Anne was not the only person searching for new ideas. In the wake of the collapse of Wolsey’s whole strategy in the Great Matter, every member of the King’s party was on the look-out for the key idea that would unlock the Divorce. And the nearer they were to the centre of affairs, the greater was the pressure to come up with something new.
Two of those who had benefited most from the Great Matter were the Cambridge friends, Stephen Gardiner and Edward Foxe. Gardiner was now royal Secretary, while Foxe–always more of a backroom figure than his ebullient friend–was the leading member of the King’s Spiritual Council. On 2 August 1529, very shortly after the adjournment of the Blackfriars Court, Henry and Anne left Greenwich on the first stage of the summer Progress. Gardiner and Foxe formed part of the inner ring of courtiers and councillors who accompanied them. The first scheduled stop was Waltham Abbey or the Hertfordshire-Essex border.1
The Abbey was able to accommodate only the immediate royal party, and Gardiner and Foxe were lodged instead in the neighbouring township now known as Waltham Cross. The harbingers (the royal officials responsible for billeting courtiers) placed them in the house of a certain Mr Cressy. As they settled in, they recognised a familiar face from Cambridge. For Dr Thomas Cranmer of Jesus College was tutor to two of Cressy’s sons and had taken refuge in his house, together with his pupils, when the plague had struck in the university.2
Cranmer belonged to a senior generation. He was born in 1489 and had gone up to Cambridge in 1503. But, in comparison with the brilliant Gardiner, he was a late developer. He only took his BA in 1511–2 and did not complete his doctorate of divinity until 1526, a full four years after the much younger Gardiner had secured his own double doctorate in canon and civil law.3
But what Cranmer lacked in brilliance, he made up for in steadiness: he was thorough, organised and a superb note-taker. In contrast with the instinctively partisan Gardiner, he was also blessed (and sometimes cursed) with an ability to see both sides of the question. This, combined with his essential fair-mindedness, meant that his opinions were in a state of slow but constant change. The individual steps were scarcely ever revolutionary. But his lifetime’s journey–from orthodoxy to advanced reform–was. Finally, and unlike most of his contemporaries, he had acquired a style of written English which was clear, simple and, at its frequent best, of surpassing beauty.
Gardiner and Cranmer were, in short, the hare and the tortoise: radically different in temperament and abilities and destined to be rivals and eventually deadly opponents in Church and State. Even after five centuries, it is unclear who won.
But in 1529 they found themselves on the same side–that of Anne and the King.
At supper in Cressy’s house, probably on the night of Gardiner’s and Foxe’s arrival, the three fell into conversation. All of them being Cambridge men, they talked about the university. Then the topic shifted to the burning issue of the day: the King’s Great Matter. Cranmer’s contribution was a characteristic mixture of diffidence and boldness. First, he excused himself by saying that, unlike his two acquaintances, he had made no particular study of the question. Nevertheless, he continued, he was sure that both they and, by implication, the King were pursuing the wrong strategy. ‘I do think’, he said, ‘you go not the next way to work, as to bring the matter to a perfect conclusion and end, specially for the satisfaction of the troubled conscience of the King’s Highness.’
This was because they were treating the case legally, by ‘observing the common process and frustratory delays of these your courts’. At best, this approach would be slow; at worst, it would resolve nothing. But, Cranmer insisted, there was an alternative and superior strategy. For the issue, properly considered, was not legal but moral. And the moral laws, unlike canon law, were certain. ‘There is’, he asserted flatly, ‘but one truth in it’. And this unique truth was visible, not to lawyers like Gardiner, but to theologians like himself. ‘No man ought or better can discuss it than the divines’, he claimed. It would be easy to canvass their opinion, ‘with little industry and charge’. And, once done, Henry would have what he most craved: certainty. He would also be conscientiously entitled to settle matters on the basis of the theological ruling, whatever the state of the legal process and whatever the Pope might say or do.4
The view that truth, especially on moral questions, is one and indivisible, and that it is perceived as such by all men of goodwill, is a common one. It seems to be impervious to experience and invincible to argument and is still widely held even today. But it is especially characteristic of ages of faith and revolution–like the early sixteenth century. It also appeals particularly to academics with little experience of the outside world–like Cranmer.
Cranmer was on the threshold of this larger experience. When he stepped over it, the consequences would be huge–for himself, for Catherine, for Henry and, above all, for Anne.
Cranmer’s recommended course of action was also a professional slight on Gardiner and his discipline of law. Was this the result of innocence? Or was it a deliberate dig at a showy and, so far, much more successful colleague? As often with Cranmer, it is impossible to be sure.
But Gardiner’s hurt feelings or envy, if there were such, had to be set aside. Cranmer, his naïve and donnish acquaintance, might have stumbled on the way forward for the Great Matter. At any rate, his idea was worth floating before the King. Gardiner and Foxe made haste to do so.
Choosing their moment, they recounted their conversation at Waltham to Henry and Henry, intrigued, decided to summon Cranmer to an interview.
Here an element of doubt enters. According to both versions of the story, Cranmer had his audience at Greenwich. But the Court did not return there for fully twelve weeks, until 24 October. By that time much water had flowed under the bridge. Wolsey had fallen and on the 25th, also at Greenwich, Henry gave his successor, Sir Thomas More, the Great Seal.5
Some historians feel that this gap before the interview is too long. In fact, it seems to me to make sense, since, in the interim, Henry’s mind had been on other things. First there was the winding up of the Legatine Court. Then there was the engineering of Wolsey’s fall. Finally there was the debate over his successor and the preparations for the forthcoming Parliament. Only in late October did the King have the leisure either to meet Cranmer or to respond to his audacious suggestion.
