Lamentation (The Shardlake Series Book 6) (92 page)

Dakota L. Hamilton’s
The Household of Queen Katherine Parr
(unpublished PhD thesis, Oxford, 1992) was a treasure trove on the structure of the Queen’s Court. Simon Thurley’s
Whitehall Palace, The Official Illustrated History
(London, 2008),
Whitehall Palace, An Architectural History of the Royal Apartments 1240–1690
(London, 1999) and his
The Royal Palaces of Tudor England
(Yale, 1993) brought the vanished palace back to life, although a good deal of my reconstruction had of course to be imaginative. David Loades’s
The Tudor Court
(London, 1996) and Maria Hayward’s
Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII
(London, 2007) were also of great help.

For the wider London world, Liza Picard’s
Elizabeth’s London
(London, 2005) was once again invaluable and, as with MacCulloch’s
Cranmer
, never far from my side. James Raven,
The Business of Books
(Yale, 2007) was especially helpful on the early printing trade. Susan Brigden’s
London and the Reformation
was another book which, again, was always near to hand. Irvin Buckwalter Horst’s
The Radical Brethren: Anabaptism and the English Reformation to 1548
(Holland, 1972) was a mine of information on the early Anabaptists.

My description of Henry’s funeral is based on the account in Robert Hutchinson,
The Last Days of Henry VIII
(London, 2005).

Thanks also to Amanda Epstein for discussing the legal aspects of the Cotterstoke Will case with me, and to Jeanette Howlett for taking me to Sudeley Castle, where Catherine Parr lived during her sad fourth marriage, and where some beautiful examples of her clothing and possessions survive, as does her tomb, where I left some flowers in memory of Henry’s last, and to me most sympathetic, Queen.

H
ISTORICAL
N
OTE

T
HE LAST YEAR OF
Henry VIII’s life saw some of the most tumultuous political events of his entire reign: a major heresy hunt, an attack on the Queen, radical changes in foreign policy, an attempt at reconciliation with the Pope and, at the end of 1546, a switch in control of the Privy Council from religious traditionalists to radicals, who were left in charge of England upon Henry’s death. Unfortunately the sources are very thin, which leaves events open to a wide variety of interpretations. The historian Glyn Redworth has said, rightly, that ‘all accounts are obliged to be in the nature of interpretative essays’.
¹

My own attempt at interpreting the events of 1546 forms the background to the story of
Lamentation
(except of course for the fact that Catherine Parr’s
Lamentation of a Sinner
was not, in the real world, stolen). So I will start with those elements of the story where the facts are clearer, before moving on, for those who may be interested, to my own venture at an ‘interpretative essay’ on what happened in the tumultuous last months of Henry’s life.

I
N
1546, E
NGLAND
’
S
ruling elite, as well as the common people in London especially, were split between those sympathetic and those hostile to religious reform. It was a matter of degree, and many people either kept their heads down to avoid trouble, or, among the ruling classes, bent with the wind for political advantage. And the wind blew very fiercely in in the mid-Tudor period, as Henry VIII, following the split with Rome in 1532–3, lurched between traditional and radical religious policies for a decade and a half.

Most of those in the reforming camp were not social radicals, except for one group, which became a bogey for the traditionalists: the Anabaptists. In Holland and Germany various sects had grown out of Luther’s Reformation, and the Anabaptists (or adult Baptists) believed in returning to the practices of early Christianity. These beliefs included holding goods in common, which meant overthrowing the feudal ruling classes – although they seem to have been more ambivalent about the rising merchant classes. When they took over the German city of Münster in 1534, the local Protestant rulers joined with Catholics to exterminate them, but the Anabaptists continued as a persecuted minority in north-western Europe. A very small number fled to England, where they may have made contact with the survivors of the fifteenth-century Lollards, but were quickly caught and burned. In England they were very few; but a Dutch Anabaptist coming to London in 1546 and forming a small group there would have been possible.

