Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [26]
Henry and Anne’s six-week sojourn proved momentous. While they were away, Anne finally submitted to Henry’s lustful advances and their relationship was consummated. By the end of December she was pregnant. They were married on January 25 in a secret ceremony presided over by Archbishop Cranmer. The formal dissolution of Henry’s first marriage now became a priority. Katherine realized that time was running out. She wrote again to her nephew Charles:
Though I know that Your Majesty is engaged in grave and important Turkish affairs … I cannot cease to importune you about my own, in which almost equal offence is being offered to God…. The prospective interview between the two kings, the companion the King now takes everywhere with him, and the authority and place he allows her to have cause the greatest scandal and the most widespread fear of impending calamity. Knowing the fears of my people, I am compelled by my conscience to resist, trusting in God and Your Majesty, and begging you to urge the Pope to pronounce sentence at once.7
Chapuys also made an urgent appeal on Katherine’s behalf to the emperor:
The Queen begs once more for the immediate decision of her case … she takes upon herself full responsibility for all the consequences, and assures Your Majesty that there need not be the slightest danger that war will follow. She believes that if His Holiness were to decide in her favour the King would even now obey him, but even should he fail to do so, she will die comparatively happy, knowing that the justice of her cause has been declared, and that the Princess, her daughter, will not lose her right to the succession.8
ON APRIL 5, 1533, the Convocation of English Bishops ruled that Pope Julius II’s dispensation allowing Henry to marry Katherine had been invalid, “the same Matrimony to be against the law of God,” and therefore “hath divorced the King’s Highness from the noble Lady Katherine.”9 The Act in Restraint of Appeals decreed that England was now an empire, “governed by one Supreme Head and King” and subject to no outside authority.10 There was now nothing to stop Henry from marrying Anne.
On May 23, Thomas Cranmer pronounced the marriage of Henry and Katherine to be null and void. It marked the failure of Katherine’s long battle to save her twenty-four-year marriage. A week after Cranmer passed judgment, the visibly pregnant Anne Boleyn rode through the City of London to be anointed and crowned at Westminster Abbey. Chapuys recorded that along the procession route no one cried “God save the Queen!” and the “people, though forbidden on pain of death to call Katherine Queen, shouted it loud.”11
Katherine was ordered to surrender the title of queen; her household was reduced in status, and workmen removed her arms from the walls of Westminster Hall and from the royal barge.12 She was now the dowager princess of Wales, the widow of Prince Arthur. Lord Mountjoy, her lord chamberlain, at Ampthill Castle in Bedfordshire, was ordered to inform her of her demotion. Katherine rejected the title of princess dowager outright: she was and would always be the king’s wife and the mother of his legitimate heir.13 Henry’s patience had run out. Katherine was to move to Buckden in Huntingdonshire, a remote palace of the bishops of Lincoln. The arrangement amounted to house arrest. She was forbidden to leave without the king’s permission and prevented from seeing her daughter.
As Henry anticipated the birth of what he hoped would be his longed-for son, he began to harden his attitude toward his daughter as well. He forbade her to write or send messengers to Katherine, though Mary begged him to change his mind. He might, she suggested, “appoint someone next to her person to give evidence