A stone’s throw from the River Thames and from Henry’s palace of Bridewell lies the monastic complex known as Blackfriars. Here, black-garbed Dominicans chanted their prayers, studied in the cloisters, ate in the lofty refectory, meditated in the gardens and orchards. It was Blackfriars that the king chose as the venue for Campeggio and Wolsey to thrash out the intimate details of his marriage. Within its walls he hoped they would reach what for him was the correct decision, and he could at last marry his Anne. That is, unless Katherine managed to prevent him.
By now she was as prepared as she could be. Her position had not changed: she would not surrender and she would maintain that her marriage to Henry was true because she had never consummated her union with Arthur. “No marriages will be secure if this is dissolved,” she told Pope Clement. She had no choice but to take a stand if truth was to be upheld.
But no court in England, she maintained, could bring her justice because its personnel were bound to be under Henry’s sway, as were any counsel assigned to her. Agreeing, Katherine’s friend Margaret appointed lawyers from the Netherlands to assist her former sister-in-law. As it turned out, they were unable to stay in England for very long as they felt intimidated, probably with reason. One whose advice she sought was the scholar Juan Luis Vives, who had written treatises on education with Princess Mary in mind. After listening politely to all the queen said concerning her marriage, doing his best to console her, and generally singing her praises, he agreed to pass on a message to Mendoza. Other than that, he was reluctant to “willingly meddle in the affairs of princes.”
Luckily for Katherine, there was one man who would “meddle in the affairs of princes,” a man of integrity and fierce courage: Bishop John Fisher. One of the legal team appointed by Henry to work for Katherine’s defense, Fisher was to become her most resolute and valiant champion. Pointing out to a furious Henry that in a dispute with Herod, John the Baptist had declared that it was “impossible … to die more gloriously than in the cause of marriage,” Fisher vowed that he himself would “dare any great or extreme peril whatever” for a similar principle. Equating Henry with Herod was tantamount to putting his own life on the line, but the bishop did not flinch.
When the court at Blackfriars opened at the end of May 1529, Katherine certainly had need of him. But she also relied upon her own instincts. The proceedings presented her with a dilemma. If she appeared in person, some might see it as a tacit acceptance of the trial’s legality; if she refused to appear, she would miss a rare opportunity to air her case in public. Such a chance might not come again. The choice was simple.
Katherine knew how to create an impression and how to play the many roles thrust upon royal women. She had fulfilled her myriad of public duties with regal aplomb while never losing sight of her essential feminine status. She was, after all, a woman who was not too proud to make her husband’s shirts. Indeed, Wolsey’s biographer, Cavendish, describes how she once appeared to the legates with a skein of white thread around her neck, apologizing that they had arrived while she was “at work” among her ladies. Perhaps she was indeed working, or perhaps she knew the importance of cultivating a good image to the worldly Campeggio, a man who had only taken holy orders following the death of his wife.
Nothing she had ever done, though, could match her superb display in that chamber at Blackfriars. The tapestry-decorated hall was set up as a courtroom, with benches for the various lawyers, chairs draped with cloth of gold for Wolsey and Campeggio, cushioned chairs set under gold brocade cloths of estate for Henry and Katherine, and plenty of room for spectators. The surroundings, far from daunting Katherine, provided her with the best of all possible stage sets. Regal, dignified, every inch the queen of England, she gave the performance of her life.
Her petition to transfer the trial to Rome rejected by the legates, she listened skeptically while Henry declared himself tormented by living in mortal sin for twenty years, vowing earnestly that he could never be “at ease” while the legality of his marriage was unclear. After Wolsey and Campeggio promised to judge the dispute fairly and justly, Katherine took control.
Rising from her seat, she crossed the floor and knelt at Henry’s feet. Cavendish has left us a very full version of what she said. She addressed herself only to her husband, as if she and he were the only two people in that packed room. Begging him for “justice and right … pity and compassion,” she reiterated her feelings of being “a poor woman,” “a stranger” born out of Henry’s lands. She had, she said, “no assured friend,” no neutral counsel.
Then, with everyone’s eyes upon her, their ears straining to catch her every word, she cut to the quick, asking what she had done to offend her husband. “I take God and the world to witness,” she said, “that I have been to you a true humble and obedient wife, ever conformable to your will and pleasure.” No one could have said otherwise. And when she touched on the question of children, few would have been unmoved:
This twenty years I have been your true wife or more, and by me ye have had divers children, although it hath pleased God to call them out of this world, which hath been no default in me.
