Part 1 (1/2)

The Wives of Henry the Eighth and the Parts They Played in History.

by Martin Hume.

PREFACE

Either by chance or by the peculiar working of our const.i.tution, the Queen Consorts of England have as a rule been nationally important only in proportion to the influence exerted by the political tendencies which prompted their respective marriages. England has had no Catharine or Marie de Medici, no Elizabeth Farnese, no Catharine of Russia, no Caroline of Naples, no Maria Luisa of Spain, who, either through the minority of their sons or the weakness of their husbands, dominated the countries of their adoption; the Consorts of English Kings having been, in the great majority of cases, simply domestic helpmates of their husbands and children, with comparatively small political power or ambition for themselves. Only those whose elevation responded to tendencies of a nationally enduring character, or who represented temporarily the active forces in a great national struggle, can claim to be powerful political factors in the history of our country. The six Consorts of Henry VIII., whose successive rise and fall synchronised with the beginning and progress of the Reformation in England, are perhaps those whose fleeting prominence was most pregnant of good or evil for the nation and for civilisation at large, because they personified causes infinitely more important than themselves.

The careers of these unhappy women have almost invariably been considered, nevertheless, from a purely personal point of view. It is true that the many historians of the Reformation have dwelt upon the rivalry between Katharine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, and their strenuous efforts to gain their respective ends; but even in their case their action has usually been regarded as individual in impulse, instead of being, as I believe it was, prompted or thwarted by political forces and considerations, of which the Queens themselves were only partially conscious. The lives of Henry's Consorts have been related as if each of the six was an isolated phenomenon that had by chance attracted the desire of a lascivious despot, and in her turn had been deposed when his eye had fallen, equally fortuitously, upon another woman who pleased his errant fancy better. This view I believe to be a superficial and misleading one. I regard Henry himself not as the far-seeing statesman he is so often depicted for us, sternly resolved from the first to free his country from the yoke of Rome, and pressing forward through a lifetime with his eyes firmly fixed upon the goal of England's religious freedom; but rather as a weak, vain, boastful man, the plaything of his pa.s.sions, which were artfully made use of by rival parties to forward religious and political ends in the struggle of giants that ended in the Reformation. No influence that could be exercised over the King was neglected by those who sought to lead him, and least of all that which appealed to his uxoriousness; and I hope to show in the text of this book how each of his wives in turn was but an instrument of politicians, intended to sway the King on one side or the other. Regarded from this point of view, the lives of these six unhappy Queens a.s.sume an importance in national history which cannot be accorded to them if they are considered in the usual light as the victims of a strong, l.u.s.tful tyrant, each one standing apart, and in her turn simply the darling solace of his hours of dalliance. Doubtless the latter point of view provides to the historian a wider scope for the description of picturesque ceremonial and gorgeous millinery, as well as for pathetic pa.s.sages dealing with the personal sufferings of the Queens in their distress; but I can only hope that the absence of much of this sentimental and feminine interest from my pages will be compensated by the wider aspect in which the public and political significance of Henry's wives is presented; that a clearer understanding than usual may thus be gained of the tortuous process by which the Reformation in England was effected, and that the figure of the King in the picture may stand in a juster proportion to his environment than is often the case.

MARTIN HUME.

LONDON, _October_ 1905.

THE WIVES OF HENRY THE EIGHTH

CHAPTER I

1488-1501

INTRODUCTORY--WHY KATHARINE CAME TO ENGLAND--POLITICAL MATRIMONY

The history of modern Europe takes its start from an event which must have appeared insignificant to a generation that had witnessed the violent end of the English dominion in France, had been dinned by the clash of the Wars of the Roses, and watched with breathless fear the savage hosts of Islam striking at the heart of Christendom over the still smoking ruins of the Byzantine Empire.

