Edward’s rather unattractive prissiness grew as the years went by. In a letter to Henry’s queen, Katherine Parr, written on 2 May 1546 from Hunsdon when he was just eight, he scolded his half-sister Mary, thirty years his elder, as well as indulging in subtle little sideswipes at the queen herself:
Pardon my rude style in writing to you, most illustrious Queen and beloved Mother, and receive my hearty thanks for your loving kindness to me and my sister.
Yet, dearest Mother, the only true consolation is from Heaven and the only real love is the love of God.
Preserve, therefore, I pray you, my dearest sister Mary from all the wiles and enchantments of the evil one, and beseech her to attend no longer to foreign dances and merriments, which do not become a most Christian princess.64
Another letter to Katherine, written in the same year, concludes: ‘I pray to God to keep you and to grant you learning and virtue, the most sure of riches.’65
His religious education was almost certainly organised by Archbishop Cranmer, one of the leaders of the reformist faction at Henry’s court, with some influence exerted by Katherine herself; some of his later tutors became exiles during the Marian Counter-Reformation after 1553. Edward had a great interest and erudition in religious issues and his library contained many books on the subject. These volumes included Lectures in Latin on the First Three Chapters of Genesis, given to him as a New Year’s gift by Glaterus Doloenus, later attached to the royal household. At the end, the donor pointedly seeks a stipend for ministers of the Dutch Protestant Church in England.66 Nothing in life is ever free. Another, later acquisition was the Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon, translated into Latin elegiac verse by the Parisian Martin Brione on forty-nine pages of vellum with illuminated initials to each chapter and dedicated to Edward as king.67 This all seems heavyweight reading for a young prince, but he lapped it up.
John Bale, the fiercely Protestant Bishop of Ossory, wrote in 1552 of the excellence of the prince’s education:
His worthy education in liberal letters and godly virtues and his natural aptness in retaining the same, plenteously declares him to be no poor child but a manifest Solomon in princely wisdom.
His sober admonitions and open examples of godliness at this day shows him mindfully to prefer the wealth of his commons [people] as well as ghostly [spiritual] as bodily, above all foreign matters.68
There is little doubt that the ideas developing regarding religious change within the mind of the heir to the throne would find echoes in the beliefs held by his new stepmother, who was probably increasingly responsible for the ordering of the prince’s education, bringing in Anthony Cooke and William Grindal, as well as John Cheke.69
Both princesses and Edward lived in separate households, but with the arrival of Katherine Parr as Queen Consort, Mary was finally allowed to stay at the royal court as a member of her entourage while Henry lived. It was part of Katherine’s campaign to create a family for her elderly husband in his remaining years, although she probably would not have dared to express her plans in such stark terms to the king. Whilst separate establishments were maintained for Elizabeth and Edward up to December 1542, Henry’s children by three different mothers were brought together for special occasions. The first opportunity came in August 1543 when Henry was persuaded by Katherine to take a detour to Ashridge, Hertfordshire, to visit the royal children, while they were journeying on their royal progress to Ampthill.
