Henry VIII Part 17

[Footnote 538: In Harpsfield's _Pretended Divorce_ there is a very improbable story that Wyatt told Henry VIII. his relations with Anne were far from innocent and warned the King against marrying a woman of Anne's character.]

None of these projects advanced any farther, possibly because they conflicted with the relations developing between Anne and the King himself. As Wyatt complained in a sonnet,[539]

There is written her fair neck round about _Noli me tangere_; for Caesar's I am And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

But, for any definite doc.u.mentary evidence to the contrary, it might be urged that Henry's pa.s.sion for Anne was subsequent to the commencement of his proceedings for a divorce from Catherine. Those proceedings began at least as early as March, 1527, while the first allusion to the connection between the King and Anne Boleyn occurs in the instructions to Dr. William Knight, sent in the following autumn to procure a dispensation for her marriage with Henry.[540] The King's famous love-letters, the earliest of which are conjecturally a.s.signed to July, 1527,[541] are without date and with but slight internal indications of the time at which they were written; they may be earlier than 1527, they may be as late as the following winter. It is unlikely that Henry would have sought for the Pope's dispensation to marry (p. 190) Anne until he was a.s.sured of her consent, of which in some of the letters he appears to be doubtful; on the other hand, it is difficult to see how a lady of the Court could refuse an offer of marriage made by her sovereign. Her reluctance was to fill a less honourable position, into which Henry was not so wicked as to think of forcing her. "I trust," he writes in one of his letters, "your absence is not wilful on your part; for if so, I can but lament my ill-fortune, and by degrees abate my great folly."[542] His love for Anne Boleyn was certainly his "great folly," the one overmastering pa.s.sion of his life. There is, however, nothing very extraordinary in the letters themselves; in one he says he has for more than a year been "wounded with the dart of love," and is uncertain whether Anne returns his affection. In others he bewails her briefest absence as though it were an eternity; desires her father to hasten his return to Court; is torn with anxiety lest Anne should take the plague, comforts her with the a.s.surance that few women have had it, and sends her a hart killed by his own hand, making the inevitable play on the word. Later on, he alludes to the progress of the divorce case; excuses the shortness of a letter on the ground that he has spent four hours over the book he was writing in his own defence[543] and has a pain in his head. The series ends with an announcement that he has been fitting up apartments for her, and with congratulations to himself and to her that the "well-wishing" Legate, Campeggio, who has been sent from Rome to (p. 191) try the case, has told him he was not so "imperial" in his sympathies as had been alleged.

[Footnote 539: Wyatt, _Works_, ed. G.F. Nott, 1816, p. 143.]

[Footnote 540: _L. and P._, iv., 3422.]

[Footnote 541: _Ibid._, iv., 3218-20, 3325-26, 3990, 4383, 4403, 4410, 4477, 4537, 4539, 4597, 4648, 4742, 4894. They have also been printed by Hearne at the end of his edition of _Robert of Avesbury_, in the _Pamphleteer_, vol. xxi., and in the _Harleian Miscellany_, vol. iii. The originals in Henry's hand are in the Vatican Library; one of them was reproduced in facsimile for the ill.u.s.trated edition of this book.]

[Footnote 542: _L. and P._, iv., 3326.]

[Footnote 543: In 1531 he was said to have written "many books" on the divorce question (_ibid._, v., 251).]

The secret of her fascination over Henry was a puzzle to observers.

"Madame Anne," wrote a Venetian, "is not one of the handsomest women in the world. She is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the King's great appet.i.te, and her eyes, which are black and beautiful".[544] She had probably learnt in France the art of using her beautiful eyes to the best advantage; her hair, which was long and black, she wore loose, and on her way to her coronation Cranmer describes her as "sitting _in_ her hair".[545] Possibly this was one of the French customs, which somewhat scandalised the staider ladies of the English Court. She is said to have had a slight defect on one of her nails, which she endeavoured to conceal behind her other fingers.[546] Of her mental accomplishments there is not much evidence; she naturally, after some years' residence at the Court of France, spoke French, though she wrote it in an orthography that was quite her own. Her devotion to the Gospel is the one great virtue with which Foxe and other Elizabethans strove to invest the mother of the Good Queen Bess. But it had no n.o.bler foundation than the facts that Anne's position drove her into hostility to the Roman jurisdiction, and that her family shared the envy of church goods, common to the n.o.bility and the gentry of the time.[547] Her place in English history is due (p. 192) solely to the circ.u.mstance that she appealed to the less refined part of Henry's nature; she was pre-eminent neither in beauty nor in intellect, and her virtue was not of a character to command or deserve the respect of her own or subsequent ages.

