by Simon Schama
Whoso list to hount, I know where there is an hynde
But as for me, helas, I may no more.
The vayne travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of theme that farthest commeth behinde.
Yet may I by no means my weried mynde
Drawe from the Diere, but as she fleeth afore
Faynting I folowe . . .
Towards the end of the poem, the forlorn and exhausted hunter cautions anyone rash enough to imagine they might do better:
. . . I put him owte of dowbte
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with Diamonds in letters plain
There is written her fair neck rounde abowte:
‘Noli me tangere for Caesar’s I ame,
And wilde to hold though I seem tame.’
‘Do not touch’ – for Caesar, otherwise known as Henry VIII, had indeed thrown himself into the chase, and the king, as we know, was an inexhaustible huntsman. Wyatt knew when he was beaten. But before he retired from the contest (according to his grandson George, who heard it from one of Anne’s maids, Anne Gainsford), Wyatt allowed himself at least one little triumph. Henry and the poet were reportedly playing bowls. Smiling at his reported rival, Henry pointed to a throw, using a finger with Anne’s ring prominently on it, remarking offhand, ‘Mine I believe’. Wyatt responded by taking out from inside his shirt Anne’s jewel, suspended from a necklace, and replied: ‘If it like Your Majesty give me leave to measure. I hope it will be mine.’ Henry was evidently not amused. ‘It may be so but then I am deceived.’ Game over.
By the summer of 1526 Henry’s pursuit of Anne had turned serious. When he danced with her in front of the queen, the contrast between the two women was glaring. Anne was everything Catherine of Aragon was not. Ten years younger, merry rather than pious, spirited, even teasing in the French manner rather than gravely deferential in the Spanish fashion. She opened the way to sexual bliss, domestic happiness and, most important of all, the possibility of a son and heir. Henry now believed that a divine curse had been laid on his marriage for taking his dead brother’s wife as his own and that for seventeen years he had been living in an incestuous relationship. Leviticus 20:21 was quite clear about this: ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.’ It would be wrong to assume that Henry was merely exploiting the scripture as a disingenuous pretext to discard Catherine and satisfy his craving for Anne. He was, certainly, besotted, but he was also a serious and literal Bible reader and the texts in Leviticus would have explained why his marriage had become a barren misery (even though the existence of his daughter Mary hardly corresponded to the curse of childlessness). In 1525 he stopped sleeping with Catherine, and his conviction that he must escape an unholy union grew swiftly into an obsession.
Anne’s point-blank refusal to entertain the idea of becoming Henry’s mistress only intensified his urgency. During 1526 and 1527 their relationship developed from a courtly flirtation (presents of roebucks and jewellery) to something much more serious. Henry, who normally found writing letters torture, wrote seventeen to Anne, parsing each of her replies with the excruciating obsessiveness of the insecure lover:
Debating with myself the contents of your letter I have put myself in great distress not knowing how to interpret them, whether to my disadvantage as in some places shown or to advantage as in others I understand them; praying you with all my heart that you will expressly certify me of your whole mind concerning the love between us two. For of necessity I must ensure me of this answer, having been now one whole year struck with the dart of love, not being assured either of failure or finding place in your heart and grounded affection. Which last point has kept me for some little time from calling you my mistress since if you love me in none other sort save that of common affection, that name in no wise belongs to you, for it denotes a singular love, far removed from the common.
Anne was quite different from her sister, Mary, who was notorious as an easy conquest. This was, for the first time in his life, hard work. Even his trump card, the promise to make Anne his sole mistress, a formal royal concubine, backfired disastrously when she recoiled in aversion from the suggestion, punishing Henry by disappearing from court altogether. Beside himself with contrition, Henry begged forgiveness, and Anne eventually put him out of his misery, sending the king a little ship with a solitary maiden aboard. It worked like a dream. Henry went into a paroxysm of rapture and responded by proposing something quite different from concubinage:
Praying you also that if ever before I have in any way done you offence, that you will give me the same absolution that you ask [no doubt for appearing cold], ensuring you that henceforth my heart shall be dedicate to you alone, greatly desirous that my body could be as well, as God can bring to pass if it pleaseth Him whom I entreat once each day for the accomplishment thereof, trusting that at length my prayer will be heard, wishing the time brief and thinking it will be but long until we see each other again.
