The King is Dead Read online

  Sir Richard Rich, later Baron of Leeze, in a sketch after Hans Holbein. Rich (c.1496–1567) was the man whose perjury condemned Sir Thomas More and who racked Anne Askewe with his own hands. The original sketch on which this copy is based was probably completed when Rich was Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, the body that dealt with the funds received from the dissolution of the monasteries – a position that made Rich’s name apt for his own enlarged means. He was named as an assistant councillor in Henry VIII’s last will and testament.

  Wriothesley’s first victim in 1546 was a young gentlewoman from Lincolnshire called Anne Askewe.12 She had first been arrested in 1545, but then released; yet on 24 May 1546 she was summoned before the Privy Council at Greenwich to be examined on her beliefs about the nature of the sacrament of the Mass. According to her own account, the Councillors urged her to ‘confess the sacrament to be flesh, blood and bone’, but she held that ‘the bread is but a remembrance of his [Christ’s] death, or a sacrament of thanksgiving for it’. ‘As for that you call your God,’ she declared, it ‘is but a piece of bread.’ Displaying deft knowledge of Scripture, she backed up her conclusion by quoting from the Book of Daniel that ‘God will be in nothing that is made with the hands of men’, and that Christ did not literally mean the bread was his body, just as he did not mean he was an actual door, a vine, or a lamb, in his other metaphors quoted in John and 1 Corinthians.13 Scriptural she may have been, but the beliefs she was expressing were sacramentarian and, in Henrician England, held to be heretical.

  Askewe was prosecuted for heresy on 28 June, and the next day she was sent to the Tower of London, to be examined by Wriothesley and Sir Richard Rich, formerly Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations. Born in around 1496, the dastardly named Sir Richard Rich was a member of Middle Temple and a lawyer by training. He was also an obnoxious, amoral and ruthless chancer, who climbed high on the bodies of those more principled than himself. His career, including such positions as Commissioner of the Peace, Attorney-General for Wales, and Solicitor-General for England, should have made him a great devotee of the law; but it was on his perjury that Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher, who both opposed Henry’s supremacy over the Church, had gone to their deaths, and, while he owed everything to Cromwell, he had given evidence, too, at Cromwell’s attainder for treason. Wriothesley’s profit from the monastic suppression was negligible compared to Rich’s haul: he filled his pockets as Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations; only the king had benefited more.

  In the Tower, Wriothesley and Rich asked Anne Askewe whether she could name any others belonging to her ‘sect’, specifically questioning her about several women: Catherine Willoughby, the dowager Duchess of Suffolk, who was known for her evangelical views; Anne Calthorpe, Countess of Sussex; Anne Stanhope, Countess of Hertford; Joan Champernowne, the wife of Sir Anthony Denny; and Mabel Clifford, the widow of Sir William Fitzwilliam.14 These queries touched close to the heart of the court: Catherine Willoughby, fourth wife to the late Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, was a close friend of Kateryn Parr; Denny was a Gentleman of the King’s Privy Chamber and a close friend of Henry; and the Countess of Hertford was, of course, wife of the king’s brother-in-law who was conveniently in France. It looks like Wriothesley and Rich were trying to condemn Hertford’s wife in his absence. The other women in the list were ladies of Kateryn Parr’s court.15

  A scene illustrating ‘The order and maner of the burning of Anne Askew’, included in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (also known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs). The contemporary woodcut shows the Lincolnshire gentlewoman Anne Askewe (1521–46) being burnt at the stake, with others, at London’s Smithfield on 16 July 1546, having been condemned for heresy and tortured in the Tower of London.

