Tudor_Passion. Manipulation. Murder. the Story of England's Most Notorious Royal Family

by Leanda de Lisle

  A few months later, in February 1544, the secretary of the Spanish nobleman Juan Esteban, Duke of Najera, was invited to Whitehall with his master to meet the queen. They travelled to the palace by barge, admiring the Thames on the way. ‘It is not possible, in my opinion, that a more beautiful river should exist in the world’, the Spaniard noted, ‘the city stands on each side of it, and innumerable boats, vessels and other craft are seen moving on the stream’, and ‘never did I see a river so thickly covered with swans’. Whitehall had a well-laid-out garden with walks decorated with statues, and carvings of birds, monsters and other creatures. Inside Katherine Parr greeted them in her chambers. She was extremely animated with ‘a lively and pleasing appearance’, and was dressed in a magnificent gown of cloth of gold, worn with sleeves lined with scarlet satin and trimmed with red velvet. ‘Suspended from her neck’, he also noted, were ‘two crosses, and a jewel of very rich diamonds’.

  Having asked her visitors to sit down, Katherine called for music. While the queen danced with her brother, Margaret Douglas and the princess Mary danced with other gentlemen. Margaret was in silk and Mary in a violet gown set off with a petticoat of cloth of gold, her auburn hair glittering with her jewelled headdress. At the end of the evening the duke kissed the queen’s hand, and asked if he could also kiss Mary’s, but the princess insisted on a kiss on the lips, in the English manner. The Spanish secretary thought her very pretty and ‘well shaped’, and was told she was ‘so much beloved throughout the kingdom that she is almost adored’, but that she was careful ‘to conceal her acquirements’.

  Mary had learned from experience that it can be helpful to be underestimated and was now at court only because her father no longer regarded her as dangerous. Henry believed a husband could yet make her so, so he had no intention of having her married, even if it meant she died a childless spinster. He wanted no potential challengers to the claims of his son. For Mary’s friend and cousin, Margaret Douglas, a wedding also seemed far off. Happily, however, that was about to change. Instead of using resources to invade Scotland, Henry intended to build up a body of Scottish support for a marriage between the infant Queen of Scots and his son Edward, thus uniting the kingdoms under the English crown. Margaret Douglas was to be a pawn in these plans, with Henry offering her as a bride to a man who regarded himself as the rightful holder of the Scottish throne: Matthew Stuart, Earl of Lennox.

  A descendant of James I of Scotland, Lennox had returned from exile in France the previous year, only to be disappointed in what he could achieve in pursuit of his ambitions. He hoped he would do better leading a pro-English Scottish party from England.6 Under the treaty Lennox made with Henry, he had to agree to recognise Henry’s ‘right’ of overlordship in Scotland and convert to the religion of Henry’s Church of England. Then he was introduced to Margaret. It had been agreed that both parties would have the opportunity to accept or reject the marriage after they had seen each other.7 Margaret proved delighted with Lennox. Described as ‘a strong man of personage well shaped . . . with a good and manly countenance . . . he was most pleasant for a lady’.8 Lennox was equally delighted with Margaret, who he found as beautiful as others had judged her as a girl, and talented and clever as well.

  With the match settled, the princess Mary showered Margaret with wedding gifts of balas rubies, table diamonds, sapphires and pendant pearls, brooches and girdle buckles. Henry gave Lennox still more substantial gifts of land, principally in Yorkshire, where they were to reside at Temple Newsam, a house only completed in 1520, and which had belonged to one of the executed leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace. On the morning of 29 June Margaret and Lennox married in front of the king and queen.9 It was to prove a love match as well as an effective political partnership, but the Lennoxes had been obliged to stomach some disappointment. Margaret’s name was not mentioned in the Third Act of Succession, which had been given the royal assent that spring.

