The Tudors

by G. J. Meyer

  She had only one real problem: children, or the absence thereof. In the first year of her marriage Catherine gave birth to a daughter, but the newborn died. A year after that she gave birth to a son, named Henry after his father, but after fifty-two days he died too. There followed in short order a miscarriage and then another short-lived boy. In February 1516 Princess Mary was born, a healthy girl with her parents’ red-gold hair. She was followed by one or possibly two more miscarriages, the last of them in 1518, at which point Catherine entered her late thirties overweight and menopausal, the girlish beauty of her earlier years a memory. Henry by contrast was barely thirty, a fountain of vitality. In 1519 his dalliance with a woman named Bessie Blount resulted in the birth of a healthy boy. In traditional fashion the child was named Henry Fitzroy—Henry son of the king. Though his mother was sent off into a respectable arranged marriage, his royal father took pleasure in having a son at last.

  He took pleasure in his daughter, too, an appealing and clever child, small like her mother, eager to please her mighty sire. There is little to suggest that the king was, at this point, greatly troubled about not having a legitimate male heir. The succession problem, to the extent that there was perceived to be one, appeared to be solved in the early 1520s when Princess Mary was betrothed to her cousin the emperor Charles. It delighted Henry to treat the Holy Roman emperor as his son, to give him advice (unwelcome though it may have been) on statecraft, and to think that one day, as a result of this glorious union, some grandchild of his would rule much of the world. It came as a shock to Henry and Catherine when, in 1525, Charles withdrew from the engagement. They should not have been surprised: Mary was only ten years old, Charles twenty-five. He had decided to marry another of his first cousins, the daughter of the king of Portugal. She was grown and brought with her a big dowry that he desperately needed.

  Henry, in his anger and disappointment, lashed out at his wife and his daughter, using Fitzroy as a weapon. At age six the boy was brought out of the shadows, shown off at court, and made Duke of Richmond (that old Tudor family title), Duke of Somerset, and Earl of Nottingham. He was given lands commensurate with his new status, and there was talk that his father intended to make him king of Ireland, perhaps one day even king of England.

  Now it was Catherine’s turn to be furious, and for the first time in a decade and a half of marriage she allowed the court to see that she was angry with her husband. Henry was untroubled. What Catherine thought had never mattered so little to him. Their marriage was dead, England’s connection to Spain and the Hapsburgs dead with it, and the stage set for all the troubles to follow.

  3

  Frustration and

  Embarrassment

  Getting rid of Catherine of Aragon was far from the only thing that Henry and Wolsey had to worry about as the 1520s drew to a close. They had a kingdom to manage and a not very happy one at that. Its propertied classes were fed up with the Crown’s incessant demands for money, and the population at large was staggering under the effects of several consecutive bad harvests. Relations with the continent required a good deal of attention as well. From January 1528 on into the following year, England in alliance with France was at war with the empire of Charles V. It was a peculiar conflict in the way that most wars of the time can seem peculiar to us: a tentative, distinctly limited affair in which England sent no soldiers across the Channel to do any actual fighting. But the stakes were not trivial. One of the ideas behind allying with France and helping to finance its armies was to isolate Charles and force him to join in the great pan-European peace that had long been Wolsey’s dream. Less loftily but no doubt more importantly from Henry’s perspective, the alliance was intended to weaken Charles to such an extent that the pope need have no fear in annulling the king’s marriage. Thus much of Europe was at war at least partly because of Henry’s “great matter.”

  But alliances and treaties meant so little in sixteenth-century Europe that one almost wonders why anyone considered them worth making. War against Charles V meant war with a Hapsburg empire extending from Hungary to Spain and on to the New World, but where England was concerned the most important part of that empire was the Duchy of Burgundy, which included the so-called Low Countries or Netherlands, today’s Belgium and Holland. In the 1520s, the empire having grown far too unwieldy for any one man to manage, Burgundy was ruled by a regent, Archduchess Margaret of Savoy. Margaret, like Catherine of Aragon, was Charles V’s aunt. But she was the sister of Charles’s late father Philip the Handsome and therefore a true Hapsburg, whereas Catherine was the sister of Charles’s mother and therefore without Hapsburg blood. In her youth Margaret had been married briefly to Catherine’s brother, the short-lived Prince John. A bond of affection had formed between the two women; the archduchess supported her sister-in-law unreservedly and thereby made herself one of Henry’s most troublesome adversaries. But money can talk more loudly than family ties, not least when whole national economies are at risk. Margaret and her imperial nephew found themselves faced with the hard fact that England, a leading source of wool for Burgundy’s textile industry, was indispensable not only to the duchy but to the empire. North of the Channel, Henry and Wolsey came up against the other side of the same coin: if cut off from its markets in the Low Countries, a worrisome part of England’s economy would be in danger of collapse. The situation posed political dangers as well: merchants, manufacturers, and workers were not likely to passively accept the loss of their livelihoods for the sake of a distant and arcane war with little real meaning for any of them (if indeed it made much sense in any objective way). Nor could the royal treasuries on either side afford to lose the revenues brought in by tariffs on the wool and cloth trade and the taxes that the industry generated. A deal was quickly cut to permit the wool and cloth trade to continue as if there were no war. The leading powers of the time never indulged in total war. The defeat of the enemy, not his total destruction, was always the point.