  To persuade her to talk, Askewe was racked, first by Sir Anthony Knevet, the Lieutenant of the Tower, and then, when he refused to proceed further, by Rich and Wriothesley themselves, in an act of savage criminality.16 ‘Throwing off their gowns, [they] would needs play the tormentors themselves’, racking her till they ‘almost tore her body asunder’, till ‘the strings of her arms and eyes were perished’, till, said Askewe, ‘I was nigh dead’.17 This was all strictly illegal and highly irregular: torture was rare in cases of heresy and was against the law when done without a permit from the Privy Council, in the case of someone already condemned, or when that someone was a woman.18 All these criteria applied to Anne. Nevertheless, she refused to indict anyone, even holding out when the racking was done and Wriothesley forced her to sit her broken body for ‘two long hours reasoning with my lord chancellor upon the bare floor’, promising her that should she change her mind, she would want for nothing.19 When she went to Smithfield for her execution on 16 July 1546, she had to be carried in a chair, because the racking had damaged her so badly that she could not walk. There, before she was burned with two other martyrs, Wriothesley gave her one last opportunity to recant.

  What drove such a desperate and determined pursuit of heresy, and why was Askewe so pressed to incriminate others? Historians have suggested that with evangelicals like the Earl of Hertford out of the way, the conservatives, with Wriothesley at their helm, became intent on rooting out heresy, for both sincerely religious but also more worldly, political purposes. Had Askewe’s spirit been broken as effectively as her body had been, and had she implicated others, she might well have named a number of leading evangelicals at court; and with the evangelicals out in the cold, the conservatives would have ruled the roost.

  There is also evidence that the attack on Askewe was just one part of a calculated campaign. Between Askewe’s racking and her burning, Wriothesley moved against someone much closer to the heart of the court, George Blage.

  Blage was a courtier – a member of the king’s Privy Chamber, a soldier, diplomat, Member of Parliament, evangelical, friend to the poets Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, and a poet himself, albeit an indifferent one. He was a close enough companion of the king to have earned the honour of a derogatory nickname – Henry called him ‘my pig’ – and yet, boldly in July 1546, Wriothesley directly targeted Blage.

  The evidence used against him was that in May Blage had been heard to mock the Mass by posing the question of what to do if the bread of the Mass were eaten by a mouse, to which he had concluded ‘that in his opinion it were well done that the mouse were taken and put in the pix’ – the pix being the receptacle containing the consecrated bread, to be held up for adoration.20 These were heretical, sacramentarian beliefs, and on this evidence Wriothesley had Blage arrested on 11 July and, within 24 hours, convicted by a jury and condemned to death by fire.

  It was an extraordinary miscalculation on Wriothesley’s part. Henry was indeed fundamentally opposed to any doctrine that denied the real presence of Christ in the bread and the wine. In 1538, dressed in the white of theological purity, the king had presided in person over the trial of a sacramentarian heretic, John Lambert, at Hampton Court, and Lambert had perished in the flames. The only other person of any standing who espoused these beliefs and escaped the fire in the summer of 1546 was the former bishop, Nicholas Shaxton, who formally recanted.21 Such evidence suggests, therefore, how fond and furious Henry must have been to intervene to save Blage: the fondness for Blage was coupled with fury at the lord chancellor attempting to reach into the king’s own Privy Chamber and pluck out from it a man whom Henry considered to be a good friend as well as a personal servant. As soon as the news of Blage’s arrest made it to him, Henry instantly commanded Wriothesley to draw up a pardon; he would not see his pig roasted.22 The incident reveals the audacity of conservative machinations at court, but also, importantly, the limits on any attempt to force Henry to do anything. The story of the creation of Henry VIII’s last will cannot be understood without remembering this characteristic intransigence of the king.

  This episode makes the other target of the conservatives – an attempt at an even greater prize than Blage – more incredible. At some point over these
months, they tried to indict the queen, Kateryn Parr, for heresy.23

  Hampton Court, depicted in a pen-and-ink drawing (1556) by Anthonis van den Wyngaerde. His sketch, completed nearly a decade after Henry VIII’s death, shows the scale of the building work and extensions at Hampton Court in the 1530s. In ten years, following the ‘gift’ of the palace to the king by Cardinal Wolsey, Henry spent the extraordinary sum of around £60,000 on adding a new Great Hall, apartments, kitchens and tennis courts. It was in Hampton Court that his heir, Edward, was born.

