Anne’s father, the Earl of Wiltshire, arrived back from the Continent at the beginning of August 1530–probably on the 4th. It was the Progress time and the Court was at Easthampstead, a hunting lodge in the depths of Windsor forest. For weeks, the King had done nothing but devote himself to the chase–and to Anne.1
Now, suddenly, he was galvanised into taking the most momentous step in the whole history of the Divorce: he decided that, as King of England, his marriage was not subject to the judgement of the Pope after all.
Chapuys was quick to notice the change in the pace of events. ‘Immediately on the arrival of the Earl’, he reported, ‘the King despatched a messenger express to Rome.’ Two or three days later Henry sent out summonses to leading members of the Council to meet in special session at Hampton Court.
The day appointed for the meeting was the 11th. Catherine (though not, one suspects, Anne) was left behind at Windsor and Henry took up residence at Hampton Court. The French ambassador was in attendance as well. The meeting turned into a mini-Parliament and continued for five days until the 16th. Chapuys naturally suspected that it had been convoked to discuss the Divorce. Equally naturally, he, as Imperial ambassador, received bland assurances to the contrary. But his suspicions were roused by the fact that on the 17th ‘another courier was despatched to Rome’, which must, he concluded, ‘be in consequence of some resolution passed at that very meeting’.
Chapuys was right. The accounts of Sir Brian Tuke, the Treasurer of the Chamber and Master of the Posts, confirm that ‘Francis Piedmont, courier, [was] sent to Rome’, with letters dated the 16th. They also confirm that his ‘letters [were] of great importance’.2
The letters have disappeared. But subsequent correspondence makes it possible to reconstruct their contents: Henry’s ambassadors in Rome were instructed to inform the Pope that he had no jurisdiction in the case. On the contrary, ‘the custom of England [is] that no one should be compelled to go to law out of the Kingdom.’ ‘This custom and privilege’, they were also to assert, ‘stand on firm and solid reasons and have true and just foundations.’3
This, the ‘custom and privilege of England’, was the germ, though no more, of the Royal Supremacy. The Supremacy asserted that the King, not the Pope, was rightful Head of the Church in England. It was key doctrine of the English Reformation, and provided the basis, not only for the Divorce, but also for the whole future constitution of the Church of England, as it became.
And, it is now clear, the doctrine was first conceived, or at least first put into words, at Hampton Court on 11–16 August 1530.
This answers one question but immediately raises another: where did the idea come from? One answer might be from Henry himself, who had said something similar during an earlier clash between ‘Church’ and ‘State’ in the Richard Hunne affair of 1514–5.
In December 1514, London was rocked by the discovery of the body of Richard Hunne, who was found hanged in the Bishop of London’s gaol known as the Lollards’ Tower. Hunne was a prosperous merchant-tailor of London, who had been charged with heresy on apparently flimsy grounds. Was his death suicide or murder? The ecclesiastical and secular authorities immediately took opposite sides in the affair. The Church courts gave a verdict of suicide and had his body burned as that of a heretic. The London coroner’s jury, on the other hand, found a verdict of murder against both the bishop’s gaoler and his chancellor. Finally, in a set-piece debate before the King himself, Henry intervened on the side of the lay authorities:
By the ordinance and sufferance of God [he declared], we are King of England, and the Kings of England in times past have never had any superior but God only. Wherefore know you well that we will maintain the right of our Crown and of our temporal jurisdiction, as well in this point as in all others, in as ample a wise as any of our progenitors have done before us.
The debate, curiously, took place at Blackfriars, almost certainly in the same Parliament Chamber where, in 1529, the Legatine Trial of Henry’s marriage precipitated an even greater clash of jurisdictions.4
And the parallels go beyond location. For, at first sight, there does indeed seem to be a straight line from Henry’s remarks in 1515 to the claim formulated at Hampton Court in 1530. But that cannot be. For if Henry was already convinced of his ‘supremacy’ in 1515, why, only six years later in 1521, did he argue so powerfully for the most far-reaching claims of the Papal monarchy in the Assertio? And why, eight years later still, did he sue so hard and so humiliatingly to the Pope for a Roman solution to the Great Matter?
