by G. J. Meyer
“Would indeed that it might be so, so that dying we might live as living we die,” Houghton replied. “But they will not do to us so great a kindness, nor to themselves so great an injury. Many of you are of noble blood, and what I think they will do is this: me and the elder brethren they will kill, and they will dismiss you that are young into a world which is not for you. If therefore it will depend on me alone—if my oath will suffice for the house—I will throw myself for your sakes on the mercy of God. I will make myself anathema, and to preserve you from these dangers I will consent to the king’s will. If, however, they have determined otherwise—if they choose to have the consent of us all—the will of God be done. If one death will not suffice, we will all die.”
From Houghton’s perspective, that is, a forced return to the outside world was more to be dreaded than death. He was prepared either to take an oath he did not believe or to sacrifice his life if in either way he could save his brothers, but he did not expect any such solution to prove possible. According to the sole surviving account of what was happening inside the London Charterhouse at this time, the other monks agreed that escape was improbable and began to prepare themselves for death. There was one exception: a monk who wrote to Cromwell to acknowledge the royal supremacy and beg release from his vows, complaining that “the religion is so hard, what with fasting and with the great watch, that there is not six whole monks within this cloister but that they have one infirmity or other.” Such eager surrenders were rare. It is surely ironic, considering the accusations of laxity that in due course would be leveled against all the orders, that from the beginning of Cromwell’s campaign the harshest punishments were meted out to those houses where the strictest rules were most faithfully observed. And that the only complaint known to have been made against Houghton by one of his own monks was that discipline was too strict under his leadership.
While waiting for the next display of kingly power, Houghton was visited by two other Carthusian priors, Robert Laurence of Beauvale and Augustine Webster of Axholme. No doubt they too were expecting the worst, and it would have been natural for them to look for direction not only to London but specifically to Houghton, who since 1532 had been “visitor” of the order’s English province and therefore its senior member. For reasons unknown (possibly they thought that by taking the initiative they could demonstrate their wish to be cooperative, or perhaps Laurence and Webster had taken up Houghton’s idea of trying to sacrifice himself for the sake of the community) the three decided not to await the return of the king’s commissioners but to go and see Cromwell. There was, however, no meeting: as soon as he learned of their arrival, Cromwell had his visitors taken to the Tower and locked up. In the days that followed, they refused to take the oath and were joined in their confinement by a fourth prisoner, Richard Reynolds, a monk of Syon, the Bridgettine order’s only English establishment. Reynolds was a noted humanist scholar, said to be the only English monk conversant in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He had helped to make Syon one of England’s leading centers of Renaissance learning, and his order like the Carthusians and Friars Observant was noted not only for its high standards but for its long advocacy of church reform. Thus Syon, like the London Charterhouse, had been singled out by Cromwell for special attention, and that attention had focused on Reynolds because of his renown. Under questioning he had said that he “would spend his blood for the king” but could not deny that the pope was head of the church.
On April 28 the four priests were indicted for refusing the supremacy oath. They pleaded not guilty at the start of their trial, which did not go smoothly for the authorities. The jury declared itself unable to find the defendants guilty because, following as they did the dictates of their consciences and not seeking to persuade anyone to agree with them, they could not have been acting maliciously—“maliciously” being the word that Cromwell had had to insert into the Treason Act to get Parliament to approve it. The judges then instructed the jurymen that none of this mattered: that to refuse the oath was, ipso facto, to act maliciously. Even after this the jury continued to balk, so that finally Cromwell had to make an appearance and batter the members into submission with threats. On May 4 the four convicted men—joined now by a fifth, a parish priest named John Hale who was a friend and neighbor of Reynolds’s—were tied to hurdles (flat rectangular forms made of wood and similar to sections of fence) and dragged from the Tower to Tyburn Hill, the place of execution for traitors. There they were given a final offer of pardon in return for swearing the oath, and all refused.
