Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [21]
THE HUMANIST Juan Luis Vives, who had left England in May to spend the summer in the Netherlands, returned in late September to find Katherine “troubled and afflicted with this controversy that had arisen about her marriage.” She “began to unfold … her calamity,” weeping over her “destiny, that she should find him, whom she loved far more than herself, so alienated from her that he thought of marrying another; and this affected her with a grief the more intense as her love for him was the more ardent.” She was unable to find out what Henry planned to do next, but the “report and common opinion was … that her cause was remitted to Rome.”
Katherine instructed Vives to go to the emperor’s ambassador, López, and ask the emperor on her behalf “that he would deal with the Pope that she might … be heard before his Holiness decided on her cause.”13 On October 26, López did as Katherine asked. “The divorce is more talked of than ever,” he wrote to his master; “if therefore the Emperor really has the Queen’s honour and peace of mind at heart, orders should be sent to Rome for a trusty messenger to bring us the Pope’s decision.”14
Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio arrived in England on October 9 with orders from the pope to hear the case but to reach no decision.15 He proposed that Katherine take vows of “perpetual chastity” and join a religious community, leaving Henry free to marry again without calling into question Mary’s legitimacy or her claim to the throne. Katherine responded angrily: she would never take the veil as Campeggio had proposed and intended to “live and die in the estate of matrimony, into which God had called her, and that she would always be of that opinion and never change it.” She held her husband’s conscience and honor in “more esteem than anything in this world.” She was, she said, the true and legitimate wife of the king and at the time of their wedding remained “intact and uncorrupted.”16 It was a protest she would make repeatedly for the next seven years.
Katherine would prove as defiantly committed to the legitimacy of her marriage as Henry was to its annulment. “She insists that everything shall be decided by [judicial] sentence,” Campeggio reported.
“Neither the whole kingdom on the one hand, nor any great punishment on the other, although she might be torn limb by limb, should compel her to alter this opinion.”17
AS THEIR MARRIAGE CRUMBLED and diplomats hurried between England and Rome, the king and queen continued to appear together in public at court. Mary lived as she had before her removal to the Marches, in houses adjacent to her parents, and regularly visiting them at court. With the outbreak of the plague in May 1528, the royal family, Henry, Katherine, and Mary, came together at Wolsey’s house at Tyttenhanger, near St. Albans in Hertfordshire. For the twelve-year-old Mary, it was precious time spent with both her parents. In what is the earliest of her letters known to have survived, she thanked Wolsey for arranging for all of them to be together, telling him “I have been allowed for a month to enjoy, to my supreme delight, the society of the King and Queen my parents.”18
It was but a temporary reprieve. Increasingly Henry would leave Katherine for days at a time to visit Anne. In advance of the Christmas festivities of 1528, Henry “lodged [his mistress] in a very fine lodging, which he has prepared for her close by his own.” And, as Cardinal Jean du Bellay, the French diplomat, remarked, “Greater court … is paid to her everyday than has been to the Queen for a long time.”19 It was the way of things to come. But if Katherine knew all this, she chose to turn a blind eye. Perhaps she hoped that Henry’s affection for Anne would wane. Certainly she took comfort in the fact that, as she confided to Mendoza, Henry continued “to visit her, and they dine and sleep