Sometime in the late spring of 1543, Henry VIII offered Catherine Parr his hand. As with her simultaneous courtship with Sir Thomas Seymour, the background to the relationship is obscure. Perhaps Catherine and Henry were introduced by Catherine’s brother or sister, both of whom were now well placed and high in favour. Perhaps Catherine at some stage had petitioned the King in person on behalf of the disgraced Latimer and had caught the royal eye.
However it occurred, it is clear that Henry’s offer was unwelcome to Catherine. She was already in love with Seymour. And she was not, unlike Henry’s previous English wives, in the least infatuated with the idea of being Queen. Instead, she seems to have been aware of the pitfalls and dangers of the position and properly doubtful of her capacity to fulfil it. But equally, for a subject, a royal request to marry was the equivalent of a command. It was almost unthinkable to say no.
In this dilemma, Catherine, like a true believer, turned to God for guidance. An answer came. But it was not the one she wanted. She prayed again. The answer remained the same. Still she resisted; still God was implacable. And so the struggle continued: ‘God’, she wrote to Seymour, ‘withstood my will therein most vehemently for a time.’
But finally her resistance was overcome. ‘Through His grace and goodness’, she remembered, ‘[He] made that possible which seemed to me impossible: that was, made me renounce utterly mine own will and to follow His most willingly.’
And His will, she now accepted, was that she should marry Henry.1
Her submission, which was as ecstatic as her resistance had been fierce, had the effect of a revelation. Henceforward Catherine was a woman with a mission. She was marrying Henry at God’s command and for His purpose. And that purpose was no less than to complete the conversion of England to Reform.
So the last and apparently the most unassuming of Henry’s Queens was, in fact, the most dedicated and determined. She had known the passions of both earthly and heavenly love and she had emerged with her character formidably annealed in the flames.
How would the ever more irrascible and self-willed King cope? And would she survive?
It may be that God had another auxiliary in the struggle to persuade Catherine to choose to marry Henry.
The man she really loved, Sir Thomas Seymour, had spent most of 1542 on a mission to Charles V’s brother Ferdinand, King of the Romans, during which he had witnessed Ferdinand’s unsuccessful attempt to recapture Pest from the Turks. He returned home in the New Year, only to be redespatched almost immediately as ambassador to Mary of Hungary, Regent of the Netherlands. Chapuys had first caught wind of the intention to send Seymour to the Netherlands on 10 March 1543; a week later, on the 17th, Henry informed the ambassador that the decision had been taken.2
What has excited historians’ attention, of course, is that Latimer had died only a few days earlier on 2 March. Was Henry moving quickly to get an inconvenient rival out of the way?3
It is possible. But, on closer examination, the King’s manoeuvres turn out to have been less than decisive. In the same letter that Chapuys announced Seymour’s official nomination as ambassador, he also noted that it was unlikely that Seymour would leave until after Easter (25 March). In the event, his departure was delayed a further six weeks until the beginning of May. If Henry really had feared Seymour’s hold over Catherine, it is inconceivable that he would have left him kicking his heels at Court for two full months after Latimer’s death. For these weeks, surely, were the time when the crucial struggle between Catherine’s will and God’s declared intention took place. Had Seymour had the power to alter the outcome, Henry’s dilatoriness gave him every opportunity to try.4
Instead, it seems almost certain that Catherine’s own subsequent account of her choice is correct. In it, she made no mention of Seymour’s temporary exile as a factor in her decision. Rather she attributed it solely to God and to her own struggle with her inner voices.
By June the struggle was over. One of the first to be told the way the wind was blowing was Catherine’s brother, William, Lord Parr, who had been appointed Lord Warden of the Western March in April 1543. Other news ‘is none’, John Dudley, who was now Lord Admiral and Viscount Lisle, wrote to him from Greenwich on 20 June, ‘but that my Lady Latimer, your sister, and Mrs Herbert [Parr’s other sister Anne] be both here at Court with my Lady Mary’s Grace and my Lady Elizabeth’.5
The movements of the royal family would suggest that Dudley’s letter marks the actual moment of Catherine’s decision. For during June its members had been unusually scattered. Henry had spent most of the month journeying to and from Harwich, ‘where he perused and saw two notable havens but liked Colne Water best’. Mary had taken advantage of her father’s absence to pay a visit to her ex-step-mother, Anne of Cleves, at Richmond. While Catherine, presumably, had pondered her fate at the Charterhouse.6
When, therefore, Catherine rejoined the Court at Greenwich, where Henry arrived on the 19th, it can only have been to inform the King that she had accepted him. Plans for the wedding then moved forward swiftly. On 10 July, Cranmer issued his licence to permit the marriage to be solemnised ‘in any church, chapel or oratory without the issue of banns’. And two days later, on the 12th, the ceremony itself took place in the Queen’s Privy Closet at Hampton Court.7
This was the more private of the Queen’s two oratories. Similarly, the wedding itself, as might be expected in the case of an already much-married, middle-aged couple, was a quiet, almost private affair. But it was by no means a hole-in-corner one. The celebrant was Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. And the congregation, which numbered about twenty, was made up of the Gentlemen of the King’s Privy Chamber, as well as close family members of the bride and groom. Both Henry’s daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, were present, as was Lady Margaret Douglas, his niece by his elder sister Margaret’s second but divorced husband, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus. Catherine’s family was represented only by her sister and brother-in-law, Anne and William Herbert. But the three aristocratic ladies who were then closest to her–Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk (née Willoughby), Anne, Countess of Hertford (née Stanhope) and Joan, Viscountess Lisle (née Guildford)–were also present.
