Anne Boleyn Part Eight: King Henry VIII's Great Matter Part Two of Two

                                                        Written By: Katelyn Abbott

Anne, in conjunction with Thomas Cranmer, would provide the solution to the annulment of King Henry VIII’s marriage to Queen Katherine, since Thomas Cranmer was a Cambridge man and a reformer, said that rather than appeal to the Pope’s verdict King Henry VIII should amass a team of university theologians who could prove that his marriage to Katherine of Aragon was unlawful according to scripture. Thomas Cranmer became the Boleyn family chaplain and according to Joanna Denny “…he remained Anne’s pastor until her death and a friend to her memory thereafter.” After meeting with King Henry VIII in 1529 Thomas Cranmer accompanied Sir Thomas Boleyn in 1530 abroad to champion both King Henry VIII and Anne’s attempts to marry to both the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at Bologna and the Pope along with their plan to have the universities in Europe decide the outcome of the Great Matter. This had been a disaster. The envoys clearly were too closely tied to Anne and there did happen to be no reason for their appeal to be any more persuasive than the previous ones. Sir Thomas Boleyn and Thomas Cranmer ended up refusing to treat the Pope with the expected courtesies like kissing his feet.

Alarmingly for all of Anne’s efforts King Henry VIII began to question England breaking away from Rome. It had been difficult for King Henry VIII to distance himself from what he had been taught about religion. His convictions caused him to fear that he was potentially jeopardizing his immortal soul by contemplating breaking away from Rome in order to annul his marriage to Queen Katherine and bastardize his daughter Princess Mary for him to be able to marry Anne and have her bear him the son that he so desperately longed for. He did order the copies of the much banned books that she had lent to him publicly burned and ended up outlawing all evangelical texts from England which must have been a move that had been very worrisome to Anne. For other reasons for Anne’s sadness was that Stephen Gardiner had declared that he could not in good conscious go against the Pope and Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, was also slacking on his duties to secure the King’s annulment.

Anne was undoubtedly in great distress from her anger, her bitterness, her confusion, and her disappointment as all that she had been striving for to be able to marry King Henry VIII and become the Queen of England must have now seemed further away from her than ever before. She had been upset about Sir Thomas More’s growing power as the Chancellor of England. Sir Thomas More came to be using his newfound position to call on for a new crusade on heretics. Despite Sir Thomas More being a brilliant, cultured,  and deeply well-educated man and he ended up being praised “ as a martyr for individual conscience” this was the same right that he had denied to those he had personally slandered through his inflammatory writings, tortured, and took to murdering by burning them as heretics as the stake as Chancellor of England.

King Henry VIII and Anne hosted a magnificent ball in honor of the departing Jean du Bellay on January 12, 1530.

Anne was not popular with the people of England who did not accept Anne for who she was, cared nothing for her, and despised her. Queen Katherine was beloved by the English people. The English people called Anne names such as diversely as “Nan Bullen” and denounced her as a heretic, a whore, and a witch. She ended up being the scapegoat for all of King Henry VIII’s unpopular decisions, but it is important to remember that no one ever controlled King Henry VIII or did make him do anything other than exactly what he desired to do. King Henry VIII’s desire for an annulment for his marriage to Queen Katherine had gone on to be the gossip of all Europe and Anne had been roundly condemned and criticized for it. She was not popular in the English Court either for many courtiers did not accept her for who she was, cared nothing for her, and despised her and Anne made many enemies both for her sharp tongue and her terrible temper that she had sometimes forgot to withhold and her unique situation. The English Court had been impressed by Queen Katherine’s solemn piety for three decades and she had many supporters though none of them were inclined to face King Henry VIII’s formidable wrath on her behalf. For among Anne’s many enemies were Bishop John Fisher, Sir Nicholas Carew, the Courtenays, Elizabeth Barton (“the Nun of Kent”), the Duke of Suffolk, the Duchess of Norfolk, Sir John Russell, the Montagues, the Nevilles, Reginald Pole along with the rest of his entire whole family, and Sir William FitzWilliam.  Princess Mary Tudor, the Duchess of Suffolk, was a great supporter of Queen Katherine who did not accept Anne for who she was, cared nothing for her, and despised her and she refused to come to the English Court whenever Anne was there. Her husband Charles Brandon the Duke of Suffolk was reported to feel the same way about Anne while Anne was reported to not have accepted them for who they are, care nothing for them, and despise them for Charles Brandon's inappropriate flirtation with Archduchess Margaret of Austria and their scandalous behavior together in France. Anne responded to her unpopularity among the English people by making her motto on December 25, 1530 “Ainsi sera, groigne qui groine’ which meant “Grumble all you like, this is how it’s going to be” for a few weeks before changing it, but she was sustained only by King Henry VIII’s romantic feelings for her and she knew his mercurial temper. She had might have been just as surprised by King Henry VIII’s faithfulness to her for seven years as everyone else was though he did have sexual relations with at least two women during this period of time

 A picture of Anne speaking out against Queen Katherine in public at the English Court

 

A picture of her getting upset about Queen Katherine still making King Henry VIII’s shirts

 

Anne was given precedence over the Duchesses of Norfolk and Suffolk that the latter of which was the King’s own beloved younger sister Princess Mary Tudor at the Christmas celebration of 1529. By 1530 Anne was openly honored by King Henry VIII at the English Court. She came to be accorded precedence once over all the other ladies at the English Court and she sat with King Henry VIII at banquets, he would take her on hunts with him while Queen Katherine was virtually ignored, and wore rich gowns of purple-a color reserved for royalty-which King Henry VIII had given her. His Privy Purse accounts ended up showing that he spent the equivalent of £165,000 on gifts for Anne during a period of three years. For among his offerings were cosmetics, furs, gowns (some made of cloth of gold, satin, and velvet), headpieces, lace fans, pearl-encrusted gloves, perfume, and precious stones to adorn her clothes. He had given her numerous items of jewelry such as earrings, necklaces, bracelets, brooches, gold trinkets to sew on her gowns along with borders of jewels and pearls to edge those gowns, heart-shaped head ornaments, nineteen diamonds to wear in her hair, one ring set with emeralds and another with a table diamond, nineteen smaller diamonds forming lovers’ knots, twenty-one rubies set in gold roses, and even “a crown of gold.” King Henry VIII had them made for her by his jeweler Cornelius Heyess. Anne owned a bracelet set with a miniature of the King which he had given to her early on in their courtship along with initial pendants and rings. Her jewel box, a small bound chest, now resides at Leeds Castle. He purchased Anne things for her amusement such as arrows, bows, and playing cards.

The pretense of King Henry VIII’s first marriage to Queen Katherine did end up being allowed to be continued as Queen Katherine continued to personally make his shirts and send him gifts and notes. Anne ended up finding out that Queen Katherine still made King Henry VIII’s shirts as he had requested her to do so after she caught a Groom of the Privy Chamber taking linen to the Queen that he told her was meant for her to use to make the King his shirts and she was furious about it for this bestowed wifely status on Queen Katherine. She got jealous over it and she had told King Henry VIII to put an end to it at once since she was more than willing to make him shirts for him if he needed her to do so as she was an expert needlewoman herself. Inevitably King Henry VIII ended up telling Queen Katherine of Aragon to stop making his shirts for him, but she still did so anyway. It was an untenable situation and it grated on both women. Anne landed up giving into her sharp tongue and her terrible temper and she lashed out because of it. She took out her frustration that King Henry VIII had not yet managed to leave Queen Katherine after he came seeking solace from her after he had a heated argument with his wife on him on St. Andrew’s Day November 20, 1529 by stating, “Did I not tell you that when you disputed with the queen she was sure to have the upper hand? I see that some fine morning you will succumb to her reasoning, and that you will cast me off. 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 this world; but alas! Farewell to my time and youth spent to no purpose at all.” What Anne had eluded to King Henry VIII was that time was running out for them to be able to married in her most fertile years and that she might have had children with him by now if he had got his annulment from his marriage to Queen Katherine which was something meant to spur King Henry VIII on to further action.

A picture of Anne finding the book of prophecy that someone left for her to find in her apartments

Sometime in 1530 a book of ancient prophecies appeared in Anne’s apartments which when opened showed three crude drawings representing King Henry VIII, Katherine of Aragon, and Anne Boleyn. The figure of Anne lacked a head. When Anne Gainsford was shown the book with its drawing by her mistress she allegedly remarked, “If I thought it true, though he were an emperor, I would not myself marry him.” Whereas, Anne Boleyn according to Anne Gainsford, she had dismissed the book as a bauble. Anne knew something of her fate, but she continued on regardless as during the summer of 1530 King Henry VIII dared to remind Anne how much she owed him and the many enemies she had made him, her reply was reported as: “That matters not, for it is foretold in ancient prophecies that at this time a queen shall be burnt. But even if I were to suffer a thousand deaths, my love for you will not abate one jot.”

King Henry VIII got into an argument with Queen Katherine of Aragon about him doing a personal wrong in seeking to annul their marriage and bastardize their daughter Princess Mary, but him also scandalizing himself by keeping company with Anne on December 24, 1530. He retorted that he  she was mistaken since he was not doing anything other by keeping company with Anne to learn more about her character as he would marry her unlike how they were living in sin no matter what Queen Katherine of Aragon or the Pope had to say to that. Anne had said sometime after that to one of Queen Katherine’s ladies-in-waiting that she wished all Spaniards were at the bottom of the sea and that she cared nothing for Katherine or any of her family and would rather see her hanged than acknowledge her as her mistress and Queen.

Anne was given £100 by King Henry VIII to buy him a New Year’s Gift for January 1, 1531.
 

In January 1531 King Henry VIII and Anne got into a violent argument with one another with Anne threatening to leave him. At the prospect of losing Anne, King Henry VIII apparently went hotfoot to Anne’s father Sir Thomas Boleyn and the Duke of Norfolk and begged them with tears in his eyes to act as mediators to make Anne stay with him. The couple came to make up with each other over the quarrel and he did placate Anne with more gifts of furs and rich embroideries. This ended up happening on several occasions with Anne lamenting her lost honor and youth in waiting around for him to annul his marriage to Queen Katherine and King Henry VIII begging her to desist as he cried and end up speaking no more of leaving him with him giving her gifts to be peace offerings to her to keep her with him.

Anne was by King Henry VIII’s side when he visited Sir Nicholas Carew at Beddington Park in Surrey in February 1531.
 

In February 1531 Bishop John Fisher was actually poisoned by his cook Richard Rouse who had added a white powder to the soup which was served to his household and him. Basically several men died at the table and other people came to fall seriously ill, but Bishop John Fisher did eat only a little of the soup himself. He ended up suffering from terrible stomach pains, but he had escaped what must have been an attempt upon his life. For this Richard Rouse was arrested even though it was widely believed by people at the English Court that he had been acting on the instructions of Sir Thomas Boleyn who was said to have given him the poison to silence him for being strongly against it being God’s law for King Henry VIII to be the Head of the Church of England and that Anne herself was privy to the plot though there is no historical evidence to support these rumors. King Henry VIII had gone to ignore the rumors that Anne and the Boleyn faction had anything to do with it and even though he was becoming increasingly irritated by Bishop John Fisher’s resistance against his will he had pressed Parliament to pass a new law providing for harsh treatment of poisoners: in the future they would be publicly boiled to death which was a punishment meted out to the unfortunate Richard Rouse. History will never really know who was actually behind the poisoning of Bishop John Fisher, but one strongly can argue that Anne or her family would not have been stupid enough to kill the bishop in a careless manner which could have been discovered so easily especially when many of her detractors depict her as a brilliant, cunning, and duplicitous woman known for careful plotting.

In April of 1531 Princess Mary, ailing from stomach pains, wrote a request to be near both her father King Henry VIII and her mother Queen Katherine at the English Court. Anne had been paranoid that King Henry VIII, Queen Katherine, and their daughter Princess Mary being together as a family again would strength their familial bond with each other. She came to have Princess Mary’s request turn down, but her running interference on the matter actually caused the opposite of her desired effect as she had offended King Henry VIII by doing so and he ended up briefly retreating to Queen Katherine before he returned to Anne after he quarreled with Queen Katherine about them seeing their daughter Princess Mary.

Ambassador Eustace Chapuys reported a rumor that Charles Brandon the Duke of Suffolk was banned from the English Court after he raked up a story of a romantic relationship between Sir Thomas Wyatt and Anne as lovers in an effort to convince King Henry VIII that she was a woman with a past in May of 1531. Anne clearly did not forgive such an insult. She did accuse the Duke of Suffolk—possibly with some justification given later events—of seducing his son’s betrothed who was a girl of no more than eleven at the time. King Henry VIII ended up getting Anne to relent so that he would be able to bring by the Duke of Suffolk to the English Court and he was recalled back to the English Court.

In June of 1531 according to Imperial Ambassador Eustace Chapuys Anne Boleyn was aware that one of King Henry VIII’s friends Sir Henry Guildford did not accept her for who she was, cared nothing for her, and despised her and she ended up viewing him as her enemy as he did not think that King Henry VIII should cast off his wife Queen Katherine without a papal sentence and decide to fortify himself against the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the pope by making a French alliance. Anne confronted him on the issue and decided to threaten him with the loss of the comptrollership when she was able to marry King Henry VIII and became the Queen of England. He ended up replying that he would resign first before she would be able to do so and he went straightaway to King Henry VIII to give up his baton to him. Though King Henry VIII returned it to him and said that he should not take the matter of what Anne said seriously, he left the English Court for a time because of it.

During June and July of 1531 King Henry VIII and Anne spent their time hunting accompanied only by Sir Nicholas Carew and two other attendants.

In  the summer of 1531 King Henry VIII had been able to finally leave Queen Katherine for good. Queen Katherine was banished from the English Court and her rooms had been given to Anne. Queen Katherine continued to call herself the Queen of England and she was indeed still the Queen of England for King Henry VIII would take another two years before he finally broke away from Rome and created the Anglican Church of England.

King Henry VIII ended up taking Anne with him to visit Lord Sandys at The Vyne during the summer of 1531.

Public support among the English people however remained with Queen Katherine and Anne was unpopular among the people of England and abroad. Anne was dining at a manor house with friends on the river Thames and she was almost seized by a crowd of angry women whose intent was to kill her one evening in the autumn of 1531. She just managed to escape the mob of women by boat and it was fortunate that she escaped for they most likely would have done so had she stayed there.

The Duchess of Norfolk, who supported Queen Katherine of Aragon on principle since the Duke was an ally of Anne Boleyn, apparently openly impugned Anne’s ancestry and quarreled bitterly with her over Anne’s interference in the marriages of the Duchess’s children. She smuggled letters to Queen Katherine of Aragon in oranges. Then when Anne found out what was happening, she warned her aunt in very “high words” to desist from doing so, but the Duchess defiantly continued to act as a go-between for Queen Katherine of Aragon.

   A picture of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer

The Boleyn family chaplain, Thomas Cranmer, was appointed as the next Archbishop of Canterbury with papal approval when the previous Archbishop of Canterbury William Warham died in 1532.

 

Thomas Cromwell brought a number of acts including the Submission of the Clergy and the Supplication against the Ordinaries before Parliament in 1532, which recognized royal supremacy over the Church of England, thus finalizing the break with Rome. Following these acts Thomas More resigned as Lord Chancellor. This left Thomas Cromwell as King Henry VIII’s chief minister.

 

An apparent one reason for Anne’s strong anti-clericalism was because she had felt that there were too many priests supported Queen Katherine instead of her. Anne had been known to say loudly to her father Sir Thomas Boleyn that King Henry VIII “ did put in a good word for a priest, as there were too many of them already” whenever King Henry VIII did put in a good word for an erring priest brought before his justices. She clearly had no love at all for the Church of Rome for their failure in securing a swift annulment to King Henry VIII and Queen Katherine’s marriage and due to her supporting the newly established Church of England with such conviction it was widely believed that she would urge King Henry VIII to do away with traditional forms of worship as well though she most likely planned to do nothing of the sort. Evidently at the end of 1532 Queen Katherine ended up warning Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, that thanks to Anne Boleyn King Henry VIII had already seized a great deal of Church property.