Catherine’s coup in 1527 with the Felipez mission had internationalised the Divorce; it would take Henry and Wolsey almost eighteen months of frantic effort to repatriate it. She had also torn the veil of secrecy off the Great Matter and it could never be put back. Things were out in the open, and when the case next came to trial it would be in open court. The tribunal would be a stage, towards which the eyes of all Europe would turn. And Catherine would give the performance of her life.
But, meanwhile, she had to wait and to see. What would King Henry do? How would Pope Clement respond? Who would take her side and who her husband’s? She was not passive, of course. But, as Henry was the aggressor, the initiative belonged to him. The strain, the insecurity began to tell. Above all, she suffered bitter pangs at her husband’s personal rejection of her. That autumn, she found a confidant in Juan Luis Vives.
Vives had left England in May 1527 to spend the summer in the Netherlands. He returned, as agreed, in late September, ‘to teach the most illustrious lady Princess the Latin language, and such precepts of wisdom as would arm her against any adverse fortune’. Instead, he found another more in need of his services as a comforter: Mary’s mother, Catherine herself.1
Catherine took the first step. ‘Troubled and afflicted with this controversy that had arisen about her marriage, [she] began to unfold…this her calamity’ to Vives ‘as her compatriot and [one who] used the same language’. It was probably the first time she had been able to talk freely about the matter in her native tongue to an intelligent and sympathetic listener. The emotional release proved too much. She broke down and cried like any other woman.
She wept over her destiny, that she should find him, whom she loved far more than herself, so alienated from her that he thought of marrying another; and this affected her with a grief the more intense as her love for him was the more ardent.
Vives offered her Job’s comfort: God chastised those whom He loved. ‘Who can blame me’, Vives demanded, ‘that I listened to a miserable and afflicted woman? that I soothed her by discourse and conversation?’
But the talk soon turned from these pious generalities to the more dangerous topic of the Great Matter itself. ‘As we went on, we spoke more warmly, and proceeded to the discussion and examination of the cause.’ Catherine told Vives that she was unable to find out what Henry had decided to do next, ‘for it was concealed from all excepting very few’. But the ‘report and common opinion was…that the cause was remitted to Rome’. She was desperately anxious that her case should not go unheard in Rome, as it had threatened to do in Wolsey’s court at York Place. So, once again, she turned to the Emperor. Her agent lay to hand: she would use Vives as her go-between. He was commanded ‘to go to the Emperor’s ambassador, and to ask him, on her behalf, to write to request the Emperor that he would deal with the Pope that she might…be heard before his Holiness decided on her cause’. Ambassador Mendoza promised Vives that he would write as Catherine wished.2
Mendoza was as good as his word. On 26 October he wrote in unusually blunt terms to his master. ‘The divorce is more talked of than ever,’ he reported. ‘If therefore the Emperor really has the Queen’s honour and peace of mind at heart, orders should be sent to Rome for a trusty messenger to bring us the Pope’s decision.’ Catherine had also sent the ambassador, probably by Vives as well, an appeal in her own name to her nephew. Mendoza explained that he was sending Catherine’s letter separately, ‘that it may be safe in case of [this] being intercepted’.3
The precaution worked and Catherine’s letter reached its destination. It also shows that her claims of ignorance need to be taken with a pinch of salt. Her particular fears, she explained to Charles, arose from a meeting summoned for 15 November, when ‘all the lawyers of the kingdom shall meet together and discuss whether I am or am not his lawful wife’. Their opinions, she continued, were to be collected together and forwarded to Pope Clement to serve as the basis for his decision.
Catherine, indeed, was extraordinarily well informed. The 15 November meeting, which followed up an earlier discussion at Hampton Court in October, was to take soundings on the ‘King’s Book’. This was an elaborately referenced position-paper, setting out Henry’s case. It had been assembled that summer by a team of theologians and canon lawyers working with Henry’s active participation and under his personal direction. The work had proceeded in strict secrecy; likewise the discussion-seminars. The Queen can only have heard about the November meeting from one of those summoned.4
This pattern would repeat itself. For the Divorce was a parting of the ways for the political establishment of Tudor England. Some remained true to Henry through thick and thin. But others found that they were drawn, inexorably and against their better interest, to Catherine. For some it was a matter of high, conscientious principle; for others, there were mundane reasons, such as family ties to the Queen’s Household or the ancient, semi-feudal loyalty of servant to mistress. Those who sided with the Queen included many whom Henry regarded as his closest friends and advisers. Only the bravest of them dared act openly for her. But many betrayed Henry in secret by a whispered word or a carefully discarded paper: his ambassador in France; the Clerk of the Privy Council; one of his key agents in Rome. The result was that the King could do nothing in his Great Matter without Catherine knowing, and without Catherine broadcasting it to the world. The walls of his private apartments seemed to have ears. Was he safe in the Council Chamber? Or the confessional? Could he trust even Wolsey?
A cancer of suspicion and paranoia had planted itself in the King’s mind. It would grow until it destroyed the whole political world of his youth–that carefree world of jousts and revels which he and Catherine had built together.
One of the first victims was Richard Pace, scholar, gossip and the sharpest pen in early Tudor England. The strain of serving two masters–Wolsey and Henry–had already driven him to a sort of nervous breakdown. He gave up politics and went back to the world of scholarship in which he had begun. The rest-cure worked and he recovered. But he could not escape his past, for the Divorce had now politicised scholarship itself. In the earliest days of the controversy, Pace was a strong supporter of Henry and recruited, for the King, Robert Wakefield, the greatest Hebrew scholar in England. But in the summer of 1527, Pace underwent a conversion and, swinging from one extreme to the other, became a violent partisan of Catherine.5
As usual with him, it was all or nothing. He spoke ‘to the King touching this matter of the Queen and the government of the Cardinal’ (Wolsey was widely blamed in the Queen’s circle for instigating the Divorce). And he went beyond words to action. The result was pure cloak and dagger. Pace got in touch with Mendoza via a friendly English merchant. The message was: ‘if he only would send one of his servants to speak with him [the Emperor’s] interests might be served’. Mendoza duly sent one of his staff, who spoke English. Mendoza must meet with him at once, Pace insisted, ‘and named the Church of St Paul’s as the place of meeting least likely to arouse suspicion’. Wisely, ambassador Mendoza did not keep the rendezvous. But his member of staff had been tailed to Pace’s house. On 25 October Pace was arrested and sent to the Tower. He knew too much.6
The following February, Wolsey was able to make a wider trawl through the ranks of the Queen’s supporters. At the end of January, England joined France in declaring war on Charles V. High words were exchanged but no gunfire, since neither side actually wanted conflict. But the phoney war gave the opportunity to break diplomatic immunity. In Spain, Charles V carried out a mass detention of ambassadors; in England, Wolsey ordered the lightning arrest of Mendoza. It was done under cover of a summons to Court. But instead of being taken to the palace, the ambassador was led to ‘a house which he did not know’ and told that, unless he handed over the key to the strong-box containing his papers, it would be broken open. Mendoza managed to slip the key to his Secretary, who got back to the Embassy before the guards and removed and secreted safely ‘all the letters and ciphers relating to the Emperor’s affairs’.7
Others were less lucky. A week later, Sir John Russell informed the King, as instructed, that Wolsey had ‘examined Francisco Felipez and Vives in the gentlest manner he could without force, thinking that this was more to the King’s honour’. Felipez, whom Henry had personally dismissed from his post in the Queen’s Household after his return from Spain the previous autumn, can hardly have been surprised. But Vives took a tone of high moral indignation in the written statement which was wrung out of him. He had heard, he began, ‘great complaints of the Emperor, that he had violated the law of nations [jus gentium] by taking the ambassadors of many nations’. But his own treatment at the hands of Wolsey was equally, Vives insisted, an offence against the laws of decency and friendship. ‘This is not less an outrage to compel anyone to divulge what was secretly entrusted to him, especially a servant trusted by a mistress whose fidelity to her husband is undoubted.’ Not that he or Catherine had done anything to be ashamed of. ‘But the example is a bad one, for a great part of the intercourse of life rests on the faith of secrecy, which, if destroyed, everyone will be on guard against a companion as against an enemy.’8
Vives, alas, was right, in both his analysis and his prophecy. The sanctity of private conversations, even the security of one’s own thoughts, were also to be among the victims of the Great Matter. And the government soon became less nice about the means it used to extract information about them.
