Thomas Cranmer showed Henry a way to bypass the papal Curia and have doctors of the Church confirm that his private revelation was in very truth the age-old law of God. Some months earlier Anne had shown him something even more significant, a treatise which demonstrated the coherent political expression of his feelings about royal authority which Henry had been groping after. This was
The Obedience of the Christian Man and How Christian Rulers Ought to Govern
, published in October 1528 by the exiled William Tyndale, whose translation of the New Testament, with its Lutheran prologues, had been pouring illegally across the Channel since 1526. Anne acquired a copy of The Obedience soon after its publication and certainly before the following spring, when Wolsey instructed the dean of the Chapel Royal to undertake a purge of heretical books at court.
38
Having read it, Anne marked passages to show to Henry, but in the meantime lent the book to her gentlewoman, Anne Gainsford. However, the girl’s suitor and future husband, George Zouche, ‘plucked’ it from her ‘among other love-tricks’ and, much taken with so shocking an author, refused to return the book, despite the entreaties of his beloved, fearful for both her mistress’s property and the danger Tyndale presented. Predictably, the dean caught the young man reading it and the copy was passed to the cardinal. Hastily the girl owned up, giving Wolsey no time to smear her mistress (if, indeed, he planned to), and Anne Boleyn went to Henry, vowing ‘it shall be the dearest book that ever dean or cardinal took away.’ Henry listened, and sight of his ring caused the clerics to return the book. Anne, however, did not leave it there. She drew Henry’s attention to the marked passages and suggested that he would find them well worth reading. The story certainly rings true, for Elizabethan Protestant hagiography would surely have credited Anne with promoting Tyndale’s
New Testament
rather than a political text long forgotten. It is also doubly attested. John Lowthe, archdeacon of Nottingham, told it to John Foxe, and Lowthe had spent part of his earlier career in the Zouche household; George Wyatt learned of the episode directly from Anne Gainsford.
39
The Obedience of the Christian Man
set out to demonstrate ‘the obedience of all degrees [in society] by God’s word’ and to show that ‘all men without exception are under the temporal sword, whatsoever names they give themselves.’
40
The belief that the pope, the prelates and the clergy possessed separate power and authority was clean contrary to scripture. ‘The king is in the person of God and his law in God’s law.’
41
Hence the ruler is accountable to God alone and the obedience of the subject is an obedience required by God; indeed, when the subject obeys or disobeys the prince, he obeys or disobeys God. Papal claims are vacuous; there is no distinction in position between clergy and laity, Church affairs and temporal affairs: all is under the sole control of the monarch. For the Church to rule the princes of Europe - as it did - was not only ‘a shame above all shames and a notorious thing’, but an inversion of the divine order: ‘One king, one law is God’s ordinance in every realm.’
42
Here was a message which could not but resonate in Henry VIII’s deepest inner convictions.
The arrival of
The Obedience
answers an obvious question - what did Anne and her more radical supporters have in mind when they began to move against Wolsey? Indeed, since Anne acquired her copy of the book about the time that she lost confidence in the cardinal, it could be that reading Tyndale influenced that decision. Until then, the only alternative to a papally sanctioned annulment had been the somewhat irresponsible French advice to marry at once and hope the pope would accept the
fait accompli
, a course which might have left Henry with no recognized second marriage and England open to the dreaded papal interdict.
43
Tyndale, however, now offered a realistic option: throw off Rome’s judicial and administrative tyranny and restore the proper God-given status and power to the prince, who would then reform the Church and bring it back to true biblical purity. As Anne did not immediately alert Henry to the thesis, it seems probable that her initial intention had been to raise the possibility of unilateral action only if expectations from Blackfriars were disappointed. But though Henry may have received the text earlier than she had intended, he did not shy away. He declared, ‘This book is for me and all kings to read.’
44
True, he did not surrender immediately. The assumptions of almost everyone around the king reinforced tradition, a divorce allowed by Rome was still preferable and Tyndale was tarred with the brush of heresy.
45
Nevertheless, Henry had been shown the radical alternative and was mightily attracted by what he saw. Indeed, he set about trying to recruit William Tyndale as a propaganda writer!
46
Anne also introduced Henry to more virulent anticlerical material. Simon Fish, a London lawyer, had fled to Tyndale after satirizing Wolsey in the Gray’s Inn Christmas play of 1526 and then running contraband books.
47
From the comparative safety of the Low Countries Fish then flooded London with
The Supplication of Beggars
, a petition to Henry which made a searing attack on the blood-sucking avarice and shameless immorality of the English clergy, which was reducing the realm to penury. According to Fish’s wife (who told Foxe the story), her husband sent Anne a copy of the pamphlet and she, after discussion with her brother, gave it to Henry. Once more the king found some of the ideas sympathetic. As Fish explained, clerical pretension made nonsense of the king’s justice:
So captive are your laws unto them that no man that they list to excommunicate may be admitted to sue any action in any of your courts. If any man in your sessions dare be so hardy to indict a priest of any such crime, he hath, ere the year go out, such a yoke of heresy laid in his neck, that it maketh him wish that he had not done it.
48
The king immediately put in hand a pardon for Fish and a recall to England, and subsequently interviewed him.
49
Anne was thus feeding the king with ideas. But though these confirmed his instincts, they stopped short of practical politics. The Boleyns, therefore, had also to move on the vital matter of implementation. The first tactic was the one they had mooted towards the end of 1528, a monster petition from the elite of England to the pope, begging for the divorce in the national interest. The draft presented at an initial meeting in June 1530, was too anti-papal to win immediate acceptance, but even when modified, the text was still full of menace. It warned Clement that, although refusing the divorce would make the condition of Henry’s subjects ‘more miserable ... it will not be wholly desperate, since it is possible to find relief some other way’.
50
Months before, Wolsey had warned of the radical advice being poured into the royal ear; now this had helped shape a formal communication to the Holy See. The revision was carefully not put to a second full meeting, but touted round the country from individual to individual at a brisk canter. The man in charge was William Brereton, groom of the privy chamber, the first association with Anne’s cause of a man who would die as her alleged ‘lover’ in 1536.
51
Assisting him was Thomas Wriothesley, a Gardiner man but one who may have owed his training at Cambridge to support from Thomas Boleyn.
52
All the adult peers accessible in the time available signed the petition, along with twenty-two abbots and the senior officers of the royal household, clerical and lay. Only six bishops did so - the remaining fourteen in England and three in Wales were not asked.
Few of those promoting this petition could have hoped much from any impact on Rome, but it had the great domestic advantage of whipping grumblers into line and isolating Katherine’s more determined supporters. However, at the June meeting the king had also taken the opportunity to test the approach suggested by Cranmer.
53
Could he, armed with the opinion of the theologians of the Western Church, marry without obtaining papal approval? Stunned silence greeted the notion until ‘one of the king’s chief favourites’ fell on his knees to warn Henry that this would provoke popular unrest and to beg him at least to wait until the cold and wet of winter would discourage troublemakers. Who this favourite was we do not know. Of the signatories, the one most likely to dare express such opinions was the marquis of Exeter, but irrespective of identity, that favourite had faced Henry with the unpleasant reality that radical policies might be politically impossible.
Some weeks after the June meeting, evidence of new and potentially even more radical thinking emerged from the Boleyn camp. Henry was handed a set of papers known as the
Collectanea satis capiosa.
54
It was a product of research teams which had been working on the king’s problems for many months and consisted of a data bank of scriptural, patristic and historical arguments which demonstrated - or claimed to demonstrate - that there was no warrant for the centuries-old assumption that the pope was supreme in spiritual matters. Henry would therefore be justified in taking into his own hands the solution of his matrimonial problem. The king greeted the document not so much as a drowning man greets a straw but as he might a rescue party from outer space.
55
Research was also in progress on the canon law and theology of marriage. Anne’s father oversaw the publication of the opinions of the European universities in April 1531.
56
In November there followed an English translation and elaboration by Cranmer.
57
Its title,
The Determinations of the most famous and excellent Universities of Italy and France
, is somewhat misleading as the book developed the case put to the Blackfriars court and picked up a number of points from the Collectanea. It also achieved a new stage in menace by asserting in the vernacular that ‘the duty of a loving and a devout bishop [was] to withstand the Pope openly to his face’ for failing to enforce obedience to God in matrimonial cases such as Henry’s.
58
Cranmer continued to enjoy Boleyn patronage and other researchers were similarly supported. One was the Hebraist Robert Wakefield who provided key advice that in the original, Leviticus 20: 21 specifically referred to sons.
59
The overall leader of research was Edward Fox, the king’s future almoner. Involved from the start in the king’s matrimonial affairs, in December 1529 Fox was granted a benefice in the bishopric of Durham, whose revenue was, pro tem, assigned to support the Boleyns, and he would soon begin filling the chapel of his Cambridge college with Boleyn iconography.
60
The
Collectanea
material made possible two lines of argument on first principles. The first was that each province in the early Church had its own jurisdiction, independent of the pope. The proper body to settle Henry’s divorce suit was therefore the English Church, and it alone. The second argument was even more drastic. It cut out the pope entirely, and established that in any kingdom, all authority, by divine institution, belonged to its king - exactly that God-authenticated right over Church and State alike that Henry hankered after. This, of course, was just what Tyndale and Anne Boleyn had told him, but there was a vital difference. Fox offered Henry the proof that he was already head of the Church - he had no need to vindicate his rights. The Church was the intruder, usurping authority which did not belong to it. Tyndale had called on Henry to invade previously sacrosanct territory against all accepted law and public opinion; Fox made this superfluous. Henry was already in possession, an emperor answerable only to God for the conduct of every aspect of life in his realm, a conservative standing for traditionalist rights, innate in himself ‘and all kings’. He had only to flex his muscles.
By June 1530 observers could tell that Anne Boleyn and her supporters felt themselves on the brink of a major advance, and when the
Collectanea
reached the king, the impact on the tone and content of royal pronouncements both in Rome and in England was immediate.
61
Henry went further in October, as a new parliamentary session approached, and proposed to a gathering of clerics and lawyers that the archbishop of Canterbury should be empowered by statute to decide the divorce suit, notwithstanding papal prohibition. When told that parliament could not act in this way, he reacted angrily, postponing the session until the new year and belabouring the papal nuncio with both
Collectanea
arguments, asserting that except over doctrine, the pope’s power was ‘usurpation and tyranny’.
62
Anne Boleyn and her father kept up the momentum with anti-papal tirades so violent as to shock the unshockable Chapuys and drive him from court, uttering dire warnings that together they would alienate England from the Holy See.
63
Wiltshire pressed the same line in council, as Henry informed the ambassador, and the king himself was similarly violent, especially on one occasion when Chapuys noticed Anne Boleyn listening at a nearby open window.
64
When Charles V’s man seized the chance to respond with some home truths of his own, Henry quickly took the conversation out of earshot and the danger of an outburst from Anne. In London, royal printers were busy with propaganda. As well as the items derived in part from the trawl of European universities, 1531 saw
The Glass of Truth
(to which Henry made some contribution), the Latin text of
A Disputation between a cleric and a knight
(with an English version following in 1533) and Christopher German’s
New Additions.
65
Nor was diplomatic activity ignored. Anne in particular went out of her way to entertain the French envoys over Christmas, while Henry gave the senior of them rooms in Bridewell Palace itself.
66