Henry VIII (38 page)

Wolsey was soon to discover with a nasty jolt how things stood. When he returned from France on 17 September, he rode at once to Richmond, bearing rich gifts for the King from Francis I. As was his usual custom, he sent a message to Henry requesting a private audience to discuss his mission, asking where his master would receive him. But Anne was with the King, and before Henry could answer, she addressed the messenger in ringing tones, “Where else is the Cardinal to come? Tell him that he may come here, where the King is.”
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The gauntlet was thrown: from now on, there would be a bitter power struggle between the King's minister and his sweetheart.

After the treaty with France had been formally confirmed in September 1527, Henry VIII and Francis I exchanged orders of chivalry. Henry sent Francis the Order of the Garter, and Francis bestowed on Henry the French equivalent, the Order of St. Michael, which had been founded by Louis XI in 1469 in imitation of the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece. Each sovereign sent the other a beautifully illuminated copy of the statutes of each respective Order.
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Henry accepted the Order of St. Michael with pride, and formally promised to wear, on appropriate occasions, its collar of gold scallop shells with a pendant of the Archangel Michael, its long, ermine-lined mantle of white cloth of silver edged with gold scallop shells, and its cape and hood of crimson velvet embroidered in gold.
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Henry's ambassador to France, the “comely”
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Sir Anthony Browne, half-brother to Sir William Fitzwilliam and a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, had been present at the chapter of the Order of St. Michael that was traditionally (but not regularly) held on the feast of Michaelmas, 29 September, but he was disparaging about the ceremonies he had witnessed, and told Henry, “They would fain follow the fashion of your Order, but they fail in everything. I think in all the world there is no such Order as yours.”
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On 10 November, the same day that Francis I had received the Garter from Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle, Henry VIII was formally invested with the Order of St. Michael. Once again, the banqueting house at Greenwich was decked out in rich tapestries, and the disguising house was adorned with a white marble fountain and two trees fashioned from silk: a Tudor hawthorn and a Valois mulberry. After the investiture, in which the King was robed in his insignia by Anne de Montmorency, Great Master of France, there was a tournament (which ended early because the autumn light was poor), a banquet, and a masque. So brilliant was the occasion that the next day it seemed to have been “a fantastical dream.”
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The winter of 1527–1528 was exceptionally bitter—even the sea froze in places. The King kept Christmas at Greenwich, but Anne Boleyn remained at Hever. In January 1528, probably through her influence, Sir Nicholas Carew, who was her cousin, was restored to his old place in the Privy Chamber, much to Wolsey's chagrin. But Carew was no longer the wild rake he had once been, and was now a sober politician and supporter of the French alliance.

The weather was much improved when, in March, Anne and her mother stayed as the King's guests at Windsor. Henry was attended only by his riding household, and every afternoon he and Anne went hunting or hawking in Windsor Forest, returning after dark, or walked together in the Great Park. In the evenings, they amused themselves with cards, dice, and dancing, played music, and recited poetry. One day the King ordered a picnic, which was held at Windsor Manor. Tables and stools were borrowed from the townsfolk of Windsor, and food and kitchen equipment were brought down from the castle. Henry and Anne and their friends feasted on plovers, partridges, larks, and rabbits, as well as confections with lashings of cream, which was supplied by the parkkeeper's wife.
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On another occasion, Anne asked Thomas Heneage, one of Wolsey's servants who was about to be appointed a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, to ask the Cardinal if he would be so kind as to send her some carps and shrimps for her table.

Anne loved hunting with Henry, because this was one of the few occasions when she could have him almost to herself, with only a few trusted companions in attendance. He was delighted to be able to share his favourite pastime with her, and bought her four French saddles of black velvet with silk and gold fringing, complete with footstools, matching harnesses, and reins, as well as bows, arrows, and gloves.
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Sometimes she would ride behind him on his own mount, using a black velvet pillion saddle—“a most unusual procedure,” commented a scandalised imperial ambassador.
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Anne herself ordered her palfreys specially from Ireland.
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When they were apart, Henry would write to tell her of his successes in the chase, and send her gifts of venison. Not all of their hunting expeditions were felicitous: once, Anne's greyhound savaged and killed a cow, and the King had to pay 10s (£150) in compensation to its irate owner. Anne was also fond of archery, and once tried her hand at bowls, although she was beaten by Richard Hill, the Sergeant of the Cellar who was one of the King's gambling partners. Henry paid him £12 (£3,600) on Anne's behalf.
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Anne was “well skilled at all games fashionable at court.”
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She was an inveterate gambler, but often rash, so the King gave her only £5 (£1,500) at a time, often in small change, from his Privy Purse, “for playing money.”
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Nevertheless, his accounts show that he often lost large sums to her. One of their favourite games was “Pope July,” which appears to have been a satirical interpretation of Henry's nullity suit.
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While she was at Windsor, Anne managed to offend Sir John Russell, an influential member of the Privy Chamber who had become involved in a bitter dispute with her cousin and client, Sir Thomas Cheney, another of the King's Gentlemen, over the marriage of Russell's two step-daughters, who were Wolsey's wards. Cheney and another courtier, Sir John Wallop, wanted to marry them, but Wolsey and Russell had refused their permission. On an earlier occasion, Anne had successfully intervened when Cheney had been in disgrace with Wolsey. However, this time Henry took Russell's part, and forbade Cheney to enter the Privy Chamber until he had made his peace with Russell. But the row continued, and several months later, when Wolsey banished Cheney from court, Anne summoned him back, “in spite of the Cardinal, not without using rude words to Wolsey.” At that point, Wolsey capitulated, and Cheney married his heiress.
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The affair highlighted Anne's increasing ascendancy in the power struggle between her and Wolsey, and turned Russell into the first of the many powerful enemies she would make during the course of her career.

35

“A Thousand Cases of Sweat”

Until 1528, Henry VIII enjoyed good health, but from then on he was troubled by a series of minor ailments. He began to suffer feverish headaches and “rheums,” which could have been due to catarrh, migraine, rising blood pressure, or even the head injuries he had received. In 1528, he had a bladder infection, and around the same time a sore appeared on his leg; this may have been a varicose ulcer, an abscess or a septic condition of the bone, such as osteomyelitis, caused by injury. His surgeon, Thomas Vicary, temporarily cured it, but it would later recur.

There is a persistent but erroneous belief that Henry suffered from syphilis, a disease thought to have been introduced into Europe around 1493 from the newly discovered Americas; that his so-called ulcer was its primary sore, which would have healed spontaneously; and that his feverish headaches were symptomatic of the disease's progress;
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if this had been the case, the headaches would have appeared at a later stage, not at the same time as the primary sore. It is true that, after Wolsey's fall, his physician, Dr. Augustine Agostini, who was almost certainly a creature of the Boleyns, stated that the Cardinal, knowing that he had “the foul and contagious disease of the great pox,” yet “came daily” to the King, breathing in his ear and blowing upon him “with perilous and infective breath.”
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But there is no evidence that Wolsey had syphilis, and even if he had he could not have transmitted it to Henry in this way. It has also been claimed that a portrait of Henry VIII at Hever Castle shows him with the collapsed bridge of the nose that is a symptom of the advancing disease. This portrait is in fact a poor copy of a lost original by Holbein that was painted around 1543/4; better-quality copies of the same portrait at Castle Howard and in the National Portrait Gallery, and other later representations of the King, all show him with his familiar high-bridged nose.

No hostile foreign envoy ever claimed that Henry had syphilis. In all the detailed records of purchases of medicaments by the King's doctors and apothecaries, there is not a single mention of mercury, which was the most effective treatment for syphilis, and which was administered over a period of six weeks with such unpleasant side effects that no ambassador could have failed to understand what ailed the King. Nor was Henry given the various remedies that were prescribed for Francis I, who did have what was known as the French disease. Henry did devise for himself a plaster made from “
lignum guaiacum
,” a hardwood imported from the New World that was ground into ash and dissolved in water for the relief of syphilitics; however, that substance was, and still is, a proven remedy for gout, sore throats, and pains in the leg.
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Henry never suffered the disfiguring rash and skin eruptions of the second stage of the illness, nor the blindness, paralysis, and dementia that are characteristic of its final stages: he was lucid to the end. Neither did his children show any symptoms of having inherited the disease.

