Great Harry

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Just after the "Evil May Day" frightened Londoners were subjected to a second panic. The sweating sickness returned with frightening virulence, striking nearly every household and setting the church bells tolling endlessly for the dead. "In some one town half the people died," the chronicler Hall wrote, "and in some other town the third part, the sweat was so fervent and infectious."^ By August most of the country lay in dread of death, with victims being "borne to their graves in every direction," and fresh graves dug every day. But the alarm was nowhere greater than in the capital, where some were so terrified, the Venetian Chieregato observed, "that they suffered more from fear than others did from the sweat itself."^ Masters and servants joined in taking daily preventives, and in nursing those who succumbed despite them, wrapping the victims sometimes to the point of suffocation in warm clothes and blankets in an effort to prevent air from reaching their swollen armpits.

  In the royal household the king's own preventive made from sawge of vertue, herb of grace and elder leaves was employed, but to little effect. One by one the servants began to sicken and die—young Lord Grey, then an unnamed German servant, then dozens among the kitchen staff and in the stables, and finally even some of those who waited personally on the king. To save his life the royal secretary Ammonio made hasty plans to leave for the countryside with a friend. The arrangements were made; riding horses were sent for, and the two men packed their belongings and celebrated their deliverance with a hearty dinner together. Three days later Ammonio was dead of the sweat, and his relatives and fellow-churchmen were petitioning to be given the benefices left vacant by his death. ^

  Henry left London at the first sign of infection, moving from place to place with a greatly reduced household, zigzagging from one untainted village to another as the summer months passed. By fall disease had reduced his household further, and had made many in it easy marks for healers and miracle-workers of all sorts. In October a Spanish friar came to court, esteemed for his wonder-working powers as a saint. The courtiers listened eagerly as he told how he had escaped the peril of the sea in a violent storm, ordering the waves to calm and the wind to cease, "the heaven itself, at his protest, shutting its windows." Some may have availed themselves of the friar's blessings, but the king, as eager as any to find a cure, remained skeptical. After an hour's interview with the man he sent him on his way, pronouncing him to be more a friar than a saint, and returned to his hawking.^

  In November the royal servants were still dying, and in desperation

  Henry sent them all away and settled down to wait for the sweat to pass in the company of the queen, three favorite gentlemen, and the musician Memo. For the first time since the start of his reign he made no plans to spend Christmas in state. None of his palaces was free of infection, and those near London were at additional risk. In the absence of the king and cardinal—Wolsey, stricken with the sweat in August, was roaming the countryside with the remnant of his decimated household—public order had once again been menaced. The London apprentices had rioted against the foreigners a second time, and the city was in arms for its defense.^

  The approach of Christmas found Henry and his tiny retinue near Southampton, waiting anxiously for the arrival of the Flanders fleet, intending to buy their winter provisions as the goods came off the ships and before they could circulate in the disease-plagued countryside.** Bad weather delayed the fleet, and day after day passed without news of it, though there were dozens of stories of fishing boats and even galleons lost in the stormy seas. One way and another Henry and his companions came by what they needed, but it was January before they returned to London, and even then their stay was to be brief. In March Henry was startled into fear when he learned that three of the pages who slept in his chamber had been struck down suddenly, and just as suddenly died, their bodies whisked away before the sight of them could unman their master completely.^

  He took his councilors and left the capital again, finding refuge at Abingdon where, as he said, he could be at ease "where no man cometh to tell him of the death of any person, as they were wont daily." Despite the inconveniences—the lack of space, the shortage of foodstuffs and of horse meat, the difficulty of getting news from Wolsey at Westminster— the king settled in at Abingdon, with his advisers, his sister Mary, whose presence pleased him so much he urged her to stay on, and his wife, who told him in no uncertain terms what a mistake it would be to return to London. "Although she was no prophet," Katherine said, "yet she would lose her finger if some inconvenient should not ensue unto the king's person if he should at this time repass towards London."^^ Gradually, as the dying became less frequent, the routines of the court were cautiously re-established, and Henry's fear of sickness and sudden death receded out of consciousness once again.

