History of England 1-6

There were little groups in Coleman Street, Hosier Lane and Honey Lane of London who eagerly took up the new translation, some among them bold enough to proclaim their beliefs. The reformers, known sometimes as ‘gospellers’, took advantage of the printing press to issue texts, pamphlets and treatises on religious reform. In his role as a royal councillor Thomas More led a raid against the Hanseatic merchants who were lodged in a building known as the Steelyard. ‘There is no need to be alarmed at our coming here,’ he told the merchants as they were just sitting down for dinner. ‘We have been sent by the council and by his grace the lord cardinal.’ He went on to say that ‘we have received reliable news that many of your number possess books by Martin Luther’. He even accused some of importing those books. Three merchants were immediately arrested, and eight others brought before Wolsey.

In the early weeks of 1526 Robert Barnes had been accused of preaching heresy after he had openly denounced the pomp and wealth of the Church from the pulpit of St Edward’s Church in Cambridge. He was brought before the cardinal.

Wolsey: Were it better for me, being in the honour and dignity that I am, to coin my pillars and pole axes and to give the money to five or six beggars, than for to maintain the commonwealth for them as I do? Do you not reckon the commonwealth better than five or six beggars?

Barnes: The coining might be for the salvation of your grace’s soul and as for the commonwealth, as your grace knew, the commonwealth was before your grace and must be when your grace is gone. I only damned in my sermon the gorgeous pomp and pride of all exterior ornaments.

Wolsey: Well, you say very well.

When he was told that the man was ‘reformable’, the cardinal promised ‘to be good unto him’. In a subsequent letter to the king, Barnes characterized himself as a ‘poor simple worm and not able to kill a cat’. Yet he also declared that ‘there are certain men like conditioned to dogs; if there be any man that is not their countryman, or that they love not, or know not, say anything against them, then cry they: an heretic, an heretic, to the fire, to the fire. These be the dogs that fear true preachers.’ Barnes did not go to the fire. He was brought to St Paul’s on 11 February, and forced to kneel in the aisle. On a platform in front of him sat the cardinal, on a throne of gold, flanked by eighteen bishops and eighteen abbots and priors. Faggots had been tied to his back, the wood as a symbol of the flames around the stake. In the autumn of that year, provoked by the wide circulation of Tyndale’s New Testament, the bishop of London issued another formal warning against the reading of heretical books.

There is an interesting sequel to the interrogation of Barnes. He was placed under a form of ‘house arrest’ in a monastery in Northampton, where a friend devised a plan for his escape. Barnes wrote a letter to the cardinal in which he declared that he was so desperate that he was going to drown himself; he named the place, and then deposited a pile of clothes by the river bank. He also left another letter to the mayor of Northampton, asking him to search the river; he said that he had written a private letter to the cardinal that was tied with wax around his neck. The search was duly undertaken and, despite the absence of a body, the welcome news that a heretic had killed himself out of despair was published abroad. Yet Barnes had disguised himself as a ‘poor man’, travelled secretly to London, and then taken ship to the Low Countries where he composed two tracts under the name of Antonius Anglus.

The ‘known men’ were becoming of serious concern to those, like Thomas More, who were certain of the perils of their teaching. In the autumn of 1527 a Cambridge scholar, Thomas Bilney, preached against the cults surrounding certain images of the Virgin and of the saints; they were nothing but stocks and stones. Twice he was pulled from his pulpit by an irate congregation. Yet he persisted in his attacks upon what he called idolatry and ‘vain worship’. ‘Saints in heaven need no light,’ he said, ‘and the images have no eyes to see.’ He was brought before the bishop of London, and made a formal recantation. Yet that was not the end of the matter. He reverted to his earlier unorthodox beliefs, and was eventually burned in the Lollards’ Pit outside Norwich. ‘Little Bilney’, as he was called, became an early Protestant martyr.

Another presumed heretic from Cambridge, George Joye, was called before Wolsey. He was asked to attend ‘the chamber of presence’ for questioning, but he had never before heard the phrase. ‘I was half ashamed to ask after it, and went into a long entry on the left hand, and at last happened upon a door, and knocked, and opened it; and when I looked in, it was the kitchen. Then I went back into the hall and asked for the chamber of presence: and one pointed me up a pair of stairs.’ It is trifling, perhaps, but it suggests the fear and trembling that would descend upon one not used to court or to interrogation.

Within three months of Bilney’s trial the Church began a concerted effort to discover and apprehend the heretics. The houses of suspected merchants were searched. Close inquiries were made among leather-sellers and tailors, shoemakers and printers. An Oxford scholar, Thomas Garrett, was taken for questioning by the university authorities. He told a friend that he was now ‘undone’. His principal interrogator, Dr London, was described as ‘puffing, blustering and blowing, like an hungry and greedy lion seeking his prey’. Garrett managed to escape, no one knew whither. So Dr London consulted an astrologer who told him that he had ‘fled in a tawny coat south-eastward’. In fact, when he was finally captured at Bedminster on the south bank of the Avon, he was dressed ‘in a courtier’s coat and buttoned cap’.

As a result of Garrett’s evidence the rooms of other scholars were searched and over 100 banned books discovered. Six Oxford men were imprisoned for some months in the fish cellar of Cardinal College, Wolsey’s own creation, where it is reported that three of them died. It is significant that all of these ‘new named brethren’, as More called them, came from the universities; they were a small elite fraternity, but the authorities were afraid that their questions and their opinions might filter through the general population. They were nevertheless a minority, and their beliefs might not have strayed very far beyond the walls of their colleges. It would take the catalyst of the king’s divorce, the ‘great matter’, to quicken the process of religious reform.

Cardinal Campeggio, appointed by the pope to consider the case, made his weary and painful journey to England in the summer of 1528; he suffered from gout, and needed many halts along the way. He was awaited with impatience and, as soon as he was lodged at Bath House in London, Wolsey came to importune him. ‘They will endure no procrastination,’ Campeggio told Rome, ‘alleging that the affairs of the kingdom are at a standstill, and that if the cause remains undetermined it will give rise to infinite and imminent perils.’ Unfortunately he was under instruction to delay at all costs.

Soon enough he was granted an audience with the king at the palace of Blackfriars, where the cardinal advised him ‘against attempting this matter’; if necessary the pope would grant Henry a fresh dispensation to unite himself with Katherine. The king listened patiently and then gave what Campeggio described as a ‘premeditated’ answer on the total invalidity of the marriage. It was clear that he was not about to be moved. Then Campeggio offered the suggestion that Katherine should enter a religious house; if she were wedded to God, then Henry would be free to remarry.

So Campeggio and Wolsey visited the queen who, after much reflection, rejected the idea. ‘I intend,’ she told them, ‘to live and die in the state of matrimony, to which God has called me. I will always remain of this opinion, and will never change it.’ Her dignity and self-possession, in the face of intolerable pressure, were remarkable. In this impasse Rome repeated its instructions that nothing should be said or done ‘without a new and express commission from this place’.

The threat to Katherine took a more definite form. It was alleged in the king’s council that a plot, to poison the king and the cardinal, had been discovered; a letter was sent to her on the subject ‘in which if she had any hand, she must not expect to be spared’. It was a crude attempt to subdue her, but it did not succeed. The council also complained that ‘she showed herself much abroad, and by civilities, and by gracious bowing her head, which had not been her custom formerly, did study to work upon the people’. But the crowds of London were already supporting her. Wolsey ordered a search to be made for hackbuts and crossbows, the material of insurrection. The situation had reached a point of crisis, not at all helped by the sudden discovery of what became known as ‘the Spanish brief’; this was another papal dispensation, permitting the marriage of Katherine and Henry.

As the weeks of autumn and winter passed without any progress, Anne Boleyn and Henry became increasingly angry and impatient. The king was besotted by her; he lodged her in the palace at Greenwich and lavished jewels and other presents on her. ‘He sees nothing,’ Campeggio told Rome, ‘he thinks of nothing but Anne.’ In their irritation and anxiety they turned their fire upon the cardinal. In turn Wolsey berated Campeggio with the threat that, if nothing were done, such a storm would burst that ‘it were better to die than to live’. One of the king’s envoys, Stephen Gardiner, knelt before the pope. ‘You who should be as simple as doves,’ he said in a remarkable act of impropriety, ‘are full of all deceits, and craft, and dissembling.’ The pope had informed Henry that he could not act without hearing the arguments of both sides, and in the spring of 1529 Sir Francis Bryan, a cousin of Anne Boleyn, wrote from Rome that ‘who so ever hath made your grace believe that he would do for you in this cause hath not, I think, done your grace the best service’. He was clearly alluding to the cardinal. Wolsey himself was saying to his confidential servants that he would pursue the matter as far as he could, and then retire voluntarily in order to devote himself to spiritual affairs. He knew well enough, in any case, that his end might be approaching.

On the last day of May 1529, the legatine court under the direction of Wolsey and Campeggio was convened in the parliament chamber at Blackfriars; the king and queen were staying at the palace of Bridewell, close by, and crossed a wooden bridge over the Fleet river to attend the court. They were both summoned to appear on Friday 18 June, but two days before that date Katherine asked to meet the archbishop of Canterbury and eight bishops; she protested against the whole notion of a trial and told them that she wished to refer the matter to Rome. This would ensure an endless process of debate and questioning. She also delivered a formal protest to the two cardinals at Blackfriars, declaring that they were incompetent judges.

On the day appointed the king and queen came to the legatine court, where Henry took his seat under a cloth of state. Campeggio then delivered an oration on the ‘intolerable’ matter of ‘adultery, or rather incest’ that they must now adjudicate.

‘King Harry of England, come into the court!’

‘Here,’ he replied.

‘Katherine queen of England, come into the court!’

She rose without replying and, leaving her small circle of advisers and lawyers, she went over to the king; she knelt at his feet and spoke to him so that all could hear her. ‘I am a poor woman, and a stranger in your dominions, where I cannot expect good counsel or indifferent judges. I have been long your wife, and I desire to know wherein I have offended you.’ She then pleaded her virginity when she met him, and the fact that she had borne him several children (only one of which, of course, had lived). ‘If I have done anything amiss, I am willing to be put away in shame.’ She spoke a little more, saying that no lawyer in England would, or could, speak freely for her. ‘I desire to be excused until I hear from Spain.’ With that she rose, and made a low curtsy to the king before leaving the court. The cardinals called after her but she made no answer.

The king then spoke to those assembled, stating that she had always been a true and obedient wife. Wolsey rose and denied the reports that he had been the first mover in the matter of the divorce. The king vindicated him and declared that his own scruples of conscience had prompted him. If his marriage were found to be lawful, he would be happy to continue living with the queen. Few in the court believed him.

In succeeding days a number of witnesses were called, the principal among them testifying that Katherine and Prince Arthur had consummated the marriage after their wedding. On leaving the bedroom on the following morning, Arthur had been heard to say that ‘I have been in Spain all night’. One of Katherine’s supporters, John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, protested against ‘things detestable to be heard’; Wolsey rebuked him and sharp words were exchanged between them.

Charles V sent an envoy to Rome, saying that a verdict against his aunt would be a great dishonour to his family. He insisted that the matter be ‘avocated’ or recalled to Rome, where a more fair investigation would be held; he had also given an undertaking that the pope’s immediate family would be established as the rulers of Florence. An agent for Wolsey, Dr Bennet, threw himself at the feet of the pope and declared, in tears, that then ‘the king and kingdom of England will be certainly lost’. It was unthinkable that his master would appear at a Roman court as a suppliant. Pope Clement wept, and begged for death. On 9 July he called the English ambassadors and told them that the hearing had been recalled to Rome. ‘I am between the hammer and forge,’ he said. ‘It is impossible to refuse what the emperor now demands, whose forces so surround me.’

Meanwhile Campeggio had been drawing out the process of judgment with a series of delays and procedural questions. By Friday 23 July, it seemed that the end was in sight. But on that day Campeggio adjourned the proceedings until October, on the pretence that he must follow the Roman system of justice. He hoped that a favourable verdict might then be announced. The duke of Suffolk was among those who loudly announced their discontent. ‘By the Mass,’ he said, ‘I see now the truth of what is commonly said, that never cardinal yet did good in England!’ A few days later the letter from the pope, declaring that the court had been recalled to Rome, arrived for the king. The failure of the legatine court to deliver a favourable verdict to Henry was the decisive moment in Wolsey’s career. It is clear enough that he was no longer conducting the affairs of the realm; his last warrant for a royal payment was signed on 18 July, and his last letter to any English envoys was sent on 27 July. He had not yet been dismissed, but the shadow had fallen upon him. Anne Boleyn wrote to him an angry letter, in which she accused him of secretly supporting Katherine’s cause; she now relied only on heaven and the king ‘to set right again those plans which you have broken and spoiled’. One of the attendants at a royal banquet heard a conversation between Anne and the king which he later reported to the cardinal’s usher. ‘There is never a nobleman within this realm,’ she said, ‘that if he had done but half so much as he has done, but he were well worthy to lose his head.’

A book was prepared in which the failures of the cardinal’s administration were outlined; this account of pride and waste and folly was signed by thirty-four of the royal council. The French ambassador was sure of their real intentions. ‘These lords’, he wrote, ‘intend after Wolsey is dead or ruined, to impeach the state of the Church, and take all their goods.’

Henry was not sure how to proceed after the failure of his attempt to procure a favourable court verdict, and so he gathered together a team of scholars and clerics in pursuit of his ‘great matter’. Among these was Thomas Cranmer. The young reader of divinity at Cambridge suggested that the king could avoid long and fruitless negotiations at Rome by appealing directly to the scholars and universities of Europe; if they declared in his favour, the pope would be obliged to act. As soon as he was informed of Cranmer’s plan the king declared that the cleric ‘had the sow by the right ear’. In time Cranmer became the man to guide the English Reformation.

The king’s envoys visited the universities of Europe in order to gain the opinions of eminent canonists on the prohibitions of Leviticus against marrying a brother’s widow. Some of them could be persuaded by the liberal use of bribes to declare in his favour, but others proved recalcitrant. It was not a wholly successful enterprise. Paris and Bologna, together with six other universities, supported his position. But the divines of Padua, Ferrara and Venice were against him. Poitiers and Salamanca also favoured Katherine. When it was rumoured that even the doctors and proctors of Oxford were opposed, the king wrote a harsh letter to them from Windsor that ended with the words ‘non est bonum irritare crabrones’, ‘It is not good to stir a hornets’ nest’. The king also arranged for a sympathetic letter, signed by all the peers and prelates of England, to be dispatched to the pontiff. He had not yet decided to defy the pope and was still willing to persuade him.

By the early autumn of 1529 it was clear to all observers that the time of Wolsey had come to an end. He was no longer one of the king’s confidential councillors, and Henry had been alerted to secret correspondence between Wolsey and the pope. Wolsey’s usher reported that, on one of the last occasions the cardinal was at court, the king took out a letter and was overheard asking him ‘how can that be: is not this in your own hand?’ The nature of the letter is not known, yet it must have contained something to the cardinal’s disadvantage.

On 9 October the first formal charges were laid against Wolsey. He was accused of praemunire, or of placing the interests of the pope before those of the king. Since he had become papal legate at Henry’s urgent instigation, this was not the principal issue. The king was attacking the pretensions of the pope as well as the supposed malfeasance of the cardinal. When the writ was issued against Wolsey, it was decreed that all of his lands and goods were also forfeited to the Crown. His days of glory had come to an end. The cardinal then wrote to Henry pleading for ‘grace, mercy, remission and pardon’. The French ambassador visited him and found him scarcely able to speak. His countenance ‘has lost half of its life’.

Two weeks after Wolsey’s dismissal the king was pleased to invite Thomas More to become the new chancellor. Since More was known to be an avid hunter of heretics, it was evident proof that Henry did not wish to disavow the orthodox Church. In fact More started his pursuit within a month of taking his position; he arrested a citizen of London, Thomas Phillips, on suspicion of heresy. Phillips was interrogated many times and yet refused to admit any guilt; More consigned him to prison, where he remained for three years. It was the beginning of the new chancellor’s campaign of terror against the ‘known men’.

Yet ambiguous words were still coming from the king himself. Even as he was working to obtain papal consent for his separation from Katherine, he was reflecting upon the alternatives. In a heated argument with the queen he had declared that if the pope did not judge the marriage to be null and void, he ‘would denounce the pope as a heretic and marry whom he pleased’. He told the imperial ambassador that Luther had been right to attack the pomp and circumstance of the Church. Yet he saw no certain way forward, and had no grand strategy for religious reformation. He was in any case perplexed and anxious after the uncertain ending of the legatine court. It was reported that he was suffering from insomnia, and was ill in bed ‘in consequence of the grief and anger he had lately gone through’. He spent four hours closeted with the French ambassador, talking over the options and perils that faced him.

Nevertheless Henry now took over the direction and administration of the country. He would never again allow any one minister to determine policy in the manner of Wolsey. Eleven days after the cardinal’s dismissal the king applied the Great Seal, the sign and symbol of royal power, to certain documents in an inner chamber at Windsor; it was a ceremonial occasion, and was duly recorded as such. He gathered a new inner group around him, among them the dukes of Norfolk and of Suffolk. Even the lord chancellor was a layman, thus breaking an ancient precedent.

One other member of the administration was recruited. Thomas Cromwell had been previously in the service of Wolsey, particularly in the work of dissolving smaller monasteries and nunneries. On his master’s fall he was seen weeping, with a book of prayers to the Virgin in his hand; yet he inveigled himself into the king’s good grace and was nominated for a place in parliament. Soon enough his talent and self-assurance helped him to rise, in a career that has been compared to that of a grand vizier in an eastern despotism, and he became successively royal councillor, master of the king’s jewels, chancellor of the exchequer for life, master of the rolls and secretary of state. Yet he never repudiated his old patron and when granted his own coat-of-arms he adopted Wolsey’s device of the Cornish chough.

It had been intimated to the cardinal that he should retire to a small episcopal palace in Esher and, as he rode there on his mule, a messenger came from the king bearing with him a ring and a letter. Henry had written to tell him that he need not despair and that he could at any time be raised higher than before. The cardinal alighted from his mule and knelt down on the earth in prayer. The motives of the king are not immediately apparent. It was said at the time that there was a mystery or secrecy about royalty that no observer should attempt to penetrate. Yet it may be that Henry wished to test the success of his new council before irrevocably destroying the cardinal.

A parliament was summoned at the beginning of November as a way of informing the nation of the king’s will. The members of the Commons, in large part lawyers and country gentlemen, were quite at ease with the royal prerogative; their role was to register the king’s decrees and to shield him from blame for unpopular measures. When Thomas Cromwell was first nominated as a member of parliament he was told to consult with the duke of Norfolk ‘to know the king’s pleasure how you shall order yourself in the parliament house’. The Speaker was a royal official whose salary was paid by the king and, as Edward Hall states in his Chronicle, ‘the most part of the Commons were the king’s servants’.

The parliament of 1529 was no different from its predecessors. The king sat upon his throne while the lord chancellor, Thomas More, standing at his right hand, delivered an oration on the causes for its summons. He adverted to Wolsey as ‘the great wether [a castrated ram] which is of late fallen’. The members of the Commons soon showed their loyalty with an Act ‘to release the king from repayment of the loans he borrowed’. When one member opposed the measure the king wondered aloud whether he was ‘on my side’. The parliament passed bills on the rearing of calves and the price of woollen hats beyond the sea, but its attention was largely trained on the economic exactions of the Church. It was riding in the wake of the anti-clerical anger released at the fall of Wolsey. A general petition was drawn up in which the vices and corruptions of the clergy were denounced in strident terms as the fruit of the seven deadly sins; the ‘ordinaries’ or secular clergy were vicious and ravenous and insatiable and idle and cruel.

