The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (33 page)

The old king, Paget testified, considered that ‘the nobility of this realm was greatly decayed, some by attainders, some by their own misgovernance and riotous wasting and some by sickness and sundry other means’. Therefore, even whilst facing the forbidding prospect of death, Henry had discussed with his secretary the advancement of some of his courtiers ‘to higher places of honour’ and Paget had duly noted down the names of the candidates.

The names on his list will hardly come as a surprise. To the victors and survivors in the great struggle for power went the spoils. Hertford
was to be made Duke of Somerset and Earl Marshal, and Dudley, Viscount Lisle, Earl of Warwick
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and Great Chamberlain. William Parr was elevated to Marquis of Northampton, while Russell, Wriothesley and Lord St John were also to be made earls. Amongst the barons to be created were Sir Thomas Seymour, now Lord High Admiral, and that notorious weathercock Sir Richard Rich, ever swinging with the political wind. Incomes from the estates of Norfolk and Surrey were also available for distribution. Paget said that he had suggested to Henry that as he had advanced these true and faithful servants

it might please him to bestow liberally upon such as should please him. Whereunto, he accorded and willed me to bring him [the titles] of the lordships and valuations.

But he liked it not and in my presence called Master Gates and bad him fetch such books as he had of the duke of Norfolk and earl of Surrey’s lands, which he did.
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The king’s first attempt at sharing out the spoils was not satisfactory. The secretary, no doubt with an eye to bestowing favours that would have to be repaid in the future, said this ‘was too little’ and discussed it further with Henry. ‘He bade me speak with them [the intended recipients of the king’s munificence] and know their dispositions and he would after tell me more.’ The faithful and manipulative Denny was also not to be forgotten:

And then considering what painful service Master Denny did take daily with him [the king], and also moved of honesty for that Mr Denny had diverse times been a suitor for me and I never for him, I beseeched his majesty to be [a] good lord unto him and to give him [the manor of] Bungay [Suffolk] which I had heard he much desired.

His majesty much commended my suit and said he had thought before to be good to him and to Mr [William] Herbert and Mr Gates also …
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Henry, ever avaricious, finally decided to keep Norfolk’s lands in his own hands, with the exception of some in Sussex and Hampshire.

Thus, at a stroke and by very dubious practice, members of the new government considerably enriched themselves. If you have the power, why not flaunt it? Who was going to argue with them or dispute this largesse?

Hertford received lands worth £800 a year, with a further £300 annually from ‘the next bishop’s lands that shall fall void’. Lisle and Wriothesley were to get revenues of £300 a year and Sir Thomas Seymour lands worth £500 per annum. Rich was awarded the very precise income of £66 13s 4d a year. Denny got Bungay and lands worth £200; Herbert, lands worth 400 marks (‘to help get him out of debt withal’); and Gates, 100 marks.

Straight-faced, Paget pledged that all this being ‘remembered on his deathbed’ by Henry ‘that he had promised great things to diverse men, he willed in his testament that whatsoever should in any wise appear to his Council to have been promised by him, the same should be performed’.
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Herbert attested that one name was missing from the long list of beneficiaries of Henry’s munificence – Paget himself. According to Herbert, they had pointed this out to the dying king and had praised the secretary’s faithful service. Yes, said Henry, he remembered him well enough and ‘he must needs be helped’.
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So Paget, too, was given lands worth 400 marks a year.

Hertford, or Somerset as he now was, and his colleagues on the Council agreed that these bountiful gifts ‘had been determined’ by ‘our late sovereign lord’ and therefore after his death, ‘partly for the conservation of our own honesty and specially for the honour and surety of our sovereign lord that now is, [we] take upon us the degrees of honour and enter into the charge of attendance and service in the great and weighty affairs’ of Edward VI. Moreover, they thought that ‘we cannot otherwise discharge ourselves towards God and the world then if we paid [back] that which was given or promised’.
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So that was all right, then. There are few things in life more comforting
than feeling morally justified in accepting great honours and wealth.

Paget had delivered fully: not only, at best, a doubtful will, but also a cynical distribution of royal gifts to those who had conspired to provide absolute power to Somerset. Only Wriothesley objected to Somerset’s
coup d’état
, and he was quickly to pay the price of opposition. He was accused of acting illegally in his use of the Great Seal of the realm in appointing four colleagues to hear Chancery cases on his behalf. On 6 March, Wriothesley was fired as Lord Chancellor, kicked off the Privy Council, fined £4,000 and put under house arrest in London
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to prevent any chance of him fomenting trouble in his home county of Hampshire. He was, however, readmitted to the Council sometime in 1548, but in the internecine struggles for power that followed two years later he was again struck off and banished from court after an abortive conspiracy against the government leaders. He died, supposedly of grief over his expulsion from court, on 30 July 1550.

Somerset turned out to be a good soldier but a hopeless administrator. He was arrogant, headstrong and impetuous, and ruled by his imperious second wife, Anne Stanhope. Paget tried desperately to make him both more amenable to the differing views within the Council and more flexible in the implementation of government:

Of late, your grace is grown into great choleric fashions when so ever you are contraried [to] that [which] you have conceived in your head.

A subject in great authority, as your grace is, using such fashion is like to fall into great danger and peril of his own person besides that to the commonwealth.

I beseech you: when the whole Council shall move you or give you advice in a matter … to follow the same and relent some time from your own opinions.
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No wonder Paget later wrote to the Lord Protector on 7 July 1549:

Remember what you promised me in the gallery at Westminster before the breath was out of the body of the king … Remember
what you promised me immediately after, devising with me concerning the place which you now occupy. And that was to follow my advice in all your proceedings, more than any man’s.
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Paget also felt it necessary later to send Somerset very sensible advice about the practice of good governance, laying down his ‘manifesto’ in a letter to the Lord Protector on 2 January 1549: ‘I pray your grace accept this token in good part which very hearty love and great carefulness of your grace’s well doings has moved me to send [you], to whom I wish as well as I do to my own soul.’ Always, he counselled:

Deliberate maturely in all things.

Execute quickly the deliberations.

Do justice without respect.
²⁰

Make assured and staid wise men ministers under you. Maintain the ministers in their offices.

Punish the disobedient according to their deserts.

Reward the king’s worthy servants liberally and quickly. Give your own to your own and the king’s to the king’s frankly.

Dispatch suitors shortly. Be affable to the good and stern to the evil.

Follow advice in Council.

Take fee or reward of the king only.

Keep your ministers about you uncorrupt.

Paget added: ‘Thus God will prosper you, the king favour you and all men love you.’
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It is good advice that some governments could do worse than follow closely today.

What of Katherine, now the dowager queen? In his will, Henry repaid her devoted care of him and her compassion for his children with substantial legacies granted in praise of her virtues of ‘great love, obedience, chastity of life and wisdom’.
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She was angry that the role of regent had been taken away from her and protested to the new government, but it ignored her appeals. At least she was not going to starve. The cash and goods left to her, worth just over £1 million at today’s prices, were not overgenerous, but the dower and jointure made Katherine very wealthy indeed. Her income and her matronly good looks rendered her an attractive catch for anyone audacious enough to woo the king’s widow.

Within just a month after Henry’s death, she was again smitten with her old sweetheart, the roguish Thomas Seymour. Nine love letters exchanged between them over a period of seventeen months survive in various private and public archives to this day. By March 1547, Katherine had probably accepted the Lord High Admiral’s offer of marriage but, as with Henry, told him that there had to be a decent period of public mourning before a wedding could be staged.

In one letter, Seymour writes playfully of a supper with Katherine’s sister Anne Herbert and her husband, Sir William, later to be created Earl of Pembroke.

She waded further with me touching my lodging with your highness at Chelsea, which I denied … but that indeed, I went by the garden as I went to the bishop of London’s house and at this point stood with her a long time.

Till at last, she told me further tokens, which made me change my colours, who, like a false wench, took me [in] with the manner.

Then remembering what she was and knowing how well you trusted her, examined whether those things came from your highness or were feigned. She answered that they came from your highness … for which I render unto your highness my most humble and hearty thanks.

For by her company, in default of yours, I shall shorten the weeks in these parts, which heretofore were four days longer in everyone of them than they were under the plummet [featherbed] at Chelsea.
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He writes of Katherine’s ‘goodness to me, showed at our last lodging together’ and asks to receive her letters – even just ‘three lines in a letter from you’
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– and for her to send him ‘one of your small pictures, if you have any left, who with his silence,
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shall give me occasion to think on the friendly cheer that I shall receive when my suit shall be at an end’.

The Herberts acted as a discreet post office for the lovers’ letters, but chief amongst the couple’s concerns was what the new boy king, let alone the Lord Protector, would think of their plans for marriage so soon after Henry’s death. Katherine wrote to Seymour from her palace in Chelsea regarding his attempts to win approval from his brother:

My lord: As I gather from your letter, delivered to my brother Herbert, you are in some fear how to frame my lord your brother [the Lord Protector] to speak in your favour. The denial of your request shall make his folly more manifest to the world, which will grieve me more than the want of his speaking.

I would not wish you to importune for his goodwill, if it come not frankly at the first …

I would desire you might obtain the king’s letters in your favour and also the aid and furtherance of the most notable of the Council … which thing obtained shall be no such small shame to your brother and loving sister.
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Seymour was obviously in a hurry to arrange the wedding ceremony, which worried her:

My lord, whereas you charge me with a promise, written with mine own hand, to change the two years into two months, I think you have no such plain sentence written in my hand.

I know not whether you be a paraphraser or not.

If you be learned in that science, it is possible you may of one word make a whole sentence, and yet not at all times alter the true meaning of the writer; as it appears by this your exposition upon my writing.

Katherine was keen to keep up good appearances and to avoid the risk of scandal:

When it shall be your pleasure to repair hither, you must take some pain to come early in the morning that you may be gone again by seven o’clock and so I suppose you may come without suspect [suspicion].

I pray you let me have knowledge overnight at what hour you will come, that your portress may wait at the gate to the fields for you.

She signs herself: ‘By her that is, and shall be, your humble, true and loving wife during her life, Katherine the Queen.’

Another of her letters sought reassurance that her lover was not offended by her slowness in writing, ‘for my promise was but once in a fortnight’. The letter also contains the first signs of a rift between Katherine and her prospective brother-in-law, the Lord Protector, and his feisty wife Anne. Katherine, as dowager queen, felt very slighted at being edged away from the court and the centre of attention:

My lord, your brother, has deferred answer concerning such requests as I made to him till his coming here, which he said shall be immediately after the term.

This is not his first promise I have received of his coming and yet under-performed.

I think my lady has taught him this lesson: for it is her custom to promise many comings to her friends and to perform none. I trust in greater matters, she is more circumspect.
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Seymour, in his thin, spindly, spider-like scrawl, replied in haste from St James’s Palace:

Yesterday in the morning, I had written a letter to your highness upon occasion I met with a man of my Lord Marquis [Katherine’s brother William Parr, Marquis of Northampton] as I came to Chelsea, whom I knew not, who told Nicholas Throgmorton
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that
I was in Chelsea fields with other circumstances which I defer till at more leisure.

Which letter being finished … I remembered your commandment
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to me, wherewith I threw it into the fire, be minding to keep your requests and desires, and for that it hath pleased you to be the first breaker of your appointment, I shall desire your highness to reserve my thanks of the same …