The King is Dead Read online

  The first folio of Henry VIII’s last will and testament, from The National Archives. Henry’s will opens with the king’s signature by dry stamp and the words ‘In the name of God and of the glorious and blessed Virgin our Lady Saint Mary and of all the holy company of Heaven’.

  Finally, Henry completes his doctrinal statement by stating that he ‘most humbly and heartily’ commends and bequeaths his soul to God, in the hope of everlasting life, but knows that his body, once his soul has departed, will remain ‘but as a cadaver and so return to the vile matter it was made of… for it is but ashes and to ashes it shall again’ (folio 4).

  This is a thoroughly conservative, theologically orthodox statement of beliefs. Its conception of salvation is far from Lutheran. It is also worth noting what it does not mention. Henry does not call God ‘Father’, as Sir Anthony Denny’s testament of 1549 will do; he does not refer to Christ as ‘Jesus’ as the wills of Sir William Parr’s (1548), Thomas Wriothesley (1551) and Stephen Gardiner (1558) go on to do, nor does he repeat an oft-used phrase praising ‘the infinite mercy’ of God.12 Henry’s notion of God seems not to have been personal or familial, nor indulgent, but rather a hierarchical figure with whom Henry had a contract. He makes no mention of the Holy Ghost or God’s Trinitarian nature, as Denny and Southampton both do, and in this, in comparison to other wills of the period, his theology is closest to Gardiner’s.13 The language of the will leaves us with no sense of a man about to press further into Protestant reform.

  Pressing the tip of his nose to death’s doorway also seems to have given Henry a pragmatic, Pascal’s-wager-style approach to the possibility of Purgatory: it might well not exist, but it was less risky to assume it did. Prayers for the dead might have been omitted from the recent litany, and monasteries may have been closed – but Henry wanted his soul prayed for, just in case. He left lands, worth an annual revenue of £600, to the Dean and Chapter of St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, in exchange for two priests to say daily masses ‘perpetually while the world shall endure’ (folio 7) and four solemn obits (requiem masses to pray for the soul of a deceased person) each year.

  In order that these prayers might be heard more favourably by the Almighty, Henry also decreed that alms worth 1,000 marks (or £666 13s 4d) should be given ‘to the most poor and needy people that may be found’ (folio 6) – although in typical, snooty Henry VIII-style, these poor and needy people were not to be just any riff-raff: ‘common beggars as much as may be avoided’ (folio 6). In exchange for cash, these poor people were also required to pray ‘heartily to God for remission of our offences and the wealth of our soul’. At the quarterly obits, another £10 was to be given to the poor, and, in addition, Henry used his will to found a body of thirteen ‘poor knights’, who were each to be given twelve pence every day – a total of £17 16s a year. He charged his executors with fulfilling these conditions ‘as they will answer before Almighty God at the dreadful Day of Judgement’ (folios 8–9). In short, some philanthropic impulse notwithstanding, Henry committed the equivalent of £1,323 16s a year to pay for his soul’s progress through Purgatory, a sizeable investment that suggests strongly that Henry had doctrinally not moved far from Catholicism.14

  In fact, the only religiously unorthodox aspect of Henry’s life was the way he left it: that simple squeeze of Cranmer’s hand, and not receiving the full rites of extreme unction. Yet, Henry’s own Ten Articles of 1536, while deeming confession and absolution by priests to be necessary, had removed extreme unction from the list of sacraments. Henry didn’t end his life – just as he hadn’t lived it – as a Protestant, but rather in his own special, idiosyncratic religious position: reform coupled with fairly orthodox Catholic theology. This is the position of faith that his will reflects. To the end, Henry did not waver from his course but kept to the doctrine of the English Church that he himself had created – and which he intended his son’s rule to maintain.

  There is a very telling line in Henry’s will: a sentence that goes to the heart of what he tried to achieve with his life. He states: ‘our chief labour and study in this world is to establish him [his son, Edward] in the Crown Imperial of this realm after our decease in such sort as may be pleasing to God, and to the wealth of this realm, and to his own honour and quiet’ (folio 19). Henry’s chief labour in this world had, indeed, been to ensure the smooth transfer of the crown to a son, for the blessing and surety of the realm; it is this mission that explains both Henry’s most radical act – breaking with Rome – and his tabloid fame as the husband of six wives. It was also the primary mission of his will.