  King Francis of France, as charmingly amoral a rogue as was to be found in all of Europe, was prepared as usual to pursue whatever opportunities he could find regardless of alliances or declarations of war. He had reason to hate Charles V, who had imposed a humiliating peace after destroying his army in the Battle of Pavia in 1525 and taking him prisoner. Charles still held Francis’s two sons as hostages, and the strength of the Hapsburgs in Italy remained the one great obstacle to the expansion south of the Alps that Francis would lust after all his life. Nevertheless Francis now saw advantages in trying to come to terms with the empire, if only for the time being. If doing so might involve the betrayal (not for the first or last time) of his old friend Henry of England, that was a price that Francis, even more than most of the rulers of the day, would never hesitate to pay. And so by early 1529 representatives of France and Spain (Francis’s mother and Charles’s aunt Margaret prominent among them) were meeting to negotiate a peace. The English were not invited, and Wolsey was alarmed at finding himself excluded: the treaty being discussed would unite the two great continental powers, leave England without allies, and mean the ruin of everything he had been trying to achieve. Henry was little less troubled: by making peace with France, Charles would escape his isolation, and would be free to make himself the ally and patron, if perhaps not quite the master, of the pope.

  Henry’s only hope was to secure his annulment before France and the Empire came to terms. A new field of opportunity suddenly appeared to open up when, in February, word arrived of the death of Pope Clement. Henry went quickly into action, instructing his agents in Rome that everything possible should be done to secure Wolsey’s election. He had attempted this same thing on earlier occasions; long before deciding to repudiate his marriage, he had seen the advantages of placing an Englishman on the throne of St. Peter. That Wolsey himself felt any compelling desire to become pope is not at all clear; his exalted position in England appears to have satisfied even his voracious appetite for power. But things had never gone as badly for him as they were going in
1529, and he seems to have sensed that unless he seized the papacy his career, even his life, might be over. So he prepared to campaign as never before. Henry, meanwhile, was telling his agents that if Wolsey’s election proved impossible, they were to prevent the election of any of the several possible candidates answerable to Charles V. But then fresh news arrived: Clement was not dead at all, but only very sick. Several weeks passed before he recovered sufficiently to resume his meetings with England’s representatives in Rome. The senior member of the embassy, Stephen Gardiner, was a youngish priest-courtier of the sort that had for centuries played a central role in the government of England. Earlier Gardiner had served as Wolsey’s secretary and had won the king’s favor by energetically supporting the case for the annulment. Now, having traveled to Italy on Henry’s behalf and accomplished nothing, he was desperate for a success of some kind to report back to England. To the papal court he repeated Wolsey’s warnings that Henry, if thwarted, might ally himself with the reformers who were tearing the church apart in Germany. Audaciously, he urged Clement to consider the consequences for his own soul should he die without having given Henry the justice to which he, as king, was entitled. The pope, as he unfailingly did when pressed in this way, offered sincere but useless assurances that he wished to be as helpful to the English monarch as it lay within his power to be.

  Henry and Wolsey were growing desperate too. Blocked in Rome, and frustrated by how badly their proxy war with the empire was going (the supplies of gold they were sending to France were not preventing Charles from winning one military victory after another), they once again focused their hopes on the tribunal for which Cardinal Campeggio had been sent from Rome months before. All was in readiness for the hearing—the trial—that Campeggio was still under secret orders to delay by every possible means. The king’s case had long since been ready. Catherine, too, with the assistance of English advisers including Bishop John Fisher and canon lawyers sent from Flanders by Margaret of Savoy, had made extensive preparations. In the course of doing so, however, Catherine had lost whatever hope she originally had of receiving an impartial hearing. From Wolsey she could obviously expect nothing. And Campeggio, she now feared, was so eager to accommodate the king and had been so entangled in Wolsey’s machinations as to be no longer capable of independent judgment. And so, early in March, arguing that the tribunal lacked the authority to hear the case and could not be expected to proceed without bias, she sent a letter asking Clement to recall the question to Rome. The pope, around whose neck the case now hung like a rotting corpse, did nothing in response. Catherine’s appeal had no effect on Henry’s determination to move forward, Campeggio could offer no justification for further delay, and on May 28 a license for the tribunal to begin its business was issued under the king’s Great Seal.

  The tribunal met for the first time three days later at Blackfriars Abbey in London, a full seven months after Campeggio’s arrival in England. It remained in session for a month, producing drama of the highest order. On June 18, the first day on which Catherine’s representatives were expected to appear, the queen arrived in person. She repeated the complaints that she had already directed to the pope, telling the legates that their proceedings were inherently illegitimate and she herself was at a hopeless disadvantage, and that she therefore intended to offer no defense. She demanded that Wolsey and Campeggio send the case back to Rome.

