by David Loades
On Saturday, 31 May Anne processed through the streets of London, and on 1 June was crowned as queen in Westminster Abbey. The Duke of Suffolk was constrained to appear as High Constable for the day, but the Duke of Norfolk was represented as Earl Marshall by his brother Lord William Howard, and there is curiously no mention in the published account of the Earl of Wiltshire. The Lord Privy Seal was definitely present but was given no special role. Neither was Thomas Cromwell, who more than anyone else had brought this event about, so it was presumably by the King’s deliberate decision that those closest to his wife did not feature. The point of The Noble, Triumphant Coronation was to emphasise the attendance of those whose support could not be taken for granted, and that hardly applied to the Queen’s father.[225] The Duke of Norfolk was absent on a diplomatic mission, but his Duchess positively refused to appear, although she was Anne’s aunt. The ladies may have been allowed an indulgence which was not extended to their menfolk. The Queen was certainly ‘well accompanied’, but the ladies are not named, perhaps to disguise the absentees. However, they almost certainly included Anne’s sister and sister-in-law, who were in no position to resist pressure to participate, even if they had been inclined to do so. In spite of the eulogies, it was a thoroughly controversial event and Chapuys (who did not attend) wrote a mocking report of it afterwards for the Emperor’s benefit, declaring that the people stood silent and that half the nobility absented themselves.[226] It was only a week since the Archbishop’s court at Dunstable had finally pronounced Henry’s first marriage null and void. The Pope’s reaction to these events was understandable outrage, because he had been defied on every count. On 8 August he issued a Bull calling upon Henry to restore Catherine and repudiate Anne under threat of excommunication, summoning all Christian princes to depose the schismatic if he did not yield. On the 13th, Henry responded by appealing to a general council, citing the law of God and the Pope’s unreasonableness.[227] That still mattered, because in addition to the political risks involved, and in spite of the Act in Restraint of Appeals, Clement was still in some minimal sense the head of the English Church, and Henry was still seeking to have his actions confirmed in Rome. Meanwhile, one of the effects of his actions was made clear by a proclamation issued on 5 July declaring that he had ‘taken to his wife after the laws of the church, the right high and excellent Princess Lady Anne, now Queen of England’, and that consequently the Lady Catherine ‘should not from henceforth have or use the name, style or dignity of Queen of this realm’, but was to be known simply as the Princess Dowager of Wales.[228] Catherine, needless to say, repudiated the decision, and was surreptitiously supported by her household. Henry made a generous provision for her as the Dowager Princess, and was circumspect about enforcing the penalties decreed for non-observance of his proclamation. In his treatment of Catherine, he was treading on very thin ice.
Thomas was now in a sense triumphant. His extended family had played a leading role in the coronation celebrations, and in the days of festivities which had followed. His son George was absent with the Duke of Norfolk in France, but the rest had played their allotted parts well. Even the death of the King’s sister Mary, the Duchess of Suffolk, on 24 June did not dampen down the hilarity. Indeed Henry, who had been seriously embarrassed by her refusal to recognise Anne, may have been secretly quite pleased. The mourning was brief, even perfunctory. More important was the delivery on the 28th of Francis I’s wedding gift – a splendid litter with three mules – which had been transmitted by George Boleyn. This was taken as proof that the King of France was on Henry’s side, although in fact Francis was playing a double game.[229] He was willing to intervene to get the sentence of excommunication postponed, and to continue diplomatic relations with England when it came into effect, but he was not willing to quarrel with the Pope in the process. This gesture of recognition for Henry’s second marriage was as far as he was prepared to go, and Clement recognised that, so that relations between Rome and Paris continued to be amicable, to Henry’s great chagrin. On Tuesday, 26 August, Anne ‘took to her chamber’ at Greenwich to await the birth of her hoped-for son. In view of his experiences with Catherine, the King was understandably anxious, but this time he need not have worried. After an easy labour, she was delivered of a perfect and healthy child; the only snag was that it was girl. Her parents concealed their disappointment, and named her Elizabeth after her paternal grandmother.[230] Plans for a joust were abandoned, but a magnificent christening was conducted on Wednesday, 10 September, at which all sorts of political messages were conveyed. First and foremost it was a Boleyn/Howard triumph, and of the twenty-one participants listed by Edward Hall, ten were members of one family or the other, including both the Earl of Wiltshire and his son. Thomas Cranmer was the godfather. At the same time, as many of Catherine and Mary’s friends as could be persuaded or coerced also took part. Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter was one of the godmothers, in spite of her obvious reluctance, while her husband, the Marquis, bore the taper of ‘virgin wax’. The Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, who was the other godmother, carried the child, her train borne by the Earl of Wiltshire and the Earl of Derby. Lord Hussey, the Lady Mary’s Chamberlain, was constrained to help bear the canopy, while the Duke of Suffolk escorted the child.[231] They must have felt that they were assisting at a Roman triumph. Nevertheless Elizabeth’s sex was a set back for the whole clan, and Anne, who had manoeuvred herself into what had seemed in June to be an impregnable position, was now again acutely vulnerable. Chapuys’s despatches continue to breathe venom against ‘the concubine’, and now against the ‘little bastard’ also, while emphasising the love which ‘all the people’ have for the Queen and Princess (Catherine and Mary). He overstated his case, but the support was there, and Henry knew it.[232] While the courts of Europe amused themselves with thoughts of his discomfort, the King still knew that he had an uphill battle to win hearts and minds to a cause to which he was totally committed.
Part of that battle was fought in parliament where, early in 1534, the Act of Succession described the ‘lawful matrimony had and solemnised between your Highness and your most dear and entirely beloved wife Queen Anne’, and decreed the succession to lie in the offspring of that union. This was followed by a Treasons Act later in the year, which declared it to be high treason to deny the King any of his titles, notably that of Supreme Head of the Church.[233] Both these Acts were drafted by Thomas Cromwell, and it is not clear that the Earl of Wiltshire played any part other than that of a councillor, who would have been expected to approve the draft before it was submitted to parliament, and to speak in its support in the House of Lords. It was under the terms of this Act of Treasons that John Fisher, Thomas More and the Carthusian priors were arraigned in 1535. The Earl of Wiltshire was a member of each of the Commissions of Oyer and Terminer which tried these offenders, and was certainly present at the execution of the priors. As a councillor it was a duty which he could not have avoided. Perhaps it had been in anticipation of such a responsibility that he had in November 1533 asked the great Erasmus to write a treatise ‘how everyone should prepare for death’, although at the age of fifty-seven his concern was probably more personal.[234] Whereas Anne’s fingerprints are all over the public policy of the period 1533–36, and her role and importance are well attested by correspondents both foreign and domestic, her father is a shadowy figure. That she was the real leader of the family-based faction seems beyond all reasonable doubt, and Lord Wiltshire may well have found this hard to stomach. Most of the records of his activity refer to his official functions as councillor and Lord Privy Seal. Even his diplomatic role seems to have been taken over by his son George. We catch glimpses of him from time to time. He apparently joined with the Duke of Norfolk to browbeat his kinswoman Anne Shelton for being too lenient with the Lady Mary, whose outspoken defiance was a source of great irritation to Anne.[235] In June 1535 he wrote to Cromwell asking for the Secretary’s favour over a bill of complaint which had been brought against himself and his broth
er James by one Leonard Spencer of Norwich. He obviously thought that Spencer was acting out of mere malice. The rights and wrongs of the case are obscure, but it is significant that the favour was sought that way around.[236] In August 1535 he apparently asked for a bill in the Irish parliament concerning the legitimacy of the Earl of Ossory’s siblings to be deferred while he and his ‘copartner sentleger’ searched their own evidences. In this case it would appear that he was not successful, because a week later he signed an instruction to the Lord Chancellor to process certain acts for that parliament, including one of repeal for a previous act which had legitimated the Earl’s bastard brethren. The Earl himself had sought this bill so presumably it was a safeguard against colateral claims on his estate.[237] Cromwell instructed the Chancellor to ensure that neither the Earl of Ormond’s interests nor the King’s were adversely affected. It may also be that the search of his own ‘evidences’ produced nothing relevant. As late as March 1536 the Earl of Wiltshire secured a beneficial extension of his lease on the Crown honour of Rayleigh, including his son George in the terms and reducing the rent. All the evidence suggests that Thomas Boleyn remained a favoured courtier right up to the last minute, and that when the crash came in the King’s relations with Anne, he was not directly involved.
