THE ORIGIN OF THE DIVORCE.[489]
[Footnote 489: It is impossible to avoid the term
"divorce," although neither from Henry VIII.'s nor
from the Pope's point of view was there any such
thing (see the present writer's _Cranmer_, p. 24
_n._).]
Matrimonial discords have, from the days of Helen of Troy, been the
fruitful source of public calamities; and one of the most decisive
events in English history, the breach with the Church of Rome, found
its occasion in the divorce of Catherine of Aragon. Its origin has
been traced to various circumstances. On one hand, it is attributed to
Henry's passion for Anne Boleyn, on the other, to doubts of the
validity of Henry's marriage, raised by the Bishop of Tarbes in 1527,
while negotiating a matrimonial alliance between the Princess Mary and
Francis I. These are the two most popular theories, and both are
demonstrably false.[490] Doubts of the legality of Henry's marriage
had existed long before the Bishop of Tarbes paid his visit to
England, and even before Anne Boleyn was born. They were urged, not
only on the eve of the completion of the marriage, but when it was
first suggested. In 1503, when Henry VII. applied to Julius II. for a
dispensation to enable his second son to marry his brother's (p. 174)
widow, the Pope replied that "the dispensation was a great matter; nor
did he well know, _prima facie_, if it were competent for the Pope to
dispense in such a case".[491] He granted the dispensation, but the
doubts were not entirely removed. Catherine's confessor instilled them
into her mind, and was recalled by Ferdinand on that account. The
Spanish King himself felt it necessary to dispel certain "scruples of
conscience" Henry might entertain as to the "sin" of marrying his
brother's widow.[492] Warham and Fox debated the matter, and Warham
apparently opposed the marriage.[493] A general council had pronounced
against the Pope's dispensing power;[494] and, though the Popes had,
in effect, established their superiority over general councils, those
who still maintained the contrary view can hardly have failed to doubt
the legality of Henry's marriage.
[Footnote 490: See, besides the original
authorities cited in this chapter, Busch, _Der
Ursprung der Ehescheidung Koenig Heinrichs VIII._
(Hist. Taschenbuch, Leipzig, VI., viii., 271-327).]
[Footnote 491: _L. and P._, iv., 5773; Pocock,
_Records of the Reformation_, i., 1.]
[Footnote 492: _Sp. Cal._, vol. ii., Pref., p.
xiv., No. 8.]
[Footnote 493: _L. and P._, iv., 5774 [6].]
[Footnote 494: _Ibid._, iv., 5376.]
So good a papalist as the young King, however, would hardly allow
theoretical doubts of the general powers of the Pope to outweigh the
practical advantages of a marriage in his own particular case; and it
is safe to assume that his confidence in its validity would have
remained unshaken, but for extraneous circumstances of a definite and
urgent nature. On the 31st of January, 1510, seven months after his
marriage with Catherine, she gave birth to her first child; it was a
daughter, and was still-born.[495] On the 27th of May following (p. 175)
she told her father that the event was considered in England to be of
evil omen, but that Henry took it cheerfully, and she thanked God for
having given her such a husband. "The King," wrote Catherine's
confessor, "adores her, and her highness him." Less than eight months
later, on the 1st of January, 1511, she was delivered of her first-born
son.[496] A tourney was held to celebrate the joyous event, and the
heralds received a handsome largess at the christening. The child was
named Henry, styled Prince of Wales, and given a serjeant-at-arms on
the 14th, and a clerk of the signet on the 19th of February. Three
days later he was dead; he was buried at the cost of some ten thousand
pounds in Westminster Abbey. The rejoicings were turned to grief,
which, aggravated by successive disappointments, bore with cumulative
force on the mind of the King and his people. In September, 1513, the
Venetian ambassador announced the birth of another son,[497] who was
either still-born, or died immediately afterwards. In June, 1514,
there is again a reference to the christening of the "King's new
son,"[498] but he, too, was no sooner christened than dead.
[Footnote 495: _D.N.B._, ix., 292, gives this date.
Catherine herself, writing on 27th May, 1510, says
that "some _days_ before she had been delivered of
a still-born daughter" (_Sp. Cal._, ii., 43). On
1st November, 1509, Henry informed Ferdinand that
Catherine was pregnant, and the child had quickened
(_ibid._, ii., 23).]
[Footnote 496: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 95-96; _L. and
P._, vol. i., 1491, 1495, 1513, Pref., p. lxxiii.;
ii., 4692.]
[Footnote 497: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 329.]
[Footnote 498: _L. and P._, i., 5192.]
