This mirrors the so-called ‘unfulfilled gifts’ clause in the will that has sparked speculation that this section was drawn up later in January and inserted after the dry stamping.33 Indeed, a judicious, if not suspicious, individual may conclude that the will was not stamped until Henry was near death, or dead already. It may be, of course, that Henry, anxious to maintain his grasp on his court’s loyalties, postponed signing the will until he was too ill to physically lift a pen and write legibly. To maintain stable governance of the realm, his Councillors may have then felt impelled to wield the dry stamp themselves and backdated the will to a point when Henry would have been well enough to approve it himself. But would not the threat of a last-minute, last-gasp codicil have kept them in line?
Paget, now a loyal ally of Hertford, was ‘privy in the beginning, proceeding and ending of the will’ and is the only one who truly knew what went on during those last anxious days – and he took his secrets to the grave.
During the final month of Henry’s life, his robust spirit struggled manfully against approaching death. On some days, he seemed much better; on others, his health suffered setbacks, slowly sapping his strength and resilience. Clues to his physical and mental state come in diplomatic dispatches written by ambassadors who constantly tapped their sources at court for news of what was happening behind the closely guarded doors of the king’s Privy Chamber. Odet de Selve told the French ambassador in Flanders on 8 January that Henry had
been so ill for the past fifteen days that he was reported dead. Many people here still believe him so, seeing that whatever amendment is announced, few persons have access to his lodging and his chamber.34
Two days later, he wrote to Francis I that he had learnt
from several good quarters that the king’s health is much better … he seems to have been very ill and in great danger owing to his legs which have had to be cauterised. Neither the Queen nor the Lady Mary could see him, nor do we know that they will now do so.35
The ambassador ended with a prediction: he had ‘great reason to conjecture that whatever his health, it can only be bad and [he] will not last long’.
Poor Henry – now his legs were being cauterised, seared with hot irons by his doctors. He at least seems to have remained compos mentis until around mid-January.
Henry may still have retained a feeble hand on the tiller of state affairs. At the Privy Council at Ely Palace on 27 December, harsh things were said about the failure of the English administration in Boulogne to provide details of the strength of the garrison, food stocks and the amount of cash available to them. The king ‘marvelled not a little that they had hitherto been so remiss in neglecting so special a point, [as] these three months past, they had reported [to London] nothing touching these matters’. And two days later, the Privy Council sent a letter to the Council of the North indicating that Henry had pardoned two Sacramentarians ‘as they were now penitent’.36 Even confronting death, the king summoned energy enough to attend to the minutiae of palace life: two documents that received the dry stamp, probably in early January, were concerned with a batch of apple trees that the royal gardener, the priest Sir John de Leu, was to collect from France for the Privy Gardens.37 Knowing Henry’s dislike of talk of his mortality, perhaps he was in a state of denial.
On 17 January, Henry briefly saw the Spanish and French ambassadors, who had been warned not to tire him with lengthy conversation. This was the last time the king was seen by outsiders and he seemed ‘fairly well’ and talked of diplomacy and military issues, although at times he sought help from the attentive Paget on matters of detail. Two days later, he was reported to be planning the investiture of Edward as Prince of Wales.
As the days went by, the condition of the king, lying propped up in bed, worsened. He began to drift in and out of consciousness. There were those around him who saw this as an opportunity to grab their last chance of enrichment or advancement before his long reign ended. John Gates had already received some choice grants from the Court of Augmentations on 30 December: Keeper of Suffolk’s mansion in Southwark and Chief Steward of the lands of St Mary Overy in the same parish.38 During that pain-wracked, hazy January, the dry stamp was deployed by William Clerk on eighty-six documents, all dutifully recorded on a parchment roll of four membranes, or pages. In all cases, the stamp was used in the presence of Sir Anthony Denny and John Gates.
Amongst the documents were:
A bill to pass by Act of Parliament for the better assurance of your majesty’s grant in fee simple to Sir William Paget, chief of your majesty’s two principal secretaries, of certain lordships, manors, parks etc which the bishops of Coventry, Lichfield and Chester lately gave and rendered to your highness. (Preferred by secretary Paget.)
