Henry VIII (39 page)

36

“Back to Your Wife!”

The Great Matter polarised opinion among the elite and led to a vicious struggle for power. By 1528, three distinct factions were emerging at court, in the Privy Chamber and in the Privy Council: those who were adherents of Wolsey and supported the King, notably Sir John Russell; the aristocratic conservatives, among them Exeter, the Staffords, the Nevilles, the Poles, and the Duchess of Norfolk, who discreetly supported the Queen, but also wanted Wolsey out of power; and the Boleyn faction, which would soon be the most powerful and was led by Anne herself, Rochford, George Boleyn, and Sir Francis Bryan. The members of this group, who included Sir Thomas Cheney and his friend John Wallop, were determined to break Wolsey's monopoly on power, and they seized every opportunity to poison the King's mind against him.

They were joined by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, who, although they disliked Rochford and his family, had long plotted the Cardinal's downfall, and saw in Anne Boleyn a means of achieving it.
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Norfolk was also motivated by self-interest, since Anne was his niece and her advancement could only benefit the Howards. Anne was a willing tool: George Cavendish says she was agreeable to the requests of her supporters because she had “an inward desire to be revenged upon the Cardinal” for the breaking of her affair with Lord Henry Percy and her subsequent banishment in disgrace, but her enmity is more likely to have been fuelled by her father's removal from two very lucrative and prestigious offices.

Henry Norris, the Groom of the Stool and one of the King's chief confidants, was a loyal supporter of the Boleyns but not committed to bringing down the Cardinal. Discreet and levelheaded, he did his best to strike a balance between opposing interests.

The Queen enjoyed the support of several churchmen, among them John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, the frail Richard Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, who made his views clear before his death that year, and her brave chaplain Thomas Abell, who in 1530 wrote a treatise supporting her case, which Henry banned. William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, was also of the opinion that the royal marriage was valid, but compromised his principles by supporting the King.

Another person who deeply disappointed Katherine was her protégé, Juan Luis Vives, who also sided with Henry, as did many humanists, Sir Thomas More and John Fisher being notable exceptions. When Katherine asked Vives to defend her in the coming legatine hearing, he declined and left England for Bruges.
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The Queen stopped his pension.

There is no doubt that, thanks to the influence of Anne Boleyn, Wolsey's power was declining. In August 1528, Jean du Bellay told Francis I that Wolsey no longer enjoyed the King's fullest confidence, and that Henry was making decisions without his knowledge;
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three months later, Mendoza reported that the Cardinal was “no longer received at court as graciously as before.”
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In the past, Wolsey's power had been such that he could easily neutralise emerging factions, who had never held much sway at court because of his overriding political dominance, but that was no longer the case. Now he had to jostle for supremacy with everyone else. As his grasp weakened, the Boleyn faction flourished, and his enemies prepared to destroy him. To counteract their influence with the King, Wolsey secured the appointment of his own clients to the Privy Chamber, among them Thomas Heneage, who was on good terms with Anne Boleyn, and the Cardinal's former secretary, Sir Richard Page, who would soon switch his loyalty to the Boleyns. Wolsey also did his best to sweeten Mistress Anne with gifts and entertainments and by his strenuous efforts to obtain an annulment in the face of the Pope's stalling tactics. He knew that Anne's elevation to the consort's throne would mean his own downfall, yet he had no choice but to do the King's bidding. Relations between Anne and Wolsey were always outwardly cordial, but that deceived no one.

The King, meanwhile, had been reading as many authorities on canon and civil law as he could lay hands on, to perfect his case in readiness for the legate's arrival. In one letter to Anne Boleyn, he claimed he was spending up to four hours each day poring through vast theological tomes, and suffering “some pain in my head” as a result.
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This new passion for study led to the acquisition of more and more volumes for the royal libraries, while some books were obligingly loaned to the King by the abbots of various monasteries. Henry even sent the humanist scholar Richard Croke to Italy to acquire or consult obscure works, giving him detailed instructions as to what to look for and transcribe.
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He had convinced himself that his case was sound, and he was prepared to go to astonishing lengths to prove it.

