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ELIZABETH IN DANGER
IN THE THIN LIGHT OF THE NEW DAY, LEADING COURTIERS ARRIVED at Whitehall to view the royal corpse. Henry’s body lay on the vast state bed expanded in 1542 to bear his weight. It was the most valuable piece of furniture in the palace. Six craftsmen had worked for ten months to carve its gilded frame and the rich hangings cost even more than the bed itself.1 It was in Henry’s waxy face, however, that the power he had wielded was best recalled. ‘If all the pictures and patterns of a merciless prince were lost in the world, they might again be painted to the life out of the story of this king’, the Elizabethan Sir Walter Raleigh would later write. Now that power was gone Henry’s trusted servants were free to ignore his dying commands.
If Henry could have walked during the last night of his life he would have seen two figures in the gallery outside his chamber door: his private secretary, Sir William Paget, instantly recognisable by his forked frizzy beard, and the tall, fair figure of the young Edward’s uncle, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. Henry had wanted a council of equals to rule during Edward’s minority, but Paget believed this was impossible in a kingdom so used to being ruled entirely by the will of one man, and for weeks he had helped prepare the ground for Edward Seymour to take charge of the council as Lord Protector of England. He had pressed the king to grant land and titles to potential supporters, and as the instructions were always verbal Paget could mishear or misunderstand them in such a way as helped their cause. His price, he had told Edward Seymour, was to be his principle adviser. As the king drew his last breaths the deal had been sealed and now they were ready to gain the agreement of other key figures.
All that day, as the great men came and went, the usual ceremonies continued without interruption. No news was released of the king’s death, and at dinner a choice of fish and fowl was delivered to the sound of trumpets. The following morning, as the same rituals were repeated, Edward Seymour arrived at the medieval palace of Hertford to collect his royal nephew and escort him to London. Henry had been poised to make Edward the Prince of Wales, and the grey-eyed boy believed this was the purpose of their journey.2 Only when they stopped at the Princess Elizabeth’s residence at the plain brick quadrate palace of Enfield, were he and his thirteen-year-old sister told that their father was dead. The children wept bitterly in each other’s arms. Neither had yet faced the dangers and physical threats that their sister Mary had known. Edward was Henry’s longed-for son, and despite some physical resemblance between Elizabeth and her disgraced mother, Henry had always loved her, sending her his ‘heart blessings’ when he was away at war in France.3 Without their father, they were both now extremely vulnerable.
At 8 a.m. on Monday 31 January 1547, the Lord Chancellor announced Henry’s death in Parliament, and an hour later Edward was proclaimed king. That afternoon, with carefully synchronised timing the new Edward VI arrived at the Tower in front of the watching crowds, together with Edward Seymour. There were brave salutes from cannon fired from the fortress and battleships on the Thames to greet the new king, but the fact that Edward was a child was a cause for national anxiety. While some in the crowds rejoiced, at least inwardly, that Henry was dead (with pro-papal Catholics claiming visions of the king surrounded by fire), most grieved that he had died too soon. Their fears would soon prove justified. Henry’s executors had already organised the first meeting of the new reign. There they renamed themselves the ‘Privy Council’, added Edward VI’s younger uncle Thomas Seymour to their number, and made Edward Seymour Protector of England.
The term ‘Privy Council’ had first been used in 1540 when Henry VIII had given the old, more informal council a fixed membership, a hierarchy based on the ranking of offices, a secretariat and an official record, as well as powers to summon individuals before it by legal process. It had met more or less daily for the rest of Henry’s reign and had proved an extremely effective executive body.4 Nevertheless, recreating it had broken the closed circle of equals Henry had envisaged ruling during Edward’s minority. For all the terror Henry had instilled, his will had been overturned before he was even buried.
Preparations now began for Henry’s funeral. On the Wednesday night, the feast of Candlemas, Henry VIII’s coffin was carried from the Privy Chamber to the royal chapel. There a huge ‘hearse’ had been built. The term then referred to a static structure big enough to hold the coffin and to allow the principal mourners to sit within it. Each corner was adorned with the banners of saints beaten in fine gold on damask, and it held forty candles. As the coffin was set within the hearse, the light bounced off the precious stones glittering in the cover of cloth of gold.
Following medieval royal tradition, Mass was said in the royal chapel continually for the next ten days. Behind the scenes, however, was a less spiritual mood. Details were still being thrashed out about who was going to get what in the distribution of land, office and titles being used to bolster the Protectorate. Edward Seymour was to be made Duke of Somerset, the family title of the Beauforts through whom Henry VII had claimed his right to the throne. The new Protector Somerset’s close ally, John Dudley, became Earl of Warwick, a title that had been held by the last male Plantagenet.
The carve-up of royal property and appointment of honours paused only as the funeral began on Sunday 13 February. Three bishops took it in turns to officiate at three Masses: the first in white in honour of the Virgin, the second in blue to celebrate the Trinity, the last in black for the requiem. But Henry was not to be buried just yet. The next day his body began a two-day journey to Windsor, with hundreds of official mourners assembling at Charing Cross at first light.
Two gentleman porters began the march at eight o’clock, on that clear winter’s morning. Each carried a black stave, ‘to stay, that neither cart, horse, nor man should trouble or cumber them in this passage’. Behind walked the sergeant of the vestry with his verger carrying a huge cross: then the singing children and priests of the Chapel Royal; then 250 poor men in long hooded gowns, each carrying a burning torch. These were the traditional ‘beadsmen’ paid to pray for the soul of the deceased.5 They were followed by the royal standards, and behind them other mourners were grouped in ascending order of precedence. The most senior, François van der Delft, the ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, walked with Archbishop Cranmer close to the chariot carrying Henry’s coffin. It was covered with blue velvet and cloth of gold, the colours of the Order of the Garter, and the coffin was surmounted with its life-size representation of the king, dressed as a Garter knight and wearing ‘a crown imperial of inestimable value’.
Bells rang in the villages ahead to warn of the procession’s arrival so that as it passed by the churches, the local curates and clerks were ready outside, dressed ‘in their best ornaments’ and praying loudly. The procession stopped for the night at Syon before continuing the following morning, the chariot surrounded with the banners of the Trinity, the Virgin and St George.6 The only innovation was a new banner of ‘King Henry the saint’ – that is, the last Lancastrian king, Henry VI.7 Henry VIII’s attacks on the cult of saints had ensured that Henry VI was never to be beatified, but he had remained keen, nevertheless, to be associated with his pious predecessor. In his will, he asked that the tombs at Windsor of Henry VI and his Yorkist grandfather Edward IV be made ‘more princely’, as well as ordering his own magnificent tomb to be ‘made up’.
No expense had been spared in crafting the vast marble edifice that was to mark Henry’s last resting place. It reused much of the tomb that Cardinal Wolsey had commissioned for himself, including gilded bronze torch-bearing angels by Benedetto da Rovezzano, who later collaborated with Michelangelo. In addition, however, were four life-size images of Henry and Jane Seymour, as well as a statue of the king on horseback under a triumphal arch, ‘of the whole stature of a goodly man and a large horse’. A further 134 figures, including St George, the Apostles and the Evangelists, ‘all of brass gilt as in the pattern appeareth’, were planned.8
> At last, Henry’s coffin was borne into St George’s Chapel, and another Mass was said, Katherine Parr looking down through the carved windows of the Queen’s Closet dressed in robes of blue velvet. The next day came the interment with sixteen tall Yeomen of the Guard lowering Henry’s body into the vault he was to share with Jane Seymour. The Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, threw earth into the grave, and Henry’s chief officers and gentlemen of the Privy Chamber then broke their wands of office on their heads, casting ‘them after the corpse within the pit’ with tears and sighs.9
When Henry VIII had become king in 1509 the young prince had represented an ideal of chivalric kingship come to life: pious, romantic, athletic, musical. It was an image that still held a powerful hold over the English imagination. Much of what Henry had done since the break with Rome had been deeply unpopular, but he had worn the trappings of a king so well that he had retained the devotion of a majority of his subjects. In 1544 the bloated and crippled Henry was being described to the secretary of the Spanish nobleman Juan Esteban, Duke of Najera, as if he were still the beautiful young man of his youth. The people are ‘martial, valorous . . . full of suspicion’, one visitor noted. ‘But towards their king they are wonderfully well affected . . . so that the most binding oath which is taken by them is that by which “the king’s life” has been pledged.’10 Even with Henry’s power gone, his reputation would help protect his children. It would not, however, protect his church.
