The failure of the attack upon Katharine in the summer of 1546 marks the decline of the Catholic party in the Council. Peace was made with France in the autumn; and Katharine did her part in the splendid reception of the Admiral of France and the great rejoicings over the new peace treaty (September 1546). Almost simultaneously came the news of fresh dissensions between the Emperor and Francis; for the terms of the peace of Crespy were flagrantly evaded, and it began to be seen now that the treaty had for its sole object the keeping of France quiet and England at war whilst the German Protestants were crushed. Not in France alone, but in England too, the revulsion of feeling against the Emperor’s aims was great. The treacherous attack upon his own vassals in order to force orthodoxy upon them at the sword’s point had been successful, and it was seen to constitute a menace to all the world. Again Protestant envoys came to England and obtained a loan from Henry: again the Duke Philip of Bavaria, who said that he had never heard mass in his life until he arrived in England, came to claim the hand of the Princess Mary;[259] and the Catholics in the King’s Council, forced to stand upon the defensive, became, not the conspirators but those conspired against. Hertford and Dudley, now Lord Admiral, were the King’s principal companions, both in his pastimes and his business; and the imperial ambassador expressed his fears for the future to a caucus of the Council consisting of Gardiner, Wriothesley, and Paulet, deploring, as he said, that “not only had the Protestants their openly declared champions ... but I had even heard that some of them had gained great favour with the King, though I wished they were as far away from Court as they were last year. I did not mention names, but the persons I referred to were the Earl of Hertford and the Lord Admiral. The councillors made no reply, but they clearly showed that they understood me, and continued in their great devotion to your Majesty.”[260]
Late in September the King fell seriously ill, and his life for a time was despaired of. Dr. Butts had died some months before, and the Queen was indefatigable in her attendance; and the Seymours, as uncles of the heir, rose in importance as the danger to the King increased. The only strong men on the Council on the Catholic side were Gardiner, who was extremely unpopular and already beaten, and Norfolk. Paulet was as obedient to the prevailing wind as a weathercock; Wriothesley was an obsequious, greedy sycophant; Paget a humble official with little influence, and the rest were nonentities. The enmity of the Seymours against the Howards was of long standing, and was as much personal as political; especially between the younger brother, Sir Thomas Seymour, and the Earl of Surrey, the heir of Norfolk, whose quarrels and affrays had several times caused scandal at Court. There was much ill-will also between Surrey and his sister, the widowed Duchess of Richmond, who after the death of her young husband had been almost betrothed to Sir Thomas Seymour.[261] With these elements of enmity a story was trumped up which frightened the sick King into the absurd idea that Surrey aimed at succeeding to the crown, to the exclusion of Henry’s children. It was sufficient to send him to the Tower, and afterwards to the block as one of Henry’s most popular victims. His father, the aged Duke of Norfolk, was got rid of by charges of complicity with him. Stripped of his garter, the first of English nobles was carried to the Tower by water, whilst his brilliant poet son was led through the streets of London like a pickpurse, cheered to the echo by the crowd that loved him. The story hatched to explain the arrests to the public, besides the silly gossip about Surrey’s coat-of-arms and claims to the crown, was, that whilst the King was thought to be dying in November at Windsor, the Duke and his son had plotted to obtain possession of the Prince for their own ends on the death of his father. Having regard for the plots and counterplots that we know divided the Council at the time, this is very probable, and was exactly what Hertford and Dudley were doing, the Prince, indeed, being then in his uncle’s keeping at Hertford Castle.
At the end of December the King suffered from a fresh attack, which promised to be fatal. He was at Whitehall at the time, whilst Katharine was at Greenwich, an unusual thing which attracted much comment; but whether she was purposely excluded by Hertford from access to him or not, it is certain that the Protestant party of which she, the Duchess of Suffolk, and the Countess of Hertford were the principal lady members, and the Earl of Hertford and Lord Admiral Dudley the active leaders, alone had control of affairs. Gardiner had been threatened with the Tower months before, and had then only been saved by Norfolk’s bold protest. Now Norfolk was safe under bolts and bars, whilst Wriothesley and Paulet were openly insulted by Hertford and Dudley, and, like their chief Gardiner, lay low in fear of what was to come when the King died.[262] They were soon to learn. The King had been growing worse daily during January. His legs, covered with running ulcers, were useless to him and in terrible torture. His bulk was so unwieldy that mechanical means had to be employed to lift him. Surrey had been done to death in the Tower for high treason, whilst yet the King’s stiffened hand could sign the death-warrant; but when the time came for killing Norfolk, Henry was too far gone to place his signature to the fatal paper. Wriothesley, always ready to oblige the strong, produced a commission, stated to be authorised by the King, empowering him as Chancellor to sign for him, which he did upon the warrant ordering the death of Norfolk, whose head was to fall on the following morning. But it was too late, for on the morrow before the hour fixed for the execution the soul of King Henry had gone to its account, and none dared carry out the vicarious command to sacrifice the proudest noble in the realm for the convenience of the political party for the moment predominant.