Meanwhile, Wolsey had at last made some headway in Rome on the Great Matter. Ever since he had aborted his own court at York Place, he and the King had been trying to get the Pope’s agreement for the case to be heard again in England on a more regular footing. But on what terms? There were two methods by which a Pope could authorise such delegated jurisdiction. The first was known as a ‘general commission’. This simply instructed named judges to investigate a case, deliver a verdict and carry out whatever consequential action was necessary–for example, to separate the spouses of a marriage which had been found to be invalid. The disadvantage of such a commission from Henry’s point of view was that it left the outcome of the trial dangerously open; that the verdict was subject to appeal to Rome; and that the case could be ‘revoked’ or recalled even before a verdict had been reached. So a general commission would offer Henry neither the certainty he needed nor any guarantee of the ‘right’ verdict. This led his advisers to propose instead the use of the other form of Papal authorisation known as a ‘decretal commission’. This was an altogether more restrictive document. It set out the law on the question, leaving the judges only to discover the facts and deliver their verdict accordingly. The advantages from Henry’s point of view were obvious. Provided the statement of law was framed appropriately, the verdict could be guaranteed. It would be like ticking the boxes on a form.
The decision rested with Giulio de’ Medici, who had reigned as Pope Clement VII since 1523. He was a wily Florentine, who turned prevarication into an art form. He would talk, at inordinate length, without ever reaching a conclusion. And he knew every word, in mellifluous Italian or fluent Latin, apart from ‘yes’ and ‘no’. His other dominant characteristic was a certain timorousness. But then he had plenty to be afraid of. The Lutheran heresy, which abusively rejected his power as Pope, was making great strides in Germany and threatened to take most of the country into schism. The troops of the Emperor Charles V had not only sacked his capital but threatened his hold over the Papacy’s territories in central Italy. His family, the Medici, had been driven out of their hereditary city-state of Florence, which they had ruled as dukes. Now Wolsey was threatening him as well and telling him that, if Henry were not enabled to get rid of Catherine, England would go the way of Germany.
Clement was aware of the risk and anxious to do what he could for Henry. Indeed, bearing in mind that England was far away and Charles V’s troops near at hand, he was not ungenerous. He was also hoping that something would either turn up (like a French victory in Italy) or go away (like Henry’s infatuation with his new woman) to let him off the hook. So Clement was playing for time. He would offer Henry almost everything he wanted in the pre-trial commissions, but not quite. And he would stretch out the negotiations as long as he could.
The result was a policy which led to Clement being vilified by both sides in turn: first by Catherine and her supporters, since he seemed to be offering Henry too much, and later by Henry, since he took back what he had given. Clement shrugged. He had to keep afloat both those leaky ships of state, the Papacy and the Medici dukedom. And if that meant he lost England, so be it. ‘I do’, he said to one of the English agents in a rare moment of frankness, ‘consider the ruin that hangs over me; I repent what I have done. [But] if heresies arise, is it my fault? My conscience acquits me.’9
It would be hard to think of a man more alien to Catherine, with her hard-edged Spanish certainties. The Papacy, Catherine proclaimed, should stand firmly on the Rock which is Christ’. It should be a fortress, proud and immovable. But Pope Clement, unlike Queen Catherine, had seen what happened to proud buildings in warfare. All over Rome and the Papal states were shattered palaces and castles and monasteries, roofless, windowless and gutted, their treasures pillaged and their inhabitants murdered or raped or held hostage. Better by far, Clement thought, to lie low, to show the wisdom of the serpent and the meekness of the dove and to survive.10
But Catherine would never understand such supineness, as she saw it, and she would never understand why the Pope seemed so anxious to please her husband. For Clement willingly granted a general commission for the trial of Henry’s marriage. He was also happy to follow Wolsey’s suggestion and appoint Lorenzo Campeggio as the English Cardinal’s fellow-judge and legate. Campeggio was Cardinal-Protector of England at Rome and absentee Bishop of Salisbury. His appointment led to an obvious charge of bias, in that both judges were English bishops and took the King of England’s shilling. Catherine and her supporters pressed the charge vigorously. Clement ignored them, since he knew that Campeggio’s true loyalties lay to the Papal service, in which most of his extended family had made their careers and fortunes.
But even Clement baulked at the decretal commission. Its blatant bias to Henry was certain to offend Charles V mortally. It also offended Clement’s own sense of justice. But finally Clement was brought to grant this too, though only on strict conditions: the decretal commission was never to leave Campeggio’s hands; it was to be shown only to Wolsey and Henry; and if possible, it was never to be used. Even so, he regretted his action immediately. He would have given one of his fingers not to have signed it, he said.11
By now it was August 1528. After endless delays, real and diplomatic, Campeggio had begun his journey to England. The first leg, from the port of Tarquinia, fifty miles north-west of Rome, to Provence, was by sea. But thereafter he had to cross France by land. Here his progress was slow–and agonisingly so, because of his gout. Riding even his slow-paced mule was intolerable; instead he had to be carried in a horse litter. And he could stand this for no more than a few hours a day. By 14 September he had only reached Paris and he did not reach Calais till the end of the month. The journey had taken nine weeks. But he was about to arrive in England at last.12
And at last the curious, eighteen-month-long armistice in the Great Matter would be broken. Since the abrupt ending of the York Place tribunal, direct hostilities had been suspended. Instead, each side had used the time to develop their own arguments and to probe the weaknesses of their opponents. Not surprisingly, since they were talking only to themselves, each had come to the conclusion that they had got the better of the other. Now their confidence would be put to the test.
We know the state of mind of the two parties on the eve of battle thanks to a conversation between Wolsey and Catherine’s Almoner, Dr Robert Shorton. After beginning with other matters, Wolsey had quickly steered the talk to the Great Matter. ‘What tidings had he heard of late in the Court?’ Wolsey asked. ‘None’, Shorton replied, ‘but that it was much bruited that a Legate should come hither into England.’ And what, Wolsey continued, did ‘the Queen [think] of his coming?’ ‘She was fully persuaded and believed that his coming was only for the decision of the cause of matrimony depending between her and the King’s Highness,’ Shorton answered.
This gave Wolsey his opening. Swearing Shorton to secrecy by everything he held sacred–‘his fidelity, his oath and sub sigillo confessionis [under the seal of confession]’–he pumped him on the Queen’s intentions. Shorton made no bones about replying, probably because Catherine had spoken plainly enough herself and had not greatly cared who heard her. ‘He heard the Queen oft say, that if in this cause she might attain and enjoy her natural defence and justice, she distrusted nothing but that [she should win].’ She had four reasons. First, because ‘it was in the eyes of God most plain and evident that she was never [carnally] known of Prince Arthur’. Second, because neither of the judges was competent to try the case, since both were the King’s subjects and appointed at his instance. Third, because she had no access to ‘indifferent counsel [impartial legal advice]’ in England. And fourth, because ‘she had in Spain two Bulls, the one be[ar]ing later date than the other, but both of such efficacy and strength, as should soon remove all objections and cavillations [nit-picking objections] to the infringing of this matrimony’.
Shorton’s testimony is important. Often, Catherine is presented as taking a simple, untutored stand on right and conscience alone. She would make such a stand, and very effective it was too. But, as we can see from Shorton’s report, there was nothing spontaneous or untutored about it. Instead, it was part of a carefully considered legal strategy. Catherine, like Henry, had been doing her homework. She was as intimately involved in the niceties of argument about the case as he, and just as much in command of the details. And she had rather better ammunition.
This was clear from Wolsey’s response. First, he blustered about Catherine herself. Her statement, he protested, was so full of ‘undiscreet, ungodly purposes and sayings’ that Wolsey doubted whether she was of ‘such perfection [or] virtue’ as he had once thought. Then he began a point-by-point refutation of her arguments–on her virginity, on the partiality of the judges and on her lack of access to ‘indifferent’, that is, in effect, overseas counsel. He went on at inordinate length, especially on the issue of the consummation of her first marriage with Arthur. The Spanish ambassadors, he claimed, ‘did send the sheets they lay in, spotted with blood, into Spain, in full testimony and proof thereof ’. But on the fourth head of Catherine’s case, the two Spanish Bulls, this matador of debate said nothing. Was it because he had nothing to say?13
Campeggio arrived in London on 9 October and, more dead than alive, was lodged at Bath House. Bath House, then the town house of the bishops of Bath and later the residence of the earls of Arundel, lay just beyond the Temple, with pleasant gardens reaching down to the Thames. Thence, it was a short journey downstream by boat to Henry’s city palace of Bridewell. On the 21st, Henry and Catherine took up residence in Bridewell. On the 22nd, Campeggio, accompanied by Wolsey, was formally received at Court, and the King ‘came out to the very foot of the staircase to meet them’. First there was a grand public ceremony, in which Charles V was denounced as a tyrant and the common enemy of the Pope and Christendom. Then the King and the two Cardinals, Campeggio and Wolsey, retired to the King’s Privy Chamber, where they were closeted ‘a long time together’. The pre-trial negotiations had begun.14
Catherine was about to experience the politics of the Papal Court at first hand. And, it turned out, they rested not on a rock but in quicksand.