The full-size colour copy at the Walker was produced within a decade or two of the mural: it must have been intended either for another monarch or, more probably, for a courtier. Its provenance suggests links to the Seymour family, meaning it might have been commissioned by Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, before his execution in 1552. This, and the fact that similar copies exist at Petworth; Chatsworth; Trinity College, Cambridge; Belvoir Castle; St Bartholomew’s Hospital; Hampton Court Palace; and Parham House, suggest that this particular image of Henry had acquired an authoritative status. By ordering their own copy, courtiers felt they could demonstrate that they knew the party line; they knew what this portrait said about the King and they embraced that message.
So, what was the message? The clues are in the picture itself …
For a start, Henry is huge. He is barrel-chested, with improbably broad shoulders that are only further exaggerated by the puffed sleeves of his gown. His stance — which was considered improper, even lewd, when painted — mimics the heroic martial pose of a man in full armour. In a masterful, last-minute alteration from the original cartoon for the mural, Holbein turned Henry’s face to stare confrontationally, with a sort of bovine intensity, at the viewer. This is evidently a man to be reckoned with.
Henry does not, however, bear any of the traditional accoutrements of royalty: there is no crown, orb or sceptre. The only signifiers of status are the blue ribbon of the Order of the Garter round his left leg, the magnificence of his clothing and jewellery and the sumptuousness of the setting. His attire is splendid: he wears a red velvet gown, embroidered with gold and trimmed with dark sable fur. His doublet and jerkin are cloth of silver, the former slashed to reveal the shirt below, and adorned with large jewels. He sports a heavy chain of rubies, diamonds and pearls that looks very like the ‘collar of such balas [rubies] and pearl that few men ever saw the like’ described by Edward Hall in 1539. His bonnet and fingers are similarly garnished with gems. He stands on a luxurious Turkish carpet with a detail of classical architecture behind him. This is Tudor bling: Henry truly matches his description by one ambassador as ‘the best dressed sovereign in the world’.
Above all, it is Henry the man, not Henry the King, that this picture emphasises. The impression that this picture was designed to give is best understood by seeing Henry’s body as two triangles: one formed by his vast shoulders and tapering to his waist, and the other from his splayed feet, up his legs. These triangles meet to focus the gaze on his bulging codpiece, protruding through his jerkin. His hands — holding a glove, and the cord to his dagger — frame his groin still further. This picture is about all Henry’s virility and potency.
Why? The previous year had seen Henry suffer two major betrayals: a rebellion against his assumption of the title of Supreme Head of the Church of England and the dissolution of the monasteries by a large number of his northern subjects [see PONTEFRACT CASTLE]; and the alleged adultery of his second wife, Anne Boleyn. The inscription on the plinth at the centre of the original mural praised Henry’s position as Supreme Head, while the characterisation of Henry himself addressed the other issue at stake.
Not only was a wife’s adultery thought, in the sixteenth century, to reflect on her husband’s lack of sexual appetite but, worse still, in Anne Boleyn’s trial, Anne’s allegation that Henry ‘was not skilful in copulating with a woman, and had neither vigour nor potency’ had been read aloud before a gathered crowd of 2,000. The listeners were the very group of important courtiers who would, the following year, be confronted with this ego-appeasing, myth-creating image of the King on the wall of the Privy Chamber. This, of course, is why the portrait needed to be full-length, Henry’s figure so exaggerated and his codpiece centre stage.
Quite simply, this famous picture of the King was a piece of visual spin to recast Henry as a virile alpha male to those who knew better, and his courtiers bought it to suggest they believed the lie. It was so successful that it remains the dominant image of Henry VIII to this day.
The value of conveying messages through art was not lost on Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth. Close to Henry in the Walker is a magnificent portrait of Elizabeth I, painted by Nicholas Hilliard in 1574, which is replete with symbolism. Elizabeth’s wealth is portrayed through her elaborate red velvet gown, the painstaking blackwork embroidery of her shift and her many jewels. The central message is, though, Elizabeth’s status as an unmarried Virgin Queen. The pearls with which she is drenched are a symbol of purity, as are the cherries draped over her right ear. The emblem at Elizabeth’s breast gives the name to the painting: the Pelican portrait. A symbol of Christ’s sacrifice, mother pelicans were (wrongly) believed to pluck selflessly at their own breasts to feed their starving young. Here the pelican claims the same sacrificial role for Elizabeth as the mother of her kingdom.
