Anne also defied established ecclesiastical authority by protecting the illegal trade in Bibles. It was probably as early as the end of 1530 that a Thomas Alwaye prepared to approach her in the hope that she would get the bishops off his back, following his arrest and imprisonment for possessing an English Testament and other prohibited books.
47
A year after she became queen she put in hand the restoration of the Antwerp merchant, Richard Herman, to membership of the English society of merchants there, from which he had been expelled in Wolsey’s time, ‘only for that that he [still like a good Christian man] did both with his goods and policy, to his great hurt and hinderance in this world, help the setting forth of the New Testament in English’.
48
It has also been suggested that Anne may have been behind the licensing of a Southwark printer from the Low Countries to produce the Coverdale text in England, and therefore free of the dangerous glosses which foreign books so often carried. Add to that the possibility that so long as she was alive, the drafts of the injunctions to the clergy being prepared in 1536 included a clause requiring every parish to set up a Latin and an English Bible in its church, ‘for every man that will to look and read thereon’.
49
To recognize the dominant place in life which Anne Boleyn gave to the Bible is to locate her faith firmly in the world of Christian humanism. For a man like Erasmus, the premier Christian humanist of all, the Bible, in as reliable a form as scholarship could produce, was central to all good living:
If you approach the scriptures in all humility and with regulated caution, you will perceive that you have been breathed upon by the Holy Will of God. It will bring about a transformation that is impossible to describe ... Man may lie and make mistakes; the truth of God neither deceives nor is deceived.
50
Erasmus, indeed, was aware of Anne. Already he had translated the Twenty-second Psalm for her father, but when in 1533 he wrote two more pieces dedicated to the earl,
A Preparation to Death and A Plain and Godly Exposition or Declaration of the Common Creed
, he began the latter:
To the right excellent and most honourable lord, Thomas earl of Wiltshire and of Ormonde, father to the most gracious and virtuous Queen Anne, wife to the most gracious sovereign lord, King Henry the VIIIth, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Greeting!
51
Yet Anne’s particular religious affinity was not with Erasmus but with the Christian humanists of France. We have already noted her manuscript French psalter with its muscular
putti
and monograms. It employs a translation from Hebrew credited to the Picquard scholar, Louis de Berquin, who was burned as a heretic in 1528. The French Bible which Anne used was a 1534 Antwerp edition of the 1525 translation by Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples, the first great evangelical figure in France, a text which the Paris Faculty of Theology was equally anxious to consign to the fire. Lefevre had to flee to Strassburg.
52
Anne’s Bible is now part of the collection of the British Library. It is in two volumes and retains much of the binding put on when it was received in England (see plate 29). There are ‘HA’ ciphers and Tudor roses, and a decidedly evangelical choice of texts for the front and back of each volume:
AINSI + QUE + TOVS + MEVRENT + PAR + ADAM:
AVSSY + TOVS + SERONT + VIVIFIES + PAR + CHRIST.
LA + LOY + A + ESTE + DONNEE + PAR + MOYSSE:
LA + GRACE + ET + LA + VERITE + PAR + IESV + CHRIST.
53
The full-page frontispiece of the creation is coloured.
Two more of Lefevre’s works which Anne owned we have already met as illuminated manuscripts. ‘The Pistellis and Gospelles for the LII Sondayes in the Yere’ is part copy, part English translation of his
Epistres et Evangiles des cinquante et deux semaines de l‘an,
printed by Simon du Bois at Alençon, 1530-2.
54
The actual copy the scribe worked from has also survived; manuscript annotations establish that it is now in the British Library (shelf-mark 1016.a.9). ‘The Ecclesiaste’ is a similarly hybrid version of a Lefèvre publication, his translation of a commentary by Johannes Brenz. This was printed
circa
1531 as
L’Ecclesiaste,
also by du Bois at Alençon.
55
What must be the copy text of this also survives in the British Library (1016.a.5).
Why would anyone go to the labour and expense of turning printed French texts which Anne could read perfectly well into such mixed and elaborate manuscripts? For more than a century the translator of ‘The Pistellis and Gospelles’ was thought to have been Henry Parker, Lord Morley, George Boleyn’s father-in-law, but in 1998 James Carley managed to read a damaged inscription and establish that the person responsible was none other than George himself.
56
His dedication is worth recording as a demonstration under the guise of courtly gallantry of the closeness of brother and sister, but even more for the evidence that George was writing at Anne’s request:
To the right honourable lady, the Lady Marchioness of Pembroke, her most loving and friendly brother sends greetings.
Our friendly dealings, with so divers and sundry benefits, besides the perpetual bond of blood, have so often bound me, Madam, inwardly to love you, daily to praise you, and continually to serve you, that in every of them I must perforce become your debtor for want of power, but nothing of my good will. And were it not that by experience your gentleness is daily proved, your meek fashion often times put in use, I might well despair in myself, studying to acquit your deserts towards me, or embolden myself with so poor a thing to present you. But, knowing these perfectly to reign in you with more, I have been so bold to send unto you, not jewels or gold, whereof you have plenty, not pearl or rich stones, whereof you have enough, but a rude translation of a well-willer, a good matter meanly handled, most humbly desiring you with favour to weigh the weakness of my dull wit, and patiently to pardon where any fault is, always considering that by your commandment I have adventured to do this, without the which it had not been in me to have performed it. But that hath had power to make me pass my wit, which like as in this I have been ready to fulfil, so in all other things at all times I shall be ready to obey, praying him on whom this book treats, to grant you many good years to his pleasure and shortly to increase in heart’s ease with honour.
