The King is Dead Read online

  Thomas Wriothesley had ostensibly supported Hertford’s elevation to the protectorate as a first among equals – yet scraps of evidence suggest that he had been less than happy about Hertford’s promotion and was determined to keep the Protector’s authority to the terms of Henry VIII’s will. A manuscript by an unknown author in the British Library records a quarrel between Wriothesley and Hertford in early February, and states that ‘Wriothesley was sore against him to be made Protector’.3 As lord chancellor, Wriothesley was keeper of the Great Seal of England, which needed to be attached to every royal patent and commission; in short, Wriothesley had a veto on all appointments to sinecures and offices.4 He controlled the distribution of power and the acquisition of wealth; he could prevent the new Duke of Somerset from wielding the authority he wanted. He also disagreed with the Protector’s stance on matters of religion, when the dramatic Protestant iconoclasm of Somerset’s premiership would become the defining characteristic of Edward’s reign. Two days before Edward’s coronation, Wriothesley, now Earl of Southampton, blundered, and his mis-step was sufficiently grave for Somerset to be able to eject him from the machinery of power.

  Southampton’s error was that, keen to focus on the business of government in the Council, he had delegated his responsibilities in Chancery to four experienced civil lawyers who were to hear cases in his absence. This essentially constituted a commission to others to act as lord chancellor without the king’s consent. On 5 March, he was charged at Westminster before the rest of the Council with having ‘made manifold abuses in the Court of Chancery… to the great hindrance, prejudice and decay of the contrary to the common laws of the realm’.5 In so doing, it was found that he had ‘offend[ed] the King’s Majesty’ and, by the common law, ‘forfeit[ed] his office as chancellor’.6 He was to be fined and imprisoned under house arrest, at the king’s will.

  This wonderful sketch, by Hans Holbein, portrays Lord Chancellor Thomas Wriothesley (1505–50). A member of Henry VIII’s Privy Council, Wriothesley was also nominated by the king as an executor and regency councillor to Edward VI. He was later created Earl of Southampton. A conservative in religion, Wriothesley racked Anne Askewe with his own hands in 1546 (as did Richard Rich). He was soon deposed by the Earl of Hertford’s Protestant government – although Wriothesley, in turn, later helped dismantle Somerset’s protectorate.

  This infraction was genuine, but it was not Southampton’s real offence. That lay in his opposition to Somerset’s position, as hinted at in his trial when Somerset stated that Southampton had ‘used unfitting words to me, the said Protector, to the prejudice of the king’s estate and the hindrance of his Majesty’s affairs’.7 Somerset’s alleged concern about ‘what danger might ensue to the King’s most royal person, and what hindrance, detriment and subversion to his affairs’ should the Great Seal remain in the possession of ‘so stout and arrogant a person as durst and would presume at his will and pleasure to seal things that he might by any liberty, custom, privilege or other grant by virtue of his office’ sounds like a serious case of transference.8 The Great Seal passed to Lord St John’s keeping, and Southampton fell from grace.

  The deposition of one of Henry VIII’s nominated councillors was the beginning of the end of any adherence to Henry’s will. On 12 March, it was overthrown entirely. Letters patent were issued, with the Great Seal attached and in the king’s name, which gave Somerset power over the royal prerogative and the right to appoint the members of the King’s Council.9 The regency councillors and assistant councillors named in the will were combined to form one single Privy Council, and Henry’s prudent schema was quashed. In practice, however, the composition of the Council was moot, for Somerset proceeded to rule as an autocrat, jettisoning all Henry’s hopes for balanced, conciliar rule.

