Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII (35 page)

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Authors: Robert Hutchinson

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Campeggio had finally reached London in October 1528. Anne Boleyn had been installed in a fine suite of rooms in Greenwich Palace conveniently adjoining the king’s own apartments. But Henry, for the sake of appearances, resumed eating with Katherine at table and sometimes shared her bed. She made ‘such cheer as she has always done in her greatest triumphs; nor to see them together could anyone have told there was anything the matter’, according to the French ambassador, Jean du Bellay.
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By 2 December Henry had tired of such polite niceties and Katherine had been ignominiously packed off to Hampton Court.
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He resorted to a blatantly populist move to distract attention from the divorce, issuing a commission the following day to investigate how many aliens were trading in London. Only ten alien households for each trade were permitted and the remainder had to close down their businesses, work under Englishmen or quit the realm. The French ambassador estimated this would remove 15,000 foreigners from London but his Spanish counterpart believed that up to twice this number would be deported.
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As the matter dragged on, month after month, Clement VII’s secretary in Rome, Giovanni Sanga, told Campeggio of the Pope’s utter frustration and weariness over the king’s marriage:
Would to God the cardinal [Wolsey] had allowed the matter to take its course [at his legatine court in 1527] because if the king had come to decision without the Pope’s authority, whether wrongly or rightly, it would have been without blame or prejudice to His Holiness.
Sanga added:
It would greatly please the Pope if the queen could be induced to enter some religion [nunnery].
Although this course would be portentous and unusual, he could more
readily entertain the idea, as it would involve the injury of only one person.
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But Katherine was not going to be shunted off into a convent merely to please the Pope. At stake was the justice of the queen’s cause before God, her own pride, the legitimacy of her daughter Mary and her rightful position as the king’s lawful heir.
Campeggio, amid this maelstrom of intrigue and conspiracy, suffered ‘infinite agitation of mind’ as well as a crippling attack of the gout in his knee. The weather, even that of an English summer, was too cold for his Italian blood and he complained of ‘having to wear winter clothes and use fires as if it were winter’. He also feared pestilence: ‘The plague continued vigorously and there is some fear of the sweating sickness.’ It says something of Henry’s grim determination to seal an annulment that he overcame his normally rampant phobia about the plague to press his case.
Wolsey visited Campeggio one day at dawn while he was still in bed to discuss events and then at nine o’clock Katherine arrived to make her confession, asserting firmly that she came to Henry an ‘intact and uncorrupted maid’. The queen intended ‘to live and die in the estate of matrimony to which God had called her’ and ‘although she should be torn limb from limb, [nothing] should induce her to alter this resolution’.
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As the volume of paper accumulated, delay followed delay, much to Henry’s vexation.
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At last he lost patience and on 30 May 1529 authorised Wolsey and Campeggio to proceed with the public trial of his marriage with Katherine. The two cardinals rejected Katherine’s appeal to Rome and summoned her to appear before them.
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The chosen location was the first-floor parliament chamber above the inner cloister of the Dominican friary commonly known as Blackfriars, on the western edge of the City of London. It was linked with the Bridewell Palace by a gallery across the River Fleet. At the southern end of the 110 ft (33.53 m) long room, a table and two chairs for the papal commissioners were set up on a dais. On the right was a cloth of gold canopy above Henry’s throne with a corresponding one for the queen
facing it on the left.
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In front were benches for lawyers and the bishops.
On the morning of Monday 21 June the full court assembled. Henry and Katherine entered from Bridewell amid loud cheers from a large crowd of her supporters and in a vain attempt to silence their shouts, an enraged Henry ordered his guards to ensure ‘that nobody should again be admitted to the place’.
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Proceedings began with the usher’s cry of: ‘King Harry of England, come into court,’ and Henry rose from his throne with a brisk, peremptory, ‘Here, my lords!’ The usher then asked the same of the queen but, instead of the formal answer, she stood up and walked slowly around the bishops and knelt at her husband’s feet. Her barely suppressed emotion brought back her Spanish accent:
Sir! I beseech you for all the love that has been between us and for the love of God, let me have justice and right.
Take [on] me some pity and compassion for I am a poor woman and a stranger born out of your dominion. I have no assured friend and much less indifferent counsel.
I flee to you as … the head of justice in this realm.
Henry sat silent and stony-faced as his discarded wife’s words rang around the hushed chamber. Katherine continued her eloquent attack on his hopes and dreams of a divorce:
Alas Sir! Wherein have I offended you or what occasion of displeasure?
Have I designed [plotted] against your will and pleasure, intending (as I perceive) to put me from you?
I have been to you a true, humble and obedient wife, ever conformable to your will and pleasure … always well pleased and contented with all things wherein you had delight or dalliance …
I loved all those whom you loved only for your sake, whether I had cause or not and whether they were my friends or enemies.
This twenty years I have been your true wife and by me you have had diverse children, although it has pleased God to call them out of this world, which has been no default in me.
Katherine moved on to the main plank of her argument:
When you had me at the first, I take God to be my judge, I was a true maid without touch of man and … I put [this] to your conscience.
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The queen paused. She had told the Spanish ambassador that Henry had often boasted that she had come to him a virgin and that she believed he would never deny it. Katherine had now posed the question very publicly and dared him to give his answer.
It never came. The king sat stunned, immobile on his throne, as the seconds ticked by amid an expectant silence in the huge chamber.
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Katherine continued with a steady voice:
