Tudor Queens of England (20 page)

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reputable instrument of Parliament. Taking advantage of anti-clerical sentiment in the House of Commons stimulated by a row over mortuary fees, on 18 March he introduced into the House ‘A supplication against the Ordinaries’. Catherine’s defences remained impregnable, but she was now being outfl anked. By the autumn of 1532 the King had determined to ignore the Pope and seek a solution using the legislative resources available within England. In August Archbishop Warham died and he had the opportunity to appoint a new prelate who would co-operate in his scheme. Meanwhile he created Anne Marquis of Pembroke and took her off to France to meet Francis, whose friendship, or at least acquiescence, was essential now he was set on a course that was bound to leave the Emperor even more alienated. The French king tactfully avoided meeting Anne but in other respects was supportive because his quarrels with the Emperor were never ending. At some time during their stay in Calais, Henry and Anne at last slept together. In January 1533 the amenable Thomas Cranmer became the new Archbishop of Canterbury and Anne was discovered to be pregnant. The climax swiftly followed. Henry and Anne were secretly married and Cranmer’s court at Dunstable declared his fi rst marriage null and void. Catherine, of course, refused to recognize either the court or its decision, but her position was now extremely precarious.

33 On the basis of
Cranmer’s decision, Henry declared that she was no longer Queen, but Dowager Princess of Wales and that their daughter, Mary, was illegitimate. Neither woman (Mary was by now 17) would accept this judgement, which was embodied in a proclamation issued on 5 July
.34
A proclamation was not a law and the penalty decreed for disobedience was as yet only ‘extreme displeasure’ but it put the Queen’s supporters on the spot. Chapuys was full of righteous indignation and her household servants, who had a low political profi le, ignored it. However, her more prominent political sympathizers began to draw in their horns. Offending the King was a risky business and those with careers to consider, like the King’s former secretary Stephen Gardiner, changed sides. Catherine was by no means abandoned but by the time that Elizabeth was born in September 1533, her position was becoming increasingly beleaguered. This was, in a sense, her own choice. The King’s proclamation had concluded:

‘… nevertheless the King’s most gracious pleasure is that the said Lady Catherine shall be well used, obeyed and entreated according to her honour and noble parentage, by the name, style and title of Princess Dowager.’

And he was as good as his word. Although he reduced her establishment in accordance with his own perception of her status, it was still costing him nearly

£3,000 a year – very far from the poverty to which Chapuys complained that she had been reduced.

35
Catherine could simply have accepted the
fait accompli
, which had left her in a kind of honourable retirement or she could have taken 106

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the veil, even at this late stage, or she could have demanded to go back to Spain. Instead she remained obdurate, thus making her own life far more wretched than it need have been and the lives of all her servants and wellwishers extremely diffi cult. Almost the only satisfaction that the autumn of 1533 brought to her and her friends was that Anne’s child, for which so much had been sacrifi ced, turned out to be a girl. Henry did not know what to do about her. He moved her from Ampthill in July 1533 to Buckden in Huntingdonshire, a manor of the Bishop of Ely, where she complained of the proximity of the fens. Finally, perhaps in response to these pleas, or perhaps for reasons of his own, in May 1534 he moved her again, this time to Kimbolton, which was smaller than Buckden, but more salubrious. At that time he again reduced her household, but not by very much and she still retained a core of Spanish servants, including her physician and apothecary. Chapuys made an endless nuisance of himself with protests against her dishonourable treatment and more seriously intrigued vigorously with disaffected nobles on her behalf. Cromwell kept a careful eye on his behaviour and probably knew that, whereas Charles was not disposed to curb his activities, he was paying absolutely no heed to his pleas for intervention. Catherine might be his aunt and he had no intention of abandoning her but at the same time he had no intention either of getting embroiled in England’s domestic affairs. He would confi ne himself to preventing any reconciliation between Henry and the Pope, who in the autumn of 1533 had ordered the King of England to take his wife back, under pain of excommunication.

36
Only in one respect did Henry behave vindictively towards his ex-wife. He refused to allow any personal contact between Catherine and Mary. Messages, sometime apparently written in Spanish, passed to and fro, borne by trusty messengers, but even when her daughter was ill, the Queen was not allowed to visit her. By 1535 the King was aware that the daughter was potentially more dangerous than the mother. For all her obstinacy, Catherine would never countenance any armed opposition to the King’s will –

but Mary was much less experienced and more suggestible. If rebellion was to stir as the King moved defi nitively to end Papal authority in England, it was only too likely that she would become its fi gurehead. She was just as recalcitrant as Catherine and unless or until he had a legitimate son there would be many who would continue to regard her as his lawful heir. In 1534 Henry’s fi rst Succession Act made it high treason to deny Elizabeth’s legitimacy, or to affi rm the validity of his fi rst marriage. An oath was imposed on all subjects to that effect but it was not administered to Mary and her mother. The King knew their minds well enough but had no desire t

o cut their heads off.37

Towards the end of 1535 Catherine became ill and in January of the following year she died at Kimbolton, insisting to the last that she was the Queen of England.

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Mary (to her great grief) was not allowed to come to her but her passing was exemplary in its piety and she was laid to rest with all the honours due a Dowager Princess, in Peterborough Cathedral. There were, inevitably, rumours of poison and Catherine had herself apparently feared no less. However, they were only rumours. If Henry had been willing to yield to the temptation to do away with her he would have done so long before. It would appear that the former Queen succumbed to a series of heart attacks. She was 51. Even if we accept the validity of Cranmer’s sentence, she had still been accepted as Henry’s wife for almost 24

years – far longer than any of her successors. She was a highly intelligent and well-educated woman, who had been in her time a great patron of scholars and the recipient of many dedications. Vives is only the best known example. In her youth she had been not only attractive but light hearted and good humoured. Unfortunately neither her good looks nor her good humour survived advancing years and misfortune. Her strong-mindedness became the most infl exible and self destructive obstinacy and her piety, from being gracious, became obsessive. There is no doubt that in the last years of her life she courted a kind of virtual martyrdom and took a grim satisfaction from the fact that, in 1533, her daughter was similarly affl icted for her sake. For the fi rst ten years of her marriage she had devoted all her considerable infl uence to maintaining the alliance between her husband and her homeland but lost that battle eventually because of her father’s death and the rise of Thomas Wolsey. Paradoxically, it was the King’s attempts to get rid of her that revived that relationship in a different and even more potent form. Without really intending to be so, she became her nephew’s bridgehead into English politics and a pressure point that the Emperor found of great value in his dealings with the King of England. Despite spending more than 35 years in England and enduring both good and bad fortune, Catherine never forgot that she was of the royal blood of Spain. How dare a mere Tudor treat her so disrespectfully!

If Catherine could be dubbed ‘the wife who never was’, the same title might be applied more realistically to Anne of Cleves. Henry had married Catherine because he wanted her and because she represented a long-standing alliance that corresponded with his present strategic needs. He married Anne because she represented a short-term solution to a pressing problem. When the problem disappeared, the marriage came down to a question of personal chemistry, which was soon found to be non-existent. The year 1539 was, or appeared to be, a dangerous time for England. The King had declared his independence of the Pope fi ve years before and stood excommunicate, which was standing invitation for any neighbouring prince to attack him in the name of the Churc

h.38 A
s long as the Emperor and the King of France were at daggers drawn there was small 108

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chance of that happening but on 12 January 1539 they came to terms in the Treaty of Toledo and each agreed not to come to any understanding with England without the consent of the other. There was talk of withdrawing their diplomatic representatives and the threat seemed to be real. Henry reacted in three ways. First he ordered musters up and down the country, mobilized his fl eet and commenced a series of fortifi cations along the south co

