By autumn, the pendulum was swinging the other way. The Duke of Norfolk’s son, Henry Howard (Earl of Surrey), was foolish enough to flaunt his Plantagenet ancestry by quartering the royal arms into his own heraldic bearings - an act easily portrayed as treason in the charged atmosphere of the dying king’s court. The Howards’ rivals pounced, and the duke and the earl were both charged with treason, the earl for the act itself, and his father for not informing against him. The case rested, interestingly enough, on the powers of visitation and enquiry into heraldic bearings with which Henry VIII had invested the College of Arms (the corporation of royal heralds) in the i5zos. The new authority of the heralds was just one sign of how the relationship between Crown and nobility was changing, for it showed that the very concept of nobility was now dependent upon the king’s will and pleasure. One of the ‘Kings of Arms’, thus established by their sovereign as arbiters of heraldic propriety, had warned Surrey against his heraldic pretensions - which were intended not as a claim to the throne but, more realistically, as a claim on his family’s behalf, as the premier family in England, to exercise the regency for the young king who would soon succeed his father. Henry Howard defended himself with such vigour that the jury hesitated long over their verdict. (His earldom was a courtesy title, not a peerage as such, so he was indicted before commoners at the Guildhall rather than before peers at Westminster.) However, William Paget rushed to court to seek the advice of his sovereign. On his return, he was allowed to interview the jurors, who promptly returned a guilty verdict. Even from his deathbed the ailing king could still overawe his subjects. Howard was beheaded on 19 January 1547, Henry’s final victim. Rather than proceed by such means with the even flimsier case against the Duke of Norfolk,
Section of the will of Henry VIII, 30 December 1546, bequeathing the ‘imperial crown’ of England to Mary in the event of Edward’s death without issue. Note that while Edward is described as Henry’s ‘deerest sonne prince Edward’, Mary is simply his ‘daughter’.
He was condemned by act of attainder a few days after his son’s death. Destined for the scaffold on 28 January, he was saved only by the king’s own death in the early hours of that morning.
As the end came, it was therefore the evangelicals who surrounded the dying king. In his will he endeavoured to provide collective government for his young son, nominating sixteen men to form Edward’s Privy Council. But with the disgraced Howards excluded, along with their episcopal ally, ‘wily Winchester’, the shrewd Bishop Stephen Gardiner, the prospects of balance and stability among this group were slim. Asked why he had omitted Gardiner, the king explained that while he, Henry, could manage the bishop, nobody else could. The bishop, Henry reckoned, would end up running rings around the rest of them and taking sole charge. Henry’s anxieties about the future were accurate in everything except their focus. The exclusion of Gardiner delivered Edward VI into the hands of his predatory uncle, Edward Seymour.
Henry VIII died shortly after midnight, in the early hours of the morning of Friday 28 January. Had he died six months earlier, England would have remained a Catholic
Country. His own will encapsulated the ambiguities of his idiosyncratic religious compromise. Endowing a chantry for his soul at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, where his splendid Renaissance tomb, cannibalised from Wolsey’s, was still unfinished, and never to be finished, requesting thousands of Masses and seeking the intercession of the saints - Henry’s imperious frame of mind is wonderfully expressed in the unselfconscious comment, ‘we do instantly require the Blessed Virgin Mary... to pray for us’ - it could be the will of any late medieval king. Yet alongside this entirely traditional provision for his soul we can see the hand of Cranmer (or perhaps of Catherine Parr) guiding the royal pen into expressing confidence in evangelical terms:
That every Christian creature living here in this transitory and wretched world under God, dying in steadfast and perfect faith... is ordained by Christ’s Passion to be saved and to attain eternal life, of which number we verily trust by his grace to be one...
It was the conservative bishops Gardiner, Tunstall and Bonner who presided over the exequies of the king. Gardiner celebrated the requiem Mass on Sunday 13 February, and two days later presided over the arrival of Henry’s coffin at St George’s, Windsor. Later Catholic historians reported that it burst open under the pressure of the rapid decomposition of his corpse, so that it could be licked by dogs. Some added that Mary Tudor had him exhumed and burned. These stories are but myths of vengeance against one for whom they thought the very fires of hell barely adequate. To Gardiner also it fell to preach the sermon at the burial on 16 February. Sadly, no text survives: it would have been illuminating to hear the final judgement on his master of a loyal servant who was at times so close to him. Henry was buried beside Jane Seymour, beloved among all his wives because she had given him a son.
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