by David Loades
2
DISRUPTION
Henry’s case for an annulment of his first marriage was not strong, but he did have a case – and in other circumstances it might have been sufficient to persuade the pope to oblige him. Two considerations could have worked in his favour. Firstly, Julius II’s dispensation was from consanguinity, in other words it assumed that Arthur and Catherine had consummated their marriage; but if, as Catherine insisted, her marriage to Arthur had never been consummated, that was an irrelevant issue. The impediment of what was called ‘public honesty’, the marriage ceremony with Arthur itself, remained. This was not a strong argument, but it could have been sufficient. Stronger, but much more controversial, was the argument that Leviticus 20:21, which forbade a man to marry his brother’s wife, constituted divine law from which the pope did not have the power to dispense. Not only was this theologically dubious, because the ruling was apparently contradicted by a passage in Deuteronomy (ch. 25), but it also savoured of the Lutheran precept of sola scriptura – that the word of scripture must take precedence over any ruling of canon law.[23]
As was observed several years ago, to have succeeded, Henry’s case in Rome would have required both good luck and highly skilled management – neither of which it received.[24] Henry himself rendered the public honesty argument inoperative by insisting that Catherine had not come to him as a virgin, and sabotaged any chance of an amicable arrangement by his dogmatic clumsiness. Wolsey was battling against overwhelming odds, but in 1528 he did secure a legatine commission for himself and Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio to hear the case in England, with a verbal undertaking that Pope Clement would confirm the finding.
This was the nearest he came to success. Campeggio’s mission was doomed from the start, because Henry was so committed to his divine-law opinion that ‘an angel from heaven could not dissuade him’.[25] The king was also furiously impatient, because his relationship with Anne Boleyn was coming to the boil, and she was holding out on him. Even more seriously, both cardinals Wolsey and Campeggio were the victims of the pope’s duplicity, because, being committed to the Emperor (who was Catherine’s nephew), he had not the slightest intention of confirming any finding that they might make in Henry’s favour. He was merely buying time in the rather desperate hope that the situation would resolve itself. Although he was unaware of this, Wolsey knew the king well enough to be seriously worried. If Henry did not get his own way, not only would Wolsey’s own career be finished, but England might break with the papacy altogether. ‘I close my eyes before such horror … I throw myself at the Holy Father’s feet’, he wrote in December 1528. Perhaps Clement did not take such blusterings seriously; at any rate they made no difference.
When the legatine court at length convened on 18 June 1529, Catherine refused to recognise its competence, and after a futile exchange of arguments, the session was adjourned on the pretext of the Roman vacation. The king was enraged beyond measure, and Wolsey was disgraced, much to the satisfaction of his many enemies, but to no positive gain whatsoever.[26] Henry’s bluff had been called, and he had to decide what to do, because dismissing his chancellor made not the slightest difference in Rome. For the time being Catherine had won, and was still the king’s lawful wife. However, that had always been likely to happen, given the pope’s predicament, and if it was a consolation to her, it was no benefit. While Henry groped around for a new policy, and she retained her status at court, Anne Boleyn moved in and a curious ménage à trois developed. Politically Anne and her friends dominated the king’s council, but she refused to share the king’s bed. Catherine continued to accompany her husband on official occasions, and, as far as we can tell, continued to sleep with him, at least intermittently, for another two years.
Inevitably Henry found himself reproached by both women for this indecisive situation, and caught between their fierce tongues he appears more than a little ridiculous.[27] The tensions must frequently have become intolerable. Mary was now thirteen, and must have been well aware of what was going on, although she was not normally resident at court. For the time being nobody was much interested in her. She remained betrothed to the Duke of Orléans, but nothing much could be expected to happen until he reached the canonical age of cohabitation, which would not be until 1533. Given her lack of physical development, her own puberty may well have been delayed, but such matters were not discussed and her household accounts, which could have been revealing in that respect, do not survive for this period. She seems to have been a frequent and welcome visitor at court, and we know she was there at Christmas 1529, when her father gave her extra pocket money to the tune of £20 ‘for to disport her with’. She went with both her parents to mass on the Feast of the Circumcision (2 January), but how long she remained after that we do not know. At an age when even a royal princess might have expected something a little more entertaining, she seems to have spent most of her time at her books, relieved only by needlework and music, and mostly on her own.
