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

the artillery: they said they had never seen ships so armed.” From Gravesend the gallant company rowed in the royal barges amidst salvoes of guns to Greenwich. There at the hall door of the palace stood Katharine surrounded by her ladies, and holding her tiny daughter by the hand. Sinking upon one knee the Emperor craved his aunt’s blessing, which was given, and thenceforward for five weeks the feasting and glorious shows went on without intermission.

      On the second day after the arrival at Greenwich, whilst Henry was arming for a joust, a courier, all travel-stained and weary, demanded prompt audience, to hand the King a letter from his ambassador in France. The King read the despatch with knitted brows, and, turning to his friend Sir William Compton, said: “Go and tell the Emperor I have news for him.” When Charles came the letter was handed to him, and it must have rejoiced his heart as he read it. Francis bade defiance to the King of England, and thenceforward Henry and the Emperor were allies in arms against a common enemy. Glittering pageants followed in London and Windsor, where Charles sat as Knight of the Garter under triumphant Henry’s presidency; masques and dances, banquets and hunting, delighted the host and surprised the guests with the unrestrained lavishness of the welcome;[33] but we may be certain that what chiefly interested Katharine and her nephew was not this costly trifling, but the eternal friendship between England and Spain solemnly sworn upon the sacrament in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, by the Emperor and Henry, and the binding alliance between them in peace and war, cemented by the pledge that Charles should marry his cousin Mary Tudor and no one else in the world. It was Katharine’s final and greatest triumph, and the shadows fell thick and fast thereafter.

      Henry promptly took his usual showy and unprofitable part in the war. Only a few weeks after the Emperor bade his new ally farewell, an English force invaded Picardy, and the Earl of Surrey’s fleet threatened all French shipping in the Channel. Coerced by the King of England too, Venice deserted France and joined forces with the allies; the new Pope and the Italian princes did the same, and the Emperor’s arms carried all before them in Italy. Henry was kept faithful to his ally by the vain hope of a dismemberment of France, in which he should be the principal gainer; the Pope Clement VII., the ambitious Medici, who succeeded Adrian in September 1523, hungered for fresh territory which Charles alone could give him; the rebel De Bourbon, the greatest soldier of France, was fighting against his own king; and in February 1525 the crushing blow of Pavia fell, and Francis, “all lost except honour,” was a prisoner in the hands of his enemy, who looking over Christendom saw none to say him nay but the bold monk at Wittemberg.

