So the resistance to the tax was open and sometimes violent: 4,000 men took up arms in Suffolk, and the tax commissioners were beaten off in Kent. The citizens of London refused to pay on the ground that the exactions were unlawful. In Cambridge and in Lincolnshire the people were ‘looking out for a stir’. When the duke of Norfolk asked to consult with the ‘captain’ of the rebels in his own shire, he was told that ‘his name is Poverty; for he and his cousin Necessity have brought us to this doing’.
The risk of another general revolt, like that of 1381, was too great to be contemplated. Such an uprising was about to break out in Germany, where a hell of violence and anarchy descended upon the land; 300,000 rebels took up arms, and 100,000 peasants died. So the king retreated. He issued a proclamation in which he denied knowing anything at all about the tax demands; he then graciously remitted them and issued pardons to the rebels. He had learned a lesson in the limitations of regal power. Yet the cardinal was considered to be more greatly at fault. There was no end, one chronicler wrote, to the ‘inward grudge and hatred that the commons bore to the cardinal’. Henry knew that Wolsey had failed. This was no longer the quiet and joyful country at the time of his accession. And the cardinal, well, he was only one man.
The false stridency of the war policy was further exposed when in 1525 the cardinal began to explore the possibilities of an accord with France against the erstwhile ally of Spain. Charles was now so powerful as to become a menace. A treaty ‘of perpetual peace’ with France was signed in the summer, just six months after the cardinal had proposed a great war against her. Charles V demanded that he be released from his betrothal to the young Princess Mary. All was undone. All must be done again.
Henry was engaged in affairs of the heart as well as those of the battlefield. He had, in his own phrase, been ‘struck with the dart of love’. A new ship was commissioned in 1526, to be named the Anne Boleyn. In the spring of that year the royal goldsmiths fashioned four brooches for him to bestow upon a certain lady. One was formed in the image of Venus, while another was of a lady and a heart; the third was of a man lying in a woman’s lap, while the fourth showed the same woman with a crown. It was noted that in this period he was more than usually boisterous and energetic. The newfound friendship with France was the excuse for any number of revels and banquets and jousts and pageants. In the summer of 1526 Henry hunted with ferocity and passion. He wanted to win the prize.
He had begun to write letters to Anne Boleyn in French, the language of courtly romance. One eighteenth-century historian has described them as ‘very ill writ, the hand is scarce legible and the French seems faulty’. Nevertheless they served their purpose. The first of them was presented with the gift of a buck that the king had killed the evening before, and soon enough another followed in which he thanked her ‘right heartily, for that it pleaseth you to still hold me in some remembrance’. This was not the conventional letter of a king to a royal mistress.
In a subsequent letter he professes himself confused about her feelings, ‘praying you with all my heart that you will expressly tell me your whole mind concerning the love between us’. He then proposes that he will take her ‘as his only mistress, rejecting from thought and affection all others save yourself, to serve you only’. Yet Anne Boleyn had already retreated to her parents’ house, at Hever in Kent, and refused to come to court. ‘I could do none other than lament me of my ill fortune,’ he wrote to her, ‘abating by little and little my so great folly.’ There is no doubt that he had conceived an overpowering passion for her, and she in her turn was doing her best to retain his affection without alienating him. It was a difficult task, and must have brought her close to nervous prostration.
In another letter Henry longed for their meeting which ‘is on my part the more desired than any earthly thing; for what joy in this world can be greater than to have the company of her who is the most dearly loved’. How do you gently refuse a great and powerful king? She sent him a diamond, which was decorated with an image of a lady in her ship. The lady was tossed about on the waves, but the diamond is a symbol of an imperishable and steadfast heart.
Katherine herself was being cast aside. After the treaty with France it was no longer necessary to appease her nephew, Charles V. When three of her Spanish ladies complained of the dukedom given to Henry’s illegitimate son, Henry FitzRoy, they were dismissed from court. Katherine’s letters were being opened and read by Wolsey. The cardinal, or the king, placed spies among her entourage. Wolsey insisted that he should be present at any interview between her and Charles’s representatives. Yet the king’s displeasure was not visited upon the child, who might still become queen of England. Mary now had her own household of more than 300 servants; at dinner she could choose between thirty-five courses. She hawked and hunted; she played cards and gambled with dice.
There was, of course, always the possibility of a son. It seems fair to assume that Henry had at first wanted Anne as a mistress but, after the first infatuation, decided that she should be his wife. With Anne Boleyn as the prospective bride, the future of the dynasty might soon be secured. Without a son, as Henry claimed soon after, the kingdom would be overwhelmed by ‘mischief and trouble’. His doubts about the union with Katherine of Aragon were undoubtedly genuine. He was not acting out of lust for Anne Boleyn alone. If he had married Katherine despite the injunction of Leviticus, to refrain from the widow of a dead brother, he might truly have been cursed. Twenty-four years before, a papal dispensation had been obtained for the union. It was his duty now to have that original dispensation declared null and void so that he could be properly married for the first time. The pope could not, and should not, waive divine law as expressed in the Bible itself. The conscience of the king was the important matter; the word appears in many of his letters as a way of justifying himself to heaven. He once declared that conscience ‘is the highest and supreme court for judgement or justice’. He knew that he was right.
So, in the spring of 1527, Henry began his first attempt to have his marriage to Katherine annulled by Pope Clement VII. He told his wife that he was only exploring the questions raised by certain lawyers and theologians, at which point she wept and swore that her union with Prince Arthur had never been consummated. She knew which way the wind was blowing. In May 1527, Wolsey called the king to appear before him and the archbishop of Canterbury in order to discuss the status of the marriage. It was a piece of stage management, the king himself having already determined that the cardinal would declare the marriage null and void. Yet as papal legate Wolsey could not decide the matter without putting the case to the pope. He adjourned the proceedings and declared that he would consult more widely. This was the beginning of all the troubles that led eventually to the break with Rome.
Wolsey was not sure of the identity of the king’s intended bride. He assumed that it would be a diplomatic marriage, perhaps to a female of the French royal house. Anne Boleyn seemed to him to be another court mistress. Yet now Henry went behind his back; taking advantage of Wolsey’s absence on a diplomatic mission in France, he sent one of his secretaries to Rome with the draft of a papal bull allowing the king to marry another and unnamed woman with the blessing and authority of the Church. The king told his secretary that the matter would remain secret ‘for any craft the cardinal or any other can find’. This is a significant reference to his chief minister, suggesting that their early intimate relations had come to an end. Henry now also began to employ scholars and divines to research all precedents, and to press his case in print. At some point in 1527 work began on collecting and collating a set of arguments for the king’s divorce; Henry called it ‘liber noster’ or ‘our book’.