He complained bitterly all the way back to Greenwich that he had been monstrously deceived; that this dull, plain, lumpish girl was nothing like the paragon he had been led to expect; and that if he’d known what she was really like ‘she should never have come into this realm’. ‘Is there none other remedy but that I must needs, against my will, put my neck in the yoke?’ he asked Thomas Cromwell. None immediately suggested itself. Anne was here now and Henry would have to go through with the wedding whether he liked it or not. The ceremony took place on Twelfth Night but although he slept beside his bride for a few nights, nothing – not even the inducement of begetting another son – could bring the King to consummate the marriage. Anne was as disappointing in bed as she was out of it and after feeling her breasts and belly Henry told Cromwell disconsolately that he had ‘neither will nor courage to the rest’.
Obviously some remedy would have to be found, especially as by Easter the whole Court knew that the King’s fancy had been caught by one of the new Queen’s maids of honour – plump, lively little Catherine Howard who, by a curious coincidence, was a cousin of Anne Boleyn. Fortunately divorce was easier nowadays and before the summer was half over the King and his legal advisers had discovered ample grounds for a nullity suit. It was all very civilized and amicable. Anne had accepted dismissal with a docility, an alacrity even, which quite surprised the King, and opted to remain in England on a pension of £500 a year, with two royal residences allocated to her use. She settled down apparently quite content with her position as Henry’s ‘adopted sister’, and was to become a valued friend of the royal family - a sort of honorary maiden aunt.
Having got his freedom, Henry wasted no time. On 28 July 1540 he married Catherine Howard and that same day Thomas Cromwell was executed for high treason. Cromwell’s fall, although still shrouded in a fair amount of confusion, closely parodied that of the King’s other great minister. Cardinal Wolsey. Like Wolsey, Cromwell had served his master faithfully and well. Like Wolsey, he had no aristocratic family connections (he is generally believed to have been the son of a blacksmith) and therefore depended heavily on the King for protection from his enemies.
Henry did not want to be bothered with politics just then. He had temporarily forgotten his increasing age and girth and his bad legs and was enjoying an Indian summer of renewed youth and vigour in the entrancing company of his ‘rose without a thorn’. The French ambassador remarked that ‘the King is so amorous of Catherine Howard that he cannot treat her well enough and caresses her more than he did the others’. Henry showered jewels, expensive dresses and grants of land on his new pet and carried her off on an extended honeymoon which lasted into the autumn.
There were no problems about consummating this marriage; but while Anne of Cleves had been a timid, unawakened virgin, Catherine at nineteen was already sexually experienced - a significant fact which seems to have escaped Henry’s notice. However it did not long escape the notice of the Court that the Queen’s behaviour could, at the least, be described as indiscreet. In the spring of 1541 the King set off on a progress northward - the first time he had ever visited this recalcitrant part of his dominions - taking with him his wife, his elder daughter and a personal retinue over a thousand strong. The weather was bad and the King of Scots, whom Henry had been hoping to meet at York, failed to turn up at the rendezvous - a deliberate snub which annoyed his uncle very much - but otherwise the trip could be counted as a success and the King arrived back at Hampton Court in October in a complacent frame of mind. He did not know that throughout the summer’s journeyings and very likely before, the Queen had been slipping off up the backstairs to meet one of the gentlemen of his Privy Chamber, her ‘little sweet fool’ Thomas Culpepper.
This was not the only thing Henry did not know about his ‘jewel of a wife’ but those people who did know - people with special knowledge about her casual, scrambling girlhood in her grandmother’s house down at Horsham where the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk had shut her eyes to goings on in the maids’ dormitory after lights out - were beginning to wonder if it was altogether wise to keep this knowledge to themselves. Finally, John Lascelles, who had his own reasons for disliking the whole Howard tribe and whose sister Mary had been a member of the household at Horsham, laid certain information before the Council. He told how one Henry Manox, a music teacher, had been familiar with the secret parts of Catherine’s body when she was only fourteen; how one Francis Dereham, now the Queen’s secretary, had been made welcome in her ‘naked bed’ and had known her carnally many times before her marriage to the King.
Gossip was one thing, but detailed accusations like these could not be suppressed. Henry’s first reaction was furious incredulity. This was all a plot to blacken the Queen’s name and he ordered an immediate investigation. But when the whole, rather squalid little story had been dragged painfully into the light, the facts were undeniable. There could be no doubt whatever that Catherine had been promiscuous before her marriage and that her behaviour since had been at best criminally foolish. Actual adultery with Culpepper was never proved conclusively but the presumption of guilt was very strong and, in any case, Culpepper confessed both desire and intention which was quite enough.
