Old habits die hard, as do old marriages. Catherine and Henry had been married for almost twenty years. Recently they had grown apart emotionally. But a whole network of connexions and assumptions remained. There was their shared love for their daughter Mary. And there were the little routines of half a lifetime of shared living. Catherine made Henry’s shirts (and, to his dying day, he never lost his taste for the black-thread embroidery round the collar and cuffs that was known as Spanish work). When they were apart, they exchanged messages every few days, as they had done since their first separation in the French war of 1513. To authenticate the messages, they used secret tokens, known only to each other. Breaking these ties would take years of mounting pain and bitterness–bitterness on Henry’s part and pain largely on Catherine’s.1
Even Court ritual drove them together. The Court calendar revolved round the ‘Days of Estate’. These were the main feast days of the Church which were also marked by high ceremony at Court. The King and Queen wore matching robes, whose colour depended on the occasion (purple or scarlet for celebration, blue for mourning). They processed to the Chapel Royal. They heard mass in their adjacent Closets or Pews and they participated in special ceremonies at the altar. Then they dined publicly and in state. On certain days, such as Twelfth Night or Shrove Tuesday, they watched a play in the Great Hall in the evening or took part in a banquet. And they did all this together.
The greatest concentration of ‘Days of Estate’ lay in the extended Christmas celebrations, which lasted from Christmas Day, 25 December, when the King and Queen wore the purple, to Epiphany, 6 January, when they appeared in their crowns and most of the coronation regalia. So, as Christmas 1528 approached, all eyes were on the Court. Would the time-honoured rituals be observed, or would Henry carry out his repeated threats to separate from Catherine?2
In the event, habit and perhaps a sense of decency more or less prevailed. The King and Queen had moved to Greenwich on 17 November 1528. Catherine remained there; Henry broke off to pay several short visits to Bridewell. Ostensibly, these visits were to enable him to consult more freely with the legates about the Great Matter. But they had a covert purpose as well. For Henry ‘had lodged [his mistress] in a very fine lodging, which he has prepared for her close by his own’. There, ‘greater court is…paid to her everyday than has been to the Queen for a long time’.3
Did Catherine know about her rival’s nights of pleasure and days of pomp in London? If so, she chose to ignore them. Instead, she took advantage of her husband’s absence in town to summon Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, to see her incognito in her apartments at Greenwich. She confirmed that Henry had reiterated his determination to separate from her, on the grounds of his personal safety. It was not Catherine herself that he mistrusted, he assured his wife, but ‘he is not quite so sure of her servants, both English and Spanish, and especially of the latter’. But Henry had not, Catherine said with relief, carried out the threat. Instead, whenever he came to Greenwich, ‘he very seldom fails to visit her, and they dine and sleep together’. Catherine, understandably, did not go into details. So we will never know if Henry had resumed the sexual relations, which, according to Campeggio, he had broken off at the time of the first trial of the marriage in 1527. But it seems unlikely.
Mendoza then speculated on Henry’s motives. The King had received legal advice, he guessed, that he must not appear too flagrantly to deprive Catherine of her conjugal rights while the Great Matter was still sub judice. This is probably true. But Henry was not only acting legalistically. He preferred, of course, to spend his time with his other woman. But, when he was under the same roof as Catherine, he ate with her and accompanied her out of habit and because he always had. And he kept Christmas in the old fashion too.
Henry joined Catherine at Greenwich on the 18th. On Christmas Day, he heard two masses and tipped the boys of the Chapel Royal two pounds for their singing of Gloria in excelsis. The same day, the French ambassador reported that ‘the whole Court has retired to Greenwich, where open house is kept both by the King and Queen, as it used to be in former years’. But things were not quite as usual. For the King’s mistress was at Greenwich too, ‘having her establishment apart, as…she does not like to meet with the Queen’. Did she fear Catherine’s tongue or Catherine’s tears?
But Catherine had more important things to worry about than her husband’s mistress. Ever since Campeggio’s arrival in England, her strategy had been clear. It was to persuade Pope Clement to revoke the commission to his two legates, Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal Campeggio, and take the trial of her marriage back into his own hands in Rome.
