by G. J. Meyer
No easy solutions were open to Clement. If he overruled the dispensation by which Pope Julius had approved the union of Henry and Catherine a generation before, he would compromise the authority of papal dispensations generally. If on the other hand he failed to do so, or to find some other solution, he risked losing nearly the best friend he had in all of Europe and compounding the problems rising out of the Lutheran revolt in Germany. From the beginning of the divorce case until his death, Clement repeatedly weakened his own position, risking betrayal of the principles by which justice required that the case be judged, in a fruitless effort to placate Henry. In the end the rupture between the two was caused not by obstinacy on the pope’s part but by Henry’s relentless escalation of his threats and demands even as the weakness of his case became more obvious. That weakness was so fundamental that—regardless of how much fear Charles V may have been able to arouse in the pope’s breast—any ruling in Henry’s favor would have been an act so transparently cynical as to constitute an indelible scandal. It would have seemed to confirm the worst things that any Protestant firebrand ever found to say about the papacy and its ways.
It was October 1528 when Campeggio arrived in England at last and preparations for a formal hearing could begin. The cardinal had moved northward from Rome in excruciatingly slow stages, so disabled with gout that he could travel only in a litter, in such pain that at times it was impossible for him to travel at all. He was a remarkable man, a legal scholar who had taken holy orders only after the death of the wife who had borne him five children, and an authority on canon law, a qualification rendered especially important by Wolsey’s lack of background in the subject. He was known to be honest, fair, and wise in the ways of the world, and if he had often served England as an agent in Rome he had done so without compromising his integrity. The highest possible testimony to his stature is the fact that both sides in the divorce case—Henry and Wolsey as plaintiffs, Catherine and Fisher and others on the defense—initially welcomed his involvement.
Not all the cards were on the table, however. The king and Wolsey were privy to a secret not shared with Catherine and her advisers: Campeggio had brought with him from Rome a document declaring the case to have been decided in Henry’s favor. Knowledge of this document, presumably to be disclosed at some propitious moment, bolstered Henry’s confidence that everything would soon be settled to his satisfaction. To complicate the situation even further, however, Campeggio also had unwritten instructions, confided to him by the pope in person and not known to Henry or Wolsey. Clement had told him to search for a compromise solution that would make a formal hearing unnecessary and, if no such solution emerged, to delay a final decision by every possible means. With this in mind, Campeggio met repeatedly and at length with Henry, with Catherine, with anyone who might be able to influence Henry or Catherine or help him to do so. He tried every imaginable gambit, starting by assuring the parties that the pope would be pleased to issue a new dispensation correcting any flaws in the one that had permitted the marriage in the first place. This was obviously the last thing Henry wanted. Campeggio suggested to Catherine that she should enter a convent, take religious vows, and so free her husband to marry; the queen replied that she would do so as soon as Henry agreed to enter a monastery. Some of the things that Campeggio allegedly proposed could only have come from a desperate mind. He is supposed to have invited Henry to take Anne Boleyn as his mistress with a promise that Rome would legitimize their children—and to have suggested that Henry commit bigamy, marrying Anne without dissolving his marriage to Catherine. (Martin Luther, opposed to the annulment, would offer the same idea.) He is even supposed to have encouraged the king to ensure the Tudor succession by marrying Princess Mary to her half-brother, the king’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy, an act of incest that would have stunned all Europe.
The whole affair seemed at times to be in danger of sinking to the level of farce. Henry sent a new petition to Rome, one distinct from the annulment suit, asking for a dispensation permitting him to marry Anne Boleyn in spite of the fact that her sister had, some years before, been his mistress. The issue here was the same as in the divorce: “consanguinity,” a supposed blood relationship created by sexual intercourse. Canon law said that, because of his past relationship with Mary Boleyn, Henry was linked to Anne in a brother-sister relationship as real as the one that had joined him to Catherine before their marriage—assuming that Catherine’s marriage to Prince Arthur had been consummated. If there had been no consummation, the barrier blocking Henry from marrying Anne was actually bigger than any between him and Catherine. It is curious, not to say ironic, that Henry would request a papal exemption in the Boleyn case while adamantly insisting that no pope could grant a similar exemption where Catherine was concerned. Clement quickly and cheerfully granted the king’s request, at the same time rendering his own decision worthless by noting that the dispensation could be put to use only if the marriage to Queen Catherine were found to be invalid.
In another irony, that same year Henry’s older sister Margaret, widow of King James IV of Scotland and mother of the young James V, secured an annulment of her second marriage in order to enter upon a third. Instead of congratulating her—instead of observing a disapproving silence, for that matter—Henry boiled over with indignation, accusing Margaret of violating the “divine order of inseparable matrimony.” It is probably unfair to accuse him of hypocrisy in outbursts of this kind. Whatever his own behavior, however much the standards he applied to others diverged from those he applied to himself, he does appear to have sincerely regarded himself not only as a model of uprightness but as qualified to pass judgment on his inferiors—a category into which he would have put virtually every living human being.
Even so, making every possible allowance for the blindness produced in Henry by his limitless self-satisfaction, the performance he now put on for the benefit of a number of the kingdom’s leading personages was nothing less than astonishing. In November 1528, annoyed by public demonstrations of support for Catherine (she was so loudly cheered whenever she appeared that Henry banned the gathering of crowds wherever she was in residence), he summoned to his court an august assembly that included members of his council, representatives of the nobility, and the mayor, aldermen, and other leading citizens of London. To this group he delivered an address much of which was devoted to praise of Queen Catherine, “a woman of most gentleness, humility, and buxomness,” as Henry described her. “Yea,” he added, “and of all good qualities pertaining to nobility she is without comparison.”
“If I were to marry again, I would choose her above all women,” Henry declared. “But if it be determined in judgment that our marriage is against God’s law, then shall I sorrow, parting from so good a lady and loving companion.” This was Henry VIII in one of his least attractive, most shameless manifestations: Henry the virtuous, the entirely innocent, ostentatiously shedding tears as he stated his determination to do what was right (and coincidentally most convenient to himself) no matter how deeply it pained him. It is difficult not to find him guilty of rank hypocrisy in this case.
He told the assembled dignitaries that he was prepared to accept the decision of the upcoming tribunal whatever that decision turned out to be—good evidence of his certainty that Campeggio and the pope were going to give him what he wanted. At the conclusion of his monologue, suddenly angered by no one knows what—a skeptical or sardonic look somewhere in the audience, or a sudden stab of fear that the tribunal might not end as he expected?—Henry began shouting about how he would respond if contradicted. “There was no head so fine,” an ambassador observing the proceedings reported him as saying, “that he would not make it fly.” This side of Henry would not be much in evidence for another five or six years but would thereafter become dominant.
The last little farce of 1528 came when Henry turned again to the thankless task of trying to make Rome and England and the wide world understand that his position was above rebuttal or reproach. He
circulated among the kingdom’s leading men—the nobility, the senior clergy, other persons of quality and note—a kind of petition stating that his suit should be granted because his marriage was void.
When it came back to him, it bore exactly three signatures.
One was that of the Duke of Norfolk. He was Anne Boleyn’s uncle.
Another was that of the Viscount Rochford. He was Thomas Boleyn, Anne’s father.
And the third was that of Anne’s brother George, still a very junior courtier.
It was a humiliation, but Henry did not react. Perhaps he thought it didn’t matter all that much. The new year would bring the tribunal at last, and the result of that, surely, was in the bag.
Background
THE SPANISH CONNECTION
WEARING AS HE DID A CROWN TO WHICH HE HAD ONLY the most questionable of claims, from the start of his reign the first Henry Tudor had reason to worry about the place of his new dynasty among Europe’s royal families. Acceptance was essential and could not be taken for granted. It was therefore a great coup, a breakthrough, when just a few years after the Battle of Bosworth Henry’s diplomats were able to arrange the betrothal of his little son Prince Arthur to a daughter of the royal house of Spain.
