The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (11 page)

Now a mystery emerges from the dark recesses of the royal court: the lasting enigma of ‘a child named Ralfe Lyons, that was given to Henry’ in 1546.
⁷⁸
The wording is quite clear: ‘given to our late sovereign lord
Henry the eight’ is pointedly repeated on each of four pages of accounts for the last year of the king’s reign and for 1547–8, the first year of Edward’s. In twenty-first-century understanding, ‘given’ clearly implies offered up for adoption or fostering, but this interpretation seems unlikely in mid-Tudor England, although something very unusual had obviously happened to justify the constant use of this tantalising phrase and to warrant maintaining separate accounts for him. Certainly, special care was lavished on the child for the two years that the Privy Purse was responsible for his upkeep. Ralfe Lyons was sent to be taught by Robert Phillips at the Chapel Royal, based since 1533 at St James’s Palace, across the fields from the Palace of Westminster. Payments were made for new clothes – 5s 4d for a doublet, 8d for a purse in 1546 – and for board and wages within the allowances. History is silent on how young Ralfe came to be cared for so well, why he was singled out for this generous attention and what eventually happened to him. Was he the son of a favoured junior member of the royal household whose parents had both died, leaving him an orphan? Can one detect in this the kind, caring hand of Katherine Parr? Given the king’s medical condition and reduced sexual capacity, the child was unlikely to be another royal bastard. Alternatively, was he merely a boy chorister with a fabulous singing voice who was sequestered from another institution, as it is known that efforts were made to employ the best singers for the Chapel Royal?
⁷⁹
The answer maddeningly remains a mystery.

Within the royal family, one particular issue had to be overcome before Katherine’s long-desired normalisation of relations could be achieved. This was Henry’s suspicion regarding Princess Elizabeth and her own distrust of her father after the numerous unsuccessful attempts to marry her off for diplomatic or political ends. By 1545, she was an articulate twelve-year-old well-educated girl who had copious quantities of the low cunning that was an integral part of the Tudor genes. Part of her rehabilitation into family life came with the restoration of both princesses into the line of succession to the crown after Edward and his heirs, enshrined in an Act passed by Parliament in 1544.
⁸⁰
It is not difficult to see Katherine’s quietly manipulative hand in this decision
by Henry to legitimise his daughters in the eyes of the law, an action that irrevocably bound both princesses to her patronage and affection.

In July 1544, Henry went to war in France for the last time, appointing Katherine as regent of England. He also changed the structure of Edward’s household, appointing Cox to be almoner and Cheke as a deputy ‘both for the better instruction of the prince and the diligent teaching of such children as be appointed to attend upon them’.
⁸¹
Edward moved to Hampton Court for greater security, apparently with the two princesses, as on 25 July Katherine wrote from that palace to Henry: ‘My lord prince and the rest of your Majesty’s children are all (thanks be to God) in very good health.’

Elizabeth, who apparently departed soon after, ruefully sent a letter to Katherine on 31 July from St James’s Palace, complaining at her separation from her stepmother:

Envious fortune for a whole year deprived me of your presence and not content therewith has again despoiled me of that benefit.

The princess, however, knew she had Katherine’s love, whom, she heard, had not forgotten her in her letters to the king, campaigning in France.
⁸²

Katherine, firmly rooted in modern humanist thinking, was not quite so close to the staunchly Catholic Princess Mary, although she showered gifts upon her and encouraged her to translate into English Erasmus’
Paraphrase of the Gospel of St John
.
⁸³
The queen also persuaded Elizabeth to translate from the French Queen Marguerite of Navarre’s devotional poem
The Mirror or Glass of the Sinful Soul
, happily delivered by Elizabeth to Katherine as a New Year’s gift on 31 December 1544,
⁸⁴
and Erasmus’
Dialogues Fidei
.

