The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon

Dr. Butts, the King’s physician, whose portrait by Holbein is so familiar to us, was one of the most devoted friends of Queen Catherine. During Mary’s illness, Dr. Butts had affected to be afraid of the responsibility of attending upon her. He had consented afterwards, though with apparent reluctance, and had met in consultation Catherine’s doctor, who had also allowed himself to be persuaded. Henry sent Butts down to Eltham with his own horses. The Royal physician found his patient better than he expected, and, instead of talking over her disorders, he talked of the condition of the realm with his brother practitioner. “The Doctor is a very clever man,” wrote Chapuys, reporting the account of the conversation which he received from the Queen’s physician, “and is intimate with the nobles and the Council. He says that there are but two ways of assisting the Queen and Princess and of setting right the affairs of the realm: one would be if it pleased God to visit the King with some little malady.”319 “The second method was force, of which, he said, the King and his Ministers were in marvellous fear. If it came to a war, he thought the King would be specially careful of the Queen and Princess, meaning to use them, should things turn to the worst, as mediators for peace. But if neither of these means were made use of, he really believed they were in danger of their lives. He considered it was lucky for the King that the Emperor did not know how easy the enterprise of England would be; and the present, he said, was the right time for it.”

His private physician, it is to be remembered, was necessarily, of all Henry’s servants, the most trusted by him; and the doctor was not contented with indirect suggestions, for he himself sent a secret message to Chapuys that twenty great peers and a hundred knights were ready, they and their vassals, to venture fortune and life, with the smallest assistance from the Emperor, to rise and make a revolution.320

Dr. Butts with his petite maladie was a “giant traitor,” though, happily for himself, he was left undiscovered. Human sympathies run so inevitably on the side of the sufferers in history, that we forget that something also is due to those whom they forced into dealing hardly with them. Catherine and the faithful Catholics who conspired and lost their lives for her cause and the Pope’s, are in no danger of losing the favourable judgment of the world; the tyranny and cruelty of Henry VIII. will probably remain for ever a subject of eloquent denunciation; but there is an altera pars– another view of the story, which we may be permitted without offence to recognise. Henry was, on the whole, right; the general cause for which he was contending was a good cause. His victory opened the fountains of English national life, won for England spiritual freedom, and behind spiritual freedom her political liberties. His defeat would have kindled the martyr-fires in every English town, and would have burnt out of the country thousands of poor men and women as noble as Catherine herself. He had stained the purity of his action by intermingling with it a weak passion for a foolish and bad woman, and bitterly he had to suffer for his mistake; but the revolt against, and the overthrow of, ecclesiastical despotism were precious services, which ought to be remembered to his honour; and, when the good doctor to whom he trusted his life, out of compassion for an unfortunate lady was, perhaps, willing to administer a doubtful potion to him, or to aid in inviting a Catholic army into England to extinguish the light that was dawning there, only those who are Catholics first and Englishmen afterwards will say that it was well done on the doctor’s part.

The temper of the nation was growing dangerous, and the forces on both sides were ranging themselves for the battle. Bishop Fisher has been seen sounding on the same string. He, with More, had now been for many months in the Tower, and his communications with Chapuys having been cut off, he had been unable to continue his solicitations; but the Ambassador had undertaken for the whole of the clergy on the instant that the Emperor should declare himself. The growth of Lutheranism had touched their hearts with pious indignation; their hatred of heresy was almost the sole distinction which they had preserved belonging to their sacred calling. The regular orders were the most worthless; the smaller monasteries were nests of depravity; the purpose of their existence was to sing souls out of purgatory, and the efficacy of their musical petitionings being no longer believed in, the King had concluded that monks and nuns could be better employed, and that the wealth which maintained them could be turned to better purpose – to the purpose especially of the defence of the realm against them and their machinations. The monks everywhere were the active missionaries of treason. They writhed under the Act of Supremacy. Their hope of continuance depended on the restoration of the Papal authority. When they were discovered to be at once useless and treacherous, it was not unjust to take their lands from them and apply the money for which those lands could be sold, to the fleet and the fortresses on the coast.

In this, the greatest of his reforms, Cromwell had been the King’s chief adviser. He had been employed under Wolsey in the first suppression of the most corrupt of the smaller houses. In the course of his work he had gained an insight into the scandalous habits of their occupants, which convinced him of the impolicy and uselessness of attempting to prolong their existence. Institutions however ancient, organizations however profoundly sacred, cannot outlive the recognition that the evil which they produce is constant and the advantage visionary.

