Great Harry

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  To onlookers the itinerant court resembled an armed camp, for if King Henry took his councilors and courtiers with him he also took fighting men—armed knights and archers and halberdiers with full panoply. There were drummers and trumpeters and military heralds, and warhorses enough, it seemed, to engage battle. And as if this were not protection enough, there were cannon too, sent northward by sea and then upriver to a point near York. It was here, in the heart of the north country, that the royal party might expect to encounter resistance.

  York had been a center of rebellion in what was euphemistically referred to as ''the commotion time"—the Pilgrimage of Grace—five years earlier, and though the risings of that era had been thoroughly and savagely suppressed a new conspiracy had been uncovered there only recently. Yo rkshire was a bastion o f support for the remnants of the White Rose, t he Poles and Courtenays alTcTNeviires whose Pla ntagenet

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  blood put them at odds with Henry Tudor. It was largely to overawe these past and potential rebels that Henry journeyed northward, but he had a second purpose as well. His nephew James V of Scotland had promised to meet him at York in September. For a variety of reasons, ranging from French pressure to fear of capture by the English, James might choose not to honor his promise, but Henry was prepared to meet him if he did.

  Because he meant to be away from London for at least three months Henry determined to remove all threat of revolt there by ordering the execution of several Tower prisoners of royal blood. There were a good many of them: Lord Leonard Grey, under suspicion for misconduct in Ireland; Lord Lisle, more incompetent than dangerous, who had been in the Tower for a year and whose prison robes were made by the king's tailor out of deference to his rank; the queen's cousin Lord Dacres, a young rake of twenty-three who with several companions had killed an old man in a brawl; Gertrude Blount, marchioness of Exeter, and Edward Courtenay, widow and son of the late marquis executed as a traitor in 1538; the aged matriarch Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury and mother of the attainted Reginald Pole and of the condemned traitor Henry Pole, Lord Montague; and finally Montague's young son. (One other Plan-tagenet, John Neville, was under sentence of death though not in the Tower; it was he who had led the most recent disturbances in the north.) Four of these prisoners—Grey, Dacres, Neville, and Margaret Pole—were hanged or beheaded, while the others remained imprisoned under strict guard. The deaths of Dacres and Pole caused a mild outcry. Despite his youth and high birth Dacres was dragged through the streets to Tyburn like any lowborn criminal and hanged—a death so ignominious it made his judges weep.* For his beheading of the enfeebled countess of Salisbury, butchered by inches by a clumsy novice executioner, Henry won nothing but contempt. Was his throne so insecure he must protect it by slaughtering old women? And was he so heartless as to forget his former respect and affection for his venerable kinswoman?^

  / If the deaths of these noble prisoners aroused pity the dozens of

  / commoners executed along with them attracted relatively less comment.

  I Though never indifferent to it Henry's subjects had become in recent

  years habituated to judicial violence on a large scale. "It is no new thing to see men hanged, quartered, or beheaded, for one thing or another," a

  I visitor to London wrote in 1541, "sometimes for trifling expressions / construed as against the king."^ Thus the hanging of two archers of the

  ] royal guard, a customs controller, a Kentish gentleman, and two knights of Rhodes for offenses ranging from robbery to treason were recorded by

  ' court observers without comment. No particular popular reaction was noted when two men, one of them a groom of his chamber, died for counterfeiting the king's seal, or when men were hanged for eating meat

  I on Friday.

  One chronicler did note with pity the burning of a boy for heresy. He was only fourteen, far too young to comprehend the doctrines he was accused of perverting. Hearing his elders debate about the theology of the mass, he made the mistake of repeating their words. The bishop of

  London heard of it, and condemned him to die; before the fire consumed him he repeated, in ^'childish innocence and fear," what the bishop's officers had taught him to say in praise of the orthodox beHef.^ But if the monstrous inappropriateness of this execution was perceived the burnings of other heretics were recounted without emotion. Chroniclers noted the burning of three heretics (an Italian painter, an anonymous Englishman and a French groom of Anne of Cleves) as matter-of-factly as they did the annual return of plague or the calling of the midsummer watch, just as the executions of some sixty followers of John Neville, two dozen of them churchmen, called forth neither regret nor revulsion.

