by Robert Lacey
When Anne’s second pregnancy ended in a miscarriage in January 1536 her fate was sealed, since Tudor medical science — or the lack of it — meant that one miscarriage might well be the first of an unbreakable series. This had been the case with Katherine, and once again Henry had not been slow in lining up a possible replacement for his non-productive Queen. He had set his cap at Jane Seymour, a soft-spoken young woman who was as meek and submissive as Anne had proved complicated and assertive.
Having made the Boleyn marriage possible, Thomas Cromwell was now given the job of destroying it. Anne had always been flirtatious, and this proved the route to her undoing. Playful glances and gestures were interpreted as evidence of actual infidelity. Men were tortured and‘confessions’ produced. A court musician pleaded guilty to adultery. Her own brother was charged with incest. The facts were outlandish, but the servants of a Tudor government knew that‘proof’ had to be found so that the defective Queen could be condemned. As Anne Boleyn prepared to step out on to Tower Green on 19 May 1536, the first Queen of England ever to be executed, she seemed to have reached her own peace.’I hear the executioner is very good,’ she said, and I have a little neck.’ Then she put her hands around her throat and burst out laughing.
Henry wasted no time. No sooner had he received the news of Anne’s beheading than he set off upriver on his barge to see Jane Seymour. Engaged the next day, the couple were married ten days later, and Jane was formally enthroned on Whit Sunday 4 June 1536 — in the very chair where Anne had sat only five weeks earlier.
From Henry’s point of view, it was third time lucky. A kindly and level-headed woman in her late twenties, Jane worked hard to reconcile Henry with his elder daughter Mary, whose place in the succession he had given to Anne’s daughter Elizabeth, and the lottery of fertility finally yielded the King the male heir that he wanted. At Hampton Court on 12 October 1537, Queen Jane was delivered of a healthy baby boy, whom Henry christened Edward, after the Confessor, the patron saint of English royalty. Henry at last had the token of divine blessing he had sought.
But his wife had suffered a disastrous delivery. According to one account, she had undergone the then primitive and almost invariably fatal surgery of a Caesarean section. Other evidence suggests blood poisoning of the placenta — puerperal fever. Either way, Prince Edward’s mother died after twelve days of blood loss and infection that the royal doctors were helpless to reverse.
Henry was prostrated with unaccustomed sorrow. Jane Seymour lay in state for three weeks, and then, alone of Henry’s wives, she was buried in pomp and glory in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. It was later said that her name was on Henry’s lips when he died, and certainly his will was to direct that he should be buried beside her. When the King of France sent his congratulations on the birth of a healthy heir, Henry’s reply was uncharacteristically subdued.’Divine Providence,’ he wrote,‘bath mingled my joy with the bitterness of the death of her who brought me this happiness.’
Diplomatic dispatches are seldom to be taken at their face value, still less when worded by Henry VIII. But in this case we might, perhaps, give Henry the benefit of the doubt.
THE PILGRIMAGE OF GRACE
1536
EARLY-SIXTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE WAS INTER-woven with the joy of religious rite and spectacle — effigies of saints, stained-glass windows; the washing of feet on Maundy Thursday, the‘creeping to the cross’ on Good Friday. In London every Whit Sunday, doves were released from the tower of St Paul’s Cathedral to symbolise the Holy Spirit winging its way to heaven. This age-old texture of symbol and ritual provided a satisfying structure to most people’s lives. The English were devout folk, reported one European traveller:‘they all attend mass every day’.
The miracle of the mass — the Holy Communion service when bread and wine were offered up at the altar — was graphically described in Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, the bestselling epic first printed and published by Caxton in 1485. As the bishop held up a wafer of bread, there came a figure in likeness of a child, and the visage was as red and as bright as any fire, and smote himself into the bread, that all they saw it that the bread was formed of a fleshly man’.
This was the moment of‘transubstantiation’ when, according to Catholic belief, the bread and wine on the altar were literally transformed into the body and blood of Christ. It provided the awe-inspiring climax of every mass. Bells rang, incense wafted, and heads were bowed as Jesus himself, both child and‘fleshly man’, descended from heaven to join that particular human congregation — to be devoured as the people ate his flesh and the priest alone drank his blood (the liquid that had once been wine was too precious to risk being passed around and spilled).
By the 1520S and 30s, the evangelical followers of Luther and Tyndale were openly scoffing at this potent but, to their mind, primitive and sacrilegious Catholic theatre. How could the Lord’s sacred body be conjured up on earth by imperfect men in gaudy vestments? The exhilarating idea at the heart of the Reformation, that every man could have his own direct relationship with God, challenged the central role of the priest in religious ceremonies — and from this spiritual doubt followed material consequences. By what right did the clerics control their vast infrastructure of earthly power and possessions, notably the vast landed estates of the monasteries? The Church was by far the largest landowner in England.
In 1535 Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, seized on this appetising question: if the Church was corrupted by its involvement with worldly goods, why should he not relieve it of the problem? So he sent out his‘Visitors’, crews of inspectors who descended on the eight hundred or so monasteries and nunneries in England and duly discovered what they were sent to find. Laziness, greed and sexual peccadilloes: it was not difficult to unearth — or indeed, invent — evidence that some of the country’s seven thousand monks, nuns and friars had been failing to live up to the high ideals they set themselves. Cromwell’s inquisitors gleefully presented to their master plenty of examples of misconduct, along with some improbable relics — the clippings of St Edmund’s toenails, St Thomas Becket’s penknife. Their hastily gathered dossiers provided the excuse for the biggest land grab in English history, starting in 1536 with the dissolution of the smaller monasteries.
But the destruction of the country’s age-old education, employment and social welfare network was not accomplished without protest. The monasteries represented everything that, for centuries, people had been taught to respect, and in October 1536 the north of England rose in revolt. Rallying behind dramatic banners depicting the five wounds of Christ, some forty thousand marchers came to the aid of Mother Church in a rebellion they proudly called the Pilgrimage of Grace.
The‘pilgrims’ set about reinstating the monks and nuns in sixteen of the fifty-five houses that had already been suppressed. They demanded the legitimisation of Queen Katherine’s daughter, Mary. They also called for the destruction of the disruptive books of Luther and Tyndale, and for the removal of Thomas Cromwell along with his ally Thomas Cranmer, the reforming Archbishop of Canterbury. The rebels had a fundamental faith in the orthodoxy of their monarch — if only King Henry’s wicked advisers were removed, they believed, he would return to the good old ways.
This loyalty proved their undoing when Henry, unable to raise sufficient troops against them, bought time by agreeing to concede to the‘pilgrims’ some of their demands; he invited their leader, Robert Aske, to come down to London and present his grievances in person, under safe conduct. But once the rebels were safely dispersed back home in their villages, Henry seized on the excuse of new risings in the early months of 1537 to exact revenge.’Our pleasure,’ he instructed his army commander, the Duke of Norfolk,‘[is] that you shall cause such dreadful execution to be done upon a good number of every town village and hamlet that have offended as they may be a fearful spectacle to all others hereafter that would practise any like matter.’
Norfolk carried out his orders ruthlessly. Some seventy Cumberlan
d villagers were hanged on trees in their gardens in full sight of their wives and children; the monks of Saw-ley, one of the monasteries reopened by the pilgrims, were hanged on long timber staves projecting from their steeple. Aske was executed in front of the people who had so enthusiastically cheered him a few months earlier.
The rebels had not been wrong in their hunch that Henry was at heart a traditional Catholic — the King believed in the miracle of transubstantiation to the day he died. Even as the Reformation progressed, he burned the reformers who dared to suggest that the bread and wine of the communion were mere symbols of Christ’s body and blood. But he needed to fill his coffers. By 1540 England’s last religious house, the rich Augustinian abbey of Waltham, had been closed and the royal treasury was richer by £132,000 (more than £50 million today) from the sale of the monastery lands.
Even richer in the long term were the squires, merchants and magnates who had been conscripted into the new order of things, picking up prime monastic acres all over the country. The Dissolution of the Monasteries was Henry’s payoff to the landed classes, and it helped make the Reformation permanent.