  Henry was aware it was unlikely he would have more children and so he had Mary and Elizabeth named as Edward’s heirs, following any children he might have with Katherine Parr. Neither Margaret Douglas nor Henry’s other nieces, Frances and Eleanor Brandon, was mentioned, however. The Act merely stated that Elizabeth’s heirs would be named later in letters patent. As the previous Act of 1536 had observed, he feared named heirs might ‘take great heart and courage, and by presumption fall into inobedience and rebellion’. Unlike his spinster daughters, his nieces were married, and into great noble families: Margaret Douglas to Lennox, Frances Brandon to Harry Grey, Marquess of Dorset, and her younger sister, Eleanor Brandon, to Henry Clifford, Earl of Cumberland.

  Henry’s decisions on the succession were about defending the rights of his children and on a personal level Henry was very fond of Margaret. He wrote to her from Calais that September, as the French campaign continued, sending the new bride his special ‘recommendations’.10 Six days later Henry’s army enjoyed a great victory with Boulogne surrendering to English forces. As had happened in the past, however, Henry was let down by his ally. On 18 September, Charles V concluded a peace treaty with Francis I. England was left to fight on alone through 1545, defeating invasion attempts and attacks on Boulogne, while launching massive raids into Scotland in answer to the arrival of French reinforcements there. It dissipated the wealth Henry had taken from the church and smashed the economy. Henry’s oldest friend and one-time brother-in-law Charles Brandon was worn to the bone, and died of pneumonia in August shortly after he had returned home from fortifying Portsmouth. In June 1546, his money exhausted, Henry was obliged to make peace with France.

  Only recently recovered from the birth of her son, Henry, Lord Darnley, Margaret Douglas was by this time already back at court.11 Appointed with her cousins, Frances and Eleanor Brandon, as a lady-in-waiting to Katherine Parr, she was now to have a front-row seat to the paranoid and bloody denouement of Henry’s reign.12

  The fifty-five-year-old king was increasingly bedridden. His waist, once measuring a trim thirty-two inches, was a gross fifty-four inches, and his legs suffered recurring ulcers. Yet Henry found it hard to forget his youthful chivalric glory. In his favourite psalter, where Psalm 37:25 read ‘I have been young and now am old’, he wrote in the margin ‘a grievous saying’. It was all the more so when it meant he had so little time left to protect Edward. He wanted an awe-inspiring image for the little boy and had his son painted in the famous Holbein pose: skinny legs spread, his fresh, eight-year-old face looking commanding, straight at the viewer. But however Henry had him painted, Edward was still just a boy, ‘the most amiable, and the gentlest thing of all the world’, one of his tutors observed.13

  Edward was fond of the queen, and fonder still of his elder sister Mary, the nearest thing he had had to a mother since babyhood, and in whose company, he said, he felt a ‘special content’. ‘Although I do not frequently write to you, my dearest sister,’ he wrote to her that year, ‘yet . . . I love you quite as well as if I wrote to you more frequently’; indeed he observed, ‘I love you most.’14 As Edward’s nearest royal relative, Mary was the obvious choice for regent if Henry died while Edward was a minor.15 But if Mary married, would Edward be safe from an ambitious prince? Henry feared not. And what of Edward’s council? What dangers might they both face there?

  Since 1533 and the break with Rome the quarrels of the Wars of the Roses had been replaced with religious divisions. Courtiers were now driven not only by personal ambition, but also by competing ideologies; some wished for further evangelical reform; some wanted to maintain the status quo, and others wished to reverse the break with Rome. In Italy the Council of Trent had recently opened. The church’s teachings were to be discussed and defined anew, and this threatened to leave Henry’s Reformation behind. Humanism was to be hugely influential in what became known as the Catholic Revival or (more negatively) the Counter-Reformation. Henry’s anti-papal stance meant England could not be part of that, yet he persisted in seeing Lutheranism and the still more radical Swiss Re
formed Churches as heretical.

  In Parliament in December 1545, the same month that the Council of Trent had opened, Henry had berated both houses for their quarrels, complaining that the Bible was being ‘disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every ale house and tavern’. His role as the arbiter of religious truth was a power he was now determined to remind his subjects forcibly was his alone, and would be inherited by his son. As in 1534 and 1536, when he threatened his daughter Mary to demonstrate that he would not tolerate any opposition to his royal will, so in 1546 Henry’s queen was the first to be used as an example and warning that it was for the king alone to declare on religious issues.

