Authors: Linda Porter
Mary Tudor (14 page)
Following her rebuff to Campeggio, Katherine believed that, if she was not winning, she was not, at least, losing. But it was a strange existence that she led over the next two years. She and Mary were normally with Henry for the religious festivals and great days of state. They all spent Christmas 1528 together at Greenwich, in a show of family unity that was entirely false. On the second day of January 1529 they both attended a reception for the new Venetian ambassador, and it was noted that the queen was accompanied by ‘her handsome and virtuously-educated daughter’. Was this meant to imply that Mary was already publicly committed to her mother, or was it merely the result of court etiquette? The report back to the Signory in Venice left out a detail that the Doge and his council might have found more titillating. Also at Greenwich that Christmas, though in a separate establishment, was Anne Boleyn. She had survived a serious bout of the sweating sickness in the summer and was now fully restored to health. Anne kept well away from the queen and the princess but her presence was widely known. Katherine ignored it. There is no evidence that she made an issue of Anne personally when she was with Henry. It is possible that Mary was still in the dark about what was happening. So Anne Boleyn in many ways held the advantage over the two women who stood in her way. She had the king’s love, her influence was growing and she was not going to disappear. Katherine was clinging to an illusion, but Anne’s power was in the ascendancy. She had no qualms about using it to defeat the queen and to deny the young princess her birthright.
The objective was clear, but the means to achieving it less so, and the time it took galling. Anne was well aware that the woman she meant to supplant had a flair for the public occasion and a lingering hold on the king himself. There was the unavoidable fact that Anne might spend a great deal of time at Henry’s side, while her family received favours and political advancement, but still Katherine was queen and recognised as such by the king himself.The king did not like confrontation, least of all with women, and he avoided it whenever possible. Yet it was Henry, encouraged by Anne’s steadfastness, who wanted a resolution of his case by Cardinals Campeggio and Wolsey. On 30 May 1529 he gave them authority to proceed with the trial. This provided Katherine with the opportunity to plead her own cause in person. Determined not to go quietly, she would have her day in court.
The cardinals required the king and queen to attend a hearing scheduled for 18 June, in the Parliament Chamber of the Dominican Friary of London, familiarly known as Blackfriars. Two days earlier, Katherine made her formal appeal for the case to be heard in Rome. She would appear before the legatine court having, in effect, already rejected its authority. But she wanted to be seen and, angry though she knew Henry would be, she wanted to make a direct appeal to him. For Katherine, this was not about Anne Boleyn, waiting to occupy her place in the royal bed. It was about her own conscience and the utter conviction that her time spent as England’s queen was not built on a lie, but was sacred in the eyes of God.
The trial of a royal marriage, dramatised to great effect in Shakespeare’s last play,
King Henry VIII
, was unprecedented in English history. Everyone was seized by the momentous nature of events when the queen and her supporters made their entry on 18 June, and Katherine having read aloud her challenge to the competence of the cardinals to hear her case and confirmed her appeal to Rome, was told that the court would answer her on 21 June, when the king himself would also appear. There, before an audience that included ordinary Londoners, many of whom were women who were open and vocal in support of the queen, Henry and Katherine faced each other on a public stage. This was Katherine’s moment, and she still cut a regal figure, despite her girth. She denounced Wolsey and Campeggio as interested parties not competent to hear the case. Wolsey was one of her husband’s ministers and had directly benefited from office. Campeggio also held an English bishopric. How could she expect to receive justice from them? When the king spoke he told the judges he could no longer live in mortal sin, but Katherine’s response was bitter and sceptical. Why, she challenged, had Henry been silent so long, if, as he claimed, it was his conscience which pricked him? How could she, a foreigner, expect justice in England?
King Henry VIII
, was unprecedented in English history. Everyone was seized by the momentous nature of events when the queen and her supporters made their entry on 18 June, and Katherine having read aloud her challenge to the competence of the cardinals to hear her case and confirmed her appeal to Rome, was told that the court would answer her on 21 June, when the king himself would also appear. There, before an audience that included ordinary Londoners, many of whom were women who were open and vocal in support of the queen, Henry and Katherine faced each other on a public stage. This was Katherine’s moment, and she still cut a regal figure, despite her girth. She denounced Wolsey and Campeggio as interested parties not competent to hear the case. Wolsey was one of her husband’s ministers and had directly benefited from office. Campeggio also held an English bishopric. How could she expect to receive justice from them? When the king spoke he told the judges he could no longer live in mortal sin, but Katherine’s response was bitter and sceptical. Why, she challenged, had Henry been silent so long, if, as he claimed, it was his conscience which pricked him? How could she, a foreigner, expect justice in England?
