Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

protested, then voted a seventh; the clergy protested, but yielded

half a year's revenue from every benefice. When news came that

Charles's army had overwhelmed the French at Pavia (1525) and taken

Francis prisoner, Henry and Wolsey thought it advisable to share in

the impending dismemberment of France. A new invasion was planned;

more money was needed; Wolsey risked the last shreds of his popularity

by asking all Englishmen with over L50 ($5,000?) income to

contribute a sixth of their goods to an "Amicable Grant" for the

prosecution of the war to a glorious end; let us amicably grant that

the purpose may have been to prevent Charles from swallowing all

France. The demand was so widely resisted that Wolsey had to veer to a

program of peace. A treaty of mutual defense was signed with France as

another effort to restore the balance of power. But in 1527 Imperial

troops captured Rome and the Pope; Charles seemed now the invincible

master of the Continent; Wolsey's policy of check and balance was

ruined. In January 1528, England joined France in war against Charles.

Now Charles was the nephew of Catherine of Aragon, from whom Henry

earnestly desired a divorce; and Clement VII, who could grant it for

reasons of state, was in person and policy a captive of Charles.

IV. THE KING'S "DIVORCE"

-

Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, came to

England in 1501, aged sixteen, and married (November 14) Arthur,

aged fifteen, oldest son of Henry VII. Arthur died on April 2, 1502.

It was generally assumed that the marriage had been consummated; the

Spanish ambassador dutifully sent "proofs" thereof to Ferdinand; and

Arthur's title, Prince of Wales, was not officially transferred to his

younger brother Henry till two months after Arthur's death. `062349

But Catherine denied the consummation. She had brought with her a

dowry of 200,000 ducats ($5,000,000?). Loath to let Catherine go

back to Spain with these ducats, and anxious to renew a marital

alliance with the powerful Ferdinand, Henry VII proposed that

Catherine should marry Prince Henry, though she was the lad's elder by

six years. A Biblical passage (Lev. 20:21) forbade such a marriage:

"If a man shall take his brother's wife it is an unclean thing... they

shall be childless." Another passage, however, ruled quite the

contrary: "If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have

no child... her husband's brother... shall take her to him to wife"

(Deut. 25:5). Archbishop Warham condemned the proposed union; Bishop

Fox of Winchester defended it if a papal dispensation could be

obtained from the impediment of affinity. Henry VII applied for the

dispensation; Pope Julius II granted it (1503). Some canonists

questioned, some affirmed, the papal power to dispense from a Biblical

precept, `062350 and Julius himself had some doubts. `062351 The

betrothal- in effect a legal marriage- was made formal (1503), but

as the bridegroom was still only twelve, cohabitation was postponed.

In 1505 Prince Henry asked to have the marriage annulled as having

been forced upon him by his father, `062352 but he was prevailed

upon to confirm the union as in the interest of England; and in

1509, six weeks after his accession, the marriage was publicly

celebrated.

Seven months later (January 31, 1510) Catherine bore her first

child, which died at birth. A year thereafter she bore a son; Henry

rejoiced in a male heir who would continue the Tudor line; but in a

few weeks the infant died. A second and third son succumbed soon after

birth (1513, 1514). Henry began to think of a divorce- or, more

precisely, an annulment of his marriage as invalid. Poor Catherine

tried again, and in 1516 she gave birth to the future Queen Mary.

Henry relented; "if it was a daughter this time," he told himself, "by

the grace of God the sons will follow." `062353 In 1518 Catherine

was delivered of another stillborn child. The disappointment of King

and country was sharpened by the fact that Mary, aged two, had already

been betrothed to the dauphin of France; if no son came to Henry, Mary

would inherit the English throne, and her husband, becoming King of

France, would in effect be King of England too, making Britain a

province of France. The dukes of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Buckingham

had hopes of displacing Mary and securing the crown; Buckingham talked

too much, was accused of treason, and was beheaded (1521). Henry

expressed fear that his sonlessness was a divine punishment for having

used a papal dispensation from a Biblical command. `062354 He took a

vow that if the Queen would bear him a son he would lead a crusade

against the Turks. But Catherine had no further pregnancies. By 1525

all hope of additional offspring by her was abandoned.

