Anne always tried to ignore the bad feeling shown towards her by the people of England. In the summer of 1532, for example, she and Henry were forced to turn back from a hunting trip as wherever they went the people lined the streets urging Henry to take back Catherine. The women, in particular reserved their ire for Anne and insulted her. Anne was always careful to show that she did not care and she probably put many of the reactions down to jealousy. By mid 1532, she was the sole woman in the king’s life and she would have known that her marriage was only a matter of time.
Catherine had continued to press her nephew and the Pope for a judgment in favour of her marriage but Clement VII vacillated, unwilling to pronounce either way and risk a rift with either the emperor or Henry. By mid 1532, both Henry and Anne had realised that the Pope would never grant the divorce and finally Henry decided to take more decisive action. Anne was already fulfilling most of the role of queen by that stage. In 1529, Thomas Boleyn had been created Earl of Wiltshire and Ormond and at the banquet to celebrate the appointment, Anne took the place of the queen. Although this event gave Anne the title of Lady Anne Rochford, it was still not enough for Anne and, in September 1532, Henry decided to take the unprecedented step of creating her a peeress in her own right. On 1 September Anne knelt before Henry as he created her Lady Marquis of Pembroke with land grants worth one thousand pounds a year. It is of particular note that in the patent conferring the title on Anne, the title and lands were stated to descend to her male heirs, rather than the more usual specification that it must be legitimate male heirs. This is a clear indication of a change in the nature of Anne and Henry’s relationship and it indicates that they were close to consummating their relationship.
Due to her upbringing in France, Anne was always in favour of a French alliance and worked closely with the French ambassadors. Given his difficulties with the emperor, Henry was also in favour of a French alliance and, on 10 October 1532, Anne and Henry travelled to Dover, sailing to Calais the next day. The meeting with Francis was intended to be Anne’s Field of the Cloth of Gold, introducing her to the world as the next queen of England and before the journey Anne was busy buying costly dresses to ensure that she looked the part. Henry also wanted to show Anne’s suitability as queen to the world and:
‘The king, not contented with having given her [Anne] his jewels, sent the Duke of Norfolk to obtain the Queen’s as well. She replied that she could not send jewels or anything else to the king, as he had long ago forbidden her to do so; and, besides, it was against her conscience to give her jewels to adorn a person who is the scandal of Christendom, and a disgrace to the king, who takes her to such an assembly; however, if the king sent expressly to ask for them, she would obey him in this as in other things’.
Henry was angered by Catherine’s response, but he sent to her expressly and Anne may have been wearing some of Catherine’s jewels when she first set foot in France after over ten years away. The visit was always intended to be Anne’s triumph, but it was, of necessity, a smaller occasion than the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Although Anne was a queen in all but name by late 1532, she still was not actually queen. Francis’s new wife, Eleanor of Austria, was the sister of the emperor and so would never have been expected by Anne to attend. Both Anne and Henry had hopes that Francis’s sister Marguerite would agree to meet Anne and they were deeply disappointed when she also refused. Francis offered his mistress, the Duchess of Vendome, but this simply would not do and it was finally agreed that there would be no French ladies in the party. Anne therefore waited at Calais when Henry rode to meet Francis. She was placated by the enormous diamond Francis sent her on her arrival.
Henry spent several days with Francis before bringing the French king back to Calais with him and Anne spent that time preparing for her first meeting with Francis in a decade. Both she and Henry ensured that England was displayed in its greatest splendour to the French king and his lodging in Calais was hung with satin silk and silver with a carpet of cloth of gold embroidered with flowers. Henry then hosted a great banquet in Francis’s honour whilst Anne prepared excitedly for her big moment. According to Hall’s Chronicle:
‘After supper came in the Marchioness of Pembroke, with vii ladies in masking apparel, of straunge fashion, made of clothe of gold, compassed with crimosyn tinsell satin, owned with clothe of silver, lying lose and knit with laces of gold; these ladies were brought into the chamber, with the four damoselles apparelled in crimosin sattyn, with tabards of fine cipres: the lady Marqyes tooke the Frenche kyng, and the Countes of Darby, toke the King of Naver, and every lady toke a lorde, and in daunsyng the kyng of Englande, toke awaie the ladies visers, so that there the ladies beauties were shewed, and after they had daunsed a while they ceased, and the French kyng talked with the Marchioness of Pembroke a pace, & then he toke his leave of the ladies, and the kyng conveighed hym to his lodgyng’.
Anne’s meeting with Francis was an unqualified success and they perhaps reminisced about the old days when they had known each other in France. For both Anne and Henry, Francis’s approval was the recognition they needed and they finally consummated their relationship for the first time. This may have been as they waited at Calais for several weeks for the weather to change and it is a testament to the security that Anne finally felt in her relationship with Henry. She would be his wife and she would be his queen and, in late 1532, she knew that it would be only a matter of months.
There had been rumours that Anne and Henry would marry in France, although Anne had insisted that ‘even if the King wished, she would not consent, for she wished it to be done here in the place where queens are wont to be married and crowned’. By late 1532, Anne was secure enough to make demands about what her marriage would be and in January she knew that she was more secure still. By the middle of January, Anne would have been certain that she was pregnant. This was no longer the disaster that it could earlier have been and, on 25 January, Anne and Henry came quietly to Whitehall attended only by Henry Norris and Mr Henage of Henry’s privy chamber and Anne’s friend, Lady Berkeley. Henry’s chaplain, Rowland Lee, was also summoned and married the couple secretly, receiving the office of Bishop of Lichfield for his pains.
Few details survive of Anne and Henry’s marriage and it was kept secret even from their closest supporters. For Henry, it was probably the happiest moment of his life and for Anne, it was her moment of triumph. Anne left the ceremony glowing with happiness, secure in the knowledge that she was now the king’s wife. She would have been very aware that, while she was the king’s wife, she was not yet his queen and that Henry was still firmly married to Catherine of Aragon.
POPE IN ENGLAND
In January 1533, Anne was finally married to the king and expecting his child. In spite of this, there was still a great deal of work to do to ensure that she was recognised as both Henry’s wife and his queen and the fact of her pregnancy meant that the clock was rapidly ticking away. Anne was at her happiest in early 1533, knowing that everything was at last going as she had planned. However, in order to finally achieve the divorce, both Henry and Anne had to engineer a radical solution that changed England forever.
In the early months of 1533 Henry and Anne knew that they had to keep their marriage secret to ensure that no word of it reached the Pope or the emperor. Anne was triumphant and neither she nor Henry could refrain from dropping hints about her altered state. It must have amused Anne to see the confusion on people’s faces as she spoke of her marriage and pregnancy and the shock she caused. On one occasion in February, while dining in her chamber with some members of the court, Anne could not resist saying, several times that ‘she felt as sure as death that the king would marry her shortly’. Anne’s indiscretion continued and, shortly after this incident, Anne informed stunned observers that she had developed a craving for apples and that the king had told her this was a sign that she was pregnant. Coming from the supposedly unmarried Anne, these hints were shocking, but Anne simply did not care. She knew that she was married and, once the king’s divorce was finally out of the way, she could declare it to the world. Henry was also as committed to their marriage as ever and, in early March, he dropped hints of the marriage to Anne’s step-grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. According to Chapuys, during a banquet in Anne’s chamber, Henry pointed out Anne’s rich possessions and referred to her rich marriage. Anne and Henry must have shared a smile during the meal over their secret although they would have been aware that most people at court suspected the truth. Even Catherine, kept in exile away from London, knew that there was some new plot against her. Catherine was fearful that the sudden promotion of the unknown Thomas Cranmer to the see of Canterbury ‘was for the purpose of attempting something against her’. She was, of course, correct.
