The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (62 page)
Read The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn Online
Authors: Eric Ives
There is some satisfaction in the fact that Henry never did find him.
70
70
21
THE RESPONSE, JANUARY — APRIL 1536
A
BOUT the time that Henry discovered that Jane Seymour now had a new price-tag, several of her backers were dining with Eustace Chapuys — the subject of discussion, a new bride for Henry. By the end of April they were seeking ecclesiastical opinion on the validity of any divorce.
1
If hostile tales are to be believed, they may even have succeeded in encouraging the king to speculate with Jane about the possibility of marriage, and certainly an atmosphere of doubt about the long-term future of the Boleyn marriage was encouraged.
2
BOUT the time that Henry discovered that Jane Seymour now had a new price-tag, several of her backers were dining with Eustace Chapuys — the subject of discussion, a new bride for Henry. By the end of April they were seeking ecclesiastical opinion on the validity of any divorce.
1
If hostile tales are to be believed, they may even have succeeded in encouraging the king to speculate with Jane about the possibility of marriage, and certainly an atmosphere of doubt about the long-term future of the Boleyn marriage was encouraged.
2
The response of Anne Boleyn and her supporters was to fight. Chapuys reported only that Anne was raging against Jane, but the signs of more serious resistance are plain. George Boleyn maintained a high profile. He was much in evidence at court, and when the king had to choose a peer to cast the proxy vote of Lord Delaware for the session of parliament which began on 4 February, it was to George that it went.
3
The Boleyns continued to enjoy noted royal favour. Early in March they secured letters patent reconstructing Thomas’s lease of the Crown honour of Rayleigh in Essex, with the term extended, George brought in as joint tenant and a 20 per cent rebate on the rent.
4
One of the Acts of parliament which received the royal assent on 14 April stripped the bishopric of Norwich of the town of Lynn and other properties; a week later, Chapuys had discovered that the beneficiary was to be the earl of Wiltshire, and that a couple of abbeys were earmarked for him as well.
5
Other Acts assured property to Anne, including Colly Weston which Henry had transferred from the duke of Richmond.
6
It is true that on St George’s Day, Sir Nicholas Carewe was elected to fill up a vacancy among the Knights of the Garter, and that Chapuys interpreted this as a defeat for Rochford and a sign of Anne’s weakened influence, but the choice was at least in part dictated by the king’s earlier half-promise to Francis that Carewe was next in line.
7
Anne retained her influence almost to the last, and may, indeed, have been exploiting her position to disarm the opposition. Certainly she was exerting herself at the request of the earl of Westmorland to secure favours for his brother-in-law, Henry, Lord Stafford - an unlikely association, for Stafford was the son of Katherine’s favourite, the last duke of Buckingham, and his wife was sister to Lord Montagu, who even then was plotting against the queen.
8
Anne did not lightly surrender her husband to Jane Seymour.
3
The Boleyns continued to enjoy noted royal favour. Early in March they secured letters patent reconstructing Thomas’s lease of the Crown honour of Rayleigh in Essex, with the term extended, George brought in as joint tenant and a 20 per cent rebate on the rent.
4
One of the Acts of parliament which received the royal assent on 14 April stripped the bishopric of Norwich of the town of Lynn and other properties; a week later, Chapuys had discovered that the beneficiary was to be the earl of Wiltshire, and that a couple of abbeys were earmarked for him as well.
5
Other Acts assured property to Anne, including Colly Weston which Henry had transferred from the duke of Richmond.
6
It is true that on St George’s Day, Sir Nicholas Carewe was elected to fill up a vacancy among the Knights of the Garter, and that Chapuys interpreted this as a defeat for Rochford and a sign of Anne’s weakened influence, but the choice was at least in part dictated by the king’s earlier half-promise to Francis that Carewe was next in line.
7
Anne retained her influence almost to the last, and may, indeed, have been exploiting her position to disarm the opposition. Certainly she was exerting herself at the request of the earl of Westmorland to secure favours for his brother-in-law, Henry, Lord Stafford - an unlikely association, for Stafford was the son of Katherine’s favourite, the last duke of Buckingham, and his wife was sister to Lord Montagu, who even then was plotting against the queen.
8
Anne did not lightly surrender her husband to Jane Seymour.
One development in the early spring of 1536 was full of ill omen. Anne and Thomas Cromwell quarrelled. Chapuys learned of this fatal split towards the end of March and confirmed it to his own satisfaction at a meeting with Cromwell on 1 April.