  This season of bloodshed was after all only an episode in a gory tale extending over severar years. Fifty-three people had been attainted in 1539-40, and most of them had died. A dozen more had been burned or beheaded with Cromwell, many others in isolated executions. For some, such as Norfolk's half-brother Thomas Howard (imprisoned for aspiring to marry the king's niece Margaret Douglas), the filth and disease of the rat-ridden Tower brought death more swiftly than the headsman's sword. <(The court, always a scene of partisan contention and rivalry, had taken on a darker tone of murderous conflict. Factions rose to power by devouring or annihilating their rivals, only to be in the end devoured themselves.NCromwell and his allies had hounded the great nobles out of power, then had fallen prey to the resurgent influence of Norfolk and his adherents. And as all pre-eminence was transitory, the Norfolk faction now looked for enemies everywhere^ and the Privy Council chamber became an arena of snarling discord.^T do not recall having ever seen these people so morose as they are at present," Marillac wrote in 1541, *'for they do not know whom to trust, and the king himself, having offended so many people, mistrusts everyone."^)

  Looming in menace over all the infighting was the suspicious, aging king, now riding roughshod over the factions, now using them for his own secret ends, occasionally used by them. His surface mastery of their wrangling concealed much "irresolution and despondency," according to Marillac; he was easily thrown into uncertainty about the loyalty of his courtiers and officials, and his solution was to "dip his hands in blood" agap and again.

  /Henry's unpredictable, murderous wrath had come to be his most potent weapon against his irascible courtiers. When in a fury his reason and understanding deserted him entirely. He became, quite simply, "the most dangerous and cruel man in the world."^ The violence he had done, the lives he had taken gnawed at him; though he never doubted the morality of his actions (which in many cases were politically justifiable) he was not immune to their corroding influence. In time the unrelenting carnage blighted his spirit and wore away at his judgment, making him more dangerous with every passing yearyHenry had after all ordered the ^ executions of a beloved wife, a dozen or more blood relatives and twice as many intimate friends and associates. He no longer hesitated, as he would have once, to order men and women to the block.

  He seemed almost to take a macabre pleasure in exercising his life and

  death powers, occasionally sentencing men to die and then reprieving them at the last minute. He brought his intellect to bear as well, revolving in his mind reasoned justifications for his judicial murders and in one case setting them down in writing. Just as he had boasted of writing a play about Anne Boleyn in the days following her death, so he wrote a "little book"—apparently an imagined post-facto trial—about the deaths of the marquis of Exeter and Lord Montague just after they lost their lives.^

  Such justifications may have soothed his conscience, but they did nothing to alter his worsening reputation. On the continent, news of Henry's executions met with incredulity, then disgust. "Let us cease to sing the praises of the English Nero," the Protestant leader Melanchthon wrote, regretting that he had flattered Henry and sought his alliance.® ^Within the realm there was profound unease and fear, and a sense that the times themselves were shifting.^"Thy father's father never saw such a world," a Be
rkshire man remarked in amazement. Londoners grew accustomed to watching the gruesome display of severed heads on Tower Bridge; when they were taken down it was a sure sign the king had ordered a harvest of fresh heads to put in their place.^

  V "In England, death has snatched everyone of worth away, or fear has shrank them up," a foreigner commented, and the remark might have stood as an epitaph for the depleted court/To be sure, there were still men and women in abundance around the king, but few of them belonged to his generation; still fewer could recall the joyous early years when the youthful, sunny monarch had presided over a chivalrous court. A new group of young, ambitious courtiers now kept him company, but they could not replace men such as Edward Neville, who had so resembled his royal kinsman, or Henry Courtenay, who had been with the king since boyhood and slept in his chamber, or Nicholas Carew, the spectacular jouster and royal horse master who had been among Henry's inseparable companions. These and many like them had been swept away, tainted by treason, and though the king did not lack company they could not be replaced.

