Game of Queens (25 page)

Conversely, however, Princess Mary was brought back from Ludlow, to be displayed as a suitable bride for one of King François's sons. (The match would be the less welcome to Katherine of Aragon, it was reported, for the fact the French king's mother was ‘a terrible woman'.) Curiously, Anne Boleyn played a part in entertaining the French envoys, dancing with the king while the French ambassador danced with Mary. If it were a snub to Katherine of Aragon's Spanish affections, it was also a sign Mary was still publicly seen as England's princess. But the end of April saw the Treaty of Westminster, an alliance made between England and France against Katherine's nephew.

In May 1527 Wolsey – surely by arrangement with his king – summoned Henry VIII to appear before an ecclesiastical court, to discuss matters affecting the ‘tranquillity of consciences'. The court was held in the greatest secrecy at Wolsey's residence but Katherine was not wholly ignorant of it. ‘Spanish ladies spy well', as Francis Bryan, a kinsman of Anne Boleyn's, once said. The day after the first meeting of Wolsey's inquiry, Charles V's ambassador de Mendoza was able to report on it, adding that ‘though the queen herself has not ventured, and does not venture, to speak to me on the subject, that all her hope rests, after God, on your imperial highness'. She was communicating with Mendoza through a third party ‘who pretended not to come from her, though I suspect he came with her consent'.

Two different strands of debate were raised about the validity of the king's original marriage contract: the theological interpretation of the Bible and the validity of the dispensation granted for Henry to marry Katherine at the beginning of the century; a dispensation so hedged around by the parents, Ferdinand and Isabella and Henry VII, as to leave several anomalies.

In the book of Leviticus, the Bible says: ‘If a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing: he has uncovered his brother's nakedness. They shall be childless', which, Henry was easily persuaded to believe, meant without male child. Although the book of Deuteronomy conversely urged that a man had a positive duty to marry his deceased brother's widow (‘and raise up seed for his brother'), much of the debate centred on the question of to what degree Katherine had really been Henry's brother's wife; on whether she and Arthur had consummated their relationship. But Katherine was in any case unlikely to be impressed by Henry's suggestion that their marriage was incestuous and therefore cursed. Just recently, in 1525, her niece Catalina had married King João of Portugal – whose father Manuel had married one of Catalina's sisters, and two of her aunts.

Henry and Wolsey must, however, have had real hopes of papal sanction for the ending of his inconvenient marriage. Earlier in the spring of 1527 Clement had finally granted Margaret Tudor an annulment, while her sister Mary's husband Charles Brandon had received two. Events, however, were to overtake them, and in the most dramatic way. The proceedings of the inquiry were abruptly broken off when news filtered through of what was happening in that European bearpit, Italy.

In the pursuance of Charles V's Italian wars, the peninsula was now overrun not only by Spanish troops but by the emperor's unpaid German mercenaries and the French traitor Bourbon's men. Advancing southwards into the Papal States, on 6 May the famished furious soldiers surged into Rome itself, forcing the pope to flee and committing, in the words of Spain's own diplomat, ‘unparalleled atrocities'. The slaughter raged for more than ten days, and it has been estimated that as many as twenty thousand died; eight thousand on the first day alone. Nuns were raped, St Peter's sacked and unburied corpses piled high in the streets.

Katherine of Aragon had been prophetically accurate to say that ‘all her hope' rested on her nephew Charles V. After the sack of Rome the emperor held the pope's fate in his hands. How likely was the pope to give a judgement against Katherine, the emperor's aunt?

Forced to act on his own initiative, on 22 June Henry VIII at last confronted Katherine and told her he wanted a formal separation. Katherine's reaction was an outburst of tears, followed by the steadfast denial that her marriage with Arthur had been consummated. This, the physical rather than the legal, was to remain the bedrock of her case. If Anne Boleyn's story was now openly political, Katherine's body was a battleground. Wolsey sent instructions that his representative should tell the pope of ‘certain diseases in the queen defying all remedy, for which, as well as for other causes, the king will never again live with her as a wife'.

That summer of 1527, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn agreed to marry, as evinced by the terms in which, in September, a dispensation was requested from Rome. Henry sought permission ‘to marry a woman with whose sister he had already had sexual intercourse' (presumably Anne's sister Mary) or ‘one with whom he had himself had sexual intercourse'. This second proviso begs the question of whether Anne had indeed preserved her chastity as rigorously as is usually supposed, or whether she and Henry had in the early days consummated their relationship, only to pull back when the question of marriage, and with it the legitimacy of any child Anne might bear, arose.

In September Wolsey, returning from a mission abroad, found himself effectively summoned by Anne into the king's presence; a sign of how power was shifting. In October Henry asked Thomas More, who was rising rapidly as a politician and administrator, respected for his ethical principles as well as his sharp legal brain, his opinion on the passage in Leviticus. In November, he invited a number of scholars to Hampton Court.

Wolsey had been pressing the pope to help Henry, and Clement had been persuaded to issue a somewhat anomalous document: permission for Henry to marry Anne if his marriage to Katherine were dissolved, without saying how that goal might be attained. In February 1528 new envoys were sent towards Rome, with instructions to call, on their way, on Anne, who had withdrawn to Hever.

The last two years had seen dramatic changes in the positions of Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. Anne had now to be regarded as the king's future bride. But there was a danger.

The rules of the new chess declared that a lowly pawn, winning through to the enemy's back row, might itself become a queen, with all the powers that implied. But half a century earlier, a Catalan poem, ‘
Scachs d'Amor'
(Chess Game of Love), had made a stipulation. No pawn could be ‘queened' until the queen of its colour had been taken: there could not be two white, or two black, queens at one time.
⁴

 

 

 

*
None of Henry VIII's letters to Anne Boleyn are dated, nor is there any agreement among historians as to their chronology [
see note on sources
]. None of Anne's letters to him survive.

18

New pieces on the board

Scotland, the Netherlands, Hungary,
Italy, France, 1526–1528

In England a new phase of the story had begun. But the last years of the 1520s were something of a turning point for everyone. Some actors would leave the stage, while others waited in the wings for a new act of the play.

In Scotland two rescue attempts in 1526 failed to get the young James V out of his stepfather Angus’s hold but in June 1528 James escaped. Colourful stories made a legend of it: the boy-king getting his custodian drunk, dressing as a groom, and galloping away to Stirling where his mother was waiting to raise the drawbridge once he was safe inside. With Angus and his cohorts forbidden to come near his person, at sixteen he would begin ruling in reality.

He was younger than François I had been when he inherited France but Margaret Tudor was no Louise of Savoy. On 3 March that year Margaret had married her young lover, Henry Stewart, whom James created Lord Methven ‘for the great love that he bore to his dearest mother’. (Margaret’s brother Henry VIII, by contrast, would continue – with sublime disregard for the proverb about pots and kettles – to call Margaret ‘a shame and disgrace to all her family’.)

James V gave his mother his blessing. What he withheld was power. While Margaret’s third marriage came to prove her unhappiest yet, she would have comparatively little political influence in the years immediately ahead. From the end of the 1520s, Margaret Tudor’s would be largely a personal, rather than a political, story.

However, in each of the great European dynasties, new pieces were appearing on the board. In 1526, Charles V had married his cousin Isabella of Portugal. In the same year his widowed sister Eleanor, another of Margaret of Austria’s nieces, became engaged to François during his captivity, although the marriage did not immediately take place. And 1526 also brought momentous change for another of Charles V’s siblings, and evidence that the pattern of European power would soon be changing under the pressure of a new threat.

