The Children of Henry VIII (17 page)

At Court, the following year, there were further momentous changes. To win European allies against the pope, Henry married Anne of Cleves in January 1540, but was a distinctly reluctant bridegroom. Anne, as Cromwell—the architect of the Cleves alliance—had been keen to reassure him, possessed a ‘queenly manner’, but that was not what Henry was looking for. ‘Alas, whom should men trust?’ the king complained. ‘I promise you, I see no such thing in her as hath been showed unto me of her,
and am ashamed that men hath praised her as they have done, and I like her not.’
⁷⁸

After carefully feeling Anne’s ‘belly and breasts’ on his wedding night, Henry decided that ‘she was no maid’. He claimed he was ‘struck to the heart, and left her as good a maid as he found her.’
⁷⁹
He admitted to having a couple of shots at consummation over the ensuing weeks, but when he failed ignominiously, Cranmer annulled the match. And when the Duke of Norfolk triumphantly produced irrefutable evidence that Cromwell was a closet Lutheran who had encouraged iconoclasm and sheltered a secret cell of radical Protestants at Calais, Henry had his second chief minister convicted of high treason and heresy by Parliament, then executed.

The king then married the duke’s niece, Katherine Howard, a girl barely out of her teens, but after eighteen months of ecstasy, he caught her out enjoying secret assignations with an old flame. In February 1542, she was executed for adultery, after which Henry chose Katherine Parr, widow of John Neville, Lord Latimer, as his sixth and final queen.

The wedding took place in the queen’s oratory at Hampton Court on 12 July 1543 with Mary and Elizabeth prominent among the guests.
⁸⁰
Mary was now 27, and within a month, her father decided that she should be ‘retained with the queen, who shows her all affection’.
⁸¹
With Henry’s marriage to Katherine Parr, his elder daughter thus finally managed to escape from the humiliating constraints placed upon her by Anne Boleyn and was allowed to live permanently at Court.

Elizabeth, already 9, was sent to join Edward’s household along with Lady Troy, Kat Champernowne and Blanche Parry.
⁸²
She was still provided with a separate ‘side’ and kept her chamber servants, but her establishment was redesigned largely to function as a
satellite of Edward’s. Or at least it was in theory. For the two ‘sides’ were often physically apart. After Henry’s wedding to Katherine Parr, Edward spent several months at Ampthill in Bedfordshire or Ashridge on the Hertfordshire–Buckinghamshire border, while Elizabeth lodged at Hatfield or Enfield.
⁸³
Generally the two ‘sides’ moved about the country more or less in tandem, but they were not always in the same place.

Then, in July 1544, Edward was summoned to Hampton Court to attend on Katherine, who was made regent while Henry led his armies in a full-scale invasion of France in a fresh alliance with Charles V.
⁸⁴
It signalled the start of a new phase in all three children’s lives.

W
HEN
Henry married Katherine Parr, he was 52 and beginning to deteriorate physically. Overweight and sometimes walking with a staff, his chest had ballooned to fifty-two inches and his waist to forty-nine.
¹
An ulcer on his left leg (eventually on both legs)—possibly the result of varicose veins, more likely of chronic osteomyelitis, a septic infection of the bone caused by the injuries he had sustained from hunting or jousting—gave him regular pain. He could be laid up in agony for up to twelve days, black in the face and barely able to speak, if the passageway in the skin through which the pus escaped closed up, obliging his physicians to cut open, cauterize and freshly bandage it.
²

Contrary to legend, Henry never suffered from syphilis. His apothecary’s accounts prove that the drugs administered to him did not include mercury, the basis of the standard treatment for venereal disease in his lifetime.
³
Rather it was gluttony, bad diet, and lack of exercise after he gave up jousting
following his accident in 1536 that transformed Henry from an ebullient, statuesque athlete into a semi-mobile hulk.

His decrepitude has helped to fuel an image of his last queen as a middle-aged bluestocking. The Spanish ambassador described her as barren and less beautiful even than Anne of Cleves, but this was pure spite.
⁴

No more than 31 when she married Henry, Katherine was vivacious and pretty, of middling height and with auburn hair and grey eyes. Had she not been sexually attractive, she would never have caught Henry’s attention. And it is improbable that he would have married her if he had not believed her fecund, as he yearned for more sons.
⁵

She already had a suitor—she was in love with Thomas Seymour, Queen Jane’s younger brother, and he with her. As she would reassure him after Henry’s death, ‘As truly as God is God, my mind was fully bent, the other time I was at liberty, to marry you before any man I knew’.
⁶
But she realized at once that she must choose Henry when he made his move.

Katherine was not simply politic; she also had a mission: she was a convert to the evangelical reform movement and may have been one for a decade or more.
⁷
Well educated by her mother along the lines pioneered by Thomas More for his own daughters, she was familiar with a wide range of the writings of the continental religious reformers, which (like Anne Boleyn) she probably read in French.
⁸

The trouble was that Henry—despite resoundingly rejecting the pope and having reservations about auricular confession and the priesthood—was himself still very much a Catholic in theology. In 1539, he had persuaded Parliament to pass an Act of Six Articles reasserting the primacy of the Catholic sacraments. More
recently he had severely restricted who was allowed to read the English Bible.

Katherine therefore knew she would need to dissimulate. Unlike Anne Boleyn, she never lectured the king or spoke out of turn, skilfully cultivating the impression that all her opinions were subject to her husband’s guidance. Although publishing some of her translations and writings while he was alive, she waited until after his death before allowing her friends to publish a penitential meditation, largely drawn from the Epistles of St Paul, that echoed the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone, attacked the cult of saints and rejected as superstition beliefs or ceremonies not found in the Bible. Given the title
The Lamentation of a Sinner
when it finally appeared in print, the book was politically explosive, since one of its aims was to persuade Parliament to lift the restrictions Henry had imposed upon reading the vernacular Bible.
⁹

But for all her caution not to cross the line, Katherine would come within a cat’s whisker of being the victim of a Court conspiracy. Only a hastily snatched word of warning from one of Henry’s physicians, followed by Cranmer’s nimble footwork, saved her from the fate suffered by Anne Askew, an evangelical member of the queen’s own circle, who was burned at the stake for heresy.
¹⁰

And yet, Katherine was never narrow-minded or a killjoy. She adored shoes, ordering 250 pairs in less than two years in a range of colours including black, crimson, white and blue, many of them trimmed with gold. Mary bonded well with her despite their differences over religion. With a four-year age gap only between them, it was as if Katherine was the elder sister Mary never had. The two women shared an addiction to jewels and fine clothes, which they ordered liberally and in many cases from the same suppliers. French gowns were their favourites, especially when
made from cloth of gold or silver, cloth of tissue, or pink, purple and crimson satin, preferably with flamboyant embroidered sleeves and square open necks filled in with high-collared silk partlets.
¹¹

Black was another favourite colour, and as long as Katherine dictated fashion, blackwork designs using naturalistic motifs, including trailing plants and flower patterns, were in vogue.
¹²
But rarely were these flashy enough for Mary. She wanted her black satin or velvet gowns to be embroidered with diamonds and pearls and the most delicate passementerie of gold and silver thread. Her dresses must literally sparkle. She notably hoarded pairs of Spanish leather gloves, which were imported by the dozen.
¹³

A patron of up to half a dozen artists and miniaturists, Katherine posed for a full-length portrait of herself from ‘Master John’ in which she wore a sensational French gown trimmed with the fur of sables and lynxes and in which she showed off a spectacular crowned brooch with three pendant pearls (see
Plate 2
). And where she led, Mary followed, ordering a three-quarter-length portrait of herself from the same artist in which she wore cloth of gold.

Before Henry left for the war in France on 12 July 1544, he got Parliament to enact a new succession settlement. The Third Act of Succession, passed in March, reinstated Mary and Elizabeth in the line of succession, although neither was formally legitimized. The Act determined that the succession would fall in turn, assuming the king had no more children, to Edward and his lawful heirs, Mary and her lawful heirs, and then Elizabeth, with the proviso that Henry might devise specific conditions for the succession of
both his daughters by letters patent or in his last will and testament. Should either ignore the conditions relating to the terms under which she would be permitted to marry, she would forfeit her claim to the throne.
¹⁴

To memorialize his daughters’ restoration to the line of succession, Henry commissioned an unknown artist to make a family group portrait to hang at Hampton Court. The original idea could well have been Katherine’s. If so, it was a brilliant one, an echo on a much smaller, more intimate scale of a massive dynastic fresco that Henry had himself commissioned in 1537 from Hans Holbein the Younger for his Privy Chamber at Whitehall, but this time including the king’s children whom the earlier mural had omitted.

Besides a sophisticated understanding of the power of art, however, Katherine also had the wisdom to realize that in Henry’s eyes it would always be Edward’s mother, Queen Jane, rather than herself, whom he would regard as the matriarch of the dynasty. It was not simply from a cultural debt to Holbein’s fresco that the new painting showed the king seated in majesty on his throne with his right arm on Edward’s shoulder, with Mary and Elizabeth standing, one on each side, at an appropriate distance, but with Jane Seymour instead of Katherine sitting by his side.

No longer was Elizabeth tainted by the catastrophic events that had destroyed her mother. Some historians have tried to argue the opposite—that, far from being rehabilitated, she had been ‘exiled’ by her father, or at the very least forgotten.
¹⁵
The point turns on a letter to Katherine written on 31 July 1544 in which the 10-year-old Elizabeth appears to complain that she has neither seen her stepmother since the day of her father’s wedding nor has she ‘dared’ to write to Henry, ‘for which at present I humbly
entreat your most excellent highness that in writing to His Majesty, you will deign to recommend me to him.’ ‘In this my exile’, she continues, ‘I surely know that your highness’s clemency has had as much care and solicitude for my health as the King’s Majesty would have done.’
¹⁶