1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII Read online

  Copyright © 2009 Suzannah Lipscomb

  This edition copyright © 2009 Lion Hudson

  The right of Suzannah Lipscomb to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Lion Books

  an imprint of

  Lion Hudson plc

  Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road,

  Oxford OX2 8DR, England

  www.lionhudson.com/lion

  UK hardback ISBN 978 0 7459 5365 6

  US hardback ISBN 978 0 8254 7938 0

  UK paperback ISBN 978 0 7459 5332 8

  US paperback ISBN 978 0 8254 7922 9

  epub ISBN 978 0 7459 5903 0

  Kindle ISBN 978 0 7459 5902 3

  First edition 2009

  First electronic edition 2012

  Text Acknowledgments

  Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas

  Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Cover illustration: Clare Melinsky

  A catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library

  Praise for 1536

  ‘Suzannah Lipscomb shows vividly how the events of a single tumultuous year, from marital betrayal to mass rebellion, crystallized Henry’s personal fears, religious priorities, political style and visual image, shaping the tyranny of his last years, the idiosyncrasies of his Reformation and the lasting myth of the wilful colossus.’

  Steven Gunn, Lecturer in Modern History, University of Oxford

  ‘An enlightening and comprehensive analysis of a pivotal year in Henry VIII’s reign.’

  Tracy Borman, author of King’s Mistress, Queen’s Servant: Henrietta Howard

  ‘1536 is a lucid and evocative account of Henry VIII in his times, and a finely judged portrait of the pomp, envy, fury and melancholy of kingship. It is also an object lesson in male vainglory, and the precipitous decline even the most gilded life can lurch into: of how the best-known and most naturally gifted monarch in British history succumbed to the strange, familiar passions of age, arrogance and insecurity.’

  Tom Chatfield, Arts & Books Editor, Prospect

  ‘At once scholarly and a joy to read.’

  Thomas Betteridge, Reader in Early Modern English Literature,

  Oxford Brookes University

  For my father and mother, Nick and Marguerite,

  my great-aunt, Sylvia,

  and in loving memory of my grandad, Charlie,

  all of whom were proud of the book before

  a word of it had been written.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise for 1536

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  Part One: Setting the Scene

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: The Change

  Chapter 2: Young Henry

  Chapter 3: The Divorce

  Chapter 4: 1536 and All That

  Part Two: The Crisis of Masculinity

  Chapter 5: A Wife’s Death

  Chapter 6: The King’s Honour

  Chapter 7: The Fall of Anne Boleyn

  Chapter 8: A Dearth of Heirs

  Chapter 9: Masculinity and Image

  Part Three: The King’s Religion

  Chapter 10: The Reformation in England

  Chapter 11: 1536: The Church Established

  Chapter 12: The Role of Henry VIII in Later Reformation

  Chapter 13: Henry VIII’s Theology

  Chapter 14: The Aftermath of the Reformation

  Part Four: Henry the Tyrant

  Chapter 15: The Pilgrimage of Grace

  Chapter 16: The Mouldwarp Prophecy

  Chapter 17: Courtly Dissent

  Chapter 18: Did Henry VIII Become a Tyrant?

  Epilogue

  Appendix 1: Timeline of 1536

  Appendix 2: Henry VIII’s Wives

  Appendix 3: The Cost of Living in Henry VIII’s Reign

  Notes

  Endnotes

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible had I not been offered the post of Associate in the Knowledge Transfer Partnership between Historic Royal Palaces and Kingston University, which is part-funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am very grateful for the wonderful opportunities this role has opened up to me, this book included.

  I would like to express my gratitude to Historic Royal Palaces for kindly agreeing to release copyright on the research I had carried out as part of my duties as the Research Curator on the Henry VIII project, and especially would like to thank Lucy Worsley, Polly Schomberg, Erica Longfellow and Kent Rawlinson for their support and friendship. My thanks also go to Benedetta Tiana for being the first person to be enthused by the 1536 idea!

  I am grateful to the many scholarly giants on whose shoulders I have stood. I would particularly like to acknowledge my debt to the work of George Bernard, Susan Brigden, Xanthe Brooke and David Crombie, Michael Bush and David Bownes, C. S. L. Davies, G. R. Elton, Christopher Haigh, R. W. Hoyle, Eric Ives, Stanford E. Lehmberg, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Peter Marshall, Alec Ryrie, David Starkey, Tania String and Greg Walker. I thank Tania String for giving me a copy of a forthcoming article in draft. I am very grateful to my peer-reviewer, Eric Ives, for his thoughtful comments on the text. As always, the errors that remain are mine alone.

  On a personal note, I would like to thank Tom Betteridge, my wonderful DPhil supervisor Robin Briggs, Lyndal Roper and the Balliol history workshop, and Susan Brigden, my undergraduate tutor, inspiration and friend – the person who first introduced me to the words ‘you loke for ded men’s showys’. I’d also like to thank John Cairns for taking a great author’s photo and Miranda Powell for improving the book immeasurably with her thoughtful copy-editing. Thank you to the friends and family who have encouraged and supported me as I wrote this book. I am enormously grateful to Kate Kirkpatrick, my excellent editor, and to my mother, Marguerite Lipscomb, who’s been my splendid and untiring first reader and critic, and the source of much encouragement. Thank you.

  Preface

  My publishers and I quibbled over the word ‘changed’ in the title. I had put forward the extraordinary litany of events that occurred in 1536, all with huge repercussions for Henry VIII, those around him and his kingdom in general, and marshalled the evidence of his behaviour after this point, noting how markedly it differed from the early years of his reign. But ‘changed’? Was it not too dogmatic, too emphatic? I worried about the confines of a year, especially as the Tudors understood their years to start and end at different points to our 1 January – 31 December axis. I also worried about the apparent conceit of positing the seismic shifts of Henry VIII’s thinking within this one (Gregorian) calendar year that occurred after his ‘divorce’ from Katherine of Aragon, his marriage to Anne Boleyn, the Acts of Supremacy and Succession and the deaths of Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher.

  And yet, the more I researched, studied, and pondered the facts, the more convinced I’ve become that this year really did change Henry VIII. He did move from being the much fêted, glorious, and fun young monarch of the 1510s and 1520s, into the overweight, suspicious, ruthless tyrant who is commonly depicted as in popular culture. I
n some ways, of course, this was the result of a cumulative process, but the events of 1536 catalyzed, fostered and entrenched this change. Whether looking at Henry VIII’s character, health, religion, image, reputation or legacy, it is possible to talk of ‘before’ and ‘after’ 1536.

  This book really explores how Henry VIII became Henry VIII – and who Henry VIII really was. As such, it sets itself up to tackle what Eric Ives has called ‘the ultimate unresolvable paradox of Tudor history: Henry VIII’s psychology’.1 There are evident difficulties with doing this. The available evidence gives us limited access to Henry VIII’s thoughts, motivations and emotions – there are, for example, no helpful personal diaries or confessional letters that tell us his thoughts and feelings over, say, the period of Anne Boleyn’s arrest and execution.1

  A number of commentators have put Henry VIII on the psychiatrist’s couch. Psychologist J. C. Flügel considered Henry VIII with reference to the Oedipus complex. In doing so, he suggested that Henry was driven by conflicting tendencies in his ‘psychosexual life’; that is, the simultaneous desire for, and repulsion by, sexual rivals, incestuous liaisons and chastity in his wives. Miles F. Shore suggested Henry VIII’s childhood separations from his parents, and alternating adulation and brutality, contributed to a mid-life ‘crisis of generativity’, extreme narcissism, grandiose fantasies, and transience in relationships. With these serious analyses by psychologists at one end of the scale, at the other is the pop psychology that has informed the production of the myriad films about Henry VIII. The scriptwriter of ITV’s 2003 Henry VIII, Peter Morgan, described Henry as a ‘neglected second son… there’s a vulnerability to him… [he’s] impulsive, powerful, not a complete oaf, a wounded character’. Ray Winstone, who played the title role, reflected, ‘Once [Henry] got rid of his first wife, who was his brother’s widow, he lost a bit of his soul. Once you do that, you can’t get it back. And each [wife] became easier to get rid of. That’s what I was trying to portray. A man who, at the beginning, was a young man in love, but had been left this legacy by his father: have a son. And that would consume him.’ Henry VIII can appear to be, as Lacey Baldwin Smith described him, ‘a baffling composite of shifting shadows’.2

  My experience at Hampton Court Palace has shown me that what visitors want to know about people in the past above all is ‘how they felt’. Yet, it can be difficult enough knowing what one feels oneself, let alone understanding the feelings of another person at a 500-year remove. There are numerous ways to read Henry VIII’s character, but it is important to be confined by the available evidence. This book attempts to recreate and understand the pressures on, and convictions of, Henry VIII, and it does so by analyzing contemporary reports of his behaviour and speech, material produced by Henry VIII himself including his letters, theological treatises, royal proclamations and other state papers, and the context of the culture and attitudes of the period. It does this cautiously, however, and refrains, I hope, from wild speculation or unreasonable conjecture. It is sometimes necessary to infer and extrapolate from available evidence, but my inference has been trammelled by existing evidence and reasoning. The picture one can form of Henry, the man and monarch, is one composed of fragments – be they his letters to the rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the artwork he commissioned, the marginal annotations in his psalter or the gossip reported by the Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys. From this we can make reasoned, intelligent guesses, but this must always be in line with what we actually know.

