Part of the explanation is that Henry was passionately in love. This was anything but a secret. Chapuys, hardly arrived and yet to go to court, could still report: ‘The king’s affection for La Bolaing increases daily. It is so great just now that it can hardly be greater; such is the intimacy and familiarity in which they live at present.’
2
On 8 December, seven weeks after Wolsey’s dismissal, Henry publicly demonstrated his favour by elevating Anne’s father not only to the coveted title ‘earl of Ormonde’ but to a senior English earldom as well: Wiltshire. George thereby became Viscount Rochford and was soon made a nobleman of the privy chamber.
3
Along with Wiltshire, two more of the anti-Wolsey nobles were promoted, becoming earls of Sussex and Huntingdon. The next day there was a grand celebration to which, if we believe Chapuys, the king’s sister Mary and both the dowager duchess and the current duchess of Norfolk (the highest-ranking noblewomen in the land) were summoned to watch Anne taking the place of the queen at Henry’s side.
4
To cap it all, early in the new year Boleyn replaced the bishop of Durham as lord privy seal, the third ranking officer of state.
There was, too, the tension the couple had to face. Katherine of Aragon still lived at court, formally recognized as queen by the king no less than the rest of the royal household, a permanent reproach to Henry and an irritant to Anne.
5
On the whole Anne coped better, allowing Katherine’s mixture of martyrdom and complaint to drive Henry into her company. Thus on St Andrew’s Day, a week before Rochford’s promotion, Katherine had turned on Henry after dining with him, taxing him with unkindness and private neglect.
6
Defending himself, he boasted that the opinions on his case which were being collected were so weighty that the decision must go in his favour, and if it did not he would ‘denounce the pope as a heretic and marry whom he pleased’. Katherine poured scorn on his arguments and Henry walked out in a huff. Anne took full advantage:
Did I not tell you that whenever you disputed with the queen she was sure to have the upper hand? I see that some fine morning you will succumb to her reasoning and that you will cast me off. I have been waiting long and might in the meanwhile have contracted some advantageous marriage, out of which I might have had issue, which is the greatest consolation in this world. But, alas! Farewell to my time and youth spent to no purpose at all.
Even though Henry hoped to pacify her by placing her at his side at the 9 December banquet, it seems that Anne declined to appear at the Christmas festivities at Greenwich, which Henry celebrated with Katherine ‘in great triumph’.
7
The tactic worked. On 31 December Henry sent Walter Walsh, groom of the privy chamber, to Anne with a gift of £110, while the imperial ambassador noted early in February 1530 that Henry was spending all his time at York Place with Anne., leaving Katherine alone at Richmond for their longest separation yet.
8
The story of the St Andrew’s Day outburst is recorded in one of Eustace Chapuys’ early letters, and as we have seen, anyone studying Anne faces the problem that the immediacy and commitment of his reports can impose a particular view of events and motives. He was, however, wrong to see Henry as the besotted victim of a shrewd and calculating harpy whom Wolsey would stigmatize as ‘the midnight crow’.
9
Irrespective of his desire for Anne, the obstruction he was experiencing was challenging something much deeper, the very core of his self-identity. He was discovering that he was less than the king God had made him. The drive to marry Anne was not only to satisfy emotion and desire; it became a campaign to vindicate his kingship.
As early as 1515, the Church-State crisis known to history as ‘the Hunne affair’ had seen Henry publicly back a judicial ruling that ‘the positive laws [i.e. institutional decrees] of the church only bind those who receive them’; hence papal canons were admissible in England only with royal approval.
10
He did not deny the Church’s traditional liberties or the Crown’s exclusion from spiritual matters, but ‘by order and sufferance of God we are king of England and kings of England in time past have never had any superior but God only.... Therefore we will not agree to your desire now any more than our forebears have in time past.’
