by Linda Porter
The Nun of Kent was a well-known figure by 1528 and sufficiently regarded for the king himself to seek the views of Thomas More on her sayings and visions. More was unimpressed, finding nothing exceptional in Elizabeth’s utterances. He commented that he saw in them only something that ‘a right simple woman might, in my mind, speak of her own wit well enough’. Wolsey, who had two meetings with Elizabeth, may have been the person who suggested to the king that it was worth hearing from the nun herself. Henry agreed and Barton was given access to the very pinnacle of Tudor power.
Such proximity to the great fed delusions of invincibility. Elizabeth Barton was now far removed from the humble social sphere in which she had begun life.Yet with her celebrity status came a growing sense of unreality that was to be her undoing. By the late 1520s her prophecies contained much more overtly political content. There were declamations that papal authority must be maintained and heresy rooted out. Most seriously of all, from Henry’s perspective, this uneducated woman who had discussed her visions with him now made a sustained onslaught on the divorce itself. She emerged as a major supporter of Katherine of Aragon.
The visions concerning the king and his marriage were detailed and specific. An angel told Elizabeth Barton that if Henry put aside Katherine of Aragon and married Anne Boleyn, God’s vengeance would overtake him: ‘then within one month after such marriage he should no longer be king of this realm, and in the reputation of almighty God should not be a king one day nor one hour but would die a villain’s death’.7 Even more chilling was the nun’s revelation that she had seen the precise spot prepared for the king in hell. This was strong stuff. Henry was an intelligent, well-educated prince, but he was also a man of his times. Languishing in hell was the ultimate dread and the nun’s conviction that she knew the site of his eternal torments, delivered to his face, was deeply unsettling. Determined that her prophecies would be known in high places, Elizabeth Barton did not back off; both archbishop Warham and Wolsey were informed that they would also be destroyed if they countenanced the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn.
Some people were repelled by these increasingly violent denunciations but others at least wanted to meet the Nun of Kent themselves. Gertrude Courtenay, evidently aware of the risk she was running, came in disguise to meet her at Canterbury and subsequently Gertrude and her husband received the nun at one of their properties in Surrey, where the young woman fell into a trance. Elizabeth Barton did not disappoint. For so long as she was viewed as a genuine seer, speaking the true word of God, the nun and her advisers might have expected that her uncompromising stance was permissible under the guise of ‘frank counsel’. For a while, even the king wondered whether the Nun of Kent might be divinely inspired.
The queen was well aware of the efforts of her supporters and the tenacity of the women who supported her cause. She also realised that the personal risks they took would have only a minimal impact on the outcome of her struggle.The key to Katherine’s campaign, and the cause of growing bitterness between herself and Henry, however polite they may have seemed at official functions, was the queen’s decision in June 1529 to ask that her case be heard in Rome. Henry had always wanted, indeed expected, papal involvement, but on his own terms. He greatly resented the idea of being summoned to Rome and interrogated by the pope. This was not just annoyance at what the king and his party regarded as troublesome gamesmanship by a fractious woman; papal interference of this sort was an affront to his authority and what he increasingly saw as his unchallengeable position as sovereign of both England and its Church.And there was, too, the disquieting prospect that because Katherine had also played the imperial card, his domestic problems might be used as the excuse for military action by the emperor.
Katherine always maintained, even after Henry married Anne Boleyn, that she sought her nephew’s moral support to save the king from error and the country from excommunication and heresy. Even at moments of desperation, she did not want imperial troops invading England in her defence. She was fighting a war, but it was a war of argument and strategy, not swords. In the end, it did become brutal, but the brutality was Henry’s, not Katherine’s or the emperor’s. Charles’s response to Katherine’s situation was a pragmatic one, inevitably fashioned by the dictates of his imperial role.To the queen he wrote letters expressing his indignation and concern, but they were more proper than fiery: ‘I cannot express it otherwise than by assuring you that were my own mother concerned I should not experience greater sorrow than in this your case,’ he wrote at the end of August 1527.8 Not much comfort here, then, as his own mother was very much still alive but widely regarded as mentally unbalanced and living in retreat in Spain. Katherine most definitely would resist a similar fate.