Domestic griefs were now embittered by political resentments. Ferdinand
valued his daughter mainly as a political emissary; he had formally
accredited her as his ambassador at Henry's Court, and she naturally
used her influence to maintain the political union between her father
and her husband. The arrangement had serious drawbacks; when relations
between sovereigns grew strained, their ambassadors could be (p. 176)
recalled, but Catherine had to stay. In 1514 Henry was boiling over
with indignation at his double betrayal by the Catholic king; and it
is not surprising that he vented some of his rage on the wife who was
Ferdinand's representative. He reproached her, writes Peter Martyr
from Ferdinand's Court, with her father's ill-faith, and taunted her
with his own conquests. To this brutality Martyr attributes the
premature birth of Catherine's fourth son towards the end of 1514.[499]
Henry, in fact, was preparing to cast off, not merely the Spanish
alliance, but his Spanish wife. He was negotiating for a joint attack
on Castile with Louis XII. and threatening the divorce of Catherine.[500]
"It is said," writes a Venetian from Rome in August, 1514, "that the
King of England means to repudiate his present wife, the daughter of
the King of Spain and his brother's widow, because he is unable to
have children by her, and intends to marry a daughter of the French
Duke of Bourbon.... He intends to annul his own marriage, and will
obtain what he wants from the Pope as France did from Pope Julius
II."[501]
[Footnote 499: _L. and P._, i., 5718.]
[Footnote 500: See above p. 76.]
[Footnote 501: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 479. The Pope was
really Alexander VI.]
But the death of Louis XII. (January, 1515) and the consequent
loosening of the Anglo-French alliance made Henry and Ferdinand again
political allies; while, as the year wore on, Catherine was known to
be once more pregnant, and Henry's hopes of issue revived. This time
they were not disappointed; the Princess Mary was born on the 18th of
February, 1516.[502] Ferdinand had died on the 23rd of January, but
the news was kept from Catherine, lest it might add to the risks (p. 177)
of her confinement.[503] The young princess seemed likely to live, and
Henry was delighted. When Giustinian, amid his congratulations, said
he would have been better pleased had it been a son, the King replied:
"We are both young; if it was a daughter this time, by the grace of
God the sons will follow".[504] All thoughts of a divorce passed away
for the time, but the desired sons did not arrive. In August, 1517,
Catherine was reported to be again expecting issue, but nothing more
is heard of the matter, and it is probable that about this time the
Queen had various miscarriages. In July, 1518, Henry wrote to Wolsey
from Woodstock that Catherine was once more pregnant, and that he
could not move the Court to London, as it was one of the Queen's
"dangerous times".[505] His precautions were unavailing, and, on the
10th of November, his child arrived still-born. Giustinian notes the
great vexation with which the people heard the news, and expresses the
opinion that, had it occurred a month or two earlier, the Princess
Mary would not have been betrothed to the French dauphin, "as the one
fear of England was lest it should pass into subjection to France
through that marriage".[506]
[Footnote 502: _L. and P._, ii., 1505, 1573.]
[Footnote 503: _L. and P._, ii., 1563, 1610.]
[Footnote 504: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 691.]
[Footnote 505: _Cotton MS._, Vespasian, F, iii.,
fol. 34, _b_; _cf. L. and P._, ii., 4074, 4288.]
[Footnote 506: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 1103.]
The child was the last born of Catherine. For some years Henry went on
hoping against every probability that he might still have male issue
by his Queen; and in 1519 he undertook to lead a crusade against the
Turk in person if he should have an heir.[507] But physicians summoned
from Spain were no more successful than their English colleagues. (p. 178)
By 1525 the last ray of hope had flickered out. Catherine was then
forty years old; and Henry at the age of thirty-four, in the full
vigour of youthful manhood, seemed doomed by the irony of fate and by
his union with Catherine to leave a disputed inheritance. Never did
England's interests more imperatively demand a secure and peaceful
succession. Never before had there been such mortality among the
children of an English king; never before had an English king married
his brother's widow. So striking a coincidence could be only explained
by the relation of cause and effect. Men who saw the judgment of God
in the sack of Rome, might surely discern in the fatality that
attended the children of Henry VIII. a fulfilment of the doom of
childlessness pronounced in the Book of the Law against him who should
marry his brother's wife. "God," wrote the French ambassador in 1528,
"has long ago Himself passed sentence on it;"[508] and there is no
reason to doubt Henry's assertion, that he had come to regard the
death of his children as a Divine judgment, and that he was impelled
to question his marriage by the dictates of conscience. The "scruples
of conscience," which Henry VII. had urged as an excuse for delaying
the marriage, were merely a cloak for political reasons; but scruples
of conscience are dangerous playthings, and the pretence of Henry VII.
became, through the death of his children, a terrible reality to Henry
VIII.
