4
So far as I can see, this passion of the king is a most extraordinary thing. He sees nothing, he thinks of nothing but Anne; he cannot do without her for an hour and it moves one to pity to see how the king’s life, the stability and downfall of the whole country hang upon this one question.
Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, letter to the Holy See dated 18 February 1529.
Just as Henry VIII had been at first a loyal son of the pope, so he was also for many years a diligent spouse to Catherine of Aragon. Soon after her marriage, indeed, Queen Catherine was described as being in ‘the greatest gaiety and contentment that ever there was’, and for almost a decade she and Henry were to live in harmony as, at the very least, close and devoted friends. On the one hand, they were happy partners at revels, dances and a host of other entertainments. Both rode together, likewise, in the hunt. And as the king jousted tirelessly in her honour, wearing her symbol, the pomegranate, on the trappings of his horse, the queen played her coyly simpering part to perfection, spending most afternoons with him in her apartments, discussing theology, reading books or receiving visitors. Finally, when evening came at last, it was his habit – ‘taking his pleasure as usual with the Queen’ – to enjoy supper in his other half’s company, after which he invariably joined her for Vespers. Such, indeed, was his ardour that in 1513, shortly after she had sent him the blood-soaked garments of the fallen King of Scotland as a sign of victory and token of her love, Henry had declared to her father: ‘If I were still free, I would choose her for wife above all others.’ Catherine was, after all, a kindly, gracious, loving and humble partner, who had learned well the virtues of patience and discretion after the death of her first husband, the prince’s elder brother, Arthur. Yet, sad to say, none of these qualities would now serve to spare her from rejection at the hands of the very man around whom she had so gladly rebuilt her life.
There was, of course, still much outward affection and warmth in evidence when, on 18 February 1516 at Greenwich Palace, the royal couple’s procreative exertions had borne their first lasting fruit, for at last the king’s manly honour and his nation’s future seemed less doubtful. So vital had the delivery of a healthy child been this time that, as the queen endured a difficult labour, clutching the girdle of her patron saint and namesake, the news of her father’s demise had been kept from her, lest grief affect the final passage of her pregnancy. And in view of her harrowing catalogue of previous failures, such grave precautions seemed most apt. Catherine had already delivered a stillborn daughter in 1510 and at the end of November 1514 she had given birth to a premature child, ‘a prince who lived not long after’. Indeed, before the Princess Mary’s birth the queen had brought forth four sons in all, none of whom survived longer than a few weeks. But now, aided by her physician Dr Vittoria and providence too, perhaps, she delivered a new babe who was described by her glowing father as ‘a right lusty princess’.
Nevertheless, only a year or so after his daughter’s birth, Henry’s infidelities began to make their mark. There had been earlier rumours of dalliance, but these seem to have been consistent by and large with the rather cloying and impotently flirtatious gallantries typical of the time. The king had, for instance, apparently shown an interest in one of Queen Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting, Lady Anne Hastings, as early as 1510, though after a whiff of scandal it came to nothing. Then in Flanders, in 1513, it was noticed how gaily the 22-year-old king had danced with Margaret of Savoy. A year later, a young lady from Margaret’s court called Etienette La Baume, whom Henry had met on campaign, wrote and reminded him of their encounter at Lille where the king had spoken ‘beaucoup de belles choses’ (‘many beautiful things’). All this denoted little of significance, however, and for almost the entire first decade of his marriage Henry appears to have been rather unique among his princely counterparts in terms of faithfulness to his spouse. In comparison to Henry’s nil score up to 1519, the Emperor Maximilian, for instance, had sired eleven bastards.
Sometime before this, though, ‘coeur loyall’ had already begun a tip-toeing but inexorable descent into husbandly contempt, and at the sumptuous fêting of the French ambassadors during Michaelmas 1518, Elizabeth Blount, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine, had caught his eye. Moreover, when on 18 November the queen gave birth to a dead princess, she did so in the cruel knowledge that Mistress Blount had just become pregnant by Henry. To add salt to the wound, the latter’s healthy son was born in June 1519 and, as the years unfolded, he would be officially acknowledged and treated to a spate of high honours. While Henry’s legitimate daughter, Mary, was eventually packed off to the Marches as Princess of Wales, his bastard son would be made Earl of Nottingham, Warden of the Cinque Ports, Warden of the Scottish Marches, Lord High Admiral and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Most significantly of all, he was created Duke of Richmond and Somerset – two combined titles that were of old and significant association among the Tudors. At the same time, he was also given his own household, which, at a cost of £4,000 per year, was markedly more substantial than that of his half-sister. And when the queen protested, Henry took no more notice than to dismiss three of her Spanish ladies as a lesson in wifely obedience. Worse still, he soon began to discuss with the council an altogether more startling project – that of entailing the crown upon his bastard son.
By the shaky sexual standards of the age, of course, the king might still be reckoned comparatively abstemious even after this first lapse, since he appears to have confined his adulterous exploits to the times when Catherine was either pregnant or recovering from childbirth. Nevertheless, the first bite of the extra-marital apple is almost invariably an hors d’oeuvre, and after Mistress Blount came Mary Boleyn, wife of William Carey since 1521 and sister of Anne. There was, moreover, a special piquancy about this particular liaison, for if Henry had already nibbled at temptation, then Mary herself had surely gorged and laid bare the orchard. Having been loosed at a susceptible age in the French court, she had succumbed too avidly to the gallant atmosphere pertaining there and emerged ‘as a very great wanton with a most infamous reputation’. Francis I himself, indeed, was among her lovers and described this ‘English mare’ with typical sensitivity as ‘a great whore, the most infamous of all’.
But then, after earlier dips, came Henry’s fateful plunge. For at some point during 1525 or 1526 what began as a light flirtation with a less-than-ravishing raven-haired woman in her mid-twenties grew into something altogether more momentous. The offspring of a clan of avaricious social climbers, Anne Boleyn had joined her sister at the French court in August 1513 to learn the subtleties of deportment, dancing, polite conversation, high fashion and etiquette. Yet the ladies awaiting her there sought new freedoms and displayed new audacities, and though she would become in due course a committed advocate of the new religious thinking, she would also learn to shun austerity. Indeed, while Anne Boleyn and her French counterparts were attending to their prayer books, they were no less keen to apply their thoughts to the altogether less edifying pages of Margerite of Navarre’s Heptameron. And having fully gauged the ways of the world, they could titillate and captivate accordingly, so that when, eventually, Mistress Boleyn finally encountered the man with whom her destiny lay, she was more than fully equipped to laugh and dance her way into England’s history.
Yet if truth be told, the underlying reasons for Henry’s decision to put paid to his marriage are rather more murky than is sometimes recognised and all too often the fears of dynastic insecurity that appear to have haunted him have also deceived historians. There is no doubt, of course, that there was a serious political dimension to the king’s perplexity concerning the succession issue. Compared with France, where there were prolific lines of princes and princesses of the royal blood, the families of both Henry VII and Henry VIII were tiny. In England, the problem of rival claimants to the throne had been greatly eased by the early deaths or infertility of those descended from the Yorkist line. Apart from Henry VIII’s own mother, who had in any case been bound to the Tudor cause by marriage, only one of Edward IV’s six other daughters had produced a son, the future Marquess of Exeter, and nor, in spite of the attention they attracted, were Edward’s two nephews ever serious contenders for the throne. Edmund de la Pole, after all, was already captive at the time of Henry’s accession, only to be quietly executed in 1513. And although his exiled brother Richard had grandiosely styled himself the ‘White Rose’ and been proclaimed King of England by Louis XII of France in 1512, support for his claim was abruptly withdrawn only two years later when the French booted him unceremoniously from their country after peace had been made with Henry. Ultimately, he would end his exile only by being killed at the side of Francis I at the Battle of Pavia in 1525 – an event that caused Henry to declare confidently at the time that ‘all the enemies of England are gone’. And in the meantime the grandchildren of Edward IV’s hapless brother, the Duke of Clarence – Lord Henry Montague, Reginald Pole and Sir Geoffrey Pole – were always to remain irritants rather than genuine threats.
In reality, then, this was a comparatively flaccid brood to inconvenience the Tudor dynasty, particularly when the Poles continued to confine themselves to nothing more than armchair plotting and pungent comments – to the extent, indeed, that even by the late 1530s their sole threat seemed to progress along the lines that Henry ‘will one day die suddenly; his leg will kill him and then we shall have jolly stirring’. Such was the measure of their subtle strategy. And while the Stafford line may ultimately have produced the most substantial potential rival to Henry VIII in the form of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, even he would be trapped neatly by his own indiscreet murmurings in 1521, leaving what can at very best be considered fringe claimants, such as Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, who could trace his descent from Edward I, and Henry Brandon, the young Earl of Lincoln. Moreover, the consistent submissiveness of characters like Norfolk, not to mention the desultory nature of the so-called ‘Exeter Conspiracy’ of 1538, served simply as further proof, if any were needed, of the essential security of the second Tudor’s throne.
So at that very point when Henry VIII was, in all likelihood, beginning to ponder the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the threat of rival dynastic contenders was diminishing almost beyond trace, though there was also, of course, the far from insignificant matter of the royal conscience to complicate matters. For time and again, as events unfolded, Henry made frequent references to ‘the tranquillity of consciences and the health of his soul’, in connection with Pope Julius II’s dispensation of 1503 that had sanctioned his marriage to his brother’s widow in the first place, and in particular its apparent breach of the biblical Book of Leviticus (20:21), which not only declared that ‘if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing’ but warned, too, that any resulting marriage ‘shall be childless’. In 1529, he would write to Charles V, explaining that he could not ‘quiet or appease his conscience remaining longer with the queen, whom, for her nobleness of blood and other virtues, he had loved entirely as his wife, until he saw in Scripture that God had forbidden their union’. Yet his growing conviction since at least 1522 that he was a victim of God’s punishment as a result of his effectively incestuous marriage was essentially insubstantial. Indeed, the so-called ‘Levitical seed’ that supposedly tormented him, was, in reality, more pip than acorn, as John Fisher, whom Henry had once described as the most learned theologian he had ever known, would readily prove in a series of antidotes to Henry’s scriptural headache delivered in the Long Gallery at Windsor in the late summer of 1527. For in contradistinction to Leviticus, the Book of Deuteronomy (25:5) actually contained a direct invocation for a man to marry his deceased brother’s wife when that brother had died without children. And there was also, of course, the hardly insignificant consideration that, notwithstanding the threat of the ‘Levitical curse’, Henry’s union with his wife was not in any case actually childless.
Yet although the birth of Princess Mary offered an apparently safe haven in the midst of this theological minefield, the king’s conscience continued to serve as the lubricant that allowed him to force square pegs into round holes, and his response was simply to appoint another scholar to give him the answers he wanted. At which point, Robert Wakefield, a gifted young scholar of Hebrew with no eye for either professional or any other kind of martyrdom, duly emerged to oblige his sovereign by conveniently contending that the ‘childless’ reference in Leviticus referred exclusively to male offspring and that Deuteronomy was using the word ‘brother’ in the wider sense of male relatives in general. Nor was this all. For, having been readily convinced, Henry was now rocked on every side by portents of God’s displeasure, which multiplied as they reverberated. His tomb, a towering marble structure, had been commissioned in 1519, and in 1521 he had been struck down by fever and begun to complain of severe sinus troubles. But if the creeping onset of middle age and infirmity had already begun to assail him by his mid-thirties in a century where a man’s forties offered old age and his fifties held out only the release of the grave, Henry’s preoccupation with Leviticus was now to be further fuelled by other events, including the worst plague in a decade, which seemed to descend straight from heaven in July 1525 to chastise the kingdom for his sinful union. At the contagion’s peak, fifty people a day died in London and, as Henry was reminded in January 1526 when two gentlemen of his own household died, not even the protection of the royal court was a guarantee of safety.
Always susceptible to morbid presentiments of any kind, it was during the 1528 epidemic of the ‘sweating sickness’ that Henry’s fears would reach truly exceptional heights. The mere name of ‘the sweat’, Bishop Gardiner wrote, ‘is so terrible to his highness’ ears that he dare in no wise approach where it is noised to have been’. Immured in Wolsey’s residence at Tittenhanger, it now became his practice to shut himself away for long periods – sometimes in a high tower where he often took his supper alone or consulted with his physician Dr Chambers. At times like these, indeed, he feared to sleep alone and ordered Sir Francis Bryan to attend him in his privy chamber throughout the night, at which time his earlier scrapes with death will only have served to compound his fears. For in March 1524, he had entered the lists with the visor of his helmet open while jousting with the Duke of Suffolk. And although, according to Hall’s Chronicle, the horrified spectators shouted to the duke to hold, he could neither hear nor see, so that his lance struck and shattered against the king’s helmet less than an inch from his exposed face. A year later too, while hawking, Henry had vaulted a ditch, only to break his jumping-pole and fall head-first into the water, lodging his face firmly in the mud before panting attendants arrived in the nick of time to save their master from the kind of earthy earthly exit that would have led to merry banqueting barbs throughout the courts of Europe.
Yet the next challenge to the king’s peace of mind would come from an even less likely quarter. For just as his existing anxieties and impatience were progressively overwhelming him, so some good distance from the royal court – at Aldington in Kent – the stirrings that would bring his misgivings to a critical pitch were about to be unleashed, with the launch of Archbishop Warham’s episcopal commission to investigate the case of Elizabeth Barton. At the time of Barton’s promised cure at Court-at-Street, the archbishop was, it seems, away from Canterbury, but in answer to an alert, presumably from Richard Master, he wasted no time in dispatching his registrar back to his cathedral city with a list of suggested participants, which left no doubt about either the urgency or gravity of the matter they would be examining, since this was no haphazard group of ignorant or light-minded persons. On the contrary, all seven nominees were men of excellent standing and known worth. Three were Benedictine monks under the jurisdiction of the Prior of Christ Church, Canterbury, of which the archbishop himself was titular head. Two more were friars of the reformed order of Franciscan Observants, who had recently established a house in Canterbury. And alongside these five members of the regular clergy were to sit also: Barton’s confessor and spiritual mentor, Richard Master, who as local parish priest had an ex officio right to be involved, and a certain Thomas Wall, who was to act as secretary to the commission.
Certainly, the Priory of Christ Church itself, formally known as Holy Trinity, was one of the kingdom’s most notable foundations, lying in the heart of Canterbury, and exceeding by some way even the prestige of the city’s other great Benedictine house, the abbey of St Augustine’s, which lay just outside the walls. And if its prior, 49-year-old Thomas Goldwell, may ultimately have lacked the fibre to resist pressure from without, even he, as a Doctor of Divinity and former Warden of Canterbury College, who had ruled the cathedral monastery for eleven years, was a figure of considerable substance. Indeed, in the event of the archbishop’s death, it was upon the Prior and Chapter of Christ Church that the powers of the Primate of All England would devolve until a successor was found, making Goldwell one of the senior figures within the entire English Church. And at a time when the good name of monks was under common assault, he had also played no small part in ensuring that the reputation of Christ Church held largely firm by attracting the highest calibre of monks to its cloisters. As such, it was hardly surprising, perhaps, that the core of the nominees for Archbishop Warham’s commission should indeed have been drawn from there. For all three were men of mature character, holding very senior and responsible positions within the monastery, and two were prestigious graduates of the University of Oxford. Indeed, Dom Edward Bocking, DD, and Dom William Hadleigh – whose names suggest that their forebears may possibly have hailed from manors belonging to the Priory of Christ Church in Essex and Suffolk respectively – had, like the prior himself, received their education at a house of studies founded in 1363 by Archbishop Islip for the monks of Christ Church, which was later incorporated into Cardinal Wolsey’s new foundation of Christ Church College. And both had distinguished themselves not only by their exceptional scholarship but by the merits of their subsequent careers.