[Footnote 544: _Ven. Cal._, iv., 365.]

[Footnote 545: Cranmer, _Works_ (Parker Soc.), ii., 245; _cf. Ven. Cal._, iv., 351, 418.]

[Footnote 546: _L. and P._, iv., Introd., p.

ccx.x.xvii.]

[Footnote 547: There is not much historical truth in Gray's phrase about "the Gospel light which dawned from Bullen's eyes"; but Brewer goes too far in minimising the "Lutheran" proclivities of the Boleyns. In 1531 Chapuys described Anne and her father as being "more Lutheran than Luther himself"

(_L. and P._, v., 148), in 1532 as "true apostles of the new sect" (_ibid._, v., 850), and in 1533 as "perfect Lutherans" (_ibid._, vi., 142).]

It is otherwise with her rival, Queen Catherine, the third of the princ.i.p.al characters involved in the divorce. If Henry's motives were not so entirely bad as they have often been represented, neither they nor Anne Boleyn's can stand a moment's comparison with the unsullied purity of Catherine's life or the lofty courage with which she defended the cause she believed to be right. There is no more pathetic figure in English history, nor one condemned to a crueller fate. No breath of scandal touched her fair name, or impugned her devotion to Henry. If she had the misfortune to be identified with a particular policy, the alliance with the House of Burgundy, the fault was not hers; she had been married to Henry in consideration of the advantages which that alliance was supposed to confer; and, if she used her influence to further Spanish interest, it was a natural feeling as near akin to virtue as to vice, and Carroz at least complained, in 1514, that she had completely identified herself with her husband and her husband's subjects.[548] If her miscarriages and the death of her children (p. 193) were a grief to Henry, the pain and the sorrow were hers in far greater measure; if they had made her old and deformed, as Francis brutally described her in 1519,[549] the fact must have been far more bitter to her than it was unpleasant to Henry. There may have been some hardship to Henry in the circ.u.mstance that, for political motives, he had been induced by his council to marry a wife who was six years his senior; but to Catherine herself a divorce was the height of injustice. The question was in fact one of justice against a real or supposed political necessity, and in such cases justice commonly goes to the wall. In politics, men seek to colour with justice actions based upon considerations of expediency. They first convince themselves, and then they endeavour with less success to persuade mankind.

[Footnote 548: _Sp. Cal._, ii., 201.]

[Footnote 549: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 1230.]

So Henry VIII. convinced himself that the dispensation granted by Julius II. was null and void, that he had never been married to Catherine, and that to continue to live with his brother's wife was sin. "The King," he instructed his amba.s.sador to tell Charles V. in 1533, "taketh himself to be in the right, not because so many say it, but because he, being learned, knoweth the matter to be right.... The justice of our cause is so rooted in our breast that nothing can remove it, and even the canons say that a man should rather endure all the censures of the Church than offend his conscience."[550] No man was less tolerant of heresy than Henry, but no man set greater (p. 194) store on his own private judgment. To that extent he was a Protestant; "though," he instructed Paget in 1534 to tell the Lutheran princes, "the law of every man's conscience be but a private court, yet it is the highest and supreme court for judgment or justice". G.o.d and his conscience, he told Chapuys in 1533, were on very good terms.[551] On another occasion he wrote to Charles _Ubi Spiritus Domini, ibi libertas_,[552] with the obvious implication that he possessed the spirit of the Lord, and therefore he might do as he liked. To him, as to St. Paul, all things were lawful; and Henry's appeals to the Pope, to learned divines, to universities at home and abroad, were not for his own satisfaction, but were merely concessions to the profane herd, unskilled in royal learning and unblessed with a kingly conscience.

Against that conviction, so firmly rooted in the royal breast, appeals to pity were vain, and attempts to shake it were perilous. It was his conscience that made Henry so dangerous. Men are tolerant of differences about things indifferent, but conscience makes bigots of us all; theological hatreds are proverbially bitter, and religious wars are cruel. Conscience made Sir Thomas More persecute, and glory in the persecution of heretics,[553] and conscience earned Mary her epithet "b.l.o.o.d.y". They were moved by conscientious belief in the Catholic faith, Henry by conscientious belief in himself; and conscientious scruples are none the less exigent for being reached by crooked paths.