The clamour was then given the shape of formal bills against the payments demanded by clerics for proving wills and for funerals; the clergy were also to be prohibited from holding any land on lease and from engaging in trade. It is quite clear that the royal council had inspired, if not exactly orchestrated, these complaints. It was another way of striking at the pope by reminding him that parliament would always uphold the wishes of the king. He had his people behind him. It is characteristic of the early reform of religion in England, however, that it should begin with pragmatic and financial concerns. The English instinct has always been towards practice rather than theory.

When their bills were sent to the upper house John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, complained that the Commons were trying to destroy the Church and that they acted ‘for lack of faith’; when the Commons complained to the king, Fisher was obliged to withdraw his remarks. It was generally believed, however, that the bishops of England were too eager to defend the financial abuses that had been condemned. When they claimed that their practices were based on prescription and custom, a lawyer from Gray’s Inn remarked: ‘The usage hath ever been of thieves to rob on Shooter’s Hill, ergo, is it lawful?’ The hunt had begun.

In the autumn of this year Anne Boleyn gave to her royal master a copy of a pamphlet that had recently been issued. It has been argued that Anne was a Lutheran in all but name, but it may be that she simply wished to advise Henry on a possible extension of his powers and of his income. Simon Fish’s A Supplication for the Beggars was an anti-clerical manifesto in which the author directly addresses the king on the scandalous practices of the ‘ravenous wolves’ of the clergy who are devouring his kingdom. From the bishop to the summoner, this ‘idle ravenous sort … have gotten into their hands more than the third part of all your realm’. They had also debauched 100,000 women. What was the remedy? Make laws against them. Fish added that ‘this is the great scab, why they will not let the New Testament go abroad in your mother tongue’. It is reported that Henry ‘kept the book in his bosom three or four days’, and he is likely to have agreed with much of its contents. The bishop of Norwich wrote in alarm to the archbishop of Canterbury that ‘wheresoever they go, they hear say that the king’s pleasure is, the New Testament in English should go forth, and men should have it and read it’. Did not Anne Boleyn have a French translation of the New Testament?

Throughout the autumn and winter of 1529 the king’s team of scholars were busily investigating volumes of forgotten lore in order to find precedents for Henry’s separation from Katherine. But in the course of their work Cranmer and others came upon, or were invited to consider, material that might entirely change the relations between king and pope. In an ancient book entitled Leges Anglorum they discovered that in ad 187 a certain Lucius I became the first Christian king of England; Lucius had asked the pope to entrust him with Roman law, whereupon the pope had replied that the king did not need any Roman intervention because ‘you are vicar of God in your realm’. This of course was highly significant in the charged atmosphere of the time. By invoking ancient precedent Henry might be able to claim spiritual supremacy as well as secular power. The canons of various Church councils were scrutinized to elicit the opinions that no bishop could assume the title of ‘universal bishop’ and that no see need defer to the authority of Rome. The papers were eventually given the title of Collectanea satis copiosa, or a ‘large enough collection’.

The document was given to Henry in the summer of 1530 and he examined it very carefully; he made notes on forty-six separate points. In a conversation with an envoy from the king of France he declared that the pope was an ignorant man and not fit to be any kind of universal pastor. Henry was also well informed about the anti-clerical works coming out of Antwerp and Hamburg. After he had read William Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man, in which it is argued that the king’s authority should be extended over ecclesiastic affairs, he is reported to have said that ‘this is the book for me and all kings to read’.

In that summer the king’s ambassadors in Rome declared to the pope that no Englishman could be cited in a foreign court. When Anne Boleyn’s father, the earl of Wiltshire, came as an envoy before the pontiff he refused to kiss the pope’s foot even though it was graciously stretched out to him. In this year Henry himself wrote to the pope expostulating with him for using ignorant counsellors. ‘This truly is a default, and verily a great fault, worthy to be alienate and abhorred of Christ’s vicar, in that you have dealt so variably, yes rather so inconstantly and deceivably.’ He went on to declare that ‘never was there any prince so handled by a pope as your holiness has treated us’. The question at the English court now concerned the best path by which to advance.

The last days of Wolsey were at hand. He was harried north, to his archbishopric of York. The duke of Norfolk advised Thomas Cromwell to ‘tell him if he go not away shortly, but shall tarry, I shall tear him with my teeth’. When he was informed that his proposed school at Ipswich was being deferred, and that the construction of Cardinal College in Oxford had been diverted for the king’s purposes, the cardinal told Cromwell that ‘I cannot write more for weeping and for sorrow’. Yet he still asserted his own power. He set the date for his enthronement as archbishop of York and wrote to the king asking for his mitre and pall. Henry then spoke aloud of his ‘brazen insolence’. ‘Is there still arrogance in this fellow,’ he asked, ‘who is so obviously ruined?’ On 4 November, three days before the planned enthronement, Wolsey was arrested. It was alleged that he had engaged in secret correspondence with the pope and with the French and Spanish sovereigns. There may have been some truth in this, since in his extremity he had sought assistance wherever he could find it, but it is most unlikely that he had committed treason. It is also possible that he was trying to promote the cause of Katherine and to hinder that of the woman whom he called ‘the night crow’.

After his arrest he was taken south at a slow pace, stopping at the abbeys and monastic houses along his route. His once sturdy constitution was by now fatally undermined, and on his journey he was attacked by a violent case of dysentery. It was said to have been brought on by a surfeit of Warden pears, but there were other reasons for his dissolution. The keeper of the Tower, Sir William Kingston, was ordered to meet Wolsey at Sheffield; his destination was now in sight. When Wolsey heard of Kingston’s arrival, he clapped his hand on his thigh and gave a great sigh. His gentleman usher tried to put the best interpretation on the events, saying that Kingston had come to conduct the cardinal into the presence of the king. The cardinal was not convinced. ‘I perceive,’ he said, ‘more than you can imagine or can know. Experience of old has taught me.’

Kingston was then introduced to the prelate and knelt before him. ‘I pray you, stand up,’ Wolsey said, ‘kneel not unto a very wretch, replete with misery, not worthy to be esteemed, as a vile object, utterly cast away.’ Kingston also tried to reassure him, but the cardinal was not to be comforted. ‘I know’, he said, ‘what is provided for me.’ He knew that it would be a traitor’s death, with beheading as the best fate he could expect. His dysentery became more violent still, and by the time he reached Leicester Abbey most of his strength had gone. ‘Father Abbot,’ he said on his arrival, ‘I am come hither to leave my bones among you.’ He was laid in a bed, where he waited for his end. He spoke of the king. ‘He is a prince of royal courage, and has a princely heart; and rather than he will miss or want part of his appetite he will hazard the loss of one half of his kingdom.’ At the stroke of eight in the evening, Wolsey lost consciousness and died. He still lies buried somewhere within the ruins of Leicester Abbey, and a monument stands on the supposed site of his grave. Yet this was more than the passing of an individual life. The fall of Wolsey was intimately associated with the demise of the Church.

6

Old authentic histories

Henry had determined to act on behalf of what he called ‘entire Englishmen’ against ‘Englishmen papisticate’. In the early autumn of 1530 he claimed that fourteen senior clerics, among them eight bishops and three abbots, were guilty of praemunire; they were accused of colluding with Wolsey in his role as papal legate. Only days after the death of the cardinal, the same ‘information’ was filed against all of the clergy of England; they were charged with the offence because they had administered canon law or Roman law in the ecclesiastical courts, a crime which of course they had been committing for many centuries. The Spanish ambassador reported that the bishops and abbots were ‘terrified’. No one understood the workings of this newfound principle, and its interpretation was widely believed to reside only in the king’s head. Parliament was recalled at the beginning of 1531, and at the same time the convocation of the clergy was transferred from St Paul’s to Westminster. Both bodies would be under the king’s thumb.

In this atmosphere of fear and threat it was learned that the king would graciously accept a large sum of money to allay the offences of the clergy. In effect they were being forced to pay a subsidy. The province of Canterbury duly obliged by offering £100,000 but the offer was accompanied by a series of conditions. The bishops and abbots asked for a clear definition of praemunire, in case of future difficulties, and demanded that the Church itself be confirmed in all its ancient privileges as stated in Magna Carta. These proposals seem to have infuriated the king, who did not wish to bargain with his subjects. The invocation of Magna Carta also posed a threat to any unilateral action he might wish to take on religious matters.

So he attacked. In February 1531 he sent five articles to be added to the proposal on the clerical subsidy. In the first of them he called upon convocation to recognize him as ‘sole protector and supreme head of the English church and clergy’. This was the fruit of his reading the ancient sources, suggested to him by Cranmer and others, where the supreme leadership of the Church in England was first bestowed upon King Lucius. In the second article the king proposed the theory that it was he who truly had the ‘cura animarum’ or ‘cure of the souls’ of his subjects. No king had ever proposed such sweeping powers; no king had ever presumed so much.

Consternation ensued among the leaders of the clergy. They may not have had the opportunity of reading Leges Anglorum, as well as the other sources made available to the king, and so Henry’s assumption of sovereignty over the Church was an extraordinary and almost unthinkable innovation. He wished to replace the papacy that had governed the Church for more than a thousand years. And what did he mean by the ‘cure’ or ‘care’ of souls? That was the office of a priest duly ordained.

They were also aware that there would be some intimate connection with the king’s wish to separate himself from Katherine. Of this, too, they could know nothing certain. They could only look on with trepidation. The country, and the capital, were deeply divided on the ‘great matter’. When a minister of the church of Austin Friars in London asked for prayers to be said on behalf of Anne Boleyn, ‘queen’, most of the congregation rose from their seats and walked out. It was said that the women of the country took the queen’s part – all of them, that is, except for Anne Boleyn. The Spanish ambassador wrote that ‘the Lady Anne is braver than a lion … She said to one of the queen’s ladies that she wished all Spaniards were in the sea. The lady told her such language was disrespectful to her mistress. She said she cared nothing for the queen, and would rather see her hang than acknowledge her as her mistress.’

Agonized debate now took place among the members of the convocation, torn between their duties to the pope and their loyalty to the king. They also knew that it would be dangerous, and even fatal, to incur the wrath of the sovereign. Yet under the nominal leadership of John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, who had already spoken out on behalf of the queen, they tried to withstand the pressure of the king. In this period Fisher was under severe threat from person or persons unknown. A gun was fired at his episcopal palace beside the Thames, and the shot seemed to have come from the house of the earl of Wiltshire on the other side of the water; the earl of Wiltshire was of course the father of Anne Boleyn. One of Fisher’s early biographers says that the bishop decided to return to Rochester at the earliest opportunity.

Another odd event increased his alarm. A porridge had been prepared for the bishop’s household, of which several of his servants had partaken. Fisher himself had not been hungry and had not tasted it. In the event one servant, and a poor woman fed out of charity, died; many others became ill. The porridge had been poisoned by the cook, who confessed that he had added laxatives to the food; but he insisted that it was simply a joke, or prank, that had misfired. The king’s reaction was ferocious. He determined that an Act should be passed through parliament rendering murder by poisoning an act of treason, for which the penalty was to be boiled alive. The cook was duly placed in a boiling cauldron at Smithfield. Some at court whispered that Anne Boleyn, or one of her supporters, had persuaded him to commit the crime. Henry may have acted with sudden ferocity in order to remove any such suspicions.

The king’s own advisers were uncertain about the full consequences of his demands upon the convocation, and they were divided into what might be called radical and conservative factions. The Boleyns wished to press forward very quickly. If the king were head of the Church, the pope’s opinion on the matter of the separation would be of no consequence; the marriage with Anne could be duly solemnized. Others feared that a papal interdict, or excommunication of the nation, might bring war with Spain and a general disruption of trade with the Catholic powers of Europe. The king himself was not clear about his future strategy; he was proceeding by degrees, testing his ground with every step.

That is why he came to an agreement with the convocation that seemed to take away the spirit of their submission. After much debate, and much consultation between the archbishop of Canterbury and the king, it was agreed that Henry would be the supreme head of the Church in England ‘quantum per Christi legem licet’ – ‘so far as the law of Christ allows’. Some sources render it as ‘Dei legem’, ‘the law of God’, but the purport is the same. When this proposal was put to the convocation, a general silence followed. ‘Whoever is silent,’ the archbishop told them, ‘seems to consent.’ A voice called out that ‘then we are all silent’. So the proposal was agreed. It was one of the defining moments in the reformation of the Church and opened a schism that has lasted ever since. It also threw into doubt the concept of a united Christendom. The Turks, then pressing down upon the eastern borders of Europe, might have taken comfort from that fact.

Yet the phrase invoking Christ’s law was open to manifold interpretations, and in extreme form might be thought to cancel any spiritual sovereignty that the king claimed. It was not at all clear whether Henry had decided finally to supplant the papacy; he had, as it were, issued a warning to Rome. In any future confrontation, the clergy of England would be bound to him. As everyone knew, no one would in practice be able to defy his authority. Now that he had been granted the money from the clergy, however, he seemed disinclined to pursue the matter – for the time being, at least.

Henry had withdrawn further into a private set of rooms that were known as the ‘privy chamber’, the ‘privy lodgings’ and the ‘secret lodgings’ at his palace in Whitehall, and in Hampton Court. He had now also withdrawn himself from Katherine. She wrote to her nephew that her life was ‘now so shattered by misfortune that no human creature among Christians ever suffered so intense an agony’. Her agony materially affected her daughter, Princess Mary, who in the spring of 1531 fell ill for three weeks with some kind of stomach disorder; her physicians diagnosed it as ‘hysteria’, by which they meant a fault within the womb. When Katherine asked permission to visit her, the king suggested that she should stay with her permanently. At the end of May a delegation from the privy council was dispatched to her, imploring her to be ‘sensible’ in the matter of the separation. She turned upon them with all the fervour of an unjustly maligned woman. ‘I am his true wife,’ she told them. ‘Go to Rome and argue with others than a lone woman!’

Two months later he formally renounced her. In midsummer she accompanied Henry to Windsor, but then without warning he rode to Woodstock after ordering her to stay where she was. Having received an indignant letter from her, he replied in somewhat abusive terms. She had subjected him to the indignity of a citation to Rome. She had turned down the advice of his counsellors. He wanted no more letters. She was removed to the More, a large house in Hertfordshire that had previously belonged to the cardinal; then she was dispatched to Ampthill Castle in Bedfordshire. Her large court remained with her, and she was inevitably seen as the central figure for those opposed to the Boleyns and to the radical religious strategy they pursued. The queen herself became more strict in her observances. She rose at midnight to attend Mass; she confessed and fasted twice a week; she read only works of devotion and beneath her court dress she wore the habit of the third order of St Francis.

A marked signal of the popular mood emerged in the winter of this year. On 24 November Anne had gone with a few others to dine at a friend’s house beside the Thames. The word of her arrival soon spread through the city, and a mob of 7,000 or 8,000 women (or, perhaps, men dressed as women) descended upon the location with the intention of frightening her or seizing her. Fortunately she heard the rumour of their approach and left quickly by means of the river. The king ordered that the whole incident should remain unreported, but the Venetian ambassador had already recorded the event.

The animus against Anne grew. She was commonly known as the ‘goggle-eyed whore’, and the abbot of Whitby was arrested and prosecuted for calling her ‘a common stewed whore’. General excitement and contention arose in the parishes of the kingdom, as the people debated every aspect of the king’s ‘great matter’ in respect of the separation from Katherine and the supremacy of the pope. It is reported that the air was filled with wild rumour and speculation, with talk of witches and devils and stories of saints and apparitions. Thomas Cranmer himself saw a portent in the sky. He observed a blue cross above the moon, together with a horse’s head and a flaming sword. ‘What strange things do signify to come hereafter,’ he wrote, ‘God alone knows.’

In the winter of 1531 a young woman appeared in the role of an inspired prophet forecasting doom. Elizabeth Barton was a young serving girl from Kent who worked in the household of a steward for the archbishop of Canterbury. She had previously been invaded by an unknown ailment and, after some months of suffering, began to fall into clairvoyant trances in which ‘she spoke words of marvellous holiness’. Her reputation began to spread until it was magnified beyond measure; she announced that she had been visited by the Virgin, who had promised her release from suffering on a certain day. On that day she was conducted in a procession of 2,000 people to a chapel of the Virgin, where she fell into a trance; a voice issued from her belly speaking ‘so sweetly and so heavenly’ of religious joy but ‘horribly and terribly’ of sin.

A book of her oracles was sent to the king, who did not take it seriously. An angel commanded her to seek an audience with him, and it seems that she was granted an interview on three separate occasions. In 1528 she had also held a private interview with Thomas Wolsey. For the time being, at least, the king left her alone. But she proved to be more dangerous than he thought. By 1531 her prophecies touched Henry himself. If he divorced his wife he should not ‘reign a month, but die a villain’s death’. He must address himself to three matters, the first ‘that he take none of the pope’s right, nor patrimony from him, the second that he destroy all those new folks of opinion and the works of their new learning [religious reform], the third that if he married and took Anne to wife the vengeance of God should plague him’.

She made other declarations of a similar nature, all of which served only to inflame the people who believed implicitly in divine revelation. A network of priests and friars was now gathered around her, carrying her message in the pulpit and beside the market cross. She began to converse with the courtiers around Katherine; John Fisher wept as he listened to her, believing that he heard the words of God. The young woman was becoming dangerous. As Thomas Cranmer confessed at a later date, ‘Truly, I think, she did marvellously stop the going forward of the king’s marriage by the reasons of her visions.’

More unwelcome words came from the pulpit. On Easter Sunday 1532 a Franciscan friar preached before Henry and Anne Boleyn at Greenwich; Father Peto bravely denounced the king for his behaviour and prophesied that if he should marry Anne he would be punished as God had punished Ahab: ‘The dogs would lick up your blood – yes yours!’ It was fortunate that the friar did not lose his life for imagining the king’s death; instead he was eventually banished from the realm.

Against this background of unrest parliament was once more convened, in which the king determined to continue his campaign against Pope Clement VII. An Act was introduced effectively to cancel what were known as ‘annates’, the payments made to Rome by newly elected bishops and archbishops. The measure was delayed for a year, to be introduced at the king’s discretion; it was in other words a bribe for the pope’s good behaviour. The Act met very strong resistance in the Lords, particularly among the spiritual peers who were deeply concerned about Henry’s ultimate intentions. Yet they were in the minority.

Then the Commons, more compliant to the court’s wishes, presented to the king a long petition containing its grievances against the Church; in particular it questioned the right of the clergy to pass legislation in convocation. The Commons also complained about such matters as the ecclesiastical courts, the trial of heretics and the size of ecclesiastical fees. These were familiar complaints, but they were given added force in the light of the king’s new role as supreme head of the Church.

In the early days of April the king dispatched the petition to the archbishop of Canterbury, already sitting in convocation, and demanded a swift reply. He received it a week later. The clergy denied all the charges raised against them and asserted that their power of legislation was based upon the Scriptures; their activities were in no way detrimental to the royal prerogative. The king then summoned the representatives of the Commons into his presence, and gave them the clerical response. ‘We think this answer will smally please you,’ he told them, ‘for it seemeth to us very slender. You be a great sort of wise men; I doubt not but you will look circumspectly in the matter, and we will be indifferent between you.’ The king had therefore implicitly pitted the Commons against the Church.

