A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [105]
The annulment he sought required Rome’s consent, but that should have presented no problem. Papal dispensations were not uncommon; the usual procedure was to find some flaw in a marriage which would permit an annulment or a divorce. In Henry’s case the flaw was genuine. Catherine was the widow of his older brother Arthur, and English canon law prohibited such a marriage, taking its precedent from the book of Leviticus (20:21): “If a man shall take his brother’s wife it is an unclean thing … they shall be childless.” The Vatican had provided a dispensation permitting Henry to wed her, but it was doubtful that the pontiff had possessed the power to overrule the scriptural ban, particularly since the queen’s fruitlessness seemed to have fulfilled its prophecy. The king said that the dispensation, and therefore his union with Catherine, had been illegal. Theologians on both sides of the Channel agreed with him.
In Rome, however, the prospect of an English royal divorce bore distasteful political implications. Pope Clement was struggling to recover from the sack of the holy city, where, largely as a result of his own blundering, his situation had become highly complicated. If the pontiff agreed, he could anticipate a highly unpleasant confrontation with a ruler even more powerful than Henry: the Holy Roman emperor, whose domains sprawled across the Continent, and whose armies had now twice defeated the French in disputes over Milan, Burgundy, Naples, and Navarre. The undisputed master of Italy, Charles V literally surrounded the Vatican and therefore was, in proximity alone, bound to intimidate any pontiff, particularly at a time when the papacy was deeply involved in regal intrigues. Clement was a captive pope, and the emperor’s views would be given great weight, especially if they were strongly held.
In this case they were. Charles’s childhood tutor, the future Pope Adrian, had instilled in him a solemn reverence for the Vicar of Christ. Catherine was his aunt, and he was incensed by the argument—unwisely presented to the Vatican by Henry’s legate—that because she had been Arthur’s widow, her marriage was not only invalid but actually incestuous. Should the Vatican accept this reasoning, she would be reduced to the level of a discarded concubine, and her daughter, Mary, England’s heir apparent, Charles’s cousin, would become illegitimate. If Clement denied papal permission, Henry would be blocked—unless, of course, he quit the Church, a possibility which seems to have occurred to no one except him until he had publicly committed himself. It came as a shock to prominent English Catholics, confronting them with an agonizing choice between their faith and their monarch. No one who knew Henry expected royal sympathy for their dilemma, and there was none; when the humanist Juan Luis Vives spoke up for Catherine, he was dismissed as Mary Tudor’s teacher and banished from the court.
None of Henry’s predecessors would have dreamed of breaking with Rome, but he was a man of immense determination, and his resolve was strengthened by his choice of, and infatuation with, Catherine’s successor: Anne Boleyn, a nobly born nineteen-year-old girl remarkable for her flashing eyes, long, flowing hair, and vivacity. Here his judgment was gravely flawed. Superficially, Anne seemed qualified for the throne. The daughter of a viscount and granddaughter of a duke, she had been educated at a Paris finishing school and had served as lady-in-waiting, first to Marguerite of Navarre and then, back in England, to Catherine. She was witty and gay. But she was also flighty, self-centered, and, by all accounts, lascivious.
It was her sexuality which had attracted Henry to her. The Boleyn women were noted for their libidos; both Anne’s mother and her older sister had slipped naked into the king’s bed, to his subsequent delight, but her lovemaking skills eclipsed theirs. To him this wanton girl seemed built to breed. He was convinced that once the Holy See had sanctioned a royal annulment, freeing him to wed her, crown her, and impregnate her