gentlemen and yeomen in black and tawny liveries rode in the vanguard, along with the closely-guarded carts and carriages loaded with the cardinal's traveling furnishings. As always, Wolsey himself rode on muleback, his rich cardinal's robes blending with the red velvet trappings of his mount. Seven attendants rode before him bearing his tall silver crosses and pillars, the Great Seal of England, his cardinal's hat and the gold-embroidered bag that held his scarlet cloak.
At Canterbury he paused to join in a special litany for the captive pope. ''Saint Mary, pray for our Pope Clement," the monks intoned, while Wolsey knelt and "wept very tenderly" from sorrow. Two other errands delayed his departure. One was a visit to Archbishop Warham. There was reason to think that Warham might be taking Katherine's part in the marital dispute, and Wolsey needed to assure himself this was not so. The cardinal explained the king's position to the aging archbishop, stressing the fact that what Henry sought was nothing more than an inquiry into the truth. Warham's words were reassuring. ''However displeasant it may be to the queen," he told Wolsey, "truth and law must prevail."
Heartened by Warham's expression of support Wolsey called on Bishop Fisher, whom he knew to be opposed to the king's suit. Like Warham Fisher was an old man, nearing seventy, a relic from the old century and the old reign. Contented with his modest episcopal see of Rochester, he spent his time in "his paradise"—his library—whose high windows let in more wind and fog than they did light, giving him head colds. In a well-reasoned written opinion on the divorce he had already informed Wolsey that he considered the papal dispensation authorizing the marriage to be valid, and further inquiry needless. Without trying to change Fisher's mind the cardinal merely explained Henry's view to him more fully, adding that Katherine had spoken harshly to her husband— which Fisher condemned—and urging him not to take any further action of any kind without the king's authorization. The interview was not free from tension—Fisher was Katherine's partisan, and Wolsey knew it—but at least he offered no overt objection to what was asked of him.^
Weighing carefully how he would conduct his embassy, and believing, however obtusely, that the fate of the church was in his hands, Wolsey took ship at Dover early in July. As he was boarding a farewell gift arrived from Henry—a "great, goodly and fat hart" killed by the king's crossbow and sent for Wolsey's table in token of his royal master's love.®
Wherefore now we That lovers he Let us now pray Ones love sure For to procure Without denay.
Sometime in the spring or summer of 1527 Henry wrote the first of his love letters to Anne Boleyn. "My mistress and friend," he wrote, "I and my heart commit themselves into your hands, beseeching you to hold us recommended to your good favor, and that your affection to us may not be by absence diminished."
He missed her, "more than he would ever have thought." He could not bear their separation, except that he had a "firm hope" that his affection was returned. To keep himself constantly in her thoughts he sent her his picture, set in a bracelet, adding the awkward sentiment that he wished himself in its place around her wrist. ^
Henry was on his summer hunting progress, traveling with a larger entourage than usual. The indispensable Norfolk and Suffolk were with him, as were his cousin Henry Courtenay and Anne's father Thomas Boleyn, Lord Rochford. At least four other titled courtiers rounded out the company, along with three of their wives. Katherine traveled with the hunting party too, though Henry no longer came to her chamber when his long day in the fields was over. Instead he sought out the company of the men, and dined alone with them in seclusion.
In the dark stillness of the forest the high matters of politics and government, the bruits of the London streets, the clamor of the court seemed far away and the king could lose himself in the joy of the chase and the still greater joy of thinking about his love. He was not entirely out of touch. News came of reactions to the nullity suit—called in diplomatic dispatches "the king's great matter"—of Wolsey's mission to France, of the French king's new mistress Hely, "whose beauty," Anthony Browne wrote from the French court, "is not highly to be praised." Yet these reminders of outside events rarely intruded on Henry's thoughts, and if they did he had only to call to his side his hunter John Yardeley or Humphrey Rainsford, master of the privy hounds, to talk to them about the next day's sport. The king was in good health, a clerk wrote to Wolsey from the traveling household. His "merry visage" had returned, and with
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it his usual high spirits. He even remembered to show a certain chivalry toward Katherine, whose bed and board he had so pointedly renounced. When he left Hunsdon for Beaulieu toward the end of July "though he was ready to depart by a good space, he tarried for the queen, and so they rode forth together."^
If he sensed Katherine's pain Henry did not show it. Armored by the conviction that the step he had taken was right in God's eyes, buoyed by his growing infatuation for Anne, he shrugged off the evidence of Katherine's unhappiness and looked ahead to the day, not far off, when his new queen would be crowned.