According to Augustino Scarpellino, who visited the court on behalf of the Duke of Milan in the summer of 1530, Mary was ‘always apart, at a distance of ten or fifteen miles, with a suitable establishment …’[28] Henry sent her regular presents of £10 or £20, perhaps to ease his conscience, and she on one occasion sent him a buck. This suggests that by this time she was relieving the tedium with a little hunting, because the point of such a present would surely be that she had killed it herself. Apart from Scarpellino’s comment that she was ‘said to be already advanced in wisdom and stature’, we get hardly any sight of her – and he was reporting a general opinion, because he never met her himself. She seems to have spent most of her time at Richmond, which would just about meet Scarpellino’s description.
There were insubstantial rumours of alternative marriages for Mary – to Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan, even to her half brother Henry Fitzroy – but none of these had any substance. The Fitzroy idea, which Eustace Chapuys, the new Imperial ambassador, instinctively attributed to ‘the concubine’ (Anne Boleyn) because it was so repellent, seems in fact to have originated with an increasingly desperate pope. Clement was simultaneously suggesting bigamy to Henry, so the holy father was doing himself no favours.[29] At Christmas 1530 Mary was again at court, and again received £20. Although she was fifteen in February 1531, the early part of that year really marked the end of her childhood – the calm before the real storms of adolescence began. She spent almost the whole of March with her mother, and in June her father came to Richmond and ‘made great cheer’ in her company.
However, in early April Mary fell ill from what Scarpellino described as ‘hysteria’, and was still not fully recovered three weeks later. This was clearly a menstrual disorder of some severity, and may well have represented the delayed and somewhat irregular onset of puberty. She was attended by the king’s physicians, and by a certain Dr Bartelot, who was probably the Tudor equivalent of a consultant gynaecologist. As he was paid £20 for his attendance, he was clearly a specialist of some standing.[30] The stress of her parents’ deteriorating relationship may also have been a factor in this illness. In May, Henry and Catherine fell out bitterly over their respective relations with their daughter, and that may well have been a factor in the final breakdown, which came at the end of June. Henry dismissed his wife from the court, with the furious words that he never wished to see her again. She was ordered to retire to The More (in the king’s hands since the death of Wolsey in November 1530), while Mary was to remain at Richmond. They were ordered never to see each other again.
This was not quite as final as it sounded, because Catherine was at Windsor in July, and Mary spent some time with her there. It did, however, represent a serious intention, and the queen was at The More by the end of August. Thereafter contact between mother and daughter was by way of written messages.[31] In some respects Henry’s bark was worse than his bite. He had threatened to reduce Catherine’s household drastically, but did not in fact do so, and she had over 200 servants at The More,
including a chamber staff of 50, which was a full complement for a queen consort. In some ways Mary was harder hit than her mother. Her material circumstances remained unchanged, but her mother’s occasional company had been a great comfort to her as she faced the daunting challenge of growing up. Now she was on her own apart from the frequent company of Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury, whose own adolescence was so far in the past that she may not have been much help. Christmas 1531 was miserable. Mary received her usual £20, but was not at court, probably by her own choice. Communication with Catherine was prohibited, and Anne Boleyn, in spite of her political ascendancy, was in no position to take over Catherine’s role.
