The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (5 page)

Marillac reported that the king, then at his house at Woking, Surrey,

has taken a new rule of living. To rise between five and six, hear mass at seven and then ride [hunt] till dinner-time which is ten a.m. He says he feels much better thus in the country than when he resided all winter in his houses at the gates of London.
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He took Katherine on an energetic and triumphant progress that scorching summer – the hottest in living memory – through the counties of Surrey, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, hunting and feasting, dancing and singing all the way. It was truly pastime with good company and marked one of the few periods of real settled happiness for the king. But in September, on the way south to London, at Ampthill in Bedfordshire, he fell sick with malaria and the ulcers on his legs flared up again, forcing him to take to his bed. After recovering and returning to Windsor, he discovered that his niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, senior lady of Katherine’s Privy Chamber, was involved in an affair with the queen’s brother, Lord Charles Howard. The king could sometimes be prudish over matters sexual. She was banished to Syon Abbey in Middlesex for a year for her ‘over-much lightness’. There were also fears about an outbreak of plague outside the walls of Windsor Castle: Henry ordered the sick to be taken from their beds and carried out to the fields alongside the Thames to die, to prevent the threat of infection spreading to the court.
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In February 1541, Henry, already walking with the aid of a staff, alarmingly suffered more problems with his ulcerated legs that probably led to a dangerous infection, as he was reported feverish, with a blackened face. But following fearsome losses of temper, he recovered both his good humour and his health. Two months later, there were reports that Katherine was pregnant but these came to nothing and Henry, for the first time, seemed displeased with her.

A curious little drama was played out in London in late June 1541 that vividly demonstrates Henry’s vindictiveness and spite. It also reveals just how capricious he could be in the dispensation of his royal prerogative of mercy. Twenty-three-year-old Thomas Fiennes – Lord Dacre of the South, of Herstmonceux Castle, Sussex – was amongst ‘eight rakish youths’ who had killed ‘a poor old man’, John Busebridge, in an ‘unpremeditated affray’ in the neighbouring parish of Hellingly after they were caught poaching deer. With the others, Dacre was tried and sentenced to death. Sir William Paget reported that on 27 June, members of his jury of peers met the Privy Council in the Star Chamber in the Palace of Westminster to discuss their concerns about the case. Some ‘spoke so loud’ that the royal clerk could plainly hear their voices through the two closed doors between him and the meeting. Amongst those who could not agree to the charge of wilful murder was Lord Cobham, whose remarks, reported Paget, were ‘vehement and stiff’. After dinner, the Council passed on these concerns to Henry, together with Dacre’s humble submission to the king, ‘hoping thereby to move his majesty to pardon him’. The appeals had no effect.
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Chapuys reported to the Queen of Hungary that despite being both of noble blood and wealthy – Dacre owned property worth more than £1,200 a year (around £450,000 in today’s money) – the youth was

hung from the most ignominious gibbet and for greater shame, dragged through the streets to the place of execution [Tyburn]
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to the great pity of many people, and even of his very judges who wept when they sentenced him and in a body asked his pardon of the king.
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Significantly, another youth who was present at the old man’s death had been ‘freely pardoned’ on 29 June, the day of Dacre’s execution. He was the son of Sir Thomas Cheyney, former Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, who had been appointed Treasurer of the Royal Household in 1539
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and had organised that lightning nocturnal grab of Cromwell’s bullion. Patronage, in Henry’s England, was everything. At other times, he was also more free in the act of mercy towards those close to him:
on 28 January 1538, Henry had reprieved a servant of his young favourite Thomas Culpeper (of whom we shall hear more shortly) at the very last moment ‘to the great comfort of all the people’ crowding around the scaffold in the tiltyard in front of the Palace of Westminster. The boy servant had stolen his master’s purse, containing a jewel of the king’s, and £12 in cash. ‘He was brought to the place of execution … and the hangman was taking down the ladder from the gallows, [when] the king sent his pardon and so saved his life.’
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Fresh from these excitements, on 30 June 1541 the king and queen, with an escort of 1,000 soldiers, began the long-promised, glittering and stately progress to the restive North of England, reaching York on 16 September, where their subjects had hopes, subsequently unfounded, that Katherine was to be formally crowned queen. In the quiet of the early hours, after the splendid feasts and banquets had ended, it was the queen’s secret nocturnal activities on this progress that were to become her fatal undoing.

Henry returned to Hampton Court from this progress at the end of October and ordered that on 2 November – All Souls’ Day – there should be special prayers offered for ‘the good life he led and trusted to lead’ with ‘this jewel of womanhood’. Crushingly and cruelly, on that very day he was to have the veil torn from his old eyes about his young, flirtatious queen. Cranmer had received confidential information from John Lassels, a religious reformer (who would be burnt at the stake five years later for his Protestant beliefs), about Katherine’s unchaste life before her marriage to the king. Her previous behaviour now proved to have been far from ‘pure and honest’. Henry arrived in the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court to hear a Mass for the Dead and found a sealed letter from Cranmer waiting for him in his pew. The inscription on the cover urged him to read it in private. Within, the note accused the queen of having ‘lived most corruptly and sensually’.

An incredulous king was informed that his wife had behaved improperly with Henry Monox, a lute-player who had taught her the virginals (an ironic pun) at her step-grandmother’s home when she was just fifteen. Discovering them alone together, Agnes, Dowager Duchess of Norfolk,
had administered ‘two or three blows’ to Katherine and told them to behave.
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Katherine had also had an affair with Francis Dereham in the autumn of 1538, when she was seventeen. Only three months earlier, in August 1541, Katherine had unwisely appointed him her private secretary and usher of her chamber. Henry’s self-belief suffered a stunning blow at this news and he initially refused to believe Cranmer’s allegations. Then he asked his old friend Southampton, now Lord Privy Seal, secretly to investigate the charges levelled against his queen.

Dereham was taken to the Tower of London and interrogated by the Privy Council. He claimed he had been betrothed to Katherine in 1538 and consequently the relationship had not been sinful in the eyes of the Church. Stunningly, he also named Thomas Culpeper, one of Henry’s especial favourites in his Privy Chamber, as having ‘succeeded him in the queen’s affections’. This ambitious courtier was a less than attractive character: two years before, he had raped a park-keeper’s wife in a wooded thicket while three or four of his companions had held her down. He later killed a villager who tried to arrest him.
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Henry, who did not want to lose Culpeper’s jolly company or his frequent tender ministrations to his painful legs, had then astonishingly pardoned him. This time, Culpeper was arrested and questioned by Wriothesley under the threat of torture on the rack – a notorious machine in the bowels of the Tower nicknamed ‘the Duke of Exeter’s daughter’ by apprehensive Londoners.
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Back in the Palace of Westminster, Culpeper’s rooms were being searched for evidence and his goods and chattels listed and valued. He had started his life at court as a page, later being appointed a groom and finally, two years before his arrest, he had been created a Gentleman of the king’s Privy Chamber, which allowed him privileged access to the sovereign’s person. His possessions included two caps of velvet given to him by the king, plus numerous gowns, coats and other clothing, together with swords and daggers. Other items included horses and bedroom furniture. In total, his possessions were valued at £214 18s 1d (£80,500 at 2004 prices) and were delivered up to Sir Thomas Heneage of the Privy Chamber. Culpeper’s debts, to the king
and six others, amounted to £195 2s 8d (£73,050),
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some of it probably gambling debts. A disapproving bank manager today might well say that, on paper, Culpeper was living only just above the line of penury; the figures certainly speak volumes about his fast and loose life. But the courtier also had considerable potential earnings from the positions showered upon such a favourite by a doting Henry. The inventory of his goods includes them all: Keeper of the Gallery at Greenwich Palace; Clerk of the Armoury; Keeper of the parks and houses at Penshurst and North Lye; Lieutenant of Tonbridge Castle; and Steward of Ashdown Forest. There were also substantial incomes from property holdings. His lustful dalliance with the queen had flaunted and risked all this, as well as his life.