57
Two important conclusions arise from this dedication. First it nails once and for all the canard that Anne saw illuminated religious books primarily as fine art. If a fine manuscript was all that was wanted, why ask George to translate this particular text? Secondly, the affinity between ‘The Pistellis and Gospelles’ and ‘The Ecclesiaste’ effectively makes it certain that George was also responsible for the latter. That in turn authenticates a passage in George Boleyn’s scaffold speech which was uniquely recorded by a Calais soldier, Elis Gruffudd — probably passed on by the executioner:
Truly so that the Word should be among the people of the realm I took upon myself great labour to urge the king to permit the printing of the Scriptures to go unimpeded among the commons of the realm in their own language. And truly to God I was one of those who did most to procure the matter to place the Word of God among the people because of the love and affection which I bear for the Gospel and the truth of Christ’s words.
58
Promoting the vernacular Bible was clearly a Boleyn family enterprise.
Why Anne should ask her brother for part translations can only be guessed at. The comments of Latymer demonstrate that she was anxious for others to hear the evangelical message, but the elite quality of ‘The Ecclesiaste’ and ‘The Pistellis’ shows that these particular manuscripts were not for general use. Perhaps it was that even if Anne, as we have seen, was herself ready to ignore the episcopal ban on English Bibles, professional scribes and illuminators were reluctant to do so. Alternatively, retaining the Bible passages in French may simply illustrate the fact that individuals dislike changes to scripture versions they are familiar with.
59
It is also possible to follow up Latymer’s reference to Anne’s chaplains being ‘furnished of all kind of French books that reverently treated of the holy scripture’, and du Brun’s mention of her having ‘other good books by learned men who give healthy advice for this mortal life and consolation for the immortal soul’. We have seen Thomas Tebold sending home books, and the queen used other agents as well. William Lok, her mercer, ran errands for her on his trips to the Low Countries, and his daughter remembered in her eighties how ‘Queen Anne Boleyn that was mother to our late Queen Elizabeth caused him to get her the gospels and epistles written in parchment in French, together with the psalms.’
60
William Latymer himself was on a book-buying trip for Anne when she was arrested.
61
A clue to what they bought is given by the existence of shelf-marks in the copy of
L’Ecclesiaste
which George Boleyn used to prepare his translation. These demonstrate that the book ended up in the royal library at Westminster, no doubt when his (and his sister’s) property was confiscated by the Crown in 1536. But that library also contained a substantial number of other French evangelical books, also published by du Bois and all issued between 1527 and 1534, but not later. The conclusion seems irresistible. They too had been owned by Anne and her brother. Indeed, this was probably the case with other evangelical works published abroad in these key years and which are known to have been subsequently in the Westminster library, notably the nine items (including Anne’s French Bible) which were printed by Martin Lempereur, who also produced the copy Anne owned of Tyndale’s New Testament. In all, the Boleyn confiscations might have yielded as many as forty evangelical books in French or by French printers.
Anne’s link with French reform also accounts for her presentation manuscript of ‘Le Pasteur Evangélique’.
62
This is an anonymous poetic discourse on the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John where Christ contrasts the good and the bad shepherds, hence the title under which it was published at Antwerp in 1541:
Le Sermon du bon pasteur et du mauvais
.
63
The Antwerp title-page gives the author as Clément Marot, one of the enduring lights of French reform, but this has been questioned, and the theory propounded that the poem was specifically written for Anne during a visit to England by Almanque Papillon, a valet of Francis
I.
64
The earliest known text of the poem is certainly the copy presented to Anne, and it concludes with twenty-five lines which eulogize Henry VIII as Francis I’s constant friend and a monarch endowed with the virtue of true riches, one of the great Christian rulers of the day, and a veritable Hezekiah reforming the Church. The final sestet addresses Anne directly with a prophecy that the Good Shepherd [Christ] would give her a son in Henry’s image, whom the couple would live to see grow into manhood:
Oh Anne my lady, Oh incomparable queen
This Good Shepherd who favours you
will give you a son who will be the living image
of the king his father, and he will live and flourish
until the two of you can see him reach the age
when a man is mature.
Unfortunately for the theory that the poem was specially written for Anne, three other endings are known. These suggest that even if Anne was the first recipient, Le Sermon was conceived as a piece of reformist humanism which could be adapted as required. As for authorship, the Sorbonne as well as the printer had no doubt that Marot was responsible. Who the donor of the manuscript was we do not know. The evident expense argues that this was not the poet himself, and the most plausible candidate must be Anne’s favourite, Jean de Dinteville. Indeed it could be his gift on the occasion of, or in commemoration of, the coronation, since the lines about Anne must date from after her marriage and before late 1534, when Marot fled from France, pursued by name as a leading ‘Lutheran’, the pejorative label the conservatives gave to reform.
66
Be that conjecture as it may, the poem remains another most persuasive demonstration of Anne’s link with French reform.
Anne Boleyn, however, was not content with book-collecting. Latymer tells of Anne coming to the immediate rescue of a French refugee, ‘Mistress Mary’, who had fled to England to escape persecution, and of her efforts to get John Sturm, the future Strassburg educator, out of Paris on a safe-conduct.
67
We know most, however, about her efforts on behalf of the poet Nicolas Bourbon. Borbonius, as he called himself in suitable humanist fashion, was the son of an ironmaster from Champagne, a noted neo-Latin author and schoolmaster, and a man prominent among that first generation of French evangelical reformers who from the 1520s had as their patroness the king’s sister, Marguerite of Navarre.
68
He was in touch with Erasmus, enjoyed an old acquaintance with Guillaume Budé, the premier Greek scholar in France, knew Clement Marot intimately, and also Gérard Roussel, one of the original members of that early evangelical preaching team, the Cercle de Meaux, and later Marguerite’s almoner. Bourbon himself entered the duchess’s service in 1529 as tutor to her infant daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, the future mother of Henry IV.