The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (17 page)

I am grieved both for the dishonour to yourself and the diminution of the credit of him who recommended you to his majesty. The king has commanded me in his name to charge you to observe your covenants with him and set his commissioners free to execute their [missions].
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Paget added a dire threat: ‘Or else, be assured that wherever you may be in all Christendom, it will cost you your life, even if his majesty pays 50,000 crowns for it.’
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His words remind us of the threats uttered by an American president nearly five centuries later: ‘You may run, but you cannot hide.’

But the English threats were easily shrugged off and the money was not returned, although the luckless English hostages were at least freed.
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Henry had learnt an expensive lesson regarding the unreliability of European mercenaries – beware Germans bearing arms – although his son later hired substantial numbers of them to help put down the insurrections in England in 1549. Stephen Vaughan, the king’s financial agent in Antwerp, wrote harshly of the German nation:

Happy is he that has no need of Almaines [Germans] for of all the nations under the heavens, they be the worst, most rudest and unreasonable to deal with.
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Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, was rather embarrassed by the behaviour of the mercenary he had recommended. On 16 December, he wrote to Henry of his indignation that von Reiffenberg and ‘his fellow soldiers did not deal uprightly’
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with the English king. But, after all, he pleaded, he had nothing to do with their decisions and this he had emphasized to Henry’s ambassadors. It was a somewhat lacklustre apology.

On 4 August, the City of London sent another 1,000 soldiers – gunners, bowmen and pikemen dressed in new white coats – off in barges from Tower Wharf to Dover for embarkation on to ships waiting to take them across the Channel.
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The king’s Council, stretched militarily on two fronts, ordered Cranmer ‘as victories come only at the appointment of God within the remembrance of man’ to organise prayers in English and religious processions throughout the kingdom on 10 August
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to seek a victory against the French.

It was also a year for bad weather: on June 25, there were tempests in Derbyshire, Lancashire and Cheshire, uprooting trees, damaging houses and the spires and towers of churches and producing hailstones ‘as big as a man’s fist [that] had prints [impressions] on them like faces
and some like gun holes’.
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France was not spared, either. In Paris, too, in July lightning burnt down four of the great churches and the tower wherein was stored much of the army’s artillery.
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At Havre-de-Grace in Normandy, a major French warship, the oddly named carrack
Rumpy le Conte
, was also burnt and lost with all hands, together with £1 million in gold – payment for the sailors of Francis I’s battle fleet. At least destiny was even-handed in dealing out catastrophe to the two combatant nations.

Cornelius Sceppurus, a member of the imperial emperor’s Council, told Dr Louis Schore, President of the Council of Flanders, that he saw no fighting ships on the Thames in London during this period, ‘but many ships and small craft carrying soldiers to Boulogne. The people desire peace but must dance to their leader’s tune.’
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Well they might. The war was crippling England’s fragile economy and its people were burdened by taxation to pay for it. The campaign in France in 1544 had cost Henry’s exchequer a total of more than £700,000, well over £200 million at today’s prices, compared with the £250,000
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budgeted for the war by his government. The armies and fleet consumed another £560,000, or £196 million, the following year up to 8 September. A ‘benevolence’ – a less than voluntary gift to the exchequer – was planned in early 1545, with the king writing to the commissioners for collection:

Our people … Be of so loving and kind disposition towards us that they will gladly contribute by way of benevolence that, for the necessity of the affair, shall be requisite as if the same was granted by Parliament.
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Richard Read, a London alderman, unpatriotically refused to pay up and for his pains was forcibly conscripted into the army and sent to fight on the Scottish borders. The Privy Council, writing to Sir William Evers, Lord Warden of the Eastern Marches, in January 1545, said that the vengeful Henry thought

that he [Read] should do some service with his body and for that purpose sends him to your school, as you shall perceive by such
letters as he shall deliver unto you, there to serve as a soldier, and yet both he and his men at his own charge.

