In the summer of 1531, the vicar of Kirk Holland, in Derbyshire, told his parishioners some extraordinary news: the King was about to marry another wife. And ‘one Mr Cromwell penned certain matters in the Parliament House, which no man gainsaid’. One of his hearers, the vicar said, ‘knew the gentlewoman, and that her father’s name was Sir Thomas Boleyn’.1
This seems to be the first time that Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn were linked in the public consciousness. Quite why Cromwell’s activities in the brief and unremarkable parliamentary session of 1531 should attract such attention is unclear. Most likely, in fact, the vicar was confusing events in Parliament with those in Convocation. The confusion was easily made, since the place of meeting of Convocation had been shifted from the customary St Paul’s to the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey. The Commons met in the nearby Refectory of the Abbey and the Lords in the Painted Chamber in the adjacent palace. It was only a few steps from the one assembly to the other, and the journey was frequently made as the intense negotiations over the Submission of the Clergy took place.2
In these negotiations, Cromwell, MP for Taunton and newly appointed King’s Councillor, played a leading part. He came into the Chapter House on the morning of Friday, 10 February 1531, and had a secret conference with Archbishop Warham. The next day, Convocation acquiesced in silence to the King’s new title of ‘Supreme Head of the Church, in so far as the Law of Christ allows’.3
Anne, as we have seen, greeted the news with as much joy ‘as if she had actually gained Paradise’. And was Cromwell the man whom she credited with unlocking the heavenly gates? And could he pull off the trick once more–this time to make her Henry’s wife and Queen at last? It seemed as though he could.
But in spite of Cromwell’s already acquired reputation as a Parliamentary Pickford, who carried everything, the next session, which opened on 15 January 1532, got off to a surprisingly shaky start. Almost a month was spent in acrimonious and inconclusive discussion about the King’s feudal rights. Then, in the second week of February, Norfolk convened an informal meeting of the leading members of both Houses to consider an important new proposal. ‘Many learned doctors’, he reported, ‘had concluded that all matrimonial causes belonged to the temporal, not to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction.’ Were the parliamentary opinion-formers prepared to support the King’s prerogative in this matter?4
The issue of the Church’s jurisdiction in matrimony had already been aired in public by the distinguished lawyer Christopher St German. In a series of books, the first of which was published in 1528, he argued for limiting canon law narrowly to matters of Faith and leaving questions of property (like wills and marriages) to the common law.5
Magpie-like as ever, Henry’s councillors were seeing if Parliament would be prepared to accept St German’s arguments–which would, in turn, open the way to a direct, parliamentary solution of the Great Matter.
In fact, though much has been made of St German by some modern historians, his ideas fell at the first fence. ‘The first to answer [Norfolk]’, Chapuys reported, ‘was Lord Darcy, who said that his property and his person were entirely at the King’s disposal, but that from what he had read and heard he believed that all matrimonial matters were spiritual and fell under ecclesiastical jurisdiction.’ The majority of the meeting followed Darcy’s lead, ‘to the Duke’s great disappointment and annoyance’.6
Another scheme, Chapuys heard, was floated by Anne’s father, Thomas Boleyn, now the Earl of Wiltshire. Since Archbishop Warham was immovable on the subject of the Divorce, Wiltshire proposed the abolition of archiepiscopal authority over the Church and its transfer instead to the King. Anne, with her Lutheran sympathies, was supposed to have been enthusiastic about the idea. But it too disappeared without trace into that box marked ‘too radical by half ’.7
For Parliament, it became clear, was no more enamoured of Henry’s new claims over the Church than any other reasonably representative group of his subjects. This proved true even in the contentious area of clerical taxation.
Annates or First Fruits was the fee, amounting to one year’s income, which a new bishop was required to pay to Rome for the Bulls ratifying his appointment. The burden was considerable and appointees had to mortgage themselves to the hilt to pay it–with disastrous consequences to their families and friends if they died before they had been in post long enough to liquidate the debt. In view of this, it might be thought that the higher clergy would have rushed to welcome a government-sponsored Bill to abolish Annates. But the opposite was the case. The Council’s motive, to put financial pressure on the Pope to agree to the Divorce, was too transparent, and the measure was fought bitterly at every stage. Indeed, the Act of Annates passed into law only through the King’s heavy-handed personal intervention in both Houses. The government also made an important concession. The Act as passed was conditional, and it would only be put into practice, the Duke of Norfolk assured the English ambassadors in Rome, if the Pope continued to refuse Henry his Divorce.8
This was as far as Parliament would go by way of innovation. And for Anne it was nowhere near far enough.
