She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (3 page)

His ‘towardness in learning’ could not be denied, but his attempts to emulate the easy athleticism for which his ebullient father had been admired were less successful. As a young man, Henry had distinguished himself as an expert in the saddle and on the tournament field. He had been tall and well made, like his maternal grandfather, Edward IV: both stood over six feet, and were famed across Europe for their physical prowess and striking 
beauty (at least before the appetite for excess which they also shared transformed both their looks and their health). Edward VI, on the other hand, had inherited his mother’s slight build along with her fair hair and grey eyes, with a tendency, by some reports, for his left shoulder to stand higher than his right. He rode well, and hunted regularly, but the surviving records of his first attempts in the tiltyard, where his father had so excelled, suggest that it was not an arena in which he immediately felt at home. In the spring of 1551, Edward led a group of friends dressed in team colours of black silk and white taffeta, against challengers in yellow led by the young earl of Hertford, in a sporting competition to ‘run at the ring’ – that is, to tilt at a metal circlet hanging from a post, victory going to whichever rider succeeded in carrying it off on the point of his lance. ‘The yellow band took it twice in 120 courses,’ the king noted disconsolately, ‘and my band touched often, which was counted as nothing, and took never, which seemed very strange, and so the prize was of my side lost.’

But, unlikely though it seemed that he would rival his father’s chivalric exploits, this slender, solemn boy was not noticeably frail. In his early childhood, policy rather than medical scrutiny had dictated the reports of Edward’s health relayed by foreign ambassadors at his father’s court. When a French marriage alliance was under consideration, François I’s envoy told his royal master that four-year-old Edward was ‘handsome, strong, and marvellously big for his age’. When the negotiations broke down, he observed that the prince had ‘a natural weakness’ and would probably die young. In truth, Edward had suffered only two serious illnesses: malaria, contracted at Hampton Court Palace just after his fourth birthday in the autumn of 1541, from which he recovered completely in a matter of weeks, and an attack of what was diagnosed as measles and smallpox at the beginning of April 1552. Again, his recovery was rapid. By 23 April he was strong enough to shoulder the heavy ceremonial robes of the Order of the Garter on St George’s Day at Westminster Abbey, and on 2 May Edward wrote to his closest friend, Barnaby Fitzpatrick, to apologise for
the break in their correspondence. He had been ‘a little troubled with the smallpox’, he said, ‘… but now we have shaken that quite away’.

He knew how lucky he was. A year earlier, he had ridden in full armour through the streets of London to dispel rumours that he had fallen victim to the epidemic of sweating sickness which had taken hold of southern England. But this defiant royal display could not protect his friends from the virulent disease. The mysterious ‘English Sweat’ had arrived on English shores at the same time as the Tudor dynasty only a little more than half a century earlier, perhaps brought across the Channel by the French mercenaries who fought for Edward’s grandfather, the future Henry VII, at Bosworth Field. It was now endemic – the outbreak of 1551 was the fifth since 1485 – and deadly. That summer, the terrifying symptoms – fever, dizziness, intense headaches, rashes, pain in the limbs and a drenching sweat – appeared in Cambridge, where Henry and Charles Brandon, the duke of Suffolk and his brother, had been sent to study at St John’s College. They left the town as soon as they could, but it was already too late. Henry Brandon died on 14 July. Charles inherited his brother’s title on his sickbed; he was duke of Suffolk for half an hour before he too perished. They were sixteen and fourteen years old.

Edward was already well aware of life’s fragility, and he had his uncompromising faith to sustain him in his grief. Nonetheless, the deaths of the Brandon brothers cast a pall over the court that summer, despite the lavish reception laid on for three noble emissaries sent by the French king, Henri II, to invest Edward with the chivalric Order of St Michel. The visit went well enough, but several onlookers, French and English, including Edward’s principal tutor John Cheke, expressed concern about the unremitting demands placed on the thirteen-year-old king by this elaborate diplomatic choreography, on top of the regular pressures imposed by his schooling and the daily meetings of his Privy Council.