That the monastic system was doomed had become generally felt; that the victims of the intended overthrow should be impatient of their fate was no more than natural. The magnitude of the design, the interests which were threatened, the imagined sanctity attaching to property devoted to the Church, gave an opportunity for outcry against sacrilege. The entire body of monks became in their various orders an army of insurrectionary preachers, well supplied with money, terrifying the weak, encouraging the strong, and appealing to the superstitions so powerful with a people like the English, who were tenacious of their habits and associations.

The Abbots and Priors had sworn to the supremacy, but had sworn reluctantly, with secret reservations to save their consciences. With the prospect of an Imperial deliverer to appear among them, they were recovering courage to defy their excommunicated enemy. Those who retained the most of the original spirit of their religion were the first to recover heart for resistance. The monks of the London Charterhouse, who were exceptions to the general corruption, and were men of piety and character, came forward to repudiate their oaths and to dare the law to punish them. Their tragical story is familiar to all readers of English history. Chapuys adds a few particulars. Their Prior, Haughton, had consented to the Act of Supremacy; but his conscience told him that in doing so he had committed perjury. He went voluntarily, with three of the brotherhood, to Cromwell, and retracted his oath, declaring that the King in calling himself Head of the Church was usurping the Pope’s authority. They had not been sent for; their house was in no immediate danger; and there was no intention of meddling with them. Their act was a gratuitous defiance; and under the circumstances of the country was an act of war. The effect, if not the purpose, was, and must have been, to encourage a spirit which would explode in rebellion. Cromwell warned them of their danger, and advised them to keep their scruples to themselves. They said they would rather encounter a hundred thousand deaths. They were called before a Council of Peers. The Knights of the Garter were holding their annual Chapter, and the attendance was large. The Duke of Norfolk presided, having returned to the Court, and the proceedings were unusually solemn. The monks were required to withdraw their declaration; they were told that the statute was not to be disputed. They persisted. They were allowed a night to reflect, and they spent it on their knees in prayer. In the morning they were recalled; their courage held, and they were sentenced to die, with another friar who had spoken and written to similar purpose.

They had thrown down a challenge to the Government; the challenge was accepted, and the execution marked the importance of the occasion. They were not a handful of insignificant priests, they were the advanced guard of insurrection; and to allow them to triumph was to admit defeat. They were conducted through the streets by an armed force. The Duke of Norfolk, the Duke of Richmond, Henry’s illegitimate son, Lord Wiltshire, and Lord Rochford attended at the scaffold. Sir Henry Norris was also there, masked, with forty of the Royal Guard on horseback. At the scaffold they were again offered a chance of life; again they refused, and died gallantly. The struggle had begun for the Crown of England. In claiming the supremacy for the Pope, these men had abjured their allegiance to the King whom the Pope had excommunicated. Conscience was nothing – motive was nothing. Conscience was not allowed as a plea when a Lutheran was threatened with the stake. In all civil conflicts high motives are to be found on both sides, and in earnest times words are not used without meaning. The Statute of Supremacy was Henry’s defence against an attempt to deprive him of his crown and deprive the kingdom of its independence. To disobey the law was treason; and the penalty of treason was death.321

Chapuys in telling the story urged it as a proof to Charles that there was no hope of the King’s repentance. It was now expected that More and Fisher, and perhaps the Queen and Princess, would be called on also to acknowledge the supremacy, and, if they refused, would suffer the same fate. The King’s Ministers, Chapuys said, were known to have often reproached the King, and to have told him it was a shame for him and the kingdom not to punish them as traitors. Anne Boleyn was fiercer and haughtier than ever she was.322 Sir Thomas More was under the same impression that Anne had been instigator of the severities. She would take his head from him, he said, and then added, prophetically, that her own would follow. The presence of her father and brother and her favourite Norris at the execution of the Carthusians confirmed the impression. The action of the Government had grounds more sufficient than a woman’s urgency. More and Fisher received notice that they would be examined on the statute, and were allowed six weeks to prepare their answer. Chapuys did not believe that any danger threatened Catherine, or threatened her household. She herself, however, anticipated the worst, and only hoped that her own fate might rouse the Emperor at last.

The Emperor was not to be roused. He was preparing for his great expedition to Tunis to root out the corsairs, and had other work on hand. In vain Chapuys had tried to make him believe that Cromwell meditated the destruction of the Princess Mary; in vain Chapuys had told him that words were useless, and that “cautery was the only remedy” – that the English Peers were panting for encouragement to take arms. He had no confidence in insurgent subjects who could not use the constitutional methods which they possessed to do anything for themselves. He saw Henry crushing down resistance with the relentless severity of the law. He replied to Chapuys’s entreaties that, although he could not in conscience abandon his aunt and cousin, yet the Ambassador must temporise. He had changed his mind about Mary’s escape: he said it was dangerous, unadvisable, and not to be thought of.323 The present was not the proper moment. He wrote a cautious letter to the King, which he forwarded for Chapuys to deliver. In spite of Charterhouse monks and Lutheran preachers, the Ambassador was to take up again the negotiations for the treaty.

Thus Cromwell and he recommenced their secret meetings. A country-house was selected for the purpose, where their interviews would be unobserved. Chapuys had recommended that Henry should assist in calling a General Council. Cromwell undertook that Henry would consent, provided the Council was not held in Italy, or in the Pope’s or the Emperor’s dominions, and provided that the divorce should not be among the questions submitted to it. The Emperor, he said, had done enough for his honour, and might now leave the matter to the King’s conscience. With respect to the Queen and Princess, the King had already written to Sir John Wallop, who was to lay his letters before the Spanish Ambassador in Paris. The King had said that, although the Emperor, in forsaking a loyal friend for the sake of a woman, had not acted well with him, yet he was willing to forget and forgive. If the Emperor would advise the ladies to submit to the judgment of the Universities of Europe, which had been sanctioned by the English estates of the realm, and was as good as a decree of a Council, they would have nothing to complain of.324 Chapuys observed that such a letter ought to have been shown to himself before it was sent; but that was of no moment. The King of France, Cromwell went on, would bring the Turk, and the Devil, too, into Christendom to recover Milan; the King and the Emperor ought to draw together to hold France in check; and yet, to give Chapuys a hint that he knew what he had been doing, he said he had heard, though he did not believe it, that the Emperor and the King of the Romans had thought of invading England, in a belief that they would make an easy conquest of it. They would find the enterprise more costly than they expected, and, even if they did conquer England, they could not keep it. Chapuys, wishing to learn how much had been discovered, asked what Cromwell meant. Cromwell told him the exact truth. The scheme had been to stop the trade between England and Flanders. A rebellion was expected to follow, which, Cromwell admitted, was not unlikely; and then, in great detail and with a quiet air of certainty, he referred to the solicitations continually made to the Emperor to send across an army.

Leaving Chapuys to wonder at his sources of information, so accurate, Cromwell spoke of an approaching conference at Calais, which was to be held at the request of the French King. He did not think anything would come of it. He had himself declined to be present, but one of the proposals to be made would be an offer of the Duke of Angoulême for the young Princess Elizabeth. The Council, he said, had meantime been reviewing the old treaty for the marriage of the Emperor to the Princess Mary, and the King had spoken in the warmest terms of the Emperor. Perhaps as a substitute for the French connection, and provided the divorce was not called in question again, he thought that the Princess Elizabeth might be betrothed to Philip, and a marriage could be found out of the realm for the Princess Mary with the Emperor’s consent and approbation. The King, in this case, would give her the greatest and richest dower that was ever given to any Queen or Empress.325

Chapuys observed that the divorce must be disposed of before fresh marriages could be thought of. Cromwell wished him to speak himself to the King. Chapuys politely declined to take so delicate a negotiation out of Cromwell’s hands. For himself, he had not yet abandoned hope of a different issue. Lord Darcy was still eager as ever, and wished to communicate directly with the Emperor. From Ireland, too, the news were less discouraging. The insurrection had burnt down, but was still unsubdued. Lord Thomas found one of his difficulties to lie in the incompleteness of the Papal censures. The formal Bull of Deposition was still unpublished. The young chief had written to the Pope to say that, but for this deficiency, he would have driven the English out of the island, and to beg that it might be immediately supplied. He had himself, too, perhaps, been in fault. The murder of an archbishop who had not been directly excommunicated was an irregularity and possibly a crime. He prayed that the Pope would send him absolution. Paul as he read the letter showed much pleasure. He excused his hesitation as having risen from a hope that the King of England would repent. For the future he said he would do his duty; and at once sent Lord Thomas the required pardon for an act which had been really meritorious.326

The absolution may have benefited Lord Thomas’s soul. It did not save him from the gallows.

