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Yes, but Catherine was obviously lying. The kings of England and Aragon had scholars go through her first marriage with a fine-toothed comb looking for a reason to annul it so that Catherine could marry Henry and maintain the alliance. When they came back saying that the only way to annul the marriage was if it hadn’t been consummated, Catherine said that she had never slept with her husband. That’s not terribly plausible under the circumstances, and if it were true all of the canon lawyers would have been unnecessary in the first place.
The pope actually refused to annul her second marriage for political and military reasons.
Yeah the Papacy allowing the annulment of the already married King of France Louis XII to marry the widow Duchess of Brittany of the previous king (the kings were cousins) just a few years before looks nakedly political. If Catherine been any other woman and not been related so closely to the Holy Roman Emperor I suspect the annulment would have granted, and her forced into a convent. The king's great matter had the unfortunate affect of no betrothals turning into marriage for Mary I, if she had married earlier we could have seen Hapsburg England! So only one of Henry VIII's children inclined to procreate never got the opportunity.
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Why do you believe Henry over Catherine? I have a lot more reason to trust her word than his, and that of Anne Boleyn whose own ambition and that of her family had led her to work towards this marriage over a long period.
Arthur, heir to the throne, Henry's elder brother and Catherine's husband, was married at the age of fifteen and died six months later of (presumed to be) the sweating sickness. There are allegations that he had been growing weaker and more sickly since the wedding in the period leading up to his death. Doubts about the consummation of the marriage are therefore not unreasonable. Evidence as to its being consummated relied on third-party hearsay by those highly incentivised to please the king in his trial over "I'm right and this bitch is wrong, force her to do what I say":
So an attempt at consummation, ending in premature ejaculation but no full penetration, on the part of inexperienced and over-excited teenagers is entirely possible.
Remember, they were both only fifteen. Catherine certainly would have been raised strictly and come to the marriage a virgin, and it is unlikely (though not impossible) that Arthur had much if any opportunity for sexual experimentation before his marriage. Henry VII's household seems to have been run strictly and on moral lines, and besides that, the risk of bastards or entanglements with prior claims for marriage by the daughters of noble houses on the grounds of "your son had sex with me" were way too much of a risk for the very shaky House of Tudor whose grasp on the throne had not been well-established and was, even in the times of Henry VIII, vulnerable to rival counter-claims by the likes of the Pole family whose own ancestry was every bit as royal or even better. Henry VIII was, in the wake of his brother's early death, very closely monitored, even smothered, by his father who oversaw his upbringing.
Henry VII did not want to lose the alliance he had worked for so hard, nor the dowry he had been promised (his frugal, not to say penny-pinching, attitude to the royal finances enabled him to leave behind at his death a full treasury, massive public resentment at the tax regime he had inflicted on them, very unpopular scapegoats in the form of his tax collectors who were then promptly executed by his son in order to placate the public, and that same full treasury was then blown through by Henry VIII who lived extravagantly beyond the means of the English economy of the time).
Henry wasn't about to lose that Spanish princess nor pay back what dowry he had received, so he put pressure on to have the marriage annulled in order to enable his second son, and now only male heir, to marry her when he came of age. It was Henry VIII who later had the scruples about "oh I must have inadvertently married my brother's widow, which is incest, and the Old Testament says God punishes that, this is why I have no living male heirs and must annul this illegal marriage so I can marry my current mistress", and put the pressure on the pope of the time to do so.
I agree about the political and military reasons for the pope to reject this (who wants to offend the Holy Roman Emperor?) but it also put him in the difficult position of countermanding the dispensation provided by a previous pope, just on the whims of English kings: "yeah we know we previously asked your predecessor to grant us a dispensation to say this marriage was valid and licit, now we want you to grant a dispensation to say it's invalid and illicit". This wasn't just a matter of a legal quibble or overturning a previous court decision, this touches on the Power of the Keys. If we're talking about "why get canon lawyers involved?", the King's Great Matter involved Henry sending scholars all over Europe to get canon law and theological opinions in his favour, a resounding lack of same, leading to him having to heavily rely on his pet theologians in the universities at home, and even the likes of Luther going "well uh no he's properly married, just copy the Biblical patriarchs and take a second wife you muppet". The failure to push through the divorce caused the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey, up till then the most powerful man in England next to the king, and later on that of St Thomas More for his efforts to avoid being pressured into "hey, everyone in Europe respects Tom and he agrees with me, so this new marriage must be kosher, yeah?"
