The Last Days of Henry VIII

by Hutchinson, Robert

  One of the first to be ensnared was Norfolk’s second son, the reformist Lord Thomas Howard. He was dragged before the Privy Council on 7 May, charged with ‘disputing indiscreetly of Scripture with other young gentlemen of the court’17 and offered mercy if ‘he would confess what he said in disproof of sermons preached in court last Lent and his other talk in the Queen’s chamber.’ He escaped with a stern adjuration to reform his ways.

  Gardiner’s pack was in full cry by the early summer of 1546, still spreading rumours of the queen’s imminent downfall. Richard Worley, a page of the pallet chamber, was sent to prison for his ‘unseemly reasoning of the Scripture’ and the hunt cornered the fashionable preacher Dr Edward Crome in June. He had given a sermon at the Mercers’ Chapel in London two months before in which he denied the reality of Purgatory and had been ordered to recant at Paul’s Cross. This he refused but later faced the agonies of indecision. The London merchant Otwell Johnson sarcastically wrote to his brother in Calais:

  Our news here [is] of Dr Crome’s canting, recanting, decanting or rather double canting.18

  Dr William Huicke, probably a relation of Henry’s physician Robert Huicke, was arrested for his support of Crome, as was John Lassels, a sewer of the Privy Chamber who, five years earlier, had provided the damning information to Cranmer about Katherine Howard’s teenage depravity.

  The minor poet and evangelical Sir George Blagge, one of Henry’s cronies, was also detained in Newgate and sentenced at the Guildhall to be burnt after being accused of heresy by Sir Hugh Caverley and a man called Littleton. But Blagge was freed through the personal intervention of the outraged king. Henry remonstrated with Wriothesley over his arrest – ‘for coming so near to him, even to his Privy Chamber’. The Lord Chancellor then quickly pardoned Blagge, who laboured under the king’s nickname of ‘my pig’. When Henry next saw him, he called out: ‘Ah, my pig! Are you safe again?’ Blagge, bowing low, replied: ‘Yes, sire. And if your majesty had not been better to me than your bishops, your pig had been roasted ere this time.’19

  On 18 June, Henry Hobberthorne, Lord Mayor of London, arraigned Anne Askew, or Ascough, for preaching against the ‘Real Presence’ in the wafers and wine of the Mass. She had already been in trouble in London the previous year over the same issue, when she lived in The Temple, on the city’s western edge. The then mayor, Sir Martin Bowes (who, as one of the sheriffs, had wretchedly presided over the execution of Robert Barnes in 1540), had questioned her but had been confounded by her wit and knowledge:

  The Mayor: You foolish woman. Do you say that the priests cannot make the Body of Christ?

  Anne Askew: I say so, my lord, for I have read ‘God made man,’ but that man can make God I [have] never yet read, nor, I suppose, ever shall read it.

  Mayor: After the words of consecration is it not the Lord’s body?

  Askew: No, it is but consecrated bread or sacramental bread.

  Mayor: What if a mouse eat it after the consecration? What shall become of the mouse? What say you, you foolish woman? I say that mouse is damned.

  Askew: Alack, poor mouse!20

  She had been set free then, but was now again accused of heresy after the interception of a letter she had written.21 Anne, aged twenty-five and an ‘elegant beauty and rare wit’, had been thrown out of her Lincolnshire home by her incompatible older husband Thomas Kyme for her vocal and unorthodox religious views. The Jesuit Robert Parsons wrote four decades later that she ‘was a coy dame and of very evil fame for wantonness’ and had

  gad[ded] up and down the country, gospelling and gossiping where she might and ought not. This for diverse years before her imprisonment; but especially she delighted to be in London near the court.22

  In the Tower, her investigation began on 29 June, conducted by Wriothesley, Rich and Sir John Baker, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, with questions about Queen Katherine’s ladies-in-waiting. In papers smuggled out of prison, Anne described the interrogation:

  ‘They asked me [about] my lady of Suffolk, my lady of Sussex,23 my lady of Hertford,24 my lady Denny and my lady Fitzwilliams.’25

  Being further pressed to state from whom she had received relief whilst in prison, on their saying there were diverse ladies who had sent her money, she admitted ‘that there was a man in a blue coat which delivered me ten shillings and said that my lady of Hertford sent it me and another in a violet coat gave me eight shillings and said my lady Denny sent it me.

