Great Harry

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  For several years these notions went no further. Henry continued to hope for a papal judgment nullifying his marriage to Katherine, and held back from precipitating an irreversible breach with Rome. He did, however, advance to power in his service a man whose thoroughgoing ideas of reform reflected his own impatient urge for a radical solution to his dilemma.

  Thomas Cromwell rose swiftly to hold a succession of court offices after 1530, becoming master of the jewels, then privy councilor, master of the king's wards, chancellor of the exchequer and finally, in 1534, principal royal secretary—his preferred fulcrum of political leverage. By this time it was being said that the king's new chief servant had been granted as much authority as Wolsey once possessed (though Cromwell never achieved Wolsey's degree of influence with Henry), and his role in drafting the key reform statutes of the 1530s made him the central figure in the politics of that momentous decade.

  Save in his expanding girth and phenomenal intellect, Cromwell was in fact unlike his former master Wolsey in every respect. Where Wolsey had been carefully schooled Cromwell was self-taught, with a voracious eagerness to learn that drove him, despite his governmental labors, to learn Italian, French, Latin and a little Greek. On a long journey to Italy he diverted his mind and edified his spirit by memorizing the entirety of Erasmus' Latin New Testament. Cromwell had none of Wolsey's dazzling ostentation; though Henry rewarded him with abundant wealth he lived during the early years of his power in a large house more suited to a successful merchant than a royal secretary.^ Where Wolsey had been a worldly churchman in the medieval mold, Cromwell was deeply, resolutely anticlerical, though along with his hatred of the clergy went a profound piety that had much in common with the teachings of Luther and the other reformers.

  Of greater immediate importance to the king was that Cromwell brought to the tasks of government the dispassionate, calculating eye of an accountant and lawyer. Wolsey's policies had cost Henry countless sums; Cromwell was responsible for even more far-reaching innovations, but made the solvency of the royal treasury a paramount concern.

  The stolid, almost porcine portraits of Thomas Cromwell reveal his shrewd intelligence but do scant justice to the many-sidedness of his personality. By his own admission he had been a wild and unruly youth—a "ruffian," he called himself—and carried a residue of tough, hearty unconventionality into adulthood. Expecting Cromwell to stay at his house in York in 1537, Norfolk offered him every comfort. "And if ye lust not to dally with my wife," the duke wrote, he had "a young woman with pretty proper tetins" to offer the royal secretary.'* Cromwell spoke

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  well, and pointedly. His banter was admired by an exacting judge of wit, Chapuys, and the ambassador noted how Cromwell's normally controlled features would come alive during a conversation, his eyes adding subtleties of expression to his words.

  Cromwell was indeed an excellent foil for his royal master—an individualist who shared Henry's physicality as well as his view of affairs. Though he worked so hard that his friends warned of illness from ''overmuch paining his body and cumbering his wits," the secretary enjoyed a good deal of recreation, taking particular pleasure in his hawks. He hunted with the king in summer and fall—he was an excellent shot with the longbow—and played bowls and gambled with him at other times. They took mutual pleasure when events were to their liking. In October of 1534 news reached the English court that Clement VII, Henry's longtime nemesis, was dead. The king and Cromwell reacted with immense satisfaction, and the secretary could not restrain himself from saying publicly ''that this great devil was dead," and looking as if he would gladly have used a more insulting term than devil.^ (The people of Rome, whose own view of the pope was even more bitterly hostile, refused to let Clement's corpse rest in peace. They broke open his tomb and stabbed his lifeless body, dragging it along the ground by a hook.)