  A Royal Commission on 21 March, written in Edward VI’s name, confirmed Somerset’s singular standing. It nominated and appointed one ‘meet and trusty personage above all others’, agreeing to ‘ratify, approve, confirm, allow all and every thing and things whatsoever devised, set forth, committed and done by our said uncle as Governor of our person and Protector of our said realms and dominions’.10 Somerset had full and total control. That these were little short of regal powers is confirmed in the much later letter of Paget to Somerset in July 1549, when Paget reminded his master that ‘Your Grace is, during the king’s young age of imperfection, to do his own things, as it were a king, and have His Majesty’s absolute power’. For inspiration of how to act, Paget would charge Somerset to look to the example of ‘him which died last, of most noble memory King Henry VIII’.11

  Henry’s memory might have been dredged up when convenient to give an example of how to rule, but seldom can a monarch of such terrible power have been so quickly forgotten. Within eight weeks of Henry’s death, the careful plan he had made for the future of the constitution had been entirely discarded. The ‘singular trust and special confidence’ he had placed in his ‘right entirely beloved councillors’ had been utterly misplaced.12

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  Henry VIII’s will was not yet quite a dead duck; it continued to be evoked or contested throughout the sixteenth century in order to bolster claims to power, and – despite the best efforts of his children to overturn it – it so happened that the Tudor succession paralleled Henry’s intentions.

  In the first year of Edward VI’s reign, an inscription by Edward’s lord chancellor endorsing Henry VIII’s will was added as a covering folio to the testament (see page 201). After Southampton’s disgrace, the chancellorship was filled by Baron Rich: he may have tortured Anne Askewe back in 1546, but now, bending like a reed in the wind, he had re-positioned himself as part of the new Protestant government under Somerset. But Somerset’s power was not to last.

  In October 1549, it was Henry VIII’s will that provided the legal authority to Somerset’s fellow Privy Councillors to dismantle his protectorate in a bloodless coup. Somerset’s arrogant usurpation of the role of Lord Protector had not been to everyone’s taste, and over the succeeding two years he grew increasingly autocratic and dismissive of his peers, while seeking popularity among the masses.13 His tendency towards unilateral decision-making and pretensions to royal status (he adopted the royal ‘we’) caused offence and convinced most members of the Privy Council that, despite being the king’s most senior male relative, he was unfit for office. The coup was ostensibly led by the Earl of Southampton – briefly restored to power – but the power behind it came from Somerset’s erstwhile ally John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. The charge against Somerset contained no suggestion that he had tampered with Henry VIII’s will; there was, however, every suggestion that he had ignored its instructions.14 Warwick succeeded Somerset, and although his more conciliar style of government positioned him as the first among equals – he never arrogated to himself the position of Lord Protector – in October 1551 he was elevated to the Dukedom of Northumberland. Days later, Somerset was arrested and subsequently executed on a technicality.

  When Edward VI was dying in 1553, the fifteen-year-old king attempted to use his ‘device for the succession’ to override the succession carefully outlined by Henry VIII. Following the ‘Protestant revolution’ of his reign, Edward was desperate not to hand the throne to his Catholic half-sister Mary. His other reason for excluding her was that she was also technically illegitimate, since Henry had never relegitimized his daughters – despite naming them in his will, and in Acts of Parliament, as his successors. Ironically, in preparing his device, Edward was adopting his father’s approach to the succession: it was in the gift of the king, and so what one monarch had given, another could take away. Edward’s single-page device was a miniature imitation of Henry VIII’s will.

  The Lady Elizabeth – the future Elizabeth I – in a portrait attributed to William Scrots. This painting shows Elizabeth in around 1546, a year before Henry died. She is dressed in gorgeously rich attire, and is wearing the round English headdress that her mother made fashionable, and which shows off her auburn
hair. The picture also displays her learning and piety – the small book in her hands is probably the New Testament, while the large book behind her is likely to be the Old Testament. The portrait is first recorded in the collection of her half-brother, Edward VI, where it is described as ‘the picture of the Ladye Elizabeth her grace with a booke in her hande her gowne like crymsen clothe’.

