Elizabeth

by Lisa Hilton

  The impact of Anne Boleyn’s religion on her daughter is another instance of a preference among some historians for facile emotive connections rather than thorough examination of the evolving and complex definitions of terms such as protestant and evangelical, which often serve to obscure, rather than clarify, the theological revolution which began with Henry VIII’s rejection of papal supremacy and continued well into Elizabeth’s reign and beyond. Statements such as “in time Anne would probably have turned Protestant… . She and her father were described by the Spanish Ambassador as ‘more Lutheran than Luther himself.’ She was a great evangelical” are a case in point.5 Protestant as a term was first used in German in 1529 at the Diet of Speyer, and was current in English in 1533, but for much of the Edwardine period, the term reformed was more frequently used. Evangelical did not necessarily mean Protestant, since it could be applied to Catholic reformers, such as Erasmus, as well as more radical thinkers, such as Martin Luther or Huldrych Zwingli. The question is rendered more difficult by the fact that “Lutheranism” was often used as a shorthand by Romance language speakers to categorize generally those who rejected papal supremacy, while not necessarily accepting other “Protestant” doctrines such as the Presence of Christ at the offering of the host. In 1560, for example, the Guise Cardinal of Lorraine wrote to his beleaguered sister in Scotland that the French would punish “those wicked Lutherans,” which was hardly an accurate summation of the beliefs of the Scots Congregational Lords.6 Aside from the fact that Chapuys was, as ever, a hostile witness, using the most provocatively negative terms to describe the “concubine” to his orthodox master, the fact that he described Anne and her father in this manner is in no way indicative that Anne herself followed Luther’s doctrines. Indeed, as we shall see, this linguistic confusion pertained in Elizabeth’s subsequent dealings with the Ottoman Empire, where both she and her ambassador were referred to as “Lutheran” at the sultan’s court well into the seventeenth century.

  So how “Protestant” was Anne Boleyn? Was she such a crucial influence in the English Reformation, both in her own practice and her direction of her husband’s emerging Church? Much has been made of Anne’s interest in the gospel, in particular her possession of a translation of the Bible into French by Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, as well as an English edition of his Epistres et evangiles, which was dedicated to her. Yet an interest in the gospels in the vernacular had become common in educated circles in the 1520s and 1530s, among pious, progressive courtiers who read about, thought about, and discussed their religion without taking issue with the essential tenets of the Catholic Church. According to William Latymer, one of Anne’s chaplains and later Dean of Peterborough under Elizabeth, who prepared a life of Anne for the queen early in her reign, Anne frequently discussed the gospel with Henry. Latymer is the only chronicler to make this claim, and, again, it is hardly proof that Anne was pushing her husband towards reform. If nothing else, Henry enjoyed debates which showed off his theological credentials—he had been extremely proud of the title Fidei Defensor, conferred upon him by Pope Leo X in 1521, in affirmation of his tract The Defence of the Seven Sacraments (in which the king supported the sacrament of marriage and the authority of Rome), which was revoked in 1530 and reconferred by Parliament eight years after Anne’s death. As an intelligent and talented conversationalist, the topic might well have been one which Anne knew would interest and flatter her husband, but a conversation is hardly a religious revolution. Equally, Henry might well have had quite enough of doctrinal hairsplitting by the time he married Anne. Three copies of Thomas Cromwell’s 1536 instructions to the clergy include the provision of the Bible in Latin and English for every church, that “every man that will to look and read thereon,” a stipulation which, it has been claimed, was linked directly to Anne’s promotion of the vernacular Bible, since the item was removed after Anne’s execution and the majority of the injunctions do not include it. However, there is no evidence whatsoever of any direct connection with Anne, nor any dating of the drafts which do include the provision of the Bible, so “it is the merest surmise to see her hand in this.”7