Of course, like the group in
Lamentation
, these men would have been vulnerable to infiltration by official spies, of which there were plenty. The slowly emerging world of London printing (at this period most books were imported from the Continent) was watched by the authorities, with printers often being reformers, and some having contacts with exiled English polemicists in Germany and the Netherlands, of whom John Bale (a religious, though not a social, radical) was the most feared. And Anne Askew, hiding in London in 1546, was captured by informers – and later tortured in the Tower by Wriothesley and Rich. She was one of many brought before the Privy Council for questioning during the 1546 heresy hunt; although, as Shardlake observes in my novel, it would have been very unusual for an accusation as weak as Isabel Slanning’s in the story to go that high.

L
ONDON IN
154 6 was a tumultuous, violent, sectarian and impoverished place. It was only a year since the country had faced a serious threat of invasion. The King’s French war had, literally, bankrupted England – Continental bankers were refusing to lend Henry any more money – and the debasement of the coinage continued apace, to the impoverishment of the lower classes especially. The harvest of 1546 seems to have been a good one, which was probably just as well for the elite; bad harvests later in the decade contributed to large-scale rebellions.

W
HITEHALL
P
ALACE
, located on the fringes of the city, was an utterly different world. The palace, seized by Henry VIII from Cardinal Wolsey, was extensively expanded and enriched by the King, although its development was restricted as it was bounded on the east by the Thames, and on the west by the great thoroughfares of Whitehall and King Street, leading from London to Westminster. The problem was solved by building the recreational side of the palace on the western side of the roadway, and bridging the road with the magnificent Holbein Gate, where Henry had his private study. The two great paintings mentioned in the book – one showing Henry and Jane Seymour with the King’s father Henry VII and his Queen, and the other showing Henry and Jane Seymour (by that time long dead) with Henry’s three children, and two figures in the background who are believed to have been the royal fools Will Somers and Jane – were highlights of the magnificent decoration of the palace. Scrots’s portrait of the young Princess Elizabeth was painted at this time, and can be seen in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Baynard’s Castle, which like Whitehall Palace no longer exists, was home in 1546 to the Queen’s wardrobe as well as to her sister Anne and brother-in-law William Herbert.

T
HE ELITE GOVERNING
E
NGLAND
at the end of Henry VIII’s reign was divided by religion, but it was also divided into family blocs. Catherine Parr, like all Henry’s queens, placed family members in positions of importance within her household, such as Lord Parr and Mary Odell, while her brother-in-law William Herbert was an important member of the King’s private chamber, and her brother William Parr took a place on the Privy Council, the King’s executive council, as well as the earldom of Essex.

This would now be called nepotism, but the Tudor view was entirely different – people were expected to advance members of their own family networks. So far as the royal court was concerned, this led inevitably to distant relatives and family hangers-on making their way to court in the hope of a place in royal service, as described in the book.

The Parrs were all on the reformist side, and their family loyalties seem to have been exceptionally tight; more so than their reformist allies and potential political rivals, the Seymours, the family of Prince Edward’s mother Jane Seymour. Thomas Seymour was a drag on his brother Edward, now Lord Hertford. Nonetheless Lord Hertford was close to Henry and had considerable political ability, although when he actually rose to the top after Henry’s death he proved inadequate for the job. Meanwhile, during 1546 William Paget, the King’s Secretary, appears to have moved from being a protégé of Bishop Gardiner’s to an ally of Lord Hertford.

A
T THE SAME TIME
a young man named William Cecil was beginning to make his career on the fringes of politics. I have invented his position on Queen Catherine’s Learned Council, although he was certainly a friend of the Queen, and moreover wrote the preface to
Lamentation of a Sinner
when it was published in 1547. During that year he first appears on the record as Edward Seymour’s secretary, beginning the meteoric rise which was to culminate, in 1558, when he became chief adviser to Elizabeth I. Edmund Walsingham, meanwhile, was the uncle of Elizabeth’s famous future spymaster, Thomas Walsingham.