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I have asked counsel of the greatest clerks in Christendom, and for this cause I have sent for this legate as a man indifferent, only to know the truth and settle my conscience, and for no other cause as God can judge. And as touching the Queen, if it be adjudged by the law of God that she is my lawful wife, there were never thing more pleasant nor more acceptable to me in my life, both for the discharge and cheering of my conscience, and also for the good qualities and conditions, the which I know to be in her.
From a speech delivered by Henry VIII at Bridewell Palace on 5 November 1528.
When Henry VIII’s trap for the papal brief he desired so badly to discredit was forestalled by Thomas Abell’s intervention, any receding hopes for a speedy trial and resolution of the king’s torments had vanished altogether. Thereafter, royal agents in Rome laboured in vain, on a dozen flimsy pretexts, to have the brief declared a forgery, while Pope Clement was only too happy for the added delay. Campeggio too, nursing his gout as well as his shrinking treasury beside the foggy Thames, was no less glad of a further excuse for impeding a process that was by now so certain to end in failure. Like Clement, as long as no action was taken he could comfort himself with the hope that something might turn up – ‘that time would bring forth something’ to yield a breakthrough – by which he meant that either one of the principals would die, that Henry would lose his head and commit bigamy, or that Anne would someday fail to fend him off, and that once she was at last his bedmate, the king would lose his appetite for legal sanctions. Yet if Wolsey’s predicament could stir the Italian’s sympathy, the king’s agitated subterfuges aroused in him only sardonic amusement. The mighty ruler had, after all, hustled the object of his passion out of London before Campeggio’s arrival, then ridden after her to soothe his pangs of separation, and finally brought her back with the most transparent lack of discretion. He could, moreover, have spared himself the trouble, since the legate had known throughout of the lady in the case, and found it not a little amusing, indeed, that although she gave herself the airs of an acknowledged maîtresse en titre, her royal admirer was still unable to proceed to ‘the ultimate conjunction’ without the pope’s approval.
For Wolsey, of course, the situation was indeed now critical, since on 29 May the king had instructed him to proceed with Campeggio under the terms of Clement’s original commission, with the result that two days later formal arrangements were drawn up for Henry and Catherine to appear at Blackfriars on 18 June. Dangling agonisingly ‘betwixt hope and fear’, Wolsey still wondered in fact whether Clement might well renege upon his earlier guarantee and revoke the case to Rome. Even more perplexingly, however, he had received further confirmation of his own increasingly brittle relationship with the king. For during the previous summer he had blocked the appointment of Eleanor Carey as Abbess of Wilton and in doing so denied the wishes of Anne Boleyn. The result was a wholly unfamiliar barb from his royal master. ‘Ah! my lord’, wrote Henry:
It is a double offence, both to do ill and colour it, too; but with men that have wit it cannot be accepted so. Wherefore, good my lord, use no more that way with me, for there is no man living that more hateth it.
Nor was this all, for Henry then proceeded to twist the knife by questioning both Wolsey’s closure of certain monasteries and subsequent decision to redistribute the resulting funds to his beloved colleges at Oxford and Ipswich.
Naturally enough, therefore, it was with no little trepidation that, on Friday, 18 June 1529, Wolsey finally made his way to the long-awaited legatine court at Blackfriars, which lay conveniently near to the new palace of Bridewell just across the Fleet River. He was faced with the critical moment of his career and, though he only feared as much as yet, neither he nor Campeggio could actually deliver the favourable outcome on which all hinged. For, as the two scarlet-robed princes of the Universal Church, hatted, gloved and ringed, moved majestically to their chairs of state behind a railed and carpeted table, both were hopelessly at odds. As such, the great hall of the Dominican priory at Blackfriars – decked out ‘like a solemn court’ with carpets and wall tapestries – which had been the meeting place for the Parliament of 1523, may already have seemed more like a place of judgement for Wolsey personally; the queen’s eleven advocates (seven English, four foreign) more like his prosecutors than her defenders. And then, of course, there was Catherine herself to consider, by her own confession ‘a poor ignorant woman’ unversed in the law, but idolised nevertheless by the Londoners who thronged outside the building. She had wooed them, as Wolsey bitterly acknowledged, ‘by beckoning with her head and smiling’ – ‘which she had not been accustomed to do in times past’ – and now she was to have her moment.
Certainly, the queen’s advisers were a commendable and not unformidable array. Soon after Campeggio’s arrival in England, Henry had consulted her about the appointment of her counsellors in the coming trial, and she had stated at that time her clear preference for the assistance of Spanish advocates and proctors. Yet on grounds of the delay that this would involve, Catherine had been allowed only the services of two young lawyers from Flanders – de la Blekerie and Van Scoere – who, though excellent jurists, left soon after their arrival, since the time was not then ripe for action and there was little, in effect, for them to do. Thereafter, once Juan Luis Vives, her protégé, friend and pensioner, had deemed it unwise to represent her, the queen was dependent mainly upon English counsel. But two of these – John Fisher and Henry Standish, Bishop of St Asaph – were nevertheless major theologians, and the others, with the exception perhaps of Catherine’s Spanish confessor, Jorge de Atheca, Bishop of Llandaff, were comparable in proven ability and distinguished attainments with any advocate ranged against them on the king’s side. Four, including Dr Robert Ridley, were conspicuously able theologians, albeit of lesser repute than Fisher and Standish, while the civil and canon lawyers at the queen’s disposal were also figures of considerable reputation. For they included not only Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, Nicholas West, Bishop of Ely, and John Clerk, Bishop of Bath and Wells, but Archbishop Warham of Canterbury himself. All, it is true, lacked the steel in their characters possessed by most of the theologians who would sit alongside them at Blackfriars. Wolsey, indeed, had already told the king of Warham that he had ‘sufficiently instructed him how he shall order himself in case the Queen demands his counsel’. But their presence remained significant, to say the least, rendering the additional presence of the queen’s foreign counsellors almost an irrelevance.
Of the lesser theologians at the queen’s counsel bench, three, in fact, would ultimately suffer martyrdom. Thomas Abell went to Smithfield on 30 July 1540, and did so in the company of the other two – Richard Fetherston and Edward Powell – partially, no doubt, because he, like them, had first blackened his copybook at Blackfriars six years earlier, and not least either because all were simply too substantial to ignore. Fetherston was a graduate of Cambridge who, as Archdeacon of Brecon, had risen to become chaplain to Queen Catherine and tutor to her daughter, Princess Mary. And though there is actually no firm evidence that he had achieved the rank of Doctor of Theology at one of the English universities, he was nevertheless described by John Pits in his De illustribus Angliae scriptoribus as ‘sacrae theologiae Doctor’. No less a figure than Juan Luis Vives, moreover, described him as ‘learned and honest’ and deemed the cleric a worthy successor to himself as tutor to the princess:
As for your writing in Latin [Vives observed to the young Lady Mary upon his return to Spain], I am glad that ye shall change from me to Master Fetherstone, for that shall do you much good, to learn by him to write right.
And if Fetherston’s intellect was not in doubt, neither was his loyal advocacy of the queen’s cause, for even before the Blackfriars proceedings were under way, he had taken part in the session of Convocation that began in April 1529, and was one of the few members who refused to sign the act declaring the king’s marriage with Catherine to be illegal, ab initio, through the pope’s inability to grant a dispensation in such a case. Later, too, he is said to have written a treatise, Contra divortium Henrici et Catharinae, Liber unus, condeming the divorce – though no copy of the work is still extant – while in 1534, when called upon to take the oath of supremacy, he would resolutely refuse, resulting in his incarceration in the Tower of London on 13 December 1534, where he seems to have remained until his execution in 1540.
