History of England 1-6

He began another phase of his royal building. He enlarged the palace at Hampton Court so that it eventually encompassed more than a thousand rooms and was the largest structure in England since the time of the Romans. In the autumn of 1538, too, he began work in Surrey on an architectural conceit or fantasy known as Nonsuch Palace, so named because there was none such like it in the entire kingdom. It was made up of turrets and towers, cupolas and battlements; the upper part was framed in timber and decorated with stucco panels and carved slates. The gardens were filled with statues and waterfalls, with images of birds and pyramids and cupids from which gushed water. It was fit for an extravagant and conceited king, but it was not completed in his lifetime. Henry would reign for only nine more years.

12

The body of Christ

At the beginning of 1539 fears emerged over the threat of invasion, encouraged by the papal edict against the king; the French king and the Spanish emperor were rumoured to be in alliance with the pope, while the king of Scotland, James V, promised to support them. ‘We will be’, one courtier wrote, ‘a morsel among choppers.’ It was said that 8,000 mercenaries were gathering in the Low Countries. A fleet of sixty-eight ships was sighted off Margate. This would be the first concerted attack since the time of the Norman invasion. Henry had been excommunicated but his enemies declared that the people were still in slavish obedience to a heretic king; one merchant wrote from London that they would all be taken ‘for Jews or infidels’ and could lawfully be enslaved by the enemy.

Henry reviewed his fleet, consisting of 150 ships, and ordered military musters to be summoned throughout the country; he then toured the more vulnerable areas along the south coast and ordered new fortifications. The fortresses along the border with Scotland were strengthened. The king’s ships left the Thames for Portsmouth. The building stone from the abandoned monasteries was employed to build defences. The privy council met daily in preparation for war. The bodyguard of the king were known as ‘gentlemen pensioners’; they wore velvet doublets and coats complete with gold chains, and each gripped a large poleaxe in his right hand.

At the beginning of May thousands of men, from the age of sixteen to sixty, mustered whatever armour and weapons they possessed before marching from Mile End, the traditional meeting point of armed bands, into the city; the fields of Stepney and Bethnal Green ‘were covered with men and weapons’, with the battalions of pikes ‘like a great forest’. In the following month Thomas Cromwell staged a battle between two barges on the Thames; one was commanded by men dressed as the pope and his cardinals, while in the other stood figures representing the king and the court. The Vatican was of course overpowered and ditched into the river.

Henry himself was in a state of high anxiety. It was the one eventuality he had most feared. The French ambassador in London wrote in alarm to his court, begging to be relieved of his duties on the grounds that he feared the wrath of the king; he was ‘the most dangerous and cruel man in the world’, and seemed to be in such a state of fury that he had ‘neither reason nor understanding’. The ambassador professed to believe that the king might attack or even kill him in the course of an audience.

Yet the enterprise against England was prevented by quarrels between France and Spain. It is also likely that the spies of those nations had reported to their masters that there was little evidence of internal disaffection; the people would not rise up in arms against their king. No invading navy arrived, and the general alarm soon subsided. But the king knew very well that it would be unwise to stir up domestic discontent any further; he had pushed the people to the edge of their religious tolerance. He deemed it wise, therefore, to placate the conservative or orthodox faithful who comprised the majority of the population. In that spirit, too, he was following his own instincts.

Henry was clearly moving away from the path of religious reform. In a declaration for ‘unity of religion’, devised in the spring of 1539, the king blamed the indiscriminate reading of the English Bible for the incidence of ‘murmur, malice and malignity’ within the realm. He had hoped that the Scriptures would be read ‘with meekness’ but instead they had provoked rivalry and dissension. The people disputed ‘arrogantly’ in taverns and even in churches, angrily denouncing rival interpretations as heretical or papistical. The Bible should, in future, only be read in silence. The declaration was in fact never issued, and was replaced by a more formal proclamation.

Evidence of religious disputes can be found in the records of the church courts. Mrs Cicely Marshall of St Albans parish was accused of ‘despising holy bread and holy water’, while a fellow parishioner was blamed for ‘despising our Lady’. John Humfrey of St Giles, Cripplegate, was summoned for ‘speaking against the sacraments and ceremonies of the church’. A woman from the parish of St Nicholas in the Flesh Shambles was presented ‘for busy reasoning on the new learning, and not keeping the church’. Margaret Ambsworth of St Botolph without Aldgate was summoned ‘for instructing of maids, and being a great doctress’. Robert Plat and his wife ‘were great reasoners in scripture, saying they had it of the Spirit’. All of these people, and many more, were given the common name of ‘meddlers’.

A parliament was also summoned in the spring of 1539 to consider matters of religion. A contemporary reported that it was assembled to negotiate ‘a thorough unity and uniformity established for the reformation of the church of this realm’. Unity was not easily to be won.

Various opinions, for example, were maintained over the bread and the wine offered in the Mass. The orthodox Catholic faithful upheld the doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby the bread and wine became in actual fact the body and blood of Christ. This is a mystery of the faith. It is believed because it is impossible, and proof of the overwhelming power of God. Luther also believed in the real presence of Christ in the sacrament, but denied that He was there ‘in substance’; his belief was in something that became known as consubstantiation or sacramental union, whereby the integrity of the bread and wine remain even while being transformed by the body and blood of Christ.

The more radical reformers, intent upon destroying priestly power and what were for them superstitious rituals, declared that the Eucharist was only a commemoration or remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice that had been performed once and for ever; it could not be endlessly rehearsed at the altar. ‘Hoc est corpus meum’ should therefore be translated as ‘This signifies my body’. Christ was in heaven; He was not on the earth, even at Mass.

Endless permutations could of course be devised between these three statements of belief. Thus one reformer declined to believe that the bread and wine are miraculously changed, but conceded that ‘the Body and Blood of Christ are truly received by faith’ when the worshipper partakes of them in perfect piety. This was known as ‘virtualism’. In an age when religion was the single most important aspect of social life, these debates were also matters of state. At the beginning of the parliamentary session a small committee was set up to examine all of the issues, the most tendentious being the question of the Blessed Sacrament.

The committee comprised four conservative and four reforming bishops, with Cromwell presiding as vicegerent in religious matters. Of course they could come to no shared conclusions, and Henry stepped forward. He allowed the conservative duke of Norfolk to present six simple questions to the House of Lords that were so framed as to yield only one possible answer. The result of their deliberations emerged in the document known as the Act of the Six Articles that clearly restated the orthodox position on such matters as confession and clerical celibacy. It was essentially a device to quell religious controversy and forge unity in matters of doctrine. It became known to those who detested it as ‘the whip with six strings’ or ‘the bloody act’.

The Six Articles were a strong rebuff to reformers such as Cranmer and Cromwell, and were a clear victory for the conservative faction. Transubstantiation was upheld in all but name, although Cranmer had finally managed to remove the term itself. But Henry had the last word; in his own hand he amended the draft of the Act so that the bread and wine were now ordained to be ‘none other substances but the substance of his foresaid natural body’. After Henry’s death Cranmer declared that ‘Christ is eaten with the heart. Eating with the mouth cannot give life. The righteous alone can eat the Body of Christ.’ But for the moment he was forced to remain silent.

At a later date he also recorded his opinion that the Act of the Six Articles ‘was so much against the truth, and common judgements both of divines and lawyers, that if the king’s majesty himself had not come personally into the parliament house, those laws had never passed’. Yet they seem to have been welcomed by the populace. The French ambassador wrote to his court that ‘the people show great joy at the king’s declaration touching the sacrament, being much more inclined to the old religion than to the new opinions’. The people were not even prepared to read their prayers in English. ‘How loath be our priests to teach the commandments,’ one reformer lamented, ‘the articles of faith and the pater noster, in English! Again how unwilling be the people to learn it! Yea, they jest at it calling it the new pater noster …’

The denial of transubstantiation was now to be punished by death in the fire, while the refusal to subscribe to the other five articles led to the forfeiture of all goods and imprisonment at the king’s pleasure. It was the most severe religious law in English history. The articles were essentially the king’s declaration of faith. It was a faith shaped by the will of the ruler and by the power of punishment. It is reported that some 200 were arrested and held in prison; they had, in the phrase of the period, been ‘brought into trouble’. Some free spirits were not hindered. John Harridaunce, known as the inspired bricklayer of Whitechapel, was still preaching out of his window between nine and twelve at night, where he referred to the religious reformers as ‘setters forth of light’. When a neighbouring baker warned him that he was breaking the tenets of the Six Articles he replied that ‘it is fit for me to be burnt as for thee to bake a loaf’.

The duke of Norfolk remarked to his chaplain, ‘You see, we have hindered priests from having wives.’

‘And can your grace’, the chaplain replied, ‘prevent also men’s wives from having priests?’

Two bishops were forced to resign their sees as a result of the new measures; Hugh Latimer left Worcester and Nicholas Shaxton left Salisbury. Archbishop Cranmer was obliged to send his wife and children into exile. In the early summer the archbishop summoned a Scottish evangelical, Alexander Alesius, to Lambeth palace. ‘Happy man that you are,’ he said, ‘you can escape! Would that I were at liberty to do the same; truly my see would not hold me back.’ He then admitted that he had signed the decree when ‘compelled by fear’. The Lutherans of Germany were horrified by the Act, which they regarded as the end of religious reform in England. The king had shown his true colours. He was not in the least evangelical. He only wished to augment his revenues, with the treasures of the old Church, and to increase his power.

There was a significant epilogue to the passing of the Act. Thomas Cranmer, wrestling with his highly developed conscience, made a series of scholarly notes on the mistakes and misjudgements contained in the articles. His secretary, Ralph Morice, took a wherry from Lambeth to deliver the notebook to the king himself. On the south side of the river, at this moment, a bearbaiting was being held. The bear broke loose from its tormentors and plunged into the Thames, hotly pursued by the dogs.

All the passengers in the wherry, with the exception of Cranmer’s secretary, leaped into the water. The bear then clambered into the boat, at which point Morice lost his nerve and jumped overboard. All thought of the notebook left him in his desire to be rescued. When he finally reached land, however, he saw the book floating on the water. He called out to the bear-ward to retrieve it. But when the man took up the book, he handed it to a priest. The cleric saw immediately that these were notes against the Six Articles and accused Morice of treason. In the ensuing argument Morice foolishly confessed that the notes had been written by the archbishop of Canterbury himself. The priest refused to hand them back.

Morice now fell into a panic and in his distress called upon Thomas Cromwell. On the following morning Cromwell summoned the priest, who was about to hand the book to one of Cranmer’s enemies. Cromwell ‘took the book out of his hands, and threatened him severely for his presumption in meddling with a privy councillor’s book’. The story is an indication, if nothing else, of the fears and tensions within the court itself. Reports circulated at the time that Cranmer had been sent to the Tower and even that he had been executed. In the same period Thomas Cromwell and the duke of Norfolk had a furious quarrel at Cromwell’s house; the subject of the dispute is not known. Could it be that Cromwell himself was now no longer safe?

13

The fall

Henry had been seeking another wife ever since the death of Jane Seymour; another son was likely to guarantee the future of his dynasty. The wives of kings were generally considered to be little more than brood mares. Charles V had proposed the duchess of Milan to him, and the French court had suggested various other ladies for the dubious honour of obtaining his hand. He asked the French ambassador to convey eight of them to Calais, where he could inspect them all at once; the invitation was declined.

Yet Cromwell, favouring a union with the Protestant princes of northern Europe, took the part of Anne of Cleves. Her father, only recently dead, had been a reformer if not precisely a Lutheran; Anne’s older sister was already married to the elector of Saxony. They would be invaluable allies. Henry also feared the collaboration between the French king and the emperor, together with the pope, in any future enterprise against England. At that very moment Charles V was travelling from Spain into France. Henry needed friends.

It was whispered that Anne of Cleves was as modest as she was beautiful; a portrait of her, executed by Hans Holbein, was brought to England. The king gazed upon it and pronounced her to be eminently worthy of marriage. It was reported at the time that she spoke no language but German and that she had no ear for music. Yet in matters of state these are trifles. After the conclusion of some months of negotiation, the lady was shipped to England at the end of 1539. Henry was so eager to see her that he rode incognito to Rochester, where he looked upon her secretly. He did not like what he saw, comparing her to a Flanders mare. He berated the earl of Southampton for having written, from Calais, about her beauty. The earl excused himself on the grounds that he believed matters had gone too far to be reversed. The king’s anger then fell upon Cromwell. He told him that the proposed bride was ‘nothing so well as she was spoken of’. He then asserted that ‘if I had known what I know now, she should not have come into this realm’. At a later meeting he asked him, ‘Is there none other remedy but that I must needs, against my will, put my neck in the yoke?’

There was no remedy. He did not dare to renounce her at the cost of alienating his new allies in northern Europe and, as he put it, ‘for fear of making a ruffle in the world’. ‘I am not well handled,’ he told Cromwell. Cromwell would pay the price at a later date. The marriage was duly solemnized on 6 January 1540, even as the king was making it clear to his court that he had taken a great dislike to his bride. He was always scrupulously polite to her and, knowing no English, she may have been unaware of his aversion. The morning after the marriage Cromwell asked him if he now liked her more. No. He suspected that she was not a virgin, and she had such ‘displeasant smells’ about her that he loathed her more than ever. He doubted if the marriage would ever be consummated. In that speculation he proved to be right. The royal couple were married for a little over six months and, although on occasions they lay in the same bed, there was no progeny. Instead the king told one of his doctors that he had ‘duas pollutiones nocturnas in somno’ or, in common parlance, two wet dreams.

A courtier had come up to Cromwell as he stood alone in a gallery, leaning against a window. ‘For God’s sake,’ he told Cromwell, ‘devise how his grace may be relieved by one way or another.’

‘Yes, but what and how?’ Cromwell broke away saying, ‘Well, well, it is a great matter.’

Eventually it was proposed that there should be an amicable separation; Anne of Cleves would not follow the same path as Anne Boleyn or even Katherine of Aragon. The convocation of the clergy were persuaded to declare the marriage null and invalid, on the grounds that there had been no issue, and parliament confirmed the verdict. Anne of Cleves herself did not seem particularly discomfited by the dissolution of her marriage, and was in any case given a generous pension. She learned English quickly enough, and settled down in the country for the next seventeen years with very few regrets. One of the many properties she owned is still to be seen in Lewes.

Henry was all the time attending carefully to the security and education of his only son. Edward was the key to the future. His first portrait, by Hans Holbein, was probably executed in 1540. It shows the infant dressed in rich robes, like a miniature version of his father. Like his father, too, he stares directly and calmly out of the canvas; his right hand is raised, as if he were about to make a declaration, and the rattle in his left hand closely resembles a tiny sceptre.

In this year a tutor, Richard Cox, was appointed to guide the three-year-old boy in all the lessons a virtuous prince must learn; another tutor, John Cheke, was appointed four years later. The two men were humanist scholars in the tradition of Erasmus, and seem to have trodden the same middle path in religion as Henry himself. The teachers of the heir to the throne could never have been Lutherans. Yet the truth remains that Edward endorsed a more radical Protestantism almost as soon as he gained the throne. He was to be called ‘the godly imp’.

He was instructed also in Greek and in Latin, of which he soon had a fair command. He would be introduced to the arts of horseriding and of archery, both fit for a king. As he acquired more learning the prince was given his own study, with a writing desk covered in black velvet; various mathematical and astronomical instruments were at his disposal, including a compass and a metal rule. A chess set lay on a shelf, while an hourglass hung from the wall. He had slates on which to write, as well as a variety of pens. In another room beside his bedchamber he kept miscellaneous papers concerning his mother, Jane Seymour, as well as his books; he also owned a puppet, and two pairs of spectacles. Diverse carved and painted objects, such as a spear and a staff ‘of unicorns’ horns garnished with silver gilt’, were also to be found.

In the spring of 1540 Thomas Cromwell was created earl of Essex; his bright particular star was still in the ascendant. He was conducting the primary affairs of the nation; soon after his elevation he committed the bishop of Chichester to the Tower of London on the charge of favouring those who refused the oath of supremacy. He had also threatened the bishops of Durham, Winchester and Bath with the consequences of royal displeasure.

Yet there were always mutterings against him. He treated the nobles with a high hand, so that the duke of Norfolk in particular became his implacable opponent. He was accused of being over-mighty and over-wealthy, and of recklessly squandering the king’s treasure.

On the morning of 10 June 1540, he took his place in the Lords, as usual; at three in the afternoon of the same day he proceeded to his chair at the head of the council table. Norfolk shouted out, ‘Cromwell! Do not sit there! That is no place for you! Traitors do not sit among gentlemen.’ ‘I am not a traitor,’ Cromwell replied. Whereupon the captain of the guard, and six other officers, came to him.

‘I arrest you.’

‘What for?’

‘That, you will learn elsewhere.’

In his fury Cromwell threw his cap down on the stone floor of the chamber. ‘This, then,’ he said ‘is the reward for all my services.’ The members of the council then erupted in a fury of antagonism, screaming abuse and thumping their fists on the table.

It is impossible to unravel all the private suspicions and antagonisms that led to his fall. He was hated by many of the nobility who resented the fact that the son of a blacksmith should have risen above them. Those of the old faith detested him for his destruction of their shrines and monasteries. The public accusations against him were manifold. He was accused of taking bribes and of encroaching on royal authority in matters like pardoning convicted men and issuing commissions. He was indeed guilty of all these, if guilty is the right word. They were really activities that came with the job, and had previously been tolerated by the king. Bribery was the only way, for example, that the system of administration could work.

Another set of charges concerned Cromwell’s beliefs; he was accused of holding heretical opinions and of supporting heretics in court and country. It was claimed that he was a Lutheran who had all the while been conspiring to change the religion of the nation; as the king’s ambassador to the emperor put it, he had allowed the impression that ‘all piety and religion, having no place, was banished out of England’. Letters between him and the Lutheran lords of Germany were discovered, although it is possible that they were forgeries. It was reported to the German princes that he had indirectly threatened to kill the king if Henry should attempt to reverse the process of religious reform; he had said that he would strike a dagger into the heart of the man who should oppose reformation. If such a threat had been made, then Cromwell was guilty of treason. It was of course the principal charge against him.

He was allowed to confront his accusers, but he was not permitted a public trial before his peers. He was instead subject to an Act of attainder for treason, a device that he himself had invented. The bill of attainder passed through both Lords and Commons without a single dissenting vote. Only Cranmer endeavoured to find a good word for him, and wrote to the king remarking on Cromwell’s past services. ‘I loved him as a friend,’ he said, ‘for so I took him to be.’

It is sometimes asserted that Cromwell’s fate was largely the consequence of the fatal alignment between religion and politics, but the bungled marriage of Henry and Anne of Cleves also played some part in the matter. The French king and the emperor had failed to forge an alliance, so Henry no longer needed the princes of Germany for allies; the marriage had proved to be without purpose. Although Cromwell had expedited the union at Henry’s request and with Henry’s approval, he could not wholly shield himself from the king’s frustration and anger.

Of course the force of the conservative reaction to Cromwell’s statutes of religion, for which the Pilgrimage of Grace is evidence, had shaken Henry; the king had colluded with them, but in the popular mind Cromwell was the prime mover of reform. He was the ‘evil counsellor’ who had given wicked advice to his sovereign. It was politic, therefore, that Cromwell should be given up.