[Footnote 507: _L. and P._, iii., 432.]
[Footnote 508: Du Bellay to Montmorenci, 1st Nov.,
1528, _L. and P._, iv., 4899.]
Queen Catherine, too, had scruples of conscience about the marriage,
though of a different sort. When she first heard of Henry's intention
to seek a divorce, she is reported to have said that "she had (p. 179)
not offended, but it was a judgment of God, for that her former marriage
was made in blood"; the price of it had been the head of the innocent
Earl of Warwick, demanded by Ferdinand of Aragon.[509] Nor was she
alone in this feeling. "He had heard," witnessed Buckingham's chancellor
in 1521, "the Duke grudge that the Earl of Warwick was put to death,
and say that God would punish it, by not suffering the King's issue to
prosper, as appeared by the death of his sons; and that his daughters
prosper not, and that he had no issue male."[510]
[Footnote 509: _Sp. Cal._, i., 249; _L. and P. of
Richard III. and Henry VII._, vol. i., pp. xxxiii.,
113; Hall, _Chron_., p. 491; Bacon, _Henry VII._,
ed. 1870, p. 376; _Transactions of the Royal Hist.
Soc._, N.S., xviii., 187.]
[Footnote 510: _L. and P._, iii., 1284.]
Conscience, however, often moves men in directions indicated by other
than conscientious motives, and, of the other motives which influenced
Henry's mind, some were respectable and some the reverse. The most
legitimate was his desire to provide for the succession to the throne.
It was obvious to him and his council that, if he died with no
children but Mary, England ran the risk of being plunged into an
anarchy worse than that of the civil wars. "By English law," wrote
Falier, the Venetian ambassador, in 1531, "females are excluded from
the throne;"[511] that was not true, but it was undoubtedly a
widespread impression, based upon the past history of England. No
Queen-Regnant had asserted a right to the English throne but one, and
that one precedent provided the most effective argument for avoiding a
repetition of the experiment. Matilda was never crowned, though she
had the same claim to the throne as Mary, and her attempt to (p. 180)
enforce her title involved England in nineteen years of anarchy and
civil war. Stephen stood to Matilda in precisely the same relation as
James V. of Scotland stood to the Princess Mary; and in 1532, as soon
as he came of age, James was urged to style himself "Prince of England"
and Duke of York, in manifest derogation of Mary's title.[512] At that
time Charles V. was discussing alternative plans for deposing Henry
VIII. One was to set up James V., the other to marry Mary to some
great English noble and proclaim them King and Queen;[513] Mary by
herself was thought to have no chance of success. John of Gaunt had
maintained in Parliament that the succession descended only through
males;[514] the Lancastrian case was that Henry IV., the son of Edward
III.'s fourth son, had a better title to the throne than Philippa, the
daughter of the third; an Act limiting the succession to the male line
was passed in 1406;[515] and Henry VII. himself only reigned through a
tacit denial of the right of women to sit on the English throne.
[Footnote 511: _Ven. Cal._, iv., 300.]
[Footnote 512: _L. and P._, v., 609, 817.]
[Footnote 513: _Ibid._, vi., 446.]
[Footnote 514: _Chronicon Angliae_, Rolls Ser., p.
92, _s.a._, 1376; _D.N.B._, xxix., 421. This became
the orthodox Lancastrian theory (_cf._ Fortescue,
_Governance of England_, ed. Plummer, pp. 352-55).]
[Footnote 515: Stubbs, _Const. Hist._, iii., 58.
This Act was, however, repealed before the end of
the same year.]
The objection to female sovereigns was grounded not so much on male
disbelief in their personal qualifications, as upon the inevitable
consequence of matrimonial and dynastic problems.[516] If the Princess
Mary succeeded, was she to marry? If not, her death would leave (p. 181)
the kingdom no better provided with heirs than before; and in her weak
state of health, her death seemed no distant prospect. If, on the
other hand, she married, her husband must be either a subject or a
foreign prince. To marry a subject would at once create discords like
those from which the Wars of the Roses had sprung; to marry a foreign
prince was to threaten Englishmen, then more jealous than ever of
foreign influence, with the fear of alien domination. They had before
their eyes numerous instances in which matrimonial alliances had
involved the union of states so heterogeneous as Spain and the
Netherlands; and they had no mind to see England absorbed in some
continental empire. In the matrimonial schemes arranged for the
princess, it was generally stipulated that she should, in default of
male heirs, succeed to the throne of England; her succession was
obviously a matter of doubt, and it is quite certain that her marriage
in France or in Spain would have proved a bar in the way of her
succession to the English throne, or at least have given rise to
conflicting claims.
[Footnote 516: Professor Maitland has spoken of the
"Byzantinism" of Henry's reign, and possibly the
objection to female sovereigns was strengthened by
the prevalent respect for Roman imperial and
Byzantine custom (_cf._ Hodgkin, _Charles the
Great_, p. 180).]
These rival pretensions began to be heard as soon as it became evident
that Henry VIII. would have no male heirs by Catherine of Aragon. In
1519, a year after the birth of the Queen's last child, Giustinian
reported to the Venetian signiory on the various nobles who had hopes
of the crown. The Duke of Norfolk had expectations in right of his
wife, a daughter of Edward IV., and the Duke of Suffolk in right of
his Duchess, the sister of Henry VIII. But the Duke of Buckingham was
the most formidable: "It was thought that, were the King to die
without male heirs, that Duke might easily obtain the crown".[517] (p. 182)
His claims had been canvassed in 1503, when the issue of Henry VII.
seemed likely to fail,[518] and now that the issue of Henry VIII. was
in even worse plight, Buckingham's claims to the crown became again a
matter of comment. His hopes of the crown cost him his head; he had
always been discontented with Tudor rule, especially under Wolsey; he
allowed himself to be encouraged with hopes of succeeding the King,
and possibly spoke of asserting his claim in case of Henry's death.
This was to touch Henry on his tenderest spot, and, in 1521, the Duke
was tried by his peers, found guilty of high treason, and sent to the
block.[519] In this, as in all the great trials of Henry's reign, and
indeed in most state trials of all ages, considerations of justice
were subordinated to the real or supposed dictates of political
expediency. Buckingham was executed, not because he was a criminal,
but because he was, or might become, dangerous; his crime was not
treason, but descent from Edward III. Henry VIII., like Henry VII.,
showed his grasp of the truth that nothing makes a government so
secure as the absence of all alternatives.
[Footnote 517: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 1287. Buckingham's
end was undoubtedly hastened by Wolsey's jealousy;
before the end of 1518 the Cardinal had been
instilling into Henry's ear suspicions of
Buckingham (_L. and P._, iii., 1; _cf. ibid._, ii.,
3973, 4057). Brewer regards the hostility of Wolsey
to Buckingham as one of Polydore Vergil's
"calumnies" (_ibid._, vol. iii., Introd., p.
lxvi.).]
[Footnote 518: _L. and P. of Richard III. and Henry
VII._, i., 233.]
[Footnote 519: See detailed accounts in _L. and
P._, iii., 1284, 1356. Shakespeare's account in
"Henry VIII." is remarkably accurate, except in
matters of date.]
Buckingham's execution is one of the symptoms that, as early as 1521,
the failure of his issue had made Henry nervous and susceptible about
the succession. Even in 1519, when Charles V.'s minister, (p. 183)
Chievres, was proposing to marry his niece to the Earl of Devonshire,
a grandson of Edward IV., Henry was suspicious, and Wolsey inquired
whether Chievres was "looking to any chance of the Earl's succession
to the throne of England."[520] If further proof were needed that
Henry's anxiety about the succession was not, as has been represented,
a mere afterthought intended to justify his divorce from Catherine, it
might be found in the extraordinary measures taken with regard to his
one and only illegitimate son. The boy was born in 1519. His mother
was Elizabeth Blount, sister of Erasmus's friend, Lord Mountjoy; and
she is noticed as taking part in the Court revels during the early
years of Henry's reign.[521] Outwardly, at any rate, Henry's Court was
long a model of decorum; there was no parade of vice as in the days of
Charles II., and the existence of this royal bastard was so effectually
concealed that no reference to him occurs in the correspondence of the
time until 1525, when it was thought expedient to give him a position
of public importance. The necessity of providing some male successor
to Henry was considered so urgent that, two years before the divorce
is said to have occurred to him, he and his council were meditating a
scheme for entailing the succession on the King's illegitimate son. In
1525 the child was created Duke of Richmond and Somerset. These titles
were significant; Earl of Richmond had been Henry VII.'s title before
he came to the throne; Duke of Somerset had been that of his grandfather
and of his youngest son. Shortly afterwards the boy was made Lord (p. 184)
High Admiral of England, Lord Warden of the Marches, and Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland,[522] the two latter being offices which Henry
VIII. himself had held in his early youth. In January, 1527, the
Spanish ambassador reported that there was a scheme on foot to make
the Duke King of Ireland;[523] it was obviously a design to prepare
the way for his succession to the kingdom of England. The English
envoys in Spain were directed to tell the Emperor that Henry proposed
to demand some noble princess of near blood to the Emperor as a wife
for the Duke of Richmond. The Duke, they were to say, "is near of the
King's blood and of excellent qualities, and is already furnished to
keep the state of a great prince, and yet may be easily, by the King's
means, exalted to higher things".[524] The lady suggested was Charles's
niece, a daughter of the Queen of Portugal; she was already promised
to the Dauphin of France, but the envoys remarked that, if that match
were broken off, she might find "another dauphin" in the Duke of
Richmond. Another plan for settling the succession was that the Duke
should, by papal dispensation, marry his half-sister Mary! Cardinal
Campeggio saw no moral objection to this. "At first I myself," he
writes on his arrival in England in October, 1528, "had thought of
this as a means of establishing the succession, but I do not believe
that this design would suffice to satisfy the King's desires."[525]
The Pope was equally willing to facilitate the scheme, on (p. 185)
condition that Henry abandoned his divorce from Catherine.[526] Possibly
Henry saw more objections than Pope or Cardinal to a marriage between
brother and sister. At all events Mary was soon betrothed to the
French prince, and the Emperor recorded his impression that the French
marriage was designed to remove the Princess from the Duke of
Richmond's path to the throne.[527]
[Footnote 520: _L. and P._, iii., 386.]
