No, he must get out. He must get out and contrive, with God’s help, to placate Henry Tudor without too grossly offending the Emperor.
The often-used, pious phrase, “with God’s help” slid through his mind and then turned and came back and leered at him. Where had God been all day? Where was He now while the drunken Lutheran soldiers raped the city and the Vicar of Christ cowered helpless? To face such things with a steadfast mind demanded the faith of a saint; and even the saints had known their moments of black disbelief and despair. One must believe that what happened on this earth was permitted to happen by God’s will; yet who could believe that this overthrow of holy things, this bloodshed, this triumph of evil was in accord with the will of God?
He should pray; he knew that, but in these last months he had prayed with the utmost fervor; the set stylized prayers of the Rubric and the other sort, the simple humble appeals from the heart. Yet this had happened…
He rose, slipped on a thin silk robe and prostrated himself before his prie-dieu.
Some long time later he stood up, still uncomforted, and knew that it was useless to go to bed again. So he rang a bell and sent someone to look for Cardinal Campeggio, who was one of those who had fled with him to San Angelo; that in itself proved Campeggio’s allegiance; several Cardinals, in sympathy with the Emperor, had thought it safe to stay in the city. Clement liked Campeggio, a singularly levelheaded man, capable alike of silence and of outspokenness.
“If he is awake,” Clement said, considerately, “I wish to see him. If he is asleep, leave him be.”
Campeggio was not asleep. In the whole of Rome that night the only people who slept were babies so young that the security of their mothers’ arms was enough for them, and such of the invading soldiers to whom drinking mattered more than loot or rape and who had by this time fallen into sodden stupor.
In the safe, if not very comfortable room, the two men sat on hard stools and talked; first about the day’s disaster, about which there was nothing new to say; and then about the future which was so vague and speculative. Campeggio, having taken the measure of Clement’s mood, racked his brain for some consoling words, and presently said,
“I am as certain as one can be of anything that this is not the Emperor’s doing. This is the work of the Duke of Bourbon and the Prince of Orange and the rabble who call themselves their followers but refuse to be controlled by them. Charles is a faithful son of the Church, and when he knows what has taken place in Rome this day he will be appalled, and rightly.” He paused for a moment and then added, “The Empire is so vast and so varied; I think it would be wrong to allow those few dissident German states to color one’s view of the whole. For myself, I sometimes doubt if they were ever converted at all. They were the last people to renounce paganism, and now infected by Luther they have reverted. But they are not the Empire.”
“You think I should hasten to make peace with the Emperor?”
“I think that the well-being of the world depends upon the unity between the Papacy and the Empire. They are natural allies. The French are frivolous and unreliable; and the English have only one interest in Europe—their unrealistic dream of regaining France. The fact that the Turks are in Hungary affects them less, I am sure, than the price of mutton.”
Clement remembered that during his predecessor’s reign Campeggio had been sent to England to ask Henry’s support in a crusade against the Turks. The mission had been a failure, but Campeggio had made himself agreeable, and had been given an English bishopric.
He said, “I have been thinking about the English. You know them. Do you understand them?”
“No. Nobody does. They do not even understand themselves. Of all people they are the most unpredictable—and the most hypocritical. Their King is typical of them all.”
“He failed to send the help he promised,” Clement agreed.
“I was thinking rather about his pious whimperings with regard to his conscience; he doubts the legality of his marriage yet he continues to cohabit with his wife.”
“So he should,” Clement said, gently but firmly. “Until the marriage is declared unlawful he would be wrong to put her aside.”
“Things come to my ears,” Campeggio said, “rumors with which no one would trouble your Holiness. And the latest thing I heard from England is that it is less a matter of his conscience than his liking for another lady—one of his wife’s maids-of-honor.”
“Oh,” Clement said. Rumor could never be relied upon, nor could it be discounted; there was often a grain of truth in the wildest story. “But even so—Kings allow themselves a good deal of latitude in such matters without attempting to overturn a marriage of long standing.”
“And so, no doubt, would he,” Campeggio said drily, “but the lady has some say in the matter. And her ultimate intention is surely signified by the fact that she has for three years resisted all his attempts to seduce her. Or so gossip says.”
“And that is a very unusual form for gossip to take! Do you know her name?”
“She is Anne Boleyn, daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn, an upstart. On the distaff side the girl is well-connected. And one thing I do know about the English. If the King were ever in a position to marry her, they’d accept her. They think so highly of their Englishness that they’d regard an English commoner as more than the equal of any foreign princess.”
Clement was regarding the thing from a different angle.
“Boleyn. No friend to Wolsey.”
“Wolsey,” Campeggio said, “has no friends. He has henchmen, and tools and sycophants and partisans. But that is by the way. Wolsey is a sound churchman, he is opposed to any change. Thomas Boleyn, like all his kind, would welcome any change which brought them ten pence.”
“Lutheran?”
“No-o-o. That wouldn’t suit the King. He’s shrewd enough. He can see, as any sensible man would, that the logical end of heresy is anarchy. Throw down the Church and how long would the throne stand? This, going on outside there…” the noise came up to them, muted a little, but still clearly enough, for the screams of the victims to be distinguished from the drunken yells of the victors, “that is Luther’s work. Begin by treating your parish priest with contempt and you end by ignoring the orders of your own leader in war. Henry knows that. There’ll be no Lutherans in England while he sits on the throne. But there are many changes, short of that, which might come about if new men like Thomas Boleyn ever had, say, half the power Wolsey now holds. The English,” he hesitated; he had no wish to depress Clement any further; on the other hand an hour of gossip and mere academic discussion might help to divert him. “The English have never, I feel, been fully integrated; they’re Christian, some are even pious, but their Englishness gets in the way; they have this ancient law against receiving instructions from any outside power; it has never been repealed and could at a moment’s notice be considered to apply even to a Papal Bull. There was that London tailor, Richard Hunne, who if he hadn’t lost his nerve and hanged himself before his trial, was prepared to sue his parish priest under that old law, you may remember. They resent paying what they call Peter’s Pence; they resent the payment of annates; they troop in their thousands to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket, and one out of every two boys born in England is named for him, but if the same situation arose again and the King fell out with a Bishop—they’d take the King’s side to a man. A very curious people; one has only to watch them keeping Christmas to realize that.”
“And how do they keep Christmas?”
“With a Mass in the church and the old Druid sacred plant, the mistletoe, in the hall; with evergreens, holly and ivy, sacred to woodland gods even farther back in time, and with twelve days of undisciplined revelry that is more like the old Saturnalia than anything I ever saw or heard of.”
All very interesting and informative, but Clement’s mind insisted upon coming back to his present situation.
“When they hear of this,” he moved an eloquent hand, “what will their reaction be???
?
“Mixed, as their reactions always are. They’ll say—We’re glad we weren’t there; and—If we’d been there things would have been different; and—Serves him right for falling out with the Emperor. Never forget, Your Holiness, the Netherlands are part of the Empire and it is in the Netherlands that the English sell their wool. The French they hate, and I have no doubt that it was the idea of fighting alongside the French and not against them that has made them such feeble allies for you in this war.”
He should have said, “for us.” He realized that as soon as he had said the other thing; but Clement seemed not to have noticed.
“To make peace with the Emperor seems to be my only hope,” Clement said. “Spain is the stronghold of the faith, and the heart of the Empire. And that brings up again the problem of the English marriage, now more important than ever if what you tell me is true.”
“It is a matter of time,” Campeggio said. “The King may tire of being repulsed; the lady may give in. The Queen is said to be dropsical—though that is denied in other quarters. Given time anything could happen. Henry has reached the age when men have a roving eye; it might easily fall upon someone less obdurate. Let us hope…”
He broke off as a series of screams, more piercing than any hitherto heard, rose through the din. Clement shuddered, and his heart reproached him anew. How dismally he had failed. He broke into womanish tears.
“They are my sheep,” he said, “and I can do nothing to protect them.”
Campeggio said, not callously, but as a plain statement of fact,
“Your Holiness is their spiritual shepherd. On the physical plane there is but one defense for sheep—they must learn to fight back. In any given situation they always vastly outnumber the wolves.”
Clement was not exactly comforted by these comments, but he sensed in Campeggio a detachment which he himself did not possess, and he made another attempt to control his tears.
“You were speaking about time.”
“Oh yes. I was thinking that the French having proved no match for the Emperor’s troops and the English having failed us, our only hope is to come to terms with Charles. I’m no seer, but I think that Henry will do the same; his wool merchants will see to that. And while this peace is brought about, such trivial extraneous things as whether Henry is married or not should be…” He realized that he was on the brink of proffering an unasked-for piece of advice. “I am sorry, your Holiness; it is not for me to advise you.”
“If you can, do.”
“The matter should be delayed. Not shelved, that would anger Henry. Merely delayed for as long as is possible. There are methods of delay well known to lawyers.”
“If I am free to use them,” Clement said, coming back to his own immediate future. He then voiced the thing which troubled him most, “I think I was wrong to allow myself to be persuaded to come here. I should have stayed, robed and in my chair. That was my intention. At the lowest it would have been an assertion of faith, and it would have left me with some authority.”
“If you had stayed, you would now be dead. Of that I am certain!”
“You think they would have dared…”
“They are drunken and mutinous; they would re-crucify Christ given the chance. Your Holiness must…” There he was doing it again.
“Must what?” Clement asked mildly.
“Escape from here. Throw yourself under the Emperor’s protection. Unless I am much mistaken this day’s work is going to make a breach between the real Empire and the German principalities. The Emperor and the Empire will be on your side. After all, Charles has not yet been crowned. Who else could do it?”
So the hideous night ran its course and the talk in the high room ran hither and thither, touching upon many things. Before the year was out, Clement was to follow Campeggio’s advice and, dressed like a workman, with a sack on his shoulders, escaped to Orvieto. He was to carry with him inerasable memories of the rape of Rome, memories which strengthened his determination never again to fall out with the Emperor; and adhering to the memory of that one particular night, as barnacles cling to a ship’s hull, some of the other things that Campeggio had said; that Henry was a staunch churchman, unlikely to turn Lutheran if offended, that Henry must not be offended; that it would be against the interest of the Church for Anne Boleyn ever to be Queen of England; that only time was needed to solve everything.
He was to carry also the conviction that Campeggio was farsighted and reliable, and very knowledgeable. If, in the years that lay ahead, so unsafe and so uncertain, he ever needed a man for any particularly delicate mission, Campeggio was the one he would try first.
VII
…she showed neither to Mistress Anne nor unto the King any spark or kind of grudge or displeasure, but took and accepted all things in good part, and with wisdom and great patience.
Cavendish, The Life of Cardinal Wolsey
GREENWICH. JUNE 1527
WHEN HENRY ENTERED, CATHERINE ROSE and greeted him with grave respect before giving any sign of the immense pleasure which his visit gave her. Even to herself she would not use the word neglectful, but it was impossible to overlook the fact that lately she had seen less and less of him on private occasions. She told herself that he was busy, much occupied with the affairs of state, and of that, she, daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, fully approved. Rulers should take their duties seriously. She had often thought, and occasionally in the past gently hinted, that Henry left too much to Wolsey. Such dependence, even in its most innocent aspect, was bad, since Wolsey was twenty years older that his King, and must one day die, or sink into useless senility. It was better that Henry should learn to do without him.
She had almost brought herself to believe her own explanation of Henry’s withdrawal from her: but she was not a fool, and she knew very well that any man, however preoccupied, can make time to spend with the woman who holds his interest. She had lost Henry’s; that she admitted to herself, sadly, but with resignation. It was no one’s fault; it was inevitable; it was due to the dates of their births.
Just six years difference, so little, so much, so variable.
Six years had made an unbridgeable gap between a boy of ten and a well-developed, marriageable girl of almost sixteen; and it was across this gap that they had first looked at one another when he gave her his hand and led her along the aisle of St. Paul’s Cathedral where, at the altar, his brother Arthur awaited her. She had thought him very handsome, had even entertained a fleeting hope that her first-born son might inherit the sturdy physique of his young uncle Henry, rather than that of his delicate-looking father.
After that, with every passing month, the gap between them had narrowed, until he was a great lusty fellow of eighteen, almost full-grown of body and in mind rendered precocious by the respect that had been paid to him, and the demands made upon him since the death of Arthur had made him heir to the throne. Between such an eighteen-year-old and a young woman of twenty-four, who since the death of her husband, after a few months’ “marriage” had lived an almost nunlike life, there seemed no gap at all. They were married; they mourned together over their first stillborn child, and in the next year rejoiced—oh, with what fervor—over the birth of a living son. Completely at one in joy, they had organized the celebrations to make his birth, completely at one in sorrow, they saw him coffined before the gay decorations were down.
Then, a man of twenty-five, a woman of thirty-one they had leaned over the cradle of another living child, a daughter this time, a small, not very thriving child, but she lived and that was a good sign. They were still young; there was still hope that they could breed another boy, who would live.
All too soon the gap began to yawn again; Henry was in his prime, Catherine moving into middle age. Repeated childbirth had thickened her body, repeated disappointment had sobered her spirits. There was still no child but the one daughter. Catherine had prayed to God and to the Virgin and to the Saints until sometimes she felt they must be weary
of her; she had made pilgrimages to shrines and paid for prayers to be said for her, she had been charitable, and patient, and always on guard against despair, for despair was sin…And now, on this brilliant June morning in 1527, Henry was thirty-six, handsome, shapely, hard-muscled, sexually at the height of his powers, while she was forty-two and had known for several months that her childbearing days were done. The six years’ gap was wider than it had ever been.
Under her determined cheerfulness and resignation to the will of God, a persistent sense of failure gnawed. She had failed as a wife, for every man, even a peasant with nothing but his name, an old donkey, and a scythe to bequeath, wanted a son, how much more so the King of England…? She had failed England, too; that curious and in some ways uncouth country, where foreigners were ill-esteemed, had taken her to its heart and had looked to her to provide it with an heir. Still, even the feeling of failure had its palliatives. What happened was according to the will of God. And there was Mary. After all, Catherine’s own mother had been Queen in her own right, and a better ruler the world had never seen. Why should not Mary be as good; she had all the qualities, young as she was, gravity, intelligence, integrity, and courage.
When Henry said, “I have a matter of some importance to discuss,” Catherine thought instantly of Mary.
Henry spoke pleasantly, addressing Catherine, but looking at her ladies, all as gay as flowers in their summer dresses. Catherine—he gave her her due—was not as dowdy as many pious women were, nor did she surround herself with women so old or ill-featured that by comparison she might look younger and more comely. There were, indeed, amongst the women who went fluttering and chattering away, more than one who might have attracted him, had his heart not been fixed.
But his heart was fixed, and this next half-hour, which he suspected would be the most uncomfortable half-hour he had ever spent, must be regarded as the breaking of a barrier between him and his heart’s desire. It must be regarded as one of those ordeals which qualified a man for knighthood. It was, more simply, just something that must be done.