The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  The king was in any case beginning to tire of Cromwell and was increasingly inclined towards the religious conservatives, Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London. The many real reforms that had been achieved by Cromwell such as introducing parish registers of births, deaths and marriages, did not make up for the government’s unpopularity. When Anne of Cleves arrived in London, the marriage having been arranged on the basis of a flattering portrait by Hans Holbein because the king was too busy to meet her, Cromwell’s career began to take a downward path. For Anne of Cleves looked nothing like her portrait, which may be seen at the Louvre in Paris. To Henry she seemed big, raw-boned and ungainly; moreover she could speak only a very few words of English. ‘A Flanders mare, I like her not,’ Henry is said to have hissed angrily at Cromwell when he first met her. Meanwhile despite the grandeur of the wedding, no alliance was forthcoming from the League of Protestant princes. Although the king could not withdraw from the marriage Cranmer swiftly produced suitable reasons as to why it was invalid, and Queen Anne of Cleves retired on a pension, presumably glad to have escaped with her head.

  The king soon yielded to the Catholic faction’s petitions, led by the ambitious and unscrupulous Duke of Norfolk, to dismiss Cromwell. Having presided over the trial of one niece Anne Boleyn, he was dangling another, Catherine Howard, before the king as a future bride. When in the summer of 1540 it was discovered that a Protestant preacher named Dr Barnes was Cromwell’s confidential agent to the German Protestant princes, it seemed good evidence that Cromwell was the agent of Protestant heretics in England. Within weeks Cromwell too had been executed, deserted by all his friends save Archbishop Cranmer, who begged the king to show clemency to a man who had been such a faithful servant. It was to no avail.

  The atmosphere in England by the 1540s was one of muted terror. Cardinal Pole would rightly ask, ‘Is England Turkey that she is governed by the sword?’ Protestant and Catholic martyrs were dragged on the same hurdles to Smithfield for burning, for if it was treason to recognize the Papal Supremacy it was also treason to deny Catholic doctrine! The court was full of the manoeuvring of the two implacably opposed religious parties, who frequently informed against one another.

  The Catholic faction were delighted when in the very month of Cromwell’s execution the king at last took as his fifth wife the lovely little Catherine Howard. All were hopeful the marriage would last–but it was not to be. In Catherine Howard’s case, for once there was good reason for the king’s suspicious mind, now as inflamed as his massive leg with its running ulcer, to doubt her. The new queen, aged only eighteen, could not help finding the young blades at court more attractive than her fifty-year-old husband, as the king observed. Less than two years after Catherine had married him, the king vanished after dinner at Hampton Court and departed for his new palace at Whitehall. He never saw the queen again. A few days later, one icy mid-November morning, men came for Catherine and arrested her at Hampton Court. There, in the so-called ‘haunted gallery’ which links the chapel with the State Apartments, a woman dressed in white is said to haunt the long corridor, crying and moaning as she walks–the ghost of Catherine Howard.

  After a period of house arrest at Syon House in Chiswick, the queen–like her cousin Anne Boleyn–was executed for treason on the grounds of adultery. During her captivity her jewels were ripped from all her splendid clothing and sent back to the outraged king. All her friends had been interrogated and she herself had secretly confessed to Archbishop Cranmer, thinking it might help her if she made a clean breast of things and pleaded youth and foolishness.

  Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife, whom he married a year later in 1543, was Catherine Parr. She was much older than his other wives and a pragmatist with a good sensible head firmly screwed on to her shoulders. She managed to keep it there by outliving the king. She was also a very good nurse, which was by far her most important quality to a king crippled by thrombosis. By the late 1540s Henry VIII had long lost the athletic prowess of his youth; the hunting and music-making were a thing of the past. Though he still managed to lead his troops to the siege of Boulogne in 1544, mostly he had to be wheeled round his palaces in a mechanical contraption, so enormously swollen had his legs become. Too unfit even to sign his own name, a rubber stamp had to be invented to do the job.