  Katherine Parr had a strong interest in religious reform. She had promoted evangelical tutors for Edward and every afternoon evangelical chaplains were invited to preach to her ladies. The historian David Starkey believes it was the princess Elizabeth who unwittingly brought to the king’s attention the true radical nature of Katherine’s religious inclinations.16 Aged twelve, Anne Boleyn’s daughter was proving an excellent linguist, and in imitation of her great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, she had begun to do her own translations of religious works. In 1546 she gave her father a New Year’s gift of a translation into French, Italian and Latin of a composition of her stepmother’s: a book of prayers and meditations printed in 1545. It reflected the Lutheran belief that faith alone, without the necessity of carrying out good works, was all that was necessary for salvation, and Starkey suggests that far from pleasing the king, the gift made him realise that Katherine was involving herself in theological matters and encouraging Elizabeth to do so too.

  Katherine further exposed herself to danger, however, in a forceful letter that she wrote to the University of Cambridge on 26 February 1546. Responding to a request for her intercession with the king on the university’s behalf, Katherine once again waded into her husband’s preserve of theology, chiding the Cambridge scholars for writing to her in Latin and instructing them that the purpose of learning was only to set forth Christ’s teachings, and that all else was vanity. The very next day the Imperial ambassador reported to Charles V that there were rumours circulating that Henry would discard Katherine and marry again. These spread rapidly and circulated at least into early April, after which they faded. A famous story later told by the Elizabethan martyrologist, John Foxe, may well reflect something of what had happened.

  Foxe described how Katherine enjoyed debating religion with the king. But one day, after they parted, he had expressed irritation over it. Foxe then claims that conservative councillors seized the opportunity to fan Henry’s anger and a warrant for her arrest was drawn up. Henry, however, decided to warn Katherine about his displeasure through one of his doctors. She took the hint, and when she went to Henry that night she reassured him humbly that she had only debated with him for her own instruction and to take his mind off the pain in his leg. ‘And is it even so sweetheart?’ Foxe records him as asking her, ‘then perfect friends we are now again’. Katherine Parr had indeed survived danger, much as Foxe’s story later relayed, but the source of the danger was Henry, not the dark forces of conservatism that Foxe preferred to blame. Henry had made a point, as well as indulging his cruel streak: religious policy came from him alone.17

  Katherine Parr proved immune from the ferocious heresy hunts that followed. But while Henry countenanced, and even encouraged, the zeal of conservatives in this regard, he also chose this moment to break the intellectual leader of religious conservatism in England: the Bishop of Winchester, Stephan Gardiner. Hitherto the bishop had been one of his most effective servants, but Henry believed that the only man who could control a figure as brilliant as Gardiner was Henry himself, and he did not want Gardiner coming to dominate his son, or those around him. Although Gardiner had helped frame the arguments for the Royal Supremacy, Henry may also have suspected (rightly) that Gardiner would come to question its ability to protect England from heresy. In November 1546 Gardiner discovered Henry was mysteriously angry with him over the exchange of some lands. The king would never see him again.

  It was, however, to be the Duke of Norfolk’s eldest son, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who unwittingly provoked Henry’s deepest fears for his son. One of the great poets of his generation, Surrey was the brother of Margaret Douglas’ friend Mary Fitzroy, Duchess of Richmond (widow of the king’s bastard son), and was close to their fellow poet, Mary Shelton. He was, however, also known with good reason as ‘the most foolish, proud boy that is in England’. Surrey had quartered the royal arms into his own heraldic bearings, and made it plain he believed his father, as England’s premier nobleman, should be Protector when Henry died. The king had not forgotten that the last Protector was Richard III, in whose cause Surrey’s grandfather had fought and his great-grandfather had died. Henry’s son Edward, now aged nine, was three years younger than Edward V had been when he disappeared with his brother. On 12 December 1546, the glamorous Surrey was arrested on suspicion of treason and shortly afterwards he and Norfolk were sent to the Tower.

  On 26 December, shut up away from all but his closest servants, Henry called for his will to draw up his final plans for Edward’s protection. He knew he was now dying and that this was his last opportunity to ensure Edward’s survival. His daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, had been nominated as Edward’s heirs under the Act of Succession. This would remain the case. Being illegitimate and female, they posed no threat to Edward – unless they married – and Henry’s will now added the proviso that their inheritance depended on them marrying only in accordance with the wishes of the executors of his will. Henry was to name sixteen men as his executors, whom he envisaged sharing the authority of the crown equally until Edward reached the age of eighteen. He was not going to trust any one individual with the powers of either a Protector or a regent.

  To prevent factions Henry further instructed that no one would be allowed to join his privileged circle of oligarchs before Edward’s majority, and none was to be expelled. It was a sealed entity. Those who were on the king’s list included Edward’s senior maternal uncle, Edward Seymour, supported by his chief ally on the council, John Dudley. They had been key figures in the king’s recent wars, as well as pivotal members of the evangelical and reformist grouping at court. Another was Katherine Parr’s brother-in-law, the flame-haired William Herbert, who was expected to guarantee the interests of a child born to the queen, should she prove to be pregnant after Henry’s death.18 Henry also now settled the unresolved matter of the long-stop heirs – the successors to a childless Elizabeth.

  Henry’s great-niece Mary, Queen of Scots – daughter of James V – was the most senior heir in blood. But whom she married was outside the control of anyone in England. It was likely to be a King of France or Spain, and Henry was not going to give a foreign monarch any help in laying claim to Edward’s throne. Edward was born while England was in schism with Rome, so it was possible to argue he was not legitimate. To protect Edward, Mary, Queen of Scots and her heirs were therefore ignored in his will.19

  The claims of Margaret Douglas, who was next in line, also went unmentioned. Historians have said Henry’s decision followed a quarrel Margaret had with her uncle that autumn, and have suggested it was over religion. The numerous payments Margaret and her husband made that year to chantry priests, who prayed for souls in purgatory, indicate they were conservative.20 But Henry VIII asked in his will for Masses to be said for his soul (albeit on nothing like the scale of his father). There is no evidence that Margaret ever quarrelled with Henry over his religious policies, and the sole basis for the claim of there being any quarrel at all is a much later, self-serving story spun by a disgruntled former Lennox servant.21 In reality the evidence is that Henry had wished to demote Margaret in the line of succession since 1536 when she was referred to as her mother’s ‘natural’ child. Her claim to the English throne was now united with her husband’s claim to the crown of Scotland, making it potentially powerful enough to draw support in England, Scotland and
France (where Lennox had spent many years). Alone amongst Henry’s nieces Margaret also had a son, Henry, Lord Darnley. Margaret was not named in Henry’s will to limit the potential threat she posed, not because of any quarrel.22

  In place of the descendants of his elder sister, Margaret of Scotland, Henry looked to those of his younger sister, Mary, the French queen. The senior heir was his niece Frances, but her husband was denied a place on Henry’s list of executors and her name was passed over in favour of her young daughters, Lady Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey. These three unmarried girls, all under the age of ten, and with only a distant claim under Common Law, were chosen because they were weak candidates who posed little threat to Edward.

  With the matter of the succession decided on, the dying king moved to complete the destruction of the Howards. It proved difficult to persuade a jury to convict Surrey of treason and Henry intervened personally to convince them to do so. The ‘proud boy’ was executed on 19 January. A final Act of Attainder was used to deal with the still trickier case against Norfolk, who Surrey had argued should be Protector. The execution was due to take place on 28 January, but by the evening of Thursday 27 January it was clear to all around the king that his death was imminent. Henry was asked if he wanted to confess his sins, but he was not troubled by his conscience in the way his father had been. Henry was as sure as ever that his actions as king had had the purest motives, and that all those he had destroyed had received their just merits. ‘I will first take a little sleep’, he said. ‘And then, as I feel myself, I will advise [you] upon the matter.’ Henry VIII never woke.