Katherine had a substantial household of her own. The humanist scholar Sir Anthony Cope was her Vice-Chamberlain before her uncle, Lord Parr of Horton, was appointed in his place. Her sister Anne, wife of William Herbert, became her chief lady of the bedchamber and her stepdaughter from her last marriage, Margaret Neville, one of her maids of honour. Her almoner was George Day, Bishop of Chichester, and her chaplains included John Parkhurst. Her household payments provide a detailed insight into her new life and interests. In 1544, Richard Bell was paid a shilling for going to Oldford to fetch Lady Audley’s fool, or jester, to court to entertain the queen. She had her own ensemble of Italian viol-players, who were each paid 10d a day. In 1546, there were a number of payments to William Coke, Groom of the Leash, for milk and straw for Katherine’s greyhounds; Thomas Beck received 4d for hempseed for the queen’s parrot (which lived in the Privy Chamber) and 12s 4d was paid to Maurice Ludlow, Groom of the Chamber, for transporting her hawks. Giles Bateson, crossbow-maker, received 44s 8d for various contrivances, ‘a crossbow case and one dozen crossbow strings for the queen’s grace’,70 and John Chapman, freemason, 20s for carving a wooden beast – a panther – for the queen’s barge on the River Thames. In September, Edward Fox received 3s for riding from Byfleet, Surrey, to London with one of her clocks to be mended. There are several payments for fetching the queen’s furred gowns, stored at Baynard’s Castle in London, and for travelling from the palace at Eltham in Kent to London for ‘pins, starch and other necessaries’.71 Some of these gowns had been made for Katherine Howard, but now were economically altered by the royal seamstresses to fit the new queen. Not that Katherine Parr was parsimonious in her expenditure on fashion: the accounts mention the purchase of forty-seven pairs of shoes in one year.72 But aside from the hunting, music and other pastimes, Katherine’s sense and prudence shine through the dull listing of her expenditure. Again and again, cash outlays were paid to those tasked in advance with searching out cases of sickness in the areas around the court’s next destination: the queen was anxious to avoid any risk of infection by the plague both for her husband’s sake and for that of her stepchildren.
There is no doubt that Katherine’s kindness and compassion engendered great affection for her amongst Henry’s disparate brood. Edward’s forms of address to the queen in his letters, Mater Charissima – ‘my dearest mother’ – or ‘most honourable and entirely beloved mother’, are strongly indicative of the warm relationship that had developed between them.73 They must have had very regular correspondence, as Katherine wrote to him several times, gently chiding him for his lack of letters to her.
One of Edward’s letters, written on 12 August 1546 from The More, the house Henry had earlier acquired from Cardinal Wolsey, near Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire, thanks the queen for her kindness to him during his visit to Westminster and apologises for not writing sooner:
It seems to me an age since last I saw you. But I wish to entreat your highness to pardon me for that I have not addressed letters to you for so long. Indeed I intended to, but everyday expected I should see you.74
At other times, he clearly showered her with letters. Earlier that year, on 24 May, he wrote to the queen in Latin:
Oh most noble queen, perchance you are amazed that I write to you so often in so short a time but ’twere as like you would marvel that I do my duty unto you.
This I now do most willingly, for I have a fitting messenger, my servant, so that I cannot fail to send letters … to bear witness to my devotion to you.
Your most obedient son, Edward the Prince.75
His correspondence to Katherine was mainly written in Latin but sometimes in English and French. One letter from Hunsdon, dated 10 June 1546, was concerned with the queen’s penmanship and her efforts to learn Latin herself. It is a remarkable insight into the precocity of the eight-year-old, who was writing to a stepmother more than four times his age. With ponderous humour, the prince expresses ‘much surprise’ that a letter, in Latin, had been written by her and not by her secretary: ‘I hear besides that your highness makes progress in the Latin language and in good literature, on which account I feel no little joy, for literature is lasting while other things perish.’76
Six months earlier, he had written to thank Katherine for sending him a new portrait of Henry and herself, saying that the pleasure of looking at the features of those ‘he desired so much to see in person was so great that he was more thankful for such a new year’s gift than if he had received costly robes or chased gold or anything of the highest estimation’.77
&nb
sp; Now a mystery emerges from the dark recesses of the royal court: the lasting enigma of ‘a child named Ralfe Lyons, that was given to Henry’ in 1546.78 The wording is quite clear: ‘given to our late sovereign lord Henry the eight’ is pointedly repeated on each of four pages of accounts for the last year of the king’s reign and for 1547–8, the first year of Edward’s. In twenty-first-century understanding, ‘given’ clearly implies offered up for adoption or fostering, but this interpretation seems unlikely in mid-Tudor England, although something very unusual had obviously happened to justify the constant use of this tantalising phrase and to warrant maintaining separate accounts for him. Certainly, special care was lavished on the child for the two years that the Privy Purse was responsible for his upkeep. Ralfe Lyons was sent to be taught by Robert Phillips at the Chapel Royal, based since 1533 at St James’s Palace, across the fields from the Palace of Westminster. Payments were made for new clothes – 5s 4d for a doublet, 8d for a purse in 1546 – and for board and wages within the allowances. History is silent on how young Ralfe came to be cared for so well, why he was singled out for this generous attention and what eventually happened to him. Was he the son of a favoured junior member of the royal household whose parents had both died, leaving him an orphan? Can one detect in this the kind, caring hand of Katherine Parr? Given the king’s medical condition and reduced sexual capacity, the child was unlikely to be another royal bastard. Alternatively, was he merely a boy chorister with a fabulous singing voice who was sequestered from another institution, as it is known that efforts were made to employ the best singers for the Chapel Royal?79 The answer maddeningly remains a mystery.
