The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (29 page)

The events of New Year’s Day 1532 certainly made clear who held the moral initiative.
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Tradition dictated that on that day the members of the royal family and the court exchanged gifts. Anne duly gave Henry an exotic set of richly decorated Pyrenean boar spears and, in contrast to New Year 1531, he seems not to have had to pay for his present in advance. His gift to her was a matching set of hangings for her room and bed, in cloth of gold, cloth of silver and richly embroidered crimson satin.
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As for Katherine, the king had decided for the first time not to give presents to her or to her ladies and, rather meanly, had ordered the courtiers to follow suit.
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He had not, however, forbidden Katherine, who recognized a splendid opportunity to circumvent the prohibition on sending messages to Henry. Nothing had been said about gifts. Carefully choosing a gold cup of a highly distinctive design and of obvious expense, the queen sent it to be presented to her husband. The unfortunate gentleman of the privy chamber on duty could not refuse it, but when he came to present the cup to Henry, he found himself the target of predictable fury. Two hours or so later the king realized his error and sent to get the cup back, frantic that it might already have been returned to Katherine. If so, it could have been re-presented during a court function when Henry would have found it impossible not to accept and thereby recognize publicly his relationship with Katherine. Fortunately the privy chamber still had the cup, and orders were given not to return it until the evening, when it would be too late for Katherine to try that ploy. Christmas was not happy for either Henry or Anne.
Behind the scenes, however, movements were already in train which would break the political impasse and transform stalemate into victory. The first sign was a breakthrough on the vital question, ‘By what mechanism could a lay monarch assert his God-given authority over the Church if the clergy refused to obey?’ This was triumphantly answered in 1531, in the ‘new additions’ which a septuagenarian lawyer, Christopher St German, made to a work already in print, known to later generations as
Doctor and Student.
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In the main text St German had argued that only the sacramental functions of the Church were outside the concern of human, that is secular, law. In practice, however, ancient prescription allowed the Church a great deal more, and in the ‘new additions’ St German faced head-on the question: what was ‘the power of the parliament concerning the spiritualty and the spiritual jurisdiction’?
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Traditionalists such as Thomas More believed that no local legislature could prevail against the universally recognized liberties of the Church. St German showed otherwise. A statute binds all men because all have assented to it, the Lords directly and the Commons through their representatives. It can, therefore, properly regulate all the actions of the Church which belong to the temporal sphere, prescription or no. In effect, whenever the Church wanted to do more than exhort, it needed statutory authority. ‘The king in parliament’ is ‘the high sovereign over the people which hath not only charge on the bodies but also on the souls of his subjects’.
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Felicitous plotting would bring Christopher St German on the scene as a protégé of Anne Boleyn. Alas, history is not so neat. He was, however, directly in touch with Henry VIII and working as a parliamentary draftsman.
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In other words, however he had come to royal attention, St German was not just another theorist. He was actively drafting legislation to give statutory effect to the supreme headship with, as the ultimate prize, the achieving of the king’s divorce by parliamentary authority.
The second development that promised hope to Anne Boleyn in 1531 was the arrival not of a book, but of a man: Thomas Cromwell. Since Cromwell would bring Anne to the throne at last - and himself, in the process, to high favour with the king - and since he would, within three years of that, destroy her as he manoeuvred to become supreme in government, a good dramatist would have scripted a memorable first encounter. Yet this too would be false, and not merely because life is not art or, more prosaically, because our first evidence is of Anne sending him a verbal message in March 1529. Cromwell at first meeting would have seemed nothing remarkable.
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About 45, fourteen years a business agent and solicitor for Thomas Wolsey, he had saved himself from the wreck of the cardinal’s enterprises by neat footwork, which had left him in charge of salvage operations on behalf of the king. Cromwell had also worked for the duke of Norfolk, particularly on parliamentary matters, but by the opening of 1531 he had risen to be a sworn royal counsellor. Opinions about him were fiercely discrepant while he was alive, and historians today are no more in agreement. For some he was a fixer, a hit-man firing bullets others made to bring down men better than himself. Alternatively he was the bureaucrat, the agent, the archetypal staff officer. Or, yet again, he was a perceptive statesman, the original mind which reallocated the atomic weights in the periodic table of English politics.
