Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  There were, as always, diplomatic inducements as well. When Charles V’s victory at Pavia in 1525 made him master of the continent, Henry believed the moment had come for English and imperial armies to carry out his lifelong dream, his “Great Enterprise” against France. The emperor, whose wars had exhausted his treasury, was not caught up in Henry’s romantic ambitions, and his lack of enthusiasm for the conquest of France, combined with his abrupt decision to marry the Portuguese princess Isabella instead of Mary, led to a breach between the two sovereigns. Katherine was a victim of that breach. Her position at Henry’s court had been changing for some time, but with the dissolving of the imperial alliance it grew more awkward than ever. She had long since lost her usefulness to him, and was now little more than a relic of the early years of his reign. Henry had improved with age, and was still robust and youthful; Katherine had become stout and massive, with the fleshy jowls and sagging cheeks of an ill-favored Spanish matron. At twenty, her look of demure innocence had made her plainness appealing; at forty, the deep sadness and resignation in her bloated face made her grotesque. Sympathetic courtiers and visitors who searched the queen’s features saw there an unmistakable nobility of expression; casual observers said she was ugly, and made jokes about the young king and his old wife.

  For years Katherine had been Henry’s wife in name only, and with the opening of the divorce procedures Henry’s representatives became guardedly candid about her sexual inadequacies. It is impossible to be precise about these complaints. As a young woman Katherine had been troubled by some ailment whose symptoms, including irregular menstrual periods, misled her into believing that she was pregnant when she was not. Repeated real pregnancies may well have brought new disorders, or made the old one worse; by the time she reached her early forties Wolsey was hinting that there were “secret reasons” why Katherine was no longer a fit wife. “There are certain diseases in the queen defying all remedy,” he wrote, “for which and other causes the king will never live with her.”1Whatever disappointment this may have caused her was sharpened by Henry’s habitual flirtations and brief seductions, and by his long-term liaison with Mary Carey. Katherine was forced to look past these indignities without complaint, keeping her inward torment from her daughter and confiding in her few remaining Spanish gentlewomen and priests. Her only close relative was her nephew Charles V, and as she grew older and more unhappy she maintained the affectionate bond that had grown up between them on his successive visits to England.

  It was precisely this bond that now made her an irritant. For if Katherine was indecorous and superfluous, she was also, in Wolsey’s eyes at least, potentially traitorous as well. She had never said or done anything to arouse suspicion, but her sympathies were all on the imperial side, and as Wolsey maneuvered toward a reopening of the alliance with France he became more and more fearful about the queen’s loyalties. He kept himself informed about whom she saw and wrote to, and saw to it that she did not communicate with the emperor’s ambassador in England. He paid spies to live in her household and report all that they saw and heard, and even bribed her trusted servants. One serving woman, torn between Wolsey’s pressure and her love for Katherine, left the court entirely rather than betray her mistress.2

  Beyond all the talk of biblical law, diplomatic necessity and the need for a male heir lay a more disruptive motive for the divorce: Henry’s celebrated passion for Anne Boleyn. Cynics then and since have claimed that if he had never met Anne Henry would have remained complacently married, content with his pattern of routine infidelities and untroubled by scruples of conscience. Or, they have speculated, if the king had wanted Anne a little less and she had yielded a little more, his ardor would have burned itself out in time and Anne would have gone the way of Bessie Blount and Anne’s sister Mary Carey. But as it happened,Henry’s attraction to Anne was unaccountably strong, and her sense of her power over him unusually acute. For seven years she kept herself in the center of his attention, yet just out of reach, until in the end he discarded and persecuted his wife and daughter, cast off England’s immemorial allegiance to the pope and raised himself to new heights of power verging on tyranny, all in the attempt to make Anne queen.

