Lastly she appealed to his sense of right and wrong. "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 it be true or no, I put it to your conscience."
Her plea over, the queen waited in silence for an answer that never came. Then she got to her feet and made her way slowly to the door of the great hall. Henry signaled the court crier to call her back.
"Katherine queen of England," he shouted, "come into the court!" She refused to acknowledge the summons, even when it was repeated and her escort, the faithful Griffith ap Rhys, urged her to turn back.
"On, on," she said to him, "it makes no matter, for it is no indifferent court for me. Therefore I will not tarry, go on your ways."
Nothing that came afterward could match the intensity of that moment, though weeks of detailed testimony dulled the courtiers' memories of the queen's defiant stand. Every incident of that faraway wedding night in 1501 was brought to light again—how Katherine had lain under the sheets when Arthur was escorted into the bedchamber, her face veiled out of modesty as the clerics blessed the bed; how the two had remained together all that night; how Arthur, early the next morning, had called lustily to his gentlemen for a cup of ale, saying he had "been this night in the midst of Spain." "Masters, it is good pastime to have a wife," he had told them, and some among them still remembered remarking to one another that the prince's decline in health set in just after his wedding night; at the time they concluded that his weakness came about "because he lay with the lady Katherine."^^
None of this was conclusive. Much of what the courtiers and servants said was as irrelevant as it was embarrassing, and even the best evidence was only circumstantial. Yet except for Fisher Katherine's lawyers defended her poorly, and by mid-July Campeggio realized that when the time came he would have no choice but to rule for the king. Caught between the weight of the king's case and the pope's directive to avoid judgment Campeggio made an anguished decision. When on July 23 the king's proctor made his formal request for judgment the legate rose and announced that, as all the courts in Rome were in recess at this period, he was obliged to recess his court as well, to reconvene in October.
After months of hopeful effort Henry had been tricked. Wolsey too had been fooled, for as legate he had it in his power to pronounce a definitive judgment and he had let his opportunity slip. No document
records the king's reaction to the announcement; rage, dismay, above all a wave of monumental impatience must have swept over him.
Suffolk's response spoke for him. As soon as Campeggio announced the adjournment the nobleman rose to his feet and, clapping his hand furiously down on the table in front of him, swore an oath.
*'By the mass, now I see that the old said saw is true, that there was never legate or cardinal, that did good in England!"^^
With that all the nobles got up together and swept out of the room, *'leaving the legates sitting one looking at the other sore astonished."
Long time I lived in the courte, With lords and ladies of great sorte; And when I smiled all men were glad, But when I frown'd my prince grew sad.
The drama at Blackfriars in the summer of 1529 closed the first stage of the king's struggle for his divorce. For the next few years, though efforts to bring about a definitive judgment continued, the mood of almost compulsive urgency surrounding the king's great matter gave way to the settled expectation that, in time, King Henry would have his way.
Slowly the courtiers adapted themselves to the new tone of court society, learning to amuse themselves at "Pope July," the game whose points were called matrimony, intrigue, and the pope and whose tacit object was to make a light matter of the king's divorce. They followed their sovereign's example and arrayed themselves more magnificently than ever, parading through the galleries of Hampton Court as if in disdain of all troublesome thoughts, and paying extravagant attention to the king and his lady.
