The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon

Little is known in detail of the proceedings of this Parliament. The Acts remain: the debates are lost. The principal difficulties with which it had to deal concerned Anne’s trial and the disposition of the inheritance of the Crown. On the matter of real importance, on the resolution of King and Legislature to go forward with the Reformation, all doubts were promptly dispelled. An Act was passed without opposition reasserting the extinction of the Pope’s authority, and another taking away the protection of sanctuary from felonious priests. The succession was a harder problem. Day after day it had been debated in the Council. Lord Sussex had proposed that, as all the children of the King were illegitimate, the male should be preferred to the female and the crown be settled on the Duke of Richmond.443 Richmond was personally liked. He resembled his father in appearance and character, and the King himself was supposed to favour this solution. With the outer world the favourite was the Princess Mary. Both she and her mother were respected for a misfortune which was not due to faults of theirs, and the Princess was the more endeared by the danger to which she was believed to have been exposed through the machinations of Anne. The new Queen was her strongest advocate, and the King’s affection for her had not been diminished even when she had tried him the most. He could not have been ignorant of her correspondence with Chapuys: he probably knew that she had wished to escape out of the realm, and that the Pope, who was now suing to him, had meant to bestow his own crown upon her. But her qualities were like his own, tough and unmalleable, and in the midst of his anger he had admired her resolution. Every one expected that she would be restored to her rank after Anne’s death. The King had apparently been satisfied with her letter to him. Cromwell was her friend, and Chapuys, who had qualified her submission, was triumphant and confident. He was led to expect that an Act would be introduced declaring her the next heir – nay, he had thought that such an Act had been passed. Unfortunately for him the question of her acknowledgment of the Act of Supremacy was necessarily revived. Had she or had she not accepted it? The Act had been imposed, with the Statute of Treasons attached, as a test of loyalty to the Reformation. It was impossible to place her nearest to the throne as long as she refused obedience to a law essential to the national independence. To refuse was to confess of a purpose of undoing her father’s work, should he die and the crown descend to her. She had supposed that “she was out of her trouble” while she had saved her conscience by the reservation in her submission. Chapuys found her again “in extreme perplexity and anger.” The reservation had been observed. The Duke of Norfolk, Lord Sussex, a Bishop, and other Privy Councillors, had come with a message to her, like those which had been so often carried ineffectually to her mother, to represent the necessity of obedience. Chapuys said that she had confounded them with her wise answers, and that, when they could not meet her arguments, they “told her that, if she was their daughter, they would knock her head against the wall till it was as soft as a baked apple.” In passing through Mary and through Chapuys the words, perhaps, received some metaphorical additions. It is likely enough, however, that Norfolk, who was supporting her claims with all his power, was irritated at the revival of the old difficulties which he had hoped were removed. The Princess “in her extreme necessity” wrote for advice to the Ambassador. The Emperor was no longer in a condition to threaten, and to secure Mary’s place as next in the succession was of too vital importance to the Imperialists to permit them to encourage her in scruples of conscience. Chapuys answered frankly that, if the King persisted, she must do what he required. The Emperor had distinctly said so. Her life was precious, she must hide her real feelings till a time came for the redress of the disorders of the realm. Nothing was demanded of her expressly against God or the Articles of Faith, and God looked to intentions rather than acts.

Mary still hesitated. She had the Tudor obstinacy, and she tried her will against her father’s. The King was extremely angry. He had believed that she had given way and that the troubles which had distracted his family were at last over. He had been exceptionally well-disposed towards her. He had probably decided to be governed by the wishes of the people and to appoint her by statute presumptive heir, and she seemed determined to make it impossible for him. He suspected that she was being secretly encouraged. To defend her conduct, as Cromwell ventured to do, provoked him the more, for he felt, truly, that to give way was to abandon the field. Lady Hussey was sent to the Tower; Lord Exeter and Sir William Fitzwilliam were suspended from attendance on the Council; and even Cromwell, for four or five days, counted himself a lost man. Jane Seymour interceded in vain. To refuse to acknowledge the supremacy was treason, and had been made treason for ample reason. Mary, as the first subject in the realm, could not be allowed to deny it. Henry sent for the Judges, to consider what was to be done, and the Court was once more in terror. The Judges advised that a strict form of submission should be drawn, and that the Princess should be required to sign it. If she persisted in her refusal, she would then be liable to the law. The difficulty was overcome, or evaded, in a manner characteristic of the system to which Mary so passionately adhered. Chapuys drew a secret protest that, in submitting, she was yielding only to force. Thus guarded, he assured her that her consent would not be binding, that the Pope would not only refrain from blaming her, but would highly approve. She was still unsatisfied, till she made him promise to write to the Imperial Ambassador at Rome to procure a secret absolution from the Pope for the full satisfaction of her conscience. Thus protected, she disdainfully set her name to the paper prepared by the Judges, without condescending to read it, and the marked contempt, in Chapuys’s opinion, would serve as an excuse for her in the future.444

While the crisis lasted the Council were in permanent session. Timid Peers were alarmed at the King’s peremptoriness, and said that it might cost him his throne. The secret process by which Mary had been brought to yield may have been conjectured, and her resistance was not forgotten, but she had signed what was demanded, and it was enough. In the Court there was universal delight. Chapuys congratulated Cromwell, and Cromwell led him to believe that the crown would be settled as he wished. The King and Queen drove down to Richmond to pay the Princess a visit. Henry gave her a handsome present of money and said that now she might have anything that she pleased. The Queen gave her a diamond. She was to return to the court and resume her old station. One cloud only remained. If it was generally understood that the heir presumptive in her heart detested the measures in which she had formally acquiesced, the country could no longer be expected to support a policy which would be reversed on the King’s death. Mary’s conduct left little doubt of her real feelings, and therefore it was not held to be safe to give her by statute the position which her friends desired for her. The facility with which the Pope could dispense with inconvenient obligations rendered a verbal acquiescence an imperfect safeguard. Parliament, therefore, did not, after all, entail the crown upon her, in the event of the King’s present marriage being unfruitful, but left her to deserve it and empowered the King to name his own successor.

Chapuys, however, was able to console himself with the reflection that the Bastard, as he called Elizabeth, was now out of the question. The Duke of Richmond was ill – sinking under the same weakness of constitution which had been so fatal in the Tudor family and of which he, in fact, died a few weeks later. The prevailing opinion was that the King could never have another child. Mary’s prospects, therefore, were tolerably “secure. I must admit,” Chapuys wrote on the 8th of July, “that her treatment improves every day. She never had so much liberty as now, or was served with so much state even by the little Bastard’s waiting-women. She will want nothing in future but the name of Princess of Wales,445 and that is of no consequence, for all the rest she will have more abundantly than before.”

Mary, in fact, now wanted nothing save the Pope’s pardon for having abjured his authority. Chapuys had undertaken that it would be easily granted. The Emperor had himself asked for it, yet not only could not Cifuentes obtain the absolution, but he did not so much as dare to speak to Paul on the subject. The absolution for the murder of an Archbishop of Dublin had been bestowed cheerfully and instantly on Fitzgerald. Mary was left with perjury on her conscience, and no relief could be had. There appeared to be some technical difficulty. “Unless she retracted and abjured in the presence of the persons before whom she took the oath, it was said that the Pope’s absolution would be of no use to her.” There was, perhaps, another objection. Cifuentes imperfectly trusted Paul. He feared that if he pressed the request the secret would be betrayed and that Mary’s life would be in danger.446

Time, perhaps, and reflection alleviated Mary’s remorse and enabled her to dispense with the Papal anodyne, while Cromwell further comforted the Ambassador in August by telling him that the King felt he was growing old, that he was hopeless of further offspring, and was thinking seriously of making Mary his heir after all.447

Age the King could not contend with, but for the rest he had carried his policy through. The first act of the Reformation was closing, and he was left in command of the situation. The curtain was to rise again with the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire rebellion, to be followed by the treason of the Poles. But there is no occasion to tell a story over again which I can tell no better than I have done already, nor does it belong to the subject of the present volume. The Pilgrimage of Grace was the outbreak of the conspiracy encouraged by Chapuys to punish Henry, and to stop the progress of the Reformation; Chapuys’s successors in the time of Elizabeth followed his example; and with them all the result was the same – the ruin of the cause which with such weapons they were trying to maintain, and the deaths on the scaffold of the victims of visionary hopes and promises which were never to be made good.

All the great persons whom Chapuys names as willing to engage in the enterprise – the Peers, the Knights, who, with the least help from the Emperor, would hurl the King from his throne, Lord Darcy and Lord Hussey, the Bishop of Rochester, as later on, the Marquis of Exeter, Lord Montague, and his mother – sank one after another into bloody graves. They mistook their imaginations for facts, their passions for arguments, and the vain talk of an unscrupulous Ambassador for solid ground on which to venture into treason. In their dreams they saw the phantom of the Emperor coming over with an army to help them. Excited as they had been, they could not part with their hopes. They knew that they were powerful in numbers. Their preparations had been made, and many thousands of clergy and gentlemen and yeomen had been kindled into crusading enthusiasm. The flame burst out sporadically and at intervals, without certain plan or purpose, at a time when the Emperor could not help them, even if he had ever seriously intended it, and thus the conflagration, which at first blazed through all the northern counties, was extinguished before it turned to civil war. The common people who had been concerned in it suffered but lightly. But the roots had penetrated deep; the conspiracy was of long standing; the intention of the leaders was to carry out the Papal censures, and put down what was called heresy. The rising was really formidable, for the loyalty of many of the great nobles was not above suspicion, and, if not promptly dealt with, it might have enveloped the whole island. Those who rise in arms against Governments must take the consequences of failure, and the leaders who had been the active spirits in the sedition were inexorably punished. In my History of the time I have understated the number of those who were executed. Care was taken to select only those who had been definitely prominent. Nearly three hundred were hanged in all – in batches of twenty-five or thirty, in each of the great northern cities; and, to emphasize the example and to show that the sacerdotal habit would no longer protect treason, the orders were to select particularly the priests and friars who had been engaged. The rising was undertaken in the name of religion. The clergy had been the most eager of the instigators. Chapuys had told the Emperor that of all Henry’s subjects the clergy were the most disaffected, and the most willing to supply money for an invasion. They were therefore legitimately picked out for retribution, and in Lincoln, York, Hull, Doncaster, Newcastle, and Carlisle, the didactic spectacle was witnessed of some scores of reverend persons swinging for the crows to eat in the sacred dress of their order. A severe lesson was required to teach a superstitious world that the clerical immunities existed no longer and that priests who broke the law would suffer like common mortals; but it must be clearly understood that, if these men could have had their way, the hundreds who suffered would have been thousands, and the victims would have been the poor men who were looking for a purer faith in the pages of the New Testament.

When we consider the rivers of blood which were shed elsewhere before the Protestant cause could establish itself, the real wonder is the small cost in human life of the mighty revolution successfully accomplished by Henry. With him, indeed, Chapuys must share the honour. The Catholics, if they had pleased, might have pressed their objections and their remonstrances in Parliament; and a nation as disposed for compromise as the English might have mutilated the inevitable changes. Chapuys’s counsels tempted them into more dangerous and less pardonable roads. By encouraging them in secret conspiracies he made them a menace to the peace of the realm. He brought Fisher to the block. He forced the Government to pass the Act of Supremacy as a defence against treason, and was thus the cause also of the execution of Sir Thomas More and the Charterhouse Monks.

To Chapuys, perhaps, and to his faithful imitators later in the century – De Quadra and Mendoza – the country owes the completeness of the success of the Reformation. It was a battle fought out gallantly between two principles – a crisis in the eternal struggle between the old and the new. The Catholics may boast legitimately of their martyrs. But the Protestants have a martyrology longer far and no less honourable, and those who continue to believe that the victory won in England in the sixteenth century was a victory of right over wrong, have no need to blush for the actions of the brave men who, in the pulpit or in the Council Chamber, on the scaffold or at the stake, won for mankind the spiritual liberty which is now the law of the world.

1

Calendar of State Papers, Hen. VIII., Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. Introduction, p. 223.

2

Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, Hen. VIII., vol. iv. p. 1112. – Hen. VIII. to Clement VII., Oct. 23, 1526. —Ib. p. 1145. Giberto to Gambara, Dec. 20, 1526. —Ib. p. 1207.

3

Giberto, Bishop of Verona, to Wolsey, Feb. 10, 1527. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. pp. 1282-3.

4

Giberto, Bishop of Verona, to Wolsey, Feb. 10, 1527. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, April 26, 1527, vol. iv. p. 1386.

5

Inigo de Mendoza to the Emperor, Jan. 19, 1527. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. pt. 2, p. 24.

6

Alonzo Sanchez to Charles V., May 7, 1527. —Ib. p. 176.

7

Mendoza to Charles V., March 18, 1527. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. part 2, p. 110.

8

Report from England, Nov. 10, 1531. —Venetian Calendar. Falieri arrived in England in 1528, and the general parts of the Report cover the intervening period.

9

Inigo de Mendoza to Charles V., May 18, 1527. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. part 2, p. 193.

10

Lope de Soria to Charles V., May 25, 1527. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. part 2, p. 209.

11

Mendoza to Charles V., July 13, 1527. —Spanish Calendar, vol. ii. part 2, p. 276.

12

Ib. vol. iii. part 2, p. 273.

13

Andrea Navagero to the Signory, July 17, 1527. —Venetian Calendar.

14

Mendoza to Charles V., July 17, 1527. —Spanish Calendar.

15

Wolsey to Henry VIII., July 5. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. part 2. Bishop Fisher to Paul, ibid., p. 1471.

16

Charles V. to Inigo de Mendoza, July 29. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. part 2, p. 1500.

17

Ibid.

18

Charles V. to Mendoza, Sept. 30, 1527. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. p. 1569.

19

The Emperor to the Cardinal of York, Aug. 31, 1527. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. part 2, p. 357.

20

Wolsey to Henry VIII., Aug. – , 1527. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. part 2.

21

The Cardinals of France to Clement VII., Sept. 16, 1527. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. part 2, p. 383.

22

Mendoza to Charles V., Aug. 16, 1527. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. part 2, p. 327.