This time Henry did not wear his horns so pleasantly. Catherine had wounded an ageing man where it really hurt and the French ambassador reported that the King ‘has changed his love for the Queen into hatred, and taken such grief at being deceived that of late it was thought he had gone mad, for he called for a sword to slay her he had loved so much.’ Later, to the acute embarrassment of the Council, rage gave way to tears of self-pity as the King bemoaned his ‘ill-luck in meeting with such ill-conditioned wives’. The wretched Catherine, too, was in a sorry state and when Cranmer was sent to visit her to bring her to a proper sense of her iniquity, he found her in such a ‘frenzy’ of terror and remorse that the kind-hearted Archbishop was moved rather to pity and to fear for her reason.
It was a miserable Christmas all round, made worse by anxiety about Edward, who had been seriously ill with a malarial-type fever. But by early February 1542, when that poor, silly little trollop Catherine Howard had been beheaded on Tower Green and had gone to join her cousin Anne under the stones of St. Peter-ad-Vincula, Henry was slowly recovering his normal self-esteem. All the same, his last two disastrous experiences had put him right off marriage for the time being and he turned instead to more congenial pastimes, such as bullying the Scots and planning further adventures in France.
Margaret Tudor had died the previous autumn at the age of fifty-two, but although her death snapped another link with the past, it made little material difference to the crisis situation building up in Scotland. Margaret’s uncontrolled temper and her unfortunate tendency to allow her private passions to influence her public life had dissipated much of her political credibility and, in any case, she and her brother had been on bad terms for some time. Henry had always disapproved strongly of his sister’s determination to divorce her unsatisfactory second husband, the Earl of Angus, and Margaret never quite forgave Henry for taking Angus’s side in their long, bitter and immensely complicated matrimonial dispute. The Earl eventually sought asylum in England, while his daughter and the King’s niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, was brought up at the English Court.
But if Margaret Tudor had largely failed the cause of Anglo-Scottish friendship, her son’s attitude was even more disappointing. As soon as he was in a position to manage his own affairs, young James had turned obstinately back to France, marrying first one and then another French wife. Equally irritatingly, he remained an orthodox Roman Catholic steadfastly refusing to follow the example of his schismatic and iconoclastic uncle - even when Henry generously offered him the benefit of his experience and sent him detailed instructions on ‘how to create your own national church’.
The King had expended a lot of time and trouble in wooing his nephew but now he was getting impatient. He wanted to secure his back door without further delay and by Oc
tober 1542 he was ready to take direct action. The Duke of Norfolk led an army across the Border in a full scale raiding expedition which cut a swathe of wreckage and destruction but failed to intimidate the Scots. Instead, predictably, it stirred them to retaliate and on 2^ November an army often thousand attacked a greatly inferior English force at Sol way Moss, north of Carlisle. The outcome was a disaster even more horrifying than Flodden. The Scots were routed utterly and completely at a cost, so it was boasted, of only seven English casualties. This was disgrace as well as disaster and three weeks later Scotland’s misfortunes were crowned by the death of her king. James v, always a melancholic and unstable character, had turned his face to the wall and now the Scottish throne passed to the week-old girl baby born to James’s second wife, Mary of Guise, in the dismal aftermath of Solway Moss.
Fate had dealt Henry triumph in spades and presented him with a first-rate opportunity to solve the Scottish problem. Instead, by a mixture of arrogance, impatience, over-confidence and greed, the King not only wasted his chances but helped to sow the seeds of his little great-niece’s tragedy. The obvious way to achieve a peaceful and (with any luck) permanent union between England and Scotland was by a marriage between the infant Mary Queen of Scots and Edward Prince of Wales; but this was a matter for delicate and tactful negotiation, needing sympathetic consideration of Scottish national pride - which was prickly enough at the best of times - and generous guarantees of Scottish liberties. The Scots could see as well as anyone that the logical result of the proposed alliance would be a swallowing whole of Scotland by England. ‘If your lad were a lass and our lass were a lad, would you then be so earnest in this matter?’ one Scotsman enquired to the English ambassador.
In these circumstances, Henry’s bullying demands that Mary should be sent to England at once; that he should become, in effect, Scotland’s regent; that Scotland should renounce her treaty of friendship with France and make no other foreign treaties without his consent; and that English garrisons should be admitted to Edinburgh, Stirling and Dumbarton had the immediate effect of raising every Scottish hackle and of dismaying and alienating even the pro-English lords. Such demands were, of course, not merely unacceptable, they were - short of total military conquest - unenforceable and Henry had to climb down. In the treaty finally signed at Greenwich on 1 July 1543 it was agreed that Mary should remain in Scotland until she reached marriageable age and the break with France was no longer insisted on. But the damage had been done and the French party in Scotland was rapidly regaining its ascendancy. There was no Duke of Albany to call home on this occasion, but Cardinal Beaton, the powerful and unscrupulous Catholic leader, was strongly pro-French in his sympathies and so, naturally enough, was the Queen Mother, an intelligent and tough-minded Frenchwoman.
Before the end of the year the Scottish Parliament had repudiated the Treaty of Greenwich and was busily refurbishing all the old ties with France. Henry was back where he had been before Solway Moss - in fact he was rather worse off- and a savage punitive expedition against Edinburgh and Leith in the spring of 1544 achieved nothing in the long-term except a further hardening of Scottish attitudes and a strengthening of Scottish determination to keep their baby queen out of the clutches of her wicked great-uncle whatever the cost. As his old friend Charles Brandon told him, the King would get nothing out of Scotland now save by the sword.
While he had been making a considerable hash of his son’s marriage prospects, Henry had done rather better for himself and on 12 July 1543, in a quiet ceremony at Hampton Court, he took his sixth and last wife. Lady Latymer of Snape Hall, born Katherine Parr, daughter of an old-established Northamptonshire family, proved in many ways his best and most successful choice. Already twice married to men much older than herself and twice widowed, the new Queen at thirty-one was still a pretty woman. Even more important, she was a mature, well-educated and sensible woman, experienced in the ways of elderly husbands. As the anonymous author of the Spanish Chronicle put it, she was ‘quieter than any of the young wives the King had had, and as she knew more of the world, she always got on pleasantly with the King and had no caprices.’
Katherine Parr had not sought the honour done to her - rather the reverse. Apart from the obvious perils involved in becoming Henry’s wife, the King was no longer a very attractive proposition physically. He had aged quite noticeably since the Catherine Howard episode and at fifty-two he was grossly fat with suppurating, foul-smelling and acutely painful ulcers on both legs. His mind was still sharp enough but he was growing increasingly moody and suspicious. Often morose and unpredictably bad-tempered, he could be as dangerous as a wounded tiger and it is hardly surprising that Katherine should have quailed at the prospect before her - especially as she was already being courted by Henry’s brother-in-law, the dashingly handsome Thomas Seymour. But Thomas Seymour, like Thomas Wyatt before him, knew better than to enter into amatory competition with his sovereign lord and as soon as the King’s interest became clear, he melted hastily into the background, leaving Katherine to accept the fact that it was plainly God’s will that she should be Queen of England. In the circumstances, it is very much to her credit that she accepted it cheerfully and gave Henry loyal and sympathetic companionship during the last years of his life.
As well as being a good wife, Katherine Parr was also a good stepmother, taking a conscientious and constructive interest in the welfare of her husband’s curiously assorted brood and trying to create some sort of home life for them. She was not, of course, a stranger to the royal family. Her mother had been one of Catherine of Aragon’s ladies and she herself had spent most of her early years at Court. Now she renewed her childhood acquaintance with the Princess Mary - there was only four years’ difference in their ages - and the two women became very friendly. Mary was still spending most of her time in the country, at Havering or Hunsdon or Beaulieu in Essex, a quiet, informal existence usually shared with either her little sister or her brother; but Katherine encouraged her to come to Court more often, wrote to her regularly, lent her money and sent down one of her own servants whom she knew would be welcome ‘for the sake of his music’.
Following in the tradition of those pious and serious-minded royal ladies, Margaret Beaufort and Catherine of Aragon, Katherine Parr took an informed and practical interest in educational matters and was a lively patron of the New Learning. She played an active part in the reorganization of the royal schoolroom which took place during the summer of 1544 and is generally credited with securing the appointment of the Cambridge humanist and Greek scholar, John Cheke, as principal tutor to Prince Edward who, at six-and-a-half, was just beginning his classical training in earnest. The Queen picked another Cambridge man, William Grindal, to tutor the Princess Elizabeth.
Anne Boleyn’s daughter was ten years old now - a pale, sharp-featured, carrotty-haired girl who had not so far attracted much notice in the outside world. As the bastard of a notorious adulteress, she had little value on the international marriage market and at home she had always been over-shadowed by her brother and sister. Her father was apparently quite fond of her, when he remembered her existence, and she took her place as a member of the family on state occasions; but since her mother’s disgrace, the up-bringing of the once ‘high and mighty princess of England’ had been left almost entirely in the hands of her governess. Katherine Parr was the first of Elizabeth’s numerous stepmothers to take the trouble to get to know the child of Henry’s ‘great folly’, who seemed doomed to the life of a poor relation or, at best, marriage to some useful supporter who would be prepared to overlook her unfortunate maternity in exchange for a toehold in the royal family. It may have been politic to gain the support and affection of Edward and Mary, but the Queen was acting out of disinterested kindness when she brought young Elizabeth to Court, gave her apartments next to her own at Greenwich, saw that something was done about her education and offered her friendship and guidance at a time when she was beginning to need them most.
In
July 1544 Henry crossed the Channel for the last time to take part in his last foreign war, but before he left a third Act of Succession had reached the Statute Book. This Act confirmed the King’s right to dispose of the crown by will, but made it clear that should Edward fail to leave an heir, and failing any children of Henry’s latest marriage, the throne would pass first to Mary and then to Elizabeth, subject to conditions to be laid down by the King in his will. Neither Mary nor Elizabeth was legitimized by the new Act - the question of their legitimacy was simply ignored - and their constitutional position remained peculiar to say the least.
The House of Tudor Page 20