Six Wives (92 page)
Authors: David Starkey
* * *
But the vacancy was intended to be a short one only. This is shown by the fact that, despite Jane's death, the ladies of her Chamber were kept together. Henry provided for the young unmarried women, including Anne Basset, by boarding them out with the senior married ladies. He entertained the ladies, young and old, with splendid banquets at Court. And he even supplied them with holiday fun when he sent them off as a group, at his own expense, to view the fleet at Portsmouth. Henry was not being wholly altruistic, of course. He loved the company of women and, whether he had a wife or not, he could not live without it.
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And, who knows, one of the young ladies, like Anne Basset, might kindle his sleeping fires.
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* * *
Nevertheless, as time went by, the King's continuing failure to wed became a subject of concern to the Tudor chattering classes.
Normally, their conversations – at Court, over the dinner-table or in the hunting field – are lost to us. But an extraordinary chance recorded one in the summer of 1539. Even more remarkably, the two main participants were men who have figured in our story. One was George Constantine, Henry Norris's former servant and priest. He was opinionated, talkative and an incorrigible gossip. He was also remarkably well informed. The other was John Barlow, Anne's former chaplain and factotum, who still held the Deanship of the College of Westbury-onTrym, which she had given him. Barlow was an altogether different character. He was a shrewd, taciturn red-head, given to sharp turns of phrase and quick, probing questions.
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In late August 1539 the two were riding together from Bristol to St David's, where John's brother, William, was bishop. And, as they rode, they talked. It seemed ordinary good-fellowship. But, though Constantine did not realise it at the time, Barlow was pumping him for information – perhaps with a view to entrapping him. At all events, their conversation attracted Cromwell's attention and was recorded from memory by Constantine in an effort to exonerate himself.
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* * *
'Hearest of no marriage toward?' Barlow asked. It was a sensitive subject and even Constantine at first tried to steer clear of it. 'I cannot tell what to say,' he replied, 'but methink it great pity that the King is so long without a Queen: his Grace might yet have many fair children.' Barlow returned to the attack: 'But hearest anything of any marriage?' The conversation now became a sort of truth game. 'There be two spoken of,' Constantine replied, with deliberate obscurity. 'Yea, marry! the Duchess of Milan and one of Cleves,' Barlow replied, showing that he too was upto-date with the latest news.
Now that both men had put their cards on the table, Constantine
became more confidential. 'Little Dr Wotton', the ambassador to Cleves, had sent home his companion, one of the Privy Chamber. 'I have forgotten his name,' said Constantine. Barlow prompted him: 'Marry! his name is Beard.' 'It is Beard indeed,' Constantine acknowledged. 'Now, Sir,' he continued, 'this Beard is come home and sent thitherward again with the King's Painter.' 'I pray you keep this gear secret,' he added.
Both agreed that the swift re-despatch of Beard was a good sign. For their attitude to Henry's two possible marriages was not neutral. They were strongly opposed to the marriage with the Duchess of Milan – which they, in any case, thought doomed since her Habsburg family was insisting on a Papal dispensation for the match. 'I pray God it be dashed,' said Constantine. 'For of this I am sure, that it is not possible that there can be faithful amity betwixt the King, the Emperor [who was the Duchess's uncle] and the French King, so long as the King receiveth not the Pope, who is their God in earth.'
In contrast, they were warm partisans of the Cleves match. Constantine, naturally, spoke the most plainly. 'I may tell you', he said, 'there is good hope, yet, that all shall be well enough if that marriage go forward.' 'For', he explained, 'the Duke of Cleves doth favour God's Word, and is a mighty Prince now; for he hath Guelderland in his hand too, and that against the Emperor.'
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* * *
Constantine's and Barlow's partisanship about Henry's next marriage was typical and reflected the wider divisions within the political élite. For the bitter politico-religious tensions of the earlier 1530s had intensified in the years after Jane's death.
On the one hand, people were more aware of the issues and cared about them more strongly. On the other, Henry himself, partly out of policy and partly out of a convinced belief in the
via media
or third way, swung now this way and now that. The result was that policy shifted, with dangerous unpredictability, from Reform to counter-Reform. In the summer of 1538 it seemed as though Cromwell would pull off the coup of an alliance between Henry and the Lutheran Princes of Germany who had formed themselves into the Schmalkaldic League. But the scheme was scotched by Bishop Tunstall of Durham, who, after years of internal exile in the north, came back to the Court and high favour during the Progress of 1538. Another more ambiguous gain for the conservatives was Gardiner's return from his prolonged French Embassy on 28 September.
via media
or third way, swung now this way and now that. The result was that policy shifted, with dangerous unpredictability, from Reform to counter-Reform. In the summer of 1538 it seemed as though Cromwell would pull off the coup of an alliance between Henry and the Lutheran Princes of Germany who had formed themselves into the Schmalkaldic League. But the scheme was scotched by Bishop Tunstall of Durham, who, after years of internal exile in the north, came back to the Court and high favour during the Progress of 1538. Another more ambiguous gain for the conservatives was Gardiner's return from his prolonged French Embassy on 28 September.
Constantine and Barlow were fully alert to the threat presented by these two men. '[Gardiner]', Constantine conceded, 'is learned and, as I think, the wittiest, the boldest and the best learned in his faculty that is in England, and a great rhetorician.' But then came the qualification: '[he is] of very corrupt judgement'. 'He hath done much hurt, I promise you,' Barlow agreed. 'Nay,' Constantine dissented, 'there is no man hath done so much hurt in this matter as the Bishop of Durham.' 'For he,' he added, 'by his stillness, soberness and subtlety, worketh more than ten such as Winchester and he is a learned man too.'
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Despite the successes of Gardiner and Tunstall, Cromwell struck back at the end of 1538 by successfully pinning charges of treason on the Exeters, Montague and the rest of the Pole family, including its matriarch, the Countess of Salisbury. And in the New Year, Carew himself followed them to the block on charges of complicity in the Poles' treason. Past historians have seen these executions as the result of Henry's tyrannical hatred of the surviving members of the rival House of York. In fact, by contemporary standards, the victims deserved their fate, since, as we have seen, they had been root-and-branch opponents of Reform since the earliest days of the Boleyn marriage.
But then, in the Parliament which met in the early summer of 1539, Reform came a cropper. Led directly by Henry and by Norfolk as Henry's willing spokesman, Parliament passed the Act for the Abolishing of Diversity in Opinion, otherwise known as the Act of Six Articles. The principal Article reaffirmed belief in the Real Presence in the Sacrament, to which, as the Corpus Christi Day celebrations of 1536 showed, Henry was passionately committed. 'First', it declared, it was necessary to believe that 'in the most holy sacrament of the altar, by the strength and efficacy of Christ's mighty word, it being spoken by the priest, is present really, under the form of bread and wine, the natural body and blood of our Saviour Jesus Christ' and nothing else.
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The remaining five Articles ruled equally definitively on a whole range of currently disputed positions. Communion 'in both kinds' – that is, by partaking of both the bread and the wine – was not necessary. Priestly marriage was unlawful. Monastic vows should be kept. Masses for the dead were allowable. Confession to a priest was both necessary and desirable.
Only the most radical, known rather confusingly as 'Sacramentaries', disagreed with the doctrine of Transubstantiation as defined by the first Article. But the other five Articles outlawed what had become mainstream Reformed opinion.
The result was a disaster for Anne's bishops. Cranmer argued openly against the Bill in the Lords and was only 'persuaded', Constantine heard, by Cromwell. Hilsey of Rochester likewise compromised. But Latimer and Shaxton refused to bend and resigned their sees in return for pensions. Barlow expressed satisfaction at the news of the pensions, since Latimer owed him money. But his satisfaction was tempered by his awareness of Latimer's outspokenness. 'I am sure', Barlow said, '[Latimer] shall never receive a penny of his pension, for he shall be hanged, I warrant him, ere Christmas!'
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The defeat, then, for Reform was only just short of a rout and Constantine and Barlow were aware of belonging to a party under siege. They had to trust, Constantine said, to 'moderation'. This was not a very safe refuge in Henrician politics. Better to trust, instead, to the Cleves marriage and to the hope that a new wife would mean a new policy in religion.
But was Henry really able and willing to marry? 'His Grace
was
lusty', Constantine lamented, 'but it grieved me at the heart to see his Grace halt [limp] so much upon his sore leg.'
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was
lusty', Constantine lamented, 'but it grieved me at the heart to see his Grace halt [limp] so much upon his sore leg.'
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For Henry had developed a severe ulceration on the calf of his left leg. The ulcer was not syphilitic as some have supposed. Instead, it was almost certainly the legacy of an old jousting or riding injury which had damaged the shin-bone. Splinters of bone remained in the muscle, which created a deep and ineradicable ulceration. It followed a cycle. The ulcer would discharge; heal over; re-infect; swell, burst and finally discharge. And so on. The swelling was agonising; the discharge offered a deceptive and temporary relief.
