Wives of Henry the Eighth and the Parts They Played in History — Plot and Counterplot - Jane Seymour and Anne of Cleves - Part 2

At length the day long yearned and prayed for by Henry came.

Jane had for some months lived in the strictest quietude, and prayers and masses for her safe delivery were offered in the churches for weeks before.

In September she had travelled slowly to Hampton Court, and on the 12th October 1537 a healthy son was born to her and Henry.

The joy of the King was great beyond words.

The gross sensualist, old beyond his years, had in vain hoped through all his sturdy youth for a boy, who, beyond reproach, might bear his regal name.

He had flouted Christendom and defied the greatest powers on earth in order to marry a woman who might bear him a man child.

When she failed to do so, he had coldly stood aside whilst his instruments defamed her and did her to death; and now, at last, in his declining years, his prayer was answered, and the House of Tudor was secure upon the future throne of England.

Bonfires blazed and joy bells rang throughout the land; feasts of unexampled bounteousness coarsely brought home to the lieges the blessing that had come to save the country from the calamity of a disputed succession.

The Seymour brothers at once became, next the King and his son, the most important personages in England, the elder, Edward, being created Earl of Hertford, and both receiving great additional grants of monastic lands.

In the general jubilation at the birth, the interests of the mother were forgotten.

No attempt appears to have been made to save her from the excitement that surrounded her; and on the very day of her delivery she signed an official letter "Jane the Quene" to Cromwell, directing him to communicate to the Privy Council the joyful news.

The most sumptuous royal christening ever seen was in bustling preparation in and about her sick-chamber; and that no circumstance of state should be lacking, the mother herself, only four days after the birth, was forced to take part in the exhausting ceremony.

In the chapel at Hampton Court, newly decorated like the splendid banqueting-hall adjoining, where the initials of Jane carved in stone with those of the King, and her arms and device on glowing glass and gilded scutcheon still perpetuate her fleeting presence, the christening ceremony was held by torchlight late in the chill autumn evening.

Through the long draughty corridors, preceded by braying trumpets and followed by rustling crowds of elated courtiers, the sick woman was carried on her stately pallet covered with heavy robes of crimson velvet and ermine.

Under a golden canopy, supported by the four greatest nobles in the land, next to Norfolk, who was one of the godfathers, the Marchioness of Exeter bore the infant in her arms to the scene of the ceremony; and the Princess Mary, fiercely avid of love as she ever was, held the prince at the font.

Suffolk, Arundel, and doomed Exeter, with a host of other magnates, stood around; whilst one towering handsome figure, with a long brown beard, carried aloft in his arms the tiny fair girl-child of Anne, the Lady Elizabeth, holding in her dainty hands the holy chrisom.

It was Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, looked at askance by the rest as a new man, but already overlapping them all as the uncle of the infant prince.

During the _Te Deum_ and the long, pompous ceremony of the baptism the mother lay flushed and excited upon her couch;

whilst the proud father, his broad face beaming with pride, sat by her side, holding her hand.

It was hard upon midnight when the Queen gave her blessing to her child and was carried back to her chamber, with more trumpet blasts and noisy gratulation.

The next day, as was to be expected, she was in a high fever, so ill that she was confessed and received extreme unction.

But she rallied, and seemed somewhat amended for the next few days, though ominous rumours were rife in London that her life had purposely been jeopardised in order to save that of the child at birth.

[181] They were not true, but they give the measure of the public estimate of Henry's character, and have been made the most of by Sanders, Rivadeneyra, and the other Jesuit historians.

On the 23rd October the Queen fell gravely ill again, and in the night was thought to be dying.

Henry had intended to ride to Esher that day, but "could not find it in his heart" to go; and the next night, the 24th October, Jane Seymour died, a sacrifice to improper treatment and heartlessly exacted ceremonial.

Henry had not been married long enough to her to have become tired of her, and her somewhat lethargic placidity had suited him.

She had, moreover, borne him the long-looked-for son; and his grief for her loss was profound, and no doubt sincere.

