The first steps taken in May 1527 towards a divorce would have revealed to a less egocentric man than Henry that he did not have an open and shut case. On the face of it those steps were routine — Wolsey called Henry to answer the charge that he was living in sin with his brother’s widow — but because Katherine was carefully kept in the dark it was suspected at the time, and has often been suggested since, that Wolsey and the king were trying to achieve a divorce by stealth. Yet nothing could have extinguished Katherine’s right to appeal to the pope, so it is more likely that the water was being tested to see if support could be mustered for the king’s case. If so, the water was very cold indeed; the lawyers shrank from deciding without advice from the senior bishops, and at least some of the latter felt that canon law was not in the king’s favour.
2
At that date, all Western Europe accepted that marriage between a man and his former sister-in-law was incest, and Henry and Katherine had only been able to marry in the first place because a dispensation from the pope had allowed them to ignore that objection. Thus, if Henry’s divine revelation was genuine, the pope had exceeded his powers and must now eat his words.
The international situation, too, was anything but favourable. For over thirty years the French and a succession of enemies (most recently the Habsburgs) had been fighting for the mastery of Italy. In May 1527 this had reached a climax when troops loyal to the Emperor Charles V sacked the city of Rome. For some months Pope Clement VII was a prisoner in his own citadel and then a pauper refugee — a situation made far worse for him by a concurrent uprising in Florence which expelled his family, the Medici. In the first instance Clement looked for help to the French (backed by Henry VIII), but he never forgot that if they failed he would ultimately have to deal with the emperor. Fail the French did. By September 1528 they were pinned back to a few garrisons in Milan, and a final effort ended in defeat in June 1529 at the Battle of Landriano. It was only in the immediate aftermath of the Sack, when he was desperate for friends, that the pope had any incentive to accommodate Henry’s wish to free himself from Katherine. Otherwise, although French gains always made Clement VII more amenable, he never committed himself to anything — such as annulling the marriage of the emperor’s aunt — which would prevent an accommodation with Charles and the recovery of Florence, should the emperor triumph.
Divorce from Katherine, therefore, was difficult in law and impossible politically. Rome’s answer was to make a series of deceptive concessions to Henry’s demand that the case should be settled in England by Wolsey and a visiting papal legate, acting with full authority delegated from the pope. Even when the legate, Cardinal Campeggio, did arrive in the autumn of 1528, his powers were not complete, necessitating further wearisome and unsatisfactory negotiation with the papal Curia, while Katherine exacerbated the frustration by producing a new and different dispensation which meant that all progress thus far was threatened. Campeggio, who knew that the pope expected him to stall as much as possible, was eventually forced to start proceedings on 31 May 1529, but it was not until 21 June that the famous public confrontation between Katherine and Henry took place in the parliament chamber at Blackfriars, with the queen’s plea to her husband which has re-echoed ever since on the Shakespearean stage.
3
When Henry sat in embarrassed silence, Katherine appealed from the partiality of Blackfriars to the justice of God, turned her back on husband and legates alike and walked out, never to return. Her counsel, however, continued, tying the trial up in technicalities, and Campeggio announced that, in conformity with the practices of the Curia, a summer recess would start on 31 July. By that time, in far-away Italy, the pope had bowed to imperial pressure and issued orders recalling the case to Rome and, by the Treaty of Barcelona, announced that, as Clement himself put it, he ‘had made up his mind to become an imperialist, and live and die as such’.
In all this Anne Boleyn had no place — or not officially. The public line was always that the king’s conscience was troubled. With the prospect of Campeggio’s imminent arrival, in September 1528 Henry had sent Anne to Hever to stay with her mother, and he ostentatiously continued to live with Katherine.
4
In November 1528 he became seriously concerned about the rising level of popular support for the queen, and on Sunday the 8th called a meeting of his courtiers and counsellors and the leading citizens of London to insist that there was no result he would like better from the suit than the confirmation that Katherine was his wife.
