Tudors (History of England Vol 2)

by Ackroyd, Peter

  Other young women were no doubt installed in Jericho for the king’s delectation, but the next one to be named by history is Mary Boleyn. She had been conveniently married to a gentleman of the king’s household, and under the cover of the court she became the king’s mistress in 1520. Now she is best known as the sister of the other Boleyn girl, but her relationship with Henry lasted for approximately five years. In 1523 he named one of the new royal ships the Mary Boleyn, and two years later he promoted her father to the peerage as Viscount Rochford.

  By this time, however, the king had become enamoured of the younger daughter. The date of his first encounter with Anne Boleyn is not known precisely, but by 1523 she had already come to the attention of Thomas Wolsey. Her attachment to Henry Percy, heir to the earldom of Northumberland, was considered to be a step too far; Percy went back to the north, and Anne was expelled from court. Wolsey’s usher, George Cavendish, reports that she was so angry that ‘she smoked’ red-hot with rage. Only after this date, therefore, is it likely that she caught the eye of the king.

  Yet he was soon enthralled by her. Her complexion was considered to be ‘rather dark’ but she had fine eyes and lustrous hair; her narrow oval face, high cheek-bones and small breasts would be inherited by her eminent daughter. In the early portraits she appears to be pert and vivacious, but at a slightly later date there is evidence of wariness or watchfulness. So many disparate reports exist of her character that it is impossible to form a true judgement. There can be no doubt, however, that she was resourceful and quick-witted; she could not otherwise have survived the life of the court. She loved music and danced very well. It has often been suggested that by charm and persuasion she managed to avoid intercourse with the king until she was certain of becoming his wife, but it is equally likely that Henry himself wished to make sure of a formal union that would render any children legitimate.

  All this was known or suspected by Katherine of Aragon, who asked Erasmus to write a treatise entitled De Servando Conjugio – ‘On Preserving Marriage’. She was aware of Henry FitzRoy, and was deeply offended when he was brought to court at precisely the time when it was clear that she could no longer bear children. Henry had in any case turned away from her. She was approaching the age of forty; all her early grace had faded, and the young king of France described her as ‘ugly and deformed’. As a consequence, perhaps, Henry no longer frequented her bed. Most importantly she had failed in her primary duty to bear a son and heir.

  Certain doubts had already entered Henry’s mind. He had read the text in Leviticus that prohibited any man from marrying the widow of a dead brother. It declares that ‘thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of your brother’s wife; it is thy brother’s nakedness’, for which the penalty will be that of bearing no children. He had quoted Leviticus in his treatise against Luther, in which text he had also adverted to ‘the severe and inflexible justice of God’. What if his marriage flouted divine decree? In Leviticus itself God speaks: ‘I will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague . . . and ye shall sow your seed in vain.’ God had perhaps denied him a royal heir as a punishment for his sin.

  In matters of succession Henry could be savage. He had already demonstrated that the wrath of the king meant death. In the event of the king’s own demise Edward Stafford, third duke of Buckingham, was considered the favourite to succeed him; he was after all descended from Thomas Woodstock, one of the sons of Edward III. He was, therefore, an object of suspicion. In the spring of 1521 the king himself had interrogated the duke’s servants in order to find evidence of treason. It was alleged as the principal charge that the duke had consulted with a monkish necromancer who had told him that Henry would have no male issue and that ‘he should have all’. Buckingham had bought inordinate amounts of cloth of gold and cloth of silver. It was even stated by one of his servants that he had planned to come into the royal presence ‘having upon him secretly a knife’. He was of course found guilty by seventeen of his peers and beheaded on Tower Green. It was widely believed at the time that Wolsey – who was known to Londoners as ‘the butcher’ – had engineered Buckingham’s fall but Henry’s overwhelming need to preserve his dynasty was the root cause of all.

  He may have now rested all his hopes on his bastard son, Henry, but there was no precedent for an illegitimate heir to the throne except for the improbably distant Harold Harefoot in 1037. There was always Princess Mary, already given her own court, but there had been only one queen regnant in English history; and Matilda had in fact been known as ‘lady of England’. So a proper male heir would have to be found. Already, then, Henry was contemplating the possibility of a new bride.

  Mary could, in the interim, be put to other uses. At the age of two she had been promised to the son of Francis I but then, only four years later, she was formally betrothed to Charles V. What could be more fitting than to be the wife of the Holy Roman Emperor and sovereign of Spain? These were games of war, however, rather than of betrothal.

  In the summer of 1521 Henry entered into a treaty with Charles against Francis I, and promised to send a great army of 30,000 foot and 10,000 horse into the French dominion. Yet the stomach for war breeds an appetite for money. That is why Wolsey was soon demanding, and obtaining, new revenues from the Church. In March 1522 he set in motion a great national inquiry to assess the wealth of each individual and the military capacity of every male; it was characteristic of his direct and inclusive style of government. The taxes raised were nominated as ‘loans’, but in fact they were never repaid. Two months later the earl of Surrey, with a large force of men, invaded northern France to no obvious effect. Charles sailed to England and was formally affianced to Princess Mary. On the journey upriver from Gravesend to Greenwich, the emperor’s barges were perfumed with ‘sweet herbs’ to conceal the offensive odours of the Thames.

  In the spring of the following year parliament was convened to treat of what Wolsey called ‘the grand invasion of France’ or, rather, to provide the funds for it. ‘There has been,’ a contemporary reported, ‘the greatest and sorest hold in the Lower House for payment of two shillings of the pound that ever was seen, I think, in any parliament. This matter has been debated and beaten fifteen or sixteen days together . . .’ The tax on the value of land was a precedent never ‘seen before this time’. The Speaker of the House, Thomas More, was able by his powers of calm persuasion to pass the measure.

  This was the meeting of parliament in which Thomas Cromwell first came to notice. He was already a merchant and a scrivener, a dyer of cloth and a moneylender, his various employments testifying to his skill and facility in the affairs of the world. He would soon also enter Gray’s Inn as a lawyer. In his speech to his colleagues he volunteered ‘to utter my poor mind’. He urged the king to stay in England and not to risk himself by campaigning in France; he also argued for caution and vigilance in maintaining the supply lines or ‘victualling’. In conclusion he recommended that Scotland should be the principal target of the king’s army. He used an old maxim, ‘who that intendeth France to win, with Scotland let him begin’.

  Cromwell was not enthusiastic about the parliamentary debates. He wrote to a friend that ‘for sixteen whole weeks wherein we communed of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudge, riches, poverty, penury, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, deceit, oppression, magnanimity, activity, force . . . as well as we might, and left where we began’. He did admit, however, that the Commons had granted the king ‘a right large subsidy, the like whereof was never granted in this realm’.

  So, in the summer of 1523, the great enterprise was undertaken. Under the command of Suffolk, Henry’s jousting partner, 10,000 men sailed to Calais. In girth as well as in splendour, he was a good substitute for the king. He had intended to lay siege to Boulogne and thus gain another port for England. But the king and the cardinal urged him to march upon Paris and, with the help of Charles V and other allies, destroy the heart of France. Yet war is fickle. The allies were captured,
or surrounded, or fled from battle. Rain, mud and disease reduced the English forces outside Paris, and eventually they were forced to retreat.

  In the vortex of this war strange mischances and collisions were destined to occur. The city states of Renaissance Italy, the true cause of the confrontation between Francis and Charles, were put at great peril; Scotland, as part of its old alliance with France, was threatening invasion with the assistance of French troops; and, with the princes of Europe fighting one another, the Turks came much closer to their goal of conquering the eastern parts of that continent. No one could see a path through the wood because, in truth, there was no path. It was a wearisome story of battles and sieges, of invasions and retreats, which left all the participants in approximately the same position as before.

