Note (back) — Chapter XI

Henry's path was now clear. Cranmer was archbishop and legatus natus with a title which none could dispute. By Act of Parliament his court was the final resort for all ecclesiastical cases. No appeals from his decision could be lawfully made. So, on 11th April, before he was yet consecrated, he besought the King's gracious permission to determine his "great cause of matrimony, because much bruit exists among the common people on the subject".[840] No doubt there did; but that was not the cause for the haste. Henry was pleased to accede to this request of the "principal minister of our spiritual jurisdiction"; and, on the 10th of May, the Archbishop opened his Court at Dunstable. Catherine, of course, could recognise no authority in Cranmer to try a cause that was before the papal curia. She was declared contumacious, and, on the 23rd, the Archbishop gave his sentence. Following the line of Convocation, he pronounced that the Pope had no power to license marriages such as Henry's, and that the King and Catherine had never been husband and wife.[841] Five days later, after a secret investigation, he declared that Henry and Anne Boleyn were lawfully married, and on Whitsunday, the 1st of June, he crowned Anne as Queen in Westminster Abbey.[842] Three months later, on Sunday, the 7th of September, between three and four in the afternoon, Queen Anne gave birth to a daughter at Greenwich.[843] The child was christened on the following Wednesday by Stokesley, Bishop of London, and Cranmer stood godfather. Chapuys scarcely considered the matter worth mention. The King's amie had given birth to a bastard, a detail of little importance to any one, and least of all to a monarch like Charles V.[844] Yet the "bastard" was Queen Elizabeth, and the child, thus ushered into a contemptuous world, lived to humble the pride of Spain, and to bear to a final triumph the banner which Henry had raised.