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

Aragon.[26] There is no doubt that at this time Katharine felt that her only chance of keeping her footing was to please Henry, and “forget Spain,” as Friar Diego advised her to do.

      When the King of France died on New Year’s Day, 1515, and his young widow—Katharine’s friend, Mary Tudor—clandestinely married her lover, Charles Brandon, Katharine’s efforts to reconcile her husband to the peccant pair are evidence, if no other existed, that Henry’s anger was more assumed than real, and that his vanity was pleased by the submissive prayers for his forgiveness. As no doubt the Queen, and Wolsey, who had joined his efforts with hers, foresaw, not only were Mary and Brandon pardoned, but taken into high favour. At the public marriage of Mary and Brandon at Greenwich at Easter 1515 more tournaments, masques and balls, enabled the King to show off his gallantry and agility in competition with his new brother-in-law; and on the subsequent May Day at Shooter’s Hill, Katharine and Mary, who were inseparable, took part in elaborate and costly al fresco entertainments in which Robin Hood, several pagan deities, and the various attributes of spring, were paraded for their delectation. It all sounds very gay, though somewhat silly, as we read the endless catalogues of bedizenment, of tilts and races, feasting, dancing, and music that delighted Henry and his friends; but before Katharine there ever hovered the spectre of her childlessness, and Henry, after the ceremonial gaiety and overdone gallantry to his wife, would too frequently put spurs to his courser and gallop off to New Hall in Essex, where Lady Tailebois lived.

      A gleam of hope and happiness came to her late in 1515 when she was again expecting to become a mother. By liberal gifts—“the greatest presents ever brought to England,” said Henry himself—and by flattery unlimited, Ferdinand, almost on his death-bed, managed to “bridle” his son-in-law, to borrow a large sum of money from him and draw him anew into a coalition against France. But the hope was soon dashed; King Ferdinand died almost simultaneously with the birth of a girl-child to his daughter Katharine. It is true the babe was like to live, but a son, not a daughter, was what Henry wanted. Yet he put the best face on the matter publicly. The Venetian ambassador purposely delayed his congratulations, because the child was of the wrong sex; and when finally he coldly offered them, he pointedly told the King that they would have been much more hearty if the child had been a son. “We are both young,” replied Henry. “If it is a daughter this time, by the grace of God sons will follow.” The desire of the King for a male heir was perfectly natural. No Queen had reigned independently over England; and for the perpetuation of a new dynasty like the Tudors the succession in the male line was of the highest importance. In addition to this, Henry was above all things proud of his manliness, and he looked upon the absence of a son as in some sort reflecting a humiliation upon him.

      Katharine’s health had never been robust; and at the age of thirty-three, after four confinements, she had lost her bloom. Disappointment and suffering, added to her constitutional weakness, was telling upon her, and her influence grew daily smaller. The gorgeous shows and frivolous amusements in which her husband so much delighted palled upon her, and she now took little pains to feign enjoyment in them, giving up much of her time to religious exercises, fasting rigidly twice a week and saints’ days throughout the year, in addition to the Lenten observances, and wearing beneath her silks and satins a rough Franciscan nun’s gown of serge. As in the case of so many of her kindred, mystical devotion was weaving its grey web about her, and saintliness of the peculiar Spanish type was covering her as with a garment. Henry, on the contrary, was a full-blooded young man of twenty-eight, with a physique like that of a butcher, held by no earthly control or check upon his appetites, overflowing with vitality and the joy of life; and it is not to be wondered at that he found his disillusioned and consciously saintly wife a somewhat uncomfortable companion.