[Footnote 521: _Ibid._, ii., p. 1461.]
[Footnote 522: See G.E. C[okayne]'s and Doyle's
_Peerages_, _s.v._ "Richmond".]
[Footnote 523: _Sp. Cal._, iii., 109; _L. and P._,
iv., 2988, 3028, 3140.]
[Footnote 524: _L. and P._, iv., 3051. In _ibid._,
iv., 3135, Richmond is styled "The Prince".]
[Footnote 525: Laemmer, _Monumenta Vaticana_, p.
29; _L. and P._, iv., 4881. It was claimed that the
Pope's dispensing power was unlimited, extending
even to marriages between brothers and sisters
(_ibid._, v., 468). Campeggio told Du Bellay in
1528 that the Pope's power was "infinite" (_ibid._,
iv., 4942).]
[Footnote 526: _L. and P._, iv., 5072.]
[Footnote 527: _Sp. Cal._, iii., 482.]
The conception of this violent expedient is mainly of interest as
illustrating the supreme importance attached to the question of
providing for a male successor to Henry. He wanted an heir to the
throne, and he wanted a fresh wife for that reason. A mistress would
not satisfy him, because his children by a mistress would hardly
succeed without dispute to the throne, not because he laboured under
any moral scruples on the point. He had already had two mistresses,
Elizabeth Blount, the mother of the Duke of Richmond, and Anne's
sister, Mary Boleyn. Possibly, even probably, there were other lapses
from conjugal fidelity, for, in 1533, the Duke of Norfolk told Chapuys
that Henry was always inclined to amours;[528] but none are capable of
definite proof, and if Henry had other illegitimate children besides
the Duke of Richmond it is difficult to understand why their existence
should have been so effectually concealed when such publicity was
given their brother. The King is said to have had ten mistresses in
1528, but the statement is based on a misrepresentation of the only
document adduced in its support.[529] It is a list of New Year's (p. 186)
presents,[530] which runs "To thirty-three noble ladies" such and such
gifts, then "to ten mistresses" other gifts; it is doubtful if the
word then bore its modern sinister signification; in this particular
instance it merely means "gentlewomen," and differentiates them from
the noble ladies. Henry's morals, indeed, compare not unfavourably
with those of other sovereigns. His standard was neither higher nor
lower than that of Charles V., who was at this time negotiating a
marriage between his natural daughter and the Pope's nephew; it was
not lower than those of James II., of William III., or of the first
two Georges; it was infinitely higher than the standard of Francis I.,
of Charles II., or even of Henry of Navarre and Louis XIV.
[Footnote 528: _L. and P._, vi., 241.]
[Footnote 529: E.L. Taunton, _Wolsey_, 1902, p.
173, where the words are erroneously given as "To
the King's ten mistresses"; "the King's" is an
interpolation.]
[Footnote 530: _L. and P._, iv., 3748.]
The gross immorality so freely imputed to Henry seems to have as
little foundation as the theory that his sole object in seeking the
divorce from Catherine and separation from Rome was the gratification
of his passion for Anne Boleyn. If that had been the case, there would
be no adequate explanation of the persistence with which he pursued
the divorce. He was "studying the matter so diligently," Campeggio
says, "that I believe in this case he knows more than a great
theologian and jurist"; he was so convinced of the justice of his
cause "that an angel descending from heaven would be unable to
persuade him otherwise".[531] He sent embassy after embassy to Rome;
he risked the enmity of Catholic Europe; he defied the authority of
the vicar of Christ; and lavished vast sums to obtain verdicts in his
favour from most of the universities in Christendom. It is not (p. 187)
credible that all this energy was expended merely to satisfy a sensual
passion, which could be satisfied without a murmur from Pope or Emperor,
if he was content with Anne Boleyn as a mistress, and is believed to
have been already satisfied in 1529, four years before the divorce was
obtained.[532] So, too, the actual sentence of divorce in 1533 was
precipitated not by Henry's passion for Anne, but by the desire that
her child should be legitimate. She was pregnant before Henry was
married to her or divorced from Catherine. But, though the representation
of Henry's passion for Anne Boleyn as the sole _fons et origo_ of the
divorce is far from convincing, that passion introduced various
complications into the question; it was not merely an additional
incentive to Henry's desires; it also brought Wolsey and Henry into
conflict; and the unpopularity of the divorce was increased by the
feeling that Henry was losing caste by seeking to marry a lady of the
rank and character of Anne Boleyn.
[Footnote 531: _Ibid._, iv., 4858.]
[Footnote 532: No conclusive evidence on this point
is possible; the French ambassador, Clement VII.
and others believed that Henry VIII. and Anne
Boleyn had been cohabiting since 1529. On the other
hand, if such was the case, it is singular that no
child should have been born before 1533; for after
that date Anne seems to have had a miscarriage
nearly every year. Ortiz, indeed, reports from Rome
that she had a miscarriage in 1531 (_L. and P._,
v., 594), but the evidence is not good.]
* * * * *
The Boleyns were wealthy merchants of London, of which one of them had
been Lord-Mayor, but Anne's mother was of noble blood, being daughter
and co-heir of the Earl of Ormonde,[533] and it is a curious fact that
all of Henry's wives could trace their descent from Edward I.[534]
Anne's age is uncertain, but she is generally believed to have (p. 188)
been born in 1507.[535] Attempts have been made to date her influence
over the King by the royal favours bestowed on her father, Sir Thomas,
afterwards Viscount Rochford and Earl of Wiltshire, but, as these
favours flowed in a fairly regular stream from the beginning of the
reign, as Sir Thomas's services were at least a colourable excuse for
them, and as his other daughter Mary was Henry's mistress before he
fell in love with Anne, these grants are not a very substantial ground
upon which to build. Of Anne herself little is known except that,
about 1519, she was sent as maid of honour to the French Queen,
Claude; five years before, her sister Mary had accompanied Mary Tudor
in a similar capacity on her marriage with Louis XII.[536] In 1522,
when war with France was on the eve of breaking out, Anne was recalled
to the English Court,[537] where she took part in revels and
love-intrigues. Sir Thomas Wyatt, the poet, although a married man,
sued for her favours;[538] Henry, Lord Percy made her more honest
proposals, but was compelled to desist by the King himself, who (p. 189)
had arranged for her marriage with Piers Butler, son of the Earl
of Ormond, as a means to end the feud between the Butler and the
Boleyn families.
[Footnote 533: See Friedmann's _Anne Boleyn_, 2
vols., 1884, and articles on the Boleyn family in
_D.N.B._, vol. v.]
[Footnote 534: See George Fisher, _Key to the
History of England_, Table xvii.; _Gentleman's
Magazine_, May, 1829.]
[Footnote 535: Henry would then be fifteen, yet a
fable was invented and often repeated that Henry
VIII. was Anne Boleyn's father. Nicholas Sanders,
whose _De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis
Anglicani_ became the basis of Roman Catholic
histories of the English Reformation, gave currency
to the story; and some modern writers prefer
Sanders' veracity to Foxe's.]
[Footnote 536: The error that it was Anne who
accompanied Mary Tudor in 1514 was exposed by
Brewer more than forty years ago, but it still
lingers and was repeated with innumerable others in
the Catalogue of the New Gallery Portrait
Exhibition of 1902.]
[Footnote 537: _L. and P._, iii., 1994.]
[Footnote 538: In Harpsfield's _Pretended Divorce_
there is a very improbable story that Wyatt told
Henry VIII. his relations with Anne were far from
innocent and warned the King against marrying a
woman of Anne's character.]
