There is an alternative scenario, suggested by something Edward Hall says. ‘The king, after his return [from Calais] married privily the Lady Anne Bulleyn on Saint Erkenwald’s Day, which marriage was kept so secret, that very few knew it, till she was great with child, at Easter after.
50
St Erkenwald’s Day was the day the couple returned to Dover. Later Protestants canvassed that date to protect Elizabeth’s reputation; even at full term she could not have been conceived earlier than the start of December. Hall, however, had no such motive and his date does coincide with the approximate start of cohabitation (which must have been known in court circles). Significantly, too, Nicholas Sander dates the marriage as 14 November although he had every reason to slander Elizabeth’s legitimacy.
51
It could be, therefore, that Thursday, 14 November 1532, was when Henry and Anne made some sort of formal commitment. Given the regular ceremony in January before a priest, it is unlikely that November 14 saw a formal marriage. But for Anne and Henry to abandon years of self-denial, their commitment must have been sufficiently robust to stand up in canon law - probably espousals
de
praesenti
before witnesses which, if sealed by intercourse, would have been canonically valid, always assuming that the union with Katherine would subsequently be struck down.
52
If Hall was referring to something of this kind, it is again clear that the initiative can only have come from Anne. By marrying, Henry effectively threw away the agreement with Francis I he had sought for over a year and had specially travelled to Calais to secure only days earlier.
53
Anne, on the other hand, secured the formal commitment she had always stood out for. She had also ensured, crucially, that she would be the wife in possession whenever the divorce came through. Ending Henry’s marriage to Katherine would not now create a vacancy which her enemies could try to exploit.
Some observers of the behaviour of Henry and Anne, and many more commentators at second hand, would have found this discussion quite unnecessary. All over Europe the assumption was that Henry had married his mistress. There was even gossip that they had already had a child or children.
54
Yet the grounds for believing that Anne remained a virgin until the last months of 1532 are strong. Sander might claim that she was promiscuous at a very early age, but as we have seen, the equally Catholic George Cavendish, who had known her, was unequivocal:
The noblest prince that reigned on the ground
I had to my husband, he took me to his wife;
At home with my father a maiden he found me.
55
There is no evidence that Anne bore any children before 1533, neither in the comments of informed observers nor - and this is more significant - in any administrative or financial records. No process was ever made at Rome on the ground of her immorality, and Katherine’s case suffered by its eagerness to assume the worst without proof.
56
Evidence of adultery would have decisively weakened Henry’s claim to be acting on grounds of conscience, but it was never forthcoming. Anne’s determination to be a wife and not a mistress meant that self-interest lay in morality. Henry’s need for a legitimate heir made for the same - and the argument is the stronger if we should see the king doubtful about the success of his divorce almost to the last. Neither could afford the risks of incautious passion. That the relationship had a physical element - at least on Henry’s side - is well attested, and how this could be expressed yet controlled over six years may intrigue the curiosity and challenge the belief of a generation brought up to different norms of behaviour. We may even wonder how strong that physical element was. But controlled it was; when full sexual relations began, they were initiated by calculation - and the calculation was very possibly Anne’s.
12
A CORONATION AND A CHRISTENING
L
ONDON was all a-bustle as the Easter season of 1533 came to an end. Anne Boleyn, now the king’s ‘most dear and well-beloved wife’, was to be crowned on Whit Sunday, 1 June, and orders had arrived for the full panoply of a royal coronation.
1
The city had to ‘make preparation as well to fetch her grace from Greenwich to the Tower by water, as to see the city ordered and garnished with pageants in places accustomed, for the honour of her grace when she should be conveyed from the Tower to Westminster’, and with only two and a half weeks to get ready for what was to be the first major exhibition of civic pageantry since 1522 - indeed, only the second of its kind in the whole reign.
2
Now scores of participants were mobilized - nobles and others who claimed the right to serve in particular capacities, those selected to be knighted in honour of the occasion and those who were to take part in the processions.
