Henry VIII (43 page)

The summer of 1530 brought with it the plague, causing the king to flee from Hampton Court to Greenwich. Before his arrival, several poor folk were expelled from their homes as a precautionary measure; the King later compensated them for the inconvenience. During August, Henry gave himself “entirely to hunting privately and moving from one place to another.”
²⁵

His son Richmond was sent back to Windsor, where Norfolk's thirteen-year-old son, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was sent to keep him company and share his lessons. They remained there for two years and forged a lasting friendship. Surrey, who was to become one of England's greatest poets, later looked back, when Richmond was dead and he himself in prison in Windsor Castle, upon that time of awakening adolescence as an isolated idyll. He celebrated it in one of his most moving poems, which reveals more details of Richmond's formative years than any other source:

So cruel prison, how could betide, alas,
As proud Windsor? where I, in lust [vigour] and joy,
With a King's son, my childish years did pass
In greater feast than Priam's sons of Troy:
Where each sweet place returns a taste full sour,
The large green courts where we were wont to hove
With eyes cast up unto the maidens' tower,
And easy sighs such as folk draw in love.
The stately seats, the ladies bright of hue,
The dances short, long tales of great delight,
With words and looks that tigers could but rue,
Where each of us did plead the other's right.

 

He recalled them playing tennis under the watchful eye of a governess, and missing the ball because their thoughts were on young girls:

The palm play where, despoiled [stripped] for the game,
With dazed eyes oft we, by gleams of love,
Have missed the ball and got sight of our dame,
To bait her eyes, which kept the leads above.

 

There were happy hours spent jousting, riding, and hunting, and secret confidences shared:

The gravel ground, with sleeves tied on the helm,
On foaming horse, with swords and friendly hearts,
With cheer, as though one should another whelm,
Where we have fought and chased oft with darts.
With silver drops the mead yet spread for ruth,
In active games of nimbleness and strength,
Where we did strain, trained with swarms of youth,
Our tender limbs, that yet shot up in length.
The wild forest, the clothed holts with green,
With reins availed and swift, y-breathed horse,
With cry of hounds and merry blasts between,
Where we did chase the fearful hart of force.
The wide walls eke, that harboured us each night,
Wherewith, alas! reviveth in my breast
The sweet accord: such sleeps as yet delight
The pleasant dreams, the quiet bed of rest.
The secret thoughts imparted with such trust,
The wanton talk, the divers change of play,
The friendship sworn, each promise kept so just,
Wherewith we passed the winter nights away.
Give me account, where is my noble fere [companion]
Whom in thy walls thou didst each night enclose?
To other lief [dear], but unto me most dear.
Echo, alas, that doth my sorrow rue,
Returns thereto a hollow sound of plaint.
Thus I alone, where all my freedom grew,
In prison pine, with bondage and restraint;
And with remembrance of the greater grief,
To banish the less, I find my chief relief.
²⁶

 

In 1531, the King gave Richmond the early fifteenth-century house at Collyweston, Northamptonshire, Margaret Beaufort's former residence, as his principal seat, but it appears that he rarely used it before 1533.
²⁷

Cardinal Wolsey, meanwhile, had retired to his See of York and was staying at Cawood Castle, preparing for his belated enthronement as Archbishop. Suddenly, in November 1530, the Earl of Northumberland—the former Lord Henry Percy, whose courtship of Anne Boleyn the Cardinal had ended—arrived at Cawood with Walter Welch of the Privy Chamber and, in the King's name, arrested Wolsey for high treason. The Cardinal was charged with having attempted to enlist the support of foreign rulers in his own cause and having been in secret correspondence with Rome.

Wolsey travelled south with the Earl; they were met on the way by the Captain of the King's Guard, Sir William Kingston, with twenty-four of his men. The Cardinal knew that at the end of his journey the execution block awaited him. But he was also a sick man, and when they arrived at Leicester Abbey for the night, he collapsed. As he lay dying, he said, “If I had served God as diligently as I have done the King, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs.”
²⁸
He was buried in St. Mary's Abbey in the hair shirt that he had worn secretly during the last months of his life.
²⁹

George Cavendish rode south to Hampton Court to inform the King of Wolsey's death, and found Henry at shooting at the butts. Noticing Cavendish leaning against a tree looking pensive, the King came up and clapped a hand on his shoulder.

