As always,
they’re all wonderful, but as always I’ll arbitrarily pick one to celebrate:
the shortest article of them all, and the kind of wonderfully precise, surgical
devastation that I have always envied but never managed to produce.
We all know
about Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon’s divorce … what more could there
possibly be to say about it? Well, John F. Hadwin has found something, and we
won’t ever be able to tell the story in quite
the same way again. When the papal legate Cardinal Campeggio arrived in England
to try the case in 1528, he suggested that one solution would be if Katherine
of Aragon decided to become a nun. She absolutely refused, but it’s become a regular
part of the story – even picked up by Hilary Mantel – to observe that, if she’d been less
unbudgeable on this point, the whole thing could have been solved very simply.
Well, turns out
that’s not the case. Hadwin lays out clearly and effectively that a proposal to
dissolve the marriage this way, while not actually legally impossible, was
certainly more dubious than the straightforward route to an annulment that
Henry and his allies were already pursuing. And if it had happened, it would
not have given his new marriage anything like the clear legitimacy which he
sought, nor would it have satisfied his, by now sincere, conviction that his
marriage was sinful.
It may, even,
have been a ruse by Campeggio to lure Henry into accepting the legitimacy of the pope’s
dispensing power … though Hadwin doesn’t press that, and the evidence I think
makes it no more than possible.
Still, if, like me, you’ve ever confidently said
or written that the whole thing could have been solved if Katherine had only
agreed to become a nun: no, it couldn’t have been. In the end, the king’s
marriage was either legitimate or it wasn’t, and someone had to lose. Hats off
to Hadwin for demonstrating this so lucidly and succinctly.
No comments:
Post a Comment