5
Prophesy not unto us the truth, but speak only pleasant words.
Isaiah 30:10
By the time that Thomas Wolsey reached Calais on the most crucial of all his missions, he had been given some further grounds for optimism. Already, in April, he had induced Henry to write to his French counterpart as his ‘brother and perfect friend’, thanking him ‘for some birds you have sent me for the pursuit of the heron’. But now, according to a Hungarian envoy, the King of France was at a clear disadvantage in the coming negotiations. He was, Wolsey heard, ‘destitute of good captains and money’, and this was not all, since ‘the said French king considering the captivity of the pope, the detention of his children with the emperor’, and the likelihood of Imperial generals ‘attaining Italy’ was ‘marvellous perplexed, not knowing what to do’. As such, the sealing of the Anglo-French treaties agreed to in England three months earlier and the arrangement of a marriage between Henry and a French princess, such as Renée, Francis I’s sister-in-law, seemed a matter of course. Nor was Wolsey disheartened when he finally arrived at Amiens in August to conclude business, since the French king – surrounded by Greek and Albanian mercenaries, ‘drawn up in a great piece of oats, all in harness, upon light horses’ – was swift to agree a full alliance. And though Renée, somewhat to Wolsey’s regret, was eventually spared a marriage contract with Henry, there was at least the considerable consolation of the Princess Mary’s engagement to Francis’s younger son.
For all its early success, however, Wolsey’s time in France was punctuated with petty frustrations and apparent ill omens. At Boulogne he had been greeted by pageants at the city gate, one depicting ‘a nun called Holy Church whom the Spaniards and Almayns had violated, but whom the cardinal had rescued and set up again’, and another of the pope ‘lying under the emperor sitting in majesty, whom the cardinal pulled down’. Yet the mule that Wolsey was riding shied at the sound of cannon fire and nearly threw him to the ground. Furthermore, insulting graffiti were found in his lodgings. In one place, a cardinal’s hat was carved into a stone windowsill, with a gallows over it, and to compound his problems he was subject to repeated thefts from his chamber, which included a valuable silver dish and other items kept for his personal use. Perhaps the worst loss of all came at Compiègne, however, when the truly indispensable silver and gilt inkpot, with which he composed his dispatches to Henry, went missing. The culprit, it emerged, was the protégé of a professional thief in Paris – a 12-year-old ‘ruffian’s page’ – who was found hiding under a stairwell when the alarm was raised, and who subsequently confessed, prior to being placed in the pillory, how he had not only taken the precious inkpot, but everything else pilfered from the cardinal in recent days.
To add to Wolsey’s vexation, moreover, an even more curious incident marred the banqueting that followed the meeting with Francis, for accompanying the cardinal as part of his travelling household was a group of highly skilled musicians, including a particularly gifted, but ill-fated, shalm-player. So impressed was the French king by their virtuosity that he subsequently borrowed the entire ensemble for a visit to the house of a nobleman, where they played on throughout the night and so captivated their audience that they were said to have thoroughly surpassed even the king’s own players – none more so, indeed, than the celebrated shalm-player himself. Yet two days later, Wolsey’s most revered musician was left breathless in the most literal sense of the term – a stone cold corpse who had died, it was said, ‘either with extreme labour of blowing or with poisoning’. For the hapless cardinal, it seems, there was simply no escape on earth from envy.
Much more importantly, however, there was to be no respite either from the King of England’s misjudgement and indiscretion. In London, the angry talk was that Wolsey was ‘all French’, and the commercial interests of the City were scarcely concealing their concerns about the threat to trade with the Low Countries posed by any new alliance with France. When Wolsey defended it, wrote Edward Hall, ‘some knocked the other on the elbow and said softly “he lieth”’. But now Sir Thomas More was reporting to the cardinal how the king, too, was restive about the same thing. Pointing out ‘how loath the Low Countries were to have any war with him’, Henry had also commanded Lord Sandys to ‘hold back his troops at Guisnes’, lest his reluctant enemies ‘reaped the goods of the English merchants’ and began ‘some business upon the English Pale’. As Wolsey proceeded to build bridges with the French, then, their foundations were being steadily undermined by stirrings at home.
But these particular developments did not remotely match the much more troublesome – and ominous – events that had also begun to unfold in the cardinal’s absence. For in spite of his appeals that Henry should proceed ‘both gently and doucely’ with the queen – at least ‘till it were known what should succeed of the pope’ – the king had continued to bluster and bully. Indeed, a month before the cardinal’s departure, he had impulsively confronted Catherine with his doubts about their marriage, which, he declared, must make their separation inevitable. And in the aftermath of this shockwave, she had somehow managed to obtain a passport for her trusted servant of thirty years, Francisco Felipez, whom she now dispatched to her nephew in Spain. Though Henry had informed the French of Felipez’s mission in the hope that he would be captured en route, the Spaniard nevertheless evaded his pursuers and duly reached Valladolid to inform the emperor of his aunt’s predicament. Now, therefore, Charles V was not only apprised of what he termed ‘this ugly affair’, but became irrevocably committed to Catherine’s cause. ‘Nothing shall be omitted on my part to help you in your present tribulation,’ he told her, and to confirm his promise he followed her suggestion and urged the pope to revoke Wolsey’s legatine power, which would leave him powerless in the matter of the marriage.
Meanwhile, the cardinal’s enemies at the English court had also been making hay. Much to his dismay, Wolsey learned, for instance, that the king had enjoyed supper in his privy chamber with the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the Marquess of Exeter and Sir Thomas Boleyn. Given Henry’s susceptibility to influence and proneness to whim, the possibilities were obvious and with this in mind, John Clerk was therefore returned at once to England to emphasise Wolsey’s progress and explain his plans for the future. He returned, too, with a personal letter from the cardinal, couched in the most obsequious terms, assuring the king that it was his unstinting desire to bring to pass ‘your secret matter’ with the pope. The letter was written, Wolsey assured Henry, ‘with the rude and shaking hand of your must humble subject and chaplain’.
But the cardinal’s hands would not be steadied by the bad news that next came his way, since he now learned that his royal master was actually intending to bypass him with a direct appeal of his own to the pope. William Knight, the special envoy appointed for the task, was ostensibly to convey the king’s condolences for Clement’s captivity and to assist Wolsey’s current efforts to oversee papal affairs. He was instructed, further, to meet Wolsey at Compiègne, pretending all the while that his journey to Italy had nothing to do with the divorce and making every effort to conceal his true objectives from ‘any craft that the Cardinal … can find’. In reality, however, Knight was to carry two draft bulls for the pope to consider – one permitting the king to marry any woman he chose once freed from Catherine, the other looking ahead to the possibility that the pope might not be able to declare Henry’s marriage invalid. In the latter eventuality, the pope was to permit the King of England to enjoy a second, simultaneous, marriage with Anne Boleyn.
When Wolsey learned of these plans from a member of the king’s household, the impact was nothing short of seismic. He had left England on his greatest and most critical enterprise to date, and now he had been decisively undermined by the master he was striving to serve against all odds. And not only was that master now courting disaster, he was also, it seemed, mistrustful of the only man who could help him. Without informing Wolsey, Henry had, for good measure, foolishly resolved to propose a marriage – and a bigamous one at that – to none other than Anne Boleyn, the very woman who, as an agent of her Howard relatives, could be guaranteed to seek his minister’s destruction. It was, indeed, one of the cardinal’s residing superstitions that his fall would be brought about by a woman, and now his worst fears were being realised. That the king should have sunk to such duplicity was the worst blow he had suffered so far, and for the first time in Wolsey’s long career the threat to his pre-eminence stood out starkly. For not only had his master struck out independently and in the process left him both stranded and exposed, he was now expected to feign ignorance of the king’s subterfuge, and, worse still, connive in a scheme that was as ominous for him personally as it was ill-conceived.
