Bloody Mary (12 page)

Toward the end of June Henry came to the queen’s apartments and said simply that he now found they had never been legally married, and that he was taking steps to have the situation rectified by the pope. Katherine wept, and Henry, unnerved, left the room. Even though she had known it was coming, hearing of the divorce from his own lips shattered Katherine’s composure, and left her agonized. The sheer heart-lessness of the blow was what alarmed her most; in her eighteen years as Henry’s wife she had not known him to be so openly, deliberately cruel. He had exposed her to a thousand humiliations, and had lashed out at her in anger, but this blunt, pitiless malevolence was new.

As soon as her panic passed she sent for help. Her courier reached the court of Charles V late in July, carrying a letter which confirmed the startling news of Henry’s plans. The emperor’s response was unambiguous yet cautious. He sat down and wrote a letter to Henry in his own hand, urging him to abandon the divorce as injurious to England’s security and likely to lead to “everlasting feuds and partialities” over the question of the succession. At the same time he sent a message to Katherine emphasizing the enormity of the king’s action, “calculated to astonish the whole world,” and assuring her that he would “do everything in his power on her behalf.” Privately he wrote to Mendoza that the entire issue must be treated as a family matter for the time being; if possible, he must prevent it from becoming an affair of state. Above all, Charles feared that through Henry’s ill-advised whim both Katherine and Mary would be irrevocably dishonored, “a thing in itself so unreasonable that there is no example of it in ancient or modern history.”
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As the months passed Henry’s sudden, scandalous decision was transformed into an interminable, highly technical legal debate. Embassy after embassy was sent to Rome—first Henry’s chosen negotiator William Knight, then Wolsey’s representatives, bishops Gardiner and Fox, and still later Francis Bryan and the diplomat Peter Vannes. None of these legations moved Pope Clement, who was still attempting to recover from the destruction of his city and the indignities of captivity. Charles released him seven months after his troops seized Rome, and the pope was trying to rebuild his court in exile at Orvieto, but he was no longer capable of acting independently even if he had been a man of strong character, which he was not. He would not offend the emperor by granting the divorce; he feared to alienate Henry by an outright refusal to grant it. In short, he did nothing, and he did it with every semblance of purposeful activity the papal bureaucracy could devise.

After a year the papal legate Cardinal Campeggio came to England, bringing with him authorization to convene a court to examine the case,
but Clement had told him to delay a conclusive decision for as long as possible, meanwhile urging Henry to take Katherine back. Soon after Campeggio arrived Katherine threw all Henry’s previous efforts into confusion by producing a second papal bull pronouncing her marriage to Henry valid. The need to discredit this second bull led to further diplomatic convolutions, and ultimately, by the spring of 1529, to a complete stalemate in the negotiations with the pope.

As if to complement the murky frustrations of these proceedings the sweating sickness broke out again in London. Once again without warning the cycle of chills, “fervent heat,” delirium and death broke in upon ordinary lives. Forty thousand were affected in the first outbreak alone, and Londoners fleeing the infection carried it into the countryside where it struck thousands more. Commerce and government slowed, and then stopped altogether; courts were adjourned and countinghouses locked up. Wolsey, who had come safely through the sweat once, made certain to avoid infection by locking himself away until the visitation was over. Anyone who wished to speak with the cardinal, the French ambassador wrote, had to shout through a trumpet. Householders of all degrees, from the king on down, brought out the vials and boxes of medicines they had kept from the last assault of the sweat ten years earlier, but the disease was as fatal as ever. In the words of one who lived through it, the sweat “brought more business to the priests than the doctors,” and was so “pestiferous and ragious” that the only safety lay in moving from place to place, staying one step ahead of infection.

When Henry’s gentleman William Compton caught it and died, and Anne Boleyn and others of the court were very ill, the king moved suddenly to a manor in Hertfordshire, leaving his courtiers and his sweetheart to struggle along as best they might. He wrote Anne an encouraging note reminding her that the disease spared women more often than men, but by the time she was able to read it she was probably out of danger, and was certainly angry at his desertion. The king took particular care for Henry Fitzroy, ordering him moved from Pontefract Castle when six people in the neighboring parish died of the sweat. He worried that there was no doctor within reach, and personally compounded preventives for the boy and his household. “Thanks be to God and to your said highness,” Fitzroy wrote to his father when the epidemic had died down, “I have passed this last summer without any peril or danger of the ragious sweat that hath reigned in these parts and other, with the help of such preservatives as your highness did send to me, whereof most humble and lowly I thank the same.”
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Whether Henry dosed his wife and daughter with his medicines is unknown, but they were with him in his Hertfordshire retreat, and for a time the bitter issue of the divorce took second place to the more press
ing question of survival. Mary had been ill with smallpox slightly before the sweat appeared and was in fragile health, while Katherine’s constitution was beginning to weaken under the strain of the drawn-out delays and difficulties in the king’s proceedings. In her dealings with Henry she chose to behave as if nothing had changed, but her cheerful and loving manner toward him was kept up at great cost, and her confessor and Spanish gentlewomen knew well what anguish she kept hidden.