  The losses were unusually conspicuous when the exclusive inner circle of courtiers, the Knights of the Garter, met on Saint George's Day to elect new members. The Order of the Garter was more to Henry than a mark of highest distinction and a sacred band of sworn companions: the order and its festivities were linked in a fundamental way with his reign itself. He had been proclaimed king on Saint George's Day in 1509. His regnal years were calculated from that day, and it was his royal birthday, a personal and sentimental occasion. With each annual meeting of the order the king, surrounded by the twenty-five Knights, ended an old cycle and began a new one.

  Thus when the Knights Companions assembled at Windsor in 1540 to observe their feast it was dismaying to see how few of them were left. Keeping the records had become a problem, as so many of the names on the rolls belonged to men who had dishonored their place among the Companions by being executed or imprisoned as traitors. The matter had to be brought to the king's attention. Should the names of traitors

  continue to be carried on the rolls, or should they be blotted out, marring the immaculate appearance of the time-honored records? Henry thought for a while, then gave his judgment. Nothing would be blotted out; instead, opposite each unworthy name the words "Vahl Proditor!" — **0h! Traitor!''—should be written in the margin.^^

  The one new companion who lightened Henry's heart was his young wife Catherine, his thomless rose, the rejuvenating comfort of his old age. Her good effect on him had been apparent from the earliest days of their marriage. It was hunting season, and the king set out each morning at daybreak for the fields, riding with the eager energy of a young man and working up a healthy appetite for an early midday dinner. He declared himself to be in excellent health (his physicians would hardly have agreed), and praised the benefits of country air and exercise in contrast to the pestilential fogs and indoor life of London. Certainly he seemed to have energy to spare, passing his evenings banqueting with the queen, limping through the newest French dances and complimenting his wife and her ladies on their fashionable French gowns.

  It was said Henry spent more money on clothes and jewels for his fifth wife than he ever had for any of the others. Every day brought some new caprice to be satisfied, some new bauble purchased. There were chains of gold and ropes of pearls, jeweled crosses and necklaces of table diamonds. One day Henry presented Catherine with a black velvet muffler furred with sables and ornamented with rubies and hundreds of pearls, "betwixt every row of pearls small chains of gold, with also a chain to hang the same muffler containing thirty pearls."^^ Such expenditures were trifling, though, compared to the extravagant affection he lavished on her. "The king caresses her more than he did the others," Chapuys noted of Catherine; though she lacked the haunting, fey sensuality of Anne Boleyn, she awakened and satisfied Henry's desire to the full. Unauthenticated portraits said to be of Catherine do not bear out Maril-lac's judgment that she was "a lady of great beauty." Her brow and eyes were fair enough, but (if these portraits are to be trusted at all) she had inherited the large Howard nose, and her chubby cheeks and double chin gave her face a slightly bulbous look. In fact Catherine may well have borne an unfortunate resemblance to her uncle Norfolk, whose fishlike face and downward-slanting eyes must have made him one of the uglier men at the court.

  To Henry Catherine's youth and vital carnality were what counted, and to celebrate their union he commissioned a French artisan to make a "pearl bed," its dimensions adequate to accommodate his bulk and its decoration a fantasy work of nacreous splendor. ^^ How often he joined Catherine in this bed was a matter of public knowledge, attended by ceremony. Once his gentlemen had undressed him and put him to bed in his own chamber, he called for his night-robe and prepared himself for the excursion to the queen's apartments. An escort of grooms of the bedchamber and pages carrying torches accompanied him through the anterooms and passages connecting his apartments with hers, and left him at her door.)

