by John Guy
After Jane Seymour’s death, the relationship between the Court, the prince’s household and the joint household was relatively porous.75 Mary was sometimes with Elizabeth in Hertfordshire, but more often at Court or visiting her brother at his nursery in her capacity as godmother, spoiling him with presents. Elizabeth spent most of her time in Hertfordshire, but made a number of visits to Hampton Court, Greenwich and Richmond.76 As New Year’s gifts to their half-brother in 1539, Mary sent ‘a coat of crimson satin embroidered’ and Elizabeth ‘a shirt of cambric [i.e. fine linen] of her own working’.77
At Court, the following year, there were further momentous changes. To win European allies against the pope, Henry married Anne of Cleves in January 1540, but was a distinctly reluctant bridegroom. Anne, as Cromwell—the architect of the Cleves alliance—had been keen to reassure him, possessed a ‘queenly manner’, but that was not what Henry was looking for. ‘Alas, whom should men trust?’ the king complained. ‘I promise you, I see no such thing in her as hath been showed unto me of her, and am ashamed that men hath praised her as they have done, and I like her not.’78
After carefully feeling Anne’s ‘belly and breasts’ on his wedding night, Henry decided that ‘she was no maid’. He claimed he was ‘struck to the heart, and left her as good a maid as he found her.’79 He admitted to having a couple of shots at consummation over the ensuing weeks, but when he failed ignominiously, Cranmer annulled the match. And when the Duke of Norfolk triumphantly produced irrefutable evidence that Cromwell was a closet Lutheran who had encouraged iconoclasm and sheltered a secret cell of radical Protestants at Calais, Henry had his second chief minister convicted of high treason and heresy by Parliament, then executed.
The king then married the duke’s niece, Katherine Howard, a girl barely out of her teens, but after eighteen months of ecstasy, he caught her out enjoying secret assignations with an old flame. In February 1542, she was executed for adultery, after which Henry chose Katherine Parr, widow of John Neville, Lord Latimer, as his sixth and final queen.
The wedding took place in the queen’s oratory at Hampton Court on 12 July 1543 with Mary and Elizabeth prominent among the guests.80 Mary was now 27, and within a month, her father decided that she should be ‘retained with the queen, who shows her all affection’.81 With Henry’s marriage to Katherine Parr, his elder daughter thus finally managed to escape from the humiliating constraints placed upon her by Anne Boleyn and was allowed to live permanently at Court.
Elizabeth, already 9, was sent to join Edward’s household along with Lady Troy, Kat Champernowne and Blanche Parry.82 She was still provided with a separate ‘side’ and kept her chamber servants, but her establishment was redesigned largely to function as a satellite of Edward’s. Or at least it was in theory. For the two ‘sides’ were often physically apart. After Henry’s wedding to Katherine Parr, Edward spent several months at Ampthill in Bedfordshire or Ashridge on the Hertfordshire–Buckinghamshire border, while Elizabeth lodged at Hatfield or Enfield.83 Generally the two ‘sides’ moved about the country more or less in tandem, but they were not always in the same place.
Then, in July 1544, Edward was summoned to Hampton Court to attend on Katherine, who was made regent while Henry led his armies in a full-scale invasion of France in a fresh alliance with Charles V.84 It signalled the start of a new phase in all three children’s lives.
CHAPTER 6
Ruling from the Grave
WHEN Henry married Katherine Parr, he was 52 and beginning to deteriorate physically. Overweight and sometimes walking with a staff, his chest had ballooned to fifty-two inches and his waist to forty-nine.1 An ulcer on his left leg (eventually on both legs)—possibly the result of varicose veins, more likely of chronic osteomyelitis, a septic infection of the bone caused by the injuries he had sustained from hunting or jousting—gave him regular pain. He could be laid up in agony for up to twelve days, black in the face and barely able to speak, if the passageway in the skin through which the pus escaped closed up, obliging his physicians to cut open, cauterize and freshly bandage it.2
Contrary to legend, Henry never suffered from syphilis. His apothecary’s accounts prove that the drugs administered to him did not include mercury, the basis of the standard treatment for venereal disease in his lifetime.3 Rather it was gluttony, bad diet, and lack of exercise after he gave up jousting following his accident in 1536 that transformed Henry from an ebullient, statuesque athlete into a semi-mobile hulk.