It was then that she broadcast to the world that she had been a virgin upon her marriage to Henry: “And when ye had me at the first, I take God to be my judge, I was a true maid without touch of man.” No one listening could mistake what was in fact her key point. Devastatingly, she went on to remind Henry that he knew she was telling the truth. “Whether it be true or no, I put it to your conscience,” she challenged, knowing perfectly well how much Henry’s conscience mattered to him.
Henry VII and Ferdinand, she continued, both “excellent kings in wisdom and princely behaviour,” as well as the “wise counsellors” around them, had thought the marriage “good and lawful,” so she could not understand why Henry could entertain such doubts himself and cause her so much pain.
Returning to her point about having no proper advisers, she implored the king to spare her the “extremity” of the court until she received counsel from Spain. If he would not, she said, delivering yet another body blow, she could only commit her cause to God.
In the stunned silence that greeted her totally unexpected speech, she curtsied deeply to Henry and swept from the room, leaning upon the arm of one of her household officials and accompanied by her supportive ladies. Requests that she return to her seat were treated disdainfully. “It is no indifferent [neutral] court for me,” she pronounced, “therefore I will not tarry.” She had thrown everything into disarray, just as she must have planned. She would never go back.
With her empty chair a constant accusation for Henry, he had little choice but to press on. The trial continued in her absence, the queen being pronounced “contumacious,” her cause maintained by her legal advisers, who remained after her dramatic departure. Katherine had often proved herself a poor judge of character: she had eulogized the calculating and grasping Friar Diego, she had criticized the efforts of the hardworking Dr. de Puebla. Her belief that Wolsey was anything but an impartial judge was correct, but when she dismissed her advocates as Henry’s stooges, she did Fisher in particular a gross disservice. He never gave an inch. He fought her corner with erudition, skill, and consummate bravery.
He needed to, for Henry’s counsellors pursued the king’s case as if their lives depended on it. Katherine’s claim of virginity, so difficult for her to prove, was bound to be the crux. The obvious approach was to reinvestigate what had happened in the bedroom on Arthur’s wedding night and at Ludlow. After Isabella and Ferdinand’s first night spent as man and wife, their blood-flecked sheets had been proudly displayed; that had not been done with those used by Arthur and Katherine. Wolsey’s clumsy attempt to suggest to Katherine’s almoner that they had been smuggled to Ferdinand to prove consummation was a blatant lie. Had Ferdinand received bloodied sheets, neither he nor Isabella would have had any reason to order their ambassador to try to find out whether their daughter was still a maiden, which is precisely what they did when news had reached them of Arthur’s sudden death. And Wolsey did not seek to produce anyone able to testify to seeing soiled sheets removed from the royal couple’s bed, either on that first morning or on any other occasion when Katherine and Arthur had been supposedly living as man and wife. Perhaps the reason was simply that there really had been no bloodstained sheets in the first place?
Wolsey therefore tried a different avenue. He amassed a huge dossier, almost entirely hearsay, of often voyeuristic documents in which those who had escorted Arthur to his bedchamber or had met him outside his bedroom door on the following morning now told their stories. Henry’s cronies certainly did their best for their master and, incidentally, for themselves. The king’s favorite and former jousting partner Charles Brandon, now elevated to the dukedom of Suffolk and married to Henry’s sister, “the French Queen,” described Arthur’s boasts of being “in the midst of Spain” and repeated insinuations that it had been too much sex that had caused Arthur “to decay,” thus bringing about his premature death. Anne’s father, Thomas Boleyn, was quick to reiterate the “in Spain” stories, even though he had not heard the words himself; in any case, he said, he “believed” the marriage consummated “from their [Katherine’s and Arthur’s] age.” In other words, he knew precisely nothing. And that was the sum of it: mostly these so-called witnesses affirmed that they “believed” or “assumed” consummation because they had not heard otherwise or because they had overheard someone else talking about it.
Wolsey would have been aware of this, but he had an ace up his sleeve, or so he thought. He had tracked down William Thomas, the man who had helped Arthur into his nightgown and taken him to Katherine’s chamber, leaving him there all night long. His is perhaps the most crucial piece of evidence in Henry’s favor, as he confirms that Arthur and Katherine did indeed sleep in the same room on more than one occasion. However, since Katherine herself admitted to Campeggio that she had slept with Arthur, although not “more than seven nights,” his testimony loses much of its value.
