Most of those in the reforming camp were not social radicals, except for one group, which became a bogey for the traditionalists: the Anabaptists. In Holland and Germany various sects had grown out of Luther’s Reformation, and the Anabaptists (or adult Baptists) believed in returning to the practices of early Christianity. These beliefs included holding goods in common, which meant overthrowing the feudal ruling classes – although they seem to have been more ambivalent about the rising merchant classes. When they took over the German city of Münster in 1534, the local Protestant rulers joined with Catholics to exterminate them, but the Anabaptists continued as a persecuted minority in north-western Europe. A very small number fled to England, where they may have made contact with the survivors of the fifteenth-century Lollards, but were quickly caught and burned. In England they were very few; but a Dutch Anabaptist coming to London in 1546 and forming a small group there would have been possible.
Of course, like the group in Lamentation, these men would have been vulnerable to infiltration by official spies, of which there were plenty. The slowly emerging world of London printing (at this period most books were imported from the Continent) was watched by the authorities, with printers often being reformers, and some having contacts with exiled English polemicists in Germany and the Netherlands, of whom John Bale (a religious, though not a social, radical) was the most feared. And Anne Askew, hiding in London in 1546, was captured by informers – and later tortured in the Tower by Wriothesley and Rich. She was one of many brought before the Privy Council for questioning during the 1546 heresy hunt; although, as Shardlake observes in my novel, it would have been very unusual for an accusation as weak as Isabel Slanning’s in the story to go that high.
LONDON IN 154 6 was a tumultuous, violent, sectarian and impoverished place. It was only a year since the country had faced a serious threat of invasion. The King’s French war had, literally, bankrupted England – Continental bankers were refusing to lend Henry any more money – and the debasement of the coinage continued apace, to the impoverishment of the lower classes especially. The harvest of 1546 seems to have been a good one, which was probably just as well for the elite; bad harvests later in the decade contributed to large-scale rebellions.
WHITEHALL PALACE, located on the fringes of the city, was an utterly different world. The palace, seized by Henry VIII from Cardinal Wolsey, was extensively expanded and enriched by the King, although its development was restricted as it was bounded on the east by the Thames, and on the west by the great thoroughfares of Whitehall and King Street, leading from London to Westminster. The problem was solved by building the recreational side of the palace on the western side of the roadway, and bridging the road with the magnificent Holbein Gate, where Henry had his private study. The two great paintings mentioned in the book – one showing Henry and Jane Seymour with the King’s father Henry VII and his Queen, and the other showing Henry and Jane Seymour (by that time long dead) with Henry’s three children, and two figures in the background who are believed to have been the royal fools Will Somers and Jane – were highlights of the magnificent decoration of the palace. Scrots’s portrait of the young Princess Elizabeth was painted at this time, and can be seen in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Baynard’s Castle, which like Whitehall Palace no longer exists, was home in 1546 to the Queen’s wardrobe as well as to her sister Anne and brother-in-law William Herbert.
THE ELITE GOVERNING ENGLAND at the end of Henry VIII’s reign was divided by religion, but it was also divided into family blocs. Catherine Parr, like all Henry’s queens, placed family members in positions of importance within her household, such as Lord Parr and Mary Odell, while her brother-in-law William Herbert was an important member of the King’s private chamber, and her brother William Parr took a place on the Privy Council, the King’s executive council, as well as the earldom of Essex.
This would now be called nepotism, but the Tudor view was entirely different – people were expected to advance members of their own family networks. So far as the royal court was concerned, this led inevitably to distant relatives and family hangers-on making their way to court in the hope of a place in royal service, as described in the book.
The Parrs were all on the reformist side, and their family loyalties seem to have been exceptionally tight; more so than their reformist allies and potential political rivals, the Seymours, the family of Prince Edward’s mother Jane Seymour. Thomas Seymour was a drag on his brother Edward, now Lord Hertford. Nonetheless Lord Hertford was close to Henry and had considerable political ability, although when he actually rose to the top after Henry’s death he proved inadequate for the job. Meanwhile, during 1546 William Paget, the King’s Secretary, appears to have moved from being a protégé of Bishop Gardiner’s to an ally of Lord Hertford.
AT THE SAME TIME a young man named William Cecil was beginning to make his career on the fringes of politics. I have invented his position on Queen Catherine’s Learned Council, although he was certainly a friend of the Queen, and moreover wrote the preface to Lamentation of a Sinner when it was published in 1547. During that year he first appears on the record as Edward Seymour’s secretary, beginning the meteoric rise which was to culminate, in 1558, when he became chief adviser to Elizabeth I. Edmund Walsingham, meanwhile, was the uncle of Elizabeth’s famous future spymaster, Thomas Walsingham.
THE FACT THAT all these people knew each other is indicative of just how tiny the Tudor elite was – essentially a group of titled country landowners, though increasingly open to men from the gentry and merchant classes, who sought positions at court to amass wealth and, like Rich and Paget, went on to create their own great estates. Paget and Rich were both lawyers of undistinguished lineage but great ability, who were first chosen for service by Thomas Cromwell – as Shardlake observes, six years after his death much of the political elite still consisted of men whom Cromwell had advanced. ‘Gentleman’ status, meanwhile, was everything for young men like Nicholas Overton, who guarded it jealously; allowed to wear swords and colourful clothes of rich material forbidden to the common populace, they were brought up to see themselves as quite different from the common run.