  Moreover, interest in vernacular culture in general and (since the fourteenth century) the Bible had been a particular feature of English queenship for five hundred years. While many elite women had some knowledge of Latin in the medieval period, the area in which they were best able to participate in cultural patronage was the vernacular, in French from Anglo-Norman times and subsequently in English. Since Matilda of Flanders had collaborated with Archbishop Lanfranc on Church reform in the eleventh century, the association between royal women and vernacular pious literature had been powerful. Matilda’s successor, Matilda of Scotland, commissioned two significant works, a Life of her mother, Saint Margaret, and the poem “The Voyage of Saint Brendan,” while the continued patronage of the convent at Wilton connected royal women with a tradition of women’s intellectualism stretching back to the Confessor’s queen, Edith. It was Richard II’s first wife, Anne of Bohemia, who took the then-controversial step of promoting the vernacular Bible, a precedent which has been overlooked in its endorsement of a movement that came to fruition in the time of the next Queen Anne. Anne of Bohemia’s father, Charles IV, endorsed vernacular religious texts, and when Anne arrived in England as a bride in 1381, she brought with her the New Testament in Latin, Czech, and German. Translations of the gospels were also produced for the queen in English, and her commitment to pious reading therein was praised at her funeral by Archbishop Thomas Arundel. At the time, accessible translations of the Bible were considered heretical by many, but not by Anne. In possessing and discussing the gospel in the vernacular, then, Anne Boleyn was arguably participating in a tradition of English queenship which long predated the Lutheran controversy. Anne’s time as queen was so short that it is difficult to assess her participation in many of the activities associated with English queens, but from Henry’s insistence on the protocols of her coronation and anointing to her own desire to follow the prescribed rituals when she took her chamber for the birth of her daughter, we see that such associations were particularly important in cementing her (disputed) royal authority, and her interest in the gospels is entirely consistent with this.

  The case for Anne as an active reformer is also compromised by the fact that her activities were most notable by their absence. That Anne was responsible for promoting sympathetic clerics to bishoprics has been accepted in several cases, but there is no direct evidence for her individual involvement, while Church preferments in the years anticipating and following the break with Rome were governed by service to the king and, crucially, support for his decision to divorce Katherine of Aragon and abjure papal authority:

  What we have are some scraps of evidence of isolated instances of possible interest … not requiring any specific pious commitment… . To read this as compelling evidence of Anne’s supposed “evangelical” religious sympathies or her desire to further “reformed” religion is to infer too much.8

  Imprisoned in the Tower, Anne was recorded as saying, “I would to God I had my bishops for they would all go to the king for me,” but this implies less a conviction of support for her faith than a pathetic political naivety.9 Anne may have considered those bishops who had supported her marriage as being on her side, but they owed their places, and their loyalty, to Henry, not his disgraced queen, and not one of them attempted to save her.

  Anne’s personal beliefs also appear to have been entirely orthodox within the parameters of the Henrician Reformation. The question is not, perhaps, how “Protestant” Anne was but how Catholic she remained. Certainly she supported the reform which had made her a queen, but nothing she actually did is indicative of Lutheran leanings. At Easter 1533, when she was pregnant with Elizabeth, Anne mentioned to the Duke of Norfolk that she wished to make a pilgrimage to the shrine at Walsingham, sacred to Our Lady and hence particularly associated with birth. This sits uneasily with her supposed contempt for the external manifestations of
the old faith. In early 1536, Tristram Revel, formerly of Christ’s College, Cambridge, offered to present her with a translation of Farrago rerum theologicarum, a text by Francis Lambertus which disputed the Real Presence at Mass. Anne refused to accept it. As a prisoner, she asked her jailer, Sir William Kingston, “Shall I be in heaven, for I have done many good deeds in my days?” a statement which it was simply impossible for a Lutheran who believed in justification by faith alone to utter. Equally, Anne was hysterically desperate to receive the host while in the Tower and to be confessed and absolved after her trial. Finally, Lancelot de Carles, who lived at the residence of the French ambassador and wrote a poem on Anne’s fall, noted an eyewitness account of her speech from the scaffold in which Anne invited prayers to Jesus for her sins, that they might not delay her progress to heaven, which suggests that she continued to believe in the doctrine of purgatory. Fundamentally and indisputably, Anne lived and died a Catholic.

