Tudor

by Leanda de Lisle

  The law against unauthorised marriage into the royal family, introduced by Henry VIII in 1536, had been repealed in November 1547. But even if what Thomas Seymour planned was not treason, Elizabeth’s place in the succession remained subject to her marrying in accordance with the wishes of the Privy Council. Elizabeth was also mindful of what Katherine Parr had said to her when they last met. She refused even to write to Seymour to commiserate the death of the queen, fearful that it might be taken as an encouragement. Elizabeth was not, however, fully in control of her adult servants. Kat Astley began working with Elizabeth’s cofferer (or accountant), Thomas Parry, to arrange the princess’ marriage, even discussing Elizabeth’s property with Seymour, without her permission. This stopped only in January 1549 when Seymour was arrested.

  When Elizabeth’s terrified servants were questioned, Seymour’s visits to her bedchamber were described. Kat Astley and Thomas Parry also confessed their role in pushing for a marriage. But each made it clear that Elizabeth had refused to be drawn into their plans. The young princess, who was emerging as brave and quick-witted, also remained consistent in her denials that she had intended to marry anyone without the council’s permission. She even pleaded for Kat Astley, ‘who hath taken great labour and pain in bringing of me up in learning and honesty’, claiming she had heard Kat ‘many times say that she would never have me marry’ without the council’s consent.23 But if her position was safe, for Seymour it was a different matter. He had plotted not only to marry Elizabeth, but also to overthrow Somerset. Poor Edward, who was fond of his uncle Thomas, was obliged to give his assent to the Act of Attainder that condemned him on 10 March 1549. Seymour was executed ten days later.

  In a famous but invented story, when Elizabeth heard the news of Seymour’s death she commented that he had been ‘a man of much wit and very little judgement’.24 Elizabeth’s actual views on Seymour were expressed in writing in a book of psalms and prayers, which still survives at Elton Hall near Peterborough. It had once belonged to Katherine Parr, and is inscribed with words of affection from Henry VIII to his last wife: ‘Remember this writer/When you do pray/For he is yours/None can say nay.’ He had signed it ‘H’ with a superimposed ‘R’ for Rex. On a separate page Elizabeth now wrote in Latin, ‘Vanity of Vanities, and the height of Vanity. T. Seymour.’ Beneath was a ‘T’ and superimposed ‘R’ in mimicry of the signature her father had used.25 Elizabeth believed ambition had destroyed Thomas Seymour. It would also destroy his brother.

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  MARY IN DANGER

  THE PRIESTS IN MARY’S CHAPEL WORE VESTMENTS OF WHITE AND gold on Whit Sunday 10 June 1549. The Protectorate – Somerset, Archbishop Cranmer and their allies – had banned ashes on Ash Wednesday and palms on Palm Sunday. Every church candle, save two on the altar, was snuffed out by political decree. Now, a new religious service had been commanded. Written in English it reflected the view that Christ was not present, body and blood, in consecrated bread and wine. This was an attack on the heart and soul of Catholic belief. Mary had been arguing that her father’s religious settlement could not be overturned while Edward was a minor. Central to this was the Mass. For Mary the time had now come for an act of defiance. The full Henrician Mass was being celebrated in public at her house of Kenninghall in Norfolk according to the Sarum Rite, said in the British Isles for 500 years.

  Across England other congregations listened to the words from the new Book of Common Prayer with growing anger. They had been taught to obey royal decrees as a religious duty, for God had appointed the king to rule over them. Yet their king was only a boy, and what was being asked of them was sacrilegious. The following day, at Sampford Courtenay in Devon, villagers forced their parish priest to say Mass once more. Their rebellion spread rapidly and by 2 July there was violence across the Midlands, the Home Counties, Essex, Norfolk and Yorkshire, while in the west Exeter was under siege. Only ten days later Norwich was also threatened, with an army of 16,000 rebels at its gates, but there it was largely those receptive to the new religious ideas who had joined the rising. The great men who had benefited from the lands confiscated from the church under Henry VIII had continued to expand their estates, and were enclosing the common land that saved the landless from starvation when paid work dried up. ‘The pride of great men is now intolerable, but our condition miserable’, ran the Rebel’s Complaint; ‘We will rather take arms, and mix heaven and earth together than endure so great a cruelty.’