Remarkably, all were dressed in clerical garb; until now it would have been unthinkable to execute a priest in the habit of his vocation—or for that matter, to execute a priest without first degrading him from his clerical status. Even more remarkably, among those in attendance were Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the king’s illegitimate son; Queen Anne’s father Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, and his son, George Lord Rochford; the mighty Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk; and in fact virtually the entire royal court including the council. This must have happened at the king’s instructions, and its purpose was almost certainly to discourage expressions of discontent from the large crowd that an occasion of this kind was sure to attract. It is possible that the king himself was present, though in disguise: five horsemen whose faces were covered with visors arrived on the scene, and when one of these visors fell open it revealed the face of Norfolk’s brother, an intimate of King Henry’s. As the five approached the killing ground, the members of the court deferentially stood aside.
Houghton died first, and in keeping with custom he was allowed to speak before doing so. “I call almighty God to witness, and all good people, and I beseech you all here present to bear witness for me in the day of judgment, that being here to die, I declare that it is from no obstinate rebellious spirit that I do not obey the king, but because I fear to offend the majesty of God. Our holy mother the church has decreed otherwise than the king and the Parliament have decreed, and therefore rather than disobey the church I am ready to suffer. Pray for me and have mercy on my brethren, of whom I have been the unworthy prior.” It was later reported that the king was angry with Norfolk, Wiltshire, and the other nobles because none of them had offered any response. But as he probably knew—he certainly knew if he was present—the mood of the crowd had been hostile not to the men being executed but to their being killed. It might have been dangerous to try to belittle Houghton in the moment before his death.
Perhaps because so many distinguished guests were on hand to be edified and impressed, the usual work of butchery—an interrupted hanging, followed by emasculation, evisceration, and the rubbing of a still-beating heart in the victim’s face—was carried out with exceptional energy that day. Reynolds was last to die, offering encouragement to the others as they climbed the scaffold, and before presenting himself for execution he asked the crowd to pray for the king. He like the others was quartered, his head and the sections of his body put on display around London. One of Houghton’s arms was nailed above the entry to his monastery, a warning to everyone associated with the place. In the weeks that followed, four more monks and lay brothers of the London Charterhouse would die at Tyburn, among them the procurator Humphrey Middlemore and a man named Sebastian Newdigate who before entering religious life had been a member of the royal court. In the subsequent months fifteen would be starved to death in prison; iron collars around their necks, their feet in shackles, they were chained to upright posts in such a way as to be unable either to sit or lie down and left to slowly die. A new prior, one friendly to the king’s cause, was introduced by Cromwell to replace Houghton. With armed force he imposed a new regime that made it impossible for the monks to follow their rule and transformed their monastery into a prison. They were allowed to do almost nothing except listen to sermons delivered by preachers sent by Cromwell and wait for their fate to be decided.
It had been arranged, on the morning of Houghton’s execution, that Thomas More would be visited in th
e Tower by his daughter Margaret, who had long been asking him to accept the oath of supremacy and so save his life. From a window, and obviously not by coincidence, the two were able to observe the condemned priests as they were taken off to be killed. It was all part of the continuing effort to use every tool at the Crown’s disposal—terror, persuasion, the promise of a swift return to royal favor—to induce More and John Fisher to submit. This latest gambit worked no better than the others. It became an occasion for More, not to lose his resolve, but to offer comfort to the young woman to whom, of all his large family and circle of friends, he was closest. “Lo, dost thou not see, Meg, that these blessed fathers be now as cheerfully going to their deaths as bridegrooms to their marriage?” he asked.
Wherefore thereby mayst thou see, mine own good daughter, what a great difference there is between such as have in effect spent all their days in a strait, hard, penitential, and painful life religiously, and such as have in the world, like worldly wretches, as thy poor father hath done, consumed all their time in pleasure and ease licentiously. For God, continuing their long-continued life in most sore and grievous penance, will no longer suffer them to remain here in this vale of misery and iniquity, but speedily hence taketh them to the fruition of his everlasting deity. Whereas thy silly father, Meg, that like a most wicked wretch, hath passed forth the whole course of his miserable life most sinfully, God thinking him not worthy so soon to come to that eternal felicity, leaveth him here yet still in the world, further to be plunged and turmoiled with misery.
