BL

British Library

CJC ii. X

Corpus juris canonici, printed edition of 1582, made digitally available by the University of California, Los Angeles, vol.ii, Liber extra (followed by the numbers of liber, titulus and capitulum)

CSPS

Calendar of letters, dispatches and state papers relating to negotiations between England and Spain, ed. G. A. Bergenroth, P. De Gayangos and others, London 1862–1964

LP

Letters and papers, foreign and domestic of the reign of Henry VIII, ed. J. S. Brewer, James Gairdner and R. H. Brodie, London 1864–1920

Romische Dokumente

Romische Dokumente zur Geschichte des Ehescheidung Heinrichs viii von England, ed. Stefan Ehses, Paderborn 1895

TNA

The National Archives

In 1527 Henry viii embarked on a lengthy campaign to rid himself of his first wife so that he could marry Anne Boleyn and beget a legitimate male heir. Given papal reluctance to grant an annulment, Henry's subsequent break with Rome might seem virtually inevitable;Footnote ¹ however a significant number of historians have argued otherwise, suggesting that a simple act of abnegation by Katherine could have preserved the rights of her daughter, the papacy and the English Church.Footnote ² All she had to do, they contend, was to accept a scheme proposed in October 1528 by the newly arrived papal legate, Lorenzo Campeggio, to take religious vows, whereupon her husband could be licensed to remarry.Footnote ³ The consequences that they envisage were eloquently put by Garrett Mattingly: ‘Had Katherine retired to a nunnery, Henry would have remained in the Roman fold, and in his time Protestant theology would have found no footing near the throne.’Footnote ⁴ It will be argued here that, although the Henrician Reformation may not have been inevitable, it could hardly have been prevented by such means. Campeggio's proposal was a flame that flared briefly only in the autumn of 1528, afterwards flickering intermittently for a year or so but being extinguished, not simply by Katherine's intransigence but by its inherent defects and its inadequacy to satisfy the king's needs.

History abounds with ‘might-have-beens’. They may be worthy of serious consideration if they have some inherent plausibility, have attracted support from scholars who merit our respect and have perhaps spread to a wider audience than the academic community. All three conditions are present here. The scheme's proponent was a professor of canon law at Bologna before becoming a diplomat; the list of historians is impressive, starting with Lord Acton and recently joined by David Loades; lastly, the issue has now been given broader currency in a prize-winning novel, which will be read by many thousands.Footnote ⁵ To justify declaring that all are mistaken requires careful examination of the evidence, yet a strange feature of this issue is that it has occasioned no real debate. When not being hailed as a lost opportunity, Campeggio's proposal has usually been ignored, misinterpreted or summarily dismissed, while those few scholars who have mentioned the difficulties of implementing such a plan have tended to leave the matter in mid-air;Footnote ⁶ this has left a critical void which this article attempts to fill.

Campeggio was England's ‘cardinal protector’ at Rome and had been sent to act as co-judge with Thomas Wolsey of Henry's case for an annulment.Footnote ⁷ The king's major argument was that Julius ii's 1503 dispensation from the Levitical bar on marrying one's brother's widow was ultra vires the authority of the papacy and that specific divine decrees could not thus be set aside;Footnote ⁸ additionally he maintained that there had been fatal weaknesses in the dispensation itself. The current pope, Clement vii, however, lived under the shadow of Charles v, Katherine's nephew, and while the emperor's power predominated in Italy Clement was anxious to avoid giving him cause for displeasure that might redound to the disadvantage of his office or of Medici interests in the peninsula. He thus pressed Campeggio to try first to dissuade Henry from seeking any annulment at all.Footnote ⁹ Having failed in a more direct approach, the legate proposed that Katherine take the veil. For his plan to succeed, three features would have been essential: firstly that Katherine should agree; secondly that the Church (notably its head, Clement vii) would facilitate the process; thirdly, that it would have fully satisfied Henry viii's own aims. Katherine's adamant rejection has meant that the other two requirements have been largely unexplored, but all three deserve serious scrutiny.

