Two years later, though, hopes rose once more as Katherine again became bountifully, enthusiastically pregnant. As soon as her condition was suspected it became the most absorbing topic of conversation at court. In hushed tones the king's officials and household staff exchanged gossip about her prospects for a safe delivery, listening for scraps of news from Dr. de Victoria and watching the queen's face for signs of strain. Once again the doctor became a very important man; he had long since settled in as Katherine's chief physician, and to make him more comfortable his wife had been brought from Spain to join him, at some considerable cost.
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No physician could have been more solicitous of Katherine's well-being than Henry, though, who as her pregnancy continued to go well kept her with him on his hunting progresses and let her needs govern his itinerary. Pace recorded the king's delight the night he rode to Woodstock to meet Katherine "and the queen did meet with his grace at his chamber door, and showed unto him, for his welcome home, her belly something great, declaring openly that she was quick with child." Henry officially informed Wolsey at once, and gave orders for the quickening to be celebrated with a solemn singing of the Te Deum in St. Paul's. In a secret letter to the cardinal written at about the same time he made his hopes plain. He trusted that Katherine was indeed carrying a living child, he told his chancellor, and he meant to make certain she came to no harm. For her sake he would not return to London, "because about this time is partly of her dangerous times, and because of that I would remove her as little as I may now." Henry's letter revealed his guarded excitement. He had been disappointed too often not to restrain his optimism, but after all the last child had lived and this one gave signs of life. Nothing was certain, Henry wrote, all was in God's hands, but the queen's condition was "a thing wherein I have great hope and likelihood." God might well bring to completion that which he had begun.^
Again the hopes proved to be vain. The child, a girl, was stillborn. It was to be Katherine's last.
Now in 1521 only the most resolute optimist could envision the birth of a son to Katherine of Aragon, and in the absence of such a prospect there was much anxiety about who the king's heir would be. Buckingham had been an alarmingly likely possibility. The Carthusian who had encouraged the duke with his treasonous revelations was far from alone in thinking he might one day rule; his popularity had been undeniable. Richard de la Pole, though he lacked Buckingham's popular support, had an impeccable bloodline and the somewhat fitful backing of the French king; his claims could hardly be ignored. Of Henry's own blood, there was the surviving son of Margaret Tudor and James IV, Prince James, whom some already spoke of as the natural heir, and Henry Brandon, the young earl of Lincoln who had been bom just after Princess Mary.^
More distant relatives of the king were thought to have at least some chance of succeeding. In 1519 Henry and Wolsey were somewhat startled to hear that Charles V's minister Chievres had proposed a match between his own niece and Henry Courtenay, Henry VIII's first cousin and close confidant. A princely dowry of fifty thousand gold crowns was being offered with the girl, and the emperor indicated he would add even more. For some reason—perhaps the same reason he had tried to arrange a marriage between Charles Brandon and Margaret of Savoy—Henry seems to have favored the match, but Wolsey was highly suspicious of it. He saw to it that inquiries were made to discover just what Chievres' motives were, and asked pointedly whether the offer was based on an expectation that Courtenay might succeed to the throne.''
Though spoken of only in whispers—for to debate the question of the king's heir was treason—the matter was much in the air in the early 1520s,
and weighed heavily on Henry. What had gone wrong? Evidently a large part of the problem lay with Katherine, whose checkered history of stillbirths, miscarriages and odd female phenomena—unexplained swellings and deflatings, menstrual irregularities—put her record of failure far outside the norm, even in an age when perhaps half of all infants died within their first year.^ A series of physicians and midwives, of which Dr. de Victoria was only the most prominent, had been unable to cure the queen's disorders, and she was rapidly reaching the end of her childbear-ing years.^
Publicly at least no one said that Henry was to blame. Even if such a suggestion had not been treasonous it would have been all but unthinkable, for as he reached his late twenties the king was no less virile and vigorous than he had been at the start of his reign. His agile, admirably proportioned body was still a match for most opponents in the joust; the angelic beauty of his face had become more striking with the years, and he still had a boyish air, though his red-blond hair was now complemented by a thick, manly red beard which "looked like gold."^ Long hours of riding, either in the tiltyard or through the grounds of his hunting parks, kept Henry exceedingly fit; the quick laugh which punctuated his speech, the hearty way he clapped his hands on men's shoulders when he talked to them, his frequent, ringing oath "By St. George!" all betokened high spirits and abundant health.
