The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (36 page)

Anne of Cleves died in 1557 and was buried in Westminster Abbey in a tomb now scarcely visible on the south side of the high altar. At least in death she had attained the status of being amongst the kings and queens, a place so long denied her.

Finally, there is Will Somers, Henry’s fool. After the old king’s death,
he went into honourable retirement in apartments at Hampton Court, occasionally appearing in plays, masques and entertainments at Edward’s court. Amongst these popular guest appearances was one at Christmastime 1551, at Greenwich, when he appeared in cardboard armour for personal mock-combat with the young king. Five shillings were also paid for other costumes for him of ‘white-banded blue brocaded silk, guarded [edged] with red satin’ and ‘a frock of tawny silk striped with gold [and] furred about the neck’.
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He also appeared in ‘interludes’ for Mary and was present at the coronation of Elizabeth in January 1559. He died on 15 June 1560,
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his laughter and merry jibes at last silenced, and was buried in the church of St Leonard’s, Shoreditch, London.

In the sixteenth century, there were two very important motivations in the erection of tombs, aside from merely marking the graves of the dead for posterity. The first was visual impact – the monument should always reflect the deceased’s power, status and wealth, real or imagined. The second, before the religious changes of the Reformation, was a continuation of the medieval need to persuade worshippers or passers-by to pray for the soul of the departed, trapped in purgatory. Sometimes, tombs were constructed during the lifetime of those commemorated, not only as a constant pious reminder of inevitable mortality, but also to ensure that their wishes and tastes were precisely fulfilled – very much a case of ‘if you want something done well, you have to do it yourself’. So it was for Henry VIII, with his strong desire to demonstrate, in perpetuity,
the importance and prestige not only of the Tudor dynasty, but also his role as a Renaissance king astride the European political stage. Moreover, he was, despite his break with Rome and consequent excommunication and his largely politically motivated dalliances with the German Lutherans, still a devout and passionate adherent of the traditional beliefs of the Holy Catholic Church.

Paradoxically, despite his all-consuming vanity and his careful planning, history was to deal a series of very cruel blows to his sepulchral ambitions. The story of this monument to one of England’s greatest sovereigns is a sad saga of greed, penny-pinching, sacrilegious desecration and neglect. What is left to us now from the king’s grandiose plans is only a large, imposing black marble sarcophagus, inevitably commandeered from another’s tomb by Henry, and, irony of ironies, later reused itself, cavalierly, 260 years later by a parsimonious Georgian government for the monument to England’s fallen hero Admiral Lord Nelson, in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

Henry’s plans for an ambitious monument looked ill-fated from the very start. Work began on a tomb for the king and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in 1518 – only nine years after he ascended the throne, while he was still a hale and hearty twenty-seven-year-old with a full and active life ahead of him. A contract to design a grandiose monument was signed with the distinguished Florentine sculptor Pietro Torrigiano, who three years earlier had completed the magnificent Renaissance tomb for the king’s parents, Henry VII and his wife, Elizabeth of York, in Westminster Abbey, for £1,500, or £805,000 in 2004 values.
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The new monument was to be of white marble and black touchstone, like that of the king’s father, but ‘more greater by the fourth part [twenty-five per cent bigger]’.
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The tomb had to be ‘so fully and cleverly [constructed] and sightly’ and also ‘to be made and finished in beauty, fairness, costs and adornments’. It was to cost no more than £2,000 and be finished in four years.
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A model was to be completed within a set period, but this was never settled.

As an indication of its importance, the king’s Chief Minister Thomas Wolsey was put in charge of the project, with the choice of the place of
the burial site left to Henry. He had apparently already made up his mind: at a meeting of the Chapter of the Order of the Garter at Greenwich in 1517, the king had announced ‘that when the Most High God called him out of this world, he would have his corpse interred at Windsor and no where else’.
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There was some discussion about payment – Torrigiano wanted negotiable Florentine merchants’ bonds rather than English ready money, perhaps a reflection of his distrust of the value of Henry’s coinage – but the agreement was never pursued and the Italian left England in disgust, without official permission, sometime before June 1519.