It is certainly worth asking whether Katherine's rebuff should be taken for granted. It does seem likely that she would have refused the proposal, however persuasively it were tendered, but there were tactical errors – and downright lies – in its presentation. One suggestio falsi was Campeggio's implication that Louis xii's first marriage had been ended by similar means. Not only was this untrue, but that union was said to have remained unconsummated – a fact which put it into a quite different category in canon law from Katherine's, as Campeggio would have known.Footnote ¹⁰ His reassuring statement that the former queen Jeanne ‘is still living with the greatest honour and reputation’ was also, at the least, an extraordinary error, since she had died in 1505.Footnote ¹¹ Then there is Henry's blustering talk of forcing the queen to take the veil, alleging that ‘The pope had condemned her at Rome and the legate had come with the sole purpose of having the sentence executed.’Footnote ¹² The latter point was transparently false and the threat would be canonically improper since all vows should be made voluntarily. David Loades suggests that this bullying could have been crucial, and that a sweet-talking Henry might have had more success.Footnote ¹³ On another tack, Eric Ives has speculated that family duty could have pointed the queen in a different direction if Henry's intended wife had been a Habsburg.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet even if the game had been played more subtly, Katherine might still have had a justified suspicion that her husband's interpretation of Campeggio's offer differed substantially from what the legate intended, some anxiety about the Boleyns' links with heresyFootnote ¹⁵ and a proper concern about her daughter's future position very similar to her husband's worries over his succession. Mattingly asserted that her refusal sprang from ‘blind emotion’ and jealousy,Footnote ¹⁶ and Loades maintains that ‘Her decision was … based upon pride, and upon the public face of events.’Footnote ¹⁷ Such readings of the queen's mind may well be correct, but a more objective appraisal of the situation might have led her to the same conclusion.Footnote ¹⁸ From whatever motives, she insisted that she wanted the annulment suit to reach a clear and honest conclusion: was she validly married or not?Footnote ¹⁹

Let us assume that Katherine had agreed to take the veil. This would certainly not automatically have freed Henry to remarry. As has been seen, Campeggio's comparison with Louis xii's annulment stretched the truth, but the temptation to rewrite history seems to have passed from source to scholar since, according to Mattingly, the legate claimed ‘that he had discretionary powers to dissolve her earthly in favour of a heavenly marriage’.Footnote ²⁰ There is no evidence for this extraordinary assertion, though Campeggio did certainly try to create the impression that the plan originated with Clement.Footnote ²¹ This again appears to have been untrue, since at the beginning of November 1528 the legate had to plead with the pope for Henry to have ‘a dispensation or indisputable licence … to proceed to a second marriage’ if Katherine entered religionFootnote ²² and Clement seemed taken by surprise at this request, welcoming the proposal but cautiously admitting that it was ‘portentous and unusual’.Footnote ²³ It would thus seem that the legate had been ‘talking up’ the source of his scheme in England – though it is of course possible that he and the pope were playing a devious game to deceive any unauthorised reader of their correspondence. Whatever the origins, however, it is clear that Clement had not yet thought seriously about the project's implications; furthermore he had always insisted that that he was no canonist and must seek advice on such matters from experts.Footnote ²⁴

What might those experts say? Loades suggests that Katherine's taking religious vows ‘would, in the view of most canonists, free her husband to marry again’, but this would be true only if the marriage were still unconsummated.Footnote ²⁵ The canons themselves are quite categorical: in a valid and consummated marriage, one spouse's entry into religion cannot free the other to remarry; indeed the advice is that a similar vow (at least of chastity) should be made.Footnote ²⁶ While in the Eastern Church such means were often used by Balkan potentates or Byzantine emperors to rid themselves of unwanted wives, and divorce on these grounds (or for adultery) had once been sanctioned by the Synod of Compiègne in 757, Roman doctrine had for centuries allowed no exceptions to Christ's precept, ‘Whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder’.Footnote ²⁷ To many contemporaries this would have seemed an even more powerful injunction than that forbidding marriage to a brother's widow, since the latter could be regarded as only a Mosaic rule which (unlike many others) had been maintained by the Early Church, as opposed to a clear command by Christ himself.Footnote ²⁸ A dispensation to enter a second marriage on the grounds of Katherine's entering religion – what might perhaps be called a ‘Compiègne divorce’ –would thus indeed be ‘portentous and unusual’, a verdict confirmed more recently by Henry Ansgar Kelly who describes the scheme as ‘highly dubious and revolutionary’.Footnote ²⁹

But revolutions do happen. Kelly is right: there was a major obstacle in canon law, but this does not mean that Campeggio's plan was totally unthinkable. Such, however, seems to have been the assumption made by several scholars who, apparently aware of the canonical position, felt obliged to interpret the proposal as intended to be only an adjunct to the annulment process. James Gairdner surmised that the legate's purpose was merely that ‘the queen should simplify the matter at least by retiring into a nunnery and letting judgement go against her marriage by default’ – language later echoed by Philip Hughes and Geoffrey Parmiter.Footnote ³⁰ These arguments appear to rest on misunderstandings, both of the legal processes authorised for the case and of the legate's real intentions: there is clear evidence of the latter in the letter that he wrote to Rome requesting a dispensation for Henry to remarry if Katherine took the veil.Footnote ³¹ Nevertheless the error is a fruitful one, alerting us to the possibility that such misunderstandings might have arisen much earlier – possibly in the mind of the king himself.

What factors might then bring such a ‘revolutionary’ scheme within the bounds of possibility? In the first place, though the canons were certainly viewed as providing guiding principles, Richard Helmholz warns us that they are not to be treated as if they were ‘a modern code’.Footnote ³² Secondly, as J. J. Scarisbrick notes, major figures like Duns Scotus and St Bonaventure were among the minority who had questioned the canonical principle forbidding remarriage to those whose spouses had entered religion.Footnote ³³ Thirdly, there was a recent example of a pope's dispensing what seemed a clear scriptural command, one also backed by the canons – Julius ii's bull dispensing Henry himself to marry his brother's widow.Footnote ³⁴ Though the king might be embarrassed by this comparison the example illustrates how plastic and malleable could be the interpretation of scriptural and canonical injunctions, given the pressures of the time. Campeggio himself was said to hold that papal powers were infinite,Footnote ³⁵ and a pontiff disposed to suggest that princess Mary marry her half-brotherFootnote ³⁶ might perhaps not balk at offering a ‘Compiègne divorce’ which would license Henry to remarry.

It is therefore not impossible that, in the right circumstances, Clement would have been prepared to issue such a licence or (also ‘portentous and unusual’) one for bigamy, as he hinted later.Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, the latter could be granted without any pretence of Katherine's consent, and thus might have appeared more attractive to Henry once Katherine's refusal had been acknowledged. But what would those ‘right circumstances’ be for Campeggio's own scheme to work? Katherine's willingness to take the veil would obviously be essential. Charles v, considering his family slighted by such a submission, would probably have had his representatives maintain the canonical position that this did not free Henry to remarry.Footnote ³⁸ A weakening of the imperial position in Italy might, however, allow Clement to defy Charles. Yet that very weakening would also ease the way to a simpler solution – an annulment based on the 1503 bull's having been ‘ill grounded’.Footnote ³⁹ Clement had already taken steps in that direction by issuing a decretal commission to Campeggio and Wolsey to try the case. This had apparently asked only for investigation of those alleged faults in the framing of the bull which, if proved, would have sufficed to annul the marriage.Footnote ⁴⁰ For the pope to accept (or authorise) such a verdict would have avoided any need to issue yet another questionable dispensation from a clear divine prohibition – and the possibility that the emperor would take a leaf from Henry's book by declaring that move ultra vires. A judgement on ‘ill grounds’, which imperialists continued to fear long after the advocation of the case to Rome in 1529,Footnote ⁴¹ would be straightforward and safer. Such a result would have delighted Wolsey, who was always chary of questioning the papal plenitudo potestatis,Footnote ⁴² and also perhaps the king – at least before that advocation. The only legal problem with the ‘ill grounds’ argument was that Clement repeatedly offered retrospective dispensations to correct any earlier faults.Footnote ⁴³ But a pope unhampered by imperial pressure might be persuaded to withdraw such offers, and Henry certainly would not request them. In considering the king's chances of obtaining his ends through papal compliance, therefore, Campeggio's plan and Katherine's hypothetical acquiescence might seem irrelevant. If Clement stuck to canon law, then, as Peter Vannes was told in March 1529, he could not do it.Footnote ⁴⁴ If he did not, then a favourable Italian situation would mean that he could satisfy Henry much more easily. In reality, once Charles had proved his dominance in Italy, Clement felt unable to offer either.