  The new queen was kind and dutiful to her stepchildren, Mary, Elizabeth and Edward. The two girls, having both been declared illegitimate by Henry, had been brought up in penniless obscurity far from court. To an unenthusiastic Henry, Catherine insisted that the nervous and religious Lady Mary and the clever Lady Elizabeth, whose mother’s head had been cut off when she was under three, should come to live with her and the king. Catherine Parr made sure that after years of neglect they were treated as befitted their rank as their father’s daughters.

  As the king’s ill-health signalled that the end of his life was approaching, members of the court began jockeying among themselves for power. Most significant were the two brothers of Jane Seymour, Edward and Thomas. As uncles of the sickly nine-year-old-heir Edward they hoped to rule the country, with the elder uncle Edward Seymour becoming lord protector. Meanwhile, however, rumours had reached the king’s suspicious ears that the Duke of Norfolk, who had now been uncle to two queens, and his son the Earl of Surrey were openly stating that their royal blood showed that on the king’s death Norfolk would be the best regent. Surrey indeed had taken to wearing the arms of Edward the Confessor. For this lèse-majesté Surrey was executed on 19 January 1547 and Norfolk would have been executed on the 28th had Henry VIII not died the day before. The king passed away holding the gentle Cranmer’s hand. It was one of the few of Henry’s relationships that had endured.

  The succession to the English throne of a minor had always tended to be a recipe for disaster. On the other hand the kingdom Edward VI’s father bequeathed to him was more unified under royal government and more closely linked to Westminster than ever before. As partly Welsh with lands and a following in Wales, it had been a relatively easy matter for Henry by the 1536 Statute of Wales finally to do away with the ancient marcher jurisdictions, and the whole country was finally organized into shires along the English model. In Ireland a Fitzgerald rising proved the perfect excuse for Henry to send in an army to reduce the country to some semblance of order. He extended the Reformation to Ireland on the same principles as he had done in England, giving Irish lords the extensive lands of the monasteries in return for their loyalty. Since Lord of Ireland had been a papal title, Henry now called himself King of Ireland.

  However, Henry’s heirs also had a great many problems on hand. The government’s way of raising money during lean times had been to clip the coinage or mix copper into the gold and silver. Edward Seymour, or the Duke of Somerset as he immediately became, who had duly become the lord protector, faced a country in revolt against a very debased coinage, for in order to counteract the devalued coinage shopkeepers put up their prices. The dissolution of the monasteries might have enhanced the fortunes and secured the loyalty of thousands of well-to-do English families, but it had also created pressing social problems. The new owners of monastic lands had none of the kindliness of the old monks, nor their sense of community. The hospitals and almshouses for the poor vanished, and rents became much higher.

  Above all, the enclosure system took even more ferocious root. Land which previously had been allowed for the use of the community was hedged round for the new owners’ private use. At the same time the high price of wool meant unemployment for thousands as arable farming was abandoned in favour of sheep farming. Skilled men found themselves without homes, as that most profitable of animals, the sheep, required only one shepherd for a large flock. As early as 1516, with the publication of Utopia, Sir Thomas More had warned of sheep eating men. Now it was a situation raging out of control and creating landless yeomen who wandered from parish to parish desperate for work.

  In contrast to the dead king, Somerset was a convinced
radical Protestant–as was the severe young king himself. Henry VIII’s Reformation had been carried out in a very gingerly fashion by a monarch conscious of the tightrope he was walking between Catholic powers abroad and natural conservatism at home. The new rulers had none of the old king’s instincts.

  Edward VI (1547–1553)

  Despite his dislike of extreme Protestants, Henry VIII had so respected their learning that he had left the upbringing of his precious son and heir in the hands of distinguished Protestant divines such as Roger Ascham. The result was a solemn little boy who had inherited a good deal of his father’s willpower and who was dedicated to taking the new religion many steps past where his father had intended it to end. One of Edward VI’s favourite preachers was the former Bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer, the friend of Protestant martyrs under Henry VIII, whom Henry had deprived of his see for holding views that were too radical. Under the influence of Protector Somerset and the boy-king, the court became a quieter, more solemn place than it had been under the late king. Instead of the gaudy colours and slashed velvet doublets of Henry VIII’s reign, most Protestant men and women dressed in the dark colours which would soon be identified with the Puritans.

  Court life was dominated by the struggle between the protector himself and members of the royal Council to control the ferociously intellectual but sickly young king. But it was also a struggle between the protector and his brother Thomas Seymour. The sheer force of Thomas Seymour’s magnetic personality had thrust him to the heart of the royal establishment. Six months into the new reign Seymour swept the late king’s widow Catherine Parr off her feet and married her, living much of the time at Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire. Seymour, who was by now an admiral, thus instantly had control over a possible heiress to the throne, the Lady Elizabeth, who had continued to live with her stepmother after her father’s death.

  Thomas Seymour was a rumbustious adventurer whose swashbuckling manner and over-familiar treatment of the young Elizabeth led to rumours that he even had plans to marry her himself and thereby seize the throne. His reputation was not good. He was said to have made money by clipping the coinage and even to have benefited from piracy by abusing his position as an admiral. Wild stories proliferated about him. Servants claimed to have seen him romping in Elizabeth’s bed in the early morning when both were wearing only nightshirts. He was said to have cut one of her dresses off her on the grounds that black did not suit her, and to have been seen kissing her. When Catherine Parr died in childbirth in 1548, there were even rumours that he had deliberately poisoned her in order to marry Elizabeth.

  In fact Seymour had bigger fish to fry: he hoped to persuade his nephew the king to make him protector instead of his elder brother. Whatever his intentions, he began to muster men for a rebellion. When Somerset got wind of it Seymour was executed. On hearing of his execution the thirteen-year-old Elizabeth remarked coolly to her governess Kate Ashley, ‘This day died a man with much wit and very little judgement.’

  But Somerset’s position was not shored up by the execution of his brother. Trouble was brewing, stirred up by the wholesale changes of the previous ten years. Not only was the enclosure system beginning to bite, but under Edward the Church of England moved dramatically away from its old rituals, which Henry VIII had been keen to preserve for the sake of continuity. It took on a severely logical new shape which satisfied purist intellectuals, but took no account of popular sentiment.

  Cromwell had begun the process of stripping shrines and churches, mainly to benefit the Treasury. But the Edwardian government took the spoliation of churches to extremes–its aim not so much pecuniary as to rid the Church of the superstition which polluted Roman Catholicism. Thus it was that government agents rushed into churches and whitewashed the stained-glass windows depicting saints and miracles–many old English churches still bear traces of this whitewash. They also dragged out elaborate altars, rood screens and statues and attacked them with hammers. This process, known as iconoclasm, was made lawful by an act against books and images. Longstanding ceremonies and holidays which were an enjoyable part of the village year, such as Candlemas on 2 February, being smeared with ashes on Ash Wednesday, and carrying palms in memory of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, were abolished by law as papal inventions. And once again priests were allowed to marry.

  In 1549 the enforced use of the first new prayer book (commissioned by Henry VIII and in preparation for several years under Cranmer) triggered uprisings all over the south-west and in the eastern counties of England. Though the two protests were quite distinct–the south-west calling for the restoration of the Mass in Latin and the area round Norwich under Jack Ket for the pulling down of the enclosures–they both signalled the great unpopularity of the government. Managing them proved to be the downfall of Protector Somerset. He was a kindly man and had too much sympathy with Ket’s grievances to suppress his rebellion with the severity the rest of the King’s Council felt it merited.

  While Somerset hesitated, his rivals in the Council struck. John Dudley, son of Henry VII’s executed minister, disposed of the eastern counties rebellion with great despatch, hanging Jack Ket from the parapet of Norwich Castle while his followers dangled from what they had called the Oak of Reformation. A formidable soldier, Dudley was the coming man. He had distinguished himself at the recent Battle of Pinkie, Somerset’s attempt to aid the new Protestant Reformation in Scotland and at the same time to marry Edward VI to the infant heiress, Mary of Scotland. But if Dudley had emerged as the hero of the hour, Somerset had been humiliated. For the Scots did not like what was complained of as a ‘rough wooing’, and Mary was smuggled over to France to marry the dauphin instead.

  Somerset not only looked foolish, he was also visibly corrupt. Although all of the Council enjoyed the proceeds from a further suppression of the chantries, the protector’s share was large enough to begin building the first Italianate mansion in England, Somerset House in the Strand, which until recently was the national repository of our records of births, deaths and marriages. But it was an excuse for dismissing the protector. That same year, Somerset was ousted from the Council, and Dudley, or the Duke of Northumberland as he became, took control.

  Northumberland, even more than Somerset, was the champion of the radical wing of the Church. England became a haven for the more advanced Protestant divines like Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr fleeing from the wrath of the Emperor Charles V, whose armies seemed to be on the point of suppressing the German Reformation altogether. Despite the popular reaction to the first prayer book, the English Church took an even sharper turn away from Henrician Catholicism by publishing the second prayer book in 1552 and the Forty-Two Articles of Faith a year later. In fact, for all the outrage it had caused, the first prayer book was as Catholic as its progenitor Henry VIII. But the second, though also written by Cranmer, showed just how fast Protestant intellectual thought was moving in England. The Church had swung towards the Zwinglian idea of Communion being a ceremony of commemoration rather than a Real Presence, and many important Protestants of a strongly radical tendency were appointed to key bishoprics: Nicholas Ridley, who was a convinced Zwinglian, became Bishop of London and John Hooper became Bishop of Gloucester and soon attracted attention by refusing to wear the vestments of a bishop because the ancient Church would not have insisted on them.

  In July 1553 Northumberland was alarmed to see that the sixteen-year-old king’s always fragile health was going downhill rapidly. He would have to act fast if he wished to preserve his power. By Henry VIII’s will and by parliamentary statute the succession had been fixed on Catherine of Aragon’s daughter Princess Mary and then on Princess Elizabeth. Yet if Edward was succeeded by Princess Mary, who was well known for having the Catholic Mass celebrated in her own apartments, she would endanger the whole English Protestant Reformation. Instead, with the backing of the Archbishop of Canterbury Cranmer and the Bishop of London Nicholas Ridley, Northumberland persuaded Edward that the throne should go to
the strenuously Protestant Lady Jane Grey, who as the eldest granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary had the next claim to the throne. Princess Elizabeth had no Catholic leanings either, but she lacked the unique qualification that Lady Jane possessed, as far as Northumberland was concerned: Lady Jane was married to his son.

  In his own hand, Edward VI sketched out a new will bypassing Mary and Elizabeth. The crown was to go to Lady Jane Grey. Two days later, on the evening of 7 July, the pale young king’s consumptive lungs gave out. The palace guard was doubled to make sure the news did not leak out before Northumberland could arrest Princess Mary. But somehow a messenger galloped from London to warn Mary at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire that her brother was dead and she must flee. Before the sun rose the thirty-seven-year-old Mary, with a few retainers, had reached Kenninghall in Norfolk.

  In London a furious Northumberland proclaimed the gentle Lady Jane Grey queen. But her reception was less than rapturous, and she was anyway unwilling to be Northumberland’s puppet. After a reign of only ten days, while men swarmed to Princess Mary’s army in the eastern counties, Mary was welcomed by the rest of the Council into London. She entered the city without resistance on 3 August, riding side by side with Princess Elizabeth, and after imprisoning Lady Jane and Northumberland, became queen.

  Mary I (1553–1558)

  Mary ruled for five short years before she succumbed to stomach cancer. Though dumpy and plain, the new queen combined the steely Tudor willpower with a profound Catholicism inherited from her Spanish mother. Despite all the pressures brought to bear by her father and brother, she had refused to abandon her faith, believing that it was her mission to return England to her ancient religion. In this she was actively abetted by the Spanish ambassador, who became one of her most important advisers. Directly she became queen all the Protestant bishops, Hooper, Ridley and Cranmer, were replaced by the ‘Catholic’ bishops of Henry VIII’s reign who had meanwhile been languishing in prison.