The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (142 page)

In fact, given the threat that Catherine’s opposition posed, what is only marginally less surprising than her bravery in offering it is the restraint shown by Henry and Wolsey in resisting it. She may have been threatened with constructive treason and subjected to lengthy harangues on the reasons why she should comply with Henry’s wishes, but she was allowed to take legal advice from foreigners and to appoint to her legal council men of the highest calibre who, whatever her occasional suspicions about them,
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seem to have prosecuted her case for the most part with sincerity and vigour. John Fisher is the outstanding example, but his episcopal colleagues, John Clerk and Henry Standish, were not far behind.
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That this was allowed to happen is not entirely to Henry’s and Wolsey’s credit, just as the pressure placed on her to comply is not entirely to their discredit. Given the need to secure for Henry as legally and politically sound a marriage as possible, appearances had to be very important, and thus it was difficult not to allow her at least some of
her legal rights. Catherine’s treatment had little to do with morality and everything to do with expediency; and it must be judged accordingly. But in order to understand Wolsey’s position we must remove the spotlight for a moment from the wronged but defiant queen and focus it on a figure whose overriding responsibility was to the king. It has been suggested here that Wolsey would have been unlikely to see any political advantage for himself or for the Crown in trying to remove Catherine. This alone means that he is a most unlikely candidate for the role of author of the divorce, and it will be suggested shortly that in his heart of hearts he would have been much more likely to be opposed to it because of the great difficulties it would so obviously present. But his personal views were neither here nor there. It was his duty to carry out the king’s wishes to the best of his ability. In the way of those wishes stood Catherine, who had so singularly failed to see where her duty as a loyal subject lay. This being so, she became the enemy who must be treated in whatever way the Crown found expedient.

Why Catherine chose to resist remains something of a mystery. It is not enough to say that she was fighting for her daughter’s interests, for, as Wolsey more than once pointed out,
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compliance with Henry’s wishes would have done much more to further them. It is also the case that nothing stood in the way of good relations between Henry and Charles more than Catherine’s unwillingness to yield gracefully to her husband’s wishes. Thus, what might be called the sensible reasons for taking the stand she did are not all that credible. What seems to have sustained her was a strong sense of the rightness of her position: that her marriage being holy and good, no power on earth could dissolve it. Whether this belief was coupled, as has been suggested,
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with an intense bitterness at being rejected by a man of whom she had deserved nothing but good, and whether this bitterness translated itself into a determination to thwart his every wish, a not uncommon reaction to the break up of a marriage, must remain speculation, though there are reasons for rejecting it.

One reason is that her comments about Henry’s behaviour towards her reveal distress and sadness, not anger. Her anger was reserved for Wolsey, whom she blamed for what had happened. It was he, she told Campeggio, who had ‘blown this coal’ between herself and Henry,
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and it is her views that provide the most convincing evidence that Wolsey was the author of her troubles, even if in the end they must be rejected. It is easy enough to see why she thought as she did. Whatever Wolsey’s responsibility for instigating the divorce, much of its management was bound to fall to him. It was he who presided over the two legatine courts which tried the matter. It was he whose task it usually was to persuade her to comply with Henry’s wishes; he who was chiefly responsible for the divorce negotiations with the Curia and other European courts; and, in particular, it was he who was most clearly asssociated with the new francophile policy that coincided with, and was in part dictated by, the search for a divorce. It must have seemed to Catherine at this time that everywhere she turned the figure of the cardinal blocked her way. And not only
was her conclusion that he was responsible for both the conception of the divorce and its management a very natural one, but it was probably psychologically necessary too. What Catherine had to explain to herself, and in the least hurtful way possible, was Henry’s rejection of her. The wiles of a younger and more attractive rival were not by themselves enough. For one thing, there had been other rivals in the past, but none had previously threatened her marriage.
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For another, such an explanation would attach rather more blame to Henry as willing accomplice of these wiles than she was prepared to allow. What was required was an Iago-like figure, powerful and sinister enough fatally to corrupt her husband, and this Wolsey provided. Moreover, by blaming him, she gave herself the hope that if only his evil influence could be removed, Henry would return to his senses and come back to her. Wolsey thus became the scapegoat who hid from her the unbearable truth that Henry himself was the author of all her misfortunes.