Charles V’s envoys in Rome were bringing heavy pressures to bear to the same effect. The pressures culminated on 27 April 1529 when a formal written protest was presented to the Pope in person, requiring Clement ‘to have the case adjudicated in his Court, since, were it to be tried in England, Queen Catherine would never obtain justice’.4
Catherine’s hope was that her nephew’s request would have the force of a command. But it fell on unwilling ears. Clement, caught as he was between the upper and nether millstones of Charles V’s power and Henry VIII’s wrath, had little sympathy for Catherine’s plight. ‘Would to God’, his Secretary, Sanga, wrote to Campeggio, ‘that [Wolsey] had allowed the matter to take its course [in 1527], because if the King had come to a decision without the Pope’s authority, whether wrongly or rightly, it would have been without blame or prejudice to his Holiness.’ And would to God also that Catherine would agree to take the veil. ‘The course would be portentous and unusual’, Sanga readily admitted, but it would involve the injury of only one person: Catherine. And that Clement could ‘readily entertain’.5
Only one thing would force the Pope to act: a direct, personal appeal from Catherine herself.
Now it was Catherine’s turn to hesitate. So far, she had moved purposefully and decisively. But, faced with this decision, she postponed, prevaricated, grasped at every straw. It was not that she did not understand what was required. Rather, she understood its consequences all too well. A sixteenth-century wife, especially a royal wife, was expected to have no will apart from her husband’s. Or, at least, she was never to display such a will publicly. In all her previous actions in the Great Matter, Catherine had stayed–just–on the right side of this principle. Everything she had done had been secret and, in so far as it was known to her husband, disavowable. But an appeal to Rome would be open, and an open challenge. It might enable her to keep Henry as her husband. But she would forfeit his trust for ever. For Catherine to appeal was to choose the weapon of a suicide. The first result would be, as she herself wrote, ‘suum manifestum excidium [her own certain ruin]’. It was to be used only in the last extremity.
For several months, Henry’s own hesitations spared Catherine the need to make this terrible choice. Ever since Catherine had detonated the bombshell of the Brief, Henry and his agents in Rome had been trying to make the basis of the Legatine Trial in England more water-tight. But Pope Clement, even-handed in his dissimulation, had blocked them at every turn. Without additional assurance from Rome, Henry was reluctant to risk an open trial of his marriage. These delays were Catherine’s salvation, as the Imperial ambassador, Mendoza, pointed out. To Mendoza’s profound relief, he had left London for the Netherlands in late May. At the time of his departure, he reported, ‘the Queen’s case was at a standstill, and there were no symptoms of its being proceeded with. There was, therefore, no occasion or need for a protest, nor for making an appeal to the judges.’6
But, within a few days, the world had been turned upside-down. Henry lost patience and decided, whatever the defects in the legates’ authority, to force matters to a conclusion. Perhaps he hoped that bullying and bribery would win the day (the vast wealthy Bishopric of Durham had already been dangled in front of Campeggio’s nose). Perhaps he believed in the force of his cause.
