A Journey Through Tudor England (34 page)

‘
Add but the voice and you have his whole self
.

That you may doubt whether the painter or the father has made him.
’

Boastful inscription in Latin verse in a portrait by Hans Holbein

T
he Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool is the place to come face to face with Henry VIII or, at least, an arresting life-size, full-length, colour portrait of him. Dating from the 1540s or 1550s, this is the finest-quality existing copy of Hans Holbein the Younger’s original painting: a wall mural at Whitehall Palace, which was destroyed by fire in 1698. This portrait type has become the definitive image of Henry VIII: one with which we’re so familiar that we may easily miss the significance, symbolism and iconography of this powerful picture.

Holbein painted the original Whitehall Mural in 1537: you can see his initial cartoon, or sketch, of Henry VIII at the National Portrait Gallery, and a miniature version of the whole mural, captured in the late seventeenth century by painter Remigius van Leemput (an assistant to Van Dyck), at Hampton Court Palace.
The mural featured Henry VIII — in the first life-size, full-length portrait of an English monarch — with his parents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, and his wife, Jane Seymour, all standing around a stone plinth. The mural was a vast nine feet by twelve feet: in other words, a huge, arresting image of the King and his family, big enough to cover one wall in Henry’s Privy Chamber at Whitehall Palace. A quick look suffices to know what a read of the Latin inscription on the plinth confirms: this picture was not to glorify the three figures of Henry’s family, who are depicted with their gaze averted and with closed, even submissive body language; it was, above all, to lionise the dominant figure of Henry VIII himself.

The full-size colour copy at the Walker was produced within a decade or two of the mural: it must have been intended either for another monarch or, more probably, for a courtier. Its provenance suggests links to the Seymour family, meaning it might have been commissioned by Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, before his execution in 1552. This, and the fact that similar copies exist at Petworth; Chatsworth; Trinity College, Cambridge; Belvoir Castle; St Bartholomew’s Hospital; Hampton Court Palace; and Parham House, suggest that this particular image of Henry had acquired an authoritative status. By ordering their own copy, courtiers felt they could demonstrate that they knew the party line; they knew what this portrait said about the King and they embraced that message.

So, what was the message? The clues are in the picture itself …

For a start, Henry is huge. He is barrel-chested, with improbably broad shoulders that are only further exaggerated by the puffed sleeves of his gown. His stance — which was considered improper, even lewd, when painted — mimics the heroic martial pose of a man in full armour. In a masterful, last-minute alteration from the original cartoon for the mural, Holbein turned Henry’s face to stare confrontationally, with a sort of bovine intensity, at the viewer. This is evidently a man to be reckoned with.

Henry does not, however, bear any of the traditional accoutrements of royalty: there is no crown, orb or sceptre. The only signifiers of status are the blue ribbon of the Order of the Garter round his left leg, the magnificence of his clothing and jewellery and the sumptuousness of the setting. His attire is splendid: he wears a red velvet gown, embroidered with gold and trimmed with dark sable fur. His doublet and jerkin are cloth of silver, the former slashed to reveal the shirt below, and adorned with large jewels. He sports a heavy chain of rubies, diamonds and pearls that looks very like the ‘collar of such balas [rubies] and pearl that few men ever saw the like’ described by Edward Hall in 1539. His bonnet and fingers are similarly garnished with gems. He stands on a luxurious Turkish carpet with a detail of classical architecture behind him. This is Tudor bling: Henry truly matches his description by one ambassador as ‘the best dressed sovereign in the world’.

Above all, it is Henry the man, not Henry the King, that this picture emphasises. The impression that this picture was designed to give is best understood by seeing Henry’s body as two triangles: one formed by his vast shoulders and tapering to his waist, and the other from his splayed feet, up his legs. These triangles meet to focus the gaze on his bulging codpiece, protruding through his jerkin. His hands — holding a glove, and the cord to his dagger — frame his groin still further. This picture is about all Henry’s virility and potency.

Why? The previous year had seen Henry suffer two major betrayals: a rebellion against his assumption of the title of Supreme Head of the Church of England and the dissolution of the monasteries by a large number of his northern subjects [see P
ONTEFRACT
C
ASTLE
]; and the alleged adultery of his second wife, Anne Boleyn. The inscription on the plinth at the centre of the original mural praised Henry’s position as Supreme Head, while the characterisation of Henry himself addressed the other issue at stake.

Not only was a wife’s adultery thought, in the sixteenth century, to reflect on her husband’s lack of sexual appetite but, worse still, in Anne Boleyn’s trial, Anne’s allegation that Henry ‘was not skilful in copulating with a woman, and had neither vigour nor potency’ had been read aloud before a gathered crowd of 2,000. The listeners were the very group of important courtiers who would, the following year, be confronted with this ego-appeasing, myth-creating image of the King on the wall of the Privy Chamber. This, of course, is why the portrait needed to be full-length, Henry’s figure so exaggerated and his codpiece centre stage.

Quite simply, this famous picture of the King was a piece of visual spin to recast Henry as a virile alpha male to those who knew better, and his courtiers bought it to suggest they believed the lie. It was so successful that it remains the dominant image of Henry VIII to this day.

The value of conveying messages through art was not lost on Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth. Close to Henry in the Walker is a magnificent portrait of Elizabeth I, painted by Nicholas Hilliard in 1574, which is replete with symbolism. Elizabeth’s wealth is portrayed through her elaborate red velvet gown, the painstaking blackwork embroidery of her shift and her many jewels. The central message is, though, Elizabeth’s status as an unmarried Virgin Queen. The pearls with which she is drenched are a symbol of purity, as are the cherries draped over her right ear. The emblem at Elizabeth’s breast gives the name to the painting: the
Pelican
portrait. A symbol of Christ’s sacrifice, mother pelicans were (wrongly) believed to pluck selflessly at their own breasts to feed their starving young. Here the pelican claims the same sacrificial role for Elizabeth as the mother of her kingdom.