Katherine’s anguish was made worse by the constant efforts of Wol-sey, Campeggio and others to separate her from Henry, if possible, by some means short of divorce. One obvious alternative was to persuade her to enter a convent—an action which, under church law, would have released Henry from the marriage as irrevocably as her death. At first this solution was proposed to her under the mildest of conditions; she would lose nothing but “the use of the king’s person,” and would be allowed to keep her dowry, her income from rents, and her jewels. Most important, her entry into religion would in no way diminish Mary’s succession rights. But Katherine was not tempted, even for a moment, to agree to any proposal under which she would cease to be Henry’s wife, and she did not even take time to think it over before refusing. Other proposals angered her. Campeggio and Wolsey both favored a scheme which would satisfy Henry’s desire to be rid of Katherine while preserving Mary as his heir. This plan called for the princess to marry Fitzroy after a papal dispensation overcame the obstacle of their blood relationship, but though it was suggested more than once no one took steps to implement it. Still another ingenious if unconventional solution, which seems to have originated with Clement VII himself, was that Henry marry Anne without divorcing Katherine, becoming the first bigamous monarch in Western history.

The longer a definitive resolution was delayed the more impatient Henry grew, and his impatience put unbearable pressure on those who served him. He pressed Wolsey hardest, and the cardinal used every tactic at his command to obtain the divorce. He badgered the pope, he hounded the papal legate, and when Campeggio tried to persuade him to withdraw his support for the king’s cause he found Wolsey “no more moved than if I had spoken to a rock.”
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Wolsey was in fact being torn in two by the growing rift between Henry and Clement. As a cardinal of the Roman church he was a servant of the pope, and of papal interests, while as chancellor and principal churchman of the realm he owed primary allegiance to the king. As long as English and papal policies coincided, as they did throughout the earlier years of Henry’s reign, Wolsey’s two roles were complementary, but now they had become irreconcilably opposed.

He blamed Anne for his dilemma. If Henry had to take a second wife,
he said to him in private, let her be a princess from the French royal house, not a coquettish woman of the court. It galled him that neither Anne nor her relatives respected his high status; he was accustomed to having his wants attended by dukes and earls, and even those who admired him most admitted in after years that he was “the haughtiest man that then lived.” That Anne had usurped his powers of persuasion over the king he found unforgivable, and he slandered her openly. “I know there is a night crow that possesses the royal ear against me,” he said, “and misrepresents all my actions.” Henry, of course, sided with Anne, and so brought further tensions into a court already divided in its loyalties.

Henry’s sister Mary, Katherine’s gentlewomen and countless others who admired the queen were outraged that the king should try to put another woman in her place. They found the divorce and everything connected with it morally offensive, and only their fear of Henry and of the growing power of his sweetheart kept them from making spirited complaints. As it was, Anne was the object of open contempt and sarcasm; as Katherine’s position at court declined, Anne became hated.

Henry’s impatience with Katherine’s resolute determination to remain his wife now led to threats and disgrace. He sent the queen a written message, delivered by two bishops, ordering her to comply with his desire to put her aside or Mary would be taken from her. In a parody of her real conduct, he accused Katherine of tormenting him, and of trying to turn his subjects against him by acknowledging their cheers of support and affection. He warned her that, should “certain ill-disposed persons”—meaning agents of the emperor—try to assassinate Henry or Campeggio, she would bear the full weight of punishment. As before, Katherine was not intimidated, and held her ground. But she saw now the full depth and menace of the king’s own resoluteness. He meant to have his way, and he meant to harm whoever opposed him. If Katherine would not yield, she must be made to comply by force. She was moved away from Greenwich, and Anne Boleyn was installed in her apartments there. The transition from Queen Katherine to Queen Anne was well under way.

