1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (6 page)

Nevertheless, Henry and Anne were very obviously exceedingly happy, in a way that some considered unseemly. Apart from Henry’s anxieties about foreign affairs, his other concerns, as David Starkey has noted, were to use the style of Katherine’s funeral to indicate his continuing belief that she had never been his wife nor a queen, and to acquire her belongings. Ralph Sadler, Cromwell’s clerk, wrote to Cromwell that he had questioned Henry’s decision not to have a hearse at St Paul’s, as had been the custom at the death of Henry’s sister, Mary, in 1533. Henry had replied that ‘she was a Queen’ (Mary was the dowager queen of France, as well as duchess of Suffolk) and that for Katherine it would not be ‘either requisite or needful’, though he intended she would be buried at Peterborough with great solemnization. His approach to Katherine’s possessions is darker. If Katherine had not been queen, then she died a widow, and a ‘woman sole’ with the right to dispose of her goods as she wished (they would not automatically go to Henry). Yet, on 19 January, Richard Rich, the solicitor-general, the man whose word had sent Thomas More to his death, wrote to Henry about this tricky legal situation suggesting that Henry ‘might seize her goods by another means’, without admitting her to be his wife.
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Henry’s behaviour – his almost unmitigated joy and capacity for self-deception – suggests the youthful ebullience, confidence and conviction he felt at the turn of 1536. One might have thought that the death of his first wife, the wife of his youth, would have had a greater effect on him. He was, however, so thoroughly persuaded of the legitimacy of his position as Supreme Head of the Church of England – of his marriage to Anne Boleyn who was expecting his son and heir – that it doesn’t seem to be until later that his experience of Katherine’s death had a consequential effect on his sense of his own mortality. Henry was not to know at this stage that Katherine’s was the first, and least emotionally draining, of the three deaths of those close to him in this year. Rather his reaction to this event paints a picture of Henry’s mental state before the cataclysmic events of 1536 had really begun to unfold. When they did, it was precisely his buoyant, youthful exuberance that came under attack.

C
HAPTER
6

The King’s Honour

O
ne way of understanding the effect of the events of 1536 is to realize that they threatened Henry VIII’s honour, with which he was greatly preoccupied. He commented as much in August 1544 in a letter to Francis I, king of France ‘thus touching our honour, which, as you know, we have hitherto guarded and will not have stained in our old age’. He was not alone. Men at this time were ‘intoxicated’ with honour, and with maintaining their reputations and good names. Men and women in the sixteenth century used the concept of ‘honour’ to talk about their gender roles: male honour was bound up with masculinity, upholding patriarchy, controlling women and defending one’s good name.
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The characteristics of masculinity, or ‘manhood’ as it was referred to in the sixteenth century, were marriage and the patriarchal control of a household, the exercise of reason, sexual prowess, physical strength, especially demonstrated through violence, and courage. In the noble and chivalric world in which Henry VIII operated, the paramount place for demonstrating physical strength and manly courage was in the joust, and until 1536, this was where Henry’s untroubled sense of masculinity had most glorified itself. The joust was the central event of a tournament, which normally also included other forms of mock combat. There would have been groups of knights fighting each other on horseback (called the tourney) as well as combat at barriers – opponents fighting on foot with swords or long staves across waist-high barriers. In the joust, two armoured riders would charge at each other on either side of a wooden barrier called the tilt, holding a lance in their right hands with the barrier to their left. Points were awarded for striking, and especially for breaking their lance against the body of the opposing knight. By the early sixteenth century, blunted lances, or lances made safe by a tip fixed to their point, were in general use. Nevertheless, the jousts were still wildly violent and dangerous. When kings participated, they fought for real. In 1559, Henri II, the king of France, was fatally wounded in a tournament when his opponent’s lance shattered and splinters pierced his visor, entering his head above his left eye. Henry VIII had narrowly escaped therefore, when in 1524, tilting against Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, he charged without remembering to lower his visor, and the duke’s spear broke on the king’s helmet and filled his headpiece full of splinters.
²

