Free Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners by Alison Plowden

was finally shut.
    The ending of a marriage by a decree of nullity, pronouncing the contract void from the beginning, was a different matter and, although normally beyond the reach of ordinary people, was neither particularly difficult nor even particularly unusual among the great and the powerful with money and influence at their disposal. There were a number of grounds on which an annulment could be applied for, including misrepresentation, whether deliberate or not, regarding the status - social, financial or marital - of either party at the time the marriage contract was drawn up; forced matrimony, alleging that the consent of either or both parties had not been freely given; precontract, when one of the parties had already promised, before witnesses, to marry another; the impotence, madness or taking of a formal vow of chastity by one of the parties; and consanguinity or affinity, where it could be shown that husband and wife were related, either by blood or marriage, within one of the prohibited degrees.
    Henry's famous 'scruple of conscience' - his fear that he might, unwittingly of course, have been living in sin all those years - was based on a text in the Book of Leviticus which stated uncompromisingly that 'if a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing ... they shall be childless'. This, the King realized in an apparently blinding flash of revelation, must be the reason for his hitherto inexplicable failure to beget a male heir. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that the Queen's inability to bear a living son must surely be a sign of God's displeasure at their unlawful cohabitation. Why else should the deity, who had always shown such a flattering degree of interest in his doings, deny him male children? Having thus come to the convenient conclusion that he was, after all, still a bachelor, Henry felt free to pursue his natural inclinations supported by an uplifting sense of moral rectitude. Indeed, so completely satisfied did he appear with the justice of his cause, that one observer believed an angel descending from heaven would have been unable to persuade him otherwise.
    Nevertheless, the King could not feel at all certain that his wife would see the matter in the same light, and he was noticeably uneager to break the news to her. When at last he did nerve himself to do so, Catherine could find no words to answer him. It was many years now since she had been her husband's confidante, had shared his problems and his growing pains and had been permitted to offer him advice. It was a good many years, too, since Henry had worn her favour in the lists, had laid his youthful triumphs at her feet and come hurrying to bring her any titbits of news he thought would interest or please her. But although they had grown apart, although other people had shouldered her out of his confidence, for Catherine, Henry would always remain the beautiful young man who had rescued her from lonely humiliation - the gay, generous boy who had loved her and made her his queen in that long-ago joyous springtime, when life had been spent in 'continual festival'. She could accept, though sadly, that love must die, but that the man whose 'true and humble' wife she had been, whose children she had borne and whose interests she had loyally tried to serve, was now apparently prepared to discard her, to wipe out nearly twenty years of married life as though it had never been, callously to dishonour her name and to bastardize their daughter, was a betrayal too black for speech. As Catherine listened to her husband's glib talk of his troubled conscience, of how they had been in mortal sin during all the years they had lived together and inviting her to choose a place of retirement away from the Court, words refused to come, and she collapsed into helpless, uncharacteristic tears.
    It was a short-lived collapse, and the Queen soon made it abundantly clear that she intended to fight every inch of the way. Her