Yet if the problem was entirely Katherine's, why had one of her children lived? At five years old. Princess Mary was proving to be a reasonably hardy, precociously gifted little girl who had her father's blonde hair and gray eyes. Henry appeared to be very pleased with his daughter. He enjoyed carrying her in his arms, showing her to each of his courtiers in turn and calling her his "pearl of the world." She was quick-witted and musical, as he was, and she charmed ambassadors with her smiles and her accomplished playing on the virginals; they agreed with one another that she would grow into a beautiful woman. Henry saw little of Mary, however. She had her own household, her own servants and tutors and furnishings, her own miniature throne covered in cloth of gold and velvet. Henry's relative Margaret Pole presided over Mary's establishment, and Katherine saw to it that the princess was prepared for her future role as a serious, devout wife.
Mary was thriving; Katherine was vindicated. There must be another explanation for the troubled succession. Evidence given at Buckingham's trial had shown that there was. It was said God was punishing Henry for his tainted marriage. Two sins, incest and murder, befouled the union of Henry and Katherine. Theologians had questioned the lawfulness of Henry's marriage to his brother's widow; the king's subjects recalled the execution of the earl of Warwick in 1499 and said that a marriage-meaning the marriage of Katherine and Arthur—made in blood must be accursed.
Buckingham's chancellor had heard the duke say that Warwick's death still rankled, and that God was exacting punishment for it "by not suffering the king's issue to prosper, as appeared by the death of his
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son"—in this instance, the son bom in 1511.** To sixteenth-century men and women the idea of divine vengeance at work in human affairs was natural, indeed unavoidable. Superhuman explanations for earthly events came to mind more readily than human ones, and they worked with particular force on Henry's alert imagination.^
Haunting, vexing, perhaps insurmountable, the need for a son made itself felt in every area of Henry's life. His least indisposition gave rise to inordinate concern. When fevers laid him low, or pains in the head with ''rheums falling out of the same," the court officials fretted and feared the worst until he was well again. Every time he entered the tiltyard his councilors prayed he would not emerge battered or maimed, and that the ringing blows his opponents aimed at his head and neck would not scramble his brains or unravel his wits. Having no son made it hazardous for the king to lead his men into battle, either against other nations or against rebels at home. From a diplomatic standpoint Henry and England were at a particular disadvantage. With a son he would have been able to arrange a match with the daughter of almost any European ruler he chose, demanding a large dowry and a military alliance in addition. With a daughter he might still gain a military alliance along with a betrothal, but the large dowry would have to be paid out, from his own coffers. And in addition there was the serious question of whether the princess' husband would in time become king of England.
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When Mary was betrothed to the French dauphin in 1518 and, after that alliance was set aside, to Charles V in 1522, the marriage treaties named the princess as Henry's heir in the event he had no son. "It is to be considered that she is now our sole heir," Henry instructed his imperial envoy Tunstall to say in 1521, "and may succeed to the crown."^^ But under English law women's property, titles and incomes passed to their husbands. If she became queen would Mary's husband become king? And wouldn't she, as a dutiful wife, defer to his judgment in matters of state, or perhaps even give the entire kingdom into his keeping? Sometime in the early 1520s Henry called together his chief justices and questioned them at length on these issues. Because no precedent existed, there were no certain answers, yet it seemed clear that Mary's husband would not be able to claim the throne by right. Whether he might obtain it by force or by intimidating his wife was another matter.
Long before this Henry had begun in a roundabout way to seek another sort of solution to the succession problem. If his wife could not give him a son, perhaps a mistress could.
