Tudors (History of England Vol 2)

by Ackroyd, Peter

  Yet who was to tell the king that he was dying? Even to ‘imagine’ the death of the sovereign was to incur the charge of treason. It was also unwise to snuff out the last gleam of hope. The doctors gave the charge to Sir Anthony Denny, who had for some time been the principal gentleman of the bedchamber. He approached his master and whispered to him that ‘in man’s judgement, you are not like to live’. He then encouraged him to prepare for death in a pious Christian manner. The king was advised to call for Thomas Cranmer but replied that he ‘would take a little sleep’ first. When the archbishop did arrive, he was too late; if Henry was not already dead, he was at least speechless. The king died at two in the morning of 28 January 1547. He had reigned for thirty-seven years and nine months.

  It is difficult to assess the king’s private religion at the end of his life. He was said to have entertained the idea, according to Foxe, of substituting the Mass with a communion service; but this Lutheran impulse cannot be substantiated. The evidence suggests that he died, as he had lived, a Catholic. His will invoked ‘the name of God and of the glorious and blessed virgin our Lady Saint Mary’; he also ordered that daily Masses be said, as long as the world endured, for the salvation of his soul. That is not the language of a Lutheran. It suggests, although it does not prove, that the king still believed in the existence of purgatory despite the denial of it in his own religious articles.

  As for the religion of the country, opinions differed at the time and still differ. Was it a predominantly and practically Catholic kingdom, with a king instead of a pope at its head? Or was it in the throes of a singular change to a plainer and simpler worship? It is perhaps best seen as a confused and confusing process of acquiescence in the king’s wishes. The habit of obedience was instinctive, especially when it was compounded by fear and threat of force. A French observer said at the time that if Henry were to declare Mahomet God, the English people would accept it. Certain devout people would not be moved from the dictates of their conscience – Thomas More and Anne Askew come to mind – but, for most, the practice of religion was determined by custom and regulated by authority. The rituals of public worship were the same as those practised in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the evidence of wills suggests that the reformed religion had not made great progress with the majority of the people. By establishing the principle of royal supremacy, however, Henry had created an instrument that could be used for the purposes of religious reform.

  The chain of stern necessity now bound all the participants in the drama. The death of a king was a momentous event, a rupture in the natural order that had swiftly to be repaired before the forces of chaos spilled out. In the last months of his life access to the king had been granted by Sir Anthony Denny and Sir William Paget, private secretary. Denny and Paget were a powerful influence upon the ailing king, and in this crucial period it is likely that they aligned themselves with the reformers in the king’s council.

  In the autumn of 1546 the imperial ambassador, in a dispatch to his master, described the unexpected rise in the influence of these reformers. ‘The Protestants’, he told him, ‘have their openly declared champions . . . I had even heard that some of them had gained great favour with the king; and I could only wish that they were as far away from court as they were last year.’ He then named the two most prominent among them as ‘the earl of Hertford and the lord admiral’. These two men, Edward Seymour and John Dudley, would indeed set the tone of the next reign.

  Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, was Edward’s uncle; he was Jane Seymour’s elder brother who on his sister’s marriage to the king had become a gentleman of the privy chamber. He had been raised to his earldom at the time of the young prince’s christening, and steadily climbed in royal favour; he had become warden of the Scottish Marches, or the northern borderlands, where his military skills were evident. He had taken part in the king’s campaigns in Scotland and France, and had therefore become part of the king’s inner martial band. John Dudley was the son of a royal councillor who had been beheaded at the beginning of Henry’s rule; he had quickly proved himself to be a master of the sea, and had progressed from vice-admiral to lord high admiral; he had also participated in the expeditions against Scotland and France, winning Henry’s admiration and friendship. Seymour and Dudley were, in effect, warlords.

  The pair were deeply concerned, therefore, with the question of the king’s last will and testament. It is dated 30 December 1546, a little less than a month before his death. An original had been revised on 26 December by Henry in the presence of some of his councillors. We may see among them Denny and Paget, Seymour and Dudley. Henry bequeathed the crown to his son and to his son’s issue; if that failed he named any children born of his own queen, but in that regard he was perhaps over-confident. The throne would then pass to Lady Mary, and then to Lady Elizabeth. All this came to pass. The right to the throne then jumped to the issue of the king’s youngest sister, the duchess of Suffolk, thus excluding the claims of the Scottish family of Stuarts into which his older sister had married. This would cause much controversy during the reign of Elizabeth.

  Henry then designated sixteen men as members of the regency council that would superintend the early years of the reign of Edward VI. Yet the fact is that he never signed the will. He left it too late, perhaps reserving to himself the possibility of changing its details and thus maintaining discipline in the court. It was subsequently signed with a ‘dry stamp’ or facsimile on the day before his death, 27 January, a delay that might have allowed for the exercise of creative editing; the signature, which was stamped upon the will and then inked in, was also contrived at a stage when he was no longer capable of reacting to any changes.

  All the members of the regency council were ‘new men’, or what might be called professional men who had gained their ascendancy in the last years of Henry’s rule. Those of the nobility had only attained that rank in recent years. Some of them inclined towards the reformed faith, among them Denny and Seymour, but the majority were no doubt happy with the religious settlement that Henry had ordained. The king was actively seeking balance and moderation in the council of the young heir.

  That is perhaps why Stephen Gardiner, the leading conservative, was excluded from the council. The king may have suspected Gardiner of papal sympathies, and such a stance would be doubly dangerous during a minority. This was a deliberate decision by the king himself. It is reported that he omitted Gardiner’s name with the remark that ‘he was a wilful man and not meet to be about his son’. Paget records that he and others tried to persuade the king otherwise but Henry retorted that ‘he marvelled what we meant and that we all knew him to be a wilful man’. He is also reported to have said that ‘I remembered him well enough, and of good purpose have left him out; for surely if he were in my testament, and one of you [the council], he would cumber you all, and you should never rule him, he is of so troublesome a nature. I myself could use him, and rule him to all manner of purposes, as seemed good unto me; but so shall you never do.’ Temperamental, rather than doctrinal, considerations may have ensured his dismissal. It seems likely that the king wished for the continuance of his ‘middle’ policy of reformed Catholicism. In this, he was to be disappointed.

  The heir to the throne, in his own chronicle, reported the events in the immediate aftermath of the king’s death. Edward had been staying in Seymour’s castle at Hertford, but was then taken to Enfield Palace where he was told of his father’s death. ‘The next day . . . he [Edward himself] was brought to the Tower of London where he tarried the space of three weeks; and in the mean season the council sat every day for the performance of the will.’ He then states that ‘they thought best to choose the duke of Somerset to be Protector of the Realm and Governor of the King’s Person’. The new duke was none other than Edward Seymour himself, promoted to this title after becoming the protector.

  Paget and Seymour had been colluding even as the king approached his death. ‘Remember what you promised to me in the gallery a
t Westminster,’ Paget wrote to Seymour later, ‘before the breath was out of the body of the king that dead is. Remember what you promised me immediately after, devising with me concerning the place which you now occupy.’ Twenty-four hours after Henry’s death Seymour wrote to Paget from Hertford. The letter was sent between three and four in the morning, carried by a messenger who was ordered to ‘haste, post haste, haste with all diligence for thy life, for thy life’. Among other matters Seymour told Paget that ‘for divers respects, I think it not convenient to satisfy the world’ about the contents of Henry’s will until they had met and so arranged affairs ‘as there may be no controversy hereafter’.

  So the two men had been scheming about their seizure of power. It is also possible, to put it no higher, that Paget, with the connivance of Denny, had added material to the will itself. There was, for example, a clause known as ‘unfulfilled gifts’, decreeing that any promise of Henry to reward his courtiers should be implemented after his death; by these means lands and honours were liberally distributed to the ‘new men’.

  In a contest of high stakes, amid all the fear and ambition released by the king’s death, any trick or forgery was acceptable. The members of the court were grasping and unscrupulous, having to act and react in a climate of anxiety and suspicion. It was an atmosphere that Henry had created, perhaps, but in this respect he was not very different from his predecessors and successors.

  On 4 February the new council ignored the basic sentiment of the king’s will. Henry had ordained a system of majority rule, to preserve the balance of the government, that could only be overturned if the ‘most part’ agreed to do so in writing. It was overturned immediately when the council decided that ‘some special man’ should guide the proceedings of the realm; Seymour, as a man of proven ability and a blood relative of the new king, was chosen as protector of the kingdom and governor of the king’s person. The imperial ambassador was not so sanguine; he reported to the emperor’s sister that Seymour, or Somerset as we must now call him, was ‘a dry, sour, opinionated man’. In the scramble for power, however, he had won.

  The body of the dead king was disembowelled and cleansed, but the surgeons discovered that the arteries were so blocked that there was ‘hardly half a pint of pure blood in his whole body’. It was then encased in lead, with a coffin that was carried by sixteen men at the time of his burial. An army of 1,000 accompanied the funeral march from Westminster to Windsor, with 250 mourners as well as all the other dignitaries of Church and State; the procession stretched for 4 miles. When the procession stopped for the night at Syon, it is reported that part of the leaden coffin had come apart and that a dog was seen to be licking the spilled blood. It is a striking illustration of a macabre prophecy delivered to Henry by Father Peto fifteen years before – ‘The dogs would lick up your blood – yes yours’. It is perhaps too dramatically appropriate to be true.

  The hearse itself was nine storeys high, and the road to Windsor had to be repaved to accommodate it, while on top of the hearse a great wax effigy of the king was displayed to the crowds of spectators. It was dressed in cloth of crimson velvet, and adorned with jewels. The real body, already decomposing, was lowered into the choir vault of St George’s Chapel.

  17

  The breaking of the altars

  On 20 February 1547 a solemn little boy proceeded down the aisle of Westminster Abbey; the great lords of the realm held up the crown, the orb and the sceptre. ‘Yea, yea, yea,’ the congregation called out, ‘King Edward! King Edward! King Edward!’ On the previous day they boy had been greeted by a London pageant, with images of a phoenix and a lion, of crowns and of flowers. A chant emerged from the crowd, ‘Sing up heart, sing up heart, sing no more down, but joy in King Edward that weareth the crown.’ He had stopped to watch the acrobatics of a tight-rope dancer.

  Edward, coming to the throne of England at the age of nine, was hailed by some as the new Josiah. Josiah, son of Amon, assumed the rule of his country at the age of eight and proceeded to do ‘that which was right in the sight of the Lord’. He tore down the graven images of the Assyrian cults and broke the altars into dust. In his reign, the true law of God was providentially found and became the law of Judah. The parallels were clear to those who wished to eradicate the traces of the Romish faith. Edward was seen as a godly king with a fundamental biblical power.

  Continuity was assured, also, with the council previously around Henry now preserved around his son. In Foxe’s Book of Martyrs John Foxe concluded, however, that ‘a new face of things began now to appear, as it were in a stage new players coming in, the old being thrust out’. Among the discarded players were the conservatives Stephen Gardiner and the duke of Norfolk, thus tilting the balance in favour of further religious reform. Stephen Gardiner had in fact played a role at the coronation ceremony, but that was his only public duty in the course of the new king’s reign. The duke of Somerset, the protector, now dominated the proceedings of the council and had become king in all but name; two gilt maces were always borne in procession before him and he asked Katherine Parr to hand her royal jewels to his wife. He went so far as to call the French king ‘brother’, in a diplomatic letter; the English ambassador in Paris was advised that this was not good form from one who was not the Lord’s anointed.