On the afternoon of 26th January 1547 the end of the King was seen to be approaching. The events of Henry’s deathbed have been told with so much religious passion on both sides that it is somewhat difficult to arrive at the truth. Between the soul in despair and mortal anguish, as described by Rivadeneyra, and the devout Protestant deathbed portrayed by some of the ardent religious reformers, there is a world of difference. The accepted English version says that, fearing the dying man’s anger, none of the courtiers dared to tell him of his coming dissolution, until his old friend Sir Anthony Denny, leaning over him, gently broke the news. Henry was calm and resigned, and when asked if he wished to see a priest, he answered: “Only Cranmer, and him not yet.” It was to be never, for Henry was speechless and sightless when the Primate came, and the King could answer only by a pressure of his numbed fingers the question if he died in the faith of Christ. Another contemporary, whom I have several times quoted, though always with some reservation, says that Henry, some days before he died, took a tender farewell of the Princess Mary, to whose motherly care he commended her young brother; and that he then sent for the Queen and said to her, “‘It is God’s will that we should part, and I order all these gentlemen to honour and treat you as if I were living still; and, if it should be your pleasure to marry again, I order that you shall have seven thousand pounds for your service as long as you live, and all your jewels and ornaments.’ The good Queen could not answer for weeping, and he ordered her to leave him. The next day he confessed, took the sacrament, and commended his soul to God.”[263]
Henry died, in fact, as he had lived, a Catholic. The Reformation in England, of which we have traced the beginnings in this book, did not spring mature from the mind and will of the King, but was gradually thrust upon him by the force of circumstances, arising out of the steps he took to satisfy his passion and gratify his imperious vanity. Freedom of thought in religion was the last thing to commend itself to such a mind as his, and his treatment of those who disobeyed either the Act of Supremacy or the Bloody Statute (the Six Articles) shows that neither on the one side or the other would he tolerate dissent from his own views, which he characteristically caused to be embodied in the law of the land, either in politics or religion. The concession to subjects of the right of private judgment in matters of conscience seemed to the potentates of the sixteenth century to strike at the very base of all authority, and the very last to concede such a revolutionary claim was Henry Tudor. His separation from the Papal obedience, whilst retaining what, in his view, were the essentials of the Papal creed, was directed rather to the increase than to the diminution of his own authority over his subjects, and it was this fact that doubtless made it more than ever attractive to him. To ascribe to him a complete plan for the aggrandisement of England and her emancipation from foreign control, by means of religious schism, has always appeared to me to endow him with a political sagacity and prescience which, in my opinion, he did not possess, and to estimate imperfectly the forces by which he was impelled.
We have seen how, entirely in consequence of the unexpected difficulties raised by the Papacy to the first divorce, he adopted the bold advice of Cranmer and Cromwell to defy the Pope on that particular point. The opposition of the Pope was a purely political one, forced upon him by the Emperor for reasons of State, in order to prevent a coalition between England and France; and there were several occasions when, if the Pope had been left to himself, he would have found a solution that would have kept England in the orthodox fold. But for the persistence of the opposition Henry would never have taken the first step that led to the Reformation. Having taken it, each other step onward was the almost inevitable consequence of the first, having regard to the peculiar character of the King. It has been the main business of this book to trace in what respect the policy that ended in the great religious schism was reflected or influenced by the matrimonial adventures of the King, who has gone down to history as the most married monarch of modern times. We have seen that, although, with the exception of Katharine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, each for a short time, the direct influence of Henry’s wives upon events was small, each one represented, and coincided in point of time with, a change in the ruling forces around the King. We have seen that the libidinous tendency of the monarch was utilised by the rival parties, as were all other elements that might help them, to forward the opportunity by which a person to some extent dependent upon them might be placed at the side of the King as his wife; and when for the purpose it was necessary to remove the wife in possession first, we have witnessed the process by which it was effected.
