Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII

by Robert Hutchinson

  Well, said the duke, yet will I drink of my lord’s wine [before] I pass. Then a gentleman of my lord’s [Wolsey] brought the duke with much reverence into the cellar, where the duke drank.

  When he saw and perceived no cheer to him was made, he changed colour and so departed to his barge, saying to his servants, I marvel where my chancellor is, that he comes not to me.113

  Naïve Buckingham! Gilbert, his chancellor, was already locked up in the Tower.

  As the duke was rowed in stately fashion downriver towards London Bridge, his barge was intercepted by another boat, packed with one hundred of the king’s Yeomen of the Guard. Their captain, Sir Henry Marney, leapt aboard and arrested the duke in the king’s name. Prisoner and escort landed at nearby Hay Wharf and marched the short distance along Thames Street to the gates of the Tower. As well as Gilbert, the duke’s confessor John Delacourt and a Carthusian monk called Nicholas Hopkins were already in custody. His attendants on the barge were ordered to go to the duke’s London home, the Manor of the Rose in the parish of St Lawrence Poultney.114

  The same day the king’s secretary Richard Pace wrote to Wolsey to postpone a planned visit by Thomas Ruthal, Bishop of Durham, as ‘the king would not suffer him so to do, but commanded him to tarry here [at Greenwich] for the examination of certain things of Buckingham’s servants’. Ruthal had sent on a letter, written on Henry’s orders, to those looking after Buckingham’s house.115 (The letter has not survived, but knowing the king’s habits on such occasions, it probably contained orders for them to inventory and value the duke’s possessions.)

  The charges were quickly drawn up and his trial by seventeen peers, presided over by his old friend Thomas Howard, Second Duke of Norfolk, began at eight o’clock on the morning of Monday 13 May at Westminster.116 The executioner’s axe – the blade turned away – was carried before Buckingham as he was brought into court to stand at the bar, between Sir Thomas Lovell, Constable of the Tower, and Sir Richard Cholmeley, its deputy lieutenant. The clerk of the court opened proceedings:

  Sir Edward, Duke of Buckingham, hold up your hand.

  You are indicted of high treason in that you traitorously have conspired and imagined as far as in thee lay, to shorten the life of our sovereign lord the king.117

  Of this treason how will you acquit yourself?

  Buckingham answered formally: ‘By my peers.’118 Then the charges against him were read, and the duke snapped: ‘It is false and untrue and [was] conspired and forged to bring me to my death and that I will prove.’119

  Wolsey had lined up Gilbert, Delacourt and Charles Knyvet (a distant relation whom Buckingham had earlier sacked as his surveyor) as witnesses against their master over the next three days. There was much talk of Nicholas Hopkins, a monk from the Carthusian priory at Hinton, Somerset, who was notorious for his cryptic prophecies which held the duke spellbound. The monk several times predicted that Buckingham ‘would have all and that he should endeavour to obtain the love of the community’; that ‘the king would have no male issue of his body’; and that ‘if anything but good should happen to the king … the duke was next in succession to the crown of England’.

  Buckingham had given generously to the Carthusians and warned his chaplain to keep these predictions secret under seal of confession, saying prophetically ‘that if the king knew of it, I will be altogether destroyed’.120

  Knyvet testified that the duke planned

  what his father intended to do to Richard III at Salisbury when he made suit to come to the king’s presence, having upon him secretly a knife, so that when kneeling before the king he would have risen suddenly and stabbed him.

  In saying this, the duke put his hand treasonably upon his dagger and said that if he were so ill-treated he would do his best to execute his purpose.

  This he swore by the blood of our Lord.

  There was more damning testimony. Knyvet heard of Hopkins’ predictions and warned that the monk might be deluded by the devil ‘and [that] it was evil to meddle with such things’:

  The duke said it could not do him harm and feloniously rejoiced in the words of the monk, adding that if it had happened well with the king when he was last sick, the duke would have cut off the heads of my lord cardinal, Sir Thomas Lovell and others, also that he would rather die than be ordered as he was.