11
As the frustration of the divorce suit dragged on, his mind increasingly debated the extent to which the pope could tell a king, a man appointed directly by God, what he could or could not do. Henry continued to press for papal approval, but casual remarks and private conversations showed that more and more he was beginning to question the pope’s role in his ‘great matter’. The threats that England would withdraw allegiance from Rome, or appeal over the pope’s head to a general council of the Church, were far more serious than the huffing and puffing which Clement VII and, it seems, Henry’s own men took them for. All orthodox Western Christians knew that, as Thomas More put it, authority over the Church rightfully belonged to the bishop of Rome, ‘a spiritual pre-eminence by the mouth of our Saviour himself, personally present upon the earth, only to St Peter and his successors, bishops of the same see, by special prerogative granted’.
12
That papal authority was not thus divinely ordained was inconceivable, yet increasingly not so to Henry VIII of England. His determination to marry Anne Boleyn expressed something deep in the king’s psychology.
Since this intense concern with what it meant to be a king antedates Henry’s interest in Anne Boleyn by many years, it gives the lie to Eustace Chapuys and other writers (at the time and since) that the whole was driven by lust. Sex certainly provided them a ready and discreditable explanation for the change in a king who in 1521 wrote the apparently pro-papal
Assertio Septem Sacramentorum,
but later became ready, even eager, to butcher anyone upholding the thousand-year-old Christian conviction that the pope of Rome was head of the Church. But it was not Henry’s loins which caused him to think radical thoughts. The Reformation changes were less unprecedented novelties than the consequence of long-held royal convictions breaking through traditional limits. The result was revolution, but a revolution produced more by extinguishing the independence of the Church than by intlating royal authority. This is not to say that in 1529 Henry VIII had grasped the 1532 principle that he was ‘Supreme Head of the Church of England’. It is to say that many of the constituents of that concept were already present in the king’s mind, and that in the heat of adversity they were beginning to fuse.
In all this, the regime which replaced Wolsey had nothing to contribute. The object of the new men had been to topple Wolsey, not to resolve the king’s matrimonial dilemma. Possibly there was some feeling that a parliament might offer a route forward, but if so, nobody knew what that was, and in the thinking of Norfolk and the others, the principal need for the session was to attaint Wolsey.
13
That, indeed, was the one cause which held them together, and they grew terrified when it became clear at the beginning of December that the king would not permit a parliamentary bill of attainder, and was exhibiting every sign that he would bring the cardinal back into government.
14
Norfolk did his best to keep Henry and the former minister apart, but he had to give ground to the king and to the cardinal’s friends at court, and accept Wolsey. being pardoned and restored to royal favour on 12 February. The terms for this saw the cardinal retain the archbishopric of York plus a pension of 1000 marks from the see of Winchester, plus over £6000 in chattels returned by the king, which made him at least as wealthy as the duke.
15
Wolsey did everything possible to recruit support, and by May the council was known to be discussing the need to bring him back to run things. Norfolk alternated between vindictive fright and sycophantic self-preservation, and by the autumn the king was making ominous comments on the incapacity of his new advisers.
16
The one person who kept her nerve was Anne. It was thanks to her that Wolsey’s ‘hinderers and enemies’ retained the initiative and were able always to count on having ‘time with the king before his friends’.
17
The former minister had recognized this from the start. He wrote to his agent, Thomas Cromwell, soon after his surrender: ‘If the displeasure of my lady Anne be somewhat assuaged as I pray God the same may be, then it should [be devised] that by some convenient mean she be further laboured, [for] this is the only help and remedy. All possible means [must be attempted for the] attaining of her favour.’
18
When he fell ill in January 1530, he played on the king’s genuine concern to extract a message of sympathy from Anne (plate 53).
19
She was, however, only superficially won over and, according to Chapuys, was more interested in whether Wolsey was genuinely ill, or merely milking the king’s good nature.
20
Her response to the news that he had been pardoned was to lash out at Norfolk for caving in so abjectly, she cold-shouldered the cardinal’s supporters at court, and a letter from him in May, even though brought by one of her own faction, was met with mere formality and the message that she ‘will not promise to speak to the king for you’.
21
At the same time Anne was making it clear to the French, Wolsey’s strongest supporters, that she could do more for them than he ever would.
