Henry VIII's Health in a Nutshell (5 page)

Further indications of the change Henry was undergoing are demonstrated by his treatment of his long-suffering wife Katherina during the height of his passion for Anne. While he was still in his late 30s, the king always showed a modicum of kindness and gentility toward the queen by maintaining Katherina’s place at court.
⁵²
He may have moved Katherina out of his adjoining rooms so he could install Anne in her place, but at least in public he showed Katherina respect and consideration. Although Katherina had been replaced in his affections and he was attempting to nullify their marriage, he publicly “praised her good qualities at length”
⁵³
. Even when he was so smitten with Anne that he was mocked throughout Europe, he was still endeavouring to treat Katherina as decently as possible given the situation. That changed drastically after 1531. Except for some rare sporadic moments of benignancy, the king became vicious in his treatment of his first wife. He tortured her with petty emotional cruelties, such as demanding she turn over her jewels and her christening clothes to his new wife, as punishment for opposing his will. Repulsively, he celebrated when his former queen finally died in January 1536. This seems especially vile considering that with her last breath Katherina declared her unceasing love for the handsome prince she had married.

1. Figure 6 -
   A vintage engraving showing
   Anne Boleyn
   

When Katherina died, Anne was pregnant and, despite Henry’s occasional infidelities, was still reasonably secure in his affections. Yet within a few months the king had charged her with adultery and treason, charges that are almost unanimously considered fraudulent, and he had her beheaded on 19 May 1536. Henry seems to have convinced himself that, despite the ludicrousness of it, Anne had betrayed him with more than 100 men and was planning on poisoning his elder children
⁵⁴
. The king’s growing paranoia would send many other loyal courtiers to their deaths in the coming years.

After Anne’s murder, the king’s behaviour became nearly unrecognizable from that of the man he once was. He had become mentally unstable enough to set in motion plans to try Mary, his own daughter, for treason because she refused to agree with his claims about her mother and his right to be supreme head of the church. Relentless browbeating and a possible threat to her life finally intimidated Mary enough to give in. She submitted to her father’s demands, signing a document declaring herself to be the illegitimate product of incest and repudiating one of the central tenets of her Catholic faith. Once Mary had capitulated to his blackmail, the king welcomed her back to court. When Mary was restored to him, Henry was quick to blame Anne Boleyn for the persecution his daughter had suffered, regardless of the fact that Anne had been dead for weeks by this time
⁵⁵
.

Henry’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy died shortly after Anne Boleyn did. The king’s behaviour upon learning of Fitzroy’s death was bizarre to say the least. Henry ordered the Duke of Norfolk to bury Fitzroy in secret, perhaps because he feared the kingdom discovering he had no male heir at all. Norfolk followed Henry’s directions, but when the king heard about the small funeral and the lack of mourners, he flew into a rage and threatened to imprison the duke in the Tower, much to the dumbfounded Norfolk’s fear and consternation
⁵⁶
. Obeying Henry had become as dangerous as disagreeing with him.

As he entered his mid-40s Henry became evermore capricious and prone to deadly rages. Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, became nearly “exasperated to the point of collapse by his master’s childish irrationality [...] it became more and more clear that [Henry’s] inner compass had gone awry”
⁵⁷
. The courtiers and diplomats who saw him daily became increasingly afraid because no one could be certain what the king would do next. No one was safe. Henry would now turn suddenly against long-time friends and relations and have them killed on the slightest pretext. Even Jane Seymour was not safe from the king’s anger. When his latest queen begged him to restore the monasteries he had destroyed, he raged at her, ”ordering her not to meddle in affairs of state and ominously reminding her of what happened to the last queen who had so meddled”
⁵⁸
.

Henry’s condition continued to worsen. In 1538 Henry told one of the most notoriously lecherous men in his court to dance with Princess Mary and bait her with innuendos to ascertain whether or not she was indeed as innocent as she was rumoured to be
⁵⁹
. Mary passed the test, but it was a sign of Henry’s increasing instability that the once chivalrous king would devise this sort of experiment for his daughter.

In that same year, Henry confiscated the treasures of the shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury and ordered the destruction of the shrine itself, to the horror of his subjects. The king was now so erratic in matters of religion that he had people burned at the stake for daring to dispute the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation even as he destroyed Catholic property
⁶⁰
. Since the king found displeasure with elements of both Catholicism and Protestantism, there was almost no one of any faith who could be safe from religious persecution at his whim. This is such a radical departure from the learned theologian Henry had been formerly that it almost demands a pathological explanation in order to be understandable.

As he aged, Henry was increasingly paranoid and it is “hardly surprising that his paranoia took the form of a many-pronged attack on his cousins of royal blood living in England”
⁶¹
. He executed his cousins Henry Pole, Lord Montague and Henry Courtenay, 1st Marquess of Exeter in 1539, mainly for the crime of being too closely related to him and thus potential claimants to the throne. He also imprisoned their sons. The Marquess of Exeter’s son, Edward Courtenay, was only 12 years old at the time of his arrest, and was imprisoned for
fifteen years
before being released by Mary I during the first few weeks of her reign. Lord Montague’s son was not as lucky. He died in the Tower at an unrecorded date.

