Great Harry

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  In his fondest expectation, though, Henry was disappointed. His nephew James failed to keep his appointment as promised, and remained in safety on the Scots side of the border. Much labor and expense was wasted. More than a thousand workmen had been employed to prepare a "great lodging"—a ruined abbey, restored to temporary usefulness—for the royal meeting, and all the hangings and plate and finery of the London court had been hauled north to ornament it. Post horses had been brought from the royal stables to carry messages between Henry at York and James at Berwick as final preparations were made. Yet even as the work went forward the Scots were riding across the border in the name of King James to harry the English, spoiling fields and burning barns and killing anyone who opposed them. And Henry, indignant at the insult, ordered his men on the borders to retaliate with "spoils, burnings and killings, three hurts for one."^^

  Reconciliation between the two kings seemed further off than ever, and Henry, who had already been away from the capital far longer than expected, turned for home.

  The return journey took nearly a month. Henry arrived at Hampton Court in the last week of October, disgruntled over the murderous Scots

  and their unreliable king, yet exhilarated by his excursion in the country and satisfied that his appearance in the north had helped to secure his throne. He was unprepared for the jarring news that awaited him.

  Prince Edward was seriously ill. He lay in his gilded bed, a chunky child of four, his face drained of color and his body glistening with sweat from a high fever. The king immediately summoned all the physicians he could reach by messenger, and one by one they came. They peered at the prince, they muttered to one another, they deliberated as a group. Publicly they recommended measures to be taken toward a cure; privately one of them told Marillac that Edward was in danger of his life.^®

  For days the prince remained in the grip of the fever, as his anxious father sought to get on with the business of government after his long absence. Then on November 2 Henry received much worse news. His wife, whose purity he had thought beyond reproach, was in fact an adulteress.

  Of speech she is too bold, Of carriage all too free; Sir king, she hath within thy hall A cuckold made of thee.

  Allfrolick light and wanton She hath her carriage borne: And given thee for a kingly crown To wear a cuckold's home.

  At first Henry could not believe the report Cranmer brought him about Catherine. It was an account by an informer, based on a chance remark his sister made wondering '*at the king's taking for queen one who had lived so incontinently before marriage." On the face of it the accusation was unworthy of notice, to be taken no more seriously than other slanderous insults reported to the Privy Council every week. Yet in accusing the queen the informer, John Lassells, was taking his life in his hands, and his sister, Mary Hall, had been in a position to know. Had Catherine Howard acted unwisely, and indiscreetly, as a girl? Either way the truth should be sought.

  Piece by piece the unhappy tale came out. Catherine had indeed, as Mary Hall testified, been "light, both in living and in conditions." As a very young girl she had been infatuated with Henry Manox, an unprincipled music teacher who came to give her lessons on the virginals and stayed to teach her the facts of life. She had allowed Manox to kiss her and to "feel the secret parts of her body"; he might have gotten further except that Catherine passed into other hands, those of Francis Dereham. With Dereham she lived out an adolescent love fantasy, made all the more exciting by intrigue and midnight revelry and pledges of love and future marriage. Catherine was living in a large household of young people at Lambeth, under the lax supervision of the dowager duchess of Norfolk. She found it easy enough to steal her aunt's keys, let Dereham into her room, and welcome him into her bed.^

  As more and more witnesses were examined it became clear that Catherine's behavior before coming to court had been far from secret. Her chamber servants at Lambeth, their friends, an old porter, several grooms and the duchess' chamber woman were all privy to the scandal Catherine had caused. Many of her female relatives knew of her past

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  when she became queen, but kept a conspiratorial silence. The duchess maintained that she was ignorant of the entire affair, "holding up her hands and saying she was as innocent as the child newborn," but in the face of much counterevidence no one believed her.

