The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (35 page)

Although sounding sinister, these are likely to be the murmurings of a woman in delirium. She recovered her reason to dictate her will, ‘being persuaded of the approach of death’, leaving everything to her husband. It remained unsigned but was attested as a true record of her wishes by her doctor, Huicke, and her chaplain, John Parkhurst.

Seymour was devastated. He told the Marquis of Dorset that he was ‘so amazed [by] my great loss’ that he would break up and dissolve
‘my whole house’.
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But it was not long before he saw an end to his grief and his ambitions remained unchecked. In January 1549, Pigott, his servant, told his sister that he had overheard the admiral saying that ‘he would wear black for a year and then knew where to have a wife’.
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In May 1782, Katherine’s grave was found by one of those strange parties of eighteenth-century tourists, part day-trippers, part antiquarians, always with an active morbid curiosity. Some ladies were examining Sudeley Castle’s ruined chapel of St Mary,
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then used to house rabbits, and after noting a large alabaster slab fixed in the north wall, they began digging in the ground not far away:

Not much more than a foot from the surface, they found a leaden envelope
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which they opened in two places, on the face and breast, and found it to contain a human body wrapped in cerecloth.

Upon removing what covered the face, they discovered the features and particularly the eyes in perfect preservation.

Alarmed at this sight and with the smell, which came principally from the cerecloth, they ordered the ground to be thrown in immediately without judiciously closing up the cerecloth and lead, which covered the face.
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Written on a label attached to the lead coffin was an inscription identifying the body within: Katherine – ‘wife to King Henry the VIII and the wife of Thomas Lord of Sudeley, high admiral of England and uncle to King Edward VI’. Two years later, another party disturbed her remains and found that decomposition had ‘reduced the face to bone’. In 1786, an antiquary recovered samples of the clothes worn by the corpse, its hair and a tooth, which are preserved still at Sudeley Castle. The queen was reburied in a new monument, including a life-size effigy of her, designed by that architect of high Victorian gothic taste, Sir George Gilbert Scott, in 1863.
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Katherine’s daughter Mary went to live with her mother’s old friend and lady-in-waiting, Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, but died probably before the age of two.

Just over a month after being chief mourner at Katherine’s funeral,
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Lady Jane Grey, then a child of eleven, wrote a letter in her careful handwriting to the Lord Admiral:

Thinking myself so much bound to your lordship for your great goodness towards me from time to time, that I cannot by any means be able to recompense the least part thereof, I purposed to write a few rude words to your lordship rather as a token to show how much worth I think your lordship’s goodness than to give worthy thanks for the same.

These my letters shall testify to you that like as you have become towards me a loving and kind father, so I shall be always most ready to obey your godly monitions and good instructions as becomes one upon whom you have heaped so many benefits.
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Thomas Seymour, always jealous of his brother, the Protector, had long nourished plans to snatch power and control the king. He had tried to win influence by giving Edward presents and pocket money. In addition, he had other grievances against Somerset. The admiral showed his brother-in-law William Parr, Marquis of Northampton, ‘the suits to the Protector touching the Queen’s servants, jewels and other things which he claimed to be hers’.
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All these had been denied her since Henry’s death. He also harboured dreams of marrying one of the two princesses, ideas firmly quashed by members of the Privy Council. He was, as in most things, rather obvious, and was arrested on 17 January 1549 for treason. Rumours swept London about what had happened. The Spanish ambassador van der Delft reported to his imperial master on 27 January:

Sire, I have heard that the Admiral of England, with the help of some people about the court, attempted to outrage the person of the young king by night and has been taken to the Tower.

The alarm was given by the gentleman who sleeps in the king’s chamber, who awakened by the barking of the dog that lies before the king’s door, cried out: ‘Help! Murder!’

Everybody rushed in but the only thing they found was the lifeless corpse of the dog.

Suspicion points to the Admiral because he had scattered the watch that night on several errands and because it has been noticed that he has some secret plot on hand, hoping to marry … the lady Elizabeth who is also under grave suspicion.
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John Fowler, Groom of the Privy Chamber, told the Council how, early one morning, Seymour had arrived at St James’s Palace and was surprised at the lack of guards there. He said there was ‘slender company about the king’ – no one in the presence chamber and ‘not a dozen in the whole house. A man might steal away the king now for I came with more men than is in all the house besides’.
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Paget told van der Delft later: ‘He [Seymour] has been a great rascal,’
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which may serve as a suitable epitaph on his life. Somerset signed his brother’s death warrant and the admiral was executed on 20 March 1549.

Elizabeth had been unwittingly dragged into Seymour’s plot and was now facing some embarrassing questions. She wrote in her careful, clear hand to Somerset that she had never contemplated marriage ‘without the Council’s consent thereto’. Moreover, she had heard that there were

rumours abroad which be greatly both against my honour and honesty which above all other things I esteem, which be these that I am in the Tower and with child by my Lord Admiral.

Elizabeth ends:

My Lord, these are shameful slanders for the which besides the great desire I have to see the king’s majesty, I shall most heartily desire your lordship that I may come to the court after your first determination that I may show myself there as I am. Written in haste from Hatfield, this 28 of January. Your assured friend to my little power, Elizabeth.
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Somerset himself was toppled from power after openly quarrelling with his old ally John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. His influence and authority had also been damaged by his brother’s disgrace. In the government crisis of 1549, when rebellions broke out in the West, East Anglia and the Midlands and were threatened elsewhere, Somerset had acted hesitantly and incompetently. On 6 October, he had moved the king for his safety to Windsor Castle, but his colleagues in the Council in London arrested him on 14 October and he confessed to twenty-nine charges on 24 October. He was released in February 1550, freely pardoned and restored to membership of the Privy Council on 10 April, only to be arrested again in October 1551 on trumped-up charges of high treason and felony. He was convicted only of felony (for inciting a riot) but none the less was executed on 22 January 1552. The king, in his personal chronicle, recorded his uncle’s death merely as: ‘The Duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill between eight and nine o’clock in the morning.’

The energetic Warwick, later created Duke of Northumberland, had triumphed in the power struggle for control of king and realm, becoming president of Edward’s Council. When the king fell ill, probably with tuberculosis, in the early summer of 1553, the prospect of staunchly Catholic Mary succeeding loomed large in his and other Protestant minds. The king, sometime in early April, drew up his plan for the succession, which excluded both his half-sisters, who had been laid down as his successors by the Third Act of Succession passed in Henry VIII’s reign. Edward’s document created a brand-new succession path, beginning with the male heirs of Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, daughter of Mary, Henry’s younger sister. It continued with the male heirs of Frances’ daughters, Jane, Catherine and Mary Grey. The major problem was that none had any sons when Edward’s ‘devise for the succession’ was written.
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The solution for the Privy Councillors was easy: to make the succession far more viable by ensuring that it went directly to Lady Jane Grey and her male heirs. The alteration was open and above board: the judges, led by Lord Chief Justice Montague, were asked to deploy their legal brains on the issues raised. Unsurprisingly,
they declined to become involved ‘for the danger of treason’ and Northumberland

fell into a great anger and rage and called [Montague] traitor before all the Council and said that in the quarrel of that matter, he would fight in his shirt with any man living.
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Edward summoned the judges to his presence on 15 June and told them in no uncertain terms ‘with sharp words and angry countenance’ to help him draw up the royal will. The legal opposition collapsed and letters patent, implementing the succession, were drawn up within the next few days.

Edward died, ‘thin and wasted’, on 6 July, in his sixteenth year. Lady Jane Grey was duly named as his successor and was proclaimed queen of England in London on 10 July 1553. Princess Mary had fled to East Anglia and, after mustering forces loyal to her cause and to a Catholic accession, marched on the capital where the Council named her as queen nine days later. Jane, who had married one of the sons of Dudley, now Duke of Northumberland, was beheaded on 12 February 1554, aged just seventeen. Northumberland was also doomed. At his trial, he questioned whether his actions, under the authority of the Great Seal of the realm, could be treason, but his judges told him that the Seal was not that of the lawful queen but of an usurper,
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the unhappy and unwilling Lady Jane Grey. On the Tower Hill scaffold, on 22 August 1553, he paid the penalty for it.

One of his confederates involved in the fiasco of Lady Jane Grey’s abortive succession was the ubiquitous John Gates. While he undoubtedly was a religious reformer, his upwardly mobile progression through the Edwardine government was more motivated by personal ambition and greed. He was, however, a notorious and enthusiastic despoiler of churches. As Sheriff of Essex, he was ordered to enforce the injunctions of 1550 to destroy ‘superstitious altars’. The Essex historian Philip Morant later wrote of him:

This covetous man pulled the chancel [of Chelmsford Church] down for the sake of making money out of the materials, notwithstanding so many noble persons had chosen it for their resting place, namely Humfrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, Anne, his wife and three of the sons, including Sir Henry, who had married Margaret, countess of Richmond, grandmother of Henry VIII.
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Gates also played a role in preventing the planned clandestine flight of Princess Mary to Antwerp in July 1550. In April 1551, he was made Vice-Chamberlain and Captain of the King’s Guard, with a seat on the Privy Council, and granted further lands worth £120 a year.
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On 7 July 1552, he was made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He was also executed for treason on 22 August 1553, shortly after Mary’s accession, the axeman requiring three blows to bloodily sever his head.
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Anthony Denny served in William Parr’s expedition to put down the Norfolk insurgents in Kett’s Rebellion in 1549, but died in September that year, probably on the 10th, at his home at Cheshunt, Hertfordshire.
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Paget was created Baron Paget of Beaudesert in 1549 and remained faithful to his troublesome leader, Somerset. After the Protector’s downfall, Paget was arrested in 1551 on suspicion of plotting against Dudley and the following year was degraded from the Order of the Garter and fined £6,000 over allegations that he exploited his offices for private gain. After Edward’s death, he joined Queen Jane’s Council, but quickly changed sides and sanctioned the proclamation declaring Mary queen. He was rewarded by being appointed a Privy Councillor and was made her Lord Privy Seal in 1556. On Elizabeth’s accession, he quit all his offices and died in 1563.

Stephen Gardiner quickly fell foul of the new Protestant government of Edward VI following its introduction of doctrinal changes and was held in the Fleet Prison from September 1547, to which ‘he had been as well used as if it had been his house’.
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He was released after promising to conform but

forgetful of his promises, he had raised much strife and contention
and had caused all his servants to be secretly armed and harnessed
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and had put public affronts on those whom the Council sent down to preach in his diocese.

In some places, to disgrace them, he went into the pulpit before them and warned the people to beware of such teachers and to receive no other doctrine but what he had taught them.

He was placed under house arrest at his home in Southwark and, after preaching a ‘seditious’ sermon before Edward, was sent to the Tower ‘and the door of his closet sealed up’. In April 1551, he was deprived of his bishopric, but after the accession of the Catholic Mary Tudor in 1553, he was swiftly freed on 9 August, the day after Edward’s funeral, and was given the Great Seal of England, as Lord Chancellor, four days later. But his glory days were short-lived: on 13 November 1555, he died at the Palace of Westminster between noon and one o’clock. His body was brought by water to his home in Southwark and elaborate obsequies followed, before he was buried at Winchester.
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As for Cranmer, the
Book of Common Prayer
, with its wonderful, rolling English words and phrases, is his lasting memorial.
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The first version appeared in 1549 and a revised edition in 1552. As if his Protestant views were not damning enough in Mary’s eyes, he was persuaded to sign the document naming Lady Jane Grey queen and consequently, after her succession, he quickly ended up in the Tower, accused of treason and sedition. He was taken to Oxford and confronted with charges of heresy. In the face of death, the old man’s resolve weakened and he signed a number of papers acknowledging the supremacy of the Pope and the truth of Catholic doctrine. In the end, he withdrew these recantations and was burnt at the stake on 21 March 1556.