On January 19, not a week after his trial, the poet, King Henry VIII.’s latest victim, was beheaded on Tower Hill. It was not the fault of Henry’s advisers that his aged father did not follow him to the grave. To have cleared Surrey out of their path was much; but it was not enough. The Duke’s heir gone, there were many eager to share amongst themselves the Norfolk spoils; Henry was ready to send his old servant to join his son; and only the King’s death, on the very night before the day appointed for the Duke’s execution, saved him from sharing Surrey’s fate. On January 28, 1547, nine days after the Earl had been slain, Henry was dead.
The end can have taken few people by surprise. Whether it was unexpected by the King none can tell. His will was made—a will paving the way for the misfortunes of one of his kin, and preparing the scaffold upon which Lady Jane Grey was to die; since, tacitly setting aside the claims of his elder sister, Margaret of Scotland, and her heirs, he provided that, after his own children, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth, the descendants of Mary Tudor, of whom Jane was, in the younger generation, the representative, should stand next in the order of succession to the throne. It was the first occasion upon which Lady Jane’s position had been explicitly defined, and was the prelude of the tragedy that was to follow. Should the unrepealed statutes declaring the King’s daughters illegitimate be permitted in the future to weigh against his present provisions in their favour, his great niece or her mother would, in the event of Prince Edward’s death, become heirs to the crown.
For Henry the opportunity of cancelling, had it been possible, the injustices of a lifetime was over. “Soon after the death of the Earl of Surrey,” writes the Spanish chronicler, “the King felt unwell; and, as he was a wise man, he called his council together, and said to them, ‘Gentlemen, I am unwell, and cannot tell when God may call me, so I wish to put my soul in order, and to reward my servants for what they have done.’”
The writer was probably drawing upon his imagination, and presenting rather a picture of what, in his opinion, ought to have taken place than of what truly happened. It quickly became patent to all that the end was at hand; but, though the physicians represented to those about the dying man that it was fitting that he should be warned of his condition, most of them shrank from the task. At length Sir Anthony Denny took the performance of the duty upon himself, exhorting his master boldly to prepare for death, “calling himself to remembrance of his former life, and to call upon God in Christ betimes for grace and mercy.”[46]
What followed must again be largely matter of conjecture, the various accounts being coloured according to the theological views of the narrator. It is possible that, feeling the end near, and calling to mind, as Denny bade him, the life he had led, Henry may have been visited by one of those deathbed repentances so mercilessly described by Raleigh: “For what do they do otherwise that die this kind of well-dying, but say to God as followeth: We beseech Thee, O God, that all the falsehoods, forswearings, and treacheries of our lives past may be pleasing unto Thee; that Thou wilt, for our sakes (that have had no leisure to do anything for Thine) change Thy nature (though impossible) and forget to be a just God; that Thou wilt love injuries and oppressions, call ambition wisdom, and charity foolishness.”[47] Into the secrets of the deathbed none can penetrate. Some say the King’s remorse, for the execution of Anne Boleyn in particular, was genuine; others that he was haunted by visionary fears and terrors. In the Spanish chronicle quoted above, it is asserted that, sending for “Madam Mary,” his injured daughter, he confessed that fortune—he might have said himself—had been hard against her, that he grieved not to have married her as he wished, and prayed her further to be a mother to the Prince, “for look, he is very little yet.”
The same authority has also drawn what one must believe to be an imaginary picture of a final and affecting interview between Katherine and her husband, “when the good Queen could not answer for weeping.”[48] His account is uncorroborated by other evidence, and it is impossible to believe that she can have felt genuine sorrow for the death of a man whose life was a perpetual menace to her own.
According to Foxe, when Denny, the courageous servant who had warned him of his danger, asked whether he would see no learned divine, the King replied that, were any such to be called, it should be Cranmer, but him not yet. He would first sleep, and then, according as he felt, would advise upon the matter. When, an hour or two later, finding his weakness increasing, he sent for the Archbishop, it was too late for speech. “Notwithstanding ... he, reaching his hand to Dr. Cranmer, did hold him fast,” and, desired by the latter to give some token of trust in God, he “did wring his hand in his as hard as he could, and so, shortly after, departed.”[49]