9
Next day, by the end of mass, everyone in the royal chapel knew. As we have seen, the preacher appointed for that Passion Sunday was Anne’s almoner, John Skip, who made very clear his own (and the queen’s) support for moderate reform.
10
In contrast, the remainder of his discourse was anything but moderate. The text he had chosen was John, chapter 8, verse 46, ‘Which of you can convict me of sin?’ and the sermon almost caused a riot. Skip was accused of malice, slander, presumption, lack of charity, sedition, treason, disobedience to the gospel, attacking ‘the great posts, pillars and columns sustaining and holding up the common wealth’ and inviting anarchy.
11
The reason for this furore was the way he had developed his text. Skip identified the congregation as ‘you’, and in particular the royal counsellors, whom he accused of gross sycophancy - a king’s ‘counsel nowadays will move him no otherwise unto any things but as they see him disposed and inclined to the same’.
12
The ‘me’ Skip applied to the English clergy collectively, so making his sermon a no-holds-barred rebuttal of the generalized attacks on the clergy which, he said, were rife ‘nowadays’. He readily accepted that particular clerics might be fallible, but criticism of the entire clerical estate was totally unjustified. What was more, it was hypocritical. ‘He wished that men would therein use a more temperance and first amend their own lives before they taxed other men’s.’
13
And Skip was blunt about lay motives: ‘nowadays many men ... rebuke the clergy... because they would have from the clergy their possessions.’
14
9
Next day, by the end of mass, everyone in the royal chapel knew. As we have seen, the preacher appointed for that Passion Sunday was Anne’s almoner, John Skip, who made very clear his own (and the queen’s) support for moderate reform.
10
In contrast, the remainder of his discourse was anything but moderate. The text he had chosen was John, chapter 8, verse 46, ‘Which of you can convict me of sin?’ and the sermon almost caused a riot. Skip was accused of malice, slander, presumption, lack of charity, sedition, treason, disobedience to the gospel, attacking ‘the great posts, pillars and columns sustaining and holding up the common wealth’ and inviting anarchy.
11
The reason for this furore was the way he had developed his text. Skip identified the congregation as ‘you’, and in particular the royal counsellors, whom he accused of gross sycophancy - a king’s ‘counsel nowadays will move him no otherwise unto any things but as they see him disposed and inclined to the same’.
12
The ‘me’ Skip applied to the English clergy collectively, so making his sermon a no-holds-barred rebuttal of the generalized attacks on the clergy which, he said, were rife ‘nowadays’. He readily accepted that particular clerics might be fallible, but criticism of the entire clerical estate was totally unjustified. What was more, it was hypocritical. ‘He wished that men would therein use a more temperance and first amend their own lives before they taxed other men’s.’
13
And Skip was blunt about lay motives: ‘nowadays many men ... rebuke the clergy... because they would have from the clergy their possessions.’
14
No cleric in Anne’s household would have dared say such things without her specific approval. Early in the sermon Skip even risked a coded swipe at Henry’s interest in Jane Seymour and the Crown’s preoccupation with money.
15
King Solomon, he reminded his hearers:
15
King Solomon, he reminded his hearers:
in the latter end of his reign he became very un-noble and defamed himself sore by sensual and carnal appetite in taking of many wives and concubines and also by avaricious mind in laying too great or sore burdens and yokes upon his subjects, over-pressing them too sore thereby.
The chapel took the point. How, Skip’s critics would ask later, could the preacher have intended this otherwise than:
to touch the king’s grace with the said similitude. Albeit he showed not his mind in plain and express words [the congregation] conceived right well the malice of his mind as well by that general example as if he had coined the similitude particularly.
15
Later the preacher went further and made Anne’s endorsement explicit — and so too her split with Cromwell. This followed from his assertion that a king needed:
to be well wary what he does after the counsel of his counsellors for some time for the malice that they bear toward many men or toward one man as of a multitude they would have the whole multitude destroyed.
16
To illustrate this Skip took the example of Esther, the Jewish wife of the Persian ruler Ahasuerus. As he recounted the Old Testament story, Ahasuerus had been deceived by his adviser, Haman, into ordering a massacre of his Jewish subjects on the ground that they were disregarding his laws. But,
there was a good woman (which this gentle king Ahasuerus loved very well and put his trust in because he knew that she was ever his friend) and she gave unto the king contrary counsel.
17
The Jews were saved and Haman was hanged. The Esther story was very familiar to a Tudor congregation, and Skip’s allusions were impossible to miss. The clergy overall were the Jews, Henry VIII was Ahasuerus and Cromwell was Haman. And the good woman? Everybody in the chapel that day knew that it was Ahasuerus’s wife Esther — Henry’s wife Anne.
The occasion for Skip’s diatribe, and the cause of the breach between Anne and Cromwell, was the legislation to confiscate the wealth of the smaller monasteries, which at that moment was awaiting the royal assent. Indeed, the sermon’s bitter attack on laymen exploiting tales about clerical vices in order to justify the pillage of Church wealth gave the lie direct to the minister. Less than a month before, Cromwell had released the
Compendium compertorum
, a carefully edited catalogue of gross monastic indecencies, in order to sway parliamentary opinion in favour of contiscation.
18
Hugh Latimer’s recollection was that ‘when their enormities were first read in the Parliament house, they were so great and abominable, that there was nothing but “down with them”.’
19
Compendium compertorum
, a carefully edited catalogue of gross monastic indecencies, in order to sway parliamentary opinion in favour of contiscation.
18
Hugh Latimer’s recollection was that ‘when their enormities were first read in the Parliament house, they were so great and abominable, that there was nothing but “down with them”.’
19
Skip, of course, was not suggesting that Anne supported the monastic status quo. Indeed, at court, in government, in parliament and among the higher clergy many felt that reform of the monasteries was needed and some redirection of Church assets ‘to better uses’.
20
However, what were ‘better uses’? Anne — along with most other prominent reformers - had counted on endowments being allocated to education or other charitable causes; after all, they represented the charitable donations of past generations. The refounded college at Stoke by Nayland was the model of what she wanted to achieve.
21
There was firm precedent for such repositioning of assets; the most recent major example was Wolsey’s transfer of the endowments of several semi-defunct monasteries to new educational foundations in Oxford and Ipswich. Skip urged a similar course, emphasizing ‘the great decay of the universities in this realm and how necessary the maintenance of them is for the continuance of Christ’s faith and his religion’.
22
Cromwell thought otherwise. For some years the government had been toying with the possibility of confiscating ecclesiastical land and thereby solving the king’s deep-rooted financial problem. Here was the minister’s opportunity to make Henry ‘the richest prince in Christendom’ and provide funds to modernize the country’s antiquated defences. It would also dramatically increase royal (and ministerial) influence by multiplying the fund of royal patronage. The policy had Henry’s enthusiastic concurrence and it carried the day in parliament — possibly after the king had come down to the Commons in successive weeks to ensure that the bill got through.
23
20
However, what were ‘better uses’? Anne — along with most other prominent reformers - had counted on endowments being allocated to education or other charitable causes; after all, they represented the charitable donations of past generations. The refounded college at Stoke by Nayland was the model of what she wanted to achieve.
21
There was firm precedent for such repositioning of assets; the most recent major example was Wolsey’s transfer of the endowments of several semi-defunct monasteries to new educational foundations in Oxford and Ipswich. Skip urged a similar course, emphasizing ‘the great decay of the universities in this realm and how necessary the maintenance of them is for the continuance of Christ’s faith and his religion’.
22
Cromwell thought otherwise. For some years the government had been toying with the possibility of confiscating ecclesiastical land and thereby solving the king’s deep-rooted financial problem. Here was the minister’s opportunity to make Henry ‘the richest prince in Christendom’ and provide funds to modernize the country’s antiquated defences. It would also dramatically increase royal (and ministerial) influence by multiplying the fund of royal patronage. The policy had Henry’s enthusiastic concurrence and it carried the day in parliament — possibly after the king had come down to the Commons in successive weeks to ensure that the bill got through.
23
Preached in the interval between the Dissolution Bill being passed by parliament and the royal assent being given, Skip’s sermon was Anne’s call to courtiers and counsellors alike to change the advice they were giving the king and to reject the lure of personal gain. Indeed Skip publicly and deliberately endorsed the popular suspicion that in proposing secularization, the real motive of Cromwell and his henchmen was to feather their own nests.
24
To make that point clear beyond all doubt, he deliberately reversed a detail in the Esther story. According to the Vulgate text of the Bible, Haman, the minister, offered to
pay
the king 10,000 talents to cover the cost of the archers required to destroy the Jews, although the king refused to accept the money. Skip, however, said that Haman promised that the pogrom would
raise
10,000 talents for the Crown, and Ahasuerus responded that the minister could take the money for himself.
25
In consequence Haman was ‘much more crueller upon them [the Jews] because he perceived that he should have the x
M
talents himself’.
26
In effect, Anne’s almoner was publicly attacking Cromwell’s motives and integrity.