And at the end Henry signed:
Written with the hand of that Secretary who in heart, body and will is Your loyal and most ensured servant,
H autre A ne cherse R [Henry who looks no further than his AB].
All that remained was to secure the divorce, and Henry must have been confident that Wolsey would bring his managerial magic to whatever small obstacles might be set in his way.
But in 1527 something happened, a long way from England, to make those obstacles mountainous. Catherine of Aragon’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V, sacked Rome and took Pope Clement VII prisoner. Whatever his own judgement might have been on the matter, it was now out of the question for the pope to oblige Henry on his ‘Great Matter’ without mortally offending the emperor. Ever the mischief-maker, Francis I suggested that Henry should unilaterally declare himself unmarried. But even if he took Francis’s advice, there was nothing to stop Catherine from appealing to Rome, possibly provoking an excommunication, and certainly ruling out what Henry wanted most: the recognition of his and Anne’s children as legitimate heirs.
For the first time Wolsey must have felt uncomfortable in his cardinal’s hat. Whichever way he turned, he was in trouble. If he failed to get the king his divorce, he was ruined; if he provoked the pope and the emperor, he lost his diplomatic cachet and his power as a prince of the Church. In the autumn of 1528 he staked everything on a planned mission by the papal legate, Cardinal Campeggio, to hear the case for an annulment. The cardinal was supposed to consider the Crown’s argument that, at the time of Arthur’s death, the pope had had no authority to grant dispensation from the Leviticus prohibition. In that case, Henry’s marriage to Catherine had been, from the beginning, unlawful. But during the long delay before the court actually sat (in June 1529), opinion out of doors and inside was shifting massively in Catherine’s favour. To the charges of incest, the queen was insisting that her marriage to Arthur had never been consummated and thus had been no marriage at all. Increasingly seen as a victim, Catherine had never been more popular, and the ‘goggle-eyed whore’ epithet that would cling to Anne Boleyn for the rest of her life could already be heard in the taverns and streets. Henry had to send her away to her parents at Hever Castle, where she fell dangerously ill with the sweating sickness (evidently a kind of viral influenza). Rattled by the firmness of the queen, Henry made a grotesquely disingenuous speech in which he claimed that he should like nothing better than for his marriage to Catherine to be proved lawful: ‘She is a woman of most humility and buxomness, yea and of all good qualities pertaining to nobility.’ No one was fooled. All kinds of partisans for the queen suddenly found their voice, including John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and even Martin Luther.
At Blackfriars the court turned into a stage for Catherine’s genuinely heartrending despair. Henry sat stone-faced while the queen knelt at his feet in floods of tears, sobbing as she made the secrets of their marriage bed the heart of
the matter. Only desperation could have forced so naturally modest a woman to speak thus:
Sire, I beseech you for all the love that hath been between us and for the love of God let me have justice and right. Take of me some pity and compassion for I am a poor woman and a stranger born out of your dominion. I have no assured friend here . . . When ye had me at the first, I take God to be my judge, I was a true maid without touch of man. And whether this be true or no, I put it to your conscience.
This was too much. The cardinal-legate broke up the court on the pretext of a summer adjournment. The king was livid. Wolsey was finished. He was dismissed, ostensibly for fraud and corruption, by a coalition of anti-Wolseyites that included Anne’s own family: her father and her brother, George, Viscount Rochford; her Howard uncle, the Duke of Norfolk; and Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk (who may have felt he owed the king a love match). Within a year Wolsey was dead, charges of high treason still hanging over his head.
Getting rid of Wolsey, though, did not solve the problem. His successor as chancellor was Thomas More, who would not touch the poisoned chalice of the divorce. Fisher, annoyingly, kept referring to a passage in Deuteronomy that actually urged the taking of a dead brother’s wife as an act of compassion! Henry’s own confidence in a satisfactory solution failed him enough to renew his suggestion to Anne that perhaps she would reconsider the possibility of becoming his mistress, a suggestion she treated as so offensive that it must have been made ‘in mirth’ to test her. At some point in 1530 it was Anne herself who decided that she must take matters in hand and steer the whole business in a radically new direction. She put into Henry’s hands a copy of William Tyndale’s work On the Obedience of a Christian Man and how Christian Rulers Ought to Govern, published at the end of 1528 and, in the eyes of the Church, very much a banned book. Although Tyndale, like Luther, was against the divorce, his little book was dynamite, for it flatly rejected any notion of an authority divided between Church and state, insisting instead that ‘one king, one law is God’s ordinance in every realm’. A true Christian prince, in other words, was governor of both Church and state and need not defer to the illegitimately usurped power of the ‘Bishop of Rome’. A non-papal solution to Henry’s divorce suddenly presented itself. Henry would, in effect, act as his own pope, the governor of the English Church, and award himself the divorce – with, of course, the blessing of the bishops and the parliament of England. The matter had been personal and dynastic. Now it would be national and political.
An air of peculiar unreality hung over the business of Church and state in the spring of 1530. Thomas More was busy burning heretics and their infamous literature, but it was the Roman Church in England that was about to go up in smoke. With a characteristic combination of conviction and self-interest, Anne Boleyn and her family had recruited a think-tank of well-disposed theologians, including the Cambridge scholar Thomas Cranmer, to come up with historical evidence for the royal supremacy. They duly beavered away in the archives and produced a collection of writings, the Collectanea satis copiosa (Sufficiently Copious Collection), which asserted that in the earliest days of the Church each ‘province’ (England, for example) had had its own jurisdiction that was quite apart from and free of Rome, and that God had always intended kings to be rulers of those Churches, accountable only to the Almighty. Beneath the deceptive antiquarianism, the implications of the ‘Collection’ were as radical as Tyndale’s book.
Henry had still not finally resolved to break with Rome. Teams of his lawyers and theologians were sweeping through the universities of Europe with instructions to produce opinions that might still sway the pope. But there were times when the decidedly finite reserves of royal patience were exhausted and Henry began to act and sound like both chief prince and priest. To a startled Church assembly, summoned so that Henry could denounce heresy, he also added that he might personally have to take in hand a translation of the Bible, which would then be given to the laity when he judged it fit and proper. To the imperial ambassador he let it be known that some of the things that Luther said seemed to him to have merit. In fact, the more Henry learned about the royal supremacy the better he liked it. It may have begun as a tactic to intimidate the pope and the English bishops into seeing the divorce his way, but after a while Henry began to internalize the idea as a self-evident truth. One can almost hear him clapping a hand to the bullish brow and exclaiming, ‘How can I have been so dull as to have missed this?’
The royal ego, never a small part of his personality, ballooned to imperial proportions and it got the palaces to house it – fifty of them before the reign was done. Some of the greatest and grandest had been Wolsey’s and were now transferred to the king: York Place in London was renamed Whitehall and personally inspected by Anne to see if its accommodations were suitable, and Hampton Court became the stage for the swaggering theatre of Henrician court life. Nothing measures the imperial scale of that court better than the size of the space needed to feed it. Some 230 people were employed to service the thousand who were, every day, entitled to eat at the king’s expense. There were three vast larders for meat alone; a specially designed wet larder to hold fish, supplied by water drawn from the fountains outside; spiceries, fruiteries; six immense fireplaces; three gargantuan cellars capable of holding the 300 casks of wine and 600,000 gallons of ale downed each year. And at the centre of it all, carefully protected by the Privy Chamber from undue exhibition, was England’s new Caesar, the forty-year-old king, colossal and autocratic, bestriding the realm, his pose deliberately meant to recall the power of the Roman emperors.
