The House of Tudor (30 page)

The collapse of the plot against the Queen marked the end of the short-lived right-wing resurgence on the Council and by the autumn the conservative Catholic party had suffered a virtual death-blow in the disgrace of the Duke of Norfolk and the sudden removal of Bishop Gardiner from the list of executors of the King’s will. The ruin of the influential Howard family seemed complete. Norfolk’s arrogant soldier-poet son, the Earl of Surrey, was executed for the technical treason of quartering his arms with those of Edward the Confessor, and the old Duke himself escaped a similar fate by the skin of his teeth. As for that brilliant but tricky lawyer and diplomat Stephen Gardiner, Henry would give no reason for excluding him from the projected Council of Regency, except to say that ‘he was a wilful man and not meet to be about his son’. He himself could control Gardiner and ‘use him and rule him to all manner of purposes’, but no one else would be able to.

As Christmas approached, it was becoming obvious that the King had begun to fail. He who had once been the handsomest prince in Christendom was now a swollen, rotting hulk, suffering such agony from his ulcerated legs that his physicians despaired of his recovery. The exact nature of Henry’s illness remains a matter for speculation and suggestions have included malaria, gout, alcoholism, cardiac infection, osteomyelitis and, of course, syphilis. This hypothesis was first put forward in the late nineteenth century and was naturally pounced on joyfully by all those who enjoy a bit of historical dirt. But, in fact, there is not a shred of contemporary evidence that the King had venereal disease, no hint that he ever underwent the recognized treatment for ‘the great pox’, and this was just the sort of interesting information which foreign ambassadors were paid to ferret out.

Modern medical opinion inclines to the view that Henry’s ‘sorre legge’, which first began to trouble him as early as 1528, was caused by varicose ulcers, or that he may have been suffering from a chronic septic infection of the bone following an injury received in one of his mishaps in the tiltyard. He had a serious accident in 1536 (the same on which Anne Boleyn tried to blame her disastrous miscarriage) when he fell heavily from his horse while jousting and was unconscious for two hours. This had put an end to his jousting days and although he still rode and walked energetically, he was obliged to give up most of the violent physical exercise he loved. He had already begun to put on weight and from then on all his enormous muscular body turned steadily to fat. The strain this imposed on the heart, added to unwise diet, the terrifying ministrations of Tudor doctors, constant pain and recurring high fever would have been enough to kill most people, and probably only Henry’s will-power and his magnificent constitution kept him going during those last weeks.

Early in January the Imperial ambassador was reporting that the King could not live much longer, but the King was not dead yet. He was still obstinately alive and refusing to sign his will - making it perfectly clear that anybody foolish enough to trade on their expectations would suffer the same fate as Stephen Gardiner. As long as the will remained unsigned Henry could cling at least to the illusion of power -the absolute power over other people’s lives which fed his insatiable egotism. As long as the future remained uncertain the atmosphere at Court was thick with tension and suspicion, as hopeful councillors eyed one another jealously and the old man propped on his pillows looked on with malevolent amusement.

In the end he left it too late. On 27 January, when it was obvious that death was very near, the Council, faced with the horrifying possibility of the King dying intestate, took matters into their own hands and ordered the will to be signed with the dry stamp - that is to say, an outline facsimile of the royal signature was embossed on the paper and inked in by a clerk. This, at any rate, is one version of the story. Another says that the final draft of the will had been stamped and handed over to the Earl of Hertford on 30 December; but it would have been entirely typical of Henry to have kept his anxious servants on tenterhooks and to have enjoyed doing so. Nor had he yet come to terms with the fact of his dying and had dealt with this particular problem by ignoring it.

