From 1527 on, however, the nun of Kent was consulted most often about the king’s divorce. The unambiguous clarity of the nun’s pronouncements about this issue was a welcome contrast to the disagreements among lawyers and theologians about the validity of the royal marriage and the indecisiveness of the pope. According to Elizabeth Barton Henry imperiled his soul when he put away his wife, and if he married Anne Boleyn he would not live six months. He was already “so abominable in the sight of God that he was not worthy to tread on hallowed ground,” she said. If he took the ultimate step of a second marriage God would destroy him and many others in a plague more devastating than any yet seen in England.
The nun was now receiving messages from an angel, she explained,and the angel instructed her to tell the king in what danger he stood. Whether because he believed in her powers or merely out of deference to her popular reputation Henry ordered Elizabeth Barton brought before him several times. Each time she warned him of the consequences of his sin, and though he didn’t find her prophecies alarming enough to make him change his mind about Anne she must have made a strong impression nonetheless, for Henry seems to have offered to make her an abbess. He was angry when she refused his offer, and still angrier when he heard that she claimed to be using her psychic powers to prevent his marriage. In fact the nun’s claims to power and supernatural influence escalated as the royal divorce dragged on. She boasted that through clairvoyance she could overhear the king’s private conversations, and that she had observed how devils conversed with Anne and put detestable ideas into her mind. Other occult abilities enabled her to prevent ships from leaving the harbor and to free souls from purgatory. Her angelic messages frightened the archbishop of Canterbury so badly that he refused to perform the marriage ceremony for Henry and Anne; thus in a sense she had, as she claimed, prevented their union singlehandedly.
By this time Elizabeth Barton had become the tool of political forces. She was being used by opponents of the divorce, and at least some of her revelations and messages were coming from Father Bocking’s pen. Booking and others, among them pro-Katherine monks of the Observant and Carthusian orders, carried accounts of the nun’s prophecies to every courtier and high official who would listen. Mary’s former governess Margaret Pole, her chamberlain John Hussey and his wife Anne, Gertrude Blount and other partisans of Katherine and Mary were heartened by the revelations. Thomas More “greatly rejoiced” to hear that in time the injustice done to Katherine would be avenged, but to protect himself he refused to hear anything the holy maid said about the king. Bishop Fisher, who had defended Katherine valiantly in the legatine court in 1529 and continued to be an outspoken opponent of the divorce, wept for joy when the nun’s messages were read to him, and pronounced her to be entirely credible.
Until 1533 the holy campaign of the nun of Kent was tolerated. But in that year, when Anne became not only Henry’s legal wife but England’s crowned queen, the nun’s fulminations began to sound dangerously like treason. She was now saying that in marrying Anne Henry had forfeited his right to rule. In God’s eyes he was no longer king, and the people were sure to rise up and depose him. He would soon be forced to leave England forever and seek an obscure death among pitiless foreigners. She was certain of these predictions, the nun added, because while in a trance she had been shown both Henry’s destiny and the exactplace prepared for him in hell. Should anyone doubt the origin of her inspiration, he had only to hear of a letter she had recently received from Mary Magdalene in heaven, a priceless relic written in characters of gold.
The political menace in these prognostications was unmistakable. With unrest high and Anne’s child about to be born, Henry could not afford to spare the famous nun. In July Elizabeth Barton, Father Bocking and a number of others associated with them were arrested and questioned, and all printed accounts of the life and predictions of the holy maid were collected and destroyed. She confessed that some, if not all, of her revelations were fraudulent and nine months later she and her companions were hanged.1
Far more disturbing to Henry than Elizabeth Barton’s visions and prophecies was the broad force of popular mysticism she represented. She belonged to that underworld of folk belief that showed itself at times of public crisis and that followed no causal logic. When she first became a popular oracle the nun of Kent had no intention of feeding discontent or promoting rebellion; to the end of her life she saw herself primarily as God’s mouthpiece, fulfilling his will. Though she was eventually exploited by others she came forward initially on her own. There was something uncanny, something of the everpresent supernatural world in her appearance and message, and Henry, knowing that world to be beyond even his sovereignty, shuddered when he saw the holy maid and tried to put her out of his thoughts.
