The Boleyns (14 page)

The other issue generating tension within the Boleyn party was religion. There is no reason to suppose that Sir Thomas’s children were brought up to question any of the teachings of the Church, and in later years both the Earl of Wiltshire and his wife were strictly orthodox in their beliefs. Anne, however, picked up evangelical ideas in France, perhaps from Margaret of Angouleme, but more likely from other members of her circle. Such ideas, which might be broadly classed as Christian humanist, are associated particularly with Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples, and were very widespread among the French aristocracy of that period (1515–1525).
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Women were particularly likely to be influenced, and both Queen Claude and her sister Renee were sympathetic, so it would have been difficult for Anne to have avoided such an ‘infection’. Indeed it is quite possible that she underwent some kind of spiritual awakening, because she was highly intelligent and the burning issue of the day was the nature of religious experience. Margaret seems to have been something of a role model for her, and their tastes in piety bear a strong resemblance. One of the habits which she certainly acquired was that of reading the scriptures in French, particularly the epistles of St Paul, and this was a habit which she retained after her return to England.
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During her years as queen she was to be a keen supporter of the bible in English, and may well have influenced the King in that direction in 1535. None of this made her a Lutheran, or any other kind of heretic, and the evidence suggests that her beliefs on such key issues as justification remained strictly orthodox. What it does suggest, however, is that her personal faith was quite compatible with that support for the Royal Supremacy which her political position dictated. Years later William Latymer, writing for the benefit of Queen Elizabeth, represents her as saying:

the royal estate of princes, for the excellency thereof doth far pass and excel all other estates and degrees of life, which doth represent and outwardly shadow unto us the glorious and celestial monarchy which God, the governor of all things, doth exercise in the firmament …
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This reflected accurately Henry’s own sense of his exalted position, which owed nothing to Martin Luther’s concept of princely power and responsibility, but a great deal to what might be called the ‘
praemunire
tradition’ of the English monarchy.

The difficulty in attempting to assess Anne’s religious position is that it is bedevilled by hindsight. To Cavendish she was arrogant and a serial temptress, neither of which attitudes would be compatible with sincere piety, yet her own words do not suggest a lack in that direction:

T is nothing better than by true faith to take Jesus Christ of our side for mediator, advocate and intercessor. For who that believeth in him and doth come with him to this judgement, shall not be confused.
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To Nicholas Harpesfield she was an arch-heretic, who seduced Henry from the true path of the Church, while to John Foxe and William Latymer she was an heroic champion of the gospel, who paved the way for the introduction of Protestantism, and died partly for that reason.
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The truth seems to have been that she was an evangelical by conviction, and that her political influence was exercised on behalf of Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, both of whom were concerned to pursue an evangelical policy. Her possession of an English translation of Lefevre d’Etaples’
Epistres et Evangiles
, which was dedicated to her, and may have been commissioned specially, points in the same direction. Lefevre was very insistent upon the dependence of the believer on Christ alone for salvation, a position which left him at loggerheads with the ecclesiastical establishment, which emphasised the intercession both of the saints and of the Church, but was entirely consistent with what we know of Anne’s faith.
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We know that she was contemptuous of the cults of saints, of their shrines and of the pilgrimages which they attracted, all of which attitudes found reflection in royal policy both before and after her death. Significantly, she received the dedications of a number of evangelical works, and patronised clergy of that persuasion. Mathew Parker, later Elizabeth’s first Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of her chaplains, and Hugh Latimer is alleged to have owed his promotion to the see of Worcester to her intervention.
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She was close to Thomas Cranmer, who was godfather to her daughter, and supported Richard Tracy, whose father had been posthumously condemned for denying the validity of prayers for the dead. She was also generous with her charitable giving, the estimates of which vary from £1,500 a year to ‘xiiii or xv thousand pounds’, both of which are exaggerations (and the latter grossly so), but the truth was substantial enough to earn the gratitude and respect of contemporaries.
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Altogether her piety was practical and bibliocentric, devoted to the idea of reform in the Church, and critical of its more popular practices, but not stepping outside the parameters which Henry himself laid down. Unlike Thomas Cromwell later, she was not suspected or accused of sacramentarianism, and all the evidence suggests that her belief in the mass was strictly orthodox. She received the sacrament devoutly before she died, and Henry (who was prepared to believe almost any charge against her at the end) never accused her of heresy.

Nevertheless she and her brother both fell out with their parents over their evangelical programme. The Earl, like the Duke of Norfolk, was as ambivalent as he could afford to be about the Royal Supremacy. Even after the failure of the Legatine court he would have preferred (as we have seen) to wait for a papal decision before deciding upon a course of action, and was deeply unhappy about his daughter’s pregnancy which forced the issue in the spring of 1533.
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Insofar as there was a shaper of policy in the years 1532– 1536, that person was the King, which helps to explain its erratic progress and apparent inconsistencies. Thomas Cromwell was his ‘man of affairs’, who devised the ways and means to achieve what his master wanted, and insofar as he ran his own programme, that depended upon the limits of Henry’s tolerance. The Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Wiltshire fade from the picture after 1533, and that may well be due to their lack of sympathy with the approaches which Cromwell was making to the Schmalkaldic League, and the uncertain state of relations with France. They were both great officers of State, because Thomas Howard had been Lord Treasurer since 1522, so they continued to sit in the council, but after 1532 are no longer described as ‘ruling all’ under the King. Both were hopeful of a rapprochement with the papacy after Clement’s death, but the King overruled them. The court observers concentrated their attention on Henry’s relationship with Anne, both charting and exaggerating its ups and downs, but there are distinct signs that the Earl of Wiltshire thought that his daughter was overplaying her hand, and was even overheard muttering at one point that she would be the ruin of her family.
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Having come to power (in a sense) on the back of her sexual prowess, he found himself increasingly out of sympathy with her tactics, and out of sympathy with the evangelical programme which she shared with Thomas Cromwell. Wiltshire was a religious conservative, who went along with the King’s policy because he had to, but was deeply suspicious of Cranmer, and of the other reforming bishops whom Anne had helped to promote. So a fault line ran through the Boleyn party, even at the height of their apparent success, with Anne, Lord Rochford and Thomas Cromwell on one side, and her father, her uncle, and other conservative peers such as the Earl of Shrewsbury on the other.