The Tudors certainly knew how to sing their own praises.
‘Yours as long as life endures.’
On a high blustery ridge, overlooking the town, the sandstone remains of Pontefract Castle belie its important royal history: a history of incredible bad luck.
Known as the ‘key to the North’, the first motte and bailey castle was built here in the 1080s by the de Lacy family. By the early thirteenth century, it had been rebuilt as a strong stone fortress, and it was here that the deposed Richard II was held prisoner and killed by Henry IV in 1400, reputedly by slow starvation. Later, Pontefract, as one of the last royalist strongholds, would be besieged three times during the Civil War. It was demolished when local people petitioned Parliament for its destruction in 1649. Before then, it had served as the setting for Henry VIII to be betrayed, twice.
Although now in ruins, Pontefract evokes its formerly grand and impressive self. In Henry VIII’s day, it was described by the French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, as ‘one of the finest castles in England’. Evidence remains of its large keep, the fifteenth-century Great Kitchen with bakehouse, brewhouse and ovens, the Norman and Elizabethan chapels, Great Hall and royal apartments. However, the modern world — and nature — has encroached: trees grow in the royal apartments, modern houses sit on top of what once was John of Gaunt’s Shillington Tower and a 1960s housing estate abuts the Constable Tower, creating quite a contrast between the old and new.
At this great and strategically important castle, Henry VIII would be undone by acts of treachery and disloyalty on two occasions. The first was in late 1536. In October, up to 50,000 men rose in rebellion against him across Yorkshire and Lincolnshire: it remains the largest peacetime rebellion against a reigning monarch in English history. Here at Pontefract Castle, the rebels amassed and drew up their manifesto of twenty-four demands.
The rebels’ fears were partly financial: they had heard rumours that the King planned to charge taxes on cattle, white bread, cake, goose and capons, and on weddings, christenings and funerals. They were also concerned that the King’s Council was made up of ‘persons of low birth and small reputation’ (a powerful statement about the commitment to hierarchy in Tudor England, even among ordinary people).
Above all, though, their worries were religious. They described themselves as Pilgrims of Grace fighting ‘for the preservation of Christ’s church’; they even marched behind a banner bearing the five wounds of Christ. They feared that the King was planning to pull down the parish churches, and steal the Church jewels and plate. As one rebel, John Hallom, stated in 1537, ‘because the people saw many abbeys pulled down indeed, they believed the rest to be true’. They feared that ‘heretics’, like Thomas Cromwell, were infiltrating the country and, like the monks at Charterhouse, they strongly objected to Henry’s adoption of the title of the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Above all, as their leader, Robert Aske, would later state: ‘The suppression of the abbeys was the greatest cause of the said insurrection’: they were vehemently opposed to the dissolution of the monasteries.
Their disquiet was not without reason, but from Henry VIII’s egomaniacal point of view, the uprising was n
othing but a completely treasonous betrayal. He was particularly affronted by the presumptuous suggestion that his subjects knew better how to rule than he, and was keen to suppress the rebellion entirely. Moreover, he had reason to be afraid of them: if they had wanted to, the rebels could easily have defeated the 9,000-strong royal army and even have deposed him.
Nevertheless, Henry was persuaded to negotiate with the rebels, which the Duke of Norfolk did on his behalf in December 1536. In exchange for their disbanding, Norfolk promised the rebels a Parliament in the north to consider their concerns, and a pardon for their rebellion. The rebels agreed and left Pontefract for home but, in the new year, when no Parliament had been called, fresh revolts broke out. It was just the excuse for which Henry had been looking to take savage revenge.
In short, Henry had set them up. In early 1537, between 144 and 153 people were executed for their involvement in the revolts, and the leader Robert Aske was ‘hanged in chains’ (in the gibbet irons) in York. Convinced that monks were leading figures in the rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace was also pivotal to Henry’s decision to suppress not only the ‘lesser monastic houses’, as ordered in March 1536, but all 800 religious houses in England.
