by Susan Bordo
Even those who knew better, such as Thomas Cromwell, realized that blaming the king for Mary’s mistreatment could create a huge public relations disaster and encouraged Chapuys in his Anne-blaming. As early as October of 1534, Chapuys met with Cromwell, who reassured Chapuys of Henry’s “paternal affection” for Mary and claimed that “he loved her 100 times more than his last born” and that he and Chapuys should do all that they could to “soften and mend all matters relating to her,” for “in time everything would be set to rights.”55 Although I am often skeptical of Chapuys’ second- and thirdhand “intelligence,” the manipulative, self-serving speech he attributes to Cromwell has, to my ears, the ring of truth.
True it was [Cromwell said] that the King, his master, had occasionally complained of the suit which Your Majesty had instituted against him at Rome, but he [Cromwell] had fully shown that Your Majesty could not help stirring in favour of Queen Katherine, bound as she was to you by the bonds of consanguinity and royal rank; and that, considering the King, his master, if in your Majesty’s place, might have acted as you did there was no fear of his now taking in bad part your interference in the affairs of so close a relative. He himself had so strongly and so often inculcated that reasoning upon the King, that, in his opinion, no cause now remained for disagreement between Your Majesty and his master, save perhaps the affair of these two good ladies [Katherine and Mary]; to remedy which, as he had signified to me, it was needful that we both should agree upon a satisfactory settlement of all complaints, and the knitting of that lasting friendship which might otherwise be endangered. Cromwell ended by saying in passing that it was perfectly true that great union and friendship existed now between France and England, but that I could guess the cause of it. He did not say more on this subject. Your Majesty, by your great wisdom, will be able to judge what Cromwell’s last words meant.56
Of course, the “cause” that was implied here was Anne—who Cromwell “hinted” was standing between the repair of relations between England and Spain in a double way: first, because she was known to be a Francophile, and second and more important, because she was the obstacle standing in the way of reaching a “satisfactory settlement of all complaints” by Katherine and Mary.57 Chapuys also took Cromwell as hinting “that there was some appearance of the King changing his love.”58 He wasn’t sure whether to take this seriously—for Cromwell was quite capable of dissembling when it suited his purposes—but what seems crystal clear is that Cromwell was buttering up Chapuys in the interests of Henry’s PR and future good relations with Charles, and that Anne was already being used by him to take the heat off Henry.
Why would Cromwell, who shared Anne’s religious proclivities, want to stir up the anti-Anne pot with Chapuys and Charles? After all, he had been the chief engineer of the break with Rome and, as a reformist himself, had been Anne’s strongest ally at the start of her relationship with Henry. At one point, it was generally believed that Cromwell, as Chapuys later put it, was “Anne’s right hand.”59 What had happened? At this point, nothing of grave significance. But Cromwell was a man who was ever alert to the slightest changes in the weather of power politics, and Anne had just had a miscarriage in July of 1535. It was not publicly reported, but this can be inferred from comments made about her “goodly belly” in April and Henry’s postponement of a trip to France that summer “on account of her condition.”60 Then in July—silence. There now had been two unsuccessful pregnancies as far as the issue of a male heir was concerned. Moreover, although Elizabeth was born healthy and beautiful, this child had not even gone to term—a far more ominous sign for superstitious Henry. Was he already wondering whether God disapproved of this marriage? And did he share his misgivings with his “most beloved” Cromwell?
Cromwell and Anne, although they inveighed against Rome and fought for the divorce together, had a serious break brewing. Even though they may have shared the same “theory” of reform (although we don’t know for sure, as what became English Protestantism was only just evolving), they disagreed sharply on what should be done with the spoils of disbanded churches and monasteries. From the beginning of his ascent to power—and among the reasons why he was able to keep the favor of the nobility even after Wolsey was deposed—Cromwell “actively assisted the King in diverting revenues from the suppressed monasteries, originally granted to Wolsey’s two colleges, to the purses of Henry’s cronies at court.”61 Anne, in contrast, favored using the funds to set up educational and charitable institutions, and was shocked to learn that the money was being diverted for private use. This difference between them would not explode until April of 1536, but it seems that in sidling up to Chapuys, Cromwell was already preparing for the possibility that there might be a showdown that would result in his own fall from favor, and he was seeking an alliance with Chapuys to prepare for a possible strike against Anne.
