James Froude - The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon

Finally, I do not allow myself to be tempted into controversy with particular writers whose views disagree with my own. To contradict in detail every hostile version of Henry VIII.’s or his ministers’ conduct would be as tedious as it would be irritating and unprofitable. My censors have been so many that a reply to them all is impossible, and so distinguished that a selection would be invidious. Those who wish for invectives against the King, or Cranmer, or Cromwell, can find them everywhere, from school manuals to the grave works of elaborate historians. For me, it is enough to tell the story as it presents itself to my own mind, and to leave what appears to me to be the truth to speak for itself.

The English nation throughout their long history have borne an honourable reputation. Luther quotes a saying of Maximilian that there were three real sovereigns in Europe – the Emperor, the King of France, and the King of England. The Emperor was a king of kings. If he gave an order to the princes of the Reich, they obeyed or disobeyed as they pleased. The King of France was a king of asses. He ordered about his people at his will, and they obeyed like asses. The King of England was king of a loyal nation who obeyed him with heart and mind as loyal and faithful subjects. This was the character borne in the world by the fathers of the generation whom popular historians represent as having dishonoured themselves by subserviency to a bloodthirsty tyrant. It is at least possible that popular historians have been mistaken, and that the subjects of Henry VIII. were neither much better nor much worse than those who preceded or came after them.

Prospects of a disputed succession to the crown – Various claimants – Catherine incapable of having further children – Irregularity of her marriage with the King – Papal dispensations – First mention of the divorce – Situation of the Papacy – Charles V. – Policy of Wolsey – Anglo-French alliance – Imperial troops in Italy – Appeal of the Pope – Mission of Inigo de Mendoza – The Bishop of Tarbes – Legitimacy of the Princess Mary called in question – Secret meeting of the Legates’ court – Alarms of Catherine – Sack of Rome by the Duke of Bourbon – Proposed reform of the Papacy – The divorce promoted by Wolsey – Unpopular in England – Attempts of the Emperor to gain Wolsey.

In the year 1526 the political prospects of England became seriously clouded. A disputed succession had led in the previous century to a desperate civil war. In that year it became known in private circles that if Henry VIII. was to die the realm would again be left without a certain heir, and that the strife of the Roses might be renewed on an even more distracting scale. The sons who had been born to Queen Catherine had died in childbirth or had died immediately after it. The passionate hope of the country that she might still produce a male child who would survive had been constantly disappointed, and now could be entertained no longer. She was eight years older than her husband. She had “certain diseases” which made it impossible that she should be again pregnant, and Henry had for two years ceased to cohabit with her. He had two children still living – the Princess Mary, Catherine’s daughter, then a girl of eleven, and an illegitimate son born in 1519, the mother being a daughter of Sir John Blount, and married afterwards to Sir Gilbert Talboys. By presumptive law the Princess was the next heir; but no woman had ever sat on the throne of England alone and in her own right, and it was doubtful whether the nation would submit to a female sovereign. The boy, though excluded by his birth from the prospect of the crown, was yet brought up with exceptional care, called a prince by his tutors, and probably regarded by his father as a possible successor should his sister go the way of her brothers. In 1525, after the King had deliberately withdrawn from Catherine, he was created Duke of Richmond – a title of peculiar significance, since it had been borne by his grandfather, Henry VII. – and he was granted precedence over the rest of the peerage. Illegitimacy was a serious, but, it might be thought, was not an absolute, bar. The Conqueror had been himself a bastard. The Church, by its habits of granting dispensations for irregular marriages or of dissolving them on pleas of affinity or consanguinity or other pretext, had confused the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate. A Church Court had illegitimatised the children of Edward IV. and Elizabeth Grey, on the ground of one of Edward’s previous connections; yet no one regarded the princes murdered in the Tower as having been illegitimate in reality; and to prevent disputes and for an adequate object, the Duke of Richmond, had he grown to manhood, might, in the absence of other claims, have been recognised by Parliament. But the Duke was still a child, and might die as Henry’s other sons had died; and other claims there were which, in the face of the bar sinister, could not fail to be asserted. James V. of Scotland was next in blood, being the son of Henry’s eldest sister, Margaret. There were the Greys, inheriting from the second sister, Mary. Outside the royal house there were the still popular representatives of the White Rose, the Marquis of Exeter, who was Edward IV.’s grandson; the Countess of Salisbury, daughter of Edward’s brother the Duke of Clarence, and sister of the murdered Earl of Warwick; and Henry’s life was the only obstacle between the collision of these opposing pretensions. James, it was quite certain, would not be allowed to succeed without a struggle. National rivalry forbade it. Yet it was no less certain that he would try, and would probably be backed by France. There was but one escape from convulsions which might easily be the ruin of the realm. The King was in the flower of his age, and might naturally look for a Prince of Wales to come after him if he was married to a woman capable of bearing one. It is neither unnatural nor, under the circumstances, a matter to be censured if he and others began to reflect upon the peculiar character of his connection with Catherine of Aragon. It is not sufficiently remembered that the marriage of a widow with her husband’s brother was then, as it is now, forbidden by the laws of all civilised countries. Such a marriage at the present day would be held ipso facto invalid and not a marriage at all. An irregular power was then held to rest with the successors of St. Peter to dispense, under certain conditions, with the inhibitory rules. The popes are now understood to have never rightly possessed such an authority, and therefore, according to modern law and sentiment, Henry and Catherine never were husband and wife at all. At the time it was uncertain whether the dispensing power extended so far as to sanction such a union, and when the discussion rose upon it the Roman canonists were themselves divided. Those who maintained the widest view of the papal faculty yet agreed that such a dispensation could only be granted for urgent cause, such as to prevent foreign wars or internal seditions, and no such cause was alleged to have existed when Ferdinand and Henry VII. arranged the marriage between their children. The dispensation had been granted by Pope Julius with reluctance, had been acted upon after considerable hesitation, and was of doubtful validity, since the necessary conditions were absent. The marriages of kings were determined with little reference to the personal affection of the parties. Between Henry and Catherine there was probably as much and as little personal attachment as there usually is in such cases. He respected and perhaps admired her character; but she was not beautiful, she was not attractive, while she was as proud and intractable as her mother Isabella. Their union had been settled by the two fathers to cement the alliance between England and Spain. Such connections rest on a different foundation from those which are voluntarily entered into between private persons. What is made up for political reasons may pardonably be dissolved when other reasons of a similar kind require it; and when it became clear that Catherine could never bear another child, that the penalty threatened in the Levitical law against marriages of this precise kind had been literally enforced in the death of the male offspring, and that civil war was imminent in consequence upon the King’s death, Henry may have doubted in good faith whether she had ever been his wife at all – whether, in fact, the marriage was not of the character which everyone would now allow to attach to similar unions. Had there been a Prince of Wales, the question would never have arisen, and Henry, like other kings, would have borne his fate. But there was no prince, and the question had risen, and there was no reason why it should not. There was no trace at the outset of an attachment to another woman. If there had been, there would be little to condemn; but Anne Boleyn, when it was first mooted, was no more to the King than any other lady of the court. He required a wife who could produce a son to secure the succession. The powers which had allowed an irregular marriage could equally dissolve it, and the King felt that he had a right to demand a familiar concession which other sovereigns had often applied for in one form or another, and rarely in vain.