Henry's liaison with Anne Stafford had not been renewed following her abrupt departure from the court early in the reign, yet there were many other girls to choose from. English girls were exceptional: "divinely pretty," soft, pleasant, gentle and charming, "as bright as a breast of bacon," in one contemporary description. "They have one custom [in England] which cannot be too much admired," Erasmus wrote. "When you go anywhere on a visit the girls all kiss you. They kiss you again when you arrive. They kiss you when you go away; and they kiss you again when you return. Go where you will, it is all kisses."^^ To outsiders the
English habits of love seemed odd. The women appeared to be highly passionate, while the men, though lustful, seemed impervious to romance. Heedless of medical warnings that excessive lovemaking brought on gout, anemia, dyspepsia and blindness Englishmen were "somewhat licentious in their dispositions," yet they rarely fell prey to passion. "I never have noticed anyone," a visiting Venetian remarked, "either at court or amongst the lower orders, to be in love; whence one must necessarily conclude, either that the English are the most discreet lovers in the world, or that they are incapable of love."
Though he was hardly incapable of love, none of Henry's mistresses stirred his feelings to any great degree. The earliest of them, Jane Popyngcort, left few traces of her place in the king's affections—if indeed she was his mistress.^^ A maid of honor to Queen Katherine who lost her good reputation when she became the mistress of the hostage due de Longueville, Jane became a lady in waiting and close companion of Henry's sister Mary, and a lively participant in court revels and disguis-ings. Henry's involvement with her came in the final months of 1514, when Mary was in France as wife to Louis XII and the duke was in attendance on her, leaving Jane behind in England. Before long Jane left for Paris to resume her place at de Longueville's side, and when she did Henry sent her off with a reward of a hundred pounds. ^^
By the time Jane left England in May of 1516 Bessie Blount had been the court beauty for several years. A relative of Lord Mountjoy, Bessie sang and danced beautifully and was a favorite of Charles Brandon and of the king's minions, especially the lecherous Francis Bryan. By her "goodly pastimes," wrote the chronicler Hall, Bessie "won the king's heart," and by summer or fall of 1518 she had become his mistress. As Henry was taking care to guard Katherine's health that summer, and writing to Wolsey of his hopes for her child, he was almost certainly keeping company with Bessie Blount as well; his bitter disappointment at Katherine's stillbirth was softened somewhat by news of Bessie's pregnancy.
Ironically, Bessie's child not only lived, it was a boy. He was christened Henry Fitzroy, in acknowledgment of his royal paternity, and was assigned a princely household like that of the king's legitimate daughter. Bessie made way for her successor as royal mistress, Mary Boleyn Carey, content to be unofficially honored with the title "mother of the king's son" and content, too, with Henry's generosity toward her. Manors in Lincoln and York were given her, and a marriage was arranged with one of Wolsey's retainers, Gilbert Talboys. Both Talboys and his father, a madman in Wolsey's custody who had once been a soldier in Henry's armies, benefited from the marriage; Henry rewarded them with great sums of money, and in addition, Gilbert Talboys was knighted and became sheriff of Lincoln in 1525.^'^
Of Henry's next mistress surprisingly little is known. Thomas Bo-leyn's older daughter Mary married one of the king's favorites, William Carey, in 1520 and Henry attended their wedding and made an offering.^^ With Carey's indulgent complicity his wife served the king's sexual needs
over the next several years, though neither she nor her husband received rewards on the scale of those given to Bessie and Gilbert Talboys. Henry christened one of his ships the Mary Boleyn; that was all.*^ By the mid-1520s the liaison had ended and instead of installing a new mistress right away Henry began to turn his attention more and more to his unsatisfactory marriage.
