The Wives of Henry the Eighth and the Parts They Played in History

by Martin A. S. Hume

After six months of marriage without sign of issue, Henry began to take fright. The Duke of Richmond was dead, and both the King’s daughters were acknowledged by the law of England to be illegitimate. He was already forty-six years of age, and had lately grown very obese; and his death without further issue or a resettlement of the succession would inevitably lead to a dynastic dispute, with the probable result of the return of the House of York to the throne in the person of one of the Poles under the ægis of Rome. Whenever possible, Jane had said a good word for the Princess Mary, and Henry began to listen more kindly than before to his wife’s well-meant attempts to soften him in favour of his daughter. The Catholic party was all alert with new hopes that the King, convinced that he could father no more sons, would cause his elder daughter to be acknowledged his heir;[178] but the reformers, who had grown up numerously, especially in and about London, during Henry’s defiance of Rome, looked askance at a policy which in time they feared might bring back the old order of things. The mainstay of this party at Court, apart from the professed Lutherans and the new bishops, were those who, having received grants of ecclesiastical property, despaired of any return to the Roman communion and the imperial alliance without the restoration of the Church property. Amongst these courtiers was Jane’s brother, Edward Seymour, Viscount Beauchamp, who had received large grants of ecclesiastical lands at intervals since 1528. He was a personal friend of the King, and had taken no active part in the intrigue that accompanied his sister’s elevation, though after the marriage he naturally rose higher than before in the favour of the King. He was a clever and superficially brilliant, but ostentatious and greedy man, of no great strength of purpose, whose new relationship to the King marked him out as a dominating influence in the future. The Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, upon whom Henry had depended as generals, were now very old and ailing, and there was no other peer but Cromwell of any ability in the Councils.

Even thus early it was clear that Seymour’s weight would, notwithstanding the circumstances of his sister’s rise, be thrown on to the anti-Papal side when the crucial struggle came. He was, moreover, a new man; and as such not welcomed by the older nobility, who, though desirous of retaining their Church plunder, were yet bound by their traditions against bureaucrats such as Cromwell, and the policy of defiance of the Papacy that he and his like had suggested and carried out. Cromwell’s own position at this time (1536-37) was a paradoxical one. It was he who had led Henry on, step by step, to entire schism and the plunder of the Church; it was he who not only had shown how to get rid of Katharine, but how to destroy her successor; and it was he whom the Catholic party hated with a whole-hearted detestation, for the King’s acts as well as his own. On the other hand, he was hardly less distrusted by the reforming party; for his efforts were known to be directed to a reconciliation with the Emperor, which could only be effected conjointly with some sort of arrangement with the Papacy. His efforts to please the imperialists by siding with the Princess Mary during her dispute with her father led him to the very verge of destruction. Whilst the young Princess was being badgered into making her shameful and insincere renunciation of her faith and birthright, Cromwell, the very man who was the instrument for extorting her submission, sat, as he says, for a week in the Council considering himself “a dead man,” because the King believed that he was encouraging Mary to resist. Cromwell, therefore, like most men who endeavour to hold a middle course, was distrusted and hated by every one; and it must have been obvious to him that if he could ensure the adhesion of the rising Seymour interest his chance of weathering the storm would be infinitely improved. His son had recently married Jane Seymour’s sister, and this brought him into close relationship with the family, and, as will be seen, led in the next year to a compact political union between the Seymour brothers, Cromwell, and the reforming party, as against the nobles and traditional conservatives.

For the time, however, Cromwell held on his way, endeavouring to keep in with the imperialists and Mary; and it was doubtless to his prompting that Jane used her influence, when at its highest point, to reconcile the Princess personally to her father. To the great joy of the King, in March 1537, Jane was declared to be with child. The Emperor had already opened a negotiation for the marriage of Mary with his brother-in-law, the Infante Luiz of Portugal, and Henry was playing a waiting game till he saw if Jane would bear him a child. If so, Mary might go; although he still refused to legitimise her; but if no more issue was to be born to him, he could hardly allow his elder daughter to leave England and fall into the hands of the Emperor. Charles, on the other hand, was extremely anxious to obtain possession of so valuable a pledge for the future as Mary; and was willing to go to almost any lengths to get her, either by fair means or foul, fearing, as he did, that the girl might be married discreditably in England—he thought even to Cromwell himself—in order to destroy her international value to Henry’s rivals.