Another step came with the summoning of the long-delayed legatine court in the summer of 1529. Here Katherine made two dramatic gestures. She flung herself at Henry’s feet and begged him to take her back, and when this had no effect she defied him, announcing that she refused to accept the biased judgment of a court assembled in England under Henry’s control. She appealed to the pope, she said, and walked out of the room.

Katherine had in fact considered contesting the divorce in the legate’s court. She sent to Flanders for two imperialist lawyers to argue in her
favor, but they never arrived. The emperor had stated that no English court could arrive at a just judgment in the matter, and to send lawyers to act in such a court would be contradictory. The imperial ambassador Mendoza disapproved of this decision. Katherine’s chief supporters were the English people, he wrote, “who love her and generally take her part in this affair.” If they saw that she was abandoned by her relatives and friends on the continent, he feared they would lose courage and think her cause hopeless.
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His fears were disproved, though, by the reception that greeted the queen as she left the court. A large crowd was waiting for her, and shouted approval and encouragement as she passed. Those who described the scene noted the large numbers of women who called out to Katherine and cheered her on. If it were left to the women to decide, the French ambassador wrote in a dispatch, Henry would be certain to lose his case.

But the affair of the royal divorce had long since ceased to be a quarrel of the English court in which the people of London took sides. It had quickly become an international scandal. Henry commissioned legal experts at the leading European universities to pass sentence on the merits of his cause, and Charles V paid others to refute them. In the process of collecting favorable legal judgments large sums changed hands, and the case was clouded by new ramifications of procedure and precedent. Wol-sey was still urging a papal settlement, but the legatine court had been adjourned before a decision was reached, and Clement VII’s future as arbiter was in peril. Wolsey had been warning Campeggio that, if the pope did not act soon, England might slip out of his grasp just as Germany had when Luther received no satisfaction from the pope. Like Luther’s demands for reform in Germany, Henry’s demand for a divorce had become the most urgent matter in England. If the pope continued to delay a settlement, or if he pronounced against Henry, Wolsey assured the Italian legate, “the authority of the See Apostolic in the kingdom will be annihilated.”
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That was my joy is now my woo and payne;

That was my bliss is now my displesaunce;

That was my trust is now my wanhope playne;

That was my wele is now my most grevaunce.

What causeth this but only yowre plesaunce

Onryghtfully skewyng me unkyndness,

That hath byn your fayre lady and mastress.

For Mary the tortuous years of the royal divorce were a time of shocks, disillusionment and anguish. One month the court had been taken up with the joyous celebration of her betrothal; the next month she was all but forgotten as news of the king’s decision to divorce Katherine became the dominating preoccupation of the entire court. One moment she was the adored child of loving parents; the next she was caught up in the emotional turmoil that wrenched the little family apart and destroyed all her expectations. From the time she was eleven and a half until she turned sixteen Mary lived in a constant state of uncertainty and suspended hopes, always looking for the imminent vindication of her mother’s cause yet living under constant strain as that vindication was further and further delayed.

In the meantime everything old and familiar was falling away. Her father, though he still took occasional pleasure in Mary, was now capricious and cruel. Her mother was a beleaguered woman struggling to maintain her dignity as her husband abused her and another woman gradually took her place. The court became a wasp’s nest of enmities, petty jealousies and backbiting, and at its center, instead of the gracious and smiling queen, Mary saw a shameless, petulant woman who by her scheming ambition had destroyed the old order of things.

Worst of all, Mary herself, once the radiant pearl of her father’s court
and his presumed heir, was now only the daughter of his castoff queen. As long as Katherine remained queen Mary would still be princess, but her father and the powerful men who served him were attempting to dethrone Katherine with every means at their command, and if they succeeded, Mary would be no more than the king’s bastard. Like Henry Fitzroy she would be of royal blood, but baseborn, and a baseborn female would be of little use or standing in the royal court. As the dispute over the divorce dragged on, Mary’s adolescence became a stormy and anxious interim between an idyllic childhood and a dubious future.

Much of what she endured during these years must be presumed, for she largely drops from sight in the official records, dispatches and letters of the divorce era. One thing is very clear, however: from the start Mary watched and wept over her mother’s trials, and took her part. Katherine’s heroism was the one fixed point in the shifting circumstances of Mary’s life, and what she learned from her mother about wifely obedience, steadfast fidelity to conscience and resignation in the face of suffering was a lesson she would never forget.

“My tribulations are so great, my life so disturbed by the plans daily invented to further the king’s wicked intention, the surprises which the king gives me, with certain persons of his council, are so mortal, and my treatment is what God knows, that it is enough to shorten ten lives, much more mine,” Katherine wrote to Charles V.
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By the time she wrote this letter in November of 1531 she had lived through nearly five years of what she called “the pains of Purgatory on earth.”
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Time and again she had been confronted, without warning, by deputations of royal councilors sent to browbeat her into submitting and relinquishing her stand on the divorce. They accused her of disobedience, stubbornness, ill temper, shrewishness. They insulted her and tried to trick her with words. They taunted her with the old pain of her stillborn children, saying that God had shown his abomination of her marriage “by the curse of sterility.”
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The queen stood up bravely to each assault, trying to ignore the insults while using the arguments of her accusers to support her own position. As she grew more heated she told them all to go to Rome, with as much contempt as if she were telling them to go to hell. She answered them not only convincingly but with a sharpness of intellect and logic that at first startled them and later, or so the imperial ambassador Chapuys believed, won their sympathies and made them “secretly nudge one another when any point [she made] touched the quick.”
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Those who claimed that Henry’s lawyers and churchmen were “confounded by a single woman, and all their designs turned topsy-turvy,” were not far wrong. Henry, who knew well the queen’s articulateness and skill in debate, waited anxiously to hear the outcome of these encounters, and each time he found that Katherine had come off the
victor he shook his head, saying he feared as much and “remaining very pensive.”

In the early years of the conflict he had taken Katherine on in person. One night toward the end of 1529 they dined together and disputed the issues of the divorce throughout the meal. Henry lost ground at every turn, and finally tried to take refuge behind the most recent of the expert legal judgments he had bought. Katherine, who had an impressive list of experts on her side, dismissed his point with a laugh and boasted that she could collect a thousand opinions favorable to her for every one of Henry’s. At this he left the room suddenly and appeared “very disconcerted and downcast” for the rest of the day. At supper Anne realized what had happened, and was angry.

“Did I not tell you that whenever you disputed with the queen she was sure to have the upper hand?” she asked him reproachfully. “I see that some fine morning you will succumb to her reasoning and that you will cast me off. I have been waiting long, and might in the meanwhile have contracted some advantageous marriage, out of which I might have had issue, which is the greatest consolation in this world.”

Anne played on his depression, his shame at losing the argument, his ever present concern about the succession. Then came her ultimate barb.

“Alas! Farewell to my time and youth spent to no purpose at all.”
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Anne had every advantage in the tug of war with Katherine, but still Henry continued to argue with the queen. Even after he stopped seeing Katherine they continued to quarrel by letter, with Henry’s letters composed by teams of secretaries and officials and revised over and over before they were sent. Henry had allowed himself to become caught between two very shrewd women, and would need more than strong logic to extricate himself from his uncomfortable position.

Other forms of pressure were, of course, being applied to sway Katherine. One was Henry’s maddeningly capricious behavior toward her. In person and through messengers he conveyed the most alarming threats and warnings, yet until the summer of 1531 he made a point of dining with the queen at all the great festivals of the year. He was sometimes surly and vicious, sometimes good tempered and even affectionate. He kept Katherine off balance, never allowing her to accurately guess his intentions or his true feelings. He wa9 angry when she showed concern about Mary, yet more angry when she did not. She risked increasing his displeasure with everything she did, and there was no discerning when or how his next blow would fall.

