Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr Read online

  It had been acknowledged for years that the king wanted to put aside Katherine of Aragon. At the time that Katherine married Lord Latimer, Henry VIII’s first wife, now known as the Princess Dowager (a title so patronizing that one cannot blame her for despising it), was banished from court and living at Kimbolton Castle on the edge of the fens in Huntingdonshire. She had not seen her daughter, Mary (also banished from court and living in the household of Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth) for three years. Some of the nobility, particularly women, had been brave enough to support her openly, but despite her continued defiance, Anne Boleyn’s triumph over her would have seemed a reality in 1534. Mary, bastardized and disinherited when Elizabeth was born, had suffered severe stress and psychological harassment, as well as serious bouts of illness. But she was still refusing to acknowledge the change to her status or the invalidity of her parents’ marriage. Her position must have seemed all but hopeless to outside, but not necessarily disinterested, observers like the Latimers. Lord Latimer had conformed sufficiently to sign the letter of the nobility to Rome supporting the divorce and he had sat in parliament as the programme of reform was pushed through, but the substance of it was against his own personal inclinations. At this stage, like others, he kept his doubts to himself.

  The legislative process that led to the complete break with Rome had begun in 1532 but reached its height in the year that Katherine Parr married Lord Latimer. In 1534 were passed the Act of Supremacy, a new Act of Succession (which ignored Mary), supported by the leading nobility of England, the Ecclesiastical Licences Act, which upheld English as opposed to papal law, and an act that banned the payment of Church taxation to Rome; henceforward, the Crown would take one-tenth of clerical income. In a sweeping move to stifle dissent, further legislation made criticism of the Boleyn marriage treasonable, as were accusations of heresy or schism against the king. It was in this atmosphere of ruthless determination and suppression of opponents that the Latimers and their relatives lived their daily lives. There were quite evidently advantages to be had if opportunity and care were skilfully combined. But there was also danger and difficulty, particularly for anyone suspected of being less than completely loyal. Cuthbert Tunstall, Katherine’s distant cousin, knew this only too well.

  Katherine’s second marriage must have been a minor consideration to her kinsman, the bishop of Durham, in the year 1534. Or perhaps he found his involvement in it a welcome relief from the extreme pressure that he was put under to conform to the king’s will. For three years, he had been trying to balance his conscience with political expediency. He had defended Katherine of Aragon, but not with the vigour or absolute conviction of the bishop of Rochester, John Fisher. He had been bold enough to tell Henry that he could not be Head of the Church in spiritual matters and he may well have been one of the four bishops of the northern convocation who voted against the divorce (direct evidence is lacking), but he recognized that the queen’s cause was hopeless, and never attempted to lead any organized opposition to Henry. In fact, he attended Anne Boleyn’s coronation. But it did not end there. On a personal level, he felt he could not just keep quiet. There was too much at stake; he dreaded rejection by the whole of Christendom and exposure to the predations of foreign powers seeking to take advantage of England, as, he pointed out in a letter to the king, Henry himself had done when he invaded France more than twenty years before. Henry refuted Tunstall’s points line by line. Yet this was much more than an academic difference of opinion that could be confined to written exchanges. It made the king realize that he must bring Tunstall to heel.

  The bishop had expected to attend parliament in early 1534 but he was directed to stay in the north; Henry did not want dissidents present while vital legislation was being passed. But once that legislation was on the statute books, Cuthbert Tunstall was summoned south to take the oath to the Act of Succession. In his absence, his home at Bishop Auckland in County Durham was searched, by order of the king, but no incriminating documents or books were found, mainly because Tunstall had been forewarned to remove anything that might endanger himself. Once he took the oath (however unwillingly) he found that there was no going back. Both he and Archbishop Lee of York were required to explain to the imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, and subsequently to the very angry Katherine of Aragon herself, the justification for the annulment of her marriage. They did not succeed in getting her to agree or to acknowledge that she would cease to use the title of queen.

  Tunstall’s experience at the time of Katherine Parr’s second marriage must have been a harrowing one. Fisher and Thomas More, with whom he essentially agreed on all points concerning the divorce and the break from Rome, were in the Tower. His own loyalty was highly suspect, as the secret raids on his property showed. There is some indication that More advised him not to endanger himself any further, because it would achieve nothing. Perhaps he thought that, by staying alive, he could at least keep the worst excesses of Lutheranism out of England. He knew he was no martyr yet he bridled at the accusation of infirmity aimed at him by the diplomat and theologian Reginald Pole in 1536: ‘where ye do find fault with me, that I fainted in my heart, and would not die for the Bishop of Rome[’s] authority; when this matter was first purposed unto me, surely it was no fainting that made me agreeable thereunto’.4 He had struggled, one cannot know how much, with his conscience and he emerged from a perilous time alive, but compromised. The politician in Tunstall had survived; he retained his post as bishop of Durham and president of the Council of the North. Above all, like many of the upper ranks of the clergy and the aristocracy, he put loyalty to the king first. But Henry never really trusted him again. For the king, it was a simple matter. Those who were not fully committed to his break with Rome, the new Royal Supremacy and all the raft of legislation that underpinned his Reformation, were against him. They could submit, or die. A few, like Thomas More, saw it as a clear choice. A man like Tunstall, a seasoned diplomat but also long-standing churchman, found the predicament agonizing.

