Lamentation (The Shardlake Series Book 6) (96 page)

A
FTER THE FAILURE
of Bertano’s mission, the focus turned back to relations with France, and much attention was devoted to the preparations to welcome Admiral d’Annebault to London at the end of the month. The sheer scale of the celebrations, in a country financially ruined by Henry’s war, has, I think, been rather ignored. There had been no such celebrations to welcome a foreigner, at least not since the arrival of the ill-fated Anne of Cleves in 1539. Archbishop Cranmer’s secretary, Ralph Morice, later recounted how Henry stood at one of the Hampton Court banquets for d’Annebault, with one arm round the admiral’s shoulder and the other round Cranmer’s (a sign of favour to both, although Henry by now may have found it difficult to stand unsupported) and, according to Morice, made the astounding statement that he and the French king would soon abolish the Mass and establish a common Communion. This was never remotely possible, of course (Francis I of France remained firmly Catholic), but for the King to say such a thing even in jest could only be a sign of radical intention, quite unthinkable even a few weeks before.

T
HE BALANCE OF POWER
on the Privy Council had shifted back towards the reformers with the return from abroad of the Earl of Hertford and Lord Lisle, and it was mainly reformers who accompanied Henry on his Progress at the beginning of September. This Progress was intended to be unusually brief, lasting only a couple of weeks and going only so far as Guildford, but Henry fell ill again during this time and moved from Guildford only to Windsor, where, halfway back, he stayed until the end of October. During most of that time the conservatives on the Privy Council remained in London dealing with routine business, while the radicals were with Henry. As was Catherine Parr.

Henry may well have spent these autumn months plotting his final decisive moves; perhaps his latest bout of severe illness gave him further intimations of mortality. In November and December Gardiner was sidelined, at one point struck in the face at a council meeting by Lord Lisle – without consequences for Lisle, though it was a serious offence – and repeatedly denied an audience with the King. Then, in December, Norfolk and Surrey were arrested, found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. The ostensible cause was Surrey’s quartering of the royal arms with his own, but the whole affair smacks of a manufactured attempt to get rid of Norfolk. As the senior peer in England, he thought he should have control of Henry’s successor, the young Edward; as noted already, Henry had used far-fetched accusations of treason before to dispose of Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell. Surrey was executed in January 1547; Norfolk himself was due to follow his son to the block on the 28th, but the King’s death in the early hours of that morning saved him; he languished instead in the Tower of London for the next six and a half years.

In early December, Henry was seriously ill again and seems never to have recovered fully. The last two months of his life appear to have been passed entirely at Whitehall. Some historians have seen the fact that Henry was apart from the Queen during the last month of his life as politically significant. Certainly Catherine did not get the Regency she had hoped for. However, though she spent Christmas at Richmond Palace, away from the King, her chambers were prepared for her at Whitehall in mid-January, although it is not known whether she actually took up residence, before Henry fell ill for the final time, just afterwards. But the point is not that Henry did not see the Queen during these last weeks of his life, but that he saw hardly
anyone
except Secretary Paget, and – significantly – the two chief gentlemen of his bedchamber.

Always in Henry’s reign, the gentlemen of the bedchamber, chosen by him and with the closest access to his person, wielded serious political power. His two chief gentlemen during most of 1546 were Anthony Denny, a radical sympathizer, and his deputy William Browne, a conservative. In October, Browne was moved and his replacement was none other than William Herbert, the Queen’s brother-in-law and a reformer. This surely puts paid to any idea that the Parrs were out of favour following the heresy hunt.

Henry also, inevitably, saw much of his doctors. His long-standing chief physician, the reformer William Butts, had died in 1545 and was succeeded by his deputy, Thomas Wendy, another radical who also served as chief physician to the Queen. Indeed, it has been suggested that he was the man who got a copy of her arrest warrant to the Queen in July, either secretly or, as I think more likely, acting as go-between in Henry’s scheme to humiliate Wriothesley.

W
ITH THESE MEN
in close attendance, the King wrote his last Will at the end of December. The Will has caused much controversy. For the last few years of Henry’s life, with so many documents to be signed and the King in poor health, use had been made of a ‘dry stamp’, a stamp with a facsimile of the King’s signature. When Henry approved a document, it was stamped and the King’s signature inked in, most often by Paget. One would have expected the King to sign his own Will, but the dry stamp was used. The Will, too, was not entered on the register of court documents until a month after its signature, by which time Henry was dead.

Without venturing too far into this area of controversy, the provision that during Edward VI’s minority the realm was to be governed by a council of sixteen persons, with a strongly radical balance, almost certainly reflects Henry’s intention in December. However, it is quite possible that the clause giving Secretary Paget the power to make ‘unfulfilled gifts’, the details of which Paget said the King had confided to him personally, was a forgery. After the King’s death on the 28th of January 1547, Paget and Edward Seymour quickly seized the initiative; peerages and gifts of money were handed out liberally to members of the council as ‘unfulfilled gifts’, and the council made Lord Hertford Protector.

H
ERTFORD BECAME
, for a while, something like a dictator. A new religious policy of Protestant radicalism began. The Mass was abolished, church interiors whitewashed, a new Prayer Book installed. Whether Henry VIII wished for any of this is very doubtful, but he had secured his main aim – the preservation of the Royal Supremacy for the young Edward VI. By the time Edward reached fifteen, in late 1552, his own personality as a radical and rather severe reformer was emerging. Had he lived as long as his father, which no one saw any reason to doubt, a Protestant revolution, as thoroughgoing as that which took place in 1560s Scotland, would probably have become firmly established. But by one of history’s ironies, Edward died from tuberculosis in 1553, a few months short of his sixteenth birthday.

The throne then passed to the King’s elder daughter Mary, who reversed course all the way back to papal allegiance, renounced the Royal Supremacy, re-established monasticism and married the Catholic Prince (later King) Philip of Spain. But in 1558, after only five years’ rule, Mary too died, probably of cancer, and the throne passed to Elizabeth, who re-established Protestantism, albeit of a distinctly moderate kind.

It has often been suggested that the ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ factions at Henry’s court were motivated more by desire for power than any religious conviction, and indeed many councillors – Paget, Rich, Cecil and others – managed to survive and hold office under both Edward and Mary, the younger councillors continuing to serve Elizabeth. But Edward’s senior councillors, who implemented radical Protestantism, were mainly former Henrician radicals, while Mary’s were mainly former Henrician conservatives. This reminds us that while many clerics and councillors were motivated by the desire for power and wealth, it is a mistake to think the Tudor ruling classes took religion lightly.

T
HE STORY OF
the last two years of Catherine Parr’s life is tragic. To her disappointment, she did not become Regent. Then this most capable and usually astute woman decided to follow her heart rather than her head, and quickly married her old love, the Protector’s brother Thomas Seymour. The result was disastrous. She moved with him (and the teenage Elizabeth) to Seymour’s castle at Sudeley. There, at thirty-five, Catherine fell pregnant for the first time. Thomas Seymour, who had probably married Catherine because of her status as Queen Dowager, diverted himself during his wife’s pregnancy with sexual abuse of the fourteen-year-old Elizabeth. When Catherine found out, Elizabeth was sent away from the household of the stepmother she had been close to for four years.

In September 1548 Catherine gave birth to a daughter, but like so many Tudor women, she died shortly afterwards from an infection of the womb. In the delirium of her last days she accused her husband of mocking and betraying her.

Seymour, who seems by now to have been hardly sane, then launched a crack-brained plot, in February 1549, to seize his young nephew Edward VI, and perhaps make himself Protector in his brother’s place. He had no support whatever, was immediately arrested and executed for treason in March 1549. Elizabeth, hearing of his execution, is said to have remarked, ‘Today died a man of much wit and little judgement.’ As so often, she summed things up exactly.

Catherine’s baby, the now orphaned Mary Seymour, passed into the care of Catherine’s friend the Dowager Duchess of Suffolk, but disappears from the records after 1550, and must have died in infancy like so many Tudor children. It was the saddest of endings to the story of Catherine Parr.

Endnote

1
Redworth, G.,
In Defence of the Church Catholic: The Life of Stephen Gardiner
(1990)

A
LSO BY
C. J. S
ANSOM

WINTER IN MADRID

DOMINION

The Shardlake series

DISSOLUTION

DARK FIRE

SOVEREIGN

REVELATION

HEARTSTONE