Tudor Women Queens & Commoners

by Alison Plowden

  3. THE KING'S LADY

  Henry VIII's so-called divorce from his first wife - the King's 'great matter' as it was cautiously referred to by those in the know during its early stages - was to overshadow English foreign and domestic politics for the best part of ten years. Its most immediate and far-reaching consequence, the breach with Rome and the establishment of a national Church, directly affected the lives of every man, woman and child in the country and was to lead to a dangerous isolation from the main body of Christendom - an isolation whose implications became increasingly alarming as the Tudor century unfolded. Many good men, and women too, were to die, many useful lives would be wrecked, and many ancient, revered institutions be overthrown because the King of England wished to take a new wife.

  When, in the spring of 1527, the King, so he said, first began to doubt the validity of his marriage to his brother's widow, divorce in its modern sense was unknown. It's true that the Church could, in exceptional cases of flagrant adultery or cruelty, or if one partner became a heretic, be persuaded to grant the equivalent of a judicial separation, but it was generally held that, since 'a man and woman conjoined in matrimony be by God's ordinance but one flesh and body,' the marriage bond was indissoluble. In the years immediately following the Reformation, there were isolated cases of a complete divorce, allowing the innocent party to re-marry, being granted by the ecclesiastical authorities with royal approval, but on the whole, by the end of Elizabeth's reign, divorce had become more and not less difficult to obtain, and in 1602 the door was finally shut.

  The ending of a marriage by a decree of nullity, pronouncing the contract void from the beginning, was a different matter and, although normally beyond the reach of ordinary people, was neither particularly difficult nor even particularly unusual among the great and the powerful with money and influence at their disposal. There were a number of grounds on which an annulment could be applied for, including misrepresentation, whether deliberate or not, regarding the status - social, financial or marital - of either party at the time the marriage contract was drawn up; forced matrimony, alleging that the consent of either or both parties had not been freely given; precontract, when one of the parties had already promised, before witnesses, to marry another; the impotence, madness or taking of a formal vow of chastity by one of the parties; and consanguinity or affinity, where it could be shown that husband and wife were related, either by blood or marriage, within one of the prohibited degrees.

  Henry's famous 'scruple of conscience' - his fear that he might, unwittingly of course, have been living in sin all those years - was based on a text in the Book of Leviticus which stated uncompromisingly that 'if a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing ... they shall be childless'. This, the King realized in an apparently blinding flash of revelation, must be the reason for his hitherto inexplicable failure to beget a male heir. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that the Queen's inability to bear a living son must surely be a sign of God's displeasure at their unlawful cohabitation. Why else should the deity, who had always shown such a flattering degree of interest in his doings, deny him male children? Having thus come to the convenient conclusion that he was, after all, still a bachelor, Henry felt free to pursue his natural inclinations supported by an uplifting sense of moral rectitude. Indeed, so completely satisfied did he appear with the justice of his cause, that one observer believed an angel descending from heaven would have been unable to persuade him otherwise.

  Nevertheless, the King could not feel at all certain that his wife would see the matter in the same light, and he was noticeably uneager to break the news to her. When at last he did nerve himself to do so, Catherine could find no words to answer him. It was many years now since she had been her husband's confidante, had shared his problems and his growing pains and had been permitted to offer him advice. It was a good many years, too, since Henry had worn her favour in the lists, had laid his youthful triumphs at her feet and come hurrying to bring her any titbits of news he thought would interest or please her. But although they had grown apart, although other people had shouldered her out of his confidence, for Catherine, Henry would always remain the beautiful young man who had rescued her from lonely humiliation - the gay, generous boy who had loved her and made her his queen in that long-ago joyous springtime, when life had been spent in 'continual festival'. She could accept, though sadly, that love must die, but that the man whose 'true and humble' wife she had been, whose children she had borne and whose interests she had loyally tried to serve, was now apparently prepared to discard her, to wipe out nearly twenty years of married life as though it had never been, callously to dishonour her name and to bastardize their daughter, was a betrayal too black for speech. As Catherine listened to her husband's glib talk of his troubled conscience, of how they had been in mortal sin during all the years they had lived together and inviting her to choose a place of retirement away from the Court, words refused to come, and she collapsed into helpless, uncharacteristic tears.

  It was a short-lived collapse, and the Queen soon made it abundantly clear that she intended to fight every inch of the way. Her position was simple and could be simply stated. If the King was really worried about the validity of their marriage, then it was right that the matter should be examined and his doubts laid to rest. As for herself, her conscience was clear, and she had nothing to fear from a free and impartial enquiry. She knew that she was, had always been and always would be Henry's true and lawful wife. Had they not been married in the sight of God by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, with the approval of the wisest men in England and Spain? Her first marriage to the boy Arthur had never been consummated, and she had come to Henry, as she was presently publicly to remind him, 'as a very maid without touch of man'. Therefore, the affinity prohibited in Leviticus did not exist, and Henry need have no qualms about the Pope's power to set aside the law of God.

