by Simon Schama
All this delighted Henry VIII. There was not the slightest reason to imagine, as the king entered his thirties, that he would ever be anything except the loyal Fidei Defensor, Defender of the Faith, the title a grateful pope had given Henry for writing against Luther. He was, after all, the Walsingham pilgrim, and his queen was the impeccably Catholic Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of Ferdinand, the king of Spain. She had originally (if very briefly) been married to Henry’s older brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales, since through most of Henry’s youth there had been no thought that he would ever be king. The marriage between Arthur and Catherine had been Henry VII’s attempt to piggyback the Tudors to dynastic respectability by allying themselves with the great Spanish dynasts, Ferdinand and Isabella, so the premature death in 1502 of the teenage Arthur, who had indeed been the flower of chivalry his name evoked, was a diplomatic as well as a family disaster. In his late forties and a widower, Henry VII for a while seriously thought about marrying Catherine himself, but in the end it was decided that she should be betrothed instead to Henry, the new Prince of Wales, then just eleven years old. They were supposed to be married four years later when the groom would have been fifteen and the bride nineteen, but the dowry failed to materialize, no small matter for Henry VII for whom money talked. So the prince was kept away from his Spanish princess right up to the time that his father died in 1509, when he was finally able to seize the keys to the kingdom and his long-promised wife.
Henry was now almost eighteen, and he lost no time in making it clear he would be his own master. To ensure that he would not inherit the unpopularity of his father’s councillors, Edmund Dudley and Richard Empson (detested for their vigorous tax administration), he had them summarily impeached and executed. He then began to spend the money they had laboriously amassed, not least on a spectacular wedding for himself and Catherine. We tend to think of Catherine of Aragon as the embittered and victimized matron she did indeed become, but portraits confirm contemporary reports that in the early years of her marriage she was not at all unattractive, but dark and voluptuous. From the visible signs of affection between husband and wife the future of the dynasty must have seemed auspicious. Henry VII, after all, had had seven children even if only three of them had survived.
As for Henry himself, you could practically smell the testosterone. Any way and anywhere he could flash his burly energy, he flashed it: in the saddle, on the dance floor or on the tennis court, where a besotted courtier wrote excitedly of the king’s skin glowing through his finely woven shirt. Six feet tall (had there ever been a short king of England since John?), Henry not only shone, he glittered, literally, his fingers a mass of rings and a diamond as big as a walnut hanging from a neck that was described by another admirer as long, thick and beautiful enough to belong to a woman. Henry dispensed his famous, breezy charm rather like the English weather, in sunny intervals alternating with long, cloudy spells and sudden bursts of heavy thunder. The charm was of the rib-poking, back-slapping, arm-around-the-shoulder, punch-in-the-belly kind, which, depending on the mood of the week, could betoken either rapid promotion or imminent arrest. Henry wallowed in the praise droolingly lavished on him by his courtiers and foreign ambassadors: Henry the gallant, Henry the clever, Henry the nimble, Henry the superstar. He was the only king with his personal band, hired to go touring with him and featuring the eighteen-year-old as lead singer-songwriter.
Early in his reign Henry had a Latin biography of Henry V translated into English, an unsubtle allusion to his belief that he was not so much the Agincourt warrior’s descendant as his reincarnation, and that made the first order of the day a nice little war with France. This happened to suit Henry’s in-laws, Ferdinand and Isabella, who were eager to help themselves to the border province of Navarre. In 1512 a joint attack was launched, but it petered out ignominiously when the English fleet waited in vain for a Spanish army to materialize. The following year a campaign was planned for Normandy. This was a huge success: farms were indiscriminately ransacked and burned, towns put to the sword. Henry thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, especially the skirmish dignified as the Battle of the Spurs, in which the French cavalry, finding themselves ambushed, turned and fled, leaving nobles behind as lucrative prisoners. There were even better things to come. Henry’s brother-in-law, James IV of Scotland (who was married to his elder sister, Margaret), had gallantly decided to live up to his end of the ‘auld alliance’ by invading northern Britain, a campaign that ended catastrophically at Flodden in 1513, where a smaller English force led by Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey (soon to be Henry’s Earl Marshal Norfolk), annihilated the Scots, leaving 10,000 dead, including most of the great earls of Scotland and James IV himself.