Yet there were darker and deeper reasons for his removal. Cromwell had been arrested and tried as part of a diplomatic dance. The French king, Francis I, had always detested Cromwell as a heretic and as a supporter of the Spanish cause; when the duke of Norfolk came to the French court as a special ambassador, Francis suggested to him that an agreement might be reached if Cromwell were removed from office. Norfolk duly repeated this observation to the king. Henry himself was now happy to be characterized as a religious conservative, to ingratiate himself further with the French, and so it suited him to portray Cromwell as a covert Lutheran heretic who had misled his master. The fact that these charges were largely untrue was not important. In effect Cromwell had served his purpose, having enriched the king with the dissolution of the monasteries, and could now be dispatched from the scene.

Cromwell was removed to the Tower to await his execution by the axe. His house was searched and a hoard of ‘crosses, chalices, mitres, vases and other things from the spoils of the Church’ were discovered. Henry stripped him of all his titles, and declared that his former servant was to be known only as ‘Thomas Cromwell, cloth-carder’ in recognition of a former lowly occupation before his royal service. The church bells pealed in rejoicing, and impromptu parties were held in the streets of London.

From his last lodging he wrote a contrite letter to the king in which ‘your highness’s most heavy and most miserable prisoner, and poor slave’ begged for ‘mercy, mercy, mercy’. Mercy was not a commodity, however, in which the king traded. On the morning of 28 July Cromwell proclaimed on the scaffold that he was dying in the old faith, and then he bowed his head for the axe. The two executioners were ‘ragged and butcherly’, and another contemporary account describes how they were ‘chopping the Lord Cromwell’s neck and head for nearly half-an-hour’.

The fall of Cromwell was the harbinger of a more severe prosecution of those whom Henry and the conservative faction deemed to be heretics. Robert Barnes, once an Augustinian friar at Cambridge, was one of the reformers whom Cromwell had protected; it was he whom Cromwell had used in the past as an envoy to the German Lutherans. In February 1540, Barnes preached against the leading conservative Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, and accused him of setting ‘evil herbs’ in the ‘garden of scripture’. At the end of his sermon he had flung down his glove as a token of defiance against the bishop. Barnes was taken up, but recanted. Three months later, in the spring of 1540, he once again preached what was considered to be heretical doctrine at St Mary Spital; on this occasion he was sent to the Tower. It may be that, at this stage, he was used as part of the case against Cromwell; one of the vicegerent’s closest supporters, after all, was an arrant heretic. Two days after Cromwell’s execution, Barnes was burned at Smithfield.

He did not die alone. In a triumphant reassertion of his ‘middle way’ the king burned two other reformers, who were believed to be part of Cromwell’s supposed conspiracy, and hanged three ‘papist’ priests who had denied the royal supremacy. Henry was proclaiming that he was not a sovereign of one faction or another; he dispensed justice equally to all. There was one difference; it was said that those who supported the papacy were hanged, while those who opposed it were burned.

From this time forward, in fact, he no longer employed one pre-eminent minister. The years of Wolsey and of Cromwell were over. Now the king decided to supervise the affairs of the realm. He described himself as ‘old’ but he was not too old to control the business of the council or to read the dispatches of his ambassadors. The king’s council was established upon a more formal basis; it had a membership of approximately nineteen peers or prelates, and met each day at court. A minute book was to be kept. The privy council now fashioned policy in partnership with the king; it supervised the workings of the law and the operations of the exchequer. Some counsellors were superior to others, of course, and the most prominent among them were now Stephen Gardiner, Thomas Cranmer and the duke of Norfolk.

Norfolk had another advantage. At the end of the previous year he had brought his pretty niece to court, as one of the maids-in-waiting to Anne of Cleves. Katherine Howard was perhaps sixteen, perhaps twenty-two – her date of birth is not known for certain – and not at all demure. It was one of her family’s mottoes that marriage must provide more than ‘four bare legs in a bed’. A marriage, in other words, must bring with it other advantages. Katherine Howard was schooled in all the arts and tricks that might appeal to the king, and it seems that she was not averse to using them. On 28 July, just nineteen days after his union with Anne of Cleves was formally annulled, Henry married her. It proved to be her day of doom.

She soon became acquainted with her husband’s formidable temper. The ulcer on his leg once more became infected, and the pus was drained from it in a sometimes painful operation. He became morose and depressed. He began to regret the execution of Cromwell, and complained that he had been deceived about him by some of his councillors who ‘by false accusations had made him put to death the most faithful servant he ever had’. He often blamed others for the faults of his own actions. It was reported that he had ‘formed a sinister opinion of some of his chief men’, and dispatched so many people from court that it ‘resembled more a private family than a king’s train’. He fell into foul fits of temper, and refused even to listen to music. He would not allow the new queen into his presence for ten days.

A respite was at hand. By the spring of 1541 his ulcer had healed and on 10 April the French ambassador reported that ‘the Queen is thought to be with child’. The rumour proved to be false, however, and it is possible that Katherine Howard miscarried. It was the old curse that seemed to hang over the king. It was reported, by the same ambassador, that Henry was displeased with his wife and was ‘avoiding as much as possible her company’.

On 30 June, however, the king and queen led a great progress to the north. He had never travelled to those regions before, and had really known them only in the context of riot and rebellion. This was his opportunity to impress the northern people with his might and magnificence. He led 5,000 horse and 1,000 foot-soldiers so that it seemed an armed camp was on the march from Grafton to Northampton, Lincoln to Boston, Doncaster and Pontefract and York. He dressed in cloth of gold, and graciously accepted the submission of erstwhile rebels. His was the theatre of power.

Yet behind the scenes of this theatre another drama was being performed. Katherine Howard, perhaps vexed and unsatisfied by her ageing lover, was proving to be unfaithful. Even as the progress went further northward she began a liaison with a gentleman, Thomas Culpeper, and with the connivance of her ladies-in-waiting arranged to meet him at secret venues; she sought the back doors and the back stairs to expedite her passion. He became her ‘sweet little fool’.

At the same time it was rumoured that, five years before, Katherine had been intimate with her instructor on the virginal. Henry Manox had boasted that she had promised him ‘her maidenhead though it be painful to her’. This fault was compounded when another former lover from the same period, Francis Dereham, now came forward. It was believed, at a later date, that he was in fact her common-law husband. It is possible that he threatened her with some disclosure. At all events she appointed him as her private secretary and usher of her chamber. It was a woeful mistake.

Cranmer was approached by an informant who knew all about Katherine Howard’s previous indiscretions. The archbishop summoned certain members of her former household, who only confirmed the stories. It was imperative that the king be told, but no one wished to be the messenger of such tidings. If the news proved to be false, the result would be fatal. On 1 November, in the royal chapel, the king gave public thanks to God for having been ‘pleased to give me a wife so entirely conformable to my inclinations’. While the service continued the archbishop left a sealed letter for the king with the details of the queen’s previous indiscretions.

Henry refused to believe them. He insisted that the reports were the work of a faction determined to bring down the duke of Norfolk as well as the queen. He demanded that Cranmer investigate this plot and ‘not to desist until you have got to the bottom of the pot’. Whereupon the king’s guards interrupted Katherine and her ladies while they were dancing together, insisting that this was ‘no more the time to dance’. The young queen was then confined to her apartments, where she remained in fear and trembling. She must have suspected that certain inconvenient facts were about to emerge.

When Cranmer and the council questioned more deeply into the affair, it was clear that the queen was in fact deeply compromised. Manox and Dereham were interrogated, in the course of which interview Manox confessed how he ‘had commonly used to feel the secrets and other parts of the queen’s body’. Dereham also confirmed that he ‘had known her carnally many times, both in doublet and hose between the sheets and in naked bed’.

Cranmer interviewed Katherine on at least two occasions but found her ‘in such lamentation and heaviness as I never saw no creature’. She screamed with panic at her likely fate. There were times when she seemed about to fall ‘into some dangerous ecstasy, or else into a very frenzy’. She lied to Cranmer about her previous lovers, alleging that Dereham had raped her ‘with importunate force’. She admitted a few days later that he had indeed given her tokens. He knew ‘a little woman in London with a crooked back, who was very cunning in making all manner of flowers’ out of silk. She also admitted that he called her ‘wife’. On their nights of love-making he would bring with him wine, apples and strawberries. But ‘as for these words, I promise you, I do love you with all my heart, I do not remember that ever I spake them’. She wrote out a full confession to the king, which seems to have cheered him a little. She had, at the very least, never been unfaithful to him in the course of their marriage.

Yet rumour has a thousand tongues, and the royal court is its proper home. Once the queen’s former frailties were known, it was hard to conceal more recent examples. The name of Thomas Culpeper was mentioned. The gossip about the young courtier soon reached the ears of the privy council which, in the words of its proceedings, ‘weighed the matter and deeply pondered the gravity thereof’. They called some of the queen’s ladies and interrogated them about her behaviour. One of them, Margaret Morton, said that there passed a look between the queen and Culpeper ‘of such sort that I thought there was love between them’. She also alleged that the two had been alone in the queen’s closet for five or six hours, and ‘for certain they had passed out’ – the sixteenth-century phrase for orgasm. Another lady-in-waiting confirmed that there was much ‘puffing and blowing’ between them. The queen’s principal lady, Lady Rochford, the perfidious sister-in-law of Anne Boleyn, had already been ‘seized with raving madness’; she had eased the passage of Culpeper into her mistress’s chamber. She would be brought, insane, to the scaffold.

The privy council next interrogated Culpeper. His was the crucial case, since the queen’s adultery would be considered to be high treason. He denied any actual intercourse but agreed that ‘he intended and meant to do ill with the queen and that in like wise the queen so minded to do with him’. The privy council did not believe him. He and the queen must have passed out. ‘You may see what was done before marriage,’ Cranmer told them. ‘God knows what has been done since!’ It was suggested that Katherine had also been dallying with Dereham on the progress to the north.

Henry attended a secret night session of the council at the London residence of the bishop of Winchester. When the full account was put to him, he raged so violently that it was feared he would go mad. He called for his sword, with the intention of killing his young wife. He swore that she would never ‘have such delight in her lechery as she should have pain and torture in her death’. Then he broke down and wept, which was considered ‘strange’ for one of his ‘courage’. The news of the queen’s disgrace was soon known everywhere. The duke of Norfolk, her uncle, declared to the French ambassador that she ‘had prostituted herself to seven or eight persons’ and that she ought to be burned.

On 1 December Culpeper and Dereham were both brought to Westminster Hall on the charge of treason. In the course of the charges Katherine herself was described as a ‘common harlot’. The two men were found guilty and sentenced to the traitor’s death of hanging and disembowelling. Henry Manox, having offended long before Katherine had become queen, was reprieved. Culpeper, a gentleman, had his punishment commuted to a simple beheading.

On 13 February 1542 Katherine Howard followed him to the scaffold. She had been married to the king for less than two years. She panicked when she embarked on the Thames for her final journey, and had to be manhandled onto the boat. A flotilla of vessels then carried her from Syon to the Tower, where she was received with all the honours due to a queen. She was beheaded three days later, on Tower Green, and was said to have been meek and repentant at the end. She had in fact rehearsed her death and had asked for the block to be brought to her prison chamber so that she could learn how to put her neck upon it gracefully. Her body was buried close to that of Anne Boleyn in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula. Many of her family were sent to the Tower but were eventually released. The duke of Norfolk stayed on his estates and avoided the court. But from this day forward Henry never really trusted him.

On the day of his wife’s execution the king held a great banquet, with twenty-six ladies at his own table, and over the succeeding days gave many such feasts. He was eating so much that his vast bulk grew ever heavier, and his bed was enlarged to a width of 7 feet. Yet in private he was cast down. In the margin of a translation of Proverbs, the king made a double mark beside the following passage: ‘For the lips of a harlot are a dropping honeycomb, and her throat is softer than oil. But at the last she is as bitter as wormwood, and as sharp as a two-edged sword.’

14

War games

In the summer of 1542, Pope Paul III established the Holy Office of the Inquisition, with six cardinals as inquisitors-general. ‘Even if my own father were a heretic,’ the pope declared, ‘I would gather the wood to burn him.’ The paths of religious faith were perilous. Henry, now that he had broken with the papacy, was eager to see Charles V follow his example; it was the English king’s wish to see a great general council held in which the differences of religion could be debated and perhaps resolved.

The diplomatic situation seemed to be working in his favour. He was contemplating an alliance with Charles V against France, a joint invasion that would not in fact take place until the summer of 1544. Yet in the meantime it was important to secure his northern territories. He had agreed to meet the king of Scotland, James V, at York towards the end of his northern progress in the summer of 1541; but James, perhaps fearing kidnap or assassination, did not arrive. The king’s father, James IV, had been killed by Henry’s army at Flodden Field less than thirty years before. This rebuff served only to augment Henry’s anger at the increasing number of border raids by the Scots, who still considered parts of northern England as their proper home. When a Scottish raiding party seized one of the king’s representatives, in the summer of 1542, the matter came to open war.

The French king and his court were delighted. Francis I told the English ambassador that ‘your majesty [Henry] had begun with the Scots, and the Scots had given you your hands full’. He had nothing to fear from the English while they were distracted by the ancient enemy. The Scots were also now in full cry. ‘All is ours,’ they said. ‘The English are but heretics.’ In the autumn of 1542 the duke of Norfolk, partly returned to favour, led 20,000 men into the Lothians where he laid waste to the harvest; he also left towns and villages in ruins. The army then retired to Berwick.

In reprisal, a Scottish army of some 15,000 men advanced into Cumberland in the last week of November. They were not met by English forces, whose commanders were taken wholly by surprise by the Scottish movement, but rather by the farmers and farm labourers of the county who promptly took up their arms and mounted their horses; in this part of England, it was always wise to be prepared for combat. Then they launched a series of attacks upon the Scots, dividing their forces and killing any stragglers. When an unexpected company of horsemen suddenly appeared on the horizon, the cry went up that the duke of Norfolk had come with his men.

Norfolk was not in the vicinity at all; nevertheless the Scots fled towards the border pursued by a few thousand English soldiers hurriedly assembled by a northern magnate, Sir Thomas Wharton. Yet the Scottish forces lost their way and began to flounder in the Solway and its reaches just as the tide began to flow. They drowned, or were killed; most of them met their end in Solway Moss, a quagmire between Gretna and the Esk where they were surrounded and dispatched. Many of the greatest nobles of the land were seized and taken to London. ‘Worldly men say that all this came by misorder and fortune,’ John Knox said, ‘but who has the least spunk of the knowledge of God may as evidently see the work of His hand …’

James V, on hearing the news, became disconsolate and pined to death. In a literal sense he suffered from loss of power. On 8 December he heard the news that his wife had given birth to a child, Mary, who became the woeful queen of Scots. ‘The devil go with it,’ he said. ‘It will end as it began. It came from a lass and it will end with a lass.’ By this he meant that the Stuart dynasty had been established by the daughter of Robert the Bruce, and would end with his own newborn daughter. But Mary, queen of Scots, was not destined to be the last of the line. It only came to an end with the demise of Queen Anne 172 years later. Ten days after making this semi-accurate prophecy, he was dead. The English king was jubilant. This was what sovereigns were put on earth to achieve. To win glory. To conquer their enemies. All the heaviness that had fallen upon him after the disgrace of Katherine Howard seemed to have left him.

A parliament was called at the beginning of 1543. Its first task was to grant a subsidy to the king to pay for the war in Scotland and ‘for his other great and urgent occasions’, by which was meant the coming invasion of France. An Act was also passed ‘for the advancement of true religion, and abolishment of the contrary’; one more attempt to quell the religious dissension of the country. No plays or interludes could mention the Scriptures; no one could read from the Bible in an open assembly. Merchants and gentlemen might study it in the quietness of their homes ‘but no women, nor artificers, apprentices, journeymen, serving-men under the degree of yeomen; nor no husbandmen, or labourers, might read it’.

In the late spring of the year, yet another formulation of the English faith was issued from the press. It was entitled A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man; set forth by the King’s Majesty of England. It became known simply as the King’s Book. Although it is in essence a conservative document, it promulgated once more the middle way between Catholicism and Lutheranism. The power of the pope was denied, but the sacrifice of the Mass was upheld. Purgatory was not quite abolished, but it was growing ever dimmer. The miracle of transubstantiation was affirmed. Faith and works were equally urgent for salvation; shrines and pilgrimages were not.

The king’s council was busy with matters of heresy in this period. In a space of some five days, from 15 to 19 March, seven suspects were brought before it or committed to several prisons. On 17 March, for example, one cleric was dispatched to the Fleet for ‘evil opinions touching the Sacrament of the Altar’. It was said that the principal member of the conservative faction, Stephen Gardiner, ‘had bent his bow to shoot at some of the head deer’. In his Easter Day sermon Gardiner grouped together Anabaptists and those who questioned the cult of Mary, crying out from the pulpit ‘Heretics! Faggots! Fire!’ When one chaplain of Canterbury was buried in the cathedral, the bell-ringer took the censer from the thurifer and poured its burning coals over the new grave; the dead cleric was suspected of heresy.

Yet one man of Canterbury escaped. Archbishop Cranmer, the chief supporter of the cause of reform, was also suspected. At a sermon in the cathedral he was supposed to have preached that the sacrament of the altar was ‘but a similitude’; it was not Christ’s body but a token or remembrance. If he had thus spoken, then he was going much further than any other English dignitary dared. Some of the canons at his own cathedral began to whisper against him. The more orthodox members of the king’s council were heard to suggest that it was invidious to burn poor men but to allow the principal instigator of heresy to stay in favour. By the spring of 1543 they sent a declaration to the king in which a commission of inquiry into Cranmer’s teaching was suggested.

Some evenings later the royal barge was moored at Lambeth, and the king invited the archbishop for a river journey. When they were comfortably seated the king turned to Cranmer. ‘Ah, my chaplain, I have news for you. I know now who is the greatest heretic in Kent.’ He pulled out the document of accusations, collected from Canterbury by the council. Cranmer read it, and then knelt before the king. He wished the matter to be brought to a trial. He acknowledged that he still opposed the spirit of the Six Articles, but declared that he had done nothing against them. The king had always trusted, and confided in, the archbishop. He also wished to avoid further disunity and controversy in an already troubled Church.

So he asked Cranmer himself to be the judge in the whole matter. The archbishop demurred, but the king insisted. The cleric thereupon appointed his chancellor and his registrar to examine those who had accused him of heresy. The homes of the principals were searched, and papers were found that suggested a conspiracy among them; certain letters from Stephen Gardiner were recovered. Cranmer also learned that some of his apparent allies had been implicated. But he was not a man of vengeance. Quietly he allowed the matter to rest. When the king requested that he call one of his secret enemies a ‘knave’ to his face, he replied that this was not the language of a bishop.

A further attempt upon Cranmer was made at the end of November. The king now played a game of hazard. He authorized his council to summon the archbishop on the charge of heresy and ‘as they saw cause, to commit him to the Tower’. Yet that night he summoned the archbishop into his presence. When Cranmer arrived in haste, Henry told him precisely what the council planned to do.

Cranmer seemed to receive the news meekly enough and said something to the effect that he expected a fair hearing. The king rebuked him. ‘Do you not think that if they have you once in prison, three or four false knaves will soon be procured to witness against you and to condemn you, which else now being at your liberty dare not once open their lips or appear before your face?’ Henry was acquainted with the nature of trials for heresy.