  ‘Whether it were true or no, I cannot tell, for I am not sure who sent it to me, but as the men did say.’

  Then they asked, ‘Were there [any] of the [Privy] Council that did maintain me?’ And I said, ‘No.’26

  She deftly sidestepped their questions or bravely refused point blank to answer. In desperate frustration, Wriothesley and Rich sent for Sir Anthony Knyvett, Lieutenant of the Tower, and ordered him to put her on the rack to be tortured to extract the truth. Very unwillingly, Knyvett had her strapped to the machine and told his men just to ‘pinch’ her, as a sharp warning to tell all. The questions still went unanswered and he was told to use the machine to stretch her body agonisingly further. Knyvett refused, maintaining rightly that racking a woman was illegal even under Henry’s harsh penal laws.

  Angrily, Wriothesley and Rich stripped off their gowns and themselves turned the windlasses controlling the ropes of the rack, tearing her muscles and sinews and cracking her bones. Anne’s account of her torture is both graphic and horrific:

  Because I confessed no ladies nor gentlewomen to be of my opinion, they kept me [on the rack] a long time. And because I lay still and did not cry, my Lord Chancellor and master Rich took pains to rack me [with] their own hands till I was nigh dead.

  Knyvett insisted that she should be released.

  I immediately swooned and then they recovered me again. After that, I sat two long hours reasoning with my Lord Chancellor upon the bare floor, where he with many flattering words, persuaded me to leave my opinion. But my Lord God gave me grace to persevere and will do (I hope) to the very end.

  The Lieutenant of the Tower, disgusted at her treatment, took a boat to Westminster and informed the king of the woman’s torture. ‘When the king had understood, he seemed not very well to like their extreme handling of the woman’ and pardoned Knyvett.27 (The Jesuit Parsons, however, later claimed that the king himself had caused Anne Askew to be racked to find out if she had talked with his queen and ‘corrupted’ the Duchess of Suffolk.)

  Henry, always interested in theology, frequently had conversations with his wife about religious matters. In late June or early July, she went too far in her disputation and her arguments irritated the king, who was already feeling depressed and too unwell to go to Mass or to limp too often around the Privy Gardens of his Palace of Westminster. After she retired to bed, Henry turned to Gardiner, who was conveniently present, and snapped crossly:

  A good hearing it is when women become such clerks [scholars] and a thing much to my comfort to come in my old days to be taught by a woman!28

  Here was the bishop’s chance to strike. He murmured in the king’s ear that the queen’s views were heresy under law and that

  he with others of his faithful councillors, could, within a short time, disclose such treasons cloaked with this heresy that his majesty would easily perceive how perilous a matter it is to cherish a serpent within his own bosom.29

  Henry himself must have signed the warrant for Katherine’s arrest.

  Probably by 4 July, the charges against her had been drawn up. On 8 July, a proclamation was issued prohibiting the possession of heretical books, to provide some legal basis for the jaws of the trap about to snap shut on Katherine.

  Then the king’s innate cunning came into play.

  He confided details of the planned arrest to one of his doctors, probably Thomas Wendy. A copy of the arrest warrant was conveniently dropped by one of his Councillors in a corridor of the queen’s apartments. Katherine, who had taken to her bed ill, knew quickly about
the plot against her.

  Her naked panic can only be imagined.

  Was she to follow Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard to become yet another of Henry’s slaughtered queens? Only this time, her end would come on top of her own funeral pyre, at the stake. When the king came to see her,

  she uttered her grief, fearing lest his majesty had taken displeasure with her and had utterly forsaken her. He, like a loving husband, with sweet and comfortable words, so refreshed and appeased her careful mind that she began to recover.30

  Despite his soothing words, Katherine knew full well after the fatal experiences of her unhappy predecessors as royal consort that simply throwing herself on Henry’s mercy would not save her from execution. To Henry, an abject apology or appeals for clemency were tantamount to complete surrender – an admission of legal culpability. That evening, probably 13 July, she went to the king’s bedchamber, accompanied by her sister Anne Herbert and preceded by the nine-year-old Lady Jane Grey, carrying a candle.