They could not, however, afford to fall out publicly, because behind them continued to lurk the shadow of Catherine and her friends. Anne had in a sense seen off her principle rival in June 1531, when the King had brought an end to the
ménage a trois
which had prevailed since 1528 by dismissing Catherine from the court with the curt observation that he never wished to see her again. She retired, first to Ampthill, before being moved to Buckden, and then to Kimbolton, but she was well provided for and continued to be an embarrassingly popular figure.
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Politically, her friends were in limbo, but were kept in touch with her and with each other, by the Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys. Those who made their allegiance too obvious were at best out of favour at court, like the Marquis and Marchioness of Exeter, or at worst in prison, like Lady Hussey, or even on the block, a fate which befell Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher in the summer of 1535. Some went into exile, as Reginald Pole did in 1532, when he could no longer stomach Henry’s pursuit of an annulment. Pole was a formidable scholar and polemicist, who became a cardinal in 1535, and who was to ‘carpet bomb’ the King’s position in
Pro Ecclesiasticae Unitatis Defensione
in 1536.
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Henry was perfectly well aware of Catherine’s popularity, and feared at one point that she might raise a rebellion against him. That, however, was not her way. Her claim was always to be the King’s lawful and dutiful spouse, and armed insurrection would have been quite inconsistent with that position. For the same reason she refused to countenance Chapuys’s ambitious plans for an Imperial intervention. She was always grateful for the ambassador’s support, but probably realised perfectly well that her nephew was not prepared to commit men and money to what was, in effect, a personal quarrel.
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Catherine’s most determined, and most politically significant supporter, was her daughter Mary. Mary was seventeen in 1533, and full of her mother’s obstinacy. She refused to accept either Catherine’s demotion to the status of dowager princess, nor her own designation as ‘The lady Mary’, decreed by proclamation in July 1533. As a result the Countess of Salisbury was dismissed from her position as her Lady Governess, and her household was dissolved.
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Instead she was placed in the household being created for the Princess Elizabeth, and run by Anne Shelton, who was Anne Boleyn’s aunt. This household was something of a Boleyn family institution, and was deliberately designed to be as uncomfortable as possible for Mary. Mary lacked her mother’s restraint, and the ‘Aragon’ party began increasingly to look to her for a political lead, because her position as her father’s daughter made her a possible replacement for him if any insurrection were to take place. For this reason, Queen Anne and her whole political backing, were apprehensive of Mary, and extremely hostile to her. Mary made this situation worse by deliberately insulting Anne whenever she came to visit Elizabeth, and by throwing tantrums whenever she was not addressed as ‘Princess’, a practice which Elizabeth’s servants carefully avoided.
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Henry, however, remained attached to his daughter, difficult as she was, and that prevented any drastic action from being taken against her – a situation which drove Anne’s father to an indiscreet fury. Communication between Catherine and her daughter was supposed to be forbidden, and they were certainly not allowed to meet, even when one or the other of them was ill, but in practice messages continued to be passed. Some of these were apparently written in Spanish, with which Mary must have been familiar, and they were conveyed by loyal servants, of whom Catherine had a good supply, and Mary a handful.
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It may well be that Henry unofficially instructed that these be allowed to pass, because otherwise it is hard to see why Elizabeth’s servants did not detect the practice and put a stop to it.

The Boleyn ascendancy depended ultimately on Anne’s hold over Henry VIII’s affections, and that relationship continued to be the subject of anxious scrutiny by friend and foe alike. In this connection there were two problems. The first and most obvious was Anne’s failure to bear a son. Elizabeth’s birth was a setback, but the fertility omens were good, and she fell pregnant again early in 1534. The second was her failure to adjust to the status of wife. The conventional view of a wife was that she should be chaste, humble and obedient. She ought also to be pious and silent, the nagging wife being a stock figure of ridicule for husbands. Anne however, was a woman with a mind of her own, and her own political agenda, more suitable in many ways for the council chamber than for the boudoir. She had held her lover’s attention through the interminable years of their courtship by her intelligence and her temper. She had steered Henry’s policies when he had seemed uncertain which way to go, she had led her family based faction, often in spite of her father, and she had not hesitated to tell her lover what she thought of him when he attempted to stray. Henry had found this fascinating, and although her behaviour had resulted in flaming rows, these were always followed by passionate reconciliations. Observers were baffled and intrigued by his reactions, but Anne always appeared to know what she was doing. However, what she failed to realise was that what was acceptable behaviour in a mistress, was not acceptable in a wife. Henry was nothing if not conventional in his expectations, and he began to find her tantrums and her political interference intolerable. After becoming queen, she should have left the politics to her father and her brother, to say nothing of Thomas Cromwell. Her piety, and the use of her patronage, were appropriate, but that she should be receiving the French ambassador and briefing the envoys whom the King was sending abroad was not. Then in the summer of 1534 she miscarried. It is not known whether the foetus was male or female, and may not have been known at the time, but this was a serious setback which aroused the demons of doubt in the King’s mind.
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Had he made another mistake?