The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (22 page)

All were aware of Denny’s influence and power. Edmond Harvel, the English ambassador to Venice, kept a close eye on Denny’s nephew John, who was studying in that Italian city-state. John seems to have been a gullible youth, distracted by its cosmopolitan environment. In May 1543, Harvel wrote to Denny saying that his nephew was ‘forcing himself’ to increase his virtuous qualities, but ‘being weak and delicate of nature, it [would not be helpful] to load him with a greater burden than he may well sustain’. John himself later wrote to Denny, praying God to inspire him to observe his uncle’s loving admonitions.
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When Sir Thomas Cheyney, Treasurer of the Royal Household, broke his son’s engagement with Denny’s niece, he was warned that Henry’s favourite was a man

near about the king and one unmet to be trifled or mocked with.
Your slipping away may not only lose you friendship but cause displeasure. My advice is that you consider that.
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Denny’s role as keeper of the Privy Purse entailed handling large sums of money for the king’s personal use, from payment of his sometimes substantial gambling debts – Henry was a keen card player
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– to settling bills for his many construction projects. During the last five years of the reign, Denny received a total of £243,387 1s 6d for Henry’s use, or more than £61 million in today’s monetary values, spent according to the king’s verbal orders.
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This Tudor monarch, unlike his father, was a profligate spender, pushing the exchequer’s balance sheet into the red in both 1544 and 1545, mainly because of expenditure on the fighting in France and Scotland. Total revenues for those years – from the taxes on laity and clergy, the cynical debasement of the currency, revenues from dissolved monastic lands via the Court of Augmentation and the like – came to £594,925 (£210 million at 2004 prices) and £620,246 (£201 million) respectively, reflecting the impact of both rampant inflation and devaluation. The wars cost more than £740,000 each year for 1544 and 1545 (£260 million and £242 million) and after adding other expenditure (the king’s works, diplomatic missions and servicing the large loans taken out with the Fuggers banking family and others) there were overspends of £329,706 (£115 million) and £311,451 (£102 million) for those two years.
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In addition to reducing the proportion of gold and silver in everyone’s money, in May 1544, England’s currency was devalued and two new coins introduced: the sovereign, worth £1 (or £350 in today’s spending power), and the half-sovereign. Inflation over the previous decade, fuelled by government spending and the debasement, amounted to 100 per cent. No wonder the Privy Council and Henry’s administrators were keen to end the war with France: England was bankrupt.

The exchequer painfully clambered into the black in 1546, showing a surplus of around £180,000 for that year, prompting Henry to continue his shopping sprees, as shown by Denny’s accounts. The king had
always liked nice things around him:
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thirteen items in gold and silver gilt – bowls, cups, flagons – were ordered from Morgan Wolf, the royal goldsmith, in March that year alone.
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Then, as now, there is nothing like a little retail therapy to distract one’s mind from every trouble and ailment. Petty cash was kept in coffers inside the ‘withdrawing chamber’ at his Palace of Westminster and topped up to meet the king’s most immediate needs:

April 1
: Delivered out of his majesty’s removing coffers in his great withdrawing chamber, by the hands of Sir Thomas Cawarden,
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the sum of £518 8s 4d.

April 2
: Delivered by the king his majesty out of his said removing coffers, £2,000 thereof being brought to his said majesty by … merchants for non performance of a bargain of bringing in wines made by them to the king, the sum of £1,536 5s 8d.

April 3
: Received out of the king, his majesty’s own hands, lately brought to his highness by Sir Edmund Peckham,
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the sum of £2,000.

April 7
: Delivered out of his majesty’s removing coffers by the hands of Sir Thomas Cawarden, the sum of £57 6s 8d.
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Each section of the voluminous accounts was signed by Nicholas Bristow, clerk, and countersigned by his master, Anthony Denny.

Henry’s eyesight was also failing and his accounts from 1544 onwards show purchases of spectacles, ten pairs at a time, from Germany.
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These would be clipped on to the nose and the repeated orders perhaps indicate the king’s proclivity for losing them. His poor sight, combined with his traditional distaste and impatience for signing official papers, created the need in his last years for a new, less irksome method of indicating his approval for actions or decisions on the mountain of letters, dispatches, petitions, grants, accounts and bills that came into his Privy Chamber for administrative processing.

As a solution, the so-called ‘dry stamp’ was used in lieu of the royal
autograph or ‘sign manual’ from September 1545. This was a small carved wooden block that was impressed on paper – probably with a special hand press
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– to leave a dry imprinted facsimile of Henry’s signature. This would later be inked in by William Clerk, one of the clerks of the Privy Seal serving under Sir Anthony Denny and his brother-in-law John Gates of the Privy Chamber, who always witnessed the deployment of this signature block. All transactions involving the dry stamp were specially recorded in a separate book, which was supposed to be regularly reviewed by the king
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because of the obvious dangers of abuse and misuse that the process invited. Initially the wooden block, kept within a small, locked black leather casket, was held securely by the king himself. But as the months went by and his melancholy increased, he gave up custody of the stamp to Gates and so handed over the reins of power to those closely surrounding him.
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Of course, forging the royal signature would normally be a treasonable offence, so to ensure that the procedure did not transgress the law, those wielding the dry stamp had to be formally and retrospectively pardoned as well as licensed, as an administrative convenience, in its use for a limited period in the future. Thus, in August 1546, Denny was officially pardoned ‘for all treasons concerning the counterfeiting, impression and writing of the king’s sign manual since September 20 last’
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and the same pardon was issued immediately to William Clerk and John Gates. Furthermore, Denny, Gates and Clerk were authorised to use the dry stamp until 10 May 1547 in a document approved at Hampton Court on 31 August 1546. They were permitted

to sign on the king’s behalf and name during his pleasure; warrants, bills, gifts, grants, leases, pardons, letters and minutes … in form following; namely, two of them with a stamp, called a ‘dry stamp’ shall at the King’s command make an impression without blackening and afterwards the said Clerk or else the said Anthony and John shall blacken the same, provided that all such warrants and other writings are entered in a book or certain schedules to be signed by the king’s own hand monthly.
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The certificate was examined by the law officers, led by Henry Bradshaw, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, who countersigned it, together with a bevy of officials and courtiers led by Wriothesley.

Those who had custody of the dry stamp now held the keys to the exchequer, the power of royal patronage and the means finally to destroy their political enemies. In the months to come, some of the greatest figures in the land were to feel the devastating effects of that small wooden block, simply pressed down on state papers, and to pay dearly for Henry’s rapidly deteriorating medical condition.

The sands of time had almost run out for the grumbling, gargantuan monarch. The last great state occasion of Henry’s reign was staged in August 1546, when the French admiral Claud d’Annebaut, with a glittering train of 200 nobles and their liveried followers, came to London aboard the
Great Zachary
of Dieppe and fourteen galleys to ratify the new peace treaty ending the war between England and France. The king was infirm and the eight-year-old Prince Edward deputised for him, riding out on 23 August to welcome the French formally at Hounslow, Middlesex, with 700 gentlemen and nobles in attendance, escorted by eighty yeomen of the guard. It was a glorious, dazzling spectacle. The admiral and his party rode down two lines of 500 mounted English yeomen, all wearing ‘new liveries’, before halting in front of the young prince, who was mounted on horseback with the rest of his party, all dressed in rich velvet coats. The precocious Edward impressed the French with his Latin speech of welcome, which displayed ‘great wit and audacity’, and with his skilled horsemanship.
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Afterwards, one of the French party, Monsieur de Morette, told Dr Nicholas Wotton that he ‘rejoiced very much to have seen my lord prince’s grace, of whose praises, he can not speak [highly] enough’.
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The party moved on to Hampton Court where Wriothesley and senior members of the Privy Council greeted the French party. Four days were then spent hunting in pleasant pastime between the two former enemies. Each night there were lavish banquets and masques in two specially erected marquees, complete with boarded walls and windows of painted horn, decorated inside with rich hangings and filled with cupboards holding gold plate,
sumptuously decorated with jewels and pearls ‘which shone richly’.
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The visitors were accommodated in a village of tents made of cloth of gold, pitched in the palace gardens.
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On the first evening, after the feasting, Henry, with his lame legs, was being supported by both Archbishop Cranmer and the French admiral. To the utter surprise of d’Annebaut, Henry suddenly came out with far-reaching proposals for the ‘establishment of sincere religion’ in both England and France. They should ‘change the Mass in both the realms into a [Protestant] communion’, said the king, and after Francis I had publicly repudiated the supremacy of the pope, he and Henry should demand that the Imperial Emperor Charles V should do the same ‘or else they would break off with him’.
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Was Henry being devious, provocative or was he really now prepared to embrace Protestantism totally, foreshadowing what would happen in England a few years later during his son’s short, iconoclastic reign? Was Henry, so often the instrument of mass destruction in his own realm, now bent on a policy of destruction of the Mass? The Chantries Act, designed to seize the wealth of religious charities, could possibly be construed as the opening shot in a state attack on the Mass, although more likely it was designed solely for fiscal benefit. The conversation, recounted later by Cranmer, has caused debate and controversy ever since, particularly as it comes from (and was reported by) such an obviously militant Protestant source. Certainly, the evangelical party was now becoming more powerful at court and increasingly had Henry’s ear. Whilst this was probably not a deliberate, rational policy on the king’s part, perhaps it was a portent that the religious conservatives were sometime soon to lose their authority and influence in the dark, sequestered little world of Henry’s secret royal apartments.

On the morning of Christmas Eve, 24 December 1545, Henry made what was to be his last speech to Parliament, during its prorogation,
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until 4 November the following year, a task normally undertaken by Lord Chancellor Wriothesley. Given his declining health, many then believed that Henry might be making his final appearance in the House of Lords at Westminster. Henry was never a great public orator, far from the eloquent rabble-rouser that his daughter Elizabeth was to become. But his speech that cold day was surprisingly both measured and compelling, although apparently delivered without notes. He wanted to impart a stern message, not just for the ears of his legislators, but also for the far wider audience beyond the walls of Parliament. All his subjects were intended to hear and obey his words.

The king began by thanking his MPs for passing the cash-raising Chantries Bill into law – although this had earlier only narrowly escaped defeat at the last minute.
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Henry sought to reassure any doubters
amongst them about his planned sequestration of the ecclesiastical chantries and colleges. He solemnly pledged that he would not suffer the ministries of the Church to decay, education to be diminished or the needs of the poor to go unrelieved. No prince in the world, he said pompously, ‘more favours his subjects than I do you, nor no subjects or commons more love and obey their sovereign lord than I perceive you do me.’

The polite niceties over, the king – standing painfully, and only with the aid of some Gentlemen of his Privy Chamber – moved on to the real reason for his being there: to deliver an articulate, sobering, chastising speech to his Lords spiritual and temporal and the Commons about the continuingly vexed issue of religion. Like a testy Victorian schoolmaster, he appealed for better order in the festering debate between devout conservative and radical evangelical reformer:

My loving subjects: Study and take pains to amend one thing which surely is amiss and far out of order, to the which I most heartily require you which is that charity and concord is not amongst you but discord and dissensions beareth rule in every place.

What love and charity is amongst you when the one calls the other heretic and Anabaptist and he calls him again papist, hypocrite and Pharisee?
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Are these tokens of charity amongst you? Are these the signs of fraternal love between you?