  Five days after Henry first heard of his wife's prior entanglements he came to a hard decision: sorrowfully and "with careful proceeding," he ordered that Catherine's household be disbanded, her coffers and chests sealed and her former possessions kept under guard. Proclamation was to be made at Hampton Court that, as she had forfeited her honor, so Catherine had now to forfeit her title of queen; henceforth she was to be plain Catherine Howard again, kept in confinement with "a mean number of servants" at Syon House until the law took its course against her.^

  Given the extreme embarrassment and disgrace she had brought to him Henry was remarkably lenient. There was talk of sending her to a convent—eventually, after the marriage was declared null. (Nullity would be easy to prove. Dereham swore that he and Catherine had been pledged to one another; this plus consummation made them man and wife under church law. If Catherine was married to Dereham when she married Henry, the latter was no marriage.)

  Catherine was suffering enough. There was no need to punish her further. When Cranmer went to see her he found her in a state "it would have pitied any man's heart to see." Remorse over her past, bitter regret that her indiscretions had come to light, even the king's mercy all brought her to tears. While the archbishop was with her the hour of six o'clock came, and with it a fresh flood of weeping. It was at that hour, she told Cranmer, that Hennage customarily brought her news of Henry.^ With more thought for saving face than for taking vengeance Henry proceeded with as much dignity as he could in degrading Catherine, and resumed his usual pastimes with conspicuous nonchalance. He went out of his way to appear high-spirited and jovial, and to surround himself with ladies when he dined.

  But by mid-November new shock waves ran through the court as the full scope of the queen's misconduct began to emerge, and the king left for the country "for the purpose of relieving his mind from the annoyance and troubles caused by late events."'* To save himself, Dereham had revealed what only a few of the queen's women knew for certain: Catherine had a lover at court, Thomas Culpepper.

  To Henry's utter dismay he now learned that his young wife had not only been repeatedly unfaithful to him, she had carried on her intrigues right under his nose. And she had chosen one of his closest intimates, a man who had been brought up in his chamber and who occasionally shared his bed. That Culpepper persisted in defending his innocence only made matters worse. The queen had sent for him, he swore, with Lady Rochford as go-between; when he came to meet her "at a retired place" she said she loved him and was "dying for his love" in return. He was blameless.

  Throughout the summer and early fall, while the great northern progress ran its course, Catherine had flirted with Culpepper and more

  than likely seduced him. She was clearly the aggressor, not the victim, and in her blind desperation she failed to conceal her passion from her bedchamber women, who now testified against her. There could be no further leniency for one who had cuckolded the king.

  Once all was known Henry, grief-stricken and humiliated, grew angry. Catherine had made a fool of him. His courtiers whispered to one another behind his back, and laughed at him. And the more he gave vent to his extremes of feeling, the more people talked, though they "thought more than they said," as Marillac put it. Henry alarmed his councilors by calling for a sword to kill Catherine, and by mumbling vengefully in the midst of their deliberations that "that wicked woman had never such delight in her incontinency as she should have torture in her death." Sometimes he seemed to forget himself entirely, suddenly rising in the midst of a Council meeting and calling for his horses, telling no one where he meant to go. And always he gave in at last to tears, weeping publicly over his ill fortun
e, declaring he would never marry again as long as he lived, wishing he had never seen Catherine and treating his councilors as if they and not the queen were to blame.^

  On through December and January the ordeal of trials, condemnations and executions proceeded. On December 10 Culpepper and Dereham were executed, the former having "obtained the grace" of being beheaded rather than hanged and disemboweled as his sentence prescribed. Christmas came and went—Henry spent the holiday season at Greenwich and, with a small company, at country houses "seeking in pastimes to forget his grief—and then the major indictments were brought. Toward the end of January Catherine Howard and Lady Rochford were attainted of treason, and shortly afterward they were brought to the Tower to prepare to die. Catherine had spent her last months making macabre cheer at Syon House, adorning herself with greater care than ever and ordering her few attendants about with imperious disdain. As the day of her execution approached this fa9ade wore thin. She admitted her guilt, and expected no mercy, she said. Her only request was that her death be a private affair, not a public humiliation.

