The House of Tudor (27 page)

Mary’s last visit to London was in the spring of 1533, when she came up for the wedding of her elder daughter, Frances, now sixteen, to Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset at Suffolk House and the betrothal of the younger, Eleanor, to Henry Clifford, the Earl of Cumberland’s heir. Suffolk had to stay in town - he was very busy with preparations for Anne Boleyn’s coronation - and Mary travelled back to Westhorpe alone with Eleanor. On Midsummer Day the loveliest princess in Europe was dead at the age of thirty-eight. In March 1534 her son Henry, Earl of Lincoln, followed her to the grave. Remarkably little is known about this young man, who stood so close to the throne and who lived to the age of eighteen before succumbing, again most probably to tuberculosis. But his death was regarded as a windfall for his cousin, the King of Scotland, since the pundits considered that Henry’s younger nephew, being native born, might be preferred to the elder in the succession stakes.

Charles Brandon survived this double tragedy with reasonable equanimity. He had made Mary Tudor a faithful and affectionate husband, but he replaced her within a couple of months. To do him justice, financial necessity had something to do with this almost indecent haste. He was, as usual, heavily in debt - Frances’ wedding had cost him over fifteen hundred pounds and there was Eleanor’s still to come. The Duke of Suffolk needed a rich wife and he picked the handiest candidate, his ward Katherine Willoughby, daughter and heir of Lord William Willoughby and Maria de Salinas, one of Catherine of Aragon’s Spanish ladies. The fact that Katherine Willoughby was about the same age as his own younger daughter - fourteen to his forty-eight - and was betrothed to his own son, did not apparently detract from her eligibility in the Duke’s eyes though it did give rise to some unkind gossip. In fact, the marriage proved a very happy one. Young Katherine was an intelligent, high-spirited girl (she later became notorious for her outspoken Protestantism) and quickly gave her husband two more sons. In the same month of the same year that Prince Edward was born there was another addition to the clan and to what was to become known as the Suffolk line, when Frances Grey, nee Brandon, gave birth to a daughter, Jane, named perhaps in honour of the Queen.

But Jane Seymour was in no condition to appreciate the compliment. A few days after Edward’s christening she became so ill that the last sacraments were administered. She rallied briefly, but by 24 October she was dead. According to Cromwell, her death was due to the negligence of her attendants, who had allowed her to catch cold and to eat unsuitable food. In fact, of course, she died of puerperal sepsis - the scourge of all women in childbed.

Jane was given a state funeral at Windsor Castle with the Princess Mary officiating as chief mourner. She was the first and, as it turned out, the only one of Henry’s wives to be buried as Queen and perhaps this was fair - she was, after all, the only one who had fulfilled her side of the bargain to his satisfaction. The King ‘retired to a solitary place to pass his sorrows’ and his grief was probably sincere enough, while it lasted. But he was soon back at Hampton Court so that he could see his son every day and make sure that ‘the realm’s most precious jewel’ was being properly cared for.

Edward spent the first few months of his life at Court under his father’s eye, but with the approach of summer, always the most dangerous time of year for plague and other contagions, the nursery was moved out into the country. The most elaborate precautions against infection were laid down in a series of ordinances, written out in the King’s own hand. No officer of the prince’s privy chamber might go to London without permission and on their return must observe a period of quarantine, in case they had picked up anything nasty. If anyone in the household did fall ill, they were to be removed at once. Everything was to be kept scrupulously clean - all galleries, passages and courts were to be swept and scrubbed twice a day, everything the prince touched or used was to be carefully washed and handled only by his personal servants, no dirty utensils were to be left lying about and all dogs, except the ladies’ pets, had to be confined to kennels.

Under these sensible hygienic rules, Edward grew and thrived. He was a large, fair, placid baby - a type much admired - and Eustace Chapuys described him as ‘one of the prettiest children that could be seen anywhere’. Details of his progress were minutely recorded: his first teeth appeared without difficulty; at a year old he was a little thinner, but shooting out in length and trying to walk; at eighteen months he threw a rather embarrassing tantrum in front of some queerly dressed foreign visitors, hiding his face in his nurse’s shoulder and howling with rage; at nearly two the Lady Mistress of his household told Thomas Cromwell that his grace was in good health and merry. ‘I would to God’, she went on, ‘the King’s grace and your lordship had seen him yesternight, for his grace was marvelously pleasantly disposed. The musicians played and his grace danced and played so wantonly that he could not stand still, and was as full of pretty toys as ever I saw a child in my life.’ To his father, of course, Edward was perfect and Henry lost no opportunity to hang over the cradle or display the prince to the people.

