House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty Read online

  Henry now moved to sever, irrevocably, his links with Rome and to take the first steps towards independence of the Church in England, through a series of legal measures steered through Parliament by Cromwell.50 An able champion of the annulment arrived in the shape of Thomas Cranmer, who, although only an archdeacon, was nominated as Archbishop of Canterbury in succession to William Warham who had died in August 1532. His loyalties to the cause of the ‘Great Matter’ were unimpeachable: he had been private chaplain to Anne Boleyn’s father, now elevated to the Earldom of Wiltshire and Ormonde.

  Henry’s love for Anne remained wholly undiminished and he was determined to demonstrate it. On 1 September 1532, she enjoyed her first public mark of favour when she was raised to the peerage in her own right as Marchioness of Pembroke, with a generous annuity of £1,000 a year. He then took her on to a glittering meeting with Francis I of France in Boulogne and Calais, accompanied by a 2,000-strong English entourage, when she proudly wore a dazzling display of jewellery confiscated from Catherine of Aragon.

  It was then, or shortly afterwards, that she allowed Henry into her bed for the first time.

  About the middle of January 1533, Anne found that she was pregnant and a proud and expectant Henry swiftly, secretly and bigamously married her on the 25th in a chamber above the Holbein Gate in his new Palace of Westminster. Norfolk was not present at the ceremony.

  Cranmer was a fervent supporter of the royal divorce being decided under English jurisdiction and now, naively, if not appeasively, Clement VII in Rome approved Henry’s choice of him as Primate of England. The Pope issued the necessary nine bulls on 21-22 February, allowing Cranmer’s consecration as Archbishop of Canterbury to take place on 30 March at St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster. So that there could be no doubt as to the reality of religious authority in England, Henry informed Cranmer that the primacy and its authority existed ‘only by the sufferances of us and our progenitors’ and ‘you are, under us, by God’s calling and ours, the most principal minister of our spiritual jurisdiction within this our realm’.51

  The archbishop could waste little time, as Anne’s condition was becoming every day more obvious and royal scandal was looming. An ecclesiastical court was established at Dunstable, Bedfordshire, close to where Queen Catherine had been exiled, to dissolve her marriage with Henry. It came as no surprise when she refused to appear before the tribunal, presided over by Cranmer. At ten o’clock on the morning of 23 May 1533, the Primate declared the matrimony ‘to be against the laws of God’ and ‘therefore divorced the king’s highness from the noble lady Catherine’.52 Henry was free to marry again under the law, although in truth, of course, he had already jumped the gun.

  Anne was crowned by Cranmer in Westminster Abbey on Whit Sunday, 1 June 1533, in a spectacular ceremony that it was estimated to have cost Henry a staggering 100,000 gold ducats out of his own purse - plus another 200,000 sycophantically supplied by the City of London,53 equating to £55 million at current values.54 This was a high price for love.

  Norfolk had petitioned for the hereditary office of Earl Marshal to be returned to him six weeks before. It had been held by the second duke, but granted to the royal favourite Suffolk in 1524, which had been a source of rancour ever since.55 The king belatedly agreed on 28 May, but, ironically, Norfolk was forced to hand over the Earl Marshal’s responsibility for Anne’s coronation to his half-brother William, as he was going to France to represent Henry at a meeting between Francis I and Pope Clement VII. The duke arrived in Lyons to accompany the French king to Nice for the discussions, but unexpected news arrived from Rome that so shocked him that he nearly fainted when he heard it.

  On 11 July, Clement, in a secret consistory court hearing, had condemned both Henry’s separation from Catherine and his marriage with Anne. The Pope set a deadline of September for Henry to take back his former wife, under pain of excommunication.56 Norfolk despatched his nephew George Boleyn, now Viscount Rochford to ride pell-mell to England with the news and to seek further instructions. As a result, Norfolk was summoned urgently back to court, and he rode almost five hundred miles in just eight days,57 a remarkable achievement for a sixty-year-old man.

  But all the duke’s agitation and distress was a waste of energy. In the event, the sentence of excommunication was postponed for two more months and never promulgated.