Inevitably, in the close-knit world of the Tudor Court, there were many reminders of the past. Only a few dozen yards away from where he then stood, Henry had found Cranmer’s letter denouncing Catherine Howard. The celebrant, Gardiner, had already helped make or unmake four of the King’s previous marriages. And many other members of the congregation had been almost as actively involved. Russell had been abused by Anne Boleyn; had rejoiced at her fall and had been confided in by Henry over Anne of Cleves. Browne, Heneage and Denny had likewise shared the King’s confidences in the Cleves affair. But it was of course his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, who bore the heaviest scars.
If Henry was aware of any of this he showed no sign. Instead, he made the marriage vows ‘hilari vultu’–‘with a joyful countenance’.8
Catherine’s expression is not noted.
Four days later, Secretary Wriothesley, who had done well out of the fall of his master Cromwell, wrote to Henry’s former brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk. He enclosed a letter from the Duchess of Suffolk, who had of course been a witness of the wedding. But he also added his own comments on the bride. Catherine was ‘a woman, in my judgement’, Wriothesley wrote, ‘for virtue, wisdom, and gentleness, most meet for his Highness and I am sure his Majesty had never a wife more agreeable to his heart than she is’. ‘Our Lord’, he ended piously, ‘send them long life and much joy together.’9
Four days later still, on the 20th, Wriothesley forwarded another letter, from Catherine herself to her brother William. Naturally, there is no mention of her own doubts about the marriage. Instead she expresses a simple, heartfelt happiness: ‘It [hath] pleased God to incline the King to take her as his wife’, she writes, ‘which is the greatest joy and comfort that could happen to her.’ And she is eager for William to share in her delight, ‘as the person who has most cause to rejoice thereat’.
Some historians have detected a note of cynicism in this last remark, as though Catherine should hint that she had been sacrificed on the altar of her brother’s family ambition. But this is to strain both Catherine’s language and the facts. William may have (re) introduced Henry and Catherine. But there is no evidence that he played a decisive part in the marriage. And certainly, far away in the north, he can have exercised no direct pressure on his sister. Moreover, Catherine had a straightforward Tudor sense of family honour, and, it is clear, a real affection for her brother. ‘Let her sometimes hear of his health’, she begs him, ‘as friendly as if she had not been called to this honour.’ In other words: write to me just as you used to, and forget that I am Queen.10
Wriothesley glossed this letter, too, in a covering note. ‘Your good lordship’, he wrote, ‘shall herewith receive a letter from the Queen’s Highness, who is a most gracious lady and to your lordship a most kind sister.’ ‘I doubt not’, he continued, ‘but you will earnestly thank God of His goodness, and also frame yourself to be every day more and more an ornament to her Majesty.’11
Perhaps, in view of these effusions and his earlier Judas-record, it is not surprising that Wriothesley turned into one of Catherine’s most dangerous enemies.
The welcome, real or simulated, for Catherine’s marriage was not universal of course. Indeed, for that other relic of the past, Anne of Cleves, it represented the last straw. ‘She is’, Chapuys was informed, ‘in despair and much afflicted in consequence of this late marriage.’ For Catherine, so Anne proudly felt, was her ‘inferior…in beauty and gives no hope of posterity to the King, for she had no children by her two first husbands’. Now that Henry was definitively lost, as even Anne was forced to admit, her estates, palaces and possessions had lost their charm as well. ‘She would rather’, Chapuys heard from ‘an authentic quarter’, ‘be stripped to her petticoat and return to her mother than remain longer in England.’12
Perhaps. But we should remember that Chapuys, in view of the hostility between the Empire and Anne’s brother, the Duke of Cleves, was not an impartial witness: he was eager to bring about a final rupture between England and Cleves and eager, too, to get Anne out of the way. But, in any case, Anne’s desperate mood did not last. She was not the despairing sort and England, finally, was her destiny.