      The death of Louis XII., Maximilian, and Ferdinand, and the peaceful accession of young Charles to the throne of Spain and the prospective imperial crown, entirely altered the political aspect of Europe. Francis I. needed peace in the first years of his reign; and to Charles it was also desirable, in order that his rule over turbulent Spain could be firmly established and his imperial succession secured. All the English ministers and councillors were heavily bribed by France, Wolsey himself was strongly in favour of the French connection, and everybody entered into a conspiracy to flatter Henry. The natural result was a league first of England and France, and subsequently a general peace to which all the principal Christian potentates subscribed, and men thought that the millennium had come. Katharine’s international importance had disappeared with the death of her father and the accession of Charles to the throne of Aragon as well as to that of Castile. Wolsey was now Henry’s sole adviser in matters of state and managed his master dexterously, whilst endeavouring not entirely to offend the Queen. Glimpses of his harmonious relations with Katharine at this time (1516-1520) are numerous. At the splendid christening of the Princess Mary, Wolsey was one of the sponsors, and he was “gossip” with Katharine at the baptism of Mary Tudor Duchess of Suffolk’s son.

      Nor can the Queen’s famous action after the evil May Day (1517) have been opposed or discountenanced by the Cardinal. The universal peace had brought to London hosts of foreigners, especially Frenchmen, and the alien question was acute. Wolsey, whose sudden rise and insolence had deeply angered the nobles, had, as principal promoter of the unpopular peace with France, to bear a full share of the detestation in which his friends the aliens were held. Late in April there were rumours that a general attack upon foreigners by the younger citizens would be made, and at Wolsey’s instance the civic authorities ordered that all the Londoners should keep indoors. Some lads in Chepe disregarded the command, and the Alderman of the Ward attempted to arrest one of them. Then rose the cry of “’Prentices and Clubs! Death to the Cardinal!” and forth there poured from lane and alley riotous youngsters by the hundred, to wreak vengeance on the insolent foreigners who took the bread out of worthy Englishmen’s mouths. Sack and pillage reigned for a few hours, but the guard quelled the boys with blood, the King rode hastily from Richmond, the Lieutenant of the Tower dropped a few casual cannon-balls into the city, and before sunset all was quiet. The gibbets rose at the street corners and a bloody vengeance fell upon the rioters. Dozens were hanged, drawn, and quartered with atrocious cruelty; and under the ruthless Duke of Norfolk four hundred more were condemned to death for treason to the King, who, it was bitterly said in London, loved outlanders better than his own folk. It is unlikely that Henry really meant to plunge all his capital in mourning by hanging the flower of its youth, but he loved, for vanity’s sake, that his clemency should be publicly sought, and to act the part of a deity in restoring to life those legally dead. In any case, Katharine’s spontaneous and determined intercession for the ’prentice lads would take no denial, and she pleaded with effect. Her intercession, nevertheless, could hardly have been so successful as it was if Wolsey had been opposed to it; and the subsequent comedy in the great Hall at Westminster on the 22nd May was doubtless planned to afford Henry an opportunity of appearing in his favourite character. Seated upon a canopied throne high upon a daïs of brocade, surrounded by his prelates and nobles and with Wolsey by his side, Henry frowned in crimson velvet whilst the “poore younglings and olde false knaves” trooped in, a sorry procession, stripped to their shirts, with halters around their necks. Wolsey in stern words rebuked their crime, and scolded the Lord Mayor and Aldermen for their laxity; ending by saying they all deserved to hang. “Mercy! gracious lord, mercy!” cried the terrified boys and their distracted mothers behind; and the Cardinal and the peers knelt before the throne to beg the life of the offenders, which the King granted, and with a great shout of joy halters were stripped from many a callow neck, and cast into the rafters of the Hall for very joy. But all men knew, and the mothers too, that Wolsey’s intercession was only make-believe, and that what they saw was but the ceremonial act of grace. The Queen they thanked in their hearts and not the haughty Cardinal, for the King had pardoned the ’prentices privately days before, when Katharine and her two sisters-in-law, the widowed Queens of France and Scotland, had knelt before the King in unfeigned tears, and had clamoured for the lives of the Londoners. To the day of the Queen’s unhappy death this debt was never forgotten by the citizens, who loved her faithfully to the end far better than any of her successors.

      The sweating sickness in the autumn of 1517 sent Henry and his wife as far away from contagion as possible, for sickness always frightened the big bully into a panic. During his absence from London, Wolsey was busy negotiating a still closer alliance with France, by the marriage