Six Wives (36 page)

    Mendoza, however, got round the precaution simply enough and 'made the messenger learn by heart all that was required'. He was to tell Charles to ignore Catherine's letter, as it was not 'a free act of her will'. But Felipez's journey was no sooner begun than it was over. 'He fell at Abbeville and broke an arm' and had to come back to London.

    Everything had to be done again. Catherine's letter was rewritten and given this time to her Chaplain, Thomas Abel. Abel was to prove one of Catherine's bravest and most devoted defenders. But he was English, and Henry's subject and servant before he was hers. That alone in 1529 was enough for Catherine. 'Unwilling to deliver the [oral] message to the King's servant [Abel], in whom she placed no trust', she paired him with Montoya, another Spaniard, 'who might also retain by heart the . . . message'.
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    Abel and Montoya made the journey to the Franco-Spanish frontier in company with another royal courier, Curzon, who was carrying letters informing the English ambassadors in Spain of the mission to get hold of the Brief. They reached Fuenterrabia together on 2 February. But there Curzon was stopped, though Abel and Montoya were let through. Abel had seemed particularly keen to press ahead. The result was that Abel was in Valladolid ten days before the English ambassadors knew anything about his arrival.
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    He put his time to good use. He got an audience with the Emperor to whom he gave the letter extorted from Catherine. He also gave him a covering note. The gist was the message which Montoya and, before him, Felipez, had learned by heart. But Abel elaborated the simple message into a six-point memorandum. Charles was to remonstrate with the Pope for his apparent favour to Henry. He was to send a good canonist (canon lawyer) as his ambassador to England, to take charge of the case. And he was to match Henry's research effort and 'order good canonists and legists to examine the matter, and write to the Queen thereon something that she can make use of '.
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    What was going on? Was Abel indeed acting on Catherine's orders, as he claimed? Or had he taken over Montoya's mission on his own initiative? And what of Catherine's role? Was her earlier distrust of Abel real? Or was it a subterfuge, in which she deceived even the Spanish ambassador, to keep Abel 'clean'? We shall never know for certain, since, as in all the best spy stories, the controller (Catherine) and the agent (Abel) had covered their tracks so well.

    One thing is clear, however. Despite the incident at the frontier, the English ambassadors in Spain had no inkling that Abel might be a double agent. Instead, they consulted him and confided in him as a colleague. Especially on the matter of the Brief. For the Emperor denied them only one thing. He refused, courteously but absolutely, to hand over the original of the Brief. (The English ambassadors could not understand why!) Otherwise Charles V was generous in allowing them access to it. The Brief was read to them; they were given a notarially attested copy; they were even allowed, under supervision, to transcribe it and examine it.
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    One of the ambassadors was Edward Lee, who was Henry's main legal expert on the Great Matter. He found Abel, who was a fellow Court cleric, particularly helpful in his analysis of the Brief. The Brief stated that it was obtained at the request of Henry and Catherine. But Catherine, Abel confirmed, had never heard of it till she received the transcript from Spain in 1528. The Brief also stated as a matter of certainty that Arthur had carnally 'known' Catherine. Abel confirmed that the Queen denied this on oath. Finally, when Lee came to draw up his list of points which suggested that the Brief was a forgery, he arranged them under twelve heads, as was 'partly suggested by his conversation with Master Abel'.
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    These conversations have a surreal quality. On one side, there is Henry's chief legal expert; on the other, the man who was to emerge as one of Catherine's most effective propagandists. And they are engaged in an animated exchange of ideas. But only Abel knew who was on whose side. And only he and Catherine were able to benefit from the knowledge. *

The Abel mission was Catherine's third hammer-blow against Henry. Once again (as with the production of the Brief and the Felipez mission), she had proved that she had better intelligence, better and more daring agents and finally, I think, a better tactical sense.

    There is a curious footnote to the affair of the Brief. The Imperial Chancellor Gattinara told Lee that 'he thought that the Holy Ghost, foreseeing what might follow, had preserved it'. For the Brief was found, he admitted, not in any official archive, but in 'the hands of . . . a cousin of the person who had the handling of both marriages of the Queen'. Lee asked if his name perhaps was De Puebla. Gattinara acknowledged that it was.
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    So De Puebla had done one last service for Catherine's marriage – even from beyond the grave.

