1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (11 page)

By June 1536, after Elizabeth was bastardized in late May, all Henry’s children were illegitimate and unable, therefore, to inherit the throne. Henry was in a worse position than he had ever been and this was compounded in June. At the same time that Cromwell was assuring Chapuys that Henry was thinking of making Mary his heir, Henry insisted that Mary should submit to swearing an oath that acknowledged Henry as ‘Supreme Head in Earth, under Christ of the Church of England’. In addition, she was also to swear that the marriage between Henry and Mary’s mother had been ‘by God’s law, and man’s law, incestuous and unlawful’. In other words, Mary was required to declare her own bastardy. The document suggests she resisted doing this. Mary had signed her name after declaring the king’s position as Supreme Head, as if to write no more, but then was evidently induced to write a further paragraph proclaiming her parents’ marriage invalid, under which she signed again. Henry’s decision to press for this declaration after years of allowing Mary not to subscribe to this position relates almost certainly to the strength of his conviction about his rightful position as Supreme Head and his desire to assert his pre-eminence anew (as he did in other ways at this time, see chapter 11), in light of the humiliating betrayal and bruising damage he had just suffered. This accords with Henry’s behaviour when Mary initially refused to sign – he grew ‘desperate with anger’ and swore ‘in a great passion’ that if she did not, she and several others would suffer for it. One other, and not mutually exclusive, possibility is that Henry had started to reconsider his options. Chapuys reported in early June that there had been a provocative suggestion made by Robert Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, who had ‘stated the other day in the Privy Council in the King’s presence, that, considering the Princess was a bastard, as well as the Duke of Richmond, it was advisable to prefer the male to the female for the succession to the Crown.’ Chapuys worried that ‘this opinion of the Earl not having been contradicted by the King might hereafter gain ground and have adherents’. Chapuys certainly interpreted the timing of Henry’s insistence as evidence that Henry was gearing up to legitimate Richmond and wanted Mary’s status to be indisputable. In mid-June, threatened with legal proceedings against her if she didn’t conform, Mary signed.
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Until such time as Jane bore children, the next-in-line to the throne was now James V of Scotland. His sister (and therefore, second in line to the throne) was Henry’s niece, Margaret Douglas, daughter of Henry’s elder sister, also called Margaret. In June 1536, it was discovered that Margaret Douglas had secretly married the Duke of Norfolk’s younger brother, Lord Thomas Howard. For one so close to the throne to marry without consulting the king was sheer folly, possibly even high treason. It suggested, as the act of parliament concerning the attainder of Lord Thomas stated, that ‘the said Lord Thomas falsely, craftily and traitorously hath imagined and compassed, that in case our said Sovereign Lord should die without heirs of his body, which God defend, that then the said Lord Thomas by reason of marriage in so high a blood… should aspire… to the Dignity of the said Imperial Crown of this Realm’. Henry ‘was very much annoyed at his niece’s marriage’ and in July, both Margaret and Thomas Howard were sent to the Tower. Lord Thomas was sentenced to execution (he, in fact, died in the Tower on 31 October 1537), but Margaret was excused death, largely, Chapuys thought, as the marriage had not been consummated, but also perhaps because her mother pleaded with her brother, the king, for mercy.
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With three illegitimate children and a future possible heir in the Tower, the situation seemed hardly able to get any worse. But it did. In early July, Richmond fell ill, and on 23 July 1536, Henry’s beloved and only son died of tuberculosis. At this point, Jane Seymour was not even pregnant, and a month later, Henry would indicate his doubt whether she would conceive. The timing could not have been worse – earlier in July, parliament had passed an act which, for the first time, did not confine the succession to the legitimate line but allowed Henry to designate whomever he liked as his successor. The act had not named a successor, for fear that if ‘such person… should be so named, (they) might happen to take great heart and courage, and by presumption fall into inobedience and rebellion’, a clause that spoke of Henry’s growing fear of betrayal. It is possible that this new act had deliberately opened up the succession and with it the possibility that Richmond could one day inherit the throne. If it had, the king’s hopes and intentions would only have intensified his grief at his son’s death.
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Henry reacted strangely to the news. He initially ordered the Duke of Norfolk, Richmond’s father-in-law, to arrange a secret funeral. This was done at Thetford Priory in Norfolk according to the king’s instructions, as Chapuys observed: ‘Richmond, whom the King had certainly intended to succeed to the Crown, after being dead eight days, has been secretly carried in a wagon, covered with straw, without any company except two persons clothed in green, who followed at a distance.’ The two persons were George and Richard Cotton, who had been governor and comptroller of Richmond’s household. Only three other people attended the funeral: Norfolk, Richmond’s brother-in-law, the Earl of Surrey and his widow. Such a quiet, guarded affair was a hardly a fitting funeral for a duke of this rank, let alone the son of a king. It was as if Henry wanted ‘to sweep the whole thing under the carpet’. Within days though, Henry had written to Norfolk reproaching him for not having buried Richmond honourably. Such contradictory behaviour suggests that Henry was experiencing a mixture of denial, confusion and deep grief.
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C
HAPTER
9

