On 15 February 1533 or thereabouts, Anne informed the Duke of Norfolk, in front of many witnesses, that ‘immediately after Easter, she was resolved to go on a pilgrimage to Our Lady [of Walsingham]in the event that she were not pregnant’. Chapuys reported the remark in shocked tones. But he also understood its significance: ‘it seems that she wishes the world to understand that she is pregnant or that she is so indeed’.1
Amid the masculine games of diplomatic bluff and counter-bluff, Anne was playing a woman’s card. And it was, she knew, the ace of trumps. She was also announcing a timetable, set by her own, insistent biology. By Easter, Catherine would be divorced. She, Anne, would be Henry’s acknowledged wife and Queen. And she would be known to be pregnant with the heir-to-be.
The long game, which had begun on New Year’s Day 1527 with Henry’s pledge that he would marry her, would be over. And she would have won.
But the timetable was extraordinarily tight. Easter Day fell on 13 April, which left ten weeks at most to settle the Great Matter which had already dragged itself out over six years. Was it possible? Only two things might make it so: Cromwell’s organising genius and Cranmer’s way with words.
The countdown began on 4 February. This was the date which Henry, in consultation with Audley, had fixed for the opening of the new session of Parliament. Little was done that day, other than to order the Commons to elect a new speaker to replace Audley who, as More’s successor as Lord Chancellor, was now the presiding officer in the Lords. Four days later the new speaker was presented to the King in a ceremony which was grander than the opening itself: both the French ambassador and the Papal Nuncio were present and the Lords wore their crimson and miniver-trimmed Parliament robes. Henry had taken the Nuncio ‘in his own barge and close to his person’ from Greenwich to Westminster for the presentation; and, the ceremony over, De Burgo was shown round the buildings of the Palace of Westminster and entertained to dinner by the two Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk.2
Chapuys concluded correctly that this extraordinary show of favour to the Papal representative in England was part of Henry’s attempt to convince the world that he had done a deal with the Nuncio’s master in Rome. And the Imperial ambassador railed at the folly which might lead Pope Clement to contemplate such a step. For the Divorce, Chapuys insisted to Charles V, was already decided on. Anne and her father were in charge. And, thanks to their patronage, Lutherans and heretics were on the threshold of power. Indeed, Cranmer himself had the reputation of ‘belonging heart and soul’ to the sect. Could not Clement be made to realise this? Could not Charles, who was staying with Clement in Bologna, get him to act before it was too late? And, above all, could not Rome be persuaded to block or at least postpone Cranmer’s appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury? The Bulls, Chapuys suggested, could easily be delayed or a special clause could be inserted in the archbishop’s oath ‘forbidding himself to mix himself up with the Divorce case.’3
Chapuys’s prophecies of doom proved all too accurate. But, Cassandra-like, he was ignored. Pope Clement, with his usual policy of giving with one hand what he took with another, felt that it was Henry’s turn to enjoy a favour. The French were also applying heavy pressure on Henry’s behalf: there was, they insinuated to the Pope, nothing that the English King wanted more than an amicable settlement with Rome. And Charles, despite his ambassador’s urgent warnings, did nothing either.
Instead, and conforming to the Reformers’ worst stereotype, the Papal Curia only haggled about money: it was not a question of whether Cranmer should get his Bulls, but only of how much he (or rather Henry VIII on his behalf) would have to pay. On 22 February, archdeacon Hawkins, Henry’s agent in Rome, sent an interim report on the bargaining. Hitherto, he informed Henry, nothing had happened because ‘they could not agree on the price’. But the previous day Campeggio (who, despite the debacle of the Blackfriars Trial, was still the Cardinal-Protector of England) had formally reported the vacancy at Canterbury in the Consistory and moved the grant of Bulls for Cranmer. Behind the scenes discussion of cost continued, however. If the Annate, the principal Papal tax, were levied in full (‘after the rigour’) it would come to 10,000 ducats (that is, at the exchange rate of 4s and 6d to the ducat, £2,333). Campeggio himself was due a ‘propina’ (a pourboire or tip) of 1,500 ducats (£350) ‘only for proponing the vacation in Consistory’. And the Pope’s officials would expect 3,000 or 4,000 ducats (£700 or £933) ‘for sundries’ (pro minutis servitiis).
