Great Harry

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  So many of his gentlemen fell sick that Henry feared to enter his own apartments, and he must have become, if not habituated, at least resigned to receiving news of their sudden deaths. The king was at Hunsdon—a country house he had bought for its "wholesome air" in time of plague—when he heard that William Compton had succumbed to the sweat. The news was bitter, as carelessness had hastened Compton's death; he had been "lost by negligence, in letting him sleep in the beginning of the sweat."^ Indignity followed on tragedy. Compton had been an immensely wealthy man, and once he was dead his goods were plundered by thieving servitors and others before his executors could protect them. The other courtiers went after his offices like crows descending on carrion; their letters of entreaty soliciting a share in the spoils of Compton's estate fill many pages in the court records. Of what was left after the thieves and opportunists took their booty, much went to Compton's common-law wife Anne Hastings, while to Henry he bequeathed his "little chest of ivory with gilt lock" (and its contents of jewels and treasure), a chessboard and a pair of tables.^

  Of greater concern than Compton was William Carey, whose death drew on a double tragedy. Carey's widow was Mary Boleyn, whose welfare was of some concern to her sister Anne as well as to her former lover King Henry. For some reason Thomas Boleyn broke with his daughter and all but disowned her in her widowhood, until at Anne's request Henry wrote to him telling him to take her into his house again and resume her support.^

  Always in the forefront of the king's fears was the safety of his son. Henry Fitzroy was at Pontefract when the epidemic broke out, and within days of its first appearance people in the villages surrounding the castle had begun to die and the boy's council ordered the household removed. Eventually an uncontaminated lodging was found, and there Fitzroy remained throughout the late spring and summer, attended by only a handful of servants. As a precaution one of his councilors wrote to the king asking him to send a physician to attend his son should he fall ill. No doctors at all were to be found in the remote areas of the north—only wise women and gentlewomen who knew enough of folk medicine to care for their children and servants. Henry did not send a physician, but he did send preservatives of his own making for the boy to take, and read with relief the letters that came informing him that Fitzroy continued well throughout the dangerous season.^^

  During much of June the royal household—reduced through illness, death and the king's scrutiny to "a small and clean company"—changed residences every day or two in an effort to outrun contagion. To lighten

  his troubled mind Henry busied himself with inquiries about the nature and course of the sweat, what remedies were found to be most efficacious against it and, above all, what reasons might be found for optimism. *'Little danger was in it, if good order was observed," he insisted to his secretary Tuke. Many of those who fell ill recovered, he reminded the surviving courtiers: his own physician Dr. Butts had managed to shake off the disease, as had his beloved Anne and her father. First Anne's maid had been affected, then others of the household at Hever. Both Anne and Thomas Boleyn had been taken seriously ill, but were recovered a week later, thanks in part to the efforts of the enfeebled Dr. Butts.

  Wolsey obliged his master by sending him what news he had of proven remedies, some concocted for use in his own household and others in use elsewhere. The dowager duchess of Norfolk acquired a particular reputation as a healer during the sweat season, and the cardinal wrote about her at length. She had saved many who came to her in extremis, having received the sacraments and prepared themselves for death, and her remedies and advice were much sought after. The duchess was convinced that those who died of the sweat succumbed "through default of keeping," and that adequate care, combined with bed rest and the right medicine, would restore any sufferer to health again. She dosed those with pains around the heart or in the groin with treacle and "imperial water"; those with stomach cramps she gave an herb to purge the swelling and refused them all food and drink for sixteen hours. To keep well, she advised Wolsey to wrap a mixture of vinegar, wormwood, rosewater and crumbs of brown bread in a linen cloth, and to keep the cloth before his nose whenever he came near an infected area.'*

  Henry too was full of advice and remedies, sending Wolsey "manus Christi," an efficacious herb, and instructing him to eat lightly and drink very little wine, and to take "pills of Rasis" to fortify himself. He showed much solicitude toward Tuke, who suffered from a painful bladder complaint; one by one he explained to the secretary all the remedies he knew of, as knowledgeably "as any most cunning physician in England could do."

