The Other Tudors (28 page)

Henry and Anne also exchanged brief notes in a Book of Hours belonging to Anne, probably passing the book from one to the other during chapel services. Henry wrote, ‘If you remember my love in your prayers as strongly as I adore you, I shall hardly be forgotten, for I am yours, Henry R forever’, and Anne wrote, ‘By daily proof you shall me find/To be to you both loving and kind.’
¹⁸

Wolsey began discussions on the divorce and on 18 June the trial opened at Blackfriars to decide the legality of Henry and Catherine’s marriage, although it closed in July without reaching a conclusion. A second attack on the Church that was now unable or unwilling to grant Henry’s divorce was mounted by Parliament. Much was made of spiritual failings and frauds in the Church. Thomas Cranmer, a rising cleric in the King’s service, suggested to Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, another of the King’s clerical servants, that an appeal should be made, not to fellow churchmen, but to the academics of the Universities. They would look at the question of whether the marriage was correct in civil law as opposed to church law. While these legal niceties were being addressed, there must have been rumours about Henry and Anne. However, at this time the fiction of marriage was maintained; Catherine still lived with Henry in their apartments while Anne had separate rooms nearby.

Henry’s love for Anne continued and increased. In an early dispatch from the Imperial Ambassador, Chapuys wrote, ‘The king’s affection for La Bolaing [
sic
] increases daily. It is so great just now that it can hardly be greater; such is the intimacy and familiarities in which they live at present.’
¹⁹

By November 1529 Wolsey was in the sad position of writing to Cromwell that he was under Anne’s displeasure. She wrote a personal letter to the Cardinal:

In October 1528, William Tyndale published
The Obedience of the Christian Man and How Christian Rulers Ought to Govern
, and copies came into England printed in English. According to Anne Zouche (née Gainsford), one of the Queen’s ladies, recording the event many years later, Anne Boleyn got hold of a copy. She lent it to one of her ladies, Anne Gainsford, whose fiancée George Zouche took it as a joke. He was caught reading it by the Dean of the Chapel Royal, who confiscated it as a proscribed book and gave it to Cardinal Wolsey. Anne told Henry who ordered Wolsey to give it back to Anne. She then showed it to Henry, particularly the passages that said that the King, as God’s Anointed, should be the sole temporal and spiritual ruler of a country (‘One king, one law is God’s ordinance in every realm’). Although Henry strongly disapproved of most of Tyndale’s ideas, he found this particular one most appealing.
²¹

The divorce was supposed to proceed as follows: Henry would be called before a court. He would be found to have married his brother’s widow in error. The marriage would be annulled, with a papal bull confirming this, leaving the King free to remarry.

In fact, William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, declined to make a ruling and referred the matter to Rome. With the Papal City under the control of Charles V’s Imperial army, Pope Clement VII was unlikely to go against the wishes of the Holy Roman Emperor, also Catherine’s nephew. While Wolsey was negotiating to have a separate papal court set up in England under his authority, Henry privately sent Dr William Knight as his envoy to the Pope. He asked for two things. The first was a dispensation to take a second wife without divorcing, for the purpose of getting an heir; the second was a dispensation for this second wife if she were within the proscribed bounds of consanguinity. The problem addressed by the second bull was that since Mary Boleyn had been Henry’s mistress, marrying Anne Boleyn was technically like marrying his wife’s sister (a publicly acknowledged mistress had the same legal standing as a wife under church law), which was equally as proscribed as marrying his brother’s wife. This request confirmed that Henry was indeed considering marrying Anne at this point. Wolsey now saw clearly that Henry planned to make Anne his queen, and not take a French princess as his wife as Wolsey wanted. Against public opinion, Wolsey backed a French army to drive the Imperial forces out of Italy and out of Rome. Once they had done this and he was free from Imperial control, the Pope issued a warrant for Wolsey and Cardinal Campeggio to try Henry’s case in London.

When it came to the divorce, the Pope sought only to delay matters. He did not wish to alienate either Henry VIII or Charles V. He instructed the cardinals to examine only relevant issues of canon law, and that any result should be kept secret, to be ratified by Rome. Lorenzo Campeggio, the Papal Envoy, was a diplomat and a professor of canon law from Bologna. While Campeggio, racked with gout, travelled to England, the French army fell victim to disease and the Imperial army again invaded Italy: once more papal power was under the control of Charles V. Arriving in England, Campeggio at first tried reconciliation. He was forced to report, ‘He [Henry VIII] told me briefly that he wished nothing except a declaration whether his marriage was valid or not, always presuming it was not, and I think that an angel descending from heaven could not persuade him otherwise.’
²²

The King met with the Lord Mayor of London, aldermen, burgesses, assorted worthies and commons, one of whom was Edward Hall, the historian, who made a record of the event. Henry said he sought divorce only for the succession, not for his own pleasure, and because he had been brought to believe that he had broken canon law. In public he had only praise for Catherine
²³

On 18 June 1529 Catherine of Aragon came to court at Blackfriars and appealed against the case proceeding since a) the location and b) the composition of the court were prejudicial towards her, and c) the case was still pending in Rome. On 24 June she appeared again, and made a speech before Henry. After proclaiming herself ‘your true wife, and by me ye have had divers children, although it hath pleased God to call them from this world’, she then played her strongest card, ‘… and when ye had me at the first, I take God to be my judge, I was a true maid, without touch of man, and whether this be true or not, I put it to your conscience.’ After the speech, she walked out, despite being called back to attend the court.
²⁴
Henry ignored the point about Catherine being a virgin at the time of their marriage. It may be that he could not commit perjury. Possibly the only defence Henry could have put forward was that he didn’t know if she was a virgin or not, because he was very inexperienced at the time of his marriage. This would have been unbelievably embarrassing, especially if people believed it were true.

