Six Wives (35 page)

    This time Campeggio was accompanied by Wolsey. Campeggio began with deliberate obliqueness. Pope Clement would of course offer Catherine justice, he said. Nevertheless, to avoid scandal, it was much better that the matter should not come to open trial. Instead, Catherine, 'should, of her prudence, take some other course which would give general satisfaction and greatly benefit herself and others'. 'I did not further explain the means to her,' Campeggio told his correspondent, 'in order to discover what she would demand.'

    This was a proper opening gambit, polished in a thousand difficult negotiations. But Catherine, refusing to play the game by Campeggio's rules, immediately named names. 'She had heard', she said, 'that we were [come] to persuade her to enter some religion.' Campeggio was taken aback at such bluntness but quickly shifted ground. 'I did not deny it,' he reported. Then he proceeded to try to sell her the idea. To take the veil, he informed Catherine, would 'satisfy God, her own conscience, [and] the glory and fame of her name'; and it would preserve 'her honours and temporal goods and the succession of her daughter'. There was also, he concluded, 'the example of [Jeanne de Valois], the Queen of France that was, who did a similar thing, and who still lives in the greatest honour and reputation with God and all that kingdom'.
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    Wolsey echoed Campeggio's arguments, at greater length and more urgently.

    The Cardinals, Wolsey and Campeggio, two of Europe's most experienced and wily men of business, had been jumped into declaring their hands. Catherine, however, refused to show hers. Instead, protesting pathetically that she was 'a woman, a foreigner and friendless', she said she would once more demand 'indifferent' counsel from the King. 'Then she would give us audience.'

* * *

The pathos of Catherine's situation is real. But it should not disguise the fact that she had just issued an ultimatum. Until she got the advisers she wanted from Henry, she would not give her reply to Campeggio's proposal, and the best hope for a quick solution to the Great Matter would remain in suspense.

    She saw Henry on the 25th to reiterate her demand for 'indifferent' counsel. It was something which Henry had hitherto resisted absolutely. The Great Matter touched the English succession too closely, he claimed, for any foreigner to be allowed to deal in it. Catherine put her case once more, and this time Henry yielded. She was assigned seven English counsel, two Flemings, and 'a Spaniard, Luis Vives, whom she herself nominates'. Her ultimatum had worked.

    Having got her way on the issue of foreign counsel, Catherine became submissive once more and asked Henry's permission to confess to Campeggio. His heart must have leapt. Was she about to accept the bait and become a nun? Why else would she wish to see the Cardinal in private? For a moment, I guess, Henry thought that his troubles were over. He gave her leave with alacrity.

    Catherine came to see Campeggio at 9 o'clock the following morning, the 26th. The visit lasted a long time, because she had so much to say, beginning with 'her first arrival in this kingdom' and continuing to 'the present'. But the principal matter was her virginity.

In making this solemn affirmation, Catherine was addressing the Pope through his legate and the world through the Pope. So she not only gave Campeggio permission to break the seal of the confessional and inform Clement VII of what she had said, she positively encouraged him. But England was a different matter. Here she had to be more cautious. She said 'she would declare her intentions in proper place and time' and, meanwhile, asked that Campeggio swear his secretaries to silence.

    But what, Campeggio wanted to know, of his suggestion that she should take the veil? Would she consider that? Her answer was crushing.

'She repeated this so many times and so determinately and deliberately', Campeggio reported, 'that I am convinced she will act accordingly.'

    For once, this man of so many fluent words was at a loss for a single one. 'Nothing more occurred to me [to say]', he wrote, 'and she left me.' He was impressed and exasperated at the same time. 'I have always judged her to be a prudent lady, and now more so.' Nevertheless, he lamented 'her obstinacy in not accepting this sound counsel'. It 'does not much please me', he ended querulously.
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* * *

But Catherine was no longer in the business of pleasing him or any other man. The weakest spot in the wall had turned out to be stronger than Campeggio had thought.

C
atherine's fear was that Henry would force the Great Matter to a quick, summary judgement. With Campeggio's arrival, the threat of this now seemed very real. Campeggio had shown the decretal commission to Henry on the 24th. The following day, the King boasted to Catherine about its effects. 'The Pope had condemned her at Rome', he told her triumphantly, 'and the Legate Campeggio had come for the sole purpose of having the sentence executed.' She knew Henry well enough not to believe everything he said. But in this case she could take no chances. Even her own actions had contributed to the emergency. By rejecting so decisively Campeggio's suggestion that she should take the veil, she had destroyed the possibility of a compromise solution and had brought the moment of trial nearer. Indeed, she had welcomed it: 'she insists', Campeggio reported, 'that everything shall be decided by [judicial] sentence.' 'Neither the whole kingdom on the one hand, nor any great punishment on the other, although she might be torn limb from limb, should compel her to alter this opinion', she had told him. She would be a martyr to marriage and the trial would be her scaffold.
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    But she knew that under no circumstances must she be tried by the decretal commission. It was time to use her secret weapon and, probably in the second week of November, she showed Campeggio her 'Spanish Bulls'. The effect was cataclysmic.

* * *

The decretal commission was based on the Bull of dispensation, which had justified the dispensation for the marriage of Henry and Catherine by the need to preserve the peace between England and Spain. For this Bull to stand in law, the reason had to be sufficient. Henry and Wolsey were advised that it was not, and the decretal commission rested on this advice. The commission recited the contents of the Bull; noted its likely defects; and required the legates to proceed to judgement on the basis of three questions, all derived from the supposed inadequacies in the Bull. Would the peace between England and Spain have continued without the marriage? Was it true that Henry did not desire the marriage in order to conserve the peace? Had the rulers, or one of them, among whom the peace was to be kept, died before the marriage took place? If all or any of these objections were found to be valid, the Bull would be void and the marriage null.

