13.L&P 8 (666).
14.John Guy, A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More (2008), p. 259.
15.There is a 1588 copy of this bull in the Vatican archives. Copia bullae Pauli III contra Henricum regem Angliae, quem totumque regnum ecclesiastico interdicto supponti, mandando cunctis ut contra eum arma capiant. The incipit is ‘Eius qui immobilis permanes’. The datation: ‘Datum Rome apud Sanctum Marchum anno incarnatione dominice millesimo quingentesimo trigesimo quinto anno tertio calendas septembris’, i.e. 1 September 1535. (The signature is AA Arm. Arc. 1588).
16.L&P 11 (48). The daughter of Sir John and Lady Anne Shelton, and sister-in-law of Madge/Margaret Shelton née Parker; see Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn, p. 46. There is a view that she also had a sister called Margaret, but the evidence is pretty thin; see Paul G. Remley, ‘Mary Shelton and her Tudor Literary Milieu’, in Rethinking the Henrician Era (ed Peter C. Herman) (1994), pp. 40–77. For the further suggestion that Margaret Shelton was Mary’s sister-in-law see Heale, ‘Women and the Courtly Love Lyric’, in op. cit., pp. 296–313.
17.Heale, ‘Women and the Courtly Love Lyric’ in op. cit., p. 301.
18.CSPS 5, Pt I (142).
19.L&P 10 (141).
20.Katherine was buried with the status of Prince Arthur’s widow, not that of a queen consort, and a junior member of the royal family – the French queen’s younger daughter, Eleanor – played the role of chief mourner. An annual service is still held for Katherine at what is now Peterborough Cathedral and the Spanish embassy continues to send a wreath in commemoration.
21.CSPS 5, Pt II (29).
22.George Wyatt, son of Sir Thomas Wyatt; CSPS 5, Pt II (29).
23.L&P 10 (199).
24.His later impotence in his marriage with Anne of Cleves may also to have reflected concern about the validity of that marriage; see Retha Warnicke, The Marrying of Anne of Cleves (2000), pp. 162, 167.
25.CSPS 5, Pt II (84).
22The Fall of Anne Boleyn
1.Elizabeth Wood, wife of Sir James Boleyn.
2.L&P 11 (48).
3.Nicola Shulman, Graven With Diamonds (2011), p. 144.
4.L&P 10 (601).
5.L&P 10 (782).
6.Henry later told Jane Seymour that it was Anne’s meddling in a political matter that was her undoing.
7.L&P 10 (699).
8.There were witnesses but Thomas Howard admitted only to Margaret telling William Howard’s wife, Margaret Gamage, the next day. William and Margaret’s eldest daughter was named Douglas after her godmother Lady Margaret Douglas. She later ‘married’ Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester in a ceremony that was never recognised in law.
9.L&P 10 (908).
10.L&P 10 (798).
11.L&P 10 (793).
12.Ives, Anne Boleyn, p. 325.
13.L&P 10 (956); R. B. Merriman, The Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell Vol. 2 (1902), p. 12.
14.More than 200 people came forward in 1932 to confess they had kidnapped the baby of the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh.
15.Norris held the Garter office of Black Rod. L&P 10 (878).
16.L&P 10 (793).
17.Sir William Page (a friend of Cromwell) and Sir Francis Bryan (who had powerful support amongst court conservatives who were needed to bring Anne down).
18.The judge was John Spelman. The lady-in-waiting was Lady Wingfield. It is possible that Lady Wingfield was aware of some minor indiscretion by Anne. A surviving letter from the queen to Lady Wingfield indicates she had been keen to keep on the right side of her.
19.The rumours about Lady Wingfield, who died in 1534, are the probable origin of a story later spun in verse by a Frenchman at court called Lancelot de Carles. It describes a woman whose brother accuses her of immorality. She insists she is no worse than others at court, and better than the queen, who has slept with Smeaton, Norris and George Boleyn. The brother tells two friends what he has heard, and they tell the king. These verses are clearly inspired by a combination of the accusations against Anne and dramatic licence – the author describes his view of how things ‘must’ have happened, while creating a living drama between a brother and sister that is more vivid than a deathbed confession. But some historians have accepted the de Carles story as literal truth. They suggest the woman in the poem is Lady Worcester.
20.John Hussey in a letter to Lord Lisle. He also mentions ‘one maid more’. The unnamed maid was probably Margery Horsman; see Ives, Anne Boleyn, p. 332.
21.Anne Braye, wife of George Brooke, Lord Cobham.
