Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies
Anne Boleyn: Chapter 5

And so we arrive at the most historic, albeit apocalyptic, part of the story that everyone thinks they know so well: Henry and Anne’s war with the pope and England’s break from Rome.

How, during this time, Anne conspired to bring down the king’s all-powerful adviser Thomas Wolsey owing to their long-running feud over Henry Percy (wrong), after he failed to secure the king his annulment (wrong again). How Anne’s scheming to be queen killed the frail old cardinal as he was arrested and brought back to London (nope); how Henry tore a reluctant country from Catholicism for his own selfish gain (erm, not quite) and fought the pope for seven years to be with the woman he loved (you’re kidding, right?!).

How about I give you a rundown of the full story? No more cherry-picking of the highlights to twist the truth to fit preconceived ideas. No more diluting history on the assumption that readers aren’t interested in the bits that don’t involve a sex scandal. We’re a smart bunch; if we can handle the politics of the twenty-first century, I dare say we can keep up with the intricacies of international and domestic diplomacy of 1529. After all, they’re not too dissimilar.

It is often suggested that while Anne obviously had a vested interest in Henry divorcing Katherine of Aragon – her very reputation now hung perilously in the balance – all she did for the next seven years was lurk ominously in the shadows, whispering seductive words of encouragement in the king’s ear. (That was in between the endless partying and plots to kill Katherine and her daughter, Mary, of course.) But what many readers may not realise is the extent of Anne’s political involvement in the king’s controversial annulment. Then again, perhaps you’re not surprised at all, imagining the little schemer did everything she could to realise her dreams of being queen.

Either way, the particular strategy and approach she used gives us further evidence that she accepted the king’s proposal solely for her religious cause.

It was Anne, as an impassioned evangelical, who dared to introduce the king to the heretical religious works of Bible translator Tyndale, prompting Henry VIII to have an epiphany: as king of England, he was answerable to no man on earth. No, not even the pope. Only God. Vitally, this meant that Henry’s seven-year fight to marry Anne was not so much about love (that much I think we agree on by now) or even a sociopathic obsession to win his prize, but instead had quickly developed into him proving his God-given power as king over that of the pope. Who, it has to be said, was having none of this divorce malarkey, and told Henry his marriage to Katherine of Aragon could not be annulled.

So if Anne Boleyn is to be blamed for the break from Rome, then let’s at least give the woman the credit she deserves; for she was not just an accidental catalyst for reform, a Helen of Troy whose face launched a thousand ships but left the real work to the men. No, Anne Boleyn was a key fighter for religious change, and it began with her marriage to the king.

The first evidence we have that she accepted Henry’s proposal for religious purposes is a letter from Cardinal Wolsey’s secretary, Stephen Gardiner, referencing private discussions with the king the previous year, 1528, about a potential alliance with the German Lutheran princes to help secure his annulment.¹⁹³

Now, the princes were pretty much as their description suggests: German, royal and strongly in support of Martin Luther’s fight for religious reform. This league of princes quickly began to serve as immense inspiration to many as the potential future for the English monarchy, not least to Anne Boleyn.¹⁹⁴ History has credited the king’s future chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, with the entire German princes alliance, but Cromwell’s biographer MacCulloch confirms that in 1528–29 he was working on other projects for his then master, Wolsey.¹⁹⁵

In which case, who could possibly have been encouraging Henry to pursue a Lutheran alliance so early on?

Yes, gentleman at the back, it was Anne Boleyn.

G. W. Bernard argues that Henry alone was pulling the strings regarding this alliance, but ten bonus points to the reader who can tell me why anti-heretic Henry, self-professed Defender of the Faith, would be interested in an alliance with the decidedly heretical Lutheran leaders?

Yes, the young lady at the front is right, his evangelical fiancée, Anne Boleyn.

They even later sent Thomas Boleyn’s godson, Thomas Theobald, to the German princes with the secret task of getting them to send Martin Luther’s right-hand man Melanchthon to England.¹⁹⁶ Another move solely accredited to Cromwell; but why would political historians even consider Anne’s involvement when she had been relegated to the subplot of scheming mistress? However, as we are about to replace out, she became one of the most ferocious political figures of Tudor England. Her ability to argue the case to Henry VIII for a Lutheran alliance shows us firstly how seriously he took her advice, and also just how far her religious campaign had come in such a short space of time. Indeed, in July 1532, after Anne became patron to Cambridge scholar Thomas Cranmer, taking him into the heart of the Boleyn family, he was sent by the king to Nuremberg, where he had five days of meetings with the Lutheran princes.¹⁹⁷

Now, not to diminish Anne’s early political manoeuvres, but the reason Henry would have even considered such a shocking alliance was probably due to the fact that the pope – whom he so badly needed to approve his annulment to Katherine – had just been captured and held hostage by the most powerful ruler in Europe, Emperor Charles V, who, remember, was also king of Spain, and also happened to be Katherine of Aragon’s nephew. Ah yes, that again.

