The Queen’s House. Late September 1532
The coffer had written on it the words ‘The Queen’s Jewels’. his was where the glittering collection of unset gemstones, pearls, bracelets, strings of beads, rings, aglets, chains, clasps, crosses, jewelled buttons, collets, carcanets, partlets and decorated girdles of the English queen lived. The jewels in the collection now belonged to Catherine. They may not yet have entered the special jewel coffer that was first described by a court official in 1547, but she certainly kept them with her.
Some had come to England with her from Spain in her dowry. Others she had picked out from the selection offered to her by Henry VII to cure her homesickness. Still more had been inherited shortly after her second marriage when Henry’s grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, died. While many items had probably long been part of the royal collection, the contents of the jewel box also increased over the years with gifts from Henry. Many of these arrived – and some later departed – as part of the traditional exchange of gifts at court every New Year.
Whatever their origin, Catherine’s jewel-edged formal clothes and the heavy, elaborate chains and crosses she wore around her neck for portraits were evidence of status. They allowed her to show off her royal magnificence. They were, in short, proof that she was queen.
In late September 1532, a messenger from the duke of Norfolk arrived at her house to deliver the news that Henry wanted her jewels. This was not an attempt to increase his own, already abundant, collection of personal jewellery. He was preparing to meet the French king, the messenger said, and needed the jewels for the woman accompanying him, Anne Boleyn.
Catherine refused to hand over the jewels to her rival. ‘I cannot present the king with my jewels as he desires, inasmuch as when, on a late occasion, I, according to the custom of this kingdom, presented him with a New Year’s gift he warned me to refrain from such presents in future,’ she said, alluding to the gold cup he had so angrily rejected. ‘Besides which it is very annoying and offensive to me, and I would consider it a sin and a load upon my conscience if I were persuaded to give up my jewels for such a wicked purpose as that of ornamenting a person who is the scandal of Christendom.’ Anne Boleyn, she said, was turning Henry into a laughing stock by flaunting herself beside a man who was not her husband. Catherine blamed the woman who was stealing her husband away for ‘bringing vituperation and infamy upon the king, through his taking her with him to such a meeting across the Channel’.
If the king wanted the jewels, she said, he would have to order her to hand them over. ‘I am ready to obey his commands in that as in all other matters,’ she said. A gentleman of the king’s chamber duly arrived with the order. Catherine had no choice. She handed over all the jewellery she possessed, according to Chapuys. The one thing she held on to was a small, plain gold cross on a gold necklace. This contained something she considered far more valuable than any shiny gem – a sliver of the cross on which Jesus Christ died.
Catherine watched Anne’s progress from a distance, kept up to date by her ladies and their contacts at court, as her rival grew in confidence and pressed home her advantage. Anne had started the year by taking over Catherine’s own quarters at Greenwich and surrounding herself with a queen-sized entourage of ladies-in-waiting. The trip across the Channel to meet King Francis was designed to be a moment of crowning glory. Before they sailed for Calais in October 1532, Henry gave Anne the title of marchioness of Pembroke. This made her, in her own right, one of the senior people in the land. It also ensured her a hefty income. Unusually, though, the terms of the patent allowed her to pass the title on to any illegitimate children – a sign, perhaps, that Henry was still not fully confident about being granted a legitimate divorce.
Anne kept her own suspicious, watchful eye not just on Catherine and her supporters but on Princess Mary as well. When Henry and Mary, apparently by accident, met while out hunting that autumn, Anne sent two of her ladies to listen in to their conversation. A cowed Henry confined himself to swapping pleasantries with his own daughter.
For the trip to see the French king, Henry ordered up a queen’s wardrobe of magnificent gowns for Anne. The English let it be known that Henry would rather not meet Francis’s Spanish wife Eleanor, who was Charles’s sister and Catherine’s niece, as ‘he hates Spanish dress, since it makes him see a devil’. Catherine wondered if the confiscation of her jewellery meant, as was strongly rumoured, that Henry planned to marry Anne while they were on the continent. Chapuys reported, however, that Anne had said she would not do that. ‘She wants it done here, in the place where other queens have customarily been married and crowned,’ he reported.
Catherine’s husband and her rival returned from the continent in mid-November. They lingered for a while in Kent and the south-east. This may be where Anne, after more than five years, finally allowed Henry into her bed. Or perhaps it was in the English port of Calais, where rain, wind and fog kept them huddling in the town’s handsome Exchequer, that they took advantage of two bedrooms connected by a single door. Wherever it was, it was a momentous decision on Anne’s part. It meant, apart from anything else, that she felt absolutely secure that she would be queen.
Neither Catherine nor anyone else, except for those sworn to secrecy, knew about the change in Henry and Anne’s relationship – which may have involved some kind of binding exchange of vows in front of witnesses. There was no escaping, however, the changes that were happening to England’s government and church – and which gave Anne the confidence to take Henry into her bed.
Henry had been struggling to find a way both to achieve a legal divorce and to impose his new vision of an English kingship. Catherine beat him continually in Rome – where his main achievement was, to his wife’s continual frustration, to slow things down to a snail’s pace. His ideas developed incrementally. His actions were piecemeal. Each shift moved him closer to the idea that, with no ifs or buts, it was he, not the pope, who ruled the English church and clergy. Henry had always had a flamboyant sense of himself.
He was not, however, surrounded by great revolutionaries. Henry himself had the charisma, and power, to lead but he needed others to help him provide ideology and enthusiasm and, above all, to enforce change. The nobles who Henry had turned to after Wolsey’s departure were, however much they coveted the church’s wealth, conservative men. So, too, were the bishops. Even those, like Archbishop Warham, who were scared of Henry’s wrath or who, like Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, had helped him pursue the divorce, could suddenly dig in their heels if the pope’s, and their own, authority was challenged.
Men such as the scholar Edward Fox and Thomas Cranmer were helping Henry gather ideological arguments for his revolution. Anne, too, helped by pushing the works of William Tyndale into his hands. Hers was a formidable voice within Henry’s circle, but she could not be seen to be leading change. Wherever Henry’s ideas came from, there can be no doubt that the engine driving him forward was primed, first and foremost, by his need to overcome Catherine’s resistance to a divorce.
What the revolution needed most of all was an enforcer – someone with the talent, determination and, above all, discipline to drive through the changes. Thomas Cromwell began to fill the role. He was nothing if not disciplined. He was also hardworking, clever, ambitious and ruthless. And he was a believer. Increasingly, he oversaw Henry’s assault on the church of Rome.
Cromwell’s expertise lay both in the law and in the implacable pursuit of money. He had been Wolsey’s agent when the cardinal suppressed a series of minor monasteries in order to use their resources to fund his colleges at Oxford and Ipswich. At the fall of Wolsey, Cavendish found a teary-eyed Cromwell reciting his matins to himself in the latter’s house at Esher. ‘Which would since have been a very strange sight,’ he observed ironically some years after Cromwell had taken a key role in Henry’s attacks on the Roman Catholic church. Cromwell explained that he was feeling sorry for himself. What would he do without Wolsey? Then he pulled himself together and declared that he would seek his luck at Henry’s court. ‘I do intend (God willing), this afternoon, when my lord hath dined, to ride to London and so to the court, where I will either make or mar,’ he said.
Cromwell’s original success stemmed from his overseeing of Wolsey’s largess, when the cardinal suddenly had to start buying support. Wolsey began to spread his money as widely as possible, giving out generous annuities to, amongst others, Anne Boleyn’s brother, George. Cromwell organised this for him, reaping the gratitude of those who benefited from the cardinal’s sudden munificence. After Wolsey’s death he proved just as formidable at helping the king administer the cardinal’s former estate. He also began to prove himself in parliament. In 1529 he had heard, perhaps even joined in, the cries of ‘Down with the church!’ that echoed around the chamber during a debate which showed that not only Henry was tiring of corrupt, over-fed priests. Years of clerical abuse had left the field well manured. He also seems to have helped persuade the clergy to accept Henry as their Supreme Head – albeit with that caveat of only ‘as far as the law of Christ allows’. By the end of autumn 1531 he had become Henry’s man in parliament. He soon acquired a new skill – that of turning parliament against the church and the clergy.
In March 1532 parliament denounced the abuses of the church and its courts in the so-called ‘Supplication against the Ordinaries’. This explicitly described Henry as the ‘only head, sovereign lord, protector and defender’ of the church. It removed the ifs and buts the clergy had included when they had previously insisted that this was only so ‘as far as the law of Christ allows’. The clergy fought the changes, but lost. It was the moment Sir Thomas More, ever faithful to his own view of the church, decided he could no longer serve the king and resigned as lord chancellor.
Catherine, meanwhile, saw the tide washing away from her. The pope was feeble. He offered only mealy-mouthed admonitions to Henry and avoided, at all costs, reaching a sentence. She would lodge her complaints against Clement to God after her death, she told her nephew. Charles continued to support her, but he had more important business elsewhere. In November 1532 she wrote to congratulate him on a victory over the Turkish army in Hungary. She urged him, also, to tell the pope ‘to kill the second Turk, which is the business of my lord the king and I’.
She despaired, but kept her hand on the tiller. Chapuys and, occasionally, even the papal nuncio in England awaited her instructions – as did a team of people in Rome. There was no holding back the tide, however. In August 1532 William Warham died. Old age, rather than the king’s rage, eventually killed the man who, as archbishop of Canterbury, Catherine had found so spineless. Warham had, however, refused to disobey the pope and try the case himself. All Henry needed to do now was place someone in Canterbury who would not shrink from delivering a divorce – whatever Rome said. That man, much to his own alarm, was Cranmer. His own secret marriage may have weighed on his conscience. ‘There was never man came more unwillingly to a bishoprick than I did to that,’ he claimed later.
Almost everything was now in place to defy Rome. Cromwell could be counted on, when necessary, to deliver the final parliamentary acts. Cranmer would do the rest.
Little surprise, perhaps, that Anne Boleyn now felt confident she would finally get what she had been promised five long years before. Her sluggish lover, though, still needed pushing. Soon events moved to the point of no return. By Christmas 1532, Anne was pregnant. It was a final, calculated move to bind Henry to her. In January 1533, in absolute secrecy, they were married. Catherine’s husband was now a bigamist.