The shock wave that went out across Europe on More's death was as much a measure of the humanist's goodness as of his fame. Accounts of his trial and execution appeared in several languages, and in every European country his admirers recorded their grief in letters remarkable for their depth of feeling. More's candor, his urbanity, his all-pervasive kindness had won him a place in many hearts; men he had never met "lamented him as a parent or brother." "I have myself seen many shed tears for him who had never seen him or had anything to do with him," one humanist wrote from Paris. "My own tears fall unwillingly as I write this."^
While in the Tower More had concerned himself chiefly with preparing for death, he told his friends. But the casual writings he left and the notes he made in the margins of his books show broader interests. To lighten his sorrows he wrote songs. (More's enjoyment of singing in the choir once led Norfolk to scold him: "God body, God body, my lord chancellor, a parish dark, a parish dark! You dishonor the king and his office!") One song, "Lewis, the Lost Lover," began with the melancholy line "Fie, flattering fortune, look thou never so fair"; another, "Davy, the Dicer," was more lively.
Most of all More's Tower writings reveal the rare charity of spirit that was the hallmark of his character. Henry was often in his thoughts, yet he was without bitterness toward the man who had befriended him, then coerced him, then dispossessed him and put him at risk of his life. As he meditated on the verses in his prayer book More marked some to be repeated ''Pro rege" —"For the king"—and apparently remembered Henry often in his devotions. "The king shall joy in his strength, O Lord; and in thy salvation greatly shall he rejoice!" "For the king trusteth in the Lord, and through the mercy of the Most High he shall not be moved," he prayed again and again, kneeling on the stone floor of his cell, until prayer drove out all resentment.^
(The deaths of More and Fisher in 15^5 marked the end of an initial positive stage in the English Reformation. Jn the first half of the decade
English men and women had in large part tolerated the alterations wrought by parliamentary statute, though in the north acceptance was much less widespread. Though the Commons had opposed the divorce, they embraced the break with Rome and the assault on clerical independence with remarkable compliance. Older views ascribing their acquiescence to political coercion have been discarded; it now appears that king and Commons alike viewed the church as a "shabby incubus" in need of radical reform.^
Among the populace at large there was much outspoken hostility toward the clergy and blasphemous contempt for sacred things. ''Nearly all the people here hate the priests," Chapuys had written in 1529, and indeed the heavy taxation, the moral and material corruption of the clergy gave abundant cause for resentment.^^ Lollard doctrines centuries old rejecting the pope, the priests and the sacraments were reasserting themselves, adding to the religious tempest blown up by preachers of reform. Given every encouragement by Cromwell and by Archbishop Cranmer, a host of articulate evangelists headed by Hugh Latimer held forth against the overelaborate ritual of the church, its superstitious veneration of saints and its doctrine of purgatory. These teachings met with a good deal of counterargument, yet they were if anything less extreme than the anticlerical sentiments to be heard throughout the countryside. In one Sussex village the parishioners disdained holy statues as *'idols and mammets," and dismissed the mass as no more meaningful than "the bleating of a cow to her calf." One man slandered the Virgin Mary with particular venom. "If our lady were here in earth," he was heard to say, "I would no more fear to meddle with her than with a common whore."*^
But if the earlier 1530s had seen broad agreement between king and people on religious issues, by the middle of the decade the momentum of popular favor had ebbed. The deaths of More and Fisher signaled a cresting of opposition to all that the Reformation Parliament had accomplished. Now for every villager who scoffed at the mass there was another loudly proclaiming fidelity to it, and to the pope as well, and in order to contain the wave of reaction a means of enforcement was needed.
The new treason laws provided the legal framework, loyal subjects
ieager to denounce disloyalty the channel of information. All across the country ordinary men and women listened keenly to their friends, their neighbors, passers-by—even their relatives—to see whether they spoke ill of the king or queen, or criticized the royal supremacy. When evil words were detected, bystanders were called upon to swear to what they had heard. Then the informer went to the nearest knight or lord, who saw to it that the facts reached Cromwell. There were no spies or paid informers, yet the denunciations came in by the hundreds. Proclamations, official declarations, treatises, pamphlets, sermons, even ballads constantly warned the king's subjects of their duty to report treasonous words, and of the penalties they risked if they kept what they heard to themselves. Their response helped to spread a mantle of fear over the realm as Bishop Fisher and Thomas More went to their deaths.
This corrosive fear was fed by rumors of espionage on a grand scale and by the daily fact of arrests and denunciations. In actuality each report that reached Cromwell at court was weighed carefully to screen out accusations rooted in malice. Yet such scrutiny was small comfort to villagers and city-dwellers unnerved by stories of men seized for slight causes and held in prison on even slighter pretexts. "It is rumored," a correspondent wrote to the king's aunt Lady Lisle in 1535, "that a person should be committed to the Tower for saying that this month will be rainy and full of wet, next month, death, and the third month, war. He will be kept there till experience shows the truth of his prophecy."^^
In their vigilance informers made no exception of words spoken by drunkards or the senile. A servant of the duchess of Northumberland was imprisoned for criticizing the king; he claimed to have been drunk beyond sense, and to have no memory of his offense. He was acquitted of the charge, yet was kept in prison, "in danger of his limbs," until his mistress had to intercede on his behalf.^^ When Cromwell heard that an absent-minded canon nearing his eightieth year had mistakenly prayed for "Katherine the queen" instead of Anne he did not press for punishment, but the bitter words of an "aged and wretched" Worcester husbandman were taken more seriously. Limping homeward through the mud one rainy market day the old man was overheard to curse the king as the cause of the bad weather that had plagued the countryside in recent years. Ever since Henry "began this business," the farmer muttered, the weather had been "troublous and unstable, and I ween we shall never have better weather while the king reigneth, and therefore it maketh no matter if he were knocked or patted on the head."^^
Similar indifference toward the king's fate was shown by a more unique prisoner. John Bonde had been prior of Barton for sixty years when he came to the attention of the royal examiners for speaking "opprobious words" against the king and queen. They judged him to be over a hundred years old—he had been past his prime when Henry VII was a boy—but though his mind was "much enfeebled" his opinions were firm and critical. Bonde's jailers did not hesitate to seize his modest possessions and to imprison him, but they had no precedent to guide them in punishing so venerable an opponent of the king. They confined him to his house, allowing one servant to see to his needs and making certain he had warm meat and drink and enough firewood to keep off the chill, and then,wrote to Cromwell for advice; his reply has been lost.^^
sjhe Tudor populace feared Cromwell and the spies they imagined him to have; they feared one another; they feared false accusations and excessive punishment. But most of all they feared the wrath of the king?) In his fervor to protect his headship of the church Henry was sending hoTy and good men to their deaths—not only Fisher and More but Carthusian monks, hanged in their religious habits after suffering inhuman tortures in prison. His displeasure—many called it vengeance—seemed limitless. In the end it encompassed even the being he had once held dearer than his wife, his child, his peace of mind: Anne Boleyn.
To say that Henry was exceedingly dismayed at the birth of Elizabeth
Tudor in Septe
mber of 1533 would far understate the depth of his disappointment. The baby was the culmination of years of eager expectation; it was to crown all of Henry's hopes, and some day to reign after him. The unforeseen arrival of a daughter instead of a son turned these hopes sour, and exposed the king to the mocking ridicule of all those who had opposed his marriage to Anne.
News of the birth of a girl to the queen led many to laugh inwardly at the king's expense. One who could not restrain himself was the bishop of Bath's secretary, who burst out his reaction at the bishop's dinner table. "By our Lord's body," he said with vehemence, "if he had lain with her he would have gotten a boy, or else he would have meddled with her till his eyes did start out of his head!"^^
Henry's critics, his wife, even God himself had humiliated him—or worse. "God has forgotten him entirely," it seemed to Chapuys, "hardening him in his obstinacy to punish and ruin him." He had been cheated by both natural and supernatural forces, and this despite his longsuffering struggle against the pope, Katherine of Aragon's jurists, the weight of Catholic opinion. When Mary had been bom seventeen years earlier the young Henry had made light of his disappointment, assuring solicitous courtiers that sons would surely follow. There was no such lightness now. In middle age the king's horizons were narrowing; what at twenty-five had seemed an infinite margin of time now loomed as a finite span of precious years, years in which his son and heir must be bom, nurtured through infancy, trained through childhood to the tasks of rule. There was no time for mistakes. There must be no more daughters.
Henry was not present when Princess Elizabeth was christened in the silver font at Greenwich, and indeed he paid far less attention to his baby daughter than to the progress of Anne's second pregnancy, which followed almost immediately. By January of 1534 the queen was noticeably with child; a silver cradle was ordered for the hoped-for son, with roses entwined about its pillars and gleaming stones set in gold around the rim. The child miscarried, but by the time the royal hunting progress began in June Anne had "a goodly belly" once again, and hope revived briefly. When this third pregnancy too ended abruptly (probably in a miscarriage) Henry exploded in furious frustration.^^
To distract himself he sought the company of new favorites: the pale, gentle Jane Seymour and ano ther wom an—a considerable beauty—whose name has b een lostj but whose partisan sympathy toward Katherine and Mar>nTelped~to improve their lot somewhat in the second half of 1534. Anne fought against these rivals, and against a third royal mistress, Margaret Shelton, whom her Norfolk relatives brought to court to tempt the king early in 1535. Yet the more Anne struggled to hold Henry's favor the more she drove him to others, and slipped further into a quicksand of insecurity. When Anne and her sister-in-law Lady Rochford conspired to send the unnamed beauty away from court the king stepped in and banished Lady Rochford instead. Deprived of her companion, Anne confronted Henry directly, but found him inured to her complaints. She should count herself lucky, he told her, for he had done much for her that "he would not do now if the thing were to begin."^^
By his flirtations, his irritability, his wounding inattention to his wife Henry made his dissatisfaction clear. He had gone through a great deal to make Anne queen; she had not played her part. Like Katherine before her she appeared to be barren of sons. After two years of marriage, he repented his choice. Courtiers noted that, though she refused to resign herself to her situation, Anne had lost her old "pride and insolence," and now looked anxious and troubled.^^ Her distress would have turned to panic had she known that Henry was seeking an excuse to divorce her.
"Our greatest wish, next to having a son, is to see you again," Anne wrote to the queen of Navarre in 1535. Giving Henry an heir had become her consuming preoccupation, more important than outdistancing her rivals, more important than advancing the interests of her infant daughter. She paced the galleries of Hampton Court restlessly, recalling how in happier days she and Henry (and Lady Boleyn) had come to see the palace and its treasures just after Wolsey's death, full of hope for the future. Now everything around her reminded Anne of failure—the palace itself, the beautiful clothes and furnishings Henry had given her, the verses poets had written her wishing her "a son to be the living image of the king his father." According to a visitor to court Anne was never without a book in her hand—usually a French book—seeking "salutary remedies for this mortal life and consolations for the immortal soul." The songs in her music book too echoed the burden of sorrow she carried.^^
Come regrets, come all to my heart, Come swiftly, let none of you depart; Come care, come sorrow, and come tears, Come all that oppresses a lover's heart.
The king's urgent need for a son was underlined in 1535 when negotiations for the betrothal of Princess Elizabeth and a French prince ended in disagreement. Elizabeth had not only disappointed her father by being the wrong sex; doubts about her legitimacy (Cranmer's settlement of the nullity suit was not universally recognized outside England) made her useless to him as a diplomatic pawn as well. Anne became increasingly jealous of Henry's other children. Henry Fitzroy, now grown into "a most handsome, urbane and learned young gentleman" of sixteen, had married Norfolk's only daughter Mary, an alliance calculated to worsen the bad relations between Anne and her uncle. As for Henry's older daughter, no longer Princess Mary but plain "Lady Mary," Anne had long been her sworn enemy. "I am her death and she is mine," she said succinctly. Only one of them could survive the struggle she foresaw, and she meant to be the victor, even if she had to use poison.
Outsiders marveled that Mary and Katherine lived on despite the combined ill effects of confinement, isolation, recurrent sickness and constant fear for their lives. They were kept apart—allegedly because, as Henry said, Katherine might otherwise "raise a number of troops and make war as boldly as her mother Isabella had." They were for the most part kept in ignorance of one another's health and prospects, though each knew only too well the dangers the other faced. Katherine, aging now and
growing less resistant to disease, was not expected to live long even if she escaped Anne's vengeance. Mary, who had been subject to chronic illness since adolescence, faded in and out of health though her strength of will remained unconquered. Mary's worst suffering was mental, for beyond her fear of Anne she had to endure extremes of cruel hostility and tempting offers of reconciliation from a father she had never ceased to adore.
By the spring of 1535 Anne was visibly in the grip of her fears. She tried to make light of her husband's infidelities, but her laughter was strained, and she confessed herself to be very near '^ruined and lost." She felt she was under constant surveillance, and, what was worse, menaced by occult forces. According to popular prophecy a queen of England was to be burned at the stake; to deflect this fate from herself Anne tried to bring it on Katherine, telling Henry she was a traitor and rebel, more deserving of death than Fisher and More. Anne found an accommodating seer willing to swear to a miraculous vision. It had been revealed to him, he said, that as long as Katherine and Mary lived Anne could not conceive a child.21
The stratagem failed, and before too many months had passed Anne's swollen belly belied it. She had conceived again, and this time she had conceived a boy.
On January 8, 1536, Katherine finally died, still professing her love for Henry. Perhaps from callous bad taste, perhaps to brazen out a rush of disturbingly mixed feelings, Henry put on a bright suit of yellow satin and paraded ostentatiously before his courtiers as if rejoicing at the death. Anne too put on a yellow gown, though she remained in the background during the days of jousting and banqueting that followed. As eager as ever to distinguish himself in the lists, Henry ignored his middle-aged stoutness and his slowed reactions and ran course after course in the jousting; inevitably, he had an accident. Riding in full armor against an opponent, he fell to the ground, and seconds later his massive warhorse fell on top of him. For two hours he lay unconscious, while courtiers prayed and knitted their brows and planned what their first move ought to be once the king was pronounced dead.<
br />
When Norfolk informed Anne of the mishap, according to one account, she seemed indifferent to Henry's peril. A week later, though, when she miscarried her child she blamed the loss of the baby on the panic she felt at the news (and Norfolk's abrupt announcement of it). Henry's chagrin at the miscarriage turned to barely contained rage when he learned that the infant had "the appearance of a male."^^ Anne had become an intolerable source of frustration to him. Already estranged from her, he now sought to be relieved of her permanently, and to take a new wife.
Anne's fall was swift and dramatic. A royal commission was created to bring forward evidence of treason against her, and within days she and several others were imprisoned in the Tower. Anne was accused of adultery with five men—among them her own brother—and, with her lovers, of "encompassing the king's death." The identity of the five men
1
(all closely tied to the Boleyn faction at court) has led to the suspicion that the accusations were as much the result of political intrigue as of marital disharmony.^^ Yet one fact overrode all: the king needed a male heir, and it seemed certain Anne could not provide one.
After summary trials the queen's convicted lovers—young Francis Weston, Henry's former page, William Brereton, another young man who had risen from page to gentleman of the privy chamber, Anne's brother George Boleyn, Henry's "favorite courtier" Henry Norris, who had been a trusted, intimate member of the royal household for twenty years, and the musician and dancer Mark Smeaton—were executed on May 17. Only one, Smeaton, confessed himself guilty of the crime alleged against him, and that after being put to the rack and tortured with hot irons. Anne swore she was entirely innocent, and showed a pathetic resignation in the face of death.
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