There is no convincing answer to these points. Instead, it makes better sense to see Henry’s words in 1515 as high-sounding but vague rhetoric, of a type to which he was prone on great public occasions. They could mean anything–or nothing. And in 1515, it became clear, they meant precious little: Wolsey saw to that.
The ideas of 1530 were therefore new, in substance if not in formulation. And a much more convincing source for them is the Boleyns. The coincidence between the Earl of Wiltshire’s return and the convening of the Hampton Court meeting itself speaks volumes. So does the nature of the mission which had kept him abroad for seven full months. During that period he had taken overall charge of the canvass of the universities in both France and Italy. He had been in close touch with the labourers at the intellectual coalface, such as Cranmer who had been sent to Italy, and Stokesley and latterly Foxe who had been sent to France. And it seems clear that he had immersed himself fully in the debate. It would be hard to think of a better forcing-house for the idea of the Supremacy.
For the key, I think, is to see the Supremacy, not as a radical departure in the strategy of the Great Matter, but rather as a logical outcome of the canvass of the universities.
Back in the immediate aftermath of his roasting by Charles V at Bologna, Wiltshire had given the French ambassador a remarkably cool analysis of England’s immediate strategy. ‘He said’, the Bishop of Tarbes reported, ‘the English would act for three or four months like those who look at dancers, and take courage according as they see them dancing ill or well. And as they should see Francis do, so would the King his master do.’ ‘You will understand what these words imply’, the ambassador added portentously.5
During the next three or four months, Wiltshire, whether in Paris or at the French Court, had a front-row seat at the ballet of European politics. It was time enough for him to decide that Francis I could be trusted and that a joint plan of action should be agreed. The plan emerges most clearly from the correspondence of Du Bellay. By April, Du Bellay was reporting his conviction that, ‘if the King of England sees the Princes in France and that he has [the verdict of] the University of Paris…I think that he’ll marry immediately’. He repeated the conviction at the beginning of May. By the end of June, his conversations with Wiltshire had crystallised into the outlines of an agreement. Henry, it was taken for granted, would act unilaterally; meanwhile Francis I would protect his back.6
The detailed negotiations, it was also agreed, would be undertaken by Du Bellay himself as special ambassador to England. As soon as the Sorbonne had delivered its verdict (which was to be extorted, of course, by his brother De Langes), Du Bellay would go post-haste to England to conclude a treaty for mutual defence. Francis, Du Bellay’s subsequent instructions made clear, preferred the treaty to be in general terms. But, if Henry pressed, Du Bellay was authorised to include a ‘special engagement about the matter of his marriage’. The engagement was formulated very broadly: if, in consequence of Henry’s suit for the nullity of his marriage, England were attacked ‘by any prince or potentate of what estate, quality or condition he be’, Francis would come to his aid.7
It is hard to overestimate the importance of such a guarantee. The Emperor might threaten armies, or the Pope spiritual sanctions, but, shielded by his good brother of France, who was also the Most Christian King, Henry could regard them with something like indifference.
Anne, it now seemed, would be married in weeks rather than months.
Unfortunately, the plan unravelled almost immediately. Béda and his allies in the Sorbonne mounted a furious rear-guard action, in which they threatened to rescind the verdict, favourable for Henry, which the faculty had reached in July. De Langes, by invoking Francis’s direct authority, managed to quell the revolt. But Du Bellay lost precious days in Paris, helping his brother to regain control of the Sorbonne and he did not arrive at Dover till 19 August. But by then it was too late. The Hampton Court meeting had already come and gone, with France represented only by the resident ambassador and no new treaty agreed. Moreover, at the meeting Henry had found some of his own councillors almost as recalcitrant as the die-hards of the Sorbonne. Warned by Chapuys, Archbishop Warham of Canterbury, who was the only possible English judge in the Great Matter, refused to act in defiance of Rome. Henry was blocked–both at home, and, temporarily, abroad. He had the verdict of the Sorbonne. But he could do nothing with it.8
Out of this frustration, I would guess, ‘the custom and privilege of England’ was born. The determination of the Sorbonne and the other universities provided Henry, it was now clear, with only moral authority. But what use was that if neither Warham at home nor Clement in Rome would recognise it? ‘The custom and privilege of England’, when it developed into the Supremacy, would bridge the gap. For it would provide a jurisdictional authority that would compel recognition of the verdict of the determinations.
At least it would where Henry’s writ ran.
For the moment, however, Henry contented himself with sending his vague but threatening letter to Rome. For there was still the summer–and Anne–to enjoy.
This was the second, uninterrupted summer that Anne had spent with Henry. But there was a new joyousness about it, as they had thrown all pretence and concealment to the winds. She would be seen as the King’s companion and consort, outside the palace as well as within. She did not care who knew it. And she would go in appropriate state.
Henry’s prodigal generosity saw to that.
Perhaps the clearest testimony to Anne’s altered status had come on 27 May 1530 when Henry issued orders for her to be supplied with an astonishing range of luxurious velvet-covered and gilt horse-furniture, including saddles and harnesses for her own horses and trappings for the mules that carried her litter. Inevitably, bearing in mind her francophile tastes, most of the saddles were ‘of the French fashion’, while some of their trimmings were decorated in the latest Renaissance style and ‘graven with antique works’. Also included in the warrant was ‘a pillion of fine down, covered with black velvet, fringed with silk and gold, [and] lined with buckram’.9
It can only have been for her to ride behind Henry.
Indeed, she already had. The incident took place a few weeks previously, on 27 April, as the Court was removing from Windsor to its eventual destination at York Place. Normally the journey would have been done by water; instead, it was decided to travel by land in a sort of mini-Progress. The route lay via The More, Hunsdon and Enfield, all of which had fine, deer-filled parks which promised excellent sport. Henry was in holiday mood, and, to show it, on the first leg of the journey from Windsor to The More, he made Anne ride pillion behind him.
Kingship was forgotten. Anne had made him a young lover again.
But others noticed and, according to Chapuys, were shocked at the gross familiarity. ‘The King shows greater favour to the Lady every day’, Chapuys reported. ‘Very recently’, he continued, ‘coming from Windsor, he made her ride behind him on a pillion, a most unusual proceeding, and one that has greatly called forth peoples’ attention here.’ Two men, he added, had been imprisoned for daring to gossip about it.10
Also in late May, Anne had been fitted out with hunting gear, consisting of bows, arrows, shafts, broad heads, a bracer or wrist-guard and a shooting glove. These supplies were quickly exhausted and in June another four bows were supplied for her use.
For weeks she and Henry rode and hunted and did little else. ‘For nearly a month’, Chapuys reported in mid-August, ‘the King has transacted no business…[Instead] he has given himself up entirely to hunting privately and moving from one place to another.’ After the interruption of the Hampton Court meeting, the holiday resumed. In September it was marred by a disagreeable incident in which two packs of greyhounds, one belonging to Anne and the other to a Groom of the Privy Chamber, mauled a cow to death. But a royal tip of ten shillings smoothed matters over.11
At the beginning of September, however, Chapuys noticed a change. Anne’s cousin, Sir Francis Bryan, returned from his Embassy in France at the end of August. Immediately, the ports were closed and Henry was ‘continually engaged in Council’. Evidently, Bryan had returned with important news. But, despite his best efforts, Chapuys could not ferret it out. He did, however, reappraise his earlier judgement about Henry’s idleness. ‘This year’, he decided on balance, ‘[the King] has attended more to business and less to sport than for a long time previously.’ And Henry’s new-found industry would continue into the autumn and through the winter. For at last he saw a way to the solution of the Great Matter–the Boleyn way which Henry would now make his own.12
The first to confront the ‘new’ Henry was the newly appointed Papal Nuncio, Antonio de Pulleo, Baron de Burgo. His choice as Nuncio is yet another testimony to Clement’s tact and understanding. Sensitive to the rising tide of English anticlericalism, the Pope had chosen a layman as his representative, not a cleric. De Burgo was also as near to a neutral on the Great Matter as was possible in the increasingly polarised world of the 1530s. On the one hand, as a Sicilian nobleman, he was a subject of Charles V in his capacity as King of Naples. On the other, he was in the Papal service, was high in Clement’s personal confidence and had the temperament of a natural diplomat, being ‘well-mannered…and learned’, as the Milanese ambassador described him appreciatively. Best of all from Henry’s point of view, Miçer Mai, the fiercely partisan Imperial ambassador in Rome, viewed his despatch with grave misgivings. ‘I have done all I could to prevent his nomination’, he reported. And when, despite his best efforts, De Burgo was sent, Mai conceded defeat with the dry: ‘We shall see’.13
Mai, it turned out, need not have worried. For, with all his patience and emollient charm, De Burgo found himself in an impossible situation. Acting on Clement’s direct instructions, the Nuncio offered the compromise that Mai feared. But Henry rejected it. He had become as hard-line as Mai himself.
All this was clear from the moment of De Burgo’s first audience. He arrived in London on 9 September. The end of the hunting season, the Day of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, was still five days away, and the time was normally sacred to the chase. But Henry interrupted his sport to receive the Nuncio at Waltham Abbey on the 12th. De Burgo explained that the six-month moratorium, agreed with Wiltshire, was coming to an end and the trial in Rome would have to begin. But Clement would, he continued, go to almost any lengths to compromise on the judges and even the place of trial.
Henry brushed these offers aside. Who cared what a modern Pope of these degenerate times would do? ‘For…it had been enacted’, he informed the startled Nuncio, ‘by several ancient Popes (whose authority should, on account of their sanctity, be of more weight than that of recent ones), that no cause having its origin in this country should be advoked to another kingdom.’ He had already informed the Pope of this privilege. If Clement refused to honour it, Henry declared, ‘I can safely proceed to action.’ And if, as a consequence, Charles V attacked him, he would see off the attack. But, in any case, his good friend and ally, Francis I of France, would come to his defence.14
Moreover, Henry did not rely on words alone. Instead, on 12 September 1530, the very day of De Burgo’s audience, he issued a proclamation. This forbade any suit ‘to the Court of Rome’, or any attempt to publish in England any Bull obtained in the last year, which contained ‘matter prejudicial to the high authority, jurisdiction and prerogative royal’ of England. The penalty was Praemunire. This was the device which had destroyed Wolsey. It was now threatened against Catherine and her supporters, if they tried to publish a hostile Papal verdict against Henry. It was even threatened against De Burgo, if he served any procedural writs on the King.15
On Sunday, 25 September, two days after the Progress ended, De Burgo went to Hampton Court to register a formal protest against the proclamation. He might have spared his breath. For the ministerial troika of Norfolk, Suffolk and Wiltshire maintained a united and vehemently anti-Papal front. ‘They cared neither for Pope nor Popes in this kingdom’, they bragged to De Burgo, ‘not even if St Peter should come to life again; [and] that the King was absolute both as Emperor and Pope in his own kingdom.’ It was brave talk. It also suggests that the work of fleshing out and documenting the idea of the ‘custom and privileges of England’ was already well underway.16
