The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (58 page)

Read The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn Online

Authors: Eric Ives

For a writer to be able to turn the book of Ecclesiastes, with its refrain ‘Vanity, vanity, all is vanity’, into a paean to faith is a remarkable testimony to evangelical determination. The other great concerns of Christian humanism are to be found here also. First, concern for the Bible and its proper scholarly interpretation: ‘We have been too long without all the Holy Scripture’ so that the ‘doctrines of men’ have been embraced.
23
Before ‘the books of men’ are read, one ‘must have read the true rule of the great architector or master workman’, that is, the Bible.
24
Too many books by the unwise have led to ‘pernicious sermons’.
25
God gives true wisdom irrespective of age, status or wealth: ‘Say not then: “he is a pope, he is an emperor, he is a king, he is ancient, wilt not thou believe and follow him?” ’
26
‘The Pistellis and Gospelles’ carry the same message. As M. A. Screech put it, ‘Not a father of the church, not a holy exegete, not a doctor [of the church] is mentioned. [Lefèvre] makes an absolute distinction between the bible and tradition.’
27
The homily on the gospel for the feast of the Nativity of Our Lady says quite bluntly ‘Scripture says nothing of the human birth of Mary and so one cannot preach about it.’
28
The sidelining of scripture, as
The Ecclesiaste
makes clear, has been the fault of rulers:
If it had been so in times past, the holy Word of God should not have been so long hid, nor out of use and in the stead of the same so many superfluous and unprofitable books and curious vain questions brought forth which serve not only to lose time but they be clean contrary from the true and pure truth.
 
Kings and princes have a responsibility to govern their realms not only by ‘iron and sword’ (which on their own produce ‘subjects like bondmen’), but by ‘good doctrine’.
29
We also find the Christian humanist concern to exploit rhetoric for effective communication; classical allusions as illustrations; popular sayings; homely illustrations like the parallel between the endless thirst of the diabetic and the vain pursuit of worldly reason (‘there is no means for to have the perfectness and certainty in all things but by true faith’); even an attempt to translate Solomon’s revenue into contemporary coinage.
30
Practical application is there too — an application which Anne could accept for herself. She might well have reflected after her coronation on the rightness of this exposition of Ecclesiastes chapter 3, verses 1-8:
Then it is unto God that we must lift up our eyes when one goeth about to be married. If it be ordained that thou shalt have her, she shall be thine without thy care; if it be not ordained thou losest thy pain. And this place here is to put aside the foolish love with all the hard anguish and cares thereof. When it is time for to seek, truly without doubt thou shalt find, or else thou losest thy pain. Wherefore we may attribute nothing unto ourselves but we must put all into the hands of God.
31
 
