The Last Days of Henry VIII

by Hutchinson, Robert

  My lord: This shall be to advertise you that my lord your brother has this afternoon a little made me warm.

  It was fortunate we were so much distant for I suppose else I should have bitten him.

  What cause have they to fear [you] having such a wife? It is requisite for them to continually pray for a short dispatch of that hell.

  Tomorrow or else upon Saturday at afternoon about three o’clock I will see the king where I intend to utter all my choler to my lord your brother, if you do not give me advice to the contrary: for I would be loath to do anything to hinder your matter.

  I will declare unto you how my lord has used me concerning Fausterne,35 and after I shall most humbly desire to direct mine answer to him in that behalf … My lord, I beseech you send me word with speed how I shall use myself to my new brother.36

  It was a testing time for her, made worse by the insistence of precedence over her at court by Somerset’s wife. Katherine wrote to Seymour:

  How is this that through my marriage to you, the wife of your brother is treating me with contempt and presumes to go before me.

  I will never allow it, for I am Queen and shall be called so all my life and I promise you if she does again what she did yesterday I will pull her back myself.37

  Somerset was unsympathetic. He wrote to Seymour: ‘Brother, are you not my younger brother and am I not Protector? Do you not know that your wife, before she married the king, was of lower rank than my wife?’

  The next day, in the chapel either at Westminster or St James’s Palace, the Protector’s wife ‘came and thrust herself forward and sat in the Queen’s place. As soon as the Queen saw it, she could not bear it and took hold of her arm and said: “I deserve this for degrading myself from a queen to marrying the admiral.” The other ladies that were there would not allow the quarrel to go further.’

  The duchess was brimming over with fury about Katherine’s behaviour, refused to bear her train and told all and sundry about her contempt for the dowager queen:

  Did not Henry VIII marry Katherine Parr in his doting days when he brought himself so low by his lust and cruelty that no lady that stood on her honour would venture on him?

  And shall I now give place to her who in her former estate was but Latimer’s widow and is now fain to cast herself on a younger brother.

  If master admiral teaches his wife no better manners, I am she that will.38

  Aside from court jealousies and the row over ownership of her jewels, Katherine was still dutifully concerned about the welfare of her stepchildren. A letter to her from Elizabeth, written from Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, sometime in 1547 talks fondly of the queen dowager’s friendship:

  Truly I was replete with sorrow to depart from your highness, especially leaving you undoubtful of health. Although I answered little, I weighed it more deeper when you said you would warn me of all evils that you should hear of me.

  For if your grace had not a good opinion of me, you would not have offered friendship to me that way, that all men judge the contrary.

  But what may I more say than thank God for providing such friends to me; desiring God to enrich me with their long life and [grant] me grace to be in heart no less thankful to receive it than I now am glad in writing to show it.

  Although I have plenty of matter, here I will stay for I know you are not quiet to read.39

  Elizabeth, now aged thirteen, came to live with Katherine at Chelsea very soon after Henry’s death and was to spend seventeen months with her stepmother and her new husband. Therein lay great danger: the boisterous Seymour was fond of fun and games with the princess, and she, in the first flush of puberty, enjoyed his flirtations. Her governess Catherine, or ‘Cat’, Ashley later testified:

  At Chelsea, after he was married to the Queen, he would come many mornings into Lady Elizabeth’s chamber before she was ready and sometimes before she had risen and if she were up he would bid her good morrow and would ask her how she did and strike her on the back or on the buttocks familiarly …

  And if she were in bed, he would put open the curtains and make as though he would come at her and one morning he strove to have kissed her in bed.

  That one morning at Hanworth, the Queen came with him and she and the Lord Admiral tickled the Lady Elizabeth in the bed.

  Another time at Hanworth, he romped with her in the garden and cut her gown, being black cloth, into a hundred pieces, and when this deponent came up and chided Lady Elizabeth, she answered that she could not strive withal, for the Queen held her while the Lord Admiral cut her dress.40

  There is evidence that Katherine grew uneasy and angry at this flirting: ‘The Lord Admiral came sometimes [to Elizabeth’s chamber] without the Queen, which some misliked.’41 Shortly after Whitsun 1548, Katherine put her foot down and sent Elizabeth back to Cheshunt.

