The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (2 page)

The first priority was to stabilise Henry’s body, already corrupted by the blood and pus of his ulcerated legs,
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by ‘spurging, cleansing, bowelling, searing, embalming, furnishing and dressing with spices’.
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Paulet ordered the royal household’s gentleman apothecary, Thomas Alsop, to supply unguents – including cloves, oil of balm, tow, myrrh and sweet-smelling nigella and musk – either powdered and divided into seven lots for the surgeons to use in embalming, or contained in ten bags to put into the coffin,
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at a total cost to the exchequer of £26 12s 2d – more than £6,600 at today’s prices. Alsop and the yeomen apothecaries of the royal household assisted the surgeons and wax-chandlers in the embalming process now under way. It must have been a thoroughly unpleasant and exhausting experience: at his death, Henry probably weighed more than twenty-eight stone
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and the 6 ft. 3 in.-tall obese corpse cannot have been easy to manhandle. None the less, the cleansing and purging were successfully completed and the royal bowels removed before the embalmed cadaver was wrapped in layers of waxed cerecloth, in turn covered with lengths of the finest velvet and finally trussed up with silken cords. A label, probably cast in lead, was secured to the breast with ‘writing in great and small letters … containing his name and style, the day and year of his death’. The king’s serjeant plumber and carpenters were then called in to seal the body inside an anthropoid lead shell and to construct the 6 ft. 10 in.-long coffin’s huge outer casing of solid elm.
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The king’s entrails and bowels were buried in a lead box in the chapel of the Palace of Westminster amid solemn Masses and the weighty coffin set upon trestles within the presence chamber, resting beneath a rich pall of cloth of gold with a cross on top, surrounded by candles. Thirty of Henry’s chaplains and the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber took turns to mount their loyal twenty-four-hour watch over the body for five days.
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Above the coffin, as a reminder of the glories of the reign now ended, was the huge
Whitehall Mural
, painted ten years before, showing the
magnificent, imposing figure of Henry at the height of his powers. He stands proudly before the figures of his parents, Henry VII and his queen Elizabeth of York, the demure Jane Seymour – mother of the king’s lawful successor – to his right.
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It was, and is, a powerful propaganda image. Many watching in that hushed room must have wondered what the future held for England and the uncertain Tudor dynasty.

Some conspirators already knew.

Henry had always been unlucky in his women. Throughout his life, a number of wives failed him in his desperately important political mission to provide healthy, legitimate male heirs to carry on the precarious Tudor line. During those tempestuous years, some of his wives had plotted and intrigued, and others, in his eyes, had cuckolded or betrayed him. In the 1530s, full in the teeth of the Holy Catholic Church, he had annulled his union with his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, on the grounds of the uncertain consummation of her marriage with his elder brother Arthur before his death aged fifteen, from tuberculosis, on 2 April 1502, less than five months after their wedding. Henry’s reckless infatuation with Anne Boleyn ended brutally on Tower Green on 19
May 1536 with an executioner specially brought from St Omer in France to behead her with a mighty two-handed sword. After the political pain and agony of nearly three decades and his cataclysmic break with Rome, Henry finally got his long-sought-after lawful son at two o’clock on the morning of 12 October 1537 by his third wife, the modest, charming and fragile Jane Seymour. She died twelve days later, just before midnight, from a puerperal fever and septicaemia caused by an infection contracted during the arduous two days and three nights of labour in her newly decorated chamber at Hampton Court.