      Three years of costly war for interests not primarily their own had already disillusioned the English people. By methods more violent and tyrannical than ever had been adopted by any previous king, Henry had wrung from parliament supplies so oppressive and extortionate for the purposes of the war as to disgust and incense the whole country. Wolsey, too, had been for the second time beguiled about the Papacy he coveted, and knew now that he could not trust the Emperor to serve any interests but his own. The French collapse at Pavia, moreover, and pity for the captive Francis languishing at Madrid, had caused in England and elsewhere a reaction in his favour. Henry himself was, as was his wont, violently angry at the cynical way in which his own hopes in France were shelved by Charles; and the Pope, alarmed now at the Emperor’s unchecked dominion in Italy, and the insufficient share of the spoil offered to him, also began to look askance at his ally. So, notwithstanding the official rejoicings in England when the news of Pavia came, and the revived plan of Henry and Wolsey to join Bourbon in his intention to dismember France, with or without the aid of Charles, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Warham, correctly interpreted the prevailing opinion in England in his letter to Wolsey (quoted by Hallam), saying that the people had “more cause to weep than to rejoice” at the French defeat. The renewed extortionate demands for money aroused in England discontent so dangerous as to reach rebellion against the King’s officers.[34] Risings in Kent and the eastern counties, and the outspoken remonstrances of the leaders of the middle and working classes at length convinced Wolsey, and through him the King, that a change of policy was inevitable. England once more had been made the cat’s-paw of Spain; and now, with an empty exchequer and a profoundly discontented people, was obliged again to shift its balance to the side which promised the best hopes for peace, and to redress the equilibrium in Europe upon which the English power depended. France was still rich in resources, and was made to pay or rather promise the vast sum of two million crowns in instalments, and an annuity of a hundred thousand a year to the King for England’s friendship, whilst Francis was forced to abandon all his claims on Italy and Burgundy (January 1526), and marry the Emperor’s sister Leonora, before he was permitted to return to France, at peace once more. It is true that every party to the treaties endeavoured to evade the fulfilment of his pledges; but that was the custom of the times. The point that interests us here is that the new policy now actively pursued by Wolsey of close friendship with France, necessarily meant the ruin of Katharine, unless she was dexterous and adaptable enough either to reverse the policy or openly espouse it. Unfortunately she did neither. She was now forty-one years of age, and had ceased for nearly two years to cohabit with her husband. Her health was bad; she had grown stout, and her comeliness had departed; all hopes of her giving to the King the son and heir for whom he so ardently craved had quite vanished, and with them much of her personal hold upon her husband. To her alarm and chagrin, Henry, as if in despair of being succeeded by a legitimate heir, in 1525, before signing the new alliance with France, had created his dearly loved natural son, Henry Fitzroy, a duke under the royal title of Duke of Richmond, which had been borne by his father; and Katharine, not without reason, feared the King’s intention to depose her daughter, the betrothed of the Emperor, in favour of an English bastard. We have in previous pages noticed the peculiar absence of tact and flexibility in Katharine’s character; and Wolsey’s ostentatious French leanings after 1525 were met by the Queen with open opposition and acrimonious reproach, instead of by temporising wiliness. The Emperor’s off-hand treatment of his betrothed bride, Mary Tudor, further embittered Katharine, who was thus surrounded on every side by disillusionment and disappointment. Charles sent commissioners to England just before the battle of Pavia to demand, amongst other unamiable requirements, the prompt sending of Mary, who was only nine years old, to Flanders with an increased dowry. This was no part of the agreement, and was, as no doubt Charles foresaw and desired, certain to be refused. The envoys received from Henry and Katharine, and more emphatically from Wolsey, a negative answer to the request,[35] Mary being, as they said, the greatest treasure they had, for whom no hostages would be sufficient.[36] Katharine would not let her nephew slip out of his engagement without a struggle. Mary herself was made soon after to send a fine emerald to her betrothed with a grand message to the effect that when they came together she would be able to know (i.e. by the clearness or otherwise of the gem) “whether his Majesty do keep himself as continent and chaste as, with God’s grace, she will.” As at this time the Emperor was a man of twenty-five, whilst his bride had not reached ten years, the cases were hardly parallel; and within three months (in July 1525) Charles had betrothed himself to his cousin of Portugal. The treaty that had been so solemnly sworn to on the high altar at Windsor only three years before, had thus become so much waste-paper, and Katharine’s best hopes for her child and herself were finally defeated. A still greater trial for her followed; for whilst Wolsey was drawing nearer and nearer to France, and the King himself was becoming more distant from his wife every day, the little Princess was taken from the loving care of her mother, and sent to reside in her principality of Wales.[37] Thenceforward the life of Katharine was a painful martyrdom without one break in the monotony of misfortune.

      Katharine appears never to have been unduly jealous of Henry’s various mistresses. She, one of the proudest princesses in Christendom, probably considered them quite beneath her notice, and as usual adjuncts to a sovereign’s establishment. Henry, moreover, was far from being a generous or complaisant lover; and allowed his lady favourites no great social and political power, such as that wielded by the mistresses of Francis I. Lady Tailebois (Eleanor Blount) made no figure at Court, and Mary Boleyn, the wife of William Carey, a quite undistinguished courtier, who had been Henry’s mistress from about 1521,[38] was always impecunious and sometimes disreputable, though her greedy father reaped a rich harvest from his daughter’s attractions. Katharine evidently troubled herself very little about such infidelity on the part of her husband, and certainly Wolsey had no objection. The real anxiety of the Queen arose from Henry’s ardent desire for