  Henry had given up the frantic itinerary which had kept his servants packing and unpacking daily, and settled in at Tittenhanger. There seemed to be nowhere else to go; there was sickness at Eltham, Hunsdon had proven to be as pestilential as any other country house, and Greenwich was full of the sweat. (An attempt to purify Greenwich by ordering the mass emigration of the town poor proved futile; perhaps as a penance Henry ordered his marshal afterward to divide some eighteen pounds among the longsuffering townspeople displaced at his whim.'^)

  Everything possible was done to make Tittenhanger safe from disease. The rooms were purged daily with fire. The courtiers and household servants were given regular doses of the best preservatives to be found. The king, always a believer in the health benefits of fresh air, ordered the small window in his private room greatly enlarged, and spent many hours walking briskly through the grounds of the estate, breathing deeply as he strode through the gardens and park.

  To some extent the exhilaration of survival seems to have kept Henry's spirits up even as the fear of death threatened to unnerve him. In his own words he was ''of good heart" despite all, and communicated his own hopefulness to those around him. To them he appeared "very merry," both when working with his secretaries and when walking abroad. He began his day with Katherine, then sought out Hennage for news about the divorce. The "great matter" and other letters and dispatches kept him busy until dinner time, after which he went out to hunt and shoot until supper. The hunting so drew him that he found the work of government tedious; Tuke wrote how, as he read aloud the letters of greatest importance, the king grew restless and "seemed to think them long," and impatiently sorted stacks of papers as he listened. ^^ The work finished, Henry was off to the fields, and before too many weeks passed his favorite companion joined him in his pastimes. Anne returned to court toward the end of July, and rode out with the king in the long summer afternoons, equipped with a bow and arrows and a shooting glove made especially for her.

  Though outwardly cheerful Henry did daily battle with his inner fears. The sickness and death that encircled him triggered old terrors left from his earliest childhood, and the very mention of the contagion filled him with dread. The mere name of the sweat, Gardiner wrote, "is so terrible and fearful to his highness' ears that he dare in no wise approach unto the place where it is noised to have been."^^ Years later a French ambassador called Henry "the most timid person in such matters you could meet with," and indeed it would be hard to overestimate the traumatic impact of the 1528 epidemic on the king. Prevailing common sense dictated that he should isolate himself from all but a few companions, and it became his practice to shut himself away for long periods, sometimes in his chamber and sometimes in a high tower which he used for a variety of purposes. He often took his supper there, alone, or at other times consulted there with his physician Dr. Chambers.^^

  Seclusion was appropriate to Henry's deeper moods, when he was "much troubled" by fears and when his faith in his own powers of survival waned. At these times he feared to sleep alone, and ordered Francis Bryan to sleep in the privy chamber with him. The hours of concentrated reading and writing he undertook during these months gave him headaches, and the country air brought on head colds; these infirmities, combined with the everpresent danger of the sweat, forced him into a constant state of spiritual preparedness for death. He confessed daily and received the eucharist, as did Katherine; he put his conscience in or
der; and he made his will. His tomb—a towering structure to be built in white marble and black touchstone—he had commissioned nearly ten years earlier. Whether he gave further thought to it now is unclear.

  Certainly he gave deep thought to the larger issues of life and death, destiny and chance, and to his longed-for future with Anne. Surrounded by uncertainty, he resigned himself to destiny, recognizing that, as he wrote to his beloved, "whoso will struggle against fate at such a point is full often the further off from his desire." Every time he took the

  sacrament he felt more secure, and announced himself to be "armed towards God and the world."

  He drew even more security from the unsullied state of his conscience, believing that its purity ensured him God's favor. In the letters he wrote the word conscience appeared again and again: he would not "clog the conscience" of his correspondent; he forbore to "distain his honor or conscience"; "good conscience" must rule, "conscience can be best judge." The "exoneration of conscience before God" he held to be of pre-eminent importance, conscience being, in his view, the instrument by which people accounted for themselves in God's eyes.*®

  His own conscience could not have been more clear. He had begun to compose a book on the subject of his invalid marriage, and spent his evenings poring over theological volumes and extracting texts to support his position. The work went well. "I am right well comforted," he said, "in so much that my book maketh substantially for my matter." Probably Henry expected his treatise to have the same impact as his book against Luther; certainly he expected it to offset the halfhearted response his diplomats had received from the pope in Rome. Some nights he devoted as much as four hours to this labor, and the more writing and reading he did the more entrenched his view of the issues became. By August the king was so committed to his cause, the French ambassador Du Bellay declared, "that none but God can get him out of it."*^

  One at least tried. Wolsey was far from sanguine about the eventual outcome of the nullity suit. With shrewdness acquired over many years of skilled diplomacy he assessed Pope Clement's position and concluded, rightly, that no definite answer was likely to be forthcoming—at least not in the near future. The king was bound to be disappointed, and his disappointment might be turned to rage by Wolsey's enemies. The cardinal tried to make his master see what he saw, and to retreat from his position. But Henry only "used terrible language" to Wolsey and went on with his book, leaving Wolsey anxious and distraught. Should the king's suit turn out as he expected he would bear much of the blame. It would take "a terrible alchemy and dexterity," he told Du Bellay, to overcome the assaults of those ranged against him.*^

  As the summer advanced the sweat receded, until by the end of August "little or nothing was heard thereof in any place." Henry and Anne were apart once again—a nod to discretion in honor of the coming of the papal legate Campeggio who, the lovers hoped, would clear the way for their union. Henry sent Anne news of Campeggio's progress on the long journey from Rome. "The legate which we most desire arrived at Paris on Sunday or Monday last past," he wrote, "so that I trust by the next Monday to hear of his arrival in Calais; and then I trust within a while to enjoy that which I have so longed for, to God's pleasure, and our both comforts."'^

  Henry was writing at the end of a day of hunting in the forest, in the closing days of the season he loved best. He had come through a dangerous time unscathed, and better days seemed to lie ahead. He was tired, yet his letter, though brief, was full of fervor and hope:

  No more to you at this present, mine own darling, for lack of time, but that I would you were in mine arms, or I in yours, for I think it long since I kissed you.

  Written after the killing of an hart, at eleven of the clock (minding, with God's grace, to-morrow, mightily timely to kill another) by the hand which I trust shortly shall be yours.

  Henry R.

  My welth is health, and perfect ease; My conscience clere my chiefe defence, I never seeke by hryhes to please, Nor hy desert to give offence: Thus do I live, thus will I die; Would all did so as well as I!

  As it turned out Campeggio did not arrive until the first week in October—a circumstance which set a pattern for delays and obstructions that was to continue throughout his stay in England. The significance of his tardy arrival was lost on Henry and Anne, who had begun to look on their joint future as assured, and could not perceive that Campeggio's lateness was part of a broad papal policy designed to frustrate the conclusion of the nullity suit for as long as possible. Optimistic reports from the negotiators Foxe and Gardiner had raised their hopes, while Clement himself had sent Henry word that he would do his best to satisfy him, no matter how difficult it might be.^ Petitioners at court had begun to look to Anne, as they had once looked to Katherine, to help them gain the king's favor. She was not yet queen, of course, but she seemed a sort of queen-to-be, continually at Henry's side, evidently important to him, the prime focus, when he was not preoccupied with the business of government or his engrossing pastimes, of his interest and attention.^

  From being infatuated friends Henry and Anne had become, in some sense, lovers; they did not yet share the same bed, but they were on the most intimate terms. "Wishing myself (specially an evening) in my sweetheart's arms," he wrote to her at the end of a letter, "whose pretty dukkys [breasts] I trust shortly to kiss."^ Passion bound them now, as well as joint expectations, and in addition a new note of cozy domesticity had entered their relationship. Anne wrote to Wolsey saying she "longed to hear from you news of the legate, and hope they will be very good," and at the bottom of the letter was another paragraph in Henry's hand. "The writer of this would not cease till she had called me likewise to set to my hand," he said. "Both of us desire to see you."'*

  Though not living together they were rarely far apart, and as Campeggio reached the last stages of his journey new lodgings were being prepared for Anne at Greenwich under Wolsey's direction, separate enough from the king's apartments to avoid open scandal yet close enough for easy access. The arrangements were certain to be temporary

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  in any case; according to the Spanish ambassador Mendoza, Henry and Anne saw the favorable papal judgment as all but in hand, and were already making plans for their wedding.^

  The man on whom they relied to make it possible had to be carried slowly and painfully into London on a litter. Excruciatingly crippling gout prevented him from either walking or riding; it was all he could do to sit in his litter and endure the shocks and jars of the journey without crying out in complaint. Curious villagers who caught sight of him along the way saw little but a shrunken figure hunched in pain with a long untrimmed beard—the latter, rumor informed them, a sign of mourning for the state of the English church.^

  Cardinal Campeggio was a great master of the canon law. No less a giant of erudition than Erasmus called him "one of the best and most learned men living," and he was universally held to be one of the least prejudiced as well. He held the counterbalancing offices of cardinal protector of England and cardinal protector of the Holy Roman Empire. He was by title an English as well as an Italian prelate—Henry had made him bishop of Salisbury four years earlier—and though he was clearly bound to represent the pope (and therefore to avoid alienating Charles V) he was ambivalent in his attitude toward Hapsburg interests. His house had been ransacked by imperial soldiers during the recent plundering of Rome, and he had been forced into a possessionless exile. In his gout-ridden condition even the most minor dislocation in his life caused extra pain, and the violent disruptions in the papal city had taxed his endurance to its extreme limits.

  Campeggio had one further advantage as arbiter in the king's divorce: he was a married man himself. Before taking holy orders late in life he had been a professor of canon law at the University of Bologna; in secular life he had a wife and three children. He was not unsympathetic to domestic quarrels, and was capable of weighing the issues involved with his own experience as well as the canon law to guide him.

  He was to need all
the expertise he could summon to settle Henry and Katherine's embattled situation. The authorization and instructions he brought with him to England were at once sweeping and exceedingly restricting. With Wolsey, Campeggio was to preside over a court inquiring into the validity of the dispensation of Pope Julius II permitting Henry and Katherine to marry, and to pronounce on the validity of the marriage itself in consequence. The judgment—if in fact the case ever came to judgment—would rest with Campeggio rather than his colleague, for Wolsey was no canonist and was even ignorant of the basic procedures to be observed in a legatine court. And the judgment was to be final; neither Henry nor Katherine was to be allowed subsequently to appeal the case to Rome.^

  So ran the official instructions. Unofficially Campeggio brought with him a long list of counter-instructions intended to undermine the outward purpose of his legacy. His primary directive was to delay the convening of the court for as long as possible. Henry and Katherine were to be presented a number of alternative solutions, any one of which would

  circumvent the need for a papal judgment rendered in England. Henry was to be urged to follow the example of Charles Brandon and obtain a judgment of nullity from an English church court. Once he had it the pope could confirm it, with relatively little blame. Or Katherine was to be persuaded to enter a convent, thus leaving Henry free to remarry—at least in theory. (The most learned of Clement VITs lawyers eventually advised the pope that he could not grant Henry a dispensation to marry if Katherine took the veil.**) Other proposals were more ingenious: that Henry Fitzroy should marry Princess Mary, thus becoming unarguably the heir to the throne, and satisfying the king's need for a legitimate male heir; that children of Henry and Anne bom out of wedlock be made legitimate by papal decree; that, as Henry first suggested, he be allowed to have two wives.