Within the royal family, one particular issue had to be overcome before Katherine’s long-desired normalisation of relations could be achieved. This was Henry’s suspicion regarding Princess Elizabeth and her own distrust of her father after the numerous unsuccessful attempts to marry her off for diplomatic or political ends. By 1545, she was an articulate twelve-year-old well-educated girl who had copious quantities of the low cunning that was an integral part of the Tudor genes. Part of her rehabilitation into family life came with the restoration of both princesses into the line of succession to the crown after Edward and his heirs, enshrined in an Act passed by Parliament in 1544.80 It is not difficult to see Katherine’s quietly manipulative hand in this decision by Henry to legitimise his daughters in the eyes of the law, an action that irrevocably bound both princesses to her patronage and affection.
In July 1544, Henry went to war in France for the last time, appointing Katherine as regent of England. He also changed the structure of Edward’s household, appointing Cox to be almoner and Cheke as a deputy ‘both for the better instruction of the prince and the diligent teaching of such children as be appointed to attend upon them’.81 Edward moved to Hampton Court for greater security, apparently with the two princesses, as on 25 July Katherine wrote from that palace to Henry: ‘My lord prince and the rest of your Majesty’s children are all (thanks be to God) in very good health.’
Elizabeth, who apparently departed soon after, ruefully sent a letter to Katherine on 31 July from St James’s Palace, complaining at her separation from her stepmother:
Envious fortune for a whole year deprived me of your presence and not content therewith has again despoiled me of that benefit.
The princess, however, knew she had Katherine’s love, whom, she heard, had not forgotten her in her letters to the king, campaigning in France.82
Katherine, firmly rooted in modern humanist thinking, was not quite so close to the staunchly Catholic Princess Mary, although she showered gifts upon her and encouraged her to translate into English Erasmus’ Paraphrase of the Gospel of St John.83 The queen also persuaded Elizabeth to translate from the French Queen Marguerite of Navarre’s devotional poem The Mirror or Glass of the Sinful Soul, happily delivered by Elizabeth to Katherine as a New Year’s gift on 31 December 1544,84 and Erasmus’ Dialogues Fidei.
Katherine herself also produced religious books – Prayers Stirring the Mind unto Heavenly Meditations, which became something of a best seller after it was first published in 1545,85 and Lamentations of a Sinner, copies of which were circulating in Henry’s court by November 154586 but which, significantly, only appeared in print after his death in 1547, portraying the king as a Moses who had led England out of the thraldom of Rome. When she was aged twelve, Elizabeth also translated Katherine’s expanded Prayers and Meditations into Latin, French and Italian. This 117-page book, with a crimson silk binding deftly embroidered by Elizabeth herself in gold and silver thread with the initial ‘H’ and a large monogram of the name ‘Katherina’, includes a dedicatory letter to Henry written in Latin and dated ‘Hertford, December 20 1545’.87
Katherine’s interest in religion and her views on its development were reflected in the make-up of her household and those who benefited from her patronage: for example, Thomas Cromwell’s friend Miles Coverdale, who translated the Bible into English; the psalmist Thomas Sternhold; and Nicholas Udall, the ‘thrashing’88 headmaster of Eton, who took part in the translation of Erasmus’ Paraphrases of the Gospels89 with Princess Mary.