  When she and Henry were ordered to appear on June 21, both did so, the king no doubt eagerly and with high expectations, the queen under protest. The few accounts of that day’s proceedings differ as to whether the king or the queen spoke first, but they agree about what was said. Henry delivered an oration, a reprise of the things he had said earlier to the dignitaries assembled at his court. He had asked the pope to commission a tribunal, he said, not because of any fault in Catherine—again he rhapsodized about what a good wife and queen she had always been—but because the promptings of his conscience left him with no choice. Perhaps because he knew he was rumored to be a mere pawn of Wolsey in this matter, more likely to assert Wolsey’s ability to serve as an impartial judge, he claimed that from the beginning he had proceeded not on but against the cardinal’s advice. To the extent that he had followed the counsel of anyone, he said, it had been that of his confessor and of certain learned (but unnamed) bishops in England and France. He repeated his transparently absurd assertion that nothing would make him happier than a finding in favor of the legitimacy of his marriage, saying again that he intended to accept the tribunal’s decision whatever it turned out to be.

  Wolsey’s contribution that day was to announce that he and Campeggio had found against Catherine’s protest, so that the case would not be returned to Rome—not, at least, by them. He assured all assembled that he was in no way prejudiced against the queen and wanted nothing except a just resolution of the case. Campeggio must have struggled to follow the proceedings; his knowledge of English was so limited that since his arrival he had had to communicate in French and Latin.

  At some point, possibly before Henry gave his speech—though it makes a better story to assume (as Shakespeare later would) that she acted in response to what the king had said—Catherine rose from her chair, crossed the room to where Henry sat, and dropped to her knees before him.

  “Sir,” she began in the accent that had not left her in a quarter-century in England, “I beseech you to pity me, a woman and a stranger, without an assured friend and without an indifferent counselor. I take God to witness that I have always been to you a true and loyal wife, that I have made it my constant duty to seek your pleasure, that I have loved all whom you loved, whether I had reason or not, whether they were friends to me or foes. I have been your wife for years. I have brought you many children. God knows that when I came to your bed I was a virgin, and I put it to your own conscience to say whether it was or was not so. If there be any offense which can be alleged against me, I consent to depart with infamy. If not, then I pray you do me justice.”

  It was at least as much a challenge as an appeal. Catherine waited for a response, but Henry said nothing. Finally she stood, a short, stout woman, aging and careworn but totally in control of herself, her dignity anchored in the knowledge that she herself was descended from kings of England and was the daughter not only of a powerful king but of a great queen. After bowing deeply in Henry’s direction she made for the exit. When an attendant attempted to call her back, she paused and spoke again. “I never before disputed the will of my husband,” she declared to the silent chamber. “I shall take the first opportunity to ask pardon for this disobedience.” With that she was gone, ignoring further demands for her return. Neither on that occasion nor at any other time did the king attempt to contradict Catherine’s assertion that she had been a virgin on the day they were wed.

  Catherine refused all future summonses to appear or to send representatives, and the tribunal declared her “contumacious” for doing so. The hearing therefore unfolded as an entirely one-sided affair, with the king’s attorneys arguing his case and receiving no rebuttal. Basically that case rested on three main points: that the marriage of Arthur and Catherine had in fact been consummated (unproven at best); that the dispensation permitting Henry to wed Catherine had been obtained under false pretenses (the evidence for this complicated claim was even less impressive than the witnesses who testified to Prince Arthur’s alleged boast, the morning after his wedding, that he had spent a hot night “in the midst of Spain”); and finally that a document produced by Catherine to prove that her father had known her first marriage to be unconsummated was a forgery (extremely improbable, and if true not possibly decisive). Weak as the king’s position was, the fact that his was the only case being presented must have heightened Henry’s expectation that the matter would soon be brought to a satisfactory conclusion. Poor Campeggio, largely dependent upon Wolsey and others to explain what was being said by the attorneys and witnesses, must have wondered how he was going to avoid making a final ruling. He wrote to
Clement, plaintively adding his voice to those asking for a recall of the case to Rome.

  On the mainland of Europe, meanwhile, the ground was shifting in ways that Henry could not have welcomed and must have cost Wolsey sleep. On June 21—the day of Catherine’s challenge to Henry—the forces of the empire met a French army at Landriano and routed it. This was the second time in four years that Charles had inflicted a devastating defeat on Francis in Italy, and it convinced the French king to push the talks then in process forward to completion. The resulting Peace of Cambrai, signed on August 3, left Italy under Hapsburg control. The triumphant emperor, a canny diplomat as well as one of the best generals of the day, wisely began dealing not only gently but magnanimously with the pope, allowing his return to Rome and the rebuilding of the city’s ruined defenses. Clement at this point had every reason for wanting the friendliest possible relations with Charles, who had never been less than respectful in his dealings with the papacy and was its strongest, most dependable ally in the endlessly difficult struggle with the Protestants of Germany. Among the forces drawing pope to emperor was the fact that Charles, once again master of Italy in the aftermath of Landriano, had it in his power to decide whether the pope’s Medici kinsmen would be allowed to rule in Florence. Clement declared, not surprisingly, that he was now a committed “imperialist.”