The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (44 page)

Read The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn Online

Authors: Eric Ives

Anne was, of course, no isolated figure. She still had behind her the supporters who had brought her to power and were now intent on reaping the fruits of that power. Not enough is yet known of the ramifications of the Boleyn faction - its presence and policy can be principally demonstrated in religious matters - but its dominance in affairs generally is beyond doubt. The archbishop of Canterbury was Thomas Cranmer. The lord privy seal was Anne’s father, the king’s secretary was Thomas Cromwell. The lord chancellor was Thomas Audley, to whom Anne lent a house at Havering in 1535 to escape the plague in London.
13
Of these posts, all but the privy seal had, at the start of 1532, been in the hands of men loyal to Katherine of Aragon and her daughter Mary. In the privy chamber, Anne’s brother was one of the two noblemen, and Henry Norris was groom of the stool and the king’s right-hand man, while lesser men like Brereton occupied a number of the other places there. Potential rivals were in eclipse. Stephen Gardiner kept a low profile, intent on regaining royal favour; thanks to his expertise he was soon back at work for the king, but the seriousness of his rift with Henry (which never really healed) was known as far afield as Padua.
14
The dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk continued to attend court from time to time, but Suffolk in particular counted for little. Not only was he now only the king’s ex-brother-in-law, but by 1535 he was being stripped of his assets to pay outstanding debts to the Crown.
15
Chapuys’ letters show how often the ambassador now had to deal with Cromwell, instead of either Brandon or Howard. This is not to say that all supporters of Katherine and Mary were in eclipse. Several of the privy chamber were still in the king’s good books - Carewe, Neville, Browne and Russell - while even Exeter kept his place as a counter to Rochford. There can, however, be no doubt where the weight of royal favour lay. Chapuys told the emperor’s adviser, Granvelle, in November 1535 that Cromwell, the king’s secretary, stood above everybody except the Lady’.
16
In all of this, particular interest inevitably concentrates on this last, the relationship between Anne and Cromwell. Although he would eventually grow to become a cuckoo in the Boleyn nest, until then there is nothing to suggest that Anne ever saw the secretary as other than her loyal dependant, and to all outward appearances he remained ‘her man’. She appointed him her high steward at
£
20 a year.
17
Cromwell sent the warrant for the delivery to Anne of her letters patent creating her lady marquis of Pembroke, and Cromwell probably directed the survey of her Welsh properties; the file copy of the survey instructions remained with him, along with a copy of the order to local royal officers to assist and an estimate of the value of the properties inspected.
18
The success of the coronation was largely attributed to him. And this close relationship continued. Its tone is very clear in a letter Anne sent to the minister when his ally, Christopher Hales, the attorney-general, began to meddle with a wardship which had been granted to her:
Master Secretary, I pray you despatch with speed this matter, for mine honour lies much on it, and what should the king’s attorney do with Pointz’s obligation, since I have the child by the king’s grace’s gift, but only to trouble him hereafter, which by no means I will suffer, and thus fare you well as I would ye did. Your loving mistress, Anne the Queen.
19
 
Privately Chapuys bracketed together ‘the king, the concubine, Cromwell, and their adherents’, and Anne and Cromwell were linked together as far away as Lübeck.
20
In 1535 we even find Cromwell having a book of physick sought out and sent to Anne.
21
On occasion we see queen and minister working together. In 1531 Sir Thomas Wharton tried to forestall their anticipated opposition by securing a supporting letter from the king and sending individual copies to both Cromwell and Anne.
22
In September 1535, Hugh Latimer wrote to Cromwell:
I trust you have not forgotten my last suit, with which I was minded to have gone to the king; but the queen, remembering at what end my lord of Salisbury was, said it would be enough to leave it to you.
23
 
The closeness of Anne and Cromwell is also evident in the way petitioners would approach the queen through Cromwell. Soon after Anne’s recognition, Edmund Bonner wrote to Cromwell from Rome, sending:
a letter of congratulation to the queen’s highness, to be delivered unto her by your hands; not doubting but like wise, as of your goodness without any my merit it hath pleased you to set me forward, so it may like you with her grace so to set forth my service and good will to her grace.
24
 
Audley secured his refuge from the plague by asking the minister to approach the queen.
25
Christopher Hales even expected Cromwell to pass letters on to her.
26
Anne, in her turn, was known to be an effective influence on Cromwell. In 1532 Richard Lyst, a Franciscan lay brother at Greenwich, sent her news of the misdeeds of his superior, John Forrest, in the clear expectation that she would pass it on.
27
When the earl of Oxford despaired of securing certain hereditary offices by direct application to the king, he approached Anne and, armed with her support, then wrote to Cromwell.
28
A drive against river obstructions late in 1535 threatened the weir which Lady Lisle’s family owned at Umberleigh in Devon. Direct applications to Cromwell and the king were found useless, but it was thought worth considering an alternative application via the queen.
29
When the lord deputy of Ireland died on the last day of 1535, his widow, Anne Skeffington, petitioned Cromwell to secure payment of his overdue fees, plus free passage from Ireland where the new lord deputy, Leonard Grey again, was trying to hang on to as many as possible of the assets of his predecessor. Yet at the same time Lady Skeffington wrote directly to Anne, imploring her to secure the king’s backing for her petition to the minister.
30
We may see something of the same sort in the efforts of Elizabeth Staynings to secure access to the queen.
31
Her husband, Walter, was in prison for debt, but despite the king’s instructions to Cromwell to sort the matter out, as well as the reminders of Norris and other men of standing, the minister always pleaded pressure of other work. This has been interpreted as Cromwell frustrating the intervention of the privy chamber, but it reads more like an attempt to use administrative delay to assist Staynings’ creditors, or in order to exact the price for Cromwell’s own services too.
32
Mrs Staynings, knowing that she would soon have to leave London to have the child she was carrying, wrote to her aunt, the Viscountess Lisle, then in Calais: ‘Good madam, if there be any lady of your acquaintance in the court that you think that is familiar or great with the queen, that it please you to write unto her that I may resort unto her sometime, for I feel me that trouble is not yet at an end.
33
There is some evidence to suggest that Anne was seen as particularly receptive to female petitioners. We have already had instances concerning Lady Skeffington and Elizabeth Staynings. The latter’s husband too, when desperately looking for protection in April 1533, sought the help of his wife’s aunt, who was in attendance on the newly proclaimed Anne: ‘I judge in my mind the queen will be good and gracious lady unto me upon your special request, to see me have the laws executed indifferently between me and my adversaries that keeps me in prison.’
34
Over the winter of 1535-6 Katherine Howard, Anne’s aunt, was trying to secure a separation from her second husband, Henry, Lord Daubeney. She told Cromwell that the only assistance she was receiving was from the queen herself, and this despite the strenuous efforts which were being made to destroy her standing with Anne.
35
The help may have been very practical indeed; Lord Daubcney, who was certainly pleading financial hardship at one stage, reached an amicable agreement with his wife after Anne’s father had made available
£
400.
Anne’s elevation to the throne also had repercussions within her family, of which she seems to have become the accepted head. When the son of Sir William Courteney of Powderham died, the father was approached to assist in a match between his widowed daughter-in-law and Cromwell’s nephew, Richard Cromwell.
36
Courteney, however, replied that the girl was a near relative of the queen and he would not move unless Cromwell could send him a request from the king that he should promote the match, to guarantee him against ‘her grace’s displeasure’. This puts into a somewhat different light the rustication from court of Anne’s sister Mary. In 1534 she had secretly married ‘young Stafford’, one of the hangers-on at court, the second son of minor Midlands gentry, and the marriage had been discovered only when it became obvious she was pregnant. The reason for Anne’s rigorous attitude was not pique or pride. It was that Mary had failed to recognize her position, both by making what was an obvious
