Henry VIII (49 page)

The symbolism of empire was again brought into play. A new coinage was issued bearing the image of the King as Roman Emperor, and a third Great Seal in the Renaissance style was made, featuring the King on an antique throne and bearing the title of Supreme Head; this image was probably designed by Lucas Horenbout, whose portraits of the King it greatly resembles.
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An imperial crown was added to the royal arms to signify that Henry recognised no higher power than his own save God.
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There was a deliberate revival of the cult of King Arthur, from whom the Tudors claimed to be descended, and who was said to have owned a seal proclaiming him “Arthur, Emperor of Britain and Gaul.”
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Henry VIII, it was claimed, was merely reviving his ancestor's title and dignity. It was also asserted that England's sovereignty had for a thousand years been mistakenly subinfeudated to Rome by the King's predecessors: now he had redeemed it.
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No English king before Henry VIII had ever been so concerned to magnify and disseminate his public image. Under Cromwell's auspices, there was a flood of tracts and pamphlets proclaiming Henry's heroic virtues and moral superiority. Preachers, artists, craftsmen, writers, poets, playwrights, and historians such as Polydore Vergil were called upon to use their talents to advertise and glorify the New Monarchy. Propagandists such as Gardiner portrayed Henry VIII as semidivine, calling him “the image of God upon Earth” who “excelled in God's sight among all other human creatures.”
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A correspondent of Sir Anthony Browne declared that the King's subjects “had not to do with a man but with a more excellent and divine estate,” in whose presence one could not stand without trembling.
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The effect of all this was to turn Henry into an imperious and dangerous autocrat who became mesmerised by his own legend. In 1536 he wrote, “God has not only made us King by inheritance, but has given us wisdom, policy and other graces in most plentiful sort, necessary for a prince to direct his affairs to his honour and glory.”
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The New Monarchy found its visual expression in art. It was state policy to ensure that images of the King and the symbols of monarchy proliferated. Henry had always been fond of giving portraits of himself to those he favoured, but it now became de rigueur for his subjects to proclaim their loyalty by displaying the image of the sovereign in their houses, thus instituting a tradition that would continue for three hundred years.

The artist who was chiefly responsible for creating the iconography of the New Monarchy was Holbein. In 1534, he painted a miniature of Solomon receiving the Queen of Sheba.
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In it, the figure of Solomon almost certainly represents Henry VIII—this is the first known painting of him by Holbein—and he appears enthroned in a magnificent Renaissance setting, highlighted in gold; above are the words “Blessed be the Lord thy God, which delighteth in thee to set thee on His throne, to be King for the Lord thy God.” The message is unmistakable and powerful. The Queen of Sheba, kneeling in homage, can be symbolic of no other but the Church of England. This miniature may have been commissioned by Cromwell for presentation to the King.

The Reformation had a profound impact on art in England. As portrait painting became enduringly fashionable, religious paintings and images began to appear old-fashioned and contentious, and biblical scenes gradually featured less and less as subjects for tapestries and pictures, often being replaced by classical themes. Artistically, England became isolated from the European mainstream.

At court, art was a useful propaganda tool, although few examples survive. Around 1535, the Flemish artist Joos van Cleve painted a portrait of Henry VIII
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that shows him holding a scroll on which appears a Latin text from St. Mark, chapter 16: “Go ye into the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.” These, perhaps coincidentally, were the words that appeared on the title page of Miles Coverdale's banned English Bible of 1535. It has been suggested that the portrait was painted before the break with Rome, in which case the inscription must proclaim the King's loyalty to the Catholic Church, but it cannot, on the evidence of costume, be dated earlier than 1530, at which time Henry's relations with the Pope were deteriorating rapidly. The painting must therefore belong to the period of the Reformation, for which its text is apposite.

Around 1538–1540, Henry commissioned from Girolamo da Treviso a painting of the Four Evangelists stoning the Pope, which was executed in grisaille highlighted in gold. It hung in the King's privy gallery at Hampton Court, outside his bedchamber, and is the only known surviving picture, other than portraits and the great narrative paintings, from Henry's collection. Treviso had been one of Raphael's students in Rome before working for the Gonzaga at the court of Mantua. Henry retained him not only for his artistic talent, but also for his skills as a military engineer and architect. The King's enhanced prestige had also given impetus to his programme of building, restoring, and acquiring houses, since the royal palaces were now to be the magnificent, glittering setting for the New Monarchy, and craftsmen like Treviso would be much in demand.