Read was dispatched ‘on pain of death’ to take part in

any enterprise against the enemy.

He is to ride and do as the other poor soldiers do in all things that he may know what pains other poor soldiers abide and feel the smart of his folly.

Use him after the sharp military discipline of the northern wars.
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Read was captured by the Scots in the disaster at Ancrum Moor. In December 1545, his wife entreated the Privy Council to agree to exchange a Scottish prisoner held in the Tower for her imprisoned husband, offering to pay cash in lieu of the Scot’s ransom. The Scottish prisoner was Patrick Hume, servant to Cardinal David Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrew’s, who had been seized by English forces earlier that year, in September. He was brought to the Council and after ‘a general declaration of his cruelty to Englishmen and namely the murder of Sir Bryan Layton, late captain of Norham, the king’s clemency was declared unto him for his return to Scotland, upon procuring Read’s release’.
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The clergy were also asked to pay the next instalment of their subsidy at 3s in the pound to the crown in June instead of at Christmas. But still Henry’s exchequer struggled to pay the mounting bills. In November 1545, Lord Chancellor Wriothesley had further gathered a meagre £20,000 to pay for the wars, but told Paget on 11 November:

I assure you master secretary, I am at my wits’ end how we shall possibly shift for [the] three months following and especially for the two next. For I see no great likelihood that any good sum will come in until after Christmas.
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Early in 1546, the MP Thomas Hussey wrote to the Earl of Surrey that ‘the king’s majesty is indebted at this time, four hundred thousand marks, to the levying … by subsidy and other practices at this
Parliament, there is not to be received above £200,000’. In addition to sales of monastic lands, England’s coinage was being debased through the addition, by the Mint, of base metal, and Henry turned his attentions to dissolving the rich ecclesiastical chantries and hospitals as a means of raising extra cash. Henry was also borrowing heavily overseas, but later in 1546, Stephen Vaughan, his long-suffering financial agent in Antwerp, told his master in London that the cautious Fuggers’ Bank would part with no more money ‘unless your majesty would find the means by act of Parliament that all the subjects of your majesty’s ream shall be bound for the repayment thereof again’. The Privy Council said that Henry did not want to enter into such an agreement as required ‘by the Fuggers … for repayment’ as it would ‘seem to the world to be brought so low as he should need for that sum to give them assurance by act of Parliament’. Wriothesley cast around for other methods of raising cash, such as collecting debts owed to the government, but the money came in slowly.

Our daily travail is with such as appear here for the king’s … debts, and we send out letters in great number for more debtors … As for money, all the shift shall be made that is possible, but yet the store is very small. The contribution comes very slowly in.
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Plaintively, Wriothesley added: ‘The Mint is drawn dry.’

Eventually even Henry had to overcome his enormous ego and cave in to the financial pressures posed by his empty exchequer. Consequently, in April 1546, Paget, John Dudley – Viscount Lisle, Hertford and Dr Nicholas Wotton, Dean of Canterbury and York and Henry’s ambassador in Flanders, were commissioned to enter into peace talks with the French, with an agenda tucked into their doublets that included English insistence on holding on to Boulogne, demands for war reparations in cash and for the French to stop mischief-making in Scotland. Henry initially asked for eight million crowns in French payments: ‘Eight millions quoth they [the French envoys]. You speak merrily! All Christendom has not so much money. We may as well offer you again
one hundred crowns.’
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Backwards and forwards went the negotiations, with Henry inevitably interfering in the detail of the discussions. At times, the wrangling was almost more than the English delegation could bear. On 27 May, Paget, who had vowed that he and his colleagues would ‘show ourselves men of stomach and intend to be revenged on this proud nation’, wrote to Sir William Petre from Guines:

Instead of the grace and peace, which I sent you last, help to send unto us now on this side, fire and sword, for other things cannot bring these false dogs to reason.

God give them pestilence, false traitors!