So as dedicated as Henry was to Catholicism, and as much as he bowed in submission to the pope, he lived in fear of God far more; so he was willing to do anything to get out of his marriage. If that meant looking into some kind of agreement and alliance with this powerful league of German princes, then maybe it was worth it; and, perhaps more importantly, worth seeing how much power they had to counteract that of the all-conquering Charles V.

As Cromwell rose to power over the years and the negotiations rumbled on, in 1534 Nicholas Heath, who was Anne’s closest faction member and Cranmer’s leading assistant, was sent on a mission to Germany to renew efforts for an alliance;¹⁹⁸ Cromwell was told to draft a proposal to enter into a ‘league or amity’ with the Lutheran princes.¹⁹⁹ Notes from this assembly state it was ‘set up through a few of the most distinguished people of the realm, though not endorsed by the king’.²⁰⁰ Obviously, international negotiations such as these couldn’t have taken place without the king’s technical approval, but from this note it’s clear Henry still wasn’t totally sure about pursuing the alliance. But does that mean Cromwell was the main cheerleader? After all, history has told us he shared the same evangelical beliefs as Anne, and would take any opportunity to push for reform. But as various biographers of Cromwell have discovered, there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary in his early years serving the king. Not least are two rather shocking letters from Cromwell to Wolsey written in May 1530 (summarised by Thomas Master) in which he states he has ‘discovered lately some who favour Luther’s sect’ and read ‘pestiferous books’ by Tyndale and Fish, which he feared would ‘destroy the whole obedience and policy of this realm’.²⁰¹ It’s in these letters that Cromwell also stated of William Tyndale, ‘I [wish] he had never been born.’

Some modern historians on #TeamCromwell have tried to excuse these damaging statements as being either what the king would want him to say, or what Wolsey would want to hear. But the fact he said it in the first place shows Cromwell was not willing to publicly stand up and fight for his faith in the early years, if he truly harboured any deep evangelical faith at this stage at all.

As for all first-generation evangelicals, there could be a long process of understanding where your faith lay, so I’m certainly not about to reprimand Cromwell for taking his time to figure out what he believed. It only matters here in terms of understanding who was behind the German princes alliance from the start. So, for some slightly more telling evidence: in 1517, when Martin Luther was laying his life on the line by calling out the shocking abuse of indulgences, Cromwell was petitioning the pope for approval to sell a new indulgence himself back home to the people of Lincolnshire – which the pope granted him in a bull dated 24 February 1518.²⁰² A recent biographer speculates that it might have been the ease with which Cromwell found he could manipulate the pope that would later urge him to support the break from Rome. An interesting analysis to consider. Otherwise we’re left with the distasteful story of the impoverished Putney lad who was willing to rip off his fellow common man to make a quick buck for himself.²⁰³

Further evidence presents itself around the time of the German alliance, when Cromwell was repeatedly asked to forward a copy of English reformer Robert Barnes’s A Supplication unto King Henry VIII, in which the author appealed to the king to reform the Church. Yet, tellingly, Cromwell purposefully delayed in passing it on.²⁰⁴ And so, we must logically conclude that it was Anne, not Cromwell, who was pushing for this Lutheran alliance in the early days. It was Anne who drew inspiration from the Lutheran princes and saw her marriage to the king as part of the process of reform, not just in the Church but within the monarchy itself – exactly as Marguerite d’Angoulême set out to do before her.

Alas, this will not be the last time history will credit Cromwell with Anne’s good work, as you will discover soon enough.