Edward’s illness the following spring intensified those worries, but he was robust enough by the summer of 1552 to undertake a
stately progress through Sussex, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset, bestowing on some of his wealthiest subjects the costly honour of entertaining their king and his forbiddingly large entourage for days at a time. Throughout the trip, Edward sent regular bulletins to Barnaby Fitzpatrick, who was now serving with Henri II’s army at Nancy. ‘Whereas you have all been occupied in killing of your enemies,’ he told his friend, ‘in long marchings, in pained journeys, in extreme heat, in sore skirmishings and divers assaults, we have been occupied in killing of wild beasts, in pleasant journeys, in good fare, in viewing of fair countries, and have rather sought how to fortify our own than to spoil another man’s.’ It was apparent – however much Edward himself refused to admit it – that even these delightful diversions could now tax his stamina. But there still seemed no cause for serious concern about his wellbeing by Christmas, when the court threw itself into extravagant festivities under the direction of the ‘Lord of Misrule’, a gentleman of the royal household temporarily transformed into the anarchic ringleader of the season’s entertainments.

By Easter 1553, however, the court pageants – and with them the king’s health – had taken a more ominous turn. At the palace of Westminster that April, the Master of the Revels presented a cavalcade of Greek Worthies wearing headpieces ‘moulded like lions’ heads, the mouth devouring the man’s head helmetwise’, attended by torch-bearing satyrs, each equipped with a pair of ‘oxen’s legs and counterfeit feet’. But after the music and the tumbling, to the menacing beat of a single drum, came a ‘Masque of Death’, a macabre parade of ghastly figures, each one ‘double visaged, the one side like a man and the other like death’, bearing shields adorned with the heads of dead animals. And by then, as the players capered, the horrifying possibility was emerging that Edward might be watching a tableau of his own fate.

His physicians did not know it, but an attack of measles, such as the one from which the king had recovered a year earlier, serves to suppress the victim’s resistance to tuberculosis. And at the beginning of February 1553 – just two months before the Masque of
Death stalked through Westminster’s great hall – Edward had fallen ill with a feverish, chesty cold which he could not shake off. Six weeks later he was still confined to his chambers, Charles V’s ambassador Jehan Scheyfve reported to the emperor in encrypted French, ‘and it appears that he is very weak and thin, besides which I learn from a good source that his doctors … are of the opinion that the slightest change might place his life in great danger’. In April, Edward rallied enough to be allowed brief, carefully supervised outings in the spring sunshine in the gardens at Westminster, and after the Easter festivities he was parcelled up in velvet and furs to be transported down the Thames by river-barge to his favourite palace at Greenwich, the great guns of the Tower of London booming in salute as the royal flotilla passed by. A fortnight later, however, Ambassador Scheyfve noted that the king had ventured outside only once since his arrival there. A ‘trustworthy source’ had let slip that Edward was wasting away, and that his racking cough was now bringing up blood and alarmingly discoloured sputum.

In public, the king’s councillors loudly maintained the fiction that his recovery was imminent. John Dudley, duke of Northumberland, the ruthless politician who had supplanted Edward’s uncle, Protector Somerset, as his chief minister in 1549, announced firmly on 7 May that ‘our sovereign lord does begin very joyfully to increase and amend’. But Scheyfve was in no doubt of the iron fist that lay beneath the surface of these velvet assurances. The royal doctors whose unhappy responsibility it was to preside over the king’s slow decline had requested the benefit of a fresh medical opinion, and reinforcements to their ranks had been recruited; but all those who treated Edward were ‘strictly and expressly forbidden, under pain of death, to mention to anyone private details concerning the king’s illness or condition’, the ambassador reported. Meanwhile, gossip on the streets of the capital about his failing health was discouraged more forcibly: three Londoners who had been overheard to say that the king was dying had their ears cut off in punishment.

Edward himself was also pressed into service in the attempt to stem the flood of rumour and counter-rumour. He was now too weak to show himself in the open air, or even to stand unaided, but on 20 May he was held up at a window of Greenwich Palace to watch as three great ships set out from the Thames on a voyage of exploration masterminded by the Venetian cartographer Sebastian Cabot. Captained by Sir Hugh Willoughby and piloted by the talented navigator Richard Chancellor, the
Bona Esperanza
,
Bona
Confidentia
and
Edward Bonaventure
had been funded by a joint-stock company of merchants and courtiers to search for a passage through the north-eastern seas to the trade routes of China. It was a glorious sight – the tall ships and their crews decked out in pale blue as they took their leave, while the cannon thundered and the crowds cheered. Propped up painfully behind Greenwich’s ornate glass, Edward could not know that two of the three vessels setting off with such hope would never see England again. The small fleet was separated by a storm off the Norwegian coast little more than two months later. Richard Chancellor, at the helm of the
Edward
Bonaventure
, reached the port of St Nicholas on the White Sea and pressed on by sled to Moscow, where his overtures to the Tsar, Ivan the Terrible, established English trading privileges so successfully that the China Company became the Muscovy Company immediately on his return. But Hugh Willoughby – a distinguished soldier who had begged for this command despite his inexperience at sea – was not so fortunate. Lacking Chancellor’s expert guidance, the
Bona Esperanza
and
Bona Confidentia
meandered up and down the Russian coast, hopelessly lost, until in September they dropped anchor in arctic waters off the uninhabited shore of Lapland. The ice-bound ships, containing the frozen bodies of Willoughby and his men, were found by Russian fishermen the following summer.

Edward, whose black-and-gold desk was often heaped with maps and atlases beside his brass quadrant and astrolabe, had been excited by Cabot’s ambitious plans; and the duke of Northumberland, at the head of the young king’s government, was a former
lord admiral of England who had been instrumental in bringing Cabot from his Spanish home to London and assembling the wealthy syndicate to back Willoughby’s mission. But in May 1553, as the three ships disappeared into the haze of the horizon, Northumberland had no time to savour the fruits of his labours. Despite the belligerent optimism of the duke’s public pronouncements, it was obvious that Edward would not survive to see the return of the ship that bore his name. He was not seen again at the palace windows. Barely able to leave his bed, he was now running a constant fever. He coughed incessantly, and his face and legs began to swell. The noxious treatments administered by his anxious doctors became ever more oppressive: his head was shaved to permit the application of poultices to his scalp, and the stimulants prescribed as ‘restoratives’ left him unable to rest without heavy draughts of opiates. Whispered conversations in the corridors at Greenwich and at Westminster no longer debated whether the king would die, but when. Everything now depended on who would succeed him – and that was a matter of terrifying uncertainty.

Henry VIII had moved heaven and earth – almost literally, given the convulsions he had precipitated in his subjects’ spiritual lives – in his effort to secure a male heir. In the end, all his hopes had come to rest on the narrow shoulders of one boy, who had proved too fragile to sustain them. And, extraordinarily, there was no one left to claim the title of king of England. For the first time in the kingdom’s history, all the contenders for the crown that Edward was about to relinquish were female.

This unprecedented lack of a king-in-waiting was in part the result of Tudor paranoia about the dilute solution of royal blood that flowed in the Tudor line itself. True, Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, could trace his descent from Edward III, the mighty warrior-king who had ruled England in the fourteenth century. But that descent had come via the Beauforts, illegitimate offspring of Edward III’s son John of Gaunt – a bastard family who had later been legitimised by act of parliament but explicitly excluded from the royal succession. Henry VII’s acquisition of the
crown on the battlefield at Bosworth in 1485 therefore had everything to do with the unpredictable effects of civil war, and nothing to do with birthright.

Henry VIII’s dynastic claims were less tenuous, thanks to his mother, Elizabeth of York, the eldest daughter of Edward IV and sister of the murdered princes in the Tower. But neither of the two Henrys would ever admit that her role had been more than that of a fitting consort for the ‘rightful’ Tudor monarch. Meanwhile, both kings had engaged in a cull of the surviving representatives of the Plantagenet bloodline. Few of Elizabeth of York’s remaining royal cousins died in their beds; some were cut down on the battlefield, others on the block. Violence had brought the Tudors to the throne, and violence now left them unchallenged in possession of it.

But this new dynasty was a young sapling compared to the Plantagenet family tree, and had produced few boys to fill its branches. Henry VII had been an only child, born to a thirteen-year-old mother who never conceived again. He fathered eight children: only four survived infancy, of whom the eldest, Arthur, died at fifteen, leaving one younger brother, the future Henry VIII, and two sisters, Margaret and Mary. Both of these Tudor princesses made glittering but short-lived diplomatic matches, Margaret to the king of Scotland and Mary to the king of France. Both then married again in widowhood, Margaret to Archibald Douglas, earl of Angus, a powerful Scottish lord, and Mary – in headstrong haste, only weeks after the death of her first husband – to Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk, the handsome best friend of her brother, King Henry.