5
And on the principle that a lie might as well be a good one, he said (so Edward Hall recollected):
I assure you all, that beside her noble parentage of the which she is descended (as you all know), she is a woman of most gentleness, of most humility and buxomness, yea and of all good qualities appertaining to nobility, she is without comparison, as I this twenty years almost have had true experiment, so that if I were to marry again, if the marriage might be good, I would surely choose her above all other women.
Of course, in Henry’s mind there was no ‘if’ about the marriage being valid. When Campeggio arrived he found the king impervious to reason: ‘I believe that an angel descending from Heaven would be unable to persuade him otherwise.’
6
But if Anne was out of sight — at least when convenient — she was not out of mind. The king’s letters in 1528 show how significant was the pressure she exerted towards a divorce. When in February Stephen Gardiner, the up-and-coming man in the Church, and Edward Fox, who was beginning to make a name as an expert on the king’s ‘great matter’, were sent to Rome with the latest bright new proposal, they were ordered to call in at Hever first, to report to Anne. ‘Darling,’ the king wrote, ‘these [words] shall be only to advertise you that this bearer and his fellow be dispatched with as many things to compass our matter and to bring it to pass as our wits could imagine or devise.’ He warned her that it would take time, ‘yet I will ensure you there shall be no time lost that may be won, and further can not be done; for
ultra posse non est esse
[anything more is quite impossible]. Keep him not too long with you, but desire him, for your sake, to make the more speed.’
7
In a later letter, full of the misery of absence, Henry is careful to tell Anne that he has given himself a headache after four hours’ work on the divorce; in another he sends her brother to break bad news tactfully.
8
When Campeggio at last reached Paris, he writes with the good news; when the legate, having at last arrived, failed to visit Anne, thus driving her into an outburst of fear and suspicion, he manages to calm her, and then writes to welcome her promise to behave sensibly in future:
what joy it is to me to understand of your conformableness to reason, and of the suppressing of your inutile and vain thoughts and fantasies with the bridle of reason. Wherefore, good sweet-heart, continue the same, not only in this, but in all your doings hereafter; for thereby shall come, both to you and me, the greatest quietness that may be in this world.
And he very tactfully went on to mention wedding preparations!
9
The importance of Anne as a spur in the divorce is well illustrated in Edward Fox’s letter to Stephen Gardiner, reporting his reception when, in May 1528, he returned to England. The ambassadors had written ahead to announce that the pope had conceded almost everything Henry had asked for, and when Fox arrived at Greenwich at five in the afternoon, only to find that Wolsey had already departed, Henry seized the chance to surprise Anne.
10
The envoy was told not to come to the king, but to go at once to Anne’s chamber in the Tiltyard Gallery and break the news to her first. She was overcome with joy — so delighted, in fact, that she forgot Fox’s name and insisted on calling him ‘Master Stevens’ (that is, Stephen Gardiner). Then the king came in to enjoy his little surprise and, after Anne had left, got down to detailed discussion with Fox. But Henry could not be without her at such a moment and he called her back for an intense barrage of questions to Fox — was the pope favourable, what had the lawyers said, what about the items that had not been conceded? Whereupon Henry sent Fox, then and there, on to London to see Wolsey. The poor man, who had not reached Sandwich until eleven the night before and had already that day ridden fifty-five miles, with several brushes with inquisitive local officials to delay him and then this excited interview, eventually got the cardinal out of bed at his London residence, well past ten o’clock.
Six months later the story was no longer of Henry wanting to demonstrate to Anne his success with the pope, but of Anne standing between the king and a total loss of nerve. The support for Katherine and the poor reception by the notables of his speech on 8 November so shook him that he rushed off to see Anne (despite his intention to keep his distance from her while the divorce was going through).
11
The imperial ambassador, believing Anne to be already Henry’s mistress, interpreted this as a decision to pursue the amour with more privacy.