All this had been managed, somehow, without breaking the bank, the reason being that an extraordinary bank-manager was in charge: Thomas Wolsey, the butcher’s son (as all his many enemies reminded him) and omnicompetent minder of the realm. The art of Wolsey’s management was his mastery of both matters and men. He had inherited an increasingly sophisticated administration from the Yorkist kings and Henry VII, but he added to it a shrewd understanding of the machinery of power. He could stroke parliament when it was necessary, and he could bang heads (even aristocratic heads) together when that was called for. He was an awesome manipulator of patronage, honours, bribes and threats. In other words, he was a political psychologist in a cardinal’s hat.
Wolsey knew just what made people tick – their vanities and their fears – and he also understood the critical relationship between display and authority. He used it to stunning (and ultimately self-destructive) effect at Hampton Court, where he built himself a palace, realizing in bricks and mortar his status as a ‘prince of the Church’. And he also used it for Henry VIII, creating carefully measured pools of distance between the person of the king and his routine business. That business was taken care of by Wolsey and the council. Henry’s person, on the other hand, was closed off in Privy Chamber, literally a private space patrolled by a select inner corps of sixteen gentlemen-courtiers, the chief of whom was the Groom of the Stole. This was the job all gentlemen of any ambition killed for: the honour of attending on the king every waking hour, including the times when he was grunting on the close-stool.
The pièce de résistance of Wolsey’s orchestration of royal ceremony took place in 1520 with the astounding jamboree known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It had its political point, meaning to demonstrate to the new Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, whose vast territories dominated Europe, that if need be the two old cross-Channel foes could stand together against Habsburg intimidation. So instead of the usual war, there was a wondrous demonstration of amity between Henry and the young Valois king, Francis I. It came to war anyway, not with swords and lances but something much more deadly: style.
For weeks on end Francis and Henry competed in displays of outrageous ostentation. In the greatest transportation exercise seen since the campaigns of Edward III, Wolsey shipped over the entire ruling class of England, about 5000 of them, earls, bishops and knights of the shire, including in a display of unconvincing humility himself, riding on a mule, dressed in crimson velvet (with, lest he be thought self-effacing, another 200 identically clad behind him). Francis, alas, won the decor and design prize by having his 3000 horses and 5000 men issue from a 60-foot-high pavilion made from strips of blue velvet and cloth of gold sewn with the fleur-de-lis. At the English end was a half-millennium affair of a fake wood and canvas castle, heavily crenellated and decorated with the ubiquitous Tudor rose. Music – especially music composed by Henry – played; wine flowed from red and white fountains; much heron was consumed; and the two kings spent hours trying on outfits to stun the opposition. They wrestled not only with knotty problems of state but each other, the fox and the bear, half-naked and all tangled up, the more supple Francis throwing Henry on his back.
No doubt he laughed. No doubt he hated it. No wonder that two years after this orgy of good fellowship and a solemn promise to build a
chapel to Our Lady of Peace on the site, Francis and Henry were at war again.
And somewhere in the middle of this over-dressed mêlée was the young woman who would bring down Wolsey’s entire house of cards and with it, quite inconceivably, the Roman Church in England. So much has been written about the tragic soap opera of Anne Boleyn’s life that ‘serious history’ seems duty-bound to turn away from it to the weightier and less personal issues that we instinctively think ought to be behind so profound a change as the break with Rome. But if the traditional Church was not on its last legs, if Protestantism was in its infancy in England, and if, before his infatuation, Henry VIII showed no sign whatsoever of interest in the Reformation, then it’s not only reasonable but essential to come back to Anne Boleyn as both the occasion and cause of the extraordinary change in direction.
She may have been first introduced to the king at the Field of the Cloth of Gold where she was present, not in the English but the French camp as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Claude, the wife of Francis I. But there might not have been much about the girl – long dark hair, a prominent nose – to catch the king’s eye, and his attention was, in any case, engaged elsewhere and it wasn’t in Catherine of Aragon’s bed. Whatever heat had been generated between the king and queen had gone through a prolonged cooling-off after their son Henry had died in 1511, when he was just two months old, notwithstanding all the king’s tributes to the Lady of Walsingham. Catherine had become pregnant again, but the child, born in 1516, was a girl, Mary. Although he paid his queen all due respect in public, the king made little effort to hide his disappointment that the Spanish princess, whose fruitfulness had been so heavily advertised, had proved incapable of providing a male heir. When a son was born to his mistress Elizabeth Blount, the king, almost as if to make a point, called the boy Henry fitz Roy and subsequently made him Earl of Richmond, the title his own father had carried to the battlefield at Bosworth! The point of mistresses for someone like Henry VIII (as for all the princes of Europe) was their disposability. And at some point in 1525 he began sleeping with Anne’s sister Mary (whose marriage to William Carey seemed only a minor inconvenience). The son born to Mary Boleyn early in 1526 was also called Henry, and there were predictable mutterings about his paternity.
Despite the myth of the Boleyns as obscure country gentry, they were, in fact, at the very top of the Kentish county elite, ambitious and well connected, just the kind of family on which the government depended to see their will done smoothly and efficiently. In return, people like Thomas Boleyn won favours, places at court and, if they stayed on the king’s right side, entry into the Privy Council. Thomas’s wife was Elizabeth Howard, a member of the greatest aristocratic family in the land and the daughter of the Earl of Surrey, the victor of Flodden. So, from the beginning, Thomas Boleyn was one of the courtiers personally close enough to the young king to take him on as an opponent in the tilts and close enough to be an annoyance to Thomas Wolsey. But Boleyn, who spoke good French and was a well-travelled cosmopolitan, was exactly the kind of person who was useful during the years when Henry was trying to establish himself as a major power in Europe.
Boleyn’s diplomatic career brought both his daughters when they were still children into the court life of the great European dynasts. Anne’s first experience of this kind would have been at Mechelen in Flanders, at the court of the affable Habsburg regent of the Netherlands, Margaret of Austria. But when England’s foreign allegiance switched from the Habsburgs to France, Anne was transferred along with it, this time to the Valois court of Claude, the wife of the then dauphin, Francis. In the palaces of the Loire, the chief pastime, after hunting, was courtly love, that theatrical form of aristocratic flirtation around which a whole culture had grown up: desire endlessly deferred; sexual passion transfigured into pure, selfless love; troubadours, masks; silk handkerchiefs, a lot of sighing. There were moments, though, when the elaborate pretence was swept aside and basic instincts took command. Anne Boleyn and her sister, Mary, witnessed at close quarters one such moment – the most extraordinary sexual drama of the age.
As part of the strategy developed by Wolsey to counterbalance the increasingly irksome attachment to the Habsburgs, Henry had decided to marry his younger sister, Mary, to Louis XII of France. He was fifty-two; she was barely in her teens, but bright, extremely pretty and able to play her brother like a lute. Her price for being a sacrifice to diplomacy was that she should have a say in the next match. Perhaps Mary knew something her brother did not, for Louis was dead in eleven weeks. His marriage alliance policy foiled, Henry now threw the whole plan into reverse, hoping to tie the Habsburgs more closely to him by exporting his sister to the Archduke Charles, shortly to be emperor. Whatever he had promised Mary was of trifling consequences beside the critical interests of state. He was sure she would see it that way, but she did not. Mary had heard of the famous lantern jaw and exophthalmic eyes, and she informed the king that she would rather die than become Charles’s wife. Pending the resolution of his sister’s future, Henry sent one of his closest companions and sparring partner in the lists, Charles Brandon, to bring the young widow back from France along with as much of her dowry as he could decently retrieve. Brandon was notorious as a reckless flirt, but when he saw the sweet, tearful face of Mary Tudor, he became putty in her hands. The new king of France, Francis I, was delighted to play dishonest marriage broker and break up an Anglo-Habsburg marriage. But the couple didn’t need a Pandarus. Mary threw herself at Brandon and virtually demanded that he marry her. When he heard of the secret wedding between Brandon and Mary, Henry was predictably apoplectic, seeing himself as the dupe of a double-betrayal, by his friend and by his sister. Their elopement was virtually, if not technically, an act of treason, since the blood-line of the dynasty was certainly at stake, but after weeks of royal rage and tear-soaked expressions of sorrow by the guilty parties, he relented somewhat and Brandon and Mary were packed off to become the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk.