Despite Henry’s honest and genuine grief at his queen’s death, it was not long before his counsellors were pressing him to take a fourth wife, primarily for diplomatic reasons, but also to provide the all-important ‘spare’ male heir, a Duke of York, in case the infant Prince Edward fell victim to the constant epidemics of plague and other diseases that afflicted London. Unofficial ambassadorial enquiries, possibly without Henry’s knowledge, were immediately put in hand regarding a number of potential candidates even before Jane’s solemn burial in a vault beneath the choir of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on 12 November.
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Initially, a French match looked politically advantageous, which might block a threatening alliance emerging between France and Spain. Reports of a voluptuous tall widow, Marie of Guise, had captivated Henry and, as he told his cronies, he was ‘big in person and have need of a big wife’.
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But she had already become betrothed to James V of Scotland
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and Henry had bluntly told the French envoy in London that he ‘would not take the Scots’ leavings’.
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Other nubile French ladies were suggested, including Marie’s attractive sisters, Louise and Renée. Amongst her many other charms and allurements, the blushing Louise was known to be a virgin. The French ambassador Louis de Perreau, Sieur de Castillon, lasciviously told the king: ‘Take her! She is a maid, so you will have the advantage of being able to shape the passage to your measure.’
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Laughing uproariously, Henry slapped the bawdy diplomat on his shoulder and piously went in to attend Mass. Marie of Vendôme was also available, but unfortunately already professed as a nun. However, the boisterous Constable of France was ‘sure the king of England, who considers himself
Pope in his own kingdom, would choose her in preference to all others’.
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Henry was always wary of making a physically unattractive match. Consequently, he demanded to inspect personally seven or eight French princesses within a marquee pitched on the border between France and English-held Calais before making his final choice of bride. Even though they would be properly chaperoned by the French queen, the king, Francis I, was outraged at the suggestion, and Castillon was instructed to tell Henry in August 1538:

It is not the custom of France to send damsels of noble and princely families to be passed in review as if they were hackneys [horses] for sale.
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More accepted methods of royal selection, involving sedate diplomatic reports about suitability and appearance, were firmly rejected in London, with Henry insisting:

By God! I trust no one but myself. The thing touches me too near. I wish to see them and know them some time before deciding.

The audacious French ambassador archly replied, to Henry’s palpable embarrassment:

Then maybe your grace would like to mount them one after the other and keep the one you find to be the best broken in. Is that the way the knights of the Round Table treated women in your country in times past?
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His laddish jibe hit home at the priggish monarch’s well-known fondness for chivalry and courtly love and occasional prudery over matters moral. Castillon reported afterwards:

I think this shamed him, for he laughed and blushed at the same time and recognised that the way he had taken was a little discourteous. After rubbing his nose a little, he said, ‘Yes, but since the king [Francis I], my brother, has already so great an amity with the [Spanish] emperor, what amity should I have with him? I ask
because I am resolved not to marry again unless the emperor or king prefer my friendship to that which they have together.’
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The ambassador adroitly ducked the question, replying tactfully that it would take a wiser man than he to answer that. Henry’s choice of partner manifestly rested not just on sexual attraction – diplomacy was an all-important consideration, too.

Privately, some may have thought that the matter of a new wife was daily becoming increasingly unseemly – more like an ageing stallion being brought to stud with a young, prancing filly than part of a grand, sweeping diplomatic strategy and a vital means to further safeguard the crown of England for the Tudor dynasty. If anyone did think this, no one dared, at the risk of the king’s notorious and awesome rage, to mutter more than uncouth whispers amongst the swaggering courtiers in the corridors of Henry’s palaces.

But the king was not dissuaded from pursuing the arcane process of princely courtship by his French failures in love. Perhaps, his fawning advisers murmured discreetly, a Hapsburg candidate, then? They had in their sights another prospective bride: Christina, daughter of the deposed Christian II of Denmark, niece of the Spanish Emperor Charles V and great-niece to Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

She was slim, also very tall and said to be ‘soft of speech and very gentle in countenance’
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with dimples appearing on her chin and cheeks when she smiled ‘which becomes her right exceeding well’.
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The sixteen-year-old widow of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, was universally admired for her beauty and the portrait that the court artist Hans Holbein the Younger had frantically painted in just three hours and brought back from Brussels enchanted Henry and awakened joy and fresh romance in his cynical old heart.