Back in Rome, with the Papacy once more under the influence of Charles V, on 13 July, Clement VII and the papal court decided that the case should be heard by them, and that the London court should be closed. There were also indications that Charles V and Francis I were considering peace between them, which came about at the beginning of August. Henry had lost his ally against Charles and his ability to rescue the Papacy and get the decision he needed.

On 22 July, Campeggio explained that in Rome it was a papal holiday, and adjourned the papal court in London until 1 October, yet another delaying tactic, although the court would never reconvene. Wolsey was now doomed. Everyone was against him; Anne Boleyn’s supporters, Catherine’s supporters, the dukes, the nobility who resented his power coupled with his working class origins, the Church, almost everyone in fact. His fall was sudden, and absolute, and virtually unlamented.

By late 1529, Wolsey had lost the King’s favour and resigned his court posts when he was accused of praemunire, the crime of acting in ecclesiastical matters without the royal consent. In Wolsey’s case, this was plainly ridiculous, but it was enough to lose him his posts and place in the King’s Privy Council. His resignation, however, could not save him; in 1530 Wolsey was arrested and died in November, on his way to prison. The irony was that the nobleman sent to arrest him was Henry Percy, now Earl of Northumberland on his father’s death, whose engagement to Anne Boleyn had been ended by Wolsey years before. In the last months before his death, Wolsey thought he could end the crisis by persuading the Pope to order Henry to put aside Anne. In the event, his arrest for treason and his death occurred too soon. Once they knew of his death, the Boleyns ordered an entertainment for Anne and Henry, with a performance of a farce entitled, ‘Of the Cardinal’s going to Hell’.
²⁵

Some time in November, Henry quarrelled with Catherine. They had spoken and Catherine had effectively told Henry that he knew very well she was his wife and a virgin when they married. Henry said the lawyers and scholars meeting at the University of Paris would find in his favour; if the Pope didn’t annul the marriage, he would call the Pope a heretic, and marry where he pleased anyway. Catherine said the decisions in Paris were irrelevant. If Henry’s experts said one thing, she could find a thousand more to say another. Henry went straight to Anne for reassurance; what he got instead was tears. Anne claimed that she had given up the best years of her life for him, given up other chances to get married; if he went on talking to Catherine she would convince him to go back to her, and then where would Anne be for all her love, fidelity and devotion?

Henry’s response was to take immediate action: Catherine was told to stay in her rooms or go to Richmond. A ball was held at which Anne acted as if she were the queen, taking precedence over the Duchesses of Suffolk and Norfolk. By January 1530, Catherine was now virtually separated from her husband, with Henry refusing to see her or behave kindly towards her. By February he was living with Anne at York Place. The Pope insisted that the divorce case could only be heard in Rome and ordered Henry not to interfere; the academics might be bullied into supporting the divorce, but there was still popular support for Catherine.

By July, Henry was going on a summer progress with Catherine and the whole affair seemed to blow hot and cold. There were almost as many opinions around Court as there were people asked; the English nobles signed a letter to the Pope asking for the divorce, and the Pope responded by reminding Henry that this was a matter of canon law, not a popularity contest. Some advisers simply didn’t want to give an opinion; some said leave it all to Rome; some said, marry Anne and then trust to making it right later.
²⁶

It was Thomas Cromwell, formerly one of Wolsey’s agents, who gave Henry’s plans a new direction. Why should the Church in England have effectively two heads: God’s Vicar and God’s Anointed King? Why should Henry not be sole Head of the Church in England? All this needed was agreement from the Church Council and from Parliament. By these means, he could stay within the Catholic Church, but would have overall control over both Church and State. This appealed not only to Henry’s desire for a divorce, but also his constant need for money. Cromwell had been responsible, under Wolsey, for closing down some of the smaller monastic sites so that Wolsey could use their revenue to found colleges; Cromwell knew how wealthy the monasteries were, and how that wealth could be liberated for the Crown. His first step was to persuade the clergy at Convocation that they were guilty of treason in publishing papal bulls without the King’s permission. They responded by voting a subsidy (actually a bribe) of over £100,000 to Henry. He agreed to take it if they acknowledged him as Supreme Head of the Church and Clergy of England. The Pope was the Supreme Head of the Christian Catholic Church, after Christ. Henry was currently Head of the Church in England and Protector of the Faith. In the end they compromised: Henry was to be voted Supreme Head ‘as far as the law of Christ allows.’

Catherine had a lot of support from the church, nobles and commons; the Boleyns had very little. However, the nobles and commons thought little of the Pope as he refrained from taking any action on her behalf. Clement VII had become mentally ill and was incapable of making decisions or initiating action. When asked for a decision, the Pope would breathe rapidly and unevenly, rub his hands together and cry. He was also playing politics, to save the authority of the Church and win back ground lost to the Protestant reformers. For this he needed the support of France and England. So he did nothing, hoping that Henry would remain, at least to all appearances, a supporter of the Catholic Church.