The uncertainties of illness were now added to Henry's frighteningly unpredictable character. Still worse, at the age of forty-eight, he was suddenly aware of ageing and ageing fast.
He did not like it. Was Anne's supposed gibe that he was impotent becoming true?
Anne of
Cleves
72. From Queen to sister
C
romwell had first floated the idea of a German marriage for Henry during the negotiations with the Schmalkaldic League in 1538. 'The Lord Cromwell', the principal ambassador wrote home after private discussions with the minister, 'is most favourably inclined to the German nation.' '[And he] wants very dearly', the ambassador continued, 'that the King should wed himself with the German Princes.'
romwell had first floated the idea of a German marriage for Henry during the negotiations with the Schmalkaldic League in 1538. 'The Lord Cromwell', the principal ambassador wrote home after private discussions with the minister, 'is most favourably inclined to the German nation.' '[And he] wants very dearly', the ambassador continued, 'that the King should wed himself with the German Princes.'
Unfortunately, the ambassador could think of no suitable Protestant princess. But then he remembered the Duke of Cleves. The Duke ruled a powerful agglomeration of territories in north Germany with their capital at Dusseldorf and had two marriageable sisters, Anne and Amelia. From Cromwell's politico-religious point of view, the Cleves alliance was not ideal, since the Duke was neither Lutheran nor a member of the Schmalkaldic League. But he was closely connected by marriage to the Lutheran leader, Duke John Frederick of Saxony, who had married the Duke of Cleves's eldest sister, Sybilla.
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* * *
Early in 1539 the English took the first soundings in the Saxon court. The English ambassador, Christopher Mont, had two sets of instructions: his official ones from Henry, and another, secret set from Cromwell. The latter were addressed by Cromwell 'to his friend Christopher Mont', and ordered him to make discreet enquiries about 'the beauty and qualities of [Anne], the eldest of the two daughters of Cleves, her shape, stature and complexion'. If his enquiries led him to think that 'she might be likened unto his Majesty', he was to suggest the proposed marriage to the Saxon minister Burchard, though the formal initiative would have to come, it was made clear, from Cleves.
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Anne, Mont quickly discovered, had won golden opinions all round. 'Everyman', he reported to Cromwell, 'praiseth the beauty of the said Lady, as well for the face, as for the whole body, above all other ladies excellent.' Among the superlatives one struck home particularly with Henry. 'She excelleth', it was reported, 'as far the Duchess [of Milan], as the golden sun excelleth the silvern moon.'
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This was high praise indeed. Christina of Denmark, the youthful widowed Duchess of Milan, was, as we have seen, the rival candidate for Henry's hand. She had been closely observed by John Hutton, the English agent in the Netherlands, while she was staying at the viceregal court there. 'She is not so pure white', Hutton reported, 'as [Jane Seymour]. But she hath a singular good countenance, and, when she chanceth to smile, there appeareth two pits in her cheeks, and one in her chin, the which becometh her right excellently well.' She was only sixteen years old, 'but very high of stature for that age'. 'She [also]', Hutton concluded, 'resembleth much one Mistress Shelton, that sometime waited in Court upon Queen Anne [Boleyn]'.
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'Mistress Shelton' was Madge Shelton, Anne's cousin and Henry's old flame.
Hutton was careful to deprecate his taste in women. 'I knowledge myself of judgement herein very ignorant,' he wrote. But, clearly, he knew exactly what Henry liked.
Fired by Hutton's description, Henry sent Holbein to paint the Duchess of Milan. The resulting portrait confirmed all the details of her beauty, down to the dimpled cheeks and chin. It also confirmed that she was Henry's type. He fell in love with the woman, and, when the marriage failed to proceed, remained in love with the picture, which he kept in his collection to his dying day.
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If Anne were really so superior to Christina then she was beautiful indeed.
* * *
But Henry was wise enough at this stage not to trust to mere report. He wanted the testimony of his eyes – or at least of a painter's eyes. 'First', Cromwell informed Mont, 'it is expedient that they should send her picture hither.' Mont broached the matter directly with Duke John Frederick of Saxony. 'He should find some occasion to send it,' the Duke replied. But unfortunately, the Duke continued, 'his [own] painter, Lucas, was left sick behind him at home'.
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'Lucas' was Lucas Cranach the Elder, the Saxon court painter. Illness continued to disable Cranach, it seems, and the English had to try for an alternative.
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