The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (54 page)

Although most of the compositions in the book are for church use, six are secular. One by an anonymous composer is a neo-Latin poem linking the New Testament story of Lazarus with Olympus and the Greek gods. Two are Italian humanist poems set by Josquin. The remaining three are, in many ways, the most interesting. They are examples of the new style of Parisian
chanson,
which had become especially fashionable at the French court during Anne’s stay with Claude. With an evident lyrical melodic line, the
chanson
strove for lightness and for music married to the rhythm of words chosen for grace and wit, often bordering on the risque. Amateur ensembles could perform these. One of the
chansons
in Anne’s book is a setting by Claude de Sermisy of a poem by Clement Marot. During Anne’s time in France Marot was at the start of his court career, and she would later offer him refuge from persecution.
93
Sermisy she must have encountered. He was one of Francis I’s favourite musicians, and under the soubriquet of ‘Claudin’, his eventual output of 160 or so
chansons
included some of the most popular music of his day.
94
The Claudin/Marot piece is a dialogue with ‘Joy’:
Jouyssance vous donneray,
Mon amy, et vous meneray
Là où pretend vostre esperance.
[I will give you joy my friend and lead you where your hope lies]
and the impudent answer is:
De vostre mort mary seray
[I would be very sad at your death]
 
For the other two chansons in the book, we have only a title, but these too give a flavour of the new form:
Venes regres venes tous
(‘Come repining, come whatever’) and
Gentilz galans compaignons
(‘My gentle, gallant fellows’). We can have little doubt that Henry joined Anne to sing these and others like them.
18
 