But, whenever the encounter took place, the meeting of minds was instantaneous. Cranmer was telling Henry what he wanted to hear. He was also repeating what, if we believe Reginald Pole, Anne had been telling Henry since 1527. ‘That man hath the sow by the right ear’, Henry is supposed to have said appreciatively about Cranmer.6
Cranmer’s Cambridge days were over. On the spot, Henry ‘retained him to write his mind in that his cause of divorcement’. Then, according to John Foxe’s more coloured version of the story, the King summoned Thomas Boleyn, Anne’s father. ‘I pray you, my lord’, he said, ‘let Dr Cranmer have entertainment in your house at Durham Place for a time, to the intent he may be there quiet to accomplish my request, and let him lack neither books nor anything requisite for his study.’7
Cranmer’s connexion with the Boleyns had begun.
This too was a meeting of minds–and interests. Thomas Boleyn, like his two bright children, Anne and George, was interested in the new religious ideas. This was enough for Chapuys to brand the whole family as ‘Lutheran’. Cranmer was tending in the same direction, for reasons that were both personal and philosophical. He had interrupted his Cambridge career for what looks like a shot-gun marriage with the barmaid of the Dolphin Inn. The marriage ended quickly because of her early death. But Cranmer’s interest in the opposite sex remained very much alive. During the lively conversation at Waltham, he had also argued that Papal power must yield to Scriptural truth. This too was a characteristically Lutheran position–as was the attitude he assumed, practically if not yet theoretically, to clerical marriage.
But of course it was the political implications of Cranmer’s ideas which mattered and which made him so attractive to the Boleyns. For marriage and the extent of Papal power were the hot issues of the day. And Cranmer, it seemed, had something new to say on them. Or at least he said it better than anyone else. Soon he became Thomas Boleyn’s chief theoretician and strategist on the Divorce. At the same time, and drawing largely on Cranmer’s ideas, Lord Privy Seal Wiltshire, as Thomas Boleyn now was, turned himself into the minister for the Great Matter.
There was a sort of inevitability about this. Thomas Boleyn, as Anne’s father, had the most obvious personal interest of all Henry’s new councillors in bringing about the Divorce. He was also prepared to countenance measures that were, it soon became clear, too extreme for anyone else to stomach. And since the Divorce was the principal item of royal policy, the councillor in charge of it became, ipso facto, principal minister.
Historians have been slow to recognise Thomas Boleyn’s position–as indeed were contemporaries. Instead, it was the showier power of the two Dukes, Norfolk and Suffolk, who attracted comment and adulation. Understandably piqued, Thomas Boleyn decided to teach the French ambassador, Du Bellay, the new realities of power. The casus belli was an apparently trivial item of diplomatic business. Du Bellay thought that the matter had already been settled by Norfolk and Suffolk. Boleyn quickly showed him his mistake. ‘He let everybody have their say’, the aggrieved ambassador reported, ‘then argued the opposite and defended it to the hilt.’ His intention, Du Bellay added, was to display his displeasure that ‘one had failed to worship the Young Lady [Anne]’. It was also to confirm the truth of what Boleyn had told him previously. ‘That is to say that none of the other [councillors] have any credit at all [with Henry] unless it pleased the Young Lady to lend them some.’
Did Thomas Boleyn protest too much? I do not think so. Nor did Du Bellay. Thomas Boleyn’s claim about the power wielded by his daughter, Anne, was, the ambassador concluded, ‘as true as the Gospel’.8
All this meant, as far as Cranmer was concerned, that he reported not only to Thomas Boleyn but also to Anne, as the power behind her father and, evidently, the power behind the throne as well.
With this backing, Cranmer’s rise as head of the Durham Place think-tank was rapid. Already, probably by November 1529, he formed one of a select group of four royal advisers who were nominated to try to persuade Thomas More, the newly appointed Chancellor, out of his unfortunate reluctance to support the Divorce. More lists the group as consisting of Cranmer; the Almoner, Edward Lee; Foxe; and Niccolo de Burgo (‘the Italian friar’). And he describes them as ‘such of his Grace’s learned counsel, as most for his part had laboured and most have found in the matter’. Cranmer was indeed in exalted company and had come far, fast.9
But his main activity that autumn was to follow up Henry’s instructions at his first audience and prepare a ‘book’ on the King’s case for a Divorce. Foxe describes the result as follows: it contained, ‘besides the authorities of Scriptures, of general councils and of ancient writers, also his own opinion, which was this: That the [Pope] had no such authority, as whereby he might dispense with the word of God and the Scripture’. The ‘book’ itself cannot now be securely identified and it is even unclear whether it survives. What is certain, however, is that it was sent to Cambridge. There it was circulated among the theology faculty with a view to softening up opinion on the Divorce. It was clearly effective–at least in persuading the already converted.10
It is, however, important to put Cranmer’s contribution in context. There was, of course, nothing new about Henry consulting learned opinion. Such consultations had formed part of the King’s armoury from the very beginning of the Great Matter. Moreover, in the dying days of his ministry, Wolsey had been eager for a canvass of French opinion and had tried on at least two occasions to persuade Ambassador Du Bellay, who was sympathetic to Henry’s position, to undertake it on the King’s behalf. But what is characteristic of these schemes is their vagueness. ‘Wolsey and the King’, Du Bellay reported baldly, ‘appeared to desire very much that I should go over to France to get the opinions of learned men there on the Divorce.’11
