My primary source researches, which have been diverse, have for some time centred mainly on the 1520s and 1530s. Since they largely concern England, and since England in these decades was ruled by Henry VIII, I have seen endless mentions of his marital shenanigans. We all know that Henry was married to “Catherine of Aragon”; that he had his chosen Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, decree in May 1533 that the marriage had always been null and void; and that he had Cranmer decree a few days later that he and Anne Boleyn (pronounced “Bullen”, by the way) were already validly married. We know that Henry and Anne had had a secret wedding ritual, witnessed by just a few, during the night of 25 January, shortly after Anne found that she was pregnant; however, this was merely a formalization ceremony. They had purported to marry to each other sometime previously, probably without any witnesses, and probably at Dover Castle on St Erkenwald’s Day, 14 November 1532.

 

As a matter of interest, although the Catholic Church has always taught that a marriage is a sacrament and is indissoluble, and that the ministers of the sacrament are the husband and wife themselves, it has not always required that there be witnesses, even a priest. Today if an unmarried man and woman find themselves washed up on a desert island, they can still marry each other, validly and sacramentally, without a priest or other witnesses.

 

After reading innumerable documents from Henry VIII’s era, something dawned on me. It is that nobody, Catholic or Protestant, male or female, young or old, ever spoke about “Catherine of Aragon”. From her universally applauded coronation in 1509 until her lonely death in 1535 she was always Queen Catherine. After Anne was crowned, those who wished to be or had to be polite, when they were being polite, spoke of her as Queen Anne – not as Anne Boleyn. Those who did not have to be continuously polite when speaking of her, such as the Ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire, Eustace Chapuys, in his private speech and correspondence, continued to speak of her as they had done before, which was usually as the King’s whore. Indeed, Anne was generally hated or despised, as became embarrassingly clear during her procession to Westminster Hall on 21 May 1533 in preparation for her coronation the next day, when there was much unflattering heckling from the sidelines, mostly from women, and much disrespect shown by hats being left on heads and cheers not erupting from throats. Anne was never acknowledged as Henry’s wife or queen by the crowned heads elsewhere, at least while Catherine lived; and the Protestant leaders outside England, including Luther, and even the English Protestant scriptural translator William Tyndale, in exile in Antwerp, were scornful of the supposed annulment and the supposed marriage.

 

Yet even when one accepts the above facts, as most scholars and serious students of the era do, a grave distortion of understanding is perpetrated and perpetuated when Queen Catherine is spoken or thought about as “Catherine of Aragon”. Why? Because she then becomes in mind a fleshless, bloodless, two-dimensional political figment; and the way the real person was actually perceived, thought about, felt towards, by the English people is lost to mind. Nobody can, and nobody did, love a Catherine of Aragon; anyone can, and almost all the English did, love a Queen Catherine. In Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, which many scholars think was co-written with the younger dramatist John Fletcher (I am uncertain), she is Queen Catherine and is loved.

 

Thus if one wishes even to begin understanding the significance for the English people of Henry’s treatment of his first wife and first Queen, one must think and speak of her as “Queen Catherine” almost always, and as “Catherine of Aragon” almost never. After all, if one uses misleading language, the first person one misleads will be oneself.