  He could only watch as More and Fisher went to the block in the summer of 1535 and the attack on the religious orders gained momentum. Any hopes that the final outcome of the divorce and the split with Rome would see an end to instability were crushed as it became apparent that the government’s religious policy was still evolving. The king and Cromwell needed to be sure that the split from Rome could not be undone insidiously. They were well aware that there were many important men (such as Tunstall) and many sectors of the community where acquiescence to the royal command did not equate to conviction. And where these doubts lingered, there was the potential for undermining the achievements so purposefully put in place in London. Two obvious sources of concern were the attitude of the universities and, more crucially still, that of the monasteries, whose first loyalty had so recently been to Rome and not to Henry VIII. It has been suggested that too much has been read into the assessment of monastic wealth, the Valor Ecclesiasticus, ordered by Cromwell early in 1535 and completed by the autumn of that year.5 But even if this exercise was not the first step in a far-reaching plan to gain hold of monastic property and wealth – and, with hindsight, it certainly looks that way, but it is easy to confuse cause with effect – its underlying assumption that the religious houses were not to be trusted, that many of them had strayed far from the simple path laid out by St Bernard of Clairvaux in the eleventh century, pointed to an uncomfortable, uncertain future. It remained to be seen who would benefit by reform of the monastic way of life, yet one thing was clear: whatever course was followed, it would be dictated by the Crown.

  A year after the completion of the Valor Ecclesiasticus, after the highprofile deaths of his former chancellor, the bishop of Rochester and leading members of the Carthusian monastic order, Henry was more determined than ever to extend his authority. Thus far he had dealt successfully with dissidents. The Latimers, living unremarkably at Snape, would nevertheless have been aware of Cuthbert Tunstall’s dilemma and may have known of the opposition
to the king’s divorce by Sir George Throckmorton, a Warwickshire knight who was Katherine’s uncle by marriage. William and Anne Parr, though silent on national affairs and well connected at court, had themselves crossed Thomas Cromwell in 1533, when he tried to help himself to lands that they owned. These kind of indirect embarrassments were not, however, unique to the Latimers and they might have managed to avoid criticism had calm prevailed. But there was no tranquillity for England in 1536. Voices of resistance were not silenced; in fact, they were growing stronger. Nowhere were these louder than in the north.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Pilgrimage of Grace

  ‘When time enlarged villainy to commit all profane and sinister acts, no thing was spared, how holy soever it was. All was turned upside down, and the bodies of saints and other heroical persons being wrapped in lead were turned out thereof, and lead sold to plumbers, books and pictures were burned, evidences not regarded; all was subject to violence and rapine.’

  Yorkshireman Thomas Meynell’s view

  of the assault on traditional religion1

  THE YEAR 1536, the most momentous of Henry VIII’s reign, started quietly enough. Yet by 8 June 1536, when the brief parliament of that year opened in London, the king’s first two wives were dead and he was already married to a third. Katherine of Aragon had succumbed to failing health and heartbreak at the beginning of January, her love of Henry undiminished. She was buried with muted ceremony in Peterborough Cathedral. The position of the queen who had supplanted her was, however, far from secure. Anne Boleyn was a mercurial, difficult woman who made enemies easily. She had certainly made one of Thomas Cromwell, the chief minister, who knew her well enough to realize that the breach between them threatened his career and possibly his life as well. But despite her volatile relationship with Henry VIII, made more uneasy still by the fact that she had not born him a male heir, had recently miscarried and was now in her mid-thirties, Anne does not seem to have understood that her husband could become her enemy as well. The loss of the king’s love, whether or not it amounted to actual hatred, combined with Cromwell’s belief that she stood in his way. For Anne, it was a fatal brew. On 19 May she went to the block on trumped-up charges of adultery, ruthlessly abandoned by those who had fawned on her during the long years of the divorce from Katherine of Aragon. Only ten days later Henry married Jane Seymour, carefully groomed as the meek, blonde successor to Anne, the brunette termagant. By 22 June he had finally suppressed the one woman of his family who remained defiant, his elder daughter, Mary, forcing her to acknowledge that her mother’s marriage was unlawful and that she herself was illegitimate. Her supporters, threatened with death, fell quiet.

  Henry was now truly master in his own country and could concentrate on pushing through his programme of religious reform. Whether this encompassed, as early as 1536, the total suppression of the monasteries, seems unlikely. But the act of March 1536 did close many (though by no means all, there were significant exemptions) of the smaller monasteries whose annual income fell below £200. In the same month that he was bringing his daughter to heel after some three years of disobedience, the king’s views on religious purification and the need for unity in the Church (his Church, as it now was) were published as the Ten Articles. These attacked superstition, holy days and pilgrimages and idolatry but retained the Mass and refused to embrace the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone. In August, injunctions were issued to the clergy as to how the Ten Articles should be used in preaching and day-to-day religious life. Some degree of unpopularity was anticipated but it was hoped that the force of good argument would prevail. Meanwhile, the visitations of monasteries continued, even after the smaller ones were closed. If there was no far-reaching plan as yet in place, there was equally no intention to stand still on matters of religion.