  Later Buckingham was walking in the gallery of his house at Bletchingly, Surrey, with his son-in-law Sir George Neville, Lord Abergavenny. He declared that if the king should die, he ‘meant to have the rule in England, whoever would say the contrary’. If Abergavenny had opposed this, Buckingham ‘would fight with him in that quarrel and strike him on the head with his sword. This he affirmed with great oaths.’121

  Gilbert’s deposition claimed that the duke believed the Tudor family lay under a curse because of Henry VII’s execution of the Earl of Warwick, back in 1499, and God would punish them ‘by not suffering the king’s issue to prosper, as appeared by the death of his son [Prince Henry] and that his daughters prosper not and that he had no issue male’.

  The chancellor had heard Buckingham say several times that Wolsey was an [id]olater, taking counsel from a spirit how he might contin[ue to have th]e king’s favour and that he was the king’s bawd, showing him [what w]omen were most wholesome and best of complexion and that his life was so abominable that God would not allow it to continue.

  Furthermore, he had heard the duke complain ‘he had done as good service as any man and was not rewarded and that the king gave fees and offices to boys, rather than noblemen’.122

  The witnesses were then carted off to the Tower without Buckingham being able to cross-examine them, but Norfolk told the prisoner at the bar:

  The king … has commanded that you shall have his laws ministered with favour and right to you.

  If you have anything to say, you shall be heard.123

  Buckingham certainly did and his angry words tumbled out for more than an hour, refuting the charges with surprising eloquence.124 He alleged that of all men, Norfolk’s own heir, the Earl of Surrey, his son-in-law, ‘hated him the most and had hurt him the most to the king’s majesty’.125

  Although the jury of peers debated ‘a great while’, the verdict, delivered on 16 May, was a foregone conclusion.

  The king clearly considered Buckingham guilty and we have some curious evidence to support that statement. On the reverse of an earlier private letter from Rome to Richard Pace, Henry’s secretary had jotted down some obscure memoranda to himself. At the top is this sentence, written in Latin: ‘The king is convinced that Buckingham will be found guilty and be condemned by the lords and for this matter and for the affairs of Ireland, a Parliament will be summoned.’ Other notes follow – the duke’s confessor and the monk Hopkins had been sent to the Tower; ‘Arthur Pole [Buckingham’s cousin] has been expelled [from] the court’; and finally ‘as to the Countess of Salisbury [whose daughter Henry Stafford, the duke’s son married], nothing has yet been decided on account of her noble birth and many virtues’.126

  When the peers returned, each was asked by Norfolk: ‘What say you of Sir Edward, Duke of Buckingham, touching these high treasons?’ Beginning with the junior baron, each one solemnly placed his right hand on his breast and replied: ‘I say that he is guilty.’ Every time, Norfolk scribbled each peer’s verdict on a small piece of parchment in his narrow, cramped handwriting: Dicit quod et culpabilis – ‘Asserted guilty’.127

  Buckingham was brought back into court from a nearby house called Paradise where he had awaited the verdict. Norfolk sat silent, agitated and sweating profusely. He seemed to compose himself, bowed low to the court and stared hard at the prisoner. Then, breathing deeply, he declared: ‘Sir Edward, you have heard how you are indicted of high treason. You pleaded not guilty, putting yourself to the judgement of your peers [who] have found you guilty.’ Norfolk suddenly burst into torrents of tears, sobbing uncontrollably. It was some time before he could bring himself to pronounce on his friend Buckingham t
he sentence reserved for traitors –

  to be hanged, cut down alive, your members to be cut off and cast into the fire, your bowels burnt before you, your head smitten off and your body quartered and divided at the king’s will. And God have mercy on your soul. Amen.128