Bocking, some five years senior to Hadleigh, had been born around 1483, and although it is not known whether he was brought up within the monastery school itself or had entered the Benedictine Order in his teens, there is little doubt about his brilliance. For in 1504, at the age of 21 or thereabouts, he was already an established member of the University of Oxford. Only six years later, moreover, he had become warden of his college, holding this office for the next eight years, before receiving the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in June 1513, as a reward for his study of logic, philosophy and theology over the nine proceeding years. Nor was this the sum of his achievements. For in June 1518 he was granted his doctorate in divinity, after which he almost immediately applied to be dispensed from the normal term of regency, since he had just been ‘appointed to rule his own monastery’ – or, in other words, been recalled to his mother house of Christ Church, Canterbury, to join the governing body there as ‘cellarer’, one of the four principal offices of any monastic community, responsible for its housekeeping and internal management. Controlling a staff of twenty-eight monks, Bocking was conducting his administrative duties with his usual diligence and efficiency, when in 1526, at the age of around 44, he was nominated to serve on the episcopal commission that would change the course of his life.
Ultimately, too, it would render him the butt of the same kind of propaganda slurs as the woman who would now come to dominate his affairs. ‘That he was a doctor I don’t deny,’ the Protestant controversialist Richard Morison wrote in 1537, ‘though he never taught anyone anything,’ and the doctorate itself was also dismissed with appropriate derision. ‘The years he had spent, rather than studied, at the University,’ cracked Morison without any further elaboration, ‘had procured him a doctorate,’ notwithstanding Bocking’s other considerable achievements, both intellectual and administrative. Certainly, he was not an easy man. On the contrary, he was known to superiors like Prior Goldwell for his ‘temerity, furious zeal and malicious blind affection’. But his peers were eventually forced to admit to Henry VIII that he had exercised considerable influence over certain monks, ‘and especially such as were brought into our religion [i.e. Order] by Dr Bocking, being of the younger sort’. Significantly, these young monks were all university men themselves, attracted by Dom Edward’s intellectual gifts and spirituality, and less inclined than their elders to resent his pig-headedness. Strong convictions forcefully expressed, something so irksome at times to the old, are, after all, occasionally more admired in the young. And neither should we forget to balance Morison’s sniping against the judgement of John Fisher’s anonymous biographer, who considered Dom Edward ‘a learned and virtuous man’.
The same, moreover, could be said with equal confidence of the second of Archbishop Warham’s appointees from Christ Church. Though quieter and more self-effacing, Dom William Hadleigh’s career to date had been almost as distinguished, and he, unlike Bocking perhaps, also fell more clearly into both categories of the two sorts of model monk later specified by Prior Goldwell in 1538, i.e. not only ‘witty’ (intelligent) but ‘a good man’ (obedient) to boot. He had been born in 1488, received his degree of Bachelor of Divinity at Canterbury College, Oxford, in the same year as Dom Edward gained his doctorate, and succeeded him as warden of the college when Dom Edward went back to Canterbury in 1518. Remaining at Oxford, until 1524, Dom William, too, then returned to Christ Church, Canterbury, taking up, like Bocking before him, a post of significant responsibility – in his case, the role of penitentiary, which he was still holding two years later, at the age of 39, when the summons to join Archbishop Warham’s ecclesiastical commission arrived and sucked him into a political vortex for which he, unlike Prior Goldwell, had neither the necessary guile nor instinct for survival. For while Goldwell was before long covering his tracks and distancing himself from the affair, bemoaning the doubtful reputation of the Maid and claiming in retrospect that he should have selected none of the men enlisted from his monastery to judge her, Hadleigh would go about his duties all too sincerely and naïvely – in much the same way, it seems, as the second of his colleagues from Christ Church: a certain Fr Barnes, about whom little is known beyond the fact that on a list of late 1533, he is described as master of the monastery’s eleemosynary, or almoner.
Of the two Franciscan Observants appointed to the commission, meanwhile, little is known. The name of one, indeed, went entirely unrecorded, while the other, Father Lewis Wilkinson, is hardly less elusive, since his details fail to appear even on any university list for the period. Yet their Order was anything but unknown and would emerge before long not only as one of the most outspoken sources of opposition to the royal divorce, but among the very vanguard of those elements most feared by the government. Standing, as their name implies, for a strict maintenance of the Franciscan Rule, the Observants, unlike their so-called Conventual counterparts, held no property in common, and had renounced all vested incomes and accumulated goods, so that by the early part of the fourteenth century their reputation was secure. And though when the time of trial eventually arrived, neither they nor similar groups like the Bridgettines of Syon would endure the carnage accepted so readily by the Carthusians, they would certainly adopt a bolder stance than many of their more suppliant peers: ministering throughout to Queen Catherine from their Greenwich friary, which fronted the Thames and adjoined the royal palace; stridently criticising the king from the pulpit of the chapel in the same palace’s west wing; and ultimately refusing to comply with Thomas Cromwell’s commissioners for enforcing the oath of supremacy, on the grounds ‘that they had professed St Francis’s religion and in the observance thereof they would live and die’.
Significantly, the Observants had already established a long-standing association with royalty and were intimately tied not only to the everyday environment of life at Greenwich in particular, but also at Richmond, where their foundation once again enjoyed easy access to a nearby royal palace. Since they possessed no library in their own buildings at Greenwich, they had been allowed complete use of the palace library, which they actually referred to as ‘our library’ and which added to their ongoing visibility in the midst of the royal occupants. Furthermore, Henry VII had maintained close and amicable relations with them throughout his life, and had chosen his own confessor from among their number, while his wife, Elizabeth, had also made the Greenwich friary an annual grant, and selected its chapel for the baptism of her children. All six of England’s Observant houses would, in fact, receive legacies in the first Tudor’s will, and nor was the future Henry VIII lacking in gifts and affection for the Observants, informing Pope Leo X how he could not sufficiently express his admiration for their rigorous adherence to St Francis’s rule of poverty and the sincerity of their devotion to the poor. No religious order, claimed Henry, battled against vice with more perseverance – and few, ironically enough, would prove more attentive in their endeavour to keep Christ’s fold intact.
But if the second Tudor’s pronouncements in their favour were typically lavish, so his wife’s actions on behalf of the Observants spoke much more eloquently still of her own devotion, which dated back to her acquaintance with, arguably, the most illustrious of all their number: the celebrated canon and civil lawyer, Archbishop Ximenez of Toledo, who was confessor to her mother. Such was the calibre of Ximenez’s zeal, in fact, that he had at first refused his archbishopric to preserve his vow of poverty, only agreeing subsequently to don prelatical robes at all on condition that his friar’s habit was plainly visible underneath. Thereafter, he would give a great part of the very considerable revenues of his see for the relief of the poor and the ransoming of captives, and, like Queen Catherine herself, he would also become a great patron of learning, founding the University of Alcalá in 1504. Nor, after her arrival in England three years earlier, did the queen’s devotion to her Franciscan friends waver. On the contrary, before the birth of her first child, she vowed, while in labour, to present ‘to St Peter the Martyr’ one of her richest headdresses, and duly dispatched it to Spain soon afterwards by one of her maids. Surely enough, the saint concerned was Peter of Sassoferrato, who had been sent to Spain by St Francis to preach the Gospel, only to be martyred by the Moors at Valencia in 1231. And when the queen’s own life came to an end, it was little surprise either that her final request would be for her burial in a church of the Observants – curiously forgetting, or perhaps somehow unaware, that by that time the whole Order had been suppressed.
