Young Henry: The Rise of Henry VIII (36 page)

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Authors: Robert Hutchinson

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Henry, with reluctant bad grace, attempted to smooth the cardinal’s ruffled dignity:
As to the business of the porters, long before your return to Italy they had received orders to allow no one to pass on any legal suspicion, even with our letters patent, without diligent examination of their baggage.
As we had no intention that this should prove an annoyance to you, nor hinder your journey, or cause you any loss, we request that you take this in good part.
We regret that greater caution and prudence was not shown by the officers in discharge of their duty. As it was done in fulfilment of their oath, we trust you will not consider them deserving of punishment.
You will do us wrong if you think the worse for this fact.
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This was as much of an apology as Campeggio was ever to get. After two weeks in Dover, he finally arrived on French soil on 26 October 1529, still seething. One can only hope that at least he was free from the pain from his gout.
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Henry found it impossible to forgive Katherine for her telling
coup de théâtre
at Blackfriars. On St Andrew’s Day, 30 November, the royal couple dined together and the queen taxed him about her ‘long suffering the pains of Purgatory on earth’. She was ‘very badly treated by his refusing to dine with and visit her in her apartments’, she grumbled. Henry snapped back that ‘she had no cause to complain of bad treatment, for she was mistress in her own household, where she could do what she pleased’. As for not eating with her, ‘he was so much engaged with business, owing to the cardinal having left the affairs of government in a state of great confusion that he had enough to do to work day and night to put them to rights again’. What was more, he did not sleep with her because he was not her legitimate husband. If the Pope did not declare their marriage null and void, Henry ‘would denounce the Pope as a heretic and marry whom he pleased’.
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Much against his will, Thomas More succeeded Wolsey as Chancellor and the disgraced cardinal was banished north to York. Sensing the blood of a kill, his enemies closed in and he was arrested for treason as he sat down to dinner in his palace at Cawood on Friday 4 November. He died on the way back to London at the Augustinian abbey of St Mary’s, Leicester, on 29 November, probably from dysentery, although there were some who believed ‘he killed himself with purgatives’.
125
He was aged about sixty.
Henry did not immediately give up on his efforts to secure a papal annulment. On 13 July 1530, the peers of England sent an address to Clement VII, praying him to consent to the king’s desires and avoid the ‘evils which arose from delaying the divorce’. The parchment, with eighty-five red wax seals attached, remains in the secret archives of the Vatican to this day.
126
This was also to no avail. Even Katherine despaired at Rome’s failure to come to a decision, any decision, just or unjust. ‘God knows what I suffer from these people; enough to kill ten men, much more a shattered
woman who has done no harm,’ she plaintively told her nephew Charles V in mid-October 1531.
127
Henry was ever the man of action. The title ‘God’s Deputy on Earth’ complemented his self-vision of imperial majesty. Exasperated with popes, cardinals and bishops, the Defender of the Faith now moved to sever all links with Rome and to take his first steps towards independence of the church in England – with him as its Supreme Head. This was adroitly achieved via a series of legal measures steered through Parliament by his capable and cunning new adviser Thomas Cromwell, who had his own aspirations for change in the Church in England.
128
The king also had a new champion in Thomas Cranmer, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in succession to Warham, who had died in August 1532. Cranmer’s support for the ‘King’s Great Matter’ was impeccable: he had been private chaplain to Anne Boleyn’s father, now elevated to the earldom of Wiltshire and Ormond.
On 1 September 1532 Anne herself was raised to the peerage when she was created Marchioness of Pembroke with a munificent annuity of £1,000. Henry then took her on to glittering meetings with Francis I of France in Boulogne and Calais, where she wore a scintillating array of jewellery heartlessly confiscated from Katherine of Aragon.
The king’s paramour remained deeply unpopular in England. Cromwell’s legion of informers reported reams of public slander, both sacred and profane, about her in the noisy taverns and marketplaces of England. The Lancashire parson James Harrison promised: ‘I will [have] none for queen but Queen Katherine! Who the devil made Nan Boleyn, that whore, queen?’
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The Colchester monk John Frances declared that when Henry had met Francis I, Anne had ‘followed his arse as the dog follows his master’s arse’.
130
It was shortly afterwards that Anne welcomed Henry into her bed for the first time. About the middle of January 1533, she found she was pregnant and a jubilant Henry secretly and bigamously married her on the 25th in a chamber above the Holbein Gate in his Palace of Westminster.
Her condition dictated that some speed was necessary to contain public scandal. Cranmer convened his ecclesiastical court at Dunstable,
Bedfordshire, near Ampthill, where Katherine and her now tiny household had been exiled by the king. She resolutely refused to appear. At ten o’clock on the morning of 23 May 1533, the archbishop declared her marriage ‘to be against the laws of God’ and ‘divorced the king’s highness from the noble lady Katherine’.
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At last Henry was free of his barren wife. His mistress was expecting their first child, and God willing, it would be a son.
Anne was ostentatiously crowned by Cranmer in Westminster Abbey on Whit Sunday, 1 June 1533, in a spectacular ceremony that cost Henry an estimated 100,000 gold ducats, plus another 200,000 obsequiously donated by the City of London
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– equivalent to more than £55 million at today’s values. By anyone’s standards, a high price for an heir.
Sir Thomas More, who had resigned as Lord Chancellor in May 1532, was conspicuous by his absence.
Despite her amply cut flowing robes, Anne’s pregnancy was obvious. Henry’s corps of physicians was unanimous that the child would be a boy. Like his father before him, the king also consulted astrologers who confidently predicted the desired outcome.
Circular letters announcing the birth of a male heir had been carefully written out for immediate dispatch to the great and good once Anne had delivered both Henry and England’s hope for the future.
At four o’clock in the afternoon of Sunday 7 September 1533, at Greenwich Palace, Queen Anne gave birth to a baby girl. She was called Elizabeth after Henry’s beloved mother.
Within that silent, unhappy palace, a clerk sighed, picked up his pen and painstakingly began to squeeze an extra two ‘S’s at the end of the word ‘prince’, on the first of a pile of those circular letters.
133
Henry’s dreams remained unfulfilled. His Tudor dynasty remained just a heartbeat away from oblivion.
 
 
Henry’s breach with Rome and his supremacy over matters religious set the bloody tone for the remainder of his almost four decades on the throne of England. Many were to die as a consequence of his dynastic ambitions in a series of executions that made the scaffolds in the cities of England a butcher’s block of stinking gore and entrails.
Among the first to die was his grandmother’s favourite, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, who had strenuously opposed the annulment of the king’s marriage and refused to swear an oath under the Act of Supremacy which gave Henry control of the church in England. After months of cruel imprisonment, the aged and infirm prelate was executed on 22 June 1535 on Tower Hill.
His journey to the scaffold, carried in a chair – he was too old and weak to walk – was hastened by the unfortunate decision by the new pope, Paul III, to make him a cardinal. Although prevarication had been honed to a fine skill, timing was not the Vatican’s forte. The king angrily declared that he would ‘send [Fisher’s] head to Rome for the cardinal’s hat’.
Then it was the turn of the king’s friend Sir Thomas More to face Henry’s rough justice. Royal promises of his immunity over the issue of the marriage proved mere hot air and his resignation as Lord Chancellor on 16 May 1532 did not save him. He had been condemned to perpetual imprisonment for cleverly avoiding taking the Oath of Succession that recognised Anne Boleyn as the king’s lawful wife and their children as the legitimate heirs to the throne. Anyone refusing to take the oath was guilty of treason and More, as a revered national figure, was just too important to escape retribution. He was beheaded with one blow of the axe on the morning of 6 July 1535 after a perjured trial.
Katherine died, lonely and neglected, at Kimbolton Castle, Huntingdonshire, probably from cancer of the heart, on 7 January 1536. She had last seen Henry and her daughter Mary late in the summer of 1531.
Anne Boleyn did not live up to her personal motto: ‘The Most Happy’. After she suffered several miscarriages, Henry became weary of a wife whom he increasingly saw as a peevish and arrogant tartar and alleged that she had tricked him into marriage ‘by means of sortileges [sorcery] and charms and that owing to that, he would hold it … nullified’.
His chief minister, Thomas Cromwell was the ideal man to free him of such a termagant wife. After he scrabbled around finding dubious evidence, she was accused of adultery with five of the king’s courtiers as well as plotting Henry’s death. One alleged accomplice was her brother George, Viscount Rochford, who was charged with committing incest with the queen. At her trial at the Tower, witnessed by 2,000 awestruck and enthralled spectators, a slip of paper was produced recording Anne’s damning description of her husband’s poor performance in bed: ‘
Que le Roy n’estait habile en cas de soi copuler avec femme, et qu’il n’avait ni vertu ni puissance
’ – ‘The king was not skilful when copulating with a woman and he had not virtue or power’. If nothing else, this was enough to condemn her.
Rochford and his fellow courtiers were executed on 17 May 1536 and two days later Anne was beheaded by a single sweep of a long two-handed sword wielded by a French executioner especially brought over from St Omer at a fee of £24.
Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the king’s illegitimate son by Bessie Blount, married Mary Howard, daughter of the Third Duke of Norfolk. The marriage was never consummated and he died, probably from tuberculosis, on the morning of 23 July 1536 in St James’ Palace. He was just seventeen.
Henry still harboured fears about the threat of the Yorkist nobility and in November 1538 Thomas Cromwell swept up the surviving distant members of the White Rose faction – who coincidentally were also numbered amongst his countless bitter enemies.
Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, Henry Lord Montague, Sir Edward Neville and Princess Mary’s old governess, Margaret Pole,
Countess of Salisbury, were all arrested. The first three were executed on 9 December at Tower Hill. The sixty-seven-year-old countess was imprisoned in the Tower and eventually was led to the scaffold on 27 May 1541. She refused to lay her head on the block saying, ‘So should traitors do [but] I am none neither.’ The executioner was a ham-fisted, inexperienced youth who limply told her that this was ‘the fashion’. He repeatedly hacked her grey-haired head and shoulders before he could bloodily finish the job. Montague’s heir Henry disappeared within the Tower and died some time after September 1542. Exeter’s twelve-year-old son Edward was held there until Mary ascended the throne in 1553 when he was eventually freed.
On 30 May 1536, Henry married Jane Seymour, one of Anne’s ladies in another secret wedding, this time in the Queen’s Closet at Westminster.
At two o’clock in the morning of Friday 12 October 1537, Henry’s elusive dream of a male heir was at last transformed into happy reality. After a harrowing thirty hours in labour, Jane Seymour gave birth to a boy, named Edward, at Hampton Court. But she died twelve days later, aged twenty-eight, probably from puerperal fever and septicaemia.
Analysis of Henry’s symptoms and the changes in his appearance as shown in portraits, suggests that from the late 1530s Henry probably suffered from Cushing’s syndrome, a rare endocrine abnormality that causes gross obesity in the body’s trunk and increased fat around the neck, as well as weakening of the bones and diabetes. In some cases – and Henry was possibly one – the condition turns the victim into a paranoid psychotic. In his last years he could barely walk and was carried around his palaces in a kind of sedan chair, called ‘the king’s tram’.
The king had three more wives – Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard and the matronly Katherine Parr – but by then was probably incapable of procreating.
Henry died speechless, alone and friendless in the great carved walnut bed within his secret apartments in Westminster Palace at around two o’clock in the morning of Friday 28 January 1547.
As with his father, his death was kept a close secret for three days with road blocks set up around London and England was sealed off from Europe by closure of the ports.
The king’s legitimate male heir, nine-year-old Edward, was proclaimed king on 31 January, as the cannon boomed out their salutes from the ramparts of the Tower and from ships moored on the Thames.
The Tudor dynasty had been secured – for the moment anyway.

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