I am not quite done ruminating over the English Reformation.  If you will indulge me for a few minutes I will then turn to the fight to the death between Cromwell and Anne Boleyn.

It’s a well-known historical phenomenon that if you look at a map of the Roman Empire at its height in say 200 AD and then look at a map of how Western Europe divided between Protestant and Catholic after Luther’s appearance in 1517, more than 1000 years after the last Roman emperor resigned to spend more time with his family, the correspondence is remarkably close.  This has been a commonplace observation among the historians.  They talk about it after dinner while they are passing the brandy around the table, before they start talking about real estate.

The Roman Empire anchored itself to the Rhine and the Danube.  The Romans occasionally tried to take territory beyond those rivers, but never succeeded.  There just wasn’t enough of value beyond those lines to justify the cost of conquest.  The Germans sometimes tried to push west of the Rhine or south of the Danube, but the Romans kept both areas well garrisoned.  The Romans began to lose effective control of their western borderlands in the last quarter of the fourth century.  After 476, there was no Roman emperor in the west.  In 1517, more than ten centuries later, Martin Luther showed up and said, in guttural German, “The way you are worshiping is wrong.  Here is what you must do.”  (Just kidding – the theses, all 95 of them, were written in Latin.)  The response of people east of the Rhine and north of the Danube was “We agree.  We will follow you.”  (Or, following the rules of German word order:  We will you follow.)  The people west of the Rhine and south of the Danube said “We will with Rome stay.”  Why would this be?

For one thousand years, bakers would bake bread, cobblers would make shoes, farmers tilled their fields, priests prayed.  Life went on, day by day, each person devoting nearly all of his or her energy and thought to keeping body and soul together for one more day.  Occasionally, the daily routine would be interrupted by a catastrophe.  The Franks, Burgundians, Alemani, Alans, Vandals, Goths or who knows else would invade, kill some of your friends or relatives, take control of the territory where you lived.  After a few centuries, the Arabs tried to take over, depending on where you were.  Then the Vikings turned up, wreaked havoc, took some people as slaves, killed others, and generally made life miserable.  (I should have put in a trigger warning for readers of Scandinavian descent.)  In between invasions, you could experience visits of plague and famine.  This went on for centuries, with everyone too busy trying to stay alive to give a thought about who used to run the show in these parts.  And yet, when the question arose as to which faith to follow, the people who descended from those who a millennium earlier had been subject to Rome chose the Pope, and the people whose remote ancestors lived outside the Roman orbit chose Luther, allowing in both cases for plenty of local exceptions.

I am of course exaggerating the level to which consciousness of the Roman Empire faded as Rome’s power faded.  There is a very strong case to be made that the Roman way of life continued for centuries, but in reduced circumstances, after the Germanic migrations of late antiquity[1].  Latin continued to be spoken, Roman coins continued to be used.  The Mediterranean was still the pivot on which European trade turned, although much reduced from former times.  There was still a Roman emperor.  He just wasn’t in Italy.  He was in Byzantium, Constantinople.  Until the Arabs closed off the Mediterranean in the seventh century, the eastern Roman emperor continued to play a political role in Western Europe.  And after the Arab expansion ended, when Europe was on its own in a way it had not been before, the Frankish king declared himself the “Holy Roman Emperor”.  So, there was more to it than a brooding historical omnipresence hovering just out of sight for a millennium while people simply did chores and ate bread.

Still, there is no question that these long-term trends for some reason have a life of their own.  Daniel Hannan reports that when Catherine the Great heard news of the French Revolution, her response was “The Gauls are driving out the Franks.”  Hannan himself provides a very credible account that the English for centuries prior to the Norman Conquest had a very different political culture from the feudal system that was imposed on them after 1066.  The pre-Conquest English treated the law as an authority superior to the king.  Kings were required to take an oath agreeing to be bound by the law and could be severely punished if they tried to exercise powers not granted to them.  Hannan sees the Norman Conquest as a catastrophe for the English and views the centuries from the Conquest through Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, the Glorious Revolution, and much more as the working out through history of the recovery by the English of the ancestral rights that were suppressed when they were placed under the Norman yoke.  That process certainly took a long pause while Henry VIII was on the throne.  His most ardent admirers would not claim that he viewed the law as something prior to and superior to his own personal royal authority.

England is the one country that appears to present an exception to the general pattern by which ancestral affinity to Rome predicted the religious decision.  What is today England and Wales is more or less the same territory as the Roman province of Britannia.  But Britannia came into the Roman Empire rather late.  There had been contact, including a visit and a partial occupation by Julius Caesar in the first century BC, but Rome did not truly incorporate Britannia into the Empire until 43 AD.  It took a century after that to complete the process of conquest and colonization.  And even then, the Roman hold was not very strong.  Britain was not romanized to nearly the extent of the continental holdings and it began to fall away from the Empire earlier than other parts of Western Europe.  The Angles and the Saxons were raiding before 300, had established footholds by 350, and were more or less in charge in the first decades of the fifth century.  Physically separated from the continent, Britannia, now under new management, went its own way.

Perhaps that is part of the explanation why, when the break came, it came not over a matter of religious principle but over the question of whether the King’s roving eye (and not only his eye) was to find peace through the charms of Anne Boleyn.  One of the strangest things about the whole episode is how unnecessary it proved to be.  Henry divorced Catherine because she couldn’t bear him a son and no longer attracted him.  He might have stayed married to her, lived apart, and waited for her death if Anne Boleyn had agreed to adopt the role of concubine (the term by which catholic Europe referred to her), but Anne would not have it.  She had to be queen.  She might have remained queen, putting up with concubines herself, had she produced a son.  It’s one of those odd historical coincidences that the day Catherine was buried, January 29, 1536, was the day Anne miscarried for the last time.  She had been carrying a boy.  If Henry had just waited for Catherine to die, he could have gone on marrying four more instead of five more times, had his son with Jane Seymour and skipped the English Reformation and the entire Boleyn parenthesis.  Shakespeare’s history plays might have focused on the Scottish antecedents of Mary, Queen of Scots (whom we would know as Mary II – we call her “Queen of Scots” only because things didn’t work out for her in England) rather than Elizabeth’s Lancastrian ancestors.[2]

Anne and Cromwell had been allies in some areas, opponents in others.  He had worked the legislation that made her queen.  She believed in religious reform, as did he.  However, when he started to take the smaller monasteries apart, she had wanted the profits to find their way to charitable works.  Instead they went to the royal treasury, and quite a bit of it took a detour into the pockets and purses of Cromwell and his friends.  The main problem between them, though, was deeper than policy or peculation.  Anne detested Cromwell right down to his bones.  She had hated Wolsey and Cromwell was Wolsey’s man.  On top of that, he was close to the king and she didn’t like the idea of anyone else having that kind of influence over him.  Add to that some old-fashioned class prejudice brewing in an ungenerous personality and you have the basis for the deep and bitter hatred that Anne felt for Cromwell in the early months of 1536.

The incident in which Henry unloads the weight of his royal temper onto Cromwell in the presence of the court actually happened.  We know the exact date, April 21, 1536, and we know much of the detail about it, because the Emperor’s ambassador Chapuys sent a stream of written reports to his boss and those letters have survived.  Cromwell was trying to move Henry toward an alliance with Germany (that is, the “Empire”) and away from France.  He had held a series of meetings with Chapuys in which he led Chapuys to believe that he could accomplish this goal, but also made it clear that he was acting on his own, without royal approval.  Cromwell was acting as Wolsey might have acted, but did not have the kind of relationship with Henry that Wolsey had at one time enjoyed.

Cromwell made the clever move of putting Chapuys and Anne in the same public space, which forced Chapuys to bow in order not to be rude.  Henry and Anne were now free to treat that bit of courtesy as recognition.  Later that day, Chapuys told Henry about his conversations with Cromwell and suggested that closer relations between England and the Empire could now be pursued.  That’s what put Henry into his rage.  He wanted Cromwell to carry out orders, to administer the government, not to create policy.  It appears that Cromwell had seriously overstepped his authority.  Yet, the situation is somewhat confusing because Chapuys reported a conversation with Cromwell shortly after the king’s explosion in which Cromwell said that he had been acting on Henry’s instructions all along.  Whether this was face-saving or factual on Cromwell’s part, or an inventive bit of butt-covering by Chapuys in a letter to his emperor, is hard to tell.

Cromwell spent the next week away from court.  The novel and the TV show suggest that he was regaining his nerve after the royal dressing down.  His biographer Tracy Bolton does not think Cromwell was that sensitive a soul.  Rather, he used the week away from court to plot Anne Boleyn’s destruction.  The novel and the TV series are highly faithful to the historical facts in broad outline, but a few details are out of place, some of them worth noting.  One point not brought out in the show is that Cromwell came to realize that Anne’s continued existence presented danger both for the present and the future.  If she remained queen, she was a dangerous enemy.  If she found her way back into the king’s affections, something she had done before, she would be sure to destroy anyone who had looked at her sideways during the period of her disfavor.  Beyond that, if she stayed married to Henry, the likelihood now was that she would bear no further children.  That meant that in the course of time there was a good chance that Mary Tudor, daughter of Catherine, would inherit the throne, which would undo all of the religious and political reform that Cromwell had worked so hard to achieve.  (Elizabeth was still an infant and would be under-age far beyond the planning horizon of 1536.)  Either scenario would also include his own death.  Anne’s death would avoid both problems.

The show has a scene in which Cromwell has a quiet meeting with Nicholas Carew, who represents a group of Yorkists who would be willing to work with Cromwell if he would further their interests.  There were some descendants of the brother of Edward IV and Richard III still alive at the time, all of whom were watched by Henry’s agents with some care.  Even fifty years after Bosworth Field, Henry had to keep an eye on possible rival claimants.  (In the novel, Hilary Mantel tells us that Margaret Pole, the matron of this group, considered Henry the “spawn of Welsh cattle-raiders”.)  For this reason, the conversation in Cromwell’s house was seditious and it is doubtful that either man would have said or listened to anything so risky with a person he did not trust with his life.  However, it is true that Cromwell reached out at this time to religious conservatives, including Yorkists, with whom he was not in sympathy in order to have as many people on his side as he could muster in the coming battle with Anne.

The first evidence that Cromwell gathered came from the gossip of the ladies who attended Anne.  Several of them had reason to hold a grudge against her, and Cromwell and his staff knew how to lead them on one by one.  The process began innocently enough, but as he began to put a sinister twist on their reports and they began to see which way the wind was blowing, their reports became ever more damning.

Toward the end of April, Cromwell thought he had enough evidence from the queen’s ladies to let Henry know that there were grave suspicions surrounding the queen.  Henry had been growing distant toward Anne prior to her miscarriage, but the loss of a potential heir in January 1536 seems to have convinced him that the marriage to Anne had to end.  Henry does not appear to have told Cromwell to get up a case against Anne, but an express order would not have been necessary.  The initial meeting, which may have been attended by Nicholas Carew as well as Cromwell, seems to have turned the king against Anne finally and permanently.  But Cromwell needed more evidence in hand to build his case.

In the novel and the TV show, Mark Smeaton is at Cromwell’s house and begins by joking, innocently he thinks, about his relationship with Anne, a little locker room talk before the invention of locker rooms.  Incidentally, Mark Smeaton is the name of a musician in Anne’s employ and he did give the evidence that allowed Cromwell to proceed (and was executed for his trouble).  However, the historical Mark did not wander into a trap the way Hilary Mantel presents the tale.  Rather, Cromwell had him arrested and brought to Cromwell’s house.  Mark had no useful evidence to offer, so he was subjected to torture until he provided what was wanted.  A knotted rope was tied around his head and tightened until he said what Cromwell wanted to hear.  Then he was sent to the Tower.  This happened on the night of April 30 – May 1.

The evidence from that interview was not delivered into Henry’s ear by Richard Cromwell.  Rather, on May 1, Thomas wrote a letter to the king that Richard delivered.  When the king received the reports of Anne’s infidelity, he was absolutely thunderstruck.

Anne was accused of infidelity with numerous men, all but one of them nobles (Mark Smeaton was the exception) and one of those her brother.  The particular noblemen selected for these charges were also Cromwell’s political enemies, which is not a coincidence.  In fact, there were three gentlemen who were somehow or other swept up in the resulting legal melee and temporarily imprisoned who were not enemies of Cromwell.  Two of them were men with whom he was on friendly terms.  All three obtained their release, apparently through Cromwell’s influence.

The whole case was a fabrication, made credible by Anne’s flirtatious manner and her insatiable desire for flattery.  Her female attendants were not necessarily seeking revenge against her.  They may not have liked her, but they told their tales innocently and Cromwell did the rest.  No doubt, the lady attendants became more cooperative when they saw which way the wind was blowing.  The noblemen all denied the charges and in fact could have proven that they were in other parts of the country on the dates on which they were accused of adultery with the queen.  The case against Anne’s brother was that they had spent some time alone in her chambers.  That’s how weak the case was.  The actual evidence did not matter at all.  Henry believed it because it solved his marital problem and allowed him to pursue his dynastic ambitions.  The court knew what it was supposed to do, and that was that.

Henry did bring in a French executioner who was noted for his sharp sword and his excellent technique.  Only Anne received this treatment.  The men all faced a good old-fashioned English executioner wielding an axe.  Not every husband would have been so considerate.  On the other hand, he sent for the executioner prior to the beginning of the trial.  As a final note, I don’t believe Anne was blindfolded at the moment of execution.  Reports of people who were there say that in the instant after the decapitation, her head was held up for public view.  Spectators were horrified to see that her lips and eyes were still moving, which tells us that the eyes were not covered with a cloth.

As the series ended, Henry has a huge grin on his face as he gives the faithful Cromwell a bear hug.  Cromwell has just seen something horrible, a series of bloody executions that he himself arranged on evidence that he had fabricated.  Henry is presented as man with no qualms at all.  He is delighted that he is free to marry again and gives high marks to the service he is getting from his staff.

The historical Henry must have been equally thrilled, although one wonders whether he would have gone as far as giving a bear hug to the man who had just proven the king to be a cuckold.  You have to wonder if Henry ever thought about the merits of the case against his wife and some of his closest associates.  Would he have considered that Anne had to be out of her mind to risk a conviction for treason, to risk her life over extramarital extracurriculars?  He knew that she was a woman who could price out her charms.  It would have been out of character for her to sell at the fire-sale prices set out in her indictment.  And what about her supposed partners in crime?  Some of them were old friends of Henry’s.  They were highly unlikely to turn on him in this way.  Add to that the fact that the accused were all political opponents of the accuser, and you would think that a little bell might have gone off in the back of Henry’s mind suggesting that a different way must be found.  There is no question that he could have had what he wanted eventually, but he chose the first option on offer and put people to death without a care that they were innocent.  They were in his way, and that was all that counted with him.

While the king is dispensing his bear hug, Cromwell is staring into the middle distance, possibly because he is morally conflicted.  Or, it may be that the thought has occurred to him that the process of getting rid of Anne was too easy.  Anyone at court might do the same to anyone else.

The “Wolf Hall” novels were planned as a trilogy.  The first book, Wolf Hall, takes us to the execution of Thomas More and the second, Bring Up The Bodies, ends with the death of Anne Boleyn.  The TV series has taken us to the end of the work published so far.  The third novel is expected later this year according to Ms. Mantel’s website.  I look forward to reading it and to seeing it dramatized.

[1] The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne compared the Roman situation to the immigration experienced by the United States from roughly 1880 to 1925.  Tens of millions of immigrants arrived speaking languages other than English (Irish and British immigrants aside) and bearing different political traditions.  Yet the United States remained a republic with unmistakably Anglo-Saxon political and cultural characteristics.

[2] Possibly not.  Elizabeth’s Lancastrian ancestors were also Mary’s.  Still, it’s difficult to imagine that the plays would have looked the same with the Queen of Scots on the English throne.  For example, Shakespeare puts the magnificent jeremiad in Act II of Richard II (“this earth, this realm, this England”) into the mouth of the founder of the Lancastrian line.  With Mary Stuart in charge, “This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle / This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars / This other Eden, demi-paradise” might have needed a rewrite to retain royal favor, as it does not quite fit Scotland.  No doubt Mr. Shakespeare would have worked it out and we would be marveling at the play to this day.