The Children of Henry VIII (12 page)

Henry was jubilant. He promised Anne his eternal love, pledging himself ‘for ever to honour, love, and serve you sincerely’. But he laments that Anne is not yet ready to sleep with him. ‘Assuring you’, he writes, ‘that henceforward my heart shall be dedicated to you alone. I wish my body was so too.’
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In other words, Anne’s surrender was conditional.

So infatuated was Henry that he allowed Anne to bargain with him. She would not become his mistress like her sister; she would be his wife and his queen. With Katherine several years past the menopause, Anne played her ace of trumps, daringly vowing to give the king a legitimate male heir, one who—unlike Fitzroy—could be certain to succeed to the throne, because she and Henry would be married.

Henry, for his part, seems to have believed that an annulment of his marriage to Katherine would be straightforward, or perhaps the pious queen could be persuaded to take religious vows and retire to a nunnery, in which case he would be free to marry again. It was a breathtaking gamble on both sides and the question was how to win it.

Henry sprang into action, informing Wolsey around Easter 1527 that he had deep ‘scruples’ about the validity of his marriage to Katherine, but at this stage concealing his intention to make Anne his wife rather than his mistress. He did so not because his chief minister could be predicted to oppose a divorce, but because he knew the cardinal would do all he could to dissuade him from marrying a subject. Many of Wolsey’s later difficulties with Henry would spring from this initial deception. At a stroke, the king deprived his most trusted servant of the essential facts he needed
to fulfil his master’s desires, because if Henry was to marry Anne, the king was in almost exactly the same predicament as he had been in 1503 when his father had first decided to betroth him to his dead brother’s widow. Besides an annulment of his marriage to Katherine, he would
also
need a papal dispensation allowing him to marry a woman to whom he was already related in the first degree of affinity, i.e. Anne, because of his earlier sexual relationship with her sister.
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And that would not be easy.

In May 1527, Wolsey secretly summoned Henry to appear before a special church court at York Place to answer matters affecting the ‘tranquillity of consciences’ and the salvation of the king’s soul. What Henry said there will never be known, but shortly afterwards he claimed his conscience had been most recently ‘pricked’ by questions asked by the ambassadors sent to discuss Princess Mary’s betrothal to the Duke of Orléans.
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Wolsey’s stage-managed proceedings came to nothing. His secret court had to be abruptly adjourned after the appalling news arrived that a mutinous imperial army led by the Duke of Bourbon—its soldiers starving and unpaid—had besieged Rome and sacked the city. Pope Clement VII was forced to flee along the secret tunnel connecting the Vatican to the Castel Sant’Angelo, where he signed a truce, making himself Charles V’s prisoner.
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With the pope now firmly under the thumb of Katherine’s nephew, Wolsey knew that the queen would be certain to win if she appealed for justice in her case to Rome. When he left with Thomas More for Amiens in July on a mission to ratify the French alliance, the cardinal had the seeds of a daring plan germinating in his mind. He would convene a powerful group of cardinals at Avignon and take over the government of the Church while the pope was incapacitated.
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He would then meet Charles at Perpignan and
attempt to strike a deal on the divorce in Henry’s favour. He had French support, but was strongly opposed by the Italian cardinals and by Clement himself.
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The plan came to nothing. Henry, meanwhile, impatiently took command of his divorce campaign.

From this point onwards, the king consistently voiced two arguments. One—chiefly used at Rome—was that he had never been legally married to Katherine, because the bull of dispensation granted by Pope Julius II that had first allowed him to marry his elder brother’s widow had contained serious flaws. The other—mainly used for whipping up support in England—was more far-reaching, denying that the pope had ever had sufficient authority to allow the marriage in the first place.
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As Henry scribbled eagerly to Anne, he was himself writing a book on his ‘great matter’. ‘I am right well comforted’, he explained, ‘in so much that my book maketh substantially for my matter; in looking whereof I have spent above four hours this day, which caused me now to write the shorter letter to you at this time, because of some pain in my head.’
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Several versions of this ‘book’ in all its different drafts and incarnations have survived. Henry insisted that the Old Testament prohibition on marriage to a brother’s wife (Leviticus 20:21) was a precept of divine law binding on Christians. He rejected a seemingly contrary text (Deuteronomy 25:5), denying its relevance on the grounds that it merely reflected a Jewish tradition known as the ‘levirate’ by which the brother or next of kin to a deceased man was bound to marry the widow.

