Henry VIII (56 page)

The Queen's household, which, since her death, had been subject to the rule of the Lady Mary, was disbanded soon afterwards,
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and her official jewels returned to the Jewel House; her personal jewellery was given to her family or distributed among her ladies. Mary herself returned to Hunsdon later in November, and for the next two years would be an infrequent visitor to court, since there was no queen to act as her chaperone.

Court mourning was decreed for a period of three months, until the day after Candlemas Day, 3 February 1538, when the King and everybody else appeared again in normal clothes.
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After the funeral, Henry emerged from seclusion and was reported to be “in good health and merry as a widower may be.”
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Already, he was considering taking another wife.

51

“The Very Pearl of the Realm”

In November 1537, Cromwell began searching for a foreign bride for the King, having persuaded a grieving Henry to “frame his mind” to a fourth marriage. Given that the hazards of infancy could carry off the Prince at any time, it was prudent to safeguard the succession by remarrying and providing other sons.

Since his birth, Edward had remained at court in the care of his dry nurse, Sybil Penn, and a wet-nurse, Mother Jack. In March 1538, the King established a household for his son at Hampton Court, which cost £6,500 (nearly £2 million) to administer in the first year. Suffolk's cousin, Sir William Sidney, brother-in-law of Sybil Penn and a member of the Privy Chamber, was appointed Chamberlain to the Prince. The redoubtable Lady Margaret Bryan transferred from the Lady Elizabeth's household to act as Lady Mistress; she was replaced by Katherine Champernowne,
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who took charge of Elizabeth's elementary education. Lady Bryan was now responsible for the “nurture and education”
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of the Prince. She was assisted by Sybil Penn, who remained on the staff after the wet-nurse's services were dispensed with in October 1538. Dr. Butts was Edward's physician. In 1539, Dr. Richard Coxe, a renowned Cambridge scholar, was appointed his Almoner.

The apartments created for Prince Edward at Hampton Court were in the north range of Chapel Court and were linked by a gallery to the now-deserted Queen's apartments; they had a similar layout to those of the King. In the presence chamber was the magnificent cradle of estate in which the heir to England was shown off to privileged visitors, who approached via a processional stair and a heavily guarded watching chamber. The privy chamber served as a day nursery. In the bedchamber, or “rocking chamber,” was the cradle in which the Prince actually slept, protected from the sun by a canopy,
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while next door was a bathroom, and a garderobe which may still be seen. The Prince had his own privy kitchen, where his food was prepared.
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Henry's increasing paranoia is evident in the strict ordinances he imposed on the Prince's household, which were designed to eliminate all risks to his son's health and safety. It was not only the myriad illnesses to which Tudor babies were prone to succumb that Henry feared, but also poison or the assassin's dagger. Even dukes had to obtain a written authority from the King before approaching the Prince's cradle. No member of his household was to speak with persons suspected of having been in contact with the plague, nor were they permitted to visit London without permission during the summer months, for fear they might themselves act as carriers. Any servant who did fall ill was to leave the household at once. The Prince's Chamberlain was to supervise the robing of his charge, his daily bath, the preparation of his food, and the washing of his clothes. All Edward's food was tasted for poison. The walls and floors of the rooms, galleries, passages, and courtyards in and around the Prince's apartments had to be swept and scrubbed with soap thrice daily. Members of his household were to observe stringent standards of personal hygiene, everything that might be handled by the baby had to be washed before he came into contact with it, and no food or dirty utensils were to be left lying around. There were no pages in Edward's household because the King held that boys were careless and clumsy; dogs and beggars were also rigorously excluded.
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Henry would have preferred to have his precious son under his eye at court, but the crowded court was an often unsanitary place where infection might breed, and it was felt that the purer country air would be a far healthier environment. The Prince's establishment was therefore moved from Hampton Court to Havering in November 1538, and thence to Hundson the following year. While he was there, the Privy Council were invited to inspect his progress; Lord Audley declared he had never seen so goodly a child for his age, “for he shooteth out in length and waxeth firm and stiff, and can steadfastly stand.”
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Later, Edward settled for a time at Ashridge, near Berkhamsted. The King also created lodgings for him next to his own at Greenwich, and at Enfield, Tittenhanger, and Hatfield.
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No accommodation was prepared for him at Whitehall, probably because St. James's Palace had been designated his London residence; parts of it were still referred to as “the Prince's lodging” in Elizabethan times.
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The King doted on his son, and visited him whenever he could. In May 1538, Edward was brought to him at the hunting lodge at Royston. Henry played with him and cuddled him “in his arms a long space,” then held him up at a window so that the crowds outside could see him.
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A delightful cameo of the King and the infant Prince survives as testimony to Henry's joy in his son.
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Lady Bryan sent regular reports on Edward's progress to Cromwell. Chapuys thought the Prince “one of the prettiest children that could be seen anywhere.”
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He was strong, healthy, adventurous, and given to normal temper tantrums. There was nothing to suggest that this precious child would not live beyond his sixteenth year.

Although the court was in mourning over the Christmas of 1537, which was spent quietly at Greenwich,
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an account survives of the gift-giving ceremony on New Year's Day. When John Husee presented himself in the presence chamber to deliver Lord Lisle's offerings, he found the King leaning against a cupboard as the courtiers came forward in turn to give their presents to him. Beside Henry stood Cromwell and Hertford, and behind were two Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, Sir William Kingston and Sir John Russell. At the other end of the cupboard stood Bryan Tuke, Henry's Secretary, recording the gifts on a scroll.

When he saw Husee, Cromwell beamed. “Here cometh my Lord Lisle's man,” he said. Husee did not catch Henry's reply, but the King looked pleased, smiled warmly as the gift was presented, and seemed to take longer than usual to express his thanks, inquiring about the health and activities of Lord and Lady Lisle. All the King's gifts were displayed on trestle tables; they included a clock fashioned like a book (from Suffolk), pictures, velvet purses full of coins, carpets, coffers, dog collars, embroidered shirts, hawks' hoods, a gold trencher, six cheeses from Suffolk, and even a marmoset.
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Henry had sometimes made use of the stately episcopal palace at Hatfield, Hertfordshire, and in 1538 it finally came into his possession. Built of red brick around a large courtyard by John Morton, Bishop of Ely (and future Archbishop of Canterbury) in the 1480s, it was essentially a mediaeval house with towers, buttresses, gables, and twisted chimneys. In 1538, the King visited Hatfield to escape the plague in London, nervously complaining to Sir Nicholas Carew, his Master of Horse, that his head hurt. However, the country air had a beneficial effect, and he was soon in a merry mood.
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Henry kept Hatfield in good repair, using it chiefly as a nursery palace for his children, and it will be forever associated with his daughter Elizabeth, who in 1558 received the news of her accession in the park.
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The King acquired two other houses at this time: Henham Hall, a newly built courtyard house in Suffolk, which came to him through an exchange with the Duke of Suffolk;
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and a former Austin friary at Newcastle that came to be known as the King's Manor, which Henry never visited but retained for the use of the Council of the North.
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Henry was about to embark on the most innovative and adventurous building project of his reign: a purpose-built palace incorporating the very latest trends in architectural design, which would rival Francis I's great palace of Chambord on the Loire. Plans were drawn up for such a house to be built at Waltham-in-the-Forest,
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but were soon abandoned. Instead, the King acquired the village and church of Cuddington, near Ewell, Surrey, and razed them to the ground. In their place arose the most amazing palace ever to be constructed in England. Because no one had yet seen anything like it, it was called Nonsuch.

Nonsuch was essentially a small hunting lodge and private pleasure house, built around two courts. It was designed by James Nedcham, Surveyor of the King's Works. Some of the building materials came from the suppressed Merton Priory. The outer court was constructed in the conventional Tudor style, with turrets and battlements, but the inner court was flanked by two large, octagonal, pinnacled towers; they, and the outer walls of the court, were decorated with gilded plasterwork panels carved with elaborate Renaissance reliefs. Figures of Roman emperors adorned the gateway that led from the outer court to the inner, while a massive statue of the King enthroned dominated the inner court, where the royal apartments were situated. The lower walls of this courtyard were of stone, but the upper sections were of plaster and covered with “a variety of pictures and other antique forms of excellent workmanship” in mezzo-relievo stucco bordered by guilloche carving in slate, mounted on timber battens.
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They illustrated heroic tales from history and mythology, and were chosen to reflect the noble virtues of the King. The artists responsible were Nicholas Bellin of Modena, William Cure of Amsterdam, and Giles Goring.

We know relatively little about the interior of the palace. Much of it was decorated by Nicholas Bellin, who had worked with Francesco Primaticcio at Fontainebleau before entering Henry's service in 1537, at a salary of £20 (£6,000) plus 20s (£300) for clothing. There was no great hall, just a dining hall large enough to seat the King's riding household, and the usual ranges of first-floor inward and outward chambers, each with twelve rooms. The royal lodgings were accessed by “generous winding steps, magnificently built.”
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French Renaissance influence seems to have predominated; Bellin built huge stucco chimneypieces, like those that dominated the chambers of Francis I. In the privy chamber, there was a fountain in the form of a silver serpent caught in the paws of a lion.