Equally unyielding to the king’s designs was the Welshman Dr Edward Powell, who had been born around 1478 and gone on to become a fellow of Oriel College at Oxford in 1495 before receiving the degree of Doctor of Divinity on 26 June 1506. Rector of Bleadon, Somerset, and prebendary of Centum Solidorum in Lincoln, which he exchanged for Carlton-cum-Thurlby in 1505, and the latter for Sutton-in-Marisco in 1525, he also held the prebends of Lyme Regis, Calstock, Bedminster, and St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, along with the living of St Edmond’s, Salisbury. But it was as a court preacher in high favour with Henry VIII that he first made his name, helping the king to write his Assertio Septem Sacramentorum in response to Martin Luther, and then publishing his own work on the subject in December 1523. Whereafter, the University of Oxford not only commended Powell’s work, but styled him ‘the glory of the university’ in a letter to the king, though Powell, too, became, in effect, a marked man from the time of his appointment to defend the legality of royal marriage, and particularly after his decision to write the Tractatus de non dissolvendo Henrici Regis cum Catherina matrimonio in its defence.
Nor was this the last or least of Powell’s ‘indiscretions’. For in March 1533, he was selected to answer Hugh Latimer at Bristol, and was alleged to have disparaged his opponent’s moral character. In consequence, Latimer complained to Thomas Cromwell, and Powell fell into further disfavour by denouncing Henry’s marriage with Anne Boleyn – after which his path to martyrdom followed the familiar course. Discharged from the proctorship of Salisbury in January 1534, he was attainted in November, together with John Fisher, for high treason in refusing to take the oath of succession, and deprived of his benefices, before being imprisoned in the Tower of London. Such was his perceived threat, moreover, that when his gaoler offered to allow both him and Thomas Abell to be freed temporarily on bail, the unfortunate man was sent to the Marshalsea Prison. Sadly, it was the last prospect of freedom that the dauntless doctor would ever be afforded. For, like Abell and Fetherstone, he too would be tied to a hurdle in the company of a Protestant fellow martyr en route to Smithfield in the summer of 1540. In Powell’s case, his companion was the Lutheran Robert Barnes, a divine like him, who had also fallen foul of the royal will, and whose treatment prompted an imaginary dialogue in verse, detailing the two men’s ordeal and highlighting its ironies – The Metynge of Doctor Barnes and Dr. Powell at Paradise Gate and of theyre communicacion bothe drawen to Smithfylde fro the Towar – which can still be found in the British Museum today.
But if some of the queen’s counsellors more than a decade earlier had therefore been made for martyrdom, others would ultimately prove more malleable. Henry Standish, for example, was from the outset the most doubtful of Catherine’s advocates at Blackriars, and inevitably perhaps, from the evidence of his earlier career, eventually chose to tie himself to the king’s chariot. He had studied at both Oxford and Cambridge, joined the Conventual as opposed to the Observant Franciscans, and gone on to become not only Warden of the Grey Friars at Newgate in London but Provincial of his Order. Before this, however, he had already come under Henry VIII’s favour and was for years a court preacher. Nor was it without significance that in the shockwaves resulting from the notorious ‘Hunne case’ of 1515, Standish should have seen fit to displease Convocation by opposing clerical immunity from secular courts, receiving the king’s protection in the process and consequently escaping without punishment. Three years later he was made Bishop of St Asaph, though not, it must be said, without the disapproval of Richard Pace, the king’s Latin secretary, who confided ironically to Wolsey that he was ‘right sorry for the good service he was like to do the Church’. And whether through ambition, pragmatism or principle, or perhaps a combination of all three, Standish would ultimately embrace the impending change of religious course without demur, even becoming in 1533 one of the three bishops who consecrated Thomas Cranmer Archbishop of Canterbury.
Four years earlier, he was prepared to speak in muted tones on the queen’s behalf, but not for long. And the same willingness to tow the new religious line was true eventually even of Robert Ridley, who also arrived at Blackfriars in the summer of 1529 to defend the queen’s marriage. Altogether more outspoken in his support than Standish, he came of an old-established gentle family, which for some 300 years had had its seat in South Tyneside. The Ridleys, indeed, had been substantial figures in Northumbrian affairs for much of that time, and the well-known religious conservatism of the north had not been without effect on Robert Ridley’s own Catholicism. At Cambridge and the Sorbonne he had proved an able scholar, and both at Cambridge and in London, where he served as Bishop Tunstall’s chaplain, he would become a figure of some prominence in the trials of heretics, notwithstanding the fact that his own nephew, Nicholas – for whose education at Pembroke Hall and the Sorbonne he provided – would be burned at the stake by Mary Tudor more than two decades later. Ordained either by John Fisher or Nicholas West of Ely, another of the queen’s counsellors, the younger Ridley’s fate was testament to the mounting tides that would sweep certain men on both sides of the religious divide from safety and conformity to the jagged rocks of moral defiance, though Robert Ridley’s charted course would involve little more than the comparatively cosy exchange of one type of conformity for another, as he too, alongside his former patron Cuthbert Tunstall, came in due course to accept the royal supremacy without resistance.
In this particular respect, moreover, as well as in its more general features, Tunstall’s career is of particular interest. For he was born at Hackforth near Bedale in North Yorkshire in 1474, an illegitimate son of Thomas Tunstall of Thurland Castle in Lancashire, and spent two years as a kitchen boy in the household of Sir Thomas Holland, perhaps at Lynn in Norfolk, before being admitted to Balliol College, Oxford, around 1491, where he studied mathematics, theology and law. Some five years later he became a scholar of the King’s Hall, Cambridge, though he did not in fact receive a degree from either Oxford or Cambridge, graduating instead from the University of Padua in 1505 with doctorates in both civil and canon law, after studying under some of Europe’s leading humanists and becoming proficient in both Greek and Hebrew. By this time Tunstall’s reputation for learning was so exceptional that he would be singled out for particular praise by Erasmus and become William Warham’s chancellor on 25 August 1511, shortly before his appointment as Rector of Harrow on the Hill, and subsequent appointment as a canon of Lincoln in 1514 and Archdeacon of Chester in 1515. And this, as it emerged, was only the end of the beginning, since he was frequently employed thereafter on diplomatic business: in 1515 at Flanders, where he established an intimate friendship with Erasmus and travelled alongside Sir Thomas More; in 1519 at Cologne; and during 1520–21 at Worms, which gave him a lasting sense of the significance held by the Lutheran movement and its literature. And in the meantime, he had been made Master of the Rolls in 1516, and subsequently Dean of Salisbury in 1521, after which he became Bishop of London by papal provision in 1522, and on 25 May 1523 Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, in which capacity he negotiated with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V after the Battle of Pavia, and helped to arrange the Peace of Cambrai in 1529.
By any standards, therefore, Tunstall’s career had been a glittering one. But in spite of his presence as Catherine’s advocate at Blackfriars, he too would join the king’s ranks as the breach with Rome finally unfolded. He did so, it is true, with reservations and moderation, and without, as he saw it, any fundamental sacrifice of his Catholic principles. Yet during the reign of Edward VI, Tunstall would suffer, first, house arrest and then imprisonment in the Tower and deprivation of his bishopric at Durham – to which he had been appointed in February 1530 – for resisting the more radical religious policies of the new reign. And although reinstalled under Mary Tudor, he was prepared once again to resist a ruler on grounds of conscience, refusing on the one hand to take the oath of supremacy under Elizabeth I, or, likewise, to participate in the consecration of the Anglican Matthew Parker as Archbishop of Canterbury. Indeed, though by then 85 years old, he suffered arrest, deprivation of his diocese in September 1559, and imprisonment at Lambeth Palace, where he died within a few weeks. As such, his moral fibre was never in doubt and, if circumstances had dictated otherwise, there seems little doubt that he, too, might have been prepared to face the rigours of the scaffold. But under Henry VIII his position had amounted only to passive obedience, in direct contrast to those others now ranged alongside him at Blackfriars who, on the self-same grounds of conscience, would ultimately wend their way to Tower Hill or Smithfield.
Tunstall’s tight-lipped compliance would hold true for the vast majority of the episcopacy as the story of the breach with Rome unfolded with all its twists and turns, and its ripples and eddies carried people first one way and then another, sometimes washing them to shores that even they themselves could never have predicted. One-time keen conservative Robert Ridley, for example, had actually been a significant influence upon Thomas Cranmer, who, in a letter of 1532 to the distinguished German theologian Johann Cochlaeus, freely acknowledged his debt. Cranmer regarded the conservative Ridley not only as his teacher but as a source of particular inspiration in philosophy, and this may explain why the man who eventually married Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn had himself, on some occasions, shown wavering degrees of loyalty both to the king and his schemes for the divorce. Certainly, this was the opinion of Granvelle, the Holy Roman Emperor’s chancellor, who later declared how surprised he was at Cranmer’s support for Anne Boleyn in 1533, since he had been at Ratisbon only the previous year and roundly criticised what the English king and his ministers were doing at the time. Plainly, in a situation of flux and turmoil individuals are apt to behave unpredictably, particularly when their own fortitude is less than guaranteed, and in such circumstances, the best safe haven is often the new consensus that finally emerges from pressure at the centre – in this case the remorseless influence of the king himself. Under such circumstances, Cranmer was perhaps only typical of a timid mind, lifted from the quietude of his Cambridge study to become, at a most crucial moment in his country’s history, a man of affairs. At the defining period of his life, two reigns later, of course, he would pendulate much more widely still, only to find his mettle by the most roundabout of routes and emerge in his own right as a martyr to his persecutor’s flames.
There was vacillation too for another member of Queen Catherine’s legal team: John Clerk, Bishop of Bath and Wells, who had studied at Bologna, receiving a doctor’s degree in law there, before becoming Dean of Windsor from 1519 to 1523. Certainly, there had been early hope at Blackfriars that he might display a forthrightness equal to John Fisher’s, for on the day after Catherine’s last appearance at the court he would come before it, intrepidly asserting, according to the Venetian ambassador, that to prevent the king from falling into mortal sin, both he and the Bishop of Rochester would defend the rights of the queen to the limit and demonstrate how she was his legitimate wife. Even more surprisingly, perhaps, both Clerk and Fisher would not only go on to present a writ of appeal against the tribunal itself, but reject its two judges as suspect. Yet only a few weeks after proceedings at Blackfriars had run their course, Clerk duly altered his tune, on the grounds that the revocation of the case to Rome had tied England’s hands, and that, in consequence, the queen should not attempt to advance her claims further. While Fisher remained unwavering, both Clerk and Tunstall would try to dissuade her altogether from attempting to pursue her suit at Rome, after Wolsey had told the former of the danger to her were she to act thus. All this Clerk knew well, of course, just as he knew of the danger involved for him personally, as a result of which he declined to act further as Catherine’s counsellor, opting instead for loyal service to her nemesis. Indeed, when the time came, he would not only keenly endorse the annulment but actually help Cranmer draft the 1534 Act of Supremacy.
Such, then, were the varied responses of Catherine’s advisers to what would prove to be their failure in the fateful summer of 1529, though for one at least – Nicholas West, Bishop of Ely – the ultimate agonising choice would never in fact arrive, since his death at the age of 72 on 28 April 1533 came at a time before the king’s claims to supremacy had hardened into relentless fact. Beforehand, however, he too had been no less torn than so many of his counterparts by the conflicting loyalties engendered by the royal divorce. Certainly, his pedigree of long service to the Crown was impeccable, for after his ordination and fellowship at Cambridge, which dated to 1486, he became chaplain to Henry VII and, from 1509, Dean of St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Thereafter, as Bishop of Ely, which he became in 1515, he continued his long and successful association with the Crown as a diplomatist, which had had begun as early as 1502 through his friendship with Richard Foxe, Bishop of Durham, and encompassed among other things: visits to Emperor Maximilian I and George, Duke of Saxony; the negotiation of an important commercial treaty with Flanders in 1506; attempts to arrange marriages between Henry VIII’s daughter Mary and the future Emperor Charles V, and between the king himself and Charles’s sister Margaret; as well as numerous embassies to France and Scotland, relating most notably to the French peace treaties of 1518 and 1525 and the negotiations at the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520. At other times too, equally significantly, he was employed on personal matters by Cardinal Wolsey, living like the cardinal himself, it seems, ‘in greater splendour than any other prelate of his time, having more than a hundred servants’ – though none of this would stop him ultimately from witnessing the queen’s appeal to the pope when it was drawn up on 16 June 1529, and providing yet another example of the unpredictability of the allegiances now to unfold at Blackfriars.
For at least one of those present that summer, however, there was no hint of ambivalence or equivocation: a tall, frailly thin figure, of greatly dignified and scholarly bearing whom one probable eyewitness of the scene, George Cavendish, described as ‘a very godly man who after suffered death … which was greatly lamented through all the universities of Christendom’. The individual cited by Cavendish was, of course, John Fisher, who, as we have seen, was to remark towards the end of his life that of all the controversies in which he had become embroiled – including his remorseless polemical battle with Martin Luther – none had cost him more effort than that involving the king’s marriage. And those efforts would now not only reach their climax, but confirm in effect, once and for all, the full scale of both his opposition and the threat it represented: not least because his writings against Luther – as well as those refuting Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, in which he debunked the medieval cult of the Magdalene as unscriptural – had been extensive enough in their own right to establish him as one of the controversialists on the European scene in the 1520s. Between 1522 and 1527, when he indicated his intention to withdraw from such writings, he had expended well over half a million words on five volumes of Latin polemic: a tract against the humanist Velenius defending the historicity of the tradition associating the apostle Peter with Rome; three works against Luther himself, including the Assertionis Lutheranae Confutatio of 1523, which constituted the first comprehensive rebuttal of the German’s teachings; and what can only be termed a blockbuster of some 220,000 words against the eucharistic doctrine of the Swiss reformer Oecolampadius, in 1527. And now, after two further pamphlets in English originating in keynote sermons at Paul’s Cross – the first on the occasion of the burning of heretical books organised by Wolsey in 1521, the second, by royal command, on the abjuration of Robert Barnes in 1526 – he was set to supplement his leadership in English academic circles with what amounted, quite literally, to a ‘life-or-death’ mission on behalf of the sanctity of the royal marriage.