The King was undoubtedly something of a hypochondriac. He considered himself an expert on diseases and ailments, and, as we have seen, was fond of devising cures for them. This concern was extended to his courtiers. When, in 1528, Sir Bryan Tuke, who had succeeded Sir Henry Wyatt as Treasurer of the Chamber, developed a painful kidney complaint, he confided in Wolsey, who in turn told the King. But somewhere along the line the information became garbled, and when Tuke next sought an audience with Henry to discuss secretarial business, the King “began to tell me of a medicine for a tumour in the testicles. I immediately said His Highness was not well informed of my disease, which is not there but in my kidneys.” Undeterred, “His Highness had me by and by, and gave me direct counsel, and showed me the remedies, as any cunning physician in England could do.”
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In an age without painkillers, Henry's minor complaints alone could have accounted for his increasing tetchiness, even without his frustration at the delay in obtaining a decision on his marriage. For the Pope, anxious to play for time, had decided to send a legate to England to hear the King's case, but the man he had chosen, Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, suffered from gout and could travel only in slow stages. Henry, who was now determined to marry Anne Boleyn, was desperate with impatience.

Now Fate, it seemed, might snatch from him what he most desired, for in May 1528 the dreaded sweating sickness broke out again.
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In great fear, the King dismissed most of his courtiers and servants and left Greenwich for Waltham Abbey in Essex, taking the Queen and Anne Boleyn with him. When news came that there was plague near Pontefract, where Richmond was staying, a worried Henry ordered his son to move further north, and sent him remedies that he himself had concocted, in case he fell ill. Fortunately, the regular bulletins on his health that reached the King were all reassuring.
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This visitation of the sweat proved particularly virulent, with forty thousand cases in London alone, although not all of them proved fatal. “The term of Parliament was adjourned, and the judges' circuit also.”
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Eighteen members of Wolsey's household died within the space of four hours, and two others succumbed after the Cardinal had sought refuge at the More.

At Waltham, two Ushers, two Grooms of the Chamber, George Boleyn, and Sir William Fitzwilliam all sickened but recovered. When one of Anne Boleyn's maids fell ill in June, Henry sent his sweetheart home to Hever, then fled in terror to Hunsdon, where he “strengthened” himself with medicines
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made up by his apothecary Cuthbert Blackden, and remained isolated in a tower with Dr. Chamber and his other physicians.
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To begin with, he was so “much troubled” by fear of the sweat that he ordered Sir Francis Bryan to sleep in his bedchamber with him. However, as time went by and no one in the household fell sick, the King grew “very merry” with relief.
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He bombarded Wolsey with good advice, sent through Bryan Tuke: the Cardinal was to avoid any places where there was a risk of infection, and if any of his household fell ill, he was to remove with speed. “His Highness desireth Your Grace to keep out of the air, to have only a small and clean company about him, to use small suppers and to drink little wine, and once in the week to use the pills of Rhazis” (which were named after the Arab physician who had invented them). If Wolsey himself fell ill, the King had devised a posset of herbs that would bring out the sweat most profusely. Otherwise, the Cardinal was to look to his soul “and commit all to God.”
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Wolsey responded with news that the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk had had some success in curing a number of the sick: she made them fast for sixteen hours and stay in bed for a whole day and night, then kept them in isolation for a week, dosing them with treacle and herbs.
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Soon afterwards, the King received the devastating news that Anne and her father had caught the sweating sickness, and in a fever of anxiety he sent his second physician; the kindly and urbane Dr. William Butts, who had formerly been in the household of the Princess Mary at Hunsdon, to attend them, with a letter to Anne “praying God that He may soon restore your health.”
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Butts was soon back at court with the cheerful news that Anne and her father had recovered. Soon, a relieved Henry was writing to tell her, “Since your last letters, mine own darling, Walter Welch, Master [John] Browne, John Carey, Urian Brereton and John Cocke the apothecary be fallen of the sweat in this house and, thanked be God, all recovered. As yet the plague is not fully ceased here, but I trust shortly it shall. By the mercy of God, the rest of us yet be well, and I trust shall pass it.”
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But the King's hopes of the sweat abating were in vain, and “for a space, he removed almost every day, till at the last he came to Tittenhanger,” one of Wolsey's houses, “where he prepared to bide the time that God would allow him.”
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The house was “purged daily by fires and other preservatives,”
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such as vinegar, and the King had the window in the Cardinal's closet enlarged, so as to admit more fresh air. Fearing that the plague might be a sign of divine displeasure, and realising that he should prepare for the worst, he kept the Queen with him and followed a strict devotional routine, attending mass and taking communion more frequently than usual, and going to confession daily.
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His mornings were devoted to business, his afternoons to hunting.
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Wolsey, meanwhile, had gone to Leeds Castle, where he spent his time dealing with the rush of requests for the offices and property of those who had died.

Back in London, the Duke of Norfolk caught the sweat and survived, but it carried off three of the King's most favoured Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber: Sir William Compton, Sir Edward Poyntz, and William Carey, the husband of Mary Boleyn. Compton, who had been “lost by negligence by letting him sleep in the beginning of the sweat,”
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left no heir; his servants stole his effects, and there was a stampede for his vacated offices. Even young Richmond wrote to his father urging that some be given to Sir Edward Seymour, “the Master of my Horse.”
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Compton's will bequeathed his wealth to Anne Hastings, and to the King he left personal mementos, “a little chest of ivory with a gilt lock” filled with jewels, a chessboard, and a backgammon set.
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William Carey died suddenly on 22 June, aged only thirty-two. The King granted the wardship of his son, Henry Carey, to the boy's aunt, Anne Boleyn,
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and warned her in a letter that her sister Mary was in “extreme necessity”; in Henry's opinion, it was her father's responsibility to support her. At Anne's request, he ordered Rochford to take her under his roof and give her succour. Later that year, at Anne's further behest, Henry himself assigned Mary an annuity of £100 (£30,000) that had formerly been enjoyed by William Carey.
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Carey's death left a vacancy in the Privy Chamber, which was filled three days later by Sir Francis Bryan,
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who was another of Anne's cousins and had long desired to recover his former place. Anne's good offices may have brought this about; certainly Bryan was one of her earliest supporters. Yet for all his brilliance, he—unlike Carew—had not been sobered by the advancing years; although he was now an established cipherer, diplomat, and courtier, he still behaved like the profligate libertine he had always been. He would now become highly influential, riding high in the King's favour: he was Henry's constant companion in the privy chamber, and his favoured opponent in gambling, bowls, and tennis.

Another Privy Chamber member who was well thought of by the King was the young page Francis Weston, a gifted lute player and a superb athlete, whom Wyatt described as a “pleasant” individual. Henry liked his company and often chose him to sleep in his bedchamber at night.
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Anne also favoured him; he and Bryan sometimes joined her and the King for cards.
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From Tittenhanger, Henry moved north to the healthier air of Ampthill, where he began to complain of pains in his head, causing a momentary panic. He was still feeling poorly when he moved to Grafton, but there the pains disappeared. What began as a flight from the plague had now turned into a progress, but the King was careful to visit various shrines and religious houses for the health of his soul.

In high summer, the sweat began to abate in England, although it was rapidly spreading across Europe for the first time. Henry, on his way to Woodstock, was met by a messenger who warned him that one of the servants of the Duke of Suffolk, who had gone ahead to prepare for his arrival, had died of the sweat some days before. The King “could not a little marvel” that Suffolk had failed to warn him of this earlier; now the giests had to be changed at a moment's notice, much to the King's irritation.
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This resulted in his moving north to Old Moor Hall at Sutton Coldfield, where he stayed as the guest of John Vesey, Bishop of Exeter. While hunting in nearby Sutton Chase, Henry tracked down a rare boar, but it turned viciously on him, and his life was saved only by the timely intervention of a local girl who, being fortuitiously nearby with her bow and arrow, shot the beast dead.

In August, the King's plans were altered again because there were still cases of plague nearer to London. A sojourn at the More was abandoned, and the King lodged at Tittenhanger instead.
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At every stage of his journey, his officers were sent ahead to check that each house was free from infection.
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Around this time, Jean du Bellay, Bishop of Bayonne, the first resident French ambassador to be sent to England, came to present his credentials to the King. Soon after his arrival, du Bellay noted that “Mlle. Boleyn has returned to court,” accompanied once more by her mother. It was not a long visit, but sufficient to further inflame the King's ardour after the long weeks of separation. Together they rode out hunting daily, and du Bellay, whose master's support both Henry and Anne were keen to secure, was often asked to accompany them, a mark of signal favour. “Madame Anne” set herself to charm him, bestowing on him generous gifts—a hunting outfit, hat, and horn, and a handsome greyhound—and telling him that everything she did was “entirely by the commandment of the King,” while Henry would often take him aside to discuss confidential affairs. The ambassador's despatches reveal how flattered he was by this attention, but he was careful to say that it was really a sign of the King of England's love for France.
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The King of France, no fool, would get the message.