Plainly, then, the selection by Archbishop Warham a decade earlier of Father Wilkinson and his unknown colleague for the episcopal commission into Elizabeth Barton’s case had added considerable weight to that commission’s credibility, since the Observant’s reputation for integrity was impeccable. Moreover, as the archbishop well knew, the presence of this brace of Observants would help counterbalance the more distinctly intellectual orientation of their three Benedictine colleagues, since they were representative of what might be considered the new wave of modern-minded clergy. Emerging originally as what amounted to a protest movement against the loose interpretation of the Franciscan Rule, they had only been established by papal decree as an independent Order of St Francis – that is to say, an Order entirely separate from their Conventual counterparts – in 1517. But thereafter their experience of life outside the cloister made them, quite literally, men of the world, and their resulting everyday contact with members of the laity, and particularly with women, made them invaluable additions to Warham’s panel – not, it must be said, that the appointed Benedictines knew nothing of human nature themselves. For to be head of an Oxford college, however clerical its constitution, was hardly to live in a cloister, while to be cellarer, penitentiary or almoner of a major monastery was certainly to know a tall story from a true one. In short, if Elizabeth Barton were deceiving or deceived, it would be made manifest soon enough.
But upon the commissioners’ arrival in Aldington, their young subject’s credibility could not, it seems, be impugned, for, notwithstanding the Protestant colouring of William Lambarde’s redaction, the resulting account of Edward Thwaites makes amply clear that:
These men opposed her in the chief points of Popish [sic] belief and, finding her sound therein, not only waded no further in the discovery of the fraud, but gave favourable countenance and joined with her in setting forth of the same.
Clearly, she had not only been vindicated by her inquisitors’ ‘oppositions’, but won them comprehensively to her cause, so much so, indeed, that they attended a Mass of thanksgiving at a date of the now undoubtedly ‘holy’ Maid’s own choosing in the chapel of Court-at-Street where her henceforth officially endorsed encounter with the Blessed Virgin had occurred. And the resulting event was not only a public and well-publicised occasion, with the commissioners themselves present, but remarkably well attended into the bargain. For, as even Nicholas Heath’s hostile Sermon was to acknowledge:
When the said day appointed by her came, Dr Bocking and this Parson of Aldington … with other clerks and religious men, accompanied with two thousand and more of the King’s Grace’s people, went in procession with [Elizabeth Barton] from her said master’s house to the said chapel at Court-at-Street, singing the litany and saying divers psalms and orations [prayers] by the way.
If Thwaites is the better guide, moreover – as well he may be, since Heath’s Sermon, just like the account in the Act of Attainder which followed it, is blatantly propagandistic in nature – the numbers present were actually considerably higher still, since spring, after all, was in the air, and as Thwaites takes up the story again, with the procession completing its 2.5-mile journey by descending the wooded way to the little plateau where the chapel stood, it is clear that the event had not merely attracted the low-born and credulous. On the contrary, according to Thwaites’s account, Barton:
Entered the chapel with Ave regina caelorum in prick-song [i.e. from printed sheet music, produced by the organisers, presumably at no small expense], accompanied with these Commissioners, many ladies, gentlemen and gentlewomen of the best degree, and three thousand persons besides of the common sort of the country.
Even if exaggerated, therefore, it is hard to deny that that the numbers involved must surely have created a remarkable spectacle, particularly when it is remembered that both The Sermon and the government’s subsequent Act of Attainder could only venture to reduce them by a third. And the anthem they sang on their way marked not only their reverence for the Maid’s celestial advocate, the Virgin Mary, but the season of the year – sometime between Candlemas Day and the Wednesday in Holy Week – which was also of special significance in the Church’s calendar:
Hail, Queen of the heavens,
hail, Mistress of the angels,
hail, Root: hail Gate
through which the Light dawns on the world!
Rejoice, glorious Virgin,
loveliest of all creatures!
And so farewell, fairest of all:
pray for us to Christ.
Indeed, since Easter Day fell on 1 April in 1526, we can surmise that the procession occurred between 2 February and 28 March, perhaps on the feast of the Annunciation on 25 March. And if the account of Thomas Cranmer, produced in a letter to Nicholas Hawkins, Archdeacon of Ely, is any guide, it was conducted with Barton herself still in a state of considerable physical debility – even carried, perhaps, in a litter. For Cranmer’s letter, dated 20 December 1533, tells how she was ‘laid before the image of our Lady’, before going on to relate how she emerged from her trance state ‘perfectly whole’, i.e. cured, after a remarkable disfigurement of her face and a ‘voice heard speaking within her belly’, sometimes ‘sweet’, sometimes ‘horrible’, according to whether it described heaven or hell. Thereafter, he tells us, she had ‘lain there a long time before she came to herself again’, and, in the meantime during her trance, she had related ‘many things for the confirmation of pilgrimages and trentals, hearing of masses, and confessions, and many other such things’.
Yet what might at first be thought an invaluable account of an extraordinary episode is, in fact, anything but, since Cranmer’s description is actually no more than a private, and initially light-hearted, treatment of a ‘miracle’, about which he always remained sceptical. His letter too, it should be remembered, is written by a committed reformer to a friend of similar outlook abroad. And although he had by that time twice examined Barton and also vetted Nicholas Heath’s government-approved Sermon on the Maid’s deceptions, it contains no new material beyond what Thwaites had produced in his Marvellous Work, even preserving some passages, including the cure itself that Lambarde once more saw fit to suppress later. That Cranmer should have so neglected any new material is noteworthy enough. But that his description should also have followed, virtually word for word, an account of the physical transformations experienced by another contemporary prophetess, the so-called ‘Maid of Ipswich’, described by Sir Thomas More five years earlier, casts grave doubt on this aspect of his narrative in particular. For if More was not himself imitating a lost passage of A Marvellous Work, Cranmer was merely working up second-hand material – most probably with his tongue set firmly in his cheek, as an exercise in comic hagiography solely intended to mock and undermine the central participant and those who were taken in by her antics.
So what, then, did happen within the walls of the little chapel at Court-at-Street on 25 March 1526, as thousands waited outside, unable to squeeze into its narrow confines? Here too, it seems, our most reliable source is necessarily Thwaites, whose eyewitness recollection tells us that:
There fell she eftsoons into a marvellous passion [i.e. suffering] before the image of our Lady, much like a body diseased of the falling evil [i.e. epilepsy].
In the which she uttered sundry metrical and rhyming speeches, tending to the worship of our Lady of Court-of-Street (whose chapel there she wished to be better maintained, and to be furnished with a daily singing priest);
Tending also to her own bestowing in some religious house, for such (said she) was our Lady’s pleasure;
and tending finally and fully to the advancement of the credit of such feigned [i.e. alleged] miracles as that author [Thwaites] doth report.