But as the prince cut his teeth and began to grow out of the cradle and the King continued to worry in case some disrespectful germs should dare to approach his darling, danger threatened, or seemed to threaten, from abroad. In December 1538 the Pope, encouraged by the Pilgrimage of Grace and other hopeful signs of unrest among the islanders, at last summoned up enough resolution to promulgate his long-delayed Bull of Excommunication against the defiant and irreligious King of England. This somewhat antique weapon which, in theory, deprived an offending monarch of his throne and put him and his subjects outside the Christian pale, had lost most of its teeth by the middle of the sixteenth century, but it still inspired a good deal of superstitious dread among the faithful. This, coupled with the fact that the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of France (on whom, in theory, would fall the duty of deposing the King of England) had temporarily buried the hatchet, gave rise to a short-lived but excitable invasion scare along the south coast. But neither Charles nor François, good papalists though they declared themselves to be, had any real intention of moving against Henry and the chief result of the Pope’s action was to give the King an excuse to complete the virtual annihilation of his remaining Plantagenet cousins.

The Holy Father had sent Reginald Pole, son of the Countess of Salisbury, on a mission to both France and the Emperor to rouse them against ‘the most cruel and abominable tyrant’ across the Channel. Pole was a high-minded if not very realistic individual, a Cardinal since 1536 and an exile for his religious principles. His errand was a dismal failure, but, as he might have foreseen, it spelt doom for his family at home. His elder brother Henry, Lord Montague, was promptly executed and his mother arrested. Royal vengeance also fell on the Courtenay family. The Marquis of Exeter with his wife and young son went to the Tower, the Marquis soon leaving it again for Tower Hill and the block. Two years later, Henry finally completed the work of safeguarding his son’s inheritance by carrying out the death sentence on the old Countess of Salisbury herself Margaret Pole, nee Plantagenet, once long ago, the dearest friend of Queen Catherine of Aragon, a second mother to the Princess Mary Tudor and ‘a lady of virtue and honour if there was ever one in England’ was taken out on a May morning to be literally hacked to pieces by an apprentice executioner: an action which more than any other lent considerable point to Reginald Pole’s book in which he had compared the King of England to the Emperor Nero.

8: THE OLD FOX

He is an old fox, proud as the devil and accustomed to ruling.

It was the nervous international situation with England threatened with encirclement by the Catholic powers which propelled Henry into his fourth marriage. To guard against political isolation, the King needed friends among the emergent Protestant nations and so an alliance and a new Queen were sought from the Lutheran states of Northern Europe and finally found in the small duchy of Cleves on the northern Rhine. Anne of Cleves landed at Deal on 27 December 1539, having been delayed for a fortnight at Calais by bad weather and the King, suddenly boyishly impatient for a sight of his bride, dashed down to Rochester ‘to nourish love’. It was quite like the old days, just Henry and a few companions riding incognito on a romantic errand. Unfortunately, though, it ended in an embarrassing fiasco. To begin with Anne, not so well versed as the English ladies in the King’s little ways, failed to realize who he was and was understandably taken aback when this enormous, middle-aged man in a marbled cloak and hood burst unannounced into her room to enfold her in an ardent embrace. But even when the situation had been painstakingly explained to her, she displayed none of the delighted surprise proper to the occasion and would only edge nervously away from her alarming fiancé. It did not help, of course, that she could speak no English, or indeed any other language but her native German and Henry left as soon as he decently could, taking with him the present of expensive furs which he was not going to waste on such an underserving object.

He complained bitterly all the way back to Greenwich that he had been monstrously deceived; that this dull, plain, lumpish girl was nothing like the paragon he had been led to expect; and that if he’d known what she was really like ‘she should never have come into this realm’. ‘Is there none other remedy
but that I must needs, against my will, put my neck in the yoke?’ he asked Thomas Cromwell. None immediately suggested itself. Anne was here now and Henry would have to go through with the wedding whether he liked it or not. The ceremony took place on Twelfth Night but although he slept beside his bride for a few nights, nothing – not even the inducement of begetting another son – could bring the King to consummate the marriage. Anne was as disappointing in bed as she was out of it and after feeling her breasts and belly Henry told Cromwell disconsolately that he had ‘neither will nor courage to the rest’.

