The Divorce Question

Privy Expenses 2 May 1532: 'to my Lady Anne of Rochford viz: Twenty-two Flemish ells of gold arras at forty six shillings and four pence,' ¹

After Anne Boleyn's first appearance at the English court in April 1522, her father received two separate grants of lands and offices from the crown. In 1525 he was created a peer with the title of Viscount Rochford. King Henry VIII's private and local matter of the 1520s became a momentous public affair of the 1530s.

Events conspired to make this romantic attachment highly significant. The king was already married and to a Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon. But there was a succession problem. Though Catherine had borne Henry VIII five children within the first five years of marriage, only one of these children lived as long as two months. And when in February 1516 she was delivered of her only normally healthy child, it chanced to be a female, (the princess Mary). 'Whether a woman could claim to be queen in her own right was doubtful' in C16th England.² Mary's birth was followed by further miscarriages and it became clear after 1518 that the Queen Catherine would never produce a prince. Henry VIII was convinced he could produce an heir only with assistance from elsewhere. His illegitimate child, Henry, created Duke of Richmond, seemed to demonstrate this fact.

Henry was beginning to realise that he needed a new marriage, if he was to secure the succession. But there was a stumbling block to annulment. Whilst kings were among the few who could obtain permission from the Pope as head of the western church to cast off a wife and take another, this annulment was to be entangled in statecraft and politics. Since May 1527 and the sack of Rome by imperial forces, Pope Clement VII happened to be in the pocket of the Queen's nephew, the Emperor Charles V. No annulment would be forthcoming from the head of the Roman Catholic Church in the foreseeable future.

Henry VIII was now driven towards a great extension of English monarchical power. An Act of Parliament was secured 'for the king's highness to be 'supreme head of the Church of England and to have authority to reform and redress all errors, heresies, and abuses in the same,' 1534. St.26 Hen.VIII,c.1.³ Divorce would not be difficult to win from a church of which he was the head! Yet this must be done properly and the authority of Parliament was to be the vehicle of this and other changes.

Today historians cannot agree on the importance of the royal divorce. For some it is the mere occasion of the break with Rome, but for others it is one of the main causes of the Reformation.⁴ Whilst it is tempting to personalise history, the Reformation was a process which began elsewhere in Europe and continued long after Henry VIII's reign.