Much as he hated signs of mortality, he wore black mourning for her for three months, and shut himself up at Windsor away from the world, and above all away from the corpse of his dead wife, for a fortnight.

Jane's body, embalmed, lay in the presence chamber at Hampton Court for a week.

Blazing tapers surrounded the great hearse, and masses went on from dawn to midday in the chamber.

All night long the Queen's ladies, with Princess Mary, watched before the bier, until the end of the month, when the catafalque had been erected in the chapel for the formal lying in state.

On the 12th November, with the greatest possible pomp, the funeral procession bore the dead Queen to Windsor for burial in a grave in St. George's Chapel, destined to receive the remains of Henry as well as that of his third wife, the mother of his son.

[182] The writers of the time, following the lead of Henry and his courtiers, never mentioned their grief for the Queen without promptly suggesting that it was more than counterbalanced by their joy at the birth of her son, who from his first appearance in the world was hailed as a paragon of beauty and perfection.

Thanksgivings for the boon of a male heir to the King blended their sounds of jubilation with the droning of the masses for the mother's soul, and the flare of the bonfires died down into the flickering tapers that dimly lit the funerals.

Even Henry himself, in writing to give the news of his son's birth, confessed that his joy at the event had far exceeded his grief for Jane's death.

So far as the Catholic party that had promoted it was concerned, the marriage with Jane had been a failure.

The Pilgrimage of Grace had been drowned in the blood of ruthless slaughter: and partly because of Mary's scruples and fears, partly because they themselves had been gorged with the plunder of the Church, nearly all the great nobles stood aside and raised no voice whilst Cromwell and his master still worked havoc on the religious houses, regardless of Jane's timid intercession.

Boxley, Walsingham, and even the sacred shrine of Canterbury, yielded their relics and images, venerated for centuries, to be scorned and destroyed; whilst the vast accumulated treasures of gold and gems that enriched them went to fill the coffers of the King, and their lands to bribe his favourites.

Throughout England the work of confiscation was carried on now with a zeal which only greed for the resultant profit can explain.

[183] The attacks upon superstition in the Church by those in authority naturally aroused a feeling of greater freedom of thought amongst the mass of the people.

The establishment of an open Bible in English in every church for the perusal of the parishioners, due, as indeed most of the doctrinal changes were, to Cranmer, encouraged men to think to some extent for themselves.

But though, for purposes to which reference will be made presently, Henry willingly concurred in Cranmer's reforming tendencies and Cromwell's anti-ecclesiastical plans for providing him with abundant money, he would allow no departure from orthodoxy as he understood it.

His love for theological controversy, and his undoubted ability and learning in that direction, enabled him to enforce his views with apparently unanswerable arguments, especially as he was able, and quite ready, to close the dispute with an obstinate antagonist by prescribing the stake and the gibbet either to those who repudiated his spiritual supremacy or to those who, like the Anabaptists, questioned the efficacy of a sacrament which he had adopted.

For Henry it was to a great extent a matter of pride and self-esteem now to show to his own subjects and the world that he was absolutely supreme and infallible, and this feeling unquestionably had greatly influenced the progress effected by the reformation and emancipation from Rome made after the disappointing marriage with Jane Seymour.

But there was also policy in Henry's present action.

Throughout the years 1536 and 1537 Francis and the Emperor had continued at war; but by the close of the latter year it was evident that both combatants were exhausted, and would shortly make up their differences.

The Papal excommunication of Henry and his realm was now in full force, making rebellion against the King a laudable act for all good Catholics; and any agreement between the two great Continental sovereigns in union with Rome boded ill for England and for its King.

There were others, too, to whom such a combination boded ill.

The alliance between France and the infidel Turk to attack the Christian Emperor had aroused intense indignation amongst Catholics throughout the world against Francis; and the Pope, utilising this feeling, strove hard to persuade both Christian sovereigns to cease their fratricidal struggle and to recognise that the real enemy to be feared and destroyed was Lutheranism or heresy in their midst.

During the Emperor's absence, and the war, Protestantism in Germany had advanced with giant strides.

