Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII

by Robert Hutchinson

  There is so much feeling expressed here about the queen’s divorce … that should 6,000 or 7,000 men land on the coast of Cornwall to espouse [her] cause, 40,000 Englishmen would at once join them …

  A cold douche of realism then quenched his righteous indignation and he added the cautionary ‘ … though popular favour often fails when put to the test’.87

  Henry, with a strange sense of detachment from the hornet’s nest he had disturbed, then went off hunting in Hertfordshire and Essex, entertaining a large party at his house at Beaulieu. Sir William Fitzwilliam, Treasurer of the Household, wrote despairingly to Wolsey:

  The king is keeping a very great and expensive house for here are lodged the Duke of Norfolk and his wife, the Duke of Suffolk, the Marquis of Exeter, the Earls of Oxford, Essex and Rutland, Viscounts Fitzwalter and Rochford … and others.

  I and the other officers intended to reduce the expenses this summer but I do not see how this can be done.

  The king is merry and in good health and hunts daily.88

  Wolsey counselled his master to handle the queen ‘both gently and docilely’89 before he scurried majestically off through France to a convocation of refugee cardinals in Avignon in an abortive attempt to reorganise church governance, as Clement was hors de combat. As he rode, he was ‘hourly musing’ on Henry’s ‘great and secret affair’ and on how to free the king from his ‘pensive and dolorous life’ for the ‘continuance of your health and the surety of your realm and succession’. Pausing breathlessly at Abbeville only to dash off a letter to the king, he wrote that

  I consider the Pope’s consent must be gained in case the queen should decline my jurisdiction or the approbation of the cardinals be had.

  For the first, the Pope’s deliverance will be necessary, for the other the convocation of the cardinals in France.

  If the Pope were delivered, I doubt not he would be easily induced to do everything to your good satisfaction and purpose.90

  Meanwhile, Henry’s affair with Anne was gathering momentum. Seventeen of his love letters to her survive, beginning with one preserved in the Vatican Library, probably dating from January 1527 and written in French, with a few crossings-out. The king was delighted by her New Year’s gift of a bespoke trinket – a tiny model of a ship crewed by a single girl – given possibly to heal a lover’s tiff. Henry wrote wistfully:

  The proofs of your affection are such … that they constrain me ever truly to honour, love and serve you …

  Praying you also that if ever I have in any way done you offence that you will give me the same absolution that you ask, ensuring you that henceforth my heart shall dedicate to you alone, greatly desirous that so my body could be as well, as God can bring to pass if it pleases Him.91

  This now had gone much further than courtly love.

  But Henry was unsure of where he stood with Anne Boleyn. An early letter prayed her to

  expressly certify me of your whole mind concerning the love between us two. I must ensure me of this answer having been now above one whole year struck with the dart of love, not being assured either of failure or of finding place in your heart …

  Which last point has kept me for some little time from calling you my mistress, since if you do not love me in a way which is beyond common affection, that name in no way belongs to you, for it denotes a singular love, far removed from the common.92

  The king was not at this stage offering marriage – rather the status of official royal mistress, copying the French royal fashion.93 But that would not solve his problems of a male heir; he already had one royal bastard in his form book.

  Then, amid showers of expensive jewellery lavished on the dark-haired girl, marriage with her became Henry’s all-consuming ambition. A ring set with emeralds was given to Anne during Henry’s stay at Beaulieu that August. This was the first of many such costly trinkets during the following months: ‘a diamond in a brooch of Our Lady of Boulogne’; ‘nineteen diamonds for her head’; two bracelets set with ten diamonds and eight pearls; ‘two diamonds on two hearts for her head’ and so on.94

  In another billet-doux to Anne, Henry complained that the brief time spent parted from her felt ‘like a whole fortnight’ and that his letter was shorter than usual ‘because of a pain in my head’. He ended his sickly-sweet note: ‘Wishing myself specially in an evening in my sweetheart’s arms, whose pretty dubbys [breasts] I trust shortly to cusse [kiss]’.95

  Henry scribbled a message in French to Anne on a page portraying Christ as the ‘Man of Sorrows’ in his prayer book during Mass in the Chapel Royal: ‘If you remember my love in your prayers as strongly as I worship you I shall hardly be forgotten for I am yours. Henry R. Forever.’ Anne replied in a hastily written English couplet: ‘By daily proof you shall me find/To be to you both loving and kind.’ Calculatingly, perhaps, her notes were written below an illustration of the Annunciation when the angel Gabriel told the Virgin Mary she would have a son (Plate 17).96

  Some time in the late summer of 1527 the king ignored Wolsey’s advice and sent the experienced diplomat William Knight to Rome on a mission with three secret objectives. Firstly, he was to obtain papal annulment of the marriage to Katherine and secondly, absolution of Henry’s sin in living with her as man and wife. The third objective was yet more controversial and damning as, implicitly, Henry was acknowledging his earlier adultery and his desire to marry Anne Boleyn as soon as possible. Ironically, to achieve that, papal dispensation was required for this second marriage as Anne was ‘a woman related to himself in the first degree of affinity’ as the sister of his former bedmate Mary Boleyn. No surprise then that the contents of the letter that Knight was to hand over to Clement VII were kept secret, ‘which no man doth know but they … will never disclose it to any man living for any craft [subterfuge] the Cardinal or any other can find’.97