The Tudors certainly knew how to sing their own praises.

‘Yours as long as life endures.’

O
n a high blustery ridge, overlooking the town, the sandstone remains of Pontefract Castle belie its important royal history: a history of incredible bad luck.

Known as the ‘key to the North’, the first motte and bailey castle was built here in the 1080s by the de Lacy family. By the early thirteenth century, it had been rebuilt as a strong stone fortress, and it was here that the deposed Richard II was held prisoner and killed by Henry IV in 1400, reputedly by slow starvation. Later, Pontefract, as one of the last royalist strongholds, would be besieged three times during the Civil War. It was demolished when local people petitioned Parliament for its destruction in 1649. Before then, it had served as the setting for Henry VIII to be betrayed, twice.

Although now in ruins, Pontefract evokes its formerly grand and impressive self. In Henry VIII’s day, it was described by the French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, as ‘one of the finest castles in England’. Evidence remains of its large keep, the fifteenth-century Great Kitchen with bakehouse, brewhouse and ovens, the
Norman and Elizabethan chapels, Great Hall and royal apartments. However, the modern world — and nature — has encroached: trees grow in the royal apartments, modern houses sit on top of what once was John of Gaunt’s Shillington Tower and a 1960s housing estate abuts the Constable Tower, creating quite a contrast between the old and new.

At this great and strategically important castle, Henry VIII would be undone by acts of treachery and disloyalty on two occasions. The first was in late 1536. In October, up to 50,000 men rose in rebellion against him across Yorkshire and Lincolnshire: it remains the largest peacetime rebellion against a reigning monarch in English history. Here at Pontefract Castle, the rebels amassed and drew up their manifesto of twenty-four demands.

The rebels’ fears were partly financial: they had heard rumours that the King planned to charge taxes on cattle, white bread, cake, goose and capons, and on weddings, christenings and funerals. They were also concerned that the King’s Council was made up of ‘persons of low birth and small reputation’ (a powerful statement about the commitment to hierarchy in Tudor England, even among ordinary people).

Above all, though, their worries were religious. They described themselves as Pilgrims of Grace fighting ‘for the preservation of Christ’s church’; they even marched behind a banner bearing the five wounds of Christ. They feared that the King was planning to pull down the parish churches, and steal the Church jewels and plate. As one rebel, John Hallom, stated in 1537, ‘because the people saw many abbeys pulled down indeed, they believed the rest to be true’. They feared that ‘heretics’, like Thomas Cromwell, were infiltrating the country and, like the monks at Charterhouse, they strongly objected to Henry’s adoption of the title of the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Above all, as their leader, Robert Aske, would later state: ‘The suppression of the
abbeys was the greatest cause of the said insurrection’: they were vehemently opposed to the dissolution of the monasteries.

Their disquiet was not without reason, but from Henry VIII’s egomaniacal point of view, the uprising was nothing but a completely treasonous betrayal. He was particularly affronted by the presumptuous suggestion that his subjects knew better how to rule than he, and was keen to suppress the rebellion entirely. Moreover, he had reason to be afraid of them: if they had wanted to, the rebels could easily have defeated the 9,000-strong royal army and even have deposed him.

Nevertheless, Henry was persuaded to negotiate with the rebels, which the Duke of Norfolk did on his behalf in December 1536. In exchange for their disbanding, Norfolk promised the rebels a Parliament in the north to consider their concerns, and a pardon for their rebellion. The rebels agreed and left Pontefract for home but, in the new year, when no Parliament had been called, fresh revolts broke out. It was just the excuse for which Henry had been looking to take savage revenge.

In short, Henry had set them up. In early 1537, between 144 and 153 people were executed for their involvement in the revolts, and the leader Robert Aske was ‘hanged in chains’ (in the gibbet irons) in York. Convinced that monks were leading figures in the rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace was also pivotal to Henry’s decision to suppress not only the ‘lesser monastic houses’, as ordered in March 1536, but all 800 religious houses in England.

The second betrayal was more personal. In July 1540, Henry VIII married his fifth wife: Katherine Howard, a young, attractive girl of sixteen to twenty-four years of age (her date of birth is unknown), who was formerly Anne of Cleves’s maid-of-honour. Henry VIII was delighted with his new wife, and took her on progress to York in the summer of 1541 (the only time he ever went that far north). It was while staying at Lincoln and then at
Pontefract Castle that Katherine, with the help of Jane, Lady Rochford, received Thomas Culpeper, a young gentleman of the King’s Privy Chamber into her rooms, for ‘many stolen interviews’.

It was not Katherine’s first dalliance: it later emerged that before her marriage she had flirted with her instructor on the virginals, Henry Manox, and gone so far as to lie in ‘na ed bed’ with a man called Francis Dereham, whom she had promised to marry (when put together, promises to marry and consumnation constituted legal marriage). Four days after her arrival at Pontefract in 1541, Katherine foolishly appointed Dereham as her secretary. Some historians have suggested that both this and Katherine’s meetings with Culpeper were simply an attempt to purchase their silence about her past, but a letter from Katherine to Culpeper suggests otherwise. She writes, ‘it makes my heart die to think I cannot be always in your company’ and signs off, ‘yours as long as life endures’. We cannot be 100 per cent sure that Katherine and Culpeper were lovers, but they certainly acted very rashly indeed.