  His fear of over-mighty courtiers, though, was growing, and in April of 1521 he struck out against the most conspicuous of them, Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham.

  High steward of England, a proud, pugnacious lord in the medieval mold, Buckingham had served Henry from the time the latter was prince of Wales. As king Henry had tolerated the duke's hot temper, his profane raillery and his open hatred of Wolsey, leaving him in possession of his vast estates—he was said to be the greatest landholder in England—and relying on him as a soldier and a stem governor of his lordship on the Welsh border.

  By 1520, however, his trust in the duke had dissolved. Wolsey had "made a good watch" on Buckingham, as the king asked, and he and his agents had learned much from the duke's servants. They told how

  Buckingham had gathered and armed fighting men, ostensibly in the name of the king but in fact to be used to overthrow him. He had bought hundreds of pounds' worth of cloth of gold and silver and silks, they said, to bribe the royal guard and ensure their support when the moment of action came. He had consulted a treasonous Carthusian monk, Nicholas Hopkins, who prophesied that the king would have no son and that Buckingham himself would one day be king. And he had the monstrous daring, so his surveyor Charles Knevet swore, to conceive of murdering the king, coming into his presence, "having upon him secretly a knife, so that when kneeling before the king he would have risen suddenly and stabbed him."^^

  For this catalogue of offenses Buckingham was seized, along with his brother-in-law Lord Abergavenny and two of the Poles. (Reginald Pole, whom the king had sent to Italy to study, was not implicated and wrote to England at once asserting his loyalty. ^2) As alarming as the duke's criminous improprieties was the public sentiment in his favor. He went to his trial under heavy guard, amid fear that he might be rescued "by reason of his numerous followers in London." Convicted of plotting to kill Henry and take the throne, he was not greeted with the jeering contempt a traitor deserved. Instead, the crowds who gathered to watch the duke on his return to the Tower found his fate distressing. His death was "universally lamented by all London," the Venetian ambassador wrote; all men grieved for him, and many wept at his execution. "Our Italians," he added, "had not the heart to see him die."^^

  The king had not the strength to watch Buckingham's death either. He was in bed with a high fever and chills, unable to eat and worried over by his physicians. It was left to Wolsey to remind him that a callous etiquette obliged him to write consoling letters to the widow and son of the man he had condemned to death, and to send drafts of these letters for the royal signature. ^^

  That the people should mourn a man accused of imagining their king's death confused and dismayed Henry, though the duke's trial had already brought to light much that was dismaying. Discontent had begun to temper the affection Henry's subjects still felt for him—discontent with his high-handed treatment of his nobles, with his choice of associates in power, with the course and nature of his rule.

  To take Buckingham's word for it—the word of a condemned man, convinced even as he spoke in his own defense that "he knew it was the king's will that he should die"—the nobles greatly resented Henry's strong mastery over them. Their ancestral place in government was being disregarded,
their ancestral prerogatives overlooked. Instead of ruling alongside the king they were overruled by him, while men of lesser rank served him in the work of governing. He "wished the nobles would break their minds," the duke complained to one of his officers, revealing the extent of their displeasure, "for few of them were contented, they were so unkindly handled." For a great aristocrat to keep his grievances silent was an intolerable humiliation. Buckingham roared out his feelings, speaking his fate: "he would rather die than be ordered as he was."^^

  What the English nobility of the 1520s saw as an affront to their

  personal status was in truth part of a shift in governmental power that had been under way for more than a generation. Ideas of honor and precedence formed in feudal times persisted, but in reality men such as Buckingham were not the prepotent lords they had once been. They still kept barrels full of suits of armor in their castles, ready to arm their fighting men as their medieval ancestors had done, but their old power was waning. Comfort and luxury more than the need for defense now determined the structure of their castles; they thought less often of enforcing their rights through warfare than of displaying their rank through fine clothes, a costly table, and splendid entertainments. And as their tastes shifted toward grandeur their incomes—derived from fixed rents in a time of rising costs—declined, enfeebling them still further and making the kind of stalwart opposition Buckingham wished for even more remote.

  Henry could not afford to take comfort from these changes, though, for he had to confront not abstract forces but arrogant, lordly men, men bred to violence whose family histories were scarred with tumult and local warfare. Provoked too far, such men could become disloyal; if they should rebel there was little enough to stand between them and their sovereign. Though he boasted to foreign envoys that he had "more money and greater force and authority" than his ancestors had ever possessed, Henry had no standing army and was not well prepared for internal lawlessness. His coastal and border fortresses were barely satisfactory, but few other royal castles were in condition to be used. Many were in ruins, their fallen walls and crumbling battlements plundered for building materials. Others, though usable to some extent, were in severe decay; only a handful were "metely strong" to resist assault. Henry could not afford to risk a baronial rebellion, and the dissatisfaction now spoken of made him uneasy.

  Angered at their displacement from power, the nobles were infuriated to see their places filled by mere "boys"—the king's minions—and other inferiors. The fees and offices that should have gone to Henry's great lords were squandered on men such as William Compton, an orphan raised at court, or the young scholars of humble family whom the king favored for their capability. Though created a nobleman of the highest rank Charles Brandon was looked on as one of these inferiors, envied for his influence and feared for his ambition. His grandiose, pinnacled mansion in Southwark gave credence to rumors that he had high hopes of the crown in right of his wife, and since his restoration to favor he had resumed his old role at Henry's side, meeting foreign visitors to court, discussing matters of state "very earnestly" with ambassadors and conducting himself as second only to Wolsey in power.

  But it was Wolsey who rankled most. Buckingham's hatred of him was so great it was at first rumored that the duke was imprisoned for plotting his assassination and not the king's.^^ The cardinal's middle-class origins were an insult to all men of rank; his aristocratic arrogance and disdain were too much for real aristocrats to bear. There was a warfare of style between Wolsey and the peers of the realm, and it was irksome that the king should favor Wolsey. Emboldened by the royal favor the cardinal

  f

  lashed out venomously at the nobles, in language preserved by another of his enemies, Henry's old tutor Skelton. "He regardeth lordes/ No more than pot shordes," Skelton wrote. He called them "doddy pates," rainbeaten beggars, ruffians and recreants.

  He hath despite and scorn

  At them that be well bom

  He rebukes them and rails

  Ye whoresons, ye vassals

  Ye knaves, ye churls' sons

  Ye ribands, not worth two plums . . .

  So Wolsey reviled the men he surpassed in pride and ostentation, galling them by his insults yet relying on his unequaled power to protect himself from their revenge. Everything about the cardinal was offensive to the nobility. He kept them waiting, refusing to see callers until they had tried three or four times to get in to see him; he thought himself the equal of royalty, and sat down to dinner with the king and queen, forcing Buckingham and Suffolk to serve him as they did their royal master. He sat in state to receive his New Year's gifts from the courtiers just as the king did, and entertained them at Hampton Court in a fashion that put their own magnificence to shame.

  Guests at the cardinal's great palace of York Place walked through eight elegant rooms to reach his audience chamber, rooms hung with tapestries and adorned with costly gifts from foreign sovereigns. In an era when sour-smelling rushes covered the floors of hovels and palaces alike Wolsey's palace of Hampton Court was furnished with sixty large damascene carpets—a gift from the Venetian Signory, made at Wolsey's demand. (After some debate the Venetians decided to satisfy the cardinal by selling the gold chain Henry had given their ambassador Giustiniani to pay for the carpets.^^) As a cardinal the sumptuary laws allowed Wolsey to serve nine courses at his banquets—even a duke was limited to seven— and his cooks and pastry chefs were regularly called upon to turn out dozens of ingenious dishes in quantities to satisfy hundreds of diners. At one feast well over four hundred guests consumed pies baked in the shape of St. Paul's Cathedral, and puddings sculpted to represent dancing courtiers, all as real-looking as a painting.