Masculinity and Image

I
n 1536, Hans Holbein the younger painted a new portrait of Henry VIII. This painting, conserved in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in Madrid, is the only surviving picture of Henry VIII universally agreed to be by Holbein himself. It marked a departure from previous representations of the king. This was partly simply a result of Holbein’s extraordinary talent and his astonishing and innovative technique of representing his sitters with almost photographic realism. Yet, the painting is also remarkable because of the characteristics that it appears to give Henry VIII: strong, ultra-masculine qualities that were even more forcefully deployed in a full-length portrait of Henry VIII painted by Holbein a year later. Although the Holbein original of this full-length representation – a wall mural at Whitehall Palace – was destroyed in the late seventeenth century, multiple copies of it mean that it now is the primary image through which we imagine and identify Henry VIII. As a result, the qualities with which it imbues Henry are ones that we now associate with him. The process of creating a picture is a complex thing – how much the finished result depends on the painter, or, in this case, the sitter and patron cannot be known – but it is probable that Henry VIII had something to say about how he was depicted. The production of these pictures, which conveyed strength and virility so hot on the heels of the events of early 1536, and the attribution of qualities so far from those being associated with Henry VIII at that moment, suggest that the themes of these portraits were influenced by the events of 1536. Perhaps they can be seen as a reaction to the challenge that 1536 had presented to Henry VIII’s sense of his own masculinity.

The Thyssen Portrait

Holbein had first visited England between 1526 and 1528 and in this period produced several portraits for Thomas More and his family. He returned in 1532 and at some point between 1532 and 1537 was employed by Henry VIII. In September 1536, Holbein’s friend, Nicolas Bourbon, described him in a letter as the ‘royal painter’ and, although the royal account books for May 1531 to January 1538 are lost, we can see that from 1538, Holbein received a salary of £30 a year, which was paid quarterly.
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The Thyssen portrait was probably painted after the execution of Anne Boleyn on 19 May 1536 and Henry’s engagement to Jane Seymour the next day. It is small: 28 by 20 cm, but its size belies its power. It shows Henry VIII almost looming out of the small frame. Against a vibrant blue background, the king is pictured with his face turned to a three-quarter angle and his eyes looking back to the viewer. His chest appears vast, so much so that his shoulders do not even fit in the picture, and the image is made more overpowering by the opulence and finery of his clothing and jewellery. Such magnificent clothing contrasts with the smooth and realistic structure of Henry’s broad face: the high cheekbones, the strong jaw emphasized by his clipped beard, the small, piercing eyes with their heavy lids, his long nose and tight, pursed lips. It is not a wholly flattering depiction. But, rather than showing a handsome, softened image as in, for example, Joos van Cleve’s imagined portrait of Henry VIII in 1535, Holbein’s image imbues Henry with a certain severity, steeliness and power. This forceful sense of mastery and potency was undoubtedly Holbein’s goal. One commentator epitomized the picture when he wrote that ‘the unbridled vitality of this ruler can be tangibly felt’.
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It is a striking image in a way few earlier pictures of Henry were. In the portrait of Henry painted in the 1520s, he is shown as a round-shouldered insipid youth. In Lucas Horenbout’s miniatures, Henry is wan, anemic and insubstantial. In sharp contrast, the Henry of Holbein’s 1536 portrait has been transformed into a force to be reckoned with. Here, he appears magnificent, powerful, potent, strong, fierce and calmly terrifying. It was a remarkable new image of the king. It also is not too great a stretch of the imagination to conclude that as far as portraits were concerned, after this point, this representation became the ‘officially sanctioned image’ of Henry VIII. This new image wasn’t intended for propaganda in the modern sense of the word – it was not designed to be seen by vast numbers of people – but it was to be seen by those people who mattered, and it was intended to communicate certain ideas about the king’s character. Holbein’s ability to attribute character through his paintings can be seen by comparing the Thyssen with Holbein’s portrait of Jane Seymour, also painted in 1536. While Henry’s shoulders and upper arms do not make it into the picture, in order to emphasize his grandeur, practically all of Jane’s voluminous sleeves do. She might also be ornately bejewelled but her positioning, stance and expression mean that, in comparison to Henry’s steely power, she looks petite, demure and submissive.
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This portrait was an image painted by Holbein but it is unlikely to have been solely of Holbein’s making in inspiration and message. The production of portraits was a process of negotiation. Images of Henry produced as a result of a royal commission needed, above all, to satisfy the monarch’s conception of himself. They were given in anticipation of what would make them pleasing to the sitter. So while Henry must have been recognizable in Holbein’s portrait, it is likely that the picture was also acceptable because it depicted a vision of the king’s character of which Henry VIII approved. It is clear that Holbein responded to the needs and expectations of his monarch, and it is also inconceivable that he would not have been aware of the events at court in the early part of 1536 and the resulting political climate. Whatever the process of creation, his final product was evidently a great success, for it formed the basis of all the later images of the king.
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The Whitehall Mural

One of the images strongly influenced by Holbein’s portrait of 1536 was his full-length portrait of Henry painted the following year. This familiar image was part of a wall mural painted in the king’s chambers at Whitehall Palace. As such, because the palace burned down in 1698 (only the Banqueting House remains standing), the original painting was destroyed, and only the original sketch (cartoon) of Henry and two later seventeenth-century copies of the whole mural remain. There are also a large number of sixteenth-century copies, some dating from within Henry’s lifetime, of the portion of the mural that comprises Henry VIII’s portrait. This extraordinary image was the first full-length life-size portrait of a monarch in England, and one of the first in Europe.
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This powerful image is how we know Henry VIII. The historian G. R. Elton once famously suggested that Henry VIII is the only English monarch identifiable from his silhouette alone. The silhouette of Henry in our mind’s eye is a man standing with legs astride, with extraordinarily wide shoulders bulked out by padded clothing and with arms bent at the elbow. This silhouette was the one given to Henry in Holbein’s full-length portrait, and this, together with the image of Henry’s face in Holbein’s Thyssen portrait, have ingrained themselves in our collective consciousness. When we think of Henry VIII, we visualize the stance, bulk, clothing and countenance of these images. But even more than this, Henry VIII’s image makes us all think we know him. David Starkey has argued that Holbein’s full-length portrait is not just the most memorable image of an English monarch, ‘it
is
Henry… the reason why he fascinates us… the beginning of his biography and the key to his mind’.
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The full-length portrait of Henry VIII is part of the Whitehall mural, which also showed Henry VII and his wife Elizabeth of York and Henry VIII’s third wife Jane Seymour, grouped around a stone plinth or altar. They stand on a richly draped carpet against a background of ornate architectural features, including cartouches supported by mermen and mermaids and a large scalloped shell. They are all dressed in rich fabrics – Henry VII and Elizabeth of York wear gold, lined with ermine. He leans an arm on the top of the altar, while she folds one arm over the other and gathers her skirts in one hand. Jane Seymour stands with her hands clasped in front of her, as demurely as she had in the portrait of 1536, and a small dog is curled up on her train. All three avert their gaze from the viewer – the wives are particularly submissive, with closed body language. To the left of the altar, Henry VIII stands squarely but at a slightly defiant angle, his feet planted wide apart and his arms bent at the elbow, and with one hand he carries his gloves while the other rests on the cords of his dagger. He looks, arrestingly, straight out at the viewer. The mural measures roughly nine by twelve feet and, judging from the cartoon, the impact of the vast mural must have been tremendous. Henry VIII, in particular, at over six feet tall and extraordinarily broad, must have been hugely intimidating.
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