It was a measure of the moral stature already obtained by Fisher, of course, that when the king first began his quest for a divorce in the spring of 1527, almost his very first move had been to attempt to secure the support of the Bishop of Rochester, though as the controversy developed, Henry’s early admiration for ‘the saintliest bishop in Christendom’ swiftly turned to venom, which, under the circumstances and in light of the man concerned, is hardly surprising. For when interrogated in the Tower in 1534, Fisher estimated that he had written no fewer than ‘seven or eight’ works in defence of the queen’s cause, four of which are known to survive, along with the outline of a further two and broad hints about the content of another. Perhaps the most significant, De Causa Matrimonii, was in all likelihood smuggled out of England in the Spanish ambassador’s diplomatic bag, and printed in Alcalá in 1530. And this book alone, along with a sheaf of letters that also still survives, leaves little doubt of a characteristically relentless campaign on their author’s part. Certainly, Fisher’s writings were praised by supporters of the queen as diverse as the Imperial ambassador, Chapuys, and theologians like Johann Cochlaeus and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. But perhaps the most telling indicator of both their quality and quantity is the simple fact that while the king’s advisers expressed little but contempt for his contributions, they nevertheless wrote more refutations of his works than any other. Indeed, until the appearance in 1531 of Gravissimae Censurae – a book summarising the opinions of the European universities that had been prepared at the king’s order in the latter part of the previous year – Fisher’s output determined the entire direction of the controversy, and even as late as 1534, he would be regarded as the man to beat, with two refutations of his arguments published in that year alone, though by that time, as the Gravissimae Censurae had already effectively confirmed three years earlier, his adversaries had been reduced to the basest techniques of misrepresentation and special pleading. For on theoretical grounds at least – whether in the exegesis of the Hebrew, in the evaluation and collation of scriptural texts, in the interpretation of patristic and scholastic writers, or in the application of theological and philosophical concepts of law – there could be no doubt that the object of their attack had bested them on all fronts.
Yet the dilemmas of the summer of 1529 and the years that followed were not, of course, to be resolved by dispassionate discourse and impartial legal process, but by policy, self-interest and force. And when Fisher made his mark at Blackfriars, his brazen defiance could have only one long-term outcome. In any case, the proceedings of the legatine tribunal had been immediately and irretrievably marred by the queen’s total refusal to co-operate, since she appeared in person only at the second and third sessions on 18 and 21 June, and only then to protest against the possibility of receiving a fair hearing in England and to lodge her appeal in Rome. Upon her first appearance, moreover, she protested vehemently against Wolsey’s appointment as judge before withdrawing regally and declaring famously how ‘I be no Englishwoman but a Spaniard born!’, though it was for her second and final appearance that the plump figure, dressed in a gown of crimson velvet edged with sable, saved what was indubitably her most widely remembered performance. For with flagrant disregard for official procedure, she weaved her way with high drama through crowded benches and tables to fall on her knees before her husband, pleading to him not to dishonour her or disown their daughter, while he sat staring past her, making no comment when she had finished, or as she swept from the courtroom to the loud acclaim of the crowds outside.
After this Catherine made no further appearance. Nor was there any real need, however, for although proceedings had indeed been of dubious legality from the outset, John Fisher took up her cause – albeit unofficially in view of her appeal to Rome – with a boldness and eloquence that remains remarkable across the centuries. Certainly, Campeggio was shocked at the court’s irregularities, consoling himself as best he might that ‘in the house of a foreigner one cannot do all one wishes’. But the die was cast and the Bishop of Rochester, notwithstanding his own obsession with niceties, legal and otherwise, would not be reined in. For when the king saw fit, after his wife’s departure, to refer to Wolsey’s secret tribunal of May 1527 and to the support he had received from the episcopacy at that time, the scene was set for an explosive exchange recorded by George Cavendish:
I moved you first my Lord of Canterbury [Henry declared], asking your licence, forasmuch as you were our metropolitan, to put this matter in question; and so I did of all you my lords [bishops] to the which ye have all granted by writing under all your seals, the which I have here to be showed.
But when Warham confirmed the king’s claim, Fisher strenuously denied it, as Cavendish makes all too abundantly clear in his description of the archbishop’s affirmation and the extraordinary exchange that resulted, in which the Bishop of Rochester not only stood firm against both his monarch and his ecclesiastical superior, but boldly implied that they were all but liars, reducing even the king himself to the lamest possible final word on the issue. Such is the significance of the altercation as, arguably, one of the most noteworthy in the entire history of England’s breach with Rome that it is worth repeating in full:
‘That is truth if it please your highmess,’ quoth the Bishop of Canterbury, ‘I doubt not but all my brethren here present here will affirm the same.’
‘No, sir, not I,’ quoth the Bishop of Rochester, ‘ye have not my consent thereto.’
‘No hath,’ quoth the king, ‘look here upon this, is not this your hand and seal?’ And showed him the instrument with seals.
‘No, forsooth, sire,’ quoth the Bishop of Rochester, ‘it is not my hand nor seal?’
‘Yes, sir,’ quoth he [i.e. Warham].
‘That is not so,’ quoth the Bishop of Rochester, ‘for indeed you were in hand with me to have my hand and seal, as other of my lords had already done; but then I said to you, that I would never consent to no such act, for it were much against my conscience; nor my hand and seal should never be seen at any such instrument, God willing, with much more matter touching the same communication between us.’
‘You say truth,’ quoth the Bishop of Canterbury, ‘such words ye said unto me; but at the last ye were fully persuaded that I should for you subscribe your name and put-to a seal myself, and ye would allow the same.’
‘All which words and matter,’ quoth the Bishop of Rochester, ‘under your correction, my lord, and supportation of this noble audience, there is no thing more untrue.’
‘Well, well,’ quoth the king, ‘it shall make no matter; we will not stand with you in argument herein, for you are but one man.’
Yet, to the king’s infinite discomfort and displeasure, that one man was far from done. For on what is likely to have been only the following day, both Fisher and Dr Robert Ridley were this time sorely at odds with Wolsey over the alleged consummation of Catherine’s marriage to Prince Arthur, and the cardinal’s contention that ‘no man could know the truth about the matter’, which, according to Cavendish, Fisher rejected out of hand as follows:
‘Yes,’ quoth the Bishop of Rochester, ‘Ego nosco veritatem [I know the truth].’
‘How know you the truth?’ quoth my lord Cardinal.
‘Forsooth my lord,’ quoth he, ‘Ego sum professor veritatis [I myself am a professor of truth]; I know that God is truth itself, nor he never spake but truth; which said quod deus coniunxit homo non separet [whom God has joined together, let no man put asunder]. And forasmuch as this marriage was made and joined by God to a good intent, I say that I know the truth the which cannot be broken or loosed by the power of man upon no feigned occasion.’
The sting, of course, lay in the final phrase, ‘upon no feigned occasion’, confirming quite categorically that Fisher’s recalcitrance the previous day was no fleeting aberration. On the contrary, this was only the beginning, as both the king and Wolsey no doubt fully appreciated, of an escalation of opposition that might lead they knew not where. For Dr Ridley too, emboldened no doubt by Fisher’s example, took up the assault, focusing in his case upon the ‘divers presumptions’, i.e. depositions, cited by Wolsey, which were purported by the king’s counsellors to demonstrate that his marriage had not been valid from the beginning. If so, the proponents of the divorce maintained, employing the semblance at least of a sound syllogism, the marriage was not joined by God and therefore unlawful, since God ordains nothing without ‘just order’. But, as Ridley well knew, all depended upon the ‘presumptions’, which he proceeded to attack with a vigour not dissimilar to Fisher’s own, declaring quite unapologetically how it was a shame, and greatly to the dishonour of everyone assembled, that any such presumptions should be alleged in open court, since they were to all good and honest men ‘most detestable to be rehearsed’. Most reprehensible of all, of course, were those depositions collected by the government that concerned the details of what had occurred on the royal couple’s wedding night. And though Ridley did not refer to them specifically, he left little doubt of his intentions after Wolsey vainly instructed him to treat these ‘presumptions’ with greater respect: ‘No, no, my lord [declared the bishop], there belongeth no reverence to be given to these abominable presumptions, for an unreverent tale must be unreverently answered.’
The battle, then, had clearly been openly and fully joined in a way that raises a host of intriguing question marks against the power of Wolsey, and indeed the king himself, to intimidate unconditionally those they chose to target. Yet after the ringing crescendos of 21 and 22 June, there followed a subsequent six days of tedious technicalities and dull routine until Fisher once again breathed life into the faltering court. He was present at Blackfriars, in fact, on each session of which there is record, and on 28 June, at the fifth session, he delivered an impassioned oration, described by Campeggio’s secretary, which struck like a thunderbolt and openly signalled his readiness from this point onwards for martyrdom. Nor was the date coincidental, since this was the eve of the nativity of John the Baptist, who had himself been put to death by King Herod.
Under the circumstances, the resulting speech could hardly have been more provocative, not only casting Henry in the role of one of the great biblical tyrants, but denying, at one and the same time, a frequently cited mainstay of the entire royal case: namely that the sin for which Herod had been upbraided by the Baptist was the identical offence of infringing Leviticus by marrying the wife (Herodias) of his own brother (Philip). On the contrary, Fisher maintained, there was a whole raft of technical reasons why the two cases were crucially different. And as a result, even five years before Fisher’s arrival upon Tower Hill, it seems that he had crossed a Rubicon from which there could be no hope of return. Like many other martyrs of his kind, he had died, in effect, long before the moment of extinction actually arrived, achieving in the process, if his subsequent behaviour is any guide, a resignation and peace of mind that comes with acknowledgement of the inevitable and the certainty of ultimate victory and happiness beyond death. It was a state of being that brought with it too, of course, a profound sense of liberation and indeed exhilaration, representing a critical dilemma for a government not yet committed, or even aware of how to achieve, the wholesale eradication of dissent.
As Campeggio’s secretary describes them, events at the fifth Blackfriars session unfolded as follows:
Yesterday the fifth audience was given. While the proceedings were going on as usual, owing to the queen’s contumacy, the Bishop of Rochester made his appearance, and said, in an appropriate speech, that in a former audience he had heard the king’s majesty discuss the cause, and testify before all that his only intention was to get justice done, and to relieve himself of the scruple that he had on his conscience, inviting both the judges and everyone else to throw some light on the investigation of the cause, because on this account he found his mind much distressed and perplexed. If on this offer and command of the king he [Fisher] did not come forward in public and manifest what he had discovered in this matter after two years most diligent study [he would be failing in his duty].
Therefore, both in order not to procure the damnation of his soul, and in order not to be unfaithful to the king, or to fail in doing the duty which he owed to the truth in a matter of such importance, he presented himself before their lordships to declare, to affirm, and with forcible reasons to demonstrate to them that this marriage of the king and the queen can be dissolved by no power, human or divine, and for this opinion he declared he would even lay down his life. He added that the Baptist in olden times regarded it as impossible to die more gloriously than in the cause of marriage, and that since it was not so holy at that time as it has now become by the shedding of Christ’s blood, he could encourage himself more ardently, more effectually, and with greater confidence, to dare any great or extreme peril whatever. He used many other suitable words, and at the end presented a small book [libellus] which had been written by him.
Campeggio’s secretary mentions, too, how Henry Standish then spoke, ‘expressing nearly the same opinion, but with less polished eloquence and in briefer terms’, as did another unnamed figure ‘who alleged various arguments from the sacred canons, which were not very cogent’. Clearly, Fisher was already in a league of his own, and firmly established not only as the centrepiece of any further resistance but, more importantly still, as a loose cannon whose campaign against the divorce was barely under way.
This affair [the secretary concluded] was unexpected and unforeseen, and consequently has kept everyone in wonder. What he will do we shall see when the day comes. You already know what sort of man he is, and may imagine what is likely to happen.
Most worrying of all, however, was the simple inability of the Bishop of Rochester’s protagonists to parry even partially the force of his arguments or the power of his rhetoric. For as the French ambassador, Du Bellay, who was also present, noted: ‘A rather modest answer was made by the judges, that it was not his business to pronounce so decidedly in the matter as the cause was not committed to him.’ And if Fisher’s speeches could not be countered effectively, the small book he submitted at the time only added to the government’s perplexity and the growing anger of the king himself.
Such libelli were not, in fact, uncommon. On the contrary, counsel on both sides regularly submitted statements of learned opinion to the legatine court – sometimes on points of canon law, and sometimes on the general issues – so that on 9 July, for example, eight such ‘libels’ would be presented on behalf of the king, and seven in support of the queen. Of these latter, two were from the Bishop of Ely (Nicholas West), two from the Bishop of London (Cuthbert Tunstall), one from Richard Gwent (a canonist and later Archdeacon of London) and two more from the Bishop of Rochester. But the treatise submitted by Fisher on 28 June carried with it particular potency. Consisting of about 16,000 words and entitled Licitum fuisse, it is divided into six axioms of unequal length, the first two of which alone are given detailed consideration in the surviving manuscript. The first and longest deals with the central question of whether or not marriage to a brother’s widow was forbidden by divine law. The second encompasses the theory and practice of papal dispensations, while the remaining four briefly affirm that if the marriage was indeed dispensable and had in this case been dispensed appropriately, then Henry’s union with Catherine had been properly arranged, contracted and sacramentally sealed, and was thus indissoluble. As might be expected, the document is framed in highly scholastic fashion, containing extensive biblical references, especially to the case of Thamar and the sons of Judah in Genesis 38, in which Judah had not only instructed his second son, Onan, to marry Thamar, the wife of his first son, Er, but also his third son, Shelah, after Onan had also died without offspring. But the upshot was another stinging broadside against the king’s case, reducing the entire problem to a series of simple propositions and plain truths that sliced at a stroke through the mire of subtle distinctions and conflicting witness that had so far bedeviled the court – leaving the outraged king with but one alternative. For although he still clung vainly to the delusion that the court could not dare to reject his wishes ultimately, Fisher’s resort to brass tacks would be fatal to the moral foundation of any favourable outcome unless effectively and immediately rebutted.
The man chosen for this unenviable task was Stephen Gardiner. Fifteen years younger than the man he was instructed to attack, Gardiner nevertheless boasted a brilliant career at Cambridge where he had distinguished himself in civil and canon law, becoming Master of Trinity Hall in 1525, before being entrusted with the ill-fated embassy to Rome of 1528, where, in the company of Edward Fox, he set out to browbeat the pope with an arrogance and insolence that few envoys have dared to emulate. Certainly, he was a man of razor tongue, and although we have no knowledge of his previous relations with John Fisher as chancellor of his university, the personal animosity with which he conducted his current errand on behalf of the king is striking. By now in Wolsey’s service and soon to be the king’s secretary, Gardiner had, no doubt, been fully briefed by Henry concerning the lines upon which the attack should proceed, but the result was a work that, while beginning reasonably enough perhaps, would amount overall to a diatribe of remarkable bitterness, written as if delivered by Henry himself, which Fisher was handed in manuscript form and duly annotated with margin notes, highlighted in italics in the lengthy opening passage from the introduction provided below.
