Henry VIII (47 page)
The King's other major building project at this time was at Windsor, where he built a wooden platform that later became known as the North Terrace along the clifftop beneath the royal apartments in the Upper and Middle Wards. It gave him access from his lodgings to the Little Park, via an outside stair: “every afternoon” that summer, “when the weather is anything fair, His Grace doth ride forth on hawking, or walketh, and cometh not in again till it be late in the evening.”
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He was in a buoyant mood, for he was confident that he would soon, at long last, be the father of a prince.
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“The High and Mighty Princess of England”
In 1533, Hans Holbein painted a splendid double portrait of the French ambassadors Jean de Dintevilleâwho begged to be recalled after only one stormy audience with Henry VIII, in June 1533, from which de Dinteville emerged visibly shaking
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âand Georges de Selves. It was a picture that was laden with symbolism, dark hints of mortality, and religious discord.
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It was probably this masterpiece, which was almost certainly painted at Bridewell Palace, that led to Holbein's being taken up by Cromwell, who appreciated his genius and meant to exploit it in the service of the King. After Cromwell had sat for him,
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Holbein soon found himself in demand as a fashionable portrait painter, working on commissions from important people at court.
Many of his portraits survive, some as drawings,
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others as finished works; some, of husbands and wives, were in pairs. Several are known to be lost. These portraits constitute the most important and extensive visual record of any sixteenth-century court and are important source material for costume and jewellery. Holbein must have set up a large studio with several students assisting him and reproducing his works in order to keep up with the demand for them.
Holbein also produced exquisite miniatures, having learned the art of limning from “the famous Master Lucas,” who was almost certainly Lucas Horenbout, whom Holbein “as far excelled in drawing, arrangement, understanding and execution as the sun surpasses the moon in brightness.”
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Fifteen of his miniatures survive, five in the Royal Collection.
It has been suggested, on good evidence, that Holbein worked as a spy for Cromwell.
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It was easy for him, as a fashionable artist, to obtain an entrée to the houses of those whose loyalty to the new régime was suspect: it is surely no coincidence that several of the portraits he painted at this time were of persons about whom Cromwell wanted information, such as George Neville, Lord Abergavenny; Sir Nicholas Carew; and Sir John Russell, none of whom had much liking for Anne Boleyn.
Holbein appears to have found a royal patron in Anne Boleyn, whose religious views he shared. He designed for her an antique-style standing cup and cover decorated with an imperial crown and her falcon badge supported by satyrs,
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as well as the metalwork on the binding of her illuminated manuscript “The Ecclesiaste.” He also designed monogram jewellery for Anne and Henry and executed a set of portrait drawings of the young women of the Queen's circle, all similar in composition. However, no certain portrait of Anne by him survives, and it may be that any that did exist were destroyed after her death.
On 3 July 1533, Katherine of Aragon's erstwhile Chamberlain, Lord Mountjoy, was sent to Ampthill to inform his former mistress of the King's marriage to Anne Boleyn and order her to relinquish the title of Queen. Staunch in her conviction that she was the King's true wife, Katherine refused, despite being threatened by the privy councillors present with an indictment for treason. Knowing of Anne Boleyn's spite towards her, she believed that Henry was being influenced against his true nature to set her aside. Henry had his revenge later that month, when he moved Katherine to a less comfortable residence, Buckden Towers in Huntingdonshire, with a household that had again been reduced in size; of her thirty maids of honour, only ten remained.
That July, Henry set off on a progress which was restricted to the London area because of the Queen's advancing pregnancy; all was progressing well, and at Wanstead in July, Anne and Henry were reported to be very merry.
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At the end of the month, not wishing to upset his wife at this time, he left her at Windsor, saying he was going hunting, when in fact he was meeting with his Council to discuss grave news from Rome:
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the Pope, having learned of the King's remarriage, had threatened to excommunicate him if he did not repudiate Anne by September. Henry refused to be intimidated, nor did he perceive the hand of a vengeful deity in the deaths of two members of his household from plague at Guildford, but moved with his Privy Chamber to Sutton Place, the home of Sir Francis Weston, which was mercifully free of contagion.
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This was not just a hunting progress but an exercise in public relations, for during it the King attempted to win over those whom he suspected of having become disaffected by recent events. He visited Exeter at his house at Horsley in Surrey, where he was entertained with a lavish banquet of twenty-nine dishes,
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and Sir John Russell at Chenies in Buckinghamshire, where he slept on a gold and silver bed with the royal arms embroidered on its tester. On 6 August, Russell wrote he had never seen “His Grace merrier of a great while than he is now”; at all the houses they had stayed in there had been “the best pastime in hunting red deer that I have seen.”
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A week later Henry returned to Windsor, then removed with Anne to York Place and Greenwich, where she took to her chamber on 26 August;
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her Chamberlain had been briefed by Lord Mountjoy as to the arrangements made in the past for Queen Katherine's confinements.
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The King had taken from his treasury a “rich and triumphant bed,” which had been part of the Duke of Longueville's ransom in 1515, and had it placed in Anne's bedchamber, next to a pallet bed with a crimson canopy, on which she would actually be delivered. A new state bed had been built in her presence chamber, where she would receive well-wishers after the delivery.
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But while these preparations were being made, Anne found out that Henry, running true to form during his wife's pregnancy, was being unfaithful to her. The name of his inamorata is unrecorded, but Chapuys described her as “very beautiful” and added that “many nobles are assisting him in the affair,” presumably to discountenance the Queen. Unlike Katherine, Anne created a scene, using “certain words which the King very much disliked,” but he brutally told her that she must “shut her eyes and endure as her betters had done,” and that she ought to know that he could humiliate her as quickly as he had raised her; it was as well she had her bed, because he would not give it to her now. For two or three days, the royal couple maintained a frosty silence; then there was a grudging reconciliation. Chapuys dismissed this as “a love quarrel,” but it is an indication that Henry's passion for Anne had subsided somewhat.
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Nevertheless, it was being said abroad that he was still so infatuated with her that court discipline was becoming very lax.
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The King was planning jousts, banquets, and masques to celebrate his son's imminent birth: he had consulted his physicians and astrologers, and all had assured him that the child would be male. The royal father had not yet made up his mind whether to call the boy Edward or Henry, but had asked the French ambassador to hold him at the font at his baptism.
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Letters announcing the birth of a prince were awaiting dispatch to the English shires and foreign courts.
At last, on 7 September, in a chamber hung with tapestries depicting the legend of St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins, Anne Boleyn gave birth, not to the expected son, but to a healthy, red-haired daughter who much resembled her father.
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“God has forgotten him entirely,” commented Chapuys,
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but the King, although disappointed, was confident that sons would soon follow. After the word “prince” had been changed to “princess,” the letters announcing the birth were sent off
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and Te Deum was sung in St. Paul's for the Queen's safe delivery.
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But the planned jousts and entertainments were cancelled.
On 10 September, when she was only three days old, the King's daughter was given a splendid christening in the church of the Observant Friars at Greenwich. The church and the gallery that led to it were both hung with rich arras, and the silver font placed on a high, railed platform. The royal infant, wearing a mantle of purple velvet furred with ermine, with a long train, was carried in procession to the church by the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk under a crimson canopy borne by four earls. Anne had wanted her borne upon the christening cloth that had been used for the Princess Mary, but Katherine of Aragon refused to relinquish it on the grounds that it was her personal property, brought from Spain.
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Archbishop Cranmer stood godfather at the christening, while the Dowagers of Norfolk and Dorset were godmothers, and the baby was baptised Elizabeth by John Stokesley, Bishop of London. Immediately afterwards, Cranmer confirmed her, with a reluctant Lady Exeter as sponsor.
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Then Garter King of Arms cried, “God of His infinite goodness send prosperous life and long to the high and mighty Princess of England, Elizabeth!” and the trumpets sounded a fanfare. In the flickering light of five hundred torches, Elizabeth was borne back in procession to the Queen's bedchamber, where she received her mother's blessing. The King was not present, but he commanded Norfolk and Suffolk to thank the Lord Mayor and his brethren for attending. That evening, bonfires were lit and free wine flowed in the City.