Katherine herself also produced religious books –
Prayers Stirring the Mind unto Heavenly Meditations
, which became something of a best seller after it was first published in 1545,
⁸⁵
and
Lamentations of a Sinner
, copies of which were circulating in Henry’s court by November 1545
⁸⁶
but which, significantly, only appeared in print after his death in 1547, portraying the king as a Moses who had led England out of the thraldom of Rome. When she was aged twelve, Elizabeth also translated
Katherine’s expanded
Prayers and Meditations
into Latin, French and Italian. This 117-page book, with a crimson silk binding deftly embroidered by Elizabeth herself in gold and silver thread with the initial ‘H’ and a large monogram of the name ‘Katherina’, includes a dedicatory letter to Henry written in Latin and dated ‘Hertford, December 20 1545’.
⁸⁷

Katherine’s interest in religion and her views on its development were reflected in the make-up of her household and those who benefited from her patronage: for example, Thomas Cromwell’s friend Miles Coverdale, who translated the Bible into English; the psalmist Thomas Sternhold; and Nicholas Udall, the ‘thrashing’
⁸⁸
headmaster of Eton, who took part in the translation of Erasmus’
Paraphrases of the Gospels
⁸⁹
with Princess Mary.

Although she loved dancing and fine clothes and jewels, Katherine’s chambers were also a citadel of learning and liberal thought. As a reflection of the religious discussions that constantly went on within her apartments, a Mr Goldsmith who had unsuccessfully sought a position in her household congratulated the queen for her ‘rare goodness [that] has made every day a Sunday, a thing hitherto unheard of, especially in a royal palace’.
⁹⁰
Udall described life in Katherine’s apartments as embracing ‘virtuous exercises, reading and writing and with most earnest study’; she and her ladies ‘early and late, apply themselves to extending [their] knowledge’. The queen’s beliefs and opinions were to lead her into very dangerous waters indeed: the maelstrom caused by the continuing conflict within Henry’s Privy Council over religious reform. It was almost to cost the queen her life.

On 16 November 1538, King Henry publicly grasped the nettle of heresy. John Lambert, alias John Nicholson, had been arrested for persistently denying the holy presence of Christ in the consecrated wafer and wine of the Mass, the so-called ‘Real Presence’. The prisoner had been educated at Cambridge – he had been a fellow of Queens’ College in 1521 – and later had become a radical evangelical, serving as a chaplain to the English community in Antwerp. He was jailed in England in 1532 for his beliefs but later released and went on to run a school in London. Arrested again, Lambert now had to confront Henry personally in an elaborately staged propaganda trial for his life.

The king’s religious policies sometimes seem contradictory during the second half of his reign, as he flip-flopped between conservative
and reformist measures pressed upon him by the vociferous opposing factions within his court. Whilst remaining very much an orthodox and devout Catholic in many aspects of doctrine and liturgy, he veered to and fro between executing members of both the evangelical and conservative factions,
¹
sometimes as heretics, more often as traitors, as well as staging very public bonfires of profane books.
²
Much earlier in his reign, he had been an ardent supporter of the Holy Catholic Church, yearning for what he saw as due papal recognition of his piety. It came on 11 October 1521, when the spendthrift Pope Leo X declared Henry – his ‘most dear son in Christ’ –
Fidei Defensor
, ‘Defender of the Faith’, for his authorship of a 30,000-word book in Latin, the
Assertio Septem Sacramentorum
or ‘Assertion of the Seven Sacraments’. This had been written, with some academic assistance, specifically to mock and attack the new Protestant beliefs then being promulgated by the apostate monk Martin Luther in Germany. The book went through twenty editions, eagerly devoured by Henry’s pious and loyal subjects.
³
Then came the thorny and self-serving issue of the king’s divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Henry’s assumption of the supremacy of the Church in England and the break with Rome followed in December 1533, when the Privy Council ordered that Pope Clement VII no longer had authority over the realm and should henceforth be referred to merely as ‘the Bishop of Rome’. The Act of Supremacy, passed in November 1534,
⁴
confirmed Henry’s rule over the Church in English law and was to cause much bloodshed amongst those, great and low, priest and secular, who could not bring themselves in good conscience to take the oath of allegiance to the king as head of the Church. The subsequent Act for Extinguishing the Authority of the Bishop of Rome of 1536 impolitely railed against

