Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (20 page)

H
ENRY
VIII had been a widower for just over a year. It was not a state he enjoyed. Like most men of his times, he believed that having a wife was part of the natural order of things. He was not looking for a partner in the modern sense (the idea would have
seemed ridiculous to him) but he was undoubtedly an uxorious man. Undeterred by the tally of five previous attempts at wedded bliss, all of which, he firmly believed, had foundered through God’s will or man’s infamy, he was ready to try again. Lessons had been learned from the disastrous embarrassment of Katherine Howard and he was no longer prey to the attractions of a teenage strumpet dangled in front of him by deeply self-interested factions. He wanted a more mature woman with whom he could hold a conversation, who knew something of the world and possessed the right mixture of intelligence and grace to play effectively the part of queen consort, which, after all, was performed on the international stage. Someone, in other words, in whom he could have trust. It probably also occurred to him that, now he had mended fences with his elder daughter, Mary, after years of tension, it would be a very good thing if he chose a bride who could be a proper companion to her. That would add another note of femininity but also gravity to the court. In fact, his mind was beginning to turn to all of his three children and how he might organize the question of the succession beyond Edward, his immediate heir. Not that he had given up the idea of producing further brothers for the prince. A lady who could produce a duke of York would be exceedingly welcome. Henry knew better than anyone that elder brothers might not always outlive their younger siblings. Above all, one gets the sense that Henry was lonely, that in his heart of hearts he could not quite abandon the notion that he could enjoy a happy, married life with a lady who shared his interests and would never threaten him in any way.

But whatever the mix of his emotions at the time, he was looking, first and foremost, for a wife who would please him. She must meet his standards of attractiveness, or the relationship would founder. And she must have an unimpeachable reputation, to save him from the horrors of Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard. He was not especially seeking a stepmother for his children – Henry was hardly a family man – but considerations
about their future were beginning to take shape in his mind. Nor, however ill and uncomfortable he might be from time to time, was he looking for a nurse. He wanted a wife for his bed and a worthy queen for his kingdom. In June 1543 he would be fifty-two years old. He was undisputed master of the kingdom he had ruled for thirty-four years but he still yearned for one more chance at connubial bliss. Perhaps he sensed that a good marriage would revive more than just his flagging spirits and ailing body. It might improve England’s standing as a European power. He was not, though, looking to find a high-profile foreign bride. The negotiations would be endless and the outcome might just be another Anne of Cleves. Always a shrewd observer of what was going on around him and ever-charming to the ladies of the court, an idea began to form in his mind. Lady Latimer had all the qualities he desired. ‘For beside the virtues of her mind,’ wrote John Foxe, ‘she was endued with rare gifts of nature, as singular beauty, favour and a comely personage; things wherein the king was greatly delighted.’
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She was an ideal choice for his sixth wife. Once the decision had been taken, it seemed such an obvious course that he was quite prepared to be patient and wait for the lady’s formal acceptance of his marriage proposal. He could also watch his brother-in-law’s discomfiture with some amusement.

What was Henry VIII actually like in 1543, both as man and king? We think we know him – he is surely the most instantly recognizable English monarch – yet he was not an easy man to know and it was an important part of his office to preserve that aura of being different from ordinary men. There are portraits of him from every decade of his life. Once he became king, they were all intended to capture his authority and magnificence. Yet they tell a sad story. Physically, he was by the 1540s a far cry from the golden youth (albeit with a rather girlish face) who captivated European observers when he came to the throne back in 1509. The clean-shaven young man with bobbed hair had been replaced by the more severe, bearded image of the mature
king, his hair cropped close to his head beneath the jewelled caps he always wore in public. And the taut, athletic body of the sportsman and jouster was long gone. In 1515, the year before the birth of Princess Mary, when he was twenty-four years old, his waistline measured 35½ inches. By 1540 it had expanded to 49 inches and was still increasing. Two years later, even as he was contemplating marrying for the sixth time, it was noted that he was ‘already very stout and daily growing heavier, he seems very old and grey . . . three of the biggest men to be found could get inside his doublet’.
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Hardly, then, an enticing prospect as a husband. Of course, he dressed superbly, ever-conscious of his image as a monarch, yet the bulky layers of Tudor clothing only added to his girth. The impression must have been overwhelming.

Given his massive size, it is hardly surprising that Henry’s health had suffered. In this respect his athletic past caught up with him and actually contributed to his difficulties. By the late 1530s he was suffering from problems with his legs, caused, it is now thought, by old injuries that had never healed properly and led to bone disease. When this flared up, the pain was intense. Over the years, the king became less and less active and the vicious circle of pain, immobility and weight-gain continued. In March 1543, the king’s secretary, Sir William Paget, wrote to Edward Seymour: ‘the king’s majesty is now well again, who hath two or three days been troubled with a humour descending to his leg’.
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This was nothing new, and it would only get worse. One revealing detail of this is the increase in the king’s orders for hose. This had averaged a little over 100 pairs a year between 1535 and 1539; in the years 1543–5, 322 pairs were supplied for the increasingly diseased royal legs.
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Henry was already walking with the aid of a stick but he did not yet need the contraption of a chair on pulleys that moved him from one part of Whitehall Palace to another at the end of his reign.