3
Lady Cobham found herself allocated the role of attendant horsewoman and required to find white palfreys for herself and her own ladies, and although her own robes and the long cloth of gold (or perhaps red velvet) trapper for her horse were provided, she was expected to equip her attendants herself, ‘as unto your honour and that solemnity appertaineth’.
4
And the lesser folk were busy on the decoration, the railing and the gritting of the streets to give footing to the horses - all the preparations, large and small, inseparable from the great occasion.
The pageantry of a coronation spread over four days.
5
On the first, the monarch would be escorted by river to the Tower; the next was devoted to court rituals, and on the afternoon of the third a road procession took place from the Tower, through the city to Westminster; on the final day came the coronation itself and a great banquet in Westminster Hall. There were some half-dozen ‘places accustomed’ for pageants on the route through the city, and all were decorated on the occasion of Anne’s coronation, plus three more, making the show as big as that for Charles V in 1522 and larger than Katherine of Aragon’s in 1501. The water pageant, too, was outstanding.
It was about one o‘clock on Thursday, 29 May, that, escorted by numerous smaller vessels, the fifty great barges of the London livery companies set out from the rendezvous at Billingsgate. The term ‘barge’ is now somewhat misleading.
6
Company barges were sixty or seventy feet long with a beam of ten feet or so, shallow draft and a large covered cabin for passengers. They were powered by four to eight oars a side up forrard and were highly decorated. On that Thursday they were more elaborately dressed than even for the lord mayor’s procession, with flags and bunting overall, hung with gold foil that glistened in the sun and with little bells that tinkled; the vessels were packed with musicians of every kind, and more cannon than seems safe on such a crowded waterway. The fleet was led by a light wherry in which had been constructed a mechanical dragon that could be made to move and belch out flames, and with it were other models of monsters and huge wild men, who threw blazing fireworks and uttered hideous cries. A very safe distance behind came the mayor’s barge, with the aldermen in scarlet and the common councillors. To the starboard of the mayor’s craft came the famous bachelors’ barge, provided by the Haberdashers, the company of the then mayor. Hangings of cloth of gold and cloth of silver concealed ‘trumpets and divers other melodious instruments’, flags carried the arms of the company and of the Merchant Adventurers, the rigging was decorated with streamers which had little bells at the end, two great banners (one fore, one aft) were blazoned with the arms of Henry and Anne, and the starboard gunwale was covered with thirty-six shields showing the two coats of arms impaled. On the opposite side of the mayor’s barge was another wherry, this time carrying an outsize representation of Anne’s principal badge, a white falcon crowned, perching on red and white roses which burst out of a golden tree-stump growing on a green hill surrounded by ‘virgins singing and playing sweetly’.
Rowing against the tide, it took the procession two hours to reach Greenwich, reverse its order and come to anchor off the palace steps. In mid-afternoon Anne entered her own ‘sumptuously’ decorated barge, along with the principal ladies of the court. A second barge carried the rest of her women, then came the king’s barge full of his guard ‘in their best array’, with the royal trumpets and minstrels, followed by the barges of the courtiers - totalling, with the livery company vessels, some 120 large craft and 200 small ones. Observers rhapsodized about:
the banners and pennants of arms of their crafts, the which were beaten of fine gold, illustring [reflecting] so goodly against the sun, and also the standards, streamers of the cognisances and devices, ventalling with [waving in] the wind, also the trumpets blowing, shawms and minstrels playing, the which were a right sumptuous and a triumphant sight to see and to hear all the way as they past upon the water, to hear the said marvellous sweet harmony of the said instruments, the which sounds to be a thing of another world.
7
Now rowing with the tide, the flotilla was making better than seven knots. All sea-going vessels had been ordered out of the fairway, but they joined in with gun salutes as Anne passed, almost as though officially lining the route. When the main anchorage of the Pool of London was reached, the salvoes became so many, drowning the continuous ripple of the cannon-fire among the barges, that observers lost count. But the best was yet to come. As the procession rounded the bend of the river at Wapping and came in sight of the Tower, the gunners there received the order they had been waiting for and ‘loosed their ordinance’, four pieces at a time. While the rest of the fleet ‘hovered’ - backed water - off Tower Wharf, to one final crescendo of noise the barges carrying Anne and the lord mayor pulled in to the landing steps. They were greeted by a party of the Tower officers and the heralds; then Anne and the London notables proceeded through the crowd to a second reception party, the officers of the royal households, and then on to be greeted by the great officers of state; finally through the postern gate into the fortress and to the king himself who, that day, as throughout the coronation festivities, had been compelled by ancient tradition to observe in secret. Henry embraced his wife, who turned to thank the citizens ‘with many goodly words’, and so too the king. London had done him proud.
Henry too had achieved something more than magnificence by mobilizing city and court to do honour to his new wife. What the feeling of observers and participants was we do not know, but even if we discount as wishful thinking many of the assertions that, whenever they appeared in public, Katherine of Aragon and her daughter Mary were greeted with enthusiasm, there must still have been many in both the court and the city who had mixed feelings about this new marriage. But just as it was intended to do, this magnificent river pageant had drawn thousands of excited spectators, and what they had seen was the city oligarchy and the elite of the realm uniting to honour the king’s second wife. As one herald put it, ‘all the lords that might come, but especially temporal peers of all the realm in their barges’, while another seems to imply that before the queen and her entourage embarked there had been some formal acclamation of Anne ‘as queen of England by all the lords of England’.
8
Who could blame the populace for concluding that those who knew agreed with what Henry had done? And who could expect critics such as the duke of Suffolk not to look at the banks as they passed by and decide that Henry had popular support for his actions? The pageant had been engineered as a piece of corporate idolatry. All had apostatized before the king’s command; all had bowed the knee to the new goddess. And even for those with harder heads and less imagination, there was an equally significant lesson. Henry had had his way; the king’s will was irresistible.
The first public ceremony over, the royal couple spent the next forty-eight hours in the Tower, enjoying the reconstructed apartments which had been readied for the occasion at Cromwell’s personal direction. Virtually nothing of them remains, but they were in the south-east corner, in the innermost ward, between the White Tower and the main curtain wall. As well as lesser rooms, Anne had available a rebuilt great chamber and a rebuilt dining-room, while a new bridge across the moat gave access from her private garden into the city. The plans for a private gallery for the queen had been dropped, but there was the restored great gallery to do double duty. And within the privacy of the Tower, the court rituals of the coronation continued to proclaim the lessons of the day, particularly this time to the nobility and gentry. Eighteen Knights of the Bath were created, in ceremonies which lasted from dinner on Friday to Saturday morning, and involved a special overnight vigil in chambers fitted up for each candidate in the White Tower. These included up-and-coming courtiers such as Francis Weston, the king’s former page, and William Windsor, the son of Lord Windsor, keeper of the great wardrobe, but many were connected with Anne Boleyn or her Howard relations. Henry Parker, George Boleyn’s brother-in-law; the earl of Derby, whose wife was Anne’s aunt; Thomas Arundel, who had recently married Anne’s cousin; Henry Saville of Thornhill in Yorkshire, who was already identified as the man to block the pretensions of her open enemy, Thomas, Lord Darcy; possibly Lord Berkeley, whose wife had been Anne’s bridesmaid back in January - all these and others were object lessons that the new way to honour was support for the new queen.
9
Then on the Saturday Henry dubbed nearly fifty knights bachelor.
10
Since the honour was in some ways a burden that could only be avoided by paying a fine, some men were probably there under compulsion, but we can again pick out the names of protégés of such Boleyn supporters as Cromwell, Henry Norris, William Brereton and the earl of Derby. There could be little doubt who it was ‘the king delighteth to honour’.
11