To compound an already dire situation, moreover, the projected meeting of cardinals at Avignon was already foundering hopelessly. With the King of France’s half-hearted persuasion, six cardinals eventually answered the appeal to protest the imprisonment of Clement VII and pledge their refusal to any act he might make under compulsion. But in other quarters no further ripples of support were forthcoming. On the contrary, the College of Cardinals, in spite of lukewarm French pressure and Wolsey’s bribes, stood icily aloof from the man whom they had already twice rejected for the papacy. Bad luck – in this case at least – was little in evidence. It was true that both English agents and Italian agents in English pay had experienced great difficulty in obtaining access to the pope now that news of the annulment had reached the emperor. But the simple truth was that Wolsey’s motives had quite simply proven too transparent and fear of Imperial reprisals too strong. The pope, in any case, had rejected any delegation of power, and by December was enjoying a liberty of sorts at Orvieto after being allowed to escape his more blatant captivity at Rome. If ever Wolsey’s conclave had been a viable option, now it was wholly superfluous.
After a desultory attempt to prevent Knight’s passage to Rome on the quite legitimate grounds that he ‘had no colour or acquaintance there’, and a predictably futile appeal that the king ‘take a little patience’ and trust instead to the efforts of Girolamo Ghinucci, Bishop of Worcester, Wolsey was therefore squarely thwarted. Henry’s reply had, it is true, been polite, expressing gratitude at his servant’s efforts, ‘which service cannot be by any kind master forgotten, of which fault I trust I shall never be accused, especially to youward, which so laboriously do serve me’. But it was clear that Wolsey would need to return, if he were to have any realistic chance of salvaging the imminent shipwreck. Knight’s errand in Rome was bound for wholesale failure, and when king and minister were once together, there was still perhaps an outside possibility that Henry’s thoughts might be guided as in earlier days. Above all, Wolsey must revive the crucial bond of trust, if not the old and easy familiarity, that had for so long held fast against all adversity.
On 13 September, therefore, the careworn traveller informed his master that he was making for home as speedily ‘as mine old and cracked body may endure’. Predictably, the months of travel had worn him down as he rushed from city to city enduring French heat and French impudence, and, as summer gave way to autumn in more senses than one, so Wolsey gave way to self-pity, bemoaning ‘the travails and pains which I daily and hourly sustain, without any regard to the continuance of my life or death’. In his absence, the slip of a girl whose love for Henry Percy he had once rudely quashed became exalted, indulging her passion for carp and shrimps at the king’s high table, while he in turn expressed unbounded passion for her. ‘For what joy in this world,’ wrote Henry, ‘can be greater than to have the company of her who is the most dearly loved, knowing likewise that she by her choice holds the same, the thought of which greatly delights me.’ Though the king continued to maintain civilities with his wife and queen, Mistress Anne Boleyn was also firmly ensconced at Windsor, joining him when hawking or upon his afternoon walks in the surrounding parkland. ‘Darling,’ ran another of the king’s letters, ‘you and I shall [soon] have our desired end, which should be more to my heart’s ease, and more quietness to my mind than any other thing in the world.’
Yet for all his many woes, Wolsey remained, it must be said, a formidable figure who had discharged a string of high offices and managed the affairs of princes far too long to be lightly discounted. Furthermore, he was still ostensibly the king’s friend. Certainly, he knew his master’s ways and whims, as well as his secret needs and wishes. He knew his weak points, too – his fears and insecurities, his volatility, his proneness to flattery and passing fancy. And though Wolsey’s enemies continued to whisper against him, they did so mainly in corners. Nor did they offer any viable alternative to his primacy. And so it was, as the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and Anne Boleyn continued to weave their webs around him, that the ‘great panjandrum’ duly played his final card, knowing full well that Pope Clement VII was, after all, a craven and muddle-headed procrastinator who had once been described as ‘the most secretive man in the world’. For it was not only Charles V who could apply persuasive threats against the Holy Father, and in January 1528, therefore, notwithstanding the cries of those who sought his downfall, England joined the League of Cognac with France, delivering a formal declaration of war against the emperor on 28 January, though no hostilities followed, since Wolsey’s plan was merely to bluff Clement into concessions.
Thereafter, Stephen Gardiner and Edward Fox were accordingly dispatched to Rome to apply the requisite pressure, and upon their arrival on 20 March they found Clement bearded and benighted. ‘I cannot tell’, observed Gardiner, ‘how the pope should be described as being at liberty here, where hunger, scarcity, bad lodgings, and ill air keep him as much confined as he was in the Castle Angelo.’ On the way to their audience, the Englishmen passed, it seems, through three rooms ‘all naked and unhanged, the roofs fallen down, and, as we can guess 30 persons, riffraff and other, standing in the chamber for a garnishment’. When they met the Holy Father himself, furthermore, they found him, according to Gardiner, upon a couch covered with a rug not worth twenty shillings. As the meeting progressed, Pope Clement paced up and down his bedchamber in undisguised agitation, waving his arms like one distracted, sighing and wiping his eyes and bemoaning his fate. With the Spaniards at his doorstep, he found himself, he said, ‘in the power of dogs’. But above all, he talked of the danger he would be in should he offend Charles, in response to which the envoys threatened him with the loss he would sustain if England and even perhaps France chose to sever their links with the Holy See. Indeed, true to their instructions, they displayed little sympathy and returned to the pope ‘on the morrow’, when they ‘spoke roundly to him’ and confirmed in no uncertain terms that their king would, if necessary, ‘do without him’.
At the same time, it was impressed upon Clement that at this very moment French forces under Odet de Foix, Vicomte de Lautrec, were marching triumphantly through Italy to besiege Naples. How, in such circumstances, could he not comply, especially when, as Gardiner and Fox also emphasised, the King of England’s motives were so honourable? For any suggestion that their sovereign’s nullity suit was prompted by ‘vain affection and undue love’ for Anne Boleyn, or what the pope termed ‘private reasons’ was strenuously denied, along with swirling rumours at the papal court that the king’s mistress was already pregnant. No doubt feeling the ink curdle upon his pen, Wolsey had, in fact, already instructed his men to speak up ardently in Anne’s defence, emphasising the:
Excellent virtues [qualities] of the said gentlewoman, the purity of her life, her constant virginity, her maidenly and womanly pudicity, her soberness, chasteness, meekness, humility, wisdom, descent of right noble and high thorough regal blood, education in all good and laudable [qualities] and manners [and] apparent aptness to procreation of children.
Nor, of course, was it any coincidence that this particular encomium to the royal mistress had been prominently displayed in the recorded instructions to Fox and Gardiner, where it would be seen by the king himself. For if the cardinal’s survival depended upon it, even he would have to worship at Anne’s altar for the time being, just as he would not hesitate to cudgel his Holy Father in the way now chosen.
Even so, the discussions dragged on wearily day after day and often night after night as Gardiner answered all qualms and quibbles extempore in Latin. ‘Discussed the matter warmly for five hours until one in the morning,’ he informed Wolsey, ‘when we departed with no other answer but that we should have a definite reply the next day before dinner.’ But no reply came. On another occasion, the pope sent a canonist and his protonotary, Gambara, out to the houses of his cardinals for a speedy judgement, only to receive the answer that they would study the matter on the morrow. The pope, complained Gardiner, ‘sees all that is spoken sooner and better than any other, but no man is so slow to give an answer’. ‘Fearing a scorpion in every word’, the pope’s advisers were equally obstructive. Only the ongoing threat that the King of England might be forced to look elsewhere for a solution to his predicament – to ‘live out of the laws of Holy Church’, as it was said – seemed to afford any appreciable leverage.
But relentless pressure, combined with the advance of a French army in Northern Italy and the threat to Naples from Andrea Doria’s galleys, did indeed give Clement the will to act at last. And with the emperor’s troops increasingly demoralised and the prospect of a new and healthier balance of force in his homelands, the pope finally submitted on 7 April with a typical display of amateur dramatics. Walking frantically up and down the great audience chamber, with tears dripping down his copious beard and ‘casting now and then his arms abroad’, Clement duly agreed that the king’s case could be heard at a legatine court in London headed by Wolsey and Lorenzo Campeggio, the Englishman’s personal choice for co-adjudicator. There remained, it is true, the need for further clarification of certain details, which Wolsey was immediately alive to. Clement’s initial agreement omitted, for instance, any reference to the binding authority of the court’s decisions and did not preclude the possibility of revoking the case to Rome at a later date. But in a secret letter, dated 23 July 1528, the necessary assurances were delivered on all such scores. The pope’s representative was, moreover, to travel to England, fully equipped with a decretal bull sanctioning an annulment of the king’s marriage – something which Wolsey considered absolutely essential.