Henry’s tomb was, he noted in his will, ‘almost complete’. It promised to be a powerful statement of the power and glory of his godly reign. Yet it would never be built. This was due in no small part to the actions of his last weeks. Destroying the Duke of Norfolk, and his decision to exclude Bishop Gardiner from his list of executors, were acts intended to protect Edward. But it had amounted to a rout of the religious conservatives and this was to have seismic consequences for England. Henry had decreed that the king was head of the Church of England and the king defined its theology. But the king was now a nine-year-old boy entirely in the power of the reformist Somerset and his allies. The way was open for the Reformation to be driven forward by those who shared neither the tastes nor the theology represented by Henry’s tomb with its angels and saints.11 As planks were laid over Henry’s open grave, the Garter King of Arms proclaimed that the king lived, now as Edward VI; and a cultural revolution was about to begin.
The nine-year-old Edward VI made his formal entry into London on the following Saturday to a pageant sequence that had been written for the coronation of the seven-year-old Henry VI. Ambassadors were lined up at the Tower where he arrived dressed in purest white and mounted on a horse trapped in crimson satin and gold damask. The Imperial ambassador greeted the boy in French, but was stopped by the Protector who told him to address the king in Latin, which he said Edward understood better. The ambassador did as he was asked, but commented in his dispatches that ‘truth to tell, he seemed to me to understand one just as little as the other, although the Archbishop of Canterbury had assured me that the king knew Latin as well as he did himself’.12
The procession to Westminster took four hours, but the boy king barely seemed to notice the numerous pageants that had been organised by the City authorities. The only moment when Edward showed his natural childish delight was when an acrobat whizzed down a tightrope from the battlements of St Paul’s, jumped about and made him laugh. The next day, at Westminster Abbey, Edward was sat on several cushions and dutifully read the new coronation oath written by Archbishop Cranmer. The protections of the clergy guaranteed in Magna Carta were deleted, and it was now for the people to consent to the king’s laws, not the other way round. These powers were to be used to impose dramatic religious change, with Cranmer explaining in his address that Edward was called upon to emulate the youthful biblical king Josiah, purging his kingdom of idolatry and images as well as papal ‘tyranny’.13 While Henry’s injunctions had ordered the removal from churches of images that were judged to be the objects of worship, the view was now taken that all religious images must go.
Edward soon saw the statues and pictures of saints in his rooms taken away, while beyond the palace an orgy of iconoclasm was launched. In churches rood screens, tombs with their prayers for the dead, and stained glass windows, were smashed. The Elizabethan antiquarian John Stow complained that because some of this Christian Taliban ‘judged every image to be an idol’, not only religious art, but even the secular thirteenth-century carvings of kings in Ludgate were broken.14 In place of crucifixes the royal arms were painted. This emphasis on the monarch, and his divine link with God, made it all the more important for the regime that Edward be seen as the driving force behind their actions and not a mere puppet. Hence Cranmer’s claim about Edward’s excellent Latin, which was of a piece with the more general claim that his abilities were so remarkable ‘it should seem he were already a father’ to his people, rather than a boy ‘not yet ten years old’.15
It was still more vital that Edward grow up to applaud their actions and not to condemn them. To this end Edward was sat daily before preachers whose sermons advocated the changes he saw around him, and his reformist tutor, John Cheke, was ever at his elbow ‘to inform and teach him’. The fatherless Edward, told that he was now a father to his people, did his best to be the kind of father he would have wanted – loving and attentive – and he listened and learned for his subjects’ sake. A new Book of Homilies was soon printed which unambiguously promoted the Lutheran teaching on justification by faith alone. By August the rosary was banned, and the Mass, so evident during Henry’s lying-in-state, began to be attacked with ‘much speaking against the sacrament of the altar, that some called it Jack in the box, with divers other shameful names’.16
The Protector Somerset foresaw no difficulties coming from Edward’s half-sisters. They had been given substantial land grants, giving them incomes far in excess of £3,000 a year due to them under their father’s will. Mary was dealt with particularly generously, with an income that placed her on a par with dukes.17 Many in Europe considered that Mary, as Edward’s nearest royal relative, should have been given the role of regent. Somerset did not wish to risk any dangerous accusations that her rightful place had been usurped. With this new income Mary left Katherine Parr’s household in May 1547 to set up her own establishment. She made clear her anger over the religious changes, which she argued were illegal during her brother’s minority, but Somerset told her he was certain that she would soon come round to the reforms, as she had previously to her father’s.
Elizabeth, who was too young to be independent, remained with Katherine Parr and her life would now take a very different path from that of her sister. Mary had always been affectionate towards her. She used to write to their father praising Elizabeth and she made gifts for her, like the box she personally embroidered in silver thread.18 But while Mary continued to write to Elizabeth, her family became the small band of servants with whom she lived, many of whom were related to each other and who had a strong emotional bond. They were often keen religious reformers, and amongst these was the most important member of the household to the princess: her governess, the jovial and sophisticated Kat Astley, who had been with Elizabeth since 1536 and was married to a kinsman of the Boleyns called John Astley.19
Elizabeth’s stepmother, Katherine Parr, was also a loving and maternal figure. But unfortunately for Elizabeth, the same month that Mary left Katherine Parr’s household the dowager queen had married in secret. Katherine Parr’s choice was the man she had been in love with before she had married Henry – the Protector Somerset’s charming but power-greedy younger brother, Thomas Seymour, Baron Sudeley. He had wanted a position that recognised his close blood relationship with the king, specifically the Governorship of the King’s Person. This would have given him close access to the king, with all the possibilities for influence that suggests. To his frustration, however, the Protector Somerset had taken the post for himself. Seymour was now intent on promoting h
is place within the royal family by other means, and judged that marrying Katherine Parr would add considerably to his status. The question for the couple was how to make their marriage public.
Katherine suggested to Seymour that he persuade Edward and Mary to write letters giving their permission for the marriage and later make the announcement that it had taken place. Both were extremely fond of Katherine, but Mary was deeply shocked by their plans. It was ‘strange news’, she told Seymour, her father being ‘as yet very ripe in mine own remembrance’.20 Seymour had better luck with Edward who was easily persuaded into doing what was asked of him. The letter proved no help to the couple when the marriage became public, however. Katherine’s behaviour in marrying within five months of Henry VIII’s death was considered still more sexually incontinent than Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots’ remarriage within a year of the death of James IV. Their manipulation of Edward also meant their future access to him was to be limited.
The marriage Katherine Parr had chosen for love was furthermore to prove a short and tragic one. By May of the following year, 1548, when she was six months pregnant, she was filled with fears that if she were to die in childbirth Seymour would replace her with Elizabeth. Kat Astley had been complaining that Seymour would visit the princess in her bedchamber dressed only in his nightshirt and would try to kiss her good morning. At first Katherine Parr had made light of it, but vulnerable in her pregnant state, she became more suspicious about his intentions. Elizabeth left her household the week after Pentecost, with Katherine Parr warning her that her good name was at risk. The princess did not need reminding that as the daughter of the infamous Anne Boleyn, she had still more reason to be careful than most women. Shocked and humiliated, Elizabeth wrote to Katherine afterwards, assuring her that she had listened to her advice, ‘albeit I answered little, I weighed it more deeply when you said you would warn me of all evils you should hear of me’.21 But she would never see the sensual and once-ebullient Katherine again. Henry VIII’s last wife died shortly after giving birth that summer. The baby was a girl, destined to die before her second birthday.22 And Thomas Seymour was, indeed, soon plotting to marry Elizabeth.
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