Journey Through Tudor England

by Suzannah Lipscomb

  Luckily for her, Henry VII died on 21 April 1509, and the new King, Henry VIII, promptly married Katherine on 11 June at Greenwich Palace. Observers noted that the young couple were very much in love, a claim borne out by the fact that Katherine was frequently pregnant. Sadly, however, she miscarried in January 1510 and had a stillborn boy in 1514, while two children died in infancy, including a son and heir, Henry, at seven weeks old in 1511.

  Henry evidently trusted his wife: in 1513, when he went to war in France, Katherine was appointed Queen-Regent and Governor of the Realm. In this role, she presided over the war with Scotland, including the slaughter at the Battle of Flodden Field.

  In February 1516, Katherine finally gave birth to a healthy baby, Mary, but by the early 1520s she was no longer regarded as attractive, and it was becoming clear that she was now infertile. It must have been especially galling for her when Henry’s bastard son Henry Fitzroy [see FRAMLINGHAM] was titled in 1525.

  Katherine turned a blind eye to Henry’s love affairs but, in 1527, she would have realised that his latest infatuation was of a different order, after hearing about a secret tribunal held by Cardinal Wolsey to investigate their marriage. Her suspicions were confirmed when Henry paid a visit to her in June: he told her that he believed they had been living in mortal sin for the past eighteen years, and must now live apart.

  The story of Henry’s ‘Great Matter’, his love affair with Anne Boleyn and ‘divorce’ from Katherine, with the justification that Leviticus 20:21 forbade a man to take his brother’s wife for fear of childlessness, is very familiar. Yet, it is still remarkably poignant. Katherine’s appeal, on her knees, to her husband at the trial at Blackfriars under Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio in May 1529 is heartrending:

  I beseech you for the love that has been between us, and the love of God, let me have some justice … This twenty years or more I have been your true wife and by me you have had divers children, although it hath pleased God to call them out of this world …

  After twenty-two years of marriage, she saw Henry for the last time in July 1531 when he left to go hunting with Anne; he did not even wish Katherine goodbye. Soon after, she was also separated from her daughter: Katherine was sent to The More, Hertfordshire, while Mary was sent to Richmond. They would never see each other again, despite Katherine’s pleading to be allowed to do so when Mary was ill in September 1534 and February 1535.

  The final indignities came in September 1532, when Henry ordered Katherine to hand over her jewels for Anne’s use, and in June 1533, when Anne was crowned queen and Katherine demoted to Princess Dowager, a title she never accepted. Although Rome pronounced her marriage to Henry ‘valid and canonical’ in March 1534, it was too little, too late.

  At Kimbolton in Huntingdonshire, in December 1535, Katherine grew very ill. When her loyal friend Maria de Salinas, Lady Willoughby joined her on 29 December, Katherine had not eaten or slept properly for days, and the pain in her stomach was so great she could barely sit up. After a brief remission, she died at 2 p.m. on 7 January 1536. Her embalmer found all her organs to be healthy except her heart, which was ‘quite black and hideous to look at’. Poison was suspected, but it was probably cancer.

  After lying in state, her coffin, covered in black velvet and drawn by six horses, processed from Kimbolton to Peterborough Abbey. On 29 January, three funeral masses were said; neither Henry nor Mary attended.

  Katherine’s original tomb was destroyed in 1643 by Oliver Cromwell’s troops. The modern black slab was given in 1895 in response to an appeal to those with the name of Katherine. It is engraved with the coats of arms of sixteenth-century England and Spain, Katherine’s pomegranate badge, and the words:

  Here lies the body of Katharine of Aragon Queen of England: first wife of King Henry VIII: who died at Kimbolton Castle, on the 8th day of January 1536 aged 49 years.

  ‘The burden that is fallen upon me makes me amazed, and yet, considering I am God’s creature ordained to obey his appointment, I will thereto yield.’

  Hatfield was Elizabeth I’s childhood home, but it doesn’t look exactly as she might remember it. Five years after her death, another great house was built at Hatfield, giving us not one, but two great houses — Hatfield Old Palace and Hatfield House — to visit. Of all the Elizabethan royal residences, Hatfield is the most strongly identified with her, and for good reason.

  One of Henry VII’s ministers, Cardinal Morton, Bishop of Ely built Hatfield Palace as a grand episcopal residence between 1485 and 1497. Rather like an Oxbridge college, it was designed as four great buildings of russet-red brick around a central quadrangle. Today only one side remains: the Great (or Banqueting) Hall.

  Like Cardinal Wolsey’s house at Hampton Court, Henry VIII thought nothing of appropriating the Bishop’s palace as he saw fit, seizing ownership of it during the suppression of the monasteries. He had, after all, already started to use it as a residence for his children.

  At the tender age of three months, in December 1533, the young Princess Elizabeth was established in an independent household at Hatfield Palace. Soon afterwards, her elder half-sister Mary’s own household was dissolved and Mary was sent, to her chagrin, to join Elizabeth. This humiliation was made all the worse by the fact that the couple in charge of the new joint household were Sir John and Lady Shelton, Anne Boleyn’s aunt and uncle. Anne herself visited her daughter Elizabeth in spring 1534 to check that she had settled in.

  Royal childhoods were peripatetic affairs, constantly on the move from one palace to another, but even after Elizabeth was made motherless and downgraded to the title ‘Lady Elizabeth’, she returned repeatedly to Hatfield. It is here that we can imagine her being taught by her tutors, William Grindal, and later, the classicist Roger Ascham. Unusually for the age, she received the same education as her brother Edward, learning Latin and Greek, French and Italian. She read, Ascham wrote, ‘almost the whole of Cicero, and a great part of Livy’. For relaxation, the sprawling deer park at Hatfield allowed for hunting and walking. For entertainment, Elizabeth had her own court of minstrels, fools and players. Elizabeth also learnt from Ascham a taste for animal and bird baiting.

  After her father’s death, Elizabeth was allowed by her brother Edward VI, with whom she had an amenable relationship, to take up official residence at Hatfield at Christmas 1548, and in September 1550, the ownership of Hatfield was formally granted to her. Her position during Mary’s reign, however, was not quite so favourable, and after spending time in the Tower of London and a year under house arrest at Woodstock, she was only finally allowed to return to her estate at Hatfield in October 1555. It was here, famously, that she learnt that her half-sister had died, and that she had become queen.

  Legend has it that on 17 November 1558, Elizabeth was walking in Hatfield deer park when a messenger found her under an oak tree and told her that she was now queen. Elizabeth is said to have responded with the words of Psalm 118, ‘This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.’ Sadly, this is probably apocryphal, as only one commentator records it, seventy years after the event. Another account, by Sir John Harington, recalls Elizabeth saying, only somewhat less poetically, that she was sorrowful for her sister’s death and ‘amazed’ at the great burden which had fallen to her, but she was ‘God’s creature’ and it was His design.

  Three days later, under the marvellous chestnut and oak framed ceiling of the Great Hall of Hatfield Palace, the new Queen Elizabeth held her first ever Council of State. Her first act was to appoint Sir William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) as Secretary of State. On 23 November 1558, Elizabeth left Hatfield in a grand procession of 1,000 courtiers to travel into London to be crowned queen. She was cheered all the way by the large crowds that lined the streets to see her.

  Hatfield now became one of Elizabeth’s many palaces, and somewhere she stayed while on progress. After her death, James I offered Burghley’s son, Robert Cecil, Hatfield in exchange for the palatial Theobalds: Cecil agreed, and promptly demolished three-quarters
of the palace in order to build a beautiful Jacobean house, reusing the old bricks. He did not forget Elizabeth entirely: the new house was built in the shape of a letter E.

  In Hatfield House, there are also several other reminders of Elizabeth’s presence. Look out for the exquisite Ermine and Rainbow portraits of Elizabeth by Nicholas Hilliard (1585) and Isaac Oliver (c.1600). Both are rich in symbolism, including the ermine wearing a little gold crown as a symbol of royalty, the rainbow symbolising peace and Elizabeth’s cloak festooned with eyes and ears: she is one who sees and hears all. Hatfield also houses a widebrimmed straw hat, yellow silk stockings and long-fingered gloves, all said to have belonged to Elizabeth, as well as a great stash of her letters in the archives. Most intriguingly, in the library is a twenty-two-yard illuminated parchment roll tracing the ancestry of Elizabeth back to Adam and Eve.

  The remaining Great Hall of the Old Palace did not fare well. For many years, it was used as stables, and all the ground-floor windows were bricked in. Still, it is rather remarkable that the land and house remained in the hands of the descendants of the one man who featured so prominently in Elizabeth’s reign as Queen: William Cecil, Elizabeth’s most trusted adviser. He stood by her side at Hatfield on that momentous day of her first Council of State in November 1558, and his family have lived at Hatfield ever since.

  TUDOR SPORTS AND PASTIMES

  ‘Pastime with good company

  I love and will until I die.

  Grudge who list, but none deny

  So God be pleased, thus live will I.

  For my pastance,

  Hunt, sing and dance,

  My heart is set.

  All goodly sport,

  For my comfort,

  Who shall me let?’

  Song written and composed by Henry VIII

  The games of choice for the Tudor nobility were jousting, hunting, archery, tennis, bowls, quoits and skittles. Henry VIII excelled at them all.

  Of these, jousting held a special place. It was the central event of a tournament, where two armoured riders on horseback charged at each other on either side of a wooden barrier (the tilt) holding a long lance pinned between their right arm and body, poised to hit the other knight. Striking the lance against the body or head of the other rider scored points, but the ultimate goal was to unhorse one’s opponent. It demanded strength, accuracy, speed and an almost foolhardy fearlessness: when knights and kings jousted, they jousted for real. In 1559, Henri II, the King of France, died of septicaemia as a result of a jousting accident when a splintering lance entered his visor and pierced his eye. Foreign ambassadors commented on Henry VIII’s expertise at the tilt, but it was his downfall, too: an accident while jousting in 1536 gave him a lifelong suppurating ulcer in his leg, an injury that directly affected his temperament and contributed to his obesity.

  Henry VIII also loved to hunt — stags, not foxes. A complete glutton for the sport, he rode out early and came back late, tiring eight or ten horses in the course of a day. Another kingly sport was tennis. Henry played a complex indoor version now known as ‘real tennis’, which involves hitting the ball around the walls of the court, and scoring points by hitting it into netted windows. It is still possible to play real tennis at Hampton Court, where Henry VIII built two courts (although the current one dates from the early seventeenth century).

  But sports were not necessarily for the masses. In perhaps one of the most mirthless (and unsportsmanlike?) laws ever passed by any ruler, an Act of Parliament in 1512 banned the lower orders from playing tennis, bowls or closh (skittles). Thirty years later, a new act reiterated that no ‘artisan, husbandman, labourer, fisherman, waterman or servingman’ was allowed to play tennis, dice, cards, bowls, skittles or quoits except at Christmas. It also reprimanded the ‘many subtle and inventative and crafty persons’ who had devised new games to replace the forbidden ones!

  A game commonly, but illegally, played by the lower orders was football. Other than scoring by putting the ball between the opponent’s goalposts, it was nothing like the modern game. Indeed, there were not actually any rules per se: the ball could be handled, fighting was normal, there was no limit to the number of men on each team and goalposts could easily be several miles apart. Such was its aggression that Sir Thomas Elyot in his 1531 The Book Named the Governor wrote that it was ‘to be utterly abjected of all noblemen … wherein is nothing but beastly fury and extreme violence; whereof proceedeth hurt, and consequently rancour and malice do remain with them that be wounded’.

  The Tudors loved blood sports. Elizabeth I was particularly fond of bear baiting. Bears were chained to a post and set on by mastiffs. The main bear pit in London was in Southwark, close to the site of the original Globe theatre. Archaeologists have found bones from old bears, smashed dogs’ skulls and a layer of hazelnuts, the Elizabethan equivalent of popcorn, near Bear Gardens, SE1. Robert Laneham’s description of the bear baiting at Kenilworth in 1575 is enough to make a modern reader shudder at what passed for pleasure for our ancestors:

  If the dog in pleading would pluck the bear by the throat, the bear with traverse would claw him again by the scalp … therefore, with fending & proving, with plucking & tugging, scratching & biting, by plain tooth & nail on one side and the other, such expense of blood and leather [skin] was there between them, as a month’s licking (I think) will not recover … it was a sport very pleasant …

  The Elizabethans apparently did not register any sense of animal cruelty. The Privy Council even intervened in 1591 to protect bear baiting, and prevent plays being scheduled against the usual Thursday baiting session ‘because in divers places the players do use to recite their plays to the great hurt and destruction of the game of bear-baiting and like pastimes which are maintained for Her Majesty’s pleasure’.

  Elizabeth I also, like her father, took great pleasure in the less violent pastimes of music and dance. Henry VIII was a composer who played many musical instruments. On his death, he left a large collection of viols, virginals (a keyboard instrument of the harpsichord family), flutes, clavichords, lutes, shawms (early oboes), sackbuts (early trombones), citterns (a stringed instrument like a mandolin) and recorders. Elizabeth I herself could play the lute and the virginals, and patronised composers such as William Byrd and Thomas Tallis. But if she liked to play music, Elizabeth loved to dance, choosing either the stately, serene pavane, or the energetic galliard, which involved intricate steps and high leaps. The most controversial dance step of all was la volta, which involved a man lifting and turning his partner with considerable intimacy. Not everyone approved of the modern dance steps: Puritan Philip Stubbs, writing in 1583, decried such dancing as an ‘introduction to whoredom, a preparative to wantonness, a provocative to uncleanness, and an entroit [route] to all kinds of lewdness’.

  ‘Woe be to you that join house to house, and field to field! Shall ye alone inhabit the earth?’

  At the side of the B1172, the former main road from Wymondham (pronounced ‘Windham’) to Norwich, stands a tree known as Kett’s Oak. Now propped up and filled with concrete to keep it standing, it is said to be the very oak at which Robert Kett, a wealthy tradesman from Wymondham, gathered the Norfolk rebel armies in July 1549 before marching on Norwich (then England’s second city), in protest against religious, social and economic changes that the common folk found oppressive and unfair. The rebellion plunged Norfolk into great social crisis and, before it was over, the county had experienced intense upheaval, vicious fighting and the execution of as many men within a couple of weeks as died in the whole of ‘Bloody’ Mary I’s reign as martyrs. It was a pivotal moment in the history of Tudor England, and the story starts at the oak that still stands today.

  Norfolk was not the only county to rebel in 1549. In many parts of the country, ordinary people in Edward VI’s reign were angry about rising social inequality, religious changes imposed from above and a rapidly deteriorating economic situation. Most peasants paid rents to their lord of the manor, and suspected their
lords of being increasingly corrupt, greedy and oppressive — with good reason. Lords were raising rents and dues, turning vast swathes of land into deer parks for the leisure of hunting and, worst of all, enclosing common lands to graze their sheep. The common lands were a vital resource for poor people: a place to gather firewood, graze the odd cow and forage for wild berries and fruit. ‘Stealing’ common lands through enclosure was therefore seen as a great evil, which would lead to depopulation and pauperisation. Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester railed against it in one sermon, ‘Woe be to you that join house to house, and field to field! Shall ye alone inhabit the earth?’

  This was coupled with unpopular religious changes under Edward VI’s fervent Protestant government. The state was considered to be meddling in the affairs of the Church and handing the shared belongings of the Church to avaricious gentry in the aftermath of the dissolution of the monasteries. Both issues concerned social conflict, and the rights of the nobility and the Crown to interfere in the traditional, reciprocal relations between rich and poor. Matters came to a head in 1549 as food prices had soared, impoverishing new swathes of society.

  On 6 July, crowds gathered in Wymondham to watch the Wymondham Game, a traditional play about the life of Sir Thomas à Becket. In festive spirit, and having heard news of uprisings in Kent and Cambridge, a commotion arose, targeting John Flowerdew, a minor gentleman who had acted as the King’s agent in stripping Wymondham Abbey of its assets following the dissolution. Next, the crowd turned on his enemy, Robert Kett, who had initially led the opposition to Flowerdew.