  Having established his religious credentials, made provision for his soul and outlined plans for his funeral, Henry dedicated the majority of his last will and testament – fully some 3,550 of 6,110 words, or almost 60 per cent – to plans for the succession. This was pragmatic – Henry offers a workable blueprint in the case of all possible eventualities – but it is hard not to detect the emotion behind these many clauses. The prospect of dying when one’s children are young is an agonizing worry for every parent. For Henry, it also meant that he might fail his own father. In the first half of the sixteenth century, everyone accepted that to ensure a peaceful succession, one of the primary responsibilities of a monarch was to produce at least one adult male heir – that is, a boy of at least 15 years old – and, ideally, a spare, in the case the first should die (as Henry’s older brother, Arthur, had done). Henry had not done this, and while he had been on the throne for over thirty-seven years and seen off the last of the Plantagenet threats, the rule of the Tudors was only two generations old and the accession of a minor had potential to plunge the country back into the instability of the Wars of the Roses. Having married and re-married in the hope of sons, Henry anxiously outlined in his will how, with only one boy-child directly in line to the throne, the country was to be ruled after his death, how his ‘entirely beloved’ councillors and executors (folio 22) were to help manage ‘the sure establishment of the succession’ (folio 9), and what to do if Edward died without an heir. This was the will’s most urgent and important task.

  With the Acts of Succession of 1536 and 1544, which rendered Mary and Elizabeth illegitimate, Henry acquired the statutory right to name his successor in his last will or by letters patent.1 The Act of 1544 had also, in a belt-and-braces approach, laid out a basic line of descent: the crown would go to Prince Edward, and if he were to die without children it would pass to ‘Lady Mary the King’s Highness’ daughter’ and the heirs of her body; and if she were to die without children, to ‘Lady Elizabeth the king’s second daughter’, though even here it reiterated the right of the king to limit this inheritance through any conditions set out in his last will or letters patent.2 So, the will had crucial legal and constitutional significance for the future of the realm.

  The will gives seven stages of succession, each with conditions. The first is the most obvious. It states that:

  …immediately after our departure out of this present life, our said son Edward shall have and enjoy the said Imperial Crown and Realm of England and Ireland, our titles to France, with all dignities, honours, and pre-eminences, prerogatives, authorities and jurisdictions, lands and possessions to the same annexed or belonging to him and his heirs of the body lawfully begotten (folio 10)

  Edward and his lawful, natural children were in direct line to the throne.

  Mary Tudor, painted in 1544 by the artist known as Master John. This beautiful portrait shows Henry VIII’s eldest daughter at the age of twenty-seven. With features very similar to her father’s – the same auburn hair and small mouth – she appears plain to the modern eye, although she is gloriously attired. The portrait names her as ‘Ladi Mari’, as she had been stripped of the title ‘Princess’ by the Act of Succession in 1536.

  But what if Edward were to die without such heirs? Although, in their wills, none of his predecessors had thought to make provision for such contingencies, Henry VIII was not content to let the future find its own
way.3 If Edward died without heirs, he specified that the crown was then to pass, secondly, to ‘the heirs of our body lawfully begotten of the body of our entirely beloved wife Queen Kateryn’ (folio 10). Even in the last month of his life, Henry remained hopeful that Kateryn Parr would yet bear him a son, but his optimism went even further. Failing any heirs by Queen Kateryn, he next appointed his heirs from ‘any other our lawful wife that we shall hereafter marry’ (folio 10). You have to hand it to Henry: this six-times-married, fifty-five-year-old man, whose father had died at fifty-two, and whose grandfathers had perished at around twenty-six and forty, still believed – a month before his death – that there was ever the possibility of marrying again and fathering more children.