The second betrayal was more personal. In July 1540, Henry VIII married his fifth wife: Katherine Howard, a young, attractive girl of sixteen to twenty-four years of age (her date of birth is unknown), who was formerly Anne of Cleves’s maid-of-honour. Henry VIII was delighted with his new wife, and took her on progress to York in the summer of 1541 (the only time he ever went that far north). It was while staying at Lincoln and then at Pontefract Castle that Katherine, with the help of Jane, Lady Rochford, received Thomas Culpeper, a young gentleman of the King’s Privy Chamber into her rooms, for ‘many stolen interviews’.
It was not Katherine’s first dalliance: it later emerged that before her marriage she had flirted with her instructor on the virginals, Henry Manox, and gone so far as to lie in ‘na ed bed’ with a man called Francis Dereham, whom she had promised to marry (when put together, promises to marry and consumnation constituted legal marriage). Four days after her arrival at Pontefract in 1541, Katherine foolishly appointed Dereham as her secretary. Some historians have suggested that both this and Katherine’s meetings with Culpeper were simply an attempt to purchase their silence about her past, but a letter from Katherine to Culpeper suggests otherwise. She writes, ‘it makes my heart die to think I cannot be always in your company’ and signs off, ‘yours as long as life endures’. We cannot be 100 per cent sure that Katherine and Culpeper were lovers, but they certainly acted very rashly indeed.
On 2 November 1541, the very day after Henry had publicly offered prayers of thanks for his happy marriage, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer reportedly left a letter on Henry’s chair in the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court detailing the allegations of Katherine’s misbehaviour: he was too terrified to tell Henry face to face. Katherine was immediately confined to her chambers and never saw Henry again.
Henry was utterly devastated, and took his revenge. In December 1541 Culpeper was beheaded at Tyburn, and Dereham soon after suffered the usual traitor’s death of hanging, drawing and quartering. Katherine, meanwhile, was condemned by an Act of Attainder, passed through Parliament, which meant she had no chance to defend herself as she would have done at trial. The last few paragraphs of this Act created in law the general principles that consensual adultery by a queen was treasonous (previous Acts had only made provision for ‘violation’ of the queen) and that any queen who failed to disclose her past ‘unchaste life’ would also be guilty of treason (thereby creating the law and condemning her in the same document). On 10 February 1542, Katherine was transported by barge to the Tower of London, passing under Culpeper and Dereham’s rotting heads on London Bridge. She was executed three days later.
If Pontefract seems desolate now, just imagine how it felt to Henry VIII.
‘It is a lamentable thing to see a legion of monks and nuns who have been chased from their monasteries wandering miserably hither and thither seeking means to live.’
Eustace Chapuys, Imperial ambassador to England, 1537
Designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1986, Fountains Abbey has the largest monastic ruins in the country, gorgeously set in 800-acre grounds that include a beautiful landscaped Georgian water garden complete with neoclassical follies, and a deer park.
Founded as a Benedictine abbey in 1132, the monks at Fountains Abbey adopted the Cistercian rule, which meant a rigorous and austere way of life. This didn’t stop Fountains becoming, by the thirteenth century, one of England’s richest monasteries. It is still possible to wander through the fine cloisters, enjoy the vaulted ceiling of the cellarium and see evidence of the monastery’s great wealth in the warming room with its vast fireplace, the muniment room — for the storage of documents — and the abbey’s twelfth-century corn mill.
The evident beauty of the ruined medieval abbey reveals the extent of the damage and cultural trauma caused by the dissolution of the monasteries. The first sign of the coming storm came when Henry VIII’s first minister, Thomas Cromwell, ordered a survey and visitation of all monastic houses in 1535. Commissioners were sent to find out the annual income of each house, and to search diligently for hints of scandal. The resulting report, called the Valor Ecclesiasticus, is a colourful and gossipy list of sins and abuses, which also mocks the monasteries’ treasured relics. At Fountains, the commissioners reported finding four ‘sodomites’ and six ‘incontinentia’ (monks guilty of sexual relations with women). One of the latter was the abbot, William Thirsk, whom, they said, had greatly dilapidated his house, ‘wasted the wood’, committed theft and sacrilege and, worst of all, ‘notoriously kept six whores’.
