Henry VIII.

by A. F. Pollard

So low was brought the proud city of the Seven Hills, the holy place, watered with the blood of the martyrs and hallowed by the steps of the saints, the goal of the earthly pilgrim, the seat of the throne of the Vicar of God. No Jew saw the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not with keener anguish than the devout sons of the Church heard of the desecration of Rome. If a Roman Catholic and an imperialist could term it the just judgment of God, heretics and schismatics, preparing to burst the bonds of Rome and "deny obedience to the said See," saw in it the fulfilment of the woes pronounced by St. John the Divine on the Rome of Nero, and by Daniel the Prophet on Belshazzar's Babylon. Babylon the great was fallen, and become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit; her ruler was weighed in the balances and found wanting; his kingdom was divided and given to kings and peoples who came, like the Medes and the Persians, from the hardier realms of the North.

CHAPTER VII.

THE ORIGIN OF THE DIVORCE.[489]

Matrimonial discords have, from the days of Helen of Troy, been the fruitful source of public calamities; and one of the most decisive events in English history, the breach with the Church of Rome, found its occasion in the divorce of Catherine of Aragon. Its origin has been traced to various circumstances. On one hand, it is attributed to Henry's passion for Anne Boleyn, on the other, to doubts of the validity of Henry's marriage, raised by the Bishop of Tarbes in 1527, while negotiating a matrimonial alliance between the Princess Mary and Francis I. These are the two most popular theories, and both are demonstrably false.[490] Doubts of the legality of Henry's marriage had existed long before the Bishop of Tarbes paid his visit to England, and even before Anne Boleyn was born. They were urged, not only on the eve of the completion of the marriage, but when it was first suggested. In 1503, when Henry VII. applied to Julius II. for a dispensation to enable his second son to marry his brother's widow, the Pope replied that "the dispensation was a great matter; nor did he well know, prima facie, if it were competent for the Pope to dispense in such a case".[491] He granted the dispensation, but the doubts were not entirely removed. Catherine's confessor instilled them into her mind, and was recalled by Ferdinand on that account. The Spanish King himself felt it necessary to dispel certain "scruples of conscience" Henry might entertain as to the "sin" of marrying his brother's widow.[492] Warham and Fox debated the matter, and Warham apparently opposed the marriage.[493] A general council had pronounced against the Pope's dispensing power;[494] and, though the Popes had, in effect, established their superiority over general councils, those who still maintained the contrary view can hardly have failed to doubt the legality of Henry's marriage.

So good a papalist as the young King, however, would hardly allow theoretical doubts of the general powers of the Pope to outweigh the practical advantages of a marriage in his own particular case; and it is safe to assume that his confidence in its validity would have remained unshaken, but for extraneous circumstances of a definite and urgent nature. On the 31st of January, 1510, seven months after his marriage with Catherine, she gave birth to her first child; it was a daughter, and was still-born.[495] On the 27th of May following she told her father that the event was considered in England to be of evil omen, but that Henry took it cheerfully, and she thanked God for having given her such a husband. "The King," wrote Catherine's confessor, "adores her, and her highness him." Less than eight months later, on the 1st of January, 1511, she was delivered of her first-born son.[496] A tourney was held to celebrate the joyous event, and the heralds received a handsome largess at the christening. The child was named Henry, styled Prince of Wales, and given a serjeant-at-arms on the 14th, and a clerk of the signet on the 19th of February. Three days later he was dead; he was buried at the cost of some ten thousand pounds in Westminster Abbey. The rejoicings were turned to grief, which, aggravated by successive disappointments, bore with cumulative force on the mind of the King and his people. In September, 1513, the Venetian ambassador announced the birth of another son,[497] who was either still-born, or died immediately afterwards. In June, 1514, there is again a reference to the christening of the "King's new son,"[498] but he, too, was no sooner christened than dead.

Domestic griefs were now embittered by political resentments. Ferdinand valued his daughter mainly as a political emissary; he had formally accredited her as his ambassador at Henry's Court, and she naturally used her influence to maintain the political union between her father and her husband. The arrangement had serious drawbacks; when relations between sovereigns grew strained, their ambassadors could be recalled, but Catherine had to stay. In 1514 Henry was boiling over with indignation at his double betrayal by the Catholic king; and it is not surprising that he vented some of his rage on the wife who was Ferdinand's representative. He reproached her, writes Peter Martyr from Ferdinand's Court, with her father's ill-faith, and taunted her with his own conquests. To this brutality Martyr attributes the premature birth of Catherine's fourth son towards the end of 1514.[499] Henry, in fact, was preparing to cast off, not merely the Spanish alliance, but his Spanish wife. He was negotiating for a joint attack on Castile with Louis XII. and threatening the divorce of Catherine.[500] "It is said," writes a Venetian from Rome in August, 1514, "that the King of England means to repudiate his present wife, the daughter of the King of Spain and his brother's widow, because he is unable to have children by her, and intends to marry a daughter of the French Duke of Bourbon.... He intends to annul his own marriage, and will obtain what he wants from the Pope as France did from Pope Julius II."[501]

But the death of Louis XII. (January, 1515) and the consequent loosening of the Anglo-French alliance made Henry and Ferdinand again political allies; while, as the year wore on, Catherine was known to be once more pregnant, and Henry's hopes of issue revived. This time they were not disappointed; the Princess Mary was born on the 18th of February, 1516.[502] Ferdinand had died on the 23rd of January, but the news was kept from Catherine, lest it might add to the risks of her confinement.[503] The young princess seemed likely to live, and Henry was delighted. When Giustinian, amid his congratulations, said he would have been better pleased had it been a son, the King replied: "We are both young; if it was a daughter this time, by the grace of God the sons will follow".[504] All thoughts of a divorce passed away for the time, but the desired sons did not arrive. In August, 1517, Catherine was reported to be again expecting issue, but nothing more is heard of the matter, and it is probable that about this time the Queen had various miscarriages. In July, 1518, Henry wrote to Wolsey from Woodstock that Catherine was once more pregnant, and that he could not move the Court to London, as it was one of the Queen's "dangerous times".[505] His precautions were unavailing, and, on the 10th of November, his child arrived still-born. Giustinian notes the great vexation with which the people heard the news, and expresses the opinion that, had it occurred a month or two earlier, the Princess Mary would not have been betrothed to the French dauphin, "as the one fear of England was lest it should pass into subjection to France through that marriage".[506]

The child was the last born of Catherine. For some years Henry went on hoping against every probability that he might still have male issue by his Queen; and in 1519 he undertook to lead a crusade against the Turk in person if he should have an heir.[507] But physicians summoned from Spain were no more successful than their English colleagues. By 1525 the last ray of hope had flickered out. Catherine was then forty years old; and Henry at the age of thirty-four, in the full vigour of youthful manhood, seemed doomed by the irony of fate and by his union with Catherine to leave a disputed inheritance. Never did England's interests more imperatively demand a secure and peaceful succession. Never before had there been such mortality among the children of an English king; never before had an English king married his brother's widow. So striking a coincidence could be only explained by the relation of cause and effect. Men who saw the judgment of God in the sack of Rome, might surely discern in the fatality that attended the children of Henry VIII. a fulfilment of the doom of childlessness pronounced in the Book of the Law against him who should marry his brother's wife. "God," wrote the French ambassador in 1528, "has long ago Himself passed sentence on it;"[508] and there is no reason to doubt Henry's assertion, that he had come to regard the death of his children as a Divine judgment, and that he was impelled to question his marriage by the dictates of conscience. The "scruples of conscience," which Henry VII. had urged as an excuse for delaying the marriage, were merely a cloak for political reasons; but scruples of conscience are dangerous playthings, and the pretence of Henry VII. became, through the death of his children, a terrible reality to Henry VIII.

Queen Catherine, too, had scruples of conscience about the marriage, though of a different sort. When she first heard of Henry's intention to seek a divorce, she is reported to have said that "she had not offended, but it was a judgment of God, for that her former marriage was made in blood"; the price of it had been the head of the innocent Earl of Warwick, demanded by Ferdinand of Aragon.[509] Nor was she alone in this feeling. "He had heard," witnessed Buckingham's chancellor in 1521, "the Duke grudge that the Earl of Warwick was put to death, and say that God would punish it, by not suffering the King's issue to prosper, as appeared by the death of his sons; and that his daughters prosper not, and that he had no issue male."[510]

Conscience, however, often moves men in directions indicated by other than conscientious motives, and, of the other motives which influenced Henry's mind, some were respectable and some the reverse. The most legitimate was his desire to provide for the succession to the throne. It was obvious to him and his council that, if he died with no children but Mary, England ran the risk of being plunged into an anarchy worse than that of the civil wars. "By English law," wrote Falier, the Venetian ambassador, in 1531, "females are excluded from the throne;"[511] that was not true, but it was undoubtedly a widespread impression, based upon the past history of England. No Queen-Regnant had asserted a right to the English throne but one, and that one precedent provided the most effective argument for avoiding a repetition of the experiment. Matilda was never crowned, though she had the same claim to the throne as Mary, and her attempt to enforce her title involved England in nineteen years of anarchy and civil war. Stephen stood to Matilda in precisely the same relation as James V. of Scotland stood to the Princess Mary; and in 1532, as soon as he came of age, James was urged to style himself "Prince of England" and Duke of York, in manifest derogation of Mary's title.[512] At that time Charles V. was discussing alternative plans for deposing Henry VIII. One was to set up James V., the other to marry Mary to some great English noble and proclaim them King and Queen;[513] Mary by herself was thought to have no chance of success. John of Gaunt had maintained in Parliament that the succession descended only through males;[514] the Lancastrian case was that Henry IV., the son of Edward III.'s fourth son, had a better title to the throne than Philippa, the daughter of the third; an Act limiting the succession to the male line was passed in 1406;[515] and Henry VII. himself only reigned through a tacit denial of the right of women to sit on the English throne.