The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon. Froude James Anthony
minatory brief forbidding Parliament to meddle with her. She had mistaken the purpose of its meeting, and she had mistaken the King’s character. Important as the divorce question might be, a great nation had other things to think of which had waited too long. It had originated in an ambitious scheme of Wolsey to alter the balance of power in Europe, and to form a new combination which the English generally disliked. Had his policy been successful he would have been continued in office, with various consequences which might or might not have been of advantage to the country. But he had failed miserably. He had drawn the King into a quarrel with his hereditary ally. He had entangled him, by ungrounded assurances, in a network of embarrassments, which had been made worse by the premature and indecent advancement of the Queen’s intended successor. For this the Cardinal was not responsible. It was the King’s own doing, and he had bitterly to pay for it. But Wolsey had misled his master into believing that there would be no difficulty. In the last critical moment he had not stood by him as the King had a right to expect; and, in the result, Henry found himself summoned to appear as a party before the Pope, the Pope himself being openly and confessedly a creature in the hands of the Emperor. No English sovereign had ever before been placed in a situation so degrading.
Parliament was to meet for other objects – objects which could not be attained while Wolsey was in power and were themselves of incalculable consequence. But Anne Boleyn was an embarrassment, and Henry did for the moment hesitate whether it might not be better to abandon her. He had no desire to break the unity of Christendom or to disturb the peace of his own kingdom for the sake of a pretty woman. The Duke of Norfolk, though he was Anne’s uncle, if he did not oppose her intended elevation, did nothing to encourage it. Her father, Lord Wiltshire, had been against it from the first. The Peers and the people would be the sufferers from a disputed succession, but they seemed willing to encounter the risk, or at least they showed no eagerness for the King’s marriage with this particular person. If Reginald Pole is to be believed, the King did once inform the Council that he would go no further with it. The Emperor, to make retreat easy to him, had allowed nothing to be said on the subject at Cambray, and had instructed the Pope to hold his hand and make no further movement. He sent a new Ambassador to England, on a mission of doulceur et amytié. Eustace Chapuys, the Minister whom he selected, was not perhaps the best selection which he could have made, and Lord Paget, who knew him well, has left an account of him not very favourable. “For Chapuys,” he said, “I never took him for a wise man, but for one that used to speak cum summâ licentiâ whatsoever came in buccam, without respect of honesty or truth, so it might serve his turn, and of that fashion it is small mastery to be a wise man. He is a great practicer, with which honest term we cover tale-telling, lying, dissimuling, and flattering.”80 Chapuys being the authority for many of the scandals about Henry, this description of him by a competent observer may be borne in remembrance; but there can be no question that Charles sent him to England on an embassy of peace, and one diplomatist is not always perhaps the fairest judge of another of the same trade. The King’s hesitation, if he ever did hesitate, was not of long duration. He had been treated like a child, tricked, played with, trifled with, and he was a dangerous person to deal with in so light a fashion. Chapuys reached London in the beginning of September. On landing he found the citation to Rome had not been officially notified to the King, as a morsel too big for him to swallow.81 The King received him politely, invited him to dine in the palace, and allowed him afterwards to be introduced to Catherine, who was still residing at the court. Three days after he had a long interview with Henry. His commission, he said, was to smooth all differences between the King and his master. The King responded with equal graciousness, but turned the conversation upon those differences themselves. The Emperor, he said, had not used him well. The advocation to Rome was absurd. He had written himself to the Pope with his own hand, telling him it was not only expedient but absolutely necessary that the cause should be tried in England. The Roman territories were still in the occupation of the Imperial troops. The Pope had committed it to two of his Cardinals, had solemnly promised that it should not be revoked, and that he would confirm any sentence which the Legates should pronounce. These engagements the Emperor had obliged the Pope to break. He himself had not proceeded upon light grounds. He was a conscientious prince, he said, who preferred his own salvation to all worldly advantages, as appeared sufficiently from his conduct in the affair. Had he been differently situated and not attentive to his conscience, he might have adopted other measures, which he had not taken and never would take.82 Chapuys attempted to defend Clement. “Enough of that pope,” Henry sharply interrupted. “This is not the first time that he has changed his mind. I have long known his versatile and fickle nature.”83 The Pope, he went on, “would never dare pronounce sentence, unless it favoured the Emperor.”
Catherine was eagerly communicative. Chapuys learned from her that the King had offered that the case should be heard at Cambray – which she had, of course, refused. She was much alarmed about the Parliament, “the King having played his cards so well that he would have a majority of votes in his favour.” It was quite certain that he meant to persevere. She professed outwardly that she was personally attached to the King; yet she desired Chapuys expressly to caution the Emperor against believing that his conduct had anything to do with conscience. The idea of separation, she said, had originated entirely in his own iniquity and malice, and when the treaty of Cambray was completed, he had announced it to her with the words: “My peace with the Emperor is made: it will last as long as you choose.”84
Chapuys had been charged to ascertain the feeling of the English people. He found them generally well affected to the Queen. But the Lutheran heresy was creeping in. The Duke of Suffolk had spoken bitterly of Papal legates, and Chapuys believed if they had nothing to fear but the Pope’s malediction, there were great numbers who would follow the Duke’s advice and make Popes of the King and Bishops, all to have the divorce case tried in England.85 The Queen was afraid of pressing her appeal, fearing that if the Commons in Parliament heard that the King had been summoned to Rome, measures injurious to her might easily be proposed and carried.86 Even the Duke of Norfolk was not satisfactory. He professed to be devoted to the Emperor; he said he would willingly have lost a hand so that the divorce question should never have been raised; but it was an affair of theology and canon law, and he had not meddled with it. If the Emperor had remained neutral, instead of interfering, it would have been sooner settled.87
But, for the instant, the interests of the people of England were fixed on a subject more immediately close to them. The sins of the clergy had at last found them out. They pretended to be a supernatural order, to hold the keys of heaven and hell, to be persons too sacred for ordinary authority to touch. Their vices and their tyranny had made them and their fantastic assumptions no longer bearable, and all Europe was in revolt against the scandals of the Church and Churchmen. The ecclesiastical courts, as the pretended guardians of morality, had the laity at their mercy; and every offence, real or imaginary, was converted into an occasion of extortion. The courts were themselves nests of corruption; while the lives and habits of the order which they represented made ridiculous their affectations of superiority to common men. Clement’s conduct of the divorce case was only a supreme instance of the methods in which the clerical tribunals administered what they called justice. An authority equally oblivious of the common principles of right and wrong was extended over the private lives and language of every family in Catholic Christendom. In England the cup was full and the day of reckoning had arrived. I have related in the first volume of my history of the period the meeting of the Parliament of 1529, and I have printed there the Petition of the Commons to the Crown, with the Bishops’ reply to it.88 I need not repeat what has been written already. A few more words are needed, however, to explain the animosity which broke out against Wolsey. The great Cardinal was the living embodiment of the detested ecclesiastical domination, and a representation in his own person of the worst abuses complained of. He had been a vigorous Minister, full of large schemes and high ambitions. He had been conscious of much that was wrong. He had checked the eagerness
Paget to Petre. —
Chapuys to the Regent Margaret, Sept. 18, 1529. —
Chapuys to Charles V., Sept. 2. —
Chapuys to Charles V., Sept. 2, 1529. —
Chapuys to Charles V., Sept. 2, 1529. —
The transcripts of these documents were furnished to me by the late Sir Francis Palgrave, who was then Keeper of the Records.