  In the end foreign mercenaries were paid to crush the rebel armies. Some 2,500 farm boys were killed in the west and 3,000 in the east, where John Dudley, Earl of Warwick used Germans used to particularly dirty and difficult work. As a percentage of the population the deaths that summer are equivalent to the entire English military casualties of World War II. It left much of the country cowed, but come October Somerset realised he was also under threat from erstwhile allies on the council. They blamed the scale of the risings on the duke delaying the use of force and ignoring advice, even from Henry VIII’s former private secretary, William Paget, who had helped plot his rise to power as the old king lay dying.

  The unfolding coup was a frightening experience for Edward, who had just turned twelve. Somerset told the boy that the plotters would kill them both if they succeeded in their plans. Edward was seen riding from Hampton Court to Windsor with his uncle, waving a little sword from his horse, begging those on the roadside, ‘My vassals will you help me against those who want to kill me?’ When the guards came to Windsor to arrest Somerset and entered Edward’s chamber he reacted with terror. He was soon reassured, however, and there were no plans, as yet, to execute Somerset, who was lodged in the Tower. He was merely replaced by a Privy Council now chaired by John Dudley, who would be named Lord President a few months later.1

  The son of Edmund Dudley, one of the most notorious of Henry VII’s henchmen, John Dudley was a devoted family man adored by his wife and children. He could, however, also be extremely intimidating. He had clawed his way up the greasy pole in the shadow of his father’s execution at the outset of Henry VIII’s reign and it was later said that he ‘had such a head that he seldom went about anything, but he conceived first three or four purposes beforehand’.2 The Imperial ambassador judged him a pragmatist and hoped the overthrow of the Protector would be good for Mary. She told him doubtfully on 7 November that ‘the councillors have not as yet pressed her or exacted from her anything against her will . . . and so . . . she is awaiting the upshot of the matter, not without apprehension’.3 Meanwhile, at Mary’s turreted house of Beaulieu in Essex on 26 November, she prepared to receive her cousin, Frances Brandon, who was accompanied by her daughters.4

  A slim, elegant woman, Frances was the elder daughter of Mary’s late aunt, the French queen, and only a few months younger than Mary.5 She had served in the princess’ household when her eldest child, Lady Jane Grey, was a baby. Mary recalled with gratitude the support Frances’ mother had given Katherine of Aragon against Anne Boleyn. But Frances found the arguments of Swiss and German religious reformers inspiring and she was amongst those who most welcomed the religious changes that Mary opposed. Having carefully erased all mentions of the Pope and Thomas Becket from a Book of Hours she had inherited from her mother, she now found all the images of saints and devotions of the Virgin so distasteful that she would give it away the following year.6 Her daughters Jane, aged twelve, Katherine nine, and Mary Grey, four, were all being raised as what we could now term Protestants and she was particularly close to Jane, who she helped with her studies.7 An exceptionally clever child, Jane was also proving passionate about her faith. According to the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe, Jane even deliberately insulted Mary’s belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist while she was staying at Beaulieu.