There are, however, signs of tensions within the Boleyn ‘camp’. The whole logic of their position suggested that they should support the evangelical party – those seeking reform of the Church – which the Royal Supremacy was ostensibly designed to facilitate. Anne was certainly of that opinion, and so was Thomas Cromwell. John Foxe was right when years later he described her as a ‘great promoter’ of the Gospel.[238] That did not make her a Lutheran, but it did make the infiltration of Protestantism easier, and to that extent she was a promoter of heresy. This the Duke of Norfolk found totally unacceptable, and his acceptance of the Supremacy was conditional upon its being used for the suppression of heresy, which was Henry’s first expressed intention. The Earl of Wiltshire’s position seems to have been rather similar. He supported a fact finding mission in 1535 and 1536 by one of Cromwell’s agents named Thomas Trebold, who reported on the arrest of William Tyndale and the affair of the placards in France. Trebold’s surviving reports are directed partly to Cromwell, but also to Cranmer, and to Lord Wiltshire. His cover was scholarship, and he travelled widely in Germany, meeting Luther in Wittenburg and Martin Bucer in Strasburg. Part of his mission seems to have been to convince the continental reformers, not only of the merits of Henry’s position, but also of the potential of the Earl of Wiltshire as a patron.[239] At one point he sent to the latter a work published by the French reformer Clement Marot. Anne’s affinities were with the Christian humanists of France, and Trebold may have assumed that her father’s were the same, but in fact he seems to have sat on the conservative wing of the King’s affinity, and to have followed his daughter’s lead only reluctantly. He patronised the scholar Robert Wakefield, but that was in the context of annulling the King’s first marriage rather than of evangelical reform, and, unlike Anne, his promotion of reforming clergy is hard to be discerned.[240] It would be wrong to suggest that the Boleyns as a political party were divided by these differences, but whereas Anne and her brother were undoubtedly in the evangelical camp, their father did not go much beyond the ecclesiastical supremacy which was the fundamental underpinning of their whole position. Time was to show that his position was closer to that of the King than theirs was.
6
THE BOLEYNS AS A POLITICAL FACTION – THE WHITEHALL YEARS
Viscount Rochford became a member of a recognisable group within the council as the result of two developments of the summer of 1527. The first was the emergence of his daughter Anne as a realistic queen in waiting, and the second was a serious wobble in the confidential relationship between the King and Cardinal Wolsey. Because of the importance of Anne’s personal and political ties to Henry this is normally known as the ‘Boleyn faction’, but its acknowledged leader was not her father but her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. It was a group primarily defined by its negative purpose – to get rid of Wolsey – and for that reason included among its members both the Duke of Suffolk and Lord Darcy, neither of whom was particularly sympathetic to Anne’s ambitions.[241] According to Inigo de Mendoza, the Imperial ambassador, this group had coalesced during the Cardinal’s absence in France, for the express purpose of exploiting the apparent fact that the King no longer trusted him as fully as he had once done. He suspected that Wolsey feared Anne’s advance, and would retire from active politics if she became queen. Because the Cardinal had no desire to be forced out in this manner, he was doing his best to sabotage Henry’s plans and would try to convince the King that he was in error.[242] The French ambassador came to the same conclusion, and expressed the view that Rochford’s hostility was grounded on the fact that Wolsey had forced him out of the treasurership of the Household when he was created a viscount. There is no evidence for the latter conclusion, and in any case Wolsey reasserted his supremacy after his return from France, particularly through the organisation of various set pieces, notably on 1 November when a French delegation invested the King with the Order of St Michael. At about the same time, news was received of the failure of Henry’s latest bid in Rome, and both the King and Anne seem to have come to the conclusion that the Cardinal was even more indispensable.[243] His credit was fully restored, and his enemies, both within the council and outside it, controlled their fury and awaited another opportunity. Throughout the first half of 1528 Anne was studiously polite to Wolsey and his agents, and he returned the compliment, sending her fish for Lent from his famous ponds, and solicitously enquiring after her health when she was indisposed in June. Whatever his private thoughts may have been, when she was recovering from the dreaded sweat in July, he was even more fulsome, and sent her a ‘rich and goodly’ present into the bargain. She responded in kind, professing herself ‘most bound of all creatures, next to the king’s Grace, to love and serve your grace’ and concluding that she will do everything possible to further Wolsey’s favour when the King’s great matter was at ‘a good end’.[244] There is no sign of the lurking grudge which Cavendish attributes to her, although the conditional element in her professions of love and service might well have given him pause for thought.
Anne may have been dissimulating, but then so may Wolsey; except that neither of them had any obvious cause to deceive the other. The granting of the Legatine commission, and Campeggio’s arrival in October appeared to signify important progress, and Wolsey’s stock was riding high. However, trouble was lurking just below the surface. Anne was understandably suspicious that she was being kept out of Campeggio’s way, and a month after his arrival nothing had happened. Wolsey became increasingly exasperated, and warned the Pope that ‘many people’ were pressing the King to solve his problem at home, which would be disastrous for the papal authority.[245] There is no doubt as to who these people were, and at the end of November Henry sent Anne’s cousin, Francis Bryan, to Clement with a virtual ultimatum, threatening the withdrawal of obedience. At the same time the Boleyns were beginning to press for another policy involving a great petition from the elite of England, seeking an annulment in the national interest. This was not aimed specifically against Wolsey, but he was no party to it because it would have meant bypassing his efforts altogether, and that was something which he could not contemplate.[246] By the third week of January 1529 the French ambassador noticed that Norfolk and his allies were talking themselves up, and Mendoza had picked up a story to the effect that Anne had concluded that the cardinals were out to frustrate her, and had formed an alliance against them with her father and the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk. This was the first time that the latter had featured so prominently in these rumours, and the first time that Anne had been recognised as the political equal of the King’s councillors.[247] Nevertheless, for the time being the anti-Wolsey coalition made no progress because Henry was not to be persuaded, and throughout the spring
the King and the Cardinal worked in apparent harmony to apply increased pressure in Rome. The opening of the Blackfriars court on 18 June was a fruit of that collaboration. Anne, however, was not convinced, possibly because her supporters in Italy, notably Francis Bryan, were warning her of the papal intransigence, and representing Wolsey as (at best) a dupe, which turned out to be pretty near the mark.[248] It was a bad sign when the Cardinal’s representative, Sir John Russell, was due to go to France in June, that his mission was countermanded and the Duke of Suffolk sent instead. Suffolk achieved nothing, but that is not the point; when he returned in July he found Wolsey bogged down in the Legatine court, and the Boleyn faction geared up for a showdown. Lord Darcy, who had his own reasons for hating the Cardinal, had drawn up an action plan, which ambitiously proposed the immediate arrest of Wolsey and his agents, the impounding of their papers and a thorough investigation of their administration.[249] When the Legatine court was adjourned, many thought that the moment to strike had come. Anne had apparently convinced Henry that he had been doublecrossed, and a document detailing thirty-four charges against the Chancellor was presented to the King before he left for his summer progress, that is not later than 4 August.