The arrangement offered Henry a connection to one of the most brilliant political partnerships in history, that of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Their 1469 marriage had united Spain’s leading Christian kingdoms, and they spent the years that followed in a hard, ultimately triumphal campaign to drive the Moors—Muslims originally from North Africa—out of the southern kingdom of Granada. (Less gloriously, the pair also used the Inquisition to expel all Jews and Muslims who refused to convert.) Ferdinand and Isabella both belonged to the ancient house of Trastámara (and were also, incidentally, descended from King Edward III of England through his son John of Gaunt). At the time of their wedding Ferdinand was king of Sicily (which his father had given him) as well as Aragon, and in due course he began competing with the kings of France for domination in Italy.
Isabella was the most impressive woman of her time. She was a strong, skillful ruler and an active field commander in the war for Granada, along the way giving birth to the son and four daughters with whom she and her husband planned to perpetuate the Trastámara dynasty and link it to other important kingdoms. Having secured for their son and heir no less a bride than the daughter of the Holy Roman emperor, and having compounded this success by arranging to marry one of their daughters to the emperor’s son and heir (two other daughters went to the Portuguese royal family), they could afford to send their youngest child, the Infanta Catalina, across the water to England. It was of course a strictly political arrangement. For Ferdinand and Isabella it was a way of keeping England from allying with France, their archrival. For the Tudors it was a confirmation of legitimacy.
More than a decade had to pass, however, before Arthur and Catalina would be old enough to live together as man and wife. Both children received superb preparation for the careers that lay ahead, but hers was the more impressive. In 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus came upon the New World during a voyage to India financed by the Spanish Crown, the six-year-old girl rode with her parents and sisters and brother into the newly conquered city of Granada. The reunification of Spain being thus complete, Isabella was able to give full attention to readying her youngest child for a future as queen of England. The result, when the time came for Catalina to journey to her new home and become Catherine, Princess of Wales, was a refined, strong-minded young woman who knew the classics, knew history and the works of the church fathers, could converse easily in Latin, and had been taught by her mother to take her duties seriously and always be loyal to her husband and the church.
During the years of waiting Spain had gone from strength to strength. Its vast New World empire took shape with astonishing speed after Columbus’s first voyages, promising to generate fabulous quantities of wealth. In 1494 the Treaty of Tordesillas drew a north-south line down the length of the Atlantic Ocean, conferring all the non-Christian lands on one side to Spain and those on the other to Portugal (which thereby acquired a Brazil that was probably not yet known to exist). King Ferdinand continued to pursue his ambitions in Italy, having so much success that in 1504 he added Naples to his string of kingdoms. All this was rendered nearly meaningless, however, by the death of his and Isabella’s newly married son, John, at nineteen. The prince’s bride was pregnant at the time of his death (which the royal physicians blamed on too much sex, the actual cause probably being tuberculosis), but the child was stillborn. Suddenly everything that Ferdinand and Isabella had built, the glorious legacy of the Trastámara, stood to be inherited by the family of their eldest surviving daughter’s husband. For Ferdinand in particular, the thought that the fruits of his achievement would fall to the German Hapsburgs was almost too galling to be endured.
When the ship bearing Catherine arrived in England in 1501 at the end of a grueling four-month voyage through heavy seas, Henry VII insisted on violating Spanish protocol and having an immediate look at her face. He was delighted by what he was shown: an exceptionally pretty and self-possessed little lady, nearly if not actually a storybook princess, obviously a fitting progenitor for a mighty line of kings. He spent heavily to make the wedding a grand public event, a declaration that the Tudors had arrived. Throughout many of the festivities Catherine was escorted by her bridegroom’s precocious brother Henry, who at age ten was Duke of York, earl marshal of England, lieutenant of Ireland, and warden of the Scottish marches and appears to have attracted far more notice than Arthur. Shortly thereafter the newlyweds were sent to their new home at Ludlow Castle, where Arthur, still only fifteen and destined to remain forever an indistinct presence in the chronicles of his time, died within a few months. The cause of death was possibly a mysterious disease called the sweating sickness that had only recently appeared in England, or possibly tuberculosis or influenza. Catherine, too, became gravely ill but recovered to find herself a widow—by her own testimony and that of her principal lady-in-waiting a virgin widow—at sixteen years of age.
Life became difficult for Catherine. She wanted to return home, but her father-in-law did not want her to go. Henry VII was on bad terms with France at the time, and fearful of losing his alliance with Spain. Never a man to part lightly with money, he had no wish to return the half of Catherine’s considerable dowry that Ferdinand had sent with her. And he continued to be impressed with Catherine herself—so much so that he applied to the pope for the dispensation required for young Prince Henry to marry his deceased brother’s wife.
By the time the dispensation was delivered in 1504—the year of Queen Isabella’s death, which deprived Catherine of her best source of support and counsel—relations between England and France had improved. Now it was Ferdinand who, afraid of an Anglo-French alliance, was determined that Catherine must remain where she was and wed the English king’s son. King Henry began to regard her as a nuisance and to treat her disgracefully. She wrote home to complain that she had lost her servants, her clothes were in tatters, and she barely had enough to eat. When Prince Henry became fourteen, the age of consent under canon law, he signed a repudiation of his betrothal. He did so, we can be sure, on the instructions of his father, who had become interested in marrying him to a Hapsburg. Wherever the repudiation originated, it was a blow to Catherine, whose health began to fail. She was making preparations to depart England when, in the spring of 1509, the king sank into his last illness and died. In short order—it must have seemed a miracle—the new king declared his intention to marry her, possibly on the advice of his Council but just as possibly because he was a youth of healthy appetites, had no experience of women and no other marriage prospects, and preferred taking an attractive bride whom he already knew over waiting for whatever his diplomats might bring home from the international matrimonial sweepstakes. He was almost eighteen, Catherine twenty-three.
It was a good marriage for a
long time. Catherine showed herself to be a devoted wife, sometimes begging Henry to change his mind but never defying him and certainly never speaking ill of him. She even personally embroidered his shirts. He for his part was clearly delighted to have a partner who was fully his equal in intelligence and learning and had far more knowledge of the world. To the extent that there was trouble, it came from Catherine’s father. Ferdinand by this time was a sour and scheming old man, devoid of any reluctance to exploit and deceive even his own daughter’s husband. In 1511, taking advantage of Henry’s eagerness to make war on France, he allied their two kingdoms in the Treaty of Westminster. He joined the subsequent invasion of France only long enough to grab the little Kingdom of Navarre for himself. Having accomplished that, he made a separate peace, leaving Henry alone, exposed and looking like a fool.
Back in England, meanwhile, Catherine was serving capably in the post to which her husband had named her before his departure: that of “rectrix and governor of the realm.” Not long after Henry’s return, when four hundred Londoners were on the verge of being executed for rampaging in the streets and pillaging the homes and businesses of foreigners, she remained on her knees in front of the king until he granted clemency. In such ways, and with her piety and unassuming demeanor, she was becoming a beloved public figure. No one had ever heard of her doing a dishonest or cruel or selfish thing.
In spite of her father, her family connections were growing in value. Old Ferdinand, a lifelong lecher and father of many bastards, remarried late in life in the hope of generating another legitimate son. He succeeded, but the child lived only hours. And so in 1516, when Ferdinand himself died, the Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile and Sicily and Naples, plus New Spain in America and much else, all passed to young Charles of Hapsburg, the son of Catherine’s apparently insane elder sister Joanna. When Charles’s paternal grandfather, Maximilian of Hapsburg, died not long afterward, Catherine found that her nephew now loomed over Europe as ruler of the Spanish dominions and Holy Roman emperor.