Although she loved dancing and fine clothes and jewels, Katherine’s chambers were also a citadel of learning and liberal thought. As a reflection of the religious discussions that constantly went on within her apartments, a Mr Goldsmith who had unsuccessfully sought a position in her household congratulated the queen for her ‘rare goodness [that] has made every day a Sunday, a thing hitherto unheard of, especially in a royal palace’.90 Udall described life in Katherine’s apartments as embracing ‘virtuous exercises, reading and writing and with most earnest study’; she and her ladies ‘early and late, apply themselves to extending [their] knowledge’. The queen’s beliefs and opinions were to lead her into very dangerous waters indeed: the maelstrom caused by the continuing conflict within Henry’s Privy Council over religious reform. It was almost to cost the queen her life.
CHAPTER THREE
The Hunt for Heretics
‘Consider, gentle reader, how full of iniquity this time is, in which the high mystery of our religion is so openly assaulted … Be desirous of the very truth and seek it as thou art ordered, by direction of Christ’s church, and not as deceitful teachers would lead you, by their secret ways.’
BISHOP STEPHEN GARDINER, A DETECTION OF THE DEVIL’S SOPHISTRY (LONDON, 1546).
On 16 November 1538, King Henry publicly grasped the nettle of heresy. John Lambert, alias John Nicholson, had been arrested for persistently denying the holy presence of Christ in the consecrated wafer and wine of the Mass, the so-called ‘Real Presence’. The prisoner had been educated at Cambridge – he had been a fellow of Queens’ College in 1521 – and later had become a radical evangelical, serving as a chaplain to the English community in Antwerp. He was jailed in England in 1532 for his beliefs but later released and went on to run a school in London. Arrested again, Lambert now had to confront Henry personally in an elaborately staged propaganda trial for his life.
The king’s religious policies sometimes seem contradictory during the second half of his reign, as he flip-flopped between conservative and reformist measures pressed upon him by the vociferous opposing factions within his court. Whilst remaining very much an orthodox and devout Catholic in many aspects of doctrine and liturgy, he veered to and fro between executing members of both the evangelical and conservative factions,1 sometimes as heretics, more often as traitors, as well as staging very public bonfires of profane books.2 Much earlier in his reign, he had been an ardent supporter of the Holy Catholic Church, yearning for what he saw as due papal recognition of his piety. It came on 11 October 1521, when the spendthrift Pope Leo X declared Henry – his ‘most dear son in Christ’ – Fidei Defensor, ‘Defender of the Faith’, for his authorship of a 30,000-word book in Latin, the Assertio Septem Sacramentorum or ‘Assertion of the Seven Sacraments’. This had been written, with some academic assistance, specifically to mock and att
ack the new Protestant beliefs then being promulgated by the apostate monk Martin Luther in Germany. The book went through twenty editions, eagerly devoured by Henry’s pious and loyal subjects.3 Then came the thorny and self-serving issue of the king’s divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Henry’s assumption of the supremacy of the Church in England and the break with Rome followed in December 1533, when the Privy Council ordered that Pope Clement VII no longer had authority over the realm and should henceforth be referred to merely as ‘the Bishop of Rome’. The Act of Supremacy, passed in November 1534,4 confirmed Henry’s rule over the Church in English law and was to cause much bloodshed amongst those, great and low, priest and secular, who could not bring themselves in good conscience to take the oath of allegiance to the king as head of the Church. The subsequent Act for Extinguishing the Authority of the Bishop of Rome of 1536 impolitely railed against
The pretended power and usurped authority of the Bishop of Rome, by some called the Pope … which did obfuscate and wrest God’s holy word and testament a long season from the spiritual and true meaning thereof, to his worldly and carnal affections, as pomp, glory, avarice, ambition and tyranny, covering and shadowing the same with his human and politic devices, traditions and inventions, set forth to promote and establish his only dominion, both upon the souls and also the bodies and goods of all Christian people, excluding Christ out of his kingdom and the rule of man his soul as much as he may and all temporal kings and princes out of their dominions which they ought to have by God’s law upon the bodies and goods of their subjects.5
The Last Days of Henry VIII Page 8