A couple of statements in the dossier stand out, since they reveal that not everyone was on Henry’s side. Bishop Fox, once one of Henry VII’s ministers, had been interviewed in 1527 in the very early stages of Wolsey’s investigations. By then seventy-nine years old, he professed not to remember many things, but there was one point on which he was very definite: after Arthur’s demise, there had been “frequent deliberations” in Henry’s council “in reference to the impediment” to Katherine’s marriage to the future Henry VIII, which had been created by her marriage to Arthur. Fox knew about the deliberations because he had been present. Nicholas West, Bishop of Ely, was another dissenting voice. While he could “say nothing of the consummation” other than that Katherine and Arthur had been old enough, West expressed “doubts of it” because the queen had denied it to him “on the testimony of her conscience.”
Overall, Wolsey’s dossier remains thoroughly unconvincing. And this did not escape Katherine’s shrewd mind. Lying buried for centuries in the Spanish archives, where it was discovered by the leading Spanish historian and antiquarian Pascual de Gayangos in 1879, is a “list of persons likely to give evidence on the first and second marriage of the queen of England” who had returned to Spain over the years, together with the questions they were to be asked. Among those named is Catalina, the Moor, “once the Queen’s slave, who used to make her bed and attend to other services of the chamber.” Then there is Catalina Fortes, a former lady-in-waiting to Katherine, “and much in her confidence.” Another “waiting maid to the Queen,” now married to one of her former male attendants, Juan Cuero, is also mentioned, as is Maria de Rojas, who (says the compiler of the list) “used to sleep in the same bed” with Katherine “after the death of Prince Arthur, her first husband.”
The questions put to these former servants leave us in no doubt as to the line that was being pursued:
[1] How long did the said Queen live with Arthur, prince of Wales, and whether the councillors of the king of England [Henry VII] were of opinion that the said Queen and Arthur, her first husband, did not consummate matrimony, owing to his extreme debility, and to the act being exceedingly injurious to his health?
[2] Whether it be true that the said Arthur was very young and thin, delicate and of a weak complexion, and unfit for a woman, and whether he looked as if he were impotent for marriage?
Here was a completely fresh approach to the problem. Had Arthur, after all, been a sickly boy and “unfit for a woman” even before he had first entered the bedroom on his wedding night to make love to his bride? Had he all along been impotent, unable to manage more than a teenage fumble?
It would take a considerable time for Charles’s agents to track down the people on the list. Their testimony, whatever it finally was, was for some reason never produced at the Blackfriars trial and did not affect its outcome. Nevertheless, the Spanish initiative on Katherine’s behalf shows that she had been more than happy for her former servants to give their evidence, clearly believing that she had nothing to fear from what they might have to say. On the other hand, the likelihood that they would have contradicted the official Spanish line so clearly dictated by Charles was about the same as the likelihood that Henry’s nobles and Arthur’s former servants would contradict the English one. And in the last resort, the evidence on both sides could only have been hearsay, because no one, not even Katherine’s Spanish bedchamber servants, had actually been in the room or watched her and Arthur enjoy, or attempt, sexual intercourse together, or not.
And so the case dragged on. Despite all Wolsey’s—and Katherine’s—best efforts, nothing could be proved on either side, and since there was also no consensus on how the canon law surrounding the case should be interpreted, with Campeggio adhering to his secret instructions from Clement not to decide any substantive points of law, no decision could be reached. Campeggio, who went so far as to say that he hated the entire business as a “heavy burden” and a “travail,” could see no way out. It thus fell to him to deliver the coup de grâce. On September 1, he transferred the entire case to Rome.
No one had won. Katherine still did not have her husband back and now faced an agonizing wait while the papal court ground slowly into action; Henry had not received a papal judgment that would allow him to marry Anne with impunity; Clement had antagonized Henry. And as Katherine had foreseen when she told Mendoza that she thought Wolsey “would be the victim” of Henry’s “rage,” the court’s failure presaged the great cardinal’s fall. Try as he might, Wolsey could do nothing to placate Henry. In September 1529, Mendoza’s replacement, Eustace Chapuys, summed up Wolsey’s predicament: “The affairs of the old Cardinal are beginning to take a very bad turn. Formerly no one dared to say a word against him, but now the tables are turned.”
Turned they were. In October, Wolsey was forced to surrender the king’s great seal, meaning that he was no longer chancellor; five days after that he pleaded guilty to praemunire (the catchall crime of accepting foreign jurisdiction contrary to the royal prerogative). Katherine had come to loathe Wolsey, believing him an enemy of Charles and imagining him to be the main instigator of the divorce, but his spectacular fall, and its consequences, shocked even her. His property confiscated by the king, the humiliated and frightened cardinal had to write out in his own hand an inventory of every single item he possessed to make sure that nothing was missed. His silver and gold plate, his embroidered hangings and tapestries, his sumptuously furnished houses were all now Henry’s. Gloating over the gleaming treasure trove and the glories of Wolsey’s London residence, Henry could not resist showing everything off to Anne and her mother.
