Of course, forging the royal signature would normally be a treasonable offence, so to ensure that the procedure did not transgress the law, those wielding the dry stamp had to be formally and retrospectively pardoned as well as licensed, as an administrative convenience, in its use for a limited period in the future. Thus, in August 1546, Denny was officially pardoned ‘for all treasons concerning the counterfeiting, impression and writing of the king’s sign manual since September 20 last’37 and the same pardon was issued immediately to William Clerk and John Gates. Furthermore, Denny, Gates and Clerk were authorised to use the dry stamp until 10 May 1547 in a document approved at Hampton Court on 31 August 1546. They were permitted
to sign on the king’s behalf and name during his pleasure; warrants, bills, gifts, grants, leases, pardons, letters and minutes … in form following; namely, two of them with a stamp, called a ‘dry stamp’ shall at the King’s command make an impression without blackening and afterwards the said Clerk or else the said Anthony and John shall blacken the same, provided that all such warrants and other writings are entered in a book or certain schedules to be signed by the king’s own hand monthly.38
The certificate was examined by the law officers, led by Henry Bradshaw, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, who countersigned it, together with a bevy of officials and courtiers led by Wriothesley.
Those who had custody of the dry stamp now held the keys to the exchequer, the power of royal patronage and the means finally to destroy their political enemies. In the months to come, some of the greatest figures in the land were to feel the devastating effects of that small wooden block, simply pressed down on state papers, and to pay dearly for Henry’s rapidly deteriorating medical condition.
The sands of time had almost run out for the grumbling, gargantuan monarch. The last great state occasion of Henry’s reign was staged in August 1546, when the French admiral Claud d’Annebaut, with a glittering train of 200 nobles and their liveried followers, came to London aboard the Great Zachary of Dieppe and fourteen galleys to ratify the new peace treaty ending the war between England and France. The king was infirm and the eight-year-old Prince Edward deputised for him, riding out on 23 August to welcome the French formally at Hounslow, Middlesex, with 700 gentlemen and nobles in attendance, escorted by eighty yeomen of the guard. It was a glorious, dazzling spectacle. The admiral and his party rode down two lines of 500 mounted English yeomen, all wearing ‘new liveries’, before halting in front of the young prince, who was mounted on horseback with the rest of his party, all dressed in rich velvet coats. The precocious Edward impressed the French with his Latin speech of welcome, which displayed ‘great wit and audacity’, and with his skilled horsemanship.39 Afterwards, one of the French party, Monsieur de Morette, told Dr Nicholas Wotton that he ‘rejoiced very much to have seen my lord prince’s grace, of whose praises, he can not speak [highly] enough’.40 The party moved on to Hampton Court where Wriothesley and senior members of the Privy Council greeted the French party. Four days were then spent hunting in pleasant pastime between the two former enemies. Each night there were lavish banquets and masques in two specially erected marquees, complete with boarded walls and windows of painted horn, decorated inside with rich hangings and filled with cupboards holding gold plate, sumptuously decorated with jewels and pearls ‘which shone richly’.41 The visitors were accommodated in a village of tents made of cloth of gold, pitched in the palace gardens.42
On the first evening, after the feasting, Henry, with his lame legs, was being supported by both Archbishop Cranmer and the French admiral. To the utter surprise of d’Annebaut, Henry suddenly came out with far-reaching proposals for the ‘establishment of sincere religion’ in both England and France. They should ‘change the Mass in both the realms into a [Protestant] communion’, said the king, and after Francis I had publicly repudiated the supremacy of the pope, he and Henry should demand that the Imperial Emperor Charles V should do the same ‘or else they would break off with him’.43 Was Henry being devious, provocative or was he really now prepared to embrace Protestantism totally, foreshadowing what would happen in England a few years later during his son’s short, iconoclastic reign? Was Henry, so often the instrument of mass destruction in his own realm, now bent on a policy of destruction of the Mass? The Chantries Act, designed to seize the wealth of religious charities, could possibly be construed as the opening shot in a state attack on the Mass, although more likely it was designed solely for fiscal benefit. The conversation, recounted later by Cranmer, has caused debate and controversy ever since, particularly as it comes from (and was reported by) such an obviously militant Protestant source. Certainly, the evangelical party was now becoming more powerful at court and increasingly had Henry’s ear. Whilst this was probably not a deliberate, rational policy on the king’s part, perhaps it was a portent that the religious conservatives were sometime soon to lose their authority and influence in the dark, sequestered little world of Henry’s secret royal apartments.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Plot to Burn the Queen
‘They curse and ban my words everyday and all of their thoughts be set to do me harm … They watch my steps, how they may take my soul in a trap … They do beset my way, that I should not escape.’
