Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners (7 page)

George Cavendish, recording the incident in his Life of his master, believed that the King had already begun 'to kindle the brand of amours' for the young lady in question and had ordered Wolsey to intervene. In view of later events, this must have seemed a perfectly reasonable assumption but, in fact, there is no evidence that Henry had any amorous intent towards Anne in 1522, a time when he was probably still enjoying the hospitality of her elder sister's bed. A less romantic but more plausible explanation is that the Cardinal had simply acted to prevent two thoughtless young people from upsetting the plans of their elders and betters. Wolsey and the Earl of Northumberland between them had no difficulty in reducing Lord Percy to an apologetic pulp, but young Anne showed her furious disappointment so plainly that she was sent home in disgrace.

In the autumn of 1522 Thomas Boleyn had little reason to be pleased with either of his daughters. Mary had spoiled her chances by promiscuity, for although there was little real social stigma attached to having been the King's mistress, it undoubtedly affected a girl's matrimonial prospects, and she and her family had a right to expect royal compensation for possible loss of reputation. It's true that Sir Thomas's own career was coming along quite nicely - he'd recently risen to become Treasurer of the Household and was soon to be made a Knight of the Garter - but Henry was notoriously stingy towards his mistresses. Even Elizabeth Blount, who'd presented him with a bastard son, only achieved a respectable marriage, and Mary Boleyn had to be content with William Carey, one of the King's boon companions but otherwise of no particular account. Mary's father may well have reflected gloomily on how much better these things were managed in France, where the
maîtresse en titre
was a public figure wielding influence and patronage who could normally expect to retire on a more than comfortable fortune. As for Anne, it looked as if the child had ruined herself at the outset by her headstrong behaviour and inability to control her temper.

But Anne was to have a second chance. Her rustication seems to have lasted for about three years, and when she returned to Court, at either the end of 1525 or the beginning of 1526, she was still unbetrothed - the Butler marriage had finally fallen through, and there were, it seems, no other suitors under consideration. She was now in her nineteenth year and, to the outward eye, quite unconcerned about the unsettled state of her future. All the same, she must have been well aware that time was passing and very conscious of the fact that she couldn't afford to make any more mistakes. While she waited for something to turn up, Anne had begun to amuse herself by a flirtation with Thomas Wyatt, the witty and talented courtier, poet and diplomat who was a neighbour of the Boleyns down in Kent. She and her brother George and Thomas Wyatt formed a close little clique, gay, brilliant and irreverent, and although we know precious little about the actual inception of the King's grand passion for Mistress Anne, it is at least probable that it was the obvious interest of Thomas Wyatt, himself a married man, which first stirred Henry to take notice of the lady.

The game of courtly love, derived from the mediaeval French romances which were such popular reading, was a recognized pastime in high society. It involved much sighing and languishing and mournful serenading on the part of the young men -much coyness and 'cruelty' on the part of the ladies, whose 'lovers' became their true knights and servants to command. None of this, of course, had anything to do with real life, and as soon as any real feelings were stirred, the conventions of the game rapidly disappeared. Anne seems to have succeeded in keeping the pretence of her 'court' going for several months, but a man like Henry Tudor would not brook competition for long. There was some by-play over a trinket belonging to Anne and flourished by Wyatt during a game of bowls with the King. Henry, in turn, produced a ring which, he declared, she had given to him, and the episode ended with his majesty stumping away in a huff, muttering that he had been deceived. Since all the Boleyns depended heavily on royal goodwill, Anne had hastily to smooth things over, and Thomas Wyatt melted sadly but wisely into the background.

