Bastard Prince (16 page)

Richmond remained at Sheriff Hutton until 16 June 1529, when he was almost ten years old. If his return was linked to Henry's ‘great matter' and a corresponding decline in his fortunes, it is hard to see why he was not recalled with Mary. Nor does it seem that the council's ability to govern was the deciding factor. The complaint that the council should be removed on the grounds that these clerics were ‘sore moved against all temporal men' suggests their intervention was effective enough to be resented.

The council had made strenuous attempts to bring the north to good order. They did not sit complacently in Yorkshire: officers were sent out to assess the less hospitable regions and assizes were held at Newcastle and Carlisle. Richmond's councillors also sat on Commissions of the Peace for Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland, as well as Yorkshire. They were even prepared to intervene in disputes within the palatine of Durham, despite its privileged status. Their actions produced clear improvements. In August 1527 Magnus reported that the York assizes had been very quiet with ‘but little business and so few things to be done as have not been seen afore'. In November 1527 they held the largest and most well-attended assize that Newcastle had ever seen.

Not every aspect of the experiment was a resounding success. It had originally been hoped to extend the council's jurisdiction right across the northern counties, using deputy wardens to oversee the West, Middle and East Marches. Instead, in December 1527, responsibility for the East and Middle Marches was ceded to the Earl of Northumberland and Lord William Dacre became Warden of the West March. Technically, this was a failure for Richmond's council, but the plan had never been implemented before and came with no guarantee of success. They had repeatedly advised Wolsey of their own misgivings about the arrangement and it is perhaps unfair to blame the council for the shortcomings of others.

The policy had not begun well. The cardinal took several months to appoint the three wardens. Once they were in place, the Earl of Cumberland apparently tried to rule the West March from his castle at Skipton in Yorkshire. Lord Eure openly admitted that he lacked the support of the local gentry and could not ensure order and the Earl of Westmorland's sole interest in his position seems to have been his fee of £1,000.
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That the fault did not lie entirely with the council is demonstrated by the fact that a number of Richmond's officers were seconded to assist Northumberland and Dacre in carrying out their new responsibilities as wardens.

Nevertheless, the council did have its limitations. Thomas, Lord Dacre, despite his prominent role at Richmond's elevation, refused to surrender the town and castle of Carlisle to the duke's council without confirmation from the king or Wolsey. After his death in October 1525, a dispute between his heir, William, Lord Dacre, and the Earl of Cumberland got so out of hand that the council was forced to refer the matter to Wolsey. Such events highlight the difficulty these new men of the cardinal's faced in getting their social superiors to toe the line, although it has to be said that even the king's personal intervention did not effect any immediate improvement in Dacre's conduct. The council's decrees could be ignored, defendants might fail to appear and at least one man from Tynedale, who was placed in Richmond's household as a pledge of good behaviour, absconded.

Yet no sixteenth-century court, not even the king's courts in Chancery or Star Chamber in London, was immune to such disobedience. The chief problem faced by Richmond's council was a handicap shared by Mary's council in the Marches of Wales. Any party dissatisfied by their order could and did decide to try their luck in London. When Nicholas Rudd discovered that the judgment of Richmond's council ‘should weigh and pass against him' he obtained a subpoena in the Court of Chancery. When Wolsey recommitted the suit to the north, Rudd failed to appear. Having been told that Rudd was again intending to try his case in the king's courts, Richmond's council were clearly anxious that Wolsey should not allow the duke's authority to be openly flouted:

Although this did affect the council's ability to act as the fount of all justice and power in the north, it was a general weakness of sixteenth-century government, rather than a direct reflection on the personal standing of Richmond himself.

Nor does it seem that Richmond's recall was linked with Wolsey's increasingly precarious position. As the cardinal failed to secure the much-desired annulment of the king's marriage, his enemies began to circle. However, none of the changes in the composition of the government of the north seem designed to root out those who had connections with Wolsey. Several of Richmond's officers, including Thomas Magnus, remained attached to the Council of the North.
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However, if there was an intention to make it specifically less clerical in character then Bishop Tunstall was a curious choice to head the new body. In fact Tunstall's appointment signified yet another experiment in northern government. This time all pretence at the traditional style of a nobleman's council was dropped. Tunstall was known as the President of the Council and he answered directly to the crown.

Richmond's tenure as the king's lieutenant in the north has sometimes been dismissed as a little more than a farce, incapable of bringing the area under proper control. His council did experience a number of difficulties. At various times they complained of a lack of goods and provisions. They suffered from poverty, severe weather conditions and areas so sparsely populated that they had trouble finding sufficient numbers of people to undertake the commissions with which they had been entrusted. Such conditions could not fail to hamper the effective implementation of justice. Yet the records kept and the precedents established under their authority continued to be used.

By 1532 Tunstall was also recalled and Richmond surrendered his role as Lord Lieutenant to Dacre. That this admirably bureaucratic solution would also falter tends to support the idea that the feudal and isolated character of the north of England made it particularly difficult to govern, rather than the argument that Richmond's council was especially flawed. When the question of the government of the north was again addressed in 1536, the example of Richmond's council provided the solution. This time the Duke of Norfolk was to be dispatched as the king's lieutenant ‘and shall have a Council joined with him, as was appointed to the Duke of Richmond at his lying in those parts'. Perhaps, at least in comparison to other models, the council was rather more successful at a difficult task than has generally been acknowledged.