By Henry VIII’s day, tournaments had become lavish occasions for pomp and magnificence. Despite the huge cost of tournaments and their associated masques and banquets (one estimate is that Henry VIII spent £4,000 on the Westminster tournament of 1511, almost twice the cost of his 900-ton warship, the
Great Elizabeth
), these were not mere entertainment, nor were they decadent, self-indulgent or wasteful binges in expenditure. For a start, in the sixteenth century, there was really no such thing as ‘inconspicuous consumption’ – anything of value was showy and obvious – and it was proper and necessary for a monarch to appear magnanimous and majestic. Baldesar Castiglione in his manual for courtiers published in 1528, summarizes contemporary thought when he wrote that the ideal ruler ‘should be a prince of great splendour and generosity… he should hold magnificent banquets, festivals, games and public shows’. Monarchical magnificence was an essential part of good lordship and kingly honour. The tournament thus served the important political goal of demonstrating the wealth and prestige of the monarch to his subjects and, especially, to foreign diplomats. Tournaments were, symbolically, also regarded as important peacetime training for war, and served as chivalrous alternatives, even if by this point they bore little resemblance to real warfare. Before a tournament in May 1540, the challenge framed itself in these terms, stating how ‘in the idleness of peace there is danger that noble men may themselves fall into idleness’, so now, ‘as, in the past, feats of arms have raised men to honour, both in God’s service against his infidel enemies and in serving their princes’. Sir Thomas Elyot, in his 1531
The Book Named the Governor
, spoke of exercises, including wrestling, hunting and combat of arms, which are ‘apt to the furniture of a gentleman’s personage, adapting his body to hardness, strength and agility, and to help therewith himself in peril, which may happen in wars’.
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In the joust, individual knights competed against each other, so there were also opportunities for great personal glory. Henry VIII was a fine athlete and one of the champions of the joust. Sebastian Giustinian, the Venetian ambassador at Henry VIII’s court between 1515 and 1519, was suitably impressed: ‘after dinner, a stately joust took place, at which His Majesty jousted with many others, strenuously and valorously… this most serene King is not only very expert in arms, and of great valour, and most excellent in his personal endowments’. His secretary, Nicolo Sagudino, also noted that ‘King excel[led] all the others, shivering many lances, and unhorsing one of his opponents’. From January 1510, when Henry made his first public appearance in the tiltyard as king, until January 1536, he was a splendid, passionate, skilful and brave participant in the joust. Miles F. Shore has commented that ‘Henry’s narcissism was strongly attached to masculine activities’, and the joust was pre-eminently an arena in which Henry VIII could display his superior physical strength, his ‘prowess’ and ‘the nobility of his courage’ (according to the contemporary
Book of the Order of Chivalry
) – all of which differentiated him from the weaker sex and established his credentials as a consummate man.
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Until 1536 then, Henry disported himself as a young athletic man, attracting the praise and admiration of onlookers. In 1536, this was all to change. On 24 January 1536, the 44-year-old Henry was unhorsed by an opponent and fell so heavily ‘that everyone thought it a miracle he was not killed’. The speed of the gallop at the charge, his heavy armour, the height of Henry’s great horse (and weight, if the large, mailed animal fell on him) and the blow of his opponent’s lance combined to make this a very serious accident. Henry was unconscious for two hours, and one suggestion has been that he bruised his cerebral cortex. Given what later happened to Henri II, it is no wonder that people suddenly became concerned with his mortality. The official line appears to have been to make light of the event. Chapuys, the imperial ambassador, wrote that Henry had sustained no injury, and at the beginning of February, Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief minister, was reassuring people that ‘the King is merry and in perfect health’. Yet, there are several indications that such a fall was thought to have consequences on a grand scale. The papal nuncio in France, Bishop Faenza, wrote to the Vatican on 17 February ‘that since the King had this fall, there is some hope that he may return’, that is, to the Catholic fold. In other words, he made a direct correlation between a momentous accident that would have made the king aware of his mortality, and Henry’s concern for his own spiritual wellbeing (as the writer saw it) and that of his kingdom. The fall was felt to be so significant that it might just bring about such a momentous volte-face in Henry’s religious and foreign policy. By 6 March, Catholic Europe had conceded that such a change has not occurred, ‘the King has not improved in consequence of his fall’, but the very hope of it indicates the importance of the event in the eyes of the watching world.
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Anne Boleyn claimed that king’s fall was of even greater importance. On 29 January 1536, Anne miscarried, blaming the miscarriage on her shock at hearing the news of the king’s fall five days earlier. It was Chapuys who reported this and he was scathing about her reasoning. But at least two other sources confirm this. The chronicler and Windsor herald, Charles Wriothesley, wrote that ‘Queen Anne was brought abed and delivered of a man child… afore her time’, because ‘she took a fright, for the King ran that time at the ring and had a fall from his horse… and it caused her to fall in travail’. In addition, Lancelot de Carles, who was staying in London, composed a French poem on 2 June 1536. It reiterates how the king fell so severely from his horse that it was thought it would prove fatal, and that when the queen heard the news, it ‘strongly offended’ her stomach and advanced ‘the fruit’ of her womb, so that she gave birth prematurely to a stillborn son.
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It is almost certain that this fall had a major impact on Henry’s health that would affect him ever after. During one of his royal progresses in 1527, Henry had suffered from a ‘sore leg’, which seems likely to have been a varicose ulcer on the thigh. It was, at least temporarily, successfully healed by Thomas Vicary, who was appointed the king’s surgeon in 1528, no doubt in recognition of his services. The fall of 1536 probably caused the ulcer to burst open. This time, however, Vicary seems to have been unable to cure it, despite the fact that he was finally made Sergeant-Surgeon in this year, a timing which may have been more than mere coincidence. That this ulcer was to plague Henry chronically throughout the rest of his life is made clear in a letter from John Hussey to Lord Lisle in April 1537 which noted ‘the King goes seldom abroad, because his leg is something sore’, and in June that same year, Henry himself wrote to Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, that the real reason for postponing his trip to York was ‘to be frank with you, which you must keep to yourself, a humour has fallen into our legs, and our physicians advise us not to go far in the heat of the day, even for this reason only’. A year later, one of the fistulas in his leg became blocked, and the French ambassador, Louis de Perreau, Seigneur de Castillon, noted that ‘for ten or twelve days the humours which had no outlet were like to have stifled him, so that he was sometime without speaking black in the face and in great danger’. Later that year, Sir Geoffrey Pole, in his examination under the charge of treason, said, ‘that though the King gloried with the title to be Supreme Head next God, yet he had a sore leg that no poor man would be glad of, and that he should not live long for all his authority next to God’. After a similar attack in 1541, the new French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, made a passing reference that further confirms that the king’s leg had put him in great peril from around 1536, although it seems not to have been much publicized at the time. Marillac wrote in March 1541 that there was a complication with the ulcer for ‘one of his legs, formerly opened and kept open to maintain his health, suddenly closed to his great alarm,
for, five or six years ago
,
in like case, he thought to have died
’. The diagnosis of the exact nature of the ulcer has been debated. Early suggestions that it was a luetic – or syphilitic-ulcer, do not correspond well with the fact that the king showed no other signs of syphilis and that syphilitic ulcers are inclined to self-heal. Sir Arthur Salisbury MacNalty suggests that Henry suffered from osteomyelitis, a chronic septic infection of the thigh bone, and that the episode of 1541 may have been a thrombosis vein with detachment of the clot causing pulmonary embolism, with intermittent fevers thereafter as a result of septic absorption from the wound, as for example, in 1544. It is also possible that such an attack was the cause of Henry’s death, although Sir Arthur indicates that ‘uraemia due to chronic nephritis with a failing heart and dropsy cannot be excluded’.
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The ulcer produced increasingly frequent and severe pain, infections and fevers and discharges that let off an embarrassingly unpleasant smell. The combination of this recurrent and excruciating pain, together with the unprepossessing nature of his running sore, seems to have gradually manifested itself in the personality of the king. Henry became increasingly anxious and irascible, easily irritated and prone to rage. As we’ll see, there were other factors in this shift in his character, but the impact of this draining and debilitating pain should not be underestimated.