  In the unlikely event of these scenarios not being realized, the crown would then pass to ‘our said daughter Mary and the heirs of her body lawfully begotten’ (folio 11), upon condition that her choice of bridegroom was approved by Edward’s Privy Council, in writing. If she died without heirs, the crown was to move on to ‘our said daughter Elizabeth and to the heirs of her body lawfully begotten’ (folio 12), with the same condition about acquiring the approval of the Council to marry. Yet, despite nominating his daughters as his heirs and requiring them to bear lawfully begotten children, they themselves remained in an ambiguous position: still illegitimate. At one point after their names, the words ‘lawfully begotten’ are neatly, but decisively, crossed out (folio 12). Did Henry not foresee the precarious footing on which he put any future rule by his daughters? Did he believe the prospect so unlikely that he did not think to repeal the illegitimacy into which he had cast them, in high dudgeon, in 1536? Probably, Henry’s considered opinion was that his marriages to Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn had genuinely been annulled: it was the only belief that freed him from painful cognitive dissonance. But therefore, it proceeded that Mary and Elizabeth were unredeemably bastards.

  There is a similar mystery over Henry’s sixth succession scenario. If all the above failed – if neither Edward, Kateryn Parr, any future wife, Mary nor Elizabeth bore heirs – then the crown was to pass to ‘the heirs of the body of Lady Frances, our niece, eldest daughter to our late sister the French Queen’ (folio 13). Lady Frances Grey was the daughter of Henry’s younger sister, Mary Tudor (who had indeed been married to Louis XII of France) and Henry’s best friend, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. Frances, in turn, had married Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset, the grandson of Edward IV’s queen, Elizabeth Woodville, and by 1546 had borne him three surviving daughters, the ladies Jane, Katherine and Mary. For some reason, Henry decided to overlook his living niece, Frances, skipping her generation in favour of her offspring. The reason is unclear. Professor Eric Ives suggested that the issue was either something personal to do with Frances, or it may have been a comment on her husband, as it was assumed at this stage that if a woman became queen, her husband would assume the title of king.4 This latter seems most plausible as this high-ranking peer is conspicuous by his absence from either the list of sixteen regency councillors or the twelve assistants named in Henry’s will. Norfolk and Gardiner were not the only ones being disregarded.]

  In fact, nominating Lady Frances’s heirs meant an even greater omission: it ruled out the descendants of Henry VIII’s older sister, Margaret Tudor, whose son James V had been King of Scotland, and whose granddaughter Mary was now Queen of the Scots. By all the normal rules of hereditary and dynastic succession, Mary, Queen of Scots, ought to have had precedence over Lady Jane Grey; but in this instance, Henry exercised his right to determine the succession through his will very deliberately. It is worth noting just how unusual this was: none of his recent namesakes – Henry V, Henry VI nor Henry VII, for example – had attempted anything so grandiose as to interfere, in their wills, with the time-honoured pattern of male primogeniture in royal succession.5

  Illuminated pages from a compilation of prayers belonging to Lady Jane Grey, but derived from various books of devotion and written in Queen Kateryn Parr’s own hand. Commonly known as ‘Lady Jane Grey’s Prayer Book’, it is almost certainly a deathbed gift from Kateryn to Jane in early September 1548. At that time, she was living in Kateryn Parr’s household and became the chief mourner at her funeral.

  After war with the Scots in the early 1540s – including the humiliating defeat of them at Solway Moss, which arguably hastened the death of James V – the accession of the infant Mary to the Scottish throne had triggered Henry VIII’s interest in exercising de facto rule over the whole of the British Isles. To do this, he had attempted to have Mary delivered to England to be brought up and married to Edward. At the Treaty of Greenwich in July 1543, Mary’s mother, Marie de Guise, had promised that although Mary would remain in Scotland until she was ten, she would then marry Edward. However, the treaty was almost immediately all but renounced. In retaliation, Henry struck Mary and her descendants from the line of inheritance to the English throne.6

  Henry had one final provision: if the heirs of Lady Frances did not produce issue, the crown would move to the heirs of Lady Eleanor, second daughter to Henry’s sister, Mary Tudor (folio 13). Wife to Henry Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, Eleanor died in 1547, leaving one daughter, Margaret. This Margaret was the last descendant Henry specified in his will. Then, he gave up his meddling with the future. If none of the above were able to produce heirs, Henry ruled that the imperial crown should go ‘to the next rightful heirs’ (folio 14).

  ~

  All of this, of course, was provision for a seriously worst-case scenario. Henry confidently hoped that his throne would be in the possession of his son Edward, and to help the young king through the potentially tricky years of his inevitable minority Henry also came up with a plan that he hoped would ensure a smooth transition from his reign into a mature, balanced and secure government under Edward VI’s headship. This was his plan for a regency council of sixteen wise, trusted and well-beloved councillors, who would rule England in Edward’s stead.

  The situation in which the throne was inherited by a minor had occurred several times in English history: Edward VI’s was to be the sixth minority kingship in England since 1216. In an age of personal kingship, when a monarch needed to rule as well as reign, a minority was a deeply problematic and unstable time: an invitation to civil war, an incitement to noble tussles over position and precedence, and an opportunity for the unprincipled to seize power.7 Little wonder that the text often cited was Ecclesiastes 10, verses 16–17: ‘Woe to thee, O land, whose king is a boy!’ It was Henry’s hope that a council of sixteen good men and true would steer the young Edward through these precarious years.

  In fact, it had been decided even before Edward’s birth. Henry and Thomas Cromwell had outlined in the Act of Succession of 1536 that if the king died before a future son reached eighteen, then the governance of the realm should be conducted by his natural mother and ‘of such other your councillors and nobles of your realm as Your Highness shall limit and appoint by your last will made in writing signed with your most gracious hand’.8 As Edward’s mother had died in 1537, only the Council nominated by Henry in his last will held this power.

  Edward VI, painted by William Scrots in 1547. This gorgeous picture shows the new king standing in almost precisely the same stance as Henry VIII in the Whitehall Mural (see p. 15), and the viewer is invited to draw visual parallels: Edward is to be seen as a chip off the old block, the reincarnation of the old king. Note the richness of the velvet and ermine worn by Edward, and also the padded doublet, designed to make him look more manly than this boy-king actually was.

  This reading of Henry VIII’s will and intention was challenged in the 1960s by Professor Lacey Baldwin Smith, who argued that we cannot take Henry’s plan at face value. Baldwin Smith thought there was no way that Henry seriously intended to legislate for conciliar rule because it was ‘totally out of tune with prevailing political theory, which was authoritarian to its very core’.9 Either he was ‘a fool or a senile old man’ to propose something so unworka
ble, or, Baldwin Smith argued, Henry did not intend it as a model of rule but as a kind of Damoclean sword – a means of controlling his courtiers by dangling before them the prospect of whether they would be in or out.10 This is highly speculative and there is little evidence to support it. In fact, not all of those named regency councillors and executors even knew before the king’s death that they had been nominated – Bishop Cuthbert Tunstal, for one, only found out afterwards – so it seems unlikely that the composition of the council was used as a weapon of political manipulation.11

  The weight of history also argued for Henry to adopt a conciliar solution to the problem of his son’s minority. After the accessions of the fourteen-year-old Edward III in 1327 and ten-year-old Richard II in 1377, councils had effectively ruled in lieu of the nominal king. For Richard, there had been no official minority – the illusion of the child-king ruling had been maintained, while the Council made all the actual decisions.12 Richard II’s eldest paternal uncle, John of Gaunt, as the most senior royal, played a crucial role in this council – one historian, Gwilym Dodd, has argued that even if he was not technically a regent, in reality he was – but the specified form of government thought appropriate for minority rule was a shared council, from which, at first, John of Gaunt was specifically excluded.13

  More recent historical precedents – Henry VI, who became king at nine months old in 1422, and Edward V, who acceded in 1483 at the age of twelve – had been of single nominated protectors or regents. In the cases of both kings, this had been their uncles, the dukes of Gloucester. Yet Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, only had the title of ‘protector’ in 1422 – it did not carry with it the right to rule, and it was terminated in 1429 when Henry VI was seven years old. Henry VIII would not have thought it a suitable arrangement for his nine-year-old son. Even more compellingly, the transformation of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, into Richard III through the betrayal and deposition of his nephew, the boy-king Edward V in his care, revealed the perils of minority government under a single head and gave a voluble historical warning of the dangers of handing power to a ‘protector’.