He wanted his daughter to see his own death, which pretty clearly was not far off, as a deliverance, even a cause for celebration.
It is fair to say that the king did not want More’s death and did not want Fisher’s. What he wanted was their submission, their acknowledgment before the whole Christian world that from the beginning of his conflict with Rome he had been right and the two of them had been wrong. But if he could not have that he would take their lives instead, as yet another warning to anyone who had not paid sufficient attention to the fate of the Observant Franciscans and the Charterhouse priors. And by May 1535 his patience was wearing thin. A long procession of eminent churchmen had been sent to reason with his two most famous prisoners—at least half a dozen bishops are known to have called on Fisher—but all their arguments and commentaries upon ancient texts had accomplished nothing. The conditions of More’s and Fisher’s confinement, as well as the state in which More’s household had to live, had been made progressively worse until by winter the aged Fisher was literally begging for help, declaring that he had neither enough clothes nor sufficient food to keep himself alive. But harshness, too, had produced no results. The prisoners continued to refuse to submit, but continued also not to do or say anything that would allow the Crown to condemn them to death. Under repeated questioning—they were always interrogated separately, just as they were kept apart in the Tower—they refused to express any opinion of the Act of Supremacy. Fisher was straightforward in his refusal: not even the Act itself, he said again and again, required any man to reveal his innermost thoughts. More was more careful if no less consistent. Because he had been attainted, he said, he no longer enjoyed the protection of the law and so had no reason to concern himself with it. “Now I have in good faith discharged my mind of all such matters,” he said, “and neither will dispute kings’ titles nor popes’.” It was a sterile, agonizing standoff for everyone involved.
The new pope, Paul III, unwittingly broke the deadlock with an announcement that, when it reached England on May 20, astounded everyone and pleased no one: John Fisher had been named to the College of Cardinals, becoming the first Englishman since Wolsey to be so honored. Paul was a reformer, among the first pontiffs to recognize that the excesses of the Renaissance were not merely wrong but intolerable. In putting together a list of men to be made cardinals he had selected candidates known for scholarship, for exemplary personal conduct, and for upholding high standards in all areas of ecclesiastical life. Fisher was an obvious choice in every respect, a charismatic figure known across Europe for his theological writings and life of simple virtue. The pope is said to have believed that King Henry would be pleased to see the mentor of his youth, a man he himself had described as one of the ornaments of England, honored with a cardinal’s red hat. If so, he was incredibly ill informed. It seems more plausible that he hoped by singling Fisher out to give him some measure of protection against the royal wrath, but even here any such thoughts would have been badly mistaken.
Henry interpreted the news from Rome as an intentional provocation. He took the announcement as an insult to his own man Thomas Cranmer, who as England’s primate would, under ordinary circumstances, have been made a cardinal long before any mere bishop of Rochester. He warned that the pope could send Fisher a hat, “but I will take care that he have never a head to wear it on.” Fisher, for his part, was reported to have told the man who brought him news of his appointment that if the red hat were lying at his feet “he would not stoop to pick it up, so little did he set by it.” There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of those words, or that Fisher could have uttered them. He was the antithesis of Thomas Wolsey, never in the course of his long life showing the slightest interest in personal advancement or political power. Nor is it possible to doubt that the king meant what he said. The pope’s initiative settled the fates of Fisher and More alike.
