Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Katherine of Aragon and Her Supporters 1527-1536: Introduction

Since I handed in my MA dissertation a while ago, I thought I'd post the chapters of it on here in case anyone wanted to read it. I do appreciate that this is going to come out 'backwards', ie the introduction, posted first, will actually be last on a list of posts about this topic. 

INTRODUCTION – ‘THE KING’S GREAT MATTER’
‘He who marries his brother’s wife hath done an unclean thing. He hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness. They shall be childless.’ (Leviticus 20:21)

In an age of secular societies it is hard to imagine the power such a verse from the Bible could have over the minds of men, but for Henry VIII and those around him, for almost nine years, upon these words hinged everything. For, or at least according to the story Henry liked to put about, the reading of this Bible verse had inspired him to repudiate his first wife, Katherine of Aragon[1], who had indeed been married previously to his brother Arthur, and marry again in the hope of siring male heirs. The momentous and sometimes incredibly complex events that followed over the torturous course of years from 1527 until 1536 has always been known, both by contemporaries and by historians, as ‘the King’s Great Matter’. This is despite the fact that it irrevocably altered the lives of three women; Anne Boleyn, Katherine of Aragon, and Katherine’s daughter Mary. This rather masculine centred outlook could be justified at the time when the King was still alive and even perhaps the recipient of people’s correspondence. However, the consistent historiographical focus on Henry’s motives, Henry’s actions, and the consequences to church and state of Henry’s desire for remarriage ignores the far too obvious fact that a divorce – any divorce – never involves just one person.
        Although this paper is concerned with Katherine and her supporters, context is important for any historical issue, and so a brief analysis of Henry’s motives for divorce – which became the arguments Katherine’s party attacked or defended against – will provide a useful backdrop. Henry and Katherine had married soon after his ascension in 1509. To this day, the reasons for Henry doing so remain unclear. Perhaps it was from chivalric notions, where Henry saw himself as rescuing Katherine from the limbo of being a foreign princess in England without a husband. Perhaps Henry was honestly fond of her. Or perhaps simply, as Mortimer Levine argues, ‘the King rushed into this union because Katherine was on hand and of an age at which she might be expected to produce an heir quickly.’[2] Over the years between the marriage and the beginning of the divorce, Henry lost what romantic affection he had possibly possessed for Katherine whilst, and all sources agree on this, Katherine retained her love for him. He pursued affairs, though by the standards of the time he was not a particularly bad offender. But the most obvious legacy of the marriage was that, by 1527, Henry and Katherine had only one living child, their daughter Mary. And, for Henry, this was as good as being childless.
        As late as 1532, Henry was still expounding his worries about the succession as a motive for wanting a divorce. The introduction of a book said to be by him, A Glasse of the Truthe, is devoted to explaining the problem as he saw it. ‘If the female heyre, shall chaunce to rule, she can nat continue longe without an husbande, whiche by goddess lawe, muste than be her gouernour and heed, and so finally shall directe this realme...Wherefore we thinke the establyshement of titles is not so surely rooted nor yet so entirely mainteyned by the female as by male.’[3] England had no successful example of a queen regnant. The only time the crown had been passed to a female heir – to Matilda in the twelfth century – the result had been civil war with her cousin, Stephen. Consequently, many historians of the divorce accept that ‘Henry’s passionate desire for a male heir was natural and justified’[4], even if his means of obtaining this heir had profound effects. Katherine, however, had the example of her mother ruling Castile on her own, and saw no reason why her daughter could not do the same with England, and thus began her struggle to preserve Mary’s rights.
        As mentioned above, Henry often cited the verse from Leviticus as the reason for his lack of heirs. For historians, this brings up the issue of Henry’s conscience, because of Henry’s love for Anne Boleyn. Those historians who have written about Katherine’s supporters usually take a strongly negative view of Henry’s conscience, as shown by the comment in E.E Reynolds’ book about Bishop Fisher; Henry ‘made his conscience the servant of his appetites.’[5]  In fact, the levitical argument, although becoming the primary argument of Henry and his advocates, was not the only reason for divorce put forward at the beginning of proceedings. Henry was also said to have been moved to reconsider his marriage by a comment from the French envoy, the Bishop of Tarbes, concerning Mary’s legitimacy.[6] This particular motive was soon dropped. The problem for historians is whether to allow Henry the same considerations of conscience and moral integrity usually given to Katherine and her supporters. Lucy Wooding argues that ‘it would be wrong to cast the queen as the pious and wronged victim of Henry’s calculating self-interest. Henry too had a moral case, which hinged on scripture, in which the future security of the kingdom was at stake.’[7] Can Henry then be blamed outright for Katherine’s predicament during the divorce if, in one sense, his actions could be classed as justifiable? Or did Katherine complicate matters by simply being unable to understand Henry’s need for a male heir? There is no easy answer to this, but it is important to remember that Henry, just as much as Katherine, passionately believed in his course of action, and neither of them were prepared to deviate from their chosen path once they had set their minds to it. This is the context in which Katherine and her supporters will be discussed.
        In the expansive historiography of the divorce, and indeed in the historiography of Henry’s wives in general, Katherine is usually treated as someone who got in the way of the far more ‘interesting’ story of Henry and Anne. Even in David Starkey’s Six Wives, which for a book aimed at a popular audience is remarkably weighty and well-researched, the section about Katherine ends in 1527, a full six years before her successor actually married Henry. The recent desire by historians to move understanding of Anne Boleyn away from the stereotypical ‘scheming temptress’ of early chronicles means that we now have a far better picture of her actions during the divorce era, and it is clear she was no mere passive beneficiary of Henry’s plans.[8] This work on Anne is commendable and necessary, yet it seems that no one wants to do the same with Katherine. Perhaps this is because historians see her personality as essentially one-dimensional; hers was the life of a patient, saintly queen which, though admirable, was historically boring. If this is the case, then why were contemporaries so taken aback by Katherine’s resistance to Henry’s desire for a divorce? Why then did it take Henry six years to secure a second marriage? It is useful in studying Katherine’s character to begin not with the divorce saga but with her arrival in England in 1501. She had already become acquainted with hardship in the years between the death of Prince Arthur in 1502 and her marriage to Henry in 1509; this was the time when Henry VII kept her in financial austerity in order to persuade her father, Ferdinand of Aragon, to pay the rest of her dowry. Also, let it not be forgotten that Katherine suffered the pain of losing several children to miscarriage, still-birth, or infant mortality. However, in the years preceding the divorce she had settled into the role of a devoted, yet politically powerless wife, and loving mother to her daughter Mary. With this in mind, one can almost sense the frustration of some historians of the divorce that Katherine did not simply continue in this submissive state. Yet this is precisely what makes Katherine’s opposition to Henry so interesting and so needful of historical study.
        Sources appertaining to Katherine and her supporters are not lacking. Letters and Papers, for example, is full of writings from either side of the divorce battle, and some of Katherine’s advocates, such as Bishop Fisher, also wrote and published their arguments. However, extra care must be taken when reading all these sources to peel away the layers of self-interest and argumentative rhetoric in order to try and find what the writers were really thinking about the issues at hand. Even Katherine herself, as will be explored further later on, developed distinct patterns of language in her letters as the divorce saga wore on. This is not to say that these sources cannot be immensely useful; the reports of ambassador Chapuys, for example, reveal much about the opposition to the divorce.
        The last biography of Katherine, written by Garret Mattingly, was published in 1942, and since then there has been no attempt, for scholarly or public readership, to discuss Katherine separately from the ‘six wives’ formula. The result is that Mattingly is over-quoted to the point of exhaustion in these books. Mattingly’s work, whilst an excellent read, is written almost in the tone of a story book rather than a serious scholarly piece. Take, for example, his opening remark that ‘this is the story of a life which shaped history by not moving with its flow.’[9] It is an eloquent, somewhat beautiful, phrase, but it suffers from the same drawback as any work that is sympathetic to Katherine; it immediately casts her in the role of a martyr. As will be explained later in this paper, Katherine did use the language of martyrdom on some occasions, and two of her supporters – Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More – were martyred. But these people were as human and as fallible as anyone else. A balance must be achieved between brushing Katherine’s actions aside completely and concentrating too hard on making her decisions above moral reproach.
        The primary aim of this paper is to begin to redress the historiographical neglect of Katherine’s side of the divorce by focussing on her and her supporters from 1527 until her death in January 1536. Whilst Henry and his own advocates will appear within this discussion, theirs’ will be a background part. Although it is easy and perhaps understandable, upon undertaking a thorough examination of the sources about Katherine during these years, to pity and to sympathise with her dilemma, this paper will ask a question not often considered; whether the actions taken by Katherine and her supporters were the right ones, not in terms of being morally righteous, but in terms of whether this opposition actually helped their cause or simply made things worse. Katherine and those who supported her will be discussed in individual chapters, but within a framework that will assess how the supporters interacted with each other, in order to determine whether there really was, as G.R Elton calls it, an ‘Aragonese faction.’[10] Naturally, Katherine herself will be considered first, followed by her daughter Mary and then her other supporters, such as Bishop Fisher, Thomas More, and the Imperial ambassador Chapuys. The opposition of these individuals will be analysed in terms of its main principles and how effective it was at getting Henry’s side to change tactics, in order to reach a conclusion as to the historical significance of Katherine and those who supported her.




