What would turn out to be the last year of Henry VIII’s life was a fascinating, tumultuous period of conflict and contention, as those around the throne jostled for power. The ultimate goal was control of the government after the ageing king died. The trouble was, of course, that no one knew quite when that would happen. With the benefit of hindsight, however, we have the privilege of knowing precisely when death would come to call on Henry VIII, and so can see exactly how the events of this last year are pivotal to understanding the context in which Henry drew up his last will and testament, in December 1546.

Much of the storm that would break as Henry drew up his will started to brew earlier in the year. One catalyst was the English defeat by the French at the Battle of St Etienne in January 1546, for which responsibility lay with Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey.

Surrey had been born into the one of the most important and powerful noble families in Tudor England.1 He was the eldest son of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, while on his mother’s side he was descended from the dukes of Buckingham, and two of his cousins (Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard) had been Henry VIII’s queens. Probably born in 1517, and named after his king, Surrey had grown up with Henry VIII’s illegitimate son at Windsor Castle and at the court of the French king, Francis I, in 1533; in short, he had been reared as a prince. He had also been made a Knight of the Garter at the age of twenty-four. He was a poet of extraordinary power, who invented new verse forms in English, both blank verse and the ‘Shakespearian’ sonnet. He was, though, vainglorious, reckless and conceited. For April 1543, the Acts of the Privy Council include the note that the Earl of Surrey and a small gang had been sent to Fleet Prison for eating meat in Lent and in ‘a lewd and unseemly manner… walking in the night about the streets and breaking with stonebows of certain windows’.2 The historian W.K. Jordan described him very aptly as an ‘infinitely gifted juvenile delinquent’.3 Nevertheless, his night-time exploits had not prevented the recognition of his talent, which is why, at the age of just twenty-eight, in August 1545, Surrey had been made Henry VIII’s commander-in-chief of the armed forces in France.

Yet, whether from lack of judgment or sheer misfortune, in January 1546 this youthful leader met disaster. At St Etienne, under his command, the defeated English suffered casualties of between 200 and 1,000 men, and there was no doubting that many of those slain were the highest-ranking military personnel and the cream of English society.

One commentator, the Welsh soldier Elis Gruffydd, blamed the thrashing on Surrey’s pride and arrogance. What is not in doubt is Surrey’s disgrace. When defeat looked unavoidable, he fled the field of battle, and in his letter to the king blamed the failure not on the leaders but on ‘a humour that sometime reigneth in English men’.4 It is no wonder that he was soon stripped of his position and recalled home.

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in a portrait from 1546, attributed to William Scrots. Born in 1517, Surrey was the son of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. He is shown here wearing an ostentatious doublet and hose, necklace and Garter. The portrait allegorically depicts Surrey’s royal descent from Edward the Confessor and Edward III (implied in his unwise heraldic quartering of the royal arms of Edward the Confessor with his own). Surrey was commander-in-chief of Henry VIII’s forces in France until 1546, but he was executed for high treason on 19 January 1547.

In Surrey’s place was put Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, who had recently known great military success in Scotland. This substitution bred resentment in the thwarted, arrogant Surrey. According to the seventeenth-century historian Gilbert Burnet, at Hertford’s advancement Surrey ‘let fall some words of high resentment and bitter contempt, which not long after wrought his ruin’; another seventeenth-century writer, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, mused that Surrey’s behaviour ‘did so little satisfy the king (who loved no noise but of victory) that he ever after disaffected him; for which cause also he was shortly removed’.5 They were right: here Surrey sowed the seeds of his destruction, above all by disappointing his king. Henry would brook no failure. The Battle of St Etienne would claim its final victim in the vital last weeks of Henry VIII’s reign.

Meanwhile, Hertford’s appointment in Surrey’s place as Lieutenant-General in France removed the former from the centre of power for a crucial season over the spring and summer of 1546. Hertford, aged in his mid-forties, was the king’s brother-in-law by virtue of being the older brother of Jane Seymour. He was a member of Henry’s Privy Council and a brilliant soldier. He was also a man who had a profound sense of his own self-importance, and whose audacity could look like arrogance and pride to his enemies. Reading Hertford’s letters, one is struck by his ‘bold and rude writing’: Hertford’s handwriting and spelling were rather rudimentary, but ‘bold and rude’ also sums up his peculiar combination of gumption and ill-temper.6 Imperial Ambassador François Van der Delft thought him ‘a dry, sour, opinionated man’.7

The Catholic Van der Delft had good reason, anyway, to dislike Hertford. Although Hertford kept his cards close to his chest, it is evident that he was an ‘evangelical’ – a proto-Protestant. Evangelicals believed in justification by faith alone (as Luther did) – that salvation could be achieved simply through believing in God’s grace and the sufficiency of Christ’s death on the Cross to wipe away sin. They also held that ultimate authority lay with the Bible, and that the Church needed to be reformed in line with the Scriptures, including by the elimination of images in worship (which evangelicals considered idolatrous) and the removal of practices such as the veneration of saints and pilgrimages to honour relics. Many at Henry VIII’s court were opposed to such beliefs.

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Hertford’s absence seems to have emboldened those of another religious complexion to attempt to seize control of the court in mid-1546. These were the ‘conservatives’, who inclined towards retaining many of the beliefs and practices of the Catholic Church despite having ditched the pope. The key conservative and the chief instigator of a series of high-profile attacks on suspected heretics in the summer of 1546 was Henry’s lord chancellor, Sir Thomas Wriothesley.

Wriothesley (pronounced ‘Rye-zlee’) was forty-one years old in 1546 and had been lord chancellor for two years. Born into a family of heralds, he had originally been Thomas Cromwell’s man, profiting – as so many of the gentry and nobility had done – from the dissolution of the monasteries.8 When Cromwell fell, however, Wriothesley continued his own ascent, and in 1540 he had been made one of the king’s principal secretaries, before being promoted to the highest office in the land: that of lord chancellor.

Sir Thomas Wriothesley was both astute and dogged. His contemporary, Richard Morison, noted that he was ‘an earnest follower of whatsoever he took in hand, and did very seldom miss where either wit or travail were able to bring his purpose to pass’.9 Or perhaps George Blage, who had his own reasons to judge Wriothesley harshly, was more accurate when he declared that Wriothesley had ‘crept full high’ only ‘by false deceit, by craft and subtle ways’.10 The judgment of recent historians has inclined more to the latter view. Professor Peter Marshall concluded that ‘broken loyalties and betrayals were the stepping-stones of Wriothesley’s career’.11 The events of 1546 would suggest that he was – though zealous, hardworking and possessed of Henry’s trust – rather nasty.

Sir Richard Rich, later Baron of Leeze, in a sketch after Hans Holbein. Rich (c.1496–1567) was the man whose perjury condemned Sir Thomas More and who racked Anne Askewe with his own hands. The original sketch on which this copy is based was probably completed when Rich was Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, the body that dealt with the funds received from the dissolution of the monasteries – a position that made Rich’s name apt for his own enlarged means. He was named as an assistant councillor in Henry VIII’s last will and testament.

Wriothesley’s first victim in 1546 was a young gentlewoman from Lincolnshire called Anne Askewe.12 She had first been arrested in 1545, but then released; yet on 24 May 1546 she was summoned before the Privy Council at Greenwich to be examined on her beliefs about the nature of the sacrament of the Mass. According to her own account, the Councillors urged her to ‘confess the sacrament to be flesh, blood and bone’, but she held that ‘the bread is but a remembrance of his [Christ’s] death, or a sacrament of thanksgiving for it’. ‘As for that you call your God,’ she declared, it ‘is but a piece of bread.’ Displaying deft knowledge of Scripture, she backed up her conclusion by quoting from the Book of Daniel that ‘God will be in nothing that is made with the hands of men’, and that Christ did not literally mean the bread was his body, just as he did not mean he was an actual door, a vine, or a lamb, in his other metaphors quoted in John and 1 Corinthians.13 Scriptural she may have been, but the beliefs she was expressing were sacramentarian and, in Henrician England, held to be heretical.

Askewe was prosecuted for heresy on 28 June, and the next day she was sent to the Tower of London, to be examined by Wriothesley and Sir Richard Rich, formerly Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations. Born in around 1496, the dastardly named Sir Richard Rich was a member of Middle Temple and a lawyer by training. He was also an obnoxious, amoral and ruthless chancer, who climbed high on the bodies of those more principled than himself. His career, including such positions as Commissioner of the Peace, Attorney-General for Wales, and Solicitor-General for England, should have made him a great devotee of the law; but it was on his perjury that Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher, who both opposed Henry’s supremacy over the Church, had gone to their deaths, and, while he owed everything to Cromwell, he had given evidence, too, at Cromwell’s attainder for treason. Wriothesley’s profit from the monastic suppression was negligible compared to Rich’s haul: he filled his pockets as Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations; only the king had benefited more.

In the Tower, Wriothesley and Rich asked Anne Askewe whether she could name any others belonging to her ‘sect’, specifically questioning her about several women: Catherine Willoughby, the dowager Duchess of Suffolk, who was known for her evangelical views; Anne Calthorpe, Countess of Sussex; Anne Stanhope, Countess of Hertford; Joan Champernowne, the wife of Sir Anthony Denny; and Mabel Clifford, the widow of Sir William Fitzwilliam.14 These queries touched close to the heart of the court: Catherine Willoughby, fourth wife to the late Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, was a close friend of Kateryn Parr; Denny was a Gentleman of the King’s Privy Chamber and a close friend of Henry; and the Countess of Hertford was, of course, wife of the king’s brother-in-law who was conveniently in France. It looks like Wriothesley and Rich were trying to condemn Hertford’s wife in his absence. The other women in the list were ladies of Kateryn Parr’s court.15

A scene illustrating ‘The order and maner of the burning of Anne Askew’, included in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (also known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs). The contemporary woodcut shows the Lincolnshire gentlewoman Anne Askewe (1521–46) being burnt at the stake, with others, at London’s Smithfield on 16 July 1546, having been condemned for heresy and tortured in the Tower of London.

To persuade her to talk, Askewe was racked, first by Sir Anthony Knevet, the Lieutenant of the Tower, and then, when he refused to proceed further, by Rich and Wriothesley themselves, in an act of savage criminality.16 ‘Throwing off their gowns, [they] would needs play the tormentors themselves’, racking her till they ‘almost tore her body asunder’, till ‘the strings of her arms and eyes were perished’, till, said Askewe, ‘I was nigh dead’.17 This was all strictly illegal and highly irregular: torture was rare in cases of heresy and was against the law when done without a permit from the Privy Council, in the case of someone already condemned, or when that someone was a woman.18 All these criteria applied to Anne. Nevertheless, she refused to indict anyone, even holding out when the racking was done and Wriothesley forced her to sit her broken body for ‘two long hours reasoning with my lord chancellor upon the bare floor’, promising her that should she change her mind, she would want for nothing.19 When she went to Smithfield for her execution on 16 July 1546, she had to be carried in a chair, because the racking had damaged her so badly that she could not walk. There, before she was burned with two other martyrs, Wriothesley gave her one last opportunity to recant.

What drove such a desperate and determined pursuit of heresy, and why was Askewe so pressed to incriminate others? Historians have suggested that with evangelicals like the Earl of Hertford out of the way, the conservatives, with Wriothesley at their helm, became intent on rooting out heresy, for both sincerely religious but also more worldly, political purposes. Had Askewe’s spirit been broken as effectively as her body had been, and had she implicated others, she might well have named a number of leading evangelicals at court; and with the evangelicals out in the cold, the conservatives would have ruled the roost.

There is also evidence that the attack on Askewe was just one part of a calculated campaign. Between Askewe’s racking and her burning, Wriothesley moved against someone much closer to the heart of the court, George Blage.

Blage was a courtier – a member of the king’s Privy Chamber, a soldier, diplomat, Member of Parliament, evangelical, friend to the poets Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, and a poet himself, albeit an indifferent one. He was a close enough companion of the king to have earned the honour of a derogatory nickname – Henry called him ‘my pig’ – and yet, boldly in July 1546, Wriothesley directly targeted Blage.