It was the same at the beginning of October when Henry decided to send his own envoys to France instead. Chapuys, it is true, reports that Catherine ‘is very much afraid’ that one of the envoys, Dr John Stokesley, the Dean of the Chapel Royal, was ‘sent now to France for no other purpose than that of inducing the University of Paris to write in behalf of the King’. But Catherine, understandably, often anticipated movements against her long before they happened. So it was in this case. For the envoys’ instructions replicate the vagueness of Wolsey’s would-be commission to Du Bellay. Since Du Bellay had advised Henry that many French scholars were of ‘semblable opinion and sentence’, the King commanded Stokesley to consult with Du Bellay’s brother, Guillaume, the seigneur de Langey, about whom he should approach. Then, ‘having conference with such learned men…he shall extend his wit and learning to conduce them, and attain their opinions and sentences conformable to the King’s purpose’. There is no mention of the Sorbonne or any other university. Instead, the only body specifically named is ‘the French Court’–though Stokesley was also authorised to extend his search ‘elsewhere’.12
Chapuys is equally misleading on the status of the Embassy. He compared it dismissively to one sent at the same time to his own master, the Emperor, claiming that its personnel were men ‘of less splendour in their equipage and condition’: that is, of lower rank. He could not have been further from the truth, since the French Embassy was headed by Anne’s own brother, George. Du Bellay, of course, knew differently. He had had some wry amusement at the choice of the Boleyns’ ‘little prince’ as ambassador when he was still barely out of his teens. But he had no illusion about George’s importance. Those who sent him, he advised, ‘are most anxious for him to be given a good welcome and more honour than is ordinarily necessary’. The choice of Stokesley is equally significant since he too was a Boleyn client. ‘Your good lordship’, Stokesley wrote a few months later to Thomas Boleyn, ‘hath fastly bound me to be your beadsman and servitor at your commandment during the little rest of my life.’13
In other words, even at this embryonic stage, the canvass of learned opinion was a Boleyn enterprise, to be overseen by members of the family and carried out by its clients. And so it would remain–and more so–after Cranmer’s dramatic intervention transformed its nature.
For that, it is now clear, is what he did. In place of the earlier, vague proposals for consultation, Cranmer produced a fully thought through scheme that had shape, strategy and a modus operandi.
The elements were already there in his remarks at Waltham. But they were refined and developed in his subsequent conversations with the King and Thomas Boleyn and, above all, in his Durham Place writings. We can also be sure that Anne made her own powerful contribution.
At Waltham, Cranmer had argued that the ‘sentence [of the Divines] may be soon known and brought to pass’. This, in the fully developed scheme, translated into a systematic canvass of academic opinion. It was carried out university by university and it was designed to result in a series of formal, legally binding statements or ‘determinations’, agreed by the appropriate representative body of each university and delivered under its official seal. Cranmer, from the first, had also been clear that the matter was essentially one for ‘the Divines’. This was to result in the targeting of faculties of theology. Faculties of canon law were also consulted. But, in general, fewer hopes were entertained of them and less importance was given to their verdicts. But most important was Cranmer’s reduction of the complexities of the Great Matter to a straightforward, four-part formula or questionnaire. It was a talent for creative simplification that was to find its fullest and longest-lasting achievement in his later liturgical works. Here, however, he deployed it to devastating polemical effect.14
Was it, the universities were to be asked, permissible to marry the widow of your deceased brother, when the marriage had been childless but consummated? Or was it contrary to divine law? And contrary to natural law? And if it were contrary to both divine and natural law, could the Pope dispense from such a prohibition?
Henry’s preferred answers to these questions were ‘no’, ‘yes’, ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ respectively.
By late November 1529, Henry was fully up to speed on the new approach to the Great Matter and had persuaded himself that it would work. Indeed, he was confident enough to boast about it to Catherine.
The two, of course, were leading separate lives, albeit usually under the same roof. But they maintained the decencies. Whatever their increasingly acrimonious private disputes, they preserved a façade of public politeness, behaving, as the Milanese ambassador noted with some surprise, with ‘so much reciprocal courtesy…that anyone acquainted with the controversy cannot but consider their conduct more than human’. They also kept up the ceremonial of the Court, processing together to the Chapel Royal on the great feast-days of the Church and dining together afterwards. And it was over these meals that their worst quarrels tended to occur.15
So it was on St Andrew’s Day, 30 November 1529.
It was Catherine who commenced hostilities. According to Chapuys, she protested that she suffered the ‘pains of Purgatory on earth’ from Henry’s neglect of her. In particular, she complained of Henry’s ‘refusing to dine with her and visit her in her apartments’. Henry justified his neglect by pleading business: Wolsey had left things in such a mess that he was having ‘to work day and night to put them to rights again’. Then he, in turn, went on the attack. As for ‘visiting her in her apartments or partaking of her bed’, that was impossible since he was not her husband. All respectable, authoritative opinion, he insisted, agreed on this point. He already had several such opinions, ‘founded upon right and canonic law’, and, when he had the rest, he would send them to the Pope. That should end the matter. But if the Pope did not ‘in conformity with the above opinions…declare their marriage null and void, then in that case he would denounce the Pope as a heretic and marry whom he pleased’.
Catherine, who was as well informed on the case as both Henry and Anne, picked her husband’s arguments to pieces. She ended by telling Henry triumphantly that ‘for each doctor or lawyer who might decide in your favour and against me, I shall find a thousand to declare that the marriage is good and indissoluble’.
Did her crowing bring back Henry’s memories of an earlier exchange, when, in the aftermath of Flodden, Catherine had told him that, in return for his captive French Duke, she was sending him the coat of the dead King of Scots?
Then, as now, his wife knew who was the greater victor.
Bested, Henry retreated to Anne. But he found cold comfort. ‘Did I not tell you’, Anne snapped, ‘that whenever you disputed with the Queen she was sure to have the upper hand?’ Some fine day, she continued, Henry would succumb to Catherine’s arguments. Then what would happen to Anne? She would be cast off. ‘I have been waiting long’, she protested with increasing vehemence, ‘and might in the meanwhile have contracted some advantageous marriage, out of which I might have had issue…But, alas!, farewell to my time and youth spent to no purpose at all’.16
One almost begins to feel sorry for Henry, caught as he was in the cross-fire between two such women.
In fact, whatever Henry had said to Catherine, it was not until New Year 1530 that the campaign to secure favourable ‘determinations’ from the universities really got under way, both at home and abroad.
At home, and even before the royal approaches were made, Cranmer’s own university of Cambridge was up in arms. The occasion was two sermons delivered in Advent (the four weeks before Christmas) 1529 by Hugh Latimer, Fellow of Clare Hall. As late as 1524, when he took his degree of bachelor of divinity, Latimer had been a staunch traditionalist. But shortly thereafter he was ‘converted’ by Thomas Bilney. Overnight he became a powerful preacher and (like most brilliant lecturers) a thorn in the flesh of the university authorities. Things came to a head in his Advent sermons. They were outrageously populist, explaining Salvation by analogy with the rules of a popular game of cards known as Triumph or Trump. And their teaching was inflammatory too. Trumps, according to Latimer were hearts: the heart prostrated and humbled in the Love of God, like Mary Magdalen’s. And in the love of your neighbour too. This meant that traditional (Latimer called them ‘voluntary’) works of piety–such as pilgrimages, offerings to saints and the setting up of candles in church–were, at best, an irrelevance in the quest for Salvation. Instead, saving, triumphing Love showed itself only by the necessary works of mercy and charity, such as relieving the poor, visiting prisoners and comforting the sick.17
Immediately, a battle of the pulpits broke out, with sermons and counter-sermons. News reached the Court, where Cambridge men including Foxe and Gardiner had the King’s ear. On 24 January, Foxe wrote to the vice-chancellor, Dr William Buckmaster of Peterhouse, warning him of Henry’s impending intervention in the ‘shameful contentions’ and urging him to put the university’s own house in order by enjoining silence on both parties. But Foxe’s letter also reveals a new dimension to the affair: the petty squabbles of Cambridge had been caught up in the larger divisions over the Great Matter.
‘It is reported to the King’, Foxe wrote, ‘that this malice is expressed because Latimer favours his cause.’ The suspicion was borne out, Foxe continued, because Latimer’s opponents had such strong connexions with Bishop Fisher of Rochester, Catherine’s great champion and the chancellor of the university. They were members of St John’s, the Cambridge college which Fisher had encouraged Henry’s grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, to found. And they were egged on, it was reported, by Fisher’s many friends in the university, including the master of St John’s.18
Five days later, on the 29th, Buckmaster acted on Foxe’s advice and, in a speech to the senate, ordered both parties to keep silence about matters of current controversy. It is unknown how effective this order was. But, in any case, feelings were still running high when, in early February, Foxe and Gardiner arrived at Cambridge as royal envoys to the university.19
Cambridge had been chosen for the honour of delivering the first verdict on Henry’s marriage. And it was Foxe and Gardiner’s task to make sure that the verdict was the right one.
Bearing in mind his multiplicity of connexions with the university, Henry was probably expecting a walkover. In the event, he met stiff opposition, as Gardiner and Foxe informed him in their initial report. They arrived in Cambridge on Saturday at noon and that night and the following Sunday morning they spent consulting and lobbying. But the other side were equally active: ‘as we assembled, they assembled; as we made friends, they made friends’.
The result was that, when the university senate assembled on Sunday afternoon, Henry’s opponents at first carried the day. The scene will be painfully familiar to anyone who has sat through such events. Vice-chancellor Buckmaster began, as was customary, by consulting the doctors of theology. There was no clear pattern to their replies et res erat in multa confusione (‘and things were in great confusion’). Tandem (‘at length’), as Gardiner feelingly puts it, it was agreed that the decision should be referred to a committee, known then as now as ‘delegates’. There followed a concerted attempt by Henry’s opponents to exclude from this committee anyone who was known to have ‘allowed [accepted] Dr Cranmer’s book’ on the Divorce, which had already been circulated. This was fought off. But when the vice-chancellor’s proposed terms of reference for the delegates were put to the vote, ‘they would in no wise agree’. As it was already night, Buckmaster adjourned the meeting till the following afternoon.
Even then it was a cliff-hanger. The first ballot resulted in another negative. Then there was a tie. Finally, at the third attempt, ‘by labour of friends to cause some to depart the house which were against it, it was obtained’. Gardiner and Foxe sent Henry a copy of this vote or ‘grace’ (as again it is still called), together with an annotated list of the delegates. ‘All marked with “A” ’, they told Henry in their covering letter, ‘be already of your Grace’s opinion.’ Six of the doctors were thus marked and seven of the masters, while three more names bore the note: de isto bene speratur (‘of this one there is good hope’). It was, as Henry’s agents concluded, just enough:
Your Highness may perceive by the notes, that we be already sure of as many as be requisite, wanting only three; and we have good hope of four [sic]; of which four if we get two, and obtain of another to be absent, it is sufficient for our purpose.
Cranmer, it may be remembered, had thought that the canvass of academic opinion could be done ‘with little industry and charge’. He had fallen at the first fence, even in his own university.20
Nevertheless, Cambridge finally delivered the desired verdict on 9 March. Immediately, a delegation headed by the vice-chancellor went to Court to inform the King in person. They arrived at Windsor on 13 March in the afternoon. It was the second Sunday in Lent, and the preacher appointed for this prestigious occasion was none other than Latimer. It was his first sermon at Court and he proved as much a sensation there as at Cambridge. Henry gave him an extra reward of £5 (the annual stipend for many clergy) from his Privy Purse, on top of the customary 20 shillings.21
There is no similarly direct evidence for Anne’s reaction. But it is safe to assume that it was profound. She came to accept Latimer’s distinction, which was then novel and controversial, between the two sorts of ‘works’. ‘Voluntary’ works of traditional piety, he had proclaimed in his Cambridge sermons and probably repeated at Court, were useless; instead true works were the ‘necessary’ works of charity and mercy which flowed from Saving Grace and Love. Soon Anne’s rapidly growing means would enable her to put her preferences into action. Foxe, the martyrologist, asserts that her charitable alms ‘in three quarters of a year…is summed to the number of fourteen or fifteen thousand pounds’. This is an impossibly vast amount, and it has been guessed that Foxe, who rarely makes such a straightforward mistake of fact, may have added a zero to his source. But everybody agreed that her benefactions were unusually generous. And she was to invoke them in her hour of need.22
A reluctant witness of Latimer’s triumph was Vice-chancellor Buckmaster. Buckmaster had used the weight of his office to support the King’s cause at Cambridge. But, like university authorities throughout the ages, he had little time for troublemakers–such as Latimer.
Buckmaster had arrived at Windsor in time to hear ‘part of Mr Latimer’s sermon’, which was followed by evensong at about 5 o’clock. That done, Buckmaster presented the university’s ‘determination’ to the King, ‘in the Chamber of Presence, all the Court beholding’. Henry was delighted. It was the first ‘determination’ of a university and it was, he had been assured by Foxe and Gardiner, favourable. He glanced at the covering letter but did not bother to read the ‘determination’ itself. Instead he turned his charm on Buckmaster. ‘His Highness’, Buckmaster reported in a letter to his close friend Dr John Edmunds, master of Peterhouse and his successor as vice-chancellor, ‘gave me great thanks…[and] much lauded our wisdoms’. He then made clear that his thanks would be followed by a more substantial token of favour for Cambridge. ‘He showed me also’, Buckmaster continued, ‘what he had in his hands for our University.’
Nevertheless, the King could not pass up the chance of having a dig at Buckmaster for his hostility to the new favourite royal preacher, Latimer. ‘By and by [Henry] greatly praised Mr Latimer’s sermon; and, in so praising, said in this wise: “This displeaseth greatly Mr Vice-chancellor yonder!”’
‘And here is the first act,’ Buckmaster interpolated, as the smooth high-table raconteur he was.
The second act took place next day. There were two scenes. In the first, the Cambridge delegation was presented with Henry’s personal rewards: twenty nobles (£6 13s 4d) for Buckmaster and half as much (£3 6s 8d) for the junior proctor who accompanied him. The rewards were brought by Dr Butts, the favourite royal physician and master of St Mary’s Hostel, Cambridge, who had clearly been carrying out some discreet lobbying for his university. Butts further informed Buckmaster that he should take the reward ‘for a resolute answer, and that I might depart from the Court when I would’. Was Anne, to whom Butts was very close, intervening to get the delegation out of the way before Henry’s mood changed?
If so, she was too late and Butts’s orders were countermanded by Foxe. There then took place the second, and much less agreeable, scene of the act. It was set in a ‘privy place’ where Foxe brought Buckmaster to await the King’s arrival. He entered at 1 o’clock. ‘It was in a gallery’, Buckmaster informed Edmunds, and ‘there were only Mr Secretary [Gardiner], Mr Provost [Foxe], Mr Latimer and Mr Proctor and I and no more.’ Henry kept them in intense debate for five hours. The reason was that he had discovered a crucial omission in what they had brought. ‘He was scarce contented’, Buckmaster reported, that the ‘determination’ contained no answer to the question: An papa possit dispensare cum jure divino? (Could the Pope dispense with divine law?). Without an answer to this, the Cambridge declaration, won with such effort, was almost useless for Henry’s purposes.
Foxe and Gardiner had already explained the reason: if the clause had been included ‘it would never have been so obtained’. Buckmaster added his own excuses: ‘I made the best, and confirmed the same that they had showed his Grace before’. Henry grudgingly accepted the explanation but demanded that the additional clause be adopted after Easter.
At 6 o’clock Henry departed, ‘casting a little Holy Water of the Court’ (that is, fair words without meaning). And Foxe and Gardiner did not even ask Buckmaster to stay for a drink.
Buckmaster left the next day, ‘thinking more than I said and being glad that I was out of the Court, where, as I both heard and perceived, many men did wonder on me’. ‘And here shall be an end for this time of this fable,’ he concluded with relief.23
Not for the last time, an academic had found himself out of his depth in the world of power politics.
There is no evidence that the additional clause, on the Papal dispensing power, was ever agreed. Nevertheless, despite Cambridge’s failure fully to satisfy Henry, the university’s ‘determination’ was a watershed. It was the moment when a generation chose. And at Cambridge, though not at Oxford, it had decided that it was on the side of Henry, of Reform–and of Anne. We do not know what the ‘A’ annotation stands for in Foxe’s and Gardiner’s list. Perhaps it was ‘A’ for Amicus or ‘Friend’. It can hardly have been ‘A’ for ‘Anne’. Yet it might just as well have been. For, of the seven Masters marked with an ‘A’, no less than four, Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Shaxton, John Skip and Thomas Goodrich, came to enjoy her enthusiastic patronage: Latimer became her chaplain, while Skip succeeded Shaxton as her Almoner.24
And just how vigorous and calculating Anne’s patronage was emerges from the case of one of the doctors marked with an ‘A’, Edward Crome, DD. Crome also was to benefit from Anne’s interest in his career. Indeed, she pushed him too far for his own liking. In 1534 she obtained for him the parsonage of the important City church of St Mary’s, Aldermanbury. But Crome long hesitated about accepting the position. Finally, on 20 May 1534, Anne lost patience. ‘By which refusal’, she informed him bluntly, ‘we think that you right little regard or esteem your weal or advancement.’ He was also disregarding the larger questions that were so important to her. She had determined on his appointment, she informed him, as tending powerfully to ‘the furtherance of virtue, truth and godly doctrine’. Therefore, she commanded, let him ‘use no farther delays in this matter but take on you the cure and charge…as you tender our pleasure in any behalf ’.25
Faced with this imperious command, Crome accepted.
One name, of course, is missing from the goings-on at Cambridge: Thomas Cranmer, the man who had started it all. This is because it had been decided that Cranmer would be better employed abroad.
In late January 1530, all the talk was of the despatch of an Embassy from Henry to the Emperor Charles V, who was about to meet Pope Clement VII at Bologna for his Imperial coronation. The Embassy was headed by Anne’s father, Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, in his triple capacity as the King’s first minister, future father-in-law and leading magnate (even Henry, according to Chapuys, insisted on referring to him as ‘monseigneur’). And it was an appropriately magnificent affair. On 20 January 1530, to confirm his status, Wiltshire was formally appointed Lord Privy Seal and given a valuable wardship. The same day, the eagle-eyed Chapuys noted that the advance luggage train of the Embassy, consisting of servants with eight mules, had left London. But this was only the beginning. ‘It is thought’, Chapuys reported, ‘that the whole troop will consist of 60 or 80 horses, exclusive of the mules.’ ‘Early’ the next day, Wiltshire himself set off. He was accompanied by two theologians, a canon lawyer, a herald and a clerk of the signet to act as secretary to the Embassy and to draw up documentation in the proper form. The initial costs, for wages and living expenses alone, amounted to the enormous sum of £1,743. This left such a large hole in the Chamber, the treasury which normally paid ambassadorial expenses, that Henry made good the amount out of his Privy Purse.
Apart from Wiltshire, Chapuys picked out only three members of the Embassy by name. One of the three, whom he identified as a royal chaplain and theologian, was Cranmer (‘Croma’).26
This, clearly, was no ordinary Embassy. Instead, it was an attempt at a comprehensive relaunch of the Great Matter. Cranmer’s insights would be applied to diplomacy, in the form of a last-ditch attempt to win over Charles V, the key obstacle to the solution of the Divorce at Rome. His ideas would also be given practical effect, by a comprehensive canvass of academic opinion in France and Italy. In comparison with these ambitious goals, anything going on in England was small beer. Which is why Gardiner and Foxe were left to deal with Oxford and Cambridge, while Cranmer was sent off with Wiltshire. It is also why Wiltshire himself as chief minister was put in personal charge of the mission.
The last time anything like this had been tried was Wolsey’s ill-fated mission to France in 1527. But then the diplomatic situation had turned against Wolsey; he was also fatally undercut at home. Wiltshire would have better luck. The fate, which had made Charles V absolute master of Europe, slowly began to turn. And Wiltshire could also relax on the home front: his daughter Anne would see to that.
Wiltshire’s first port of call was Paris, the seat of the Sorbonne. This was the most prestigious faculty of theology in Christendom. A favourable verdict from the Sorbonne would go far to establish Henry’s case; a negative one would destroy it. Henry had high hopes, since Francis I of France had thrown his weight behind the campaign for the Divorce. But Henry’s approaches to the faculty, which had begun the previous November, had run into immediate difficulties. The first obstacle was the formidable Noel Béda, principal of the collège de Montaigu and the scourge of the proto-Protestant Cercle de Meaux. Béda was rigorously orthodox, too, on the question of Papal authority, which, he correctly perceived, was challenged by Henry VIII’s claims. He was therefore implacable in his opposition. And, thanks to his authority, obstinacy and almost infinite deviousness, he waged a highly effective campaign. He was not short of allies either, whether in the parlement of Paris or in the substantial group of Spanish scholars in the Sorbonne. The latter were led by Dr Garay, who, with very little help from Charles V, conducted a freelance guerrilla war on Catherine’s behalf.
It was like Cambridge, only worse.
Wiltshire was informed of the situation in a letter from his client Stokesley, one of the two English agents in Paris. The letter, dated 16 January, probably reached the Earl en route. It detailed the machinations of Béda and ‘the unlearned Spanish Doctor Pedro Garay’, and the steps which the English had taken to counter the ‘authority’ of the former and the ‘fury’ of the latter. But finally, Stokesley made plain, everything depended on direct intervention by the French King.
