The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (32 page)

Lord Talbot came next, carrying a banner embroidered with Henry’s arms, leading a section of heralds carrying the king’s helmet, shield and sword. Chief amongst them was Christopher Barker, Garter King at Arms, bearing the dead monarch’s ‘rich coat of arms, curiously embroidered’. Then came the twelve ‘banners of descent’ showing the arms of the king’s favoured marriages and ancestors, led by two displaying his arms impaling those of Queen Jane Seymour and Queen Katherine Parr.

Next came the chariot bearing the coffin, a knight riding at each corner bearing banners depicting saints or deities – St Edward, the Trinity, Our Lady and St George – in a conscious display of the King’s piety.
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Flanking it were six hooded assistants and behind rode the chief mourner and the twelve other mourners, followed by the King’s Champion with his staff and Sir Anthony Browne, bare-headed, leading Henry’s charger, trapped ‘in cloth of gold down to the ground’. Behind, Sir Anthony Wingfield, captain of the guard, led his men, who marched three abreast, dressed all in black, their halberds resting on their shoulders, point down.

Other places were filled by the innumerable members of Henry’s household – the gentlemen, yeomen, grooms and pages of the bakehouse, pantry, cellars, buttery, confectionery, laundry, kitchen, boilinghouse, poultry yard and wood yard, all wearing the black mourning provided. There were his cupbearers, his trumpeters, caretakers and the Keeper of Marylebone Park. Amongst the legion of retainers on the royal payroll in the procession were members of the king’s extensive medical staff: the four physicians – Doctors Chambre, Owen, Cromer and Wendy, his five surgeons, led by John Ayliffe, and two of his apothecaries, Alsop and Reynolds. Listed amongst the queen’s household was Henry’s faithful fool and long-time companion, Will Somers.
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The procession left the palace ‘in goodly order’ and, via Charing Cross, Knightsbridge, Chelsea, Kensington, Fulham, Hammersmith, Chiswick and Brentford, slowly made its way to Syon, some eight miles from Westminster, along the route of today’s Great West Road, the A4,
attracting ‘the great admiration of them that beheld it, which was an innumerable people’. As it wended its way through each village, the priests dutifully came out of their churches, wearing their best vestments, and offered prayers for their dead sovereign, devoutly censing and sprinkling the cortège with holy water as it trundled by.

Shortly after leaving Brentford, the head of the procession reached Syon at about two o’clock in the afternoon, passing through lines of London aldermen and nobility mounted on horseback on either side of the road. The chariot was brought to the west door of the huge 260-ft.-long double-aisled church and the coffin placed on trestles within another gilded hearse inside. The standards and banners were raised on each side along the choir. The effigy was solemnly removed to the vestry.

After further Masses were said by the Bishops of London, Bristol and Gloucester, Paulet, Lord Steward of the Household, set an overnight watch about the king’s corpse ‘done with great reverence and devotion’.

Herein lies a curious legend. During the night, it was reported later, putrid matter leaked from the coffin and, in apparent fulfilment of a sermon delivered to Henry at Greenwich by a friar back in 1534 predicting that ‘the dogs should lick his blood as they had done Ahab’s’,
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stray curs wandered into the church and did just that. According to another version, the coffin’s huge weight caused it to fall, fracturing its outer casing and cracking the lead anthropoid shell within. A third account, by Agnes Strickland in the nineteenth century and quoting ‘a contemporary document’, tells of the leaden coffin

being cleft by the shaking of the carriage, [and] the pavement of the church was wetted with Henry’s blood.

In the morning came plumbers to solder the coffin under whose feet was suddenly seen a dog creeping and licking up the king’s blood. If you ask me how I know this, I answer William Greville, who could scarcely drive away the dog, told me and so did the plumber also.
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It is possible that a soldered joint may have sprung open. Certainly, the king’s body would have been in an advanced state of putrefaction by this time, more than two weeks after his death. If these accounts were true, any damage or hasty repairs could have been hidden beneath the pall.

