The King is Dead Read online

  It was a reflection of Henry’s particular religious positioning that at Smithfield, in July 1540, he could order the simultaneous hanging, drawing and quartering of three Roman Catholics – for their commitment to the pope – and the burning at the stake of three ‘heretics’, or reformers, for their belief in the principle of justification by faith through grace alone. When Henry amended his bishops’ writings about theology in the years after Jane Seymour’s death, he adjusted them to fit a theological worldview that was peculiarly his own.

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  When Henry did marry again, in 1540, it was an absolute fiasco, mitigated only by the fact that the woman in question, Anne of Cleves, left their abortive union after just a few months with her head intact and with a fair clutch of houses. Everyone else may have thought she was ‘womanly’ and ‘goodly’, but Henry found her ‘nothing as fair as she hath been reported’ and could not bring himself to consummate their marriage. His later tight-lipped report was that when he had felt her breasts and stomach, which he thought unmaidenly, he ‘had neither will nor courage to proceed any further in other matters’.4

  That he had been required to marry her at all he blamed on his first minister, Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell had been at the heart of Henry’s government for six years, operating as his master’s eyes, ears, hands and conscience. That did not preclude getting those hands dirty from time to time. The break with Rome, the tricky foreign relations thereafter, the execution of Anne Boleyn, the reform of the Church, the dissolution of the monasteries – all had been Cromwell’s doing, on Henry’s command. Yet in 1540, the Cleves affair was the catalyst for Cromwell’s destruction, and all his pleading was to no avail. He wrote an understandably impassioned, but fruitless, letter to the king from the Tower of London, signing off ‘with the quaking hand, and most sorrowful heart, of your most sorrowful subject, and most humble servant, and prisoner… I cry mercy, mercy, mercy’.5

  Cromwell’s execution changed the nature of England’s politics. After his death, no single leading minister rose up to replace him. Instead, from August 1540, the King’s Privy Council – officially, ‘the King’s Most Honourable Council Attendant upon his Highness’ Person’ – was formally established as England’s primary organ of government. Functioning rather like an executive board, its original nineteen members, appointed by the king, worked collectively, making decisions about issues of governance large and small. As a council, they had full executive authority, advising the king, administering the realm, managing national defence, enforcing law and order, regulating economic affairs, investigating crime, managing Parliament, and issuing proclamations in the king’s name. Unsurprisingly, such extensive powers of government took time to administer, and the Council met almost every day, usually at court, moving with the king from palace to palace – though very few members attended every meeting.

  If the king’s six-month marriage to Anne of Cleves had proved Cromwell’s undoing, it had at least yielded one apparent benefit for Henry. The king had identified a girl far more to his liking. In classic style, she was a maid of honour to his current queen, just as Jane had been to Anne Boleyn, and Anne to Katherine of Aragon. Distastefully, Henry married his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, on the same day that Cromwell was beheaded.

  Catherine’s date of birth is unknown, but we can calculate that she was between sixteen and twenty-four years old, to his forty-nine years. For eighteen months, her youth rejuvenated him. In the end, however, his marriage to Catherine came at great emotional cost to him, and an even greater cost to her. The day after he had ordered public prayers to celebrate his happiness, Henry’s archbishop alerted him to Catherine’s pre-marital indiscretions and extra-marital infidelities. A letter of 12 November 1541 from the Privy Council to Sir William Paget, then resident ambassador in France, describes how Henry, on discussing the matter with them, was speechless with shock and emotion before releasing ‘plenty of tears’.6 For her betrayal, Catherine was rewarded with a trip down the Thames, passing under the tarred heads of her lovers on London Bridge to a temporary stay in the Tower, before, on 13 February 1542, she followed them to the block.

  A sketch of Henry VIII, made in 1540, possibly by Holbein’s assistants. Dating from seven years before the king’s death, the drawing shows the monarch’s heavyset face, his eyes appearing to glare malignantly and fixedly at the spectator.

  Kateryn Parr as Queen of England, painted c.1545 by Master John. Far from the dowdy nursemaid of legend, Kateryn Parr (1512–48) – Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife – was an attractive, sartorially adventurous and graceful woman, who made an intelligent and mature companion for Henry’s last years. Her final, and fourth, marriage was to Henry’s brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Seymour, in 1547, and she died, following her first childbirth, in September 1548.

  Ever the optimist, Henry married again fifteen months later. This time his bride wasn’t an inconstant and giddy girl, but a mature, intelligent and graceful woman of thirty-three. According to his later lord chancellor, Sir Thomas Wriothesley, Henry never had ‘a wife more agreeable to his heart’ than Kateryn Parr.7 Certainly, the twice-widowed Kateryn brought experience and wisdom to her queenship, and she relished the opportunity to patronize musicians, artists, playwrights and churchmen, as well as producing her own scholarship: Kateryn was both the first Queen of England to publish her own book and the first English woman to publish a work of prose under her own name in the sixteenth century. Although she had never had children herself, she had been a step-mother already and knew how to provide maternal care for the motherless young Edward and Elizabeth, and even to their older sibling, Mary. Kateryn was an attractive, steady and level-headed choice for Henry’s latter years.

  It is unlikely that he had a similar appeal to her. Before his eye had alighted on her – when she was serving as one of Lady Mary’s maids of honour – she had been minded to marry the king’s brother-in-law, the handsome Sir Thomas Seymour, and indeed the pair finally wed very soon after Henry VIII’s death. But back in 1543, although her husband may have been a king who remained a powerful and decisive force in the governance of the realm, there was no disguising that Henry was becoming aged and grossly fat. The emotional devastations of his life, and the ongoing physical debilitation of his injury, were taking their toll. In 1540, Henry had been given a beautifully illustrated Psalter; at some point in the following years, beside Psalm 37.25, which reads ‘I have been young and now am old’, Henry inscribed in the margin ‘dolens dictum’, ‘a grievous saying’.8

  Over the next couple of years, Henry VIII’s decision to go to war with both Scotland and France, and especially his insistence on leading troops against the French himself, can be understood to be as much acts of defying age as driven by foreign policy. Henry had last sought military glory in France in his early twenties; in other words, it was thirty-one years since he had sported armour in the field – armour that needed now to be enlarged quite dramatically.9 The war against France had as its ambitious aim the taking of Paris in alliance with Emperor Charles V. Henry directed the campaign first against Boulogne, besieging the town and forcing a surrender, so that he could ride through its gates on 18 September 1544 as a conquering hero, Henry V reborn, before returning in triumph to England and leaving his generals in the field to continue the fight.

  It was a glorious moment for Henry’s ego. Yet, his true sense of his own mortality can be charted by the fact that before his French adventure, and unlike in 1513, he drew up a will – this version does not appear to have survived – and had a new Act of Succession passed by Parliament, which confirmed the legal status of that will. The preamble to the Act states that the grounds for its creation were the king’s intentions to ‘make a voyage royal in his Majesty’s most royal Person into the Realm of France, against his ancient enemy the French king’, which had caused him ‘prudently and wisely’ to ‘consider… and call… to his remembrance how this realm standeth at the present time in the case of succession’.10 He might have been playing the p
art of an immortal warrior, but he could nonetheless spy death on the horizon. In his absence from England, he appointed Queen Kateryn to rule as regent-general, and he nominated a small regency council to provide counsel for her.

  The religious state of the realm also continued to vex Henry. In 1543, Parliament passed the Act for the Advancement of True Religion, which was primarily a proclamation against heretical books, but which also restricted the reading of the English Bible to nobility, gentry and merchants, barring it specifically from all ‘women, artificers, apprenticers, journeymen, servingmen under the influence of yeomen, husbandmen and labourers’ – in short, everyone of a lowly social standing. This was only five years after the command that a Bible in English should be placed in every parish church in the land.11

  The page from Henry VIII’s Psalter (1540–1), in which, next to Psalm 37.25 – ‘I have been young and now am old’ – is the marginal inscription in Henry’s handwriting: dolens dictum – ‘a grievous saying’.

  Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex. This image of Cromwell (1485–1540) is attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger, although, if indeed it is by Holbein rather than his workshop, it is not the artist’s finest work. (A former conservator at New York’s Frick Collection, William Suhr, wrote in 1964 that it ‘does not show the master’s hand’.) Nevertheless, it is a powerful image of Cromwell early in his career: he is named as the ‘Master of our Jewel House’, dating the painting to c.1532–3. Cromwell would rise to be Henry VIII’s chief minister, and he became the instigator of Henry’s English Reformation before his execution in 1540.

  Henry made the reason for this apparent volte-face in policy clear in an unusual and heartfelt speech to Parliament at Christmas 1545, a speech so moving that Sir William Petre (pronounced ‘Peter’), one of his new privy secretaries, wrote to Paget that to hear Henry speak thus was ‘such a joy and marvellous comfort as I reckon this day of the happiest of my life’. It grieved him, Henry said, that ‘that most precious jewel, the word of God, is disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern’. He had hoped that reading the Bible in English would promote obedience; instead it had produced irreverence and dissension. He bemoaned the religious divisions that had sprung up in the country, complaining about those ‘too stiff in their old mumpsimus’ – too unwilling to change from the mumbled repetition of Roman Catholic practices – and others ‘too busy and curious in their new sumpsimus’ – too quick to embrace the novelties of Reformed thought emerging from the Continent. Henry reduced himself to tears, pleading for unity and charity among his subjects. Few listening, according to Petre, could avoid weeping too.12

  Cry they might have done, but few were really ready to follow his exhortations. The last year of Henry’s life was to be marked by discord that came close to the throne.

  What would turn out to be the last year of Henry VIII’s life was a fascinating, tumultuous period of conflict and contention, as those around the throne jostled for power. The ultimate goal was control of the government after the ageing king died. The trouble was, of course, that no one knew quite when that would happen. With the benefit of hindsight, however, we have the privilege of knowing precisely when death would come to call on Henry VIII, and so can see exactly how the events of this last year are pivotal to understanding the context in which Henry drew up his last will and testament, in December 1546.

  Much of the storm that would break as Henry drew up his will started to brew earlier in the year. One catalyst was the English defeat by the French at the Battle of St Etienne in January 1546, for which responsibility lay with Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey.

  Surrey had been born into the one of the most important and powerful noble families in Tudor England.1 He was the eldest son of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, while on his mother’s side he was descended from the dukes of Buckingham, and two of his cousins (Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard) had been Henry VIII’s queens. Probably born in 1517, and named after his king, Surrey had grown up with Henry VIII’s illegitimate son at Windsor Castle and at the court of the French king, Francis I, in 1533; in short, he had been reared as a prince. He had also been made a Knight of the Garter at the age of twenty-four. He was a poet of extraordinary power, who invented new verse forms in English, both blank verse and the ‘Shakespearian’ sonnet. He was, though, vainglorious, reckless and conceited. For April 1543, the Acts of the Privy Council include the note that the Earl of Surrey and a small gang had been sent to Fleet Prison for eating meat in Lent and in ‘a lewd and unseemly manner… walking in the night about the streets and breaking with stonebows of certain windows’.2 The historian W.K. Jordan described him very aptly as an ‘infinitely gifted juvenile delinquent’.3 Nevertheless, his night-time exploits had not prevented the recognition of his talent, which is why, at the age of just twenty-eight, in August 1545, Surrey had been made Henry VIII’s commander-in-chief of the armed forces in France.

  Yet, whether from lack of judgment or sheer misfortune, in January 1546 this youthful leader met disaster. At St Etienne, under his command, the defeated English suffered casualties of between 200 and 1,000 men, and there was no doubting that many of those slain were the highest-ranking military personnel and the cream of English society.

  One commentator, the Welsh soldier Elis Gruffydd, blamed the thrashing on Surrey’s pride and arrogance. What is not in doubt is Surrey’s disgrace. When defeat looked unavoidable, he fled the field of battle, and in his letter to the king blamed the failure not on the leaders but on ‘a humour that sometime reigneth in English men’.4 It is no wonder that he was soon stripped of his position and recalled home.

  Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in a portrait from 1546, attributed to William Scrots. Born in 1517, Surrey was the son of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. He is shown here wearing an ostentatious doublet and hose, necklace and Garter. The portrait allegorically depicts Surrey’s royal descent from Edward the Confessor and Edward III (implied in his unwise heraldic quartering of the royal arms of Edward the Confessor with his own). Surrey was commander-in-chief of Henry VIII’s forces in France until 1546, but he was executed for high treason on 19 January 1547.

  In Surrey’s place was put Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, who had recently known great military success in Scotland. This substitution bred resentment in the thwarted, arrogant Surrey. According to the seventeenth-century historian Gilbert Burnet, at Hertford’s advancement Surrey ‘let fall some words of high resentment and bitter contempt, which not long after wrought his ruin’; another seventeenth-century writer, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, mused that Surrey’s behaviour ‘did so little satisfy the king (who loved no noise but of victory) that he ever after disaffected him; for which cause also he was shortly removed’.5 They were right: here Surrey sowed the seeds of his destruction, above all by disappointing his king. Henry would brook no failure. The Battle of St Etienne would claim its final victim in the vital last weeks of Henry VIII’s reign.

  Meanwhile, Hertford’s appointment in Surrey’s place as Lieutenant-General in France removed the former from the centre of power for a crucial season over the spring and summer of 1546. Hertford, aged in his mid-forties, was the king’s brother-in-law by virtue of being the older brother of Jane Seymour. He was a member of Henry’s Privy Council and a brilliant soldier. He was also a man who had a profound sense of his own self-importance, and whose audacity could look like arrogance and pride to his enemies. Reading Hertford’s letters, one is struck by his ‘bold and rude writing’: Hertford’s handwriting and spelling were rather rudimentary, but ‘bold and rude’ also sums up his peculiar combination of gumption and ill-temper.6 Imperial Ambassador François Van der Delft thought him ‘a dry, sour, opinionated man’.7

  The Catholic Van der Delft had good reason, anyway, to dislike Hertford. Although Hertford kept his cards close to his chest, it is evident that he was an ‘evangelical’ – a proto-Protestant. Evangelicals believed in justification by faith alone (as Luther did) – that salvation could be achieved simply thro
ugh believing in God’s grace and the sufficiency of Christ’s death on the Cross to wipe away sin. They also held that ultimate authority lay with the Bible, and that the Church needed to be reformed in line with the Scriptures, including by the elimination of images in worship (which evangelicals considered idolatrous) and the removal of practices such as the veneration of saints and pilgrimages to honour relics. Many at Henry VIII’s court were opposed to such beliefs.

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  Hertford’s absence seems to have emboldened those of another religious complexion to attempt to seize control of the court in mid-1546. These were the ‘conservatives’, who inclined towards retaining many of the beliefs and practices of the Catholic Church despite having ditched the pope. The key conservative and the chief instigator of a series of high-profile attacks on suspected heretics in the summer of 1546 was Henry’s lord chancellor, Sir Thomas Wriothesley.

  Wriothesley (pronounced ‘Rye-zlee’) was forty-one years old in 1546 and had been lord chancellor for two years. Born into a family of heralds, he had originally been Thomas Cromwell’s man, profiting – as so many of the gentry and nobility had done – from the dissolution of the monasteries.8 When Cromwell fell, however, Wriothesley continued his own ascent, and in 1540 he had been made one of the king’s principal secretaries, before being promoted to the highest office in the land: that of lord chancellor.

  Sir Thomas Wriothesley was both astute and dogged. His contemporary, Richard Morison, noted that he was ‘an earnest follower of whatsoever he took in hand, and did very seldom miss where either wit or travail were able to bring his purpose to pass’.9 Or perhaps George Blage, who had his own reasons to judge Wriothesley harshly, was more accurate when he declared that Wriothesley had ‘crept full high’ only ‘by false deceit, by craft and subtle ways’.10 The judgment of recent historians has inclined more to the latter view. Professor Peter Marshall concluded that ‘broken loyalties and betrayals were the stepping-stones of Wriothesley’s career’.11 The events of 1546 would suggest that he was – though zealous, hardworking and possessed of Henry’s trust – rather nasty.