Anne’s brother George, the other English agent, had ridden off in post to the Court at Dijon to try to procure it. But Stokesley was not optimistic. For Francis I’s two sons, surrendered as hostages for the fulfilment of his treaty with his captor Charles V, were still in Spanish hands. Till they were released, the French would do nothing openly, ‘for that they feared that thereby the Emperor might make a colour [pretext] to delay the deliverance of the…King’s children.’ Montmorency, the chief French minister, and De Langey, Du Bellay’s brother, had been quite open about this, Stokesley reported: only let the Princes be in French hands ‘and we should have of…them all aid and furtherance that we would desire’. But were they, he wondered, as sincere as they seemed? Would it not be wiser to continue to press ahead while the French were so dependent on the English for co-operation in the complex negotiations with the Emperor?27
Wiltshire seems to have endorsed Stokesley’s advice. He then continued towards his own rendezvous with Francis.
The meeting had been fixed to take place at Moulins in the Auvergne on 18 February. The town had been chosen because it was convenient both for Wiltshire’s journey south, towards the Italian frontier, and for the French King, who was still at Dijon. But Wiltshire, hastening towards Bologna, arrived three days early, on the 15th. Luckily Du Bellay was there to meet him. He immediately set himself to roll out the red carpet for Wiltshire, since, as he knew from his experiences in England, the feelings of the future father-in-law of the King of England ruffled easily. Wiltshire should be lodged in the château, he recommended. The French King should send Court officials to wait on him. Above all, Francis I should come to meet him himself. ‘You know the man’, Du Bellay advised Montmorency, ‘he only wants to stay here till tomorrow!’28
In the event, the King of France did come to meet the Earl of Wiltshire–though since Francis only arrived in Moulins on the 19th, Wiltshire had to stay three or four extra days.
Wiltshire then resumed his journey south. At Roanne, he heard that the Pope and Emperor were planning to leave Bologna soon after the forthcoming coronation on 24 February. Appalled at the risk of missing his goal, Wiltshire tried to ride post. But his constitution was not up to the strain, and at Lyon he was so ‘broken’ that he had to abandon the plan. But (as might be expected of Anne’s father) what he lacked in strength he made up for in determination. ‘If I know him’, Du Bellay remarked, ‘as soon as he’s recovered, he’ll make the best speed he can.’ He did so and arrived in Bologna on 14 March, with a few days to spare before the Emperor’s departure on the 22nd.29
Wiltshire had his first, formal audience with the Emperor on the 15th but the substantive discussions continued over the following few days. The courtesies were observed but high words were exchanged on both sides. As Wiltshire sought to recapitulate Henry’s arguments on the Divorce, Charles cut him short and ‘went very far with him’. ‘He was not to be believed in this case’, the Emperor said, ‘as he was a party.’ Despite this assault from the greatest ruler of Christendom, Wiltshire more than stood his ground. ‘What he did’, he replied, ‘was not as a father but as a subject and servant of his master.’ The English King, he continued, would have been delighted if the Emperor had been willing to understand and accept his conscientious objections to his marriage, ‘nevertheless his pleasure would not hinder the execution of his intention’.
There was now a mutual stand-off.
At this point, as the attempt to broker a settlement had failed, Wiltshire was instructed to pull from the hat the rabbit of Cranmer’s argument. The issue was one, he said, of the authority of Scripture versus the authority of the Pope. And there could be no contest between the two. Scripture was clear in it, so too were the canons and decretals (here Wiltshire cited the precise chapter). Finally, Wiltshire explained, Henry had received a sort of prophetic support:
The King [he said] is also encouraged by a wonderfully virtuous and wise man, who says that he is not to be considered pious but impious, who transgresses his Master’s law for the sake of a servant [this was a reference to the Pope’s title of servus servorum Dei (Servant of the Servants of God)] and fears more to offend man than God.
This ‘wonderfully virtuous and wise man’, whose judgement Henry so much depended on, can only have been Cranmer.
Charles V listened to Wiltshire’s exposition with a mixture of impatience and incomprehension. He then announced his definitive position. He intended that the affair would be determined by the ordinary course of justice at Rome. ‘If the marriage with his aunt be found to be null, he will not maintain it, but if it is pronounced valid, he will.’30
And he refused to hear Wiltshire further.
Wiltshire had to endure another embarrassment. So far, Henry had managed to avoid being served with the citation to appear in Rome for the trial of his marriage. But, taking advantage of the presence of Spanish troops in Bologna, Catherine’s proxy served the summons on Wiltshire as Henry’s accredited representative. Wiltshire blustered. But, so long as Charles was in Bologna, there was nothing he could do.
The moment the Emperor left, however, he complained vigorously to the Pope of the indignity, and demanded a six-month delay, on condition that Henry did not act unilaterally. The Pope refused to act without consulting the Emperor. But when Charles V made no objection the compromise was agreed.
The English were greatly helped in this damage-limitation exercise by the French envoy to the Curia, the Bishop of Tarbes. Wiltshire was properly grateful, as Tarbes informed Francis I: the events at Bologna, Wiltshire said, ‘will create a stronger affection towards you, in himself and his master’. And Francis would have a more potent ally still. ‘He told me yesterday’, Tarbes continued, ‘he was sure, if his daughter came to be Queen, she would be all her life your very humble servant, well knowing that all their weal depends on you only.’31
The language is extravagant, but there was a sober reality behind it. Anne’s preferences were French, not only in culture, language and religion but, crucially, in foreign policy too. It was, after all, no more than a recognition of mutual interests.
