For whatever reason, Henry was in no hurry to remarry after Jane’s death. Perhaps he really was inconsolable. Perhaps it was the difficulty of finding another suitable wife. The most likely explanation, however, lies in a quirk in the King’s amorous nature.
For Henry, as we have seen, being in love, or at least being able to imagine himself in love, was a prerequisite for marriage. But he tended to fall in love with a woman only when he was falling out of love with another one. It was thus that Anne had succeeded Catherine and thus in turn, as her own star waned, that Anne had been displaced by Jane. But Jane died while Henry was still in love with her–or, at least, not much out of it. Moreover, the fact that she died giving him a son meant that he came to love her more dead than alive. In these circumstances, the machinery of love on the rebound did not come into play and the post of Queen lay vacant.
But the vacancy was intended to be a short one only. This is shown by the fact that, despite Jane’s death, the ladies of her Chamber were kept together. Henry provided for the young unmarried women, including Anne Basset, by boarding them out with the senior married ladies. He entertained the ladies, young and old, with splendid banquets at Court. And he even supplied them with holiday fun when he sent them off as a group, at his own expense, to view the fleet at Portsmouth. Henry was not being wholly altruistic, of course. He loved the company of women and, whether he had a wife or not, he could not live without it.1
And, who knows, one of the young ladies, like Anne Basset, might kindle his sleeping fires.2
Nevertheless, as time went by, the King’s continuing failure to wed became a subject of concern to the Tudor chattering classes.
Normally, their conversations–at Court, over the dinner-table or in the hunting field–are lost to us. But an extraordinary chance recorded one in the summer of 1539. Even more remarkably, the two main participants were men who have figured in our story. One was George Constantine, Henry Norris’s former servant and priest. He was opinionated, talkative and an incorrigible gossip. He was also remarkably well informed. The other was John Barlow, Anne’s former chaplain and factotum, who still held the Deanship of the College of Westbury-on-Trym, which she had given him. Barlow was an altogether different character. He was a shrewd, taciturn red-head, given to sharp turns of phrase and quick, probing questions.3
In late August 1539 the two were riding together from Bristol to St David’s, where John’s brother, William, was bishop. And, as they rode, they talked. It seemed ordinary good-fellowship. But, though Constantine did not realise it at the time, Barlow was pumping him for information–perhaps with a view to entrapping him. At all events, their conversation attracted Cromwell’s attention and was recorded from memory by Constantine in an effort to exonerate himself.4
‘Hearest of no marriage toward?’ Barlow asked. It was a sensitive subject and even Constantine at first tried to steer clear of it. ‘I cannot tell what to say,’ he replied, ‘but methink it great pity that the King is so long without a Queen: his Grace might yet have many fair children.’ Barlow returned to the attack: ‘But hearest anything of any marriage?’ The conversation now became a sort of truth game. ‘There be two spoken of,’ Constantine replied, with deliberate obscurity. ‘Yea, marry! the Duchess of Milan and one of Cleves,’ Barlow replied, showing that he too was up-to-date with the latest news.
Now that both men had put their cards on the table, Constantine became more confidential. ‘Little Dr Wotton’, the ambassador to Cleves, had sent home his companion, one of the Privy Chamber. ‘I have forgotten his name,’ said Constantine. Barlow prompted him: ‘Marry! his name is Beard.’ ‘It is Beard indeed,’ Constantine acknowledged. ‘Now, Sir,’ he continued, ‘this Beard is come home and sent thitherward again with the King’s Painter.’ ‘I pray you keep this gear secret,’ he added.
Both agreed that the swift re-despatch of Beard was a good sign. For their attitude to Henry’s two possible marriages was not neutral. They were strongly opposed to the marriage with the Duchess of Milan–which they, in any case, thought doomed since her Habsburg family was insisting on a Papal dispensation for the match. ‘I pray God it be dashed,’ said Constantine. ‘For of this I am sure, that it is not possible that there can be faithful amity betwixt the King, the Emperor [who was the Duchess’s uncle] and the French King, so long as the King receiveth not the Pope, who is their God in earth.’
In contrast, they were warm partisans of the Cleves match. Constantine, naturally, spoke the most plainly. ‘I may tell you’, he said, ‘there is good hope, yet, that all shall be well enough if that marriage go forward.’ ‘For’, he explained, ‘the Duke of Cleves doth favour God’s Word, and is a mighty Prince now; for he hath Guelderland in his hand too, and that against the Emperor.’5
Constantine’s and Barlow’s partisanship about Henry’s next marriage was typical and reflected the wider divisions within the political élite. For the bitter politico-religious tensions of the earlier 1530s had intensified in the years after Jane’s death.
