“At length her grace, and with modest paces Came to the altar; where she kneel’d, and saintlike Cast her fair eyes to heaven and pray’d devoutly. Then rose again and bow’d her to the people: When by the Archbishop of Canterbury She had all the royal makings of a queen; As holy oil, Edward Confessor’s crown, The rod, and bird of peace, and all such emblems Laid nobly on her: which performed, the choir With all the choicest music of the kingdom, Together sung ‘Te Deum.’ So she parted And with the same full state paced back again To York Place where the feast is held.”
Three short years passed away and a pall of darkness falls over this brilliant scene, and Anne’s regal state and “royal makings of a queen” are changed to the prison and the scaffold.
In September 1533, Anne brought a daughter into the world, the future Queen Elizabeth. In the following year Parliament passed an Act of Succession, devised by Henry, by which his former marriage with Catherine of Arragon was declared to be an unlawful one, and Anne’s daughter was made successor to the Crown, thus excluding the Princess Mary from the succession. All the King’s subjects were commanded to acknowledge this new Act, but the Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, and Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, whilst willing to obey the Act as an Act of Parliament, declined to allow that the King’s marriage with the Spanish Princess was illegal. Henry, on hearing this, burst into one of his Tudor furies, and both More and Fisher were, by his orders, sent to the Tower. At the same time Henry sent Commissioners through the length and breadth of England to suppress all the religious communities that refused to obey the Act, and also those who were not willing to conform to his new Law of Succession.
Thomas Cromwell was the principal agent in carrying out Henry’s commands against the monasteries. No fitter man for the task could have been found. Risen from a humble station, Cromwell, who had been introduced to the King’s notice by Wolsey, after his patron’s fall had become private secretary to the sovereign; and in 1534 he was appointed Henry’s Vicar-General in all matters appertaining to Ecclesiastical affairs.
One of the Orders of Friars, styled Friars Observant, had openly expressed their opinion concerning Henry’s second marriage, and for this the Order was ruthlessly suppressed, many of its members being executed. The same fate befell the Carthusians, some of whom were imprisoned in the Tower for refusing to conform to the oath of this Act of Succession. The Prior of Sion Hospital was hanged as a felon, and many other priests and friars were put to death with every brutal detail appertaining to the manner of execution for high treason.