Not altogether surprisingly, perhaps, Lambarde, as a dutiful Elizabethan Protestant, had seen fit to omit what was actually the whole point of Thwaite’s story: namely, that Barton was ultimately cured. But in all other respects at least, he seems to have faithfully summarised the oracles, as recorded by Thwaites originally – and all of which, incidentally, were eventually realised. For a chaplain was indeed appointed to sing Mass daily in the old chapel; Elizabeth Barton did in fact become a nun; while Court-at Street went on, as predicted, to become not only a place of pilgrimage but a site, allegedly, for further miraculous happenings after Barton had finally gone away to her appointed Benedictine convent of St Sepulchre’s at Canterbury.
Within a year of its publication by Robert Redman in 1527, moreover, Thwaites’s Marvellous Work was so widely diffused that William Tyndale almost certainly had a copy of it on the Continent when writing The Obedience of a Christian Man, and if so, the scale of Elizabeth Barton’s impact – as well as the magnitude of her potential threat – is apparent. Archbishop Warham’s commissioners, after all, had only just confirmed the Maid’s legitimacy when Our Lady of Court-at-Street had appeared to endorse their judgement, by virtue of a miraculous healing in full public view. All of which was potent stuff indeed, and more than sufficient grounds in a contemporary context for the generation of a cult that was soon becoming influential among all classes, notwithstanding the ongoing caution of Warham himself. For, as The Sermon confirms:
Dr Bocking rode up to the said Archbishop of Canterbury, and showed him that a great miracle had been done upon her at Court-at-Street by the mightiful power of God and his blessedful Mother Mary and desired him to declare the same for a miracle, and that it might please him to sequester that elected person of God to the nunnery of St Sepulchre’s at Canterbury.
To whom the archbishop answered, that he would not be hasty therein [i.e. about proclaiming the miracle], but would counsel thereupon with the prelates and clergy of his diocese and with his Learned Council. And that he was contented that the said Elizabeth should be in the meantime in the nunnery of St Sepulchre’s, if the prioress would take her.
Sensibly enough, then, Warham had remained circumspect, though without casting doubt of any kind upon the sincerity of either Bocking’s judgement or intentions. And the Benedictine was indeed now central to events. For if the Act of Attainder of 1534 is to be relied upon, among the many ‘wondrous words’ uttered by the Maid at Court-at-Street was a declaration that it was the ‘pleasure of God’ that ‘Edward Bocking should be her ghostly father [i.e. spiritual director]’. Nor did the archbishop make any appreciable effort to curb Bocking’s role. On the contrary, he not only consulted his diocesan clergy and ‘Learned Council’ on the strength of the Benedictine’s testimony, but thereafter submitted the written evidence to the king himself, who duly passed it on to Sir Thomas More, then High Steward of Cambridge University and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
Later, in February 1534, by which time Barton’s case was threatening to shake the entire kingdom, More described his response in a letter to Thomas Cromwell, in which he was characteristically evasive about his own responsibility for decisions any subsequent developments:
It is, I suppose, about eight or nine years ago, since I heard of that housewife [Elizabeth Barton] first. At which time, the Bishop of Canterbury that then was – God assoil his soul – sent unto the King’s Grace a roll of paper in which were written certain words of hers as she had, as report was then made, at sundry times spoken in her trances. Whereupon it pleased the King’s Grace to deliver me the roll, commanding me to look thereon and afterward show him what I thought therein. Whereunto, at another time, when his Highness asked me, I told him that in good faith I found nothing in these words that I could anything regard or esteem, for, saving that some part fell in rhyme, and that – God wot – full rude, else for any reason – God wot – that I saw therein, a right simple woman might, in my mind, speak it of her own wit well enough. Howbeit, I said, that because it was constantly reported for a truth that God wrought in her and that a miracle was showed upon her, I durst not, nor would not, be bold in judging the matter. And the King’s Grace, as methought, esteemed the matter as light [unimportant] as it after proved lewd [silly].
But if More was, indeed, as condescendingly unconcerned as his letter suggests, his conjecture about the king’s response is altogether less convincing. For although lazy-minded enough to pass the burdensome task of weighing the evidence to the man who would eventually become the most famous of all his martyrs, Henry VIII remained intensely susceptible to the wonder-workings and supernatural interventions so closely associated with pre-Reformation religion. And it was with his approval, therefore, that Archbishop Warham not only ratified Barton’s miraculous cure but sanctioned the ringing of bells throughout the diocese and cathedral city of Canterbury in thanksgiving for the divine intervention on her behalf. It was Thomas Cranmer himself, moreover, who not only confirmed this in his letter to Nicholas Hawkins of 1533, but provided further evidence of the Holy Maid’s impact, as demonstrated by the popularity of Thwaites’s book:
And so [he recorded] this miracle was finished and solemnly rung, and a book written of all the whole story thereof and put into print; which, ever since that time, hath been commonly sold and gone abroad among all the people.
For Cranmer, of course, the entire episode betokened the wellspring of ignorance and superstition against which he was so determined to direct his evangelical energies, and by December 1533, when his letter was written, he could clearly afford a degree of dismissiveness in recounting the episode, as the Maid and her main confederates mouldered in the Tower. But seven years earlier, as she sat in a cell of another kind within the convent of St Sepulchre’s, she was anything but contained. On the contrary, she had swiftly acquired thousands of new admirers now encompassing far more than the common people of Kent – whom Richard Morison nevertheless considered more uneducated and susceptible to a religious hoax than those in other parts of England – along with a spiritual director of uncommon tenacity and boldness in Dom Edward Bocking, who was to shape her future and act, in effect, as her agent and impresario.
For, in compliance with the Elizabeth Barton’s declaration at Court-at-Street, Archbishop Warham had indeed ‘caused and given license to the cellarer to be this woman’s ghostly father’, though much to the disapproval, it must be said, of the prior of his own monastery who had obviously found Bocking’s conduct throughout their relationship hard to handle – not least because he was mainifestly a man of considerable obduracy and therefore one whom an individual like Thomas Goldwell, in continual search of an uncomplicated life, could never warm to. All of which the prior made clear in a letter to Thomas Cromwell, dated 12 November 1533, in which he reflected upon his cellarer’s new role in relation to Elizabeth Barton: ‘And so he hath continued ever since, as far as I know, and resorted unto her at times convenient when he would himself; and that by my Lord of Canterbury’s license and not mine.’ Yet with Bocking’s tenacious assistance, as the 1534 Act of Attainder confirms, ‘the said Elizabeth’ was indeed to be ‘brought into a marvellous fame, credit and good opinion of a great multitude of the people of his realm’ – which was well enough for now, perhaps, but only while she confined her pronouncements to their current limits.
And the prospect of such restraint seemed increasingly remote as the king’s whims regarding his marriage assumed ever more menacing forms over the coming months. For by the spring of 1527, he had committed himself irrevocably to a series of frontal assaults on both his wife’s word and papal authority. First, with utter insensitivity to Catherine’s vehement denials and against Thomas Wolsey’s express advice, Henry duly protested that his wife’s marriage to his brother, Arthur, had indeed been consummated, therefore his marriage to Catherine was, as such, contrary to God’s law. After which, having been adulterously bypassed, Catherine was left with no other choice than to acknowledge the loss of her honour in favour of a woman of no substance or reputation. Naturally enough, for a Trastámara princess such as she, this was utterly intolerable, and in response to her husband’s secrecy, contempt and bullying, Catherine would ultimately throw away for good the keys to her co-operation. Equally damagingly, the king’s chosen course also ignited the whole issue of papal authority by implying that no pope had the capability to dispense with God’s law as laid down in the Bible. In short, Henry was determined to challenge his wife’s honesty, to lecture the doctors of the Church on divinity and biblical exegesis, and to tell the pope his job. And as the price for his attempt to unpick the complex legal knots binding him to his wife, he would now find himself provoking not only Elizabeth Barton, but the even more formidable opposition of Bishop John Fisher.
