The young lawyer William Roper,58 who had married Margaret, one of More’s daughters by his first wife, in 1521,59 rejoiced at the king’s happiness and his close friendship with his father-in-law. But More warned of the quicksilver fickleness of Henry’s favour:
I thank our Lord I find his grace my very good lord indeed and I believe he singularly favours me as any subject with [in this] realm.
Howbeit son Roper, I may tell you I have no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head [could] win him a castle in France … it should not fail to go.60
His words were unhappily prophetic. A new salacious power that was to touch their lives and damage all of them – the queen, More and countless others – had now come to court.
Mary Boleyn’s younger sister Anne made her debut at a court pageant on 1 March 1522 – Shrove Tuesday – staged in honour of Imperial ambassadors visiting London. She was probably aged around twenty-three.
The extravagant masque, at Wolsey’s palace at York Place, was based on the theme of courtly love. Workmen had laboured twelve days to erect a large wooden castle, complete with battlements and three towers. Its green tinfoil decoration provided the name of this mock fortress: ‘Chateau Vert’. Eight masked ladies were perched in the towers, dressed in white satin and wearing Milan bonnets trimmed with Venetian gold, representing the feminine virtues of Honour, Kindness, Perseverance, Bounty, Beauty, Pity, Constancy and Mercy. Considering her new role in Henry’s life, it is not surprising that Mary Boleyn took the leading role of ‘Beauty’. Anne played ‘Perseverance’.61 Every tower bore a banner with embroidered emblems symbolising the agonies of unrequited love: three broken hearts, a female hand gripping a man’s heart and another lady’s hand turning a man’s heart upside down.
The allegorical roles of the opposite male attributes were led by Henry, again not unexpectedly acting as ‘Amorousness’. He and his seven fellow thespians wore caps and coats of cloth of gold and tinsel and cloaks of blue satin.
Defending the ladies were eight boy choristers from the Chapel Royal, dressed bizarrely as Indian women, representing the supposed feminine vices – Disdain, Jealousy, Scorn, Malebouche (a sharp tongue) and the like. They were invited to surrender the castle but when Disdain and Scorn piped up their staunch refusal in their treble voices, the courtiers playfully assaulted the fortress, throwing oranges, dates and ‘other fruits made for pleasure’ at its occupants, who stoutly defended themselves with streams of rosewater and by hurling sweetmeats at the assailants. At the climactic moment, the boy choristers clumsily retreated in their dresses, but not without three losing their hats, for which Richard Gibson, the master of the revels, had to ruefully pay 11d each.62
The ladies were made winsome prisoners and then both groups of gorgeously attired actors ‘danced together very pleasantly’ which ‘much pleased’ the envoys. ‘When they [had] danced their fill’ they removed their masks to reveal their identities and all went into a costly banquet.63
Anne had returned from a spell at the French court. To modern tastes, she would not be considered a great beauty: short rather than tall, with a sallow (if not swarthy) complexion, a ‘bosom not much raised’, a wide, sly mouth and a long neck (Plate 16). She was proud of her long brown hair and her black flashing almond eyes were compelling, if not bewitching. Anne aroused strong emotions and some were uncomplimentary about her appearance. Nicholas Sander, the Elizabethan recusant, claimed later that
she had a projecting tooth under the upper lip and on her right hand, six fingers.
There was a large wen [goitre] under her chin and … to hide its ugliness she wore a high-[necked] dress covering her throat.64
Therein lies the genesis of Anne Boleyn’s abominable sixth finger on her left hand, indicating to the superstitious that she was a witch or a sorceress with evil magical powers which she deployed against the king. In truth, she did have a small growth on one finger, as testified to by George Wyatt:
There was found on the side of her nail upon one of her fingers some little show of a nail which yet was so small by the report of those that have seen her … and was usually by her hidden.65
Anne Boleyn now briefly recedes from the limelight to a dim, barely seen role at Henry’s court until 1527. Katherine fatally accepted her as one of her maids of honour. Her uncle, the Third Duke of Norfolk, had urged a politically expedient marriage between Anne and James Butler, one of the disorderly Irish nobility, but the Boleyns showed no great enthusiasm for this match. She had a brief affair with Henry Percy, heir to the earldom of Northumberland, and then amorously toyed with the poet Thomas Wyatt the Elder, who lived quite close to the Boleyn seat at Hever Castle, Kent, and moved in the same circles at court.
How Henry fell lock, stock and barrel for her some time in 1526 is unclear. There is one unsubstantiated story, with its elements of courtly love and obscure symbolism, that smacks of some veracity. One of Anne’s attendants, Anne Gainsford, recounted how Wyatt had filched a small jewel from her mistress to wear around his neck on a ribbon. About the same time, the king also took ‘from her a ring and that [he] wore upon his little finger’. Several days later Henry was playing bowls with Wyatt and other courtiers and claimed his throw had hit the jack. He pointed with his little finger wearing the ring, saying, ‘Wyatt, I tell you that it’s mine!’ The poet pulled out Anne’s jewel and used its ribbon to measure the distance between jack and wood, declaring: ‘If it may like [please] your majesty to give me leave to measure it, I hope it will be mine.’ The king was immediately angered, snapping, ‘It may be so, but then am I deceived’ – with ominous emphasis on the last word. He strode off to confront Anne, who hastily explained she had played no part in Wyatt’s theft.66
Around eighteen months after the ennoblement of his illegitimate son, Henry must have decided to seek a decree of nullity on his marriage from Pope Clement VII.67 He had briefly considered declaring Fitzroy his heir instead of Princess Mary, but had discarded this as a risk too far politically. The idea of Mary governing England after his death was also unacceptable to a patriarchal Tudor who understood only too well the lessons of English history.68
The king was still young and frenetically active and convinced himself that with another wife, the longed-for male heirs would soon fill the royal nursery. The alternatives were just too ghastly to contemplate – Mary married off to a European ally with a subsequent union between England and a foreign crown, or worse still, a return to the anarchy of divisive civil war, such as the thirty-two bloody years of the Wars of the Roses, which were still fresh in the nation’s memory.
There were also painful reminders of his own mortality. On 10 March 1524 Henry survived a perilous jousting accident as he ran against Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. The king was proudly wearing new armour ‘made of his own devise and fashion’ but he thundered down the tiltyard vaingloriously with the visor of his helmet still up, leaving his face unprotected. Spectators cried out warningly: ‘Hold! Hold!’ but the horses ran on, their riders’ lances menacingly levelled. Edward Hall was probably a witness:
What sorrow it was to the people when they saw the splinters of the duke’s spear strike on the king’s headpiece.
The duke struck the king on the brow right under the defence of the headpiece on the very skull … [it] broke all to shivers … all the king’s headpiece was full of splinters.
Henry was lucky not to have his neck broken or his skull fractured. With typical Tudor bravado, he ran six more courses to show he was unharmed, even though his face was painfully bruised. But thereafter, he suffered headaches which became more severe in 1527 – 8, suggesting that he had sustained a cerebral injury.69
During the royal progress of that year, Henry was also confined to bed at Canterbury with ‘a sore leg’ – thought to be a varicose ulcer on the left leg. This was probably caused by the constrictive garter he fashionably wore below the knee, or alternatively was the result of a traumatic injury received while jousting. Thomas Vicary, a local surgeon, managed to h
eal the ulcer quickly and relatively painlessly.70
In 1525 Henry had another narrow escape while hawking near Hitchin in Hertfordshire. The king, showing off as usual, athletically vaulted over a water-filled ditch using a pole, but it suddenly broke ‘so that if Edmond Moody, a footman, had not leapt into the water and lifted up his head which was fast in the clay, he [would] have drowned’.71
Three years later the fourth pandemic of sweating sickness struck England – infecting 40,000 people in London alone and killing more than 2,000 of them.72 Wolsey and the Duke of Norfolk both contracted the disease and recovered, but five members of the royal household went down with it, including the king’s apothecary. Three courtiers very close to Henry died – William Compton, William Carey and Francis Poyntz. The king fled from Greenwich to Eltham and then on to the more remote of his palaces to escape the ravages of ‘the sweat’. Anne Boleyn was dispatched to a quarantined existence at Hever, with Henry assuring her that ‘few women or none have this malady’.73 She and her brother George did contract a mild dose and the king thoughtfully sent William Butts, his second-best physician, to successfully treat her.74
God ‘of His Goodness’ may have preserved the king again but would death claim him before he had his son and heir? A divorce and a new wife, in Henry’s eyes, grew more urgent each day.
A manuscript in the royal library provided a potentially persuasive argument to support an annulment. It is a thirteenth-century copy of the biblical Book of Leviticus produced by the monks of St Augustine’s Priory in Canterbury. On folio 159 verso are the lines from chapter twenty, verse twenty-one, in Latin:
If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing. He hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.
Alongside, in the margin, is a ‘manicule’ or ‘pilcrow’, a tiny hand with a long pointing index finger, freely sketched in ink to emphasise the importance of the passage.75 Here was the veiled reason for his lack of sons at last revealed – he had married his brother’s wife clean against the law of God and His Holy Church. The king’s ‘scrupulous conscience’, usually rarely troubled, was immediately assailed by the awful realisation that all along he had been living in mortal sin with Katherine.
Many were convinced it was Wolsey who had planted this idea in the king’s mind, using John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln, to impart it during the secrecy of the royal confession.76 For example, the new Spanish ambassador Iñigo de Mendoza claimed that ‘as the finishing stroke to all his iniquities, the cardinal is scheming to bring about the queen’s divorce’77 But Wolsey, perhaps thinner skinned than he appeared, always refuted this and later asked Henry to declare publicly ‘whether I have been the chief inventor or first mover of this matter unto your majesty for I am greatly suspected of all men herein’. The king replied: ‘My lord cardinal I can well excuse herein … You have been rather against me in attempting or setting forth thereof.’78 On another occasion Wolsey said that when he heard of the divorce, he knelt humbly before the king ‘in his Privy Chamber … the space of an hour or two, to persuade him from his will and appetite but I could never bring to pass to dissuade him therefrom’.79 Longland, for his part, maintained it was the king who raised the subject ‘and never left urging him until he had won him to give his consent’.80
So it was all Henry’s idea, and when he wanted something, nothing would deter him from grasping it. Those chilling words from Leviticus were a revelation from God Himself and the fact that he had fallen for another woman was irrelevant – merely forming the means to the all-important end of securing his dynasty.
In February 1527 the College of Cardinals in Rome wrote to Wolsey warmly complimenting him on his encouragement of Henry to defend Holy Church. It was a glowing testimonial:
Placed as you are at such a distance and in the very corner of Christendom, in piety and affection to the Church you are superior to many who are much nearer.
So long as Henry rules and has such an adviser, the ship of the Church will ride safely through the storm.81
Pride, they say, comes before a fall. As far as both the Vatican and Wolsey were concerned, one of the greatest falls in history was swiftly heading their way.
Like most major catastrophes, a number of small factors conspired to increase the tempo of a headlong flight to disaster.
Two months after the cardinals had heaped their praise on him, an unenthusiastic Wolsey sent his officials to Winchester to interrogate Bishop Richard Fox on the events of 1501 to 1505. The seventy-eight-year-old former minister was decrepit, completely blind and his memory lacked clarity. For two days they badgered and hectored him on whether Katherine’s marriage to Arthur had been consummated and whether Henry had truly wanted to marry his brother’s widow. The poor old man was stammering and hesitant in his replies to their progressively more vexed questions. The officials reported:
He cannot speak of his own knowledge but he thinks that Henry desired the marriage and that he loved Katherine for her excellent qualities … He does not remember that Henry, when he arrived at the age of puberty, expressly consented to, or dissented from the marriage … but he thinks a protestation was made … still to be found with Master Ryden, clerk of the council.
