Lamentation

by C. J. Sansom

  AND SO TO MY ATTEMPT at an interpretation of the plot against Catherine Parr (I think there was only one, not two as has sometimes been suggested, and it spanned several months). Recent historical work by Susan James, Linda Porter and Janel Mueller – has given us a much clearer picture of Catherine. She was an attractive, sophisticated woman who had spent her life on the fringes of the court (the Parr family were minor players in the royal household during her childhood) and would have known the King for years. After the death of her second husband, Lord Latimer, she herself later wrote to Thomas Seymour that she had wished to marry him, but the King had set his sights on her. Thus, she believed, she was called by God to marry Henry, and she meant to, surely, in order to influence his religious policy so far as she could. Her letter indicates she was already a reformist sympathizer when she married Henry.

  Catherine, who had great style, was an extremely successful and sophisticated performer of the visible and ceremonial aspects of Queen Consort, including the entertainment of foreign ambassadors. She was also, it seems, a very sympathetic personality; loyal and trustworthy and, one detects, with a sense of humour.

  Unlike most Tudor women, Catherine had received a good education from her mother, Lady Maud Parr. She learned Latin as a girl; it became rusty, but she picked it up again when she became Queen. She also studied other languages – in the last months of Henry’s reign she was learning Spanish, a useful language then for diplomacy. She had a wide range of interests, collecting clocks and coins, and was clearly drawn to scholarship. Her intelligence, while very considerable, seems to have been broad rather than of great depth and focus – in that, she resembled Henry.

  Religious influences on Catherine before her marriage to the King in 1543 were contradictory; her brother, Sir William Parr, her uncle Lord William Parr (following the early death of her father, the principal male influence on the family), and her sister and brother-in-law Anne and Sir William Herbert, were all reformist sympathizers. Her mother Lady Maud Parr, however, had been a lady-in-waiting and friend to Catherine of Aragon, but she died in 1529 before Henry expelled his first wife from the royal household. The Boroughs, the family of Catherine’s first husband, were reformist sympathizers, but her second husband, Lord Latimer (her marriage to whom appears to have been happy), was a traditionalist. However, her later letter to Thomas Seymour seems to me to indicate she was already travelling a reformist path by 1543. She was to journey further.

  CATHERINE PARR WAS NOT, nor would she have claimed to be, a serious theologian. Her little book Prayers and Meditations, published in 1545, is quite orthodox. The Lamentation of a Sinner, however, probably written over the winter of 1545–6, shows a writer passionate about salvation, which could only be found through reading the Bible and ultimately through faith in Christ. Confessional writings in this vein were common at the time, though not from an English Queen.

  Catherine tells of how her own love of the world’s pleasures blinded her for a long time to God’s grace, before she succumbed to Him. She writes with the fiercely self-critical religiosity of similar contemporary ‘confessions’ and ‘lamentations’. There is enough in the Lamentation to ground suspicion of her among traditionalists, because of her belief in salvation coming through a personal relationship with Christ, and study of the Bible, rather than through the practices of the official church. However – and this is vital – the Lamentation says nothing at all about, or against, the Mass.

  Writing it at all was risky, although in the winter of 1545–6 Henry had taken a new and radical step against the old religion in appropriating the chantries, where Masses were said for the dead, although this move was probably motivated primarily by his desire to get hold of some much-needed money – their endowments were large. But in the early months of 1546 Catherine’s caution seems to have quite deserted her in her public association with reformers and, according to Foxe, in openly arguing religion with the King.

