Game of Queens

by Sarah Gristwood

  Meanwhile, three hundred miles away in Florence, a convent had not long disgorged a frightened young girl. For Catherine de Medici, the repercussions of the Ladies’ Peace had not been happy. Charles V, eager to confirm his position as the dominant influence in the Italian peninsula, had entered into negotiations with the pope, whose pre-occupation was to restore his Medici family’s influence in Florence. The results would be terrifying for the eleven-year-old Catherine de Medici.

  Catherine had spent the last three years tranquilly and happily in the Murate convent, where the aristocratic nuns treated her with every show of affection. The Florentine authorities ‘would gladly see her in Kingdom Come’, noted the French ambassador, who (Catherine’s mother having been a Frenchwoman) kept a protective eye on her. He added – interestingly, in terms of Catherine’s future – ‘I have never seen anyone of her age so quick to feel the good and ill that are done to her.’ And on 20 July 1530, great ill seemed to have come.

  Charles V had placed at the pope’s disposal an army, which in October 1529 began what would prove a ten-month siege of the city, with the aim of restoring Medici rule. Catherine’s male relations had fled when the city established a republic two years before. Now came that danger of which the French ambassador had warned, a hammering in the middle of the night on the doors of the Murate. The child inside the thick walls, however, had herself already decided how to combat this new threat. While the mother superior persuaded the men to come back in the morning, Catherine – convinced the summons could only be to her execution – cut off her hair and donned a nun’s habit, shouting that no one would dare take a bride of Christ from her monastery.

  She was wrong. As one of the nuns wrote, such force was used ‘that we had to give her up’. But in the event, the city authorities did nothing worse than to set her astride a donkey and escort her through the baying crowds back to the convent where she had first been placed three years earlier. There had been calls for the child to be stripped naked and suspended from the walls, or placed in a military brothel for the amusement of the soldiery. Even after the city surrendered a few weeks later, contemporaries noted that she never forgot – could not stop talking about – her ordeal. It is something to remember when, in Paris four decades later, Catherine de Medici would once again be faced with the fear of violence ripping through her city.

  When peace, and the Medici, were restored to Florence, Catherine went back to visit the nuns of the Murate, and celebrate with them. She would send them money and letters for the rest of her life. But her uncle the pope had plans for her beyond convent walls. Moving her to Rome, and placing her in the house of a relative instructed to give her a cosmopolitan gloss, he managed (with the promise of half a dozen Italian cities, Pisa among them, as her dowry) to betroth her to the French king’s second son Henri, to cement the mood of all-round accord.

  The ‘greatest match in the world’, the pope called it, and he was something of a connoisseur, having also betrothed the new young Duke of Florence (his nephew or illegitimate son) to Charles V’s illegitimate daughter, Margaret ‘of Parma’. In the spring of 1533 the fourteen-year-old Catherine de Medici would have the duty of welcoming the ten-year-old Margaret of Parma into Florence.

  Catherine de Medici and Margaret of Parma were perhaps the first representatives of another generation of women; the one that would be associated with the latter half of the sixteenth century. But of course the generations did not divide so neatly. In the Netherlands, in 1531, Margaret of Austria was succeeded by another female regent: her twenty-five-year-old widowed niece Mary of Hungary.

  After successfully holding Hungary for her brother Ferdinand, King of Hungary, Mary had refused his offer of a second regency in 1528. Such affairs needed ‘a person older and wiser’, Mary said. Her reluctance was understandable: it was the turbulence in Hungary that encouraged the Ottoman Empire to launch the campaign that culminated, just weeks after the Ladies’ Peace, in the Siege of Vienna. That campaign almost cost Ferdinand all he had won and struck a terrifying blow deep into Habsburg heartland.

  But Mary was undoubtedly able. A Hungarian correspondent had written to Erasmus: ‘I wish that . . . the queen would become the king: the fate of the homeland would then be better.’ And the Habsburg Empire was ever greedy for loyal lieutenants. ‘I am only one and I can’t be everywhere’, Charles V would later complain to Mary. As Ferdinand said, telling Mary of their aunt Margaret’s death in December 1530, her life might now ‘take a different course’. The next month, Charles did indeed ask Mary to assume the regency of the Netherlands.

  Family duty impelled agreement. Mary was now ‘Mary, by the Grace of God, Queen of Hungary, of Bohemia, etc., governor of the Netherlands for His Imperial and Catholic Majesty, and his lieutenant’. Like Margaret of Austria before her, she was determined not to allow her family to marry her off again. But neither did she wish to remain as a queen without kingdom, income, role or offspring. Margaret of Austria herself had once, before she found her role as regent, lamented that she might ‘be left to wander about the world like a person lost and forgotten’, or so her father recalled.

  Mary of Hungary continued, however, to display a more ambivalent attitude towards responsibility than her aunt Margaret, complaining a few months into the Netherlands job that it felt like having a rope around her neck. She did not, she said, perhaps pointedly, wish to act ‘like those women who interfere in many things which are not demanded of them’. Conversely, it was said of her that she ruled by rigour whereas Margaret had done it by charm.

  The Venetian ambassador to the Hungarian court had written that ‘by reason of her natural volatility and from too much exercise’ – Mary was notoriously obsessed with hunting and falconry – it was generally assumed she would never have children. He added a description; that she was ‘of diminutive stature, long and narrow face, rather comely, very spare . . . lively, never quiet either at home or abroad’. The late sixteenth-century writer Brantôme described her as ‘un peu homasse’ (a little mannish), adding that ‘she made war well, sometimes through her lieutenants, sometimes in person, always on horseback, like an Amazon’.

  Her brother Charles V told her on another occasion that she did ‘not react in such a feminine manner as others of your sex, who are of a more delicate disposition’. Later, in 1537, when the French were attacking the Netherlands, she appeared in a black leather jerkin, fitted with eyelets that would hold a cuirass, swearing she would show François I ‘to what purpose God can give a woman strength’. She had strength, and she would stand in need of it, as, in their different ways, Louise of Savoy and Margaret of Austria had; as Catherine de Medici would continue to do.

  22

  ‘Thus it will be’

  England, 1530–1531

  In England, Anne Boleyn launched into her own battle, metaphorically picking up the weapons herself, once it had become all too apparent that Henry VIII’s divorce would not be obtained the old clerical way. As she did, she had two great allies: the new reformed faith and the French upbringing which had given that country a stake in her success.

  Generations of historians have chosen to see Marguerite of Navarre as a mentor, a mother figure if you like, to Anne Boleyn. There is no evidence to support the suggestion (made by some near-contemporaries, as well as subsequently) that Anne had been in Marguerite’s service during her time in France. But there would shortly be evidence that Marguerite was a role model for Anne, and in this, their common interest in religious reform was key.

  One of the many debates about Anne Boleyn remains the precise nature of her religious stance. Later, in the reign of Anne’s Protestant daughter Elizabeth, the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe would declare of her: ‘What a zealous defender she was of Christ’s gospel all the world doth know.’ The Scots reformer, Alexander Ales, told Elizabeth that, ‘True religion in England had its commencement and its end with your mother.’

  Certainly Anne was in the habit of both studying and speaking about the Bible. Sh
e even supported the illegal trade in vernacular Bibles. But then so too had Marguerite of Navarre, and she managed to remain a Catholic. The books Anne owned included several by writers close to Marguerite and indicate a strong interest in the new learning, including a French psalter with a translation credited to the unfortunate Louis de Berquin and a French Bible translated by another of the Meaux circle, Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples. When the poet Nicolas Bourbon, whom Marguerite had made her daughter’s tutor, found France too hot to hold him, he fled to England, and Anne’s protection.

  In the years ahead Anne Boleyn would undoubtedly be active in seeking out abuses in the Catholic church but then so was Marguerite of Navarre. It was, for example, Anne’s emissaries who revealed that the blood held up for veneration at Hailes Abbey – supposedly holy blood – was in fact that of a duck. Anne would be sufficiently active in promoting the appointment of reformers in the church to be able to speak of ‘my bishops’. But although some of the clergy she supported would continue to move further towards a new faith, it was not true of all. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Anne’s beliefs but the question was how far her enthusiasm for purity in religion might take her.

  A sermon later preached by her almoner, John Skip, would describe the ‘little ceremonies of the church’ – anathema to any radical reformer – as ‘very good and commodious’, as long as properly used. Nor were her religious practices stripped of all the old ways. She would plan a pilgrimage, put faith in a prophecy; say, near her death, that she would go to heaven because she had done good deeds, and spend her last night praying before the consecrated bread and wine. All these things belonged to the old brand of faith, not the new. But perhaps (only fifteen years after Luther’s voice first made itself heard on the European stage) we should not be surprised that Anne, like many of her contemporaries, could not easily set aside all the traditions among which she had grown up. Heaven knows, Henry’s beliefs and practices would be even more complex, or contradictory.

  Even before the Blackfriars showdown, Anne Boleyn had shown Henry VIII passages in an illicit book, The Obedience of the Christian Man and How Christian Rulers Ought to Govern, published by the exiled William Tyndale. Famous for his translation of the New Testament with Lutheran prologues, Tyndale had taken refuge in the Netherlands, where the regents were, for as long as possible, turning a blind eye to this cuckoo in their midst. The book was a defiance of papal authority, declaring that the subject is accountable to the ruler, and the ruler to God alone. It was the idea Henry had been looking for: ‘This book is for me and all kings to read.’

  If the traditional function of a woman behind a powerful man was to be advisory, intercessory, the conduit through which ideas as well as clemency could flow, then Anne fulfilled it very successfully, in that her ideas won through. But these ideas began to give a more overtly religious framework to the question of King Henry’s marriage.

  A timely new introduction at court, in the months after the hearing at Blackfriars, was the Cambridge scholar, Thomas Cranmer. He suggested that Henry’s was not a case of canon law but a theological problem of the pope’s right to dictate to princes, and that theologians (at the universities of Europe as well as England) should thus be canvassed. He was sent away, in the care of the Boleyn family, to formulate his ideas.

  Through the following spring one theological authority after another was persuaded to give Henry VIII the answer he wanted until at last (once King François’s sons were safely back in their own country) even the University of Paris gave way. In June 1530 Henry was handed the Collectanea satis copiosa, a bank of biblical and historical material suggesting the pope was not necessarily supreme; in August, he summoned his council to another conference at Hampton Court. In September, warned by a newly arrived papal nuncio that the Vatican trial of the marriage Katherine of Aragon had requested would have soon to begin, Henry issued a proclamation forbidding any suit to Rome.

  Charles V’s horrified ambassador Eustace Chapuys warned that if ‘the Earl and his daughter’ (Anne Boleyn and her father) remained in power, they would ‘entirely alienate this kingdom from its allegiance to the Pope’. In October, Henry suggested to his gathering of clerics and lawyers that his Archbishop of Canterbury should be empowered to decide the divorce suit, although the idea did not immediately bear fruit.

  It was now a propaganda war, and some of the weapons were women’s. Anne Boleyn, angered to learn that Katherine of Aragon was still stitching Henry’s shirts (as her mother Isabella had once embroidered Ferdinand’s), insisted she should – briefly, as it proved – take over the task. She would have learnt the traditional female arts in Mechelen, where Margaret of Austria’s personal possessions included a distaff and spindle with which to spin. Margaret once sent her father Maximilian some shirts she had helped to make. ‘Our skin will be comforted with meeting the fineness and softness of such beautiful linen, such as the angels in Paradise use for their clothing’, Maximilian wrote in the chatty letters they exchanged.

  Before Christmas 1530 Anne ordered a new livery for her servants, bearing her recently adopted motto: ‘Thus it will be, Grumble who will’. It had been the motto of Margaret of Austria’s court. Chapuys reported that Anne, on New Year’s Day 1531, declared ‘that she wished all Spaniards were at the bottom of the sea . . . that she cared not for the queen or any of her family, and that she would rather see her hanged than have to confess that she was her queen and mistress’.

