Anne had a crown, a daughter and a kingdom being ordered to accept them both. Parliament would make resistance more dangerous. It could not make their places permanent.
On 3 November 1534, Parliament resumed at Westminster for the session that would produce the Act of Supremacy and a new Treasons Act. Henry VIII's authority over the English Church would receive statutory recognition. Behind that great change stood a family whose relationships had become questions the whole country was required to answer. Was Anne Boleyn the king's lawful wife? Was her little daughter entitled to inherit his crown?
Elizabeth was nearly fourteen months old. She had been born at Greenwich on 7 September 1533, the daughter of a crowned queen, with an elder half-sister whose position had been overturned to make room for hers. Mary was Catherine of Aragon's daughter. For years she had been Henry's only surviving legitimate child. Now English law denied the validity of her parents' marriage and placed the succession with Anne's children. The two girls shared a father. The law allowed them very different futures.
For Anne, being called queen mattered far beyond precedence at court. Her marriage determined whether Elizabeth was a legitimate daughter of the king or a child excluded from the throne. Neither Catherine nor Mary accepted the settlement that displaced them. Henry could change the official account of his family. Getting the family to agree was proving rather harder.
The spring of 1534 had already brought an Act of Succession. Its wording gave Anne the full weight of parliamentary recognition, describing her as Henry's "most dear and entirely beloved wife Queen Anne". Their marriage was to be established "for ever". Children born of it would inherit, with sons taking precedence over daughters. It named the first in line plainly: "the Lady Elizabeth, now princess". Until there was a son, Elizabeth held the place her elder sister had lost. A child who could not yet understand the words had become the answer to a national argument.
For ever was an ambitious promise.
When Parliament returned in November, the government was strengthening the authority behind that settlement. The Act of Supremacy would recognise Henry as the supreme head on earth of the Church of England. The clergy had already acknowledged a qualified version of his headship in 1531. This statute went further, attaching the title and its powers to the Crown. The king whose marriage had brought him into conflict with Rome would exercise authority in his own realm without accepting the pope as his superior.
Anne was a participant in this change. She supported religious reform and reforming churchmen; the break with Rome gave opportunities to people and ideas she favoured. It also helped sustain the marriage that made her queen. Her interests as a religious patron, a wife and a mother met in the same settlement. None of that meant England had suddenly become Protestant in every belief and practice. It meant that Henry's authority over its Church was being made harder to challenge.
The new Treasons Act gave that authority a sharper defence. Its provisions, taking effect from 1 February 1535, covered malicious words and actions aimed at bodily harm to the king, the queen or their heirs apparent, or at depriving them of the dignity, title or name of their royal estates. Conviction could bring death. Anne's title and her daughter's place belonged to the royal order the statute defended. Disputing Henry's settlement could carry consequences far beyond losing favour at court.
Two men were already in the Tower when this session began: Thomas More, Henry's former Lord Chancellor, and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. Their imprisonment had followed the spring succession-oath crisis, months before the new Act of Supremacy. The question of which daughter would inherit had become inseparable from what men could swear before God.
In April, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer had written to Thomas Cromwell about a possible way through. More and Fisher, he reported, were willing to swear to the succession itself, but would not accept the preamble accompanying it. Cranmer proposed accepting their narrower oath. They could promise to uphold the succession against other powers without being forced to affirm everything bound up with it. He even argued that their acceptance might help bring Catherine and Mary to accept their changed positions. There was a practical distinction available between obeying a settlement and believing every claim used to justify it.
It did not get them out of the Tower.
By November, Anne's marriage and Elizabeth's inheritance had laws behind them, while refusal had already put prominent men in prison. Yet the settlement still left Anne without a living son. Elizabeth's place would give way to any younger brother born after her. Henry's search for a male heir continued inside the marriage that Parliament was defending. Anne possessed the title, the recognition and the child placed in the succession. All three remained bound to the king whose wishes had displaced Catherine and Mary.
On 19 May 1536, eighteen months after Parliament reassembled, Anne was executed. That summer another Act of Succession declared Elizabeth illegitimate and excluded her from the throne. She was not yet three. The daughter whose inheritance Parliament had defended was now, by another act of the same institution, a daughter who could not inherit.
