Henry also had another major difficulty – he had chosen the wrong argument at the worst time. With papal authority being questioned by Luther and others, any threat to undermine it – such as by questioning the Pope’s power to dispense with the biblical injunction against marrying a dead brother’s wife – was bound to be opposed vehemently. Nevertheless, Wolsey turned to England’s one internationally respected theologian, Margaret Beaufort’s old friend and confessor, the Bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, for his opinion on the matter.
Fisher was a member of that fashionable group of scholars known as humanists. This referred to the study of the humanities: literature, ideas, and politics studied through the Greek and Roman classics, and is unrelated to modern humanism, which concerns the dignity of man without reference to God.4 Amongst them Erasmus had published a New Testament in Greek and this was to become the basis of several new translations. Since a different accent on the meaning of a word could question centuries of belief, so a new importance was being placed on historical accuracy and authenticity. Some humanists would become what we would call Protestant. They are often amongst those termed ‘evangelicals’, because they wished to return to the ‘evangelium’ or ‘good news’ of the Gospel, stripping away church traditions they believed had no biblical basis. Many other humanists would, however, remain orthodox Catholics.
Following the king’s lead, Fisher had written powerful arguments against Luther and in favour of papal authority, fearing that without the discipline of the central authority of Rome Western Christendom was in danger of splintering. It cannot have much surprised Wolsey, therefore, when Fisher replied to his queries with the unwelcome answer that, in his opinion, the Pope did indeed have the power to dispense with the Levitical objection to marrying a brother’s widow. Quoting from the Gospel of St Matthew, Fisher observed that were it not the case, ‘it is in vain that Christ has said [to St Peter, the first Pope], “Whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”’5
Wolsey realised there was, nevertheless, a possible way out of Henry’s difficulties. Katherine insisted she had never had sexual intercourse with Arthur and that Henry’s ‘scruple’ was therefore groundless. In doing so she had unwittingly opened up a different avenue to an annulment. Wolsey suggested to Henry that they accept that Katherine was a virgin when Henry married her. The law of ‘public honesty’ forbad a marriage between a woman who had been legally married, but had never consummated her marriage, to the brother of her husband. This had not been covered in Pope Julius’ original dispensation. But for Henry it was vital that the basis for his annulment should vindicate his belief that his marriage was cursed and rationalise his experience in having no sons by Katherine. Henry did not want an annulment on some legal technicality, and for Wolsey even to hint that his argument was weak was seen as a betrayal.
Worse news followed in September 1527 when Wolsey learned that Henry intended to marry Anne Boleyn instead of a princess who might have gained the king foreign support for his annulment. The cardinal had just returned from a visit to France and had requested a private appointment with Henry, as was usual. The messenger reported back that he had found the king ensconced with ‘a certain lady called Anna de Bolaine’. She had issued her own order to Wolsey: ‘tell him to come here, where the king is’.6 Wolsey would later call Anne the ‘night crow’. In legend these were birds of ill omen, and so it was for Wolsey that ‘the night crow cried, aboding luckless time’.7 Nevertheless, for the time being at least, the glittering Anne and the great cardinal were allies with the same objective – the annulment of Henry’s marriage – and to their relief the Pope agreed that Henry’s case should be heard in England. The judges were to be Wolsey and a man called Lorenzo Campeggio, England’s long-standing Cardinal Protector, whose job it was to act as the special advocate of England’s interests in the papal Curia. Campeggio arrived in London on 9 October 1528, three days after the Pope had returned to Rome to make peace with the emperor.
Henry was anxious for matters to proceed rapidly and Anne was still more so. Her biographer, Eric Ives, estimated that she was by now already twenty-seven. This was old for a bride in an era when a woman of thirty was considered ‘winter fodder’. Anne also feared that as time passed Henry might lose interest in her and in remarriage. She could not compete easily with the long familiarity of Henry’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon. Court ritual meant the king and queen were often together, and the French ambassador reported that to see them you would never know there was anything wrong. Anne was grateful when Wolsey found her lodgings close to Henry and she asked him to keep her up to date on ‘news of the legate; for I do hope as they come from you they shall be very good’. It wasn’t until June 1529, however, that Wolsey was able to confirm that the court had opened.