That the king’s intention henceforth was to annul his marriage once and for all first became certain in mid-May 1527 when a bizarre transaction was staged at York Place, Wolsey’s mansion at Westminster. Acting in his capacity as legate a latere, the cardinal had duly decided to summon his royal master before a secretly convened court to answer a ‘charge’ that, for the last seventeen years, he had been living in ‘open sin’ with his brother’s widow. The assessors were to be Wolsey himself along with Archbishop Warham, who had long harboured doubts over the papal dispensation of 1503, which had underpinned Henry’s marriage to Catherine in the first place, while the queen was to be neither informed nor represented. And in the meantime, the king, suitably cast in the role of defendant rather than petitioner, was to appear before the court not so much as the instigator of a treacherous act but as the unwitting victim of a misconceived dispensation framed more than twenty years earlier. Explaining to Henry that, as legate, he was duty bound to investigate the validity of his marriage, Wolsey, too, could neatly sanitise his own role, posing as no more than the righteous executant of canon law and noble guardian of his sovereign’s spiritual welfare. Warham, meanwhile, was to be deftly presented as the final arbiter of the marriage’s validity, in the hope of expunging any charge of partiality or self-interest on Wolsey’s part.
But even this was not the sum of the deception. For as the whole elaborate ruse unfolded and the Archbishop of Canterbury settled into his all-too-familiar role of exalted irrelevance in the cardinal’s shadow, Henry, too, excelled himself as actor and master-deceiver – not only concealing from Wolsey his longer-term wish to marry Anne Boleyn, but showing no hesitation either in daring to present a feigned protest to the effect that he was indeed legally married to his wife. In the process, with cold-blooded gall, the king duly produced Pope Julius’s dispensation on cue and then employed Dr John Bell, his proctor, to defend its validity, leaving Wolsey’s court to pore over the legality of Henry’s union with Catherine for all of two weeks, during which time Bell’s arguments were conveniently dismantled by the prosecutor, Dr Richard Wolman, and witnesses produced to challenge their soundness. There were concerns, it is true, over the queen’s eventual reaction, and the likelihood that she would insist upon appealing her case to the pope and the emperor, thus transforming into an international crisis what Wolsey was hoping to present as a merely domestic matter. But the court itself seemed neatly insulated from all such external interference, and therefore appeared to be performing its function precisely as intended. Over its four sessions, indeed, it appeared to be proceeding inexorably to its preordained conclusion.
Yet by the time that the court adjourned abruptly for its last session on 31 May, a thunderbolt from Italy had robbed Wolsey once and for all of any illusion that this most delicate of tasks could be settled so neatly. For Rome, he now learned, had been captured by Spanish and Imperial troops more than a fortnight earlier, even before his legatine court had convened, and to increase the irony the capture had been effected by none other than England’s former confederate, the Duke of Bourbon. Though Bourbon himself had been shot in the thigh during the onslaught and eventually died in the Sistine Chapel, his famished and unpaid troops had nevertheless taken a fearful toll upon the Holy City, killing up to a quarter of its population in the process. ‘Never’, wrote one commentator, ‘was Rome so pilled neither by Goths nor Vandals.’ Holy relics and sacred shrines were destroyed, virgins spoiled and wives ravished, while rampaging soldiers ‘punished citizens by the privy members to cause them to confess their treasure’. Pope Clement, in the meantime, had fled in fear of his life to the Castle of San Angelo and was now under siege, leaving him, in effect, a captive of Queen Catherine’s devoted nephew, Emperor Charles V – and with the most fateful consequences. For henceforth, it would be impossible for the pontiff to make even the slightest move without the emperor’s permission, and Wolsey would be left to cobble together a thankless policy of bringing to bear whatever pressure he might muster against a wholly immovable obstacle to his royal master’s plans.
At a stroke, therefore, Wolsey’s legatine court had been rendered utterly impotent, since a pope at the emperor’s mercy was a pope incapable of sanctioning any action intolerable to the emperor’s aunt. And while Clement cowered before her nephew, Catherine herself was no longer to be so lightly circumvented, let alone casually discarded. Indeed, in the brief time it had taken a breathless messenger to deliver his tale of disaster, Wolsey’s task had gone from difficult to desperate, and he reacted accordingly. Ruling that it could not provide an authoritative decision on so intricate a point of canon law as the king’s marriage, the legatine court – of which so much had been expected – now confined itself to a finding that the dispensation of 1503 was no more than ‘open to doubt’. Only two days later, moreover, the beleaguered cardinal was expressing to his royal master the full gravity of the new situation:
And surely sire [he wrote], if the Pope’s Holiness fortune either to be slain or taken, as God forbid, it shall not a little hinder your Grace’s affairs, which I now have in hand; wherein such good and substantial order and process hath hitherto been made and used.
Yet within those same two days Wolsey had conceived another grand enterprise – perhaps his grandest to date – shot full with complex crossing threads and diverse linking outcomes, all of which, he vainly contended, might rescue an all but hopeless situation and redound once more to both his sovereign’s and his own greater glory.
For Henry, of course, the news of Rome’s fall could hardly have been more frustrating. And though exhorted on all sides to rescue the pope, he remained, nonetheless, at a total loss as to how this might be achieved. ‘What should I do?’ he complained to Wolsey. ‘My person nor my people cannot him rescue, but if my treasure may help him, take that which to you seemeth most convenient.’ Certainly, the ‘treasure’ offered by the king, were it to be forthcoming, would indeed be convenient, since the first plank of Wolsey’s proposed solution involved consolidating an existing alliance with the French. But something much more sweeping still was also required, for, with the pope subservient to a secular power, the Church itself was now in urgent need of a rescuer. And with that in mind, the cardinal therefore contrived to visit France in person, where Louise of Savoy was already suggesting that the princes of Christendom should withdraw their allegiance to the Bishop of Rome until his release. Once there, or so he hoped, he would duly proceed, in all his pomp and glory, to take over the government of Christendom on Pope Clement’s behalf.
Though Wolsey’s extraordinary objective was probably born of nothing more than utter desperation, the charge of megalomania is, of course, easy enough to level. For this, it should be remembered, was a man who wished to be buried, like the king, at Windsor and whose tomb was to match in splendour that of Henry VII. A black marble sarcophagus was to hold a carved bronze representation of the cardinal lying in repose, while kneeling angels bearing the symbols of Wolsey’s dignities – his cross and cardinal’s hat – were to guard his head and feet, as four more angels bearing candlesticks perched atop thick bronze pillars 9ft high. This too, likewise, was an individual used to the most extravagant deference. It had long been customary, in fact, for visitors at the English court to kiss the cardinal’s hand before kissing the king’s – an acknowledgement of the higher respect due to the divine office, but in practice as much a bow to Wolsey the person as to his rank within the Church. Yet if Wolsey’s very name had already become for ego and ambition, he had not attained his current status without good reason And as both the leading churchman of the West not under Imperial sway and a figure whom the pope claimed to regard not merely as a brother but as a colleague, there were still slender grounds, perhaps, for hope of a kind, since his plan, as always, was not without an elegant logic. To resolve the crisis he would travel to France in person, win the allegiance of its king, and convoke an assembly of cardinals at Avignon, which was to oversee the administration of papal affairs during the pope’s captivity. Then, by deft diplomacy he would secure Pope Clement’s freedom and thereby guarantee the Church’s compliance in the annulment of King Henry’s marriage.
