The process became bogged down with technicalities, and with constant behind-the-scenes meetings and showers of paper. Campeggio was at its very vortex. He wrote to his friend Giacomo Salviati, the Pope’s second secretary, in cipher:
I find myself in such trouble and anxiety that if your Lordship saw me in bed with a cruel attack of gout in seven places, accompanied with fever … brought on by the pain and surrounded by fifteen [lawyers] with two piles of books to show me all they conclude is according to law and nothing else can or ought to be done, I am sure you will have compassion upon me …
I am obliged to have myself carried to the place where the trial is held, God knows with what discomfort to me and danger in moving, in ascending and descending staircases and landing from the vessel [from the Thames].
I pray God I may not have to remain for ever in England.115
He admitted: ‘I understand the desire of his Holiness to be that we should not go on to pronounce judgement and that I should keep on procrastinating as long as I can.’ After one inconclusive meeting, Henry pathetically pleaded with Campeggio and his secretary in Latin: ‘Be good friends to me and have pity on me.’
Unknown to the king, Clement VII, yielding to Imperial pressure, had already annulled the legatine commission and Campeggio, watched by an incredulous Henry from a gallery next to the door of the courtroom, adjourned its proceedings on 23 July for a lengthy vacation to follow the normal summer practice of courts in Rome. It could not resit until October at the earliest, but in practice, the matter of the divorce had been referred back to Rome. The king, black-faced with anger, stormed back to Bridewell, but Suffolk, down in the hall, slammed his fist on a table and exclaimed: ‘By the Mass! Now I see that the old saying is true! It was never merry in England while we had cardinals amongst us.’
Wolsey had promised to deliver a papal annulment to his master on a golden plate, but Vatican bureaucracy, procrastination and duplicity had failed him. The warning signs of royal disfavour and displeasure were there for all to see. The French ambassador du Bellay said that ‘the cardinal is in the greatest pain … the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and the others lead the king to believe that he has not furthered the marriage as much as he could have done if he wished it’. Anne Boleyn’s cousin, Francis Bryan, who was openly using ‘fair means or foul’ to carry out his mission in Rome, told Henry: ‘Whosoever has made your grace believe that he [the Pope] would do for you in this case, has not, I think, done your grace the best service.’116
Wolsey’s downfall followed in October. A Venetian merchant in London wrote that the cardinal
has at length found fortune irate and hostile beyond measure, in such ways that she [Anne Boleyn] has brought him to ruin.
He has lost the royal favour and incurred his majesty’s utmost indignation, his supreme authority being converted into bondage and calamity.
He has been forbidden to act as legate, and has lost the chancellorship, the bishopric of Winchester, the abbacy of St Alban’s and all his other revenues and properties, with the exception of the archbishopric of York.117
A strict watch was mounted at all ports to prevent Wolsey from smuggling his immense wealth out of the realm, which Henry coveted for himself.
Unfortunately, a battered and weary Campeggio, gratefully heading back to Rome, was caught up in the paranoia. Tediously, he had been stopped at road blocks en route to the coast and at Dover he found that a lack of shipping was being used as a transparent excuse to detain him in England.118
Finally, his luggage was seized by customs officials at Dover. His long beard bristling, he angrily refused to surrender the keys to his trunks and so the locks were forced. As they gleefully picked over his dirty washing, Campeggio, beside himself with rage at this insufferable affront to his legatine dignity, snapped: ‘You do me great injustice to suppose that the cardinal [Wolsey] could corrupt a man like myself – who has been proof against the king’s innumerable presents.’119
Of course, what the searchers had been instructed to look out for was Campeggio’s secret commission from the Pope – plus any copies of his secret correspondence. According to the partisan Edward Hall, they were sadly disappointed as only ‘a few letters [were] found … in many chests were old hosen [close-fitting breeches], old coats and such vile stuff as no honest man would carry’.120
A less-than-contrite Henry responded to the cardinal’s remonstrances. The king’s patience had been worn thin by the old Italian’s intransigence. A pungently worded one-page letter in Latin brushed aside Campeggio’s irate complaints of‘disrespect shown to the pontifical dignity and the violation of … legatine authority’. Henry added, somewhat disingenuously:
I … wonder that your wisdom should exaggerate such minute offences and take such dire offence – as though it were in my power to anticipate the temerity of the mob, or the excessive officiousness of others in the discharge of their duty.
The king relished the cardinal’s discomfort and could not resist a last opportunity to cut him down in size:
As to your legateship, no wrong has been done by me or mine, seeing that your authority only extended to the termination of my cause and when that was revoked by papal inhibition, it … expired.
Neither I nor my subjects acknowledge that you have any other authority.
I wonder that you are so ignorant of the laws of this kingdom that you were not afraid to make use of the title of legate when it became defunct, seeing that you are a bishop here121 and so bound by the most solemn obligation to observe and respect my royal dignity, jurisdiction [and] prerogative.
Henry, with reluctant bad grace, attempted to smooth the cardinal’s ruffled dignity:
As to the business of the porters, long before your return to Italy they had received orders to allow no one to pass on any legal suspicion, even with our letters patent, without diligent examination of their baggage.
As we had no intention that this should prove an annoyance to you, nor hinder your journey, or cause you any loss, we request that you take this in good part.
We regret that greater caution and prudence was not shown by the officers in discharge of their duty. As it was done in fulfilment of their oath, we trust you will not consider them deserving of punishment.
You will do us wrong if you think the worse for this fact.122
This was as much of an apology as Campeggio was ever to get. After two weeks in Dover, he finally arrived on French soil on 26 October 1529, still seething. One can only hope that at least he was free from the pain from his gout.123
Henry found it impossible to forgive Katherine for her telling coup de théâtre at Blackfriars. On St Andrew’s Day, 30 November, the royal couple dined together and the queen taxed him about her ‘long suffering the pains of Purgatory on earth’. She was ‘very badly treated by his refusing to dine with and visit her in her apartments’, she grumbled. Henry snapped back that ‘she had no cause to complain of bad treatment, for she was mistress in her own household, where she could do what she pleased’. As for not eating with her, ‘he was so much engaged with business, owing to the cardinal having left the affairs of government in a state of great confusion that he had enough to do to work day and night to put them to rights again’. What was more, he did not sleep with her because he was not her legitimate husband. If the Pope did not declare their marriage null and void, Henry ‘would denounce the Pope as a heretic and marry whom he pleased’.124
Much against his will, Thomas More succeeded Wolsey as Chancellor and the disgraced cardinal was banished north to York. Sensing the blood of a kill, his enemies closed in and he was arrested for treason as he sat down to dinner in his palace at Cawood on Friday 4 November. He died on the way back to London at the Augustinian abbey of St Mary’s, Leicester, on 29 November, probably from dysentery, although there were some who believed ‘he killed himself with purgatives’.125 He was aged about sixty.
Henry did not immediately give up on his efforts to secure a papal annulment. On 13 July 1530
, the peers of England sent an address to Clement VII, praying him to consent to the king’s desires and avoid the ‘evils which arose from delaying the divorce’. The parchment, with eighty-five red wax seals attached, remains in the secret archives of the Vatican to this day.126
This was also to no avail. Even Katherine despaired at Rome’s failure to come to a decision, any decision, just or unjust. ‘God knows what I suffer from these people; enough to kill ten men, much more a shattered woman who has done no harm,’ she plaintively told her nephew Charles V in mid-October 1531.127
Henry was ever the man of action. The title ‘God’s Deputy on Earth’ complemented his self-vision of imperial majesty. Exasperated with popes, cardinals and bishops, the Defender of the Faith now moved to sever all links with Rome and to take his first steps towards independence of the church in England – with him as its Supreme Head. This was adroitly achieved via a series of legal measures steered through Parliament by his capable and cunning new adviser Thomas Cromwell, who had his own aspirations for change in the Church in England.128
The king also had a new champion in Thomas Cranmer, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in succession to Warham, who had died in August 1532. Cranmer’s support for the ‘King’s Great Matter’ was impeccable: he had been private chaplain to Anne Boleyn’s father, now elevated to the earldom of Wiltshire and Ormond.