O
ld habits die hard, as do old marriages. Catherine and Henry had been married for almost twenty years. Recently they had grown apart emotionally. But a whole network of connexions and assumptions remained. There was their shared love for their daughter Mary. And there were the little routines of half a lifetime of shared living. Catherine made Henry's shirts (and, to his dying day, he never lost his taste for the black-thread embroidery round the collar and cuffs that was known as Spanish work). When they were apart, they exchanged messages every few days, as they had done since their first separation in the French war of 1513. To authenticate the messages, they used secret tokens, known only to each other. Breaking these ties would take years of mounting pain and bitterness – bitterness on Henry's part and pain largely on Catherine's.
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    Even Court ritual drove them together. The Court calendar revolved round the 'Days of Estate'. These were the main feast days of the Church which were also marked by high ceremony at Court. The King and Queen wore matching robes, whose colour depended on the occasion (purple or scarlet for celebration, blue for mourning). They processed to the Chapel Royal. They heard mass in their adjacent Closets or Pews and they participated in special ceremonies at the altar. Then they dined publicly and in state. On certain days, such as Twelfth Night or Shrove Tuesday, they watched a play in the Great Hall in the evening or took part in a banquet. And they did all this together.

    The greatest concentration of 'Days of Estate' lay in the extended Christmas celebrations, which lasted from Christmas Day, 25 December, when the King and Queen wore the purple, to Epiphany, 6 January, when they appeared in their crowns and most of the coronation regalia. So, as Christmas 1528 approached, all eyes were on the Court. Would the time-honoured rituals be observed, or would Henry carry out his repeated threats to separate from Catherine?
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* * *

In the event, habit and perhaps a sense of decency more or less prevailed. The King and Queen had moved to Greenwich on 17 November 1528. Catherine remained there; Henry broke off to pay several short visits to Bridewell. Ostensibly, these visits were to enable him to consult more freely with the legates about the Great Matter. But they had a covert purpose as well. For Henry 'had lodged [his mistress] in a very fine lodging, which he has prepared for her close by his own'. There, 'greater court is . . . paid to her everyday than has been to the Queen for a long time'.
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    Did Catherine know about her rival's nights of pleasure and days of pomp in London? If so, she chose to ignore them. Instead, she took advantage of her husband's absence in town to summon Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, to see her incognito in her apartments at Greenwich. She confirmed that Henry had reiterated his determination to separate from her, on the grounds of his personal safety. It was not Catherine herself that he mistrusted, he assured his wife, but 'he is not quite so sure of her servants, both English and Spanish, and especially of the latter'. But Henry had not, Catherine said with relief, carried out the threat. Instead, whenever he came to Greenwich, 'he very seldom fails to visit her, and they dine and sleep together'. Catherine, understandably, did not go into details. So we will never know if Henry had resumed the sexual relations, which, according to Campeggio, he had broken off at the time of the first trial of the marriage in 1527. But it seems unlikely.

    Mendoza then speculated on Henry's motives. The King had received legal advice, he guessed, that he must not appear too flagrantly to deprive Catherine of her conjugal rights while the Great Matter was still
sub judice
. This is probably true. But Henry was not only acting legalistically. He preferred, of course, to spend his time with his other woman. But, when he was under the same roof as Catherine, he ate with her and accompanied her out of habit and because he always had. And he kept Christmas in the old fashion too.

    Henry joined Catherine at Greenwich on the 18th. On Christmas Day, he heard two masses and tipped the boys of the Chapel Royal two pounds for their singing of
Gloria in excelsis
. The same day, the French ambassador reported that 'the whole Court has retired to Greenwich, where open house is kept both by the King and Queen, as it used to be in former years'. But things were not quite as usual. For the King's mistress was at Greenwich too, 'having her establishment apart, as . . . she does not like to meet with the Queen'. Did she fear Catherine's tongue or Catherine's tears?

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But Catherine had more important things to worry about than her husband's mistress. Ever since Campeggio's arrival in England, her strategy had been clear. It was to persuade Pope Clement to revoke the commission to his two legates, Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal Campeggio, and take the trial of her marriage back into his own hands in Rome.

