Windsor Castle. Late July 1531
Catherine was alone, or as alone as one could be in a castle with thirty ladies-in-waiting and 170 servants. Henry had gone, but she did not know he had gone for good. Nor, perhaps, did he. His cowardly, surreptitious exit offered hope. Anne Boleyn may have been the only corner of the triangle with a clear picture of the future in her mind.
Henry saw what he was doing as a form of punishment. If the pope was threatening to call him to Rome, it was because his wife had asked him to. Catherine, in other words, was the one challenging his new-found idea of England’s traditional kingship and, in Henry’s mind, that meant he could now hit back without remorse. The queen, Henry informed the papal nuncio later on, was rude and disobedient. ‘Since his holiness (Pope Clement) chooses to consider her my legitimate wife, it is evident that the right of punishing her for the rudeness with which she has treated – and is daily treating – me belongs exclusively to me,’ he said. If Catherine was going to play the submissive, loyal wife then he would scrape back the gloss of husbandly gallantry and reveal a basic truth of their marriage. While she was his, she was his to punish.
Catherine was not sure how long he planned to punish her for. Nor was her friend Chapuys, who spent a further four months speculating about when, or whether, she would be called back to court. Perhaps, to begin with, Catherine did not even mind that much. Henry had, after all, been absent before. There were advantages that came with Anne’s departure. Princess Mary, for example, could come to Windsor Castle. Catherine, at last, spent precious time with her daughter. ‘She will make her forget the pain of the king’s absence,’ said Chapuys. They rode and hunted through the fine, long summer days. They also talked. There were serious matters to be discussed. One of them faced divorce. The other faced being tarred with the brush of bastardy.
The habits of matrimony proved difficult to destroy. For more than two decades Catherine and Henry had followed a regular system of communicating when apart. Every three days they sent a messenger who carried a token, a counter-sign, as proof of identity. A few days after Henry had left Windsor Catherine gave her messenger a letter and the token (perhaps a jewel).
In her message, Catherine asked after Henry’s health and told him that she wished he had let her say adieu. She was sad without him, but knew it was for him to order and for her to obey. Henry treated the messenger with gravity. He would consult his councillors. Then he called the messenger back and unleashed his anger. He cared not for her adieux or enquiries after his health. He had no wish to console her as she had annoyed him in a thousand ways, humiliating him with the call to Rome and refusing the advice of his councillors. He poured scorn on her nephew, the emperor, and ordered her to stop sending him messengers.
Catherine defied his ban and sent a message back. Forget my nephew, she said. God will decide who is right. Henry found defiance confusing when it was masked, as it had been earlier, as subservience. The latter stroked his kingliness, his sense of chivalry and his manliness. That is why it had worked so well these past four years. Catherine’s outright defiance, however, enraged and emboldened him. He knew he was right, he replied, because so many people had told him so. His own expertise on canon law was now universally recognised, or so, in a moment of revelatory hubris, he proclaimed. Then he sent another messenger. He planned to go hunting around Windsor and did not want to see her. She must leave.
Catherine was sent to The More, one of Wolsey’s former houses in Hertfordshire. This was insult added to injury. First her husband had gone off without her, now she was being turned out of her house by Anne Boleyn. Her daughter, to make things worse, was sent away to Richmond. Their days together were over. Henry wanted Catherine to suffer, and soften. Her ‘purgatory’, as she liked to call it, was just beginning. Catherine would never see her daughter again.
Even then, she could not bring herself to criticise her husband directly, at least not in writing. That would have been too dangerous. He was a good and virtuous man at heart, she insisted in one of the deluge of letters she began sending to her nephew Charles. The pope, by delaying judgement, had allowed her enemies in the Boleyn camp ‘to take him prisoner’. Henry was like a Spanish bull, she explained, pricked and goaded into action by their lances. Catherine’s own supporters, meanwhile, were terrified. ‘They have scared them so much that they no longer dare speak,’ she complained. She had already noticed how the waverers were being drawn over by royal offerings ‘like hawks to the lure’. Catherine felt humiliated. She struggled to hold back the hyperbole. Surely no Christian had ever suffered more than she. It was enough to kill ten people, she insisted.
Mario Savorgnano, a Venetian who saw her at The More, noted that, although the king made sure she had few visitors, there were still more than two hundred people in her court. ‘In the morning we saw her majesty dine: she had some thirty maids of honour standing round the table, and about fifty who performed its service,’ he reported. ‘Her majesty is not of tall stature, rather small. If not handsome, she is not ugly; she is somewhat stout and has always a smile on her countenance.’
Wolsey’s building programme had turned The More into a grand, modern country house with long galleries and bridges extending over the moat into the privy gardens. The broad moat that now surrounded her, however, must have felt as if it were there to keep her prisoner. She told Chapuys that she would rather be publicly locked up in the Tower of London and planned to tell the king as much. There, at least, ‘her misfortune would be immediately notorious to all the world’.
Three months after abandoning his wife, Henry decided to test Catherine’s will. Had Catherine’s Spanish stubbornness finally weakened? He sent four of his most loyal and strong-willed men to find out. It was, in its way, a repeat of the visit by the thirty councillors though his men had obviously decided they needed to vary their strategy if they were to have any chance of success. She had defeated the thirty visitors to Greenwich with her womanly protestations of innocence and subservience to both the king and God. This time she told them just as sweetly that she was defending not just herself but her daughter. She had also finally realised, to her great sadness, that the king was not ruled by his conscience but by passion. Henry too, she implied, needed saving – from himself. Then, as Catherine’s court of ladies and gentlemen looked on in astonishment, Henry’s envoys threw themselves down on their knees before her. This was their new tactic. They would be the supplicants this time. The peace of the kingdom and the king’s honour, not to mention her daughter’s welfare and her own comfort, depended on her decision, they told her. This was not just begging. It was also, with its unsubtle threat to Mary, menace.
Few people, however, could outdo Catherine when it came to supplication. The queen sank dramatically to her own knees and raised her voice. They had spoken quietly to her, but she wanted to make absolutely sure that everyone could hear what she had to say. Her ladies and gentlemen listened avidly. She began pleading with Henry’s envoys. For God’s sake and out of respect for Christ’s blood and suffering, could they please persuade Henry to return to his lawful wife, she begged them. If he refused, could he not allow God, through the pope, to decide what must be done? So she went on, the wronged woman begging her husband’s councillors to put him back on the right track. By the time she had finished there was barely a dry eye in the room.
Her visitors recovered their tongues, and their malice, shortly before they left. If she hated The More, the king had told them, he could always move her to a smaller house or to an abbey. Catherine’s reply contained its own, not so veiled threat. She would go wherever the king, her master, sent her. If he ordered her to be burnt at the stake, she would obey. This was the ultimate defiance. If Henry wanted to make England’s queen a martyr, then he could go ahead. She was ready to burn.
Catherine had crossed a line. She would be queen or they could kill her. It was very clear and very simple. Only God could take away her title and He, obviously, was on her side. For Catherine, this was both dangerous and liberating. In some ways she was returning to the dramatic, obstinate misery of her youth, when she had proclaimed that she would rather die than leave England unwed. She was, however, no longer an immature young girl. Age had made her more, not less, determined. Not even the threats to Mary would move her from now on. If her daughter had to become a martyr too, that would be God’s will – and her husband’s.
Catherine’s outward security hid her inner pain. Writing to her nephew Charles shortly before Christmas 1531, she signed her letter: ‘At The More, without my husband, without having offended him in any way’.
That Christmas was sombre for Henry as well. Even Edward Hall, his loyal chronicler, admitted that Christmas and the New Year gift-giving that marked the arrival of 1532 were the worst for years. ‘All men said there was no mirth in that Christmas because the queen and the ladies were absent,’ he reported. To make things worse, Henry suddenly found himself presented, on New Year’s Day, with a beautifully crafted gold cup – a present from his banished wife. It was a piece of deliberate provocation on Catherine’s part. He had renewed his ban on messages but forgotten to tell her not to observe the custom of giving New Year’s presents. Catherine saw an opportunity to publicly reassert her matrimonial status. She was still his wife, so he would get a wife’s gift. Henry narrowly avoided the embarrassment of having it presented to him in front of Anne and the rest of the court. e angrily ordered it taken away. For the first time, Henry did not buy New Year’s presents for Catherine or her ladies (while Anne got a room full of tapestries and a bed covered in cloth of gold and silver, crimson satin and embroidery). Catherine’s own haul of gifts was the worst for two decades, as Henry had also banned his gentlemen from sending her anything.
John Fisher, Anne Boleyn’s bête noire, remained steadfast, despite further threats against his life. He vowed that, even if he met a hundred thousand deaths, he would still defend Catherine. These were dangerous times, however, and a certain amount of subterfuge was needed if he was to help Catherine. He told Chapuys, with whom he was in regular contact, never to acknowledge in public that they knew one another. Chapuys was not to be offended if he ignored him when they were in the same room. He obviously did not want to be arrested and accused of fraternising with Henry’s enemies, as Wolsey had been. Another senior clergyman, Henry’s cousin Reginald Pole, turned down the archbishopric of York because of Catherine. He asked, instead, to be allowed to go abroad – warning Henry that, if he stayed, he would be obliged to defend the queen in parliament.
The church, increasingly squeezed by Henry, began to protest. One preacher at St Paul’s openly denounced the divorce in March 1532, and was arrested afterwards. Henry apparently then issued orders for preachers to come out in his defence. When one did so in the diocese of Salisbury, however, he was booed and hissed by the women. The forces of law and order were required to restrain them from attacking him.
Even Hall, a natural Henry supporter, had to admit that popular opinion was on Catherine’s side. ‘The Lady Anne Boleyn was so much in the king’s favour that the common people which knew not the king’s true intent said and thought that the absence of the queen was only for her sake, which was not true,’ he said.