In his despatches home, written on the 18th and 19th as events were still unfolding, Wiltshire made no attempt to gloss his failure with Charles. The Emperor, he wrote, was both resolute and immovable: ‘stiffly…set in the contrary part of Your Grace’s Great Matter and earnest…in it’. He was primed by Chancellor Gattinara. And Gattinara’s influence was equally malign on Chapuys, ‘the Emperor’s ambassador being resident with your Grace in England’, since he was, Wiltshire suspected, ‘by many likelihoods…much led and guided by the Chancellor’. Finally, the Pope was and would remain in the Emperor’s pocket: ‘he is led by the Emperor, so that he neither will nor dare displease him.’
The enemy, in short, was now fully known and unmasked.
The courier made excellent time to England and the letters were in Henry’s hands by the time of his audience with the French ambassador at the beginning of April. His worst fears were confirmed. ‘The King’, the ambassador reported, ‘is so displeased with the Emperor’s haughtiness that he has a great mind to recall his ambassador; which he adds, he is the more induced to do, as he believes it would lead the Emperor to withdraw his, for he is little satisfied with the Imperial ambassador here.’ Henry also speculated openly on an English solution to the Divorce, ‘by the advice of his Council and Parliament’. The Pope was ‘simoniacal and ignorant’, and other kingdoms, he was convinced, would follow his lead in refusing to recognise Rome.
All this suggests that historians have misunderstood the effects of the Bologna meeting. It was not a defeat for Wiltshire, as the Duke of Norfolk, already jealous of Boleyn power, was eager to insinuate to Chapuys. On the contrary, it demonstrated that the Boleyn strategy on the Great Matter had been correct. Anne and her father had long argued that, since Rome neither could nor would grant a Divorce, alternative means must be found. Now they stood vindicated by Charles’s intransigence.32
Cranmer, it was clear, was right. The Boleyns as his patrons were right. There was no alternative. And this in turn meant that the canvass of university opinion became more important than ever.
The original intention had been for Wiltshire to remain in Italy till the canvass was complete: he would then present the ‘determinations’ to the Pope, who would stand confounded; the Pope might even yield…
Bologna challenged this cosy assumption. Now Wiltshire was instructed to return to France, to hold a watching brief on the political situation there. To replace him, Cranmer was given the day-to-day charge of the Italian canvass. He proved exceptionally successful, and, within a few months, favourable verdicts had been obtained from the four leading universities: Padua, Pavia, Ferrara and Bologna. This is the more remarkable since the English were operating in ‘enemy’ territory. It was ‘serious’, the Imperial ambassador to Venice reported, that the faculty in the Pope’s own city of Bologna should find for Henry, since ‘they are subjects of the Pope’. But find they did. The means used were not pretty–on either side. English money was met with Imperial and Papal threats. Academics intrigued, deceived and shamelessly changed their minds. Inevitably, there were crises, in which Richard Croke, the most active and excitable English agent, appealed beyond Cranmer and invoked the Boleyns themselves. ‘Advertise my Lord [of Wiltshire] or the King or else all will be lost’, he wrote in one letter. ‘I pray you’, he implored Cranmer in another, ‘to move my Lord of Wiltshire and my Lady Boleyn to move the King to be good to me, and that I may have money and authority of an ambassador.’ Then his task would be easy.33
Other universities in France followed with declarations for Henry: Orleans on 5 April, Angers on 7 May, Bourges on 10 June. But still the great prize of the Sorbonne eluded him. For the haggling over the French Princes was not yet concluded and, until they were safely released, Francis and his agents were unwilling to defy the Emperor by applying the necessary pressure to whip Béda and his followers into line. Finally, and much against his better judgement, De Langey, who was acting as Francis I’s chief agent at the Sorbonne, was driven to act on 12 June: ‘I should have been glad if I could have dissembled further’, he informed Francis, ‘without creating more distrust in the King of England’s men.’ But he had put them off as long as he could. Indeed, he feared that Anne’s cousin, Sir Francis Bryan, who had taken over from her brother George as the principal English agent in Paris, might have been withdrawn in disgust at French delays.34
But, reluctant and half-hearted as it was, De Langey’s intervention was far from satisfying the English and three days later, on the 15th, they wrote to Wiltshire, who was being entertained royally at the French Court at Angoulême, to complain. De Langey was showing them one set of letters to Francis but actually sending other, milder ones, they grumbled. And they reported in horror the sort of language which Henry’s opponents had used in the debates. Béda had exhorted his colleagues, they wrote, to remain fast, ‘trusting that there were left many yet qui non flexerunt genua Simulacro Baal [who would not bend the knee to the Idol of Baal]’. ‘Signifying’, they continued, ‘that the King our master and the French King were the idol of Baal, and all that followed their desires committed idolatry’.35
Finally, events broke the deadlock. On I July, Francis’s sons were handed over at the Spanish frontier. And on 2 July, certain that the release would take place, De Langey extorted the required verdict from the Faculty.36
The news reached the English Court only on the 11th. Henry rejoiced and Anne was triumphant. Who cares about the Emperor now, she crowed. ‘She has been’, Chapuys reported to Charles V, ‘urging on the King and telling him that Your Majesty had it not in your power to do him any harm.’ Why, she continued, ‘her own family would provide for one year 10,000 men for his service at their own expense!’
More important, she offered herself. ‘It is foretold in ancient prophecies’, she said to Henry when he was remonstrating with her on the number of enemies he was making on her behalf, ‘that at this time a Queen shall be burned; but even if I were to suffer a thousand deaths, my love for you would not abate one jot’.37
At last events were running her way.