The King is Dead Read online

  The king may have been dead; but that did not mean Henry VIII was prepared to cede power. His chief instrument of control from beyond the grave was to be his last will and testament.

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  Henry VIII’s will had a special legal importance, unique among royal wills. This is because, back in his annus horribilis of 1536, he had faced the situation of having, at the age of forty-five, two children but no heirs.9 In that year he had had a significant fall from his horse while jousting, which opened up an ulcer in his leg; had faced a major rebellion in the north of the country; had seen his seventeen-year-old son, the illegitimate Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset, die; and had faced the devastating allegation that the woman he loved had committed adultery with five men, including her own brother, for which Henry had ordered her execution.

  Henry’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon, had been the widow of his elder brother Arthur, to whom she had been married for just five months before Arthur’s death in 1502. The daughter of illustrious parents, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, Katherine was six years older than Henry, auburn-haired, highly educated, deeply religious, and resilient, having survived seven difficult years of living in limbo after Arthur’s death, separated from her family and uncertain as to her future. She and Henry were married in 1509, soon after his accession, and the king and queen were crowned together.

  What seemed at first a happy marriage was soured by the repeated heartbreak of miscarriages, stillbirths and infant mortality. One prince, named Henry, born in 1511, died just seven weeks later. Only one child – a daughter named Mary, born in 1516 – survived. For the sake of the peace of the country, and to prevent civil war and foreign domination – which were thought to be the consequences of female rule – Henry needed sons. The birth of Henry Fitzroy in 1519 to his mistress, Elizabeth Blount, was of little help; Henry VIII’s sons needed to be legitimate, and Fitzroy’s birth merely confirmed the king’s suspicion that the problem lay not with him, but with his wife. By the 1520s, as Katherine reached her forties, Henry feared that her childbearing days were over.

  Several developments now occurred at the same time. First, around 1526, Henry met the woman who was to be the love of his life, Anne Boleyn, and he started to imagine the possibility of children by another wife. Second, according to Henry’s speech before the papal court at Blackfriars in 1529, which was convened to judge the validity of his marriage to Katherine, ‘a certain scrupulosity… pricked my conscience… which doubt pricked, vexed and troubled so my mind, and so disquieted me, that I was in great doubt of God’s indignation’.10 This ‘scrupulosity’ was the pressing concern that his lack of a male heir was an indication that he was being punished by God, and that the pope should never have given him a dispensation to marry his brother’s widow, which was explicitly prohibited by Scripture (Leviticus Chapter 18, Verse 16 and Chapter 20, Verse 21).11 These pricks of conscience seem terribly convenient; but Henry was probably quite genuine in his conviction that his first marriage was a sham. He had an infinite capacity for self-delusion and was a great believer in the letter, rather than the spirit, of the law.

  Anne Boleyn (c.1501–36), portrayed in a medal from 1534. It was cast in lead when the queen, Henry VIII’s second wife, was thought to be pregnant, and it is the only agreed likeness of Anne from her lifetime. The medal shows her long face and high cheekbones. The date and Anne’s motto ‘The Moost Happi’ (The Most Happy) are written on the rim, and the initials A.R. spell out ‘Anna Regina’ – Anne the Queen.

  Yet, even if the king was sincerely assured of the righteousness of his position, the matter of getting his marriage annulled, usually such a straightforward affair, was this time anything but. In 1527, when Henry began to press for a ‘divorce’, troops belonging to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, had just sacked Rome, and Pope Clement VII was being held prisoner at his Roman fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo. The response that the pope could give to Henry’s request to annul his marriage thus depended on what Charles V might have to say about it. Given that Charles happened to be Katherine of Aragon’s nephew, it was almost inevitable that he would take her part, and Henry’s chances looked slim. The papal court called in London in 1529 to hear the matter was a time-wasting affair, largely scuppered by Katherine herself, who had no intention of being put out to pasture. Henry needed another strategy.

  It came from the king’s burgeoning sense of his own sovereignty. In the twentieth-century, historian J.J. Scarisbrick was so convinced of Henry’s growing commitment to this notion that he asserted: ‘even if there had been no divorce Henry might yet have taken issue with the Church’.12 The claim to sovereignty meant asserting that England was an empire and that English kings had always enjoyed spiritual, as well as political, supremacy in their realm. This, in turn, meant that Kings of England had no superior: they were first under God, and needed no approval from the pope, nor from any intermediary to meddle in their communications with the Almighty. What this all added up to was the revelation that the pope had no jurisdiction in the matter of Henry’s divorce.

  Over the early 1530s, this little acorn of thought gradually developed into the mature oak of the royal supremacy, and through an important series of Acts of Parliament, the ‘break with Rome’ was accomplished. In 1534, it was declared that Henry was, and always had been, the Supreme Head of the Church in England. A year earlier, he had married the witty and cosmopolitan mistress Anne Boleyn, and had had his marriage to Katherine of Aragon annulled – in that order – by his scholarly new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer.

  In September 1533, Anne Boleyn bore him a child – not the longed-for son, but a daughter, Elizabeth. Still, the couple hoped that her evident fertility would soon manifest itself in a blush of boys. It was not, of course, to be. After some false starts, Anne miscarried in early 1536; distressingly, she was far enough along in her pregnancy for the doctors to tell that the foetus was male. She had no opportunity to try again. A few months later, she was faced with charges of adultery, incest and ‘conspiring for the king’s death’ and was beheaded on the morning of 19 May 1536 within the walls of the Tower of London. In the aftermath of this disaster, Henry had his marriage to Anne Boleyn declared void, their daughter Elizabeth was proclaimed illegitimate – and neither did the debacle restore Mary’s fortunes, for the king forced his elder daughter to swear that the marriage between her parents had been ‘incestuous and unlawful’ and that she herself was a bastard. After the death of Fitzroy in July 1536, Henry was left with two living children and without a legitimate heir.

  This was a perilous position to be in, especially for a king acutely sensitive to the perceived novelty of Tudor rule. While Henry had high hopes that his new, third, wife Jane Seymour might play her part, he needed to make provision for a worst-case scenario. And so, in that terrible year of 1536, a Succession Act was passed in Parliament, which confirmed the illegitimacy of his daughters, disinherited them from the right to claim the throne, and determined that his lawful children by Queen Jane, and by any subsequent wife, would succeed him. In the absence of such issue, however, and not wishing to leave the realm ‘destitute’, the statute instructed the king that he would have ‘full and plenary power and authority to give, dispose, appoint, assign, declare and limit [the succession], by your letters patents under your great seal or else by your last will made in writing and signed by your most gracious hand’.13

  The king, therefore, had the right to appoint his successor by his will. The Act additionally empowered Henry to designate conditions for the succession and to specify the composition of a regency council should his heir be a minor at the time of his death.

  These rights were confirmed in the next Succession Act of 1544. By this time, however, a legitimate son, Prince Edward, had been born to Jane and so was named in this Act as Henry’s heir, while Lady Mary and Lady Elizabeth (having lost their titles of ‘Princess’ along with their legitimacy) were re-inserted back into the line of succession after Edward and
his heirs. Crucially, however - for it would have later ramifications – Henry’s two daughters were not legitimized. In the light of this legislation, the king’s last will would become a document with fundamental constitutional clout.

  It would also be very different to the wills of earlier kings. Henry V, Henry VI, Edward IV and Henry VII had spent the majority of their wills apportioning estates, and making provision for their souls and for the commonwealth. Henry VIII’s will had a different raison d’être. It was dedicated, as his life had been, to determining the succession and to ensuring the future of the Tudor dynasty. To do so, it arrogated to itself astonishing and hubristic rights to decide the future of the country as no other royal will before it had attempted to do. It set out precisely what Henry wanted to happen after his death – that is, if we can be confident that it really did express the king’s desires. Whether or not the will was the creation of the king and truly expressed his volition are the first mysteries to be solved.

  Thomas Cranmer, in a portrait by Gerlach Flicke, dated to 1545–6. Henry VIII’s Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533, Cranmer (1489–1556) annulled the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn in 1533, helped create the new Church of England and, ultimately, was the man holding the king’s hand when Henry VIII died. He was named as a regency councillor and executor in Henry VIII’s last will and went on to be the architect of the Protestant reformation during Edward VI’s reign. He was martyred by Mary I.

  In order to understand the circumstances in which Henry VIII’s will was drawn up and appreciate the implications and importance of its contents, it is first necessary to know something of the extraordinary developments of Henry’s latter years. Henry’s physical degeneration in his last decade was sufficient to make an early death likely and, with it came the necessity of planning for the succession of a minor as heir. The simultaneous degeneration in Henry’s character meant that the increasingly tyrannical monarch became ever harder to control. Yet, the religious shifts made (as well as those rebuffed) by Henry’s government over these years created fault lines among those seeking to influence the king’s will and raised the stakes for those wanting to determine the future of the country.

  After the traumas of 1536, Henry’s last decade began joyfully. On 12 October 1537, his third wife, the docile Jane Seymour, gave birth to their son at Hampton Court. Prince Edward was christened in the chapel there three days later. Yet it was Jane’s death from puerperal sepsis, or childbed fever, two weeks after Edward’s birth that rather set the tone of the years to come. Plunged into mourning, and no doubt brimming with self-pity as well as grief, the king famed for his fondness for marriage did not wed again for more than two years.

  One of the two activities with which Henry preoccupied himself in those years was hunting. After his accident in January 1536, Henry was never able to joust again, but he could still manage to hunt, as he morphed from an attractive youth into a monstrously obese and prematurely aged man. By 1541, the French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, noted that the king had grown ‘very stout’. Measurements of Henry’s armour suggest that his waist had increased from 37 inches to 54 inches in just five years.

  Much of the inactivity that led to this weight-gain (coupled, one presumes, with a fair amount of comfort-eating) was due to the unabating pain that Henry suffered throughout the last eleven years of his life. Although a constant ache, the ulcer in his leg, opened up by his fall in January 1536, would flare up from time to time in ravaging waves of pain and fever. In spring and summer 1537, the ulcer prevented Henry from travelling far; he wrote to the Duke of Norfolk that he could not journey to York because ‘to be frank with you, which you must keep to yourself, a humour has fallen into our legs, and our physicians advise us not to go far in the heat of the day’.1 In 1538 and 1541, for a fortnight at a time, he was in so much pain that, as French Ambassador Louis de Perreau, Seigneur de Castillon, noted, ‘the humours which had no outlet were like to have stifled him, so that he was sometime without speaking black in the face and in great danger’.2

  Castillon, and Henry himself, understood Henry’s condition in the light of the medical knowledge of the day: as an excess of one of the body’s four humours (of blood, phlegm, and black and yellow bile). Modern physicians have suggested that Henry suffered from osteomylitis, or a chronic septic infection of the femur, and that these intermittent feverish attacks were caused by septic absorption or clotting of the blood, as in deep vein thrombosis (DVT). Untreated – or at least untreated by modern medicine such as anticoagulants – such clots can lead to a pulmonary embolism. It may be this that finally killed Henry, although kidney disease and heart failure (perhaps together with the swollen legs that are characteristic of oedema or dropsy) may have also been contributors.

  Less physically strenuous than hunting, Henry’s other main preoccupation at this time was theology: he spent hours meticulously correcting a book of doctrine prepared for him by his bishops.

  Twenty years earlier, Martin Luther had started his great rebellion against the Catholic Church by protesting against ‘indulgences’ – certificates that promised time off (1,000 years, 10,000 years, 20,000 years) from the sufferings of Purgatory, and which were issued by the Church in exchange for specific good deeds or the donation of money. Luther soon developed his radical theology, which challenged the Church on every level. He believed that to be made right with God, there was nothing the believer needed to do other than accept the grace of God by faith – the doctrine known as ‘solifidianism’ or ‘justification by grace through faith alone’. No amount of works of charity or good deeds or gifts of money could ‘buy’ one’s way into heaven. In addition, Luther believed that the Bible had supreme authority over and above the pronouncements of the Church, and he held to the idea of the ‘priesthood of all believers’: that every believer, graciously assisted by God, could do everything necessary for his or her salvation, without resorting to the panoply of priestly services designed to bridge the gap between God and man. Finally, Luther rejected the idea of Purgatory after death – the place for purging the debt of one’s sins before the Christian could enter Heaven – as a non-Scriptural fiction. Luther believed that Christ had achieved, on the Cross, everything necessary for salvation.

  The consequences of this theological shift were vast. It meant a rejection of prayers to saints and the Virgin Mary, for prayers would instead go direct to God; it meant an end to worship with the aid of relics – those physical remnants of the saints – or the shrines and pilgrimages to house and honour them; it meant a redefinition of the role of the priest, who was no longer needed for confession or absolution. In time, followers of Martin Luther, such as John Calvin, added further layers of interpretation, and by the 1540s, across Europe, there were those – known in England as ‘sacramentarians’ – who would claim that the bread and wine of the Mass did not actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ, nor bore his ‘real presence’ while remaining bread and wine, but instead were just symbols designed for remembrance and thanksgiving (although Luther himself never went that far).

  When Henry first broke with the Church of Rome, the Church of England simply constituted a replacement of the pope’s authority with that of the king. From 1536 onwards, however, Henry started to add a theological dimension to his political reformation. This was far from Lutheran. Henry had hated Luther ever since the German had been very rude about the king in response to Henry’s book Assertio Septum Sacramentorum (The Defence of the Seven Sacraments), which had been a rebuttal of Luther’s works. Yet, by 1536, Henry was no longer asserting that there were seven sacraments (the Mass, baptism, marriage, penance, confirmation, ordination and extreme unction). Instead, in the first doctrinal statement of the Church of England – the Ten Articles, produced in 1536 – Henry affirmed that there were only three sacraments (the Mass, baptism and penance). He defined his idiosyncratic religious position as somewhere between Protestantism and Catholicism: justification was by faith, but faith joined with charitable works, not fa
ith alone; the sacrament of penance – confession to, and absolution by, priests – was essential; and Christ was really present in the bread and wine of the Mass. About Purgatory, he was ambivalent, conceding that it was good to pray for the souls of the dead, but that the place where they were was unknown.3

  One area of theology over which Henry and Luther did agree was that the authority of Scripture was greater than that of the pope. A feature of Henry VIII’s reformation was, therefore, the introduction of the Bible in English rather than in Latin, and in September 1538 the government ordered that an English Bible be put in every parish church in the land.

  The Frontispiece of the Great Bible, issued in 1538 and intended to be placed in each parish church in the country. In the illustration, Henry VIII, looming large beneath a rather squashed God, munificently hands the Word of God (Verbum Dei) to Archbishop Cranmer (left) and Thomas Cromwell (right), to be in turn diffused down the social and ecclesiastical ranks. The populace shout ‘Vivat Rex!’ or the vernacular ‘Long Live the King!’, depending on their social status.

  Another key component of Henry’s reformation, also initiated in 1536, was the eradication of superstition, idolatry and hypocrisy. The Royal Injunctions of 1536 (written chiefly, despite the title, by Thomas Cromwell) restricted the use of images in worship and the veneration of the saints, called for the destruction of shrines and commanded an end to the practice of pilgrimage. The dissolution of the monasteries began from a similar impulse – the elimination of corrupt practices in the church. But after the Pilgrimage of Grace, a major rebellion in the north of England for which Henry held monks largely responsible, the motives for the wholesale destruction of monasticism were more murky. Revenge, avarice and an irrepressible sense that monks’ first allegiance was treasonably to the pope led to more than 800 religious houses being closed in just four years.