Between six and seven o’clock that Tuesday morning, after three blasts on the trumpets,
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the procession resumed its slow progress to Windsor amid funereal knells rung in the towers of churches they passed, reaching the royal town at about one o’clock in the afternoon. It was greeted by Eton scholars kneeling bare-headed in white surplices, carrying tapers and singing psalms.

At the bridge foot, the mayor and most substantial men stood on the one side, and on the other, priests and clerks, and by them the corpse passed through the castle gate.
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Within the chapel, another painted and gilded hearse had been constructed, this time 35 ft. high, of two storeys, fringed with black silk, with thirteen pillars bearing candles – the candles made up, it was estimated, of 4,000 lb. of the finest wax. The coffin was placed inside, with the effigy on top of a black velvet pall. Looking down from above, from the queen’s closet, was Katherine Parr, wearing the blue velvet robes, lined with sarsenet, and a purple bodice on her ‘kirtle’ made for the funeral. Below her, the ambassadors and other noblemen watched the splendour and pageantry from the choir, as yet another Mass and
dirige
were conducted.

The next morning, 16 February, after a number of Masses had been said, Gardiner, assisted by Thomas Goodrich, Bishop of Ely, and Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, began the Requiem. Henry’s coat of arms, his shield, sword and helmet were reverently laid upon the altar.

And with that, the man of arms, which was Chidock Paulet, came to the choir floor upon his horse in complete harness [armour] all save his head-piece, and a pole-axe in his hand, with the point downward.
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This weapon was also laid on the altar. After the offering of various palls, Gardiner climbed into the pulpit before the high altar and preached a sermon on the text ‘Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord’. This was a late change of plan: Henry Holbeach, Bishop of Rochester, was originally scheduled to preach.
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Gardiner spoke of the frailty of man and the ‘community of death’ involving both rich and poor, great and lowly, who had suffered such a ‘dolorous loss’ from the death of so gracious a king. But he also comforted them by speaking of ‘the resurrection in the life to come and exhorted everyone to rejoice and give thanks to Almighty God, having sent us so toward and virtuous a prince to reign over us’.
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Six knights removed the effigy to the vestry as the archbishop and the bishops came down to the hearse, singing ‘
Circumdederunt me
’
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and the rest of the funeral canticle.

The vault in the floor of the choir where Henry had asked to be temporarily buried, alongside Jane Seymour, was then uncovered. Sixteen ‘tall yeomen of the guard’ using five strong linen towels then slowly lowered the great coffin into the vault, with Gardiner standing at the head of the grave, reciting the burial service, and the officers of the household crowding around him in the candlelight. As the bishop threw handfuls of earth into the vault, declaiming ‘
Pulverem, pulveri et cinerem cineri
’,
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Paget, Sir Thomas Cheyney – Treasurer, Sir John Gage – Comptroller, Sir Edmund Knyvett – Serjeant Porter, and the four gentlemen ushers broke their white wands of office over their heads and hurled the fragments into the grave ‘with exceeding sorrow and heaviness, not without grievous sighs and tears’. The trappings of Henry’s power and authority had followed him into the vault.

The grave was covered with planks and Christopher Barker, Garter King at Arms, dressed magnificently in his tabard, took up his position in the centre of the choir, surrounded by the other heralds. In a loud voice, he cried out:

Almighty God of his infinite goodness, give good life and long to the most high and mighty Prince, our sovereign lord King Edward VI, by the grace of God, King of England, France and Ireland, Defender
of the Faith and on earth, under God, of the Church of England and Ireland, the supreme head and Sovereign, of the most noble order of the Garter.
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Then he shouted, ‘
Vive le noble roy Edward
’ – a cry echoed three times by the officers of arms about him. Above them, in the rood loft, the trumpets sounded ‘with great melody and courage to the comfort of all that were there present’.
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Various items used in the funeral were later handed over to officials as gifts or fees. These included the cloth of estate of blue velvet, which was given to the Grooms of the Privy Chamber, and an iron chair, covered with purple velvet and fringed with purple silk, and three blue cushions which provided the fee to Hertford as Chamberlain.
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After dinner, the Lords of the Privy Council took to horse and rode speedily to London. The old king was dead. Another, a young, impressionable boy, was on the throne and his ceremonial entry into the capital was planned for Saturday 19 February – with the coronation the next day, Shrove Sunday, in Westminster Abbey.

