Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (24 page)

Francis hurriedly sent her off to Scotland, where she married James V in early June 1538. Henry told Castillon petulantly: ‘Well, if that is so, I am receiving offers from many quarters.’ Not only had his amorous advances been spurned, but the ‘Auld Alliance’ between Scotland and France had been further cemented, much to his chagrin.

Thus thwarted, Henry turned to the Hapsburgs. Reports about Christina, the young widow of the Duke of Milan, had intrigued him – particularly her love of his own favourite pastimes, hunting and playing cards. The Spanish Emperor sent Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza to London to discuss the possible match. He and the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys were guests of honour at a sumptuous banquet at Hampton Court.
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Hutton meanwhile was still keeping a close eye on Christina in Brussels. He informed Cromwell on 21 February 1538: ‘She speaks French and seems to be of few words. In her speaking, she lisps, which does nothing to misbecome her.’ In July, he reported her conversation with one of her attendants who had been in England, but Hutton did not know

whether it was by commission of the Duchess or for his private business … She demanded of him how he liked England [and he] answered that he thought he had seen another Italy. Then she demanded if he had seen the king which he affirmed to have done, declaring his grace’s good and prosperous health, with as much lauding [praise of] his majesty’s benignity, comeliness, aboundans [wealth] and bountifulness as might be.

Unto which she answered that many times she heard much praise of the king’s grace but now she was fully satisfied it was true.
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Christina appeared to have been hooked by Henry’s dubious charms. Anxious to seal the match, Cromwell sent Thomas Wriothesley to Brussels to meet the widowed Duchess. He reported to an anxious Henry back in London that she had ‘a very good woman’s face and [was]
competently fair but very well favoured’ although unfashionably, her skin was a ‘little brown’. With permission, he had asked her whether she would consider marrying Henry. She had a wise head on her shoulders, for all her tender years: ‘As for my inclination, what should I say? You know I am at the Emperor’s commandment.’ The Englishman cried out: ‘Oh madam, how happy shall you be if it be your chance to be matched with my master!’

Wriothesley told her persuasively that his royal master was ‘the most gentle gentleman that lives; his nature so benign and pleasant that I think till this day, no man has heard many angry words pass his mouth’. Did the sixteen-year-old believe this outrageous canard? Wriothesley quickly pressed 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.’ The young Duchess looked him straight in the eye. Wriothesley told Henry afterwards: ‘She smiled again and I think could have laughed … had not her gravity forbidden it and restrained it with much pain. She heard me well and like one (I thought) that was tickled.’ Finally, she said ‘she knew your majesty was a noble and good prince’.
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Cromwell’s man was another clearly enchanted with the young widow.

But before the canny Henry went any further, he wanted a portrait of her to study, if not to gloat over. One of the gentlemen of his privy chamber, Philip Hoby, was sent secretly to Brussels to meet her, together with Henry’s talented court artist, Hans Holbein the Younger. The painter dashed off a sketch of her in just three hours on 12 March 1538, and was back in London six days later with it under his arm, to show his king. Henry was captivated by the modest, coy image of the teenager and commissioned Holbein to paint him an enchanting full-length portrait of her in oils, shown wearing mourning dress.
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In his heart and in his mind, she rapidly changed into a comely, compliant bride and he swaggeringly boasted that after their wedding, there would follow ‘our younger sons’, ennobled with the ancient dukedoms of York, Gloucester and Somerset.
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Moreover, proposed Henry, his daughter Princess Mary could marry Don Luis, the brother of the Portuguese King, in a double
wedding, thereby ensuring England’s participation in any future peace treaty with France.