Again Cromwell and Chapuys met. Again the discussion returned to the insoluble problem. The Spanish Council of State had half recommended that the divorce should be passed over, as it had been at Cambray. Chapuys laboured to entangle Henry in an engagement that it should be submitted to the intended General Council. The argument took the usual form. Cromwell said that the King could not revoke what he had done, without disgrace. Chapuys answered that it was the only way to avoid disgrace, and the most honourable course which he could adopt. The King ought not to be satisfied in such a matter with the laws and constitutions of his own country. If he would yield on this single point, the taking away the property of the clergy might in some degree be confirmed. The ground alleged for it being the defence of the realm, there would be less occasion for such measures in future; the Emperor would allow the King to make his submission in any form that he might choose, and everything should be made as smooth as Henry could desire.

Cromwell, according to Chapuys, admitted the soundness of the argument, but he said that it was neither in his power, nor in any man’s power, to persuade the King, who would hazard all rather than yield. Even the present Pope, he said, had, when Cardinal, written an autograph letter to the King, telling him that he had a right to ask for a divorce, and that Clement had done him great wrong.

The less reason then, Chapuys neatly observed, for refusing to lay the matter before a General Council.

The Ambassador went through his work dutifully, though expecting nothing from it, and his reports of what passed with the English Ministers ended generally with a recommendation of what he thought the wiser course. Lord Hussey, he said, had sent to him to say that he could remain no longer in a country where all ranks and classes were being driven into heresy; and would, therefore, cross the Channel to see the Emperor in person, to urge his own opinion and learn the Emperor’s decision from his own lips. If the answer was unfavourable he would tell his friends, that they might not be deceived in their expectations. They would then act for themselves.327

It is likely that Chapuys had been instructed to reserve the concessions which Charles was prepared to make till it was certain that, without them, the treaty would fail. France meanwhile was outbidding the Emperor, and the King was using, without disguise, the offers of each Power to alarm the other. Cromwell at the next meeting told Chapuys that Francis was ready to support the divorce unreservedly if Henry would assist him in taking Milan. The French, he said, should have a sharp answer, could confidence be felt in the Emperor’s overtures. A sharp struggle was going on in the Council between the French and Imperial factions. Himself sincerely anxious for the success of the negotiation in which he was engaged, Cromwell said he had fallen into worse disgrace with Anne Boleyn than he had ever been. Anne had never liked him. She had told him recently “she would like to see his head off his shoulders.”328 She was equally angry with the Duke of Norfolk, who had been too frank in the terms in which he had spoken of her. If she discovered his interviews with Chapuys she would do them both some ill turn.

The King himself agreed with Cromwell in preferring the Emperor to Francis, but he would not part company with France till he was assured that Charles no longer meant his harm. Charles, it will be remembered, had himself written to Henry, and the letter had by this time arrived. Chapuys feared that, if he presented it at a public audience, the Court would conclude that the Emperor was reconciled, and had abandoned the Queen and Princess, so he applied for a private reception. The King granted it, read the letter, spoke graciously of the expedition against the Turks, and then significantly of his own armaments and the new fortifications at Dover and Calais. He believed (as Chapuys had heard from the Princess Mary) that, if he could tide over the present summer, the winter would then protect him, and that in another year he would be strong enough to fear no one. Seeing that he said nothing of the treaty, Chapuys began upon it, and said that the Emperor was anxious to come to terms with him, so far as honour and conscience would allow. Henry showed not the least eagerness. He replied with entire frankness that France was going to war for Milan. Large offers had been made to him, which, so far, he had not accepted; but he might be induced to listen, unless he could be better assured of the Emperor’s intention.329

It was evident that Henry could neither be cajoled nor frightened. Should Charles then give up the point for which he was contending? Once more the Imperial Privy Council sat to consider what was to be done. It had become clear that no treaty could be made with Henry unless the Emperor would distinctly consent that the divorce should not be spoken of. The old objections were again weighed – the injuries to the Queen and to the Holy See, the Emperor’s obligations, the bad effect on Christendom and on England which a composition on such terms would produce, the encouragement to other Princes to act as Henry had done – stubborn facts of the case which could not be evaded. On the other hand were the dangerous attitude of Francis, the obstinacy of Henry, the possibility that France and England might unite, and the inability of the Emperor to encounter their coalition. Both Francis and Henry were powerful Princes, and a quarrel would not benefit the Queen and her daughter if the Emperor was powerless to help them. The divorce was the difficulty. Should the Emperor insist on a promise that it should be submitted to a General Council? It might be advisable, under certain circumstances, to create disturbances in England and Ireland, so as to force the King into an alliance on the Emperor’s terms. But if Henry could be induced to suspend or modify his attacks on the Faith and the Church, to break his connection with France and withdraw from his negotiations with the Germans, if securities could be taken that the Queen and Princess should not be compelled to sign or promise anything without the Emperor’s consent, the evident sense of the Spanish Council of State was that the proceedings against the King should be suspended, perhaps for his life, and that no stipulations should be insisted on, either for the King’s return to the Church or for his consent to the meeting of the General Council. God might perhaps work on the King’s conscience without threat of force or violence; and the Emperor, before starting on his expedition to Tunis, might tell the English Ambassador that he wished to be the King’s friend, and would not go to war with any Christian Prince unless he was compelled. The Queen’s consent would, of course, be necessary; she and the Princess would be more miserable than ever if they were made to believe that there was no help for them.330 But their consent, if there was no alternative, might be assumed when a refusal would be useless.

If the willingness to make concessions was the measure of the respective anxieties for an agreement between the two countries, Spain was more eager than England, for the Emperor was willing to yield the point on which he had broken the unity of Christendom and content himself with words, while Henry would yield nothing, except the French alliance, for which he had cared little from the time that France had refused to follow him into schism.

An alliance of the Emperor with an excommunicated sovereign in the face of a sentence which he had himself insisted on, and with a Bull of Deposition ready for launching, would be an insult to the Holy See more dangerous to it than the revolt of a single kingdom. The treaty might, however, have been completed on the terms which Wallop and the Imperial Ambassador had agreed on at Paris, and which the Imperial Council had not rejected. The Pope saw the peril, struck in, and made it impossible. In the trial and execution of the Carthusians Henry had shown to Europe that he was himself in earnest. The blood of martyrs was the seed of the Church, and Paul calculated rightly that he could not injure the King of England more effectually than by driving him to fresh severities and thus provoking an insurrection. No other explanation can be given for his having chosen this particular moment for an act which must and would produce the desired consequence. Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More had been allowed six weeks to consider whether they would acknowledge the Statute of Supremacy. More was respected by every one, except the Lutherans, whom he confessed that he hated; Fisher was regarded as a saint by the Catholic part of England; and the King, who was dependent after all on the support of his subjects and could not wish to shock or alienate them, would probably have pressed them no further, unless challenged by some fresh provocation. Fisher had waded deep into treason, but, if the King knew it, there was no evidence which could be produced. Before the six weeks were expired the Court and the world were astonished to hear that Paul had created the Bishop of Rochester a cardinal, and that the hat was already on the way. Casalis, who foresaw the consequences, had protested against the appointment, both to the Pope and the Consistory. Paul pretended to be frightened. He begged Casalis to excuse him to the King. He professed, what it was impossible to believe, that he had intended to pay England a compliment. A general Council was to meet. He wished England to be represented there by a Prelate whom he understood to be distinguished for learning and sanctity. The Roman Pontiffs have had a chequered reputation, but the weakest of them has never been suspected of a want of worldly acuteness. The condition of England was as well understood at Rome as it was understood by Chapuys, and, with Dr. Ortiz at his ear, Paul must have been acquainted with the disposition of every peer and prelate in the realm. Fisher’s name had been familiar through the seven years’ controversy as of the one English Bishop who had been constant in resistance to every step of Henry’s policy. Paul, who had just absolved Silken Thomas for the Archbishop of Dublin’s murder, had little to learn about the conspiracy, or about Fisher’s share in it. The excuse was an insolence more affronting than the act itself. It was impossible for the King to acknowledge himself defied and defeated. He said briefly that he would send Fisher’s head to Rome, for the hat to be fitted on it. Sir Thomas More, as Fisher’s dearest friend, connected with him in opposition to the Reformation and sharing his imprisonment for the same actions, was involved along with him in the fatal effects of the Pope’s cunning or the Pope’s idiotcy. The six weeks ran out. The Bishop and the ex-Chancellor were called again before the Council, refused to acknowledge the supremacy, and were committed for trial.