The bishops knew that their answer had failed to satisfy the king or the parliament, and so they immediately offered one concession. They pledged that in the king’s lifetime they would never introduce legislation in matters unconnected with faith; the qualification was a very slender one, and did not resolve anything. On 11 May the king once more invited a delegation for a formal interview. ‘I have discovered,’ he said, ‘that the clergy owe me only one half of an allegiance. All the prelates at their consecration make an oath to the pope clean contrary to the oath they make to us so that they seem his subjects and not ours.’ This was disingenuous, but the king’s intention was becoming clear. He was intent upon fundamentally destroying the power and the authority of the pope.

He sent another memorial to the convocation or, rather, he issued a series of demands. No new canons, or legislative orders, were to be proposed or enacted without royal licence. All existing ecclesiastical laws were to be reviewed by a panel of ecclesiastics and parliamentarians, sixteen on either side, and a majority verdict would suffice for abolition. Any such majority verdict would then be upheld by the king, whose authority was supreme.

The convocation debated the matter for five days, but by that time the king had grown impatient. He demanded an answer. With one exception, the bishop of Bath, all the clergy then replied that they accepted the proposals in full knowledge of the king’s ‘excellent wisdom, princely goodness and fervent zeal to the promotion of God’s honour’. Their answer, or surrender, became known as the ‘Submission of the Clergy’. The Spanish ambassador wrote that ‘churchmen will now be of less account than shoemakers, who at least have the power of assembling and making their own statutes’. At a later date the great historian Lord Acton would describe the ‘Submission’ as representing ‘the advent of a new polity’. The independent nation state of England could not truly have emerged without this radical separation from the authority of Rome. Yet the change can be put in more immediate terms. An absolute monarch needed absolute rule over all his subjects, lay and clerical.

On the day after the ‘Submission’ Thomas More resigned, or was forced to resign, as chancellor. He had become too prominent a supporter of the pope, and of the old rights of the Church. ‘If a lion knew his own strength,’ he had once said of the king, ‘hard were it for any man to rule him.’ There was one other who still resisted the wishes of the king. John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, was in secret communication with the Spanish ambassador; they agreed that, if they accidentally met in public, they would ignore one another. Yet within months Fisher was suggesting that a Spanish invasion force should sail to England and overthrow the king. The archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, dictated to his scribes a testament in which he denounced the legislation against the Church. ‘By these writings,’ he said, ‘we do dissent from, refuse, and contradict them.’ Then he lay down and died, beyond the reach of the king at last. Out of the habit of obedience, and of loyalty to the throne, all the other bishops acquiesced. It is probable, also, that they feared the wrath of the king.

Henry sought the support of parliament at every stage in these proceedings largely for the sake of safety. The king himself went to parliament on three separate occasions in order to sway the vote. He could not be sure how the country would receive the great changes he was preparing. So he tried to make it seem that the Commons, in particular, were instigating or seeking the measures against the Church. Although he was in effect the sole mover of the anti-clerical legislation, he deemed it best to appear above the fray.

In the process the Commons itself acquired additional authority and came to be regarded as a partner to the king. In a later address the king told parliament that ‘we be informed by our judges that we at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in the time of parliament, wherein we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit together in one body politic’. This was effectively a new doctrine of state whereby ‘the king in parliament’ wielded supreme authority in a newly united nation.

In the early autumn of 1532 the king placed a mantle of crimson velvet, and a golden coronet, upon Anne Boleyn. She had been given a hereditary peerage, as marquess of Pembroke, the first woman to be so honoured in England. It was clear that she was soon to be further exalted. A number of the queen’s jewels were now transferred to her, despite Katherine’s vehement protests. Yet all was not well. When the king took her on progress through the southern counties the response of the people was at best sullen when not overtly hostile. Henry scrutinized the faces of all the members of the court, when they were in her presence, to ensure that they paid her the right measure of respect. It was reported that the king ‘begged the lords to go and visit and make their court to the new queen’.

A number of tracts were published around this time by the king’s printer, Thomas Berthelet, supporting the king’s ‘great matter’. One of them, A Glass of the Truth, may have in part been written by the king himself. It defended Henry’s decision to separate from Katherine by reason of biblical injunction, but also included some private details about her supposed wedding night with Prince Arthur.

He took Anne with him on a journey to France; now that he had come close to an open breach with Charles V, the nephew of the queen, he was obliged to maintain his alliance with Francis I. But the sister of the French king, and other ladies of the court at Paris, declined to meet her; Henry’s own sister, Mary, had also refused to accompany them across the Channel. Anne was obliged to remain in Calais, while Henry proceeded to Boulogne for his interview with the French sovereign. Their visit lasted far longer than they intended, when severe gales and storms prevented them from embarking in the Swallow for a fortnight. When they did eventually return to England they were confronted at Canterbury by Elizabeth Barton, ‘the mad nun of Kent’, who once more lectured them on their transgressions and prophesied calamity.

Yet the mind and intention of the king could not now be changed. It seems that, a few days later, he slept with Anne Boleyn. Certainly, by the beginning of December, she was pregnant. The birth of Elizabeth occurred nine months later. The only possible reason for the decision to begin sexual relations was the certainty that the two had now agreed upon an immediate marriage. There are reports that a secret ceremony took place two days after their return from France, with only Anne’s close family as witnesses, but they cannot be proven. It is likely, however, that the king would have taken the precaution of some official ritual before inseminating his lover. The risk of an illegitimate child was too great.

A formal marriage did take place in the following month when, just before dawn on 25 January 1533, they were united by the king’s chaplain in the ‘high chamber’ above the newly built Holbein Gate at Whitehall Palace. The other circumstances of the marriage are not known, but it is believed that two or three of the king’s privy chamber were present. Soon afterwards the preachers of the court began to pray for ‘Anne, the queen’, and Katherine was ordered to omit the title. By the following month the condition of Anne Boleyn was widely known, and the lady herself began to joke about her newfound craving for apples; her laughter rang around the hallways. She told the Venetian ambassador that ‘God had inspired his Majesty to marry her’.

Their union took place in the full anticipation of a final break with Rome. A parliament had been called at the beginning of February. Its first measures were concerned with the quality of shoe leather and the fair price of goods; crows and ravens were to be destroyed, and the road from the Strand to Charing Cross should be paved. Only then did the members direct their attention to more spiritual matters. The Act in Restraint of Appeals declared that all ecclesiastical cases should be determined within England itself with no reference to any supposed higher authority; this meant that the matter of the king’s separation would be adjudicated in London and Canterbury rather than in Rome. It has been described as the most important statute of the sixteenth century, for it was the one that effectively destroyed the polity of the Middle Ages.

The prologue to the Act itself sufficiently emphasized the king’s imperial longings. It declared that ‘whereas, by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one Supreme Head and King … unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people, divided in terms and by names of spirituality and temporality, be bounden and owe to bear, next to god, a natural and humble obedience’. So the reformation of religion was to be conceived as a welcome return to the past. All the changes and novelties claimed the authority of ancient law and practice. There is no mention of ‘the pope’s holiness’, as there had been in previous statutes, only of ‘the see of Rome’. Henry had recovered his imperial dignity as absolute ruler, with the expectation that he would acquire control over the entire British Isles. Twenty years earlier he had named two new ships the Henry Imperial and the Mary Imperial. Seals and medals were issued showing him sitting in state.

It is often suggested that Thomas Cromwell was the minister who oversaw or even devised these constitutional changes, but many hands were behind the proposals. Cranmer was naturally among them, but lawyers in parliament were also willing to help with drafts of the legislation. Many of them had been opposed to the powers of the ecclesiastical courts and had consistently favoured common law over canon law. It was, after all, their profession. A further consequence ensued. If canon law was subordinate to common law, it was also subordinate to the king. So by degrees the concept of imperium was formed. That concept is more properly known as ‘caesaro-papism’; the king was now both Caesar and pope. Henry was described as a king with a pope in his belly. Material consequences also arose from this dual authority. The imperial ambassador reported in the spring of this year that the king ‘was determined to reunite to the Crown the goods which the churchmen held of it’.

Thomas Cranmer had been chosen by Henry for the archbishopric of Canterbury, on the death of William Warham, but it was still deemed necessary that he receive his authority from the pope. The old dispensation had to be observed for a little longer, if only to guarantee Cranmer’s legitimacy. So Henry withheld royal consent to the Act in Restraint of Appeals, just as he had resisted seizing the annates destined for Rome. To Pope Clement VII he still posed as the defender of the faith against a disobedient and anti-ecclesiastical Commons. He even asked the papal nuncio to accompany him on a visit to parliament.

The pope obliged with a bull confirming Cranmer but, before the new archbishop swore his formal oath to Rome as legate of the Holy See, Cranmer declared that he was determined to fulfil only his obligations to God and to the king. At the end of March he was duly consecrated. It was time now for the next steps. The clergy, assembled at their convocation, declared the marriage between Henry and Katherine of Aragon to have been invalid. Only 19, out of 216, dissented. The rout of the Church was complete. John Fisher was placed under house arrest and was not released until the status of Anne Boleyn was finally confirmed.

At an ecclesiastical court meeting in Dunstable, on 23 May, Cranmer issued a decree stating that the marriage with Anne Boleyn was fully lawful. The archbishop had previously written to Thomas Cromwell, pleading that the meeting of the court be kept a close secret; he did not want to run the risk of Katherine’s attendance. When Pope Clement VII heard of the verdict delivered by ‘my lord of Canterbury’ he declared that ‘such doings are too sore for me to stand still and do nothing. It is against my duty to God and the world to tolerate them.’ The bishop of London, present for the occasion, remonstrated with the pontiff. Whereupon Clement threatened to burn him alive or boil him in a cauldron of lead. The bishop told the king that the pope was ‘continually folding up and unwinding of his handkerchief, which he never does except when he is tickled to the very heart with great anger’.

On the morning of 31 May Anne Boleyn was carried from the Tower to Westminster in a white chariot drawn by two palfreys in trappings of white damask; above her head was a golden canopy stringed with silver bells. The citizens and their wives had dressed the fronts of their houses with scarlet arras and crimson tapestries, so that the streets seemed to have become clouds of colour. The mystery plays were performed on special stages, and the fountains of London poured forth wine. On the following day she was taken from Westminster Hall to the abbey, where she was crowned as queen of England. ‘I did set the Crown on her head,’ Cranmer wrote, ‘and then was sung Te Deum.’

Despite the grandeur of the ceremony, the feelings of the population might not be so adulatory. During her procession into the city the constables of each parish had stood on guard with their staves at the ready ‘for to cause the people to keep good room and order’. The monogram of the king and his new queen, ‘HA’, was interpreted by some as a ribald ‘Ha! Ha!’ Yet the Venetian envoy witnessed ‘the utmost order and tranquillity’ of the large crowds, even if part of that tranquillity might be better interpreted as silent hostility. The people had come out of curiosity, perhaps, rather than respect. It is reported that Anne herself counted only ten people who shouted out the customary greeting of ‘God save your Grace’. A contemporary writer, commenting on the intricate patterns of her coronation garments, suggested that ‘her dress was covered with tongues pierced with nails, to show the treatment which those who spoke against her might expect’. Power may be glorious but it can quickly become fierce; three years later the radiant new queen would experience this herself.

A deputation of councillors came to Katherine, now officially titled as princess dowager rather than queen. They informed her of the decision of the court at Dunstable and of the king’s marriage. ‘Oh yes,’ she replied, ‘we know the authority by which it has been done, by power rather than justice.’ She asked to see a copy of the proposals they had brought to her and, when she saw the phrase ‘princess dowager’, she took a pen and struck it out. In retaliation Henry reduced the size of her household. In the summer of that year two women were stripped and beaten with rods, their ears nailed to a wooden post, for having said that ‘queen Katherine is the true queen of England’.

The king and his councillors now moved against Elizabeth Barton. In the summer of 1533 Henry asked Cranmer and Cromwell to investigate the claims and the behaviour of the nun, who is then said to have confessed ‘many mad follies’ to the archbishop. She was accused of high treason, by reason of her prophecies of the doom of the Tudors, and was taken to the Tower of London for questioning. It may be that she was put on the rack. In any case it was declared that she had confessed that all her visions and revelations had been impostures, and in a subsequent meeting of the Star Chamber ‘some of them began to murmur, and cry that she merited the fire’. It was then determined that the nun should be taken throughout the kingdom, and that she should in various places confess her fraudulence. At the beginning of 1534 she was ‘attainted’ in parliament of treason, and was later dragged through the streets from the Tower to Tyburn where she was beheaded. It was sufficiently clear that anyone who opposed the king was in mortal danger. The traditional pieties of the faithful, which had once blessed and sustained the nun, were not enough to save her.

At the time of Elizabeth Barton’s arrest and confession the king was reported to be ‘very merry’. He had come through. He was pope and Caesar. He was compared to Solomon and to Samson. ‘I dare not cast my eyes but sidewise,’ a contemporary wrote, ‘upon the flaming beams of the king’s bright sun.’ He was building a new cockpit for his palace at Whitehall, and his new queen was pregnant with what was hoped to be a male heir. The dynasty was at last secure.

During the queen’s pregnancy, however, he was unfaithful. The identity of the woman is not known, but she was described by the imperial ambassador as ‘very beautiful’; he also said that ‘many nobles are assisting him in this affair’, perhaps as a way of humiliating Anne Boleyn. On discovering the relationship Anne confronted Henry and used ‘certain words which the king very much disliked’. His royal temper flared up and he is reported to have told her to ‘shut her eyes and endure as her betters have done’; he also declared that he could lower her as well as raise her.

The storm passed, and Anne Boleyn still held the future within her. The astrologers and physicians of the court prognosticated the birth of a son, and Henry was hesitating between the names of Henry and Edward for his heir. Yet on 7 September, in a room known as the Chamber of the Virgins, Anne was delivered of a girl. ‘God has forgotten him entirely,’ the imperial ambassador wrote to his master. The infant was named Elizabeth after the king’s mother, Elizabeth of York. Henry was disappointed, but he professed to be hopeful that a son would soon follow. A week after the birth, Princess Mary, now seventeen, was stripped of her title; she was to be known now as ‘the Lady Mary, the king’s daughter’. She wrote a letter of gentle complaint, declaring that she was ‘his lawful daughter, born in true matrimony’. In his reply the king accused her of ‘forgetting her filial duty and allegiance’ and forbade her ‘arrogantly to usurp’ the title of princess. Three months later Elizabeth was taken in state to Hatfield House, in Hertfordshire, where her court was established. On the following day Mary was ordered to Hatfield, also, but only to enter ‘the service of the princess’. It was said that the king wished her to die of grief.

Yet all was not well within the royal palace. The unanticipated birth of a daughter, and the emergence of a royal mistress, made it plain to Anne Boleyn that her position was not as secure as it once had been. At a banquet she told a French envoy that she dared not speak as freely as she wished ‘for fear of where she was, and of eyes that were watching her countenance’. The royal court was a fearful and suspicious place, full of whispers and devices. She knew also that she was far from popular with the people. Her time of lamentation would soon come.

7

The king’s pleasure

The pace of religious change was quickened by the king’s statutes against the pope. Henry wanted no innovations in belief or in worship, but his first measures would surely lead to others. The papacy was the keystone of the arch of the old faith; once it was removed, the entire structure was likely to weaken and to fall. The emergence of a national Church would in the end result in a national religion. A radical preacher, Hugh Latimer, had been intoning in Bristol against ‘pilgrimages, the worshipping of saints, the worshipping of images, of purgatory’; but he had also been a prominent supporter of the separation from Katherine, and in 1533 Cromwell enlisted him in the court’s service. Latimer was soon dispatching preachers of his persuasion to several parts of the country. It was enough for Henry’s purposes that they were opposed to the pope, but they advocated more radical measures in other aspects of devotion. So the causes of religious reform and of the royal supremacy were associated.

Some occasions of iconoclasm were also reported. John Foxe, the author of Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Dayes, Touching Matters of the Church, more commonly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, records that in 1531 and 1532 religious images were ‘cast down and destroyed in many places’. The rood – the image of Christ on the cross that hung between the nave and the chancel – was seized from the little church of Dovercourt, a village in Essex. It was then carried for a quarter of a mile before being burned ‘without any resistance of said idol’. Since the rood was reported to have the miraculous power of keeping the door of the church open, this was a signal defeat for those who venerated it. Three of the perpetrators were apprehended and hanged.

In the autumn of 1533 it was reported that statues were being thrown out of churches as mere ‘stocks and stones’; the citizens and their wives pierced them with their bodkins ‘to see whether they will bleed or no’. These were not simply incidents of random destruction. It was said that if you take off the paint of Rome, you will undo her. There must have been some who saw religious imagery as one of the instruments of their slavery, but many people also regarded the gilded statues and paintings as an affront to the poor. ‘This year,’ an Augustinian canon wrote in 1534, ‘many dreadful gales, much rain, lightning, especially in summertime, and at odd times throughout the year; also divers sudden mortal fevers and the charity of many people grows cold; no love, not the least devotion remains in the people, but rather many false opinions and schisms.’ The times were out of joint. Henry was denounced by some as the Mouldwarp of English legend who would be ‘cursed with God’s own mouth’.

Parliamentary work had still to be done in matters of religion. At the end of 1533 the royal council was meeting daily in order to prepare policy, and summoned several learned canonists for their advice. Parliament was called and assembled at the beginning of the new year. It sat for the first three months of 1534, during the course of which it confirmed and ratified all of the measures proposed by the king and his council. The Submission of Clergy Act recognized the previous submission of the clergy; the Absolute Restraint of Annates Act prohibited the sending of moneys to the pope and concurred with the election of bishops; the Dispensation and Peter’s Pence Act confirmed that the archbishop of Canterbury was now in charge of dispensations from canon law.

In March 1534 Pope Clement VII decreed that the king’s first marriage to Katherine was still valid, thus consigning Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth to oblivion. It is reported that Henry took no account of it. Yet in retaliation the pope’s name was removed from all prayer books and litanies; it was further ordered that it should be ‘never more (except in contumely and reproach) remembered, but perpetually suppressed and obscured’. If the pope was ever mentioned at all, it was only as the bishop of Rome. This is the period when the word ‘papist’ became a term of contempt. In the winter of that year a priest, supporting the royal supremacy, fashioned an image of the pope out of snow; 4,000 people came to watch as it slowly melted away.

Just days after the papal decision an Act of Succession was passed by parliament, by which the royal inheritance was settled on the children of Anne Boleyn. Yet the Act was also enforced by an oath, whereby every person of full age was sworn to defend its provisions. It was in effect an oath of loyalty, so that any refusal to swear was deemed to be an act of treason. It passed through parliament after some debate, and the removal of certain ambiguous words, but there is no doubt that it was generally supported. Such was the measure of cooperation with the king, in fact, that a new subsidy Act guaranteed him revenue from taxation in times of peace as well as war. So the Commons supported him; the nobility supported him, or at least did not speak out publicly against him; the bishops supported him, albeit with secret doubts and reservations. A popular phrase of the time was that ‘these be no causes to die for’. Two men, in particular, refused to follow this advice.

Yet there was genuine fear, with some people denounced for speaking ill of the king and his new marriage. They could now be condemned as traitors. One villager complained that if three or four people were seen walking together ‘the constable come to them and will know what communication they have, or else they shall be stocked’. A fragment of a conversation is recorded in a court document: ‘Be content, for if you report me I will say that I never said it.’ Erasmus wrote that ‘friends who used to write and send me presents now send neither letters nor gifts, nor receive any from any one, and this through fear’. He went on to say that the people of England now acted and reacted ‘as if a scorpion lay sleeping under every stone’. Between 1534 and 1540 over 300 executions were ordered on the charge of treason. A large number of people fled the realm.

Thomas Cromwell himself took up the investigation of those who were accused. A letter from him to a priest in Leicestershire stated: ‘The king’s pleasure and commandment is that, all excuses and delays set apart, you shall incontinently upon the sight hereof repair unto me …’ It was one of many unwelcome invitations. To speak of a surveillance state would be anachronistic and wrong, but it is apparent that Cromwell and his agents had created an effective, if informal, system of control. ‘I hear it is your pleasure,’ one lord wrote, ‘that I should go into the country to hearken if there be any ill-disposed people in those parts that would talk or be busy any way.’ There was in any case no sense of privacy in the sixteenth-century world; men commonly shared beds, and princes dined in public. The individuals of every community were under endless scrutiny from their neighbours, and were subject to ridicule or even punishment if they breached generally accepted standards. There was no notion of liberty. If it was asked, ‘May I not do as I wish with what belongs to me?’, the answer came that no man may do what is wrong. In every schoolroom, and from every pulpit, the virtue of obedience was emphasized. It was God’s law, against which there could be no appeal.

The clergy were asked to supervise their parishioners, and the local justices were supposed to watch the bishops to see if they ‘do truly, sincerely, and without all manner of cloak, colour or dissimulation execute and accomplish our will and commandment’. ‘Taletellers’ and ‘counterfeiters of news’ were to be apprehended. The Act of Succession was nailed to the door of every parish church in the country, and the clergy were ordered to preach against the pretensions of the pope; they were forbidden to speak of disputed matters such as purgatory and the veneration of the saints. The royal supremacy was to be proclaimed from every pulpit in the land. Henry demanded no more and no less than total obedience by methods which no king before him had presumed to use. He made it clear that, in obeying their sovereign, the people were in effect obeying God. In the same period the king and Cromwell were reforming local government by placing their trusted men in the provincial councils. In Ireland and Wales and northern England, the old guard was replaced by new and supposedly more loyal men. The country was given order by a strong central authority supervised by Thomas Cromwell, who sent out a series of circular letters to sheriffs and bishops and judges.

The oath attendant upon the Act of Succession was rapidly imposed. The whole of London swore. In Yorkshire the people were ‘most willing to take the oath’. The sheriff of Norwich reported that ‘never were people more willing or diligent’. In the small village of Little Waldingfield in Suffolk, ninety-eight signed with their name, and thirty-five with a mark.

A few refused to sign, however, believing that it was contrary to the will of the pope and of the whole Church. Among these brave, or stubborn, spirits were the Carthusian friars of Charterhouse. It is reported on good authority that the king himself went in disguise to the monastery, in order to debate with them on the matter. Those who stood firm were soon imprisoned. On 15 June 1534 one of the king’s men reported to Thomas Cromwell that the Observant Friars of Richmond were also refusing to conform; ‘their conclusion was,’ he wrote, ‘they had professed St Francis’s religion, and in the observance thereof they would live and die’. And, yes, they would die. Two days later, two carts full of friars were driven through the city on their way to the Tower.

The recalcitrant bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, refused to take the oath and was also consigned to the Tower; from his prison he wrote to Cromwell beseeching him to take pity and ‘let me have such things as are necessary for me in mine age’. A visitor reported that he looked like a skeleton, scarcely able to bear the clothes on his back.

Thomas More was also summoned before Cranmer and Cromwell at Lambeth Palace, where the oath was given to him for his perusal; but he also refused to subscribe. He was happy to swear that the children of Anne Boleyn could succeed to the throne, but he could not declare on oath that all the previous Acts of Parliament had been valid. He could not deny the authority of the pope ‘without the jeoparding of my soul to perpetual damnation’. He too was consigned to the Tower, where he would remain until his execution. Another notable refusal came from the king’s first daughter, Mary, who could not be persuaded to renounce her mother. She was not yet put to the test of formal signature, but her position was clear enough. When Anne Boleyn heard the news she declared that the ‘cursed bastard’ should be given ‘a good banging’. Mary was in fact confined to her room, and one of her servants was dispatched to prison. She soon became ill once more and the king’s physician, after visiting her, declared that the sickness came in part from ‘sorrow and trouble’.

Some last steps had to be taken in the long separation from the pope. The final Act of the parliament, assembled at a second session in November, was to bring to a conclusion and a culmination all of its previous work. The oath of succession was refined, in the light of experience with More and others, and a new Treasons Act was passed that prohibited on pain of death malicious speech against the king and the royal family. It would be treason, for example, to call the king a heretic or a schismatic or a tyrant. Now it was a question of loyalty rather than theology.

A Supremacy Act was also passed that gave legal and coherent form to all of the powers that the king had assumed, with the statement that ‘the king our sovereign lord, and his heirs and successors, shall be taken, accepted and reputed as the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England, called Anglicana Ecclesia’. He could reform all errors and correct all heresies; his spiritual authority could not be challenged. He lacked only potestas ordinis; because he was not a priest, he had no right to administer the sacraments or to preach. He was the Catholic head of a Catholic Church. Thus, in the words of John Foxe, the pope was ‘abolished, eradicated and exploded out of this land’. The king was effectively acting upon a principle of English thought and practice that had first manifested itself in the twelfth century. The opposition between William Rufus and Anselm of Canterbury was similar to that between Henry and Archbishop Warham. One of the servants of the king’s father, Edmund Dudley, had stated twenty years before that ‘the root of the love of God, which is to know Him with good works, within this realm must chiefly grow by our sovereign lord the king’. This veneration of the Crown was one of the abiding aspects of English history.

The frontispiece to Miles Coverdale’s translation of the Bible, published in 1535, displayed an image of the king sitting on his throne beneath the Almighty. Henry holds in each hand a book on which is written ‘The Word of God’; he is giving copies to Cranmer and to another bishop, saying ‘Take this and preach’. In the lower part of the frontispiece the people are shouting ‘Vivat Rex! Vivat Rex!’ while children who know no Latin are saying ‘God save the King!’

In retaliation for the Act of Supremacy the pope issued a bull of interdict and deposition against the king. Henry was now a thing accursed; on his death his body should be denied burial, while his soul could be cast into hell for ever. The people of England would be declared contumacious unless they rose in instant rebellion; their marriages would be deemed illegal and their wills invalid. No true son of the Church should now trade, or communicate, with the island. On the urgent wish of the French king, however, the pope did not publish this general excommunication for three years. At this juncture, foreign politics came to the assistance of Henry.

The more conservative of the bishops believed that Henry would now be the bulwark against German heresy, while Cranmer hoped that the king would be the instrument of reform. In this expectation he was joined by Thomas Cromwell, who knew that his master could now grow rich as well as powerful. A document had been prepared entitled ‘Things to be moved for the king’s highness for an increase and augmentation to be had for the maintenance of his most royal estate’. It was proposed that the lands and incomes of the Church should in large part be diverted to the king’s treasury.

At the beginning of 1535, therefore, a survey of the Church’s worth was undertaken. It was the largest such report since the Domesday Book of the eleventh century. The officials from every cathedral and every parish church, every monastery and every hospital, every convent and every collegiate church, were obliged to open their estate books and their accounts; they were questioned on oath about their income from tithes and from lands. They were asked to give an account of their gold chalices and their silver candlesticks. Within a short time the king knew exactly how much he could expect from church revenue, having already laid down that a tenth of its income should be his. In the process he took much more than the pope ever did.

In the same period Thomas Cromwell had been appointed ‘vicegerent’, or administrative deputy in spiritual matters, precisely in order to supervise the collection of revenue. He was accustomed to questions of church money; it had been he who, under Wolsey, had appropriated the incomes of certain monasteries for the sake of the cardinal’s new college at Oxford. In the summer of the year the ‘visitations’ of the smaller monasteries began in the west of England, seeking out instances of venality and immorality among the monks and abbots; the visitors were given power to discipline or remove recalcitrant clergy, and encouraged the brothers to denounce one another for various sins. It was said of one prior that he ‘hath but six children and but one daughter … he thanks God he never meddled with married women, but all with maidens the fairest that could be got … the pope, considering his fragility, gave him licence to keep an whore’. It was decreed that no abbot or monk should be permitted to walk outside the walls of the monastery. It was also determined that all religious under the age of twenty-four were to be dismissed. Some novices had appeared at service in top-boots and hats with satin rosettes.

The visitors then turned their attention to the universities, where it was decided that the learning of the scholastics and the medieval doctors should be abandoned in favour of the humanist learning approved by Erasmus and other reformers. Daily lectures in Latin and in Greek, central to the principles of Renaissance learning, were instituted. The study of canon law was discontinued. If the visitations were primarily concerned with the raising of revenue, they also engaged themselves with matters of religious and educational renovation.

This was also the dying time. The monks of the Charterhouse were the first to be executed, having been arraigned under the Treasons Act just passed by parliament. The jury were not eager to sentence to death such holy men, but Cromwell told them that they would themselves suffer death if they refused. When their prior, John Haughton, heard the verdict he simply said, ‘This is the judgment of the world.’ On 4 May 1535, they were brought in their habits to the scaffold, the first time in English history that clergy have suffered in their ecclesiastical dress. Haughton was the first to die. He was partially hanged before his heart was ripped out and rubbed in his face; his bowels were then pulled from his stomach, while he still lived, and burned before him. He was beheaded and his body cut into quarters. Two more followed, and then three in the next month. Many lords and courtiers were part of the crowd, including two dukes and an earl, and it was reported that ‘the king himself would have liked to see the butchery’. It was an image of his power over the Church and the people.

The citizens of London were less sanguine about the punishment and many were horrified that monks should suffer in their habits. It was observed that, since the day of their death, it had never ceased to rain. The corn harvest was a failure, yielding only a third of the usual crop. All this was conceived to be a sign of divine displeasure. Yet who now would dare to speak out against the king? Certain noblemen, however, sent secret messages to Spain in an effort to spur an invasion; it was said that the king had lost the hearts of all his subjects.

In a memorandum book belonging to Thomas Cromwell are the following notes:

Item – to advertise with the king of the ordering of Master Fisher.

Item – to know his pleasure touching Master More.

Master Fisher was indeed put on trial in the middle of June, accused of high treason for having said that ‘the king our sovereign lord is not supreme head in earth of the Church of England’. His fate was not averted by the decision of the pope to grant him the red hat of a cardinal. To Henry this seemed to be mere meddling in the affairs of England, and he promised that his head would be off before the hat was on. The hat got as far as Calais.

A jury of twelve freeholders condemned the aged cleric to a traitor’s death, in the manner of the Carthusians, but true to his word Henry commuted the punishment to a simple beheading. Five days later, on 22 June 1535, Fisher was taken to the scaffold; emaciated and ill, he was too weak to walk to the site of execution on Tower Hill, and so he was carried in a chair where before his execution he besought those present to pray for him. ‘I beseech Almighty God,’ he said, ‘of His infinite goodness to save the king and this realm …’ His head was taken off at the first stroke, and the observers were astonished that so much blood should gush from so skeletal a body.

The day after the execution the king attended an anti-papal pageant, based upon the Book of Revelation. Such spectacles and dramas were becoming more frequent. The imperial ambassador observed that the king sat retired ‘but was so pleased to see himself represented as cutting off the heads of the clergy that, in order to laugh at his ease and encourage the people, he discovered himself’.

Thomas More followed John Fisher to the scaffold. Four days after Fisher’s death a special commission was established to consider his case. Ever since his imprisonment in the Tower he had been cajoled and bullied by Cromwell, in the hope that he might relent. Cromwell even insinuated that More’s obstinacy, by providing a bad example, had helped to bring the Carthusians to destruction. This proved too much for even his patience to bear. ‘I do nobody harm,’ he replied, ‘I say none harm, I think none harm, but wish everybody good. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith I long not to live.’

The trial was held in Westminster Hall, where he conducted himself with acuity and dignity. But the verdict was never for a moment in doubt. He was convicted of treason and five days later was led to Tower Hill where the axe awaited him. His last words were a jest to the executioner. ‘You will give me this day,’ he told him, ‘a greater benefit than ever any mortal man can be able to give me. Pluck up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thine office. My neck is very short; take heed, therefore, thou strike not awry for saving of thine honesty.’

Katherine of Aragon, witnessing the destruction of those whom she considered saints, sent an urgent letter to the pope with the message that ‘if a remedy be not applied shortly, there will be no end to ruined souls and martyred saints. The good will be firm and suffer. The lukewarm will fail if they find none to help them.’ But no help was at hand. The execution of More and Fisher, together with that of the Carthusian monks, was considered by the Catholic countries of Europe to be an act of barbarism, the Christian princes conveniently forgetting their own savage measures against supposed heretics. There was no Inquisition in England.

In the search for allies, therefore, it became advisable to reach some accord with the Protestant leaders of Germany. In a message to the elector of Saxony, for example, Henry congratulated him for his ‘most virtuous mind’ and declared that the two countries ‘standing together would be so much stronger to withstand their adversaries’. It was hoped that a league of the reforming nations of Europe might then be formed. It was also hoped that the king might be persuaded to sign the Lutheran confession of faith, known as the Confession of Augsburg, that had been drawn up five years before by the German princes. The proposals came to nothing.

The scope of the ‘visitations’ of the smaller monasteries was extended in the autumn of 1535. The visitors had previously confined their attentions to the west of England; when their work was completed there, they moved on to the east and to the southeast before travelling to the north at the beginning of 1536. The speed of their researches did not augur well for their reliability. Yet the visitors continually questioned and investigated the priors, the abbots, the monks and their servants: ‘Whether the divine service was kept up, day and night, in the right hours? And how many were commonly present, and who were frequently absent?’ ‘Whether they kept company with women, within or without the monastery? Or if there were any back-doors, by which women came within the precinct?’ ‘Whether they had any boys lying by them?’ ‘Whether any of the brethren were incorrigible?’ ‘Whether you do wear your religious habit continually, and never leave it off but when you go to bed?’

There were in all eighty-six questions. One prior was accused of preaching treason and was forced to his knees before he confessed. The abbot of Fountains kept six whores. The abbot of Battle was described to Cromwell as ‘the veriest hayne, beetle and buserde, and the arrentest chorle that ever I see’. A hayne was a wretch; a beetle was a blockhead; and a buserde was a stupid person. An arrentest chorle may be described as a thoroughly boorish wretch. The canons of Leicester Abbey were accused of buggery. The prior of Crutched Friars was found in bed with a woman at eleven o’clock on a Friday morning. The abbot of West Langdon was described as the ‘drunkenest knave living’. The visitor, Richard Leyton, described to Cromwell how he had entered the abbot’s lodging. ‘I was a good space knocking at the abbot’s door; no voice answered, saving the abbot’s little dog that within his door fast locked bayed and barked. I found a short poleaxe standing behind the door, and with it I dashed the abbot’s door in pieces … and about the house I go, with that poleaxe in my hand, for this abbot is a dangerous desperate knave, and a hardy.’

The visitors also noted the number of shrines and relics that they observed in the course of their labours; they marked them under the heading of ‘superstitio’, a sign of the direction in which Cromwell and his servants were moving. At the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, for example, they found one of the stones with which St Stephen was killed and one of the coals with which St Lawrence was roasted. In the same establishment they came across the skull of St Petronilla that people sick of the fever placed on their heads. The monasteries were therefore considered to be beds of papistry, and it was said that the monks were in a sense the reserve army of Rome. Thomas Cromwell described them as ‘the pope’s spies’. If there was no evidence of wrongdoing, the visitors merely concluded that the monks were engaged in a conspiracy of silence. When sins are being actively looked for, they can always be found.

A parliament was called in February 1536, the last session of a body that had been assembled seven years before. It has since become known as the Reformation Parliament, and can perhaps be called the most important in all of English history. The king came into the House of Lords with a ‘declaration’ about the state of the monasteries, no doubt based upon the various reports of the visitors. Hugh Latimer, appointed bishop of Worcester in the previous year, was present on the occasion and records that ‘when their enormities were first read in the parliament house, they were so great and abominable that there was nothing but down with them’. Some dissent may have been expressed. According to one report the king summoned members of the Commons to the royal gallery. ‘I hear,’ he said, ‘that my bill will not pass, but I will have it pass, or I will have some of your heads.’

An Act for the Dissolution of Monasteries was indeed passed, by which all religious houses with an annual income of less than £200 were to be ‘suppressed’. This was a large sum of money, and in theory 419 monastic houses were obliged to close; yet the abbots made petitions for exemptions, and 176 of the monasteries were granted a stay of execution. It is also clear Cromwell and his servants were bribed in money or in goods. Yet this was not a general dissolution. The larger monasteries had not been touched, and the monks of the smaller establishments were given leave to transfer to them. All was still well in the ‘great and solemn monasteries wherein (thanks be to God) religion is right well kept and observed’. It is hard to believe, however, that piety only began at £200 per year.

As a consequence the protests were few and uncoordinated. It might be thought that Cromwell’s strategy was to proceed slowly and cautiously, removing one obstacle at a time. It is more likely, however, that the king and his chief minister were trying to find their way in unfamiliar territory; they were not yet clear about their final objective and fashioned their policy as they went along. The senior clergy in convocation were in the meantime formulating the principles of the new faith under the royal supremacy. The imperial ambassador noted that ‘they do not admit of purgatory nor of the observance of Lent and other fasts, nor of the festivals of saints, and worship of images which is the shortest way to arrive at the plundering of the church of St Thomas of Canterbury and other places of resort for pilgrims in this country’. In this conclusion, the ambassador was correct. It was a practical and financial, rather than a dogmatic and doctrinal, decision.

Parliament, in its last session, also established a Court of Augmentations through which all the revenues from the dissolution of the monasteries – all the rents and tithes – were to be adjudicated and passed to the Crown. Other parties were also interested in the spoils. One lord wrote to Cromwell ‘beseeching you to help me to some old abbey in mine old days’. The court was duly set up in the spring of 1536. This was, in a word Thomas Cranmer now used for the first time, the ‘world of reformation’.

8

A little neck

On 7 January 1536 Katherine of Aragon died. Rejected and humiliated by her husband, deprived of the company of her daughter, her last years had not been happy ones. She had been alternately abused and threatened, but she could not be moved from the fact that Henry was her lawful husband. She clung to this certainty as the world around her shifted. It was even rumoured that the king was ready to behead her, but it is unlikely that he would have made so egregious a mistake. She had written to her daughter, Mary, that ‘he will not suffer you to perish, if you beware to offend him’; it is not exactly a ringing endorsement of his clemency. She also advised her daughter that ‘in whatsoever company you shall come, obey the king’s commandments, speak few words and meddle nothing’. She had not meddled; she had simply endured. The Spanish were always associated, in this period, with formality and self-control; she had those qualities to the highest degree. In a letter written to her husband, hours before her death, she implored him to preserve his soul from the peril of sins ‘for which you have cast me into many miseries and yourself into many cares’. She signed it as ‘Katherine the Queen’. It was suspected by some that she had been poisoned, but in fact a cancerous tumour was found around her heart.

