Great Harry

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Recalling these events later the king's servants claimed that it had been Cromwell who, taking Henry aside and talking to him "secretly," at last persuaded him to go through with the wedding. Even so he made his reluctance obvious. "My lord," he said to Cromwell on his wedding morning, "if it were not to satisfy the world and my realm, I would not do that I must do this day for none earthly thing."

  Henry showed his mood of heavy-hearted resignation in the way he prepared that morning for the ceremony, taking twice as long as usual to allow his chamberers to dress him in his wedding finery. At last he was ready, and walked as slowly as courtesy permitted to the gallery adjoining his chamber where Archbishop Cranmer was waiting to join him to his fourth wife. The sight of Anne in her rich pearl-studded wedding gown, her "fair, yellow and long" hair hanging to her waist and a jeweled coronal on her head did nothing to alleviate his forlorn mood. She curtsied to him three times "with most demure countenance"; he forced a wan smile in reply. The vows were exchanged, the bride given away by one of her attendants, the earl of Overstein. Within minutes the ceremony was over, and on Anne's finger was a gold wedding ring engraved with the words "God send me well to keep."^

  For the rest of the day Henry dreaded the coming of night, and the hour of retiring, and the unavoidable moment when he and Anne must be alone. The day passed in masses and collations and banqueting, the evening in masks and "diverse disports." But then "the time came that it pleased the king and her to take their rest," and he led his wife to her bed.

  Then began an ordeal of spirit as acute as any Henry had ever undergone. He had taken Anne to wife in all good conscience, expecting to force his body to the distasteful task of begetting sons by her. Yet though he "did as much to move the consent of his heart and mind as ever man did," his revulsion overcame his determination.

  Time and again he tried, lying with Anne night after night yet ever "leaving her as good a maid as he found her." He was not reticent about her imperfections. He complained to his gentlemen that her breasts were loose and slack, her belly stretched and unmaidenly. He believed he had reason to suspect her virginity—while maintaining that he had never tested it—and the more he brooded on the issue the more he was "struck to the heart" by it and incapacitated for lovemaking. After several months of this he began to remark ruefully that he doubted he would ever have any more children, adding that "before God he thought [Anne] was not his lawful wife."^

  Until Easter Henry was well advised to pretend, in public at least, that

  he was satisfied with his bride. His alHance with the duke of Cleves had had the predictable effect of making Charles V more insecure; as if in response to the new coalition the emperor had come northward from Spain to attend to his interests in the Low Countries and the Rhineland. A clash between Charles and Henry's brother-in-law of Cleves over the disputed area of Gelders seemed imminent, especially as, in the view of Henry's ambassador, Gelders meant more to the emperor than Milan, more even than all Italy. Charles was meanwhile displaying his friendship with Francis by sojourning in Paris, and as long as he stayed there Henry did not dare to suggest that his Protestant marriage was blemished by a fatal flaw.

  The king might speak candidly to his intimates about his dubious wedded state but no one else must know: to all appearances the pulse of life at his court quickened with the coming of the new queen, with Anne presiding over "a great court of noblemen and gentlemen" engaged in tournaments and disguisings and similar diversions. Discerning courtiers might notice that the king's gaze rested too often on his wife's round little waiting maid Catherine Howard, but Anne herself said nothing, and professed to be perfectly happy with her situation. She sent word to her mother and brother thanking them for arranging for her "such a marriage that she could wish no better." That she was the king's wife in name only seemed a minor anomaly.^ Members of Anne's retinue who left England in the aftermath of the wedding told no tales; overburdened with gilt cups and fat purses of coins from Henry's bounty, their wages and expenses paid from the English treasury, they carried back only stories of marital harmony and happiness.^

  But as the spring wore on Henry's patience with his sham matrimony wore thin. What was more, the diplomatic situation which had compelled him to continue the nominal marriage was changing. The emperor left Paris, and soon afterward his relations with the French king showed increasing strain. His feud with the duke of Cleves lost much of its fervor, while Henry's need for the duke—and for his Lutheran colleagues in the Schmalkaldic League—dwindled. And there had been a shift in the legal status of the marriage. The documents sought for on Anne's arrival in England finally came to light many weeks later, and to the surprise of all concerned they showed that her precontract with the duke of Lorraine's son had in fact been a binding union, not merely a future promise to wed, revocable at need.