  Through this splendor Wolsey strode like one bom to wealth, his robes flowing in elegant folds to his feet, his wit flying, pressing to his nose from time to time a pomander filled with "confections against the pestilent airs" which blocked out the odors of the crowded hall.

  Embittered by the cardinal's prosperity the disappointed courtiers told stories about the hidden foulness of his life: how he had fathered a bastard son and daughter, and made the girl a nun and endowed the boy with church livings worth many thousands of pounds; how he encouraged churchmen to flagrantly abuse their vows of chastity, following his example; and how "he was the king's bawd, showing him what women were most wholesome, and best of complexions."^**

  Hatred of Wolsey was not confined to court circles. From the time he

  became cardinal, the chronicler Hall wrote, "all men almost hated him, and disdained him."^^ Rioting apprentices on the Evil May Day threatened to kill Wolsey, and in the taverns of the capital it was said that "the cardinal would destroy this realm, and set all the nobles in the king's top."^^ Merchants accused him of lending money from the royal treasury to foreigners for profit, and every unpopular act of Henry's was laid to Wolsey's charge.^'

  So profound was Wolsey's impact on the popular imagination that he began to figure in the obscure occult pronouncements the people confided to one another over their pots of ale. A brewer, so Wolsey's spies reported, claimed to "see by prophecy that a great man being bishop, should ride upon a high horse and should have as great a fall as ever had man." Another man, Thomas Gyldon, predicted in 1520 that "within this two year he the said cardinal would have the shamefullest fall that ever chanced in England," and added that he would give a hundred pounds from his own purse to see that time come soon.^^

  These and other murmurings carried hints that among Henry's subjects were some who no longer saw in him the gifted, all-powerful young king who had won glory in France and Flanders. A counter-image had arisen—of a ruler vulnerable to sinister forces, ruled by others and seemingly unable to break his dark bonds.

  "It is a wonder to see the king how he is ordered nowadays," a Lincolnshire man told a group of his fellow-townspeople, "for the cardinal and the duke of Suffolk, which the king hath brought up of nought, do rule him in all things even as they list." He was not certain of t
he source of their power, whether it arose from "necromancy, witchcraft, or policy," but others were ready to swear that both Suffolk and the cardinal trafficked in black magic. The duke, it was said, had used magic to cause the leg of his rival William Compton to become diseased, while Wolsey was rumored to worship satanic powers, "taking council of a spirit how he might continue to have the king's favor."^^ Together they "meddled with the devil, and by puissance of the said devil kept their master subject." "^

  Henry counted on the lords in the Star Chamber to take quick action to silence these rumors, but he brooded for days in his sickbed over the treachery of Buckingham, and over the perplexing problem of an heir.

  O waly, waly, gin love be bonny, A little time while it is new; But when its auld, it waxeth cauld, And fades awa like morning dew.

  By far the most disturbing of the revelations to come to hght at Buckingham's trial was that Henry's subjects were actively, vocally worried that he had no son. In 1521, twelve years into the reign, the problem of the succession was becoming acute. The queen had borne three sons, but none survived. The New Year's Boy had lived less than two months. The son bom in 1513 either was stillborn or died just after birth. And the eagerly awaited son born prematurely in 1514 was also bom dead, "to the very great grief" of a king and court hoping fervently that this time the odds would be in Katherine's favor.

  It was almost an anticlimax when in February of 1516 Katherine gave birth to a livebom daughter who instead of dying, kicked and screamed her way into healthy infancy. The baby. Princess Mary, was welcome enough—chiefly as living proof that the queen was capable of motherhood—but a daughter could not fill the need for a male heir. Katherine's physician, Ferdinand de Victoria, was paid handsomely for his part in the queen's success, yet even as they congratulated the new father Henry's subjects were thinking ahead to the possibility of a son. "Beseeching our lord to send you as much rejoicing of my lady princess, and make you as glad a father as ever was king," Mountjoy wrote to Henry, "and after this good beginning to send you many fair [children] to your grace's comfort and all your tme subjects'."^ When a month after Mary's birth Mary Brandon was delivered of a healthy son it must have pained his royal uncle to attend his christening and to give the boy his own name.