Great Harry

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  According to his intimate associate Paolo Giovio, the chief aim of Clement's response was delay. The longer he waited to make a definite judgment, the more the two parties in the dispute would be compelled to treat him with deference.^^ To be sure, fear of further imperial reprisals broke in on this strategy from time to time. Yet that fear also worked to Henry's advantage, driving the pope into the arms of his erstwhile English allies and turning him against the cause of Charles V and his aunt. Pulled by these conflicting forces, Clement acted as both his temperament and his strategy dictated: he vacillated. As he waited for a decisive judgment Henry soothed his impatience by writing more and more impassioned letters to Anne.

  Through the fall and winter of 1527-28 he wrote her time after time, pouring into his letters all the ardor, all the longing, all the exasperation and insecurity of a lover. He wrote in French and in English, at length and in brief. He wrote of the monumental upheaval that loving her had worked

  in him—**my great folly," he called it—and of his fear that, having committed his heart to her, she might after all turn away in indifference. Hunting, he sent her his trophies—"a hart for Henry," a buck "killed my hand late yesternight," and other game. Along with them he sent messages of how he missed her, and wished she and not her brother George were there to ride beside him through the forests. He suffered such heartfelt pain at her absence that "neither tongue nor pen can express the hurt," he wrote; his only compensation was the thrill of anticipating their long-awaited meeting, which he "more desired than any earthly thing." "For what joy in this world," he added, "can be greater than to have the company of her who is the most dearly loved, knowing likewise that she by her choice holds the same, the thought of which greatly delights me."^^

  These were neither the foolishly effusive letters of a man besotted by love nor the purple outpourings of a self-conscious stylist. They had all the fresh, vigorous openness of Henry's speech and manner; they were sincere and engaging, and they would have won any woman's heart.

  In February the letters began to take on a new tone. "Darling," Henry wrote excitedly, "you and I shall [soon] have our desired end, which should be more to my heart's ease, and more quietness to my mind, than any other thing in the world."^^ New envoys were being dispatched to Italy, two young lawyers Edward Foxe and Stephen Gardiner, men with the ambitious toughness to sweep the negotiations with Clement VII through to a conclusion. Gardiner was particularly able, quick-witted and adroit in argument and with the subtlety to throw an opponent off guard and maneuver him in unexpected directions. Together the two negotiators were under orders to convince the pope to agree in advance to support the judgment of a legatine court in England, to be conducted jointly by Cardinal Wolsey and the erudite canonist Cardinal Campeggio. Foxe would bring the written arguments back to England right away; Gardiner would remain to accompany Campeggio when he made his journey later in the year.

  Anticipating his envoys' success Henry wrote to the pope, thanking him in advance for his support in the nullity suit. He and all his kingdom would be eternally bound to Clement for what he was doing, the king wrote; he was sure there would be no objection to the strategy Gardiner and Foxe would put forward.^^ As if in celebration of a final settlement Henry arranged for a vast impromptu picnic at Windsor. It was held in the lodge of the little hunting park adjoining the castle, a site so ill equipped for large-scale entertainments that all the kitchen equipment had to be brought in by water and the trestles and tables borrowed from the town nearby. The dozens of plovers, partridges, larks and rabbits for the diners came from the surrounding fields, the beef, bacon and oxen from, the local purveyors. The park keeper's wife supplied the cream.^^

  The following weeks were happy ones for Henry, with his sweetheart beside him and good news about their future apparently in the offing. Anne made herself at home at Windsor, joining the king when he rode out hawking or walked in the park in the afternoons, and dining in the evenings with Thomas Hennage, a servant of Wolsey's. Henry and his

  love had little to occupy themselves but each other. There were few household servants in residence, and fewer courtiers; beyond attending to his master's correspondence Hennage had little to do but to convey to Wolsey Anne's requests for dinner—carps, shrimps, and other delicacies.

  Anne's status was changing. She had not yet displaced Katherine— Henry still acknowledged Katherine's rank by conducting visitors to court to greet his wife and daughter—but she had risen greatly in influence. The most conspicuous sign of that influence was her new relationship to Wolsey. Anne had come a long way since the day the cardinal had separated her from Henry Percy and sent her in disgrace to Hever Castle. Then he had commanded her; now she commanded him, at least in small matters, and Wolsey was quick to shift his ground.

  Their relative places in the king's esteem had become clear on Wolsey's return from France. He had come to Richmond, bringing all the news of his embassy and of the rich gifts he had received from King Francis—a golden chalice and paten, gold silk altar cloths, tapestries worth thirty thousand ducats. As usual he sent a message to the king asking to be received, expecting a joyous private welcome from his master. This time, though, Anne was waiting along with Henry, and she had the insolence to answer on the king's behalf. She cut short the cardinal's opportunity for a private audience, and peremptorily summoned him. "Where else is the cardinal to come?" she said to the servant who approached her. "Tell him that he may come here, where the king is."^^

  When Gardiner and Foxe reached Orvieto they found Pope Clement in a state of appalling wretchedness. He had liberated himself from captivity only to enthrone himself amid squalor. Surrounded by his hungry and ill-clad retainers he was shut up in the foul-smelling episcopal palace, whose "naked and unhanged" chambers stood open to the weather where the roof had fallen in. A shabby retinue of some thirty officials and hangers-on made up the papal court in exile, waiting aimlessly for their sorry master to gain possession of himself amid his calamities. In their midst he paced up and down, sighing and wiping his eyes and bemoaning his fate. The Spaniards were practically at his doorstep; he was, he said, "in the power of the dogs."^^

  The English envoys had little regard for Clement's misery. They were there to persuade, argue and, if need be, threaten him into cooperation. First, though, they had to disabuse him of a dangerous misapprehension: that the nullity suit was prompted solely by Henry's "vain affection and undue love" for Anne Boleyn. He had heard, Clement told Gardiner and Foxe, that the English king wanted his divorce for "private reasons" only, and that the woman he loved was far below him not only in rank but in virtue. Rumor had gone even further. It was said at the papal court that Anne was pregnant, and that Henry urgently wanted to make her child his heir.^** On the contrary, the Englishmen assured him, Anne was a model of chastity (though assuredly "apt to procreate children"), impressing all who saw her with "the purity of her life, her constant virginity, her maidenly and womanly pudicity, her soberness, her chasteness, meekness, humility, wisdom, descent of right noble and high thorough regal

  blood," and so on. The pope need have no doubt that of all the women in England, Anne was the fittest to become queen.

  As for Katherine, she would be treated with all the honor and love due to a sister, '*with all manner of kindness." (Wolsey had convinced Henry to put the bigamy proposal aside.) It would be best for her to withdraw her opposition to the king's suit and acknowledge the invalidity of her marriage; if she did, Henry would treat her more liberally. Gardiner and Foxe asked Clement and his cardinals to write to Katherine and urge her compliance, then turned to the more weighty matter of the divorce itself.

  The lawyers argued Henry's case from all sides, bringing to bear every point they had found in theology and the canon law. Clement listened attentively, evidently grasping all that they had to say yet hesitating to pronounce on its merit. "He sees all that is spoken better and sooner than any other," Gardiner remarked, "but no man is so slow to give an answer." The pope was in fact at
a disadvantage, as he had little or no knowledge of canon law. Yet his ignorance served his purpose, in allowing him an excuse to postpone judgment. He needed the advice of his most trusted councilors, he said; to act without it would be to risk their dissent from his opinion later. The envoys pressed their arguments; the pope shook his head and said there was nothing he could do for the present. They "spoke roundly" to him, but he only sighed repeatedly and wiped his eyes.

