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

by Martin A. S. Hume

In his distraction Henry was at a loss what to do. He always wanted to appear in the right, and he dared not imprison or openly ill-treat Katharine, for his own people favoured her, and all Europe would have joined in condemning him; yet it was clear that even Windsor Castle was not, in future, big enough for both Queen and favourite at the same time, and positive orders at length were sent to Katharine, in the autumn of 1531, to take up her residence at More in Hertfordshire, in a house formerly belonging to Wolsey.[80] She obeyed with a heavy heart, for it meant parting—and for ever—with her daughter, who was sent to live at Richmond, and was strictly forbidden to communicate with her mother. Katharine said she would have preferred to have been sent to the Tower, to being consigned to a place so unfit for her as More, with its foul ways and ruinous surroundings, but nothing broke her spirit or humbled her pride. Her household was still regal in its extent, for we are told by an Italian visitor to her that “thirty maids of honour stood around her table when she dined, and there were fifty who performed its service: her household consisting of about two hundred persons in all.” But her state was a mockery now; for Lady Anne, she knew, was with her husband, loudly boasting that within three or four months she would be a queen, and already playing the part insolently. The Privy Purse expenses of the period show how openly Anne was acknowledged as being Henry’s actual consort. Not only did she accompany the King everywhere on his excursions and progresses, and partake of the receptions offered to him by local authorities and nobles,[81] but large sums of money were paid out of the King’s treasury for the gorgeous garb in which she loved to appear. Purple velvet at half a guinea a yard, costly furs and linen, bows and arrows, liveries for her servants, and all sorts of fine gear were bought for Anne. The Lord Mayor of London, in June 1530, sent her a present of cherries, and the bearer got a reward of 6s. 8d. Soon after Anne’s greyhounds killed a cow, and the Privy Purse had to pay the damage, 10s. In November, 19¾ yards of crimson satin at 15s. a yard had to be paid for to make Lady Anne a robe, and £8, 8s. for budge skins was paid soon afterwards. When Christmas came and card-playing was in season, my Lady Anne must have playing money, £20 all in groats; and when she lost, as she did pretty heavily, her losings had to be paid by the treasurer, though her winnings she kept for herself. No less than a hundred pounds was given to her as a New Year’s gift in 1531. A few weeks afterwards, a farm at Greenwich was bought for her for £66; and her writing-desk had to be adorned with latten and gold at a great cost. As the year 1531 advanced and Katharine’s cause became more desperate, the extravagance of her rival grew; and when in the autumn of that year the Queen was finally banished from Court, Anne’s bills for dressmaker’s finery amounted to extravagant proportions.

The position was rendered the more bitter for Katharine when she recognised that the Pope, in a fright now at Henry’s defiance, was trying to meet him half way, and was listening to the suggestion of referring the question to a tribunal at Cambray or elsewhere; whilst the Emperor himself was only anxious to get the cause settled somehow without an open affront to his house or necessary cause for quarrel with Henry.[82] And yet, withal, the divorce did not seem to make headway in England itself. As we have seen, the common people were strongly against it: the clergy, trembling, as well they might, for their privileges between the Pope and the King, were naturally as a body in favour of the ecclesiastical view; and many of Henry and Anne’s clerical instruments, such as Dr. Bennet in Rome and Dr. Sampson at Vienna, were secretly working against the cause they were supposed to be aiding: even some of the new prelates, such as Gardiner of Winchester and Stokesley of London, grew less active advocates when they understood that upon them and their order would fall ultimately the responsibility of declaring invalid a marriage which the Church and the Pope had sanctioned. Much stronger still even was the dislike to the King’s marriage on the part of the older nobility, whose enmity to Wolsey had first made the marriage appear practicable. They had sided with Anne to overthrow Wolsey; but the obstinate determination of the King to rid himself of his wife and marry his favourite, had brought forward new clerical and bureaucratic ministers whose proceedings and advice alarmed the aristocracy much more than anything Wolsey had done. If Katharine had been tactful, or even an able politician, she had the materials at hand to form a combination in favour of herself and her daughter, before which Henry, coward as he was, would have quailed. But she lacked the qualities necessary for a leader: she irritated the King without frightening him, and instead of conciliating the nobles who really sympathised with her, though they were forced to do the King’s bidding, she snubbed them haughtily and drove them from her.