The Princes had boldly refused to recognise any conciliatory Council of the Church under the control of the Pope; and the pressure used by the Emperor to compel them to do so aroused the suspicion that the day was fast approaching when Lutheranism would have to fight for its life against the imperial suzerain of Germany.

Already the forces were gathering.

George of Saxony, the enemy of Luther, was hurrying to the grave, and Henry his brother and heir was a strong Protestant.

Philip of Hesse had two years before thrown down the gage, and had taken by force from the Emperor the territory of Wuertemburg, and had restored the Protestant Duke Ulrich.

Charles' brother Ferdinand, who ruled the empire, clamoured as loudly as did Mary of Hungary in Flanders and Eleanor of Austria in France, for a peace between the two champions of Christendom, the repudiation by France of the Turkish alliance, and a concentration of the Catholic forces in the world before it was too late to crush the hydra of heresy which threatened them all.

It was natural in the circumstances that the enemies of the Papacy should be drawn together.

A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind, and a common danger drew Henry of England and Philip of Hesse together.

Henry was no Lutheran, and did not pretend to be.

He had been drawn into the Reformation by the process that we have followed, in which interested advisers had worked upon his passions and self-esteem; but he had gone too far in defiance of Rome now to turn back, and was forced to look to his own safety by such policy as was possible to him.

For several months after Jane Seymour's death the envoys of the German Protestants were in England in close negotiation with Henry and Cromwell.

In order that a close league should be made, it was necessary that some common doctrinal standpoint should be agreed upon, and infinite theological discussions took place to bring this about.

Henry would not give way on any principal point, and the Protestant ambassadors went home again without a formal understanding.

But though Henry remained, as he intended to do, thus unpledged, it was good policy for him to impress upon the Germans by his ruthless suppression of the monasteries, and his prohibition of the ancient superstitions, that he was the enemy of their enemy; and that if he was attacked for heresy, it would be incumbent upon the Lutherans to be on his side even against their own suzerain.

This was not, however, the only move made by Henry against the threatening danger of a joint attack of the Catholic powers.

He had hardly thrown off his mourning for Jane before he turned his hand to the old game of dividing his rivals.

His bluff was as audacious and brilliant as usual.

To the imperial and French ambassadors in turn he boasted that either of their masters would prefer his friendship and alliance to that of the other; and, rightly convinced that he would really be more likely to gain latitudinarian Francis than Charles, he proposed in the spring of 1538 that he should marry a French princess.

As the two great Catholic sovereigns drew closer together, though still nominally at war in Italy, Henry became, indeed, quite an eager wooer.

His friend, Sir Francis Brian, was sent to Paris, secretly to forward his suit, and obtained a portrait of the Duke of Guise's second daughter, the sister of the King of Scotland's bride, Mary of Lorraine; with which Henry confessed himself quite smitten.

He had, before this, only three months after Jane's death, made a desperate attempt to prevail upon Francis to let him have Mary of Lorraine herself; though she was already betrothed to the King of Scots, his nephew; but this had been positively and even indignantly refused.

Even the younger daughter of Guise, beautiful as she was, did not quite satisfy his vanity.

Both he and his agent Brian, who was a fit representative for him, disgusted Francis by suggesting that three other French princesses should be taken to Calais by the Queen of Navarre--Francis' sister--in order that they might be paraded before the King of England for his selection, "like hackneys," as was said at the time.

[184] He thought that the angry repudiation of such an insulting proposal was most unreasonable.

"How can I choose a wife by deputy?"

he asked.

"I must depend upon my own eyes"; besides, he added, he must hear them sing, and see how they comported themselves.

Perhaps, suggested the French ambassador sarcastically, he would like to go further and test the ladies in other ways, as the knights of King Arthur used to do.

Henry coloured at this; but vauntingly replied that he could, if he pleased, marry into the imperial house; but he would not marry at all unless he was quite sure that his new relation would prefer his alliance to all others.

When, at length, in June, the truce of Nice was signed, and soon afterwards the fraternal meeting and close community between Francis and Charles was effected at Aigues Mortes, Henry began to get seriously alarmed.