The royal supremacy was not without its critics at court. The conservative Gardiner initially led a clerical party opposed to the new order, and stoically endured a period out of favour. Norfolk, another reactionary conservative, had mixed feelings, having little time for priests yet scorning humanist tenets. “I have never read the Scripture, nor never will read it,” he declared. All the same, “it was merry in England afore the New Learning came up; yea, I would all things were as hath been in times past.”
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Nevertheless, he was the King's man through and through, and Henry did not question his loyalty, although Cromwell remained suspicious of him and did all he could to oust him from court. After the Master Secretary, Norfolk was the most experienced and respected member of the Council, but he represented the old feudal order, and there could never be anything but rivalry between him and the upstart he had helped to power. Norfolk's other rival, Suffolk, had still not recovered his former eminent position, declined to become involved in factional politics, and supported the Reformation, even though his formidable mother-in-law was in the opposite camp.

In November 1534, Norfolk was deputed to receive Francis I's special envoy, Philippe Chabot de Brion, Admiral of France, who had come to help restore good relations between England and France, which had deteriorated. The Admiral was lodged at Bridewell Palace, entertained by Norfolk and Suffolk, and invited to dine with the King at court.
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The Queen, who had met de Brion in Calais in 1532, was offended when he failed to follow the practice of previous French ambassadors and send her a courteous message of goodwill, for she had planned to give a banquet in his honour. But the Admiral did not request an audience. The King noticed the omission, and dropped a heavy hint that the envoy should pay his respects to the Queen. Nevertheless, de Brion was chillingly aloof in her presence and did not participate in the dancing and tennis she had arranged for him. Instead, he struck up a friendship with Chapuys, which alarmed Anne greatly.

Worse was to come. The Admiral proposed a marriage between the Lady Mary and the Dauphin, ignoring Elizabeth entirely, then stated that, if Henry would not agree to this, his master would marry his son to the Emperor's daughter—an alliance that would leave England, at this critical time, isolated in Europe.
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Henry and Anne were mortified, and the King angrily repudiated the proposal, suggesting instead that Elizabeth be betrothed to Francis's third son, Charles. The French were unmoved.

Anne was under immense strain at this time. The King of France was no longer her friend, she had failed to give Henry the son he so desired, and she was miserable at his continued involvement with his unnamed mistress. She had enlisted Lady Rochford's help in getting rid of her rival, but the King intervened and icily told Anne that “she had good reason to be content with what he had done for her for, were he to begin again, he would certainly not do as much, and that she ought to consider where she came from.” Lady Rochford was temporarily banished from court. When Anne dared to complain to the King, in front of several courtiers, that the maid of honour he had seduced was rude and disrespectful to her, he stormed out of the room in a temper.
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The King invited a number of beautiful ladies to court for the Admiral's visit, among them his mistress. “He is more given to matters of dancing and ladies than he ever was,” observed Chapuys. At the beginning of December, de Brion was seated with the King and Queen at a court ball held in his honour, watching the dancing, when Henry rose and went to fetch the Admiral's secretary, Palmedes Gontier, saying that he wished to present him to Anne. The Admiral noticed the Queen's anxious eyes following Henry as he moved through the crowds in the presence chamber; then suddenly she burst out laughing hysterically. When the astonished envoy coldly inquired whether she was mocking him, she looked at him with tears in her eyes and replied, “I could not help laughing at the King's proposition of introducing your secretary to me, for whilst he was looking out for him, he met a lady, who has made him forget the matter!” Sir Nicholas Carew told Chapuys at this time that the King was growing tired of Anne's complaints.
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Anne had cause for further sorrow that December when her dog Little Purkoy suffered a fall and died of his injuries. None of her attendants dared tell her, so the King took it upon himself to break the news.
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Then to sadness was added anger and humiliation when the Queen's sister Mary appeared at court noticeably pregnant and revealed that she had married—for love—a landless nobody called William Stafford, a distant cousin of the late Duke of Buckingham, and a soldier serving at Calais. So furious were the Boleyns at this mésalliance that they persuaded the King to forbid the disgraced couple the court. When Wiltshire cut off her allowance, Mary wrote in despair to Cromwell, begging him to intercede with the Queen and other members of her family on her behalf, but to no avail: she would never again be received at court.
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She and her husband retired into obscurity in the country. Later, Wiltshire relented and allowed them the use of Rochford Hall in Essex, and it remained their chief residence until Mary Boleyn died on 19 July 1543.
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At Christmas 1534, the King and Queen kept “a great house.”
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The King displayed “his most hearty manner,”
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but the tension at court was palpable.