On hearing the news of her death the king rejoiced. ‘God be praised,’ he said, ‘we are free from all suspicion of war!’ He had been concerned that her nephew, Charles V, might form a Catholic league with France and the pope against the infidel of England. On the following day he and Anne Boleyn appeared at a ball, both of them dressed in brilliant yellow.

It is not known how Mary learned of the death of her mother, but the news provoked another bout of illness. She was once more threatened by Anne Boleyn. ‘If I have a son, as I hope shortly,’ Anne wrote, ‘I know what will happen to her.’ ‘She is my death,’ Anne had once said, ‘and I am hers.’ Mary was now alone in the world, and her thoughts turned to the prospect of escape to her mother’s imperial family in Brussels. She spoke to the imperial ambassador about the possibility of fleeing across the Channel, but he advised caution and circumspection. In the meantime, he said ‘she is daily preparing herself for death’. She was in a most invidious position. In certain circumstances she might be considered a pretender to the throne. Those who wished to rebel against the new order of religion, for example, would welcome her at their head. She was surrounded by perils.

On the day of Katherine’s burial in the abbey church of Peterborough, 29 January, Anne Boleyn miscarried a male child; it was one more link in the chain of fate that bound together the two women. Anne blamed the accident on the shock she had received, five days before, on hearing the news that the king had fallen from his horse during a jousting match at the tiltyard in Greenwich; he had lain unconscious on the ground for two hours. Yet the king believed, or chose to believe, that the hand of divine providence lay behind the event. ‘I see,’ he is reported to have said, ‘that God will not give me male children.’

The king’s attentions were already wandering once more. Thomas Cromwell had told the imperial ambassador that ‘in future he was to lead a more moral life than hitherto – a chaste and marital one with his present queen’. Yet the minister had put a hand to his mouth in order to hide his smile, so the ambassador concluded that he was not necessarily telling the truth. Henry was in fact pursuing Jane Seymour, a young lady in the household of Anne Boleyn herself, whose rather sharp features were later bequeathed to her son. It was reported that Anne Boleyn found the girl on her husband’s knee and flew into a rage, but this may just be later gossip.

The ambassador also tells another story that hints at the complications of the court. While speaking to ‘the brother of the damsel the king is now courting’, he witnessed an argument when ‘angry words seemed to be passing between the king and Cromwell for, after a considerable interval of time, the latter came out of the embrasure of the window where the king was standing, on the excuse that he was so thirsty he could go on no longer, and this he really was, from sheer annoyance, for he went to sit on a chest, out of the king’s sight, and asked for something to drink’. Eventually Henry came looking for him.

A courtier once described how ‘the king beknaveth him [Cromwell] twice a week, and sometimes knocks him well about the pate; and yet when he hath been well pummelled about the head and shaken up as it were a dog, he will come out of the Great Chamber … with as merry a countenance as though he might rule all the roost’. This is the human aspect of court life, rarely observed, where we are able to glimpse the constant personal tensions that fashioned the decisions we now call history.

Great and malign changes, indeed, were soon to occur at the court. It was reported that the king had expressed his horror of Anne Boleyn to an intimate in the privy chamber, and accused her of luring him into marriage through the use of witchcraft. That is why he had been abandoned by God. So the story goes. Yet in practice he still behaved to her with every courtesy and attention, and the records show that she was spending a great deal of money on fine garments for herself and her daughter. There was every reason to suppose, despite the fears of the king, that she might bear another child. Anne Boleyn herself professed to believe so.

But then the calamity struck. On 24 April two separate commissions, under the conditions of utmost secrecy, were established to search into occasions and suspicions of treason. On one of them sat Thomas Cromwell and the duke of Norfolk, Anne Boleyn’s uncle but no longer her friend. Three days later it was suggested that the king might wish for a divorce. What had happened? One of the ladies at the court had spoken unwisely about the queen’s affairs and had mentioned a certain ‘Mark’. Once it had been spoken, it could not be unsaid. To conceal or to attempt to suppress information about the queen’s alleged infidelity would be equivalent to treason – or, in the phrase of the time, misprision or concealment of treason. The rumour or report had immediately taken on a life of its own.

On 30 April Mark Smeaton, a court musician and a groom of the privy chamber, was taken from Greenwich to the Tower where he confessed to having been Anne’s lover; that confession may have smelled of the rack, but it might have been a true account prompted by terror. He never retracted it and repeated it at the foot of the gallows. On the following day at the May Day jousts Anne’s brother, George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, rode against Sir Henry Norris; Norris was the intimate friend of the sovereign and the chief gentleman of the privy chamber. They were both soon to die for the suspicion of having lain with Anne Boleyn.

After the joust was over the king rode from Greenwich to Whitehall, taking Norris with him as one of a small company. During the journey he turned on Norris and accused him of pursuing an affair with his wife. To meddle with the queen of England was treason. The king promised him a pardon if he confessed the truth, but Norris vehemently denied the charge. He was taken to the Tower at dawn on the following day. George Boleyn had already been arrested, and charged with having sexual relations with his own sister. The evidence for the incest came from his wife, Lady Rochford, who may have spoken out of malice towards her promiscuous husband. The ladies of the queen’s household had also been interrogated and may have revealed interesting information. Some five men were accused of having slept with her – Mark Smeaton, George Boleyn, Henry Norris, William Brereton, Francis Weston – and were executed. Three others, including Thomas Wyatt the poet, were acquitted. These commissions of inquiry were not necessarily show trials.

The queen herself was interrogated by the king’s council. At one point Anne Boleyn was seen entreating the king in Greenwich Palace, with her baby daughter in her arms; but this was not enough. The cannon was soon fired, as a token that a noble or a royal had been taken to the Tower. When she arrived at that place she fell on her knees and prayed ‘God to help her, as she was not guilty of the thing for which she was accused’. When she was told that Smeaton and Norris were among those incarcerated she cried out: ‘Oh Norris have you accused me? You are in the Tower with me, and you and I will die together; and Mark, so will you.’

She had spoken with her gaoler in the Tower, Sir William Kingston, about certain earlier conversations:

Anne Boleyn: Why don’t you get on with your marriage?

Henry Norris: I will wait a while.

Anne Boleyn: You look for dead man’s shoes; for if anything happens to the king, you would look to have me.

Henry Norris: If I had any such thought, let my head be cut off.

A dialogue with Mark Smeaton was also remembered:

Anne Boleyn: Why are you so sad?

Mark Smeaton: It does not matter.

Anne Boleyn: You must not expect me to speak to you as if you were a nobleman, since you are an inferior person.

Mark Smeaton: No, no, madam. A look suffices me.

The remarks were not proof of guilt, by any means, but they do not appear to be entirely innocent. ‘Imagining the king’s death’, as Anne had done, was in itself an act of treason. It would not be difficult for a jury to convict her. The royal court had now turned against her, sensing in which direction the wind was blowing. Only Cranmer had doubts. ‘I am in such perplexity,’ he told the king, that ‘my mind is clean amazed; for I never had better opinion in woman than I had in her.’

Four of the accused were brought to trial in the middle of May, in Westminster Hall, while George Boleyn was to be arraigned before his peers in the Tower. Only Smeaton acknowledged his crime by repeating his confession that he had known the queen carnally on three occasions. The others pleaded not guilty. It is reported that Norris had also confessed, on first being questioned, but then withdrew the confession. They were all sentenced to death.

On her first arrival the queen had asked the lieutenant of the Tower, Sir William Kingston, if she would die without being shown justice. ‘The poorest subject the king has,’ he replied, ‘has justice.’ And, at that, she laughed. She knew well enough that she would not survive the anger and suspicion of the king. She and her brother were taken to the Great Hall of the Tower before twenty-seven peers of the realm, as a mark of respect to their rank, and were questioned. ‘I can say no more but “nay”,’ the queen said ‘without I should open my body. If any man accuse me, I can say but “nay”, and they can bring no witnesses.’ The pair were duly convicted of high treason, for which the penalty in the queen’s case was death by burning. Yet a beheading was penalty enough. The lieutenant of the Tower told her that ‘it will be no pain, it was so subtle’.

‘I have heard say,’ she replied, ‘that the executioner is very good, and I have a little neck.’ Then she put her hands about her neck, and laughed. On 19 May, just before noon, she was brought to the scaffold within the walls of the Tower. In her nervousness she continually glanced behind her, as if she might be taken unawares. She was the first queen of England ever to be beheaded. Her exact age at the time is unknown, but it is estimated that she was in her early thirties. When the executioner held up the head, its eyes and lips moved. Her body was then thrown into a common chest of elm-tree, made to hold arrows.

Henry had also taken the precaution of having his marriage to Anne annulled, on the grounds that she had been involved in a liaison nine years before, without seeming to realize that if she had not been his wife she could not have committed adultery. But he wished to expunge her, to blot her out. Whether he was right to do so has been a matter of controversy ever since the events themselves. It has been supposed, for example, that Anne Boleyn was the victim of a conspiracy managed by Cromwell or by the ‘conservative’ faction at the court.

Yet common sense would suggest that this would be a perilous undertaking indeed. All of the men accused were well known at court; George Boleyn was her brother, in high estate, and Henry Norris was the intimate of the king. It would have been madness to implicate such men in a scheme that had no foundation. At the trial all the details of the times and places were read out, as, for example, in the first indictment that ‘the queen [on the] 6th October 25 Hen. VIII [1533] at Westminster, by words etc., procured and incited one Henry Norris, Esq., one of the gentlemen of the king’s privy chamber, to have illicit intercourse with her; and that the act was committed at Westminster, 12th October 25 Hen. VIII’. The details may not have been entirely accurate, but the fact that they were given suggests a strong and definitive case was being made. This was not some nebulous charge built upon rumour and false report. Why accuse five men, four of them known and respected, when one would have been sufficient?

And the charges were believed. It is true enough that no one would willingly defy the wishes of the king, but it is still the case that twenty-seven peers unanimously decided that the queen had indeed committed incest with her brother. Two grand juries and a petty jury had concluded the cases of the other men.

It is at least possible that Anne Boleyn was not as innocent as she claimed. It may be that she pursued other men in desperate search for a male child who could be hailed as the heir to the throne, thereby saving herself and her family for the foreseeable future. Another aspect of the trial was suppressed. It was alleged against her that she had spoken to George Boleyn’s wife about the king’s impotence. A piece of paper detailing the matter was handed to George Boleyn, during the course of the trial, that he was supposed to read in silence. ‘The king was not skilful in copulating with a woman and he had not virtue or power.’ In scorn, and bravado, he read it out aloud. That is not necessarily the action of an honest man. It is the action of a defendant daring the court to do its worst. Boleyn also did not deny that he had spread rumours about the princess Elizabeth’s true paternity. It was in fact rumoured that the real father was Sir Henry Norris. No one can at this late date be certain of anything. The truth, as always, lies at the bottom of the well. The best epigraph of the events in the spring of 1536 comes from one of those briefly accused, Thomas Wyatt:

These bloody days have broke my heart,

My lust, my youth, did then depart …

The king dressed in white on the day of Anne Boleyn’s execution, and on the following morning he married again. He must have been thoroughly convinced of her guilt, or had come upon another offence that he never disclosed, or both. When his illegitimate son, Henry of Richmond, visited him the king greeted him with tears saying that he and Mary ‘ought to thank God for having escaped from the hands of that woman, who had planned their deaths by poison’. He was said to have behaved with an almost defiant gaiety, and to have composed a verse tragedy in which Anne Boleyn had 100 different amours.

The king had a further reason to remarry. He was now forty years old and he was desperate for a male heir. He had in effect already bastardized Mary and Elizabeth. The duke of Richmond was illegitimate and therefore ineligible.

The death of Anne Boleyn was not greeted with any great dismay by the people of England. Anne had been in large part disparaged by the populace, at least in private, and a contemporary described the joy evinced ‘at the ruin of the concubine’. Henry’s new wife, Jane Seymour, was not herself universally popular. ‘There is a ballad made lately of great derision against us,’ Henry told her ‘which if it go abroad and is seen by you, I pray you to pay no manner of regard to it. I am not at present informed who is the setter forth of this malignant writing; but if he is found, he shall be straitly punished for it.’ The man was in fact never found.

The joy of the people was also part of a general belief that Lady Mary would now be restored to royal favour. Yet this was too optimistic an interpretation of events at court. Thomas Cromwell now moved against Mary’s supporters on the grounds that they had been trying to engineer the succession on her behalf. It seems that Jane Seymour herself urged her new husband to reconcile himself with his oldest daughter, but instead Henry subjected Mary to even more pressure.

He sent a delegation to her, under the leadership of the duke of Norfolk, urging her to take the oath of allegiance; this would entail repudiating the marriage of her mother and her own legitimacy. It would also require her to accept the king as supreme head of the Church. On all these matters, she declined to swear. The duke of Norfolk then declared that she was guilty of treason. It was clear enough that Henry was willing to prosecute her, with all the unhappy and perhaps even unbearable consequences. Thomas Cromwell wrote to her that ‘I think you the most obstinate and obdurate woman … that ever was’; he urged her to repent ‘your ingratitude and miserable unkindness’. He warned that otherwise she would reach ‘the point of utter undoing’ which might include a traitor’s death. She was now twenty-one years of age.

A short while after, she surrendered. The imperial ambassador had remonstrated with her, telling her that it was her duty to survive the chaos and the terror. He persuaded her that her destiny might lie in rescuing the nation for the true faith, and that nothing in the world should prevent this. Martyrdom would be a failure of responsibility. She did not read the declaration of submission, but simply signed it. She had declared ‘the King’s Highness to be the supreme head in earth under Christ of the Church of England’ and that the marriage between her mother and the king ‘was by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful’.

She could go no further. In her abject state she wrote to her father declaring that ‘my body I do wholly commit to your mercy and fatherly pity, desiring no state, no condition nor no manner or degree of living but such as your grace shall appoint unto me’. She was at once welcomed back into royal favour, but the damage to her conscience and sense of self had been done. She would never bend, or weaken her will, again. The guilt of repudiating her mother would remain with her, perhaps to be in part allayed by the fires of Smithfield. It is reported that she was overcome with sorrow and remorse, immediately after signing the document, and asked the imperial ambassador to obtain for her a special dispensation from Rome. Yet she seems to have adjusted to her return to court very well, purchasing jewellery and fine clothes; she gambled, modestly but continuously, and had her own group of minstrels. She also had her own ‘fool’, a lady called Jane, with a shaven head.

After the beheading of Anne Boleyn it was clear that the party of religious change, which had profited by her intervention in the affairs of the realm, might be destined for an eclipse. In Rome dislike of the king was replaced by something like sympathetic pity, in the pious hope that Henry might now return to the embrace of the Church after his experiences with the ‘witch’. That was of course entirely to misunderstand the nature of Henry’s reform. He had never been opposed to the doctrines of the Church, only to its leadership. His understanding of the power, and profits, he had thereby gained was enough to prohibit any return to Rome. He believed also that religious unity was the prerequisite of political unity.

He saw himself in the role of the Old Testament kings who were determined to enforce the law of God upon their kingdoms in the fear that they might be consumed by divine wrath. Had not Jehoash, king of Israel, stripped the priests of their gold? Had not Josiah renovated the Temple of the Lord? Had not Solomon sat in judgment? The bishop of Durham, Cuthbert Tunstall, declared that Henry acted ‘as the chief and best of the kings of Israel did, and as all good Christian kings ought to do’.

His assertion of royal supremacy, however, was aligned with a desire for reform of the monasteries and the colleges. The king attended several Masses each day and never proclaimed or believed himself to be a Lutheran. He was also attached to various forms of popular piety, including the ritual of ‘creeping to the cross’. All his life he fingered a personal rosary, now in the possession of the duke of Devonshire, and ordained many requiem Masses at the time of his death. He was in most respects an orthodox Catholic.

A meeting of parliament was called at the beginning of June in order to discuss the circumstances of the realm after the recent execution of Anne Boleyn. It cancelled the two Acts favourable to Anne Boleyn and her offspring, thus reducing Elizabeth to the same status as Mary. The lord chancellor extolled the third marriage of the king, who, ‘at the humble entreaty of his nobility, has consented once more to accept that condition and has taken to himself a wife who in age and form is deemed to be meet and apt for the procreation of children’.

The key was the begetting of a male heir and, if the king should die (which God forbid!) or the new queen prove infertile ‘he desires you therefore to nominate some person as his heir apparent’. Their answer may already have been agreed and rehearsed. In the absence of a legitimate male heir, parliament granted the king the power to bequeath his crown at his will. The way, therefore, was open to the illegitimate duke of Richmond. He was the least bad alternative. Yet the frailty of the dynasty was confirmed when, in the summer of 1536, Richmond died of tuberculosis or some other undiagnosed lung complaint; Henry ordered that the body should be buried secretly, to prevent public disquiet, but nothing could conceal the fact that the succession now rested on two daughters who had been declared illegitimate. The young man’s ornate tomb is still to be seen at the church of St Michael the Archangel in Framlingham, Suffolk.

The evidence of the king’s anxiety at this time emerged when in the summer Lord Thomas Howard, the younger brother of the duke of Norfolk, was accused of treason; his crime was to contract himself to Lady Margaret Douglas, the daughter of the queen of Scots. Since the queen was Henry’s sister, Henry suspected that Howard was aiming at the succession. Howard was confined to the Tower where he died in the following year.

In June 1536 the convocation of the senior clergy had been assembled at St Paul’s. Hugh Latimer, the recently consecrated bishop of Worcester and principal reformer, had been chosen to preach to them. His text came from the sixteenth chapter of St Luke’s Gospel, namely ‘the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light’. He asked them to examine their hearts and enquire what they had achieved in convocation after convocation. The odious fictions of Rome survived even still, including ‘the canonizations and beatifications, the totquots and dispensations, the pardons of marvellous variety’ as well as ‘the ancient purgatory pickpurse’. You know the proverb, he told them. An evil crow, an evil egg. At the end of his sermon he warned them that ‘God will visit you. He will come. He will not tarry long.’

The reaction of the 500 clerical delegates is not known, but two weeks later they presented the king with a petition of complaint against the numerous blasphemies and heresies that were now circulating through the kingdom. It was a barely disguised attack on Latimer and other radicals. They were aggrieved that the sacrament of the altar was being described as a ‘little pretty piece Round Robin’. The hallowed oil of extreme unction was ‘the bishop of Rome’s grease and butter’. Our Lady was only a woman ‘like a bag of saffron or pepper when the spice was out’. Mass and matins were ‘but roaring, howling, whistling, mumming, conjuring and juggling’. It was an implicit invitation to the king to bring to a halt the process of reform. There was no question of ‘toleration’. The concept was only rarely mentioned. Matters of religion were too powerful and too important to be treated with circumspection. Falsehood was to be prosecuted by every means available.

In response Henry, with the help of Cranmer and others, drew up a summary of the articles of faith that the people of England were required to believe. The preface to the Ten Articles declared that their purpose was to bring ‘unity and concord in opinion’. In truth the king wished to assert the royal supremacy, and the general renovation of the Church, without embracing Lutheran doctrine. He seems to have concurred with the reformers’ emphasis upon only three of the sacraments – those of baptism, penance and the Eucharist – without denying the efficacy of the other four. Purgatory was denounced as a pernicious invention of the bishop of Rome, but it was also declared that ‘custom of long continuance approving the same, we agree that it is meet and expedient to pray for the souls departed’. It was a question of balance. A manuscript draft of one page survives; it shows the rival scribblings of the reformer Cranmer and the conservative Tunstall vying for authority.