  To readers familiar with Tudor history, much of what follows will be commonplace; as Lacey Baldwin Smith once wrote, ‘most of the ideas have been knocking about the historical attic for years’. I do think, however, that there is a new perspective to be gained from the historical method of examining the events of a year in conjunction with each other. Connections can be made between, for instance, Anne Boleyn’s alleged adultery and the art history narrative of Holbein’s Henry, or between Reginald Pole’s De Unitate and Thomas Cromwell’s appointment as vicegerent in spirituals over all ecclesiastical affairs. Links can also be made between even apparently contradictory behaviour, like Henry’s partying with Jane Seymour and the ladies of the court during Anne’s imprisonment, and his later telling Chapuys that he felt himself growing old. Set in the context of the reign as a whole, the analysis of 1536 and its repercussions can shape a deeper understanding of this most fascinating and elusive of monarchs – an understanding that both humanizes him and looks unflinchingly at his flaws. The Henry VIII who emerges is one whose reactions to betrayal negatively determined the fates of many.3

  Please note all dates have been modernized, as has spelling for the most part. As this book is intended for a general readership, references are fewer than in an equivalent academic work. Similarly, the calendared state papers are referenced, not the original manuscripts. Notes relating to cited source material can be found at the end of each paragraph, and their references in the ‘Notes’ section.

  Prologue

  For those living in 1536, the world could be a frightening place. To make sense of it, there were certain principles, values and beliefs to which people held – many of which require a great stretch of the imagination for the twenty-first century observer to understand. Yet, without grasping them, it is impossible even to begin to enter into the mind of our protagonist, Henry VIII himself.

  Above all, this was a world that believed in the existence of a divinely created order. The disruption of this order was widely expected to bring the terrifying prospect of chaos on a cosmic scale. As Shakespeare wrote in Troilus and Cressida:

  Take but degree away, untune that string,

  And hark, what discord follows.

  This order needed to be reflected in society, by rank, status and hierarchy. Everyone had their place and station; all men were not created equal. This fact was displayed even in what people wore. Sumptuary laws governed the dress of each rank of society: no man under the degree of a lord could wear cloth of gold or silver, or sable (the brown fur of the arctic fox). Only Knights of the Garter and above could wear crimson or blue velvet. No person under a knight could wear gowns or doublets of velvet. Those who owned land yielding £20 a year might wear satin or damask in their doublets, while husbandry servants, shepherds and labourers were forbidden to wear cloth costing more than two shillings a yard. The penalty for the latter was three days in the stocks. The threat of such a punishment represented the belief that dissatisfaction with one’s lot could engender disorder, injustice and anarchy. In practice, however, the social structure was accommodating enough to allow some superlative men, Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell included, to rise above the position of their birth. The corollary of hierarchy was the idea of patronage – that those of superior status would advance those of lower status who could be useful to them.2

  At the top of the hierarchy was the king, who, it was believed, had been appointed by God. To be a king was therefore a high calling and a sacred duty. It was his role and responsibility to rule in a way that ensured peace, prosperity, stability and security in the realm. Kingship by divine right meant that, in theory, kings were answerable to God alone. They could not legitimately be removed from their position, nor was disobedience to them permissible. The role of the subject was to obey them as God. In practice, such absolute power was modified by the need to maintain the cooperation of the populace, but even that cooperation was wedded to the idea that the ‘commonwealth’ was produced by living in harmony in line with the divine ordering of society.3

  For everyone in sixteenth-century society knew that there was a God in heaven and a devil in hell, and that every decision in their lives moved them closer to one or other of them. Everyone conceived of the world in religious terms, and religion was part of the natural warp and weave of everyday life. Everyone believed that one day they would face judgment and that the decisions they made on earth would determine their eternity. It has been suggested that it was not even conceptually possible to be an atheist in the sixteent
h century. Some historians have suggested that the religion of the sixteenth century was so potent because it was an epoch dominated by fear, and religious belief offered a means of apparent control. This might be too reductionist, but either way, the depth and sincerity of religious conviction meant that decisions in Tudor times about what people today might see as the finer points of theology could have life and death consequences. How one conducted one’s religious life was of the utmost importance.4

  This prevalence of religious belief meant that crime was conceived of as evidence of sin and not the consequence of social circumstances. As such, painful and spectacular punishment was thought necessary both to deter others and to cleanse society from the disorder and pollution of the criminal’s sin. The public – and often brutal – discipline of wrongdoers restored order through exemplary justice, and prevented God’s wrath on society as a whole. It was therefore divinely sanctioned. The violence of the times was not restricted to the lower classes of society: ‘polite society was almost as violent, almost as crowded and credulous, almost as brutal’.5

  A final, obvious observation to make of sixteenth-century English society is that women were considered to be inferior to men, weaker in mind and body and more prone to sin. Medical theory held that women’s bodies were imperfectly formed (inverted) males, and were cold and moist, to men’s superior qualities of hot and dry. Women were also thought to be naturally more lustful than men, and therefore, the source and cause of sexual sin. Honour, for both men and women, was linked to ensuring women’s chastity, before and within marriage. Such beliefs were to have major repercussions in the life of Henry VIII in 1536.6

  CHAPTER 1

  The Change