  John Foxe tells us that Kateryn, an evangelical, was much given to reading and studying the Bible with the ladies of her privy chamber.24 Furthermore, she took to debating religion with the king, very frankly, and urging him to further reformation of the Church. This he bore well, and even, for a time, seemed to enjoy. But on one occasion perhaps, Foxe suggests, sickly and pained by his leg, Henry grumbled at Kateryn’s temerity after she had left, muttering sarcastically: ‘a good hearing it is, when women become such clerks; and a thing much to my comfort, to come in mine old days to be taught by my wife’.

  Henry was overheard by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. A trained lawyer, former ambassador, and brilliant but self-important, stubborn and argumentative cleric, Gardiner opposed Kateryn’s religious views, and the opportunity seemed too good to miss. Gardiner soothed the king with the kind of ostensibly reassuring phrases that in reality alarm and disconcert. He had soon ‘whetted the king both to anger and displeasure towards the queen’.25 Stirred to distrust, Henry allowed Kateryn to be investigated: her rooms were searched for forbidden books, her ladies were questioned, and articles against her were drawn up. It looked as if the queen’s life might be on the line.

  Given Henry VIII’s record, we might be astonished that the famous six-wives ditty ends as it does: ‘Divorced, beheaded, died / Divorced, beheaded, survived’. Kateryn’s survival seems to have been wrought by the compassion of one or two of individuals who tipped her off, and by her own quick thinking. Foxe tells us one rather improbable story about the damning articles falling from the pockets of one of Henry’s councillors, and their being found by ‘some godly person’ and taken to the queen. More convincingly, he also relates that Henry recounted the affair to one of his physicians – either Dr Thomas Wendy or Dr George Owen, though Foxe thinks the former more likely – who warned the queen of her precarious position.26

  Either way, Kateryn was in the know and the next night, when she visited the king, the conversation turned to religion. When Henry sought her opinion, she delivered a speech of submission so artful and persuasive that it is rivalled only by Katherina’s morally troubling speech in the final act of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew for totality of capitulation.27 Kateryn spoke of a woman’s entire inferiority and subjection to man, who was her head, by whom she was to be governed, commanded and directed, and questioned how her ‘only anchor, supreme head and governor here in earth, next unto God’ could seek the judgment of ‘a silly poor woman’.28 ‘Not so… you are become a doctor, Kate to instruct us,’ Henry retorted, to which Kateryn explained that she had only ever been bold with him to ‘minister talk’, to distract his mind from the pain of his injury, and to profit from the king’s learning, and that, in truth, she believed it ‘very unseemly, and preposterous’ for a woman to purport to instruct her ‘lord and husband’. As often with Foxe, we do not know if these words are an invented speech or based on an eyewitness report; but whatever she said was enough to convince Henry. He took her in his arms, called her ‘sweetheart’ and declared that they were perfect friends again.

  The next day, as the king and queen, with the queen’s ladies, were walking in the gardens, Wriothesley appeared with forty guards intending to arrest Kateryn and her womenfolk. The lord chancellor knelt before Henry and in this deferential pose spoke softly to the king. From a distance, the only words of Henry’s heated response that could be heard were ‘Knave! Arrant knave! Beast! Fool!’, and Wriothesley was dismissed from the royal presence.29 Kateryn had passed her test – or, as Foxe put it, she had ‘escaped the dangerous snares of her bloody and cruel enemies’.30

  The only surviving account of this whole incident comes from John Foxe, and the lack of contemporary evidence to corroborate it has led some historians to doubt its veracity.31 Certain details, however, make it seem credible: the fact that it did not appear in Foxe’s first edition of 1563 but only later, as if he had learnt of it from a witness; his lack of certainty about the identity of the doctor; the words unheard in Henry’s dressing-down of Wriothesley; and the fact that Foxe cites his source as being ‘certain of [Kateryn’s] ladies and gentlewomen, being yet alive’.32 What is less plausible is that the mastermind behind the plot was Stephen Gardiner. The bishop was Foxe’s ‘usual suspect’, and while Gardiner may have been involved, Wriothesley seems to have played a major role, as he had done in the pursuit of Askewe and Blage.33 It was he, as lord chancellor, who could have drawn up articles against Kateryn; he who came to carry out the gratifying seizure. Perhaps the initiative also lay, rather, with him.