“I will make an end of my game, then I will talk with you,” he said. Later, Norris summoned Cavendish to the privy lodgings where the King, wearing a gown of russet velvet lined with sables, awaited him. After Cavendish broke the news, Henry spent an hour “examining me of divers weighty matters concerning my lord, wishing that liefer than £20,000 that he had lived.”
³⁰

Henry kept his personal sorrow to himself, but he was determined to assert his authority over the Church that Wolsey had represented. In December 1530, spurred on by Cromwell and the rampant anticlericalism engendered by the Great Matter, he indicted fifteen of his senior clergy-men under the Statute of Praemunire for having recognised Wolsey's unlawful ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

After dropping this bombshell, Henry presided with the Queen over the Christmas celebrations at Greenwich, while Anne Boleyn made herself scarce. She had recently made a fool of herself by adopting a motto that had long been used by the Emperor's family, and ordering it to be embroidered on her servants' doublets. Given the fact that she had spent her youth at the court of Margaret of Austria, she was probably aware of what she was doing, but the defiant gesture had backfired when people began laughing at her, and she hastily had the mottoes removed.
³¹
Anne was back at court by New Year, however, when the King had to give her £100 to buy him a gift,
³²
and she was at his side when, in February 1531, he visited Sir Nicholas Carew at Beddington Park in Surrey.

England now stood on the brink of the Reformation, and there is no doubt that Anne was using all her influence to further her own cause and that of reform by encouraging the King in his new policies.

39

“Opprobrious Words”

By early 1531 Cromwell had entered the inner circle of the Privy Council and was heavily influencing royal policy with his ideal of a sovereign state supported by Parliament, the law, and an efficient administration. In February of that year, the indicted clergy submitted to the King, paid an enormous fine, and recognised him as Supreme Head of the Church of England “as far as the law of Christ allows.” The title was suggested by Archbishop Warham, the qualification by Bishop Fisher, who was emerging as one of Henry's chief opponents. The King had not broken with Rome, but set himself up as the temporal head of the English Church: the Pope's spiritual authority was as yet unchallenged.

Two months later, the new Supreme Head began extending and refurbishing York Place as his chief London residence. In order to lay out spacious gardens, he acquired and demolished neighbouring properties. A crenellated gatehouse with chequered brickwork, an oriel window, Tudor badges, and terracotta roundels of Roman emperors was built across the highway (the present Whitehall) that bisected the palace site. This would later be known as the Holbein Gate, although there is no evidence that Holbein ever worked on it, although he would be responsible for the ceiling of Henry's new long gallery. The privy gallery that had been brought from Esher ran across the gateway and linked Wolsey's old house with the privy chamber in the new buildings. To the north lay the privy garden, to the south an orchard. The King, who retained the Cardinal's great hall and chapel, erected new lodgings for himself, all on one level; these were completed by October 1532. Mediaeval Kennington Palace, south of the Thames, was demolished and its stonework used for York Place.

Later on, Henry had the Thames embanked along the river side of the palace and built new privy stairs for his exclusive use, and another gatehouse, the classically styled King's Gate, to the south of the highway. He also converted Wolsey's old lodgings into a Queen's Side for Anne Boleyn.

When completed, Whitehall would be the largest palace in Europe. It consisted of a rambling series of magnificent state apartments, courtier lodgings, and service quarters, all ranged around a series of courtyards. The exterior walls were painted with chequers and black and white grotesque work. Henry's own lodgings, on the east side of the palace, overlooking the Thames, were sumptuous: his privy chamber contained an alabaster fountain, and all the principal rooms had high bay windows, ceilings “marvellously wrought in stone with gold” by Clement Armstrong,
¹
“and wainscots of carved wood representing a thousand beautiful figures.”
²
The windows blazed with heraldic glass by Galyon Hone, and the walls were hung with royal portraits.

Inside, there were “many and singular commodious things, most apt and convenient to appertain only to so noble a Prince for his singular comfort, pastime and solace,”
³
For his bedchamber, a “great bed of walnut tree,”
⁴
gilded by Andrew Wright, one of the King's decorative artists, was constructed over ten months at a cost of £83.3s.10d (£24,957.50). Lucas Horenbout is known to have carried out commissions for the King at York Place in 1531–1532, as did another eminent painter and engraver, John Bettes the Elder, who helped paint a mural of Henry's coronation.
⁵

Much of this was done “to please the Lady,”
⁶
but Anne Boleyn no longer pleased many of her former supporters. In June 1532, she quarrelled violently with Sir Henry Guildford, who had dared to praise the Queen in her hearing, and “threatened him most furiously” that, when she became Queen, she would have him punished and dismissed from his office of Comptroller. In scathing tones he told her that she need not wait so long, and immediately resigned. The King urged him to reconsider, advising him he “should not mind women's talk,” but although Chapuys says Guildford refused, he must at some stage have relented because he certainly remained in office until his death.
⁷

During June and July, Henry and Anne spent their time hunting, accompanied only by Sir Nicholas Carew and two other attendants.
⁸
Up until this time, the King and Queen had made a point of visiting each other every few days for the sake of appearances; Henry always treated Katherine “with respect, and occasionally dines with her.”
⁹
But now he decided that they must separate for good. On Friday, 14 July, he rode out from Windsor with Anne and Carew and went to Woodstock, leaving Katherine behind without saying farewell. He simply left orders that she was to remove with her household to the More and not write to him or see her daughter Mary.

At the More, Katherine continued to enjoy the state of a queen, with a household that numbered two hundred, but few courtiers came to pay their respects. An Italian visitor, Mario Savorgnano, who went there that summer to see her dine, reported that she had “always a smile on her face” and that thirty maids of honour were standing around her table.
¹⁰
One of those maids was Wyatt's mistress, Elizabeth Darrell, who would remain with Katherine until her death. Another was Jane Seymour,
¹¹
whose brother Edward was an Esquire of the Body to the King.

The Princess Mary was then residing at Richmond. At fifteen, she was “not very tall” but had “a pretty face” and was “well-proprtioned with a very beautiful complexion.”
¹²
Her adolescence had been marred by the rift between her parents, which caused her untold misery and was to have an indelible effect upon her health. Although she loved her father, it was her mother whom she staunchly supported, and it was for this reason that Henry refused to allow the two to meet, in case they might plot against him.

Henry was forty that June. Later that year, an Italian visitor, Lodovico Falier, would say of him: “In this eighth Henry, God has combined such corporeal and intellectual beauty as not merely to surprise but to astound all men. His face is angelic rather than handsome, his head imperial and bold, and he wears a beard, contrary to English fashion.”
¹³
His hair was now worn cropped close to his head. Savorgnano described Henry as being “tall of stature, very well formed, and of very handsome presence. . . . Nature, in creating such a prince, has done her utmost to present a perfect model of manly beauty, in favour both with God and man. . . . I never saw a prince better disposed than this one. He is also learned and accomplished, and most generous and kind.”
¹⁴
“You never saw a taller or more noble looking personage,” wrote the reformer Simon Grynaeus, who visited England that year.
¹⁵
In 1532, Falier wrote a confidential dispatch, stating that the King had “a very well-proprtioned body of tall stature and an air of royal majesty such as has not been witnessed in any other sovereign for many years.”
¹⁶

During the summer of 1531, the King travelled to Sandwich to inspect the defences there, and later took Anne Boleyn to visit Lord Sandys at The Vyne. In the autumn, he was hunting again; then in November he and the Queen hosted separate banquets for the Lord Mayor and citizens of London in adjoining rooms at Ely Place in Holborn. Henry and Katherine managed to avoid meeting each other on this, the last state occasion in which the Queen would take part.

Katherine's departure from court undermined the power of her faction. Leave of absence was never refused to those who took her part, and in the Privy Chamber Exeter, whom Katherine had described to Chapuys as a good friend of hers, and his friend Carew found their influence undermined by Cromwell's allies. The Duchess of Norfolk, who supported the Queen on principle since the Duke was an ally of Anne Boleyn, openly impugned Anne's ancestry, quarrelled bitterly with her over Anne's interference in the marriages of the Duchess's children, and smuggled letters to the Queen in oranges; Anne found out what was happening and warned her aunt, in very “high words,” to desist, but the Duchess defiantly continued to act as a go-between for Katherine and Chapuys. Inevitably, the King discovered what was happening, and banished her from court.
¹⁷

As the influence of the Boleyns and Cromwell increased, so that of Norfolk and Suffolk declined. Realising that they had brought down the Cardinal only to have someone else take his place, rather than themselves, both dukes were implacably hostile to Cromwell, whom they regarded as an upstart, although they were wise enough to establish good working relationships with him. Cromwell, however, was no fool: he knew that Norfolk in particular could “speak fair to his enemy as to his friend,”
¹⁸
and young Surrey, his son, was not above openly referring to Cromwell as “that foul churl.”
¹⁹
Gardiner, who was appointed Bishop of Winchester in December 1531, was Norfolk's ally, but Anne was becoming suspicious of them both. Norfolk crossed swords with his niece on several occasions; Gardiner, however, was too wily to give her any cause for complaint. Norfolk and Suffolk were themselves at odds, both in the Council chamber and in their local jurisdictions in East Anglia, and the men of their affinity were now forming themselves into antagonistic rival bands.

The atmosphere at Greenwich that Christmas was subdued: “there was no mirth because the Queen and the ladies were absent.”
²⁰
Anne was now installed in the Queen's lodgings, “acompanied by almost as many ladies as if she were queen,”
²¹
but she did not preside with the King over the festivities, which were devised to impress the new French ambassador, Giles de la Pommeraye.
²²
The Queen kept Christmas at the More, and made good cheer for the sake of her ladies, while Mary was at Beaulieu. Her cousin Margaret Douglas had recently joined her household and was sharing her education; the two girls, who were almost of an age, became very close friends.

At New Year, Anne presented Henry with some darts (probably boar spears) wrought “in the Biscayan fashion, richly ornamented,” while he gave her a set of rich hangings of cloth of gold and silver and crimson satin, lavishly embroidered, and a bed hung with cloth of gold and silver. Although he had sent a gift to Mary, Henry did not purchase one for Katherine, yet she sent him an exquisite standing cup. Angry with embarrassment, he refused to receive it, then changed his mind in case her messenger should return later in the day to present it in front of the whole court. Recalling the messenger, he took the cup and had it discreetly placed among his other gifts on a sideboard in the presence chamber. In the evening he returned it, sending orders that neither Katherine nor Mary were to send him gifts in future.
²³

By 1532, Henry was heartily sick of the Pope's procrastination, which in his opinion was bringing the Church into disrepute, and he was beginning to contemplate a complete break with Rome. Antipapal feeling was widespread in England, especially in the southeast, and there was bitter resentment against the tithes that had to be paid to an already wealthy Church and the corruption of many of its clergy. If Henry broke with Rome, the revenues of the English Church would be his, and his power and jurisdiction immeasurably increased. But it was a huge step to take after a thousand years of unity, and the King wavered, hoping that even after all this time, the Pope would pronounce in his favour.

Others, however, had seen which way the wind was blowing. Reginald Pole went into self-imposed exile in Italy rather than stay in England to face a conflict of loyalties, and other members of the Queen's faction realised that they would soon be embroiled in a clash of ideologies.

The man who would mastermind the English Reformation, Thomas Cromwell, was appointed Master of the Jewel House in April 1532 and soon afterwards emerged as the King's chief minister. He would never be another such as Wolsey, for he was essentially a bureaucrat, not a prince of the Church, and there was no danger of his forming a rival court to challenge the ascendancy of the King's because his tastes were modest and middle-class, compared with those of the Cardinal. He lived in a well-appointed house in London, dressed well but soberly, owned a fine collection of jewellery, enjoyed hunting, bowls, and gambling, and gave generously of his wealth for the relief of the London poor. Cromwell did not have Wolsey's monopoly on power; he had to share it with Anne Boleyn and her faction, with whom he was allied against the court conservatives. However, he had “risen above everyone except the Lady, and the world says he has more credit with his master than ever the Cardinal had. Now there is not a person who does anything except Cromwell.”
²⁴
The King, however, did not leave all decision making to Cromwell: the policies were essentially Henry's, but the means of carrying them out efficiently were devised by his brilliant minister. During the next two years, Cromwell would amass a number of prestigious and lucrative offices, the most important being that of Chancellor of the Exchequer, to which he was appointed in 1533.

Under Cromwell's auspices, Parliament would introduce a series of measures designed to limit papal power in England and bring the Great Matter to a satisfactory conclusion. The first of these, the Annates Act, passed in April 1532, effectively deprived the Pope of the first fruits of all English benefices.

At Easter, the provincial of the Observant Friars, William Peto, was invited to preach before the King and court, but caused a sensation when he warned a glowering Henry that any marriage with Anne Boleyn would be unlawful. If, like Ahab in the Bible, the King committed this dire sin, the dogs would one day lick his blood, as they had Ahab's. A furious Henry ordered one of his chaplains, Richard Curwen, to preach a retaliatory sermon the following Sunday, but he was heckled by another Observant Friar, Henry Elston. Both Peto and Elston were arrested.