It was an outcome, not surprisingly, that Henry would hear of at Greenwich ‘marvellously thankfully’ and with ‘marvellous demonstrations of joy and gladness’. And for Wolsey in particular the news that his co-legate to determine the ‘Great Matter’ would be none other than Cardinal Campeggio could not have been more heartening. ‘One of the best and most learned men living’, according to Erasmus, Campeggio was an expert in both canon and civil law, and a man of considerable worldly experience to boot. He had, after all, been married to one Francesca Guastevallani until her death in 1509 and had the unusual distinction of producing five sons before entering ecclesiastical service during the pontificate of Julius II. Thereafter, he had performed both diligently and effectively as cardinal-protector of the Holy Roman Empire, during which time he also became well acquainted with the English king and court as an expert cadger of English benefices and absentee Bishop of Salisbury. It was Campeggio, too, who visited England in 1518 to propose the launch of a new crusade against the Turk. Above all, however, the Italian appeared to be Wolsey’s creature – a man, indeed, whom Wolsey had decisively upstaged, almost bullied, a decade earlier. And though he was bound to represent the pope and therefore avoid offence to the emperor, he was nevertheless known to be one of the more ambivalent supporters of Imperial interests – not least, perhaps, because his own house and possessions had been destroyed during the sack of Rome only a year earlier.
Yet the double game, of course, was still afoot and Wolsey now found himself the victim of what would amount to slow diplomatic strangulation – more drawn out, more frustrating, more ingenious, more inexorable and more excruciating than even he might have devised for an unwitting quarry of his own. It was Wolsey, in fact, who had kept Campeggio waiting interminably in Calais in 1518, as he applied pressure for his own appointment as a papal legate at that time. Now, however, the roles were reversed, as the Italian exploited every opportunity to loiter and obstruct. Acting under strict instructions from Clement, even his martyrdom to gout became from this time forth an invaluable asset. Unable either to walk or ride, it was all he could do, it seems, to sit confined in his litter, enduring the purgatory of unpaved roads and stifling summer heat as he trundled across Europe. Such, indeed, was his discomfort that curious villagers who caught sight of him along the way to his destination in London saw only a shrunken figure hunched in pain with a long untrimmed beard – a sign, they thought, of mourning for the English Church. But every shock and jar of his journey meant further delay and further opportunity for some unforeseen development that might somehow release the pope from the Gordian knot currently binding him.
By August, however, Campeggio’s agonising odyssey was at last nearing completion. And as a nod to discretion in anticipation of his arrival, the king’s mistress had even been encouraged to take up new apartments at Greenwich, specially prepared for her by Wolsey, to separate her from her lover. Even so, the apartments still allowed easy access, and while briefly absent on a hunting trip, Henry now informed her of the Italian’s approach. Writing at 11 p.m. after a hard day’s chase and ‘the killing of a hart’, the message to ‘mine own darling’ was encouraging. ‘The legate which we most desire arrived at Paris on Sunday or Monday last past,’ wrote the king, ‘so that I trust by the next Monday to hear of his arrival in Calais; and then I trust within a while to enjoy that which I have so longed for, to God’s pleasure, and our both comforts.’ The ‘while’, however, would still be a long one. For it was not until 28 October that the Italian finally reached London – accompanied by much booing, since the divorce was already unpopular – to be housed, first, in the Duke of Suffolk’s residence and then the Bishop of Bath’s palace. And if Henry was expecting rapid results thereafter, he would be bitterly disappointed, since even by now the international situation had shifted fatefully. For while the Vicomte de Lautrec had been killed and the emperor’s cause in Italy bolstered by the defection of Andrea Doria’s galleys, there had also been a regrouping of the Italian states, and Florence had once more declared itself a republic. Only by coming to terms with the emperor, therefore, could the Medici pope now save his own family, and accordingly, in December he would write to Campeggio ordering him to burn the decretal commission and consign Henry’s hopes and Wolsey’s fortunes to ashes.
But as if all this were not enough, there remained one other looming storm cloud upon Cardinal Campeggio’s arrival in England. And on 1 October, as he passed through Canterbury on his way to a meeting with Archbishop Warham, the Italian duly passed the very gates of the place where its source now resided. For the Benedictine convent of St Sepulchre, where Elizabeth Barton had already taken her place among the ‘choir nuns’ after swearing her solemn vows that midsummer, lay directly along the cardinal’s route – nestled inconspicuously in the eastern suburbs of Canterbury, about a quarter of a mile from the city walls and almost adjoining Watling Street, the ancient Roman road running straight from London to Dover. With an income estimated variously as £381 19s 7d and £291 12s 5d at the time of its dissolution, there was little, in fact, to distinguish Barton’s new home very visibly from the multitude of so-called ‘lesser’ religious houses, later specified by Thomas Cromwell as boasting an income of barely more than half that sum. And at the time of her arrival, the tiny community did indeed consist of no more than a prioress and five black-veiled nuns, all immured within an unpretentious building whose former existence may only be discerned today from scraps of old walls, the Gothic-sounding names of some surrounding properties, and a street sign pointing to Nunnery Fields.
Yet in this case especially, appearances were deceptive, since St Sepulchre’s had sustained itself both effectively and honourably across the centuries after its foundation by Canterbury’s second-ever archbishop, St Anselm of Bec. And long before the advent of its most famous resident, the convent already ranked as a corporation, boasting not only its own seal but all the other characteristics of a thriving nunnery, including, not least, the special favour and protection of the archbishop himself, as a result of which its nuns continued to enjoy an advantage even when dealing with their gigantic neighbours, the Priory of Christ Church and the Abbey of St Augustine. Remaining on good terms with both throughout their frequent rivalries – which on one occasion had resulted in nothing less than a pitched battle for the relics of their founding saint – the nuns had in fact avoided all scandal and, more importantly still, maintained their independence skilfully. For although located within the boundaries of the fee of the Abbey of St Augustine, St Sepulchre’s had stayed quite independent of the abbot’s jurisdiction, while receiving the patronage of a parish church from the abbey, as well as advantageous wooding rights to the north of the city in the forest of Blean, which belonged to the Priory of Christ Church. Even today, the name Minchen Wood – from the Saxon mynecena and Latin monacha, ‘belonging to the nuns’ – is a residing trace not only of their presence but the goodwill accorded them. And there had been royal patronage too, particularly from King Henry III, who in his fortieth year granted various liberties to the convent’s prioress.
Later, in fact, Cardinal Morton had also bequeathed in perpetuity lands lying within the park at Maidstone called the Mote, along with a nearby mill. And during the time of Archbishop Whittesley (1368–74), John Bourn, Rector of Freckenham, had established a chantry chapel for the convent’s upkeep. But generous patronage and the protection afforded by influential friends had been supplemented in St Sepulchre’s case by that most distinctive gift of all: a largely spotless reputation. For its limited size had, it seems, played a significant part in preserving the sanctity of its handful of residents under the leadership of Dame Philippa Jonys, the Mother Prioress, who, though sprung from comparatively humble stock within the serried ranks of the Canterbury bourgeoisie, had nevertheless acquired significant status within the city – not least as a result of Archbishop Warham’s favour, and her own sterling efforts in consolidating St Sepulchre’s worthy reputation. Certainly, her predecessor, Dame Mildred Hale, had done her job well, ensuring that the most recent ‘visitation’ of 1511 had uncovered no grounds for complaint beyond the fact that the nuns did not rise from matins in the middle of the night, but at dawn – an issue that the prioress had in any case actually raised herself and explained on the grounds that the doors of the cloister were being mended and the roof covered. But it was largely because of her successor’s influence that the archbishop and Dom Edward Bocking had specifically chosen St Sepulchre’s as a suitable residence for Elizabeth Barton, since the Benedictine rule had become so effectively observed under Dame Philippa’s leadership that nuns from other convents – like one Dame Elizabeth Penny of Higham Priory – were sometimes transferred there for correction and rehabilitation. Diligent in prayer, modest in behaviour, moderate in lifestyle, the nuns displayed none of the excesses or shortcomings so characteristic of hostile propaganda, and if the inventory of Elizabeth Barton’s possessions, taken at the time of her arrest, is any guide, she too had readily embraced the austerity of the community. For even when professed and at the height of her fame, the Holy Maid’s total wardrobe consisted of nothing more – apart from the habit she stood up in – than one coat, two mantles (one of them old), two kirtles (one of them old), a collar and two stoles. Nor were the accoutrements of her cell any less rudimentary: a piece of plank for a table, two large chests and one small one, three candlesticks, five cushions, two mats, one of them cut in pieces, an old mattress, seven coarse sheets, two coverlets, two pillows, a bolster, three pillow-cases and an old diaper towel. Beyond these exiguities, there were merely two plates, two dishes, two saucers and a little metal basin.
In this modest setting, Barton’s novitiate had proceeded to its end without hint of reproach, for in spite of her growing celebrity, which was attested to by the ongoing attacks of William Tyndale abroad, Barton herself appears to have remained entirely unspoilt. Widely admired, on the one hand, for what John Fisher’s anonymous first biographer considered ‘her virtues and austere life’, she had continued, we are told, to receive her ‘many revelations of Almighty God and his holy saints’ without boast or affectation. According to the Act of Attainder that finally condemned her, she had seen ‘heavenly lights’, heard ‘heavenly voices, heavenly melodies and joys’, and made the convent’s chapel of St Giles her place of special resort – ‘and specially by night, saying that the dorter door was made open unto her by God’s power’. Indeed, the visions begun at Goldwell and Court-at-Street’s ancient chapel had, it seems, continued with almost weekly frequency, as she now found herself transported in trance state to the chapel and what she claimed to be miraculous encounters with Our Lady. But in spite of the increasingly reverential treatment that this attracted, and notwithstanding frequent recurrences of her illness, which are cited in Thwaites’s Marvellous Work, she had nevertheless kept her convent’s rule studiously and even earned Archbishop Warham’s discerning praise as ‘a very well-disposed and virtuous woman’.
Now a figure of nationwide repute, the Holy Maid’s utterances had, in fact, also ensured that the chapel at Court-at-Street was no longer the damp and dreary ruin it had once been. On the contrary, it already boasted not only its own chaplain but a ceiling of lime and plaster that was considered sufficiently elegant for it to be copied on a larger scale at nearby Great Chart. And in the meantime, numerous bequests from far and wide continued to flow in from the likes of Thomas Stubbs of Borden, who wrote the chapel into his will, though he lived halfway across the country, as well as more exalted figures like Isabel Lady Poynings of Smeeth, who left the chapel’s resident hermit a legacy of 6s 8d, along with ‘a yard and two nails and a half of cloth of gold, for a vestment’ for the chapel itself, and a baldachino for the altar. The number of pilgrims had steadily increased, some leaving silver thread the length of their bodies, as was the custom among wealthier invalids in payment for their cure, and, as word of miraculous healings mounted, so the upward spiral of fame escalated both for the shrine – for such it now was – and the young woman responsible for its renown. By this point no longer simply Elizabeth Barton but rather the Reverend Dame Elizabeth Barton, her life had been drastically transformed in less than two years. And there was every reason to believe that this process still had far to run, leaving her ideally placed, if she so chose, to settle for a life of religious distinction amid the tranquil glow of her many awed admirers.
But it was equally clear at such a crucial political juncture for the entire kingdom that the Maid’s pronouncements, if unrestrained, might yet take on a new and altogether greater significance, which is, indeed, precisely what had started to happen by the time of Cardinal Campeggio’s visit. For, as the 1534 Act of Attainder later put it, she had by now begun ‘to be told by the Holy Spirit of God many things that should follow to the world for punishment of the sins of the princes and the people’. And nor, it seems, was this all, since ‘by reason of the great perfection that was thought to be in her’, she had also attracted the ‘great confidence’ of ‘divers and great men of the realm, as [well as] mean men, and especially divers and religious men’ who ‘often resorted to her and communed with her’. Even on the very day that Cardinal Campeggio entered Canterbury, indeed, Archbishop Warham found himself penning the following message to none other than Thomas Wolsey, which presaged, in effect, the Maid’s first entry into the very highest reaches of national politics.
Please it your Grace, so it is that Elizabeth Barton, being a religious woman professed at St Sepulchre’s in Canterbury, who had all the visions at Our Lady of Court-of-Street, a very well-disposed and virtuous woman (as I am informed by her sisters), is very desirous to speak with your Grace personally.
What she hath to say, or whether it be good or ill, I do not know; but she hath desired me to write unto your Grace and to desire the same (as I do), that she may come into your Grace’s presence. Whom, when your Grace have heard, ye may order as shall please the same. For I assure your Grace she hath made very importunate suit to me to be a mean to your Grace that she may speak with you.
Expressed with considerable caution, the letter is significant from at least one other perspective, too. Certainly, there had never been any love lost between Warham and the man to whom he now wrote. They belonged, on the one hand, to different generations: the archbishop was in his late seventies, the cardinal in his mid-fifties. Likewise, Warham was a former chancellor, Wolsey the current one, and while Warham was legatus natus, his one-time junior now held the higher rank of legatus a latere, with the result that within both Church and State, the younger man held the whip hand, which he was sometimes all too ready to employ, even threatening at one point to have his older colleague deprived. For if Warham was by training a lawyer and by profession a diplomat of the Crown – someone whose archbishopric had arrived, in effect, as a retirement pension – Wolsey remained a thrusting individualist and go-getter, whose own archbishopric and cardinal’s hat had been earned by undisguised ambition. As such, some circumspection on Warham’s part was only to be expected, perhaps. But its extremity remains curious, since he vouches in his letter for nothing whatsoever beyond the fact that Elizabeth Barton is a renowned visionary, while the onus for recommending her as a pious and virtuous woman is shifted to the nuns of her community. Similarly, he effectively disavows, by his silence on the matter, any knowledge of what she wants to say. And although she is his own ecclesiastical subject, he gives the cardinal free license to do what he wishes with her afterwards.
Even more curious, perhaps, is the means by which Barton gained direct access to Warham in the first place, since no nun enjoyed freedom of movement from her convent without explicit permission – leaving us to assume with some confidence an initial introduction from Dom Edward Bocking, ‘whose counsel’, according to the 1534 Act of Attainder, she had ‘used and evermore followed in her goings’, and who must have given some advance notice of her business. Yet even with this, there is the added puzzle of how Barton, who had made such ‘importunate suit’ to Warham, had nevertheless failed to divulge to him any aspect of the nature of her message to Wolsey. Could she, moreover, have persuaded such a seasoned and cautious old diplomat to grant her wish in the course of a single interview, or is the implication that she had effectively laid siege to him, launching appeal after appeal over interview after interview until he finally conceded? Such a possibility is certainly consistent with the later deposition of Prior Goldwell of Christ Church, who contended that she was with the archbishop ‘many times’. And this is not all, since the whole point of her persistence, according to Goldwell, was to deliver her ‘revelations’ not only regarding Wolsey but ‘touching my Lord of Canterbury’ himself. If so, then Warham emerges on this occasion as a very model of duplicity – particularly when he ascribed such authority to what he heard. For, according to the prior’s testimony, Bocking ‘showed unto me at divers seasons’ how ‘he [the archbishop] gave much credence unto her words in such things as she knew and surmised [claimed by inspiration] to know, that she did show unto him’.
So impressed was Warham by what Barton said, and so alarmed by the crisis precipitated by the arrival of the new legate to institute the next phase of the divorce, that he seems to have taken the risk – when his own character naturally inclined him to utmost caution – of sending her on to his rival, Wolsey, with a revelation that would prove no less disconcerting than the one she had in all likelihood delivered to him.