Other artists known to have worked at Nonsuch were the Florentine Bartholemew Penni, a portrait painter who had also produced narrative paintings for the King, and Antonio Toto, who had executed frescoes at Hampton Court. Toto is believed to have painted the wooden and canvas wall panels now at Loseley House near Guildford, which may have come from Nonsuch. They bear grotesque motifs, trompe l'oeil designs, mythological figures, classical urns, putti, the King's portcullis badge and motto, the Prince of Wales's feathers, and the cipher and badge—a maiden issuing from a Tudor rose—of Katherine Parr, which dates them to 1543 at the earliest. Also at Loseley is a marble table carved with a Tudor rose and a Scottish thistle, thought to have been made for Henry VIII at the time he was hoping to marry Prince Edward to the young Mary, Queen of Scots, and to have come from Nonsuch. Portraits of Henry, Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, and Mary I, said to have been found in the cellars of the old palace, now hang in Nonsuch Mansion, a Georgian house in Nonsuch Park, which also boasts another relic of the palace, a stone plaque dated 1543, which adorns its porch wall. A fragment of glass bearing the arms of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, probably from Nonsuch, is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The palace stood in a two-thousand-acre park stocked with a thousand deer. To the southwest was a two-storey timber banqueting house, which had a viewing platform on the roof from which the King could watch hunts in the park. A little way off there was another, smaller banqueting house. The gardens of Nonsuch, laid out by French experts, became famous for their groves, fountains, rockeries, stone carvings, marble pillars, aviaries, trellised walks, orchards, and vines, and there was a maze in the privy garden.
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Work on Nonsuch began in April 1538, with 520 labourers and craftsmen working round the clock and camping out in tents, but their task was complicated and demanding. The inner court was virtually complete by 1541, but the outer court was still unfinished at the time of Henry's death. By then, he had outlaid £24,536 (about £7.5 million) on the project.
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Not for nothing was Nonsuch called “the very pearl of the realm.” One Jacobean observer wrote: “Here, Henry VIII, in his magnificence, erected a structure so beautiful, so elegant and so splendid that, in whatever direction the admirer of florid architecture turns his eyes, he will say that it easily bears off the prize. So great is the emulation of ancient Roman art, such are its paintings, its gilding and its decoration, that you would say that it is the sky spangled with stars.”
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52

“A Sort of Knaves”

In April 1538, the ever-simmering tensions at court erupted into violence. One of Lord Hertford's retainers killed a man in a duel within the verge of the court, then fled to sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. In another incident, a courtier was found murdered, while soon afterwards a brawl between the servants of the Earl of Southampton ended with one being brutally slain. Then Sir Gavin Carew and one of his men picked a fight with a Serjeant of the Household and his Yeoman, which left the Yeoman dead and the Serjeant badly wounded. Cromwell's own henchmen then weighed in against Carew, who was arrested, and the quarrel spread among the servants of the various lords of the Council, leading to a riot involving forty gentlemen and their retainers.
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There is no record of what happened next, and no one is known to have been punished.

This may have been due to a more urgent crisis intervening. In May 1538, the King fell desperately ill. The abscess or ulcer on his leg closed up and “the humours which had no outlet were like to have stifled him.” It appears that a blood clot from his diseased leg broke loose and caused a blockage in a lung, rendering him black in the face and speechless with pain. For twelve days, he was “in great danger” and his courtiers, expecting him to die, began to debate whether their allegiance would lie with the infant Edward or the adult Mary. Then the King suddenly rallied, and by the end of the month was well again.
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From now on, however, his physicians would endeavour to prevent the suppurating wound in his leg from closing.

It was now more imperative than ever that the King remarry, and soon. Various brides were under consideration: it was thought that some of the highborn ladies of France might prove suitable, but Henry, who was proving particularly choosy, was taking no chances, and demanded that seven or eight of them be brought to Calais for his inspection. On the instructions of an outraged King Francis, the French ambassador, Gaspard de Coligny, Sieur de Castillon, replied, “It is not the custom in France to send damsels of noble and princely families to be passed in review as if they were hackneys for sale.” Why could not His Majesty send envoys to report on their appearance and demeanour?

“By God!” retorted Henry, “I trust no one but myself. The thing touches me too near. I wish to see them and know them some time before deciding.”

