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

marriage to Prince Arthur had been consummated and therefore did not cover the so-called diriment impediment of public honesty, created by the fact that whether or not the marriage had been completed in the sight of God, they had indisputably been through a public wedding ceremony and been married in the sight of the Church. Legal nit-picking perhaps, but the King would have had a much better argument in canon law. Catherine's advisers, too, wished that instead of basing her defence on her virginity at the time of her second marriage - a statement no longer susceptible of legal proof-she had taken her stand on the Pope's undoubted powers to dispense. She could, they reminded her, always apply secretly to Rome for another, supplementary bull, making good any accidental deficiencies in the first.
    Unfortunately, though, the King of England's great matter was based on emotion rather than logic. Behind a smokescreen of legal and theological wrangling, the real battle was being fought over the far bloodier issues of outraged pride, jealousy and a bitter sense of rejection and injustice; of frustrated sexual urges, ambition, envy and greed. The battle between Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn recognized none of the rules of war, and in the end, of course, it destroyed them both.
    Two more dissimilar women than these two deadly adversaries can hardly be imagined. In 1527 Catherine was in her forty-second year. As a girl she had been pretty, small and well made, with a clear pink and white skin and quantities of russet-coloured hair, which the chronicler Edward Hall had specially noticed as being 'of a very great length, beautiful and goodly to behold'. Now her once slender figure was thickened with repeated child-bearing, and her lovely hair had darkened to a muddy brown, but visiting ambassadors still remarked on the excellence of her complexion. A dumpy little woman with a soft, sweet voice which had never lost its trace of foreign accent, and the imperturbable dignity which comes from generations of pride of caste, she faced the enemy armoured by an utter inward conviction of right and truth, and her own unbreakable will.
    Henry's partisans have accused his first wife of spiritual arrogance, of bigotry and bloody-mindedness, and undoubtedly she was one of those uncomfortable people who would literally rather die than compromise over a moral issue. There's also no doubt that she was an uncommonly proud and stubborn woman. But to have yielded would have meant admitting to the world that she had lived all her married life in incestuous adultery, that she had been no more than 'the King's harlot', the Princess her daughter worth no more than any man's casually begotten bastard; and it would have meant seeing another woman occupying her place. The meekest of wives might well have jibbed at such self-sacrifice; for one of Catherine's background and temperament it was unthinkable. But what had started as the simple defence of her marriage was soon to develop into the defence of something infinitely greater. As time went by and the struggle for the divorce unfolded, the Queen began to realize that she was fighting not merely for her own and her daughter's natural rights but for her husband's soul and the souls of all his people against the forces of darkness which seemed more and more to be embodied in the seductive, dark-eyed person of Mistress Anne Boleyn.
    Historians, especially nineteenth-century historians, have generally taken for granted that it was Henry's pressing need for a son and heir which impelled him to seek a divorce from his barren wife and which alone sustained him through the long and blood-stained battle with Rome, but that was not how it looked to his own contemporaries. Naturally the King wanted a son, and everyone would have felt happier if there had been a Prince of Wales and, ideally, a Duke of York too, growing up in the royal nursery. But times had changed. In the 1520s, England was settled, united and