Despite, or rather because of, the protection of the king’s sister, this group lived dangerously, watched for every false move by the die-hard conservatives of the Sorbonne and its ally, the
parlement
of Paris; and while the Affair of the Placards saw Marot scamper abroad, Bourbon was slower or less lucky. His first book of epigrams, the
Nugae (Trifles),
published in Paris in 1533, had contained a scathing attack on the enemies of the humanist ‘new learning’, and this was quite enough to get him arrested and gaoled - during which time he lost all his possessions, including his pet nightingale.
69
According to Latymer, Bourbon got a letter out of prison to William Butts, conveyed, one guesses, by Jean de Dinteville, who had been at school with the poet.
70
Bourbon may even have sent an appeal for transmission to Anne:
A poor man, I lie shut up in this dark prison: There is no one who would be able or who would dare to bring help: You alone, Oh Queen: you, Oh noble nymph, both can and dare, as one whom the king and whom God himself loves.
71
Butts informed Anne, and Henry intervened in France on Bourbon’s behalf. The poet then found himself having to travel to England, an experience which he did not enjoy, but once here, he lodged with Butts at Anne’s expense and later with Henry’s goldsmith, Cornelius Hayes.
72
The nearly fifty verses he wrote in England or on English subjects show that he rapidly became part of the evangelical scene: two epigrams addressed to Cromwell, ‘aflame with the love of Christ’, three to Cranmer, a gift from God, ‘a head to his people’, and one to the two of them together.
73
William Butts appears as ‘my Maecenas and my father’, Holbein as ‘the incomparable painter’, Latimer as ‘the Eternal Father’s trumpet’, and above all, Anne.
74
For no crime, but through a false charge brought by certain individuals and their hatred, I was shut up in prison. I was praying for all good fortune for those who afflicted me. Why? I kept unshaken hope and faith. Then your pity lighted upon me from the ends of the earth, snatching me in my affliction, Anna, away from all my troubles. If this had not happened, I should be chained in that darkness, unhappily languishing, still under restraint.
How can I express my thanks, still less, Oh Queen, repay you? I confess I have not the resources. But the Spirit of Jesus which enflames you wholly with his fire, He has the wherewithal to give you your due.
75
In all Anne figures in six of Bourbon’s ‘trifles’, far more than anyone else, and shares a seventh with Henry.
76
Trifles
is an appropriate name for Bourbon’s elegancies, but in one he offers a perspective on Anne which would otherwise pass us by.
77
The epigram in question ends as others do with a reference to what he owed the queen for rescuing him and to the importance of the queen’s commitment to Christ. Its unique opening, however, acclaims Anne as a figure of international significance.
Just as the golden sun dispels the gloomy shadows of night and at day-break makes all things bright: so you, O queen, restored as a new light to your French and enlightening everything, bring back the Golden Age.
At one level ‘your French’ is an elegant reference to Anne’s status as almost an honorary Frenchwoman - the kind of sentiment we have already see in de Carles. Her service to Claude had clearly left an impression. Bourbon, however, seems to mean something more, hailing Anne not simply as one who has learned from France but who is a beacon to France. And that promises a ‘Golden Age’ as her royal leadership revivifies reform on the continent. Was this anything more than a client’s conceit? Or was there really a possibility that had Anne survived to hold Henry to a course of moderate reform, she could have been a formative influence on the religious shape of Europe, just as her daughter would be?
19
PERSONAL RELIGION
T
HE habit of scribbling in books is much to be deplored, except where the offender is a person of historic interest. Anne’s signature in the older of the Hever Books of Hours certainly guaranteed value when it reached the sale-room, and the tiny drawing she added of an armillary sphere has, we have seen, considerable interest. Even more importance, however, attaches to the rest of the inscription:
le temps viendra
— ‘the time will come.’