The king’s attempts to parry this opening salvo with the feeble assurance ‘of the great love he had and has for her’, and his earnest desire that the marriage should be declared valid, were a tactical mistake. If that was what he was going to maintain, then she would take the argument literally to him. Crossing the crowded courtroom, with its floor packed with lawyers and its gallery filled with the common people, Katherine made her way directly to where Henry sat: ‘The queen rose and throwing herself on her knees before the king, said aloud that she had lived for twenty years with his majesty as his lawful wife … and that she did not deserve to be repudiated and thus put to shame without any cause.’And though Mary was not there, she was not forgotten. In her broken English, which only added to her air of vulnerability, the queen reminded the king that he knew she had been a virgin when she married him. So she pleaded with him ‘to consider her honour, her daughter’s and his; that he should not be displeased at her defending it, and should consider the reputation of her nation and relatives, who will be seriously offended’.
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Mary did not hear her mother’s passionate plea nor see her father give way under this emotional onslaught and apparently concur that the case should be decided in Rome.Yet it is evident from her subsequent behaviour that the aftermath of the Blackfriars trial had a profound impact on her. Her own future was now in the public domain. It could not be evaded. And her mother, increasingly isolated, had scored a historic victory. Katherine, having gained the initiative, did not wait to hear the court’s reaction. She swept out, past the cheering women, ignoring the king’s attempts to have her called back. On 23 July, Campeggio adjourned the legatine court, pronouncing that the case could be resolved only in Rome. There would be no easy solution to her husband’s quest and she and Mary were safe for the time being. Her daughter could continue with her preparation to be England’s queen. But there was still Anne Boleyn.
She may have been constrained by social conventions and frustrated by the lack of progress but Anne never gave up in her determination to be queen of England. Little is known of her actual relationship with Katherine of Aragon, but Anne evidently underestimated the queen’s character and intellect. Like many women in her situation, hearing the complaints of a besotted lover about the inadequacies of his wife, the dire state of his marriage and his undying love for her, Anne probably did not want to think much about Katherine at all.The queen’s day was over and replacing her must have seemed a straightforward step, since she and Henry were never legally married. Anne would be his first true wife. This simple scenario was very appealing to a young woman who stood on the brink of a magnificent transformation of her life. It says much for Anne Boleyn’s self-belief that when the vision dissolved, she did not accept defeat. But her dismissal of Katherine as a rival, perfectly comprehensible on an emotional level, was unrealistic. She ignored the bonds that had grown up between Henry and his wife, as well as being far too dismissive of the kind of person that Katherine really was. Anne had been part of the queen’s entourage for some years but clearly did not understand her. It is almost as if all she saw was the dumpy, rather melancholy woman who prayed a great deal and amused herself by sewing her husband’s shirts. She overlooked Katherine’s regal bearing at state occasions, her knowledge of politics and international diplomacy; indeed, she does not seem to have taken any account of the queen’s European status and influence at all. Katherine was trained to be a queen whereas Anne Boleyn, for all her undoubted intelligence, was trained to be a courtier. If the distinction was lost on Anne, it was not for one moment lost on Katherine of Aragon.
Anne’s early belief that she would be queen in a matter of months shows that she did not consider how, or even whether, Katherine would fight. The queen and her daughter were an irrelevance and their fate, which would be decided by the king, did not directly concern her.The combination of Henry’s love and her ambition was a heady one, and Anne already knew too much about court politics to waste any time on remorse. The fact that her elevation would bring untold distress to a blameless woman and a young girl brought up as the heir of England never seems to have troubled her at all. Neither did the realisation that she would certainly make enemies of some of the most powerful men in England. Instead, she began to work on the advancement of her own family, particularly her father, Thomas, and brother, George. She could not succeed with the king’s love alone, though the absolute certainty of his commitment to her gave her the confidence to carry on. When Henry faltered, she remained firm. And she believed she knew who stood in her way.