 
What, then, did the arrival of Thomas Cromwell in 1530-1 mean for Anne Boleyn? The difficulty with this question is separating the man then from the man we know later. It is all too easy to see the ferment in royal ideas and policies in 1532 and afterwards, and to argue that he was the new yeast. What we need to ask is what our assessment would be if Cromwell had died in 1532. The working papers he left show him already active in a myriad matters, but there is no reason to believe that if the papers processed by other busy counsellors had survived, we would not have material of much the same character. Certainly, by Wolsey’s standards, his archive suggests an executive and not yet a policy-maker. And we have no need of a policy-maker. Tyndale’s unitary sovereign state, Fox’s supreme headship, St German’s king in parliament - here already is the philosophy, the proclamation and the mechanism of the Henrician Reformation. Not that Cromwell had nothing to contribute. He was quickly associated with the new thinking, the offer to convocation in February 1531 of the Trojan Horse formula ‘as far as the law of Christ allows’, and he was perhaps already toying with the implications of ‘empire’.
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Yet in ideas Cromwell was a latecomer, and to load him with responsibility for the innovative thinking behind the Reformation is to distract from his real originality in the Boleyn camp. At last Anne was backed by a first-rate politician.
Henry VIII had initially planned to recall parliament for October 1531, but the lack of clear policies among the counsellors put back the meeting twice, eventually until 15 January 1532.
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Hard though it is to follow the arguments of these preliminary weeks, it is clear that several options were being canvassed. Anne spoke defiantly of achieving the divorce irrespective of Charles V, and her alliance with the French (who themselves exuded confidence in a rapid divorce) was demonstrated to all at a banquet in late October, when she sat at the head of the table between Henry and the senior French envoy, Jean du Bellay, while his colleague sat with Norfolk and her parents and, less comfortably, Gardiner and Fitzwilliam.
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Cranmer’s Determinations appeared in November, and Cromwell and his ally, Thomas Audley, Speaker of the Commons and from November a king’s serjeant-at-law (a senior legal adviser to the Crown), produced drafts for legislation to enable the divorce to be granted by the English Church and papal countermeasures to be ignored.
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On the other hand, Cromwell and Audley were also busy drafting bills for a quite different scenario - the continuation of the struggle for a divorce at Rome. Very probably this was on instructions from Henry or Norfolk or both. One draft made it treason to bring into England any sentence by Clement against Henry; another attempted to curb the activities of English clerics abroad, possibly to bind Reginald Pole before his departure to Avignon and Padua was permitted in January 1532. A related scheme was an attempt to hit the pope financially by cutting off annates from England (payments made by new appointees to major benefices). This may have begun as a radical plan based on the
Collectanea,
and it did include clauses to ensure that the English Church would function irrespective of any papal censures, but it was drafted using language about the pope which it is mild to describe as sycophantic.
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Norfolk certainly presented the annates bill to the Lords only as a device to put more pressure on Clement VII, and never seriously believed that it threatened the link with Rome.
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Even so, it ran into vigorous opposition in both houses, which was quelled only by Henry’s personal intervention and that more than once, and even then only after significant concessions.
The reception which the annates bill received did not augur well for parliament’s willingness to adopt the full gospel of St German. In any case, opposition at court and in the council could no longer be ignored.
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Early in the new year, Anne’s uncle - desperate to find the least traumatic way to make progress - tried, with the assistance of her father, to persuade Archbishop Warham to defy the pope. Having failed at that, Norfolk called his supporters together, and putting as strongly as he could the lesser
Collectanea
argument about English privilege (topped off with the St German-like argument that matrimonial causes belonged to the temporal sphere and so to the Crown), he asked for their commitment to defend these royal rights. The faction broke, then and there. Thomas, Lord Darcy, who had been with Norfolk all the way since the attack on Wolsey, spoke bluntly and for the majority. His life and his property were at the king’s disposal, but matrimonial cases belonged without question to the Church courts. And, he added ominously, king and council knew perfectly well what to do ‘without wishing to put a cat betwixt other people’s legs’ or dragging in outsiders.
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If the king heeded the advice and the implied warning, there was no future for Anne.
