The Last Days of Henry VIII

by Hutchinson, Robert

  Much of what we have as evidence of what actually happened during those turbulent times comes from obviously militant Protestant sources or apologists. After nearly 500 years, it is difficult to separate true fact from skewed propaganda, a weapon as freely and effectively used by both sides during the Reformation as it is in politics today. But there is no disputing the bloodshed, cruelty and horror as so many died on both sides, as martyrs, for their faith and beliefs. Richard Hilles wrote of those years:

  It is now no novelty among us to see men slain, hung, drawn, quartered, beheaded. Some for trifling expressions, which were explained or interpreted as having been spoken against the king; others for the Pope’s supremacy; some for one thing, some for another.54

  It is all too easy in the twenty-first century to shrink back in revulsion at the endless slaughter caused by religious differences in the sixteenth. It was, to our modern eyes, a cruel, hard time and it is difficult for us to distinguish what happened in Henry’s reign from the conditions we tragically witnessed in twentieth-century totalitarian states. But we should judge the remedies aimed at curing dissent and punishing crime by the standards of mid-sixteenth-century England and by what was occurring concurrently in Europe. No doubt the population supped deeply from the spoon of horror when they saw those suffering harsh penalties for transgression, but some may have judged the crimes just as terrible. And horror there was. One example may serve to illustrate the point. In 1531, Parliament passed an Act against poisoners55 that decreed that those found guilty should be sentenced to the hideous death of being boiled alive. It was a swift riposte to a crime that was, according to the Act, ‘most rare, and seldom committed or practised’ in England, a knee-jerk official reaction to assuage what they perceived to be mounting public concern. The law was passed following the case of Richard Roos who, for unknown motivations aside from his ‘wicked and damnable disposition’, poisoned porridge that was being heated in the kitchen of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. Not only were ‘seventeen persons of his family which did eat of that porridge’ poisoned, one later dying, ‘but also certain poor people which resorted to the said bishop’s palace and were there charitably fed with the remains of the porridge’ were also afflicted. One pauper woman also died. Roos was duly boiled to death at Smithfield.56 There was another case in March 1542, when Margaret Davy, ‘a maid’, was boiled alive after she poisoned people in the three London households she had lived in, murdering three individuals.57 Life was cheap for the great and mighty of the land as well as for the lowborn and poor. Judicial execution, for transgression against the king’s will or against the law of the land, had to be a spectacle to prove a deterrent. Almost always, these were synonymous. These were hard, merciless days in Henry Tudor’s England.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Final Quest for Military Glory

  ‘Rejoice Boulogne in the rule of the eighth Henry! Thy towers are adorned with crimson roses, now are the ill-scented lilies uprooted and prostrate, the cock is expelled and the lion reigns in the invincible citadel.’

  TRANSLATION OF A LATIN INSCRIPTION ON THE BLADE OF A SWORD MADE FOR HENRY VIII.1

  After the Franco-Spanish truce of 1538 with its consequent threat of invasion, Henry’s attention turned to his northern border with the troublesome Scots in the early 1540s. The English border forces had launched frequent hit-and-run raids on Scottish villages across the frontier, burning and destroying homes and driving back captured livestock into England. After negotiations to secure the marriage between Prince Edward and the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, broke down and a dispute flared up over the English capture of some Scottish ships on the high seas, the king’s impatience boiled over. He ordered Suffolk to attack Edinburgh when the winter rains ended in March 1544, with his army of 8,000 men, based in Darlington. These plans were dropped when a much larger force under Hertford, drawn from Ipswich, King’s Lynn, London and Hull, was embarked in 114 ships at Tynemouth at the end of April for a punitive assault on the Scottish capital. The Privy Council cold-bloodedly told Hertford that Henry’s pleasure ‘was that you shall put to fire and the sword’ all the communities along the shores of the Forth Estuary and burn Edinburgh ‘without taking either the castle or town to mercy, though they would yield, for you know the falsehood of them all’. On 4 May, the English force successfully landed near the port of Leith, entering nearby Edinburgh three days later after blasting open its gates, and burnt the city – although the virtually impregnable castle, high up above on its sheer cliffs of volcanic rock, withstood Hertford’s assaults.

