by Lisa Hilton
France was England’s traditional enemy, but the marriage of Henry VIII’s sister Mary to Louis XII of France in 1514 cemented an alliance with the French, which endured (despite Mary’s swift widowhood and the accession of François in 1515) for some seven years, yet war was again declared in 1522. Another peace treaty was signed in 1525, but Henry’s pursuit of the Boleyn marriage necessitated a change in his foreign policy. Imperial troops sacked Rome in 1527, and Pope Clement VII, whose consent to an annulment of the Aragon marriage Henry urgently needed, found himself the prisoner of Charles V, Katherine’s nephew. The Treaty of Cambrai in 1529, among François, the emperor, and the pope, secured an imperial-papal alliance, halted French campaigns in Italy, and left England isolated. Henry now deemed it politic to cultivate François’s support for his marriage to Anne, which François was initially prepared to offer, in order to stave off a threatening alliance with Charles. Thus the early 1530s saw some tentative collusion with England’s break from Rome—the French king had strong-armed the theology faculty of the Sorbonne into declaring Henry’s marriage with Katherine invalid in 1530, and in 1532, a defensive alliance had been agreed upon at meetings at Boulogne and Calais. However, the appearance of Elizabeth herself disrupted this cooperation. When Henry discovered Anne was pregnant in early 1533, he had little choice but to marry her immediately, lest his longed-for heir be tainted with illegitimacy. But François was furious when Henry pressed on so precipitately with the wedding. For his part, François had been dancing round the question of the English royal divorce, since he needed papal support for his own project of marrying his son to the pope’s niece Catherine de Medici, with the object of recovering French power on the Italian peninsula. By the time the Valois-Medici marriage took place, the two kings had resumed their usual quarrelsome relationship. François wanted an English alliance but was chary of losing papal support to join England in isolation if he gave his full sanction to the Boleyn marriage.
In October 1534, the French had received a proposition that they should formally acknowledge the validity of Henry and Anne’s union and recognize Elizabeth. In November, the Admiral of France, Philippe de Chabot, Comte de Brion, arrived with a proposal from François that Mary be betrothed to the dauphin. François thus sought to keep all his potential allies happy—joining the houses of Tudor and Valois while implying to Charles and the pope that Mary, not Elizabeth, was still the “right” heir. Henry initially treated the offer as a feint but eventually conceded that Mary might marry François’s third son, the Duke of Angoulême, with the proviso that the couple renounce any claim to the English crown. Better still, Henry suggested, if François would persuade the pope to revoke the sentence of excommunication against him, Angoulême could marry Elizabeth in return for Henry’s renunciation of his own ancient title to France and a significant parcel of land grants on the French coast. Brion showed no interest in a proposed visit to Elizabeth, instead asking Henry to proceed with the negotiations for Mary’s betrothal. Anne’s anger was hysterical. Usually a model of the controlled court lady, she embarrassed herself by bursting into screeching laughter at an entertainment held for Brion, which clearly offended the admiral.
Royal marriage brokering could be as graceful, precisely choreographed, and meaningless as a stately pavane, and the game being played here had little to do with the eventual marital disposal of either Elizabeth or Mary, and everything to do with the contentious status of Henry’s queen. Any hopes Anne might have had for the settlement of her daughter’s future dissipated when the marriage negotiations collapsed at an inconclusive summit in Calais, which Cromwell, who favored an alliance with the emperor, cried off.
In January 1536, two crucial events took place. First, Katherine of Aragon died at Kimbolton. Recognizing that she was ill with what modern assessments concur was cancer, she had written to Henry the previous month, commending “our daughter” Mary to him and “beseeching thou to be a good father unto her.” Henry’s reaction to the news was repulsive. He accompanied Elizabeth to Mass dressed in yellow, their progress marked “by trumpets and other great triumphs.”10 Anne was reportedly overjoyed, but her triumph did not last. On the day of Katherine’s funeral, she suffered a miscarriage. Reportedly, the fetus was male, and conventionally, the queen “miscarried of her savior.” Perhaps, though, it was not the child in her womb which had been protecting Anne but a dying woman in Cambridgeshire. As long as Katherine of Aragon lived, Henry could not repudiate his wife. When she died, “Anne’s shield had been removed.”11
The idea that Anne’s miscarriage heralded her downfall has been widely canvassed, but there is little evidence that this was the case. As late as April 1536, Henry continued publicly to endorse his marriage. That Anne had indeed miscarried a male child is confirmed by Chapuys; the chronicler Charles Wriothesley, who described her as being “delivered of a male child before her time”; and the poet Lancelot de Carles, who confirmed that “she gave birth prematurely to a son.” None of these writers mentioned that the fetus was in any way deformed, and yet this supposition has gained considerable currency, based on a comment made fifty years later by an exiled Catholic writer, Nicholas Sander, who claimed that the queen had been delivered of a formless lump of flesh. Even these words are too imprecise to support the claim of some disability or deformity, and it would certainly be strange that Chapuys did not remark upon it at the time had this been the case. That a deformed child was evidence of Anne’s adultery in the king’s mind, or that she was believed to be a witch, have been inferred from the suggestion, but since there was no deformed child, the argument is circular. Had Anne’s pregnancy run to term, and had the boy lived, then of course the story of the queen, and the English succession, would be very different, but this does not mean that the miscarriage in itself precipitated Anne’s downfall.
In April 1536, Chapuys received orders from his master, Charles V, to finally recognize Anne at court, a gesture which was contrary to imperial policy since 1529. The emperor believed it was now more advantageous that Anne remain queen, since if the papal sentence against him was enforced, and Henry put aside his wife as a consequence, there was a risk that the king would remarry. Any subsequent offspring would take precedence over Mary, the imperialists’ preferred heir. Accordingly, the ambassador attended Mass, accompanied by Anne’s brother Lord Rochford, with whom he had exchanged pleasantries before an interview with the king. “As the king came during the offertory,” Chapuys reported,
There was a large gathering of people and part of them to see what expressions the concubine and I would make: she did so courteously enough, for I was just behind the door through which she entered, she turned round to do me the reverence comparable to that which I did her.12
Here was the subtlety of Renaissance statecraft, an exchange of bows which could pass as the merest civil gesture and yet which nevertheless signified an important change of policy. The encounter was obviously staged, as the crowd waiting in anticipation to see it shows, and it reflected the desire of the king to see his wife acknowledged and a reciprocal willingness on the part of the imperial ambassador to gratify him. Officially, Anne was clearly in favor, and so long as relations with the empire were concerned, would remain that way. Yet just over one month later, the queen was dead.
If the miscarriage is discounted, the sources of Anne Boleyn’s demise have been ascribed to the machinations of two, sometimes overlapping, forces—the “Aragonese” conservatives and Thomas Cromwell, a one-man faction all of his own. Henry himself hovers on the sidelines, a bloated tiger, ready to be soothed by pert little Jane Seymour’s purrings. Or, again, Henry wanted Anne dead and set his most capable minister to conspire it. That Cromwell orchestrated the charges against Anne, and their inevitable conclusion, is undoubted; why he did so remains a matter of dispute among eminent historians. Highly convincing reasonings have been produced on both sides to demonstrate that, in his own words, Cromwell was “a fantasiser et conspirer le dit affair” (imagined and contrived); his centra
lity in Anne’s trial and execution remains, whether she is considered guilty or the innocent victim of his machinations. It is the method of Cromwell’s elaboration of the charges of incest, adultery, and treason, though, which brings Anne’s influence on her daughter into focus.
It has been argued that, as queen, Elizabeth’s power was to some extent maintained by what has become known as the “cult of Elizabeth,” a practice of adoring and venerating the queen which blended the language of courtly love with that of religion, to present her as a semi-divine figure. “Courtly love” long predated the Renaissance but was very much a part of elite culture in the sixteenth century, revitalized by the influence and inclusion of the new humanist learning. In England, the tradition of courtly love is particularly associated with one earlier queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, but by the sixteenth century, the form promoted by Eleanor’s father, Guillaume IX of Aquitaine, had become a culture universal among the European ruling classes. Courtly love and its correlative, chivalry, provided a code of conduct which pertained from the battlefield to the “pastime” of the royal chamber. It was a highly complex, witty, stylized, exclusive, and sometimes subversive intellectual game in which both courtiers and kings aspired to produce the most subtle and ingenious forms of homage to their (often fictitious) lady loves.
This is the crucial element of courtly love—that it was a game, albeit a highly sophisticated one. The form of a swooning knight paying court to his impossible beloved was endlessly supple, a super-language in which anything might be said or, more deliciously, unsaid. Sexual favors were not the object (though they were often the consequence) of the game of love; well played, it could lead to preferment, patronage, an augmentation of status in the ruthless milieu of court politics, the production and distribution of such poetry mirroring the dynamic of the courtier’s life of endless waiting. It was also a means of free expression under a tyrannical system where to speak one’s mind could be to lose one’s head.
Anne’s court, like Elizabeth’s, was one of poetry, while the “cult of Elizabeth,” if such there was one, was based on a manipulation of the tropes of courtly love, of that culture of romantic literary chivalry which had played such a significant part in her parents’ courtship. And Anne Boleyn, until Cromwell decided to be literal rather than literary minded, was a mistress of the art. In one reading of Cromwell’s actions in 1536, it was courtly love which he used to bring Anne down, and it was Elizabeth’s appropriation of her mother’s practices, if not her errors, which enabled her so triumphantly to manipulate the mechanics of her mother’s disgrace into her own unique form of political glory.
In 1582, Elizabeth I wrote a poem on the departure of her last serious suitor, the Duke of Anjou:
I grieve and dare not show my discontent
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate… .
I am, and not, I freeze and yet am burned
Since from myself another self I turned.
Elizabeth is here demonstrating her own mastery of the conventions of courtly love. The piece is very much a performance in the accepted style. Paradoxes—“I freeze and yet am burned”—were characteristic of Renaissance poetry, known as “Petrarchan contraries” after the Italian humanist whose sonnets had brought perfection to the earlier troubadour form of courtly love, and which were influential all over Europe. Elizabeth may have been describing her own feelings in her poem, but her feelings are not really the point. Participating in the convention displayed the queen’s skill at literary composition; the fact that Elizabeth’s performance is highly derivative shows her ability to play the game of saying one thing—a tortured farewell to her last lover—while thinking another—a rather wistful good riddance, in Anjou’s case.