  Anne Boleyn was a black-eyed brunette of about fifteen when she came to Henry’s court in 1522. She was then a thin and somewhat gawky adolescent with a neck too long for her heart-shaped face, but over the next four years she blossomed under the attentions of her cousin, the poet Thomas Wyatt, and Henry Percy, son of the earl of Northumberland, who pined after her and wanted to marry her. Four years at the French court had made her more sophisticated than most English girls, and four more spent observing the king’s relationship with her sister gave her a jaundiced view of the way powerful men treated the women they used for pleasure. Mary Carey was a willing, uncomplaining plaything who submitted to a one-sided bargain in which she gave Henry everything he wanted and got nothing in return. By the time she was nineteen, Anne was determined to make a better bargain than her sister, and it may have been that rivalry with her predecessor which helped her to keep her resolution in the face of Henry’s years of wheedling, coy reproaches and clumsy wooing.

  She was helped, too, by the relatives and friends who promoted her romance with the king in order to further their own fortunes and political interests. In 1527 nearly all of Henry’s close companions were linked to Anne. Charles Brandon and William Compton were her close friends, Francis Bryan was her cousin, Henry Norris her near relative and admirer. Her brother George was prominent at court, and her father, Thomas Boleyn, had recently been made Viscount Rochford. Beyond these immediate advantages she had aristocratic connections and royal ancestry. Her grandfather was the second duke of Norfolk, the powerful third duke of Norfolk was her uncle, and both her parents could claim Plantagenet descent.3 Henry, who was too shrewd not to take all these things into consideration, pushed them to the back of his mind and indulged his lovesick preoccupation to the hilt. From the summer of 1527 he shut Katherine out of his consciousness, gave little thought to Mary, and put Wolsey in charge of arranging his divorce. He composed inarticulate love letters to his sweetheart and showered her with gifts, and in the evenings he put on his diamonds and brocades, drank as much wine as he could hold, and danced until daybreak.

  Katherine found out about her husband’s plan to divorce her several weeks before he had the courage to tell her himself. She heard aboutWolsey’s secret court of inquiry, and informed the imperial ambassador Mendoza. Before long the entire matter was an open secret.

  Toward the end of June Henry came to the queen’s apartments and said simply that he now found they had never been legally married, and that he was taking steps to have the situation rectified by the pope. Katherine wept, and Henry, unnerved, left the room. Even though she had known it was coming, hearing of the divorce from his own lips shattered Katherine’s composure, and left her agonized. The sheer heart-lessness of the blow was what alarmed her most; in her eighteen years as Henry’s wife she had not known him to be so openly, deliberately cruel. He had exposed her to a thousand humiliations, and had lashed out at her in anger, but this blunt, pitiless malevolence was new.

  As soon as her panic passed she sent for help. Her courier reached the court of Charles V late in July, carrying a letter which confirmed the startling news of Henry’s plans. The emperor’s response was unambiguous yet cautious. He sat down and wrote a letter to Henry in his own hand, urging him to abandon the divorce as injurious to England’s security and likely to lead to “everlasting feuds and partialities” over the question of the succession. At the same time he sent a message to Katherine emphasizing the enormity of the king’s action, “calculated to astonish the whole world,” and assuring her that he would “do everything in his power on her behalf.” Privately he wrote to Mendoza that the entire issue must be treated as a family matter for the time being; if possible, he must prevent it from becoming an affair of state. Above all, Charles feared that through Henry’s ill-advised whim both Ka
therine and Mary would be irrevocably dishonored, “a thing in itself so unreasonable that there is no example of it in ancient or modern history.”4

  As the months passed Henry’s sudden, scandalous decision was transformed into an interminable, highly technical legal debate. Embassy after embassy was sent to Rome—first Henry’s chosen negotiator William Knight, then Wolsey’s representatives, bishops Gardiner and Fox, and still later Francis Bryan and the diplomat Peter Vannes. None of these legations moved Pope Clement, who was still attempting to recover from the destruction of his city and the indignities of captivity. Charles released him seven months after his troops seized Rome, and the pope was trying to rebuild his court in exile at Orvieto, but he was no longer capable of acting independently even if he had been a man of strong character, which he was not. He would not offend the emperor by granting the divorce; he feared to alienate Henry by an outright refusal to grant it. In short, he did nothing, and he did it with every semblance of purposeful activity the papal bureaucracy could devise.