There could be no question, of course, that the king’s sledgehammer tendencies would have to be carefully circumvented in such a delicate situation. Henry’s preferred approach to his predicament was, after all, to contend that Catherine’s previous marriage to his brother had indeed been consummated, in spite of her resolute denials, and to insist that the pope had not the authority to grant a dispensation that challenged divine law as laid down in Scripture. To argue thus, as Wolsey well knew, cast doubt not only on the queen’s integrity, but upon papal authority in general, and was therefore bound both to inflame and complicate matters considerably. The cardinal’s own solution, by contrast, was therefore to accept the non-consummation of the marriage, and thereby invalidate the dispensation on much less provocative, but wholly effective, technical grounds. For if, as Wolsey reasoned, the marriage had not been consummated in the first place, then the dispensation had dealt with a non-existent impediment and was therefore without authority. As a further flourish, it might also be pointed out that Julius II’s measure had not dealt with the issue of ‘public honesty’ or, in other words, the fact that Arthur and Catherine had indeed been formally married in a Church ceremony. In addressing a non-existent impediment, the original dispensation had on this basis also neglected a real one. And if the king could be persuaded, therefore, to leave well alone and allow his minister a free hand to execute his plans across the Channel, all, it seemed, might yet be executed with surgical precision and minimal collateral damage.
So when Wolsey left for France on 22 July, amid the usual outstanding pomp, he did so with some measure of his characteristic resilience, set fair, or so he hoped, for another master-stroke on the basis of a grand plan that appeared a triumph of vision and creativity – both sweeping in concept and bold in content, a masterpiece of intricacy and simplicity combined. Beforehand, he had drawn up a communication for the pope to sign, bestowing upon his own person absolute power as if he were indeed pope – power ‘even to relax, limit or moderate divine law’ – which meant that Clement would be undertaking to ratify all Wolsey’s actions upon regaining his freedom. The cardinal had troubled, too, to consult with his astrologer about the most favourable date for his departure, and on the appointed day his splendid retinue duly formed ranks and set off for Dover, spreading out along the narrow road for over three-quarters of a mile. Hundreds of gentlemen and yeomen in black and tawny liveries rode in the vanguard, along with closely guarded carts and carriages loaded down with ‘barrels of gold’ and Wolsey’s travel furnishings. While the cardinal travelled as always on muleback, his rich robes blending with the red velvet trappings of his mount, seven attendants rode before him bearing the usual paraphernalia of his office:
And before him [recorded his gentleman usher, George Cavendish, as the great procession made its way over London Bridge] he had his two great crosses of silver, two great pieces of silver, the great seal of England, his cardinal’s hat, and a gentleman that carried his valaunce, otherwise called a cloakbag, which was made altogether of fine scarlet cloth, embroidered over and over with cloth of gold very richly, having in it a cloak of fine scarlet.
But it was Wolsey’s stopping places en route to the coast and embarkation for Calais – and one in particular – that makes Cavendish’s account so intriguing. For, as the gentleman usher noted in passing: ‘The next day he rode to Rochester and lodged in the bishop’s palace there; and the rest of his train in the city, and in Strood on this side the bridge.’
True, there were other errands to perform beforehand, not to mention prayers to recite, as the would-be man of the hour passed on his way. At Canterbury, for instance, he paused to join a special litany for the captive pope. ‘Saint Mary, pray for our Pope Clement’, intoned the monks, while Wolsey knelt and ‘wept very tenderly’. There was time, too, to visit Archbishop Warham, whom the cardinal feared might be inclined to Catherine’s side in any impending struggle, though the aged bishop’s words were reassuring. ‘However displeasant it may be to the queen,’ he declared, ‘truth and law must prevail.’ But it was the meeting with John Fisher at Rochester that carried altogether greater significance, since the bishop had already expressed his opinions on the divorce in a cogent tract – making clear that he considered Pope Julius’s dispensation valid and further inquiry needless – which Wolsey had forwarded to the king on 2 June, along with a lame observation, intended to assuage his master’s anger, that Fisher’s ‘said opinion proceedeth rather of affection than of sincerity, of his learning or scripture’.
In fact, Fisher’s views could hardly have been more unequivocal or less indicative of gut feelings based on personal prejudice. On the contrary, they were framed with characteristically rigorous logic and delivered with a frankness that both Wolsey and the king doubtless found withering. ‘Having consulted all those silent masters [i.e. learned authorities] I have by me,’ Fisher wrote:
And diligently discussed their opinions and weighed their reasons, I find there is a great disgreement among them, a great many asserting that it [i.e. a marriage to a deceased brother’s widow] is prohibited by the divine law, whilst others on the contrary confirm that it is by no means repugnant to it; and having truly weighed the reasons on both sides in an even scale I think I see it easy to unravel all the arguments which they produce who deny it to be lawful by the divine law, but not so easy to answer the others; so I am fully persuaded that it cannot be proved by any solid reason that it is prohibited by the divine law now in force that the brother of a brother deceased without children shall take his wife; which, if true, as I do not doubt of its being most certain, who is there now that considers the plenitude of power which Christ has conferred on the pope, who can deny that the pope may dispense for some great cause with a brother of a brother deceased without issue taking his wife? But that granting the reasons on both sides equal and that neither weighed down the other, yet would that oblige me to be more inclined and yielding to the pope’s side; I know it is allowed by both parties as part of the amplitude of the pope’s power that it is lawful for him on hearing the opinions of divines and lawyers concerning the matter to interpret ambiguous places of Scripture, for that otherwise in vain had Christ said to him, Whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven.
‘With no scruple remaining’, therefore, John Fisher had in fact embarked upon the long road to Tower Hill and an appointment with his executioner, though it was a destiny that was anything but obvious as yet, particularly when Wolsey’s visit to his residence on 4 July still appeared to hold out hope that at least the bishop’s active opposition was by no means yet assured.
Certainly, the meeting could not have been anything other than intense, as the cardinal’s letter to the king, dated four days later, confirms. For the validity of the royal marriage was now no longer presented as a purely academic question but as a matter of policy, as Wolsey explained how Henry’s conscience had been sorely troubled by doubts about his marriage, expressed by the Bishop of Tarbes on his recent embassy to negotiate a marriage between the King of France and the Princess Mary. Nor, significantly, was this Fisher’s first intimation of the whole affair, since his brother Robert had reported rumours of the York Place inquiry soon after it began, and the queen herself, it seems, had already sent him a message enlisting his advice on ‘certain matters’ between herself and the king, after she had heard of the inquiry on 18 May, thanks to the alertness of the Spanish ambassador. Henceforth, the pressure would be mounting on all sides, and the support of Fisher, whose reputation extended far beyond English shores, as a result of his writings against Luther, would be invaluable, making Wolsey’s visit to Rochester anything but coincidental. Yet with regard at least to the validity of Julius II’s dispensation, Fisher still harboured certain technical reservations, if Wolsey’s account is to be trusted, and though this was hardly an unalloyed victory for the king’s cause, it did at least proffer hope of less than all-out opposition from the man whose opinion at this stage was clearly considered paramount.
Even more encouraging, at the same time, was Fisher’s response to word of the queen’s apparent recalcitrance, though Wolsey’s silence on how she had actually heard of the matter from the king himself is carefully avoided.
And I assure your grace [the cardinal’s letter continues], my lord of Rochester, hearing the process of the matter after this sort, did greatly blame the queen, as well for giving so light credence in so weighty a matter as also when she heard it to handle the same in such fashion as rumour and bruit should spread thereof.
[The bishop] doubted not, but that if he might speak with her and disclose unto her all the circumstances of the matter as afore, he should cause her greatly to repent, humble and submit herself unto your highness; considering that the thing done by your grace was so necessary and expedient and the queen’s act so perilous. Howbeit I have persuaded him that he will nothing speak or do therein, or anything counsel her, but as shall stand with your pleasure; for he saith, although she be queen of this realm, yet he acknowledgeth you for his high sovereign lord and king, and will not therefore otherwise behave himself, in all matters, concerning or touching your person, than as shall be by your grace expressly commanded.