  A way out of the regrettable marriage had shown itself. Cromwell must once again engineer a divorce—actually, as with Katherine of Aragon, a nullity suit—and smooth the way for a new queen.

  By April Henry's infatuation with Catherine Howard was becoming a subject of scandal, though it was not yet clear that he meant her to replace Anne of Cleves as queen. She was thirty years his junior, with a charm of face and manner that beguiled the king the way her cousin Anne Boleyn had beguiled him many years before. He began to favor her with gifts— quilts and jewels and painted brooches—and spent more and more time with her. They met at Norfolk's London house, or at Gardiner's epis-

  copal palace. Londoners became accustomed to the sight of Henry's barge as he rode up or downriver into the city from Greenwich or Richmond to see Catherine at all hours of the day or night. They gossiped about his adultery, never guessing that he held himself to be unmarried in the sight of God, and when at last they heard that he had separated from Anne of Cleves they presumed at once that Catherine Howard must be pregnant by the king.*^

  So the months passed, and still Cromwell delayed beginning the divorce proceedings. He could hardly do otherwise, given the dangerous choices he faced. To proceed with the nullity suit would have meant not only admitting the failure of his policy favoring the German Protestants but aiding the triumph of Catherine Howard's uncle, Cromwell's archrival Norfolk. To advise the king against a divorce was unthinkable—and futile. So Cromwell delayed, while attending to pariiamentary bills, attempting to forestall an assault by Gardiner over the radical religious views of Robert Barnes, managing the day-to-day supervision of international affairs. Meanwhile his enemies grew stronger, and plotted his downfall.

  By 1540 Cromwell was among the most hated men in England. Like his predecessor and mentor Wolsey he was hated by all sorts and conditions of the king's subjects, though where Wolsey had been despised for his arrogance and ostentation it was the inhuman ruthlessness of Cromwell's methods that drew down on him the people's wrath. Thousands of lives had been touched by his administration of the treason law; in person or through his agents he had sentenced hundreds of men and women to the pillory or to prison. More than five dozen of his victims had been hanged, drawn and quartered in chilling public executions.*^ Though his achievements in transforming royal administration were as remarkable as they were far-reaching they hardly counted to his contemporaries in government, who saw in him only a lowborn opportunist who at last rose too high.

  Among Cromwell's bitterest enemies was Cardinal Reginald Pole, who called him ''the messenger of Satan" and looked forward to the time when his misdeeds would be punished. The day would come, Pole said, when the lord privy seal would feel the pains of all those he had sent to die, and on that day Londoners would witness one of the most joyous entertainments ever offered them.^^ (Pole's malevolence grew out of unbearable grief. Cromwell had sworn to make the cardinal "eat his heart"; when many of Pole's relatives were executed or imprisoned in 1539 Cromwell's oath was fulfilled.)

  Next to Pole Norfolk bore most malice against Cromwell, and stood to gain most by his removal from government. Yet the king's favor had always shielded him
from the duke. Though he mistreated and underestimated his chief servant Henry had thus far stood by him in his quarrels with his rivals. Henry never forgot that, no matter how great his genius, Cromwell was a commoner, unfit by birth "to intermeddle with the affairs of kings." He treated him like a page or a kitchen boy, raging at him frequently and "knocking him well about the pate" on occasion, though

  Cromwell invariably shook off the blows and recovered his composure almost at once.^^ Yet the more the king abused him the more he esteemed him, to judge from the honors Cromwell accumulated. In April of 1540, when Henry's impatience over the nullity suit was mounting, he exalted Cromwell to the high rank of earl of Essex. To all appearances the king's commoner had reached the pinnacle of worldly success.*^

  Two months later, on June 10, Cromwell was seized without warning as he sat at the Council table and arrested as a traitor. Norfolk stood before him, stem and sardonic, relishing his revenge. He snatched the collar of the Garter from around Cromwell's neck and motioned to the captain of the guard to take his prisoner away. Bemused at first by the suddenness of these events Cromwell did not react, but as he regained himself he exploded in fury, snatching off his bonnet and slamming it to the floor. This time his protector had not intervened. He was beaten, and what slight hope he had of royal clemency was extinguished when he heard that his goods had been seized at once on his arrest. There was no need to await the verdict of his trial; his fate was clear.

  Indeed there was no trial, only an overwhelmingly convincing (and unrecorded) denunciation to the king, who in the end was persuaded that the earl of Essex was a dangerous heretic, a source of contagion to the true belief and a sworn traitor besides. Cromwell espoused sacramenta-rian doctrines—the same doctrines Henry had personally confuted in his debate with John Lambert, who had been burned for holding them—and beyond that, Henry was told, he had committed himself to fight for these doctrines against any opponent, even the king. Henry must have heard from Cromwell's enemies how on one occasion he defended the erroneous teachings of Robert Barnes (who was in fact not a sacramentarian but a Lutheran), saying that if the king disavowed them he would "fight in his own person, with his sword in his hand, against him and all others." According to the story Cromwell had underscored his threat by drawing his dagger and swearing a high oath: "Or else this dagger thrust me to the heart, if I would not die in that quarrel against them all."^^

  It was a dramatic story calculated to offend the king's strong sense of orthodoxy while impressing itself on his chivalrous mentality as well. He allowed himself to be convinced, pushed toward conviction by his dissatisfaction over the nullity suit. He abandoned his brilliant servant to his enemies, and remained unmoved by Cromwell's desperate, pleading letters from his Tower prison, begging for "mercy, mercy, mercy!" He kept him alive, though, long enough to serve as a key witness in the divorce.

  A month after Cromwell's arrest Henry was declared to be an unmarried man once again. After first sending Anne away to Richmond he set in motion the official chain of events culminating in the parliamentary declaration of nullity. There were no legal difficulties. The precontract was put in evidence, and with it Henry's testimony, backed up by the written recollections of his chamber servants and the former lord privy seal, that he had lacked the will and power to consummate the marriage. His inability was taken to show his lack of consent; he swore on his word as a

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  gentleman that "if Anne brought maidenhead with her" to England, then as far as he was concerned she was still a maid.*^

  No account was taken of what Anne of Cleves might think of these proceedings, yet when she was formally notified of their outcome by a delegation of courtiers she received the news "without alteration of countenance," and showed herself to be almost perversely compliant with Henry's wishes. He had taken care to sweeten the sour news with a purse of coins, but the precaution was unnecessary. Without hesitation Anne sat down with her interpreter to read the letters Henry had written her, and afterward declared herself ready to give her consent to all that had been done—or rather undone. She wrote him a reply, accepting his judgment while acknowledging that "the case must be hard and sorrowful," and that only her "regard for God and his truth"—and her ever lively obedience—could persuade her to put aside her great love for the man she once thought to be her husband. She signed the letter "Your Majesty's most humble sister and servant," and to symbolize her change in status she sent Henry the wedding ring she had worn for six months, asking him to have it "broken into pieces as a thing which she knew of no force or value."^^

  The reasoning behind Anne's acquiescence, and her subsequent decision to spend the rest of her life in England, was not far to seek. If to Henry she was no more than a troublesome impediment to his fifth marriage to her brother in Cleves she had become a hated liability, an object of intense resentment and possible violence. She told the English courtiers in no uncertain terms that if she returned to her homeland her brother would kill her, and there can be no doubt that even if he spared her she would have faced an exceedingly uncomfortable future there as an unwanted, and probably unmarriageable, young dowager.^^ Caught between her cheerfully indifferent "brother" Henry and her vengeful natural brother Duke William, her choice was clear.

  And it was well rewarded. After some negotiation—Anne was a clear-headed and practical woman—she agreed to accept a substantial yearly income, with the manors of Richmond and Bletchingly, a sufficient household of servants and furnishings, and a generous assortment of "most precious clothes," jewels and pearls. She kept her Dutch maids Katherine and Gertrude, her cook Schoulenburg, and an honorable title and place in the courtly hierarchy. She would be a marchioness, lower in rank than the king's wife and daughters but higher than any other woman in the realm. And she would occasionally enjoy the king's society as a friend, along with his perpetual gratitude.

  Having dispatched Anne Henry had no further use for Cromwell, and on July 28 he went to the block at Tyburn. In his last moments he transcended the ignominy of a traitor's end. Wrongfully accused, condemned unheard, he made no reference to the injustice of his situation in his dignified speech. He repented his sins, and prayed for the king and his heir. Then he spoke his last prayer—not the prayer of a sacramentarian heretic, but that of a humanist and admirer of Erasmus.

  Cromwell's death called for more bloodshed. To justify the accusation

  that he had protected heretics three men were burned at Smithfield, one of them the Lutheran Barnes whom Cromwell had indeed protected but who had himself been a vigorous persecutor of sacramentaries. Barnes, William Jerome, vicar of the London parish of Stepney where Cromwell lived, and another Lutheran preacher, Thomas Garrett, were brought to the place of execution and tied to a single wooden stake. None of the men knew why he was there; when Barnes asked the executioner to name his crime the man admitted he could not.

  Torches were put to the dry wood heaped about the stake, and in a moment the flames leaped up around the victims' legs. A moment more and they were overcome by smoke and pain, but before they died the crowd that watched the horrifying spectacle took careful note of their behavior. Their faces remained composed, their features neither twisted in anguish nor contorted in pain. It was as if an unseen force shielded them against all suffering, and when they spoke the spectators strained to hear their last words, the words of martyrs in an extraordinary state of grace.

  As the reek of burning flesh rose over the field three other men were led to their deaths: Thomas Abell, once Katherine of Aragon's chaplain, Edward Powell, a cleric who had written in her defense years before, and Richard Featherstone, former tutor to her daughter Mary. These Catholic victims too were linked to the fall of Cromwell, creating a grotesque balance of suffering that satisfied his opponents—not the king, who may well have been ignorant of all these executions.

  Yet if Henry knew nothing of these events his ignorance was perhaps understandable. He was far away at Oatlands, enjoying the
company of the woman he had married the day Cromwell died, his *'rose without a thorn," Catherine Howard.

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  VI

  Old Harry

  '^^/W^

  Henry, our royall king, would ride a hunting

  To the greene forest so pleasant andfaire;

  To see the harts skipping, and dainty does tripping:

  Unto merry Sherwood his nobles repaire:

  Hawke and hound were unbound, all things prepared

  For the game, in the same, with good regard.

  ^T midsummer of 1541 Henry journeyed northward on progress to the most distant parts of his realm. He had never before traveled so far from London. Lincoln, Pontefract, York, Doncaster—these were only names to him, names he associated with rebellion and reaction^The places themselves he had only imagined, as he imagined the tall, taciturn men and resolute women of the north parts, his fearsome subjects who had never seen their king.

  The royal progress was not a simple hunting party but a great traveling court, with some five thousand courtiers and servants making up the king's retinue. No town could house such a host; two hundred large tents and pavilions served as portable sleeping quarters and banqueting halls, kitchens and stables. On traveling days the great tents were folded and carried in carts from one camp site to the next, along with the rugs and hangings and chests of clothes and furnishings that made them seem less bare. On other days, when the king's itinerary called for an extended stay or when bad weather or poor roads caused delays, the tents stayed up, and the full ceremony and activity of court life was recreated within them.