But when all these palms were appropriately greased, the way would be open for the next Consistory, due in nine days or so, to complete the formalities of Cranmer’s appointment by approving the grant of the archbishop’s pall or pallium. ‘The Pall’, Hawkins explained to Henry, ‘is a piece of white cloth made of the wool of certain lambs, which the Pope halloweth [blesses], and consecrate by the Pope, and laid on St Peter’s sepulchre.’ It was thus the most sacred archiepiscopal vestment and symbolised the Primate’s position as the Pope’s direct representative. It was also expensive, and would cost yet another 1,000 ducats (£233).4
Happily, as Henry had already made clear, money was no object. Instead, the only hitch in the process came when Bonner arrived at the Papal Court hotfoot from England on 27 February, with Henry’s new instructions to demand, once more, the delegation of the trial of the Great Matter to England. The English ambassadors had an audience with Clement on 2 March, and the Pope, for once, lost his temper. To press him further in the matter, the French Cardinal de Tournon warned his English colleagues, would ‘so irritate and exasperate’ him that it would ‘destroy’ the English and French positions in Rome and throw Clement unreservedly into the arms of the Emperor. There was also, Bonner reported to Henry, ‘an evident peril and fear’ that ‘if we should have further pressed him, he would have denied my Lord Elect’s Bulls’.5
Wisely, they laid off and the moment of danger passed. For, on 3 March, the day after the English ambassadors’ stormy meeting with the Pope, the last two of the eleven Bulls conferring Canterbury on Cranmer were sealed: the one sending him the pall and the other ordering the Archbishop of York and the Bishop of London to invest him with it.6
These Bulls were the most traditional of overtures to the coming storm in the English Church. They also meant that the reality of revolution was covered (as though by Cranmer’s pall) with the fig-leaf of tradition–to the fury of Henry’s and Anne’s conservative opponents and to the confusion of the people. For if Cranmer were so recently appointed by the Pope, how could the Pope disapprove of what Cranmer was doing?
While all this was going on in Rome, the Parliament in Westminster was left twiddling its thumbs and–as if to prove its harmlessness–on about 12 February, De Burgo was taken to observe the Commons in session. He found them debating an insignificant bill against thieves. He did not stay long but went on to a sumptuous banquet at the lodgings of Treasurer Fitzwilliam.7
De Burgo should, of course, have eaten his supper with a long spoon. But he was by no means the only person, nor the most important, to be taken in by Henry’s performance in the great game. The result was that by mid-February Henry and Anne were confident of success; they even felt free to indulge in a little careless talk. Twice Henry boasted to the inner circle of his Court that ‘he would, immediately on the expedition of the Bulls, let people know what he was about, and what he himself intended doing’. And soon a more explicit version of his words became the common rumour. ‘Well nigh everybody’, the Venetian ambassador reported on 23 February, ‘is of the opinion that immediately on the arrival of the Bulls…the Divorce case will be terminated, whether the Pope assents or not.’8
But, as usual, it was Anne who went the furthest. On 7 February, while dining in her own apartments, she said, in a vivid if ominous phrase, that she was ‘as sure as her own death that she should be very soon married to the King’. A fortnight later, on the 22nd, she made her boast about her pregnancy public. Speaking, almost certainly, to her former flame, Thomas Wyatt, she said that she had ‘a fearsome and unquenchable longing to eat apples’, which she had never experienced before. The King, she added, had told her ‘that it was a sign that she must be pregnant’. But, she said, she had replied that ‘she was sure she was not’. Then she burst out laughing and withdrew into her apartments.9
No one who heard her was in any doubt what she meant.
The upshot was that the King felt able to jump the gun. Cranmer’s Bulls did not arrive in London till about 26 March. But already on 9 March there had been an officially sponsored sermon at Court, delivered in the presence of Henry and Anne themselves, which denounced the King’s existing marriage as sinful and called on him to enter into a new and better union. No wonder, the preacher had continued, if Henry in such circumstances should take a wife who was of ‘low rank’ but eminent in ‘virtues and secret merits…as happened in the cases of Kings Saul and David’.