12
But it is more likely, one may hazard, that Henry was in despair at the difficulties, and making a frantic plea that Anne face the realities and accept the position of
maîtresse en titre
after all. Instead of that she stiffened his nerve and insisted that he return to London at once to press the divorce.
13
She seems to have insisted also on being allowed back to court herself; if Henry’s resolve could crack like this, she needed to be on the spot. Given the need to preserve the dictates of modesty, and the presence of Katherine at court, this was not easy, but Henry was soon able to write to Anne that Wolsey had come up with the answer: ‘As touching a lodging for you, we have gotten one by my lord cardinal’s means, the like whereof could not have been found hereabouts for all causes, as this bearer shall more show you.’
14
Du Bellay, the French ambassador, was quick to notice, and to report on 9 December, that Anne was at last back at court and lodged grandly near to the king.
15
Where that was is not clear. One tradition suggests Durham House, where Wolsey had been staying while his palace, York Place, was being rebuilt, or the nearby Suffolk Place, but the most likely reading of Henry’s letter suggests a suite at the king’s palace at Bridewell, secured by Wolsey sweeping out the existing occupants.
16
Certainly when the court moved to Greenwich for Christmas, Anne had her own separate suite in the palace.
As the French ambassador pointed out, there was some delicacy in the king housing his current wife and her intended successor under the same roof, and he may have been right to suggest that Anne took care to meet Katherine as little as possible. Or perhaps he had it backwards.
17
Hall’s account of Christmas 1528 does not suggest much enthusiastic participation by the queen:
The more to quicken his spirits and for recreation, the king kept his Christmas at Greenwich, with much solemnity and great plenty of viands, and thither came the two legates, who were received by two dukes, and divers earls, barons and gentlemen, to whom the king showed great pleasures, both of jousts, tourney, banquets, masques and disguisings, and on the Twelfth Day he made the lawful son of Cardinal Campeius [Campeggio] born in wedlock, a knight, and gave him a collar of esses of gold. But the queen showed to them no matter of countenance, and made no joy of nothing, her mind was so troubled.
18
Almost nothing has survived to reveal the personal relations of Anne and Katherine once the king’s intentions were out in the open, or, indeed, before that. Cavendish would have it that Katherine behaved impeccably and ‘shewed ([neither] to Mistress Anne, ne to the king) any spark or kind of grudge or displeasure’; indeed, she ‘dissembled the same, having Mistress Anne in more estimation for the king’s sake’.
19
This, Cavendish says, showed her to be a true patient Griselda, as in the Boccaccio/ Chaucer story, and other writers made the same identification.
20
One may suggest, however, that Katherine was keeping her nerve. Kings had mistresses, Henry had had mistresses. So long as the wife tolerated the other woman she should present no danger; the only error was to treat her as a real threat and so elevate her to the status of queen in waiting. Katherine’s mistake - and though she would have been a saint not to make it, a mistake that was fatal for her handling of Henry — was not to recognize the depth of Henry’s self-deception. As for Anne, George Wyatt (and he is supported by some Catholic sources) claims that she was loyal to the queen and that Katherine tried to help her to resist the king’s advances, which could be true at the stage of his ‘courtly love’ attack.
21
He spoils the story, however, by suggesting that Katherine did this by engaging Anne in frequent games of cards, which were intended to make it impossible for her to keep her deformed finger out of sight; this makes sense only if the games were intended to disgust the king rather than giving Anne an excuse to keep away from him. The muddle is probably Wyatt’s, embroidering a family story about one card game (unidentified) in which Anne frequently turned up a king, and Katherine remarked, ‘My lady Anne, you have good hap to stop at a king, but you are not like others, you will have all or none.’ Whether, as is often suggested, Katherine was delivering a warning and a prophecy ‘under game’, or whether a chance remark in gaming subsequently assumed an unintended significance, it is impossible to say.
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