On 30 May, Henry authorised Wolsey and Campeggio to proceed with the trial. The next day, the two Cardinals met in the Parliament Chamber, otherwise the Upper Refectory (or Upper Frater), at Blackfriars. The Pope’s general commission was read and they formally accepted it. Their first act was to appoint two bishops to summon the King and Queen to appear before them on 18 June. The summons was served on Catherine the next day in her Privy Chamber at Windsor. Her decision on the appeal could be postponed no longer.7
Even so, she hung on till the eleventh hour and beyond. On 14 June, the King and Queen left Hampton Court to take up residence at Greenwich ‘in order to be present [at Blackfriars] at the day fixed’. Henry travelled by water; Catherine by land. En route, she ‘crossed the water’, and went to call on Campeggio. He was laid up, as he reported, with ‘my gout, which is accompanied by a slight feverishness’. But Catherine, ‘very anxious and perplexed about her affairs’, threw etiquette to the winds and was ushered ‘even to my bedside’. Her first anxiety was the fact that her advocates had not arrived from Flanders. She did not fully trust her English counsel, she said. What should she do? Hope for the best, Campeggio replied. But all this, I suspect, was so much beating about the bush for Catherine’s real concern: how could the case go ahead in England when the Emperor had asked for it to be revoked to Rome? Had the revocation in fact taken place? Campeggio had to admit that it had not. Once more, he pressed the matter of taking the veil. She brushed him aside. Her mind was made up. ‘On the Queen’s departure from me she went to her lodgings here in London, and there met her counsellors.’8
The ‘Queen’s lodgings’ in London were situated in Baynard’s Castle, where Henry VII and Elizabeth of York had stayed during the celebrations for Catherine’s first marriage with Prince Arthur. This time, they witnessed a very different ceremony. Catherine remained with her advisers all that day and into the next. Then, on the 16th, in their presence and in ‘a certain upper chamber’, she made her formal appeal from the legates to Rome. She did so in the presence of two notaries, who recorded the fact in proper form in ‘a public instrument’. The die was cast.
Catherine knew she had to act. But she was wife and woman enough to regret what she had to do. ‘She is very sad and disconsolate’, Mendoza reported on the basis of direct information, ‘because, though when sick in her very heart, she swallowed the potion prescribed for her, she yet sees no relief at hand in her misfortune.’ The reason for her sorrow, he explained, was that ‘she apprehends that instead of calming her husband’s irritation against her, she has rather increased it by her act’. She was right. But her conscience, and her sense of affronted right, drove her to yet more open defiance of Henry.9
The place chosen for the public trial of Catherine’s marriage was the Parliament Chamber of the Dominican Friary of London. Invariably known as Blackfriars, because of the colour of the friars’ robes, the Friary occupied an enormous site at the western corner of the City walls. To the north it was bounded by Ludgate Hill, to the west by the Fleet River and to the south by the Thames. Internally, the precinct was divided by Water Lane, which ran north-south from the Great Gate off Ludgate Hill to the Water Gate on the Thames. The western half of the precinct was largely empty, save for orchards and gardens. The eastern side of Water Lane, however, was thickly developed with the Friary buildings.
The buildings lay on a north-south axis. The Church was to the north, with two cloisters, the Great Cloister and the Inner Cloister, one after the other, to the south. On the first floor of the west side of the Great Cloister was the Friary Guest House, and, directly to the south, the Parliament Chamber, which, likewise, formed the first floor of the west side of the Inner Cloister. The two buildings were linked by a staircase tower. The Refectory occupied the whole of the range and was an enormous room, a hundred and ten feet long and fifty-two feet wide. The rooms of the Guest House were narrower, since the west side of this range was taken up with a gallery, ten feet wide and a hundred and ten feet long. At its northern end, the gallery was joined by another two-storey gallery, which crossed the Friary gardens and orchards diagonally, from south-east to north-west. At the north-western end, a covered bridge across the Fleet River connected this gallery directly to the private apartments of Bridewell Palace, which lay on the opposite bank of the Fleet River.10
The bridge and galleries were the final stage of the construction of Bridewell Palace. Henry had started building the palace in 1515, to replace the accommodation he had lost when the private lodgings at Westminster burned out in 1512. The works took seven years and cost the enormous sum of £20,000. But, when they were finished, Henry had a palace-monastery complex that more than substituted for Westminster. Bridewell itself offered residential accommodation which was modern, compact and fashionable, in contrast with the sprawling, half-ruinous medieval splendours of Westminster, while Blackfriars had facilities, sacred and secular, which rivalled those of Westminster Abbey. The site, on the boundaries of the City, rather than in a suburb (as was Westminster), was also well suited to a king who was popular and knew it. Now, with the hugely ambitious network of galleries linking the palace and monastery, Bridewell-Blackfriars was set to displace Westminster and become the royal capital of Tudor England.
The newly completed buildings were first used in 1522, for the visit of Catherine’s nephew, Charles V. The following year, Parliament was summoned there. The King stayed in Bridewell, heard the customary mass of the Holy Ghost in the Friary Church, and opened the Parliament in the Parliament Chamber or Upper Refectory.11
The decision to use the Parliament Chamber for the Legatine Trial was thus a natural one. No one could have guessed that the outcome of the Trial would be a triumph for Catherine. Nor that it would alienate Henry from the palace and the City and destroy the prospects for Bridewell as a royal habitation forever.
In early May, Thomas Garton, Page of the Wardrobe of the Beds, was ordered to prepare the Chamber for the trial. A ‘dormant’ or fixed table and two chairs, covered in cloth of gold with cloth of gold cushions, were placed for the judges on the dais at the southern end of the room. The dais was railed and ‘all covered in carpets and tapestry…like a solemn Court’. On the right-hand side of the Chamber was a throne, with a cloth of gold canopy, for the King, and on the left, another throne, also canopied but lower, for the Queen. In the body of the court were bars at either end for the advocates, benches for the assembled bishops, and more benches and tables for the clerks.
Some of the weightier items, including the benches, bars and dais, may have been still in situ from the last Parliament. The rest–the chairs, carpets, cushions and precious textiles–would have come from the storehouse of the Great Wardrobe. This lay directly to the east of Blackfriars, at the junction of Carter Lane and St Andrew’s Hill, and was connected to the monastery by another gallery. The proximity of the Wardrobe and the re-use of existing materials kept Garton’s costs for ‘making ready the Parliament Chamber’ to a modest six shillings.12
The second session of the court took place, as arranged, on Friday, 18 June. This again was intended to be a formal occasion, in which the two parties would answer their citation or summons by proxy.
Henry duly sent his proxies. But Catherine created a sensation by appearing in person. This took everyone by surprise: according to Campeggio, her arrival was ‘unexpected and unknown till the last moment’. She entered in solemn state, accompanied by four bishops, the rest of her counsel, and ‘a great company’ of ladies and gentlewomen. Then, ‘sadly and with great gravity’, she read the written protestation against the jurisdiction of the Cardinals which she had made on the 16th, and required it to be registered and returned to her. The judges agreed and informed Catherine that they would answer her protestation on the following Monday, 21 June.13
Between 9 and 10 o’clock on the Monday morning, the full court duly assembled. Catherine entered first, then the two Cardinals, Wolsey and Campeggio, and finally Henry VIII himself, who was the first to be seated. ‘It was’, according to George Cavendish (who, as Wolsey’s Gentleman Usher, was an eye-witness), ‘the strangest and newest sight’ that a King and Queen should ‘appear in…court [as common persons]…to abide the judgement of their own subjects’. The court crier cried: ‘Silence!’ Then the judges’ commission was read and the parties summoned into court. ‘King Harry of England, come into court!’ called the crier. ‘Here, my lords!’ answered the King, as he rose from his throne.
Then, standing but still under the canopy, the King addressed the court. He ‘said a few words in English’, asking for a swift decision ‘to determine the validity or nullity of his marriage, about which he had from the beginning felt a perpetual scruple’. Wolsey spoke next and also set out his bona fide. He acknowledged the infinite benefits he had received from the King; nevertheless, he protested, both he and Campeggio would judge the case only according to the facts and their conscience. Wolsey’s speech was designed to answer the substance of Catherine’s objections. It remained only for Campeggio formally to reject her protestation and to reassert the competence of the judges.
That done, Catherine was cited to appear. ‘Catherine, Queen of England, come into the court!’ called the crier. Catherine was now on a stage, and the eyes of all the world were on her. She did not falter. First, she addressed the judges. Once more she rejected their competence and appealed directly to Rome. Then she turned to her husband. He had spoken of his scruples. But now, she bitterly replied, ‘it was not the time to say this after so long silence’.
Stung, Henry defended himself. He had remained silent, he insisted, only because of ‘the great love he had and has for her [and] he desired, more than anything else, that the marriage should be declared valid’. Then he, too, went on to the attack and denounced her appeal to Rome. It was unreasonable, he argued, ‘considering the Emperor’s power there’. And was not England, the country of which she was Queen, ‘perfectly secure for her’? Did she not have ‘the choice of prelates and lawyers’ as her counsel?14
For the King publicly to bandy words with his Queen was undignified. It was also a blunder. As Anne Boleyn later pointed out, whenever Henry got into an argument with Catherine, he lost. He did so spectacularly this time.15
Suddenly the Queen left her dais, which was placed opposite her husband’s. But it was separated from it by the body of the court with its bars and throng of lawyers, clerk and bishops. These obstacles made it impossible for the Queen to cross the room directly; instead ‘she took pain to go about unto the King [and knelt] down at his feet’. Twice Henry tried to raise her up, according to Campeggio, but still she knelt. Then, ‘in the sight of all the court and assembly’, she spoke ‘in broken English’:
[She begged] him to consider her honour, her daughter’s and his; that he should not be displeased at her defending it, and should consider the reputation of her nation and relatives, who will be seriously offended; in accordance with what he had said about his good will, she had throughout appealed to Rome, where it was reasonable that the affair should be determined, as the present place was open to suspicion and because the cause is already [begun] at Rome.
Catherine, for all her ‘broken English’, made the speech of her life. But its effect was not so much rhetorical as forensic. By appearing to take her husband’s protestations of continuing love at face value, she had twisted his words to devastating effect. If Henry was so keen for the marriage to be found valid, she had said, how could he possibly object to her appeal to Rome? Surely it was the most natural thing in the world?
Still worse from Henry’s point of view was his own response. The heat of the moment, his instinctive gallantry, the overwhelming sympathy of the audience for his wife–all drove him to give some sort of agreement to Catherine’s request.
It is unclear just how far he went. Campeggio understood the exchange to mean that Henry had actually ‘granted [Catherine] full liberty to write and send messengers to Rome and to his Holiness [with her appeal]’. Catherine understood the same. But Henry, appalled at what he had done under pressure, later tried to introduce qualifications. It proved impossible. He had given his wife the word of a King, spoken in public, that she could appeal to Rome. He could never retract. She could act with a clear conscience.
It was Catherine’s final and most effective coup against the Great Matter. She had knelt. But she had fought and won.16
There was nothing more for her to do in the court. ‘She rose up, making a low courtesy to the King, and departed from thence.’ It was supposed that she would have returned to her former seat; instead ‘she took her direct way out of the house, leaning, as she was wont always to do, upon the arm of her General Receiver called Mr Griffith [Richards]’. Seeing his prey escape, Henry ordered the crier to call her back. ‘Catherine, Queen of England, come into the court!’ he cried. Richards said to her: ‘Madam, ye be called again.’ ‘On, on,’ she replied. ‘It makes no matter, for this is no indifferent court for me; therefore I will not tarry. Go on your ways.’ Twice more the crier repeated his summons. But Catherine ignored him. She never returned.17
In this extraordinary exchange, both Henry and Catherine were playing to the gallery. The court was open, and the common folk, male and female, of London packed the lower end of the Parliament Chamber, overflowed into the anteroom and stood on the stairs. And there was no doubt who got the applause. ‘If the matter was to be decided by the women’, the French ambassador, the shrewd, worldly Bishop Jean du Bellay, noted, ‘[the King] would lose the battle; for they did not fail to encourage the Queen at her entrance and departure by their cries, telling her to care for nothing, and other such words; while she recommended herself to their good prayers, and used other Spanish tricks (castellanneries).’18 There had been earlier demonstrations too. When Henry and Catherine ‘were passing from their royal residence [Bridewell] to the Dominicans through a gallery communicating with that convent, the Queen was…warmly greeted by immense crowds of people, who publicly wished her victory over her enemies’. Enraged, Henry ordered his guards that ‘nobody should be again admitted to the place’.