Cromwell was aware that developing a friendship with Chapuys was risky, but assessing the situation at the time, he wasn’t overly concerned. In June of 1535 he told Chapuys that if Anne knew how close he and Chapuys were, she would see Cromwell’s head off his shoulders. At the time, Cromwell shrugged it off, telling Chapuys that “I trust so much on my master, that I fancy she cannot do me any harm.”62 But the differences between Anne and Cromwell were escalating—not just over the use of confiscated money but also over international alliances (Anne favored France, while Cromwell was beginning to lean toward some kind of accommodation with Charles)—and the mere fact that Cromwell was already assessing his security relative to Anne’s displeasure with him suggests that he was aware she could, under the right circumstances, be a danger to him and that he was making preparations.
Cromwell also undoubtedly became aware, in the fall of that year, that a new family was rising in the king’s favor: the Seymours. Edward Seymour, who had hosted a visit from Henry to Wolf Hall in September, was becoming a special favorite. Henry had always enjoyed the company of vital, masculine, young men (“thrusting, acquisitive and ambitious” is how Derek Wilson describes them63) and as his own athleticism and sense of masculine potency declined, hobbled by leg ulcers and increasing obesity, he may have begun to live vicariously through them, “unconsciously sucking new life from their physical and mental vigor.”64 By 1535, Seymour’s circle—John Dudley, Thomas Wriothesley, Ralph Sadler—had come to serve this function for Henry. They were also courting Cromwell, whom they rightly saw as having the king’s ear and who was seemingly, at this point, the architect of England’s future. They hated the Boleyns. And Edward Seymour had a sister.
The Other Women: Katherine and Jane
On January 7, 1536, Katherine of Aragon died, most likely of cancer of the heart (a real illness, but an apt bodily metaphor as well). It was an enormous relief to both Anne and Henry. For Anne, it meant that at last she was the only queen of England. And both of them hoped that Katherine’s death, removing the chief reason for the emperor’s breach with Henry, would repair relations with Charles and tip the balance in England’s favor vis-à-vis Francis (who now would have to court Henry in order to be sure that England did not ally against him with Charles). “The next day,” Ives reports, “the king and queen appeared in joyful yellow from top to toe, and Elizabeth was triumphantly paraded to church. After dinner Henry went down to the Great Hall, where the ladies of the court were dancing, with his sixteen month old daughter in his arms, showing her off to one and another.”65 Whether or not their yellow clothing was a mark of their joy, as Ives says, or a sign of respect for the dead has been much debated. But whatever the meaning of the color of their clothing, neither had a political reason at this point to mourn Katherine’s death—and Henry, over the years of battle with Katherine, seems to have lost any trace of affection for her.
Chapuys was horrified by their reaction; grief stricken at having lost his longtime friend, whom he had comforted and championed over the years, he quickly began spreading rumors that Katherine had been poisoned by Anne. But good news was to come a bit later that month
when Chapuys reported, thirdhand as usual, that one of the king’s “principal courtiers” said that the king had confessed to another lady and her husband “that he had been seduced and forced into this second marriage by means of sortileges and charms, and that, owing to that, he held it as null. God (he said) had well shown his displeasure at it by denying him male children. He, therefore, considered that he could take a third wife, which he said he wished much to do.”66 Even Chapuys, ever alert to promising signs that Anne would be supplanted, finds this report “incredible.” Anne was in her final month of what was to be her last pregnancy; how could the king be sure that God would not bless the marriage with a male heir this time around? Was someone whispering in Henry’s ear, planting suggestions about Anne?