Fox, as wily as ever, refused to sign his deposition, but one of his interrogators, the lawyer Richard Wolman, signed it for him.82
This was not an auspicious start. Wolsey had no choice but to convene his legatine court at York Place on 17 May to covertly examine the validity of Henry’s marriage to Katherine. William Warham, the seventy-seven-year-old Archbishop of Canterbury, who had voiced doubts about the marriage in 1509, acted as assessor. In his dotage, he lived in mortal terror of the king: ‘Indignatio Principis mors est,’ he warned Katherine, ‘the wrath of the king is death’83 – precisely the phrase that Norfolk would later employ, in 1534, in his private conversation with Sir Thomas More.
As legate of the Holy See, it was Wolsey’s duty to correct offences against the marriage laws. This, however, was no ordinary marriage and the offence no ordinary infringement. Henry sat at Wolsey’s right hand, fidgeting and impatient to win the desired result. He had not dared to tell his queen of the proceedings, conducted wholly in Latin.
The cardinal began by reciting the facts of the marriage. The validity of Pope Julius’s dispensation allowing Henry to wed his dead brother’s wife was questioned. The king felt serious ‘scruples of conscience’ on the matter and, dreading God’s vengeance which inevitably was wreaked upon those who disobey Him, wanted the legality of his marriage put to legatine judgement.84 The king appointed Wolman as his counsel.
The court never pronounced. There was a fatal weakening in Wolsey’s resolve: he realised that, given the notoriety of the case and its international ramifications, his judgement could easily be quashed in Rome. Furthermore, it would be impossible to grant the divorce by stealth. Seeking security in numbers, he asked the most learned theologians in England – amongst them John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, Longland, Bishop of Lincoln, and Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London – for their opinions on the issue. Fisher replied robustly that there was no sound reason why the marriage should have been prohibited and ‘considering the fullness of authority given by our Lord to the Pope, who can deny that the latter may give a dispensation for any serious cause?’85 Not helpful.
It was therefore no cut-and-dried case. Furthermore, news of an unexpected problem stunned London on 1 June. Rome had been sacked by Imperial troops during one of those endless wars on Italian soil and Pope Clement VII and his cardinals had fled for safety into the Castello St Angelo, overlooking the River Tiber. One observer wrote:
What Goths, what Vandals, what Turks were ever like this army of the Emperor in the sacrilege they have committed? They strewed on the ground the sacred body of Christ [consecrated hosts], trod under foot the relics of the saints to steal their ornaments. No church or monastery was spared. They violated nuns amid the cries of their mother [superiors].86
I
t would hardly be business as usual in the Vatican.
On 22 June Henry finally summoned up enough courage to admit to his queen that he planned to divorce her on the grounds that they had been living in mortal sin for eighteen years. This being the opinion of the churchmen he had consulted, he said, she should now name the English nunnery to which she would retire gracefully, while yet retaining her dignity.
It was a forlorn hope, to expect her to go quietly. Katherine burst into floods of tears ‘and being too much agitated to reply’ Henry tried to console her by weakly promising ‘that all should be done for the best’ before fleeing her apartments, thoroughly chastened. The Spanish envoy Mendoza heard more about the confrontation:
The king begged her to keep secrecy upon what he had told her. Not that the people of England are ignorant of the king’s intentions, for the affair is [as] notorious as if it had been proclaimed by the public crier, but they cannot believe that he will ever carry so wicked a purpose into effect.
Katherine wanted her nephew Charles V to make ‘every possible effort … with the Pope to deprive the cardinal of his legatine powers’ – a shrewd move, since Pope Clement VII was virtually in the Emperor’s pocket. Mendoza coloured his dispatch with some wishful thinking:
Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII Page 27