by Alison Weir
Often, she would threaten to leave Henry, as in January 1531, when they quarrelled violently. At the prospect of losing her, Henry went hotfoot to Norfolk and Anne's father, and begged them with tears in his eyes to act as mediators. When the quarrel was made up, he placated Anne with yet more gifts: furs and rich embroideries. This charade was repeated on several occasions, with Anne lamenting her lost time and honour, and Henry weeping, begging her to desist and speak no more of leaving him. And, always, there were the peace offerings.
As the months, and then the years, went by, Anne became increasingly difficult to deal with. The Long delays and the resultant stress, coupled with the constant strain of holding Henry at arm's length, tested her endurance to the limit. Her position was insecure, and she knew it. Yet she seemed unable to avoid friction with her royal lover. She was furious to discover that the Queen was still mending Henry's shirts. She herself was an expert needlewoman, and the King's admission that the shirts had been sent to Katherine on his orders did little to sweeten her temper. After such quarrels,
however, Anne would soon be fervently assuring Henry how much she loved him. 'Even if I were to suffer a thousand deaths,' she told him - referring to an old prophecy that a queen would be burned at this time - 'my love for you will not abate one jot!' Chapuys drily observed that, 'As usual in these cases, their mutual love will be greater than before.'
Once installed at Whitehall Palace, Anne was attended like a queen and courted like one. In December 1529, her father was formally created Earl of Wiltshire which meant that she herself would from henceforth be styled the Lady Anne Boleyn, and her brother be known as Viscount Rochford. To celebrate Wiltshire's elevation, the King gave a banquet at Whitehall, at which Anne took precedence over all the ladies of the court and sat by the King's side on the Queen's throne. Chapuys was present and, after seeing the lavish feast, the dancing and the 'carousing', came away with the impression he had just witnessed a marriage feast: 'It seemed as if nothing were wanting but the priest to give away the nuptial ring
and pronounce the blessing.' Anne also presided over a magnificent ball hosted by the King on 12 January in honour of the departing French ambassador, who was sympathetic to her cause.
For all Anne's prominence in the life of the court, the King was at pains to convince everyone that he and the Queen were still on good terms, and kept Katherine constantly with him. She even followed the hunt each day. The Venetian ambassador observed that 'so much reciprocal courtesy is being displayed in public that any one acquainted with the controversy cannot but consider their conduct more than human'. Both were good at concealing the tensions that lay below the surface.
In private, however, it was a different story. On 30 November 1529, when Henry paid a rare visit to her after dinner, Katherine blurted out that she had been suffering the pangs of purgatory on earth, and that she was very badly treated by his refusing to dine with her and visit her in her apartments. He told her she had no cause to complain, for she was mistress in her own household, where she could do as she pleased. He had not dined with her as he was so much engaged with business of all kinds, the Cardinal having left the affairs of government in great confusion. As to his visiting her in her apartments, and sharing her bed, she ought to know that he was not her legitimate husband. He had been assured of this by many learned doctors.
'Doctors!' retorted Katherine, in a passion. 'You know yourself, without the help of any doctors, that you are my husband and that your case has no foundation! I care not a straw for your doctors!' For every doctor or lawyer who upheld Henry's case, she went on, she could find a thousand to hold their marriage good and valid.
But she was getting nowhere. Henry was immovable on that issue, and the quarrel ended with him leaving to seek comfort from Anne Boleyn. Yet she, knowing he had been with Katherine, was decidedly unsympathetic. 'Did I not tell you that whenever you argue with the Queen she is sure to have the upper hand?' she scolded. 'I see that some fine morning you will succumb to her reasoning, and cast me off!' With this, Henry had had enough, and fled back to his own apartments in search of peace.
Gradually the concept of radical change had become firmly rooted in Henry Tudor's mind, and on Christmas Eve he told the Queen that if the Pope pronounced sentence against him, he would not heed it, adding that 'he prized and valued the Church of Canterbury as much as the people across the sea did the Roman'. Severing the Church of England from the main body of Christendom was an idea entirely repugnant to Katherine, and she had difficulty in believing that this was what the King really intended. But, as far as his own case was concerned, Henry was being realistic. The long silence from the Vatican was proof that his suit was being deliberately shelved, and it seemed inevitable that he would soon have to take matters into his own hands.
