The Wives of Henry the Eighth and the Parts They Played in History

by Martin A. S. Hume

Gardiner was a far different negotiator from Knight, and was able, though with infinite difficulty, to induce Clement to grant the new bull demanded, relegating the cause finally to the Legatine Court in London. The Pope would have preferred that Wolsey should have sat alone as Legate, but Wolsey was so unpopular in England, and the war into which he had again dragged the country against the Emperor was so detested,[58] whilst Queen Katharine had so many sympathisers, that it was considered necessary that a foreign Legate should add his authority to that of Wolsey to do the evil deed. Campeggio, who had been in England before, and was a pensioner of Henry as Bishop of Hereford, was the Cardinal selected by Wolsey; and at last Clement consented to send him. Every one concerned appears to have endeavoured to avoid responsibility for what they knew was a shabby business. The Pope, crafty and shifty, was in a most difficult position, and blew hot and cold. The first commission given to Gardiner and Fox, which was received with such delight by Anne and Henry when Fox brought it to London in April 1528, was found on examination still to leave the question open to Papal veto. It is true that it gave permission to the Legates to pronounce for the King, but the responsibility for the ruling was left to them, and their decision might be impugned. When, at the urgent demand of Gardiner, the Pope with many tears gave a decretal laying down that the King’s marriage with Katharine was bad by canon law if the facts were as represented, he gave secret orders to the Legate Campeggio that the decretal was to be burnt and not to be acted upon.

Whilst the Pope was thus between the devil and the deep sea, trying to please the Emperor on the one hand and the Kings of France and England on the other, and deceiving both, the influence of Anne over her royal lover grew stronger every day. Wolsey was in the toils and he knew it. When Charles had answered the English declaration of war (January 1528), it was the Cardinal’s rapacity, pride, and ambition against which he thundered as the cause of the strife and of the insult offered to the imperial house. To the Emperor the Cardinal could not again turn. Henry, moreover, was no longer the obedient tool he had been before Anne was by his side to stiffen his courage; and Wolsey knew that, notwithstanding the favourite’s feline civilities and feigned dependence upon him, it would be the turn of his enemies to rule when once she became the King’s wedded wife. He was, indeed, hoist with his own petard. The divorce had been mainly promoted, if not originated, by him, and the divorce in the present circumstances would crush him. But he had pledged himself too deeply to draw back openly; and he still had to smile upon those who were planning his ruin, and himself urge forward the policy by which it was to be effected.

In the meanwhile Katharine stood firm, living under the same roof as her husband, sitting at the same table with him with a serene countenance in public, and to all appearance unchanged in her relations to him. But though her pride stood her in good stead she was perplexed and lonely. Henry’s intention to divorce her, and his infatuation for Anne, were of course public property, and the courtiers turned to the coming constellation, whatever the common people might do. Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, withdrew from Court in the spring after the declaration of war, and the Queen’s isolation was then complete. To the Spanish Latinist in Flanders, J. Luis Vives, and to Erasmus, she wrote asking for counsel in her perplexity, but decorous epistles in stilted Latin advising resignation and Christian fortitude was all she got from either.[59] Her nephew the Emperor had urged her, in any case, to refuse to recognise the authority of any tribunal in England to judge her case, and had done what he could to frighten the Pope against acceding to Henry’s wishes. But even he was not implacable, if his political ends were served in any arrangement that might be made; and at this time he evidently hoped, as did the Pope most fervently, that as a last resource Katharine would help everybody out of the trouble by giving up the struggle and taking the veil. Her personal desire would doubtless have been to adopt this course, for the world had lost its savour, but she was a daughter of Isabel the Catholic, and tame surrender was not in her line. Her married life with Henry she knew was at an end;[60] but her daughter was now growing into girlhood, and her legitimacy and heirship to the English crown she would only surrender with her own life. So to all smooth suggestions that she should make things pleasant all round by acquiescing in the King’s view of their marriage, she was scornfully irresponsive.

Through the plague-scourged summer of 1528 Henry and Anne waited impatiently for the coming of the Legate Campeggio. He was old and gouty, hampered with a mission which he dreaded; for he could not hope to reconcile the irreconcilable, and the Pope had quietly given him the hint that he need not hurry. Clement was, indeed, in a greater fix than ever. He had been made to promise by the Emperor that the case should not be decided in England, and yet he had been forced into giving the dispensation and decretal not only allowing it to be decided there in favour of Henry, but had despatched Campeggio to pronounce judgment. He had, however, at the same time assured the Emperor that means should be found to prevent the finality of any decision in England until the Emperor had approved of it, and Campeggio was instructed accordingly. The Spaniards thought that the English Cardinal would do his best to second the efforts of the Pope without appearing to do so, and there is no doubt that they were right, for Wolsey was now (the summer of 1528) really alarmed at the engine he had set in motion and could not stop. Katharine knew that the Legate was on his way, and that the Pope had, in appearance, granted all of Henry’s demands; but she did not know, or could not understand, the political forces that were operating in her favour, which made the Pope defraud the King of England, and turned her erstwhile mortal enemy Wolsey into her secret friend. Tact and ready adaptability might still have helped Katharine. The party of nobles under Norfolk, it is true, had deserted her; but Wolsey and the bureaucrats were still a power to be reckoned with, and the middle classes and the populace were all in favour of the Queen and the imperial alliance. If these elements had been cleverly combined they might have conquered, for Henry was always a coward and would have bent to the stronger force. But Katharine was a bad hand at changing sides, and Wolsey dared not openly do so.

For a few days in the summer of 1528, whilst Campeggio was still lingering on the Continent, it looked as if a mightier power than any of them might settle the question for once and all. Henry and Anne were at Greenwich when the plague broke out in London. In June one of Anne’s attendants fell ill of the malady, and Henry in a panic sent his favourite to Hever, whilst he hurried from place to place in Hertfordshire. The plague followed him. Sir Francis Poyns, Sir William Compton, William Carey, and other members of his Court died in the course of the epidemic, and the dread news soon reached Henry that Anne and her father were both stricken at Hever Castle. Henry had written daily to her whilst they had been separated. “Since your last letter, mine own darling,” he wrote a few days after she left, “Walter Welsh, Master Brown, Thomas Care, Grion of Brereton, and John Coke the apothecary have fallen of the sweat in this house.... By the mercy of God the rest of us be yet well, and I trust shall pass it, either not to have it, or at least as easily as the rest have done.” Later he wrote: “The uneasiness my doubts about your health gave me, disturbed and alarmed me exceedingly; and I should not have had any quiet without hearing certain tidings. But now, since you have felt as yet nothing, I hope, and am assured, that it will spare you, as I hope it is doing with us. For when we were at Waltham two ushers, two valets, and your brother, master-treasurer, fell ill, but are now quite well; and since we have returned to our house at Hunsdon we have been perfectly well, and have not now one sick person, God be praised. I think if you would retire from Surrey, as we did, you would escape all danger. There is another thing may comfort you, which is, in truth, that in this distemper few or no women have been taken ill, and no person of our Court has died.[61] For which reason I beg you, my entirely beloved, not to frighten yourself, nor be too uneasy at our absence, for wherever I am, I am yours: and yet we must sometimes submit to our misfortunes; for whoever will struggle against fate is generally but so much the further from gaining his end. Wherefore, comfort yourself and take courage, and avoid the pestilence as much as you can; for I hope shortly to make you sing la renvoyé. No more at present from lack of time, but that I wish you in my arms that I might a little dispel your unreasonable thoughts. Written by the hand of him who is, and always will be, yours.”

When the news of Anne’s illness reached him he despatched one of his physicians post haste with the following letter to his favourite: “There came to me suddenly in the night the most afflicting news that could have arrived. The first, to hear the sickness of my mistress, whom I esteem more than all the world, and whose health I desire as I do my own, so that I would gladly bear half your illness to make you well; the second, the fear that I have of being still longer harassed by my enemy—your absence—much longer ... who is, so far as I can judge, determined to spite me more, because I pray God to rid me of this troublesome tormentor; the third, because the physician in whom I have most confidence is absent at the very time when he might be of the most service to me, for I should hope by his means to obtain one of my chiefest joys on earth—that is, the care of my mistress. Yet, for want of him, I send you my second, and hope that he will soon make you well. I shall then love him more than ever. I beseech you to be guided by his advice, and I hope soon to see you again, which will be to me a greater comfort than all the precious jewels in the world.” In a few days Anne was out of danger, and the hopes and fears aroused by her illness gave place to the old intrigues again.

A few weeks later Anne was with her lover at Ampthill, hoping and praying daily for the coming of the gouty Legate, who was slowly being carried through France to the coast. Wolsey had to be very humble now, for Anne had shown her ability to make Henry brave him, and the King rebuked him publicly at her bidding,[62] but until Campeggio came and the fateful decision was given that would make Anne a Queen, both she and Henry diplomatically alternated cajolery with the humbling process towards the Cardinal. Anne’s well-known letter with Henry’s postscript, so earnestly asking Wolsey for news of Campeggio, is written in most affectionate terms, Anne saying, amongst other pretty things, that she “loves him next unto the King’s grace, above all creatures living.” But the object of her wheedling was only to gain news of the speedy coming of the Legate. The King’s postscript to this letter is characteristic of him. “The writer of this letter would not cease till she had caused me likewise to set my hand, desiring you, though it be short, to take it in good part. I assure you that there is neither of us but greatly desireth to see you, and are joyous to hear that you have escaped the plague so well; trusting the fury thereof to be passed, especially with them that keepeth good diet, as I trust you do. The not hearing of the Legate’s arrival in France causeth us somewhat to muse: notwithstanding, we trust, by your diligence and vigilance, with the assistance of Almighty God, shortly to be eased out of that trouble.”[63]