Though further interrogations failed to draw anything new out of Fisher, in June, enfeebled by two years of imprisonment under conditions that almost seemed calculated to kill, he was put on trial for treason. His conviction was a foregone conclusion, the judges and jury having been handpicked by Cromwell and the king, but for purposes of propaganda it was important to make the proceedings seem as legitimate as possible. The Crown’s best weapon was its key witness, the lawyer Richard Rich. Now in his late thirties, Rich had risen to become solicitor-general by attaching himself to Thomas Audley, himself such an unfailingly dependable servant of the Crown that Henry had made him first speaker of the House of Commons and then, after More’s resignation, chancellor. Rich’s testimony was, after all the long months during which the Crown had repeatedly tried and failed to induce Fisher to express himself on the supremacy, nothing less than a bombshell. He told the court that when the king sent him to meet with Fisher, the bishop told him that he “believed in his conscience and by his learning knew that the king neither was nor by any right could be supreme head in earth of the church of England.”
What was perhaps even more surprising, Fisher did not challenge the truthfulness of Rich’s testimony. He erupted with the furious indignation that had been characteristic of him for years now, ever since the king had begun claiming that his marriage to Queen Catherine was not valid, but his anger here was aimed less at what Rich was saying than at his daring to say it in court. Rich, it turned out, had in his visit to the Tower told Fisher that he had been instructed by the king to ask for the bishop’s opinion of the Supremacy Act, and to promise that nothing he said would be used against him in court or otherwise. He had added, Fisher told the judges, that the king sincerely wanted to know what he thought “for the great affiance [trust or confidence] he had in me, more than in any other.” There had followed—again according to what Fisher told the court—an explicit suggestion that Henry, after taking Fisher’s position into account, “was very like to retract much of his former doings and make recompense for the same, in case I should so advise him.” To all this Rich had added his own promise not to repeat anything Fisher told him to anyone except the king. Fisher had responded as any honest, trusting, and even moderately courageous subject would have under such circumstances. For the first time since coming under suspicion, at the king’s request and for the king’s sake, he unburdened himself. In doing so he committed treason.
It is impossible to know anything about the characters of the two men involved in this exchange—or for that matter, of Henry VIII—and doubt Fisher’s account. This is all the more
true because even Rich himself, who was building a phenomenally successful career on a willingness to do and say whatever was likely to be most pleasing to those more powerful than himself, never challenged what Fisher had said. And because Fisher, who to his dying day never lost a profound if exasperated respect for Henry as king and an equally deep affection for him personally, would certainly have responded to even an indirect appeal from him for guidance. He may have had little opportunity to get to know Richard Rich or to learn what kind of man he was. He would have been reluctant to think any man capable of making the kinds of pledges that Rich made not only on his own behalf but on the king’s and then breaking his word in the most destructive way imaginable.
“What a monstrous matter is this!” Fisher cried.
To lay now to my charge as treason the thing which I spake not until besides this man’s oath, I had as full and sure a promise from the king, by this his trusty and sure messenger, as the king could make me by word of mouth, that I should never be impeached nor hurt by mine answer that I should send unto him by this his messenger, which I would never have spoken, had it not been in trust of my prince’s promise, and of my true and loving heart towards him, my natural liege lord, in satisfying him with declaration of mine opinion and conscience in this matter, as he earnestly required me by this messenger to signify plainly unto him.
Rich, accused not only of disgracing himself but of suggesting disgraceful behavior on the part of the king, might well have responded by calling Fisher a liar. Instead he accepted Fisher’s version of what had transpired between them, probably in order to keep the Crown’s case intact. Rich and Fisher were together in testifying that the bishop had—regardless of his reasons, whether or not he had been deceived—denied the supremacy. That was enough; it gave the king’s judges all they needed. Tacitly accepting that Henry had, in effect, promised Fisher immunity, they set aside Rich’s assurances to the bishop as making no difference. Every other argument that Fisher offered in his defense was likewise swept aside. Inevitably (the jurors understood that they had no choice if they valued their own liberty and livelihoods) he was convicted, sentenced to death, and returned to the Tower. Perhaps because of his wretched physical condition, perhaps because the king still felt some of his old affection, Fisher was told that he would merely be beheaded, not subjected to the horrors that had been visited upon the Carthusians.