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About The King is Dead
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‘Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs…
Let’s choose executors and talk of wills…
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings…’
William Shakespeare, Richard II, Act III, Scene II
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword
A Note on Spelling, Money and Dates
Chapter 1: The Death of a King
Chapter 2: The Last Decade
Chapter 3: The Last Year
Chapter 4: The Final Months
Chapter 5: The Making of the Will
Chapter 6: The Faith of the King
Chapter 7: The Succession
Chapter 8: The Transfer of Power
Chapter 9: The ‘Unwritten Will’
Chapter 10: The Legacy of the Will
Epilogue
APPENDIX I: Henry VIII’s Last Will and Testament: A Transcription
APPENDIX II: Council Personnel
APPENDIX III: Highlights from Henry VIII’s Inventory
Notes on the Text
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Picture Credits
Index
About The King is Dead
Reviews
About Suzannah Lipscomb
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
The family of Henry VIII, painted by an unknown artist. This picture, from 1545, depicts Henry VIII at Whitehall Palace with his offspring: his daughters twenty-nine-year-old Mary (left) and twelve-year-old Elizabeth (right), and, close at hand, his eight-year-old son, Edward, around whom Henry has an arm. It is an idealized image: the wife on Henry’s left was not his wife in 1545 – Kateryn Parr – but rather his third wife, Jane Seymour, who gave him his son and heir. Curator Brett Dolman has observed that Henry, Jane and Edward appear very much as a Holy Family, adored by the two princesses. The man in the archway is Will Somer, the king’s fool.
Henry VIII’s last will and testament is one of the most intriguing and contested documents in British history. Given special legal and constitutional significance by the 1536 and 1544 Acts of Succession, which allowed Henry to nominate his successor in his last will, it is exceptional among English royal wills. For Henry VIII, the monarch so renowned – or notorious – for remarrying in pursuit of a male heir, the succession was his abiding obsession until the very end.
Throughout the sixteenth century, Henry VIII’s will was called upon to determine the course of history. On the accession of Henry’s nine-year-old son as Edward VI, Henry’s will was used both to justify government by a regency council under the increasingly authoritarian sway of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, as ‘Lord Protector of England’, and then to warrant the dissolution of Somerset’s protectorate in October 1549. Four years later, the will was overruled – if temporarily – to divert the succession to Edward VI’s cousin, the Protestant Lady Jane Grey. During Elizabeth I’s reign, it was deemed invalid by those who supported Mary, Queen of Scots’ claim to the English throne.
Despite these challenges, however, until Elizabeth’s own death and the accession of James VI of Scotland as England’s James I in 1603, the sequence of childless English monarchs over the previous half-century meant that the line of succession as laid out in Henry VIII’s will came to pass.
In the centuries since, historians have disagreed vehemently over the will’s intended meaning, its authenticity and validity, and the circumstances of its creation. One school of thought – represented by such great names of Tudor history as Geoffrey R. Elton, David Starkey and John Guy – has argued that it was the product of a conspiracy staged by an ‘evangelical’ or proto-Protestant faction at court seeking to advance religious reform, led by Edward Seymour (at that time Earl of Hertford) and Sir William Paget. These historians assert that the will remained unsigned until Henry was on his deathbed; that, in the month between Henry drawing up its final form in December 1546 and his death on 28 January 1547, Hertford and Paget added clauses enabling their subsequent assumption of power; and that the will was hurriedly stamped as Henry lay dying, to ensure its legitimacy. Having manoeuvred to guarantee the dominance of religious reformers on the Privy Council – which meant destroying the religious conservatives who stood in their way – the evangelicals, it is argued, were then perfectly poised to attain control of the government at the accession of Edward VI.1
In this book, I disagree wholeheartedly with this interpretation. Although faction did exist at court, I am convinced that these historians have been too influenced by the sixteenth-century martyrologist John Foxe’s estimation of Henry VIII: ‘according as his counsel was about him, so was [he] led’.2 I believe – by contrast – that until very close to the hour of his death, Henry was clearly directing events.