She was, however, less than enamoured with the prospect of marital bliss with the English king, even though Thomas Wriothesley, then one of Henry’s two principal secretaries, persuasively told her that his master was the ‘most gentle gentleman that lives, his nature so benign and pleasant that I think till this day, no man hath heard many angry words
pass his mouth’.
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No doubt he paused expectantly for her reaction to this outrageous canard. Confronted by her silence, Wriothesley hastened on: Henry, he said, was ‘one of the most puissant and mighty princes of Christendom. If you saw him, you would [talk of ] his virtue, gentleness, wisdom, experience, goodliness of person, all … gifts and qualities meet to be in a Prince’.

Truth was never at a premium amongst the sycophantic courtiers, and Christina knew it. She listened carefully to his saccharine words but giggled, Wriothesley reported afterwards, ‘like one, methought, that was tickled’.
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The duchess’s doubts mounted as her advisers talked openly of the widespread rumours of the sinister demise of the king’s previous wives: ‘Her great-aunt was poisoned, that the second wife was put to death and the third lost for lack of keeping her childbed.’
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There was also the necessity (but, realistically, remote chance) of obtaining a papal dispensation to allow marriage to her great-aunt’s widower.

Henry’s reputation abroad was the real problem, however: on 2 January 1539, the Marquis de Aguilar wrote to the imperial emperor that the English king ‘is every day growing more inhumane and cruel’,
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a stark and telling accusation in the sixteenth century when life was cheap and judicial execution both uncivilised and universally practised. Henry Pole, Lord Montague, who had been caught up in Henry’s brutal and violent purge of his blood royal cousins the Courtenays and Poles (the last of the royal Plantagenet line) and executed the previous month, had prophetically told his servant: ‘Jerome, the King never made man, but he destroyed him again with displeasure or with the sword’ – a prediction that would become repeatedly true, as many were to discover at the cost of their lives or their lands. In the end, with a wit and wisdom far beyond her teenage years, Christina reportedly declared that if she had two heads, one would be at Henry’s disposal.
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She would not become his new bride.

Despite by now being well practised in the marriage stakes and in choosing a handful of mistresses in the past, Henry was finding it difficult to make a decision on a bride. Diplomatic events abroad overtook
him as he continued to cast wearily about for a new wife, surrounded by portraits of eligible Continental princesses and piles of glowing testimonials to their beauty and demeanour provided by his energetic envoys. On 18 June 1538, France and Spain agreed on a diplomatic
rapprochement
, signing a ten-year truce in Nice. Urged on by Pope Paul III, they planned co-ordinated action against religious heresy, beginning with a trade embargo. An invasion of England by the Catholic powers now suddenly seemed likely, sparking the frantic construction of a rash of new fortifications along her vulnerable south coast. The German Protestant princely houses began to look a more attractive option, both as a source for a bride and as Continental allies to prevent Henry’s total isolation in European politics.

And so the king embarked on the farce, if not disaster, of his fourth marriage.

His fumbling choice settled on twenty-four-year-old Anne of Cleves, who came from very much a ducal backwater on the Lower Rhine. She was one of two unmarried sisters of the ambitious Duke William who had succeeded to the Clevois title in February 1539. All the warning signs, however, were apparent for those with the skill to spot them. Anne did not hunt, nor could she sing or play a musical instrument – three of Henry’s favourite pastimes – but she
was
an accomplished needlewoman. She was unsophisticated, unworldly and unused (if not totally innocent) in the ways of both men and love. She could command only a few words of English; indeed, she could not read or write in any language aside from her own unattractive nasal and guttural Low German dialect. When Henry’s envoy, Nicholas Wotton, complained that he could not see her face beneath her voluminous headdress, her scandalised chancellor retorted, ‘What, do you want to see her naked?’ And the full-face portrait brought back to Henry generously flattered her appearance, showing her with a solemn, almost serene countenance, an oval face, a prominent, slightly bulbous long nose and heavy-lidded eyes, demurely cast down.