What of Henry's attitude to the proposal? If Katherine had taken the veil, and if the papacy had been free to act but for some reason preferred Campeggio's scheme to the simpler, less ‘revolutionary’, option, would the king have been satisfied? It seems highly unlikely, but to appreciate Henry's viewpoint it is first necessary to clarify the nature of his quest. This was certainly not simply to wed Anne Boleyn. Most scholars have concurred with the emphasis given by Elton and Scarisbrick that, whatever the roots of Henry's ‘Great Matter’, he became unquestionably ‘convinced in his conscience that his marriage to Catherine had been a great sin’ and that his lack of sons was a punishment for this transgression.Footnote ⁴⁵ This reasoning also means that we must take seriously Henry's worries about a future renewal of civil war, which might best be averted by the birth of a healthy and clearly legitimate baby boy. In earlier marriage negotiations with France and the Empire he had insisted that Mary was heir presumptive;Footnote ⁴⁶ he now argued that she would be barred by illegitimacy. This contention puzzled continental contemporaries because elsewhere in western Europe those children born to couples who in good faith (like Henry and Katherine in 1509) believed themselves validly married were treated as legitimate. Nevertheless, Henry was right. After a period of some uncertainty, by the late fourteenth century England had opted out of the bona fides principle, just as it had famously done in the 1236 Statute of Merton from that of legitimation per subsequens matrimonium. Footnote ⁴⁷ While it is true that the English royal succession was not rigidly constrained by the law of property, nevertheless, as Sir John Baker notes, ‘succession problems were usually debated in legal terms and in accordance with the common law canons of inheritance’.Footnote ⁴⁸ A successful challenge to his marriage would thus automatically bastardise Mary and leave Henry with no direct heir.Footnote ⁴⁹

True, Mary could have been legitimated by statute, but this could only be viewed as second-best, especially if used to establish the claim of a woman to a throne that had never been occupied by an unchallenged female monarch. Of course, Henry vii's title also ran back to a legitimated ancestor, but he had not stressed this element at his accession and a number of Henry viii's contemporaries also seemed unhappy about it, preferring to emphasise his Yorkist descent.Footnote ⁵⁰ It was not merely subjects who took this view: C. S. L. Davies notes that ‘it seems as if both Henry viii and Elizabeth i were happier with their Yorkist ancestry than with the somewhat dubious Lancastrian line’.Footnote ⁵¹ A further problem with statute was that what parliament may do it may also undo. If Henry iv had sought to modify the legitimation of the Beauforts by statute instead of by duplicitously amending Richard ii’s letters patent there would have been no Tudor claim to the throne at all.Footnote ⁵² Legitimation by statute might thus be little better than the oft repeated papal plea that Henry simply proceed to a second marriage and await challenges;Footnote ⁵³ the danger was not a present one to the monarch himself but a future one to his chosen heir. While Clement and Wolsey might be prepared to snatch at any plausible expedient that could get them off their respective hooks, the king needed a solution that was as secure and watertight as possible, one that could not be challenged in ways reminiscent of those which Richard iii had found to bastardise Edward iv's children, including Henry's own mother. The nightmare vision of a return to civil war appears often in his requests to the pope and again in the preamble to the first succession actFootnote ⁵⁴ – though the king was deaf to the pleas of those arguing, like Tyndale, that his chosen remedy might enhance rather than reduce these perils.Footnote ⁵⁵

Thus Henry desperately wanted a secure succession, yet his choice of a new wife had already given one hostage to fortune since she was the sister of a former mistress. Though there was no specific Levitical injunction inhibiting his marrying Anne, a positive canonical impediment existed since the king's intercourse with Mary Boleyn had created a first-degree relationship of affinity with her sister.Footnote ⁵⁶ Henry extracted what in his eyes was a satisfactory papal dispensation in April 1528;Footnote ⁵⁷ nevertheless, despite its careful drafting, a future objection was always a possibility.Footnote ⁵⁸ The King could thus never attain that absolute cast-iron certainty that he craved; however, he tried to ensure that no other potential challenges might cloud the future.

