This has, to me, the flavour of a deliberate ruse by the King, rather than a spontaneous sequence of events as reported to Foxe by two survivors from Catherine’s ladies (though it may have looked genuine to them). To begin with, it is hard to guess the legal grounds on which Catherine could have been arrested in July, since extensive enquiries about her and her ladies had revealed nothing at all. If Henry had actually wanted to dispose of her, he could easily have manufactured something, as he did when he wanted to rid himself of Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell, and was soon to do again with the Duke of Norfolk.
It is worth noting in this context that three years before, when Archbishop Cranmer had been the subject of accusations of heresy by Gardiner, the King had turned the tables on the conservatives in a very similar manner, agreeing that Cranmer should be called before the Privy Council, but giving him his ring beforehand to show to the council as proof he still had the King’s support. The outcome was that a commission to investigate Cranmer was appointed, but headed by Cranmer himself! This tactic had the benefit of humiliating one party (in both cases the religious conservatives) while reminding the other (first Cranmer, then Catherine) very firmly who was in charge. Given the failure of the heresy hunt, it would have been quite characteristic of Henry to humiliate Wriothesley in this way, while forcing Catherine, like Cranmer earlier, to play a part in the deception – and in Catherine’s case, publicly to admit that as a woman it was her place to learn from, and not lecture, her husband.
I think, therefore, that the arrest warrant was nothing more or less than a put-up job, designed to humiliate Wriothesley and also to signal that the heresy hunt was over and the Queen still in Henry’s favour. Catherine herself was likely ordered to be involved, and the whole thing stage-managed by Henry himself.
By the end of July, when new jewellery was ordered for her for the forthcoming visit of Admiral d’Annebault, Catherine Parr was clearly and visibly once more high in the King’s favour. Her brother, as Earl of Essex, rode at the admiral’s side on his procession through London in August. And in October, crucially, Catherine’s brother-in-law Lord Herbert was promoted to Deputy Chamberlain, a position which was to be of critical influence in the King’s last days. The Parrs had successfully weathered the storm.
THERE REMAINED BERTANO’S visit, but as noted previously, it was a failure. When the papal emissary arrived early in August, hopes of some sort of accommodation with the Pope seem to have been immediately dashed. And from now on the King began to move, steadily, back towards the reformers. He may well have feared that if Gardiner and Norfolk were left in charge of the realm during his son’s minority, they would take England back to Rome. And Henry’s first priority was always to ensure that the Royal Supremacy passed to his son. Such a fear on the King’s part was not unrealistic; a decade later Gardiner was to be key lieutenant to Henry’s daughter, Mary I, when she returned England, briefly, to papal allegiance.
AFTER THE FAILURE of Bertano’s mission, the focus turned back to relations with France, and much attention was devoted to the preparations to welcome Admiral d’Annebault to London at the end of the month. The sheer scale of the celebrations, in a country financially ruined by Henry’s war, has, I think, been rather ignored. There had been no such celebrations to welcome a foreigner, at least not since the arrival of the ill-fated Anne of Cleves in 1539. Archbishop Cranmer’s secretary, Ralph Morice, later recounted how Henry stood at one of the Hampton Court banquets for d’Annebault, with one arm round the admiral’s shoulder and the other round Cranmer’s (a sign of favour to both, although Henry by now may have found it difficult to stand unsupported) and, according to Morice, made the astounding statement that he and the French king would soon abolish the Mass and establish a common Communion. This was never remotely possible, of course (Francis I of France remained firmly Catholic), but for the King to say such a thing even in jest could only be a sign of radical intention, quite unthinkable even a few weeks before.