  /if Henry held in mind ideas of clerical reform, immunity from papal junsdiction, and personal headship of the church long before Cromwell's tenure in power began, still it was Cromwell who brought these ideas clearly into focus and translated them into policy. It was an outgrowth of the secretary's genius that the strictly religious changes in the Reformation statutes were embedded in a broader general theory of sovereignty, and that both were brought into being in a way that redefined the governmental role of Parliament as the natural arena of royal legislation. A new bond was formed between king and Parliament in the 1530s, a bond fateful for the direction of English government and for the growth of the monarchy) Much that was old remained, but the transformation to which Cromwell was midwife revitalized the Tudor state and exalted Henry to unprecedented authority.^

  The scope of these events was hidden from Vicar Hale, who saw in them nothing more than criminal tyranny and equated them with the king's other enormities. Prominent among these was Henry's fleshly appetite and taste for "foul pleasures." By the mid-1530s the scandalous circumstances under which Henry had ended his first marriage had long since lent him a reputation for amorous excess. His infidelity to Anne increased this reputation, until references to the king's fondness for women became as much a commonplace of diplomatic correspondence as it was of court gossip. Henry "caused a number of beautiful ladies to come to the court" in honor of the French admiral's visit in 1534; he was "more given to matters of dancing and of ladies than he ever was," Chapuys reported shortly afterward; it was well known, Charles V wrote to his ambassador, that Henry was "of amorous complexion."^ The mere mention of a girl's name in the king's presence called forth a comment on her fairness or plainness; that this indicated more than a heightened

  aesthetic awareness seems probable from Norfolk's testimony that Henry was "continually inclined to amours."®

  Fear or discretion must have made Henry's subjects reluctant to commit to writing what they may have known of his royal lust, but there were whispered hints at wholesale lechery. Hale heard from the porter at Syon that "our sovereign lord had a short of maidens over one of his chambers at Famham"—perhaps a royal brothel.^ And a sanctuary man (almost certainly a criminal) of Westminster told of hearing one William Webbe swear that the king had abducted his mistress in broad daylight.

  Webbe was out riding near Eltham, his "pretty wench" behind him. They encountered Henry, who "plucked down her muffler and kissed her, and liked her so well that he took her from him." It was said the girl was still with the king, and Webbe, who had sworn vengeance on his sovereign, was desperately telling his story to anyone who would Hsten.^**

  How much Hale exaggerated in condemning Henry's sexual sins must remain conjectural, given the slendemess of the surviving evidence. Another of his criticisms, though, touched a central theme in the king's character in these years. In saying that Henry saw himself as exalted above other rulers and was "puffed with vain glory and pride," the vicar put in crude terms a significant shift in personality.

  In his thirties Henry had begun to take on the lineaments of mature kingship, showing more than a hint of his masterful father's sense of command. Now in his forties he had gained a new plateau of authority, all the more formidable in that it drew its strength from a unique font of inner conviction.

  In the crucible of the divorce years Henry had developed an unshakable faith in the reliability of his own intelligence and judgment, a sense of certitude that enabled him to stand firm against the opposition that encircled him. While he never lost sight of the weight of expert opinion— hoping, as he said, to "conquer by numbers as well as by justice and truth"—still he placed greatest reliance on his personal discrimination. He was right, he declared, "not because so many say it, but because he, being learned, knoweth the matter to be right."^^ An inventory of Henry's jewels in 1535 listed a gold bracelet bearing the enameled inscription ''plus tot morir que changer ma pensee" —"to die rather than change my mind."i2

  This certitude matured during the era of the breach with Rome—just at the time Cromwell was drafting the ringing preamble to the Act in Restraint of Appeals with its reference to E
ngland's "one Supreme Head and King having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial Crown." The act accorded Henry "plenary, whole, and entire power, pre-eminence, authority, prerogative, and jurisdiction." From one standpoint it put him on a level of unquestionable, all but infallible power—an aggrandizement unique in English history.

  The exaltation of the monarchy, the assumption of headship of the church, the vocabulary of imperial dignity set a special seal on Henry's inner certainty, as if God and Parliament were backing his sense of rightness. Buoyed by these heady supports, he thought more and more of

  his place in the world and in history, envisioning both in grandiose terms.

  In discussing with Chapuys his grievances against Charles V, Henry took the tone of an injured giant consoled by the assurance of vindication on a Europe-wide scale. The recollection of these grievances "caused him great trouble and almost illness," Henry said, yet "it was enough for him that the world knew his wrongs." Not long afterward he gave a lavish banquet, and as he ate and drank, surrounded by his courtiers and foreign visitors, he boasted of the amazing religious changes he was bringing to the realm. "He would make such a reformation," Henry said exultantly, "that in the end he should be eternally remembered in all Christendom."^^

  The more expansive he became the more Henry distanced himself from those around him. Convinced that he was by nature different from other men, endowed with insight and discernment far beyond the common, Henry heeded less the voices of his councilors and allowed his kingly instincts to guide him. "God has not only made us king by inheritance," he wrote in 1536, "but has given us wisdom, policy, and other graces in most plentiful sort, necessary for a prince to direct his affairs by to his honor and glory."^^

  Yet if in his own eyes the king was sublimely purposeful and rational, to others he was increasingly bewildering, full of contradictions and inclined to caprice. His .conscience seemed to follow a logic all it s,own. His policy toward other rulers was a puzzling amalgam of chivalrous boast and shrewd inaction. Francis I, on good terms with Henry in the mid-1530s, called him "the hardest friend to bear in the world—at one time unstable, at another time obstinate and proud, so that it is almost impossible to bear with him." At the height of his impatience Francis dismissed Henry as a self-satisfied dupe who "thinks himself very wise, but is nothing more than a fool." In sum, though, the French king found Henry a baffling enigma, quite simply "the strangest man in the world."^^

  Cromwell was occasionally exasperated to the point of collapse by his master's childish irrationality. When in the spring of 1536 prolonged discussions of relations between England and the empire failed to lead to enlightened policy-making the secretary "took to his bed from pure sorrow," and pronounced a wistful judgment on all royal personalities. "Princes have spirits or properties," he said, "which are hidden and unknown to all others."^^

  Reginald Pole, a longtime supporter of the king turned opponent by England's repudiation of the pope, saw well his royal cousin's dilemma. What Henry needed was to listen to the forthright criticism of well-meaning advisers, Pole said. Henry must be shown his faults, clearly and without regard to his pride or his power of revenge. Pole himself had undertaken the task of undeceiving the king in a harshly critical treatise attacking Henry's policies and personal life; had he not done so, he remarked despairingly, who else would have?

  That Pole's treatise went unheeded was cause for concern, for as Henry went ahead it became more and more clear that his inner compass had gone awry.

  These blodye dayes have brokyn my hart, My lust, my youth dyd then departe And blynd desyer of as tat e; Who hastis to clyme sekes to reverte.

  On the morning of the twenty-second of June, 1535, crowds gathered at the Tower in the courtyard where, fourteen years eariier, the duke of Buckingham had been executed. They had come to witness another death, one many of them found impossible to imagine. John Fisher, the frail, seventy-six-year-old bishop of Rochester, was to give up his life by the king's command.

  Workmen were still erecting the scaffold when Fisher rode into view, a shrunken figure in a black cloth vest and cap, withered with age and so emaciated from his months in the Tower that he seemed "more like a shadow than a man." He had awaited the day of his execution in dread ever since Cromwell informed him of it, telling him at the same time that the pope had made him a cardinal. Now he had still longer to wait, for the workmen were at their task for another hour, and the old man was kept sitting astride his mule, watching in heavy silence as they prepared the arena of his suffering.

  This day would bring to an end more than two years of painful imprisonment. During his tenure in the Tower Fisher had endured the dual agonies of age and confinement. His delicate stomach refused the rank food the jailer brought him; he shivered even at midday in the damp and cold of his cell; ill-fed and weak from exposure he *'fell into decay and diseases of his body," and could not care for himself. "I have neither shirt nor sheet nor yet other clothes that are necessary for me to wear," he wrote to Cromwell in his wretchedness, ''but that be ragged and rent too shamefully. Notwithstanding, I might easily suffer that if they would keep my body warm."^

  If he shivered now in the cold morning air the bishop disguised it well, for his voice was clear and bold as he spoke to the crowd after mounting the scaffold. He told them to love the king and obey him, "for he was good by nature," though mistaken in his religious policies. Of his own deeds he said little but that he was condemned to die for wishing to preserve the honor of God and the Holy See. Looking out over the upturned faces of the men and women below him—many of them the same people who had come "in great grief" to demand his blessing when he first entered the Tower—Fisher asked for their prayers. He was only flesh, he told them, and feared death as any man would. He had long since

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  made up his mind to die, if need be, for Christ and his church, yet now that the moment was at hand his body rebelled in terror.

  The death Fisher faced was a traitor's death, its fearsomeness compounded by humiliation and butchery. After the headsman finished his work the headless corpse of a traitor was slit open, his bowels drawn out and burned. His remains were then hacked into quarters and hung in the sun to rot, and before his blood dried on the scaffold the makers of charms and potions crowded around to gather it into vessels for safekeeping.

  Had he thought of these things Fisher might have lost his nerve, yet he seemed to find the courage to "suffer cheerfully his approaching punishment," as he had hoped. As the onlookers prayed he knelt down with the difficulty of an elderly man, and laid his head on the block, and died.^

  There was no question that, under English law, Fisher was a traitor. He had not only openly opposed the royal supremacy, he had written to Charles V urging him to invade England and forcibly restore the authority of the pope. Yet because he had acted from conscience, and from a faith so deeply rooted that it commanded awe, Fisher seemed beyond the law. His age, his reputation as "the most holy and learned prelate in Christendom," his cardinalate all made him a grossly inappropriate object of the king's wrath—and no one hesitated to lay the execution directly to Henry's charge. Had Henry not reacted angrily to the news of Fisher's appointment as cardinal, announcing that he would give the bishop "another hat, and send the head afterwards to Rome for the cardinal's hat"?^ Had Fisher not been a strong supporter of Katherine, and so among Henry's bitterest foes?

  Royal enmity toward the old man had been building for years, an enmity so terrible it rode over Henry's tenderer feelings toward Fisher as his boyhood mentor and councilor. Contemporary opinion saw in Fisher's execution not judicial murder justified by state necessity but cruel vengeance, "the most cowardly, grievous and infamous" ever seen. It was not put down to leniency that the aged body, after a period of gruesome public display, was neither disemboweled nor quartered. Nor was Henry thought merciful for ordering the body buried almost at once; surely his intention was not to protect the dead man's dignity but to cheat the relic-hunters of their prizes
. The final vengeance, though, belonged to the victim. Fisher's severed head, affixed to London Bridge, remained star-tlingly lifelike for days, its incorruptibility proof of the slain bishop's holiness.^

  The outrage that erupted on Fisher's death was fed within days by another equally barbarous execution. Thomas More, the king's personal friend for decades and until 1532 his chancellor, followed Fisher to the scaffold, charged with treasonous refusal to swear assent to the succession. (Like Fisher, More opposed the Succession Act because he construed it to imply denial of papal power.) More was careful to go no further than to refuse the oath; beyond that he was silent. Yet there was no mistaking the impact of his silence, or of the longstanding opposition to the divorce which preceded it. For years More had served as a focal point for such opposition, with only the king's good will standing between him

  and persecution. In 1535, law and circumstances made his silence intolerable. Anything short of spoken assent was treason. "Though we should have no word or deed to charge upon you," Attorney General Christopher Hales told More at his trial, "yet we have your silence, and that is a sign of your evil intention and a sure proof of malice."^

  In vain More's wife and children wrote to Henry, reminding him of the ex-chancellor's long and true service, and of the imperatives of conscience which impelled him in his stand. He acted not from malice but from "such a long-continued and deep-rooted scruple as passeth his power to avoid and put away," they wrote, and indeed the king knew well enough what More's scruples were. Years before, the two men had struck a bargain, with Henry assuring More that he would not have to handle what was distasteful to his conscience. More "should look first unto God," Henry said, "and after God unto him." More kept his part of the bargain to the end. Henry, who was hunting at Reading on the day of More's execution, had seen fit to ignore his.^