Mary ‘of Hungary’, as she would come to be known, the fifth child of Philip of Burgundy and his Spanish wife Juana, had been betrothed while in her cradle to Louis Jagiellon, the eldest son of the Hungarian king. At first raised at Margaret of Austria’s Mechelen court, Mary was sent to the court of her grandfather Maximilian in Vienna before she was ten years old. There, she lived in company with the Hungarian king’s daughter, who was herself betrothed to Mary’s brother Ferdinand. The double alliance was intended to secure the Habsburg interest in the extensive kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia, which were especially important as Europe’s frontier with the Turks.

In 1521 Mary went to Hungary as its queen, and within three years the teenager had won considerable influence, placing herself at the head of one of the great political factions. This was, however, a turbulent kingdom. The Hungarian nobility were in a perpetual state of warfare with each other, with their peasantry and with the Ottoman Turks under the great Suleiman. In 1526, Suleiman broke through the Hungarian frontier; at the Battle of Mohacs at the end of August the Hungarian army was devastated and Mary’s husband was killed.

Mary sent urgently for her brother Ferdinand (who claimed Hungary through his wife) but instead of travelling to her side, Ferdinand appointed her as his regent in Hungary.
¹
Mary kept the throne for Ferdinand, engineering his election as King of Hungary in the teeth of any rival. By the time he arrived a year later she had, however, already asked for, and been refused, leave to resign her regency. This lack of appetite for power was to be a characteristic of her next few decades, which were permeated by the ever-growing Ottoman threat.

Another of Margaret of Austria’s nieces, Isabella, was also unlucky in her spouse. Married to Christian of Denmark, Isabella had arrived in that country to find any place she might have hoped to occupy taken by her husband’s Dutch-born mistress and her mother. Moreover Christian (‘Christian the Tyrant’ as he was known in Sweden, over which he also briefly reigned) was not a man who could make the friends needed for success in the elective monarchy of Denmark and Norway. In January 1523, he was deposed by his uncle Frederick. In 1531 he attempted to regain his throne, was captured, and eventually ended his life a prisoner. Isabella and the children she had borne him were taken back into the care of her family.

Isabella herself died in 1526, and Margaret of Austria was determined to bring up Isabella’s daughters, her great-nieces, Dorothea and Christina. Margaret took a firm line with Isabella’s errant spouse, refusing even to transmit letters between Christian and Charles, from whom he hoped to get troops to regain his kingdoms. The year saw also the start of marriage negotiations for yet another child being raised in Margaret of Austria’s care; one whose future would be intertwined with the Netherlands. The illegitimate issue of Charles V’s youthful fling with a Flemish servant, Margaret ‘of Parma’ was acknowledged by her father and in 1527 was betrothed to the pope’s nephew (or more probably illegitimate son) Alessandro de Medici.

The rise of the Florentine banking family of Medici began during the late fourteenth century and gathered pace under Cosimo de Medici in the fifteenth. The artistic patronage they extended led to the great flowering of the Florentine Renaissance but their assumption of dynastic power angered the old noble families. The beginning of the sixteenth century saw them cast into exile but in 1512 they once again seized power, while the election of a Medici to the papacy as Leo X in the following year gave them even greater prominence. Now another Medici sat on the papal throne, as Clement VII.

But when, in the spring of 1527, imperial troops sacked Rome and took Pope Clement prisoner, the hostilities of necessity involved the pope’s whole Medici family. In a riot of violence – a chair thrown from a palace window smashed the arm of Michelangelo’s
David
, recently installed outside the Palazzo Vecchio – the Republic of Florence threw off the Medici yoke. One family representative, however, remained inside the city: the eight-year-old Catherine de Medici.

Her father was Lorenzo de Medici, Duke of Urbino, the pope’s nephew, who had died weeks after Catherine’s birth; her French-born mother had died of puerperal fever. During the short time they were with her, her parents, according to one contemporary, had been ‘as pleased as if she had been a boy’. Nevertheless, hers was a difficult start even by the standards of the day. But now Catherine was being raised under the auspices of a formidable aunt, Clarice Strozzi, of whom Pope Leo X said that it would have been ‘well for the family if Clarice had been the man’.