22.The evidence that Jane, Lady Rochford was part of the women’s protest again Anne Boleyn in the summer of 1535 is very weak; see it in L&P 9 (566) and n. It is also worth pointing out that although Lady Rochford was treated generously by Cromwell after her husband’s death (something her detractors have made much of), it was not unusual to look after the interests of the wives of executed traitors. Examples are the widows of Perkin Warbeck under Henry VII, the widow of the Duke of Buckingham under Henry VIII, and of Harry Grey, Duke of Suffolk under Mary I. On other ‘evidence’, see John Guy’s review of Alison Weir’s The Lady in the Tower, Sunday Times, 1 November 2009. Jane would become a tempting target for slander following a scandal that was still a few years away – and unfortunately many women of the Tudor period have been slandered.
23.Spelman.
23Love and Death
1.Shulman, Graven With Diamonds, p. 196.
2.L&P 2, August 1536 (203).
3.Ibid.
4.L&P 11 (41).
5.At some point that year a set of new and magnificent tapestries were delivered to court depicting the seven deadly sins. That Henry chose this period to buy very expensive works of art illustrating the vices which dupe and mislead mankind is striking. Campbell, Henry VIII, p. 226.
6.L&P 10 (908).
7.A witness recalled seeing him from a window, but we do not know if he could see Anne; see Shulman, Graven With Diamonds, p. 202.
8.A manuscript in the Vatican archives reveals that in France the papal nuncio heard that they were married already: this may be why. ASV, Serg. St Francia, Vol. 1B, f. 40r: ‘Al Signor Protonotaro Ambrogio: se non che hiersera venne un corriere d’Inghilterra, che porta per quel ch’io ne intendo come quel Re ha pigliato per moglie quella dama che vivendo anche l’altra, mostrava che più gli piacesse, ne per anchora ho saputo altro particolare. Da Lione alli X di giugno 1536.’
9.Linda Porter, Mary Tudor: The First Queen (2007), p. 123.
10.Her status was helped further by the fact that Charles Brandon’s last surviving son with Mary, the French queen, had died in 1534. Only their daughters Frances and Eleanor survived.
11.CSPS 5, Pt II (61).
12.CSPS 7, Pt II (71).
13.L&P 11 (40).
14.Helen Baron, ‘Mary (Howard) Fitzroy’s Hand in the Devonshire Manuscript’ in Review of English Studies 45, No. 179 (August 1994), p. 327.
15.Remley, ‘Mary Shelton’ in op. cit., pp. 53, 54.
16.Lehmberg, ‘Parliamentary Attainder in the Reign of Henry VIII’ in op. cit., pp. 691, 692. Within four years the Howards had their revenge and Cromwell was attainted, as so many others had been after 1533.
17.L&P 11 (147).
18.Margaret Douglas was ignored in the Third Act of Succession, in which Henry said that he would later appoint Elizabeth’s heirs.
19.L&P 11 (293).
20.L&P 11 (294).
21.L&P 11 (994).
22.L&P 11 (1373).
23.L&P 11 (202.37); Blaauw, ‘On the Effigy . . .’ in op. cit., pp. 30, 31, 32. Although there is a probate to his will dated 1542, Sir David had died in 1535.
24Three Wives
1.L&P 12, Pt I, p. 81, Pt II, p. 280.
2.Leanda de Lisle, The Sisters Who Would be Queen (2009), pp. 11, 12. Frances’ brothers had died before reaching adulthood. Frances’ appearance can be judged from the effigy on her tomb at Westminster Abbey. Jane Grey was named after Jane Seymour.
3.Her biographer Kimberly Schutte
claims she was there in the first carriage with Frances, but is mistaken. See L&P 12, Pt II (1060).
4.L&P 12 (1023); Wriothesley, Chronicle, p. 70. He died on 31 October.
5.The opening stanza, written in thick, smudged ink, calls together her family and friends to hear her plans:
Now that ye be assembled here,
All ye my friends and my request,
’specially you my father dear,
that of my blood are the nearest,
this unto you is my request,
that ye will patiently hear,
by these my last words expressed,
my testament entire.
They cannot stop what she intends, for she has prepared a defence as strong as the high Tower, and the ‘door fast barred’. What she intends amounts to suicide, and she asks her father’s forgiveness:
Wherefore sweet father I you pray,
Bear this my death with patience,
And torment not your hairs grey
But freely pardon my offence.
Her reason, she explains, is the suffering she endures through her constant love for a man who has died because of her, and with whom she now wishes to be:
Let me not from the sweet presence
Of him that I have caused to die.
His epitaph was also written into the book she would one day pass on to her sons:
But when you come by my sepulchre
Remember that your fellow resteth here
For I loved much, though I unworthy were.
(The original last line reads ‘But I louyd eke’. Remley, ‘Mary Shelton’ in op. cit., p. 52.)
6.The abortive attempt to make a tomb for Henry VIII at Westminster Abbey began in 1518/19 with payments being made intermittently up to 1536 when payments ceased; various sculptors were involved. Henry had seen the completion of the magnificent high altar he had built in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey in 1526: the year he fell in love with Anne Boleyn.
7.Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy (2009), p. 137.
8.Ibid., p. 136; Ives, The Reformation Experience, p. 199.
9.The image in Canterbury, commissioned in Henry VII’s will, was to have the words ‘Saint Thomas Intercede for Me’ written in enamel letters on it.
10.The friar was John Forrest, the image was Derfel Gadran, said to have been one of King Arthur’s warriors.
11.The reformer was John Lambert.
12.CSPS 6, Pt I (166).
13.This took place at the royal hunting lodge at Royston in Hertfordshire; see ‘Edward VI’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
14.Margaret and James IV, Mary and Louis XII.
15.L&P 15 (22).
16.Warnicke, The Marrying of Anne of Cleves, p. 141.
17.High cholesterol levels can affect sexual performance as the tiny artilleries in the penis shut down. Obesity is also associated with hormonal changes and lowered testosterone levels. Although weight has not previously been linked with Henry’s impotence, it may help explain his failure to father more children.
18.See the illuminations depicting Henry in his psalter, painted in 1540 by Jean Mallard. In the one I refer to here he is depicted as the biblical King David playing his harp. It was a comparison designed to delight the king who saw himself as David’s heir: a warrior, musician and theocratic monarch. http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/sacredtexts/henrypsalter.html.
19.They married at Oatlands Palace, Surrey. See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
20.The former Margaret Tudor died at Methven Castle on 18 October. She had asked that her daughter might have her goods, but the day following her death James V had issued counter-orders ‘to lock up her goods to his use’; L&P 16 (1307). She was buried in the Carthusian abbey at Perth. Unfortunately, like her husband James IV, her body would not rest in peace. The tomb was to be desecrated and her skeleton burned by Protestant reformers in 1559.
21.Charles de Marillac; Starkey, Six Wives, p. 651.
22.The music teacher, Henry Manox, had not, however, had her ‘maidenhead’ although she had promised it to him; Starkey, Six Wives, p. 669.
23.L&P 16 (1334).
24.The king’s niece, Margaret Douglas, was to be sent to Kenninghall in Norfolk, the family seat of the duke. L&P 16 (1331).
25.L&P 16 (1332).
26.L&P 16 (1333); State Papers During the Reign of Henry VIII, 11 vols. (1830–2), Vol. 1, p. 694.
27.State Papers During the Reign of Henry VIII, Vol. 1, p. 694.
25The Last Years of Henry VIII
1.Hamilton Papers (ed J. Bain), Vol. 1 (1890), pp. 337, 338. One, Oliver Sinclair, was carrying the banner.
2.George Douglas’ report: Hamilton Papers (ed J. Bain), Vol. 1 (1890), pp. 339, 340.
3.Marjorie Bruce.
4.So claimed John Knox.
5.Sir John Haywood, The Life and Reign of King Edward VI (1630), p. 196.
6.L&P 18, Pt I (210), Pt II (202) (257) (275) (281). There were doubts about the legitimacy of the governor of Scotland and heir presumptive, the Earl of Arran, who had also emerged as an enemy of Henry’s plans.
7.L&P 19, Pt I (522): ‘if Lenaxe perform the above covenants according to the king’s expectation, and Lady Margaret and Lenaxe on seeing each other agree for that purpose, he will both agree to the marriage and further consider Lenaxe’s good service’.
8.Matthew Stuart, Earl of Lennox, quoting Robert Lindsay of Pittscottie, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
9.L&P 19, Pt I (799).
10.L&P 19, Pt II (201). Her husband was already back in Scotland on the king’s business. While she was named, her cousins Frances and Eleanor were not.
11.Henry, Lord Darnley was named after the king and was then six months old. Her first son had died.
12.L&P 21, Pt I (969).
13.William Thomas quoted in John Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials Relating Chiefly to Religion, Vol. 2, Pt I (1822), p. 13.
14.British Library Harleian MSS 5087 f. 11; Chris Skidmore, Edward VI: The Lost King of England (2007), pp. 38, 39.
15.Anne of Beaujeu had played such a role for her brother Charles VIII of France when Henry VII was in exile there.
16.Starkey, Six Wives, pp. 752–64.
17.Thank you to Tom Freeman for allowing me to see a forthcoming and groundbreaking essay on the story recorded in Foxe on which my comments are based. It will appear under the title ‘One survived’ in a collection on Henry VIII and his court edited by Tom Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb, and is due to be published by Ashgate in the UK in 2013.
18.William Herbert was a distant kinsman of Henry VII’s guardian.
19.Thanks to John Guy for drawing my attention to the fact the Stuarts were ignored in Henry’s will, and not barred.
20.L&P 21, Pt II (181).
21.According to this story Henry was so protective of the reputation of this individual, who acted as an English spy in Scotland, that Margaret’s accusations against him ‘ever after lost a part of [the king’s] heart, as appeared at his death’. British Library Cotton MS Caligula B VIII, ff. 165–8.
22.She would affectionately keep a tablet picture of the king until she died. See her will online, National Archives Prob 11/60; also see my Appendix on Margaret Douglas.
26Elizabeth in Danger
1.Thurley, Royal Palaces, p. 236.
2.His eyes were described as grey by Girolamo Cardano, Opera, Vol. 5 (1663), pp. 503–8.
3.L&P 19, Pt II (201).
4.David Starkey, Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne (2000), p. 39.
5.‘Bede’ is a prayer, from Old English ‘bidden’, to pray.
6.In Catholic legend it was at Syon that a prophecy given by the Observant Franciscan William Peto is said to have come to pass. Peto had given a sermon before Henry VIII at Greenwich in 1532, comparing Henry VIII to King Ahab – whose wife Jezebel had replaced the Lord’s true prophets with the pagan priests of Baal, the obvious inference being that Boleyn was England’s Jezebel. Peto went on to warn Henry that
if he continued to behave like Ahab then his corpse would suffer the same indignity that had befallen the Israelite king (after his death wild dogs had licked Ahab’s blood). It was later said that at Syon Henry’s coffin burst as a result of gases leaking from the putrefying body and a dog licked the blood that dripped from it.
7.Jennifer Loach, ‘The Function of Ceremonial in the Reign of Henry VIII’ in Past & Present 142, I (1994), p. 63.
8.Francesco Cagliotti, ‘Benedetto da Rovezzano in England: New Light on the Cardinal Wolsey-Henry VII Tomb’ in The Anglo-Florentine Art for the Early Tudors (eds Cinzia Maria Sicca and Louis A. Waldman) (2012), pp. 177–293. My thanks to Dr Clare Rider at St George’s Chapel Archives and Chapter Library for further information.
9.Strype, Memorials, Vol. 2, Pt II (1822), pp. 292–311.
10.Nicander Nacius, quoted in Susan E. James, Kateryn Parr: The Making of a Queen (1999), p. 88.
11.The sculptor Nicholas Bellin de Modena, who would work on Henry’s tomb in the Westminster Abbey workshop with his wages paid by Edward VI, was unable to finish his work because the new iconoclastic ‘priests of Westminster’ kept throwing him out as a papist (Judith M. Walker, English Literary Renaissance 26, issue 3 [September 1996], n. 17 p. 520). Edward VI asked in his will that money be put aside to finish the tomb, but although Elizabeth I would eventually move what was left at Westminster to Windsor, nothing further was done. Henry VIII’s unfinished tomb was eventually demolished by order of the Long Parliament in 1646, the brass statues sold to pay for the garrison at Windsor, with the additional order ‘that such images as may be used in any superstitious manner be defaced’. At least some parts of the monument were discovered during the reign of Charles II, but what happened then is unknown. (Windsor Chapter Acts, 31 May 1661.) Two nine-feet tall bronze candlesticks ended up in St Bavon’s Cathedral in Ghent, replicas of which were later commissioned by Edward VII, and now stand by the high altar in St George’s. There is also some debate over two large angels, which may be original or copies of those from Henry VIII’s tomb, and which were sold by Sotheby’s in 1994. It was also under Edward VI that the chapel’s relics were removed to be sold or destroyed. These appear to have included Henry VI’s hat and spurs (which were mentioned in an inventory of 1534) and a piece of his bedstead, which were revered by pilgrims to his shrine. The Inventories of St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, 1384–1667 (ed Maurice Bond) (1947), pp. 284–6. Nevertheless, Edward’s will repeated Henry VIII’s instructions that the tomb be made more princely. Literary Remains of King Edward the Sixth (ed J. G. Nichols) (1857), p. 576. The tomb was described by Paul Hentzner in 1598, but John Speed recorded that it had disappeared by 1611. It appears to have fallen into decay and so been removed. Edward IV’s tomb also suffered: his coat of mail and banner, which were hung over his grave, were plundered during the Civil War in 1642. Thanks to Dr Clare Rider for this information.
Tudor_Passion. Manipulation. Murder. the Story of England's Most Notorious Royal Family Page 49