Anne’s ability to hold the king off for seven years is part of her legend. The brilliance of her strategy was to cast herself in the role of the courtly lady, requiring Henry to play the perfect knight. Henry was nothing if not dogged in the pursuit of all the roles in which he cast himself—philosopher-king, warrior, even husband—and “this persona of courtly lover … was fully formed in Henry and had been signaling … for an answering adept to come and lift its latch. In Anne, he had her. She was the mistress of Petrarchan contraries: her blowing hot and cold made the perfect environment for the king’s tender interest.”13
Once Henry had an idea in his mind, it was fixed. His minister Thomas Wolsey, who expertly managed the king for so long until he fell foul of that very certainty in the matter of the divorce, assessed his personality:
I have often kneeled before him … an hour or two to persuade him from his will and appetite, but I could never bring to pass to dissuade him therefrom. Therefore … I warn you be advised and assured what matter you put in his head, for ye shall never pull it out again.
What Anne did was put the idea of marriage, and only marriage, into that stubborn crowned head. Her virginity was not the obstacle to his passion; it was the incentive. Anne’s hymen became an instrument in Henry’s divorce. When Henry instructed Wolsey to convey his wishes to the English envoys in Rome, he was anxious to explain that he intended to divorce Katherine not out of lust for Anne but because his marriage was a sin in the sight of God. Anne’s “constant virginity” was an article in the case, both legally and within the terms which Anne and Henry constructed for their relationship—effectively, Anne was protected by the conventions of courtly love. Henry was not only anxious to prove his facility at the game of love to Anne, as his letters to her rather desperately show, but to the courts of Europe. By interpreting the role of courtly lady “to its utmost potential [Anne] became more powerful than any man.”14
How did Anne Boleyn acquire such skill? Certainly, she came from a family of courtiers. In 1514, her father, Thomas, had been sent as ambassador to the Archduchess Margaret, regent of the Netherlands, and his daughter Anne became one of eighteen ladies serving Margaret at Malines, in a household which included three future queens and the future Emperor Charles V. The magnificence and sophistication of the Burgundian court had greatly influenced those of two English monarchs, Edward IV and Henry VII, and would continue to be a model well into the sixteenth century, but Anne’s time there was relatively brief. She was present at the marriage of Henry’s sister Mary Tudor to Louis XII of France in October 1514, and after Louis’s death, Anne joined the entourage of the new queen of France, François I’s bride, Queen Claude, where she remained for seven years. When she returned to England, the combination of her own wit and attractiveness and the rare polish she had acquired abroad made her exceptional. Anne was an elegant dancer, beautifully dressed, an accomplished musician, and a fluent French speaker, but above all that, she was clever, indeed brilliant, expert at the flashing, flirtatious wordplay which relieved the claustrophobic tension of court life. Next to her, the English ladies, and their Spanish queen, looked like bumpkins.
As maîtresse-en-titre (if not in fact) and then as queen, Anne’s court was not quite the sober and earnest hive of virtue that William Latymer and John Foxe portrayed. Henry and Anne were reported on many occasions to be “very merry,” “pastime in the queen’s chamber was never more,” remarked her vice chamberlain.15 “Pastime” was the informal entertainment of the queen’s rooms—music, cards, perhaps dancing, storytelling, word games, poetry reading. The “pastime” was where gossip was whispered, where courtships were conducted in the candlelight, where the shafts of courtly wit darted and shone. Castiglione described the custom of “pastime” thus:
Among the other pleasant pastimes and music and dancing that continually were practiced, sometimes neat questions were proposed, sometimes ingenious games were devised … in which under various disguises the company disclosed their thoughts figuratively to whom they liked best.16
Sex was very much present, as a reality or a delectable mirage, depending on the accounts of Anne’s conduct one chooses to believe, but it was from this flirtatious atmosphere that Cromwell drew his weapons.
From this intense, intellectual, and sen
sual environment, Cromwell conjured the names of seven men who were to be accused of adultery with Anne. Mark Smeaton, her Flemish musician, the only low-born man among them, was also the only one who pleaded guilty. Smeaton, Henry Norris, Sir Francis Weston, William Brereton, and Anne’s brother, Elizabeth’s uncle Viscount Rochford, were executed. Sir Richard Page was exonerated of all charges. And Sir Thomas Wyatt went to the Tower but not the block. It was Wyatt who witnessed, as his biographer beautifully puts it, “a cataclysmic event, one of those gashes in history that tears, as Rilke said, the ‘till then from the ever since.’”17
Wyatt was an intimate member of Anne’s circle, and the most accomplished of its poets. His exquisite lyric to Anne, “Whoso List to Hunt,” leaves a perfect representation of the language of love and longing which surrounded that circle and which Cromwell spun so chaotically out of control. With hindsight, “Whoso List” reads as a fatal warning:
Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, helas, I may no more.