But to this day we find corners of the English countryside curiously sanctified by the remains of high gothic arches, haunted towers and long-deserted cloisters. Rievaulx in north Yorkshire, Tintern in the Wye Valley, and Whitby on the windswept North Sea coast where St Hilda preached and the cowherd Caedmon sang: all these ghostly ruins are visible reminders of what was once the heart of English learning, education and history-making — a civilisation that consoled and inspired rich and poor alike for centuries.
… DIVORCED, BEHEADED, SURVIVED
1539-47
IN THE SUMMER OF 1539 HENRY VIII STAGED a pageant on the River Thames. Two barges put out on to the water, one manned by a crew representing the King and his Council, the other by sailors in the scarlet costumes of the Pope and his cardinals. As Henry and crowds of Londoners looked on, the two boats met and engaged in mock battle, with much capering and horseplay until the inevitable happened — the scarlet-clad Pope and his cardinals were pitched into the river.
Real life was not so simple. In 1538 the Pope had issued a call to the Catholic powers of Europe to rally against Englands ’most cruel and abominable tyrant’ and England now found herself dangerously isolated. Thomas Cromwell’s solution was to look for support among the Protestant princes of Germany. He could see how his royal master had been moping since the death of Jane Seymour a year or so earlier: perhaps business and pleasure could be combined by marriage to a comely German princess.
Inquiries established that there were two promising candidates in Cleves, the powerful north German duchy with its capital at Dusseldorf. The duke had a pair of marriageable sisters, Anne and Amelia, and early in 1539 Cromwell asked the English ambassador Christopher Mont to investigate their beauty. Mont reported back positively, and two locally produced portraits were sent off for the King’s inspection. But were the likenesses trustworthy?
The answer was to dispatch the King’s own painter, Hans Holbein, the talented German artist whose precise and luminous portraits embody for us the personalities and textures of Henry’s court. Working quickly as usual, Holbein produced portraits of both sisters in little more than a week. That of Anne showed a serene and pleasant-looking woman, and legend has it that Henry fell in love with the portrait. In fact, the King had already decided that now, at forty-eight, he should go for the elder of the two sisters — the twenty-four-year-old Anne. The gentle, modest face that he saw in Holbein’s canvas simply confirmed all the written reports he had received.
When Henry met his bride-to-be, however, he found her downright plain.‘I see nothing in this woman as men report of her,’ he said, speaking‘very sadly and pensively’ soon after he had greeted Anne on New Year’s Day 1540.’I marvel that wise men would make such report as they have done.’
Four days later Henry VIII went to his fourth marriage ceremony with a heavy heart. If it were not to satisfy the world and my realm,’ he told Cromwell reproachfully on their way to the service,‘I would not do that I must do this day for none earthly thing.’
Next morning, Henry was in a thoroughly bad mood: there were still more grounds for reproach.
’Surely, as ye know,’ he said to Cromwell,‘I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse, for I have felt her belly and her breasts, and thereby, as I can judge, she should be no maid.’ He added the indelicate detail that Anne suffered from bad body odour, and went on to describe the deflating effect this had on his ardour.‘I had neither will nor courage to proceed any further in other matters… he confessed.’I have left her as good a maid as I found her.’
The royal doctors were called in. It was a serious matter when a king could not consummate his marriage, but all they could offer was the age-old advice in such circumstances — not to worry too much. They advised Henry to take a night off.
But when the King returned to the fray, he found that nothing had changed — as Anne confirmed with charming innocence.‘When he comes to bed,’ she told one of her ladies-in-waiting,‘he kisses me and taketh me by the hand and biddeth me “Goodnight, sweetheart”. And in the morning [he] kisses me and biddeth me “Farewell, darling”. Is this not enough?’
We know these extraordinary details because, not for the first time, Thomas Cromwell was allotted the task of undoing what he had done. A widely unpopular figure, he had pushed the reforming agenda too far for the tastes of many, and landing his master with a wife that Henry disparagingly called‘the Flanders Mare’ proved the last straw. In June 1540 Cromwell became the latest of Henry’s scapegoats, condemned for treason by act of Parliament and facing the dreadful penalties of hanging, drawing and quartering. If he wished to avoid this particular fate, the minister’s final duty was to set down on paper the circumstantial evidence that would make possible the annulment of Henry’s non-marriage to Anne.