Not long after Henry sent his letter and portrait bracelet to Anne he received a gift in reply. It was an ornament of some sort, perhaps a piece of jewelry, with a beautiful diamond and a miniature ship with a tiny passenger, a ''solitary damsel." It charmed him completely, and called forth fresh declarations of love. By her gift Anne had shown her "great benevolence and goodwill" toward him, giving such warm evidence of her affection that he could not help but pledge her all his honor, love and service; in her alone his hope "hath set up his everlasting rest, saying aut illic aut nullibi/' either there or nowhere. He ventured now to write of his greater hope, that soon he could dedicate his body to Anne as well as his heart, "as God can bring to pass if it pleaseth him, whom I entreat once each day for the accomplishment thereof, trusting that at length my prayer will be heard."
That she should become his body and soul was Henry's all-encompassing desire, yet her eagerness did not match his. Many years later Anne confessed that, at the start of their affair, she had "never . . . in her heart, wanted to love the king." She may well have been more wary of him than fond. She may have been confused in her feelings, uncertain whether the mastery she was slowly conceding to him sprang from romantic passion or from the dutiful response of a young girl to her breathtakingly handsome king. Anne certainly had more than enough sophistication to resist Henry, and the discernment to know what the effect of her resistance would be. Yet her response may have been more hesitant than calculating. And, of course, her response may not have been hers at all. Quite possibly her letters, at least in the beginning, were dictated by parents and relatives unwilling to leave in the hands of a girl of twenty a matter that concerned their own futures so directly.
For a time Anne's letters sent Henry into despair. Having said one thing she informed him she meant to do another. She seemed to waver in her emotions, now sounding ardent, now formal and detached. He was unable to reconcile the differences between these passages, and asked her, "in great distress," once and for all to say unambiguously what she felt. With all his heart he begged her to "expressly certify me of your whole mind concerning the love between us two." He had loved her for more than a year; now he had to know whether she rejected or favored his suit. However expressed, the positive answer she finally gave—none of Anne's letters has been preserved—made Henry's hopes soar again, and turned his thoughts more keenly than ever to securing his divorce.
Meanwhile Wolsey's efforts to accommodate his king went forward. He arrived in France in early July, prepared to undertake an extraordinary array of diplomatic tasks. The grandest of them, the assumption of headship of the church, would come last. As a preliminary he was to finalize the Anglo-French treaties agreed to in England three months earlier, and to arrange for a splendid meeting between Henry and Francis, on the model of their triumphant encounter at the Field of Cloth of Gold seven years before. Wolsey hoped to achieve nothing short of a European peace—his old dream—climaxed by a three-way accord with the emperor. Once p
eace treaties united England, France and the Hapsburg empire, the pope might be freed. If not, Wolsey would don the papal authority—and use it, if need be, to hasten the favorable outcome of Henry's suit.
