The queen’s concern for religion is especially well documented in the case of monastic houses. Soon after her coronation, one of the rival factions in the abbey at Burton-on-Trent was apparently expecting that Cromwell, under pressure from Henry and Anne, would countermand the orders he had already given for the election of a new abbot.
23
In 1533 she took action to get Cromwell to investigate conditions at Thetford Priory, and later that summer she was communicating with him about the abbey of Vale Royal in Cheshire.
24
All this certainly gives credibility to the stories told by her chaplain, William Latymer. If we accept his testimony, Anne was fully behind the campaign to impose new injunctions on the monastic houses, which Cromwell began in the summer of 1535.
25
One of these injunctions prohibited the display of ‘relics or feigned miracles’. When, in the third week in July, Anne and Henry arrived on progress at Winchcombe in Gloucestershire, close to the famous pilgrim centre of Hailes Abbey, she sent a posse of her chaplains to the monastery to ‘view, search and examine by all possible means’ the bona fides of the house’s greatest attraction, ‘the blood of Hailes’, which was supposed never to have congealed since Christ’s crucifixion. They reported that it was duck’s blood or wax, whereupon Anne went to the king, and the relic was removed — to the comfort, Latymer says, of ignorant and weak Christians, but one might rather suppose their bewilderment at a raid by such exalted sceptics. Unfortunately for Latymer’s story, the relic was still there in 1538, when a more thorough inspection removed the contents and decided it was some kind of resin, but it may still be true that Anne did intervene at Hailes Abbey in 1535.
26
A visit to the house by Henry and Anne was undoubtedly intended, and that may have led to the abbot being interviewed by Cromwell; certainly the secretary was involved with the community. There is even support for the possibility that Anne did achieve some temporary removal of the relic. When preaching about the deception in 1538 and announcing the latest findings, John Hilsey apologized for spreading the story that the material was duck’s blood, which clearly implies an earlier questioning of the relic, and agrees exactly with one of the explanations William Latymer gives of what Anne was told.
One episode for which Latymer is the sole authority is the visit that Anne Boleyn paid to the nuns of Syon, that remarkable flower of English monasticism which combined aristocratic exclusiveness with genuine piety and serious learning.
27
The detail Latymer gives does allow us to date the visit to early December 1535, when the queen was at nearby Richmond, and so to establish the authenticity of the story, since at that time a major effort was being made to compel this prestigious community to accept the new order.
28
As well as lesser agents, Cromwell himself went down; and a day or so later, on Tuesday, 14 December, John Skip and Dr William Butts, the king’s physician (of whom more anon), formed the first wave of a concentrated assault. The next day the king himself sent four high-powered academics, and Lord Windsor, whose sister was a nun at Syon, also did what he could; on the Thursday the bishop of London arrived. Come Saturday and a full report to the king, and it seems likely that Anne’s visit was the outcome. Perhaps a woman, the queen herself, would have more success. She arrived when the nuns were in choir, to be refused entry on the ground that she was married and so excluded by the rule of the order. Anne declined to accept the answer and waited, with her attendants. Eventually the choir doors were opened and her party came in, only to discover all sixty or so nuns prostrate, with their faces fixedly ‘downward to the ground’. Thereupon, if we are to believe Latymer, Anne addressed this unpromising audience with ‘a brief exhortation’ about the moral decline of the congregation - all sorts of slanders were being reported back to the court — and she also rebuked them for persisting with Latin primers which they could not understand, offering them English primers instead which, after some resistance, the nuns accepted. Throughout his memoir Latymer makes Anne appear painfully stilted, and the absurd pomposity of this speech invites disbelief; it is hardly effective to admonish the backs of an audience’s heads, and Anne, of all people, must have known that these daughters of the best families and of the most scholarly religious house in England were better Latinists than she. But whatever really happened, Anne’s visit did not effect the desired conversion. We do not know that the nuns ever promised to accept the king’s headship of the Church.
The particular agents of Anne’s religious influence were her chaplains, whom she chose with care from the most promising young reformist scholars, particularly from Cambridge.
29
Her talent-spotter was Dr William Butts, who combined a privileged position as a medical man with an interest in reform and a concern for his former university, especially his old college, Gonville Hall. It was Butts who brought Latimer to court, where he became a chaplain to Anne and was on very good terms with her vice-chamberlain, Edward Baynton. Shaxton and Skip were Gonville men and so was Crome, whom we have already noticed. Sometimes Butts went direct to the king, as he did when he recommended John Cheke, Prince Edward’s future tutor, for promotion, but when Cheke sought support for the up-and-coming William Bill, later Elizabeth’s almoner, Anne was the person he approached, via another of her chaplains, Matthew Parker.
30
The queen’s pursuit of Parker, who would end his career as her daughter’s first archbishop of Canterbury, is particularly well documented. William Betts, another Gonville Hall man, had moved to Corpus Christi college and later became Anne’s chaplain. Parker, also a Corpus man, was evidently commended to Anne by Betts, and on the latter’s death she decided that Parker should succeed him. No time was lost. Her almoner, John Skip, wrote two letters on the same day, urging him to come at once without bothering to collect much baggage — a long gown would do.
31
Six months demonstrated how well she had chosen. The king sent Parker, ‘chaplain to our dearest wife’, a doe to enjoy; and Anne gave him something more permanent, the post of dean of the collegiate church of Stoke by Clare in Suffolk.
32
He preached to the household of the Princess Elizabeth, and then before Henry on the third Sunday in Lent 1536.
33
Whether Cranmer gave him the advice about preaching that he gave to Latimer is not known — don’t grind axes, don’t get at individuals, and don’t go on too long: ‘an hour, or an hour and a half at the most, for by long expense of time the king and the queen shall peradventure wax so weary at the beginning [of the series of sermons] that they shall have small delight to continue throughout with you to the end.’
34
Probably Parker had sense enough to tell how much Anne could stand, for their relationship of patron and client, laywoman and Christian pastor, was evidently sympathetic. As we have seen, less than six days before her arrest, Anne seems to have laid a particular responsibility on him to watch over her daughter. That charge, and the debt he felt he owed to Anne, stayed with him for the rest of his life.
35
Cranmer’s advice to be cautious in sermons was wise, for Anne’s clerical favourites were very much marked men. Several, indeed, were men with a past. William Betts had been associated with the scandal at Wolsey’s college in Oxford in 1528 over the circulation of prohibited books; at the time Anne herself had interceded with Wolsey for one of the others involved, possibly the Thomas Garret who was burned at the stake in 1540.
36
A number of these men were also associated with the martyr Thomas Bilney, notably Hugh Latimer and Parker, who saw Bilney die.
37
Yet it would be wrong to picture Anne as a patron of a tight and unified caucus. The clergy she supported differed among themselves — Edward Fox, Hilsey and possibly Cranmer found Latimer far too extreme at times — and although some would end their lives as martyrs for ‘Protestantism’, others such as Shaxton would find their place among the upholders of ‘Catholic’ ways.
38
Applying confessional labels in the 1520s and 1530s is, in fact, wholly inappropriate. In was, in Lucien Febvre’s telling phrase, a period of ‘magnificent religious anarchy’.