  Somerset’s relations with his real brother were tense and difficult. Thomas Seymour had been appointed lord high admiral for life. One early biographer described him as ‘fierce in courage, courtly in fashion, in personage stately and in voice magnificent’, but had made one other observation; he was, perhaps, ‘somewhat empty in matter’. He was one of the hollow men who triumph at court. He now demanded to be made governor to the young king who was, after all, also his nephew. Instead he was given a place on the privy council and promised some of the spoils of office. His ambitions were not so easily satisfied, however, and he began to plot against the rule of his brother Edward.

  He also took the precaution of uniting himself with the royal widow. Katherine Parr had wished to marry him in the days when she was being courted by the king and, now that Henry was dead, she and Seymour acted swiftly to secure their alliance. In their quick courtship she wrote to him from her house in Chelsea asking him to come to her early in the morning so that ‘you may come without suspect’. The haste was considered by many to be unseemly; if Katherine were soon to prove to be pregnant, it was conceivable that Henry was the father. Any child would be a remarkable dynastic conundrum. The young princesses, Mary and Elizabeth, shared their outrage at ‘seeing the ashes, or rather the scarcely cold body of the king our father so shamefully dishonoured by the queen our stepmother’; these were the words of Elizabeth who also urged caution and dissimulation on her older sister. They were dealing with ‘too powerful a party, who have got all authority into their own hands’. She herself was obliged to use ‘tact’ toward Katherine Parr; silence and cunning were always to be her weapons.

  Thomas Seymour, snubbed in the matter of the royal governorship, nevertheless connived to win his young nephew’s favour. He began to visit him in private, and surreptitiously gave him money while denouncing his brother’s meanness. ‘You are a beggarly king,’ he told the boy. ‘You have no money to play or give.’ He even elicited from him a letter to Katherine Parr in which it seemed that Edward was asking his stepmother to marry Seymour. ‘Wherefore,’ he wrote, ‘ye shall not need to fear any grief to come, or to suspect lack of aid in need; seeing that he, being mine uncle [the protector], is so good in nature that he will not be troublesome.’ He was offering, in other words, to protect Katherine against the obvious wrath of Somerset at any clandestine marriage. The protector was indeed greatly offended.

  It seems more than likely that Seymour himself dictated the letter to the young king, which throws into doubt the image of the boy as grave and devout beyond his years. A few weeks after his accession it was noted that Edward began to swear and blaspheme, using such phrases as ‘by God’s blood’. He told his tutor that one of his class
mates, chosen from the sons of the nobility, had advised him that ‘kings always swore’. He was made to watch as the schoolfriend was soundly whipped.

  The protector was by instinct a religious reformer and his closest associates were also of that persuasion; his personal doctor, William Turner, had published works banned during the previous reign. It was reported that his six daughters had been educated in ‘good literature and in the knowledge of God’s most holy laws’, which was an indirect way of saying that they had been evangelized. In one of his proclamations he warned ‘parents to keep their children’ from such ‘evil and pernicious games’ as bowling and tennis, an order which at a slightly later date might have been described as puritanical.

  John Bradford, a radical sectary, was questioned by the bishop of Durham at the end of the reign. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘the doctrine taught in King Edward’s days was God’s pure religion.’ The reply was swift and revealing. ‘What religion mean you in King Edward’s days? What year of his reign?’ The first attempts at change came soon enough. Ten days before the new king’s coronation the wardens and curates of St Martin’s in London tore down all the images of the saints and whitewashed the paintings on the walls. They were acting too quickly, in fact, and were taken to the Tower for a period.

  Yet an alteration in feeling was quickly becoming manifest. In a contemporary diary, for 1547, is the entry that ‘this year the archbishop of Canterbury did eat meat openly in Lent, in the hall of Lambeth, the like of which was never seen since England was a Christian country’. Thomas Cranmer had already outlined the nature of the English Church; he said that it was necessary that he and the other bishops should renew their commissions as functionaries of the new king. They were no longer to be seen as the successors of the apostles but as government officials. This was now a state Church in which the pulpits would be used to publish the decrees and desires of the council. It is perhaps well to remember that Edward was the first anointed English king to enjoy the title of supreme head of the English Church.