It was time instead to return to the old, tried and tested tunes of anticlericalism. These had proved a hit in the first session of the Reformation Parliament, even with convinced religious conservatives, like Lord Darcy or committed supporters of Catherine of Aragon, like Sir Henry Guildford. Now Anne and Cromwell, her new right-hand man, co-operated to stage a revival.
From the beginning the mood in Parliament was favourable. According to the chronicler Hall, who as MP for Much Wenlock was an eye-witness of proceedings in the Lower House, ‘the cruelty of the ordinaries [bishops]’ ranked high among the Commons’ initial grievances. Lay grumbles about ecclesiastical power were of course nothing new. But what gave them a special edge was the clamp-down on heresy which had followed Wolsey’s fall. Spurred on by Lord Chancellor More, the bishops had gone on the offensive against heterodox opinion. And no one was spared. Anne’s favourite preacher, Latimer, was arraigned on a heresy charge in the Convocation which met alongside Parliament. And the merchant William Tracy, the father of Cromwell’s old friend and fellow MP Richard, was posthumously condemned as a heretic for making a will which was rude about clerical pretensions.9
All this meant that tensions between the clergy and the laity were already dangerously high when, a fortnight after the start of the session, they were deliberately inflamed by a gesture at Court. For Simon Fish’s brilliantly subversive pamphlet, The Supplication of Beggars, which had opened the way to the first anticlerical wave of autumn 1529, was given a new lease of life. The fact has been obscured by the carelessness of many historians about detail. The text of The Supplication printed by Foxe begins with the note:
A certain libel or book, entitled The Supplication of Beggars, thrown and scattered at the Procession in Westminster, on Candlemas day, before King Henry VIII, for him to read and peruse.
This, many have assumed, meant that Fish’s pamphlet was distributed at Court on 2 February 1529, the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was known as Candlemas on account of the elaborately decorated candles which were offered up at the altar by the faithful, led by the King himself. But this date is impossible, since on 2 February 1529, Henry was not at Westminster but Greenwich. Nor did he have a palace in Westminster either. This lack was supplied, as we have seen, by his seizure of York Place from the fallen Wolsey in the autumn of 1529. Henry then spent Candlemas at York Place in each of the following years: 1530, 1531 and 1532. But of these dates, 1532 is much the most probable for the ‘throwing and scattering’ of the pamphlet in the procession before the King. And it is likely, too, that Anne, who had first brought Fish’s work to Henry’s attention, had a hand in its dramatic re-entry on to the public stage.10
Meanwhile, in Parliament, Cromwell was engineering his own, parallel reprise. Back in 1529, the Commons had begun to codify their anticlerical grievances into a series of petitions. The petitions seem not to have been submitted to the King before they were quietly allowed to lapse as part of Henry’s scheme to call off the parliamentary attack on Wolsey. But Cromwell, always good with paper, seems to have kept copies–just in case they came in useful. And come in useful they did in 1532.11
The papers were reworked into a single, omnibus petition. It was retitled, in a deliberate, provocative echo of Fish’s pamphlet, The Supplication against the Ordinaries. And, in a series of carefully co-ordinated moves, it was rewritten and reused to force Convocation into a complete surrender of its legislative independence to Henry. All existing canons were to be submitted to him for approval; all future ones would require his consent. The surrender took place on 15 May 1532, when Convocation also acknowledged Henry as Supreme Head of the English Church, now without reservation. Parliament itself had been prorogued on the 14th and, on the 16th, Lord Chancellor More resigned. He had lost the behind-the-scenes battle for the King’s mind.12
Henceforward, Henry’s ‘good servant’ would be forced into an increasingly public struggle with the King himself. It could end in only one way.
