The Tudors (44 page)

Some of Henry’s changes rose out of that contempt for almost everyone except himself that had become an integral part of his character. The Bishops’ Book as first published had asserted that God sees all men as equal; the king inserted a clarification to the effect that equality must be seen as “touching the soul only,” whatever exactly he might have meant by that. A passage about the duty of Christians to attend to the
needs of the poor was amended to exclude from charity those “many folk which had liever live by the graft of begging slothfully”—easy words for a man who since adolescence had been able to regard the wealth of all England and Wales as his to do with as he wished and had rarely in his adult life been obliged to do anything he didn’t want to do. Because Henry kept a court astrologer, he deleted astrology from the bishops’ list of superstitions to be shunned. He also deleted a passage stating that rulers have a duty to “provide and care” for their subjects, and changed a warning that rulers in forcing their subjects to obey must act “by and according to the just order of their laws” so that it applied only to those acting in the ruler’s name, not to the ruler himself. Some of Henry’s changes were difficult even for Cranmer to swallow. What the archbishop found particularly irksome was the king’s rewriting of the First Commandment (where, in an absurd anachronism, he inserted the name “Jesu Christ”) and the closing words of the Lord’s Prayer. That Henry felt no hesitation in changing such ancient and supposedly divine texts is perhaps the most striking evidence we have of the heights to which his arrogance could rise, his exalted view of his own place in the hierarchy of the living and the dead.

Between the first appearance of the Bishops’ Book and the point where Henry found time to undertake its improvement, there occurred an event that he himself would have considered among the greatest of his life and reign. At two in the morning on October 12, after a labor of more than two days, Queen Jane gave birth to a healthy son. Henry was not present for the birth, having fled days before to his residence at Esher to escape an outbreak of plague. Upon receiving the news he rushed back to Hampton Court, ordering celebrations that soon had bells ringing from every church tower in England and the guards at the Tower firing two thousand rounds of artillery. Henry was said to have wept when he held his son for the first time. Almost exactly ten years had passed since he first undertook to rid himself of Catherine of Aragon, and at last, at forty-six, he had his heir. Amid great precautions aimed at keeping the plague out of the palace, the boy was baptized on October 15. He was given the name Edward, less in honor of his grandfather Edward IV than because he had been born on the eve of St. Edward’s Day. His godfathers were Thomas Cranmer and the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk. His godmother was his half-sister, the recently
humbled and rehabilitated Mary. The baptismal oil was carried by the four-year-old Elizabeth. She in turn was carried in procession by Queen Jane’s brother Edward Seymour, who, being now the uncle of a future king, was shortly made the Earl of Hertford.

The celebrations continued, but two days after her son’s christening Jane was taken ill and soon was in gravely serious condition. Henry departed on a long-planned hunting trip—it was, after all, the start of the season—but returned to court on the evening of October 24 after receiving word that his wife had hemorrhaged and was not expected to live. She died that midnight of causes that can never be known with certainty. It has often been stated that a cesarean section had been performed to save her child after two days and three nights of fruitless labor, but this cannot be the case; a cesarean meant certain death in the sixteenth century, and though it is hardly inconceivable that the court physicians would have sacrificed Jane to save their master’s heir, in the days following Prince Edward’s birth Jane was expected to recover and appeared to be doing so. A more plausible explanation is that she died because part of the placenta had been left inside her womb after she gave birth. By a sad irony, midwives of the kind who assisted at almost all deliveries in Tudor times, and who were well schooled in such practicalities as removal of the placenta, had been excluded from the royal birthing chamber. Only physicians of the loftiest reputation had been permitted to attend the queen. The state of academic medicine being what it was in the sixteenth century, such worthies probably knew less about the realities of childbirth than any experienced midwife. Henry left Hampton Court and went to Windsor Castle. Three weeks later, when the queen’s embalmed body arrived at Windsor for interment, he moved again, this time to Whitehall. It would be ungenerous to doubt that his grief over the death of his wife was as great as his joy over the birth of a son, but his recovery appears to have been swift. In rather short order he was reported to be in good spirits—“in good health and merry as a widower may be”—and to be scheming with Cromwell about where to find his next wife.