  In the document, Edward VI initially nominated only male heirs from the line of Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary – overlooking the line from Henry’s elder sister, Margaret, as Henry himself had done. But when, in the spring of 1553, Edward realized that his illness was terminal, he inserted the crucial words ‘Lady Jane and her’ before ‘heirs males’, and so nominated as his direct heir his Protestant cousin Lady Jane Grey.15 Some of Henry’s former councillors, including Russell and St John, raised objections to the casual disregard of Henry’s will; but letters patent embodying Edward’s device (which, under the terms of Henry’s Acts of Succession, would have been legally sufficient to determine the succession) were drawn up by Lord Chief Justice Sir Edward Montagu – another of those that Henry had named for the regency council – and no fewer than 102 witnesses added their support to the final ‘declaration’, which was also signed and sealed by the king.16 This declaration was just passing through Parliament when Edward died.

  During the abortive reign of Lady Jane Grey that followed, a letter from Mary on 9 July 1553, stating her claim to the throne, made specific reference to her right ‘by Act of Parliament and the testament and last will of our late dearest father King Henry the Eight’.17 Thus, while Edward had acted according to his father’s precedent of writing his will, Mary espoused Henry’s wishes as expressed within it: in each case, Henry VIII’s will remained the lodestone.

  Mary’s adherence to her father’s will in defence of her own accession, and her subsequent absence of ‘issue’ after marriage in 1554, left her little choice but to pass the imperial crown down the line of succession that Henry had specified – to her half-sister, Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s ill-concealed Protestantism meant that Mary resisted naming her as successor when she drew up her own will; but ten days before she died, the queen consented to the Council’s request to make ‘certain declarations in favour of the Lady Elizabeth concerning the accession’.18 Within six hours of Mary’s death, Elizabeth was proclaimed queen. Henry VIII’s unlikely plan for the succession had now been fulfilled through three of his imagined scenarios.

  A few years into Elizabeth I’s reign, supporters of the Stuart claim to the throne, seeking to nominate Mary, Queen of Scots as the natural successor to Elizabeth, tried to dispute the validity of Henry VIII’s will. Sir William Maitland, Lord of Lethington and Secretary of Scotland, wrote to Sir William Cecil, Elizabeth’s first minister, on 4 January 1566 calling Henry’s last will a ‘dissembled and forged signed testament’.19 In an argument also advanced at some length in certain manuscripts from the 1560s, including an anonymous treatise of 1566 (possibly written by Edward Plowden), Henry’s will was declared to be invalid because it was signed by dry stamp, and not ‘with his most gracious hand’ as specified by the Acts of Succession.20 This lack of signature led the anonymous author to conclude ‘that if his will in writing be not signed with his hand, it is insufficient to make the crown pass’, ‘the authority of the act is not executed and so the limitation of the crown by that will is void’.21 In short, if the will could be proved insufficiently endorsed by Henry VIII, its exclusion of the Scottish line descended from Henry’s sister, Margaret, from the crown of England could no longer stand.

  Yet, Elizabeth I’s long life gradually erased the need for this argument. When she died, the crown would indeed pass down the Scottish line that Henry had excluded, and James VI of Scotland would also rule as James I of England. Henry VIII’s will had finally ceased to have any consequence at all.

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  There are many stories about the fate of Henry VIII’s will. In 1547, it was placed in the Treasury for safekeeping, stored in a ‘round box or bag of black velvet’.22 This must be the original that now resides in The National Archives at Kew.

  Edward VI’s ‘devise for the succession’, written in his youthful hand. Just as Henry VIII had done in his will, King Edward VI wanted to exercise his monarchical right to nominate his successor. Edward initially named ‘L’ Jane’s heires masles’ [Lady Jane’s heirs males], choosing his successors from the line of Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary. But, when he realized that he was dying, he made a crucial change, turning ‘Jane’s’ into ‘Jane’ and following it with the words ‘and her’, so that he bequeathed his throne directly to Lady Jane Grey and, only then, to her male heirs.

