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 XVII

Henry VII Tudor

I'm sorry about these breaks when I just can’t get to the blog but I have had company the last few days and to be honest I was having such a good time that I didn’t even pay attention to the blog much less sit down and do the research for the next entry.  And there is so much I want to get into—the proposed canonizations of John Paul II and John XXIII, the recent “Fortnight for Freedom” and the agenda that drives this charade, some of Pope Francis’ recent comments about the Church and where we need to go—but I am going to stay with the Anglican story for at least three or four more entries.

We left off with England being in a period of political fragility as Henry VII Tudor tries to bring order out of the chaos of the Wars of the Roses and securely establish his new dynasty as legitimate heirs to both the Lancastrian (Henry’ own faction) and Yorkist (his wife Elizabeth’s family cause) titles to the Crown.  Henry was not the most rightful heir—several others had stronger claims by strict right of succession—but he was the most powerful and certainly the most capable.  In fact he, and his heir (also Henry, Henry VIII) was able to break the feudal power of the nobles and build a strong central national government established on the monarchy.  Thus the Tudors would create the English State out of the various baronies and fiefdoms of Medieval England.  This was the same time that Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon were creating Spain out of their diverse holdings and that the French monarchy was centralizing their power under the Valois dynasty.  Other “nations” such as Germany or Italy would remain broken up in dozens, or even scores, of dukedoms, principalities, prince-bishoprics, and other entities for three or more centuries. 
Let me make one comment about the British monarchy before we proceed further.  We think that a King holds the Crown because he, as first-born (or at least as oldest surviving) male heir has inherited it from his father, the previous King.  Such is the illusion.  In fact, the Crown of England is and always has been elective.  That is to say that the Crown belongs to whomever is recognized as having the right to wear it.  Who does that recognizing can be a bit tricky and that weighed heavy on the Tudor consciousness. 
Let me explain what we cannot say that, strictly speaking, the Crown is hereditary.  We all know that Prince Charles will inevitably succeed his mother, Queen Elizabeth, to the Throne.  The Queen succeeded her Father, King George VI.  But that is an illusion—not the fact. This principle of the Crown being held as a gift of Parliament was firmly proven in 1688 when Parliament deposed James II in favor his son-in-law and daughter, William and Mary.  James fought it but Parliament’s choice prevailed in the Glorious Revolution.  
Here is a more recent example.  When the government ministers decided in 1936 that Edward VIII could not be King if he married the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, Edward was given no choice but to resign the Crown and his brother Albert (known publicly as George)—the Father of the current Queen—replaced him.  Edward was shocked that he had to resign the crown but the government gave him no choice.  Had he not voluntarily resigned, a bill to depose him would have been introduced in Parliament and passed.   Even then there was talk of passing over George for his brother, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, because of George’s difficulty in public speaking.  Parliament was free to make the choice.  (Incidentally, the untold story is that the Government waned Edward out not because of his marriage to a divorced woman—Prince Charles will get away with that—but because Edward was quite favorable to German National Socialism and Chancellor Hitler and men like Churchill, seeing the inevitably of war, needed to make sure they had a trustworthy king.) 
As we will see, Henry VIII had Parliament enact various acts of succession to guarantee the access of his children to the Crown, an access the right to which was very muddled due to his complex marriage situations (as we shall also shortly see).  Even so, at the death of Henry’s childless son, Edward VI,  there was an attempt to have Parliament recognize not Henry’s daughters—Mary and Elizabeth—but a grand-niece of Henry, Lady Jane Grey.  It was unsuccessful—the Royal Council gave their ascent but Parliament never did.  (The Council did so—in part, at least—to prevent the Catholic Mary from becoming Queen and restoring Catholicism.  Lady Jane was championed by the extreme Protestant cause, a sort of sixteenth-century Tea Party faction.)
Going back further, in Anglo-Saxon England, the Witenagemot—the assembly of nobles and prelates—elected the King from among the nobility.   Even after the Conquest, several kings were chosen by election.  By the rules of primogeniture, Richard the Lionhearted should have been succeeded by Arthur of Brittany, the son of his deceased brother, Geoffrey Plantagenet.  Arthur was only twelve at the time, however, and the nobility of England felt that they could not afford to have a minor on the throne and so chose Richard’s younger brother, John.   Arthur could hardly have been less bad a king than John, of course, but that is not the point.  The point is that consent of the nobility—and later Parliament—trumps the rules of primogeniture.  In 1399 Parliament deposed Richard II and chose Henry Bolingbroke—Henry IV—as King even though the next in line to the throne was the five year old Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March.  The argument was again made, that England could not afford to have a child on the throne at such a critical time. In fact it was the success of Bolingbroke’s rebellion against the wimpish Richard that won support for this taking the Crown.  While today the Crown is legally in the gift of Parliament, that was a constitutional development that had not been solidified by the time of Henry VII and the establishment of the Tudor Dynasty. 
All this is to say that the succession to the crown was never taken for granted.  It had been usurped too often—sometimes by violence, sometimes by law, sometimes by a combination of both—and Henry Tudor needed to cement the succession.  He had two sons who lived to adulthood, Arthur and Henry.  Arthur was the older brother, Henry the younger.  A third brother, Edmund, died in infancy.  Two sisters, Elizabeth and Katherine also died in infancy.  Two sisters lived into adulthood, one marrying the King of Scotland; the other marrying the King of France. 
There are claims that Arthur was a frail child while his brother Henry was strong and buff.  Arthur’s frailty is probably exaggerated.  Henry’s strength is not.  While Henry would make the greater King, there was no reason to suspect that Arthur would not have a normal adulthood and be a capable ruler.  Their father, Henry VII, himself was not the athlete that Henry the son was, but he was a most capable king.  In any event, having “an heir and a spare” gave Henry VII the peace of mind that his dynasty would continue.  Arthur was educated for kingship; Henry was prepared for a career in the Church where he would be named Archbishop of York. Would that not have changed the course of things?