24
To make that point clear beyond all doubt, he deliberately reversed a detail in the Esther story. According to the Vulgate text of the Bible, Haman, the minister, offered to
pay
the king 10,000 talents to cover the cost of the archers required to destroy the Jews, although the king refused to accept the money. Skip, however, said that Haman promised that the pogrom would
raise
10,000 talents for the Crown, and Ahasuerus responded that the minister could take the money for himself.
25
In consequence Haman was ‘much more crueller upon them [the Jews] because he perceived that he should have the x
M
talents himself’.
26
In effect, Anne’s almoner was publicly attacking Cromwell’s motives and integrity.
Possibly Skip’s sermon was as direct and belligerent as it was because Anne had been duped. The material issued by Cromwell’s office had been clearly disingenuous. It had claimed that the object of the dissolution was ‘the maintenance of certain notable persons of learning and good qualities about his Highness’ and the bill referred to the use of the confiscated assets ‘to the pleasure of Almighty God and to the honour and profit of this realm’ and specifically included bodies politic and corporate among those who would benefit.
27
The queen, indeed, may only have discovered that total secularization was intended following the shady deal by which the king had effectively sold Sawley Abbey in Yorkshire to the courtier Sir Arthur Darcy, before the Dissolution Bill was even on the statute book.
28
Whatever the surprise, Anne rapidly became the leader of the opposition.
29
27
The queen, indeed, may only have discovered that total secularization was intended following the shady deal by which the king had effectively sold Sawley Abbey in Yorkshire to the courtier Sir Arthur Darcy, before the Dissolution Bill was even on the statute book.
28
Whatever the surprise, Anne rapidly became the leader of the opposition.
29
The agenda was no longer a need to convince the generality of the appropriateness of dissolution, something which still concerned one of her chaplains, Robert Singleton, when preaching at Paul’s Cross only the day after Skip’s sermon.
30
Anne now called on reform-minded preachers ‘to be very curious [careful] how they should minister occasion in any of their sermons touching the subverting of any houses of religion, but rather to make continual and earnest petition for the stay of the same.’
31
Skip was not the only cleric she sent into battle. William Latymer reported that she summoned Hugh Latimer, the country’s premier preacher, and instructed him to suggest in his next sermon before the king that houses should not be dissolved but converted to better uses.
32
The bishop chose to preach on the parable of the vineyard in Luke, chapter 20, in which unsatisfactory tenants deny rent to an owner. The point he drew out from the Gospel story was that once the bad tenants had been evicted, the vineyard was not destroyed but handed over to worthier occupants. Monasteries, therefore, should be converted ‘to places of study and good letters’.
30
Anne now called on reform-minded preachers ‘to be very curious [careful] how they should minister occasion in any of their sermons touching the subverting of any houses of religion, but rather to make continual and earnest petition for the stay of the same.’
31
Skip was not the only cleric she sent into battle. William Latymer reported that she summoned Hugh Latimer, the country’s premier preacher, and instructed him to suggest in his next sermon before the king that houses should not be dissolved but converted to better uses.
32
The bishop chose to preach on the parable of the vineyard in Luke, chapter 20, in which unsatisfactory tenants deny rent to an owner. The point he drew out from the Gospel story was that once the bad tenants had been evicted, the vineyard was not destroyed but handed over to worthier occupants. Monasteries, therefore, should be converted ‘to places of study and good letters’.
Anne’s opposition was not confined to the pulpit. Earlier in Lent, Archbishop Cranmer had preached a sermon on the old agenda, supporting the secularization of abbey land and arguing that money spent on masses for the dead would be better spent on the poor.
33
Suddenly, on 22 April, he wrote urgently to Cromwell, saying:
33
Suddenly, on 22 April, he wrote urgently to Cromwell, saying:
I was ever hitherto cold, but now am in a heat with the cause of religion [that is, the religious orders] , which goeth all contrary to mine expectation, if it be as the fame goeth; wherein I would wonder[fully] fain break my mind unto you.
34
Had Anne got to the archbishop and convinced him that the dissolution Cromwell was implementing would bring the poor nothing? Latymer also tells of a delegation of abbots and priors calling on the queen once her opposition to secularization was known, and asking for her protection.
35
The queen, he claimed, read the group a stern lecture on their notorious corruptions and attacked them for their connections with Rome, for their refusal to admit the preachers of ‘God’s Word’ and for the inadequate support they gave to scholars at the universities.
36
35
The queen, he claimed, read the group a stern lecture on their notorious corruptions and attacked them for their connections with Rome, for their refusal to admit the preachers of ‘God’s Word’ and for the inadequate support they gave to scholars at the universities.
36
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