46

“That Thin Old Woman”

The court had now taken on a new character: the emphasis was no longer on chivalry and revelry but on religion and factional interests. Funding the New Monarchy posed problems, but the Church of which Henry was now Supreme Head possessed untapped wealth. Early in 1535, the King made Cromwell his Vice-Regent in spiritual matters and ordered him to make a survey of all the religious houses in England in order to discover any abuses within them, and—more importantly—to establish the possessions of each. The results of the survey, which took many months to complete, were written down in a great book known as the Valor Ecclesiasticus;
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on its title page is a miniature, executed by Lucas Horenbout, of Henry VIII enthroned.

Suppressing monasteries was no new thing. Henry V had done it, in the early fifteenth century, as had Wolsey, and before the break with Rome Pope Clement had intended to sanction the closure of some English abbeys. The monastic orders were in decline: no new house had been founded since Syon Abbey in 1415, apart from the six friaries of the Observant Franciscans in the period 1482 to 1507.

Henry VIII's commissioners exposed much laxity and several cases of fraud, such as the much-celebrated Holy Blood of Hailes, which turned out to be the blood of a duck, renewed regularly by the monks. Several communities opposed the royal supremacy. Queen Anne went in person to Syon Abbey and lectured the “prostrate and grovelling” sisters on “the enormity of their wanton incontinence,” and ticked them off for reciting by rote Latin prayers that they did not understand. Before she left, she gave each one a prayerbook in English.
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But Anne did not agree with Cromwell that the religious houses should all be closed down. She did her best to spare those that received a good report, and suggested that reform was a better alternative than closure.

Cromwell, however, wanted to make Henry “the richest King that ever was in England.”
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With the wealth and vast lands of the monasteries in his possession, he could not only fill his depleted treasury but also reward those who had shown their loyalty to the new order, thus transforming it into a popular movement.

Once the decision was made to suppress the monasteries, Henry took steps to preserve their literary treasures. He commissioned his librarian, John Leland, to “peruse and diligently to search all the libraries” belonging to the religious houses and colleges, make a survey of their books and manuscripts, and find texts that would emphasise the royal supremacy and the New Monarchy. Leland set out to perform his mammoth task in 1535; he would not complete it until 1543. As he travelled around England, he “conserved many good authors, the which otherwise had been like to have perished,” and removed many works, which ended up in the royal libraries.
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He also made copious notes on the places he visited, their customs and legends, and the people who lived there. These notes were later collated and published in 1710–1712 as Leland's
Itinerary
.

By February 1534, the King had tired of his unnamed mistress and begun courting one of the Queen's cousins, either Madge Shelton or her sister Mary.
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Madge was soft-spoken and pretty, with dimpled cheeks and a fair complexion. Unlike her predecessor, the Queen's cousin, whichever she was, had no intention of espousing the cause of Katherine and Mary, but Anne resented Sir Francis Weston and other Gentlemen of the King's Privy Chamber paying court to her.
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Moreover, the girl was a frivolous creature. When the Queen discovered that she had written “idle poesies” in her prayer book, she “wonderfully rebuked her” for defacing it with “such wanton toys.”
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Anne's determination to play the virtuous queen found further expression at Easter 1535, when she distributed larger purses of Maundy money than any queen had hitherto given.
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The King also permitted his former wife Katherine to perform the traditional Maundy Thursday rites; she had “kept a Maundy” the previous year, and he had not objected because his grandmother Margaret Beaufort had set a precedent for royal ladies other than queens presiding, and Katherine was now officially Princess Dowager of Wales.
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On 5 May, the Boleyn contingent was out in force at Tyburn to witness the first executions of those who had refused to swear the oath to the Act of Succession. Among them were John Houghton, Prior of the London Charterhouse, and Richard Reynolds, a monk of Syon Abbey, who were both renowned throughout Europe for their learning and integrity. Wiltshire, Rochford, Norfolk, and Richmond stood “quite near the sufferers,” looking on as the dreadful sentence of hanging, drawing, and quartering was carried out. Rumour had it that Henry himself would have liked to be present, “which was very probable, seeing that nearly all the court were there.” Some courtiers, however, had come masked or disguised as Scotsmen.
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Afterwards, shock waves reverberated around Christendom at the enormity of what the King had done.

When one of the Queen's ladies contracted measles that spring, Henry mistook it for plague and hurried away with Anne to Hampton Court. But plague did break out in London soon afterwards, and a proclamation was issued forbiding the citizens to approach the court.
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The King spent the late spring and summer months hunting well away from the capital before departing on progress.

During May, the celebrated French humanist and poet Nicholas Bourbon sought asylum at the English court after falling foul of the French authorities for his evangelical reformist beliefs. When his plight had been drawn to the attention of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn by the French ambassador, Jean de Dinteville, and Dr. William Butts, with whom Bourbon corresponded regularly, they secured his release from prison, and were now happy to extend to him their patronage. Bourbon, a friend of Erasmus, was lodged at first in Dr. Butts's house at the Queen's expense; Butts, he said, was like a father to him. Later he lived with the King's goldsmith, Cornelius Heyss. Anne also secured for Bourbon a post as tutor to her nephew and ward, Henry Carey, Sir Henry Norris's son, and Edmund, son of Sir Nicholas Harvey, another reformist courtier in the Queen's circle.
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During his stay in England, Bourbon—who wrote under the name Borbonius—sat for Holbein, whom he called “the incomparable painter,” and also befriended Cromwell, whom he described as being “aflame with the love of Christ,” Nicolaus Kratzer, and Archbishop Cranmer, who was “a head to his people.”
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In 1535, Miles Coverdale's English translation of the Bible was published in Zürich. It was dedicated to Henry VIII and his “dearest wife and most virtuous princess, Queen Anne,” but was never officially sanctioned in England. Its frontispiece, which is attributed to Holbein, shows an image of Henry VIII as an Old Testament king, perhaps King David, enthroned above the lords spiritual and temporal, holding a sword and a Bible, which he is handing down to three kneeling bishops. This image was revolutionary for its time, in that it had hitherto been bishops who had conferred spiritual authority on kings. Anne Boleyn owned the copy that is now in the British Library; her initials are embossed on the binding.

In June 1535, a satirical play parodying the Apocalypse was performed before the King at court. After the Reformation, drama became increasingly politicised, and was under the control of one of Cromwell's masters of propaganda, Richard Moryson. Cromwell advised the King that plays were an ideal means of setting forth “lively before the people's eyes the abomination and wickedness of the Bishop of Rome, monks, friars, nuns and suchlike, and to declare and open to them the obedience that your subjects, by God's and man's laws, owe to Your Majesty.”
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In the late 1530s, a number of such plays were performed at court, including perhaps John Bale's
King John
, which was not only the first historical play in English but was also a clever piece of propaganda that refuted the Pope's claim to hold jurisdiction over the English Church. “Bilious Bishop Bale,” as he was called—he was Bishop of Ossory—was a closet Protestant and playwright who, under Cromwell's patronage, had his own touring company of players which he used to promote the Reformation and the New Monarchy. Another of his plays was
The Whore of Babylon
(c. 1546). However, given the sensitive climate of the times, there was a limit to what was acceptable at court: antipapal thrusts could all too often be misconstrued as attacks on the Catholic faith itself.

Drama was ever popular at court. In the year 1537–1538, for example, seven companies of players were working for the King, the Queen, the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Chancellor Audley, Suffolk, Exeter, and the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, whose names they bore. These companies were amateur dramatic groups formed by members of the royal household and the households of the nobility. Among the productions they mounted were old favourites such as
Fulgens and Lucrece
and
The Pardoner and the Friar
. The latter was adapted by John Heywood from Geoffrey Chaucer's
The Canterbury Tales
; Christopher Marlowe later based
The Jew of Malta
on this work.