The coolest reaction of all to Catherine’s wedding came from the radical English merchant Richard Hilles, self-exiled in Strasbourg. ‘Our King has, within these two months’, he reported in September to Henry Bullinger, ‘burned three godly men in one day.’ But then, Hilles added, Henry had got married at the same time, ‘and he is always wont to celebrate his nuptials by some wickedness of this kind’. Hilles’s letter shows that Catherine’s own Reformist leanings were as yet unknown outside the Court; indeed, they may even have been unknown to Henry himself.13
For the moment, perhaps, it was better that way.
Catherine was proclaimed Queen at Hampton Court on the day of her wedding. It was the barest of formalities. Otherwise, there was no entrée into London, or river procession, or any other kind of inauguration ceremony. And the idea of a coronation was not even mentioned, either then or subsequently.
A few days later, the King and Queen left on what turned out to be a protracted honeymoon that kept them away from the capital for the rest of the year. It began, however, as an ordinary Progress. First they travelled into Surrey, with visits to some of Henry’s favourite hunting parks at Oatlands, Woking, Guildford and Sunninghill. Then, in mid-August, the royal party crossed the Thames on their way north. They stayed a few days in Catherine’s own house as Queen at Hanworth, near Twickenham, before skirting London to the west on their way to Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire. There they spent the high summer, going from Wolsey’s old house at The More, to Ashridge, Dunstable and Ampthill.
Ampthill, where Henry was a frequent visitor because of the excellence of the sport and ‘the cleanness of air’, had its usual rejuvenating effect. Or perhaps it was his new marriage. For, during the royal visit, carpenters were set to work on a new spiral staircase to give Henry access from his Privy Chamber to the gardens and park, while in the park itself they erected three new standings from which the King could view the hunt and shoot at the game.
After Ampthill, the King and Queen turned west into Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. They reached Woodstock in the middle of September, and they remained there till the end of the month.14
Usually, the Progress would have ended about then. But the plague, which had been particularly virulent in London in the summer, raged all the autumn and interrupted the ordinary routines of public life. The sessions of the Law Courts were moved from London to St Albans while the King and Queen returned to safety at Ampthill, where they spent much of October and November. Henry paid a flying visit to Whitehall on 20–21 December, but then withdrew once more to spend Christmas at Hampton Court.15
The effect of all this was to throw Catherine together with her new husband almost uninterruptedly for six months. It also gave Henry his most prolonged taste of family life for almost two decades.
He seems rather to have enjoyed it.
It had all begun in the run-up to Catherine’s marriage. As we have seen, Catherine seems to have told Henry of her decision to accept him at Greenwich on about 20 June. Mary and Elizabeth were at Court as well and the assumption must be that they had been summoned to meet their new step-mother. Was this Henry’s doing? Or Catherine’s?
Catherine’s predecessor, Catherine Howard, had made a similar attempt at bringing Henry’s children together. But it took place several months after her marriage and followed a sticky patch with her difficult eldest step-child, Mary. Between them, Catherine and Henry were contriving to get matters off to a much smoother start. Mary and Elizabeth were honoured guests at their wedding, and, on the wedding day itself, Catherine gave Mary a very substantial present of £20 and no doubt made a similar gift to Elizabeth as well. The two half-sisters then continued at Court with their parents for the first leg of the Progress. After that, they went their separate ways.16
The fact was reported with glee by Chapuys. ‘The King continues to treat [Mary] kindly’, he wrote on 13 August, ‘and has made her stay with the new Queen, who behaves affectionately towards her.’ ‘As to Anne Boleyn’s daughter’, he continued disparagingly, ‘the King has sent her back again to stay with the Prince, his son.’17
Here, however, it is Chapuys’s own prejudices that speak. In reality, there was a perfectly proper reason for the contrasting treatment of Catherine’s two step-daughters. Mary was in her mid-twenties: gracious, as attractive as she ever would be, and an ornament to the Court. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was just ten. She was growing up quickly. But she was still more suited to the schoolroom than the Court and it was to her schooling that she returned.
There would be plenty of other opportunities for Catherine to get to know her better.