In February 1530, Charles V went to Bologna to be crowned by the Pope, and Henry, resolving to turn the situation to his own advantage, sent an embassy headed by Cranmer and Wiltshire newly appointed Lord Privy Seal - to stress to the Emperor that the King had pressed for an annulment only 'for the discharge of his conscience and for the quietness of his realm'. The embassy was not a success, due partly to the aggressive and provocative attitude of Wiltshire, an ardent reformist, and although Charles told the ambassadors that he would abide by whatever decision the Pope reached, he added that he thought Julius II's dispensation was 'as strong as God's law'. It was painfully obvious that Clement would not dare gainsay him, and in April Henry told the French ambassador that he intended to settle the matter within his own kingdom by the advice of his Council and Parliament, so as not to have recourse to the Pope, 'whom he regards as ignorant and no good father'. Katherine, conversely, was relying entirely on the Pope. In April, she wrote to Dr Pedro Ortiz, whom the Emperor had sent to represent her interests in Rome, and begged him to put pressure on Clement to give a ruling in her case. 'I fear that God's vicar on earth does not wish to remedy these evils,' she wrote. 'I do not know what to think of his Holiness.' Throughout the summer months, she sent letter after letter to Clement, beseeching him to take pity on her and pass sentence, but he ignored them, fearing that a decision in the Queen's favour might provoke Henry into creating a schism within the Church.
Henry's subjects were as supportive as ever of Katherine, and in the spring of 1530 a rumour was circulating widely that the King had separated the Queen from her daughter out of spite. This was not true, and to prove it Henry summoned the Princess to Windsor to be with her mother, and left them there together when the court moved on elsewhere. Mary was now fourteen, old enough to realise what the presence of Anne Boleyn at court betokened. Hitherto, she had been studiously sheltered from her parents' troubles, thanks to the diligence of her mother and her governess, Lady Salisbury. When Katherine left Windsor to rejoin the court, Mary went back to Hunsdon, where her father visited her on 7 July. He had seen very little of her in recent years, and one purpose of his visit was to reassure himself that she had not been infected by what he was pleased to call Katherine's obstinacy. Yet when he left Hunsdon, he almost certainly carried with him the realisation that both Mary and her governess were already staunch supporters of the Queen.
In July 1530, a petition was sent to the Pope from all the lords spiritual and temporal of England - including Wolsey - beseeching His Holiness to decide the case in Henry's favour. Clement peevishly accused them of having troubled him for little cause, and warned them that he had to consider all the interested parties. Nor could he deny the Queen's right of appeal to Rome.
Meanwhile, Henry's agents had canvassed most of the European universities on the issue of the validity of the King's marriage, and where it was felt necessary, bribes were issued to the learned divines in order to obtain the opinions the King hoped to hear. In July 1530, Henry tested his Council's reaction to the prospect of him declaring himself a free man and marrying Anne Boleyn without the Pope's sanction. One councillor threw himself on his knees, and begged his master to wait at least until winter to see what tr
anspired, and Henry, seeing the others to be of like mind, reluctantly agreed. Even the Emperor, however, was certain that the King would marry Anne with or without the Pope's permission. After three years of tortuous negotiations to end his marriage, Henry was still obsessed with her, and more than ever convinced that God was guiding his actions. He described his flexible conscience as 'the highest and most supreme court for judgement and justice', and - according to Chapuys - told the Queen he 'kept her [Anne] in his company only to learn her character, as he had made up his mind to marry her. And marry her he would, whatever the Pope might say.' He was, in truth, no longer the same man who had lodged a plea in Archbishop Warham's ecclesiastical court in 1527. The despot was emerging, determined to have his own way, and even if necessary to alter the process of law to get it.
