Parr, that “it had pleased God to incline the King’s heart to take her as his wife, which was to her the greatest joy and comfort that could happen.” Wriothesley enclosed this letter in one of his own in which he entreated Parr to make himself worthy of such a sister as the new Queen. Chapuys wrote to the Emperor on 27th July: “My lady of Cleves has taken great grief and despair at the King’s espousal of this last wife, who is not, she says, nearly so beautiful as she, and besides that there is no hope of issue, seeing that she has been twice married before and no children born to her.” Richard Hills, “Heretic Hills,” as they called him, in a letter to Bullinger, the Swiss Reformer, who subsequently became the friend of Lady Jane Grey, and dated from Strasburg on 26th September, makes the following very characteristic comments on the King’s sixth marriage:—
“No news but that our King has, within these two months as I have already written to John Bucer, burnt three godly men in one day. In July he married the widow of a nobleman named Latimer, and, as you know, he is always wont to celebrate his nuptials by some wickedness of this kind.”
The victims alluded to are known as the “Windsor martyrs.” They were men in humble circumstances named Parsons, Testwood, and Filmer.35 A fourth, John Marbeck, who was organist at St. George’s Chapel Royal, was, it is said, reprieved at the instance of Dr. Casson, Bishop of Salisbury, and of the Queen, who is also credited with having saved the life of Dr. Haines, Dean of Exeter, of Sir Philip Hoby and his wife, and of Sir Thomas Carden, who had been denounced by Dr. London as spreading heresy even within the precincts of the palace. The result of the Queen’s action was that London and Simmonds, his coadjutor, were condemned for perjury, and sentenced to ride round Windsor with their faces to the horses’ tails—a humiliating punishment which is said to have caused Dr. London’s death—no great loss to humanity.
To save human life and to alleviate suffering is a meritorious act that brings its own reward; but in spite of this, and although the newly made Queen was thus enabled to realise her own influence, she must have found her honeymoon a season full of dread, revealing as it did the terrible insecurity of lives dependent on the fiat of so capricious a tyrant as her royal mate.
CHAPTER IV
THE KING’S HOUSEHOLD
Not Solomon in all his glory—nor Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent of Istambul—was lodged more sumptuously than Tudor King Henry VIII of England. When Katherine Parr espoused the much-married monarch, she found herself mistress of a score of royal palaces, each furnished in a manner not unworthy of the splendour of Aladdin after that fortunate youth had gained possession of his magic Lamp, and served by the most numerous retinue ever brought together in this ancient kingdom of ours. The Venetian envoys, accustomed to the luxury and artistic elegance of the Queen of the Adriatic, were fairly dazzled by the sight of the treasures Henry gathered about him. Although within the space of a few brief years he suffered vandal hands to rob his country of more noble abbeys, churches, libraries, and works of art than had been destroyed by time and foreign and civil war combined since William’s Conquest, the King’s own artistic sense was highly developed, and he revelled, with a glee that sometimes verged upon the childish, in pomp and luxury and all things rare and beautiful.36 To the confiscated collections of Wolsey he added the spoils of a hundred monasteries, and the Inventory of his effects, taken a few days after his death,37 fills two enormous folio volumes preserved among the Harleian Papers in the British Museum. It is written in a round, legible hand, on the finest paper of the period, and a glimpse of its contents cannot fail to excite the longing of the virtuoso and to stir the imagination as effectually as any brilliant page of description in the Arabian Nights. A perusal of these bulky tomes facilitates some partial conception of the extraordinary magnificence of the Court at which Lady Jane Grey figured as a child, and whence, no doubt, she derived that taste for “costlie attire, music and other vanities,” which was to evoke the unfavourable criticism of her Puritan friends at Zurich and Strasburg, who exhorted her, if she really desired to save her soul, to forswear all such trash, and imitate “the simplicity in dress and modesty in demeanour” practised by her cousin the Princess Elizabeth. We find hundreds of entries touching bedsteads, tables, card or playing tables, chairs, couches and footstools of carved ebony, cedar-wood, walnut, or oak, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, ivory, or rich metal wirework, and upholstered in silk, satin, velvet, or Florence brocade, fringed with gold, and even with strings of seed-pearls. Persian and Turkish carpets, silks and woollen, covered every available space in corridor, gallery, hall, and bedchamber, and there is mention of one especially wonderful carpet “of silk,” probably Persian, “nine yards long by two and a half wide.” One chamber was decorated with “101 yards of white satin embroidered and fringed with gold,” while the walls of another were panelled with purple cloth of gold, i.e. purple silk shot with gold.
There must have been some hundreds of complete sets of the costliest tapestries and arras in the various royal palaces. Wolsey, whose passion for tapestry as a mural decoration became quite unreasonable, collected scores of the finest specimens the looms of Italy and Flanders could produce and lavish outlay secure. After his fall these remained as he had left them at Hampton Court, where we still admire the splendid series representing the “Story of Abraham,” designed by Raphael’s pupil, Bernard van Orly, and another of yet earlier date illustrating the “Triumphs,” of which three, those of “Death,” “Renown,” and “Time,” occupy their original positions in Henry VIII’s Great Watching or Guard Chamber. As we gaze on their faded beauty, we should remind ourselves that the immense quantity of gold thread wrought with infinite care and taste into their composition, and now tarnished, glistened in King Henry’s time in all the glory of its freshness. In the Audience Chamber at Whitehall many a great Ambassador may have envied the arras hangings, representing the “Acts of the Apostles,”38 from designs by Raphael presented to the King by Pope Leo X when he gave him the proud title of “Defender of the Faith.”
The walls of three State rooms at Hampton Court were hung “with cloth of gold, blue cloth of gold, crimson velvet upon velvet, tawny velvet upon velvet, green velvet figury, and cloth of bawdekin,” a regal material woven partly of silk and partly of gold. Some of the chief tapestries at Whitehall represented the “History of Our Lady,” the “Story of Ahasuerus and Esther,” the “Crucifixion,” the “Story of Apollo and Daphne,” “St. George and the Dragon,” “Hawking and Hunting Scenes,” the “Siege of Jerusalem,” and many other like episodes in sacred and profane history and in mythology. The King would order a score of sets of tapestry at once, and would spend a sum equal to £10,000 or £15,000 of our money upon them. The overflow of tapestries, “picture-hangings,” Oriental silks, Genoa velvets, Florence and Venice brocades, curtains of French lace, Chinese silks, and costly furniture, went to the State rooms of the stern old Tower; to Windsor—where a few remnants of Henry VIII’s belongings still remain; to Woodstock, to Richmond, to Greenwich, to Oatlands in Surrey—where Prince Edward often lived; to Newhall to Havering atte Bower—the chief country seat of Princess Mary; to Hatfield and Enfield Chase—where Princess Elizabeth spent her girlhood; to the Queen’s dower-houses at Hanworth and Chelsea; and above all, to that marvel of the age, the new Palace of Nonesuch, which Henry had built him at Cheam, Surrey.39 At Whitehall there were scores of cupboards crammed with gold and silver plate, and there were ivory and ebony cabinets with crystal doors, in which glittered strange Italian jewels, and curiosities from all parts of the then known world. In none of Henry’s palaces does there seem to have been a gallery exclusively devoted to pictures, such as would be found in most contemporary Italian and French royal and princely residences; but there were plenty of pictures or “painted tables,” as the Inventory quaintly calls them, in nearly every chamber. In 1540 Holbein’s great fresco in the King’s Privy Council Room at Whitehall, representing King Henry VII and Queen Elizabeth of York in the background, with Henry VIII and Jane Seymour standing in front, was a comparatively recent work. The illustrious artist, who died in London of the plague in 1543, had also designed the ceiling of the “Matted Gallery,” and covered the walls of the Chapel Royal with frescoes and arabesques.
The