A Real Papist Plot

From TLS:

Garnet referred to “King Henries papers [that] I have ready but expect [i.e. await] meanes to send them”. Garnet’s own missive has not survived, but we know of it because another Jesuit, Christopher Grene, made notes in the 1660s from English Jesuit materials for the great historian Daniello Bartoli SJ. Until now no one has remarked that Grene not only jotted down the quoted summary, but also annotated Garnet’s letter as follows – “litterae Henr. VIII ad Annam Bolenam quae nunc sunt in Biblioteca Vaticana”.

In other words Grene identified the “papers” with the collection of love letters written from Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn, which is now indeed to be found in the Vatican Library. These seventeen letters, written in English and French, have long provided inspiration for popular historians and novelists. Henry’s wish to be soon in the arms of his “sweet-heart” Anne, “whose pretty duckys I trust shortly to kiss”, has proved irresistible.

But it has always been a mystery how the letters ended up in, of all places, the Vatican Library. From the seventeenth century to this day people have speculated about how they got there. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, for example, believed that the luggage of the departing Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio – the papal legate appointed to hear the king’s petition for the annulment of his marriage – was searched in 1529 by royal officials in an attempt to reclaim the letters, but they had already been dispatched to Rome. Lord Herbert gave no source for his story. The modern consensus seems to be that they must have been stolen in the 1530s from Anne herself, but there is no evidence for this.

Grene’s scribbled note may provide the answer. If it is correct, that means the letters were kept somewhere in England for about seventy years after the amorous king put pen to paper, and before they went to Rome. Could they, for example, have been retained in the possession of the Howards (Boleyn’s own family)? Anne Dacre-Howard, countess of Arundel, had Jesuit chaplains. We know that one of them, Robert Southwell, sent some of his political writings abroad before he was arrested in 1592, at which point his own papers appear to have come into Garnet’s possession.

Moreover, this makes sense because we know that at precisely this period Garnet was sending various manuscripts to Parsons in Rome in order to serve the polemical needs of the moment. Parsons was turning out huge quantities of polemic at this time. One of his projects was his “Certamen ecclesiae Anglicanae” – a truly vast projected Latin history of the English Reformation. The extant manuscript volumes go from the time of Henry VIII to that of Edward VI.

Parsons followed the line set out in the salacious account penned by the priest Nicholas Sander in his De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani. In certain parts of Catholic Europe Sander’s work provided the basis for the official account of the English branch of the Reformation for centuries. Here, Henry’s depraved lusting after the entirely corrupt and corrupting Anne Boleyn was the immediate cause both for the rupture with Rome and for his descent into tyranny.

Sander portrayed Anne not merely as “full of pride, ambition, envy and impurity”, but also as someone who had “sinned first with her father’s butler and then with his chaplain”. Furthermore, as the offspring of her mother’s affair with Henry, Anne was, in fact, Henry’s daughter, so the Reformation in England under their daughter, Elizabeth, was the product of a vile incestuous union, and Elizabeth herself was doubly illegitimate.

Sander’s scurrilous tell-all book was first published in 1585, and it was later updated and seen through the press again by Parsons himself. Cardinal Allen extended and expanded the Catholic account of the sexual corruption of the Tudors in his tract of 1588, Admonition to the Nobility and People of England, designed to accompany the Armada and to justify the deposition of the queen through a vivid depiction of her sexual depravity and political tyranny.

 

This was a genre of libellous secret history in which original documents were used in order to reveal what had really gone on at the Tudor court. It is therefore not difficult to imagine what use Parsons would have made of the letters. But his “Certamen” was, for whatever reason, neither completed nor printed, though the surviving manuscript (at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire) informs us that Parsons was anticipating the arrival of the letters from England.

We cannot yet be sure precisely when the letters made their way into the Vatican Library. Nor do we know that they were immediately shown to visitors when they did enter the collection. Nevertheless, various travel accounts – including relations of the journeys made by John Raymond, Lord Willoughby and Lady Catherine Whetenall – suggest that, by the middle decades of the seventeenth century, viewing Henry’s letters in the Vatican was an aspect of the developing grand tour. The letters could still be made to serve polemical ends while being presented to curious travellers, eager to see the treasures of the Vatican. In his published correspondence the Whig churchman Gilbert Burnet described his visit in 1685:

 

When it appeared that I was come from England, King Henry the VIII’s Book of the Seven Sacraments, with an inscription writ upon it with his own hand to Pope Leo the X, was shewed me; together with a collection of some letters that he writ to Anne Bolen of which some are in English, and some in French. I that knew his hand well saw clearly that they were no forgeries.

Burnet had his own, very different historical agenda. His monumental History of the Reformation was published in three volumes (1679, 1681 and 1715), at least in part, as he said, in response to the “fictions” of Sander. Despite his confessional distance from Garnet and Parsons, Burnet also sought to enlist the love letters, but in order to counter previous “popish” claims about the divorce. Burnet wrote in 1715 that he did not think it “fit” to copy out the letters himself in the Vatican Library. Instead he had prevailed upon his friend James Fall “to do it for me”. Because, Burnet explained, “those at Rome” hailed the letters, in “derision”, as “the true Original of our Reformation”, and actively “encouraged” travellers from England to “look on them”, he could neither suppress nor ignore them. Burnet gave Fall’s copy to the printer and “ordered” the letters to be printed as a separate publication, a more “proper” place for “such stuff” than the august pages of his History.

 

Love-Letters from King Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn was published in 1714 by John Churchill, publisher to both Burnet and John Locke. In the preface to this compact edition the nameless editor worked hard to put a favourable gloss on the letters, placing isolated “indecent expressions” in historical perspective: the “simplicity and unpoliteness” of the Tudor age had “allowed too great liberties of that sort”. Like Burnet the editor emphasized that the letters showed Henry’s “affection” for Anne to have been “altogether upon honourable terms”.

For the cost of a shilling the edition provided a potted version of Burnet’s account of the Henrician divorce to “arm” the “ordinary reader” against the “calumnies of the papists on that subject”. Here the letters are still central to a coherent polemic about the (Long) Reformation. But the edition’s title, Love-Letters from King Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn, also places them in the flourishing contemporary market for passionate epistolary literature, including Aphra Behn’s much reprinted Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87) and Roger L’Estrange’s popular translation of the Lettres portugaises (1669) as Five Love-Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier (1678), an edition of which appeared in the same year as Henry’s letters to Anne.

Love-Letters from King Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn suggests an association between a certain sort of text-based historical scholarship and the wider reaches of fictionalized cheap print and sensationalized, sexualized popular history, which the recent fascination with the love lives of the Tudors has continued into the twenty-first century. The urge to engage as wide a public as possible has supplanted the urgent ideological zeal of the priests and Jesuits who first sought to bring the letters to a wider audience. One is reminded of Marx’s dictum about history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. (Read more.)

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