Part 17 (1/2)
[Footnote 538: In Harpsfield's _Pretended Divorce_ there is a very improbable story that Wyatt told Henry VIII. his relations with Anne were far from innocent and warned the King against marrying a woman of Anne's character.]
None of these projects advanced any farther, possibly because they conflicted with the relations developing between Anne and the King himself. As Wyatt complained in a sonnet,[539]
There is written her fair neck round about _Noli me tangere_; for Caesar's I am And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.
But, for any definite doc.u.mentary evidence to the contrary, it might be urged that Henry's pa.s.sion for Anne was subsequent to the commencement of his proceedings for a divorce from Catherine. Those proceedings began at least as early as March, 1527, while the first allusion to the connection between the King and Anne Boleyn occurs in the instructions to Dr. William Knight, sent in the following autumn to procure a dispensation for her marriage with Henry.[540] The King's famous love-letters, the earliest of which are conjecturally a.s.signed to July, 1527,[541] are without date and with but slight internal indications of the time at which they were written; they may be earlier than 1527, they may be as late as the following winter. It is unlikely that Henry would have sought for the Pope's dispensation to marry (p. 190) Anne until he was a.s.sured of her consent, of which in some of the letters he appears to be doubtful; on the other hand, it is difficult to see how a lady of the Court could refuse an offer of marriage made by her sovereign. Her reluctance was to fill a less honourable position, into which Henry was not so wicked as to think of forcing her. ”I trust,” he writes in one of his letters, ”your absence is not wilful on your part; for if so, I can but lament my ill-fortune, and by degrees abate my great folly.”[542] His love for Anne Boleyn was certainly his ”great folly,” the one overmastering pa.s.sion of his life. There is, however, nothing very extraordinary in the letters themselves; in one he says he has for more than a year been ”wounded with the dart of love,” and is uncertain whether Anne returns his affection. In others he bewails her briefest absence as though it were an eternity; desires her father to hasten his return to Court; is torn with anxiety lest Anne should take the plague, comforts her with the a.s.surance that few women have had it, and sends her a hart killed by his own hand, making the inevitable play on the word. Later on, he alludes to the progress of the divorce case; excuses the shortness of a letter on the ground that he has spent four hours over the book he was writing in his own defence[543] and has a pain in his head. The series ends with an announcement that he has been fitting up apartments for her, and with congratulations to himself and to her that the ”well-wis.h.i.+ng” Legate, Campeggio, who has been sent from Rome to (p. 191) try the case, has told him he was not so ”imperial” in his sympathies as had been alleged.
[Footnote 539: Wyatt, _Works_, ed. G.F. Nott, 1816, p. 143.]
[Footnote 540: _L. and P._, iv., 3422.]
[Footnote 541: _Ibid._, iv., 3218-20, 3325-26, 3990, 4383, 4403, 4410, 4477, 4537, 4539, 4597, 4648, 4742, 4894. They have also been printed by Hearne at the end of his edition of _Robert of Avesbury_, in the _Pamphleteer_, vol. xxi., and in the _Harleian Miscellany_, vol. iii. The originals in Henry's hand are in the Vatican Library; one of them was reproduced in facsimile for the ill.u.s.trated edition of this book.]
[Footnote 542: _L. and P._, iv., 3326.]
[Footnote 543: In 1531 he was said to have written ”many books” on the divorce question (_ibid._, v., 251).]
The secret of her fascination over Henry was a puzzle to observers.
”Madame Anne,” wrote a Venetian, ”is not one of the handsomest women in the world. She is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the King's great appet.i.te, and her eyes, which are black and beautiful”.[544] She had probably learnt in France the art of using her beautiful eyes to the best advantage; her hair, which was long and black, she wore loose, and on her way to her coronation Cranmer describes her as ”sitting _in_ her hair”.[545] Possibly this was one of the French customs, which somewhat scandalised the staider ladies of the English Court. She is said to have had a slight defect on one of her nails, which she endeavoured to conceal behind her other fingers.[546] Of her mental accomplishments there is not much evidence; she naturally, after some years' residence at the Court of France, spoke French, though she wrote it in an orthography that was quite her own. Her devotion to the Gospel is the one great virtue with which Foxe and other Elizabethans strove to invest the mother of the Good Queen Bess. But it had no n.o.bler foundation than the facts that Anne's position drove her into hostility to the Roman jurisdiction, and that her family shared the envy of church goods, common to the n.o.bility and the gentry of the time.[547] Her place in English history is due (p. 192) solely to the circ.u.mstance that she appealed to the less refined part of Henry's nature; she was pre-eminent neither in beauty nor in intellect, and her virtue was not of a character to command or deserve the respect of her own or subsequent ages.
[Footnote 544: _Ven. Cal._, iv., 365.]
[Footnote 545: Cranmer, _Works_ (Parker Soc.), ii., 245; _cf. Ven. Cal._, iv., 351, 418.]
[Footnote 546: _L. and P._, iv., Introd., p.
ccx.x.xvii.]
[Footnote 547: There is not much historical truth in Gray's phrase about ”the Gospel light which dawned from Bullen's eyes”; but Brewer goes too far in minimising the ”Lutheran” proclivities of the Boleyns. In 1531 Chapuys described Anne and her father as being ”more Lutheran than Luther himself”
(_L. and P._, v., 148), in 1532 as ”true apostles of the new sect” (_ibid._, v., 850), and in 1533 as ”perfect Lutherans” (_ibid._, vi., 142).]
It is otherwise with her rival, Queen Catherine, the third of the princ.i.p.al characters involved in the divorce. If Henry's motives were not so entirely bad as they have often been represented, neither they nor Anne Boleyn's can stand a moment's comparison with the unsullied purity of Catherine's life or the lofty courage with which she defended the cause she believed to be right. There is no more pathetic figure in English history, nor one condemned to a crueller fate. No breath of scandal touched her fair name, or impugned her devotion to Henry. If she had the misfortune to be identified with a particular policy, the alliance with the House of Burgundy, the fault was not hers; she had been married to Henry in consideration of the advantages which that alliance was supposed to confer; and, if she used her influence to further Spanish interest, it was a natural feeling as near akin to virtue as to vice, and Carroz at least complained, in 1514, that she had completely identified herself with her husband and her husband's subjects.[548] If her miscarriages and the death of her children (p. 193) were a grief to Henry, the pain and the sorrow were hers in far greater measure; if they had made her old and deformed, as Francis brutally described her in 1519,[549] the fact must have been far more bitter to her than it was unpleasant to Henry. There may have been some hards.h.i.+p to Henry in the circ.u.mstance that, for political motives, he had been induced by his council to marry a wife who was six years his senior; but to Catherine herself a divorce was the height of injustice. The question was in fact one of justice against a real or supposed political necessity, and in such cases justice commonly goes to the wall. In politics, men seek to colour with justice actions based upon considerations of expediency. They first convince themselves, and then they endeavour with less success to persuade mankind.
[Footnote 548: _Sp. Cal._, ii., 201.]
[Footnote 549: _Ven. Cal._, ii., 1230.]
So Henry VIII. convinced himself that the dispensation granted by Julius II. was null and void, that he had never been married to Catherine, and that to continue to live with his brother's wife was sin. ”The King,” he instructed his amba.s.sador to tell Charles V. in 1533, ”taketh himself to be in the right, not because so many say it, but because he, being learned, knoweth the matter to be right.... The justice of our cause is so rooted in our breast that nothing can remove it, and even the canons say that a man should rather endure all the censures of the Church than offend his conscience.”[550] No man was less tolerant of heresy than Henry, but no man set greater (p. 194) store on his own private judgment. To that extent he was a Protestant; ”though,” he instructed Paget in 1534 to tell the Lutheran princes, ”the law of every man's conscience be but a private court, yet it is the highest and supreme court for judgment or justice”. G.o.d and his conscience, he told Chapuys in 1533, were on very good terms.[551] On another occasion he wrote to Charles _Ubi Spiritus Domini, ibi libertas_,[552] with the obvious implication that he possessed the spirit of the Lord, and therefore he might do as he liked. To him, as to St. Paul, all things were lawful; and Henry's appeals to the Pope, to learned divines, to universities at home and abroad, were not for his own satisfaction, but were merely concessions to the profane herd, unskilled in royal learning and unblessed with a kingly conscience.
Against that conviction, so firmly rooted in the royal breast, appeals to pity were vain, and attempts to shake it were perilous. It was his conscience that made Henry so dangerous. Men are tolerant of differences about things indifferent, but conscience makes bigots of us all; theological hatreds are proverbially bitter, and religious wars are cruel. Conscience made Sir Thomas More persecute, and glory in the persecution of heretics,[553] and conscience earned Mary her epithet ”b.l.o.o.d.y”. They were moved by conscientious belief in the Catholic faith, Henry by conscientious belief in himself; and conscientious scruples are none the less exigent for being reached by crooked paths.
[Footnote 550: _L. and P._, vi., 775. _Hoc volo, sic jubeo; stet pro ratione voluntas._ Luther quoted this line _a propos_ of Henry; see his preface to Robert Barnes' _Bekenntniss des Glaubens_, Wittemberg, 1540.]
[Footnote 551: _L. and P._, vi., 351; vii., 148.]
[Footnote 552: _Ibid._, iv., 6111.]
[Footnote 553: It has been denied that More either persecuted or gloried in the persecution of heretics; but he admits himself that he recommended corporal punishment in two cases and ”it is clear that he underestimated his activity” (_D.N.B._, x.x.xviii., 436, and instances and authorities there cited).]
CHAPTER VIII. (p. 195)
THE POPE'S DILEMMA.