The reason for Wolsey’s strong opposition to a match which appeared a perfectly fitting one for both the lovers, is not far to seek. Cavendish himself gives us the clue when he says that when the King first heard that Anne had become engaged to Percy, “he was much moved thereat, for he had a private affection for her himself which was not yet discovered to any”: and the faithful usher in telling the story excuses Wolsey by saying that “he did nothing but what the King commanded.” This affair marks the beginning of Henry’s infatuation for Anne. There was no reason for Wolsey to object to a flirtation between the girl and her royal admirer; indeed the devotion of the King to a new mistress would doubtless make him the more ready to consent to contract another entirely political marriage, if he could get rid of Katharine; and the Cardinal smiled complaisantly at the prospect that all was going well for his plans. Anne, for the look of the thing, was sent away from Court for a short time after the Percy affair had been broken off; but before many weeks were over she was back again as one of Katharine’s maids of honour, and the King’s admiration for her was evident to all observers.[48]
It is more than questionable whether up to this time (1526) Anne ever dreamed of becoming Henry’s wife; but in any case she was too clever to let herself go cheaply. She knew well the difference in the positions held by the King’s mistresses in the French Court and that which had been occupied by her sister and Lady Tailebois in England, and she coyly held her royal lover at arm’s length, with the idea of enhancing her value at last. Henry, as we have seen, was utterly tired of, and estranged from, Katharine; and his new flame, with her natural ability and acquired French arts, flattered and pleased his vanity better than any woman had done before. It is quite probable that she began to aim secretly at the higher prize in the spring of 1527, when the idea of the divorce from Katharine had taken shape in the King’s mind under the sedulous prompting of Wolsey for his personal and political ends; but if such was the case she was careful not to show her hand prematurely. Her only hope of winning such a game was to keep imperious Henry in a fever of love, whilst declining all his illicit advances. It was a difficult and a dangerous thing to do, for her quarry might break away at any moment, whereas if such a word as marriage between the King and her reached the ears of the cardinal, she and her family would inevitably be destroyed.
Such was the condition of affairs when Wolsey started for France in July 1527. He went, determined to leave no stone unturned to set Henry free from Katharine. He knew that there was no time to be lost, for the letters from Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in London, and Katharine’s messenger Felipe, were on their way to tell the story to the Emperor in Spain; and Clement VII., a prisoner in the hands of the imperialists, would not dare to dissolve the marriage after Charles had had time to command him not to do so. It was a stiff race who should get to the Pope first. Wolsey’s alternative plan in the circumstances was a clever one. It was to send to Rome the Bishop of Worcester (the Italian Ghinucci), Henry’s ambassador in Spain, then on his way home, to obtain, with the support of the cardinals of French sympathies, a “general faculty” from Clement VII. for Wolsey to exercise all the Papal functions during the Pope’s captivity: “by which, without informing the Pope of your (i.e. Henry’s) purpose, I may delegate such judges as the Queen will not refuse; and if she does the cognisance of the cause shall be devolved upon me, and by a clause to be inserted in the general commission no appeal be allowed from my decision to the Pope.”[49]
How unscrupulous Wolsey and Henry were in the matter is seen in a letter dated shortly before the above was written, in which Wolsey says to Ghinucci (Bishop of Worcester) and Dr. Lee, Henry’s ambassador with the Emperor, that “a rumour has, somehow or other, sprung up in England that proceedings are being taken for a divorce between the King and the Queen, which is entirely without foundation, yet not altogether causeless, for there has been some discussion about the Papal dispensation; not with any view to a divorce, but to satisfy the French, who raised the objection on proposing a marriage between the Princess (Mary Tudor) and their sovereign. The proceedings which took place on this dispute gave rise to the rumour, and reached the ears of the Queen, who expressed some resentment but was satisfied after explanation; and no suspicion exists, except, perchance, the Queen may have communicated with the Emperor.”[50] Charles had, indeed, heard the whole story, as far as Katharine knew it, from the lips of Felipe before this was written, and was not to be put off with such smooth lies. He wrote indignantly to his ambassador Mendoza in London, directing him to see Henry and point out to him, in diplomatic language veiling many a threat, the danger, as well as the turpitude, of repudiating his lawful wife with no valid excuse; and more vigorously still he let the Pope know that there must be no underhand work to his detriment or that of his family. Whilst the arrogant Cardinal of York was thus playing for his own hand first, and for Henry secondly, in France, his jealous enemies in England might put their heads together and plot against him undeterred by the paralysing fear of his frown. His pride and insolence, as well as his French political leanings, had caused the populace to hate him; the commercial classes, who suffered most by the wars with their best customers, the Flemings and Spaniards, were strongly opposed to him; whilst the territorial and noble party, which had usually been friendly with Katharine, and were traditionally against bureaucratic or ecclesiastical ministers of the crown, suffered with impatience the galling yoke of the Ipswich butcher’s son, who drove them as he listed.