Sometime in 1524 Henry expressed a keen desire to see Erasmus and talk with him. He had recently been given a copy of the great humanist's treatise on the freedom of the will, and a passage in the work spoke to his thoughts in an especially satisfying way. In it Erasmus urged his readers not to be too curious about the ways of God, but to leave them as divine mysteries. As Henry had been pondering these mysteries intensely, Erasmus' insights may have offered some sort of release; in any case they made him wish for a visit with his boyhood friend, very possibly to confide to him the unsettled state of his mind about his marriage.
Several things weighed on him. The gravest of them, the succession, was still unresolved. Mary was officially the heir; Henry Fitzroy, though he might prove useful in time, had not yet been designated to succeed, and his illegitimacy posed a problem. The uncertain succession thwarted the king at every turn; it was becoming intolerable. Then there was the indeterminate state of his marriage itself. Judging from a remark Henry made years later to a visitor at court, it was just at this time that he and Katherine ceased to live together as man and wife.^^ Soon afterward she reached menopause, and the diplomats authorized to discuss the matter at foreign courts openly acknowledged that though "God might send her more children," it would be nothing short of a miracle if he did.^^
Henry was in a quandary. What should he do? The church taught that the purpose of marriage was procreation, yet his marriage would be fruitless from now on. It was a king's Christian duty to provide a male heir to the throne, for the safety of the kingdom, yet so long as he stayed with Katherine there would be no son. If he persisted in this marriage Henry would leave these clear moral obligations unsatisfied. Finally there was the all too persuasive idea that God himself disapproved of the union, and would be placated only if it were dissolved.
These and similar themes ran through Henry's mind in the middle years of the 1520s like the arguments and counter-arguments in the debates he loved to arrange. There were hints about a divorce, though outwardly the king and queen preserved an amicable, comfortable companionship that offered many shared pleasures to them both.^^
"I love true where 1 did marry," Henry sang in his early years with Katherine. Probably he still loved her; the deaths of their children, the ventures he had undertaken with her avid support, the triumphs and common dangers they had faced bound them together in default of passion. The initials '*H & K" were still woven into Henry's jousting finery and revels costumes, sometimes intertwined with trueloves and hearts, and he still enjoyed planning surprises for his wife. One day early in 1520 Henry and Katherine were in her chamber, when suddenly to the queen's amazement four masked gentlemen entered the room unan-
nounced, along with a wheeled cart. A lady sat in the cart, with jousting armor beside her. The gentlemen challenged the king to a joust; he entered the challenge, and the little ceremony came to an end.^^ Henry and Katherine rarely spent more than a few hours in one another's company, but they saw each other often. The king was frequently reported to be "taking his pleasure as usual with th
e queen"; ambassadors and officials often found him in her chamber, discussing books or politics or religion. They hunted together, went on pilgrimages together—though sometimes to separate shrines—and met at the end of the day for supper and vespers when there were no banquets or entertainments to attend in the great hall.
Henry was accustomed to visit Katherine after the midday meal, accompanied by whichever of the courtiers were in attendance on him. The bishop of Lincoln described in a letter how when he was at Eltham in January of 1525 he went to Katherine's apartments and was met there by the king and queen.
"Madam," Henry said to his wife, "my lord of Lincoln can show you of my lord cardinal's college at Oxenford, and what learning there is and shall be, and what learned men in the same."
Bowing to the bishop, Henry left him with Katherine, and she listened graciously as the churchman went on to explain to her Wolsey's plan for the new college he was building, how it would draw students from all over Europe and how the students and masters alike would remember to pray for her welfare.^^
With Thomas More Henry and Katherine were more relaxed. He came to them on business but stayed on long after the business was done to talk and laugh and enjoy their company. In November of 1524, when there was war on the continent and the old enmity between England and France had been rekindled. More brought Henry the latest dispatches with news of European affairs. The king talked with More awhile, then read the papers with close attention, making comments to Katherine as he went along. She listened with informed interest, saying she was glad to hear the Spanish troops were acquitting themselves well in Italy and smiling to hear of the bad fortunes of the French. Henry and More laughed over the predicament of King Francis, halted on his way into Italy and in need of help to extricate himself and his troops.^^
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