  The fact that this was done behind Wolsey’s back while he was away in France must signal Henry’s avid desire for Anne. The cardinal quickly got wind of the plan and of rumours at court that the king believed he was dragging his heels over the divorce. He wrote an excruciatingly subservient letter to Henry from Compiegne on his way back to England:

  I shall never be found but as your most humble, loyal and faithful obedient servant … [enduring] the travails and pains which I daily and hourly sustain without any regard to the continuance of my life and health which is only preserved by the assured trust of your gracious love and favour … I intend to depart hence … continuing my journey towards your highness with such diligence as my old and [cracked] body may endure.

  There was never lover more desirous of the sight of his lady than I am of your most noble and royal person.98

  By the time Wolsey arrived back at court, he found the king with Anne and willing to allow him into his presence only with her approval.99 It was an early portent of the shape of things to come.

  Clement VII had now escaped his enforced confinement, but he was still caught on the prongs of a painful regal pitchfork: should he grant Henry, his ‘Defender of the Faith’, all he desired, based on the grounds of an imperfect dispensation by his predecessor, or reject the divorce and so placate Katherine’s nephew, the all-powerful Emperor Charles V? As usual, prevarication was the papal answer. Despite intense rival diplomatic activity by both English and Imperial agents, the Vatican flaccidly proposed a legatine commission to examine the validity of Henry’s marriage, appointing the gout-ridden Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio to limp his way across Europe to preside, with Wolsey, over proceedings in London. Campeggio was the official ‘protector’ of England in the Vatican and was the absentee Bishop of Salisbury. He was a heavy, sluggish and tired man with a long straggling beard, but his appearance hid a clever expert in canonical law.100 Henry soon offered him the lucrative bishopric of Durham as an incentive for making the right decision. Campeggio, however, had three secret strategies from the Pope to pursue: firstly to persuade the king to drop the idea of divorce; secondly to persuade the queen to enter a nunnery;
and thirdly, to proceed as slowly as possible.101

  It was glaringly apparent that Katherine enjoyed vocal popular support as a spurned queen and on Sunday 8 November 1528, Henry summoned his counsellors and leading London citizens to Bridewell to hear his sanitised version of events.

  Although it has pleased almighty God to send us a fair daughter … begotten to our great comfort and joy, yet it has been told to us by diverse great clerks that she is neither a lawful daughter nor her mother our lawful wife but that we have lived together abominably and detestably in open adultery.

  Think you, my lords, that these words touch not my body and soul, think you that these doings do not daily and hourly trouble my conscience and vex my spirits?

  Katherine was a woman

  of most gentleness, of most humility and buxomness, yes, and of all good qualities … she is without comparison as I this twenty years almost have had the true experiment. If I were to marry again, if the marriage might be good, I would choose her above all other women.

  But if it be determined by judgement that our marriage was against God’s law and clearly void, then I shall not only sorrow the departing from so good a lady and loving companion, but much more lament and bewail my unfortunate chance that I have so long lived in adultery to God’s great displeasure, and have no true heir of my body to inherit this realm.

  These be the sores that vex my mind. These be the pangs that trouble my conscience. For these griefs I seek a remedy.

  The king failed to win their sympathy, still less their support. The chronicler Hall reported that some of Henry’s audience

  sighed and said nothing. Others were sorry to hear the king so troubled in his conscience. Others that favoured the queen much sorrowed that this matter was now opened and so every man spoke as his heart served him.102

  Campeggio had finally reached London in October 1528. Anne Boleyn had been installed in a fine suite of rooms in Greenwich Palace conveniently adjoining the king’s own apartments. But Henry, for the sake of appearances, resumed eating with Katherine at table and sometimes shared her bed. She made ‘such cheer as she has always done in her greatest triumphs; nor to see them together could anyone have told there was anything the matter’, according to the French ambassador, Jean du Bellay.103 By 2 December Henry had tired of such polite niceties and Katherine had been ignominiously packed off to Hampton Court.104

  He resorted to a blatantly populist move to distract attention from the divorce, issuing a commission the following day to investigate how many aliens were trading in London. Only ten alien households for each trade were permitted and the remainder had to close down their businesses, work under Englishmen or quit the realm. The French ambassador estimated this would remove 15,000 foreigners from London but his Spanish counterpart believed that up to twice this number would be deported.105

  As the matter dragged on, month after month, Clement VII’s secretary in Rome, Giovanni Sanga, told Campeggio of the Pope’s utter frustration and weariness over the king’s marriage:

  Would to God the cardinal [Wolsey] had allowed the matter to take its course [at his legatine court in 1527] because if the king had come to decision without the Pope’s authority, whether wrongly or rightly, it would have been without blame or prejudice to His Holiness.