Henry had long since lost taste for her as a woman. He was now

thirty-four, in the prime of lusty manhood; she was forty, and

looked older than her years. She had never been alluring, but her

frequent illnesses and misfortunes had deformed her body and

darkened her spirit. She excelled in culture and refinement, but

husbands have seldom found erudition charming in a wife. She was a

good and faithful spouse, loving her husband only next to Spain. She

thought of herself as- for a time she was- Spanish envoy, and she

argued that England should always side with Ferdinand or Charles.

About 1518 Henry took his first-known post-marriage mistress,

Elizabeth Blount, sister of Erasmus' friend Mountjoy. She gave him a

son in 1519; Henry made the boy Duke of Richmond and Somerset, and

thought of entailing the succession to him. About 1524 he took another

mistress, Mary Boleyn; `062355 indeed, Sir George Throckmorton accused

him to his face of adultery with Mary's mother, too. `062356 It was an

unwritten law of the times that royalty, if married for reasons of

state rather than choice, might seek outside of marriage the romance

that had missed the legal bed.

In or before 1527 Henry turned his charm upon Mary's sister Anne.

Their father was Sir Thomas Boleyn, a merchant and diplomat long

favored by the King; their mother was a Howard, daughter of the Duke

of Norfolk. Anne was sent to Paris as a finishing school; there she

was made a lady-in-waiting to Queen Claude, then to Marguerite of

Navarre, from whom she may have imbibed some Protestant leanings.

Henry could have seen her as a vivacious girl of thirteen at the Field

of the Cloth of Gold. Returning to England at fifteen (1522), she

became lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine. She was not strikingly

beautiful; she was short, with dark complexion, broad mouth, and

long neck; but Henry and others were lured by her flashing black eyes,

her flowing brown hair, her grace and wit and gaiety. She had some

ardent lovers, including Thomas Wyatt the poet, and Henry Percy,

future Earl of Northumberland; her enemies later charged that she

had been clandestinely married to Percy before she set her sights on

the King; the evidence is inconclusive. `062357 We do not know when

Henry began to court her; the earliest of his extant love letters to

her is conjecturally assigned to July 1527.

What was the relation of this romance to Henry's petition for the

annulment of his marriage? Unquestionably he had thought of this as

far back as 1514, when Anne was a girl of seven. He seems to have

put the notion aside till 1524, when, according to his own account, he

ceased to have conjugal relations with Catherine. `062358 The earliest

recorded proceedings for an annulment were taken in March 1527, long

after Henry's acquaintance with Anne, and about the time that she

replaced her sister in the bosom of the King. Wolsey was apparently

unaware of any royal intention to marry Anne when, in July 1527, he

went to France partly to arrange a union between Henry and Renee, that

daughter of Louis XII who was soon to make a Protestant stir in Italy.

The first known reference to Henry's intention is in a letter sent

on August 16, 1527, by the Spanish ambassador informing Charles V of a

general belief in London that if the King obtained a "divorce" he

would marry "a daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn"; `062359 this could

hardly have meant Mary Boleyn, for by the end of 1527 Henry and Anne

were living in neighboring apartments under the same roof in

Greenwich. `062360 We may conclude that Henry's suit for annulment was

accelerated, though hardly caused, by his infatuation with Anne. The

basic cause was his desire for a son, to whom he might transmit the

throne with some confidence in a peaceful succession. Practically

all England shared that hope. The people remembered with horror the

many years (1454-85) of war between the houses of York and Lancaster

for the crown. The Tudor dynasty was but forty-two years old in

1527; its title to the throne was dubious; only a legitimate and

direct male heir to the King could continue the dynasty

unchallenged. If Henry had never met Anne Boleyn he would still have

desired and deserved a divorce and an adequately fertile wife.

Wolsey agreed with the King on this point, and assured him that a

papal annulment could be readily obtained; the papal power to grant

such separations was generally accepted as a wise provision for

precisely such national needs, and many precedents could be adduced.

But the busy Cardinal had reckoned without two disagreeable

developments: Henry wanted not Renee but Anne, and the annulment would

have to come from a pope who, when the problem reached him, was a

prisoner of an emperor who had plentiful cause for hostility to Henry.