THE ADVENT OF REFORM
 
T
HE most haunting description of Anne Boleyn is ‘Anna of the Thousand Days’. The brevity of her marriage, the gradient of catastrophe from the coronation to Tower Green, her final total vulnerability, it is all there, above all the transience — gone, almost as though she had never been. The image is arresting, but the Protestant leaders in her daughter’s reign would have rejected it decisively. John Foxe declared of Anne: ‘What a zealous defender she was of Christ’s gospel all the world doth know, and her acts do and will declare to the world’s end.’
1
Of course, remarks like this are what we would expect of Foxe and the rest. From 1558, although Elizabeth, the new queen, was committed to restoring and defending her father’s supremacy over the English Church, she needed (the reformers believed) every possible stiffening to persuade her to adhere to a clearly Protestant position. Yet the evidence is on their side; Anne Boleyn was not a catalyst in the English Reformation; she was a key element in the equation.
2
We have seen how Anne played a major part in pushing Henry into asserting his headship of the Church. That headship was not just a constitutional rejection of the primacy of Rome. It was, as Thomas More and others at the time were well aware, a change with profound implications, revolutionizing the ethos of Christianity in England. Yet over and beyond this, Anne was a strong supporter of religious reform - defined as we shall see later - and she was the first to demonstrate the potential there was in the royal supremacy for that distinctive element in the English Reformation, the monarch’s freedom to take the initiative in religious change. Whatever the chances were of any grass-roots movement for reform on this side of the Channel, it made all the difference when the impetus towards change came from the highest level in the land. Brief though Anne’s influence was, it was a thousand days of support for reform from the throne itself. And hindsight can say more. The breach in the dyke of tradition which she encouraged and protected made the flood first of reformed, and later of more specifically Protestant Christianity, unstoppable. Catholic hatred of Anne damned her for the break with Rome and for the entrance of heresy into England. It was right on both counts.
The most striking evidence of Anne Boleyn’s influence in the Church is what Alexander Ales described to Elizabeth as ‘the evangelical bishops whom your most holy mother had appointed from among those scholars who favoured the purer doctrine of the gospel’.
3
William Latymer listed them as Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Shaxton, Thomas Goodrich and her almoner John Skip, although the latter was not elected a bishop until three years after Anne’s death. The actual list is somewhat longer. Chapuys noted the partisan appointment of John Salcot, alias Capon, to Bangor, while William Barlow, elected to St Asaph’s and St David’s in quick succession in 1536, was a staunch Boleyn supporter.
4
Indeed, of the ten elections to the episcopate between 1532 and Anne’s death in 1536, seven were reformers who were her clients. Another, Edward Fox, was clearly being rewarded for his sterling support for Anne during the divorce, and the list also included John Hilsey who, though not directly linked to Anne, was a protégé of Cranmer.
5
Alexander Ales was, of course, exaggerating when he wrote of Anne ‘appointing’ these men — William Latymer was more correct to talk of her ‘continual mediations’ with the king ‘for their preferment’ — but the point is clear. And the influence of this spate of appointments was crucial to the future of the Reformation. At the end of the reign, the reforming bishops in office were still predominantly those patronized by Anne Boleyn.
6
Anne’s religious patronage extended to lesser positions in the Church as well. When Henry Gold, Archbishop Warham’s former chaplain, was executed for complicity with the Nun of Kent, Anne secured his benefice of St Mary Aldermanbury for Dr Edward Crome, only to find that fashionable London cleric somewhat slow in responding to his royal patron. The result was a stinging rebuke, linking the neglect of his own best interests with neglect for the advancement of godly doctrine.
7
This was in 1534, but Anne had been exercising an influence on appointments long before this. In the summer of 1528 she was pressing Wolsey to change his mistaken nomination of William Barlow to the living of Tonbridge into the living of Sundridge, which was what her father had originally asked for.
8
Nor, as the letter to Crome shows, was her interest just in securing rewards for favourite clerics, but in using them to promote reform. It was no accident that when she wanted to place a ‘friend’ in the hospital of St John Redcliffe, she couched her letter to the corporation of Bristol as a request to grant the next appointment to two reformers in her entourage, Baynton and Shaxton, and David Hutton, a local reformist leader.
9
We know, indeed, a little of the way in which William Barlow exploited the promotion Anne secured for him to the priory of Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire, a year or so before his appointment as a bishop in North Wales.
10
Cromwell also wanted the bishop of St David’s to accept Barlow as suffragan, but Bishop Rawlins would have nothing to do with this incomer and his contentious preaching of ‘God’s Word’. Considerable friction arose in the monastery between the conservatives and the new prior, who was supported by his brother John, another Boleyn protégé, who knew Anne well and was reckoned to owe to her his position as dean of Westbury. The infighting grew so bad that at one point William was forced to leave Pembroke. The correspondence between London and West Wales that the quarrel produced gives tantalizing glimpses of the network of conservative resistance to reform at the centre and in the provinces, at one point even touching Dr John Incent of St Paul’s, who was to be accused of the murder in 1536 of the anticlerical London member of parliament, Robert Pakington.
11
Be that as it may, Anne was certainly engaged against Incent in another battle — to wrest control of the St Paul’s chapter from him and his fellow conservatives.
12
When Anne was arrested, John Barlow’s commitment to her nearly led him to disaster. Apparently deciding that the first news of this was a malicious conservative rumour, he descended on Pembrokeshire, only to have the informant, who was, as he suspected, one of the leading anti-reformers, threaten him and declare that one as close to Anne as Barlow must have been privy to her treason and should be arrested in case he made an escape by sea from Milford Haven. Fortunately for the dean, he kept his head and arrested the informant instead, making dark threats about papist sympathizers.
As the involvement of Thomas Cromwell in the Pembroke quarrels demonstrates, Anne Boleyn was not alone in her support for reform. She was one of a group of powerfully placed individuals whose loss was lamented in the early 1540s by Richard Hilles, a London merchant of reformist leanings who after the death of the queen found England increasingly hot for him: he listed Anne herself, Rochford, Cromwell (all dead), Latimer (resigned), and he could have included Shaxton too.
13
Other names were added by John Foxe in a later remark: ‘So long as Queen Anne, Thomas Cromwell, Archbishop Cranmer, Master Denny, Doctor Butts, with such like were about [Henry VIII], and could prevail with him, what organ of Christ’s glory did more good in the church than he?’
14
Rochford’s support for reform had been particularly open; Chapuys hated being entertained by him because of his insistence on starting religious debates.
15
Anne’s brother referred to this love in his speech on the scaffold, which was widely reported in England and abroad:
I was a great reader and a mighty debater of the word of God, and one of those who most favoured the gospel of Jesus Christ. Wherefore, lest the word of God should be brought into reproach on my account, I now tell you all, Sirs, that if I had, in very deed, kept his holy word, even as I read and reasoned about it with all the strength of my wit, certain am I that I should not be in the piteous condition wherein I now stand. Truly and diligently did I read the gospel of Christ Jesus, but I turned not to profit that which I did read; the which, had I done, of a surety I had not fallen into so great errors. Wherefore I do beseech you all, for the love of our Lord God, that ye do at all seasons, hold by the truth, and speak it, and embrace it; for beyond all peradventure, better profiteth he who readeth not and yet doeth well, than he who readeth much and yet liveth in sin.
 