There are other examples of compromise or mediation. The habit of kneeling and worshipping images of the saints was considered to be unnecessarily superstitious. But other customs and ceremonies of the Church, such as the giving of ashes on Ash Wednesday and the carrying of palms on Palm Sunday, were deemed to be ‘good and laudable’. Even as the Articles were being drawn up the king and his new queen, Jane Seymour, took part in a Corpus Christi procession celebrating the Eucharist consecrated in the Mass. The question of reform was raised but by no means answered, and the English Church was still in almost all respects a Catholic Church. You may go so far, but you can go no further. The process of religious change was fitful, improvised and still uncertain. The Ten Articles were therefore described by the German reformer Melanchthon as ‘confusissime compositi’.

There was no confusion, however, in the prosecution of Henry’s immediate purpose. In the late spring and early summer of 1536, the smaller monasteries came under the hand of Thomas Cromwell. Parliament had already passed the Act for the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the early months of the year, and now the royal commissioners began their work of suppression. It took a period of six or more weeks to dissolve a small monastery. The bells were taken from the towers and the lead was stripped from the roofs; all the plate and jewellery were carried off, and the disposable corn sold. In the work of despoliation, 2,000 monks and nuns were dispossessed and sent back into the world. How they lived, on their return, is unknown.

The process, however, was not always a swift or quiet one. When the visitors determined that the rood loft in the priory of St Nicholas in Exeter should be pulled down, a crowd of angry women entered the church to seize the workman ‘and hurled stones at him, insomuch that for his safety he was driven to take to the tower for refuge’. Yet they pursued him so eagerly that he was forced to leap out of a window and ‘very hardly he escaped the breaking of his neck, but yet he brake one of his ribs’.

At the end of September the monks of Hexham in Northumberland also resisted the encroachments. When the commissioners came into the town they saw ‘many people assembled with bills, halberds and other defenceable weapons, ready standing in the street, like men ready to defend a town of war’. As the commissioners rode towards the monastery the common bell of the town and the great bell of the monastery were rung; the doors were shut against them and several monks were gathered on the roof and steeple with swords, bows and arrows. ‘We be twenty brethren in this house,’ one canon shouted, ‘and we shall die all before you shall have the house!’

They also had another weapon besides swords and bows. The archbishop of York had begged the king to spare the monks of Hexham and had indeed received a grant to that effect under the Great Seal. When the commissioners saw this grant, they withdrew. On the following day the monks came out of their house, two by two, and with their weapons joined the people of Hexham in ‘a place called the green’. From there they watched until the commissioners ‘were past out of sight of the monastery’. Yet they were punished at a later date. The king mentioned Hexham by name in a letter to the duke of Norfolk in which he states that the monks ‘are to be tied up [executed] without further delay or ceremony’.

Popular anger or frustration was further created by the publication of certain ‘injunctions’. These were issued as a result of the rulings of the Ten Articles and, among other matters, forbade the mention of purgatory and abolished many saints’ days that had hitherto been celebrated as holidays. In this year Thomas Cromwell also ordered the destruction of the shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. It was another attack upon the ‘superstitions’ maintained and exploited by the monks. To many people, and perhaps especially to the citizens of London, these were matters of indifference. But the more orthodox, and the more devout, were angry. Their resentment soon turned to open rebellion.

9

The great revolt

By the spring and summer of 1536 rumours and whispers were circulating through the kingdom. A priest from Penrith in Cumberland had travelled as far south as Tewkesbury, where he said in an alehouse that ‘we be kept bare and smit under, yet we shall rise once again, and 40,000 will rise upon a day’. He may have been in his cups but the people of the north, in particular, were aggrieved at the dissolution of the smaller monasteries. They had been providing food and comfort, in somewhat bleak circumstances, for many generations.

An Essex priest went with a labourer, by the name of Lambeles Redoon, to gather the sheaves of corn. ‘There shall be business in the north,’ the priest said before adding that he, and 10,000 others, would flock there.

‘Little said,’ the labourer wisely replied, ‘is soon amended.’

‘Remember you not what I said unto you right now, care you not for that, for before Easter comes, the king shall not reign long.’

Rumours abounded that all the jewels and vessels of the parish churches were to be removed and replaced by tin or brass. The sack of the shrines lent a certain credit to the reports. It was whispered that parish churches were to be situated at least five miles apart, and that any in closer proximity were to be pulled down. It was said that all christenings, burials and marriages were to be taxed and that no poor man was to be allowed to eat white bread or goose without paying tribute to the king. Edward Brocke, ‘an aged wretched person’, had said that there would be no end to bad weather while the king still reigned.

The fall of Anne Boleyn was believed to have been prophesied by Merlin. Other signs and portents were scrutinized. The word passed among the monasteries that ‘the decorate rose shall be slain in his mother’s belly’, which was said to mean that Henry would be killed by the priests since the Church he oppressed was his mother. The language of prophecy was the language of the people pitched against the language of royal proclamations.

Intimations of revolt emerged in the summer. When a priest in Windsor had preached rebellion, he was hanged on the spot. When fifty or sixty men and women in Taunton rose up in riot, twelve were sentenced to death and dispatched in different places for their executions to act as a warning. No priest or friar, between the age of sixteen and sixty, was permitted to carry any weapon save for his meat knife.

The first large revolt erupted at the beginning of October 1536, after three groups of royal councillors had descended upon Lincolnshire with a variety of purposes; one was set upon the suppression of the smaller monasteries, while the two others were concerned with gathering taxes and interrogating the clergy. This interference from London was considered to be too grievous to bear. In the market town of Louth a procession had gathered behind three silver crosses when a singing-man, Thomas Foster, cried out ‘Masters, step forth and let us follow the crosses this day: God knows whether ever we shall follow them again.’ The fear was of confiscation, and that evening a group of armed villagers arrived at the parish church in order to guard its treasures.

The news of these ‘rufflings’ in Louth soon spread, and bands of armed men under the leadership of one who called himself Captain Cobbler began to ride through the county to impede or stop the work of the royal commissioners; the common bells of the various parishes were rung in order to raise the people. The rebels were demanding that the king ‘must take no more money of the commons during his life and suppress no more abbeys’; they also wanted Thomas Cromwell and various ‘heretic’ bishops to be surrendered to them for condign punishment. The vicar of Louth added that the people were dismayed at ‘the putting down of holy days … and putting down of monasteries’ as well as ‘the new erroneous opinions touching Our Lady and purgatory’. Religion was at the heart of their protest.

They co-opted the support and leadership of the ‘gentlemen’, willing or unwilling, so that their revolt could have a more legitimate air. Yet when the chancellor of Lincoln was pulled from his horse and murdered by a mob, with the priests calling out ‘Kill him! Kill him!’, the affair became much more serious. The signal came for a general arming of the people, and beacons were lit along the south shore of the Humber. The people of Yorkshire saw the fires and understood the message. A large army of 10,000 men, made up of bands from different parts of Lincolnshire, met at Hambleton Hill. They gathered strength, and it was reported that 20,000 of them were advancing upon Lincoln itself.

The court had of course been informed of these events, and Henry called upon the duke of Norfolk to lead a force against the rebels. Such was his uncertainty that he brought his two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, to Whitehall, and ordered the Tower of London to be reinforced. It was possible that the whole country might rise against him. Had he miscalculated the effects of his religious policy? Stephen Gardiner, then bishop of Winchester, recalled at a later date that ‘when the tumult was in the north, in the time of King Henry VIII, I am sure the king was determined to have given over the supremacy again to the pope, but the hour was not then come’. Various reports now reached Cromwell and the king. The apprentices were leaving their masters. The towns were defenceless. The tenants were rising against their lords. There were 40,000 men on the march. The king gathered a group of fifteen councillors around him.

When the rebels arrived in Lincoln, the gentlemen were lodged in the cathedral close; the chapter-house became their meeting place. By now the king’s men had mustered many horsemen, and royal forces had gathered at Nottingham, Huntingdon and Stamford. The rebels were also intent upon battle and demanded that the gentlemen should lead them forward. It would mark the beginning of a civil war, a religious war that might destroy the country. It was reported that ‘all the gentlemen and honest yeomen of the county were weary of this matter, and sorry for it, but durst not disclose their opinion to the commons for fear of their lives’. They were in a sense now being held hostage by the ‘churls’.

They sent a message to the king seeking pardon, and then walked from the cathedral to the fields beyond the town where the commons were gathered; they told them that they would not go forward with them but would wait for the king’s reply. The news bewildered the rebels, who now began to fear that all was in crisis. A large party of them slipped back to their villages, and it was reported that half of their number left Lincoln. A royal herald now arrived at the town, demanding surrender, and in the face of the king’s power the insurgents dispersed. In answer to a petition from the commons Henry had sent a defiant message. ‘How presumptuous then are you, the rude commons of one shire,’ he wrote with more vehemence than tact, ‘and that one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm … to find fault with your Prince?’ Clemency was offered to the largest number of them, and only a few local leaders were hanged. The abbots of Kirkstead and of Barlings were also executed for their part in fomenting the troubles. The rebellion had lasted a fortnight.

But if the rebellion in Lincolnshire was over, it was merely a prelude to a much larger and more dangerous movement elsewhere. ‘This matter hangeth yet like a fever,’ an official wrote to Cromwell ‘one day good, one day bad.’ The men of Yorkshire had seen the beacons beside the Humber and eagerly took up the standard of revolt. If they had not risen in Lincolnshire, a royal commissioner told Cromwell later, they would not have risen in the north. The revolt in the East Riding was essentially a northern drift of the original rebellion, but it took a more organized form. The monasteries had played an important part in the life of Yorkshire, and the suppression of the smaller of them had been widely denounced.

The rebellion under the nominal leadership of Robert Aske, a gentleman, was begun by the bells of Beverley; a proclamation was made to the effect that all should swear an oath to maintain God, the king, the commons and the holy Church. The bishops and the nobles were of course omitted, because it was widely believed that their ‘wicked counsels’ had misled the sovereign. The king, and the common people, and the Church, were deemed to be the bedrock of England. In any case nothing could touch Henry adversely; that would be treason.

It was known as ‘the Pilgrimage of Grace’. Its token was a badge or banner depicting the five wounds of Christ, the holy wounds inflicted at the time of the crucifixion. It is perhaps sufficient indication that the rebels were in large part engaged in a religious protest. Their demands included the return of the ‘old faith’ and the restoration of the monasteries; another condition, interestingly enough, was that ‘the Lady Mary may be made legitimate and the former statute [of her illegitimacy] therein annulled’. So Mary was seen as the unofficial representative of the orthodox Catholic cause.

When the bells rang backwards at Beverley the people flocked into the fields and under Aske’s direction they agreed to meet fully armed at West Wood Green; the whole county was stirred and Aske published a declaration obliging ‘every man to be true to the king’s issue, and the noble blood, and preserve the Church of God from spoiling’. Lord Darcy, the king’s steward in Yorkshire, was informed of certain ‘light heads’ stirring up rebellion in Northumberland, Dent, Sedbergh and Wensleydale; he rode at once to Pontefract Castle and dispatched his son to the court at Whitehall. The rebellions in the North Riding and County Durham were guided by Captain Poverty, a principle rather than a person; it seems likely that the men of these areas, as well as Cumberland and Westmorland, were animated by agrarian and economic concerns as much as matters of religion. In Cumberland the four ‘captains’ – Faith, Poverty, Pity and Charity – marched in solemn procession around the church at Burgh before hearing Mass there.

Robert Aske’s pilgrims were by the middle of October intent upon marching to York. Others had been drawn off to besiege Hull, a trade rival to Beverley, which quickly fell without a fight. Darcy wrote to the king asking for money and weapons to save the king’s treasure in York, where the citizens were ‘lightly disposed’. On 15 October Aske led 20,000 men to the gates of the city and issued a proclamation in which he stated that ‘evil disposed persons’ about the king had been responsible for innovations ‘contrary to the faith of God’; they also intended to ‘spoil and rob the whole body of this realm’. This was a reference to the suppression of the smaller monasteries and to fears about the parish churches; but it also bears some relation to the burden of taxation levied on the people.

The lord mayor of York opened the gates, and Aske entered with his men; the great requirement was order, and it was decreed that the rebels or ‘pilgrims’ should pay twopence for any meal they consumed. Aske brought with him a petition to be sent to the king. This repeated all the earlier complaints and discontents, of which ‘the suppression of so many religious houses’ came first. It also denounced Thomas Cromwell and many bishops ‘who have subverted the faith of Christ’. On the door of York Minster Aske set up an order for ‘the religious persons to enter into their houses again’. Many small monasteries had been established in and around the city. The people escorted the monks by torchlight back to their old homes with much cheering and rejoicing. Wherever they were restored ‘though it were never so late they sang matins the same night’.

The Yorkshire rebels had been sadly disappointed by the failure of the Lincolnshire men, but they were now acting in a far more disciplined and determined manner. They had also gathered the willing or unwilling support of the gentry of the county, to whom they administered an oath stating that ‘you shall not enter into this our pilgrimage of grace for the commonwealth but only for the love you bear unto Almighty God his faith and to the Holy Church militant and the maintenance thereof, to the preservation of the king’s person and his issue, to the purifying of the nobility, and to expel all villein blood and evil counsellors’. The dispersal of all those of ‘villein blood’ was another sign of anxiety; it was believed that the traditional social order, and the respect for social degree, were being fatally undermined. The gentry and commons alike were deeply conservative. Aske and his followers seem to have genuinely believed that they were acting on behalf of the king, and that he would in the end thank them for their endeavours.

Aske now marched to Pontefract Castle with only 300 men. He sent in a letter to the lords gathered there that they must surrender or be threatened with an assault; he knew well enough that thousands of his men were not far behind. Darcy decided to treat with him and invited Aske to enter the state chamber where he might debate the grievances of the pilgrims with the archbishop of York and others. Aske stood in front of these great lords and explained to them that ‘first, the lords spiritual had not done their duty’. Two days later Darcy surrendered the castle. It was believed by Henry, and by others, that he had failed in his responsibilities.

The revolt had already spread beyond the bounds of Yorkshire into Cumberland and Westmorland, Durham and Northumberland; or rather it would be more exact to say that existing turmoil and suspicion were exacerbated by the events in the East Riding. Berwick and Newcastle held out for the king, as did the royal castles at Skipton and Scarborough. There was no general campaign, and only a few skirmishes; a large number of people had been mobilized with uncertain consequences.

A royal herald had arrived at Pontefract Castle and was taken to Robert Aske; the herald described him as ‘keeping his port and countenance as though he had been a great prince’. The king’s proclamation was given to him, but it seems to have contained nothing but high words. Then the report came that a royal army, under the earl of Shrewsbury, had gathered just 12 miles south of Doncaster; the soldiers were 25 miles from Pontefract Castle. It was agreed that Aske and his men should move down to the Don and oppose their crossing. It was also proposed that the commons should bear with them into any battle the sacred banner of St Cuthbert, the patron saint of the north. Other bands of armed men now joined Aske in Pontefract and the whole area was in arms.

As the rebels approached Doncaster, the royal herald arrived with a message from the earl of Shrewsbury. He said that the blood of a civil war must be averted, and suggested that ‘four of the discreetest men of the north parts’ should come to Doncaster and explain to the lords assembled there the reasons for their rising. There ensued much debate between Aske and his colleagues. If they failed in battle with the king’s men, their cause would be lost irrevocably. If they won the fight a religious war would ensue, fought largely in the south. Yet this was their best opportunity. The royal army was small and might easily be defeated, leaving the road open to London. The rebels did not know that the king’s men were in disarray and were not sure of the strength or the position of their enemy. But Aske was no Napoleon or Cromwell; he hesitated, and chose the safer option. The lords and the rebels would meet in a chosen place.

The men of Yorkshire and Durham marched towards Doncaster, the priests and monks moving along the lines with words and prayers of encouragement; they proceeded behind the banner of Cuthbert and sang a marching song:

God that rights all

Redress now shall

And what is thrall

Again make free …

They chose four delegates, who proceeded to the royal camp, where Shrewsbury had been joined by the duke of Norfolk and other grandees. The delegates had memorized their articles of complaint, about maintaining the old faith and preserving the ancient liberties of the Church, which Norfolk wrote down. It was then agreed that a conference of approximately thirty on each side would meet on Doncaster bridge, where they would discuss all of these matters. The details of their debate are not known, but it is possible that Norfolk intimated that he took their part in religious matters; he was known to be orthodox in his attachment to the old faith.

A truce was then agreed, whereby the pilgrims agreed to disperse on condition that all their complaints were put before the king. Henry himself was furious that Norfolk had come to terms with what he considered to be pernicious rebels; he had wanted them to be destroyed by the royal army. Yet the advantage now lay on his side. The pilgrims were hardly likely to rise again. He now had the indisputable benefit of time to wear down any opposition. Aske and his men continued to believe that the king would gratefully accept their proposals; once the evil counsels of Thomas Cromwell and Archbishop Cranmer were removed he would see the light once more.

On 2 November general pardons were issued for all rebels dwelling north of Doncaster, with the exception of Robert Aske and nine other instigators of the revolt. In a sermon at St Paul’s Cross, on the previous Sunday, Hugh Latimer had preached about those who wore ‘the Cross and the Wounds before and behind’ in order to ‘deceive the poor ignorant people and bring them to fight against both the King, the Church and the Commonwealth’.

When Norfolk and the other negotiators came into the king’s presence at Windsor he was at first in a furious rage against them for sparing the blood of traitors; eventually he had calmed himself enough to write down his responses to the complaints of the pilgrims. ‘First,’ he wrote, ‘as touching the maintenance of the Faith, the terms be so general, that hard they be to be answered.’ Yet he took advantage of their generality to protest that he, more than any other king, had preserved the purity of the true faith. He defied them and offered no hint of retreat. ‘Wherefore,’ he warned them, ‘henceforth remember better the duties of subjects to your king and sovereign lord, and meddle no more of those nor such like things as you have nothing to do in.’ Yet a day’s reflection convinced him that it was better to temporize with, rather than to confront, the men of Yorkshire. They were still in arms, and the ‘wild men’ of the far north were ready to join them.

The king sent a message to Lord Darcy, suggesting that by some stratagem he should kidnap or kill Aske; Darcy refused on the grounds that it was against his honour to ‘betray or disserve any living man’. It was a bold reply, but a foolish one. His loyalties were already highly suspect and he was believed to side with those of the old faith. It was alleged that he had surrendered Pontefract Castle too easily. The king suspected that many of the northern gentry were covertly engaged in rebellion, and he reacted accordingly. It was reported by two witnesses that Darcy, on hearing the news of the Lincolnshire rebellion, had said: ‘Ah, they are up in Lincolnshire. God speed them well. I would they had done this three years past, for the world should have been better than it is.’ His reckoning would soon come.

Rumours of disturbances and meetings were still coming from the northern counties; more alarming, from the court’s perspective, was the news that copies of the pilgrims’ petition were circulating in London. Aske and his men met at York and at Pontefract. Henry ordered Norfolk to return to the north where he was to demand the outright submission of the rebels; when the duke informed him that such a favourable resolution was impossible, the king grew very angry. His wrath was directed at Norfolk as much as the rebels themselves; he believed the duke to be weak and vacillating, and even half suspected him of siding with the men of the north. Yet he knew that their threat remained. He promised a free pardon, and even a meeting of parliament at York to consider their demands; he was playing for time, secretly preparing an army to defeat them in the field.