That Henry was the author, if something of a simplification, must surely be the truth. None of the arguments and evidence that point to Wolsey in the end convince. Moreover, other suggested candidates turn out to be men of straw. One such is John Longland, bishop of Lincoln and one of the king’s confessors; but what he could possibly have been up to in taking the initiative in such a sensitive matter defies the imagination. Then there is Gabriel de Grammont, bishop of Tarbes, of whom more shortly, but he is no more likely an author than Longland: in such a matter no foreign ambassador’s view could have carried sufficient weight. Unless one sees Henry as at the mercy of every passing whim and fancy that blew in his direction, it is only he himself who could have been the author of his own divorce: he was the king and it was his marriage.

Why did he want a divorce? Both at the time and since a number of reasons have been put forward, some more creditable to him, and more credible, than others. It is, of course, likely that there was more than one reason, but what was surely central was his passion for Anne Boleyn. In making this perhaps not very controversial statement there are, nevertheless, problems of evidence. It is not even possible to ascertain when their relationship began: nearly twenty love letters have survived, but none of them is dated.
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As for what it was about Anne that attracted him, that too remains something of a mystery. She was no obvious beauty, apart from her dark almond-eyes, about which most people commented.
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She had spent some time at the French court, so perhaps it was her sophisticated French ways that enticed him; at any rate, she was probably a great deal more fun than Catherine, who in 1527 was in her early forties, and even ten years previously had been considered ‘rather ugly than otherwise’.
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Moreover, not only did Catherine lack beauty, but she also lacked sons; and as her last pregnancy had occurred as long ago as 1518, by 1527 it was certain that she would never bear one.
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This cannot have helped the marriage, but
whether it destroyed it is another matter. In Mary, Catherine had produced a legitimate female heir. There also existed an illegitimate male heir in Henry Fitzroy, the son of an early mistress, Elizabeth Blount. In 1525 Fitzroy, aged six, had been created duke of Richmond, and appointed nominal head of the Council of the North. There was, thus, no question of him remaining a skeleton in the cupboard, but whether Henry ever seriously contemplated naming him his heir it is impossible to tell.
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As for a legitimate male heir, of course Henry talked about the need for one, but not quite as often as historians have done; and, when he did so, it appears to have been for tactical reasons rather than out of concern that the lack was proof that God was against his marriage, or that it endangered the future well-being of his kingdom. For instance, as we shall shortly discover, one of Henry’s problems, when he tried to make use of the Levitical prohibition against a marriage to one’s brother’s widow, was the very existence of Mary. Proof of this prohibition was supposedly that such a marriage would be childless. Fortunately, there was a way round this, not invented by Henry, which was to argue that only the lack of a male child was relevant, even though that was not strictly what the text said.
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This being so, Henry had to stress such a lack, whether it really bothered him or not. When it suited him he was perfectly happy not to stress it.

When, in November 1528 he addressed a meeting of notables in a major propaganda exercise to prove to his audience that his ‘great matter’ was entirely motivated by a concern for the common weal, he concentrated only on the effect on Mary’s legitimacy, put in doubt by his invalid marriage, and on her right to succeed, at no stage suggesting that her gender was any impediment.
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He did not convince his audience, and he should not convince us. The trouble with all seemingly altruistic reasons for the divorce is that they appear to be entirely geared to the demands of the moment. And the course of his relationship with Anne does nothing to strengthen the view that concern for a male heir was uppermost in Henry’s mind. If it had been, a more compliant lady might have served his purpose better and, while it is true that Anne’s miscarriage in January 1536 may well have had something to do with her downfall in the following April, the marriage was under stress well before then, and, unlike Catherine, she was still capable of bearing him other children. But though Henry’s concern for a male heir does not carry great conviction, it is possible that in 1527 Catherine’s inability to bear him more children and Anne’s potential to do so, may have played some part in Henry’s thinking.

Again care needs to be taken about the role assigned to the bishop of Tarbes both at the time and since. During the course of the Anglo-French negotiations in
the early spring of 1527 he does seem to have raised the question of Mary’s legitimacy, this in response to English questioning about Francis
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’s precise marital status following his pre-contract to Eleanor of Austria.
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Given that one of the options being discussed was a marriage between the French king and Mary, such diplomatic manoeuvring was to be expected, but, it is possible that the bishop’s question triggered in Henry a chain of thought that made it easier for him to question his marriage. If the French could challenge its validity there must be something wrong with it. But that the bishop’s intervention played only an accidental part is suggested by the way it was made use of in the months ahead. Wolsey mentioned it in that first tricky interview with Fisher on the subject of the divorce in July 1527, presumably because it offered a neutral explanation of how a scruple about the marriage had entered Henry’s head at that particular time
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and certainly it was better than talking to Fisher about Anne! It was also used, this time by Henry, at that meeting of notables already referred to.
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On the other hand, when explaining the origins of Henry’s ‘scruple’ to the pope or emperor it was more usual to stress that it had first arisen out of the king’s own biblical studies, an edifying picture indeed!
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As with the arguments about the lack of a male heir, so with the bishop of Tarbes’s role, it was the circumstances that dictated whether or not they were used, and this in turn suggests that scepticism is called for. The one argument for the divorce that Henry never made in public was that he had fallen in love with Anne, for to have done so would have been tactically foolish. Yet in February 1529 Campeggio was to say that Henry’s love was ‘something amazing, and in fact he sees nothing and thinks nothing but Anne. He cannot stay away from her for an hour; it is really quite pitiable, and on it depends his life, and indeed the destruction or survival of this kingdom.’
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Surely Campeggio had got to the heart of the matter, for without the intensity of that love, or perhaps it should be called infatuation, it is difficult to see how Henry could have sustained the campaign for the five and half years that were needed, or that he would have jeopardized so much in order to do so.

Henry was the author of his own divorce. So where does that leave Wolsey? Perhaps as an opponent of it, if not from the start, though Cavendish said he was,
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at least from the moment he realized that Henry was in deadly earnest about Anne? There are reasons for believing this. The most important is that the divorce confronted him with enormous problems, for which there may never have been any satisfactory solutions. This alone suggests that it was a foolish thing to wish for – unless, like Henry, one was in love. As regards the succession to the throne, it raised more questions than it solved. As regards foreign policy, it meant that England became a hostage to the other European powers, for once it became apparent that there was something that Henry wanted almost regardless of the cost, they were in the strongest of positions to raise their terms. The possibility that the divorce would
lead to schism unless Clement complied was a threat that Wolsey was to use frequently, but it was also a real possibility and one that would have worried Wolsey a good deal. Religious divisions would enormously complicate the conduct of foreign policy, leaving Henry dangerously exposed to attack from his two main rivals, Francis and Charles. In addition, they would undermine the internal peace of the kingdom, and at the same time make a mockery of the Christian faith. Wolsey was never a papalist, and, despite what was said earlier about his churchmanship, might just have accepted an English Church free of Rome’s authority; but he was no friend of heresy and his acceptance would have been extremely reluctant. With his firm grasp of all the implications, Wolsey must have had many misgivings about a policy dictated to him by his master’s foolishness. And there is the possibility that he may have feared for his own position if Anne ever became queen and, as a result, her faction ruled. Against all this, however, there is one compelling argument: that failure to obtain what the king so passionately wanted was the quickest route to his own destruction. It is this argument which should be borne in mind while we consider the episode that has lent most support to the opposite point of view.