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 Henry with legal manoeuvres and diplomatic subtleties. It was not a personal affair. Given Catherine’s relationship to Charles, it was the empire and its vassal Pope against England. But the crunch came with the second divorce trial in 1529 – for Henry and for Wolsey most of all.
Getting the trial underway at all was something of a triumph for Wolsey. But it soon became clear that, faced with the brute fact of Charles V’s power, Wolsey, for all his cleverness and confidence, and for all his claims of supremacy over the Church in England, had been unable to persuade the Pope to disavow his predecessor’s dispensation. Henry’s patience was at an end. So, just as importantly, was Anne’s. Without that, all the formalities of the trial were empty and the court, once again, was adjourned without a verdict.
As the second divorce trial neared its abortive end, the Duke of Suffolk had expressed contempt at Wolsey’s powerlessness to do the king’s bidding. Wolsey replied that he was but a ‘simple cardinal’. It was a humbling admission. Henry had no time for such creatures. Throughout his reign, Henry had been able to maintain his independence from Rome and even be seen as superior to it. Had he not taken the moral leadership of Christendom as the bringer of peace? If the Pope was supposedly an equal partner and Henry supreme in his own kingdom, Wolsey’s weakness had exposed it all as a sham. This failure cost him his job as the king’s minister, and it would have cost him his head, if he had lived longer. Wolsey died cursing Anne for causing his downfall, and predicting the ruin of the Church.
Before he fell, Wolsey warned the Pope that if the divorce was blocked, Henry would be forced ‘to adopt those remedies which are injurious to the Pope, and are frequently instilled into the King’s mind’. The refusal of Rome to deal with Henry honourably meant that ‘the sparks of that opposition here, which have been extinguished with such care and vigilance, will blaze forth to the utmost danger of all’. This was an allusion to the Lutheran heresy, which was flourishing in Germany and the Low Countries and creeping into England, despite government repression of heretics and the public turning of heretical books. And there was no secret as to who had ‘instilled’ such radical ideas in Henry’s mind. Blocked in Rome, Anne Boleyn, who was a Lutheran sympathizer, encouraged Henry to turn to Rome’s English opponents.
Anne was an avid reader of heretical books that had been banned by the orthodox and loyal Catholic king. But these blasphemous books became increasingly appealing to Henry. When a radical clergyman was arrested for distributing Lutheran tracts and William Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible, Anne stepped in to save him. It was a crucial moment. For not only did Anne protect heretics, but she brought their books to her lover’s attention. One of them, Tyndale’s Obedience of the Christian Man, had a particular relevance for him. As the books of Kings and Romans in the Bible made clear, it was kings whom God ordained with His power, not priests. Kings had rights as spiritual leaders. Such an argument flattered Henry’s ambition. Kingship gave him a special place in Christendom, but that God-given authority had been usurped through the centuries by others. ‘This is a book for me and all kings to read,’ he declared, animated by this new vision of kingship. That might be true, but Henry needed more: he needed to find a way round the long-acknowledged authority of the Pope, an authority that, a few years earlier, he had defended to the hilt.
It’s not what you know but who you know, we’re told. In the case of Thomas Cranmer it was both. When the divorce crisis began, Cranmer was an obscure theology don at Cambridge. But in the summer of 1529, a chance meeting with two Cambridge acquaintances brought Cranmer to the notice of Henry and Anne. The consequences transformed Cranmer, his world and ours.
For Henry, Cranmer insisted, had been going about the divorce in the wrong way. He had been treating it as a legal matter. But it wasn’t: it was moral. And in morals the Bible supplied absolute answers as to what was right and what was wrong. And there were experts who knew which was which – they were university theologians, like Cranmer himself.
Let Henry only consult the universities, therefore, and he would have a clear, unambiguous verdict in favour of the divorce which even Rome and the Pope would have to recognize.
‘That man hath the sow by the right ear,’ the king exclaimed. Henry was already coming to believe that the Pope was not the sole judge in Christendom. Now Cranmer had confirmed it with all the weight of his theological scholarship. Immediately, the canvas of university opinion began, starting, like so many new ideas, in Cambridge itself. Cranmer had thought that it would be high minded and straightforward. In fact both sides played dirty and used every device known to the academic politician: rigged committees, selected terms of reference and straightforward bullying and bribing. But after two days toing and froing, the university delivered the verdict that Henry wanted. Cambridge would be on the side of the winners in Tudor England.
With Cambridge and (more reluctantly) Oxford secured, Henry’s envoys set out for the Continent to pit the arguments of the King of England against the authority of the Pope. In universities across Europe they bribed, cajoled and threatened theologians to give a verdict in Henry’s favour.
Over the next few years the whole