Thomas Cromwell was executed — with an axe — on 28 July 1540; the paperwork he produced at the eleventh hour helped Henry secure annulment of the Cleves marriage. Just ten days later the King was married again, to Katherine Howard, the twenty-year-old niece of his fierce general in the north, the Duke of Norfolk. For nearly a year the traditionalist duke, a Catholic and a bitter enemy of Cromwell’s, had been pushing the enticing Katherine into Henry’s path while plotting his rival’s downfall.
Unfortunately, the new Queen’s lively allure was accompanied by a lively sexual appetite, and little more than a year after her marriage, rumours circulated about Katherine’s promiscuity. As an unmarried girl in the unsupervised surroundings of the Norfolk household, she was said to have romped with Henry Manox her music teacher and also with her cousin Thomas Dereham — whom she then had the nerve to employ as her private secretary when she became Queen. In the autumn of 1541, during a royal progress to the north, inquiries revealed that she had waited till Henry was asleep before cavorting with another young lover, Thomas Culpeper.
Henry wept openly before his Council when finally confronted with proof of his wife’s betrayal. Katherine was beheaded in February the next year, along with Culpeper, Manox the music teacher, her cousin Dereham and Lady Rochford, the lady-in-waiting who had facilitated the backstairs liaisons after the King had gone to sleep.
Henry was by now a gross and lumbering man-mountain,‘moved by engines and art rather than by nature’, as the Duke of Norfolk put it. Arthritic and ulcerous, the ageing King had to be manhandled up staircases — a little cart was built to transport him around Hampton Court. His apothecary’s accounts list dam-busting quantities of liquorice, rhubarb and other laxatives, along with grease for the royal haemorrhoids.
What Henry needed was a reliable and experienced wife, and he finally found one in Catherine Parr, thirty-one years old and twice widowed — which gave her the distinction of being England’s most married Queen. In July 1543 she embarked sagely on the awesome challenge of life with England’s most married king, bringing together hi
s children Mary, Elizabeth and Edward to create, for the first time, something like a functional royal family household. Catherine was sympathetic to the new faith, and her most signifcant achievement, apart from surviving, was probably to ensure that the two younger children, Edward and Elizabeth, were educated by tutors who favoured reform.
When Henry died on 28 January 1547, the news was kept secret for three days. It was difficult to imagine England without the lustful, self-indulgent tyrant who had once been the beautiful young sportsman-king. In moral terms the tale of his reign was one of remorseless decline, of power corrupting absolutely. By no measure of virtue could Henry VIII be called a good man.
But he was a great one — and arguably England’s greatest ever king. Take virtue out of the equation, and his accomplishments were formidable. He destroyed the centuries-old medieval Church. He revolutionised the ownership of English land. He increased the power of central government to unprecedented heights, and though he ruled England as a despot, he did so without the support of an army. The new Church of England was Henry VIII’s most obvious legacy. And in the turbulent years that followed his death the country’s destiny would also be decisively shaped by the institution that he had enlisted — and thus, in the process, strengthened — to help him break from Rome: the Houses of Parliament and, in particular, the House of Commons.
BOY KING - EDWARD VI, THE GODLY IMP’
1547-53
AFTER ALL THE TROUBLE THAT HENRY VIII and England had gone through to get a male heir, Henry made sure that his son Edward received the best education that could be devised for a future king. The boy’s tutors, Richard Cox and John Cheke, were the leading humanist scholars of the day, and they redoubled their efforts with the nine-year-old when he succeeded his father in January 1547, In his geography lessons Edward learned by heart the names of all the ports in England, Scotland and France, together with the prevailing winds and tides; in history he studied the long and disastrous reign of Henry VI, an object lesson in how not to rule. By the age of twelve, the godly imp’ was reading twelve chapters of the Bible every day and taking notes as he listened to the Sunday sermon. In a display of cunning reminiscent of his grandfather Henry VII, the boy king devised his own secret code of Greek letters so no one could read his personal jottings.