Henry even discovered that a handful of people were ready to defy him to his face. On Easter Day in 1532 the provincial of the Observant Friars, William Peto, preached in front of Henry at the chapel that this order of largely incorruptible Franciscans had beside the palace at Greenwich. The friars were Catherine’s favourite men of the cloth, and her relationship with those at Greenwich was specially close. Unbounded affection and false counsel, Peto warned in his sermon, were bad for kings. These were unsubtle references to Henry’s ‘unbounded’ desire for Anne Boleyn and to those who encouraged him to believe he deserved a divorce. When Henry asked afterwards what he had meant, Peto did not shrink from explaining. The divorce, he said, was endangering the crown. All of England, he added, was against it. Henry tried to counter Peto by putting up his own preacher in their church soon afterwards, while the former was out of the country. The other friars reacted angrily and the preacher’s claim that all theologians backed Henry was greeted with an outraged rebuttal, there and then, by their warden. The friars privately told Chapuys that they, too, were willing to die for Catherine. A serious rift in the church, which would have bloody consequences, was beginning to appear.
Henry began to employ a heavy hand. His increasingly influential new councillor Thomas Cromwell was already keeping an eye out for dissenters. He kept a close watch on the Observant riars, and even had a spy amongst them. Two friars were banished to far-off monasteries. Thomas Abel was locked up in the ower of London for the next eight months. Orders reportedly went out to find all copies of his book rebutting Henry’s arguments.
Some in the church began to sense that Henry might one day start suppressing monasteries. The ever-vigilant Cromwell discovered that the prior of one London friary had already claimed that Henry might eventually be known not as defensor fidei, Defender of the Faith, but as destructor fidei, Destroyer of the Faith. The loose-tongued prior also claimed that the next time the king’s fool performed one of his favorite tricks by falling off the back of his horse, he should explain that Henry, too, was set for a fall.
Peto was right that the country was, generally, against the divorce – though few seemed ready to stir themselves to action. Already, in late 1531, the Venetian envoy Ludovico Falier had returned home to declare: ‘The queen being so loved and respected, the people already commence murmuring; and were the faction to produce a leader … it is certain that the nation would take up arms for the queen.’ Savorgnano, for his part, came away with the firm impression that the people of England were on Catherine’s side. ‘There is now living with him [Henry] a young woman of noble birth, though many say of bad character, whose will is law to him,’ he said.
He is expected to marry her, should the divorce take place, which it is supposed will not be effected, as the peers of the realm, both spiritual and temporal, and the people are opposed to it; nor during the present queen’s life will they have any other queen in the kingdom.
In May 1532, as if to prove Savorgnano right, two members of parliament stood up to complain about the king asking for money to fortify the Scottish border. The Scots, they said, never did anything without a foreign ally. If the king just took back his wife and treated her properly, thereby pacifying the emperor, there would be nothing to worry about – and the danger that Englishmen would start fighting amongst themselves over the divorce would also be averted. A member of the Commons called Temse called on the house to demand that Henry ‘take the queen again into his company’ in order to avoid ‘bastardising the Lady Mary, the king’s only child, and diverse other inconveniences’.
Then Sir Thomas More, unable to bear the moral conflict of obeying Henry while the latter pursued the divorce and asserted his supremacy over the church, resigned as chancellor in May 1532. ‘There has never been, nor ever will be such a fine man in the position,’ observed Chapuys. Even Dr Benet, one of Henry’s team in Rome, privately let Catherine know of his shame at what he was being asked to do. He was not alone. Other English ambassadors also privately recognised that justice was on Catherine’s side. The senior nobles, a generally conservative group who were offended by the upstart Anne, watched nervously. Henry’s sister Mary, who had been Catherine’s companion at many of the great events of her father-in-law’s court, was amongst those who most disliked her brother’s fiancée. Her husband, the duke of Suffolk, had already been heard saying it was time the king was persuaded to drop his marriage plans. Remarks that Mary made against Anne then sparked a sudden burst of violence at the Sanctuary in Westminster. One of the Suffolk family’s principal gentlemen died in the fracas. Her husband had to promise to restrain his people, though these later plotted revenge on the killers.
The marchioness of Exeter, Gertrude Courtenay, also began to pass information to Chapuys on the moves against Catherine at court. When the young marquess of Dorset had been temporarily banished from court in 1531, Catherine saw Anne’s secret hand at work. She was sure that her friendship with him was to blame. Given that the duke of Norfolk’s wife had also expressed concern, it was clear that the greatest families of England were increasingly disturbed by Boleyn’s ascendancy. Chapuys was soon claiming that several high people had secretly told him that, should the pope pass sentence declaring Catherine’s marriage valid, they would ensure (presumably by force of arms) that the sentence was obeyed. Chapuys delightedly passed each item of anti-Boleyn gossip on to the emperor.
As the king rode north with Anne Boleyn on an extended hunting trip in July 1532, the royal entourage was reportedly hooted and hissed at. Women’s voices called out insults against Anne, Chapuys reported. After several days Henry ordered the party to turn back. This may well have been because he and Boleyn were preparing to meet the king of France in an attempt to win his support for their plans. Henry could have had little doubt by then, however, that Catherine’s support ran deep. When he returned south, perhaps to assuage Anne, he called in the officials involved in coronation protocol. It was time, he said, to begin preparations for Anne’s big day.