Henry VIII (65 page)

61

“The Worst Legs in the World”

Around 1544–1545, the Whitehall family group portrait, a masterful piece of dynastic propaganda, was painted by an unknown artist. At the centre is the dominating figure of the King, enthroned in a magnificent setting with a richly decorated battened ceiling, wall panelling and pillars embellished with antique grotesque work, a painted floor, and an embroidered cloth of estate. Prince Edward stands at his knee, while to the right sits, not Katherine Parr, but Jane Seymour, who had borne the King an heir; her figure was probably copied from Holbein's mural. On the far left stands the Lady Mary, and on the far right the Lady Elizabeth. Through two open arched doorways to either side of the dais can be seen tantalising glimpses of the Great Garden of Whitehall with the King's Beasts mounted on columns, and in the background the Lady Mary's lodging with its grotesque decoration, the Westminster Clockhouse, a turret of the Great Close tennis court, and part of the north transept of Westminster Abbey, as well as the figures of a man and a woman, who are thought to represent Will Somers and Jane the Fool. The picture was probably painted for the presence chamber at Whitehall, where it is known to have been hanging in 1586–1587.
¹

The image of the King in this picture derives directly from Holbein, and is intended to show a great ruler at the zenith of his power. But other representations of the King dating from the last years of his reign show a prematurely aged and bloated human being. One of the best-known portrait types from these years is that at Castle Howard; it is one of several versions of a lost portrait by Holbein and is dated 1542. The King faces forwards, in the pose adopted for the Whitehall mural, but his face is fatter and he leans on a staff. Other versions are at Hever Castle, the National Portrait Gallery, and St. Bartholemew's Hospital, London.

Cornelis Matsys, who lived and worked in Antwerp, made an engraving of the King in 1544.
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This is one of the most famous yet grotesque depictions of Henry VIII in later life, with its slitted eyes and heavy jowls, but it may not have been taken from life, since there is no record of Matsys ever visiting England. A medal of Henry wearing a skullcap and bonnet, which is of more realistic proportions yet still shows a bloated, ageing face, is perhaps a better representation.
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The King had more leisure for his intellectual interests during his latter years, since his bad leg and huge bulk did not permit him to indulge as frequently as hitherto in the physical pursuits he had once loved. Confined more often to his secret lodgings, he read extensively and made prolific marginal notes. His accounts record payments for books, calendars, almanacs, writing paper, and a globe.
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He now needed spectacles— known as gazings—for reading, and ordered ten pairs at a time from craftsmen in Germany. The frames were made of gold or silver and clipped onto the nose, rather than the ears, while the lenses, cut from rock crystal, came from specialists in Venice.

Between March and June 1545, Henry was ill again. He had “a burning fever for several days, and subsequently the malady attacked the leg.”
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He remained behind closed doors, and the true state of his health was deliberately not made public, but there was naturally speculation, and Gardiner expressed the fear that the King would not live until “my Lord Prince may come to man's estate.”
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When Henry finally did emerge, he told Chapuys that he had felt “ten times better in France” than he had since his return. The ambassador was shocked to see him “much broken down” and very depressed. He spent his days in his chair, locked in melancholy, dressing only to attend mass, and sometimes rousing himself to play cards with Hertford or Lisle.
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Henry was having to come to terms with the fact that he would be a semi-invalid for the rest of his life—a bitter prospect for a man who had once been such an active and renowned sportsman. He lamented the fact that time “is of all losses the most irrecuperable, for it can never be redeemed for no manner price nor prayer.”
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Exacerbated by inactivity and pain, the King's temper became more irascible than usual, and he was “often of one mind in the morning and of quite another after dinner.”
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Yet soon his iron will asserted itself, and he would force himself to carry on as normal, riding out, hunting, hawking, and playing bowls as often as his health permitted, and moving from house to house with relentless frequency. Chapuys thought it remarkable that he could get about at all, since he had “the worst legs in the world” and was now of very weak constitution.
¹⁰

This is borne out by the fact that more and more apothecaries were employed to assist the King's Gentleman Apothecary, Thomas Alsop, during the years 1540–1546. Sometimes apothecaries from outside the court were paid to make up medicines for the King. Expenditure on these preparations rose steadily.
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It was the apothecaries who determined what he should be given, rather than the physicians, whose role was now subordinate. The physicians' role was to monitor Henry's health, measuring his urine against his fluid intake and examining his stools. It is fortunate that none of his medical staff resorted to the drastic, painful, and usually useless remedies employed by some Tudor doctors, although it is clear that they could do little to relieve his symptoms. “At the last, by reason of his sore leg, the anguish whereof began more and more to increase, he waxed sickly, and therewithal froward and difficult to be pleased.”
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When he was in this mood, those around him knew “it was high time for us to get clear of him, in order to avoid offending him or irritating him further, having regard to his malady.”
¹³

The King's doctors, being so frequently in attendance, were now among the most influential people at court, and none more so than Sir William Butts, in whom Henry had special confidence. Butts was a great evangelical and perhaps a closet Protestant, and is known to have used his influence to protect others of like mind. Once, when Henry was determined to punish one Richard Turner, a young reformist, for inciting a Kentish community to antipapist demonstrations, Butts waited until the King was having his beard trimmed, and “with some pleasant conceits to refresh and solace” him, “pleasantly and merrily insinuated unto the King the effect of the matter,” after which Henry “so altered his mind that, whereas before he commanded the said Turner to be whipped out of the country, he now commanded him to be retained as a faithful subject.”
¹⁴
Butts exercised vast powers of patronage, being sought out by clients who wanted their suits laid before the King, but he remained discreet and entirely trustworthy. During these final years, it was to Butts, Cranmer, and Somers, more than anyone else, that Henry confided his secrets and unburdened his mind.

Chapuys was also in very poor health, due to gout, and had to be carried about in a chair. In May 1545, he told the King he would shortly be departing from England for good. Soon afterwards, as he sat enjoying the sunshine in the garden facing the Queen's lodgings at Whitehall, Katherine Parr approached with her ladies and told him how sorry she was to hear that he was leaving, for, as Chapuys recorded, Henry had told her “that I had always performed my duties well, and the King trusted me; but on the other hand, she doubted not that my health would be better on the other side of the sea.” The Queen insisted on taking him to say farewell to the Lady Mary, whose champion he had been for so many years. During his retirement, Chapuys would keep abreast of affairs in England and write succinct and insightful commentaries on them.
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Soon after his departure, the Emperor replaced him with a new ambassador, Francis van der Delft.

The war between England and France continued. Hertford had been left in command at Boulogne, and in January, using brilliant military tactics, had successfully repelled an onslaught by the French.
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Later that year, Henry was to replace him with Norfolk and give him a command in the north against the obdurate Scots.

In July, French ships harried the south coast. The King went down to Portsmouth to review his fleet and oversee operations. On 19 July, as the French lay off the Isle of Wight, Henry was standing on the battlements of Southsea Castle, watching the “Great Harry” lead his ships out of the Solent to do battle. Suddenly, the
Mary Rose
, with all hands on board, keeled over and sank. More than six hundred men drowned, and their cries could be heard by the horrified King.

“Oh, my gentlemen! Oh, my gallant men!” he cried, then turned to comfort Lady Carew, the wife of Sir George Carew, Vice Admiral of the Fleet, who had gone down with the stricken ship.
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The loss of the Mary
Rose
was a terrible blow to Henry, yet despite it the English fleet still managed to trounce the French and send them packing.

Afterwards, Henry departed on a hunting progress, feeling so confident of the “valour and affection of his subjects” that he could safely leave the defence of his kingdom to them, having arranged for regular reports to be sent to him.
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He stayed three nights at Nonsuch, inspecting works he had ordered to be carried out in May, when he had complained that the workmen were making slow progress with completing the palace. This time, he was here with the court, and a forest of tents sprang up in the gardens to accommodate everyone, while furnishings and tapestries were brought from Whitehall to make the house fit for the King.

Dwindling funds had brought to a halt the King's passion for property acquisition. The last house Henry acquired was Apethorpe Hall in Northamptonshire, which he purchased from Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, in 1543.
¹⁹

On 22 August, while the court was at Guildford, the Duke of Suffolk, who had accompanied the King on progress, died unexpectedly. Henry was stricken at the loss of one of his oldest and most loyal friends, and arranged for the Duke to be buried in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, at his own expense. He told the Council that, for as long as Suffolk had served him, he had never betrayed a friend or knowingly taken unfair advantage of an enemy. None of those present could say as much, he added, his gaze bearing down on them. Young Henry Brandon, now eleven, succeeded his father as Duke of Suffolk, while the late Duke's widow, Katherine Willoughby, continued to rule over his vast estates in Lincolnshire. William Paulet, Lord St. John, Chamberlain of the Household, was promoted to Lord Great Master in Suffolk's place.

Norfolk had taken over Hertford's command in France, but quickly proved so incompetent that the King recalled him and gave him perhaps the most blistering dressing-down of his careeer, accusing him of acting “clean discrepant from our commandment,” and warning him that in future he must “study and seek our honour, herein somewhat touched, redubbed.”
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Surrey was chosen to replace his father in France. For a year now, the Earl had been occupied with the building of a fine new mansion, Mount Surrey, near Norwich.
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In September 1545, he was appointed the King's Lieutenant General in charge of all the land and naval forces in France. Once installed at Boulogne, he served the King with such ostentatious valour that both Henry and Paget felt obliged to rebuke him for putting himself at unnecessary risk.
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The Council were not so impressed by Surrey's lavish overspending, nor the inefficiency of his administration.
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On 6 November 1545, Katherine Parr published her first book, a devotional work entitled
Prayers or Meditations, wherein the Mind is Stirred Patiently to Su fer all Afflictions
, which was printed by Thomas Berthelet. Although strongly evangelical in tone and content, it did not overstep the bounds of orthodoxy, and appeared with the King's full approval. It was very rare in early Tudor England for a woman to publish a book: only seven other women did so during the reigns of the first two Tudors.
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Katherine's book immediately became very popular, especially among her own sex, and went through nineteen editions in the sixteenth century. On the strength of its reputation, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge both asked the Queen to become their patron, an honour she took pleasure in accepting, and Nicholas Udall dedicated to Katherine his translation of the Gospel of St. Luke.

In 1544, Roger Ascham had completed his brilliant satirical treatise
Toxophilus
, which was ostensibly about archery—“a pastime honest for the mind, wholesome for the body, fit for every man, vile for no man”— yet also contained a pithy summation of the state of the realm and a plea for English to replace Latin as the language of humanism. Ascham had long hoped to present his work to the King, but the French war had intervened, and it was not until 1545 that he obtained—probably through the good offices of his friend and patron Sir Anthony Denny—an audience of Henry, who received him in the gallery at Greenwich and “did so well like” the book that he immediately awarded Ascham a pension of £10 (£3,000), thus opening the way to further court patronage.

Henry—and the reformists—lost another supportive friend in November 1545 when Sir William Butts died. Dr. Thomas Wendy replaced him, but he lacked the intellectual stature of Butts, whose ministrations were greatly missed when, in the winter, the King suffered yet another bout of illness. Van der Delft reported on Christmas Eve that Henry was “so unwell that, considering his age and corpulence, fears are entertained that he will be unable to survive further attacks.”
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Nevertheless, on that same day, the King went to Westminster and addressed Parliament for what was to prove the last time in his reign. With unusual humility, he thanked the Speaker for his speech reminding him of his duty as sovereign, “which is to endeavour myself to obtain and get such excellent qualities and necessary virtues as a prince or governor ought to have, of which gifts I recognise myself both bare and barren. But for such small qualities as God has endowed me with, I render to His goodness my most humble thanks.” After complaining that “that most precious jewel, the Word of God, is now disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern,” he exhorted his subjects, “Be in charity one with another, like brother and brother. Love, dread and serve God, the which I, as your sovereign lord, exhort and require you; and then I doubt not but that love and league shall never be dissolved nor broken between us.”
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His speech had a profound impact on his listeners: one M.P. commented, “To us that have not heard him often, it was such a joy and marvellous comfort as I reckon this day one of the happiest of my life.”
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