by Alison Weir
Henry VIII’s commissioners exposed much laxity and several cases of fraud, such as the much-celebrated Holy Blood of Hailes, which turned out to be the blood of a duck, renewed regularly by the monks. Several communities opposed the royal supremacy. Queen Anne went in person to Syon Abbey and lectured the “prostrate and grovelling” sisters on “the enormity of their wanton incontinence,” and ticked them off for reciting by rote Latin prayers that they did not understand. Before she left, she gave each one a prayerbook in English.2 But Anne did not agree with Cromwell that the religious houses should all be closed down. She did her best to spare those that received a good report, and suggested that reform was a better alternative than closure.
Cromwell, however, wanted to make Henry “the richest King that ever was in England.”3 With the wealth and vast lands of the monasteries in his possession, he could not only fill his depleted treasury but also reward those who had shown their loyalty to the new order, thus transforming it into a popular movement.
Once the decision was made to suppress the monasteries, Henry took steps to preserve their literary treasures. He commissioned his librarian, John Leland, to “peruse and diligently to search all the libraries” belonging to the religious houses and colleges, make a survey of their books and manuscripts, and find texts that would emphasise the royal supremacy and the New Monarchy. Leland set out to perform his mammoth task in 1535; he would not complete it until 1543. As he travelled around England, he “conserved many good authors, the which otherwise had been like to have perished,” and removed many works, which ended up in the royal libraries.4 He also made copious notes on the places he visited, their customs and legends, and the people who lived there. These notes were later collated and published in 1710–1712 as Leland’s Itinerary.
By February 1534, the King had tired of his unnamed mistress and begun courting one of the Queen’s cousins, either Madge Shelton or her sister Mary.5 Madge was soft-spoken and pretty, with dimpled cheeks and a fair complexion. Unlike her predecessor, the Queen’s cousin, whichever she was, had no intention of espousing the cause of Katherine and Mary, but Anne resented Sir Francis Weston and other Gentlemen of the King’s Privy Chamber paying court to her.6 Moreover, the girl was a frivolous creature. When the Queen discovered that she had written “idle poesies” in her prayer book, she “wonderfully rebuked her” for defacing it with “such wanton toys.”7
Anne’s determination to play the virtuous queen found further expression at Easter 1535, when she distributed larger purses of Maundy money than any queen had hitherto given.8 The King also permitted his former wife Katherine to perform the traditional Maundy Thursday rites; she had “kept a Maundy” the previous year, and he had not objected because his grandmother Margaret Beaufort had set a precedent for royal ladies other than queens presiding, and Katherine was now officially Princess Dowager of Wales. 9
On 5 May, the Boleyn contingent was out in force at Tyburn to witness the first executions of those who had refused to swear the oath to the Act of Succession. Among them were John Houghton, Prior of the London Charterhouse, and Richard Reynolds, a monk of Syon Abbey, who were both renowned throughout Europe for their learning and integrity. Wiltshire, Rochford, Norfolk, and Richmond stood “quite near the sufferers,” looking on as the dreadful sentence of hanging, drawing, and quartering was carried out. Rumour had it that Henry himself would have liked to be present, “which was very probable, seeing that nearly all the court were there.” Some courtiers, however, had come masked or disguised as Scotsmen. 10 Afterwards, shock waves reverberated around Christendom at the enormity of what the King had done.
When one of the Queen’s ladies contracted measles that spring, Henry mistook it for plague and hurried away with Anne to Hampton Court. But plague did break out in London soon afterwards, and a proclamation was issued forbiding the citizens to approach the court.11 The King spent the late spring and summer months hunting well away from the capital before departing on progress.