None of these projects advanced any farther, possibly because they
conflicted with the relations developing between Anne and the King
himself. As Wyatt complained in a sonnet,[539]
There is written her fair neck round about
_Noli me tangere_; for Caesar's I am
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
But, for any definite documentary evidence to the contrary, it might
be urged that Henry's passion for Anne was subsequent to the
commencement of his proceedings for a divorce from Catherine. Those
proceedings began at least as early as March, 1527, while the first
allusion to the connection between the King and Anne Boleyn occurs in
the instructions to Dr. William Knight, sent in the following autumn
to procure a dispensation for her marriage with Henry.[540] The King's
famous love-letters, the earliest of which are conjecturally assigned
to July, 1527,[541] are without date and with but slight internal
indications of the time at which they were written; they may be earlier
than 1527, they may be as late as the following winter. It is unlikely
that Henry would have sought for the Pope's dispensation to marry (p. 190)
Anne until he was assured of her consent, of which in some of the
letters he appears to be doubtful; on the other hand, it is difficult
to see how a lady of the Court could refuse an offer of marriage made
by her sovereign. Her reluctance was to fill a less honourable
position, into which Henry was not so wicked as to think of forcing
her. "I trust," he writes in one of his letters, "your absence is not
wilful on your part; for if so, I can but lament my ill-fortune, and
by degrees abate my great folly."[542] His love for Anne Boleyn was
certainly his "great folly," the one overmastering passion of his
life. There is, however, nothing very extraordinary in the letters
themselves; in one he says he has for more than a year been "wounded
with the dart of love," and is uncertain whether Anne returns his
affection. In others he bewails her briefest absence as though it were
an eternity; desires her father to hasten his return to Court; is torn
with anxiety lest Anne should take the plague, comforts her with the
assurance that few women have had it, and sends her a hart killed by
his own hand, making the inevitable play on the word. Later on, he
alludes to the progress of the divorce case; excuses the shortness of
a letter on the ground that he has spent four hours over the book he
was writing in his own defence[543] and has a pain in his head. The
series ends with an announcement that he has been fitting up apartments
for her, and with congratulations to himself and to her that the
"well-wishing" Legate, Campeggio, who has been sent from Rome to (p. 191)
try the case, has told him he was not so "imperial" in his sympathies
as had been alleged.
[Footnote 539: Wyatt, _Works_, ed. G.F. Nott, 1816,
p. 143.]
[Footnote 540: _L. and P._, iv., 3422.]
[Footnote 541: _Ibid._, iv., 3218-20, 3325-26,
3990, 4383, 4403, 4410, 4477, 4537, 4539, 4597,
4648, 4742, 4894. They have also been printed by
Hearne at the end of his edition of _Robert of
Avesbury_, in the _Pamphleteer_, vol. xxi., and in
the _Harleian Miscellany_, vol. iii. The originals
in Henry's hand are in the Vatican Library; one of
them was reproduced in facsimile for the
illustrated edition of this book.]
[Footnote 542: _L. and P._, iv., 3326.]
[Footnote 543: In 1531 he was said to have written
"many books" on the divorce question (_ibid._, v.,
251).]
The secret of her fascination over Henry was a puzzle to observers.
"Madame Anne," wrote a Venetian, "is not one of the handsomest women
in the world. She is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long
neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but
the King's great appetite, and her eyes, which are black and
beautiful".[544] She had probably learnt in France the art of using
her beautiful eyes to the best advantage; her hair, which was long and
black, she wore loose, and on her way to her coronation Cranmer
describes her as "sitting _in_ her hair".[545] Possibly this was one
of the French customs, which somewhat scandalised the staider ladies
of the English Court. She is said to have had a slight defect on one
of her nails, which she endeavoured to conceal behind her other
fingers.[546] Of her mental accomplishments there is not much evidence;
she naturally, after some years' residence at the Court of France,
spoke French, though she wrote it in an orthography that was quite her
own. Her devotion to the Gospel is the one great virtue with which
Foxe and other Elizabethans strove to invest the mother of the Good
Queen Bess. But it had no nobler foundation than the facts that Anne's
position drove her into hostility to the Roman jurisdiction, and that
her family shared the envy of church goods, common to the nobility and
the gentry of the time.[547] Her place in English history is due (p. 192)
solely to the circumstance that she appealed to the less refined part
of Henry's nature; she was pre-eminent neither in beauty nor in
intellect, and her virtue was not of a character to command or deserve
the respect of her own or subsequent ages.
[Footnote 544: _Ven. Cal._, iv., 365.]
[Footnote 545: Cranmer, _Works_ (Parker Soc.), ii.,
245; _cf. Ven. Cal._, iv., 351, 418.]
[Footnote 546: _L. and P._, iv., Introd., p.
ccxxxvii.]
