At Court, as elsewhere, each of these three parties were standing on their guard, ready to parry or to strike a blow when occasion arose, jealous of every success scored by their opponents. The fall of Cromwell had inspired the Catholics with hope, and, with Gardiner as Minister and Wriothesley as Chancellor, they had been in a more favourable position than for some time past at the date of the King’s last marriage. It had then been assumed that the new Queen’s influence would be employed upon their side—an expectation confirmed by her friendship with the Princess Mary. The discovery that the widow of Lord Latimer—so fervent a Catholic that he had joined in the north-country insurrection known as the Pilgrimage of Grace—had broken with her past, openly displayed her sympathy with Protestant doctrine, and, in common with the King’s nieces, was addicted to what was called the “new learning,” quickly disabused them of their hopes, rendered the Catholic party at Court her embittered enemies, and lent additional danger to what was already a perilous position by affording those at present in power a motive for removing from the King’s side a woman regarded as the advocate of innovation.
So far their efforts had been fruitless. Katherine still held her own. During Henry’s absence in France, whither he had gone to conduct the campaign in person, she had administered the Government, as Queen-Regent, with tact and discretion; the King loved her—as he understood love—and, what was perhaps a more important matter, she had contrived to render herself necessary to him. Wary, prudent, and pious, and notwithstanding the possession of qualities marking her out in some sort as the superior woman of her day, she was not above pandering to his love of flattery. Into her book entitled The Lamentations of a Sinner, she introduced a fulsome panegyric of the godly and learned King who had removed from his realm the veils and mists of error, and in the guise of a modern Moses had been victorious over the Roman Pharaoh. What she publicly printed she doubtless reiterated in private; and the King found the domestic incense soothing to an irritable temper, still further acerbated by disease.
By other methods she had commended herself to those who were about him open to conciliation. She had served a long apprenticeship in the art of the step-mother, both Lord Borough, her first husband, and Lord Latimer having possessed children when she married them; and her skill in dealing with the little heir to the throne and his sisters proved that she had turned her experience to good account. Her genuine kindness, not only to Mary, who had been her friend from the first, but to Elizabeth, ten years old at the time of the marriage, was calculated to propitiate the adherents of each; and to her good offices it was in especial due that Anne Boleyn’s daughter, hitherto kept chiefly at a distance from Court, was brought to Whitehall. The child, young as she was, was old enough to appreciate the importance of possessing a friend in her father’s wife, and the letter she addressed to her step-mother on the occasion overflowed with expressions of devotion and gratitude. To the place the Queen won in the affections of the all-important heir, the boy’s letters bear witness.
From an engraving by F. Bartolozzi after a picture by Holbein.
HENRY VIII. AND HIS THREE CHILDREN.
There is no need to assume that Katherine’s course of action was wholly dictated by interested motives. Yet in this case principle and prudence went hand in hand. Henry was becoming increasingly sick and suffering, and, with the shadow of death deepening above him, the gifts he asked of life were insensibly changing their character. His autocratic and violent temper remained the same, but peace and quiet, a soothing atmosphere of submissive affection, the absence of domestic friction, if not sufficient to ensure his wife immunity from peril, constituted her best chance of escaping the doom of her predecessors. To a selfish man the appeal must be to self-interest. This appeal Katherine consistently made and it had so far proved successful. For the rest, whether she suffered from terror of possible disaster or resolutely shut her eyes to what might have unnerved and rendered her unfit for the part she had to play, none can tell, any more than it can be determined whether, as she looked from the man she had married to the man she had loved, she indulged in vain regrets for the happiness of which she had caught a glimpse in those brief days when she had dreamed of a future to be shared with Thomas Seymour.
In spite, however, of her caution, in spite of the perfection with which she performed the duties of wife and nurse, by 1546 disquieting reports were afloat.
“I am confused and apprehensive,” wrote Charles V.’s ambassador from London in the February of that year, “to have to inform Your Majesty that there are rumours here of a new Queen, although I do not know how true they be.... The King shows no alteration in his behaviour towards the Queen, though I am informed that she is annoyed by the rumours.”[15]
With the history of the past to quicken her apprehensions, she may well have been more than “annoyed” by them. But, true or false, she could but pursue the line of conduct she had adopted, and must have turned with relief from domestic anxieties to any other matters that could serve to distract her mind from her precarious future. Amongst the learned ladies of a day when scholarship was becoming a fashion she occupied a foremost place, and was actively engaged in promoting educational interests. Stimulated by her step-mother’s approval, the Princess Mary had been encouraged to undertake part of the translation of Erasmus’s paraphrases of the Gospels; and Elizabeth is found sending the Queen, as a fitting offering, a translation from the Italian inscribed on vellum and entitled the Glasse of the Synneful Soule, accompanying it by the expression of a hope that, having passed through hands so learned as the Queen’s, it would come forth from them in a new form. The education of the little Prince Edward too was pushed rapidly forward, and at six years old, the year of his father’s marriage, he had been taken out of the hands of women and committed to the tuition of John Cheke and Dr. Richard Cox. These two, explains Heylyn, being equal in authority, employed themselves to his advantage in their several kinds—Dr. Cox for knowledge of divinity, philosophy, and gravity of manners, Mr. Cheke for eloquence in the Greek and Latin tongues; whilst other masters instructed the poor child in modern languages, so that in a short time he spoke French perfectly, and was able to express himself “magnificently enough” in Italian, Greek, and Spanish.[16]