  Clearly they had reached an impasse. Only threats remained. Before leaving England Wolsey had instructed Gardiner and Foxe to tell the pope that, if Henry got no satisfaction at the papal court, he would find other means of satisfying his conscience and ridding himself of his present wife. They said this now, adding that, should he look for a judgment elsewhere, the king might be forced to "live out of the laws of holy church."

  Syck, sicke and tot owe sick and sicke and like to die, the sikest nyghte that ever I abode, good lord have mercy on me

  It was in April that the sweating sickness began to break out once again in London. Without warning, men and women were struck down where they stood, bent double by gripping intestinal pains and throbbing headaches, violent chills and dizziness, then a stinking sweat and a fever so high it burned them to the point of collapse. Death came within hours; those who lived through their agony for an entire day had good hope of survival.

  Just before the physical symptoms appeared the sufferers experienced a curious mental disorientation—a sense of apprehension and fear, a foreboding of pain and death. At least one contemporary, the royal secretary Brian Tuke, believed this fear to be a sort of psychological contaminant which terrorized the healthy into illness. Tuke himself com-batted the disease directly by working himself into a natural sweat each night, but others who withdrew in panic fell victim to their fearful imaginations. Carried away mentally by the "disposition of the time," Tuke wrote, they brooded on the inevitability of infection even as they struggled to avoid it. Every rumor of a renewed outbreak sent them into agitated alarm. "One rumor causes a thousand cases of sweat," Tuke insisted. "Thousands have it from fear who need not else sweat, especially if they observe good diet."^

  It was precisely this link between fear of the sweat and the onsetting symptom of the disease that made the epidemic so frightening. Panicked citizens could not distinguish between their dread of infection and the infection itself, and the more they shut themselves away in fainthearted isolation the more surely illness seemed to come. By one estimate, forty thousand contracted the sweating sickness in London alone in the early weeks of its appearance. Of these many thousands died, while those who recovered remained weak and were often burdened with secondary infections. The disease had scoured England three times before—most recently in 1517 —yet this visitation was the most severe by far. It was as if each fresh outbreak was a stronger sign that the English were at odds with God and were being punished in consequence. At root, the mass apprehension that unmanned Londoners in the spring of 1528 was less the fear of death than the fear of hell.

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  There was little help to be had from the doctors. They could account for the disease, after a fashion, but they could not cure it. The poison entered the body through the heart, liver or brain, they believed. Bleeding the patient from the arm, or from between the thumb and first finger, or possibly from between the shoulders could draw off some of the toxin; otherwise the fatal fever would set in along with a "pricking or flakering of blood." Physicians and apothecaries disagreed over remedies, with the latter recommending exotic medicines compounded of treacle and herbs, sapphires and sometimes pure gold. Many doctors agreed, though, that what mattered most was to keep the afflicted person awake, lest he fall into a fatal sleep.^

  Panicked city-dwellers tried in vain to purge the atmosphere of its poisons by burning spices and perfumes, but as the sweat moved through the streets and households of the capital in May and June, striking down most of those who stood in its path, all who could fled to the countryside to escape it, leaving their goods and livelihoods behind.

  In the country folk medicine prevailed. Preventives first compounded four decades earlier when the disease entered England were revived now, their recipes passed by word of mouth in every village and hamlet. Proved medicines of many kinds circulated. Great quantities of vinegar were consumed. It was an essential ingredient in many preventives, and was also used to cleanse the stale air. Mixed in sauces, vinegar aided digestion and was thought to increase resistance to the sweat; for the same reason it was mixed with drinking water and drunk instead of white wine. Throughout the spring and summer of 1528 the strong smell of vinegar hung in the households of Tudor England like a malodorous fog, its taste choking the appetite and its fumes crowding out even the overpowering stink of unwashed floors and unswept streets.