A new reign had dawned on an anxious England.

On 31 January 1547, Edward had been publicly proclaimed king, his courtiers ‘tempering their sorrow for the death of their late master with the joy of his son’s happy succeeding [of] him’.
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The salvoes of guns firing triumphantly along the battlements of the Tower of London and the strident, clarion notes of the trumpets sounding that afternoon must have startled the Duke of Norfolk, still imprisoned within its walls and tremulously awaiting his grim fate. But those guns signified his reprieve, despite reports to the contrary.
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Norfolk was scheduled to die on the block the very morning Henry died. The legal formalities were all in place; it was simply a question of Hertford and his allies delivering the signed death warrant to the Constable of the Tower. That order was never issued, probably because of their preoccupations with forming a new regency government under Hertford, as Lord Protector of the realm. Perhaps even Hertford wondered whether he could dare to press ahead with the execution. In the event, he took no chances: the Duke of Norfolk remained in the Tower throughout the six years of Edward’s reign and was only released
on Mary’s accession in 1553. The Act of Attainder against him was then reversed and his estates and title restored to him on 3 August of that year. As Earl Marshal, he presided over Mary’s coronation
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and the following year, at the age of eighty-one, he was appointed lieutenant-general of government forces to put down the Kentish rebellion (Wyatt’s Rebellion), caused primarily by Mary’s decision to marry Philip of Spain. But he hardly covered himself with military glory, being panicked into a humiliating retreat back to London with his small force of white-coated royal troops.
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Norfolk died in his own bed at Kenninghall on 25 August 1554
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and was later buried in his new mortuary chapel at Framlingham, Suffolk. His beautifully carved Renaissance tomb was erected five years later.
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Back in 1547, the French king, Francis I, ordered a solemn Mass to be said for Henry’s soul at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.
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He was dead himself in March. The Emperor Charles V renounced his throne in favour of his son Philip in 1555 and died, after living the pious life of a monk, three years later. The three monarchs who had dominated Europe for more than three decades had all gone in the space of eight years.

A week after ascending to the English throne, Edward – still closely guarded inside the Tower – wrote a dutiful letter of condolence, in his best schoolroom Latin, to his stepmother. ‘Since it has seemed good to God, the best and greatest, that my father, your spouse, the most famous king, has now ended this life, the two of us share one common grief,’ he wrote pompously, if not precociously. He continued:

This indeed brings us consolation: he is now in heaven [and] that he has departed this wretched life [and entered] fortunate and eternal bliss.

For whosoever lives a fortunate life here and well governs the commonwealth, as my most noble sire has done, who has promoted all religion and driven forth all superstition, shall have a most sure way into Heaven.

Though nature bids me weep and shed much tears for the loss
of him that has departed, nevertheless scripture and wisdom bids me restrain these sentiments, lest we seem void of all hope in the resurrection of the dead and life eternal.

Since your highness has conferred so much good on me, it is meet I should hasten to bestow upon you what advantage I may. I pray for your highness. Farewell revered queen.

The letter was signed: ‘Edward the king.’
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One of the first actions of his councillors was to award themselves new titles and generous grants of lands, in addition to confirming Hertford as Lord Protector and Governor of the King’s Person. He was also called the ‘Lord Great Master’ – a title with the Stalinist ring of a modern-day North Korean leader.

Secretary Paget swore before the Privy Council a deposition of Henry’s unfulfilled intentions – ‘to have such things paid and performed as was partly owing to them and partly promised’. According to Paget, all these royal good intentions were contained in a book that Henry had slipped into the pocket of his nightshirt. Sadly, the book had now gone missing and ‘ere [these plans] could be achieved, God took him from us’, said the official solemnly. But all was not lost.
Mirabile dictu!
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Paget, like any efficient civil servant, was of course blessed with a remarkable photographic memory and his vivid, detailed and wholly convenient recollections were naturally fully supported by Sir Anthony Denny and Sir William Herbert, his master’s confidants – and subsequent beneficiaries.