Tudor (33 page)

The aim of Henry's invasion attempt had been to cripple Scotland before he turned his attention, once again, to France. The prestige of Henry V's victories had helped protect the throne of his infant son Henry VI well into his majority. Henry VIII hoped that territorial gains in France would, similarly, secure the throne for his son, Edward, were Henry to die before the boy reached adulthood.

For James V there was little hope of peace with Henry and the difficult task he faced in defending his country from his belligerent Tudor uncle was made still harder by illness. On 6 December, at the end of a long day of military planning, James left Edinburgh for Falkland Palace, twenty-one miles from his capital. He was exhausted
by the time he arrived, and went to bed. The next day he was too sick to be moved, vomiting copiously, and suffering severe diarrhoea. Feverish and anxious he ‘did rage and cry out, and spake but few wise words thereafter'.
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On 8 December the dying king learned that his wife had delivered a daughter at Linlithgow. The Scottish crown had come to the Stuarts through a woman.
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Unless James' daughter married another Stuart it seemed certain the dynasty would end with one as well. ‘It cam wi' a lass and it will gang wi' a lass', are the last coherent words James is reported by tradition, as having said.
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James V had ruled Scotland since he was sixteen, when he escaped the damaging control of his stepfather, Angus, with the help of his mother, Queen Margaret. He was only thirty when he died on 14 December, his body grotesquely swollen. In England his death was ascribed to ‘regret, sorrow and rage' over Solway Moss. Certainly James had been bitterly angry at times, but his symptoms are suggestive of cholera rather than depressive illness. He had fought for his life as his body ran dry, fearing what his country and his daughter, the new Mary, Queen of Scots, would face without him.

At Henry's court James' twenty-seven-year-old half-sister, Margaret Douglas, mourned him, as was her duty. She was back in favour and, with the king's daughters, was amongst eighteen attendants at his wedding at Hampton Court on 12 July 1543. Henry's sixth wife, the twice-widowed Katherine Parr, was thirty-one years old and the kind of woman who had always attracted him: strong-willed, clever, passionate and sensual. He had spotted her amongst his daughter Mary's ladies-in-waiting. At the time Katherine Parr was in a love affair with Prince Edward's younger uncle, Thomas Seymour, a vivid figure, ‘fierce in courage, courtly in fashion, in voice magnificent'.
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But when the king's interest became clear Katherine had little choice but to sacrifice her love for Seymour to marry Henry.

A few months later, in February 1544, the secretary of the Spanish nobleman Juan Esteban, Duke of Najera, was invited to Whitehall with his master to meet the queen. They travelled to the palace by
barge, admiring the Thames on the way. ‘It is not possible, in my opinion, that a more beautiful river should exist in the world', the Spaniard noted, ‘the city stands on each side of it, and innumerable boats, vessels and other craft are seen moving on the stream', and ‘never did I see a river so thickly covered with swans'. Whitehall had a well-laid-out garden with walks decorated with statues, and carvings of birds, monsters and other creatures. Inside Katherine Parr greeted them in her chambers. She was extremely animated with ‘a lively and pleasing appearance', and was dressed in a magnificent gown of cloth of gold, worn with sleeves lined with scarlet satin and trimmed with red velvet. ‘Suspended from her neck', he also noted, were ‘two crosses, and a jewel of very rich diamonds'.

Having asked her visitors to sit down, Katherine called for music. While the queen danced with her brother, Margaret Douglas and the princess Mary danced with other gentlemen. Margaret was in silk and Mary in a violet gown set off with a petticoat of cloth of gold, her auburn hair glittering with her jewelled headdress. At the end of the evening the duke kissed the queen's hand, and asked if he could also kiss Mary's, but the princess insisted on a kiss on the lips, in the English manner. The Spanish secretary thought her very pretty and ‘well shaped', and was told she was ‘so much beloved throughout the kingdom that she is almost adored', but that she was careful ‘to conceal her acquirements'.

