Henry VIII (48 page)

On 14 December, the household of the Lady Mary, as the former Princess was henceforth to be known, was disbanded; when Lady Salisbury refused to surrender Mary's jewels to the Queen, she was summarily dismissed. Mary was sent to live in her half-sister's establishment, where she was assigned the meanest chamber in the house. Her new governess, Anne, Lady Shelton, the Queen's aunt, did her best to make her life a misery, and Mary went in fear that the Boleyn faction would try to poison her. She was missing her mother dreadfully, but the King would not let them meet, even when Mary fell seriously ill. Instead, he sent his own physician to her, and allowed Katherine to send hers. Thanks to the good offices of Chapuys, Katherine managed to smuggle heartening letters to Mary.
³⁸
But her father, in thrall to her jealous stepmother, refused to see her when he visited Elizabeth,
³⁹
who took precedence over Mary in everything.

Very few now dared speak out in favour of the former Queen and her daughter. The Marquess of Exeter, whose sympathies lay with Katherine and who loathed Cromwell and deplored the King's new religious policies, remained sitting on the fence, but his wife was so active and vociferous in Katherine's favour that Henry warned them both that they “must not trip or vary for fear of losing their heads.”
⁴⁰
After that, Lady Exeter kept quiet. Chapuys thought that aristocratic opposition to the Boleyn marriage was far more cohesive and widespread than it actually was, but although Katherine and Mary had several influential supporters, it is clear that there was no organised court faction acting on their behalf.

45

“The Image of God upon Earth”

The Christmas of 1533 was spent at Greenwich, where “the King's Grace kept great court, as merry and lusty as ever”
¹
—as well he might be, for Anne was once again pregnant.
²
Her gift to him at New Year, 1534, was an exquisite table fountain of gold, studded with rubies, diamonds, and pearls, from which “issueth water at the teats of three naked women standing at the foot of the fountain”;
³
it was probably designed by Holbein.

In January, Lady Lisle, still in pursuit of places for her daughters in the Queen's household, sent Anne a rare breed of toy dog, which was entrusted to Sir Francis Bryan. He told Her Ladyship, “the Queen liked [it] so well that she took it from me before it had been an hour in my hands.” Anne called the dog Little Purkoy (or Pourquoi), and “set much store” by him. Later that year, Lady Lisle sent Anne a caged linnet and eighteen dotterells (a small breed of plover); the latter were slaughtered at Dover, brought to court by Lord Rochford, and served to the Queen six at a time. Anne liked them “very well,” and assured Lady Lisle that the linnet was “a pleasant singing bird, which doth not cease to give Her Grace rejoicing with her pleasant song.”
⁴
But there was no offer of a place for either of Lady Lisle's daughters.

Cromwell's influence was growing steadily. In 1534, he was appointed Master of the Rolls and Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, and in April finally succeeded in ousting Gardiner, who never forgave him, and replacing him as principal Secretary to the King, an office that would become of supreme political importance during his tenure. In this new capacity, Cromwell wielded power by charming people into his confidence or intimidating them with the threat of treason—overtly or, more often, by implication. Through his many contacts and a network of paid informers and numerous grateful clients, he gained access to a great deal of confidential and sensitive information that was stored for future reference and sometimes used against those whom the King or Master Secretary wanted out of the way.

It was essential that opposition to the King's new marriage be crushed, and on 23 March 1534 an Act of Parliament settling the succession upon the Princess Elizabeth and disinheriting the Lady Mary was passed. The Act required every loyal subject, when so required, to swear an oath recognising its provisions. Most people complied, but there were notable exceptions. Katherine and Mary both refused to take the oath, and the King knew better than to use force, for the fact that the Emperor was Katherine's nephew represented a powerful deterrent.

Both Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher also declined to swear, and were committed to the Tower for their disobedience. When More was questioned by Cromwell, he declared: “I am the King's faithful subject. I say no harm, I think no harm, but I wish everybody good. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith, I long not to live.”
⁵
Through several interrogations, he responded to all demands to take the oath with uncompromising silence, and reminded his distraught daughter and family that he had always looked first upon God and then upon the King, “according to the lesson His Highness taught me at my first coming to his noble service.”
⁶
His silence spoke volumes, and Henry feared it would serve as a battle cry for those who opposed him. “By the mass, Master More,” commented Norfolk, “it is perilous striving with princes.”
⁷
More did not need his old friend to remind him of the peril in which he had placed himself.

Fisher was not so reticent; he had stated categorically, “The King our Sovereign Lord is not the Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England.” Now he was refusing to acknowledge Henry's marriage. His defiance could only be construed as treasonous.

Once again, the King was confident that he would soon have a son whose birth would bring such rejoicing that few would even think of questioning his legitimacy. To mark this pregnancy, he ordered a medal of Anne to be struck, inscribed with her portrait in relief and the legend A.R. THE MOOST HAPPI.
⁸
Every care was taken of the expectant mother: when her morning rest was disturbed by the noise made by Henry's peacocks and pelican, which had been a gift from the “New Found Land” (America) and now had the run of the gardens at Greenwich, he arranged for Sir Henry Norris to remove them to his own house nearby, and paid for three timber coops to be built for them there.
⁹

The Queen's apartments at Eltham were converted into a nursery “against the coming of the prince,” with a great chamber, a dining chamber, an arraying chamber, and a bedchamber, in which was a cradle covered with a canopy of iron. The roof timbers were all painted yellow ochre.
¹⁰
The King ordered his goldsmith, Cornelius Heyss, to make a silver cradle of estate, which may have been designed by Holbein. It had pillars adorned with Tudor roses, precious stones set in a gold border around the rim, and gold figures of Adam and Eve crafted by Heyss and painted by Holbein. The bedding was embroidered with gold, and cloth of gold was purchased for a layette.
¹¹

In April 1534, doubtless anticipating that there would soon be a new Knight of the Garter, the King commissioned a magnificent new register of the Order, called the
Liber Niger
or Black Book of the Garter after its black velvet binding; in it were enshrined the Order's statutes, its history, and the records of its ceremonies. The Black Book survives today,
¹²
a beautifully illuminated manuscript which contains illustrations of the enthroned King surrounded by his Knights, and of him bringing up the rear in a Garter procession.

On 22 June, Lucas Horenbout, who had worked with others on the Black Book of the Garter, became a naturalised subject of Henry VIII and was appointed King's Painter for life. He was assigned a tenement at Charing Cross in which to set up his studio, and was licensed to employ four foreign journeymen.
¹³
One of his first commissions in his new role was a miniature of the fifteen-year-old Duke of Richmond,
¹⁴
which shows Fitzroy in an open-necked nightshirt and embroidered nightcap, further evidence that he was known to be terminally ill. The miniature bears out a Venetian envoy's statement that the Duke greatly resembled his father in looks, although his nose is bigger than Henry's. (In the 1930s it was thought that the anonymous full-length portrait in the Royal Collection of a Tudor courtier dressed entirely in scarlet was Richmond, but the costume is of a later date.)

Henry had planned another visit to Calais in the summer of 1534, but he postponed it until April because the Queen's pregnancy prevented her from accompanying him. Instead he went on progress, staying at the More, Chenies, Woking, and Eltham, where he visited his daughter Elizabeth. On 28 July, he arrived at Guildford, where Anne had planned to join him, but it is not known if she actually did so. Henry stayed there until 7 August, then rode north to tour the Midlands.
¹⁵

On 23 September, Chapuys, who had accompanied the court, reported from Woodstock that the Queen was not after all to have a child, and that the King had begun to have doubts as to whether she had ever been pregnant at all.
¹⁶
This sounds rather like a face-saving, damage-limitation exercise on Henry's part, since it would have been virtually impossible for Anne to keep up the deception of a false pregnancy for eight months—in June, she had had “a goodly belly”
¹⁷
—and what probably happened is that sometime in July or early August, she lost the child she was carrying, or it died soon after birth. It was not usual for royal stillbirths or miscarriages to be publicly announced, but an even stricter veil of secrecy seems to have been drawn over this event than had been the case with Katherine of Aragon's lost babies. That Anne's infant was born prematurely may be inferred from the fact that she did not formally take to her chamber preparatory to the birth.

According to Chapuys, the outcome of this tragedy was that the King “renewed and increased the love that he had had previously towards another very beautiful maid-of-honour of this court.” Her identity is unknown, but she was almost certainly the mistress he had dallied with before the birth of Elizabeth in 1533, because she was similarly concerned to befriend the Lady Mary. She was certainly not Jane Seymour, because Chapuys did not consider Jane a beauty.
¹⁸

Frustration and resentment over his continuing lack of a legitimate son, coupled with fear for the health of his illegitimate one, made the King more determined than ever to justify himself to the world, and even less tolerant of those who opposed him. In October 1534, Henry suppressed the Order of Observant Friars at Greenwich,
¹⁹
whose members had consistently spoken out against the nullity suit and the King's supremacy. The friary church was converted into a mill for the royal armoury.

