The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (7 page)

The king was now aged fifty-one, in poor health and grown very stout. For the first time after ridding himself of a wife in thirty tempestuous years of wedlock, there were no plans to find him another, even though Parliament had now passed an Act making it a treasonable offence for a woman to marry the king without disclosing her unchaste past. This measure was, in the bland words of today’s Whitehall civil servants, intended purely as an enabling measure ‘to avoid doubts for the future’, as well as providing Queen Katherine’s demise with a more substantial veneer of legitimacy, albeit retrospective. Chapuys, in a thinly veiled comment on the notoriously loose morals of Henry’s household, wrote: ‘Few, if any, ladies of the court nowadays [are] likely to aspire to such an honour of becoming one of the king’s wives or to desire that the choice should fall on them.’
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It was not that Henry did not feel the need for female company in his declining years. There were some who believed that Henry’s amorous habits would die hard and that he would swiftly seek another wife; some
hopefuls even suggested, vainly, that Anne of Cleves, now apparently grown ‘half as beautiful again since she left court’, could attempt a return match with the English king. Elizabeth Basset and Jane Rattsey, two of her ladies-in-waiting, were hauled up before Henry’s Council on 4 December 1541 and jailed for adding fuel to the fire of rumour by indiscreetly asking, ‘What! Is God working his own work to make the Lady Anne of Cleves queen again?’ and ‘What a man is the King! How many wives
will
he have?’
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No doubt, many of his 2.7 million subjects may have pondered the same question.

In truth, he now required a consort to look after his three children by different mothers: Mary, aged twenty-six and still without a husband, Elizabeth, eight-and-half, and Edward, approaching five. He also needed a woman’s tender touch in dressing his painful and debilitating ulcerated legs, to comfort him in the loneliness of his old age and to distract him from the daily problems of kingship. The idea of further procreation to produce a Duke of York may have finally disappeared from Henry’s mind with his poor health, increasing corpulence and the searing pain of Katherine Howard’s betrayal. For the king had again taken to food as a solace in his grief: Marillac, in his diplomatic dispatches, talks openly of the monarch’s ‘marvellous excess’ in eating and reports him ‘daily growing heavier’. Henry’s weight had increased so substantially that his great bed of walnut in the Palace of Westminster had to be widened and strengthened to support his growing bulk.

Chapuys, the mischievous Spanish ambassador, suggested to William Paget, then clerk of the king’s Council (who for ‘a long time [has] been on intimate terms with me’), that if Henry cast Katherine aside

on account of her having had connexion with a man before her marriage to him, he would have been justified in doing the same with Madam dé Cleves, for if the rumour current in the Low Countries was true, there were plenty of causes for a separation considering the queen’s [Anne of Cleves’] age [and] her being fond of wine, as they [the English] might have had occasion to observe,
it was natural enough to suppose she had failed in the same manner. The Clerk did not deny the strength of my argument, but said he did not believe the King would again retake her or marry another woman until Parliament positively forced him to it.
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Ambassadors always deal in rumours, and here the gossipy Chapuys was being unkind to Anne of Cleves, as the talk of her lack of chastity seems totally unfounded. There were, however, some official attempts by the Duchy of Cleves to reinstate Anne to the unlikely royal affections. Its ambassador sought to speak to Henry about Anne, ‘but as the king’s grief did not permit it’ he had to make do with addressing the Privy Council in the middle of December 1541. After passing on the Duke of Cleves’ thanks for Henry’s ‘liberality to his sister, he prayed them [to find] means to reconcile the marriage’ and restore Anne as queen. The Council, on the king’s behalf, answered ‘that the separation had been made for such just cause that he [Henry] prayed the duke would never make such a request’. The ambassador, perhaps experiencing difficulty with his English, asked for this very definite statement to be repeated. Bishop Gardiner ‘with every appearance of anger, said that the king would never take back the said lady and that what was done was founded on great reason, whatever the world might allege’. The man from Cleves dared not reply, Marillac reported to Francis I, ‘for fear that they might take occasion to treat [Anne] worse’.
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Aside from mischief-making in the corridors of Westminster, Chapuys meanwhile had more important diplomatic imperatives: the envoy was at some pains to dissuade Henry from the possibility of seeking a sixth wife in France. Chapuys reported to his imperial master how the English king had told him that