  All of this Lord Latimer knew well enough. He had first attended parliament in 1529 as a member of the House of Commons, representing Yorkshire, but had moved up to the House of Lords the following year, on the death of his father. The Reformation Parliament, as it is known, actually sat for seven years, through eight different sessions, until it was finally dissolved in mid-April 1536. The Journal of the House of Lords is missing for much of this period, though we do know that Latimer regularly attended in the first part of 1534, shortly before his marriage to Katherine Parr. Since he also wrote to Cromwell in 1536 asking for leave of absence, the inference must be that he was normally a conscientious attendee. As he also had duties to fulfil on the Council of the North, his time at home in Snape could only have been limited. And there were other matters requiring his presence outside Yorkshire. He missed the beginning of the brief parliament of 1536, which began in June, because of business connected with his estates in Worcestershire. Subsequently, he journeyed to London, but was absent again when parliament was dissolved in July. The likelihood is that his affairs in Worcester were not completed and he felt compelled to leave early. By the autumn, he was back in Snape. It must have seemed a welcome break from his travels. But there were storm clouds all around.

  THE FIRST SIGNS serious discontent in northern England were reported by Sir Francis Bigod (the intended father-in-law of Katherine’s stepdaughter) to Cromwell at the end of September. Little did Bigod know then the role he would play in unfolding events. The king’s commissioners who were carrying out monastic visitations in Northumberland wrote, at the same time, of the outright defiance they met in Hexham, where ‘the convent had prepared guns and artillery to defend themselves … many armed persons [were] in the streets … there were twenty brethren in the house who would all die before the commissioners should have it’.2 Here is an indication of a deep-seated concern, of suspicion of the motives of the government’s representatives and a festering hostility that could suddenly translate to violence. Yet few could have anticipated the widespread northern uprising of 1536, which its participants called the Pilgrimage of Grace.

  It has been described as the rebellion that shook Henry VIII’s throne. Yet despite the large numbers of men (and some women), of varying social groups and backgrounds who were caught up in the Pilgrimage, none of them wanted to overthrow the king. Throughout the winter of 1536 and on into the next year, when a further uprising fatally compromised those who had put their faith in Henry VIII, protestations of loyalty were constant, consistent and genuine. Also consistent was the king’s utter disdain for those who had dared to rise against him and his determination to take revenge on their ‘leaders’, men like Lord Latimer who were probably coerced by the pilgrims, but who were by no means out of sympathy with their demands. For there was a fundamental difference between the rebels and the king. They believed all along that he was influenced by heretic, greedy upstarts and was merely ill-advised, and that, as a just prince, he would listen to their demands. It was, in truth, a naive viewpoint, based on a completely false reading of Henry VIII’s personality and his increasingly dictatorial interpretation of kingship. Perhaps there was also a degree of defensive thinking behind the pilgrims’ stance, as the uprising grew. Rebels seldom found favour with monarchs in the long run and Henry had given ample indication of how he dealt with those who stood in his way. The king had one straightforward objective in dealing with the Pilgrimage of Grace: to defeat it utterly, by any means. An early victory would be better but he was astute enough to accept that he might have to bide his time.

  The Pilgrimage affected the lives of many of those close to Katherine Parr. Ranged against her husband and his perhaps unwilling colleagues in the great castle of Pontefract, which became the headquarters of the Pilgrimage, were her brother and uncle and her former father-in-law, Lord Borough. Cuthbert Tunstall, determined to remove himself from danger and the taint of suspicion that still hung over him, fled to his castle in Norham-on-Tweed as the pilgrims advanced on Auckland and stayed put there until it was all over. He did refuse the king’s request for him to come to London, but made sure that he was in no way implicated in this conflagration on his doorstep. Su
ch a course, as we shall see, was not open to Lord Latimer.

  Other important names of the court and the Church, men whom Katherine would come to know in the aftermath of the events of 1536–7, were also caught up in the rebellion. The dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk commanded the king’s armed forces and Norfolk was chief negotiator with the pilgrims, a role he filled with his unique combination of guile and whining complaint. But it was the northern aristocracy, represented by the Darcys, the Constables, the Percys and the Nevilles themselves, who faced the most difficult dilemma during the Pilgrimage. Viewed as traitors in London and untrustworthy, potential turncoats by the rebels, they would pay the highest price of all. And at the centre of events remains one of the most mysterious figures of sixteenth-century England, the one-eyed lawyer Robert Aske, who set out in early October 1536 from his east Yorkshire home to return to legal practice in London and was executed the following summer, hanged in chains in York, his trust in Henry VIII rewarded by a terrible death.

  For the Pilgrimage of Grace was more than a clash between the old and the new. It went to the heart of the order of things in Tudor England and how the monarch should govern and be advised. It was a popular uprising with a veneer of aristocratic leadership, because the lords of the north could not ultimately let themselves be led by the commons. The intention was not to remove the king, but to make him better. Instead, it made him worse.