But though she was the most famous, she was not the only visionary to articulate the workings of the popular imagination. The wife of the former master of Henry’s jewel house, Robert Amadas, began in 1533 to spread “ungracious” statements about the king’s occult destiny throughout the court. Prophecies known to her for some twenty years were now unfolding, she said. These prophecies foretold how Henry, called the Mouldwarp, was to be “cursed with God’s own mouth” and banished, while his kingdom would be conquered by the Scots and divided into four parts. Mistress Amadas kept a painted roll of her predictions, which told of the coming of “the dead man in the island,” the deaths of many of Henry’s favorites and a great “battle of priests” in which the king would be destroyed.2 Prophets and oracles were multiplying outside court circles. A clairvoyant living in the household of Sir Henry Wyatt was receiving urgent messages from the supernatural world for Queen Anne throughout 1533, which he delivered to various clerics in her service.3 Former supporters of the divorce were dreaming visionary dreams in which they were shown their errors in graphic and terrifying forms.4It was as if the vast forces of the invisible world were gathering against the king and speaking their opposition through the ancient seers, loretel-lers and revelatory dreams of folk belief.
What Henry may have sensed was that the nun of Kent and the others represented only the beginning of a ground swell of popular opposition to his rule. He sensed an ever-increasing upsurge of feeling against everything new, everything that challenged tradition and the old ways. And far from conciliating that feeling, Henry was moving faster than ever toward a radical break with the past. For at the very time that Elizabeth Barton and her colleagues were suffering at Tyburn Parliament was preparing legislation so sweeping it would permanently change the church, the faith, and the monarchy.
In 1527 Henry had made the momentous decision to divorce his wife. Now in 1534 he made an even more fateful decision: he would make himself head of the English church. In a series of acts the authority of the pope in England was destroyed and the autonomy of the clergy dissolved. The “bishop of Rome,” the lawmakers asserted, had long ago seized powers that rightfully belonged to the king of England as supreme and plenary ruler of all his subjects, lay and clerical alike. Now these powers were restored. The clergy were forbidden to make laws or render judicial decisions without royal permission, and from now on the king himself would choose bishops and abbots, oversee the spiritual health of the monasteries and reform errors in belief. The pope’s “false pretended power” was ended once and for all; hereafter Henry would take his place in everything, short of consecrating clergymen and celebrating mass. With his usual habit of confusing self-interest with righteous idealism, Henry convinced himself that these changes were needed in order to free English men and women from the stranglehold of papal rule. Henry was Moses delivering his people from bondage, a selfless ruler carrying out his “sacred duty” to defend the “liberties of his realm and crown.”
As he took on the mantle of papal authority in England Henry took on the aura of sacred majesty as well. Since the middle ages English rulers had enjoyed an exalted status somewhere between laymen and priests. Their persons were sanctified by holy oil at their coronations, and they inherited
the power to heal persons afflicted with the “king’s evil,” scrofula, by touching them with their hands. But the lofty eminence Henry now attained was something new. His advisers spoke of him as “excelling among all other human creatures,” and ascribed to him the combined virtues of Solomon and Samson. His glory was dazzling. “I dare not cast my eyes but sidewise upon the flaming beams of the king’s bright sun,” one man wrote to Henry. His will was indistinguishable from the divine will, since he ruled at God’s pleasure. Thus he was to be obeyed without “one syllable of exception,” no matter what he ordered. “The king is, in this world, without law,” a theorist of royal authority declared, “and may at his lust do right or wrong, and shall give accounts but to God only.”5 From here it was only a short step to comparing theking on earth to the king of heaven, and Henry was in fact called the “Son of Man” who carried the divine imprint in his person. The king, Bishop Gardiner wrote, “represents as it were the image of God upon earth,” and deserves the reverence and obedience not unlike that which God commands.