Since in this matrimonial cause now to be investigated, or in the controversy now to be determined, we have attempted or designed nothing, on our own authority, which were unsuited to the office of a true Christian prince; but on the contrary have always had regard before everything to equity, justice and truth, and have everywhere held that the judgement of the Church was to be deferred to with great respect; relying upon our consciousness of this our innocence, we hoped, O judges, that we should have all the best men as supporters of our honour, our efforts and our purposes, and hardly thought that there might come forth anyone to disgrace such a dutiful mind as ours, show enmity to our virtue, and jealousy of our fame. If this was to be (and we are not ignorant how many things have deceived the wisest, even in regard to their own concerns, and to public affairs), yet we never supposed, O Judges, that the bishop of Rochester would take up before your tribunal that accusation against ourselves, which would rather befit the hatred, or better still the fury, of bad citizens, and a multitude seditiously roused, than his own virtue and dignity. Of a certainty, O Judges, we did unfold to this Rochester, and this already some months ago [Fisher: nearly a year ago], and more than once, how far we had been from purposely seeking out or rashly devising those reasons, which long before had engendered us in scruples of conscience, in regard to this illegitimate and incestuous marriage. Which reasons this very Rochester thus far then approved, and deemed so weighty and powerful, that unless we applied to the oracle of our most serene Lord [the pope], which he then thought it necessary to consult upon those matters, he did not believe that our former peace of mind could be restored to us. [Fisher: I did not say so, but the cardinal would have been glad if I had said so]. Now when this same our most holy Lord [the pope] (yet not without the advice and opinion of some of the most reverend cardinals of the apostolic see, and of other members of the Roman court, most eminent for their worthiness and erudition) had judged that these same reasons made the cause of our marriage so intricate and ambiguous, that only through the ruling of the best chosen and most discreet judges could it be treated and set forth according to its dignity and magnitude; and when he has, most in accordance with your deserts, entrusted it to you, O Judges, and to your scrupulousness to be wholly determined; and has sent thee here, O most reverend Campegius, for no other reason, to the great charges indeed of his Holiness, and to thy huge peril and travail through the dangers of so many things and ways; what shall we believe, O judges, to have come into the mind of this Rochester, or by what spirit shall we think he has been led, to come here so impudently and so much out of season [Fisher: I was obliged to this by the protestation of the king and cardinal], in order to declare his own personal view of the matter, now at length after so many months, and even here before such a great and illustrious assembly as that of your court.
It had been of constancy on his part, not to ascribe now at last in public those scruples of conscience, which he had once thought we were right in harbouring, to mere commonplaces (as he calls them), to subtleties only probable in appearance, and other gilded persuasions of rhetoricians. It had been of Christian piety (if indeed by study of many opinions he had succeeded in ascertaining thoroughly what in this cause was just, what true, what lawful), to have reminded us of it again and again in private, and not to proclaim with such huge self-confidence, to the great blemishing of our conscience; it had been of his duty, of his faith and of his loyalty (which every good citizen owes to his king) to protect and vindicate our conscience from the calumnies of evil men; and since he saw, by tokens in no wise obscure, our conscience labour and fluctuate, to hasten to its help by all possible means; it had been of pious reverence and observance which he owes to the supreme Pontiff, when the latter had decreed that this cause was exceedingly intricate, and especially necessary to the preservation of this our realm, so that he could weigh everything by yourselves judging supremely, to acquiesce in his decision, rather than publicly to charge his Holiness with levity, as if the truth of the cause he had committed to you for investigation, and was so obvious, easy, plain, and open, that it would be foolish to call into question. [Fisher: It is not obvious to all, but only to those who are compelled to study it].
Lastly it had been of wisdom and modesty, when you had commenced in the cause assigned to you according to the most ample authority of your jurisdiction, to allow to you a free order of trial, and not to prescribe to you a so to say new formula for judging, and to bring forward of his own authority before your sentence.
Significantly, of course, the fulsome reference to ‘pious reverence and observance’ owed to the pope is a telling reflection of the king’s ongoing allegiance to the Holy See, just as his unwavering respect for the legatine court itself leaves little doubt, at this stage, of his continued confidence in the likelihood of a favourable judgement. Nor, of course, is it any less plain from the surprisingly clumsy reference to ‘this illegitimate and incestuous marriage’, that the king had already pre-judged the outcome of the tribunal, notwithstanding the implied subservience of his supposedly ‘dutiful mind’ to the eventual verdict of its judges. But in a number of respects the points made against Fisher up to this point do indeed appear to carry a certain degree of force. For he had indeed, it might well be argued, exceeded his rightful brief at a number of levels, and in doing so behaved with an outspoken belligerence that not only transgressed, but actually shattered conventional standards of respect, both to the Crown and the pope. He had succumbed, it seems, to the kind of rush of blood that had overcome him in his dealings with Richard Croke, but now he had done so with both Wolsey, and far more importantly still, the king himself, rendering the references to his ‘loyalty’ and ‘the preservation of this our realm’ especially noteworthy. If, moreover, Henry had indeed pre-judged the case, the argument that Fisher had also preempted proceedings was far from groundless either, since the pronouncement of a verdict remained, of course, the judges’ prerogative. Even Fisher’s margin comments, for that matter, exhibit a characteristic testiness that serves, arguably, to reinforce the very claims against him.
Yet from this point onwards, the quickness and depth of the king’s anger would dwarf even Fisher’s own. For, after a comparatively moderate beginning, Gardiner’s invective against Fisher on the king’s behalf assumed the following far more vitriolic turn:
But it is in vain that we require those things of this bishop, O Judges, whose breast and heart are so filled and stirred up by two most evil advisers, namely a certain immoderate arrogance, and a too self-confident temerity. (Fisher: Arrogance – temerity). For else whence did these words proceed, O Judges, that he would by sound and unanswerable arguments, at once place before your eyes, and those of all men, the naked truth of this cause; and that indeed he would defend it constantly, and defend it indeed as far as the stake (Fisher: I said nothing of that); and that he had now a juster cause, in withstanding the dissolution of this marriage than Saint John the Baptist had once had against Herod. O voice devoid of all modesty and gravity! (Fisher: What more did I attest than the cardinal who [affirmed] he would be burnt or torn limb from limb rather than act contrary to justice?) As if indeed, alone of all men, Rochester was gifted with discernment, and alone had investigated and illuminated the truth of this case.
And what need was there for him to declare himself ready to endure fire and flame for that reason, when such manifest tokens gave him evident proof of our clemency and our zeal to protect, and not oppress, truth. And lastly how unjust is that comparison, by which he labours to couple together his cause and that of the holy Baptist. Unless perhaps he has conceived that opinion of ourselves, that apparently we were somehow playing the Herod, or daring some crime akin to the crime of Herod. To be sure, O Judges, never did Herod’s impiety bear a pleasing aspect for us; and certainly we did learn from the rule of the Gospel and the voice of the Baptist that this in him was to be condemned, that he had taken to his wife the sister of his brother. But whichever of the two things Rochester may think in regard to us, we were always far removed from Herod’s cruelty. If ever we proceeded with any severity against those who appeared to look upon this divorce with little favour, and did not rather lovingly draw them to ourselves with the highest favours, in proportion to their virtues, let Rochester come, and justly cast Herod’s tyranny in our teeth. But let this man’s evil-speaking against us his prince, be his own punishment. Yet, O Judges, lest you might be steeped in darkness, and lest your judgement might be hindered by his assertion, uttered with great haughtiness, that he has now at last found the very truth, and plucked it out of darkness, it behoves us to examine this bragging and more than thrasonical pomposity of words.
Even in light of the stylistic conventions of the time, which, particularly in polemical works, could often exhibit a level of personal insult jarring to modern readers, Gardiner’s onslaught was strong medicine, especially when it was composed to be passed off as the king’s own. Certainly, Henry approved it and may even have edited it, which would explain not only the careless reference to his ‘illegitmate and incestuous marriage’ but also the technically unsound reference to Herod’s marriage, since the issue there had actually been the prior divorce of Herod’s wife, Herodias, from his half-brother Philip, which was deemed contrary to Jewish law. In any event, the danger for Fisher was now manifest and, if anything, heightened not only by his own unwillingness to retreat or compromise on theoretical grounds, but by his apparent inability to consider how his objections might have been expressed less challengingly. How, for example, he could suggest in his margin notes that he ‘did not understand’ why the king might interpret his comments as an attempt to place him on the same plain as Herod, is as hard to understand as some of his other quibbles concerning certain of Gardiner’s slips elsewhere. The Bishop of Rochester’s comments smack at times, indeed, of the schoolmaster with his pupil, and, ironically enough, confirm in part what was actually the most telling of all the criticisms directed against him, namely, that in pursuing the truth, he could lose sight of the sensibilities of those with whom he was dealing and slip into the very kind of ‘thrasonical pomposity of words’ cited so pompously by Gardiner himself. It was, of course, the perennial pitfall of the academic. But, if harmless enough in the lecture hall, at the centre of a budding political crisis, it could hardly have been more provocative, especially when the arguments put forward were, indeed, infuratingly ‘sound and unanswerable’.
For when Gardiner turned to a defence of the king’s case, he could only rehearse the old justifications that were as familiar as they were flawed. Once more the validity of the dispensation was questioned on the grounds that the pope had been misled, since there was, in fact, no danger of war between England and Spain to justify the marriage in the way that had been proposed at the time. Likewise, the tired old contentions that Henry had been too young to make a responsible decision when first betrothed were merely rehashed and the relevant texts in Leviticus and Deuteronomy pored over yet again with no fresh insights. Nor were the king’s other counsellors able to stage even remotely convincing minor hits upon Fisher’s position, as his mastery of biblical exegesis allowed him not only to counter their every move, but even to engage in what appears, on occasion, to have come very close to outright mockery, as the desperation of his adversaries became more apparent. When they argued, for example, that the marriage forbidden by Leviticus must have been intrinsically immoral, since it was described by Moses as an ‘abomination’, Fisher proceeded to point out that many things proscribed in Leviticus were nevertheless widely practised among Christians, including transvestism, which was permitted in plays, and the eating of eels. And this was not all. For Fisher also went so far as to examine the genealogy of Christ himself, alluding to the discrepancy between Matthew and Luke over the identity of Joseph’s father, and concluding that it could be resolved if his mother had married two brothers under the injunction of Deuteronomy, making one his natural, and the other his legal, father.
Several months before the commencement of the tribunal, however, rumours had reached Fisher that the scholar who had actually taught him the rudiments of Hebrew had discovered something new in that language that might render invaluable assistance to the king’s case. According to Robert Wakefield himself, he had indeed instructed Fisher ‘about eighteen years ago’, and we learn of his ‘discovery’ from a letter written by the bishop to a certain correspondent named ‘Paul’, who had been shaken, it seems, by a report that Wakefield’s revelation was so crucial that it had caused all the bishops previously opposed to the king’s wishes to change course and swing into line behind him. For Wakefield had simply denied, as we have seen, that the Hebrew text of Deuteronomy actually prescribed marriage between a widow and the brother of her first husband at all. Instead, he maintained, the true signification of the relevant Hebrew word was any near, male relative, i.e. ‘cousin’ in the sixteenth-century sense. As such, both the Septuagint and Vulgate versions of the Bible were in error and, if so, the doubt thrown on the Levitical prohibition to the king’s marriage was at once lifted, since the prohibition in Leviticus now became a qualification on the text of Deuteronomy, rather than the latter an exception to the former. Clearly, this was a line of reasoning that Fisher could not ignore, though he assured ‘Paul’ at the time that he could see nothing of substance in the Hebrew to support the king’s case, before rapidly extemporising a reply to Wakefield, which was eventually written up and expanded for presentation at Blackfriars in what became a verbal scholastic disputation before the court.
Once again, therefore, the bishop would foil his opponents convincingly, taking issue with Wakefield on several points, not the least of which was the tactlessness of his suggestion, especially when delivered before a gathering containing laymen, that the Vulgate contained errors. Might this not, he argued, undermine their faith in it, and thus the very Church that had endorsed it? But if indiscretion and, by implication, arrogance on Wakefield’s part would seem a weak card to be played by a man soon to be accused of those very weaknesses himself, at this point at least, and in these particular circumstances, the ploy was undoubtedly an effective one when the two legates sitting in judgement were all too painfully aware themselves of the chaos likely to ensue within the Church should the reliability of the Vulgate be thus undermined. And Fisher, in any case, had other, far more effective tricks to play. He was hampered, of course, by the fact that Wakefield had taught him Hebrew initially and was not averse to reminding him of that fact. But in consequence, he steered clear of philology, and pointed out with no less effectiveness that the true meaning of Deuteronomy 25:5 was to be determined by interpreting it in the light of scriptural references elsewhere, all of which appeared to endorse it, as indeed did the writings of the various patristic authorities on the subject. It was unimaginable, after all, that the genealogies of Christ given by Matthew and Luke could not be reconciled on the issue of Joseph’s parentage, and there was, in any case, the added consideration that the custom codified in Deuteronomy had actually been prevalent before the time of Moses: a consideration that he had gleaned from his own extensive knowledge of the Cabbala.
If not a killing blow in its own right to Wakefield’s contention, therefore, Fisher had clearly done enough to trump the one potential ace available to his enemies and to carry the day in a way that he would continue to do throughout the summer of 1529, as the proceedings at Blackfriars ground out their hugely frustrating course for the king. Yet with every victory came further charges of arrogance, so that in little over a year, senior churchmen other than Gardiner were also shuffling uneasily at their colleague’s behaviour. By December 1530, indeed, Archbishop Warham, Bishop Edward Lee of York, John Stokesley, Bishop of London, and Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, would all be urging Fisher to withdraw his writings in support of the queen, and objecting when told that the matter was too clear to warrant such action. Only one month later, the Imperial ambassador, Chapuys, would note how Fisher had finished revising a further book – probably an expanded version of his opinions stated earlier in court – which by August had been published in Spain, albeit, as Chapuys duly noted, without the permission of the author himself. Many thought, wrote the ambassador, that the bishop would go in fear of the king’s displeasure, but in fact he seemed indifferent to what Henry might think or plan – so much so, indeed, that when questioned in the Tower, he could not, as we have seen, even remember how many books or tracts he had written in the queen’s defence.
Nor, when questioned at that time, did he have any apparent notion of either the number of copies involved or the whereabouts of their circulation:
I do not know, nor was I very careful about them except for the last two, which went to the heart of the matter … I never sent them or any copies of them out of the country, nor consented to this being done.
Though no doubt truthful, this was nevertheless naivety of a truly staggering order. For Chapuys had certainly gained access to them and was steadily forwarding the results to Dr Pierre Ortiz, the emperor’s representative in Rome, adding a whole new layer of significance and danger to their content, both for the king and, for that matter, Fisher himself. For from the time of his arrival in England in October 1529, Chapuys had in fact quickly assumed an organising role in opposition to the divorce that Fisher himself never sought. One of the bishop’s main problems, indeed – and one of the reasons for the scale of the threat he presented, ironically enough – was that he never thought sufficiently politically. On the contrary, the divorce was from his perspective purely a matter of principle founded on strict logic, its broader, more practical ramifications a matter wholly for others: all of which compounded his status as a disconcertingly loose cannon and the most convenient of tools for those, especially abroad, who sought to exploit his talents and status for their own purposes.