39
When Anne first began to patronize the more innovative clergy of the day, Luther’s ninety-five theses were hardly more than a decade old; the events which gave rise to the very name ‘Protestant’ occurred only two months before the opening of the legatine court at Blackfriars. Even on the continent, lines were in the course of being drawn — among reformers, as well as between reformers and conservatives. Indeed, within nine months of the Protestant ‘protestation’, reform had been disrupted by a disagreement about the nature of the eucharist, which would produce permanent division. There would henceforth be Catholics, Lutherans and sacramentaries, as well as ‘anabaptists’, that inchoate religious self-help minority which added withdrawal from established society and its obligations to the sacramentarian belief that the bread and wine at the eucharist were a symbol of Christ’s death and not, in some real sense, Christ’s own body and blood. But with London being 450 miles and two languages away from this turmoil of definition, to say nothing of an admittedly imperfect but nevertheless highly active English censorship, it is appropriate during Anne’s lifetime to see only two general positions in England — that the Church needed to be supported as it was, and that the Church as it was needed to be reformed — around which and between which most individuals ranged with varying levels of commitment.
What then did reform mean to Anne Boleyn? Chapuys damned her, her father and her brother as Lutherans, but he was probably not implying any direct link, merely an equality in error. There is no hint, either, that Anne had links with previous English heresy, although Latimer was accused of being a Lollard, and there were congruences between the new critics of the Church and the persecuted underground which looked back to John Wyclif. The absolute conviction which drove Anne was the importance of the Bible. For that reason, if her brand of reform needs to be given a label, that label must be ‘evangelical’ — ‘pertaining to the
euangelion
, the gospel, and especially to the written gospel’.
First of all, Anne talked about the Bible, just as her brother did. William Latymer describes her habit of discussing some scriptural problem whenever she dined with Henry, and said that this was copied at the tables of her chamberlain and vice-chamberlain.
40
From time to time Henry would join in, and Latymer had himself seen the correspondence which arose out of one debate between the king and Sir James Boleyn on one side and Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Shaxton on the other. Scriptural debate at table is hardly in favour today, but it was certainly the thing among sixteenth-century evangelical hostesses. Katherine Parr, Henry’s last wife, also encouraged the king’s taste for this latest in intellectual stimulus.
Anne also studied the Bible. Her private preference, as Latymer says quite correctly, was for the French text:
Her highness was very expert in the French tongue, exercising herself continually in reading the French Bible and other French books of like effect and conceived great pleasure in the same, wherefore her highness charged her chaplains to be furnished of all kind of French books that reverently treated of the holy scripture.
41
A vivid picture of this was drawn by Louis de Brun, author of ‘Vng Petit Traicte en Francoys’, a treatise on letter-writing, which he dedicated to Anne at new year 1531:
When I consider the great affection and real passion which you have for the French tongue, I am not surprised that you are never found, if circumstances permit, without your having some book in French in your hand which is of use and value in pointing out and finding the true and narrow way to all virtues, as, for example, translations of the Holy Scriptures, reliable and full of all sound doctrines, or, equally, of other good books by learned men who give healthy advice for this mortal life and consolation for the immortal soul. And most of all, last Lent and the Lent before [i.e. 1530 and 1529], when I was attending this magnificent, excellent and triumphant court, I have seen you continually reading those helpful letters of St. Paul which contain all the fashion and rule to live righteously, in every good manner of behaviour, which you know well and practise, thanks to your continual reading of them.
42
While Anne read for herself in French, she was eager to disseminate the Bible in the vernacular. According to Latymer, she kept an English version on a lectern in her suite for anyone to read who wished.
43
If strictly true, this must refer to the final months of her life, since Coverdale’s Bible did not appear until 1535 in Zurich. The exiled Bible translators were certainly keen to secure royal patronage; George Joye, a former associate of Tyndale, printed a sample sheet from Genesis and sent a copy to Henry and one to Anne.
44
Anne’s copy of Tyndale’s 1534 edition of the New Testament is still extant (plate 28).
45
Printed on vellum, with the capital letters hand-coloured in red, many of the woodcuts in full colour, and the edges gilded, it looks very like a presentation copy. The significant point about the Tyndale is that it was a banned book in England; one conservative cleric had declared soon after the first edition that no one who received it could be a true son of the Church.
46
Coverdale’s work, too, would be banned when it appeared, despite the unofficial dedication to Henry.