For the moment, then, it was Catherine’s relationship with Mary that flourished. Her own mother’s long years of service to Mary’s mother, Catherine of Aragon, would have provided the key bond. Probably indeed Catherine still had Maud Parr’s bequest of the ‘beads of lignum always dressed with gold, which the…Queen’s Grace gave me’. The rosary was not something to be shown to Henry. But, with Mary, it would have been an instant passport to her affection and trust. Besides, with only a four-year gap between them, step-mother and daughter were almost of an age. And they shared the same interests, from scholarship to dancing.18
As the Progress continued, however, circumstances would also have brought Henry’s other children to Catherine’s attention. Probably this was planned as well. Their nursery-houses were located in and around Hertfordshire, which was the destination of the second half of the Progress. Here Henry was killing several birds with one stone: he was eager to inspect his houses at Dunstable, where he was converting the nunnery in which Cranmer had granted his first divorce, and at Ampthill, which he planned to turn into a palace. But the royal couple also visited Ashridge, where Elizabeth and Edward seem to have been staying. And the unexpected return of the Court to the area in the autumn brought fresh opportunities. Mary’s accounts for these months show that messengers were sent to and from the other royal Households in the vicinity and servants exchanged. Almost certainly, family meetings and visits took place as well–though just who met whom is impossible to establish.19
By Christmas, Henry’s new-found domesticity was becoming a subject of speculation in foreign Courts. In the Netherlands, for example, the Lady Regent, Mary of Hungary, asked the English ambassador ‘how the Queen’s Grace, my Lord Prince, my Lady Mary and my Lady Elizabeth did, and whether [the King] and they continued still in one household?’20
It made a change from deaths and divorces.
But we must not sentimentalise too much, or exaggerate Catherine’s own role. No doubt she facilitated. But the accommodation with Henry’s children took place because he, Henry, wanted it. And it was a prelude to a much more momentous decision: on 16 January 1544 the Court returned to Whitehall for a new session of Parliament whose principal item of business would be to legislate a new, radical settlement of the Succession.21
The existing law had been laid down by the Second Succession Act, which was passed in 1536 after the Seymour marriage. This Act determined the order of succession as Henry’s heirs male by Queen Jane; his heirs male ‘by any other lawful wife’; his female heirs by Queen Jane, and his female heirs by any future wife. At the time, these provisions seemed to cater for any foreseeable eventuality. But, eight years later, time and dynastic luck were, it appeared, threatening to run out.22
Henry was fifty-two. He remained capable of extraordinary bursts of energy, as on the Progress of 1543. But, in general, he was ageing visibly and rapidly. On the other hand, Prince Edward, his heir and sole legitimate offspring, was only a boy of six. He was a healthy and vigorous child. Even so, sixteenth-century mortality rates made it an open question whether he would live to marry and have children.
Equally open to doubt was the fertility of the new Queen, on which rested the possibility of any further legitimate children, male or female. For contemporaries, as we have seen in the case of Chapuys, looked at Catherine’s two previous marriages, which were childless, and drew the conclusion that she was sterile. The conclusion, as it turned out, was wrong and when she married a husband who was potent she conceived almost immediately, despite being in her mid-thirties. But that lay in the unknown future and, meanwhile, the doubt remained.
The result was that a real and pressing uncertainty now bedevilled the whole future descent of the Tudor crown. This the new Succession Act frankly admitted. ‘It standeth’, it acknowledged, ‘in the only pleasure and will of Almighty God whether the King’s Majesty shall have any heirs begotten and procreated between his Highness and his…most entirely beloved wife Queen Catherine.’ ‘Or whether’, it continued, ‘the said Prince Edward shall have issue of his body lawfully begotten.’23
If, God forbid, the worst happened and both these lines of descent failed, then an alternative was necessary. The solution proffered in the Act was to restore Catherine’s step-daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, in that order, to the succession. They remained bastardised. And the Act envisaged that special conditions would be imposed on them by the King. Nevertheless, they were now acknowledged heirs presumptive to the crown.
Thus the ‘one Household’, in which Henry had lived with his new wife and his three children for much of the time since his marriage to Catherine, had found its legal expression. And there is every reason to believe that Catherine had encouraged Henry in this decision, which, for better and for worse, shaped the future of England for the rest of the sixteenth-century and beyond.
The other principal concern of the 1544 Session of Parliament was religion. And here again Catherine’s influence was strong, although historians have been slow to recognise the fact. But they are hardly to be blamed, in view of the intractability of the sources. These consist of a series of stories and reminiscences, to be found either in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs or in Foxe’s working papers. The stories, as usual with Foxe, are more or less undated. But, it turns out, the prolonged Progress of 1543, which I have just documented here for the first time, provides the clues which both pin-down and validate the incidents narrated by Foxe.24
And their (admittedly off-stage) heroine is Catherine.
The previous Session of Parliament, which had ended on 12 May 1543, a couple of months before Catherine’s wedding, marked the high point of the conservative reaction in religion. Its chief target and intended victim was Archbishop Cranmer and its architect and presiding genius was Bishop Gardiner of Winchester.
