Six Wives (66 page)

    This was, as far as I can judge, the first time that Catherine had referred directly to Anne in her exchanges with Henry. And it immediately put her on the defensive. For Henry in turn was able to assume the moral high ground. She was altogether mistaken, he replied, in her insinuations about Anne. He was not living in sin with her and there was nothing wrong in their relations. True, he kept her company. But that was only to learn her character as he had made up his mind to marry her. And marry her he would, he added triumphantly, whatever Catherine or the Pope might say.
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    Catherine, for once, was bested in a quarrel with Henry.

    Anne followed up Henry's little victory, when, later in the holiday season, she said 'to one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting that she wished all the Spaniards were at the bottom of the sea'. Scandalised, the lady-inwaiting replied that Anne 'should not for the sake of the Queen's honour express such sentiments'. But Anne was not to be abashed. 'She cared not', she replied, 'for the Queen or any of her family, and that she would rather see her hanged than have to confess that she was her Queen and mistress.'
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    This was a declaration of open war.

    Catherine responded in kind and her language about Anne took on the shrewish vehemence of the wronged wife throughout the ages. Anne was that 'woman [Henry] has under his roof'. And she was equally pointed about her husband. His conduct, she wrote to her nephew Charles V, was flagrant and displayed 'not the least particle of shame'.
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* * *

But, as so often in the Great Matter, it was events abroad that put the final spark to the tinder.

    Here it is important to be clear about Henry's developing strategy. From the moment of the failure of the Blackfriars Trial, it had been taken for granted that an English verdict on the Divorce would somehow have to be sanctioned by Parliament. There was no mystery about this, as some modern historians like to claim. On the contrary, it was clear to supporters and opponents alike. This is why Catherine trembled as the date of each session of the Reformation Parliament approached, and why she breathed a sigh of relief as it was further prorogued. For Henry, these successive prorogations were infuriating but necessary as he did not dare to submit the Great Matter to Parliament unless he could be sure in advance that it would agree to it. He had been repulsed once by Rome. To court the same fate in his own kingdom would probably be fatal – certainly to his chance of remarriage; probably also to his hold on the throne.

    So the King had to play a waiting game, as arguments were mustered, opponents discreetly muzzled and neutrals massaged. But the great threat to this tactic was sudden action from the Pope. Papal excommunication of Henry, or an order to separate from Anne, could have brought down Henry's house of cards. Fear that Wolsey would invoke such ecclesiastical censures against Henry was the immediate occasion for Wolsey's arrest in November 1530. It also accounts for the sudden move against Catherine in the summer of 1531.

    The issue was brought to a head by the failure of a French mission to get Pope Clement to agree to a formal suspension of the process in Rome. The Pope's letters instructing Nuncio De Burgo to inform Henry of his decision arrived in London on 30 May. Knowing the likely reaction from the King, De Burgo hesitated about asking for an audience. But Chapuys stiffened his resolution and, 'at my persuasion', the ambassador reported, the Nuncio went to the Court at Greenwich the following day.

    Henry's reaction was curiously mixed. His own ambassadors had already told him of the substance of his message, he coolly informed De Burgo. Then he launched into his now accustomed abuse of Rome: 'Even if His Holiness should do his worst by excommunicating me . . . I shall not mind it', he boasted, 'for I care not a fig for all his excommunications. Let him follow his own at Rome, I will do here what I think best.' But then, mercurial as ever, he conceded Clement's essential goodwill. 'I take the Pope upon the whole to be a worthy man,' he said, 'but ever since the last wars he has been so awfully afraid of the Emperor that he dares not act against his wishes.'
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    But if he spared the Nuncio, he made up for it by his subsequent treatment of Catherine. His wife, he now decided, was his opponents' weakest point. She was in his power and could be browbeaten or worse. This of course had always been true. But hitherto Henry had been restrained by caution or even the remains of his former tenderness. Time had diminished that. He had also been provoked by Catherine's increased stridency. For if her actions matched her words she was preparing to invoke the extreme measures against her husband which so far she had carefully avoided. And, last but not least, there was now Anne's open, passionate hostility towards the Queen and her supporters.

    It was an explosive mixture.

* * *

    The delegation was about thirty strong and was led by the senior members of the peerage. It was also reinforced by the leading legal experts on the Divorce. Clearly, it was designed to impress, even to overawe, by its size and weight. Predictably, it failed. Each councillor in turn went to bat with Catherine and each, if we believe Chapuys, was smartly bowled out. She was especially dismissive with the clergy. She told Lee that he spoke 'more for the sake of flattering the King than of adhering to the truth'. And she advised Sampson, Dean of the Chapel Royal, to spare his breath with her and go and argue the case in Rome, where it belonged!

    Finally, having successfully taken on all-comers, Catherine rubbed salt in the wound by putting on a pretty display of feminine pathos. Why so powerful a delegation? she asked. 'What could have prevailed on them thus to assemble and come and surprise her, a poor woman without friends or counsel?'

    The delegation retired, doubly defeated by Catherine's intelligence and her guile.
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* * *

But what was worse from Henry's point of view was the reaction of several members of his own Council. Instead of outrage, they seemed to enjoy the discomfiture of their colleagues at the hands of the Queen. And they scarcely bothered to conceal the fact.

    Controller Guildford was most outspoken. 'It would be a very good thing', he said to no one in particular, 'if all the doctors who had been the inventors and abettors of the plan [for the Divorce] could be tied together in a cart and sent to Rome.' The Earl of Shrewsbury, who was Lord Steward of the Household and the holder of one of the oldest and richest earldoms, used politer language, but, for those who understood his words, actually threatened resistance. They, he reminded his colleagues, represented 'all the nobility of the Kingdom'. This was the dangerous doctrine of aristocratic collegiality which had scotched the ambitions of many medieval kings. Was it now to be invoked against Henry?

