Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (17 page)

The next chapter will concentrate on the reasons for the king’s desire and the implications of the pope’s denial. In the meantime, Henry and Wolsey’s continental adventures had produced four results, none of which was particularly fortunate for England. First, they had drained the English treasury. Second, they had increased parliamentary and popular resentment of high taxes and the Great Cardinal who had levied them. Third, they had discredited Wolsey with the king. Finally and above all, they had proved that England was, in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, a second-rate power. The issues of royal finance, the role of Parliament, the power of royal favorites, and England’s role in Europe would persist to the end of the period covered by this book. More immediately, their current disposition would affect profoundly the central problem of Henry VIII’s reign, a problem which contemporaries called, euphemistically, the King’s Great Matter.

CHAPTER TWO

(Dis-)Establishing the Henrician Church, 1525–1536

Sometime in the mid-1520s King Henry VIII began to sour on his marriage. Within a decade, those feelings would lead him not only to a new wife, but to sever his realm and people from their allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church. The break with Rome would, in turn, lead to a reformation in religion and a revolution in the relationship of those people to the Tudor state. No wonder that “the King’s Great Matter” has often been portrayed as one of those moments in history when a major turning point, affecting the lives of millions of people, hinged on the obsessions of a single man. But, in fact, it was all far more complicated than that.

The King’s Great Matter

The problem which Henry wanted to solve was, on one level, simple, personal, and, up to a point, private. It was not, primarily, that he was attracted to another woman or that he was frustrated sexually. From the earliest days of his marriage he had been able to pursue such attractions and fulfill such cravings without much interference from his wife. Perhaps for this reason, Henry and Catherine seemed to have a happy marriage: he liked to style himself her champion and she was loyal and popular, earning praise for her government of the realm when he left it on the French campaign of 1513. Rather, his dissatisfaction centered around her tragic obstetrical history, specifically her failure to give birth to a male heir. In 1516, after seven years of marriage, Queen Catherine gave birth to a daughter, Mary, the union’s only living offspring. The ensuing years saw a succession of miscarriages and stillbirths, including three males. By 1525, Catherine was 40 years old and had not been pregnant for seven years. Early modern women tended to experience menopause earlier than women do today, so it was unlikely that she would ever conceive again. Barring her death and his remarriage, it became increasingly clear that the eminently macho King Hal would have no son.

In other words, he would be succeeded at his death by Princess Mary, a woman. Knowing, as we do today, the achievements of the women who later sat on the English throne, it is difficult to understand Henry’s anxiety, which soon reached a point of obsession. But from the point of view of the early sixteenth century – a view based on the Great Chain of Being and England’s previous history – the notion of a female sovereign was nearly unthinkable. First, it violated the fundamental tenets of the Chain: if God was male and the king his representative on earth, how could a woman represent Him or wield His power? If God had placed man at the head of the state, the Church, and the family, how could “degree, priority, and place” – that is, order itself – survive if that position was yielded to a woman?

More to the immediate point, the one precedent for female rule, the brief “reign” of Matilda (lived 1102–67) in 1141, was universally agreed to have been an unhappy one.
¹
This patriarchal interpretation of English history became all the more urgent given England’s recent (pre-1485) history of civil war. Reared on the memory of the Wars of the Roses, Henry VIII and his subjects had been taught to believe that without a strong (read adult male) presence on the throne of England, those wars could break out again, not least because a number of Yorkist claimants still lived.
²
Henry’s fears go far to explain the execution of peers with royal blood like Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk (b. 1472?) in 1513, Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham in 1521, and other claimants thereafter. They also explain why, in 1525, he named his illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy (1519–36),
³
duke of Richmond and heaped offices upon him. Henry may have considered declaring Richmond his heir. But if Henry’s subjects might quibble over Mary’s gender, they could just as easily come to blows over Richmond’s dubious legitimacy. Henry’s succession problem remained unsolved.

The fate of Henry’s kingdom was not the only consideration weighing on his mind. There was that of his immortal soul as well. It will be recalled that Queen Catherine had been previously married to Henry’s brother, Arthur. That marriage ended soon after it had begun when Arthur died in 1502. Henry, something of an amateur theologian, knew well those passages in the Bible, Leviticus 18:16 and 20:21, which forbid a man to marry or have physical relations with his brother’s wife. On the other hand, he also knew of Deuteronomy 25:5, which urges marriage in the case of the first husband’s/brother’s death. Because of this seeming contradiction, it had been necessary to secure a dispensation from Pope Julius II (1443–1513; reigned 1503–13) in 1504 in order to allow Henry and Catherine to marry in 1509. By the mid-1520s, Henry VIII was beginning to doubt the dispensation’s efficacy and, thus, his marriage’s validity. After all, if he and Catherine were God’s chosen, if their marriage was consistent with the divine will, why had the Supreme Being not blessed it with male children? Were not Catherine’s miscarriages and stillbirths a sign of heavenly displeasure? Indeed, contemporary theology would have bolstered Henry’s doubts, for any kind of obstetrical accident or malformation at birth tended to be interpreted as a sign of God’s punishment.

Only when we grasp the fact that Henry had weightier things on his mind than the demands of the royal libido can we understand the role of Anne Boleyn (ca. 1500–36) in the break with Rome: she was the catalyst, not the cause. In 1525 Anne was the 20-something daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn (1476/ 7–1539), a diplomat and courtier. She had accompanied her father on an embassy to France and had picked up valuable “polish” at the French court as a lady-inwaiting to the queen. While Anne was not considered among the most beautiful women of the court, she did have pretty dark eyes and a mind which was bright, vivacious, and highly cultured. She was especially interested in the new ideas of religious reform wafting in from Europe. These qualities stood in sharp contrast to the sober-sided Catholic respectability of the middle-aged Catherine. The king had first encountered Anne while carrying on an affair with her elder sister, Mary (ca. 1499–1543) but by 1526 he had transferred his affections to the younger woman.

Popular tradition has it that Anne’s ambition to be queen planted the seeds of Henry’s divorce. According to this view, the king was only interested in a love affair. It was Anne who made it clear that she would only sleep with him if she were made his queen. This is a seductive image: the middle-aged and slightly paunchy monarch begging this slip of a girl for a tumble, she imperiously refusing him, the gleam of a crown in her eye. The trouble with this image is that it ignores Henry’s other problems. Regardless of his feelings for Anne or her ambitions, these were, by 1527 at least, already moving the king toward his drastic solution. What he needed was not a mistress but a new queen, a legal consort, young enough and strong enough to bear him a legitimate male heir. Thus, irrespective of Henry’s or Anne’s amorous inclinations, to achieve his goal, he needed a divorce.
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To achieve the divorce, Henry turned, as usual, to the Great Cardinal. Wolsey was supposed to be the king’s faithful servant and a big man with Rome. Moreover, his recent failure to secure funding (the Amicable Grant) for another French campaign had left the cardinal in desperate need of a major success on the king’s behalf. This should have concentrated his mind wonderfully on the King’s Great Matter. In fact, the divorce negotiations would prove that neither Wolsey nor England itself had much pull with Rome or the great continental powers. As a result, the divorce would be his downfall.

But nobody knew this in 1527. On the surface, the King’s Great Matter seemed eminently solvable. Contrary to popular belief, the Roman Catholic Church was perfectly willing to annul an inconvenient marriage if the participants were sufficiently important and the diplomatic situation sufficiently pressing. In 1514, after Henry VIII became disillusioned with his Imperial alliance, the pope annulled the prior betrothal of his sister, Mary, to the future Charles V in order to enable her to marry Louis XII of France. After Louis died in 1515, Mary wed Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk (ca. 1484–1545), who required the annulment of
two
previous marriages in order to be eligible to contract this one.
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And finally, in 1527, the pope had granted the divorce of Henry’s other sister, Margaret, queen dowager of Scotland, from Archibald Douglas, earl of Angus (ca. 1489–1557), which enabled her to marry Henry Stewart, later Lord Methven (ca. 1495–1553/4). Both of the last two cases had involved the agreement of the very pope from whom Henry wanted his annulment, Clement VII (1478–1534; reigned 1523–34). So, Henry and Wolsey had every reason to think that dynastic and diplomatic necessity would prevail once more when, in May 1527, the Great Cardinal, acting as papal representative, convened a secret court in London for the purpose of invalidating the king’s marriage.

At this point, however, two problems arose, one theological, one diplomatic. The theological problem concerned the king’s argument for annulment. The simple course would have been to allege that something had gone wrong with the pope’s initial dispensation of 1504. Instead, Henry insisted that the pope had no
right
to dispense him or his wife from the injunctions in Leviticus 18:16 and 20:21. It was one thing for Clement VII to agree that a marriage was invalid because canon law or the proper Church procedures had not been applied correctly by a previous pope. It was quite another – and much more damaging to his authority – to agree that tha papacy had no
power
to do what it had done. What sitting pope would agree to that?

The diplomatic impediment to the divorce arose out of the long-term struggle between France and the Holy Roman Empire over Italy. At the end of May 1527, the Imperial army sacked Rome and, in June, took the pope prisoner. It will be remembered that the emperor was Charles V, the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella and, therefore, the nephew of Catherine of Aragon. Now that Pope Clement was Charles’s “guest,” he was even less likely to grant a request that was so insulting to his host’s aunt, even if that request came from the king of England. After all, Charles V was not only the pope’s jailer; he was far more powerful and important in European affairs than Henry.

The tide seemed to turn in 1528. The French went on the offensive, and this appeared to lessen the pressure on the pope. He made a show of cooperating with Henry by granting Wolsey the right to hear the case for divorce and pronounce judgment. But the cardinal was to share these tasks with a hand-picked papal representative sent from Rome, Lorenzo, Cardinal Campeggio (1471/2–1539). In fact, Campeggio had been given secret orders to delay the trial and prevent it from coming to a verdict. In reality, the pope wanted to wash his hands of the whole embarrassing affair, privately advising Henry to divorce Catherine without permission. Henry, convinced of the justice of his cause, obsessed with the proper forms and the state of his soul, refused.

Campeggio did his part by delaying the trial until May 1529. This gave Catherine and her advisers time to prepare a case. To the delight of a cheering crowd outside Blackfriars Hall, the queen appeared at the trial and, in her finest hour, demanded to be heard. First, she questioned the right of the court to examine her marriage. She was a royal person and so, she argued, above the law. (That is, if the law is the king’s, how could the law judge a royal person?) Then she denied that she and Arthur had ever had sexual relations. Thus, her first marriage had never been consummated.
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In canon law, this rendered her marriage to
Arthur
invalid, leaving her perfectly free to wed Henry. Finally, she demanded the right to appeal her case directly to Rome. These arguments seem to have caught Henry and Wolsey off guard. Worse, in July Campeggio argued that the court had to follow the calendar of the papal court and so adjourn for the hot Italian summer – despite the fact that it was meeting on the banks of the Thames! In fact, it would never meet again. That summer, Charles V went back on the offensive in northern Italy. This, combined with Catherine’s arguments, gave the pope sufficient reason to recall the case to Rome where, Henry was sure, no divorce would ever be granted.

Frustrated, Henry turned on Wolsey. He began by charging the cardinal with violating the Statute of Praemunire, the old medieval law that forbade acknowledging another loyalty beyond that of the king (in this case, the pope; see Introduction). Then he stripped the cardinal of his civil offices and property. Wolsey, lucky not to face execution, resolved to take up his rarely visited see (archbishopric) of York. But he moved slowly away from the seat of power, hoping that the king would forgive him. Nor could he resist negotiating with agents of France, Spain, the papacy, even the queen in an attempt to engineer his return. His many enemies at court accused him of plotting against the king, who indicted him for treason. In November 1530, while on his way back to London for trial, he fell ill and died at Leicester Abbey. While lying on his deathbed, he is supposed to have lamented: “If I had served God as diligently as I have done the King, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs.”
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