The King is Dead

by Suzannah Lipscomb

  What evidence is there for this falsification? David Starkey thinks the ten witnesses may have signed a blank sheet, ‘for the last lines of the will are written more closely together, as though the signatures were already there’.29 Yet, this is patently untrue. The last lines of the will, just as with all those before them, are spaced out on the page with the great precision and care of an expert calligrapher (see page 201); there are no squeezed characters or cramped lines. Where changes have been made to the text of the will, they are minor: there are a total of five interstitial additions and four redactions (mostly striking-out the words ‘lawfully begotten’ accidentally added after Mary and Elizabeth’s names), and their mark on the page is evident. Where space has been left for later additions – in the case of forgotten names – the gap is obvious. Otherwise, the twenty-eight-folio will is clearly complete. It flows from one folio to the next without breaks.30 The redactions and additions that are present make it very clear that it is a physical impossibility that substantive edits were made to this will after the addition of signatures without it leaving some record on the text itself.

  Perhaps, David Starkey declares, the will that was signed was ‘not the text we have’. He also offers ‘incontrovertible evidence’ that the will was altered after the supposed date of its making. This proof of the will’s later manipulation – or even rewriting – is, he states, that ‘Sir Thomas Seymour was listed as a councillor in the will’ but was only made a Privy Councillor on 23 January 1547. Thus, the will must have been altered after this date.

  The trouble with this argument is that Seymour is not listed as a councillor in the will. The testament only appointed Sir Thomas Seymour to be one of the assistants to the sixteen councillors named to make up Edward’s regency council, and his inclusion in this list does not imply that he was already a member of the existing Privy Council. He was, rather, one of the three non-councillors among the assistants – and there were the other six non-Privy Councillors among those nominated as regency councillors. In short, rather than Seymour’s inclusion being a pivotal fact in the light of which ‘no modern court would hesitate to overturn Henry’s last will and testament’, it is a non-fact: neither incontrovertible, nor evidence.31 The inclusion of Seymour proves nothing.

  Sir Anthony Browne (d. 1548), Master of the King’s Horse, in a portrait by an unknown sixteenth-century artist. It is augmented with biographical inscriptions. Browne, who was a close companion and servant of the king, was named as a regency councillor and executor in Henry VIII’s last will and testament. It was Browne who, albeit unsuccessfully, objected to Stephen Gardiner’s exclusion from the regency council.

  In fact, the only real suggestion that the will might have been stamped later than 30 December comes from our first point of enquiry: that it was only entered in the register of documents signed by stamp in January. Was this a simple mistake? Surely not – given that the document in question was of pre-eminent constitutional significance. It is true that this was not the first time that something signed in one month had been included in the register subsequently: the register of documents for October 1546 includes as item 42, ‘pardon, the bill signed in September’.32

  However, there is more to it than that. In the register, the king’s will is introduced with a flourish, and the first two words of ‘Your majesties last will and testament’ are written in extra-large calligraphy: this is not a mistake that anyone was attempting to hide. In fact, it was probably put there precisely to be noticed. It seems likely, as Professor Eric Ives advocated, that the king’s presence at the witnessing and stamping of the will had made its inclusion in a separate register of documents to be endorsed by him seem superfluous; but, in the last days, as his impending death became apparent, it seemed suddenly worrying that not having included the will on a register might undermine its legality and legitimacy. It was, therefore, entered into the January register for the ostentatious purpose of proclaiming its authenticity. Had the will been stamped later than its given date, its inclusion so prominently in the January register would surely have done the precise opposite: it would have cast doubt on its legitimacy. Its inclusion, therefore, on the register of documents for January 1547 does not prove that it was stamped at a later date; rather, it suggests that it was indeed stamped in Henry VIII’s presence on 30 December 1546.

  ~

  Sir Thomas Seymour, in a posthumous painting, with verses of praise, by an unknown artist of the later sixteenth century. Younger brother of Edward Seymour (Earl of Hertford), Sir Thomas (1508–49) became, after Henry’s death, Baron Seymour of Sudeley. On 23 January 1547, he was made a Privy Councillor. He had previously been named by Henry VIII as an assistant to the sixteen regency councillors in the king’s last will and testament. In May 1547, Sir Thomas married the king’s widow, Kateryn Parr – though his chief claim to fame, or notoriety, was his alleged plotting to marry Princess Elizabeth after Kateryn’s death, which ensured his downfall.

  It was not implausible that the king might yet rally at the time of making his will. But by early January 1547 he was again brought down by a great fever. The French ambassadors noted in mid-January that Henry had been sick for a fortnight and his ulcer had had to be cauterized – the flesh burnt and singed in the vain hope of controlling the weeping infection.33 State affairs and plans for a military campaign continued: the bishops Tunstal and Gardiner carried on negotiating with the Scots and the French, and Baron de La Garde, captain of the French fleet, claimed to have seen infantry and cavalry gathering outside London, bound, he thought, for Calais or Boulogne or Scotland.34 On 17 January the ambassadors met Henry and congratulated him on his recovery, for he seemed to them now fairly well, and the king was sufficiently compos mentis to discuss business with Paget as late as 22 January. Yet, it was a chimera, a mere temporary remission. For Henry was soon in the throes of his last illness. When dawn broke in England, on 28 January, the old king was dead.

  The will Henry left behind was precisely as he intended it to be. Those named as members of Edward’s regency council – and those omitted – were just as Henry had wanted. It is not necessary to look to theories of a conspiracy to explain how, on 28 January 1547, the evangelicals at court held a strong hand.

  The way in which the evangelicals at court found themselves so well placed on Henry VIII’s death has persuaded some commentators that the king foresaw and intended their ascendancy: that, in actual fact, he wanted the zealous Protestantism that was advanced during Edward VI’s reign and pursued under the leadership of Edward Seymour and John Dudley. But what does the will have to say about Henry VIII’s faith and his intentions for the new reign?

  Although he has gone down in history as the man who destroyed the unity of Christendom simply in order to bed his nubile mistress, the truth is that throughout his life Henry was a pious man, and it is little wonder that his last will is an unmistakable testament to his religiosity. It is also a fascinating snapshot of his precise position on the Geiger counter of religious belief in the sixteenth century, telling us where on the dial between Roman Catholicism and radical Protestantism Henry actually fell in the last month of his life.

  Henry’s faith had been conventional in his youth. He had gone on pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham. In 1521, his book Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (The Defence of the Seven Sacraments) robustly defended the pope against Martin Luther’s criticisms. This sixteenth-century bestseller had earned Henry the title Fidei Defensor, ‘Defender of the Faith’, and the irony of his proudly continuing to use it after his break with Rome seems never to have occurred to him.

  When separation from the Roman Catholic Church became necessary to attain his annulment from Katherine, Henry seems to have adopted his new elevation to the position of Supreme Head of the Church of England with alacrity. He revelled in his right to define the religious beliefs of the kingdom, dictating doctrine by composing the Ten Articles (to Establish Christian Quietness and Unity Among Us…) – the first doctrinal statement of th
e Church of England. The King’s Book of 1543 was his own personal re-working of a long theological treatise prepared by his bishops. The orthodoxy that these texts decreed was neither consummately Catholic, nor palpably Protestant.

  On the one hand, the new Church of England was reformed. Not only had Henry dispensed with the pope, but he saw himself as a reborn Old Testament prophet, king and judge – in the mould of David, Josiah, Abraham or Hezekiah – charged with the task of rescuing England from idolatry. In the words of the King’s Book, ‘finding our people seduced and drawn from the truth by hypocrisy and superstition,’ he had ‘travailed to purge and cleanse our realm’.1 This effort meant destroying shrines, including that at Canterbury to the great saint of monarch-defying papal obedience, Thomas Becket. It also brought an end to pilgrimages, to the worship of relics and to the adoration of saints; and it involved restricting the use of images in worship, including dismantling the statues, paintings and sculptures of saints on traditional medieval rood screens. Reform also served as a partial justification for the dissolution of all the religious houses in England. Their end reflected a theological shift – the monasteries had chiefly existed to pray for the souls of the dead in purgatory. Prayers for the dead, though praised in the King’s Book, were omitted from the new English litany of 1544.

  Henry reduced the seven sacraments to the mere three of the Mass, baptism and penance – ironically, just as Luther had done – although marriage was later reinstated. In addition, his government commissioned the production of a Bible in English – the first legal English translation – even if Henry was keen to limit its reading audience to those of sufficient social rank to understand it. The frontispiece of this ‘Great Bible’ of 1539 depicts Henry as he wanted to be seen: magnanimously handing out the Word of God to his grateful people, while the Almighty whispers in his ear.

  On the other hand, Henry’s Church of England was far from recognizably Protestant. His Ten Articles and King’s Book continued to affirm the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the Mass and asserted that salvation was only possible by both belief and good works, rejecting the potentially anarchic Lutheran dogma of justification by grace through faith alone.

  Yet, in the summer before Henry’s death, there had been two incidents that suggested that Henry was perhaps re-thinking his Church’s precarious, idiosyncratic balance between Catholicism and Protestantism. Curiously, the two events have different stories to tell.

  The first was that in late July 1546, for the first time in over a dozen years, an envoy from the pope – an Italian called Gurone Bertano – arrived in England and was granted an audience with the king. Did this mean that Henry was considering a rapprochement with Rome? The meeting seemed promising; but two months later, Bertano was given his marching orders.2

  The second, contradictory, event occurred only a few weeks later. While entertaining Claude d’Annebaut, the Admiral of France, in August, Henry – casually leaning one arm on the shoulder of his archbishop, Cranmer, and his other on d’Annebaut – remarked that France and England, newly allied, had decided to banish ‘the Bishop of Rome’ (the pope) from France and to change ‘the Mass in both the realms into a communion’.3 Was he ‘thoroughly and firmly resolved in that behalf’, as Cranmer would contend a few years later, or was it a ‘typical trick of Henry’s, throwing a hand grenade into the assembled company to see what reaction it would provoke’?4

  ‘King Edward VI and the Pope’ (c.1575), by an unknown artist. This painting concocts a scene in which Henry VIII, on his deathbed, points to his successor in the shape of Prince Edward, thus commissioning the dramatic Protestant reformation that took place under Edward VI’s reign. Under Edward’s feet, the pope has been knocked over by a book declaring ‘The Word of the Lord endureth forever’, while (top right) violent iconoclasts pull down images against a backdrop of destruction. The standing figure to Edward’s right has been identified as Edward Seymour (Earl of Hertford, later Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector), while among the seated councillors are Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (in white) and, to his right, Lord Russell. Sir William Paget and John Dudley (Viscount Lisle, later Earl of Warwick) are also probably represented.

  In London’s National Portrait Gallery, there is a painting by an unknown artist, dating from the 1570s, entitled King Edward VI and the Pope. Henry VIII, on his deathbed, is shown pointing to his son, thereby nominating his successor, and is attended by a council that includes Hertford and Lisle. Under Edward’s feet, the pope has been felled by a book that declares ‘The Word of the Lord endureth forever’, and in the top right, as if through a window, we can see violent iconoclasts at work, pulling down images against a backdrop of ruin and destruction. The message of this later propaganda is clear: Henry intended the radical Protestantism of Edward VI’s reign.

  This was also the line taken by John Foxe, and, following Foxe, some historians have argued that Henry was indeed intending further reform in the twilight of his life.5 Together with his bold remark to d’Annebaut, they point to Henry’s choice of executors, and specifically to the exclusion of Norfolk and Gardiner, to suggest that he was deliberately tilting the composition of his son’s regency council to leave a body dominated by evangelicals who would advance the cause of Protestantism after his death. In the twentieth century, Professor G.R. Elton added that the tutors appointed by Henry to teach Edward – Dr Richard Cox and Sir John Cheke – would both come out as vehement Protestants during Edward’s reign, and that Henry must therefore have chosen them in full knowledge of the intellectual and spiritual influence they would have exerted on his son. Henry, it is argued, must have been converted at the end of his life, and must have been lining up a Protestant triumph.6

  Is there anything to suggest that this is true? In practice, there seems to have been little religious motivation in Henry’s decision to oust Gardiner and Norfolk, except perhaps Henry’s awareness that Gardiner’s commitment to the royal supremacy was only skin-deep. The real problem with both Gardiner and Norfolk was character: obstinacy and overweening pride. In addition, in the 1540s, the men appointed to be Edward’s tutors, Cox and Cheke, were not known Protestants, but rather classical-inspired scholars – humanists – in the manner of Erasmus.7 They were chosen because they were leading intellectuals and, if anything, moderate in religion. Cox was, for example, one of two men nominated as ‘indifferent hearers’ in the public religious debate between Bishop Gardiner and the Protestant Robert Barnes in March 1540.8 They may have later become Protestants, but there is no way that Henry would have known this when he appointed them to instruct his heir, and little should therefore be read into it. Finally, Henry’s remark to d’Annebaut and Cranmer seems so outrageous a suggestion – and so completely at odds with happily burning Askewe and others a few months earlier for believing precisely the same thing – that we must surely regard it as a piece of playful and preposterous banter.

  Above all, Henry’s will itself gives us clues about what Henry believed at the very end of his life. For Henry was an inveterate corrector of theological texts, and if he had spotted any error in the religious pronouncements of his will when it was read to him a month before he died, it is hard to believe that he would not have altered it.

  The will’s opening words are: ‘In the name of God and of the glorious and blessed Virgin our Lady Saint Mary and of all the holy company of Heaven’ (folio 1).9 Although Henry did not identify by name ten specific saints as his father had done in his will, nor was he as fulsome in his devotion towards ‘this most Blessed Mother ever Virgin, our Lady Saint Mary’ (as Henry VII’s will has it), this is conventional enough and markedly Catholic in style.10 Later wills of his councillors do not mention the Virgin Mary; even Gardiner, who made his will in the safely Catholic reign of Mary I, on 28 January 1558, committed his soul to ‘the infinite mercy of Almighty God’ and the Virgin Mary did not get a look in – although Gardiner did ask for the ‘intercession of all the company of Heaven’.11 Henry, in fact, mentions the Virgin
Mary and the saints twice: a few pages in, he imperiously states that ‘we do instantly require and desire the Blessed Virgin Mary his Mother with all the holy company of heaven continually to pray for us’ (folio 3). In Henry’s world, things are not requested, but demanded, even of the Mother of God.

  The second indication of Henry’s faith lies in his early confirmation of his supremacy: he is ‘in earth immediately under God the Supreme Head of the Church of England and Ireland’ (folio 1). It is not surprising that such a central plank of Henry’s conception of the religious universe is mentioned boldly and upfront. Then he moves on to explain his theology of salvation: how he believes human beings are made right with God.

  He states his belief in ‘original sin’ – the conviction that he is, as ‘all mankind is mortal and born in sin’ (folio 1). He affirms his understanding of the divinity: God, who is Almighty, presides over a ‘transitory and wretched world’ and provides ‘great gifts and benefits’. Henry acknowledges his unworthiness to receive these gifts – ‘our self insufficient in any part to deserve or recompense the same’ (folio 1) – but three things, Henry believes, will free him from this wretched state. Chief among God’s gifts is the offer of redemption through the person of his son, through whose ‘most precious body and blood in [the] time of his passion’ (folio 3) mankind can be saved and attain eternal life. In addition, Henry notes both the importance of repenting one’s ‘old and detestable life’ (folio 3) and, twice, that a person must endeavour ‘to execute in his lifetime… such good deeds and charitable works as scripture demandeth’ (folio 1 and similarly on folio 2). The greater his ‘estate, honour and authority in this world’ (folio 2), the greater his good works should be. Salvation, then, comes from Christ’s death, the believer’s repentance and the performance of good works in life.