  The frequency of these nocturnal visits led to the expectation that Catherine would soon become pregnant, but month after month passed and there was no word of a child. By January of 1541, after half a year of marriage, there was talk of the king's displeasure with his wife—most of it the result of Anne of Cleves' recent visit to the king and queen during the holiday season. A few months later, however, Catherine herself became "rather sad and thoughtful" at the possibility that Henry might divorce her and take Anne back, and his reassurances left her unconvinced.^^

  Henry and Catherine had been married nearly a year when the great progress northward began, and by this time they were reported to be somewhat estranged. Henry was behaving toward Catherine as he had toward Anne Boleyn when she seemed barren of sons, "avoiding as much as possible her company" and seeking distractions elsewhere. It was noted that the queen, who had once done nothing but "dance and amuse herself," now shut herself away in her apartments. What she did there only her confidante Lady Rochford knew.

  Nearly three weeks after the king and his retinue of five thousand set out for the north he was tempted to abandon the excursion entirely and go home. Only a few miles out of London the caravan was halted by heavy rains. The tents were struck, and the travelers huddled inside them, shivering in the unseasonable cold. Day after day the stormy weather continued, until the fields lay under water and the roads became impassable bogs. The carts and baggage wagons sank into the mire, the courtiers grew bored and irritable, and as a last straw the queen fell sick.^'*

  Somehow, toward the end of July the unwieldy cortege got moving again. Norfolk and Suffolk, who had gone ahead to prepare the way, had managed to find a safe route through the marshy fen country and to bargain for grain and other provisions undamaged by the flooding. The queen regained her health, and the courtiers recovered their good spirits in anticipation of the pageantry and hunting to come.

  On August 9, a month behind schedule, the royal party arrived in Lincoln. To flatter his northern subjects Henry at first wore Lincoln green, though he had Catherine changed into robes of cloth of gold and silver for their formal entry into the town. The mayor and citizenry made their sovereigns a cheerful and colorful welcome, with orations in Latin and English and a celebration of thanksgiving in the cathedral. There seemed to be no evidence of disaffection, though Henry showed a prudent mistrust for all large gatherings of his subjects throughout his months away from London. Everywhere, in small towns and large, the reception was equally respectful. The citizens decorated the streets with rich cloths and hangings, there was singing and cheering and speechmaking, and then a procession. With the townspeople preceding him and a guard of eighty archers bringing up the rear, Henry and his nobles rode to their lodgings. Beside Henry rode Queen Catherine and his daughter Mary, the latter a much-beloved figure in the Catholic north.

  Everywhere he rested the king hunted, and increased his popularity among the local gentry by sending them a portion of the deer and game he killed. Largely because of the size of the roy
al retinue, the hunting was on

  an unprecedented scale. Beasts were driven by the hundreds into enclosed areas where the king and his companions, standing in one spot, could shoot them. More slaughter than sport, this pastime pleased Henry partly because he imagined no continental ruler could imitate it. Marillac, who was present on the progress, described a ''chase" made near Hatfield, where the well-stocked hunting grounds included not only woods but adjacent ponds and marshes. Here the huntsmen staged a spectacular display of venery. As the king and nobles shot some two hundred stags and does, boatmen swept the marshes for dozens of young swans and other river birds, while fishermen hauled in great quantities of pike and bream and sturgeon. Afterward the hunters dined on the spot, and Henry, who invited the French ambassador to join him in his tent, urged him not to forget to tell King Francis what he had seen that day. While they were eating the king pointed with pleasure to the surplus animals that had been left in reserve for the next day's hunt, some three hundred stags grazing "as near the company as if they had been domestic cattle. "1^

  The high point of the progress came when the king confronted the men of Yorkshire who had risen against him in such numbers five years earlier. They came by the thousands to kneel before him and ask his pardon. "We your humble subjects," their spokesman cried out, "confess that we wretches . . . have most grievously, heinously and wantonly offended your majesty in the unnatural, most odious and detestable offenses of outrageous disobedience and traitorous rebellion." They begged Henry to rid his mind of any "relics of indignation" he might harbor against them, and swore that they would pray unceasingly for his preservation, and that of his queen and the prince, from then on. They presented the king with lengthy written submissions as well, and showed him such reverential deference that he could not but be moved.^^