Henry was not discouraged by this abortive start of the project. There are some grounds for belief that he later sought new designs elsewhere. In 1527, the Venetian architect and sculptor Jacopo Sansovino was reported to be considering a commission from the English king for an unspecified but ambitious project worth the astonishingly high fee of 75,000 ducats
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or £18,750.
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It has been argued
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that this project was the design and construction of the tomb shown in a drawing owned by Nicholas Charles, Lancaster Herald, and described a century later by John Speed in his
History of Britain
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and which was perhaps based on one originally produced for Pope Leo X (who died in December 1521) by Baccio Bandinelli.

This monument was to be 28 ft. high, 15 ft. long and topped by an effigy of the king on horseback in grand Italian Renaissance style. Beneath this high canopy were to lie the effigies of the king and queen. In its sheer megalomaniac scale, it was deliberately intended to be a monument to outshine that of any pope or monarch found within the churches and abbeys of Europe. The famous sculptor John Flaxman, nearly three centuries later, was full of enthusiasm, saying that the tomb would have been ‘one of the most magnificent sepulchral monuments ever conceived and surpassing everything of the kind in the modern world’.
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But this design was also never created.

The butcher’s son Wolsey was also a creature of his times, desiring an equally impressive monument to preserve his memory and speak volubly of his achievements as a statesman. The cardinal recruited
another Italian sculptor, Benedetto da Rovezzano,
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to design and build him a tomb in the chapel built by Edward IV located at the east end of St George’s, the Chapel Royal, Windsor.
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Work began in 1524 and continued for five years. It was to be a stupendous edifice, with a black marble sarcophagus 7 ft. long and 4 ft. wide supporting a massive effigy of the cardinal made of gilded bronze, with two griffins recumbent at its feet. This figure and tomb-chest, complete with a facsimile cardinal’s hat, were to rest on a platform of black marble with four bronze pillars at the corners, each 9 ft. high. Angels, each more than 3 ft. tall and holding candlesticks, were to be placed on top of each pillar. There were also to be twelve small images of saints, a cross and two pillars – symbols of the cardinal’s and papal authority, and two shields, or escutcheons, bearing Wolsey’s arms.

Included in the project costings was the sum of £800 for gilding portions of the monument, which should be compared with the £200 paid out for Henry VII’s tomb at Westminster. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, in his
Life of Wolsey
published in 1622, pointed out that its ‘design … [was] so glorious that it exceeded far that of Henry VII’. Vanity of vanities: Wolsey, always conscious of his status, was now equating himself with royalty, if not surpassing it in grandeur. The point was probably not lost on Henry VIII.

This tomb was also never completed. Wolsey suddenly fell from royal favour in the autumn of 1529, victim of Anne Boleyn’s hatred and Henry’s fury at Wolsey’s failure to secure his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Crippled by ill health and facing charges of treason, the disgraced cardinal pathetically petitioned for the effigy portraying him to be sent to him in York for a new tomb for him there. His request was peremptorily denied.
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Henry, ever rapacious and undoubtedly savouring a delicious sense of piquancy, seized components of Wolsey’s tomb for his own use, employing Rovezzano and his assistant Giovanni de Maiano
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to complete it to revised designs for a dynastic monument. The bronze effigy of Wolsey was discarded (no doubt ignominiously consigned to the melting pot) and the sarcophagus appropriated. In the new design, a gilded
bronze life-size figure of the king was to lie upon it. The podium of Wolsey’s tomb was to be raised about 5 ft. and bronze friezes inserted into its walls. The cardinal’s four corner pillars were replaced by eight or ten taller versions, capped by figures of the Apostles – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Between the pillars were bronze candlesticks 9 ft. tall.
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These may have formed part of Torrigiano’s original design, as Rovezzano talks of the

four pillars … which were not sufficient … to stand the weight of the said altar which Master Peter Torrigiano had made of the said pillars which appertain to the King’s most noble grace.
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An altar was to be set up to the east of the tomb, surmounted by a canopy with four kneeling figures of angels on top and supported by four pillars ‘on stilted bases’ decorated with figures. At the base were to be sixteen effigies of children, all holding candlesticks.
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Both tomb and altar were to be surrounded by a 4 ft.-high bronze and black marble enclosure to form a separate chantry in the centre of the chapel, where priests would pray for the royal soul.

