was going to win.
28
He wrote in March assuring her of his devotion, and she replied in phrases typical of the patron to the client: ‘I pray God to send you well to speed ... so that you would put me to the study, how to reward your high service. I do trust in God you shall not repent it.’ Anne took the chance, at the same time, to tie up the rest of the embassy by sending cramp-rings for Gardiner and the two other envoys (Bryan excepted): ‘And have me kindly recommended to them both, as she that, you may assure them, will be glad to do them any pleasure which shall be in my power.’
29
Ironically, the one person whom Anne found difficult to motivate against the cardinal was Henry. Whether this was scepticism about Norfolk’s ability to succeed if Wolsey failed (in the event well justified), or a dependence engendered over fifteen years, or the minister’s unrivalled ability and his proven record of success, Henry was anxious to cling to his right-hand man. There was a rumour in January that he was beginning to distrust Wolsey’s promises, and he did keep Norfolk, Suffolk and Rochford more in the picture.
30
Yet throughout the spring of 1529, Henry and Wolsey made common cause in an effort to force concessions from the pope. The king clung to the illusion that the pope was genuinely anxious to help and that he only needed encouragement, and the minister kept his doubts to himself. On 6 April they wrote in parallel to the English envoys to reject the ‘desperation’ in the reports from Rome, implying lack of zeal and urging greater efforts, although when Bryan’s even gloomier next letter could not resist a suitably expressed ‘I told you so,’ it was Wolsey who had to make apologies on behalf of the king.
31
Every piece of correspondence from Rome, every word, was scrutinized for evidence of papal good intentions.
32
Clement would yield.
All this was based on nothing. In January the resident English ambassador at Rome had sent an envoy to explain that the pope would budge no further, and Campeggio had tried again and again to convince both Henry and Wolsey that the pope could not bend the law in their favour, that the Holy Father was adamant.
33
Clement would not quash the dispensation for Katherine’s second marriage. The very idea that the English should expect this offended him deeply, as did their relentless pressure — what Bryan had described as ‘first by fair means and afterward by foul’.
34
When eventually letters from Rome did carry conviction, Henry and Wolsey attributed failure entirely to imperial obstruction; and they turned on Campeggio, or rather, since they still needed him, on his senior staff, with a joint display of criticism which was only partly engineered by Wolsey to put the blame for his own public over-confidence on the pope’s deceit.
35
Already, however, they had decided on a new tack: to go for a rapid decision on the suit in England. ‘The king’s highness,’ wrote Wolsey, ‘is minded for the time to dissemble the matter, and taking as much as may be had and attained there to the benefit of his cause, to proceed in the decision of the same here, by virtue of the commission already granted unto me and my lord legate Campeggio.’
36

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