1
The phrase is an abbreviation of a proverb of which the full version is ‘a day will come that shall pay for all’ and of itself may seem hardly remarkable for someone of an evangelical persuasion to write below an illumination of the Last Judgement.
2
Effectively it is a precis of the comment in
L’Ecclesiaste
that ‘the judgment of God shall be general and universal where as all things shall be discovered and nothing shall abide hidden, whether it be good or evil.’
3
Nevertheless, that Anne should write this, and write it when comparatively young, does provoke a deeper question about the faith she espoused. What did it mean for her personally?
That would not be an easy question to answer, even given the best documentation. As George Wyatt said, ‘in the burrows of man’s heart be many secret corners.’
4
Self-interest and ambition — which Anne had in plenty — each pointed to reform as the cause that would serve her best after the pope revoked Henry’s annulment suit to Rome. Yet Anne’s evident interest in French reform cannot be dismissed as a posture taken up for the occasion. She had had no direct contact with France since 1521. Her only visit thereafter would be the month she spent with Henry in Calais in October 1532. Her brother George is, of course, a possible link. He made regular diplomatic visits to France, but his first was late in 1529, months after du Brun had seen Anne already deep in St. Paul.
5
By then Anne’s reformist allegiance was well established and the certainty is, therefore, that she was ‘infected’ during her years in France.
Earlier writers assumed that the person responsible was the king’s sister, Marguerite of Angoulême. To someone like Nicholas Sander, it seemed blatantly obvious. Infection passed from Marguerite to Anne, and from Anne into England. That now seems improbable, given that (as we have seen) Anne was never a member of the duchess’s household and, in her letters, appears more a suitor than a disciple.
6
Recent research, however, has shown, that in France sympathy with non-schismatic reform was far from an eccentricity of Marguerite’s.
7
Widely shared among the upper members of French society, the evangelical position would be openly embraced by the queen’s sister Renée, and Claude herself was certainly not hostile.
8
Thus in the ordinary course of Anne’s duties around the queen, she would have worked with and become familiar with many aristocratic women seeking spiritual fulfilment. Almost certainly, too, she would have listened to court sermons from reformist clerics. She could hardly have missed, for example the evangelistic preaching of Michel d‘Arande in the autumn of 1521 about which Marguerite wrote: ‘The spirit which Our Lord caused to speak through his mouth will have struck the souls of those open to receive his word and to hear the truth.’
9
Perhaps, indeed, we should go further and speculate that, while in France, Anne was one of those who did go through a spiritual awakening. She had a good brain; the burning issue of the day was the nature of religious experience; later she would respond to the most winning of spiritual directors, such as Latimer and Parker; she was close to her brother, who ‘spoke the language of Zion’ on the scaffold; only her two oldest religious books were traditional Latin works of devotion.
10
Why should we not allow her genuine religious experience? Where, perhaps, we should then place Marguerite is not as a direct mentor to Anne in France, but as a role model once she had herself achieved royal status.
11
That would certainly account for the tone of Anne’s letters and for the fact that many of the books she collected came from authors and printers encouraged by the queen of Navarre.
12
There are, too, parallels between Anne expressing her faith in fine illuminated manuscripts and Marguerite doing the same.
13
We could even speculate that Anne would have possessed a copy of Marguerite’s own
Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse,
published in 1531, and that this was the copy which her daughter Elizabeth would use in 1545 when translating the work for Katherine Parr.
14
One objection which is raised to a genuinely devout Anne Boleyn is her life as a great court lady.
15
Bourbon saw her as ‘a divine helper’ whom God used to feed the afflicted, but how does that Anne relate to Anne the cynosure of the court, or the ‘haughty’ Anne of the 1520s, described by Cavendish? If we are to believe Latymer, Madge Shelton got into the hottest of hot water with Anne when it was discovered that her prayer book had ‘idle poesies’ written in it, and yet this scandalized queen had exchanged love notes with the king on the pages of her (or his) Book of Hours.
16
Circumstances do, of course, alter cases, and so do advancing years. We must recognize also that William Latymer was committed to portraying Anne as the archetypal ‘godly matron’ and so very ready to air-brush out anything worldly. But more fundamentally, the sixteenth century saw no contradiction between religious commitment and human glory. As Latymer reports Anne saying to her chaplains:
the royal estate of princes, for the excellency thereof doth far pass and excel all other estates and degrees of life, which doth represent and outwardly shadow unto us the glorious and celestial monarchy which God, the governor of all things, doth exercise in the firmament.
17
The monarch who upheld his status glorified God, and never more than when he of all people bowed in worship. Besides this, again as
L‘Ecclesiaste
put it, ‘worldly goods, honour, puissance, joy, voluptuousness, health and all the other things ... be good and gifts of God.’
18
Certainly to abandon oneself ‘unto all voluptuousness and delights’ is ‘to be out of the wit [crazy]’, but the world of ascetic renunciation is far away:
Should I say for all this that it is prohibited for to be merry and that Jesuchrist hath only chosen sturdy people: seeing that he himself hath helped at feasts: specially that in the law was promised the rejoicing under the fig tree? No surely. But at such joys we may not bring forth Adam but Jesuchrist that is to say we should rejoice in the Lord which we find merciful and from whose hand we receiveth his gifts and blessings.
19
Hair shirts, Thomas More’s included, tell us more about psychology than spirituality.
It is, indeed, hard to deny Anne a personal faith. Apart from the Bible in which, significantly, we know she had an interest in Paul’s epistles, the works she read and collected are certainly redolent of a Christianity of commitment and not of routine observance. The
Ecclesiaste
ends with the injunction ‘Fear God and keep his commandments for this is the whole duty of man,’ and George Boleyn’s translation of Lefèvre’s accompanying
annotation
is worth quoting at length.
20
What is crucial, it says, is to follow the sequence in the text; the fear of God is the necessary precondition for all obedience:
For faith which giveth the true fear of God, is it that doth prepare us for to keep the commandments well, and maketh us good workmen, for to make good works; and maketh us good trees for to bear good fruit. Then if we be not first well prepared, made good workmen, and made good trees we may not look to do the least of the commandments. Therefore Moses giving the commandments for the beginning said: ‘Hearken Israel, thy God is one god’, which is as much as to say as, believe, have faith, for without faith God doth not profit us, nor we can accomplish nothing: but the faith in God, and in our Lord Jesuchrist is it which chiefly doth relieve us from the transgressions that be passed of the sentence of the law, and yieldeth us innocents, and in such manner that none can demand of us anything, for because that faith hath gotten us Jesuchrist, and maketh him our own, he having accomplished the law, and satisfied unto all transgressions. Then faith having reconciled us unto the Father, doth get us also the Holy Ghost. Which yieldeth witness in our hearts that we be the sons of God. Whereby engendereth in us true childerly fear, and putteth away all servile and hired fear. And then it sheddeth in our hearts the fire of love and dilection, by the means whereof we be well prepared for to keep the law of God, which is but love: and without the which it is aswell possible for us to keep the said commandments, as unto the ice to abide warming and burning in the fire. For our hearts (without this fire of the Holy Ghost) be over hard frozen and cooled, and overmuch founded and rooted in the love of ourselves. (fols 147-8)
For a man who would avoid eternal damnation, ‘there is nothing better than by true faith to take Jesuchrist of our side for pledge, mediator, advocate and intercessor. For who that believeth in him and doth come with him to this judgment, shall not be confused.’
21
If this was Anne Boleyn’s experience of faith, then she was an evangelical by conviction and not just by policy. Compare this with the assertion in
The Ten Articles
(endorsed by Henry within weeks of Anne’s execution) that penance was ‘so necessary for salvation that no man ... can, without the same, be saved or attain everlasting life’.
22
When it came to personal religion, husband and wife were miles apart.