  Why, then, should so many inferences have been made which connect Anne’s religion with the Protestantism of her daughter? The case rests mainly on William Latymer’s account of Anne’s life and the work of the martyrologist John Foxe. Latymer presented Anne as a model of a pious queen, dispensing alms to the poor and urging her chaplains to reprimand her if they observed her to “yield to any manner of sensuality.”10 Foxe concurred with this image but went further, claiming by 1559 that the nation was indebted to Anne “for the restoration and piety of the church.” He claimed that Anne promoted the gospel and maintained a scrupulously virtuous court. Both writers had an interest in emphasizing Anne’s piety to their new queen, and both, by implication, were stressing that it was impossible that such a godly woman might have been guilty of the repellent adulteries of which she had been convicted. The editor of Latymer’s life confirms that it is, at best, an airbrushed account: “[He] deliberately suppressed all material relating to Anne which is not consistent with [his] portrait of a pious and solemn reformer.” Contemporary observers of Anne’s inner circle present her court as a somewhat racier environment, but even given the obvious motivation of both Latymer and Foxe to present an idealized picture of Anne, neither of them said anything precise about the nature of her own religious belief. Both Latymer and Foxe were ardent reformers, and both were working with the aim not just of rehabilitating Elizabeth’s disgraced mother but of pushing forward a reformist agenda. The 1559 religious settlement was not a conclusion, they hoped, but a beginning, the first step on the path to more radical reform. We might read something unattractively manipulative in their accounts, an attempt to impress an emotional connection with reform on a daughter who had never known her mother, and who might be persuaded towards further reform by a belief that she was pursuing her mother’s legacy. Elizabeth was robust enough to resist such beguilements, but this has not prevented some historians from accepting them.

  Anne’s religious legacy was less literal, more literary. The courtly lover’s relationship with his unkind lady corresponds, within the new Protestant dynamic of the Reformation, to man’s relationship with God. Where the structure of the Catholic Church was displaced, the worshipper became his own conduit for holy favor, pursuing a state of grace endlessly, often desperately, with no guarantee of satisfaction. Only continued effort, continued communication, could guard against uncertainty. The pleading, the extravagant devotion Elizabeth evoked in her courtiers’ verses, and which sounds so stagy and insincere to modern ears, is a mirroring of a new language which was desperately earnest in the context of the Elizabethan Church, that of the worshipper appealing to the deity.

  It is to Katherine Parr that one of Elizabeth’s principal biographers ascribes her newly acquired zeal for reformed religion, a zeal which transformed her spiritually but also produced one of the most effective transformations of her image which were later to characterize her queenship.

  Elizabeth’s translation of Marguerite of Navarre’s work can be used as evidence of her own conversion to the reformed faith, which, for her, was always to be filtered through the pious prism of royal supremacy over the Church. During the Boulogne campaign in 1544, Elizabeth had been able to observe Katherine Parr in the role of regent, as a woman competently governing powerful men. It is also considered likely that she and Katherine were reading Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse together. A letter from Katherine to Henry in which she explains her increasing adherence to the doctrine of justification by faith alone—one of the principal tenets of reformed religion—is linguistically and thematically similar to Marguerite of Navarre’s work. Katherine’s letter equates royal grace with divine grace—“I make like account with your Majesty as I do with God.”11 She implied that Henry was God’s chosen instrument, who would direct the realm towards the true faith. Like Katherine, Elizabeth would come to see the royal supremacy—the leadership of her father’s Church—as a melding of sacred and worldly monarchy, but with one essential difference. Katherine was in the position in which Elizabeth’s courtiers were to find themselves, seeking a relationship with their God which was parlayed through the figure of the monarch. Elizabeth became that monarch. And here we see, intellectually, a binding of both her paternal and maternal legacies. From Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth could absorb the language of courtly love, channeled through reform into the casting of the courtier as suitor for both her own and divine grace, that combination of ruler and godhead which was embodied—literally—in Henry’s Church. This blending of sacred and profane love is expressed in a lyric included in John Dowland’s Book of Airs, published towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign in 1597:

  But ah poor Knight, though thus in dream he ranged,

  Hoping to serve this Saint in sort most meet… .

  Ah me, he cries, Goddess my limbs grow faint,

  Though I time’s prisoner be, be you my Saint.12

  Elizabeth’s spiritual awakening was expressed externally by a transformation in her appearance. A portrait of 1546–47, possibly painted as a gift to Edward VI in an exchange of paintings by William Scrots between the siblings, shows Elizabeth in similar clothing to that of the slightly earlier Family of Henry VIII. Elizabeth wears a wide-sleeved, ornately worked red gown and an elegant headdress decorated with pearls, and holds a “girdle book” below her waist, attached by a jeweled belt. The positioning of the book, in the same place as her brother’s codpiece, accentuated by his dagger, in the companion picture suggests Elizabeth’s learning and her maidenly modesty. Four years later, though, she had adopted a far more demure costume, which attracted the nickname “Sweet Sister Temperance” from her pious brother. The later Clopton Portrait gives an indication of how Elizabeth had changed her style to reflect her new, reformed religious belief. Although still richly jeweled and furred, Elizabeth is depicted in a plain black gown, her hair caught under the severe black cap. The royal “saint’s” attire would grow ever more extravagantly elaborate over the years, as her authority evolved with her image, but Elizabeth’s self-presentation during Edward’s reign was a clear indication of the commitment to reform realized during her period in her last stepmother’s household.

  Elizabeth’s next venture in translation was also a tribute to Katherine, a collection of the queen’s own Prayers and Meditations into French, Latin, and Italian, this time as a gift to her father. Again, Elizabeth’s work makes reference to English queenship traditions, including the eglantine device of her grandmother, Elizabeth of York, along with four yellow-centered Tudor roses in gold and silver on a crimson background. It was her first use of the emblem, a symbol of purity, of which she became particularly fond. The present was accompanied by Elizabeth’s only known letter to Henry, dated from Hertford on 30 December. It is an earnest and affectionate production, Elizabeth clearly trying to impress her father with her accomplishments and diligence, but also figuring herself confidently and emphatically as Henry’s loving heir. It begins: “To the most glorious and mighty King Henry VIII,” her “matchless and most benevolent” father, whom “philosophers regard as a god on ear
th.” She continues that “it seemed fitting to me that this task should be undertaken by myself, your daughter and one who should be not only the imitator of your virtues but also heir to them.” Elizabeth seemed certain of two points here: first, that her father’s royal supremacy over the Church was theologically legitimate, and second, that she was in no way unsuitable to follow his kingly example, except, as she added, “if there be any error in it, it may yet merit pardon on account of my ignorance, my youth, my short time of study and my goodwill.” She concluded by drawing the strands of her gift warmly together: “Wherefore I do not doubt … that you will feel that this holy work which is the more highly to be valued as having been compiled by the Queen your wife, may have its value ever so little enhanced by being translated by your daughter.”

  Elizabeth was at court with her father on three occasions during the following year, and this was perhaps the period when she grew closest to him, a closeness rendered poignant by the fact that Henry, once considered the most beautiful prince in Christendom, was visibly sickening. Obese, irascible, plagued by weeping sores and the peevish selfishness of chronic pain, the king was dying.

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  HENRY VIII DIED on 28 January 1547. Edward’s uncle Edward Seymour, then Earl of Hertford, brought the nine-year-old boy to Enfield, where Elizabeth had retired after her father’s last Christmas court, on the pretext that he was being taken to London to be created Prince of Wales. Once brother and sister were together, they were informed of Henry’s death. Later chroniclers had it that the new king clung to his fourteen-year-old sister and that the children wept together for some hours, a likely if not necessarily factual reaction. Some weeks later, Edward wrote to Elizabeth that they ought to restrain their mourning for Henry, whose soul was surely in heaven, which frankly sounds much more like him. Elizabeth was well past Latin truisms, but, as she observed the reconfiguration of her life after her father’s death, it seemed that the worldly glory of Henry, who “had bestridden England like a colossus,” had been brief indeed.1 The royal schoolroom was broken up, Edward was naturally preoccupied with his new role, and Katherine Parr, Henry’s devoted and dutiful wife, was finally free to pursue the longings of her heart. Within four months, she was married to handsome Thomas Seymour, and her sober, reforming head appeared to have been completely turned.