When she heard about the sermon Catherine decided that it was ‘a sign of her case being irretrievably lost’.10
Five days later, on the 14th, the Bill in Restraint of Appeals was introduced into the Commons. The Bill, painstakingly drafted and redrafted by Cromwell and Audley the previous autumn, was intended to do enough but no more. Extravagant and unnecessarily controversial schemes, like the transfer of matrimonial jurisdiction from the Spiritual to the Temporal law, were abandoned. Instead, the Bill left the Spiritual jurisdiction intact–up to a point. For appeals from Canterbury to Rome were forbidden. And the Archbishop, as Chapuys put it, would now become Pope in England.11
But, as Henry and Anne had known all along, Cranmer intended to be a modest sort of Pontiff who would defer in almost all things to his royal master and mistress-to-be. And he made this clear from the moment of his consecration, which took place on Passion Sunday, 30 March, only four days after the arrival of his Bulls.12
First Cranmer went to the Chapter House of St Stephen’s College in the Palace of Westminster. There, in the presence of a select group of witnesses–the King’s prothonotary, the clerk of the Council and a handful of canon lawyers–Cranmer swore the required oaths to the Pope and then, as agreed, immediately undercut them by his Protestation. Nothing in the oaths, he affirmed, should oblige him to act ‘against the Law of God, or against our illustrious King of England, his Commonwealth, Laws or Prerogative’. Nor should his oaths leave him ‘any the less free to speak or less able to advise and assent to anything which might further the Reformation of the Christian religion, the government of the English Church, or the Prerogative of the Crown or the well-being of the Commonwealth’. Rather indeed, he promised to take the initiative in driving change: ‘to reform wherever and whatever in the English Church that shall seem to me to require reformation’.13
Was it Cranmer himself who invoked ‘Reformation’? Or Henry? Or Cromwell? Whoever it was chose well. For the clarion cry of ‘Reformation’ was one of the keys to the forthcoming revolution. It would be used to justify actions more dubious than the breaking of oaths and to quell consciences more sensitive than Cranmer’s.
After making the Protestation, Cranmer processed south through the Cloister to St Stephen’s chapel for his consecration.
Built by the first three Edwards, St Stephen’s was the private royal chapel of Westminster Palace. And its lavish decoration and sculpture made it the symbol of the piety of the medieval English kings: there were images of King Edward III and Queen Philippa and their ten children, of the two sergeants-at-arms who attended them in procession, and of the Adoration of the Magi or Three Kings, on whose feast day of 6 January the King and Queen came to the chapel for the most splendid ceremony of the Court liturgical year.14
No one, however, who had worshipped in the chapel, not even the founder-kings, was a more devout believer in the religious role and authority of monarchs than Cranmer. But no one interpreted the role more radically either.
Before entering the chapel, Cranmer had been vested in his priestly robes and the ceremony he was to undergo would make him a priest of priests: Archbishop, Primate of All England, successor of St Augustine and the Apostles, and, through the laying-on of the pallium, the direct representative of the Pope and St Peter himself. But, throughout, Cranmer clutched the notarial copy of his Protestation like a royal talisman. And, at each crucial point, he referred himself to it: when he took his first oath to the Pope before his consecration, and, again, when he swore a second oath before he received the pallium. All that he did, swore and accepted, he insisted, was subject to the over-riding conditions made in his Protestation: the ceremony might seem to make him the Pope’s but, to his mind at least, his Protestation kept him intact as God’s and the King’s.
Reginald Pole’s brutal comment seems fair. ‘Other perjurers’, he told Cranmer, ‘be wont to break their oath after they have sworn; you break it before.’15
The rights and wrongs of Cranmer’s action were, finally, a matter between his conscience and his God. It was the effect of what he did that mattered. For Henry and Anne now had an Archbishop of Canterbury of their choice who would do their bidding. And he hastened to obey. He had to, because Easter, Anne’s proclaimed deadline, was only a fortnight away.
The issue of the Divorce had already been submitted to Convocation on 26 March and, over the following days, the ‘Determinations’ of the universities, in the obtaining of which Anne’s tutor, her father and her brother had played so prominent a role, were tabled and debated. But on 1 April, Cranmer himself took the chair in the upper house of Convocation for the first time as Archbishop. He proved a ruthless business manager and, within a few days, secured large majorities for two key propositions: that there was proof that Arthur had ‘carnally known’ Catherine and that the Pope had no power to dispense the case. Fisher fought to the last and was silenced only by his arrest on the 6th. On the 8th, Convocation itself was prorogued. It had laid down the principles; it would be up to Cranmer to give them judicial effect.16
Parliament had also been prorogued for the Easter recess on 7 April. According to Chapuys, the Commons were still resisting the Bill in Restraint of Appeals on 31 March. But, within the week, opposition collapsed and the Bill cleared both Houses by the day of prorogation.17
Anne’s deadline had been met.
On 9 April a high-ranking delegation of Councillors, headed by Norfolk, formally gave Catherine notice that Henry had already married Anne. But it was left to her Chamberlain, Mountjoy, to inform her of the corollary: that she was no longer Queen and must neither live nor be addressed as such. Indignantly, Catherine brushed the royal order aside.
