tions, when her husband was not able to satisfy her."[1] The Wriothesley Chronicle says positively that, on the 17th of May, in the afternoon, at a solemn court kept at Lambeth by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the doctors of the law, the King was divorced from his wife, Queen Anne; and there at the same court was a privy contract approved that she had made to the Earl of Northumberland, afore the King's time, and so she was discharged, and was never lawful Queen of England.[2]
There are difficulties in accepting either of these conjectures. Chapuys, like Dr. Lingard after him, decided naturally for the hypothesis most disgraceful to the King. The Mary Boleyn story, authoritatively confirmed, at once covered Henry's divorce process with shame, and established the superior claim of Mary to the succession.[3] But in the Act of Parliament the cause is described as something unknown in 1533, when the first Statute was passed: and the alleged intrigue had then been the common subject of talk in Catholic circles and among the Opposition members of Parliament. The Act says that the cause
- ↑ Chapuys to Granvelle, May 19, 1536.—Calendar, Foreign and Domestic, vol. x. p. 380.
- ↑ Wriothesley's Chronicle, vol. i. pp. 40, 41.
- ↑ Chapuys's words are worth preserving. He was mistaken in his account of the Statute. It did not declare Mary legitimate, and it left Henry power to name his own successor should his marriage with Jane Seymour prove unfruitful. So great an error shows the looseness with which he welcomed any story which fell in with his wishes. He says: "Le statut declairant la Princesse legitime heretiere, la fille de la Concubine, a esté revoqué, et elle declairé bastarde, non point eomme fille de M. Norris, comme se pouvoit plus honnestement dire, mais pour avoir esté la marriage entre la dicte Concubine et le dict Roy illegitime à cause qu'il avoit cogneu charnellement la sœur de la dicte Concubine: pour laquelle cause l'Archevesque de Canterburi, ung ou deux jours avant que la dicte Concubine fut executée, donna et prefera la sentence de divorce, de quoy, comme sçavez trop mieulx, n'estoit grand besoign, puisque l'epée et la mort les auroit prochainement et absolument