His decrepitude has helped to fuel an image of his last queen as a middle-aged bluestocking. The Spanish ambassador described her as barren and less beautiful even than Anne of Cleves, but this was pure spite.4
No more than 31 when she married Henry, Katherine was vivacious and pretty, of middling height and with auburn hair and grey eyes. Had she not been sexually attractive, she would never have caught Henry’s attention. And it is improbable that he would have married her if he had not believed her fecund, as he yearned for more sons.5
She already had a suitor—she was in love with Thomas Seymour, Queen Jane’s younger brother, and he with her. As she would reassure him after Henry’s death, ‘As truly as God is God, my mind was fully bent, the other time I was at liberty, to marry you before any man I knew’.6 But she realized at once that she must choose Henry when he made his move.
Katherine was not simply politic; she also had a mission: she was a convert to the evangelical reform movement and may have been one for a decade or more.7 Well educated by her mother along the lines pioneered by Thomas More for his own daughters, she was familiar with a wide range of the writings of the continental religious reformers, which (like Anne Boleyn) she probably read in French.8
The trouble was that Henry—despite resoundingly rejecting the pope and having reservations about auricular confession and the priesthood—was himself still very much a Catholic in theology. In 1539, he had persuaded Parliament to pass an Act of Six Articles reasserting the primacy of the Catholic sacraments. More recently he had severely restricted who was allowed to read the English Bible.
Katherine therefore knew she would need to dissimulate. Unlike Anne Boleyn, she never lectured the king or spoke out of turn, skilfully cultivating the impression that all her opinions were subject to her husband’s guidance. Although publishing some of her translations and writings while he was alive, she waited until after his death before allowing her friends to publish a penitential meditation, largely drawn from the Epistles of St Paul, that echoed the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone, attacked the cult of saints and rejected as superstition beliefs or ceremonies not found in the Bible. Given the title The Lamentation of a Sinner when it finally appeared in print, the book was politically explosive, since one of its aims was to persuade Parliament to lift the restrictions Henry had imposed upon reading the vernacular Bible.9
But for all her caution not to cross the line, Katherine would come within a cat’s whisker of being the victim of a Court conspiracy. Only a hastily snatched word of warning from one of Henry’s physicians, followed by Cranmer’s nimble footwork, saved her from the fate suffered by Anne Askew, an evangelical member of the queen’s own circle, who was burned at the stake for heresy.10
And yet, Katherine was never narrow-minded or a killjoy. She adored shoes, ordering 250 pairs in less than two years in a range of colours including black, crimson, white and blue, many of them trimmed with gold. Mary bonded well with her despite their differences over religion. With a four-year age gap only between them, it was as if Katherine was the elder sister Mary never had. The two women shared an addiction to jewels and fine clothes, which they ordered liberally and in many cases from the same suppliers. French gowns were their favourites, especially when made from cloth of gold or silver, cloth of tissue, or pink, purple and crimson satin, preferably with flamboyant embroidered sleeves and square open necks filled in with high-collared silk partlets.11
Black was another favourite colour, and as long as Katherine dictated fashion,
blackwork designs using naturalistic motifs, including trailing plants and flower patterns, were in vogue.12 But rarely were these flashy enough for Mary. She wanted her black satin or velvet gowns to be embroidered with diamonds and pearls and the most delicate passementerie of gold and silver thread. Her dresses must literally sparkle. She notably hoarded pairs of Spanish leather gloves, which were imported by the dozen.13
A patron of up to half a dozen artists and miniaturists, Katherine posed for a full-length portrait of herself from ‘Master John’ in which she wore a sensational French gown trimmed with the fur of sables and lynxes and in which she showed off a spectacular crowned brooch with three pendant pearls (see Plate 2). And where she led, Mary followed, ordering a three-quarter-length portrait of herself from the same artist in which she wore cloth of gold.
