Tudor (26 page)

Henry ignored the pleas of his sister, who wrote complaining bitterly of the pain of being separated from her daughter.
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But nor was he yet ready to welcome Margaret Douglas at court. It was exactly at this time that Campeggio had arrived in London, and Henry and her godfather Wolsey were focused on the setting up of the Legatine court. Margaret Douglas was left in Northumberland under guard until March 1529, when Angus had lost the last of his castles in Scotland and left for exile in England. Her father escorted Margaret on to the house of Wolsey's then comptroller, a man called Thomas Strangways, who was a sheriff in York. There he left her with a gentlewoman-in-waiting and a manservant, but little money. She stayed for a year, with Strangways obliged to cover her costs out of his own pocket while the Legatine court farce played out and Wolsey tried, and failed, to save his career. By 6 April 1530, however, Henry was at last ready to celebrate her arrival at court, ordering a dress from the Great Wardrobe for ‘our niece' as his welcome gift.
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Margaret found the court very changed from when her mother had last visited it and she was a baby. There was no Wolsey: he had left court for the last time. Her uncle Henry, who had always been so gay, singing of his ‘pastime with good company', was now living miserably in a virtual
ménage à trois
with Katherine, who had grown ‘somewhat stout', and his chic mistress, Anne Boleyn. Katherine ‘always has a smile on her countenance', which must have been hard enough for Henry to live with, while Anne's temper flared like fire as she watched her youth burning away. She would remind Henry bitterly, ‘I have been waiting long and might in the meantime have contracted some advantageous marriage out of which I might have had issue, which is the greatest consolation in the world.' In June, when Anne discovered Katherine was still making Henry's shirts, there were furious words. But the regular rows and tearful making up between Henry and Anne only seemed to strengthen their relationship.

To many at court the king's passion seemed a weakness, yet it was helping fuel his relentless determination to press on with his plans to
marry Anne. Pressure was maintained in Rome to push the annulment forward and, with Anne's encouragement, Henry was even preparing to bypass the Pope altogether. Henry now wanted to be declared ‘absolute emperor and Pope in his kingdom' and be proclaimed supreme head of the Church of England.
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This was quite a volte-face. Less than ten years earlier Henry had written in his attack on Luther, ‘I have no intention of insulting the Pope by discussing his prerogative as if it were a matter of doubt.' In England the supremacy of the Pope over the church had been an article of faith for a thousand years.
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The overwhelming majority in England saw the papacy, with all its faults, as the ‘well of grace', and the Pope as the heir to St Peter.
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Henry, however, now believed God had appointed him, not only as a secular ruler of his subjects, but as their spiritual ruler as well. This change of heart had a great deal to do with his absolute intolerance to any opposition to his royal will. But breaking with the Pope had a positive attraction too. Henry VIII had always taken a strong interest in theological debate, even intervening in quarrels between clergy and laity.
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As the English ‘Pope' he could take this further, and be free to adjudicate the beliefs of the church within his kingdom. The greatest appeal lay, however, in the glorious title of emperor it would earn him, and which he claimed was his by ancient right.

Over a decade earlier Henry had had the round table at Winchester, said to have belonged to King Arthur, painted in the Tudor colours, with a union rose at its centre, from which rises an image of Arthur wearing an Imperial crown and depicting Henry's features. Now, more was to be made of this.
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In January 1531 the Duke of Norfolk showed the French ambassador a seal, supposedly dating from the reign of King Arthur and inscribed ‘Arthur Emperor of Britain'. The ambassador was told this ‘proved' Henry had inherited a special Imperial status from his distant forebears that gave him powers over church and state.
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There had been little effort to make any political capital out of Arthurianism since his brother Prince Arthur's death. That was changing. The difficulty for Henry was that humanist scholars
were increasingly sceptical about such old legends, and the Bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, was making mincemeat of Henry's arguments.

In February 1531 a murder attempt was made against Fisher, and many believed Anne Boleyn's family were behind it. Fisher's cook confessed someone had given him powder to put in the broth he had made, as a joke, he had thought.
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Fisher, who ate little, refused it, which may have saved his life as everyone who touched it fell seriously ill. Two servants died, as did several of the poor who were fed at Fisher's gates. Henry promptly had poisoning raised to the level of high treason. But no evidence concerning what had happened was ever presented to a jury. Instead the cook was the first criminal, guilty of a mere felony and in custody, to be condemned and sentenced to death by an Act of Parliament known as an attainder, which simply declared his guilt.
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His execution at Smithfield was a gruesome affair, with the wretched man suspended above a cauldron of boiling water, locked in chains, and ‘pulled up and down with a gibbet at divers times 'til he was dead'.
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It is often claimed that this was a new punishment invented by Henry, who was frightened he might be assassinated by poisoning. Not so: what was new was the condemnation of a criminal without any prior judicial process.
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It offered a grim forewarning of Henry's disrespect for the principles of common law, as well as expressing his anxiety that a man can't trust his cook.

Fisher's brush with death was still a subject of considerable interest when the princess Mary visited court the following month. Aged fifteen, Mary was just a few months younger than Margaret Douglas, petite and pretty, well proportioned with a beautiful complexion. She was devoted to her mother, with whom she stayed four or five days, but Mary loved her father too. Henry, in turn, was proud of his daughter and when he visited her household at Richmond in June they ‘made great cheer'. To foreign observers it seemed that her place as his heir remained secure and the Imperial and the Venetian
ambassadors were convinced the marriage annulment would not take place while ‘the peers of the realm, both spiritual and temporal, and the people, are opposed to it'.
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At court Henry's once warm relationship with his younger sister, the French queen, had cooled over his love for his mistress. They had been the sole Tudor siblings after Arthur had died and Queen Margaret had left for Scotland; she had married, in Charles Brandon, his closest friend. But the French queen loathed having Anne, her former maid of honour, awarded a higher status than herself at court. ‘Difference . . . about precedency', it was noted at the time, ‘breedeth many quarrels among women, who can better endure almost any kind of injury than to have such as are of meaner degree than themselves to take place before them.'
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Brandon tried to rake up stories from Anne's past in an effort to break her hold on Henry. Anne responded with the ac cusation that Brandon was having ‘criminal intercourse with his own daughter'– he had two daughters by an earlier marriage, as well as two with the French queen (the eldest, Frances, was fourteen).
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Anne remained equally defiant of public opinion. The common sort called Anne Boleyn a ‘burnt arse whore', but she had her servants' livery coats embroidered with a new motto: ‘
Ainsi sera: groigne qui groigne
' (So it will be: complain who will).
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And what would be was, of course, her marriage to Henry. He had made his decision.

On 16 July, Henry rode off with Anne and left Katherine at Windsor without so much as a goodbye, never to see her again. While he and Anne hunted at Chertsey Abbey in Surrey, the princess Mary hurried to see her mother. Her presence that August helped Katherine ‘forget the pain of the king's absence', the Imperial ambassador believed. Mother and daughter remained together through the long summer, until Henry decided he wished to go hunting at Windsor and return to the castle. His bed and another for Anne Boleyn, each eleven feet square and with covers of gold and silver, remained in the castle even into the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when they became tourist attractions. Katherine was ordered to retire to a house called the More in
Hertfordshire, whilst Mary was instructed to return to her household in Richmond. Her cousin Margaret accompanied the princess as her senior lady-in-waiting.
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The warrants for the Master of the Wardrobe to supply cloth and liveries to Mary's household that October include a long list for Margaret Douglas. There was a very expensive ‘gown of tinsel of 11 yards, a black velvet gown of 11yds, furred with powdered ermine [i.e. the white fur split and the black ermine tails sown in a regular pattern]; a gown of black damask, of 11yds; kirtles [outer petticoats] and sleeves of crimson satin, black velvet and black satin, of 7 yds'. There were also velvet shoes, and gloves, and more clothing for her servants, of tawny velvet and black satin.
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This was an indication of the high status of the princess she served, as well as her own.

Margaret, who had first-hand experience of quarrelling parents, was a good companion for Mary. The princess also had the support, however, of a remarkable governess: Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, the only sister of the last male Plantagenet, Edward, Earl of Warwick, executed by Henry VII. Married as a girl to one of Margaret Beaufort's half-nephews, the countess was one of the five wealthiest peers in England. As such she was a woman in a man's role and she had a high opinion of what her sex was capable of: a view she imparted to the princess. Mary's mother, as the daughter of a reigning queen, was similarly confident of a woman's capacity for rule. But the shadows were lengthening over this Indian summer of Mary's childhood. In Henry's private rooms he had chosen a new collection of tapestries telling the classical story of Aeneas, obliged by divine intervention to leave his wife Dido and fulfill his destiny.
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Henry longed to seek his own great destiny, and a fresh mind was giving shape and direction to his ambitions: a former servant of Wolsey called Thomas Cromwell.

The surviving portrait of Cromwell, dressed in black and with piggy eyes, gives no hint of the tremendous charm he could deploy. Like Wolsey, Cromwell came from humble origins (his alcoholic father was
a tradesman from Putney), he had a phenomenal appetite for hard work, a sharp intellect and, in common with Anne Boleyn, he held strongly evangelical views on church reform, as well as supporting the supremacy of the king. On 15 May 1532 Cromwell successfully engineered a formal submission of the clergy to Henry as their overlord. This ended the independence of the church guaranteed in Magna Carta, and caused Henry's Lord Chancellor, Thomas More, to resign the following day. Henry had picked More for the post precisely because he was a highly principled as well as a clever man. Henry was sure that in time More would be bound to see the virtue of his cause. But More had not: what he saw was that the supremacy, far from being a liberation from papal tyranny, left no appeal from the diktat of the king, even in matters of innermost conscience.

The way was cleared for the break with Rome on the death of the old Archbishop of Canterbury in August. One of Anne's evangelical allies amongst the clergy, Thomas Cranmer, was appointed in his place that winter. Cranmer could and would marry her to the king, she felt assured, and it was in the confident belief that she was to be queen at last that Anne began sleeping with Henry.
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They married privately, sometime before the end of February 1533, when she was already pregnant.
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It did not matter to Henry that he had not yet been granted his annulment. Henry believed his marriage to Anne was his first and only marriage, with the annulment of his non-marriage to Katherine a mere formality, and that would follow soon enough. On 7 April an Act in Restraint of Appeals was passed forbidding Katherine of Aragon, or anyone else, appealing to foreign tribunals. This was justified with a reference to Geoffrey of Monmouth's
History of the Kings of Britain
, arguing that ‘by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire' governed by ‘one supreme head and king'. The Pope's role as supreme judge on earth in matters spiritual concerning England was at an end, and the break with Rome made.

Shortly afterwards Katherine was informed formally of the king's
marriage to Anne. She was further told that she was no longer to be called queen and that she was to be stripped of her servants. Katherine retorted that she would live as a beggar if needs be, but she would always be queen. At Richmond, Margaret Douglas remained in attendance on the princess Mary, who ‘was at first thoughtful', and controlling her feelings as best she could, ‘seemed even to rejoice' at the news. Although she was miserable to be forbidden any contact with her mother, Mary hoped that Anne's triumph would be short-lived and she needed to be well placed in her father's affections when that day came. Anne could yet lose her child, or even die in labour. After dinner Mary wrote to her father, who was delighted by her letter, ‘praising above all things the wisdom and prudence of his daughter'.
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Anne was less restrained with her feelings, boasting that she would soon have the princess for her maid, or married to ‘some varlet', that is, someone base.
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The years of waiting, fearful that Henry would abandon her, had left Anne bitter. There was a new order in England and Anne was determined all should bow to it.