There are conflicting reports from Chapuys and a Privy Chamber groom as to how magnificent the ceremony truly was. The Imperial Ambassador could always be counted upon to discount any recognition of the Queen and described the event to his master in Spain as uncomfortable, against God, and lacking in true regal presence. By contrast, a member of court detailed the elaborate liveries of the servants, along with the beautiful dresses of the ladies. For a group that may not have wanted to attend, this collection of nobles had certainly brought out their absolute best attire for the occasion. Chapuys did concede that the number of attendees was far larger than for the christening of the Princess Elizabeth. This would be the single highest compliment, as it was all that the Ambassador could muster.
If the festivities truly were smaller than might have been expected, it is just as likely that this was a deliberate decision by the King, who quickly grew to be highly protective of his heir. While the people lined the streets and additional security was deployed, inside the church was even more tightly controlled. After the sweating sickness outbreak, Henry had developed an unhealthy paranoia of all things resembling illness or filth, and demanded that a strict ceiling be put on the number of people permitted in the Prince’s presence, to reduce the likelihood of illness to the Prince’s person.
Although there was only an elementary understanding of the connection between cleanliness and illness, Henry would take no chances and ordered that the Prince’s undergarments be disposed of after a single use, preferring that anything resembling filth be kept away from the precious youth. The servants had never seen anything like it before, but after all, Henry was a new father and he wanted to take every precaution possible to ensure that the heir to the Tudor line had the very best care he could find.
To ensure the health of his son, every possible consideration was given to the Prince’s care. He ordered that only those persons whom he had selected could attend the boy, and that his chambers be scrubbed three times a day. Those who cared for the Prince directly had to be of outstanding moral character. His majesty would take no chances on any immoral persons influencing his son’s character. He also decreed that no person below the rank of knight could wait on the young Prince at any time. It was nothing strange for infants not to survive past a few weeks and, having had painful personal experience with this, Henry left nothing to chance.
Ironically, emphasis on apparent cleanliness while not understanding the germ theory of disease, led to some increased risk factors for the Prince. All servants and dinnerware that the Prince would touch would also be of the highest standards of cleanliness, but it is documented that servants ministering to the child were so often forced to scrub their hands, and so hard, that their skin would be raw, sore, and often covered with blisters, making them potentially more susceptible to infections that might be passed on before manifesting direct symptoms. Should the King be notified that servants waiting upon the Prince had this condition they were immediately replaced.
Outer garments could not be so easily disposed of, or so vigorously boiled and washed before re-use, because they often incorporated hand sewn pearls, diamonds and incredibly delicate lace that could be easily destroyed. Nevertheless, Anne would often order that a garment be sealed away after a single wearing, justifying the extravagance as making an excellent display for the people to see, and a source of income as well, as the King’s subjects would pay handsomely to see these garments.
In a sense, Anne displayed great ingenuity in charging to see the Prince’s attire. This was the first such example of profiting from one’s celebrity. She had managed to create a public museum requiring an admission cost of two ducats. The money went into the royal coffers but, surprisingly, thousands lined up to see the Prince’s fine garments. People came from all over the kingdom to see his attire. Anne had not witnessed anything like it and it gave her a far broader idea.
Henry on the other hand, had apparently been validated by God with the Prince’s birth. Suddenly, all the turmoil and all the labor that taking Anne as his wife had required seemed worth the sacrifices; the victory boosted his own sense of self and gave him greater serenity and confidence in the correctness of his decisions. Another element of Henry’s personality that had changed with this birth was that he found himself growing closer to God.
The King would spend long hours talking to the Prince, holding him, reading to him and telling him of the great King he would someday become. Servants would often catch him retelling the story of Henry V’s Battle at Agincourt, while the Prince’s little eyes just intently focused on Henry as he spoke. He relished every aspect of his new healthy son. It could be argued that, at least for a time, Henry’s son mellowed his vibrant personality and allowed him to revel in a good cheer at court, the like of which had not been seen since the very early part of his reign.
Anne recovered quickly and into perfect health. She was released from churching at the end of July, a full ten days ahead of schedule. This could have been due to having begun her “lying in” over a month in advance, though there are no records to prove or disprove that this was the case. Now that the Prince was born, she too was far more relaxed than at any time before. On July 16th, 1536, the Prince gained his own household, with the same Governess Lady Bryan, as his sister. He would join Elizabeth at Hatfield to be watched after and so that the two could grow up together; this was mostly at Anne’s intense insistence, which the couple fought over.
3.4… Portents of Danger
Henry’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy, who had been suffering from consumption for several months, finally died at St. James Palace in early July 1536. His titles, revenues and all estates reverted back to the crown, including the Dukedom of Somerset. His death was covered up with unusual speed and Norfolk buried him at Framlingham Church in Suffolk, attended by only two witnesses. According to contemporary accounts, the King had ordered the Duke of Norfolk to dispose of the body as soon as possible. When Norfolk returned to tell his majesty that he had done his bidding, the King became overcome by grief.
Never again was the name Henry Fitzroy spoken in the King’s reign. He was all but forgotten, except of course by his mother Elizabeth (Bessie) Blount, who retired to the country mourning the loss of her only son. The expediency and lack of public announcement on the death was particularly strange, especially considering that the King at one point had groomed Fitzroy as heir apparent. Conspiracies surrounding the nature of his death and what some believe were its cover-up still continues today, with no conclusive evidence to set the record straight.
As recognition for Anne having fulfilled her Queenly duty, Henry bestowed upon her St. James Castle, with an increase in her salary to the equivalent of a million pounds a year in current prices. Prince Henry was given the titles of Duke of Richmond and Duke of Somerset, along with a handsome sum of 500,000 pounds a year until his sixth birthday, at which point the sum would be doubled. Lord Rochford was given the Earldom of Hartford and Viscount Rochford received the additional title of Viscount Lisle. For all of Cromwell’s efforts he too was advanced, elevated to peerage as the Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon, on July 8th, 1536. Not all nobles were so delighted. Many of the courtiers while claiming to be reformers remained secret Catholics and were still loyal to the Lady Mary. The constant advancement of the Boleyn’s further aggravated them and spurred some to devise means of retaliating.
At the end of July, royal messengers received dispatches back from Europe. Francis I ordered bells rang at the time of birth, free wine for those in Paris and Calais, and sent cloth of gold along with plate and jewels for the new royal addition. Further, he sent a personal message to Henry congratulating his fellow brother on such a fine delivery. This was a genuine message of warmth and acceptance that appealed to Henry on various emotional and diplomatic levels and once again affirmed France as an ally. Germany, Portugal, and the Netherlands sent equally warm messages to Henry with gifts of gold plates, jewels, cloth of gol
d and silk from the East, spices from the Indies, and countless other rare treasures to celebrate the good news.
Spain was less celebratory, being that in her eyes the child was a bastard and not recognized by the Catholic Church in Rome as a legitimate heir to a renegade kingdom. Nonetheless, for the sake of political amity and keeping relations cool to avoid warfare, Charles V sent a standard message of congratulations—far less warm than Francis had been—and sent a single gold cup engraved with the Prince’s title, date of birth, and encrusted with jewels. Anne too was delighted to receive it, knowing, it was sent with regret. With Henry’s permission, she had the cup melted down and made into a gold necklace engraved with her logo “the most happy.” While less than the flamboyant gestures made by the French, Henry accepted the Spanish tribute graciously, as England was not equipped to do battle with the Holy Roman Empire, certainly not with the Emperor, who was flush with wealth and power from its conquest of the New World.
The Italian city-states were cordial, but distant, mostly due to pressure from the Vatican, which lobbied staunchly against any form of recognition for this “bastard child of the great whore.” As far as Rome was concerned, Henry was undone and not entitled to rule his own kingdom. For months, the Pope had been attempting to lure both France and Spain, the two most powerful militaries of the time, to invade and conquer England, returning its allegiance to Rome. Neither had any real inclination to do so, they both had their own internal squabbles to be concerned with.
Henry, conflicted at the mixed messages he was receiving from Spain and Italy, convened a Privy Council session to review the perceived slights. The Council judged that the gestures were not slights to the Prince, but rather, were responses to the status of the controversy over the Church of England. Recognizing that the difficulties of the new church had been bound to reverberate, but would not eventually bar his son from claiming the throne, Henry calmed in his anger. Meanwhile, Anne continued to advise her King in private and accepted the perceived public slights in exchange for growing private influence. In return for her loyalty, and still grateful to her for having borne a new Tudor king, Henry would come to rely upon her advice even more.
Chapter 4
Religion in England
The fading feudal system, invention of the printing press, and the growth in literacy that attended the latter, led to the spread of religious reformism to an entirely new class of people who would go on to become the primary sponsors of reform. These significant changes led to an evolution of society that was preparing the groundwork for a new age, leaving behind the long interregnum following the fall of the Roman Empire. Socially, culturally, economically, and politically, Europe was coming into an age of rebirth, or Renaissance; the power of the secular state was poised to rise and challenge the order maintained for 15 centuries by the Roman Church. What could not have been predicted was that this challenger would be a former “spare” to the throne, who had himself once been destined for life as a churchman.
4.1 Auditing the Church
As part of Henry’s efforts to come to terms with the true scope of the power and wealth of the Church, and thus to plan on how to become its master, came the Valor Ecclesiastes. The Valor, a massive survey—or audit—of all the religious houses in England, and parts of Ireland and Wales, was instituted after Cromwell had been presented with evidence concerning the monasteries’ corruption. Spanning the entire country, the purpose of this work was to truly understand the status of each monastery, both in terms of finances and whether or not they had embraced the reformation by recognizing the King as the Supreme Head of the Church. It would also allow the crown to determine how to proceed with additional administrative duties to complete the reformation. Henry authorized Cromwell to compile the—beautifully illustrated and bound—Valor Ecclesiastes in 1535.
The commissioners sent to do this assessment were unpaid agents of the crown, but they worked diligently to carry out their mission in only five months. The amount of information needed for these reports required that the commissioners be heavily dependent upon the local sheriffs, mayors, and other magistrates, who actually did the work of acquiring the data and passing it back through the commissioners. Those who appeared suspicious based on the reports found themselves visited either by Cromwell himself, or by his lead agents. These agents, Thomas Legh, John Price, and Richard Layton as the principal administrator, were hand selected by Cromwell for having proved themselves loyal to the new regime. Doubtless, the reports were not free from political and personal biases.
Richard Layton had diligently served Cromwell in the trial of Sir Thomas More by presenting questionable evidence for the state after interrogating both More and Bishop Fisher. Layton also served in multiple religious offices prior to his service in compiling the Valor, including the post of Chaplain of St. Peters, Dean of York, and Archdeacon of Buckingham. He also recommended Thomas Legh to Cromwell for the canvass. Legh was a highly respected, secular lawyer, who had represented Henry in his divorce suit. Along with Legh came John Prise, who worked directly for Cromwell and had served as Registrar of Salisbury Cathedral. A respected scholar with published historical volumes of King Arthur, he was well known at court for his literary efforts. These men held offices of theological vestments, but their works and beliefs were mostly secular. Perhaps this trio saw the value of serving the government in any capacity they could, be it for honest or manipulative purposes.
The construction of this survey also came to play a role in the continuing division between the Boleyn faction and Cromwell. Viscount Rochford was insulted that Cromwell did not consult him for his assistance in the survey and held it against him thereafter. George felt that he had made a great asset to the cause and was eager to begin surveying the King’s lands, only to be refused by Cromwell. This decision was not without good reason, as Cromwell believed that far too many common people knew George’s face, and thus that George’s very presence would lead people to tailor their testimony. Nevertheless, George refused to relent and was further embittered by being passed over.
As the commissioners visited the monasteries, they found the sheer amount of wealth astounding. It was long thought, since the largest monasteries were established in the 12th and 13th centuries, that these institutions were powerful and had amassed great treasures; however, the scale of the treasure was remarkable. Marble statues of the Virgin Mary and the Apostles, solid gold crucifixes encrusted with rubies and emeralds, and rare pearl rosaries were just a few of the precious items cataloged. The treasures were worth many millions of pounds.
More troubling from the standpoint of the King and his men was that this wealth was insulated from the royal—national—treasury, and instead fed Rome. All men of the cloth paid dues to the Holy See to retain their titles, and these were inevitably monies raised in, and then diverted from, England. Alleged miracles were touted and holy reliquaries were paraded—even supposed bones of the Virgin Mary herself, which were found to be the bones of a former nun—all for profit. Naturally, there was also the raising of monies by means of that especially unpopular practice, the selling of indulgences. This money was kept on hand to splendidly decorate the Vatican and palaces of higher clergy with beautiful frescos, paintings, tapestries and magnificent sculptures and busts, including those of the Popes, Cardinals and Bishops, themselves. Even more shocking than the avarice seemingly at play in the church, was the prevalence of sins of the flesh, as well. Some religious houses displayed such licentiousness that nuns were pregnant, and monks and Priests held wives, mistresses, and quite often illegitimate children.
Not all of the 372 religious houses surveyed held to such vile standards. Some were in full compliance of the law and lived modestly and humbly, especially in the north where poverty and illiteracy were rampant. Regardless, Cranmer and Cromwell magnified the actions of the inappropriate houses to the King, leaving the suggestion that all almost all houses were living in greed and depravity. They advised the Kin
g to shut down these monasteries and immediately convert their assets and treasures into the King’s exchequer. It was all part of Cromwell’s grand scheme to make Henry the wealthiest King in all of England’s history.
When the results of the Valor came out both the King and Queen were given beautifully illustrated copies that they both thoroughly combed through. Anne’s careful review of Cromwell’s suppressions and the results of the Valor led her to a central belief that Cromwell intentionally closed and converted even houses with excellent reports out of sheer greed. She was livid. After learning about the minister’s activities, the Queen confronted Cromwell to understand why these houses were closed and to decide the course of action for those religious houses that were to be suppressed. This meeting did not go well and was quite awkward. Cromwell was highly cautious in his speech towards the Queen and Anne was careful to listen to his every word for any hint of disrespect.
She told Cromwell of her and Henry’s plans to reform certain houses to become educational and humanitarian trusts, despite his efforts to the contrary. Cromwell did his best to reassure her that he had no intention to yield her plans, which was a direct lie, but he had to save face. She further let him know that she knew well of “his affairs and would be in touch.” This mysterious comment has never been fully explained and it is highly doubtful that Cromwell understood its meaning to be anything but a veiled threat that the Queen was keeping her eyes on the minister, another indication that their relationship was far beyond repair.
Had the Queen Lived: Page 10