Henry then gave Cranmer his personal ring, which was a sure token of royal support; it was a sign that he had determined to take the matter into his own hands. With this, Cranmer returned to his palace at Lambeth. On the following morning he was duly summoned to come before the council, but he suffered the indignity of being kept waiting for three-quarters of an hour ‘among serving men and lackeys’. The king was informed of this very quickly, and thundered in his rage. ‘Have they served me so?’ he asked. ‘It is well enough. I shall talk with them by and by.’ It has all the making of a stage play which, from the pen of Shakespeare, it eventually became.

Cranmer stood before the council, where he was informed by his erstwhile colleagues that he was under arrest on suspicion of heretical teachings. He then showed them the king’s ring, at which they were astounded. ‘Did I not tell you, my lords?’ one of them cried out. The errant councillors were led before the king, who lectured them on the need for amity and unity. ‘Ah, my lords,’ he told them. ‘I had thought that I had had a discreet and wise council, but now I perceive that I am deceived. How have you handled here my lord of Canterbury?’

The duke of Norfolk, one of the leaders of the plot against Cranmer, said that ‘we meant no manner of hurt unto my lord of Canterbury in that we requested to have him in durance; that we only did because he might after his trial be set at liberty to his more glory’. It was, at the best, a very weak excuse. ‘Well,’ the king replied, ‘I pray you, use not my friends so. I perceive now well enough how the world goes with you. There remains malice among you one to another. Let it be avoided out of hand, I would advise you.’ Cranmer was safe for the rest of the king’s reign.

Henry had protected his archbishop out of genuine affection but also out of policy. He did not want his nation, or indeed his religion, to be further divided. It seemed, however, that in essential matters of doctrine the reformers had lost their cause. One of them wrote that a man might journey the length and breadth of the kingdom without finding one preacher who ‘out of a pure heart and faith unfeigned is seeking the glory of our God. He [the king] has taken them all away.’ The action was of a piece with Henry’s new alliance with Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and the most Catholic king of the Spanish empire.

Yet there was a chance that reform might find a new champion. In the summer of 1543 Henry married his sixth and last wife. In the immediate court environment, to which Katherine Parr belonged, the king had, according to the Spanish ambassador, become ‘sad, pensive and sighing’. He pined for female companionship and affection. Katherine Parr – twice widowed and one of Lady Mary’s entourage – was in love with one of the king’s courtiers, Thomas Seymour. The king, however, dispatched him to Brussels as an ambassador and decided to marry Katherine Parr himself. There was no question of refusal. He may have been fat and infirm but he was the sovereign; it was her duty to accept. ‘A fine burden,’ Anne of Cleves is reported to have remarked, ‘Madam Katharine has taken on herself!’

Katherine Parr was learned, by the standards of the day, and she was also pious; she even wrote two devotional manuals, one of them entitled The Lamentations of a Sinner. So she had become interested, to put it no higher, in the case of religious reform. ‘Every day in the afternoon for the space of one hour,’ it was reported, ‘one of her chaplains, in her privy chamber, made some collation to her and to her ladies and gentlewomen …’ Among these ladies were a number of tacit Lutherans – Lady Elizabeth Hoby, Lady Lisle, Lady Butts and the duchess of Suffolk among them. One of the more interesting features of the late Henrician court lies in this recrudescence of female piety. One contemporary noted that the ‘young damsels … have continually in their hands either psalms, homilies, or other devout meditations’. Katherine Parr was among them and, according to John Foxe, was ‘very zealous towards the Gospel’. In good time this would bring her trouble.

Throughout this year, and the beginning of 1544, preparations were made for the great invasion of France under the combined leadership of Henry of England and Charles of Spain. The cost of the undertaking was so vast, however, that the general coinage of the realm was debased by introducing a larger amount of alloy into its gold and silver coins. By these means the king’s mint acquired large sums of money, since the face value of the currency was the same despite the smaller amount of precious metal. Prices naturally rose, at a rate of approximately 10 per cent each year, and the economy took twenty years to recover. These were the results of the king’s passion for war.

Other ways of making money were also found. It was decided to exact a ‘benevolence’ from the nation. Those who owned lands worth more than an annual value of 40 shillings were to be requested to contribute to the king’s coffers; it was their duty to the sovereign. Those who refused were punished. One alderman of London was sent as a common soldier to the Scottish border, where his commander was told to subject him to the harshest and most dangerous duties. Another alderman was simply sent to the Tower, where he remained for three months.

The preparation for the invasion had already cost much blood. Scotland had renounced all its promises and agreements with the king, concluded after the disaster at Solway Moss, and once more established the old alliance with France. Henry could not contemplate the prospect of an enemy at his back door, and so he resolved to punish the Scots for what he regarded as their duplicity and faithlessness. At the beginning of May an English fleet sailed up the Firth of Forth and their commander, Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, was ordered to ‘burn Edinburgh town, so razed and defaced when you have sacked and gotten what you can of it, as there may remain forever a perpetual memory of the vengeance of God’. He was commanded to overthrow the castle and beat down Holyrood House, while at the same time putting to the flame all the towns and villages in the immediate vicinity. The campaign of terror was then to continue to Leith and St Andrews ‘putting man, woman and child to fire and sword, without exception, where any resistance shall be made against you’. Once more the wrath of the king meant death.

Hertford duly obeyed the orders of his sovereign and reported on 9 May that he had made ‘a jolly fire and smoke upon the town’ of Edinburgh. Nine days later he wrote that his mission was accomplished to the effect that ‘we trust your Majesty shall hear that the like devastation hath not been made in Scotland these many years’. A French fleet came to the aid of their allies and landed a considerable force which, with the Scottish army, marched to the border country; their campaign of fire and fury was duly challenged by another invasion by the earl of Hertford who in the autumn of the year destroyed 243 villages, five market towns and seven monasteries. This dance of death between the two nations would continue, at intervals, until the time of Oliver Cromwell.

The army of the English set out for France itself in the summer of 1544. The largest invasion force ever was dispatched abroad: 48,000 men took to the Channel. It needed the combined strength of 6,500 horses to drag the guns and carts of ammunition. The bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, had been appointed somewhat quixotically as Purveyor General; he said that he had been a ‘continual purveyor of cheese, butter, herrings and stockfish’. His enemies now referred to him as ‘Stephen Stockfish’.

The first scheme of war provided that the armies of the king and the emperor should march upon Paris, but Henry detected flaws in the proposal; it would leave his forces dangerously unprotected in the rear. It was first necessary for him to subdue the towns of Boulogne and Montreuil before passing the Somme on his way to the capital. By the end of June the English army had gathered about Boulogne, and on 14 July Henry crossed the Channel. A few days later he rode out from the gates of Calais, then an English garrison town, and came upon the territories of France; across his saddle he placed a great musket with a long iron barrel. He was travelling 25 miles south to join his army at Boulogne. The siege guns were soon blasting at the castle on the eastern side of the hilltop town.

Diplomatic, as well as military, activities were under way. In the summer of 1544 Francis wrote to the two kings, privately urging each of them to come to terms with him and thus hoping to divide their counsels: Henry sent the letter on to his ally, Charles, and replied to the French king that he was suggesting a policy ‘wherein you greatly touch our honour, the which, as you are aware, having always guarded inviolably to this present, I will never consent in my old age that it shall be any way distained’. In the following month he wrote – or rather dictated – a letter to Katherine Parr even as he sustained the siege of Boulogne. He told her that ‘we be so occupied, and have so much to do in foreseeing and caring for everything ourself, as we have almost no manner of rest or leisure to do any other thing’. This is the king at war, energetic and ever busy. He was delighted to be once more in arms, and one of his commanders reported that he was ‘merry and in as good health as I have seen his grace at any time this seven year’. He was in pursuit of glory, which was really the only reason for warfare.

Charles V was detained at the town of Dizier or St Didier for seven weeks, thus losing half the time that had been calculated for the march upon Paris itself. But the emperor then pressed forward, even though in the process his communications were broken and his supplies cut off. The advance surprised Henry, but the king could not have foreseen the duplicity of his ally. Francis and Charles had settled the terms of a separate peace, leaving out Henry, and needed only an excuse to enact it. With Charles’s army in perilous circumstance, the emperor declared himself obliged to make a treaty. The Spaniards and the French once more joined hands in the diplomatic dance.

The siege of Boulogne had been protracted beyond anticipation. The valour of the defenders of the town provoked even the king’s admiration. ‘They fought hand to hand,’ he wrote to the queen, ‘much manfuller than either Burgundians or Flemings would have done …’ Yet finally he prevailed, and the people of the town marched out in surrender. Montreuil still held out, however, and it was clear to all that the English army would never reach the gates of Paris. At this juncture Charles sealed the treaty with Francis, leaving Henry the only belligerent. The king’s anger and incredulity at the treachery of his ally are understandable, but the relative failure of the invasion is not in doubt. He had taken Boulogne, but not Paris, at an estimated cost of some £2 million; that was roughly equivalent to ten years of normal spending. The bulk of the crown lands, acquired from the Church, were sold off. This led directly to the frailty of the royal finances in subsequent years, and was one of the contributing factors to the Civil War. Yet this is to move too far forward. In the immediate context of 1544 the treasury was exhausted and Stephen Gardiner was moved to write, in emulation of Colet thirty-three years before, that ‘the worst peace is better than the best war’. On the last day of September Henry sailed back to England.

The threat from France remained, more dangerous than ever after the peace with Spain. It became clear by the spring of the following year that Francis was planning an invasion and was gathering a large fleet of ships for the purpose; galleys were even being brought overland from the Mediterranean to join the flotilla. The fortifications along England’s shores were strengthened further and the trained bands of local fighters were put on alert. In the event the French force got precisely nowhere; inclement winds propelled the ships back to their own coastline, and the supplies of food began to run low. So the French commanders ordered a retreat. An attempt was made at battle near Portsmouth, when some French galleys fired at the English ships, but once more an unfavourable wind forced them back. A French fleet was sighted off Shoreham, but again it turned around; an outbreak of disease had felled the sailors. In the course of this flurry of maritime activity one ship, the Mary Rose, managed to sink itself in Portsmouth harbour. This can be taken as a symbol of the armed struggle between England and France.

15

A family portrait

In 1545 a family portrait had been commissioned by the king from an unknown artist. It displays Henry in full might, sitting on his throne between his heir and the long-dead Jane Seymour; on the right stands Lady Elizabeth, and on the left Lady Mary. Henry’s hand rests upon his son’s neck. The setting is the king’s lodging on the ground floor of the royal palace at Whitehall. Katherine Parr is not a part of this dramatic tableau, but she was now very much part of the family. During the king’s absence in France, she had become the regent of England. She stayed generally at Hampton Court, where Mary and then Elizabeth resided with her. They were educated in the broadly based humanism associated with the name of Erasmus that soon became an aspect of early Protestantism.

Katherine also helped to guide the studies of the young Prince Edward. He called her ‘his most dear mother’, and told her that ‘I received so many benefits from you that my mind can hardly grasp them’. She herself was receiving instruction and Edward wrote that ‘I hear too that your highness is progressing in the Latin tongue … wherefore I feel no little joy, for letters are lasting’. This is a conventional expression, and need not necessarily reflect Edward’s real sentiments. Yet he did persevere with his classical studies. He had read and memorized, for example, four books of Cato. He read Cicero in Latin and Herodotus in Greek. Soon enough he began the study of French; he was, at least in theory, one day to become the king of France. He also became immersed in geography and history as a way of preparing himself for sovereign rule. He informed his tutor, John Cheke, that ‘I have only done my duty’. In such a position of eminence, and with such an overweening father, his sense of his role and responsibilities was already immense. It was remarked that, even as a young boy, he had the mannerisms of an adult.

His caps were decorated with diamonds and sapphires, his garments woven from cloth of gold; he possessed a dagger of gold that hung from a rope of pearls, its sheath covered in diamonds, rubies and emeralds. He shone as he walked or rode. A painting of him, from 1546, survives. He stands between a pillar and a window, dressed in all the robes of state. He holds the golden dagger in his right hand while his left hand significantly touches his codpiece as a symbol that the dynasty would continue.

Yet he also had time for the sports of kings. Among his possessions were gloves for hawking, rods for fishing, and swords for fencing. He owned greyhounds and horses. He loved to hunt and draw the longbow; he played rackets and engaged in the noble art of tilting. He also performed upon the lute, like his father.

He had an especial affection for his half-sister Mary, but his love was not unmixed with the same sense of duty. He asked Katherine Parr to ensure that Mary no longer attended ‘foreign dances and merriments which do not become a most Christian princess’. He was eight at the time he issued this warning. At a later date the siblings would disagree about the purport of being a ‘Christian’. Yet his anxiety suggests a picture of Mary quite different from that of the sour and zealous burner of heretics; she loved dancing; she had a taste for finery and liked to gamble at cards. She had a passion for music, just like her father and her siblings. Music is a key to the Tudor age. An image of Elizabeth survives, dining to the sound of twelve trumpets and two kettledrums together with fifes, cornets and side drums. Everybody sang in the streets or at their work, ‘the mason at his wall, the shipboy at his oar, and the tiler on the housetop’. A lute was placed in many barber shops, for customers to while away the time.

But Mary also had a reputation for her studies, and another royal, Mary of Portugal, praised ‘the fame of her virtue and learning’. In the last months of 1545, under the supervision of Katherine Parr, she was translating a paraphrase by Erasmus of the Gospel according to St John that was published in the following year.

Edward was matched in his zeal for learning by his other half-sister, who was a precocious student of languages. Elizabeth mastered Greek and Latin with ease, studying Greek in the morning and Latin in the afternoon; late in her realm, when she was by the standards of the time an old woman, she managed an extempore oration in Latin that delighted her court. She also learned Spanish, Italian, Flemish and a little Welsh. At the age of eleven she presented her stepmother with her translation from the French of Margaret of Navarre’s long poem, The Mirror of the Sinful Soul; her English prose covers twenty-seven pages. Her principal tutor, Roger Ascham, reported that at the age of sixteen ‘the constitution of her mind is exempt from female weakness, and she is endowed with a masculine power of application. No apprehension can be quicker than hers, no memory more retentive …’ A childhood companion of Edward, Jane Dormer, took a less sanguine view of the girl; at the age of twelve or thirteen Elizabeth was ‘proud and disdainful’. So we have a fine example of two young women granted a humanist education that rivalled any being offered at the schools or universities. It was not unique – Thomas More had provided the same tuition for his own daughters – but it was unusual.

The happy family, however, was about to be disturbed by tensions concerning religion. Henry himself was still much exercised over matters of faith. When he appeared in parliament, at the end of 1545, he burst into tears when he began to address the divisions in the kingdom. ‘I hear’, he said, ‘that the special foundation of our religion being charity between man and man is so refrigerate as there was never more dissension and lack of love between man and man … some are called Papists, some Lutherans, and some Anabaptists; names devised of the devil …’ He went on to declare that ‘I am very sorry to know and hear how unreverendly that precious jewel the Word of God is disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern’.

Cranmer himself was in the process of modifying his most sacred beliefs. In this transition, by a slow and gradual process of meditation and study, the archbishop repudiated the idea of transubstantiation by which the bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ. Eventually he would come to believe that the miracle took place in the heart of the communicant, whereby he or she is spiritually changed on reception of the host. Everything was in flux.

Argument and debate, therefore, exercised the more acerbic or inquisitive spirits. Henry had wanted a purified Catholic Church, cleansed of its more egregious superstitions; he had also wanted a national Church under his sovereignty. What he had created, however, was a fragile and in some ways inconsistent alternative. The fact that it changed utterly after his death is a measure of its instability. A new English litany was published in the summer of 1545, but the Mass and the other services of the Church were still performed in Latin. In the same year a bill against heretics, more severe than any before, was thrown out by the Commons in parliament; this is another sign of division. The ceremony of ‘creeping to the cross’ on Good Friday was abolished at the beginning of 1546; when Cranmer sought to remove all ceremonies involving bells and crucifixes the king first agreed, but then changed his mind. He still wanted to preserve the image, to the king of France and to the emperor, of an orthodox sovereign. He was even then in the process of negotiating with them.

After the abortive end of hostilities it became clear that France and England would have to treat with one another before squandering any more resources on useless threats and counter-threats. So there began a process of diplomatic conversations that Henry caustically described as ‘interpretations’; he told his envoy that ‘you must stick earnestly with them, and in no wise descend to the second degree, but upon a manifest appearance that they would rather break up than assert to the first degree’. It was a matter of subtleties and feints and manoeuvres in a situation of mutual suspicion and distrust. The result was the Treaty of Ardres, signed in the summer of 1546, by which Henry was allowed to occupy Boulogne for eight years before returning it for the sum of 2 million écus. It was the last treaty he would ever sign.

That ‘charity between man and man’, upheld by the king in parliament, was notably lacking among some of Henry’s councillors. The more conservative of them held considerable doubts about the nature of Katherine Parr’s influence upon the household. The fact that Mary was translating Erasmus is itself significant, and the scholar’s paraphrase of the Gospel according to St John played some part in the later reformation under Edward’s rule. So Katherine was encouraging the kind of reformed spirituality that humanism inspired.

The king had complained, in the early months of 1546, about the way in which his wife brought up the subject of faith. John Foxe, whose evidence is generally reliable, quotes him as saying sarcastically to Stephen Gardiner that it is ‘a thing much to my comfort to come in mine old days to be taught by my wife’. At a later opportunity Gardiner whispered to the king that the queen’s opinions were, according to the law, heretical and that ‘he would easily perceive how perilous a matter it is to cherish a serpent within his own bosom’. These words also come from Foxe. Henry then allowed Gardiner to interview the ladies closest to the queen.

Such matters emerged at a time when the prosecution of heretics was increased, and in particular the persecution of a woman close to the queen and the queen’s ladies. Anne Askew had friends at court, and her brother was gentleman pensioner and cup-bearer; but she was being watched. One spy who had lodgings opposite her own reported that ‘at midnight she beginneth to pray, and ceaseth not in many hours after …’ In March 1546 she was summoned before the commissioners of heresy at Saddlers’ Hall in Gutter Lane; here she confessed to having said that ‘God was not in temples made with hands’. She was asked whether a mouse, eating a consecrated host, received God. She made no answer, but merely smiled.

She was consigned to a London prison before being brought before the bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, who later earned the nickname of ‘Bloody Bonner’. On this occasion he was a mild persecutor and, being approached by her ‘good friends’, released her on the understanding that she had submitted. Yet then she relapsed into heresy, and in the summer of the year was brought before the council at the palace in Greenwich. She was of ‘worshipful stock’ but her recalcitrance was therefore all the more notable; it was also hoped by the conservatives on the council that the prospect of torture or of burning might prompt her to implicate some ladies of the court. She was asked to confirm that the Holy Sacrament was ‘flesh, blood and bone’ to which she replied that ‘it was a great shame for them to counsel contrary to their knowledge’. When pressed for her views on the Eucharist she responded that ‘she would not sing the lord’s song in a strange land’. When Stephen Gardiner charged her with speaking in parables she borrowed some words from Christ and replied, ‘if I tell you the truth, you will not believe me.’ Gardiner declared that she was a parrot. By now, weary of imprisonment, she was ‘sore sick, thinking no less than to die’. When in prison she composed a ballad, of which one verse runs:

I saw a ryall trone

Where Justyce shuld have sitt

But in her stede was one

Of modye [angry] cruell wytt.

In the Tower she was charged to reveal the others of her sect; when she maintained her silence, she was put on the rack and tortured. Still she did not name her secret allies. She wrote her own account, published in the following year in Germany. ‘Then they did put me on the rack because I confessed no ladies or gentlewomen to be of my opinion, and thereon they kept me a long time; and because I lay still and did not cry my Lord Chancellor and Master Rich took pains to rack me with their own hands, till I was nigh dead.’ On 15 July she was brought to Smithfield for burning, but she had been so broken by the rack that she could not stand. She was tied to the stake, and the faggots were lit. Rain and thunder marked these proceedings, whereupon one spectator called out ‘A vengeance on you all that thus doth burn Christ’s member.’ At which remark a Catholic carter struck him down. The differences of faith among the people were clear enough.

A month later, Katherine Parr was marked out for investigation. This is the story John Foxe tells, twenty years later, in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. It is likely that he heard of it from those who were part of the court at the time; he is hardly likely to have invented it, since it does not serve any essential purpose in his Protestant ‘book of martyrs’ except to blacken the reputation of Stephen Gardiner. For that purpose, however, he may have embellished the facts of the matter. He reports correctly that, in this period, Henry kept largely to his privy quarters where he saw only his closest advisers. This was the atmosphere in which the king allowed Gardiner secretly to investigate his wife’s religious opinions for any taint of heresy. He even permitted certain articles of accusation to be drawn up against her. This is inherently plausible; given the facts of his own mortality, so obvious to him now, he may have been concerned about those in the immediate vicinity of his son after his death.

The articles of accusation were fortunately dropped on the floor of the court, where they were recovered by some ‘godly person’ who took them at once to Katherine Parr. It is more likely that a ‘godly’ friend, knowing of the machinations against the queen, privately warned her. Whereupon she fell ‘into a great melancholy and agony’; given her husband’s treatment of some of his earlier consorts, this is hardly surprising. Her terror was such, however, that one of the king’s own doctors was sent to minister to her; this man was also privy to Henry’s designs, and gave her further information about the enemies set to destroy her.

Yet the king called her to him one evening, and began to discourse on matters of religion. She took the opportunity of apologizing for her previous ‘boldness’ which was not done to ‘maintain opinion’ but to afford him diversion ‘over this painful time of your infirmity’. She is reported to have said, in order to assuage him still further, that she had also hoped that ‘I, hearing your majesty’s learned discourse, might receive to myself some profit thereby’. His vanity appeased, the king graciously condescended to pardon her. ‘And is it even so, sweetheart!’

The king and queen, together with some of their retinue, were in the privy garden a day or two later. The lord chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, then came forward with a guard of forty soldiers to arrest Katherine Parr and some of her ladies on the charge of heresy. But the king interposed. He took the chancellor aside and asked him for an explanation. He was then heard to shout, ‘Knave! Arrant knave! Beast! And fool!’ before dismissing him and the soldiers.

It is a story from one source, and no other, but authentic touches can be found in it. The life of the court was indeed full of enmity and suspicion concerning the highest in the land, and there can be no doubt that differences over the pace and nature of religious reform were at the centre of the controversies. The rather serpentine conduct of the king, setting one group of courtiers against another, is also in character. It was a means of keeping control and of asserting mastery, even over his wife. It was further reported by Foxe that Henry never afterwards trusted the conservative bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, who had first started the investigation of Katherine. This mistrust is confirmed by the king’s subsequent treatment of the bishop. The queen was back in favour, and dabbled no more in pious discussions. She would very soon be devoted to nursing her husband in his last illness.

16

The last days

The king, in his mid-fifties, wanted no mention of death. He spent most of his time in his privy chamber at Whitehall or at Greenwich; the walls were covered with tapestries, and the furnishings included two or three tables, a cupboard for plate and goblets, and some chairs. Musical instruments were also to be found there for solace and recreation. Outside, in the presence chamber, the courtiers paid their reverences to an empty throne. This was still the site of the king’s majesty and must be so honoured.

He was by now ill and ailing. The royal accounts show that large sums were being spent for the purchase of rhubarb, a sovereign specific against the infirmities of a choleric disposition; he had always harboured powerful forces of anger but his fury was compounded by the fact that he was now in almost constant pain. He was obese and had to be transported in chairs called ‘trams’ through his galleries and chambers. A tram was an early form of wheelchair to ease the burden of his ulcerated legs. The chronicler Edward Hall reports that he ‘could not go up or down stairs unless he was raised up or let down by an engine’, no doubt some form of pulley or hoist. He was also obliged to wear spectacles, which were then known as ‘gazings’; they were clipped to the nose.

Yet he was able to strike out again. He excluded Stephen Gardiner from court for failing to exchange some diocesan lands with the king; that was the explanation proffered at the time, but it may also be that the bishop’s disgrace was the result of his intrigue against Katherine Parr. It is reported that although the bishop was banished from the king’s presence he would go with the other councillors to the door of the king’s bedchamber and wait there until these more honoured councillors returned, only to give the world the impression that he was still in favour. It is in fact easy to conclude that there was a general purge of the ‘conservative faction’ in this period. The greatest of them, the duke of Norfolk, was soon to be consigned to the Tower.

Norfolk had been a pre-eminent councillor for much of the king’s reign but in November 1546 he and his son, the earl of Surrey, fell victim to Henry’s fear and suspicion. Surrey had quartered the royal arms with his own, and had advised his sister to become the king’s mistress in order to advance the family fortunes; he had been heard to suggest that in the event of the king’s death his father should become protector of the realm. They were in double peril because the Howard family, as collateral descendants of the Plantagenets, had some pretension to the throne. In a sheet of charges the king added certain words in his own hand, marked here by capitals. ‘HOW THIS MAN’S INTENT IS TO BE JUDGED; AND WHETHER THIS import any danger, peril or slander to the title of the Prince or very Heir Apparent …’ The succession of Edward had to be protected at all costs.

In the early days of December Norfolk and Surrey were imprisoned. It was now reported that the duke had known about a secret scheme, concocted by Stephen Gardiner, to restore the papacy. It was revealed also that Surrey had said that the ‘new men’, the religious reformers, would after the king’s death ‘smart for it’. The earl was brought before a special commission at the Guildhall, on 13 January 1547, and duly sentenced to death. Norfolk escaped a trial, for the time being, but was consigned to the Tower. He was saved from the executioner only because of the king’s own demise.

The reports of the various ambassadors tell the same story of decline and decay; the king looks ‘greatly fallen away’ and is ‘so unwell given his age and corpulence that he may not survive’. His physicians were reported to be in despair, and rumours circulated that he was already dead. ‘Whatever his health,’ one ambassador wrote, ‘it can only be bad and will not last long.’

Yet who was to tell the king that he was dying? Even to ‘imagine’ the death of the sovereign was to incur the charge of treason. It was also unwise to snuff out the last gleam of hope. The doctors gave the charge to Sir Anthony Denny, who had for some time been the principal gentleman of the bedchamber. He approached his master and whispered to him that ‘in man’s judgement, you are not like to live’. He then encouraged him to prepare for death in a pious Christian manner. The king was advised to call for Thomas Cranmer but replied that he ‘would take a little sleep’ first. When the archbishop did arrive, he was too late; if Henry was not already dead, he was at least speechless. The king died at two in the morning of 28 January 1547. He had reigned for thirty-seven years and nine months.

It is difficult to assess the king’s private religion at the end of his life. He was said to have entertained the idea, according to Foxe, of substituting the Mass with a communion service; but this Lutheran impulse cannot be substantiated. The evidence suggests that he died, as he had lived, a Catholic. His will invoked ‘the name of God and of the glorious and blessed virgin our Lady Saint Mary’; he also ordered that daily Masses be said, as long as the world endured, for the salvation of his soul. That is not the language of a Lutheran. It suggests, although it does not prove, that the king still believed in the existence of purgatory despite the denial of it in his own religious articles.

As for the religion of the country, opinions differed at the time and still differ. Was it a predominantly and practically Catholic kingdom, with a king instead of a pope at its head? Or was it in the throes of a singular change to a plainer and simpler worship? It is perhaps best seen as a confused and confusing process of acquiescence in the king’s wishes. The habit of obedience was instinctive, especially when it was compounded by fear and threat of force. A French observer said at the time that if Henry were to declare Mahomet God, the English people would accept it. Certain devout people would not be moved from the dictates of their conscience – Thomas More and Anne Askew come to mind – but, for most, the practice of religion was determined by custom and regulated by authority. The rituals of public worship were the same as those practised in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the evidence of wills suggests that the reformed religion had not made great progress with the majority of the people. By establishing the principle of royal supremacy, however, Henry had created an instrument that could be used for the purposes of religious reform.

The chain of stern necessity now bound all the participants in the drama. The death of a king was a momentous event, a rupture in the natural order that had swiftly to be repaired before the forces of chaos spilled out. In the last months of his life access to the king had been granted by Sir Anthony Denny and Sir William Paget, private secretary. Denny and Paget were a powerful influence upon the ailing king, and in this crucial period it is likely that they aligned themselves with the reformers in the king’s council.

In the autumn of 1546 the imperial ambassador, in a dispatch to his master, described the unexpected rise in the influence of these reformers. ‘The Protestants’, he told him, ‘have their openly declared champions … I had even heard that some of them had gained great favour with the king; and I could only wish that they were as far away from court as they were last year.’ He then named the two most prominent among them as ‘the earl of Hertford and the lord admiral’. These two men, Edward Seymour and John Dudley, would indeed set the tone of the next reign.

Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, was Edward’s uncle; he was Jane Seymour’s elder brother who on his sister’s marriage to the king had become a gentleman of the privy chamber. He had been raised to his earldom at the time of the young prince’s christening, and steadily climbed in royal favour; he had become warden of the Scottish Marches, or the northern borderlands, where his military skills were evident. He had taken part in the king’s campaigns in Scotland and France, and had therefore become part of the king’s inner martial band. John Dudley was the son of a royal councillor who had been beheaded at the beginning of Henry’s rule; he had quickly proved himself to be a master of the sea, and had progressed from vice-admiral to lord high admiral; he had also participated in the expeditions against Scotland and France, winning Henry’s admiration and friendship. Seymour and Dudley were, in effect, warlords.

The pair were deeply concerned, therefore, with the question of the king’s last will and testament. It is dated 30 December 1546, a little less than a month before his death. An original had been revised on 26 December by Henry in the presence of some of his councillors. We may see among them Denny and Paget, Seymour and Dudley. Henry bequeathed the crown to his son and to his son’s issue; if that failed he named any children born of his own queen, but in that regard he was perhaps overconfident. The throne would then pass to Lady Mary, and then to Lady Elizabeth. All this came to pass. The right to the throne then jumped to the issue of the king’s youngest sister, the duchess of Suffolk, thus excluding the claims of the Scottish family of Stuarts into which his older sister had married. This would cause much controversy during the reign of Elizabeth.

Henry then designated sixteen men as members of the regency council that would superintend the early years of the reign of Edward VI. Yet the fact is that he never signed the will. He left it too late, perhaps reserving to himself the possibility of changing its details and thus maintaining discipline in the court. It was subsequently signed with a ‘dry stamp’ or facsimile on the day before his death, 27 January, a delay that might have allowed for the exercise of creative editing; the signature, which was stamped upon the will and then inked in, was also contrived at a stage when he was no longer capable of reacting to any changes.

All the members of the regency council were ‘new men’, or what might be called professional men who had gained their ascendancy in the last years of Henry’s rule. Those of the nobility had only attained that rank in recent years. Some of them inclined towards the reformed faith, among them Denny and Seymour, but the majority were no doubt happy with the religious settlement that Henry had ordained. The king was actively seeking balance and moderation in the council of the young heir.

That is perhaps why Stephen Gardiner, the leading conservative, was excluded from the council. The king may have suspected Gardiner of papal sympathies, and such a stance would be doubly dangerous during a minority. This was a deliberate decision by the king himself. It is reported that he omitted Gardiner’s name with the remark that ‘he was a wilful man and not meet to be about his son’. Paget records that he and others tried to persuade the king otherwise but Henry retorted that ‘he marvelled what we meant and that we all knew him to be a wilful man’. He is also reported to have said that ‘I remembered him well enough, and of good purpose have left him out; for surely if he were in my testament, and one of you [the council], he would cumber you all, and you should never rule him, he is of so troublesome a nature. I myself could use him, and rule him to all manner of purposes, as seemed good unto me; but so shall you never do.’ Temperamental, rather than doctrinal, considerations may have ensured his dismissal. It seems likely that the king wished for the continuance of his ‘middle’ policy of reformed Catholicism. In this, he was to be disappointed.

The heir to the throne, in his own chronicle, reported the events in the immediate aftermath of the king’s death. Edward had been staying in Seymour’s castle at Hertford, but was then taken to Enfield Palace where he was told of his father’s death. ‘The next day … he [Edward himself] was brought to the Tower of London where he tarried the space of three weeks; and in the mean season the council sat every day for the performance of the will.’ He then states that ‘they thought best to choose the duke of Somerset to be Protector of the Realm and Governor of the King’s Person’. The new duke was none other than Edward Seymour himself, promoted to this title after becoming the protector.

Paget and Seymour had been colluding even as the king approached his death. ‘Remember what you promised to me in the gallery at Westminster,’ Paget wrote to Seymour later, ‘before the breath was out of the body of the king that dead is. Remember what you promised me immediately after, devising with me concerning the place which you now occupy.’ Twenty-four hours after Henry’s death Seymour wrote to Paget from Hertford. The letter was sent between three and four in the morning, carried by a messenger who was ordered to ‘haste, post haste, haste with all diligence for thy life, for thy life’. Among other matters Seymour told Paget that ‘for divers respects, I think it not convenient to satisfy the world’ about the contents of Henry’s will until they had met and so arranged affairs ‘as there may be no controversy hereafter’.

So the two men had been scheming about their seizure of power. It is also possible, to put it no higher, that Paget, with the connivance of Denny, had added material to the will itself. There was, for example, a clause known as ‘unfulfilled gifts’, decreeing that any promise of Henry to reward his courtiers should be implemented after his death; by these means lands and honours were liberally distributed to the ‘new men’.

In a contest of high stakes, amid all the fear and ambition released by the king’s death, any trick or forgery was acceptable. The members of the court were grasping and unscrupulous, having to act and react in a climate of anxiety and suspicion. It was an atmosphere that Henry had created, perhaps, but in this respect he was not very different from his predecessors and successors.

On 4 February the new council ignored the basic sentiment of the king’s will. Henry had ordained a system of majority rule, to preserve the balance of the government, that could only be overturned if the ‘most part’ agreed to do so in writing. It was overturned immediately when the council decided that ‘some special man’ should guide the proceedings of the realm; Seymour, as a man of proven ability and a blood relative of the new king, was chosen as protector of the kingdom and governor of the king’s person. The imperial ambassador was not so sanguine; he reported to the emperor’s sister that Seymour, or Somerset as we must now call him, was ‘a dry, sour, opinionated man’. In the scramble for power, however, he had won.

The body of the dead king was disembowelled and cleansed, but the surgeons discovered that the arteries were so blocked that there was ‘hardly half a pint of pure blood in his whole body’. It was then encased in lead, with a coffin that was carried by sixteen men at the time of his burial. An army of 1,000 accompanied the funeral march from Westminster to Windsor, with 250 mourners as well as all the other dignitaries of Church and State; the procession stretched for 4 miles. When the procession stopped for the night at Syon, it is reported that part of the leaden coffin had come apart and that a dog was seen to be licking the spilled blood. It is a striking illustration of a macabre prophecy delivered to Henry by Father Peto fifteen years before – ‘The dogs would lick up your blood – yes yours’. It is perhaps too dramatically appropriate to be true.

The hearse itself was nine storeys high, and the road to Windsor had to be repaved to accommodate it, while on top of the hearse a great wax effigy of the king was displayed to the crowds of spectators. It was dressed in cloth of crimson velvet, and adorned with jewels. The real body, already decomposing, was lowered into the choir vault of St George’s Chapel.

17

The breaking of the altars

On 20 February 1547 a solemn little boy proceeded down the aisle of Westminster Abbey; the great lords of the realm held up the crown, the orb and the sceptre. ‘Yea, yea, yea,’ the congregation called out, ‘King Edward! King Edward! King Edward!’ On the previous day they boy had been greeted by a London pageant, with images of a phoenix and a lion, of crowns and of flowers. A chant emerged from the crowd, ‘Sing up heart, sing up heart, sing no more down, but joy in King Edward that weareth the crown.’ He had stopped to watch the acrobatics of a tightrope dancer.

Edward, coming to the throne of England at the age of nine, was hailed by some as the new Josiah. Josiah, son of Amon, assumed the rule of his country at the age of eight and proceeded to do ‘that which was right in the sight of the Lord’. He tore down the graven images of the Assyrian cults and broke the altars into dust. In his reign, the true law of God was providentially found and became the law of Judah. The parallels were clear to those who wished to eradicate the traces of the Romish faith. Edward was seen as a godly king with a fundamental biblical power.

Continuity was assured, also, with the council previously around Henry now preserved around his son. In Foxe’s Book of Martyrs John Foxe concluded, however, that ‘a new face of things began now to appear, as it were in a stage new players coming in, the old being thrust out’. Among the discarded players were the conservatives Stephen Gardiner and the duke of Norfolk, thus tilting the balance in favour of further religious reform. Stephen Gardiner had in fact played a role at the coronation ceremony, but that was his only public duty in the course of the new king’s reign. The duke of Somerset, the protector, now dominated the proceedings of the council and had become king in all but name; two gilt maces were always borne in procession before him and he asked Katherine Parr to hand her royal jewels to his wife. He went so far as to call the French king ‘brother’, in a diplomatic letter; the English ambassador in Paris was advised that this was not good form from one who was not the Lord’s anointed.

Somerset’s relations with his real brother were tense and difficult. Thomas Seymour had been appointed lord high admiral for life. One early biographer described him as ‘fierce in courage, courtly in fashion, in personage stately and in voice magnificent’, but had made one other observation; he was, perhaps, ‘somewhat empty in matter’. He was one of the hollow men who triumph at court. He now demanded to be made governor to the young king who was, after all, also his nephew. Instead he was given a place on the privy council and promised some of the spoils of office. His ambitions were not so easily satisfied, however, and he began to plot against the rule of his brother Edward.

He also took the precaution of uniting himself with the royal widow. Katherine Parr had wished to marry him in the days when she was being courted by the king and, now that Henry was dead, she and Seymour acted swiftly to secure their alliance. In their quick courtship she wrote to him from her house in Chelsea asking him to come to her early in the morning so that ‘you may come without suspect’. The haste was considered by many to be unseemly; if Katherine were soon to prove to be pregnant, it was conceivable that Henry was the father. Any child would be a remarkable dynastic conundrum. The young princesses, Mary and Elizabeth, shared their outrage at ‘seeing the ashes, or rather the scarcely cold body of the king our father so shamefully dishonoured by the queen our stepmother’; these were the words of Elizabeth who also urged caution and dissimulation on her older sister. They were dealing with ‘too powerful a party, who have got all authority into their own hands’. She herself was obliged to use ‘tact’ toward Katherine Parr; silence and cunning were always to be her weapons.