Henry was now moving nearer to an alliance with the Emperor, despite the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that stood in its way. Yet Renaissance princes often took a pragmatic approach to such things, and Charles V can only have been relieved that Henry's friendship with Francis I had begun to cool. The King had been angered by the refusal of the French to consider the Princess Elizabeth as a bride for Francis's son, and at the same time concerned that, because she was a bastard in the eyes of Catholic Europe, she would be of little value to him in the marriage market. In June, the new French ambassador, Antoine de Castlenau, Bishop of Tarbes, took offence at the King's refusal to allow him to use Bridewell Palace as an embassy, as his predecessors had done, and was further put out when Cromwell pointedly avoided him. To make matters worse, Henry had begun to make a great fuss of Chapuys, inviting him to join him in the chase and generally courting his goodwill.
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Yet Henry's persecution of eminent Roman Catholics continued to threaten the fragile beginnings of an entente with the Emperor. In June, Bishop Fisher was tried and condemned to death for treason. “A very image of death”
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after long months of rigorous confinement, he emerged on 22 June to kneel at the executioner's block on Tower Hill, wearing his finest clothes, for this, he declared, was his wedding day. On the scaffold, he insisted that he was dying to preserve the honour of God, and was then decapitated with a sword. Some time earlier, word had come from Rome that the Pope had made him a cardinal and that his red hat was on its way. The King had commented grimly that he would have to wear it on his shoulders. There was widespread outrage at the butchering of such a saintly man.

The trial of Sir Thomas More followed on 1 July, and he was condemned to death on the perjured evidence of Richard Rich, one of Cromwell's henchmen. On 6 July, while the King hunted at Reading,
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More was beheaded on Tower Hill, claiming he died “the King's good servant, but God's first.”
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His execution provoked even greater shock than Fisher's had, but few were brave enough to follow his example. The King soon regretted More's death, and accused Anne Boleyn of having been the cause of it. Anne sought to distract him by arranging feasts and revels.
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Lady Rochford was now back at court, but was no longer the Queen's friend and ally. Since her banishment the previous year, something had occurred to alienate her from her sister-in-law. Perhaps she blamed Anne for her disgrace, or had become jealous of the close bond between the Queen and Lord Rochford. The evidence suggests that the Rochfords' marriage was not happy, and Jane may have resented Anne's influence over her husband. What happened next suggests that there was now a serious rift between the two women, for in July, Lady Rochford was one of several ladies involved in a demonstration at Greenwich in support of the Lady Mary, and ended up in the Tower with the other ringleaders, among them Katherine Boughton, wife of Lord William Howard, and the wives of some leading citizens of London.
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Will Somers, the King's fool, was also in disgrace, for that same month Sir Nicholas Carew had dared him to declare that the Queen was “a ribald” and the Princess Elizabeth “a bastard.” Great licence was normally allowed the royal jesters, but on this occasion, according to Chapuys, the King threatened to kill Somers with his own hand, and the fool had to go into hiding in Carew's house at Beddington until his master's wrath had cooled.
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Henry's mood improved as the summer progressed. In July, he was happily “feasting ladies,” and perhaps going further than that, since Chapuys commented that his “amorous” reputation was now notorious.
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At forty-four, he was beginning to put on weight, and he sported cropped hair and a permanent short square beard, which he expected others to copy. John Stow claims that on 8 May 1535 the King had “commanded all about his court to poll their heads, and to give them example he caused his own hair to be polled, and from henceforth his beard to be knotted and no more shaven.” His later portraits bear this out.

Henry's mania for property had not abated. In 1535, he acquired five new houses. He bought moated Chobham Park in Surrey from Chertsey Abbey, and immediately began extending it and creating royal lodgings.
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He gained possession of manor houses at Hackney, near London, and at Leconfield, Humberside, the latter by exchange with the Earl of Northumberland,
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who also sold the King Petworth House in Sussex.
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Lastly, Henry got a house at Mortlake in Surrey by exchange with Archbishop Cranmer.