[Footnote 547: There is not much historical truth
in Gray's phrase about "the Gospel light which
dawned from Bullen's eyes"; but Brewer goes too far
in minimising the "Lutheran" proclivities of the
Boleyns. In 1531 Chapuys described Anne and her
father as being "more Lutheran than Luther himself"
(_L. and P._, v., 148), in 1532 as "true apostles
of the new sect" (_ibid._, v., 850), and in 1533 as
"perfect Lutherans" (_ibid._, vi., 142).]
It is otherwise with her rival, Queen Catherine, the third of the
principal characters involved in the divorce. If Henry's motives were
not so entirely bad as they have often been represented, neither they
nor Anne Boleyn's can stand a moment's comparison with the unsullied
purity of Catherine's life or the lofty courage with which she defended
the cause she believed to be right. There is no more pathetic figure
in English history, nor one condemned to a crueller fate. No breath of
scandal touched her fair name, or impugned her devotion to Henry. If
she had the misfortune to be identified with a particular policy, the
alliance with the House of Burgundy, the fault was not hers; she had
been married to Henry in consideration of the advantages which that
alliance was supposed to confer; and, if she used her influence to
further Spanish interest, it was a natural feeling as near akin to
virtue as to vice, and Carroz at least complained, in 1514, that she
had completely identified herself with her husband and her husband's
subjects.[548] If her miscarriages and the death of her children (p. 193)
were a grief to Henry, the pain and the sorrow were hers in far
greater measure; if they had made her old and deformed, as Francis
brutally described her in 1519,[549] the fact must have been far more
bitter to her than it was unpleasant to Henry. There may have been
some hardship to Henry in the circumstance that, for political
motives, he had been induced by his council to marry a wife who was
six years his senior; but to Catherine herself a divorce was the
height of injustice. The question was in fact one of justice against a
real or supposed political necessity, and in such cases justice
commonly goes to the wall. In politics, men seek to colour with
justice actions based upon considerations of expediency. They first
convince themselves, and then they endeavour with less success to
persuade mankind.
[Footnote 548: _Sp. Cal._, ii., 201.]
[Footnote 549: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 1230.]
So Henry VIII. convinced himself that the dispensation granted by
Julius II. was null and void, that he had never been married to
Catherine, and that to continue to live with his brother's wife was
sin. "The King," he instructed his ambassador to tell Charles V. in
1533, "taketh himself to be in the right, not because so many say it,
but because he, being learned, knoweth the matter to be right.... The
justice of our cause is so rooted in our breast that nothing can
remove it, and even the canons say that a man should rather endure all
the censures of the Church than offend his conscience."[550] No man
was less tolerant of heresy than Henry, but no man set greater (p. 194)
store on his own private judgment. To that extent he was a Protestant;
"though," he instructed Paget in 1534 to tell the Lutheran princes,
"the law of every man's conscience be but a private court, yet it is
the highest and supreme court for judgment or justice". God and his
conscience, he told Chapuys in 1533, were on very good terms.[551] On
another occasion he wrote to Charles _Ubi Spiritus Domini, ibi
libertas_,[552] with the obvious implication that he possessed the
spirit of the Lord, and therefore he might do as he liked. To him, as
to St. Paul, all things were lawful; and Henry's appeals to the Pope,
to learned divines, to universities at home and abroad, were not for
his own satisfaction, but were merely concessions to the profane herd,
unskilled in royal learning and unblessed with a kingly conscience.
Against that conviction, so firmly rooted in the royal breast, appeals
to pity were vain, and attempts to shake it were perilous. It was his
conscience that made Henry so dangerous. Men are tolerant of
differences about things indifferent, but conscience makes bigots of
us all; theological hatreds are proverbially bitter, and religious
wars are cruel. Conscience made Sir Thomas More persecute, and glory
in the persecution of heretics,[553] and conscience earned Mary her
epithet "Bloody". They were moved by conscientious belief in the
Catholic faith, Henry by conscientious belief in himself; and
conscientious scruples are none the less exigent for being reached by
crooked paths.
[Footnote 550: _L. and P._, vi., 775. _Hoc volo,
sic jubeo; stet pro ratione voluntas._ Luther
quoted this line _a propos_ of Henry; see his
preface to Robert Barnes' _Bekenntniss des
Glaubens_, Wittemberg, 1540.]
[Footnote 551: _L. and P._, vi., 351; vii., 148.]
[Footnote 552: _Ibid._, iv., 6111.]
[Footnote 553: It has been denied that More either
persecuted or gloried in the persecution of
heretics; but he admits himself that he recommended
corporal punishment in two cases and "it is clear
that he underestimated his activity" (_D.N.B._,
xxxviii., 436, and instances and authorities there
cited).]