Early in 1530, therefore, Chapuys was reporting to his Imperial master, Charles V, how he had dispatched a treatise by Fisher, and that the bishop had recently completed another, which Queen Catherine had ordered him to pass on. The two works concerned can probably be identified with Licitum Fuisse and De Causa Matrimonii, and significantly enough, Chapuys also confided how Fisher was afraid to be identified as the latter’s author, though by December, the ambassador had nevertheless sent forward a further volume, Brevis Apologia, which had been written in response to the government’s own Gravissimae Censurae. Consisting of some 60,000 words, the Brevis Apologia was, moreover, in at least one respect, arguably the most significant of all Fisher’s treatises on the subject. For although it was never published, it represented a hardening of the bishop’s position by contending, in accordance with Hesychias, that the Levitical prohibition was directed not so much against unlawful marriage as illicit sexual intercourse. If so, the validity of the king’s marriage was beyond all further question. Equally significant, moreover, is the tone of the Apologia, since there is a very specific failure to remark upon the supposed good faith underlying Henry’s concerns. For hitherto, Fisher’s writings had been written on the clear assumption that both the king and his advocates were engaging in a dispassionate quest for truth, but now there are no such concessions on the bishop’s part. On the contrary, the persistent use of the term hi doctissimi – ‘these most learned doctors’ – to describe the authors of the Censurae smacks of sarcasm, and, as he exposes one blatant misrepresentation after another, he now declares himself astonished at their outright dishonesty:
Blessed Jesus, what sort of conscience do these learned fellows have, who so grievously mutilate and distort the sayings of so weighty an author [Hesychius] in a matter of such importance, in order to establish [i.e. support] their error – to use no stronger term for it – any way they can.
More portentously still, there was also the following statement: ‘These most learned fellows do not seem to care how narrowly they restrict papal authority as long as they can secure a divorce.’
Even by this point, therefore, Fisher’s defence of the marriage was already merging into the stand for the papal primacy that was eventually to bring him to the scaffold. And it was small wonder, of course, that not only Henry’s government, but that of his successor too, would progressively come to perceive Fisher’s writings with such concern. In April 1531, Dr Ortiz wrote that he had received two manuscripts different from the version of De Causa Matrimonii published in Spain, indicating the scale of the book’s proliferation, and the records of Fisher’s eventual interrogations in the Tower leave no doubt at all of the grave suspicions engendered by his close association with Chapuys. By that time, indeed, Fisher’s notoriety in government circles, and especially with Thomas Cromwell, was such that almost any ‘seditious’ work might be attributed by him, including the so-called Parasœve, whose author claimed to have spent time studying in Paris, and which could only have been written at a time when the bishop was actually under house arrest at Lambeth.
Nor was it any coincidence that Fisher’s early biographer should have related how:
It was once told me by a reverend father that was Dean of Rochester many years together, named Mr Phillips, that on a time in the days of King Edward VI when certain commissioners were coming towards him to search his house for books, he for fear burned a large volume which this holy bishop [i.e. Fisher] had compiled containing in it the whole story and matter of the divorce; which volume he gave him with his own hand a little before his trouble.
Plainly, the bishop’s influence was to last well beyond the grave, and it was a testament to his lasting influence, too, that in the reign of Queen Mary, Nicholas Harpsfield would employ Fisher’s reply to the universities in his Treatise on the Pretended Divorce of King Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon. Yet the fruits of his tenacity still amounted to little more than a relentless beating of the air in the summer of 1529 when he was staging his bravest and most remarkably overt resistance of all. For even as his scathing broadsides continued to hit home at Blackfriars, far-off developments in Europe of which he knew nothing had already been assuming a decisive significance all of their own.
As early as 27 July the struggles at the legatine court had become bogged down in technicalities, but by that time events in London were in any case irrelevant. For in June, Imperial forces had crushed the French at Landriano and, on 13 July, the pope duly agreed to the Treaty of Barcelona, which pledged him for the foreseeable future to side with Charles. Unbeknown to the participants at Blackfriars, moreover, the pope had also, in yielding to the emperor’s pressure, annulled the legatine commission and summoned Henry to appear before the Rota in Rome. And though news did not reach England for some time, the situation was already dire enough even without such a thunderbolt, since on 31 July, only ten days before the final decision that Henry expected, Campeggio declared that the court would follow the Roman calendar and adjourn for the vacation, which meant that there would be no further proceedings until October.
With this announcement, not surprisingly, there was outrage and tumult in the court. ‘By the mass,’ thundered the beetle-browed Duke of Suffolk, ‘it was never merry in England whilst we had cardinals amongst us,’ whereupon Wolsey smartly reminded the fuming peer of the help that he had been given at the time of his marriage to the king’s sister. ‘If I, a simple cardinal, had not been,’ retorted Wolsey loudly, ‘you should have had at this present time no head upon your shoulders wherein you should have had a tongue to make any such report in despite of us!’ Yet the power of the cardinal’s language was not matched by the strength of his position, since the king had suffered a shattering blow and duly retired to Waltham Abbey to nurse his wrath and ponder all the hard things that Anne Boleyn and her grasping tribe of relatives would now be sure to utter against his minister. For although Henry’s personal interventions had continually undermined Wolsey’s efforts, it was, of course, the latter who would inevitably carry the blame.
By the time that the Franco-Imperial Peace of Cambrai was signed on 3 August, Henry’s patience was already terminally exhausted and so, in effect, was the cardinal’s primacy. Within a month, indeed, this great potentate of Church and State, the once unchallenged master of all he surveyed, whom Cavendish would call ‘the haughtiest man alive’, was teetering on the brink and Anne Boleyn and the faction around her were exercising all their influence to lever him over the edge. And surely enough, on 9 October 1529, Wolsey was finally charged under the Statute of Praemunire of 1393 on the grounds that he had used his ecclesiastical authority to impinge upon the legal jurisdiction of the Crown. The charge, of course, was purely a pretext and a smokescreen, since Wolsey’s only real offence was failure to satisfy the caprice of his sovereign. But one week later he was nonetheless stripped of his Lord Chancellor’s office and made to deliver up the Great Seal, before surrendering York Place and most of his other property in a desperate last attempt to placate the king, who had relied so heavily for so long on his chief minister’s resourcefulness, only to scupper his stratagems and then proceed to spurn him for failure.
For a Bill of Attainder was indeed brought against the stricken cardinal on 3 November, and thereafter, with one of those rich ironies that are so common in history, York Place was swiftly renamed Whitehall and handed over to Anne Boleyn by an elated Henry for use as her personal residence. Soon after the former occupant had made his exit, moreover, Anne was brought in secret to view the fine tapestries and plate of her new dwelling. Thrilled by the splendour of it all, now she would have her own court and truly be queen in all but name. Accordingly, great changes were put in hand to enlarge the palace and satisfy her fastidious requirements, as neighbouring houses were compulsorily acquired to extend the site and make room for gardens. ‘All this has been done,’ reported the Imperial ambassador, ‘to please the lady, who likes better that the king should stay in Whitehall than anywhere else, as there is no lodging in it for the Queen.’ And in the meantime, the queen herself, by contrast, had been cast once and for all into marital and political limbo.