Henry VIII, Part Three

The Scots had been decimated at Flodden Field, and the French had suffered numerous setbacks in 1513, so it shocked many when Henry decided not to continue his hunt for triumph the next year. It wasn’t that he wasn’t invested; he just couldn’t afford it. England had become rich off Henry VII’s financial measures, but much of the treasury’s abundance had been spent on supporting Ferdinand and Maximilian during the French campaign. These two English allies hadn’t carried their weight, and the English coffers were running on fumes. Coupled with this, the Holy League fell apart when Pope Leo X negotiated peace with France. Peace in the east meant that France would be able to siphon more men and material to the west, making Henry’s adventures significantly harder. Henry sued for his own peace with France, and in the ensuing agreement he pledged his sister Mary to the much-older French king. Thus peace with France was secured for another eight years.

Mary had been previously pledged to Charles, the grandson of both Ferdinand of Spain and Maximilian of the Holy Roman Empire. Had that marriage gone through, she would’ve found herself queen of a large tract of land. When both of Charles’ grandfathers died (Ferdinand in 1516 and Maximilian in 1519), Charles ascended to the thrones of both Spain and the Holy Roman Empire as King and Emperor Charles V. When Louis XII died in 1515, just two years after claiming Mary Tudor as his wife, the French throne passed to his son Francis I. Thus continental Europe had three young rulers and a clean slate: Henry VIII of England, Francis I of France, and Charles V of the joint Spanish and Holy Roman Empire could forge a different future for Europe than the constant squabbles that had marked their relations thus far. Henry’s trusted councilor, Thomas Wolsey, encouraged Henry to pursue not only peace but a wide alliance. The resulting Treaty of London in 1518 united the kingdoms of western Europe and set them against the rising threat of the expanding Ottoman Empire to the east. Wolsey hoped that, with such grand steps towards peace, a final and lasting peace could be secured – but Henry’s competitive streak would make such a hope ill-fated.

the field of the cloth of gold

The kings of France and England were set to meet in friendship in 1520 at the Field of Cloth and Gold near Calaise for two weeks of banqueting, dancing, and jousting. The idea was that Henry and Francis could strike up a friendship and lead their respective nations into a period of peace and alliance; but Henry and Francis were too much alike, and they mixed like oil and water. Both were good-looking, powerful, and competitive, and both wanted to outdo the other and establish an unofficial ‘dominance’ moving forward. Both monarchs left the festivities brooding, resentful, and scheming on how to establish superiority over the other. Henry liked Charles V much more than Francis, and Charles didn’t like Francis at all. Charles thrust the Empire into war with France in 1521, and though Henry offered to mediate, these proactive attempts at peace came to nothing. Henry had to take a stand somewhere, and he threw in with the more likable (not to mention more powerful) Charles. Henry hoped that this new alliance would enable him to restore more English lands in France. Though the English did well in biting off small portions of Francis’ western territories, Charles landed a killing blow at the Battle of Pavia, in which he captured King Francis. With the French king in chains, Charles had all the means to dictate peace – and he swept the English aside. Henry, incensed that he was being excluded despite the gains he’d made, decided to pull England out of the conflict and signed the Treaty of the More with France on 30 August 1525. 

Francis I is captured at Pavia

Henry's aspirations in France were put on hold, but he had enough to focus on at home: her name was Anne Boleyn. As far as mistresses go, there was nothing special about her; Henry was known for having mistresses, as was typical (and expected) of kings. As early as 1510, within a year of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry was having an illustrious affair with one of the sisters of the Duke of Buckingham, either Elizabeth or Anne Hastings. Beginning in 1516 Henry had a more permanent mistress, Elizabeth Blount. There were likely more affairs, so Anne Boleyn was by no means the first. Catherine, no doubt knowledgeable of the king’s infidelity, was nevertheless devoted to her husband, and historians consider their marriage unusually good for the climate of the times. Nevertheless, Henry yearned for younger flesh (Catherine, remember, was six years his senior), and he was disappointed that his wife wasn’t doing her job by giving him a son who could become heir to his throne.

This isn’t to say that Catherine didn’t bear him children. She gave birth to a stillborn daughter on 31 January 1510, and four months later she became pregnant again. This time she had a son, young Henry, who was born on New Year’s Day 1511. Henry was ebullient, and he turned the birth of his male heir into a festive occasion, even including a two-day jousting tournament. Sadly, the young heir died seven weeks later. Catherine bore two more sons, in 1514 and 1515, but both were stillborn. In February 1516 she gave birth to a second daughter, Mary, who surpassed the death-dates of her siblings. Relations between king and queen had been strained up to this point, but Mary’s vitality reintroduced vigor into the marriage. Two years later Catherine became pregnant yet again, but this third daughter was stillborn. The next year, 1519, Henry’s long-time mistress Elizabeth Blount gave birth to an illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy. He couldn’t be Henry’s heir because he was born a bastard, so Henry made him Duke of Richmond in 1525. It’s likely Henry was maneuvering to build Fitzroy’s legitimacy in case Catherine didn’t bear him a son; this is evidenced that by the time of Fitzroy’s death in 1536, Parliament was enacting the Second Succession Act which could have allowed him to become king if Henry sired no legitimate heirs. The bastard son’s death, of course, annulled Henry’s hopes. 

Anne Boleyn

The birth of a son to Henry’s mistress soured the king’s relationship with Catherine. If other women could bear him healthy sons, why couldn’t his wife? Blount may have been Henry’s long-time mistress, but it certainly wasn’t a monogamous affair; at the same time he was sleeping with Mary Boleyn, Catherine’s lady-in-waiting. Henry was introduced to Mary’s sister, the twenty-five-year-old Anne who served in Catherine’s entourage. Henry tried to get an affair rolling, but Anne rejected his advances (whether out of initial repulsion, fear of betraying the queen, or because she was cleverly working an angle on Henry, historians are divided). While Anne was giving Henry the cold shoulder (though perhaps with a tantalizing wink or subversively sensuous teasing), the king tried to finagle a means of siring a legitimate heir outside the bounds of wedlock. 

Henry’s obsession with an heir – what became known as the king’s ‘great matter’ – consumed him. As he saw it, he had three options: he could legitimize his bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, which would require intervention by the papacy and would be open to considerable legal challenge; he could marry off his one surviving legitimate daughter Mary and hope for a grandson to inherit directly; or he could somehow wiggle free of his marriage to Catherine and remarry someone of younger stock who could bear him a son. His increasing desire for the tantalizing Anne drew him towards this third option, and it wasn’t long before Henry’s mind was obsessed with annulling his marriage to the forty-year-old Catherine. If he was able to do that, he could take Anne as his true wife and have her (hopefully) bear him male heirs. 

Henry’s quest for an annulment would result in one of the most history-altering innovations in English history: the break from the Catholic Church and the creation of the Church of England. Historians debate the king’s motivations in spearheading such a revolutionary move, but it seems apparent that the primary motivation wasn’t religious conviction but manipulating (or, one could say, outright rejecting) the status quo in order to procure an heir and stabilize the Tudor throne. Henry was raised as a faithful Catholic and underwent religious studies; he was eminent in his studies, devout and intelligent in his faith, and his 1521 Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (or ‘Defence of the Seven Sacraments’) earned him the title Fidei Defensor, or ‘Defender of the Faith’, from Pope Leo X. In searching for a way out of his marriage to Catherine, he became convinced – or, at least, pretended to be convinced – that his marriage was sinful: by marrying his brother’s wife, he was in violation of Leviticus 20.21. This text states that a man who took his brother’s wife would remain childless; though Catherine had conceived a daughter, Henry didn’t think it counted as proof of Catherine’s innocence because it was only male heirs who could be counted as ‘legitimate children.’ He surmised that Catherine’s inability to bear a son was because of this sin; God was punishing him for going against basic bible teaching in marrying his older brother’s widow. In 1527 Henry approached Pope Clement VII and insisted that because his marriage was outside the bounds of God’s law, it must be annulled. The papacy rejected Henry’s reasoning and refused to grant the annulment. Henry’s back-and-forth waggling with the papacy resulted in an ecclesiastical court sent to England, though Clement VII advised his legate, Lorenzo Campeggio, to resist Henry’s machinations. The ecclesiastical court lasted nearly two months; it ended when the pope called Campeggio back to Rome, and it became apparent that the court would lead nowhere. Henry, whose last hope for annulment had been dashed with the failure of the ecclesiastical court, blamed his advisor, Cardinal Wolsey, for the failure. 

Cardinal Wolsey

Cardinal Wolsey had been near and dear to Henry’s heart for a while, but even before the failure of the ecclesiastical court, the relationship was in decline. The friction between the two began to heat up in 1523 when Wolsey called a parliament and failed to get a tax hike authorized. The next year, he attempted to levy a special tax, but his attempts led to such public resistance that Henry rescinded the levy. Both he and Wolsey claimed credit for rescinding the levy (with neither willing to take credit for implementing it), but Henry held the real power and made Wolsey take blame for the fiasco. The government’s financial state was struggling, and Wolsey made matters worse by attempting to reverse alliances overseas. The English cloth trade with the Netherlands suffered, and the reversal of alliances cost the English spoils of victory that could’ve been had with Francis I’s defeat and capture at Pavia. These blunders made Henry question whether Wolsey was up for the task at hand, and the failure of the ecclesiastical court was the final straw that tightened the noose around Wolsey’s fragile neck. In late 1529 Henry charged Wolsey with praemunire, or siding with the papacy against the king, and Wolsey was blacklisted from the king’s court. Despite a brief reconciliation (with an official pardon) months later, Wolsey was subsequently charged with treason; he wouldn’t stand trial, dying in prison while waiting for his case to be heard.