  Then, astonishingly, the dowager queen, at the age of around thirty-five, became pregnant. She retreated from Chelsea to her manor of Hanworth in Middlesex because of the spread of the plague. One of her letters from there, on 9 June 1548, talks of her unborn child stirring in her womb:

  I gave your little knave your blessing who like an honest man stirred apace after and before. For Mary Odell, being abed with me, had laid her hand upon my belly to feel it stir.

  It has stirred these three days every morning and evening so that I trust when you come, it will make you some pastime.

  And thus I end, bidding my sweetheart and loving husband better to fare than myself.42

  Katherine was hoping that Seymour would escort her from Hanworth to their home at Sudeley Castle, near Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, where she was planning to spend her confinement. But a threatened attack by the French fleet on Pevensey Castle, Sussex, could have summoned the admiral to duty at any time. ‘I am very sorry for the news of the Frenchmen,’ she wrote to him. ‘I pray God it not be a let [hindrance] to our journey. As soon as you know what they will do, good my lord, I beseech you to let me hear from you, for I shall not be quiet till I know.’

  Her husband replied from Westminster the same day, saying that her letter revived his spirits ‘partly for that I do perceive you be armed with patience’ but ‘chiefest, that I hear my little man doth shake his poll’, referring to the unborn child’s movements, probably of its head. Seymour had spoken to the Lord Protector about taking a leave of absence from his duties:

  I spoke to him of your going down into the country on Wednesday, who was sorry thereof, trusting that I would be here all tomorrow to hear what the Frenchmen will do.

  And on Monday dinner, I trust to be with you. As for the Frenchmen, I have no mistrust that they shall be any let of my going with you on this journey or of any continuance [at Sudeley] there with your highness.43

  He adds: ‘I do desire your highness to keep the little knave so lean and gaunt with your good diet and walking, that he may be so small that he may creep out of a mouse hole.’ Seymour took his wife and Lady Jane Grey – the young daughter of the Marquis of Dorset and Seymour’s ward – to Sudeley on 13 June, for the last three months of Katherine’s pregnancy. She was clearly having a difficult time. Elizabeth wrote to Katherine as her confinement drew near:

  Although your highness’s letters be most joyful to me in absence, yet considering what pain it is for you to write, your grace being so great with child and so sickly …

  I much rejoice at your health, with the well liking of the country, with my humble thanks that your grace wished me with you … [Seymour] shall be diligent to give me knowledge from time to time how his busy child doth and if I were at his birth, no doubt I would see him beaten for the trouble he hath put to you.

  Master [Sir Anthony] Denny and my lady [his wife, Joan] with humble thanks pray most entirely for your grace, praying the almighty God to send you a most lucky deliverance …

  Written, with very little leisure, this last day of July.

  Your humble daughter, Elizabeth.44

  Mary also wrote, rather stiffly, on 9 August:

 
I trust to hear great success of your grace’s great belly and in the meantime shall desire much to hear of your health, which I pray almighty God to continue and increase to his pleasure as much as your own heart can desire.45

  Katherine, attended by Henry’s former physician Dr Robert Huicke, gave birth to a healthy daughter on 30 August. She was named Mary, after the princess, her stepsister. Seymour’s brother, the Lord Protector, wrote to congratulate him from Syon on 1 September:

  We are right glad to understand by your letters that the Queen your bedfellow has had a happy hour and escaping all danger, has made you the father of so pretty a daughter.