On 1 September 1532 Anne herself was raised to the peerage when she was created Marchioness of Pembroke with a munificent annuity of £1,000. Henry then took her on to glittering meetings with Francis I of France in Boulogne and Calais, where she wore a scintillating array of jewellery heartlessly confiscated from Katherine of Aragon.
The king’s paramour remained deeply unpopular in England. Cromwell’s legion of informers reported reams of public slander, both sacred and profane, about her in the noisy taverns and marketplaces of England. The Lancashire parson James Harrison promised: ‘I will [have] none for queen but Queen Katherine! Who the devil made Nan Boleyn, that whore, queen?’129 The Colchester monk John Frances declared that when Henry had met Francis I, Anne had ‘followed his arse as the dog follows his master’s arse’.130
It was shortly afterwards that Anne welcomed Henry into her bed for the first time. About the middle of January 1533, she found she was pregnant and a jubilant Henry secretly and bigamously married her on the 25th in a chamber above the Holbein Gate in his Palace of Westminster.
Her condition dictated that some speed was necessary to contain public scandal. Cranmer convened his ecclesiastical court at Dunstable, Bedfordshire, near Ampthill, where Katherine and her now tiny household had been exiled by the king. She resolutely refused to appear. At ten o’clock on the morning of 23 May 1533, the archbishop declared her marriage ‘to be against the laws of God’ and ‘divorced the king’s highness from the noble lady Katherine’.131
At last Henry was free of his barren wife. His mistress was expecting their first child, and God willing, it would be a son.
Anne was ostentatiously crowned by Cranmer in Westminster Abbey on Whit Sunday, 1 June 1533, in a spectacular ceremony that cost Henry an estimated 100,000 gold ducats, plus another 200,000 obsequiously donated by the City of London 132 – equivalent to more than £55 million at today’s values. By anyone’s standards, a high price for an heir.
Sir Thomas More, who had resigned as Lord Chancellor in May 1532, was conspicuous by his absence.
Despite her amply cut flowing robes, Anne’s pregnancy was obvious. Henry’s corps of physicians was unanimous that the child would be a boy. Like his father before him, the king also consulted astrologers who confidently predicted the desired outcome.
Circular letters announcing the birth of a male heir had been carefully written out for immediate dispatch to the great and good once Anne had delivered both Henry and England’s hope for the future.
At four o’clock in the afternoon of Sunday 7 September 1533, at Greenwich Palace, Queen Anne gave birth to a baby girl. She was called Elizabeth after Henry’s beloved mother.
Within that silent, unhappy palace, a clerk sighed, picked up his pen and painstakingly began to squeeze an extra two ‘S’s at the end of the word ‘prince’, on the first of a pile of those circular letters.133
Henry’s dreams remained unfulfilled. His Tudor dynasty remained just a heartbeat away from oblivion.
Epilogue
Henry’s breach with Rome and his supremacy over matters religious set the bloody tone for the remainder of his almost four decades on the throne of England. Many were to die as a consequence of his dynastic ambitions in a series of executions that made the scaffolds in the cities of England a butcher’s block of stinking gore and entrails.
Among the first to die was his grandmother’s favourite, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, who had strenuously opposed the annulment of the king’s marriage and refused to swear an oath under the Act of Supremacy which gave Henry control of the church in England. After months of cruel imprisonment, the aged and infirm prelate was executed on 22 June 1535 on Tower Hill.
