The House of Tudor (28 page)

This time Henry did not wear his horns so pleasantly. Catherine had wounded an ageing man where it really hurt and the French ambassador reported that the King ‘has changed his love for the Queen into hatred, and taken such grief at being deceived that of late it was thought he had gone mad, for he called for a sword to slay her he had loved so much.’ Later, to the acute embarrassment of the Council, rage gave way to tears of self-pity as the King bemoaned his ‘ill-luck in meeting with such ill-conditioned wives’. The wretched Catherine, too, was in a sorry state and when Cranmer was sent to visit her to bring her to a proper sense of her iniquity, he found her in such a ‘frenzy’ of terror and remorse that the kind-hearted Archbishop was moved rather to pity and to fear for her reason.

It was a miserable Christmas all round, made worse by anxiety about Edward, who had been seriously ill with a malarial-type fever. But by early February 1542, when that poor, silly little trollop Catherine Howard had been beheaded on Tower Green and had gone to join her cousin Anne under the stones of St. Peter-ad-Vincula, Henry was slowly recovering his normal self-esteem. All the same, his last two disastrous experiences had put him right off marriage for the time being and he turned instead to more congenial pastimes, such as bullying the Scots and planning further adventures in France.

Margaret Tudor had died the previous autumn at the age of fifty-two, but although her death snapped another link with the past, it made little material difference to the crisis situation building up in Scotland. Margaret’s uncontrolled temper and her unfortunate tendency to allow her private passions to influence her public life had dissipated much of her political credibility and, in any case, she and her brother had been on bad terms for some time. Henry had always disapproved strongly of his sister’s determination to divorce her unsatisfactory second husband, the Earl of Angus, and Margaret never quite forgave Henry for taking Angus’s side in their long, bitter and immensely complicated matrimonial dispute. The Earl eventually sought asylum in England, while his daughter and the King’s niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, was brought up at the English Court.

But if Margaret Tudor had largely failed the cause of Anglo-Scottish friendship, her son’s attitude was even more disappointing. As soon as he was in a position to manage his own affairs, young James had turned obstinately back to France, marrying first one and then another French wife. Equally irritatingly, he remained an orthodox Roman Catholic steadfastly refusing to follow the example of his schismatic and iconoclastic uncle - even when Henry generously offered him the benefit of his experience and sent him detailed instructions on ‘how to create your own national church’.

The King had expended a lot of time and trouble in wooing his nephew but now he was getting impatient. He wanted to secure his back door without further delay and by October 1542 he was ready to take direct action. The Duke of Norfolk led an army across the Border in a full scale raiding expedition which cut a swathe of wreckage and destruction but failed to intimidate the Scots. Instead, predictably, it stirred them to retaliate and on 2^ November an army often thousand attacked a greatly inferior English force at Sol way Moss, north of Carlisle. The outcome was a disaster even more horrifying than Flodden. The Scots were routed utterly and completely at a cost, so it was boasted, of only seven English casualties. This was disgrace as well as disaster and three weeks later Scotland’s misfortunes were crowned by the death of her king. James v, always a melancholic and unstable character, had turned his face to the wall and now the Scottish throne passed to the week-old girl baby born to James’s second wife, Mary of Guise, in the dismal aftermath of Solway Moss.

Fate had dealt Henry triumph in spades and presented him with a first-rate opportunity to solve the Scottish problem. Instead, by a mixture of arrogance, impatience, over-confidence and greed, the King not only wasted his chances but helped to sow the seeds of his little great-niece’s tragedy. The obvious way to achieve a peaceful and (with any luck) permanent union between England and Scotland was by a marriage between the infant Mary Queen of Scots and Edward Prince of Wales; but this was a matter for delicate and tactful negotiation, needing sympathetic consideration of Scottish national pride - which was prickly enough at the best of times - and generous guarantees of Scottish liberties. The Scots could see as well as anyone that the logical result of the proposed alliance would be a swallowing whole of Scotland by England. ‘If your lad were a lass and our lass were a lad, would you then be so earnest in this matter?’ one Scotsman enquired to the English ambassador.

