Anne Boleyn: the First Celebrity

A guest post by LH Member Lissa Chapman. This article first appeared in London Historians Members’ Newsletter of February 2017.

Anne Boleyn’s coronation was an immensely significant, and highly controversial public event planned to an almost impossible deadline. Through the early spring of 1533 the Royal Court had been rife with rumours that the King and “The Lady” were married, as indeed they had been since a secret ceremony in late January. By March Anne was dropping other hints – on one occasion she thrilled a roomful of courtiers by asking if anyone had an apple she could have and confiding, giggling wildly, that the King said the craving must mean she was pregnant. Then, suddenly, it was all official. On Easter Saturday the newly proclaimed Queen Anne went to mass at Greenwich dressed in pleated cloth of gold, heavily jewelled, her long gauzy train carried by her cousin, and accompanied by sixty maids of honour.

“ANNA BOLINA UXOR HENRI OCTA” – c1533

By this time the new Queen was indeed over four months pregnant, so if she was going to be crowned before the birth of her child, there was no time to be lost. As Thomas Wyatt was to write of her, the news that Henry VIII had remarried without waiting for the Pope’s permission had set the country “in a roar”. Eustace Chapuys, the ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor, wrote that “All the world is astonished at it, for it looks like a dream, and even those who take her part do not know whether to laugh or cry”. Famously, Chapuys was perhaps the discarded Catherine of Aragon’s greatest champion, and was indignant at the news to the point that in protest he tried to persuade the Emperor Charles V to recall him. And it is Chapuys who is the oftenest quoted and most complete source for the events of this time. However, for the evidence about the preparations for Anne’s coronation there is no shortage of incontrovertible evidence of the most straightforward and unbiased kind: invoices, accounts and sets of instructions.

Early modern coronations were demanding affairs. A four-day series of public spectacles, beginning with a water pageant, continuing with a procession through London interspersed with entertainments and culminating in the religious ceremony at Westminster Abbey and followed by a great feast, was involved. On this occasion all this had to be achieved with a lead-time of little more than six weeks from the day Anne was proclaimed Queen. And, given how controversial a figure she was, everything had to be planned and agreed at the highest level at court. The eyes of the whole of Europe would be watching, and it was crucially important to weigh up and control the messages given by each aspect of the ceremonial, as well as to impress friend and enemy alike with its erudition, sophistication and luxury. Political spin is no modern invention. There is evidence that both Thomas Cromwell and the Duke of Suffolk had important roles in the planning of the event. Cromwell was an obvious choice, but Suffolk was being put in a difficult position – his wife, the King’s sister Mary, had already let it be known that she would not accept Anne Boleyn as Queen, and the couple had left Court some months previously. But Suffolk was not allowed to get away with this, and back he came to London, where he was on duty until after Anne was crowned.

There were of course, a great many people and agencies involved. For the City, there were traditions and precedents to call on, but even so the schedule was tight – the Lord Mayor only received the order to prepare a water procession to escort the queen from Greenwich to the Tower of London on 13th May, just over a fortnight before the event. The City Aldermen and the King’s Council joined forces to plan all aspects of the procession through the City, with some moderately courteous squabbling about who was to finance which aspects of the day. The final cost is not recorded, but the Milanese ambassador speculated that the City’s share alone came to an incredible £46,000 (multiply by about 500). In order to get some idea both of the significance of the event and the size of the budget, we may think in terms of an Olympic opening ceremony and add a royal wedding.

Antony van Wyngaerde drawing of the Tower of London, c1550

The first, and absolute, necessity was that the coronation should take place in a London that was at least peaceful, and preferably enthusiastic. Chapuys reported that, when Anne was prayed for as queen on Easter Saturday at St Paul’s, “almost all left the church in high displeasure and with sad countenances without waiting for the rest of the sermon”. He then claims that the King sent for the Lord Mayor of London to warn him that nothing like it must happen again, and he must personally ensure that no one spoke out against the new marriage. The Lord Mayor then apparently sent for the senior members of all the livery companies to warn them to keep quiet and look pleased.

There are some other pieces of evidence to back up Chapuys. A scattering of reports from all over the country concern ordinary people in trouble for criticising either the King for breaking with Catherine of Aragon, or, slightly less riskily, disrespecting Anne Boleyn herself. A new mother in Gloucestershire was denounced by her midwife for having said, in the throes of labour, that the midwife’s services were good enough for “good Queen Catherine” and too good for Anne Boleyn. Early in 1533 a woman called Elizabeth Amadas, became notorious as she spread stories centring round a prophesy of a ruler called the Mouldwarp, a tyrant bearing a strong resemblance to Henry VIII who was due to be overthrown that year. The stories appear to have spread like wildfire. But the evidence is too sparse to be sure whether the mood of London in 1533 was genuinely and consistently hostile to Anne. What appears certain is that both the king and Anne herself were afraid that it might be, and were determined to take no chances.

The first part of the coronation took place on Thursday 29th May when the Lord Mayor of London and the Masters and senior members of all the Livery Companies went by barge to Greenwich to collect the queen-to-be and bring her to London. An eye-witness to the event, the chronicler Edward Hall, was to claim there were over 300 boats in the procession, which was almost as long as the route to Greenwich. As the flotilla returned to London, it was joined by a boat with with a white falcon superstructure – the queen’s personal badge, which was to be an important motif throughout the celebrations. And all along the route guns were fired in salute, and boat loads of musicians played.

It was traditional for the new king or queen to sleep the night before the coronation in the Tower of London, so it was there that Anne Boleyn disembarked, to be greeted by the King and conducted to the newly refurbished queen’s house within the Tower. The next public ceremonial was planned for 31st May, when Anne was to ride through the City, entertained as she went with plays, music and special effects. John Leland and Nicholas Udall were commissioned to design and script them. Both were court officials known to be Boleyn supporters. They had all the resources of the King’s works and London’s guilds at their disposal, and they used them, involving several hundred people in the preparations and finally staging a series of entertainments that combined political and religious imagery and spectacle to what most observers conceded was good effect.

On the day, the procession began at least three hours late – whether because something had gone wrong or because Anne herself was not ready on time we shall never know. However, it was not until the late afternoon that Anne finally emerged from her apartments in the Tower to set off to ride through the streets of the City, riding in a horse litter with a canopy held over her head. Observers described her as dressed in white cloth of gold adorned with rubies, and “in her hair” – this dress and her dramatically dark hair, worn loose to her waist, must have made her an eye-catching figure. Not only her dress, but her litter and the trappings of her horses were white or silver, and she wore a gold, ruby encrusted circlet on her head – not yet, of course, a crown.

The procession was headed by the gentlemen of the royal household and the servants of the French ambassador, all in violet, with one sleeve in the Queen’s colours of violet and blue, followed by the judges, the Knights of the Bath, the royal council, the bishops and the Lord Mayor of London. The Queen came next, surrounded by her chief ladies, all in crimson or black velvet, and including many of Anne’s own closest relatives, including her mother and sister, and her step grandmother, the dowager Duchess of Norfolk. There were at least two notable absentees, however – the current Duchess of Norfolk, and the king’s sister Mary, the Duchess of Suffolk – both opponents of Anne and of sufficient importance that the king had been unable to force their attendance.

Looking at the scripts of the plays and descriptions of the other entertainments, the whole procession must have taken perhaps three hours to complete. Each entertainment was performed only once, so the proceedings must have been somewhat tedious to all those who were too far away to see them. Anne appears to have played her part with the expected grace and good humour, knowing of course that her every move and expression were being watched by observers from all over Europe. One of the “Anne Boleyn myths” is that she was hissed by the London crowds as she rode through the city. There is no contemporary source for this. A city lawyer, Sir John Spelman, reported that all went according to plan ; even Chapuys says nothing of this kind.

Perhaps the most memorable part of the entertainments is one of the songs. “The White Falcon”, the final item in the pageant performed on a stage in the shape of a castle at the Leaden Hall in Gracechurch Street. The action included the blessing of the new queen by St Anne and the “three Blessed Marys”, followed by a series of mechanical wonders – a tree stump began to spill out roses, whereupon a white falcon swooped down out of the cupola to land on the flowers. Finally, an angel appeared and crowned the falcon, while a child recited a blessing. All this to the singing of a song describing the adventures of
“This white falcon
Rare and gaison
This bird shyneth so bright…”

The White Falcon in the modern City.

All this religious iconography was interspersed with classical allusions, with scenes featuring Mount Parnassus, Apollo and the muses and, at Cornhill, the Three Graces waited to greet the Queen. So traditional religious imagery alternated with the new humanism – but in both, the message was the same – Anne was ushering in a new and hopeful age.

The Venetian Ambassador, one of those invited to observe alongside the King, reported that the coronation had been celebrated “with the utmost order and tranquillity”. Not even the most hostile witness could claim that anything had gone spectacularly wrong. What they could and did say, however, is that the London crowds were sullen and even mocking. An anonymous report claimed first of all that Anne rode in a litter so low the ears of the mules appeared to be hers, dressed in a robe suitable for the Witch of the West, as it sported embroidered tongues pierced with nails and a high neck to hide a huge swelling in her neck. The account continued that the crowds did not cheer or take off their hats as she passed, and that the Lord Mayor, when she complained, said he could not command the people’s hearts. We are then told that Anne’s fool said they were keeping their caps on to hide their scurvy heads, and that some people in the crowd started shouting out “ha, ha” when they saw the decorations with Henry’s and Anne’s initials intertwined. The “Cronica del Rey Enrico”, written two decades after the event, tells a similar story. These unattributable sources may have some basis in fact – or they may be the result of wishful thinking on the part of Anne’s enemies.

At the end of the day’s celebrations, after singing from the boys of St Paul’s, the Recorder of London presented the queen with a purse made of cloth of gold containing “a thousand markes of angell nobels” as a gift from the City (this was about £600 – serious money in 1533). She was then escorted through Ludgate, up Fleet Street and on to Westminster.

“She was conveyed out of the backside of the palace to a barge and so unto York Place, where the King’s Grace was before her coming….for this you must ever presuppose that his Grace came always before her secretly in a barge, as well from Greenwich to the Tower, as from the Tower to York Place”

The new Queen had passed her ordeal by London.

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