Since it was treasonable to prophesy the King’s death, those at his bedside were understandably reluctant to draw his attention to its inexorable approach and it was not until the evening of the twenty-seventh that Sir Anthony Denny, chief gentleman of the Privy Chamber, plucked up courage to tell his master what case he was in - ‘to man’s judgement not like to live’. Henry received the news calmly. He felt confident that, in the circumstances, the Almighty, whom he had always regarded very much in the light of a working partner, would not hesitate to pardon all his sins, ‘though they were greater than they be’. Denny asked if he would like to unburden his conscience to some learned man and Henry replied that if he wanted anyone it would be Cranmer, but he would ‘take a little sleep’ before deciding. Cranmer was fetched from Croydon but by the time he arrived the King was past speech and could only grasp his old friend by the hand. His little sleep was turning into the longest sleep of all, and at about two o’clock in the morning of 28 January 1547 Henry Tudor drifted quietly out into the dark. He was fifty-five years old and had ruled England for very nearly thirty-eight years.

A wide variety of adjectives can and have been applied to the second Tudor King - from patriotic, wise and courageous, to tyrannical, sadistic and paranoid. Somewhere between the two extremes lies a man of many talents, of intelligence and considerable native shrewdness, who had acquired a good deal of political acumen (though often at quite unnecessary expense); an intellectually lazy man, who quickly became bored with the dry business of government but who had an unerring eye for picking men and for using them; a man of enormous personal charm and outward warmth, capable of giving and inspiring affection but fundamentally cold-hearted, fundamentally ruthless. ‘He is a wonderful man’, a French ambassador once observed of the King of England, ‘and has wonderful people around him, but he is an old fox.’

Henry’s most outstanding characteristic, which coloured his every action, both public and private, throughout his reign, was his sublime, sometimes preposterous, egotism. ‘Squire Harry’, remarked Martin Luther, ‘wishes to be God and to do as he pleases.’ What inner fears and deep-seated insecurity lay hidden behind the dazzling, high-gloss façade which Henry presented to the world; what sense of inadequacy was concealed by that terrifying joviality, those outbursts of murderous rage, we can only guess. The great majority of his subjects, untroubled by Freudian speculation, saw only the façade – the princely courage, the huge bejewelled figure which seemed to embody the very essence of the kingly ideal - and were content. And after all, why not? Henry had given them strong government and internal peace and had offered a highly satisfying focus for their growing sense of national identity. In defying the monolithic power of the Roman Church, he had done something which no English king before him had dared to do and he had got clean away with it. If a number of harmless individuals had been hurt in the process and if he had wasted a unique opportunity to use the wealth of the Church to provide social benefits for the people - well, the people on the whole were not complaining. They may not always have approved of Henry’s goings on, but he had been a king who was a king, a king to be proud of and to this day Bluff King Hal remains one of the very few English monarchs who is instantly recognizable to their descendants.

As for his private life, Henry VIII is naturally remembered as the King with six wives - an unusual achievement for any man, but in Henry’s case its importance can easily be exaggerated. For in spite of the highly-coloured sexual reputation which his matrimonial marathon has earned him, he was no Don Juan. On the contrary, he had an almost bourgeois respect for convention - his wives far out-numbered his mistresses - and in general he took a severely practical view of the married state. It was intended for the procreation of children and the Queens’ primary function had always been to produce sons. Henry had, in fact, left instructions that he was to be buried at Windsor beside Jane Seymour, the only Queen who had fulfilled her primary function, and on 16 February, after a solemn funeral mass conducted by Stephen Gardiner, he was laid to rest between the stalls and the altar in St. George’s Chapel.

And so he was gone. He had hounded his first wife into her grave and wrecked his elder daughter’s life. He had killed his own great love. He had callously abandoned his most faithful servants naked to their enemies. And yet, in spite of it all, he was not a monster. The nation mourned him sincerely and within weeks of his death he was becoming a national symbol.

9: A BOY OF WONDROUS HOPE

Sing up, heart, sing up, heart, and sing no more down,

For joy of King Edward, that weareth the crown!

Henry VIII was the last of the adult Tudor males. When he died the only males with royal Tudor blood in their veins were Henry’s own son, Edward, now nine years and three months old, and infant Lord Darnley, son of his niece Margaret Douglas, who had married into a collateral branch of the Stuart family. Apart from these two children, the English royal house had become exclusively and depressingly female. There were Henry’s two daughters, the Ladies Mary and Elizabeth; his other two nieces, Frances Grey, Marchioness of Dorset and Eleanor Clifford, Countess of Cumberland and their daughters – three Greys, Jane, Katherine and Mary, aged respectively nine, seven and two, and one Clifford, Margaret, now seven years old – while the main branch of the Stuart-Tudor line was solely represented by the young Queen of Scotland.

This preponderance of women and little girls was politically as well as dynastically unfortunate, for it meant that until Edward was old enough to take over – at least another six or seven years – control would pass out of Tudor hands. King Henry’s will had provided for a council of sixteen executors, each ‘with like and equal charge’, to rule the country during his son’s minority – an arrangement so patently unworkable that it had been set aside within a week of the old King’s death. At a meeting of the executors held on 31 January it was agreed that ‘some special man’ would have to be preferred before the rest. The choice was an obvious one and the council obediently proceeded to confer on Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, ‘the name and title of Protector of all the realms and dominions of the King’s majesty that now is, and of the Governor of his most royal person’.

There were, of course, plenty of precedents for appointing the uncle of a child King as regent and guardian, and Edward Seymour had other qualifications. He was a man of proven ability, an experienced and successful soldier and diplomat, generally respected by his colleagues and trusted by the late King. But he was not of the blood royal. The son of a Wiltshire landowning family, he owed his earldom in part to his own exertions, but more to the fact that his sister had had the singular good luck to become Queen. His elevation to vice-regal status would inevitably give rise to jealousy and faction, and it remained to be seen whether he possessed the ruthlessness needed to fight off competition.

He had begun promisingly. Guided by his friend and ally, that shrewd political tactician, Secretary of State William Paget, Seymour had left Whitehall in the early hours of 28 January, before the old King’s body was cold. His destination was Hertford Castle, the current residence of the new King; his purpose to get custody of his nephew while Paget handled his interests in London. Largely thanks to Paget, the
coup
was so skilfully managed that by the time the council met on the thirty-first, they were simply rubber-stamping an already accomplished transference of power.

Seymour brought Edward as far as Enfield to join the Princess Elizabeth before breaking the news of their father’s death. Brother and sister clung together in such floods of tears that the onlookers were deeply moved, but whether the children cried from grief, from shock or just in sympathy with each other, it is impossible to say. Henry, at least in his own estimation, had been a concerned and affectionate father - Edward certainly had been the apple of his eye. Yet it is not easy to believe that either Edward or Elizabeth felt genuine human sorrow at his loss. In spite of Katherine Parr’s well-meant efforts, neither had ever known any real family life; neither had ever been given the opportunity to form a genuine human relationship with their incredible parent. But they both knew that his death meant their sheet anchor had gone; that in spite of the kneeling courtiers, the elaborate deference and the fine words, they were now, at nine and thirteen, alone and all too vulnerable in a potentially very dangerous world.

The small, solemn, blond boy who rode through the mid-winter landscape on his way to take possession of his capital seemed a very different type from the bouncing, rumbustious extrovert his father had been at a similar age, and if anyone noticed an ominous resemblance to his uncle Arthur, no one commented on it. Physically Edward was an attractive child, with delicately modelled features, big grey eyes and the family’s reddish gold hair, while mentally and intellectually he showed the greatest promise. An enthusiastic contemporary wrote:

If you knew the towardness of that young Prince your heart would melt to hear him named...the beautifullest creature that liveth under the sun, the wittiest, the most amiable and the gentlest thing of all the world. Such a spirit of capacity, learning the things taught him by his schoolmasters, that it is a wonder to hear say. And finally he hath such a grace of deportment and gesture in gravity when he cometh into any presence, that it should seem he were already a father, and yet passeth he not the age of ten years.

Allowing for the fact that almost any child of average intelligence being put through the academic forcing process devised by Edward’s tutors might seem a prodigy to the uninitiated, it is still fair to say that Edward was well above average intelligence. He was quick, clever and eager to learn. As for his gravity of deportment and gesture, the priggish, unchildlike behaviour which often make the young King appear both pathetic and repulsive, this was simply the natural result of his training and background.