Catherine was a devout Catholic (not in the modern term of the phrase which seems to just mean "Catholic who agrees with the Democratic party agenda on everything") and would have been very aware of the moral implications of committing perjury. It would have been a lot easier for her to go along with Henry's demands (as Anne of Cleves did in her own situation at a later time) and would have made her daughter, Mary's, position more secure - but she did not.
You can believe she was lying because she was a jealous, spiteful woman - or you can believe she was telling the truth and an impatient king brought pressure to bear in order to get his own way at the behest of an ambitious woman who, ironically, then failed to provide the son she had promised Henry, a promise which had strung him along for years and kept his wandering attention fixed on her, and then boomeranged when this same spiteful man had her trial brought forward for displeasing and embarrassing him. Catherine was left to die of cancer, Anne got a public execution and her replacement installed as wife and queen on the very same day.
I know who I find more credible, and it ain't Henry, the guy who had mistresses throughout his marriages, over his faithful wife.
That is a fair point.
Well, yeah. It was a misreading of Leviticus – if it were correct then levirate marriage, commanded to Jews in the same book, would make no sense. But it was a misreading that underlay canon law. And you can see why the issue would obsess him.
She'd certainly have understandable reasons for jealousy. And if she had originally felt that lying was a minor offense made as much for Henry's sake as for hers, it wouldn't be at all shocking if she refused to come clean so that he could look justified in betraying her.
Or, on the other hand, if she wasn't lying, neither would it be shocking if she refused to lie just to make it convenient for Henry to dump her for his long-term mistress. Henry (and those he had charged with getting this done) had little scruples about bending the truth; there was a lot of ground to be cleared before the second marriage could take place, and it wasn't all down to an inconvenient wife.
Anne Boleyn had at one time attempted to contract a marriage with Henry Percy, son of the Earl of Northumberland, and they were secretly betrothed. This didn't suit either of their families, or Cardinal Wolsey, so whatever arrangement they had was broken up and Percy was married off to another woman. When the king's marriage with Anne was to go forward, Percy was pressured to claim there had been nothing between them. Then later on, when it was incumbent to get rid of her, he was pressured to admit there had been a pre-contract before them. This was treated as legally akin to marriage, so she was allegedly not free to marry Henry.
Did the men accused of being Anne's lovers lie or tell the truth when they denied this? Was Anne lying in her letter to Henry denying that she had ever committed adultery? We are really in "he said/she said" territory now.
As well as Anne's past romantic/sexual history, there was the problem that Henry had taken Anne's elder sister, Mary, as a mistress before he met Anne. If Catherine was guilty of having consummated a sexual relationship with Henry's brother, thus making their marriage illicit, then the boot was on the other foot here as well: a sexual relationship between Henry and Mary would have created a pseudo-kinship making Anne his sister-in-law, as it were, and thus rendering his marriage with her equally sinful, incestuous, and invalid as Catherine's marriage with Henry was claimed to be.
So in the tangled matter of Henry's marriages, we can't know what was the truth, as apart from "what was the 'truth' the king wanted declared at the time?"
This is why I tend to believe Catherine. She was put under oath, and I don't think she would have been prepared to commit perjury just to get back at Anne. Nowadays we think of perjury as a technical legal offence and indeed trivial (unless you're caught out), but people used to believe that swearing false oaths would indeed damn you to Hell. So there wouldn't have been the attitude that "lying was a minor offense made as much for Henry's sake as for hers". Catherine could have admitted a consummated marriage with Arthur, claimed that she had relied on the papal dispensation and the advice of her elders that the marriage with Henry was permissible, and made things easier for her. Henry had had mistresses during their marriage and she had accepted that, because that was the way of things. (Something Henry later allegedly reproached Anne about, when she was said to have confronted him about taking a replacement mistress, that greater ladies than her - a reference to Queen Catherine - had had to accept this). It would have made things easier and more secure for both her and her daughter, Mary (and Henry was not above being spiteful to his own child, with alleged threats later of executing her if she continued to be obstinate about accepting Anne as queen), as it went for Anne of Cleves who was more complaisant or better able to play the game, agreeing to all Henry's demands and being well treated in return when he wanted to get rid of her.
We'll never know the exact truth, without getting a time machine to go back and see if Catherine remained a virgin after her first marriage. All we can do is judge the characters of those involved as to how they strike us, and Henry strikes me as a liar - or at least someone able to persuade himself that he was acting from the purest motives and not just out of personal whim, and that all those opposed to him were in fact not alone wrong but wicked and evil.
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