The other great loser from the 1532 session was Gardiner. In the autumn of 1531 he had been given the choicest of Wolsey’s benefices, the bishopric of Winchester, which was the richest see in England. And as late as January 1532, shortly before he was recalled from a brief Embassy to France, Henry (according to Cromwell) had complained of his absence as ‘the lack of my right hand’.13
But the hand was to offend Henry, for, in the debates on The Supplication, Gardiner immediately took a high line in defence of the privileges and independence of the Church. The boy from Bury St Edmunds had not climbed to the top of the greasy pole to see it cut from beneath him. But, for once, he miscalculated.
The King, Chapuys reported on 13 May, ‘is very angry, especially with the Chancellor [More] and the Bishop of Winchester’. Gardiner, however, had made a more dangerous enemy still. He had been one of Anne’s earliest and most effective partisans in the Great Matter. But, as the Boleyns’ anticlerical and even heretical policies became clear, his attitude changed. By the time of the Council’s confrontation with Catherine in June 1531 he was showing, according to Chapuys, some sympathy with the Queen’s position. In return, ‘the Lady [now] strongly suspects and dislikes him’. Anne’s suspicions were confirmed by his behaviour in Convocation and she became openly hostile.14
Henry, as usual, softened first. But Anne could be won over only by a valuable sacrifice. In 1530, Gardiner, then the King’s newly fledged Secretary, had acquired the use of the royal manor of Hanworth. It was an up-to-date building, extensively remodelled by Henry VII; it had a fine park and gardens and it was very convenient for Hampton Court. It was, in short, good enough for Anne and certainly too good for one of Anne’s enemies. So in June 1532, Gardiner, as a precondition for his forgiveness, was required to surrender his interest to the King. Henry promptly re-granted Hanworth to Anne, and rebuilt it and refurbished it as her own country seat. That it had been prised from Gardiner only added, no doubt, to the delights of its strawberry beds and terra-cotta Classical medallions.15
But Parliamentary manoeuvres, however important, were not the be-all, still less the end-all of the Divorce–despite the fact that English historians, with their narrow national focus and their excessive concentration on ‘the Constitution’, often write as though they were. Instead, managing the Great Matter was a complex affair. It was like playing a game of chess or conducting an orchestra. Each piece had to be moved to its right place on the board; each section of the orchestra be brought in at the right time. One false entry and the harmony of the English political élite, which was already strained to breaking-point, might collapse entirely; one wrong move and the beleaguered Queen might yet escape.
Then where would be the climax, where the consummation of checkmate for Anne?
In this complex of factors, foreign policy was of paramount importance. The new understanding with France–the final achievement of Wolsey’s foreign policy–had always been the precondition for Henry’s freedom of manoeuvre over the dissolution of his first marriage to the Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon. Only France was strong enough to make Catherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles, think twice about invading England or launching trade sanctions. And only France had enough influence at Rome to counter-balance the formidable pressure on the Pope of the Spanish cardinals and ambassadors.
But if Henry was at last to get rid of his Spanish-born Queen, England’s understanding with France had first to be made water-tight.
Here Anne was in her element. Her skill in the French language, her understanding of French ways and her enthusiasm for her adoptive country, all conspired to make her the key instrument in the charm-offensive which Henry now launched against France.
It had got underway in late 1531, when, on Christmas Eve, the new French ambassador, Gilles de La Pommeraye, arrived to replace Giovanni Gioachino di Passano. Anne ‘feasted’ both the incoming and the outgoing ambassadors. And she mingled business with pleasure. ‘With all their pastimes’, Chapuys sourly reported, ‘they were not idle, and have this day [29 December] sent [the Bishop of] Winchester to France.’ In his turn, De La Pommeraye was frank with Chapuys about his own mission. ‘Pommeraye is here’, Chapuys informed the Emperor, ‘for the process of the Divorce to be decided in this kingdom.’ ‘And’, he continued, ‘he tells me that it is impossible to conceive how much the King has the said affair at heart and that his master [Francis I] will refuse him nothing.’
