The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (30 page)

He bequeathed £10,000 in money and plate to each of his daughters for their marriages ‘or more at the executors’ discretion’ and both would have £3,000 a year to live on from the hour of his death. His wife Katherine was to have £3,000 in plate, jewels and household stuff and to take what she liked of what she already possessed. She would further receive £1,000 in cash in addition to the enjoyment of her jointure – the estate settled on her during her lifetime after the king’s death.

Henry then left a raft of personal bequests to his favourites: 500 marks (about £650) to Cranmer; £500 each to Wriothesley, St John, Russell, Hertford and Lisle; and £300 each to Denny, Herbert, Sir Anthony Browne, Paget, Sir Edward North, Nicholas Wotton and four others. Paget had left blank spaces for the amounts in the draft, but he later filled these in, most likely after more discussion with the king. Further, smaller bequests ‘in token of special love and favour’ went to a host of royal household courtiers and servants, including Sir Thomas Seymour, John Gates and Sir Richard Rich. His doctors – Wendy, Owen and ‘the Scot’ Cromer – each received £100 and the apothecaries Thomas Alsop and Patrick Reynolds, 100 marks (£130) apiece.
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The eleven witnesses included John Gates and, in true royal tradition, three doctors – Wendy, Owen and Huicke – presumably to enable them to testify that the king was of sound mind when the testament was drawn up. The final signatory was the ubiquitous Privy Chamber clerk, William Clerk.

The will, contained in a small book, was signed ‘with our hand, in our palace of Westminster, the 30th day of December’ 1546. It all looked clear cut and unequivocal. But it wasn’t – far from it – and the circumstances in which the will was drawn up and signed have caused considerable controversy amongst historians over nearly five centuries since.
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In reality, Henry did not sign the will.

The dry stamp was deployed for the facsimile signatures at its beginning and end, use of the stamp witnessed by Hertford, Paget, Denny and Herbert and ‘also in the presence of certain other witnesses to the same’.
William Clerk noted in his monthly record of the stamp’s employment:

Which testament, your majesty delivered in our sights with your own hand to the said earl of Hertford as your own deed, last will and testament, revoking and annulling all your highness’ former wills and testaments.
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It was then placed in a locked ‘round box or bag of black velvet’ for safekeeping.

The date of the will is something of a mystery. It refers to Thomas Seymour as a Privy Councillor – but he was not admitted to the Council until 23 January 1547.
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Years later, Dudley was to testify that Seymour’s name had been included against the king’s wishes. Henry, ‘on his deathbed’, on hearing the name read, cried out: ‘No, no!’ even ‘as his breath was failing’. Was this because of Henry’s old jealousy of him over his wife’s affections?

Moreover, the will appears as the penultimate item in Clerk’s register for January 1547 recording all stamped documents. He must have already prepared the schedule for January when it became necessary to add a note of the will and the Howard attainder to the document. An extra piece of parchment, 100 mm in depth, was stuck on at the last minute, containing the entries for the will and the attainder, as well as Clerk’s signature.
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Was the will in fact signed (or rather dry-stamped) just a few days or even hours before Henry’s death – and not on 30 December? The conspiracy theorist will point out that the king would have been in no fit state to inspect this register of the dry stamp’s use in late January, when it would have been offered up for his close inspection. In fact, he did not live long enough to inspect it.
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Or was this merely honest forgetfulness – or, frankly, incompetence – on Clerk’s part and there really was no conspiracy? From such happenstance was spawned a thousand doctoral dissertations.

There were other issues that those around Henry were keen for him to settle before his demise.

Paget was later to tell the Privy Council how the king

being remembered in his deathbed that he promised great things to diverse men … willed in his testament that whatever should in any wise appear to his Council to have been promised by him, the same should be performed.

This mirrors the so-called ‘unfulfilled gifts’ clause in the will that has sparked speculation that this section was drawn up later in January and inserted after the dry stamping.
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Indeed, a judicious, if not suspicious, individual may conclude that the will was not stamped until Henry was near death, or dead already. It may be, of course, that Henry, anxious to maintain his grasp on his court’s loyalties, postponed signing the will until he was too ill to physically lift a pen and write legibly. To maintain stable governance of the realm, his Councillors may have then felt impelled to wield the dry stamp themselves and backdated the will to a point when Henry would have been well enough to approve it himself. But would not the threat of a last-minute, last-gasp codicil have kept them in line?

Paget, now a loyal ally of Hertford, was ‘privy in the beginning, proceeding and ending of the will’ and is the only one who truly knew what went on during those last anxious days – and he took his secrets to the grave.

During the final month of Henry’s life, his robust spirit struggled manfully against approaching death. On some days, he seemed much better; on others, his health suffered setbacks, slowly sapping his strength and resilience. Clues to his physical and mental state come in diplomatic dispatches written by ambassadors who constantly tapped their sources at court for news of what was happening behind the closely guarded doors of the king’s Privy Chamber. Odet de Selve told the French ambassador in Flanders on 8 January that Henry had

been so ill for the past fifteen days that he was reported dead. Many people here still believe him so, seeing that whatever amendment is announced, few persons have access to his lodging and his chamber.
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Two days later, he wrote to Francis I that he had learnt

from several good quarters that the king’s health is much better … he seems to have been very ill and in great danger owing to his legs which have had to be cauterised. Neither the Queen nor the Lady Mary could see him, nor do we know that they will now do so.
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The ambassador ended with a prediction: he had ‘great reason to conjecture that whatever his health, it can only be bad and [he] will not last long’.

Poor Henry – now his legs were being cauterised, seared with hot irons by his doctors. He at least seems to have remained
compos mentis
until around mid-January.

Henry may still have retained a feeble hand on the tiller of state affairs. At the Privy Council at Ely Palace on 27 December, harsh things were said about the failure of the English administration in Boulogne to provide details of the strength of the garrison, food stocks and the amount of cash available to them. The king ‘marvelled not a little that they had hitherto been so remiss in neglecting so special a point, [as] these three months past, they had reported [to London] nothing touching these matters’. And two days later, the Privy Council sent a letter to the Council of the North indicating that Henry had pardoned two Sacramentarians ‘as they were now penitent’.
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Even confronting death, the king summoned energy enough to attend to the minutiae of palace life: two documents that received the dry stamp, probably in early January, were concerned with a batch of apple trees that the royal gardener, the priest Sir John de Leu, was to collect from France for the Privy Gardens.
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Knowing Henry’s dislike of talk of his mortality, perhaps he was in a state of denial.

On 17 January, Henry briefly saw the Spanish and French ambassadors, who had been warned not to tire him with lengthy conversation. This was the last time the king was seen by outsiders and he seemed ‘fairly well’ and talked of diplomacy and military issues, although at times he sought help from the attentive Paget on matters of detail. Two
days later, he was reported to be planning the investiture of Edward as Prince of Wales.

As the days went by, the condition of the king, lying propped up in bed, worsened. He began to drift in and out of consciousness. There were those around him who saw this as an opportunity to grab their last chance of enrichment or advancement before his long reign ended. John Gates had already received some choice grants from the Court of Augmentations on 30 December: Keeper of Suffolk’s mansion in Southwark and Chief Steward of the lands of St Mary Overy in the same parish.
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During that pain-wracked, hazy January, the dry stamp was deployed by William Clerk on eighty-six documents, all dutifully recorded on a parchment roll of four membranes, or pages. In all cases, the stamp was used in the presence of Sir Anthony Denny and John Gates.

Amongst the documents were:

A bill to pass by Act of Parliament for the better assurance of your majesty’s grant in fee simple to Sir William Paget, chief of your majesty’s two principal secretaries, of certain lordships, manors, parks etc which the bishops of Coventry, Lichfield and Chester lately gave and rendered to your highness. (Preferred by secretary Paget.)

Gift in fee simple of the manors of Berwick, North Newton etc., Wiltshire, parcel of the late monastery of Wilton and other lands, yearly value £119 4s 9d, for Sir William Herbert [Gentleman of the Privy Chamber] who pays George Howard £800 for them.

Custody of the manors of Magna Raveley and Moynes in Upwood parish and a messuage [a dwelling house with outbuildings] with a close and pasture in Raveley, Huntingdonshire, and the lands called Goldings, Hunts and Drapers, in Ashwell, Hertfordshire, in the king’s hands by minority of William Sewster, son and heir of John Sewster esq., to William Clerk, the king’s servant.

Wardship [no name of minor given] granted to William Clerk.
John Roberts, yeoman extraordinary of the privy chamber, to have the portership of the fortress of Falmouth in Cornwall which he has long exercised.
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There was also a special mandate to Wriothesley, Lord St John, Russell and Hertford to deliver the king’s consent to the Act of Attainder of Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, and Henry, late Earl of Surrey. The document was dated January, but the day of the month was left blank.
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The last document in the collection was the commission to Hertford instructing him to ‘pronounce in the Parliament House your majesty’s assent to the attainder of the Duke of Norfolk by Act of Parliament’.

At mid-morning of Thursday 27 January, Henry had received communion from his confessor (possibly John Boole
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) and afterwards he was conscious enough to discuss matters of state with a few of his Councillors. But as the day wore on, it was apparent to all who saw him that he was rapidly losing his last battle with Death.

All in that silent Palace of Westminster knew full well that by law it was foul treason to predict the king’s death. Some had been brutally executed for unwisely uttering such thoughts. Outside the doors of his bedchamber, there was apprehension about what was now inevitable. Would anyone have the courage to tell the old man that his end was approaching? All still feared the king’s power to exact terrible vengeance; everyone, including his doctors, was still wary of his violent temper. They knew of his repugnance to any mention of his mortality. The dangerous duty predictably fell to Denny.

He entered the king’s silent chamber that evening and knelt quietly beside the bed. The king was conscious and stared down at him as the courtier strove to summon the courage to utter the unspeakable. Henry’s skin had probably taken on a yellow colour as a result of his condition; he may have found it difficult to breathe evenly. Denny finally warned Henry that in ‘man’s judgement you are not like to live’ and therefore exhorted him to prepare himself for death. There was a silence. Denny hurried on, urging the king to remember his sins ‘as becomes every good Christian man to do’.

The king said he believed ‘the mercy of Christ is able to pardon me all my sins, yes, though they were greater than they be’. Denny, delicately hedging around the issue of bringing in a priest to say the Last Rites, asked if Henry wanted to see ‘any learned man to confer withal and open his mind unto’. The king nodded, but, as ever, avoided taking the final decision: ‘If I had any, it should be Dr Cranmer but I will first take a little sleep. And then, as I feel myself, I will advise [you] upon on the matter.’
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These were his last known words: shortly afterwards, Henry lost the power of speech and later probably passed into a uraemic coma.
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A message was quickly dispatched by courier to Archbishop Cranmer, who was staying at his palace at Croydon. The weather was very cold that night and the frozen roads delayed his arrival at Westminster. By the time he arrived, chilled and out of breath, sometime shortly after midnight, Henry was probably still unconscious. His old friend clambered awkwardly on to the great bed and, speaking close to the king’s ear, urged him to make some sign or token that he put his trust in the mercy of Christ: a nod, a mere flicker of the eyelids or a small gesture by his hand was all that was required. There was no response in the silence apart from the laboured breathing of the dying monarch. But Cranmer grasped the king’s hand and Henry ‘did wring [it] as hard as he could’.
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All present in the room took it to be the conclusive sign that he still dwelt firmly in the faith of Christ.

Henry died shortly afterwards, probably from renal and liver failure, coupled with the effects of his obesity.
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Queen Katherine, who had returned to Westminster from Greenwich on 10 January, thus became a widow for the third time. All her jewels were sent to the Tower of London and she changed into her widow’s weeds again, acquiring special mourning jewellery, including a gold ring with a death’s head for her finger.