In these circumstances, Henry’s bullying demands that Mary should be sent to England at once; that he should become, in effect, Scotland’s regent; that Scotland should renounce her treaty of friendship with France and make no other foreign treaties without his consent; and that English garrisons should be admitted to Edinburgh, Stirling and Dumbarton had the immediate effect of raising every Scottish hackle and of dismaying and alienating even the pro-English lords. Such demands were, of course, not merely unacceptable, they were - short of total military conquest - unenforceable and Henry had to climb down. In the treaty finally signed at Greenwich on 1 July 1543 it was agreed that Mary should remain in Scotland until she reached marriageable age and the break with France was no longer insisted on. But the damage had been done and the French party in Scotland was rapidly regaining its ascendancy. There was no Duke of Albany to call home on this occasion, but Cardinal Beaton, the powerful and unscrupulous Catholic leader, was strongly pro-French in his sympathies and so, naturally enough, was the Queen Mother, an intelligent and tough-minded Frenchwoman.

Before the end of the year the Scottish Parliament had repudiated the Treaty of Greenwich and was busily refurbishing all the old ties with France. Henry was back where he had been before Solway Moss - in fact he was rather worse off- and a savage punitive expedition against Edinburgh and Leith in the spring of 1544 achieved nothing in the long-term except a further hardening of Scottish attitudes and a strengthening of Scottish determination to keep their baby queen out of the clutches of her wicked great-uncle whatever the cost. As his old friend Charles Brandon told him, the King would get nothing out of Scotland now save by the sword.

While he had been making a considerable hash of his son’s marriage prospects, Henry had done rather better for himself and on 12 July 1543, in a quiet ceremony at Hampton Court, he took his sixth and last wife. Lady Latymer of Snape Hall, born Katherine Parr, daughter of an old-established Northamptonshire family, proved in many ways his best and most successful choice. Already twice married to men much older than herself and twice widowed, the new Queen at thirty-one was still a pretty woman. Even more important, she was a mature, well-educated and sensible woman, experienced in the ways of elderly husbands. As the anonymous author of the Spanish Chronicle put it, she was ‘quieter than any of the young wives the King had had, and as she knew more of the world, she always got on pleasantly with the King and had no caprices.’

Katherine Parr had not sought the honour done to her - rather the reverse. Apart from the obvious perils involved in becoming Henry’s wife, the King was no longer a very attractive proposition physically. He had aged quite noticeably since the Catherine Howard episode and at fifty-two he was grossly fat with suppurating, foul-smelling and acutely painful ulcers on both legs. His mind was still sharp enough but he was growing increasingly moody and suspicious. Often morose and unpredictably bad-tempered, he could be as dangerous as a wounded tiger and it is hardly surprising that Katherine should have quailed at the prospect before her - especially as she was already being courted by Henry’s brother-in-law, the dashingly handsome Thomas Seymour. But Thomas Seymour, like Thomas Wyatt before him, knew better than to enter into amatory competition with his sovereign lord and as soon as the King’s interest became clear, he melted hastily into the background, leaving Katherine to accept the fact that it was plainly God’s will that she should be Queen of England. In the circumstances, it is very much to her credit that she accepted it cheerfully and gave Henry loyal and sympathetic companionship during the last years of his life.

As well as being a good wife, Katherine Parr was also a good stepmother, taking a conscientious and constructive interest in the welfare of her husband’s curiously assorted brood and trying to create some sort of home life for them. She was not, of course, a stranger to the royal family. Her mother had been one of Catherine of Aragon’s ladies and she herself had spent most of her early years at Court. Now she renewed her childhood acquaintance with the Princess Mary - there was only four years’ difference in their ages - and the two women became very friendly. Mary was still spending most of her time in the country, at Havering or Hunsdon or Beaulieu in Essex, a quiet, informal existence usually shared with either her little sister or her brother; but Katherine encouraged her to come to Court more often, wrote to her regularly, lent her money and sent down one of her own servants whom she knew would be welcome ‘for the sake of his music’.

Following in the tradition of those pious and serious-minded royal ladies, Margaret Beaufort and Catherine of Aragon, Katherine Parr took an informed and practical interest in educational matters and was a lively patron of the New Learning. She played an active part in the reorganization of the royal schoolroom which took place during the summer of 1544 and is generally credited with securing the appointment of the Cambridge humanist and Greek scholar, John Cheke, as principal tutor to Prince Edward who, at six-and-a-half, was just beginning his classical training in earnest. The Queen picked another Cambridge man, William Grindal, to tutor the Princess Elizabeth.

Anne Boleyn’s daughter was ten years old now - a pale, sharp-featured, carrotty-haired girl who had not so far attracted much notice in the outside world. As the bastard of a notorious adulteress, she had little value on the international marriage market and at home she had always been over-shadowed by her brother and sister. Her father was apparently quite fond of her, when he remembered her existence, and she took her place as a member of the family on state occasions; but since her mother’s disgrace, the up-bringing of the once ‘high and mighty princess of England’ had been left almost entirely in the hands of her governess. Katherine Parr was the first of Elizabeth’s numerous stepmothers to take the trouble to get to know the child of Henry’s ‘great folly’, who seemed doomed to the life of a poor relation or, at best, marriage to some useful supporter who would be prepared to overlook her unfortunate maternity in exchange for a toehold in the royal family. It may have been politic to gain the support and affection of Edward and Mary, but the Queen was acting out of disinterested kindness when she brought young Elizabeth to Court, gave her apartments next to her own at Greenwich, saw that something was done about her education and offered her friendship and guidance at a time when she was beginning to need them most.

In July 1544 Henry crossed the Channel for the last time to take part in his last foreign war, but before he left a third Act of Succession had reached the Statute Book. This Act confirmed the King’s right to dispose of the crown by will, but made it clear that should Edward fail to leave an heir, and failing any children of Henry’s latest marriage, the throne would pass first to Mary and then to Elizabeth, subject to conditions to be laid down by the King in his will. Neither Mary nor Elizabeth was legitimized by the new Act - the question of their legitimacy was simply ignored - and their constitutional position remained peculiar to say the least.

On 7 July Henry appointed his wife Regent in his absence abroad - an honour not accorded to a Queen consort since the days of Catherine of Aragon - and on the twelfth he set sail for Calais. The attack on France, undertaken in conjunction with the Emperor, was not a great success either politically or militarily, though Henry did achieve what was probably his main objective - the capture of Boulogne, the port used by the French to send military aid to Scotland - and he thoroughly enjoyed himself superintending the details of the siege, riding about the trenches happily occupied in ‘foreseeing and caring for everything’.

The Council and the army commanders had done their best to dissuade the Km from taking the field in person, believing not only that it would be the death of him but that he would be very much in the way. Nothing, though, was going to stop Henry from grasping this opportunity to go campaigning again and to re-create the triumphs of his glorious past. It was not the same, naturally. The sick old man who had to be hoisted painfully on to his horse, or carried round in a litter, bore little resemblance to the splendid young warrior of thirty years ago, but even so his two months’ holiday in France did him a lot of good and he was noticeably better in health and spirits as a result.

It was, it could only be, a temporary improvement, and the following March he was very poorly again with one of the recurring fevers - caused most likely by a flare-up of his inflamed leg - which had been troubling him for the past three years. The King tried hard to conceal his growing infirmity from the public; he continued to hunt and to travel about the country round London, but those closest to him could see a steady deterioration and certain people were already looking towards the future. Already the jockeying for position during an inevitable royal minority had begun and by the summer of 1545 two distinct parties were forming. On the one side stood the conservatives - the old Duke of Norfolk, the right-wing bishops, Gardiner of Winchester and Bonner of London, and the Lord Chancellor Thomas Wriothesley. Opposing them were the progressives, led by the Prince of Wales’s uncle, Edward Seymour Earl of Hertford, and John Dudley Lord Lisle, both able men who had been making a name for themselves in the royal service as diplomats and as military commanders. Behind these two were a number of other privy councillors and courtiers, up-and-coming families like the Parrs and the Herberts and, though he was careful not to draw too much attention to the fact. Archbishop Cranmer himself.