Mary Tudor (24 page)

Though he had suffered for some time from ulcerated legs, obesity, and gout, Henry’s health had declined rapidly since the New Year and he remained confined to the Privy Chamber with a high fever. On January 10, the French ambassador, Odet de Selve, wrote to Francis I that “neither the Queen nor the Lady Mary could see him.”
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His doctors had known that death was approaching but for fear of punishment had held back from telling him. Sir Anthony Denny finally volunteered to inform the king of his imminent demise. He was “to a man’s
judgement not like[ly] to live.” He should, Denny advised, now “prepare himself to death.”

“Yet is the mercy of Christ able,” Henry asked, “to pardon me all my sins, though they were greater than they be?” He ordered that Archbishop Cranmer be sent for to hear his confession, first declaring that he would “sleep a little.” He woke an hour later, “feeling feebleness to increase upon him.” By the time the archbishop arrived, Henry was unable to speak. So when Cranmer asked him his faith and assured him of salvation, he urged him to “give some token with his eyes or with his hand, that he trusted in the Lord.” Henry squeezed his hand and wrung it “as hard as he could.”
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By two in the morning of January 28, 1547, Henry was dead. He was fifty-six. Apothecaries, surgeons, and wax chandlers were immediately summoned to “do their duties in spurging, cleansing, bowelling, searing, embalming, furnishing and dressing with spices the said corpse.” The body was wrapped in fine linen and velvet and tied with silk cords before the plumber and carpenter cased the corpse in lead. The coffin was then laid out in the middle of the Privy Chamber at Whitehall, watched over by Henry’s chaplains and gentlemen.
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For three days the king’s death was not made public and was kept secret from all except Henry’s councillors. Life at court continued without interruption. Henry’s meals were brought into the great hall as usual to the sound of trumpets; Parliament remained in session, and those who requested audiences with the king were told that he was indisposed. As van der Delft wrote to the emperor, “I learn from a very confidential source that the King, whom may God receive His Grace, had departed this life, although not the slightest signs of such a thing were to be seen at court.”
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The imperial ambassador subsequently wrote that Mary had been very displeased with Edward Seymour because “he did not visit her or send to her for several days after her father’s death.”
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Only when Edward’s succession was secure would Mary be told of Henry’s passing.

Finally, on the morning of January 31, the tearful Lord Chancellor Wriothesley announced Henry’s death to the dumbstruck Parliament, and a section of his will, dealing with the succession of the crown, was read out.
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Meanwhile, on the twenty-eighth, the day of the
king’s death, Edward Seymour, the new king’s uncle, and Sir Anthony Browne, master of the king’s horse, had ridden with a force of 300 mounted troops from London to Hertford Castle to inform Edward of his father’s death and pay homage to him as the new king.
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A
T THREE IN THE AFTERNOON OF MONDAY, JANUARY
31, 1547, nine-year-old King Edward VI entered the City of London to take possession of his kingdom. Guns fired from ships on the Thames as the nobility of the realm accompanied the boy king to his lodgings.
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The following day the Privy Council gathered in the Presence Chamber, where Edward sat in a chair of estate, and Henry’s will was read out. The executors announced that it had been “agreed with one assent and consent” that Edward Seymour, the king’s uncle, should be “preferred in name and place before others” and become lord protector. This was not as Henry had decreed. The sixteen executors
were to have formed a regency council with all men having equal status; now Seymour emerged as the foremost councillor. Two weeks later, amid a general granting of lands and titles, Seymour would become duke of Somerset. “There was none so mete … in all the realm as he,” the House of Lords declared.
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Having sworn oaths to the king, his councillors cried together, “God save the noble King Edward!” Edward thanked them heartily and doffed his cap.
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He would remain in the Tower for the next three weeks until after his father’s funeral had taken place and preparations had been made for his own coronation. From there he wrote letters of condolence to his stepmother Katherine Parr and this to his sister Mary, then thirty-one, who remained in the dowager queen’s household:

On Wednesday, February 2, between eight and nine at night, Henry’s body was moved from the Privy Chamber to the Chapel Royal at Whitehall. Ten days later it was taken to Windsor in a gilded chariot pulled by seven horses, all bedecked in black velvet. The roads had been cleared and widened to allow the easier passage of the procession, which stretched over four miles. In front were 250 poor men, dressed in mourning gowns and carrying torches, followed by gentlemen bearing the king’s standards and heralds with the king’s helmet, targe (sword) shield, and coat of arms. Upon the coffin, draped in cloth of gold and blue velvet, was a life-size, lifelike effigy of King Henry, a scepter of gold in his right hand, in his left the ball of the world with a cross. On his head rested the imperial crown, and around his neck was the collar of the Garter.
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According to one observer, it “looked exactly like that of the King himself … just as if he were alive.”
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Behind the
coffin rode the king’s chief mourner, the marquess of Dorset, constable of England, and the king’s guard, all in black, their halberds pointing to the ground.

