The Tudors (11 page)

One was that of the Duke of Norfolk. He was Anne Boleyn’s uncle.

Another was that of the Viscount Rochford. He was Thomas Boleyn, Anne’s father.

And the third was that of Anne’s brother George, still a very junior courtier.

It was a humiliation, but Henry did not react. Perhaps he thought it didn’t matter all that much. The new year would bring the tribunal at last, and the result of that, surely, was in the bag.

WEARING AS HE DID A CROWN TO WHICH HE HAD ONLY the most questionable of claims, from the start of his reign the first Henry Tudor had reason to worry about the place of his new dynasty among Europe’s royal families. Acceptance was essential and could not be taken for granted. It was therefore a great coup, a breakthrough, when just a few years after the Battle of Bosworth Henry’s diplomats were able to arrange the betrothal of his little son Prince Arthur to a daughter of the royal house of Spain.

The arrangement offered Henry a connection to one of the most brilliant political partnerships in history, that of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Their 1469 marriage had united Spain’s leading Christian kingdoms, and they spent the years that followed in a hard, ultimately triumphal campaign to drive the Moors—Muslims originally from North Africa—out of the southern kingdom of Granada. (Less gloriously, the pair also used the Inquisition to expel all Jews and Muslims who refused to convert.) Ferdinand and Isabella both belonged to the ancient house of Trastámara (and were also, incidentally, descended from King Edward III of England through his son John of Gaunt). At the time of their wedding Ferdinand was king of Sicily (which his father had given him) as well as Aragon, and in due course he began competing with the kings of France for domination in Italy.

Isabella was the most impressive woman of her time. She was a strong, skillful ruler and an active field commander in the war for Granada, along the way giving birth to the son and four daughters with whom she and her husband planned to perpetuate the Trastámara dynasty and link it to other important kingdoms. Having secured for their son and heir no less a bride than the daughter of the Holy Roman emperor, and having compounded this success by arranging to marry one
of their daughters to the emperor’s son and heir (two other daughters went to the Portuguese royal family), they could afford to send their youngest child, the Infanta Catalina, across the water to England. It was of course a strictly political arrangement. For Ferdinand and Isabella it was a way of keeping England from allying with France, their archrival. For the Tudors it was a confirmation of legitimacy.

More than a decade had to pass, however, before Arthur and Catalina would be old enough to live together as man and wife. Both children received superb preparation for the careers that lay ahead, but hers was the more impressive. In 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus came upon the New World during a voyage to India financed by the Spanish Crown, the six-year-old girl rode with her parents and sisters and brother into the newly conquered city of Granada. The reunification of Spain being thus complete, Isabella was able to give full attention to readying her youngest child for a future as queen of England. The result, when the time came for Catalina to journey to her new home and become Catherine, Princess of Wales, was a refined, strong-minded young woman who knew the classics, knew history and the works of the church fathers, could converse easily in Latin, and had been taught by her mother to take her duties seriously and always be loyal to her husband and the church.

During the years of waiting Spain had gone from strength to strength. Its vast New World empire took shape with astonishing speed after Columbus’s first voyages, promising to generate fabulous quantities of wealth. In 1494 the Treaty of Tordesillas drew a north-south line down the length of the Atlantic Ocean, conferring all the non-Christian lands on one side to Spain and those on the other to Portugal (which thereby acquired a Brazil that was probably not yet known to exist). King Ferdinand continued to pursue his ambitions in Italy, having so much success that in 1504 he added Naples to his string of kingdoms. All this was rendered nearly meaningless, however, by the death of his and Isabella’s newly married son, John, at nineteen. The prince’s bride was pregnant at the time of his death (which the royal physicians blamed on too much sex, the actual cause probably being tuberculosis), but the child was stillborn. Suddenly everything that Ferdinand and Isabella had built, the glorious legacy of the Trastámara, stood to be inherited by the family of
their eldest surviving daughter’s husband. For Ferdinand in particular, the thought that the fruits of his achievement would fall to the German Hapsburgs was almost too galling to be endured.