Thomas Seymour, snubbed in the matter of the royal governorship, nevertheless connived to win his young nephew’s favour. He began to visit him in private, and surreptitiously gave him money while denouncing his brother’s meanness. ‘You are a beggarly king,’ he told the boy. ‘You have no money to play or give.’ He even elicited from him a letter to Katherine Parr in which it seemed that Edward was asking his stepmother to marry Seymour. ‘Wherefore,’ he wrote, ‘ye shall not need to fear any grief to come, or to suspect lack of aid in need; seeing that he, being mine uncle [the protector], is so good in nature that he will not be troublesome.’ He was offering, in other words, to protect Katherine against the obvious wrath of Somerset at any clandestine marriage. The protector was indeed greatly offended.

It seems more than likely that Seymour himself dictated the letter to the young king, which throws into doubt the image of the boy as grave and devout beyond his years. A few weeks after his accession it was noted that Edward began to swear and blaspheme, using such phrases as ‘by God’s blood’. He told his tutor that one of his classmates, chosen from the sons of the nobility, had advised him that ‘kings always swore’. He was made to watch as the schoolfriend was soundly whipped.

The protector was by instinct a religious reformer and his closest associates were also of that persuasion; his personal doctor, William Turner, had published works banned during the previous reign. It was reported that his six daughters had been educated in ‘good literature and in the knowledge of God’s most holy laws’, which was an indirect way of saying that they had been evangelized. In one of his proclamations he warned ‘parents to keep their children’ from such ‘evil and pernicious games’ as bowling and tennis, an order which at a slightly later date might have been described as puritanical.

John Bradford, a radical sectary, was questioned by the bishop of Durham at the end of the reign. ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘the doctrine taught in King Edward’s days was God’s pure religion.’ The reply was swift and revealing. ‘What religion mean you in King Edward’s days? What year of his reign?’ The first attempts at change came soon enough. Ten days before the new king’s coronation the wardens and curates of St Martin’s in London tore down all the images of the saints and whitewashed the paintings on the walls. They were acting too quickly, in fact, and were taken to the Tower for a period.

Yet an alteration in feeling was quickly becoming manifest. In a contemporary diary, for 1547, is the entry that ‘this year the archbishop of Canterbury did eat meat openly in Lent, in the hall of Lambeth, the like of which was never seen since England was a Christian country’. Thomas Cranmer had already outlined the nature of the English Church; he said that it was necessary that he and the other bishops should renew their commissions as functionaries of the new king. They were no longer to be seen as the successors of the apostles but as government officials. This was now a state Church in which the pulpits would be used to publish the decrees and desires of the council. It is perhaps well to remember that Edward was the first anointed English king to enjoy the title of supreme head of the English Church.

At the beginning of the new reign Thomas Cranmer grew a beard. This may be seen as a token of mourning for his old master, but in fact the clergy of the reformed Church favoured beards; it may be seen as a decisive rejection of the tonsure and of the clean-shaven popish priests. After long meditation the archbishop, as we have seen, rejected the doctrine of real presence in the Eucharist. He now invited several Protestant reformers to England, where he gave them some of the most important professorial chairs at the two universities.

In the next six years some seventy European divines made their way to England – preachers, scholars, humanists and pastors who maintained a strong and enthusiastic correspondence with their colleagues still overseas. It seemed for a while that the young king Edward might eventually come to be head of a great movement of European Protestantism. Protestant refugees, fleeing from the persecution of Charles V, also came over. A group of Flemish settlers were granted the church of Austin Friars in London for their communion, and a colony of Walloon weavers was established in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. The breadth of toleration under Somerset’s protectorate was such that not one person was executed, or tortured, for his or her religious opinions; this must be considered a unique period in sixteenth-century English history.

Many of these European refugees and scholars had already come under the influence of Jean Calvin who had now established a reforming movement of great sternness and discipline. He was a French scholar who discovered within himself a gift for systematic thought and a huge capacity for government; in 1536, at the age of twenty-six, he published the Institutes of the Christian Religion in which he established the principles of what was essentially a new city of God. Working in relative isolation, and in a short period of time, he created an entire system of theology at once authoritarian and impersonal. There was nothing private about Calvin; he was always a public force. That was the source of his greatness.

He travelled to Basle, and to Strasburg, in order to escape persecution from the French king and church. At Geneva, through the power of an unyielding will yoked with moral fervour, he created a new republic founded upon faith. He regulated worship and created a liturgy; by means of a council he watched over the morals of the city. It can be said that single-handedly he revived the spirit and the progress of the European reformation, at a time when it seemed to be in retreat from the forces of the Catholic powers.

At the heart of Calvinism was the doctrine of predestination, derived ultimately from the texts of Paul and Augustine. Before the foundations of the earth had been created God had decreed that some should be saved for everlasting life and that others should be damned eternally. If God was Almighty, then of course he already knew the identity of the elect and the reprobate. The divine potter had created some vessels of honour and of mercy, and other vessels of wrath and dishonour. Some, on embracing this doctrine, might fear for the fate of their souls and fall into despair. But for most believers the doctrine of foreknowledge and predestination was a sovereign cure for anxiety and apathy; it was an inspiring and animating doctrine that encouraged self-sacrifice and moral courage. What joy was to be found in the knowledge that you are saved? It was the power behind Oliver Cromwell’s exultant sense of ‘providence’. The true Church consisted of the elect, known only to God; once you had been saved by God’s grace you could not relapse into sinfulness. It lent status to those who might have felt themselves to be otherwise deprived.

This was the faith now being promulgated in England, particularly in the churches established by European reformers taking refuge from the depredations of Charles V. It was a doctrine that naturally attracted enthusiasts and idealists; since they are the people who work wonderful changes in the world, Calvinism rapidly spread. It became the dominant theme for the ‘hotter’ breed of reformers, and soon established itself in Poland and in Bohemia, in the Palatinate and in the Dutch Netherlands.

Now, after the accession of the young king Edward, some of the more ardent radical spirits emerged from the shadow imposed upon them by Henry’s religious policy; Thomas Underhill, for example, proclaimed himself to be a ‘hoote gospeller’ in the parish of Stratford-on-the-Bow. Hugh Latimer, the most influential radical preacher of the age, had been released at the beginning of the reign and had gone to live with Archbishop Cranmer at Lambeth Palace. From the pulpit he denounced those prelates who refused to preach the reformed faith as ‘couched in courts, ruffling in their rents, dancing in their dominions, burdened with ambassages, pampering of their paunches, like a monk that maketh his jubilee, munching in their mangers, and moiling in their gay manors and mansions’. He ended his sermon with the two words, ‘well, well’.

Dissatisfaction with the old priests sometimes erupted in the streets. The royal council commanded that the serving men and apprentices of London should no longer use ‘such insolence and evil demeanour towards priests, as reviling, tossing of them, taking violently their caps and tippets from them’. A vivid picture of these malcontents is given in The Displaying of the Protestants, published some years later; of the London apprentices it is said, ‘no regard they have at all to repair to the church upon the holy days, but flock in clusters upon stalls, either scorning the passers-by, or with their testaments utter some wise stuff of their own device’. Such is the disaffection or moroseness to be found at times of change.

The more committed or devout Catholics now migrated to France or to Italy, taking with them their threatened relics; among them were the monks who had been ejected from the Charterhouse of London. One woodcut showed the exodus of the faithful, with the legend ‘Ship over your trinkets and be packing you Papistes’. One priest threw himself from the steeple of St Magnus the Martyr, on Lower Thames Street, into the river below.

In the spring of 1547, three months after the coronation, a set of injunctions was issued for the general purification of the churches. Every picture was to be removed from the walls, and every image of saint or apostle was to be put away ‘so that there should remain no memory of the same’. Rosaries were no longer to be used. The ‘lighting of candles, kissing, kneeling, decking of images’ were denounced as superstitious; processions to shrines were no longer permitted, and in the more radical parishes of London stained-glass windows were smashed or removed. Other godly parishes were filled with equal enthusiasm. In Much Wenlock, Shropshire, the bones of a local saint were thrown onto a bonfire. In Norwich ‘divers curates and other idle persons’ visited the churches in the search for idolatrous images. In Durham the royal commissioners jumped up and down on the monstrance paraded at the festival of Corpus Christi. It was decreed that elaborate polyphonal music was no longer appropriate in a house of worship. The organs also fell silent. It had been said by reformers that the music of the old Church was ‘but roaring, howling, whistling, mumming, conjuring and juggling; and the playing at the organs a foolish vanity’.

The injunctions had also ordered the use of the English litany, and the reading of the lessons in English. The churchwardens were required to purchase one copy of the Paraphrase of the New Testament of Erasmus, a key text for the reformers. They were also obliged to keep within the church an edition of Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Homilies, a collection of twelve sermons on the principal doctrines of the English Church; the sermons were to be read from the pulpit on successive Sundays, and were largely Cranmer’s own work in which he was able to set out his vision of the reformed faith. That is why there was no mention of the Mass, and only the most cursory reference to baptism. The sovereign source of strength and power lay in a proper reading of the Bible for ‘the Scripture is full, as well of low valleys, plain ways, and easy for every man to walk in, as also of high hills and mountains, which few men can ascend unto’. The graceful cadences and euphonies of Cranmer’s style did much to ease the introduction of the new faith.

In May 1547, a general ‘visitation’ of the churches was announced. The country was divided into six circuits, and the royal commissioners interrogated the parish clergy on their compliance with the injunctions. Was the English litany in proper use? Did any priest still preach the primacy of the pope? Are there still any ‘misused images … clothes, stones, shoes, offerings, kissings, candlesticks, trindles of wax and such like’? The visitors commanded all parishes to give up their ancient festivals or ‘church ales’ in which money was raised for the maintenance of the church fabric; festivals in commemoration of the local saint were also forbidden.

One by one the great seasonal festivities of the old Church were silenced. The processions on Corpus Christi in celebration of the holy Eucharist, the May games of Robin Hood, the Hocktide ‘bindings’ of Easter where the members of one sex tied up the other, only to release them on the promise of a kiss or a small payment – all of these were denounced as relics of popery. There were to be no more rituals involving the ‘boy bishops’, whereby a young boy was dressed up to parody a divine, and the churches were no longer to be decorated with flowers. The religious guilds were abolished, too, and with them vanished the pageant plays of previous generations. One contemporary wrote that the country, ‘once renowned throughout Christendom as merry England, has lost its joy and merriment, and must be called sad and sorrowful England’.

So the interiors of the churches were now whitewashed with lime and chalk; the crucifix was supplanted by the royal arms, and the written commandments took the place of the frescoes. They had been, as one fervent homilist put it, ‘scoured of such gay gazing sights’. The conservative faithful compared them to barns rather than to chapels but, for the godly, they were the appropriate setting for psalms, Bible readings and sermons. These more radical and reformed churches were now fundamentally different from any that had come before, and were the harbingers of wholly new forms of worship. In the winter of 1547 the great rood of St Paul’s Cathedral, together with all the other images, was taken down in the course of one night. Subsequently the charnel house and chapel were turned into dwelling houses and shops. A decline in lay piety was already sufficiently obvious. When John Leland had toured the southwest of England five years previously, to prepare material for his Itinerary, he could find no signs of any church-building; the churches he praised were all the work of earlier generations.

Two bishops spoke out against the changes. Stephen Gardiner, excluded from the councils of the king, denounced the excessive zeal for innovation. ‘If you cut the old canal,’ he said, ‘the water is apt to run further than you have a mind to.’ When he was warned that his opposition to the council might put him in danger he replied that ‘I am already by nature condemned to death’. Gardiner wrote to the protector asking him not to continue with his work of reform during the minority of the king; he believed that it would endanger public peace. The bishop also wrote to Thomas Cranmer, disputing some of the doctrines upheld in the Book of Homilies. Gardiner was summoned to the council and required to obey the new injunctions; when he prevaricated he was sent to the Fleet prison, accompanied by his cook and two servants.

Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, had already preceded him to that place. ‘Ah bishop,’ the reforming duchess of Suffolk exclaimed as she passed beneath the window of Gardiner’s cell, ‘it is merry with the lambs when the wolves are shut up!’ But the bishops were not the only protesters. The French ambassador reported murmurings of grief and anger ‘in the northern parts on account of the novelties which are attempted every day by these new governors against the ancient approved religion’. The murmurings grew louder and louder until eventually a rebellion arose in the land.

18

Have at all papists!

Protector Somerset was, above all else, a soldier; his sphere was war. From the earliest days of the protectorate he was concerned with national defences, along the south coast and in the northern lands where the threat from Scotland was still very strong. He had proved his military capacities in that country, by mounting a successful invasion and an effective border raid in two successive years, and his eyes were turned to Scotland again. In 1543 Prince Edward had been betrothed to Mary, infant queen of Scots, but nothing had transpired. It was most unlikely that anything would. Yet Somerset still publicly expressed hopes of a union between the two countries, a kingdom of ‘Great Britain’ united in the strength of the reformed religion.

Like many successful military commanders he was rough in speech and inclined to deliver orders rather than to consult; he came to rely upon proclamations, for example, as the method of ordering the nation and issued seventy-seven of them in a little under three years. They varied from decrees against the hoarding of grain to the regulation of the price of meat. These proclamations did not have to be approved by the council, and in almost every case they were accompanied by the threat of severe punishment. It may be that he was uneasy about the source and nature of his power and therefore required the blunt force of the proclamation. Whatever the reason, he acquired a reputation for arrogance and froideur; it was widely reported that he did not truly consult with his colleagues of the council and preferred to rule all from a lonely eminence. ‘Of late,’ one old courtier wrote to him, ‘your Grace is grown into great choleric fashions, whensoever you are contraried in that which you have conceived in your head.’ Yet he did possess what might be called a paternalistic concern for the country, as long as its interests coincided with his own.

He was in many respects an avaricious man and acquired an unknown number of church properties and estates. His reformed religion came at a price. Three months after Edward’s coronation he began building the palace at the top of the Strand that became known to posterity as Somerset House. Three palaces of bishops, and the parish church of St Mary-le-Strand, were pulled down to make room for it; a chapel, part of the church of St John of Jerusalem in Clerkenwell, was blown up with gunpowder so that it could furnish him with stone and other materials. He also looted St Paul’s Cathedral. The French ambassador wrote that ‘in a building he is raising in this town they stop work neither Sundays nor feast days; and indeed they worked on it even upon last Ascension Day’. His essential point was not the speed of the erection but the fact that the protector was willing to ignore the ancient holy days. It was said at the time that, on observing this spectacular appropriation of church properties, men’s hearts hardened against him. At a later date John Stow, in his Survey of London, wrote that ‘these actions were in a high degree impious, so did they draw with them both open dislike from men and much secret revenge from God’.

Yet it seemed at the time that the protector was in divine favour. In the late summer of 1547, after much inconclusive negotiation with the Scots, Somerset invaded his northern neighbour. The move had as much to do with France as with Scotland; the new French king, Henry II, was determined to reclaim Boulogne, which had been ceded to Henry VIII the year before at the Treaty of Ardres. The young king of France had come to the throne in the spring, at the age of twenty-eight, and of course aspired to martial glory. Even as he prepared for struggle within the borders of his own kingdom against England he strengthened his ties with the old ally, Scotland; it was reported that the navies of both countries were harassing English vessels. Somerset also wished to punish the Scots for formally repudiating the marriage treaty between the young queen, Mary, and Edward VI. He, too, dreamed of glory.

By the late spring troops and mariners had been assembled on the very slender grounds that the Scots had organized one or two border raids. Cuthbert Tunstall, bishop of Durham, was ordered back to his diocese in order to prepare for war. On 31 August Somerset crossed the border with a proclamation that he had come ‘only to defend and maintain the honour of both the princes and realms’, and at a place beside Musselburgh known as Pinkie Cleugh he gained a decisive victory over the Scottish forces. The defending army also faced cannon fire from the English ships offshore.

It is estimated that some 10,000 Scots were killed. A contemporary chronicler notes that ‘the dead bodies lay as thick as a man may note cattle grazing’. Some of the survivors fled to Edinburgh, flinging away their weapons as they ran; others tried to hide under the willow pollards in the neighbouring bogs, with their mouths above the water like otters. After his victory Somerset promptly returned to England, leaving a force of occupation in what was essentially a defeated nation. It was decided that a number of forts, with appropriate garrisons, should be established to cow and to subdue the people. It was the beginning of a further financial crisis, with the growing realization that the costs of occupation were far greater than any rewards. The Scots were not about to submit.

Somerset had come back in haste because he feared that the French might attempt an invasion on the southern coast; the Scottish nobility had already asked Henry II for assistance against the common enemy. He may also have feared further scheming by his younger brother. The young king later recalled that ‘in the month of September 1547 the Lord Admiral told me that mine uncle, being gone into Scotland, should not pass the peace without the loss of a great number of men or of himself, and that he did spend much money in vain’. In that respect, Thomas Seymour was proved to be correct. Edward then went on to write that ‘after the return of mine uncle he [Thomas] said that I was too bashful in my matters, and that I would not speak for my right. I said I was well enough.’

But Somerset’s return was also the necessary prelude to the first parliament of the new reign. It assembled on 4 November, and was inaugurated with a Mass in which the Gloria, the Creed and the Agnus Dei were sung in English, a sure sign of the way in which matters of faith were to be resolved. One of the first measures was in fact an Act that abolished all chantries, endowments made in wills for the procuring of Masses for the sake of the souls of the dead. They were deemed to be forlorn superstitions connected with the discredited belief in purgatory; they encouraged the people in their ignorance of ‘their very true and perfect salvation through the death of Jesus Christ’.

It was piously stated that the funds and lands released from enthralment to vain piety were now to be directed towards schools and other foundations; in fact most of the revenue went straight into the pockets of the treasury for use in the Scottish wars. The number of schools created by Edward VI has been miscalculated. The majority of schools that claim him as their founder did in fact exist long before his reign; he simply continued their foundation by making a fixed payment to the schoolmaster in place of the fees the master had received from the now dissolved chantries. In the course of Edward’s rule, however, free schools were established at St Albans, Berkhamsted and Stamford. The same process of secular change affected the universities; the old monastic foundations were dissolved and new colleges took their place. Trinity College in Cambridge, for example, was established in 1546; Emmanuel College, Cambridge, was founded in 1584 on the site of a dissolved Dominican friary that had been purchased for the purpose.

Some of the revenue from the chantries was evidently put to more familiar uses, and the imperial ambassador reported that ‘all the gentry, large and small, are … on the look out to receive rewards and benefits from the king’. A small group of peers at the centre of power shared the major part of the remaining spoils; the corruption of rulers made up what Thomas More called in his Utopia ‘a conspiracy of rich men seeking their own commodity under the name of the commonwealth’. It was said that it was better to be in hell than in the court of augmentation, where the monastic revenues were administered. The proverb ‘The law is ended as a man is befriended’ was on everyone’s lips. ‘Who passeth on [refrains from] offending and breaking the laws when he hath plenty of money to stop the execution of them?’ It is the story of the government of England.