It had been clear ever since Thomas Garrett’s book-selling trip to Oxford in 1528 that printed books, especially in English, were the prime source for innovations in religion. But the conservative response, with book-burnings, like Wolsey’s, or printed counter-propaganda, like More’s, had been patchy. Gardiner, on the other hand, was that rarest of things, a reactionary with a clear sense of strategy, and the will and boldness to carry it out. Not for him, therefore, the piecemeal approach of his predecessors. Instead, under his guidance, the Lords launched a frontal attack on the whole new print culture.
The Act, ‘concerning printing of books’, was drawn in the widest of terms, banning not only erroneous printed books but also ‘printed ballads, plays, rimes, songs and other fantasies’. Indeed, its terms were so wide that almost anything on sale could be caught by them and a series of hastily added provisos were necessary to define what was still acceptable in the vernacular. The resulting list was not long. The Lord’s Prayer, Ave Maria and Creed in English were permissible, as were the Chronicles, Chaucer’s books and Gower’s writings. Songs and plays on purely secular themes were allowed as well, as were translations of the Bible other than Tyndale’s or Coverdale’s.
But these approved translations were hedged around with a series of fierce restrictions. Only the bare text of the Scriptures was permissible: all prefaces and glosses had to be blotted out. And, even with this bowdlerisation, only upper-class males–the ‘highest and most honest sort of men’–were allowed to read them. In contrast, all ‘artificers, prentices, journeymen, serving men…husbandmen [and] labourers’ were forbidden to read the Bible in English, either publicly or privately, on the pain of a month’s imprisonment.
And so were all women.25
This blanket restriction on the whole female sex evidently caused some outrage. Religion, as we have seen, was a recognised sphere of activity for women and in the course of debate a further proviso was added to the Bill which allowed ladies of noble and gentle status to join their menfolk in reading the English Bible. But they were to do so ‘to themselves alone, and not to others’.
They were not, in other words, to lead Bible readings with their children or female servants or to encourage public readings of the Scripture in their chambers. But such readings had become commonplace features of life in Godly households and Anne Boleyn, for instance, had encouraged them over a decade previously.
Would Catherine Parr quietly forego them now?
There were further defeats for Reform in Convocation (held as usual at the same time as Parliament), where Cranmer meekly submitted to a new and very conservative formulary of faith. Known as the King’s Book, it reflected Henry’s own traditionalist opinions on disputed points. The King made detailed corrections to the exposition of the Creed in his own hand and made sure also that Luther’s doctrines on the key questions of faith–justification, free will and good works–were emphatically rejected.26
Finally, and most important of all, religious persecution struck into the very heart of the royal Household.
The information had been gathered by Dr John London, Dean of Oxford and Canon of Windsor. He found several heterodox clergy and musicians among his colleagues in St George’s Chapel; he also discovered that they had powerful supporters among the courtiers who frequented the Castle. Dr London, who had been active as a heresy-hunter since his involvement in the prosecution of Garrett in 1528, began by acting on his own initiative. But, quite soon, he presented his findings to Gardiner, who took over the strategic management of the affair. The Bishop fitted the Windsor denunciations into his broader attack on Reform; he also made sure that his fellow councillors were primed and sympathetic to what they were about to hear.
By the week starting on Passion Sunday (11 March) 1543, all was ready and, over the next few days, London appeared before the Council at Whitehall to lay his accusations. Gardiner passed on a sensational summary of them to the King: ‘[heretics]’, Gardiner explained to Henry, ‘were not only crept into every corner of the Court but even into his Privy Chamber’. Thoroughly alarmed, Henry authorised a commission for a ‘privy search’ in the town, but not the Castle, of Windsor. Late at night on Thursday, 15 March, at about 11 o’clock, the commissioners struck. They sought out Anthony Pearson, a radical and charismatic priest, Henry Filmer, a tailor and churchwarden, and two ‘singing men’ in St George’s Chapel choir, Robert Testwood and John Marbeck, the latter of whom was also a composer and organist of distinction. The men were arrested and their papers seized, including the Biblical concordance (or word index)–the first in English–on which Marbeck was working. With the possible exception of Marbeck, all the men seized at Windsor were flamboyantly unorthodox and, in the event, would almost embrace martyrdom.27
The scene then shifted to London, where, in a wave of arrests, the socially more distinguished supporters of the Windsor radicals were picked up: Dr Simon Haynes, Dean of Exeter and Canon of Windsor, was imprisoned on 16 March; Thomas Weldon, a Master (that is, a high administrative official) of the Household, on 17 March; Thomas Sternold, Groom of the Wardrobe of the Robes and versifier of the Psalms, and Philip Hoby, diplomatist, scholar and Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chamber, on Palm Sunday, 18 March. On Monday the 19th, the Windsor men were sent up to London where they too were imprisoned.28
Over the Palm Sunday weekend, John London, delighted with the success of the Windsor operation (which, with characteristic boastfulness, he called a ‘spectacle’), launched the second stage of the plot. This consisted of a further series of revelations of heresy, equally sensational and this time concerning the spiritual centre of the English Church at Canterbury. Senior members of the Cathedral clergy were among those accused and the finger was pointed at Cranmer himself.29
Reform was now thoroughly on the defensive and remained so till late June, when a series of events began to swing the balance in the other direction. On 19 June, as we have seen, Henry returned from his flying visit to inspect the naval facilities at Harwich; on about the 20th he was joined at Greenwich by Catherine Parr, who had just accepted his proffered hand; and on 12 July they were married at Hampton Court by the apparently triumphant Gardiner.