In November, a new Act of Supremacy enshrined in law the King's title of Supreme Head of the Church of England, finally severing the latter from the Church of Rome. Henceforth, ecclesiastical matters and doctrine would be the responsibility of the sovereign, who now regarded himself in every respect as God's deputy on Earth, a latter-day King David or King Solomon, responsible for the temporal and spiritual welfare of his subjects. From now on, according to Richard Sampson, Bishop of Chichester, who wrote a treatise on the subject, “The word of God is to obey the King, and not the Bishop of Rome.”
²⁰

The advocates of reform, such as Queen Anne, Cranmer, and Cromwell, applauded the King for leading his people out of darkness into the light. Those bishops who were reluctant to accept the change were intimidated into doing so by Cromwell, whose jurisdiction over spiritual affairs was second only to the King's, and whose pursuit of the Reformation was so relentless that Reginald Pole called him an emissary of Satan. Anything that smacked of popery was suppressed. Hardliners even condemned the Order of the Garter and its patron saint St. George as suspect, but these were dear to the King and were allowed to remain.

To the end of his life, Henry VIII remained a devout Catholic who deplored Lutheran and other heresies, but he had to maintain a balance between the radical evangelicals at his court, who were pressing for ever wider reforms and secretly flirting with Protestantism, and the conservatives, who would have given anything to turn the clock back. The King had always been interested in theology; now he devoted more time than ever to reading up on doctrinal issues and making copious marginal notes. He would then lend the books he had read to Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber of opposing viewpoints, and ask for their comments before making up his own mind.

Because of diplomatic considerations and pressure from factions at court and foreign princes, Henry was not always consistent in his religious policies. He was unwavering in his adherence to the doctrine of transubstantiation, believed in purgatory and clerical celibacy, and insisted on maintaining the Latin rituals and ceremonies he had grown up with; he was no iconoclast, and his closets and chapels were full of painted or graven images.
²¹
His Chapel Royal remained largely unaffected by the religious changes he had effected. But he was not in favour of extreme unction, individual confession, or the traditional mystical concept of ordination to the priesthood. He burned Lutherans for heresy and papists for treason,
²²
preferring to forget that he himself had once written a tract defending the Pope's authority. He never lost an opportunity to proclaim “his zeal for the faith with all the resources of his mind and body,”
²³
and one of his gold chains bore the inscription PLUS TOST MORIR QUE CHANGER MA PENSEE (I prefer to die rather than change my mind).
²⁴

At court, religious observances remained largely unchanged, although more emphasis was laid on preaching. At York Place, the King built a special open-air pulpit in the shape of a Renaissance-style loggia in the former privy garden, now a cobbled courtyard. Four times as many courtiers could attend as could fit into the King's chapel.
²⁵
Some windows of the royal lodgings faced the “preaching place,” and the King and Queen would watch from what appears to have been the council chamber.
²⁶
Archbishop Cranmer advised preachers new to the court that they should avoid controversial issues and preach for no more than one and a half hours, “for the King and Queen may perhaps wax so weary that they shall have small delight to continue throughout with you to the end.”
²⁷
Henry particularly enjoyed the sermons of the ardent reformist Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, and on several occasions entered into theological debates with him.
²⁸

Henry and Cromwell mobilised every resource and propaganda tool at their disposal to promote and glorify the so-called New Monarchy that evolved in the wake of the Act of Supremacy and became a focus for the heightened English nationalism of the period. Henry's enhanced status was reflected in the words of Lord Morley, who described him as “the noblest King that ever reigned over the English nation, the father of our country, an ark of all princely goodness and honour, one by whose virtue, learning and noble courage England is newborn, newly brought from thraldom to freedom.”
²⁹

Cromwell enabled the King to rule like a virtual despot by clever management. He manipulated the machinery of government to serve his master's will, and ensured that the upper chamber of Parliament was packed with lords loyal to Henry and that MPs sympathetic to the new order—of which there were many—were elected to the Commons, so that there would be little opposition to the momentous legislation that was passing through Parliament's hands. Thus the monarch, the peerage, and Parliament became allies in the new order, sharing a common aim and interests. Against such an alliance protest was virtually useless.