  After a year the papal legate Cardinal Campeggio came to England, bringing with him authorization to convene a court to examine the case,but Clement had told him to delay a conclusive decision for as long as possible, meanwhile urging Henry to take Katherine back. Soon after Campeggio arrived Katherine threw all Henry’s previous efforts into confusion by producing a second papal bull pronouncing her marriage to Henry valid. The need to discredit this second bull led to further diplomatic convolutions, and ultimately, by the spring of 1529, to a complete stalemate in the negotiations with the pope.

  As if to complement the murky frustrations of these proceedings the sweating sickness broke out again in London. Once again without warning the cycle of chills, “fervent heat,” delirium and death broke in upon ordinary lives. Forty thousand were affected in the first outbreak alone, and Londoners fleeing the infection carried it into the countryside where it struck thousands more. Commerce and government slowed, and then stopped altogether; courts were adjourned and countinghouses locked up. Wolsey, who had come safely through the sweat once, made certain to avoid infection by locking himself away until the visitation was over. Anyone who wished to speak with the cardinal, the French ambassador wrote, had to shout through a trumpet. Householders of all degrees, from the king on down, brought out the vials and boxes of medicines they had kept from the last assault of the sweat ten years earlier, but the disease was as fatal as ever. In the words of one who lived through it, the sweat “brought more business to the priests than the doctors,” and was so “pestiferous and ragious” that the only safety lay in moving from place to place, staying one step ahead of infection.

  When Henry’s gentleman William Compton caught it and died, and Anne Boleyn and others of the court were very ill, the king moved suddenly to a manor in Hertfordshire, leaving his courtiers and his sweetheart to struggle along as best they might. He wrote Anne an encouraging note reminding her that the disease spared women more often than men, but by the time she was able to read it she was probably out of danger, and was certainly angry at his desertion. The king took particular care for Henry Fitzroy, ordering him moved from Pontefract Castle when six people in the neighboring parish died of the sweat. He worried that there was no doctor within reach, and personally compounded preventives for the boy and his household. “Thanks be to God and to your said highness,” Fitzroy wrote to his father when the epidemic had died down, “I have passed this last summer without any peril or danger of the ragious sweat that hath reigned in these parts and other, with the help of such preservatives as your highness did send to me, whereof most humble and lowly I thank the same.”5

  Whether Henry dosed his wife and daughter with his medicines is unknown, but they were with him in his Hertfordshire retreat, and for a time the bitter issue of the divorce took second place to the more pressing question of survival. Mary had been ill with smallpox slightly before the sweat appeared and was in fragile health, while Katherine’s constitution was beginning to weaken under the strain of the drawn-out delays and difficulties in the king’s proceedings. In her dealings with Henry she chose to behave as if nothing had changed, but her cheerful and loving manner toward him was kept up at great cost, and her confessor and Spanish gentlewomen knew well what anguish she kept hidden.

  Katherine’s anguish was made worse by the constant efforts of Wol-sey, Campeggio and others to separate her from Henry, if possible, by some means short of divorce. One obvious alternative was to persuade her to enter a convent—an action which, under church law, would have released Henry from the marriage as irrevocably as her death. At first this solution was proposed to her under the mildest of conditions; she would lose nothing but “the use of the king’s person,” and would be allowed to keep her dowry, her income from rents, and her jewels. Most important, her entry into religion would in no way diminish Mary’s succession rights. But Katherine was not tempted, even for a moment, to agree to any proposal under which she would cease to be Henry’s wife, and she did not even take time to think it over before refusing. Other proposals angered her. Campeggio and Wolsey both favored a scheme which would satisfy Henry’s desire to be rid of Katherine while preserving Mary as his heir. This plan called for the princess to marry Fitzroy after a papal dispensation overcame the obstacle of their blood relationship, but though it was suggested more than once no one took steps to implement it. Still another ingenious if unconventional solution, which seems to have originated with Clement VII himself, was that Henry marry Anne without divorcing Katherine, becoming the first bigamous monarch in Western history.