By writing on 1 October, furthermore, the archbishop knew that his letter would be delivered to the cardinal in London, long before the enfeebled Campeggio could get there, since the Italian was now unable to stand and in any case under instructions from the pope to delay at every opportunity the opening of the legatine court over which he was to preside. In consequence, Barton would be able to travel to Kent, probably in the company of one or two of her fellow nuns and, above all, her prioress, who was to effect the necessary introductions at court before Campeggio’s arrival in the capital – something that did not in fact occur until 9 October, by which time he was so ill that he remained confined to his bed for almost a fortnight. Indeed, it was not until 22 October that he became well enough to attend an official reception given in his honour, and only on the 23rd did his first formal discussion with the king occur. As such, the first three weeks of October 1528 would prove an ideal time for the Maid to deliver her message, though Wolsey’s distractions remained as intense as ever, as he pressurised Campeggio in his sickbed, and harassed the pope with importunities of his own:
And there I was [complained the gout-ridden Italian in his dispatches] in bed all the time, and still am for that matter; and he has been to visit me three or four times since, arguing with me for three or four hours at a stretch.
The themes, moreover, were as unrelenting as the pressure itself: that if Henry were thwarted, the kingdom would be thrown into confusion by his fury and ruined for lack of a sure successor to the throne; that the Church would be defamed and persecuted; and that Wolsey himself would be disgraced, dismissed and probably put to death.
Under such circumstances, Campeggio was clearly not the only cardinal in agonies at that time, since his English counterpart was as troubled in mind as the Italian was in body, making Elizabeth Barton’s message, when finally delivered, all the harder to bear. For she now imparted to him, just as she seems to have done to Warham only a little earlier, the time-honoured message that had been delivered to sinful rulers and their servants from the time of the Prophet Nathan and King David: namely, that unless they repented, death awaited. According to the Sermon preached by Nicholas Heath at St Paul’s Cross early in 1534, which is likely to have been based on the Maid’s own depositions four years after Wolsey’s death in 1530:
She said that God commanded her to say to the late Cardinal and also the said Archbishop of Canterbury that, if they furthered the King’s Grace to be married to the Queen’s Grace that now is [i.e. Anne Boleyn], they both should be utterly destroyed.
If, moreover, an anonymous document dating to November 1533 is to be believed, Barton had also been ‘charged’ by an angel – most probably the Archangel Michael of her earlier Aldington visions – to speak to the cardinal ‘of three swords that he had in his hand: one of the spirituality [relating to his cardinalate], another of the temporality [concerning his lord chancellorship], and the other of the king’s marriage’. The source involved was the testimony, it seems, of a certain John Wolff, a prisoner in the Tower of London turned government informer, who later pumped one of Barton’s associates – his cellmate, the Observant Franciscan Hugh Rich – for information. A merchant of the Steelyard, whose name also suggests Germanic origins, Wolff was in fact an international swindler, who had been imprisoned at the request of the Hanse merchants. But his account is confirmed by a similar letter of Sir Thomas More describing a conversation of his own held with another of the Maid’s associates, Friar Richard Risby, at Christmas 1532, on this very topic:
[Father Risby] told me that she had been with my Lord Legate in his life and with the King’s Grace too; and that she had told my Lord Legate a revelation of hers; of three swords that God hath put in my Lord Legate’s hand, which, if he ordered not well, God would lay it sore to his charge. The first, he said, was the ordering of the spirituality under the Pope, as Legate; the second, the rule that he bore in order of the temporality under the King, as his Chancellor; and the third, she said, was the meddling [involvement] he was put in trust with by the King, concerning the great matter of his marriage.
In effect, then, Barton had delivered a threat of divine retribution at the very time when its recipient was looking increasingly unable to avoid it, though how much effective influence she subsequently acquired over both Wolsey and Warham is not easy to say. Certainly, the Prior of Christ Church was of the opinion that she held the latter in her pocket, and Nicholas Heath’s Sermon suggests further that her sway over the old archbishop was actually responsible for his apparently remarkable change of attitude over the divorce:
For the said archbishop had, afore her coming to him, provoked [appealed] from the Pope to the General Council, intending to proceed in the King’s Grace’s said cause of matrimony and divorce, saying his Grace should have no indifferent justice shown him in other places.
Like other supporters of the divorce, Warham had, in fact, been prepared initially to endorse Wolsey’s plan to circumvent papal authority by the summons of a general ecclesiastical council of the kind that the cardinal had envisaged on his mission to Avignon. After the Maid’s intervention, however, his position altered radically. And this interpretation of the reason was consistent, too, with the opinion of the archbishop’s successor, Thomas Cranmer, who, as an intimate friend of the Boleyn family, was almost certain to have known something of the inside story – albeit not at first hand, since in 1528–29 he was still a comparatively obscure Cambridge don. Significantly, in his private correspondence of 1533, there is the following observation about Elizabeth Barton’s impact:
And truly, I think, she did marvellously stop the going forward of the King’s marriage by reason of her visions, which, she said, were of God … She also had communication with my Lord Cardinal and with my Lord of Canterbury in the matter; and in mine opinion, with her feigned and godly threatenings, she stayed them very much.
If true – and Cranmer was as good a judge as any available to us – the humble servant girl of Aldington had already achieved a truly astonishing, indeed pivotal, status, which even the Act of Attainder condemning her did not ultimately seek to hide, in spite of its more general efforts to discredit and belittle her. For as the act made clear:
The late Cardinal of England and the late Bishop of Canterbury, being so well minded to further and to set at an end [achieve] the marriage which the King now enjoyeth, according to their spiritual duty, were prevented by the false revelations of the said Nun. And that the Bishop of Canterbury was so minded, it may be proved by divers which knew his towardness, and also by his provocation which he made from the Pope, in case he [the Pope] would make any process against him from meddling in the matter.
Although Warham was already dead by 1534, therefore, and as such a convenient scapegoat for the act’s chief architect, Thomas Cromwell, the collective evidence explaining Warham’s change of heart at Barton’s urging remains compelling, particularly when Bishop John Fisher himself repeatedly asserted the identical conclusion to Cromwell, the House of Lords and indeed the king himself, freely acknowledging how:
My Lord of Canterbury, that then was both her Ordinary [diocesan bishop] and a man reputed of high wisdom and learning, told me that she had many great visions; and of him I learned greater things than ever I heard of the nun herself.
By the time that Fisher made these statements in 1534, of course, he too had been gravely compromised and was fighting for his life. But in the unlikely event that he, like Prior Goldwell, was happy to shift the burden of complicity on to a dead man’s shoulders, the general picture still emerges that from 1528 onwards, the Archbishop of Canterbury – hitherto loyal executant of the royal will – had become a proponent of the Maid’s visions and tacit supporter of her mission. Indeed, as the story unfolded, he would, at the very last, emerge as a gallant opponent of the royal will in a way that he had never remotely contemplated previously. Whether it was the Maid’s transparent sincerity or some unsettling detail in her revelations that shook the archbishop from a lifetime’s subservience remains unknown. Perhaps it was fear magnified by extreme old age and the imminence of death that worked its effect, or alternatively the honourable parting flourish of a disillusioned conscience freed at last from the world of dishonesty and double-dealing it had inhabited for so long. Certainly, Warham by his weakness, like Wolsey by his assurances of success, had allowed an emotional impulse on behalf of their king to attain unimagined proportions and to assume unimaginable ramifications. But what both men were now seeking, it seems, was nothing less than a heaven-sent intermediary who might somehow achieve at this late hour what they themselves could not hope to: a change of royal heart.
For in spite of certain appearances to the contrary, Wolsey, too, was not unmoved by the encounter with the Maid that had been engineered by Warham. The cardinal’s first and most famous biographer, George Cavendish, makes no mention of her at all in his Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, and since Cavendish was his gentleman usher, who knew all his master’s coming and goings, this might be considered significant. Yet a seemingly insignificant phrase in the Sermon, italicised in the extract below, may not only provide confirmation of the date of her first meeting with him, but also help explain precisely how the Maid affected the cardinal’s outlook:
The said Cardinal was as well minded and bent to go forth in the King’s Grace’s said cause of matrimony and divorce as any man living according to the law of God and the law of nature, till he was perverted by this nun and induced to believe that, if he proceeded in the same, God would sore strike him.
At first sight, of course, this might simply seem to mean that Wolsey was keen to pursue the king’s cause until the appearance of Barton quelled his ardour. Yet the cardinal continued desperately and unwaveringly to achieve an annulment of the royal marriage up to the very moment of his fall from power in October 1529. What did change in the meantime, however, was the strategy he employed in pursuit of his master’s ‘cause’. For until October 1528 – the time of his meeting with the Maid – he was prepared to entertain the king’s arguments about the law of God, as intimated in Leviticus, but thereafter would not even pretend to justify the divorce on these high grounds, opting instead for arguments founded purely upon political necessity and technical flaws in the original dispensation granted by Julius II.
And if Elizabeth Barton was indeed the catalyst for such a change of tactics, then her influence upon the premier mover and shaper of English affairs at this time, other than the king himself, was nothing less than momentous, explaining not only the ultimate reaction of the government to her personally but, in part at least, the fate of Wolsey, too. For to a king who prided himself upon the sensitivity of his conscience, not to mention his grasp of theology, which had already encouraged him to produce a defence of the Church’s entire sacramental system, and earn, or so he believed, the plaudits of all Europe, his minister’s choice of altogether baser ground on which to wage his fight amounted in effect to little less than an act of treason against the royal genius: an act of treachery so grotesque, in fact, as to suggest that the man concerned had been perverted or bewitched. True, the Maid had not determined the cardinal’s new tactics, but in bidding him desist from his existing course on peril of his soul, she appears to have persuaded him, in effect, to abandon the use of religious arguments for political ends – a new course that must have accorded well with his own experience in negotiations to date. For with every religious justification he advanced, Wolsey was contradicted by an equally convincing religious counter, and for every Father of the Church he cited, not to mention every General Council, papal brief or pontifical letter, there were invariably other citations, General Councils, papal briefs and pontifical letters to support the contrary position.
The king, meanwhile, remained tied to Leviticus like a bull to the ring in his nose, and, as Campeggio soon discovered, was in no mood to compromise one jot on the issue of his marriage. His desire for an annulment, Campeggio wrote a week after his arrival, was ‘most ardent’; and the Italian did not exaggerate, since ego and self-righteousness, not to mention the remorseless application of flawed reasoning – all reinforced by a typically selective show of hard learning – left Henry in no doubt about the virtue of his cause. ‘His Majesty has so diligently studied this matter,’ observed Campeggio, ‘that I believe in this case he knows more than a great theologian or jurist.’ But if the king was well acquainted with what he considered the letter of the law, he was less familiar with the true scholar’s preference for patience, balance and, above all, listening, while his supposed erudition remained, to all intents and purposes, as self-serving as his conscience. For four hours on one occasion he had held forth as Campeggio played the role of sponge and nodding student. But the real lesson emerging from the interview was neither legal nor theological. Reflecting on the king’s intransigence, Campeggio drew the only possible conclusion. ‘I believe that an angel descending from heaven would be unable to persuade him otherwise,’ he noted wistfully. And on the following Sunday, like the supremely artful dodger he undoubtedly was, the Italian was persuaded to reveal the decretal bull, which appeared to sanction all that the king desired.
What Campeggio did not reveal, however, was the elaborate ruse that centred upon this document. For, in spite of previous assurances to the contrary, the pope had finally left him in no doubt that the bull should be shown only to Henry and Wolsey, and could not be produced in court. More importantly still, its terms were on no account to be executed. As such, its unveiling was nothing more than a sop to starving men – an appetiser for a non-existent meal and a prelude to further delay as Campeggio now took to his sickbed whenever convenient. Neither hero nor genius, the Italian knew at least how to lose slowly and to save what could be saved from a no-win situation, since Wolsey, too, had proved unbending. ‘I have no more success in persuading the cardinal,’ wrote Campeggio, ‘than if I had spoken to a rock.’ Thus, with king and cardinal alike insisting that they would ‘endure no procrastination’ since ‘the affairs of the kingdom are at a standstill’, the Italian duly procrastinated, fighting hot air with a steady cooling stream of paltry excuses and chill indifference. Only when Campeggio suggested that Catherine might opt for convenient seclusion within a nunnery had Henry’s impatience temporarily abated. But she, too, remained another immovable object in the stone wall maze confronting Wolsey.
As his options receded on every front, therefore, the cardinal who had once carried all before him was reduced to increasingly futile stratagems. Ever desperate to probe any and every avenue, he had met in August with Robert Shorton, the queen’s almoner, to debate her case, but was told once more that Catherine had never known Prince Arthur as her husband. Worse still, Wolsey also learned of her conviction that no court in England could offer her justice and of her determination to make use of certain papal bulls existing in Spain that allegedly removed all impediments to her present marriage. When, therefore, Wolsey claimed to have proof of consummation, centring on rumours that Catherine had been pregnant at the time of Arthur’s death, he was already clutching at straws. Nor was the queen any more convinced by the cardinal’s even lamer assertion that the current impasse cast a stigma upon all the learned men of England who had found the marriage invalid. For, although she had been left to hammer out her defence alone, she was nevertheless secure in conscience, convinced of her cause and raring by now to fight. If grounds of expediency, therefore, or indeed any other grounds on offer had achieved so little with the pope, was not the only answer at this point, to change the mind of the king by the most desperate and unlikely option of all, which had recently, as if by providence, come to hand: namely, the agency of a humble young woman, apparently inspired from heaven, whose charisma had already swayed an archbishop and the cardinal himself? Henry’s piety, after all, went hand in glove with superstition, and there was little doubting either that his intrinsic loyalty lay always with the papacy. Had not his very badgering of Clement VII demonstrated, indeed, his underlying commitment to the Holy Father as the supreme arbiter in matters of faith and Christian morals? So as a devotee of Our Lady of Walsingham, patron of the Friars Observant and would-be crusader against the Turk, might he not yet be persuaded to listen to a message, however unwelcome, delivered by a young and virtuous nun?
It was during these critical weeks of October 1528, therefore, that Wolsey arranged Elizabeth Barton’s first encounter with the king, which, according to the testimony of John Wolff, gathered from his conversations with Friar Hugh Rich, had originated with a message delivered ‘of an angel’ that had bade her:
Go unto the king, that infidel Prince of England, and say that I commend him to amend his life; and that he leave three things which he loveth and purposeth upon; that is
that he [ceases to] take off the pope’s right and patrimony from him;
the second, that he destroy all these new folks of opinion, and the words of their new learning;
the third, that, if he married and took Anne to wife, the vengeance of God would plague him.
Quite where the first of Barton’s three interviews with Henry took place is unknown. But such forthrightness certainly involved an act of considerable courage on the nun’s part, even though the king himself appears to have remained surprisingly unmoved by the meeting. On the contrary, he appears, in fact, to have taken neither heed of her advice nor, more surprisingly still perhaps, offence at her audacity, still clinging in all likelihood to pipedreams that Campeggio’s investigations would produce the desired result and free him from any burden of sin or heavenly retribution. Such, indeed, was Henry’s apparent indifference that Wolsey saw no need afterwards to retain the Maid in London, where she could be consulted or produced as occasion demanded. Though Warham had recommended that she be transferred to Wolsey’s episcopal jurisdiction, even this did not occur. Instead, she was merely dismissed and sent back to Canterbury.
From the silence of the Tudor chroniclers about this first interview, it might never have occurred at all, perhaps, were it not for a letter of Sir Thomas More to Thomas Cromwell in February 1534 in which he tells how he:
Had heard some times in my Lord Cardinal’s days, that she had been both with his Lordship and with the King’s Grace, but what she said either to the one or to the other, upon my faith, I had never heard any one word.
Typically canny in his efforts not to incriminate himself, More knew full well, of course, that his accusers at that critical time could not hope to prove whether he had previously heard the Maid’s political revelations or not. And neither could they confirm that he knew for sure of her visits to the king and the cardinal in the first place, placing him under no compulsion to mention them at all. Instead he volunteered this information freely, which can only suggest that the meetings did actually occur. That More knew nothing of their content is also wholly plausible, since Barton’s oracles to the king only became common knowledge after the preaching campaign of the Observant Franciscans against the divorce began in 1532. In the meantime, a security screen had enveloped the whole affair, it seems, which might also explain George Cavendish’s silence on the matter.
It is curious too, perhaps, that no mention of the Maid occurs in Campeggio’s dispatches to the Holy See, particularly when she represented such an outspoken potential ally, for by this time, the legate’s task had been rendered even more intractable by events. He had tried, on the one hand, to call upon the good offices of the queen, to solve his quandary. If she could indeed be persuaded to enter a nunnery, for instance, there would be an adequate canonical case to allow her husband to remarry on the grounds that entry into a convent entailed a form of physical death for the person involved. This idea, first formulated by St Bonaventure three centuries earlier, doubtless had much to recommend it, since such an arrangement had already been employed when Jeanne de Valois, sometime wife of Louis XII, had humbly retreated to a nunnery at her husband’s wish. Moreover, even John Fisher, the queen’s staunchest supporter, was said by Campeggio to have warmed to the proposal when it was put to him. Catherine’s religiosity was known, after all, to be sufficiently ardent for such an option to be plausible, and she might still have enjoyed all the comforts and privileges of her royal station, since Henry, typically enthused by such a convenient solution, had hastened to asssure Campeggio how Catherine would lose only ‘the use of his person’, and be accorded due honour and privilege in all other respects. Most important of all from the queen’s point of view, her beloved daughter’s legitimacy and birthright would remain intact.
Yet no sooner had Catherine declined Campeggio’s initial proposal on 26 October, than another intemperate outburst by her husband put paid once and for all to any hope of breakthrough. For in a fit of rage the king had, it seems, insisted that the queen should accept Campeggio’s proposal without delay, and in October, too, he complained to the Privy Council about her behaviour in general. She was, he grumbled, too light-hearted and dressed too richly, and should be prayerful for justice rather than presenting herself in public. He even implied, at one point, that she was involved in a mysterious plot to kill him, all of which prompted a letter from the Privy Council in which Catherine was told with cudgel bluntness that she was ‘a fool to resist the King’s will’. Henceforth, therefore, the main barrier to divorce was no longer international power politics, but simply a slighted woman’s pride in the face of a torrid husband’s mistreatment and bluster, as both Wolsey and Campeggio would swiftly discover. For on one of their three subsequent visits to the queen, she listened patiently over the space of two hours to the inducements offered her: the beauties of a life of religious contemplation; the guarantee that she would retain her dowry; the promise that she would retain the guardianship of her daughter. But her only response was to request legal counsel. And at the end of discussion, it was to Campeggio rather than Wolsey that she chose to make her confession. What Catherine subsequently revealed, moreover, she urged him to communicate to the pope, even though it was rendered under the sacred seal of the confessional. Covering the whole of her life from the time of her arrival in England, she made it clear that she had not slept in the same bed with Arthur ‘more than seven nights’ and ‘that he had left her as he had found her – a virgin’. She affirmed, too, that ‘she intended to live and die in the estate of matrimony, to which God had called her’ and that ‘she would always remain of that opinion and never change it’.
On their next visit to the queen, meanwhile, Wolsey and Campeggio found her flanked by advisers, and as adamant as ever that she would do nothing either to condemn her soul or violate God’s laws, so that as Wolsey raised himself from his knees after one final flourish in which he pleaded that she listen to the voice of the Church, the course before him was at last clear. For, with the queen’s assent out of the question once and for all, the scene was now irrevocably set for all the high and public drama of his legatine court – though not, predictably, before a further series of random obstacles and painful twists and turns had run their weary course. In mid-November, for example, Catherine produced a copy of a further dispensation, hitherto unknown in England and dating from 1505, which appeared to undermine the whole case upon which Campeggio’s decretal bull was based. But then, as Sir Francis Bryan headed for Rome at Wolsey’s behest to prove the document spurious, other news arrived that the pope was mortally ill and that ‘another lapse will finish him’ – though Wolsey’s desperate fantasies of one further personal bid for the papacy and subsequent plans for hefty bribes proved fleeting, since Clement survived, and neither Stephen Gardiner’s ongoing pressure at Rome throughout the spring of 1529 nor Bryan’s best efforts yielded any progress. By Easter, indeed, Bryan had concluded that Henry’s cause was hopeless and, unlike Gardiner – who had been manfully gnawing at granite for all of fifteen months – he was prepared to say as much. ‘Neither fair means nor foul’ could at this point prevail upon the pope, he reported to Henry, and ‘if the cardinal feels aggrieved at the truth’, the message concluded, then ‘let him’.
Queen Catherine, of course, was not without her supporters, not least among the common people of London who were well accustomed to saying what they liked, and were already – according to both the French ambassador, du Bellay, and the devotedly loyal chronicler, Edward Hall – making their feelings known by booing cardinals as they passed, and cheering passionately on those occasions when Catherine ventured forth in public. And while it would be inaccurate to speak of anything approaching a ‘Queen’s party’ in more exalted circles at this time, there was nevertheless ample reason for the king to proceed with some caution towards the next and ultimate step. For besides the Spanish members of her suite – which included Jorge de Atheca, Bishop of Llandaff, her physicians, de la Sà and Fernando Vitoria, her sewer, Francisco Felipez, her apothecary, Miguel de Soto, and her favourite old lady-in-waiting, Maria de Salinas – there was also the support of Catherine’s long-standing personal friends like Mary, the king’s sister, for her to depend upon, as well as the good offices of other Englishwomen of high status like the Duchess of Norfolk, the ever-resourceful Marchioness of Exeter, and Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, who was still Princess Mary’s governess. Richard Fetherston, the princess’s tutor, the dauntless Dr Robert Ridley and the gifted Welsh scholar and preacher Dr Edward Powell were also equally unswerving in their loyalty, as were the Observant Franciscan friars, among whom numbered the queen’s confessor, Dr John Forest, another to suffer martyrdom later in the reign.
More significantly still, perhaps, there was Thomas Abell, Catherine’s chaplain, who would prove particularly outspoken in her defence and earn in consequence not only an entirely groundless citation in the Act of Attainder eventually employed against Elizabeth Barton but a martyr’s laurel of his own more than half a decade later. For the queen herself, notwithstanding strenuous efforts to implicate her, had studiously avoided all association with the Holy Maid, and her chaplain’s involvement, likewise, had never been more than marginal. Later, when the dust finally began to settle, Thomas Cromwell freely confessed to Eustace Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador, how he had used every trick he knew to extort evidence linking Catherine to the Maid, only to be thwarted at every turn, despite the fact that Barton had indeed been very insistent at various points in her desire to speak with her and to console her in her affliction. But Catherine had remained perfectly firm throughout in her personal loyalty to her husband – so much so, indeed, that Chapuys was to observe how her restraint and good sense in avoiding any action that might provoke suspicion seemed divinely inspired. And Thomas Abell too, in spite of his naturally combative nature, had been hardly less discreet in his dealings with Barton, though this would not spare him a charge of guilt by the most tenuous of links founded upon nothing more than the credence he had allegedly given to the nun’s ‘feigned revelations and miracles’ – which had inspired him, it was said, to set forth ‘divers’ books in England to the slander of the king, and thereby ‘animate’ the queen ‘to persist in her wilful opinion against the same divorce and separation’.
In fact, only one book would ever issue from Abell’s pen, though he had ultimately needed no inspiration from the Holy Maid to take up his mistress’s cause. Born around 1497 and educated at Oxford, where in 1516 he took the degree of Master of Arts, and subsequently acquired a doctorate in theology, he was in fact a shy, reserved, even cold and self-centred man, who apparently became the queen’s chaplain sometime before the beginning of 1528, since in that year the king made him a New Year’s gift in common with other members of her suite. But initially at least, there was certainly no discernible hint of any future disloyalty to the government as he proceeded to teach Catherine modern languages and music, and tended his everyday tasks dutifully. On the contrary, when the queen eventually dispatched him to Spain in quest of the original papal brief supporting the validity of her marriage, she actually appears – albeit through no fault of his – to have placed less than absolute confidence in his sympathies, partially concealing her motives for his mission and opting to send her faithful Spanish servant, Juan de Montoya, along with him. For only a little earlier she had expressed fear lest the brief should fall into her enemies’ hands, as the king’s agents were certain to spare no effort in obtaining it when there was no record of it in Rome, and there were in any case, as she well knew, informers all round her. Such, in fact, was her predicament that when the Imperial ambassador suggested she send a power of attorney to Rome, his advice, too, was refused on the simple grounds that she was surrounded by spies in her chamber and allowed so little freedom.
Under such circumstances, therefore, the queen’s anxiety was almost certainly so acute by this point that she felt unable to place faith in anyone whose absolute loyalty had not been tested already in some vital matter – a principle that applied in practice even to a chaplain who had given no grounds for distrust. Yet in spite of the queen’s apparent reservations and notwithstanding an arduous journey across the turbulent Bay of Biscay in the grim winter month of January, Abell had gone on to conduct his mission with commendable prudence and discretion, assuming direction of affairs over Montoya after their arrival, and setting forth in an interview with Charles V at Saragossa the reasons why the original brief should be kept in Spain and an attested copy brought back to England instead. For his services on this and other occasions, moreover, Abell would receive not only the award of the parochial benefice of Bradwell in Essex from Catherine upon his return, but something altogether more significant still: the unyielding animosity of her husband, as his defence of the queen’s interests became more tenacious than ever and, most significant of all, more and more overt. For once his teeth were set, Abell was unyielding, and by 1532 he had published his Invicta veritas. An answere, That by no manner of law, it may be lawfull for the most noble King of England, King Henry the eight to be divorced from the queens grace, his lawfull and very wife – a treatise printed by Merten de Keyser in Antwerp with the fictitious pressmark of Luneberge, to avoid suspicion. In it, moreover, Abell answered the numerous tracts supporting the king’s ecclesiastical claims so effectively that Henry duly bought up copies of the book in order to destroy them, before according the author the hospitality of the Beauchamp Tower in the Tower of London.
And this was not the end of Abell’s persecution. For after a year’s liberation, he was again imprisoned – this time in December 1533 – on hollow charges of disseminating the prophecies of the Maid of Kent. Kept in close confinement for six years until his persecutors had tired of breaking his spirit by any other means than the common executioner’s knot and blade, the Act of Attainder condemning him would declare how he had ‘most traitorously adhered himself unto the Bishop of Rome’ and ‘been a common enemy unto your Majesty and this your Realm, refusing your Highness to be our Supreme Head of this your Realm of England’. For which he was sentenced to be:
Drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, there to be hanged, cut down alive, your members to be cut off and cast in the fire, your bowels burnt before your eyes, your head smitten off, your body to be quartered at the King’s will.
With supreme irony, the butchery would be conducted ultimately at Smithfield, only two days after the execution of Thomas Cromwell himself, and on the very same occasion that three evangelical Protestants – Barnes, Garrett and Jerome – were not only burned alongside Abell and two other Catholics, but even tied on the same hurdles as their religious foes, prompting one foreigner, John Foxe tells us, to make the following memorable observation that could hardly have been more apt by that time: ‘What a country England is to live in when they hang papists and burn Anabaptists.’
Even now, in fact, there is still to be seen on the wall of Abell’s prison in the Tower of London a rebus consisting of the symbol of a bell with an ‘A’ upon it and the name Thomas above, which he carved during his confinement. There is also extant a very pious Latin letter written by him to a fellow martyr, and another to Cromwell, begging for some slight mitigation of his ‘close prison’, allowing him ‘license to go to church and say Mass here within the Tower and for to lie in some house upon the Green’. The application is signed ‘by your daily bedeman, Thomas Abell, priest’, and, needless to say, was never granted.
Plainly, when Iñigo de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, commented bitterly that ‘in matters of self-interest the English are without conscience of common honesty’, he could not have been thinking of Queen Catherine’s chaplain. Nor, as events would soon prove, could he have been referring to the most significant of all her supporters, who was once again stirring to assume centre stage after his earlier guarantee to Wolsey that he would not meddle in the queen’s affairs. For John Fisher had in fact been true to his word and confined himself in recent months to the administration of his diocese and his duties at Cambridge, where a statute had recently been passed in his honour, acknowledging his many benefactions, not only as adviser to Lady Margaret Beaufort in her foundations and in his labours to carry out her wishes, but also as a generous patron of the university in his own right and especially of St John’s College. All this, it was felt, numbered him among the college’s founders, and such was his reputation that it was also decided to establish an annual requiem on the day of his death. The statute ends, in fact, by hailing him as ‘the most learned father, head and glory of this republic of learning’, leaving Fisher himself to reply how such an honour was more fitting for a king than a ‘poor bishop’ (pauperculo pontifici), since he had only, in his own estimation, been the minister or agent of the king’s mother. As her confessor, he had advised her, for her soul’s wealth, to bequeath part of her wealth to the training of young men in learning and virtue so that they could preach the Gospel of Christ more effectively. And as such, he assured the senate that he would be more than content if they would link his name in their prayers with that of the noble lady.
But the same Bishop of Rochester’s modesty was nevertheless strikingly abandoned when the senate’s initial decision was challenged by none other than Richard Croke, Fellow of St John’s at Fisher’s own recommendation and the outstanding Greek scholar of his day. Only through Fisher’s influence, in fact, had Croke been retained at Cambridge at all instead of moving to Oxford as he had been urged to do by both Archbishop Warham and Sir Thomas More. Initially, indeed, Fisher had even paid the scholar’s salary, and upon his appointment in 1519, Croke had not hidden his gratitude, asking in his inaugural lecture:
What then is the message of my lord of Rochester? Why he exhorts them to apply themselves with all diligence to the study of Greek literature … The exhortation of one who had never urged them to ought but what was most profitable, might alone suffice.
Yet this had not prevented Croke, just under a decade later, from penning an ungracious letter to the senate objecting to the decision to name his benefactor as one of St John’s founders on the grounds that he had enriched himself and his relatives out of the Lady Margaret’s estates – a claim that Fisher not only firmly rejected, but which prompted a personal attack of his own, demonstrating all too aptly the sterner side of his nature. As chancellor, he declared, he had striven ‘by every means to ensure that that the glory of the Foundress shall shine, and her name be everywhere renowned!’, though this was only the prelude to a change of tack that smacked not only of righteous indignation but of a bristling loss of temper: ‘I hear you neither lecture, nor go to the common table, and also that you entertain guests from among the fellows in your rooms, against the statutes of the College, which I will not tolerate.’ Then, possibly recalling recent events, he not only pronounced that he would willingly lay down the chancellorship but included a remarkable full-frontal assault on Croke’s alleged religious sympathies:
Perhaps some other person will take it who likes the Lutheran doctrines … I do not doubt that the fathers and seniors of the University are much opposed to heresy, although there are many of you who are suspect, and some whose names are already noted.
It was a spiteful riposte and a sign, perhaps, that Fisher was experiencing more and more acutely the pressure of the gathering storm. There was more than peevishness involved and not a little childishness, indeed, in the hurt he had taken and the nature of the response, particularly in his supposed preparedness to give up his role on behalf of another ‘who likes the Lutheran doctrines’. But the letter remains a measure, too, of both Fisher’s fibre and his potential threat to the king’s plans in the struggle to come. For, like Thomas Abell, his teeth, once set, would not be gently released. On the contrary, he would grip and gnaw at an issue until the truth was discovered and justice vindicated, pursuing the logic of any argument with precisely the rigour and tenacity that one would expect from so gifted an academic. He had weighed the alternative cases, drawn his conclusions and was now poised for defence of those conclusions. In this, moreover, he was not alone. Others among his fellow bishops had also done precisely that. But they lacked the same pugnacious streak, and they lacked ultimately the curious combination of stubborn selflessness and egotism that makes so many martyrs. For the king, too, had weighed the alternative cases, drawn his conclusions, and was accordingly poised, not for defence but for attack. The storm had long been gathering. But now the heavens would open with a vengeance.