HenryVIII: the King, his wife, his lover, the. French

- Episode 02 -

The jilting of Princess Mary

The jilting of little Princess Mary
Saturday 9 July 2022
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Henry's chief advisor, Thomas, Cardinal Wolsey. We take our info from historian Peter Gwyn not Mantel's Wolf Hall.

Did Henry break with Rome in order to seize power over the wealthy, ubiquitous church in England?
 
Many notable historians say that Henry VIII’s decision to break with Rome and take over the Church in England was in order to give himself significantly more power over his subjects. It’s a very persuasive argument.

It’s certainly a much more satisfying explanation than the lovesick Henry of popular tradition.

If we believe that Henry’s real aim in these years was imperium (a bid for absolute power – ruling like a Roman Emperor) what we imply is that he was perhaps rather cynically using his divorce as a device to challenge the power of the pope, and so to seize power over the church in England, and to give himself significantly more power over his kingdom than any previous monarch.

Well at first glance this imperium line of argument seems to work very well. 

After all, at the start of his reign, in 1515, a 24 yr old Henry certainly made a bid, if not to take over the Church in England, at the very least to rule it much more directly than monarchs had before. After a bad-tempered debate with the church’s law courts, Henry ominously declared that ‘kings of England in time past have never had any superior but God only.’ 

But then the next year Henry stopped threatening the church and for more than ten years he played the role of Rome’s loyal son. Why?

Well, the reason is that his Chancellor Thomas Wolsey, who was also archbishop, cardinal and papal legate (that’s the pope’s representative) ran both church and state for him, effectively already gave Henry complete power in England.

But in the mid 1520s Wolsey’s power in England began to wane, and we believe Henry chose to pick a new and very personal quarrel with the church.
 

Gold half-crown with initials H and K either side of the double-rose, Museums Victoria

How to pick a very personal quarrel with the Church

To pick a very personal quarrel with the Church Henry VIII chose to argue that his marriage with the Spanish, Katherine of Aragon, had been wrong from the start. And it was THE POPE'S FAULT.

Katherine had first been married to Henry’s older brother, Arthur by proxy when she was just 14 and he 13. The marriage ceremony followed by the daunting public bedding ceremony had taken place when she was 16 and he 15. Arthur died a year later of a mystery illness that they had both contracted.

The bond with Spain was important to maintain and Katherine was then betrothed to marry Arthur’s brother Henry, the new heir to the throne. But to do so Katherine needed the pope’s dispensation or permission. She had obtained it and they had got married.

In 1527 (18 years after his marriage to Katherine) Henry began to argue that popes did not have the power to issue dispensations in cases like this. They had never had any such powers. Virginia Murphy has shown that in July of that year Henry collected a team who would argue that popes had never had the power to allow a man to marry his brother’s widow. (Although in reality it was something they had been doing throughout history.) This looks just like an argument over power - imperium.

But as soon as you start to look further back, this imperium explanation doesn’t seem to fit.

The problem is that Henry’s campaign against Katherine of Aragon had already got going long before anyone was talking – or even hinting – at reviving Henry’s old interest in imperium. So we need to ask when did Henry’s campaign to divorce Katherine actually begin?

The problem is that most accounts of Henry’s divorce are preoccupied with Anne Boleyn. So they spend their time trying to find evidence about when her affair with Henry began. And the answer you usually get is 1527. Or just possibly 1526 at a stretch.

But Henry started to distance himself from Katherine much much earlier.

#45 Episode 02 - The jilting of Princess Mary




 
The spark that lit the fire of Henry's split with Rome 

Henry FitzRoy [literally son of the king] (1519-36), illegitimate son of Henry VIII, born 3 yrs after Mary. Miniature by Lucas Horenbout between 1533 and 1534

The isolating and humiliation of Spanish Queen Katherine

On 18 June 1525 (long before his interest in Anne Boleyn began) Henry suddenly brought his young ILLEGITIMATE son out of obscurity.

The boy’s mother was Henry’s mistress Bessie Blount and he’d been named Henry Fitzroy – which means literally ‘son of the King.’ Henry had never kept the boy’s existence as a secret, but nor had he ever given him a formal role at court.

18 June 1525 was little Fitzroy’s sixth birthday. And on that day Henry rather unexpectedly made him the Duke of Richmond. It was the title Henry’s father had had and it made little Fitzroy, at a stroke, senior to all the other nobility, including his half-sister and heir to the throne, the Princess Mary.

Katherine was understandably furious that her daughter had been publicly eclipsed and for a couple of weeks she and Henry didn’t speak. It was the first major, public breach between them. Actually, we could take the start of this story back even further to the autumn of 1524. It was then that Katherine began to find herself increasingly isolated at court. By the end of 1526 Inigo de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, found he was no longer even allowed to meet Katherine. When he finally succeeded, Thomas Wolsey insisted on sitting in on the meeting.

‘Her wishes are strong,’ reported the Spaniard, ‘but her means of carrying them into effect are small.’

So suddenly, in the space of eighteenth months or so, Katherine had lost the influence she had always had at court and in foreign affairs. Meanwhile, BECAUSE OF HENRY'S NEW FOREIGN POLICY a fashion for everything French, rather than Spanish, overtook Henry’s court.

So this, then, is the first turning point in this story and it comes before Henry showed any interest in Anne and at least two, if not three years before Wolsey begins to lose power and Henry revives his interest in imperium.
The Battle of Pavia, 1525 (by Rupert Heller) - Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, where the French king was captured and Charles V became the most powerful ruler in Europe. This was the catalyst to Henry's break with Rome

The jilting of little Princess Mary

Long ago, in 1966, the historian RB Wernham wrote ‘the jilting of Princess Mary by Charles V in 1525 [after he captured Francis I of France at the Battle of Pavia in February 1525] marked the great turning point in Henry VIII’s reign.’

In happier times Katherine had arranged an engagement between her daughter Mary and her powerful uncle Charles V. After his success at Pavia, and having the French king as a prisoner, he now demanded they send 9 yr old Mary to live in Spain and BRING HER DOWRY with her. Or the marriage was off.

Henry and Katherine refused, understandably. And Charles married much richer 22 yr old Arabella of Portugal. Wernham was right. ‘The jilting of Princess Mary’ changed everything. It was now clear that Charles V was the most powerful ruler in Europe and he was going to throw his weight around. 

Henry and Wolsey quickly came to the conclusion that there was now far more to gain from alliance with the French. They were desperate to form a front against the Spanish and to release their king from Spanish captivity.
And that meant that Katherine had to go.

England had been allied to the Spanish since the 1490s. That was the whole reason Katherine of Aragon had been such a heavyweight player at court.
Now it was obvious that Charles V had no need whatsoever of the feeble English. So if Henry was going to count in Europe, and keep his shores safe and the Channel open to his ships, he would have to find a way to ditch the Spanish alliance, and make an alliance instead with the old enemy – the French.

So, rather than anything to do with theology, or with the politics of Henry’s bedchamber, the isolating of Katherine and the picking of a very  personal quarrel with the pope (see posts 2 and 3)  all seems very directly to have to do with foreign policy.


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