The final sentence has lost its freshness and part of its point in the course of translation. Constantine remembered Rochford’s words ‘to the effect’ that ‘I had rather had a good liver according to the gospel than ten babblers.’
16
There is even a possibility that the Boleyns sought, or maintained, private links with reformers abroad. In 1535 and 1536 Master Thomas Tebold, later known as one of Cromwell’s continental agents, was travelling in Europe, supported by the earl of Wiltshire with some assistance from Cranmer.
17
Very few of the regular letters he sent home have survived, but in July 1535 he was in Antwerp, reporting to Cranmer on his enquiries into the arrest of William Tyndale. We may note here that the appeals for Henry VIII to intervene to save the translator passed from Thomas Poinz, his landlord in Antwerp, to Poinz’s brother John, who was one of Anne’s receivers, and from him to Cromwell.
18
Tebold meanwhile had intended to go into Germany, but no doubt the Tyndale furore decided him on a detour to Orléans, unless, that is, he went there with the intention of reporting to the Boleyns, as he did on 9 January, on the current state of religious persecution in France, where an impudent reformist propaganda campaign - the Affair of the Placards - had created a massive conservative backlash. His cover, if that is not too strong a term, was scholarship and a desire to study languages, and by the spring of 1536 he was travelling in southern and central Germany, including Wittenberg, meeting everyone who was anyone — among them, it seems, the Strassburg reformer, Martin Bucer — spreading the idea that Thomas Boleyn was a promising patron of works, theological and other, keeping up a flow of diplomatic news, and enlivening his hosts by explaining the advantages of dissolving monastic houses. He was also in touch with French reformers in flight from the Placards persecution, and was able to send back to Anne’s father a piece published by Clement Marot.
The reforming group was thus more numerous than Anne alone, but it is clear that the queen was a key figure. After her death, Nicholas Shaxton wrote personally to Cromwell, begging him to be as diligent in promoting ‘the honour of God and his Holy Word than when the late queen was alive and often incited you thereto’.
19
Ales went so far as to say to Elizabeth I, ‘True religion in England had its commencement and its end with your mother.’
20
This explains why Cranmer, no less than Shaxton, was terrified in 1536 that she would bring down the cause of reform with her.
21
Already in 1532, Dr John London, one of the secretary’s unlovelier clerical agents, was showing great anxiety to stand in her good books; in 1534 Cranmer asked an unknown correspondent to accelerate an appointment as a personal favour, but carefully hinted that he could provide letters from Henry and from Anne if forced to do so; when the archbishop wrote to Cromwell in 1535 of the need to plant reform in Calais, he reported that he had already written to Anne to secure the next two benefices that became vacant in the town.
22

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