Late one night, in the beginning of October 1469, a cavalcade of men in the guise of traders halted beneath the walls of the ancient city of Burgo de Osma in Old Castile. They had travelled for many days by little-used paths through the mountains of Soria from the Aragonese frontier town of Tarrazona; and, impatient to gain the safe shelter of the fortress of Osma, they banged at the gates demanding admittance. The country was in anarchy. Leagues of churchmen and n.o.bles warred against each other and preyed upon society at large. An impotent king, deposed with ignominy by one faction, had been as ignominiously set up again by another, and royal pretenders to the succession were the puppets of rival parties whose object was to monopolise for themselves all the fruits of royalty, whilst the monarch fed upon the husks. So when the new-comers called peremptorily for admittance within the gates of Osma, the guards upon the city walls, taking them for enemies or freebooters, greeted them with a shower of missiles from the catapults. One murderous stone whizzed within a few inches of the head of a tall, fair-haired lad of good mien and handsome visage, who, dressed as a servant, accompanied the cavalcade. If the projectile had effectively hit instead of missed the stripling, the whole history of the world from that hour to this would have been changed, for this youth was Prince Ferdinand, the heir of Aragon, who was being conveyed secretly by a faction of Castilian n.o.bles to marry the Princess Isabel, who had been set forward as a pretender to her brother's throne, to the exclusion of the King's doubtful daughter, the hapless Beltraneja.

A hurried cry of explanation went up from the travellers: a shouted pa.s.sword; the flas.h.i.+ng of torches upon the walls, the joyful recognition of those within, and the gates swung open, the drawbridge dropped, and thenceforward Prince Ferdinand was safe, surrounded by the men-at-arms of Isabel's faction. Within a week the eighteen-years-old bridegroom greeted his bride, and before the end of the month Ferdinand and Isabel were married at Valladolid.

To most observers it may have seemed a small thing that a petty prince in the extreme corner of Europe had married the girl pretender to the distracted and divided realm of Castile; but there was one cunning, wicked old man in Barcelona who was fully conscious of the importance of the match that he had planned; and he, John II. of Aragon, had found an apt pupil in his son Ferdinand, crafty beyond his years. To some extent Isabel must have seen it too, for she was already a dreamer of great dreams which she meant to come true, and the strength of Aragon behind her claim would insure her the sovereignty that was to be the first step in their realisation.

This is not the place to tell how the n.o.bles of Castile found to their dismay that in Ferdinand and Isabel they had raised a King Stork instead of King Log to the throne, and how the Queen, strong as a man, subtle as a woman, crushed and chicaned her realms into order and obedience. The aims of Ferdinand and his father in effecting the union of Aragon and Castile by marriage went far beyond the Peninsula in which they lived. For ages Aragon had found its ambitions checked by the consolidation of France. The vision of a great Romance empire, stretching from Valencia to Genoa, and governed from Barcelona or Saragossa, had been dissipated when Saint Louis wrung from James the Conqueror, in the thirteenth century, his recognition of French suzerainty over Provence.

But Aragonese eyes looked still towards the east, and saw a Frenchman ever in their way. The Christian outpost in the Mediterranean, Sicily, already belonged to Aragon; so did the Balearic isles: but an Aragonese dynasty held Naples only in alternation and constant rivalry with the French house of Anjou; and as the strength of the French monarchy grew it stretched forth its hands nearer, and ever nearer, to the weak and divided princ.i.p.alities of Italy with covetous intent. Unless Aragon could check the French expansion across the Alps its own power in the Mediterranean would be dwarfed, its vast hopes must be abandoned, and it must settle down to the inglorious life of a petty State, hemmed in on all sides by more powerful neighbours. But although too weak to vanquish France alone, a King of Aragon who could dispose of the resources of greater Castile might hope, in spite of French opposition, to dominate a united Italy, and thence look towards the illimitable east. This was the aspiration that Ferdinand inherited, and to which the efforts of his long and strenuous life were all directed. The conquest of Granada, the unification of Spain, the greed, the cruelty, the lying, the treachery, the political marriages of all his children, and the fires of the Inquisition, were all means to the end for which he fought.

But fate was unkind to him. The discovery of America diverted Castilian energy from Aragonese objects, and death stepped in and made grim sport of all his marriage jugglery. Before he died, beaten and broken-hearted, he knew that the little realm of his fathers, instead of using the strength of others for its aims, would itself be used for objects which concerned it not. But though he failed his plan was a masterly one. Treaties, he knew, were rarely binding, for the age was faithless, and he himself never kept an oath an hour longer than suited him; but mutual interests by kins.h.i.+p might hold sovereigns together against a common opponent. So, one after the other, from their earliest youth, the children of Ferdinand and Isabel were made political counters in their father's great marriage league. The eldest daughter, Isabel, was married to the heir of Portugal, and every haven into which French galleys might shelter in their pa.s.sage from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Biscay was at Ferdinand's bidding.

The only son, John, was married to the daughter of Maximilian, King of the Romans, and (from 1493) Emperor, whose interest also it was to check the French advance towards north Italy and his own dominions. The second daughter, Juana, was married to the Emperor's son, Philip, sovereign, in right of his mother, of the rich inheritance of Burgundy, Flanders, Holland, and the Franche Comte, and heir to Austria and the Empire, who from Flanders might be trusted to watch the French on their northern and eastern borders; and the youngest of Ferdinand's daughters, Katharine, was destined almost from her birth to secure the alliance of England, the rival of France in the Channel, and the opponent of its aggrandis.e.m.e.nt towards the north.

Ferdinand of Aragon and Henry Tudor, Henry VII., were well matched. Both were clever, unscrupulous, and greedy; each knew that the other would cheat him if he could, and tried to get the better of every deal, utterly regardless not only of truth and honesty but of common decency. But, though Ferdinand usually beat Henry at his shuffling game, fate finally beat Ferdinand, and a powerful modern England is the clearly traceable consequence. How the great result was brought about it is one of the princ.i.p.al objects of this book to tell. That Ferdinand had everything to gain by thus surrounding France by possible rivals in his own interests is obvious, for if his plans had not miscarried he could have diverted France whenever it suited him, and his way towards the east would have been clear; but at first sight the interest of Henry VII. in placing himself into a position of antagonism towards France for the benefit of the King of Spain is not so evident. The explanation must be found in the fact that he held the throne of England by very uncertain tenure, and sought to disarm those who would be most able and likely to injure him. The royal house of Castile had been closely allied to the Plantagenets, and both Edward IV. and his brother Richard had been suitors for the hand of Isabel. The Dowager-d.u.c.h.ess of Burgundy, moreover, was Margaret Plantagenet, their sister, who sheltered and cherished in Flanders the English adherents of her house; and Henry Tudor, half a Frenchman by birth and sympathies, was looked at askance by the powerful group of Spain, the Empire, and Burgundy when first he usurped the English throne. He knew that he had little or nothing to fear from France, and one of his earliest acts was in 1487 to bid for the friends.h.i.+p of Ferdinand by means of an offer of alliance, and the marriage of his son Arthur, Prince of Wales, then a year old, with the Infanta Katharine, who was a few months older.

Ferdinand at the time was trying to bring about a match between his eldest daughter, Isabel, and the young King of France, Charles VIII., and was not very eager for a new English alliance which might alarm the French. Before the end of the year, however, it was evident that there was no chance of the Spanish Infanta's marriage with Charles VIII. coming to anything, and Ferdinand's plan for a great coalition against France was finally adopted.

In the first days of 1488 Ferdinand's two amba.s.sadors arrived in London to negotiate the English match, and the long duel of diplomacy between the Kings of England and Spain began. Of one of the envoys it behoves us to say something, because of the influence his personal character exercised upon subsequent events. Rodrigo de Puebla was one of the most extraordinary diplomatists that can be imagined, and could only have been possible under such monarchs as Henry and Ferdinand, willing as both of them were to employ the basest instruments in their underhand policy.

Puebla was a doctor of laws and a provincial mayor when he attracted the attention of Ferdinand, and his first diplomatic mission of importance was that to England. He was a poor, vain, greedy man, utterly corrupt, and Henry VII. was able to dominate him from the first. In the course of time he became more of an intimate English minister than a foreign amba.s.sador, though he represented at Henry's court not only Castile and Aragon, but also the Pope and the Empire. He constantly sat in the English council, and was almost the only man admitted to Henry's personal confidence. That such an instrument would be trusted entirely by the wary Ferdinand, was not to be expected: and though Puebla remained in England as amba.s.sador to the end of his life, he was, to his bitter jealousy, always a.s.sociated with others when important negotiations had to be conducted. Isabel wrote to him often, sometimes threatening him with punishment if he failed in carrying out his instructions satisfactorily, sometimes flattering him and promising him rewards, which he never got. He was recognised by Ferdinand as an invaluable means of gaining knowledge of Henry's real intentions, and by Henry as a tool for betraying Ferdinand. It is hardly necessary to say that he alternately sold both and was never fully paid by either.

Henry offered him an English bishopric which his own sovereigns would not allow him to accept, and a wealthy wife in England was denied him for a similar reason; for Ferdinand on principle kept his agents poor. On a wretched pittance allowed him by Henry, Puebla lived thus in London until he died almost simultaneously with his royal friend. When not spunging at the tables of the King or English n.o.bles he lived in a house of ill-fame in London, paying only twopence a day for his board, and cheating the other inmates, in the interests of the proprietor, for the balance. He was, in short, a braggart, a liar, a flatterer, and a spy, who served two rogues roguishly and was fittingly rewarded by the scorn of honest men.

This was the amba.s.sador who, with a colleague called Juan de Sepulveda, was occupied through the spring of 1488 in negotiating the marriage of the two babies--Arthur, Prince of Wales, and the Infanta Katharine. They found Henry, as Puebla says, singing _Te Deum Laudamus_ about the alliance and marriage: but when the parties came to close quarters matters went less smoothly. What Henry had to gain by the alliance was the disarming of possible enemies of his own unstable throne, whilst Ferdinand needed England's active or pa.s.sive support in a war against France, for the purpose of extorting the restoration to Aragon of the territory of Roussillon and Cerdagne, and of preventing the threatened absorption of the Duchy of Brittany into the French monarchy. The contest was keen and crafty. First the English commissioners demanded with the Infanta a dowry so large as quite to shock Puebla; it being, as he said, five times as much as had been mentioned by English agents in Spain. Puebla and Sepulveda offered a quarter of the sum demanded, and hinted with pretended jocosity that it was a great condescension on the part of the sovereigns of Spain to allow their daughter to marry at all into such a parvenu family as the Tudors. After infinite haggling, both as to the amount and the form of the dowry, it was agreed by the amba.s.sadors that 200,000 gold crowns of 4s. 2d. each should be paid in cash with the bride on her marriage. But the marriage was the least part of Ferdinand's object, if indeed he then intended, which is doubtful, that it should take place at all. What he wanted was the a.s.surance of Henry's help against France; and, of all things, peace was the first need for the English king. When the demand was made therefore that England should go to war with France whenever Ferdinand chose to do so, and should not make peace without its ally, baited though the demand was with the hollow suggestion of recovering for England the territories of Normandy and Guienne, Henry's duplicity was brought into play. He dared not consent to such terms, but he wanted the benevolent regards of Ferdinand's coalition: so his ministers flattered the Spanish king, and vaguely promised ”mounts and marvels” in the way of warlike aid, as soon as the marriage treaty was signed and sealed. Even Puebla wanted something more definite than this; and the English commissioners (the Bishop of Exeter and Giles Daubeney), ”took a missal in their hands and swore in the most solemn way before the crucifix that it is the will of the King of England first to conclude the alliance and the marriage, and afterwards to make war upon the King of France, according to the bidding of the Catholic kings.” Nor was this all: for when Puebla and his colleagues later in the day saw the King himself, Henry smiled at and flattered the envoys, and flouris.h.i.+ng his bonnet and bowing low each time the names of Ferdinand and Isabel pa.s.sed his lips, confirmed the oath of his ministers, ”which he said we must accept for plain truth, unmingled with double dealing or falsehood.”[1] Ferdinand's amba.s.sadors were fairly dazzled. They were taken to see the infant bridegroom; and Puebla grew quite poetical in describing his bodily perfections, both dressed and _in puribus naturalibus_, and the beauty and magnificence of the child's mother were equally extolled. The object of all Henry's amiability, and, indeed, of Puebla's dithyrambics also, was to cajole Ferdinand into sending his baby daughter Katharine into England at once on the marriage treaty alone. With such a hostage in his hands, Henry knew that he might safely break his oath about going to war with France to please the Spanish king.

But Ferdinand was not a man easy to cajole, and when hapless, simple Sepulveda reached Spain with the draft treaty he found himself in the presence of two very angry sovereigns indeed. Two hundred thousand crowns dowry, indeed! One hundred was the most they would give, and that must be in Spanish gold, or the King of England would be sure to cheat them over the exchange; and they must have three years in which to pay the amount, for which moreover no security should be given but their own signatures.

The cost of the bride's trousseau and jewels also must be deducted from the amount of the dowry. On the other hand, the Infanta's dowry and income from England must be fully guaranteed by land rents; and, above all, the King of England must bind himself at the same time--secretly if he likes, but by formal treaty--to go to war with France to recover for Ferdinand Roussillon and Cerdagne. Though Henry would not go quite so far as this, he conceded much for the sake of the alliances so necessary to him. The dowry from Spain was kept at 200,000 crowns, and England was pledged to a war with France whenever Ferdinand should find himself in the same position.