James Froude - The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon

Thus as early as 1526 certainly, and probably as much as a year before, Cardinal Wolsey had been feeling his way at Rome for a separation between Henry and Catherine. On September 7 in that year the Bishop of Bath, who was English Ambassador at Paris, informed the Cardinal of the arrival there of a confidential agent of Pope Clement VII. The agent had spoken to the Bishop on this especial subject, and had informed him that there would be difficulties about it. 1 1 Calendar of State Papers, Hen. VIII., Foreign and Domestic , vol. iv. Introduction, p. 223. The “blessed divorce” — benedictum divorcium the Bishop calls it – had been already under consideration at Rome. The difficulties were not specified, but the political features of the time obliged Clement to be circumspect, and it was these that were probably referred to. Francis I. had been defeated and taken prisoner by the Imperialists at Pavia. He had been carried to Spain, and had been released at Henry’s intercession, under severe conditions, to which he had reluctantly consented, and his sons had been left at Madrid as hostages for the due fulfilment of them. The victorious army, half Spanish, half German, remained under the Duke of Bourbon to complete the conquest of Italy; and Charles V., with his already vast dominions and a treasury which the world believed to be inexhaustibly supplied from the gold mines of the New World, seemed advancing to universal empire.

France in the preceding centuries had been the hereditary enemy of England; Spain and Burgundy her hereditary friends. The marriage of Catherine of Aragon had been a special feature of the established alliance. She was given first to Prince Arthur, and then to Henry, as a link in the confederacy which was to hold in check French ambition. Times were changing. Charles V. had been elected emperor, largely through English influence; but Charles was threatening to be a more serious danger to Europe than France had been. The Italian princes were too weak to resist the conqueror of Pavia. Italy once conquered, the Papacy would become a dependency of the empire, and, with Charles’s German subjects in open revolt against it, the Church would lose its authority, and the organisation of the Catholic world would fall into hopeless decrepitude. So thought Wolsey, the most sharp-sighted of English ministers. He believed that the maintenance of the Papacy was the best defence of order and liberty. The only remedy which he could see was a change of partners. England held the balance between the great rival powers. If the English alliance could be transferred from the Empire to France, the Emperor could be held in check, and his supposed ambition neutralised. Wolsey was utterly mistaken; but the mistake was not an unnatural one. Charles, busy with his Italian wars, had treated the Lutheran schism with suspicious forbearance. Notwithstanding his Indian ingots his finances were disordered. Bourbon’s lansquenets had been left to pay themselves by plunder. They had sacked monasteries, pillaged cathedral plate, and ravished nuns with irreverent ferocity. The estates of the Church had been as little spared by them as Lombardy; and to Clement VII. the invasion was another inroad of barbarians, and Bourbon a second Attila. What Bourbon’s master meant by it, and what he might intend to do, was as uncertain to Clement as perhaps it was to Charles himself. In the prostrate, degraded, and desperate condition into which the Church was falling, any resolution was possible. To the clearest eyes in Europe the Papacy seemed tottering to its fall, and Charles’s hand, if he chose to raise it, might precipitate the catastrophe. To ask a pope at such a time to give mortal offence to the Spanish nation by agreeing to the divorce of Catherine of Aragon was to ask him to sign his death-warrant. No wonder, therefore, that he found difficulties. Yet it was to France and England that Clement had to look for help in his extremities. The divorce perhaps had as yet been no more than a suggestion, a part of a policy which was still in its infancy. It could wait at any rate for a more convenient season. Meantime he sent his secretary, Sanga, to Paris to beg aid; and to Henry personally he made a passionate appeal, imploring him not to desert the Apostolic See in its hour of extreme need. He apologised for his importunacy, but he said he hoped that history would not have to record that Italy had been devastated in the time of Clement VII. to the dishonour of the King and of Wolsey. If France and England failed him, he would himself be ruined. The Emperor would be universal monarch. They would open their eyes at last, but they would open them too late. So piteous was the entreaty that Henry when he read the Pope’s letter burst into tears. 2 2 Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, Hen. VIII. , vol. iv. p. 1112. – Hen. VIII. to Clement VII., Oct. 23, 1526. — Ib. p. 1145. Giberto to Gambara, Dec. 20, 1526. — Ib. p. 1207. Clement had not been idle. He had brought his own small army into the field to oppose Bourbon; he joined the Italian League, and prepared to defend himself. He was called the father of Christendom, yet he was at open war with the most Catholic king. But Wolsey reasonably considered that unless the Western powers interfered the end would come.

If England was to act, she could act only in alliance with France. The change of policy was ill understood, and was not popular among Henry’s subjects. The divorce as yet had not been spoken of. No breath of such a purpose had gone abroad. But English sentiment was imperial, and could endure with equanimity even the afflictions of a pope. The King was more papal than his people; he allowed Wolsey to guide him, and negotiations were set on foot at once for a special treaty with France, one of the conditions of which was to be the marriage of the Princess Mary – allotted like a card in a game – either to Francis or to one of his sons; another condition being that the English crown should be settled upon her should Henry die without a legitimate son. Sir John Russell was simultaneously despatched to Rome with money to help the Pope in paying his troops and garrisoning the city. The ducats and the “kind words” which accompanied them “created incredible joy,” encouraged his Holiness to reject unjust conditions which had been offered, and restored him, if for the moment only, “from death to life.” 3 3 Giberto, Bishop of Verona, to Wolsey, Feb. 10, 1527. — Calendar, Foreign and Domestic , vol. iv. pp. 1282-3. If Russell described correctly what he saw in passing through Italy, Clement had good cause for anxiety. “The Swabians and Spaniards,” he wrote, “had committed horrible atrocities. They had burnt houses to the value of two hundred million ducats, with all the churches, images, and priests that fell into their hands. They had compelled the priests and monks to violate the nuns. Even where they were received without opposition they had burned the place; they had not spared the boys, and they had carried off the girls; and whenever they found the Sacrament of the Church they had thrown it into a river or into the vilest place they could find. If God did not punish such cruelty and wickedness, men would infer that He did not trouble Himself about the affairs of this world.” 4 4 Giberto, Bishop of Verona, to Wolsey, Feb. 10, 1527. — Calendar, Foreign and Domestic , April 26, 1527, vol. iv. p. 1386.

The news from Italy gave a fresh impulse to Wolsey’s policy and the Anglo-French Alliance, which was pushed forward in spite of popular disapproval. The Emperor, unable to pay, and therefore unable to control, his troops, became himself alarmed. He found himself pressed into a course which was stimulating the German revolt against the Papacy, and he professed himself anxious to end the war. Inigo de Mendoza, the Bishop of Burgos, was despatched to Paris to negotiate for a general pacification. From Paris he was to proceed to London to assure Henry of the Emperor’s inalienable friendship, and above all things to gain over Wolsey by the means which experience had shown to be the nearest way to Wolsey’s heart. The great Cardinal was already Charles’s pensionary, but the pension was several years in arrear. Mendoza was to tell him not only that the arrears should be immediately paid up, but that a second pension should be secured to him on the revenues of Milan, and that the Emperor would make him a further grant of 6,000 ducats annually out of the income of Spanish bishoprics. No means was to be spared to divert the hostility of so dangerous an enemy. 5 5 Inigo de Mendoza to the Emperor, Jan. 19, 1527. — Spanish Calendar , vol. iii. pt. 2, p. 24.