The evidence used against him was that in May Blage had been heard to mock the Mass by posing the question of what to do if the bread of the Mass were eaten by a mouse, to which he had concluded ‘that in his opinion it were well done that the mouse were taken and put in the pix’ – the pix being the receptacle containing the consecrated bread, to be held up for adoration.20 These were heretical, sacramentarian beliefs, and on this evidence Wriothesley had Blage arrested on 11 July and, within 24 hours, convicted by a jury and condemned to death by fire.

It was an extraordinary miscalculation on Wriothesley’s part. Henry was indeed fundamentally opposed to any doctrine that denied the real presence of Christ in the bread and the wine. In 1538, dressed in the white of theological purity, the king had presided in person over the trial of a sacramentarian heretic, John Lambert, at Hampton Court, and Lambert had perished in the flames. The only other person of any standing who espoused these beliefs and escaped the fire in the summer of 1546 was the former bishop, Nicholas Shaxton, who formally recanted.21 Such evidence suggests, therefore, how fond and furious Henry must have been to intervene to save Blage: the fondness for Blage was coupled with fury at the lord chancellor attempting to reach into the king’s own Privy Chamber and pluck out from it a man whom Henry considered to be a good friend as well as a personal servant. As soon as the news of Blage’s arrest made it to him, Henry instantly commanded Wriothesley to draw up a pardon; he would not see his pig roasted.22 The incident reveals the audacity of conservative machinations at court, but also, importantly, the limits on any attempt to force Henry to do anything. The story of the creation of Henry VIII’s last will cannot be understood without remembering this characteristic intransigence of the king.

This episode makes the other target of the conservatives – an attempt at an even greater prize than Blage – more incredible. At some point over these months, they tried to indict the queen, Kateryn Parr, for heresy.23

Hampton Court, depicted in a pen-and-ink drawing (1556) by Anthonis van den Wyngaerde. His sketch, completed nearly a decade after Henry VIII’s death, shows the scale of the building work and extensions at Hampton Court in the 1530s. In ten years, following the ‘gift’ of the palace to the king by Cardinal Wolsey, Henry spent the extraordinary sum of around £60,000 on adding a new Great Hall, apartments, kitchens and tennis courts. It was in Hampton Court that his heir, Edward, was born.

John Foxe tells us that Kateryn, an evangelical, was much given to reading and studying the Bible with the ladies of her privy chamber.24 Furthermore, she took to debating religion with the king, very frankly, and urging him to further reformation of the Church. This he bore well, and even, for a time, seemed to enjoy. But on one occasion perhaps, Foxe suggests, sickly and pained by his leg, Henry grumbled at Kateryn’s temerity after she had left, muttering sarcastically: ‘a good hearing it is, when women become such clerks; and a thing much to my comfort, to come in mine old days to be taught by my wife’.

Henry was overheard by Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. A trained lawyer, former ambassador, and brilliant but self-important, stubborn and argumentative cleric, Gardiner opposed Kateryn’s religious views, and the opportunity seemed too good to miss. Gardiner soothed the king with the kind of ostensibly reassuring phrases that in reality alarm and disconcert. He had soon ‘whetted the king both to anger and displeasure towards the queen’.25 Stirred to distrust, Henry allowed Kateryn to be investigated: her rooms were searched for forbidden books, her ladies were questioned, and articles against her were drawn up. It looked as if the queen’s life might be on the line.

Given Henry VIII’s record, we might be astonished that the famous six-wives ditty ends as it does: ‘Divorced, beheaded, died / Divorced, beheaded, survived’. Kateryn’s survival seems to have been wrought by the compassion of one or two of individuals who tipped her off, and by her own quick thinking. Foxe tells us one rather improbable story about the damning articles falling from the pockets of one of Henry’s councillors, and their being found by ‘some godly person’ and taken to the queen. More convincingly, he also relates that Henry recounted the affair to one of his physicians – either Dr Thomas Wendy or Dr George Owen, though Foxe thinks the former more likely – who warned the queen of her precarious position.26

Either way, Kateryn was in the know and the next night, when she visited the king, the conversation turned to religion. When Henry sought her opinion, she delivered a speech of submission so artful and persuasive that it is rivalled only by Katherina’s morally troubling speech in the final act of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew for totality of capitulation.27 Kateryn spoke of a woman’s entire inferiority and subjection to man, who was her head, by whom she was to be governed, commanded and directed, and questioned how her ‘only anchor, supreme head and governor here in earth, next unto God’ could seek the judgment of ‘a silly poor woman’.28 ‘Not so… you are become a doctor, Kate to instruct us,’ Henry retorted, to which Kateryn explained that she had only ever been bold with him to ‘minister talk’, to distract his mind from the pain of his injury, and to profit from the king’s learning, and that, in truth, she believed it ‘very unseemly, and preposterous’ for a woman to purport to instruct her ‘lord and husband’. As often with Foxe, we do not know if these words are an invented speech or based on an eyewitness report; but whatever she said was enough to convince Henry. He took her in his arms, called her ‘sweetheart’ and declared that they were perfect friends again.

The next day, as the king and queen, with the queen’s ladies, were walking in the gardens, Wriothesley appeared with forty guards intending to arrest Kateryn and her womenfolk. The lord chancellor knelt before Henry and in this deferential pose spoke softly to the king. From a distance, the only words of Henry’s heated response that could be heard were ‘Knave! Arrant knave! Beast! Fool!’, and Wriothesley was dismissed from the royal presence.29 Kateryn had passed her test – or, as Foxe put it, she had ‘escaped the dangerous snares of her bloody and cruel enemies’.30

The only surviving account of this whole incident comes from John Foxe, and the lack of contemporary evidence to corroborate it has led some historians to doubt its veracity.31 Certain details, however, make it seem credible: the fact that it did not appear in Foxe’s first edition of 1563 but only later, as if he had learnt of it from a witness; his lack of certainty about the identity of the doctor; the words unheard in Henry’s dressing-down of Wriothesley; and the fact that Foxe cites his source as being ‘certain of [Kateryn’s] ladies and gentlewomen, being yet alive’.32 What is less plausible is that the mastermind behind the plot was Stephen Gardiner. The bishop was Foxe’s ‘usual suspect’, and while Gardiner may have been involved, Wriothesley seems to have played a major role, as he had done in the pursuit of Askewe and Blage.33 It was he, as lord chancellor, who could have drawn up articles against Kateryn; he who came to carry out the gratifying seizure. Perhaps the initiative also lay, rather, with him.

How can we interpret this series of attacks? In the seventeenth century, Gilbert Burnet was probably right to blame Henry’s willingness to have his wife investigated on his growing ‘distempers’ and ‘peevishness’ because of his physical condition.34 The events also obviously constituted a deliberate and dangerous campaign by the conservatives – and Wriothesley’s name is the one that re-appears – to undermine and remove the evangelicals at court. Crucially, however, the events also demonstrate that even in his illness, Henry could not be manipulated to do what he did not wish to do. That Henry’s stubbornness transcended even his physical deterioration is an important clue to understanding the true nature of his last will and testament. Henry permitted the investigations of Askewe and Queen Kateryn because of his profound commitment to the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Mass, and because of a similarly fervent belief in his position as Supreme Head of the Church, in relation to which Gardiner had persuaded him that his wife had failed him.

The key to Henry’s frame of mind is in his response to Kateryn after her deft act of surrender. Once Kateryn had yielded to him, he kissed her and said that ‘it did him more good at that time to hear those words of her own mouth, than if he had heard present news of a hundred thousand pounds of money fallen unto him’. And it no doubt did. Henry saw disagreement with his religious vision as treason. By 1546, he was used to being – indeed, almost expected to be – betrayed, making him hypersensitive to slights and any whiff of treachery. Kateryn’s submission probably acted as a real, if temporary, balm to this great wound of betrayal that he bore.

Those who felt the force of the king’s ire at their perceived perfidy later in the year would not be granted a similar opportunity to tame the lion.