Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr (40 page)

Spoken in the presence of Gardiner, these words must have made William Parr uncomfortable. He and Lisle clearly hoped to influence Anne Askew to recant, and, in so doing, save her life. But they must have feared what would happen if she could not be persuaded. Gardiner and the conservatives on the Council, they knew, would use this woman’s intransigence for their own ends. Could Anne be relied upon to keep silent, or would she drag down with her, to ruin, if not to the stake, all those close connections she had at court? William Parr must surely have felt apprehensive for both his sisters at this time, and for those close to him who did not share Anne’s taste for martyrdom. Their beliefs, as she herself pointed out, were not new, but their futures depended on weathering this storm. And Anne could not be persuaded to compromise her faith, roundly rejecting Gardiner’s attempts at personal persuasion. When he asked to speak with her ‘familiarly’ she told him: ‘So did Judas, when he betrayed Christ.’ Infuriated, Gardiner then told her that she would be burnt. ‘I answered that I had searched all the scriptures, yet I never find that either Christ or his apostles put any creature to death.’ In an age of hatred, uncertainty and intolerance, it was an unanswerable rebuke. But it did not save her.

In fact, for this determined and immensely courageous woman, the worse was yet to come. Though she had not given William Parr the reassurance that she would quietly simmer down, thus removing the threat to those who knew her and shared her beliefs, with herself she made a pact to reveal nothing that would compromise others. How she kept this silent faith is one of the great horror stories of the Tudor period. Removed first to Newgate prison, Anne became very ill. She would not, however, be deflected, even by Nicholas Shaxton, a reformer who had recanted and came to her in the prison to urge her to follow the same
course. She told him that it would have been good for him never to have been born. Thus obdurate, she was sent by Richard Rich, a conservative member of the Privy Council and one of the sixteenth century’s most famous time-servers, to the Tower of London. She could hardly have expected much mercy from the man who had betrayed both Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, but what happened next was unusual even for a brutal age.

Anne’s death was of no real importance to the enemies of religious reform. There had been martyrs before, and would, no doubt, be others in the future. But in the power struggle that was being played out over the diseased body of the king, it was the living woman that still mattered. Now, at last, was made clear the true motive behind her incarceration. When Richard Rich came to the Tower to interview the prisoner, accompanied by Wriothesley, he did not waste time with theological niceties. Instead, wrote Anne, he ‘charged me upon my obedience to show if I knew any man or woman of my sect. My answer was that I knew none. Then they asked me of my lady of Suffolk, my lady of Sussex, my lady of Hertford, my lady Denny and my lady Fitzwilliam.’ Anne denied any knowledge of the religious convictions of the ladies mentioned. Neither would she name gentlewomen who, Rich contended, had given her money while in prison, though she did eventually acknowledge that she had received support from two men claiming to be acting on behalf of Lady Denny and Lady Hertford. This was the closest her interrogators came to the queen’s Privy Chamber.

Impatient with her refusal to name names, Rich and Wriothesley decided to resort to torture. The enormity of what they did Anne remembered in her clear, spare prose:

Then they put me on the rack, because I confessed no ladies or gentlewomen to be of my opinion; and there they kept me a long time, and because I lay still and did not cry, my lord chancellor and Master Rich took pains to rack me with their own hands till I was nigh dead.

Then the lieutenant [of the Tower] caused me to be loosed from the rack. Immediately, I swooned away, and then they recovered me again. After that I sat two long hours reasoning with my lord chancellor upon the bare floor. But my Lord God, I thank his everlasting goodness, gave me grace to persevere, and will do, I hope, to the very end.
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The image of this young woman of, perhaps, twenty-five years, her body broken and her eyes half-blinded by the racking, sitting on the floor of a dungeon in the Tower, continuing to argue with Thomas Wriothesley after his hideous personal involvement in her torture, comes powerfully across to us over the centuries. The lord chancellor’s own wife had been devastated by the loss of a baby son a few years earlier. Did he hope, as he turned the rack, to extract some revenge on Katherine Parr and her pompous dismissal of his wife’s grief, by getting this defenceless woman to blurt out the names of the ladies around the queen, even to declare that the queen herself shared her extreme views on the sacrament of the Eucharist? Or was it merely the opportunity to bring down those who threatened his survival in the new order that would come after Henry VIII’s death that propelled him to such barbarity? The torture of a gently-born woman was shocking even to his contemporaries. Fearful that he would be held to account for permitting Anne Askew’s agony, the lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Anthony Knevet, took himself off at great speed to lay his account before the king, who, it was reported, ‘seemed not very well to like their extreme handling’. Soon the news of what had been done leaked out, causing revulsion that damaged the government. But mistress Askew had glossed over the fact that Knevet had allowed the torture to proceed in the first place. For this, he must have had a high-level mandate. His alarm that things were going too far may equally have been prompted by resentment that members of the Privy Council were impinging on his area of responsibility. Chillingly, it is certainly possible
that the king himself had authorized the violence meted out to Anne.

She was, in truth, a difficult woman who had never shirked from promoting herself, or from courting trouble. Her supporters apparently encouraged her to write down the process of her examination by the Privy Council and the terrible suffering she endured so patiently afterwards. It is unusual to have such a complete account of this battle with authority from a sixteenth-century woman. But Anne needed little encouragement; she was quite evidently a very confident person, keen to relay her side of the story. She had never sought to hide her beliefs and her failed marriage, which cut her adrift from society, gave her independence as well as vulnerability. She is the antithesis of the submissive wife in Foxe’s account of the queen’s conciliatory exchanges with Henry VIII; the martyrologist, who probably fabricated this part of his story, may well have wanted to underline the differences between the two women. Reforming zeal was admirable, but a strident female who refused authority was not the ideal standardbearer for a new religion. Later Protestant commentators were more comfortable with Anne’s martyrdom and her exhortations to prayer than with her uncompromising self-awareness.

Anne was given further opportunities to recant, but she remained steadfast. On 26 July 1546 she was burnt at the stake in Smithfield with three male companions, including John Lascelles. Unable to stand because of her injuries, she was conveyed in a chair and held upright at the stake by a chain bound around her waist. The duke of Norfolk and her tormentor, Wriothesley, watched as she died. But also present, in a singular act of public support, was Nicholas Throckmorton, the queen’s cousin and a member of Katherine Parr’s household. It may have been not only sympathy that Throckmorton conveyed, and gratitude for Anne’s silence, but an underlying message that Katherine herself was out of danger. The attempt to compromise her had failed.

K
ATHERINE HERSELF
had nothing directly to say about the events of the summer of 1546. Yet, even if we discount the veracity of Foxe’s verbatim account of how her downfall was planned and averted, Anne Askew’s fate definitely points to a concerted attempt to incriminate some of the ladies who were closest to Katherine. Furthermore, her own behaviour during these months is indicative of an anxious queen. As early as February, at about the time that the rumours concerning her position were beginning to circulate in the diplomatic community, she ordered new coffers and locks for her chamber. This may, of course, have been simply the result of existing wear and tear, but it does suggest that she felt the need to ensure greater security for her possessions. Early in spring, her uncle, Lord Parr of Horton, who had rarely been at court since she became Henry’s consort, was summoned back to fulfil his role as Katherine’s chamberlain, despite his age and ill-health.
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The queen gave into his safe-keeping a number of books which would, no doubt, have been of great interest to the authorities, since book burnings intensified after a royal proclamation against heretical writings issued on 8 July. These were only reclaimed, by one of her most trusted servants, three months after the death of Henry VIII.
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Her chagrin may not have been wholly confined to the knowledge that she was a quarry for the bishop of Winchester and his allies. In June 1546, even as she struggled to safeguard her position, negotiations were resumed by the duke of Norfolk for a marriage between Thomas Seymour and Mary Howard, duchess of Richmond. Naturally, the queen did not comment on this development, though it is hard to believe that it improved her emotional well-being. But, as in the 1530s, nothing came of the discussions. The duchess’s brother, the earl of Surrey, despite being sympathetic to reform (one of his gentlemen was Anne Askew’s cousin), was not keen on this resurrected alliance and seems to have knocked it on the head. So his sister once more failed to become Lady Seymour, and Katherine’s former suitor remained free.

And what of the king in all this? The interweaving of fact and fiction in this story of plot and persecution leaves his part in proceedings, and, indeed, his attitude towards his wife, far from clear. The most likely explanation seems to be the one that lies just below the surface of Foxe’s hyperbole. Henry was well known for his capriciousness, a characteristic that was intensified by his physical decline. All the evidence points to the fact that his wife had begun to irritate him, not so much by her beliefs as by her frequent contending with him in public. Over-confidence in her hold on the king mingled with unbridled enthusiasm about her religious studies caused her to presume too much on his goodwill. One lesson Katherine seems to have forgotten from the experience of her predecessors was how swiftly that goodwill could disappear. She was still charming, attractive and healthy, but she was childless and increasingly opinionated. These last two weaknesses rankled with the king. It may well be that he took the opportunity offered to him by the conservatives, whispering in his ear, to put his wife in her place. When he perceived that this game might go too far, he drew back from it by making sure that the queen was alerted to the threat and giving her an opportunity to remove compromising literature from her chamber. For Henry knew that the attempt to incriminate the queen’s ladies was an attack on their husbands, as much as the queen herself, and he was not minded to give Gardiner and his allies the upper hand. In fact, the conservative campaign had even targeted his own servants and he was furious when one of his favourites, George Blagge, whom he called his ‘pig’, was imprisoned in Newgate and sentenced to be burnt. Blagge was pardoned, but the king did not forgive Wriothesley for, as he put it, ‘coming so near to him, even to his Privy Chamber’.
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Henry, though ailing, was still no fool. The attack on his queen was also, indirectly, an attack on him.

In the end, Katherine had been saved because this old man, so often represented as a monster in his last days, loved his sixth wife. He had grown tired of marital failure and he appreciated
what Katherine had brought to his life and his family. So she survived. Yet the queen’s position had been weakened by the efforts to bring her down and she was unable to recover it fully. This, though she did not know it at the time, was to be a benefit for both her enemies and for those ambitious men whose wives continued in her service.

From late summer to early winter in 1546, the royal marriage returned to the harmony that had been such an important feature of its first six months. Katherine became again the adored stepmother and indulged wife. Prince Edward, who was at court in August, wrote frequently to her. Beneath his characteristic tone of obsequious stiffness, there are still the glimpses of genuine affection. Her countenance, he said, ‘excites my love’. ‘When at court with the king,’ he wrote, ‘I received so many benefits from your majesty that I can hardly grasp them.’ He could not repay them but he rejoiced to hear of her progress in virtue and goodness and he wanted her to know that he wrote ‘both for love and duty’.
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Katherine, keen to ensure that her hold over her stepson was not diminishing and to reinforce her regal status as queen of England, sent the prince a twin portrait of herself and Henry VIII as a New Year’s gift at the beginning of 1547. Acknowledging his letter of thanks, the queen said she was ‘gratified by your appreciation of my little New Year’s gift, hoping that you will meditate upon the distinguished deeds of your father, whose portrait you are so pleased to have, and his many virtues’.
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