Nevertheless, behind the united front, there were substantial disagreements between the three councillors. Suffolk (egged on by his wife, Henry’s sister Mary) had always been opposed to the Boleyn marriage. Norfolk, as Anne’s uncle, was willing to embrace it on grounds of self-advancement and personal dynastic advantage. But now he, too, was baulking at the means, if we believe his words at a private interview, arranged at his request, with the Nuncio. ‘[Do] not…take any notice of the King’s violent words,’ he begged De Burgo in strict confidence, ‘he would take good care that none of the King’s threats should be carried into action.’17
In fact, only Wiltshire seems to have been fully on the King’s side. And his enthusiasm was limitless. While Norfolk went out of his way to signal moderation, Anne’s father, on the contrary, flaunted his extremism and, to Chapuys’s face, ‘began slandering the Pope and Cardinals…violently’. Indeed his language was so outrageous that Chapuys could stand no more of it. Instead, he reported, ‘full of horror at what was being said, I took leave and left the room immediately.’ ‘Should the Earl [Wiltshire] and his daughter remain in power,’ Chapuys concluded, ‘they will entirely alienate this kingdom from its allegiance to the Pope.’ His words were as shrewd as analysis as they proved accurate as prophecy.18
But the divisions within Henry’s inner circle of advisers were nothing compared to those in the Council and the kingdom at large. Once again, in another meeting at Hampton Court at the beginning of October, Henry tried to get agreement to the proposition that the ‘custom and privileges of the kingdom’ allowed the Divorce to be settled in England. And once again he failed.19
His first reaction, as usual when he was thwarted, was rage. Then he turned to overcoming the opposition. There were two means. One was research, to make the case for the ‘custom and privileges’ more persuasive. Here Henry himself took the lead. The other was a stick-and-carrot approach to opponents. This, as we shall see, was Anne’s province. And she would show an especial talent for wielding the stick.
Research, then as now, depends on books and a good library. So the first sign that Henry was turning himself into a researcher on the ‘custom and privileges’ came in October when Sir John Russell, Wolsey’s former client who still held on to his position in the Privy Chamber, received a reward of twenty shillings ‘for bringing of books’. A month later, in late November, Thomas Heneage, another former Wolsey client in the Privy Chamber, arranged for the transport of books by boat from York Place to Hampton Court, where Henry would spend most of the autumn. But the principal source of supply was the monastic libraries.20
Also in late November, the Abbot of Reading sent the King ‘an inventory of books’. Two days later, the inventory was followed by a delivery of books from the same source. This would scarcely have given the King or his assistants time to read and mark up the list, as was done with another inventory of the libraries of Lincolnshire monasteries. But maybe Henry was working fast. At any rate, no fewer than seventeen books with a Reading provenance have been identified in the Old Royal Libraries, though it is unclear whether they were all sent in November 1530.21
Why Reading? Proximity was probably one explanation: the House was quite near Hampton Court and Henry stayed there on at least twelve occasions in his reign. He also knew the Abbot, Hugh Faringdon. Faringdon was a monastic grandee of the old school, as much at home in the saddle as in the stall, and he kept in touch with Henry by sending him frequent presents of ‘wood’ or hunting knives.
Anne, almost certainly, had her connexions with the Abbey of Reading, too, and they make an instructive contrast with Henry’s. In 1528, as Wolsey’s henchmen were trying to purge Oxford from the consequence of Thomas Garrett’s missionary book-selling, they discovered that the infection had spread further still. ‘This Garrett’, the Bishop of Lincoln reported to Wolsey, ‘also hath, I fear, corrupted the Monastery of Reading, for he hath diverse times sent to the Prior there such corrupt books…to the number of three score or above, and received money of him for them.’ ‘How the said Prior hath used those books,’ the bishop continued, ‘and with whom, I know not.’22
The Prior (or deputy-Abbot) was John Shirburn. Evidently, Shirburn was thrown into gaol, like most of the suspects in the affair. We have already seen that, in late 1528, Anne intervened with Wolsey on behalf of another suspect, Thomas Forman, the rector of Honey Lane. Nine or ten months later, in the dying days of Wolsey’s ministry, the King himself was brought to intercede for Shirburn.
