1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII

by Lipscomb, Suzannah

  Hall, Chronicle Edward Hall, The vnion of the two noble and illustre famelies of Lancastre [and] Yorke… (London, 1550)

  HJ The Historical Journal

  Ives, Life and Death Eric Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn ‘The Most Happy’ (Oxford, 2004)

  LP J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner and R. H. Brodie (eds.) Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Of the Reign of Henry VIII (1862–1932)

  MacCulloch, Cranmer Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven and London, 1996)

  Scarisbrick, Henry VIII J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (London, 1968, 1990 reprint)

  State Papers State Papers published under the authority of His Majesty’s Commission (1830)

  Statutes The Statutes of the Realm, vol. iii, 1509–1547 (London, 1817)

  TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

  Wriothesley, Chronicle Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, From ad 1485 to 1559 ed. William Douglas Hamilton (London, 1875)

  Starkey, Six Wives David Starkey, Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (London, 2003)

  Walker, Writing Greg Walker, Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford, 2005)

  Weir, Henry VIII Alison Weir, Henry VIII: King and Court (London, 2001)

  Shore, ‘Crisis’ Miles F. Shore, ‘Henry VIII and the Crisis of Generativity’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2.4 (1972)

  Endnotes

  Preface

  1 Ives, The Life and Death, p. 351.

  2 J.C. Flügel, ‘On the Character and Married Life of Henry VIII’, in Psychoanalysis and History ed. Bruce Mazlish (Englewood Cliffs, 1963) (reprinted from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, I, 1920, 24–55); Shore, ‘Crisis’; interviews with cast and crew, Henry VIII (ITV, 2003); Baldwin Smith, Henry VIII, p. 25; also see David Starkey, Henry: Virtuous Prince (London, 2008), which was published when this book went to press.

  3 Baldwin Smith, Review article, ‘Christ, What a Fright!: The Tudor Portrait as an Icon’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4.1 (1973), pp. 119–127, here p. 120.

  PART ONE

  Setting the Scene

  Prologue

  1 L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (New York, 1954).

  2 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, I.i.109–110; Wilfred Hooper, ‘The Tudor Sumptuary Laws’, EHR 30 (1915), 443–49; Derek Wilson, England in the Age of Thomas More (Norwich, 1978), pp. 62–63.

  3 Wilson, England, pp. 86–88.

  4 Lucien Febvre, Le problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle; La religion de Rabelais (Paris, 1947); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, 1971); Jean Delumeau, Sin and fear: the emergence of a western guilt culture 13th–18th centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York, 1991).

  5 Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression (Cambridge, New York, 1984); Baldwin Smith, A Tudor Tragedy: The Life and Times of Catherine Howard, (London, 1961), pp. 74–78, here p. 78.

  6 Susan Dwyer Amussen, ‘“The Part of a Christian Man”: The Cultural Politics of Manhood in Early Modern England’, in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England. Essays presented to David Underdown ed. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester and New York, 1995), p. 215; Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass. and London 1990), pp. 134–42; Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 16, 17, 22.

  PART ONE – Chapter 1

  The Change

  1 Victoria Coren, ‘Wilf, meet Henry, Google’s top killer’, The Observer, 15 April 2007; ‘Henry VIII representation’, BDRC Focus Group, April 2006.

  2 LP, xiv (i), 14; xx (ii), 1030; Thomas Stapleton, The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More trans. P.E. Hallett (London, 1928), p. 77.

  3 Shore, ‘Crisis’, 361, 374, 389, 390; Sir Arthur Salisbury MacNalty, Henry VIII: A Difficult Patient (London, 1952), pp. 73, 95, 159ff, 183. MacNulty follows F. Chamberlin, The Private Character of Henry VIII (London, 1932). Although MacNulty mentions that the ulcer Henry sustained in 1527 would cause ‘irritability and impatience’, he foregrounds the theory of cerebral injury in explaining Henry’s

  change of character (compare with Weir’s note to MacNulty, Weir, Henry VIII, p. 370); Walker, Writing, p. 11.