  With the Scots now thoroughly cowed by this scorched-earth policy, the king could turn his martial attentions to his old enemy, France. In an unlikely diplomatic alliance between the Imperial Emperor Charles V and the heretic Henry, both sides pledged themselves to invade the realm of that ‘Most Christian’ king, Francis I. Imperial forces had been fighting the French in the Low Countries to further Spanish claims to Burgundy and in an effort to end France’s relations with the Turks, ‘the inveterate enemy of the Christian name and faith’. The Spanish were aided by 5,600 English troops under Sir John Wallop in the Siege of Landrecies, and by Henry’s subsidies for mercenaries. England and Spain were now committed to fielding armies, numbering 42,000 each, by 20 June 1544 in a twin-pronged offensive aimed at the French capital – the so-called ‘Enterprise of Paris’ – from the springboards of English-held Calais and the emperor’s lands to the north. War preparations began.

  But Henry’s health had deteriorated, delaying his departure to Europe, and his army set out before him under the command of the experienced generals Suffolk and Norfolk. Through his sheer determination (if not bloody-mindedness) and the anxious ministrations of his physicians, Henry recovered and happily and enthusiastically prepared for war – his last great adventure as a military leader. Finally, on the evening of 14 July, he landed at Calais to take the field of battle at the head of his troops, proudly riding ‘a great courser’ or heavy-armoured horse, with an absurdly large wheel-lock pistol martially, if not nonchalantly, laid across the pommel of his saddle. The banner of St George flew bravely behind him. His great helm and lance were borne by William Somerset, Lord Herbert, son of the Second Earl of Worcester,2 riding ahead of the king. Henry’s final chance for military glory irresistibly beckoned.

  It was the first time he had worn armour in the field since his campaign against France long ago in 1513; indeed, he may not have ridden in armour since a bad jousting accident in 1536.3 In preparation for the wars, an existing armour had to be enlarged to fit what was now his vast bulk, but Henry changed his mind4 about the alterations after work had begun. He probably ordered two new field armours to be made in his Almain (German) armoury at Greenwich, but settled on an Italian design imported by the Milanese Francis Albert. This beautifully etched, blackened and gilt three-quarter armour5 was almost certainly the one Henry wore on his journey to Boulogne.6

  It is difficult not to compare and contrast Henry’s gamecock self-certainty with his bloated immobility: the Shakespearian caricature of Sir John Falstaff somehow lurks in the back of one’s mind, but the king clearly lacked his constant joviality. The violent thunderstorm and torrential rain that greeted him and his column of English troops when they arrived at Marquise, twenty miles from Calais, on 25 July may have considerably dampened Henry’s ardour for campaigning.

  Before embarking for France, he had needed to ensure that England was secure and stable, particularly on the borders with Scotland, traditionally an ally of the French kings and potentially the source of a crippling diversionary attack that would disrupt the campaign across the English Channel. Like all responsible soldiers about to go into action, he prudently made a new will and, cannily, appointed Queen Katherine as regent to rule in his stead, with the Earl of Hertford as the military lieutenant or commander of all homeland forces. At the same time, as a mark of his especial favour, he settled the rich manors of Mortlake, in Surrey, and Chelsea and Hanworth, both in Middlesex, upon her.