His crudest tactic was to keep Katherine and Mary in separate
yet
neighboring establishments, letting them see one another just often enough to make their loneliness unendurable when they were apart. Or he would force Katherine to choose between his company and Mary’s,
telling her in no uncertain terms that if she visited the princess she might be forced to stay with her permanently and lose what little claim she still had on Henry’s companionship.
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The queen tried to remain undisturbed by heart-rending choices of this kind, saying only “that she would not leave him for her daughter nor anyone else in this world,” but she was inwardly distraught. “If you had experienced part of the bitter days and nights which I have endured since the commencement of this sad affair,” she told one of her tormentors, the dean of Henry’s chapel, “you would not have considered it precipitation to desire a sentence and determination of this affair, nor would you have accused me so carelessly and inadvertently of pertinacity,”
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But if Henry’s treatment afflicted and grieved the queen, even cruder attacks came from Anne. She saw to it that the few men who had been in the habit of visiting Katherine and bringing her news from court were kept away, and sent her own spies to augment those Wolsey had placed in the queen’s household some years earlier. She spoke of disgracing and harming Mary, and was overheard to remark that she “wished all Spaniards were at the bottom of the sea.” She persuaded Henry to give her Katherine’s jewels, and though at first Katherine refused, arguing that “it was against her conscience to give her jewels to adorn a person who is the scandal of Christendom,” in the end she obeyed Henry even in this.
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Anne was reported to be involving herself in the diplomatic issues raised by the divorce. She tried to persuade Henry that Charles V, who was himself guilty of breaking church law in marrying his cousin Isabella of Portugal, could not in good faith complain of Henry’s attitude to Katherine, and would certainly not go to war on her behalf. And if he did, Anne added, her relatives would pay for ten thousand soldiers for the king’s army for a whole year, forming the core of an invincible army of defense.
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Katherine’s purgatory was a solitary one. She was by no means friendless, but there was little her friends could do. The emperor’s verbal protests lost their effect after it became clear he would not back them up with force. His ambassador Chapuys was some comfort, but his visits were infrequent and he brought more bad news than good. Allies at court occasionally got news to Katherine by surreptitious means—the duchess of Norfolk sent her some poultry dressed with oranges, and in one of the oranges, a letter from a papal official in Rome—but there were too few of these gestures to alleviate the queen’s growing certainty that she would have to endure her agony alone.

This view of her situation was confirmed by the priests in her household and by the only other Spaniard to whom she opened her heart, Mary’s onetime tutor Vives. Katherine turned to Vives, he wrote in a let
ter to a friend, as both a countryman “who spoke the same language” and as one well read “in matters of morals and consolation.” She confided to him her anguish that “the man whom she loved more than herself should be so alienated from her, that he should think of marrying another, which was the greater grief the more she loved him.” His reply subordinated the human conflict to the higher design of Christian martyrdom. Katherine’s torment proved that she was dear to God, he told her, for God only tests those he cherishes, in order to strengthen their virtues.
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As time went by Katherine slipped easily into the role of a martyr, willingly submitting to injustice in this world and trusting that her self-sacrifice would be rewarded in the next. She ceased to expect vindication during her lifetime, and instead transferred her hopes to the broader arena of eternal justification. “In this world I will confess myself to be the king’s true wife,” she wrote, “and in the next they will know how unreasonably I am afflicted.”
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She adopted the vocabulary of self-immolation, declaring that “wherever the king commanded her, were it even to the fire, she would go.”
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Her admirers had cast her in this role for a long time. One imperial diplomat wrote to the empress urging her to preserve all the letters she received from Katherine, for in the years to come they would surely be valued as relics.
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It was while these traumas were unfolding that Mary’s adult personality was beginning to take shape. She came to maturity in an atmosphere of extraordinary stress, and her character emerged as a response to crises. She was jolted painfully out of childhood and forced to come to terms with a confusing and deeply tragic situation. Understandably, she looked to Katherine as her model during these disturbing years, but in patterning herself after her mother she was taking on the behavior of a desperately troubled woman. The marks of this unique rite of passage would be with Mary all her life.

Katherine had come to an agonizing crossroads in her own character. She was being pulled three ways. She was attempting to fulfill her duty as a wife, to honor her conscience, and to retain her dignity as queen. In her present circumstances, these three compulsions demanded different, contradictory reactions, and no small part of her distress came in struggling to reconcile them. As a wife her first duty was to be ruled by her husband, yet her conscience also had its imperatives; as a queen, strictly speaking, she ought not to be ruled at all but should rule others. As a wife she was bound to submit to punishment, even torture, by her husband yet her conscience forbade her to comply with unmerited punishment, and her royal dignity was incompatible with mistreatment of any kind. Wives suffered ignominy and humiliation in silence; a woman of conscience stood up and fought against these to protect her good repute, while a
monarch took swift and terrible vengeance against the slightest insult. Katherine was called upon to be an obedient inferior, a heroine and an exalted ruler all at the same time, though any one of these roles demanded all the strength she had. Had she taken her obligations as a wife less seriously, had she been more flexible in matters of conscience, had she not been the proud daughter of Queen Isabella of Castile, Katherine would have found her ordeal far easier to bear. As it was the warring selves kept up their battle within her almost to the end of her life, and without understanding clearly what she was seeing Mary saw and imitated them all.