Richmond's return to the court in June 1529 passed entirely unnoticed. All attention was focused on the legatine court being held in the parliament chamber at Blackfriars to determine the validity of Henry and Katherine's marriage. By now the king was utterly convinced that his union with his dead brother's wife was against God's law and that no pope had the power to effectively allow him to live in sin with his sister. Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, who had recently arrived as an envoy from the pope, admitted that he thought ‘an angel descending from heaven would be unable to persuade him otherwise'. For her part, Katherine had believed in 1509 that God had rescued her from seven years of dismal widowhood because it was His divine will that she should marry Henry. She had stood firm then and she saw no reason to change now. It is doubtful that Richmond was even aware that his father had also considered a rather more unorthodox means of securing the succession, one which would have ensured that his bastard son could ascend the throne of England, with a royal princess as his bride.

Privately, Wolsey now admitted to Campeggio that they had thought of marrying Richmond to his half-sister Mary and thus uniting the two claims. In theory the policy had much to recommend it. It offset the danger of domination by a foreign power by marrying Mary to an undeniably English lord. It also reduced the danger of civil war. Although it was incestuous, canon law actually allowed that sexual intercourse between a brother and sister using the missionary position was less sinful than intercourse with an unrelated partner, using any other position.
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If Henry was prepared to forgo all this talk of divorce and more importantly the associated questions of papal jurisdiction, Clement VII may well have been persuaded to accede to such a request.

Certainly, Campeggio, rather than protesting at such a sinful and unnatural solution, agreed that he had also thought of this at first. However, having seen Henry he could not believe that even this drastic step ‘would suffice to satisfy the king's desires'. Ironically, Richmond himself may well have contributed to Henry's unshakable belief that his second, or in his eyes his first, canonically correct marriage would give him a legitimate male heir. After all, he was evidence of Henry's virility and if God would grant him a son in a supposedly sinful union, yet withhold that blessing in an apparently lawful marriage, the implication was clear. The marriage was not lawful.

Actually, it may not have been. Dispensations for marriage were most commonly issued in cases of consanguinity, when two blood relations (usually distant cousins) wished to marry. With much of the nobility being related in some way or another this was a necessary expedient. The dispensation which had been issued at the time of Henry and Katherine's marriage, was for affinity. This was the relationship created when one of the partners had already slept with a member of the other's family. In this case the assumption was that Henry's brother, Arthur, had slept with Katherine. Yet if their marriage had not been consummated, as Katherine claimed and Henry never dared to deny, then the dispensation for affinity did not apply.
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What the couple had actually needed was a dispensation for public honesty, which recognised the legal connection made by marriage or betrothal and nothing more. Since a dispensation for affinity did not automatically cover the lesser offence of public honesty, Henry could have accepted Katherine's protestations that she was a virgin and still been at liberty to argue that their original dispensation was flawed. Henry's unshakable belief in Leviticus would be a rod for his own back, and one that would set him against both the papacy and his queen.

As the legatine court convened at Blackfriars, Henry spoke eloquently of his pangs of conscience. If he expected this was a mere formality, the required prelude to granting his desires, he was wrong. Katherine's impassioned defence, on her knees before her husband, took the wind from everyone's sails. Far from being childless, she pointed out that they had been blessed with several children ‘although it hath pleased God to call them from this world'. Rather than being Prince Arthur's tainted relict, she asserted that she had come to the king ‘a true maid without touch of man' and dared him to deny it. Neither then, nor at any other time, did he in fact contradict her, which certainly seems to indicate that he knew it to be the truth.

In other circumstances Henry's commitment to the Leviticus argument might have seemed noble, even pious. If his sole aim had been to put aside his aged and barren wife for a younger model, then it would have been far easier to use the technical, but perfectly valid, point that the original dispensation for consanguinity rather than public honesty had not covered their actual relationship. Instead, he had chosen to fight the papacy for the moral high ground on this point of divine law. Despite the inconsistencies in his arguments, surely men had to admire his righteous intent?

If Henry had planned to replace Katherine with a French princess or some other suitable consort, this might have been the case. There were after all viable political reasons for Henry to put aside his wife. In other circumstances Katherine might well have been censured for her selfish obstinacy. A queen had a duty to provide the kingdom with an heir and if she could not then surely her duty should be to step aside. Even her nephew Charles V might have been more sympathetic to the troubles of a brother monarch if his ‘solution' had not been such a flagrant insult to his aunt. Much of the sympathy and support for Katherine's position was engendered by the fact that by the summer of 1529 everyone was very well aware that Katherine's intended successor was Anne Boleyn.

It was widely known that Anne's sister, Mary, had already been Henry's mistress in the 1520s. This gave all Henry's pious protestations a rather hollow ring. Reginald Pole, the clerical son of Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, himself a man of royal blood, was perhaps more direct than most when he rebuked the king:

Even before it was brought to his attention it is doubtful that Henry was unaware of this. An oblique admission of guilt is found in his request for a dispensation from ‘the first degree of affinity from forbidden wedlock'. At the same time as Henry was disputing the pope's authority to validate his sinful union with Katherine he would have welcomed a similar dispensation for himself and Anne.

It became clear in April 1530 that Henry was now motivated by his desire for Anne. Since the birth of her eldest son, Elizabeth Blount had been living in Lincolnshire with her three other children, Elizabeth, George and Robert. On 15 April 1530 the death of her first husband, Gilbert Tailbois, left her a widow and available. If the king needed to ease his conscience and secure the succession, on balance, Elizabeth was a better replacement than Anne. What would have seemed unthinkable in 1519 appeared positively ideal just a decade later.