As soon, however, as Jane’s pregnancy was announced Mary’s position changed. If a child was born in wedlock to the King, especially if it were a son, there would be no need to degrade Mary by joining her to a lowly husband; she might, on the contrary, become a good international marriage asset in the hands of her father, who might bargain with Charles or Francis for her. The fresh move of Jane Seymour, therefore, in her favour, in the spring of 1537, when the Queen’s pregnancy had given her greater power over her husband, was probably welcome both to the King and Cromwell, as enhancing Mary’s importance at a time when she might be used as an international political pawn without danger. Jane was sad one day in the early period of her pregnancy. “Why, darling,” said the King, “how happeneth it you are not merrier?”[179] “It hath pleased your Grace,” replied the Queen, “to make me your wife, and there are none but my inferiors with whom to make merry, withal, your Grace excepted; unless it would please you that we might enjoy the company of the Lady Mary at Court. I could be merry with her.” “We will have her here, darling, if that will make thee merry,” said the King. And before many days had gone, Mary, with a full train of ladies, was brought from Hunsdon, magnificently dressed, to Whitehall, where, in the great presence chamber, Henry and his wife stood before the fire. The poor girl was almost overcome at the tenderness of her reception, and fell upon her knees before her father and his wife. Henry, as usual anxious to throw upon others the responsibility of his ill-treatment of his daughter, turned to his Councillors, who stood around, and said, “Some of you were desirous that I should put this jewel to death.” “That were a pity,” quoth the Queen, “to have lost your chiefest jewel of England.”[180] The hint was too much for Mary, who changed colour and fell into a swoon, greatly to her father’s concern.

At length the day long yearned and prayed for by Henry came. Jane had for some months lived in the strictest quietude, and prayers and masses for her safe delivery were offered in the churches for weeks before. In September she had travelled slowly to Hampton Court, and on the 12th October 1537 a healthy son was born to her and Henry. The joy of the King was great beyond words. The gross sensualist, old beyond his years, had in vain hoped through all his sturdy youth for a boy, who, beyond reproach, might bear his regal name. He had flouted Christendom and defied the greatest powers on earth in order to marry a woman who might bear him a man child. When she failed to do so, he had coldly stood aside whilst his instruments defamed her and did her to death; and now, at last, in his declining years, his prayer was answered, and the House of Tudor was secure upon the future throne of England. Bonfires blazed and joy bells rang throughout the land; feasts of unexampled bounteousness coarsely brought home to the lieges the blessing that had come to save the country from the calamity of a disputed succession. The Seymour brothers at once became, next the King and his son, the most important personages in England, the elder, Edward, being created Earl of Hertford, and both receiving great additional grants of monastic lands. In the general jubilation at the birth, the interests of the mother were forgotten. No attempt appears to have been made to save her from the excitement that surrounded her; and on the very day of her delivery she signed an official letter “Jane the Quene” to Cromwell, directing him to communicate to the Privy Council the joyful news.

