XVIII

God save King Henry with all his power,

And Prince Edward, that goodly flower,

With all his lords of great honour-

Sing in, troll away, sing, troll on away,

Heave and how, rumbelow, troll on away—

In October of 1537 Jane Seymour gave birth to a son. He was born at Hampton Court, and because his birthday fell on the eve of St. Edward he was given the saint’s name. Within hours of his birth Te Deums were being sung in every parish church in London for Prince Edward, and all the bells were ringing. There were bonfires in every street, and at St. Paul’s all the priests, canons and regular clergy of the city were assembling in their richest robes, with their best crosses and candlesticks carried before them. When the bishops of London and Chichester, the dean of St. Paul’s, the judges and the Lord Mayor and aldermen arrived a public feast was spread and distributed at the choir door of the church, and later a great Te Deum and anthems were sung. The king’s musicians played, and at the Tower, “a great peal of guns” was shot.

The celebrating lasted well into the night. New fires were lit in every street and lane, and the people in each neighborhood sat around them “banquetting with fruits and wine.” Hogsheads of wine were set out in various places at the king’s order, and at the Steelyard the merchants lit a hundred torches and provided wine and beer to all comers. The mayor and aldermen rode up and down the streets thanking the citizens for their good fortune, and urging them to “praise God for our prince.” It was ten o’clock before the bells stopped ringing, and even later before the Tower guns shot their two thousandth round and fell silent.

The bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer, sat down at the end of this eventful day to record the immense delight of the English people at Edward’s birth. “Here is no less joying and rejoicing in these parts for the birth of our prince,” he wrote, “whom we hungered for so long, than there was, I trow, by the neighbors at the birth of John the Baptist.” Latimer’s rhetoric was unbounded. The prince was, in his view, the gift of “an English god” who was no longer angry with his people. Edward’s birth discouraged traitors and stopped the mouths of those who spoke against the king. The prince was “the stop of vain trusts, the stay of vain expectations.” He defied all the prophets who had pronounced the king cursed with childlessness; he ended the rumors of impotence once and for all. If he proved to be a sturdy child he would become Henry’s most treasured possession, his true heir, the new hope of an aging king.

The public anticipation of Edward’s birth had begun months earlier. Late in May Queen Jane appeared in the open-laced gown and stomacher of a pregnant woman, and on May 27, Trinity Sunday, a Te Deum was sung “for joy of the queen’s quickening with child.” Then too there had been bonfires and wine for the Londoners, and throughout the summer wagers were made on the sex of the child and on the exact day when he (for it had to be a prince this time) would be born.¹ Henry took no chances with this baby. There was no court gossip about new mistresses, no indiscretion of any kind. Though it was prime hunting season Henry stayed close to the queen at Hampton Court, knowing that the birth was expected in October and realizing that his absence might upset his wife and harm his son. The king explained in a letter to Norfolk that though Jane’s “reverend conformity” made her content with anything he asked of her, still, “being but a woman, upon some sudden and displeasant rumors and bruits that might by foolish or light persons be blown abroad in our absence, being specially so far from her she might take to her stomach such impressions as might engender no little danger or displeasure to the infant.” The Council urged Henry not to travel more than sixty miles from the capital, and he concurred.²

The plague kept Henry away from Hampton Court on the night Edward was born, but he joined his pale, exhausted wife soon afterward. Jane’s labor had lasted more than fifty hours, and she was weaker than anyone realized. Her condition, though, went all but unnoticed amid the attention given to the newborn prince. Overnight Hampton Court became a nursery, and every person and object in the household came under stringent regulations ordered by the king to ensure the health of the prince. Henry’s painful memories of the death of his first son in 1511 still haunted him; there must be no repetition of that tragedy now. The recent outbreak of plague made the need for scrupulous cleanliness and isolation all the greater, and the king gave orders that neither Londoners, country people nor beggars were to be allowed within the palace gates. Every hallway and courtyard was to be washed down and swept daily;every blanket, dish and cushion brought near the baby was to be spotlessly clean. Even the christening had to be planned in accordance with these instructions, though it was to be a splendid celebration nonetheless.

There had been no christening of a prince in England for more than a quarter century, and every care was taken to make the event as elaborate and impressive as possible. Mary was to be Edward’s godmother, and she ordered a new kirtle of cloth of silver for the ceremony, paying the London cloth merchant an enormous sum for the fabric.³ Every notable of the court and government was present as the christening procession formed in the queen’s apartments. Jane received the courtiers from her bed, and she and Henry watched as the churchmen and officials took their places and walked two by two toward the chapel. The ceremony lasted for hours. Finally the tapers carried by the gentlemen of the court were lighted to indicate that the naming was complete, and the Garter King of Arms proclaimed the child “Edward, son and heir to the king of England, duke of Cornwall and earl of Chester.” Mary stood behind the marchioness of Exeter, who carried the baby in her arms under a canopy. Mary’s christening gift was a golden cup, and to the nurse, midwife and cradle rockers she gave a generous thirty pounds. As the group left the chapel Mary took Elizabeth by the hand and led her out, with Lady Kingston and Lady Herbert bearing their trains. It was after midnight when Edward was brought back to the queen’s apartments to be blessed once more, by his parents and in the name of God, the virgin Mary and St. George, and then food was provided for the entire company, hypocras and wafers for the nobles and bread and sweet wine for the “gentles and all other estates.”⁴

Latimer’s hope that the birth of an heir would put an end to rebellion was not mere rhetoric. The spectacle of so many nobles and clerics solemnly assembled to confirm the king’s heir in his rights was meant to give an appearance of popular stability and content, but in fact the king had only recently faced the most dangerous revolt of his reign. It had broken out just twelve months earlier in the north, revealing the true extent of the people’s disloyalty and the precariousness of the royal authority.

The unrest had been building for years. Economic hardship hit the northern counties very hard in the 1530s, striking at the clothiers of the West Riding, the farmers impoverished by high rents, and all those affected by the suppression of the monasteries. Sentiment against the religious innovations was very high in the north, where distrust and hatred of the king had been widespread since the early days of his divorce from Katherine. When Anne became queen the people cursed her; when Henry declared himself head of the church they refused to accept his supremacy. They swore to uphold the Act of Succession, but it onlymade them more angry, more eager, when the time came, to join forces against the king. “Even the rude people,” Chapuys reported, “said it was evident the statute was of no value, since they were compelled to swear, which had never been seen before.”⁵ Like Mary they told one another that an oath exacted by force was not morally binding, and besides this they demonstrated their opposition to the new political and religious order in direct and emphatic ways.

When preachers were sent among them to denounce the pope and the old practices of relic worship and the granting of indulgences they called them seditious. One preacher who presented a play about the pope and his “councilors” Error and Incredulity found the doors of all the parish churches closed to him. At Kendal in Westmorland the parishioners, some three hundred strong, “threatened to cast the curate into the water unless he would proclaim the pope to be head of the church.” Local priests continued to uphold the pope, to maintain the efficacy of the saints and their remains, and to dispense indulgences. They denounced the relaxed Lenten observances instituted by the king as head of the church, and they heard with horror of the Ten Articles, Henry’s redefinition of belief which made no mention of confirmation, matrimony, holy orders or extreme unction. There was no telling how far the destruction of the traditional faith might go. If the king could annihilate four of the seven sacraments, why not the other three? Already he was ordering his clergy to say that masses had no power to deliver souls from purgatory, and there were rumors that in the near future many churches would be closed and all religious ceremonies taxed.

The final provocation to rebellion, though, came with the destruction of the monasteries. The rebel leader Robert Aske, when questioned about the grievances of the Yorkshiremen who followed him, spoke eloquently about the different meaning the religious houses had in the northern counties. The abbeys “gave great alms to poor men,” he said, and taught God’s law to unlettered people living in the “mountains and desert places.” The monks had kept up the sea walls and dikes, and had built bridges and highways—something no one else did in the remote regions of the kingdom—and provided weary travelers with food and rest in country where villages were sparse. Moreover the monasteries were the guardians of tradition, both literally and metaphorically. For the nobility they were ancestral graveyards, for the common folk they embodied the past in a way that defied explanation. They were landmarks in both a historical and geographical sense. In Aske’s phrase, the abbeys were “one of the beauties of this realm to all men.”

As the pulling down of the abbeys accelerated the climate of opposition in the north grew more heated. Priests denounced Cromwell and his assistants as agents of the devil in their thorough and efficient work ofdemolition, and assured their congregations that all who took part in the suppression would be damned. Some clergy urged the monks to resist by force, and when this failed, encouraged their own parishioners to take up arms.