When the ship bearing Catherine arrived in England in 1501 at the end of a grueling four-month voyage through heavy seas, Henry VII insisted on violating Spanish protocol and having an immediate look at her face. He was delighted by what he was shown: an exceptionally pretty and self-possessed little lady, nearly if not actually a storybook princess, obviously a fitting progenitor for a mighty line of kings. He spent heavily to make the wedding a grand public event, a declaration that the Tudors had arrived. Throughout many of the festivities Catherine was escorted by her bridegroom’s precocious brother Henry, who at age ten was Duke of York, earl marshal of England, lieutenant of Ireland, and warden of the Scottish marches and appears to have attracted far more notice than Arthur. Shortly thereafter the newlyweds were sent to their new home at Ludlow Castle, where Arthur, still only fifteen and destined to remain forever an indistinct presence in the chronicles of his time, died within a few months. The cause of death was possibly a mysterious disease called the sweating sickness that had only recently appeared in England, or possibly tuberculosis or influenza. Catherine, too, became gravely ill but recovered to find herself a widow—by her own testimony and that of her principal lady-in-waiting a virgin widow—at sixteen years of age.

Life became difficult for Catherine. She wanted to return home, but her father-in-law did not want her to go. Henry VII was on bad terms with France at the time, and fearful of losing his alliance with Spain. Never a man to part lightly with money, he had no wish to return the half of Catherine’s considerable dowry that Ferdinand had sent with her. And he continued to be impressed with Catherine herself—so much so that he applied to the pope for the dispensation required for young Prince Henry to marry his deceased brother’s wife.

By the time the dispensation was delivered in 1504—the year of Queen Isabella’s death, which deprived Catherine of her best source of support and counsel—relations between England and France had improved. Now it was Ferdinand who, afraid of an Anglo-French alliance, was determined that Catherine must remain where she was and wed the
English king’s son. King Henry began to regard her as a nuisance and to treat her disgracefully. She wrote home to complain that she had lost her servants, her clothes were in tatters, and she barely had enough to eat. When Prince Henry became fourteen, the age of consent under canon law, he signed a repudiation of his betrothal. He did so, we can be sure, on the instructions of his father, who had become interested in marrying him to a Hapsburg. Wherever the repudiation originated, it was a blow to Catherine, whose health began to fail. She was making preparations to depart England when, in the spring of 1509, the king sank into his last illness and died. In short order—it must have seemed a miracle—the new king declared his intention to marry her, possibly on the advice of his Council but just as possibly because he was a youth of healthy appetites, had no experience of women and no other marriage prospects, and preferred taking an attractive bride whom he already knew over waiting for whatever his diplomats might bring home from the international matrimonial sweepstakes. He was almost eighteen, Catherine twenty-three.

It was a good marriage for a long time. Catherine showed herself to be a devoted wife, sometimes begging Henry to change his mind but never defying him and certainly never speaking ill of him. She even personally embroidered his shirts. He for his part was clearly delighted to have a partner who was fully his equal in intelligence and learning and had far more knowledge of the world. To the extent that there was trouble, it came from Catherine’s father. Ferdinand by this time was a sour and scheming old man, devoid of any reluctance to exploit and deceive even his own daughter’s husband. In 1511, taking advantage of Henry’s eagerness to make war on France, he allied their two kingdoms in the Treaty of Westminster. He joined the subsequent invasion of France only long enough to grab the little Kingdom of Navarre for himself. Having accomplished that, he made a separate peace, leaving Henry alone, exposed and looking like a fool.

Back in England, meanwhile, Catherine was serving capably in the post to which her husband had named her before his departure: that of “rectrix and governor of the realm.” Not long after Henry’s return, when four hundred Londoners were on the verge of being executed for rampaging in the streets and pillaging the homes and businesses of foreigners, she remained on her knees in front of the king until he granted
clemency. In such ways, and with her piety and unassuming demeanor, she was becoming a beloved public figure. No one had ever heard of her doing a dishonest or cruel or selfish thing.

In spite of her father, her family connections were growing in value. Old Ferdinand, a lifelong lecher and father of many bastards, remarried late in life in the hope of generating another legitimate son. He succeeded, but the child lived only hours. And so in 1516, when Ferdinand himself died, the Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile and Sicily and Naples, plus New Spain in America and much else, all passed to young Charles of Hapsburg, the son of Catherine’s apparently insane elder sister Joanna. When Charles’s paternal grandfather, Maximilian of Hapsburg, died not long afterward, Catherine found that her nephew now loomed over Europe as ruler of the Spanish dominions
and
Holy Roman emperor.

She had only one real problem: children, or the absence thereof. In the first year of her marriage Catherine gave birth to a daughter, but the newborn died. A year after that she gave birth to a son, named Henry after his father, but after fifty-two days he died too. There followed in short order a miscarriage and then another short-lived boy. In February 1516 Princess Mary was born, a healthy girl with her parents’ red-gold hair. She was followed by one or possibly two more miscarriages, the last of them in 1518, at which point Catherine entered her late thirties overweight and menopausal, the girlish beauty of her earlier years a memory. Henry by contrast was barely thirty, a fountain of vitality. In 1519 his dalliance with a woman named Bessie Blount resulted in the birth of a healthy boy. In traditional fashion the child was named Henry Fitzroy—Henry son of the king. Though his mother was sent off into a respectable arranged marriage, his royal father took pleasure in having a son at last.

He took pleasure in his daughter, too, an appealing and clever child, small like her mother, eager to please her mighty sire. There is little to suggest that the king was, at this point, greatly troubled about not having a legitimate male heir. The succession problem, to the extent that there was perceived to be one, appeared to be solved in the early 1520s when Princess Mary was betrothed to her cousin the emperor Charles. It delighted Henry to treat the Holy Roman emperor as his son, to give him advice (unwelcome though it may have been) on statecraft, and to think
that one day, as a result of this glorious union, some grandchild of his would rule much of the world. It came as a shock to Henry and Catherine when, in 1525, Charles withdrew from the engagement. They should not have been surprised: Mary was only ten years old, Charles twenty-five. He had decided to marry another of his first cousins, the daughter of the king of Portugal. She was grown and brought with her a big dowry that he desperately needed.

Henry, in his anger and disappointment, lashed out at his wife and his daughter, using Fitzroy as a weapon. At age six the boy was brought out of the shadows, shown off at court, and made Duke of Richmond (that old Tudor family title), Duke of Somerset, and Earl of Nottingham. He was given lands commensurate with his new status, and there was talk that his father intended to make him king of Ireland, perhaps one day even king of England.

Now it was Catherine’s turn to be furious, and for the first time in a decade and a half of marriage she allowed the court to see that she was angry with her husband. Henry was untroubled. What Catherine thought had never mattered so little to him. Their marriage was dead, England’s connection to Spain and the Hapsburgs dead with it, and the stage set for all the troubles to follow.

Frustration and
Embarrassment

G
etting rid of Catherine of Aragon was far from the only thing that Henry and Wolsey had to worry about as the 1520s drew to a close. They had a kingdom to manage and a not very happy one at that. Its propertied classes were fed up with the Crown’s incessant demands for money, and the population at large was staggering under the effects of several consecutive bad harvests. Relations with the continent required a good deal of attention as well. From January 1528 on into the following year, England in alliance with France was at war with the empire of Charles V. It was a peculiar conflict in the way that most wars of the time can seem peculiar to us: a tentative, distinctly limited affair in which England sent no soldiers across the Channel to do any actual fighting. But the stakes were not trivial. One of the ideas behind allying with France and helping to finance its armies was to isolate Charles and force him to join in the great pan-European peace that had long been Wolsey’s dream. Less loftily but no doubt more importantly from Henry’s perspective, the alliance was intended to weaken Charles to such an extent that the pope need have no fear in annulling the king’s marriage. Thus much of Europe was at war at least partly because of Henry’s “great matter.”