Meantime, however, Henry, together presumably with Catherine, spent a few days at Whitehall to catch up on business. He did so to striking effect. On 5 July, Dean Haynes, the first of the Windsor ringleaders to be arrested, was set at liberty, ‘after a good lesson and exhortation, with a declaration of the King’s mercy and goodness towards him’. And Henry was even more merciful to Cranmer. Or perhaps, in a famously ambiguous encounter, he merely played with his timorous Archbishop, like a big cat with a mouse.30
The incident cannot be dated precisely. But, since it took place on the Thames between Lambeth and Westminster, it must have occurred during the six days from 2 to 8 July, which, because of the plague, were to be the King’s last visit to Whitehall for six months. Henry, ‘on an evening’, was ‘rowing in the Thames in his barge’ and paused at the ‘bridge’ or landing stage at Lambeth. There he summoned Cranmer to join him in his recreation. ‘Ah, my chaplain!’ the King said ‘merily’, ‘I have news for you: I know now who is the greatest heretic in Kent.’ Thereupon he took out Dr London’s list of charges against the Canterbury clergy and their Archbishop, and appointed Cranmer, despite his protests, head of the commission to investigate them.31
It was a deliberately poisoned chalice. But it would have been even worse, from Cranmer’s point of view, if Henry had given the job to Gardiner, who was eagerly angling for it.
Was Cranmer to wriggle free yet again? The sense that the tide was turning against him probably led Gardiner, who was usually so aware of the importance of timing in politics, to overreach himself in his effort to make sure that his Windsor victims did not escape.
The result was justice that was summary even by Tudor standards. On Thursday, 26 July, Pearson, Filmer, Testwood and Marbeck were tried before a commission at Windsor headed by Bishop Capon of Salisbury. They were all found guilty under the Act of Six Articles and sentenced to be burned. On the 27th, Capon, probably by prearrangement, wrote to Gardiner at the Court, which was conveniently to hand at Woking, to recommend that he petition the King for Marbeck’s pardon. Gardiner did so and the pardon was granted immediately. The following day, Saturday the 28th, Marbeck’s less fortunate co-accused were paraded through Windsor to the place of execution. They were in a state of exaltation that seemed like a kind of spiritual inebriation. More earthly intoxicants were involved as well as they pledged each other in ale before the fires were lit. Pearson even put straw on his head so that he would die with a burning crown of martyrdom.32
That marked the end of the public business at Windsor. But there was also a secret process, as advantage was taken of the sessions to get courtier-supporters of Reform ‘privily indicted’ before the commissioners. Fortunately for them, one of Catherine’s servants had been an observer of the trial. He ‘had lain at Windsor all the time of the business and had got knowledge what number were privily indicted’. Immediately the trial was over, he made haste to Court to inform one of the accused, Thomas Cawarden, Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, of the danger. We do not know the full name of this servant as Foxe refers to him only as ‘Fulke’, which was probably his Christian name (but its popularity among the Greville family suggests that he belonged to it, or else was of its kin). Nor do we know whether he acted on his own initiative or on the Queen’s orders.33
But his actions cannot have been displeasing to her. And they were decisive. For, alerted by Fulke, Cawarden had the Clerk of the Peace, the official messenger from the commissioners at Windsor, waylaid at Guildford before he could deliver the trial reports to Gardiner. His papers were seized by Cawarden and William Paget, the newly appointed King’s Secretary, and examined by the Council. Among them they found the ‘privy indictments’.34
These were fatal to Gardiner’s scheme as the men listed in them were all intimate personal attendants of the King: Cawarden himself, Hoby, Weldon, Sternold, Edmund Harman, another Groom of the Privy Chamber, and William Snowball, one of the King’s cooks. Also indicted were the men’s wives: Mrs Cawarden, Mrs Hoby (known, in right of her previous husband as Lady Compton), Mrs Harman and Mrs Snowball. This may well explain Fulke’s presence at Windsor since the wives of the Gentlemen of the King’s Privy Chamber also served as part of the Queen’s establishment at Court. By intervening through her servant, Catherine was protecting her own.