The story from this point of view has not been told before in its entirety, and as the whole panorama unrolls before us, we mark curiously the regular degeneration of Henry’s character, as the only checks upon his action were removed, and he progressively defied traditional authority and established standards of conduct without disaster to himself. The power of the Church to censure or punish him, and the fear of personal reprobation by the world, were the influences that, had they retained their force over him to the end, would probably have kept Henry to all appearance a good man. But when he found, probably to his own surprise, that the jealous divisions of the Catholic powers on the Continent made defiance of the Church in his case unpunishable, and that crafty advisers and servile Parliaments could give to his deeds, however violent and cruel, the sanction of Holy Writ and the law of the land, there was no power on earth to hold in check the devil in the breast of Henry Tudor; and the man who began a vain, brilliant sensualist, with the feelings of a gentleman, ended a repulsive, bloodstained monster, the more dangerous because his evil was always held to be good by himself and those around him.
In his own eyes he was a deeply wronged and ill-used man when Katharine of Aragon refused to surrender her position as his wife after twenty years of wedlock, and appealed to forces outside England to aid her in supporting her claim. It was a rebellious, a cruel, and a wicked thing for her and her friends to stand in the way of his tender conscience, and of his laudable and natural desire to be succeeded on the throne by a son of his own. Similarly, it seemed very hard upon him that all Europe, and most of his own country, should be threateningly against him for the sake of Anne Boleyn, for whom he had already sacrificed and suffered so much, and particularly as she was shrewish and had brought him no son. He really was a most ill-used man, and it was a providential instance of divine justice that Cromwell, in the nick of time, when the situation had become unendurable and Jane Seymour’s prudish charms were most elusive, should fortunately discover that Anne was unworthy to be Henry’s wife, and Cranmer should decide that she never had been his wife. It was not his fault, moreover, that Anne of Cleves’ physical qualities had repelled him. A wicked and ungenerous trick had been played upon him. His trustful ingenuousness had been betrayed by flatterers at the instance of a knavish minister, who, not content with bringing him a large unsympathetic Dutch vrow for a wife, had pledged him to an alliance with a lot of insignificant vassal princes in rebellion against the greater sovereigns who were his own peers. It was a just decree of heaven that the righteous wisdom of Gardiner and Norfolk should enable it to be demonstrated clearly that the good King had once more been deceived, and that Anne, and the policy she stood for, could be repudiated at the same time without opprobrium or wrongdoing. Again, how relentless was the persecution of the powers of evil against the obese invalid of fifty who married in ignorance of her immoral past a light-lived beauty of seventeen, and was undeceived when her frivolity began to pall upon him by those whose political and religious views might benefit by the disgrace of the party that had placed Katharine Howard by the King’s side as his wife. That the girl Queen should lose her head for lack of virtue before her marriage and lack of prudence after it, was, of course, quite just, and in accordance with the law of the land—for all that Henry did was strictly legal—but it was a heartrending thing that the good husband should suffer the distress of having once believed in so unworthy a wife. Still Katharine Howard was not sacrificed in vain, for, although the Catholic policy she represented suffered no check, for reasons set forth in earlier pages, the King’s sad bereavement left him in the matrimonial market and enhanced his price as an ally, for much of the future depended upon the wife and the party that should be in possession when the King died. As we have seen, the Protestants, or rather the anti-Catholics, won the last trick; and Somerset’s predominance meant that the Reformation in England should not be one of form alone but of substance.
The life of Katharine Parr after Henry’s death hardly enters into the plan of this book; but a few lines may be devoted to it, and to her pitiable end. The instant rise of the Protector Somerset on the death of Henry brought with it a corresponding increase in the importance of his brother Sir Thomas, then Lord Seymour of Sudeley, who was certainly no less ambitious than his brother, and probably of much stronger character. For a time all went well between the brothers, Thomas being created Lord Admiral, to the annoyance of Dudley—now Earl of Warwick—who had held the office, and receiving great grants of forfeited estates and other wealth. But soon the evident attempts of Lord Seymour to rival his elder brother, and perhaps to supplant him, aroused the jealousy of Somerset, or more likely of his quarrelsome and haughty wife.
Some love passages, we have seen, took place between Seymour and Katharine Parr before her marriage with the King, so that it need not be ascribed to ambition that the lover should once more cast his eyes upon the royal widow before the weeds for the King had been cast aside.[264] Katharine, with a large dower that has already been mentioned, lived alternately in her two mansion-houses at Chelsea and Hanworth; and to her care was consigned the Lady Elizabeth, then a girl of fourteen. As early as the beginning of May 1547, Seymour had visited the widowed Queen at Chelsea with his tale of love. Katharine was now thirty-four years of age, and having married in succession three old men, might fairly be entitled to contract a fourth marriage to please herself. There was no more manly or handsome figure in England than that of Seymour, with his stately stature, his sonorous voice, and his fine brown beard; and in his quiet meetings with the Queen in her pretty riverside garden at Chelsea, he appears to have found no difficulty in persuading Katharine of the sincerity of his love.