In the course of my research, I have also discovered that the case for a coup by reformers and for an alteration of the will is based on some notable errors. These are described fully in the narrative that follows, and in its Notes on the Text, but it is worth briefly mentioning here the three main bones of contention.
The first is the assertion that, as Professor Elton put it, ‘the Privy Council… for a crucial month (8 December 1546 to 4 January 1547) met not at court but in Hertford’s town house’ and that this locus for their meetings indicates the growing power of the alleged reformist faction at that time.3 Both fact and conclusion have subsequently been accepted by other historians.4 But it is a piece of misinformation, deriving from François Van der Delft, the ambassador for the Holy Roman Empire – one of the clearest indications that he sometimes got things wrong – and can be disproved by the minutes of the Privy Council, which show that the Council actually met at Ely Place in Holborn, the townhouse of Sir Thomas Wriothesley.5 He was not only Henry’s lord chancellor but a prominent religious conservative. This piece of ‘evidence’, used to imply the domination and manipulation of England’s primary organ of government by the reformers as they built their power base, therefore proves nothing of the sort.
More significantly, some historians claim to have, as one put it, ‘incontrovertible evidence’ that the will was altered.6 They assert that that the will was tampered with after December 1546 and then stamped with Henry VIII’s device to reproduce his signature – the ‘dry stamp’; and they have attempted to prove this by observing that the will lists Sir Thomas Seymour, younger brother of Edward Seymour, as a Privy Councillor, even though he was only appointed as such on 23 January 1547. On this basis, David Starkey has concluded that ‘armed with this sort of evidence, no modern court would hesitate to overturn Henry’s last will and testament’.7 Yet the simple fact is that Thomas Seymour is not listed in this way in the will; rather, he is presented as an assistant to the regency council that Henry planned, a position that did not require prior membership of the Privy Council. Indeed, membership of Henry VIII’s Privy Council and the regency council of sixteen named in the will were not coterminous: there were six regency councillors and two other assistants, besides Thomas Seymour, who were not Privy Councillors when the will was drawn up.8 With the dismantling of this error, the theory that the will was tampered with starts to look structurally unsound, and indeed becomes unsustainable.
Third, and finally, there is the notion that Henry VIII could not bear to think of his impending death, as first alleged by Foxe and taken up by later historians.9 By contrast, Sir William Paget, the king’
s close secretary, remembered in February 1547 Henry saying – probably at some point in December – ‘that he felt himself sickly, and… could not long endure’, and as a result prepared himself for death by making plans with Paget to provide for the care of his son.10 It may be that Paget was not a reliable narrator at this juncture; but it seems likely that rather than Henry fearing to speak of his death, those who dared not speak of it were his advisers, because under the Treasons Act of 1534 it was traitorous to imagine the king’s death in words.11 In the face of his mortality, Henry was probably not the ostrich that has been depicted.
~
Having pointed to these specific points of interpretation, I ought to add that every historian builds on the work of others, as much as he or she questions it. Many historians have brought their excellent logic and profound analysis to bear on the questions I consider here. Their scholarship has illuminated the murky business of unravelling Henry’s will, and I owe a debt of thanks to them, and to others besides, whose names appear in this book’s Acknowledgements. In adding one more layer to the accumulation of comment and opinion about the circumstances and meaning of Henry VIII’s last will and testament, I hope that I, too, have brought a little more light to bear.
SUZANNAH LIPSCOMB
Château de Foncoussières
April 2015
SDG
The Whitehall Mural, in a 1667 copy by Remigius van Leemput. This arrangement of Henry VIII, Jane Seymour and Henry’s parents – Henry VII and Elizabeth of York – appeared originally, in 1537, as a 9-foot by 12-foot (2.8 x 3.6 metre) mural by Hans Holbein the Younger, at Whitehall Palace. Whitehall burnt down in 1698, but two small copies of the mural, including this one, had been made. In the depiction, the closed body language of Henry’s parents and wife contrast with his confident, open stance, and Henry’s huge masculine shoulders are exaggerated by his voluminous gown.