  On the altar in an antechapel, at right angles to the main chapel at Beaulieu, there was the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament: that is, the consecrated host was displayed after the Mass in a golden sunburst stand known as a monstrance.
8 For Mary the host was the transformed body of Christ. Jane saw it as nothing more than the idolatrous worship of a piece of unleavened bread. When one of Mary’s servants dropped to one knee in genuflection as they passed the chapel, Jane asked her sarcastically ‘whether the Lady Mary were there or not?’ The servant retorted that she had made her curtsey ‘to Him that made us all’. ‘Why’, Jane commented acidly, ‘how can He be there that made us all, [when] the baker made him?’9

  On 29 November, three days after Frances’ arrival at Beaulieu with her daughters, their father, Harry Grey, Marquess of Dorset, was appointed to the Privy Council. Described as ‘an illustrious and widely loved nobleman’, Harry Grey was much admired for his learning and his patronage of the learned. But he had all the arrogance of the ideologue and the Imperial ambassador described him as being without good sense.10 He had never previously been trusted with a council place, and that John Dudley had now given him one was taken, correctly, as a signal that Dudley had decided to base his regime on the most enthusiastic reformers.11 Edward VI, like his mother Jane Seymour, was by nature keen to please, and Dudley had discovered that Edward’s tutors had been successful in raising a reformist prince. An enthusiasm for further reform would help him to gain Edward’s trust. Within a month orders had gone out to destroy all Latin service books. By mid-January the Imperial ambassador was expressing fears that the new regime would ‘never permit the Lady Mary to live in peace . . . in order to exterminate [the Catholic] religion’.12

  Over the next few months reform was driven fast and hard, with Harry Grey and John Dudley spearheading action on the council, along with Katherine Parr’s brother, William, Marquess of Northampton. Statutory approval was given for clergy to marry, stone altars destroyed and replaced with simple wooden Communion tables, organs were ripped out of churches and elaborate music expunged, while in Oxford the Edwardian bonfires appear to have consumed nearly every book in the university library.13 Mary also found that she was under attack for continuing to have Mass said publicly in her chapels, but she was determined to hold fast. Who could better defend the Catholic beliefs of her brother’s subjects than the most senior adult royal in England? She could not be as easily disposed of as the peasants of Norfolk and Devon. She had to show courage and hope that one day, soon, her brother would overthrow his erstwhile guardians.

  Harry Grey and William Parr were at Edward’s side that Christmas of 1550, when Mary came to court to see the king. At thirteen Edward was growing up and like his father dressed magnificently, favouring reds, whites and violets embroidered with pearls.14 This helped disguise the fact he was small for his age, slightly built and, like Richard III, he had one shoulder distinctly higher than the other. He may have inherited scoliosis with his Yorkist blood. Edward had once told Mary that she was the person he ‘loved best’. But instead of fraternal kisses, Mary was subjected to a tirade, with Edward demanding to know why she still held the Mass in her chapels. Shocked, she burst into tears. This, in turn, prompted Edward to cry. He would have preferred that she understood her duty to him better and that they need not quarrel. He found it painful: that much was obvious to Mary, who was convinced that Edward had been put up to making his comments.

  The following year Mary continued to use her influence to defend her father’s religious settlement – and her influence was considerable. To her servants and affinity Mary was a quasi-sacred figure, who cared for them body and soul as their sovereign princess, sitting before them daily under a cloth of estate, in rooms hung with tapestries that boasted her royal lineage. Of Mary’s four grandparents, three had been reigning monarchs and all were the senior representative of their royal house. She was, above all, heir to the throne. In March 1551, when Edward called Mary to Westminster for a further dressing-down, she arrived in London in force ‘with fifty knights and gentlemen in velvet coats and chains of gold afore her, and after her four score gentlemen and ladies’. Each of them carried their banned rosary beads, prominently displayed.15

  Mary soon discovered, however, that she had failed to intimidate the regime. Edward would turn fourteen that year, the age at which a boy could marry under common law. John Dudley and the council had decided this would mark his majority. The implication would be that she was no longer defying them, but that she was defying the king. At Easter 1551 several of Mary’s friends were arrested after attending Mass in her house. By July she feared she was on the point of being imprisoned, or even murdered. Matters came to a head in August 1551, just as Edward began attending his first council meetings. Three of Mary’s servants were ordered to go to Beaulieu and prevent other members of the household from hearing Mass. They refused and were duly imprisoned. Mary was obliged, nevertheless, to give way. As she noted, if they arrested her chaplains too she could not hear Mass, however defiant she remained. Mary made it clear, however, that she would lay her head on the block before she heard the Prayer Book service.

  Come the autumn the aggressive attacks on Mary began, mysteriously, to recede. The reasons were not immediately obvious, but behind the scenes John Dudley was facing a threat on which he was obliged to focus his attention. Edward had been ill over the summer and, although he had soon recovered, it was a reminder that Mary remained only a heartbeat away from the crown. There was anger amongst the political elite over the way the heir to the throne was being treated. The Protector Somerset, who had been released from the Tower in February 1550, was hoping to take advantage of this to bring Dudley’s regime down. Dudley intended to deny Somerset that support and strike first.

  Out of chaos God created a hierarchical, harmonious and interconnected universe in which everything had its place, and which was infused with moral purpose. The devil rebelled against this order and fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Englishmen had a visceral fear of the return to chaos the devil sought by exploiting man’s weaknesses.

  Catherine of Valois’s marriage to Henry V, the victor of Agincourt, sealed a treaty under which their future son, Henry VI, would become heir to the French crown.

  Henry VI – King of France and England – was popularly acclaimed a saint after his murder in 1471, and devotional images appeared in churches from Devon to Northumberland, as well as several in East Anglian churches such as this one at Barton in Norfolk.

  In exile in Brittany and France the young Henry Tudor took on the mantle of the ‘fair unknown’, a stock character from romantic chivalric myth who returns from obscurity to reclaim his rightful crown, as the legendary King Arthur had done.

  Henry Tudor’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, a highly intelligent woman, has for centuries been a victim of religious and sexual prejudice. She has been condemned for doing her best to protect her only child and for conforming to the beliefs of her time.

  Images of St Anne teaching her daughter the Virgin to read were commonplace in the Middle Ages. This variation, of St Anne and the Virgin teaching Christ to read, is in the Book of Hours Margaret Beaufort inherited from her mother.

  In this famous portrait of Richard III he shows no sign of the idiopathic adolescent onset scoliosis which meant that although five foot eight, he stood as short as four foot eight.

  This Victorian image gives a real sense of the violence with which Edward V and his little brother – the princes in the Tower – were rumoured to have died in 1483. All we know is that they vanished: it is this that lies at the heart of the many conspiracy theories concerning their fate.

  The white boar badge found at Fen Hole, the likely spot where Richard III fell at Bosworth, ‘fighting manfully in the middle of his enemies’.

  This twentieth-century stained glass at Southwark Cathedral depicts the seventeenth-century legend that Richard III’s crown was caught in a hawthorn bush at Bosworth.

  Allegorical miniature of a bush of the Tudor rose incorporating a Latin poem celebrating the House of Tudor, with daisies for Henry VIII’s sister Margaret of Scotland, and marigolds for his other sister, Mary, and a pomegranate bush for his wife, Katherine of Aragon.

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nbsp; The round table that still hangs in the Great Hall of Winchester Castle was believed to be the actual round table used by King Arthur’s knights at Camelot. It was painted as early as 1516 with the union rose of white for the House of York and red for the House of Lancaster.

  Elizabeth of York – the eldest daughter of Edward IV and wife of Henry VII. Their marriage embodied the union of the houses of York and Lancaster.

  Painted funeral effigy of Henry VII: a king of many seasons, Henry VII won the crown of England and left his heir rich, with a kingdom at peace at home and respected abroad.

  Miniature prayer books such as this one were often listed as ‘tablets’ in inventories of the period, and it is possible this is the tablet picture of Henry VIII that his niece Margaret Douglas described in her will.

  Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots, elder sister of Henry VIII, with her first husband, James IV of Scots, pictured in the Seton Armorial.

  Mary Tudor, the French Queen, younger sister of Henry VIII. The drawing is marked with the graffiti ‘Plus sale que royane’, that is, ‘more dirty than queenly’, an allusion to her, as the widow of Louis XII, marrying the lowly born Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk.