The Boleyns (8 page)

However, it would have been her intention to secure an advantageous marriage, and in that so far she had been conspicuously unsuccessful. James Butler was not to her taste, and Henry Percy, who clearly was, was forbidden by forces which were too powerful for even the most accomplished seductress to master. A prolonged courtly love affair with Thomas Wyatt, if it actually occurred, would have been no substitute for a marriage bed, and other suitors do not seem to have been queuing at her door. This may have been because of the Butler negotiation, and the King’s known interest in it, or it may have been down to Anne herself. Accomplished as she was in the courtly arts, she was also highly intelligent, and possessed a mind of her own, not qualities which would have endeared her to the average early Tudor nobleman. A wife was supposed to be docile, and above all faithful, neither of which was to be expected of this free-spirited and flirtatious damsel.
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There was one man, however, who would not be put off by this combination of attributes, and that was the King. At what point Henry began to manifest an interest in her, and what the level of that interest was, has been the subject of much speculation.
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The chances are that it began as a conventional courtly love exercise. Henry had played these games with numerous ladies in the past, and each time it had set tongues around the court wagging and kept the diplomatic gossips busy. There was usually nothing in these tales, except that the King was amusing himself in his customary fashion, and even Catherine did not take them seriously. However, at some time, probably in the summer of 1525, Henry decided that Anne was different. It may well have been that her responses were wittier than usual, and the sidelong glances more convincing. At any rate he was sufficiently attracted to end his relationship with her sister, and set out on the uncharted waters of soliciting a girl who was his intellectual equal. It may well have been an exhilarating experience.

Calendaring the development of that experience is, however, a difficult matter, because it is necessary to work backwards from the known events of 1527. In April of that year the King began a secret consultative process aimed at securing the annulment of his eighteen-year-old marriage to Catherine, and in May began a collusive suit in Wolsey’s Legatine court to obtain such a verdict, on the basis of his conviction that by wedding his brother Arthur’s widow he had offended against the law of God set out in the Book of Leviticus.
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Wolsey was understandably anxious to keep these proceedings secret, especially from Catherine. The Queen was the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and if she got wind of what was intended would undoubtedly invoke his aid to get Wolsey’s proceedings quashed in Rome. Henry, however, was in a highly emotional state, and in June confronted his wife with the news that they had never been truly married, thus anticipating the verdict, and sending her messengers scurrying off to Valladolid to request that intervention which Wolsey had dreaded.
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In spite of these adverse developments, and the fact that the collusive case had been dropped, in August Henry sent to the Pope to request permission to marry a woman related to him in the first degree of affinity, once his present marriage was dissolved. This was the degree of affinity which existed between Henry and Anne as a result of his liaison with her sister, and indicates that he had proposed marriage to her by that time, and that she had accepted him. As a way ahead it was useless because of its proviso, but at least it indicates the state which the couple’s relationship had reached by that time. It has been reasonably deduced that Henry had first proposed at Easter that Anne become his mistress on some recognised and stable basis, and that she had turned him down.
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By the summer she would have known of the breakdown of the King’s relationship with Catherine, and intimated to him that she would be prepared to become his second queen. He had accepted her on those terms, and that explains his approach to Rome. Neither of them at that time appears to have expected a long wait.

However, the way in which they had got to that point is much more problematical. Henry seems to have given up sexual relations with his wife at some time in 1524, presumably on the grounds that there was no point now that she was passed the menopause and he had a satisfactory partner in Mary Boleyn. In the summer of 1525 he passed Mary over to her husband, and thereafter had no partner that anyone knows about, which perhaps explains his developing ardour for Anne. Between then and the spring of 1527 the interpretation of that ardour depends upon a sequence of undated letters, because even the usually sharp eyed Imperial ambassadors did not notice anything out of the ordinary until the summer of 1527, and the Venetians did not associate him with Anne until the spring of 1528.
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The first three of these letters show the King trying to turn a conventional courtly love attachment into something more meaningful. The first accompanied the gift of a buck, the fruit of a recent hunting expedition, and chides his mistress with not having replied to his earlier epistles, or kept her promise to write. It is signed ‘written with the hand of your servant ... HR’ and has been tentatively dated to the autumn of 1526.
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Some time later, and after an exchange of letters now lost, he wrote again, complaining that he had been ‘now above one whole year struck with the dart of love’, and asking that she ‘certify me of your whole mind concerning the love between us two’. He promised to ‘take you for my only mistress … to serve only you’. This could have been a proposition in the crude sense, or it could have been another manoeuvre in the complicated game. Anne apparently took it in the latter way, and responded with coy professions of chastity.
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If she was playing hard to get, she was doing it convincingly, and the next sequence of letters begins with one of apology from the King for having offended her. She had apparently absented herself from the court, and this had caused Henry some soul searching. Faced with the unusual situation of having to court a woman rather than having her provided by diplomatic means or
droit de seigneur
, he had rushed her defences in an unacceptable manner. Realisation of this fact, and of his need for her, then forced the King to reconsider his position. At some point during the summer of 1527 he offered her marriage, and that changed her attitude entirely. Hitherto, we may imagine, she had been placed in a very difficult situation, overawed in a sense by the size of the fish which she had (probably inadvertently) hooked. He could, as her sovereign, simply have commanded her to his bed, but he had not done so, playing instead the courtly gallant, and taking her coy professions of reluctance seriously.
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She responded, not by letter or by word of mouth, but by sending him a token loaded with meaning in the manner loved by Tudor courtiers. It was a small model ship with a woman on board, and a pendant diamond. The message would have been clear to the recipient, because the ship had for centuries been the symbol of protection, a protection which she, as the occupant, was now giving over to her Lord and Master. In other words, Anne was accepting his offer.
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Henry was delighted, and not a little relieved by the

… good intent and too humble submission vouchsafed by this your kindness, considering well that the occasion to merit it would not a little perplex me, if it were not aided therein by your great benevolence and goodwill …

He went on to reassure her that his heart belonged to her alone, and that he was ‘greatly desirous that so my body could be as well, as God can bring to pass if it pleaseth him …’
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This exchange can probably be dated to July 1527, just a few weeks before the King launched his appeal to Rome for permission to remarry. Henry was intending to take his sexual abstinence seriously on the assumption that it would not be of long duration. Anne was obviously away from the court at the time of this last letter, because he goes on to urge her to persuade her father to let her return earlier than had hitherto been planned, because he was missing her company. Meanwhile, the Pope had been incarcerated in the Castel de San Angelo by a mutinous Imperial army which had sacked the city of Rome in March, and this had created the opportunity for Wolsey to set up an interim government for the Church while Clement was out of action. If that could be brought about, the Pope’s opposition to Henry’s annulment plea could be circumvented, and Wolsey set off for France on 22 July with the intention of calling a congregation of the ‘free’ cardinals – those not with the Pope in San Angelo – in order to bring this about.
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He knew well enough about the King’s intention to seek a dissolution of his marriage, and that was clearly high on his agenda, but he appears not to have known about Anne Boleyn’s position. He knew of her existence, of course, and of Henry’s affection for her, but he did not know of the King’s commitment, in spite of keeping eyes and ears about the court. This suggests that Anne’s trinket arrived at about that time, or a little after, because part of his purpose in going to France was to sound out the possibility of a French bride for Henry. This would have cemented the Anglo-French amity which was the current foreign policy, and made any agreement with the Emperor more difficult to achieve. Such a prospect would also ensure French diplomatic backing for his plans with regard to the Church, because only by out-flanking both the Pope and the Emperor could Henry be free to marry again.
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The timing is tight, given that Catherine’s message about her plight could only have reached Charles towards the end of June, but a lot was happening in the crowded summer of 1527.

If this timetable of events is accurate it means that Henry began his courtly pursuit of Anne at sometime early in 1526, possibly in February. He appeared at the Shrovetide jousts in that year bearing the device of a heart in flames and the motto ‘Declare I dare not’, which would have been just the sort of gesture expected of a courtly gallant.
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It would also be consistent with his statement in February 1527 that he had been in the ‘toils of love’ for upwards of twelve months. It is not very satisfactory trying to piece an emotional relationship together in this fashion, but it is the best that the evidence permits. It is also a one-sided story because Anne’s reactions can only be reconstructed from the King’s responses. Was she as committed as he was? At what point did it become clear to her that his intentions were more serious than those of a mere gallant? Was she holding out on him in the spring and summer of 1527 in anticipation of getting a better offer than that of
maitresse en titre
? The long frustration which followed is also capable of more than one interpretation. Now that marriage was a commitment on both sides, did she go on resisting pressure to share his bed, or did he not press her very hard? Even if they begot a bastard who was subsequently legitimated by their marriage, that would not necessarily solve the succession problem because the Beauforts, begotten in similar circumstances by John of Gaunt in the later fourteenth century, had subsequently been barred from the Crown in a precedent which would have been well enough remembered.
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It would be better to wait until they were properly married, then there could be no question of the legitimacy of their children. Perhaps it is also worth remembering that Anne had pledged her virginity to her future husband, and was more serious in that intention than she is usually given credit for. Because of the circumstances of her fall a decade later, Anne’s virginity was the subject of much ribald speculation among her enemies, but there is no reason not to take it seriously. In any case, Henry already had a bastard son, and although he had made a great thing of ennobling the child in the summer of 1525, there is no real evidence that he seriously intended to include him in the succession.
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So they waited … and waited. Henry had a case in canon law, but it was not a strong one and would have needed exceptionally skilled management, and a degree of luck, to be accepted. The crux of the matter was the dispensation issued by Julius II in 1503. No one denied that the canon law forbade a man from marrying his brother’s relict, but equally it was generally accepted that the Pope had the power to dispense from that law, which was what Julius had done. Henry based his case on the argument that the prohibition derived, not from the canon law but from the Book of Leviticus, thus making it a part of the Divine Law, which no pope has the power to dispense.
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This was arguable, but was not accepted by Clement because it imposed undesirable limitations upon the papal authority. In taking this stand he was supported by the Emperor, who had a vested interest in the case, and by a majority of the College of Cardinals. The politics of the situation also favoured Imperial influence. Wolsey’s attempt to set up an interim government came to nothing because only a handful of cardinals responded to his call, and the Pope from his prison fulminated against it. So the English attempt to circumvent him failed. When Clement first escaped to Orvieto in December 1527, he was indignant at his recent treatment, and very hard up, so that diplomatic and financial assistance, rapidly deployed, might for a few weeks have won Henry his will, but he allowed the opportunity to slip.
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Moreover, repeated French failures to defeat Charles led the Pope in the course of the following months to reassess his position. The Emperor was the likely winner in the battle for the military control of northern Italy, and it would be folly to provoke his displeasure. So repeated English missions were put off with empty words. What Henry wanted was a so-called Decretal Commission, which would have enabled Wolsey to hear the case in England without any possibility of appeal. At length, in the summer of 1528, he apparently got what he desired – a commission to Wolsey and Lorenzo Campeggio to hear the case in London – but it rapidly transpired when Campeggio arrived in the autumn that it was not a decretal commission. Moreover, which did not transpire, Campeggio was under secret instructions under no circumstances to find for the King.
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In other words the commission was a time-wasting sham, designed to cheat Henry of his expectations. The King’s public position was that his conscience was troubled. Anne was not mentioned and Catherine continued to preside at the court. A curious
ménage a trois
was established, with Anne being given lodgings close to those of the King and easy of access, but Catherine presiding at all public occasions including the christmas celebrations of 1528. Meanwhile, rumours of the King’s intentions had got out, indeed no particular attempt at secrecy was made, and it soon transpired that the Queen had widespread aristocratic and popular support. This was particularly true among women, who identified with her as the wronged spouse, and could not find words bad enough to describe the ‘other woman’. From time to time, as in September 1528, Henry felt constrained to send Anne home to Hever Castle, more for her own security and peace of mind that for any advantage to himself.
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On 8 November in order, as he said, to discharge his conscience, he addressed an invited assembly of nobles and citizens at his palace of Bridewell: