A Journey Through Tudor England (19 page)

After a moving speech, and having quipped to the sheriff that the axe was ‘sharp medicine … a physician for all diseases’, Ralegh
was executed on 29 October 1618. Bess carried away his head in a red leather bag and kept it with her until her death. Ralegh had already surrendered Sherborne to the Crown. On his death, the attorney general declared, ‘He hath been as a star at which the world has gazed; but stars may fall.’

If Ralegh’s castle isn’t Tudor enough for you, just down the road is the golden-coloured Sandford Orcas Manor House. This virtually unknown gem is a wonderful sixteenth-century house that you can tour, for a small fee, with owner Sir Mervyn Medlycott. The current family has owned the house since 1736, and it was restored in 1978. The Great Hall dates from around 1550: the fireplace and splendid eighteen mullion windows are original, though the furniture and panelling are Jacobean. There is a ‘solar room’ above the Hall with the same mullion windows and a Jacobean four-poster bed from 1620. Note the spiral staircases, indoor porches, gatehouse and garderobe. Look out for the leather Tudor children’s shoes, found behind a cabinet where they had probably been put to ward off evil, and some fine examples of Elizabethan blackwork (decorative embroidery), including a bodice and coif (linen cap), embroidered with gold thread.

‘But a duck’s blood’

T
he ruined abbey of Hailes in Gloucestershire is a desolate reminder of a world that vanished in the 1530s. For Hailes was once one of the most famous abbeys in England, attracting pilgrims from far and wide to visit its precious holy relic: the Blood of Hailes, a silver and crystal phial said to contain Christ’s blood.

Established in 1246 as a Cistercian abbey, Hailes was founded by King Henry III’s brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall. We can imagine that it looked a little like a small version of Westminster Abbey: it was built at the same time and had the same ‘chevet’ design, or coronet of chapels, at its east end. This is where the shrine containing the holy blood was housed.

Earl Richard’s son, Edmund, had given the blood to the monks at Hailes in 1270. He came by it in Flanders, and the Patriarch of Jerusalem, later Pope Urban IV, had guaranteed its authenticity. For centuries the masses flocked to Hailes to behold this most sacred of relics, in hope of absolution from their sins.

In 1538, the Blood of Hailes became the centre of a scandal. On 24 February 1538, John Hilsey, Bishop of Rochester preached
at St Paul’s Cross in London against the idolatry and deception of Hailes and its sister abbey of Boxley in Kent. The Rood of Grace from Boxley, carved with figures thought to move by supernatural intervention, was exposed as an automaton. As Hilsey explained, ‘It was made to move the eyes and lips by strings of hair … whereby they had gotten great riches in deceiving the people.’ When Hilsey stopped speaking, the rood screen was unceremoniously broken up into little pieces by the crowd. Then Hilsey turned his attention to the Blood of Hailes. He said that he had been told twenty years earlier, in a confession by the abbot’s mistress, that it was ‘but a duck’s blood’.

Hilsey could get away with this claim because, having made himself Supreme Head of the Church of England in 1534, Henry VIII liked to think of himself as an Old Testament king, like David or Josiah, who had a special mandate from God to bring down idols and reform religious abuses. The royal injunctions of 1536, part of the first wave of doctrinal statements by the new Church of England, bemoaned the fact that, ‘superstitions and hypocrisy [had] crept into divers men’s hearts’. With the Blood of Hailes, Henry VIII had a chance to prove his reforming credentials.

The Bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer, led a commission to Gloucestershire to examine the relic in October 1538. He concluded it was not drake’s blood, but ‘unctuous gum [that had been] coloured’ and seized the phial. On 24 November 1538, Hilsey preached again at St Paul’s, saying that the blood was merely ‘honey clarified and coloured with saffron, as had been evidently proved before the King and his Council’. Whether duck’s blood, saffron honey or coloured gum, what was certain to the examiners was that it was no holy relic. It may be that Abbot Sagar, whom Latimer nicknamed ‘the bluddy abbott’, told the truth when he swore that he had inherited the relic and displayed it in good faith, but to Henry VIII, it was further proof of the greed and dishonesty
of the Catholic Church, and provided a great opportunity to seize the wealthy abbey.

On Christmas Eve, 1539, Sagar surrendered his abbey to the King’s commissioners. Over subsequent years the Abbey was gradually demolished, leaving only an outline today, where many pilgrims’ feet had sought an encounter with the divine.

Hailes Abbey is emblematic of the end of popular medieval devotion, and marks the beginnings of an age whose population would be less ready to accept the pronouncements of the clergy on trust alone.

‘As truly as God is God, my mind was fully bent the other time I was at liberty to marry you before any man I know.’

T
he graceful honey-coloured Sudeley Castle, in the heart of the Gloucestershire countryside, is mostly Elizabethan, with beautiful late medieval ruins, exquisite gardens and a separate chapel. Now owned, and still inhabited, by the Dent-Brocklehurst and Ashcombe family, there has been a castle at Sudeley since before the Norman Conquest of 1066. Sudeley has a rich Tudor history: Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn stayed here in 1535, and Elizabeth I held a party here to celebrate the defeat of the Armada (there is a stained-glass window of her in the stairwell of the house to mark this). Sudeley’s chief distinction, however, is as the final resting place of one of England’s most under-appreciated queens, Henry VIII’s sixth wife, Kateryn Parr.

Kateryn Parr has generally been dismissed as a dowdy old widow whom Henry VIII married solely to have a nursemaid, but this sorry analysis overlooks the evidence of her considerable
beauty, vitality and intelligence, and her life of great hardship, adventure, passion and peril.

For a start, she may have been a widow when she made her royal marriage, but she was anything but dowdy. A lock of her pretty strawberry-blonde hair at Sudeley confirms the loveliness seen in her recently identified portrait at the National Portrait Gallery, where she is youthful, with delicate features, a tiny waist and evident sartorial flair.

Her unlined face does not bear the marks of her tumultuous life. Left without a father at the age of five, Kateryn — who had, extraordinarily enough, been named after her godmother Katherine of Aragon — had to leave the carefree, encouraging and scholarly environment of her mother’s house when she was married off at sixteen to a frail young husband, Edward Borough. For the first two years of their marriage, she made her uncomfortable home with her bullying new father-in-law at Gainsborough Old Hall. When Edward died, Kateryn was still only twenty, and now an orphan: her mother had died two years earlier.

Her uncertain future was secured by marriage to John Neville, Lord Latimer of Snape Castle in Yorkshire, in 1534. Though just twenty-one years old to his forty, Kateryn served Latimer well as a stepmother to his two teenage children. Latimer’s daughter, Margaret Neville, would later become Kateryn’s maid-of-honour. Though their nine-year marriage was happy enough, all was not peaceful. In 1536, during the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion [see P
ONTEFRACT
C
ASTLE
], an armed mob of rebels took Lord Latimer prisoner. Two months later, Kateryn herself faced great danger when an armed mob ransacked Snape Castle, seizing her and the children as hostages. It is little wonder that after this Kateryn was keen to move south!

In the winter of 1542—3, Kateryn was in London and, with the help of her sister, Anne Herbert, had taken up a position as one of
Mary Tudor’s ladies-in-waiting. This brought her into contact with the high-fliers of Henry VIII’s court, including Sir Thomas Seymour, brother to the late Queen, Jane. Seymour was handsome, charming and recklessly ambitious. When Latimer died in February 1543, Seymour began to court Kateryn, and the twice-widowed Kateryn fell, for the first time, wildly in love. As she later wrote to Seymour, in a love letter that can be seen at Sudeley Castle:

I would not have you to think that this mine honest goodwill towards you to proceed of any sudden motion or passion for as truly as God is God, my mind was fully bent the other time I was at liberty to marry you before any man I know.

But marry him she could not, because she had caught the King’s eye and, no matter what her heart preferred, a proposal from Henry VIII could not be turned down. Henry VIII married his sixth wife on 12 July 1543 in the Queen’s private chapel at Hampton Court Palace before a small crowd of nineteen close friends and family.

A capable, accomplished and energetic queen, Kateryn was an important patron of the clergy, arts and education. She guided the rising stars of the Church, Matthew Parker (later Elizabeth I’s Archbishop of Canterbury), Miles Coverdale and Nicholas Ridley [see B
ROAD
S
TREET
]. It was she who sponsored the artists William Scrots, Master John, Lucas and Susanna Horenbout, the Bassano family of court musicians and the playwright Nicholas Udall. She founded Well Grammar School in Clare, Suffolk. She even excelled in scholarship herself: Kateryn was both the first Queen of England to publish her own book, and the first English woman to publish a work of prose in the sixteenth century. You can see her signed, beautiful 1546 copy of her
Prayers and Meditations
, bound in red
silk and embroidered with gold and silver thread, in the exhibitions at Sudeley.

As stepmother to the future Queen Elizabeth, Kateryn was an important role model. Entrusted with the position of Regent-General when Henry went to war in France in 1544, Kateryn demonstrated strong female rule to the young Elizabeth: England’s greatest monarch undoubtedly learnt the skills of queenship at Kateryn Parr’s side.

When Henry VIII died in January 1547, Kateryn’s years of duty finally seemed behind her. She impetuously rushed ahead with a marriage to Thomas Seymour in May, well before the usual two years of mourning were up, and by Christmas (which they spent with Edward VI at Hampton Court), the now four times married Kateryn was finally pregnant by the man she loved.

In the summer of 1548, Kateryn and Thomas moved to his beautiful country house at Sudeley in advance of the birth, with Lady Jane Grey in attendance. In preparation, Seymour had spent £1,000 (around £340,000 today) adding to the ancient castle, which already included a magnificent Banqueting Hall with fine oriel windows (now in ruins).

On the eve of her labour, both princesses wrote to encourage her: Elizabeth thanking her for writing despite ‘being so great with child’, and Mary hoping ‘to hear good success of your Grace’s good belly’. Heralded by these well-wishers, on 30 August 1548, the thirty-six-year-old Kateryn gave birth to her first child, a healthy girl, whom she named Mary after her eldest stepdaughter. Thomas could boast joyfully of his little daughter’s prettiness.

But their happiness was short-lived. Within days, Kateryn had developed the fever that comes from puerperal sepsis, a bacterial infection caused by a doctor’s lack of hygiene. She died on the morning of 5 September 1548. Wrapped in a waxed cloth and encased in lead, she was buried in the chapel at Sudeley (later
ruined in the Civil War). Her chief mourner was the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey [see G
UILDHALL
]. Crazed with grief, Seymour’s subsequent foolish acts led to his execution on Tower Hill, while their daughter, Mary, does not seem to have lived past the age of two.