A World Lit Only by Fire (39 page)

H
ENRY IS OFTEN
depicted as short-tempered, a man who was determined to have his way whatever the consequences. The determination was there,
but in pursuing his desires he also showed remarkable patience. His reply to Luther—the work of a staunch Catholic sovereign
—was written in 1521. In 1522 Anne Boleyn, aged fifteen, became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine, and it was there that
she caught the king’s eye. He had already despaired of Catherine’s infertility, but five years passed before he secretly began
to seek to annul their marriage. For six years the pope, under pressure from her nephew Charles, ignored Henry’s appeals.

It was in 1533 that he married Anne, now twenty-six, and was excommunicated by the pope. Parliament passed the Act of Succession
in 1534; it declared the king’s marriage to Catherine invalid, recognized Anne as the new queen, made questioning her marriage
to Henry a capital crime, and required all Henry’s subjects to take an oath of loyalty to him. Nor was the tale told. The
king’s disillusionment with Anne, among other consequences, lay ahead.

In the beginning the king had assumed that the pope would swiftly grant his request, dissolving his barren marriage. All precedents
were on his side. Even Campeggio, who first came to London in 1528, agreed with him. But the pope, to Henry’s growing frustration,
seemed incapable of making up his mind. Campeggio knew how little weight an Italian cardinal carried in London. If he ruled
in Catherine’s favor, he would simply be banished. Therefore he appealed for instructions from the Vatican. Clement’s frantic
reply reflects his helplessness. He told his cardinal “not to pronounce sentence without express commission hence. … If so
great an injury be done to the Emperor, all hope is lost of universal peace, and the Church cannot escape utter ruin, as it
is entirely in the power of the Emperor’s servants. … Delay as much as possible.” By this and other byzantine maneuvers the
pope bought time—five more years of it.

Eventually there was no time left to buy. Anticipating a dispensation, the king had fitted up splendid apartments for Anne
adjacent to his own at Greenwich; courtiers reported to her, as though she had already been crowned; crowds gathered outside
her windows, ignoring Catherine. Often Henry would not leave Greenwich until noon. But papal politics made this bedfellowship
perilous. The issue became critical when Anne discovered that she was with child. Thomas Cranmer, a Cambridge theologian,
had drawn up a new array of arguments; a team of negotiators, now hastily dispatched by the king, presented them in Rome.
Still the pontiff hesitated. Anne was beginning to show, and no infant could succeed to the monarchy unless born to a queen.

Henry could wait no longer. He appointed Cranmer archbishop of Canterbury, invested him with extraordinary powers, and urged
him to place the broadest possible interpretation on his new office. The new prelate moved swiftly, ruling that the pope was
incompetent to grant a dispensation. He declared Catherine a divorcée, secretly married Henry to his mistress, and in May
1533, on Whitsunday of her twenty-seventh year, when she was in the seventh month of her pregnancy, crowned her with great
ceremony in Westminster Hall.

Nothing could stop the split in the Church now. The king’s blood was up. He had already summoned a special session of Parliament.
Working on the anticlerical feelings of the MPs—and despite the opposition of Sir Thomas More, his new high chancellor —
he had rammed through a brutal legislative program limiting the powers of the clergy, increasing taxes on the Church, and
cutting the annates paid to Rome to 5 percent. This last act was the sort of insubordination which deeply wounded the Holy
See. Clement had dawdled for years over the divorce petition from London, but he had also drafted a bull excommunicating the
king. Now the Vatican executed it.

The king’s response was just as vehement. Following his lead, Parliament passed thirty-two religious bills, which, among other
things, cut off
all
revenues to Rome, and confiscated all Church lands—by a conservative Catholic estimate, 20 percent of the land in England.
Other measures suppressed monasteries, decreed that spiritual appeals by English Christians must be made to Canterbury or
the king, required new clergymen to swear loyalty to the crown before they could be consecrated, and stipulated that only
royal nominees could become bishops and archbishops. Then Henry took the ultimate step. In the Act of Supremacy (November
1534) he abandoned Rome completely, founding a new national church, Ecclesia Anglicana, and appointing himself and his successors
its supreme head.

Sir Thomas More, Wolsey’s successor as high chancellor, had followed Henry for a time, but he had been in agony, trapped between
conflicting loyalties. More was the king’s humble servant. However, he was also a devout Catholic. The less his sovereign
saw of him, he reasoned, the better. Therefore he resigned the chancellorship in 1532. It was in vain. He could not hide;
he was too eminent; the king was watching him closely. His personal crisis reached a climax in the spring of 1534. When the
king demanded that his subjects take an oath to obey the Act of Succession, he was asking more than More could give. It meant
swearing fealty to Henry and repudiating the papacy. Most of the English clergy meekly obeyed. More didn’t protest; he simply
remained mute. He condemned neither the oath nor those who had taken it, but though remaining loyal to the crown in word and
deed, he refused to renounce Rome—a devastating silence, because Henry was taking an enormous risk. Although he was a powerful
monarch, his reign was confined to the living. England’s rising national spirit supported him, as Germany’s had supported
Luther, but if the pope excommunicated his entire kingdom, condemning every Englishman to eternal flames, the possibility
of an uprising would be far from remote. In this exigency the king could not hesitate.

More had already opposed Henry’s marriage to Anne and refused to attend her coronation, a mortal insult. Any tolerance of
further lèse majesté by Henry would be interpreted as weakness, especially since the former chancellor, garlanded with royal
honors, was the most influential man in English public life. The king could be merciless or he could forfeit his crown, and
for this king that was no choice. More was charged with treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London.

At his trial More finally spoke out. Splitting the Church was a tragic crime, he said; he could not, in all conscience, be
an accomplice to it. Nor, he added, could he bring himself to believe that “any temporal man could be the head of the spirituality.”
He was one of the most eloquent men of his generation, but he spoke in a hubbub and could scarcely be heard. The hearing was
a formality. The verdict had already been decided. His judges included Anne’s father, her uncle, and her brother, Lord Rochford.
They condemned him to be “hanged, drawn, and quartered”—the extreme penalty for betrayal of the sovereign. It meant that
the chancellor’s shrunken cadaver, cut into four parts, would be left to rot on the London docks.

That was too much for the king. As Anne sulked—Sir Thomas had succeeded Wolsey as the object of her malice—Henry changed
the sentence to simple beheading. The scholar who had served him so faithfully went to the ax with his head high. As he mounted
the scaffold it trembled and seemed about to collapse. Turning to a king’s officer he said calmly, “I pray you, Mr. Lieutenant,
see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.” Then, altering the ghastly ritual by blindfolding himself,
he asked the hushed crowd to witness his death “in the faith and for the faith of the Catholic Church, being the King’s good
servant, but God’s first.” He died. Afterward his head was affixed to London Bridge.

England was shocked. No one in the kingdom believed the former lord chancellor even capable of betraying crown and country.
Erasmus mourned his friend, “whose soul was more pure than any snow, whose genius was such that England never had and never
again will have its like.” The Vatican proclaimed him a Christian martyr. In time the papacy beatified and then canonized
him.

L
ESS THAN A YEAR
later Anne Boleyn followed him to the block. Her thousand-day reign had been a disaster, so calamitous that the prestige
of the papacy was enhanced; only divine intervention, men reasoned, could have visited such punishment upon the rebel monarch
in London. His conviction that she would present him with an heir had been wrong. Her first baby, like Catherine’s, was female.
No one could blame her for that, but the failure of her womb was the least of it. Once on the throne she seemed to change
personality. Her gaiety vanished and was replaced by temper tantrums, sharp-tongued imperiousness, and innumerable petty demands
which left the king exasperated. Catherine at least had been gentle, and he began to miss that; when she died, he wept, and
ordered the court to go into mourning. Anne refused. After she presented him with a second, dead child—a boy, born prematurely
and badly deformed—he no longer desired her. He told friends Anne had bewitched him, and cited the baby’s deformities as
evidence of her sorcery. To her fury, he began sliding his hand under the skirts of one of her maids, the nobly born Jane
Seymour.
^*

If the evidence later arrayed against her is to be believed, Anne was the last wife in England entitled to protest her husband’s dalliance. According to sworn testimony, she had scarcely recovered
from her daughter’s birth when she began taking lovers, and her intrigues continued through her three-year marriage. If a
youth aroused her desire, witnesses declared, she would invite him to her bedchamber by dropping a handkerchief at his feet;
if he picked it up and wiped his face, her proposition had been accepted, and her personal maid would be alerted to his arrival
that evening at midnight.

These charges may have been trumped up—later it was said that several of the men accused of sleeping with the queen were
homosexuals—but this was not apparent at the time. Henry, according to the record, learned that he was being cuckolded.
Told of the handkerchief signal, he watched it happen, moved in that night with armed yeomen, and struck hard. The new lord
chancellor took Anne to the Tower and read out the charges against her. She fell to her knees, sobbing and protesting her
innocence.

In the preliminary hearing three knighted gentlemen of the privy chamber and a court musician confessed to “criminal intercourse
with the queen.” Then the earl of Northumberland, as he now was, testified that he, too, had been intimate with her. The greatest
sensation came at the end, when Lord Rochford, Anne’s brother—who had found Sir Thomas More guilty—was led into the dock
and accused of coupling with his own sister, a charge supported, by what is said to have been convincing evidence, by Rochford’s
wife. Tried by a jury which included Anne’s father, the musician pleaded guilty and, as a commoner, was merely hanged. The
knights then were beheaded.

Three days later, twenty-six peers, chaired by Anne’s uncle, the duke of Norfolk, sat in judgment of her and her brother.
Both were found guilty of adultery and incest and condemned to death by their uncle. Violent death being commonplace and a
life hereafter assumed, the condemned in that age often accepted their fate with an insouciance which would be astonishing
today. After praying that she be forgiven her crimes, Anne, still only twenty-nine, asked that her head be struck off as soon
as possible. She remarked wryly that she drew comfort from the thought that “the executioner I have heard to be very good,
and I have a little neck,” then laughed. On the scaffold she asked the crowd to pray for the king: “A gentler and more merciful
prince there never was, and to me he was ever a good, a gentle, and sovereign lord.” She and Rochford were decapitated within
a few minutes of each other, the queen, by precedence of rank, meeting the blade first.

This extraordinary cataract of events, precipitated by a king’s yearning for a male heir, led, ironically, to two royal heiresses,
each of whom reigned memorably. Catherine’s daughter, Mary, survived her mother’s humiliation and briefly visited a terrible
retribution upon those she held responsible for it. The fears of Charles V were at first realized; after the divorce Mary
was declared illegitimate. Later, however, after the birth of a male heir to Henry—the future Edward VI, his son by Jane
Seymour—Parliament relented, passing a complex act which, among other things, restored Catherine’s daughter to the royal
line of succession and permitted her to occupy the throne for five years, beginning in 1553, as Queen Mary I.

Mary was not a beloved sovereign, nor did she mean to be. Popularity was not among her priorities. Juan Luis Vives had done
his work well; she had never renounced her Roman Catholicism, nor—understandably—had she forgiven the zealous new Protestants
who had refused to let her visit her mother, even when Catherine had lain on her deathbed. As sovereign she swore to turn
back the clock, wiping out the Reformation. It was impossible, but she tried very hard. As her chief adviser she appointed
Reginald Cardinal Pole, an English cardinal who had remained loyal to Rome, and whom the pope designated as Mary’s papal legate.
Pole shared her bitterness. He had quarreled with Henry over the divorce and predicted, in the king’s presence, that he would
be consigned to hell.