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

by Martin A. S. Hume

Early in June Katharine urged strongly that Chapuys should travel to Kimbolton to see her, alleging the bad condition of her health as a reason. The King and Cromwell believed that her true object in desiring an interview was to devise plans with her nephew’s ambassador for obtaining the enforcement of the papal censure,[121] which would have meant the subversion of Henry’s power; and for weeks Chapuys begged for permission to see her in vain. “Ladies were not to be trusted,” Cromwell told him; whilst fresh Commissioners were sent, one after the other, to extort, by force if necessary, the oath of Katharine’s lady attendants to the Act of Succession, much to the Queen’s distress.[122] At length, tired of waiting, the ambassador told Cromwell that he was determined to start at once; which he did two days later, on the 16th July. With a train of sixty horsemen, his own household and Spaniards resident in England, he rode through London towards the eastern counties, ostensibly on a religious pilgrimage to Our Lady of Walsingham. Riding through the leafy lanes of Hertfordshire in the full summer tide, solaced by music, minstrelsy, and the quaint antics of Chapuys’ fool, the party were surprised on the second day of their journey to see gallop past them on the road Stephen Vaughan, one of the King’s officers who spoke Spanish; and later, when they had arrived within a few miles of Kimbolton, they were met by the same man, accompanied this time by a humble servitor of Katharine, bringing to the pilgrims wine and provisions in abundance, but also the ill news that the King had ordered that Chapuys was to be forbidden access to the Queen. The ambassador was exceedingly indignant. He did not wish to offend the King, he said, but, having come so far and being now in the immediate neighbourhood, he would not return unsuccessful without an effort to obtain a more authoritative decision. Early the next morning one of Katharine’s old officers came to Chapuys and repeated the prohibition, begging him not even to pass through the village, lest the King should take it ill. Other messages passed, but all to the same effect. Poor Katharine herself sent secret word that she was as thankful for Chapuys’ journey as if it had been successful, and hinted that it would be a consolation to her if some of her countrymen could at least approach the castle. Needless to say that the Spaniards gathered beneath the walls of the castle and chatted gallantly across the moat to the ladies upon the terraces, and some indeed, including the jester, are asserted to have found their way inside the castle, where they were regaled heartily, and the fool played some of the usual tricks of his motley.[123] Chapuys, in high dudgeon, returned by another road to London without attempting to complete his pilgrimage to Walsingham, secretly spied upon as he was, the whole way, by the King’s envoy, Vaughan. “Tell Cromwell,” he said to the latter, as he discovered himself on the outskirts of London, “that I should have judged it more honourable if the King and he had informed me of his intention before I left London, so that all the world should not have been acquainted with a proceeding which I refrain from characterising. But the Queen,” he continued, “nevertheless had cause to thank him (Cromwell) since the rudeness shown to her would now be so patent that it could not well be denied.”

Henry and Cromwell had good reason to fear foreign machinations to their detriment. The Emperor and Francis were in ominous negotiations; for the King of France could not afford to break with the Papacy, the rising of Kildare in Ireland was known to have the sympathy, if not the aid, of Spain, and it was felt throughout Christendom that the Emperor must, sooner or later, give force to the Papal sentence against England to avoid the utter loss of prestige which would follow if the ban of Rome was after all seen to be utterly innocuous. A sympathetic English lord told Chapuys secretly that Cromwell had ridiculed the idea of the Emperor’s attacking England; for his subjects would not put up with the consequent loss of trade. But if he did, continued Cromwell, “the death of Katharine and Mary would put an end to all the trouble.” Chapuys told his informant, for Cromwell’s behoof, that if any harm was done to either of the ladies the Emperor would have the greater cause for quarrel.

In the autumn Mary fell seriously ill. She had been obliged to follow “the bastard,” Elizabeth, against her will, for ever intriguing cleverly to avoid humiliation to herself. But the long struggle against such odds broke down her health, and Henry, who, in his heart of hearts, could hardly condemn his daughter’s stubbornness, so like his own, softened to the extent of his sending his favourite physician, Dr. Butts, to visit her. A greater concession was to allow Katharine’s two medical men to attend the Princess; and permission was given to Katharine herself to see her, but under conditions which rendered the concession nugatory. The Queen wrote a pathetic letter in Spanish to Cromwell, praying that Mary might be permitted to come and stay with her. “It will half cure her,” she urged. As a small boon, Henry had consented that the sick girl should be sent to a house at no great distance from Kimbolton. “Alas!” urged Katharine, “if it be only a mile away, I cannot visit her. I beseech that she be allowed to come to where I am. I will answer for her security with my life.” But Cromwell or his master was full of suspicion of imperial plots for the escape of Mary to foreign soil, and Katharine’s maternal prayer remained unheard.