Gift in fee simple of the manors of Berwick, North Newton etc., Wiltshire, parcel of the late monastery of Wilton and other lands, yearly value £119 4s 9d, for Sir William Herbert [Gentleman of the Privy Chamber] who pays George Howard £800 for them.
Custody of the manors of Magna Raveley and Moynes in Upwood parish and a messuage [a dwelling house with outbuildings] with a close and pasture in Raveley, Huntingdonshire, and the lands called Goldings, Hunts and Drapers, in Ashwell, Hertfordshire, in the king’s hands by minority of William Sewster, son and heir of John Sewster esq., to William Clerk, the king’s servant.
Wardship [no name of minor given] granted to William Clerk. John Roberts, yeoman extraordinary of the privy chamber, to have the portership of the fortress of Falmouth in Cornwall which he has long exercised.39
There was also a special mandate to Wriothesley, Lord St John, Russell and Hertford to deliver the king’s consent to the Act of Attainder of Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, and Henry, late Earl of Surrey. The document was dated January, but the day of the month was left blank.40 The last document in the collection was the commission to Hertford instructing him to ‘pronounce in the Parliament House your majesty’s assent to the attainder of the Duke of Norfolk by Act of Parliament’.
At mid-morning of Thursday 27 January, Henry had received communion from his confessor (possibly John Boole41) and afterwards he was conscious enough to discuss matters of state with a few of his Councillors. But as the day wore on, it was apparent to all who saw him that he was rapidly losing his last battle with Death.
All in that silent Palace of Westminster knew full well that by law it was foul treason to predict the king’s death. Some had been brutally executed for unwisely uttering such thoughts. Outside the doors of his bedchamber, there was apprehension about what was now inevitable. Would anyone have the courage to tell the old man that his end was approaching? All still feared the king’s power to exact terrible vengeance; everyone, including his doctors, was still wary of his violent temper. They knew of his repugnance to any mention of his mortality. The dangerous duty predictably fell to Denny.
He entered the king’s silent chamber that evening and knelt quietly beside the bed. The king was conscious and stared down at him as the courtier strove to summon the courage to utter the unspeakable. Henry’s skin had probably taken on a yellow colour as a result of his condition; he may have found it difficult to breathe evenly. Denny finally warned Henry that in ‘man’s judgement you are not like to live’ and therefore exhorted him to prepare himself for death. There was a silence. Denny hurried on, urging the king to remember his sins ‘as becomes every good Christian man to do’.
The king said he believed ‘the mercy of Christ is able to pardon me all my sins, yes, though they were greater than they be’. Denny, delicately hedging around the issue of bringing in a priest to say the Last Rites, asked if Henry wanted to see ‘any learned man to confer withal and open his mind unto’. The king nodded, but, as ever, avoided taking the final decision: ‘If I had any, it should be Dr Cranmer but I will first take a little sleep. And then, as I feel myself, I will advise [you] upon on the matter.’42 These were his last known words: shortly afterwards, Henry lost the power of speech and later probably passed into a uraemic coma.43
A message was quickly dispatched by courier to Archbishop Cranmer, who was staying at his palace at Croydon. The weather was very cold that night and the frozen roads delayed his arrival at Westminster. By the time he arrived, chilled and out of breath, sometime shortly after midnight, Henry was probably still unconscious. His old friend clambered awkwardly on to the great bed and, speaking close to the king’s ear, urged him to make some sign or token that he put his trust in the mercy of Christ: a nod, a mere flicker of the eyelids or a small gesture by his hand was all that was required. There was no response in the silence apart from the laboured breathing of the dying monarch. But Cranmer grasped the king’s hand and Henry ‘did wring [it] as hard as he could’.44 All present in the room took it to be the conclusive sign that he still dwelt firmly in the faith of Christ.
