Tudor (27 page)

On 23 May, when Cranmer at last pronounced Henry's first marriage void, the preparations for the four-day ceremonies of Anne's coronation had already begun. Her relations were to attend in force. It was a different story with the Tudor family. Henry's elder sister, Queen Margaret, offered what support she could from Scotland (which was not much); her son James V, now ruling Scotland, disapproved of the breach with Rome, as he made clear in his letters. His half-sister Margaret Douglas remained with the princess Mary, who would not attend the coronation. Henry's younger sister, the French queen, had endured poor health for some time, and also could not attend. Her daughters, Frances and Eleanor, remained with her, and although she sent him a final message of love, when she died in June the rumour was she had been killed by ‘the sorrow caused by the sight of her brother leaving his wife'.
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The final member of the Tudor family, Henry's illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, was in France as part of Henry's rapprochement with Francis I. Anne
perceived Fitzroy as a possible threat to any children she might have and there was little love lost between them, so he was surely not too disappointed to miss the occasion.
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It meant, however, that not a single one of Henry's Tudor blood relatives attended the ceremonies that began on 29 May.

The first day was a river pageant, last seen at Elizabeth of York's coronation over forty-five years earlier. Henry VII had used the occasion to re-engage Yorkist loyalties in the aftermath of the Battle of Stoke Field in 1487. Henry VIII also now needed to re-engage public loyalty – to his new marriage, his new queen, and their coming child. No expense had been spared, with 220 craft following the royal barges from Greenwich to the Tower; mechanical dragons belched smoke, musicians played, fireworks exploded, bells tinkled and flags fluttered as thousands lined the banks to watch the spectacle. At the Tower Henry was waiting to greet Anne.
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Even at forty-one he remained a handsome man. A Venetian described ‘a face like an angel's, so fair it is; his head shorn like Cæsar's'.
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As Anne disembarked he kissed her to the thunder of a thousand guns. She turned round to thank the mayor and citizens, before entering the Tower where Henry was to create eighteen Knights of the Bath the following day.

Anne emerged from the Tower on the Saturday evening for the procession to Westminster, led by the new knights in their blue hoods. The roads had been gravelled to prevent the horses slipping and the weather was perfect. Anne was carried in a litter of white cloth of gold, drawn by white horses trapped in white damask, just as Katherine of Aragon had once been. Her surcoat was a glittering ‘tissue', also of gold and white, as was her mantle, a cloak furred with ermine, while on her head she wore the coronet of gold crosses and fleurs-de-lys that had been ‘new made' for Katherine in 1509.
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Her dark hair flowed loose as a symbol of her chastity.
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To make a procession so magnificent, with the streets hung with tapestry and rich cloths, all strata of society had been involved, and Henry hoped this, as well as the communal pleasure taken in witnessing it, was working its magic in binding his
subjects to Anne. Yet hostile reports claimed that people did not take their hats off for her, and that the HA monogram of the new king and queen was everywhere mocked, with people pointing at it and laughing ‘Ha, ha!'
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A story spread afterwards that Anne had worn a dress embroidered with tongues struck through with nails as a warning to those who would speak against her.
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Ordinary people had been arrested and whipped in public for this already, so the story reflected a justified sense of fear, and a warning. Later in the summer, two women, one heavily pregnant, were ‘beaten about Cheapside naked from the waist up with rods and their ears nailed to the Standard for because they said Queen Katherine was the true queen'.
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But Anne did have her supporters. England wanted a prince to avoid the dangers of violence and possible foreign invasion if there was a disputed succession. The memories of the terrible battles of the last century and the invasions from Burgundy by Edward IV, and from France by Henry VII, were not forgotten. It was a blessing to see Anne's pregnancy so evident when she emerged from Westminster Abbey on Sunday following her coronation, wearing a crown and carrying two sceptres.
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For Anne the seven years of being the king's mistress were over and the story of Anne the queen had begun.

21

THE TERROR BEGINS

L
ESS THAN FOUR MONTHS FOLLOWING
A
NNE'S CORONATION THE
christening of her daughter was held at Greenwich and was a splendid affair. It followed to the letter the rules Margaret Beaufort had laid down for such occasions. The church of Henry VII's favourite order, the Observant Franciscans, was hung with the gold weaved tapestries called arras, and the silver font had a red silk canopy hung over it: a mark of the status of this ‘High and Mighty Princess of England', the baby Elizabeth.

The ceremonies began with a procession into the hall, led by the king's cousin, Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter, a grandson of Edward IV and a favourite jousting companion.
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He carried a candle as a symbol of life and faith, which was lit at the moment of Elizabeth's baptism, along with 500 torches held by the Yeomen of the Guard, filling the room with brilliant light. The princess had been named after the late queen, Elizabeth of York, but despite the grandeur of the ceremonies and the popularity of the name, the Imperial ambassador reported Elizabeth's christening had been ‘like her mother's coronation, very cold and disagreeable to the court and to the city, and there has been no thought of having the bonfires and rejoicings usual in such cases'.
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Henry had believed that the birth of a son would offer evidence of divine approval for his actions. This had been denied him, while his
royal cousin, Exeter, was amongst those who regretted the schism with Rome. A popular mystic called Elizabeth Barton, known as the ‘Holy Maid of Kent', had told Henry to his face that if he married Anne ‘His Majesty should not be king of this Realm by the space of one month after, And in the reputation of God should not be king one day nor one hour'.
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Many had hoped, and prayed, that Henry would listen to Barton. Instead, a month after Elizabeth's christening, Barton was arrested and those who had listened to her were at risk of accusations of treason. Letters from her former followers poured in to the king, begging forgiveness for having met her. They included one from Exeter's wife, who was fortunate to be spared punishment.

Henry was convinced that anyone who could not see that his first marriage was false must be evil in heart, and to demonstrate his determination to crush all opposition to his marriage he was now to turn on his seventeen-year-old daughter, Mary. Henry had decided that she was henceforth to be treated as a bastard. If he had had a son he might not have felt it necessary to make an issue of Mary's status – she would have come second to a brother even if both were regarded as legitimate – but with two daughters he felt he could not have Mary, as the elder, treated as superior to Elizabeth, the child of his only ‘valid' marriage. Mary was, therefore, degraded. Her servants were told to take her badges from their livery and replace them with the king's, and she was informed she was no longer to be called princess.

Mary, with all the courage and stubbornness of adolescence, continued nevertheless to use her title. She ignored threats of the king's ‘high displeasure and punishment in law' and even had the cheek to write to him expressing faux astonishment at the orders. Mary assured her father she trusted absolutely ‘that your grace was not privy to the same letter, as concerning the leaving out of the name of princess, for I doubt not in your goodness, that your grace does take me for his lawful daughter'.
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Henry realised he would have to break Mary, and to achieve that he first had to isolate her.

In December Henry shut down Mary's household, dismissing 160
servants, and her ten ladies- and gentlewomen-in-waiting. Her governess, the Countess of Salisbury, offered to pay for Mary's household out of her own pocket, but was also sent packing. To add further insult to injury Mary learned that her senior lady-in-waiting, her cousin the eighteen-year-old Lady Margaret Douglas, was ordered to join Anne Boleyn's household, while she was transferred to that of the princess Elizabeth at Hatfield.
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There, this grandchild of the heads of four royal houses found she had been placed under the care of Anne's aunt, Lady Shelton, who was permitted to beat her if she continued to resist the king's commands to accept her reduction in title. She was also to be treated at all times as inferior to her baby sister.

As Mary wept in humiliation and anger in her rooms at Hatfield, her father was telling the French ambassador that if they wanted a marriage treaty they should favour Margaret Douglas, his ‘niece, the daughter of the Queen of Scotland, whom he keeps with the queen his wife, and treats like a queen's daughter'. The French ambassador duly noted that Margaret Douglas was ‘beautiful, and highly esteemed', while saying of Mary, to judge by what Henry said of her, ‘he hates her thoroughly'.
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There were those at court, however, who were now so angered by Henry's marriage to Anne and the schism with Rome, that they wanted the Tudor dynasty brought to an end. ‘They refer to the case of Warwick [the Kingmaker], who chased away King Edward', the Imperial ambassador informed Charles V, ‘and they say you have a better title than the present king, who only claims by his mother, who was declared by sentence of the Bishop of Bath a bastard, because Edward had espoused another wife before the mother of Elizabeth of York.'
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In short the king had no right to the throne through his Tudor father, but only through his mother, and that fell down if you believed Edward IV's children were the bastards Richard III had claimed them to be.
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Henry found it hard to accept his loss of public acclaim and he also understood its dangers. Faced with a threat, he responded as his father
had always done, with massive force. A reign of terror was about to begin. In March, the Holy Maid, Elizabeth Barton, was indicted by Act of Attainder and convicted of treason without any form of judicial process.
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It was feared a jury would find her innocent of any capital crime, so she never faced one. She was executed in April, along with a number of clergy with whom she was associated. John Fisher, the most powerful defender of the Aragon marriage, was in the Tower, simply for having met Barton. Henry's former Lord Chancellor, Thomas More, joined Fisher that month for refusing to swear an oath in support of the recent Act of Succession. This statute made Mary illegitimate in English law, but the oath's preamble also denied papal jurisdiction, which More believed was key to Christian unity and instituted by Christ. For More this was a matter of his private religious conscience; for Henry it was necessary that everyone accept the rightness of his actions, even in their private thoughts.

Yet there were still no signs of God's blessing for Henry and that summer Anne miscarried her second child. The old pattern of Katherine's pregnancies was being repeated and gossip emerged the king had an eye for other women, and even that Anne was jealous.
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But theirs had always been a volatile love affair of sunshine and storms, and the marriage was about to be given a boost from an unexpected quarter – Rome. On 25 September 1534, Pope Clement VII died and the opportunity arose for a rapprochement between Rome and the king. The newly elected Pope Paul III was anxious for a clean slate. He saw the sack of Rome as God's punishment for the worldliness of recent popes and corruption within the church. The time for reform was long overdue and the battle to prevent the break-up of Western Christendom had begun. In May 1535 Pope Paul created a number of cardinals: men known for their sanctity, learning and integrity. Amongst them was Fisher. The Pope hoped this would both rescue Fisher from the Tower and encourage Henry on the path to reconciliation with Rome. The appointment was made, the Pope noted, not only for Fisher's virtues, but ‘in honour of that king and
his kingdom'.
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The new Cardinal Fisher was to be the English representative at a council that would launch the reform of the church.

What Paul III had failed to appreciate was how important Henry's supremacy over the church was to him. What may have begun as a piece of legal and constitutional chicanery, designed to get around Pope Clement's refusal to annul his first marriage, had become, for Henry, an end entirely in itself, independent of any issues concerning the succession. It was here, Henry believed, that he would find the ‘virtue, glory and immortality' he had always pursued. He had not yet achieved his boyhood dream of reconquering France, but in becoming Pope in England, with an empire over church and state, Henry had found his claim to greatness.

As always, Henry VIII genuinely believed his actions to be godly. He saw his regal prototypes as the Old Testament kings, David and Solomon, and the Christìan Roman emperors, Constantine and Justinian. Henry was certain that early English kings had similarly held the title of emperor and the popes had, for centuries, usurped it. Those close to the king said he would not give up his supremacy even if St Peter were to spring to life again.
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When Henry learned of Fisher's elevation he retorted that he would send Fisher's head to Rome for his cardinal's hat, and he had recently created the capital crime for which the bishop would die.