As to the divorce, it will be well to clear away the enormous amount of argument, of vituperation and prevarication by which the whole question is obscured, and to seek by the magnet of common sense to find the needle of truth in this vast bundle of hay.

The situation was complicated. In those days it was generally supposed that no woman could succeed to the throne, and a male successor was regarded as a political necessity. Charles V., too, was plotting to depose Henry and to proclaim James V. as ruler of England, or Mary, who was to be married to an English noble for this purpose.

The Succession

The Duke of Buckingham was the most formidable possible heir to the throne, were the King to die without male heirs. His execution took place in 1521. Desperate men take desperate remedies. Now, in 1519, Henry had a natural son by Elizabeth Blount, sister of Lord Mountjoy. This boy Henry contemplated placing on the throne, so causing considerable uneasiness to the Queen. In 1525 he was created Duke of Richmond. Shortly after he was made Lord High Admiral of England and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. It was suggested that he should marry a royal Princess. Another suggestion was that he should marry his half-sister, an arrangement which seems to have commended itself to the Pope, on condition that Henry abandoned his divorce from Queen Katharine! But this was not to be, and Mary was betrothed to the French prince. An heir must be obtained somehow, and the divorce, therefore, took more and more tangible shape. A marriage with Anne Boleyn was the next move. To attain this object, Henry applied himself with his accustomed energy. His conscience walked hand in hand with expediency.

To Rome, Henry sent many embassies and to the Universities of Christendom much gold, in order to persuade them to yield to the dictates of his conscience. His passion for marriage lines in his amours was one of Henry’s most distinguishing qualities.

In 1527 an union between Francis I. and the Princess Mary was set on foot. Here the question of Mary’s legitimacy was debated, and this gave Henry another excuse for regarding the divorce as necessary.

As the modern historian might aptly say: “Here was a pretty kettle of fish.”

There can be little doubt that as a man of God, Wolsey strongly disapproved of the divorce, but as the King’s Chancellor he felt himself bound to urge his case to the best of his ability. He was in fact the advocate—the devil’s advocate—under protest. One cannot imagine a more terrible position for a man of conscience to be placed in, but once even a cardinal embarks in politics the working of his conscience is temporarily suspended. In world politics the Ten Commandments are apt to become a negligible quantity.

Henry’s conscience was becoming more and more tender. Much may be urged in favour of the divorce from a political point of view, and no doubt Henry had a powerful faculty of self-persuasion—such men can grow to believe that whatever they desire is right, that “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” It is a pity, however, that Henry’s scruples did not assert themselves before the marriage with Katharine took place, for the ethical arguments against such an union were then equally strong. Indeed, these scruples appear to have been a “family failing,” for Henry’s sister Margaret, Queen of Scotland, obtained a dispensation of divorce from Rome on far slenderer grounds. To make matters worse for Henry, Rome was sacked—the Pope was a prisoner in the Emperor’s hands. In this state of things, the Pope was naturally disinclined to give offence to the Emperor by divorcing his aunt (Katharine).

At all costs, the Pope must be set free—on this errand Wolsey now set out for France. But Charles V. was no less wily than Wolsey, and dispatched Cardinal Quignon to Rome to frustrate his endeavours, and to deprive Wolsey of his legatine powers. A schism between Henry and Wolsey was now asserting itself—Wolsey being opposed to the King’s union with Anne Boleyn. (“We’ll no Anne Boleyns for him!”) Wolsey desired that the King should marry the French King’s sister, in order to strengthen his opposition to Charles V. of Spain.

The Cardinal was indeed in an unenviable position. If the divorce succeeded, then his enemy, Anne Boleyn, would triumph and he would fall. If the divorce failed, then Henry would thrust from him the agent who had failed to secure the object of his master. And in his fall the Cardinal would drag down the Church. It is said that Wolsey secretly opposed the divorce. This is fully brought out in Shakespeare’s play, and is indeed the main cause of Wolsey’s fall.

There was for Henry now only one way out of the dilemma into which the power of the Pope had thrown him—that was to obtain a dispensation for a bigamous marriage. It seems that Henry himself cancelled the proposition before it was made. This scruple was unnecessary, for the Pope himself secretly made a proposition “that His Majesty might be allowed two wives.”The sanction for the marriage with Anne Boleyn was obtained without great difficulty—but it was to be subject to the divorce from Katharine being ratified. Thus the King was faced with another obstacle. At this moment began the struggle for supremacy at Rome between English and Spanish influence. The Pope had to choose between the two; Charles V. was the victor, whereupon Henry cut the Gordian knot by throwing over the jurisdiction of Rome. Wolsey was in a position of tragic perplexity. He was torn by his allegiance to the King, and his zeal for the preservation of the Church. He wrote: “I cannot reflect upon it and close my eye, for I see ruin, infamy and subversion of the whole dignity and estimation of the See Apostolic if this course is persisted in.” But Pope Clement dared not offend the Emperor Charles, who was his best, because his most powerful ally, and had he not proved his power by sacking Rome? The Pope, although quite ready to grant dispensations for a marriage of Princess Mary and her half-brother, the Duke of Richmond, though he was ready to grant Margaret’s divorce, could not afford to stultify the whole Papal dignity by revoking the dispensation he had originally given that Henry should marry his brother’s wife. Truly an edifying embroglio! Henry was desirous of shifting the responsibility on God through the Pope—the Pope was sufficiently astute to wish to put the responsibility on the devil through Henry. There was one other course open—that course the Pope took.

In 1528 he gave a Commission to Wolsey and Cardinal Campeggio to try the case themselves, and pronounce sentence. Back went the embassy to England. Wolsey saw through the device, for the Pope was still free to revoke the Commission. Indeed Clement’s attitude towards Henry was dictated entirely by the fluctuating fortune of Charles V., Emperor of Spain. Meanwhile, Charles won another battle against the French, and the Pope at once gave secret instructions to Campeggio to procrastinate, assuring Charles that nothing would be done which should be to the detriment of Katharine. The wily Campeggio (emissary of the Pope) at first sought to persuade Henry to refrain from the divorce. Henry refused. Thereupon he endeavoured to persuade Katharine voluntarily to enter a nunnery. Among all these plotters and intriguers, Katharine, adamant in her virtue, maintained her position as lawful wife and Queen.

When Wolsey and Campeggio visited the Queen she was doing needlework with her maids. It appears (and this is important as showing the inwardness of Wolsey’s attitude in the matter of the divorce) that “from this interview the Queen gained over both legates to her cause; indeed, they would never pronounce against her, and this was the head and front of the King’s enmity to his former favourite Wolsey.” In the first instance, Wolsey was undoubtedly a party, however unwilling, to the separation of the King and Queen, in order that Henry might marry the brilliant and high-minded sister of Francis I., Duchess of AlenÇon. That lady would not listen to such a proposal, lest it should break the heart of Queen Katharine. Wolsey was, either from personal enmity towards Anne Boleyn or from his estimate of her character, or from both, throughout opposed to the union with that lady.

Subsequently the King sent to Katharine a deputation from his Council announcing that he had, by the advice of Cranmer, obtained the opinions of the universities of Europe concerning the divorce, and found several which considered it expedient. He therefore entreated her, for the quieting of his conscience, that she would refer the matter to the arbitration of four English prelates and four nobles. The Queen received the message in her chamber, and replied to it: “God grant my husband a quiet conscience, but I mean to abide by no decision excepting that of Rome.” This infuriated the King.

After many delays and the appearance of a document which was declared by one side to be a forgery, and by the other to be genuine, the case began on May 31, 1529. In the great hall of Blackfriars both the King and Queen appeared in person to hear the decision of the Court. The trial itself is very faithfully rendered in Shakespeare’s play. Finding the King obdurate, Katharine protested against the jurisdiction of the Court, and appealing finally to Rome, withdrew from Blackfriars.

Judgment was to be delivered on the 23rd of July, 1529. Campeggio rose in the presence of the King and adjourned the Court till October. This was the last straw, and the last meeting of the Court. Henry had lost. Charles was once more in the ascendant. England and France had declared war on him in 1528, but England’s heart was not in the enterprise—the feeling of hatred to Wolsey became widespread. Henry and Charles made terms of peace, and embraced once more after a bloodless and (for England) somewhat ignominious war. The French force was utterly defeated in battle. The Pope and Charles signed a treaty—all was nicely arranged. The Pope’s nephew was to marry the Emperor’s natural daughter; certain towns were to be restored to the Pope, who was to crown Charles with the Imperial crown. The participators in the sacking of Rome were to be absolved from sin; the proceedings against the Emperor’s aunt, Katharine, were to be null and void. If Katharine could not obtain justice in England, Henry should not have his justice in Rome. The Pope and the Emperor kissed again, and Henry finally cut himself adrift from Rome. It was the failure of the divorce that made England a Protestant country.

Henry now openly defied the Pope, by whom he was excommunicated, and so “deprived of the solace of the rites of religion; when he died he must lie without burial, and in hell suffer torment for ever.” The mind shrinks from contemplating the tortures to which the soul of His Majesty might have been subjected but for the timely intervention of his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury.

So far from Henry suffering in a temporal sense, he continued to defy the opinion and the power of the world. He showed his greatness by looking public opinion unflinchingly in the face; by ignoring, he conquered it. Amid the thunderous roarings of the Papal bull, Henry stood—as we see him in his picture—smiling and indifferent. “I never saw the King merrier than now,” wrote a contemporary in 1533. Henry always had good cards—now he held the ace of public opinion up his sleeve.Wolsey, although averse to the Queen’s divorce and the marriage of Anne Boleyn, expressed himself in terms of the strongest opposition to the overbearing Pope. A few days before the Papal revocation arrived, the Cardinal wrote thus: “If the King be cited to appear at Rome in person or by proxy, and his prerogative be interfered with, none of his subjects will tolerate it. If he appears in Italy, it will be at the head of a formidable army.” Opposed as they were to the divorce, the English people were of one mind with Wolsey in this attitude.

Henry was not slow to avail himself of the new development, and he made the divorce become in the eyes of the people but a secondary consideration to the pride of England. He drew the red herring of the Reformation across the trail of the divorce. The King and his Parliament held that the Church should not meddle with temporal affairs. The Church was the curer of souls, not the curer of the body politic.

Katharine’s cause sank into the background. The voice of justice was drowned by the birth shrieks of the Reformation.