  The commission of regency signed on 7 July 1544 instructed that Prince Edward should be moved to Hampton Court for security and laid down that Katherine should use ‘the advice and counsel of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Chancellor Wriothesley, the Earl of Hertford, the Bishop of Westminster and Sir William Petre, secretary of state, in her judgements’,7 a carefully balanced mix of conservative and radical members of the Council. A draft commission in the hand of Sir William Paget, newly appointed principal secretary to the king, dated 11 July, made arrangements for the financial running of the realm:

  Commission to Queen Katherine and [blank] at the least8 of the councillors named in the commission of regency (which the king taking his voyage at the present time over the seas to invade the realm of France has made her) to address warrants to the king’s treasurers, receivers etc for the payment of money.9

  Hard intelligence about what was going on within England was vital for its good governance, and Henry’s efficient civil servants instructed commissioners in every county to report regularly: ‘Once a month they shall certify to the Queen and council … upon the state of the county and their proceedings and all noteworthy occurrences.’10 One such report came from York, informing the queen that during the month-long assizes of oyer, terminer and gaol delivery11 at the castle there, seventeen persons had been convicted of murders and felonies, of which sixteen had been executed and one committed to the bishop’s prison. There was no mention of any acquittals.

  Katherine revelled in her new-found power and demonstrated an extraordinary level of administrative competence as well as knowledge and expertise about military matters, particularly over issues in the dangerous Scottish border region.

  Soon after Katherine assumed the regency, Francis Talbot – Earl of Shrewsbury and the king’s lieutenant in the North – and others wrote to her about the problem of Scottish prisoners held by the English12 who were not to be allowed to return home. Those able to pay for their upkeep were to be imprisoned ‘this side of the Tyne’ and the others consigned to gaols ‘as Hertford knows’. However,

  It appears that with the Scottish prisoners being at least 100 and the prisoners already there, the gaols will be so pestered that they must die of hunger unless relieved at the king’s charge.

  They begged her to decide with the Council whether to send the prisoners back to Scotland or to feed them at a cost to the exchequer,

  for the gaols are so full that many die daily for lack of food and that number being so much increased, the penury and famine must needs be the greater.

  Furthermore, the towns of Durham, Newcastle, Alnwick, Morpeth and Darneton were

  infected with a very contagious disease of which two or three people die daily so that the writers may not lie here without danger.

  Could they withdraw twenty or thirty miles south to Barnard’s Castle, for safety? The earl ended that they ‘did not think it convenient to remove without knowing her pleasure’.

  Two days later, by command of the queen at Westminster, they were firmly instructed how to resolve the problem. Those prisoners ‘of the poorer sort’ who are ‘stout, busy or otherwise like to do any hurt being at liberty’ were to be sent to several prisons, and the others ‘if extreme necessity shall so require’ should be fed at the king’s charge. The remainder should be released upon a bond for good behaviour. The letter was signed ‘Kateryn the Queen Regent’.13

  On 25 July, Katherine wrote from Hampton Court to Henry, who was directing the campaign against Boulogne, informing him that £40,000 was being sent to pay for the fighting and that the Council would be ‘diligent to advance to him, against the beginning of next month, as much money as possible’. Four thousand men were also being made ready to reinforce the English army ‘at one hour’s warning’, with arrangements in progress to transport them across the English Channel. She ends on a homely note: ‘The prince and the rest of the children are well.’14

  Today, one can still sense the excitement Katherine felt about being at the heart of events in the surviving state papers and correspondence. On 31 July, she wrote again to the king to relate a report she had received that afternoon that the fishermen of Rye in Sussex had captured a Scottish ship ‘wherein were certain Frenchmen and Scots sent with letters and credentials to the French king and others’. The plain-speaking queen thought the lucky seizure was ‘ordained of God to shame the crafty dealing and juggling of that [Scots] nation’.15 She enclosed the most important of the letters, which clearly indicates that she had read all the papers and had decided their significance.

  On 6 August, she informed Henry of rumours that Frenchmen had landed in England, adding – with a flash of humour – that ‘fearing that some seditious person had spread the rumour (for a landing of French about Gloucester was unlikely)’, she had instructed the justices of the peace in the region to quieten the excitement in the country and to make diligent inquiries. She had received replies that showed ‘all was well’ and that the rumour was founded merely on the departure from Bristol of English warships.16

  There were more serious issues to tackle, such as the problem of deserters from the English army. On 9 September, she issued a proclamation from Westminster ‘for the examination of persons returned from the king’s army in France and punishing of such as have insufficient passports to do so’.17 There was another proclamation relating to the plague then raging in ‘sundry parts of London and Westminster’. This banned from the court those infected or living in infected homes and prohibited members of the household from visiting such places ‘to avoid danger to the prince, Queen Katherine and the other children’.18

  Katherine was also adept at praising those who served the king well. In early September, she wrote to the Lords Evers and Wharton, Wardens of the Scottish Eastern and Western Marches, for whose

  diligent service … in the defence of the realm and the chastising of the king’s enemies, we give you hearty thanks and require you to give the like in our name to the captains and gentlemen that have served you.19

  The queen also required them to continue their diligence ‘especially now in the time of harvest, so as their [the Scots] corn may be wasted as much as may be’.

  This new war leader did not forget Henry’s requirement for a humble, loving wife at home. From Greenwich, soon after his departure for France, she wrote to tell him that although he had not been long away, she could not be satisfied until she had heard from him:

  The want of your presence, so much beloved and desired by me, makes me that I cannot quietly enjoy anything until I hear from your Majesty.

  She knew Henry’s absence was necessary, she continued,

  yet love and affection compels me to desire your presence … Love makes me in all things to set apart my own commodity and pleasure and to embrace most joyfully his will and pleasure whom I love.

  God, the knower of secrets, can judge these words not only to be written by ink, but most truly impressed in the heart … I make account with your Majesty as I do with God for His benefits and gifts heaped upon me daily …

  And even such confidence I have in your Majesty’s gentleness, knowing myself never to have done my duty as were requisite and meet to such a noble Prince, at whose hands I have received so much love and goodness that with words I cannot express it.

  Lest I should be too tedious unto your Majesty, I finish this, my scribbled letter, committing you into the governance of the Lord, with long life and prosperous felicity here, and after this life to enjoy the kingdom of His elect.

  She dutifully signed the letter:

  By your Majesty’s humble, obedient loving wife and servant. Kateryn the Queen. K.P.20

  Meanwhile in France, after a brief armed reconnaissance mission by Suffolk, the English forces, short of soldiers, had partially invested Boulogne, twenty miles from Calais, whilst others, under Norfolk, besieged Montreuil. Bad weather in the Channel and in Flanders delayed deliveries of gunpowder, shot and other supplies – Norfolk complained that his men had to d
rink water rather than beer – and Henry had to wait impatiently until early August before the full force of the English artillery could be brought to bear on the French defences at Boulogne. The chronicler Raphael Holinshed records the huge array of military earthworks thrown up by the besiegers:

  Beside the trenches which were cast and brought around the town, there was a mount [artificial hill or earthwork] raised upon the east side and divers pieces of artillery planted aloft on the same. The which, together with the mortar pieces, sore annoyed them within [the town] and battered down the steeple of Our Lady’s church.21

  For six weeks the deafening cannon roared, lobbing 100,000 gun stones into the town, and assaults were mounted on Boulogne’s outworks. The military operations were observed and directed by Henry, who was safely out of the range of French retaliatory fire on the north-east side of the town, near the sea and with easy access to fresh water. There was no shortage of that; no doubt he was also protected from the constant rains and high winds that afflicted operations that summer. In a postscript to a letter written to Queen Katherine on 8 September, Henry excitedly reported:

  At the closing of these letters, the castle … with the dike [defensive ditch] is at our commandment and not like to be recovered by the Frenchmen. Castle and town are like to follow the same trade for this day we begin three batteries and have three mines22 going; besides one which has shaken and torn one of the greatest bulwarks. I am too busy to write more but send blessings to all my children and recommendations to my cousin Margaret23 and the rest of the ladies and gentlemen and to my Council.24