Whether she would have felt the same about an earlier section on the subject, if it had arrived during her long courtship, one cannot know: ‘When God joineth then it is time to embrace and to use the fruit of marriage; and if he do not join, neither care nor labour shall not prevail.’
32
Or after marriage, about the arrival of children: ‘Sara with great desire did as much as to her was possible for to have children, but she lost her time for that time was determined by God. In like wise Rachel was frustrate of her desire unto the time determined by God.’
33
In all this there is no word of the role of the Church, of the priest, of the whole structure of sacraments, which command our attention when we look at established Christianity at the time. This does not mean that a woman who entertained such writings, as Anne did, rejected all established religion. It was a question of priorities. Sometimes, it is true, a passage may have critical implications, as in the commentary in ‘The Pistellis and Gospelles’ on Hebrews, chapter 9, which deals with the sacrificial death of Christ. Orthodoxy held that during mass, Christ’s death was re-presented to God as consecration by the priest transformed bread and wine into the ‘host’, that is, the body and blood of Christ (
hostia
, victim for sacrifice). However, the commentary says: ‘the true host is Jesu Christ which hath suffered death and passion for to save us, the which in shedding his precious blood upon us all, hath given unto us life and hath wholly purged us of sin.’
34
What is being implied here is not a challenge to belief in the bodily presence of Christ in the consecrated host. The target is the late medieval focus on the miraculous mechanism of the mass rather than its significance. Anne herself continued to revere Christ’s bodily presence in the consecrated bread and wine. As a condemned prisoner in the Tower she took her oath on it, received communion at least once and spent her last night praying before it.
35
A valuable insight into the nature of the non-schismatic reform Anne promoted is given by passages in a sermon which, as we shall see when considering Anne’s fall, had the queen’s wholehearted support.
36
It was preached at court by her almoner, John Skip, on Passion Sunday, 2 April 1536, and in the course of it he defended the value of ‘the little ceremonies’ of the Church, such as holy water, holy bread, holy ashes, palms ‘and such other’. No one ‘of learning and good judgement’ would want them abandoned. They had no objective sacred power — that was certain — but they were aids to memory and ‘very good and profitable if they be used for the purpose and intent that they were first ordained and instituted’:
holy water... to put us in remembrance that our sins be washed away by the sprinkling and shedding of Christ’s blood; holy bread [to remind us] that all we that have professed Christ’s faith be one body mystical and ought to be one in mind in spirit in Christ our head, even as these many pieces of holy bread which we receive be cut or divided out of one loaf; holy ashes [to remind us] that we be but ashes and dust ... and palms [to remind us] that our Saviour Christ hath gotten the victory and overcome the devil and sin.
37
 
The question, therefore, was proper use or abuse, and there responsibility lay with the king. ‘The king’s office is to see the abuses taken away and not the good things themselves except it so be that the abuses cannot be taken away, as Hezekiah took away the brazen serpent when he could not take away the abuse of it.’
38
In other words, if superstition could not be eradicated, even useful customs must be sacrificed.
In these years, evangelicals in England saw the task as winning the Church back to the inwardness of true religion and to the spiritual realities which underlay its fossilized formality; their call was to breathe life into dead bones, not bury them. Hence Anne apparently was happy to own copies of translations into French by the renegade friar, François Lambert of Avignon (including Luther’s
Prophetie de Iesaie
)
,
but when Tristram Revell, early in 1536, tried to dedicate to the queen his English translation of Lambert’s own
Farrago Rerum Theologicarum,
which denied the sacrifice of the mass, Anne refused the request.
39
Her attitude would be characteristic of all shades of English evangelical reform for at least a decade more: real spiritual experience, yes; the priority of faith, yes; access to the Bible, yes; reform of abuses and superstition, yes; but heretical views on the miracle of the altar, no.
40
In contrast to Revell, whom she rejected, she patronized Richard Tracy, whose father’s body had been exhumed and burned in 1531 because his will had implied disbelief in the Church’s ability to serve the needs of departed souls — a ‘superstition’ which was increasingly coming under reformist questioning.
41
In the same way she was thought to be willing to intervene for Thomas Patmore, who had been imprisoned following his recantation of heresies, principally about that other issue of contemporary debate, clerical marriage.
42
Another of the concerns of Christian humanists which the
Ecclesiaste
particularly emphasized was the responsibility of the elite to the poor:
The court of kings, princes, chancellors, judging places and audiences be the places where one ought to find equity and justice. But, oh good Lord, where is there more injustice, more exactions, more oppressions of poor widows and orphans, where is there more disorder in all manners and more greater company of unjust men than there, whereas should be but all good order and just people of good and holy example of life.
43
 
For future generations of Protestants, Anne Boleyn provided the model response. Again it is Latymer who provides the detail, with corroboration from elsewhere.
44
He tells of Anne giving standing orders for the relief of the deserving poor — needy and impotent householders with large families - and for the prompt handling of petitioners, under threat of her personal intervention. The purses at the royal maundy were substantially increased. The ladies of her household spent considerable amounts of time sewing clothes which were taken on progress and distributed to the poor at each stopping place, with a shilling a head, by arrangement with the local priest and two parishioners; pregnant women received a pair of sheets and two shillings. Individual cases of misfortune might be reported by a chaplain, especially if the person concerned was of the right religious emphasis. One specific story concerns a parishioner of Hugh Latimer who was brought to Anne’s attention after the death of most of his cattle. When the queen arrived at Sir Edward Baynton’s house nearby - which dates the episode to about the end of August in the progress of 1535 — she interviewed the man’s wife and gave an initial gift of twenty pounds.
45
John Foxe appears to be responsible for elaborating this charity into a fantastic suggestion that in three-quarters of a year Anne distributed
£
14,000 or
£
15,000 in poor relief.
46
Such a sum is twelve times larger than the annual surplus on Anne’s expenditure. George Wyatt repeated the figure twenty years later, but also said that her regular charity amounted to
£
1500 a year which, though still an exaggeration, is just about credible.
47
Perhaps we have here a single reported amount to which Foxe or his printer added an extra zero. Anne may also have played a part in the government’s decision to propose radical and far-reaching action on poverty to the 1536 parliament.
48
The importance of action had been drawn to her attention the year before, when William Marshall had dedicated to her
The Form and manner of subvention or helping for poor people, devised and practised in the city of Ypres
, a practical account of recent policies introduced by the city fathers. Marshall was already a Boleyn protégé, but he had a very specific object in making this dedication:
My very mind, intent and meaning is (by putting of this honourable and charitable provision in mind) to occasion your grace (which at all times is ready to further all goodness) to be a mediatrix and mean unto our most dread sovereign lord ... for the stablishing and practising of the same (if it shall seem so worthy) or of some other, as good or better, such as by his majesty or his most honourable council shall be devised.
50
 
Not only was Marshall apparently enlisted by Cromwell to draft the necessary legislation, the king came down to the Commons in person on 11 March 1536 to introduce the measure and promised to contribute to the costs of the public works the bill envisaged.
51
Perhaps it is a memory of Anne’s encouragement of this 1536 legislation which lies behind Foxe’s further story that she was involved in a scheme to establish stocks of materials in various places to enable the poor to be given work. Alternatively, perhaps Anne took private action in anticipation of the bill.
52
Poor relief was not the only practical cause Anne espoused. If there was one hope that buoyed up all Christian humanists, swept along as they were by events towards the rocks of the establishment and the reefs of worldly realities which would eventually break them, it was that education and scholarship would rescue them and society together. Comparatively few literary dedications to Anne are so far known, other than those already noted, which, rather than anything else, probably reflects the shortness of her period as lady marquis and queen.
53
She was, however, the subject of adulatory Latin poems by Robert Whittington, one of the older generation of humanists, and tutor to the king’s henchmen.
54
Anne also appears under her father’s name at the head of a work by another senior scholar, Robert Wakefield. The
Kotser Codicis R. Wakfeldi
was an impressive demolition of the validity of Henry’s first marriage by a scholar of some reputation, who as early as 1519 had been professor of Hebrew at Busleiden’s College at Louvain. The dedication makes clear Wakefield’s move from earlier conservative patronage to reliance on the whole Boleyn family: Thomas, his wife, ‘the daughter of each of you, our Queen Anne in whose happiness I rejoice exceedingly’, and her uncle James, and there are dark references to a former benefactor, ‘ungrateful, harsh, inhuman and unfair’, who owed nearly
£
100 in lost payments of an annuity, a sum which he hints the Boleyns might enforce.
55
Perhaps the earliest author who gambled on Anne in her own right was Louis de Brun, whose treatise on letter-writing is dedicated to ‘Madame Anne de Rochfort’, Anne’s title after her father became an earl in December 1529. The manuscript was prepared for the illuminator but never begun, which is strange, considering how long it remained in Anne’s hands. Why it should have been left incomplete is not known. Apart from the religious appeal we have seen already, the book stresses its practical utility, explaining how various individuals should be addressed, depending on the status of the writer. It is a neat compliment that the examples of addressing a superior range from the Holy Father the pope, to the king, the bishop of London and Monsieur de Rochfort.
56

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