A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [107]
HENRY IS OFTEN depicted as short-tempered, a man who was determined to have his way whatever the consequences. The determination was there, but in pursuing his desires he also showed remarkable patience. His reply to Luther—the work of a staunch Catholic sovereign —was written in 1521. In 1522 Anne Boleyn, aged fifteen, became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine, and it was there that she caught the king’s eye. He had already despaired of Catherine’s infertility, but five years passed before he secretly began to seek to annul their marriage. For six years the pope, under pressure from her nephew Charles, ignored Henry’s appeals.
It was in 1533 that he married Anne, now twenty-six, and was excommunicated by the pope. Parliament passed the Act of Succession in 1534; it declared the king’s marriage to Catherine invalid, recognized Anne as the new queen, made questioning her marriage to Henry a capital crime, and required all Henry’s subjects to take an oath of loyalty to him. Nor was the tale told. The king’s disillusionment with Anne, among other consequences, lay ahead.
In the beginning the king had assumed that the pope would swiftly grant his request, dissolving his barren marriage. All precedents were on his side. Even Campeggio, who first came to London in 1528, agreed with him. But the pope, to Henry’s growing frustration, seemed incapable of making up his mind. Campeggio knew how little weight an Italian cardinal carried in London. If he ruled in Catherine’s favor, he would simply be banished. Therefore he appealed for instructions from the Vatican. Clement’s frantic reply reflects his helplessness. He told his cardinal “not to pronounce sentence without express commission hence. … If so great an injury be done to the Emperor, all hope is lost of universal peace, and the Church cannot escape utter ruin, as it is entirely in the power of the Emperor’s servants. … Delay as much as possible.” By this and other byzantine maneuvers the pope bought time—five more years of it.
Eventually there was no time left to buy. Anticipating a dispensation, the king had fitted up splendid apartments for Anne adjacent to his own at Greenwich; courtiers reported to her, as though she had already been crowned; crowds gathered outside her windows, ignoring Catherine. Often Henry would not leave Greenwich until noon. But papal politics made this bedfellowship perilous. The issue became critical when Anne discovered that she was with child. Thomas Cranmer, a Cambridge theologian, had drawn up a new array of arguments; a team of negotiators, now hastily dispatched by the king, presented them in Rome. Still the pontiff hesitated. Anne was beginning to show, and no infant could succeed to the monarchy unless born to a queen.
Henry could wait no longer. He appointed Cranmer archbishop of Canterbury, invested him with extraordinary powers, and urged him to place the broadest possible interpretation on his new office. The new prelate moved swiftly, ruling that the pope was incompetent to grant a dispensation. He declared Catherine a divorcée, secretly married Henry to his mistress, and in May 1533, on Whitsunday of her twenty-seventh year, when she was in the seventh month of her pregnancy, crowned her with great ceremony in Westminster Hall.
Nothing could stop the split in the Church now. The king’s blood was up. He had already summoned a special session of Parliament. Working on the anticlerical feelings of the MPs—and despite the opposition of Sir Thomas More, his new high chancellor — he had rammed through a brutal legislative program limiting the powers of the clergy, increasing taxes on the Church, and cutting the annates