Henry VIII: The Life and Rule of England's Nero by Matusiak John

Author:Matusiak, John [Matusiak, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2013-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

9

The Infinite Clamour of

Deadlock

‘In substance, he plainly confesses that he finds himself in such perplexity that he can no longer live in it.’

Jean du Bellay, French ambassador, describing Henry VIII in January 1530.

As winter’s grip steadily tightened in 1529, Anne Boleyn’s grasp on the man of her ambition seemed increasingly secure. Now installed in her own apartments at Greenwich, she ‘kept an estate more like a Queen than a simple maid’, while elsewhere in the same palace, Catherine of Aragon continued to mend her husband’s shirts, regally contemptuous of her upstart rival and stoically resigned to her chosen path of fruitless resistance. In the cold world around her, there was nothing, it seemed, to insulate her from further mistreatment. On 8 December, Anne’s father, Thomas, was created Earl of Wiltshire and a grand celebration followed at Whitehall, over which Anne herself presided at Henry’s side. Courted and attended like a queen and sitting on the queen’s throne, ‘the King’s wench’ could not have seemed more snugly placed amid the seasonal blazes and hangings. To all appearances, the festivities seemed to betoken triumph, rejoicing and imminent conjugal bliss. Wolsey had been vanquished, Catherine’s stubborn resistance was being circumvented and Henry’s heart and conscience were, for the moment, light of their burdens.

For around a year and a half relations between the king and his wife would be maintained for formal occasions and they continued to visit one another ‘every few days’ for appearances’ sake. However, in the summer of 1531 the council ordered Catherine to vacate her apartments and move to Wolsey’s former house at the More. Thereafter began a long, dreary and humiliating exodus, encompassing a series of distant royal manors at Ampthill, Buckden and finally Kimbolton. She was forbidden either to write to the king or see her daughter, and her household would now be progressively whittled away until it became a paltry embarrassment to all concerned. Before long it consisted of little more than a confessor, a physician, an apothecary, and three women, including the ever loyal Lady Willoughby: a retinue even more inadequate than in Catherine’s days of hardship at Durham House twenty-five years earlier. Now, as her little court became a home for lost causes, she would be ‘scantily visited by courtiers’.

That the king’s Gordian knot was all but cut even before the end of 1529 seemed manifestly clear to most outside observers and especially Eustace Chapuys, the 40-year-old imperial ambassador, who was in that year newly arrived at the English court. This doctor of canon law and former ecclesiastical judge was to serve in England for the next sixteen years and though a consistently passionate ally of Catherine, he left detailed records of his activities and opinions, which, if not always entirely objective, were invariably perceptive. As a scientist of the wagging tongue and miner of the secret heart, he left no court luminary unsounded, no merchant or maidservant untapped. His staff from Flanders and Burgundy were all hand-picked for their fluency in English and their

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