They had escaped disaster, but only just. The historian who wants to reconstruct the strength of feeling that made both Mary and Brandon risk their necks for each other, but who is always told that romantic love was an eighteenth-century invention, is at something of a loss. Marriages were hard-headed business arrangements, the product of social, political or economic calculation, not passion. Except sometimes – as in this classic case, right at the heart of the Tudor court – they weren’t. So if love isn’t the subject matter of, say, the sonnets by Petrarch or Wyatt or Shakespeare, or of Romeo and Juliet, whatever we want to call it was certainly up and running with phenomenal urgency by the early sixteenth century. And it would make a difference to English history.
Anne Boleyn and her sister Mary were ladies-in-waiting at the court of Queen Claude of France while the drama of Mary Tudor and Charles Brandon was being played out. (Anne’s embarrassing closeness to the event may have been the reason for Mary Tudor’s subsequent coldness towards her.) It would have given Anne a precocious education in the politics of passion, a department of human behaviour in which she was to prove a major talent. Around nineteen years old, she returned from France and entered the dangerous, glittering world of the Tudor court as a maid of honour to the woman she would replace, Queen Catherine. Physically Anne was nothing special, despite the long black hair and big dark eyes. Her bosom, reported the Venetian ambassador, who evidently noticed these things, was ‘not much risen’. But she exploited her natural vivaciousness to play the games of love for all she was worth. Either instinctively or by education, she knew exactly when to beckon and when to push away; when to flatter men into believing everything they liked about themselves was actually true; and when to disabuse them, so they rolled around in misery like sharply rebuked puppies. Anne gave off articulate self-confidence, the teasing intelligence that made her intensely desirable. To her delight, men fell panting at her feet.
First, there was Henry Percy, the heir to the huge fortune and power of the earls of Northumberland. Independence
in the choice of marriage partner was evidently in the air in aristocratic society because Percy and Anne actually contracted a betrothal without asking the earl’s permission. Outraged, the Earl of Northumberland got Wolsey to lean heavily on the young man, who was duly crushed into submission. He ended up in an unhappy marriage with the much wealthier Margaret Talbot and died young and childless. The scandal was enough to send Anne back to the French court for another few years, not the best place, perhaps, to encourage her in demure obedience.
When Anne returned, around 1525, she attracted the attention of another admirer who was equally (but for different reasons) unsuitable: the poet-courtier Thomas Wyatt. His family had been neighbours of the Boleyns in Kent, and the two are very likely to have known each other as children. Thomas’s father, Henry, had (like Thomas Boleyn) risen far and fast enough from his Yorkshire obscurity to be able to buy Allington Castle, which he restored in the grandiose post-War of the Roses manner to look feudally dangerous on the outside and luxuriously comfortable on the inside. The same was pretty much true for his son, Thomas, a very paragon of the Renaissance courtier, drop-dead handsome (if Holbein is to be believed), famously accomplished in the lists (and therefore smiled on by the king) and so clever and well travelled that he could bring Italian love poetry back to England and make something of it in the mother tongue. Wyatt’s poems were, as usual, heavy with sighs at the unattainable object of desire – and at least one of them was meant for Anne Boleyn. By the time he met up with Anne again Wyatt was separated from his own wife, allegedly because of her adultery. But separation was not divorce, and the best he could offer Anne was the role of a mistress: not good enough for an ambitious girl on the make. Wyatt’s poem, in which he vainly pursues his ‘hind’, is heavy with the knowledge of failure: