There now ensued a process of endless false starts, vain hopes, obfuscations and delays that left the king confused and demoralized. Katherine of Aragon managed to alert her nephew, Charles V, to the dangers of her situation. Charles’s troops had sacked Rome in May with every form of barbarity, and the pope had become a virtual prisoner in the Castel Sant’Angelo. If the pontiff was at the mercy of Charles, what hope was there of successfully dealing with the marriage of the emperor’s aunt? The matter of the divorce was now becoming part of a much larger action.
In May 1527 the young Princess Mary danced before her father at a banquet. The movement of the formal dance was always construed as an allegory, with the final curtsy seen as a gesture of ‘fear, love and reverence’. In the following month, the king formally separated himself from Katherine’s bed; the Spanish ambassador, no doubt informed by Katherine herself, revealed that the king ‘had told her they had been living in mortal sin all the years they had been together’. She burst into tears, and Henry tried to comfort her by remarking that all would turn out for the best. He also begged her to keep the matter secret, but it was already too late. The reports of the separation soon reached the people. It was, the ambassador said, ‘as notorious as if it had been proclaimed by the town crier’. The people took the side of the wronged wife, of course, and refused to believe that the king would persist in such a ‘wicked’ project. The queen, meanwhile, kept her place at court and sat by her husband’s side on public occasions, when she smiled and seemed cheerful. ‘It is wonderful to see her courage,’ the duke of Norfolk said, ‘nothing seems to frighten her.’
The matter of the king’s marriage was being endlessly debated at Rome. Pope Clement had pleaded ignorance of the canon law to one of Wolsey’s ambassadors, only to be told that the whole of canon law was locked in the bosom of his Holiness. ‘It may be so,’ the pope replied, ‘but, alas, God has forgotten to give me the key to open it.’ By the end of 1527, however, after much prevarication, he agreed that cardinals Wolsey and Campeggio would examine the facts and pass a verdict without possibility of appeal; Campeggio had been chosen because he was the second and inferior papal legate for English affairs. Wolsey at once wrote to him and asked him to hasten from Rome. ‘I hope,’ he told him, ‘all things shall be done according to the will of God, the desire of the king, the quiet of the kingdom, and to our honour, with a good conscience.’ He then crossed out the last four words. The cardinals of the Church always had a good conscience. The pope, still in thrall to Charles, had already commanded Campeggio to weave infinite delays so that no verdict on the king’s marriage would ever be given. The cardinal assented, and began to make plans for a very slow progress towards England.
At the beginning of 1528 Anne Boleyn wrote to Wolsey to thank him for ‘the great pains and troubles that you have taken for me both day and night’. In a second letter she stated that ‘I am most bound of all creatures, next the king’s grace, to love and serve your grace’. It is clear that she and Henry now intended her to be queen. Yet not all was what it seemed. Three months after his arrival in England Campeggio wrote to Rome that the cardinal ‘is actually not in favour of the affair’; he ‘dare not admit this openly, nor can he help to prevent it; on the contrary he has to hide his feelings and pretend to be eagerly pursuing what the king desires’.
In private conversations with Campeggio, Wolsey simply shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have to satisfy the king,’ he told him, ‘whatever the consequences. In time a remedy will be found.’ It may be that Henry was beginning to suspect Wolsey. In this period he began to show his chief minister’s letters to other members of his council, among them the father of Anne Boleyn. Wolsey was falling into a trap from which he would never be able to extricate himself. There was one occasion, in 1528, when it was recorded that the king ‘used terrible language’ to the cardinal, leaving Wolsey unhappy and uncertain. When the cardinal named a new abbess for a certain convent, despite the protests of the king at the choice of candidate, Henry wrote him a bitter letter in reply to his excuses. ‘Ah, my lord, it is a double offence both to do ill and colour it too … wherefore, good my lord, use no more that way with me, for there is no man living who more hates it.’ The words might also be construed as a more general warning.
In the spring of 1528 the royal family spent some time together at Wolsey’s house, Tyttenhanger, near St Albans. Princess Mary described it as a happy occasion. Yet in this year it was reported that the marriage between Henry and Anne Boleyn was ‘certain’ and that the preparations for the wedding were already being made. Wolsey wrote at this time that, if the pope did not comply with the wishes and desires of the king, ‘I see ruin, infamy, and subversion of the whole dignity and estimation of the see apostolic’. In this, at least, he was proved to be right.
5
Into court
The threat to the papacy also came from other quarters. Luther’s tracts, smuggled into England after he was denounced as a heretic, were followed by William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament. Tyndale was a young cleric who had become disillusioned with the pomp and power of the Church; he was ascetic and scholarly by nature, and was instinctively attracted to the purer faith associated with the Lollards and the ‘new men’ who were even then in small conventicles proclaiming Lutheran doctrine.
He had found no employment in London, after he migrated there from Cambridge, and had travelled to Germany in quest of a more tolerant atmosphere. It was here that he translated the Scriptures from the Greek and Hebrew originals. It was said that his passage was assisted by German merchants who were already imbued with Lutheran learning.
Once he had arrived in Wittenberg, he began his task of translating the Greek into plain and dignified English, in a language that the ploughman as well as the scholar could understand. The more orthodox clerics, however, believed that the Scriptures were too sacred to be left in the hands of the laity and that any interpretation of them should only be under clerical supervision. They also believed that the key words of the Greek were in themselves holy, and would be profaned by translation.
It was here that Tyndale most transgressed, by altering the meaning of certain important concepts. ‘Congregation’ was employed instead of ‘church’, and ‘senior’ instead of ‘priest’; ‘penance’, ‘charity’, ‘grace’ and ‘confession’ were also silently removed. Tyndale later remarked that ‘I never altered one syllable of God’s word against my conscience’, but it was clear enough to the authorities that his conscience was heavily influenced by the writings of Martin Luther. In effect Tyndale was exorcizing the role of the Church in spiritual matters and placing his faith in an invisible body of the faithful known only to God. He also included a translation of Luther’s ‘Preface to the Epistle to the Romans’, and one young man, Robert Plumpton, wrote to his mother that ‘if it will please you to read the introducement, you shall see marvellous things hid in it’. The English Bible came as a sensation and a revelation; its translation was an achievement beyond all the works of ‘new’ theology and pamphlets of anti-clerical disquisition. It hit home, as if God’s truth had finally been revealed. The Bible was no longer a secret and mysterious text, from which short phrases would be muttered by priests; it was now literally an open book.