Henry soon put Francis’s good intentions to the test. His initial aim was to get the French King to agree the scheme for mutual aid against the Emperor which had first been discussed with Jean du Bellay, Bishop of Bayonne in the summer of 1530. This time, negotiations moved smoothly. On 5 May, De La Pommeraye re-embarked at Southampton for final consultations with Francis I, who was then in Brittany. De La Pommeraye returned to England on 10 June, with Francis’s present of a brace of fine greyhounds for Henry. He also bore an even better gift in the form of Francis’s agreement in principle to the treaty of mutual aid. There followed a fortnight of lavish entertainment mingled with intense negotiations at the end of which, on 23 June, the treaty was signed. The ambassador represented the French, and Anne’s father and Dr Edward Foxe, her leading intellectual supporter, the English.16
The forces which either ally was to send to the aid of the other in the event of an attack by the Emperor were relatively small. Depending on the circumstances, each side was to supply a fleet manned by 1,500 soldiers, while the English were to send a force of 5,000 archers to France, if she were the party attacked, or the French a force of 500 spears to England, if the Imperial offensive were launched there. Archers or long-bowmen were (despite the increasing effectiveness of artillery) still regarded as the best English troops; while ‘spears’ or heavily armed cavalry were likewise (despite their rout at the Battle of the Spurs) considered to be the crack French troops. The apparent disparity in numbers is accounted for by the fact that ‘a spear’ was not an individual but a small fighting formation, consisting of the mounted man-at-arms himself, supported by one or more mounted archers, light horsemen and ‘custrels’ (that is, shields-bearers attending on the man-at-arms).17
But numbers, however calculated, were not really the issue. Instead the treaty was a statement of intent, as far as the signatories were concerned, and a warning, which the Emperor would have to heed. For it signalled that an attack on England was also an attack on France. And not even Charles V was strong enough to contemplate having to deal with both at once.
Chapuys, who had a scent for such matters, realised the meaning of the treaty even before it was formally announced or he had discovered its terms. For some days he had, he complained to its target, Charles, ‘the bad odour of this new treaty in my nostrils’.18
Much would happen before he could free himself of the stench.
But the treaty was soon overtaken in importance for Henry by another, overtly symbolic scheme. He and Francis, he decided, would broadcast their union by a personal meeting of the two Kings and their Courts.
The model, of course, was the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520. This was scarcely a happy precedent from the French point of view, since on that occasion the English, by a masterpiece of duplicity, had betrayed their promises of eternal friendship even before they had made them. But things were different this time. It was not that Albion had become less perfidious. Instead, Henry needed Francis. Indeed, thanks to the Great Matter, his need for Francis was rather greater than Francis’s need for him. It was a good basis for assuming that Henry might keep to his promises.
The germ of the scheme for a personal meeting had been sown on Gardiner’s Embassy to France. The language of the English King’s despatches was unusually warm; he also expressed the desire for an up-to-date portrait of the French King. And he did so in terms which suggest that the mirror (or perhaps Anne) had been reminding Henry that time flies.
‘Forasmuch,’ Henry informed Gardiner, ‘as it is long passed sith [since] we did see our said good brother’s person, and being much desirous to have the portraiture of the same, in that form and favour that it now is, specially considering that few years do always change a man’s countenance’. To satisfy this desire, Henry continued, the bishop, was ‘to procure and get unto us, not only the same his portraiture and picture in the most like, best and curious fashion, but also the images and portraitures of our said good brother’s children [that is, the recently released Princes]’. These would, Henry assured Gardiner, become treasured objects: ‘which to behold shall always be unto us great rejoice and comfort’.19
Cromwell, who could spot a trend a mile off, had already anticipated part of this request in his New Year’s gift to the King. It consisted of ‘a ring with a ruby and a box with the images of the French King’s children’. But then, anticipating Henry’s wishes was something that Cromwell was to become increasingly good at.20
By the summer, Henry’s desire to behold Francis’s portrait had openly turned into one to see his person. The desire was loudly and vehemently expressed–by Henry and still more perhaps by Anne. And once more, as so often previously, the Progress and the hunt provided her best opportunities.
The Progress began on 4 July. Henry and Anne stayed at Waltham Abbey for five days and then, on the 9th, continued to Hunsdon. The King, the Venetian ambassador reported, ‘will proceed, hunting and amusing himself as far as “Nourgam” (Nottingham)…and then return by another road, at the end of September’. ‘He is accompanied solely by the French ambassador,’ he added.21
The plan, it seems, was for another long Progress, in which one of the areas of the country least sympathetic to innovation–any innovation–would gradually get accustomed to Anne.
According to Chapuys’s gleeful report, the plan backfired and the Progress had to be abandoned by the end of July. ‘The King was on his way to the Northern parts’, he wrote in his despatch of 29 July, ‘when he suddenly changed his purpose and came back to town.’ The reason was popular reaction. ‘Wherever he went accompanied by the Lady, the people on the road so earnestly requested him to recall the Queen, his wife, and the women especially so insulted the Royal mistress, hooting and hissing on her passage, that he was actually obliged to retrace his steps.’
The story was of course just what Chapuys wanted to hear. But he had the grace to report, as hot news, another explanation. ‘I heard yesterday, and again today…that the chief cause of the King’s sudden return is that he wishes to be prepared for the interview, now in contemplation, between himself and the King of France, at Calais, on the last day of September.’ The source, Chapuys added, was ‘very authentic’.22
It was indeed.
We learn full details from De La Pommeraye, who, as we have seen, was on the Progress. Ever since they had left Greenwich, he reported on 21 July, the King had made him good cheer and used him familiarly. ‘All day long’, he wrote, ‘I am alone with him in the chase.’ During the hunt, ‘he discusses with me all his [private] affairs’ and he takes ‘as much trouble to give me good sport as though I were some great personage’.
From Henry’s point of view, of course, he was a great personage. As Francis’s ambassador, he represented the King himself. And it was Francis whom Henry was trying to charm into agreeing to the proposed interview. The interview itself, as it happened, was conceded rather easily. But Henry would have preferred the world to think that it was Francis, not he, who had suggested the idea. He even tried to persuade De La Pommeraye that Francis should appear to be the suppliant by coming first to visit him at Calais. But here Pommeraye drew the line. It was against his master’s honour, he said flatly. Finally, after weeks of wheedling, Henry had to admit defeat. The terms of the interview were agreed and it was Henry who was to pay the first visit to Francis on his own territory at Boulogne.
But Henry also had another agendum. It was more secret and more important, and he did not trust himself as negotiator. Instead, he deliberately threw the ambassador into Anne’s company. And she, if anything, outdid the King in her kind attentions.
‘Sometimes’, De La Pommeraye informed his correspondent, the French minister Montmorency, ‘he puts my Lady Anne and me, each with our crossbow, to wait for the deer to cross our path, as you know this fashion of hunting.’ ‘On other occasions’, he reported, ‘she and I are together, quite alone, in some other place, to watch the deer run.’ Anne had even supplied him with a brand-new set of hunting equipment, making ‘me a present of a hunting frock, hat, horn and greyhound’.
According to De La Pommeraye, Anne was simply doing what Henry instructed her to do. From what we have seen of Anne’s personality, this does not seem very likely. In fact, Anne wanted the interview with Francis at least as much as Henry. Above all, she wanted to be there herself. And getting her there was the object of her wooing of De La Pommeraye.
She was not so foolish, of course, as to ask directly. Instead, she would have chosen her moment and her point of attack with strategic care. It was, we can guess, one of those moments when she and De La Pommeraye were alone. There was, perhaps, a lull in the sport and maybe the quiet of the forest in the late summer afternoon seemed to invite confidence. She had something very secret to tell him, she whispered. But first he must promise never to reveal his source. He promised. She was, she continued, an ardent friend of France. But many of Henry’s friends and councillors were not, and persisted in their hostility to the traditional enemy. Here she lowered her voice still further. Henry himself, she disclosed, wavered. But one thing would bind him to Francis forever. What was that, the ambassador asked eagerly. She hesitated before replying. Then she overwhelmed him in a burst of apparently artless confidence. Let Francis write to Henry to invite her to the meeting and all would be well. And it would be even better if Francis’s sister, Marguerite of Angoulême, came too. She had such happy memories of her and so longed to see her again!
Those famous coal-black eyes smouldered and De La Pommeraye, gallant Frenchman that he was, did what they ordered.
‘Monseigneur,’ he wrote to Montmorency, ‘I know reliably and from a good source that the greatest favour which the King [Francis] could do to the King his brother and to my Lady Anne, is that our Sovereign Lord should write to me that I should request King Henry to bring Lady Anne with him to Calais, in order that Francis could see her and entertain her.’ In return, Francis must bring Marguerite of Angoulême to entertain Henry. ‘I do not reveal my sources’, Pommeraye explained, ‘because I have sworn an oath.’