His journey to the scaffold, carried in a chair – he was too old and weak to walk – was hastened by the unfortunate decision by the new pope, Paul III, to make him a cardinal. Although prevarication had been honed to a fine skill, timing was not the Vatican’s forte. The king angrily declared that he would ‘send [Fisher’s] head to Rome for the cardinal’s hat’.
Then it was the turn of the king’s friend Sir Thomas More to face Henry’s rough justice. Royal promises of his immunity over the issue of the marriage proved mere hot air and his resignation as Lord Chancellor on 16 May 1532 did not save him. He had been condemned to perpetual imprisonment for cleverly avoiding taking the Oath of Succession that recognised Anne Boleyn as the king’s lawful wife and their children as the legitimate heirs to the throne. Anyone refusing to take the oath was guilty of treason and More, as a revered national figure, was just too important to escape retribution. He was beheaded with one blow of the axe on the morning of 6 July 1535 after a perjured trial.
Katherine died, lonely and neglected, at Kimbolton Castle, Huntingdonshire, probably from cancer of the heart, on 7 January 1536. She had last seen Henry and her daughter Mary late in the summer of 1531.
Anne Boleyn did not live up to her personal motto: ‘The Most Happy’. After she suffered several miscarriages, Henry became weary of a wife whom he increasingly saw as a peevish and arrogant tartar and alleged that she had tricked him into marriage ‘by means of sortileges [sorcery] and charms and that owing to that, he would hold it … nullified’.
His chief minister, Thomas Cromwell was the ideal man to free him of such a termagant wife. After he scrabbled around finding dubious evidence, she was accused of adultery with five of the king’s courtiers as well as plotting Henry’s death. One alleged accomplice was her brother George, Viscount Rochford, who was charged with committing incest with the queen. At her trial at the Tower, witnessed by 2,000 awestruck and enthralled spectators, a slip of paper was produced recording Anne’s damning description of her husband’s poor performance in bed: ‘Que le Roy n’estait habile en cas de soi copuler avec femme, et qu’il n’avait ni vertu ni puissance’ – ‘The king was not skilful when copulating with a woman and he had not virtue or power’. If nothing else, this was enough to condemn her.
Rochford and his fellow courtiers were executed on 17 May 1536 and two days later Anne was beheaded by a single sweep of a long two-handed sword wielded by a French executioner especially brought over from St Omer at a fee of £24.
Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the king’s illegitimate son by Bessie Blount, married Mary Howard, daughter of the Third Duke of Norfolk. The marriage was never consummated and he died, probably from tuberculosis, on the morning of 23 July 1536 in St James’ Palace. He was just seventeen.
Henry still harboured fears about the threat of the Yorkist nobility and in November 1538 Thomas Cromwell swept up the surviving distant members of the White Rose faction – who coincidental
ly were also numbered amongst his countless bitter enemies.
Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, Henry Lord Montague, Sir Edward Neville and Princess Mary’s old governess, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, were all arrested. The first three were executed on 9 December at Tower Hill. The sixty-seven-year-old countess was imprisoned in the Tower and eventually was led to the scaffold on 27 May 1541. She refused to lay her head on the block saying, ‘So should traitors do [but] I am none neither.’ The executioner was a ham-fisted, inexperienced youth who limply told her that this was ‘the fashion’. He repeatedly hacked her grey-haired head and shoulders before he could bloodily finish the job. Montague’s heir Henry disappeared within the Tower and died some time after September 1542. Exeter’s twelve-year-old son Edward was held there until Mary ascended the throne in 1553 when he was eventually freed.
On 30 May 1536, Henry married Jane Seymour, one of Anne’s ladies in another secret wedding, this time in the Queen’s Closet at Westminster.
At two o’clock in the morning of Friday 12 October 1537, Henry’s elusive dream of a male heir was at last transformed into happy reality. After a harrowing thirty hours in labour, Jane Seymour gave birth to a boy, named Edward, at Hampton Court. But she died twelve days later, aged twenty-eight, probably from puerperal fever and septicaemia.
Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII Page 29