  The king easily shrugged off the papal condemnation, buoyed up, as he was, by the prospect that Anne would preserve the Tudor dynasty by presenting him with a lawful male successor. Physicians and astrologers had been consulted and their reassuring predictions gave him every hope that his problem would at last be resolved.

  Anne was safely delivered of a fair daughter between three and four o’clock in the afternoon of Sunday 7 September 1533 in her opulently furnished room at Greenwich Palace. Norfolk hurried to London for the birth and the smile must have been quickly wiped off his face when he was told the news.

  Henry presented a brave face to destiny’s hard dealing, although the sex of the child was clearly a stunning shock. It was, moreover, hailed triumphantly as a sign of divine displeasure on the marriage by the many supporters of the discarded queen.58 The baby was christened Elizabeth by Cranmer in the Church of the Friars Observant, just outside Greenwich Palace, the following Wednesday.

  The Howards and Boleyns put on a plucky show. The old Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, wearing a mantle of purple velvet, with a train trimmed with ermine, was one of Elizabeth’s two godmothers59 who carried the infant to the font, its swaddling clothes set with pearls and gems. They walked beneath a canopy, borne by Anne’s brother, George, Norfolk’s half-brothers, William and Thomas, and Lord Hussey. Norfolk, carrying his white wand of office as Earl Marshal, was at his step-grandmother’s right-hand side.60 As was then the custom, neither parent attended the christening.

  Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador, was keen to help the discarded Catherine and her daughter Mary, whom Henry planned to declare illegitimate. In late February 1534, he valiantly sought permission to address Parliament on their plight, even though he knew it was a forlorn hope. Henry prevaricated by asking the envoy to meet Norfolk and Cromwell to discuss his planned statement. When he arrived at Norfolk’s town house, he found that Cromwell was absent due to a ‘slight indisposition which kept him indoors’. No doubt, a diplomatic illness. After hearing Chapuys’s arguments, Norfolk shrugged off the ambassador’s comments

  by referring me to the people who, he said, understood affairs of that sort better than he. [Then] he asked me point blank what sort of statements

  I proposed making in Parliament. My answer was that, beyond the true and simple narrative of what had passed in the matter of the divorce, I would utter nothing that was not honest and reasonable . . .

  Inevitably, Norfolk told him his chances of success were minimal and assured him that he always favoured his master, the Emperor Charles V, rather than the French. The following Tuesday, Chapuys went to court but was intercepted, before he could see the king, by a breathless Norfolk, fresh from attending Henry. ‘For God’s sake, Monsieur,’ he panted

  I beg and entreat you on this day to use all your discretion and prudence and so moderate your language that you may not fall into trouble or inconvenience.

  You are about to enter matters so odious and unpleasing that not all the sugar or sauces in the world would render them palatable.

  That is why I again pray and entreat you, for God’s sake, to be careful and guarded in your speech . . .

  The duke repeated this last sentence, parrot-like, ‘at least six times’. Plainly, he had just suffered the sharp edge of the king’s tongue and he dropped a broad hint to the ambassador that the issue of Catherine could only be satisfactorily settled by her death. Norfolk scurried off, after being summoned back to the royal presence, and after half an hour Chapuys was allowed to see the king.

  Henry was polite but uncompromising. The ambassador could not be ignorant of the fact that he was legitimately married to Anne Boleyn
and that his former marriage had been judicially annulled. His first wife, still living, could not be called ‘Queen’ - or hold property allotted to her by her first marriage.61 Nor could Princess Mary be called his legitimate daughter - and, even if she was, ‘her disobedience to his commands would have been sufficient reason for disinheriting her’. Mary ‘was in good health, well-lodged and nobody,’ said Henry firmly, ‘had any right to interfere in his domestic arrangements, for he could dispose of his daughter as he pleased’.

  Chapuys realised ‘there was no means of obtaining what I had come for’ and, fearing that persistence might spark one of the king’s notoriously violent tantrums, bowed humbly and backed out of the chamber.62

  Queen Anne remained deeply unpopular among her subjects, just as Catherine achieved almost saint-like status. The Lancashire parson James Harrison declared: ‘I will [have] none for queen but Queen Catherine! Who the devil made Nan Boleyn, that whore, queen?’63 The Colchester monk Dan John Frances affirmed in January 1534 that when Henry had met Francis I in Boulogne, ‘the Queen’s grace followed his arse as the dog follows his master’s arse’.64 It was high time to nip such traitorous sentiments in the bud. Cromwell’s Act of Succession, rapidly enacted in March 1534,65 demanded personal commitment to the breach with Rome, from anyone in the realm aged fourteen and above. An oath drawn up by Norfolk and Suffolk sought both a declaration of sacred belief that the marriage between Henry and Anne was lawful and total allegiance to Princess Elizabeth and any other children of the union, as rightful successors to the throne of England.

  It was now treason for anyone to oppose the succession and misprision 66 to speak against it.

  It was also now treason, under Cromwell’s new Treasons Act, to wish malicious harm to the king and queen or their heirs; to deprive them of their dignity or title, or claim that ‘the king our sovereign lord is a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or usurper’.67

  On 13 April 1534, senior members of the clergy, including John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, who had opposed the annulment, were summoned to Cranmer’s palace at Lambeth, across from Westminster on the south bank of the Thames, to take the Oath of Succession. Sir Thomas More, who had resigned as Lord Chancellor on 16 May 1532 over the breach with Rome, was also ordered to attend. He was happy, he declared, to swear the oath, but he refused to sign anything that contained the preamble to the Act, which laid out Henry’s supremacy of the Church.

  After months of imprisonment, Fisher, aged and infirm, was despatched to the executioner’s block on 22 June 1535, his journey to the scaffold hastened by an inopportune decision by the new Pope Paul III to create him a cardinal. Then it became Sir Thomas More’s turn to face Henry’s harsh justice: the king’s promises to him of immunity over the issue of the marriage proved utterly worthless.

  Condemned to perpetual imprisonment in the Tower for misprision, More was too popular a figure to be allowed to avoid the oath. As Cromwell pointedly reminded him: ‘You are not discharged of your obedience and allegiance to the king.’ He replied that his ‘poor body was at the king’s pleasure and he wished that his death would do him good’.68

  He duly came up for trial at Westminster Hall on 1 July and was condemned after perjured evidence against him by one of Cromwell’s henchmen, the Solicitor-General Sir Richard Riche. The jury took just fifteen minutes to find him guilty as charged. More then dropped all pretence of guarding his tongue, and attacked the king’s usurpation of supremacy. ‘For the seven years I have studied the matter, I have not read any approved order of the Church that a temporal lord could, or ought, to be head of the spirituality.’

  Sir Thomas Audley, the Lord Chancellor, was amazed: ‘What! You wish to be considered wiser, or of better conscience, than all the bishops and nobles of this realm?’ he demanded.

  Norfolk, one of his judges, angrily snapped out that his old friend’s malice was now patently clear. More retorted:Noble sir, not any malice or obstinacy causes me to say this but the just necessity of the cause constrains me for the discharge of my conscience and satisfaction of my soul. I know well that the reason why you have condemned me is because I have never been willing to consent to the king’s second marriage. But I hope in the divine goodness and mercy that as St Paul and St Stephen (which he persecuted) are now friends in Paradise, so we, though differing in this world, shall be united in perfect harmony in the other.

  I pray God to protect the king and give him good counsel.69

  More was executed with one blow of the axe at Tower Hill at around nine o’clock on the morning of 6 July 1535.

  Meanwhile, despite all the blood shed for the sake of the marriage, all was not well with Henry and his new queen, who no longer lived up to her motto ‘The Most Happy’.

  In January 1535, Chapuys reported court gossip about Anne’s peevish temper. Henry Percy, sixth Earl of Northumberland, her former love, talked freely of her arrogance and malice, saying that lately she had used ‘such shameful words to the Duke of Norfolk as one would not address to a dog, so that he was compelled to quit the royal chamber. In his indignation . . . he uttered reproaches against [her] of which the least was to call her la grande putain [the great whore].’70 Norfolk sulkily departed for the peace of Kenninghall, complaining to Chapuys that he was no longer held in any kind of esteem at court. The queen also lashed out at her former ally Cromwell and threatened to have him beheaded. By year end, when her pet dog Purkoy died after a fall, ‘nobody dared tell her grace of it’.71

  She even turned against her elder sister. In 1534, Mary had secretly married her second husband, Sir William Stafford,72 a soldier serving in the Calais garrison, but her obvious pregnancy revealed the relationship. Anne imperiously dismissed her from court and she was never again to be received there.