  When the Pope's representative, Cardinal Campeggio, came over to England in 1528 to try to arrange an amicable settlement, he found Catherine immovable in her determination to defend to the last the soul and the honour of her husband and herself. She utterly rejected the suggestion that she should give in gracefully and retire into a nunnery. She had no vocation for the religious life and intended to live and die in the estate of matrimony to which God had called her. But, she told Campeggio, she was an obedient daughter of the Church. She would submit to the Pope's judgement in the matter and abide by his decision, whichever way it might go. Unless and until judgement was given against her, she would continue to regard herself as the King's lawful wife and England's Queen and nothing, declared England's Queen flatly, would compel her to alter this opinion - not if she were to be torn limb from limb. If, after death, she should return to life, she would prefer to die over again rather than change it.

  As far as the Pope was concerned, Catherine could scarcely have adopted a more embarrassing position. The Holy Father had no desire to alienate so dutiful a son as the King of England - especially not at a time when the prestige of the papacy was dangerously low - and the King of England was already dropping ominous hints as to what he might do if the case went against him. On the other hand, Catherine had powerful kinsfolk (the Holy Roman Emperor was her nephew) who were well placed to exert pressure on her behalf. The last thing the Pope wanted was to have to pronounce judgement, and during the next six years he made use of every delaying tactic at his disposal to postpone that evil moment. But faced with Henry's urgent impatience, he could not long postpone the initial confrontation, and by the spring of 1529 the legal battle had been fairly joined.

  In the manner of most legal battles, it became exceedingly bitter and complicated - and sixteenth-century law governing marriage was complicated enough at the best of times. Henry had taken a fundamentalist stand on Leviticus, but unfortunately there was another passage in the Old Testament, in the Book of Deuteronomy, which ran: 'When brethren dwell together, and one of them dieth without children, the wife
of the deceased shall not marry to another; but his brother shall take her, and raise up seed for his brother.' This led to a stimulating international debate among scholars and theologians as to how these two apparently conflicting texts could be reconciled and whether the ancient Jewish law could properly be applied in a Christian community, but it did not help the King to get his divorce. The King's advisers would, in fact, have had an easier time if, unhampered by these scriptural excursions, they could have followed the time-honoured strategy of canon lawyers in such cases and attacked the papal dispensation of 1503 allowing Henry to marry his sister-in-law on the grounds that it had been issued on insufficient or inaccurate information. They could, for example, have pointed out that this dispensation assumed that Catherine's marriage to Prince Arthur had been consummated and therefore did not cover the so-called diriment impediment of public honesty, created by the fact that whether or not the marriage had been completed in the sight of God, they had indisputably been through a public wedding ceremony and been married in the sight of the Church. Legal nit-picking perhaps, but the King would have had a much better argument in canon law. Catherine's advisers, too, wished that instead of basing her defence on her virginity at the time of her second marriage - a statement no longer susceptible of legal proof-she had taken her stand on the Pope's undoubted powers to dispense. She could, they reminded her, always apply secretly to Rome for another, supplementary bull, making good any accidental deficiencies in the first.

  Unfortunately, though, the King of England's great matter was based on emotion rather than logic. Behind a smokescreen of legal and theological wrangling, the real battle was being fought over the far bloodier issues of outraged pride, jealousy and a bitter sense of rejection and injustice; of frustrated sexual urges, ambition, envy and greed. The battle between Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn recognized none of the rules of war, and in the end, of course, it destroyed them both.

  Two more dissimilar women than these two deadly adversaries can hardly be imagined. In 1527 Catherine was in her forty-second year. As a girl she had been pretty, small and well made, with a clear pink and white skin and quantities of russet-coloured hair, which the chronicler Edward Hall had specially noticed as being 'of a very great length, beautiful and goodly to behold'. Now her once slender figure was thickened with repeated child-bearing, and her lovely hair had darkened to a muddy brown, but visiting ambassadors still remarked on the excellence of her complexion. A dumpy little woman with a soft, sweet voice which had never lost its trace of foreign accent, and the imperturbable dignity which comes from generations of pride of caste, she faced the enemy armoured by an utter inward conviction of right and truth, and her own unbreakable will.

  Henry's partisans have accused his first wife of spiritual arrogance, of bigotry and bloody-mindedness, and undoubtedly she was one of those uncomfortable people who would literally rather die than compromise over a moral issue. There's also no doubt that she was an uncommonly proud and stubborn woman. But to have yielded would have meant admitting to the world that she had lived all her married life in incestuous adultery, that she had been no more than 'the King's harlot', the Princess her daughter worth no more than any man's casually begotten bastard; and it would have meant seeing another woman occupying her place. The meekest of wives might well have jibbed at such self-sacrifice; for one of Catherine's background and temperament it was unthinkable. But what had started as the simple defence of her marriage was soon to develop into the defence of something infinitely greater. As time went by and the struggle for the divorce unfolded, the Queen began to realize that she was fighting not merely for her own and her daughter's natural rights but for her husband's soul and the souls of all his people against the forces of darkness which seemed more and more to be embodied in the seductive, dark-eyed person of Mistress Anne Boleyn.