Displays of Henry’s advancing cognitive decline continued to accumulate. In 1540 the king needed to marry for political reasons. He ordered a portrait of Anna of Cleves brought to him, and once he decided she was suitably attractive for a middle-aged, obese king with constantly seeping sores on his leg, Henry negotiated their betrothal. The king also decided he was in love with his unmet fiancée. He was so adamant about his love that he abruptly chose to surprise his bride-to-be by riding ahead to Rochester Abbey, where she was lodged, and burst into her rooms dressed as a messenger in order to dazzle her with his ardour. Once he met Anna of Cleves, however, he decided she was a “Great Flanders Mare” and he wanted to get out of the marriage.
^62
63
He also insisted that simply by feeling her breasts and belly on their wedding night he could tell Anna of Cleves was not a virgin. However, her virginity was miraculously restored when Henry needed it to provide a way out of the marriage. After a short while their union was annulled and Anna, who was given manor houses and a rich annuity, remained in England as the king’s “cherished sister”
⁶⁴
. He then summarily executed Thomas Cromwell for having successfully arranged the match when Henry told him to. Although his behaviour towards Anna of Cleves could be seen as merely self-centred and petulant, the reasons he gave for wanting the annulment and his retaliation against Cromwell are so irrational as to beggar understanding.

Henry marked Cromwell’s execution by marrying his fifth wife, Katheryn Howard, the same day. No one was very surprised that Henry remarried so soon after he annulled his marriage to Anna of Cleves. His reputation for emotional vagary had become legendary, and Martin Luther scathingly declared that, “Junker Heinz will be God and does what he lust”
⁶⁵
. Katheryn had a kind, very compliant personality, inspiring Henry to choose as her motto “no other wish save his”
⁶⁶
. Henry found her easy-going temper endearing and lauded her as his “rose without a thorn”
⁶⁷
. When the king discovered that his new wife would rather flirt with a handsome young man named Thomas Culpepper
⁶⁸
instead of being required to fondle the “old, pus-oozing flesh beneath the king’s robes”
⁶⁹
, the king was distraught and enraged. He sobbed, complaining that he had been burdened with “such ill-conditioned wives” and insisted his council members were at fault “for this last mischief”
⁷⁰
, because they had urged him to wed Katheryn. Henry was clearly becoming wildly detached from reality.

The king was growing ever more inclined to murderous fickleness. In 1541 he executed the 68-year-old Countess of Salisbury, Margaret Pole, because she had the audacity to have given birth to children who were too closely related to him, and were therefore too close to his throne. It didn’t matter that her threat to Henry was non-existent. In his paranoid state the king saw the elderly countess as a source of danger. So sudden was his decision to dispatch her that there was no time to send for an experienced executioner. The hapless axeman failed to behead the countess in the first stroke, and hacked at her neck and shoulders repeatedly until he had finally mutilated her enough to kill her. Henry VIII, the same man that Erasmus wrote of as having “revived the virtues of the ancient heroes” and who “appeared to incarnate all the ardent vitality of Christian Knighthood”, had become a monster who slaughtered frail widows
⁷¹
. This is a personality change so extreme that it is hard to see it as
not
rooted in a mental illness of some kind.

Henry’s paranoia put everyone around him at risk. One of the French ambassadors to the English court warned that Henry suffered from the “plague” of “distrust and fear. This King, knowing how many changes he has made, and what tragedies and scandals he has created, would fain keep in favour with everybody, but does not trust a single man, expecting to see them all offended, and he will not cease to dip his hand in blood as long as he doubts his people. Hence every day edicts are published so sanguinary that with a thousand guards one would scarce be safe. Hence too it is that now with us, as affairs incline, he makes alliances which last as long as it makes for him to keep them”
⁷²
. Everyone was aware that Henry had become as irrational and suspicious as he was dangerous. Lord Montague, a member of Henry’s court, warned his fellow courtiers that the king would “be out of his wits one day […] for when he came into his chamber he would look angrily, and after fall to fighting”
⁷³
.

Henry’s increasing ill health did not deter him from marrying again after he beheaded his fifth wife in February of 1542. He wedded Catherine Parr, the widowed Lady Latimer, in 1543, not long after his 52
^nd
birthday. He had become such a tyrannical butcher that his subjects were almost blasé about his behaviour. An Englishman named Richard Hilles wrote to a friend in September that “our King has within these 2 months ... burnt 3 godly men in one day. For in July he married the widow of a nobleman named Latimer; and he is always wont to celebrate his nuptials by some wickedness of this kind”
⁷⁴
. It is a credit to the wisdom and acting abilities of his final wife that she only came close to losing her head once, when Henry became angry with her because she had corrected him on a point of theology. Religion was extremely important to Catherine, which may explain why she lapsed in her safe deference to Henry’s opinions. Henry issued a warrant for her arrest, which was quickly relayed to her via her allies at court. She had hysterics, either a real fit because she feared – not unreasonably -- for her life, or histrionics designed to convince Henry of her deferential opinions. Henry’s physician, a friend and religious sympathizer of the queen, told the King that his majesty’s displeasure had made Catherine “dangerously ill”
⁷⁵
. Henry was placated and Catherine was spared. In one of the major mood swings that Henry frequently experienced, when his uninformed chancellor attempted to arrest the queen the next day, the king attacked him and berated him for his audacity.

Henry was also behaving erratically in the larger world of European politics. In the middle of 1544 Henry went off to fight yet another pointless war with France, leaving his queen as regent to deal with the intermittent war between England and Scotland. The Scots, having no real desire to join their kingdom with England or subjugate themselves to the English king, had backed out of an agreement to have the infant Mary Queen of Scots wed Henry’s young son prince Edward. Incensed by the thought that they were rejecting his son and thwarting his attempts to unite Scotland and England under one crown, Henry sent Edward Seymour to launch an attack on the impudent Scots, regardless of the fact it was a war he could ill afford. The resulting five years of war was termed the “Rough Wooing” and strengthened anti-English feeling in that country so much that he lost any chance he may have had to bind the two kingdoms with marriage
⁷⁶
.