It has been calculated that more than 2,500 chantry foundations were thus removed from the land. The English were no longer permitted to pray for their dead. At the beginning of 1548 it was also proclaimed that no candles should be carried on Candlemas Day, nor ashes be applied on Ash Wednesday, nor palms be borne on Palm Sunday.

In accordance with its reformist inclinations parliament also passed legislation that allowed communion to be taken in both kinds, the bread and the wine; with this change a vernacular Order of Communion was introduced, inserted into the Latin Mass. Muscatel or malmsey wine was given to the ‘better sort’ while the rest had to make do with claret. It was further resolved that there should be no restrictions on printing, teaching or reading the Scriptures. It was therefore hoped that England would become the land of the Bible. From this time forward bishops were to be made by king’s letters patent, making sure that the newly evangelized nation had a staff of permanent officials. Piece by piece, step by step, the religion of the people was changed.

Parliament also issued a new Treason Act that repealed the draconian legislation imposed by the old king on his sometimes fractious realm. It was now no longer considered treason merely to speak against the king; any more heinous acts now needed two witnesses rather than one before matters were taken further. This particular clause on the need for two witnesses has been described by a great administrative historian, Henry Hallam, as ‘one of the most important constitutional provisions which the annals of the Tudor family afford’.

In a similar spirit of toleration the Act for the Burning of Heretics, dated 1414, was also removed from the statute book. More importantly, perhaps, the Act of Six Articles was abolished; this had been described, at its inception in 1539, as ‘an Act abolishing diversity in Opinions’. It was imposed essentially to uphold orthodox Catholicism and silence active reformers; it was no longer necessary or expedient in the new atmosphere of Edward’s reign, and its repeal could of course also be construed as a measure of religious toleration. So parliament had thrown out all the old precautions over treason and heresy, and thus had tacitly dismantled much of the oppressive legislation of the old reign.

One much less liberal measure was introduced. A new Vagrancy Act was passed that ordered into slavery those who were unwilling to work. Two justices of the peace, on hearing about the ‘idle living’ of any person from two witnesses, could ordain that the guilty party should be branded on the chest with a ‘V’ and sentenced to two years of slavery; the culprit could be chained or driven with whips. Anyone who tried to flee from this exacted labour would be punished with perpetual slavery for the first offence and with death for the second. The severity of the measure is a token of the anxiety that the vagrants caused in sixteenth-century England. They roved the country in bands, begging or stealing at pleasure; the ‘sturdy beggars’ were an old order with their own traditions and their own language in ‘the canting tongue’. ‘The cull has rum rigging, let’s ding him, and mill him, and pike’ was as much to say that ‘the man has very good clothes, let us knock him down, rob him and run’.

The masterless man was also believed to be the sign of a dissolving or deteriorating social order, thus provoking fresh fears of the future. In 1577 William Harrison wrote that ‘it is not yet full three score years since this trade began, but how it hath prospered since that time it is easy to judge, for they are now supposed of one sex and another to amount unto about 10,000 persons, as I have heard reported’. Yet the legislation is also evidence of the social discipline that was maintained over the nation by means of church ‘visitations’ and injunctions and proclamations. Anyone walking free had to be detained or restrained. The fear of disorder was very strong.

A tumult of legislation had indeed been passed in the first months of Somerset’s rule. In the spring of 1548 William Paget, once the colluder or conspirator with Somerset, wrote a letter to the protector in which he declared that the country had become restless. ‘The use of the old religion is forbidden, the use of the new is not yet printed in the stomachs of eleven of twelve parts of the realm.’ He warned the protector to be cautious and to move carefully. ‘Commissions out for this matter, new laws for this, proclamations for another, one in another’s neck, so thick that they be not set among the people … You must take pity upon the poor men’s children, and of the conservation and stay of the realm, and put no more so many irons in the fire at once.’ But Somerset objected to him as a Cassandra, prophesying woe.

Yet there had never been so much dissension over matters of religion. Some said that Somerset had gone too far, and others complained that he had not gone far enough. An indication of religious controversy can be found among the members of the royal family. Edward professed his ‘comfort and quiet of mind’ at the changes in religion, and even began writing a treatise in French on the subject of papal supremacy; at the same time his older sister, Mary, was hearing four Masses a week. Fights broke out in churches between the various factions, conservative and reformed. One church favoured the rite of Rome while another practised that of Geneva; neighbouring churches might worship according to the rules of Zurich or Wittenberg. Verse satires, ridiculing conservatives and reformers, were widely circulated; one of them was entitled Have at all Papists! By me, Hans Hatprick and another was printed as A Ballet, declaring the Fall of the Whore of Babylon, intituled ‘Tie this Mare, Tom-boy’.

In the churchwardens’ accounts at Stanford in the Vale, then in Berkshire, the date was given as ‘the time of Schism, when this realm was divided from the Catholic church’ when ‘all godly ceremonies & good uses were taken out of the Church’. The parish priest of Adwick le Street, in Doncaster, wrote that at Rogationtide ‘no procession was made about the fields, but cruel tyrants did cast down all crosses standing in open ways despitefully’. At a school in Bodmin the boys set up rival factions of ‘the old religion’ and ‘the new religion’ in a series of elaborate battles. When they managed to blow up a calf with gunpowder, the master intervened with a whip. The social and religious order had to be maintained at all costs. A boy of thirteen was whipped naked at the church of St Mary Woolnoth; his offence was to throw his cap at the Blessed Sacrament raised during a Mass.

In the spring of 1548, therefore, all preaching was prohibited except by those especially licensed to do so; this was meant to silence ‘rash, contentious, hot and undiscreet’ men who were forever stirring the pot of religious dissension. Yet even this was not enough and, later in the year, all preaching came to an end. An exception was made for the conservative bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner. He had been released from the Fleet prison on his promise that he would conform to the new religious polity, and had scarcely returned to his palace in Southwark when he was informed by the council that he was to preach before the king. He was asked to read out, and subscribe to, certain articles concerning the recent changes in religion. He was being ordered, in other words, publicly to assent to such matters as the destruction of images and the administration of communion in both kinds.

He refused, saying that this was ‘like a lesson made for a child to learn’. Whereupon he was summoned to court and the protector warned him that he could be deprived of his bishopric for disobedience to the king’s highness. Gardiner then relented a little and agreed to compose a sermon touching upon such matters. He consented to preach on St Peter’s Day, or 29 June, but the afternoon before he received a message from the protector forbidding him to make any mention of the doctrine of transubstantiation. He was about to send his chaplain with a verbal response, when he broke off. ‘You shall not go,’ he told him. ‘I will do well enough, I warrant.’

On the following afternoon he stepped up to the new ‘preaching place’, the open pulpit set in the privy garden at Whitehall; the young king sat at a window in the gallery, overlooking the preacher, where assembled in the garden was ‘such an audience as the like whereof hath not lightly been seen’. Everyone wished to hear the bishop make his peace with the religious changes. He proceeded to say that ‘I will plainly declare what I think of the state of the Church of England at this day, how I like it and what I think of it’. It was in some respects an ambiguous message. He grudgingly agreed to the dissolution of the chantries, but still believed it right to pray for the dead; he accepted that rituals and ceremonies were essentially ‘things indifferent’ and so did not object to the reforms, but he did believe that priests should retain their vow of chastity; despite the protector’s warning to avoid the subject of transubstantiation, the bishop did affirm the power of the sacrament with the phrase ‘This is my body’.

After the sermon was over Gardiner was ‘merry and quiet’ on his way back to Southwark in his barge. When his chaplain heard a rumour that he would be committed to the Tower the bishop replied that ‘it was but tales for he thought that he never pleased the Council better in all his life’. On the following day he was arrested and, on the charge of ‘wilful disobedience’, was sent to the Tower of London where he was kept in close confinement for the next five years.

Somerset, even in the midst of these controversies, was preoccupied with Scotland. Early in 1548 he issued ‘an epistle or exhortation’ to the Scottish people in which he pleaded for a bond of common interests ‘united together in one language, in one island’ which should be given ‘the indifferent old name of Britaines again’; the names of England and Scotland would therefore be abolished. Once more he insisted on the marriage of Edward and Mary as the ground for this unity but, once more, the Scots were not listening. It came as a deep shock, therefore, when it was confirmed that Mary, queen of Scots, was in fact to be betrothed to the dauphin, the French king’s eldest son. So began the public career of the young princess whose troubled life cast its shadow over English affairs for the next thirty-nine years; even at the age of ten it was said that ‘her spirit is already so high and noble that she would make great demonstration of displeasure at seeing herself degradingly treated’. Mary of Guise from Lorraine, the widow of James V, became effectively the dowager queen of Scotland in her daughter’s absence in France, where the young girl was to be raised with her future husband. France now brooded on the northern borders of England.

The French king was still eager to regain Boulogne, but the overwhelming victory of the protector’s forces at Pinkie Cleugh gave him pause. It was also in the interest of England to avoid war with France; any military campaign would prove ruinously expensive. In February 1548 the French ambassador was gracefully received by the young king at Greenwich, where they witnessed a mock siege; they spoke together in Latin, for mutual ease of intercourse. Four months later a French force landed at Leith in order to aid their Scottish allies; sallies and counter-sallies were launched about the town of Haddington in East Lothian, but large-scale fighting was avoided. Nevertheless the presence of French troops on Scottish soil was an irritant, and emphasized the flaws in Somerset’s policy of subjugation by means of garrisons.

The younger brother of the protector, Thomas Seymour, had not abandoned his schemes of advancement. Further evidence of his incapacity emerged at the time when the young Lady Elizabeth entered the household of Katherine Parr; she was at the time fourteen but her young age did not deter the man who delighted to be called her ‘stepfather’. He would appear in her bedchamber dressed only in his nightgown and slippers; he would engage in playful romps with her, smacking her on the back or buttocks. It was evident, too, that the princess had become infatuated with the handsome lord high admiral. It is said that eventually Katherine Parr found them in each other’s arms. Elizabeth left the household. When it was rumoured that the princess was indeed pregnant with Seymour’s child, the privy council was obliged to question members of her entourage; there was no truth to the reports, but the foreign ambassadors were happy to pass on any titillating news of Anne Boleyn’s daughter. The episode also served to materially increase Elizabeth’s natural wariness and secretiveness.

When Katherine Parr died in the early autumn of 1548, six days after giving birth to an infant girl, Seymour found himself with another opportunity of bolstering his state. It soon became clear that he still had designs upon Lady Elizabeth. He asked one of her household servants, Thomas Parry, ‘whether her great buttocks were grown any less or no’? More pertinently, perhaps, he began to make enquiries about ‘the state of her grace’s houses, and how many people she kept’. What houses she had and what lands? Were they good lands or not, and did she hold them for life?

A courtier was out riding with him one day, en route to parliament. ‘My lord admiral,’ he said, ‘there are certain rumours of you that I am very sorry to hear.’

‘What are they?’

‘I am informed you make means to marry either with my Lady Mary or my Lady Elizabeth. And touching that, my lord, if you go about any such thing, you seek the means to undo yourself, and all those that shall come of you.’ When Seymour denied any such intention, the courtier replied that ‘I am glad to hear you say so – do not attempt the matter’. He warned Seymour that the two previous kings had been highly suspicious of over-mighty subjects; might not the new king have the same infirmity? Seymour’s own brother, Protector Somerset, might also be moved to act against him.

Yet Seymour shook off any such warnings, and decided that it was time to act upon Edward himself. ‘Since I saw you last,’ he told him, ‘you are grown to be a goodly gentleman. I trust that within three or four years, you shall be ruler of your own things.’ When the king reached sixteen, he might be able and willing to rule of his own accord and thereby dismiss the protector; Seymour might then rise high in royal favour. Yet at this juncture the king simply said ‘no’.

Seymour still plotted. He fortified his dwelling, Holt Castle in Worcestershire, and brought in a great store of beer, beef and wheat; by some means or other he obtained the ‘double key’ that would grant him access to the privy garden and the king’s lodging. He made the journey from Holt Castle to Whitehall many times with a company of his followers. He said that ‘a man might steal away the king now for there came more with me than is in all the house besides’. Then, on the night of 16 January 1549, he was surprised by Edward’s dog just outside the royal bedchamber; he shot the dog and, as cries of ‘Help! Murder!’ rang out, he was apprehended by the king’s guard. It seems likely that he intended to kidnap the king and raise a civil war in his name. It was alleged later that he had made provision to recruit a private army and that he had planned to take over the royal mint at Bristol; these were also clear tokens of treasonable attempts.

He was arrested on the day after his discovery in the king’s quarters and taken to the Tower; soon enough he came to trial for his life on the charge of treason. The protector was now in the unenviable position of prosecuting his younger brother to the death. ‘They cannot kill me,’ Seymour said, ‘except they do me wrong.’ But then, a little later, he complained of his ‘friends’ on the royal council that ‘I think they have forgotten me’. The young king himself also turned against him. His recorded words were that ‘it were better for him to die before’. It was better for him to be dead.

In the inquiry against him, his designs on Elizabeth were also formally investigated. The young princess herself was questioned together with the more prominent members of her household. ‘They all sing one song,’ their interrogator wrote to the protector, ‘and so I think they would not do, unless they had set the note before.’ It seems likely, therefore, that Seymour’s advances had gone further than was considered permissible and may have verged on treason. ‘There goeth rumours abroad’, Elizabeth complained, ‘that I am in the Tower, and with child by my lord admiral.’ The rumours were false, but three of her entourage were dismissed. There had been smoke, and perhaps there had also been fire.

Even while he remained in the Tower Seymour engaged in more schemes. He made a pen from the point of an aiglet plucked from his hose and, according to Hugh Latimer, fabricated an ink ‘with such workmanship as the like has not been seen’; with pen and ink he then wrote two letters, to the princesses Mary and Elizabeth, ‘tending to this end, that they should conspire against my lord protector’s grace’. He concealed these letters within his shoe but, on his prison lodging being searched, they were discovered.

The king, the fount of justice, was obliged to speak. ‘We do perceive’, the king said to his council, ‘that there is great things objected and laid to my lord admiral mine uncle – and they tend to treason – and we perceive that you require but justice to be done. We think it reasonable, and we will well that you proceed according to your request.’ On the following day, 25 February, a bill of attainder for treason was sent to parliament. One of the articles against Seymour charged him to have attempted ‘to get into your hands the government of the king’s majesty, to the great danger of his highness’ person, and the subversion of the state of the realm’.

On 20 March he was taken to Tower Hill, where he was beheaded. The protector had signed the death warrant, with a shaking hand, but had taken no part in the parliamentary proceedings against his younger brother. It has been surmised that some among the council were happy to pit brother against brother, hoping thereby to accomplish the ruin of both of them. Sure enough some denounced Somerset for fratricide. A ‘godly and honourable’ woman reproached him with the words, ‘Where is thy brother? Lo, his blood crieth against thee unto God from the ground.’ He was condemned as ‘a blood-sucker and a ravenous wolf’ and it was predicted that ‘the fall of the one brother, would be the overthrow of the other’.

19

The barns of Crediton

In the first years of the young king’s reign social, as well as religious, divisions became apparent. ‘In times past,’ Hugh Latimer, the most popular preacher of the day, said in a sermon, ‘men were full of compassion; but now there is no pity; for in London their brother shall die in the streets for cold; he shall lie sick at the door between stock and stock – I cannot tell what to call it – and then perish for hunger.’ The coinage had been debased by the authorities, thus unleashing further waves of inflation on a country already impoverished. In the seven years between 1540 and 1547 prices rose by 46 per cent; in 1549 they had risen by another 11 per cent. The trend of an ever-growing population meant that the plight of the poor, and of the agricultural labourer, increased. Food was dear; wages were low. It has become known as the ‘price revolution’, accompanied by dearth and distress on a national scale. In addition the administration itself could scarcely pay its debts.

Latimer knew where most of the blame might be laid. ‘You landlords,’ he said, ‘you rent-raisers, I may say you step-lords, you have for your possessions too much … thus is caused such dearth that poor men which live of their labour cannot with the sweat of their faces have a living.’ The principal complaint of the people was raised against the system of enclosure, a term that in fact covered a multitude of practices, which embodied a wholly different concept of land use. One of these movements was ‘engrossing’ whereby many smallholdings were concentrated in the hands of one person; a second amounted to the enclosure of previous common grounds by a landlord who claimed ownership; a third was the conversion of arable into pasture land. So it was that Latimer intoned against ‘these graziers, enclosers, rent-raisers … whereas have been a great many householders and inhabitants, there is now but a shepherd and his dog’. It has been suggested that the bulk of enclosures actually took place at an earlier date, but the fast rise in prices and the fall in wages created a climate in which all economic woes were magnified.

Hugh Latimer also addressed the problem of debasement. ‘We now have a pretty little shilling [12d.],’ he said, ‘the last day, I had put it away almost for a groat [4d.].’ A shilling was in other words worth only a third of its previous value. John Heywood phrased it differently:

These testons look red: how like you the same?

’Tis a token of grace: they blush for shame.

The copper, in other words, was showing through the thin surface application of silver. When money is not taken seriously, the economy begins to crumble. A reformer, John Hooper, wrote to William Cecil, even then beginning his career at court, that ‘the prices of things be here as I tell you, the number of people be great; their little cottages and poor livings decay daily; except God by sickness take them out of the world, they must needs lack. You know what a grievous extreme, yea, in a manner unruly evil hunger is.’

In the summer of 1549 a number of riots were specifically aimed at enclosures, in which the irate crowd pulled down the hedges that had been planted to separate the land. The hedge itself became a symbol of all the ills assailing the people, among them the encroachment upon waste and common land as well as the loss of tenants’ rights against landlords who persistently raised their rents. Custom was giving way to contract and competition. In response the government of the protector sent out a number of commissioners to investigate why it was that ‘many have been driven to extreme poverty and compelled to leave the places where they were born’; an inquiry would be instituted to ensure that the relevant statutes, from the two previous reigns, were still being obeyed.

It was a measure of the protector’s concern that the royal deer park at Hampton Court was ‘disparked’ or made open and that the common right to land was restored in many parishes. The imperial ambassador observed to his court that ‘I have heard in deep secret that the protector declared to the Council, as his opinion, that the peasants’ demands were fair and just; for the poor people who had no land to graze their cattle ought to retain the commons and the lands that had always been public property, and the nobles and rich ought not to seize and add them to their parks and possessions’. A further thought may have occurred to him. If the new faith did not help to promote social justice and to uphold the rights of the poor, surely it had failed in some of its first duties?

Yet dissent and discontent continued. In the previous reign ‘all things were too strait,’ Sir William Paget told Somerset at the end of 1548, but ‘now they are too loose’. In the old days ‘was it dangerous to do or speak though the meaning were not evil; and now every man hath liberty to do and speak at liberty without danger’. In the reign of a child king, there was disorder.

General discontent was rising. ‘All things in manner going backward and unfortunate,’ Paget also wrote, ‘and every man almost out of heart and courage, and our lacks so well known as our enemies despise us and our friends pity us.’ In the spring of 1549 rumours were circulating through the kingdom, and a proclamation was issued against ‘lewd, idle, seditious and disordered persons … posting from place to place … to stir up rumours or raise up tales’.