Anne had been equally open about whom Henry did not wish to see. Above all, Francis should not bring his wife, Queen Eleanor. She was Charles’s sister and Catherine’s niece and her very appearance would bring back bad memories for the King. Henry, Anne explained, ‘hates Spanish dress since it makes him see a devil [in women’s clothes]’.23
Anne, of course, had already said very similar things about Spaniards to the ladies of the English Court. They had been shocked. But Francis, she had reason to know, would appreciate the abuse. This was because her famously outspoken cousin, Sir Francis Bryan, who was then ambassador in France, had once more spilled the beans. King Francis had been forced to marry Eleanor in the aftermath of his defeat at Pavia, and he regarded her as his badge of servitude to the Emperor. He also found her personally unattractive, Bryan wrote. Even when they were in the same house, ‘they lie not together once in four nights’ and Francis continued to make open love to his mistress. Marguerite of Angoulême was even blunter. Francis found his Queen repellent, she told the Duke of Norfolk. And what made it worse was Eleanor’s characteristic Spanish uxoriousness. ‘She is very hot in bed and desireth to be too much embraced.’ Francis could not get a wink of sleep next to her.24
Preparations for the meeting of the two Kings now went swiftly ahead. Time was short and even Cromwell’s organisational abilities were stretched. He corresponded with Sir Edward Guildford, Sir Henry Guildford’s elder half-brother, about shipping arrangements across the Channel. And he sorted out the all-important question of his-and-hers jewellery for Henry and Anne.25
Cromwell had taken over administrative responsibility for the royal jewels and plate when he was appointed Master of the King’s Jewels on 14 April 1532. He found the paperwork of the office in some disorder. New inventories were drawn up and (as was then customary) he drafted in his own servants. These included Stephen Vaughan, who, like other of Cromwell’s radical friends and dependants, now thought it safe to return to England. In the summer of 1532, Vaughan was acting as one of Cromwell’s go-betweens at the Court, and he found himself kicking his heels. ‘If you would come to Court’, he wrote to Cromwell from Woodstock, where Henry and Anne were in residence from 7–18 August, ‘the King would put me to some occupation’. He did not have long to wait.26
Probably in late August, he was despatched to Cromwell with the King’s ‘devices’ (sketches) for the making and remaking of some important piece of jewellery, including his great State collar set with balas rubies and diamonds. Probably on Thursday, 5 September, Vaughan returned with the worked-up designs from Cornelis Heyss, the royal Goldsmith, for Henry’s approval.
On the Friday night he had audience with the King ‘when he returned late from hunting’. Vaughan showed him the design for the collar (he calls it a ‘chain’). At this point Henry called in Anne to have her advice. Luckily, they both approved–though Henry had feared that Cornelis would have put in more than seven balases, thus making the collar too large. Anne had a query, too: she wanted to know if Vaughan had brought her anything from Thomas Alvard, who had charge of the remains of Wolsey’s plate and jewels at York Place. Her question was directed, almost certainly, at the eighteen diamonds set in troches of gold (that is, buttons set with three stones in a bunch) which Alvard eventually supplied to Heiss on 18 September.27
But not even Henry’s vast store of jewels was enough for Anne: she decided she must have Catherine’s too. Norfolk was sent to do the dirty work. But Catherine, so Chapuys heard, brushed aside his diplomatic feelers with scorn. She would never, she said, willingly give up her jewels to bedeck ‘a person who is the scandal of Christendom’. However, if Henry sent her a direct personal command, she would submit as a good wife must. Swallowing the insult, Henry sent the required message by a Gentleman of his Privy Chamber.28
Anne had the Queen’s jewels. She would not give them up easily.
Cromwell even dealt with matters of female dress. On 21 August, Norfolk wrote to him from the Court at Langley to countermand a previous order for crimson velvet robes for three countesses. ‘The King’s pleasure’, he reported, ‘now is that no robes of estate shall now be made but only for my wife. I send you the pattern.’ Garter King of Arms, Norfolk ended, must also be at Abingdon on Saturday, 24 August.29
These were preparations not for the forthcoming interview but for another ceremony. For it had been decided that, before Anne met Francis as Henry’s Queen-and Consort-to-be, she should be given appropriate rank by being created a peer in her own right. The title chosen was Marquess of Pembroke, which had strong royal associations, since the earldom of Pembroke had been held by Henry’s great-uncle, Jasper Tudor, to whose lands he had succeeded as a boy.
