Foundations of the Anglican Church XXXV

Canterbury Cathedral, the center
of the Anglican Communion

So here is where left this story.  The year 1527.  Henry is 36 years old.  Katherine is 42.  It has been nine years since she has become pregnant and further offspring are most unlikely.  There is one legitimate child to succeed Henry on the throne, but that child is a daughter, the Princess Mary.  The one time previous that a woman ruled England was a disaster—a time of civil war as male relatives contested the throne.  England has just gone through a long dynastic struggle and there are male claimants to the throne that Henry has been able to hold in check, but would Mary be able to do so?  What can Henry do to guarantee the stability of the Tudor dynasty? 

Henry knows that he is capable of producing a male heir.  Katherine has borne three sons, but they all died in infancy?  Is God punishing Henry for something?  Is there something wrong about his marriage to Katherine for which he is being punished?

Moreover Henry has an illegitimate son who is alive and healthy—Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset, the son of Bessie Blount, the one mistress whom Henry had publically acknowledged as royal mistress.  Could he succeed to the throne despite his illegitimacy?

Henry seriously considered naming his illegitimate son to be his heir but Katherine would have none of it.  Katherine’s proud Spanish blood would not tolerate the idea that a Princess, granddaughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Kings and greatest European monarchs of their day, would be supplanted by a bastard, even a King’s bastard.  Moreover, it is unlikely that the nobility of England would have accepted the boy.  In the end, the matter would have been mute.  Henry FitzRoy died before his father, reaching only 17 years of age.  But in 1527 Henry, of course, did not know that. 

But was God punishing Henry for something?  Katherine had been married to Henry’s brother, Arthur, but had been widowed after five months.  Katherine, and her chaperone, had claimed that the marriage was never consummated.  That may or may not have been the case.  Deuteronomy, chapter 25, commands that if a man should die childless, his brother must marry the widow and raise up children to his brother’s memory.  On the other hand, the Book of Leviticus prohibits such a marriage.  There is a dilemma here.  Catholic Canon Law prohibited the marriage of siblings-in-law but would give a dispensation when petitioned for it, particularly when the first marriage had not been consummated.  The Canon Lawyers claimed that when the marriage had not been consummated such a marriage was precisely what Deuteronomy required in terms of raising up children to the deceased brother’s memory.  Henry had always believed that Katherine’s marriage to Arthur had not been consummated, but now he was having doubts.  Maybe God was punishing him for a forbidden marriage by depriving him of male heirs.  After all, three young princes had died in infancy. 

Henry began to see a way out of his dilemma.  Maybe his marriage to Katherine could be annulled and he could  still produce an heir with a new wife.   

Foundations of the Anglican Chruch XXIX

Katherine of Aragon arounhd the

time of her marriage to Henry

Well back to the saga of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon and the story of Henry’s break with Rome.   As previously mentioned, Henry VII brought England out of the dynastic struggles of the Wars of the Roses and established the Tudor dynasty.  His chief policy was to make the Tudor claim to the throne strong so that the struggles did not break out again.  Henry held the throne by force but the rightful succession was not so clear.  There were a number of claimants to the throne and none had an undisputed right though several had stronger claims for royal legitimacy than Henry VII Tudor whose only claim was through his mother’s descent from a bastard line (though later legitimized) descending from Edward III through John of Gaunt’s relationship to this mistress (and later wife) Katherine Swynford.  This line, while after-the-fact legitimized by both Church and Parliament was explicitly barred from the succession, making Henry Tudor the least legitimate of the several claimants and resistance to the Tudor monarchy would continue into the reign of his son, Henry VIII.  Despite the lack of legitimacy, however, Henry Tudor held the throne by virtue of his defeat of the usurper, Richard III, suspect of killing his own nephew, the rightful King Edward V, one of the “Princes in the Tower.”
Henry was faced not only with a weak claim to the throne he had seized from the hunchback murderer, Richard III, but he also had seized a throne with few financial resources.  How could he govern without the funds needed?  Legitimacy—or at least recognition—was granted him by the most powerful and aristocratic monarchs in the Catholic World—Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile—when they betrothed their youngest daughter, Katherine of Aragon, to Henry’s son and heir, Prince Arthur.  Moreover the Spanish bride came with a dowry sufficient not only to solve Henry’s fiscal crisis but to make him financially secure in the foreseeable future.
The marriage of Katherine and Arthur was duly celebrated in November of 1501 in Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London but the young prince was dead in five months.  Henry would have to send the widowed princess back to Spain and, worse, send back her dowry.  But Ferdinand of Aragon did not want this any more than Henry and so the plan was hatched to marry Katherine to her deceased husband’s brother, the prince Henry.
I find it curious that Ferdinand and Isabella did not want their daughter back under any circumstances.  They were loving parents and their parting from her had been sad, most especially from her father who doted on her.  The only thing I can figure out is that they wanted to leave their joint realm to one child and didn’t want a disputed succession. With their son, the Prince of Asturias, dead, their oldest daughter, Isabella the Queen of Portugal, also dead and her sister Maria married and presently Queen of Portugal, the thrones of Castile and Aragon could both go to child 3, Joan.  This would not only unite the Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile into one nation, Spain, but join the Spanish Realm and New World Empire to the Empire of which Joan’s husband, Philip of Burgundy was heir—the Holy Roman Empire.  Joan and Philip’s child would inherit Spain, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, the Spanish Americas, what is today Belgium and Holland, Germany, Austria, and Bohemia, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, and significant parts of Poland.  This was a grand dynastic plan—in fact, too grand.  It would hold together only under one monarch, the Emperor Charles V.  He would see the impossibility of it and upon his abdication break this world-empire apart once again into the Spanish Empire and the Holy Roman Empire.  But it was a dream and a dream that could only be accomplished if child 5, Katherine, could be kept from a Spanish inheritance.  Katherine was to stay in England—hopefully as the bride of the next heir, but she was to stay under any and all circumstances.      
Henry the “spare” of the “heir and a spare” policy of the English royal family had been preparing for a career in the Church as a future Archbishop of York, but his brother’s death catapulted him from the clerical life to heir apparent.  He would be king.  And now his father was to force on him a royal bride to be his queen.  Henry
VII and Ferdinand appealed to Rome for the appropriate dispensations.  Katherine claimed that her marriage to Arthur had never been consummated but the two Kings, leaving nothing to chance, obtained the dispensation permitting Katherine to marry her deceased husband’s brother. 
This did not please the young prince Henry.  Henry initially had misgivings about marrying Katherine.  It was not that he didn’t like her.  He was very fond of her but he was still a teenager and seems reluctant to marry young.  Moreover, she was five years older and that wasn’t terribly romantic.  The issue was still not resolved when in 1509, shortly before his 18^th birthday, Henry became king.     Upon ascending the throne, Henry suddenly decided to yield to the wishes of his late father and quietly married Katherine in a private ceremony at the Greyfriars’ (Franciscan) Church in Greenwich just over a month after his father’s funeral.  (Placentia Palace, the chief royal residence, was in Greenwich and the Observant Franciscans were especially favored by the royal family for their devotion and strictness of their lives. Keep them in mind.) 
The quiet simplicity of the royal wedding was in direct contrast to the splendid coronation of Henry and Katherine in Westminster Abbey two weeks later.  Henry and Katherine processed along a route carpeted in rich fabrics to Westminister Abbey where William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury anointed them with the sacred chrism and placed the crowns on their heads.  The Court then adjourned to Westminster Hall for the traditional coronation banquet. 
The marriage of Henry and Katherine was initially—and for a long time—a happy and fruitful one.  Katherine became pregnant, but miscarried and then became pregnant a second time but miscarried at the end of January 1510.  On New Year’s Day 1511 she gave birth to a prince, Henry, Duke of Cornwall.  There were great celebrations at the birth of an heir—a son to continue the dynasty—but the prince died towards the end of February.  In 1513, Katherine gave birth to a second son, but he died within a few hours, before he could even be named.  A third son, also named Henry and made Duke of Cornwall was born in December 1514 but died within the month.  In 1516 Katherine gave birth to the one child who survived—the Princess Mary—and would eventually sit on England’s throne.  Another daughter was born in November of 1518 but lived for only six days and was never named. All in all Katherine brought six children to term and miscarried at least one more.  Only one, a daughter, survived.  This was not auspicious for a dynasty whose claim to the throne was still fragile.  England had only once before had a Queen regnant—Maud, the daughter of Henry I in the 12 century—and England had devolved into Civil War during her reign.  Could England hold together under a woman?  There were doubts—doubts that would prove to be most ironic, but that is a later part of our story.   

Foundations of the Anglican Church XXVIII

Arthur Prince of Wales

Ok back to our story.  We have looked at the issue of “Valid Orders,” not in the context of Anglicanism but in how the issue was raised and used in the early Church and in the Middle Ages.  And we have looked at the challenges facing Henry VII Tudor in trying to establish a strong central government and a stable society in England after the dynastic struggles known as the Wars of the Roses.  Let’s go back to the marriage plans Henry VII had for his son and heir, Arthur.  I had mentioned that Henry arranged for Arthur to marry Katherine, the daughter of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, the wealthiest monarchs in Europe at the time.  Katherine’s Dowry of 200,000 silver crowns was an enormous amount of money—more than the annual revenue of the English Crown at the time.  But then Ferdinand and Isabella were rolling in gold being shipped over by the boatload from their newly claimed empire in the Americas.  And they hadn’t been exactly poor Columbus’ journeys had opened for them the wealth of the “Indies.” 
Ferdinand and Isabella had five children who lived to adulthood and Katherine was their youngest.  There was, as yet, no Spain—at least not in a political sense.  There were two Kingdoms—Castile and Aragon.  Castile was actually the union of the kingdoms of Castile and León.  León in turn had been created from the ancient kingdom of Asturias, where the Reconquista had begun in resistance to the Arab conquest of the Iberian peninsula in the eighth century.  Little by little the old Christian warrior families of Asturias pushed back the Muslim invaders, gradually expanding the Christian realm to include most of what is today Northwestern Spain.  As the Christians won back more and more land and fortified it with Castles, Castile developed its own unique identity and became an independent political unit of its own.  It was united with León in the 12^th century when Alfonso VI became the King of both Kingdoms.  Aragon too was a merged kingdom comprised of the old Roman Province of Tarragona and Charlemagne’s County of Barcelona as well as the Kingdoms of Valencia and of Majorica, and the County of Provence.  This realm had pretty much solidified into the Crown of Aragon with the Marriage of Petronilla of Aragon to Ramón Beleaguer IV of Barcelona in 1137.  It would expand into a thallassocracy  (look that up in your Funk and Wagnall’s) including Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, Malta and much of Provence by the time that Ferdinand II inherited the crown.  In other words, it was not confined to the Iberian Peninsula but rimmed that section of the Mediterranean and some of its wealthiest lands. In 1469 Ferdinand of Aragon married Isabella of Castile.  Each retained his or her own kingdom.  Incidentally, Isabella was not Queen of Castile, she was King of Castile—Isabella Rex.  This was not unusual at the time—Queens regnant (as opposed to the wives of Kings) were invariably called King.  Ferdinand and Isabella were given the title Los Reyes Catholicos—the Catholic Kings.  That would make an interesting blog entry itself as I think it may have only been with the rise of Protestantism that it was resented for a woman to assume the title of King.  But that is another issue.  In any event, the two Kingdoms remained distinct, each under its proper monarch.  Regardless of the great wealth of the Aragonese possessions in the Mediterranean, Isabella and Castile was the richer of the two, and together their wealth far exceeded any other European Crown.  Together they drove the Moors out of Andalusia, the southernmost region of Spain.  With the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims in 1492 and the confiscation of their possessions, even more wealth was added to the immense royal treasury. 
Isabella died in 1504 and was succeeded by her daughter, Joanna (aka Joan the Mad).  Their son, John Prince of Asturias, had died in 1497.  The oldest sibling, Isabella had married the King of Portugal and died in 1498.  Ferdinand died in 1517 and Joanna then succeeded to the Crown of Aragon as well.  From her holding the crowns of Aragon and Castile jointly, modern Spain emerged, though each Kingdom retained many of its own laws and traditions down through the subsequent centuries.  Even today Spain is not a totally united nation with various ethnic and linguistic groups such as the Basques and the Catalonians arguing for autonomy if not fighting for independence. 