Whether Wolsey had knowledge of Catherine’s earlier request to Fisher is uncertain, but it is not hard to believe his description of the latter’s response. For in light of Fisher’s doubts about the dispensation, the York Place inquiry was not of itself an inherently unreasonable expedient, rendering Catherine’s ‘very displeasant manner’ unacceptable, particularly if, as was falsely suggested, she had merely heard of it ‘as rumour and bruit should spread thereof’. As such, it is wholly likely, too, that the bishop would have accepted Wolsey’s further request that he should ‘nothing speak or do therein, or anything counsel her, but as shall stand with your pleasure’ – particularly when the king’s intentions regarding Anne Boleyn were still unknown and the prospect of an outright breach with the Holy See still, to all intents and purposes, inconceivable.
As far as the technical weaknesses of the original bull of dispensation were concerned, moreover, Fisher’s reservations were equally consistent with his overall defence of papal authority. The document was, after all, shot through with flaws, which Fisher could hardly have sought to deny, and while he continued to maintain that the apparent impediment based on Leviticus was not, in fact, ‘of divine law’, he did not seek to hide his other misgivings, as Wolsey, no doubt with some residual relish, was keen to emphasise to Henry. For although the bishop ‘said it was not his faculty anything to judge in this matter’:
Nevertheless he misliked it much … and greatly lamented the negligence of them that so handled that thing in the beginning being of so high importance and great weight, whereupon might insurge doubt or question about the succession of your highness … He noted the matter to be more and more doubtful and the bull diminute [lessened], marvelling that none other bull was purchased than that, being so slenderly couched and against which so many things might be objected. He would not reason the matter, but noted great difficulty.
Plainly, for starving men, even crumbs may offer comfort of a kind, and Wolsey was keen to gloss Fisher’s responses in the most favourable possible light to his master – the more so, of course, at a time when so little else of encouragement appeared to be on offer. But the bishop had in fact remained non-commital, refusing to ‘reason the matter’ even on the subject of the dispensation, while studiously saying nothing to challenge the overall status of papal authority in any way shape or form, i.e. in the manner that was the king’s own preference. And this, of course, was something of which Wolsey himself was fully aware – so much so, it seems, that he now urged the king to apply direct personal pressure.
For if Fisher’s anonymous first biographer is to be believed, the bishop was subsequently summoned to Windsor, so that Henry might ‘by fair means work him to incline his mind’. ‘Wherefore,’ we are told:
The king on a day sent for him, and when he came, the king, using him very courteously, gave him many reverend and good words and at last took him into the long gallery at Windsor. And there, walking awhile with him, after divers words of great praise given him for his worthy learning and virtue, he at last break with him of this matter in the presence of the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and certain bishops alleging there how sore his conscience was tormented and how for that cause he had secretly consulted with his ghostly father [i.e. his confessor, John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln] and divers other learned men by whom he was not yet satisfied. And therefore said that upon special confidence in his great learning he had now made choice of him to use of his advice above all others, praying him to declare his opinion freely, so as with hearing thereof he might sufficiently be instructed in his conscience and remain no longer in this scruple wherewith he was so much unquieted.
But if the king’s entreaties that Fisher ‘declare his opinion freely’, and assurances that his advice would be valued ‘above all areas’ were indeed genuine, he could hardly have been more disappointed by what followed, since the bishop, it seems, ‘hearing all this case proponed by the king never stuck long in answering the matter, which he both knew and thought to be good and true’. On the contrary, speaking with what the anonymous first biographer describes as ‘a reverend gravity after this or the like sort’, Fisher told the king unequivovally that his fears were baseless:
I beseech your grace in God’s name to be of good cheer and no further to dismay yourself with this matter, neither to unquiet or trouble your conscience for the same. For there is no heed to be taken to these men that account themselves so wise and do arrogate themselves more cunning and knowledge in divinity than had all the learned fathers and divines both of Spain and of this realm in your late father’s time, neither yet so much credit to be given unto them as is to the see apostolic by whose authority was confirmed, dispensed and approved for good and lawful … And as for any peril or danger to your soul that may ensue thereby, I am not afraid in giving you this counsel to take upon my soul all the danger, and will not refuse to answer against all men in your behalf either privately or openly that can anything object against this matter, nothing doubting but there are many right worthy and learned persons within this your realm that be of this mind with me and think it a very perilous unseemly thing that any divorce should be spoken of.
Under the circumstances, the message could hardly have been more forthright, even if the anonymous first biographer chose Fisher’s words for him on this occasion, to outline the position that the bishop would henceforth advance unwaveringly. That Fisher was indeed so outspoken, moreover, reflects not only his natural bluntness, but his ongoing conviction at this stage that the king was in fact an honest man, acting earnestly under the influence of genuine moral scruples. For in a letter to an unidentified correspondent, probably written in the latter part of 1527, he declared his confidence not only that Henry would do nothing against the law of God, but that he would be quite justified in submitting his difficulties to the pope, to obtain, no doubt, final peace of mind.
Yet the same letter also notes in passing how kings, from the fullness of their powers, are apt to think that right which suits their pleasure, and in doing so reflects Fisher’s appreciation, even now perhaps, that his sovereign’s concerns might not be easily assuaged – especially when other influential voices were less inclined to express their misgivings. For in September 1527, in the wake of his encounter with Fisher, Henry had also opened his ‘Great Matter’ with Sir Thomas More for the first time, no doubt seeking affirmation of his preferred position after a response from the bishop, which had clearly failed to satisfy him. Once more, the king highlighted the crucial text in Leviticus and asked his councillor’s opinion, but More was altogether more circumspect, begging for time to study the relevant passages in the works of the early Fathers, and consult, too, the learned theologian Dr Nicholas Wilson. At no point did he either reassure him, like Fisher, that his fears were groundless, let alone warn him of the potential dangers involved in any attempt to unravel his marriage. Instead, he merely suggested that St Jerome and St Augustine and other ‘old holy doctors’ would be the king’s best councillors, and stated his preference not to be drawn into the discussions – a decision which, for the time being at least, the king would deign to accept, however reluctantly.
In the meantime, while the prolonged and confused negotiations with Rome ground out their weary course, Fisher turned his mind to a renewed study of the relevant problems in Scripture and canon law, observing later on how:
The matter was so serious, both on account of the people concerned, and on account of the injunction given me by the king, that I devoted more attention to examining the truth of it, lest I should deceive myself and others, than to anything else in my life.
Nor, in conformity with his promise to Wolsey at Rochester and a further letter warning him not to interfere, did he consult with Catherine until his appointment as her counsellor in 1529. In consequence, he too like More would be left in comparative peace before the storm broke. For with his usual gift for self-deception, Henry had, it seems, convinced himself that he had indeed prevailed upon Fisher in their meeting at Windsor, suggesting as much in a letter dispatched to Wolsey as the cardinal wound his way to France. But the Bishop of Rochester was not Sir Thomas More, and even the bishop’s learned counsel could not hope to still a self-serving conscience in a matter on which that conscience was already set firm. From the outset, the king was seeking not judges but partisans, and when Wolsey’s schemes in France collapsed about his ears, the result, as the anonymous early biographer makes clear, were in effect a forgone conclusion. Indeed, from the very time that Fisher departed Windsor, we are told, the king, ‘with his sick mind, perversely bent’, had ‘never looked on him with merry countenance as the good bishop did well perceive for that his grudge daily increased against him’.