The Tudors

by G. J. Meyer

But even two kings applying pressure could accomplish little. In Paris months of struggle culminated in the issuance of a supposedly scholarly endorsement, but it was of highly questionable validity. Having been drawn up not by the theology faculty but at Francis’s instructions, it had little impact anywhere. Similarly ambiguous results were all that could be extracted from the universities at Orleans and Toulouse, and a final humiliation occurred when a decree favorable to Henry was issued under the name of the university at Angers but repudiated by that institution’s theologians. When it was all over, the king claimed to have a number of universities on his side. But the squalid means by which his support had been won were known to everyone, including the church authorities in Rome, who knew also that all the arguments in Henry’s favor began with the assumption—unproved, unprovable, and denied by the queen—that Catherine’s first marriage had been consummated. Nor were the other side’s hands clean: Charles had spent heavily to neutralize Henry’s bribes. The episode of the universities petered out in March 1530 when the pope, weary of the squabbling, ordered that nothing more was to be written about the English royal marriage. The scholarly judgments obtained at so much trouble and expense were so compromised that Henry never even sent them to Rome.

  Blocked everywhere he turned, Henry by midyear was showing signs of deepening discouragement. According to one of his confidants, he complained of having been deceived into pursuing the divorce and said he would never have done so had he foreseen that it would bring him to this pass. Probably he was missing Wolsey at this juncture and finding himself badly in need of a strong new chief minister. Soon, however, he rallied—not only the Boleyns but the champions of radical church reform had good reason to fear the consequences if England and Rome were reconciled, and so they urged him on. By late summer he was again on the attack, possibly with Cromwell pointing the way. He somehow conceived or was given the idea, for which there was only the murkiest evidence, that a proper understanding of history revealed that no Englishman could rightly be made subject to a foreign court, even the papal court. In September he instructed his agents in Rome to inform the pope of this revelation and search the papal archives for supporting documentation. The ambassadors had never heard of any such principle and so were reluctant to present it to Clement. Their search for corroboration turned up nothing. Henry, meanwhile, the bit in his teeth now, issued on his own authority and without the involvement of Parliament a proclamation forbidding anyone in the kingdom, cleric or layman, to “pursue or attempt to purchase from the court of Rome or elsewhere, nor use, put into execution, divulge or publish anything … containing matter prejudicial to the high authority, jurisdiction and prerogative royal of this his [Henry’s] said realm.” Possibly this proclamation was intended to prevent anyone from protesting to Rome the statutes that Parliament had enacted late in 1529. Possibly it was intended to provide grounds for punishing those bishops, John Fisher most prominent among them, who had already sent such protests. Most certainly it was an act of defiance aimed at the pope, a gesture of a kind not seen before. Vague as it was in referring to “matter prejudicial” to the “prerogative royal,” its implication that the church in England was independent of the international church was unmistakable. Not coincidentally, just at this time Henry began to assert that England was and had from distant times been no mere kingdom but an empire. He wanted to be regarded as equivalent to those Christian emperors of Rome—Constantine the Great foremost among them—who were supposed to have exercised absolute dominion over state and church.

  At the end of September Henry took an even more shocking step. He instructed his attorney general to charge fifteen notable members of the English clergy with having violated the praemunire statutes by dealing, in the discharge of their ecclesiastic duties, with Cardinal Wolsey. The concept of praemunire had always been somewhat vague, and in the century since their passage the statutes had almost never been applied. Therefore the accused must have had difficulty understanding precisely what crime they were charged with. The general idea, however, was clear enough and brutally simple: Wolsey had broken the law by serving as a legate accountable to the papal court in Rome—his literal guilt could hardly be questioned, he himself having admitted it as soon as he was accused—and therefore anyone who had done business with Wolsey as legate had to be equally guilty. By extension, anyone involved in the administration of England’s ecclesiastical courts was now subject to punishment in spite of the fact that those courts had been, for clergy and laymen alike, an integral part of life in England as far back as the records reached. In terms of simple justice the whole proceeding was even more ridiculous than the original praemunire charges against Wolsey. Even if there were reasons for eliminating the ecclesiastical courts (not even the king was suggesting any such thing—the courts performed essential functions and would continue to do so long after England’s separation from Rome), to retroactively criminalize their operations was contrary to common sense.

  The shabbiness of the whole proceeding was further apparent in the fact that almost all of the accused men (eight bishops and three abbots among them) were conspicuous opponents of the divorce. John Fisher was one of them, at the center of the fray as always. Being charged in this way must have been frightening all the same. Praemunire was a weighty offense: lesser treason, punishable with loss of freedom and possessions. And the difficulties of presenting a defense, already overwhelming with the king driving the prosecution, were compounded by Wolsey’s decision, almost a year earlier, to throw himself on the king’s mercy and hope for the best. In fact, Wolsey was treated with something like leniency after he submitted. Though expelled from the government and deprived of his most richly remunerative offices, he remained archbishop of York, traveled to York for the first time since becoming the city’s primate a decade and a half before, and was making plans for a grossly belated but grandiose consecration ceremony there. But his acceptance of guilt created a presumption that his colleagues must also be guilty.

  At least some of the accused—Fisher without question, probably others as well—would have defended themselves rather than follow Wolsey’s example. And their defense would have been substantial, even if not successful in terms of the final judgment produced. Perhaps for that reason the matter never came to trial. Cromwell, in corresponding with Wolsey, reported that a trial was not going to be necessary because “there is another way devised.” This is intriguing: another way had been devised for accomplishing what? The answer, almost certainly, is that by this point, October 1530, Henry had decided not to fight the church on the issues but instead to undermine its ability to resist. The way to do that—hit upon, in all likelihood, by the increasingly influential Cromwell—was to frighten the leaders of the church so badly that they became incapable of resistance. Convicting fifteen clergymen of lesser treason for doing nothing more criminal than carrying out their traditional duties would have been an impressive step in that direction. But before the fifteen could be brought to trial, someone—no one knows who with certainty, but again Cromwell is the best guess—came up with a more ambitious idea, one whose breathtaking scope would give it vastly greater impact. The kingdom’s entire clergy, the church itself in effect, would be accused of praemunire. The idea appears to have been settled on by October, but then set aside to be sprung on the churchmen in the new year. Meanwhile Henry was postponing and postponing again the reconvening of Parliament. It was obvious to all that he had something in mind but wasn’t yet ready to act. Fisher and his fellow defendants were let off with heavy fines.

  Also in October, in a step providing further clues to his thinking, Henry called together a number of leading lawyers and clerics and presented a question for their consideration. The background to his question was a recent action of the pope’s. Clement, warned repeatedly that Henry was prepared to act autonomously unless Rome nullified his marriage and no doubt weary of being bullied, had issued an edict stating that no one was to do anything about the divorce or a possible royal remarriage unti
l the papal court issued its decision. To the lawyers and clerics he had assembled, Henry now posed the following: in light of his recently improved understanding of history—the insights enabling him to see that popes had long ago usurped rights belonging to English emperors and that no Englishman should ever be accountable to any external authority—would it not be permissible to ignore the pope? Couldn’t the archbishop of Canterbury, primate in England for nearly ten centuries, proceed independently to set aside Henry’s false marriage and allow him to take a legitimate wife?

  The assembly discussed the question, which it must have found unsettling. Then, evidently assuming that it was being consulted in good faith by a king seeking to do the right thing, it delivered its answer. No, it said, Henry could do no such thing, and neither could the archbishop. This response was inherently uncontroversial: it arose in straightforward fashion from what virtually every European had understood for centuries about how Christendom worked and was organized. When the laws and governance of the church were at issue, the last word belonged to Rome.

  Again Henry was blocked. And this time he was blocked not just by a faraway pontiff whom he had never seen but by some of the most learned and respected men in England. His options were narrowing. He could accept a humiliating defeat and yield, abandoning the idea of taking a new wife. Or he could teach his subjects to take him more seriously. Again it came down to a question of fear. If he were to get his way, people had to be afraid to deny him. He had to give them reason to be afraid.

  That has to be why he embraced the idea of charging the whole clergy with praemunire. It also has to be why, more than a year after Wolsey had been exiled to the north of England, he was suddenly arrested, charged with high treason (a crime punishable with death), and ordered to return to London and meet his fate.

  Background

  THE ROYAL HORN OF PLENTY

  ONE THING ABOVE ALL ELSE WAS ESSENTIAL TO ANYONE WHO wanted to make his mark in the England of Henry VIII: access. Access to the king himself. Intelligence, courage, ability, sound judgment—such gifts were no less important than they are today, but they could have only a limited effect unless displayed before and approved by the man who wore the crown. Access, in turn, was rarely possible unless one went where the king lived, which meant to court. This was true whether one wanted to rise in the government, in the church, or in military service. Without access to the court, nothing out of the ordinary was possible. Thus the desperate lengths to which men would go, the sacrifices they would make, to get positions at court for themselves or for their children.

  The power of access is demonstrated by the improbable importance, in the second half of King Henry’s reign, of the office of groom of the stool. The core responsibilities of this position seem ridiculous to the modern eye: not only to assure that his majesty always had a “sweet and clear” place for his daily evacuations, not only to collect what he expelled and deliver it to the court physicians for examination, but to wipe the royal backside (using, for the purpose, small triangular pieces of paper). But performing such intimate services required a degree of access that not even the king’s senior ministers and private secretaries could equal. Grooms of the stool were so close to the king that they became some of the most influential and therefore envied people in the kingdom. They were made, in effect, general managers not only of the king’s toilet but of his private quarters and of everyone employed in those jealously guarded precincts: the knights and esquires of the body (also prized appointments) and the grooms of the chamber. They were entrusted with substantial amounts of Crown money and even, to a considerable extent, with the organization of the king’s private life. If they were ever scorned or ridiculed for the nature of the duties that gave their job its name, it is unrecorded.

  Access mattered so much because the whole political system was powered by royal largesse. It was the king (along with those to whom he listened) who bestowed the highest offices, the gifts of land, financial favors ranging from annuities and monopolies to exemption from the payment of tariffs, wardships like the one that had brought Plantagenet blood into the Tudor family, and pardons for virtually any kind of offense. Such gifts were the means by which the king built a following and rewarded faithful service. To be eligible for them one had to be known to the king or his most trusted friends, and there was little chance of becoming known except at court.

  Admission to the court as most broadly defined—to the crowds that gathered wherever the king was resident—was not difficult. It required little more than a reasonably respectable appearance (meaning the attire appropriate to a gentleman), a plausible claim to have business with the Crown (anything from wares for sale to a dispute in need of resolution), and a sufficient supply of ready cash (bribery being routine). Merely being at court, therefore, was of limited value. Men spent years, even decades, hanging around the court and angling for preferment, only to see little of the king and come away empty-handed in the end. The trick was to get lifted out of the herd; this could be accomplished through good connections, an ability to charm or to make oneself useful, simple good luck, or some combination of these things. The goal was to become one of the lucky few likely to come to the royal mind when lucrative offices needed to be filled or patronage was available to be disbursed. Getting there could take years.

  It is estimated that, at the start of Henry VIII’s reign, there were at court some 120 positions that ambitious men of good birth could regard as worth having if only because they offered the possibility of visibility and advancement. By the end of the reign this number had increased by more than half. The bottom rungs on the ladder of upward mobility were entry-level positions for boys of good family—jobs as pages, for example—and though the ladder extended upward to the Royal Council (and yes, to the groom of the stool), relatively few of those who stood on it received a gentleman’s living wage. All the same, at every level vacancies were hungrily fought over, because they could lead to almost anything. Success at court—by no means always the same kind of success—propelled the careers of virtually every major figure of Henry VIII’s reign including Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and Thomas Cranmer. And of yet another successful Thomas, Anne Boleyn’s father. The story of the Boleyn family, in fact, illustrates just how fruitful access could be for people who knew how to use it. And how dangerous it could become when the political weather changed.

  The Bullens or Boleyns were an old family, farmers in Norfolk for at least two hundred years, and by the early fifteenth century they were established in the capital and rising fast. Geoffrey Boleyn made a fortune in the cloth trade, married a baron’s daughter, served as lord mayor of London, and acquired the kinds of rural estates necessary to be upper gentry. In the next generation William Boleyn lived as a country gentleman and married the daughter of an Anglo-Irish earl. By virtue of his wealth or family connections or the two things together, he got his young son Thomas admitted to the court of Henry VII.

  Thomas, born in 1477, clearly was intelligent and must have been ambitious as well; he is not known ever to have wasted an opportunity. While still in his early twenties, he took a long step up the social pyramid by marrying a daughter of Thomas Howard, survivor of Bosworth Field, Earl of Surrey, and future Duke of Norfolk. Howard had an abundance of marriageable daughters and is likely to have been pleased to place one of them with a family as prosperous and respectable as the Boleyns. His son-in-law soon began to leave his mark in the records of the court: in 1501, probably the year of Anne’s birth, he was present at the wedding of Arthur, Prince of Wales, to Catherine of Aragon, and two years later he was a member of the party that accompanied the young Princess Margaret Tudor northward for her marriage to King James IV of Scotland. As an esquire of the body—proof of excellent access, the body in question being the king’s own—he became part of the circle of well-bred young gallants that gave the court of the aging and widowed Henry VII what little luster it retained. When the king died, Boleyn was among the
favorites selected for knighthood by his successor. His penetration of Henry VIII’s inner circle is not difficult to understand. He was skilled at things that Henry VIII admired—horsemanship, jousting, hawking, and the game of bowls—and by all accounts was a man of exceptional charm.

  Sir Thomas, as he could now style himself, was fluent in both French and Latin. This was an essential credential in the world of diplomacy, and early in the new reign he was launched on the series of foreign missions that would punctuate his career. His widening horizons opened up opportunities, too, for his children, Mary, Anne, and George. When the king’s younger sister, Princess Mary, embarked for France and marriage to King Louis XII, young Mary Boleyn joined her as a lady-in-waiting. Anne, barely an adolescent, was sent to Brussels in the service of Margaret of Austria, Hapsburg regent of the Netherlands. This last was a particularly coveted posting, as Margaret was a daughter of the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian and her court was among the richest and most elegant in Europe. Both girls were thus positioned to get the kind of continental finish that, when combined with their father’s wealth and stature at court and the dash of royal blood that had come to them through their mother, could make them valuable commodities on the aristocracy’s marriage market.

  Anne had her father’s ability to make use of whatever came her way, but her sister did not. The sketchy available information suggests that Mary Boleyn was not a model of chastity even when very young, and that while at the French court she acquired a reputation for easy availability. Whether for that or for some other reason, her sojourn abroad turned out to be short. When the decrepit Louis XII died just weeks after his wedding, his beautiful young widow impulsively married Charles Brandon, one of her brother Henry’s closest friends and son of the William Brandon who had died carrying her father’s standard at Bosworth Field. When the newlyweds prepared to return to England, it was decided that Mary would return with them and become a lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine. Anne meanwhile had received high praise from Margaret of Austria, who had overseen the continuation of her education along with that of the four Hapsburg youngsters who were her wards at the time. At this point her father was able to arrange Anne’s transfer from Brussels to the French court, where she became close to Francis I’s Queen Claude. She remained in France for some six or seven years, until King Henry’s 1522 decision to go to war with France made it impossible for her to remain. She took back with her to England a degree of sophistication that gave her a confidence bordering on brashness, arriving at about the same time her sister became the king’s mistress. Anne was firmly established as the court’s principal adornment when, a few years later, Henry returned Mary to her husband with grants of land as a gesture of thanks. Mary had not exactly been seduced and abandoned, but her example would not have impressed Anne with the benefits of yielding when the king sought a lady’s favors.