It was from this standpoint that Henry viewed Campeggio's plan: would it not only allow him Anne but provide some security for their prospective son to succeed him? Here it is possible to discern a three-stage royal progress leading from misunderstanding to indifference. At first the evidence suggests that the king interpreted the scheme (possibly for the same reason) much as Gairdner, Hughes and Parmiter were later to do – as simply an adjunct to the annulment process. When the legate suggested that Katherine enter a nunnery Henry greeted the proposal enthusiastically, promising that if Katherine accepted the plan he would guarantee Mary's position as heir presumptive.Footnote ⁵⁹ Such a move should be superfluous if her birth were perfectly legitimate, as would have been the case if her mother's marriage were ended only by a ‘Compiègne divorce’. If we excuse Henry here on the ground of ignorance of the law, there is also that subsequent hectoring of Katherine when he had insisted that she was not his wife, that the case had already been decided against her and that she might be compelled to take the veil.Footnote ⁶⁰ The fact that the king's statement was premised on a cruel falsehood does not destroy its relevance to our current problem, since it demonstrates that he was then treating Katherine's agreement to enter religion not as a direct means to his end but as a desirable extra. A third example appears to confirm this interpretation. This is a draft of points to be put to the queen. It is undated but was almost certainly composed in the second week of November 1528. After berating Katherine for courting popularity and charging her with disloyalty, it outlines the case for her entering religion, following canonical principles rigorously, insisting that if she took those vows ‘the king could not take another wife during her life, nor could the pope dispense with him to do it’. But it takes for granted the continuance of the annulment case, adding that ‘The king would be contented with her entering religion on condition that, if sentence is not given against the marriage, she may then come again out of religion.’Footnote ⁶¹

Henry's initial reaction therefore rested on a serious misunderstanding (or just possibly one he duplicitously wished to imply). It did not indicate any desire to comply with the legate's real and ‘revolutionary’ purpose, which would involve abandoning the annulment suit altogether. But we then come – with possibly some overlap between the two – to a second stage where the king seems to have appreciated what Campeggio intended and to have considered it seriously. Two factors probably hastened this progress. Firstly, as Wolsey complained, Campeggio had been remarkably coy about the contents of the secret decretal commission that he brought from Rome and had made it clear that the annulment process was not to be a straightforward one. Thus, at the beginning of November 1528, the chancellor, like Campeggio, pleaded with the pope for a dispensation for Henry to remarry if Katherine entered religion – a step that he would surely not have taken without royal approval.Footnote ⁶² The second factor was Katherine's revelation, probably on 7 November, of a papal brief, issued concurrently with the 1503 bull. Its addition of ‘et aliis causis …’ to the specific reasons for the dispensation wreaked havoc with the use of the decretal commission, which seems to have focused only on those listed in the bull.Footnote ⁶³ A more anxious Henry might thus be more ready – if somewhat hesitantly – to consider Campeggio's scheme as a genuine alternative.

The new approach is revealed in two long sets of instructions to English representatives in Rome and a short summary.Footnote ⁶⁴ The first, beautifully written and signed at head and foot by Henry himself, begins with diplomatic issues and casts aspersions on the brief's authenticity. Then, rather tentatively, royal agents in Rome are asked to ascertain whether, if Katherine entered religion, the pope might indeed dispense the king to remarry – at least by exercise of his ‘absolute’ if not his ‘ordinary’ power. The document goes on to hypothesise Katherine's entering religion only on condition that her husband does so too, and asks whether Henry could be discharged from such a vow. If that prove impossible, however, they should ‘inquire whether the pope will dispense (him) to have duas uxores, making the children of the second marriage legitimate as well as those of the first’. The other directives take the same line, with the third clarifying what seems like a ‘hierarchy of means’ to Henry's end: a straightforward annulment comes first, with a ‘Compiègne divorce’ as ‘Plan B’ and bigamy as ‘Plan C’.Footnote ⁶⁵

It is hard to reconcile these with a belief that Katherine's refusal of the veil was immensely significant. Admittedly, ‘Plan B’ could be regarded as occupying second place on the grounds of simple probability – that Henry thought it more likely that he could gain a papal annulment than persuade his wife to change her mind. But Katherine's consent, though useful, would not have been essential for ‘plan C’.Footnote ⁶⁶ It is also interesting that Henry reveals considerable uncertainty as to whether Campeggio's proposal was as viable as the legate (whom he no longer trusted) had claimed: the canonical understanding shown by these documents is impressive and probably reflects both Henry's own study and good advice from English canonists like Stephen Gardiner, described by Parmiter as ‘the best canonist in England’.Footnote ⁶⁷