I most humbly require you, in the way of charity and for the love of God, to spare me the extremity of this new court … and if you will not extend to me so much indifferent favour, your pleasure will then be fulfilled and to God I commit my cause.
She rose up from her knees, made a low, dignified curtsey to the king, turned on her heel and moved sedately down the room on the arm of her Receiver General, Griffith Richard.
Henry was later to be warned by Anne Boleyn about arguing with Katherine. ‘Whenever you disputed with the queen,’ she told him tartly, ‘she is sure to have the upper hand.’
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This occasion was no different. The king angrily ordered the usher to summon her back and Richard whispered to his mistress: ‘Madam, you are called again.’ Katherine looked straight ahead as she continued her departure. ‘On, on,’ she insisted, ‘it makes no matter, for it is no indifferent court for me, therefore I will not tarry.’ She then went back to her lodgings in nearby Baynard’s Castle.
The process became bogged down with technicalities, and with constant behind-the-scenes meetings and showers of paper. Campeggio was at its very vortex. He wrote to his friend Giacomo Salviati, the Pope’s second secretary, in cipher:
I find myself in such trouble and anxiety that if your Lordship saw me in bed with a cruel attack of gout in seven places, accompanied with fever … brought on by the pain and surrounded by fifteen [lawyers] with two piles of books to show me all they conclude is according to law and
nothing else can or ought to be done, I am sure you will have compassion upon me …
I am obliged to have myself carried to the place where the trial is held, God knows with what discomfort to me and danger in moving, in ascending and descending staircases and landing from the vessel [from the Thames].
I pray God I may not have to remain for ever in England.
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He admitted: ‘I understand the desire of his Holiness to be that we should not go on to pronounce judgement and that I should keep on procrastinating as long as I can.’ After one inconclusive meeting, Henry pathetically pleaded with Campeggio and his secretary in Latin: ‘Be good friends to me and have pity on me.’
Unknown to the king, Clement VII, yielding to Imperial pressure, had already annulled the legatine commission and Campeggio, watched by an incredulous Henry from a gallery next to the door of the courtroom, adjourned its proceedings on 23 July for a lengthy vacation to follow the normal summer practice of courts in Rome. It could not resit until October at the earliest, but in practice, the matter of the divorce had been referred back to Rome. The king, black-faced with anger, stormed back to Bridewell, but Suffolk, down in the hall, slammed his fist on a table and exclaimed: ‘By the Mass! Now I see that the old saying is true! It was never merry in England while we had cardinals amongst us.’
Wolsey had promised to deliver a papal annulment to his master on a golden plate, but Vatican bureaucracy, procrastination and duplicity had failed him. The warning signs of royal disfavour and displeasure were there for all to see. The French ambassador du Bellay said that ‘the cardinal is in the greatest pain … the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and the others lead the king to believe that he has not furthered the marriage as much as he could have done if he wished it’. Anne Boleyn’s cousin, Francis Bryan, who was openly using ‘fair means or foul’ to carry out his mission in Rome, told Henry: ‘Whosoever has made your grace believe that he [the Pope] would do for you in this case, has not, I think, done your grace the best service.’
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Wolsey’s downfall followed in October. A Venetian merchant in London wrote that the cardinal
has at length found fortune irate and hostile beyond measure, in such ways that she [Anne Boleyn] has brought him to ruin.
He has lost the royal favour and incurred his majesty’s utmost indignation, his supreme authority being converted into bondage and calamity.
He has been forbidden to act as legate, and has lost the chancellorship, the bishopric of Winchester, the abbacy of St Alban’s and all his other revenues and properties, with the exception of the archbishopric of York.
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A strict watch was mounted at all ports to prevent Wolsey from smuggling his immense wealth out of the realm, which Henry coveted for himself.
Unfortunately, a battered and weary Campeggio, gratefully heading back to Rome, was caught up in the paranoia. Tediously, he had been stopped at road blocks en route to the coast and at Dover he found that a lack of shipping was being used as a transparent excuse to detain him in England.
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Finally, his luggage was seized by customs officials at Dover. His long beard bristling, he angrily refused to surrender the keys to his trunks and so the locks were forced. As they gleefully picked over his dirty washing, Campeggio, beside himself with rage at this insufferable affront to his legatine dignity, snapped: ‘You do me great injustice to suppose that the cardinal [Wolsey] could corrupt a man like myself – who has been proof against the king’s innumerable presents.’
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Of course, what the searchers had been instructed to look out for was Campeggio’s secret commission from the Pope – plus any copies of his secret correspondence. According to the partisan Edward Hall, they were sadly disappointed as only ‘a few letters [were] found … in many chests were old hosen [close-fitting breeches], old coats and such vile stuff as no honest man would carry’.
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A less-than-contrite Henry responded to the cardinal’s remonstrances. The king’s patience had been worn thin by the old Italian’s
intransigence. A pungently worded one-page letter in Latin brushed aside Campeggio’s irate complaints of‘disrespect shown to the pontifical dignity and the violation of … legatine authority’. Henry added, somewhat disingenuously:
I … wonder that your wisdom should exaggerate such minute offences and take such dire offence – as though it were in
my
power to anticipate the temerity of the mob, or the excessive officiousness of others in the discharge of their duty.
The king relished the cardinal’s discomfort and could not resist a last opportunity to cut him down in size:
As to your legateship, no wrong has been done by me or mine, seeing that your authority only extended to the termination of my cause and when that was revoked by papal inhibition, it … expired.
Neither I nor my subjects acknowledge that you have any other authority.
I wonder that you are so ignorant of the laws of this kingdom that you were not afraid to make use of the title of legate when it became defunct, seeing that you are a bishop here
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and so bound by the most solemn obligation to observe and respect my royal dignity, jurisdiction [and] prerogative.

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