[Footnote 550: _L. and P._, vi., 775. _Hoc volo, sic jubeo; stet pro ratione voluntas._ Luther quoted this line _a propos_ of Henry; see his preface to Robert Barnes' _Bekenntniss des Glaubens_, Wittemberg, 1540.]

[Footnote 551: _L. and P._, vi., 351; vii., 148.]

[Footnote 552: _Ibid._, iv., 6111.]

[Footnote 553: It has been denied that More either persecuted or gloried in the persecution of heretics; but he admits himself that he recommended corporal punishment in two cases and "it is clear that he underestimated his activity" (_D.N.B._, x.x.xviii., 436, and instances and authorities there cited).]

CHAPTER VIII. (p. 195)

THE POPE'S DILEMMA.

In February, 1527, in pursuance of the alliance with France, which Wolsey, recognising too late the fatal effects of the union with Charles, was seeking to make the basis of English policy, a French emba.s.sy arrived in England to conclude a marriage between Francis I.

and the Princess Mary. At its head was Gabriel de Grammont, Bishop of Tarbes; and in the course of his negotiations he is alleged to have first suggested those doubts of the validity of Henry's marriage, which ended in the divorce. The allegation was made by Wolsey three months later, and from that time down to our own day it has done duty with Henry's apologists as a sufficient vindication of his conduct. It is now denounced as an impudent fiction, mainly on the ground that no hint of these doubts occurs in the extant records of the negotiations.

But unfortunately we have only one or two letters relating to this diplomatic mission.[554] There exists, indeed, a detailed (p. 196) narrative, drawn up some time afterwards by Claude Dodieu, the French secretary; but the silence, on so confidential a matter, of a third party who was not present when the doubts were presumably suggested, proves little or nothing. Du Bellay, in 1528, reported to the French Government Henry's public a.s.sertion that Tarbes had mentioned these doubts;[555] the statement was not repudiated; Tarbes himself believed in the validity of Henry's case and was frequently employed in efforts to win from the Pope an a.s.sent to Henry's divorce. It is rather a strong a.s.sumption to suppose in the entire absence of positive evidence that Henry and Wolsey were deliberately lying. There is nothing impossible in the supposition that some such doubts were expressed; indeed, Francis I. had every reason to encourage doubts of Henry's marriage as a means of creating a breach between him and Charles V. In return for Mary's hand, Henry was endeavouring to obtain various advantages from Francis in the way of pensions, tribute and territory. Tarbes represented that the French King was so good a match for the English princess, that there was little need for further concession; to which Henry replied that Francis was no doubt an excellent match for his daughter, but was he free to marry? His precontract with Charles V.'s sister, Eleanor, was a complication which seriously diminished the value of Francis's offer; and the papal dispensation, which he hoped to obtain, might not be forthcoming (p. 197) or valid.[556] As a counter to this stroke, Tarbes may well have hinted that the Princess Mary was not such a prize as Henry made out.

Was the dispensation for Henry's own marriage beyond cavil? Was Mary's legitimacy beyond question? Was her succession to the English throne, a prospect Henry dangled before the Frenchman's eyes, so secure? These questions were not very new, even at the time of Tarbes's mission. The divorce had been talked about in 1514, and now, in 1527, the position of importance given to the Duke of Richmond was a matter of public comment, and inevitably suggested doubts of Mary's succession. There is no doc.u.mentary evidence that this argument was ever employed, beyond the fact that, within three months of Tarbes's mission, both Henry and Wolsey a.s.serted that the Bishop had suggested doubts of the validity of Henry's marriage.[557] Henry, however, does not say that Tarbes _first_ suggested the doubts, nor does Wolsey. The Cardinal declares that the Bishop objected to the marriage with the Princess Mary on the ground of these doubts; and some time later, when Henry explained his position to the Lord-Mayor and aldermen of London, he said, according to Du Bellay, that the scruple of conscience, which he had _long_ entertained, had terribly increased upon him since Tarbes had spoken of it.[558]

[Footnote 554: Dr. Gairdner (_Engl. Hist. Rev._, xi., 675) speaks of the "full diplomatic correspondence which we possess"; the doc.u.ments are these: (1) an undated letter (_L. and P._, iv., App. 105) announcing the amba.s.sador's arrival in England; (2) a letter of 21st March (iv., 2974); (3) a brief note of no importance to Dr. Brienne, dated 2nd April (_ibid._, 3012); (4) the formal commission of Francis I., dated 13th April (_ibid._, 3059); (5) the treaty of 30th April (3080); and (6) three brief notes from Turenne to Montmorenci, dated 6th, 7th and 24th April. From Tarbes himself there are absolutely no letters relating to his negotiations, and it would almost seem as though they had been deliberately destroyed. Our knowledge depends solely upon Dodieu's narrative.]

[Footnote 555: _L. and P._, iv., 4942.]

[Footnote 556: "There will be great difficulty,"

wrote Clerk, "_circa istud benedictum divortium_."

Brewer interpreted this as the earliest reference to Henry's divorce; it was really, as Dr. Ehses shows, in reference to the dissolution of the precontract between Francis I. and Charles V.'s sister Eleanor (_Engl. Hist. Rev._, xi., 676).]

[Footnote 557: _L. and P._, iv., 3231.]

[Footnote 558: _Ibid._, iv., 4231, 4942. Henry's own account of the matter was as follows: "For some years past he had noticed in reading the Bible the severe penalty inflicted by G.o.d on those who married the relicts of their brothers"; he at length "began to be troubled in his conscience, and to regard the sudden deaths of his male children as a Divine judgment. The more he studied the matter, the more clearly it appeared to him that he had broken a Divine law. He then called to counsel men learned in pontifical law, to ascertain their opinion of the dispensation. Some p.r.o.nounced it invalid. So far he had proceeded as secretly as possible that he might do nothing rashly" (_L. and P._, iv., 5156; _cf._ iv., 3641). Shakespeare, following Cavendish (p. 221), makes Henry reveal his doubts first to his confessor, Bishop Longland of Lincoln: "First I began in private with you, my Lord of Lincoln" ("Henry VIII.," Act II., sc. iv.); and there is contemporary authority for this belief. In 1532 Longland was said to have suggested a divorce to Henry ten years previously (_L. and P._, v., 1114), and Chapuys termed him "the princ.i.p.al promoter of these practices" (_ibid._, v., 1046); and in 1536 the northern rebels thought that he was the beginning of all the trouble (_ibid._, xi., 705); the same a.s.sertion is made in the anonymous "Life and Death of Cranmer" (_Narr.

of the Reformation_, Camden Soc., p. 219). Other persons to whom the doubtful honour was ascribed are Wolsey and Stafileo, Dean of the Rota at Rome (_L. and P._, iv., 3400; _Sp. Cal._, iv., 159).]

However that may be, before the Bishop's negotiations were (p. 198) completed the first steps had been taken towards the divorce, or, as Wolsey and Henry pretended, towards satisfying the King's scruples as to the validity of his marriage. Early in April, 1527, Dr. Richard Wolman was sent down to Winchester to examine old Bishop Fox on the subject.[559] The greatest secrecy was observed and none of the Bishop's councillors were allowed to be present. Other evidence was doubtless collected from various sources, and, on 17th May, a week after Tarbes's departure, Wolsey summoned Henry to appear before him to explain his conduct in living with his brother's widow.[560] Wolman was appointed promoter of the suit; Henry put in a justification, (p. 199) and, on 31st May, Wolman replied. With that the proceedings terminated.

In inst.i.tuting them Henry was following a precedent set by his brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk.[561] In very early days that n.o.bleman had contracted to marry Sir Anthony Browne's daughter, but for some reason the match was broken off, and he sought the hand of one Margaret Mortimer, to whom he was related in the second and third degrees of consanguinity; he obtained a dispensation, completed the marriage, and cohabited with Margaret Mortimer. But, like Henry VIII., his conscience or other considerations moved him to regard his marriage as sin, and the dispensation as invalid. He caused a declaration to that effect to be made by "the official of the Archdeacon of London, to whom the cognisance of such causes of old belongs," married Ann Browne, and, after her death, Henry's sister Mary. A marriage, the validity of which depended, like Henry's, upon a papal dispensation, and which, like Henry's, had been consummated, was declared null and void on exactly the same grounds as those upon which Henry himself sought a divorce, namely, the invalidity of the previous dispensation. On 12th May, 1528, Clement VII. issued a bull confirming Suffolk's divorce and p.r.o.nouncing ecclesiastical censures on all who called in question the Duke's subsequent marriages. That is precisely the course Henry wished to be followed. Wolsey was to declare the marriage invalid on the ground of the insufficiency of the papal dispensation; Henry might then marry whom he pleased; the Pope was to confirm the sentence, and censure all who should dispute the second marriage or the legitimacy of its possible issue.

[Footnote 559: _L. and P._, iv., 5291. This examination took place on 5th and 6th April.]

[Footnote 560: _Ibid._, iv., 3140.]

[Footnote 561: _L. and P._, iv., 5859; _cf._ iv., 737.]

Another precedent was also forced on Henry's mind. On 11th March, (p. 200) 1527, two months before Wolsey opened his court, a divorce was granted at Rome to Henry's sister Margaret, Queen of Scotland.[562] Her pretexts were infinitely more flimsy than Henry's own. She alleged a precontract on the part of her husband, Angus, which was never proved.

She professed to believe that James IV. had survived Flodden three years, and was alive when she married Angus. Angus had been unfaithful, but that was no ground for divorce by canon law; and she herself was living in shameless adultery with Henry Stewart, who had also procured a divorce to be free to marry his Queen. No objection was found at Rome to either of these divorces; but neither Angus nor Margaret Mortimer had an Emperor for a nephew; no imperial armies would march on Rome to vindicate the validity of their marriages, and Clement could issue his bulls without any fear that their justice would be challenged by the arms of powerful princes. Not so with Henry; while the secret proceedings before Wolsey were in progress, the world was shocked by the sack of Rome, and Clement was a prisoner in the hands of the Emperor's troops. There was no hope that a Pope in such a plight would confirm a sentence to the detriment of his master's aunt. "If the Pope," wrote Wolsey to Henry on receipt of the news, "be slain or taken, it will hinder the King's affairs not a little, which have hitherto been going on so well."[563] A little later he declared that, if Catherine repudiated his authority, it would be necessary to have the a.s.sent of the Pope or of the cardinals to the divorce. To obtain the former the Pope must be liberated; to secure the latter the cardinals must be a.s.sembled in France.[564] (p. 201)

[Footnote 562: _L. and P._, iv., 4130.]

[Footnote 563: _Ibid._, iv., 3147.]

[Footnote 564: _L. and P._, iv., 3311.]

To effect the Pope's liberation, or rather to call an a.s.sembly of cardinals in France during Clement's captivity, was the real object of the mission to France, on which Wolsey started in July. Such a body, acting under Wolsey's presidency and in the territories of the French King, was as likely to favour an attack upon the Emperor's aunt as the Pope in the hands of Charles's armies was certain to oppose it. Wolsey went in unparalleled splendour, not as Henry's amba.s.sador but as his lieutenant; and projects for his own advancement were, as usual, part of the programme. Louise of Savoy, the queen-mother of France, suggested to him that all Christian princes should repudiate the Pope's authority so long as he remained in captivity, and the Cardinal replied that, had the overture not been made by her, it would have been started by himself and by Henry.[565] It was rumoured in Spain that Wolsey "had gone into France to separate the Church of England and of France from the Roman, not merely during the captivity of the Pope and to effect his liberation, but for a perpetual division,"[566]

and that Francis was offering Wolsey the patriarchate of the two schismatic churches. To win over the Cardinal to the interest of Spain, it was even suggested that Charles should depose Clement and offer the Papacy to Wolsey.[567] The project of a schism was not found feasible; the cardinals at Rome were too numerous, and Wolsey only succeeded in gaining four, three French and one Italian, to join him in signing a protest repudiating Clement's authority so long as (p. 202) he remained in the Emperor's power. It was necessary to fall back after all on the Pope for a.s.sent to Henry's divorce, and the news that Charles had already got wind of the proceedings against Catherine made it advisable that no time should be lost. The Emperor, indeed, had long been aware of Henry's intentions; every care had been taken to prevent communication between Catherine and her nephew, and a plot had been laid to kidnap a messenger she was sending in August to convey her appeal for protection. All was in vain, for the very day after Wolsey's court had opened in May, Mendoza wrote to Charles that Wolsey "as the finishing stroke to all his iniquities, had been scheming to bring about the Queen's divorce"; and on the 29th of July, some days before Wolsey had any suspicion that a hint was abroad, Charles informed Mendoza that he had despatched Cardinal Quignon to Rome, to act on the Queen's behalf and to persuade Clement to revoke Wolsey's legatine powers.[568]

[Footnote 565: _Ibid._, iv., 3247, 3263.]

[Footnote 566: _Ibid._, iv., 3291.]

[Footnote 567: _Sp. Cal._, iii., 273.]