One would have thought that Henry might be a satisfied man by this point. He was definitely the most feared, and arguably the most powerful, king in the history of England. Not only the government but the church were his to command. His word was law, almost literally, and his
word was religious doctrine as well; no noble or bishop would have dared to contradict him. And now at last, on the threshold of what in his time was old age, with a lifetime of self-indulgence taking its toll on his mighty physique, there was a male heir to the throne. Suddenly it was at least possible that the Tudor dynasty, which just recently had passed its fiftieth anniversary, might have a future. A lesser man than Henry might have decided that, having done as much as any of his predecessors and far more than most, he had done enough. A better man might have decided that he had shed enough of his subjects’ blood.

But Henry was Henry, nothing better and nothing less, and he was far from satisfied. The Pilgrimage of Grace, in bringing to a halt the closing of monasteries in many parts of the north and making it possible for some of the expelled monks and nuns to return to their houses, had given rise to rumors that members of the various religious orders had encouraged and even helped to lead the rebellion. (The possible truth of such stories remains beyond reach. Nothing in the way of conclusive evidence exists one way or the other.) That had given the king and Cromwell an excuse to resume and broaden their attack on monastic establishments generally. The closing of the smaller houses was soon completed, and the attention of the agents of the Crown was turned to the larger, richer houses. Parliament having passed no law that permitted confiscation of establishments whose income exceeded £200 per annum, the royal commissioners reverted to using fear and greed to extract “voluntary” surrenders. This proved to be difficult in places, but usually not impossible. Over all the houses there hung the memory of those the Crown had already killed. Such memories were freshened by the execution, between March and May 1537, of the uncooperative abbots of Kirkstead, Barlings, Fountains, and Jervaulx, the prior of Bridlington, and an unknown number of the members of their communities. It is hardly surprising that, learning of these killings and finding themselves exposed to the questions, accusations, insinuations, threats, and promises of Cromwell’s commissioners, most of the houses gave up the struggle. No decision could have been more rational: those who signed most speedily received promises of pensions—very handsome pensions in the case of the senior officers of the largest houses, along with new positions and sometimes even grants of land—while the only possible result of refusal was a death that could do nothing to stop the
suppression process. The surrendered lands and buildings became the property of the Crown. So did everything inside the buildings—the accumulated treasure of the centuries. All the money flowed into the Court of Augmentations, from which Richard Rich parceled it out under Cromwell’s direction.

In March 1538 the leg ulcers that by now were making Henry’s life an intermittent agony began to block the flow of his blood. There may have been a clot in his lungs as well; he became unable to speak, barely able to breathe. For a week and a half he lay near death. But then, with a speed that surprised his physicians, it all passed, and he was up and active again. He had eight years and eight months more to live. They would be memorable years—as eventful as those that had come before. They would be extravagantly wasteful, they would be bathed in blood, and they would bring military and financial disaster.

THE FATHER AT LAST OF A HEALTHY AND LEGITIMATE BABY boy, father also of a new national church that (if somewhat confused doctrinally) was free of any connection to Rome, Henry VIII found himself free to turn to fields still unconquered. It was almost inevitable that he would look exactly where he had looked when seeking to demonstrate his greatness at the start of his reign nearly three decades before: across the English Channel. The old dream of winning glory on the fields of France had never stopped burning in his breast.

But that dream had been a foolish one even in 1509, and it made no sense at all three decades later. Henry had succeeded his father at a time when it was all too easy for English kings to look down on the ruling house of France. Louis XII, product of the dynasty that had ruled France for some six hundred years, was entering his second decade as king then, and though not yet fifty he had already, much like Henry VII of England, slipped into a premature old age. After two marriages he remained sonless, and because France’s Salic law prohibited daughters from inheriting the throne, he seemed destined to be the last of his branch of the Valois line. When younger he had conquered much of Italy, but his successes there gradually came to nothing as his armies were driven out of both Milan in the north and Naples in the south.

The whole dynasty seemed to be in the last stages of entropy. Louis had come to the throne only because his predecessor, the Charles VIII who as a boy-king in the 1480s had been an admiring supporter of the first Henry Tudor’s invasion of England, died at twenty-eight (killed by striking his head against the stone lintel of a castle doorway) without sons, brothers, male cousins, or uncles. The family tree was so bare that the royal genealogists, in their search for an heir, had to explore branch after barren branch before finally declaring that the only grandson of a younger brother of Charles’s great-grandfather should be crowned as
Louis XII. Louis as it happened was himself not only sonless but without brothers or uncles, so that his heir was a second cousin once removed, the boy Francis of Angoulême.