  Although (if it so pleased God) it would have been both to us and we suppose to you, a more joy and comfort if it had been this the first a son, yet the escape of danger and the prophecy and good promise of this to a great sort of happy sons, the which as you write, we trust no less than to be true.46

  But all was not well. Like Jane Seymour, Katherine contracted an infection and became delirious. She died of puerperal fever between two and three in the morning of 5 September 1548. Lady Elizabeth Tyrwhit said that two days before her death, Katherine told her that ‘she did fear such things in herself’ and ‘that she was sure she could not live’. Katherine had held Seymour’s hand and said: ‘My lady Tyrwhitt, I am not well handled, for those that be about me care not for me, but stand laughing at my grief and the more good I will them, the less good they will to me.’ The admiral answered: ‘Why sweetheart, I would do you no hurt.’ But she replied: ‘No, my lord, I think so,’ and whispered in his ear, ‘But my lord, you have given me many shrewd taunts.’ She went on: ‘My lord, I would have given a thousand marks to have had my full talk with Huicke the first day I was delivered but I dared not for [fear of] displeasing you.’47

  Although sounding sinister, these are likely to be the murmurings of a woman in delirium. She recovered her reason to dictate her will, ‘being persuaded of the approach of death’, leaving everything to her husband. It remained unsigned but was attested as a true record of her wishes by her doctor, Huicke, and her chaplain, John Parkhurst.

  Seymour was devastated. He told the Marquis of Dorset that he was ‘so amazed [by] my great loss’ that he would break up and dissolve ‘my whole house’.48 But it was not long before he saw an end to his grief and his ambitions remained unchecked. In January 1549, Pigott, his servant, told his sister that he had overheard the admiral saying that ‘he would wear black for a year and then knew where to have a wife’.49

  In May 1782, Katherine’s grave was found by one of those strange parties of eighteenth-century tourists, part day-trippers, part antiquarians, always with an active morbid curiosity. Some ladies were examining Sudeley Castle’s ruined chapel of St Mary,50 then used to house rabbits, and after noting a large alabaster slab fixed in the north wall, they began digging in the ground not far away:

  Not much more than a foot from the surface, they found a leaden envelope51 which they opened in two places, on the face and breast, and found it to contain a human body wrapped in cerecloth.

  Upon removing what covered the face, they discovered the features and particularly the eyes in perfect preservation.

  Alarmed at this sight and with the smell, which came principally from the cerecloth, they ordered the ground to be thrown in immediately without judiciously closing up the cerecloth and lead, which covered the face.52

  Written on a label attached to the lead coffin was an inscription identifying the body within: Katherine – ‘wife to King Henry the VIII and the wife of Thomas Lord of Sudeley, high admiral of England and uncle to King Edward VI’. Two years later, another party disturbed her remains and found that decomposition had ‘reduced the face to bone’. In 1786, an antiquary recovered samples of the clothes worn by the corpse, its hair and a tooth, which are preserved still at Sudeley Castle. The queen was reburied in a new monument, including a life-size effigy of her, designed by that architect of high Victorian gothic taste, Sir George Gilbert Scott, in 1863.53

  Katherine’s daughter Mary went to live with her mother’s old friend and lady-in-waiting, Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, but died probably before the age of two.

  Just over a month after being chief mourner at Katherine’s funeral,54 Lady Jane Grey, then a child of eleven, wrote a letter in her careful handwriting to the Lord Admiral:

  Thinking myself so much bound to your lordship for your great goodness towards me from time to time, that I cannot by any means be able to recompense the least part thereof, I purposed to write a few rude words to your lordship rather as a token to show how much worth I think your lordship’s goodness than to give worthy thanks for the same.

  These my letters shall testify to you that like as you have become towards me a loving and kind father, so I shall be always most ready to obey your godly monitions and good instructions as becomes one upon whom you have heaped so many benefits.55

  Thomas Seymour, always jealous of his brother, the Protector, had long nourished plans to snatch power and control the king. He had tried to win influence by giving Edward presents and pocket money. In addition, he had other grievances against Somerset. The admiral showed his brother-in-law William Parr, Marquis of Northampton, ‘the suits to the Protector touching the Queen’s servants, jewels and other things which he claimed to be hers’.56 All these had been denied her since Henry’s death. He also harboured dreams of marrying one of the two princesses, ideas firmly quashed by members of the Privy Council. He was, as in most things, rather obvious, and was arrested on 17 January 1549 for treason. Rumours swept London about what had happened. The Spanish ambassador van der Delft reported to his imperial master on 27 January:

  Sire, I have heard that the Admiral of England, with the help of some people about the court, attempted to outrage the person of the young king by night and has been taken to the Tower.

