Henry VIII's Last Victim (4 page)

Strict criteria governed the choice of Henry’s wet-nurse. She should be ‘of no servile condition or vice notable,’ wrote Sir Thomas Elyot,

for, as some ancient writers do suppose, often times the child sucketh the vice of his nurse with the milk of her pap. And also observe that she be of mature or ripe age, not under twenty years or above thirty, her body also being clean from all sickness or deformity, and having her complexion most of the right and pure sanguine, forasmuch as the milk thereof coming excelleth all other both in sweetness and substance.
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Infants were acutely vulnerable to disease at a time when medicine was not far advanced. One doctor accused his colleagues of ‘everywhere and continually . . . feeling their way with unseeing eyes’.
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The Boke of Chyldren
, a guide to paediatrics published in 1544, listed some of the ailments to which the early modern child was prone. They included ‘a postume of the brain, swelling of the head . . . terrible dreams, the falling evil, the palsy, cramp, stiffness of limbs, bloodshot eyes . . . scabbiness and itch, diseases in the ears, neasing [sneezing] out of measure, breeding of teeth . . . colic and rumbling in the guts . . . worms, swelling of the navel, the stone, pissing in bed . . . consumption, leanness and goggle eyes.’ Remedies were prescribed for each condition, but their efficacy is questionable. Stiff limbs, for example, were to be rubbed with an unguent of goat’s urine and dung, while a child suffering from earache was to be treated with a snakeskin ‘boiled in oil and dropped into the ears’.
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By the end of 1519 Henry had been joined by another sister, Mary, and a brother, Thomas, while a second brother, who was baptised Charles, died in infancy in 1520.
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Their main home was Tendring Hall in Stoke by Nayland, a small cloth-producing town on the Essex–Suffolk border. The Stour Valley provided a scenic playground for Henry and his siblings just as it did for John Constable more than two centuries later. ‘The scene of my childhood,’ he wrote, ‘made me a painter.’

Its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadow-flats, sprinkled with flocks and herds, its well cultivated uplands, its woods and rivers, with numerous scattered villages and churches, farms and picturesque cottages, all impart to this delightful county an amenity and an elegance hardly anywhere else to be found.
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Many of Henry’s earliest memories would have been of travelling between his father’s various estates. Much time was spent at Kenninghall, a medieval manor house twenty miles from Norwich. According
to an account book detailing the family’s expenditure there between 1519 and 1520, the children were given sweets, silks and shoes, while in the summer of 1519 a blue ribbon was bought just for Henry. Occasionally, too, their parents took them to London where they stayed in a house in Lambeth that was just a quick ferry ride across the Thames to the Court.
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Up until Henry’s eighth birthday, the family tended to winter at Hunsdon Hall in Hertfordshire, an impressive moated manor that boasted a brick tower one hundred feet high. In 1525 the King bought it from the Howards and took ‘great pleasure to resort [there] for the health, comfort & preservation of his most royal person’.
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,
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Moving from one estate to another was an irksome affair. Carriages were needed not only for the household personnel, but also for the furniture, hangings, tableware, cooking utensils and chapel plate. Even the beds were removed, and not just the lord and lady’s beds, but those of their children, the ushers, grooms, cooks, bakers and the rest of the travelling household. A contemporary book belonging to the fifth Earl of Northumberland gives a set of verbose instructions on how ‘to assign the said carriages, how they shall be occupied and how the said carriages shall be appointed and what they be that shall be appointed to every carriage and what carriages shall be appointed for every cause.’
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Roads were often poorly maintained and those, like the Howards, who regularly travelled through Suffolk, had to contend with ‘the foulness of the ways, which in the clay woodland soil is ever increased especially in winter season’.
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The logistics of moving house resembled those of an army on the move. Advance parties rode out to scout the route and arrange checkpoints. Others went ahead to hang tapestries, light fires, check food stores and generally ensure that the house was ready for habitation. Then, in one long caravan, the family and household departed, leaving only a skeleton staff behind. A record of one of the Howards’ sixty-mile treks from Tendring Hall to Hunsdon has survived. The six-year-old Henry set off with his mother, siblings and ‘all the household’ at daybreak on 29 October 1523. After twenty miles south-west, they reached Easterford (now Kelvedon) in Essex, where they were allowed a brief respite for breakfast. Travelling west, they passed through
Dunmow, where they had a light lunch, entered Hertfordshire, crossed the River Stort and finally reached Hunsdon in time for a hearty supper.
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When Henry was three his father was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. English kings had claimed overlordship of the island ever since a dubious papal grant in the twelfth century, but most had shown little interest in the ‘wild Irish’ and since the beginning of his reign Henry VIII had deputed the governance of the country to the Anglo-Irish Earls of Kildare. In 1520 though, he decided upon a change in policy. Complaints had reached him that Gerald Fitzgerald, ninth Earl of Kildare, and deputy since 1513, had been abusing his power. Through extortion and terror, he was treating Ireland as if it was his own private fiefdom, with scant regard for English interests. Henry VIII promptly discharged him and appointed Thomas Howard to head a new strategy for the establishment of English suzerainty. The King was told that, if managed properly, Ireland could become ‘a very Paradise’ and a useful source of revenue. Howard was ordered to set up Court in Dublin and, to give credibility and a sense of permanence to his mission, his family and household were expected to relocate with him.

