by C. J. Sansom
Always in Henry’s reign, the gentlemen of the bedchamber, chosen by him and with the closest access to his person, wielded serious political power. His two chief gentlemen during most of 1546 were Anthony Denny, a radical sympathizer, and his deputy William Browne, a conservative. In October, Browne was moved and his replacement was none other than William Herbert, the Queen’s brother-in-law and a reformer. This surely puts paid to any idea that the Parrs were out of favour following the heresy hunt.
Henry also, inevitably, saw much of his doctors. His long-standing chief physician, the reformer William Butts, had died in 1545 and was succeeded by his deputy, Thomas Wendy, another radical who also served as chief physician to the Queen. Indeed, it has been suggested that he was the man who got a copy of her arrest warrant to the Queen in July, either secretly or, as I think more likely, acting as go-between in Henry’s scheme to humiliate Wriothesley.
WITH THESE MEN in close attendance, the King wrote his last Will at the end of December. The Will has caused much controversy. For the last few years of Henry’s life, with so many documents to be signed and the King in poor health, use had been made of a ‘dry stamp’, a stamp with a facsimile of the King’s signature. When Henry approved a document, it was stamped and the King’s signature inked in, most often by Paget. One would have expected the King to sign his own Will, but the dry stamp was used. The Will, too, was not entered on the register of court documents until a month after its signature, by which time Henry was dead.
Without venturing too far into this area of controversy, the provision that during Edward VI’s minority the realm was to be governed by a council of sixteen persons, with a strongly radical balance, almost certainly reflects Henry’s intention in December. However, it is quite possible that the clause giving Secretary Paget the power to make ‘unfulfilled gifts’, the details of which Paget said the King had confided to him personally, was a forgery. After the King’s death on the 28th of January 1547, Paget and Edward Seymour quickly seized the initiative; peerages and gifts of money were handed out liberally to members of the council as ‘unfulfilled gifts’, and the council made Lord Hertford Protector.
HERTFORD BECAME, for a while, something like a dictator. A new religious policy of Protestant radicalism began. The Mass was abolished, church interiors whitewashed, a new Prayer Book installed. Whether Henry VIII wished for any of this is very doubtful, but he had secured his main aim – the preservation of the Royal Supremacy for the young Edward VI. By the time Edward reached fifteen, in late 1552, his own personality as a radical and rather severe reformer was emerging. Had he lived as long as his father, which no one saw any reason to doubt, a Protestant revolution, as thoroughgoing as that which took place in 1560s Scotland, would probably have become firmly established. But by one of history’s ironies, Edward died from tuberculosis in 1553, a few months short of his sixteenth birthday.
The throne then passed to the King’s elder daughter Mary, who reversed course all the way back to papal allegiance, renounced the Royal Supremacy, re-established monasticism and married the Catholic Prince (later King) Philip of Spain. But in 1558, after only five years’ rule, Mary too died, probably of cancer, and the throne passed to Elizabeth, who re-established Protestantism, albeit of a distinctly moderate kind.
It has often been suggested that the ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ factions at Henry’s court were motivated more by desire for power than any religious conviction, and indeed many councillors – Paget, Rich, Cecil and others – managed to survive and hold office under both Edward and Mary, the younger councillors continuing to serve Elizabeth. But Edward’s senior councillors, who implemented radical Protestantism, were mainly former Henrician radicals, while Mary’s were mainly former Henrician conservatives. This reminds us that while many clerics and councillors were motivated by the desire for power and wealth, it is a mistake to think the Tudor ruling classes took religion lightly.
THE STORY OF the last two years of Catherine Parr’s life is tragic. To her disappointment, she did not become Regent. Then this most capable and usually astute woman decided to follow her heart rather than her head, and quickly married her old love, the Protector’s brother Thomas Seymour. The result was disastrous. She moved with him (and the teenage Elizabeth) to Seymour’s castle at Sudeley. There, at thirty-five, Catherine fell pregnant for the first time. Thomas Seymour, who had probably married Catherine because of her status as Queen Dowager, diverted himself during his wife’s pregnancy with sexual abuse of the fourteen-year-old Elizabeth. When Catherine found out, Elizabeth was sent away from the household of the stepmother she had been close to for four years.
In September 1548 Catherine gave birth to a daughter, but like so many Tudor women, she died shortly afterwards from an infection of the womb. In the delirium of her last days she accused her husband of mocking and betraying her.
Seymour, who seems by now to have been hardly sane, then launched a crack-brained plot, in February 1549, to seize his young nephew Edward VI, and perhaps make himself Protector in his brother’s place. He had no support whatever, was immediately arrested and executed for treason in March 1549. Elizabeth, hearing of his execution, is said to have remarked, ‘Today died a man of much wit and little judgement.’ As so often, she summed things up exactly.
Catherine’s baby, the now orphaned Mary Seymour, passed into the care of Catherine’s friend the Dowager Duchess of Suffolk, but disappears from the records after 1550, and must have died in infancy like so many Tudor children. It was the saddest of endings to the story of Catherine Parr.
Endnote
1 Redworth, G., In Defence of the Church Catholic: The Life of Stephen Gardiner (1990)
ALSO BY C. J. SANSOM
WINTER IN MADRID
DOMINION
The Shardlake series
DISSOLUTION
DARK FIRE
SOVEREIGN
REVELATION
HEARTSTONE
First published 2014 by Mantle
This electronic edition published 2014 by Mantle
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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ISBN 978-0-230-76129-2
Copyright © C. J. Sansom 2014
Jacket photograph: Danita Delimont / Getty Images; Shutterstock
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
; Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Epilogue
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
H ISTORICAL N OTE