It seems that this is exactly what was happening. By April 1 Chapuys was writing to the emperor, informing him that the king was “paying court” to Edward Seymour’s sister, Jane, and that he had “heard” (from the Marchioness of Exeter) that Jane had been “well tutored and warned by those among this King’s courtiers who hate the concubine, telling her not in any wise to give in to the King’s fancy unless he makes her his Queen, upon which the damsel is quite resolved. She has likewise been advised to tell the King frankly, and without reserve, how much his subjects abominate the marriage contracted with the concubine, and that not one considers it legitimate.”67 The marchioness also requested, at this time, that Chapuys aid in whatever way he can the “meritorious work” of removing Anne and thus not only protecting Princess Mary from Anne’s evil plotting and ridding the country of the “heretical doctrines and practices” of “Lutheranism,” but also “clearing the King from the taint of a most abominable and adulterous marriage.”68
In the four months between Katherine’s death and Henry’s open courting of Jane, two momentous events had occurred. On January 24, Henry had a bad jousting accident, which left him unconscious for two hours, and this undoubtedly stirred up his anxiety about his own diminishing physical competence and reminded him of his mortality—something he had been trying to avoid all his life through a hypochondria bordering on obsession. Then, on January 29, Anne miscarried. Although it was probably too early in the pregnancy for attendants to determine the sex of the child, which was later described by Nicholas Sander as a “shapeless mass of flesh,” it was reported by both Chapuys and Wriothesley to have been a male. This was a “huge psychological blow” to Henry.69 We have only Chapuys to rely on for details—“I see that God will not give me male children,” he reports Henry as saying and then ominously telling Anne that he would “speak to her” when she was up—but whether the quote is accurate or not, it makes sense that the loss of a potential heir, especially after at least one other miscarriage and his own recent brush with death, would have affected Henry deeply.70 Anne, on her part, was distraught. She appealed to Henry, telling him that the miscarriage was the result of the shock over his accident, which is not improbable, although Chapuys dismisses it. In a letter of February 17, he wrote to Charles that Anne’s inability to bear male children was due to her “defective constitution,” that “the real cause” of this particular miscarriage may have been the king’s “behavior toward a damsel of the Court, named Miss Seymour, to whom he has latterly made very valuable presents.”71
Jane was a startling contrast to Anne: “fair, not dark; younger by seven or eight years; gentle rather than abrasive; of no great wit, against a mistress of repartee; a model of female self-effacement against a self-made woman.”72 Plus, whether through coaching or inspiration of her own, she refused the king’s gifts, saying that her greatest treasure was her honor and that she would accept sovereigns from him in “such a time as God would be pleased to send her some advantageous marriage.”73 She may have not been of “great wit,” but she (or her brother) knew that this would increase Henry’s ardor. The refusal of sovereigns happened after Anne’s miscarriage, an event that undoubtedly emboldened Jane and her supporters. For if Anne had produced a living son, all the rumblings about Anne, both at court and among the people, and all the conniving of the Seymours, would have crashed against a brick wall. But it was Anne’s disastrous luck that not only did she miscarry, she miscarried soon after Katherine died. Initially, this had been a cause for celebration. What Anne did not take into account (or perhaps did, but had no reason to consider probable at this point) was that with Katherine’s death, Henry could have his marriage to Anne annulled, or invalidated in some other way, without having to deal with Katherine’s claims to the throne. Disastrously and without precedent, it was the “some other way” that prevailed.
The Storm Breaks
There are a number of theories as to what allowed the unthinkable—the state-ordered execution of a queen—to happen. One theory, first advanced by Retha Warnicke and then adopted by a number of novels and media depictions, is that the miscarried fetus was grossly deformed, which led to suspicions of witchcraft. If Henry truly believed that Anne was guilty of witchcraft—which, of course, was a possibility in those times—he would have virtually no choice but to destroy her, as he would have to do with anyone in league with Satan. But although Henry complained at one point that he had been bewitched by Anne, that was a notion that, as in our own time, was freely bandied about in a very loose, metaphorical manner. It could mean simply “overcome beyond rationality by her charms”—as Chapuys means when he complains that the “accursed Lady has so enchanted and bewitched him that he will not dare to do anything against her will.”74 Moreover, none of the charges later leveled against Anne involved witchcraft, and there is no evidence that the fetus was deformed.
Another theory, which Alison Weir puts forward in The Six Wives of Henry VIII but revises in The Lady in the Tower, is that Henry, fed up with Anne, newly enamored of Jane, and eager “to rid himself” of his second wife but not knowing how, eagerly embraced Cromwell’s suggestion in April that he had information that Anne had engaged in adultery, and then asked Cromwell to find evidence to support the charges.75 But even if we accept the idea that Henry would cynically encourage a plot designed to lead to Anne’s execution, and despite his flirtation with Jane and disappointment over the miscarriage, Henry did not behave like someone looking to end his marriage until Cromwell put the allegations before him. Whatever he was feeling about Anne, recognition of his supremacy was still entwined with her, and even after the miscarriage, he was still working for imperial recognition of his marriage to “his beloved wife” Anne. With Katherine gone, that seemed a real possibility. And, in fact, in March the emperor offered, in return for the legitimation of Mary, imperial support for “‘the continuance of this last matrimony or otherwise,’ as Henry wished.”76 The deal didn’t work out due to Henry’s refusal to acknowledge that anything about his first marriage—including Mary—was legitimate. He was utterly committed to maintaining his own absolute right to the organization of his domestic affairs, and that meant both recognition of Anne as lawful wife and Mary as bastard.
Most scholars nowadays (with a couple of exceptions I’ll discuss later) believe, following Eric Ives, that the plot against Anne was orchestrated by Thomas Cromwell without Henry’s instigation or encouragement. Things had been brewing dangerously between him and Anne for some time, and by April she probably knew that he had become friends with the Seymours and had also been sidling up to Chapuys. On April 2 Anne had dared to make a public declaration of her opposition to his policies by approving a potently coded sermon written by her almoner, John Skip, in which he (implicitly) compared Cromwell to Haman, the evil Old Testament councilor (which would make Anne Esther to Henry’s Xerxes). The specific spur for the sermon was proposed legislation to confiscate the wealth of smaller monasteries, which was awaiting Henry’s consent and against which Anne was trying to generate public sentiment. But by then, the enmity between Anne and Cromwell had become more global than one piece of legislation. Still, as he told Chapuys, Cromwell felt more or less secure in Henry’s favor until a crucial meeting between the ambassador
and the king on April 18, in which Henry, who had seemed to be in favor of the reconciliation with Rome that Cromwell had been negotiating with Chapuys, now revealed his true hand and refused any negotiation that included recognition of his first marriage and Mary’s inclusion in the line of succession. Cromwell was aghast at Henry’s stubbornness, as he had been working hard toward the rapprochement with the emperor, burning his bridges with France and (because of his relationship with Chapuys) with Anne and her faction as well. Earlier in the day, it had seemed that some kind of warming between Chapuys and Anne was being orchestrated. Chapuys had been invited to visit Anne and kiss her hand—which he declined to do—then he was obliged to bow to her when she was thrust in his path during church services. Later, at dinner, Anne loudly made remarks critical of France, which were carried back to Chapuys. But when Henry took Chapuys to a window enclosure in his own room for a private discussion after dinner, he made it clear that he wouldn’t give.
“Far from the issue of April 1536 being ‘When will Anne go and how?’” Ives writes, “Henry was exploiting his second marriage to force Europe to accept that he had been right all along.”77 Cromwell was furious, humiliated, and fearful that he had unexpectedly found himself on the wrong side of Henry’s plans. In a letter to Charles, Chapuys wrote about the April 18 meeting, and what he wrote suggests that what was already on high heat between Cromwell and Anne was about to boil over. Chapuys reports that one reason why he would not “kiss or speak to the Concubine” and “refused to visit her until I had spoken to the King” was because he had been told by Cromwell that the “she devil” (Chapuys’ appellation, not Cromwell’s) “was not in favor with the King” and that “I should do well to wait till I had spoken to the King.”78