  The axe was turned so that its edge faced him. Buckingham denied he was a traitor. ‘I was never one, but my lords, I nothing malign [you] for that you have done to me but the eternal God forgive you my death and I do.’ He was then led away to a barge. Lovell wanted him to sit on the cushions and carpet provided, but the duke refused, saying, ‘When I went to Westminster I was Duke of Buckingham, now I am but … the most caitiff [wretched prisoner] of the world.’ They landed at the Temple stairs and Buckingham was led through the city amid crowds who ‘wept and lamented’.129

  At about eleven the following morning Buckingham was escorted out of the Tower by the Sheriffs of London, Sir John Skevington and John Kyme, and led to the public scaffold on Tower Hill. Buckingham climbed the steps with resolution and asked the crowd to pray for him, ‘trusting to die the king’s true man, whom, through his own negligence and lack of grace, he had offended’. Darkly, he warned his fellow nobles to beware his fate.

  Henry had commuted the sentence to simple beheading, as an act of mercy. It still took three blows to sever his head. Six Augustinian friars picked up Buckingham’s bloodstained body and head, placed them in a crudely made wooden coffin and carried it off to the Church of the Austin Friars for burial.

  The king spent that day at Greenwich. As he sat in a chair in his gallery in the palace, recuperating from a bout of malaria, Wolsey urged him to send ‘letters of consolation and credence’ to Buckingham’s widow and son. Henry refused to answer and a few days later Wolsey repeated his request, adding: ‘If you think them convenient to pass, I remit that to you.’ We do not know whether they were ever sent and Henry left Greenwich shortly afterwards on a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Master John Shorn at North Marston, Buckinghamshire, to give thanks for his recovery.130

  Wolsey provided details of the case to English ambassadors abroad:

  The king has for some time known the duke to be ill-disposed and recently he has been detected in treason against the king’s person and succession, especially against the princess with whose alliance in France he was much displeased. These things being proved and at last confessed by himself, he has been executed according to his demerits.131

  As befits all traitors, Buckingham was attainted and his goods and lands confiscated by the crown under an Act of Parliament dated 31 July 1523.132 Some properties, however, were returned to the duke’s son, Henry Stafford, Earl of Wiltshire, shortly afterwards but he was not restored to his full titles until 1547. The prophetic monk was exiled from his religious house at Hinton and was to be ‘sent to some other place of their religion to be punished for his offences’.133 He is believed to have died in the Tower, broken-hearted at the fate of his patron.

  There remained one last immediate living threat to the Tudor crown.

  Richard de la Pole, youngest brother of the Earl of Lincoln, executed in 1487 by Henry VIII, and of the Earl of Suffolk, beheaded by Henry VIII in 1513, had been traitorously serving the interests of France in his attempts to claim the English throne for the Yorkists.

  In 1514, he had been given command of 12,000 German mercenaries to defend Brittany but this was a cover for an invasion attempt that never left St Malo. Another abortive invasion was planned in 1523 and two years later, Pole found himself fighting for Francis I of France outside the walls of the city of Pavia in central Lombardy. The Imperial forces of Charles V inflicted a crushing defeat on the French and Pole was killed by German Landsknechte as his troops were slaughtered around him.134

  In London Henry was told of the massacre and the capture of the French king. He enquired of the messenger: ‘And Richard de la Pole?’ The messenger replied: ‘The White Rose is dead in battle … I saw him dead with all the others.’

  The king cried out in delight: ‘God have mercy upon his soul! All the enemies of England are gone.’135 And he ordered more wine for the courier.

  9

  THE KING’S ‘SCRUPULOUS CONSCIENCE’

  ‘If it be determined … that our marriage was against God’s law and clearly void then I shall not only sorrow the departing from so good a lady and loving companion but much more … bewail my unfortunate chance that I have so long lived in adultery to God’s great displeasure and have no true heir of my body to inherit this realm.’

