What had taken six long years and a social, religious and political revolution to accomplish against Catherine of Aragon, had now, in the case of Anne of Cleves, been completed in six days. The way was cleared for the monarch’s humble and devoted council, conveniently headed by the ‘King’s own Bishop’ Stephen Gardiner, in alliance with the Duke of Norfolk, to beg Henry ‘to frame his most noble heart to love’ some noble personage by ‘whom his Majesty might have some more store of fruit and succession to the comfort of his realm’. Henry was itching to oblige, for in Catherine Howard he had found what he fondly and blindly believed to be a veritable ‘jewel of womanhood’.
Henry and Catherine were married on
1
The marriage of a king was customarily a matter of State and public rejoicing – a moment heavy with religious and political significance, in which the deity was called upon to bless with the fruits of matrimony the union of man and woman into ‘one flesh and body’. The state of wedlock was ‘a high and blessed order ordained of God in
Paradise
’, and husband and wife were cautioned to use the nuptial bed ‘more for the desire of children, than bodily lust’.
2
Legends are born in the imaginations of men and mirror the reputation of heroes, and the story of Henry’s marriage proposal to Catherine has most of the attributes of a first-class fairytale. King, so the poets inform us, ‘went every day to see his son, and one day in the afternoon he entered the room when all the ladies were there’, and called Catherine Howard to him. She knelt before her lord, ‘waiting to see what the King could want with her’. Henry wanted a good deal, for he ‘held out his hand to her and raised her up, saying, “Catherine, from now henceorward, I wish you never to do that again, but rather that all these ladies and my whole kingdom should bend the knee to you, for I wish to make you Queen”.’ Mistress Howard was too stunned to answer and merely made a low bow in reverence to this divine monarch who had asked to be her husband. Henry then hastened to inform the council of his will, and his advisers humbly assured him that ‘if your Majesty so wills it we shall be content; what pleases your Majesty pleases us.’ What pleased the sovereign was to be wedded the following day and he ‘sent for the Bishop of London to come and marry him’.
3
The fact that there is hardly a grain of truth in this fable does not in the least detract from the account, but it should be noted for the records that Henry knew Catherine for at least three months before their marriage, while a week before the ceremony it was rumoured that the lady herself was
enceinte
.
4
This time the King was taking no chances. With the princess of
Cleves
he had been tricked by a flattering portrait and lulled by the saccharine words of his ministers. His bitterness was aggravated by the fact that he should have known better. Only the previous year, Henry had voiced the innate caution of his sex when he maintained that ‘marriage touches a man too nearly’ to accept blindly the choice of his ministers. Henry was considering a French bride at the time, and he advised the French Ambassador that he would trust no one but himself, and suggested that the French send him several sample damsels to ‘sing to me a few times before I settle’. With Gallic and caustic humour the Ambassador misrepresented the King’s words and ‘with a half smile’ asked whether ‘Your Majesty would perhaps like to try them all, one after the other, and keep the one that suits you best.’ Then, to make the point quite clear, he added: ‘It was not thus, Sire, that the Knights of the Round Table treated their ladies in old times in this country.’
5
Legend reports that this produced the only recorded blush ever to colour the royal cheeks. In choosing Catherine, however, Henry was free from doubt, for he had made his own selection and found his ‘rose without a thorn’.
The royal groom laid double claim to Catherine’s affections – as king and husband. ‘Harry with the crown’ exercised sovereignty based upon the double pillars of the divine right of inheritance and the authority conferred upon him by a willing and obedient high court of parliament. His title was majestic: Henry was ‘by the grace of God, King of England,
France
, and
Ireland
, Defender of the Faith, and in earth, under God, of the Church of England and
Ireland
the Supreme Head, and Sovereign of the most Noble Order of the Garter’. It was here in this magnificent ‘mirror of wisdom’ that the crown, the court, and the commonweal united into a single symbol of authority. That ‘most serene and invincible prince’ was a living and vital image of the august power of majesty. For better or worse, the structure of government gave full vent to the character and idiosyncrasies of the person who wore the crown. Henry not only reigned, but he ruled; his every taste, the most obscure and trifling facet of his personality, became essential matters of State. Tudor England had not so much to reckon with a sovereign as with a man, who stamped both court and crown with the indelible print of his temperament.
When Catherine first encountered her sovereign, Henry was forty-eight, and though the monarch could no longer wear his massive tilting armour as if it were a masquing attire and capsize his opponents ‘horse and all’, he was still a magnificent if portly giant of a man. The King was in the autumn of life, a fleeting Indian summer when the agility and vitality of youth still kept at bay the wolves of disease, senility and decay. Henry remained flushed and jovial, fair and graceful; the unwrinkled skin was pink and piggish, and the mammoth frame and bull-like stature continued hard and massive. Like the
Colossus of Rhodes
, he towered over his subjects, both as a man and as a king. The gargantuan frame, in an age which counted five feet as the average height, measured six feet and more, while the royal chest, garbed in doublet and puffy sleeves designed to accentuate the width of the shoulders, exceeded forty-five inches. The image of the future was only just beginning to emerge. The features had swollen and lost their girlish delicacy; the royal pate was thinning; the auburn beard was flecked with white; and the florid face gave hint of sagging jowls, coarsened nose, and hooded eyes made cruel by disease and suffering. The athlete’s slim waist had crept to fifty inches in girth, while the muscles of his chest were layered with fat.
For the moment, however, Henry remained incredibly solid, still a magnificent man and a mighty monarch. The effect was increasingly that of a gigantic beer barrel, rotund but tightly corseted, astride shapely legs spread wide to bear the weight of a man who must have tipped the scales at close to two hundred and fifty pounds. It seemed as if both God and man had conjoined to emphasize the Tudor flair for the spectacular; the King’s mantle was of ‘purple velvet, lined with white satin’ and embroidered with ‘thick gold cord’ hung with golden acorns, while the royal doublet was striped with white and crimson satin. Henry had an inexhaustible zeal for the ornate and the exorbitant; his ‘fingers were one mass of jewelled rings’, and around his bull neck he wore a gold collar from which hung a diamond the size of a walnut.
6
Part was the consequence of Tudor taste for the prodigious and part was political calculation, but the total effect was to give to Henry’s mortal frame the appearance of a god.
For a sovereign who has made such a splendid and momentous splash in history, Henry’s character is strangely and frustratingly elusive. To contemporaries and moderns alike, the man appears as a Janus in which the satanic and the angelic are inexplicably opposed. At one moment Henry emerges as a beast, lustful and brutal, grasping and vengeful, vain and obstinate beyond belief; at the next instant the image changes, and we perceive the superb athlete, the generous scholar, the accomplished diplomat and the idol of the realm.
The monarch’s vanity was insatiable, and he was inordinately proud of his physical and athletic prowess. Almost the first question he put to the Venetian Ambassador, after the succession to the throne of the young King of France, was whether his rival brother was as tall as he, as stout, and what ‘sort of legs’ he had? When the Ambassador replied that Francis’s legs were ‘spare’, Henry ‘opened the front of his doublet and placing his hand on his thigh’, said, ‘ “Look here! And I have also a good calf to my leg”.’
7
In an age that judged men by the sumptuousness of their dress, Henry was considered the ‘best dressed sovereign in the world; his robes are the richest and most superb that can be imagined.’
8
The man loved nothing better than to impress those about him by his every act – the lavish display of his attire, the inexhaustible energy that could tire eight horses in a single day, and the physical prowess that surpassed all at archery, tilting, hunting and hawking.
The legend of the King’s cavalier handling of his wives, the picture of a monarch who went through spouses ‘as some men go through socks’, is standard historical lore, and his own generation went so far as to note that Henry was ‘inclined to amours’.
9
His relations with the opposite sex were notorious even in a society that looked with tolerance upon the marital antics of sovereigns and accepted with amused cynicism the fate of disgraced and barren queens. More than once during the reign it was whispered abroad that Henry’s sexual appetite explained his sterility, and it was reported by one of the King’s more biased critics that the Duchess of Milan had dismissed Bluff King Hal as a possible mate, since she liked ‘not to be wife to such a husband that either putteth away or killeth his wives’.
10
Again on the less savoury side,
England
’s monarch was a confirmed hypochondriac, combining the healthy man’s distaste for sickness and disease in others with a profound interest in his own ailments. The faintest rumour of the plague was sufficient to send him scampering to the clean air of Windsor Castle, and not even Anne Boleyn’s ‘pretty duckys’ that he hoped soon to fondle, and the memory of his ‘sweetheart’s arms’ were sufficient to lure him back to London.
11
Henry evidently agreed with Doctor Boorde that the only sure antidote to the infection was to leave town, but he generously advised those less fortunate than himself to use a prescription consisting primarily of sage, rue, elder and bramble leaves liberally mixed with wine and ginger. ‘Take a spoonful of the same,’ the royal apothecary enjoined, ‘and you shall be safe for twenty-four days.
’12
As he grew older and learned that not even his cast-iron constitution was immune to disease and suffering, Henry developed a discriminating medical knowledge. The royal cure for an ulcerated leg was an ointment comprised largely of ground pearls. Yet for all the care and worry about his physical well being, Henry continued to eat and drink prodigiously. In the end he grew so obese that the ground shook when he moved, and he had to be carried up and down the stairs in a sedan chair.
Both foreign and domestic observers of the English court were at constant pains to comment upon the King’s obstinacy, cruelty and fickleness. Campeggio, the papal legate, reported that even ‘an angel descending from Heaven would be unable to persuade him’ once he had made up his mind, while Castillon, the French Ambassador, observed that he had ‘to do with the most dangerous and cruel man in the world.’
13
Another Frenchman was even more critical and suggested that Henry was tainted with three vices ‘which in a king may be called plagues’. These were insatiable covetousness, distrust and fear, and, finally, lightness and inconstancy.
14
There is endless evidence to make of Henry a brutal and consummate egotist, a monstrosity of a king, and a devil of a man, and history abounds with those who for both good and bad reasons see him in this light. But behind this ugly face appears another, with features angelic and divine.
The patriotic humanist, William, Lord Mountjoy, was boundless in his praise of the youthful Henry and he wrote to his good friend Erasmus, saying:
If you could see how all the world here is rejoicing in the possession of so great a Prince, how his life is all their desire, you could not contain your tears for joy. The Heavens laugh, the earth exults, all things are full of milk, of honey, and of nectar!
15
Mountjoy was certainly not above a certain amount of calculated flattery and deliberate exaggeration, since he wished Erasmus to share in the milk and honey that were expected to flow from this princely paragon. His eulogy can be balanced by the more objective report of the Venetian Ambassador, who could scarcely contain his enthusiasm when he first encountered Henry early in the reign. The young King was, he said, ‘the handsomest potentate I ever set eyes on’. He then noted a fact that would have flattered Henry immensely: he is ‘above the usual height, with an extremely fine calf to his leg, his complexion very fair and bright, with auburn hair’. Not only was England’s monarch fair to behold but he was also astute, prudent and sage; could speak French, Latin and some Italian; was master of the lute and harpsichord; could sing from a book at sight; and draw ‘the bow with greater strength than any man in England’.
16
In the circumstances there is little wonder that the world viewed him as being ‘in every respect a most accomplished Prince’, and it was the considered opinion of still another visitor to the court that God had ‘combined such corporal and mental beauty, as not merely to surprise but to astonish all men’.
17