Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (27 page)

That ‘charity between man and man’, upheld by the king in parliament, was notably lacking among some of Henry’s councillors. The more conservative of them held considerable doubts about the nature of Katherine Parr’s influence upon the household. The fact that Mary was translating Erasmus is itself significant, and the scholar’s paraphrase of the Gospel according to St John played some part in the later reformation under Edward’s rule. So Katherine was encouraging the kind of reformed spirituality that humanism inspired.

The king had complained, in the early months of 1546, about the way in which his wife brought up the subject of faith. John Foxe, whose evidence is generally reliable, quotes him as saying sarcastically to Stephen Gardiner that it is ‘a thing much to my comfort to come in mine old days to be taught by my wife’. At a later opportunity Gardiner whispered to the king that the queen’s opinions were, according to the law, heretical and that ‘he would easily perceive how perilous a matter it is to cherish a serpent within his own bosom’. These words also come from Foxe. Henry then allowed Gardiner to interview the ladies closest to the queen.

Such matters emerged at a time when the prosecution of heretics was increased, and in particular the persecution of a woman close to the queen and the queen’s ladies. Anne Askew had friends at court, and her brother was gentleman pensioner and cup-bearer; but she was being watched. One spy who had lodgings opposite her own reported that ‘at midnight she beginneth to pray, and ceaseth not in many hours after . . .’ In March 1546 she was summoned before the commissioners of heresy at Saddlers’ Hall in Gutter Lane; here she confessed to having said that ‘God was not in temples made with hands’. She was asked whether a mouse, eating a consecrated host, received God. She made no answer, but merely smiled.

She was consigned to a London prison before being brought before the bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, who later earned
the nickname of ‘Bloody Bonner’. On this occasion he was a mild persecutor and, being approached by her ‘good friends’, released her on the understanding that she had submitted. Yet then she relapsed into heresy, and in the summer of the year was brought before the council at the palace in Greenwich. She was of ‘worshipful stock’ but her recalcitrance was therefore all the more notable; it was also hoped by the conservatives on the council that the prospect of torture or of burning might prompt her to implicate some ladies of the court. She was asked to confirm that the Holy Sacrament was ‘flesh, blood and bone’ to which she replied that ‘it was a great shame for them to counsel contrary to their knowledge’. When pressed for her views on the Eucharist she responded that ‘she would not sing the lord’s song in a strange land’. When Stephen Gardiner charged her with speaking in parables she borrowed some words from Christ and replied, ‘if I tell you the truth, you will not believe me.’ Gardiner declared that she was a parrot. By now, weary of imprisonment, she was ‘sore sick, thinking no less than to die’. When in prison she composed a ballad, of which one verse runs:

In the Tower she was charged to reveal the others of her sect; when she maintained her silence, she was put on the rack and tortured. Still she did not name her secret allies. She wrote her own account, published in the following year in Germany. ‘Then they did put me on the rack because I confessed no ladies or gentlewomen to be of my opinion, and thereon they kept me a long time; and because I lay still and did not cry my Lord Chancellor and Master Rich took pains to rack me with their own hands, till I was nigh dead.’ On 15 July she was brought to Smithfield for burning, but she had been so broken by the rack that she could not stand. She was tied to the stake, and the faggots were lit. Rain and thunder marked these proceedings, whereupon one spectator called out ‘A vengeance on you all that thus doth burn Christ’s member.’ At which remark a Catholic carter struck
him down. The differences of faith among the people were clear enough.

A month later, Katherine Parr was marked out for investigation. This is the story John Foxe tells, twenty years later, in
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
. It is likely that he heard of it from those who were part of the court at the time; he is hardly likely to have invented it, since it does not serve any essential purpose in his Protestant ‘book of martyrs’ except to blacken the reputation of Stephen Gardiner. For that purpose, however, he may have embellished the facts of the matter. He reports correctly that, in this period, Henry kept largely to his privy quarters where he saw only his closest advisers. This was the atmosphere in which the king allowed Gardiner secretly to investigate his wife’s religious opinions for any taint of heresy. He even permitted certain articles of accusation to be drawn up against her. This is inherently plausible; given the facts of his own mortality, so obvious to him now, he may have been concerned about those in the immediate vicinity of his son after his death.

The articles of accusation were fortunately dropped on the floor of the court, where they were recovered by some ‘godly person’ who took them at once to Katherine Parr. It is more likely that a ‘godly’ friend, knowing of the machinations against the queen, privately warned her. Whereupon she fell ‘into a great melancholy and agony’; given her husband’s treatment of some of his earlier consorts, this is hardly surprising. Her terror was such, however, that one of the king’s own doctors was sent to minister to her; this man was also privy to Henry’s designs, and gave her further information about the enemies set to destroy her.

Yet the king called her to him one evening, and began to discourse on matters of religion. She took the opportunity of apologizing for her previous ‘boldness’ which was not done to ‘maintain opinion’ but to afford him diversion ‘over this painful time of your infirmity’. She is reported to have said, in order to assuage him still further, that she had also hoped that ‘I, hearing your majesty’s learned discourse, might receive to myself some profit thereby’. His vanity appeased, the king graciously condescended to pardon her. ‘And is it even so, sweetheart!’

The king and queen, together with some of their retinue, were
in the privy garden a day or two later. The lord chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, then came forward with a guard of forty soldiers to arrest Katherine Parr and some of her ladies on the charge of heresy. But the king interposed. He took the chancellor aside and asked him for an explanation. He was then heard to shout, ‘Knave! Arrant knave! Beast! And fool!’ before dismissing him and the soldiers.

It is a story from one source, and no other, but authentic touches can be found in it. The life of the court was indeed full of enmity and suspicion concerning the highest in the land, and there can be no doubt that differences over the pace and nature of religious reform were at the centre of the controversies. The rather serpentine conduct of the king, setting one group of courtiers against another, is also in character. It was a means of keeping control and of asserting mastery, even over his wife. It was further reported by Foxe that Henry never afterwards trusted the conservative bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, who had first started the investigation of Katherine. This mistrust is confirmed by the king’s subsequent treatment of the bishop. The queen was back in favour, and dabbled no more in pious discussions. She would very soon be devoted to nursing her husband in his last illness.

The king, in his mid-fifties, wanted no mention of death. He spent most of his time in his privy chamber at Whitehall or at Greenwich; the walls were covered with tapestries, and the furnishings included two or three tables, a cupboard for plate and goblets, and some chairs. Musical instruments were also to be found there for solace and recreation. Outside, in the presence chamber, the courtiers paid their reverences to an empty throne. This was still the site of the king’s majesty and must be so honoured.

He was by now ill and ailing. The royal accounts show that large sums were being spent for the purchase of rhubarb, a sovereign specific against the infirmities of a choleric disposition; he had always harboured powerful forces of anger but his fury was compounded by the fact that he was now in almost constant pain. He was obese and had to be transported in chairs called ‘trams’ through his galleries and chambers. A tram was an early form of wheelchair to ease the burden of his ulcerated legs. The chronicler Edward Hall reports that he ‘could not go up or down stairs unless he was raised up or let down by an engine’, no doubt some form of pulley or hoist. He was also obliged to wear spectacles, which were then known as ‘gazings’; they were clipped to the nose.

Yet he was able to strike out again. He excluded Stephen Gardiner from court for failing to exchange some diocesan lands
with the king; that was the explanation proffered at the time, but it may also be that the bishop’s disgrace was the result of his intrigue against Katherine Parr. It is reported that although the bishop was banished from the king’s presence he would go with the other councillors to the door of the king’s bedchamber and wait there until these more honoured councillors returned, only to give the world the impression that he was still in favour. It is in fact easy to conclude that there was a general purge of the ‘conservative faction’ in this period. The greatest of them, the duke of Norfolk, was soon to be consigned to the Tower.

Norfolk had been a pre-eminent councillor for much of the king’s reign but in November 1546 he and his son, the earl of Surrey, fell victim to Henry’s fear and suspicion. Surrey had quartered the royal arms with his own, and had advised his sister to become the king’s mistress in order to advance the family fortunes; he had been heard to suggest that in the event of the king’s death his father should become protector of the realm. They were in double peril because the Howard family, as collateral descendants of the Plantagenets, had some pretension to the throne. In a sheet of charges the king added certain words in his own hand, marked here by capitals. ‘HOW THIS MAN’S INTENT IS TO BE JUDGED; AND WHETHER THIS import any danger, peril or slander to the title of the Prince or very Heir Apparent . . .’ The succession of Edward had to be protected at all costs.

In the early days of December Norfolk and Surrey were imprisoned. It was now reported that the duke had known about a secret scheme, concocted by Stephen Gardiner, to restore the papacy. It was revealed also that Surrey had said that the ‘new men’, the religious reformers, would after the king’s death ‘smart for it’. The earl was brought before a special commission at the Guildhall, on 13 January 1547, and duly sentenced to death. Norfolk escaped a trial, for the time being, but was consigned to the Tower. He was saved from the executioner only because of the king’s own demise.

The reports of the various ambassadors tell the same story of decline and decay; the king looks ‘greatly fallen away’ and is ‘so unwell given his age and corpulence that he may not survive’. His
physicians were reported to be in despair, and rumours circulated that he was already dead. ‘Whatever his health,’ one ambassador wrote, ‘it can only be bad and will not last long.’

Yet who was to tell the king that he was dying? Even to ‘imagine’ the death of the sovereign was to incur the charge of treason. It was also unwise to snuff out the last gleam of hope. The doctors gave the charge to Sir Anthony Denny, who had for some time been the principal gentleman of the bedchamber. He approached his master and whispered to him that ‘in man’s judgement, you are not like to live’. He then encouraged him to prepare for death in a pious Christian manner. The king was advised to call for Thomas Cranmer but replied that he ‘would take a little sleep’ first. When the archbishop did arrive, he was too late; if Henry was not already dead, he was at least speechless. The king died at two in the morning of 28 January 1547. He had reigned for thirty-seven years and nine months.

It is difficult to assess the king’s private religion at the end of his life. He was said to have entertained the idea, according to Foxe, of substituting the Mass with a communion service; but this Lutheran impulse cannot be substantiated. The evidence suggests that he died, as he had lived, a Catholic. His will invoked ‘the name of God and of the glorious and blessed virgin our Lady Saint Mary’; he also ordered that daily Masses be said, as long as the world endured, for the salvation of his soul. That is not the language of a Lutheran. It suggests, although it does not prove, that the king still believed in the existence of purgatory despite the denial of it in his own religious articles.

As for the religion of the country, opinions differed at the time and still differ. Was it a predominantly and practically Catholic kingdom, with a king instead of a pope at its head? Or was it in the throes of a singular change to a plainer and simpler worship? It is perhaps best seen as a confused and confusing process of acquiescence in the king’s wishes. The habit of obedience was instinctive, especially when it was compounded by fear and threat of force. A French observer said at the time that if Henry were to declare Mahomet God, the English people would accept it. Certain devout people would not be moved from the dictates of their
conscience – Thomas More and Anne Askew come to mind – but, for most, the practice of religion was determined by custom and regulated by authority. The rituals of public worship were the same as those practised in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the evidence of wills suggests that the reformed religion had not made great progress with the majority of the people. By establishing the principle of royal supremacy, however, Henry had created an instrument that could be used for the purposes of religious reform.