The most sumptuous royal christening ever seen was in bustling preparation in and about her sick-chamber; and that no circumstance of state should be lacking, the mother herself, only four days after the birth, was forced to take part in the exhausting ceremony. In the chapel at Hampton Court, newly decorated like the splendid banqueting-hall adjoining, where the initials of Jane carved in stone with those of the King, and her arms and device on glowing glass and gilded scutcheon still perpetuate her fleeting presence, the christening ceremony was held by torchlight late in the chill autumn evening. Through the long draughty corridors, preceded by braying trumpets and followed by rustling crowds of elated courtiers, the sick woman was carried on her stately pallet covered with heavy robes of crimson velvet and ermine. Under a golden canopy, supported by the four greatest nobles in the land, next to Norfolk, who was one of the godfathers, the Marchioness of Exeter bore the infant in her arms to the scene of the ceremony; and the Princess Mary, fiercely avid of love as she ever was, held the prince at the font. Suffolk, Arundel, and doomed Exeter, with a host of other magnates, stood around; whilst one towering handsome figure, with a long brown beard, carried aloft in his arms the tiny fair girl-child of Anne, the Lady Elizabeth, holding in her dainty hands the holy chrisom. It was Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, looked at askance by the rest as a new man, but already overlapping them all as the uncle of the infant prince. During the Te Deum and the long, pompous ceremony of the baptism the mother lay flushed and excited upon her couch; whilst the proud father, his broad face beaming with pride, sat by her side, holding her hand.

It was hard upon midnight when the Queen gave her blessing to her child and was carried back to her chamber, with more trumpet blasts and noisy gratulation. The next day, as was to be expected, she was in a high fever, so ill that she was confessed and received extreme unction. But she rallied, and seemed somewhat amended for the next few days, though ominous rumours were rife in London that her life had purposely been jeopardised in order to save that of the child at birth.[181] They were not true, but they give the measure of the public estimate of Henry’s character, and have been made the most of by Sanders, Rivadeneyra, and the other Jesuit historians. On the 23rd October the Queen fell gravely ill again, and in the night was thought to be dying. Henry had intended to ride to Esher that day, but “could not find it in his heart” to go; and the next night, the 24th October, Jane Seymour died, a sacrifice to improper treatment and heartlessly exacted ceremonial. Henry had not been married long enough to her to have become tired of her, and her somewhat lethargic placidity had suited him. She had, moreover, borne him the long-looked-for son; and his grief for her loss was profound, and no doubt sincere. Much as he hated signs of mortality, he wore black mourning for her for three months, and shut himself up at Windsor away from the world, and above all away from the corpse of his dead wife, for a fortnight. Jane’s body, embalmed, lay in the presence chamber at Hampton Court for a week. Blazing tapers surrounded the great hearse, and masses went on from dawn to midday in the chamber. All night long the Queen’s ladies, with Princess Mary, watched before the bier, until the end of the month, when the catafalque had been erected in the chapel for the formal lying in state. On the 12th November, with the greatest possible pomp, the funeral procession bore the dead Queen to Windsor for burial in a grave in St. George’s Chapel, destined to receive the remains of Henry as well as that of his third wife, the mother of his son.[182] The writers of the time, following the lead of Henry and his courtiers, never mentioned their grief for the Queen without promptly suggesting that it was more than counterbalanced by their joy at the birth of her son, who from his first appearance in the world was hailed as a paragon of beauty and perfection. Thanksgivings for the boon of a male heir to the King blended their sounds of jubilation with the droning of the masses for the mother’s soul, and the flare of the bonfires died down into the flickering tapers that dimly lit the funerals. Even Henry himself, in writing to give the news of his son’s birth, confessed that his joy at the event had far exceeded his grief for Jane’s death.