But for anyone, even a king with imperial pretensions, the path of true love can be rocky. There remained the delicate issue of ‘affinity’ – too close a blood relationship between man and wife, banned, then as now, by canon law. Christina was niece to the Emperor Charles V, and thus great-niece to Henry’s discarded first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Not only was there affinity in such a match, but clerical pedants could claim, with some justice, that it was really a double affinity because of the earlier marriage between Catherine and Henry’s elder brother Arthur. Traditionally, such inconvenient impediments to royal nuptials could be removed by papal decree, as had happened in 1518 when Manuel I of Portugal had married Eleanor of Hapsburg, the niece of his first two wives, Isabella and Maria of Aragon, themselves sisters. However, for Henry, such an intervention by Rome would have been complete political and personal anathema. London’s alternative and brazen offer of his services as supreme head of the Church of England on Earth was equally unacceptable to the Spanish.

But the French were not to be outdone. Other nubile Gallic ladies were offered up, as was Francis’s younger son, the nineteen-year-old Henri, as a husband for Princess Mary. The new candidate brides again came from the Guise clan. Marie had two younger sisters, Louise and Renée, the former – remarkably, as she was at the French court – rumoured to remain a virgin. Castillon, who by now understood how to handle the English King, urged Henry uncouthly: ‘Take her! She is a maid, so you will have the advantage of being able to shape the passage to your measure.’ Henry burst into bawdy guffaws of laughter, slapped the envoy laddishly on the back and walked devoutly into his morning mass.
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Two more cousins of Francis were potentially available for the English King’s rheumy eyes to cast over: Marie de Vendôme and Anne of Lorraine. However, Marie had announced her intention to become a nun, but as far as the pragmatic French were concerned, this was not necessarily an obstacle to her joining Henry in his royal marriage bed. Annede Montmorency, the blunt 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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Rules were there to be broken where diplomacy was concerned.

Once more Henry dispatched Hoby and Holbein to inspect the prospective brides, and to faithfully portray them in drawings so that the King could examine their ample charms at his leisure. They discovered Louise staying in Le Havre, on the north-west French coast, in June, and returned home with two drawings of her, even though she had taken to her bed with a fever – hardly flattering to a lady’s self-esteem. Their breathless European merry-go-round continued in August when the pair were sent on a mission to seek out Renée in Joinville on the River Marne, but they missed her, and Holbein was sent on to the town of Nancy, in north-east France, to draw Francis’s cousin, Anne of Lorraine. As the French had produced another painting of Louise de Guise and Marie de Vendôme, Henry was now assembling his own portrait gallery of European wannabe queens of England.

As Cromwell doubtless frequently pointed out to him, there were some diplomatic imperatives that required a decision on whether to favour a French or imperial bride. But it was difficult for the King to make up his mind, faced with all these drawings, and in the back of his mind there were nagging doubts about just how much flattery, or artist’s licence, had gone into the young faces that stared blankly back at him off the paper or canvas. Doubtless the Latin phrase
caveat emptor
– ‘let the buyer beware’ – was in the forefront of his mind. His innovative solution was as daring as it was direct: the French should arrange a beauty parade of sorts within a marquee pitched, impartially, on the border between France and Calais, so he could inspect them personally and evaluate the attractions of each girl. Perhaps seven or eight young ladies could be assembled to make his trip worthwhile? To bumptious, bluff King Hal, there was no question of impropriety in this simple request, as the French Queen, Eleanore of Austria, could chaperone the maidens to ensure there was no chance of any hanky-panky amongst the guy ropes.

Monsieur le Roi
was outraged at Henry’s suggestion and instructed his envoy in London in August to primly tell his brother England: ‘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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Predictably, Henry was by no means abashed by such a show of moral rectitude. He pressed his demand to scrutinise the would-be brides, 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.’ Castillon, in turn, knew the value of a joke to turn aside royal wrath. He neatly punctured the English King’s pomposity by embarrassing him: ‘Then maybe your grace would like to mount them one after the other and keep the one you find the best broken in. Is that the way the knights of the Round Table treated women in times past?’
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His mocking taunt hit home. Henry ‘laughed and blushed at the same time and recognised that the way he had taken was a little discourteous’, the ambassador reported later. ‘After rubbing his nose a little, he answered: “Yes, but since the king [Francis I] my brother has already so great 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 the king prefer my friendship to that which they have together.”’

Henry was growing impatient and his hopes and dreams of a new bride were fading rapidly. Even Christina now had doubts about the ageing English King as a suitable husband, likely fuelled by his notorious reputation. Her advisers talked openly of the rumours of the sinister demise of Henry’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.’ After all the diplomatic effort, in the end she turned him down. With the wisdom of a lady far more experienced than her years would suggest, she reportedly declared that if she had two heads, just one would be at Henry’s disposal.
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The sands of diplomacy had also run their course. On 17 June 1538, Francis and Charles met in Nice and through the mediation of Pope Paul III signed a ten-year truce, raising the unwelcome spectre of a powerful Catholic alliance against Henry and England, both now dangerously isolated.

Cromwell turned to the Lutheran princely states for new allies and perhaps even a new bride. Another unlikely double marriage was tentatively suggested: Henry to Anne, the twenty-two-year-old sister of Duke William, heir to a newly formed group of duchies on the Lower Rhine.
William, in turn, would marry Princess Mary, Catherine of Aragon’s daughter. On paper, neither alliance nor bride looked too encouraging after the lost opportunities with mighty France and Spain. But it was all Cromwell had left up his sleeve.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Reformation and Retribution

I have pulled down the image of Our Lady at Caversham, where unto was great pilgrimage. The image is plated over with silver and I have put it into a chest fast locked and nailed up and by the next barge that comes from Reading to London, it shall be brought to your lordship
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DR JOHN LONDON TO CROMWELL, AFTER SUPPRESSING THE CHAPEL AT CAVERSHAM, BERKSHIRE, SEPTEMBER 1538
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Aside from the difficult foreign adventures in seeking a blushing bride for Great Harry of England, Cromwell was still fully occupied with formulating and imposing religious reform and converting monastic assets into hard cash. In the pre-Reformation religion, many monasteries gleaned considerable revenues from their guardianship of precious holy relics. Devout pilgrims visited these numerous and sometimes obscure objects of reverence in the confident expectation that a response to an anxious prayer, a generous oblation, could cure their hopeless medical conditions, resolve a tiresome everyday problem or provide some other miraculous assistance.

For example, St Petronilla was reputed to cure fevers; St Clare, those unfortunates afflicted with sore eyes; and St Genow, the painful gout. St Appollania’s ubiquitous molars relieved sufferers from toothache.
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Other
saints could be called upon to help with specific, targeted powers. An intercession by St Anthony of Padua assisted those exasperated people who had lost a possession and St Leonard helpfully opened jail doors and caused prisoners’ fetters to suddenly fall away. Some saints were also designated patrons of particular trades or professions: St Gertrude looked after the interests of rat-catchers; St Honoratus, those of bakers; St Nicholas, mariners; and St Crispin, shoemakers. The volume of daily supplication from the faithful must have deafened Heaven’s community of saints.

For the religious houses, this meant in practice that the holier their relics – or the more of them they possessed – the greater the stream of pilgrims visiting their abbey, bringing in their purses a welcome and steady income. In the face of competition from a hundred other monasteries, each with its own compellingly powerful sacred relics, it was a pious activity all too easily open to abuse by an ambitious or astute abbot or prior. For a few with a keen eye for God’s business, the temptation to exploit the old adage that ‘a fool and his money are soon parted’ must have been impossible to resist. And so it proved down the centuries.

It is not too difficult to view with a jaundiced if not cynical eye, for example, the extravagant claims made by the Benedictine abbey at Bury, Suffolk, for their odd assortment of relics: the coals that toasted St Laurence alive; the nail parings of St Edmund; the penknife and boots that belonged to St Thomas Becket; and ‘other relics for rain … [and] for avoiding of weeds growing in corn’.
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