The unhappy mother tried again soon afterwards to obtain access to her sick daughter by means of Chapuys. She besought for charity’s sake that the King would allow her to tend Mary with her own hands. “You shall also tell his Highness that there is no need for any other person but myself to nurse her: I will put her in my own bed where I sleep, and will watch her when needful.” When Chapuys saw the King with this pathetic message Henry was less arrogant than usual. “He wished to do his best for his daughter’s health; but he must be careful of his own honour and interests, which would be jeopardised if Mary were conveyed abroad, or if she escaped, as she easily might do if she were with her mother; for he had some suspicion that the Emperor had a design to get her away.” Henry threw all the blame for Mary’s obstinacy upon Katharine, who he knew was in close and constant touch with his opponents: and the fear he expressed that the Emperor and his friends in England would try to spirit Mary across the sea to Flanders, where, indeed, she might have been made a thorn in her father’s side, were perfectly well founded, and these plans were at the time the gravest peril that threatened Henry and England.[124]

Cruel, therefore, as his action towards his daughter may seem, it was really prompted by pressing considerations of his own safety. Apart from this desire to keep Mary away from foreign influence working against him through her mother, Henry exhibited frequent signs of tenderness towards his elder daughter, much to Anne’s dismay. In May 1534, for instance, he sent her a gentle message to the effect that he hoped she would obey him, and that in such case her position would be preserved. But the girl was proud and, not unnaturally, resentful, and sent back a haughty answer to what she thought was an attempt to entrap her. To her foreign friends she said that she believed her father meant to poison her, but that she cared little. She was sure of going to heaven, and was only sorry for her mother.

In the meanwhile Anne’s influence over the King was weakening. She saw the gathering clouds from all parts of Christendom ready to launch their lightning upon her head, and ruin upon England for her sake; and her temper, never good, became intolerable. Henry, having had his way, was now face to face with the threatening consequences, and could ill brook snappish petulance from the woman for whom he had brought himself to brave the world. As usual with weak men, he pitied himself sincerely, and looked around for comfort, finding none from Anne. Francis, eldest son of the Church and most Christian King, was far from being the genial ally he once had been, now that Henry was excommunicate; the German Protestant princes even stood apart and rejected Henry’s approaches for an alliance to the detriment of their own suzerain;[125] and, worst of all, the English lords of the North, Hussey, Dacre, and the rest of them, were in close conspiracy with the imperialists for an armed rising aided from abroad; which, if successful, would make short work of Henry and his anti-Papal policy.[126] In return for all this danger, the King could only look at the cross, discontented woman by his side, who apparently was as incapable of bearing him a son as Katharine had been. For some months in the spring of 1534 Anne had endeavoured to retain her hold upon him by saying that she was again with child, and during the royal progress in the midland counties in the summer Henry was more attentive than he had been to the woman he still hoped might bear him a son, although her shrewish temper sorely tried him and all around her. At length, however, the truth had to be told, and Henry’s hopes fled, and his eyes again turned elsewhere for solace.

