For almost two years after Richmond’s elevation to the dukedom of Richmond, Katherine’s life continued much as usual despite her grief over the utter collapse of the family compact with Charles. She dined in state with Henry on days of estate, as the special feast days when the king wore his crown and purple robes were known; they celebrated Christmas together; they exchanged gifts at New Year; sometimes she dined with him in her privy chamber; she traveled with him from palace to palace, even if she tended to prefer a pilgrimage to hunting these days; she watched the court revels and entertainments just as she always had; she read and she sewed as her mother had taught her.
One hopeful sign that Henry was not ready to exclude Mary from the succession was that he arranged for her to travel to Wales to preside over the Council there just as Arthur had once done. Like the young Katherine, Mary even resided at Ludlow. Although the princess had her own household and so had only been at court occasionally, to see her go so far away was a wrench for the queen, but she was reassured that Mary was in good hands, for Margaret Pole, the queen’s own friend over so many years, went with the young princess. And while Henry had not bestowed the title of Princess of Wales upon Mary officially, he had not given Wales to Fitzroy either. Nor was Mary’s future neglected. Although cast aside by Charles in favor of Isabella of Portugal, she retained considerable value on the marriage market; Wolsey was already busy negotiating a French wedding for her, perhaps even with the recently widowed Francis himself. Such a union was not one that Katherine relished—indeed she went so far as to ask the French ambassadors if the “alliance would make the King [Henry] suspected by the Emperor”—but at least it proved that her child was not to be disowned and could still have a glittering match.
Life at court continued its customary pattern too, at least outwardly. Wolsey remained the most powerful man in England next to the king, no one daring to say or do anything to antagonize him. The Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk were constantly at her husband’s side. If she noticed the prominence and aggrandizement of Norfolk’s brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Boleyn, who had been created Earl of Rochford on the same day that Fitzroy became Earl of Richmond, Katherine said nothing. She would not have thought it important. Escaping her too was Boleyn’s gradual accumulation of perquisites, such as lands and offices around Tonbridge in Kent, which had once belonged to the Duke of Buckingham.
Then there were the Boleyn children, quite permanent fixtures in court circles by now. By late 1525, Mary Carey’s affair with Henry was probably over, but her husband, William, a member of the king’s privy chamber, had profited well from his wife’s readiness to serve her king in the way she knew best. Thomas’s only son, George, was starting to accumulate property and connections on his own account. His marriage to Lord Morley’s daughter, Jane Parker, not only linked George to the established peerage, but was very lucrative. Jane’s dowry of one thousand marks (about £666), half of which was paid by a generous Henry, was huge. And although the Eltham Ordinances, a series of reforms to Henry’s privy chamber initiated by Wolsey, meant that George lost his coveted place there, he did not lose out entirely. Anyone examining the original draft of the Eltham Ordinances under ultraviolet light can see that the cardinal wrote in his own highly distinctive hand that “Young Boleyn” was “to have twenty pounds yearly above the eighty pounds he hath gotten to him and his wife to live thereupon.” In addition, George shared Buckingham’s Kent lands with his father, and the king gave him the manor of Grimstone in Norfolk for himself. George Boleyn was certainly someone to watch.
So too, although again Katherine did not realize it at first, was Thomas’s other daughter, Anne. Elegant, exotic, vivacious, and witty, she was already turning heads even if her dark complexion did not fit the conventional idea of feminine beauty, which favored delicately pale skin and blond hair. The poet Thomas Wyatt, it was rumored, found her captivating, as did Harry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland’s son and heir. Clearly, the Boleyns’ fortunes were rising. That Anne had moved on to higher things from Harry Percy (hastily married off by his father, who wanted a better match for his son than a Boleyn) and was leading Katherine’s husband into what the Spanish ambassador was to describe as a “blind, detestable and wretched passion,” was something the queen could never have imagined.
But by 1527 that was exactly what was happening—in fact had happened. We will never know for sure when Henry’s love for Anne started. According to George Cavendish, Wolsey’s contemporary biographer and gentleman usher, Anne’s burgeoning romance with Percy was stifled by Wolsey, acting upon Henry’s instructions because the king confessed to his loyal cardinal that he had a “secret affection” for the lady himself. Possibly so.
