Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (13 page)

When Henry met his bride-to-be, however, he found her downright plain.‘I see nothing in this woman as men report
of her,’ he said, speaking‘very sadly and pensively’ soon after he had greeted Anne on New Year’s Day 1540.’I marvel that
wise men would make such report as they have done.’

Four days later Henry VIII went to his fourth marriage ceremony with a heavy heart. If it were not to satisfy the world and
my realm,’ he told Cromwell reproachfully on their way to the service,‘I would not do that I must do this day for none earthly
thing.’

Next morning, Henry was in a thoroughly bad mood: there were still more grounds for reproach.

’Surely, as ye know,’ he said to Cromwell,‘I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse, for I have felt her
belly and her breasts, and thereby, as I can judge, she should be no maid.’ He added the indelicate detail that Anne suffered
from bad body odour, and went on to describe the deflating effect this had on his ardour.‘I had neither will nor courage to
proceed any further in other matters… he confessed.’I have left her as good a maid as I found her.’

The royal doctors were called in. It was a serious matter when a king could not consummate his marriage, but all they could
offer was the age-old advice in such circumstances — not to worry too much. They advised Henry to take a night off.

But when the King returned to the fray, he found that nothing had changed — as Anne confirmed with charming innocence.‘When
he comes to bed,’ she told one of her ladies-in-waiting,‘he kisses me and taketh me by the hand and biddeth me “Goodnight,
sweetheart”. And in the morning
[he] kisses me and biddeth me “Farewell, darling”. Is this not enough?’

We know these extraordinary details because, not for the first time, Thomas Cromwell was allotted the task of undoing what
he had done. A widely unpopular figure, he had pushed the reforming agenda too far for the tastes of many, and landing his
master with a wife that Henry disparagingly called‘the Flanders Mare’ proved the last straw. In June 1540 Cromwell became
the latest of Henry’s scapegoats, condemned for treason by act of Parliament and facing the dreadful penalties of hanging,
drawing and quartering. If he wished to avoid this particular fate, the minister’s final duty was to set down on paper the
circumstantial evidence that would make possible the annulment of Henry’s non-marriage to Anne.

Thomas Cromwell was executed — with an axe — on 28 July 1540; the paperwork he produced at the eleventh hour helped Henry
secure annulment of the Cleves marriage. Just ten days later the King was married again, to Katherine Howard, the twenty-year-old
niece of his fierce general in the north, the Duke of Norfolk. For nearly a year the traditionalist duke, a Catholic and a
bitter enemy of Cromwell’s, had been pushing the enticing Katherine into Henry’s path while plotting his rival’s downfall.

Unfortunately, the new Queen’s lively allure was accompanied by a lively sexual appetite, and little more than a year after
her marriage, rumours circulated about Katherine’s promiscuity. As an unmarried girl in the unsupervised surroundings of the
Norfolk household, she was said to have
romped with Henry Manox her music teacher and also with her cousin Thomas Dereham — whom she then had the nerve to employ
as her private secretary when she became Queen. In the autumn of 1541, during a royal progress to the north, inquiries revealed
that she had waited till Henry was asleep before cavorting with another young lover, Thomas Culpeper.

Henry wept openly before his Council when finally confronted with proof of his wife’s betrayal. Katherine was beheaded in
February the next year, along with Culpeper, Manox the music teacher, her cousin Dereham and Lady Rochford, the lady-in-waiting
who had facilitated the backstairs liaisons after the King had gone to sleep.

Henry was by now a gross and lumbering man-mountain,‘moved by engines and art rather than by nature’, as the Duke of Norfolk
put it. Arthritic and ulcerous, the ageing King had to be manhandled up staircases — a little cart was built to transport
him around Hampton Court. His apothecary’s accounts list dam-busting quantities of liquorice, rhubarb and other laxatives,
along with grease for the royal haemorrhoids.

What Henry needed was a reliable and experienced wife, and he finally found one in Catherine Parr, thirty-one years old and
twice widowed — which gave her the distinction of being England’s most married Queen. In July 1543 she embarked sagely on
the awesome challenge of life with England’s most married king, bringing together his children Mary, Elizabeth and Edward
to create, for the first time, something like a functional royal family household. Catherine was sympathetic to the new faith,
and her most signifcant
achievement, apart from surviving, was probably to ensure that the two younger children, Edward and Elizabeth, were educated
by tutors who favoured reform.

When Henry died on 28 January 1547, the news was kept secret for three days. It was difficult to imagine England without the
lustful, self-indulgent tyrant who had once been the beautiful young sportsman-king. In moral terms the tale of his reign
was one of remorseless decline, of power corrupting absolutely. By no measure of virtue could Henry VIII be called a good
man.

But he was a great one — and arguably England’s greatest ever king. Take virtue out of the equation, and his accomplishments
were formidable. He destroyed the centuries-old medieval Church. He revolutionised the ownership of English land. He increased
the power of central government to unprecedented heights, and though he ruled England as a despot, he did so without the support
of an army. The new Church of England was Henry VIII’s most obvious legacy. And in the turbulent years that followed his death
the country’s destiny would also be decisively shaped by the institution that he had enlisted — and thus, in the process,
strengthened — to help him break from Rome: the Houses of Parliament and, in particular, the House of Commons.

A
FTER ALL THE TROUBLE THAT HENRY VIII
and England had gone through to get a male heir, Henry made sure that his son Edward received the best education that could
be devised for a future king. The boy’s tutors, Richard Cox and John Cheke, were the leading humanist scholars of the day,
and they redoubled their efforts with the nine-year-old when he succeeded his father in January 1547, In his geography lessons
Edward learned by heart the names of all the ports in England, Scotland and France, together with the prevailing winds and
tides; in history he studied the long and disastrous reign of Henry VI, an object
lesson in how
not
to rule. By the age of twelve, the godly imp’ was reading twelve chapters of the Bible every day and taking notes as he listened
to the Sunday sermon. In a display of cunning reminiscent of his grandfather Henry VII, the boy king devised his own secret
code of Greek letters so no one could read his personal jottings.

Except for rejecting the authority of the Pope, Henry VIII had gone to his grave a pretty traditional Catholic. But he seems
to have accepted that change must come: the two tutors he engaged for his son were prominent evangelicals, and he was well
aware of the radical sympathies of his Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, who had been secretly preparing a programme
of Protestant reform. For nearly twenty years Cranmer had hidden from his master the fact that he was married — Henry did
not approve of married priests — but with Henry’s death the archbishop’s wife became public, and so did his programme of reform.

Out went the candles, the stained-glass windows, the statues of the Virgin and the colourful tableaux that had embellished
the walls of the churches, which were now slapped over with a virtuous coat of whitewash. No more ashes on Ash Wednesday,
no palms on Palm Sunday, and no creeping to the cross on Good Friday. Bells were pulled down from belfries, altar hangings
and vestments were cut up to be used as saddle-cloths — and doves no longer flew from the tower of St Paul’s on Whit Sunday.
In just six years the changes were remarkable.

Today we delight in the beautiful and sonorous phrases of the Book of Common Prayer, first framed by Thomas
Cranmer in 1548-9, then revised in 1552. But this was a strange, discordant new language to the people of the time. While
reformers obviously welcomed the change, they were in the minority. Most people felt themselves deprived of something they
had known and loved all their lives.

Times were already unsettling enough. Inflation was rampant. By 1550, a silver penny contained a fifth of the silver content
of 1500, having been so debased by the addition of red copper that, as Bishop Latimer put it, the coin literally‘blushed in
shame’. Farming, the mainstay of the economy, was being transformed by rich landowners fencing in the common land. Large flocks
of sheep, tended by a single shepherd boy, now grazed on pasture that had once supported half a dozen families ploughing their
own strips.

These new fields, or‘enclosures’, were helping enrich the Tudor squirearchy, but less affluent country-dwellers — the vast
majority of the population — felt dispossessed. In the summer of 1549, villagers in East Anglia started uprooting hedges and
seizing sheep by the thousand. They gathered on Mousehold Heath, outside Norwich, around a massive oak tree they called the
Reformation Oak. Since Christ had died to make men free, they reasoned, they were demanding an end to bondage. In the West
Country, the Cornish-speaking men of Cornwall had already risen in revolt, calling for the restoration of the mass in Latin,
since they spoke little English. They had marched eastwards, besieging Exeter for thirty-five days.

Edward’s tough councillors dealt with these and other risings in the traditional way — promising to listen to grievanees,
then meting out mortal punishment as soon as they had mustered their military strength. But inside his own family, Edward
found a nut that could not be cracked. His elder sister Mary, thirty-two years old in January 1549, was an unashamed champion
of the old faith, and she refused to prohibit the reading of the mass in her household as her brother requested. Death shall
be more welcome to me,’ she declared, than life with a troubled conscience.’

Edward’s councillors tried for a compromise, but the boy king refused to give in on the matter.’He would spend his life,’
he said,‘and all he had, rather than agree and grant to what he knew certainly to be against the truth.’

His sister tried a mixture of flattery and condescension. Although your Majesty hath far more knowledge and greater gifts
than others of your years, yet it is not possible that your Highness can at these years be a judge in matters of religion.’

Edward confirmed what a child he still was by breaking down in a fit of sobbing,‘his tender heart bursting out. All the same,
he refused to budge, as did Mary, who responded to his tears by repeating her willingness to be a martyr.’Take away my life,’
she said,‘rather than the old religion.’

This bitter clash between brother and sister showed that the obstinacy of Henry VIII lived on in both of them — as it did,
for that matter, in their Strong-willed half-sister Elizabeth, in 1553 approaching her twentieth birthday. It also suggested
that the religious differences in their respective parentings might, in the future, cause turbulence and division. When Edward
came down with a feverish cold in the
spring of that year and could not shake it off, the whole programme of evangelical reform was suddenly in jeopardy. Edward’s
Protestant advisers had no doubt that if the boy were to die and Mary succeed him, she would immediately set about dismantling
all the changes they had put in place. England would once again be subject to the Bishop of Rome. So what was to be done?

A
S THE FIFTEEN
-
YEAR
-
OLD EDWARD VI LAY
sick at Greenwich in April and May 1553, his doctors were baffled by his‘weakness and faintness of spirit’. They noted a‘tough,
strong, straining cough’ — a possible sign of tuberculosis. Edward was coughing up blood; his body was covered with ulcers.
In addition, there had been rumours that he was a victim of poison, so to protect themselves the doctors formally notified
the Council that they feared the King had less than nine months to live.