No one could have foreseen that, as a result of Henry’s conflict with Pope Clement over the status of his marriage, he would one day be pope in his own kingdom, aspiring to godlike eminence. In the beauty, strength and towering height of his physical presence he had fitted the role for a quarter of a century; his new powers were in one sense only a capstone to a symbolic stature established long before. But he now added to the appearance of semi-divine monarchy all that he had learned from a quarter century of rule. And for the last four years it had been personal rule. The giant figure of Wolsey, once pre-eminent in government and statecraft, had fallen victim to Henry’s impatience in 1530. Caught between the king’s demands and the pope’s indecisive delays, Wolsey was forced to resign his offices, handing over to Henry his great seal, his wealth and his gorgeous residence at Hampton Court.
Henry was not yet conscious of the full extent of his might—that consciousness would require years to mature—but his new glory added another dimension to an ego already monumental in its scope. Against his clerical enemies at least he felt himself to be invincible; when other opponents appeared, he would deal with them in their turn. Certainly he need no longer tolerate resistance from the two friendless women who galled him most: his ex-wife and bastard daughter.
The Act of Succession passed in the first parliamentary session of 1534 transferred to Anne’s heirs the right to succeed to the throne. Mary, already a bastard, was now excluded by every legal mechanism from the succession. If Anne had no son Elizabeth would be the next ruler. More distressing to contemplate was that, under the provisions of the act, if Henry died while his heir was still a minor Anne would become sole regent of the kingdom; there could be little doubt that as regent her first act would be to order the executions of Mary and her mother.
In anticipation of the parliamentary act Mary’s living conditions had undergone a rapid and dramatic change. Late in September of 1533, only a few weeks after Elizabeth’s birth, Mary’s chamberlain John Hussey was ordered to tell her that the time had come for her to abandon her pretensions and to recognize that she was no longer a princess. No one must call her princess in future, not even her personal servants, and to make the distinction between Mary and her half-sister Princess Elizabeth as clear as possible Mary would live in Elizabeth’s household from now on.
Mary immediately protested the informality of this announcement,with no notification in writing from either Henry or his Council, and wrote to the Council that “her conscience would in no wise suffer her to take any other than herself for princess.” She would obey the king, she said, in moving to any residence he liked, but to confess to her loss of title would dishonor her parents and “the deed of our mother, the holy church, and the pope, who is the judge in this matter, and none other.” The pope had in fact bestirred himself at last. In a decree issued to coincide with the birth of Anne’s child he proclaimed Henry’s marriage to Anne invalid. The vindication Katherine had been seeking for so many years was finally at hand, though it came far too late to bring any change in her status or treatment. It was a moral victory, but as Clement knew perfectly well, it carried no political weight now that Henry had forced through his own solution. It did not prevent Katherine from remarking afterward that she did not know who was guiltier, Henry for initiating the wickedness of the divorce or Clement for hesitating so long in denying it.
Mary’s protest produced an official written order for her to leave her establishment at Beaulieu, referring to her as “the lady Mary, the king’s daughter.” When she saw it she wrote to her father, signing herself “your most humble daughter, Mary, Princess” and pretending to believe the omission was an oversight. “I could not a little marvel” at the letter, she wrote, “trusting verily that your grace was not privy to the same.” “For I doubt not that your grace does take me for your lawful daughter, born in true matrimony.”
It was a brave response, if a futile one. Without replying to his daughter Henry gave orders that she was to move at once from Beaulieu to a far meaner and smaller residence, in bad repair and open to the fog and rain of autumn. Beaulieu was given to Anne’s brother George Boleyn, who lost no time in taking possession of it as if he meant never to leave.
At about this time Mary was visited by a team of commissioners like those who had been sent again and again to Katherine. Mary must have heard from several sources, including Katherine herself, how the former queen had met these persecutors head on and how she had learned to maximize her defense against them. Mary knew to summon her entire household—still some hundred and sixty strong—to hear her exchange with the royal representatives, certain that before so many witnesses they would be forced to weigh their words and to treat her with minimal courtesy. She knew to answer their arguments calmly, point by point, leaving them exhausted with frustration when their “prayers, threats and persuasions innumerable” failed. And thanks to Chapuys, who followed everything that happened to Mary with close attention and wrote it all down for the benefit of the imperial court, Mary was learning that tokeep her title she had to watch carefully everything she did and said. The slightest careless word, uttered in the presence of witnesses, might be used later to damage her claim to be called princess; even to acquiesce without protest when others called her by a lesser title could prejudice her rights.
Chapuys drew up for Mary a formal statement of protest, declaring that she had never said, done, or condoned anything detrimental to her status as princess. She was told to keep this document with her at all times, in case she was taken without warning to a place of imprisonment or torture, or compelled to enter a convent or to marry against her will. The ambassador believed that Henry might condemn his daughter to any one of these fates at any time, and besides her written protest he wrote out for her several brief verbal protests which she was to memorize and repeat to anyone who came for her. In essence these statements were elaborations of a single formula which Chapuys hoped would placate Henry yet preserve Mary’s birthright—a formula combining submission and defiance. “If the king wished it to be so,” she was to say, “she submitted, but she protested in due form against whatever might be done to her prejudice.” From now on the repetition of these statements became a part of her daily ritual, like her daily attendance at mass. Surrounded by her most intimate servants, she repeated again and again the words that might make the difference between treasonable disobedience and tolerated self-defense.6
Henry was neither so vindictive nor so foolish as Chapuys feared. For the time being at least he would do with Mary what he had originally decided to do in September. She would live in Elizabeth’s household at Hatfield, deprived of all marks of her former rank, as a maid of honor in Elizabeth’s service. In these surroundings, compelled to show deference to the infant princess and with none of her supporters to turn to, her rebellious spirit would in time be broken.
On December 10 the duke of Norfolk came to carry out the king’s orders. He told Mary she must prepare hersel
f to be taken to the residence of Elizabeth, whom he called “princess of Wales.” “That is a title which belongs to me by right, and to no one else,” Mary replied, pretending to find everything the duke said strange and inappropriate. Norfolk, who saw that the conversation was headed for an impasse, said curtly that “he had not gone thither to dispute, but to see the king’s wishes accomplished,” and Mary, realizing the moment for her written protest had come, asked for a half hour to herself.
Alone in her bedchamber she took out Chapuys’ draft and copied it in her own hand. Returning to Norfolk she handed him the document, and then proceeded to ask what arrangements would be made for her servants when she was transferred to her new quarters. Would her householdofficers be given a year’s wages if they had to be dismissed? How many of her household would accompany her when she moved? What of her maids, her chaplain and confessor? The duke told her that she would find plenty of servants in the new household, and would need very few of her own. A number of Mary’s servants had been sent away some weeks earlier, ostensibly for “encouraging her in her disobedience.”7
The one person who, after her mother, meant most to her, would not be allowed to make the journey to Hatfield. Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury, who had looked after Mary all her life, was told she would not be needed. She offered to continue to serve Mary at her own expense, and to pay the wages of an entire household if necessary, but Norfolk was adamant. Two maids of honor would be a sufficient retinue for the king’s bastard daughter, he said, who had better try to forget her old governess and the hundreds of other familiar faces that had formed a reassuring background to her daily existence for nearly eighteen years.8
Just before Christmas Charles Brandon came to take Mary to her new residence. When they arrived at Hatfield there was a repeat of her exchange with the duke of Norfolk earlier in the month. Mary told Brandon that she, and not Elizabeth, was the true princess, and that though she would call Elizabeth “sister,” just as she had always called Henry Fitzroy “brother,” she would never use the style of princess to refer to anyone but herself. Before he left her, Brandon gave her one final chance to give up her struggle and satisfy her father. He asked whether she had any message for the king. “None,” she replied, “except that the princess of Wales, his daughter, asked for his blessing.” Brandon blustered and frowned, and said he wouldn’t dare deliver that message. “Then,” said Mary, “go away and leave me alone.”
Bloody Mary Page 16