Anne was in the circumstances a more powerful ally for them than Katharine. She was the niece of the Duke of Norfolk, the leader of the party of nobles, and her ambition would make her an apt and eager instrument. The infatuation of the King for her grew more violent as she repelled his advances,[51] and, doubtless at the prompting of Wolsey’s foes, it soon began to be whispered that if Henry could get rid of his wife he might marry his English favourite. Before the Cardinal had been in France a month, Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, first sounded the new note of alarm to the Emperor, by telling him that Anne might become the King’s wife. It is hardly possible that no hint of the danger can have reached Wolsey, but if it did he was confident of his power over his master when he should return to England. Unfortunately for him his ideas for the King’s divorce were hampered by the plans for his own advancement; and the proposals he wrote to Henry were all founded on the idea of exerting international pressure, either for the liberation of the Pope, or to obtain from the Pontiff the decree of divorce. It was evident that this process must be a slow one, and Anne as well as Henry was in a hurry. Unlike Charles, who, though he was falsity itself to his rivals, never deceived his own ministers, Henry constantly showed the moral cowardice of his character by misleading those who were supposed to direct his policy, and at this juncture he conceived a plan of his own which promised more rapidity than that of Wolsey.[52] Without informing Wolsey of the real object of his mission, old Dr. Knight, the King’s confidential secretary, was sent to endeavour to see the Pope in St. Angelo, and by personal appeal from the King persuade him to grant a dispensation for Henry’s marriage either before his marriage with Katharine was dissolved formally (constante matrimonio), or else, if that was refused, a dispensation to marry after the declaration had been made nullifying the previous union (soluto matrimonio); but in either case the strange demand was to be made that the dispensation was to cover the case of the bride and bridegroom being connected within the prohibited degrees of affinity.[53]
Knight saw Wolsey on his way through France and hoodwinked him as to his true mission by means of a bogus set of instructions, though the Cardinal was evidently suspicious and ill at ease. This was on the 12th September 1527, and less than a fortnight later Wolsey hurried homeward. When he had set forth from England three months before he seemed to hold the King in the hollow of his hand. Private audience for him was always ready, and all doors flew open at his bidding. But when he appeared on the 30th September at the palace of Richmond, and sent one of his gentlemen to inquire of the King where he would receive him, Anne sat in the great hall by Henry’s side, as was usual now. Before the King could answer the question of Wolsey’s messenger, the favourite, with a petulance that Katharine would have considered undignified, snapped, “Where else should the Cardinal come but where the King is?” For the King to receive his ministers at private audience in a hall full of people was quite opposed to the usual etiquette of Henry’s Court, and Wolsey’s man still stood awaiting the King’s reply. But it only came in the form of a nod that confirmed the favourite’s decision. This must have struck the proud Cardinal to the heart, and when he entered the hall and bowed before his sovereign, who was toying now with his lady-love, and joking with his favourites, the minister must have known that his empire over Henry had for the time vanished. He was clever and crafty: he had often conquered difficulties before, and was not dismayed now that a young woman had supplanted him, for he still held confidence in himself. So he made no sign of annoyance, but he promptly tried to checkmate Knight’s mission when he heard of it, whilst pretending approval of the King’s attachment to Anne. The latter was deceived. She could not help seeing that with Wolsey’s help she would attain her object infinitely more easily than without it, and she in her turn smiled upon the Cardinal, though her final success would have boded ill for him, as he well knew.
His plan, doubtless, was to let the divorce question drag on as long as possible, in the hope that Henry would tire of his new flame. First he persuaded the King to send fresh instructions to Knight, on the ground that the Pope would certainly not give him a dispensation to commit bigamy in order that he might marry Anne, and that it would be easier to obtain from the Pontiff a decree leaving the validity of the marriage with Katharine to the decision of the Legates in England, Wolsey and another Cardinal. Henry having once loosened the bridle, did not entirely return to his submission to Wolsey. Like most weak men, he found it easier to rebel against the absent than against those who faced him; but he was not, if he and Anne could prevent it, again going to put his neck under the Cardinal’s yoke completely, and in a secret letter to Knight he ordered him to ask Clement for a dispensation couched in the curious terms already referred to, allowing him to marry again, even within the degrees of affinity, as soon as the union with Katharine was dissolved. Knight had found it impossible to get near the Pope in Rome, for the imperialists had been fully forewarned by this time; but at length Clement was partially released and went to Orvieto in December, whither Knight followed him before the new instructions came from England. Knight was no match for the subtle churchmen. Clement dared not, moreover, mortally offend the Emperor, whose men-at-arms still held Rome; and the dispensation that Knight sent so triumphantly to England giving the Legate’s Court in London power to decide the validity of the King’s marriage, had a clause slipped into it which destroyed its efficacy, because it left the final decision to the Pontiff after all.
