The harassed Pope was obstinately cautious, and occasionally even turned upon his persecutors. Mai now urged him to call a General Council and settle all questions. The word “council” rang painfully in Papal ears. Why did not the Emperor make war upon the Lutherans? he pettishly asked. Mai told him the Lutherans were rich and stubborn and strong, and it would be an endless work. Why not then, said Clement, begin with the Swiss, who were not so strong? Mai answered that it could not be. The heretics everywhere made common cause, and the Emperor could not fight them all single-handed. The Pope sighed, and said he feared there would be little help from France and England.[150]
In England events moved steadily on, without hesitation, yet without precipitation. The Bishops were not yet agreed on the divorce. At the close of the session (March, 1531) Sir Thomas More read in the Upper House the opinions which had been collected from the Universities at home and abroad, and a debate ensued upon them.... London and Lincoln were on the King’s side. St. Asaph and Bath were of opinion that Parliament had no right to interfere. Norfolk cut the argument short by saying that the documents had been introduced merely to be read. There was no proposal before the House. More said briefly that the King knew what his opinion was, and that he need not repeat it. The judgments were sent down to the House of Commons, where Chapuys persuaded himself that they were heard with more displeasure than approval. The session ended, and Parliament was prorogued till the following autumn. The Emperor himself wrote to More. The letter was forwarded through Chapuys, who wished to deliver it in person. More declined his visit and declined the letter. If it was placed in his hand, he said, he must communicate it to the King. Parliament having risen, there was again a breathing time.[151]
So far as the persons of the two ladies were concerned who were the central figures in the quarrel, there was little difference of opinion in England. The Duke of Norfolk, who represented the feelings of the great body of the nation, thought that the interests of the succession made the divorce a necessity. The realm could not be left exposed to the risk of another civil war. He was jealous of the honour and liberties of the country, and ill liked to see a question which touched them so nearly left to the pleasure of the Emperor. But Norfolk as much admired Catherine as he disliked his niece, and there were probably few English statesmen who did not regret that a public cause should have been tainted by a love-affair. All the leading men regretted that the King had fastened his choice upon a person neither liked nor respected. Anne’s antecedents were unfavourable. Her elevation had turned her brain; she had made herself detested for her insolence and dreaded for her intrigues. Catherine, on the other hand, was a princess of royal birth and stainless honour. The Duke observed to the Marquis of Exeter that it was a wonder to see her courage—nothing seemed to frighten her; “the Devil and no other,” he said, “must have originated so wretched a business.” The same view of the matter was growing at Rome in the Pope and among the Cardinals. The Bishop of Tarbes, who represented Francis at the Papal Court, warned Clement that the loss of England might be the loss of France also. If the King of England, he said, was driven to desperation, the miserable divorce suit would be the ruin of the world; Francis would and must stand by him if the Pope proceeded to excommunication. His impatience with his marriage might be unreasonable, but was no adequate ground for the convulsion of Catholic Christendom. Clement was at heart of the same opinion. The course which he wished to follow was to delay indefinitely. A formal suspension would not be needed. They had only to go on slowly. The King would then most likely marry, and the cause would drop. Andrea de Burgo, Ferdinand’s ambassador, said that the Emperor was strong enough to settle the matter by himself. “Not so strong as you think,” Clement observed. “Between the Turks and the Lutherans the Emperor may have trouble enough of his own.”[152]
The Pope’s unwillingness was well understood in England. He made another faint effort to save Catherine; he ordered the Nuncio to announce to Henry that the brief must be obeyed, or “justice would have its course.” Believing that the message would be resented, the Nuncio hesitated to deliver it, but, encouraged by Chapuys, at last demanded audience and informed Henry in the Pope’s name what he was to expect if he persisted. Henry shortly answered that the Pope was losing his time. He already knew what the Nuncio had come to tell him, but, once for all, he would never accept the Pope as his judge in an affair concerning himself and the English nation. “The Pope may excommunicate me,” he said. “I care not a fig for his excommunication. Let him do as he wills at Rome. I will do here as I will.... I take the Pope to be a worthy man on the whole, but ever since the last war he has been so afraid of the Emperor that he dares not act against his wishes.”[153]
The most obvious resource was to adopt the suggestion already made that the case should be transferred to Cambray, or to some other spot not open to objection, where it could be heard with impartiality. Clement himself was weary of the struggle, and eager to escape from it by any reasonable means. If Catherine would agree, Charles was unlikely to hesitate; but, though weary and worn out with disappointments, she was a resolute woman, and as long as she persisted the Emperor was determined not to desert her. With small hope of success, but as an experiment which it was thought desirable to try, a deputation of Peers and Bishops were commissioned to see Catherine, to ask her to withdraw her demand for an immediate sentence, and consent that the cause should be tried in a neutral place; while the Pope, through his Legate in Spain, made a similar proposition to Charles. The Queen heard that they were coming, and prepared for them by causing several “masses of the Holy Ghost” to be said, that she might be enlightened how to answer. The delegates arrived shortly after the masses were completed, the two Dukes, Lord Exeter, Earls, Barons, Bishops, and canon lawyers, thirty of them in all. Norfolk spoke for the rest. He said that the King had been treated with contempt and vituperation by the Pope on her account; he had been cited to appear personally at Rome—a measure never before enforced by any pope against an English king. He could not go; he could not leave his kingdom—nor could the dispute be settled by the Pope’s insistence on it. A fitter place and fitter judges must be chosen by the mutual consent of the parties, or she would be the cause of trouble and scandal to them and their posterity. The Duke entreated her to consider the consequences of refusal—to remember the many good services which the King had rendered to her father and to the Emperor, and to allow the constitution of some other court before which the King could plead.
In itself the demand was reasonable. It was impossible for a king of England to plead before the Pope, in the power, as he was, of the Emperor, who was himself a party interested in the dispute. A neutral place might have been easily found. Neutral judges might be less easily procurable; but none could be less fit than his Holiness. The Queen, however, replied stoutly as ever that her cause should be judged by the Pope and by no one else; not that she expected any favour at his hands; so far the Pope had shown himself so partial to the King that more could not be asked of him; she, and not the King, had cause to complain of his Holiness; but the Pope held the place and had the power of God upon earth, and was the image of eternal truth. To him, and only to him, she remitted her case. If trouble came, it would be the work of others, not of her. She allowed that in past times the King had assisted her relations. The Emperor had not denied it, and was the King’s true friend. With a scornful allusion to the Supremum Caput, she said, the King might be Lord and Master in temporal matters, but the Pope was the true Sovereign and Vicar of God in matters spiritual, of which matrimony was one.[154]
The Spanish Legate had succeeded no better with Charles, who returned a peremptory refusal; but so little confidence had the Emperor in the true Sovereign and Vicar of God that he insisted not merely that the Pope should try the case but should try it in his own presence, lest the Queen’s interests should suffer injury. The request itself indicated a disposition on the Pope’s part to evade his duty. Charles gave him to understand, in language sufficiently peremptory, that he intended that duty to be done.[155]
In this direction there was no hope. Catherine had been even more emphatic with the deputation. After her reply to Norfolk, the bishops and lawyers took up the word. She always denied that she had been Prince Arthur’s actual wife. She herself on all occasions courted the subject, and was not afraid of indelicacy. The Church doctors responded. They said she had slept with Prince Arthur, and the presumptions were against her. She bade them go plead their presumptions at Rome, where they would have others than a woman to answer them. She was astonished, she said, to see so many great people gathered against a lone lady without friends or counsel.
Among the great persons before her she had still some staunch friends. Anne Boleyn was detested by them all; and those who, like Norfolk, wished her, for her own sake, to be less uncompromising could not refuse to admire the gallant spirit of Isabella’s daughter. But, alas! the refusal to allow the cause to be heard in a free city, before an impartial tribunal, was equivalent to a consciousness that, unless by a court under the Emperor’s control, an unfavourable judgment was to be looked for. They could not, any one of them, allow their Sovereign to plead where an Imperial Minister could threaten the lives of uncompliant Cardinals. But, unless every knightly feeling had been dead in them, they could not have refused their sympathy. Had the Pope spoken plainly from the first, most of the Peers would perhaps have stood by the lady before them with voice and sword. But the Pope had allowed that the King was in the right. He had drawn back only under compulsion, and even at that moment was only prevented by fear from deciding on the King’s side. Glad as they might have been had the question never been raised, they could not submit their Prince to the indignity of a condemnation by a coerced tribunal—a tribunal which was to be trusted to proceed only, as it now appeared, in the Emperor’s own presence.
They carried the answer back to their master. “I feared it would be so,” he said, “knowing as I do the heart and temper of the Queen. We must now provide in some other way.”