So far as the Catholic party that had promoted it was concerned, the marriage with Jane had been a failure. The Pilgrimage of Grace had been drowned in the blood of ruthless slaughter: and partly because of Mary’s scruples and fears, partly because they themselves had been gorged with the plunder of the Church, nearly all the great nobles stood aside and raised no voice whilst Cromwell and his master still worked havoc on the religious houses, regardless of Jane’s timid intercession. Boxley, Walsingham, and even the sacred shrine of Canterbury, yielded their relics and images, venerated for centuries, to be scorned and destroyed; whilst the vast accumulated treasures of gold and gems that enriched them went to fill the coffers of the King, and their lands to bribe his favourites. Throughout England the work of confiscation was carried on now with a zeal which only greed for the resultant profit can explain.[183] The attacks upon superstition in the Church by those in authority naturally aroused a feeling of greater freedom of thought amongst the mass of the people. The establishment of an open Bible in English in every church for the perusal of the parishioners, due, as indeed most of the doctrinal changes were, to Cranmer, encouraged men to think to some extent for themselves. But though, for purposes to which reference will be made presently, Henry willingly concurred in Cranmer’s reforming tendencies and Cromwell’s anti-ecclesiastical plans for providing him with abundant money, he would allow no departure from orthodoxy as he understood it. His love for theological controversy, and his undoubted ability and learning in that direction, enabled him to enforce his views with apparently unanswerable arguments, especially as he was able, and quite ready, to close the dispute with an obstinate antagonist by prescribing the stake and the gibbet either to those who repudiated his spiritual supremacy or to those who, like the Anabaptists, questioned the efficacy of a sacrament which he had adopted. For Henry it was to a great extent a matter of pride and self-esteem now to show to his own subjects and the world that he was absolutely supreme and infallible, and this feeling unquestionably had greatly influenced the progress effected by the reformation and emancipation from Rome made after the disappointing marriage with Jane Seymour.

But there was also policy in Henry’s present action. Throughout the years 1536 and 1537 Francis and the Emperor had continued at war; but by the close of the latter year it was evident that both combatants were exhausted, and would shortly make up their differences. The Papal excommunication of Henry and his realm was now in full force, making rebellion against the King a laudable act for all good Catholics; and any agreement between the two great Continental sovereigns in union with Rome boded ill for England and for its King. There were others, too, to whom such a combination boded ill. The alliance between France and the infidel Turk to attack the Christian Emperor had aroused intense indignation amongst Catholics throughout the world against Francis; and the Pope, utilising this feeling, strove hard to persuade both Christian sovereigns to cease their fratricidal struggle and to recognise that the real enemy to be feared and destroyed was Lutheranism or heresy in their midst. During the Emperor’s absence, and the war, Protestantism in Germany had advanced with giant strides. The Princes had boldly refused to recognise any conciliatory Council of the Church under the control of the Pope; and the pressure used by the Emperor to compel them to do so aroused the suspicion that the day was fast approaching when Lutheranism would have to fight for its life against the imperial suzerain of Germany.

Already the forces were gathering. George of Saxony, the enemy of Luther, was hurrying to the grave, and Henry his brother and heir was a strong Protestant. Philip of Hesse had two years before thrown down the gage, and had taken by force from the Emperor the territory of Würtemburg, and had restored the Protestant Duke Ulrich. Charles’ brother Ferdinand, who ruled the empire, clamoured as loudly as did Mary of Hungary in Flanders and Eleanor of Austria in France, for a peace between the two champions of Christendom, the repudiation by France of the Turkish alliance, and a concentration of the Catholic forces in the world before it was too late to crush the hydra of heresy which threatened them all. It was natural in the circumstances that the enemies of the Papacy should be drawn together. A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind, and a common danger drew Henry of England and Philip of Hesse together. Henry was no Lutheran, and did not pretend to be. He had been drawn into the Reformation by the process that we have followed, in which interested advisers had worked upon his passions and self-esteem; but he had gone too far in defiance of Rome now to turn back, and was forced to look to his own safety by such policy as was possible to him. For several months after Jane Seymour’s death the envoys of the German Protestants were in England in close negotiation with Henry and Cromwell. In order that a close league should be made, it was necessary that some common doctrinal standpoint should be agreed upon, and infinite theological discussions took place to bring this about. Henry would not give way on any principal point, and the Protestant ambassadors went home again without a formal understanding. But though Henry remained, as he intended to do, thus unpledged, it was good policy for him to impress upon the Germans by his ruthless suppression of the monasteries, and his prohibition of the ancient superstitions, that he was the enemy of their enemy; and that if he was attacked for heresy, it would be incumbent upon the Lutherans to be on his side even against their own suzerain.