The trial of the royal marriage took place in the Parliament Chamber of the Dominican friary in London known as Blackfriars, in reference to the monks’ black habits. Wolsey’s servant, George Cavendish, described the judges, bishops and doctors of law all sat at their tables on benches. Henry had a chair placed on a raised platform under a cloth of estate made of ‘tissue’, the most expensive form of cloth of gold, with raised loops of fine metal thread above a velvet or silk ground.8 The queen was sitting ‘some distance beneath the king’; ‘It was’, Cavendish thought, ‘the strangest and newest sight’ that the royal couple should ‘appear . . . in court . . . to abide the judgement of their own subjects’. Henry spoke first to ask for a quick judgement. Then Katherine was called. As Anne Boleyn later observed, when Katherine was face to face with Henry, she invariably won the argument, and in court the queen put on a bravura performance.
Henry had spoken of his scruples, Katherine observed, yet ‘it was not the time to say this after so long’ and after twenty years of marriage. Henry blustered that his silence had been out of love for her and that nothing would please him more than if their marriage was found to be valid.9 At this, Katherine rose up from her dais and crossed the courtroom, skirting judges, bishops and clerks, and knelt before him. ‘Sir,’ she said, in her accented English, ‘I beseech you for all the love that has been between us, and for the love of God, let me have justice and right. Take of me some pity and compassion for I am a poor woman and a stranger born out of your dominion . . . I flee to you as the head of justice within this realm. Alas sir, where have I offended you? . . . I have been to you a true, humble and obedient wife, ever comfortable to your will and pleasure . . . and by me ye have had divers children, although it has pleased God to call them out of this world, which was no default in me.’
Twice Henry tried to raise her up. But Katherine persisted. Their fathers were both excellent kings, she reminded him, and the wise men they had consulted had agreed their marriage was allowable, ‘Therefore it is a wonder to me what new inventions are now invented against me.’ She asked for the right to appeal to Rome, observing that in England even her defenders would be his subjects. Finally, having committed herself to his pleasure and her case to God, Katherine rose to her feet and curtseyed. The court, watching in stunned silence, expected her to return to her dais. But instead she caught the eye of one of her servants and walked out of the court on his arm. The people who crowded the lower part of the chamber, the anteroom and the stairs, looked on as she continued walking with the king’s crier summoning her to return, ‘Katherine, Queen of England, come into the court.’ ‘On, on,’ she ordered her servant, ‘it makes no matter for it is no impartial court for me . . . Go on.’ She never came back.10
The protection of women lay at the heart of the concept of chivalry and Katherine had played the ‘princess in distress’ to perfection. Yet Henry felt she was behaving utterly selfishly. The future of his kingdom was at stake, and to his frustration he was not granted the quick judgement he wanted. Weeks passed, with the feverish Campeggio, in agonies with gout, carried from his bed and his barge up and down the stairs to the court, day in and day out. On 12 July depositions were made concerning the witnesses to A
rthur and Katherine’s marriage. Amongst them was that of Henry’s great-uncle, David Owen, the bastard son of Owen Tudor. Comments were made about sightings of Arthur’s ‘enflamed member’, which suggested consummation of the marriage must have followed. Sir David would only say politely that he believed there had been ‘carnal union’ as they were ‘reputed as lawful man and wife . . . everywhere in the realm of England in his hearing’.11 But the deciding point in law for the legate was the full manuscript of Julius’ dispensation for Henry and Katherine’s marriage, which had been discovered in Spain in 1528, and which Katherine had shown Campeggio in October. He was simply reluctant to make this public while Pope Clement wished to maintain his friendship with Henry, and recent developments in Italy were now leading to a rapprochement between Clement and the emperor Charles.
Clement was a member of the great Medici family who ruled Florence and after the sack of Rome the republicans of Florence had revolted against them.12 Happily for Clement these republicans were close to the emperor Charles’ French enemies and Charles was now moving towards making terms with the Pope in which the Medici would be restored. Campeggio remained desperate to delay any decision on Henry’s annulment, knowing it would go against him, but the king was beginning to understand what was happening. On the morning of 23 July Campeggio announced blandly that since the ‘reaping and harvest’ season had begun the court would be prorogued, not reconvening until October. At this, Henry’s brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, strode over to the judges and smashed his fist on the table in front of them. ‘By the Mass,’ he swore, ‘now I see that the old saw is true, that there was never legate nor cardinal that did good in England.’13 It was the king’s anger he expressed.
The case of the King of England’s marriage was soon revoked to Rome, and as Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk (the son of the victor of Flodden), later told the Spanish ambassador, Henry believed the Pope would now do the emperor’s bidding, ‘even if he were asked to dance in the public street in a jester’s jacket’.14
Wolsey’s failure to get Henry what he wanted – which had hitherto been the key to Wolsey’s success – marked the beginning of the end of his career. Henry was reluctant to utterly destroy his once invaluable servant, but Wolsey had made powerful enemies, in particular Anne who had lost all faith in him. Over the following year, 1530, Wolsey was wrong-footed in divisions over foreign policy, and when, that October, news reached the king of a papal brief ordering him to separate from Anne, the cardinal was blamed. He tried to gain support for his rehabilitation from King Francis and the emperor Charles, as well as Rome, but this left him open to accusations of treason. On 4 November 1530 the broken and sickly cardinal was arrested at dinner in York. He died at Leicester, as he was being brought to London for his trial and what would surely also have been his execution. ‘I see the matter against me, how it is framed’, Wolsey commented on his deathbed. ‘But if I had served God as diligently as I have done the king he would not have given me over in my grey hairs.’15 When the news reached court, Anne’s father celebrated Wolsey’s death by putting on a farce showing his descent into hell. ‘O, how wretched/Is that poor man that hangs on princes’ favours!’ Shakespeare’s Wolsey observes, ‘when he falls, he falls like Lucifer/Never to hope again’.
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THE RETURN OF MARGARET DOUGLAS
LADY MARGARET DOUGLAS’ APPEARANCE AT NORHAM CASTLE IN Northumberland was as dramatic as her birth at nearby Harbottle Castle thirteen years earlier. Then, her mother, Queen Margaret, had been in flight from Scotland with her father, Angus. Now, in October 1528, she was a victim of kidnap. Her father wanted to flee Scotland once more. He needed a promise of free passage in England and had snatched her from her mother to send her into Northumberland as a goodwill gesture to her uncle, Henry VIII.1
A beautiful young girl with a long, slim nose and heavily lidded eyes, Margaret Douglas left a miserable childhood behind her. After her parents’ marriage had broken down her father had seized power in Scotland. For three years he had kept her half-brother, James V, a virtual prisoner, discouraging his learning of statecraft in favour of encouraging the teenager to gamble and womanise. It was only at the end of May 1528 that Queen Margaret had been able to help James escape Angus’ clutches. The young king had learned to hate his stepfather and, as James had gathered an army, Angus had begun looking for refuge. Under the terms of the annulment of his marriage to Queen Margaret their daughter remained legitimate, making Margaret Douglas third in line to the English throne. She was a valuable commodity on the international marriage market, and one Henry was delighted to have in his gift.
Henry ignored the pleas of his sister, who wrote complaining bitterly of the pain of being separated from her daughter.2 But nor was he yet ready to welcome Margaret Douglas at court. It was exactly at this time that Campeggio had arrived in London, and Henry and her godfather Wolsey were focused on the setting up of the Legatine court. Margaret Douglas was left in Northumberland under guard until March 1529, when Angus had lost the last of his castles in Scotland and left for exile in England. Her father escorted Margaret on to the house of Wolsey’s then comptroller, a man called Thomas Strangways, who was a sheriff in York. There he left her with a gentlewoman-in-waiting and a manservant, but little money. She stayed for a year, with Strangways obliged to cover her costs out of his own pocket while the Legatine court farce played out and Wolsey tried, and failed, to save his career. By 6 April 1530, however, Henry was at last ready to celebrate her arrival at court, ordering a dress from the Great Wardrobe for ‘our niece’ as his welcome gift.3
Margaret found the court very changed from when her mother had last visited it and she was a baby. There was no Wolsey: he had left court for the last time. Her uncle Henry, who had always been so gay, singing of his ‘pastime with good company’, was now living miserably in a virtual ménage à trois with Katherine, who had grown ‘somewhat stout’, and his chic mistress, Anne Boleyn. Katherine ‘always has a smile on her countenance’, which must have been hard enough for Henry to live with, while Anne’s temper flared like fire as she watched her youth burning away. She would remind Henry bitterly, ‘I have been waiting long and might in the meantime have contracted some advantageous marriage out of which I might have had issue, which is the greatest consolation in the world.’ In June, when Anne discovered Katherine was still making Henry’s shirts, there were furious words. But the regular rows and tearful making up between Henry and Anne only seemed to strengthen their relationship.
To many at court the king’s passion seemed a weakness, yet it was helping fuel his relentless determination to press on with his plans to marry Anne. Pressure was maintained in Rome to push the annulment forward and, with Anne’s encouragement, Henry was even preparing to bypass the Pope altogether. Henry now wanted to be declared ‘absolute emperor and Pope in his kingdom’ and be proclaimed supreme head of the Church of England.4 This was quite a volte-face. Less than ten years earlier Henry had written in his attack on Luther, ‘I have no intention of insulting the Pope by discussing his prerogative as if it were a matter of doubt.’ In England the supremacy of the Pope over the church had been an article of faith for a thousand years.5 The overwhelming majority in England saw the papacy, with all its faults, as the ‘well of grace’, and the Pope as the heir to St Peter.6 Henry, however, now believed God had appointed him, not only as a secular ruler of his subjects, but as their spiritual ruler as well. This change of heart had a great deal to do with his absolute intolerance to any opposition to his royal will. But breaking with the Pope had a positive attraction too. Henry VIII had always taken a strong interest in theological debate, even intervening in quarrels between clergy and laity.7 As the English ‘Pope’ he could take this further, and be free to adjudicate the beliefs of the church within his kingdom. The greatest appeal lay, however, in the glorious title of emperor it would earn him, and which he claimed was his by ancient right.
Over a decade earlier Henry had had the round tab
le at Winchester, said to have belonged to King Arthur, painted in the Tudor colours, with a union rose at its centre, from which rises an image of Arthur wearing an Imperial crown and depicting Henry’s features. Now, more was to be made of this.8 In January 1531 the Duke of Norfolk showed the French ambassador a seal, supposedly dating from the reign of King Arthur and inscribed ‘Arthur Emperor of Britain’. The ambassador was told this ‘proved’ Henry had inherited a special Imperial status from his distant forebears that gave him powers over church and state.9 There had been little effort to make any political capital out of Arthurianism since his brother Prince Arthur’s death. That was changing. The difficulty for Henry was that humanist scholars were increasingly sceptical about such old legends, and the Bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, was making mincemeat of Henry’s arguments.
In February 1531 a murder attempt was made against Fisher, and many believed Anne Boleyn’s family were behind it. Fisher’s cook confessed someone had given him powder to put in the broth he had made, as a joke, he had thought.10 Fisher, who ate little, refused it, which may have saved his life as everyone who touched it fell seriously ill. Two servants died, as did several of the poor who were fed at Fisher’s gates. Henry promptly had poisoning raised to the level of high treason. But no evidence concerning what had happened was ever presented to a jury. Instead the cook was the first criminal, guilty of a mere felony and in custody, to be condemned and sentenced to death by an Act of Parliament known as an attainder, which simply declared his guilt.11 His execution at Smithfield was a gruesome affair, with the wretched man suspended above a cauldron of boiling water, locked in chains, and ‘pulled up and down with a gibbet at divers times ’til he was dead’.12 It is often claimed that this was a new punishment invented by Henry, who was frightened he might be assassinated by poisoning. Not so: what was new was the condemnation of a criminal without any prior judicial process.13 It offered a grim forewarning of Henry’s disrespect for the principles of common law, as well as expressing his anxiety that a man can’t trust his cook.
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