  Yet there was to be one more tremor of martial fervour. At the beginning of 1525 the Spanish imperial army won an overwhelming victory at the battle of Pavia, taking the French king prisoner and destroying much of his nobility. In his excitement Henry projected another grand coalition with Spain for the purpose, as he put it, ‘of getting full satisfaction from France’. Charles V was disinclined to share the proceeds of victory; he was now the master of Europe, and felt less need for the support of Henry. Yet the English king continued to dream and to conspire.

  He and Wolsey intended to raise money for the further campaign by a forced loan that he called an ‘amicable grant’. There was nothing amicable about it. By virtue of the royal prerogative a tax of a sixth on wealth was demanded from the laity, and a fourth from the clergy. The people of England, however, were tired of a war that was driven only by the desire of the king for honour and glory. War put at risk commerce between the nations of Europe and, by artificially raising prices on basic commodities such as meat and drink, it disturbed the patterns of national trade and industry. Since the soldiers of England were largely taken from the land, their deployment severely affected agricultural prosperity. War may have been in the interest of the king, but it was not waged to the benefit of the country. What was the point, in any case, of invading and conquering France? A ballad-writer wrote against Wolsey:

  By thee out of service many are constrained

  And course of merchandise thou hast restrained

  Wherefor men sigh and sob.

  War was bad for business. Much foreign trade was directed through Antwerp, where the major English export was that of manufactured woollen cloth. The Flemish used to say that ‘if Englishmen’s fathers were hanged at the gates of Antwerp, their children would creep between their legs to come into the town’. The trade in manufactured cloth doubled in the course of Henry’s reign, thus lending power and authority to the guild of the cloth exporters known as the Merchant Adventurers. From this period, therefore, we can date the rise of the English merchant. Anything that endangered or disrupted trade was deplored.

  So the resistance to the tax was open and sometimes violent: 4,000 men took up arms in Suffolk, and the tax commissioners were beaten off in Kent. The citizens of London refused to pay on the ground that the exactions were unlawful. In Cambridge and in Lincolnshire the people were ‘looking out for a stir’. When the duke of Norfolk asked to consult with the ‘captain’ of the rebels in his own shire, he was told that ‘his name is Poverty; for he and his cousin Necessity have brought us to this doing’.

  The risk of another general revolt, like that of 1381, was too great to be contemplated. Such an uprising was about to break out in Germany, where a hell of violence and anarchy descended upon the land; 300,000 rebels took up arms, and 100,000 peasants died. So the king retreated. He issued a proclamation in which he denied knowing anything at all about the tax demands; he then graciously remitted them and issued pardons to the rebels. He had learned a lesson in the limitations of regal power. Yet the cardinal was considered to be more greatly at fault. There was no end, one chronicler wrote, to the ‘inward grudge and hatred that the commons bore to the cardinal’. Henry knew that Wolsey had failed. This was no longer the quiet and joyful country at the time of his accession. And the cardinal, well, he was only one man.

  The false stridency of the war policy was further exposed when in 1525 the cardinal began to explore the possibilities of an accord with France against the erstwhile ally of Spain. Charles was now so powerful as to become a menace. A treaty ‘of perpetual peace’ with France was signed in the summer, just six months after the cardinal had proposed a great war against her. Charles V demanded that he be released from his betrothal to the young Princess Mary. All was undone. All must be done again.

  Henry was engaged in affairs of the heart as well as those of the battlefield. He had, in his own phrase, been ‘struck with the dart of love’. A new ship was commissioned in 1526, to be named the Anne Boleyn. In the spring of that year the royal goldsmiths fashioned four brooches for him to bestow upon a certain lady. One was formed in the image of Venus, while another was of a lady and a heart; the third was of a man lying in a woman’s lap, while the fourth showed the same woman with a crown. It was noted that in this period he was more than usually boisterous and energetic. The new-found friendship with France was the excuse for any number of revels and banquets and jousts and pageants. In the summer of 1526 Henry hunted with ferocity and passion. He wanted to win the prize.