[1] Katherine’s name can, and has been, spelt with either a ‘C’ or a ‘K’. I have chosen to use ‘K’ as this form was encountered the most frequently during my research, and all references to Katherine in works quoted in this paper will now begin with ‘K’. However, titles in the bibliography and footnotes will remain in their original form.
[2] Mortimer Levine, Tudor Dynastic Problems 1460-1571, (London 1973), p.46.
[3] Henry VIII, A Glasse of the Truthe, (1532), p.3-4, [viewed at http://www.eebo.chadwyck.com on 15.5.09]. Note: many of the books on ‘eebo’ do not have page numbers, so I have numbered then conventionally from the first page of text. Title pages are not included.
[4] R.W Chambers, Thomas More, (Brighton 1982), p.224.
[5] E.E Reynolds, St. John Fisher, (Wheathampstead, Herts, 1955, this edition 1972), p.134.
[6] Document 3231, in J.S Brewer (ed.), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol.4 (1524-1530), (1875), [viewed at http://www.british-history.ac.uk between 27. 4.09 and 30.4.09]. Hereafter referred to as L&P.
[7] Lucy Wooding, Henry VIII, (Abingdon 2008), p.149.
[8] For an excellent biography of Anne see Eric W. Ives, Anne Boleyn, (Oxford 1986).
[9] Garret Mattingly, Catherine of Aragon, (London 1942), p.13.
[10] G.R Elton, Reform and Reformation: England 1509-1558, (London 1977), p.122.