In addition to John, Isabella, and Joanna, Ferdinand and Isabella had two more daughters—Maria and Katherine.  Maria, after the death of her sister Isabella, married her brother-in-law, King Manuel of Portugal.  Maria died in 1517.  Katherine was betrothed to the Prince of Wales, Arthur, the son of Henry VII Tudor. 
It was a strange betrothal and I am not sure what it was all about.  England was not yet an up and coming Kingdom.  Henry Tudor was a new-comer to kingship and the blood royal ran very thin in his veins.  He would prove himself eventually—or his dynasty would prove itself—but in 1499 the Tudors were parvenus, by no means a prize match for marriage into the Spanish Royal Family, not only the wealthiest, but the most aristocratic in Europe.
For one thing, Henry VII was not a rich monarch.  England had as yet no overseas empire and it even lacked an effective system of taxation at home.  The King was expected “to live off his own”—that is the King was expected to finance the government, the military, the navy, and the judiciary out of his own personal revenues.  Parliament could be cajoled into special taxes in times of war and national peril, but it always kept the King a beggar, asking for money.  And as said in earlier postings, Henry’s claim to the English Crown was far from secure.  He won it by defeating Richard III on the battlefield at Bosworth, but there were several other candidates with stronger claims of rightful succession and there was always danger of further civil wars breaking out to topple the Tudors as Henry had toppled the Plantagenets. In fact, Katherine herself had a stronger claim to the throne of England than Henry.  They were both descended from John of Gaunt, the son of Edward III.  Katherine was descended from Edward III both through the marriages of John of Gaunt to his first wife, Blanche of Lancaster, and to his second wife, Constance of Castile.  (Does this sound like a soap-opera or what?)  Henry, on the other hand, had claim to Royal Blood only through John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset, Gaunt’s son with Katherine Swynford.  And to make matters worse, John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset  was born to Swynford before she and Gaunt were married.  While a papal bull in 1396 legitimized John Beaufort and his three illegitimate siblings, all children of Gaunt and Swynford, and while the following year an Act of Parliament also legitimized them, they were explicitly removed from the royal succession.  Thus a marriage to the Swynford descended Tudors was not a move up the social ladder for the Princess of Aragon. To the contrary, she was marrying way beneath her status.  And to make matters completely unbearable—we are talking about England.  This Princess who had been raised in among the sunlit orange groves of Andalusia, living in the open and airy spaces of the Alhambra, was now to face the rigors of the English climate?  Did her parents hate her?  Did they want to kill this princess?  
Katherine and Arthur married on November 14, 1501.  They were both 15, though Katherine was ten months Arthur’s senior.  The wedding included the traditional “bedding” ritual in which the whole court escorted the couple to their wedding bed and tucked them in for the night before withdrawing to give the newlyweds sufficient privacy to finish the work begun in church.
Arthur was dead in just over five months.  Many authors write how Arthur had been sickly or frail throughout his life, but this doesn’t seem to be the case.  Granted Tudors tended to be anything but average.  They were either like Edward VI or several of Henry VIII’s other children who died young, weak and sickly, or they were strong like Henry himself, and like his daughters Mary and Elizabeth.  But Arthur seems to have simply been of somewhat average health, much like Henry VII.  He died of an illness, not a chronic condition.  In fact, Katherine had come down with the same illness but survived it.  They were living at Ludlow Castle on the border with Wales where Arthur was serving as President of the Council of Wales and the Marches, a sort of governor for the western reaches of the Kingdom. 
Arthur’s death caused huge issues.  Katherine was now a widow and if she returned to Spain, Henry VII would lose the dowry—money he had already spent on, among other projects, building what was to become the English Navy.  He wanted to keep the money. Moreover, he wanted to keep his son’s Father-in-law, Ferdinand, a valuable ally against England’s traditional nemesis, France.    The obvious solution: marry the widow to the surviving son and now heir, Prince Henry.

The Foundations of the Anglican Church XXVI

As stated in the previous post, the chief challenge facing the new Tudor dynasty after Henry VII Tudor seized the Crown from Richard III, was creating the political stability that would bring an end to the dynastic struggled that had divided England throughout the fifteenth century. 
The major threat to Tudor power and the peace of the realm came from the old nobility.  The peerage was comparatively small.  Many of the noble titles had become extinct when their holders had perished in the One Hundred Years War with France or in the subsequent dynastic Wars of the Roses. Others had lost their titles for being on a losing side as the Crown shifted back and forth during the struggles between the Lancastrians and Yorkists.  Sometimes titles were restored; sometimes they weren’t.   In 1500, there were the Dukes of Norfolk, Buckingham, York, and Cornwall—but these later two were held by the heir to the Crown and so were royal title as differentiated from title of nobility.  That leaves two dukes among the nobility.  The remainder of the peerage consisted of approximately one marquess, ten earls, three viscounts, and seventy barons. 
The nobility was a small group but very proud of their family lineages and anxious to preserve their traditional power and influence.  Henry Tudor, on the other hand, was anxious to centralize power in the Crown in order to create a modern English nation state out of the competing and rival feudal holdings.  It was a time when Kings in France and Spain were consolidating royal power at the expense of the old nobility and Henry Tudor was a man with his eye on the future. 
An important tool in the balance of power between King and nobility was the Church.  The nobility sat in Parliament as the House of Lords.  But they were not the only members of that august body.  Two archbishops and fourteen bishops also sat as Peers.  They were joined by approximately forty-five abbots and mitered priors. 
The nobility found that while their legislative role increased, their personal power diminished during the reign of Henry VII and this made them restless.  They wanted to preserve the old feudal order and could not understand Henry’s vision of an English nation.  Henry, for his part, was anxious to compete with the major European powers which were the Spain, Portugal, and France.  As France was a long-time foe of England, he decided to throw his lot in with the emerging nation of Spain—then a confederation of the Kingdoms of Castile (ruled by Isabella) and Aragon (ruled by her husband, Ferdinand.)  Henry was anxious to marry his older son, Arthur, to Katherine, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella.  This would not only cement an alliance of England with the rich and powerful Iberian Kingdoms, but Katherine would bring a heavy dowry to England—something that the cash-strapped Henry could use as he tried to develop his realm, all but impoverished by a century of war, into a modern nation state.  On November 14, 1501 Arthur and Katherine were married.  The dowry was 200,000 crowns worth about ₤85,000.  Now, ₤85,000 was a fortune in 1501.  This was a world in which a well to do merchant might earn ₤100 a year and live handsomely on that.  It is never precise to convert money over a five hundred year span because it is a question of buying power rather than exact conversions.  But let us say that a merchant could live comfortably on   ₤ 100 a year and that today a businessman to have a comparable life would need an income of $85,000.00.  That would render the value of Catherine’s dowry at approximately seventy million modern dollars.  In fact, it was probably worth much more as it exceeded the annual income of the English Crown in 1501.  Henry could not afford to lose this dowry.  But it would ultimately demand a high price.