Not surprisingly, then, in the summer of 1530, the word ‘imperial’ begins to show up with some calculated regularity in Henry’s remarks. Emperors, of course, acknowledged no superior on earth. To the papal nuncio Anne’s brother, George Boleyn, and Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, said: ‘England cares nothing for popes, not even if St Peter should come to life again, for the king is absolute emperor and pope in his kingdom.’ The formula would be repeated in 1533 in the preamble to the statute designed to suppress appeals to Rome where the declaration was made that: ‘The realm of England is an empire.’ With every month that passed without a decision from Rome, Henry became more aggressive. He would not take orders from a pope, he told his envoys, who was himself a well-known bastard. By November 1530 he was insisting out loud that he was ‘chief’ of the ‘spiritual men’.
It may be that the spiritual men supposed that this would all go away – their predecessors had been there before with Henry II and with John, after all – but they were in for a very nasty shock. At the end of 1530 writs of praemunire, the ‘lesser treason’ of infringing the king’s laws (but for which the penalties were imprisonment and confiscation of property) were issued. William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was the first named, then a broader group of bishops and, finally, through its insistence on Church courts, the entire Church was held to be complicit in this ‘lesser treason’. At first, they bought off Henry with a grant of £100,000, but with the scent of their fear in his nostrils, Henry pounced on the quarry, demanding recognition of the title of Supreme Head. By encouraging parliament to issue a long and bitter attack on familiar grievances – the Church courts, tithes, the alleged worldliness of the clergy – Henry also made it clear that he was prepared to leave no propaganda tactic unexploited. In the spring of 1532 he moved in for the kill. The oath the clergy took to the pope and the money they paid him each year revealed, he said, just where their true loyalty lay. ‘Well-beloved subjects,’ he thundered to a specially summoned delegation, ‘we thought that the clergy of the realm had been our subjects wholly but now we have well perceived that they be but half our subjects, yea and scarce our subjects.’
Faced with these very big sticks, the Church cracked wide open. There were still some brave souls, like John Fisher, who remained an impassioned defender of Queen Catherine and who believed that any erosion of papal authority was tantamount to the destruction of the unity of Christendom.
But there were some other clerics who were beginning to think the unthinkable: that a king not a pope could be Supreme Head and they themselves might be part of something called the ‘Church of England’. In May 1532 the heat melted the resistance. Thomas More resigned as chancellor and Bishop Fisher continued to lecture the king, but the majority of his colleagues delivered their grovelling Submission of the Clergy which caved in to all Henry’s demands: future Church convocations would be summoned by royal writ; no new canon law could be passed without the king’s consent; and existing law would be reviewed by a committee appointed by the Crown. It was a momentous surrender. It was now unarguable that the Church in England had but one master, and he certainly did not reside in St Peter’s.
It was a reformation but not the Protestant Reformation. No core doctrines had been touched. The real presence of Christ in the mass was preserved. Priests were still required to be celibate. The monasteries were still standing, and prayers and the Bible were still read in Latin. And now that Henry had found a way to get his divorce, and now that Anne, heavily pregnant, had been crowned in Westminster Abbey by the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, the interference with the traditional Church might have stopped there.
That it did not was due to one of the most remarkable working partnerships in all British history: Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell. Take either one of them away and the English Reformation would not have happened, or at least not in the way it did. Their agenda was always more daring than the king’s, and they both had strong personal as well as religious motives for adopting the cause of reform. In Cromwell’s case it would bring him such power and authority that the son of a Putney cloth-worker would die (though not in his bed) the Earl of Essex. And although his convictions were deep, Cranmer was playing an even more dangerous game since just before he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury he had secretly married a German woman, Margarethe, thereby committing himself to one of Luther’s most shocking innovations. Cranmer was also wedded to the old Lollard idea of an English Bible for the laity, although he certainly did not believe that this gave licence to anyone to produce their own version for public consumption. That way lay religious anarchy. Cranmer, like Cromwell, was wedded to the Renaissance idea of a strong prince in a strong Christian state. The people were to be given their officially authorized Bible from on high; no other edition would be tolerated.