Henry had begun to show Anne such husbandly devotion—even in Katherine's presence—that disapproving visitors to his court were outraged. He caressed her ''openly and in public as if she were his wife"; he gave her Katherine's seat of honor at banquets. When he went riding he lifted Anne into the saddle in front of him and together they galloped over the fields. "Her will is law to him," a visiting Italian wrote, while the shrewd Du Bellay warned in his dispatches that Anne might soon be pregnant with the king's child.*
The relationship between Henry and Anne, never without turbulence, had now taken on the atmosphere of a stormy marriage. Anne had long since begun to anticipate her future status as queen, and was unrestrained in her sarcasm for her rival Queen Katherine. In the presence of one of Katherine's ladies Anne remarked that she wished all the Spaniards in the world were in the sea, and when the woman protested that Anne should not abuse the queen's honor with such language Anne replied sharply that she cared nothing whatever for Katherine, and that she would rather see her hanged than acknowledge her as her mistress.^
Such exchanges were a mild embarrassment to Henry, but he was hesitant to complain about Anne's behavior. To chastise her would mean adding to the store of grievances she nourished, and giving her added
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reason to burst into tears and bewail her fate. She often lamented her condition to Henry, alternately sobbing and regretting the loss of her youth and honor and angrily accusing him of failing to promote the nullity suit as vigorously as he might. More than once she threatened to leave him, playing on his complete devotion to her and reducing him to a state of fearful anxiety. When Anne was in these moods, it was said, "the king had much trouble to appease her," even though he begged her, with tears in his eyes, not to speak of leaving him. After one severe quarrel in January of 1531 he was again at his wits' end, and turned in his tearful extremity to Anne's relatives, pleading with them to intercede and to try to bring about a reconciliation.^
Henry attracted a good deal of criticism by his deference to Anne. He "showed himself so forgetful of what is right," an imperiahst wrote, "and of his dignity and authority, that everybody thinks little of him, as of a man who is acting against his truth, honor and conscience."'* To show such overanxious concern toward a wife would have seemed inappropriate enough; to be so disquieted over a mistress was little short of ridiculous.
Certainly Henry provided Anne with luxuries worthy of a queen. She had gowns of purple velvet and scarlet satin, and a court dress of crimson cloth of gold worth the price of a small jewel. There were expensive furs to trim these gowns, and diamonds and pearls in abundance to adorn them. There were purses of coins for playing money and spending money, and large sums of a hundred pounds or more as New Year's gifts. When she went riding Anne could choose from four French saddles Henry ordered for her, upholstered in black velvet fringed with silk and gold; each had a matching footstool for mounting and dismounting and matching harnesses and gilt bits.^ Anne's lodgings were filled with elegant furnishings—costly hangings and soft rugs, embroidered cushions, a beautifully worked desk "garnished with paten and gold." In 1530 Henry ordered a new bed, elaborately carved and fitted with rich testers and counterpane. It may have been for his private bedchamber, or it may have been the bed he shared with Anne.^
Late in 1530 Henry disconcerted his courtiers by creating a place for Anne among the nobility. The Boleyn ancestry was not inherently distinguished. Anne's great-grandfather Geoffrey Boleyn had risen from rural origins to become a prosperous merchant dealing in silk and wool—and lord mayor of London. Her grandfather had married a noble heiress; her father was an influential courtier linked by marriage to one of the most powerful men in England, the duke of Norfolk. But recent connections contracted by marriage were nothing compared to a noble claim centuries old. Now Henry discovered two Boleyn forebears—one a twelfth-century Norman lord, the other a fourteenth-century Picard—whose aristocratic blood shed luster on Anne and her family.^
Among the courtiers Anne's newfound nobility gave occasion for jokes, and t
o those who took Katherine's side, secret outrage. Among the common people it nourished a hostility that erupted into murderous violence.
According to a report reaching Venice from France, a mob of from seven to eight thousand women—and men disguised as women— gathered in London and marched to the riverside house where Anne was staying alone. It was said they intended to kill her, and they might well have succeeded had word not reached Anne of their approach. She escaped across the river in a boat and made her way to safety, doubtless vowing to stay closer to the king from then on, and to trust her future subjects less.^
Terrifying though it must have been to Anne, this incident evoked little official response; being ''a thing done by women," it seemed relatively slight, or so the French report claimed. What notice Henry took of it is unrecorded. Outwardly at least his interests seemed to narrow somewhat in these years; his privy purse accounts reveal a preoccupation with finery and amusement reminiscent of his first decade as king.
