Tudors (History of England Vol 2)

Contents

 

List of illustrations

2. All in scarlet

3. Heretic!

4. The woes of marriage

5. Into court

6. Old authentic histories

7. The king’s pleasure

8. A little neck

9. The great revolt

10. The confiscation

11. The old fashion

12. The body of Christ

13. The fall

14. War games

15. A family portrait

16. The last days

17. The breaking of the altars

18. Have at all papists!

19. The barns of Crediton

20. The lord of misrule

21. The nine-day queen

22. In the ascendant

23. Faith of our fathers

24. An age of anxiety

25. Nunc Dimittis

26. A virgin queen

27. Two queens

28. The thirty-nine steps

29. The rivals

30. The rites of spring

31. Plots and factions

32. The revels now are ended

33. The frog

34. The great plot

35. The dead cannot bite

36. Armada

37. Repent! Repent!

38. The setting sun

39. A disobedient servant

40. The end of days

41. Reformation

Index

List of illustrations

 

1  Portrait of Henry VIII,
c
.1509 (© The Berger Collection at the Denver Art Museum, USA / The Bridgeman Art Library)

2  Portrait of Katherine of Aragon, sixteenth century (© Philip Mould Ltd, London / The Bridgeman Art Library)

3  A woodcut showing King Henry’s knights after the English victory over the Scots at Flodden Field, 1513 (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

4  Detail from a depiction of the Field of the Cloth of Gold,
c
.1545 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

5  Letter from King Henry VIII to Cardinal Wolsey (‘Mine own good cardinal’), thanking him for his hard work and urging him to take some ‘pastime and comfort’,
c
.1518 (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

6  Cardinal Thomas Wolsey,
c
.1520 (© Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

7  Chalk drawing of Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger,
c.
1527 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

8  Engraving of the pope being suppressed by King Henry VIII, 1534 (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

9  Portrait of Anne Boleyn, 1534 (© Hever Castle, Kent / The Bridgeman Art Library)

10 Sixteenth-century portrait of Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk, by Hans Holbein the Younger (© Arundel Castle / The Bridgeman Art Library)

11 Detail from a contemporary engraving depicting the martyrdom of the Carthusians (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

12 Engraving showing the Pilgrimage of Grace, nineteenth century (© The Stapleton Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

13 Portrait of Jane Seymour by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1536 (© Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna / The Bridgeman Art Library)

14 Bishop Latimer’s arguments against the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, with marginal notes by Henry,
c.
1538 (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

15 Sixteenth-century portrait of Lord Cromwell by Hans Holbein the Younger (© The Trustees of the Weston Park Foundation / The Bridgeman Art Library)

16 Portrait of Anne of Cleves by Hans Holbein the Younger (© Hever Castle, Kent / The Bridgeman Art Library)

17 The title page of the Great Bible, 1539 (© Universal History Archive / Getty Images)

18 Engraving after Holbein portrait of Katherine Howard, 1796 (© The Stapleton Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

19 Contemporary portrait of Katherine Parr (© National Portrait Gallery, London / Roger-Viollet, Paris / The Bridgeman Art Library)

20 Allegory of the Tudor succession by Lucas de Heere,
c.
1570–75 (© Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire / The Bridgeman Art Library)

21 Portrait of Edward VI at the time of his accession (© Boltin Picture Library / The Bridgeman Art Library)

22 Portrait of Lady Jane Grey,
c
.1547 (© Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA / The Bridgeman Art Library)

23 Queen Mary I, 1554 (© Society of Antiquaries of London / The Bridgeman Art Library)

24 Sixteenth-century portrait of Philip II of Spain (© Philip Mould Ltd, London / The Bridgeman Art Library)

25 Anti-Catholic allegory depicting Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, 1556 (© Christie’s Images / The Bridgeman Art Library)

26 Woodcut illustration of the burning of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, taken from
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
, pub. 1563 (© Lambeth Palace Library, London / The Bridgeman Art Library)

27 Elizabeth I as a young princess,
c.
1546 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library)

28 Page of a manuscript showing the signature of Queen Elizabeth I (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

29 Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I in coronation robes (© National Portrait Gallery, London / The Bridgeman Art Library)

30 Robert Dudley, first earl of Leicester,
c.
1560s (© Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA / The Bridgeman Art Library)

31 Thomas Howard, fourth duke of Norfolk, 1562 (© His Grace The Duke of Norfolk, Arundel Castle / The Bridgeman Art Library)

32 Contemporary engraving of Queen Elizabeth I and Parliament (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

33 Mary Queen of Scots in white mourning (© Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh / The Bridgeman Art Library)

34 The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, painted after her death
c.
1613 (© Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh / The Bridgeman Art Library)

35 Engraving depicting the pope’s bull against the Queen in 1570 (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

36 Hand-coloured copper engraving of the arrival of Queen Elizabeth I at Nonesuch Palace, 1582 (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

37 Map showing the route of the Armada fleet, 1588 (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

38 Portrait of Sir Francis Drake by Nicholas Hilliard, 1581 (© Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna / The Bridgeman Art Library)

39 Illustration of the
Ark Royal
, the English fleet’s flagship against the Spanish Armada (© Mansell / Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images)

40 Sixteenth-century portrait of William Cecil, first baron Burghley (© Burghley House Collection, Lincolnshire / The Bridgeman Art Library)

41 Engraving of Sir Francis Walsingham (© Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)

42 Contemporary portrait of Sir Robert Cecil (© Bonhams, London / The Bridgeman Art Library)

43 Portrait of James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, 1586 (© Falkland Palace, Fife / Mark Fiennes / The Bridgeman Art Library)

1
 
Hallelujah

 

The land was flowing with milk and honey. On 21 April 1509 the old king, having grown ever more harsh and rapacious, died in his palace at Richmond on the south bank of the Thames. The fact was kept secret for two days, so that the realm would not tremble. Yet the new Henry had already been proclaimed king.

On 9 May the body of Henry VII was taken in a black chariot from Richmond Palace to St Paul’s Cathedral; the funeral car was attended by 1,400 formal mourners and 700 torch-bearers. But few, if any, grieved; the courtiers and household servants were already awaiting the son and heir. When the body, having been taken to the abbey of Westminster, after the funeral service was over, was lowered into its vault the heralds announced ‘le noble roy, Henri le Septième, est mort’. Then at once they cried out with one voice, ‘
Vive le noble roy, Henri le Huitième
’. His title was undisputed, the first such easy succession in a century. The new king was in his seventeenth year.

Midsummer Day, 24 June, was chosen as the day of coronation. The sun in its splendour would herald the rising of another sun. It was just four days before his eighteenth birthday. The ceremony of the coronation was considered to be the eighth sacrament of the Church, in which Henry was anointed with chrism or holy oil as a token of sacred kingship. His robes were stiff with jewels, diamonds
and rubies and emeralds and pearls, so that a glow or light hovered about him. He now radiated the power and the glory. He may have acted and dressed under advice, but he soon came to understand the theatre of magnificence.

Henry had taken the precaution, thirteen days before the coronation, of marrying his intended bride so that a king would be accompanied by a queen; it was thereby to be understood that he was an adult rather than a minor. Katherine of Aragon was the child of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, in whose reign Spain was united. She had come from that country in order to marry Prince Arthur, Henry’s older brother, but events conspired against her. Arthur died less than six months after their wedding, of consumption or the sweating sickness, and Katherine was left at the English court in the unenviable position of a widow whose usefulness had gone. It was said that the king himself, Henry VII, might wish to marry her. But this was unthinkable. Instead she was betrothed to Prince Henry, and was consigned to some years of relative penury and privation at the hands of a difficult father-in-law who was in any case pursuing a better match for his son and heir. Yet, after seven years of waiting, her moment of apotheosis had come. On the day before the coronation she was taken in a litter from the Tower of London to Westminster, passing through streets draped in rich tapestry and cloth of gold. A contemporary woodcut depicts Henry and Katherine being crowned at the same time, surrounded by rank upon rank of bishops and senior clergy.

Henry’s early years had been spent in the shadow of an anxious and over-protective father, intent before anything else on securing the dynasty. The young prince never spoke in public, except in reply to questions from the king. He could leave the palace at Greenwich or at Eltham only under careful supervision, and then venture into the palace’s park through a private door. Much care was bestowed on his early education, so that he acquired the reputation of being the most learned of princes. Throughout his life he considered himself to be a great debater in matters of theology, fully steeped in the scholarship of Thomas Aquinas. He took an early delight in music, and composed Masses as well as songs and motets; he sang, and played both lute and keyboard. He had his own company of musicians who followed him wherever he
walked, and by the time of his death he owned seventy-two flutes. He was the harmonious prince. Thomas More, in a poem celebrating the coronation, described him as the glory of the era. Surely he would inaugurate a new golden age in which all men of goodwill would flourish?

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