  The longer a definitive resolution was delayed the more impatient Henry grew, and his impatience put unbearable pressure on those who served him. He pressed Wolsey hardest, and the cardinal used every tactic at his command to obtain the divorce. He badgered the pope, he hounded the papal legate, and when Campeggio tried to persuade him to withdraw his support for the king’s cause he found Wolsey “no more moved than if I had spoken to a rock.”6 Wolsey was in fact being torn in two by the growing rift between Henry and Clement. As a cardinal of the Roman church he was a servant of the pope, and of papal interests, while as chancellor and principal churchman of the realm he owed primary allegiance to the king. As long as English and papal policies coincided, as they did throughout the earlier years of Henry’s reign, Wolsey’s two roles were complementary, but now they had become irreconcilably opposed.

  He blamed Anne for his dilemma. If Henry had to take a second wife,he said to him in private, let her be a princess from the French royal house, not a coquettish woman of the court. It galled him that neither Anne nor her relatives respected his high status; he was accustomed to having his wants attended by dukes and earls, and even those who admired him most admitted in after years that he was “the haughtiest man that then lived.” That Anne had usurped his powers of persuasion over the king he found unforgivable, and he slandered her openly. “I know there is a night crow that possesses the royal ear against me,” he said, “and misrepresents all my actions.” Henry, of course, sided with Anne, and so brought further tensions into a court already divided in its loyalties.

  Henry’s sister Mary, Katherine’s gentlewomen and countless others who admired the queen were outraged that the king should try to put another woman in her place. They found the divorce and everything connected with it morally offensive, and only their fear of Henry and of the growing power of his sweetheart kept them from making spirited complaints. As it was, Anne was the object of open contempt and sarcasm; as Katherine’s position at court declined, Anne became hated.

  Henry’s impatience with Katherine’s resolute determination to remain his wife now led to threats and disgrace. He sent the queen a written message, delivered by two bishops, ordering her to comply with his desire to put her aside or Mary would be taken from her. In a parody of her real conduct, he accused Katherine of tormenting him, and of trying to turn his subjects against him by acknowledging their cheers of support and affection. He warned he
r that, should “certain ill-disposed persons”—meaning agents of the emperor—try to assassinate Henry or Campeggio, she would bear the full weight of punishment. As before, Katherine was not intimidated, and held her ground. But she saw now the full depth and menace of the king’s own resoluteness. He meant to have his way, and he meant to harm whoever opposed him. If Katherine would not yield, she must be made to comply by force. She was moved away from Greenwich, and Anne Boleyn was installed in her apartments there. The transition from Queen Katherine to Queen Anne was well under way.

  Another step came with the summoning of the long-delayed legatine court in the summer of 1529. Here Katherine made two dramatic gestures. She flung herself at Henry’s feet and begged him to take her back, and when this had no effect she defied him, announcing that she refused to accept the biased judgment of a court assembled in England under Henry’s control. She appealed to the pope, she said, and walked out of the room.

  Katherine had in fact considered contesting the divorce in the legate’s court. She sent to Flanders for two imperialist lawyers to argue in herfavor, but they never arrived. The emperor had stated that no English court could arrive at a just judgment in the matter, and to send lawyers to act in such a court would be contradictory. The imperial ambassador Mendoza disapproved of this decision. Katherine’s chief supporters were the English people, he wrote, “who love her and generally take her part in this affair.” If they saw that she was abandoned by her relatives and friends on the continent, he feared they would lose courage and think her cause hopeless.7 His fears were disproved, though, by the reception that greeted the queen as she left the court. A large crowd was waiting for her, and shouted approval and encouragement as she passed. Those who described the scene noted the large numbers of women who called out to Katherine and cheered her on. If it were left to the women to decide, the French ambassador wrote in a dispatch, Henry would be certain to lose his case.