Anne flattered and pleased the King, but it was hardly her mind that moved him to defy the powerful Papacy, or sustained him in his fight with his own clergy. From the first we have seen him leaning upon some adviser who would relieve him from responsibility whilst giving him all the honour for success. He desired the divorce above all things; but, as usual, he wanted to shelter himself behind other authority than his own. When in 1529 he had been seeking learned opinions to influence the Pope, chance had thrown the two ecclesiastics who were his instruments, Fox and Gardiner, into contact with a learned theologian and Reader in Divinity at Cambridge University. Thomas Cranmer had studied and lived much. He was a widower, and Fellow of Magdalene, Cambridge, of forty years of age; and although in orders and a Doctor of Divinity, his tastes were rather those of a learned country gentleman than of an ecclesiastic in monkish times. In conversation with Fox and Gardiner, this high authority on theology expressed the opinion that instead of enduring the delays of the ecclesiastical courts, the question of the legality of the King’s marriage should be decided by divines from the words of the Scriptures themselves. The idea seemed a good one, and Henry jumped at it. In an interview soon afterwards he ordered Cranmer to put his arguments into a book, and placed him in the household of Anne’s father, the Earl of Wiltshire, to facilitate the writing of it. The religious movement in Germany had found many echoes in England, and doubtless Cranmer conscientiously objected to Papal control. Certain it is that, fortified as he was by the encouragement of Anne and her father, his book was a persuasive one, and greatly pleased the King, who sent it to the Pope and others. Nor did Cranmer’s activity stay there. He entered into disputation everywhere, with the object of gaining theological recruits for the King’s side, and wrote a powerful refutation of Reginald Pole’s book in favour of Katharine. The King thought so highly of Cranmer’s controversial ability that he sent him with Lee, Stokesley, and other theologians to Rome, Paris, and elsewhere on the Continent, to forward the divorce, and from Rome he was commissioned as English Ambassador with the Emperor.

Whilst Cranmer was thus fighting the King’s battle abroad, another instrument came to Henry’s hand for use in England. On the disgrace of Wolsey, his secretary, Thomas Cromwell, was recommended to Henry by friends. The King disliked him, and at first refused to see him; but consented to do so when it was hinted that Cromwell was the sort of man who would serve him well in what he had at heart. The hint was a well-founded one; for Thomas Cromwell was as ambitious and unscrupulous as his master had been; strong, bold, and fortunately unhampered by ecclesiastical orders. When Henry received him in the gardens at Whitehall, Cromwell spoke as no priest, and few laymen, would have dared to do: for, apart from the divorce question, there was to be no dallying with heresy if Henry could help it, and the fires of Smithfield burning doubters were already beginning to blaze under the influence of Sir Thomas More. “Sire,” said Cromwell to the King, “the Pope refuses you a divorce ... why wait for his consent? Every Englishman is master in his own house, and why should not you be so in England? Ought a foreign prelate to share your power with you? It is true the bishops make oath to your Majesty; but they make another to the Pope immediately afterwards which absolves them from it. Sire, you are but half a king, and we are but half your subjects. Your kingdom is a two-headed monster: will you bear such an anomaly any longer? Frederick and other German princes have cast off the yoke of Rome. Do likewise; become once more king, govern your kingdom in concert with your lords and commons.”[83]

With much more of such talk Cromwell flattered the King, who probably hardly knew whether to punish or reward such unheard-of boldness; but when Cromwell, prepared for the emergency, took from his pocket a copy of the prelates’ oath to the Pope, Henry’s indignation bore all before it, and Cromwell’s fortune was made. He at once obtained a seat in Parliament (1529), and took the lead in the anti-clerical measures which culminated in the emancipation of the English clergy from the Papacy, and their submission to the King. Gardiner, ambitious and able as he was, was yet an ecclesiastic, and looked grimly upon such a religious policy as that into which Henry was being towed by his infatuation for Anne; but Cromwell was always ready with authorities and flattery to stiffen the King’s resolve, and thenceforward, until his fall before a combination of nobles, his was the strong spirit to which Henry clung.

It will be seen that the influences against the King’s marriage with Anne were very powerful, since it had become evident that the object could only be attained by the separation of England from the Papal communion; a step too bold and too much smacking of Lutheranism to commend itself to any but the few who might benefit by the change. The greatest danger seemed that by her isolation England might enable the two great Catholic powers to combine against her, in which case Henry’s ruin was certain; and, eager as he was to divorce Katharine in England and marry Anne, the King dared not do so until he had secured at least the neutrality of France. As usual, he had to pay heavily for it. Dr. Fox, Henry’s most able and zealous foreign minister, was again sent to France, and an alliance was negotiated in the spring of 1532, by which Henry bound himself to join Francis against the Emperor in case of attack, and Francis undertook to support Henry if any attempt was made by Charles to avenge his aunt. Anne was once more jubilant and hopeful; for her cause was now linked with a national alliance which had a certain party of adherents in the English Court, and an imperial attack upon England in the interests of Katharine was rendered unlikely. But, withal, the opposition in England itself had to be overcome, for Henry was ever a stickler for correctness in form, and wanted the divorce to have an appearance of defensible legality. The bishops in Parliament were sounded, but it was soon evident that they as a body would not fly in the face of the Papacy and the Catholic interests, even to please the King. Timid, tired old Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was approached with a suggestion that he, as Primate, might convene a quorum of prelates favourable to Henry, who would approve of the entire repudiation of the Papal authority in England, and themselves pronounce the King’s divorce. But Warham was already hastening to the grave, and flatly refused to stain his last hours by spiritual revolt. Despairing of the English churchman, Henry then turned to the lay peers and commons, and, through Norfolk, asked them to decide that the matrimonial cause was one that should be dealt with by a lay tribunal; but Norfolk’s advocacy was but half-hearted, and the peers refused to make the declaration demanded.[84]

The fact is clear that England was not yet prepared to defy spiritual authority to satisfy the King’s caprice; and Anne was nearly beside herself with rage. She, indeed, was for braving everybody and getting married at once, divorce or no divorce. Why lose so much time? the French ambassador asked. If the King wanted to marry again let him do as King Louis did, and marry of his own motion.[85] The advice pleased both Henry and his lady-love, but Norfolk and Anne’s father were strongly opposed to so dangerous and irregular a step, and incurred the furious displeasure of Anne for daring to thwart her. Every one, she said, even her own kinsmen, were against her,[86] and she was not far wrong, for with the exception of Cranmer in Germany and Cromwell, no one cared to risk the popular anger by promoting the match. Above all, Warham stood firm. The continued attacks of the King at Cromwell’s suggestion against the privileges of the clergy hardened the old Archbishop’s heart, and it was evident that he as Primate would never now annul the King’s marriage and defy the authority of Rome. The opposition of Lord Chancellor More and of the new Bishop of Winchester, Gardiner, to Cromwell’s anti-clerical proposals in Parliament angered the King, and convinced him that with his present instruments it would be as difficult for him to obtain a divorce in legal form in England as in Rome itself. More was made to feel that his position was an impossible one, and retired when Parliament was prorogued in May; and Gardiner had a convenient attack of gout, which kept him away from Court until the King found he could not conduct foreign affairs without him and brought him back.

In the meanwhile Katharine neglected the opportunities offered to her of combining all these powerful elements in her favour. Nobles, clergy, and people were almost universally on her side: Anne was cordially hated, and had no friends but the few religious reformers who hoped by her means to force the King ever further away from the Papacy; and yet the Queen continued to appeal to Rome and the Emperor, against whom English patriotic feeling might be raised by Anne’s few friends. The unwisdom of thus linking Katharine’s cause with threats of foreign aggression, whilst England itself was favourable to her, was seen when the Nuncio presented to Henry a half-hearted exhortation to take his lawful wife back. Henry fulminated against the foreigner who dared to interfere between him and his wife; and, very far from alarming him, the Pope’s timid action only proved the impotence of Rome to harm him. But the results fell upon the misguided Katharine, who had instigated the step. She was sent from the More to Ampthill, a house belonging to one of her few episcopal enemies.

All through the summer of 1532 the coming and going of French agents to England puzzled the Queen and her foreign friends; but suddenly, late in July, the truth came out. Henry and Anne had gone with a great train on a hunting tour through the midlands in July; but only a few days after starting they suddenly returned to London. The quidnuncs whispered that the people on the way had clamoured so loudly that the Queen might be recalled to Court, and had so grossly insulted Anne, that the royal party had been driven back in disgust; and though there was no doubt some ground for the assertion, the real reason for the return was that the interview between Henry and the French king, so long secretly in negotiation, had at last been settled. To enlist Francis personally on the side of the divorce, and against the clerical influence, was good policy; for the Emperor could not afford to quarrel both with France and England for his aunt, and especially as the meeting arranged between Francis and the Pope at Nice for the betrothal of the Duke of Orleans with Katharine de Medici was already in contemplation, and threatened the Emperor with a combination of France, England, and perhaps the Papacy, which would be powerful enough to defy him. The policy was Cromwell’s, who had inherited from his master, Wolsey, a leaning for the French alliance; but Norfolk and the rest of Henry’s advisers were heavily bribed by France, and were on this occasion not inimical. The people at large, as usual, looked askance at the French connection. They dreaded, above all things, a war with Spain and Flanders, and recollected with apprehension the fruitless and foolish waste in splendour on the last occasion of the monarchs of France and England meeting. An attempt was made to provide that the preparations should be less costly and elaborate than those for the Field of the Cloth of Gold, but Henry could not forego the splendour that he loved, and a suite of 3000 or 4000 people were warned to accompany the King across the Channel to Boulogne and Calais.