  The sweating sickness descended upon a population already plagued by severe economic malaise. There had been widespread famine since the previous fall, brought on by a meager harvest and made worse by an unusually harsh winter. Wheat flour became so scarce it had to be mixed with beans; even then it sold for many times its normal price—an imponderable quantity in any case, given the alarmingly rapid inflation of the 1520s. Heavy snows and "frozen seas" made it impossible for relief supplies of grain to be imported from across the Channel, and in one week when the scarcity was particularly acute the king sent six hundred quarters of his own grain into the capital to help prevent starvation. What made matters worse was that meat was equally unobtainable. Murrain had killed off many cattle and sheep; those still to be seen in the fields were scrawny from lack of hay. Many fewer lambs and calves were bom to these unhealthy beasts, and the newborns were "hunger-bitten and worthless." Most of the pigs had been slaughtered; the peas and beans they would otherwise have eaten had to go to keeping the horses alive. Poultry and freshwater fish were sold in the shrunken markets, but at prices few of the hungry could afford.^

  "Either the people must die for famine," the lord mayor and aldermen told Wolsey, "or else they with strong hand will fetch com from them that

  have it." The threat of popular violence was severe enough to frighten the substantial householders of the capital, who hesitated to bring grain into their cellars to feed their families and servants. The cardinal assured the petitioners that relief was on its way from France, and that the French king had sworn that if he had only three bushels of wheat in his storehouses he would send two to his beloved allies in England. But the weeks passed and no French wheat appeared, while by late January grain ships from Flanders had begun to arrive regularly at the docks. Without their precious cargoes, the Venetian ambassador wrote, the people would have died of hunger.^

  It was a dismaying paradox to the hungry English to find themselves at war with their Flemish benefactors. Economic ties between the English wool industry and Flemish clothmakers had always been essential to English prosperity, and any dispute between Henry VIII and Charles V threatened to result in a drastic disruption of trade. In reaction to the scandal of the nullity suit several Flemish towns had begun to refuse admission of English cloths in the summer of 1527; in January of 1528 England and France went to war with the Hapsburg empire, and overnight merchants, clothiers and woolworkers found themselves without employment. Outraged villagers erupted in protest. There was a rising in Wiltshire. In Norfolk the duke was able to persuade the clothiers to continue to employ their workmen for at least a while longer; had he failed, he wrote, he would have had to face a crowd of women hundreds strong, begging him to make the clothiers put their husbands and children to work again. And in Kent the clothworkers, long past the point of merely complaining over the threat to their livelihoods, took more drastic action.

  They blamed the war and its evil results entirely on Wolsey, and they meant to punish him for the harm he had done. Four clothmakers, joined by a fuller and a fiddler—and by a hundred and fifty of the men of Frikynden and Cranbrook, "ready to rise"—conspired to kidnap Wolsey and drown him. The plot called for the villagers to
break into neighboring manor houses and steal the arms and armor stored there, then, taking the masters of these houses as hostages, to seize Wolsey. "We will bring him to the sea side," one of the conspirators explained, "and there will put him in a boat, in the which shall be bored four great holes." Once the boat was launched in the sea the holes would be unplugged and the victim would sink from view, boat and all.^

  A solution to the intolerable economic strain was soon found. Henry and Charles agreed to overlook their mutual hostility where trade was concerned. Workshops were reopened, and the clothmakers and their employers resumed their occupations—at least until the warm weather set in, and with it the dreaded sweating sickness.

  Toward the end of June, as Londoners were making general processions and offering prayers for relief from the worsening pestilence, the king left hurriedly for the countryside. His servants and courtiers were sickening and dying, and he was surrounded by news of mortality and hazard. His young namesake Henry Brandon, earl of Lincoln, was dead.

  All of his chamber servants had been struck down, and three had died. One of his apothecaries was sick, and his mason Redman died—a matter of urgent annoyance to the king, who was eager to see the completion of the repairs Redman had been making at the manor of Tittenhanger. Norfolk was among the first to be afflicted, and recovered imperfectly. Even after the major symptoms passed he still suffered a "sore fit" every week, and had difficulty walking, '*the fume did so arise in his head."^