Queens and Power in Medieval and Early Modern England

2. Widow Princess or Neglected Queen? Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII, and English Public Opinion, 1533 --1536

Widow Princess or Neglected Queen? Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII, and English Public Opinion, 1533–1536 timothy g. elston On May 23, 1533, the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, annulled Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. For Henry and his new wife, Anne Boleyn, it was as if the previous twenty-four years had never happened. For Catherine, Cranmer’s decision on the annulment had the unique consequence of making her, for the second time, the widow of Prince Arthur, Henry’s long-dead brother. To confirm that new position, Henry issued a proclamation on July 5, 1533, that stripped Catherine of the title of queen and required all subjects to address her henceforth as Princess Dowager of Wales. For Henry, his long ordeal had ended. His new wife was pregnant, and he now kept his sickly old wife out of sight, and thus, he hoped, out of the public’s mind. But the reality of the situation was much more difficult for Henry to manage than a man of his immense ego could imagine. Henry had underestimated how his own behavior, public opinion, and Catherine’s determination made her a cast-aside wife and queen, not the widowed princess he desired. No doubt, most are familiar with Catherine’s obstinate refusal to 2 17 widow princess or neglected queen? bow to Henry’s will and accept the change in her title and marital position, but her refusal in no way changed her circumstances: under English law, Catherine was the widow of Arthur. As this essay demonstrates, however, Catherine pursued a conscious strategy of continuing to portray herself in the manner the English people had come to expect, whatever her husband chose to do. Catherine had a twenty-four-year reputation for piety and advocating for the people. After the annulment, in her “widowed” isolation, Catherine exploited the expectations of both her own Christian humanist training and those of an aristocratic English society that often treated widows harshly in order to reaffirm her status with the public and, in a small sense, to subvert Henry’s proclamation. To accomplish this, Catherine had to negotiate and, to some extent, negate contemporary expectations of widowhood. From the Christian humanist perspective, two differing assessments of widowhood appear in the early sixteenth century. Most familiar in England, and perhaps to Catherine, were the opinions of Juan Luis Vives in his De Institutione Feminae Christianae. Vives insisted on widows maintaining their chastity, and thus safeguarding their late husbands’ reputations, by staying home, remaining aloof from worldly matters, and assiduously avoiding opportunities for the community to question their reputations.1 In Vives’s world, widows were especially vulnerable to charges of immorality owing to the supposed weaknesses of their characters as women. Yet as Barbara Todd has recently shown, Erasmus in his De Vidua argued that while maintaining a good reputation was essential for a woman, a virile woman, or virile widow, should still be involved in public activity, especially activity that provided the opportunity for service and demonstrated her abilities.2 Thus for a virile widow responsible for maintaining her own reputation, publicly performing acts of humanitarian service would demonstrate her genuine Christian character. ฀18 timothy g. elston Yet Catherine also had to balance this humanist view of her new position with the realities of sixteenth-century aristocratic life. Although upon the deaths of their husbands, their legal status changed from that of the “junior partner” in a marriage relationship to being women with their own legal rights, early modern aristocratic widows still faced great difficulties, including struggles over inheritance, jointure rights, and their ability to remain unmarried. Some widows, though they should have inherited and had their legal rights, often failed to receive these privileges because of more powerful and better politically connected male relatives. Under the law, widows had every right to manage and maintain the real and moveable property in their possession. They could control all of the income from their inheritance or jointure, something previously only their husbands could do. This did not mean, however, that a widow would not have any difficulties in managing her own property or the property she held in trust for her children. Even if her husband had left specific directions concerning the distribution of the property, male relatives, in some cases sons and stepsons, often attempted to force widows to turn everything over to them...