Six Wives (74 page)

    This time, as Anne herself was directly involved, there were no hitches.

A
ccording to Cranmer, writing to his friend Ambassador Hawkins in Rome, the preparations for Anne's coronation began after 'our rejourneying home' from the trial at Dunstable: in other words, in the last week of May 1533. Cranmer's letter is important since it is, I think, the first account of a coronation by the officiating prelate. But, as so often, its writer was being economical with the truth. It would, no doubt, have been more decorous if the preparations
had
been delayed until Henry's Divorce was absolute. But Anne's timetable dictated otherwise. She had been recognised as Queen at Easter and she would be crowned at Whitsuntide, which fell on 1 June. This meant that, even as Cranmer was riding back from divorcing one Queen in Bedfordshire to crowning another in London, the preparations for the latter event had been going on for several weeks, even for a year, if the rebuilding of the Tower is counted (as it should be) as part of the operation.
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    And the man in charge (as with the Tower works) was Cromwell – Anne's other right-hand man. He takes the credit for the fact himself. In the list of 'things done by the King's Highness sithence I came into his service', he notes as the penultimate item: '[the King] has borne most costly charge at the coronation of Queen Anne'. Contemporaries also recognised Cromwell's role. He was glad, wrote Sir Anthony Browne, one of Henry's inner circle and ambassador in France, at the report that the Queen's coronation had been so honourably done – 'which was not a little to Cromwell's credit'. But the best testimony of all is Cromwell's own papers. These show that he planned the event; marshalled the personnel and paid for much of the finery from the secret funds under his direct control.
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    The result was not only one of the best organised, but also one of the best documented coronations in English history. Here an insider view is useful. 'The Queen's coronation', Anne's Vice-chamberlain, Sir Edward Baynton, wrote to her brother, Lord Rochford, 'is honourably passed as ever was, if all old and ancient men say true.' Memory clearly was the issue: the last coronation was Henry's and Catherine's, twenty-four years previously in 1509. And the last royal entrée of a woman into London was Catherine's for her wedding to Arthur in 1501. These events were a bench-mark; they also introduced a note of direct comparison and competition between Anne and her displaced rival. To match them was not enough. Instead, Anne's coronation had to exceed anything that anyone could recall of any of the celebrations for Catherine – for the sake of Anne, for Henry and for their marriage.

    It was Cromwell's task to provide this extra panache of pomp and circumstance. How well he performed it – in reality as well as in possibly prejudiced comment – remains to be seen.
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* * *

The coronation rituals were, of course, already ancient: the coronation
ordo
or order of service had changed relatively little since the coronation of King Edgar in AD 973. The crown and much of the regalia were likewise Anglo-Saxon and were ascribed, probably correctly, to Edward the Confessor (1042–66). It was also Edward the Confessor who had first determined on Westminster Abbey as the coronation church. But each succeeding age had added something, with the result that, round the central Anglo-Saxon stem, there clustered a thick ivy-growth of precedent and tradition.
⁴
'To do things by the book' – that is,
The Royal
Book
– was therefore the first test for each re-enactment of the ceremony.

    The Court of Claims, which determined the right to perform various hereditary offices at the coronation, met on about 5 May under the presidency of the Duke of Suffolk. He was the Lord High Steward for the day of the coronation, and, as such, took charge of the honorifics of the secular side of the ceremony.
⁵

    Suffolk's acceptance of the appointment was, in itself, a triumph for Anne. Following the lead of his formidable Duchess, Mary Tudor, Suffolk had been one of Anne's leading opponents. Now, however, he led the way in paying her honour. Admittedly, he had always been politically supple. But his present conversion was probably helped by his wife's illness, which proved mortal. Mary wrote a pathetic letter to Henry, as 'my most dearest and best beloved brother'. 'I am rather worse than better,' she wrote of her sickness. Nevertheless she intended to come to London with her husband, 'because I would be glad to see your Grace'. 'I have been a great while out of your sight', she continued. This was a result of her self-exile from a Court dominated by the hated Anne. But now 'I trust I shall not be so long again; for the sight of your Grace is to me the greatest comfort to me that may be possible'. She never made the journey, however, dying at Westhorpe Hall, Suffolk, on 25 June, some three weeks after Anne's coronation.
⁶

    Meanwhile, Suffolk duly ratified the claims of his fellow peers to perform their honorific services. In one sense this was pure convention. But it was also a vindication for Anne. For Chapuys's despatches had been full of the boasts of great nobles that they would have nothing to do with the upstart royal mistress who would be Queen. Instead they would prevent her from becoming Queen by refusing to exercise their ancient offices for so unworthy a candidate. Most outspoken of all, apparently, was the Earl of Shrewsbury. According to Chapuys, 'to his office in this kingdom belongs the right of holding the Queen's royal crown'. And, since neither he nor his family had ever incurred reproach, 'he now would take care not to fall into dishonour by placing [the crown] on any other head but that of the present Queen'.
⁷

    Chapuys admitted that he had got the story at second-hand. And he certainly got it wrong. For Shewsbury's coronation 'service' or function, which he claimed in right of his tenure by 'serjeanty' of the manor of Farnham Royal, Buckinghamshire, was not to carry the Queen's crown, but to support her right hand while it carried the sceptre. But, far from boldly refusing his charge, Shrewsbury petitioned the Court of Claims for the service—though, on the day itself, the task was performed by his son and heir, Lord Talbot and Furnival. Perhaps this deputisation was a concession to Shrewsbury's conscience; even so, it was a long way from his original boast and exposed it for the hot-air it was. Nor did his fellow nobles even make the gesture of dissent.
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    And where the peerage led, the rest followed. The heralds performed their usual esoteric services, for which they billed the Keeper of the Privy Purse. Their charges included £50 for the crying of 'largesse', that is the proclamation of titles, at 'the most honourable and joyous marriage' and another £50 for the largesse at the coronation. The heralds, however, agreed to remit the former charge 'because they were not present'.
⁹

    This careful following of tradition led to episodes which, even then, struck observers as archaic. Cranmer, for example, was much taken by the creation of eighteen Knights of the Bath at the Tower on Friday night, 30 May. The ceremonial involved stripping and bathing the postulant knights, putting them to bed, rousing them in the small hours, cladding them in new robes of ancient form, and setting them to keep vigil in church. All of which was, Cranmer informed Hawkins, 'so strange to hear of, as also their garments stranger to behold or look on'. Clearly, Henry made sure that the rituals, which he himself had undergone at the age of three and a half at the hands of his father, on the occasion of his creation as Duke of York, were performed in their full, outlandish splendour.
¹⁰

    But equally Cromwell was not afraid to innovate. His most important change was in the processional route. In the traditional ritual, the Queen came to the Tower, rested the night, and then, the day before the coronation, processed through the City to Westminster in an open litter. Cromwell added to this a water procession which conveyed Anne in state from Greenwich to the Tower. The effect was to more-than-double the usual length of the processional route, to add another day to the ceremonies, which now stretched over four days, and to make the rebuilt Tower, sparkling in new stone and fresh paint, an important theatre of pageantry in its own right.

    Anne thus had a larger stage and a longer performance. It was an opportunity to shine – or to fail in the most public fashion possible.

* * *

The ceremonies got underway on Thursday, 29 May, at 1 o'clock, when the Lord Mayor, Sir Stephen Peacock, and the Aldermen in their scarlet and chains assembled at St Mary-at-Hill and, together with the Common Councillors, boarded the City barge at New Stairs by Billingsgate to lead the water pageant. The pageant was modelled on the annual river procession from the City to Westminster for the new Lord Mayor's swearing-in at Star Chamber. But the decoration of the barges was much more lavish, with royal escutcheons, and banners and pennants. First came a boat with a great dragon 'continually moving and casting wildfire', surrounded with monsters and wildmen, all likewise belching fire and making 'hideous noises'. Next, at 'a good distance', came the Lord Mayor's barge with, on the right hand, the gaily decorated bachelors' barge, with innumerable pennants tipped with bells, and on the left a barge with a pageant of Anne's badge of the white falcon, imperially crowned, on a golden tree stump which, made fertile by the bird's landing, sprouted red and white roses. Then followed, in order of precedence, the barges of the livery companies – dozens of them, all painted and gilded and hung with banners and tapestries.
¹¹

