Note (back) — Chapter VII

Buckingham's execution is one of the symptoms that, as early as 1521, the failure of his issue had made Henry nervous and susceptible about the succession. Even in 1519, when Charles V.'s minister, Chièvres, was proposing to marry his niece to the Earl of Devonshire, a grandson of Edward IV., Henry was suspicious, and Wolsey inquired whether Chièvres was "looking to any chance of the Earl's succession to the throne of England."[520] If further proof were needed that Henry's anxiety about the succession was not, as has been represented, a mere afterthought intended to justify his divorce from Catherine, it might be found in the extraordinary measures taken with regard to his one and only illegitimate son. The boy was born in 1519. His mother was Elizabeth Blount, sister of Erasmus's friend, Lord Mountjoy; and she is noticed as taking part in the Court revels during the early years of Henry's reign.[521] Outwardly, at any rate, Henry's Court was long a model of decorum; there was no parade of vice as in the days of Charles II., and the existence of this royal bastard was so effectually concealed that no reference to him occurs in the correspondence of the time until 1525, when it was thought expedient to give him a position of public importance. The necessity of providing some male successor to Henry was considered so urgent that, two years before the divorce is said to have occurred to him, he and his council were meditating a scheme for entailing the succession on the King's illegitimate son. In 1525 the child was created Duke of Richmond and Somerset. These titles were significant; Earl of Richmond had been Henry VII.'s title before he came to the throne; Duke of Somerset had been that of his grandfather and of his youngest son. Shortly afterwards the boy was made Lord High Admiral of England, Lord Warden of the Marches, and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,[522] the two latter being offices which Henry VIII. himself had held in his early youth. In January, 1527, the Spanish ambassador reported that there was a scheme on foot to make the Duke King of Ireland;[523] it was obviously a design to prepare the way for his succession to the kingdom of England. The English envoys in Spain were directed to tell the Emperor that Henry proposed to demand some noble princess of near blood to the Emperor as a wife for the Duke of Richmond. The Duke, they were to say, "is near of the King's blood and of excellent qualities, and is already furnished to keep the state of a great prince, and yet may be easily, by the King's means, exalted to higher things".[524] The lady suggested was Charles's niece, a daughter of the Queen of Portugal; she was already promised to the Dauphin of France, but the envoys remarked that, if that match were broken off, she might find "another dauphin" in the Duke of Richmond. Another plan for settling the succession was that the Duke should, by papal dispensation, marry his half-sister Mary! Cardinal Campeggio saw no moral objection to this. "At first I myself," he writes on his arrival in England in October, 1528, "had thought of this as a means of establishing the succession, but I do not believe that this design would suffice to satisfy the King's desires."[525] The Pope was equally willing to facilitate the scheme, on condition that Henry abandoned his divorce from Catherine.[526] Possibly Henry saw more objections than Pope or Cardinal to a marriage between brother and sister. At all events Mary was soon betrothed to the French prince, and the Emperor recorded his impression that the French marriage was designed to remove the Princess from the Duke of Richmond's path to the throne.[527]