During May, the celebrated French humanist and poet Nicholas Bourbon sought asylum at the English court after falling foul of the French authorities for his evangelical reformist beliefs. When his plight had been drawn to the attention of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn by the French ambassador, Jean de Dinteville, and Dr. William Butts, with whom Bourbon corresponded regularly, they secured his release from prison, and were now happy to extend to him their patronage. Bourbon, a friend of Erasmus, was lodged at first in Dr. Butts’s house at the Queen’s expense; Butts, he said, was like a father to him. Later he lived with the King’s goldsmith, Cornelius Heyss. Anne also secured for Bourbon a post as tutor to her nephew and ward, Henry Carey, Sir Henry Norris’s son, and Edmund, son of Sir Nicholas Harvey, another reformist courtier in the Queen’s circle.12 During his stay in England, Bourbon—who wrote under the name Borbonius—sat for Holbein, whom he called “the incomparable painter,” and also befriended Cromwell, whom he described as being “aflame with the love of Christ,” Nicolaus Kratzer, and Archbishop Cranmer, who was “a head to his people.” 13
In 1535, Miles Coverdale’s English translation of the Bible was published in Zürich. It was dedicated to Henry VIII and his “dearest wife and most virtuous princess, Queen Anne,” but was never officially sanctioned in England. Its frontispiece, which is attributed to Holbein, shows an image of Henry VIII as an Old Testament king, perhaps King David, enthroned above the lords spiritual and temporal, holding a sword and a Bible, which he is handing down to three kneeling bishops. This image was revolutionary for its time, in that it had hitherto been bishops who had conferred spiritual authority on kings. Anne Boleyn owned the copy that is now in the British Library; her initials are embossed on the binding.
In June 1535, a satirical play parodying the Apocalypse was performed before the King at court. After the Reformation, drama became increasingly politicised, and was under the control of one of Cromwell’s masters of propaganda, Richard Moryson. Cromwell advised the King that plays were an ideal means of setting forth “lively before the people’s eyes the abomination and wickedness of the Bishop of Rome, monks, friars, nuns and suchlike, and to declare and open to them the obedience that your subjects, by God’s and man’s laws, owe to Your Majesty.”14 In the late 1530s, a number of such plays were performed at court, including perhaps John Bale’s King John, which was not only the first historical play in English but was also a clever piece of propaganda that refuted the Pope’s claim to hold jurisdiction over the English Church. “Bilious Bishop Bale,” as he was called—he was Bishop of Ossory—was a closet Protestant and playwright who, under Cromwell’s patronage, had his own touring company of players which he used to promote the Reformation and the New Monarchy. Another of his plays was The Whore of Babylon (c. 1546). However, given the sensitive climate of the times, there was a limit to what was acceptable at court: antipapal thrusts could all too often be misconstrued as attacks on the Catholic faith itself.
Drama was ever popular at court. In the year 1537–1538, for example, seven companies of players were working for the King, the Queen, the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Chancellor Audley, Suffolk, Exeter, and the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, whose names they bore. These companies were amateur dramatic groups formed by members of the royal household and the households of the nobility. Among the productions they mounted were old favourites such as Fulgens and Lucrece and The Pardoner and the Friar. The latter was adapted by John Heywood from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales ; Christopher Marlowe later based The Jew of Malta on this work.
Henry was now moving nearer to an alliance with the Emperor, despite the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that stood in its way. Yet Renaissance princes often took a pragmatic approach to such things, and Charles V can only have been relieved that Henry’s friendship with Francis I had begun to cool. The King had been angered by the refusal of the French to consider the Princess Elizabeth as a bride for Francis’s son, and at the same time concerned that, because she was a bastard in the eyes of Catholic
Europe, she would be of little value to him in the marriage market. In June, the new French ambassador, Antoine de Castlenau, Bishop of Tarbes, took offence at the King’s refusal to allow him to use Bridewell Palace as an embassy, as his predecessors had done, and was further put out when Cromwell pointedly avoided him. To make matters worse, Henry had begun to make a great fuss of Chapuys, inviting him to join him in the chase and generally courting his goodwill.15
Yet Henry’s persecution of eminent Roman Catholics continued to threaten the fragile beginnings of an entente with the Emperor. In June, Bishop Fisher was tried and condemned to death for treason. “A very image of death”16 after long months of rigorous confinement, he emerged on 22 June to kneel at the executioner’s block on Tower Hill, wearing his finest clothes, for this, he declared, was his wedding day. On the scaffold, he insisted that he was dying to preserve the honour of God, and was then decapitated with a sword. Some time earlier, word had come from Rome that the Pope had made him a cardinal and that his red hat was on its way. The King had commented grimly that he would have to wear it on his shoulders. There was widespread outrage at the butchering of such a saintly man.
The trial of Sir Thomas More followed on 1 July, and he was condemned to death on the perjured evidence of Richard Rich, one of Cromwell’s henchmen. On 6 July, while the King hunted at Reading,17 More was beheaded on Tower Hill, claiming he died “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”18 His execution provoked even greater shock than Fisher’s had, but few were brave enough to follow his example. The King soon regretted More’s death, and accused Anne Boleyn of having been the cause of it. Anne sought to distract him by arranging feasts and revels.19
Lady Rochford was now back at court, but was no longer the Queen’s friend and ally. Since her banishment the previous year, something had occurred to alienate her from her sister-in-law. Perhaps she blamed Anne for her disgrace, or had become jealous of the close bond between the Queen and Lord Rochford. The evidence suggests that the Rochfords’ marriage was not happy, and Jane may have resented Anne’s influence over her husband. What happened next suggests that there was now a serious rift between the two women, for in July, Lady Rochford was one of several ladies involved in a demonstration at Greenwich in support of the Lady Mary, and ended up in the Tower with the other ringleaders, among them Katherine Boughton, wife of Lord William Howard, and the wives of some leading citizens of London.20
Will Somers, the King’s fool, was also in disgrace, for that same month Sir Nicholas Carew had dared him to declare that the Queen was “a ribald” and the Princess Elizabeth “a bastard.” Great licence was normally allowed the royal jesters, but on this occasion, according to Chapuys, the King threatened to kill Somers with his own hand, and the fool had to go into hiding in Carew’s house at Beddington until his master’s wrath had cooled.21
Henry’s mood improved as the summer progressed. In July, he was happily “feasting ladies,” and perhaps going further than that, since Chapuys commented that his “amorous” reputation was now notorious.22 At forty-four, he was beginning to put on weight, and he sported cropped hair and a permanent short square beard, which he expected others to copy. John Stow claims that on 8 May 1535 the King had “commanded all about his court to poll their heads, and to give them example he caused his own hair to be polled, and from henceforth his beard to be knotted and no more shaven.” His later portraits bear this out.
Henry’s mania for property had not abated. In 1535, he acquired five new houses. He bought moated Chobham Park in Surrey from Chertsey Abbey, and immediately began extending it and creating royal lodgings.23 He gained possession of manor houses at Hackney, near London, and at Leconfield, Humberside, the latter by exchange with the Earl of Northumberland,24 who also sold the King Petworth House in Sussex.25 Lastly, Henry got a house at Mortlake in Surrey by exchange with Archbishop Cranmer.
In 1535–1536, the King converted what had possibly been Wolsey’s dining hall at Hampton Court into the Great Watching Chamber, which still survives with its beautiful oriel window and ceiling ornamented with a geometric lattice of gilded battens, drop pendants, and leather-mâché roundels bearing 130 devices and badges of the King and Jane Seymour, in whose time the ceiling was finished.26 This was the first of the outward chambers of the King’s apartments, but those beyond its door no longer survive.
Henry was also carrying out works at Greenwich at this time. His refurbished privy chamber on the first floor of the donjon had bay windows overlooking the Thames, tapestried walls, grotesque decoration, and carpets on the floor. The antique-style ceiling was patterned with timber battens with gilded lead leaves at the intersections; it was made by the King’s joiner, Richard Ridge, who had carved the decorations on the ceiling of the great hall at Hampton Court.27
In the summer of 1535, the King embarked on one of the most important progresses of his reign. This was not just an elaborate hunting jaunt, but a public relations exercise “with a view to gaining popularity with his subjects” 28 and promoting the recent religious reforms. Not only courtiers who had supported the King’s policies were favoured with visits, but also traditionalists whose goodwill he wished to retain. During this progress, Gardiner, who had now had leisure to revise his views, secured his return to favour by publishing a timely treatise, De Vera Obedientia, which strongly endorsed the royal supremacy. The King rewarded him with the post of ambassador to France.
On 5 July, attended by a vast train of courtiers, servants, and baggage, Henry and Anne travelled west from Windsor to Reading, Ewelme, Abingdon, Woodstock, Langley, and Sudeley Castle, where they stayed a week. Cromwell joined them on 23 July, having come to arrange for the King’s commissioners to visit all the religious houses in the west country.
By late July, Henry had reached Tewkesbury. He then rode south to Gloucester; he and the Queen lodged at nearby Painswick Manor, which afforded excellent hunting. They were at Berkeley Castle from 2 to 8 August, then moved on to Thornbury; Henry had intended to visit Bristol, but had been deterred by reports of plague. Instead, a delegation of leading citizens waited upon him at Thornbury. At Iron Acton he stayed at Acton Court, where Sir Nicholas Poyntz had built a lavish new Renaissance-style eastern range especially for the King’s visit.29 The Poyntzes were a notable courtier family: Nicholas’ grandfather, Sir Robert Poyntz, had been Vice Chamberlain to Queen Katherine, while his uncle, Sir John Poyntz, was a member of Queen Anne’s household and a friend of Wyatt, who dedicated to him two of his satires on the superficiality of life at court. Nicholas himself was a reformist, a member of Cromwell’s circle, and a friend of Richard Rich.
From Iron Acton, Henry moved on to Little Sodbury and Bromham, where two fervent supporters of reform, Sir John Walsh and Sir Edward Baynton, the Queen’s Vice Chamberlain, were respectively hosts to their sovereign. Afterwards, the King made his much-celebrated visit to Wulfhall,30 the home of Sir John Seymour, where he stayed three nights.31 Some writers date his affair with Jane Seymour to this visit, yet while this may be true, there is no evidence for it.
During October there were reports that the King and Queen and all the nobles were merry and in good health, and hawking daily.32 Yet Anne again had cause for concern, for in early October the French ambassador reported that the King’s love for her was diminishing daily since he had “new amours.”33
Henry had now lost interest in Madge Shelton, or her sister; Madge was being courted by the widowed Sir Henry Norris, to whom she would be betrothed in 1536. The King was presently pursuing Sir Edward Seymour’s sister Jane, one of the Queen’s maids of honour. At twenty-seven, Jane was rather old to be unwed, but it appears that her father could not afford to dower her richly. She was neither accomplished nor pretty. “She is no great beauty,” observed Chapuys. “Her complexion is so fair that one would rather call her pale.”34 Her portraits by Holbein 35 bear out the French ambassador’s opinion that she was plain: they show a wide, angular face with compressed lips, little eyes, and a large nose. Polydore Ve
rgil called Jane “a woman of the utmost charm,” and this was perhaps the quality that attracted the King, although it is not evident in her portraits. She was also the complete antithesis of Anne Boleyn, of whom Henry was rapidly tiring. Jane was quiet, demure, subservient, and discreet, characteristics the King had come to appreciate in a woman. She could read and sign her name, but if she was as intelligent as her champions claimed, she hid it well. The King confided to Chapuys that she had a gentle nature and was “inclined to peace.”36 Her behaviour in the coming months suggests, however, that she was also a tough, ambitious woman of ruthless determination.
In October, the court spent four days in the familiar surroundings of The Vyne, where Lord Sandys extended to his sovereign his usual warm welcome. The King returned to Windsor at the end of the month, 37 and soon afterwards, the Queen discovered that she was pregnant again.
By the autumn of 1535, Henry’s relationship with Anne had deteriorated significantly, despite their show of cheerfulness. Anne was no longer the alluring young woman who had captured his heart: a portrait of her at Nidd Hall, which must date from around 1535–1536, shows that she was ageing. Chapuys was soon to refer to her as “that thin old woman,” and one courtier described her as “extremely ugly.”38 The King was by now “tired to satiety” of her;39 she had never learned the discretion or decorum befitting a queen, and still upbraided him for his infidelities. She dared to argue with him in public, laughed at his clothes and his poetry, and even appeared bored in his company. 40 She remained unpopular and controversial, and her very existence was a barrier to a closer understanding with the Emperor. She exercised so much influence over public affairs that it was said that she wielded more authority than Henry or Cromwell. “The King dares not contradict her,” wrote Chapuys. “The Lady well knows how to manage him.” 41 Henry was probably a little in awe of this formidable woman with her strident opinions and inflammable temper, and certainly resentful towards her. However, she was his queen and it was hoped that he would soon honour her as the mother of his son. Nevertheless, by December 1535, the couple were barely on speaking terms; in February 1536, Chapuys claimed Henry had had little to do with Anne for three months.42