His matrimonial offers, to his surprise, were treated very coolly; all his attempts to breed dissension between the imperial and French ambassadors, who were now hand and glove, were laughed at;[185] and the intimate confidence and friendship between his two Catholic rivals seemed at last to bring disaster to Henry's very doors; for it was not concealed that the first blow to be struck by the Catholic confederacy was to be upon the schismatic heretic who ruled England.

With Francis there was no more to be done; for Henry and Brian, by their want of delicacy, had between them deeply wounded all the possible French brides and their families.

But, at least, Henry hoped that sufficient show of friendship with Charles might be simulated to arouse Francis' jealousy of his new ally.

Henry therefore began to sneer at the patched-up friendship, as he called it.

[186] "And how about Milan?"

he asked the French ambassador, knowing that that was the still rankling sore; and soon he began to boast more openly that he himself might have Milan by the cession of it as a dower to Dom Luiz of Portugal, on his marriage with the Princess Mary; whilst Henry himself married the young widowed Duchess of Milan, Charles' niece, Christina of Denmark, that clever, quick-witted woman, whose humorous face lives for ever on the canvas of Holbein in the English National Gallery.

[187] There had been a Spanish ambassador, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, in England since the spring of 1537, to negotiate the Portuguese marriage of the Princess Mary; but the eternal questions of dowry, security, and the legitimacy of the Princess had made all negotiations so far abortive.

Now they were taken up more strongly, by means of Wyatt at Madrid, and by special envoys to Mary of Hungary in Flanders.

But it was all "buckler play," as the imperial agents and Charles himself soon found out.

Henry and Cromwell knew perfectly well that no stable alliance with the Emperor was possible then unless their religious policy was changed; and they had gone too far to change it without humiliation, if not destruction, to Henry; the real object of the negotiations being simply to obtain some sort of promise about the cession of Milan, by which Francis might be detached from the imperial alliance.

But it was unsuccessful; and, for once, the two great antagonists held together for a time against all Lutheranism and heresy.

Then Henry and Cromwell had to look anxiously for support and alliances elsewhere.

To the King it was a repugnant and humiliating necessity.

He had puffed himself into the belief that he was the most potent and infallible of sovereigns, and he found himself, for the first time, scorned by all those he had reason to fear.

He, the embodiment of the idea of regal omnipotence, would be forced to make common cause with those who, like the German Protestants, stood for resistance to supreme authority;

with usurpers like Christian III.

of Denmark, and trading democracies like Luebeck.

With much hesitation and dislike, therefore, he listened, whilst Cromwell urged the inevitable policy upon him, which led him farther and farther away from the inner circle of potentates to which he and his father had gained entrance in the course of the events related in the first chapters of this book.

Cromwell's arguments would probably have been unavailing but for the opportune "discovery," in the usual fortuitous Cromwell fashion, of a dangerous aristocratic conspiracy against Henry himself.

Cardinal Pole had been entrusted with the Papal excommunication, and everywhere impressed upon English Catholics the duty of obeying their spiritual father by deposing the King.

[188] Whether anything in the form of a regular conspiracy to do this existed in England is extremely doubtful; but the Cardinal had naturally written to his relatives in England, especially to his brother Geoffrey, and perhaps to his mother, the Countess of Salisbury, a princess of the blood royal of York.

First Geoffrey was seized and carried to the Tower, and some sort of incriminating admission drawn from him by threats of torture, though, so far as can be gathered, nothing but the repetition of disaffected conversations.

It was enough, however, for Cromwell's purpose when he needed it; and the fatal net was cast over Pole's elder brother, Lord Montague, the Marquis of Exeter, allied to the royal house, the Master of the Horse, Sir Nicholas Carew, Sir Edward Neville, and half a score of other high gentlemen, known to be faithful to the old cause--all to be unjustly sacrificed on the scaffold to the fears of Henry and the political exigencies of Cromwell.