    The procession made good order downstream, each barge two lengths behind the preceding one. They passed the river-front of Greenwich Palace, then, at Blackwall, in a carefully choreographed manoeuvre, the procession turned round and assumed a reverse order of precedence, with the Lord Mayor's barge coming last. In this order they rowed back to Greenwich, where they anchored. At 3 o'clock Queen Anne appeared. Clad in cloth of gold, she entered the Queen's barge. Actually, it was Catherine's barge, stripped of her emblems and redecorated with Anne's. Accompanying the Queen's barge were the lords and bishops, each in his own barge.
¹²

    Prominent among the bishops, of course, was Cranmer and his letter to Hawkins gives a vivid thumb-nail sketch of the return journey to the Tower: 'trumpets, shawms [a sort of oboe], and other diverse instruments all the ways playing, making great melody, which, as is reported, was as comely done as never was like in any time nigh to our remembrance'. The ships lining the river fired their guns, with particular heavy salvos at Limehouse and Ratcliff. Then, as the flotilla passed Wapping and came in sight of the Tower, the Tower's mighty guns, by a pre-arranged signal, joined in the salute, firing four at a time.
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    Anne alighted at Tower wharf. There a 'long lane' or corridor had been cleared for her through crowds to the King's Bridge, which crossed the moat at the Byward Tower. She was greeted first by the Lieutenant and Constable of the Tower, then by the Lord Chamberlain, next by the Great Officers of State and finally, at the entrance to the Tower, by Henry himself, who publicly embraced her. It seemed a spontaneous gesture – like Catherine and Arthur's turning to salute the crowd in St Paul's, thirty-two years previously in 1501. In fact, like that earlier gesture, Henry's greeting was written into the script. But this time it is certain that the couple kissed. The King, according to the clumsy prose of the recording herald, 'laid his hands on both [Anne's] sides, kissing her with great reverence and a joyful countenance'.
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    Anne's face, we can imagine, was even more cheerful. For everything she had hoped for since 1527 – the King, the throne, the very kingdom itself – was now hers. But, before Henry swept her off into the Tower, she paused to give thanks to the Lord Mayor 'with many goodly words' for the water pageant. This was still anchored by the Tower, since only a small delegation had been permitted to land with the Lord Mayor. 'But for to speak of the people that stood on every shore to behold the sight,' wrote the chronicler, Edward Hall, who was another eye-witness, 'he that saw it would not believe it.'
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    And a professed non-believer in the whole thing was, of course, Chapuys. Nevertheless even he acknowledged that 'innumerable people' were involved – though he claimed that they 'showed themselves as sorry as though it had been a funeral'.
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* * *

    Taking advantage of the long summer evenings, the procession left the Tower late, at about 5 o'clock. Anne's own equipage conformed precisely to the rules laid down in
The Royal Book
. Everything was white – her dress, her litter, and even the trappings of her horses. Also according to precedent, her head was uncovered, and, in Cranmer's vivid phrase, 'she [sat] in her hair' – that lustrous, dark hair that so contravened contemporary ideals of beauty. She wore a plain gold circlet, heavily jewelled, and her canopy was carried by the Barons of the Cinque Ports. Behind her came England's highest ranking peeresses, in chariots covered in cloth of gold and wearing robes of crimson velvet carefully differenced according to their rank. Cranmer, more sensitive to female beauty than to blood and position, dismissed these
grandes dames
as 'diverse ancient old ladies'. More youthful, though less dignified, women brought up the rear.
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