Norfolk met Aske and his colleagues once more. He agreed that the king had been misled by Cromwell and the witch, Boleyn; the ‘pilgrimage’ had shown him the right path after their crooked dealings; but the monarch could not be seen to grant petitions that were exerted by force. If the pilgrims dispersed peacefully, he would consider all their requests sympathetically. On the question of the suppressed monasteries, Norfolk stated that they would be restored until the meeting of the next parliament, where their fate would be decided. This was in fact a lie, but Henry had already made it clear that he could promise anything. The rebels were also offered a free pardon. This was enough. Aske rode to Pontefract and convinced the assembled commons that they had achieved their aims. He tore off the badge of the Five Wounds he was wearing and declared that he was no longer a captain of rebels. The revolt was at an end.

Yet deceit and dissembling were still the customs of the day. On Friday 15 December the king sent a message to Robert Aske by means of one of the gentlemen of the privy chamber. He wrote that he had a great desire to meet Aske, to whom he had just offered a free pardon, and to speak frankly about the cause and course of the rebellion. Aske welcomed the opportunity of exonerating himself. As soon as Aske entered the royal presence the king rose up and threw his arms around him. ‘Be you welcome, my good Aske; it is my wish that here, before my council, you ask what you desire and I will grant it.’

‘Sir, your majesty allows yourself to be governed by a tyrant named Cromwell. Everyone knows that if it had not been for him the 7,000 poor priests I have in my company would not be ruined wanderers as they are now.’

The king then gave the rebel a jacket of crimson satin and asked him to prepare a history of the previous few months. It must have seemed to Aske that the king was in implicit agreement with him on the important matters of religion. But Henry was deceiving him. He had no intention of halting or reversing the suppression of the monasteries; he had no intention of repealing any of the religious statutes in force; and he would never hold a parliament in York. Yet Aske could still prove useful. Rumours of more disturbances in the north had reached the council; the king asked Aske to confirm his newfound loyalty by helping to suppress them. Henry had indeed cause for alarm. Reports of new risings in Northumberland had been received. Bills had been set up on the doors of churches. ‘Commons, keep well your harness. Trust you no gentleman. Rise all at once. God shall be your governor and I shall be your captain.’

One of these captains now rode out. Sir Francis Bigod came from a great northern family, whose castle was 3 miles north of Whitby. But he was also a debt-ridden scholar who protested that he was ‘held in great suspect and jealousy because of his learning’. He had witnessed the events of the ‘pilgrimage’ and did not trust the promises of the king. He is perhaps best considered as an old-fashioned Lollard, and in particular he detested the monastic system; yet he feared for the northern lands and wished to protect them. He may also have had rebellion in his blood; his ancestors had formerly fought Henry I and Edward III.

Bigod addressed a crowd on the grievances of the north, and many of them called back to him: ‘Forward now or else never!’ It was determined that Hull and Scarborough should he held by the rebels until a parliament was assembled at York, but Bigod’s followers were repulsed in both places. Thomas Cromwell sent an observer to the north who wrote back to him: ‘I assure your lordship the people be very fickle, and methinks in a marvellous strange case and perplexity; for they stare and look for things, and fain would have what they cannot tell what.’

So this belated wave of rebellions failed in its purpose. The local gentry, keen to display their loyalty to the king, mustered their troops of followers. The duke of Norfolk raised an army of 4,000 men, most of whom had previously ridden with Robert Aske; they were eager now to atone for their previous faults. The rebels were hunted down, ambushed and slain. A group of them attempted an assault on Carlisle, but they were beaten back and captured. Norfolk also issued a proclamation that commanded all rebels to come to Carlisle where they must submit to the royal mercy. So the ‘poor caitiffs’, as they were called, duly made their pleas. ‘I came out for fear of my life.’ ‘I came forth for fear of loss of all my goods.’ ‘I came forth for fear of burning of my house and destroying of my wife and children.’

Yet there was no way of mitigating the wrath of the king. He ordered the duke of Norfolk to ‘cause such dreadful execution to be done upon a good number of the inhabitants of every town, village and hamlet … as they may be a fearful spectacle to all others hereafter that would practise any like matter; which we require you to do, without any pity or respect’. In a further twist of malign fate it was decreed that certain prisoners should be tried by juries made up of their own relations; the uncle might agree to a sentence of death upon a nephew and then see his head impaled upon a stake. Many of the rebels were hanged in their home villages, from the trees in their own gardens, as a memorial of their treason. Others were hanged in chains. The king had demanded the most severe retribution as a warning to future generations.

The brutality, and the subsequent terror, worked. There were no more rumours and whispers of revolt. There were no more complaints about the suppression of the monasteries. The people had fallen silent. The leaders of the revolt had already been dispatched to London and were lodged in the Tower. Lord Darcy was brought to trial in Westminster Hall for treason, and was beheaded on Tower Hill. Robert Aske, despite the king’s previous hospitality, was tried and found guilty. He was hanged at York.

If the rebels had held together more tightly, and seized the initiative, they might have reached London and the court. They had failed to do so but, in the process, they had revealed a strong current of popular protest against the religious policies of the king and Cromwell. The majority of the people wished to maintain their parish churches in good order and were opposed to any innovation. They argued, for example, that the cura animarum or ‘care of souls’ should be returned to the pope. They denounced Luther and others whom they called heretics. Yet Henry had faced them down; by duplicity and cunning he had defeated their leaders. He had broken the promises made on his behalf by the duke of Norfolk. But he might have said with some justification – what other way to deal with traitors? And he had won. Cranmer wrote that the enemies of reform ‘now look humbled to the ground and oppose us less’. Henry could move forward with impunity.

10

The confiscation

Any monks or abbots complicit in the late rebellion were seized and executed, their houses surrendered to the king. The abbots of Kirkstead and Barlings, of Fountains and Jervaulx and Whalley, were all hanged; they were followed a year later by the abbots of Glastonbury, Colchester and Reading. This was merely the prelude to a more general confiscation. The fact that the king had prevailed over the Pilgrimage of Grace meant that he and Cromwell felt emboldened to continue, and to widen, their policy of suppression. Within three years the monasteries, the friaries, the priories and the nunneries would be gone.

Yet Henry still feared popular discontent. He described his method to the rulers of Scotland as they began their own policy of dissolution. He advised them to keep their intentions ‘very close and secret’ in order to thwart any delays from the clergy. He then suggested that commissioners be dispatched ‘as it were to put good order in the same’ but really ‘to get knowledge of all their abominations’. The Scottish leaders should consult among themselves on the distribution of the monastic lands ‘to their great profit and honour’. The monks and abbots should then be offered some financial settlement. This was indeed the policy he followed.

Some of the great abbots were first obliged to surrender their houses, signing a declaration that ‘they did profoundly consider that the manner and trade of living, which they and others of their pretended religion, had for a long time followed, consisted in some dumb ceremonies … by which they were blindly led, having no true knowledge of God’s laws’. This might charitably be called a voluntary surrender, although the threat of death or imprisonment lay behind it. These submissions were then followed by induced surrenders as one by one the greater monasteries fell. In the first eight months of 1538, for example, thirty-eight of them were appropriated by the Crown.

Cromwell’s agent at the priory of Lewes described ‘how we had to pull the whole down to the ground’. The vault on the right side of the high altar was the first to be destroyed, followed by the groined roof, walls and pillars of the church. ‘We brought from London,’ he wrote, ‘seventeen persons, three carpenters, two smiths, two plumbers, and one that keepeth the furnace.’ The furnace was used to melt down the lead stripped from the roof. Nothing went to waste. The pages of the books from the monastic libraries, once one of the glories of England, were employed to scour candlesticks or clean shoes; they also had another use since the pages could become ‘a common servant to every man, fast nailed up upon posts in all common houses of easement’. A house of easement was a latrine.

A young man who lived in the neighbourhood of Roche Abbey, in south Yorkshire, spoke to one of the workmen who were destroying the abbey church.

‘Did you,’ he asked, ‘think well of the religious persons and of the religion then used?’

‘Yes,’ the man replied, ‘for I saw no cause to the contrary.’

‘Well, then how comes it to pass that you are so ready to destroy and spoil what you thought so well of?’

‘Might I not as well as others have some profit from the spoil of the abbey? For I saw all would away, and therefore I did as others did.’

There speaks the representative voice of the Englishman at a time of reformation.

The Carthusians were the most roughly handled, and in the summer of 1537 a list was drawn up detailing their fates under the headings of ‘there are departed’, ‘there are even at the point of death’ and ‘there are sick’. The Charterhouse at Smithfield was turned into a venue for wrestling matches, and the church became a warehouse for the king’s tents; the altars were turned into gaming tables.

As the certainty of suppression became more evident, the monasteries were eager to sell or to lease whatever property they possessed. At Bisham the monks sold their vestments in the chapter house while at a market set up in the cloister they brought their own cowls to sell.

Yet some provision was made for the lives of the monks themselves. At the priory of Castle Acre, for example, the religious were given a payment of £2 together with a small quarterly pension; this became general practice. As a result some monks were willing and even eager to go. ‘Thank God,’ said the former abbot of Beaulieu, ‘I am rid of my lewd monks.’ The former abbot of Sawtry revealed that ‘I was never out of debt when I was abbot’. Certain abbots became diocesan bishops and were more prosperous than ever; the prior of Sempringham became bishop of Lincoln, for example, and the abbot of Peterborough became the see’s bishop. The monks themselves often became the canons or prebendaries of the cathedrals.

Resistance was maintained by the brave or the foolish. When one monk at the Carthusian house of Hinton denied the royal supremacy, the others explained that he was a lunatic. The royal commissioners sometimes moved on from recalcitrant houses, leaving them isolated and unprotected until the commissioners returned on a future occasion. Yet sometimes the seizures were sudden and immediate. The monks at Evesham were at evensong in the choir when they were told to ‘make an end’.

Where did the spoils go? It had previously been proposed that the dissolution of the monasteries was for the higher good of the nation. The incomes of the various priories would be spent on colleges and hospitals and schools ‘whereby God’s work might the better be set forth, children brought up in learning, clerks nourished in the universities, old servants decayed to have livings, almshouses for poor folk to be sustained in, readers of Greek, Hebrew and Latin to have good stipends, daily alms to be ministered, mending of highways …’ It never happened. The only deity worshipped was that of Mammon.

It is difficult to estimate the size of monastic occupation. At the time it was believed that the clergy owned one third of the land, but it may be safe to presume that the monks controlled one sixth of English territory. This was of immense benefit to the Crown, and represents the largest transfer of land ownership since the time of the Norman conquest.

The greater parts of the monastic lands were sold to the highest bidder or the highest briber; many went to the local gentry or to newly rich merchants who were eager to secure their status in a society based solidly on land ownership. It was a way of binding the rising families both to the cause of the reformation and to the Tudor dynasty. City corporations sometimes made purchases, as did syndicates of investors that included doctors and lawyers. The parlours of successful men were hung with altar-cloths, their tables and beds covered with copes instead of carpets. The once sacred chalices and patens were now in secular use. It is reported that, in Berwick, a baptismal font was used as a basin ‘in which they did steep their beef and salt fish’.

Many of the monasteries and priories fell into the pockets of the courtiers. Cromwell and the duke of Norfolk, for example, shared between them the lands and revenues of the wealthy Cluniac priories at Lewes in Sussex and at Castle Acre in Norfolk. Cromwell eventually appropriated the land and revenue of six religious houses, and was widely reputed to be (after the king) the richest man in England. The duke of Northumberland secured eighteen monastic properties, while the duke of Suffolk became master of thirty foundations. Cartloads of plate and jewels were taken to the royal treasury.

From the ruins of the plundered monasteries and abbeys arose new buildings. Sir William Paulet purchased Netley Abbey and built a fine residence from the remains of the church and cloisters; Sir Thomas Wriothesley fashioned a gatehouse in the nave of Titchfield Abbey, and Sir Edward Sharington turned a nunnery into a family house. It was reported at the time that a Lancashire gentleman, having purchased an abbey, ‘made a parlour of the chancel, a hall of the church and a kitchen of the steeple’. The steeple of Austin Friars, in London, was used to store coal. The Minories, an abbey of nuns of the order of St Clare, was turned into an armoury and St Mary Graces became a naval depot where great ovens were introduced for baking bread. The house of the Crutched Friars, in the street near Tower Hill which still bears the name, was changed into a glass manufactory. Other churches were converted into stables, cookhouses and taverns. The abbeys of Malmesbury and Osney became clothing factories.

Some of the great men of the realm openly asked for the spoils. Sir Richard Grenville, the marshal of Calais, wrote to Cromwell that ‘if I have not some piece of this suppressed land by purchase or gift of the king’s majesty I should stand out of the case of few men of worship of this realm’. He was, in other words, following the example of everyone else.

Much haggling and bargaining took place with the monks themselves. The abbot of Athelney was offered 100 marks, and another ecclesiastical post. He threw up his hands and declared that ‘I will fast three days on bread and water than take so little’. One monk tried to sell his cell door for two shillings, and said that it had cost more than five shillings. So within three years the life of ten centuries was utterly destroyed.

It was perhaps a saving grace that eight cathedral churches, once staffed by monks and nuns, were now turned into secular cathedrals; the most important cathedrals in England became Canterbury, Rochester, Winchester, Ely, Norwich, Worcester, Durham and Carlisle. Only the monastic cathedral of Coventry was torn down. The others remained as centres of music and sung liturgy in a reformed world that became increasingly wary of their power.

It is difficult to calculate the effect of the dissolution on the educational life of the country. Some effort was made to replace religious with secular training. There had been a rise in the number of educational foundations in the decades around 1500, but the appetite for formal education was by no means diverted or diminished. Henry and his ministers, for example, endowed twelve permanent grammar schools in the cathedral cities, and it can be said with some certainty that the sixteenth century remained the age of the grammar school. The richer tradesmen endowed schools in their own towns, and borough institutions took the place of monastic institutions. Christ’s Hospital was established, for example, within the former Greyfriars Convent in London.

The leading reformer, Hugh Latimer, urged upon the clergy of Winchester their duty to educate children in the learning of English, while Cranmer proposed a collegiate foundation at Canterbury to take the place of the monastic cathedral school. At a later date, the archbishop of York declared the foundation of schools to be ‘so good and godly a purpose’. Yet the old faith could still prove useful: some monks began life again as schoolmasters in village or town; chapels became schoolrooms.

Some of the last monasteries to be dissolved were those of Colchester, Glastonbury and Reading, where the abbots were denounced as seditious. The abbot of Glastonbury was accused of concealing or taking away the treasures of his house and is reported to have said that ‘the king shall never have my house but against my will and against my heart’. More seriously, perhaps, he is reported to have previously expressed support for the northern rebels of the Pilgrimage of Grace. He declared them to be ‘good men’ and ‘great crackers’. It was also discovered that he, together with the abbot of Reading, had supplied the pilgrims with money. When the abbey itself was searched, gold and silver, vessels and ornaments, were found in walls, vaults and other ‘secret places’. The commissioners searched the abbot’s rooms and found there such suspicious items as papal bulls and arguments against the king’s divorce. He was questioned and his answers were deemed to be ‘cankered and traitorous’.

The abbot was charged and sentenced; he was dragged through the streets of Glastonbury before being taken to the conical hill known as Glastonbury Tor where he was hanged. His head was then placed on the abbey gate, and his quarters distributed through Somerset. So was dissolved one of the greatest of English shrines, supposedly the home of the Holy Grail and the last resting place of King Arthur. The abbots of Reading and Colchester suffered the same fate in their own towns.

The convents and friaries were the next to fall. Some 140 nunneries had been established in England, with perhaps 1,600 women, the majority of them belonging to the Benedictine order. It was much harder for a nun than a monk to make her way in the secular world; she could earn no obvious living, and as an unmarried woman would endure many more hardships in a society that considered marriage to be the only proper fate of the female. Nuns and monks were in any case still bound to their vows of chastity.

The nuns of Langley were according to the commissioners ‘all desirous to continue in religion’. The prioress ‘is of great age and impotent’ while ‘one other is in regard a fool’. Yet they were not spared. The nunneries were genuinely missed in their immediate neighbourhoods. They had become guest houses for the more important gentry. At the nunnery in Langley, for example, Lady Audeley used to attend church accompanied by twelve dogs. The convents had also offered a simple education for the daughters of the gentry, where they learned surgery, needlework, confectionery, writing and drawing. The great ages of female spirituality, evinced by such women as Dame Julian of Norwich, now also came to an end.

In the autumn of 1538 the friaries were destroyed. They were all situated within or close to towns, the friars themselves devoted to an active ministry of preaching in the world; 200 of them were in existence, and the number of friars can be estimated at 1,800. They had very little wealth or treasure, but it was considered fitting that they should also submit to the king’s authority. In many cases their surrender took the form of a confession to unnamed ‘crimes and vices’. Particular charges were sometimes raised against them. They were accused of dabbling in necromancy. The community of Austin Friars in London was compared to a herd of wild beasts in Sherwood Forest, and it was reported that they sat in the beer-house from six in the morning until ten at night ‘like drunken Flemings’. But in truth the principal offence of the friars was their resistance to reform. The Observant friars, in particular, had been vociferous in the cause of Katherine of Aragon. Some of the friars changed their clothes and became secular priests, while others went back into the world. Thomas Cromwell came across one friar, however, who was still wearing his old habit. ‘If I hear by one o’clock that this apparel be not changed,’ he warned him, ‘you will be hanged immediately for example to all others.’

While the monasteries were suppressed, their shrines and relics were destroyed. The ‘rood of grace’ at Boxley Abbey, in Kent, was one such holy image, which was also known, to the men of the new faith, as the Dagon of Ashdod or the Babylonish Bel. It was a wooden crucifix upon which the eyes and the head of Jesus sometimes moved; on some occasions the whole body on the cross trembled to express the reception of prayers. Many offerings were of course made to such a miraculous figure. A man named Partridge suspected a fraud and, laying hands on the rood, exposed a number of springs that had made the motions. It was brought to London, and pieces of it were tossed to the crowd outside St Paul’s Cathedral.

In the summer of 1537 the cult statue of Our Lady of Worcester was stripped of its clothes and jewels, to reveal that it was a doll-like effigy of an early medieval bishop. The images of the Virgin were taken down from shrines in Ipswich, Walsingham and Caversham; they were carried in carts to Smithfield and burned. The blood of Hailes, popularly believed to be the blood of Christ, was revealed to be a mixture of honey and saffron. The bishop of Salisbury, Nicholas Shaxton, urged the destruction of all ‘stinking boots, mucky combs, ragged rochets [vestments], rotten girdles, pyld [threadbare] purses, great bullocks’ horns, locks of hair, and filthy rags, gobbets of wood under the name of parcels of the holy cross …’ It was soon decreed that there must be no more ‘kissing or licking’ of supposed holy images.

These were only preliminaries to the greatest act of destruction, or desecration, in English history. The shrine of St Thomas Becket at Canterbury was probably the richest in the world. The least costly of its materials was pure gold, and Erasmus once described how ‘every part glistened, shone and sparkled with rare and very large jewels, some of them exceeding the size of a goose’s egg’. It was a treasure house of devotion, a bright worker of wonders and miracles. This was now dismantled, with the jewels and gold packed into wooden chests before being transported to London in twenty-six ox-wagons. One great ruby donated to the saint by a king of France, Louis VII, was fashioned into a ring that Henry wore on his thumb.

The saint himself was demoted and was only to be known as Bishop Becket; all of his images were removed from the churches and his festival day was no longer observed. He was tried in his absence, as it were, and was attainted of treason. He had not been a martyr but a traitor to his prince. It was in the king’s gift, therefore, to make and unmake saints. The bones of Becket were disinterred and burned on a fire lit in the middle of the city; the ashes were then discharged into the air from a cannon. It was at this moment that the pope decided to publish his Bill of Deposition against the English king, deeming him to be excommunicate and releasing his people from the duty of obeying him. It was of no practical consequence.

This demolition of holy sites did encourage, in the more profane sort, a tendency to ridicule and scoff at all the old certainties. It was said that ‘if our lady were here on earth, I would no more fear to meddle with her than with a common whore’. When a priest raised the sacred host, during the Mass, one of the parishioners held up a small dog. Some townspeople of Rye were reported as saying that ‘the mass was of a juggler’s making and a juggling cast it was’ and that ‘they would rather have a dog to sing to them than a priest’.

The dissolution of the friaries was followed by the burning of a friar. John Forrest, an Observant friar, had been imprisoned four years before on the charge of denying royal supremacy. On 22 May 1538, a cradle of chains was placed above a pile of wood in Smithfield. Upon the pyre would soon be placed the desecrated image of a saint, known as Darvel Gadarn, that had been esteemed by the people of North Wales. The image was that of a military saint, with a sword and spear. It was said that those who made offerings of money or animals to the wooden statue would be snatched from hell itself by the saint. It was also said that the image could set alight a forest. Now Darvel himself would erupt in flames.

The ceremony of execution itself was typical. Forrest was dragged on a hurdle from Newgate to Smithfield, where a crowd of 10,000 were in attendance. The bishop chosen to read the sermon was Hugh Latimer, who had written to Thomas Cromwell in high spirits that ‘if it be your pleasure that I shall play the fool after my customary manner when Forrest shall suffer, I would wish that my stage stood near to Forrest’. So his pulpit was placed next to the scaffold, from which height he preached for three hours. When he exhorted the friar to repent Forrest replied in a loud voice that ‘if an angel should come down from heaven and show me any other thing than that I had believed all my lifetime, I would not believe him’.

‘Oh,’ Latimer replied, ‘what errors has the pope introduced into the Church! And in order that you may the better understand this, you shall presently see one of his idolatrous images, by which the people of Wales have long since been deceived.’ On a signal from Cromwell eight men carried the image of Darvel Gadarn into the open space, eliciting a great yell from the citizens, and then the three executioners continued the comedy by tying it with ropes and chains to prevent its escape.

‘My lord bishop,’ Cromwell called out, pointing to Forrest, ‘I think you strive in vain with this stubborn one. It would be better to burn him.’ He turned to the soldiers. ‘Take him off at once.’

He was led to the cradle of chains and hoisted into the air. The wooden image, and other piles of wood, were placed beneath him and lit with torches.

The friar was suspended above the fire, and when he began to feel the flames he beat his breast and called out ‘Domine miserere me’ – ‘Lord have mercy on me’. He took two hours to die. In his mortal agony he clutched at a ladder to swing himself out of the blaze, but he did not succeed. The chronicler Edward Hall, remarked without pity that ‘so impatiently he took his death as never any man that puts his trust in God’. A ballad was soon circulating through the streets of London:

But now may we see,

What gods they be

Even puppets, maumets and elves;

Throw them down thrice

They cannot rise

Not once, to help themselves.

A few hours later the holy rood or crucifix close to the church of St Margaret Pattens, in Rood Lane, was attacked and demolished. It would not be so easy to remove or destroy the tenets of the old faith.

11

The old fashion

At the beginning of 1537 the bishops were ordered to draw up a statement of belief that would broadly fit Henry’s scheme for a middle way between orthodoxy and reform; the bishops themselves were divided on almost every matter under discussion, with the result that they produced what the bishop of Winchester called ‘a common storehouse, where every man laid up in store such ware as he liked’. Some said that there were three sacraments, others insisted that there were seven, and yet others believed that there were one hundred. They sat at a table covered with a carpet, while their priestly advisers stood behind them. Once they had agreed tentatively on a closing statement, they dispersed with alacrity; the plague had struck London, and the dead were lying close to the doors of Lambeth Palace.

The king went through the document and made copious emendations to the text. Thomas Cranmer then supervised the king’s work and was bold enough to correct his sense and his grammar. He told his sovereign that one word ‘obscureth the sentence and is superfluous’ and reminded him that ‘the preter tense may not conveniently be joined with the present tense’. It seems that Henry did not take offence at the archbishop’s presumption.

It was entitled The Institution of a Christian Man but it became better known as The Bishops’ Book. It was essentially a series of popular homilies to be preached from the pulpit, and was close enough to the injunctions of the old faith to be accepted and acceptable. The major difference of belief lay in the controversy between faith and works; those of a Lutheran persuasion believed that the only hope of human redemption reposed in the faith of Christ; all mankind was utterly corrupt, but Christ’s sacrifice upon the cross was sufficient to save the erring soul. If the individual placed all his or her faith and hope in Christ he or she would be saved. No work or act made any difference. It was a question of being reborn by God’s act of grace as if by a lightning flash, with the sinner then becoming utterly reliant upon divine mercy. Those who followed the tenets of the old Church profoundly disagreed with this doctrine, believing that acts of charity and good works were essential for salvation; they also reinforced the fervent belief that the administration of the seven sacraments by the Church was part of the process of redemption.

In The Bishops’ Book the issue was avoided in what may be called an act of creative ambiguity. In particular the king’s revision deleted and amended passages that Cranmer had written on justification by faith alone. Where Cranmer had stated that the believer became God’s ‘own son through adoption and faith’ Henry added the words ‘as long as I persevere in His precepts and laws’. The final text emphasized faith without endorsing Lutheran doctrine while at the same time reducing the role of good works without repudiating Catholic beliefs. But the book also supported such ancient practices as the bearing of candles at Candlemas and the hallowing of the font. Henry also demanded that the section on the three sacraments should be altered to include the missing four. It seems likely that, for most people, there was no reason to doubt that the ‘old ways’ would continue indefinitely.

It was said by a magistrate from Rainham in Kent that the new book ‘alloweth all the old fashion and putteth all the knaves of the New Learning to silence so that they dare not say a word’. Cranmer rebuked the magistrate by saying that ‘if men will indifferently read those late declarations, they shall well perceive that purgatory, pilgrimages, praying to saints, images, holy bread, holy water, holy days, merits, works, ceremony, and such other be not restored to their late accustomed abuses’. The Bishops’ Book, therefore, was open to interpretation.

In a set of injunctions, published in the following year, an English Bible was introduced to the people. Thomas Cromwell decreed that within a period of two years every church must possess and display a copy of the Bible in the native tongue; it was to be chained in an open place, where anyone could consult it. The edition used was that of Miles Coverdale, published in 1535 and essentially a reworking of Tyndale’s original. Thus the man who had been denounced as a heretic, and whose translation had been burned by royal decree eleven years before, was now the unheralded and unsung scribe of the new English faith. It was also ordered that one book comprising the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, the Creed and the Ten Commandments was to be set upon a table in the church where all might read it; this also was to be in the English tongue.

The translation has been described as one of the most significant moments in the history of reformation. It immediately identified the English Bible with the movement of religious change, and thus helped to associate what would become the Protestant faith with the English identity. In the seventeenth century, in particular, cultural history also became religious history. The career of Oliver Cromwell, for example, cannot be understood without a proper apprehension of the English translation of the Scriptures; it is perhaps worth remarking that Oliver Cromwell was a distant relation, through the marriage of his great-grandfather, to Thomas Cromwell. The translated Bible also introduced into England a biblical culture of the word, as opposed to the predominantly visual culture of the later medieval world; this refashioned culture was then to find its fruits in Milton and in Bunyan, in Blake and in Tennyson.

The English Bible also helped to fashion a language of devotion. Coverdale was the first to introduce such phrases as ‘loving kindness’ and ‘tender mercy’. A tract of the time declared that ‘Englishmen have now in hand, in every church and place, the Holy Bible in their mother tongue’. It was said that the voice of God was English. A seventeenth-century historian, William Strype, wrote that ‘everybody that could bought the book, or busily read it, or got others to read it to them’. It was read aloud, in St Paul’s Cathedral, to crowds who had gathered to listen. The king’s men also hoped that the reading of the Bible would inculcate obedience to the lawful authorities, except that obedience was now to the king rather than to the pope.

In the same set of injunctions Thomas Cromwell decreed that every parson or vicar ‘should keep one book or register, wherein he shall write the day and year of every wedding, christening and burying’. The parish register has been kept ever since, and must mark one of the most notable innovations of the reformed faith. It was also decreed that the images of the saints were no longer to be regarded as holy, and that the lights and candles placed before them should be removed. The Catholic Church of England was to be cleansed and renovated, but not overturned.

Cromwell also ordered the clergy to keep silent on matters of biblical interpretation, not to be ‘babblers nor praters, arguers nor disputers thereof; nor to presume that they know therein that they know not’. It was of the utmost importance to be quiet on matters of doctrine for fear of provoking more discord and discontent in a country that had narrowly avoided a damaging religious war.

The deliberate ambiguity of the religious reforms was itself enough to reduce the possibility of any endorsement of Lutheranism. In the summer of 1538 some Lutherans arrived from Germany to explore the possibility of a union on matters of faith; they had been lured to London by the king in the belief that it might be possible to reach an agreement with German leaders, such as the elector of Saxony and the landgrave of Hesse, in opposition to the pope and the emperor. One problem, however, could not be removed. One of Henry’s own negotiators, Robert Barnes, had once told Luther himself that ‘my king does not care about religion’. And so it seemed.

The German embassy of three got precisely nowhere. They were lodged in poor accommodation and complained that ‘multitudes of rats were running in their chambers day and night, which is no small disquietness, and their kitchen was so near the parlour that the smell was offensive to all that came to them’; one of them fell seriously ill. On matters of faith the king was polite but unmoving; they wished to extirpate such abuses as private Masses and the enforced celibacy of the clergy, but Henry could not be persuaded. They stayed for almost five months before returning with relief to Germany. The Lutheran reformer Melanchthon sent a private letter to Cranmer deploring the maintenance of popish superstition.

From Germany, too, arrived the first Anabaptists; they believed that infant baptism is not New Testament baptism, and that they were the true elect of God who did not require any external authority. All goods (including wives) should be held in common, in preparation for an imminent Second Coming. In a proclamation of November 1538, they were ordered by the king to leave the realm; those who remained were persecuted and burned.

The king’s distaste for anyone tainted with unorthodox doctrine became amply evident during proceedings in the same month against a schoolmaster, John Lambert, who was prosecuted for denying Christ’s presence in the consecrated bread and wine of the Mass. Henry himself presided at the heresy trial, dressed entirely in white silk as a token of purity; his guards also wore white. Cromwell wrote that ‘it was a wonder to see how princely … and how benignly his grace assayed to convert the miserable man, how strong and manifest reasons his highness alleged against him’.

The trial took place in the banqueting house of the palace at Westminster. ‘Ho, good fellow,’ the king began, ‘what is your name?’ He sat beneath a canopy with his lords on the left side and with his bishops on the right. Lambert had in fact used an alias to avoid official detection, and tried to explain this to the king. Henry stopped him with a voice of thunder. ‘I would not trust you, having two names, although you were my brother.’ The trial, from Lambert’s point of view, was of course already lost:

‘Tell me plainly whether you say it is the body of Christ.’

‘It is not his body. I deny it.’

‘Mark well – for now you shall be condemned even by Christ’s own words. “Hoc est enim corpus meum.” This is my body.’

The interrogation lasted for five hours. ‘Will you live or die?’ the king asked the prisoner at the conclusion. ‘You have yet a free choice.’

‘I commit my soul to God and my body to the king’s mercy.’

‘That being the case, you must die. I will not be a patron to heretics.’

Six days later Lambert was executed at Smithfield. The flames took off his thighs and legs, but the guards lifted up his still living body with their halberds and thrust it into the fire. ‘None but Christ!’ he called out. ‘None but Christ!’ Then he expired.

A religious envoy also came from another quarter. An English cardinal, Reginald Pole, had been sent from Rome as a papal legate but, hearing of his mission, the king naturally refused him entry to the country; he also surrounded him with spies and assassins. Henry himself sent a letter to Charles V, in which he warned that the cardinal was eager to promote discord among nations; his disposition is ‘so cankered that from it can no good thing proceed, but weeping crocodile tears he will, if it be possible, pour forth the venom of his serpent nature’.

When the cardinal arrived in France Henry wrote to his ambassador there that ‘we would be very glad to have the said Pole trussed up and conveyed to Calais’; Pole himself was informed that 100,000 pieces of English gold would be given to the man who brought him to England dead or alive. He was not killed, but he returned to Rome with his mission thwarted.

The king also proceeded against the members of Pole’s family. ‘Pity it is,’ Cromwell wrote, ‘that the folly of one brainsick Pole, or to say better of one witless fool, should be the ruin of so great a family.’ Pole was one of a distinguished line that issued directly from the Plantagenet dynasty; his mother, Margaret Pole, the countess of Salisbury, was the daughter of the duke of Clarence who was popularly supposed to have been drowned in a butt of malmsey in the Tower on the orders of Edward IV. Their lineage alone would have been enough to place the cardinal and his relatives under grave suspicion. The fact that they were of the old faith only increased the risks against them. They themselves were aware of their peril and made some effort to avoid one another in public for fear of supposed conspiracy. But they were undone by the open sedition of Reginald Pole.

The cardinal’s younger brother, Sir Geoffrey Pole, was arrested and interrogated; he was of unstable temper and at the first sign of pressure he conceded. He revealed all that he knew of his family’s activities and perhaps embellished certain details. As a result another of his brothers, Henry, Lord Montague, was arrested together with his cousin, the marquis of Exeter. Geoffrey Pole then tried to suffocate himself with a cushion while incarcerated in the Tower. Margaret Pole herself was questioned and fiercely denied any imputations against her. ‘We have dealed with such an one,’ her interrogator said, ‘as men have not dealed with tofore; we may rather call her a strong and constant man than a woman.’ She was eventually imprisoned and taken to her death.

On coming to the scaffold she told the executioner that she would not lay her head upon the block, saying that she had received no trial. When she was forcibly held down the man, apparently not very experienced in his task, hacked away at her head and neck for several minutes. It was weary work but ultimately the head was off. On hearing the news of his mother’s death, Cardinal Pole declared that ‘I am now the son of a martyr’. He continued in a similar vein. ‘Let us be of good cheer,’ he said. ‘We have now one more patron in heaven.’

Geoffrey Pole testified that Lord Montague had said that the king ‘will one day die suddenly – his leg will kill him – and then we shall have jolly stirring’. Montague had also feared that, when the world ‘came to stripes’, there would be ‘a lack of honest men’. He said that ‘I trust to have a fair day upon those knaves that rule about the king; and I trust to see a merry world one day’. A ‘merry world’ was a truism of the period, meaning whatever the speaker wished it to mean. There was much more to the same effect. It was also revealed that the Poles had stayed in contact with their brother overseas, and had even warned him that his life was in danger. It was professed at the time that this was a serious Catholic conspiracy to depose the king, but it looks like the isolated murmurings of a disaffected, if distinguished, family. Yet the king was not likely to overlook any sign of dissent to his religious policy. If the sovereign does not feel secure, then no one is secure. Montague and Exeter were duly condemned to death and hanged as traitors. Against their names in the register of the Order of the Garter was written ‘Vah, proditor!’ – ‘Oh, traitor!’ Exeter’s son, Edward Courtenay, was consigned to the Tower, where he remained for the next fifteen years. He was freed only when Mary became sovereign. This was the way to deal with potential claimants to the throne.

Yet Henry’s dynastic ambitions were already secure. By the spring of 1537 Henry’s new wife was pregnant, and on 12 October gave birth to a healthy boy. The child was named Edward, since he had been born on the day dedicated to St Edward the Confessor. The line of kings would continue. Jane Seymour herself, however, became sick with puerperal fever, perhaps from an injury at the time of delivery, and died twelve days after giving birth. She was twenty-nine years old.

The period of court mourning lasted for almost three weeks, and on 12 November her body was laid in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. The king ordered that 12,000 Masses should be said in the churches of London in order to intercede for her soul, a striking instance of Henry’s attachment to the beliefs and rituals of the old faith. The king wore purple, the colour of royal mourning; Lady Mary wore black with a white headdress, as a token of the fact that the queen had died in childbed. A man was arrested for repeating a prophecy, in the Bell Inn on Tower Hill, that the prince ‘should be as great a murderer as his father’ since he had already murdered his mother at his birth.

A macabre scene was enacted a few months later when some idlers were watching the funeral of a child in a London churchyard. A priest in their company found the demeanour of the mourners to be peculiar and, hastening over to them, he opened the shroud; there was no baby in the folds, but the image of a child made out of wax with two pins stuck through it. The death anticipated was said to be that of the infant prince, and the news of the magical funeral spread through the kingdom.

Elaborate precautions and regulations were in any case established within the royal nursery. No one could approach the cradle of the infant prince without a royal warrant in the king’s own hand. The baby’s food was to be tested in case of poison. His clothes were to be washed by his own servants, and no one else was allowed to touch them. All the rooms of the prince’s quarters had to be swept and scrubbed with soap three times a day. The fear of disease was always present for infants and small children. A charming cameo can be found, in the Royal Collection, of Henry with his arm around the infant boy; it is one of the few images that show the king as a natural human being. In the spring of the following year the king spent much time with his son ‘dallying with him in his arms … and so holding him in a window to the sight and great comfort of all the people’. For the next six years Lord Edward would be brought up, as he himself put it in his diary, ‘among the women’. This had also been the fate of his father.

Henry was soon in active pursuit of another wife. He told his ambassadors at the imperial court in Brussels that ‘we be daily instanted by our nobles and Council to use short expedition in the determination of our wife, for to get more increase of issue to the assurance of succession, and upon their admonitions of age coming fast on, and that the time slippeth and flyeth marvellously away, we be minded utterly to be within short space at a full resolution, one way or other, and no longer to lose time’. ‘Marvellously’ is an appropriately sixteenth-century word. ‘I marvel’ may mean ‘I wonder’ or ‘I am amazed’. So a short dialogue might be: ‘I marvel that …’; ‘I marvel that you marvel … ’

Although he was preparing himself for a fourth marriage, Henry never wholly forgot Jane Seymour. He made two subsequent journeys to her familial home, Wolf Hall, and in his will he ordained that ‘the bones and body of our true and loving wife Queen Jane’ be placed with his in the tomb. He himself might have been placed in it sooner than he intended. In the spring of 1538 the ulcers on his swollen legs became blocked, and it was said that ‘the humours which had no outlet were like to have stifled him’. It seems possible that a blood clot entered his lungs; for twelve days he lay immobile and scarcely able to breathe, his eyes and veins standing out with the protracted effort. Rumours spread that the king of England was dead, and arguments arose over the relative claims of Edward and Mary to the throne. Yet the fury of the fit eventually passed. Soon enough, he was recovered.