Anne knew that her position was unstable, and her husband’s open flirtation with a lady of the Court drove her to fury. Presuming upon her former influence, she imperiously attempted to have her new rival removed from the proximity of the King. Henry flared up at this, and let Anne know, as brutally as language could put it, that the days of his complaisance with her were over, and that he regretted having done so much for her sake. Who the King’s new lady-love was is not certain. Chapuys calls her “a very beautiful and adroit young lady, for whom his love is daily increasing, whilst the credit and insolence of the concubine (i.e. Anne) decreases.” That the new favourite was supported by the aristocratic party that opposed Anne and the religious changes is evident from Chapuys’ remark that “there is some good hope that if this love of the King’s continues the affairs of the Queen (Katharine) and the Princess will prosper, for the young lady is greatly attached to them.” Anne and her family struggled to keep their footing, but when Henry had once plucked up courage to shake off the trammels, he had all a weak man’s violence and obstinacy in following his new course. One of Princess Mary’s household came to tell Chapuys in October that “the King had turned Lady Rochford (Anne’s sister-in-law) out of the Court because she had conspired with the concubine by hook or by crook to get rid of the young lady.” The rise of the new favourite immediately changed the attitude of the courtiers towards Mary. “On Wednesday before leaving the More she (Mary) was visited by all the ladies and gentlemen, regardless of the annoyance of Anne. The day before yesterday (October 22nd) the Princess was at Richmond with the brat (garse, i.e. Elizabeth), and the lady (Anne) came to see her daughter accompanied by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and others, all of whom went and saluted the Princess (Mary) with some of the ladies; which was quite a new thing.”

The death of Pope Clement and the advent of Cardinal Farnese as Paul III., known to be not too well affected towards the Emperor, seemed at this time to offer a chance of the reconciliation of England with the Papacy: and the aristocratic party in Henry’s counsels hoped, now that the King had grown tired of his second wife, that they might influence him by a fresh appeal to his sensuality. France also took a hand in the game in its new aspect, the aim being to obtain the hand of Mary for the Dauphin, to whom, it will be recollected, she had been betrothed as a child, with the legitimisation of the Princess and the return of Henry to the fold of the Church with a French alliance. This would, of course, have involved the repudiation of Anne, with the probable final result of a French domination of England after the King’s death. The Admiral of France, Chabot de Brion, came to England late in the autumn to forward some such arrangement as that described, and incidentally to keep alive Henry’s distrust of the Emperor, whilst threatening him that the Dauphin would marry a Spanish princess if the King of England held aloof. But, though Anne’s influence over her husband was gone, Cromwell, the strong spirit, was still by his side; and reconciliation with the Papacy in any form would have meant ruin to him and the growing interests that he represented.

Even if Henry had now been inclined to yield to the Papacy, of which there is no evidence, Cromwell had gone too far to recede; and when Parliament met in November the Act of Supremacy was passed, giving the force of statute law to the independence of the Church of England. Chabot de Brion’s mission was therefore doomed to failure from the first, and the envoy took no pains to conceal his resentment towards Anne, the origin of all the trouble that dislocated the European balance of power. There was much hollow feasting and insincere professions of friendship between the two kings, but it was clear now to the Frenchmen that, with Anne or without her, Henry would bow his neck no more to the Papacy; and it was to the Princess Mary that the Catholic elements looked for a future restoration of the old state of things. A grand ball was given at Court in Chabot’s honour the day before he left London, and the dignified French envoy sat in a seat of state by the side of Anne, looking at the dancing. Suddenly, without apparent reason, she burst into a violent fit of laughter. The Admiral of France, already in no very amiable mood, frowned angrily, and, turning to her, said, “Are you laughing at me, madam, or what?” After she had laughed to her heart’s content, she excused herself to him by saying that she was laughing because the King had told her that he was going to fetch the Admiral’s secretary to be introduced to her, and on the way the King had met a lady who had made him forget everything else.

Though Henry would not submit to the Papacy at the charming of Francis, he was loath to forego the French alliance, and proposed a marriage between the younger French prince, the Duke of Angoulême, and Elizabeth; and this was under discussion during the early months of 1535. But it is clear that, although the daughter of the second marriage was to be held legitimate, Anne was to gain no accession of strength by the new alliance, for the French flouted her almost openly, and Henry was already contemplating a divorce from her. We are told by Chapuys that he only desisted from the idea when a councillor told him that “if he separated from ‘the concubine’ he would have to recognise the validity of his first marriage, and, worst of all, submit to the Pope.”[127] Who the councillor was that gave this advice is not stated; but we may fairly assume that it was Cromwell, who soon found a shorter, and, for him, a safer way of ridding his master of a wife who had tired him and could bear him no son. A French alliance, with a possible reconciliation with Rome in some form, would not have suited Cromwell; for it would have meant a triumph for the aristocratic party at Henry’s Court, and the overthrow of the men who had led Henry to defy the Papacy.