The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (9 page)

Then twenty-four of the king’s trumpeters sounded a strident fanfare that echoed around the fan-vaulted ceiling of oak timbers, completed the previous year and now resplendent with bright blue paint and gleaming gold leaf.

As usual on such occasions, the proud parents did not attend. Cranmer and the Duke of Norfolk were godfathers, and Princess Mary the godmother. It must have been a galling experience for Mary, as the tiny child had now quashed her hopes of being heir to the throne of England. If it did, she showed no sign of such jealous thoughts: the cup of gold
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she had given as a baptism present was carried out of the chapel by the Earl of Essex as the first of the gifts lavished on the young prince by the fawning royal household. Her half-sister, the four-year-old Princess
Elizabeth, was also present, carried by the Viscount Beauchamp, assisted by Lord Morley ‘on account of her tender age’.
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The prince was immediately confirmed as a full member of the Church of England, with Henry’s old friend and sparring partner at the jousting lists, Charles Brandon,
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First Duke of Suffolk, as his godfather.

Edward was afterwards taken triumphantly to his mother’s apartments in the palace where his parents were waiting to give him their fond and grateful blessing. A proud Queen Jane, smiling wanly after her long ordeal, was propped up in bed, wearing a splendid mantle of crimson velvet and ermine.
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Henry took the child up in his arms and blessed him loudly and fervently, invoking the names of Mary, the Blessed Mother of Christ, and St George, the patron saint of England. His mind must have recalled the tragic loss of Prince Henry, after just fifty-two days of life, way back in 1511, and Anne Boleyn’s repeated failures to bear him a son, for emotion suddenly overwhelmed him. The king wept unashamedly with joy as he tenderly held the little prince: at long last, here was a legitimate and incontestable heir to inherit a firmly Tudor England. The queen’s own proud announcement of the birth, in circular letters to the great and good, had earlier emphasized the legality of the joyous event: ‘[Jane the Queen] be delivered and brought in childbed of a prince conceived in most lawful matrimony between my lord the king’s majesty and us.’
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All that marital pain, all those hard travails and bitter disappointments of Henry’s past were now swept away as the tyrant cooed and burbled incongruously over the baby in his arms.
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No doubt the ingratiating guests, all their thoughts unconsciously mirroring those of the king, spontaneously burst into applause. All too quickly, the prince’s nurses reclaimed the child to return him to his own quarters in the north range of the palace’s Chapel Court
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and his canopied cradle in the ‘rocking chamber’. But the merry christening celebrations in the queen’s apartments went on until nearly dawn, with hippocras
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and sweet French wine drunk by the nobility and gentry, whilst they nibbled politely on wafers and bread. To mark the occasion, the king
knighted six courtiers, including Thomas Seymour, who was raised to membership of Henry’s Privy Chamber, Thomas Wyatt and William Parr, son of a former Comptroller of the Royal Household.
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The ragged poor, crowding in front of the barred gates of Hampton Court, were not forgotten: Henry ordered generous alms in cash – ‘great largesse’, the heralds called it – to be distributed to those waiting outside in the cold October night.

Twelve days later the queen was dead. Her end came swiftly. Sir John Russell wrote to Cromwell on 24 October: ‘She was in great danger last night and today but if she sleeps tonight, the physicians hope that she is past danger.’
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Alas, their optimism was ill-founded. Norfolk, at eight o’clock that night, sent a letter post-haste by mounted courier, again to Cromwell at Westminster, urging him to be at Hampton Court early the next morning ‘to comfort our good master, for as for our mistress, there is no likelihood of her life, the more pity, and I fear she shall not be alive at the time you shall read this’.
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Cromwell claimed later that Jane had died because of ‘the neglect of them that were about her, who suffered her to take great cold and to eat such things that her fantasy in sickness called for’,
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but the reported symptoms and the lack of medical hygiene in the sixteenth century leave little doubt as to the real cause or major factor in her death.

The king of France had quickly written to congratulate his brother England on the birth of a son. A stunned Henry, now a sudden and unexpected widower, sadly replied:

Divine Providence has mingled my joy with the bitterness of death of her who has brought me this happiness.
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Norfolk, talking to the grief-stricken king on 3 November (‘not wisely, yet plainly’), exhorted him ‘to accept God’s pleasure in taking the queen and to comfort himself with the treasure sent to him and his realm, namely the prince’. Recounting the conversation the next day in a letter to Cromwell, the duke said he had urged Henry ‘to provide for another wife’ – advice that carried, unspoken, the need to sire a Duke of York. Graspingly, charmlessly and with a tactless sense of timing, he also
tried to manipulate the king into agreeing to share out the lucrative spoils of the dissolved priory of St Pancras at Lewes, Sussex, between himself and Cromwell: ‘I was content [Cromwell] should have two parts,’ Norfolk told the king. Henry distractedly replied, ‘As you showed unto to me’ – a sign, Norfolk believed, that the king thought the property ‘well bestowed’.
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Henry’s main concern now was that the future security of the Tudor royal dynasty had to be protected from both his enemies and that equally deadly adversary, disease. As ‘God has the devil repugnant to Him and Christ hath Antichrist’,
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so there might be more threats, real or intangible, to the heir to the throne. Were there not reports circulating of evil-doers, practitioners in witchcraft, using a ‘wax child’ or dummy of the baby prince as a means of harming him? Under interrogation, one Richard Guercey confessed that he had spoken, in the kitchen of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, of information given to him by a man called Osmond – ‘one of Peckwater’s Inn’ – that there was

a wax image found in London way with a knife sticking through his head or his heart, representing the prince, and as that did consume, so likewise the prince.
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Edward spent some of the early weeks of his life at Hampton Court before being moved on to another of Henry’s houses, Havering-atte-Bower in Essex. Henry had begun construction work at Hampton Court in May 1537, preparing confidently for a male heir. These extensions included the provision of a new ‘jakes’ or lavatory, a kitchen and a washing house.
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With an eye to the necessities and trappings of the child’s regal future, a small chamber of presence was created, approached by a processional staircase.
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A household for the infant prince was set up in March 1538, led by Sir William Sidney as chamberlain, who was instructed to witness the child’s daily bath and supervise the preparation of his meals in a dedicated kitchen. All food was carefully tasted before royal consumption in case of contamination by an assassin’s poison.

The king issued strict instructions concerning the domestic
arrangements for the prince – the ‘whole realm’s most precious jewel’ – to Sidney and Sir John Cornwallis, steward.
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They should ensure ‘that all dangers and adversaries of malicious persons and casual harm shall be vigilantly foreseen and avoided’. Irrespective of rank, no one was allowed to approach the infant’s cradle or to touch the prince (and this limited to only kissing his hands when it was permitted) without a written permit from the king. No pages were employed near the prince, as youths were regarded as frivolous, clumsy and forgetful of their duties.
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Members of the household were also forbidden from entering London during the dangerous hot summer months when the plague was rife in the capital. If one fell sick, they had immediately to quit the precincts of the prince’s establishment. Three times a day, the passages and rooms in the apartments had to be scrubbed with soap to ward off infection. In the same vein, the serjeant porters regularly drove the poor from the gates of wherever the prince was lodged, for fear that they harboured disease. ‘If any beggar shall presume to draw near the gates, then they shall be … grievously punished, to the example of others’, the king’s ordinance laid down. Every want and need of the child was considered and catered for: Joan Mewtes, one of his nurses, was paid out of the king’s household accounts for ‘a dozen handkerchiefs garnished [embroidered] with gold’ at ten shillings each in 1540 and again the following year.
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On 8 September 1538, some members of the Privy Council were granted Henry’s special licence to see the infant prince at Havering for the first time. Sir Thomas Audley, writing to Cromwell, the sycophancy almost oozing off the vellum, enthusiastically reported that he had never seen

so goodly a child of his age. So merry, so pleasant, so good and loving [of ] countenance and [with] so earnest an eye as it were a sage judgement towards any person that repaireth [approaches] to his grace.

The eleven-month-old child, said the Lord Chancellor,

has shot out in length and waxes firm and stiff and can steadfastly stand and would advance himself to move and go if they would suffer [let] him … But … they do best, considering his grace is yet tender, that he should not strain himself, as his own courage would serve him, till he come above a year of age.

I am right glad to hear the king’s majesty will remove him from Havering against winter time: it is a cold house in winter, though in summer, it [has] a good air.
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At the end of November, Lady Honor Lisle, the formidable wife of Arthur Plantagenet – the illegitimate son of Edward IV who was now the Captain of Calais – was allowed to see the child. She, too, was enthusiastic in a letter to her husband:

I have seen my lord prince who is the goodliest babe that ever I set mine eyes upon. I pray God make him an old man, for I should never be weary of looking on him.
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The household became peripatetic, moving from one royal residence to another in search of fresh country air and to avoid any epidemics: from Havering to Hunsdon in Hertfordshire, thence to Ashridge in the same county. Costs of the prince’s household for the first twelve months amounted to £6,500, or £2,920,000 in 2004 monetary values,
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according to bills submitted by Richard Cotton, comptroller; a huge sum, despite the king’s penny-pinching as he urged the household to avoid ‘superfluous charges or waste’ and operate at ‘the least charges’. (Despite this, the prince had his own troupe of players, or actors, who were paid £4 for performing before the king at Christmas 1538.)

‘Mistress Jak’ was appointed Edward’s wet nurse and the infant was reported to be sucking well, ‘like a child of his puissance’,
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before her departure from this most intimate of services in October 1538. There were also four rockers of the cradle, two of them named as Jane Russell and Bridget Forster.
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Margaret, Lady Bryan, who was a member of Princess Elizabeth’s household, was created ‘lady mistress’ of the prince’s
establishment, and she reported to Cromwell in 1538 that Edward was ‘in good health and merry. His grace has four teeth and three full out and the fourth approaching.’
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Henry was a frequent visitor, checking on his son’s health and progress. In May of 1538, the king set aside a day to spend with his longed-for heir at a hunting lodge at Roydon, Hertfordshire, ‘and there solaced all the day with much mirth and joy, dallying with him in his arms a long space and so holding him in a window to the sight and great comfort of all the people’.
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No doubt they were kept at a safe distance.

New Year’s gifts to the prince throw some light on the tastes of the dysfunctional Tudor family and their immediate courtiers. On 1 January 1538, Henry’s splendid presents included a gilt basin (forty ounces in weight) with a design of a Tudor rose in the bottom, a gilt ewer and a standing cup and cover of antique design with the figure of a man on the top. Princess Mary gave a coat of crimson satin, embroidered with gold, and Elizabeth, with a nice touch of girlish domesticity, ‘a shirt of cambric of her own making’. Amongst the household’s presents of gold and silver-gilt cups, salts, bowls and pots, Henry Bourchier, Second Earl of Essex, more realistically offered a ‘bell of gold with a whistle’, noted by Edward’s careful accountants as weighing 1¼ ounces.
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He also very practically gave two oxen and twenty mutton sheep as provisions for the prince’s kitchen. The Earl of Southampton, for his part, gave a bonnet in black velvet, adorned with a white feather and a gold brooch.

The young prince spent his early years almost constantly in the company of deferential governesses and nurses, firstly Lady Bryan and Sybil Penn,
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sister-in-law of Sir William Sidney, who was appointed in October 1539 as Mistress Jak retired. The child was brought up, his own chronicle recorded later, ‘until he came to six years old among the women’.
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Their constant fussing attention may well have instilled into his character a priggishness and a perhaps understandable insistence on always having his own way. Despite the fawning reports of his appearance and character, he sometimes behaved badly, like any other child. Bishop Gardiner related an incident sometime before 1540 when the infant became tearful during a visit by ambassadors from Protestant
Saxony and Hesse. Despite all efforts by Lady Bryan and his nurse in ‘cheering … and flattering’, Edward ‘ever cried and turned away his face’ and comical face-pulling by the Earl of Essex was required to stem the flow of royal tears. The earl put his ‘great beard’ near Edward’s face, tickled him and made him laugh.
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The conservative Gardiner stuffily believed that the tantrum was a sure sign of the child’s godliness because he was shunning the Protestant envoys.