On the one hand, people were more aware of the issues and cared about them more strongly. On the other, Henry himself, partly out of policy and partly out of a convinced belief in the via media or third way, swung now this way and now that. The result was that policy shifted, with dangerous unpredictability, from Reform to counter-Reform. In the summer of 1538 it seemed as though Cromwell would pull off the coup of an alliance between Henry and the Lutheran Princes of Germany who had formed themselves into the Schmalkaldic League. But the scheme was scotched by Bishop Tunstall of Durham, who, after years of internal exile in the north, came back to the Court and high favour during the Progress of 1538. Another more ambiguous gain for the conservatives was Gardiner’s return from his prolonged French Embassy on 28 September.
Constantine and Barlow were fully alert to the threat presented by these two men. ‘[Gardiner]’, Constantine conceded, ‘is learned and, as I think, the wittiest, the boldest and the best learned in his faculty that is in England, and a great rhetorician.’ But then came the qualification: ‘[he is] of very corrupt judgement’. ‘He hath done much hurt, I promise you,’ Barlow agreed. ‘Nay,’ Constantine dissented, ‘there is no man hath done so much hurt in this matter as the Bishop of Durham.’ ‘For he,’ he added, ‘by his stillness, soberness and subtlety, worketh more than ten such as Winchester and he is a learned man too.’6
Despite the successes of Gardiner and Tunstall, Cromwell struck back at the end of 1538 by successfully pinning charges of treason on the Exeters, Montague and the rest of the Pole family, including its matriarch, the Countess of Salisbury. And in the New Year, Carew himself followed them to the block on charges of complicity in the Poles’ treason. Past historians have seen these executions as the result of Henry’s tyrannical hatred of the surviving members of the rival House of York. In fact, by contemporary standards, the victims deserved their fate, since, as we have seen, they had been root-and-branch opponents of Reform since the earliest days of the Boleyn marriage.
But then, in the Parliament which met in the early summer of 1539, Reform came a cropper. Led directly by Henry and by Norfolk as Henry’s willing spokesman, Parliament passed the Act for the Abolishing of Diversity in Opinion, otherwise known as the Act of Six Articles. The principal Article reaffirmed belief in the Real Presence in the Sacrament, to which, as the Corpus Christi Day celebrations of 1536 showed, Henry was passionately committed. ‘First’, it declared, it was necessary to believe that ‘in the most holy sacrament of the altar, by the strength and efficacy of Christ’s mighty word, it being spoken by the priest, is present really, under the form of bread and wine, the natural body and blood of our Saviour Jesus Christ’ and nothing else.7
The remaining five Articles ruled equally definitively on a whole range of currently disputed positions. Communion ‘in both kinds’–that is, by partaking of both the bread and the wine–was not necessary. Priestly marriage was unlawful. Monastic vows should be kept. Masses for the dead were allowable. Confession to a priest was both necessary and desirable.
Only the most radical, known rather confusingly as ‘Sacramentaries’, disagreed with the doctrine of Transubstantiation as defined by the first Article. But the other five Articles outlawed what had become mainstream Reformed opinion.
The result was a disaster for Anne’s bishops. Cranmer argued openly against the Bill in the Lords and was only ‘persuaded’, Constantine heard, by Cromwell. Hilsey of Rochester likewise compromised. But Latimer and Shaxton refused to bend and resigned their sees in return for pensions. Barlow expressed satisfaction at the news of the pensions, since Latimer owed him money. But his satisfaction was tempered by his awareness of Latimer’s outspokenness. ‘I am sure’, Barlow said, ‘[Latimer] shall never receive a penny of his pension, for he shall be hanged, I warrant him, ere Christmas!’8
The defeat, then, for Reform was only just short of a rout and Constantine and Barlow were aware of belonging to a party under siege. They had to trust, Constantine said, to ‘moderation’. This was not a very safe refuge in Henrician politics. Better to trust, instead, to the Cleves marriage and to the hope that a new wife would mean a new policy in religion.
But was Henry really able and willing to marry? ‘His Grace was lusty’, Constantine lamented, ‘but it grieved me at the heart to see his Grace halt [limp] so much upon his sore leg.’9
For Henry had developed a severe ulceration on the calf of his left leg. The ulcer was not syphilitic as some have supposed. Instead, it was almost certainly the legacy of an old jousting or riding injury which had damaged the shin-bone. Splinters of bone remained in the muscle, which created a deep and ineradicable ulceration. It followed a cycle. The ulcer would discharge; heal over; re-infect; swell, burst and finally discharge. And so on. The swelling was agonising; the discharge offered a deceptive and temporary relief.
The uncertainties of illness were now added to Henry’s frighteningly unpredictable character. Still worse, at the age of forty-eight, he was suddenly aware of ageing and ageing fast.
He did not like it. Was Anne’s supposed gibe that he was impotent becoming true?