It was reported that the king was dead. ‘In the mean season,’ Edward wrote in his journal, ‘because there was a rumour that I was dead, I passed through London.’ It was said that the war in Scotland was a complete failure. Indeed it had not prospered. It was rumoured that a charge would be levied for weddings, christenings and funerals. It was whispered that the protector and the council were corrupt. The bad harvest of 1549 exacerbated these protests. As a precaution all wrestling matches were forbidden, and all plays or interludes were suspended; it was unwise to allow any large congregation of people. The poor were being accused of sedition, but the reason for discontent might be found elsewhere. Robert Crowley, in a volume entitled The Way to Wealth, accused ‘the great farmers, the graziers, the rich butchers, the men of law, the merchants, the gentlemen, the knights, the lords, and I cannot tell who’ for provoking popular revolt.

In May a rebellion was fostered in Wiltshire, but the forces of a local magnate scattered or slew the protesters. In Oxfordshire the rebels were defeated by an army of 1,500 men led by Lord Gray; some were taken and hanged, befitting a state of war, while others ran back to their homes. Similar abortive risings took place in Sussex and Hampshire, Kent and Gloucestershire, Suffolk and Essex, Hertfordshire and Leicestershire and Worcestershire. Something was gravely amiss in the entire kingdom, even if these pockets of resistance were quickly stifled.

Yet nothing could withstand the force of popular protest that emerged in the early days of June. It has become known as the Western Rising or the Prayer Book Rebellion, attesting to the fact that religious and social ills were not easily to be distinguished. At the beginning of 1549 the second session of Edward’s parliament had approved the publication of the Book of Common Prayer. It was authorized as part of the Act of Uniformity ‘for the uniformity of service and administration of the sacraments throughout the realm’; it was one of the most important and permanent of parliamentary Acts, effectively prescribing the doctrine and liturgy of the Church of England for future generations.

The Act was largely the work of Thomas Cranmer in consultation with the bishops, and the freedom of debate among the senior clergy in the House of Lords meant that it did not pass without strenuous opposition. One contemporary wrote that there was ‘great sticking touching the blessed body and blood of Jesus Christ. I trust they will conclude well in it, by the help of the Holy Ghost.’ The Holy Ghost did not intervene and, although the Act was passed, eight out of the eighteen bishops present voted against it.

Cranmer insisted in the course of the great debate that ‘our faith is not to believe Him to be in the bread and wine, but that He is in heaven’. He denied the doctrine of transubstantiation, therefore, and insisted that Christ had only a spiritual presence determined by the faith of the recipient. Neither the Bible nor the holy fathers ever mention the doctrine; Cranmer believed it to be the invention of the Antichrist and his heir, Pope Gregory VII, in whose reign at the end of the eleventh century it had been introduced. Yet the more conservative bishops denounced this in turn as heresy. One reformer, Peter Martyr, wrote at the time that ‘there is so much contention about the Eucharist that every corner is full of it; every day the question is discussed among the Lords, with such disputing of bishops as was never heard; the commons thronging the lords’ galleries to hear the arguments’. These were days when the principles of religion were debated with the same eagerness as the tenets of politics and economics are now discussed.

The Book of Common Prayer, in revised form, is still in use. It is a breviary, a missal and a ritual liturgy. In time it lent strength and unity to the English Church but, like all great agents of revolution, it was fiercely controversial at the moment of its publication. It was a book of worship, written in solemn and subtle English, of which we may take one example. In the medieval marriage service the wife had pledged to be ‘bonner and buxom in bed and in board’. This has the nice alliteration of an older language. Now both partners were asked to ‘love and to cherish’ ‘for better, for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health’.

Another fundamental alteration became evident in the newly anglicized text. ‘Wherefore O Lord and heavenly Father, according to the institution of Thy dearly beloved Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, we Thy humble servants, do celebrate and make here before Thy divine Majesty with these Thy holy gifts the memorial which Thy Son wished us to make: having in remembrance His blessed passion, mighty resurrection and glorious ascension.’ What had previously been deemed a ‘holy sacrifice’ was now a ‘memorial’. The sacrifice of Christ upon the cross was remembered but not repeated or reproduced.

As a result all the more arcane rites of the Mass were removed. There was to be no more ‘shifting of the book from one place to another; laying down and licking of the chalice … holding up his fingers, hands, or thumbs joined towards his temples; breathing upon the bread or chalice’; no more secret whisperings and sudden turnings of the body. The theatre of piety was being deconstructed. The host and the chalice were not to be elevated at the climax of the drama; the adoration of the sacrament was curtailed as a symptom of idolatry. There were to be no more intimations of sacrifice and the minister, no longer called priest, was ordered simply to place the bread and wine upon the altar. The Mass was therefore stripped of its mystery.

In the old service the priest had at the moment of the elevation of the host turned symbolically to the east as the site of Golgotha, with his back turned towards the congregation as if he were communing with sacred rites; it was from the east that Christ would come on the Day of Judgment. It was now stipulated that the minister should stand at the north side of the communion table and face the people. The rich vestments of the past were forbidden, and he could don only a white surplice. The traditional calendar of the saints’ days was also omitted from the Prayer Book as arrant superstition.

Most importantly, however, the sacred service would now be performed in English rather than in Latin. One layman repeated what would become a familiar complaint that the English language could not comprehend the mystery of the Mass; it was better for it to be rendered in a language that the congregation did not understand. It was thereby filled with magic, like the ritual pronunciation of a spell. The old service had been chanted and memorized for ten centuries. The words of the hymns and psalms, the very order of the Mass itself, were part of folk memory. Now, in one parliamentary Act, they were all swept away. All these changes represented the decisive rupture with the world of medieval Catholicism.

Any minister who refused to use the new book would be imprisoned for six months and deprived of his position; on any third offence he would be consigned to life imprisonment. This was indeed an Act for ‘uniformity’. Yet if Somerset and Cranmer therefore hoped to stifle dissent, they were soon disabused. A storm of protest arose in the western counties at this break with traditional practice. The new prayer book and service were to be introduced on Whit Sunday 9 June 1549. So they were in the parish of Sampford Courtenay in Devon, where they were greeted with dismay. On the following day the parishioners approached their priest, and asked him what service he intended to use, the new or the old. The new one, he told them. But they informed him that they would have nothing but ‘the old and ancient religion’.

The priest himself was not unwilling to accede to their request. He went with them to the church, where he put on his traditional vestments and proceeded to say the Mass, in Latin, with all the now forbidden rites. The news of this development spread from Sampford Courtenay to all parts of Devon and Cornwall. The bells were rung to spread the good news. It was demanded that the old sacrament be ‘hung over the altar and worshipped and those who would not consent thereto, to die like heretics’. It was added that ‘we will not have the new service, nor the Bible, in English’. This marked the beginning of the Prayer Book Rebellion. The religious discontent turned into social discontent, exacerbated by the general climate of economic hardship. The world was being turned upside down:

When wrens wear woodknives, cranes for to kill

And sparrows build churches on a green hill

And cats unto mice do swear obedience …

The rebellion was perhaps only to be expected; one reformer had told a continental colleague that ‘a great part of the country is popish’. Another reformer, Martin Bucer, wrote to his home town of Strasburg that ‘things are for the most part carried on by means of ordinances, which the majority obey very grudgingly’. This was indeed a major cause of the rebellion; the changes were imposed on the people by parliament in London. At a slightly later date Bucer wrote that ‘of those devoted to the service of religion only a small number have as yet addicted themselves entirely to the kingdom of Christ’.

When a local gentleman tried to quell the uprising at Sampford Courtenay and was hacked to death on the steps of the parish church, his body was buried in the alignment of north to south; this testified to the fact that he was considered to be a heretic. The uprising, now touched with blood, soon spread. An historian of Exeter, John Hooker, wrote at the time that the news ‘as a cloud carried with a violent wind and as a thunder clap sounding at one instant through the whole country … they clapped their hands for joy and agreed in one mind to have the same in every of their several parishes’. The rebels from Devon were joined with those from Cornwall, and the combined force captured Crediton; it was retaken by loyalist troops but only at the expense of burning all the barns in which the rebels had been hiding. ‘The barns of Crediton!’ became a popular war cry.

A story had just come out of Clyst St Mary, a village 3 miles east of Exeter. Walter Raleigh, the father of the famous mariner, was riding towards the town when he observed an old woman on her way to Mass praying with a set of rosary beads in her hand. He stopped to rebuke her, ‘saying further that there was a punishment by the law appointed against her’. The woman hurried on to the church where she denounced the gentleman for his ‘very hard and unseemly speeches concerning religion’. She also told her fellow parishioners that he had made the threat that ‘except she would leave her beads and give over holy bread and water the gentlemen would burn them out of their houses and spoil therein’. This was a general and impolitic menace to the whole community; Raleigh was found and beaten, while a local mill was burned down. The events became part of the rebellion itself.

At the beginning of July 2,000 rebels marched in procession towards Exeter; they were guided by priests, robed and chanting, and at their head was the sacred pyx, or jewelled container, holding the Blessed Sacrament. They had come to besiege the town as an emblem of detestable heresy. The townsmen of Exeter resisted the siege with valour, despite the restrictions of food and water; one of them said that ‘he would eat one arm and fight with the other before he would agree to a surrender’.

The protesters had drawn up a set of articles in which it was stated that ‘we will have the holy decrees of our forefathers observed, kept and performed and the sacrament restored to its ancient honour’. They denounced the Book of Common Prayer itself as ‘a Christmas play’ or ‘a Christmas game’; this observation came from the fact that at the time of receiving communion the men and women were supposed to form separate groups. This was uncannily similar to the first movement of a festive dance, and so invited ridicule.

The rebellion could not, or would not, be quelled by the local magnates; as a result, Somerset was obliged to call in his own soldiers, most of whom were mercenaries from Germany and Italy. Never before had an English ruler called in foreign troops against his own people. Six battles were fought against the rebels, the most bloody of which was at the village of Clyst St Mary itself, where on 25 July Lord Russell launched an attack on approximately 2,000 of what must now be termed the enemy; 1,000 rebels died in the action, and 900 were taken only to be massacred on Clyst Heath. It was said that all their throats were slit within ten minutes. The village was put to the torch and many of the villagers were murdered. It may be true that no heretics were burned during the regime of Protector Somerset, but this general carnage must count as one of the horrors of religious warfare. When they heard of the killings another force of rebels marched to Clyst Heath, where 2,000 of them were dispatched.

Russell then moved on to relieve Exeter but, by the time he arrived, the rebels had broken off their siege and departed. Yet retribution could still be exacted. A ‘mass priest’ was hanged from the steeple of the church of St Thomas, in the south of the city, wearing his vestments and draped with the bell, beads and holy-water-bucket of the old faith. The mayor of Bodmin was summoned to dinner, after which he was invited to inspect the gallows. ‘Think you,’ he was asked, ‘think you it is strong enough?’

‘Yes, sir, it is.’

‘Well then, get you up, for it is for you.’

The mayor had in fact been forced to participate in the rising by the rebels. But revenge always includes rough justice. A final battle at Sampford Courtenay, where the riots had begun, was enough to dissolve the Prayer Book Rebellion.

Just as one fire was slowly being extinguished another flared up. In the second week of July a group of Norfolk inhabitants threw down the pales and hedges of the enclosed fields and then, under the leadership of Robert Kett, made a camp on Mousehold Heath just outside the walls of Norwich. Other people from the surrounding countryside flocked to them, to protest against what they considered to be the iniquitous oppressive regime of the gentry, and it was estimated that some 16,000 gathered beyond the city walls. One group of villagers from Heydon marched behind their parish banner, thus testifying to their allegiance to the old faith. Somerset and his councillors purported to believe that the revolt was being spread by ‘some naughtie papist priests’.

Kett and the other leaders of the revolt sent a series of articles to the protector in which they outlined their complaints; they prayed his grace ‘that no lord of no manor shall common upon the commons’ and that ‘copyhold land that is unreasonably rented may go as it did in the first year of King Henry VII’. No lord of the manor should be able to exploit common land. Private jurisdictions should be abolished. Their demands in general are clear evidence of a belief in the ancient and traditional ways of the countryside; the rebels were not innovators but conservators, protesting against the encroachments of a free market, the rapacity of newly rich landlords, and the steady depreciation in the value of money. They wished to return to what can be called feudalism. That is why they also wished to retain the old faith. It is significant that the rebels in Norfolk had first come together at a play concerning the translation of Thomas Becket to the shrine of Canterbury.

A phrase passed around that they would leave as many gentlemen in Norfolk as there were white bulls – none at all, in other words. ‘All power is in the hands of the gentry,’ it was reported in the first history of the rising, ‘and they so use it as to make it unbearable; while nothing is left for us but the extreme of misery … What is our food? Herbs and roots. Since we too have souls and bodies, is this all we are to expect from life?’ A verse was left on the carcass of a slain sheep:

Mr Pratt, your sheep are very fat,

And we thank you for that;

We have left you the skins to pay for your wife’s pins,

And you must thank us for that.

The protector had told the imperial ambassador that ‘all hath conceived a wonderful hate against gentlemen and taketh them all as their enemies … In Norfolk gentlemen, and all serving men for their sakes, are as evil-handled as may be.’ As a precaution a bodyguard of 2,000 horse and 4,000 soldiers was established around the young king. The gates of London were strengthened, and a drawbridge placed upon London Bridge. On 18 July martial law was declared, and even to mention rebellion was to draw down death at the end of the rope. It is a measure of how local revolt could threaten the whole harmony of Tudor administration, based as it was upon an informal pact between the centre and the regions. Untune that string, and hark what discord follows.

The rebels on Mousehold Heath declared themselves to be ‘the king’s friends and deputies’, emphasizing once more their role as traditional loyalists, and brought a semblance of order into their confused ranks. Spokesmen for each hundred were appointed, and Kett ordained that justice would be dispensed beneath a great oak that became known as the Tree of Reformation. Certain gentlemen and landowners were paraded beneath the tree, charged with robbing the poor, and then imprisoned within the camp.

Local camps were set up in other neighbourhoods in Suffolk and elsewhere, creating a network of protest in East Anglia. Some 3,000 Yorkshire men had gathered under the proclamation that ‘there should no king reign in England; the noblemen and gentlemen to be destroyed’. This was considerably more radical than any demands made by Kett and his men; but now all were denounced indiscriminately as agents of chaos.

On 31 July the marquis of Northampton brought 1,500 men to the walls of Norwich, where he attempted to break the supply lines between the town and the rebels; his forces made their way through the lanes and alleys of the town, but the decayed and dilapidated walls offered them no protection. The rebels came down from Mousehold Heath, with what one chronicler describes as ‘confused cries and beastly howlings’, and cut them apart; Northampton fled, leaving Norwich to the mercy of the insurgents. Kett set up an armed camp in the grounds of the cathedral and took command. He and his men were now guilty of treason, having assaulted and slaughtered the king’s army.

Somerset and the council met each day for a week, but could come to no decision. The protector first envisaged that he would lead an army against Kett and his men but then, for reasons that are unclear, changed his mind. Instead he sent out John Dudley, earl of Warwick, at the head of a force of 6,000 foot together with 1,500 horse. On 23 August, 3 miles from Norwich, Dudley sent Kett a final summons to surrender or else face certain defeat at the hands of overwhelming strength. When a royal herald approached the rebels with news of the offer a boy pulled down his breeches and did ‘a filthy act’; in response Dudley’s soldiers shot him.

Uproar now arose in the rebel camp and, when Kett offered to meet Dudley, his followers would not allow him to leave them. Whereupon Dudley now fired Norwich; his forces broke down the portcullis gate and began to roam through the city with their swords in their hands. The knights and gentlemen within the army had drawn their swords and kissed one another’s blades, which was according to Holinshed ‘an ancient custom used among men of war in times of great danger’. Dudley made for the marketplace, where many of the rebels were encamped, and promptly hanged forty-nine of Kett’s men; such was the congestion that the gallows broke apart. The rebels formed themselves into three separate companies and dispersed, launching various sallies and incursions against the army.

With much of the city on fire, and with supplies running low, Kett decided that it was better to evacuate Mousehold Heath and move to the more defensible terrain of Dussindale to the east of Norwich. He took with him the gentlemen, or hostages, who might prove useful in any negotiations. On the following morning Dudley and his army moved onto Dussindale, where a pardon was offered. It was rejected. After a confused preliminary skirmish the guns were trained upon the rebels and, as they wavered, Dudley’s horse rode into them; the prominent rebels in the front line, with Kett among them, fled the scene. The remnant of the rebel force formed a barricade out of the carts and carriages closest to hand; they faced almost certain death, on the field of battle or on the gallows at a later date, but Dudley held out to them once more the promise of pardon. It seems that he came in front of them to pledge his word that, if they submitted and surrendered, they would be spared. Most of them took this last opportunity, crying out ‘God save King Edward! God save King Edward!’ The fighting was over by mid-afternoon, with 2,000 of the rebels lying dead.

Kett had taken refuge in a barn some 8 miles away, but here he was found and taken prisoner. He was returned under armed guard on the following day to Norwich, where 300 of the recalcitrant rebels were hanged. Kett himself, after a trial in London, was eventually hanged in chains from the wall of Norwich Castle. A plaque was set up by that place in 1949 which read: ‘in reparation and honour to a notable and courageous leader in the long struggle of the common people of England to escape from a servile life into the freedom of just conditions’.

At the time, however, the verdict upon him was more ambiguous. Kett had been Dudley’s tenant, and rumours have survived of an intrigue between the men to bring down the protector. The treasurer of the army, in particular, had been sending money to Kett. It has been rumoured that Lady Mary had also been party to the plot. But the principal participants, if such they were, have successfully covered any tracks they might have made. All is dark and uncertain. We may chronicle the larger movements of the time but the private deeds remain invisible. We may see dark shapes and outlines – the smiler with the knife under the cloak, the intriguer with the open purse – but we can conclude nothing.

The rebellions may have been crushed, but their ubiquity demoralized the government of the protector. He had acted in an inconsistent manner, at one moment trying to ease their discontents while at another relying upon naked force to suppress them; he had attempted both conciliation and violence, so gaining a reputation for both weakness and brutality. But if it was clear that the response of Somerset and his colleagues was confused, it is also evident that the local administrations of both Devon and Norfolk were weak and uncertain. It did not help that the great magnate of East Anglia, the duke of Norfolk, had been confined in the Tower since 1546 on the charge of high treason. It is perhaps significant that Lady Mary, the largest landowner in Norfolk, seems to have done nothing to arrest the disorder.

At this juncture John Dudley, earl of Warwick, stepped forward; he was reputedly a friend and colleague of Somerset but, in matters of politics, the winner takes all. In the reign of Henry he had fought successfully both in Scotland and in France; his reputation as a military commander was now further attested by his victory over the Norfolk rebels where, unlike Somerset, he had taken to the field. He was circumspect and politic; not domineering, he adopted a conciliatory style.

When he returned to London at the head of the conquering army, he was virtually in control of the city. Power was now the spur to action. It was clear enough that the policies of Somerset were failing. It was claimed that he had gone too far in his early appeasement of the rebels; that, in a sequence of letters he had written in the summer, he had come close to a policy of collaboration with them against the ‘sheep-owners’. This may have been a negotiating tactic, like that which Henry VIII employed at the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace, but it was cause enough to earn the suspicion and dislike of the landed class. His ‘levity’ and ‘softness’ were denounced.

