The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  Parliament had passed the Act of Suppression of the Lesser Monasteries. The Act began: “Forasmuch as manifest sin, vicious, carnal, and abominable living is daily used among the small abbeys . . .” It was based on the reports that at Garadon there were five homosexuals, “one with ten boys”; that at Selby one of the monks had had sexual relations “with five or six married women” who had come to seek benefit from the Abbey’s “Virgin Girdle,” which protected one in childbirth; that at Warter, Brother Jackson was “guilty of incest with a nun,” and that at Calder, one Matthew Ponsonby “showed peculiar depravity.” At Bath Priory—where the prior had tried to buy Cromwell off by sending him a leash of Irish wolfhounds—monks were “more corrupt than any others in vices with both sexes.” At Lewes, the prior had “eight whores” and the place was a “very whorehouse and unnatural vices are here, especially the sub-prior, as appears by the confession of a fair young monk.”

  One by one the houses were being closed. Those monks who had a true calling were being transferred to larger, stricter houses. The rest were to leave and find their livelihood elsewhere. Their monastic property was to be sold and the proceeds to revert to the Crown. The relics were being sent here, for my inspection. It was an unhappy task.

  Monasticism had begun as a pure flowering of spiritualism. The great founder of communal Christian living (for until then there had been only desert-living Christian hermits) was Saint Benedict. He thought it better for men to live with other men, and gathered together hermits and wrote instructions, called the Rule, by which they could actually increase their spiritualism by living in a community governed by holy rules. In his view, a man should best divide his time between prayer, study, and manual work.

  In time, other interpretations of his Rule prevailed. The Cistercians stressed manual labor and apartness from civilization. The Cluniacs emphasized intricate beauty of worship. The Carthusians sought prayer and solitude. The “preaching friars”—Dominicans, Franciscans—stressed work with the people and impeccable scholarship.

  Our own inclinations seem to turn our best strivings first into vanity, then into outright sin. (The Tower of Babel?) The story of the monks was just the story of man, summarized. It now fell to me to drive them from their Garden of Eden. Nonetheless, it was a duty I performed with reluctance, especially as both Jane and Mary disliked it intensely. Ah, but they had not seen the inside of the statue. . . .

  The monastic land was sold outright, or leased. (Monks had held between one-quarter and one-third of the land in England.) Usually it was bought by the neighbouring great landholders, who sought to extend their estates.

  There were always those reformers who thought it should be distributed to the peasants. But how should the peasants use it? No, the legacy of the monasteries would come to them in other ways; there was much besides land. Land was like hawks: it required great upkeep, love, and expertise. It was not surprising that hawking was “the sport of princes.” No one else could afford the time and effort.

  The most popular plunder from the monasteries was lead from the roofs. These were stripped immediately, and the lead melted down on the spot with fires made from the ceiling and roof timbers. Next in demand, especially in the London area, were the cut stones used in the monastic buildings. These were hauled away by the cartload and found their way into the new town houses rising along the Strand. I myself appropriated volumes from monastic libraries: old scrolls and manuscripts, some dating almost from Roman times. I also used the bronze from monastery bells for casting cannon.

  The buildings themselves were turned to other uses. Often the abbey church was converted into a parish church, while the lodgings of the abbot, along with his cellar and kitchens, became a well-to-do merchant’s manor, with the old gatehouse as his porter’s lodge.

  I will not pretend that I did not rejoice in the profits therefrom. The truth was that the Royal Treasury was almost threadbare, and the monastic income helped reclothe it.

  In a greater sense, the Dissolution of the Monasteries was a relief, like emptying out the trunk of a dead man. It is always unpleasant; one has memories of him as he was, and winces at what befell him. But his property must be disposed of, and it would be wasteful and disrespectful just to pitch it all away without inspection, as tender-hearted souls advise—as if one were diminished by having one’s goods reused by the living. Surely we are not as the ancient Egyptians, hoarding all for the dead and begrudging it to the living.

  Then it all came together—every particle of discontent, nostalgia, and resistance in England—fusing in the North.