  The origin of all this regal sound and fury was Anne’s mounting worries over Catherine and Princess Mary remaining alive and the latent threat they posed her - coupled with her own persistent failure to produce a male heir. Chapuys

  feared that the king is getting so inured to cruelty [that] he will use it towards the Queen [Catherine] and the Princess at least in secret. To which, the concubine [Anne] will urge him with all her power, who has lately blamed the . . . king, saying it was a shame to him and all the realm they were not punished as traitresses, according to the statutes.

  The . . . concubine is now more haughty than ever and ventures to tell the king that he is more bound to her than man can be to woman, for she extricated him from a state of sin.73

  Dr Pedro Ortiz, the imperial ambassador in Rome, heard of Anne’s hatred for her nineteen-year-old stepdaughter Princess Mary: ‘She is my death and I am hers, so I will take care that she will not laugh at me after my death,’74 he reported her as saying.

  Further strains between Henry and Anne over her lack of a healthy son followed her miscarriage in July 1534. She was desperate to become pregnant again and was unwise enough to speak slightingly of her husband’s lacklustre performance in bed, where, she whispered, he had shown neither skill nor virility. The queen also had ‘suborned a person to say that he had [received] a revelation from God that she could not conceive while the two ladies [Catherine and Mary] were alive’.75

  Henry’s eye was also roving. Anne wrathfully demanded the dismissal of the modest, charming and fragile twenty-five-year-old Jane Seymour from court, and had behaved so violently that the king walked out on his queen, ‘complaining of her importunacy and vexatiousness’.76

  By the end of 1535, she may have lost her pet dog but things suddenly looked brighter. Anne was pregnant again, and, a few weeks later, on 7 January 1536, Catherine died, probably of cancer of the heart, at Kimbolton Castle, her lonely home in Huntingdonshire .77

  News of the death delighted the queen. Showing ‘great joy’, Anne gave the messenger a handsome present. Her father, the Earl of Wiltshire, dryly commented that it was a pity Princess Mary ‘did not keep company with her [mother]’ and Henry dressed in celebratory yellow ‘from top to toe, exce
pt for the white feather he had in his bonnet’.78 But Chapuys whispered that Anne, in the privacy of her chamber later, ‘cried and lamented, fearing she herself might be brought to the same end’.

  Her fears were entirely justified - and not long in being fulfilled.

  A few weeks later, on 26 January, Henry met with a terrible accident in the royal tilting yard at Greenwich Palace. ‘The king, mounted on a great horse to run at the lists, both fell so heavily that everyone thought it a miracle he was not killed, but he sustained no injury,’ reported an eyewitness.79 In reality, the accident was far more serious: the heavy charger rolled over on to Henry, crushing him, and afterwards, he lay ‘for two hours without speech’ probably because of severe concussion.

  Five days later, Anne miscarried of a heavy male foetus, aged about three and a half months, after Norfolk had insensitively blurted out news of Henry’s accident. The shock, she claimed, caused the loss of her son.80

  The king had little sympathy for her plight. He now wanted rid of this fractious, haughty and overbearing tartar who had failed in her promise to give him his heirs. Chapuys happily seized on second-hand court gossip that Henry had apparently told a courtier

  in great secrecy and as a confession that he had been seduced and forced into this second marriage by means of sortileges [sorcery or witchcraft] and charms and that owing to that, he would hold it as nullified.

  God, he said, had well shown his displeasure at it by denying him male children.

  He therefore considered he could take a third wife which, he said, he wished much to do.81

  Thomas Cromwell was just the man to arrange it for him and together with Norfolk, led a commission established to find fault in both the Queen’s character and behaviour.