Throughout 1530, the Emperor pressed Clement VII to pronounce in 'the sainted Queen's' favour, and he urged him to order Henry to separate from Anne Boleyn until judgement was given. In August, Charles granted Chapuys special powers to act on the Queen's behalf, and this gave the tireless ambassador the freedom he desired and needed; from that time on, he would be more zealous than ever in the Queen's cause. Katherine herself liked and trusted him implicitly, and her warm feelings were reciprocated. Years later, after his retirement in 1545, Chapuys would remember her as 'the most virtuous woman I have ever known, and the highest hearted, but too quick to trust that others were like herself, and too slow to do a little ill that much good might come of it'. Here, Chapuys was referring to Katherine's continual refusal during the 1530s to agree to an imperial invasion of England on her behalf. Chapuys would try again and again to convince her that this alone would put an end to her troubles, but such was her loyalty to the man she considered to be her husband that she consistently refused to have anything to do with the plan. Her attitude exasperated Chapuys, but it also increased his admiration for her.
In spite of the pressure from Charles V, Dr Ortiz and Chapuys, the Pope avoided giving a definitive sentence on the King's case. In March 1530, he issued a brief forbidding Henry to contract a new marriage before sentence was given; in May, another brief was issued forbidding anyone to express an opinion on the case if prompted by bribes or unworthy motives - even Clement had heard how Henry had bought off some of the universities. Then, in August, a papal encyclical forbade all persons to write anything against their consciences concerning the 'great matter'; this was a threat to the unity of the English government itself, as the new Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, was known to be against annulment on moral grounds. Then, to add insult to injury, in September the Pope suggested that Henry 'might be allowed two wives', as he could permit this with less scandal than granting an annulment. The King's anger was further fuelled in December, when he was cited to appear in Rome to defend his case. He ignored this, and also a brief issued by Clement in January 1531, ordering him to 'put away one Anne whom he kept about him', and forbidding his subjects to meddle with his case.
Thanks to Clement's conduct, Henry was losing all respect for the Holy See, and paying greater heed to the clamour of Anne Boleyn's faction for reform of the Church in England. This prompted him to consider that the English Church might be better off with himself as its head than owing allegiance to a weak and vacillating Pope. It was a notion that appealed vastly to the King, and once it had taken root in his mind, a break with Rome was inevitable. Both he and Anne were anticipating that much would be accomplished in the new session of Parliament that was due to commence in January 1531, and that their marriage could not be far off. 'The Lady feels assured on it,' commented Chapuys.
By late 1530, Henry was beginning to feel a certain amount of resentment towards Anne Boleyn, and was not above reminding her on one occasion how much she owed to him and how many enemies he had made for her sake. She remained unimpressed. 'It matters not,' she shrugged, refusing to be baited. Nevertheless, according to the Venetian ambassador, her will was still law to him. This had been demonstrated clearly in what had happened to Wolsey.
Just after Christmas 1529, the Cardinal had fallen ill and was thought to be dying. The King sent Dr Butts to him with a message saying he 'would not lose him for 20,000', and bade Anne 'send the Cardinal a token with comfortable words'. Anne knew when not to oppose the King, and meekly detached a gold tablet from her girdle, which she handed to the physician. As a result of these signs of goodwill, Wolsey's health improved daily, though the longed-for summons back to court never arrived.
But while Anne was sending comforting messages to the sick man, she was still plotting his downfall. In February, she remarked in Chapuys's hearing that it would cost her a good 20,000 crowns in bribes 'before I have done with him'. She also made Henry promise not to see Wolsey, for, as she told him, 'I know you could not help but pity him.' Chapuys was convinced that 'to reinstate him in the King's favour would not be difficult, were it not for the Lady'. Because Henry would not order Wolsey's arrest, Anne sulked for several weeks, and was enraged when, on 12 February 1530, the King formally pardoned the Cardinal and confirmed him in his See, which meant he ranked second only to the Archbishop of Canterbury within the Church hierarchy. After that, Anne was 'incessantly crying after the King' for Wolsey's blood. Wolsey himself realised that 'there was this continual serpentine enemy about the King, the night crow, that possessed the royal ear against him.' She was, he told Cavendish, the enemy that never slept, 'but studied and continually imagined his utter destruction'.
