If the weight of literary dedications to Anne Boleyn is comparatively light, the evidence of her involvement elsewhere in the world of learning is quite the opposite. She was remembered for years as a generous patron of students, and several cases can be cited to warrant the tradition. As early as 1530, when John Eldmer lost the contest to become abbot of St Mary’s, York, Anne persuaded the successful candidate to permit and support his return to Cambridge to study. After some years the new abbot called him back to the community and ruined his chance to study by loading him with administrative chores — clearly, fellow monks resented his prolonged skiving — only to have Anne intervene again to secure Eldmer’s return to the university.
57
Not only did William Barker benefit from being one of those Anne maintained at Cambridge - which opened the way to quite a literary output — but he was able to use the connection to secure favour from Elizabeth in 1559, and mercy in 1571, following his involvement in the treason of the duke of Norfolk whose secretary he had become.
58
Anne also backed scholars studying abroad. One such was John Beckynsaw, whom she supported with £40 a year to learn and eventually teach Greek at Paris.
59
When Wolsey’s bastard son, Thomas Winter, found the money running out and returned from Padua to make what he could of Cromwell’s affection for his father, the secretary pointed him in the direction of Henry and Anne. The king was too busy shooting to give him the attention he (and possibly the king) felt he deserved, but all was well the next day when Anne assured him that ‘I am aware, my dear Winter, that you are beloved by the king and have many friends who wish you well. Reckon me among the number.’ Whether the Latin periods represent Anne’s actual words hardly matters, or mattered to Winter; it was her assurance to do what she could for him that counted.
60
Anne also supported learned institutions, perhaps with annual subventions to Oxford and Cambridge (over and above the poor scholars) of as much as £80 each. More enduring, she interceded with the king to secure the exemption of both universities from the new clerical tax, the tenth, and from clerical subsidies.
61
At a humbler level, there is her interest in Matthew Parker’s reform of the collegiate church of Stoke by Clare near Sudbury, to which Anne had appointed him.
62
The reforms included, as well as regular preaching, the appointment of a lecturer on the Bible to teach four days a week in English and Latin, a new grammar school with a well-paid master and facilities for fee-paying as well as free pupils, and finally eight or ten choral scholarships, which could lead to a six-year bursary at Cambridge. Anne Boleyn was designated the new founder of the college. Here was the model of what the redeployment of Church endowments might have achieved. Circumstantial evidence indicates that she intervened in the headship of Eton, and when Nicolas Bourbon arrived, he too was put to work at his profession of teaching, but this time the sons of courtiers, particularly those from a reformist background - Thomas, the son of Sir Nicholas Harvey, Anne’s old friend and fellow evangelical; Henry Norris, the eldest son of the groom of the stool; Henry Dudley, the son of the future duke of Northumberland, and her own nephew, Henry Carey:
You, Oh queen, gave me the boys to educate,
I try to keep each one faithful to his duty.
May Christ grant that I may be equal to the task,
Shaping vessels worthy of a heavenly house.
63
It is fitting, perhaps, that a discussion of Anne Boleyn’s religious life should end with a French humanist evangelical. That was her milieu, and in it she mattered. Bourbon wrote the dedication to Book Seven of the
Nugarum,
which was to appear in 1538, soon after his arrival in London — the date is the Ides of May, 1535. Addressing ‘the benevolent reader’, he remarked that he had two great patrons, ‘the Most Christian King, our Francis’ and ‘the brilliant Henry VIII, king of the Britons’. Between them they exhibited the greatest piety and encouragement of the arts in that age.
64
Every good humanist had to be a flatterer and a beggar. Bourbon was, perhaps, nearer the truth in the dedication of Book Six, which he apparently added when he was back in France; the reference there is to ‘the liberality of Henry VIII that most humane of princes and of his wife the queen’ — a remarkable piece of honesty, for by that time Anne was disgraced and dead.
65
PART IV
A MARRIAGE DESTROYED
20
THE RIVAL, 1535 — 1536
T
HE story of the events which led to the disgrace and death of Anne Boleyn needs to begin almost a year before the tragedy itself. Henry VIII spent the summer of 1535 on a progress to the Severn and then across to Hampshire for most of September and October. The sport was good, particularly the hawking. The king had not hunted the area for some years, and after a few weeks away from the stress and blood of recent events, he was in tremendous form. So was Anne, who accompanied him throughout, and when the couple returned to Windsor in late October she was pregnant, though she could not yet know it.
1
The common people gave Henry and Anne a good reception, and the public highlight had been the consecration of three favoured clerics as bishops at Winchester on 19 September, apparently in the presence of the king; given that the three were Edward Fox, Hugh Latimer and John Hilsey, Anne’s presence can be taken for granted.
2
Henry had been so enjoying himself that he had signed very few documents during the progress, and there was something of a panic to get the formalities for the new bishops completed in time, with Anne herself advising Latimer to leave it to Cromwell.
3
In the end, several documents were signed at Wolf Hall near Marlborough, where the king stopped for a week in early September on his way to the New Forest, a visit which hindsight has endowed with enormous significance.
4
Wolf Hall was the home of Sir John Seymour and his large family — among them his eldest daughter Jane, who nine months later would become Henry’s third queen. At the time, however, it is very unlikely that anyone, including Anne and Henry, saw anything momentous about the visit. Jane may or may not have been present, Anne must have been, and myth and legend are all that suggest that this was the start of the king’s pursuit of the woman who, as the mother of Edward VI, would in Henry’s terms be his only truly successful wife.
5
Jane Seymour had, in fact, a long association with the court, where she had been one of Katherine of Aragon’s ladies.
6
If she left court at all when the latter’s household was reduced in the summer of 1533, she was back in Anne Boleyn’s entourage by the new year, when she received a gift from the king along with others of the queen’s ladies such as Anne Zouche, Madge Shelton and Bessie Holland.
7
The real significance of the royal visit to Wolf Hall was that it marked one further stage in the rise of Jane’s eldest brother, Edward. A protégé of Wolsey, with some genuine military talent (he had been knighted on the 1522 campaign while still in his teens), Edward reached the court rank of esquire of the body in 1530, and had accompanied Henry and Anne to Calais in 1532.
8
Now, after helping to host a successful royal visit, he went up a notch in his master’s esteem — and we know that the week was successful because in October Henry toyed with the idea of staying at Edward Seymour’s own Hampshire house, Elvetham, although in the end he changed his mind.
9
Seymour’s position — and his father, too, was of good standing in court circles - would alone make nonsense of the legend that it was by catching Henry’s eye at Wolf Hall that Jane secured a place in Anne’s household; the family had quite enough weight to place a daughter at court, if she had not been there already.
An alternative tale comes via one of Mary I’s later attendants, Jane Dormer, who married a Spanish nobleman and became the revered patroness of Elizabethan Catholic exiles.
10
This was that Jane Seymour’s uncle, Sir Francis Bryan, took her to court and placed her with Anne, following the refusal of the Dormers to accept her as a bride for William, the heir of the family. Bryan, however, was certainly not Jane’s uncle, merely a distant relative, and the marriage of William to Mary Sidney, supposedly made in haste in order to frustrate Bryan’s plans, did not take place until January 1535.
11
The most that any memory could be based on is a recommendation from Bryan, back in 1533, that Anne should take Jane over from Katherine, but there is no corroborating evidence for this and no such sponsorship would be needed for a lady already established in the royal entourage. One has to remember that Jane Dormer was born two years after Anne’s death and that the story was first recorded in Spain by her steward, thirty years after Jane herself had died in 1612. The likeliest explanation of the Dormer legend is that it is an attempt to illustrate the family sanctity of Jane Dormer’s grandmother, who had turned her back on a glittering match for her son with a relative of the wicked Francis Bryan, Henry VIII’s ‘vicar of hell’.
Far from Henry and Jane having their first romantic meeting at Wolf Hall, it is a reasonable certainty that the king’s interest in her became marked only in January 1536. True, in the first days of October 1535 the French ambassador, the bishop of Tarbes, did inform Francis I that Henry’s feelings for Anne were cooling steadily because he had ‘new amours’, but his opinion is contradicted by reports from various English correspondents in attendance at court, dated 2, 6 and 9 October, that Henry and Anne Boleyn were ‘merry’.
12
The earliest mention that Jane Seymour had been singled out for the king’s attentions is a Chapuys letter of 10 February 1536.
13
In his previous letter of 29 January, the ambassador had reported the rumour of a third marriage, but as he then had no name and dismissed the tale even though from ‘a good authority’, the natural conclusion is that the matter was of fairly recent origin — indeed, he termed it
une nouvelle amour.
14
There is, thus, no reason to suspect a rift in the royal marriage when the couple left the Seymours. Indeed, as the 1535 progress came to an end, Anne began to hope that her ultimate challenge was about to be met — come the spring, there would be a prince. The other difficulties that she and Henry faced were, nevertheless, still there, and some as serious as ever. The French and imperial ambassadors commented independently on the prevailing mood of so far sullen resentment at the king, his wife and his policies.
15
Support for Mary was as strong as ever, or stronger. True, June had seen the death of George Neville, Lord Abergavenny, politically the most formidable of the princess’s sympathizers, but while the small summer court was in Hampshire, there was a public demonstration at Greenwich in support of Mary by the wives of a number of London citizens, aided and abetted by some ladies of the royal household not on duty.
16
Among the ringleaders who ended in the Tower were Anne’s aunt, Lady William Howard, and her sister-in-law Jane, Lady Rochford. Evidently Jane did not share her husband George’s commitment to Anne’s cause. The matter was hushed up, but the king, encouraged by Anne’s condition, began to talk in a way that suggested that, if Mary persisted in her resistance, she would soon find herself in the Tower too.
17
Katherine, also, had at last decided that submission was not enough; unknown to Henry, in October she wrote to Charles V, inviting him to intervene.
18
In the country at large fear of religious change was now widespread. Stories of heretical preaching abounded; royal commissioners were surveying the Church estates, down to the poorest parish; Cromwell’s deputies were visiting the monasteries to enforce disturbing royal injunctions and confiscate many long-venerated relics; the recent impositions on the clergy were beginning to bite, with Wednesday, 1 December, set for payment of the new tax of 10 per cent per annum on all clerical incomes; some small religious houses were already giving up the struggle to survive. The London merchant community was full of rumours that war with the emperor was imminent, with the consequence of the loss of England’s vital markets in the Low Countries and Germany. Friction between the king and the Hanse merchants already threatened the closure of the Baltic with its grain reserves, and this appeared all the more ominous as the vital weeks of fine harvest weather at home obstinately refused to arrive. Half the crops, it was said, had been lost, and the threat of famine after what turned out to be the worst season for eight years and the fourth worst since Henry’s accession, made it impossible to levy the taxes granted by parliament. Plague, too, was rampant. And it was no use the king’s preachers exploiting the text, ‘whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth’; ordinary Englishmen knew that the king was to blame, and even more the woman whom he had done everything for and who egged him on in his godlessness.
19
Abroad, the situation was more fluid even than it had been earlier in the year. First, Charles V’s great victory at Tunis had freed him from Mediterranean distractions to intervene against Henry if he wished, while the pope had responded to the death of Fisher by excommunicating the king. The French, seeing increased danger to England, had upped the price of their support, making it clear also that it was marriage between the dauphin and Mary which really interested them. Then, on 1 November, the situation changed: the death without heirs of the duke of Milan threw open again the issue over which Francis and Charles had been quarrelling since 1515. That might appear to tip the balance of need in Henry’s favour, but equally Francis might now call for the financial support which Henry had hinted at, so dragging England, if not into direct hostilities with Charles, at least into increasing difficulties in its relations with the Low Countries. The pope, however, was pressing an alternative, a coalition to punish Henry, so there was a good deal of talk about a negotiated settlement between the Empire and France and a joint descent on England.