19.L&P 2 (343).
20.The drawing is in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
21.Emond, PhD diss., op. cit., p. 52.
17A Family Reunion and a Royal Rival
1.My research indicates it was not Edinburgh Castle as described by Maria Perry, Rosalind Marshall and others. See L&P 2 (779).
2.Ibid.
3.The cannon, which can be seen today at Edinburgh Castle, had been presented to King James II by his uncle by marriage, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy in 1457. The name comes from the town of Mons where it was made, in present-day Belgium.
4.L&P 2 (783).
5.L&P 2 (788).
6.By 16 September the party had reached Blackadder Castle, the stronghold of Angus’ family, the Douglasses. They did not stay for long before departing for Coldstream Abbey in England, and then on. Emond, PhD diss., op. cit., p. 92.
7.Original letters (ed Ellis), Vol. 1, p. 266.
8.L&P 2 (1380).
9.Emond, PhD diss., op. cit., p. 112. Queen Margaret’s letters to Albany during this period ask for the restoration of her husband’s castles, as well as the release of his imprisoned uncle Gavin Douglas, and grandfather, Lord Drummond. Although Dacre talks of Angus’ ‘desertion’, it was not unplanned or without Margaret’s approval.
10.L&P 2 (1829).
11.Eric Ives, ‘Henry VIII’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
12.Hall, Chronicle, p. 515. The virginals are a keyboard instrument of the harpsichord family.
13.L&P 2 (1562) (1845) (1861) (1863). Wolsey was godfather to Henry Brandon, and the godmother was Katherine, Countess of Devon. The cardinal was also godmother to Mary Tudor. The sources indicate variously Henry’s aunt, Katherine, as godmother, and the Duchess of Norfolk. Mary Tudor, through her mother, Katherine of Aragon, claimed legitimate descent from John of Gaunt from whom Henry VII drew his right to the throne (albeit through an illegitimate line). No child by any of Henry VIII’s future wives would be able to claim as much.
14.L&P 2 (1585).
15.L&P 2 (410).
16.Sebastian Giustinian, CSPV 2 (1287).
17.John Stow, A Survey of London (2005), p. 377.
18.It is now in the Austrian National Library in Vienna.
19.CSPV 2 (1287).
20.Hall, Chronicle, pp. 595, 703. The only surviving likeness of her is a brass memorial, which shows her kneeling in profile, and can be seen at the British Museum.
21.Ibid., p. 703.
22.Those who became heirs to their family estate as minors became wards of the Crown. The Crown could sell or gift the wardship, or arrange the marriage of their wards.
23.CSPV 2 (1287).
24.L&P 3, calendared early 1519, quoted in Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p. 120.
25.Vergil, Anglica Historia, p. 263.
26.L&P 3 (1283). As his father had hoped to do to Richard III: Buckingham’s temper was a character flaw he had shared with his two ducal predecessors. The first Duke of Buckingham had to be held back to prevent him stabbing the French rebel leader Joan of Arc during an interrogation in 1431. The second duke was so disliked that one of his servants sold his life to Richard III. Edward Buckingham was similarly given to ‘fumes and displeasure’.
27.L&P 3 (1284).
28.Then called Henton.
29.L&P 3 (1284).
30.CSPV 3 (213).
31.Ibid.
32.My own rather rough translation: ‘Dieu a sa ame graunte mercy car il fuit tresnoble prince & prudent & mirror de tout courtoise’ (Yearbook Pasch.13 Henry VIII, p.1 f. 11). Thanks to Eric Ives for drawing my attention to this reference. Much of the blame for Buckingham’s death was laid not at the feet of Henry VIII, but rather his chief minister. Verses were written decrying the ‘cruelty of the red man’, Wolsey, dressed in the scarlet of his office, a ‘vile Butcher’s son’ who ‘hath devoured the beautiful swan [Buckingham]’. Buckingham’s grandson, Thomas Stafford, would try and overthrow a later Tudor. He was executed after he led an invasion of England in 1557 against Mary I.
18Enter Anne Boleyn
1.Pavia is thirty-five kilometres south of Milan. The date, 24 February, was Charles V’s birthday.
2.His eldest brother was the Earl of Lincoln, who Richard III was said to have named as his heir. He was killed in 1487 at the Battle of Stoke Field, after his invasion from Ireland brought Lambert Simnel to England. The second brother, Edmund de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, had been imprisoned by Henry VII and executed by Henry VIII before his war in France in 1513.