What we do know, however, is that it was indeed a deep love on his part, a love for which he even did something he admitted to finding “tedious and painful”: he sat down at his writing desk to compose love letters to her, writing them in his own hand. The letters, many of them filled with sentiments that are touchingly genuine and heartfelt, almost boyish, still survive, preserved within the archives of the Vatican; frustratingly, Anne’s replies have disappeared. In these letters Henry declared himself “wounded by the dart of love,” Anne’s absence causing him “more pain” than he “should ever have thought could be felt.” She was the woman he most esteemed in the whole world, his “darling,” his “own sweetheart.” Prolonged absence would be “intolerable.” “I and my heart put ourselves in your hands,” wrote the besotted Henry.
Had Katherine had any idea that Henry was penning such missives, she would have assumed only that another mistress was about to appear on the scene. And that she should become his new paramour is probably all that Henry envisaged when he first gazed into Anne’s “black and beautiful eyes.” If she would only surrender herself to him “body and heart,” he told her, then he would do her the honor of making her his “sole mistress, remove all others from my affection, and serve you only.” To Henry’s mind, no woman could refuse such a magnanimous offer. But this one did. Having seen Elizabeth Blount and her own sister discarded once the king’s interest faded, Anne wanted more. She wanted to become Henry’s wife and his queen, not his mistress. Unfortunately, Katherine was in her way.
But this is where fortune’s wheel favored Anne, not the queen. For Henry now had scruples about the legality of his marriage, and it is far more likely that these scruples developed before he was bewitched by Anne than afterward. She merely crystallized them, focused them, and gave him an additional reason to exploit them.
Central to Henry’s thinking was the succession. He wanted a son. And he could not understand why Katherine could not provide one. There must be a reason, and that reason, Henry decided, was because somehow he had sinned against God. Such a sin could not possibly have come from his own conduct as king, for he was a dutiful son of the Church, had written against Luther and acted against heretics within his own realms. So there must be a much more basic cause of God’s anger with a man whom the pope had declared to be “Defender of the Faith.”
That cause, Henry decided, was that his very marriage was at fault: marrying his brother’s widow had been contrary to God’s law, and he was being punished because of it. The origins of his case, he thought, lay in a verse (20:21) in the Old Testament book of Leviticus that stated that a man who married his brother’s widow would remain childless. Henry had a healthy daughter, Mary, but taking advice from a Hebrew expert, he came to think that the meaning of the original verse of the scripture was that he would lack sons. This fitted his own situation perfectly: Katherine was Arthur’s widow, and the death of little Prince Henry, in addition to the queen’s failure to produce another male heir, was evidence of God’s anger.
He could even see his sin depicted in the tapestries on his own walls. We cannot know whether Katherine drew parallels between her husband and the Old Testament king David, but Henry did; he had always felt drawn to David, believing that they shared a sincere and special relationship with God, and like David he coveted military victories for the glory of God. But David had displeased his maker. Loving Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, David had deliberately sent Uriah off to fight knowing that he was almost certain to be killed, as indeed he was. The death of David’s son by Bathsheba was the terrible manifestation of God’s vengeance. For Henry, the story was further proof that his own marriage was damned. He had not killed Arthur, but he had taken to wife a woman he should not have touched. And their only son had died.
Clearly, then, Henry should not have been allowed to marry Katherine in the first place; the pope should never have issued a dispensation. The only remedy now was for the king to appease God, and the only way to do that was to repudiate Katherine so that he would no longer be living in sin and his conscience would be clear. Once free, of course, he could marry again and thus ensure the succession. What could be simpler?
All the king needed was the Church’s agreement that his marriage was wrong in the sight of God and therefore invalid. While there was no divorce in the modern sense, the Church could, and sometimes did, pronounce what amounted to a sentence of nullity on unions that had somehow contravened church law. That was what Henry wanted, and he had various precedents to encourage him: the Duke of Suffolk, his brother-in-law, had managed this with regard to his first marriage; Louis XII of France had obtained a divorce from his wife to marry Anne of Brittany; and his own sister, Margaret, the widow of James IV, who had been killed at Flodden, had managed to have her second marriage, to the Earl of Angus, annulled. Henry saw no reason why the pope would not be just as obliging for him.
In reality, the whole question of who could marry whom was far more complex than Henry’s argument suggests. Church law forbade marriage between those who were related in some degree or had become related through the marriage of a relative. But over the centuries there had been considerable discussion and debate over the exact nature of these relationships, how they were created, and whether the pope could grant dispensations to take people out of the prohibited degrees of affinity (as the relationships were called). Dispensations had indeed been issued in very similar cases to Henry and Katherine’s; as Ferdinand had once pointed out, Manuel of Portugal had been allowed to marry Katherine and Juana’s sister Maria when their eldest sister, Isabella, had died. Maria and Manuel had subsequently produced numerous offspring, one of whom had just married Charles. Manuel had even gone one stage further: when Maria died, he took Juana’s eldest daughter, Eleanor, as his third wife. And no one had suggested that any of these instances of close family intermarriage had been invalid.
Then again, the Bible itself appeared to be contradictory: a verse in the book of Deuteronomy (25:5) pronounced it a brother’s duty to marry his brother’s widow, if they had no children, so that the brother’s line could continue. And Arthur and Katherine had no children, so that verse could apply too.
However, should there be any disputes over precisely what church law asserted, the pope was there to sort it out. It was his role to reconcile what seemed to be contradictory, to define and differentiate between what was the law of God, and therefore immutable, and what was the law of man, and thus open to alternative interpretations. Once he had done that, all should be well. Certainly, when Wolsey sounded him out, the learned Bishop John Fisher could see no “sound reason to show that it is prohibited by divine law for a brother to marry the wife of a brother who has died without children.” Moreover, said Fisher, “considering the fulness of authority given by our Lord to the Pope,” it belonged to the pope “to clear ambiguous passages of Scripture, after hearing the opinions of the best divines.” Since the pope had dispensed in similar cases, “this alone should determine the question.” Henry’s marriage, therefore, was solid. And Fisher would not be the only person who would say exactly that. It was a minefield, one that Henry wanted Wolsey to enter on his behalf.
Katherine had no idea that any of these thoughts were running through her husband’s mind. The last thing he wanted was to discuss his fears with her, probably because he appreciated only too well what her response would be and how effective an opponent she could become. Anne Boleyn, who was in no doubt as to the steely nature of her adversary, was later to say that if Henry tried to dispute with Katherine “she was sure to have the upper hand.” Anne’s assessment could not have been more accurate. As far as Katherine was concerned, she and Henry were man and wife and would stay man and wife until parted by death. There was no equivocation. She had “truth and right” on her side, she was to say, and Henry was her “lawful lord and husband.” He had been so since 1509 and that was that.
And that most likely was Wolsey’s viewpoint as well when he first heard what Henry intended. Henry wanted the cardinal to use his legatine powers to convene a secret “court” to investigate the legalities of the royal marriage and come up with the correct answer: that the marriage was against God’s law, a palpable fact against which no dispensation was possible. Reluctantly, the king would then put away the woman he had innocently thought his wife. The pope, Henry thought, would not interfere but would rubber-stamp Wolsey’s judgement. Problem solved.
Except that far from being solved, the problem was only just beginning. When he had time to digest the idea, Wolsey appreciated that if the marriage could be ended, the king would be available for a new one, one that was diplomatically advantageous. Blissfully ignorant that Henry had already determined that his new bride would be Anne Boleyn, the cardinal looked to France: a French wife would cement the growing relationship with Francis and act as a strong counterweight to Charles. Most satisfactory. Nonetheless, Wolsey was under no illusion that everything would be plain sailing. Labyrinthine scheming would be required; and at that he was an expert.
So the cardinal set about fulfilling his master’s bidding. On May 17, 1527, a select group of clerics and scholars, including William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, scuttled to Wolsey’s London residence, York Place. Their task was to investigate the king’s “secret matter” by analyzing every word of the pope’s dispensation and examining all relevant canon law. Speed would be essential, secrecy maintained. But the end result was predetermined: Henry would be reprimanded and the marriage annulled. Assuming that the pope was amenable, the matter would be settled before Katherine had time to do anything about it.
That is where the plan began to go wrong. Despite all the cloak-and-dagger skulduggery, the queen heard that something was afoot. We do not know who her informant was; neither did a fuming Henry, although he left no stone unturned in his efforts to find out. But, regardless of who told her, Katherine acted immediately. With no one to ask for advice, she turned to the one place where she was certain she would get help: Spain.
Katherine instinctively knew that Charles would not desert her in this matter, even though the cooler political climate between her adopted country and her native land had ruined her own rapport with him. Affectionate correspondence had stopped. In a very telling letter to her nephew, dated November 26, 1526, Katherine had made no attempt to conceal her distress at their estrangement: “I cannot imagine what may be the cause of your Highness having been so angry, and having so forgotten me, that for upwards of two years I have had no letters from Spain,” she had written. Characteristically, though, she had not been able to resist driving home the point that she did not “deserve this treatment” because her “affection and readiness” for Charles’s cause surely meant that she “deserved a better reward.” She had returned to the same theme in a subsequent note. After thanking him for “favours conferred” upon her, and promising to serve him in whatever way her “scanty” abilities and “small” powers permitted, she had bluntly reminded him of the paucity of his attention: “I hold it to be that Your Highness has chosen to show sorrow for my death, perceiving that neither my existence nor my services are such as to deserve being recalled to your memory.” It could hardly have been otherwise, especially with Henry’s rapprochement with France and Charles’s Portuguese marriage. Ironically, it was within the bright, intricately carved rooms of Boabdil’s former palace that the new empress conceived her first child, a boy whom a delighted Charles named Philip after his own father, Philip of Burgundy.