By the late summer of 1526 the whole Court knew that Anne Boleyn was the King's latest inamorata, but no one, at this stage, 'esteemed it other than an ordinary course of dalliance'. There is, in fact, no reason to suppose that, at this stage, the King had anything other than an ordinary course of dalliance in mind, but Anne soon made him understand that she had no intention of becoming his mistress. With the example of her elder sister before her, she knew it would lead to nothing more than a second-rate and perhaps unhappy marriage, and she meant to do better than that. Just when she began to realize that she might, if she played her cards carefully, win herself the greatest matrimonial prize of all, we unfortunately have no means of knowing. Probably it dawned on her gradually during that autumn and winter as the King, unaccustomed to being refused, started to pursue her with ever-increasing fervour, while she withdrew nervously, protesting her virtue and retreating to Hever when the pressure grew too great, but never - as a modest young lady thus honoured by her sovereign could scarcely do - never repulsing him entirely.

Whether this very* feminine display was all part of a deliberate cold-blooded plan or whether it proceeded from genuine embarrassment and perplexity in the face of an admittedly awkward dilemma, Anne could not have adopted better tactics, for Henry, in spite of his highly-coloured reputation, was no casual lecher. In a series of letters, undated but almost certainly written during the spring of 1527, he begs repeatedly - almost abjectly - for an unequivocal declaration of her love, offering in return to make her his 'sole mistress' and to reject all others 'out of mind and affection'. Although the sixteenth-century sense of the word 'mistress' did not necessarily imply its modern physical connotation, Anne was taking no chances. She knew her own strength by this time - the King had given himself away too completely - and she would respond to only one kind of suggestion. Just when Henry came to accept this, to decide that here was a woman worthy to be his wife and actually to make that momentous proposal, is something else we don't know. All we do know for certain is that by May 1527 he had taken the first, tentative steps towards obtaining his freedom, without, incidentally, having the courtesy to inform the lady who had been his faithful and devoted consort for very nearly eighteen years, and thus set in motion a train of events which was radically to alter the course of English history.

Henry VIII's so-called divorce from his first wife - the King's 'great matter' as it was cautiously referred to by those in the know during its early stages - was to overshadow English foreign and domestic politics for the best part of ten years. Its most immediate and far-reaching consequence, the breach with Rome and the establishment of a national Church, directly affected the lives of every man, woman and child in the country and was to lead to a dangerous isolation from the main body of Christendom - an isolation whose implications became increasingly alarming as the Tudor century unfolded. Many good men, and women too, were to die, many useful lives would be wrecked, and many ancient, revered institutions be overthrown because the King of England wished to take a new wife.

When, in the spring of 1527, the King, so he said, first began to doubt the validity of his marriage to his brother's widow, divorce in its modern sense was unknown. It's true that the Church could, in exceptional cases of flagrant adultery or cruelty, or if one partner became a heretic, be persuaded to grant the equivalent of a judicial separation, but it was generally held that, since 'a man and woman conjoined in matrimony be by God's ordinance but one flesh and body,' the marriage bond was indissoluble. In the years immediately following the Reformation, there were isolated cases of a complete divorce, allowing the innocent party to re-marry, being granted by the ecclesiastical authorities with royal approval, but on the whole, by the end of Elizabeth's reign, divorce had become more and not less difficult to obtain, and in 1602 the door was finally shut.

The ending of a marriage by a decree of nullity, pronouncing the contract void from the beginning, was a different matter and, although normally beyond the reach of ordinary people, was neither particularly difficult nor even particularly unusual among the great and the powerful with money and influence at their disposal. There were a number of grounds on which an annulment could be applied for, including misrepresentation, whether deliberate or not, regarding the status - social, financial or marital - of either party at the time the marriage contract was drawn up; forced matrimony, alleging that the consent of either or both parties had not been freely given; precontract, when one of the parties had already promised, before witnesses, to marry another; the impotence, madness or taking of a formal vow of chastity by one of the parties; and consanguinity or affinity, where it could be shown that husband and wife were related, either by blood or marriage, within one of the prohibited degrees.

