Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity. David Starkey

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СКАЧАТЬ was unlikely to vote new taxes. In their place, Wolsey suggested an extra-parliamentary levy, to which, as spin doctor in chief, he gave the emollient name of ‘Amicable Grant’.

      It made no difference. All taxes are unpopular. This one caused riots, and the worst one took place at Lavenham in Suffolk, which was then a prosperous wool-weaving town. On 4 May, 4000 protesters poured through the streets, the church bells rang the alarms and the rioters swore that they would die for their cause. Other smaller protests took place throughout the South-East. In Lavenham, the rioters pleaded poverty. But in London, sophisticated constitutional objections were raised to a tax that hadn’t been voted in parliament.

      In the face of the protest, the government abandoned the Amicable Grant and with it Henry’s projected invasion of France. Both Wolsey and Henry put a brave face on the climbdown. But it was a terrible humiliation. To Henry, it seemed that he had failed in both peace and war, and his dreams of glory were dashed. After sixteen years of trying to emulate Arthur and Henry V, this Henry was no better, in his estimation, than his failure of a father. But there was a ray of sunshine; Henry had fallen in love again.

      Henry had some years ago fallen out of love with his wife, Catherine of Aragon. Like most kings before him, he’d had mistresses and, even an acknowledged son by one of them. The real problem was not with his wandering eyes and hands, but instead came from Catherine’s own situation.

      She was the aunt of Henry’s great betrayer, Charles V. She had urged the Anglo-Imperial alliance. Any advantage that should have come from their marriage in 1509 was, some sixteen years later, and after so many disappointments, hard to spot. Fatally for her, Catherine was identified with Henry’s crushing international embarrassment. And there was scant compensation. The age difference between Henry and Catherine was now really beginning to tell, as the miniatures of the couple painted in 1525 show.

      Henry himself, then aged thirty-four, has kept his youthful looks, but Catherine, already forty, was wearing badly. As the massive neck and shoulders in the portrait show, her once trim figure had run to fat, while her face, which used to be so pretty, had become round and blotched and bloated. The explanation of course was childbearing. Catherine had been more or less continuously pregnant in the first ten years of her marriage and it had played havoc with her figure. If the progeny had been sons, none of this would have mattered, but of all those pregnancies there was only a single child that survived – a daughter, Mary. And a woman who had lost her looks, was past childbearing age and hadn’t produced an heir was vulnerable indeed.

      Henry and Catherine’s marriage wasn’t the first royal union to get into difficulties. The man whose responsibility was to sort out such problems was the Pope in Rome, head of the Catholic Church to which England, like all the rest of western Europe, belonged.

      But at just this moment, the Pope’s position was under greater threat than ever before. The attack was led by a young German academic, Martin Luther, who in 1517 had launched the furious assault on the corruption of the Roman Church which began the Protestant Reformation. Henry and his minister Cardinal Wolsey were united in their horror at Luther’s heretical attack on the Church. In May 1521, Wolsey condemned Luther’s works in a great book-burning at St Paul’s Cathedral while Henry – the would-be Most Christian King, after all – wrote a reply to Luther called the Assertio Septum Sacramentorum or ‘Defence of the Seven Sacraments’. It was the first book to be written by an English king since Alfred the Great. Composed in Latin, it was set in the latest Roman type for circulation to a sophisticated, select European audience.

      Above all, Henry’s book was loud in its defence of the papal monarchy over the Church. So much so that Thomas More, then Henry’s friend and intimate counsellor, warned the king that since his present good relations with Rome might change in the course of time, he should ‘leave that point out or else touch it more slenderly’. But Henry was adamant in his championship of Rome and his reward was the title of ‘Defender of the Faith’ from a grateful Pope.

      Henry never wavered in his detestation of Luther and all his works. But his attitude to Rome, just as Thomas More predicted, underwent a revolution. The reasons were Henry’s need for a son and heir – and love.

      The woman he’d fallen in love with was Anne Boleyn, sister of one of his former mistresses. Sexy rather than beautiful, Anne behaved as no mistress had dared to before, and with consequences that no one could have imagined.

      III

      By the mid-1520s, Henry’s reign had hit the buffers. He’d failed in his quest for glory in both peace and war. He’d failed to father a son and heir. He’d even failed to persuade Anne to sleep with him.

      For Anne, supremely confident in her hold over Henry, refused him sexual relations unless he agreed to marry her. The difficulty, of course, was that Henry was already married to Catherine, who would never agree to a divorce. So Henry and Anne tried to find legal grounds for dissolving Henry’s marriage.

      Their best hope lay in the Bible, where the Book of Leviticus forbade a man to marry his dead brother’s widow, on pain of childlessness. It was for this reason that Henry had received a special dispensation from Pope Julius II to permit him to marry Catherine, the widow of his late brother, Arthur. But now Henry’s lawyers argued that, since the marriage broke biblical law, Rome had exceeded its powers, and the marriage was invalid. The case was submitted for decision to the man who was both the Pope’s personal representative in England and Henry’s own chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey.

      In the subterranean bowels of the Ministry of Defence building in Whitehall in London, amidst the ducting, the central heating pipes and the civil servants, there is an extraordinary survivor of the Tudor world. It is the wine cellar of Cardinal Wolsey’s town palace, known as York Place, which once stood on this site. On the first floor there was the principal reception room of the palace, known as the great chamber. It was, almost certainly, in this room on 17 May 1527 that the first trial of the marriage of Henry VIII opened.

      It was known as the secret trial, since Catherine was kept in the dark to let Wolsey move as quickly as possible. For Henry was confident that the Cardinal, armed with his formidable spiritual authority, would rule his marriage invalid. Instead, to enormous surprise, on 31 May Wolsey adjourned the court indefinitely, on grounds of the difficulty of the case.

      Why did Wolsey, who owed everything to Henry, defy the king’s wishes? Did he fear Anne Boleyn’s power as queen? Were his legal doubts genuine? Or was it, above all, because he knew that without the Pope’s agreement, no one else could hope to adjudicate in so delicate a matter? Whatever his reasons, the delay was crucial.

      For, at exactly the same moment, events were unfolding in Rome which would make it impossible for the Pope to come down on Henry’s side, even if he had so wished. Two days after Wolsey adjourned the court, news reached England that troops of the Emperor Charles V had taken Rome, sacked and pillaged the city, and driven Pope Clement VII to take refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo. The Pope was now in the power of Catherine’s nephew and Henry’s enemy, and he would remain so for the foreseeable future. Henry’s hopes of a quick divorce were at an end.

      Wolsey knew that his power and his life were at stake. Desperate to find his way back into Henry’s favour, he wrote the king a long letter, setting out the case for his own approach to the divorce. He sat down at his desk at four in the morning, ‘never’, his valet noted, ‘rising once to piss, nor yet to eat any meat, but continually wrote his letters with his own hand’. But not even Wolsey could change the reality of European power politics.

      But he could and did disguise them from the King. Back in early 1527 Henry and Anne had thought to be married in months. Instead, the months stretched into years as the Pope, with Wolsey’s connivance, strung out СКАЧАТЬ