Failing eyesight was also bothering him, as it had his paternal grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, and would, eventually,
his daughter, Mary. Henry sometimes used a reading glass, set in wood with a handle, and he also wore spectacles, which were kept in a golden case engraved with the arms of England. These fitted onto the nose and could be held in place with ties – not very dignified, perhaps, but useful in helping him to read, and probably seen only by those very close to him, since reading was something he still did in the privacy of his bedchamber. There is a wonderful illustration in one of the Royal Manuscripts in the British Library that shows a younger king reading his psalter in a chair beside his bed. Although the figure of the king himself is out of proportion, with a large head atop an impossibly small body, making him look rather like a bookish gnome, the surroundings are superbly rendered. On the tiled floor, at his feet, are two more beautifully bound books. Henry collected such fine things, with more taste and less trouble than he collected wives.

The glasses speak of the king’s determination to deal with his problems and make the necessary adjustments that come with age. Despite the agonizing bouts with his legs and the traumas of his personal life, Henry VIII had most definitely not given up on life or the business of being a king. He could no longer joust or play tennis but his cultural interests remained of great importance to him. His library of books and manuscripts had been growing throughout his reign and though the majority of them were, by the 1540s, kept in his three principal residences (Greenwich, Hampton Court and Whitehall), some also travelled with him as he visited his lesser houses in the country. During the course of his lifetime, the collection moved increasingly from manuscripts, many of which had been inherited from his father and more distant royal ancestors, to bound and printed books.

In the absence of accurate figures for the number of volumes possessed by Henry VIII, an indication of the importance he attached to them lies in the care taken of the collection. There is no surviving catalogue of the contents of the Greenwich library at the time of the king’s death, but we do know that it was housed on one of the upper floors of the palace (to safeguard it
from flooding), that it had seven desks for the reading and storing of books and a large table, under which more volumes were kept. There were 329 volumes in all at Greenwich, mostly arranged by colour rather than topic. The larger and more precious books, including ‘two great bibles in Latin’ and ‘a great book called an herbal’, were listed separately.
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By 1542, when Henry was more often at Whitehall than Greenwich, the privy councillor Sir Anthony Denny, who grew ever closer to Henry in the monarch’s final years, made an inventory of the 910 books in the upper library. By this time, a more sophisticated system of cataloguing had been developed for what was very much a working library. It contained ‘one table covered with green cloth with sundry cupboards in it to set books in with four old curtains of buckram fringed with green silk to hang afore the books’.
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Henry’s collection was wide-ranging, covering romances, music, medical books, volumes on the conduct of warfare, genealogies showing the Tudor descent from Adam and Eve, and many French manuscripts. There were items connected with personal faith, Bibles, psalters, ordinals and many works of theology. The theological works reflected the king’s intense interest in the great debates of the Reformation and his own developing ideas as the divorce from Katherine of Aragon slowly progressed. The contents of the libraries came from different sources; some were gifts, others commissions, or dedications from writers wanting to make a name for themselves. Many more came from the dissolved monasteries. As a younger man, Henry had been an avid note-taker (always in Latin) and underliner, but in later years he tended to skim the contents, send the book out to various learned parties (often with opposing viewpoints) and then summon the readers in for discussions. His mind was still very active, even if his body was not. He enjoyed disputation, providing, of course, that his view prevailed. An educated spouse must have seemed appealing. No doubt he did not dwell on the fact that the last wife who could talk on something like equal terms with him was Anne Boleyn.

The development of his library bears witness to the progression of his own views during his reign but it still took second place to his main cultural interest, music. Henry was more than just a competent musician. He could perform on the lute and virginals, and he studied the organ. At his death, he possessed over 300 musical instruments, a collection that rivals his library in its different way. Music was an important part of Henry’s daily life and he had, certainly when younger, been no mere listener but a keen participant, playing the recorder and singing with his courtiers. More than thirty pieces written by him survive. Many were arrangements of continental compositions but he was clearly proficient enough to undertake such work and he also wrote several Masses, though these have subsequently been lost. He employed sixty professional musicians, a number of whom performed regularly in his Privy Chamber. As the reign went on, he tended to follow the fashion for Italian musicians, among whom were the Bassano brothers, Venetian singers who lived in the Charterhouse, near Katherine Parr. As queen, she would become an enthusiastic patron of the brothers. It is even possible that they were a link between Katherine and Henry VIII before she married the king.

He was less devoted to the fine arts. Of course, he collected many fine things but there was no one area of concentration. He expected to have his portrait painted and for the result to send out inescapable messages about his earthly power, but his patronage of painters was rather half-hearted. It had been Anne Boleyn who introduced Hans Holbein the Younger to Henry’s court and the king himself does not seem to have viewed Holbein with any great enthusiasm. Perhaps the famously controversial portrait of Anne of Cleves did not help Holbein’s cause. By the 1540s, Henry was patronizing the Flemish artists Scrots and Master John as well as the miniaturists the Horenbouts. Holbein never, so far as we know, painted Katherine Parr.

The king was a complex man. In any consideration of Henry at this stage of his life, it is easy to concentrate on his gigantic
frame and reduce the man inside to a series of well-worn clichés. In this way the king becomes a cruel, fat, much-married tyrant, who, as the old saying goes, spared no man in his anger and no woman in his lust. This cut-out Henry has become an historical legend, the stuff of blockbuster television series. Like all legends, it contains elements of truth. But there was more to him than this enduring reputation suggests. As he looked at the condition of his kingdom in 1543 and weighed the threats to it, both internal and external, he was determined to maintain his power and authority in the face of a storm that he, as much as anyone else, had unleashed more than a decade earlier.