  Other copies, however, existed. Bishop Cuthbert Tunstal, as one of Henry’s executors, had one. When he died in November 1559, his belongings were sent to Westminster, and Matthew Parker, Elizabeth I’s newly nominated Archbishop of Canterbury, discovered among them ‘two small caskets, where I think [there is] no great substance either of money or of writing. There is one roll of books… which is nothing else but King Henry’s testament’.23 Another copy was kept by the treasurer, Sir Edmund Peckham, and inherited by his son, who gave it to a servant with firm instructions to keep it safe and ‘let no man look in it’. The servant was not so circumspect. He later admitted that he had put the will ‘in a basket with other writings in the chamber where I and three other of my fellows lay, using the same basket also to put in our apparel and other necessaries so much as it would hold, having to the same neither lock nor key’.24

  In the end, both literally and metaphorically, Henry VIII’s last will and testament had become just another scrap in the waste-paper basket.

  To some, Henry VIII’s last will and testament is ‘the epitome of his reign’ in that, by being ‘determined by other intelligences and shaped for other purposes’ than those of the king, it demonstrates the way that Henry’s ‘persona was a mask through which spoke the king’s servants more often than the king himself’.1 The foregoing chapters have outlined why I think that this judgment is largely mistaken and have attempted to show that Henry VIII was not the marionette of his servants in the matter of the making of his will – nor in anything else.

  Henry’s will does, however, epitomize his reign in a number of ways. Its focus is identical to the ‘chief labour and study’ of Henry’s life: the pursuit of a stable succession in order to preserve the dynasty. Just as the central features of Henry’s reign derived from his desire to ensure an heir, so the majority of the will was devoted to planning for the security of his son’s reign and to making provision for nine possible eventualities. In these preparations, Henry offered idiosyncratic, but practical plans: the line of succession was to exclude the Stuart line descending from his sister Margaret; the form of government to see young Edward through the perilous and unstable time of the minority was to be a regency council of sixteen, who would, with full and unfettered power, rule as a union of equals until Edward reached the age of eighteen.

  The will also neatly represents Henry’s religious outlook – a conservative orthodoxy in key areas of doctrine, coupled with an adherence to his new article of faith: his own position as Supreme Head of the Church. While there is much religiosity in the will, there is, however, little sense of a personal relationship with the Divine beyond that of one monarch addressing another. In this, it betrays another prominent feature of Henry’s character: the self-involved nature of his relationship with God and the world.

  There is, however, something rather touching about the optimism and naivety of the will. That Henry believed that Kateryn Parr yet might bear him sons, that he might yet marry again, and that his councillors, in whom he placed so much trust, would be faithful to his wishes, is testament to his hubristic arrogance and his incredible capacity for self-delusion, but also to his buoyancy of spirit and his faith in the genuine devotion of those around him. What is most striking is the disjuncture between his profound belief that he would be obeyed and loved – that e
ven after death, he would leave a forceful imprint on his closest companions – and the reality that they so quickly, and thoroughly, shrugged him off.

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  The rash and rapid way in which his former councillors crushed Henry’s careful plans for Edward VI’s minority and propelled themselves into power has made it all too easy for historians to apply the benefits of hindsight to the question of the composition of the will. The lightning success of Hertford and Paget in securing control after Henry’s death leads naturally to the assumption that well before Henry expired, a cabal must have been conspiring to stage a coup. But Dr Glyn Redworth was right to argue that, instead, Hertford ‘did not so much seize power as inherit it’.2 Hertford and Paget did make plans for Hertford’s elevation and Paget’s place at his side, but only, according to Paget’s own private account, on the night of Henry’s death. To do so before would have been recklessly dangerous in an age when words could be treasonous. It was only at this final juncture – when Henry looked certain not to rally once more – that they could talk, in whispers, of how to proceed when the ‘old fox’ finally breathed his last. H.G. Wells wrote of Queen Victoria that she ‘was like a great paper-weight that for half a century sat upon men’s minds, and when she was removed their ideas began to blow about all over the place haphazardly’. So, too, Henry’s imminent death permitted his courtiers to think the unthinkable.