FOR THE VISIT of Admiral d’Annebault in August 1546 I have followed closely the short account in Charles Wriothesley’s Chronicle. As one traces the ceremonies, one realizes their huge scale. Henry played a prominent role, but this was to be his last hurrah. Five months later he was dead. Greeting the admiral near Hampton Court was also Prince Edward’s first public appearance.
Catherine Parr and the Politics of Henry VIII’s Last Months – An Interpretative Essay
Historians have long puzzled over the huge upheavals in English politics during the last months of Henry VIII’s life. The source material is fragmentary, mainly scattered correspondence and ambassadors’ reports, and the reliability of one major source regarding Catherine Parr, John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, has been called into question. Historians are divided over Foxe; he was a radical Protestant who wrote, highly polemically, about the sufferings of Protestant martyrs in the years before Elizabeth I ascended the throne. Some have said that Foxe is too biased to be credible, adding that where Catherine Parr is concerned he was writing seventeen years after the event he described. Others respond that Foxe was meticulous about trying to get his facts right, whatever gloss he put on them. I tend to agree with those who say that Foxe was an honest and assiduous gatherer of witness testimony, while also agreeing with pretty much everyone that his chronology was notoriously unreliable – of which more below.
If one looks at a timeline of political events in 1546, two things stand out. The first is that during the spring a major heresy hunt was ordered from within the court, targeting people who had denied the truth of transubstantiation. Transubstantiation is the doctrine which claims that during the ceremony of the Mass, the bread and wine are physically transformed into the actual blood and body of Christ; many Protestants, however, disagreed. It was over this point that, in 1539, Henry VIII dr
ew a firm line. Under the ‘Act of Six Articles’ of that year, denial of transubstantiation, or ‘sacramentarianism’, was defined as heresy. One recantation was allowed; a refusal to recant, or a second offence, was punishable by burning alive.
In the 1546 heresy hunt the net spread widely, and those questioned by the council included the younger son of the Duke of Norfolk – who was interrogated about his presence at potentially subversive ‘preachings in the Queen’s chamber’ in Lent – and Henry’s courtier and friend George Blagge. The Queen was clearly under threat herself, as we shall see. The heresy hunt climaxed with the burning of Anne Askew and three others at Smithfield on the 16th of July. (The description of this in this book is based on the account by Foxe.) Meanwhile, though few even in Henry’s circle knew this, plans were being made for a papal emissary, Gurone Bertano, to be received by the King in London in August, to explore whether a rapprochement with Rome, after thirteen years of separation, was a possibility.
One gets the impression from this timeline that the ship of state which, steered by Henry, had for years veered wildly between support of traditional Catholic practice – but without the Pope – and a more thoroughgoing reform, set a firm course during the early months of 1546. With increasing speed it sailed towards the extirpation of Protestant heresy and the victory of those who favoured a traditionalist position – and possibly some agreement with the Pope.
Then suddenly, around the end of July, the ship of state turns round and steers, even faster, in exactly the opposite direction. The heresy hunt stopped dead in July, and some who had been convicted were quietly released, George Blagge being pardoned personally by the King.
In early August, Bertano arrived. He had his first and only meeting with the King on the 3rd. We do not know what was said, but the meeting was clearly unsuccessful. Afterwards, Henry wrote a letter to the Pope to which the Pontiff never replied. Bertano remained in a ‘safe house’ until late September, not seeing the King again, until word of his presence began to get out and he was ordered to go home.
DURING THE AUTUMN months Henry steered the metaphorical ship of state ever faster in a Protestant direction. He went on a Progress to Guildford, which was intended to be brief was but lengthened, probably because he fell seriously ill, and for over a month he stayed at Windsor on the way back. During this period, as was normal during Progresses, the Privy Council was split into two: those attending the King and those left in charge of business in London. Access to the King, as ever, was all-important, and the councillors Henry chose to be with him until he returned to London at the end of October were all either radical sympathizers or those who would bend to the wind, whichever way it blew.
IN NOVEMBER, BISHOP GARDINER, the leading conservative, found himself marginalized and denied access to the King. Then, in December, the other leading traditionalist, the Duke of Norfolk, and his son, the Earl of Surrey, were suddenly arrested and charged with treason. By now Henry’s health was deteriorating fast. He shut himself up at Whitehall Palace with his closest advisers, and in late December wrote a last Will, which appointed a council of sixteen to govern England until his nine-year-old son reached his majority. All the council members were either Protestants or centrists.
SPRING 1546 SAW, as well as the start of the heresy hunt, a complete about-turn in foreign policy. The two-year war against France had been a disastrous and costly failure. The English occupied Boulogne, but were besieged there, supplied by boat across the Channel, strongly opposed by French ships, at enormous cost. Despite his advisers’ entreaties during the winter of 1545–6, Henry refused to end the war.
Meantime, relations were uncertain with the Holy Roman Empire, which was at odds with its own Protestant subjects. England remained formally at war with Scotland, and the Pope continued to be an implacable foe. In March 1546 the ever warlike Henry finally accepted that this dreadful mess would have to be sorted out. Peace negotiations began with France, and a settlement was reached in June. Admiral d’Annebault, who had led the French fleet against England the year before, was invited to come to England as ambassador in August, and enormous celebrations were planned. This was surely a signal of Henry’s intent to make a lasting peace.
At the same time Henry negotiated a new treaty of peace with the other major Catholic power in Europe, the Holy Roman Empire. Peace with Scotland, too, was encompassed in the French treaty.
MOST ASTONISHING OF ALL was the arrival, via France, of the papal emissary Bertano. The previous year Pope Paul III had convened the Council of Trent, part of whose purpose was to see whether the Protestant powers could somehow be reconciled with the Holy See. This, I think, is the context for Bertano’s visit – to establish whether some arrangement could be made between England and the Pope, some formula to allow Henry to keep his Supreme Headship of the Church, which he genuinely believed had been awarded him by God, while making some friendly arrangement with the Pope. Theologically, however, the Royal Supremacy and the papal function were irreconcilable, and on this diplomatic front at least, Henry failed.
IF, AS THE TIMELINE SUGGESTS, March 1546 was the crucial date for changes in both domestic and foreign policy, what happened during that month? I think the answer lies in a development often overlooked – the collapse of Henry’s health.
It is impossible at this distance to be clear what was wrong exactly with Henry by the 1540s, but some things can be said confidently. The old idea that the King suffered from syphilis is long discredited – there is no evidence for this, and much against. At the core of Henry’s problems seems to have been lack of mobility. David Starkey has suggested in his Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (2004) that in Henry’s jousting accident in 1528 he broke his left leg; it healed but left a piece of detached bone in his calf, which decayed and formed a large and painful ulcer. In any event, Henry gradually had to give up his former regime of very active exercise and, as the years passed, he became increasingly immobile. His portraits show growing obesity, especially in the period 1537 to 1540, during his late forties, between his marriages to Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves.
By 1544, measurements for his armour showed a waistline of 54 inches; even a modest further weight gain might give a waistline of around 58 inches by 1546; even for a man of 6'2", this puts Henry at the outside edge of gross, morbid obesity. Why did a man who had so prided himself on his appearance allow this to happen? The most likely explanation is that his initial weight gain and immobility, especially given the Tudor elite’s diet of meat and sweetstuffs, would have made likely the development of type 2 diabetes, a disease not understood at the time. If this happened it would have added another element to the vicious cycle of immobility and weight gain, for Henry would have been constantly hungry and thirsty.
By 1546 it seems that walking any distance was difficult and painful for the King. He already sometimes used a ‘tram’ (a type of wheelchair) to get around the palaces, and had a ‘device’ to get him up and down stairs. And his gross obesity and immobility would have made him prone to yet another problem, deep-vein thrombosis in his legs, both of which were now described as ulcerated (a condition consistent with diabetes). Blood clots would form in the legs, then could become detached and travel to the lungs (to trigger a pulmonary embolism). If the clot can dissolve, a patient can survive, but otherwise dies. The descriptions of Henry’s medical crises from 1541 seem consistent with a series of pulmonary embolisms, the last of which killed him in January 1547, although he would also be liable to strokes or heart attacks – all his organs would have been under tremendous strain.
If Henry did become diabetic as well as morbidly obese around 1540, he could also have become impotent. He had no problems in making his first three wives pregnant, but none of his last three conceived. Catherine Parr was in some ways an odd choice for a sixth wife; she was past thirty and had already had two childless marriages (neither, as in popular myth, to men too old to sire a child). Henry badly needed a second male heir. Prince Edward (again contrary to popular myth) was
not a sickly child, but child mortality in Tudor England was high and, if he died, Henry would be back where he had started, without a male heir. Yet in 1543 he married a woman who was a most unlikely candidate to bear a child. Catherine Parr did not fall pregnant during her three-and-a-half-year marriage to Henry, but she conceived during her subsequent marriage to Thomas Seymour. So Catherine was not incapable of bearing children; but Henry by now may well have been.
None of this, of course, was the King’s fault. If what I suggest is right, Henry was trapped in a dreadful cycle of pain, immobility and consuming hunger. He seems to have suffered no major health crises in 1544 or 1545, but in March 1546 he did fall very ill, perhaps with an embolism, and his life was feared for, although he recovered after some weeks of convalescence. His next health crisis did not come until September, although it was then followed by a whole series of illnesses which culminated in his death in January 1547. I suggest, though, that the March 1546 crisis was bad enough for Henry’s doctors (who, while they may not have been very good at preserving life, would have known well the signs of impending death), his councillors, and Henry himself to realize that he probably did not have long to live, and preparations needed to be made for Prince Edward’s succession. Some final choice between the radical and conservative factions on the council now had to be made, and the crises in foreign policy had to be resolved. The frantic round of diplomatic and political activity that began then and continued for the rest of the year stemmed, I think, from Henry’s March illness.