3.Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p. 136.
4.Beverley Anne Murphy, ‘The Life and Political Significance of Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond 1525–1536’, PhD diss., University of Wales (1997), pp. 80, 81.
5.Fitzroy was endowed with lands whose revenues amounted to £4,845 in the first year. He was appointed warden-general of the marches toward Scotland on 22 June and installed into the Order of the Garter on 25 June. On 16 July he became Lord Admiral of England.
6.CSPV 3 (902).
7.Henry, Lord Morley, The Prologue Royal MSS, British Library 17 C CVI f. 2v, quoted in A. Pollnitz, ‘Humanism and Court Culture’ in Tudor Court Culture (ed Thomas Betteridge and Anna Riehl) (2012), p. 53.
8.CSPV 4 (824); G. W. Bernard, Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions (2010), p. 19. Also see the medal of Anne for the shape of her face.
9.Retha Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (1989), p. 56.
10.This follows private conversations with Eric Ives. Mary Boleyn’s affair with Henry, and possible presence at the Field of Cloth of Gold, could explain King Francis’ later reported comment that she was a notorious slut; L&P 10 (450). The Bishop of Faenza who reported this story talks about ‘the queen’s sister’ – the queen at the time being Anne Boleyn. But it also strikes me that people often got gossip about royals confused. Stories about Charles V were later applied to Edward VI, for example (the story of the skinned falcon, which was applied to Charles V after his betrothal to Henry’s sister Mary was revoked, was also applied to Edward VI following the executions of his uncles, ‘this falcon has been stripped . . . just as I . . . am skinned’). It has not been suggested before, but I believe it very possible Francis’ comments referred instead to Anne’s sister-in-law – the French queen. Her behaviour with Charles Brandon in France when recently widowed had been scandalous. ‘Plus sale que royne’ (more dirty than queenly) Francis had written on her portrait, and his mother had made her own barbed comment about her marriage with a man of ‘low estate’.
11.Thomas Skydmore of Syon, the religious conservative who claimed ‘Master Carey’ was Henry’s son, also called Henry a robber, and accused him of sleeping with Anne’s mother. He was addressing John Hale, vicar of Isleworth, who is celebrated as a Catholic martyr. L&P 8 (565) (567). There is no evidence that Henry fathered Carey’s children.
12.James Butler. Thomas Boleyn had claims to the title himself, through the female line, and was eventually granted it.
13.George Cavendish, The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey (ed R. S. Sylvester) (1959), p. 30.
14.Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier quoted in Elizabeth Heale, ‘Women and the Courtly Love Lyric: The Devonshire MS (BL Additional 17492)’ in Modern Language Review 90, No. 2 (April 1995), pp. 296–313.
15.Hall, Chronicle, p. 707. A letter Henry wrote in what appears to have been 1527 says he had been in love with her for about a year.
16.Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: The Most Happy (2004), p. 75.
17.It also argued that Communion in both kinds should be given to laity as well as clergy and rejected the hypothesis of transubstantiation. The Mass was not a sacrifice, he claimed, and the special identity of the priesthood a delusion. All Christians were priests and anyone could preside at a Communion service.
18.Henry’s views are expressed in the 1532 work, A Glass of the Truth.
19.Thomas P. Campbell, Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty (2007) pp. 180, 181, 183.
20.The previ
ous October, she had also caught Angus taking advantage of her absence from Scotland to profit from her rents. Emond, PhD diss., op. cit., p. 121.
21.L&P 3 (166), misdated April 1519. She had asked for Henry’s support, but Angus had been too useful to English interests for him to give it.
19A Marriage on Trial
1.CSPS 3, Pt II (70).
2.Ibid.
3.CSPS 3, Pt II (113).
4.Ives, The Reformation Experience, p. 68.
5.Matthew 16:19. Maria Dowling, Fisher of Men, A Life of John Fisher 1469–1535 (1999), p. 133.
6.CSPS 3, Pt II (224).
7.Cavendish, Wolsey, p. 249; Shakespeare, Henry VI Part III, Act 5, Scene 6. ‘Aboding’ is synonymous with foreboding. Edmund Spenser refers to ‘night ravens’, ‘The hateful messengers of heavy things/Of death and dolor telling sad tidings.’ The Faerie Queen, Book II, Canto VII, 23.
8.The thread was in varying heights and thickness, and the silk ground would be lampas – i.e. silk taffeta with gold thread, or brocatelle, which was similar to brocade but with designs in high relief, made on a jacquard loom. Edward Hall provides the detail that the canopy was of tissue.
9.David Starkey, Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (2004), pp. 240, 241; Cavendish, Wolsey, p. 79.
10.Cavendish, Wolsey, pp. 80, 81, 82.
11.British Library Cotton MSS Vitellius B XII.
12.Clement was born Giulio di Giuliano de’ Medici.
13.Hall, Chronicle, p. 758. Cavendish, Wolsey, p. 90, has him saying ‘it was never merry in England while we had cardinals amongst us’.
14.CSPS 4, Pt I (373).
15.Cavendish, Wolsey, pp. 178, 179. Shakespeare later paraphrased this in Henry VIII, Act 3, Scene 2, with Wolsey warning Cromwell ‘Had I but served my God with half the zeal/I served my king, he would not in mine age/Have left me naked to mine enemies.’ I also enjoy Wolsey’s soliloquy in the same scene:
Farewell! a long farewell, to all my greatness!
This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes; to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And, when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory,
But far beyond my depth: my high-blown pride
At length broke under me and now has left me,
Weary and old with service, to the mercy
Of a rude stream, that must for ever hide me.
Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye:
I feel my heart new open’d. O, how wretched
Is that poor man that hangs on princes’ favours!
There is, betwixt that smile we would aspire to,
That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin,
More pangs and fears than wars or women have:
And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,
Never to hope again.
The grandiose tomb he had commissioned was plundered by Henry and has largely disappeared, except for the sarcophagus and base. These were moved to St Paul’s Cathedral in 1808 to house the body of Lord Nelson.
20The Return of Margaret Douglas
1.L&P 4 (5794). Also in a letter dated 25 November 1528 Margaret Tudor states the Earl of Angus ‘wald nocht suffere oure ane doghter to remane wicht ws for our comfort, quha wald nocht have been disherest, scho being wicht ws’; William Fraser, The Douglas Book, Vol. 2 (1885), p. 289.
2.Ibid.
3.The Great Wardrobe Accounts of Henry VII and Henry VIII (ed Maria Haywood) (2012), p. 197.
4.CSPS 4 (445).
5.Certainly there were areas of disagreement about the precise nature and scope of papal authority. The weakness of the papacy in the early fifteenth century had prompted the development of conciliarist theories that placed authority with councils rather than just popes. Indeed, the future Catholic martyr Thomas More had objected to Henry’s earlier exultation of papal authority in his attack on Luther. But these subtle differences of interpretation were a very different thing from wholesale rejection of papal authority.
6.Eamon Duffy, ‘Rome and Catholicity’, in Saints, Sacrilege, Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations (ed E. Duffy) (2012), pp. 195–211.
7.Starkey, Six Wives, pp. 409, 410.
8.Henry showed the painted table to Charles V in 1522, when the paintwork still looked new, but it may have been done as early as 1516 when repair work was done on the hall and ‘le Round table’. See Jon Whitman, ‘National Icon: The Winchester Round Table and the Revelation of Authority’ in Arthuriana 18, No. 4 (winter 2008), p. 47.
9.Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p. 272.
10.Richard Roose was described as the cook by the Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys and in the Act of Attainder. A subsequent description of Roose as a friend of the cook appears to be wrong. See William R. Stacey, ‘Richard Roose and the Parliamentary Use of Attainder in the Reign of Henry VIII’ in Historical Journal 29, 1 (1986), n. 13, p. 3.
11.Ibid., pp. 1–15.
12.‘The Chronicle of the Grey Friars: Henry VIII’ in Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London’, Camden Society old series, Vol. 53 (1852), pp. 29–53.
13.For other cases of men and women being boiled alive for poisoning see ‘Additional notes’ in ibid., pp. 99–104.
14.CSPV 4 (682).
15.Lacey Baldwin-Smith, Treason in Tudor England (2006), p. 21.
16.CSPS 5, Pt II (739). On the importance of the French queen, see CSPV 4 (694), CSPS 4, Pt II (765).
17.It was inspired by that of her former mistress Margaret of Austria, ‘Groigne qui groigne: vive Bourgoine!’ (Complain who must: long live Burgundy!).
18.L&P 6 (1199). According to David Loades she had replaced Perkin Warbeck’s widow, Lady Catherine Gordon; see Mary Tudor: A Life (1992), p. 71. Lady Catherine’s third husband died that year.
19.L&P 5 (498).
20.Campbell, Henry VIII, p. 207.
21.They had made binding promises to each other, followed by intercourse, which under canon law was a valid marriage – for those not already married – on 14 November.
22.Ives, Anne Boleyn, p. 161; Bernard, Anne Boleyn, p. 66 (i.e. in front of a priest).
23.L&P 8 (1150).
24.L&P 6 (720).
25.Chronicle of King Henry VIII of England: Being a Contemporary Record of Some of the Principal Events (ed Martin Andrew Sharp Hume) (1889), p. 135. Mary Tudor, Duchess of Suffolk and Queen of France, was buried on 21 July 1533.
26.A couple of years earlier Fitzroy had passed on to one of his servants what he considered to be the second-rate Spanish saddle horse that Anne had given him. It was ‘very ill to ride and of worse condition’. See Murphy, PhD diss., op. cit., p. 146; HMC Longleat Miscellaneous Manuscripts XVII, f. 98.
27.Charles Wriothesley, Chronicle of England during the reign of the Tudors, 1485–1559 (ed William Douglas Hamilton), Vol. 1 (1875), p. 18.
28.CSPV 4 (694).
29.Society of Antiquaries, London, MSS 129, f. 8. It remained in royal inventories until 1547 when it was ‘acquired’ by the Protector of Somerset.
30.For a detailed description of the coronation, see L&P 6 (601).
31.L&P 6 (585).
32.Ibid.
33.Two Chronicles of London (ed C. L. Kingsford) (1910), p. 8.
34.Wriothesley, Chronicle, pp. 19, 20.
21The Terror Begins
1.His mother was Elizabeth of York’s sister, Katherine.
2.L&P 6 (1111) (1112) (1125).
3.Diane Watt, ‘Elizabeth Barton’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
4.L&P 6 (1207).
5.Margaret Douglas’ name appears in the New Year gift list so she was at court by 1 January.
6.L&P 7, Appen
dix 16 March.
7.L&P 6 (1528).
8.It later emerged that Lord Hussey (whose wife served in Mary’s household) was one such.
9.Stanford Lehmberg, ‘Parliamentary Attainder in the Reign of Henry VIII’ in Historical Journal 18 (1975), pp. 681, 682. ‘During the earlier part of Henry VIII’s reign, then, attainder was used sparingly and traditionally. No one was sent to his death solely by an act of Parliament . . . The breach with Rome altered the situation dramatically.’ ‘The pivotal act was the famous measure directed against Elizabeth Barton and her confederates, brought before the Reformation Parliament in 1534.’ ‘The Act is clearly a political measure, not a financial one, for the offenders had little property; it is the first act to deal with religious dissent, the first act filled with propaganda, the first act to be proclaimed throughout the realm, the first act to specify the death penalty, the first act of the Tudors which in itself sent offenders to the scaffold [in fact Fisher’s cook Richard Roose was the first], the first Tudor attainder for misprision, the first attainder commanding the surrender of treasonous printed matter.’
10.CSPS 5, Pt I, (90): ‘Ever since the king began to entertain doubts as to his mistress’ reported pregnancy, he has renewed and increased the love which he formerly bore to another very handsome young lady of this court; and whereas the royal mistress, hearing of it, attempted to dismiss the damsel from her service, the king has been very sad, and has sent her a message to this effect: that she ought to be satisfied with what he had done for her; for, were he to commence again, he would certainly not do as much; she ought to consider where she came from, and many other things of the same kind. Yet no great stress is to be laid on such words, considering the king’s versatility, and the wiliness (astuce) of the said lady, who knows perfectly well how to deal with him.’
11.Dowling, Fisher, p. 161.
12.CSPS 4 (445).
13.L&P 8 (666).
14.John Guy, A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More (2008), p. 259.
15.There is a 1588 copy of this bull in the Vatican archives. Copia bullae Pauli III contra Henricum regem Angliae, quem totumque regnum ecclesiastico interdicto supponti, mandando cunctis ut contra eum arma capiant. The incipit is ‘Eius qui immobilis permanes’. The datation: ‘Datum Rome apud Sanctum Marchum anno incarnatione dominice millesimo quingentesimo trigesimo quinto anno tertio calendas septembris’, i.e. 1 September 1535. (The signature is AA Arm. Arc. 1588).
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