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causes.

THE SUCCESSION TO THE THRONE.

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But for the succession to be plain and uncontested, it CHAP. was a primary condition that a lawful male heir should be born to the king and queen. The experiment of a female ruler had only been once tried since the Norman conquest, and the Empress Matilda had plunged the country into civil chaos. Yet it seemed likely that upon the king's death this dangerous experiment would be repeated. Of the six children born to Catharine between 1511 and 1518 one only, the Lady Mary, had survived, and after 1525 it was known that Catharine would bear no more children. The succession after Henry's death would then devolve upon a daughter, who, if the diplomatic schemes now pressed forward were carried out, would in due course of time be married into the royal house of France. It was natural to entertain a fear that such a marriage would lead to a loss of national independence, and we cannot doubt but that this apprehension entered into the argument of those who, like the Duke of Norfolk, opposed Wolsey's French alliance at the council board. The want of a male heir threw a shadow upon every forecast of the future. If Mary were left unmarried England would be weakened in the diplomatic markets of Europe, and the king's death would surely be followed by a disastrous contest for her hand. Civil war would almost certainly ensue if she ascended the throne as the wife of an English noble; and the third alternative was even more forbidding, for a foreign marriage, though it might fail to arouse the jealousies of the nobility, would set an alien prince at the head of English affairs.

Henry's marriage with Catharine had now lasted eighteen years, and contrary to some expectations had survived the knowledge of Ferdinand's duplicity in 1514. The king had not been a faithful husband, but strict fidelity was hardly expected of princes, and judged by the standard of a Francis, he was a model of propriety. A natural son had been born to him in 1519 by Elizabeth Blount, but with this exception we know of no royal bastards. The boy was made Duke of Richmond and Somerset in 1525, given a council and establishment, and plans were framed to proclaim him King of England and Ireland, and to marry him either to his half-sister Princess Mary or else to Doña Maria of Portugal, the niece of Charles

1 Cal. State Papers, Venice, ii., 479.

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CHAP. V. Such a departure was in itself a symptom that Henry had begun to feel the necessity of making some artificial provision for the succession. But a bastard remained a bastard, however highly he might be married, and no legitimation, however solemn, could really efface the bar sinister. Another solution of the puzzle began to exert an increasing power over Henry's mind. From the beginning there had been grave doubts as to the validity of Henry's marriage with the widow of his deceased brother. Julius II. himself had not granted the dispensation without an overt expression of doubt as to the competence of the curia, nor had the marriage passed unchallenged in the council of Henry VII. To a man so prosperous, so splendid, so conscious of nobility, of rectitude, of special services to God and the Church, there seemed to be some mysterious paradox in the strange succession of calamities which had overcome the children of this dubious marriage. What could God mean by depriving the defender of the faith, the hammer of the heretics, the hope of Christendom, the musician, the warrior, the statesman, the athlete, of just that one common thing accorded to peasants, to heretics, to Turks, without which his kingdom could not stand? It was impossible that God could be unjust. He must wish Henry to have his way, Henry, who, save in one thing, had always had it. There must be a meaning in the riddle, and the meaning could only be that the marriage with Catharine was looked on with disfavour from above, that it was no marriage, that it had never been a marriage, that the king had for eighteen years been living in sin. So construed, the calamities in Catharine's nursery would assume the form of benign monitions, exhibiting the special favour of God to God's special favourite, beacons specially prepared to light him into the safe harbour of lawful and unquestioned matrimony.

Reasons of a different order combined to assist, and were said to have originated, the logical process. Henry had fallen in love. Among the ladies of the court were two sisters, Mary and Anne, daughters of Sir Thomas Boleyn, a substantial, wellconnected, and grasping knight. The family fortunes of the Boleyns, founded by Sir Thomas's grandfather, Sir Geoffrey Boleyn, lord mayor of London in 1479, had been swollen by two prosperous marriages, and were destined to be illustrated by a third, more splendid and momentous than either. Sir

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ANNE BOLEYN.

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William Boleyn, son of Sir Geoffrey and father of Sir Thomas, CHAP. had married Margaret, daughter of Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond. Sir Thomas became the husband of the daughter of the Earl of Surrey. Anne, the younger daughter of Sir Thomas, born in 1507, was therefore niece of Thomas Howard, third duke of Norfolk, who upon his father's death in 1524 became the most important noble in the kingdom; while in virtue of his Ormond connexion Sir Thomas Boleyn came into possession of at least half of the great English and Irish estates of the Butlers, and cherished a claim upon the title and the residue of the Irish property as well. Of the early life of Anne but little is known. It seems probable, however, that in 1514, when she was seven years of age, she was sent to France in the charge of her elder sister, who was one of the gentlewomen in attendance on the queen; that she remained in France after the death of the king and the return of his widow to England, and that during part at least of her French sojourn she was placed under the care of Queen Claude of France. Seven years passed, during which Anne became proficient in the language, the elegancies, and not improbably in the vices of French society. Returning to England in 1521 she entered the suite of Queen Catharine, and here her flashing eyes, sprightly wit, and perhaps also some charm of French intonation and speech, some touch of dainty and radiant caprice arrested admiration. In her absence, in February, 1520, her elder sister Mary, who had acquired a reputation for profligacy abroad, had been married to William Carey, one of the king's gentlemen; and soon afterwards, though the date cannot be fixed with certainty, attracted and gratified the passion of the king. A shower of honours fell upon the father of the royal favourite, and from 1522 to 1525 Sir Thomas Boleyn was the recipient of a number of lucrative offices, culminating in the viscounty of Rochford in 1525.1

Meanwhile Anne had been the subject of a romance. Among the young noblemen who were finishing their education in the cardinal's household was Lord Percy, eldest son and heir of the Earl of Northumberland. While the cardinal was transacting affairs of state, Percy would spend his time in the

1 James Gairdner, "Mary and Anne Boleyn," Engl. Hist. Rev., viii., 53-60, x., 104; J. H. Round, Early Life of Anne Boleyn (1886).

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In.

CHAP. queen's chamber, dallying with the maidens of the court. the process he lost his heart to Anne, and the young couple were secretly betrothed. Whether the charms of the girl had already made an impression on the royal heart, or whether he had arranged another marriage for his wife's lady-in-waiting, Henry determined that the romance should not proceed, and instructed Wolsey to break the match. Delicacies of conduct were not in the cardinal's sphere, and Wolsey performed his task with an emphatic and effective brutality, humiliating to Percy and not likely to be forgiven by Anne. The youth was married off within the year; the girl was for a while banished from the court. But sometime late in 1526 or early in 1527 she captured the fancy of the king.

The wheels of the political and religious calculus now moved with increasing velocity. By April, 1527, it was clear to Henry that he was a bachelor, clear that with the least possible delay Anne must be his lawful wife and the mother of his children. His alleged marriage must be annulled by the pope. Similar favours had been granted for causes less grave and to persons less deserving than the defender of the faith. At the end of April or at the beginning of May he imparted his secret to Wolsey.

One day early in May Wolsey and Warham, in accordance with a prearranged plan, entered the palace of Greenwich and summoned the king to appear on the 17th of the month in the legate's house at Westminster to answer a matter affecting the "tranquillity of consciences" and the salvation of the royal soul. The matter was the royal marriage. The proceedings were secret; the proctors who were selected to attack and defend the union were members of the royal household. The king appeared in the role of a defendant, a sacrificial victim. Scrupulous minds attacked the validity of his marriage; but he would defend it, prepared however, if beaten in argument, to bow his head to the weight of theological authority. A salvo of canonical artillery was interchanged between Dr. Bell and Dr. Wolman, mock combatants in a mock suit. The bull of 1503 was cited on the one side, contested on the other; but at the third sitting on May 31 the proceedings were closed. It was a case, said the cardinal, sufficiently thorny and arduous to be submitted to the special consideration of eminent theologians and jurists.

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WOLSEY CONSULTS THE DIVINES.

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Wolsey had already begun to sound the divines. He was CHAP. prepared to argue that the marriage was invalid, whether or no Catharine during the marriage with Arthur had contracted affinity with the king. But meanwhile the plot had leaked out. As early as May 18, Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, who had been informed by Catharine, wrote to tell his master that divorce was in the air. On June 22 the king himself told her that they had been living in mortal sin and must separate. She was "very stiff and obstinate," full of passionate and indignant protest at the sudden wrong. It was possible that she might influence the divines; at one moment the king suspected that her protests had deflected Wolsey himself.

To Wolsey, who was anxious to promote a solid peace between Henry, Francis, and Charles, the king's "secret matter" must have been a cause of desperate perplexity. Yet he knew his master well enough to see that opposition was hopeless and that he must either serve or fall. "I take God to record,” he wrote, on July 5 in reference to the plan, "that there is nothing earthly that I count so much as the advancing thereof." A little later he prayed that God might gratify his master's "most noble and virtuous desires". When Fisher maintained that the dispensation properly fell within the papal prerogative, he insinuated to the king that this very tenable opinion "proceedeth rather of appetite than of sincerity of his learning in Scripture". In pursuance of a plan concerted with Henry, he secured the adhesion of Warham and the temporary neutrality of Fisher, by representing that the king's scruples had been prompted by an objection raised by the Bishop of Tarbes during the recent negotiations over the proposed French marriage with Mary. The bishop, it was said, had objected that the bull of Julius II. was insufficient, since the impediment was de jure divino, while the pope could only dispense ex urgentissima causa, but further discussion had been postponed until Wolsey's coming into France. Meanwhile it was only natural for the king to take steps "for the searching and trying out of the truth". Fisher, who had declared himself for the validity of the marriage, was induced to promise that he would give no counsel to the queen but such as should stand with the king's pleasure. Wakefield, the Hebrew scholar, and Pace, the Dean of St. Paul's, ranged themselves on the king's side.