The procession reached Syon, the former Bridgettine house on the banks of the Thames in Middlesex, at two in the afternoon. There, after Masses were said, the corpse remained overnight. One account describes how, at Syon, “the leaden coffin being cleft by the shaking of the carriage, the pavement of the church was wetted with his [Henry’s] blood.” When plumbers later came to solder the coffin, they saw a “dog creeping, and licking up the King’s blood.”
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At seven the following morning, the procession resumed its slow progress to Windsor. Funeral knells were rung, and townspeople lined the route through each town it passed. Finally the gilded chariot arrived at the chapel of the Order of the Garter, where the coffin was placed in a hearse thirty-five feet tall and covered with tapers and candles. The next morning, February 15, Henry’s burial took place. Stephen Gardiner preached the funeral sermon, and sixteen yeomen of the Guard lowered the coffin into the vault next to that of Jane Seymour, just as Henry’s will had instructed.
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As Edward Hall wrote in his chronicle, “The late King was buried at Windsor with much solemnity, and the officers broke their staves, hurling them into the grave. But they were restored to them again when they came to the Tower.”
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With Henry laid to rest, Edward’s reign could be formally inaugurated.

AT ONE IN THE
afternoon of Saturday, February 19, Edward left the Tower, dressed in white velvet and cloth of silver embroidered with precious stones, to ride on horseback through the city to Westminster.
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Before him went an ordered procession: his messengers walking side by side; his gentlemen, chaplains, esquires of the body, and nobles; and his councillors, each paired with a foreign ambassador. The marquess of Dorset walked ahead of the young king, bearing the sword of state. Bringing up the rear were the gentlemen and grooms of the Privy Chamber, the pensioners, and the Guard.
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Along the route were pageants celebrating Edward’s arrival, many
echoing those that had greeted the last boy king, Henry VI, on his entry into London in 1432.
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Edward was heralded as “a young King Solomon,” charged with “rebuilding the Temple”—that is, continuing his father’s reformation.
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In one pageant, a phoenix, representing Edward’s mother, Jane Seymour, emerged from an artificial Heaven of suns, stars, and clouds to be met by a crowned golden lion (Henry). Two angels then crowned their offspring; the phoenix and the old lion vanished, leaving the cub to rule on his own. The highlight of the pageantry, in nine-year-old Edward’s eyes, was an acrobat who “came sliding down” a rope strung from the uppermost part of the steeple of St. Paul’s to an anchor in the garden of the dean’s house. The tumbler stood up, kissed Edward’s foot, then walked back up the rope, “tumbling and casting himself from one leg to another.”
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By the time the procession reached Westminster, it was nearly six in the evening, five hours after it had set off from the Tower.
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Early the following day, noblemen were summoned to accompany the king to Westminster Abbey and attend the coronation.
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Edward was taken by barge to Whitehall and dressed in a robe of crimson velvet, “furred with powdered ermines throughout.” At the abbey a scaffold seven stairs tall had been erected, on top of which was set the throne, a white chair covered with damask and gold. Two cushions had been placed on the seat, one of cloth of tissue, the other black velvet embroidered with gold, upon which the diminutive boy king would sit.

Edward was not the youngest king to be crowned; Henry VI had been just eight at his coronation in 1429. However, his would prove to be the most radical English coronation in its thousand-year history. He would be the first monarch to be anointed “Supreme Head of the English Church,” and though the coronation would broadly follow the
Liber Regalis
—the Book of Kingship—which had dictated the ceremony for kings since 1375, there would be some significant departures.
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The week before, the Council had announced its decision, “upon mature and deep deliberation,” that the “old observances and ceremonies [should] be corrected” on account of the king’s “tender age” and so that they might conform to the “new laws of the realm,” particularly
concerning the supremacy and abolition of papal authority. A new king would traditionally swear to confirm laws and liberties that had been granted to people by kings before him and to observe “such laws as … shall be chosen by your people.”
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This was drastically altered. It was now left to the king to decide which laws and liberties he would obey. The clause ensuring the protection of the liberties of the clergy was entirely omitted, and the final part of the oath was rewritten: the people, not the king, now had to consent to the new laws.