Mary had learned from experience that it can be helpful to be underestimated and was now at court only because her father no longer regarded her as dangerous. Henry believed a husband could yet make her so, so he had no intention of having her married, even if it meant she died a childless spinster. He wanted no potential challengers to the claims of his son. For Mary's friend and cousin, Margaret Douglas, a wedding also seemed far off. Happily, however, that was about to change. Instead of using resources to invade Scotland, Henry intended to build up a body of Scottish support for a marriage between the infant Queen of Scots and his son Edward, thus uniting
the kingdoms under the English crown. Margaret Douglas was to be a pawn in these plans, with Henry offering her as a bride to a man who regarded himself as the rightful holder of the Scottish throne: Matthew Stuart, Earl of Lennox.

A descendant of James I of Scotland, Lennox had returned from exile in France the previous year, only to be disappointed in what he could achieve in pursuit of his ambitions. He hoped he would do better leading a pro-English Scottish party from England.
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Under the treaty Lennox made with Henry, he had to agree to recognise Henry's ‘right' of overlordship in Scotland and convert to the religion of Henry's Church of England. Then he was introduced to Margaret. It had been agreed that both parties would have the opportunity to accept or reject the marriage after they had seen each other.
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Margaret proved delighted with Lennox. Described as ‘a strong man of personage well shaped . . . with a good and manly countenance . . . he was most pleasant for a lady'.
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Lennox was equally delighted with Margaret, who he found as beautiful as others had judged her as a girl, and talented and clever as well.

With the match settled, the princess Mary showered Margaret with wedding gifts of balas rubies, table diamonds, sapphires and pendant pearls, brooches and girdle buckles. Henry gave Lennox still more substantial gifts of land, principally in Yorkshire, where they were to reside at Temple Newsam, a house only completed in 1520, and which had belonged to one of the executed leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace. On the morning of 29 June Margaret and Lennox married in front of the king and queen.
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It was to prove a love match as well as an effective political partnership, but the Lennoxes had been obliged to stomach some disappointment. Margaret's name was not mentioned in the Third Act of Succession, which had been given the royal assent that spring.

Henry was aware it was unlikely he would have more children and so he had Mary and Elizabeth named as Edward's heirs, following any children he might have with Katherine Parr. Neither Margaret
Douglas nor Henry's other nieces, Frances and Eleanor Brandon, was mentioned, however. The Act merely stated that Elizabeth's heirs would be named later in letters patent. As the previous Act of 1536 had observed, he feared named heirs might ‘take great heart and courage, and by presumption fall into inobedience and rebellion'. Unlike his spinster daughters, his nieces were married, and into great noble families: Margaret Douglas to Lennox, Frances Brandon to Harry Grey, Marquess of Dorset, and her younger sister, Eleanor Brandon, to Henry Clifford, Earl of Cumberland.

Henry's decisions on the succession were about defending the rights of his children and on a personal level Henry was very fond of Margaret. He wrote to her from Calais that September, as the French campaign continued, sending the new bride his special ‘recommendations'.
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Six days later Henry's army enjoyed a great victory with Boulogne surrendering to English forces. As had happened in the past, however, Henry was let down by his ally. On 18 September, Charles V concluded a peace treaty with Francis I. England was left to fight on alone through 1545, defeating invasion attempts and attacks on Boulogne, while launching massive raids into Scotland in answer to the arrival of French reinforcements there. It dissipated the wealth Henry had taken from the church and smashed the economy. Henry's oldest friend and one-time brother-in-law Charles Brandon was worn to the bone, and died of pneumonia in August shortly after he had returned home from fortifying Portsmouth. In June 1546, his money exhausted, Henry was obliged to make peace with France.

