The Tudors (45 page)

A fourth young dynamo entered the picture in the same year as the Field of the Cloth of Gold when Suleiman the Magnificent became sultan of the Islamic Ottoman Empire, which had already conquered a substantial part of southeastern Europe and was threatening to take more. From his capital at Constantinople he would cause much trouble over the following decades, but almost exclusively for the unfortunate Charles. Among the Christian monarchs it was Francis who proved the greatest cause of instability, largely because Italy was for him what France never ceased to be for Henry: a field of dreams, the setting for conquests endlessly envisioned but rarely achieved. French and Hapsburg armies fought in Italy from 1521 to 1525, with England providing Charles with substantial financial support up to the point where his forces achieved their great victory at Pavia and Francis was hauled off to Madrid as his prisoner. Henry saw Pavia as a gateway to the fulfillment of his dreams, an opportunity to eliminate France as a major power. Charles, he proposed, should help himself to great expanses of southern and eastern France while he, Henry, became king of what remained. The emperor, however, was a sensible fellow with little interest in conquest and less in glory, seeking only to hold on to what he had inherited. In any case he was virtually bankrupt by this time. He therefore declined to cooperate, which so disgusted Henry that he soon broke with Charles altogether and allied himself instead with France and the Papal States.

Reversals of this kind went on year after year. In the aftermath of Pavia, England, France, and the pope remained at war with Charles until the emperor’s aunt and Francis’s mother negotiated a separate peace that left England suddenly and frighteningly isolated. In 1530 the widowed Francis went so far as to marry Charles’s sister Eleanor, though not even that could slake his thirst for conquests in Italy. By 1536 he and Charles were again at war over Milan, but two years after that they agreed to a truce so alarming to Thomas Cromwell that, in his desperation to find Protestant allies, he arranged King Henry’s marriage to Anne, the sister of the Duke of Cleves. Nothing was ever really settled, and there continued to be no basis on which a lasting peace could be constructed. Francis remained as fixed as ever on the dream of driving the Hapsburgs out of
Italy, and to accomplish that he showed himself willing to become the ally not only of Germany’s Protestant states but of the sultan Suleiman. Charles for his part remained determined to surrender not a yard of his patrimony.

All this was of incalculable value to Henry as he broke with Rome and embarked upon the destruction of England’s monasteries. If a real peace had been possible between Francis and Charles, a crusade by the continent’s Catholic powers to return England to the old faith might have become feasible as well. Certainly that was what Pope Paul III hoped for once he understood that Henry was never going to be coaxed back into the fold.

Henry should have been thankful to be left alone. He should have been content to leave the continent alone. But even now, with so much accomplished, it was not in his nature to be satisfied, and the very existence of Francis of France seems to have caused him torment. Though their two kingdoms were no longer even remotely equal in size, wealth, or strength—after the absorption of Brittany and Burgundy and other provinces, France’s population was six times England’s—for Henry the thought of being inferior in anything was unendurable. Early in his reign, in the Loire valley, Francis had started construction of the Château de Chambord. Twenty years later, in the late thirties, it was still under construction, on the way to its eventual total of 440 rooms, 365 fireplaces, eighty-four staircases, and more than a dozen different
kinds
of towers. Six months after the birth of his son, Henry decided that such a flagrant display could not go unanswered. He undertook a project specifically intended to surpass Chambord. The result was the stupendous Nonsuch Palace, the largest building ever seen in England up to that time, utterly unnecessary because not far distant from Hampton Court or Richmond or Greenwich or Whitehall or others of Henry’s many residences, so ornate with its hundreds of feet of high-relief sculptures of gods and goddesses and emperors and kings all surmounted by huge representations of Henry himself and the child Edward that after £24,000 had been spent it would still not be nearly finished.

Nor was that enough. Henry could never be satisfied, probably, so long as Francis remained alive and securely in possession of his throne. He would continue to wait, to watch for the opportunity to show himself the greater man.

The Last of Henry

I
t was January 27, 1547, and the ulcers on King Henry’s thighs were once again alarmingly inflamed. Clogged veins had swollen his legs until the skin seemed about to split, old open sores filled his bedchamber with an atrocious stench, and the royal body was jolted at unpredictable intervals by electric stabs of pain. This was the third such episode in less than a year; with a single brief remission it had been going on for more than a month, and this time Henry really
was
dying. At age fifty-five he was an old man at the end of his strength, bald, wrinkled, and gray-bearded, unable to read without spectacles, so grotesquely fat that he could no longer climb stairs and even on level ground had to be rolled about on chairs fitted with wheels. His physicians were cauterizing the ulcers with red-hot irons, adding to his agony. His many other afflictions—the headaches, the itching, the hemorrhoids—now seemed trivial by comparison.

He was, essentially, alone. Even his wife Catherine Parr, who had been twice widowed before becoming the king’s sixth bride and was an experienced and solicitous nurse, had been sent away before Christmas and not summoned back to court since. His children—Mary, in her late twenties now and still unmarried, Elizabeth, who was just entering adolescence, and the child Edward—also were kept away. No one had access to the king except his physicians and the gentlemen of his privy chamber, who were busy fending off questions about his condition and denying
that he was seriously ill or even, as some believed, already dead. On January 16, during a temporary resurgence of some of his old vitality, Henry had been strong enough to meet with the ambassadors of his old friends and enemies Francis of France and the emperor Charles, and that had put the rumors to rest for a while. The world, however, had seen nothing of him since then.

Though Henry’s physicians didn’t know
why
he was dying, exactly, it was obvious to all of them that he could not last long. The breakdowns had been coming with increasing frequency in recent years, the periods of recovery progressively shorter and less complete. His once-powerful constitution was so overburdened with problems (thrombosed varicose veins, possibly infected bones, possibly, too, a condition called Cushing’s syndrome that would explain both his distended torso and face and his savagely irrational behavior) as to be in a state of general collapse. Whatever the facts of his condition—a condition far beyond the reach of sixteenth-century medical science—no one who could get close enough to the king to tell him that his life was at an end, to suggest that perhaps he might want to prepare himself for death, was willing to do so. Even now Henry was too dangerous to be trusted. Just eight days earlier he had had put to death, on a flimsy charge of treason, young Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and son and heir of the Duke of Norfolk. In addition to being a poet of considerable brilliance, the originator of what would come to be known as the Shakespearean sonnet, Surrey had been arrogant and reckless. But he was not a traitor by any reasonable definition of the term. Even less was his father the duke a traitor, but now he, too, after an often hard life of service to the Crown, was in the Tower awaiting execution. Small wonder that none of the men huddled in the king’s bedchamber dared to tell him the one thing that might, in his extremity, have been of some use to him. Long before, Henry had made it a crime to foretell the king’s death. People had been punished severely on charges of having done so. And so Henry lay in solitude among the deep pillows of his great bed, while his retainers hung back and left him alone with his thoughts.

He had no shortage of things to think about. If he suspected that he was dying—and he surely did, having spent the last of his strength making arrangements for the management of the kingdom after he was gone—his thoughts would have turned inevitably to the old question of
the succession. Prince Edward, the heir whose birth had been made possible by so many deaths, was still only nine years old. He was a bright child, perhaps exceptionally so, and like his half-sisters he gave every evidence of worshipping his mighty father. But he was a frail reed on which to hang the future of the dynasty—years before, when the boy was sick with fever, the court physicians had warned that he was not likely to live long—and far too young to take a role in governing or even protecting his own interests. Henry would have wished that the boy were older and more robust, or that he had a brother or two. His thoughts might have turned to the efforts he had made to produce more sons even as his potency ebbed away. To the three marriages he had contracted after the death of Jane Seymour—marriages that had cemented his reputation as England’s bluebeard while at the same time making him the laughingstock of Europe.