  4 Flügel, ‘On the Character and Married Life of Henry VIII’, p. 135; Baldwin Smith, Henry VIII, p. 23, also see p. 106.

  5 Chamberlin, The Private Character; Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p. 485; Weir, Henry VIII, pp. 370, 384 – though she cites MacNulty, not Scarisbrick.

  PART ONE – Chapter 2

  Young Henry

  1 LP, iv (iii), 5412.

  2 R. A. B. Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson (trans.), The Correspondence of Erasmus (Toronto, 1972), 12 vols, ii, pp. 126–29.

  3 Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp. 7–10.

  4 Mynors and Thomson, Correspondence of Erasmus II, pp. 147–48; LP, i, 338; Rawdon Brown (trans.), Four Years at the Court of Henry VIII. Selection of Dispatches Written by the Venetian Ambassador, Sebastian Giustinian (London 1854), 2 vols, I, p. 81; CSP, Ven, iii, 1287.

  5 Hall, Chronicle, f. 2v; Four Years, I, p. 76; CSP, Ven, iii, 918, 1287.

  6 CSP, Ven, iii, 1053, 918; LP, I (ii) 2391; CSP, Ven, iii, 1287.

  7 George Cavendish, The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey in Two Early Tudor Lives ed. Richard S. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding (New Haven and London, 1962), pp. 11, 12; Four Years, I, pp. 79–81; CSP, Ven, iii, 828, 837; Four Years, I, p. 232; CSP, Ven, iii, 1287; LP, i (ii), 2391; CSP, Ven, iii, 918.

  8 Joycelyne G. Russell, The Field of the Cloth of Gold: Men and Manners in 1520 (London, 1969), pp. 49, 145–46, 150–51; LP, iii (i), 919.

  9 CSP, Ven, iii, 918; Four years, I, pp. 85, 90, 192; Desiderius Erasmus, Opus Epistolarum ed. P.S. and H.M. Allen, 11 vols (Oxford, 1906–47), VIII, 2143, p. 129; CSP, Ven, iii, 1287, 918, 1095, 1241; LP, I, (ii), 2391.

  10 CSP, Span, 1509–25, 19; Cavendish, Wolsey, p. 12; Four Years, I, p. 281; CSP, Ven, iii, 875 and 894; Steven Gunn, ‘Warfare in Henry’s Reign’, Henry: Dressed to Kill Exhibition at the Tower of London Catalogue (Royal Armouries, forthcoming 2009); Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, pp. 21–24.

  11 Cavendish, Wolsey, p. 183.

  12 CSP, Ven, iii, 839; Four Years, I, p. 195; Cavendish, Wolsey, p. 189; Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p. 17.

  PART ONE – Chapter 3

  The Divorce

  1 E. W. Ives, ‘Henry VIII (1491–1547)’, ODNB, (Oxford, 2004); with thanks to Dr Kent Rawlinson, Curator of Historic Buildings at Hampton Court Palace for his thoughts on this.

  2 Cavendish, Wolsey, p. 32.

  3 Cavendish, Wolsey, p. 86.

  4 J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (London, 1969–1990 reprint), p. 163; Bernard, The King’s Reformation, pp. 17–22.

  5 Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p. 287; Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Henry VIII and the Reform of the Church’, in ibid (ed.) The Reign of Henry VIII: Politics, Policy and Piety (Basingstoke, 1995), p. 165; William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), ed. R. Lovett (1888), p. 93; J.G. Nichols (ed.), Narratives of the Days of the Reformation (London, 1859), p. 56.

  6 Statutes, 24. Hen VIII, c.xii; 25 Henry VIII, c.xx; 26 Henry VIII, c.i; Peter Marshall, Reformation England 1480–1642 (London, 2003), p. 39.

  7 Statutes, 28 Henry VIII, c.vii, 26 Henry VIII, c.xiii.

  8 Ives, The Life and Death, pp. 260–62; MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (London, 2003), p. 194; CSP Span V (ii), 43; LP, x, 601.

  PART ONE – Chapter 4

  1536 and All That

  1 Derek Wilson, In the Lion’s Court: Power, Ambition and Sudden Death in the Reign of Henry VIII (London, 2001), p. 382. Annus horribilis is Latin for ‘horrible year’ and was famously used by Queen Elizabeth II to describe 1992; MacNalty, Henry VIII, p. 95; R.W. Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the
politics of the 1530s (Oxford, 2001), pp. 55–92; Wilson, In the Lion’s Court, pp. 385, 386.

  PART TWO

  The Crisis of Masculinity

  1 Michael Payne and John Hunter (eds.) Renaissance Literature: An Anthology (Oxford, 2005).

  2 LP, xi, 285; phrase from Philip D. Collington, ‘Sans Wife: Sexual Anxiety and the Old Man in Shakespeare’, in Growing Old in Early Modern Europe: Cultural Representations ed. Erin Campbell (Aldershot, 2006), p. 191.

  PART TWO – Chapter 5

  A Wife’s Death

  1 LP, x, 41; ix, 964, 1036, 1037; x, 60, 59.

  2 MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp.147; CSP Span, IV (ii), 778; LP, ix, 983; N.H. Nicolas (ed.), Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England, 1386–1542, 7 vols. (London, 1830), vii, p. 347.

  3 A papal bull was an edict issued by a pope, so named after the lead seal or bulla that proved its authenticity.

  4 LP, ix, 1036, 99, x, 70, 82, ix, 1000, x, 141.

  5 LP, x, 199; Ives, The Life and Death, p. 295 miscalculates Elizabeth to be 16 months old, but she was born on 7 September 1533; Hall, Chronicle, f. 227r; see, for example, J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, p. 335, ‘he would mock her even in death’.

  6 LP, x, 141; Starkey, Six Wives, p. 510; LP, x, 76, 128.

  PART TWO – Chapter 6

  The King’s Honour

  1 LP, xix (ii), 19; C.B. Watson, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honour (Princeton, 1960); Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (London and New York, 1999), p. 5; Lyndal Roper, ‘Stealing manhood: capitalism and magic in early modern Germany’, in Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London and New York, 1994), p. 138.

  2 The term ‘masculinity’ dates from 1748, whereas the use of ‘manhood’ to mean the qualities of manliness dates back to 1393, according to the OED. The source of much of the detail of what follows is Alan Young, Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments (London, 1987), especially pp. 14–25; Frederic J. Baumgartner, France in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1995), p. 126; Hall, Chronicle, ff. 122v–123r; MacNalty, Henry VIII: A Difficult Patient, p.89.

  3 Young, Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments, p. 23; with thanks to Dr Kent Rawlinson, Curator of Historic Buildings at Hampton Court Palace, for his thoughts on ‘conspicious consumption’; Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier trans. George Bull (London, 1967), p. 310; David Loades, The Tudor Court (London, 1986), p. 3; LP, xv, 616; Thomas Elyot, The Book named the Governor ed. S.E. Lehmberg (1975), Book 1, XVI.

  4 Four Years, I, pp. 75–76, 81, see also 91; Shore, ‘Crisis’, 370; Raymond Lull, Book of the Order of Chivalry cited by Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven and London, 1995), p.129

  5 LP, x, 200; x, 427; Robert Hutchinson, The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (London, 2005), p. 138; LP, x, 200, 255, 315, 427.

  6 LP, x, 282, 351; Wriothesley, Chronicle, p. 33; Lancelot de Carles, ‘Poème sur la mort d’Anne Boleyn’, reprinted in La Grande Bretagne devant l’opinion française depuis la guerre de cent ans jusqu’à la fin du XVIe siècle ed. Georges Ascoli (Geneva, 1971), p. 242, lines 317–26. See also LP x 1036.

  7 Aymot, ‘Constantyne’, 75; MacNalty, Henry VIII, pp. 67, 73, 198–9; Norman Moore, ‘Vicary, Thomas (d. 1561)’, rev. I. G. Murray, ODNB (Oxford, 2004); cf. Elizabeth Lane Furdell, The Royal Doctors: 1485–1714: Medical Personnel at the Tudor and Stuart Courts (Rochester, New York, 2001), p.33. Vicary was promised the job in 1530 and held it until his death in 1561; LP, xii (i), 1068, xii (ii), 77. This has led some commentators to suggest Henry had ulcers in both legs, but this is the only evidence to suggest it; LP xii (i), 995; xiii (ii), 800; xvi, 589 (my italics); MacNalty, Henry VIII, pp. 103, 160–61, 198–99.

  8 MacNalty, Henry VIII, p.167; Maria Hayward, Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII (Leeds, 2007), p. 7, n.6, cf. Stephen J. Kunitz, ‘Making a Long Story Short: A Note on Men’s Height and Mortality in England from the First through the Nineteenth Centuries’, in Medical History 31, (1987), p. 275; LP, xvi, 121; xvi, 589; Four Years, I, p. 86; Weir, Henry VIII, p. 2; Castiglione, Courtier, p. 61.

  9 LP, iv (iii), 5412; Roper, ‘Blood and codpieces: masculinity in the early modern German town’, in Oedipus and the Devil, pp. 119–120.

  10 These medical texts are analyzed by Alexandra Shepard in her Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), pp. 54–55, 214–16. Cf. Alice Tobriner, ‘Old Age in Tudor-Stuart Broadside Ballads’, Folklore 102.ii (1991), 151, and Baldwin Smith, Henry VIII, p. 129; Prospero’s age is observed by Collington, ‘Sans Wife’, 197; Keith Thomas, ‘Age and Authority in Early Modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy 61 (1976), 207–8, 211–12; Collington, Sans Wife’, 187, 191, 192; judgments on old age cited by Thomas, ‘Age and Authority’, 244.

  11 John Stow, The Annales of England faithfully collected out of the most autenticall authors, records, and other monuments of antiquitie, from the first inhabitation vntill this present yeere 1592 by Iohn Stow citizen of London (London, 1592), p.964; Will Fisher, ‘The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 54.1 (2001), pp. 155–188, here 156, 158, 166, 167, 173, 174; LP, x, 743.

  PART TWO – Chapter 7

  The Fall of Anne Boleyn

  1 Having examined all the evidence, I have reached conclusions very similar to those of Greg Walker, in ‘Rethinking the Fall of Anne Boleyn’, HJ 45.1 (2002). I am also indebted to the scholarship of Eric Ives and G.W. Bernard. Those who believe it led inexorably to Anne’s execution include John Guy, Tudor England, p. 141 and Starkey, Six Wives, p. 554; J.E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth (London, 1934), p. 17.

  2 G. R. Elton suggests more than one – see England under the Tudors (London, 1955), p. 152, but the evidence for a miscarriage in 1535 is slim, and a series of miscarriages in 1534 does not fit with the dates; for the secret wedding, see Hall, Chronicle, f. 209v, cf. MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 637–38; Starkey, Six Wives, p. 463; LP, vii, 114, 556; Sir John Dewhurst, ‘The alleged miscarriages of Katharine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn’, Medical History 21 (1984), p. 54; LP, vii, 232, 958, see also 1013 and CSP Span V (ii), 75.

  3 LP, vii, 1193, CSP Span V (i), 90; Dewhurst, ‘The alleged miscarriages’, p. 55; see also St Clare Byrne, The Lisle Letters, 1, p.240; Ives, The Life and Death, pp. 190–92; Starkey, Six Wives, p. 553; Weir, Henry VIII, p. 353. Chapuys does not seem to have accompanied the court, as Weir suggests; LP, x, 450, 528; Ives suggests this story was spread by Francis I, see Ives, The Life and Death, p. 299.

  4 Wriothesley, Chronicle, p.33; LP, x, 282; CSP Span V (ii), 21; LP, x, 351; CSP Span V (ii), 29. Compare Ives, The Life and Death, p. 299; G.W. Bernard, ‘The Fall of Anne Boleyn’, EHR 106 (1991), 588 and Walker, ‘Rethinking’, 13. The original (in Vienna) is in French and entirely in cipher, and the translations of it in the Letters and Papers and the Calendar of State Papers: Spanish differ sufficiently to allow more than one interpretation of Henry’s actions; CSP Span V (ii), 29. Walker, ‘Rethinking’, 11, suggests this statement about not bearing to be apart refers to Jane, not Anne, but I believe this is a misreading; LP, x, 199, 427; CSP Span V (ii) 13; LP, x, 199. George Bernard cites the original French text, in the Vienna archives, in ‘The Fall’, p. 585.

  5 Wriothesley, Chronicle, I. pp. 189–91; see Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London, 1611), which gives ‘witchcraft’ and ‘divination’ under the entry ‘sortilege’; Ives, The Life and Death, p. 298, see LP, vi, 1069; Retha Warnicke, ‘Sexual Heresy at the Court of Henry VIII’, HJ 30 (1987), and The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1989), ch. 8, and dismissal by Bernard, ‘The fall’, 586, and Ives, The Life and Death, pp. 296–97; Walker, ‘Rethinking’, 15, note.

  6 MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 149; Walker, ‘Rethinking’, 12; LP, x, 352

  7 LP, x, 282, 495, CSP Span V (ii) 2
1; George Wyatt, ‘Extracts from the Life of the Virtuous Christian and Renowed Queen Boleigne’, in S.W. Singer, The Life of Cardinal Wolsey (London, 1925), p. 443; for Henry’s affairs, see LP, vii, 1193; viii, 263; CSP Span V (ii), 43; LP, x, 601.

  8 Ives believes Jane was coached and ‘Henry discovered the new Jane at the end of March’, but there is very little evidence of change; CSP Span V (ii), 43; LP, x, 601; LP, x, 901.

  9 Starkey, The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics (London, 2002), p. 88; Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, (2nd edition, London, 1997), p. xiii; Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions and hurtful acts (London, 2008), pp. 15–17.

  10 LP, x, 720, 752, 782; ‘concubine’ is Chapuys’ ubiquitous term for Anne, LP, x, 720 (for ‘she-devil’); vi, 975, 1018, 1069 (for 1533); LP, vi, 1069; vii, 1193; for ‘merry’, see LP, vi, 1054, 1069, vii, 126, 682, 823, 888, 1193; ix, 310, 525, 566, 571, 663; Bernard, ‘The Fall’, 585.

  11 LP, x, 699; CSP Span V (ii), 43a; LP, x, 720; Bernard, ‘The Fall’, 589–590.

  12 Ives, The Life and Death, pp. 321, 307–15; Starkey, Six Wives, pp. 555–61; for Anne and Cromwell on bad terms, see LP, x, 601; CSP Span V (ii), 61, LP, x, 1069. The crucial phrase is ‘il se mist a fantasier et conspirer le dict affaire’. See Cotgrave, A Dictionarie, for a near-contemporary translation of ‘fantasier’; see, for example, Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) and Henry VIII (2003).

  13 de Carles, ‘Poème sur la mort d’Anne Boleyn’, in Ascoli, pp. 242–46, lines 339– 374, 430–34, 443–44, 390–464; Bernard, ‘The Fall’, 596; see also Ives, The Life and Death, p. 333; LP, x, 953, 964, 793, Singer, Wolsey, p. 452; LP, x, 873.

  14 LP, x, 956, 1043; LP, x, 888, 973, 956, 784, 785, 838.

  15 Aymot, ‘Constantyne’, 64; LP, x, 908; de Carles in Ascoli, p.247, line 480; Walker, ‘Rethinking’, 18; Singer, Wolsey, p. 454.

  16 Singer, Wolsey, p. 455, LP, x, 798; Walker, ‘Rethinking’, 20, Bernard, ‘The Fall’, 601; Walker, ‘Rethinking’, 20, also reflects on Smeaton’s evident emotional instability. One thinks of the 2008 case of Uma Thurman’s stalker, Jack Jordan, and the insight into the mind of a stalker in John Fowles’s novel, The Collector (1963); Wyatt, ‘In mourning wise’, Complete Poems ed. Rebholz, p.255 (my italics).