Anne’s creation took place in the grand and already historic setting of Windsor on Sunday, 1 September 1532. In the morning, Anne was conducted in procession to the King; she was accompanied by the peers, headed by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, by the French ambassador, De La Pommeraye, and by the heralds. Garter (who had been summoned to Abingdon to prepare for the ceremony) carried her Letters Patent of creation. Anne herself was magnificent. She wore a surcoat of crimson velvet, furred with ermine, and with straight sleeves. She was supported by two countesses, while her train was born by another great lady. And, according to the Venetian ambassador, she was ‘completely covered with the most costly jewels’.
But here there had been a change of plan. The original intention, as Norfolk’s letters show, was that Anne’s train-bearer would be his wife, Elizabeth Stafford, daughter of the executed Duke of Buckingham. Formally, the task was an honour. But, for Elizabeth, it was an insult. For a Stafford to carry the train of a Boleyn was bad enough. Still worse was the fact that she was Catherine’s oldest English friend and supporter. Her opposition to Anne had become increasingly blatant. Now Elizabeth refused the task point-blank and her daughter Mary had to be her substitute.
For Anne, however, nothing could detract from the moment as, ‘in her hair’, with her splendid auburn tresses hanging round her shoulders, she advanced towards Henry and knelt. Garter delivered her Patent to Gardiner, the royal Secretary, to read it out. Did he swallow as he pronounced the flowery Latin phrases setting out her lineage, merits and honour? Then Henry himself draped the mantle round her shoulders and put the coronet on her head. He also handed over her Patent of creation and another Patent settling lands on her worth £1,000 a year. Thomas Cromwell, inevitably, had organised these as well.
There followed ‘a most solemn Mass’ which Gardiner celebrated in the Chapel Royal, in his capacity this time as Bishop of Winchester. Immediately afterwards, in a deliberate pendant to Anne’s creation, the Treaty of Mutual Aid with France, which had been agreed on 23 June, was ratified. Henry and the French ambassador advanced to the altar. The terms of the treaty were read. Then the King and De La Pommeraye signed the treaty and swore a solemn oath to observe it. The oath-taking was followed by a sermon delivered by Almoner Foxe. There was already a close alliance with France, he explained. But this treaty was ‘for the purpose of uniting the two crowns more closely…to which effect the two Kings will employ their money, troops, their persons and all their forces’. ‘For this purpose’, he concluded, ‘they will have an interview, to take counsel together and arrange what is necessary to be done.’ ‘After this the singers began to chant the Te Deum Laudamus, to the accompaniment of trumpets and other instruments.’30
Three days later, on 4 September, England’s old friend, Guillaume du Bellay, sieur de Langey, arrived from France. He bore the eagerly awaited letters with Francis’s formal request that Anne should be one of the party. Anne showed her gratitude by inviting the ambassador to a dinner which she gave for Henry at her new house at Hanworth.31
Henry and Anne sailed to France in the Swallow. At the last minute, Marguerite of Angoulême had declined the invitation on grounds of ill health. This was a disappointment for Anne and meant that, since there was no woman of the right rank to receive her, she could not accompany Henry to Boulogne on 21 October. But she made up for it when Francis paid his return visit to Henry at Calais on the 25th and stayed till the 29th. Francis began the mutual exchange of courtesies by sending her the gift of a magnificent diamond. Then, on the Sunday after supper, Anne led the party of seven masked English ladies who danced with the Kings and lords. Anne, naturally, partnered Francis. Henry, determined to show off Anne (and to show that she was dancing with Francis), snatched off the ladies’ masks. They danced a little longer, and then Francis ‘talked with [Anne] a space’. We do not, alas, know what they said.32
Henry and Anne took their time over the return journey. They lingered in Calais for a fortnight and spent almost ten days crossing Kent. And they did not arrive back at Greenwich till 27 November.33
Either in Calais or on the return journey, Anne allowed Henry to sleep with her for the first time. They were, at last, lovers in the fully physical sense.
But were they married?