There was sweet, dull Anne of Cleves, “the mare of Flanders,” to whom he had betrothed himself sight unseen in 1538 when France and Charles were allied against him, an invasion of England seemed not only possible but likely, and a marital connection with the Protestant princes of Europe (of whom the Duke of Cleves was one) seemed the only safe haven. The marriage was a fiasco from the start; Henry found his bride so unappealing, her big, slack body so repellent, that though for a while he shared her bed he never attempted consummation. A pretext was found for having the marriage annulled, and Anne, who had no wish to return to the continent, was contentedly pensioned off with two handsome houses, a staff appropriate to her new station as the king’s “sister,” and an annual stipend of £500.

There had followed the far greater catastrophe, the profound public humiliation, of Catherine Howard. The nineteen-year-old niece of the Duke of Norfolk and first cousin of Anne Boleyn, petite and vivacious if rather mindless, Catherine had been dangled before the king like a juicy morsel by courtiers who thought that if they could draw him into marrying her the consequences would be good for the whole sprawling Howard clan, good for the religious conservatives, and bad for the brothers of Jane Seymour, evangelicals who had been prospering mightily since the birth of their nephew Prince Edward. Henry rose to the bait with a speed that must have astonished the anglers. His infatuation with Catherine became obvious well before the end of his marriage to Anne
of Cleves, and he made her his wife eighteen days after the Cleves marriage was annulled. He was enchanted with the girl, lavished gifts on her, proudly put her on display during his annual summer progress. But there was much, sadly, that Henry did not know. Catherine, whose ne’er-do-well father had been absent through much of her childhood and died before she was brought to court, had had an undisciplined upbringing in the crowded household of her stepgrandmother the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. She brought to her position as maid of honor to Anne of Cleves a good deal more sexual experience than the king would have found acceptable had he been aware of it. Trouble probably was inevitable from the day she was married, through no choice of her own, to an obese and diseased man some thirty years her senior, and when it came it came in squadrons. Soon after becoming queen, in an act of astounding recklessness, Catherine appointed her lover Francis Dereham to be her private secretary, later transferring her favors to a young gentleman of the king’s privy chamber named Thomas Culpeper. In due course she was found out and reported, and the end of her story was similar to that of Anne Boleyn except that this time the queen was guilty. Dereham and Culpeper both were executed in December 1541, the latter receiving the mercy of a simple beheading but Dereham subjected to the protracted horrors reserved for traitors. The foolish and unfortunate Catherine was beheaded the following February. With her died her friend and accomplice in deceit Lady Jane Rochford, who on an earlier occasion had saved her own neck by providing damning testimony against her husband, George Boleyn. The king showed far more grief, for far longer, than he had after the death of Jane Seymour. Probably it was not grief so much as chagrin at having been cuckolded before the eyes of all Europe.

Why Henry would choose to marry yet again must remain a mystery. There could have been little chance of his becoming a father at this point, but hope may have sprung eternal in a man so proud. And Henry, in his increasingly brutal and self-defeating way, had always been hungry for affection. In any case marry he did, and wisely this time. Catherine Parr, who made little secret of being motivated by duty rather than love in accepting the king’s proposal, was an attractive thirty-one-year-old widow of great dignity and self-possession. She proved skillful at adapting herself to her husband’s moods and maintaining a pleasant household
not only for him but for all three of his children—the first and only time that Henry’s offspring were ever together even intermittently in something resembling a normal family home. But Henry proved a dangerous partner even in her case, at one point not only professing outrage at her evangelical beliefs but issuing a warrant for her arrest and dispatching guards to search her quarters and take her to the Tower. He soon changed his mind, however—if the whole episode was a kind of malicious practical joke, it was not the first time he had toyed cruelly with people close to him in this way—and as the queen learned to keep her theological opinions to herself domestic tranquillity was restored. The fact that she was kept at a distance throughout the painful final weeks of Henry’s life, however, suggests that there must have been rather severe limits to whatever intimacy the two had achieved. In any event there was little about his marital history that Henry could have considered with satisfaction as he approached his final hour on earth. He could sentimentalize only about Jane, who had done him the supreme favor of bearing a son and then dying before he could lose interest.