A providentially ordained marriage

It is easy enough to imagine why the king and Anne would have been drawn to each other. The king, intimately involved in exploring a religious issue having to do with papal authority, must have found much to discuss with Anne, who was raised at the French court in under the care of the reform-minded Queen Claude in a household whose primary figures were committed to reform of the Church.^[714] Anxious that God had deprived him of a male heir and increasingly involved in investigations into the issue, Henry VIII must have taken comfort in speaking

earnestly with Anne about religion.

Closer to Catherine Parr than Catherine of Aragon on the central religious issues of the day, Anne resembled both in their intellectual acumen, judging by her library. Based on the nine books known to have belonged to her, six of which offer proof of her reformist inclinations, historians conclude that Anne was deeply interested in direct access to Scripture.^[715] She owned Jacques Lefevre d’Etaple’s translation of the Bible into French, a two-volume edition produced in Antwerp and condemned by the Sorbonne. She also possessed a translation in French with English commentary of Lefevre d’Etaple’s Latin Introductory Commentary on the Four Gospels, published in 1522. The book was gifted to her by George, her “moost lovying and fryndely brother,” as the first sentence of its preface, deciphered by James Carley with the aid of ultraviolet light, demonstrates.^[716] She owned a French psalter, derived from a 1515 Hebrew text translated by Louis de Berquin, created at an atelier in Rouen or Paris specializing in works for the French court.^[717] Moreover, three ofAnne’s men are known to have traveled abroad buying reformist books; in addition, Rose Hickman, a woman from a merchant family, describes her father saying that when he “used to go beyond sea, Queene Anne Boloin that was mother to our late Queene Elizabeth caused him to get her the gospells and epistles written in parchment in French together with the psalms.”^[718] Other strong evidence of Anne’s interest in reform is her protection of Nicolas Bourbon, a young master of arts at the University of Paris, whose works were suppressed because of their evangelical perspectives.^[719] Thrown into prison in 1534, he was released thanks to the influence of Marguerite of Navarre, who apparently sent him on to Anne in England.

Vouspranderaypour ma seulle mestres: Anne Boleyn’s | 203 matters of importance” that he could relate only to Henry VIII and Anne.^[723] Carley observes that the fact that a group of books associated with Marguerite “turn up in a context which can be clearly tied to Anne and her circle suggests very strongly that Margaret functioned as an intellectual model for Anne during the 1530s...”^[724]

But marriage to Anne? No matter how engaging her discussions of religious matters, Anne was an inappropriate choice, because the monarchs of Europe typ­ically chose brides of their own caste.^[725] In this context, the coquette narrative looks particularly implausible. More likely, the king believed that in the pious and intelligent Anne he had found the woman providentially ordained to bear the Tudor heir. After all, he had been alerted to the invalidity of his marriage to Catherine by a divine sign: God denied him a son.^[726] And it was common among the king’s contemporaries to act on divine guidance. In 1528, Thomas More feared that he was about to lose his daughter Margaret to the sweating sickness. Repairing to the church, he was given to know that she required a “glister,” or enema. It seems that the intervention saved her life.^[727] In a world where God could be contacted, either directly or via intermediaries, to intercede in earthly affairs, the king undoubtedly would have been soliciting divine aid. Catherine had last born a child in 1518; by 1525 she was forty, and, at a certain point, the king would have lost hope that a son was forthcoming. Given the circumstances, it looks as if after deciding that he needed to annul his marriage and find a woman more apt to bear children, the king fell upon Anne, whose qualities led him to believe that God wanted her to be his wife.

Literature dealing with the marriage with Anne describes it as divinely approved. A pamphlet published towards the end of the year 1533 justifies the marriage in this way:

And how God herewith is pleased, we think it doth evidently appear by many things, First, so briefly upon this latter and lawful matrimony, so soon issue had; Secondly, so fair weather, with great plenty of corn and cattle; Thirdly, peace and amitie lately sought by divers princes and potentates of our prince;

Fourthly, the pureness of air without any pestilential or contagious disease, by so long time during, which things we ought to thank God for, and to take them for demonstrations that he is pleased both with our prince and his doings. Wherefore let us all that be his true subjects both rejoice in it and apply us accordingly to serve both God, him and his in it, according to our bounden duties.^[728]

The king speaks about Anne’s coronation of 1 June 1533 in words that further manifest his theological conception of what he was doing: in accordance with divine will his archbishop has declared his first marriage invalid, and for this reason he has married Anne, according to the laws of the Church. The corona­tion, he proclaims, will be carried out “as becoming the praise and glory and honour of the omnipotent God, the security of the succession and descent of the Crown... and to the great pleasure, comfort, and satisfaction of all the subjects of this realm.” Having made himself right with God with the annulment of his first marriage, the king is convinced that an heir will follow, because all that has happened has been in accordance with the “common consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and of the Commons of this realm, by authority of the Parliament, as in like manner by the assent and determination of the whole clergy in its constant convocations held and celebrated in both the provinces of this kingdom.”^[729]

Hall’s chronicle reinforces the notion of heavenly approbation, writing that although many believed that the king had brought a curse upon the English through his marriage to Anne, “wise men” said “God loued this mariage, consid- eryng that the newe Quene, was so sone with childe.”^[730] In January 1534, Henry VIII sent an embassy to the German Princes with instructions to explain the reasons behind his cause.

Anne too expresses the idea that the marriage was divinely sanctioned. Early on, she recognizes her own unfitness to be queen in a letter to Wolsey,

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“remembering how wretched and unworthy I am comparing to his highness.”^[732] Her new station was not owing to anything that she had done. Rather, God had “inspired his Majesty to marry her,” as she explains to the Venetian ambassador on 24 June 1533, shortly after her coronation.^[733]

If I am right, her belief that God wanted the marriage explains why Anne agreed to such a risky proposition as wedding a king who already had a queen. And yet, in retrospect, it is clear that Henry VIII and Anne were too optimistic. Anne did not produce a living son, which cast God’s opinion of the marriage into doubt and made her position precarious; had she borne the son she miscarried in early 1536, her story would have been entirely different. Much has been written about Anne’s fall, and the details suggest a number of possible interpretations of precisely how, when, and by what means the king formed the idea of literally destroying his wife. But the most important point is that at some moment, or, perhaps, over a period of many months, it dawned on Henry VIII that his mar­riage with Anne had never been divinely inspired at all. Because he could not possibly have been wrong himself, he could only have been misled.