Henry had always preferred to secure his divorce through a sentence given by the Pope but, as the years dragged on, it became necessary to consider other solutions. Many in England always believed that Anne was the driving force behind the break with Rome. Chapuys, on one occasion, described Anne and her father as ‘more Lutheran than Luther himself’. This is an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that Anne, and her brother and father, were very interested in the religious reform movement. For Anne, her interest lay in the reformer’s promotion of the scriptures in the vernacular language, rather than Latin, as set out by William Tyndale, one of the main English reformers in 1526:
‘Moreover, because the kingdom of heaven, which is the Scripture and Word of God, may be so locked up, that he which readeth or heareth it cannot understand it; as Christ testifieth how that the scribes and Pharisees had so shut it up and had taken away the key of knowledge that their Jews which thought themselves within, were yet so locked out, and are to this day that they can understand no sentence of the Scripture unto their salvation, though they can rehearse the texts everywhere and dispute thereof as subtly as the Popish doctors of dunce’s dark learning, which with their sophistry, served us, as the Pharisees do the Jews’.
Anne owned a copy of the Bible in French and later kept an English version on display, signifying her reformist beliefs. She was certainly not a fully fledged Protestant and statements she later made in the Tower demonstrate that she did not accept the key Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone. However, she was certainly anti-papal and she worked hard to ensure that Henry also became interested in the movement.
Anne’s reputation as a reformer was well known both in England and on the Continent and a number of reformist scholars presented her with copies of their works. Anne obtained a copy of Tyndale’s
Obedience of a Christian Man
, which had so upset Wolsey, early in her relationship with Henry and she marked out passages that she thought would be of interest to him. Anne also possessed Simon Fish’s anti-clerical work,
The Supplication of Beggars,
which criticised the cult of purgatory and the payment of ecclesiastical fees. More pertinently, for Anne, Fish argued that the king’s laws could not be enforced against the Pope’s as the chancellor was generally a priest. No one else had ever dared show Henry such ‘heretical’ works before, but Anne did and, gradually, as the divorce dragged on, she was able to persuade the king to take an increasingly anti-papal stance. Anne was also supported in this by Thomas Cromwell, a lawyer who was rising fast in Henry’s service and shared her reformist views.
Anne was always given credit as a major architect behind the reformation and Foxe, in his
Acts and Monuments,
claimed that she was almost its sole architect. According to Foxe:
‘It was touched, a little before, how the pope had lost great part of his authority and jurisdiction in this realm of England; now it followeth to infer, how and by what occasion his whole power and authority began utterly to be abolished by the reason and occasion of the most virtuous and noble lady, Anne Bullen, who was not as yet married to the king, howbeit in great favour: by whose godly means and most virtuous counsel the king’s mind was daily inclined better and better. Insomuch that, not long after, the king, belike perceiving the minds of the clergy not much favouring his cause, sent for the speaker again, and twelve of the common-house, having with him eight lords, and said to them, “Well-beloved subjects: we had thought the clergy of our realm had been our subjects wholly, but now we have well perceived that they be but half our subjects, yea and scarce our subjects. For all the prelates at their consecration make an oath to the pope, clean contrary to the oath that they make unto us, so that they seem to be his subjects, and not ours’.
Whilst Foxe’s favourable account of Anne is as much propaganda as the more hostile accounts, it contains an element of truth. Anne was always inclined towards religious reform and she saw a means by which these views could be useful to the divorce.
Henry’s first move against the Pope occurred in the praemunire manoeuvres of 1531. In the summer of 1530, fifteen clerics and one lay proctor were prosecuted by Henry for prioritising papal law over that of the king. This case was quickly postponed and, during the autumn and winter of 1530, it was extended by Thomas Cromwell, working closely with the king, into an attack on the entire southern clergy. In January 1531, when the clergy met in convocation, Henry insisted that they purchase a pardon for praemunire from him for £100,000. After some debate, the clergy agreed to pay this sum to the king on 24 January 1531 but Henry was not finished with the clergy. On 7 February he sent a document containing five articles to the clergy which he required them to accept. The first article was that the clergy recognise him as sole protector and supreme head of the Church in England.