Campeggio was nearly four months on his way, urged forward everywhere by English agents and letters, held back everywhere by the Pope’s fears and his own ailments; but at last, one joyful day in the middle of September, Henry could write to his lady-love at Hever: “The Legate which we most desire arrived at Paris on Sunday last past, so that I trust next Monday to hear of his arrival at Calais: and then I trust within a while after to enjoy that which I have so long longed for, to God’s pleasure and both our comfort. No more to you at present, mine own darling, for lack of time, but that I would you were in mine arms, or I in yours, for I think it long since I kissed you.” Henry had to wait longer than in his lover-like eagerness he had expected; it was fully a fortnight before he had news of Campeggio’s arrival at Dover. Great preparations had been made to entertain the Papal Legate splendidly in London, and on his way thither; but he was suffering and sorry, and begged to be saved the fatigue of a public reception. So ill was he that, rather than face the streets of London on the day he was expected, he lodged for the night at the Duke of Suffolk’s house on the Surrey side of London bridge, and the next day, 8th October, was quietly carried in the Duke’s barge across the river to the Bishop of Bath’s palace beyond Temple Bar, where he was to lodge. There he remained ill in bed, until the King’s impatience would brook no further delay; and on the 12th he was carried, sick as he was, and sorely against his will, in a crimson velvet chair for his first audience.

In the great hall of the palace of Bridewell, hard by Blackfriars, Henry sat in a chair of state, with Wolsey and Campeggio on his right hand, whilst one of the Legate’s train delivered a fulsome Latin oration, setting forth the iniquitous outrages perpetrated by the imperialists upon the Vicar of Christ, and the love and gratitude of the Pontiff for his dearest son Henry for his aid and sympathy. The one thing apparently that the Pope desired was to please his benefactor, the King of England. When the public ceremony was over, Henry took Campeggio and Wolsey into a private room; and the day following the King came secretly to Campeggio’s lodging, and for four long hours plied the suffering churchman with arguments and authorities which would justify the divorce. Up to this time Campeggio had fondly imagined that he might, with the Papal authority, persuade Henry to abandon his object. But this interview undeceived him. He found the King, as he says, better versed in the matter “than a great theologian or jurist”; and Campeggio opined at last that “if an angel descended from heaven he would be unable to persuade him” that the marriage was valid. When, however, Campeggio suggested that the Queen might be induced to enter a convent, Henry was delighted. If they would only prevail upon her to do that she should have everything she demanded: the title of Queen and all her dowry, revenue, and belongings; the Princess Mary should be acknowledged heiress to the crown, failing legitimate male issue to the King, and all should be done to Katharine’s liking. Accordingly, the next day, 14th October, Campeggio and Wolsey took boat and went to try their luck with the Queen, after seeing the King for the third time. Beginning with a long sanctimonious rigmarole, Campeggio pressed her to take a “course which would give general satisfaction and greatly benefit herself”; and Wolsey, on his knees, and in English, seconded his colleague’s advice. Katharine was cold and collected. She was, she said, a foreigner in England without skilled advice, and she declined at present to say anything. She had asked the King to assign councillors to aid her, and when she had consulted them she would see the Legates again.

As day broke across the Thames on the 25th October, Campeggio lay awake in bed at Bath House, suffering the tortures of gout, and perturbed at the difficult position in which he was placed, when Wolsey was announced, having come from York Place in his barge. When the Cardinal entered the room he told his Italian colleague that the King had appointed Archbishop Warham, Bishop Fisher, and others, to be councillors for the Queen, and that the Queen had obtained her husband’s permission to come to Campeggio and confess that morning. At nine o’clock Katharine came unobserved to Bath House by water, and was closeted for long with the Italian Cardinal. What she told him was under the sacred seal of the confessional, but she prayed that the Pope might in strict secrecy be informed of certain of the particulars arising out of her statements. She reviewed the whole of her life from the day of her arrival in England, and solemnly swore on her conscience that she had only slept with young Arthur seven nights, é che da lui restó intacta é incorrupta;[64] and this assertion, as far as it goes, we may accept as the truth, seeing the solemn circumstances under which it was made. But when Campeggio again urged Katharine to get them all out of their difficulty by retiring to a convent and letting the King have his way, she almost vehemently declared that “she would die as she had lived, a wife, as God had made her.” “Let a sentence be given,” she said, “and if it be against me I shall be free to do as I like, even as my husband will.” “But neither the whole realm, nor, on the other hand, the greatest punishment, even being torn limb from limb, shall alter me in this, and if after death I were to return to life, I would die again, and yet again, rather than I would give way.” Against such firmness as this the poor, flaccid old churchman could do nothing but hold up his hands and sigh at the idea of any one being so obstinate.