Henry died shortly afterwards, probably from renal and liver failure, coupled with the effects of his obesity.45
Queen Katherine, who had returned to Westminster from Greenwich on 10 January, thus became a widow for the third time. All her jewels were sent to the Tower of London and she changed into her widow’s weeds again, acquiring special mourning jewellery, including a gold ring with a death’s head for her finger.
CHAPTER TEN
‘Dogs Should Lick His Blood’
‘He was evermore too good for us all.’
ARCHBISHOP THOMAS CRANMER, AFTER HENRY VIII’S DEATH.1
For three days, Henry’s body lay within his secret apartments in the Palace of Westminster while the power brokers in his Council fashioned the shape of the government of the new young king, Edward VI. They also debated long and hard about whether to execute Norfolk, who was doubtless still anxiously pacing up and down in his lodgings in the Tower of London, expecting, every minute, the dreaded knock on his door that would summon him to the last short walk to the scaffold. The bureaucrats also needed many days to complete the complicated arrangements for the king’s funeral, which was to be a suitably impressive affair despite the state of the royal exchequer, still only slowly recovering from the bankruptcy caused by the war in 1544–5.2
Elaborate hearses had to be constructed – not vehicles in the modern sense but temporary structures fitted with a myriad of mounted candles – beneath which the coffin would rest while Masses, diriges3 and other religious services were said. One was required for the palace chapel, another for Syon, the midway resting point on Henry’s last journey, and a third within St George’s Chapel inside Windsor Castle. Almost 33,000 yards of black cloth and 8,085 yards of black cotton had to be found and purchased from London merchants at a cost of around £12,000,4 or more than £3.2 million at today’s prices – urgency and instant demand carried the penalty of an inflated cost. These massive quantities of cloth were used to hang in the chapels and to drape the cortège, as well as to make the hooded cloaks and other apparel for the mourners and official guests at the funeral.
Between eight and nine o’clock in the evening of 2 February – the feast of Candlemas – Henry’s bulky coffin was moved to the palace chapel, escorted by the officers of his household, the esquires of the body and other noblemen and gentlemen ‘both spiritual and temporal, and placed in their degrees’ or order of precedence. The coffin was positioned beneath a hearse supported by six pillars, which was festooned with eighty-two foot-long square wax tapers, heraldic pensils (small pennons) and escutcheons of arms. At the four corners stood banners depicting saints, their images woven in fine gold thread upon damask, and over all hung a huge canopy of rich cloth of gold. In total, 1,800 lb. of wax were used to adorn the hearse. It must have been a magnificent, bright, colourful spectacle in the candlelight, made sombre only by the black cloth draping the interior of the chapel. A wooden rail surrounded the hearse, containing seats for the twelve chief mourners, led by Henry Grey, Third Marquis of Dorset. At its foot stood
an altar, covered with black velvet, adorned with all manner of plate and jewels of the vestry, upon which … there was said mass continually during the time the corpse was there remaining.5
The next day, between nine and ten in the morning, the herald Gilbert Dethicke, Norroy King of Arms,6 resplendent in his richly embroidered tabard, stood at the choir door facing the people and cried out in a loud voice:
You shall of your charity, pray for the soul of the most famous Prince, King Henry VIII, our late most gracious King and Master.7
So began a series of Requiem Masses held night and day, the clouds of incense billowing towards the chapel’s vaulted ceiling, each celebrated by three out of nine nominated bishops, all splendid in mitre and full pontifical vestments. Ironically, the irascible and devious Gardiner, only recently banned from the precincts of the Palace of Westminster during one of Henry’s last, violent explosions of temper, was to lead all the services, as he was prelate of the Order of the Garter. Daily, before each Mass, placebo8 and dirige, Norroy repeated the late king’s style of address.