The news cannot have been met with much enthusiasm by Elizabeth Howard. As the daughter of the Duke of Buckingham, she had been brought up in what was generally considered the most magnificent noble household of the age. Marriage to an earl had led to a reduced standard of living. That had been a bearable inconvenience, but how was she to cope with the wilderness of Ireland where, in many places, so it was rumoured, ‘they care not for pot, pan, kettle, nor for mattress, feather bed, nor such implements of household’?
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Surely it was no place to take small children. One Greek envoy, describing English impressions of Ireland, wrote: ‘They fabulously tell that Hades and the gates of Hades are there, imagining that they hear the groans of men undergoing punishment; and they add, moreover, that various spectres and adverse powers are seen.’ While such tales were dismissed by the envoy, the rest of what he was told ‘appeared to me to be true, and susceptible of sober consideration’:

Such . . . as live in forests and bogs are entirely wild and savage; and there remains only the human form, whereby they may be distinguished to be men . . . And towards their own females they conduct themselves with too great simplicity, inasmuch as sometimes they have sexual intercourse with them in public; neither does this appear to themselves shameful. They feed on everything, and gorge themselves to excess with flesh.
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The Countess and her children were to be based in the more civilised area around Dublin, known as the Pale, where it was conceded that the inhabitants were ‘meetly well mannered, using the English tongue’. But even here the Irish were considered a challenge: ‘Naturally they be testy, specially if they be vexed.’
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On 23 May 1520 the Howards, their household and some five hundred troops arrived in Dublin, having crossed the Irish Sea on two galleasses,
Katherine
and
Rose
. From the outset, the situation was intolerable. While the English army faced resistance and rebellion from the Irish chieftains, the Howard household struggled with food shortages and dysentery. Sir John Bulmer, who arrived in Ireland not long after the Howards, claimed that in all his time there he never experienced even one day of good health.
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With the summer came the plague. ‘Undoubtedly no thing is so troublous to me here,’ Howard wrote from Dublin at the end of July, ‘as the universal infection of great sickness, which daily increaseth in this town.’ By early August it was inciting mass hysteria. In one infected area the villagers had forsaken their houses for the woods but even there the plague had found them and now, Howard informed Cardinal Wolsey, ‘the bodies lie dead, like swine unburied’. Howard’s main concern, though, was closer to home:

Three of my household folks hath sickened in my house, and died in the town, within seven days last past; notwithstanding I am fain to keep my wife and children here still, for I know no place in this country where to send them in clean air. Wherefore most humbly I beseech Your Grace to give me leave to send my wife and children into Wales or Lancashire, to remain near the seaside, unto the time it shall please God to cease this death here. And I shall take such fortune as God will send, for whilst I live fear of death, nor other thing, shall cause me to forbear to serve my Master, where it shall be his pleasure to command me.
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This simple request was apparently refused for the Archbishop of Armagh reported from Dublin almost two months later that Howard’s wife and children were still there despite ‘the great plague of sickness which now here reigneth and remaineth and hath remained still to his and their great jeopardy.’
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Not only did Elizabeth Howard have to
cope with the very real threat of death, but she also had to reckon with a household full of soldiers. Scarcity had driven up prices and reduced the value of the men’s wages to such an extent that they could no longer afford food or lodging. They made ‘so pitiful complaint,’ Howard wrote, ‘that I am enforced to take them into my house’, so the corridors reverberated with the clatter of armour and the carpets were trampled by heavy boots.
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The Howards remained in Ireland for the rest of the year and most of the next. A stronger military presence was clearly needed to subdue the population, but Henry VIII deflected Howard’s petitions for reinforcements, advising instead, with breathtaking disregard for the situation, ‘sober ways, politic drifts and amiable persuasions’.
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In June 1521, disillusioned and fed up, Howard asked to be recalled. He was ignored. On 16 September he renewed his plea with more urgency:

I have continued now here one year and a half, to Your Grace’s great costs and charges, and to mine undoing, for I have spent all that I might make. The country is so much disposed to flux of the body, with which disease I have of late been so sore vexed, and yet am, that I fear, if Your Grace should command me to remain this winter coming, I should be in right great danger of my life. There is dead of the same disease here, of Your Grace’s retinue, above sixty, and of the great sickness a more number.
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Four long months passed until the Howards were finally allowed to go home. Despite his obvious distaste for Irish affairs, Thomas Howard’s humane treatment of her people won him their hearts. One Irish chronicle told how

he had such grace that there was neither poor, neither rich, but lamented his departure as though all goodness were from them ravished. He was so careful for the poor, so upright amongst the higher powers, that he was rather to be
alter Salmon
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called than a private minister. He never sought no man’s blood; he never coveted nothing of any that was other men’s; he was never malicious to any. To be short, without many frivolous words to multiply, it was thought by diverse that he never offended within the compass of the seven deadly sins all the while he was in Ireland. What shall I say of his Lordship more?
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The English also appreciated his efforts at statecraft. ‘Hard it will be to find any other English captain to do more, or as much, as he hath done in that room,’ Wolsey informed the King.
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Ireland continued to be problematic for the rest of Henry VIII’s reign and Thomas Howard’s advice was constantly sought. This he was happy to give, but his reaction to a suggestion mooted in 1534 that he return to Ireland is telling: ‘If the King really wishes to send me to Ireland, he must first construct a bridge over the sea for me to return freely to England whenever I like.’
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In the Howards’ absence a family tragedy had played out at Court. On 17 May 1521 Elizabeth’s father, the Duke of Buckingham, was executed for treason. Few things aroused Henry VIII’s finely tuned sense of suspicion more than a recalcitrant nobleman. Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, was debonair, flamboyant and highly provocative. He exuded magnificence and thought nothing of putting on a banquet for over four hundred people. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, demonstrating an unfortunate aptitude for weak puns, called him ‘the finest buck in England’.
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