  How can we interpret this series of attacks? In the seventeenth century, Gilbert Burnet was probably right to blame Henry’s willingness to have his wife investigated on his growing ‘distempers’ and ‘peevishness’ because of his physical condition.34 The events also obviously constituted a deliberate and dangerous campaign by the conservatives – and Wriothesley’s name is the one that re-appears – to undermine and remove the evangelicals at court. Crucially, however, the events also demonstrate that even in his illness, Henry could not be manipulated to do what he did not wish to do. That Henry’s stubbornness transcended even his physical deterioration is an important clue to understanding the true nature of his last will and testament. Henry permitted the investigations of Askewe and Queen Kateryn because of his profound commitment to the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Mass, and because of a similarly fervent belief in his position as Supreme Head of the Church, in relation to which Gardiner had persuaded him that his wife had failed him.

  The key to Henry’s frame of mind is in his response to Kateryn after her deft act of surrender. Once Kateryn had yielded to him, he kissed her and said that ‘it did him more good at that time to hear those words of her own mouth, than if he had heard present news of a hundred thousand pounds of money fallen unto him’. And it no doubt did. Henry saw disagreement with his religious vision as treason. By 1546, he was used to being – indeed, almost expected to be – betrayed, making him hypersensitive to slights and any whiff of treachery. Kateryn’s submission probably acted as a real, if temporary, balm to this great wound of betrayal that he bore.

  Those who felt the force of the king’s ire at their perceived perfidy later in the year would not be granted a similar opportunity to tame the lion.

  On 23 August 1546, Henry VIII, his councillors and 2,000 men on horseback rode out to receive a French party of 200 gentlemen led by Claude d’Annebaut, the Admiral of France. The visitors were ushered into Hampton Court to ratify the peace that had recently been reached between the two countries. On the next day, the king, dressed in rich apparel, swore to uphold the terms of the peace and signed a treaty with d’Annebaut in the royal chapel, and then the real festivities commenced: a wondrous round of great banquets, elaborate entertainments and long days of hunting.1 It was the last great celebration of Henry’s reign.

  Among those receiving the French Admiral, at Henry’s right hand, were Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford and Lord Great Chamberlain of England, and his fellow warmonger John Dudley, Lord Lisle and High Admiral of England. They had returned to court in early August 1546, having successfully reached a state of Anglo-French amity, and their presence had an immediate impact on domestic politics: they put an end to the fumbled conservative attempts to pluck evangelicals from around the Crown.2 As the Imperial ambassador mourned in December, ‘four or five months ago, great enquiries and prosecutions were carried out against the heretics and sacramentarians b
ut they have now ceased, since the Earl of Hertford and the Lord Admiral have resided at court’.3

  Events between the return of Hertford and Lisle and Henry VIII’s death would have a direct bearing on the content, conditions and consequences of the king’s will. But what really happened in these last crucial months? The circumstances of the creation of Henry’s last will – and its long-lasting ramifications for the reign of Edward VI and beyond – are mysterious. To make sense of the critical, even fatal, slips from power and apparent jostling for position that characterize the ebb tide of the reign, some historians have proposed that the current shifted in favour of the evangelicals at court, and that, with this advantage, they deliberately and murderously conspired through a series of calculated machinations to seize control of the throne after Henry’s death.4

  This conspiracy theory requires that there existed a distinct evangelical faction, deadly opposed to those who sought to limit religious reform, and which had a growing and ultimately decisive influence over the king so that its purported leaders – Hertford, Lisle and Sir William Paget – could steer him, as the Imperial ambassador feared, ‘according to their fancy’.5 This view also requires that Henry had deteriorated to such an extent that he could be manoeuvred into destroying those he had previously valued, against his better judgment; that he could be manipulated into creating conditions that were favourable to the reformers, and that, in the end, his last will and testament could be altered as he lay dying.