The King’s Highness [Gardiner informed Wolsey on 7 September 1529] willed me also to write unto your grace, that suit is made unto him in favour of the Prior of Reading, who, for Luther’s opinion, is now in prison, and hath been a good season, at your Grace’s commandment. Unless the matter be much notable, and very heinous, he desireth your Grace, at his request, to cause the said Prior to be restored to liberty and discharged of that imprisonment.
This letter has not had the attention it deserves. 1529 is extraordinarily early for Henry to be intervening on behalf of an acknowledged Lutheran. His views on the subject were still harsh and it would have taken considerable courage to launch the suit on Shirburn’s behalf. Who would have dared and who would have had the opportunity? It is difficult to think of anybody but Anne who, then and for the future, was to be the consistent protectoress of heterodox opinion.
If this guess is right, Anne knew Shirburn or at least his circle. She knew of the suspect books he had bought for the Abbey; she would also have had the opportunity of discovering the more orthodox riches of its collections.
Did she point Henry in the direction of Reading and its library when he was doing his research? It seems as likely as not.
In the following months, dozens more books were brought to Henry, from Ramsey (twice), Sempringham, Gloucester, Evesham, Spalding, and St Augustine’s, Canterbury. And the more he read, the surer he became. He was indeed rightly ‘absolute both as Emperor and Pope in his own kingdom’. Clement’s powers, on the other hand, were a mere usurpation. In Henry’s mind at least, the way was open to the Divorce–and to much else besides.23
As Henry’s convictions hardened, Anne’s confidence rose. Not that she ever quite trusted Henry’s resolution. In November 1530, for instance, she placed herself at a window in the King’s Chamber where she could ‘overhear and overlook’ Henry’s audience with Chapuys in the adjacent gallery. And, as Chapuys’s replies became tougher, Henry, he noticed, manoeuvred him out of Anne’s earshot into the middle of the room!24
But events were now moving beyond the power of Chapuys’s repartee. Parliament, much prorogued since its first session in 1529, was due to reconvene in January 1531. Anne hoped and Catherine feared that it would take decisive action. In eager anticipation, Anne adopted a new livery for Christmas. Its motto was borrowed from the Burgundian Court, where, long ago, she had begun her career in the Archduchess Margaret’s household at La Vure. ‘Ainsi sera, groigne qui groigne, Et vive Bourgogne!’ the full motto went. Anne dropped the last line ‘And long live Burgundy’. This left her servants emblazoned with the boast: ‘Thus it will be, Grumble who will’.25
And thus it was. But, contrary to expectation, the action took place in the Convocation (the ‘parliament’ of the clergy) which met alongside Parliament proper. Suddenly, the King called on the clergy to enact his own conviction that, ‘as Emperor and Pope’, he was indeed ‘Supreme Head on Earth of the Church in England’. His spokesmen, headed by Stokesley, rehearsed the arguments. But Henry had a more powerful argument still. Once again, it was Praemunire. Once it had brought down Wolsey. Now it was turned against the entire clergy. All of them, Henry’s lawyers argued, had recognised Wolsey’s legacy. So all were guilty. The clergy fought and wriggled. But there was no escape. They had to acknowledge Henry’s new title and pay a gigantic, collective fine of £100,000.
Only one thing was saved from the wreck: the sweeping claims of Henry’s new title were modified by the addition of the phrase ‘insofar as the Law of Christ allows’. It was Henry’s turn to object to this, since, for the orthodox, the addition rendered his title meaningless. But finally he agreed. For of course he knew that Christ’s Law, properly understood, indeed declared that he was ‘Emperor and Pope’.26
Anne had no doubts either. When she heard the news, Chapuys discovered, ‘[she] made such demonstrations of joy as if she had actually gained Paradise’.27
In a sense, of course, she had. For Henry, she was sure, was in her grasp at last.
But first she had to remove the obstacles in her path.