The Wives of Henry the Eighth and the Parts They Played in History. Martin A. S. Hume

France. His conduct in the campaign was puerile in its vanity and folly, and ended lamely with the capture of two (to him) unimportant fortresses in the north, Therouenne and Tournai, and the panic flight of the French at the Battle of the Spurs or Guingate. Our business with this foolish and fruitless campaign, in which Henry was every one’s tool, is confined to the part that Katharine played at the time. On the King’s ostentatious departure from Dover he left Katharine regent of the realm, with the Earl of Surrey—afterwards Duke of Norfolk—to command the army in the north. Katharine, we are told, rode back from Dover to London full of dolour for her lord’s departure; but we see her in her element during the subsequent months of her regency. Bold and spirited, and it must be added utterly tactless, she revelled in the independent domination which she enjoyed. James IV. of Scotland had threatened that an English invasion of France would be followed by his own invasion of England. “Let him do it in God’s name,” shouted Henry; and Katharine when the threat was made good delivered a splendid oration in English to the officers who were going north to fight the Scots. “Remember,” she said, “that the Lord smiled upon those who stood in defence of their own. Remember that the English courage excels that of all other nations upon earth.”[21] Her letters to Wolsey, who accompanied Henry as almoner, or rather secretary, are full of courage, and as full of womanly anxiety for her husband. “She was troubled,” she wrote, “to learn that the King was so near the siege of Therouenne,” until Wolsey’s letter assured her of the heed he takes to avoid all manner of dangers. “With his life and health nothing can come amiss with him, without them I see no manner of good thing that shall fall after it.” But her tactlessness even in this letter shows clearly when she boasts that the King in France is not so busy with war as she is in England against the Scots. “My heart is very good of it, and I am horribly busy making standards, banners, and badges.”[22] After congratulating Henry effusively upon the capture of Therouenne and his meeting with the Emperor, Katharine herself set forth with reinforcements towards Scotland, but before she had travelled a hundred miles (to Woburn) she met the couriers galloping south to bring her the great news of Surrey’s victory at Flodden Field. Turning aside to thank Our Lady of Walsingham for the destruction of the Scottish power, Katharine on the way sent the jubilant news to Henry. James IV. in his defeat had been left dead upon the field, clad in his check surcoat, and a fragment of this coat soaked with blood the Queen sent to her husband in France, with a heartless gibe at his dead brother-in-law. We are told that in another of her letters first giving the news of Flodden, and referring to Henry’s capture of the Duke of Longueville at Therouenne, she vaingloriously compared her victory with his.[23] “It was no great thing for one armed man to take another, but she was sending three captured by a woman; if he (Henry) sent her a captive Duke she would send him a prisoner king.” For a wife and locum tenens to write thus in such circumstances to a supremely vain man like Henry, whose martial ambition was still unassuaged, was to invite his jealousy and dislike. His people saw, as he with all his boastfulness cannot fail to have done, that Flodden was the real English victory, not Therouenne, and that Katharine and Surrey, not Henry, were the heroes. Such knowledge was gall and wormwood to the King; and especially when the smoke of battle had blown away, and he saw how he had been “sold” by his wife’s relations, who kept the fruit of victory whilst he was put off with the shell.

      From that time Katharine’s influence over her husband weakened, though with occasional intermission, and he looked for guidance to a subtler mind than hers. With Henry to France had gone Thomas Wolsey, one of the clergy of the royal chapel, recently appointed almoner by the patronage of Fox, Bishop of Winchester, Henry’s leading councillor in foreign affairs. The English nobles, strong as they still were territorially, could not be trusted with the guidance of affairs by a comparatively new dynasty depending upon parliament and the towns for its power; and an official class, raised at the will of the sovereign, had been created by Henry VII., to be used as ministers and administrators. Such a class, dependent entirely upon the crown, were certain to be distasteful to the noble families, and the rivalry between these two governing elements provided the germ of party divisions which subsequently hardened into the English constitutional tradition: the officials usually being favourable to the strengthening of the royal prerogative, and the nobles desiring to maintain the check which the armed power of feudalism had formerly exercised. For reasons which will be obvious, the choice of both Henry VII. and his son of their diplomatists and ministers fell to a great extent upon clergymen; and Wolsey’s brilliant talents and facile adaptiveness during his close attendance upon Henry in France captivated his master, who needed for a minister and guide one that could never become a rival either in the field or the ladies’ chamber, where the King most desired distinction.

      Henry came home in October 1513, bitterly enraged against Katharine’s kin, and ripe for the close alliance with France which the prisoner Duke of Longueville soon managed to bring about. What mattered it that lovely young Mary Tudor was sacrificed in marriage to the decrepit old King Louis XII., notwithstanding her previous solemn betrothal to Katharine’s nephew, young Charles of Austria, and her secret love for Henry’s bosom friend, Sir Charles Brandon? Princesses were but pieces in the great political game, and must perforce take the rough with the smooth. Henry, in any case, could thus show to the Spaniard that he could defy him by a French connection. It must have been with a sad heart that Katharine took part in the triumphal doings that celebrated the peace directed against her father. The French agents, then in London, in describing her say that she was lively and gracious, quite the opposite of her gloomy sister: and doubtless she did her best to appear so, for she was proud and schooled to disappointment; but with the exception of the fact that she was again with child, all around her looked black. Her husband openly taunted her with her father’s ill faith; Henry was carrying on now an open intrigue with Lady Tailebois, whom he had brought from Calais with him; Ferdinand the Catholic at last was slowly dying, all his dreams and hopes frustrated; and on the 13th August 1514, in the palace of Greenwich, Katharine’s dear friend and sister-in-law, Mary Tudor, was married by proxy to Louis XII. Katharine, led by the Duke of Longueville, attended the festivity. She was dressed in ash-coloured satin, covered with raised gold embroidery, costly chains and necklaces of gems covered her neck and bust, and a coif trimmed with precious stones was on her head.[24] The King at the ball in the evening charmed every one by his graceful dancing, and the scene was so gay that the grave Venetian ambassador says that had it not been for his age and office he would have cast off his gown and have footed it with the rest.

      But already sinister whispers were rife, and we may be sure they were not unknown to Katharine. She had been married five years, and no child of hers had lived; and, though she was again pregnant, it was said that the Pope would be asked to authorise Henry to put her aside, and to marry a French bride. Had not his new French brother-in-law done the like years ago?[25] To what extent this idea had really entered Henry’s head at the time it is difficult to say; but courtiers and diplomatists have keen eyes, and they must have known which way the wind was blowing before they talked thus. In October 1514 Katharine was borne slowly in a litter to Dover, with the great concourse that went to speed Mary Tudor on her loveless two months’ marriage; and a few weeks afterwards Katharine gave birth prematurely to a dead child. Once more the hopes of Henry were dashed, and though Peter Martyr ascribed the misfortune to Henry’s unkindness, the superstitious time-servers of the King, and those in favour of the French alliance, began to hint that Katharine’s offspring was accursed, and that to get an heir the King must take another wife. The doings at Court were still as brilliant and as frivolous as ever; the King’s great delight being in adopting some magnificent, and, of course, perfectly transparent disguise in masque or ball, and then to disclose himself when every one, the Queen included, was supposed to be lost in wonder at the grace and agility of the pretended unknown. Those who take pleasure in the details of such puerility may be referred to Hall’s Chronicle for them: we here have more to do with the hearts beneath the finery, than with the trappings themselves.

      That Katharine was striving desperately at this time to retain her influence over her husband, and her popularity in England, is certain from the letter of Ferdinand’s ambassador (6th December 1514). He complains that on the recommendation of Friar Diego Katharine had thrown over her father’s interests in order to keep the love of Henry and his people. The Castilian interest and the Manuels have captured her, wrote the ambassador, and if Ferdinand did not promptly “put a bridle on this colt” (i.e. Henry) and bring