It was easier said than done: the banks of the Fleet were a public highway and not even Henry VIII could divert a road at his pleasure. Some of his councillors, according to the Spanish ambassador, drew the obvious conclusion: if the King could not remove the Londoners, it might be better if he removed himself. ‘It is far better for him’, they advised, ‘not to live in London, because he will be less open to slander.’
Henry took their advice, but his absence lasted only a few days. For if he wished to drive through his Divorce, he had to be on the spot. And Bridewell was his only central residence. Until he had another, he had to inure himself to the people’s cheers for Catherine and their muttered jeers and curses for himself.19
After Catherine’s walk-out from the Court at Blackfriars, the Great Matter became a double race. In London, the King and his lawyers were moving heaven and earth to rush the trial to its conclusion and obtain (they took for granted) a favourable verdict. In Rome, on the other hand, Catherine’s family and friends were exerting themselves just as manfully to persuade Pope Clement to accept Catherine’s appeal, ‘advoke’ the case to Rome and abort the Legatine Trial in England. It was anybody’s guess who would win.
At first, the shrewd money would have been on Henry’s team. Catherine’s withdrawal of course made their task easier. Her lawyers, especially Fisher, performed miracles and earned Henry’s undying hatred for their pains. But, without the Queen, there was a limit to the resistance they could offer. And the pressure on Campeggio, in particular, was immense:
If your Lordship [he wrote to his friend and colleague, Cardinal Salviati] saw me in bed with a cruel attack of gout in seven places, accompanied with fever, although only incidental, brought on by the pain, and surrounded by fifteen doctors with two piles of books to show me all they conclude is according to law, and nothing else can or ought to be done, I am sure you would have compassion on me, especially as I am obliged to have myself carried to the place where the trial is held, God knows with what discomfort to me and danger in moving, in ascending and descending staircases, and in embarking and landing from the vessel.
Campeggio’s wry humour, and the constant stream of letters he wrote to his friends in the Curia (as the Papal Court was known), saved his sanity. But they would offer no protection should the trial come to a natural conclusion. His secret instructions from Clement VII, which were repeated with every letter from Rome, were to drag things out as much as possible. But the English had grown wise to this tactic and, Campeggio ruefully observed, ‘it is no longer possible to entertain them [string them along]’ as previously. What then should he do, he asked Salviati, ‘if the process be finished before any provision [that is, an order from Rome to abandon the trial] comes?’ ‘I beg your lordship to think how I can in such a heat avoid giving sentence–I mean if judgement be for the King.’ He could say that he was unable or unwilling to give judgement. But, in that case, the commission authorised Wolsey to deliver a verdict alone. And there was not much doubt what that would be. ‘God help me,’ Campeggio concluded.20
But, as Campeggio winced and fretted, Henry (despite the vast issues at stake) was enjoying the whole thing. The King was an amateur theologian and lawyer, with a shrewd eye for quiddities, distinctions and super-subtleties. The trial was a feast of such, and Henry glutted himself. He turned up in person to swear his depositions; he debated in private with Campeggio; he had endless discussions with his lawyers.
Meanwhile, as Campeggio feared, the trial was drawing towards its end. There was a final adjournment. Then Friday, 23 July, was fixed as the day that judgement would be given. Henry, casting his kingly dignity to the winds, decided to eavesdrop. According to Cavendish, he came ‘and sat within a gallery’ next to the door of the Parliament Chamber. The door gave a view of ‘the judges where they sat, whom he might see and hear speak, to hear what judgement they would give in his suit’. The Court assembled at its usual time, between 9 and 10 o’clock in the morning. The counsel for the enquiry exhibited the written record of the trial and pressed the judges to give sentence. Henry’s moment of liberation, he thought, was at hand.21
Catherine’s behaviour throughout this frenetic period could not have been more different from Henry’s. After her dramatic walk-out from the court, she left Bridewell and went to Greenwich, where she remained, despite repeated written summons to reappear before the legates.
For she had done her work; she could only hope and pray that it would take effect in time.
Others, however, had laboured frantically on her behalf. The moment she had formally executed them, three documents had been rushed over to Brussels: her protestation against the legates, her appeal to Rome, and her power of attorney for the Spanish ambassador to the Curia. Her messenger was an un-named gentleman of her Household. It would be satisfactory to think that it was Francisco Felipez, now recovered from his broken arm. In Brussels, Mendoza, the former Spanish ambassador in London, took charge of the papers and ensured that they were ‘sent to Rome by an express messenger’. By 5 July, they were in the hands of Miçer Mai, Charles V’s ambassador to Pope Clement.22
Mai was Catherine’s ardent partisan. He dashed with the letters straight to Clement and upbraided him mercilessly for his failure to ‘advoke’ the case to Rome. Wearily, Clement agreed that Mai should set the machinery in motion. ‘You have the Queen’s powers to act for her,’ he told Mai, ‘let a petition be presented in her name and justice shall be done.’ Five days later, on the 10th, Mai got firm information about the first stages of the Blackfriars Trial: that Catherine had appealed; that the legates had rejected her appeal; and that Catherine, in consequence of her failure to appear, had been declared ‘contumacious’–that is, wilfully disobedient to the summons of the Court.23
Contumacy, Clement did not need telling, opened the way to more-or-less summary proceedings. There was now real urgency. The Pope summoned a meeting of the signatura, the advisory body which made recommendations on petitions of justice, for the 13th. Its unanimous advice was that Catherine’s appeal should be allowed. But, to give the decision added weight (and probably to put off the inevitable for a few more days), Clement resolved that the ‘advocation’ should first be ratified by the Consistory: that is, by the Pope and cardinals meeting in solemn council. This was fixed for the 16th. But, the evening before, Clement collapsed with an illness that was either diplomatic or psychosomatic, and it was announced that the Consistory was postponed. Mai exploded with fury at one of the senior cardinals, threatening that the Emperor ‘could and would find other means’ to protect Catherine. Cowed and cornered at last, Clement allowed the advocation to be decreed as planned on the 16th in a Congregation: that is, a meeting of the cardinals without the Pope.24
The English representatives in Rome had fought Mai every step of the way. And even now they had a final ploy: let the advocation be sent only to Catherine, they requested. Mai saw through that immediately. Their intention, he guessed, was either to waylay the single messenger or to have the document suppressed when it reached England. Once again Mai went directly to the Pope, who, weary and sick at heart about the whole business, told him ‘I might do what I liked’ about publication.25
It was a task Mai relished. No fewer than six copies were drawn up. One was to be posted in Rome on the 23rd. Two more were to be sent to Flanders, to be posted in Bruges and Dunkirk. And no less than four were to be sent to Catherine via the Archduchess Margaret. That would teach the English.
In the event, one of Catherine’s copies was sent by her faithful Gentleman of the Household.26
But Mai’s haste, it transpired, was superfluous. On 23 July, the day that the advocation was posted in Rome, the Legate’s Court assembled at Blackfriars. But, instead of delivering its verdict, Campeggio, ‘taking his faith upon the word of a true prelate’ announced that, since ‘the reaping and harvest vacation’ had begun in Rome, the case would stand ‘prorogued and continued’ until the beginning of the new term on 1 October. Campeggio (or was it his friend Salviati?) had come up with the solution to his dilemma: he had decreed neither for Henry nor against him but had simply adjourned the case.27
The leading members of the royal Court had come to hear the expected verdict. As soon as Campeggio announced the adjournment, the Duke of Suffolk, Henry’s brother-in-law, stepped forward and struck the table in front of the two judges: ‘By the mass,’ he swore, ‘now I see that the old…saw [proverb] is true, that there was never Legate nor Cardinal that did good in England.’28
Du Bellay, the French ambassador, had got wind the day before that something had gone wrong with the expected smooth delivery of the verdict for Henry. But, despite such premonitions, the adjournment was a terrible blow for the King.29
So far, Catherine had won every battle in the Great Matter. But Henry could not, would not, let her win the war. He would change his general. He would use new weapons. He would show who was master in England.
Then let his wife see how she would cope.