    One of the documents Catherine now produced was also a Bull (socalled because of the lead seal or
bulla
which authenticated it). This turned out to correspond word-for-word with the Bull of dispensation cited in the decretal commission. Catherine's other document was not a Bull, but the Brief or letter, sealed with wax, which Pope Julius II had sent to comfort Isabella on her deathbed.

    The Brief in the main followed the text of the Bull. But it varied from it at the crucial points which Henry's advisers had identified as the weak spots of the Bull. The Bull stated that the marriage was necessary to maintain the peace between England and Spain. The Brief made the same point but less absolutely. Existing peaceful relations, it claimed, 'would probably not last so firmly' if the marriage did not take place. The Brief also broadened the reasons for the dispensation. It was granted, it stated, not only for the sake of maintaining peace, but for
et certis aliis
causis
(for certain other reasons).

    These 'other reasons' were unspecified but they were enough to make good the errors in the Bull. If the Brief stood, the decretal commission and its captious objections fell. And there were doubts even about the general commission. Henry and Wolsey, it seemed, would have to start all over again.

    In one elegant move Catherine had undone eighteen months of frantic, expensive English diplomacy in Rome. She had also made her husband look a fool. It was not a bad morning's work.
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* * *

The response was swift. The same day Catherine's counsel asked permission to wait on her. They had serious matters which had been submitted by the 'other side'. The King, they said, had been informed that there was a conspiracy to assassinate both him and Wolsey. It was undertaken on her behalf by the Emperor's agents. The King, they continued, would like to give the Queen the benefit of the doubt and assume she was not involved. But her behaviour in other matters gave him pause. 'Your Grace does not show such love to [Henry], neither in nor yet out of bed . . . as a woman ought to do to her husband.' 'What was done in bed between both your Graces we pass over,' they said. But her public demeanour left much to be desired. The King was 'in great pensiveness by reason of this matter'; Catherine, on the other hand, showed every appearance of happiness. She exhorted 'other ladies and gentlemen of the Court to dance and pastime' and she dressed and behaved cheerfully herself.

    But, worst of all, she was courting the people. There had been demonstrations against the Divorce and in favour of Catherine. It was her duty to help repress them, she was told; instead she had encouraged them by making her public behaviour more expressive than previously. 'By beckoning with your head and smiling otherwise than in times past your Grace was wont to do, your Grace has rather comforted them in so doing than rebuked or refrained them.' Catherine, in short, it was alleged, had been playing the Diana-card, and turning the People against the Prince.

    Catherine dismissed the charges with contempt. But they were a mere warm-up to the subject of the Brief. There should be no secrets between husband and wife, she was told. Yet she had kept the Brief 'close', which showed she had not been 'so loving as your Grace ought to be'.

    At this point the tone shifted suddenly, from lofty exhortation and reproof to something more brutal. She was warned that it was foolish to 'strive' with the King. She was reminded of her 'ill-success' in childbed. Then she was subjected to a barrage of questions on the Brief. How long had she had the Brief? Whom did she send for the Brief? What letters did she write for it and to whom? Who brought her the Brief? And did she have any similar letters?

    In her replies Catherine was economical with the truth. She had received the Brief, she claimed, six months previously from Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador. And she denied receiving any letters from the Emperor at the same time.

    In fact, Mendoza was still pressing his home government for the document as late as September.

Catherine sent a messenger to warn Mendoza that he too was likely to be interrogated on the subject. 'If so', he assured the Emperor, 'I shall so shape my answer that it may not disagree with the Queen's declaration, nor make it appear as if she had stated an untruth'.
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* * *

This was only the beginning of Henry's fight back. The Brief had arrived too conveniently. And it answered the objections to the Bull too fully. Surely it was a forgery? But how could he tell? Catherine had produced only a transcript. He must get his hands on the original. All the efforts of the King and Wolsey were now bent to this end – and all Catherine's to frustrating them.

    By 23 November, Catherine was sufficiently alarmed at Henry's activities (of which, as usual, she was well informed) to summon the Spanish ambassador to see her at Greenwich. But it was hardly a regular audience. Instead, she ordered him 'to go thither in disguise, and with the greatest possible secrecy'.

    They had a long conversation, in the course of which she told him that the King was planning to send one of his most trusted friends and advisers, Sir William Fitzwilliam, the Treasurer of the Household, to Spain to demand the original of the Brief. Catherine wanted Mendoza to warn Charles V of Fitzwilliam's mission, and to advise the Emperor that under no circumstances was the Brief to be handed over. She had heard that Fitzwilliam had secret orders 'to get that document into his hands and, if successful, place it where it cannot be found again'. Charles must take no chances. She had been advised that such Briefs were not registered in Rome, so the original in Spain was unique. And 'all the strength of her case now lies in [it]'.
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    But Henry changed his mind about sending Fitzwilliam (as Mendoza thought he would). Instead, he would try a subtler approach and get Catherine herself to write to demand the original of the Brief.

    We can only guess at the means that were used, but they were successful. Having sworn Henry a 'solemn oath' to get the Brief 'by all possible means', Catherine wrote the necessary letter to Charles. The letter was sent by the overland route via France with two messengers: one the King's servant; the other the Queen's, Francisco Felipez.

    Felipez was already a marked man. Before he left, he was told that on no account was he to carry any other letter from the Queen. He swore accordingly. And watches and searches were available to make sure he kept his word.