The first risings were in Lincolnshire, where the shoemaker Nicholas Melton and his sworn companions dedicated themselves to revolt on behalf of “God, the king and the commons for the wealth of holy church.” In a nearby village the country people took as their symbol the Five Wounds of Christ, and within days there were said to be some forty thousand men following the banner of the Five Wounds, including hundreds of priests and monks. The rebel army seized Lincoln, but failed to hold the town after a royal herald arrived with a threatening message from the king. The commons of Yorkshire, however, now defied their sovereign and supported the lawyer and country gentleman Robert Aske, who with his “Pilgrims” took the city of York and became the effective ruler of the county. Henry, who had dismissed both the rebels and their petitions for reform as beneath his notice, now grew uneasy and sent Norfolk and Suffolk to put down the revolt. Already the success of the Yorkshiremen was encouraging unrest in East Anglia and Norfolk, and there was always the danger of intervention from the Scots or from continental powers. In fact the pope gave legatine powers to Reginald Pole, the son of the countess of Salisbury and scion of the Plantagenet line, and sent him to Flanders to wait for an opportune moment to cross to England and lead the rising.

While Pole waited the rebels sent the king a new list of demands. Headship of the English church was to be returned to the pope in matters that concerned the “cure of souls”—that is, spiritual and ecclesiastical affairs. Parliament was to be reformed, the recent Act of Succession repealed, and the monasteries restored. Full pardon for all rebels would have to be guaranteed before York would be surrendered to the royal forces. The demands were stringent, but the king appeared now to take them seriously. Through his deputy Norfolk he granted the Pilgrims the pardon they asked for—or so it seemed—and Aske convinced them to disband.

Before the Pilgrims realized that the king had deceived them his agents were at work rounding up all who believed they had been pardoned and bringing them to trial. Hundreds were summarily executed, many of them sentenced by juries coerced into rendering guilty verdicts. The rebel leaders, including Lords Hussey and Darcy, were beheaded, and Robert Aske was “hanged in the city of York in chains till he died.”⁶Many country people were hanged in their own gardens as examples to their fellow villagers, and monks of Sawley Abbey, a suppressed monastery which the Pilgrims had re-established, were hanged from the steeple of their church.

It was this rebellion that Latimer meant to conjure in his fervent welcome to the new prince as the sure remedy against conspiracies. Now that the king had a male heir he would be much less vulnerable to attack from those who might try to use the uncertain succession as an excuse to overthrow him.

In particular, it weakened those who supported Mary and wanted to see her rights restored. For if the Pilgrimage of Grace had been primarily a conservative protest against religious innovations it also prominently raised the question of Mary’s status. In the north Mary was still looked on as the king’s legitimate daughter, who on her mother’s side “came of the greatest blood in Christendom” and whom the Roman church had never proclaimed to be baseborn. “She is marvellously beloved by the whole people,” Aske said, and it is certain that not only the commoners but the aristocrats and gentry among the rebels, many of whom had been prepared to take the field against the king since 1534, supported Mary’s claim to the throne.⁷

Yet so complete was her restoration to favor that the rebellion did nothing to dislodge her. Henry assumed, correctly, that his daughter was not connected with the rebels in any way, despite their advocacy of her cause. Throughout the fall and winter of 1536 she associated herself more and more closely with her father and stepmother, riding beside them in the royal barge or, when the river was frozen, through the streets of London.⁸ At court she held the place of honor just below the queen, sitting opposite her, “a little lower down,” at table and enjoying the privilege of serving both the king and queen with the napkin when they washed their hands before the dishes were brought in.⁹ She stood with Jane at the font at the christenings of noblemen’s children, and rejoiced with the queen as her pregnancy advanced. Mary sent her stepmother quails in June—Jane ate them by the dozens as the summer went on, and could not seem to get enough—and attended to her obligations as mistress of a growing establishment of officers and servants.¹⁰

Some members of the new household proved to be troublesome. One of Mary’s yeoman cooks, Spencer by name, was implicated in a robbery in Oxfordshire, and had to answer to the bailiffs of Reading.¹¹ Shortly afterward it came to light that a tailor’s servant who had been given access to a manor house where Mary stayed from time to time abused his master’s trust and spent the day in the empty residence. Two of his friends were with him, and while they did no harm—one played the virginals and lute, another read a book, and all three explored the “gentlewomen’s chamber” with inordinate interest—their unsupervised stayworried the porter when he found out about it and indicated some carelessness on the part of Mary’s household steward, John Shelton.¹²

In the fall Mary was back at Hampton Court waiting out Jane’s confinement with the rest of the nobility. In her capacity as godmother to the prince she was an important figure in the celebrations that attended his birth, but a more somber honor fell to her when Jane, weakened by her ordeal and humored in her craving for “unwholesome” foods, became fatally ill and died. The rejoicing over Edward’s birth was barely over when Jane’s obsequies began, and Mary was now called upon to be chief mourner. Her responsibilities were especially grave in that Henry, who was deeply grieved by Jane’s death, rode off almost immediately to get away from the morbid atmosphere of the court and left the funeral arrangements in the hands of the Council and chief mourner.

The king was both affronted and alarmed by reminders of death. His preoccupation with medicines and hygiene, the terror of plague and dread of all other disease all point to a phobia that clung to him throughout his reign. Years later a member of Edward’s royal Council recalled that Henry “ofttimes would not only dispense with all mourning, but would be ready to pluck the black apparel from such men’s backs as presumed to wear it in his presence.” Henry’s sorrow at the loss of his wife sharpened his horror of death in general and made him more anxious than ever to take refuge away from court.

In his absence the cumbersome sequence of vigils, masses and processions that made up a royal funeral was set in motion. Jane was first laid out in her coffin in the palace, surrounded by candles and mourned by the household servants who had now to find other work. Mary distributed the funeral dole among them—a sovereign each to the chamber women, forty shillings to the page, and three shillings to the queen’s personal gardener at Hampton Court.¹³ After a few days the corpse was placed in the palace chapel, and Lancaster Herald ordered all present to kneel. “Of your charity pray for the soul of the queen!” he called out, then made way for the priests and chapel boys to sing the dirge.

Weeks of vigils followed. Watchers surrounded the hearse at all hours of the day and night, with the clergy, gentleman ushers and officers of arms presiding at night and the chief mourner and her ladies taking over during the daylight hours. There were several masses each day, among them the offering mass at which every mourner gave a piece of gold for the soul of the deceased. Finally on November 12, eighteen days after she died, Jane was escorted to her burial place in the Garter chapel at Windsor. Two hundred poor men walked ahead of the procession wearing her badge and carrying lighted torches. Mary, her horse trapped in black velvet, rode just behind the coffin, followed by twenty-nine ladies and gentlewomen. At every town and village through which the processionpassed the poor men formed a corridor of honor with their torches, and the villagers lined the road, their caps in their hands, to watch the queen pass.

At Windsor the dean and college met the funeral party at the outer gate, and the pallbearers carried the coffin into the chapel where the archbishop of Canterbury awaited it in his pontifical robes, flanked by six bishops and as many abbots. Mary followed, attended by seven ladies and with Lady Rochford carrying her train. After another day and night of lessons, dirges and masses, the women mourners offered their velvet palls—as chief mourner Mary presented seven of these—and then Jane was buried between the stalls and altar of the chapel.

Her epitaph compared her to a phoenix who in dying gave the realm another like herself.

Here lies Jane, a phoenix

Who died in giving another phoenix birth.

Let her be mourned, for birds like these

Are rare indeed.

Jane would be honored for the rest of Henry’s reign as the mother of his heir, though the king’s enemies would in time embroider the circumstances of her death with a dark legend. It would be said that, to save his son, Henry ordered the baby torn out of the womb at the cost of Jane’s life. Henry had become so despised by many of his subjects that even his bitterest personal tragedy was charged to his own cruelty.

For Mary the period of mourning had a painful postscript. Her days and nights of watching and attendance at mass after mass gave her a bad toothache, and as soon as Jane was in her grave Mary had to have the tooth pulled. Henry sent his own man, Nicholas Sampson, to do the extraction, and either the procedure was very time-consuming or Sampson was very skilled, for beyond giving him the forty-flve-shilling fee Mary sent him back to court with six gold angels in his purse.¹⁴