This second stage in Henry's response to Campeggio's proposal therefore falls far short of full commitment. As a contender for the solution to his predicament it might at best be classed among the ‘possibles’ rather than the ‘probables’. In the third stage it fades into the background, glimmering only intermittently. In January 1529 Henry's men in Rome were warned by Wolsey that the veil could be offered merely as a delaying tactic and the detailed instructions for ambassadors to Charles v in that month focus only on Henry's case for an annulment;Footnote ⁶⁸ Vannes's report from Rome in March that the scheme might seem canonically impossible was received then without comment.Footnote ⁶⁹ Apart from Campeggio's last attempt to persuade Katherine in JuneFootnote ⁷⁰ the issue disappeared until November. It then briefly re-emerged in connection with Carew's mission to Charles v, when it was hoped that some sort of compromise might be reached that would involve Charles pressing his aunt to take the veil;Footnote ⁷¹ in February 1530 Chapuys reported that Henry himself was applying such pressure.Footnote ⁷² It is not clear, however, whether he was again treating the veil as an adjunct rather than an alternative to an annulment. Whichever it was, nothing came of these moves, and there is no further mention of the scheme among the numerous and lengthy reports that Chapuys sent to the Emperor, nor does the matter seem to have been raised with the papal nuncio who arrived in September: again all discussion centres on Henry's search for an annulment. We then have clear evidence of that crucial point which would surely have occurred to Henry and his councillors earlier – though possibly not at first: that a ‘Compiègne divorce’ could only be obtained by adding a second highly unusual (and potentially challengeable) papal bull to the one that had allowed the king's first marriage. Reporting Clement's later feelers on bigamy in September 1530, Sir Gregory Casale suspected an imperial trick,Footnote ⁷³ a view shared by William Benet who, writing a month later, fancied that the offer was both a delaying tactic and a clever stratagem whereby Clement ‘should have gotten a mean to bring your Highness to grant that if he may dispense in this case, which is of no less force than your case is, consequently he might dispense in your Highness's case’.Footnote ⁷⁴ When the English failed to bite, these manoeuvres came to an end, with Benet noting with respect to Clement's suggestion regarding bigamy that ‘lately, he has said plainly that he cannot do it’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Benet's logic is compelling: it reveals the crucial weakness of these options and the fatal flaw in Campeggio's proposal – its inadequacy to satisfy Henry's aim for a secure succession. What was true of bigamy could equally (or better) be argued of a ‘Compiègne divorce’: the new dispensation, whatever its nature, would have entailed a massive breach of conventional canonical principles. Even if the pope felt happy that its granting lay within his powers, and even in the unlikely event of Henry being prepared to swallow his pride and renounce his earlier attack, it might be questioned in future on ultra vires grounds identical to – or even stronger than – those he had alleged against the 1503 bull. Furthermore, since his first marriage might still be challenged, one could envisage a situation in which rival claimants sought to bastardise each other, a process that might well have led to their seeking support from opposing religious sides. Councillors might ruefully consider that Henry had weakened the chance of either plan's proving satisfactory by his own readiness to question the validity of an arguably unique papal bull, since that description could also fit both alternatives.Footnote ⁷⁶

Meanwhile, the king was also growing indifferent to those ‘ill grounds’ arguments which had been emphasised by Wolsey and had predominated at the Blackfriars hearings in 1529:Footnote ⁷⁷ none of them features in the three major government propaganda publications of 1531–2.Footnote ⁷⁸ After toying with all these other options, Henry seems to have returned to his original position, the only novelty being to insist that the English Church was ‘sufficient and mete of itself’Footnote ⁷⁹ to determine the basic issue: could a pope dispense a man to marry his brother's widow (at least if that couple had consummated their marriage)? This was the question posed to the universities, to the two English convocations and to the archbishop's court at Dunstable in 1533.Footnote ⁸⁰ Only a favourable verdict on this fundamental point would seem to provide something approaching that cast-iron validity that Henry wanted for his union with Anne, which he had sought for six long years.

In Cranmer's court Henry won his case; a year later Katherine won hers at Rome.Footnote ⁸¹ Froude rightly claimed that the queen's intransigence matched Henry's.Footnote ⁸² But there were good reasons for digging in their heels. What Katherine was rejecting was not a high road to the continuance of a Catholic England but a sinuous and rock-strewn path leading to a false summit whose attainment would have satisfied neither her own nor her husband's hopes for the future. It would thus seem that both Henry and Katherine were correct: only a clear judgement on the validity of their marriage would serve their purposes and provide some reasonable assurance about the future. In the short run there might indeed have been less tension if the queen had taken the veil, but it is hard to see how it could have provided a satisfactory solution to ‘the king's great matter’. Henry's purpose was more far–reaching when he first seriously queried his marriage and doubted the validity of papal dispensations from specific divine decrees. That was the crucial act, not Katherine's rejection of a dubious tactic: once the king had released it, the genie could not be put back in the bottle.