‘It is this Anne’, Chapuys wrote, ‘who has put [Henry] in this perverse and wicked temper…and we must believe that she will never cease until she has seen the end of the Queen, as she has done that of the Cardinal, whom she did not hate so much.’18
It is a harsh judgement. But events would prove it accurate.
Finally on 12 April, Easter Saturday, Anne, having vanquished her rival, appeared for the first time as Queen herself. ‘Anne went’, the Venetian ambassador reported, ‘with the King to high mass, as Queen, and with all the pomp of a Queen, clad in cloth of gold, and loaded with the richest jewels.’ During the service, she was prayed for as Queen and afterwards ‘she dined in public’ in state.
‘All the world is astonished at it’, Chapuys noted, ‘and even those who take her part do not know whether to laugh or to cry.’ But the incentive to keep a properly composed expression was great. ‘The King’, Chapuys continued, ‘is very watchful of the countenance of the people, and begs the Lords to go and visit and make their court to the new Queen.’ Henry had also, the ambassador had discovered, done a deal with Cranmer to regularise his matrimonial position.19
That very day, in fact, Henry had replied to a letter from Cranmer, asking for permission to try his marriage. The request was an awkward one: Cranmer, who professed his submission to the King, had nevertheless to sit in judgement upon him. The irony of the situation had not disturbed Wolsey’s serenely imperious confidence in either of the earlier trials of 1527 or 1529. But it concerned both the King and his Archbishop now, and it took two versions of Cranmer’s letter before Henry was satisfied. In the first version, Cranmer had asked to know Henry’s ‘pleasure’ before he proceeded. In the second version, this was formalised into a request for a royal ‘licence’ to judge the case, as specified by the Act in Restraint of Appeals. Nor was it sufficient for Cranmer to state that he sought such permission ‘most humbly upon my knees’. Instead, he was coached into ending his second letter by proclaiming himself to be ‘prostrate at the feet of your Majesty’ and protesting that he had sued for the licence ‘only for the zeal’ he had to end the scandal of the Great Matter and to settle the succession ‘and for none other intent and purpose’.20
Henry, clearly, was determined that the keys snatched from St Peter should not be handed over unconditionally to his English substitute. And Cranmer, out of conscience as well as expediency, was happy to acquiesce.
Armed with Henry’s licence, Cranmer stepped, however improbably, into Wolsey’s shoes and launched the third ‘inquisition’ into the marriage. And, as previously, the royal couple were summoned to appear before their ecclesiastical judge. According to Chapuys, the summons was served on Catherine on about 15 April. ‘The Queen’, he reported, ‘has been cited to appear before the Archbishop of Canterbury on [1 May], at an Abbey 30 miles from here.’ The Abbey was Dunstable Priory in Bedfordshire. It was near the royal hunting lodge of Ampthill, where Catherine had been ordered to take up residence–but, at a dozen miles to the south-west, it was not too near. Indeed, according to Chapuys, its remoteness was why it had been selected. ‘This’, he reported, ‘being a solitary place [it] has been chosen for secrecy, as they fear that if the affair was managed [in London], the people would not refrain from speaking of it and perhaps from rioting.’21
Henry, clearly, had not forgotten his humiliation at the hands of the London crowd at the Blackfriars Trial. There must be no repetition, and Catherine must be given no opportunity to grandstand and milk sympathy.
Nevertheless, the King’s preparations were strikingly disorganised. This is curious. Henry’s arguments were hardly under-rehearsed (after all, he had been saying much the same thing for six years). And his leading counsel was the usually ferociously efficient Gardiner. What had gone wrong? Perhaps there were already tensions between Gardiner and Cromwell. Perhaps Henry’s advisers had spread themselves too thin: after all, they had just coped with contentious sessions of both Parliament and Convocation and they were about to face a meeting of the Northern Convocation, which was even more rootedly hostile to the Great Matter than its southern equivalent. Perhaps Anne’s own driving energy was absent, as her mind had already moved on from fighting for her new status to celebrating and enjoying it; if so, it proved a temporary aberration, albeit a dangerous one.
Whatever the reason, crucial documentation was missing. Where, Audley wrote to Cromwell, were the ‘Determinations’ of the universities? Cranmer had already been approached, but ‘Wiltshire reports he hath them not’. If Cromwell did not have them, they must be at York Place or with Dr [Rowland] Lee. ‘If at York Place the King says you may go thither; if not, send for Dr Lee, or, if he be not in town, search his chambers’. For the papers must be found! ‘The King’, Audley concluded, ‘wishes them sent with speed to [Gardiner].’22
All this accounts for the fact that Cranmer did not open his court till Saturday, 10 May. Even then the King’s case was not water-tight: papers were still astray and crucial witnesses were missing.
