Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners (8 page)

In the manner of most legal battles, it became exceedingly bitter and complicated - and sixteenth-century law governing marriage was complicated enough at the best of times. Henry had taken a fundamentalist stand on Leviticus, but unfortunately there was another passage in the Old Testament, in the Book of Deuteronomy, which ran: 'When brethren dwell together, and one of them dieth without children, the wife of the deceased shall not marry to another; but his brother shall take her, and raise up seed for his brother.' This led to a stimulating international debate among scholars and theologians as to how these two apparently conflicting texts could be reconciled and whether the ancient Jewish law could properly be applied in a Christian community, but it did not help the King to get his divorce. The King's advisers would, in fact, have had an easier time if, unhampered by these scriptural excursions, they could have followed the time-honoured strategy of canon lawyers in such cases and attacked the papal dispensation of 1503 allowing Henry to marry his sister-in-law on the grounds that it had been issued on insufficient or inaccurate information. They could, for example, have pointed out that this dispensation assumed that Catherine's marriage to Prince Arthur had been consummated and therefore did not cover the so-called diriment impediment of public honesty, created by the fact that whether or not the marriage had been completed in the sight of God, they had indisputably been through a public wedding ceremony and been married in the sight of the Church. Legal nit-picking perhaps, but the King would have had a much better argument in canon law. Catherine's advisers, too, wished that instead of basing her defence on her virginity at the time of her second marriage - a statement no longer susceptible of legal proof-she had taken her stand on the Pope's undoubted powers to dispense. She could, they reminded her, always apply secretly to Rome for another, supplementary bull, making good any accidental deficiencies in the first.

Unfortunately, though, the King of England's great matter was based on emotion rather than logic. Behind a smokescreen of legal and theological wrangling, the real battle was being fought over the far bloodier issues of outraged pride, jealousy and a bitter sense of rejection and injustice; of frustrated sexual urges, ambition, envy and greed. The battle between Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn recognized none of the rules of war, and in the end, of course, it destroyed them both.

Two more dissimilar women than these two deadly adversaries can hardly be imagined. In 1527 Catherine was in her forty-second year. As a girl she had been pretty, small and well made, with a clear pink and white skin and quantities of russet-coloured hair, which the chronicler Edward Hall had specially noticed as being 'of a very great length, beautiful and goodly to behold'. Now her once slender figure was thickened with repeated child-bearing, and her lovely hair had darkened to a muddy brown, but visiting ambassadors still remarked on the excellence of her complexion. A dumpy little woman with a soft, sweet voice which had never lost its trace of foreign accent, and the imperturbable dignity which comes from generations of pride of caste, she faced the enemy armoured by an utter inward conviction of right and truth, and her own unbreakable will.

Henry's partisans have accused his first wife of spiritual arrogance, of bigotry and bloody-mindedness, and undoubtedly she was one of those uncomfortable people who would literally rather die than compromise over a moral issue. There's also no doubt that she was an uncommonly proud and stubborn woman. But to have yielded would have meant admitting to the world that she had lived all her married life in incestuous adultery, that she had been no more than 'the King's harlot', the Princess her daughter worth no more than any man's casually begotten bastard; and it would have meant seeing another woman occupying her place. The meekest of wives might well have jibbed at such self-sacrifice; for one of Catherine's background and temperament it was unthinkable. But what had started as the simple defence of her marriage was soon to develop into the defence of something infinitely greater. As time went by and the struggle for the divorce unfolded, the Queen began to realize that she was fighting not merely for her own and her daughter's natural rights but for her husband's soul and the souls of all his people against the forces of darkness which seemed more and more to be embodied in the seductive, dark-eyed person of Mistress Anne Boleyn.

Historians, especially nineteenth-century historians, have generally taken for granted that it was Henry's pressing need for a son and heir which impelled him to seek a divorce from his barren wife and which alone sustained him through the long and blood-stained battle with Rome, but that was not how it looked to his own contemporaries. Naturally the King wanted a son, and everyone would have felt happier if there had been a Prince of Wales and, ideally, a Duke of York too, growing up in the royal nursery. But times had changed. In the 1520s, England was settled, united and prosperous, and the wars of York and Lancaster were fading into history. There was really very little reason why Henry's daughter, suitably married, of course - perhaps to one of her Plantagenet cousins or even to her other cousin, the young King of Scotland -should not have succeeded him. At eleven years old Mary was a healthy, promising little girl who would soon be of child-bearing age herself. Why shouldn't she provide sons to carry on the royal line? The fact that her father would not even consider this commonsense solution to his problem but, on the contrary, was proposing to repudiate the one heir he did possess and whose legitimacy no one else would have questioned, argued to his more cynical subjects that it was not the King's tender conscience or his anxiety over the succession which pricked him on so much as his desire for another woman. 'The common people,' commented Edward Hall, himself a staunch King's man, 'being ignorant of the truth and in especial women and others that favoured the Queen, talked largely and said that the King would for his own pleasure have another wife.' But the plain truth, as it seemed to many of those watching the progress of events, was that Henry was quite simply besotted by a commonplace young woman, sixteen years his junior, and so obsessed with carnal lust and 'the voluptuous affection of foolish love' that high discretion and, indeed, all other considerations were banished for the time.

It's never been easy to understand just what Henry saw in Anne Boleyn, or to define the secret of her undoubted fascination - probably it lay in that mysterious quality of sexual magnetism which defies an exact definition and has very little to do with physical beauty. Certainly Anne was not beautiful in any obvious sense. A brunette with a heavy mane of glossy black hair, a sallow skin and a rather flat-chested figure, her best feature seems to have been her large dark eyes which, according to one observer, 'invited to conversation'. But she knew how to make the best of herself. She dressed well and had become a leader of fashion at Court. She was lively, sophisticated and accomplished - a charming and witty companion, well versed in the arts of pleasing. She was also intelligent and courageous, aware of her own potential and restlessly seeking fulfilment in a world which offered few opportunities to ambitious, energetic and dissatisfied young women. Less attractive traits were her vindictive, sometimes vicious temper, her bitter tongue and her long memory for a grudge.

Did Anne ever feel any spark of genuine affection for Henry? Was she the helpless victim of her own nature and environment, unable to resist the pressures being brought to bear on her? Or was she simply an adventuress, motivated by personal envy and greed? Impossible now to judge with any certainty, but having once accepted the King's proposal, her situation can perhaps be compared to that of the young lady of Riga, who was so unwise as to go for a ride on a tiger - having once mounted the creature, there was no way to go but on. There is a story that Queen Catherine, who in general ignored her rival's pretensions with well-bred indifference -just as she had always ignored the existence of her husband's other passing fancies - was once playing cards with Anne and was heard to remark: 'My lady Anne, you have the good hap to stop at a king, but you are not like the others, you will have all or nothing.' Catherine herself had once waited out seven long years, just as obstinately determined to stake her future on an all-or-nothing throw. Perhaps they were not really so very unlike, these two tenacious warriors.

In July 1529 the Pope, reacting to pressure from the Emperor, at last agreed to take the King of England's matrimonial cause into his own hands, thus putting an end to Henry's hopes of getting a quick (and favourable) decision from an English Church court. This grievous disappointment was laid at Cardinal Wolsey's door, and the Cardinal's enemies, with Anne Boleyn at their head, closed in for the kill. According to George Cavendish, the estrangement between Wolsey and the King was 'the special labour of Mistress Anne', who had neither forgotten nor forgiven the Cardinal's part in blighting her romance with young Percy, and by the autumn the new Imperial envoy in London was reporting that the great minister's downfall seemed complete.

Mistress Anne now went everywhere with the King. She had her own apartments at Court and was able to indulge her taste in dress to the full, as well as enjoying the flattery and attentions normally bestowed on a royal favourite. In December further honours were showered on the Boleyn family. Sir Thomas became Earl of Wiltshire and Ormonde; Anne's brother George received the title of Viscount Rochford, while she herself was in future to be known as the Lady Anne Rochford. At a state banquet held to mark the occasion, Anne took precedence over all the ladies present (who did not include Queen Catherine) and was given the place of honour at the King's side. 'The very place allotted to a crowned Queen', wrote the Emperor's ambassador indignantly. 'After dinner', continued Messire Eustace Chapuys, 'there was dancing and carousing, so that it seemed as if nothing were wanting but the priest to give away the nuptial ring and pronounce the blessing.'

