Free Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners by Alison Plowden Page A

position was simple and could be simply stated. If the King was really worried about the validity of their marriage, then it was right that the matter should be examined and his doubts laid to rest. As for herself, her conscience was clear, and she had nothing to fear from a free and impartial enquiry. She knew that she was, had always been and always would be Henry's true and lawful wife. Had they not been married in the sight of God by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, with the approval of the wisest men in England and Spain? Her first marriage to the boy Arthur had never been consummated, and she had come to Henry, as she was presently publicly to remind him, 'as a very maid without touch of man'. Therefore, the affinity prohibited in Leviticus did not exist, and Henry need have no qualms about the Pope's power to set aside the law of God.
    When the Pope's representative, Cardinal Campeggio, came over to England in 1528 to try to arrange an amicable settlement, he found Catherine immovable in her determination to defend to the last the soul and the honour of her husband and herself. She utterly rejected the suggestion that she should give in gracefully and retire into a nunnery. She had no vocation for the religious life and intended to live and die in the estate of matrimony to which God had called her. But, she told Campeggio, she was an obedient daughter of the Church. She would submit to the Pope's judgement in the matter and abide by his decision, whichever way it might go. Unless and until judgement was given against her, she would continue to regard herself as the King's lawful wife and England's Queen and nothing, declared England's Queen flatly, would compel her to alter this opinion - not if she were to be torn limb from limb. If, after death, she should return to life, she would prefer to die over again rather than change it.
    As far as the Pope was concerned, Catherine could scarcely have adopted a more embarrassing position. The Holy Father had no desire to alienate so dutiful a son as the King of England - especially not at a time when the prestige of the papacy was dangerously low - and the King of England was already dropping ominous hints as to what he might do if the case went against him. On the other hand, Catherine had powerful kinsfolk (the Holy Roman Emperor was her nephew) who were well placed to exert pressure on her behalf. The last thing the Pope wanted was to have to pronounce judgement, and during the next six years he made use of every delaying tactic at his disposal to postpone that evil moment. But faced with Henry's urgent impatience, he could not long postpone the initial confrontation, and by the spring of 1529 the legal battle had been fairly joined.
    In the manner of most legal battles, it became exceedingly bitter and complicated - and sixteenth-century law governing marriage was complicated enough at the best of times. Henry had taken a fundamentalist stand on Leviticus, but unfortunately there was another passage in the Old Testament, in the Book of Deuteronomy, which ran: 'When brethren dwell together, and one of them dieth without children, the wife of the deceased shall not marry to another; but his brother shall take her, and raise up seed for his brother.' This led to a stimulating international debate among scholars and theologians as to how these two apparently conflicting texts could be reconciled and whether the ancient Jewish law could properly be applied in a Christian community, but it did not help the King to get his divorce. The King's advisers would, in fact, have had an easier time if, unhampered by these scriptural excursions, they could have followed the time-honoured strategy of canon lawyers in such cases and attacked the papal dispensation of 1503 allowing Henry to marry his sister-in-law on the grounds that it had been issued on insufficient or inaccurate information. They could, for example, have pointed out that this dispensation assumed that Catherine's