ast.39 This had the desir
ed, if not intended, effect of uniting the country behind its king. However unhappy some Englishmen might be with the drift of the King’s recent policies, they were not prepared to contemplate some foreigner interfering to put things right. Secondly he caused the Act of Six Articles to be passed. This was a reaffi rmation of Catholic orthodoxy on certain key theological issues, particularly the sacrament of the mass. Henry might have repudiated the Pope, dissolved the monasteries and authorized a vernacular Bible, but he had no desire to be thought a heretic and chose this method of distancing himself from the creeping evangelicalism that Cromwell and Cranmer had been promoting over the previous fi ve years. This apparently pulled the rug from under his third objective, which was to seek an alliance with the only European power that seemed reliably anti-papal – the Schmalkaldic League of Germany. Faced with the Treaty of Toledo, England was dangerously isolated and the League appeared to offer the only realistic option. The Leaguers, however, were insistent that Henry subscribe to the Lutheran Augsburg confession before they would enter into any formal agreement and that Henry was determined not to do. The Act of Six Articles reaffi rmed that refusal, and negotiations with the League broke down. Cleves-Julich, however, was not a member of the League. Its Duke was a Catholic of reforming tendencies who was perennially at odds with the Emperor. Cleves-Julich was not a major power but the Duke had his own allies and contacts among the anti-Habsburg German princes. Moreover, he had a sister available for marriage.

Henry had been without a partner since the tragic death of Jane Seymour in October 1537, and a considerable number of options had been considered, including several French princesses before the Treaty of Toledo appeared to cut off that line of advance. For some time his preferred choice had been Christina of Denmark but that lady had eventually declined the honour, allegedly declaring that she would prefer to keep her head on her shoulders.

40
A negotiation with Cleves had been suggested as early as June 1538, but it was only after the death of the old Duke in February 1539 and the succession of his son William, that offi cial feelers were put out. The original proposal had been for a match between the young Duke and Mary, now back in favour in England, but still illegitimate but this was quickly superseded by a negotiation for the King himself to marry William’s unassigned sister, Anne, then aged 24. The summer advanced and the

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Franco-Imperial threat failed to materialize but Thomas Cromwell was keen to see the King wedded again and pressed on with the negotiation. One son was not suffi cient for dynastic security although Edward, Jane Seymour’s son, appeared to be a robust child just entering his third year. Hans Holbein was sent across to draw the lady’s portrait and his effort (which still survives) was suffi cient to convince the King of Anne’s charms. There was some discussion of a possible precontract but that had been disposed of by the end of September and the treaty was fi nally signed on 4 Oct

ober 1539.41
What nobody disclosed, and the English envoys probably did not have the chance to observe, was that Anne was in many respects an extremely unsuitable consort. She was, admittedly, not a Lutheran, and was passably handsome, but she was almost completely uneducated, having been brought up in the domestic seclusion of the family castle. Whereas both Catherine and Anne Boleyn had been sophisticated young ladies, fl uent in several languages and accomplished in the courtly arts, and Jane Seymour had received a respectable renaissance education, Anne was a bumpkin. She spoke no language but German, was ignorant of music and knew only the dances of her native land. For a man whose needs were not only physical but intellectual and who expected his consort to shine at court and to be a patron of the arts she was a disaster waiting to happen.

For his part, Henry was compliant rather than enthusiastic. He professed himself satisfi ed with the arrangements, and prepared to greet his new bride, but this was unknown territory to him. In each of his fi rst three marriages he had known that he wanted the woman concerned, but in this case he had only a portrait to go on and knew that the match was primarily diplomatic. He was hopeful and confi dent that Thomas Cromwell had done his best, but no more. Anne set off on her journey to England – with what trepidation we do not know – at the end of October. She was honourably accompanied but no member of her own family came with her even part of the way. In the light of what happened subsequently it might be that domestic relations at home were not all that cordial and her brother may even have been glad to see the back of her. An unmarried sister of 24 could be an embarrassment. She came via Calais, the sea route from Antwerp being deemed too hazardous in the winter, and Lord Lisle received her there on 11 December. Bad weather then stayed her journey until 27 December, forcing Henry to keep Christmas on his own. So far, despite her leisurely progress, all seemed well. She made a very good impression on the Lisles. In spite of language diffi culties, she seemed gracious and sweet tempered, and passed her enforced stay in Calais by endeavouring to learn something of the English Court. Finally, on 27 December the wind changed and she was able to make a swift passage to England in one of the splendid ships that the King had 110