But in times of family crisis, all ill feeling would be forgotten. So when whispers of Henry’s underhanded divorce attempts first filtered through to her, Katherine’s immediate thought was of her nephew. In a dispatch to Charles dated May 18, 1527, the Spanish ambassador, Iñigo de Mendoza, conveyed the devastating tidings. He had heard “on reliable authority” that Wolsey, “as the finishing stroke to all his iniquities has been scheming to bring about the Queen’s divorce.” Still worse, the king was “so bent on this divorce” that he had “secretly assembled certain bishops and lawyers that they may sign a declaration to the effect that his marriage with the Queen is null and void on account of her having been his brother’s wife,” Mendoza elaborated. His information was remarkably accurate.
It is safe to speculate that the “reliable authority” was Katherine herself, because the ambassador not only knew of the secret court’s existence and purpose, he also knew of the queen’s trepidation and fears. And this though he claimed she was “so full of apprehension” that she had not “ventured to speak” with him. Clearly the queen had her own methods of communication. Dissembling was an art she had already mastered; ingenious subterfuge was to be next on her list of useful accomplishments.
However, there was always a chance that events might go no further. The king had had whims before. “She [Katherine] always fancied that the King, after pursuing his course for some time, would turn away, and yielding to his conscience, would change his purposes as he had done at other times and return to reason,” the Spanish ambassador would tell his master. Fancy it was, but a straw she was to clutch until her dying day.
Yet any early hopes that Henry would abandon the matter were dashed on June 22, 1527, when he tentatively broached the subject with her himself. He began quite forcefully, boldly stating that they had been living in “mortal sin” since the day of their wedding; he knew this because it was “the opinion of many canonists and theologians” he had consulted. So, he went on, probably a little more hesitantly, he had “come to the resolution, as his conscience was much troubled thereby, to separate himself from her.” He then had the temerity to ask her “to choose the place to which she would retire.”
Katherine’s response was to burst into tears. Perhaps this was simply because her worst fears were now realized; equally, after eighteen years of wedlock, she knew that her sobs were the best way to discomfit Henry, and she was not a woman to discard a useful weapon. She once said that he was “more accessible to persuasion than to threat”; few means of persuasion could rival the witnessing of female tears. And certainly her tears did move the king. Clumsily, he tried to assure her that “all should be done for the best” as he swiftly made his exit. But his sympathy went only so far: before leaving her to the ministrations of her ladies, he begged her to keep secret all he had said. Since the account we have of the incident comes from Mendoza, who passed it on to Charles, Katherine clearly took no notice of that particular request. Secrecy benefited Henry; she wanted publicity and she wanted outside help. That could only come from the pope himself, and from Charles. She would assiduously court and badger both.
For Katherine, there came to be three main issues. The most immediate was that her marriage was sacrosanct and so must be defended. Her parents had arranged it and the pope had allowed it. There was nothing questionable about it. And she would forever maintain that it had to be valid for the most intimate of reasons: she had never been Arthur’s wife in the fullest sense of that term. If she had not known Arthur “carnally,” then “truth and right” were hers. To deny her marital status, to put asunder those whom God had joined together, was to imperil her soul because she would be denying truth. And if Henry persisted in his wanton folly, he would imperil his soul too. Thus she was trying to preserve more than her own marriage, she was trying to rescue her husband. The fires of the Inquisition were but a taste of what the damned would face if they did not repent. She must redeem Henry from himself.
But there was Mary too. If she gave way, her daughter could be illegitimized, becoming no better than Richmond and with no more right to the throne than the king’s bastard. Dismayed at Richmond’s possible prospects before the divorce was mooted, she was even more horrified now. A wild rumor reached Charles that the projected French marriage for Mary was designed so that she could be sent to France and leave the coast clear for Richmond. Then, “in course of time the said illegitimate son might be appointed to the succession of the Crown.” With her daughter’s royal status and future at stake, Katherine would battle to the bitter end, just as Juana had fought for Charles during the Communero revolt. Eustace Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador who succeeded Mendoza upon the latter’s return to Spain in 1529, once remarked that Anne Boleyn was “fiercer than a lioness”; the same could be said of Katherine. The two women were well matched.
Yet as time went on, a wider point gradually emerged: the supremacy of Holy Mother Church. If the pope’s dispensation was cast aside, papal power itself would be discredited. Katherine expressed this very clearly in a letter to Charles and his empress in October 1528: “Were this present Pope to undo what his predecessors have done, it must inevitably weigh on his honour and conscience, and lead ultimately to the discredit of the Apostolic See, which should stand firmly on one foundation.”
Her conviction that her personal struggle was bound up with the survival of the Church, even its very soul, was to become a constant theme for her. To protect her God, no price was too high to pay for the “Defendress of the Faith.” In 1531, worried that the English Parliament would act against both herself and Mary, she would write to Chapuys that their deaths would be “martyrdom,” a fate they would willingly accept as they would be suffering “for the sake of truth.” Hyperbole had run through her letters to Ferdinand when she was complaining of her neglect by Henry VII after Arthur’s death; so it does again—but arguably with more cause.
And once she realized that her replacement was to be Anne Boleyn, the situation assumed yet another dimension, for Anne represented a threat to all that Katherine stood for. Over the years, she had managed to accept the presence of mistresses in her husband’s life with a reasonable degree of sangfroid. A quick glance in her mirror would have shown her that constant childbearing had taken its toll upon her physical appearance. While the king was still in his prime, albeit starting to put on a little weight, the passing years had not treated her so kindly; the soft prettiness that once had attracted Henry had long since disappeared. Her face was fuller, her figure stouter. “If not handsome, she is not ugly,” wrote one Venetian as tactfully as he could; another remarked on her “modest countenance.” Both men stressed her gentle character. She was “prudent and good,” she was “replete with goodness and religion.” Even Katherine understood that the plain face and goodness of a sonless wife was no competition for the youthful promise of Anne. What truly appalled Katherine, though, was not so much that Henry was tempted by Anne’s blatant allure, but the prospect of Anne’s becoming queen. No mistress should be able to oust a wife.
Even worse, Anne leaned toward the new religious ideas that, to traditionalists like Katherine, were surfacing frighteningly fast. And where Anne went, Henry was sure to follow. To Chapuys, and presumably to Katherine, Anne and her father were “more Lutheran than Luther.” Chapuys’s assessment was not entirely wrong. Religion was as central to Anne as it was to her father, her brother, and had been to her grandfather. Yet Anne was not one mindlessly to accept the concepts taught by the Church for generations. Like a modern woman, she wanted to question and probe; she reveled in the buzzing debates that were beginning to take place in intellectual circles, finding such discussions genuinely thrilling and exhilarating. Once the divorce got into its stride, her views became more pronounced, more extreme. A fluent French speaker, she soon shared with Henry a translation of the New Testament by Lefèvre d’Étaples, a copy whose cover was engraved in gold with her initials and those of the king. That Henry and Anne should own such a work was truly shocking for Katherine, herself safely brought up on the Latin Vulgate and agreeing with the Church that vernacular versions of the sacred text were heretical. Anne’s brother George was no better, forever dabbling in the exciting new ways of looking at the world and religion’s place within it. Neither Anne nor George was anything but devout, but they wanted to bring the gospels to the people, they wanted preachers to preach and enlighten, not just repeat age-old homilies, they wanted all to share a much more relevant religious experience. They represented the new ways, while Katherine stood firmly behind the old.
For Katherine, then, it was as though the Crusades were on her own doorstep. The “secret matter” started off for the queen as a straightforward struggle to make Henry overcome his unfounded scruples of conscience and return to her as her God-given husband, but it escalated over the years into a battle not just for herself and her daughter but for the preservation of nothing less than her “Holy Catholic Faith” itself. As a girl, she had witnessed the fall of Granada, a fitting climax to Isabella’s crusade for her God. Now, three decades later, it was her turn to carry on the fight.
Like her formidable mother, Katherine would not flinch from her duty. It is romantic nonsense to imagine her a patient Griselda, a saintly being quietly waiting for her husband to come to his senses while she stoically endured mental torment and anguish. It is also grossly to underestimate her. Katherine was brave, feisty, a ferocious and tenacious warrior for what she believed to be right. If Henry would not cease from risking his own soul and the souls of the people entrusted by God to his care, and if he continued to threaten the very existence of God’s Church, then she must and would oppose him every inch of the way. A lioness indeed.