  Historians, especially nineteenth-century historians, have generally taken for granted that it was Henry's pressing need for a son and heir which impelled him to seek a divorce from his barren wife and which alone sustained him through the long and blood-stained battle with Rome, but that was not how it looked to his own contemporaries. Naturally the King wanted a son, and everyone would have felt happier if there had been a Prince of Wales and, ideally, a Duke of York too, growing up in the royal nursery. But times had changed. In the 1520s, England was settled, united and prosperous, and the wars of York and Lancaster were fading into history. There was really very little reason why Henry's daughter, suitably married, of course - perhaps to one of her Plantagenet cousins or even to her other cousin, the young King of Scotland -should not have succeeded him. At eleven years old Mary was a healthy, promising little girl who would soon be of child-bearing age herself. Why shouldn't she provide sons to carry on the royal line? The fact that her father would not even consider this commonsense solution to his problem but, on the contrary, was proposing to repudiate the one heir he did possess and whose legitimacy no one else would have questioned, argued to his more cynical subjects that it was not the King's tender conscience or his anxiety over the succession which pricked him on so much as his desire for another woman. 'The common people,' commented Edward Hall, himself a staunch King's man, 'being ignorant of the truth and in especial women and others that favoured the Queen, talked largely and said that the King would for his own pleasure have another wife.' But the plain truth, as it seemed to many of those watching the progress of events, was that Henry was quite simply besotted by a commonplace young woman, sixteen years his junior, and so obsessed with carnal lust and 'the voluptuous affection of foolish love' that high discretion and, indeed, all other considerations were banished for the time.

  It's never been easy to understand just what Henry saw in Anne Boleyn, or to define the secret of her undoubted fascination - probably it lay in that mysterious quality of sexual magnetism which defies an exact definition and has very little to do with physical beauty. Certainly Anne was not beautiful in any obvious sense. A brunette with a heavy mane of glossy black hair, a sallow skin and a rather flat-chested figure, her best feature seems to have been her large dark eyes which, according to one observer, 'invited to conversation'. But she knew how to make the best of herself. She dressed well and had become a leader of fashion at Court. She was lively, sophisticated and accomplished - a charming and witty companion, well versed in the arts of pleasing. She was also intelligent and courageous, aware of her own potential and restlessly seeking fulfilment in a world which offered few opportunities to ambitious, energetic and dissatisfied young women. Less attractive traits were her vindictive, sometimes vicious temper, her bitter tongue and her long memory for a grudge.

  Did Anne ever feel any spark of genuine affection for Henry? Was she the helpless victim of her own nature and environment, unable to resist the pressures being brought to bear on her? Or was she simply an adventuress, motivated by personal envy and greed? Impossible now to judge with any certainty, but having once accepted the King's proposal, her situation can perhaps be compared to that of the young lady of Riga, who was so unwise as to go for a ride on a tiger - having once mounted the creature, there was no way to go but on. There is a story that Queen Catherine, who in general ignored her rival's pretensions with well-bred indifference -just as she had always ignored the existence of her husband's other passing fancies - was once playing cards with Anne and was heard to remark: 'My lady Anne, you have the good hap to stop at a king, but you are not like the others, you will have all or nothing.' Catherine herself had once waited out seven long years, just as obstinately determined to stake her future on an all-or-nothing throw. Perhaps they were not really so very unlike, these two tenacious warriors.

  In July 1529 the Pope, reacting to pressure from the Emperor, at last agreed to take the King of England's matrimonial cause into his own hands, thus putting an end to Henry's hopes of getting a quick (and favourable) decision from an English Church court. This grievous disappointment was laid at Cardinal Wolsey's door, and the Cardinal's enemies, with Anne Boleyn
at their head, closed in for the kill. According to George Cavendish, the estrangement between Wolsey and the King was 'the special labour of Mistress Anne', who had neither forgotten nor forgiven the Cardinal's part in blighting her romance with young Percy, and by the autumn the new Imperial envoy in London was reporting that the great minister's downfall seemed complete.

  Mistress Anne now went everywhere with the King. She had her own apartments at Court and was able to indulge her taste in dress to the full, as well as enjoying the flattery and attentions normally bestowed on a royal favourite. In December further honours were showered on the Boleyn family. Sir Thomas became Earl of Wiltshire and Ormonde; Anne's brother George received the title of Viscount Rochford, while she herself was in future to be known as the Lady Anne Rochford. At a state banquet held to mark the occasion, Anne took precedence over all the ladies present (who did not include Queen Catherine) and was given the place of honour at the King's side. 'The very place allotted to a crowned Queen', wrote the Emperor's ambassador indignantly. 'After dinner', continued Messire Eustace Chapuys, 'there was dancing and carousing, so that it seemed as if nothing were wanting but the priest to give away the nuptial ring and pronounce the blessing.'