22
Perhaps failure to regain Anne’s favour explains why Wolsey in the latter part of 1530 changed direction and began to work for a
rapprochement
with Katherine, Charles V and Rome. By October preparation was well advanced for a counter-coup, to be signalled by the arrival of a papal edict ordering Henry to leave Anne. Since Norfolk was for the moment away from court, Anne and her father had to move directly to forestall this disaster.
23
She whipped up the king’s anger against such presumption on the part of Clement and treated Henry to a scene, or a series of scenes, which reduced him to tears. She brought out again her wasted youth and the reputation she had risked for Henry; she would leave him. In the end, Henry could only pacify her by agreeing to move against Wolsey. Of course, not even Anne could have urged Wolsey’s arrest without colourable excuse. What this was is not known in detail - the cardinal died on 29 November 1530 on the way to interrogation - but it certainly included a revelation of Wolsey’s recent dealings with Rome and, perhaps, with Francis I and the emperor also. The most likely source is a deliberate leak to Anne or her father by a French ambassador concerned to prevent England swinging back towards an imperial alliance.
24
Chapuys certainly interpreted the surprisingly dismissive reaction of the French at the news of Wolsey’s death as an indication that they had earlier refused to go along with him and thus abandon support for a marriage with Anne ‘on which alone depend the credit and favour the French now enjoy at this court’.
25
Anne Boleyn’s defeat of Wolsey’s attempted comeback meant that those who had ridden to power behind her could sleep more peacefully, yet not too peacefully. ‘The great matter’ continued to defeat them in November 1530, as it had done from the start.
26
Suffolk was work-shy.
27
Thomas More, the new chancellor, had come in determined to defend the Church and stamp out heresy, but to have as little to do with the king’s ‘great matter’ as possible.
28
Norfolk possibly felt the same, but the ineffective-ness of his public commitment to the divorce was not caused by lack of will but lack of ideas - Thomas Howard would have helped Henry to hell if he wanted to go there.
29
Even the brilliant Stephen Gardiner, imprisoned by his high view of the clerical office, came up with nothing.
The only support for Henry and the moving ferment of his ideas had come from Anne and her more committed backers. When the court arrived at Waltham in early August 1529, following the Blackfriars hearing, Stephen Gardiner and Edward Fox, the provost of King’s College, Cambridge, shared lodgings together as they had earlier in the year in Italy.
30
They were billeted on a certain Mr Cressey, only to discover that his sons were being tutored by a university acquaintance, the theologian, Dr Thomas Cranmer of Jesus College.
31
Cranmer had already some awareness of the king’s predicament and when the subject came up over supper, he commented that canon law would get Henry nowhere; the problem was theological and theologians would give him the answer: ‘whose sentence may be soon known and brought so to pass with little industry and charges ... And then his highness in conscience quieted may determine with himself that which shall seem good before God, and let these tumultuary processes give place unto a certain truth.’
32
The suggestion had been made before, but when a couple of days later, Fox (also a theologian) reported Cranmer’s opinion to the king, this time it struck an immediate chord. Was not his case precisely that canon law said one thing and divine revelation the other?
33
Let this perceptive scholar be sent for, not that the king waited until he could interview Cranmer. Within days the French ambassador was being badgered by Wolsey and Henry to find an excuse to return to France and consult the theologians there, a task he did not relish.
34
Cranmer was eventually seen at Greenwich in October 1529.
35
His initial suggestion had now grown into a proposal that Europe’s faculties of theology should be consulted, and Henry engaged him to write a thesis setting out the questions at issue. Who was backing this suggestion was made clear when Henry passed Cranmer over to Rochford to be cared for at Durham House while he got on with the writing.
36
Successfully completed, that task led to an appointment as royal agent to solicit the views of the Italian universities, and Cranmer left England in January 1530 in the entourage of (once more) Anne Boleyn’s father. The earl was being sent to argue Henry’s case yet again, this time to Charles V and Clement VII at Bologna.
37
A new and highly important member had been added to the Boleyn team.