At heart, Wolsey was a conventional churchman, and had never supported an annulment of the royal marriage. During the summer of 1530, he began taking an interest in the progress of the Queen's case, and in a letter to Chapuys urged strong and immediate action as the key to its success. In July, he supported Charles V's call for Clement to order Henry's separation from Anne Boleyn, and in August, he wrote to the Pope to urge a speedy conclusion to the King's case, and to ask why the Queen's cause was 'not more energetically pushed'. In Chapuys's opinion, Wolsey was hoping for a return to power once the 'great matter' was settled, but this would only be possible if it were settled in Katherine's favour. With Anne Boleyn out of the way, and a grateful Queen Katherine exerting her influence upon a contrite husband, the path would be clear for him. But Wolsey, like many other people, underestimated the strength of the King's feelings for Anne Boleyn, and this time the miscalculation would be fatal.
Rumours of Wolsey's activities provoked Anne to fresh efforts. Her uncle, Norfolk, was a willing ally, and was not above bribing the Cardinal's physician into falsely accusing his master of having urged the Pope to excommunicate Henry VIII and lay England under an interdict in the hope of provoking an uprising on the Queen's behalf, perhaps dethroning the King and seizing power for himself. When this information was laid before him, Henry, who had recently been informing his councillors that Wolsey 'was a better man than any of you', was shocked and suspicious. For a while, images of the two Wolseys warred in his mind: the mentor of his youth who had devoted his energies to running the kingdom, the kindly avuncular man whom he had chosen as godfather to the Princess Mary; and the arch-traitor of Anne Boleyn's imagination and the evidence put forward by her party.
Anne won. On 1 November, a warrant was drawn up for the Cardinal's arrest and - in a form of poetic justice - was sent to Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, Anne's former suitor. Percy waited on Wolsey at his episcopal palace at Cawood in Yorkshire, and apprehended him on a charge of high treason. Then began the slow journey back to London, the Tower, and inevitable death. But Wolsey was a sick man, and on the way he succumbed to the ill health that had plagued him in recent months, dying at Leicester Abbey, where his escort had been obliged to find him shelter. 'If I had served God as diligently as I have done the King,' he said on his deathbed, 'he would not have given me over in my grey hairs.' He was buried next to Richard III in what Chapuys was pleased to call 'the tyrants' sepulchre'.
The King was saddened by news of his death: 'I wish he had lived,' he remarked. Anne Boleyn, how
ever, was jubilant, and staged a masque for the edification of the court entitled 'The going to hell of Cardinal Wolsey'. Though Henry found this distasteful, Anne's temper was such these days that he dared not cross her. Early in 1531, Chapuys reported:
She is becoming more arrogant every day, using words in authority towards the King of which he has several times complained to the Duke of Norfolk, saying that she was not like the Queen who never in her life used ill words to him.
Henry did not have the courage to say these things to Anne's face, for he was afraid of losing her, although she had no such qualms. Her thwarted ambition and repressed sexuality had turned her into a virago with a sharp tongue, with which she managed to alienate many of her former supporters. For all this, her power over the King remained, based as it was on sexual blackmail and shared aims.
With Cranmer's plan now being put into effect, Anne was preparing for queenship. In December 1530, she commissioned the College of Arms to draw up a family pedigree that invented a descent from a Norman lord who had supposedly settled in England in the twelfth century. 'The King is displeased with it, but he has to be patient,' Chapuys wryly commented. On the same day she ordered new liveries for her servants embroidered with the device:Ainsi sera, groigne qui groigne(Thus it will be, grudge who grudge). When the court rocked with suppressed mirth, Anne was at a loss to know why, until the King bade her get rid of the device, explaining that the motto was meant to read:Groigne qui groigne, Vive Bourgogne!(Grudge who grudge, long live Burgundy!), a device used by the Emperor.