In the Lion’s Court: Power, Ambition, and Sudden Death in the Reign of Henry VIII

651 Pages·2014·4.51 MB·English

by  Derek Wilson

CONTENTS
About the Book
About the Author
List of Illustrations
Title Page
Epigraph
Introduction
PART ONE: 1499
1 A Question of Identity
2 Walking the Tightrope
3 The Life of the University and the University of Life
PART TWO: 1509
4 A Lawyer’s Life
5 A Fair Beginning
6 Council and Councillor
7 Obscure Origins
PART THREE: 1519
8 Warrior King
9 Friends, Lovers and Creatures
10 Eminence
11 Wisdom and Folly
12 Prince, Priests and Philosophers
13 In the Thickets of Obscurity
PART FOUR: 1529
14 Wolsey – The Peacock Years
15 Out in the Cold
16 A Man of Property
17 Storms and Storm Damage
18 The Fatal Failure
19 Hopes and Fears
20 The Rise of the New Men
PART FIVE: 1539
21 New Brooms
22 Out of Control
23 End of an Era
24 Under New Management
25 The End of the Affair
26 The Unholy Maid
27 Morus Contra Mundum
28 Annus Horribilis
29 New Men, New Ideas, Old Anxieties
PART SIX: 1549
30 The Scaffold at the Centre of the Labyrinth
31 Faith and Faction
32 A Lion in the Daniels’ Den
33 Long Live the King
Epilogue: 1559
34 Requiescant
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index
Copyright
About the Book
Derek Wilson examines a set of relationships which illustrate just how
dangerous life was in the court of the Tudor lion. He tells the interlocking stories
of six men – all, curiously, called Thomas – whose ambitions and principles
brought them face to face with violent death. Thomas Wolsey was an accused
traitor on his way to the block when a kinder death intervened. Thomas More
and Thomas Cromwell, whose convictions and policies could scarcely have been
more different, both perished beneath the headman’s axe. Thomas Howard, Duke
of Norfolk, would have met the same end had the king’s own death not brought
him an eleventh-hour reprieve. Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and
Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, though outliving the monarch,
perished as a result of that war of ambitions and ideologies which rumbled on
after 1547. Wriothesley succumbed to poison of either body or mind in the
aftermath of a failed coup. Cranmer went to the stake as a heretic at the
insistence of Mary Tudor, who was very much the daughter of the father she
hated. In the Lion’s Court is an illuminating examination of the careers of the six
Thomases, whose lives are described in parallel – their family and social origins,
their pathways to the royal Council chamber, their occupancy of the siege
perilous, and the tragedies which, one by one, overwhelmed them. By showing
how events shaped and were shaped by relationships and personal destinies,
Derek Wilson offers a fresh approach to the political narrative of a tumultuous
reign.
About the Author
Derek Wilson came to prominence thirty years ago, after graduating from
Cambridge, with A Tudor Tapestry: Men, Women and Society in Reformation
England. This was followed by several critically acclaimed and bestselling
books, such as: Rothschild: A Story of Wealth and Power, Sweet Robin: Robert
Dudley Earl of Leicester, Hans Holbein: Portrait of an Unknown Man and, most
recently, The King and the Gentleman: Charles Stuart and Oliver Cromwell
1599–1649. He has also written and presented numerous radio and television
programmes. Now, after three decades of study and reflection he returns to those
themes he first explored in A Tudor Tapestry.
More details can be found on his website: www.derekwilson.com
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Hans Holbein the Younger, c.1534. (The
Royal Collection © 2000, Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II.)
The Field of Cloth of Gold (at Hampton Court), artist unknown. (The Royal
Collection © 2000, Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II.)
‘The King’ and ‘The Pope’ from The Dance of Death, Hans Holbein, c.1523–6.
Henry VIII, c.1537, after Hans Holbein. (Walker Art Gallery, National Museums
& Galleries on Merseyside.)
Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, 1540, Hans Holbein. (The Royal
Collection © 2000, Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II.)
Cardinal Thomas Wolsey as founder of Cardinal (later Christ Church) College,
Oxford, Sampson Strong. (Christ Church College, Oxford.)
Effigy of Bishop Wainfleet in Winchester Cathedral. (The Dean and Chapter of
Winchester.)
Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan, 1538, Hans Holbein. (National
Gallery, London.)
Thomas More, 1527, Hans Holbein. (Copyright The Frick Collection, New
York.)
Henry VIII, King of England (with his daughter Princess Mary and William
Somers, the Jester), Hans Holbein. (Hulton Getty.)
Anne de Clèves, reine d’Angleterre, 1539, Hans Holbein. (Photo RMN.)
A Lady: Portrait of an Unknown Lady (inscribed Anna Bollein Queen), c.1530,
Hans Holbein. (The Royal Collection © 2000, Her Majesty the Queen
Elizabeth II.)
The Light of the World, Hans Holbein.
German woodcut of the deluge, 1524.
Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex, c.1530, after Hans Holbein. (By courtesy
of the National Portrait Gallery, London.)
Cranmer plucked from the pulpit, 1569. (Bodleian Library, Oxford.)
Thomas Wriothesley, c.1535, Hans Holbein. (Courtesy of the Musées Nationaux,
Paris.)
Thomas Cranmer, c.1550, artist unknown. (Lambeth Palace.)
Title page of Coverdale’s Bible, 1535, Hans Holbein. (The British Library.)

‘You often boast to me that you have the king’s ear and often have fun
with him, freely and according to your whims. This is like having fun
with tamed lions – often it is harmless, but just as often there is fear of
harm. Often he roars in rage for no known reason, and suddenly the fun
becomes fatal.’
Thomas More
INTRODUCTION
There were lions in London. Thomas More, born and bred in the City, knew
them well. They were the ‘King’s Beasts’, housed in the Tower menagerie, and a
major tourist attraction. Did More take Erasmus and other visiting foreign
scholars to look at these awesome, savage creatures prowling around their
semicircular enclosure in the Barbican or Lion Tower? Was he a spectator at any
of the bloody displays occasionally mounted when mastiffs or bears were
matched unequally with these wild royal animals? What is beyond doubt is that
this is what he had in mind when he likened the court of Henry VIII to a lion pit
in which the magnificent and deadly king of beasts held sway. Sharing with the
King in all the sumptuous diversions of palace life could be fun but ‘often he
roars in rage for no known reason, and suddenly the fun becomes fatal’.
More knew, as anyone close to the Tudor monarch knew, that life at court was
precarious. The monolithic personality of King Harry and its impact on the men
and women who shared his life are the ingredients in a saga of unending
fascination. It has become commonplace for those wishing to understand the
reign to focus on the ‘Six Wives’. The tragic comings and goings of three
Catherines, two Annes and a Jane, summed up in the mantra
Divorced, beheaded, died,
Divorced, beheaded, survived
have suggested a simple résumé of the second Tudor’s reign. This has always
seemed to me inadequate, not because it ‘reduces’ history to a sequence of
personal relationships – history is nothing if it is not a chronicle of human
interaction – but because it does not get to grips with the real issues over which
the nation’s leaders quarrelled, fought and died in the first half of the sixteenth
century.
That is why, in this book, I propose a different set of relationships which I
believe offers a much more illuminating approach to the court and government
of Henry VIII. I can even suggest an alternative mortuary mnemonic, though
admittedly one which may not come quite so trippingly off the tongue: