Alas, what shall I do for love? For love, alas, what shall I do? Sith now so kind I do you find, To keep you me unto.
In April the ceaseless rains returned. Not a day passed without showers or a storm; often the rain continued falling through the night, and farmers who went to sleep to the sound of a gentle drizzle awoke to thunder and a downpour. In May a torrential shower flooded southeastern England for nearly thirty hours without letup, causing rivers and streams to overflow and destroying the newly sown com. Rain such as this had ruined the king's hunting the previous summer and fall; now it drove him off the tiltyard and spoiled his maying, and sent the French envoys who joined him in his outdoor pastimes scurrying for cover.
Katherine waited out the stormy season in somber anticipation. What she feared most in the world—that her beloved husband would discard her and take another wife—was indeed happening. Her world was shaking around her, yet she went on, concealing her distress and gathering what news she could of the steps the king was taking.
Much was hidden from her, but she managed to find out a good deal. She knew that leading churchmen and theologians were being asked to give opinions on the validity of the marriage, and that Wolsey—whom she blamed for the entire affair—was using his office as papal legate to expedite the case. She may even have heard something of the secret proceedings held in May at Wolsey's house at Westminister, where at Henry's request an inquiry into the marriage was held "to the tranquillity of consciences and the health of his soul."
Thus she was less surprised than stunned when toward the end of June Henry confronted her with the announcement that, as far as he was concerned, their marriage was at an end. Indeed, he said, there was no need to end something which had never been. And there was no marriage, only an illusory union based on a misunderstanding of scripture and a papal misapplication of canon law. For eighteen years these errors had gone unheeded, the king admitted, but now that they had been brought to light by learned opinion they weighed down his conscience intolerably and impelled him to leave Katherine's bed and board once and for all. It only remained for her to choose where she would live from then on, and to retire there as quickly as possible.
Henry's concise, direct message loosed all the emotion Katherine had
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kept inside for months. She wept long and piteously, and was too distraught to reply. Without appearing to grasp the enormity of his words Henry urged Katherine to keep the matter secret for the time being, adding the feeble consolation that "all would be done for the best."^
How Henry came to his decision has long been a matter of debate. Of course, the succession had preoccupied him for years and, with it, the troubling rumors of an accursed marriage. From time to time throughout the early 1520s he had discussed with churchmen the theological questions raised by the marriage of a man with his dead brother's wife, partly because he was intrigued by the intellectual puzzles they presented, and partly as an indirect way of approaching his personal dilemma. Had Erasmus been in England Henry would surely have raised these issues with him, seeking spiritual counsel as much as understanding. In the absence of his boyhood friend he hounded his confessor John Longland, bishop of Lincoln—or so Longland told his own chaplain later—becoming so insistent on the subject of the divorce that he "never left urging him until he had won him to give his consent."
In the years to come Longland would often be accused of leading Henry to question his marriage, and of suggesting a divorce. The imperial ambassador called him "the principal promoter of these practices," and in fact Longland was among the most zealous advocates of the king's cause. The weight of his influence is clear from a remark he made long afterward, when what had begun as a marital dispute had mushroomed into an epoch-making controversy. He would rather be the poorest man in the world, the bishop said, than ever have been the king's councilor and confessor. 2
In discussing with the king the ending of his marriage Longland was only articulating what was, at least by 1524, accomplished fact. Henry and Katherine no longer lived together as man and wife, and their situation was no secret. The idea of a formal separation between the king and queen must have crossed the minds of court officials, diplomats and courtiers alike, especially in view of the uncertain succession. By the time the proceedings actually began in 1527, many at Henry's court may have wondered why the king had waited so long.
Why, then, did Henry choose to act decisively when he did? What was it that, after years of talk, finally converted a vague notion into a plan of action?
Here two things confuse the matter. One is that the surviving evidence is less concerned with the actual progress of ideas and motivations in the king's mind than with what he and others wished people to believe about his motives. Henry offered different explanations for his actions at different times, depending on which seemed most useful in the circumstances. At bottom these explanations are not so much conflicting as complementary, which leads to the second source of confusion. Henry VIII was an exceedingly complex man, and was capable of maintaining several parallel rationalizations for what he thought and did at the same time. These two obstacles to simple interpretation must be kept in mind as the influences that triggered the divorce are sought.
To begin with, there was the king's conscience, always an active organ
of discrimination for Henry and increasingly the locus of his discontents. As he explained it, at the start of the new year of 1527 the full weight of Leviticus 20:21, ''If a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an impurity: he hath covered his brother's nakedness; they shall be childless," became clear to him. Consultations with learned men reinforced his newfound certainty, until he could no longer restrain himself. His long overburdened conscience goaded him, for the sake of his soul, to set right what he had done in error at the outset of his reign, and cease to think of Katherine as his wife. To be sure, the pope had given a dispensation permitting the marriage. But no earthly authority, not even the pope, could justify to Henry what was surely abominable in the sight of God.
Then too there were the French. In the course of negotiations between English and French diplomats—either in England or in France, depending on which version of the account is read—over the betrothal of Princess Mary to the second son of Francis I the issue of Mary's legitimacy arose. Was Henry certain no claim could ever be made that his marriage was invalid, thus disinheriting the princess? Because Henry told this story in several different ways, and eventually instructed his diplomats to drop it entirely, it has been looked on with suspicion as a justification invented after the fact. Yet it is not implausible. Diplomatic records are full of queries about inheritance rights, and there is no reason to doubt the possibility that the matter was raised at some point during the long weeks of deliberations. If it was, then the question may have provided the king, if not with an urgent motive, at least with a statesmanlike excuse for carrying through something he had been contemplating for other reasons.^
Finally there is the suggestion that it was Anne Boleyn and her chaplains who played on Henry's religious scruples and frightened him into putting Katherine aside. Reginald Pole, a resolute opponent of the divorce and of the religious changes that grew out of it in the 1530s—and an inverterate enemy of Henry and Anne—wrote that "the first origin of the whole lying affair" lay with Anne. Having learned from her sister's example how fleeting the king's affections were, Pole wrote to Henry, Anne resolved to keep secure her position by becoming his wife. To this end "she herself sent her chaplains, grave theologians, as pledges of how ready her will [to marry] was, not only to declare to you that it was lawful to put [Katherine] away, but to say that you were sinning mortally to keep her as your wife even for a single moment, and to denounce it as a high crime against God unless you straightway repudiated her."'*
None of these explanations rings false. If Henry's motives were not entirely idealistic, they were not entirely opportunistic either, and the protean character of his reasoning often baffled the men around him. One thing
seems certain: Henry rarely perceived his "great matter" as others did, and he maintained his idiosyncratic viewpoint throughout its tortuous course.
In thinking he could keep his proceedings secret he was particularly deceived. By mid-June, Mendoza wrote, the affair had already become "as notorious as if it had been proclaimed by the public crier," and few Londoners were without an opinion on the merits of the king's case. At Rochester Bishop Fisher, to whom Katherine appealed for advice in her
trouble, had heard what was afoot from his brother in the capital. Not long afterward the news reached Spain, carried by Katherine's sewer Francisco Felipe. He had served the queen for nearly thirty years, and his fidelity had never counted for more than in this crisis. Though the king gave him a passport allowing him to travel to Spain via France he never meant Felipe to arrive at the imperial court, knowing full well the message he carried. The French were asked to cooperate in waylaying the aging messenger. But Felipe was more wily than his would-be captors, and before he could be found in France he had reached Spain and delivered his news to Katherine's nephew at Valladolid.
Probably Henry thought the entire issue would be settled, and his troublesome marriage set aside, in a matter of months. After all, in point of law he was not seeking a divorce at all—which the church disallowed—only confirmation of the inherent invalidity of his marriage. Strictly speaking, his case was a nullity suit, and Wolsey, whose legatine powers made him, in one historian's phrase, "a kind of vice-pope for England," appeared to have the authority to rule on it. Besides, what Henry was attempting to do was hardly unprecedented. For centuries European rulers had discarded unsatisfactory spouses; accommodating popes had evolved dispensations to fit virtually any marital situation, just as they had always found ways to permit marriages between persons related by blood. Far from being writ in marble papal pronouncements on royal marriages seemed grounded in quicksand; it looked as if canon law could always be bent to bind or dissolve at will.
In recent months the dissolution suits of Henry's sister Margaret and his closest friend Charles Brandon had given fresh evidence of this. Margaret Tudor asked the pope to free her from her second husband Archibald Douglas, earl of Angus. Even if she had not aroused suspicion by living with another man—Henry Stewart, who had divorced his wife in order to marry her—Margaret would have had an exceedingly weak case. Of the two claims on which it rested, one (that her first husband James IV had not been killed at Flodden) was unquestionably false and the other unproven. Yet despite all she won her suit, and was declared free to marry again in March of 1527.
Her brother in England could not have been more outraged. Margaret had gone against the advice he had given her earlier, and had disregarded the "divine order of inseparable matrimony"; in departing from her husband she had sinned grievously, he said with indignation, for during his lifetime she could "have none other by the law of God." "The behavior of my sister sounds openly to her extreme reproach," Henry declared. "She is more like an unnatural and transformed person than a noble princess or a woman with a sense of wisdom and honor." Like all adulterers, she would surely suffer in hell, while the officials in Rome who had handed down the "shameless sentence" deserved to be punished along with her. Henry's fulminations were sincere enough, though even as he spoke them he must have noted the obliging temper of the papal court, and kept his own plea in mind.
Charles Brandon's tangled case was of greater interest to his royal brother-in-law. He had put aside one wife, outlived another, and married
a third, not without recurring compHcations. Many years earher, when he sought his dissolution, Brandon had felt some of the same pressures Henry now felt: the need for a son and heir (at the time he had only daughters), worry over an invalid papal dispensation, the sting of conscience. Like Henry, Brandon had ceased to live with his wife, so the bull of dispensation said, because in doing so he imperiled his soul. And like Henry, he had appealed to the ever capable Wolsey to conduct the legalities. Though the circumstances of Brandon's divorce were long past the case was fresh in Henry's mind, for Wolsey was currently working to obtain a bull for Brandon supplementing and overriding all earlier ecclesiastical pronouncements and punishing anyone who challenged them. If Wolsey had been able to unravel Brandon's case and bring it to a satisfactory conclusion, there was every reason to think he could confirm Henry's simple, unarguable reason for leaving Katherine.
That was, in fact, just the procedure Henry seems to have had in mind—a solemn court convened in England, with Wolsey presiding as the pope's delegate, a ruling against the dubious dispensation, a quick confirmation from Rome, and finally a quiet separation of king and queen.
And so it went—for two weeks. Wolsey convened his court, and summoned Henry before it to answer the charge that he had been living in sin. The king made his response, in person and then through a proctor, and witnesses were produced to support the contention that because Katherine and Arthur had been man and wife her subsequent union with Henry was unlawful. Wolsey's court met four times in all, then adjourned, abruptly, for the last time. Possibly the competence or finality of the court had come in doubt; more probably the extraordinary news from Italy had eclipsed all other undertakings, and set Wolsey working on a larger and more desperate task.
On the first of June news reached England that Rome had been captured by the German and Spanish troops of Charles V, and that for weeks the churches and palaces of the ancient city had been plundered and befouled by the lawless soldiers. The relics of the saints, shrines sacred to the pious for a thousand years and more, holy treasures of every kind had been destroyed or dishonored, while the monks and nuns who tended them were brutally beaten and tortured. Many clerics were killed; as the nightmare went on many of the plunderers died too, victims of the famine and disease that followed in the wake of the destruction.
The despoiling of Rome was more than a monstrous sacrilege: it was a breach with the past. Rome was the citadel of medieval faith, and the imperial invasion symbolized the onslaught of the newer doctrines—the teachings of Luther, Zwingli, and dozens of lesser-known sectaries—that were assaulting that faith with growing success. Rome was also the city of the pope, and when it fell his power fell with it. Pope Clement VII and his cardinals escaped with their lives, taking shelter in the Castel Sant'Angelo, yet for the indefinite future the pope would have only such authority as his captor, the emperor, allowed him to have.
Wolsey saw at once how fateful events in Rome could be for the successful progress of the king's nullity suit. He wrote to Henry the day after the news arrived, pointing out the harm that could be done if the
pope were killed or captured before he could release the king from his present difficulties.^ The cardinal knew well what was in the forefront of his master's mind, but there were vaster issues at stake. With the pope in the hands of a secular power the church was in need of a rescuer. Wolsey would be that man. He would go to France—where the queen mother Louise of Savoy was suggesting that all the sovereigns of Christendom should withdraw their allegiance from the bishop of Rome until the imperial captivity ended—and would summon all the other free cardinals to join him there. Acting on Pope Clement's behalf he would then take over the spiritual government of Christendom.
No man in Europe was more fitted for the task. Wolsey lived like an emperor, with one third of the English church under his personal rule. More princely than any prince of the church, he thought of himself in regal terms. When he died he intended to be buried, like the king, at Windsor; his tomb, commissioned from the Florentine sculptor Benedetto da Rovezzano, was to be as splendid as that of Henry VII. A black marble sarcophagus would hold the carved bronze figure of the cardinal lying in repose. Kneeling angels bearing the symbols of Wolsey's dignities—his cross and cardinal's hat—were to guard his head and feet, while four more angels carrying candlesticks were to be perched atop thick bronze pillars nine feet high.
Wolsey's grandiose egotism was continually reinforced by court precedent and di
plomatic flattery. It had long been customary for visitors at the English court to kiss the cardinal's hand before kissing the king's—an acknowledgment of the higher respect due to the divine office, but in practice as much a bow to Wolsey the man as to his cardinalate. The pope himself claimed to look on Wolsey not merely as a brother, but as a colleague; the cardinal relied on this collegial sentiment now, as he organized his retinue for the journey to the coast and the crossing to France.^
As he threw himself into this most ambitious venture of his long career Wolsey struggled to quiet his inner apprehensions. He was surrounded by enemies: burly Suffolk, shrewd Norfolk, clever Boleyn, now more and more the man at the king's right hand, Boleyn's friends and relatives at court and, most annoyingly, his mercurial, dark-haired daughter Anne. The common people of England hated him almost without exception, or so it seemed. He could bear the combined animosity of the entire kingdom without complaint as long as he kept the king's trust and favor, but now that too had begun to erode. He hoped, desperately, to regain Henry's reliance on him—to return to the deferential partnership that had marked their early years. In the privacy of his gardens he brooded on these things, giving orders that no one was to approach him in his musings. Suitors who came to him there were told to wait at a suitable distance, "as far as a man will shoot an arrow," until the cardinal was ready to take up the threads of government affairs again.
Before leaving for France Wolsey consulted with his astrologer, and chose a favorable day for his departure. On the appointed day his attendants formed their ranks and set off for Dover, spreading themselves out along the narrow road for three quarters of a mile. Hundreds of
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