His costumes more than matched Anne's in splendor. His gowns were of silver tissue and cloth of gold, his doublets of crimson tissue furred with sables. One doublet cost twice the value of a small farm, while the value of the gold and jewels used to trim others surpassed many a nobleman's annual income. One day in October of 1530 Henry bought a thousand pearls. The royal milliner Christopher, who supplied a variety of ornaments of dress, brought the king velvet caps and gold buttons and yards of yellow lace—and perhaps his scarlet nightcap embroidered in gold. Looking ahead to a long life of splendor, in 1529 Henry undertook to buy from the cloth merchants of Florence more than ten thousand pounds' worth of velvets, satins and precious metallic cloths, with payment to be made over twenty-six years.^
Dressed in the fruits of his extravagance, his robes gleaming and jewels shining from his cap and throat and chest, the king was awesome, and he knew it. In order to admire himself at full length he ordered a large looking glass, and stood before it, perhaps, as his attendants perfumed his clothes and person with lavender and orangeflower water. ^'^
The interstices of his working days were filled with a variety of amusements. He liked to watch his guardsmen shoot at targets, and to listen to plays put on by the children of the Chapel Royal or the boys of St. Paul's. He wagered with anyone and everyone: with his treasurer, his pages, and the sergeant of his cellar, with Anthony Knevet at tennis and Thomas Boleyn at a shooting match at Hampton Court. Acrobats, freaks and wandering entertainers—such as "the fellow with the dancing dog"—held his interest and amused his courtiers, and when other pastimes failed the king went boating on the Thames in his barge and filled the bargemen's pockets with drinking money afterwards.*'
The accounts of Henry's activities show an unusually varied and energetic life. One day he supervised workmen building a bridge at York Place, and advised them on its finishing: another day he inspected one of his fortifications, discussing its defense with the captain and gunners. At other times he went down to the docks and boarded his warships, or to the stables, where his favored mount the Barbary horse was living out his old age. Often he looked in on his horse keeper Hannibal Zinzano to talk over the state of his horses' health. Payments for 'drink and other medicines"
for the royal horses, or for their healing, were a recurring entry in the king's personal accounts, though his riding was now confined chiefly to travel and the hunt. He no longer astonished his courtiers with the acrobatics of the manage, and jousted infrequently. In March of 1531 he rode two matches in the lists against his redoubtable old partner Charles Brandon, but as Brandon was forty-six and the king in his fortieth year their combat must have lacked a good deal of its onetime fire and fervor. Henry's military ambitions were dormant too for the time being, though he continued to pay the armorer of Windsor Castle to "keep clean the king's harness there."
As ever, the woods and fields lured Henry out of doors at all seasons. He began to devote more time to hawking than in the past, and went fishing with the "angling rods" provided for him at Hampton Court. To improve his hunting in summer and fall Henry oversaw the replenishing of his hunting parks with deer and other game brought from elsewhere, and ordered his park keepers to set out hay and oats for the beasts in the winter months when food was scarce.
A substantial part of the king's attention went to looking after his numerous dependants. There were aging relatives and retainers to be supported. Annuities went to Katherine, countess of Devonshire, sister of Elizabeth of York and Henry's aunt (who styled herself proudly "daughter, sister, and aunt of kings"), to Henry's old nurse Anne Luke, to a retired "footman and tumbler," to an elderly gentlewoman of Elizabeth Woodville's who lived to be nearly ninety.
But his generosity also extended to his subjects at large. Small knots of needy men and women gathered wherever the king went—along the roadway when he traveled, before the door of the church where he heard mass—hoping to be noticed and rewarded with a few coins. Occasionally they brought him gifts: roots and herbs, green geese, live foxes, and every sort of food, from apples and orange pies to pheasants and pomegranates and cooked salmon, and the baked lampreys of which he was especially fond.^2 But more often they asked his charity, "for the love of Saint George," and sometimes they told him their stories. William Kebet, "late sumpterman of the ward," had lost his living and was "fallen in poverty and decay." The king gave him a hundred shillings, and when Kebet came again for assistance the following year, he received four pounds. To another wretched man in need and "like to be lost" went another hundred shillings, and to the destitute father of thirteen children, three pounds six.^^
The momentum of Henry's thinking and working increased as he approached his forties. In the aftermath of the inconclusive legatine trial—which even before it was recessed became superseded when Pope Clement advoked the case to Rome—the king turned with renewed intensity to studying the theological issues in the nullity suit. Always fascinated by the stuff of intellectual debate, Henry now attacked the complexities of his divorce with the fervid intelligence of a committed participant. He read and reread the pertinent passages from the Bible, the works of the Church Fathers, the writings of the scholastics and great teachers of the canon law. He read all that his own library held, then went
on to exhaust the hbraries of the rehgious houses. The abbots of Ramsey, Reading, Gloucester, Evesham and Spalding all sent him books, and when he traveled the books he was using were transported from palace to palace along with his wardrobe and other personal furnishings.
Once he mastered the accessible texts Henry went on to seek out the more obscure works which defended his side of the suit. He sent the humanist Richard Croke to Italy to search for little-known manuscripts he hoped would be available there, writing out detailed notes for Croke to follow and giving him lists of specific treatises to find and passages within them to consult.^^ Whenever a rare treatise came to light nearer home he ordered its pertinent passages transcribed for his library, and oversaw the transcription himself.^^
By 1530 the evidence on both sides in the nullity suit had been sifted for three years and more, and the arguing points had become exceedingly minute. From the outset the queen's defenders had built their case on the passage in Deuteronomy allowing marriage with a brother's widow, whereas the king's lawyers had cited the Levitican admonition against it. But over the years the issue had become much finer: in the original Hebrew, so Henry's supporters claimed, the term translated as "brother'* in the two texts was not the same. (The word used in Leviticus meant "male sibling," that in Deuteronomy "relative.") Katherine's supporters denied this, and added the scholastic argument that the good arising from beneficial treatment of the widow by her second husband canceled out whatever transgression might be inherent in the new union.
Relatively abstruse points such as these eventually grew to be familiar knowledge to Henry, and the more adroit he became in wielding the weapons of theological argument the more sanguine, even cocksure, he seemed. When the imperial ambassador Chapuys attempted to pin him down
on a statement he had made sometime earlier about Katherine's virginity he immediately found a way to slip out of the verbal trap and robbed Chapuys of his triumph. Having eluded his opponent, the ambassador wrote, Henry "as if he had won a very great victory, or discovered some great subtlety for gaining his purpose, began to crow, telling me, *Now have I paid you off? What more would you have?'
As important in increasing Henry's confidence as his skill in argument were the treatises, commentaries and collective opinions he was gathering from scholars throughout Europe. Though the most learned and esteemed churchmen of the time argued for Katherine—Cardinal Cajetan, Robert Bellarmine, the highly respected Fisher and Vives—Henry was amassing judgments in his favor, hoping to outmatch in sheer bulk the weight of all counterargument. In June, 1530, the canonists of Padua determined that no man could legitimately marry his brother's widow. The scholars of Bourges agreed, as did fifty-seven doctors and "other learned men" of Verona, Venice, Brescia, Bologna and other Italian cities. The Spanish universities of Alcala and Salamanca ruled for Katherine, as expected, but the greatest center of learning of them all, the University of Paris, judged for Henry.^^ When the news of the Parisian endorsement arrived the king ordered the text of the determination read out in the streets and marketplaces, and made no secret of his delight.
Katherine was unimpressed. *'I do not hesitate to say," she told the king to his face, ''that for each doctor or lawyer who might decide in your favor and against me, I shall find a thousand to declare that the marriage is good and indissoluble."^^ But Henry was as undaunted by the queen's bravado as he was unmanned by Anne's threats and pleadings. In his own mind, he was right. He knew he was right. And "there was nobody in this world capable of turning the current of his passion or fancy in this particular case."^^
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