It must have seemed almost a joke, therefore, when in 1515 the Holy Roman emperor renounced the betrothal of his young grandson Charles of Hapsburg to Henry VIII’s sister Mary, and Cardinal Wolsey retaliated by arranging the princess’s marriage to King Louis. Mary was eighteen, an elegant and accomplished young woman of exceptional beauty. Her bridegroom, though a good man much loved by his subjects, was in his fifties and seriously decrepit, toothless and crippled with gout. If the courts of both kingdoms recycled tired witticisms about the dangers for old men of taking desirable young wives, in this case they were vindicated. Louis was dead within weeks of the wedding. It was said that he had been danced to death. “Danced,” perhaps, was a euphemism.

At the time of his death Louis was actually the youngest of the continent’s leading royal figures. Old Ferdinand of Aragon, embittered by the failure of his dynastic ambitions, still occupied the crown of Spain at sixty-three, and the fifty-six-year-old Maximilian of Hapsburg was in his third decade as Holy Roman emperor. Henry of England, after six years on the throne, continued to stand alone as the one youthful, conspicuously virile crowned head. All that changed abruptly, however, when Louis XII’s successor stepped onto the world stage. In Francis I, France had a monarch even younger than Henry (he was only twenty) and in every way his equal: tall and powerfully built, brimming with intelligence and vitality, ambitious to expand French power and to make his court a magnet for the leading intellectual and artistic figures of the day. (He would entice even Leonardo da Vinci to leave Italy for France.) Francis opened his reign by making himself the kind of authentic military hero that Henry had hoped but failed to become with his earlier invasion of France, attacking Milan and achieving an astonishing victory over a supposedly invulnerable force of Swiss mercenaries. Almost overnight he supplanted Henry as the most glamorous figure in Europe, and there flared up between the two kings a rivalry that would not be extinguished until the pair of them died only weeks apart. It was a contest of massive egos, fueled by resentment, jealousy, and pride. Ruthless in the pursuit of their own aggrandizement and indifferent to what that pursuit cost
others, they would make war on each other so often, entering and breaking alliances so easily, that the military and diplomatic history of their reigns is a confused blur, far too complicated for brief description.

Henry and Francis met for the first time in northern France at what came to be known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. This happened in 1520, a year after the death of Maximilian vacated the office of Holy Roman emperor. Both regarded themselves as uniquely well suited to wear the most venerable crown in Europe, and so both had put themselves forward as candidates in opposition to Maximilian’s grandson Charles. But Charles, who by this time had inherited Spain and its vast dominions from his maternal grandfather Ferdinand, and Burgundy and the Low Countries from his father Philip the Handsome, had the advantage of being German like the secular and ecclesiastical princes who elected emperors. He increased this advantage by borrowing heavily enough to distribute even richer bribes than Francis. (Henry, though in earnest, was never seriously in the running financially or otherwise.) The 1520 meeting was supposed to be a kind of summit conference—Francis, anticipating war with Charles, was hoping for an English alliance—but it turned into something both more remarkable and less productive. Throughout most of June the two kings put on a competitive display of wealth and splendor on a scale never seen in Europe before or since. In Henry’s entourage were most of England’s nobility, most of the hierarchy of the church, more than five thousand men and women in all, along with nearly three thousand horses. Cardinal Wolsey’s party included twelve chaplains, fifty gentlemen, and 237 servants, Catherine of Aragon’s nearly twelve hundred people in total. Huge, ornate temporary palaces were constructed for the occasion by both sides, man-made fountains flowed with wine, and the days and nights were filled with jousts, tournaments, musical and theatrical entertainments, and feasting. Henry, sadly for himself, precipitated the best-remembered event of the whole gathering by jovially challenging Francis to a wrestling match and promptly getting himself thrown; it was a humiliation from which he never quite recovered. When the festivities were finished, nothing had been accomplished except an agreement under which Henry’s little daughter Mary was pledged to one day marry Francis’s equally little eldest son. Francis hoped that this would lead to the alliance that he
craved, but it did nothing of the kind. In short order Mary’s parents promised her to her cousin Charles, and he rather than Francis became England’s ally.