Only recently recovered from the birth of her son, Henry, Lord Darnley, Margaret Douglas was by this time already back at court.
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Appointed with her cousins, Frances and Eleanor Brandon, as a lady-in-waiting to Katherine Parr, she was now to have a front-row seat to the paranoid and bloody denouement of Henry's reign.
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The fifty-five-year-old king was increasingly bedridden. His waist, once measuring a trim thirty-two inches, was a gross fifty-four inches, and his legs suffered recurring ulcers. Yet Henry found it hard to forget
his youthful chivalric glory. In his favourite psalter, where Psalm 37:25 read ‘I have been young and now am old', he wrote in the margin ‘a grievous saying'. It was all the more so when it meant he had so little time left to protect Edward. He wanted an awe-inspiring image for the little boy and had his son painted in the famous Holbein pose: skinny legs spread, his fresh, eight-year-old face looking commanding, straight at the viewer. But however Henry had him painted, Edward was still just a boy, ‘the most amiable, and the gentlest thing of all the world', one of his tutors observed.
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Edward was fond of the queen, and fonder still of his elder sister Mary, the nearest thing he had had to a mother since babyhood, and in whose company, he said, he felt a ‘special content'. ‘Although I do not frequently write to you, my dearest sister,' he wrote to her that year, ‘yet . . . I love you quite as well as if I wrote to you more frequently'; indeed he observed, ‘I love you most.'
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As Edward's nearest royal relative, Mary was the obvious choice for regent if Henry died while Edward was a minor.
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But if Mary married, would Edward be safe from an ambitious prince? Henry feared not. And what of Edward's council? What dangers might they both face there?

Since 1533 and the break with Rome the quarrels of the Wars of the Roses had been replaced with religious divisions. Courtiers were now driven not only by personal ambition, but also by competing ideologies; some wished for further evangelical reform; some wanted to maintain the status quo, and others wished to reverse the break with Rome. In Italy the Council of Trent had recently opened. The church's teachings were to be discussed and defined anew, and this threatened to leave Henry's Reformation behind. Humanism was to be hugely influential in what became known as the Catholic Revival or (more negatively) the Counter-Reformation. Henry's anti-papal stance meant England could not be part of that, yet he persisted in seeing Lutheranism and the still more radical Swiss Reformed Churches as heretical.

In Parliament in December 1545, the same month that the Council
of Trent had opened, Henry had berated both houses for their quarrels, complaining that the Bible was being ‘disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every ale house and tavern'. His role as the arbiter of religious truth was a power he was now determined to remind his subjects forcibly was his alone, and would be inherited by his son. As in 1534 and 1536, when he threatened his daughter Mary to demonstrate that he would not tolerate any opposition to his royal will, so in 1546 Henry's queen was the first to be used as an example and warning that it was for the king alone to declare on religious issues.

Katherine Parr had a strong interest in religious reform. She had promoted evangelical tutors for Edward and every afternoon evangelical chaplains were invited to preach to her ladies. The historian David Starkey believes it was the princess Elizabeth who unwittingly brought to the king's attention the true radical nature of Katherine's religious inclinations.
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Aged twelve, Anne Boleyn's daughter was proving an excellent linguist, and in imitation of her great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, she had begun to do her own translations of religious works. In 1546 she gave her father a New Year's gift of a translation into French, Italian and Latin of a composition of her stepmother's: a book of prayers and meditations printed in 1545. It reflected the Lutheran belief that faith alone, without the necessity of carrying out good works, was all that was necessary for salvation, and Starkey suggests that far from pleasing the king, the gift made him realise that Katherine was involving herself in theological matters and encouraging Elizabeth to do so too.

Katherine further exposed herself to danger, however, in a forceful letter that she wrote to the University of Cambridge on 26 February 1546. Responding to a request for her intercession with the king on the university's behalf, Katherine once again waded into her husband's preserve of theology, chiding the Cambridge scholars for writing to her in Latin and instructing them that the purpose of learning was only to set forth Christ's teachings, and that all else was vanity. The very next day the Imperial ambassador reported to Charles V that
there were rumours circulating that Henry would discard Katherine and marry again. These spread rapidly and circulated at least into early April, after which they faded. A famous story later told by the Elizabethan martyrologist, John Foxe, may well reflect something of what had happened.