1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (5 page)

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1536 and All That

H
istorians have noted that that 1536 was a particularly awful year for Henry. Derek Wilson calls it Henry’s ‘
annus horribilis’
. R. W. Hoyle refers to it as ‘the year of three queens’, and Sir Arthur Salisbury MacNulty concludes that, in reaching forty-five, ‘it is justifiable to regard the year 1536 as marking the approach of Henry’s old age’. Few, though, have connected this turbulent and important year with Henry VIII’s changing character. Only Derek Wilson has noted that ‘most of the reign’s acts of sanguinary statecraft’ occurred after this point, and that ‘it was in 1536 that bloodletting of those close to the Crown became frequent’.
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A brief chronological overview, however, of the many tumultuous events in the life of Henry VIII in 1536 begins to suggest the significance of this one year.

The year began, from Henry’s perspective, well. On 7 January, Katherine of Aragon, Henry’s estranged (and denied) first wife, died. Yet, only a couple of weeks later, a series of less propitious acts occurred. Henry fell from his horse while jousting. He was unconscious for two hours and observers feared the worst. Despite the official pronouncements of his rude health, the fall appears to have burst open an old injury which would never properly heal and meant that this great athlete of the tiltyard would never joust again.

Anne Boleyn attributed her shock at the king’s fall to the next major event of 1536. She miscarried on the day of Katherine of Aragon’s funeral – and it had been a boy. This was a huge disappointment to the king, and threatened the stability of the realm at a time when English security was already in jeopardy. In early 1536, an edict issued by the Pope that would have deprived Henry of his right to rule was circulating in Europe, and only needed to be formally published for the invasion and overthrow of Henry’s throne to become legitimate.

In March 1536, parliament passed an act that was to have enormous repercussions – the Act for the Dissolution of the Smaller Monasteries. At the same time, Henry received a book, written by Reginald Pole, his own cousin, which viciously attacked Henry’s role as the Supreme Head of the Church of England.

The most shocking incident of the spring was, however, the ‘discovery’ of Anne Boleyn’s apparent adultery with a number of men of the King’s Privy Chamber, and her arrest, trial and, finally, execution on 19 May. The king lost no time in remarrying: on the day of Anne’s death, Archbishop Cranmer issued a dispensation for Henry to marry Jane Seymour; the couple were engaged the following day and married ten days later, on 30 May. Perhaps to mark their union, around this time, Hans Holbein the younger painted portraits of the pair. The one of Henry, known as the Thyssen portrait, is a stunning departure from previous portraits of the king; the power and magnificence exuded by Henry in the image is striking, starkly contrasting with the reality of the fact that Henry turned forty-five on 28 June 1536 – an age reckoned by the standards of the sixteenth century to represent old age.

At the time of Anne’s death, parliament passed the Second Succession Act, which declared Henry’s marriage to Anne invalid and their daughter Elizabeth illegitimate, and removed her from the line of succession – leaving Henry with no direct legitimate heir to the throne. This was buttressed by Henry’s insistence that Mary, after two years of resistance, should now sign an oath declaring her father’s royal supremacy and her own illegitimacy. In addition, the king’s niece, now second in line to the throne, chose this moment to marry without the king’s consent – a deed which now amounted to treason because it lined up her husband to be the future king. She was imprisoned with extraordinary timing, as just at that moment the king’s illegitimate but much-beloved son, Henry Fitzroy, died at the age of seventeen. Henry no longer even had the option of legitimizing his bastard.

In July 1536, Henry responded to all these challenges by making his first minister, Thomas Cromwell, vicegerent over all ecclesiastical affairs, and issued the Church of England’s first doctrinal statement – a clear indication that as far as Henry was concerned, his royal supremacy did not merely make him a figurehead. The king also issued two important proclamations dealing with religious issues – one designed to stop extremist preachers, another to cut the number of holy days that would be celebrated in the country. As the new vicegerent, in August 1536, Cromwell issued a set of royal injunctions or orders to enforce this new doctrine, and presided over the beginning of the dissolution of the monasteries.

In October, these new religious commands, and especially the suppression of the monasteries, led to a large uprising against the king in Lincolnshire, which was quickly followed by a massive armed rebellion, starting in Yorkshire, which became known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. This was the largest peacetime rebellion ever raised against an English monarch – and what is worse, Henry did not have sufficient troops to meet the rebels in the field if it came to battle. It was the single greatest crisis of his reign. An indication that the watching world expected Henry’s downfall is suggested by the fact that the Pope, at this juncture, made Reginald Pole a cardinal for his opposition to Henry’s rule. Incredibly, the rebels were persuaded to stand down, and the year ended with Henry curiously inviting the rebels’ leader, Robert Aske, to court. It was truly an
annus horribilis
.

It was a year of threats – both external and internal – of things going horribly wrong, of betrayal, rebellion, grief, age, and ill health. But it was also a year of reaction – of Henry asserting his power through his supremacy, his image, his rapid remarriage and the festivities, through his bluster to the rebels. The impact of the year can be seen immediately in the course of 1537 when Henry cracked down on those who had rebelled against him, oversaw further dissolution of the monasteries and commissioned from Holbein the Whitehall mural, an important projection of his masculinity and power. This was truly a year that defined, changed and created the character we think of as Henry VIII.

I
n 1536, a series of events cut right to the core of how Henry VIII saw himself as a man. This might seem something of a grand assertion, given that many of the sources most coveted by historians – those that reveal the deep, inner-workings of a man’s mind – are simply not available for this enigmatic king. Yet, we can gain insight from the way Henry VIII acted, from the cultural worldview of his time, and from remarks those around him reported him as making. With all these in mind, it requires only a little careful psychological inference to reconstruct and analyse the impact of the events of 1536.

The events that most require our attention occurred over the course of a harrowing six months, between January and July 1536. The cumulative impact of these traumas is made all the more striking if one realizes, as what follows will suggest, that Henry only allowed Anne Boleyn’s execution because he truly believed Anne was guilty of adultery and had horribly betrayed him. It is small wonder that this succession of events challenged his very manhood and changed him from a virile man in his prime, to a man who suddenly perceived he was ‘growing old’, and tried to fight this in ways that made him ‘a caricature of virility’.
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A Wife’s Death

H
enry VIII’s response to the first major event of 1536 betrays little sign that he yet sensed this approaching weakness, even if, in practice, this first pivotal event shaped the way he responded to everything that followed. At 2 p.m. on 7 January 1536, Katherine of Aragon died. Hers had been a relatively short illness, which modern commentators have deduced to be stomach cancer. She had been in very great pain over the course of five weeks, having first been reported sick in early December 1535. It was thought serious enough to call the Spanish ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, to her side in mid-December. By late December, her apothecary, Philip Grenacre, wrote that she couldn’t eat or drink anything without being sick, couldn’t sleep for more than an hour and a half because of the pain in her stomach, and had lost all her strength. Chapuys was shocked to discover at the turn of the year that Katherine ‘was so wasted that she could not support herself either on her feet or sitting in bed’, but she obviously had a remission before she died, because after four days at her bedside, Chapuys was convinced enough that she was out of danger to leave her in the evening of Tuesday 4 January 1536, in ‘good hope of her health’, and was desolate at news of her death three days later.
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For Katherine, life had been thoroughly unpleasant for many years – Diarmaid MacCulloch calls them ‘years of dignified misery’. This had been particularly apparent since August 1531, when Henry had sent Katherine away from court to live at The More, close to St Albans, and the princess Mary to Richmond. This was the last time Katherine saw her daughter: Henry even refused to let Mary see her mother in her dying days. By the time of her death, Katherine had not left her chamber at her new house of Kimbalton Castle for two years, and her supporters regarded the men that Henry had placed in her household – all except her confessor, apothecary and physician – as ‘guards and spies, not servants’. She had always stayed true to Henry. In June 1533, Katherine had movingly written of her feelings for him, citing ‘the great love that hath been betwixt him and me ere this… the which love in me is as faithful and true to him… as ever it was’.
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Henry’s feelings for her were quite different. Before Chapuys rode to be at Katherine’s deathbed, Henry had called him for a meeting. There he told Chapuys that he believed Katherine would not live long, and when they spoke a little later, that she was
in extremis
and he would hardly find her alive. After each of these comments, Henry immediately directed Chapuys’ attention to foreign affairs. He emphasized the strained relationship between Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, and England, reiterating his hope that Katherine’s death would remove all the difficulties between them, so that ‘if she died you would have no cause to trouble yourself about the affairs of this kingdom’. This apparent callousness on Henry’s behalf, to which Chapuys responded in terse, shocked staccato that her death could do no good, did have some basis in legitimate fears about the safety of the kingdom. At this time, a papal bull
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had been prepared which would allow Henry’s kingdom to be given to anyone who could take it, and English subjects to be absolved from their duty of allegiance to the king. Although the bull was not actually published until 1538, in late 1535 and early 1536 its publication – and the legitimated treason and chaos it would unleash – appeared to rest upon a knife-edge. Simultaneously, Francis I of France was being asked if he were willing to make war on England. It is in light of this substantial threat being made upon his kingdom because of Henry’s divorce from Katherine and union with Anne Boleyn that we should interpret Henry’s immediate reaction to hearing of Katherine’s death on Saturday 8 January. He exclaimed ‘God be praised that we are free from all suspicion of war’!
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Yet, even this defence does not make the rest of the king’s conduct more palatable. He and Anne showed great joy, and appear to have celebrated the occasion. Anne gave a ‘handsome present’ to the messenger who brought her news of Katherine’s death. Henry, dressed ‘all over in yellow, from top to toe, except the white feather he had on his bonnet’, went to Mass accompanied by trumpets. Afterwards, he danced with the ladies, where, having sent for Elizabeth, who was almost two and a half (Chapuys calls her ‘his Little Bastard’), Henry showed her off, parading her from one lady to the next, ‘like one transported with joy’. He also organized an informal joust at Greenwich in which he participated, the significance of which will become apparent later. It is perhaps wise to be a little cautious about Chapuys’ report – coming as it did from a partial observer who was very much on Katherine’s side. The chronicler Edward Hall reports that it was Anne who was dressed in yellow, and another report suggests Henry was dressed in purple silk with a white plume. These seemingly garish colours, which are normally represented as an exhibition of unbecoming glee, may have had a different symbolism to the wearers. Hall specifically notes that Anne ‘wore yellow for the mourning’ – it was the colour of royal mourning in Spain at that time, and purple has traditionally been the colour of royalty (although Henry’s other actions make clear it would have been his own royalty, rather than Katherine’s, except as Princess Dowager, that he was marking), and had traditional associations with public mourning.
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