  He had begun to write letters to Anne Boleyn in French, the language of courtly romance. One eighteenth-century historian has described them as ‘very ill writ, the hand is scarce legible and the French seems faulty’. Nevertheless they served their purpose. The first of them was presented with the gift of a buck that the king had killed the evening before, and soon enough another followed in which he thanked her ‘right heartily, for that it pleaseth you to still hold me in some remembrance’. This was not the conventional letter of a king to a royal mistress.

  In a subsequent letter he professes himself confused about her feelings, ‘praying you with all my heart that you will expressly tell me your whole mind concerning the love between us’. He then proposes that he will take her ‘as his only mistress, rejecting from thought and affection all others save yourself, to serve you only’. Yet Anne Boleyn had already retreated to her parents’ house, at Hever in Kent, and refused to come to court. ‘I could do none other than lament me of my ill fortune,’ he wrote to her, ‘abating by little and little my so great folly.’ There is no doubt that he had conceived an overpowering passion for her, and she in her turn was doing her best to retain his affection without alienating him. It was a difficult task, and must have brought her close to nervous prostration.

  In another letter Henry longed for their meeting which ‘is on my part the more desired than any earthly thing; for what joy in this world can be greater than to have the company of her who is the most dearly loved’. How do you gently refuse a great and powerful king? She sent him a diamond, which was decorated with an image of a lady in her ship. The lady was tossed about on the waves, but the diamond is a symbol of an imperishable and steadfast heart.

  Katherine herself was being cast aside. After the treaty with France it was no longer necessary to appease her nephew, Charles V. When three of her Spanish ladies complained of the dukedom given to Henry’s illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy, they were dismissed from court. Katherine’s letters were being opened and read by Wolsey. The cardinal, or the king, placed spies among her entourage. Wolsey insisted that he should be present at any interview between her and Charles’s representatives. Yet the king’s displeasure was not visited upon the child, who might still become queen of England. Mary now had her own household of more than 300 servants; at dinner she could choose between thirty-five courses. She hawked and hunted; she played cards and gambled with dice.

  There was, of course, always the possibility of a son. It seems fair to assume that Henry had at first wanted Anne as a mistress but, after the first infatuation, decided that she should be his wife. With Anne Boleyn as the prospective bride, the future of the dynasty might soon be secured. Without a son, as Henry claimed soon af
ter, the kingdom would be overwhelmed by ‘mischief and trouble’. His doubts about the union with Katherine of Aragon were undoubtedly genuine. He was not acting out of lust for Anne Boleyn alone. If he had married Katherine despite the injunction of Leviticus, to refrain from the widow of a dead brother, he might truly have been cursed. Twenty-four years before, a papal dispensation had been obtained for the union. It was his duty now to have that original dispensation declared null and void so that he could be properly married for the first time. The pope could not, and should not, waive divine law as expressed in the Bible itself. The conscience of the king was the important matter; the word appears in many of his letters as a way of justifying himself to heaven. He once declared that conscience ‘is the highest and supreme court for judgement or justice’. He knew that he was right.

  So, in the spring of 1527, Henry began his first attempt to have his marriage to Katherine annulled by Pope Clement VII. He told his wife that he was only exploring the questions raised by certain lawyers and theologians, at which point she wept and swore that her union with Prince Arthur had never been consummated. She knew which way the wind was blowing. In May 1527, Wolsey called the king to appear before him and the archbishop of Canterbury in order to discuss the status of the marriage. It was a piece of stage management, the king himself having already determined that the cardinal would declare the marriage null and void. Yet as papal legate Wolsey could not decide the matter without putting the case to the pope. He adjourned the proceedings and declared that he would consult more widely. This was the beginning of all the troubles that led eventually to the break with Rome.