The king’s majesty has been trifled [with] too long already and seeing these false, wicked men work after this fraudulent fashion, God shall revenge us upon their iniquity and falsehood.

So much for the polite niceties of diplomatic language! Fatalistically, he added: ‘All this is for the best. God’s will is fulfilled in all things.’
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At last, a peace treaty was signed on 7 June in a tent pitched at Campe
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between Ardres and Guines. The agreement stipulated that the town of Boulogne would be handed back to France in 1553, but only after payment of two million crowns (£13 million in today’s money) by the French
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in reparations for the war. That thirsty drain on England’s economy had finally been plugged.

For much of his life, the king had always enjoyed rude health, except for an attack of smallpox (or possibly measles) when he was twenty-two and the first of a number of recurrent bouts of malaria seven years later.
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As a slim, handsome youth, his athleticism in the joust, the hunting field and other manly sports such as wrestling was famous throughout the realm and in foreign courts and was admired by his subjects much more widely than any latter-day international soccer superstar’s skill and prowess.
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He was the very personification of a new, confident England, no longer an isolated island off the coast of Europe, as he attempted to dominate the stage of Continental politics.

But in 1527, when Henry was a dashing and robust thirty-six, this love of sport and physical activity caused the first of several injuries that were continually to try the king’s patience and unsubtly remind him that his imperial crown did not protect him from very human pain and suffering. In April that year, Henry apparently hurt his foot during an
energetic game of tennis,
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probably at the Palace of Westminster, and the next month he was forced to wear a black velvet slipper to ease the pain still troubling him. The weakness, in a tendon, may have persisted, as he wrenched a foot again two years later.

Worse was to come. During one of the royal progresses in 1527–8, the king was confined to bed at Canterbury with a ‘sore leg’ believed to be a varicose ulcer on the left thigh, probably caused by the constrictive garters he fashionably wore below the knee,
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or alternatively by a traumatic injury sustained while jousting.
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Thomas Vicary,
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a local surgeon, was called in and managed to heal the ulcer quickly and relatively painlessly – much to the king’s relief. Vicary was rewarded with a medical appointment to the household at a salary of 20s a year and was promoted to serjeant surgeon in 1536, a post worth £26 13s 4d annually (or more than £10,000 a year at 2004 prices), which he retained during the reigns of Edward, Mary and Elizabeth. A still-grateful Henry later granted him a twenty-one-year lease on the dissolved Abbey of Bexley in Kent.

Out of this sore leg was born the much-quoted tradition that Henry suffered from syphilis, contracted during the wild salad days of his youth in England, or while he was campaigning in France in 1513, or even that he was infected by his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
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Many still believe that he died in 1547 from the terminal effects of this venereal disease. However, the king was not, by contemporary European standards, the great royal libertine of folklore. Aside from mere court dalliances and flirtations, surviving accounts document his extramarital relations with just three women: Elizabeth Blount, mother of his bastard son Henry Fitzroy,
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later Duke of Richmond; Mary Boleyn; and Margaret Shelton. No doubt he had other flings, particularly in the hale and hearty days before he ascended the throne in 1509, at which point his life fell under the scrutiny of the prying eyes of foreign ambassadors. His varicose ulcer of 1527–8, say proponents of this theory,
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was in reality a broken-down gumma or swelling – an obvious symptom of tertiary syphilis, although the thigh is an unusual location for this.
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Moreover, gummata are not normally painful and the king certainly suffered
intolerable agony with his legs. As syphilis can also damage foetuses, the frequent miscarriages and stillbirths by both Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn are also offered up as further evidence of Henry’s venereal infection. Several portraits and sketches of Henry completed during or immediately after 1536 show a very slight ‘lesion’ or depression on the right side of the king’s nose – again, a supposed symptom of syphilis. Other paintings, however, omit this slight deformity, perhaps for reasons of royal vanity. Finally, Wolsey, in his downfall in 1529, was accused by the trumped-up Act of Attainder of attempting to infect the king with syphilis: