Henry VIII (68 page)

On the morning of 27 January, the King saw his confessor and received holy communion. Later that day, he was well enough to discuss state affairs with his councillors, but by the evening he was failing fast. The Council, knowing his death was imminent, ordered that all the ports be closed.

No one, even his doctors, had as yet plucked up the courage to warn Henry of his imminent demise. He had always been loath to hear any mention of death, and Hall states that “his servants scarcely dared speak to him to put him in mind of his approaching end, lest he, in his angry and imperious humour, should have ordered them to be indicted,” for it was treason to predict the King's death. Yet it was also unthinkable that a man should be denied time to prepare his soul, so Sir Anthony Denny boldly ventured to warn his master that “in man's judgement, he was not like to live” and should remember his sins, “as becometh every good Christian man to do.” Henry said he believed that the mercy of Christ would “pardon me all my sins, yea, though they were greater than they be.”
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Denny asked Henry if he would like to speak to any “learned man.” He replied that “if he had any, it should be Dr Cranmer, but I will first take a little sleep, and then, as I feel myself, I will advise upon the matter.” These were his last known words. A messenger was at once dispatched to Croydon to summon the Archbishop, but when Cranmer arrived in the early hours of Friday, 28 January, the King was beyond speech, and when the primate asked him to give some sign that he died in the faith of Christ, “did wring his hand in his as hard as he could.” Cranmer and the councillors present took this for hearty assent.
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Shortly afterwards, at around 2 A.M.,
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Henry VIII gave up his long struggle and quietly slipped from this world.

The cause of the King's death is uncertain, thanks to the secrecy that surrounded his final illness, but it is likely to have been a pulmonary embolism. For two days his passing was kept secret, and his body lay undisturbed in his bedchamber while outside court life went on as normal, with the King's meals being brought to his lodgings with the usual flourish of trumpets.
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On 28 January, the Earl of Hertford rode to Hertford Castle to secure the person of the nine-year-old Prince and pay homage to him as King. Once this was accomplished, he sent Paget the key that would unlock the casket containing the old King's Will. The next day, Lord Chancellor Wriothesley, so overcome with weeping that he could barely speak, announced Henry VIII's death to Parliament, where there were great demonstrations of grief. The young Edward VI was brought to the Tower on 31 January, and there proclaimed King, with the heralds crying, “The King is dead! Long live the King!”

The next day, in defiance of his late master's wishes, Hertford was named Lord Protector and appointed to head the Council of Regency.
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Meanwhile, Henry's body had been embalmed and encased in lead, and laid in state in the presence chamber at Whitehall, surrounded by burning tapers. After a few days, it was moved into the chapel.

There were solemn dirges and tolling bells in every parish church in the land, in memory of the late King. In Paris, Francis I ordered a requiem mass at Notre Dame. On 14 February, Henry VIII's body began its journey from Whitehall to Windsor, where it was taken in a solemn procession stretching for four miles. Antonio Toto and Nicholas Bellin helped to produce the heraldic escutcheons and painted banners that were carried about the hearse.

The vast coffin, covered with palls of blue velvet and cloth of gold, lay on a chariot drawn by black-caparisoned horses, which drew it along roads that had been swept and even widened for the occasion. On top of the coffin was a wax effigy of the King, carved by Nicholas Bellin and clad in crimson velvet trimmed with miniver and having on its head a crown atop “a night cap of black satin, set full of precious stones.” It wore jewelled bracelets and velvet gloves adorned with rings. Even in death, Henry was magnificent.

The cortege rested that night at Syon Abbey. The next day, it reached Windsor, and in accordance with his will, the King was buried in the vault in the choir of St. George's Chapel, next to “his true and loving wife, Queen Jane,” the mother of his heir. Sixteen strong members of the Yeomen of the Guard carried the coffin into the black-draped church and lowered it into the vault. Gardiner, who would not recover royal favour until the reign of Mary I, preached the sermon and conducted the requiem mass, while the Queen watched from Katherine of Aragon's closet. At the end of the ceremony, the chief officers of the household signified the termination of their service by breaking their white staves of office and casting them into the vault after the coffin, as the trumpets sounded “with great melancholy and courage, to the comfort of them that were present.”
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The King had left money for daily masses for his soul to be said for him at the altar “while the world should endure,”
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but the new Protestant ruling caste put a stop to them after a year.

The magnificent Renaissance tomb that Henry had taken over from Wolsey was never completed. Work on it ceased with the death of Edward VI in 1553, probably due to lack of funds. It was partially dismantled by the Commonwealth in 1649, and in 1805 the sarcophagus was used as the base of Lord Nelson's tomb in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral. One candlestick, the only surviving example of the fine metalwork on the tomb, most of which was sold off or melted down under Oliver Cromwell, now reposes in Ghent Cathedral. The chapel which had housed the tomb was completely refurbished by Queen Victoria in memory of the Prince Consort, and is now known as the Albert Memorial Chapel.

Henry VIII's unmarked vault was discovered in 1813, quite by chance; his coffin had partially fallen away, and his skeleton could clearly be seen. Jane Seymour's coffin was undisturbed. Also in the vault was the lost coffin of Charles I and that of an infant of Queen Anne, both placed there in the seventeenth century. In 1837, a slab of black marble was placed on the tomb on the orders of William IV.

Writing in the year of Henry VIII's death, his earliest biographer, the admiring William Thomas, declared that the King “was undoubtedly the rarest man that lived in his time. I say not this to make him a god, nor in all his doings I will not say he has been a saint. He did many evil things, but not as a cruel tyrant or as a hypocrite. I wot not where in all the histories I have read to find one king equal to him.”
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Henry was a legend in his own time, and under the reigns of his children, all of whom revered his memory, the legend became embedded in the national consciousness; during Elizabeth's time, “Great Harry” was especially lauded for having brought the English Church out of the tyranny of Rome. That he had caused intolerable religious divisions, executed hundreds of his subjects,
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nearly bankrupted his treasury on ruinous wars, destroyed the glories of hundreds of abbeys and churches, and debased the coinage of the realm seemed of little import beside such an achievement. And indeed it is true that, besides founding the Church of England and steering his realm courageously through a religious revolution, he promoted parliamentary government, immeasurably enhanced the standing of the monarchy, overhauled the machinery of the state, changed the face of the English landscape forever, patronised the arts to lasting effect, and created the most magnificent court in English history, setting a pattern for future centuries. Henry began his reign in a mediaeval kingdom; he ended it in a modern state.

In the seventeenth century, however, when the long and brilliant reign of the Tudors was over, the verdict of historians on Henry VIII was harsher. Sir Walter Raleigh wrote of him: “If all the pictures and patterns of a merciless prince were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this King.” Since then, Henry VIII has become a caricature of his former self, with the real man being submerged beneath the popular image of the bloated, self-willed monster who changed wives and chopped off heads with gleeful alacrity.

Thanks to a wealth of modern research, however, the genuine Henry has been allowed to emerge once more, imperious and autocratic as ever, magnificent in his person, yet all too human in the minutae of his daily life. After more than 450 years, his charisma still has the power to intrigue us, and whatever judgement we may make of him, we may well agree with Francesco Chieregato that he excelled all who ever wore a crown.

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