Determined to prove that the Levitical law meant that Pope Julius’s dispensation had been improperly granted, Henry summoned
Robert Wakefield, a distinguished Hebraist from Cambridge University, who advised him that the divine retribution threatened against illicit marriage partners according to Leviticus—‘they shall be childless’—was to be understood solely in the male gender. The biblical text, said Wakefield, should correctly read: ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an impurity. He hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness: they shall not have sons.’ This, at a stroke, removed a major stumbling block from Henry’s case as his daughter Mary was alive and well.
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Soon afterwards, the king went further, claiming that sexual intercourse with a brother’s widow was both ‘incestuous’ and ‘contrary to the law of nature’—it was an ‘abominable’ act condemned by God as much as if it had been forbidden by the Ten Commandments, which no pope could dispense. Henry’s opinion had its supporters, but a majority of the most learned theologians and canon lawyers disagreed.
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Wolsey schemed tirelessly to secure the divorce, but became increasingly desperate as Anne Boleyn’s father and brother George began taking charge of the king’s diplomacy and issuing threats that the pope was not the true ‘vicar of Christ’.

At last and after months of negotiation, the beleaguered cardinal obtained a commission from Pope Clement allowing him to hear the king’s suit jointly with Cardinal Campeggio at a second special court to be convened at Blackfriars, a Dominican monastery a stone’s throw from the Thames.

On 31 May 1529, the two cardinals summoned Henry and Katherine to appear before them on Friday 18 June.
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Campeggio, however, had already received secret instructions from the pope, ordering him not to proceed to judgment without a further express commission. And at a Consistory at the Vatican on 16 July, the case
was revoked to Rome. Two days later, the embattled Clement wrote letters of apology to Henry and Wolsey claiming that his hands were tied, but his regrets were hollow.
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When the pope’s letters arrived, Wolsey’s fall was inevitable. In August, Henry summoned Parliament, which assembled on 3 November and passed a series of anticlerical acts to which he assented. On 9 October, Wolsey was indicted in the Court of King’s Bench for
praemunire
(i.e. illegally exercising papal jurisdiction). He wisely pleaded guilty, and was replaced as Lord Chancellor by Thomas More.
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But More had a battle on his hands as long as Henry was listening to the Boleyns, who had recruited a think tank to investigate the divorce and find a way to avoid a trial of the case at Rome. Led by Edward Foxe, Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, Thomas Cranmer, a theologian at Jesus College, Cambridge, and Nicholas de Burgo, a Florentine Franciscan teaching in Oxford, they made their initial report in the autumn of 1530.

Henry was delighted with their findings, which he annotated in forty-six places. For, after investigating the king of England’s lawful powers and prerogatives from first principles and ranging historically as far back as 187
AD
, they argued that Henry and his royal ancestors had always been endowed by God with an ‘imperial’ and sacred authority, part of which had been ‘lent’ to churchmen over the centuries, but which could be resumed at will.

According to this (often specious) research, the pope was merely the ‘bishop of Rome’ whose power was limited to his own diocese, whereas the king was a ‘sacral emperor’ in his kingdom. In short, Henry was now said to be (as it were) a second King David or King Solomon as described in the Old Testament, or else like a great
Christian Roman Emperor such as Constantine or Justinian. On this assumption, he might lawfully prescribe the articles of faith for his subjects and legislate for both Church and State—just as those regal prototypes had done.
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Soon Henry would be found jotting down a note that papal jurisdiction had been exercised in England ‘but only by negligence or usurpation as we take it and esteem’.
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If he were to put such revolutionary ideas into practice, they could be used to justify a break with Rome and to declare Henry to be the Supreme Head of an autonomous Church of England. That would make the divorce as easy as the ABC, because if the king was the true head of the English Church and not the pope, then he might lawfully empower the archbishop of Canterbury or a panel of bishops to investigate his troubled ‘conscience’ and report their findings to him, a verdict which could then be enforced by the authority of Parliament.
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It is a measure of Henry’s innate conservatism that he waited almost three years before taking the plunge. Despite Anne’s constant badgering—which included showing him selected passages from William Tyndale’s writings and led to two famous Lutherans being invited to England with safe conducts to advise on the divorce—the king continued to seek an annulment of his marriage through negotiations at Rome. Every possible trick and feint was used there to secure a hearing of his case at home, or failing that on neutral ground. His chief agents in this diplomacy were the Boleyns. Anne’s father, whom Henry made Earl of Wiltshire, was sent to Bologna and Rome to bribe the cardinals. Her brother, who succeeded his father as Viscount Rochford, went to Paris to champion the divorce there.
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