Probably Charles would have opposed the annulment as long as his

aunt resisted it, and all the more if a new marriage, such as Wolsey

planned, would ally England firmly with France. The proximate cause of

the English Reformation was not the climbing beauty of Anne Boleyn but

the obstinate refusal of Catherine and Charles to see the justice of

Henry's desire for a son; the Catholic Queen and the Catholic

Emperor collaborated with the captive Pope to divorce England from the

Church. But the ultimate cause of the English Reformation was not

Henry's suit for annulment so much as the rise of the English monarchy

to such strength that it could repudiate the authority of the pope

over English affairs and revenues.

Henry affirmed that his active desire for an annulment was

occasioned by Gabriel de Grammont, who came to England in February

1527, to discuss the proposed marriage of Princess Mary with French

royalty. Grammont, according to Henry, raised a question as to

Mary's legitimacy, on the ground that Henry's marriage with

Catherine might have been invalid as violating a Scriptural ban

irremovable by a pope. Some have thought that Henry invented the

story, `062361 but Wolsey repeated it, it was reported to the French

government (1528), it was not (so far as is known) denied by Grammont,

and Grammont labored to persuade Clement that Henry's suit for

annulment was just. Charles informed his ambassador in England (July

29, 1527) that he was advising Clement to deny Henry's plea.

While he was in France Wolsey was definitely informed that Henry

wished to marry not Renee but Anne. He continued to work for the

annulment, but he did not hide his chagrin over Henry's choice.

By-passing his Chancellor, the King, in the fall of 1527, sent his

secretary, William Knight, to present two requests to the captive

Pope. The first was that Clement, recognizing the doubtful validity of

Henry's marriage, its lack of male issue, and Catherine's

unwillingness to be divorced, should allow Henry to have two wives.

A last-minute order from Henry deterred Knight from presenting this

proposal; Henry's audacity had abated; and he must have marveled when,

three years later, he received from Giovanni Casale, one of his agents

in Rome, a letter dated September 18, 1530, saying, "A few days ago

the Pope secretly proposed to me that your Majesty might be allowed

two wives." `062362 Henry's second request was quite as strange:

that the Pope should grant him a dispensation to marry a woman with

whose sister the King had had sexual relations. `062363 The Pope

agreed to this on condition that the marriage with Catherine should be

annulled; but as to this annulment he was not yet ready to decide.

Clement was not only fearful of Charles; he was reluctant to rule that

a previous pope had made a serious error in validating the marriage.

At the end of 1527 he received a third request- that he should appoint

Wolsey and another papal legate to sit as a court in England, to

hear evidence, and to pass judgment on the validity of Henry's

marriage with Catherine. Clement complied (April 13, 1528), named

Cardinal Campeggio to sit with Wolsey in London, and promised- in a

bull to be shown only to Wolsey and Henry- to confirm whatever

decision the legates should render. `062364 Probably the fact that

Henry had joined Francis (January 1528) in declaring war on Charles

and pledging themselves to liberate the Pope affected Clement's

compliance.

Charles protested, and sent to Clement a copy of a document which he

claimed had been found in Spanish archives, and in which Julius II

confirmed as valid the dispensation that Henry and Wolsey proposed

to void. At his wits' end the Pope, still a prisoner of Charles,

rushed instructions to Campeggio "not to pronounce sentence without

express commission hence.... If so great an injury be done to the

Emperor, all hope is lost of universal peace, and the Church cannot

escape utter ruin, as it is entirely in the power of the Emperor's

servants.... Delay as much as possible." `062365

On Campeggio's arrival in England (October 1528) he tried to

secure Catherine's consent to retire to a nunnery. She agreed, on

condition that Henry should take monastic vows. But nothing could be

further from Henry's mind than poverty, obedience, and chastity;

however, he suggested that he would take these vows if the Pope

would promise to release him from them on demand. Campeggio refused to

transmit this proposal to the Pope. Instead he reported (February

1529) the King's determination to marry Anne. "This passion," he

wrote, "is a most extraordinary thing. He sees nothing, he thinks of

nothing, but his Anne; he cannot be without her for an hour. It

moves me to pity to see how the King's life, the stability and

downfall of the whole country hang upon this one question." `062366

Changes in the military situation turned the Pope more and more

against Henry's proposal. The French army that Henry had helped to

finance failed in its Italian campaign, leaving the Pope completely

dependent upon the Emperor. Florence expelled its ruling Medici- and

Clement was as devoted to that family as Charles to the Hapsburgs.

Venice took advantage of the Pope's impotence to snatch Ravenna from

the Papal States. Who now could rescue the papacy except its captor?

"I have quite made up my mind," said Clement (June 7, 1529), "to

become an Imperialist, and to live and die as such." `062367 On June

29 he signed the Treaty of Barcelona, by which Charles promised to

restore Florence to the Medici, Ravenna to the papacy, and liberty

to Clement; but one condition was that Clement would never agree to

the annulment of Catherine's marriage without Catherine's free

consent. On August 5 Francis I signed the Treaty of Cambrai, which

in effect surrendered Italy and the Pope to the Emperor.

On May 31 Campeggio, having delayed as long as possible, opened with

Wolsey the legatine court to hear Henry's suit. Catherine, having

appealed to Rome, refused to acknowledge the competence of the

court. On June 21, however, both King and Queen attended. Catherine

threw herself on her knees before him, and made a moving plea for

the continuance of their marriage. She reminded him of their many

labors, her complete fidelity, her patience with his extramural

sports; she took God to witness that she had been a maid when Henry

married her; and she asked, in what had she offended him? `062368

Henry raised her up, and assured her that he wished nothing so

earnestly as that their marriage had been successful; he explained

that his reasons for separation were not personal but dynastic and

national; and he rejected her appeal to Rome on the ground that the

Emperor controlled the Pope. She withdrew in tears, and refused to

take further part in the proceedings. Bishop Fisher spoke in her

defense, thereby earning the enmity of the King. Henry demanded a

clear decision from the court. Campeggio procrastinated skillfully,

and finally (July 23, 1529) adjourned the court for the summer

vacation. To make indecision more decisive Clement "revoked" the

case to Rome.

Henry raged. Feeling that Catherine had been unreasonably obstinate,

he refused to have anything more to do with her, and spent his

pleasure hours openly with Anne. Probably to this period belong most

of the seventeen love letters that Cardinal Campeggio spirited away

from England, `062369 and which the Vatican Library preserves among

its literary treasures. Anne, wise in the ways of men and kings, had

apparently given him as yet only encouragement and titillation; now

she complained that her youth was passing while cardinals, who could

not understand the desire of a maid for a well-to-do man, dallied over

Henry's right to adorn desire with a marriage tie. She blamed Wolsey

for not pressing Henry's appeal with more resolution and dispatch; and

the King shared her resentment.

Wolsey had done his best, though his heart was not in the matter. He

had sent money to Rome to bribe the cardinals, `062370 but Charles had

sent money too, and an army to boot. The Cardinal had even connived at

the idea of bigamy, `062371 as Luther would do a few years

afterward. Yet Wolsey knew that Anne and her influential relatives

were maneuvering for his fall. He tried to appease her with dainty

viands and costly gifts, but her hostility grew as the annulment issue

dragged on. He spoke of her as "the enemy that never slept, both

studied and continually imagined, both sleeping and waking, his

utter destruction." `062372 He foresaw that if the annulment should be

granted Anne would be queen and would ruin him; and that if it were

not granted Henry would dismiss him as a failure, and would demand

an account of his stewardship, in painful financial detail.

The King had many reasons for dissatisfaction with his Chancellor.

The foreign policy had collapsed, and the turn from friendship with

Charles to alliance with France had proved disastrous. Hardly a man in

England now had a good word to say for the once omnicompetent

Cardinal. The clergy hated him for his absolute rule; the monks feared

more dissolution of monasteries; the commons hated him for taking

their sons and money to fight futile wars; the merchants hated him

because the war with Charles obstructed their trade with Flanders; the

nobles hated him for his exactions, his upstart pride, his

proliferating wealth. Some nobles, reported the French ambassador

(October 17, 1529), "intend, when Wolsey is dead or destroyed, to

get rid of the Church, and spoil the goods of the Church and Wolsey

both." `062373 Kentish clothiers suggested that the Cardinal should be

installed in a leaking boat and set adrift in the sea. `062374

Henry was subtler. On October 9, 1529, one of his attorneys issued a

writ summoning Wolsey to answer, before the King's judges, a charge

that his acts as legate had violated the Statute of Praemunire (1392),

which imposed forfeiture of goods upon any Englishman who brought

papal bulls into England. It made no difference that Wolsey had

secured the legatine authority at the King's request, `062375 and

had used it chiefly in the King's behalf. Wolsey knew that the

King's judges would convict him. He sent in to Henry a humble

submission, confessing his failures, but begging him to remember

also his services and his loyalty. Then he left London by a barge on

the Thames. At Putney he received a kindly message from the King. In

abject gratitude he knelt in the mud and thanked God. Henry

appropriated the rich contents of the Cardinal's palace at

Whitehall, but allowed him to retain the archbishopric of York, and

enough personal goods to require 160 horses and 72 Carts to haul

them to his episcopal seat. `062376 The Duke of Norfolk succeeded

Wolsey as prime minister; Thomas More succeeded him as chancellor

(November 1529).

For almost a year the fallen Cardinal served as a pious and

exemplary archbishop, visiting his parishes regularly, arranging the

repair of churches, and acting as a trusted court of arbitration. "Who

was less loved in the north than my Lord the Cardinal before he was

amongst them?" asked a Yorkshireman, "and who better beloved after

he had been there awhile?" `062377 But ambition reawoke in him as

the fear of death subsided. He wrote letters to Eustace Chapuys, the

Imperial ambassador to England; they are lost, but a report from

Chapuys to Charles reads: "I have a letter from the Cardinal's

physician, in which he tells me that his master... thought the Pope

should proceed to weightier censures, and should call in the secular

arm"- `062378 i.e., excommunication, invasion, and civil war.

Norfolk got wind of these exchanges, arrested Wolsey's physician,

and drew from him, by means uncertain, a confession that the

Cardinal had advised the Pope to excommunicate the King. We do not

know if the Ambassador or the Duke honestly reported the physician, or

if the physician truthfully reported the Cardinal. In any case

Henry, or the Duke, ordered Wolsey's arrest.

He submitted peaceably (November 4, 1530), bade farewell to his

household, and set out for London. At Sheffield Park a severe

dysentery confined him to bed. There the King's soldiers came with

orders to conduct him to the Tower. He resumed the journey, but

after two more days of riding he was so weak that his escort allowed

him to take to bed in Leicester Abbey. To the King's officer, Sir

William Kingston, he uttered the words reported by Cavendish and

adapted by Shakespeare: "If I had served my God as diligently as I

have done my King, He would not have given me over in my gray

hairs." `062379 In Leicester Abbey, November 29, 1530, Wolsey, aged

fifty-five, died.

CHAPTER XXIV: Henry VIII and Thomas More: 1529-35

I. THE REFORMATION PARLIAMENT

-

IN the Parliament that assembled at Westminster on November 3, 1529,

the controlling groups- the nobles in the Upper House, the merchants

in the Commons- agreed on three policies: the reduction of

ecclesiastical wealth and power, the maintenance of trade with

Flanders, and support of the King in his campaign for a male heir.

This did not carry with it approval of Anne Boleyn, who was

generally condemned as an adventuress, nor did it prevent an almost

universal sympathy with Catherine. `06241 The lower classes,

politically impotent, were as yet unfavorable to the divorce, and

the northern provinces, intensely Catholic, sided wholeheartedly

with the Pope. `06242 Henry kept this opposition temporarily quiet

by remaining orthodox in everything but the right of the popes to

govern the English Church. On that point the national spirit, even

stronger in England than in Germany, upheld the hand of the King;

and the clergy, though horrified at the thought of making Henry

their master, were not averse to independence from a papacy so

obviously subject to a foreign power.

About 1528 one Simon Fish published a six-page pamphlet which

Henry read without known protest, and many read with frank delight. It

was called "The Supplication of the Beggars," and asked the King to

confiscate, in whole or part, the wealth of the English Church:

-

In the times of your noble predecessors past, [there] craftily crept

into your realm... holy and idle beggars and vagabonds... bishops,

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