Cardinal Campeggio arrived in London in October 1528. The Pope had secretly instructed him to bring about a reconciliation between the King and Queen, but if that was not possible he was to persuade Katherine to enter a convent, thus freeing Henry to make another marriage. Campeggio soon saw that there was no chance of the former, and the Queen made it very clear that she had no vocation for the religious life: she insisted she was the King's true wife, and nothing would make her say otherwise. As for the Cardinal, who took the opposite viewpoint, Campeggio had no more success with him “than if I had spoken to a rock.” Moreover, it soon became obvious to the legate what drove the King, and he reported to Clement: “He sees nothing, he thinks of nothing but Anne; he cannot do without her for an hour. He is constantly kissing her and treating her as if she were his wife.” However, he was quite certain that they had “not proceeded to any ultimate conjunction.”

Campeggio soon made it clear that Clement was prepared to offer Henry anything except the annulment he so desired, even a dispensation for a marriage between the Princess Mary and her half-brother Henry Fitzroy. He insisted that Pope Julius's dispensation was sound, but the King would not accept this. Campeggio felt that, “if an angel were to descend from Heaven, he would not be able to persuade him to the contrary.” Wolsey, who by virtue of his own legatine powers was to work with Campeggio to reach a solution, was becoming increasingly desperate, as it became alarmingly clear that the Italian Cardinal was not to be manipulated.

The King did not help matters by installing Anne Boleyn in the palatial surroundings of Durham House on the Strand soon after the legate's arrival. But Anne was not satisfied with her new abode, and demanded something even grander. Henry arranged for her to lodge temporarily at Suffolk House in Southwark, the London home of the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk, and himself paid for the refurbishment of the rooms she would occupy, which were furnished with great splendour. Here, Anne kept great state, attended by ladies-in-waiting, trainbearers, and chaplains. Courtiers hastened in droves to pay their respects to her, while Katherine's chamber, once the hub of courtly entertainments and gatherings, was deserted.

Despite this semblance of popularity, Anne and her family were never well liked at court, where they were secretly considered proud and grasping, and they were hated by the people, many of whom supported their beloved Queen. When Anne went hunting with the King, villagers would hoot and hiss at her,
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and on one occasion when Henry was riding alone near Woodstock, one of his subjects yelled, “Back to your wife!”
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Anne cannot have been happy with the fact that Henry was still dining regularly with Katherine, and also, according to Jean du Bellay, sharing her bed.
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On the King's own admission, he was not having sex with her, so he was probably keeping up appearances in order to impress the legate. The strain of the nullity suit had taken its toll on Katherine—Campeggio thought she was nearly fifty, when in fact she was just forty-three, whereas Henry, at thirty-seven, was still in his prime.

In November 1528, the royal couple were together at Bridewell Palace; as they walked along the river gallery, they could hear a large crowd outside cheering the Queen.
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Fearing that his popularity was at risk, the King summoned the leading citizens of London to the palace and assured them that he had instigated nullity proceedings only to set his mind at rest, and that, were he to choose again, he would take Katherine for his wife above all others.
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In early December, however, Henry took advantage of Katherine's temporary absence at Richmond and installed Anne at Greenwich “in a very fine lodging which he has furnished very near his own. Greater court is paid to her every day than has been for a long time paid to the Queen.”
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Some were scandalised by this turn of events—the Venetian ambassador spoke in such an insultingly “lewd fashion” of the King's morals that he had to be recalled
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—but Anne did not care. She was determined to eclipse not just Katherine but Wolsey, too. It was to Anne, rather than the Cardinal, that courtiers and supplicants now came seeking patronage.