Even the women and children of the supposed sympathisers with the Papacy were not spared; and the aged Countess of Salisbury, with her grandson, and the Marchioness of Exeter, with her son, were imprisoned with many humbler ones.

The defences of the kingdom on the coast and towards Scotland were rapidly made ready to resist attack from abroad, which indeed looked imminent; and when the noble and conservative party had been sufficiently cowed by the sight of the blood of the highest of its members, when the reign of terror over the land had made all men so dumb and fearsome that none dared say him nay, Cromwell felt himself strong enough to endeavour to draw England into the league of Protestant princes and defy the Catholic world.

The position for Henry personally was an extraordinary one.

He had gradually drifted into a position of independence from Rome; but he still professed to be a strict Catholic in other respects.

His primate, Cranmer, and several other of his bishops whose ecclesiastical status was unrecognised by the Pope, were unquestionably, and not unnaturally, Protestant in their sympathies; whilst Cromwell was simply a politician who cared nothing for creeds and faiths, except as ancillary to State policy.

Francis, and even on occasion Charles himself, made little of taking Church property for lay purposes when he needed it: he had more than once been the ally of the infidel against Catholic princes, and his religious belief was notoriously lax; and yet he remained "the eldest son of the Church."

Charles had struggled successfully against the Papal pretensions to control the temporalities of the Spanish Church, his troops had sacked Rome and imprisoned the Pope, and his ministers for years had bullied pontiffs and scolded them as if they were erring schoolboys.

Excommunication had fallen upon him and his, and as hard things had been said of him in Rome as of Henry; and yet he was the champion of Catholic Christendom.

The conclusion is obvious that Henry's sin towards the Papacy was not primarily the spoliation of the Church, the repudiation of Katharine, or even the assumption of control over the temporalities, but that he had arrogated to himself the spiritual headship in his realm.

In most other respects he was as good a Catholic as Charles, and a much better one than Francis; and yet under stress of circumstances he was forced into common cause with the growing party of reform in Europe, whose separation from the Church was profoundly doctrinal, and arose from entirely different motives from those of Henry.

The danger that threatened England at the time (early in 1539) was not really quite so serious as it seemed; for, close as the alliance between Charles and Francis was, old jealousies were not dead, and a joint war against England would have revived them; whilst the Papal plan of treating England commercially as outside the pale of civilisation would have ruined Charles' subject and was impracticable.

But, in any case, the peril was real to Henry and Cromwell; and under the stress of it they were driven into the attempted policy of a Protestant confederacy.

At the end of January 1539, Christopher Mont was sent to Germany with the first overtures.

He carried letters of credence to Philip of Hesse, and Hans Frederick of Saxony, with the ostensible object of asking whether they had come to any conclusion respecting the theological disputations held in the previous year between their envoys and the English bishops to establish a common doctrinal basis.

This, of course, was a mere pretext, the real object of the mission being to discover to what extent Henry could depend upon the German Protestant princes if he were attacked by their suzerain the Emperor.

A private instruction was given to Mont by Cromwell, to remind one of the Saxon ministers who had come to England of a former conversation about a possible marriage between the young Duke of Cleves and the Princess Mary; and he was to take the opportunity of finding out all he could about the "beauty and qualities, shape, stature, and complexion" of the elder of the two unmarried daughters of the old Duke of Cleves, whose eldest daughter, Sybilla, had married Hans Frederick of Saxony himself, and was as bold a Protestant as he was.

At the same time approaches were made to Christian III.

of Denmark, who had joined the Evangelical league; and gradually the forces against the Papacy were to be knitted together.

An excuse also was found to send English envoys to Cleves itself to offer an alliance in the matter of the Duchy of Gueldres, which the Duke of Cleves had just seized without the Emperor's connivance or consent.

Carne and Wotton, the envoys, were also to offer the hand of the Princess Mary to the young Duke, and cautiously to hint at a marriage between his sister Anne and Henry, if conditions were favourable; and, like Mont in Saxony, were to close the ranks of Protestantism around the threatened Henry, from whose Court both the imperial and French ambassadors had now been withdrawn.