  The North: two words to describe a territory and a state of mind. England was conquered and civilized from the South upwards, and as one approached the borders of Scotland—first through Yorkshire and then Durham and finally Northumberland—everything dwindled. The great forests gave way first to stunted trees and then to open, windswept moors; the towns shrank to villages and then to hamlets; cultivated fields were replaced by empty, wild spaces. Here the Cistercian monasteries flourished, they who removed themselves from the centers of civilization and relied on manual labour as a route to holiness. The sheep became scrawnier and their wool thicker, and the men became lawless and more secretive, clannish. Winter lasted eight months and even the summers were grey and raw, leading Northumberland men to claim they had “two winters—a white one and a green one.”

  Since ancient times these peripheral lands had gone their own way, little connected to anything further south. A few great warrior families—the Percys, the Nevilles, the Stanleys—had claimed overlordship of these dreary, cruel wastes, and through them, the Crown had demanded obeisance. But these people knew nothing of me, and I nothing of them. The only touch of love and softness they had ever known was through the great Cistercian monasteries: Fountains, Rievaulx, Jervaulx, Kirkstall. There they could stumble in following a snowstorm and find warmth, food, shelter. There, and only there, could travellers stay the night in safety. There they could be taught to read and write, if they so desired.

  Now rumour reached them that their abbeys were to be closed. They had heard, distantly, that ties with Rome were broken. For them, the Church—through Rome—was their one distinction, their one blessing, that set them apart from their wild neighbours even further north. Word had reached them that the newly independent “Church of England” had set forth its beliefs in a statement of Ten Articles that leaned toward Lutheranism and dropped four of the seven Holy Sacraments.

  This was the aforementioned Ten Articles of Faith to Establish Christian Quietness, a statement of doctrine drawn up by my bishops in hopes of doing exactly that. The recent changes had so confused the laity that I had thought some clarification of beliefs was in order.

  The resulting Ten Articles were a magnificent compromise between the traditionalists and the reformists. Like all compromises, it evidently satisfied no one of either persuasion and unduly alarmed both factions.

  The northerners heard, also, in a distorted and distant way, that commoners had replaced noblemen in the King’s Council. They had always been served well by “their” noblemen, and feared for themselves without their guardians. But more than anything else they feared change. Like the slow-growing trees in their region—which took three or four years to attain the one year’s growth of a similar tree in southern England—they were unable to respond quickly to climactic changes. The plant that grew from their soil was the Pilgrimage of Grace.

  A pilgrimage was what they called it, but a rebellion was what it was. It broke out in spots, like the pox, all over Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Eventually the mass coalesced into a great pustule—some forty thousand strong—in the area of the middle of Yorkshire. I did not pop the pustule directly—that would have made too great a splatter—but lanced it and let it drain away and dry up.

  So much for metaphor. Now let me set down, in summary, exactly what happened in those autumn months of 1536.

  I had sent my commissioners north to supervise the suppression of the s
mall monasteries, as stipulated in the Act of Parliament. The first resistance they met was in the hamlet of Hexham, in Northumberland. There an armed mob of monks and townspeople chased them out.

  Next, a spontaneous revolt arose in Lincolnshire. The rebels surrounded the castle of Kyme, where Bessie Blount and her new husband, Edward, Lord Clinton, resided, and attempted to force them to join the rebellion. Bessie and Edward refused, and the rebels were unable either to persuade them or to capture their stronghold. As soon as they dispersed, Edward Clinton rode south to warn me.

  The irksome rebels went next to Caister, where they killed the Bishop of Lincoln’s chancellor, Dr. Heneage, and forced the Abbot of Barking, Matthew Mackerel, to join them. By this point their numbers had swelled to about twenty thousand. They had selected a local shoemaker, Nicholas Melton, as their leader, calling him “Captain Cobbler.”

  When Clinton reached me and appraised me of the situation, I empowered George Talbot, my loyal Earl of Shrewsbury in the North, to crush the rebels. But he had no need, as their movement collapsed on its own, due to lack of leadership.