There was a tense atmosphere at court during the Christmas celebrations. Anne kept open house in her own apartments, avoiding the official revels in the chamber “because she does not like to meet the Queen.”
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It was Katherine who presided over the main festivities, but she found it hard to look cheerful “and made no joy of nothing, her mind was so troubled.”
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The King ignored her misery; he entertained the two legates with jousts, banquets, masques, and disguisings, knighted Campeggio's son, and on the Feast of St. Thomas of Canterbury on 29 December appeared looking very majestic in cloth of gold lined with beautiful lynx skins. “All comers of any honest behaviour” were allowed to enter the great hall and partake of the “great plenty of viands” laid out there.
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The Boleyns had recently taken up Holbein, who around 1528 painted portraits of several members of their faction, among them Rochford's sister Anne and her husband Sir John Shelton, and Sir John Godsalve and his son, another John, who were members of Rochford's circle in Norfolk.
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Holbein had also painted the illuminated capitals for a short treatise by Nicolaus Kratzer, entitled
“Canones Horoptri,”
which was bound in green velvet and presented to Henry at New Year 1529. The treatise described the uses of an instrument called a horoptrum which had been invented by Kratzer to predict such things as the exact times of sunrise and sunset and the passage of the Sun through the Zodiac.
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We know that Holbein had returned to Basel by August 1528, when his two-year leave of absence from the city expired, but it is possible that he came back briefly to England for the presentation of the treatise. This cannot be proved, as his movements for the next three years are unrecorded.
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During the early months of 1529, the legates prepared for the hearing of the King's nullity suit. Henry proposed Warham as counsel for the Queen, but Katherine had little faith in the Archbishop's ability or inclination to uphold her cause. Besides, he was Henry's subject, and therefore not impartial. She had more confidence in her other counsel, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, a man of greater principle.

There was a minor scandal at Easter when Anne took it upon herself to bless cramp rings, a ritual that could be performed only by an anointed king or queen. The fuss soon died down, and the court moved to Richmond to celebrate St. George's Day with the usual Garter feast.

Wolsey, who had left no stone unturned to make the King's case watertight, was confident of a happy outcome when, on 31 May, the legatine court opened in the great hall of the priory of the Blackfriars in London. There was enormous public interest in the proceedings, not only because opinions ran high, but also because a king and queen had never before been summoned before a court in England. For a brief space it seemed as if the hearing might not take place after all, for when the Queen was summoned into the court, she did not go to the chair of estate appointed for her, but, ignoring the legates, made her way to the King's throne and there, falling to her knees, made a dramatic plea to him to spare her the extremity of the court. She declared that she had been a true wife to him, and that when he married her she had been a virgin, “without touch of man. And whether it be true or no, I put it to your conscience.” If, however, he persisted in his suit, then she would commit her cause to God.
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As the King stared straight ahead, Katherine rose, curtseyed, and, leaning on the arm of her Receiver General, Griffin Richards, who had served her since her marriage to Prince Arthur, she left the court, ignoring urgent calls for her return. Outside, the people cheered and clapped her. The legates, however, declared her contumacious and proceeded without her.

There followed days and days of interminable depositions and heated discussions. Much of the evidence focused on whether Prince Arthur had consummated his marriage, and several noblemen came forward to boast that they had been capable of the sex act at his age. Much of the evidence was heavily weighted in Henry's favour, but Bishop Fisher, a lone voice, spoke up for Katherine, telling the court, “This marriage of the King and Queen can be dissolved by no power, human or divine.”
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Henry dismissed this as the view of “but one man.”

Campeggio listened to it all, but gave nothing away. Finally, on 23 July, he unexpectedly adjourned the case to Rome, in compliance with the Pope's secret instructions. There was a shocked silence; then, as the King walked out, his face like thunder, the Duke of Suffolk crashed his fist onto a table and shouted, “By the mass, it was never merry in England while we had cardinals among us!” Wolsey, who was no less appalled than anyone else and doubtless believed that he now faced ruin, replied bitterly, “Of all men in this realm, ye have least cause to be offended with cardinals. For if I, a simple cardinal, had not been, ye should have at this present no head upon your shoulders.”
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