From the start the inflated aims of the embassy were punctured by petty annoyances. In Boulogne the mule Wolsey was riding shied at the sound of cannonfire and nearly threw him to the ground. Insulting graffiti were found in his lodgings; in one place a cardinal's hat was carved into a stone windowsill, with a gallows over it. Thieves broke into his chamber many times, stealing gold and silver ornaments and other things he kept for his personal use. Finally at Compiegne he lost something truly indispensable: the silver and gilt inkpot he used when he wrote his dispatches to Henry in England. A search was made, and a ragged boy of twelve or thirteen—a "ruffian's page," servant to a professional thief in Paris—was found hiding under the stairwell. The boy confessed he had taken not only the inkpot but everything else the cardinal had missed, and had delivered all to his master.^
An even more bizarre incident marred the banqueting that followed the diplomatic meetings. Accompanying the cardinal as part of his traveling household was a company of highly skilled minstrels, one of whom, a shalm-player, excelled all his peers. King Francis was so taken with the musicians that he borrowed them from Wolsey and kept them in constant attendance on him wherever he went. One night he dined away from court, at a nobleman's house, and as usual the English minstrels went along and performed for the banqueters. They played on and on throughout most of the night, outdoing themselves and so captivating their audience that they were declared to surpass the king's own musicians in virtuosity—the shalm-player in particular. Two days later the shalm-player was dead, "either with extreme labor of blowing or with poisoning." It was rumored the man was given poison out of envy, though he may simply have played his heart out for the king.^
The talks with the French went smoothly. Francis ratified the marriage contract binding his younger son to the Princess Mary, and had only the most gracious words for England and the English. He could ill afford even the shadow of a quarrel with the least of his allies; his sons were still hostages in imperial hands, and the outcome of his longstanding dispute with Charles V was far from certain.
Everywhere Wolsey went he was saluted as Cardinalis Pacificus, Cardinal Peacemaker, yet his hopes to erect a broader European peace were soon abandoned. The emperor was at present ill disposed to make
peace either with Francis or his errant uncle in England, though he was far too shrewd a statesman to allow a domestic quarrel to block his political advantage. He was moving with deliberation to prevent the divorce, writing in affronted moderation to Henry and assuring Katherine of his loyalty and concern. He sided with her in ''this ugly affair," as he termed it, and took her plight as much to heart as if she were his mother. "Nothing shall be omitted on my part to help you in your present tribulation," he told her, and to back up his words he followed her suggestion and urged the pope to revoke Wolsey's legatine power, leaving him without authority to deliver a judgment in the nullity suit.^
In the end Wolsey's self-important vision of rescuing the church faded as well. With the majority of the cardinals captive in Rome he could gather little support for his scheme to take on the headship of the church. Three French and one Italian cardinal joined him in a declaration refusing to obey Pope Clement while he remained in the hands of the emperor's troops, but in the absence of more extensive support there was little he could do.
The months of wearisome travel wore Wolsey down. He had been rushing from city to city, he wrote Henry, making the best time he could, traveling as fast as his "old and cracked body may endure." He had put up with French roads, French heat and French impudence, and with the annoying French habit of ignoring foreigners' ignorance of the French language. He had warned his serving men and attendants about this before they left England. "Now to the point of the Frenchmen's nature," he told them, "ye shall understand that their disposition is such that they will be at the first meeting as familiar with you as [if] they had been acquainted with you long before and commune with you in the French tongue as though ye understood every word they spoke." He urged them not to be disconcerted by this custom, but to return it in kind, answering pleasantly in English and carrying on their side of the mutually incomprehensible dialogue.^
News from London and the English court nagged at Wolsey. In the capital his embassy had won him greater disfavor than ever, with the people calling him "all French" and weaving what they knew of the divorce and French diplomacy into their own curious explanation of current events. The king's confessor Longland, they said, and "diverse other great clerks" had advised Henry to take as his wife Francis I's sister, the duchess of Alengon. Thomas Boleyn had gone to France to fetch the duchess' picture; now Wolsey had gone to get the bride herself, and to bring her back to England.^ (The gossip was not entirely preposterous. The duchess had been married the previous January, but another member of the French royal house, Louis XII's daughter Renee, did loom large in Wolsey's thoughts as a potential wife for Henry.) At the court itself the king's favorite councilors were taking advantage of Wolsey's absence to undermine his power; in an effort to counteract their influence he tried to convince Henry that even in the midst of other matters his mind was ever on the divorce.
"Daily and hourly m.using, and thinking on your grace's great and
secret affair," he wrote from Abbeville, "and how the same may come to good effect and desired end," he had at length become convinced that a papal judgment on Henry's behalf was the only sure way to settle the matter, since Katherine might appeal any judgment handed down by a lesser court convened in England. A few weeks earlier the cardinal had managed to discover a crucial argument in the king's favor. In discussions of the theology and canon law of the nullity suit much weight had been given to the issue of Katherine's virginity. If, as she claimed, her marriage to Arthur was never consummated, then, so she and her supporters insisted, her former marriage was no impediment to her union with Henry; hence that union was irreproachably valid. Wolsey pointed out that the mere fact of the public marriage of Katherine and Arthur was sufficient in canon law to present an impediment to the queen's remarriage—the so-called "impediment of public honesty."* Her disputed virginity was irrelevant; her case crumbled.
Thus far Wolsey's work on the king's great matter had been beyond criticism. At one blow he had knocked down the strongest defense Katherine could boast, and his further efforts promised to be equally effective. Yet for a variety of reasons Henry was pursuing the case in his own way, unknown to the cardinal. His confidence in his longtime servant had declined somewhat, though it was probably the urgency of his desire for Anne as much as any loss of faith in Wolsey that led him to carry through a secret strategy of his own. Adopting more than one approach, he reasoned, would improve the odds in his favor, and he meant to have his will no matter how high the obstacles that stood in his way.
At Henry's order two draft bulls were prepared to be taken to Rome by a special royal envoy, William Knight. The first permitted him, once he was free from Katherine, to marry any woman he chose, even one who would normally be forbidden him because of a prior connection with one of her relatives. (As opponents of the divorce never ceased to point out, through Henry's affair with Mary Boleyn Anne had become "related" to him in the same way that Katherine had by marrying Arthur.) Significantly, this bull looked ahead to the possibility that Anne might consent to become Henry's mistress before marriage; this too was to be no hindrance. The second bull was startling: quite simply, it sanctioned bigamy. If no way could be found to declare Henry's marriage to Katherine invalid, this document read, then the pope was to permit him to take a second wife.
In turning to Rome for aid Henry was putting his future happiness in dubious hands. The ways of the pope and the Roman Curia in the early sixteenth century were not those of sanctity and equity; corruption underlay every spiritual transaction, bribery every judgment of the papal cour
t. To outsiders the cardinals and other officials seemed to view their posts as sinecures to be enjoyed in profitable splendor, neglecting all but their own aggrandizement. Vice and criminality of many kinds flourished in the papal city. It was widely believed that among the cardinals were some willing to use poison against one another and even against the pope. To the humanist Richard Pace the Eternal City appeared to be a perver-
sion of everything holy, a monstrosity ''full of shame and scandal." There ''all faith, honesty and religion seem to have vanished from the earth.'* With few exceptions Englishmen visiting Rome found the ways of the Curia a disillusioning mystery. Some managed to acclimatize themselves in time, but most accomplished little. The English in Rome, one cardinal wrote in 1517, did nothing but eat and drink, run riot and abuse each other.®
Presiding over this profane milieu was Giulio de'Medici, Pope Clement VII, a quick-witted, hard-working man of inoffensive life with an unfortunate tendency to deceive and betray almost everyone who approached him. He gave way easily under pressure, promising publicly to fulfill whatever was asked of him, then working in secret to undermine the agreement; an English ambassador called him another Judas, while a Spanish diplomat declared he had never encountered anyone whose words were more opaque. Despite his flaws Clement was not devoid of humor or intelligence, and had the makings of a capable pope. Yet overwhelmed by the responsibilities of the papacy and the shattering events of his pontificate, he failed. "He endured an enormous labor," one historian has written, "to become, from a great and respected cardinal, a small and little-esteemed pope."^^
When confronted with Henry's envoys, letters and arguments in favor of his nullity suit—and Charles V's rigorous messages of opposition to it—Clement found himself in a multiple predicament. Shaken to numbness by the wrecking of his city, he was in no condition to arbitrate even a dispute between petty princelings, let alone a highly consequential issue dividing the Defender of the Faith in England and the powerful emperor whose troops now held him captive. Even after his escape from the Castel Sant'Angelo in December—he walked out past the Spanish sentinels disguised in a long false beard, wearing the tunic and slouched hat of a household servant—he could not breathe free. He settled in among his cardinals in the tumbledown bishop's palace at Orvieto a day's journey from Rome, and began the complex, drawn-out and often baffling series of maneuvers that were his response to the nullity suit.
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