Even though a large portion of modern depictions of Anne’s life barely even acknowledge her leaving court, the truth is that even after she accepted Henry’s proposal, she spent most of 1527 and 1528 living at the family home of Hever Castle, with only the odd visit back to the royal court in London. However, in December 1528, it was considered diplomatically safe enough for Anne, as the king’s controversial new fiancée, to finally be allowed to reside at court permanently.²⁰⁵ But even the most rational historian has decided this was Anne’s own plot to ensure she was on hand to coerce Henry to continue should he lose his nerve in pursuing the annulment,²⁰⁶ devious conspirator that she was. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with her being isolated over in Kent and wanting to be in the midst of the action at court. Divorce proceedings were about to kick off, and frankly she needed to be advising and guiding everyone so they didn’t mess it up – somewhat different, you must understand, to coercing and manipulating a man against his will. The truth of the matter was that now her relationship with the king was out in the open, if they failed to secure the annulment Anne would forever be seen as the very thing she had sought to avoid: a royal mistress. And not just any mistress, but one who had tried to dethrone the beloved queen. Her reputation would be permanently marred. There was no going back. Now she was in it, they had to succeed.

So, as the clock is ticking, and we draw closer to 1529 and the end of Wolsey’s life, we replace ourselves approaching the first of many accusations that Anne was responsible for the death of a dastardly foe at court.

I know we’re repeatedly told that wicked Anne Boleyn had a penchant for conspiring the death of anyone who so much as looked at her the wrong way, but actual evidence to support these scandalous rumours is simply non-existent. As for masterminding Wolsey’s epic downfall, it turns out her own efforts were not responsible for his fall from grace; it was instead a self-inflicted checkmate, resulting in a disaster of monumental proportions.

It’s safe to say that Anne and Wolsey weren’t the closest of allies. But far from being intent on wreaking revenge for how he dealt with the Henry Percy episode – a claim made by Wolsey’s usher Cavendish, which has remained unchallenged over the centuries – Anne would have seen just how important Wolsey was for the annulment, and so would have put aside any personal grudges to form a united front; to the extent that on 3 March 1528, Anne complained that Wolsey was neglecting her, proving she wanted him to work with her, not disappear off the face of the earth, as most presume was her goal from the beginning.²⁰⁷

But try as she did to work with the man who had for so long been a close ally of both the king and her own father, worrying incidents started to occur that would make Anne resent the cardinal for far more legitimate reasons than having once mocked her status.

In what we shall label Cataclysmic Clash #1 we can trace the rumblings of Wolsey and Anne’s fresh feud to the autumn of 1528, when she appealed to him to help the ‘Parson of Honey Lane’. Though the quaint title might suggest he was friends with a talking bear, the parson in question, Thomas Forman, was really quite the daredevil, selling extremely radical, not to mention dangerously illegal, books by Martin Luther to the students of Wolsey’s very own Cardinal College (now Christ Church, Oxford). Forman was subsequently arrested by Wolsey, who was horrified at the prospect of such progressive thinking infiltrating his orthodox college.

Behind the scenes, the bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, who two years earlier had been responsible for burning Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible, encouraged Wolsey to make an example of Forman. At this point, Anne intervened and tried to appeal for Forman’s release, writing to Wolsey, ‘I beseech your Grace with all my heart to remember the Parson of Honey Lane for my sake shortly.’²⁰⁸

However, Anne’s simple yet loaded message was to be infuriatingly ignored, and Forman was to die mere months later, in October. With no official record of whether this was due to illness or at the hands of his captors, the suspicious timing leads us to presume the worst. In which case, we must realise how horrified Anne would have been, not only at the murder of an evangelical reformer, but her own lack of authority over the king’s adviser to affect the very kind of life-or-death situations she rose to power to prevent. But things were only going to go from bad to worse with the cardinal.

Cataclysmic Clash #2 takes us back to the case of Simon Fish, another unfortunately named rebel who fled the country to escape Wolsey’s wrath after daring to ridicule him in a play. After being forced to leave England, Fish wrote to Anne appealing for help, and to inform her and the king that he had found the answer to the issue of gaining an annulment from the pope.

While in exile, Fish had written A Supplication for the Beggars, a pamphlet that called out the immoral actions of the clergy, and, as he pointed out in his letter to Anne, how the pope made a mockery of England’s laws. As it currently stood, if a man was excommunicated by the Church Henry could do nothing to challenge it, which essentially stripped him of any power.

This was a light-bulb moment for Anne, but did she dare propose the work of an exiled heretic to Henry? She discussed it with her brother, George, who urged her to take the risk and share it with the king. But she need not have worried, as Fish’s words deeply resonated with an increasingly disillusioned Henry, who was forced to question more and more the matter of the pope’s authority over his own. So, Henry quickly pardoned Fish and called him back to England to interview him;²⁰⁹ they rode and talked together for hours, as a result of which the king promised Fish protection from those at court who were out to get him.

Unfortunately, Fish was later to run into trouble with Thomas More, who pointed out that this royal protection didn’t extend to Fish’s wife, and she was promptly arrested for refusing to allow Latin prayers to be heard in her house. More eventually released her to tend to her daughter when she fell victim to the plague, a disease that Fish himself was sadly to contract and subsequently die from within six months²¹⁰ – but not before making an almighty impact on British history by introducing the king to this life-changing text.

It’s interesting to note that it has also been claimed by those eager to discredit Anne for any positive impact on British history, that it was Henry VIII’s footmen who brought his attention to Fish’s A Supplication for the Beggars. But in addition to sending a copy to Anne, Fish had distributed his pamphlet throughout London in the hope that one way or another it might reach the king. This would explain how Henry’s footmen could have got hold of it, but does not explain why they would dare to be the ones who recommended heretical works to the king of England, particularly if his own fiancée was initially reluctant to do so. But even if both Anne and the footmen presented Henry with Fish’s work, there is still no doubt that it could only have been Anne who had the power and gumption to push the king to pardon and speak to Fish directly.

Yet the very fact that Wolsey had men running from the country in fear of being killed for selling the religious works that Anne herself was fighting for would have added to her conviction that perhaps he wasn’t a good man to be aligning herself with after all. If she was working towards a Lutheran alliance and introducing the king to the evangelical way, is there any surprise that Wolsey, with his persecution of heretics, had to go?²¹¹

However, if these incidents weren’t enough to revolt Anne, other episodes were about to unfold that would trigger an intense loathing and contempt for the cardinal.

When Anne first returned to court in December 1528, she had received a message from her cousin Francis Bryan that Henry had a traitor among his advisers, and it didn’t take long for her to form her suspicions as to who this might be.²¹² Cardinal Campeggio had arrived from Rome two months earlier for Henry’s divorce trial at the Legatine Court. But when by late January of the following year, 1529, the hearing had still failed to take place, Anne was seriously starting to suspect that Wolsey was trying to slow the divorce proceedings down – a suspicion that the imperial ambassador Iñigo de Mendoza confirms. So, it has been suggested that Anne formed a secret alliance with her brother, George, her uncle the duke of Norfolk and Charles Brandon, the duke of Suffolk, to investigate what he was up to.²¹³

This secret investigation sounds like it was kept from the king initially, because by spring 1529 Wolsey had convinced Henry that the pope was a reasonable man who, under many layers of denial, actually wanted to help him out. So it would just be a case of persisting until they wore him down and broke his spirit until he saw no way out of the relentless bullying but to go against everything he believed and give in to the king’s demands. A foolproof approach to the annulment, if ever there was one.

This was in spite of the fact that Francis Bryan had written to the king in March, explaining that he had been in Rome for three months before he was even granted an audience with the pope, whereupon the pontiff had made it clear he couldn’t help with the annulment.²¹⁴ No wonder Anne suspected Wolsey was stalling a court case that he was in charge of setting up when they were getting news that this was to be the inevitable outcome.

In Wolsey’s defence, he was probably somewhat clueless as to how to proceed without the pope’s approval. Nevertheless, he continued to lead them down a dead end rather than save them time and hit the king with a few home truths about the pope’s intentions.

So, at a time when Wolsey really needed to be reassuring Anne that he was working with her and not against her, he goes and instructs the dean of the chapel royal to get rid of all heretical books at court.²¹⁵ Yes, we can place Cataclysmic Clash #3 to the time of a notorious story that Anne lent her cherished copy of Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man to her gentlewoman Anne Gainsford. Gainsford’s suitor and future husband, George Zouche, was then caught reading it by the dean, who passed the offending book to Wolsey. Anne refused to let her gentlewoman take the blame for being in possession of an illegal book and rushed to Henry before Wolsey snitched, proudly declaring it to be hers, saying, ‘It shall be the dearest book that ever dean or cardinal took away.’²¹⁶

But it was here that Anne saw an opportunity. She explained to Henry that, as with Fish’s A Supplication for the Beggars, the book had some very interesting points that Henry would replace of extreme interest with regard to the annulment. So, he got it back from Wolsey, and Anne proceeded to show him some of the most vital information that would eventually guide his breaking away from the clutches of Rome.

Tyndale’s book reminded Henry that kings are accountable to God alone; that neither the pope nor any other authority on earth could rule a monarch. Henry liked the sound of this. It was metaphorical music to his ears as he declared, ‘This is for me and all kings to read.’²¹⁷

Ah, so this was it?

This was the moment Henry turned to the pope and said, ‘Darling, it’s over’?

Not quite. Henry going it alone and rising up against the pope’s power was a radical step. A war. Basically a lot of work, and Henry realised it would be easier to simply have the pope give up and give him the go-ahead to wed. And so he waited.

The one thing you might be surprised to learn about psychopaths and sociopaths is that they will always choose the easy victims, and the pope was anything but. He came with a lot of headaches. The dangerous repercussions would have been repeatedly drawn to Henry’s attention, so we can’t rule out the possibility that he was scared of the consequences of a war with Rome and the dreaded sentence of excommunication.

Psychologist Dr Kevin Dutton says that although sociopaths are impulsive and won’t usually delay short-term gratification in favour of long-term gain, if Henry was a very intelligent, high-functioning sociopath, it would make sense for him to hold out for the pope rather than take the extreme option of breaking from Rome at this early date.²¹⁸

It is Wyatt who informs us that, sure enough, Wolsey did complain to the king about Anne’s illegal book, in the hope it would make Henry realise she was a heretic and encourage him to give up all this annulment nonsense – which, incidentally, was starting to make them a lot of enemies in Europe. But Wolsey’s approach didn’t have the desired effect; it only served to annoy the king, and no doubt enrage Anne – not just because Wolsey was attempting to ruin her chance of becoming the queen of England, but because he was actively working to stamp out the freedom of religious expression that Anne was fighting so hard for.²¹⁹

However, as an evangelical reformer set to replace England’s Catholic queen, Anne had found herself becoming an increasingly controversial figure.²²⁰ Indeed, Wyatt reports that in the midst of her and Henry’s fight to marry, Anne received a death threat drawn in a book of old prophecies: a haunting image of her being beheaded. Wyatt doesn’t date his story, but he has her discussing the death threat with ‘Nan’, indicating she was talking to her lady-in-waiting Anne Gainsford; so this would place the incident to when her intentions of marriage to the king were public, not before.

But who at court was behind the death threat? Frankly, it could have been any number of courtiers with access to Anne’s chambers. But considering her suspicion of Wolsey at this time and his attempt to get rid of her, we can understand how this could only have served to heighten Anne’s growing paranoia about the cardinal. Whether he was responsible or not, it’s possible that in her eyes she saw this threat as Cataclysmic Clash #4.

It must be pointed out that although Wolsey’s fall is often pinned on Henry and Anne, with the cardinal being the most powerful man at court and a mere butcher’s son, there was no shortage of more qualified courtiers who had failed to gain as much favour with the king and were baying for his blood. Wolsey’s gentleman usher Cavendish blames the lords of the council as working against him out of jealousy.²²¹ By this point, Anne was more than happy to get rid of him, but evidence does not point to her being the driving force behind the plot to bring him down, as is often presumed.

Anne’s uncle the duke of Norfolk was Wolsey’s main opponent over foreign policy. Lord Thomas Darcy’s name also crops up regularly as a bitter rival who was equally eager to see him go.²²² This was mainly because he was against Wolsey’s move to close a number of smaller monasteries to fund the launch of his own colleges (something we will touch on later), which Darcy saw as a gross misuse of Wolsey’s powers.²²³ Charles Brandon may have worked closely with Wolsey for many years, but when the king started to highlight his suspicions of his long-term adviser, Brandon was quick to turn against him to side with Henry. Similarly, we can only conclude that Wolsey’s own right-hand man, Thomas Boleyn, turned against him out of family loyalty to support his daughter’s growing suspicions.²²⁴

But before we feel compelled to fall back on earlier suspicions that of course Anne’s father was conspiring to replace the most powerful man at court, and in the process manoeuvre his daughter on to the throne, let me stop you right there. Don’t let Thomas’s willingness to support his daughter at this stage convince you that he must, therefore, have always been by her side, plotting and conspiring. For evidence that Thomas Boleyn was once firmly against Anne’s controversial marriage to the king has finally made its way, blinking, into the light, dazed and confused at having been hidden away from the public at large.

First, we have reports of a revelatory conversation between Anne and her father as her coronation loomed. With nerves frayed, Thomas suggested she shouldn’t adjust her gowns to hide her growing pregnancy and instead be ‘thankful to God for the state she was in’; to which Anne tersely replied that she was ‘in a better plight than he would have wished her to be’.²²⁵ Here we have Anne strongly implying that her father had not even supported her decision to accept the king’s controversial offer of marriage, let alone been the mastermind behind it.²²⁶

But there exists yet more critical and conclusive evidence that disproves the worst lies we’ve been sold about Thomas. Straight from the quill of the opposition, we have a revealing letter from Chapuys stating that Thomas had ‘hitherto, as the duke of Norfolk has frequently told me, tried to dissuade the king rather than otherwise from marriage’.²²⁷

Now this is quite the admission, and rings true as the concerned actions of an experienced ambassador and protective father who wanted to avoid placing his daughter, or for that matter the king of England, in a situation that would leave them open to attack.

Further proof is provided in the same report, where Chapuys confirms that the duke of Norfolk wanted it to be known that he ‘had not been either the originator or promoter of this second marriage, but, on the contrary, had always been opposed to it’.²²⁸ Not only that but Norfolk confided that had it not been for him and Thomas, Henry and Anne’s marriage ‘would have been secretly contracted a year ago’.²²⁹ Chapuys then tells us of the extreme lengths Thomas Boleyn went to in order to protect his daughter from making a huge mistake by ‘feigning an attack of frenzy’.²³⁰

Although Thomas may have tried his best to discourage both Henry and Anne in the early days, it’s safe to say his better judgement was overlooked by all. It’s clear from his eventual attempts to help the king’s annulment that he felt he had no choice but to aid his headstrong daughter and the single-minded monarch in their quest as best he could, once he knew resistance was futile. But let this evidence be the final nail in the coffin of lies that tells us Thomas Boleyn was a pimp who schemed from the start to place his daughter on the throne.

Meanwhile in Rome, the pope was holding his ground.

As the years went on and Henry persisted, it’s tempting to ask why the pontiff did not simply cave in to his demands. So why was he being so stubborn over the king’s annulment? Many think it came down to the basic fact that Catholics didn’t support divorce, while others believe that the pope wasn’t buying what most still see as Henry’s tactic of claiming his marriage went against scripture in the Bible.

However, it was a little bit trickier than that, as Henry had known full well that the scripture was an issue before entering into his marriage to Katherine. Even more damagingly, so had Rome, because it was the pope’s predecessor who had signed a bull making it legal for Henry to marry his brother’s widow in the first place.

So, Henry was effectively asking the pope to admit the Church was wrong and that it was all their fault, which, let’s be honest, they were never going to do. The pope was also painfully aware by now that Henry intended to replace his Catholic queen with an evangelical reformist, something he would obstruct as much as he could.

As this impossible situation became increasingly clear back in England, Wolsey, who had been insisting to Henry that they simply needed to persist and the pope would change his mind, suddenly found himself having given years of bad advice.

Had they been wasting their time chasing the pope’s consent? Yes, pretty much.

But instead of holding his hands up, Wolsey blamed the pope’s deceit in stringing them along to cover up his own misjudgement.²³¹ But that excuse didn’t quite wash with Anne; in fact, this would have proved her suspicions right, because she didn’t just see it as Wolsey giving accidental bad advice. She saw this as Wolsey standing in the way of yet another marriage attempt. Don’t forget, this was the second marriage match that Wolsey had potentially ruined for her; and now he was advising the king to pursue a route for the annulment that he knew would never succeed.

At this point, Anne could be forgiven for starting to think it was personal.

On 31 May 1529, the Legatine Court opened in Blackfriars, during one of the stints where Anne was packed off back to Hever to keep a low profile.²³² This was essentially Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon’s Tudor divorce trial. Cavendish described it as the ‘strangest and newest sight . . . that a king and queen [should] appear in any court as common persons’.²³³ It is here that both the king and queen made dramatic speeches that have been the focus of most ‘six wives’ biographies and dramatisations; though what is often carefully omitted from Henry and Anne’s story is the shocking admission made by the supposedly love-struck king that Katherine had been a wonderful wife, and that if their union hadn’t displeased God he would, as Cavendish confirms, have been happy to spend the rest of his life with her.²³⁴

Oh yes. He really said it. Let’s just hope no one told Anne.

Yet for all the drama and controversy, the Legatine Court ended with something of an anticlimax for those involved. Cardinal Campeggio announced that he refused to make a judgement until he had relayed the proceedings to the pope back in Rome.²³⁵ Though it’s regularly inferred that this conclusion was frustrating for Anne and Henry simply because it was not the result they were fighting for, in fact it implied something much more catastrophic. Campeggio’s decision was interpreted by all as a ploy to give Katherine enough time to appeal for the case to be heard in Rome, where Henry couldn’t influence it.

They had been well and truly played. And, rightly or wrongly, Anne suspected that this had been Wolsey’s plan all along.²³⁶ In which case, I think we can officially label the failed Legatine Court as Cataclysmic Clash #5, and the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The anti-Wolsey faction wasted no time in leaping into action. Although what followed in the summer of 1529 were two failed attempts to open the king’s eyes to Wolsey’s suspected deceit and possible secret dealings with Rome,²³⁷ it took everyone by surprise when out of the blue on 9 October, Wolsey was informed he was to be charged with praemunire – the go-to charge whenever anyone followed the pope’s laws over English laws; i.e., asserted papal jurisdiction in England.

But this didn’t come from concocted evidence presented by Anne’s faction or Wolsey’s enemies at court. As much as we can see now why Anne was justified in wanting Wolsey gone, this arrest came from the king himself. What had Henry suddenly discovered? Actually, we’re still not entirely sure, but the events that were about to explode give us a good indication.

This is another one of those times where many historians jump-cut ahead and mesh two huge events together. Call it artistic licence or distorting history to create a more succinct story, but it was not at this point, as we’re often told, that the old man was summoned to London and died on the way due to the stress of being unable to give the king and his scheming mistress an annulment.

Instead, Wolsey was told to surrender the seal, that he was no longer cardinal and must immediately leave Hampton Court, which the king seized for himself.²³⁸ But then, in what reads like a case study of the sociopath at work, far from being sent to the Tower of London as everyone expected, Wolsey was moved to Asher House, where the king subjected him to severe emotional whiplash over the coming weeks. One minute he was sending secret messages and gold rings, reassuring Wolsey he ‘loved him as much as he ever did’;²³⁹ the next, the king’s men were seizing his property and poaching his staff.²⁴⁰

But even though Wolsey had just been charged with a criminal offence, the bill presented in Parliament condemning him for treason failed to pass owing to the king’s intervention.²⁴¹ It was at this point that Henry started lamenting that he missed his former adviser.

Ah! Isn’t that a human emotion that flies in the face of this whole sociopathy theory?

No, and here’s why: Wolsey was bloody good at his job. He had got the king out of all manner of international incidents over the past twenty years. As far as Henry was aware, Wolsey was still the only man who could sort this situation with the pope. This was the reason Henry was more reluctant to ditch his minister than any of his wives. Don’t be fooled – it came down to business, not affection.

So by February of the following year, 1530, to the chilling fear of Wolsey’s enemies and evangelical reformists alike, he had managed to wrangle his way back into royal favour. But Wolsey knew he was living on borrowed time. He knew full well he couldn’t help with the king’s annulment. He saw that Henry was surrounded by people who still didn’t trust him and wouldn’t rest until he was out for good – so that’s when he is said to have made the decision to defect to the other side.²⁴²

In October 1530, Anne and the king were tipped off that preparations were underway for a scheme between Katherine of Aragon, Charles V and Rome, whereby a decree would be issued by the pope ordering Henry to return to his wife. And damningly, Wolsey was linked to the whole plot. His chaplain was intercepted carrying incriminating letters from Wolsey to Charles V, and his physician Agostini was found with letters from his master written in cypher.²⁴³ Suddenly the conversation overheard by Cavendish, of the king producing a mysterious letter back in September the previous year and demanding of Wolsey, ‘How can this be? Is this not your own hand?’ ²⁴⁴ starts to make sense. Just how long had this secret correspondence been going on for?

Far from being thrilled at finally having her suspicions confirmed about Wolsey, from all reports Anne sounded distraught at the very real possibility that this marriage she had risked everything for might not happen thanks to the cardinal’s secret plot. That she might now be cast aside, only to be remembered as the king’s whore. More devastatingly, she would have lost out on the chance to fight for her religious cause from the only position of power that could incite real change in England. Some historians like to suggest that Anne’s meltdown over the shocking revelations was ‘calculated’, and that she used emotional blackmail to provoke Henry into fighting back. However, we cannot deny that Anne’s fear and upset at this point would have been entirely warranted and genuine.

We also can’t presume she was the only one rocked by this betrayal. Indeed, Henry called Wolsey back to London immediately to answer to these new accusations.²⁴⁵ But just in case anyone doubts whether Wolsey would have really been so reckless as to have begun secret negotiations with the opposition, we have evidence directly from the accused himself. Cavendish admits in his sixteenth-century biography that his master acknowledged he was being summoned to London for ‘weighty matters yet depending . . . meaning the matter newly began between him and good Queen Katherine’ ²⁴⁶ – a pretty conclusive admission by Wolsey’s faithful servant.

So Wolsey’s eventual downfall wasn’t because he ‘failed to secure the king a marriage annulment’, as some historians have long suggested. Nor did Anne need to ‘invent’ a plot or ‘conspire his ruin’, for in the end he did it all himself. Alas, Wolsey never got his day in court to explain his secret communication with the other side, as he was to die dramatically on his way back to London. As for what killed him, various theories have been bandied about over the past five centuries, yet they all share one common denominator: Anne Boleyn.

Wolsey was at Cawood Castle in Yorkshire when Henry Percy was sent to arrest him for high treason and accompany him back to London on the king’s request²⁴⁷ (nice touch, sending Percy, which might back the claim that Anne was still harbouring at least some resentment for the way Wolsey dealt with that particular event). So they set off, stopping along the way – fatefully, it would turn out – in Sheffield Park with Percy’s father-in-law, the earl of Shrewsbury.²⁴⁸

Over the centuries, historians have made out that Wolsey was a ‘broken man’,²⁴⁹ who arrived sick and frail, his impending arrest at the hands of wicked Anne Boleyn having taken its toll on the ailing pensioner. But Cavendish, who was by his master’s side the whole time, shoots that myth down with the revelation that on his travels Wolsey ‘lacked no good cheer’, with wine and entertainment aplenty.²⁵⁰

Even though he was wanted in London, Wolsey was clearly in no rush to face the music; he stayed at Sheffield Manor Lodge for eighteen days, where, according to Cavendish, they had ‘a goodly and honourable entertainment’.²⁵¹

But after two weeks, things took a terrible turn. Cavendish reports that Wolsey declared, ‘I am suddenly taken about my stomach,’²⁵² and goes on to describe in shockingly candid detail Wolsey’s ‘new disease’,²⁵³ a testimony that ruins the other popular conspiracy theory – that Anne Boleyn poisoned him on his travels. For if this ‘new disease’ was the result of poisoning, who could possibly have done it? Wolsey had been in the safety of the Talbot household for over two weeks before falling ill – and there were absolutely no Boleyn supporters there willing to kill him. Even Percy himself surely couldn’t have been disillusioned enough to still see his cancelled plans to marry Anne as being Wolsey’s fault, instead of his own father’s and the king’s. And to be morbidly frank, no enemy would want to see Wolsey escape the humiliation of an interrogation and public beheading, and instead whimper away in a death by poisoning out in the countryside.

Speaking of which, back in London there was uneasiness at Wolsey’s failure to turn up. The night he fell ill, William Kingston, the constable of the Tower of London, arrived to escort the former cardinal back to London, explaining ‘report hath been made unto [the king], that ye should commit against his royal majesty, certain heinous crimes . . .’²⁵⁴

But before we go suspecting Kingston of poisoning Wolsey, let us point out that he fell ill before the constable arrived. In fact, unbeknown to them all, Wolsey was dying.²⁵⁵

So, if not the supposed perpetual schemer that was Anne Boleyn, what did kill him? A visit to Sheffield Manor Lodge, as it is now known, has uncovered the rather grim culprit, for Wolsey was lodged in a room directly above the toilet for a full two weeks before he fell ill.

Unlike most castles and palaces, where the faeces fell through a hole, down the side of the tower and into the moat, Sheffield Manor Lodge had to invent a whole new system for its ground-floor toilet. (Yes, we are actually talking faecal matter now – but an important matter nevertheless, so stay with me!) This new toilet system essentially consisted of leaving everything to stew on a bed of straw for two weeks, whereupon some hapless local kid climbed in and shovelled it out. Safe to say, this wasn’t the kind of royal-standard sanitation Wolsey was used to; and with all that faecal matter inevitably contaminating everything he touched for two weeks, is there any wonder he caught what one of his biographers, John Matusiak, agrees must have been dysentery?

Cavendish reported that Wolsey ‘took to the stool all night . . . unto the next day, he had above fifty stools.’ Apparently ‘the matter that he voided was wondrous black’,²⁵⁶ giving us all a delightful visual there. Thank you, Master Cavendish.

When the physician informed them that Wolsey had only four or five days left to live, Kingston hurriedly tried to get him back to London to speak with the king before he breathed his last. But it was no use. Wolsey died en route a few days later, on 29 November 1530.²⁵⁷ He would never be held accountable for his actions, nor get to answer the accusations that sullied his final year. Perhaps if he had, there wouldn’t have been room for Anne to be blamed for his downfall and death in the centuries to come.