the French were continually presenting him ladies to marry [but] I answered that no doubt they would do as they had done when he himself pursued the princess who is now the queen of Scotland
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and that in point of marriage, the French had always employed their usual tactics, and gone against the treaties between England and France … Since the French had not been ashamed to do such
things openly and to his very face, they must all the time have played him in secret more devilish tricks still; adding, the more to darken the picture, many anecdotes I knew of King Francis and his ministers.
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Henry’s spirits were dramatically lifted by a new English victory against the Scots at Solway Moss on 24 November 1542,
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quickly followed by the death of their king, James V, on 14 December from a fever and despair that his wife had delivered a daughter. On 15 January 1543, Chapuys wrote that

ever since his late queen’s misconduct [Henry] has been sad and dejected, showing no inclination for carousels and pageants or paying his court to ladies. No sooner did the news from Scotland arrive than he began to invite and entertain them at court.
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Princess Mary was recalled from her quarters at Hunsdon, Hertfordshire, to act as hostess at her father’s palaces. She was greeted warmly and was given rings, silver plate and other jewels including two rubies of ‘inestimable value’ by Henry as New Year gifts. Chapuys added:

Many here think that in the midst of all this feasting and carousing, the King may well take a fancy to some lady of the court and marry her, but I must say I see no appearance of that.
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Henry returned to staging the grand court occasions he had loved so much. At the end of January, he threw a great supper for sixty-one ladies at the Palace of Westminster, having personally stumped around their lodgings beforehand, fussily checking that everything was in pristine readiness for his guests. The king’s rheumy old eyes dwelt upon a number of the laughing company around him, including Anne Basset, a girl reportedly of very limited intellect. Marillac afterwards described her as a ‘pretty creature with wit enough to do as badly as the other [Katherine], if she were to try’. While watching Anne Basset’s silly, giggling frivolity at his dinner table, Henry was perhaps painfully
reminded of his last executed queen.
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Youth, beauty and gaiety were not now requirements for a king’s consort; morality, companionship and kindness would be more proper attributes in anyone else Henry sought to keep him warm at night. Although he received the ladies ‘with much gaiety’, he showed no ‘particular attention for any of them’, according to Chapuys.

At this time, a central character in the last days of Henry VIII emerged: Katherine Parr, who was to become his sixth and final wife.

The king would have known her for much of her life; indeed, her brother William was a long-time favourite of his. Probably born in 1512, she was the eldest child of a powerful northern magnate, Sir Thomas Parr of Kendal in Cumberland, who was knighted at Henry’s coronation in 1509 and fought at the Battle of the Spurs against the French in 1513. Her mother had been a lady-in-waiting to the king’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Katherine Parr had been married at fifteen to the ailing Edward, Lord Borough of Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, who suffered from a ‘distracted memory’, and she was widowed, childless, in 1529. In the late spring of 1532, she had married the rich widower John Neville, Baron Latimer of Snape Castle, Yorkshire. He was forty-two, more than twenty years older than his bride, had been married twice before and had two children, a son and a daughter. The Latimers were to be caught up dangerously in the northern Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion in 1536. Katherine’s husband was taken hostage by the ringleaders and became their spokesman to the king’s Council in London, before switching sides to rescue Katherine and her stepchildren unharmed from the hands of the rebels at Snape. During Thomas Cromwell’s subsequent virulent witch-hunt for those in any way involved in the rebellion, the Duke of Norfolk came to the Latimers’ aid, pointing out that he was unable to find any evidence that Katherine’s husband had done anything wrong, except when under the duress of violence. He added, ‘No man was in more danger of his life,’ and so they were spared from the heavy hand of Henry’s chief minister’s retribution.

Katherine was frequently at court: her sister, Anne, married William
Herbert, one of Henry’s confidants amongst the Gentlemen of his Privy Chamber, then an esquire of the king’s body, whose father was an illegitimate son of the 1st Earl of Pembroke.
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Latimer, sick and infirm, died in London, probably in December 1542, and Katherine arranged for him to be buried in St Paul’s Cathedral beneath an impressive tomb, recorded as having been ‘broken all in pieces’ seventy years later.
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His will was proved in March 1543.

The previous month, Henry cautiously began to pay her court.

Despite the widow insisting on a seemly period of mourning, the king had decided to pursue her as his sixth wife. She was the ideal candidate. Her personal motto – ‘To be useful in all I do’ – has the ring of a sensible, practical and dutiful Girl Guide captain. After nursing two older men, she was experienced in the ways of the sick room, as well as being gentle and kind. As the childless widow of two dead husbands, there could be no question of unpleasant surprises lurking in her past; indeed, her virtue was one of her proudest and most praised assets.
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Portraits of her show a dignified and graceful matron of some strength of character, with a fashionably pale complexion, tightly brushed-back auburn hair and light-brown eyes. She was slim, around 5 ft. 2 in. tall,
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lively in conversation and, for the time, very well educated. She enjoyed intellectual discussion – and could be very forthright in her views. Some have portrayed her as a kind of sixteenth-century bluestocking; true, Katherine could speak fluent French and Italian and later learnt to both read and write in Latin, but she also loved music and dancing, lavish jewels and expensive, fashionable clothes. She was known to be pious, but not overtly associated with either the religiously conservative or reformist groups still slugging it out brutally for dominance at court. Katherine Latimer,
née
Parr, Henry concluded, would make the ideal wife and stepmother in his declining years. With the king’s self-belief now restored, he convinced himself it might even be possible that she could bear him a Duke of York, despite the fact that the first flush of youth had long departed her. Finally, there was a political dimension, a factor never lost on the canny Henry: marriage to the daughter of such a powerful and respectable
northern family would bring him benefits in that traditionally most troublesome region of his realm. What the king desired, the king would get.

As a lame and sick man with five unfortunate marriages behind him, Henry resorted to his most powerful asset in pursuing her affections. He used hard cash to woo her, placing an order on 16 February 1543 with his tailor, John Skutt, for a generous package of pleats and sleeves, followed by gowns in the latest Italian, Dutch and Venetian fashions and ‘French hoods’, all valued at a total of £8 9s 5d (just over £3,000 in today’s money). Although grotesquely obese and afflicted with painful and stinking leg wounds, Henry still vainly believed that he knew how to turn a woman’s head.

He also had patronage to employ as a telling weapon: it can be no coincidence that a string of honours and appointments were pointedly awarded to Katherine’s brother William, Baron Parr of Kendal, at the same time as Henry was courting her, although William had long been a favourite of the king, called ‘his Integrity’ by Henry. In March, he was made a member of the Privy Council
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. This was followed by his election in April as a Knight of the Garter and his appointment as Warden of the Scottish Marches, the border territories where he had shone in the latest military campaigns against England’s intractable neighbour.

The king faced another strong contender for the hand of the rich widow: his brother-in-law by marriage to Jane Seymour, the debonair and roguish Sir Thomas Seymour, who had returned to court that month after eight months based in Vienna, serving as a military observer studying the tactics and weaponry employed in the wars against the Turks. Katherine had fallen heavily for his piratical good looks, his renown as a courageous soldier and his courtly manners and dress. Her head had been turned by his glamour, dash and derring-do; her prim heart excited, after a dull life with two sick husbands, by his wild reputation. She was not even deterred by his notorious bad temper. Henry, however, was apparently aware of their developing relationship. In order not to be outdone and to ensure that the way remained clear for an acceptance of his proposal of marriage, he appointed Sir Thomas,
within two weeks of his return, special ambassador to the queen regent in Brussels.

Katherine was clearly deeply in love with Seymour. Four years later, in a letter, she admitted to him:

For as truly as God is God, my mind was fully bent the other time I was at liberty, to marry you before any man I know. Howbeit, God withstood my will … most vehemently for a time and through His grace and goodness made that possible which seems to me most impossible; that was, made me to renounce utterly my own will and to follow His will most willingly.
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