Amid the mourning, Gardiner found time to write an outraged letter to Paget on 5 February, complaining about plans to stage a play by John de Vere in Southwark, to be performed by the Earl of Oxford’s actors – ‘lewd fellows’, he called them – just before Henry’s state funeral. Piously, the bishop wrote that the next day the parishioners of Southwark
and I have agreed to have solemn dirige for our late sovereign lord and master, as becomes us, and tomorrow certain players of my lord of Oxford, as they say, extend on the other side, within this borough of Southwark, to have a solemn play to try who shall have most resort, they in game or I in earnest …
I follow the common determination in sorrow till our late master be buried. And what the lewd fellows should mean in the contrary, I cannot tell or cannot reform it and therefore write to you …
I have spoken with Master Acton, justice of peace, whom the players [hold in] small regard and press him to a peremptory answer, whither he dare let them play or not.
Where unto, he answers neither yes nor no as to the playing; but as to the assembly of people in this borough, in this time, neither the burial finished nor the coronation done, he does not plead with the players until he has a commandment to the contrary.
But his ‘no’ is not much regarded, and mine less, as party to players …9
The actors’ plans were incomprehensible to the wrathful bishop, and symptomatic, he believed, of the moral decline in London, a city notoriously infected with the new evangelism. Although he still dwelt out in the cold as far as the Privy Council was concerned, no doubt they quickly discovered that he was very much in earnest and the play was cancelled.
On 7 February, more than 21,000 poor Londoners crowded into Leadenhall and the nearby churchyard of St Michael’s Cornhill, to be each handed a groat, a silver coin worth 4d (or just under £5 in twenty-first-century purchasing power) as a dole, or alms, to encourage them to pray for the king’s soul. Such was the clamorous press of the great unwashed that the distribution that day lasted from noon until six in the evening, from two separate doorways.10 The next night they got their chance to fulfil their side of the bargain: every parish church in the city kept a solemn dirige for the departed despot, with all the bells ringing a knell, followed the next day by a Requiem Mass said in all the churches of England.
Meanwhile, work was continuing on the massive gilded chariot that was to convey Henry’s body to Windsor and on a life-size effigy of the king that was to lie atop the coffin, beneath a canopy. The face was probably fashioned in wax, but the body was stuffed like a common tailor’s dummy beneath its sumptuous robes, garments specially made for the funeral. The carver responsible was almost certainly Nicholas Bellin of Modena, who had been working on Henry’s tomb, still lying partially completed at Westminster and Windsor, after components from the disgraced Cardinal Wolsey’s grandiose monument were appropriated by the king seventeen years before. The Florentine serjeant painter Antonio Toto also decorated the escutcheons bearing the king’s and other royal arms for the chariot and hearses, as he had for the
funeral of Jane Seymour on 12 November 1537.11 Joiners, blacksmiths and other artisans were hard at work constructing the chariot, the frame for its canopy of estate and the metal sockets for the fourteen banners to be fixed to its sides and ends.12
There were other important tasks to complete before the funeral could take place. An order was issued for the
clearing and mending of all the highways between Westminster and Windsor whereas the corpse should pass: and the noisome boughs cut down [on] every side [of] the way [to prevent] prejudicing of the standards, banners and bannerols.13
And where the ways were narrow, there were hedges opened [cut down] on either side so as the footmen might have free passage, without tarrying or disturbing of their orders.14
Bridges along the route were also checked in case they required repairs. At Windsor, the cortège’s destination, the route from the castle bridge to the west door of St George’s Chapel was lined with timber railings, all hung with black cloth and emblazoned with the king’s arms, to hold back the crowds of spectators. Lord Worcester, the king’s almoner, broke off from his now daily distribution of alms, given ‘to the great relief and comfort of the poor people’ at Leadenhall and at the Palace of Westminster, to arrange for two laden carts to deliver boards painted with heraldic arms to the forty-one parishes in Middlesex, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire through which the funeral procession would pass, or those near the route. His deputies also distributed dole money and torches to the priests at each church.
Concurrently, the arrangements for Edward’s coronation were also being made. On 8 and 12 February, Hertford delivered gold and gemstones from Henry’s secret jewel house at Westminster to be made into a new crown for the boy king.15 The coronation ceremonies were also redrafted ‘lest their tedious length should weary the king, being yet of tender age’.16
The Last Days of Henry VIII Page 23