  Sanga added:

  It would greatly please the Pope if the queen could be induced to enter some religion [nunnery].

  Although this course would be portentous and unusual, he could more readily entertain the idea, as it would involve the injury of only one person.106

  But Katherine was not going to be shunted off into a convent merely to please the Pope. At stake was the justice of the queen’s cause before God, her own pride, the legitimacy of her daughter Mary and her rightful position as the king’s lawful heir.

  Campeggio, amid this maelstrom of intrigue and conspiracy, suffered ‘infinite agitation of mind’ as well as a crippling attack of the gout in his knee. The weather, even that of an English summer, was too cold for his Italian blood and he complained of ‘having to wear winter clothes and use fires as if it were winter’. He also feared pestilence: ‘The plague continued vigorously and there is some fear of the sweating sickness.’ It says something of Henry’s grim determination to seal an annulment that he overcame his normally rampant phobia about the plague to press his case.

  Wolsey visited Campeggio one day at dawn while he was still in bed to discuss events and then at nine o’clock Katherine arrived to make her confession, asserting firmly that she came to Henry an ‘intact and uncorrupted maid’. The queen intended ‘to live and die in the estate of matrimony to which God had called her’ and ‘although she should be torn limb from limb, [nothing] should induce her to alter this resolution’. 107

  As the volume of paper accumulated, delay followed delay, much to Henry’s vexation.108 At last he lost patience and on 30 May 1529 authorised Wolsey and Campeggio to proceed with the public trial of his marriage with Katherine. The two cardinals rejected Katherine’s appeal to Rome and summoned her to appear before them.109

  The chosen location was the first-floor parliament chamber above the inner cloister of the Dominican friary commonly known as Blackfriars, on the western edge of the City of London. It was linked with the Bridewell Palace by a gallery across the River Fleet. At the southern end of the 110 ft (33.53 m) long room, a table and two chairs for the papal commissioners were set up on a dais. On the right was a cloth of gold canopy above Henry’s throne with a corresponding one for the queen facing it on the left.110 In front were benches for lawyers and the bishops.

  On the morning of Monday 21 June the full court assembled. Henry and Katherine entered from Bridewell amid loud cheers from a large crowd of her supporters and in a vain attempt to silence their shouts, an enraged Henry ordered his guards to ensure ‘that nobody should again be admitted to the place’.111

  Proceedings began with the usher’s cry of: ‘King Harry of England, come into court,’ and Henry rose from his throne with a brisk, peremptory, ‘Here, my lords!’ The usher then asked the same of the queen but, instead of the formal answer, she stood up and walked slowly around the bishops and knelt at her husband’s feet. Her barely suppressed emotion brought back her Spanish accent:

  Sir! I beseech you for all the love that has been between us and for the love of God, let me have justice and right.

  Take [on] me some pity and compassion for I am a poor woman and a stranger born out of your dominion. I have no assured friend and much less indifferent counsel.

  I flee to you as … the head of justice in this realm.

  Henry sat silent and stony-faced as his discarded wife’s words rang around the hushed chamber. Katherine continued her eloquent attack on his hopes and dreams of a divorce:

  Alas Sir! Wherein have I offended you or what occasion of displeasure?

  Have I designed [plotted] against your will and pleasure, intending (as I perceive) to put me from you?

  I have been to you a true, humble and obedient wife, ever conformable to your will and pleasure … always well pleased and contented with all things wherein you had delight or dalliance …

  I loved all those whom you loved only for your sake, whether I had cause or not and whether they were my friends or enemies.

  This twenty years I have been your true wife and by me you have had diverse children, although it has pleased God to call them out of this world, which has been no default in me.

  Katherine moved on to the main plank of her argument:

  When you had me at the first, I take God to be my judge, I was a true maid without touch of man and … I put [this] to your conscience.112

  The queen paused. She had told the Spanish ambassador that Henry had often boasted that she had come to him a virgin and that she believed he would never deny it. Katherine had now posed the question very publicly and dared him to give his answer.

  It never came. The king sat stunned, immobile on his throne, as the seconds ticked by amid an expectant
silence in the huge chamber.113

  Katherine continued with a steady voice:

  I most humbly require you, in the way of charity and for the love of God, to spare me the extremity of this new court … and if you will not extend to me so much indifferent favour, your pleasure will then be fulfilled and to God I commit my cause.

  She rose up from her knees, made a low, dignified curtsey to the king, turned on her heel and moved sedately down the room on the arm of her Receiver General, Griffith Richard.

  Henry was later to be warned by Anne Boleyn about arguing with Katherine. ‘Whenever you disputed with the queen,’ she told him tartly, ‘she is sure to have the upper hand.’114 This occasion was no different. The king angrily ordered the usher to summon her back and Richard whispered to his mistress: ‘Madam, you are called again.’ Katherine looked straight ahead as she continued her departure. ‘On, on,’ she insisted, ‘it makes no matter, for it is no indifferent court for me, therefore I will not tarry.’ She then went back to her lodgings in nearby Baynard’s Castle.