  The alarm was given by the gentleman who sleeps in the king’s chamber, who awakened by the barking of the dog that lies before the king’s door, cried out: ‘Help! Murder!’

  Everybody rushed in but the only thing they found was the lifeless corpse of the dog.

  Suspicion points to the Admiral because he had scattered the watch that night on several errands and because it has been noticed that he has some secret plot on hand, hoping to marry … the lady Elizabeth who is also under grave suspicion.57

  John Fowler, Groom of the Privy Chamber, told the Council how, early one morning, Seymour had arrived at St James’s Palace and was surprised at the lack of guards there. He said there was ‘slender company about the king’ – no one in the presence chamber and ‘not a dozen in the whole house. A man might steal away the king now for I came with more men than is in all the house besides’.58

  Paget told van der Delft later: ‘He [Seymour] has been a great rascal,’59 which may serve as a suitable epitaph on his life. Somerset signed his brother’s death warrant and the admiral was executed on 20 March 1549.

  Elizabeth had been unwittingly dragged into Seymour’s plot and was now facing some embarrassing questions. She wrote in her careful, clear hand to Somerset that she had never contemplated marriage ‘without the Council’s consent thereto’. Moreover, she had heard that there were

  rumours abroad which be greatly both against my honour and honesty which above all other things I esteem, which be these that I am in the Tower and with child by my Lord Admiral.

  Elizabeth ends:

  My Lord, these are shameful slanders for the which besides the great desire I have to see the king’s majesty, I shall most heartily desire your lordship that I may come to the court after your first determination that I may show myself there as I am. Written in haste from Hatfield, this 28 of January. Your assured friend to my little power, Elizabeth.60

  Somerset himself was toppled from power after openly quarrelling with his old ally John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. His influence and authority had also been damaged by his brother’s disgrace. In the government crisis of 1549, when rebellions broke o
ut in the West, East Anglia and the Midlands and were threatened elsewhere, Somerset had acted hesitantly and incompetently. On 6 October, he had moved the king for his safety to Windsor Castle, but his colleagues in the Council in London arrested him on 14 October and he confessed to twenty-nine charges on 24 October. He was released in February 1550, freely pardoned and restored to membership of the Privy Council on 10 April, only to be arrested again in October 1551 on trumped-up charges of high treason and felony. He was convicted only of felony (for inciting a riot) but none the less was executed on 22 January 1552. The king, in his personal chronicle, recorded his uncle’s death merely as: ‘The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill between eight and nine o’clock in the morning.’

  The energetic Warwick, later created Duke of Northumberland, had triumphed in the power struggle for control of king and realm, becoming president of Edward’s Council. When the king fell ill, probably with tuberculosis, in the early summer of 1553, the prospect of staunchly Catholic Mary succeeding loomed large in his and other Protestant minds. The king, sometime in early April, drew up his plan for the succession, which excluded both his half-sisters, who had been laid down as his successors by the Third Act of Succession passed in Henry VIII’s reign. Edward’s document created a brand-new succession path, beginning with the male heirs of Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, daughter of Mary, Henry’s younger sister. It continued with the male heirs of Frances’ daughters, Jane, Catherine and Mary Grey. The major problem was that none had any sons when Edward’s ‘devise for the succession’ was written.61 The solution for the Privy Councillors was easy: to make the succession far more viable by ensuring that it went directly to Lady Jane Grey and her male heirs. The alteration was open and above board: the judges, led by Lord Chief Justice Montague, were asked to deploy their legal brains on the issues raised. Unsurprisingly, they declined to become involved ‘for the danger of treason’ and Northumberland