SPELLING
Although I find the curious orthography of the sixteenth century enchanting, in the main text of this book I have modernized spelling and punctuation, and silently expanded contractions, for ease of reading.
The spellings used by the authorities I cite or quote have, though, been retained in the book’s endnotes (‘Notes on the Text’); and the full, unmodernized, original-spelling version of the will appears as Appendix I.
DATES
The dates are those of the Julian Calendar, which was used in England until 1752, even though most of continental Europe had adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1582. However, the calendar year is assumed to start on 1 January, rather than on Lady Day (25 March). The date of Henry VIII’s death is therefore given as 28 January 1547.
MONEY
English currency in Henry VIII’s reign (indeed, until 1971) was made up of pounds, shillings and pence: 20 shillings to the pound sterling, and 12 pence to the shilling.
Twelve pounds, seven shillings and five pence was written ‘12 l. 7 s. 5 d.’, but I have modernized to the better-known form ‘£12 7s 5d’. It was also normal to count in marks, a mark being worth two-thirds of a pound, or 13s 4d. So, 500 marks = roughly £333 4s.
I have not given modern equivalents of sums in the text, because, after inflation, and in an age where we value different commodities, these tend to be rather misleading. The following contemporary facts may, though, provide some useful orientation:
• Nicholas Lentall, a servant to Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, received £5 a year in wages, plus ‘meat, drink and livery’, and a £10 annuity.12
• Hans Holbein, court painter to Henry VIII, received a salary of £30 a year.
• The average assessed income from lands per annum for the peerage was £873 in 1545.13
There is a strange symmetry to the dates. The founder of the Tudor dynasty, Henry VII, was born in obscurity on 28 January 1457; his famous, infamous, son died in the profound darkness of a winter’s night on the same day ninety years later. He was fifty-five years old, grossly overweight, and had been plagued for a decade by a terrible running sore on his leg that had recently forced him into the Tudor equivalent of a wheelchair and a stairlift.1 He was also still ‘Henry the Eighth, by Grace of God, King of England, Ireland and France, Defender of the Faith, and Supreme Head of the Church of England’, and at 2am on 28 January 1547, in the thirty-eighth year of his reign, he took his last breath.
Although he had predicted some weeks earlier that his death might not be long in coming, only ten days before he died he had been well enough to meet ambassadors from France and the Holy Roman Empire. Six days before his death, he had given firm orders to his indefatigable secretary, Sir William Paget, on a matter of foreign policy.2 So, while the king’s sickness and bouts of indisposition had long been a familiar reality at court, and the prospect of his demise therefore always a possibility, the end itself came all of a sudden.
On the evening of 27 January, a kind of terror must have gripped his courtiers’ hearts. They could see that he was dying and knew therefore that their zealous sovereign needed to prepare his soul to meet his Maker. Yet, an Act passed in Parliament some thirteen years earlier had made it high treason to speak of the king’s death.3 The lion looked old and enfeebled, but there was still every chance that he could swipe at one of them with his ebbing strength; indeed, the unctuous Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, a recent victim of the king’s displeasure, was waiting for his moment on Tower Hill the next morning.
‘Henry VIII and the Barber Surgeons’, painted in 1540. Here, an old, jowly Henry, in full regalia, is seen giving a charter to the Worshipful Company of Barber Surgeons, whose members are named. On the right can be seen Edmund Harman and John Ailef, two of the witnesses to, and beneficiaries of, Henry’s will.
It was Denny who was brave. The ‘gentle’ Sir Anthony Denny, a decade younger than his king, had been made first Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber a few months earlier, and he was thought by the Imperial ambassador, François Van der Delft, to be ‘the most confidential of any of the gentlemen of the Chamber’.4 He was close to Henry, he could be trusted, and perhaps he, above all who clustered around Henry’s pained and corpulent body, cared enough about the king’s fate to risk his own.
Denny told the king that he was ‘to man’s judgment not like to live’ and urged him to prepare himself for death.5 Henry is said to have replied: ‘the mercy of Christ is able to pardon me all my sins, though they were greater than they be’, demonstrating his keenly felt faith as well as an undiminished sense of his own righteousness – both qualities that had characterized his entire reign.
Denny asked if he would like to have any ‘learned man’ – a priest – with whom to confer, to which Henry responded that he would have Dr Cranmer, his Archbishop of Canterbury; but to Denny’s pressing as to whether he would like him sent for immediately, the king replied that he would first ‘take a little sleep; and then, as I feel myself, I will advise upon the matter’. Optimism to the last. Yet, these were to be Henry’s final words.
In sixteenth-century England, there was a very clear sense of what a ‘good death’ involved. It did not mean a peaceful surrender to the grim reaper. It meant wrestling through a spiritual ordeal, as the Devil and his demons tried to prise the immortal soul of the dying person away from God and his angels. The deathbed was a battlefield. And so the medieval Catholic Church, into which Henry VIII had been born, had developed a series of rituals designed to walk the perishing through the valley of deathly shadows. These last rites involved a priest holding a crucifix – depicting the Saviour, Jesus Christ, crucified on the Cross – in front of the afflicted, placing a lighted candle in their hands, listening to their final confession and absolving their sins. Then a piece of consecrated bread – bread that had, by the miracle of transubstantiation, become the body of Christ, and which was called the viaticum (Latin for ‘take with you on the journey’) – was fed to the dying on the point of death. Finally, the expiring body was anointed with blessed oil in an act of extreme unction, before he or she slipped a
way.6
Henry VIII’s last minutes, however, bore little relation to this Catholic good death, and there may be a reason for that. Our account of Henry’s death comes from John Foxe, an ardent Protestant who wrote his ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Acts and Monuments) during the reign of Elizabeth I. Historians, rightly, are cautious of relying unquestioningly on his narrative. His literary style suggests some invention of dialogue, and he certainly has his heroes and villains. Yet, Foxe’s accounts were based largely on the evidence of original documents – to which he stuck mostly faithfully – and on the testimonies of individuals, and while he may have been partisan, it seems unlikely that he devised whole episodes without a source.7 And even if Foxe was inclined to recast Henry VIII as a Protestant, the version he gives us actually tells us something else.
Foxe relates that, after sleeping for a couple of hours Henry woke and realized that his end was approaching. He commanded that Cranmer be sent for, but, delayed on the frozen roads, the messenger took time to reach the archbishop, who then took time to travel to Westminster from his house at Croydon. Too much time. When Cranmer arrived, Henry was unable to speak and perilously close to unconsciousness, but wordlessly stretched out his hand to his faithful servant – the cleric who had annulled Henry’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon, who had helped him break with the Church of Rome, and establish the royal supremacy over the Church of England.
Sir Anthony Denny (1501–49), as depicted in an engraving based on a Holbein sketch: in the early 1540s, Denny was a friend and patron of the great German artist. Denny was also one of the Chief Gentlemen of the King’s Privy Chamber and the man who dared to tell the king to prepare for death. He was named as a regency councillor and executor in Henry VIII’s will.
Sensing the urgency, Cranmer did not bother with crucifix or candle or even communion, but simply instructed his sovereign to put his trust in Jesus Christ and charged him to make some sign – with eyes or hands – that he put his faith in the Lord. ‘Then the king, holding him with his hand, did wring his hand in his as hard as he could’, a desperate, impassioned last gesture – let it all not have been in vain – and then he died.8
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