For Campeggio, the priesthood was only a second career. Until he was in his mid-thirties, he had been a teacher of law at Bologna university and a married man. Then in 1509 the death of his wife opened the way to a new life in the Papal service. His rise was rapid: priest in 1510, cardinal in 1517, Protector of England in 1524. But none of this made much difference to the man. He became neither a dévôt nor a Renaissance Prince of the Church. Instead, he remained the north-Italian bourgeois he had always been. He was devoted to the advancement of his numerous family of three sons and four brothers and countless remoter relations. He had a sincere love of money. And he was an excellent diplomat and deal-maker, with a negotiator’s characteristic indifference to principle. As far as he was concerned, differences were for splitting, chasms for bridging, while walls were always to be probed for their weakest spot. And the weakest spot in England, Campeggio decided, was likely to be Catherine herself.1
Despite his state of health, Campeggio got to work quickly, with a series of private, face-to-face meetings with the principals to assess the situation for himself. He began with Henry, who came to Bath House the day after the formal reception at Court on 22 October. The two were closeted together for four hours and had a frank exchange of views. By the end, Campeggio was in no doubt that Henry was immovable. The King had decided, Campeggio wrote to a friend in the Papal Court, that his marriage was invalid ‘and I believe that an Angel descending from heaven would be unable to persuade him otherwise’.
Campeggio then pulled his white rabbit from the hat: why not persuade Catherine to enter a nunnery? This would square the circle. It would leave her status and that of her daughter intact. And it would also, by a little stretching of the law, free Henry to remarry. Henry was delighted with the idea. Moreover, Campeggio reflected to his correspondent, there was much to recommend it from Catherine’s point of view. She would gain much and lose nothing–not even her marital rights, since Henry had already given up sleeping with his wife two years previously, ‘and will not return however things turn out’. Henry agreed that Campeggio should put the proposal to the Queen the following day, the 24th.
This time Campeggio was accompanied by Wolsey. Campeggio began with deliberate obliqueness. Pope Clement would of course offer Catherine justice, he said. Nevertheless, to avoid scandal, it was much better that the matter should not come to open trial. Instead, Catherine, ‘should, of her prudence, take some other course which would give general satisfaction and greatly benefit herself and others’. ‘I did not further explain the means to her,’ Campeggio told his correspondent, ‘in order to discover what she would demand.’
This was a proper opening gambit, polished in a thousand difficult negotiations. But Catherine, refusing to play the game by Campeggio’s rules, immediately named names. ‘She had heard’, she said, ‘that we were [come] to persuade her to enter some religion.’ Campeggio was taken aback at such bluntness but quickly shifted ground. ‘I did not deny it,’ he reported. Then he proceeded to try to sell her the idea. To take the veil, he informed Catherine, would ‘satisfy God, her own conscience, [and] the glory and fame of her name’; and it would preserve ‘her honours and temporal goods and the succession of her daughter’. There was also, he concluded, ‘the example of [Jeanne de Valois], the Queen of France that was, who did a similar thing, and who still lives in the greatest honour and reputation with God and all that kingdom’.2
Wolsey echoed Campeggio’s arguments, at greater length and more urgently.
The Cardinals, Wolsey and Campeggio, two of Europe’s most experienced and wily men of business, had been jumped into declaring their hands. Catherine, however, refused to show hers. Instead, protesting pathetically that she was ‘a woman, a foreigner and friendless’, she said she would once more demand ‘indifferent’ counsel from the King. ‘Then she would give us audience.’
The pathos of Catherine’s situation is real. But it should not disguise the fact that she had just issued an ultimatum. Until she got the advisers she wanted from Henry, she would not give her reply to Campeggio’s proposal, and the best hope for a quick solution to the Great Matter would remain in suspense.
She saw Henry on the 25th to reiterate her demand for ‘indifferent’ counsel. It was something which Henry had hitherto resisted absolutely. The Great Matter touched the English succession too closely, he claimed, for any foreigner to be allowed to deal in it. Catherine put her case once more, and this time Henry yielded. She was assigned seven English counsel, two Flemings, and ‘a Spaniard, Luis Vives, whom she herself nominates’. Her ultimatum had worked.
Having got her way on the issue of foreign counsel, Catherine became submissive once more and asked Henry’s permission to confess to Campeggio. His heart must have leapt. Was she about to accept the bait and become a nun? Why else would she wish to see the Cardinal in private? For a moment, I guess, Henry thought that his troubles were over. He gave her leave with alacrity.
Catherine came to see Campeggio at 9 o’clock the following morning, the 26th. The visit lasted a long time, because she had so much to say, beginning with ‘her first arrival in this kingdom’ and continuing to ‘the present’. But the principal matter was her virginity.
She affirmed, on her conscience, that from 14 November, when she was married to the late Prince Arthur, to 2 April following when he died, she did not sleep with him more than seven nights, and that she remained intact and uncorrupted by him, as she came from her mother’s womb.
In making this solemn affirmation, Catherine was addressing the Pope through his legate and the world through the Pope. So she not only gave Campeggio permission to break the seal of the confessional and inform Clement VII of what she had said, she positively encouraged him. But England was a different matter. Here she had to be more cautious. She said ‘she would declare her intentions in proper place and time’ and, meanwhile, asked that Campeggio swear his secretaries to silence.
But what, Campeggio wanted to know, of his suggestion that she should take the veil? Would she consider that? Her answer was crushing.
She assured me she would never do so; that she intended to live and die in the estate of matrimony, into which God had called her, and that she would always be of that opinion and never change it.
‘She repeated this so many times and so determinately and deliberately’, Campeggio reported, ‘that I am convinced she will act accordingly.’
For once, this man of so many fluent words was at a loss for a single one. ‘Nothing more occurred to me [to say]’, he wrote, ‘and she left me.’ He was impressed and exasperated at the same time. ‘I have always judged her to be a prudent lady, and now more so.’ Nevertheless, he lamented ‘her obstinacy in not accepting this sound counsel’. It ‘does not much please me’, he ended querulously.3
But Catherine was no longer in the business of pleasing him or any other man. The weakest spot in the wall had turned out to be stronger than Campeggio had thought.