As, of course, would Henry. The King reacted with outrage to the fact that someone had dared to launch legal process against his own servants without express permission, and on 31 August at Ampthill he issued them with a comprehensive pardon.35
Who, however, was to blame for this act of lèse-majesté? Gardiner was obviously under suspicion. But he had covered his tracks well enough to escape–for the moment at least.
The collapse of the Windsor scheme also jeopardised the Canterbury end of the plot. This had previously been going badly for Cranmer. As ordered by Henry, the Archbishop had launched an on-ground investigation into the charge and counter-charge of popery as well as heresy among his Cathedral clergy. But the conservative party, suppliers of the original information to Dr London and Bishop Gardiner, remained insubordinate while Cranmer himself felt obliged to proceed with kid gloves. The reason, as he told his secretary Ralph Morice, was ‘that it is put into the King’s head that he [Cranmer] is the supporter and maintainer of all the heretics within the realm’.36
This was even more frightening: in July, Henry had ‘merily’ told him only that he was the biggest heretic in Kent; now, Cranmer feared, the King thought that he was the heresiarch of all England.
But help was already on the way. It was on 2 November that Ralph Morice reported Cranmer’s fears and inhibitions to his friends at Court. Two days previously, as it happened, on Hallow E’en, 31 October, the leading canon lawyer, Dr Thomas Leigh, had arrived at Canterbury. He came armed with the King’s ring, as a symbol of authority, and with orders to act as Cranmer’s lieutenant in the investigations. As a former visitor of the monasteries, and trained in the school of Thomas Cromwell, Leigh brooked no nonsense. Lay commissioners were sworn in and were directed to seize the papers of Cranmer’s accusers.37
It was now the conservatives’ turn to panic. On 1 November, the day after Leigh’s arrival, a messenger was sent post-haste to Gardiner at Court. The distance and the difficulty of locating Ampthill meant that he did not arrive till the 3rd. But he got small comfort from Gardiner, who was now desperately trying to backtrack. ‘Get you home again’, the Bishop said, ‘what need you come so far for such a matter?’38
Gardiner could not escape so easily, however. The searches ordered by Leigh in Canterbury turned up letters between the conservative clergy there and John London and Bishop Gardiner himself. John London was condemned for perjury and false witness; paraded with his face to the tail of a horse through Windsor, Reading and Newbury, and exhibited in the pillory in each town wearing a paper declaring his offences on his forehead. For one who had always been so proud and highly strung the humiliation was bitter. Almost certainly, too, John London was injured in more than his dignity. The pillory was not a pleasant place and, especially if you were unpopular, people threw worse things than insults at you. The result was that London died, still in prison, in December. And Gardiner himself only avoided a worse fate at Henry’s hands by a timely and prostrate submission.39
But the pendulum was to swing one more time. On 20 December, Cranmer, whose palace at Canterbury had just burned down and whose brother-in-law had been killed in the flames, was summoned to Court in a letter signed by Norfolk and Lord Privy Seal Russell. The letter was apparently routine. But it was marked by Secretary Paget: ‘Haste, post, haste’. Why? The explanation, almost certainly, is that the conservative majority on the Council had now made their final push against the Archbishop. They had asked Henry for permission to arrest him and send him to the Tower, and the King had agreed.40
Henry, however, was playing a double game. On 12 January the Court returned to Whitehall at the end of the Christmas festivities, which had been spent at Hampton Court. Within the next day or two, and late at night, Henry sent Anthony Denny, Cranmer’s friend and the leading Reformer in the Privy Chamber, to summon the Archbishop to his presence. The King told Cranmer that he was to be sent to the Tower on the morrow, and, when the Archbishop protested his willingness to submit to the King’s justice, upbraided his folly. ‘Think you to have better luck that way than your master Christ had?’ he asked brutally. But Cranmer was not left to the tender mercies of his fellow councillors. Instead, Henry gave him his ring, to use as a talisman when the Council tried to arrest him.
The summons came next day. Cranmer showed the ring and the Council, led by Norfolk and Russell, tumbled into the King’s apartments to abase and exonerate themselves.41
Thereafter, while Henry lived, Cranmer was untouchable.
There was a postscript to the affair. When Cranmer journeyed from Canterbury to London in the last days of 1543, to meet whatever fate awaited him, he brought with him in a chest the great cache of papers that had been accumulated by his and Leigh’s investigations. The intention was that Henry should peruse the papers himself. Whether he did so remains unclear. But the information they contained undoubtedly played a part in the forthcoming Parliamentary session.
First, there was an unusually generous General Pardon, which was tagged to the Act making the 1542 forced loan to the King an outright gift. Foxe suggests that the Pardon was the work of the conservatives, who were eager to avoid their impending punishment for perjury or conspiracy. But it was equally useful to the Reformers, since religious offences were not excluded. Of even more benefit to the Reforming party, however, was the Act which tightened up judicial procedure under the Act of Six Articles. This was designed to rule out the ‘secret and untrue accusations and presentments’, which had been ‘maliciously conspired against the King’s subjects’ in 1543. The Lords, with its inbuilt conservative majority, was unenthusiastic about the Bill, and insisted that ‘certain words be put in and out’. But they had to acquiesce in its passage. Gardiner’s worst fangs were now drawn.42
It would, of course, be absurd to attribute Gardiner’s defeat in 1543–4 solely to Catherine. But to ignore her entirely, as most recent historians have done, is equally mistaken. For it is clear, on grounds of chronology alone, that Henry’s sixth marriage marks a watershed in religious policy. Catherine’s own personal role in the change was almost invisible at the time and will remain forever opaque. But we are probably right to guess that her servant Fulke’s crucial part in thwarting the second stage of the Windsor plot was only the tip of an iceberg.
For who else was there? Cranmer was too insecure to defend himself, much less to challenge policy. Denny and Sir William Butts, the King’s doctor, brought all their backstairs and behind-the-scenes influence to bear on the side of Reform. But, since they had been unable to prevent the conservative excesses of the first half of 1543, it seems unlikely that they alone could have reversed them in the last quarter of the year.43
The only new factor, in short, in the delicate balance of forces round Henry was Catherine herself. Shrewd, tactful and patient she might be. But she was also, as we have seen, a woman with a mission–and, in the circumstances of 1543, an opportunity as well. For the extended Progress meant that she had the King pretty much to herself for the first six months of her marriage, when her influence was at its freshest and most appealing.
The resulting religious turnaround suggests that she used her moment well.
We can go further. Save for the all-important fact that she had not become pregnant, Catherine had made the most successful debut of any of Henry’s wives.
She, and her family, had their reward at Christmas 1543.
Probably on 22 December the Court took up residence at Hampton Court for the Christmas holidays. The following day was a Sunday, when the King went in solemn procession to hear mass in the Holiday Closet of the Chapel Royal. While he was there, Catherine’s brother William, Lord Parr of Kendal, and her uncle and Lord Chamberlain, Sir William Parr, took up their places in the Pages’ Chamber next to the royal apartments. Normally, the Chamber was fairly unsalubrious, as such service rooms tend to be. But it was cleaned up for the occasion and its floor strewn with fresh rushes. After mass the King returned to his apartments and stood under the throne canopy in the Presence Chamber. Thither, in turn, Catherine’s brother and uncle were led by peers of appropriate rank. The former was created Earl of Essex (in right of his already estranged wife), while the latter was made a baron as Lord Parr of Horton.44
The double ceremony was unique and it marked the Parrs’ arrival in the front rank of the English aristocracy. Moreover, their promotion was exceedingly rapid. Anne Boleyn had had to wait some three years before her father was made Earl of Wiltshire; Edward Seymour had not been created Earl of Hertford till his sister Jane had given birth to Prince Edward. But the Parrs got their titles less than six months after Catherine’s wedding.
Why?
The formal decision on the promotions and their timing was of course Henry’s. Likewise, it was Catherine’s mother, Maud Parr, who had laid the ground-work by her shrewd matrimonial strategy for her children. But Catherine, it seems certain, played her part as well, since, more even than most sixteenth-century women, she displayed a fierce family pride. The badge she chose as Queen, of a maiden’s head, was the Parr family badge. Her signature was also a tribute to her family. For, uniquely among Henry’s Queens, she incorporated the initials of her maiden name, ‘K[atherine] P[arr]’, into her royal sign manual by always signing herself thus: ‘CATHERINE THE QUEEN: KP’. Finally, there were those words in which she had informed her brother of her wedding. ‘He was’, she had told him back in July, ‘the person who has most cause to rejoice [at her marriage].’ Written by her, the words had the effect of a promise.45
The events of December show that she had moved swiftly to fulfil it.