Castillon impudently responded, “Then maybe Your Grace would like to mount them one after the other, and keep the one you find to be the best broken in. Is that the way the Knights of the Round Table treated women in your country in times past?” The King had the grace to look ashamed: “he laughed and blushed at the same time,” then quickly changed the subject.
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Henry liked Castillon's racy humour. In recommending Louise de Guise, the ambassador said, “Take her, she is still a maid, and you will be able to shape the passage to your measure.” The King laughed heartily, clapping Castillon on the shoulder.
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Another candidate for the consort's throne was Charles V's niece, the beautiful Christina of Denmark, who had married Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, but been left a widow at only sixteen. She was said to have resembled Madge Shelton in looks, and Holbein was dispatched to Brussels to paint her portrait.
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The King was entranced, and began to act the ardent swain, ordering his musicians to play love songs deep into the night and having masques staged constantly at court, but his potential bride was somewhat less enthusiastic, despite being informed by Thomas Wriothesley that his master was “a most gentle gentleman, his nature so benign and pleasant that I think till this day no man hath heard many angry words pass his mouth.” If she had two heads, Christina declared, one of them would be at His Majesty's disposal.
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In July, Henry departed on his usual hunting progress, making a detour to the south coast “to visit his ports and havens.”
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Upon his return in the autumn, he staged an unprecedented public debate in the great hall of Whitehall Palace with a radical Lutheran, John Lambert, who had been arrested for heresy. Eager spectators crowded along the tiers of scaffolding that had been specially erected along the walls so that all might hear their sovereign defend the doctrines of his Church. The King, dressed entirely in white silk, was seated under his canopy of estate, flanked on one side by purple-clad bishops and on the other by lords, judges, and the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, as Lambert was brought before him, under guard. He spoke genially enough to the prisoner, saying, “Ho, good fellow, what is thy name?”

Lambert told him it was John Nicholson, but that he was known as Lambert. The King, his “brows bent unto severity,” replied, “I would not trust you, having two names, although you were my brother.” When Lambert tried to flatter him, he interrupted, “I did not come hither to hear mine own praises!” and asked Lambert if he believed in the doctrine of transubstantiation. Lambert, after some prevarication, stated, “I deny it.” Henry warned him he would be condemned to the stake if he persisted in this opinion, but remained arguing with him for five hours in an attempt to save him. In the end, seeing it was futile, he asked, “Wilt thou live or die? Thou hast yet free choice.” Lambert would not recant, so the King, rising, told him, “That being the case, you must die, for I will not be a patron unto heretics.” Six days later Lambert was burned over a slow fire at Smithfield.
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Ever since Reginald Pole's attack on the King in 1536, the members of his family had been watched. Cromwell, who viewed these reactionary scions of the House of Plantagenet as an ever-present threat to the new order and his own position, had now accumulated a formidable amount of evidence against them, sufficient to convince an already suspicious King that his life and throne were under threat. Some of the most damaging information came from Lord Montague's brother, Geoffrey Pole, who turned King's evidence to save his own skin. There is little doubt that there was a conspiracy of sorts, and that its members were exceptionally incompetent and indiscreet, but it seems unlikely that they were as malicious and as organised as they were made out to be.

In November 1538, Cromwell struck, bringing down the entire White Rose faction, all of whom were closely related to the King. Exeter was sent to the Tower on a charge of compassing Henry's death and plotting to usurp the throne; Lady Exeter was arrested with her husband for carrying on a treasonable correspondence with Chapuys; Cardinal Pole's brother, Lord Montague; their mother, Lady Salisbury; and Sir Edward Neville, the King's former jousting companion and an enemy of Cromwell, were also imprisoned for conspiring with Exeter. Most had been in regular contact with Cardinal Pole. Even the innocent young sons of Exeter and Montague were confined in the Tower.
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The King was fond of Neville, and had warned him against associating with Montague, but he was angered when he learned that Neville had been overheard making disparaging remarks about the Privy Chamber. “God's blood!” Neville had said, “I am made a fool amongst them, but I laugh and make merry to drive forth the time. The King keepeth a sort of knaves here, that we dare neither look nor speak, and if I were able, I would rather live any life in the world than tarry in the Privy Chamber.” This, apparently, was enough to convince Henry of Neville's disloyalty.

On 9 December, Exeter, Montague, and Sir Edward Neville were beheaded. Lady Exeter would later be pardoned, but her son, Edward Courtenay, and young Henry Pole remained in the Tower, along with Lady Salisbury, who with the rest of her unfortunate family was attainted for treason by Parliament in 1539.
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The Christmas of 1538 was observed quietly at Greenwich. Soon afterwards came the news that Pope Paul III, shocked at the King's treatment of his kinsmen, had ordered the Bull of Excommunication drawn up by his predecessor in 1533 to be put into effect. This effectively isolated Henry from his Roman Catholic neighbours in Europe, who were now called upon by the Pope to dethrone him. Ominously, on 12 January 1539, those former enemies, Charles V and Francis I, signed the Treaty of Toledo, agreeing to make no further alliances with England. Henry immediately took measures to resist an invasion, strengthening defences and ordering musters up and down the land.

Cromwell now moved against other leading conservatives. His attempt to discredit Sir Anthony Browne failed because the King refused to hear any ill of his former minion. But Cromwell succeeded in ousting Sir Francis Bryan from his post as Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, to Bryan's great distress, and having him replaced by his own candidate, Anthony Denny. The son of a London lawyer who was related to the late William Carey,
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Denny was a highly educated, serious-minded humanist with a “sincere affection to God and His holy word.”
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He lived in Aldgate, where Holbein, to whom he would be a generous patron, was his neighbour; Holbein painted Denny in 1541.
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Denny was ambitious and self-seeking: although he had begun his court career in Bryan's service, he did not flinch at supplanting him. In time, he would make himself indispensable to his sovereign.

The biggest fish Cromwell netted was Sir Nicholas Carew, who had already fallen out of favour with the King after a game of bowls, when Henry had made insulting remarks, only half in jest, to him, and Carew had rashly responded in anger.
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When Cromwell produced apparently treasonable letters written by Carew at Beddington, the King was easily persuaded that he had been involved in the Exeter conspiracy.

Sir Nicholas was arrested on 14 February and executed on 3 March. Chapuys was of the opinion that it was his devotion to the Lady Mary, rather than any treasonable intent, that had brought about his fall,
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but it appears that the King coveted his estates in Surrey, where he was in the process of creating a vast hunting domain. Beddington Park also came to Henry on Carew's death.
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In March, Sir Anthony Browne was appointed Master of the Horse in place of Carew. Sir William Paulet, a privy councillor whose influence was rapidly increasing, was created Lord St. John of Basing, while Sir John Russell, now an important member of the Privy Council and the Privy Chamber, was created Lord Russell of Chenies. * *
Regardless of the Pope's censure, Henry VIII pressed on with his Reformation. In the spring of 1539, after a heated debate between Cranmer and Cromwell, on one side, and Norfolk and Gardiner on the other, Parliament passed the Act of Six Articles, enshrining the doctrines of the Church of England in law. The King had realised that his subjects were “more inclined to the old religion than the new opinions,” and the Act reflected this conservatism, boosting Henry's popularity, but although it was meant to put an end to debate, it found no favour with the radicals, who referred to it as “the whip with six strings.” Two bishops even resigned.

Although the new Act prescribed the death penalty for anyone denying the sacraments, it did authorise an English Bible to be chained in every parish church. For the first time in history, ordinary people would be able to read and interpret the Scriptures for themselves, without fear of persecution—a new freedom that was to have the most profound effects on every aspect of daily life. The first authorised version was the Great Bible of 1539–1540, based on the translations by Coverdale and Tyndale. Its title page, by an unknown artist, shows Henry VIII enthroned, handing down the Word of God to his subjects, among whom Cranmer and Cromwell are prominent.
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This powerful image of the King as the fount of all secular and spiritual virtue and authority was the first example of mass-produced propaganda in England.

Cromwell might have steered the kingdom through the Reformation and the turbulent politics of the 1530s, but by the summer of 1539 his work was almost completed and he was losing his ascendancy. He had made many enemies along the way and incurred the jealousy and resentment of many at court who coveted his power and sneered at his lowly birth, yet feared what he knew about them. Norfolk and Gardiner had already tried to bring him down in Parliament; the people of England hated him; and the King, dismayed at his support for religious radicals, was losing confidence in him. Cromwell's only true ally, aside from the fawning clients who looked to profit from his patronage, was Cranmer.

It was Cromwell who pressed the King to marry Anne of Cleves. He believed that, to counterbalance England's political isolation from the great European powers, an alliance with one of the Lutheran German states would be wise. William, Duke of Cleves had two unmarried sisters, Anne and Amelia. Anne, Cromwell had heard, excelled Christina of Denmark in beauty “as the golden sun did the silvery moon.”
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Envoys were duly dispatched to Düsseldorf, along with Hans Holbein, who had been commissioned to paint the two princesses. His portrait of Amelia is lost, or unidentified, but that of Anne is now in the Louvre. Holbein also painted a miniature of her, the only one of its period to survive in its original ivory box, which was in the shape of a Tudor rose.
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According to the English envoy, Nicholas Wotton, Holbein “expressed their images very lively.”
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The King liked what he saw, and he instructed Cromwell to proceed with the marriage negotiations.