Cromwell efficiently made a number of payments to the Italians and the English metal founders who were their assistants during the years 1530–6
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‘for labour and expenses’ connected with the tomb, the last in August of the latter year. It may be that the events of the northern rebellion, the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’, distracted both Henry and Cromwell’s attentions after that. In addition, it is known that Rovezzano was in poor health and suffering with his eyesight, possibly caused by the choking chemical fumes of the metal furnaces used to melt the copper and bronze for casting parts of the tomb, and had to return to Italy
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around 1543, but not before the effigy of the king had been cast and polished. The work passed to another Italian, Giovanni Portinari, an engineer and probably the same man who had been employed by Cromwell in the rapid, ruthless demolition of Lewes Priory during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In December 1543, Portinari was paid £37 9s 2d for copper and other charges incurred in work on the tomb that month.
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The level of work must have fallen off to only sporadic activity during the final years of the last decade of the king’s reign, probably because of the heavy demands of the campaigns in France and Scotland on government income, which had pushed the royal balance sheet into the red. The tomb was still unfinished by the time Henry made his will, in which he asks that

as soon as conveniently may be done after our decease, by our executors at our costs and charges an honourable tomb for our bones to rest in which is well onward and almost made therefore already with a fair grate about it, in which we will also [that] the bones of our true and loving wife Queen Jane be put also.
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The tombs of Henry VI and Edward IV in St George’s, located to the left and right of St George’s high altar, were also to be embellished and made ‘more princely in the same places where they now be’ as part of Henry’s clear design to revive Edward IV’s plans make Windsor the royal mausoleum – the house of kings – in the years to come. When referring to his own monument, he also uses the phrase ‘if it be not done by us in our lifetime’, presumably meaning completed. Henry must have been fully conscious of his impending death and he could not realistically have expected to finish the tomb in such a short time span, after so long a delay. His words may also imply that he was being misled by the Gentlemen of his Privy Chamber regarding the true state of the progress of the work, who may not have wanted to worry the old man as he neared the hour of meeting his Maker. Alternatively, this phraseology may be symptomatic of the king’s well-known aversion to thoughts or talk of his own mortality. The grating or enclosure of brass or bronze around the tomb was already in place in Edward IV’s chapel, however, with this proud inscription in brass inlaid upon it:

After Henry’s death, it fell to the filial responsibility of Edward VI to complete his parents’ tomb. Portinari was still employed in March 1547
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but was obviously labouring under the task. By 1551, another Italian had been brought in to work on the monument – the painter, carver and moulder Nicholas Bellin of Modena,
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who was living within the precincts of Westminster Abbey in an area called ‘the Tomb House’,
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where some components of Henry’s monument were still being stored. Edward’s Privy Council wrote to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster on 2 August 1551, licensing them to repair ‘their house where His Highness’s father’s tomb is a making and where Modena dwells’ and to take down part of the structure ‘without hindering of the making of the same tomb and Modena’s habitation’.
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Life must have been fraught for the carver in the Abbey, as the Italian fell out with the Dean and Chapter. The Privy Council wrote on 5 October 1551 to Sir Richard Sackville,
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Chancellor of Augmentations, urging him to ensure that Modena was ‘restored to his house, which the priests of Westminster had expelled him out of’. What is more, the Chancellor was told to investigate ‘what spoil has been made of things belonging to King Henry VII’s [sic] tomb which by Modena has informed to be of the value of 900 crowns’: this, then, was the cause of the angry rift between the Dean and Chapter and the Italian sculptor.
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