After this episode, Cromwell could have had little hope that legislation to secure Henry’s divorce was politically possible. However, the odds are that he had merely gone along with Henry and Norfolk to allow their exertions on the annates bill to prove they were up against an impenetrable wall of opposition. The Boleyn option was the only way forward. Cromwell also realized what was needed to achieve this. That was to bounce the king into a whole-hearted acceptance of the radical gospel - all doubts, all caution, all the warning voices swept aside by the rush of events and the force of the king’s emotion. He could also see an opportunity in an issue which had been rumbling round the Commons since 1529, ‘the crueltie of the ordinaries [church judges]’ towards people accused of heresy. It is a fashion of some historians to discount this because the pre-Reformation English Church was clearly popular and played a valued part in the life of individuals and parishes. Yet this is to misunderstand anticlericalism. Orthodox belief and support for the existing Church did not rule out criticism of the way the clergy abused its privileged position; take, for example, the ‘catch 22’ rule by which innocent people were burned for refusing to abjure heresies which they did not hold. In the first session of parliament, a sizeable number of voices had been able to carry some reforms, particularly of abuses in Church courts. Since then, however, and largely by More’s enthusiastic use of the chancellor’s office to encourage persecution, heresy had become the issue - with the first burnings for more than fifteen years. In the notorious case of Thomas Bilney, there was real doubt whether he was in any way a heretic, and although More had not been directly involved, immediately he had realized that the Bilney case would be aired in parliament he set to work on a massive cover-up.
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All this Cromwell could see. He had memories of the 1529 agitation, probably some of the anticlerical material prepared at that time, and he may even have noted that Bilney (and other alleged heretics) had attempted to appeal from the Church courts to Henry himself as ‘supreme head’, and had been ignored. Here was the point where the Church was vulnerable.
Complaints in the Commons about the prosecution of heresy became louder - fuelled, no doubt, by signs in convocation that the Church was determined to increase the pressure against unorthodox opinions but, no doubt, also discreetly encouraged by Cromwell himself. Then at an opportune moment we find the House debating a petition against the Church courts drafted by Cromwell and his assistants, the so-called ‘Supplication against the Ordinaries’, and this was submitted to the king on 18 March. Henry seems not to have recognized any special significance in this, and neither did convocation when it was asked to comment on 12 April, but the Supplication was a brilliantly conceived booby trap. It invited the king as ‘the only sovereign lord, protector and defender’ of both clergy and laity to legislate in parliament to ‘establish not only those things which to your jurisdiction and prerogative royal justly appertaineth, but also reconcile and bring into perpetual unity your said subjects, spiritual and temporal.’
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The overtones clearly echo St German and the
Collectanea,
and when the Church was called on to reply it was at once on the spot. It had either to abandon its traditional independence or tell Henry to his face what had been said so far only privately or unofficially - that the title ‘supreme head’ meant nothing.
Here chance took a hand. Convocation gave to Stephen Gardiner the job of preparing an immediate response to the first and most dangerous clause of the Supplication, which queried the independent jurisdiction of the Church. An obvious choice - brilliant, the king’s secretary, the odds-on favourite to succeed Warham at Canterbury - Gardiner had two fatal disabilities. First, he was an uncompromising advocate of the clerical privilege that had raised the son of a Suffolk cloth-maker to the richest bishopric in England, and to be, in Henry’s own words, the king’s ‘right hand’. In the second place, Gardiner had been abroad for ten weeks and had returned only in time to see the difficulty the Crown had had in securing the annates measure, in a modified form.
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The conservatives had fought. Warham had had a violent altercation with Henry across the House of Lords and now faced a
praemunire
charge; More had organized an almost subversive opposition in the council and in the Commons; on Easter Sunday, William Peto, head of the Observants, the court’s favourite order of friars, had preached a sermon telling Henry to his face that he would end up like the Old Testament tyrant Ahab (though he left unspoken the implication that Anne Boleyn was Jezebel). When, the following Sunday, a royal chaplain was put up to reply, he was barracked by another of the friars and, for good measure, hauled before convocation for breaching ecclesiastical discipline - a convocation which already had its claws into Hugh Latimer, one of Henry’s favourite clerics.
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And when parliament reassembled after Easter and Henry asked the Commons to vote him money, members sympathetic to Katherine told him that the best way to guarantee national security was to take her back. Anti-Boleyn opinion, clerical as well as lay, was everywhere standing up to be counted, and it would have required a man much less self-assured than the bishop of Winchester not to feel that now he had returned, a counter-attack must be successful. His earlier support of Anne Boleyn was dead; the independence of the Church was too great a price to pay for the king’s happiness.

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