  Henry VIII’s speech to the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London, Bridewell, 8 November 1528.1

  Between January 1510 and July 1518, Katherine of Aragon became pregnant six times. We have seen how she initially miscarried of a girl child and then on New Year’s Day 1511 delivered a boy, christened Henry, who lived just fifty-three days. There are unsubstantiated reports of a live birth in September 1513 shortly after the victory at Flodden but if these are true, the male child must have died within hours.2 Another boy was stillborn in November/December 1514 when Katherine was distraught at Henry’s angry reproaches over her father’s ‘ill faith’ and treachery.3

  But at four in the morning of Monday 18 February 1516 at Greenwich, a daughter was delivered who survived the perils of primitive Tudor post-natal care. Six days later, the king declared confidently to the Venetian ambassador Sebastian Giustinian: ‘We are both young. If it was a daughter this time, by the grace of God, the sons will follow.’4

  The baby was named Mary – after Henry’s younger sister – on Wednesday 20 February in a christening in a temporary wooden structure, hung with Arras tapestries, erected outside the door of the Franciscan Observant Friars’ church adjoining Greenwich Palace. Wolsey was chosen godfather as Henry did not want to single out one of the European heads of state for the role and thus offend the others.5

  A physical manifestation of Henry’s conviction that he would eventually have a son was included in the heraldic arms set in the façade of the gatehouse of a grand new mansion the king was building at Beaulieu, near Boreham, in Essex.6 The emblems above the Tudor dragon and greyhound are Henry’s red rose and Katherine’s pomegranate, shown with its seeds bursting out, itself a representation of her fecundity. But one pomegranate has a Tudor rose emerging from it – symbolising the hoped-for birth of a male heir.7

  Fourteen months later, the queen was pregnant yet again. On 1 July 1518, the king wrote to Wolsey from Woodstock in Oxfordshire:

  I trust the queen my wife be with child. I am … loath to repair London-wards because about this time is partly of her dangerous times and because of that I would [move] her as little as I may now.

  My lord, I write this to [you] not as an assured thing but as a thing wherein I have great hope and likelihoods.8

  When the king returned to the hunting lodge four days later, his Latin secretary Pace reported that ‘the queen welcomed him with a big belly’.9 In October Giustinian told the Doge: ‘The queen is near her delivery which is anxiously looked for.’10 But on 10 November, Katherine was delivered of a dead daughter, one month off her full term, ‘to the vexation of as many who know it’, according to Giustinian, as ‘the entire nation looked for a prince’.11

  Henry’s hopes of a crop of robust Tudor sons with Katherine were never fulfilled. If they had been, England’s subsequent political and religious history would have developed along very different paths.

  There has been speculation that the queen’s tragic record of one miscarriage and four stillbirths was due to Henry having had a balanced translocation of his chromosomes. His sperm cells might have had extra – or missing – genetic material, which can sometimes cause miscarriages. After almost five centuries nothing can be asserted with any certainty, and even with modern medical investigation it is frequently difficult to identify precisely why recurrent miscarriages or spontaneous abortions occur. Potential causes are legion but the queen’s natal problems could have been caused simply by viral infection or nutritional imbalanc
es. Given the lack of hygiene and the unhealthy diets of the period, she may have suffered from Listeriosis, which can trigger spontaneous abortion or stillbirth, a disease caused by the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes, found in stream water and some food. This also manifests itself as meningitis or pneumonia in newborns, which possibly killed the two boys that Katherine delivered in 1511 and 1513.12 Her unhappy travails are hardly startling given the prevalent infant mortality rate, which was almost two hundred in 1,000 during the Tudor era.13

  Regular pregnancies had taken a huge physical toll on the queen. In October 1519 an ungallant Giustinian described Katherine (whom he seldom saw) as ‘not handsome, though she had a very beautiful complexion. She is religious and as virtuous as words can express.’14 Other Venetian envoys were still less gracious – reporting that Henry ‘has an old deformed wife while he himself is young and handsome’.15

  The queen was now aged thirty-three and in Tudor times this was an advanced age for childbirth. She was growing stout (Plate 15) and as she approached the menopause, any chance of safeguarding Henry’s uncertain dynasty looked increasingly slender. In his desperation, the king promised God that he would crusade against the infidel Turks if he could have a male heir born in wedlock.