Meanwhile the disgraced Wolsey was packed off to the city of York to take up his somewhat neglected duties as archbishop, a move that would not satisfy his enemies, who were soon baying for his blood as well as his property. “Those who have raised this storm against the Cardinal will not rest until they have entirely done for him, knowing full well that were he to recover his lost ascendancy and power their own lives would be in jeopardy,” wrote the perspicacious Chapuys. They did not have long to wait: by now in his early sixties, Wolsey died of a flux the following year while on his way to London to face trial for treason.
Although never in danger of her life, Katherine’s own position was worse after the trial than before, as Henry plotted and schemed how to be rid of her. In outward appearance, little seemed to have changed. She carried out her duties as punctiliously as before; ever solicitous, she wrote to Charles asking him for a benefice for one of Campeggio’s servants who had lost all his property in the sack of Rome. She continued to sew Henry’s shirts—until Anne Boleyn found out, stormed into Henry’s presence, and demanded that the custom be stopped. It was. In public, Henry continued to treat her with respect. They were together at Whitsun in 1530, they dined in state on major church festivals, they hunted together “as usual” in the summer of that year. But in private, things were very different. Katherine was bypassed, and personal conversations and meetings with her husband were less and less frequent. Henry was beginning to ostracize her.
Katherine’s demeanor remained serene and dignified. Chapuys reports that just once she upbraided Henry and took him to task. She exhorted him “to be again to her a good prince and husband,” to “quit the evil life he was leading and the bad example he was setting,” reminding him that she was, as he “well knew,” his “true and lawful wife.” Henry, who hated scenes, retorted that there were many of his persuasion and that anyway the pope was in the emperor’s power. With that, he left the room “abruptly without saying another word.” Not only was such a visible display of defiance uncharacteristic of Katherine, she knew it would achieve nothing. She herself had once said that it was better to cajole Henry than to berate him.
What made matters as intolerable as they were painful for her was Anne’s prominence. No longer bothering to disguise his intentions, Henry flaunted his “own sweetheart” as if she were already his wife. With unconcealed distaste, Chapuys reported to Charles that Anne had sat at the king’s side at a banquet “occupying the very place allotted to a crowned queen.” Still more scandalous in Chapuys’s eyes, Henry rode through the countryside with Anne mounted upon his own horse in a pillion, an action so unusual and provocative that it “greatly called forth people’s attention.” And as the months passed, no one could be unaware of the gifts lavished upon her by Katherine’s besotted husband. A raft of new saddles was ordered for her, among them one “of the French fashion,” which came with a down pillow “covered with black velvet, fringed with silk and gold.” There was a harness “of black velvet, fringed with silk and gold, with buttons pear fashion, and tassels of silk and gold.” The list is endless, as more and more saddles and riding accessories were provided for Anne to accompany her king outdoors in considerable style.
The multitude of riding items pales into insignificance when compared with the jewels Anne accumulated. There were a huge emerald ring, golden buttons, a girdle of gold, a diamond brooch featuring a figure of the Virgin, rubies, gold rings, gold borders “set with 10 diamonds and 8 pearls” for her sleeves, diamonds for her hair. And, because Anne, like Katherine, was well read, there was material “for furnishing a book with silver and gilt” and bindings of velvet for other volumes. The king even settled the bill for “mending a little book which was garnished in France.” Then, to provide a suitable backdrop to show off so many sparkling items, the king paid for yards and yards of the best fabric for her ever-growing wardrobe, some satins costing almost as much by the yard as Henry’s servants earned in a month.
And where Anne went, so did her grasping family. They were all forever in the king’s company, riding with him, playing cards with him, racing greyhounds with him, hunting with him, playing bowls with him. As they did so, they gathered titles and lands. Anne’s father became Earl of Wiltshire, leaving the title of Viscount Rochford conveniently available for Anne’s sharp, astute brother, George. Her uncle, James, so closely associated with the Hebrew scholar Robert Wakefield, entered Parliament. And Durham House, the stunning riverside home where Katherine had recuperated after Arthur’s death, was given to the new Earl of Wiltshire.