    Charles V's envoys in Rome were bringing heavy pressures to bear to the same effect. The pressures culminated on 27 April 1529 when a formal written protest was presented to the Pope in person, requiring Clement 'to have the case adjudicated in his Court, since, were it to be tried in England, Queen Catherine would never obtain justice'.
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    Catherine's hope was that her nephew's request would have the force of a command. But it fell on unwilling ears. Clement, caught as he was between the upper and nether millstones of Charles V's power and Henry VIII's wrath, had little sympathy for Catherine's plight. 'Would to God', his Secretary, Sanga, wrote to Campeggio, 'that [Wolsey] had allowed the matter to take its course [in 1527], because if the King had come to a decision without the Pope's authority, whether wrongly or rightly, it would have been without blame or prejudice to his Holiness.' And would to God also that Catherine would agree to take the veil. 'The course would be portentous and unusual', Sanga readily admitted, but it would involve the injury of only one person: Catherine. And that Clement could 'readily entertain'.
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    Only one thing would force the Pope to act: a direct, personal appeal from Catherine herself.

    Now it was Catherine's turn to hesitate. So far, she had moved purposefully and decisively. But, faced with this decision, she postponed, prevaricated, grasped at every straw. It was not that she did not understand what was required. Rather, she understood its consequences all too well. A sixteenth-century wife, especially a royal wife, was expected to have no will apart from her husband's. Or, at least, she was never to display such a will publicly. In all her previous actions in the Great Matter, Catherine had stayed – just – on the right side of this principle. Everything she had done had been secret and, in so far as it was known to her husband, disavowable. But an appeal to Rome would be open, and an open challenge. It might enable her to keep Henry as her husband. But she would forfeit his trust for ever. For Catherine to appeal was to choose the weapon of a suicide. The first result would be, as she herself wrote, '
suum manifestum excidium
[her own certain ruin]'. It was to be used only in the last extremity.

    For several months, Henry's own hesitations spared Catherine the need to make this terrible choice. Ever since Catherine had detonated the bombshell of the Brief, Henry and his agents in Rome had been trying to make the basis of the Legatine Trial in England more watertight. But Pope Clement, even-handed in his dissimulation, had blocked them at every turn. Without additional assurance from Rome, Henry was reluctant to risk an open trial of his marriage. These delays were Catherine's salvation, as the Imperial ambassador, Mendoza, pointed out. To Mendoza's profound relief, he had left London for the Netherlands in late May. At the time of his departure, he reported, 'the Queen's case was at a standstill, and there were no symptoms of its being proceeded with. There was, therefore, no occasion or need for a protest, nor for making an appeal to the judges.'
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    But, within a few days, the world had been turned upside-down. Henry lost patience and decided, whatever the defects in the legates' authority, to force matters to a conclusion. Perhaps he hoped that bullying and bribery would win the day (the vast wealthy Bishopric of Durham had already been dangled in front of Campeggio's nose). Perhaps he believed in the force of his cause.

* * *

On 30 May, Henry authorised Wolsey and Campeggio to proceed with the trial. The next day, the two Cardinals met in the Parliament Chamber, otherwise the Upper Refectory (or Upper Frater), at Blackfriars. The Pope's general commission was read and they formally accepted it. Their first act was to appoint two bishops to summon the King and Queen to appear before them on 18 June. The summons was served on Catherine the next day in her Privy Chamber at Windsor. Her decision on the appeal could be postponed no longer.
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    Even so, she hung on till the eleventh hour and beyond. On 14 June, the King and Queen left Hampton Court to take up residence at Greenwich 'in order to be present [at Blackfriars] at the day fixed'. Henry travelled by water; Catherine by land. En route, she 'crossed the water', and went to call on Campeggio. He was laid up, as he reported, with 'my gout, which is accompanied by a slight feverishness'. But Catherine, 'very anxious and perplexed about her affairs', threw etiquette to the winds and was ushered 'even to my bedside'. Her first anxiety was the fact that her advocates had not arrived from Flanders. She did not fully trust her English counsel, she said. What should she do? Hope for the best, Campeggio replied. But all this, I suspect, was so much beating about the bush for Catherine's real concern: how could the case go ahead in England when the Emperor had asked for it to be revoked to Rome? Had the revocation in fact taken place? Campeggio had to admit that it had not. Once more, he pressed the matter of taking the veil. She brushed him aside. Her mind was made up. 'On the Queen's departure from me she went to her lodgings here in London, and there met her counsellors.'
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