Before Henry left for the war in France on 12 July 1544, he got Parliament to enact a new succession settlement. The Third Act of Succession, passed in March, reinstated Mary and Elizabeth in the line of succession, although neither was formally legitimized. The Act determined that the succession would fall in turn, assuming the king had no more children, to Edward and his lawful heirs, Mary and her lawful heirs, and then Elizabeth, with the proviso that Henry might devise specific conditions for the succession of both his daughters by letters patent or in his last will and testament. Should either ignore the conditions relating to the terms under which she would be permitted to marry, she would forfeit her claim to the throne.14
To memorialize his daughters’ restoration to the line of succession, Henry commissioned an unknown artist to make a family group portrait to hang at Hampton Court. The original idea could well have been Katherine’s. If so, it was a brilliant one, an echo on a much smaller, more intimate scale of a massive dynastic fresco that Henry had himself commissioned in 1537 from Hans Holbein the Younger for his Privy Chamber at Whitehall, but this time including the king’s children whom the earlier mural had omitted.
Besides a sophisticated understanding of the power of art, however, Katherine also had the wisdom to realize that in Henry’s eyes it would always be Edward’s mother, Queen Jane, rather than herself, whom he would regard as the matriarch of the dynasty. It was not simply from a cultural debt to Holbein’s fresco that the new painting showed the king seated in majesty on his throne with his right arm on Edward’s shoulder, with Mary and Elizabeth standing, one on each side, at an appropriate distance, but with Jane Seymour instead of Katherine sitting by his side.
No longer was Elizabeth tainted by the catastrophic events that had destroyed her mother. Some historians have tried to argue the opposite—that, far from being rehabilitated, she had been ‘exiled’ by her father, or at the very least forgotten.15 The point turns on a letter to Katherine written on 31 July 1544 in which the 10-year-old Elizabeth appears to complain that she has neither seen her stepmother since the day of her father’s wedding nor has she ‘dared’ to write to Henry, ‘for which at present I humbly entreat your most excellent highness that in writing to His Majesty, you will deign to recommend me to him.’ ‘In this my exile’, she continues, ‘I surely know that your highness’s clemency has had as much care and solicitude for my health as the King’s Majesty would have done.’16
But the letter was not sent from Hertfordshire where a Cinderella figure might plausibly have been quarantined, but from St James’s Palace.17 Elizabeth was there because Henry had invited all three of his children to a dinner at Whitehall on the eve of his departure for France.18 Spacious as the king’s principal palace was, there was not room to house everyone and their servants within its precincts, but St James’s was less than a mile away across the park. The queen herself lodged there sometimes.19 In any case, Katherine must have been in contact with Elizabeth by messenger a week before the so-called ‘exile’ letter was written, since she reassured Henry on 25 July that all his children were in good health.20
Elizabeth’s letter said that she looked forward to being with her ‘illustrious’ stepmother soon.21 This was not backhanded. All three siblings would shortly rendezvous with Katherine at Hampton Court. Edward was sent there first with his independent ‘side’, occupying a newly refurbished Prince’s Lodging in a different wing of the palace to Katherine’s own, but one which was connected to the royal apartments by a long gallery.22 Katherine and Mary came next by barge.23 Finally, Elizabeth was brought from St James’s.
Again in September, Katherine was accompanied by all three children when she took the Court on a miniature royal progress through the forests of Surrey to avoid the plague in and around the capital. And on 3 October, everyone was together at Leeds Castle in Kent to greet the king on his return from France, triumphant after the capture of Boulogne.24
Further changes were made in Edward’s household during 1544. With the prince approaching 7—the age at which protocol dictated that he should be treated as a young adult—Lady Bryan and her female assistants were discharged. Richard Page, who had invaluable experience as Fitzroy’s former vice-chamberlain, was brought in to replace Sir William Sidney as head of the enlarged establishment, while Sidney took over as steward.25
So far, the prince had been taught to read and write in English by Richard Cox. As part of the latest reorganization, John Cheke, an inspirational teacher from St John’s College, Cambridge, was put in overall charge of the prince’s studies. Cox was given the post of almoner, but retained chiefly as the prince’s grammar coach. A year or so later, a Frenchman, John Belmain, a Calvinist refugee and Cheke’s nephew by marriage, was brought in to teach the boy French.26 Now Edward’s education could commence in earnest.
On the principles recommended earlier by Vives, companions of roughly the prince’s own age were recruited to join him in the schoolroom. They included Henry Brandon, the eldest son of Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, by his fourth marriage to the 14-year-old Katherine Willoughby. Two years older than Edward, Brandon was the same age as Barnaby Fitzpatrick, heir to the barony of Upper Ossory in Ireland, another of the recruits. Sent to live at Henry’s Court as proof of his father’s loyalty to the king, Fitzpatrick would soon become Edward’s closest friend.27
One of the great myths about Fitzpatrick is that he was the prince’s ‘whipping boy’, the unlucky recipient of the corporal punishment Edward would otherwise have received when he refused to do his lessons had he not been the heir to the throne.28 The story is romantic fiction, since Cox shared none of the timidity of Fitzroy’s schoolmasters. When in December 1544, the frustrated tutor found his pupil bored, sulking and intractable, he gave him a final warning, and then, ‘I took my morris pike [i.e. staff used for morris dancing] and at will I went and gave him such a wound that he wist [knew] not what to do. … Me thought it [was] the luckiest day that ever I had in battle.’29
Over the next two years, Edward settled down to reading Cato’s Moral Precepts and Aesop’s Fables, using the Latin editions rather than Caxton’s translations. Guided by Cheke, he turned next to Erasmus’s Colloquies, intermingled with a variety of biblical texts and the writings of Vives. By Christmas 1546, he was poised to embark on more advanced authors such as Cicero, Livy, Pliny the Younger and the Latin translations of dialogues from Lucian. He did not begin Greek yet—his first serious foray into that language was not until 1548, when he was reading the second oration of Isocrates to Nicocles.30 But he made progress in written French.31 Spoken French he found more challenging. When introduced to the French ambassador in February 1547, he spoke in Latin, ‘because he does not yet understand French very well and has only just begun to learn it.’32
Elizabeth was 11 before her father woke up to the need to equip her with a schoolmaster. Until then, Kat Champernowne had taught her, doing it so successfully that when, in late 1539, Cromwell’s secretary and man of business Thomas Wriothesley had visited her at Hertford Castle, he found she could converse ‘with as great gravity as [if] she had been forty years old’.33
FIGURE 9 The opening page of one of Edward VI’s schoolroom ex
ercises, a fair copy of a treatise in French against the papal supremacy, written in a fashionably bold, if somewhat clumsy, italic script, and done chiefly during the winter of 1548–9. The young king addresses the work to his elder uncle, Edward Seymour, Protector Somerset.
But someone else must have been teaching her unofficially, since she could manage an italic hand by the time she wrote the so-called ‘exile’ letter to her stepmother. Kat, although an educated woman, wrote all her life using an old-fashioned, cursive style of penmanship.
The explanation lies with Kat’s brother-in-law, Sir Anthony Denny, one of the king’s Privy Chamber intimates. It was Denny who had recommended John Cheke to Henry as Edward’s principal schoolmaster, and he had almost certainly sent John Picton to help Kat with Elizabeth. Besides an italic hand, ‘Master’ Picton must also have begun teaching the young girl Italian, because her ‘exile’ letter was written in that language throughout. This also fits, since several of Denny’s closest friends, notably Philip Hoby and his brother Thomas, were fluent Italianists.
Denny, who would shortly rise to the position of chief gentleman of the Privy Chamber, was the keeper of Hatfield manor and had a house in the grounds as well as at Cheshunt nearby. He stood at the hub of a network of evangelical friends who were fervently committed to the idea of moderate religious reform along Protestant lines. They included Henry’s chief physician, William Butts, another of the king’s doctors Thomas Wendy, Thomas Cawarden and Richard Moryson. Both Cawarden and Moryson were gentlemen of the Privy Chamber planted there by Cromwell shortly before his fall. Their patronage links ran deep into the universities, chiefly Cambridge. As with Katherine Parr, discretion was their watchword, for if Henry had appreciated the full extent of their susceptibility to Protestantism, he would have savagely reined them in.