Lamentation (The Shardlake Series Book 6) (94 page)

M
OST ASTONISHING OF ALL
was the arrival, via France, of the papal emissary Bertano. The previous year Pope Paul III had convened the Council of Trent, part of whose purpose was to see whether the Protestant powers could somehow be reconciled with the Holy See. This, I think, is the context for Bertano’s visit – to establish whether some arrangement could be made between England and the Pope, some formula to allow Henry to keep his Supreme Headship of the Church, which he genuinely believed had been awarded him by God, while making some friendly arrangement with the Pope. Theologically, however, the Royal Supremacy and the papal function were irreconcilable, and on this diplomatic front at least, Henry failed.

I
F
,
AS THE TIMELINE SUGGESTS
, March 1546 was the crucial date for changes in both domestic and foreign policy, what happened during that month? I think the answer lies in a development often overlooked – the collapse of Henry’s health.

It is impossible at this distance to be clear what was wrong exactly with Henry by the 1540s, but some things can be said confidently. The old idea that the King suffered from syphilis is long discredited – there is no evidence for this, and much against. At the core of Henry’s problems seems to have been lack of mobility. David Starkey has suggested in his
Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII
(2004) that in Henry’s jousting accident in 1528 he broke his left leg; it healed but left a piece of detached bone in his calf, which decayed and formed a large and painful ulcer. In any event, Henry gradually had to give up his former regime of very active exercise and, as the years passed, he became increasingly immobile. His portraits show growing obesity, especially in the period 1537 to 1540, during his late forties, between his marriages to Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves.

By 1544, measurements for his armour showed a waistline of 54 inches; even a modest further weight gain might give a waistline of around 58 inches by 1546; even for a man of 6'2", this puts Henry at the outside edge of gross, morbid obesity. Why did a man who had so prided himself on his appearance allow this to happen? The most likely explanation is that his initial weight gain and immobility, especially given the Tudor elite’s diet of meat and sweetstuffs, would have made likely the development of type 2 diabetes, a disease not understood at the time. If this happened it would have added another element to the vicious cycle of immobility and weight gain, for Henry would have been constantly hungry and thirsty.

By 1546 it seems that walking any distance was difficult and painful for the King. He already sometimes used a ‘tram’ (a type of wheelchair) to get around the palaces, and had a ‘device’ to get him up and down stairs. And his gross obesity and immobility would have made him prone to yet another problem, deep-vein thrombosis in his legs, both of which were now described as ulcerated (a condition consistent with diabetes). Blood clots would form in the legs, then could become detached and travel to the lungs (to trigger a pulmonary embolism). If the clot can dissolve, a patient can survive, but otherwise dies. The descriptions of Henry’s medical crises from 1541 seem consistent with a series of pulmonary embolisms, the last of which killed him in January 1547, although he would also be liable to strokes or heart attacks – all his organs would have been under tremendous strain.

If Henry did become diabetic as well as morbidly obese around 1540, he could also have become impotent. He had no problems in making his first three wives pregnant, but none of his last three conceived. Catherine Parr was in some ways an odd choice for a sixth wife; she was past thirty and had already had two childless marriages (neither, as in popular myth, to men too old to sire a child). Henry badly needed a second male heir. Prince Edward (again contrary to popular myth) was not a sickly child, but child mortality in Tudor England was high and, if he died, Henry would be back where he had started, without a male heir. Yet in 1543 he married a woman who was a most unlikely candidate to bear a child. Catherine Parr did not fall pregnant during her three-and-a-half-year marriage to Henry, but she conceived during her subsequent marriage to Thomas Seymour. So Catherine was not incapable of bearing children; but Henry by now may well have been.

None of this, of course, was the King’s fault. If what I suggest is right, Henry was trapped in a dreadful cycle of pain, immobility and consuming hunger. He seems to have suffered no major health crises in 1544 or 1545, but in March 1546 he did fall very ill, perhaps with an embolism, and his life was feared for, although he recovered after some weeks of convalescence. His next health crisis did not come until September, although it was then followed by a whole series of illnesses which culminated in his death in January 1547. I suggest, though, that the March 1546 crisis was bad enough for Henry’s doctors (who, while they may not have been very good at preserving life, would have known well the signs of impending death), his councillors, and Henry himself to realize that he probably did not have long to live, and preparations needed to be made for Prince Edward’s succession. Some final choice between the radical and conservative factions on the council now had to be made, and the crises in foreign policy had to be resolved. The frantic round of diplomatic and political activity that began then and continued for the rest of the year stemmed, I think, from Henry’s March illness.

A
ND SO TO MY ATTEMPT
at an interpretation of the plot against Catherine Parr (I think there was only one, not two as has sometimes been suggested, and it spanned several months). Recent historical work by Susan James, Linda Porter and Janel Mueller – has given us a much clearer picture of Catherine. She was an attractive, sophisticated woman who had spent her life on the fringes of the court (the Parr family were minor players in the royal household during her childhood) and would have known the King for years. After the death of her second husband, Lord Latimer, she herself later wrote to Thomas Seymour that she had wished to marry him, but the King had set his sights on her. Thus, she believed, she was called by God to marry Henry, and she meant to, surely, in order to influence his religious policy so far as she could. Her letter indicates she was already a reformist sympathizer when she married Henry.

Catherine, who had great style, was an extremely successful and sophisticated performer of the visible and ceremonial aspects of Queen Consort, including the entertainment of foreign ambassadors. She was also, it seems, a very sympathetic personality; loyal and trustworthy and, one detects, with a sense of humour.

Unlike most Tudor women, Catherine had received a good education from her mother, Lady Maud Parr. She learned Latin as a girl; it became rusty, but she picked it up again when she became Queen. She also studied other languages – in the last months of Henry’s reign she was learning Spanish, a useful language then for diplomacy. She had a wide range of interests, collecting clocks and coins, and was clearly drawn to scholarship. Her intelligence, while very considerable, seems to have been broad rather than of great depth and focus – in that, she resembled Henry.

Religious influences on Catherine before her marriage to the King in 1543 were contradictory; her brother, Sir William Parr, her uncle Lord William Parr (following the early death of her father, the principal male influence on the family), and her sister and brother-in-law Anne and Sir William Herbert, were all reformist sympathizers. Her mother Lady Maud Parr, however, had been a lady-in-waiting and friend to Catherine of Aragon, but she died in 1529 before Henry expelled his first wife from the royal household. The Boroughs, the family of Catherine’s first husband, were reformist sympathizers, but her second husband, Lord Latimer (her marriage to whom appears to have been happy), was a traditionalist. However, her later letter to Thomas Seymour seems to me to indicate she was already travelling a reformist path by 1543. She was to journey further.

C
ATHERINE
P
ARR WAS NOT
, nor would she have claimed to be, a serious theologian. Her little book
Prayers and Meditations
, published in 1545, is quite orthodox. The
Lamentation of a Sinner
, however, probably written over the winter of 1545–6, shows a writer passionate about salvation, which could only be found through reading the Bible and ultimately through faith in Christ. Confessional writings in this vein were common at the time, though not from an English Queen.

Catherine tells of how her own love of the world’s pleasures blinded her for a long time to God’s grace, before she succumbed to Him. She writes with the fiercely self-critical religiosity of similar contemporary ‘confessions’ and ‘lamentations’. There is enough in the
Lamentation
to ground suspicion of her among traditionalists, because of her belief in salvation coming through a personal relationship with Christ, and study of the Bible, rather than through the practices of the official church. However – and this is vital – the
Lamentation
says nothing at all about, or against, the Mass.

Writing it at all was risky, although in the winter of 1545–6 Henry had taken a new and radical step against the old religion in appropriating the chantries, where Masses were said for the dead, although this move was probably motivated primarily by his desire to get hold of some much-needed money – their endowments were large. But in the early months of 1546 Catherine’s caution seems to have quite deserted her in her public association with reformers and, according to Foxe, in openly arguing religion with the King.

A
CCORDING TO
F
OXE
, ‘
In the time of his sickness, he
(Henry)
had left his accustomed manner of coming, and visiting his Queen: and therefore she would come to visit him, either after dinner or after supper
.’ This surely dates this part of the story to March–April 1546 (though most authorities put it months later); as this was the only period before the autumn when Henry was so seriously indisposed. Foxe tells us that Catherine took to lecturing the King on religion, and one night was careless enough to do so in the presence of Bishop Stephen Gardiner, the leading conservative, who, again in that crucial month of March, had returned from a long foreign embassy and quickly gained the King’s ear. Gardiner, according to Foxe, subsequently told the King: