Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (38 page)

And though you be permitted to read holy scripture, and to have the word of God in your mother tongue, you must understand, that it is licensed you so to do, only to inform your own conscience, and to instruct your children and family, and not to dispute, and make scripture a railing and a taunting stock against priests and preachers, as many light persons do. I am very sorry to know and hear how unreverently that most precious jewel, the word of God, is disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern . . .
¹⁴

It was an uncompromising message, delivered by a king on whom the ravages of time were all too evident. His audience
must have known, though they would not have dared to give it voice, that he was unlikely to appear before them again. Many were moved to tears by his words. This was Henry VIII’s last public statement on the Reformation in England, a Reformation to which he, personally, was deeply committed. Did he regret the introduction of the Bible and the litany in English? These had been, after all, a major part of his evolving religious policy in the 1540s. But if he still believed, as seems probable, that the premise of what he had authorized was sound, he was deeply troubled and offended by the liberties that had been taken with it, by the cacophony of raised voices stirring up controversy and hatred. Henry wanted unity and obedience. The old autocrat, weak in body but still firm of purpose, could not tolerate dissension. It was impious and dangerous. The line between a heated discussion in a tavern and sedition against the state was a very thin one. Although not a man given to self-doubt, he must have wondered whether he had opened a veritable Pandora’s box. But of one thing he was certain. The spread of scripture in the vernacular had gone farther than he intended. Those who persisted in the sort of ostentatious displays he had so witheringly criticized would feel his wrath.

Given this context, Elizabeth’s New Year’s gift to him may well have been mistimed. And there was also further cause for alarm. We do not know whether the king and queen compared the presents they were given by his children, but Katherine had received from her stepdaughter a further literary effort that would probably have given the king pause for thought. One has to admire the child’s output, if not her originality. This time, it was a translation of the first chapter of John Calvin’s
Institutes of the Christian Religion
, first published in Geneva in 1541. Henry VIII had never admired Luther, but the more extreme Calvin must have been even more distasteful to him. Nor can we be certain that the king was entirely unaware, as has often been presumed, that his wife had commenced writing the
Lamentation of a Sinner
. The revelation that Katherine was now involved in an original
composition of her own would certainly have aroused his interest, if not his benediction.

He was not, though, a man who liked confrontation on the domestic front, any more than he condoned it in his kingdom. When relationships had become difficult with his former wives, he tended to keep his irritation within himself, until it burst forth in deadly earnest. For two and a half years he had doted on Katherine Parr. Her confidence was high and the satisfaction she evidently derived from her religious projects only added to her sense of fulfilment. She had made herself into an exemplary consort for a great monarch, and this gave her the boldness to proceed with her writing and her commitment to learning. In important matters, she was still viewed as a channel to the king. When the authorities at Cambridge University wrote to her at the beginning of 1546 asking for her intercession on the university’s future, she responded with a further indication of her beliefs, arguing again the inestimable merits of Christian education in English as the truest road to academic attainment.

The queen began by taking the chancellor to task for writing to her in Latin when

you could have uttered your desires and opinions familiarly in the vulgar tongue, aptest for my intelligence: albeit you seem to have conceived rather partially than truly a favourable estimation both of my going forward and dedication to learning . . . showing how agreeable it is to me . . . not only for mine own part to be studious, but also a maintainer and cherisher of the learned state, by bearing me in hand that I am endued and perfected with those qualities and respects which ought to be in a person of my vocation.

She politely thanked them for their flattery but went on to admonish them on their curriculum:

And for as much (as I do hear) that all kind of learning doth flourish amongst you in this age, as it did amongst the Greeks at Athens long ago, I desire you all not so to hunger
for the exquisite knowledge of profane learning, that it may be thought the Greeks’ university was but transposed, or now in England again renewed, forgetting our Christianity, since their excellency only did attain to moral or natural things: but rather I gently exhort you to study and apply these doctrines as means and apt degrees to the attaining and setting forth the better Christ’s reverent and most sacred doctrine: that it may not be laid against you in evidence, at the tribunal seat of God, how you were ashamed of Christ’s doctrine . . . and that Cambridge may be accounted rather as an university of divine philosophy than of natural or moral, as Athens was . . .

What had happened to the Katherine Parr who had studied hard to improve her Latin when she first married Henry VIII, that she should now reprove the scholars of Cambridge for their use of classical languages and a classical curriculum? Her stepson was, after all, being instructed and prepared for kingship by John Cheke, one of the foremost classical scholars of his day, an appointment which, in all probability, she had influenced. Perhaps she thought this approach would sit well with her husband, despite his reservations about the spread of the vernacular in religion. Or maybe they are very much her own views, reflecting the enthusiasms for English that she describes in the
Lamentation of a Sinner
. Whatever the explanation, she was able to tell the university, terrified that it would lose financing and independence as a result of the Chantries Act of 1545, that she had succeeded in pleading their case to the king. ‘His highness,’ she wrote, ‘being such a patron to good learning, doth tender you so much, that he will rather advance learning and erect new occasion thereof, than to confound those your ancient and godly institutions.’ The letter finished with the words: ‘Scribbled with the hand of her that prayeth to the Lord and immortal God, to send you all prosperous success in godly learning and knowledge. From my Lord the King’s Majesty’s manor of Greenwich, the 26th of February.’
¹⁵

This may have been the last time that Katherine was directly involved in matters of national importance, or, for some months at least, that she had the king’s ear. The very next day the imperial ambassador, Van der Delft, a Fleming who had replaced Chapuys in Charles V’s service, wrote in his despatch to the emperor: ‘I hesitate to report that there are rumours of a new queen. Some attribute it to the sterility of the present queen while others say there will be no change during the present war. Madame Suffolk is much talked about and in great favour; but the king shows no alteration in his demeanour to the queen, although she is said to be annoyed at the rumour.’
¹⁶

As well she might have been, for although Van der Delft was probably wrong about the likelihood of Katherine Brandon as a replacement (her religious leanings would surely have upset Henry VIII more than Katherine’s) there were tensions in the royal marriage. The queen was slowly becoming aware of them, and their implications. First and foremost, the king’s health was deteriorating, and the constant pain in his legs, coupled with an immobility that meant he had to be moved around his palaces on a kind of mechanical chair, affected his entire outlook. And the imperial ambassador might have hit upon a sensitive point when he referred to Katherine’s childlessness. For as Henry became more ill, so the consciousness of his wife’s failure to provide him with brothers for Prince Edward must have been more acute. Then there was the king’s noticeable capacity for boredom with his wives after the first few years of marriage. So Katherine entered the most difficult and perilous time of her marriage to Henry VIII, in a country where the king’s speech of the previous Christmas Eve had produced no effect. Religious dissension was stronger than ever, as the forces of religious reform and conservatism mingled with the naked ambition of the king’s advisers to produce a poisonous brew. The spring and summer of 1546 were deeply anxious and unpleasant months, when Katherine was to discover just how much she had lost her hold on her husband. Into this already unpredictable situation, there intruded the
presence of another woman – not the duchess of Suffolk, nor even one who looked to supplant Katherine in the king’s affections. This woman’s motives were entirely different, but her outspoken beliefs and publicity-seeking threatened the queen’s security and perhaps her survival.

Her name was Anne Askew.

A
NNE WAS
the daughter of a Lincolnshire landowner and Member of Parliament, well-born and well educated. Her father was a prominent member of his local community and there has been speculation that she knew Katherine Parr during the queen’s first marriage. But that was nearly twenty years previously, when Anne would have been about ten years old, so any kind of closeness between them, even supposing that they had met at this time, seems far-fetched. As a young bride, Katherine Borough, as she then was, would have paid no more than polite attention to the children of neighbouring worthies. Much, though, had happened to Anne Askew since her apparently uneventful childhood. The process of her ‘conversion’ to evangelical religious ideas is scantily documented, even in what she herself said about her past. The trigger may well have been an unhappy marriage to Thomas Kyme, into which she was propelled by her father when her elder sister, Kyme’s intended wife, died suddenly. She had two children with her husband, but family life evidently became increasingly unrewarding. So she turned to study of the Bible, becoming ever more convinced that the ‘old superstitions of papistry’ must be overturned. In the Bible, Anne seems to have found a satisfaction lacking in her marriage, and she did not hold back in airing her views. This brought her into conflict with the local Church authorities and she became notorious in Lincolnshire for her extremism. The complete breakdown of her marriage soon followed, though there are varying accounts of where the blame lay. Anne’s apologists later claimed that she was thrown out of the house by her exasperated husband and left to fend for herself, but
Catholic commentators claimed that she initiated the split so that she could ‘gad up and down the country a gospelling and gossiping where she might and ought not. And this for divers years before her imprisonment; but especially she delighted to be in London near the court.’
¹⁷

This censorious description of a selfish and obsessive young woman overlooks the fact that Anne may well have come to London desperate to seek a legal separation from her husband and that she was, through family connections, very close to the court already. One of her brothers was the king’s cupbearer and a half-brother, recently deceased, a gentleman of the king’s Privy Chamber. Her sister was married to a lawyer in the duchess of Suffolk’s household. One of Anne’s chief religious advisers was John Lascelles, whose testimony against Katherine Howard had helped bring down Henry VIII’s fifth wife. So Anne was no crazed outsider or opportunist, but a woman close to the levers of power and influence. It was that very proximity that perhaps propelled her but which also made her dangerous. For Anne was increasingly ostentatious in her religious beliefs and behaviour, and although she was released after her first examination by Bishop Bonner of London in the summer of 1545, when she may or may not have recanted what were perceived as heretical views on the sacrament, she did not choose then to retire quietly. One year later, in the festering climate of religious dispute and political enmity that characterized a debt-ridden, impoverished England, where spying and betrayal were commonplace, Anne Askew again took centre stage. This time, it was her connections, as much as her beliefs, that prompted the actions taken against her. Like it or not, she had become a pawn in a deadly game. The stakes could not have been higher or simpler, for the intention of Anne’s enemies was to strike, through her, at the very centre of power and to compromise Queen Katherine, perhaps fatally.

Bishop Stephen Gardiner, who had married Katherine Parr to Henry VIII at Hampton Court, has often been cast as the architect of this final struggle between the forces of religious
conservatism and further reform, and represented as the archenemy of Katherine Parr. This interpretation is based more on John Foxe’s account of the ‘plot’ against the queen in 1546, described with such colour and detail in the
Acts and Monuments
, than on specific evidence. Gardiner’s beliefs were well known; he never attempted to hide them and was eloquent in their enunciation. His character tended to the confrontational – John Dudley, Viscount Lisle, once slapped him in the face at a meeting of the Privy Council, and there were others who would happily have done the same – but he was still a highly experienced politician and diplomat. The king disliked him but recognized his abilities, as well as his capacity to cause trouble. This latter propensity did not much bother Henry, who could happily sit back and witness dissension among his advisers. But by the summer of 1546, the king’s infirmity meant that he was unpredictable and his reactions to what was going on around him were slower. There seemed to be much to play for and Gardiner took up once again the cause of combating religious innovation and heresy. He had returned to England after a prolonged and difficult period of diplomatic negotiation, which resulted in an official ending to hostilities with France and the signing of a new treaty with Emperor Charles V. Neither of these could, in reality, have been viewed as a great triumph for England, but Gardiner, who was greatly concerned about his country’s international weakness, had, at last, been able to conclude matters successfully. Now he turned his attention once more to domestic affairs, determined to regain the momentum that he had lost while in Europe and to challenge the ‘new men’, Lisle and Hertford, Paget and Denny, for influence over Henry VIII. And always, at the back of his mind, must have been the fate of his much-loved nephew and secretary, Germain Gardiner, executed for treason early in 1544. For though religious differences have often been cited as the driving force behind the struggles of the last summer of Henry VIII’s reign, this fight was as much about power politics as about belief. The queen’s position was bound to be affected, because breaking
her hold over her husband was a crucial step in gaining the king’s ear. Many of those in key positions, including some Katherine would have counted as friends, stood to gain by limiting her role. Stephen Gardiner and his supporters were not the only ones. Foxe’s dramatic narrative of Katherine’s perils paints too simple a picture.