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At Greenwich, on the same day that the Princess Elizabeth was born, the Duke of Suffolk, a widower of just ten weeks, married his ward Katherine, the fourteen-year-old heiress of Lord Willoughby. This brilliant, spirited, sharp-witted young lady had been betrothed to his son, Henry Brandon, Earl of Lincoln, but Suffolk had had the betrothal annulled in order to marry her himself. Chapuys commented, “The Duke will have done a service to the ladies when they are reproached, as is usual, with marrying again immediately after the death of their husbands!”
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Given that the new Duchess's mother was Maria de Salinas, this marriage involved Suffolk in yet another conflict of loyalties. Yet it also rescued him from financial ruin and brought him the greater part of his lands and wealth, as well as a new country seat, Grimsthorpe in Lincolnshire, which was part of his wife's dowry.
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Despite the thirty-five-year age gap, and the fact that the Duke was growing fat and was no longer the splendid knight who had once excelled in the tiltyard, the marriage was successful. Katherine Willoughby, whose portrait sketch by Holbein is in the British Museum, bore the Duke two sons, Henry in 1534, to whom both the King and Cromwell were godfathers, and Charles in 1537/8; Holbein painted their miniatures in 1541.
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Her former betrothed, Lincoln, is said to have been so upset at losing her to his father that he died of sorrow, and Anne Boleyn, who had little love for Suffolk, is reported to have declared, “My Lord of Suffolk kills one son to beget another.”
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However, Lincoln did not die until March 1534, and had been in failing health for some time, which probably explains why Suffolk had married Katherine himself.
On 1 October, the King's daughter Mary was informed that she must no longer style herself “Princess.” She was told that the King had appointed her a new household of 162 persons, headed by her beloved governess Lady Salisbury, but it would be hers only in return for her acknowledgement of her diminished status. The next day, Mary wrote to her father, defiantly refusing to relinquish her title and censuring him for his conduct in such strong terms that even Chapuys felt she had gone too far.
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A furious Henry abandoned his plans for her household and ordered her to leave Beaulieuâwhere she had been residing and which he was now going to lease to Lord Rochford
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âand go to Hertford Castle. Mary obeyed, but her health had been broken by the strain of the conflict of loyalties that had been forced upon her, and for the rest of her life she would suffer headaches, toothache, palpitations, depression, and amenorrhoea.
On 25 November, the Duke of Richmond, lately returned from Paris, was married to Norfolk's daughter, Lady Mary Howard. It was a union that firmly allied him to the Boleyn faction. The bride was a member of the Queen's household and a staunch advocate of reform, and Fitzroy was a close friend of her brother Surrey. The marriage was a triumph for Anne Boleyn and a slap in the face for the Duchess of Norfolk, who had opposed it. However, it was never consummated,
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and it may be that the Duke, at fourteen, was already showing signs of the tuberculosis that was to kill him, and that the King, mindful of the fate of his own brother Arthur, whose death was said to have been hastened by too much early sexual activity, had ordered the young couple to wait.
There was little love lost between the Queen and Norfolk, however. The Duke had had enough of his niece's malice towards him and her insufferable pride, and had clashed with her on several occasions. Once she used “more insulting language to Norfolk than one would to a dog, such that he was obliged to leave the room.” The Duke was so offended he publicly heaped abuse on her: “one of the least offensive things he called her was âthe great whore.' ”
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Privately, he was of the opinion that she would be the ruin of his House.
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In December, when the Princess Elizabeth was three months old, she was assigned her own household and sent to live at Hatfield in Hertfordshire. Lady Margaret Bryan, who had had charge of the Princess Mary in infancy, was appointed her governess; the Lady Margaret Douglas, late of Mary's household, was her first lady of honour, while Blanche Parry, who was to stay with Elizabeth for fifty-seven years, was a Rocker in the nursery. Sir John Shelton, the Queen's uncle, was Steward of the Household. The King and Queen were distant parents, and made only occasional visits to their daughter,
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although Anne was kept informed of her progress by Lady Bryan.
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When Elizabeth was thirteen months old, the governess applied to Cromwell for permission to wean her; the request was passed on; then Sir William Paulet, Comptroller of the Household, informed Lady Bryan that the King and Queen had consented.
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