1527

The year 1527 is the point at which Henry VIII’s effort to end his marriage to Katherine of Aragon becomes an explicit political and legal crisis. Thomas Wolsey opens an inquiry into the marriage and considers how the king might secure an annulment, but Katherine rejects the claim that their union is invalid. The year also carries the remembered weight of the couple’s losses of children, placing the question of the marriage’s future beside the dynastic hopes it has repeatedly failed to fulfill.

The inquiry into the marriage

In May 1527, at York Place, Wolsey opens a secret court of inquiry into the validity of Henry’s marriage. Katherine is neither required to appear nor represented, and the proceedings are meant to be concealed from her, although the news is already known across Europe. Henry is ordered to produce the dispensation that had allowed him to marry his brother’s widow. He does so, confident that the court will find some defect in it. Wolsey is prepared to say that the marriage is open to doubt, but he cannot promise that the legatine court can resolve the matter: Katherine, he expects, will appeal to Rome.

A diplomatic route and Katherine’s refusal

Wolsey’s plans widen beyond the inquiry. With Pope Clement VII in the Emperor’s hands, he imagines crossing the Channel, reassuring the English presence at Calais, and negotiating with the French king before arranging a council at Avignon. Such a council might hear Henry’s case and issue a ruling without waiting for events in Italy to free the Pope. Wolsey imagines that Clement, once restored to liberty, would accept the council’s decision and confirm it formally. The scheme reveals the gap between the king’s urgent private objective and the international constraints on achieving it: Wolsey seeks to turn a papal emergency into an opportunity for Henry.

In June, Henry speaks to Katherine in her apartments. He presents himself as regretful and tells her, in effect, that he would choose her again if their marriage were lawful, but argues that her prior marriage to his brother makes their union contrary to divine law. Katherine refuses that framing. She stands on her status and rights, answering with a force that reaches far beyond the private conversation. The scene gives the proposed annulment its opposing voice: what Henry treats as an impediment to be removed, Katherine treats as a marriage and queenship she has no reason to surrender.

The succession behind the case

The dispute is bound to the question of an heir. Wolsey recalls the children Henry and Katherine have lost: the prince born prematurely around the turn of the year, who lived for fifty-two days; another son who died within an hour; the daughter Mary, born in 1516 and described as small but vigorous; a male child miscarried the following year; and a daughter who lived only a few days and would have been named Elizabeth. The sequence gives the king’s search for a new marriage a dynastic context without reducing the losses to a political calculation. Wolsey’s recollection of the infant prince is especially poignant because it joins the prospect of succession to the possibility—never realized—of a more contented life for Henry.

The year’s political afterlife

The novel’s chronology later returns to 1527 as the beginning of a process whose consequences extend well beyond the initial inquiry. In 1532, Thomas Cromwell helps shape Parliament’s challenge to church jurisdiction and advances measures intended to restrict revenues sent to Rome and establish the king’s supremacy in the English Church. In 1534, he presents Henry with arguments drawn from Marsiglio of Padua, according to which ecclesiastical power does not derive from Christ and the prince governs through the secular lawmaking authority of Parliament. The succession bill and its oath likewise make parliamentary legislation and public allegiance instruments of royal policy.

These later developments do not belong to the events of 1527 itself, but they clarify the year’s place in the narrative. The marriage inquiry begins as a proposed legal remedy, dependent on a court and ultimately on Rome; the later political struggle contests who has authority to decide such matters. The novel thus makes 1527 a starting point for a widening conflict in which the king’s marital claim, the succession, parliamentary power, and the jurisdiction of the Church become increasingly inseparable.