To occupy her own leisure, Queen Katherine devoted herself to the composition of a quaint book entitled The Lamentations of a Penitent Sinner, a pious work which gives us, at least in one passage, a lucid idea of the methods employed by Her Majesty to keep her hold over her extraordinary husband, among which gross flattery was by no means the least. A copy of this work was once in the possession of John Thelwall, and was sold at the death of his second wife. It contained a curious autograph, indicating that it had been given by the Queen to her “dear cosyn, Jane Grey,” who no doubt read it with veneration and delight. In this tiny volume Henry had the satisfaction of being likened unto Moses leading the Children of Israel out of bondage. “I mean by Moses, King Henry VIII, my most sovereign favourable lord and husband, one (if Moses had figured any more than Christ) through the excellent grace of God, meet to be another expressed verity of Moses’ conquest over Pharaoh (and I mean by this Pharaoh the Bishop of Rome), the greatest persecutor of all true Christians than ever was Pharaoh of the Children of Israel.”

As may well be imagined, Queen Katherine Parr did not fail to use her influence to obtain prominent positions about the Court for her own kith and kin. Her uncle and Chamberlain, Sir Thomas Parr, was created Lord Parr of Horton; her brother was raised from the rank of Baron Parr of Kendal to be Earl of Essex, in lieu of the lately decapitated Thomas Cromwell; and her brother-in-law, William Herbert, was knighted. These gentlemen received their new dignities in the Chapel Royal, but were not entertained in one of the apartments spread with Persian carpets. Their dinner was served in the choir-boys’ mess-room, in which a fresh litter of rushes was strewn for the occasion—a curious fact, which leads one to conclude that the acting master of ceremonies expected the party to indulge in libations which might result in some injury to Oriental rugs but were not likely to do much damage to fresh rushes costing 3s. 6d. the litter. Parr had to pay 40s. for his new paraphernalia, and the choir-boys got 10s. for singing after the dinner.[52]

On 14th July 1544 King Henry sailed from Dover for France to superintend in person the approaching siege of Boulogne. He left our shores in a vessel with sails made of cloth of gold, the glitter of which does not appear to have added to the ship’s speed, for the King did not get to Calais for nearly twenty-four hours, although the weather was fine, and the sea calm—probably too calm. The last time he had crossed the Channel, on his way to the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Henry had acted the part of pilot, garbed in nether garments of cloth of gold, and had blown the pilot’s whistle as loud as any trumpeter. This time he was too anxious and enfeebled to play at all. His Majesty was attended by his brother-in-law, the Duke of Suffolk, also a very sick man; by Sir William Herbert, who acted as his spear-bearer, by the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Surrey, the Spanish Duke of Alberqurque, John Dudley, the Lord High-Admiral, afterwards Duke of Northumberland, and half the English nobility. Before his departure he appointed the Queen Regent of England and Ireland, with power to sign all official and State documents, this being almost the first occasion on which a Queen-Consort of England held so responsible a position. The Earl of Hertford was to be Her Majesty’s constant attendant, but should he chance to be temporarily absent, Cranmer was to remain with her, and with these two, Sir William Petre and Lord Parr of Horton, her Grace’s uncle, Wriothesley, and Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, were to sit in council.

During this regency Katherine kept aloof from politics and occupied herself principally with assisting the University of Cambridge and with the royal children, who were left in her charge. Princess Mary, who was an almost constant guest during the King’s absence, and Princess Elizabeth, were both invited to join the circle at Oatlands, where Prince Edward was residing, and whither, owing to an outbreak of the plague, the Queen herself soon retired. From the various suburban palaces in which she was residing, Katherine addressed letters almost daily to the King, giving him accounts of the health and the doings of his children; and the monarch vouchsafed in return to write most approvingly of all she did. Towards the middle of August the Lady Dorset and her daughter, the Lady Jane Grey, came to Oatlands for a few days’ visit. This was perhaps the first and probably the only time spent by Lady Jane and Prince Edward under the same roof. The royal kinsfolk may have lived a very quiet life, spending their days in the gardens and park, and their evenings either listening to the singing of Princess Mary, who is reputed to have had a magnificent contralto voice, or to Princess Elizabeth’s playing upon the virginals, an art in which she already excelled. The Queen may perchance have favoured the company with a chapter or so from some one or other of her remarkably dull theological compositions. There is no evidence that she was a musician, and she does not seem to have been infected with the prevailing Court vice—gambling—in which even the pious Princess Mary indulged, frequently losing much more than she could pay—as demonstrated by the Household Books of Henry VIII.

Boulogne capitulated to Suffolk on 16th September, after a lengthy siege, and on the 18th, the King, accompanied by the Duke of Alberqurque, representing his ally the Emperor, received the keys of the city from his brother-in-law’s hands, and made what he was pleased to consider his triumphal entry into the town. But he rode through a city untenanted and in ruins; even the magnificent Cathedral had not been spared, and the townsfolk, who had fled for security, as they hoped, to Hardelot and Etaples, were massacred, man, woman, and child, by the allied Spanish, German, and English troops. English historians have been reticent in dealing with the siege of Boulogne,[53] and the majority have passed very lightly over the disagreement which soon broke out between our King and his ally the Emperor.[54] Charles now urged Henry to join him and march on Paris. Henry, who knew his troops to be enfeebled by hardship and suffering, and moreover felt himself far too ill to supervise fresh military operations, would go no farther, more especially because he feared to infuriate the French King, who might at any moment ally himself with his former enemy the Emperor Charles, and thus form a Catholic coalition absolutely inimical to the policy of the English King. Henry’s hesitation undoubtedly saved the city of Paris. Seeing the Emperor’s troops approach the capital, Francis roused himself for a moment from the lethargy in which he had been plunged, and once more became the hero of Marignano. The King’s attitude and the bravery of the Dauphin, who was covering the capital with 8000 men, stimulated the drooping spirits of the Parisians, and, with their usual heroism, they prepared to offer a stout resistance to their foes. They even made merry at the expense of their two arch-enemies, ridiculing the gouty Emperor and caricaturing the corpulent English King—a proof, if one were lacking, that the fatal diseases destined eventually to carry Henry off had already made sufficient progress to excite general attention. Queen Eleanor, the neglected wife of Francis I, foreseeing the horrors to which the capital and its inhabitants were exposed, determined, without consulting her husband, to plead personally with the Emperor. Accompanied by a Spanish monk named Guzman, she proceeded to the Imperial tent, and casting herself upon her knees before Charles, then writhing in agonies of gout, obtained terms from him, thus averting a siege which must have cost rivers of blood. The peace then concluded was none too satisfactory, so far as England was concerned, since it stipulated that Boulogne was to be restored in the space of six years, during which time the place lost us in money and men far more than it was worth. Never, indeed, was there a more futile expedition than this, nor a greater waste of money. The much-talked-of sails of cloth of gold wafted the King home on 1st October 1544. In London he was received with little enthusiasm, or none at all. The nation was disappointed by the terms of the peace, the army was disorganised, Norfolk already out of favour, and Surrey, accused of insubordination, was openly disgraced. Boulogne was left in the hands of Jane Grey’s future father-in-law, Lord High-Admiral John Dudley.

The health of Lady Jane’s maternal grandfather, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, failed him completely soon after his return to England. He seems to have suffered from a complication of disorders not unlike those which were afflicting his brother-in-law, the King. After the siege of Boulogne, he appears to have been of very little use, and eighteen months later he retired with his Duchess to Guildford Castle “in much suffering and pain.” There is a portrait extant of Charles Brandon, taken at this time, which represents him seated in a large armchair, his head bound up in a sort of nightcap, and his swollen and gouty feet, one of which rests on a stool, enveloped in bandages. The bloated face bears a weird resemblance to Henry VIII. Brandon died at Guildford in 1546 after a long illness, during which he was nursed by his Duchess and his two daughters, the Ladies Frances and Eleanor, the former of whom brought her eldest daughters, Jane and Katherine, with her. By his will Charles Brandon left, after deducting a rather meagre dower for his wife, the bulk of his vast fortune to his two sons, with remainder to his daughters in unequal shares, the Lady Frances, in the case of the death of her two brothers, inheriting considerably more than two-thirds of her father’s lands and money. He desired to be buried in Lincolnshire, but Henry, overlooking this request, caused his body to be conveyed to Windsor, where it was interred with great pomp in St. George’s Chapel, in the presence of his family and of a multitude of courtiers.

CHAPTER V
MRS. ANNE ASKEW

It was in the latter years of Henry VIII’s reign that Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, conceived his scheme for the reconciliation of England and England’s monarch with the Roman Pontiff. Although a less astute intriguer than his powerful opponent Cranmer, Gardiner, who was apt to lose his temper and blurt out things best kept to himself, was a man of marked ability, one of whom his crafty master made frequent use, playing him off against the Archbishop, and so retaining the balance of power in his own jealous hands. Cranmer was at this period using his influence with Henry to abolish the use of Latin in the Mass, preparatory to the eventual introduction of the Book of Common Prayer and the early and total abrogation of the Eucharistic Service in the Roman sense. Yet the wily Churchman knew right well that so long as the King lived there was but faint hope of this change. For His Majesty clung to the doctrine of Transubstantiation closer than to any other tenet; not so much on account of his faith—did he believe anything?—as because, in the days of his youth, he had indited a work in defence of the Catholic doctrine of the Sacraments, which, so his clergy had averred, proved him wiser than Solomon himself, and which Pope Leo X had favourably compared with the writings of St. Augustine and Gregory the Great, rewarding the royal author with that title of “Defender of the Faith” which is still a cherished appanage of British royalty. Henry had even made belief in the Sacrament of the Altar a principal Article amongst the famous Six, any denial of which was punishable with death. Yet, if the King had searched Cranmer’s study at Lambeth at the very moment when that wily prelate was professing to accept his beliefs from his King, as submissively as though the monarch had possessed the infallible powers of his own Maker, he might have laid his hand on a bulky correspondence between the Primate and every Lutheran and Calvinistic leader in Germany and Switzerland—with Calvin, Bullinger, Œcolampadius, Osiander, Dryander, Bucer, and the rest. Gardiner, on his side, was in communication with Cardinal Pole, Charles V, the Pope, and the entire papal party at home and abroad. This duel between the papal leader and the Reformers, then, was the true basis of all political undertakings at this momentous crisis. The rival parties were really preparing themselves for the departure of the dying King, and aimed at controlling the inevitable Protectorate, necessitated by the minority of his successor, a lad of nine summers. Had Gardiner, the Howards, and the Catholic party won the day, history would have had little, perhaps nothing, to record concerning Lady Jane Grey. Her name, like that of her accomplished friend Lady Jane Seymour, daughter of Lord Hertford, would have been lost, buried in the spent sands of the past.