  In the meantime another group had found itself a leader in Yorkshire: Robert Aske, an energetic, self-made lawyer and visionary. A clever man, it was he who thought to turn their ordinary grumbles into an extraordinary “mission”; to call themselves “pilgrims” and march under a banner with Christ on the cross on one side and a chalice and wafer on the other, and wear white uniforms with red patches for Christ’s five wounds.

  He devised an Oath of the Honourable Man, which he required his “pilgrims” to take: “Ye shall not enter into this our Pilgrimage of Grace for the Commonwealth, but only for the love that you do bear unto Almighty God his faith, and to Holy Church militant and the maintenance thereof, to the preservation of the King’s person and his issue, to the purifying of the nobility, and to expulse all villein blood and evil councillors against the Commonwealth from his Grace and his Privy Council of the same.”

  This group surrounded the royal castle of Pontrefract, where my heretofore loyal Lord Darcy—“Old Tom,” as he called himself—was in command. But Darcy, as Crum’s spies had long since informed me, was one of the secret traitors who had allied himself to the Emperor and Chapuys’s plot when Katherine was still alive. Therefore it was not surprising that he joined them. (Edward Lee, Archbishop of York, also captured by them, extemporized and escaped.)

  The rebels, now with a total force of forty thousand men—twenty-eight thousand on foot and twelve thousand on horse—were in control of the area. They announced their demands: restoration of the monasteries, abolition of heresy laws against Catholics, restoration of the Papal supremacy, legitimation of the “Princess” Mary, and death by burning of the “Protestant” bishops Cranmer, Latimer, and Shaxton. But their express hatred was focused on Cromwell—“Cow Crummock,” they called him—whom they detested with a bitterness surpassing reason. He must be removed.

  Must be? Sought they to dictate my councillors? Just as Cromwell was their supreme focus, so was my right to choose my own advisors.

  I had sent Talbot and Brandon to put down the rebels in Lincolnshire, but the rebellion collapsed before they arrived. Howard, Duke of Norfolk, I was obliged to call out of political exile (whence he had hidden and languished since his niece the Witch’s fall) to confront the Yorkshire mob. But my main objective was peacefully to disarm them, both literally and figuratively. I had no wish to fight them, as old ways disperse faster without martyrs.

  My herald knelt in front of Robert Aske: a recognized sign of submission. For that he would later be executed. But he was able, at least, to make my offer known: disband, and let your leader come to London and negotiate. You say you are no traitors, but trust your King; now prove it.

  The rebels did, and sent Robert Aske to court, where I met with him at Christmas.

  Thus ended the so-called Pilgrimage of Grace—neither a pilgrimage nor imbued with grace. But it did alert me to the deep-seated affection for the monasteries and the “Olde Religion” in my far-flung territories. When I met with Aske, one of his requests—and a reasonable one, too—was that I show myself to them, so that they might know me as well as my southern subjects, and that I agree to hold Jane’s Coronation at York. It was a pleasant thought, and would make Jane’s crowning altogether different from Anne’s.

  In the end, though, the rebellion in the North failed because it had only the common people’s loyalty, not that of the great lords of the North: the Nevilles and Percys; the Earls of Derby, Shrewsbury, and Rutland. These looked at the magnificent Cistercian monasteries and realized the properties could be theirs, if they but supported my policy. And they were right.

  The other rebellion, more unexpected and uncharacteristic, came from within the royal apartments. Jane herself took the part of the Pilgrims. Tender-hearted, she hearkened to their complaints and tried to persuade me to capitulate to them.

  “Can you not let the monasteries in the North remain?” she begged. “Their needs are different from ours, their land is different. How can you know unless you see for yourself?”

  “There can be no exceptions,” I tried to explain, gently. “For once exceptions begin, they never end. The Welsh, the Cornish, the fen country—all will want their special concerns catered to. Besides, this business of the monasteries concerns only myself and Rome.”

  I had an ugly flash of memory. “These rebels, like Darcy and Hussey and Dacre, Lord Abergavenny, were first seduced into treason by Chapuys’s plot to help Katherine’s cause. The Pope is part of it—else why would he have dispatched that filthy Plantagenet creature of his, Cardinal Pole, to come as Papal legate and lend a hand to the rebels? No one co-operates, of course. The Cardinal languishes in Flanders, unable to find a willing sea captain to sail him across the Channel. May he rot there in the Lowlands!” My voice was rising at the perfidy of it all.

  “The Pope! The Pilgrims! They are determined to bring me to my knees! Well, they shall not!” I yelled.

  Jane fell at my feet, weeping. “Do not confuse the Pilgrims with the Pope. One is honest, the other not. Can you not consider—”

  Now she turned against me! “Do you side with them, Madam?” I snapped. “Do not meddle in what you cannot understand!” They had fooled her, but they would not fool me. Did they think me a soft-headed woman?

  Jane pulled herself up, staring at me all the while, as if she did not know me. “Yes, Your Majesty,” she said.

  “ ‘Bound to Obey and Serve,’ ” I reminded her. “Is that not the motto you chose for your own?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “Then follow it!” I bellowed.

  In the North, as the early winter closed in, the rebels laid down their arms and trusted in their representative, Aske, who came to court and spent Christmas with us. I found Aske to be an honourable, thoughtful man—ironically, just the sort of “commoner” I liked to have on my councils and to which his Pilgrims objected.

  The Percy family had ruined itself in the Pilgrimage. Earlier, Henry Percy (Anne’s erstwhile lover), now the sixth Earl of Northumberland, had bequeathed his familial lands to the Crown upon his death. Whether poor dying Percy did it as a gesture of despair or mockery toward his brothers, I knew not, but it presented an elegant solution to the problem of no Crown holdings in that wild area. Naturally the two younger brothers, Thomas and Ingram Percy, objected, and became traitors and rebels in hopes of reclaiming their ancestral lands. All the while Henry Percy lay on his deathbed, his whole body “as yellow as saffron,” they said.

  Some of the rich northern abbeys, thinking to protect themselves and win favour, gave shelter and aid to the rebels. Their actions had exactly the opposite effect: they convinced me that all the monasteries must be closed, for they were no friends to me or my government.

  After the New Year, two leftover rebels, Sir Francis Bigod and John Hallam, impatient to have their “demands” met, regathered forces and attempted to capture the cities of Scarborough and Hull
. Two abbeys, Watton Priory and Jervaulx, joined in, and the next month rebellion broke out in two other shires, Cumberland and Westmorland.

  That was enough. There would be no pardon, no promises on my part carried out. The traitors, one and all, would perish, and in the sight of those they had led. Robert Aske was hanged in chains on market day in the square at York; Sir Robert Constable, in the market at Hull; and Lord Hussey was beheaded in Lincoln.

  Lord Darcy (“Old Tom,” who had shouted at Cromwell, “Yet shall there one head remain that shall strike off thy head!”) was beheaded at the Tower, along with Thomas Percy; and Tyburn (where traitors met the prescribed felons’ death) took care of the Abbot of Barking, the Vicar of Louth, and the Lancaster royal herald who had knelt in fealty to the rebels. Seventy-four lesser rebels were likewise executed in Carlisle.

  The rebel monks, some two hundred of them, were executed as the stinking traitors they were. At Sawley Abbey, they had actually crept back into their officially closed house in arrogant disregard of the law. So I ordered the Earl of Derby to hang the abbot and a score of his monks from the church steeple, on long pieces of timber, so that all his “flock” could see what befell traitors. The white-clad bodies swung from the silent tower (the bells having already been melted down and carried away). I daresay their silent movements spoke louder to the neighbourhood than any ringing bells ever had.

  This prompted the first surrender of a monastery. When my royal commissioners took up their work again in April, the Abbot of Furness Abbey, in Cumbria, found it prudent to meet my representatives with a deed of surrender, giving the Crown “all such interest and title as I have had, have, or may have in the Abbey.” This unforeseen gift made our task simple—although it rattled Cromwell, who had made out a complex schedule for closing the monasteries, based on their resistance.