Obviously some remedy would have to be found, especially as by Easter the whole Court knew that the King’s fancy had been caught by one of the new Queen’s maids of honour – plump, lively little Catherine Howard who, by a curious coincidence, was a cousin of Anne Boleyn. Fortunately divorce was easier nowadays and before the summer was half over the King and his legal advisers had discovered ample grounds for a nullity suit. It was all very civilized and amicable. Anne had accepted dismissal with a docility, an alacrity even, which quite surprised the King, and opted to remain in England on a pension of £500 a year, with two royal residences allocated to her use. She settled down apparently quite content with her position as Henry’s ‘adopted sister’, and was to become a valued friend of the royal family - a sort of honorary maiden aunt.

Having got his freedom, Henry wasted no time. On 28 July 1540 he married Catherine Howard and that same day Thomas Cromwell was executed for high treason. Cromwell’s fall, although still shrouded in a fair amount of confusion, closely parodied that of the King’s other great minister. Cardinal Wolsey. Like Wolsey, Cromwell had served his master faithfully and well. Like Wolsey, he had no aristocratic family connections (he is generally believed to have been the son of a blacksmith) and therefore depended heavily on the King for protection from his enemies.

Henry did not want to be bothered with politics just then. He had temporarily forgotten his increasing age and girth and his bad legs and was enjoying an Indian summer of renewed youth and vigour in the entrancing company of his ‘rose without a thorn’. The French ambassador remarked that ‘the King is so amorous of Catherine Howard that he cannot treat her well enough and caresses her more than he did the others’. Henry showered jewels, expensive dresses and grants of land on his new pet and carried her off on an extended honeymoon which lasted into the autumn.

There were no problems about consummating this marriage; but while Anne of Cleves had been a timid, unawakened virgin, Catherine at nineteen was already sexually experienced - a significant fact which seems to have escaped Henry’s notice. However it did not long escape the notice of the Court that the Queen’s behaviour could, at the least, be described as indiscreet. In the spring of 1541 the King set off on a progress northward - the first time he had ever visited this recalcitrant part of his dominions - taking with him his wife, his elder daughter and a personal retinue over a thousand strong. The weather was bad and the King of Scots, whom Henry had been hoping to meet at York, failed to turn up at the rendezvous - a deliberate snub which annoyed his uncle very much - but otherwise the trip could be counted as a success and the King arrived back at Hampton Court in October in a complacent frame of mind. He did not know that throughout the summer’s journeyings and very likely before, the Queen had been slipping off up the backstairs to meet one of the gentlemen of his Privy Chamber, her ‘little sweet fool’ Thomas Culpepper.

This was not the only thing Henry did not know about his ‘jewel of a wife’ but those people who did know - people with special knowledge about her casual, scrambling girlhood in her grandmother’s house down at Horsham where the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk had shut her eyes to goings on in the maids’ dormitory after lights out - were beginning to wonder if it was altogether wise to keep this knowledge to themselves. Finally, John Lascelles, who had his own reasons for disliking the whole Howard tribe and whose sister Mary had been a member of the household at Horsham, laid certain information before the Council. He told how one Henry Manox, a music teacher, had been familiar with the secret parts of Catherine’s body when she was only fourteen; how one Francis Dereham, now the Queen’s secretary, had been made welcome in her ‘naked bed’ and had known her carnally many times before her marriage to the King.

Gossip was one thing, but detailed accusations like these could not be suppressed. Henry’s first reaction was furious incredulity. This was all a plot to blacken the Queen’s name and he ordered an immediate investigation. But when the whole, rather squalid little story had been dragged painfully into the light, the facts were undeniable. There could be no doubt whatever that Catherine had been promiscuous before her marriage and that her behaviour since had been at best criminally foolish. Actual adultery with Culpepper was never proved conclusively but the presumption of guilt was very strong and, in any case, Culpepper confessed both desire and intention which was quite enough.