After the disaster at Blackfriars, Anne, who had been close by throughout proceedings, though not overtly living with the king, sat down with him to discuss the next steps. Clearly, the approach that Henry’s ministers had been following was not working and a new one was needed.The most convenient explanation for what had gone wrong was not Katherine’s intransigence, or the strength of her legal arguments, but the failure of Cardinal Wolsey, as Henry’s chief minister, to bring about the desired ruling from the pope. Henry was increasingly troubled by being dependent on papal authority for the ordering of his own affairs, and Anne was convinced that Wolsey no longer supported her, if he ever had. So the cardinal became the first major victim of the divorce. During 1529, his position became more and more untenable. Katherine considered him a long-standing enemy who sought to ruin her because he was pro-French. Anne, who for a while saw him as the person most likely to deliver Henry’s annulment, lost faith in him and believed, with some justification, that he had become an obstruction. He was damaging her chances of ever becoming queen.
Wolsey fought a rearguard action that delayed, but could not prevent, his fall.The king was at first as reluctant to dismiss him as he was to take any irrevocable steps in the domestic sphere against Katherine. Wolsey was accused of having overstepped his legatine authority and deprived of the chancellorship on 17 October 1529. The French and imperial ambassadors concurred in thinking this was the work of Anne Boleyn, and Wolsey himself had no doubts; he knew he had mightily displeased the Lady Anne, but still he hoped some means might be found to regain her good opinion: ‘This’, he wrote, ‘is the only help and remedy. All possible means must be used for attaining of her favour.’
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Wolsey was clutching at straws. He had been so long in power that he could not recognise at first that he had lost it irretrievably.There were others, who had waited long in his shadow, only too pleased that he was gone. Power on the new privy council passed to the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, neither of whom had Wolsey’s political experience, and the Boleyns’ star continued to rise. In December, Anne’s father was created earl of Wiltshire and her younger brother, George, sent as ambassador to France.The French ambassador to Henry’s court, the astute prelate Jean du Bellay, thought George Boleyn’s youth would give rise to some amusement in France. But in England no one was laughing at Anne Boleyn when she celebrated her father’s elevation at a feast attended by the leading nobles of the realm. Their wives, including Henry’s own sister Mary, were required to give precedence to Anne. She is unlikely to have displayed much humility in accepting their curtsies, but she must have felt their contempt. It was one thing to sit by Henry’s side at a banquet and another to become queen.The process by which she would achieve this ultimate goal was still far from clear.
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Wolsey was clutching at straws. He had been so long in power that he could not recognise at first that he had lost it irretrievably.There were others, who had waited long in his shadow, only too pleased that he was gone. Power on the new privy council passed to the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, neither of whom had Wolsey’s political experience, and the Boleyns’ star continued to rise. In December, Anne’s father was created earl of Wiltshire and her younger brother, George, sent as ambassador to France.The French ambassador to Henry’s court, the astute prelate Jean du Bellay, thought George Boleyn’s youth would give rise to some amusement in France. But in England no one was laughing at Anne Boleyn when she celebrated her father’s elevation at a feast attended by the leading nobles of the realm. Their wives, including Henry’s own sister Mary, were required to give precedence to Anne. She is unlikely to have displayed much humility in accepting their curtsies, but she must have felt their contempt. It was one thing to sit by Henry’s side at a banquet and another to become queen.The process by which she would achieve this ultimate goal was still far from clear.
And Wolsey might be deprived of much of his wealth, of his London palace and his role in government, sent off back to his archbishopric of York, but he would not lie down. Now he harboured a grudge against Anne as deep as her own against him. In the last year of his life he reversed his support for the king’s divorce, espoused the queen’s cause and kept open his channels of communication with the French government and the imperial ambassador.Whether this amounted to treason is not clear but his enemies certainly thought so, and Anne wanted him dead. She got her way, though Wolsey was spared the judicial proceedings and the public executions of other key figures who stood out against the king. On his journey south to face the charges against him he was taken ill at Leicester and died there in November 1530. Henry’s many other victims would have welcomed such a natural end.
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