mésalliance
for a queen’s sister, and by failing to accept the directing role which Anne now possessed within the Boleyn family.
37
Mary should have been under no illusions. As early as November 1530 the king had given Anne
£
20 to redeem a jewel Mary possessed, presumably one he had given her. Anne, the wife, wanted no one to remember Mary, the mistress.
38
At a less intimate level, Anne could also exercise influence through her household. There were the jobs it could offer. Stephen Vaughan, a merchant adventurer and an old friend of Cromwell, tried very hard to get his wife accepted as the new queen’s silk woman, even to the extent of her submitting unsolicited - and in the event unnoticed - samples of her work.
39
Nor was this the only instance of competition for places in the queen’s household, although few were as direct as David ap Powell, who applied to Cromwell for a post either as yeoman purveyor to the queen or yeoman of her carriage, because he had not the capital to trade any longer.
40
Anne’s service was evidently lucrative - her uncle, Edmund Howard, saw it as much more profitable than his position as controller at Calais.
41
Men who entered her service would also have hoped eventually to qualify for a bonus in the form of a royal grant of some kind, though in the event few had achieved this by 1536. A number of questionable characters even made a living by claiming to belong to the queen’s staff. A priest called James Billingford, alias Kettilbye, had a good thing going in the Midlands in 1534-5, where he conducted visitations of a number of abbeys, styling himself variously as Anne’s chaplain, her (or her father’s) kinsman, her scholar, the nephew of the duke of Norfolk and servant to Thomas Cromwell - just the sort of person whom it would be wise to ‘sweeten’; after all, Lady Lisle thought it an investment to send venison to ‘the queen’s genuine servants.
42
Given this, it is very strange that only a few of Anne Boleyn’s staff appear to have had personal ties with their mistress. George Taylor, her receiver-general, we have already met. He had been in Anne’s service for several years before the coronation and may have begun as a lawyer, but although his was a post of importance, carrying a fee of
£
50 a year, he has correctly, if unkindly, been described as ‘part of the background’.
43
That can certainly not be said of Cromwell, her high steward, but as we have seen he appears to have been involved in major policy issues for Anne, not day-to-day affairs. Her chancellor was her uncle, James Boleyn, with whom, as with Cromwell, she shared some sympathies, but her aunt by marriage was not among her favourite attendants.
44
Her other ladies included her sister-in-law and a cousin, Madge Shelton.
45
However, these names apart, Anne’s staff appears not to have come from her existing contacts. The chamberlain at the head of her household was an insignificant peer elevated in 1529, Thomas, Lord Burgh of Gainsborough. His first achievement for Anne was to vandalize Katherine of Aragon’s barge and his last to assist in her trial, while his subsequent performance in the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536 would be loyal but lacklustre.
46
Her master of the horse was William Coffin, a professional household administrator, actively concerned with the staffing of his department; he was later to serve Jane Seymour in the same capacity.
47
Lord Burgh’s deputy was Sir Edward Baynton. He, as we shall see, shared some of Anne’s religious opinions, but he was a long-term career courtier and went on to serve as vice-chamberlain to all Henry VIII’s later wives.
48
John Uvedale (or Udall), her secretary, had even longer in royal service, beginning as an exchequer clerk under Henry VII and ending as treasurer for the northern garrisons under Edward VI. He also combined what was obviously a part-time post for Anne with that of secretary to the duke of Richmond.
49
Her surveyor, John Smith, was a professional auditor who, on Anne’s death, simply transferred to Jane Seymour.
50
Judging by her predecessor, the council running Anne’s affairs (which met in a specific ‘council chamber’ with a designated keeper) would have consisted at least of her chancellor (Boleyn), receiver-general (Taylor) and surveyor (Smith), plus an auditor, attorney-general, solicitor-general and a clerk, all yet to be identified.
51
The queen would also have retained six lawyers ‘of counsel’ and three court attorneys.

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