  ACCORDING TO FOXE, ‘In the time of his sickness, he (Henry) had left his accustomed manner of coming, and visiting his Queen: and therefore she would come to visit him, either after dinner or after supper.’ This surely dates this part of the story to March–April 1546 (though most authorities put it months later); as this was the only period before the autumn when Henry was so seriously indisposed. Foxe tells us that Catherine took to lecturing the King on religion, and one night was careless enough to do so in the presence of Bishop Stephen Gardiner, the leading conservative, who, again in that crucial month of March, had returned from a long foreign embassy and quickly gained the King’s ear. Gardiner, according to Foxe, subsequently told the King:

  . . . how dangerous and perilous a matter it is, and ever hath been, for a Prince to suffer such insolent words at his subjects’ hands: the religion by the Queen, so stiffly maintained, did not only disallow and dissolve the policy and politic government of Princes, but also taught the people that all things ought to be in common; so that what colour soever they pretended, their opinions were indeed so odious, and to the Princes estates so perilous . . . (that they) by law deserved death.

  Then, according to Foxe, Gardiner persuaded the King to begin an investigation into radical religion, in the Queen’s household as well as elsewhere – having frightened Henry, among other things, with the mention of people who wished to hold all goods in common, in other words the Anabaptist creed, although Catherine’s (and indeed Foxe’s) beliefs were very far from Anabaptism.

  If I am right and this happened in March–April when the King was convalescing, that fits with the records of arrests and enquiries which began in April and went on till July. But why, some have asked, should the religious conservatives focus on Queen Catherine Parr? It seems to me that she was the obvious target – she was the centre of a group of highborn ladies who, certainly during Lent in 1546, met together to hear sermons and discuss religion. They included her sister Anne (wife of Sir William Herbert), Lady Denny (wife of the chief gentleman of Henry’s household, Sir Anthony Denny) and potentially most important of all, Anne Stanhope, wife of Lord Hertford. If heresy was proved against Catherine, not only would Henry’s sense of betrayal by a woman he still loved be terrible (there is no evidence at all that he wanted rid of Catherine Parr in 1546, rather the reverse), but likely all the women in her circle would fall too, and with them, crucially, their husbands. Catherine Parr, therefore, was the keystone in the arch; knock her out and the whole reformist edifice faced total collapse.

  The heresy hunt went on for three months. The spring and early summer of 1546 must have been a desperate time for Catherine, but she seems to have maintained her composure and behaved calmly throughout. Everyone in her circle seems to have stuck loyally together; though this is hardly surprising – if one fell, all fell. It is possible that searches took place within the Queen’s household, and certainly she gave some books (which may have included Lamentation of a Sinner) to her uncle Lord Parr for safekeeping in April.

  By July nothing had been found against her. By then the questioning of suspects seems to have been largely over. No evidence had been discovered against anyone within the circle of the court except for Henry’s courtier and friend George Blagge, and nobody from within the Queen’s circle. If Thomas Wriothesley and Richard Rich were actively seeking out heretics on behalf of Bishop Gardiner (and possibly, behind the scenes, the Duke of Norfolk), by July they must have been getting desperate.

  THEN, IN LATE JUNE and early July came the extraordinary and gruesome story of Anne Askew, whose memoir, the Examinations of Anne Askew, was smuggled out to Flanders, and published the next year by John Bale. Anne Askew, or to use her married name, Anne Kyme, was the wife of a Lincolnshire gentleman. She was aged around 25. By the standards of the time, her behaviour was extraordinary. A radical Protestant who had openly denied the Real Presence in the Mass, she left her husband, a religious conservative, and their two children to come to London and preach in 1545. She had relatives there, certainly a cousin, and distant connections to low-ranki
ng courtiers. Soon she was brought before the Common Council of London, where she denied she was a heretic. Nonetheless, a year later she was back, and this time, although her initial technique in argument was to hedge, she eventually admitted enough to be found guilty of heresy. She refused to recant, and having been brought before the Privy Council and questioned by Gardiner, among others, she was convicted at the end of June and sentenced to be publicly burned, along with three men, on the 16th of July.