The pretended power and usurped authority of the Bishop of Rome, by some called the Pope … which did obfuscate and wrest God’s holy word and testament a long season from the spiritual and true meaning thereof, to his worldly and carnal affections, as pomp, glory, avarice, ambition and tyranny, covering and shadowing the
same with his human and politic devices, traditions and inventions, set forth to promote and establish his only dominion, both upon the souls and also the bodies and goods of all Christian people, excluding Christ out of his kingdom and the rule of man his soul as much as he may and all temporal kings and princes out of their dominions which they ought to have by God’s law upon the bodies and goods of their subjects.
⁵

Most importantly, not only did the pope ‘rob’ the king as supreme head of the realm of England ‘immediately under God of his honour, right and pre-eminence due to him by the law of God, but spoiled this realm yearly of innumerable treasure’. It was typical Henrician propaganda: smug, self-justifying and arrogant. A staunch Lutheran in Germany could happily have written it. The Act marked an important continuum of the king’s campaign against Rome, should any of his subjects be reckless enough to retain any doubts as to the wisdom of his religious policy.

Cromwell staged a public and very graphic demonstration of the royal supremacy in London on 17 June 1539. Today we would regard it as crude, obvious propaganda, but the chief minister knew his audience well and unsubtly combined his political and religious message with a spectacular designed to entertain and amuse, as well as subliminally create support for the king’s policies. Two vessels – the king’s barge and a ‘papal’ barge – rowed up and down the River Thames between Westminster and the King’s Bridge. On board the pontifical barge were a number of men dressed as the pope and cardinals who ‘made their defiance against England’. The two boats exchanged gunfire (presumably firing blanks) and ‘at last, the pope and cardinals were overcome and all his men cast overboard into the Thames’ to the great merriment of the watchers on the banks,
⁶
including Henry himself. Other, less ambitious pageants against the pope were also staged in towns and cities throughout the realm.

Religious Injunctions of 1536 and 1538, issued by Cromwell, also required the clergy ‘to the uttermost of their wit, knowledge and learning, purely, sincerely and without any colour of dissimulation’ to preach
against the ‘Bishop of Rome’s usurped power and jurisdiction’ as a direct means of re-educating the minds of Henry’s subjects. Moreover, the Injunctions prohibited the setting up of images (religious statues) or extolling ‘relics or miracles for any superstition or lucre, nor allure the people by any enticements to the pilgrimage of any saint’. The later set of injunctions went further, imposing on the clergy of England the duty, once every three months, of warning their congregations

not to repose their trust … in any other works devised by men’s fantasies besides Scripture; as in wandering to pilgrimages, offering of money, candles or tapers to images or relics … saying over a number of beads not understood or minded on, or in such-like superstition.
⁷

Most importantly, the Injunctions of 1538 required priests to provide

on this side of the Feast of Easter next coming [1539], one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English and the same set up in some convenient place within the … church that you have cure of, whereas your parishioners may most commodiously resort to the same and read it.
⁸

This refers to the so-called
Great Bible
, printed in London in 1539–40 by Richard Grafton after the French Inquisition stopped production of it in Paris, which showed Henry in a woodcut on the main title page, as well as Cranmer and Cromwell,
⁹
and the people loyally crying ‘
Vivat Rex
’ and ‘God Save the King’. It boldly declared: ‘This is the Bible appointed to the use of the churches.’
¹⁰
But Henry’s subjects’ enjoyment of the Bible in their own language was short-lived. The Act of 1543 for the Advancement of True Religion
¹¹
withdrew his government’s permission for everyone to read the English Bible, limiting it to noblemen, gentlemen and merchants (who could peruse it in private), but women, workers, apprentices and others were strictly prohibited from reading it in public or privately. Generously, the Act allowed those of noble or gentle rank of both sexes to read it to themselves silently – certainly not to others.