23

The date of Henry’s resolution to marry Anne is of some consequence, since the general assumption is that it was the origin of the divorce. Rumour, of course, said so afterwards, but there is no evidence for it. The early love-letters written by the King to her are assigned by Mr. Brewer to the midsummer of 1527. But they are undated, and therefore the period assigned to them is conjecture merely.

24

Mendoza to Charles V., Oct. 26, 1527. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. part 2, p. 432.

25

Ibid.

26

Knight to Henry VIII., Dec. 4. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. part 2, pp. 1633-4.

27

I follow Mr. Brewer’s translation.

28

1. When he says, “It is thought,” let him be examined whom he ever heard say any such thing of the King. 2. Where, when, and why he spoke those words to Sir Wm. Essex and Sir Wm. Barentyne. 3. Whether he communicated the matter to any other. 5, 6. Whether he thought the words true and why. 7, 8. Whether he did not think the words very slanderous to any man’s good name. 10, 15. Whether he thinks such reports conducive to the peace of the Commonwealth, or fitting for a true subject to spread. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, 1537, p. 333.

29

Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. part 2, p. 1672.

30

Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. part 2, p. 1672.

31

Casalis to Wolsey, January 13, 1528. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. part 2, p. 1694.

32

Three foreigners held English sees, not one of which either of them had probably ever visited. Campeggio was Bishop of Salisbury; Ghinucci, the auditor of the Rota, was Bishop of Worcester; and Catherine’s Spanish confessor, who had come with her to England, was Bishop of Llandaff.

33

Wolsey to Gardiner and Fox, February – , 1528. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. part 2, p. 1740.

34

Embassy to the German Princes, January 5, 1534. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. vii. p. 10.

35

Casalis to Peter Vannes, April, 1538. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. part 2, p. 1842.

36

Henry VIII. to Anne Boleyn, June or July, 1528. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. part 2, p. 1960.

37

Eleanor Carey was the sister of Mary Boleyn’s husband.

38

Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv., Introduction, pp. 388-9.

39

The Emperor to Mendoza, July 5, 1528. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. part 2, p. 728.

40

Mendoza to the Emperor, September 18, 1528. —Ibid. vol. iii. part 2, p. 788.

41

Charles V. to Queen Catherine, September 1, 1528. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. part 2, p. 779.

42

Campeggio to Salviati and to Sanga, October 17, 1528. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. part 2, pp. 2099-2102.

43

Campeggio to Salviati, October 26, 1528. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. part 2, p. 2108.

44

Campeggio to Sanga, Oct. 28. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. vi. part 2, p. 2113.

45

Sanga to Campeggio, Dec. – , 1528. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. vi. part 2, p. 2210.

46

Wolsey to Casalis, Nov. 1, 1528. —Ib. vol. iv. part 2, p. 2120.

47

Catherine to Charles V., Nov. 24, 1528. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. part 2, p. 855.

48

Mendoza to Charles V., Dec. 2, 1528. —Ib. p. 862. Jan. 16, 1529. —ib. p. 878.

49

Sylvester Darius to Wolsey, Nov. 25, 1528. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. pt. 2, p. 2126.

50

Du Bellay to Montmorency, Dec. 9, 1528. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. pt. 2, p. 2177.

51

John Casalis to Wolsey, Dec. 17, 1528. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. part 2, p. 2186.

52

Mendoza to Charles V., Feb. 4, 1529. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. part 2.

53

Knight and Benet to Wolsey, Jan. 8, 1529. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. part 3, p. 2262.

54

Mai to Charles V., April 3, 1529, —Spanish Calendar, vol. iii. part 2, p. 973.

55

Micer Mai to the Emperor, May 11, 1529. —Ibid. vol. iv. part 1, p. 20.

56

In Spanish the words are even more emphatically contemptuous: “Y que ennoramala que se curasen de sus bulas y de sus bellaquerias, si las querian dar ó no dar, y que no pongan lengua en los reyes y querir ser jueces de la subjeccion de los reynos.”

57

Micer Mai to the Emperor, June 5, 1529. —Spanish Calendar, vol. iv. part 1, p. 60.

58

Campeggio to Sanga, April 3, 1529. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. p. 2379.

59

Gardiner to Henry VIII., April 21. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. p. 2415.

60

Bryan to Henry VIII. —Ibid. p. 2418.

61

Wolsey to Gardiner, May 5, 1529. —Ibid. p. 2442.

62

Campeggio to Salviati, May 12, 1529. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, p. 2451.

63

Du Bellay to Montmorency, May 22, 1529. —Ibid. vol. iv. p. 2469.

64

Ibid. May 28, 1529, p. 2476-7.

65

The Duke of Suffolk to Henry VIII., June 4, 1529. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. p. 2491.

66

Sanga to Campeggio, May 29, 1529. —Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. iv. p. 2479.