Katherine could only watch aghast as her rival was fêted, paraded, and flattered while she herself was being systematically sidelined. What Henry really wanted, or perhaps what Anne demanded, was that she no longer be at court at all. Because Katherine dug in her heels, that took time to arrange, despite Henry’s crafty offer of a precious reunion with their daughter. Seeing straight through his stratagem, Katherine’s immediate response was that nothing would make her separate from her husband; a wife’s duty was to be constantly at hand. And when he left her to spend time with Anne without even a farewell, she carried on treating him as she always had by attempting to continue their joint custom of sending messages to each other every three days.
However, with this she miscalculated. What she thought a harmless action provoked an appallingly vicious response. She sent a message asking after his health and saying how sorry she had been at not seeing him before his departure. Since she had been told that she could not have “the pleasure and happiness” of going with him, she had imagined that she might have “the consolation of bidding him adieu.” By meekly stating that nonetheless it was “for him to order and for her to obey his commands,” Katherine probably infuriated him, but his answer left her reeling. He “cared not for her adieux,” he railed to her messenger, nor did he “wish to afford her the consolation” of which she had spoken. In fact he had no desire to afford her any consolation at all and was “indifferent” about her cares for his health. Katherine’s attempts at placating him met with another stinging reply, this time in a letter, telling her that she was “very pertinacious” in her oath that she had “never been carnally known by prince Arthur, as likewise making public such an assertion.” He would prove her wrong, he threatened. Her time would be more profitably spent in trying to find witnesses “to prove her pretended virginity” than in sending messages or writing to him.
We know of all this from Chapuys’s detailed report to Charles on the matter; we also know that it took the ambassador a while to “soothe” Katherine’s “sorrow” and “calm her fears.” His efforts were doubtless needed again shortly afterward, when Henry returned Katherine’s carefully chosen New Year’s gift, a “gold cup of great value and singular workmanship,” after hardly glancing at it, while gratefully accepting Anne’s present of ornamented darts.
The very foundations of Katherine’s life were being undermined. Her husband wanted nothing to do with her; despite his promises and encouragement, Charles seemed to be achieving little for her; and her case dragged on endlessly in Rome. Everyday matters were becoming increasingly troublesome, subject to petty restrictions. With spies planted in her privy chamber, getting messages and letters to her supporters was a major challenge, although her physician Fernando Vittorio acted as her go-between whenever he could. Ever resourceful, the supportive Duchess of Norfolk once sent her a message concealed in an orange stuffed inside a gift of poultry. Even when given permission to visit her, Chapuys told Charles of how the duchess’s husband, one of Henry’s councillors, tried to fob him off by saying Katherine had gone out to “hear a sermon” when in fact she was sitting quietly in her apartments all the time.
Yet somehow she kept up her stream of letters and messages to those she thought might come to her aid. While it never occurred to her to write to her sister Juana, shut up incommunicado at Tordesillas as she was, she communicated with the pope; with Margaret; with Juana’s daughter Maria, the queen of Hungary; with Charles; with his wife, Isabella, whom he often left as regent in Spain while he attended to the rest of his vast dominions. She told them her news, she begged for their help, and she made it very clear that she would never, ever give up even though, as she complained to her nephew, her treatment was “enough to shorten ten lives, much more mine.” She would persevere, for pain and suffering were part of the human condition, designed to be endured and overcome through faith and struggle. This was particularly so when religion itself was threatened. And since the fiasco of the Blackfriars trial, Katherine had watched helplessly as her fears for her Church gradually materialized.
In a quandary about what road to follow as Campeggio left English shores, Henry tried anything and everything. Constant embassies were sent to Francis to elicit his support. Weakened after Pavia and a second defeat in the battle of Landriano, the French king was prepared to listen, but he did very little. He had no desire to defer to Charles, but he wanted peace rather than war. Thomas Boleyn had the idea of trying to reason directly with Charles himself; unsurprisingly, his arguments fell on deaf ears. Then, possibly acting on the suggestion of a Boleyn protégé, the young Cambridge don Thomas Cranmer, Henry sought opinions on his case from various European universities. The results were predictable, the institutions declaring their verdicts according to their political allegiances or the value of the king’s bribes. Katherine could breathe easily on that score. For Henry, nothing seemed to be working.
And then she suffered another, very cruel blow: enforced separation from her daughter. After a very brief, almost happy, interlude with fifteen-year-old Princess Mary, who had been allowed to visit her in Windsor, Katherine was ordered to move to Wolsey’s former Hertfordshire residence, The Moor. Mary was not to go with her but was to travel to Richmond. While the queen stayed put for another couple of months, Mary dutifully obeyed her father and left for Richmond.
Mother and daughter were never to meet again.