Ironically, the day was saved for Henry only by Catherine’s own behaviour. For Catherine was not for turning. Instead, she stuck rigidly to the strategy she had pursued since the Blackfriars Trial and refused either to recognise the court or to respond to the summons. This enabled Cranmer, like the Cardinal-Legates, to pronounce her ‘contumacious’ and proceed in her absence.
But it was still a close-run thing, as Thomas Bedell, the clerk to the Council, detailed in a letter to Cromwell written immediately after the end of the first day’s session. The key witnesses to Catherine’s response to the summons, Bedell reported, had not arrived at Dunstable; the two aged ladies who were to testify to the consummation of Catherine’s marriage had not appeared either; the King’s ‘protestation’ (in effect his witness statement) was not to hand nor, despite Henry’s imperious command, had the ‘Determinations’ of the universities turned up. Oh, and they were still missing ‘the instrument of the opinion of the Convocation’, which Cranmer had secured with such effort the previous month.23
It is an extraordinary catalogue of ineptitude. But Catherine’s own absence and, a fortiori, the absence of her lawyers, enabled Cranmer to keep the show on the road. Anne’s cousin, Sir Francis Bryan, turned up like a bad penny for the second session on Monday, 12 May, and his evidence of Catherine’s response to the summons enabled her to be pronounced definitively contumacious (vere et manifeste contumacem). This, in turn, meant that the two elderly ladies, who had refused to imperil their bodies as well as their consciences by travelling to Dunstable, could depose in London without the need for a further summons to Catherine and the consequent delay while her response was awaited.24
But the most important advantage of the King’s men was, as Chapuys had foreseen, Dunstable’s rural isolation. ‘Few or almost none were present at the place of judgement’, Bedell reported, ‘but such as came thither…with their lords and masters.’ Not even Catherine, though she was only a few miles distant, bothered to send observers. ‘There came’, Bedell reported in his second letter to Cromwell, written after the Saturday session of the court, ‘no servant of hers in Dunstable, sith our coming hither, but only such as this day be brought in as witness against her.’25
Practically in camera, therefore, the King’s lawyers felt able to cut corners. Henry’s counsel, Bedell noted in a revealing remark, ‘studieth, as diligently as they possibly can, to cause everything to be handled, so as it may be most consonant to the law, as far as the matter will suffer’. Much the same went for Cranmer himself as judge, according to the same observer. ‘And my Lord of Canterbury’, he wrote, ‘handleth himself very well, and very uprightly, without any evident cause of suspicion to be noted in him by the counsel of the said Lady Catherine, if she had any present here.’26
Indeed, so happy was the present state of affairs for the King’s case that Cranmer did everything he could to prevent any further publicity. He had not, he explained to Cromwell on 17 May, ‘even written to the Queen’ (that is, Queen Anne, not Queen Catherine) but only to the King himself. His reason was the overwhelming need for discretion: ‘I think it expedient that…the process be kept secret for a time,’ he insisted. And, above all, it must be kept secret from Catherine, lest ‘a great bruit and voice of the people in this behalf might move her to do that thing herein which peradventure she would not do if she shall hear little of it’. For Cranmer’s fear was that Catherine might think better of her position and appear in his court, which would throw the whole now smoothly running machinery out of gear. Say nothing, he begged Cromwell, and beseech Henry himself to say nothing either.27
It is an unlovely picture. But the tactic worked. By the 17th, Cranmer was able to advise Henry that, at last, ‘your Grace’s great matter is now brought to a final sentence, to be given on Friday now next ensuing [the 23rd]’. That was almost a week away. But the court, Cranmer explained to his impatient master, could not convene any earlier since all the intervening days were ‘ferial’ or holy days, on which an ecclesiastical court could not sit.28
On the 23rd, Cranmer duly reported to Henry ‘that I have given sentence in your Grace’s great and weighty cause’ and sent him a transcript. But immediately there arose another problem: Cranmer had also been instructed that Henry’s marriage with Anne was to be found good. But the details were lacking. So, Cranmer reminded Henry, it was time: ‘for the time of the Coronation is so instant and so near at hand, that the matter requireth good expedition to be had in the same’.29
This time, as Anne herself was directly involved, there were no hitches.