KATHERINE PARR, PSALMS OR PRAYERS TAKEN OUT OF HOLY SCRIPTURE, MAY 1544.1
On the morning of Christmas Eve, 24 December 1545, Henry made what was to be his last speech to Parliament, during its prorogation,2 until 4 November the following year, a task normally undertaken by Lord Chancellor Wriothesley. Given his declining health, many then believed that Henry might be making his final appearance in the House of Lords at Westminster. Henry was never a great public orator, far from the eloquent rabble-rouser that his daughter Elizabeth was to become. But his speech that cold day was surprisingly both measured and compelling, although apparently delivered without notes. He wanted to impart a stern message, not just for the ears of his legislators, but also for the far wider audience beyond the walls of Parliament. All his subjects were intended to hear and obey his words.
The king began by thanking his MPs for passing the cash-raising Chantries Bill into law – although this had earlier only narrowly escaped defeat at the last minute.3 Henry sought to reassure any doubters amongst them about his planned sequestration of the ecclesiastical chantries and colleges. He solemnly pledged that he would not suffer the ministries of the Church to decay, education to be diminished or the needs of the poor to go unrelieved. No prince in the world, he said pompously, ‘more favours his subjects than I do you, nor no subjects or commons more love and obey their sovereign lord than I perceive you do me.’
The polite niceties over, the king – standing painfully, and only with the aid of some Gentlemen of his Privy Chamber – moved on to the real reason for his being there: to deliver an articulate, sobering, chastising speech to his Lords spiritual and temporal and the Commons about the continuingly vexed issue of religion. Like a testy Victorian schoolmaster, he appealed for better order in the festering debate between devout conservative and radical evangelical reformer:
My loving subjects: Study and take pains to amend one thing which surely is amiss and far out of order, to the which I most heartily require you which is that charity and concord is not amongst you but discord and dissensions beareth rule in every place.
What love and charity is amongst you when the one calls the other heretic and Anabaptist and he calls him again papist, hypocrite and Pharisee?4 Are these tokens of charity amongst you? Are these the signs of fraternal love between you?
Perhaps by now more than weary of the ceaseless wrangling between the religious factions within his court and the doctrinal conflicts and controversies throughout the realm, he moved his regal sights on to the bishops:
I see and hear daily of you of the clergy who preach one against another; teach contrary to [one] another; inveigh one against another, without charity or discretion … All men almost be in variety and discord and few or none preach trul
y and sincerely the word of God, according as they ought to. Alas! How can the poor souls live in concord when you preachers sow amongst them in your sermons debate and discord? To you, they look for light and you bring them darkness.
Amend these crimes, I exhort you, and set forth God’s word both by true preaching and good example giving.
Henry went on to add an ominous ‘or else’ – he was, after all, the supreme head of the Church of England and wherever and whenever he had seized power, he was never afraid to exercise it, remorselessly and pitilessly. It was time for a firm reminder to them all of the true and unchanging realities of the state they lived in:
I, whom God hath appointed his vicar and high minister here, will see these divisions extinct and those enormities corrected, according to my very duty, or else I shall be accounted an unprofitable servant and untrue officer.
The secular lords and MPs were also singled out for similar criticism:
You of the temporality be not clean and unspotted of malice and envy, for you rail on bishops, speak slanderously of priests and rebuke and taunt preachers, both contrary to good order and Christian fraternity.
If you know surely that a bishop or preacher … teaches perverse doctrine, come and declare it to some of our Council or to us, to whom is committed by God the high authority to reform and order such causes and behaviour and be not judges of your own fantastical opinions and vain expositions for in such high cases you may lightly err.
Although you are permitted to read Holy Scripture, and to have the Word of God in your mother tongue, you must understand that you have this licence only to inform your own conscience and to instruct your children and family and not to dispute and make Scripture a railing and a taunting stock against priests and preachers as many light persons do.
The king was also deeply shocked by the way in which the Word of God was being misused by all and sundry:
I am very sorry to know and hear how irreverently that most precious jewel, the Word of God is disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern, contrary to the true meaning and doctrine of the same.
It was really time for Parliament and realm finally to forget their religious differences:
For of this I am sure: that charity was never so faint amongst you and virtuous and godly living was never less used nor God himself amongst Christians never less reverenced, honoured or served.
Therefore, as I said before, be in charity one with another, like brother and brother. Love, dread and serve God (to which I, as your supreme head and sovereign lord, exhort and require you) and then I doubt not the love and league … shall never be dissolved or broken between us.5
Even the king’s own officials were taken aback by his articulacy and passion, which reportedly reduced many to tears, although some at least were comforted by the session ending shortly before noon, allowing time for many members to ride home in time for the Christmas celebrations. Sir William Petre, appointed Privy Councillor and secretary the year before, wrote enthusiastically about the speech to his colleague Sir William Paget, Henry’s other secretary of state, then away on diplomatic duties in France. It was given, he said, with gravity,
so sententiously, so kingly, or rather fatherly, as peradventure6 to you that have been used to his daily talks should have been no great wonder … but to us, that have not heard him so often, was such a joy and marvellous comfort as I reckon this day one of the happiest of my life.
The toadying Paget thanked him for sending him a copy of ‘the most godly, wise and kingly oration’, which he would have given anything to hear personally – even eating fish every day for a year, the food he hated so much.7 Emotion would have overcome him, too, if he had been present: ‘I am sure my eyes would largely have uttered the affections of my heart.’ He adds: ‘Our Lord save him, good king, and make his subjects good.’
Prosaically, the always businesslike Paget ends his letter with the postscript: ‘If we come not home shortly, you must help us with more money.’
The leader of the conservative faction in Henry’s council, Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, was abroad in January 1546 on diplomatic duties, tasked with cementing England’s rickety alliance with the imperial emperor, Charles V. Cranmer, after some discussions with Henry, had decided to take advantage of Gardiner’s absence to sweep away some of the last vestiges of ritual surviving from the unreformed religion – the giant veil that shrouded church chancels during Lent, the congregation’s creeping to the cross on Good Fridays and the pealing of church bells during the nocturnal vigil of All-Hallows. He carefully drafted a letter for the king to send to Gardiner, describing the new policy, which was read out to Henry in his Privy Chamber late one afternoon by Sir Anthony Denny. The king abruptly stopped him with a sharp, ‘I am now otherwise resolved.’ Henry then brusquely ordered:
Send my lord of Canterbury word that since I spoke with him about these matters, I have received letters from my lord of Winchester … and he writes plainly to us that the league [with Spain] will not prosper nor go forward if we make any other innovation, change or alteration, either in religion or ceremonies.8
There could be no gainsaying, no argument against this sudden change of Henry’s mind. Gardiner, although overseas, was still clearly well informed about events at court. He had cleverly stymied Cranmer, playing the diplomatic card to halt further reforms. The king’s mercurial decision heralded a period of six months when Gardiner’s party held almost total sway in the desperate infighting for supremacy amongst Henry’s Council.
The religious conservatives had reached the zenith of their power within the court when they hatched an audacious plot to strike at the very heart of the king’s world: his loving wife and companion, Queen Katherine Parr, who by January 1546 was leaning more and more towards the reformist religion. In July of that year, van der Delft reported conversations he had had with Gardiner and Paget,
whom I found very favourable to the public good and to the interests of his majesty [Charles V]. As these are the councillors most in favour with the king, I doubt not that they will be good instruments for maintaining the existing friendship and for preventing the protestants [sic] from gaining footing or favour here. [The bishop and Paget] have confidently promised this.9
The queen, her Privy Chamber full of women with voluble and dangerous evangelical opinions, became the target of a conspiracy, probably stage-managed by the Bishop of Winchester and involving Norfolk, Paget, Wriothesley and the perjured Sir Richard Rich. Katherine’s ladies had long been perpetual thorns in the sides of the conservatives. The lively and irrepressible Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, the last wife of the late Charles Brandon, even kept a pet dog at court mischievously named ‘Gardiner’, which she teased and taunted outrageously in public. This time, sexual misconduct was not a viable means by which to entrap the queen, a lady of well-known propriety and impeccable morals. Heresy looked to be the best bet – and as a possible ‘plan B’, they also sought to use Norfolk’s daughter, the Duchess of Richmond, as another femme fatale to seduce the king’s affections away from Katherine. But first the conspirators had to soften up their prime target.
Their plot initially manifested itself as a widespread whispering campaign against Henry’s consort. On 27 February, van der Delft wrote to Charles V:
I hesitate to report that here are rumours of a new queen. Some attribute it to the sterility of the present Queen while others say there will be no change during the present war.
Madame Suffolk is much talked about and in great favour but the king shows no alteration in his demeanour to the queen although she is said to be annoyed at the rumours.10
On 7 March, Stephen Vaughan, Henry’s financial agent in Antwerp, wrote to Wriothesley and Paget that
This day came to my lodging a High Dutch, a merchant of this town, saying he had dined with certain friends, one of whom offered to lay a wager with him that the king’s majesty would have another wife and he prayed me to show him the truth.
He would not
tell who offered the wager and I said; ‘that I never heard of any such thing and that I was sure that there was no such thing.’
Many folks talk of this matter and from whence it comes I cannot learn.11
Gardiner, perhaps significantly, was in Antwerp that day12 on his way back from diplomatic discussions with the emperor in Utrecht. The rumours were spreading like wildfire. Cornelius Sceppurus, a member of the emperor’s Council, coyly wrote to Dr Louis Schore, President of the Council of Flanders, from London on 6 April:
I dare not write the rumours current here with regard to the feminine sex. Some change is suspected to be pending.13
Katherine felt increasingly under threat: in February, she ordered secure coffers and boxes for her private apartments with new locks to prevent any unauthorised prying into her papers.14 Some of her more controversial religious books were hidden in her garderobe (toilet) and others smuggled out of the palace and into the safekeeping of her uncle at his house in Horton, Northamptonshire.15 She was prudent: the conspirators’ net was drawing in around her. A later Protestant writer claimed that the hunt for heretics within the court that summer ‘grew exceeding hot. [As there were] many men and women that stood well affected to religion, it was thought expedient for a terror to the rest to begin with them’.16
The Last Days of Henry VIII Page 17