  In February, Henry VIII demanded that the church authorities recognise him as ‘sole protector and supreme head of the English church and clergy’. Anne Boleyn, Chapuys reported, made ‘such demonstrations of joy as if she had actually gained Paradise’. In fact her marriage to Henry was far from certain. Many of those who had backed Anne as a political counter to Cardinal Wolsey still baulked at the prospect of her as queen. But the situation was worsening dramatically for Katherine of Aragon.

  At the end of May, Henry’s emissaries had a final attempt at persuading Katherine to see reason. She refused, with a fortitude that belied her description of herself as ‘a poor woman without friends or counsel’. Anger at her recalcitrance brought, at last, an end to those strange two years in which Katherine had retained her place as queen, moving around the country at the king’s side, even though Anne might be one of the party. Early in July they were all three at Windsor; on the 14th Henry and Anne rode away to hunt at Chertsey Abbey, with Katherine ordered to remain behind. Some days later Henry’s council, in the first letter not to address her as queen, rejected her request she might bid her husband farewell.

  Her husband was not the only member of the family from whom Katherine of Aragon was to be separated. Her daughter Mary had been with her at Windsor but when Katherine was sent away to one property, Mary was sent to another some miles away. There are some indications that Henry may have been forced, by pressure of public opinion, to allow a brief visit in 1532 but it is certain that mother and daughter would never be allowed to live together again.

  For the moment at least Katherine of Aragon kept her state. A Venetian visitor reported that she had thirty maids of honour around her as she ate and a court of two hundred people. But she regarded herself as a prisoner, telling the imperial ambassador Chapuys she would rather be in the Tower and overtly locked up. The Venetian also gave it as his opinion that the people would accept no other queen.

  Keeping Katherine and her daughter apart was a punitive measure. But there was a genuine fear that Katherine – ‘a proud, stubborn woman of very high courage’, wrote Henry – might, in her defence of Mary’s interest, ‘quite easily take the field, muster a great array, and wage against me a war as fierce as any her mother Isabella ever waged in Spain’. In fact, had the authorities but known it, Katherine wrote that war ‘is a thing I would rather die than provoke’. Told, she said, that ‘the next parliament is to decide whether I am to suffer martyrdom’, Chapuys wrote to Charles V that the queen was ‘so overscrupulous’ that she preferred to suffer.
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  In the event, the very separation became a perverse reinforcement of the bond between mother and daughter; a hatred of the forces that had kept them apart, a harsh and unyielding commitment to her rights and her religion, would be Mary’s hallmark. The game of queens was an unforgiving one.

  23

  ‘a native-born Frenchwoman’

  England, 1532–1535

  In 1532, Anne Boleyn had the chance to deploy another weapon in her armoury. Politically, as well as in her religious tendencies, she had long made a point of playing up her French connections: the fact that she seemed, as the French diplomat Lancelot de Carles had put it, ‘a native-born Frenchwoman’. Indeed, in 1530 the imperial ambassador Chapuys had written that it was her alliance with Henry VIII ‘on which alone depend the credit and favour the French now enjoy at this court’.

  By 1532 a French alliance had become a more general goal. It was, after all, the French who were likeliest to assist Henry in putting pressure on the pope to grant his divorce. Practical control of the king’s ‘Great Matter’ was now largely in the hands of the new man on the scene, Thomas Cromwell. Rising from the ashes of his erstwhile master Wolsey, Cromwell had been a member of the Privy Council since the end of 1530. Now he would mastermind the process by which, this spring, first parliament and then the clergy were persuaded to ratify Henry as sole head of the church.

  But in the latest negotiations, Anne Boleyn was still the key. As the French ambassador De La Pommeraye accompanied the English court on the summer hunting trip cum progress, King Henry discussed his private affairs with the envoy and took ‘as much trouble to give me good sport as though I were some great personage’, De La Pommeraye reported proudly. He was often stationed ‘quite alone’ with Anne, who had given him a new set of hunting gear, complete with hound, for the occasion.