In the summer of 1527 Charles was much more concerned to salvage his international image, badly shattered by his armies’ behaviour in Italy. He issued a manifesto to all the princes of Europe, protesting at the calumnies spread against him, ‘as if he could be the author of the Sack of Rome’. In an indirect way, he was, and he knew it.The marriage difficulties of Henry and Katherine did not figure high on his list of priorities, though there was always the possibility that it was all part of some French-inspired plot against himself. Yet his Habsburg sense of family loyalty was piqued by the insult to his aunt, though he hardly knew her personally and had met his cousin, Mary, only once. ‘We cannot desert the queen, our good aunt, in her troubles and intend doing all we can in her favour,’ he wrote to his ambassador in London. Discretion and moderation were the best way forward, and he had told Henry this in a letter. He could not believe ‘that having, as they have, so sweet a princess for their daughter [the king] would consent to have her or her mother dishonoured, a thing so monstrous of itself and wholly without precedent in ancient or modern history’.9 In this description of Mary, whom he cast squarely as the person most likely to be adversely affected by Henry’s behaviour, there is, perhaps, just the hint of guilt for his own treatment of a young princess. Denied her opportunity to be empress, she was now threatened with illegitimacy. It must be a terrible blow, and he would undoubtedly do all he could in bringing pressure to bear on the pope, so that Katherine and Mary would have justice. But he was never going to fight. Upheaval in his northern European domains and the constant threat of war with France were far more pressing concerns.
And so the divorce, the King’s Great Matter as it was called in English circles, dragged on for six years, far beyond the worst fears of the king and his supporters. It became a European cause célèbre, as the best theological and legal minds of the day were put to work on it and the pope, escaped from Charles V’s direct control to Orvieto in Italy, decided that the safest course of action for him was to play off each side against the other for as long as possible. Determined that right was on his side, Henry spent large sums of money on canvassing the opinions of the universities of Europe, rather as senior executives in large corporations now employ consultants to tell them things they want to hear. The universities were only too happy to receive this unlooked-for funding, but they did not give the English king the definitive answer he hoped to get. Katherine also dug her heels in and fought with ferocity a rearguard action, knowing full well that she had few influential friends in England, though popular sentiment appears to have been on her side.10 But her determination, though understandable, did not mean that what she was doing was ultimately the right thing for her daughter.
Katherine always maintained that her stand was as much about Mary and Mary’s future as it was about herself, but in this she was deceived. An understandable self-deception, in the circumstances, but it was not the whole truth. The queen may have been a deeply religious woman, but she was not meek. She refused to accept any compromise, partly out of moral certainty but also because she was the queen and the daughter of great monarchs. Anne Boleyn was so far below her that she would never concede to such a person. Yet at one crucial stage in the convoluted proceedings, as early as 1528, Katherine was offered a way out that promis
ed Mary security. She refused to take it.
Pride, intense attachment to her marriage and also a degree of suspicion that assurances given might not be honoured all swirled in her mind when the Italian cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio put to Katherine in October 1528 the possibility that there was a solution to her dilemma: ‘In order to do away with the scruples and other greater evils which the discord between her and her husband was likely to produce … and in order to remove any difficulties as to the succession to the crown of England, he [the pope] thought the best expedient to be adopted was that she should profess in some religious community and take vows of perpetual chastity.’ Katherine could end all the unpleasantness by taking the veil. This would leave the king free to marry again and did not call into question Mary’s legitimacy or her claim to the throne. The queen was not impressed. She ‘at first showed a little irritation … and spoke some angry words to Wolsey, hinting that he was the cause of all of her misfortunes’. After time for reflection, she calmed down and delivered a withering riposte: ‘she held her husband’s conscience and honour in more esteem than anything in this world; that she entertained no scruple at all about her marriage, but considered herself the true and legitimate wife of the king … the proposal just made in the name of His Holiness was inadmissible’. 11 She would not be pushed aside, either into a rural retirement, as the king had first suggested, or a religious one. First and foremost, she clung to the idea that her marriage was legal. She was a queen and a wife, not a nun. Even raising the doubt that her daughter might be illegitimate was an insult to Katherine’s personal integrity.Yet both Mary and England itself might have been spared much trauma if the queen had followed the precedent offered by the first wife of the French king, Louis XII, and entered a convent. But Katherine would not compromise and so Mary’s future was inextricably linked with her mother’s fate.
Certainly the circumstances of Campeggio’s proposal did not improve the queen’s frame of mind. He was sent to London to preside, with Wolsey, over a legatine court that would adjudicate the annulment of the marriage. Henry expected that the court would find for him, but he did not know that the pope had given Campeggio instructions that he was to stall as long as possible and that he was definitely not to reach a decision.The cardinal, who was very ill with gout and had endured an awful journey to England, must have prayed that the queen would agree to his suggestion, thus sparing him months of fruitless going through the motions. If so, his prayers went unanswered, though he was much more successful when it came to delaying proceedings.
Following her rebuff to Campeggio, Katherine believed that, if she was not winning, she was not, at least, losing. But it was a strange existence that she led over the next two years. She and Mary were normally with Henry for the religious festivals and great days of state. They all spent Christmas 1528 together at Greenwich, in a show of family unity that was entirely false. On the second day of January 1529 they both attended a reception for the new Venetian ambassador, and it was noted that the queen was accompanied by ‘her handsome and virtuously-educated daughter’. Was this meant to imply that Mary was already publicly committed to her mother, or was it merely the result of court etiquette? The report back to the Signory in Venice left out a detail that the Doge and his council might have found more titillating. Also at Greenwich that Christmas, though in a separate establishment, was Anne Boleyn. She had survived a serious bout of the sweating sickness in the summer and was now fully restored to health. Anne kept well away from the queen and the princess but her presence was widely known. Katherine ignored it. There is no evidence that she made an issue of Anne personally when she was with Henry. It is possible that Mary was still in the dark about what was happening. So Anne Boleyn in many ways held the advantage over the two women who stood in her way. She had the king’s love, her influence was growing and she was not going to disappear. Katherine was clinging to an illusion, but Anne’s power was in the ascendancy. She had no qualms about using it to defeat the queen and to deny the young princess her birthright.
The objective was clear, but the means to achieving it less so, and the time it took galling. Anne was well aware that the woman she meant to supplant had a flair for the public occasion and a lingering hold on the king himself. There was the unavoidable fact that Anne might spend a great deal of time at Henry’s side, while her family received favours and political advancement, but still Katherine was queen and recognised as such by the king himself.The king did not like confrontation, least of all with women, and he avoided it whenever possible. Yet it was Henry, encouraged by Anne’s steadfastness, who wanted a resolution of his case by Cardinals Campeggio and Wolsey. On 30 May 1529 he gave them authority to proceed with the trial. This provided Katherine with the opportunity to plead her own cause in person. Determined not to go quietly, she would have her day in court.
The cardinals required the king and queen to attend a hearing scheduled for 18 June, in the Parliament Chamber of the Dominican Friary of London, familiarly known as Blackfriars. Two days earlier, Katherine made her formal appeal for the case to be heard in Rome. She would appear before the legatine court having, in effect, already rejected its authority. But she wanted to be seen and, angry though she knew Henry would be, she wanted to make a direct appeal to him. For Katherine, this was not about Anne Boleyn, waiting to occupy her place in the royal bed. It was about her own conscience and the utter conviction that her time spent as England’s queen was not built on a lie, but was sacred in the eyes of God.
The trial of a royal marriage, dramatised to great effect in Shakespeare’s last play, King Henry VIII, was unprecedented in English history. Everyone was seized by the momentous nature of events when the queen and her supporters made their entry on 18 June, and Katherine having read aloud her challenge to the competence of the cardinals to hear her case and confirmed her appeal to Rome, was told that the court would answer her on 21 June, when the king himself would also appear. There, before an audience that included ordinary Londoners, many of whom were women who were open and vocal in support of the queen, Henry and Katherine faced each other on a public stage. This was Katherine’s moment, and she still cut a regal figure, despite her girth. She denounced Wolsey and Campeggio as interested parties not competent to hear the case. Wolsey was one of her husband’s ministers and had directly benefited from office. Campeggio also held an English bishopric. How could she expect to receive justice from them? When the king spoke he told the judges he could no longer live in mortal sin, but Katherine’s response was bitter and sceptical. Why, she challenged, had Henry been silent so long, if, as he claimed, it was his conscience which pricked him? How could she, a foreigner, expect justice in England?
The king’s attempts to parry this opening salvo with the feeble assurance ‘of the great love he had and has for her’, and his earnest desire that the marriage should be declared valid, were a tactical mistake. If that was what he was going to maintain, then she would take the argument literally to him. Crossing the crowded courtroom, with its floor packed with lawyers and its gallery filled with the common people, Katherine made her way directly to where Henry sat: ‘The queen rose and throwing herself on her knees before the king, said aloud that she had lived for twenty years with his majesty as his lawful wife … and that she did not deserve to be repudiated and thus put to shame without any cause.’And though Mary was not there, she was not forgotten. In her broken English, which only added to her air of vulnerability, the queen reminded the king that he knew she had been a virgin when she married him. So she pleaded with him ‘to consider her honour, her daughter’s and his; that he should not be displeased at her defending it, and should consider the reputation of her nation and relatives, who will be seriously offended’.12
Mary did not hear her mother’s passionate plea nor see her father give way under this emotional onslaught and apparently concur that the case should be decided in Rome.Yet it is evident from her subsequent behaviour that the aftermath of the Blackfriars trial had a profound impact
on her. Her own future was now in the public domain. It could not be evaded. And her mother, increasingly isolated, had scored a historic victory. Katherine, having gained the initiative, did not wait to hear the court’s reaction. She swept out, past the cheering women, ignoring the king’s attempts to have her called back. On 23 July, Campeggio adjourned the legatine court, pronouncing that the case could be resolved only in Rome. There would be no easy solution to her husband’s quest and she and Mary were safe for the time being. Her daughter could continue with her preparation to be England’s queen. But there was still Anne Boleyn.
She may have been constrained by social conventions and frustrated by the lack of progress but Anne never gave up in her determination to be queen of England. Little is known of her actual relationship with Katherine of Aragon, but Anne evidently underestimated the queen’s character and intellect. Like many women in her situation, hearing the complaints of a besotted lover about the inadequacies of his wife, the dire state of his marriage and his undying love for her, Anne probably did not want to think much about Katherine at all.The queen’s day was over and replacing her must have seemed a straightforward step, since she and Henry were never legally married. Anne would be his first true wife. This simple scenario was very appealing to a young woman who stood on the brink of a magnificent transformation of her life. It says much for Anne Boleyn’s self-belief that when the vision dissolved, she did not accept defeat. But her dismissal of Katherine as a rival, perfectly comprehensible on an emotional level, was unrealistic. She ignored the bonds that had grown up between Henry and his wife, as well as being far too dismissive of the kind of person that Katherine really was. Anne had been part of the queen’s entourage for some years but clearly did not understand her. It is almost as if all she saw was the dumpy, rather melancholy woman who prayed a great deal and amused herself by sewing her husband’s shirts. She overlooked Katherine’s regal bearing at state occasions, her knowledge of politics and international diplomacy; indeed, she does not seem to have taken any account of the queen’s European status and influence at all. Katherine was trained to be a queen whereas Anne Boleyn, for all her undoubted intelligence, was trained to be a courtier. If the distinction was lost on Anne, it was not for one moment lost on Katherine of Aragon.