The king’s Council sorrowfully reported the scandal to Henry’s ambassador to France, Sir John Paget, on 12 November, saying, ‘A most miserable case lately revealed … Now may[be] you can see what was done before marriage. God knows what hath been done since.’
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Armed with his own intelligence, King Francis I of France – probably delighted at Henry’s discomfiture – wrote to his ‘good brother’ of England the same day, declaring that he felt the ‘grief of the king as his own’. Henry, he wrote, ‘should consider that lightness of women cannot bind the honour of men – and that the shame is confined to those who commit the crime.’ It was not intended to cheer Henry’s dark hours, nor did it.
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While the interrogations were discreetly under way at the Tower, the French ambassador Marillac reported that Henry avoided Katherine’s company at Hampton Court as much as possible and that the queen

who did nothing but dance and amuse herself, now keeps her apartments without showing herself … When musicians with instruments call at her door, they are dismissed, saying it was no longer time for dancing.

The Spanish ambassador Chapuys, puzzled at what was going on at
court, confirmed that Henry ‘feigned indisposition’ and was ten or twelve days without seeing his queen or allowing her to come into his room,

during which time there was much talk of divorce but owing to some surmise that she was with child, or else the means for a divorce were not arranged, the affair slept until 5 November when the king went into the Council room and remained there till noon.
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Meanwhile, all the queen’s coffers and chests were sealed by her investigators and palace guards were stationed at the doors of her apartments to prevent any incriminating evidence from being removed.

Katherine’s brother Lord Charles Howard, another Gentleman of the king’s Privy Chamber, was also exiled from court – without being told the reason. Marillac added:

The Duke of Norfolk must be exceedingly sorry and troubled, for the queen happens to be his own niece and the daughter of his brother, just as Anne [Boleyn] was also his niece on his sister’s side and his having been the chief cause of the king marrying her.

Piece by piece, the evidence was being covertly gathered concerning the queen’s promiscuity. The Privy Council was told that while the royal party were staying at Lincoln, Culpeper had entered her chamber ‘by the backstairs’ at eleven o’clock at night and had remained there until four the next morning. Another tryst had taken place in the cramped and hardly romantic surroundings of the queen’s stool chamber. On another occasion, she had given him a gold chain and a rich cap. The allegations of adultery and betrayal continued, on and on, poured out by Katherine’s maids and ladies of her bedchamber, who were no doubt attempting to save their own necks.

Given all that had passed in Henry’s turbulent marriages, the queen must have been mad to embark on this dangerous liaison with the king’s favourite. Was her extraordinary, almost suicidal recklessness motivated by an immature young girl’s physical and emotional disgust with an old, diseased man whom she had married for duty rather than
love? Did she crave affection from a virile gallant nearer her own age in compensation for a conjugal life more concerned with siring a new heir than with sexual pleasure?
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Did she merely gain a forbidden
frisson
from the secrecy and incredible risks of the affair? Or was she, as some must have supposed, even planning to conceive a child with Culpeper and pass it off as a Duke of York, so safeguarding her own future as queen and fulfilling the ambitions of her uncle and Bishop Gardiner? She certainly lived up to every syllable of her reputed personal motto: ‘No other will but mine own.’

During a torrid all-night Council meeting at Gardiner’s home in Southwark on 6 November, the sordid details of the queen’s activities were revealed to a still-disbelieving Henry. Finally, after he was convinced by the tide of evidence placed diffidently before him, the expected royal reaction was terrible to behold. The king had suffered twin, numbing assaults on his vanity, his bloated egotism, his self-esteem. His queen had betrayed him – and with his trusted favourite, Culpeper. Confronted by the awful truth of the double duplicity, this, probably his last sexual love, swiftly transformed into raw, naked hatred. He called for a sword so that he could slay Katherine ‘that he loved so much’. Vengeance, as always when Henry was crossed, was uppermost in his tortured mind. That ‘wicked woman’ had ‘never such delight in her incontinency as she should have torture in her death’ he screamed at the amazed courtiers. He struck out at his Council, abusing them for ‘soliciting’ him to marry her. It was all their fault! His anguished cries of animal rage broke down into wrathful tears, and he sobbed about his ‘ill-luck in meeting with such ill-conditioned wives’.
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His awestruck and frightened Councillors believed his anger had driven him insane and they shrank back, with fearful glances at each other, from his grief and rage. Henry stormed off and, like a child whose favourite toy has been broken, sought comfort and distraction in an unplanned treat: killing other defenceless quarry in the hunting field.
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