By the time Nuncio Gambara arrived in England with the dispensation and the commission, Anne had already left the Court for her parents’ house at Hever.1
This, probably, was to preserve the decencies. The fact that Henry had sought the dispensation showed of course that he was eager to marry again; while the particular provisions of the dispensation pointed directly to Anne as the woman in question: the ‘affinity contracted whether by licit or illicit intercourse’ arose from Henry’s affair with Anne’s sister Mary; ‘the previous betrothal’ referred to Anne’s aborted marriage with Percy. Indeed, her actual name seems already to have become known in Rome, together with a not very favourable view of her virtue: she was ‘not’, it was considered, ‘of so excellent qualities as she is here esteemed [in England]’. None of this was helpful to Henry’s case. But it was not seriously damaging either. On the other hand, for the Papal Nuncio to have found Henry and Anne living together in apparently open sin at Greenwich would have entirely destroyed Henry’s moral bona fide.
So Anne had to leave. At least it spared her having to witness Wolsey’s triumph. But equally her temporary rustication probably smoothed Wolsey’s path. His absence in France in the previous summer had led directly to Knight’s secret mission to Rome; now her absence in turn helped Wolsey to regain control of the Divorce suit.
Cardinal Wolsey moved with his customary single-mindedness and expedition. In little more than a week, Gambara was debriefed; the dispensation was dissected and a new mission to Rome was agreed on. Gambara would return to Rome, this time effectively as Henry’s ambassador to the Pope. And he would be accompanied by two new English envoys: Stephen Gardiner, Wolsey’s brilliant young aide, and Edward Foxe.2
Foxe came from the same stable as Gardiner. He went up to Cambridge in 1512, the year after Gardiner, and became Provost of King’s College in 1528, three years after Gardiner became Master of Trinity Hall. The two men thus enjoyed, as they said themselves, ‘old amity and fast friendship’, with Foxe deferring to Gardiner as the elder and the more brilliant. In the Embassy, for instance, Foxe had been given the precedence, since he was already a royal councillor, though it had always been intended that Gardiner was to do the bulk of the talking. But, between the two of them, they agreed that Gardiner should be named first, as well as speaking first. They also had rather different functions: Gardiner was the hard-hitting lawyer; Foxe, a Doctor of Divinity, was there to argue the theology of Henry’s case. It was a quieter role. But, in the long-run, it proved to be the more subversive.
The two had a long private meeting with Wolsey ‘in his chamber’ at his town palace of York Place on the night of Friday, 7 February. They probably accompanied the minister to Greenwich on Sunday the 9th and had an audience with Henry. Then, on the Monday, as Wolsey returned to London, they rode off, post-haste, on the first leg of their two-thousand-mile round trip. They left in such a hurry that much of the documentation of the Embassy–still in preparation at the time of their departure–had to be sent on after them by the courier Thaddeus. He was a crack rider; even so, dreadful weather conditions meant that he did not catch up with them until they were in France.3
Meanwhile, Henry and Wolsey proclaimed their renewed agreement on policy with a typical fireworks-display of co-ordinated speeches and actions. On Tuesday, 11 February, Henry went to stay the night with Wolsey at York Place. Late that same evening, in retaliation for the arrest of the English ambassadors in Spain, Mendoza, the Imperial ambassador, was arrested at his house in St Swithin’s Lane in the City and taken to Sir John Daunce’s house in Mark Lane near the Tower. On the Wednesday, the King and Cardinal summoned the ambassadors of most other powers to York Place jointly to explain their actions. The Emperor, they claimed, had persistently rejected their overtures for peace; therefore they had no choice but to declare war to protect the freedom of Italy and all Christendom from Charles V’s overweening power. That at least was what they said; their real motive, of course, was to free the Pope from Spanish control so that he could be brought to agree to Henry’s Divorce.4
Finally, on Thursday the 13th, Wolsey alone tried to justify the declaration of war to an assembly of English notables in the Star Chamber. They were more sceptical about the prospect of war with England’s major trading partner and her traditional ally. So, according to the chronicler Hall, the speech was received badly: members of the audience nudged each other (‘some knocked other on the elbow’) and whispered hostile comments. But that, for the moment, was the limit of the opposition.5
Publicly, therefore, Henry and Wolsey stood as one, shoulder-to-shoulder in support of a policy that carried high risks at home and abroad–and big opportunities too.
But all was not quite as it seemed. Just before he dismissed Foxe and Gardiner at the end of their audience on Sunday, Henry slipped Foxe a letter. It was for Anne, on whom the envoys were to call at Hever on their way to Dover.6
In contrast to Henry’s earlier, florid epistles in French, this letter was in English. And it was short, even terse. ‘This bearer and his fellow’, Henry told Anne, ‘be despatched with as many things to compass Our Matter and to bring it to pass as our will could imagine or devise.’ Henry drove the point home: the mission would result in rapid action: everything possible was being done. ‘Yet I will assure you,’ he continued, ‘there shall be no time lost that may be won, and further cannot be done; for ultra posse non esse.’
Henry doubtless intended that his excess of rhetorical devices–the repetition, the proverbial phrases, the rhyme, the translation into Latin for extra emphasis–would underscore his resolution and confidence. But they have the opposite effect. Was Henry doubtful about what he was doing? Or, more likely, did he fear that Anne was?
‘Keep him not too long with you, but desire him for your sake to make the more speed,’ Henry concluded, ‘for the sooner we shall have word from him the sooner shall Our Matter come to pass.’7
For both Henry and Anne, however, there was immediate consolation. Nuncio Gambara had left London on the same day as Gardiner and Foxe. So the coast was clear and Anne could come back to Court. Henry trusted she would make a ‘short repair [a quick return]’. But it could not be short enough for him ‘which desireth as much to be yours as you do to have him’.8
Then a hitch occurred. Somehow, Henry’s longing for Anne’s return became public knowledge. It was ‘better known at London than with any that is about me’, Henry informed Anne in another short, urgent note. He ‘much marvelled’, suspecting ‘lack of discrete handling [appropriate secrecy]’.9
He was right. For the cover of the one-time Secret Matter was long since blown. Instead, whether in public or (as they thought) in private, their love was played on an open stage. Henry reacted with irritation to the perpetual scrutiny, to the leaks and the rumours, whether true or false; Anne, in contrast, had the confidence of a natural celebrity and almost seemed to welcome the exposure.
Did she also see it as a sort of guarantee? As something which ensured that Henry was in too far to go back on his word?