EP 03 - Henry VIII: the King, his wife, his lover, the French

Henry VIII: the King, his wife, his lover, the French

- Episode 03 -

Missions Impossible

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Missions Impossible

Saturday 15 July 2022

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Castel Sant'Angelo where the pope had holed up as Spain's mercenaries seized and ravaged Rome, 6 May 1527

Henry's madcap mission to Rome where the pope is a prisoner of the Spanish

In 1527 Henry’s divorce had ground to a halt because the Spanish rather accidentally took the pope prisoner. And because the Spanish wanted to disrupt the new Anglo-French alliance, they now pressured the pope not to allow Henry to divorce Katherine and marry a French princess.

One obvious solution – the one that Henry would eventually take six years later – was to declare that the pope was nothing but a puppet and make himself head of the church. But Henry didn’t do it. Instead, he started on an arcane theological dispute with the pope that would take up months – and in the end years – of everyone’s time and was never in the end resolved. And he began a series of missions impossible. Let’s take a look.

Suddenly in August 1527, with his ‘sensible’ chief advisor Cardinal Wolsey away in France, Henry dispatched his secretary, William Knight, on a madcap mission to Rome.

In the documents Knight was carrying, Henry explains to the pope that he wants an annulment of his marriage to Katherine and permission to marry a young woman who he is already sleeping with.

He admits he’s also slept with her sister so he can only mean Anne Boleyn. If necessary, Henry explains, the pope should allow him to marry this new woman as well as Katherine.

Even if the pope had not been the prisoner of the Spanish, this would have been mad. It was the first of Henry’s ‘missions impossible.’

#48 Missions Impossible - Ep 03 Henry VIII: the King, his wife, his lover, the French LISTEN HERE

An example of a papal bull of dispensation to marry: from Pope Paul II, 14 May 1469

Henry's distancing himself from Katherine was never really about actually securing a divorce

If Henry had wanted a speedy divorce, there was a much simpler route than the one he followed.

Cardinal Wolsey had already come up with a brilliant and perfectly legal way out. On a technicality.

It went like this: the Queen maintains that her marriage to Henry’s brother Arthur had never been consummated. The Queen claims that she was still a virgin when Henry married her (something, she reminds them, Henry boasted loudly about after their wedding night).

So, according to church law - which says a marriage does not exist unless its consummated - Katherine had never in fact been married to Henry’s brother Arthur. She’d only ever been engaged. So she had never actually needed the pope's permission to marry Henry - and there was no point in Henry now trying to prove the pope had been wrong to give it.

BUT Wolsey pointed out that to marry someone who’d been officially engaged still required a papal dispensation. And it was a different one from the one for those who'd been married, which is what Katherine had asked for and obtained. So technically the dispensation Katherine/Henry had been given before their wedding was ineffective.

This meant Henry’s marriage to Katherine was null and void and (without blaming the Pope and getting into a diplomatic tangle) Henry was free to marry a French princess, or whoever he wanted.

What did Henry do?

He turned down Wolsey’s easy route to a divorce and instead adopted the impossible one - writing abstruse arguments about Old Testament texts to prove that the pope had been wrong. He spent so long on it all that he wrote to Anne that it was giving him headaches.

Divorcing Katherine was never about marrying Anne

King Francis I of France by François Clouet, 1541 (ever since the Field of the Cloth of Gold Henry and Francis were in a hate-love bromance)

It was the French who got Henry started on his divorce in the first place

As 1528 went on, the military situation in Italy improved and Henry had the perfect opportunity to get his divorce done. After all the pope was no longer so fearful of the Spanish and Henry could use Wolsey’s clever technicality. But still Henry did nothing except begin to threaten the pope that he was considering leaving the Church of Rome.

The pope had helpfully said that Wolsey could hear the divorce case in England and come to his own conclusion, presumably in Henry’s favour. But oddly, Henry wanted more. He insisted the pope ban Katherine’s right of appeal to Rome, which he could not legally do.

What was Henry’s game? We think the question we should be asking is this. Did Henry’s foreign policy have anything to gain in 1528 through all this bizarre series of missions to the pope? And straightaway the answer is obviously yes. It did.

Henry had two interrelated foreign policy objectives. The first was to contain Spain. The second was to cut some kind of figure in Europe - tricky with an empty treasury and virtually no army. Splitting with Katherine and the Spanish alliance she stood for, delivered both.

Henry had allied himself with the French who needed him against the Spanish. And the French encouraged him to seek a divorce since the pope couldn't give it without falling out with the Spanish. Perfect.

In 1529 Wolsey would tell the French ambassador that it had been ‘above all other things’, the support of the French that had got Henry started on the divorce in the first place.

Hever Castle in Kent. Anne Boleyn was sent 'home' here when she had the sweating sickness in June 1528

At the heart of every major turning point in Henry’s campaign, lies his relationship with the French

So Henry began proceedings against Katherine in May 1527 just weeks after signing his treaty with the French.

According to historian Garrett Mattingly, who wrote the classic biography of Katherine of Aragon, she always believed that the whole divorce business ‘had occurred to Wolsey as the best method of safeguarding his pro-French policy by removing from Henry’s side the [King of Spain’s] chief friend in England and substituting a French princess.’

Dragging out Henry’s divorce suited the French, since it kept the pope from committing to the Spanish. And the more the French appeared to help Henry diplomatically with the pope (without ever actually getting a divorce) the more Henry was tied to their alliance. But it also suited Henry because it tied the French to him. It was about the only card he had to play.

During these months in 1528 Henry sent Anne home to Hever Castle and went on summer progress with Katherine. Henry’s groom of the stool (who looked after the royal toilet) reported that, every morning, the king ‘cometh from the Queen.’

They were plainly still sleeping together – and went on sleeping together, according to more than one witness, at least into October 1528.

What was behind this long campaign was not trying to marry Anne instead of Katherine. And at this stage it also only appeared to be to do with imperium (ie giving himself more power) since Henry did nothing at all about taking control over the English church. Rather the opposite – he kept demanding that the pope sort the whole mess out.

Henry’s divorce looks very much like a part of his foreign policy - his new alliance with the French, and stopping the pope from going over completely to the Spanish side .

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