As a result of the survey, in March 1536, an Act of Parliament was passed to dissolve the ‘lesser’ monasteries — those with an annual income of £200 or less — and to donate their land, plate, jewels and investments to the Crown. This was presented as an attempt to reform weak houses where scandalous misconduct was rife, with the Act drawing attention to the ‘manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living’ in these monasteries, in comparison to the example of the ‘great and honourable monasteries of religion in this realm wherein … religion is right well kept & observed’. This suggests that Henry VIII and Cromwell had no plans to dissolve all the monasteries at this stage.
This changed after the Pilgrimage of Grace [see PONTEFRACT CASTLE]. Convinced of the perfidy of the monks and the dangers of their allegiance to a power outside England, Henry became increasingly hostile to monasticism itself. Every religious house in England was now to be dissolved by the ‘voluntary’ surrender of their abbots, who would be induced by a combination of threats and incentives. So began the total eradication of monasticism in England, with very few voices raised in dissent or resistance [see GLASTONBURY TOR].
The dissolution was still couched in the language of reform: abbots, monks, nuns and friars who surrendered their houses often signed documents expressing contrition and shame for their past way of life. Some went willingly: the abbot at Fountains (a wily monk called Marmaduke Bradley who bought his way into the abbotship after Thirsk resigned) surrendered the Abbey to the King’s commissioners on 26 November 1539 in exchange for an annual pension of £100 — which was very handsome indeed.
Between 1536 and 1540, over 800 religious houses were suppressed, and 7,000 monks, nuns, friars and their servants were turned out into the community. It was an act of incalculable cultural vandalism: invaluable medieval libraries were ransacked, irreplaceable jewellery was dissipated, finely crafted plate was melted down and architecturally important Gothic buildings were demolished. The only ones to survive intact were those established as secular cathedrals.
It has been estimated that the dissolution brought £1.3 million (today, about £400 million) to the Crown between 1536 and 1547, through the rents from, and the sale of, confiscated lands, and the acquisition of gold, silver plate and jewels.
Buildings like Nonsuch Palace and Hampton Court, or coastal fortifications [see PENDENNIS AND ST MAWES CASTLES] were funded from the proceeds of the dissolution.
The Crown sold many of these lands to the nobility and gentry: it was the largest redistribution of wealth since the Norman Conquest. The dissolution created a land market in England that enriched the aristocracy and permanently changed the religious and architectural landscape of England.
At Fountains, the ruins testify to the scale of the loss. They also typify the fate of many abbeys. When the estate was sold to Sir Stephen Proctor, he used the sandstone from the abbey’s ruins to build a grand new Elizabethan house, Fountains Hall, in the style of master mason Robert Smythson, who designed Hardwick. This elegant house, like many of the century’s architectural masterpieces, could not have been completed without raiding the fabric of the old, ruined monasteries that fell increasingly into decay.
Another abbey worth visiting in North Yorkshire is the dramatically ruined eleventh-century Whitby Abbey, on its windswept, rocky headland, jutting out into the North Sea. It, too, was suppressed in 1539 and later served as the setting for Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula.
In writing this book, I have depended much on the expertise and generosity of others, especially at each of the fifty places featured in this book. I particularly want to thank: Lesley Smith, Curator of Tutbury Castle; Dr Gareth Williams at the British Museum; Jane Apps, Head Steward at Hever Castle; John K. Wingfield Digby of Sherborne Castle; Jon Culverhouse, Curator, and Carolyn Crookall at Burghley House; Nigel Wright, Curator, and National Trust volunteer guide, Chiara, both at Hardwick Hall; my old colleagues and friends Mark Wallis and Stephanie Selmayr at Past Pleasures; Tudor food historian Richard Fitch; Dr Kent Rawlinson, Curator of Historic Buildings at Hampton Court Palace; and Jane Spooner, Curator of Historic Buildings at the Tower of London. Particular mention must be made of all those at Trinity College, Cambridge, who welcomed me when the college was closed to the public, namely Lord Rees of Ludlow; Pauline Smith, Porter; Professor Robin Carrell; Sue Fletcher; and Sandy Paul, Librarian. I would especially like to thank Brian Jarvis, General Manager of Thornbury Castle, for his great generosity, and the time he gave up to show me around. There are also countless members of staff and volunteers at the National Trust, English Heritage, Historic House Association and independent sites along the way, whose names I didn’t get a chance to learn, but who have helped me enormously. Thank you to you all.
Journey Through Tudor England Page 23