But appearances were deceptive, and after nearly two years the ultimate prize was, in fact, as far away as ever. The King might talk of proceeding by his own authority, but this was not as simple as it sounded, and Parliament showed an obstinate reluctance to assist him. Indeed, apart from Henry, the Lady Anne and the pushful, unscrupulous clique which had attached itself to the Boleyns, nobody liked the idea of the divorce, and sympathy for the Queen was strong among all classes of Englishmen and their wives - especially their wives. The women of England could see in Catherine's present predicament an implied threat to every respectable wife and mother. After all, if the King could today cast off his virtuous and faithful consort in order to take another, younger wife, who could tell what his subjects might be able to do tomorrow? For the vast majority of women the sanctity of the marriage bond was their only security against a harsh and hostile world, and the sight of bold, black-eyed Anne Boleyn flaunting herself, bejewelled and triumphant, at the King's right hand caused much bitter and deeply-felt resentment.

While the Pope continued to delay, apparently hoping that if he waited long enough the problem might go away of its own accord, Catherine begged and implored him to take a firm stand, to settle the case without more ado and deliver her from the pains and torments to which she was daily being exposed. Like many another deserted wife, the Queen could not bring herself to face the fact that her husband had changed, that he was deliberately rejecting her of his own free will. No, it was just that he had fallen into the clutches of a wicked woman who had bewitched him and evil counsellors who were leading him astray. These people were the real enemy, and if the Holy Father would only stop their tongues and take away their hope of making mischief by proceeding swiftly to judgement, Henry would soon become his normal sweet self again. T trust so much in the natural goodness and virtue of the King, my lord,' wrote Catherine pathetically, 'that if I could only have him with me two months as he used to be, I alone should be powerful enough to make him forget the past.'

But by the time this letter was written, Henry had already seen, or been shown, an ingenious solution to his marital problems. Parliament might not be prepared to help him directly to get his divorce, but there would be no difficulty in persuading the Commons to attack the Church. What Henry needed was the submission of his own clergy - with that he could proceed independently of the Pope, while still preserving at least the appearances of law and orthodoxy. In order to obtain that submission, what better weapon could he use than the longstanding, smouldering anti-clericalism of the bourgeois laity? And so, indeed, it proved. By the spring of 1532 the King had assumed supreme religious power in his own realm, and the English clergy had been terrorized into surrendering all their ancient, jealously-guarded freedom from secular control.

This revolution, for such it was, had been master-minded by Thomas Cromwell, the King's new counsellor and hatchet-man, and now only one obstacle remained. William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, was an old man, ailing and frightened, but there was a point beyond which he could not be driven. He would not disobey the Pope's ban on any hearing of the divorce case in England. Then, in August, Providence came to the King's aid, and death removed the Archbishop from his path.

On the morning of Sunday, 1 September, an extraordinary scene was enacted in the presence chamber at Windsor Castle. Escorted by the officers of arms and flanked by two countesses, the Lady Anne Rochford, wearing a narrow-sleeved gown of crimson velvet, her hair hanging loose about her shoulders, knelt before the King, while Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, read aloud the letters patent creating her Marquess of Pembroke - an important peer in her own right. Henry then invested his sweetheart with the panoply of her new rank and presented her with another document, granting her an independent income of a thousand pounds a year. It was an unusual, even an unprecedented occasion, but the assembled audience, which included the French ambassador and the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, did not fail to notice a significant omission in the wording of the new marquess's patent of creation. The title and the income would pass to the heirs male of her body, but the standard qualifying phrase 'lawfully begotten' had not been included. By agreeing to, or, more likely, insisting on, that omission, the Lady Anne was making what amounted to a public announcement that she had at last become the King's mistress in the obvious sense of the word. She was ninety-nine per cent certain now of final victory, but just in case anything should go wrong at the last moment, she was taking steps to insure her future and that of any child she might bear.