Henry's famous 'scruple of conscience' - his fear that he might, unwittingly of course, have been living in sin all those years - was based on a text in the Book of Leviticus which stated uncompromisingly that 'if a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing ... they shall be childless'. This, the King realized in an apparently blinding flash of revelation, must be the reason for his hitherto inexplicable failure to beget a male heir. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that the Queen's inability to bear a living son must surely be a sign of God's displeasure at their unlawful cohabitation. Why else should the deity, who had always shown such a flattering degree of interest in his doings, deny him male children? Having thus come to the convenient conclusion that he was, after all, still a bachelor, Henry felt free to pursue his natural inclinations supported by an uplifting sense of moral rectitude. Indeed, so completely satisfied did he appear with the justice of his cause, that one observer believed an angel descending from heaven would have been unable to persuade him otherwise.

Nevertheless, the King could not feel at all certain that his wife would see the matter in the same light, and he was noticeably uneager to break the news to her. When at last he did nerve himself to do so, Catherine could find no words to answer him. It was many years now since she had been her husband's confidante, had shared his problems and his growing pains and had been permitted to offer him advice. It was a good many years, too, since Henry had worn her favour in the lists, had laid his youthful triumphs at her feet and come hurrying to bring her any titbits of news he thought would interest or please her. But although they had grown apart, although other people had shouldered her out of his confidence, for Catherine, Henry would always remain the beautiful young man who had rescued her from lonely humiliation - the gay, generous boy who had loved her and made her his queen in that long-ago joyous springtime, when life had been spent in 'continual festival'. She could accept, though sadly, that love must die, but that the man whose 'true and humble' wife she had been, whose children she had borne and whose interests she had loyally tried to serve, was now apparently prepared to discard her, to wipe out nearly twenty years of married life as though it had never been, callously to dishonour her name and to bastardize their daughter, was a betrayal too black for speech. As Catherine listened to her husband's glib talk of his troubled conscience, of how they had been in mortal sin during all the years they had lived together and inviting her to choose a place of retirement away from the Court, words refused to come, and she collapsed into helpless, uncharacteristic tears.

It was a short-lived collapse, and the Queen soon made it abundantly clear that she intended to fight every inch of the way. Her position was simple and could be simply stated. If the King was really worried about the validity of their marriage, then it was right that the matter should be examined and his doubts laid to rest. As for herself, her conscience was clear, and she had nothing to fear from a free and impartial enquiry. She knew that she was, had always been and always would be Henry's true and lawful wife. Had they not been married in the sight of God by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, with the approval of the wisest men in England and Spain? Her first marriage to the boy Arthur had never been consummated, and she had come to Henry, as she was presently publicly to remind him, 'as a very maid without touch of man'. Therefore, the affinity prohibited in Leviticus did not exist, and Henry need have no qualms about the Pope's power to set aside the law of God.

When the Pope's representative, Cardinal Campeggio, came over to England in 1528 to try to arrange an amicable settlement, he found Catherine immovable in her determination to defend to the last the soul and the honour of her husband and herself. She utterly rejected the suggestion that she should give in gracefully and retire into a nunnery. She had no vocation for the religious life and intended to live and die in the estate of matrimony to which God had called her. But, she told Campeggio, she was an obedient daughter of the Church. She would submit to the Pope's judgement in the matter and abide by his decision, whichever way it might go. Unless and until judgement was given against her, she would continue to regard herself as the King's lawful wife and England's Queen and nothing, declared England's Queen flatly, would compel her to alter this opinion - not if she were to be torn limb from limb. If, after death, she should return to life, she would prefer to die over again rather than change it.

As far as the Pope was concerned, Catherine could scarcely have adopted a more embarrassing position. The Holy Father had no desire to alienate so dutiful a son as the King of England - especially not at a time when the prestige of the papacy was dangerously low - and the King of England was already dropping ominous hints as to what he might do if the case went against him. On the other hand, Catherine had powerful kinsfolk (the Holy Roman Emperor was her nephew) who were well placed to exert pressure on her behalf. The last thing the Pope wanted was to have to pronounce judgement, and during the next six years he made use of every delaying tactic at his disposal to postpone that evil moment. But faced with Henry's urgent impatience, he could not long postpone the initial confrontation, and by the spring of 1529 the legal battle had been fairly joined.