    But probably most hurtful to Henry was the reaction of the Duke of Suffolk. Brandon was Henry's brother-in-law and his closest and oldest friend. But he, too, sided with Catherine. The Queen, Suffolk told Henry, 'was ready to obey him in all things, but that she owed obedience to two persons first'. And who were they, the King snapped, thinking that Suffolk meant that his wife put her allegiance to the Pope and the Emperor above her duty to him as her husband. His reaction laid him open and Suffolk delivered a magnificent rebuke. 'God was the first,' he said, 'the second was her soul and conscience.'

    If Suffolk had turned against Henry, who would be for him?

* * *

Normally, Henry reacted to such open displays of defiance by losing his temper. This time, he kept it. It was a much more dangerous response. He had foreseen Catherine's intransigence, he said. 'It is now necessary', he added, 'to provide for the whole affair by other means.' Then, according to Chapuys's report, 'he remained for some time thoughtful'.

    The 'other means', and the threat implicit in the words, were quick to materialise. And it was Anne who struck the first blow.

    Her victim was Guildford. As soon as she heard of his remarks, she 'threatened him most furiously, saying that when she becomes Queen, she will have him punished and deprived of office'. Guildford replied that he would spare her the trouble 'for he himself will be the first to resign his post'. He then went straight to the King; told him what had happened; and surrendered his staff of office into Henry's hands on a transparently false plea of ill-health. Twice Henry refused his resignation and handed back the white staff, saying that 'he ought not to mind women's talk'. But Guildford was adamant and insisted on returning home to Kent.
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    Like Suffolk, Guildford was one of Henry's oldest adherents, with a connexion going back to the royal nursery, where Guildford's mother, Lady Joan, was one of the favourite attendants of the young Prince and his favourite sister, Mary.

    Who else would Henry have to give up for Anne's sake? The answer, it quickly became apparent, was Catherine herself.

* * *

A few days after the extraordinary scenes at Greenwich, Henry and Anne, with the Queen still in tow, left for Hampton Court. They rested for a day at York Place and then continued to their destination upriver via Putney. On about 20 June, Chapuys sent a messenger to Hampton Court to ask for an audience. But the messenger returned empty-handed, with the report that Henry 'was already gone to Windsor and other places, to amuse himself and pass away the time, accompanied only by the Lady and the Master of the Horse [Carew] and two more'. It is, in fact, very difficult to establish Henry's precise movements at this time. Despite Chapuys's assertion, the King does seem to have been primarily based at Hampton Court. But he was in London for flying visits on the 23rd and the 29th; at Hanworth Park, four miles to the west of Hampton Court, on the 28th; and at Windsor on the 12th and 13th and again on the 16th. The King's overnight visit to the Castle on the 12th–13th was reported by no less an observer than Thomas Cranmer, who then formed part of the royal entourage at Hampton Court. 'The King and my Lady Anne', he informed Wiltshire on 13 June, 'rode yesterday to Windsor, and this night they be looked for again at Hampton Court'. 'God be their guide', he added piously. This pattern of restless movement was to continue for another six weeks. So was Henry's abandonment of Catherine.
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    At first, Catherine seems to have noticed nothing very out of the ordinary about her errant husband's behaviour. But by 17 July she was thoroughly alarmed, and, as usual, informed Chapuys of her fears. The Queen, the ambassador reported, 'is very much distressed and in great tribulation'. Her reasons seemed compelling to him too. 'The King himself, the Lady and her adherents', he informed the Emperor, 'now speak out with much greater assurance than before.' Anne, he continued, 'declares that her marriage to the King will take place in three or four months at the latest'. She was also anticipating the fact by assuming more and more of her future royal state. 'During the last few days, [she has] appointed an Almoner, besides several other officers about her person.' But, worst of all, she had succeeded in excluding Catherine from her place at the King's side on formal occasions and even informal ones. 'She always accompanies the King at his hunting parties, without any female attendants of her own, whilst the Queen herself, who used formerly to follow him on such expeditions, has been ordered to remain at Windsor.'
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    Obviously, something was going on. But what? The chronicler Edward Hall, writing at the end of Henry's reign, was in no doubt.

And where Hall led, modern historians have been happy to follow like sheep. But, also like sheep, they have gone astray. For Hall's account, with its picture of Henry, firm and resolute, taking a clear-cut decision to break with his wife, cannot be right.
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    This was pointed out almost two centuries ago by the great Regency antiquary Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas. But even Nicolas did not fully elucidate what happened. For events were more tangled and Henry's behaviour more messy and confused than even he suspected.
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    The uneasy family party, in which, to quote another famously wronged royal wife, there were three in the marriage, in fact arrived at Windsor (after another brief visit to York Place) on 7 July. On the 14th, Henry indeed left Windsor. But instead of starting out boldly to distant Woodstock, he shifted only a short way to Chertsey Abbey, a mere seven miles to the east of Windsor. And there he and Anne remained for at least ten days, crossing and recrossing the river by the ferries at Hampton Court and Datchet, and hunting in the neighbouring parks which clustered round the great forest of Windsor: they were at Mote Park on the 17th, at Ditton Park near Windsor on the 19th and at Byfleet Park on the 22nd.

    Only on the 26th did Henry make a more decisive move. But it was to the
south
– that is, in the opposite direction to Woodstock. He was at Guildford on the 29th, at Farnham on the 31st and on 4 August reached The Vyne, near Basingstoke in Hampshire where he stayed for three days. There was good sport round about, and Henry and Anne hunted in Wolmer Forest on the 2nd, in Beaurepaire Park on the 5th and in Basing Park on the 6th. But they had other, human quarry as well.
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