  There is no evidence that Catherine Parr and Anne Askew ever met or corresponded. They may have had acquaintances in common, but again that is not surprising given the small size of the Tudor elite. Once condemned, according to law, Anne should have been held in prison until her execution. However, at the beginning of July she was sent to the Tower, where, according to her memoir, she was questioned again by Rich and Wriothesley; this time specifically about her links to women in Catherine Parr’s household. Not only was she questioned, she was tortured by Rich and Wriothesley personally, to the horror of the Lieutenant of the Tower, who was present. Asked specifically about her links to ladies in Queen Catherine’s circle, Anne admitted she had had gifts of money from men who claimed to be servants of the Duchess of Suffolk and Lady Hertford, but denied any direct links to them or the Queen. It was not illegal to bring prisoners money to buy food; in fact these donations were necessary to keep them alive.

  There seems no reason to doubt Anne Askew’s story; Rich and Wriothesley’s behaviour has all the hallmarks of a last, desperate effort by the religious conservatives to find some evidence damaging to the Queen. Desperate indeed, for torture of a person already convicted – and a woman from the gentlemanly classes – was not only illegal but scandalous; even more so when Wriothesley – as Lord Chancellor, the most senior law officer in England – had himself turned the rack. It was too extreme for the Tower Lieutenant, who promptly went off and told the King, who was horrified. It has been suggested the King himself may have secretly ordered the torture, but there is no evidence to support this accusation one way or the other. It seems more likely to me that Henry was genuinely angered at this attempt to torture someone into providing accusations against the Queen when months of enquiry had failed to find anything credible.

  Henry was, by now, already angry with the conservatives. He said that in arresting the courtier George Blagge they had come ‘too close to his person’ and Blagge was pardoned. Given this move, the scale of the King’s anger at those who had tried to torture Anne Askew into providing something harmful to the Queen can only be imagined.

  IN FOXE’S ACCOUNT, there was a second plot against Catherine, involving a warrant being issued for the Queen’s arrest, a copy of which, however, was conveniently dropped where it would fall into her hands. This event has been convincingly dated by Dakota Hamilton and others to July 1546. According to Foxe, Catherine’s response was to rush to the King and persuade him that she had never intended to lecture him on religion, only to engage his mind to distract him from the pain in his legs. Again according to Foxe, the gambit succeeded. Henry accepted Catherine’s submission, and Lord Chancellor Wriothesley, when he arrived with the warrant to arrest the Queen the next day, was insulted and beaten about the head by Henry and ordered from his presence – in other words, completely and publicly humiliated.

  This has, to me, the flavour of a deliberate ruse by the King, rather than a spontaneous sequence of events as reported to Foxe by two survivors from Catherine’s ladies (though it may have looked genuine to them). To begin with, it is hard to guess the legal grounds on which Catherine could have been arrested in July, since extensive enquiries about her and her ladies had revealed nothing at all. If Henry had actually wanted to dispose of her, he could easily have manufactured something, as he did when he wanted to rid himself of Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell, and was soon to do again with the Duke of Norfolk.

  It is worth noting in this context that three years before, when Archbishop Cranmer had been the subject of accusations of heresy by Gardiner, the King had turned the tables on the conservatives in a very similar manner, agreeing that Cranmer should be called before the Privy Council, but giving him his ring beforehand to show to the council as proof he still had the King’s support. The outcome was that a commission to investigate Cranmer was appointed, but headed by Cranmer himself! This tactic had the benefit of humiliating one party (in both cases the religious conservatives) while reminding the other (first Cranmer, then Catherine) very firmly who was in charge. Given the failure of the heresy hunt, it would have been quite characteristic of Henry to humiliate Wriothesley in this way, while forcing Catherine, like Cranmer earlier, to play a part in the deception – and in Catherine’s case, publicly to admit that as a woman it was her place to learn from, and not lecture, her husband.

  I think, therefore, that the arrest warrant was nothing more or less than a put-up job, designed to humiliate Wriothesley and also to signal that the heresy hunt was over and the Queen still in Henry’s favour. Catherine herself was likely ordered to be involved, and the whole thing stage-managed by Henry himself.

  By the end of July, when new jewellery was ordered for her for the forthcoming visit of Admiral d’Annebault, Catherine Parr was clearly and visibly once more high in the King’s favour. Her brother, as Earl of Essex, rode at the admiral’s side on his procession through London in August. And in October, crucially, Catherine’s brother-in-law Lord Herbert was promoted to Deputy Chamberlain, a position which was to be of critical influence in the King’s last days. The Parrs had successfully weathered the storm.

  THERE REMAINED BERTANO’S visit, but as noted previously, it was a failure. When the papal emissary arrived early in August, hopes of some sort of accommodation with the Pope seem to have been immediately dashed. And from now on the King began to move, steadily, back towards the reformers. He may well have feared that if Gardiner and Norfolk were left in charge of the realm during his son’s minority, they would take England back to Rome. And Henry’s first priority was always to ensure that the Royal Supremacy passed to his son. Such a fear on the King’s part was not unrealistic; a decade later Gardiner was to be key lieutenant to Henry’s daughter, Mary I, when she returned England, briefly, to papal allegiance.

  AFTER THE FAILURE of Bertano’s mission, the focus turned back to relations with France, and much attention was devoted to the preparations to welcome Admiral d’Annebault to London at the end of the month. The sheer scale of the celebrations, in a country financially ruined by Henry’s war, has, I think, been rather ignored. There had been no such celebrations to welcome a foreigner, at least not since the arrival of the ill-fated Anne of Cleves in 1539. Archbishop Cranmer’s secretary, Ralph Morice, later recounted how Henry stood at one of the Hampton Court banquets for d’Annebault, with one arm round the admiral’s shoulder and the other round Cranmer’s (a sign of favour to both, although Henry by now may have found it difficult to stand unsupported) and, according to Morice, made the astounding statement that he and the French king would soon abolish the Mass and establish a common Communion. This was never remotely possible, of course (Francis I of France remained firmly Catholic), but for the King to say such a thing even in jest could only be a sign of radical intention, quite unthinkable even a few weeks before.

  THE BALANCE OF POWER on the Privy Council had shifted back towards the reformers with the return from abroad of the Earl of Hertford and Lord Lisle, and it was mainly reformers who accompanied Henry on his Progress at the beginning of September. This Progress was intended to be unusually brief, lasting only a couple of weeks and going only so far as Guildford, but Henry fell ill again during this time and moved from Guildford only to Windsor, where, halfway back, he stayed until the end of October. During most of that time the conservatives on the Privy Council remained in London dealing with routine business, while the radicals were with Henry. As was Catherine Parr.

  Henry may well have spent these autumn months plotting his final decisive moves; perhaps his latest bout o
f severe illness gave him further intimations of mortality. In November and December Gardiner was sidelined, at one point struck in the face at a council meeting by Lord Lisle – without consequences for Lisle, though it was a serious offence – and repeatedly denied an audience with the King. Then, in December, Norfolk and Surrey were arrested, found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. The ostensible cause was Surrey’s quartering of the royal arms with his own, but the whole affair smacks of a manufactured attempt to get rid of Norfolk. As the senior peer in England, he thought he should have control of Henry’s successor, the young Edward; as noted already, Henry had used far-fetched accusations of treason before to dispose of Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell. Surrey was executed in January 1547; Norfolk himself was due to follow his son to the block on the 28th, but the King’s death in the early hours of that morning saved him; he languished instead in the Tower of London for the next six and a half years.

  In early December, Henry was seriously ill again and seems never to have recovered fully. The last two months of his life appear to have been passed entirely at Whitehall. Some historians have seen the fact that Henry was apart from the Queen during the last month of his life as politically significant. Certainly Catherine did not get the Regency she had hoped for. However, though she spent Christmas at Richmond Palace, away from the King, her chambers were prepared for her at Whitehall in mid-January, although it is not known whether she actually took up residence, before Henry fell ill for the final time, just afterwards. But the point is not that Henry did not see the Queen during these last weeks of his life, but that he saw hardly anyone except Secretary Paget, and – significantly – the two chief gentlemen of his bedchamber.