Six Wives (3 page)
Authors: David Starkey
That formal device apart, my only twist of novelty in the chapter is to show that Anne, far from retreating thankfully into the status of a wellendowed divorcée, never gave up hope of remarrying Henry and viewed each of his succeeding marriages with despair and renewed chagrin.
* * *
I have also depended on depositions and the dialogue form for my life of Catherine Howard. But the result is new and fresh. As a child of the sixties, I can describe Catherine's promiscuity without disapproval. I am also able, for the first time, to reproduce in full some of the more sensational material from the depositions, which includes the 'rudest word' in the language. Finally, in what again I suspect may be a first, I have read and transcribed the whole of the abstract of the interrogation of Thomas Culpepper, who was said to have conducted an affair with Catherine after her marriage to the King. The document is very long and very illegible. But deciphering it was well worth the effort. For, in place of the enthusiastic animal couplings of Catherine's premarital relationships, Culpepper's interrogation paints an altogether more ethereal picture. The couple never had sex: instead there were intense nocturnal conversations, anatomisations of their past love affairs and oblique humourous exchanges which might have come from the banter of lovers in a Shakespearean comedy.
It is all rather touching; while Catherine herself emerges as a sympathetic figure, who, alone among Henry's wives, was neither the tool nor the leader of a politico-religious faction.
Catherine also emerges more clearly in a literal sense as, for the first time, I establish the existence of a reliable likeness. The miniature by Holbein, now in the Royal Collection, was originally identified as a portrait of Catherine Howard by Horace Walpole. But the identification has never carried full conviction among scholars. Here, using the inventory of jewels given to Catherine on her wedding day, I have been able to prove that the picture is of her. It can even be dated as a wedding portrait.
* * *
With Catherine Parr, the book ends on a weightier note. I begin by discussing her origins in a rich, upwardly mobile family that remained – despite her father's premature death – at the centre of affairs at Court. This has been underplayed – especially by Strickland, who, because of her own surname, fancied that she too descended from a Westmorland gentry family – in a countervailing desire to dramatise Catherine's northern origins. Far more distorting, however, have been recent revisionist critiques of traditional claims about the quality of Catherine's early education and her early conversion to Reformed religion. I myself subscribed to these revisionist arguments in
Elizabeth
. But, as I show here with compelling new evidence, the traditional views of Catherine's education and religious affiliation are correct: she was well educated and she was a religious radical too,
even before her marriage to Henry
.
The consequences appear in the following three chapters. The first deals with the swift and dramatic impact of Catherine's marriage on the balance of religious faction at Court; while the second examines how her religious faith coloured her view of both her husband and his policies, and covered them both with an improbable glow of holiness.
But it is the last chapter which is, I think, the most original in the book. Here I show that Catherine was not only, in the hackneyed phrase first used by Strickland, 'England's first Protestant Queen'; she was also the first Queen of the Age of Print. She was a published, best-selling author; and she encouraged other people, including Henry's own daughters, to read and write books as well. The consequences led directly to the near fatal clash with her husband which is described so vividly in Foxe's
Book of Martyrs
. Doubt has been cast on Foxe's story; indeed, it has been dismissed as a pious fiction. But I am able to use the evidence of the appointment of royal doctors, who play a crucial role in the story, to demonstrate that it must be substantially true.
Book of Martyrs
. Doubt has been cast on Foxe's story; indeed, it has been dismissed as a pious fiction. But I am able to use the evidence of the appointment of royal doctors, who play a crucial role in the story, to demonstrate that it must be substantially true.
The result is to paint Catherine Parr, dismissed by Martin Hume as 'the last, and least politically important of Henry's six wives', as in fact one of the most substantial. She is also, thanks to her wonderful letters to Henry, which fuse religion and business and love into an intoxicating whole, the most immediately human. This means that it would have been agreeable to stay with her after Henry's death, through the eighteen months of her widowhood and remarriage. But the temptation had to be resisted. For this is a book about Henry's wives; and I have already told the end of Catherine's story in my
Elizabeth
.
Elizabeth
.
So the book ends with Henry's death. It also begins with a Prologue which describes Henry's experience of marriage and his motives for entering into it. These, primarily, were love and an insistent, child-like desire to be happy. It was most unusual for a King to approach marriage in such a fashion. It is why he married so often and it sets the stage for the unfolding tragicomedy of the book.
But it is also the last time that the King appears centre-stage. For the book is not about Henry but about the Six Wives who married him – for better and more usually for worse.
* * *
I have lived with this book for exactly two years. I owe much to my agent, Peter Robinson, and to my editor, Penelope Hoare, who have borne with the fits and starts of my writing and watched stoically as the book got longer and its completion more remote. I am grateful to Alasdair Hawkyard, who has helped in the compilation of the endnotes and family trees; to Rory McEntegart, who has translated German documents for me; and to Dr Mark Falcoff, who has translated from the Spanish. But my greatest debt is to James Brown, who has read and criticised each chapter as it has been written. Indeed, without his encouragement and forbearance, nothing would have been written at all.
I am writing this on my fifty-eighth birthday. In one way, finishing the book is the best birthday present I could have had. In another, I am a little sad to let it go. But I shall be back. For there remains the even bigger task of the biography of Henry himself.
There, he takes the stage at last!
DAVID STARKEY
Highbury, London
3 January 2003
Henry's Weddings
R
oyal weddings in the early sixteenth century, like royal weddings now, were an opportunity for lavish public ceremony. And none was more magnificent than the first of the century: the marriage, on 14 November 1501, of the Prince and Princess of Wales in St Paul's Cathedral.
oyal weddings in the early sixteenth century, like royal weddings now, were an opportunity for lavish public ceremony. And none was more magnificent than the first of the century: the marriage, on 14 November 1501, of the Prince and Princess of Wales in St Paul's Cathedral.
The preparations had been going on for weeks. A great elevated walkway had been erected from the west doors to the steps of the chancel, nearly six hundred feet away. The walkway was built of wood covered in red cloth and trimmed with gilt nails and it stood at head height. In the middle of the nave the walkway broadened out into a stage, several steps high. The wedding itself took place on the upper part of the stage, with the rest of the officiating clergy standing on the lower steps, so as not to obscure the view. After the wedding the young royal couple, both dressed in white, walked hand in hand (the gesture had been arranged beforehand) along the remaining section of the walkway towards the high altar for the nuptial mass. The musicians, placed high up in the vaults for maximum effect, struck up again and the cheers resounded. They became even louder, when, just before entering the gates of the sanctuary, the couple turned to face the crowds, 'that the present multitude of people might see and behold their persons'. Was there a royal wave? Did they actually kiss?
1
1
This was the sort of occasion that was tailor-made for Henry. He was handsome, tall for his age and already with an indefinable star quality (two years earlier Erasmus, on first meeting him, had noticed 'a certain royal demeanour' in his bearing). It was a show for stealing, and steal it Henry duly did. All eyes were on him when he escorted the bride along the walkway. All eyes were on him again when at the wedding ball he cast his cloth of gold gown – and his dignity – to the winds and 'danced in his jacket'. His father and mother applauded indulgently.
2
2
* * *
This was Henry's first experience of a wedding. But it was not his own. It was the wedding of his elder brother, Prince Arthur. Eight years later, it was his own turn. His brother, Prince Arthur, his mother, Queen Elizabeth, and his father, King Henry VII, were all dead, and he, aged only seventeen years and ten months, was King Henry VIII. His first independent act was to decide to get married. And his bride was the Princess he had escorted along that interminable walkway in St Paul's: Catherine of Aragon, his dead brother's widow.
But there all resemblances to the earlier ceremony end. There was no great cathedral. Not even the Chapel Royal was used. Instead, the wedding took place 'in the Queen's Closet at Greenwich' on 11 June 1509.
3
3
* * *
Actually there were two Queen's Closets or oratories at Greenwich, just as there were in Henry's other principal palaces. They were known respectively as the Privy Closet and the Holyday Closet. The Privy Closet formed part of the Queen's suite of apartments, and was situated off the narrow corridor between her Presence Chamber (or throne room) and her Privy Chamber (a sort of private sitting room). The Privy Closet was divided by a screen. First thing each weekday morning the Queen knelt on one side of the screen and heard her chaplain say mass on the other. (Henry's Queens, whatever their religious proclivities, were expected to be pious, and probably they paid attention; Henry himself took a more masculine attitude and spent his time at the mass, as we might at breakfast, going through the morning mail.)
4
4
The Holyday Closet, on the other hand, was, as its name indicates, used for high days and festivals. It was an enclosed balcony, rather like a dress circle, at the west end of the Chapel Royal. The balcony was divided in half by an internal partition, with one half forming the King's Holyday Closet and the other half the Queen's. Ordinary folk gained access to the Chapel at ground level; members of the royal family entered by a private, first-floor gallery, which connected directly with their own apartments, also on the first floor. Once inside, the Closets allowed them to hear the service, which went on for hours, in comfort and privacy: a fireplace protected them from the cold and a grille from prying eyes. At key moments of the ceremony, however, their presence was needed at the altar. So there were spiral staircases on either side of the Closets by which the King and Queen processed to the altar, knelt and made offerings, and then returned to the Closets.
5
5
We do not know which Closet was used in 1509. Most probably it was the Holyday Closet, which Henry's father had built for his mother, Queen Elizabeth, though she had not lived to use it. But it does not really matter. For the important thing is that the Holyday Closet, though designed for days of estate or ceremony, was just as private as the everyday Privy Closet. And this is the point: when Catherine married Arthur, she did so publicly and splendidly in the heart of the capital; when she married Henry, it was in a private, almost furtive ceremony, in the bowels of a palace five miles from London.
6
6
We know the names of only two witnesses: George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury and Lord Steward, and William Thomas. Shrewsbury, as Lord Steward, was departmental head of the King's Household; while Thomas, as a Groom of the Privy Chamber, belonged to the select group of personal body servants who alone had regular access to the private areas of the palace including the royal Closets. We also have the texts of the special oaths which Henry and Catherine swore in addition to their marriage vows. These were required because of the peculiar difficulties, diplomatic and legal, created by the fact that the King was marrying his own sister-in-law. But, apart from these isolated details, there is a veil of obscurity over the event. We do not even know the name of the officiating priest or bishop.
And that we know anything at all is due only to the breakdown of the marriage twenty years later and the depositions produced by Shrewsbury and Thomas in the carefully documented divorce proceedings.
7
7
* * *
'All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the marriages of Henry VIII, who, towards the end, complained bitterly of 'the sundry troubles of mind which had happened to him by marriages'. But, in one respect at least, each of his subsequent marriages followed in the footsteps of the first. They too, all five of them, were private and followed in detail the precedent of 1509.
8
With the sole exception of the service at Dover where Henry first went through some sort of marriage with Anne Boleyn, the location was the same. Anne Boleyn was married (for the second time) 'in the upper chamber over the Holbein Gate at Whitehall, before dawn'; Jane Seymour in Whitehall, too, 'in the Queen's Closet'; Anne of Cleves in the same Queen's Closet at Greenwich where, thirty years before, Henry had married Catherine of Aragon; and Catherine Parr 'in the Queen's Privy Closet at Hampton Court'. The company was the same, with ladies and gentlemen of the King's and Queen's-to-be Privy Chambers predominating. The clergy, where they are known, were similarly confidential: Roland Lee, later Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, is supposed to have married Anne Boleyn; Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, married Anne of Cleves; and Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, married Catherine Parr. All were intimate royal advisers.
9
9
So there were no crowds, no trumpeters and no choirs. The only wedding music, in fact, for this most musical of kings, was the sonorous Latin of the service. But even the Old Church, whose liturgy Henry kept to the end of his reign, put the marriage vows into English. Each of the couples, when asked if they wished to marry, said 'Yea'. Then, in turn, they made their vows. The King swore first:
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