The Boleyns were Wolsey’s enemies, and belonged to the growing faction most hostile to the Church. The news as it came upon him was utterly distasteful.[23] Anne in turn hated Wolsey, as he probably knew that she would, and she compelled him to stoop to the disgrace of suing for her favour. The inference is reasonable, therefore, that the King took the step which in the event was to produce such momentous consequences when the Cardinal was not at hand to dissuade him. He was not encouraged even by her own family. Her father, as will be seen hereafter, was from the first opposed to his daughter’s advancement. He probably knew her character too well. But Henry, when he had taken an idea into his head, was not to be moved from it. The lady was not beautiful: she was rather short than tall, her complexion was dark, her neck long, her mouth broad, her figure not particularly good. The fascinating features were her long flowing brown hair, a pair of effective dark eyes, and a boldness of character which might have put him on his guard, and did not.
The immediate effect was to cool Wolsey’s ardour for the divorce. His mission in France, which opened so splendidly, eventuated in little. The French cardinals held no meeting at Avignon. They had signed the address to Clement, but they had not made the Cardinal of York into their patriarch. Rouen was not added to his other preferments. Could he but have proposed a marriage for his sovereign with the Princess of Alençon, all might have been different, but it had fared with him as it fared with the Earl of Warwick, whom Henry’s grandfather had sent to France to woo a bride for him, and in his absence married Elizabeth Grey. He perhaps regretted the munificent offers of the Emperor which he had hastily rejected, and he returned to England in the autumn to feel the consequences of the change in his situation. Mr. Brewer labours in vain to prove that Wolsey was unfavourable to the divorce from the beginning. Catherine believed that he was the instigator of it. Mendoza was of the same opinion. Unquestionably he promoted it with all his power, and made it a part of a great policy. To maintain that he was acting thus against his conscience and to please the King is more dishonouring to him than to suppose that he was either the originator or the willing instrument. All, however, was altered when Anne Boleyn came upon the stage, and she made haste to make him feel the change. “The Legate has returned from France,” wrote Mendoza on the 26th of October. He went to visit the King at Richmond, and sent to ask where he could see him. The King was in his chamber. It happened that the lady, who seemed to entertain no great affection for the Cardinal, was in the room with the King, and before the latter could answer the message she said for him, “Where else is the Cardinal to come? Tell him he may come here where the King is.” The Legate felt that such treatment boded no good to him, but concealed his resentment. “The cause,” said Mendoza, “is supposed to be that the said lady bears the Legate a grudge, for other reasons, and because she has discovered that during his visit to France the Legate proposed to have an alliance for the King found in that country.”[24] Wolsey persuaded Mendoza that the French marriage had been a fiction, but at once he began to endeavour to undo his work, and prevent the dissolution of the marriage with Catherine. He tried to procure an unfavourable opinion from the English Bishops before legal proceedings were commenced. Mendoza, however, doubted his stability if the King persisted in his purpose, and advised that a papal decision on the case should be procured and forwarded as soon as possible.[25]
The Pope’s captivity, however, would destroy the value of any judgment which he might give while he continued in durance. The Emperor, encouraged by the intimation that Wolsey was wavering, reverted to his previous hope. In a special memorandum of measures to be taken, the most important, notwithstanding the refusal of the previous offers, was still thought to be to “bribe the Cardinal.” He must instantly be paid the arrears of his pensions out of the revenues of the sees of Palencia and Badajoz. If there was not money enough in the treasury, a further and larger pension of twelve or fourteen thousand crowns was to be given to him out of some rich bishopric in Castile. The Emperor admitted that he had promised the Cortes to appoint no more foreigners to Spanish sees, but such a promise could not be held binding, being in violation of the liberties of the Church. Every one would see that it was for the good of the kingdom.
The renewed offer was doubtless conveyed to Wolsey, but he probably found that he had gone too deep to retire. If he made such an effort as Mendoza relates, he must have speedily discovered that it would be useless. He had encouraged the King in a belief that the divorce would be granted by the Pope as a matter of course, and the King, having made up his own mind, was not to be moved from it. If Wolsey now drew back, the certain inference would be that he had accepted an imperial bribe. There was no recourse, therefore, but to go on.
While Wolsey had been hesitating, the King had, unknown to him, sent his secretary, Dr. Knight, to Rome with directions to obtain access if possible to the Pope, and procure the dispensation which had been already applied for to enable him to marry a second time without the formalities of a judgment. Such an expedient would be convenient in many ways. It would leave Catherine’s position unaffected and the legitimacy of the Princess Mary unimpugned. Knight went. He found that without a passport he could not even enter the city, still less be allowed an interview. “With ten thousand crowns he could not bribe his way into St. Angelo.” He contrived, however, to have a letter introduced, which the Pope answered by telling Knight to wait in some quiet place. He (the Pope) would “there send him all the King’s requests in as ample a form as they were desired.” Knight trusted in a short time “to have in his custody as much, perfect, sped, and under lead, as his Highness had long time desired.”[26]
Knight was too sanguine. The Emperor, finding the Pope’s detention as a prisoner embarrassing, allowed him, on the 9th of December, to escape to Orvieto, where he was apparently at liberty; but he was only in a larger cage, all his territories being occupied by Imperial troops, and he himself watched by the General of the Observants, and warned at his peril to grant nothing to Catherine’s prejudice. Henry’s Secretary followed him, saw him, and obtained something which on examination proved to be worthless. The negotiations were left again in Wolsey’s hands, and were pressed with all the eagerness of a desperate man.
Pope Clement had ceased to be a free agent. He did not look to the rights of the case. He would gladly have pleased Henry could he have pleased him without displeasing Charles. The case itself was peculiar, and opinions differed on the rights and wrongs of it. The reader must be from time to time reminded that, as the law of England has stood ever since, a marriage with a brother’s widow was not a marriage. As the law of the Church then stood, it was not a marriage unless permitted by the Pope; and according to the same law of England the Pope neither has, nor ever had, any authority to dispense with the law. Therefore Henry, on the abstract contention, was in the right. He had married Catherine under an error. The problem was to untie the knot with as little suffering to either as the nature of the case permitted. That the negotiations were full of inconsistencies, evasions, and contradictions, was natural and inevitable. To cut the knot without untying it was the only direct course, but that all means were exhausted before the application of so violent a remedy was rather a credit than a reproach.
The first inconsistency was in the King. He did not regard his marriage as valid; therefore he thought himself at liberty to marry again; but he did not wish to illegitimatise his daughter or degrade Catherine. He disputed the validity of the dispensation of Julius II.; yet he required a dispensation from Clement which was equally questionable to enable him to take a second wife. The management of the case having reverted to Wolsey, fresh instructions were sent to Sir Gregory Casalis, the regular English agent at the Papal court, to wait on Clement. Casalis was “bid consider how much the affair concerned the relief of the King’s conscience, the safety of his soul, the preservation of his life, the continuation of his succession, the welfare and repose of all his subjects now and hereafter.” The Pope at Orvieto was personally accessible. Casalis was to represent to him the many difficulties which had arisen in connection with the marriage, and the certainty of civil war in England should the King die leaving the succession no better provided for. He was, therefore, to request the Pope to grant a commission to Wolsey to hear the case and to decide it, and (perhaps as an alternative) to sign a dispensation, a draft of which Wolsey enclosed. The language of the dispensation was peculiar. Wolsey explained it by saying that “the King, remembering by the example of past times what false claims [to the crown] had been put forward, to avoid all colour or pretext of the same, desired this of the Pope as absolutely necessary.” If these two requests were conceded, Henry undertook on his part to require the Emperor to set the Pope at liberty, or to declare war against him if he refused.
A dispensation, which was to evade the real point at issue, yet to convey to the King a power to take another wife, was a novelty in itself and likely to be carefully worded. It has given occasion among modern historians to important inferences disgraceful to everyone concerned. The sinister meaning supposed to be obvious to modern critics could not have been concealed from the Pope himself. Here, therefore, follow the words which have been fastened on as for ever fatal to the intelligence and character of Henry and his Ministers.
The Pope, after reviewing the later history of England, the distractions caused by rival claimants of the crown, after admitting the necessity of guarding against the designs of the ambitious, and empowering Henry to marry again, was made to address the King in these words:[27]—