Other evidence of failure could be found. English authority in Scotland, imposed by means of garrisons, was failing. In the summer the resurgent French king, Henry II, declared war against England and began to lay siege to the English colony of Boulogne. He also had in his possession the young queen of Scotland, as his future daughter-in-law, and he seemed likely to claim her country as his own. From rebellion at home to failure abroad, evidence of Somerset’s misgovernment was everywhere to be seen.

So, on his arrival in London, Dudley at once began to consult and scheme with the principal councillors of the realm. Lady Mary was soon acquainted with the proposals to depose Somerset, and it seems very likely that she was asked to take part; it was even possible that she might be declared ‘regent’ in these early years of her brother’s rule. While consorting with the conservatives, however, Dudley was also ingratiating himself with the reformers. The council were united against the protector.

The leading members of that council addressed a letter to Charles V in which they stated their reasons for deposing Somerset. He had become ‘haught and arrogant’; he had been used ‘to taunt such of us as frankly spake their opinions’; he had shown ‘wilfulness and insolency’; he had by his proclamations and devices brought the people ‘to such a liberty and boldness that they sticked not to rebel and rise in sundry places’; and, in the middle of these disorders, he still built for himself ‘in four or five places most sumptuously’.

As soon as he became aware of these stirrings against him, which had first become manifest in late spring or early summer, Somerset tried to mobilize support on his own behalf. He sent out letters and proclamations that were in turn answered by letters and proclamations from the council. On 5 October the young king summoned ‘all his loving subjects’ to Hampton Court, where he then resided, and to come ‘with harness and weapon’; the protector was clearly speaking through him. The young king was even brought before some of Somerset’s followers, where he requested that ‘I pray you be good to us and to our uncle’. Yet it is unlikely that Edward had any real affection for him, or even resented the turn of events. When he eventually returned to London the imperial ambassador said that the young king ‘certainly looked as if he had had a surprise’.

Two days later the protector removed Edward from Hampton Court to the castle at Windsor, where a group of his own men-at-arms were set to guard him. He issued a summons to the lords and to the people asking for their assistance; but no one rose in his defence. Even Cranmer, with whom he had planned the reforms of religion, seems now to have turned against him.

Dudley and the council informed the people by means of proclamation; they wrote to the ambassadors, and to the two princesses. They also took the precaution of sending a letter to the young king himself, professing their loyalty and condemning Somerset for ignoring their advice and exceeding his authority. The protector, seeing the forces now ranged against him, capitulated; any alternative strategy could only lead to civil war. A struggle between the nobles would be an unwelcome reprise of the Wars of the Roses. He surrendered on the understanding that he would be treated leniently. He was, however, together with his partisans, immediately sent to the Tower, where he ‘confessed’ to twenty-nine articles declared against him.

Although Dudley may have been the guiding hand behind these events, it is not at all clear that he was the immediate beneficiary. It seemed for a time that the conservative faction in the council now held the ascendancy. A proclamation was therefore issued on Christmas Day condemning certain ‘evil disposed’ persons and denying that ‘they should have again their old Latin service, their conjured bread and water, with such like vain and superstitious ceremonies …’ Somerset had been so closely associated with such innovations as the Book of Common Prayer that his fall was always likely to arouse the hopes of his religious adversaries. Rumours spread that the conservative faction was about to strike at Dudley by accusing him of being complicit in all of Somerset’s actions; reports followed that Cranmer had to persuade the king to nominate reformers to the council in order to gain a majority. In the event, through a series of manoeuvres as obscure as they are intricate, Dudley defeated the conservative faction and expelled their principal members from the council. Somerset was released from the Tower in February 1550 and was given a free pardon. Yet the politics of state had changed for ever.

20

The lord of misrule

Dudley did not take the title of protector; he was too cautious to proclaim his primacy in that manner. Instead he determined to act and to govern through his colleagues on the council. The title Dudley assumed was, therefore, that of lord president of the council. The young king was now brought more firmly into the leading role; he attended certain meetings of the council, although it is likely that these were stage-managed for his benefit.

Yet even though Dudley did not take the name of protector he did assume another title. In due course, more confident in his power, he was ennobled as duke of Northumberland. Northumberland’s chaplain, John Hooper, hailed him as a ‘faithful and intrepid soldier of Christ’ and ‘a most holy and faithful instrument of the word of God’, thus announcing to the world the duke’s reformist credentials. It is difficult to search the heart and conscience of any man. At the time of his death Northumberland confessed that he had always in secret believed the old faith of Catholic England, which in turn would suggest that he had used the banner of reform simply to maintain and consolidate his power.

He also favoured the reforms of religion in the hope and expectation that he could profit from the spoils; a new bishop chosen for the see of Winchester was obliged to surrender his lands in exchange for an annual salary and Northumberland then took these large territories for himself and his followers. The bishopric of Durham was dissolved and its revenues were directed to sustain Northumberland’s new dukedom. The lands of the bishops were described as the last course of the feast provided by the Church. A preacher at St Paul’s lamented that ‘covetous officers have so used this matter that even those goods which did serve to the relief of the poor, the maintenance of learning, and to comfortable necessary hospitality in the commonwealth be turned to maintain worldly, wicked, covetous ambition’. Charity had given way to bribery. In the reign of a boy king the adults in power were free to gorge themselves upon the kingdom.

Edward remained oddly pliant and passive in his dealings with the duke. A French observer noted that ‘whenever there was something of importance that he [Northumberland] wanted done or spoken by the king without anyone knowing that it came from him, he would come secretly at night into the prince’s chamber after everybody was in bed, unnoticed by anyone. The next morning the young prince would come to his council and, as if they came from himself, advocate certain matters – at which everyone marvelled, thinking they were his own ideas.’ It was noticed by another foreign observer that the king always kept his eyes upon the duke, and would leave a meeting or conversation ‘because of signs the duke of Northumberland had made to him’. Slowly he was being educated in the ways of the world, and in the ways of government, but in no sense did he possess independent authority. Northumberland controlled the grant of offices and lands. It was said that he encouraged the young king in all martial pursuits, including those of archery and hunting, thus keeping him out of the way.

In the matter of religion, however, Edward may have already formed his own opinions. At the time of the fall of Somerset he was twelve years old. That is age enough to be enamoured of faith and piety, and his condemnation of Mary’s religious practices suggest that he was already something of a martinet in this sphere. In the previous year he had completed a treatise on papal pretensions, in which he concluded that the pontiff was ‘the true son of the devil, a bad man, an Antichrist and abominable tyrant’. He may have been instructed by his tutors in this regard, but the tone is surely his own. When he went through the service of consecration for a new bishop he came upon an invocation of the saints; with a stroke of his pen he cancelled it as a blasphemous addition. It was he who decided that there should be weekly sermons in his country’s churches. ‘Believe me,’ one reformer wrote, ‘you have never seen in the world for these thousand years so much erudition united with piety and sweetness of disposition.’

He was known as the ‘godly imp’, as we have observed, and there may have been a strong element of youthful idealism in his character. Had he not been hailed as ‘the young Josiah’? It was a title that he may have wished to fulfil. Thus he was asked to provide judgement, early in his reign, on the curious case of the bishop’s vestments.

John Hooper, Northumberland’s chaplain, had been promoted to the see of Gloucester. But the putative bishop saw an obstacle in his path. For the ceremony he would be obliged to wear the ecclesiastical habits, the white rochet and black chimere, that he had in the past denounced as the dress of the harlot of Babylon. He said that he would not become a magpie in white and black. The surplice was the magic robe of the conjuror. He was also supposed to swear obedience to the archbishop of Canterbury, where before he had promised to defer to no authority other than the Scriptures. His opposition threatened to split the new church discipline, and as a result he was confined for a period to the Fleet prison. Cranmer asked for the king’s judgement on the matter and, at the behest of Edward, a compromise was agreed. Hooper would don the vestments at the service of consecration, but he would not be obliged to wear them for his diocesan affairs. The bishop has since that time become known as ‘the father of nonconformity’. We may say, in the words of St James, ‘how great a matter a little fire kindleth’.

A parliament had been summoned towards the end of 1549 that confirmed the movement of religious change. The eight orders of the medieval church were abolished to make way for the less complex order of bishops, priests and deacons. This was now largely to be a simplified preaching ministry. The priest was no longer expected ‘to offer sacrifice and celebrate Mass both for the living and the dead’, as desired in the past, but to preach the plain gospel and administer the sacraments. Yet many clandestine papists were still to be found among the clergy; they recited the communion office with the same cadences and whisperings as the old Latin Mass; they bent down over the communion table; they genuflected and lifted up their hands; they struck their breasts and made the sign of the cross in the air. These were the vile rags of popery, infinitely comforting to many in the congregation.

An Act was passed prohibiting any statues or figures in the parish church except ‘the monumental figures of kings or nobles who had never been taken for saints’; since the Book of Common Prayer provided all necessary instruction, other prayer books, manuals or missals were to be destroyed. If they were not burnt, they could be sold to bookbinders as convenient material; they could of course also be used in the jakes. In the spring of the following year it was decreed that stone altars should be removed and replaced by wooden communion tables. ‘A goodly receiving, I promise you,’ one conservative bishop declared, ‘to set an oyster table instead of an altar …’

The altar of St Paul’s Cathedral was taken down in the dead of night, in case of popular protest, and a table set up at the foot of the steps before a curtain. Yet a chronicle of the time reports that, three days later, ‘a man was slain in Paul’s church and two frays within the church that same time afterwards’; these ‘frays’, or disturbances, became so frequent that a royal proclamation was issued against them, lamenting that ‘many quarrels, riots, frays and bloodshed have been made in some of the said churches, besides shooting of handguns to doves’. Churches had now become the centre of bitter controversy.

The parish church was now a plain, bare room; no decoration was to be seen except, perhaps, for a memorial text or two and a painted wooden board bearing the royal arms. Where once the altar had stood was now a table and bench for communicants. William Harrison, at a slightly later date, wrote that ‘dead cold is our age … there is blue ice in our churches’. Yet in these bare churches the laity participated much more openly in the service; Bible reading was given primacy, and the fundamentals of the Christian faith – the creeds, the confession of faith and prayer – were properly and fully emphasized. In the royal court itself biblical and prophetic poetry took the place of sonnets and ballads. Edwardian drama, too, concerned itself with scriptural themes.

It was still possible to go too far. In the spring of 1550 Joan Bocher, known as Joan of Kent, was arrested for preaching the doctrine that Christ was not incarnate of the Virgin Mary; he had passed through her by miracle like a ray of light through a glass. At her interrogation she ably pointed out the changes of doctrine already accommodated by the religious authorities. ‘Not long since,’ she said, ‘you burned Anne Askew for a piece of bread [the denial of transubstantiation] and yet came yourselves to believe and propose the same doctrine for which you burned her …’ That was true enough. Yet she was sentenced to death by burning and when a preacher intoned against her as she stood at the stake in Smithfield she called out that ‘he lied like a knave’. And so she died. She was condemned as an ‘Anabaptist’, a catch-all title of opprobrium that was attached to anyone with beliefs that might lead to subversion or anarchy within the body politic.

These were nervous times. Fears of another popular rebellion could not be allayed, and the dearth of resources rendered the government weak. Since the treasury was empty, it was necessary to make peace with France; Northumberland promptly managed this by returning Boulogne to the French king, receiving only half of the promised compensation. Henry VIII’s one conquest had been a costly mistake. The decision was fiercely criticized at the time, as a sign that England was no longer pre-eminent in the affairs of Europe, but it did bring an end to an expensive policy of aggression. As Paget put it in a letter to Northumberland, ‘then was then and now is now’. Calais was the last vestige of what had once been great English possessions in France; that, too, would soon be lost. Northumberland also brought back the English forces from Scotland, thus reversing another of Somerset’s favourite policies. The mercenaries who had helped to put down the rebellions, in west and east, were paid off. The period may perhaps be viewed as one in which for the first time English insularity came to the fore.

The impact of the rebellions can also be recognized in a further parliamentary Act ‘for the punishment of unlawful assemblies and raising of the king’s subjects’. Northumberland also started work on removing other causes of discontent. He began the complex and difficult task of reversing the debasement of the coinage that had occurred in the previous reign and in the protectorate. In this respect he and his fellow councillors achieved only a small measure of success. Under his leadership the privy council was re-established as the governing forum of the realm.

Lady Mary had once described Northumberland as ‘the most unstable man in England’. He returned the compliment in his belief that she was a serious threat both to him and to the new religious settlement. She was next in line to the throne and, if Edward were to die, Northumberland would be cast into the wilderness or worse. She was also the single most prominent supporter of the old faith. It would perhaps be convenient to kill her, yet the popular outcry would threaten the unity of the kingdom itself. She was also the cousin of the most powerful monarch in Europe, the emperor Charles V, and Northumberland knew that it would be unwise and dangerous to incur his wrath; the emperor had just subdued the rebellious provinces of Germany, and knew precisely how ill-prepared England was for war. In the spring of 1550, however, her privilege of observing the rites of the old religion was denied to her, and she was asked to submit to the Act of Uniformity. The imperial ambassador at once objected to this privation.

From this time forward Mary felt that she was in danger; she told the ambassador that the councillors were ‘wicked and wily in their actions and particularly malevolent towards me’. She believed that they were indeed now planning to murder her. By the summer, therefore, she had drawn up plans to flee by boat to the European mainland, where she might retreat to her cousin’s court in Flanders. At the end of June four imperial warships and four smaller ships approached the English coast near Maldon on the coast of Essex but, at this point, it seems that Mary’s nerve failed her. She repeated, over and over again, ‘What shall I do? What shall become of me?’ The ships retreated, and the princess became ever more closely watched by the council. Her chaplains were ordered to refrain from saying Mass, to which she replied that they were covered by her own immunity.

Edward himself then sent her a letter, partly written in his own hand, in which he condemned her misplaced piety and warned her that ‘in our state it shall miscontent us to permit you, so great a subject, not to keep our laws. Your nearness to us in blood, your greatness in estate and the condition of this time, maketh your fault the greater.’ An implied threat of discipline, or punishment, may be discerned here. In her reply Mary told her brother that his letter had caused her ‘more suffering than any illness, even unto death’. The bad blood between them was a source of much grief and suspicion.

When she was summoned to London to account for herself, she was accompanied by fifty knights wearing velvet coats and chains of gold; an entourage of eighty retainers followed her, each of them displaying a set of rosary beads. The message could not be clearer. But apart from proclaiming her attachment to the old faith, the display was also designed to manifest Mary’s power. If it should come to a fight, there was every chance that she would be the victor. She had the strength of the old faith with her. Two days later she went in procession to Westminster, where thousands of people came out to greet her. Omens and portents were in the air. It was reported that the earth shook as ‘men in harness came down to the ground and faded away’. It was also recorded that ‘three suns appeared, so that men could not discern which was the true sun’.

Edward had just begun keeping a journal, and in his entry for March 1551 he notes that ‘the lady Mary, my sister, came to me at Westminster’. She was called into a meeting with him and his council where it was made plain that he ‘could not bear’ her attendance at Mass.

‘My soul is God’s,’ she replied. ‘I will not change my faith nor dissemble my opinions with contrary doings.’

‘I do not constrain your faith,’ the young king replied. ‘You cannot rule as a king. You must obey as a subject. Your example may breed too much inconvenience.’

A further exchange is reported:

‘Riper age and experience,’ she said, ‘will teach Your Majesty much more yet.’

‘You also may have somewhat to learn. None are too old for that.’

Soon after this a message came from the emperor, Charles V, threatening war if Edward did not allow his sister to hear Mass. He noted that ‘to this no answer was given at this time’. Eventually the reply came that Mary was the king’s subject and was obliged to obey his laws.

Yet much of Northumberland’s time and attention was given to internal dissension and resistance to his own rule. The paramount threat once more was Somerset himself, who, on his return to the council after a brief spell of imprisonment, was devoted to undermining his successor. Somerset had survived the Tower but he had lost most of his authority and significance. For a proud man, this was too much to bear. He began a whispering campaign, or ‘popular murmuring’, against the lord president’s policy.

He established a faction against Northumberland, primarily among his supporters in London, and it is certainly possible that in the last resort he planned some kind of coup against him in parliament; it was said that he had hired an assassin to cut off Northumberland’s head, and that he had incited the citizens of London with drums and trumpets and cries of ‘Liberty!’ The lord president did not wait for him to strike, however, but ordered his arrest in the autumn of 1551. At his subsequent trial he was accused of spreading sedition, by stating, for example, that ‘the covetousness of the gentlemen had given the people reason to rise’. The charge of attempted assassination, however, seems to have been fabricated by Northumberland himself. He in fact admitted the manufacture of evidence on the eve of his own execution, and asked pardon from Somerset’s son.

Great crowds attended Somerset’s execution on Tower Hill. He addressed them from the scaffold, beginning with the words ‘Masters and good fellows …’ As he spoke there was a noise ‘as of gunpowder set on fire in a close house bursting out’ and at the same time a sound of galloping horses as of ‘a great number of great horses running on the people to overrun them’. Panic seized the spectators who fled in bewilderment, crying out ‘Jesus save us, Jesus save us’ or ‘This way they come, that way they come, away, away’. There were no horses, and no gunpowder. One lone horse and rider did approach the scaffold, at which point the people cried out ‘Pardon, pardon, pardon. God save the king. God save the king.’ Somerset, with his cap in his hand, waited for the cries to subside. ‘There is no such thing, good people,’ he said, ‘there is no such thing. It is the ordinance of God thus for to die.’ After a few more words he composed himself and, murmuring ‘Lord Jesus save me’ three times, he gave his rings to the executioner and laid his head on the block for the axe. After the event many rushed to the scaffold to dip their handkerchiefs in the dead man’s blood.

It is reported that the court provided many sports and entertainments for the young king during this period, to ward off any ‘dampy thoughts’. Yet Edward himself seems to have been largely indifferent to his uncle’s fate. He records, in his entry for 22 January 1552, ‘the duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Towerhill, between eight and nine o’clock in the morning’. Nineteen months later Northumberland would stand on the same spot.

The affairs of the realm, too, were in a state of disarray. The debasement of the currency in the protector’s regime had had the natural consequence of inflating the prices of the basic and most necessary foodstuffs. The harvest of 1551 was poor, the third such harvest in a row; and the European market for English woollens had diminished, with a glut of cloth reported at Antwerp. Money had lost half of its value since the last days of Henry. The cost of flour had doubled, for example, so that the standard halfpenny loaf was half the size; the governors of St Bartholomew’s were obliged to increase the rations to those in their care. There was very little Northumberland and his colleagues could do about these matters; they were effectively helpless in the face of overwhelming misery.

In the summer of that year, compounding all the distress and woe, an epidemic illness known as ‘the great sweat’ or ‘the sweating sickness’ spread through the country. It was also known as ‘Stop, gallant’ on account of the fact that some people who were dancing at court at nine o’clock were dead by eleven. It came at night accompanied by chills and tremors; these were followed by a fever and vomiting. The sweat was manifest soon after the onset of the attack; stupor, and death, followed. In the course of the first few days 1,000 Londoners died, and it claimed 2–3,000 in subsequent weeks. It was said in one London chronicle that ‘if they were suffered to sleep but half a quarter of an hour, they never spake after, nor had any knowledge, but when they wakened fell into pangs of death’. It was a year of horrors.