LITMIR.BIZ

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local saints whose origins may have lain with the pagan Gods. It was only in 1535 when two leading Humanists, Henry’s former Lord Chancellor, Thomas More, and the Bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, went to the block rather than accept the King’s claimed ‘royal supremacy’ over religious affairs, that people began to realise there was more to Henry’s reformation than political argument and an attempt to reform religious abuses. And even then many did not waver in their Catholic faith. These ‘Henrician’ Catholics included among their number the chief ideologue of the ‘royal supremacy’, the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner. For the bishop, as for the King, papal jurisdiction, the abolished shrines, pilgrimages, and monasteries, were not intrinsic to Catholic beliefs.⁹ The Holy Sacraments, such as the Mass, remained inviolate and they argued that although the English Church was in schism in the sense that it had separated from Rome, it was not heretical and in opposition to it.¹⁰

      Those who disagreed, and opposed Henry’s reformation, felt his tyranny to full effect, as the heads displayed at London Bridge and other public sites bore silent witness. One hundred and forty-four rebels from the Pilgrimage of Grace were dismembered and their body parts put on show in the north and around the capital. Even if Londoners avoided the terrible spectacle of these remains, they would not miss the other physical evidence of the King’s reformation. Everywhere the great religious buildings, that had played a central role in London life, were being destroyed or adapted to secular use. Only that month, the monks from the London Charterhouse who had refused to sign an oath to the royal supremacy, were taken to Newgate prison, where they would starve to death in chains.

Inside Frances’s specially prepared chamber at Dorset House, however, the sights, sounds and horrors of the outside world were all shut out. She was surrounded only with the women who would help deliver her baby. When the first intense ache of labour came it was a familiar one. Frances had already lost at least one child, a son who died in infancy, as so many Tudor children did. Nothing is recorded of his short life save his name: Henry, Lord Harington.¹¹ Contemporary sources focus instead on the children born to Anne Boleyn: her daughter, Elizabeth, born on 7th September 1533, at whose christening Dorset had borne the gilded salt;^* and the miscarriages that had followed - the little deaths that had marked the way to Boleyn’s own, executed on trumped-up charges of adultery on 19th May 1536. The King’s second marriage was annulled and an act of Parliament had since declared both the King’s daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, illegitimate and incapable of succession.¹² This raised in importance the heirs of the King’s sisters in the line of succession, and both King and kingdom had already shown sensitivity to the implications. The rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace had expressed their fear that England would pass on Henry’s death to the foreigner, James V of Scots, the son of his elder sister, Margaret. Meanwhile her daughter by a second marriage to the Earl of Angus, Lady Margaret Douglas, a favourite of the English court, was currently in prison for having become betrothed without the King’s permission. Her lover, Anne Boleyn’s uncle, Thomas Howard, would die in the Tower that October. But while Frances’s child would, inevitably, hold an important place within the royal family, the King remained determined his own line would succeed him. The pressure on her to produce a male heir was therefore of a different order to Henry’s wives. Dorset wanted a son, as all noblemen did, but he and Frances were still young and, when a girl was born, their relief that she was strong and healthy would have outweighed any disappointment in her sex.

      A servant carried the newborn child immediately to a nearby room and handed her to a nurse. It was usual for fathers to be at hand when their children were born and Dorset would have been one of the first to visit the dimly lit nursery where his daughter was being fed and bound in swaddling, to keep her limbs straight and prevent her from scratching her face. Her spiritual welfare was of still greater concern to her parents and her christening was arranged as soon as possible, though this meant Frances could not attend. New mothers were expected to remain in bed for up to a month, and some did not even sit up for a fortnight. Frances played a role, however, in helping choose as her daughter’s godmother, the King’s new wife, Jane Seymour, after whom the little girl was named.¹³

      With her pursed lips and sandy eyelashes, Jane Seymour seems a poor replacement for Anne Boleyn, whose black eyes, it was said, ‘could read the secrets of a man’s heart’, but like her predecessor, Jane Seymour was a ruthless seductress.¹⁴ Her betrothal to Henry was announced only the day after Anne was executed. Having got her king it was her performance as a brood mare that was now important. In this too, however, she was showing marked success. A pregnancy had been evident for weeks and on 27th May the rumours were confirmed with a Te Deum sung at St Paul’s Cathedral ‘for joy of the Queen’s quickening with child’.¹⁵ It remained to be seen whether Jane Seymour would give the King the son he wanted, but in choosing her as godmother to their new daughter, Frances and Harry Dorset had offered a vote of confidence, and although they could not know it, the Seymour family would remain closely linked to their own, one way or another, thereafter.

      About a fortnight after the christening, Frances had her first day out of bed and dressed in one of her finest nightgowns for a celebratory party. The royal tailor advised damask or satin, worn with an ermine-trimmed bonnet and waistcoat, allowing the wearer to keep warm as well as look good, for visiting female friends and relations. Frances had a younger sister, Eleanor, married to Lord Clifford, and an equally young stepmother. Frances’s mother had died on Midsummer’s Day in June 1533, and her father had wasted little time before remarrying. The bride he had chosen was his fourteen-year-old ward, the heiress, Katherine Willoughby. He was then forty-nine, and the muscles of the champion jouster, like those of his friend the King, had begun to turn to fat. Frances would doubtless have wished her father had waited longer and made a different choice: the new Duchess of Suffolk had been raised alongside her like a sister since the age of seven. But Frances had accepted what she could not change and remained close to her childhood friend, who was now pregnant with the second of Frances’s half-brothers, Charles Brandon. After the party was over, Frances could venture beyond her chambers to the nursery and other rooms in the house, until the lying-in concluded at last when Jane was about a month old with the ‘churching’ - a religious service of thanksgiving and purification that ended with Frances being sprinkled with holy water. ‘Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean,’ she prayed; ‘wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.’ Frances then was ready to return to Henry’s court.¹⁶ Here, the care and blessings, showered on most new mothers, were in stark contrast to the treatment Henry had meted out to the Queens who had borne his children. If his third wife, Jane Seymour, had any fears about the future, however, there was little sign of them before her own lying-in began. She made her last public appearance on 16th September at Hampton Court. There was a grand procession into Mass at the royal chapel (which still survives, the ceiling a brilliant blue, studded with golden stars), and afterwards the court gathered in the vast space of the Watching Chamber (which also remains) to enjoy cold, spiced wine. There had been months of building work carried out in anticipation of the royal birth, and the heady scents of clove and cinnamon mixed with those of burnt brick and newly hewn wood. Once Jane Seymour disappeared to her chamber, however, so most of the court left the palace. There had been an outbreak of plague that summer and they were encouraged to go home.

      There persists a myth that Lady Jane Grey was born during the subsequent three weeks of the Queen’s confinement, at the Grey family’s principal seat of Bradgate Manor in Leicestershire. Dorset’s mother, the dowager marchioness, was, however, installed at Bradgate until January 1538 and Frances was busy enjoying herself, not lying in bed. On 11th October 1537, when news reached her that Jane Seymour was in labour, she was being entertained at the house of a friend and her husband was on their estate at Stebbing in Essex.¹⁷ Dorset left immediately for London,

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