Tudor

by Leanda de Lisle

  In May 1538 an Observant Friar was convicted of heresy for his traditional Catholic beliefs, and burned with exquisite cruelty over ‘a slow fire’ fuelled by an ancient image of a Welsh saint.10 A campaign was being led against all statues and objects linked to cults, and killing the monk in this way sent out a strong message to parishes. But Henry also burned evangelicals, and in November 1538 stepped in to oversee the trial of a man who, influenced by European reformers, denied the Real Presence of God in consecrated bread.11 This was an issue that would come to be a defining difference between Catholics and Protestants – and Henry decisively rejected what would come to be called Protestantism. The miraculous transformation of bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood at the moment of consecration, which lies at the heart of Catholic belief, also lay at the centre of his Christianity. Henry, dressed symbolically in white, insisted the man die at the stake.

  Henry’s self-appointed role as Grand Inquisitor and his destruction of pilgrimage sites was, however, now attracting the threat of a crusade. The papal sentence of excommunication, suspended since Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, was issued and Pope Paul III asked the English cardinal, Reginald Pole, to persuade Charles V and Francis I to launch an invasion. The cardinal’s family in England were already suffering for their connection to him. On 9 January 1539 his elder brother, Henry, Lord Montague and his cousin, Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter, were executed for being in contact. Even Pole’s old mother, the Countess of Salisbury, the princess Mary’s former governess, was attainted and eventually executed. The axe-man, a ‘blundering youth’, was said to have ‘literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces’.12

  Henry faced the threat of invasion equally robustly, by creating the greatest fortifications of the realm since the reign of Edward I. Coastal forts were built or rebuilt and a strategic alliance was made with the House of Cleves, which held the dukedom between the Low Countries and the German Empire. To seal this, Cromwell pushed the idea of a marriage with the Duke of Cleves’ second daughter, Anne. With infant mortality high it was also the case that the more sons Henry had the better. He had shown Edward off in the spring of 1538, holding the prince in his arms at a window with ‘much mirth and joy’ and ‘to the sight and comfort of all’.13 A painting of Edward aged fourteen months, dressed in red velvet and holding a golden rattle, depicts a fat and beautiful baby. But even the healthiest baby could be snatched away suddenly by disease, and having seen Holbein’s attractive portrait of Anne of Cleves, Henry agreed to marry her.

  The king’s first meeting with his new wife, on New Year’s Day 1540, was intended to be in the romantic tradition of royal grooms meeting their brides by chance, seen already with Henry’s sisters.14 But instead of preparations and warning, Henry played it for real, bursting into her room at the Bishop’s Palace in Rochester in the guise of a servant, while she was watching a bullfight from a window. ‘She looks about 30 years of age, tall and thin, of medium beauty, and of very assured and resolute countenance’, the French ambassador reported. ‘She brought 12 or 15 ladies of honour clothed like herself [in German fashion], a thing which looks strange to many.’15 Henry offered a New Year’s gift as ‘from the king’. She accepted graciously, but to her astonishment the ‘servant’ then seized and kissed her. Confused, and evidently appalled, she thanked him, before turning back to the window, and studiously ignoring him. It had been a disaster. Humiliated, Henry later turned to the men around him commenting that Anne appeared to be ‘no maid’; that is, she was not a virgin.16

  The artist Barthel Bruyn produced a portrait of Anne of Cleves very similar to Holbein’s, but which better reflects the French description of her. Especially notable is the ugliness of her dress. In Anne Boleyn, Henry had fallen in love with the most chic and elegant woman at court. The English still favoured the French fashions she had loved, with smooth silhouettes, natural waistlines and conical skirts. The German style Anne and her ladies wore was quite different. Their necklines were high, their gowns were short-waisted and tightly laced with alternating bands of contrasting fabrics, often embroidered with lace. It was ‘heavy’ and ‘unbecoming’, and the fact Anne of Cleves spoke no English meant there was little chance of compensating for her hideous dress with a flash of courtly wit. Deeply disappointed, Henry’s reaction was immediately to consider how he might extract himself from this unwelcome marriage – hence his desperate comment that Anne was ‘no maid’.

  Henry knew that Anne of Cleves had been betrothed aged twelve to the heir to the dukedom of Lorraine. After enquiries were made, at Henry’s request, it emerged the Cleves ambassadors had failed to bring a copy of the Lorraine contract with them that would prove they were not legally man and wife. Reassurances were issued and vows sworn that Anne of Cleves was free. But when Henry married her on 6 January 1540, it was solely to cement the alliance with her father, and although he slept with Anne, he told Cromwell he could not consummate the union. Her stomach and breasts were those of a married woman, he insisted.

  Cromwell decided Anne simply needed to improve her sexual performance and instructed the Earl of Rutland to ask her to behave more ‘pleasantly’ to Henry. The unlucky earl did so in as polite a manner as he could, and through an interpreter. Anne’s English ladies later claimed she knew so little about sex that she believed a kiss was enough for consummation. Given the language barrier, such conversations seem unlikely and it is significant the women made their claims only when the king’s lawyers began looking for proof of non-consummation in order to annul the marriage.

  Franco-Imperial relations had quickly become strained, and as soon as Henry no longer needed the Cleves alliance his marriage was doomed. An impotent man could not legally marry, but Henry had his lawyers argue that he was only impotent with Anne. As evidence that he could have intercourse with other women he described how he had wet dreams and justified his lack of attraction to Anne with reference to her contract with the son of the Duke of Lorraine. Henry may well have chosen not to have sex with Anne hoping that the time would come when he could annul his marriage, but it is also possible that his impotence had a physical basis. Earlier wives had all conceived children. His later wives never would. Here his growing weight was surely a contributing factor.17 The illuminations in a psalter painted that year has an image of Henry in his favourite guise of the biblical King David, but he more closely resembles a hippopotamus in scarlet hose, even if he had not yet reached the massive proportions of the following decade.18

  Parliament confirmed the annulment of the marriage on 12 July. The chief casualty of this third annulled marriage was not Anne of Cleves, however, but its architect, Thomas Cromwell. The old nobility had spotted an opportunity to be revenged on the parvenu who had helped dispose of so many of them. On 10 June, when Henry was already courting the flirtatious twenty-two-year-old Katherine Howard, a niece of the Duke of Norfolk, Cromwell was arrested on charges of treason and heresy. His associations with Sacramentarians in Calais had left him vulnerable to the accusation that he denied the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Convicted under an Act of Attainder, he begged Henry fruitlessly for ‘mercy, mercy’. Cromwell was beheaded on 28 July, the same day that Henry married Katherine Howard.19 It was a botched job and Cromwell’s skull was smashed to pieces.

  ***

  In October 1541, Henry’s elder sister, Margaret, the dowager Queen of Scots, died aged fifty-one, following a stroke.20 The queen hadn’t seen her daughter Margaret Douglas since she had been kidnapped and taken to England aged thirteen. She had been reassured, however, that life had improved for her daughter in the four years since Thomas Howard had died in the Tower. Margaret had served Anne of Cleves as a lady-in-waiting and was now serving the new queen, Katherine Howard. She was even falling in love again, this time with the queen’s brother, Charles Howard, a nephew of Thomas’. Happily there was nothing to fear in her new romance for Henry was gloriously happy with Katherine.

  Just as Henry’s response to the stories of his impo
tence in the Boleyn trials was to banquet with beautiful women, following his admission of impotence with Anne of Cleves he liked to show off his passion for his young bride. ‘The king’, the French ambassador reported, ‘is so amorous of her that he cannot treat her well enough and caresses her more than he did the others.’21 Unfortunately, that October Archbishop Cranmer learned something disturbing about Katherine. Despite the king’s ability, self-proclaimed during his marriage to Anne of Cleves, to tell from a woman’s appearance if she was a virgin, it seemed that Henry might have been fooled in this regard where the new queen was concerned.

  Cranmer’s source was a former servant of Katherine Howard’s grandmother, Agnes, the dowager Duchess of Norfolk. Katherine had spent her early teenage years in the dowager’s household, in line with the aristocratic practice of sending daughters off to a well-connected family to improve their education. As was usual, when the dowager was away her wards were left in the care of servants and they were less concerned to keep an eye on the behaviour of these girls than the old duchess. Katherine would flirt with her music teacher, and after she became interested in another man she had agreed to let him touch her in a ‘secret place’ if he would stop pestering her. He masturbated her in the family chapel, later boasting how he had ‘had her by the cunt’ and would ‘know it among a hundred’.22 Katherine Howard had gone still further, however, with the man for whom she left the music teacher: her kinsman Francis Dereham.

  According to the young women who had shared Katherine’s room as teenagers, she and Dereham would kiss like ‘two sparrows’. They even shared a bed, the other girls in the room giggling over the ‘huffing and blowing’ emerging from Dereham under the covers. Under canon law any promise Dereham and Katherine had made each other, followed by intercourse, constituted a valid marriage, placing the king in a bigamous union. The news was a political gift to Cranmer who hoped to use it to break Howard’s influence: the Duke of Norfolk had once said that England was merry before the ‘new learning’ came up – hardly a ringing endorsement of the Reformation. For Cranmer a girl’s life was a small price to pay to damage Norfolk’s standing with the king.

  When Cranmer informed Henry what he had learned of Katherine Howard, the king’s reaction was quite different to when he had been told of Anne Boleyn’s misdeeds: he refused to accept it. He ordered that Dereham and the musician be questioned in order to clear her name, but to Henry’s horror they confessed to everything. ‘His heart was so pierced with pensiveness’, the council reported, ‘that long it was before his majesty could speak, and utter the sorrow of his heart unto us.’ When he did so there were ‘plenty of tears which was strange in [one of] his courage’.23 Again the contrast to his reaction on ‘discovering’ Anne Boleyn’s adultery is striking. This time he had had no concerns that his marriage was cursed, and no wish that his wife was no more.

  On 6 November Henry deserted Katherine Howard at Hampton Court never to see her again. By 11 November Dereham had confessed under torture that after Katherine became queen he was replaced in her affections by a gentleman of the Privy Chamber called Thomas Culpepper. It was also decided Katherine would be sent to Syon and stripped of all but four of her servants, with the rest sent home.24 First, however, the queen’s ladies all had to be interviewed. Margaret Douglas’ lover Charles Howard had already been banished from court, and Margaret must have been terrified their flirtation would be discovered – as it was.25 The interrogators learned of Margaret’s relationship the following day. The king was informed and she was delivered a chilling warning. She had ‘demeaned herself towards His Majesty, first with the Lord Thomas Howard, and second with Charles Howard’, to whom she had shown ‘overmuch lightness’. She was advised: ‘beware the third time’.26 It was considered sufficient on this occasion that she ‘fully apply herself to please the king’, and claims that she was imprisoned again are mistaken.27 But the queen was not to be so fortunate.

  It had emerged that Katherine had met Culpepper many times in private, beginning as soon as within seven or eight months of her marriage to the king. In this she had some help from an old friend called Katherine Tilney, and a great deal more help from Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, the widow of Anne Boleyn’s brother, George. Given Jane Boleyn’s position in Anne’s court Katherine may have assumed that she would know how a queen might conduct a secret love affair. But if this explains why she was asked for help, it is more difficult to understand why she agreed to give it. She was short of money and it is possible she helped Katherine in exchange for payment, or perhaps she was simply silly and enjoyed the thrill of being ‘important’ again in the queen’s bedchamber. In any event, she was the conduit for Katherine’s love letters to Culpepper.

  Katherine would meet Culpepper in a ‘vile place’, her stool house, or lavatory, where Jane Boleyn would stay with them awhile before leaving. Katherine and Culpepper never confessed to having had full intercourse. Penetration would have imperilled the succession, and as Katherine had once assured Dereham, she knew how to ‘meddle with a man’ without risking having a child by him. But Culpepper admitted that he had wanted to, very much, as did she. ‘It makes my heart to die to think what fortune I have that I cannot always be in your company’, she wrote to him, ‘yours as long as life endures, Katherine.’

  Dereham and Culpepper were tried for treason and found guilty. Dereham was hanged, drawn and quartered on 10 December 1541. Culpepper, who Henry knew from court, was granted the mercy of a beheading the same day. On the 22nd several of Katherine’s friends and relations were found guilty of failing to reveal knowledge of acts of treason. These were to be defined subsequently by the Act of Attainder used against the queen and Jane Boleyn. The Act made it a treasonous offence for an unchaste woman to marry the king without first confessing it to him, and declared that it was treason for a queen, or the wife of a Prince of Wales, to commit adultery, or for anyone to commit adultery with them. Once again Henry was sending people to the block for actions that were only made a capital crime retrospectively.

  On 10 February 1542 Katherine Howard was taken, angry and struggling, on to a covered barge and brought from Syon to the Tower. She passed under the bridge where the heads of her lovers had been rotting for two months. In the Tower, she and Jane Boleyn broke down, as Anne Boleyn had when terror reduced her to laughing, weeping hysteria. Jane was judged to be half mad, but Katherine recovered her poise and even practised laying her head on the block in the privacy of her chamber. The executioner had made a mess of Cromwell’s head on the day she was married; she wanted her death to be more dignified. It was to be so.

  Jane Boleyn waited in her rooms as her former mistress was beheaded, hearing the gasps of the crowd, before she took her own last walk to the scaffold and stepped to the block. Somehow she managed to keep herself steady. She said her prayers, laid her head down on the blood-soaked wood and died quickly, as Katherine had done, at the fall of the axe.

  25

  THE LAST YEARS OF HENRY VIII

  THE ROADS WERE COVERED IN SNOW WHEN JAMES V REACHED HIS wife, Mary of Guise, at Linlithgow Castle. It was here that his mother, Margaret Tudor, had learned of the death of his father at Flodden. James now carried the knowledge of another defeat at English hands. He had ordered a raid into England in retaliation for an invasion attempt, but on 24 November 1542 his forces were defeated at Solway Moss, his banner taken, and senior members of his household seized.1 He told the queen what had occurred, and although she was pregnant and the birth of their child was imminent, he explained he could not stay. Preparations had to be made to continue the campaign and reverse his humiliation.

  The aim of Henry’s invasion attempt had been to cripple Scotland before he turned his attention, once again, to France. The prestige of Henry V’s victories had helped protect the throne of his infant son Henry VI well into his majority. Henry VIII hoped that territorial gains in France would, similarly, secure the throne for his son, Edward, were Henry to die before the boy reached adulthood.

&
nbsp; For James V there was little hope of peace with Henry and the difficult task he faced in defending his country from his belligerent Tudor uncle was made still harder by illness. On 6 December, at the end of a long day of military planning, James left Edinburgh for Falkland Palace, twenty-one miles from his capital. He was exhausted by the time he arrived, and went to bed. The next day he was too sick to be moved, vomiting copiously, and suffering severe diarrhoea. Feverish and anxious he ‘did rage and cry out, and spake but few wise words thereafter’.2 On 8 December the dying king learned that his wife had delivered a daughter at Linlithgow. The Scottish crown had come to the Stuarts through a woman.3 Unless James’ daughter married another Stuart it seemed certain the dynasty would end with one as well. ‘It cam wi’ a lass and it will gang wi’ a lass’, are the last coherent words James is reported by tradition, as having said.4

  James V had ruled Scotland since he was sixteen, when he escaped the damaging control of his stepfather, Angus, with the help of his mother, Queen Margaret. He was only thirty when he died on 14 December, his body grotesquely swollen. In England his death was ascribed to ‘regret, sorrow and rage’ over Solway Moss. Certainly James had been bitterly angry at times, but his symptoms are suggestive of cholera rather than depressive illness. He had fought for his life as his body ran dry, fearing what his country and his daughter, the new Mary, Queen of Scots, would face without him.

  At Henry’s court James’ twenty-seven-year-old half-sister, Margaret Douglas, mourned him, as was her duty. She was back in favour and, with the king’s daughters, was amongst eighteen attendants at his wedding at Hampton Court on 12 July 1543. Henry’s sixth wife, the twice-widowed Katherine Parr, was thirty-one years old and the kind of woman who had always attracted him: strong-willed, clever, passionate and sensual. He had spotted her amongst his daughter Mary’s ladies-in-waiting. At the time Katherine Parr was in a love affair with Prince Edward’s younger uncle, Thomas Seymour, a vivid figure, ‘fierce in courage, courtly in fashion, in voice magnificent’.5 But when the king’s interest became clear Katherine had little choice but to sacrifice her love for Seymour to marry Henry.