Moreover the news from Rome was as bad as it could be. Henry had obstinately persisted with his representations there, long after it should have been obvious that they were futile. His last throw had been to claim a partial exemption from certain aspects of papal jurisdiction (such as matrimony) on the basis of the ancient liberties of England. Now he learned that that bid had also failed, and that it was only a matter of time before a definitive sentence was pronounced against him.[32]
In theory, Mary’s relations with her father remained unchanged, but in practice her sympathies were entirely with her mother. Henry was fond of his daughter, but he was too prone to treat her as a dynastic chess piece – too obviously in control – for her to regard him with much human warmth. The prohibition on communication was a challenge that mother and daughter conspired to evade, and the king’s security arrangements were distinctly porous, perhaps by design. Chapuys was convinced, probably correctly, that Anne Boleyn was the real problem. Not only was her very presence an insult to Mary, Catherine and their sympathisers, but she had good reason to fear a girl who represented an alternative vision of the future to any that she could offer. Catherine had been defeated, but Mary’s relationship with her father was of a different order, and might prove more difficult to unravel. According to Chapuys, who was well informed but by no means impartial, Anne hated her ‘as much as the queen, or more so because she sees the king has some affection for her’.[33]
In November 1531 Mary’s matrimonial prospects again evaporated when Francis decided to marry his son to the pope’s niece, Catherine de’Medici. This time Henry decided not to take offence, because a strengthening of French influence in Rome might conceivably work in his favour as he struggled against the consequences of Habsburg dominance. The Duke of Cleves immediately expressed an interest, but nothing came of it and the princess was once again available. Whether she was even aware of these developments is uncertain. They certainly made no difference to her normal routine, but she was now of full age to marry, and she would have been less than human if she had not been interested in her own prospects. She was, according to a contemporary observer, pretty and well proportioned, although not very tall. Her father continued to demonstrate his affection rather clumsily with lavish provision for her household and a generous New Year gift, but Anne was his main preoccupation, and he did not want to take the risk of bringing them together.
1532 was to be a decisive year. Even before it had begun, Imperialist cardinals and diplomats were fearing that Henry was about to do something desperate. They spoke of the need to get Catherine and Mary out of his clutches, and the pope prepared a solemn excommunication – just in case. Since 1530 the king had been trying intermittently to blackmail the curia by bullying the English Church with charges of praemunire – the crime of exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction without the king’s consent. The clergy had bought these charges off, but the threat remained.[34]
There was at the time an anti-clerical element in the House of Commons, and Thomas Cromwell, the king’s secretary, who was the formulator although not the inspirer of royal policy at this juncture, sensed an opportunity. In the summer of 1532 he persuaded his allies to present to Parliament a ’Supplication against the Ordinaries’, which he probably drafted himself. This was a complaint, along the lines of the previous praemunire proceedings, that the Church courts were not subject to the royal prerogative. Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, as spokesman for the clergy, walked straight into what looks very much like a trap. He responded to the supplication with a thumping defence of ecclesiastical independence. Henry was seriously angry, and Cromwell was able to push through an act compelling the bishops to accept a royal veto on any new canons. On 16 May, immediately following the passage of the act, Sir Thomas More resigned as lord chancellor. A way ahead in the king’s ‘Great Matter’ was now opening up.[35]
On 23 August the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, died, and it began to look as though Imperial suspicions would be confirmed. The king would seek a solution from his own bishops, without reference to the pope. In September he created Anne Boleyn Marquis of Pembroke in her own right, with land worth £1,000 a year. As a declaration of intent, this was unambiguous.
There was nothing that Catherine could do about this. She had many and strong sympathisers in England (particularly among aristocratic women) and almost unanimous support in Europe, but her defences, although intact, were about to be outflanked. Much against her will, she was compelled to hand over her jewels to a woman whom she described as ‘the scandal of Christendom’. For several obvious reasons Anne and her supporters were strongly pro- French, but when she accompanied Henry to Calais for a meeting with Francis in October 1532, her presence presented the French king with a dilemma. He could hardly refuse to meet her without causing offence to Henry, and she was in any case acting as hostess. So he compromised, allowing himself to be entertained by her, but keeping his own queen carefully out of the way, in order to avoid disputes over protocol, as well as respecting Eleanor’s opinion of Anne’s morals. He had, in any case, his own agenda in Rome. Pressure was applied on Mary to take part in what was, in effect, the triumph of her mother’s rival, but she was not present and her inclusion in the published propaganda account was a fiction.[36] Meanwhile, the queen continued her rearguard action. Her case had not yet been officially heard in Rome, because Clement was an inveterate believer in delay. Catherine did her best to cajole the Emperor into forcing the issue, but he had no desire to make a definitive break with Henry, and was beginning to find his aunt an embarrassment.
It was events in England which brought a solution. Before Christmas the king had decided that his next archbishop would be Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer, an erstwhile Cambridge academic and a committed supporter of the king’s cause, was presently on a diplomatic mission to the Emperor, in the course of which he had (secretly) married and picked up various unorthodox religious opinions.[37] In January 1533 Anne, who had probably surrendered at last to the king’s sexual yearnings during their stay in Calais, was found to be pregnant. Cranmer’s appointment was made public and the pope (who knew his track record but was still trying to avoid a showdown) duly confirmed him. By the time that this happened Henry and Anne had married in a secret ceremony, and on 23 May Cranmer, using his own authority and jurisdiction, declared that marriage valid, and the earlier contract between Henry and Catherine null and void. On Saturday 30 May a visibly pregnant Anne was duly crowned as queen.[38]
The news was received across Europe with shudders of revulsion, and the Emperor was urged to make war upon England ‘with the aid of the people’. Chapuys was convinced that there would be a great rising in Catherine’s support, but Charles’ council advised him more soberly that Henry’s matrimonial tangles were a private matter, and that the King of England had given him no pretext to intervene. In July 1533 Catherine was visited by a powerful delegation of Henry’s council, which demanded that she renounce the title of queen and accept that of Princess Dowager of Wales. She refused. Henry thereupon reduced her household to the level deemed appropriate for a princess dowager, and removed her to the manor of Buckden in Huntingdonshire, where she effectively remained under house arrest. In spite of Chapuys’ shrill and horrified protests, the house was commodious and in good repair, and the financial allowance generous.[39]
Her friends came and went freely – except Mary, who was strictly forbidden to go to Buckden.
There had been various comings and goings in Mary’s household since 1528. Lord Hussey had become her chamberlain at some point before the autumn of 1530. Her treasurer, the long-serving Richard Sydnor, had retired, and Richard Wollman had replaced Fetherstone as her tutor. However, by 1533 she was seventeen, and the days of regimented schoolwork were probably over. Both in 1532 and 1533 there were renewed rumours of a marriage with the King of Scots, and a rather wilder report of a negotiation with Transylvania.
All this was gossip, but it was linked to a significant new development. Some of the Emperor’s servants (although not Charles himself) were eyeing the possibility of using her as an agent against her father. Catherine was useless from that point of view. Even if she had been willing (which she was not), she had no claim to the throne of England – but Mary had. In the summer of 1533 it was being reported in France and Italy that the Scots had invaded, backed by the Emperor and the Danes, and that the English were rising in her favour because she was so popular. An exotic alternative was that the knight errant coming to Mary’s aid was Dom Luis of Portugal, and that the Scots were being supported by a Genoese fleet in the service of the Emperor.[40]
The only substance behind all this was that Mary was now politically more important than her mother, a fact of which Henry was perfectly well aware. In spite of this, and much to Anne’s chagrin, the ban on communication between mother and daughter, which had theoretically been in place since 1531, was not only being regularly evaded but was occasionally specifically relaxed. Mary was ill again both in March and June 1533. The first time the king’s physicians attended her, but the second time she asked for her mother’s servants, ‘which the king was well pleased to grant’. At that time messengers were passing freely between them, with the king’s knowledge and indulgence. Visits, however, remained prohibited. Anne apparently fumed against the younger woman, vowing that she would reduce her to a servant or marry her to a varlet, but she was powerless to put any of these threats into effect.[41]