  On the morning of February 13 Catherine was beheaded in the same place where Anne Boleyn and Buckingham had lost their lives. Afraid of disgracing herself before the spectators, she had rehearsed her role the night before, asking that the executioner's block be brought to her Tower room and placing her head on it for practice. When she faced the headsman the next morning her courage nearly failed her; she was "so weak that she could hardly speak," but managed to confess her guilt and to praise Henry's graciousness toward her before the axe fell.^

  When Catherine's women had taken her body away, enshrouded in a black cloak, her accomplice Lady Rochford was led in to die. Her death put an end to months of grotesque suffering. Ever since her arrest she had been beside herself with apprehension. Her brain was affected by a "fit of frenzy," the doctors reported; by a quirk of the law she could not be tried for treason as long as her derangement lasted. With malicious irony Henry sent his physicians to visit her every day so that she might recover

  sufficiently to be executed. Yet she persisted in her hysterical state, and finally a parliamentary bill was enacted permitting punishment of traitors who had lost their reason. Then, when at last she came to die. Lady Rochford enjoyed a final hour of lucidity. On the scaffold she made a "long discourse" about her faults and prayed for Henry's welfare before submitting herself to her fate.^

  To those who observed him at close range the king seemed to be nearly as affected by the recent revelations and their aftermath as the culprits themselves. ''Ever since he heard of his late queen's misconduct," Chapuys wrote, ''he has become sad and mournful, and I have scarcely spoken to him once without finding him low-spirited and dejected, sighing continually."^ Others found him to be "not a little troubled with this great affair," and declared he was not the man he had been. Though it was midwinter he went hunting, trying in vain to improve his spirits and to escape from governmental labors which had come to seem intolerable. When bad weather confined him indoors he occupied himself with going over the statements of witnesses against Catherine, revising the legal documents in an attempt to confront in his mind what gnawed at his heart.^

  Chapuys explained Henry's condition by analogy with a woman who mourned more for her tenth husband than for the other nine put together. Though all nine had been good men and faithful husbands, she had grieved over them the less because as each one died she had been certain of the next. With the loss of the tenth there was no new husband in view; in burying him she buried her hopes, and so mourned him the more bitterly. "Such is the case with the king," the ambassador concluded, who "does not seem to have any plan or female friend to fall back upon."^^

  Whatever the cause, there was no mistaking the physical change that had come over Henry in the months since he returned from the northern progress. He was noticeably older and grayer, and to Marillac at least he appeared to have lost his customary bellicosity. He resembled his grandfather King Edward in his fifties, the French ambassador said, in "loving rest and fleeing trouble." And he was daily becoming more and more mountainously fat.

  fHenry had been "very stout" for several years, the result of "mar-vehous excess" in eating and drinking. In 1536, the year he jousted for the last time and suffered the dangerous fall from his horse, the royal armorers measured him. His chest was forty-five inches, his waist thirty-seven inches—only a little larger than his measurements at age twenty-three. In 1541, his chest had grown to fifty-seven inches, and his waist, at fifty-four inches, was rapidly expanding to meet it.'^Catherine's disgrace and its bloody sequel sent him back to the dining table with renewed gluttony, until by the spring of 1542 he had transformed himself into a rotund colossus whose belly all but burst out of his doublets and who walked at a ponderous pace, limping unsteadily on his painful legs.

  Such self-destructive excess was worrisome enough in itself, but Henry's coufKTilors had another reason to worry. Only a year earlier they had witnessed an almost incapacitating cycle of mental and physical

  symptoms in the king, made worse, if not brought on, by his overindulgence. In the late winter of 1541 a tertian fever seized him, and instead of taking its normal course it affected his ulcerated legs. Ever since his brush with death in 1538 his physicians had kept the wound open; as long as the poisons were allowed to drain out he was safe. Now, abruptly, it closed. He was terrified. But the surgeons, Thomas Vicary in particular, had learned from the last experience and were able to unblock the passage, and restore their royal patient to health.

  Yet the physicians had not been able to treat the altered state of his mind and spirits. As he lay on his sickbed the king lashed out verbally at his ungrateful subjects, at his advisers, at the bulwarks and walls of his coastal fortresses which had fallen into disrepair. His people were an unhappy lot "whom he would shortly make so poor that they would not have the boldness nor the power to oppose him." His councilors were a pack of lying flatterers, pretending to serve him yet caring only for their own profit. He knew full well, he ranted on, what they were plotting, "and if God lent him health, he would take care that their projects should not succeed." In his darkest moments Henry blamed his Council members— quite accurately—^for deceiving him about Cromwell and maneuvering his execution; their false accusations had made him put to death "the most faithful servant he ever had."

  So Henry had spoken of Wolsey's disgrace and death twelve years earlier, as a tragic result of malicious rivalries. Perhaps that old grief, and others, rose to torment him now, leading him to shut himself off from his courtiers, his wife (it was at this time that he saw little of Catherine, and there were strong rumors of divorce), and even his beloved music. He spent the Shrovetide season virtually alone, without music or other pastimes, with such a small household "that his court resembled more a private family than a king's train." Visitors who came to Hampton Court on business were received with brusque efficiency and sent away.^^

  The fit of violent dissatisfaction and isolated depression passed, but recurred the following winter, accompanying Catherine's disgrace. What his innermost thoughts were no one knew. He now had no wife to confide in; his son and younger daughter, at four and eight years old, could not share his moods. Even his daughter Mary, whom he now brought to court to act in place of a queen, was left out of his private ruminations.

  Henry did leave some traces of his inner self in this period in a predictable place: the margins of his books. His printer delivered a long list of books to him in the early 1540s, devotional works, leatherbound Bibles with golden clasps and gilt ornamentation, scholastic texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and a scattering of works by the Church Fathers. They were the purchases of a true^bibliophile and humamsl—and a rnaiLQldejep-andj'ather conservative piety.^^ I n these years Henry heard mass dailyjind twice on feast days. On GoodJFriday he still "crepUo the cross" from th-eJcT^apeT"dbor1to the altar in observance of a medieval cusjom, "his own person kneeling on his grace's knees," and served the priest_
at mass afterward.*^~HuweVer his fhbods and attitudes might shift, his faith was firmly grounded. He pored over his devotional books and

  studied their familiar texts again and again, writing 'nota bene" beside particularly meaningful passages and incidentally illuminating the themes and issues he turned in his mind.

  In one book, a contemporary translation of Proverbs called The Bokes of Salomon, Henry's annotations made in 1542 tell a good deal. In this book he marked verses about kingship ("Let mercy and faithfulness never go from thee . . ."), about those ''desiring war" ("Cast down the people whose delight is to have battle"), about divine judgment and the vanity of worldly goods. But the overwhelming majority of passages he marked had to do with wives and harlots and punishment for sexual sins.

  Next to the verse "be glad with the wife of thy youth" he wrote "for wyfves"—on the face of it an irony—and drew a marginal sign next to a passage paralleling Queen Catherine Howard's unhappy path of life. "That thou mayest be delivered also from the strange woman," the passage read, "which giveth sweet words, forsaketh the husband of her youth and forgetteth the convenant of her God. For her house is inclined unto death, and her paths unto hell."

  Beside the verse "For the lips of a harlot are a dropping honeycomb, and her throat is softer than oil" the king made a double mark, continuing it as the passage went on, "But at the last she is as bitter as wormwood, and as sharp as a two-edged sword."^^

  Clearly the brooding depression Chapuys and Marillac noted went deep. Yet as always Henry made at least a show of gaiety and high spirits to cover his distress and, for a time, to escape from it. By now it had become almost a tradition with him to celebrate the deaths or discardings of disappointing wives. He had feasted with pointed rejoicing when Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn died; with Anne of Cleves he had begun to celebrate his freedom in the company of Catherine Howard long before the nullity suit was concluded. So, on the day his fifth wife was condemned, he gave a supper and banquet, with twenty-six ladies at his own table and another thirty-five close by. The celebrating went on for many weeks. Henry gave banquets for his privy councilors and the lords of the court, for the men of law, and, one evening, for a select group of ladies, all of whom spent the night at the palace. On the morning of that banquet he devoted all his time to inspecting the preparations made for his guests. He went from one chamber to another, examining the furnishings and bedding and making certain the rugs and hangings were of the best.