It may be asked, if Henry believed, as he now pretended, that his first marriage had never been legal in consequence of Katharine being his brother’s widow, why he needed a Papal dispensation to break it. The Papal brief that had been previously given allowing the marriage, was asserted by Henry’s ecclesiastical friends to be ultra vires in England, because marriage with a brother’s widow was prohibited under the common law of the land, with which the Pope could not dispense. But the matter was complicated with all manner of side issues: the legitimacy of the Princess Mary, the susceptibilities of the powerful confederation that obeyed the Emperor, the sentiment of the English people, and, above all, the invariable desire of Henry to appear a saint whilst he acted like a sinner and to avoid personal responsibility; and so Henry still strove with the ostensible, but none too hearty, aid of Wolsey, to gain from the Pope the nullification of a marriage which he said was no marriage at all. Wolsey’s position had become a most delicate and dangerous one. As soon as the Emperor learned of Anne’s rise, he had written to Mendoza (30th September 1527), saying that the Cardinal must be bought at any price. All his arrears of pension (45,000 ducats) were to be paid, 6000 ducats a year more from a Spanish bishopric were to be granted, and a Milanese marquisate was to be conferred upon him with a revenue of 15,000 ducats a year, if he would only serve the Emperor’s interests. But he dared not do it quickly or openly, dearly as he loved money, for Anne was watchful and Henry suspicious of him. His only hope was that the King’s infatuation for this long-faced woman with the prude’s mouth and the blazing eyes might pall. Then his chance would come again.
Far from growing weaker, however, Henry’s passion grew as Anne’s virtue became more rigid. She had not always been so austere, for gossip had already been busy with her good name. Percy and Sir Thomas Wyatt had both been her lovers, and with either or both of them she had in some way compromised herself.[54] But she played her game cleverly, for the stake was a big one, and her fascination must have been great. She was often away from Court, feigning to prefer the rural delights of Hever to the splendours of Greenwich or Richmond, or offended at the significant tittle-tattle about herself and the King. She was thus absent when in July 1527 Wolsey had gone to France, but took care to keep herself in Henry’s memory by sending him a splendid jewel of gold and diamonds representing a damsel in a boat on a troubled sea. The lovesick King replied in the first of those extraordinary love-letters of his which have so often been printed. “Henceforward,” he says, “my heart shall be devoted to you only. I wish my body also could be. God can do it if He pleases, to whom I pray once a day that it may be, and hope at length to be heard:” and he signs Escripte de la main du secretaire, que en cœur, corps, et volonté, est vostre loiall et plus assuré serviteure, H. (autre cœur ne cherche) R. Soon afterwards, when Wolsey was well on his way, the King writes to his lady-love again. “The time seems so long since I heard of your good health and of you that I send the bearer to be better ascertained of your health and your purpose: for since my last parting from you I have been told you have quite abandoned the intention of coming to Court, either with your mother or otherwise. If so I cannot wonder sufficiently; for I have committed no offence against you, and it is very little return for the great love I bear you to deny me the presence of the woman I esteem most of all the world. If you love me, as I hope you do, our separation should be painful to you. I trust your absence is not wilful; for if so I can but lament my ill fortune and by degrees abate my great folly.”[55] This was the tone to bring Anne to her lover again, and before many days were over they were together, and in Wolsey’s absence the marriage rumours spread apace.
The fiasco of Knight’s mission had convinced Henry and Anne that they must proceed through the ordinary diplomatic channels and with the aid of Wolsey in their future approaches to the Pope; and early in 1528 Stephen Gardiner and Edward Fox, two ecclesiastics attached to the Cardinal, were despatched on a fresh mission to Orvieto to urge Clement to grant to Wolsey and another Legate power to pronounce finally on the validity of Henry’s marriage. The Pope was to be plied with sanctimonious assurances that no carnal love for Anne prompted Henry’s desire to marry her, as the Pope had been informed, but solely her “approved excellent, virtuous qualities—the purity of her life, her constant virginity, her maidenly and womanly pudicity, her soberness, her chasteness, meekness, humility, wisdom, descent right noble and high through royal blood,[56] education in all good and laudable qualities and manners, apparent aptness to procreation of children, with her other infinite good qualities.” Gardiner and Fox on their way to Dover called at Hever, and showed to Anne this panegyric penned by Wolsey[57] upon her, and thenceforward for a time all went trippingly.