  Henry deliberately began to talk again about religion. She snatched her chance. The queen said she was ‘but a poor silly woman, accompanied by all the imperfections natural to the weakness of her sex’. She would defer her judgement ‘in this, in all other cases, to your majesty’s wisdom, as my only anchor, supreme head and governor here on earth, next unto God, to lean unto’.

  Henry maliciously toyed with her. ‘Not so, by St Mary,’ he said pointedly. ‘You are become a doctor, Kate, to instruct us (as we take it) and not to be instructed or directed by us.’ Shrewdly, she recognised this as the all-important test. She both flattered him and humbled herself:

  If your majesty take it so, then has your majesty very much mistaken me, for I have always held it preposterous for a woman to instruct her lord. If I have presumed to differ with your highness on religion it was partly to obtain information for my own comfort regarding nice points on which I stood in doubt.31

  Katherine discussed such matters

  not only to the end your majesty might with less grief pass over this painful time of your infirmity, being attentive to our talk and hoping that your majesty should reap some ease thereby. Also that, hearing your majesty’s learned discourse, might receive to myself some profit thereby.

  A grimace, masquerading as a smile, spread across Henry’s bloated features. ‘And is it even [so] sweetheart? And tended your arguments to no worse end? Then perfect friends are we now, as ever any time heretofore.’32 With that, he pulled her into his arms and tenderly kissed her.

  She was safe.

  But one last scene remained to be played out in this tight little human drama. The next afternoon, Henry and Katherine were sitting in the Privy Gardens with three of her ladies – Anne Herbert, Lady Tyrwhitt and Lady Jane Grey. He appeared ‘as pleasant as ever he was in all his life before’ but his mood changed swiftly as Wriothesley, with an escort of forty halberdiers, entered the gardens and marched up to the royal party. The Lord Chancellor had come at the appointed hour to arrest the queen and her ladies. Henry pulled Wriothesley aside and he fell on his knees before the king and reminded him of the arrangements he had previously agreed. An angry Henry shouted: ‘Arrant knave! Beast and fool!’ and some later reports said he cuffed the Lord Chancellor around the head. With an imperious sweep of his hand, he ordered him to ‘avaunt [leave] my sight’. He turned his back on the thoroughly confused Wriothesley, who was forced to make an embarrassed exit, accompanied by the steady tread of his guards following him. Katherine, watching the scene with some relief, tried to calm the still angry king. ‘Ah my poor soul,’ said Henry, ‘you little know how evil he deserves this grace at your hands. Oh, my word, sweetheart. He has been towards thee, an arrant knave and so let him go.’33

  During the remainder of the year Henry showered gifts of jewellery, furs and clothes upon Katherine, ‘his dearest wife’, in an attempt to reassure her of his continuing fondness and high regard.

  On 16 July, Anne Askew was executed at Smithfield, together with Lassels, Nicholas Belenian – a priest from Shropshire, and John Adams – a tailor, all accused of heresy. She had to be taken there in a chair, carried by two sergeants, as she could not walk because of the ‘great torments … she suffered on the rack’. She had to sit in the chair, bound to the stake. A small gunpowder charge hidden within the faggots exploded after the fire was lit, bringing her sufferings to an end.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Protestants Ascendant

  ‘As long as King Henry lived, no man could do me hurt.’

  LETTER FROM STEPHEN GARDINER TO THE DUKE OF SOMERSET, JUNE 1547.1

  The collapse of the devious and audacious plot against the queen left the conservative faction at Henry’s court in disarray and only too vulnerable to royal retribution. Gardiner himself was shortly to taste the king’s displeasure. Henry had always mistrusted this egotistical but talented churchman and might have ‘used extremity against him’ if his own life had not been rapidly running out. But Henry believed he could always exercise a degree of power over the testy bishop because he possessed secret, and probably damning, information that held the key to Gardiner’s obedience or, more likely, would justify a timely charge of treason against him. Perhaps to reassure himself of that hold, the king several times asked Paget ‘for a certain writing touching the said bishop, commanding him to keep it safe, that he might have it when he called for it’.2 What this weapon was can only be a matter of prurient conjecture, as no such document has yet been discovered.

  Gardiner was born around 1483 in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and subsequently trained as a lawyer. He started his long career in government as secretary to Wolsey, but after the cardinal’s downfall he faithfully served the king up to 1534 in the same capacity and thereafter was employed on important diplomatic missions overseas. Although Gardiner had supported the difficult question of Henry’s supremacy over the Church in England – writing a lengthy oration, De verá Obedientiá (The True Obedience), in favour of secular or princely control of religion in 1535 – the latest evangelical reforms in doctrine led him into direct and successful conflict with Cromwell and Cranmer and, later – disastrously for him – the Seymours and John Dudley, Viscount Lisle.

  A portrait of the bishop at Hardwick Hall, near Chesterfield, Derbyshire, shows an image of a man with a double chin and full, almost sensual lips, the eyes staring out of the painting directly and inquisitively. His quick anger – his ‘sanguinary temper’ – was notorious for its vitriol and fire. Gardiner’s successor at the see of Winchester, the staunchly Protestant John Ponet who was Cranmer’s chaplain before 1547 and thus clearly no friend to Gardiner, described him as having frowning brows, deep-set eyes, a ‘nose hooked like a buzzard’ and ‘great paws (like the devil)’.3 Certainly, in Catholic Mary’s reign when he became Lord Chancellor, Gardiner showed little mercy for those he saw as enemies of the state, whether political or religious. The seventeenth-century divine Thomas Fuller wrote of Gardiner: ‘His malice was like … white [gun] powder, which surely discharged the bullet, yet made no report, being secret in all his acts of cruelty.’ Thomas Mowntayne, Protestant rector of St Michael Tower Royal in London, described a public bout of Gardiner’s anger later on during Mary’s reign. Mowntayne saw Gardiner riding with the queen and her husband King Philip through Cheapside on 26 August 1555, resplendent all in scarlet, blessing bystanders as he passed:

  He was greatly laughed to scorn. Gardiner [was] sore offended … because the people did not put off their caps and make curtsey to the cross that was carried before …

  [He said] to his servants: ‘Mark that house,’ ‘Take this knave and have him …’

  Such a sort of heretics he [n]ever saw that will neither reverence the cross of Christ, no[r] yet once say so much as ‘God save the king and queen.’

  ‘I will teach them to do both, [as] I live.’4

  That night, one of Gardiner’s spies reported seeing Mowntayne watching the procession. ‘Here he fell into a great
rage, as was told to me by one of his own men, as was unseemly for a bishop, and with great speed sent for the knight marshal.’ When he arrived, Gardiner asked him how he

  handled himself in his office? Did I not send you one Mowntayne that was both a traitor and a heretic to this end that he should have suffered death? This day, the villain knave was not ashamed to stand openly in the street, looking the Prince [Philip] in the face. I would counsel you to look him up and that there be diligent search made for him this night in the city, as you will answer before the Council.

  In his book A Detection of the Devil’s Sophistry, first published in 1546, the bishop railed against the Anabaptists and the Sacramentarians who

  have with devilish pertinacity manifested their heresies, whose wilful death in obstinacy, if it could serve as an argument to prove the truth of their opinion, the truth of God’s Scripture should be brought into much perplexity.

  If such as lately suffered … there may appear tokens sufficient … to declare their zeal not to have proceeded of the spirit of God, but of arrogant pride and presumption and the spirit of the devil.5

  Later in the book, Gardiner recalls with some nostalgia the days when the realm lived in ‘faith, charity and devotion, when God’s word dwelt in men’s hearts and never came abroad to walk in men’s tongues’. Now, says the bishop scornfully, ‘jesters, railers, rhymers, players, jugglers, prattlers and simpering parrots take upon them to be the administrators and officers to set forth God’s word’. We shall see later that Gardiner did not have much patience with actors anyway, but his book was widely circulated ‘and received in many places more reverently than the blessed Bible’ amongst the still largely conservative population.

  One letter the bishop wrote later, on the evening of 11 February 1554 to Sir William Petre, graphically illustrates his ruthless and uncompromising determination to root out treason. In the immediate aftermath of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s failed uprising against Mary that month, a number of prisoners were captured and interrogated. Gardiner writes from Southwark: