by G. J. Meyer
Henry had other things to concern himself with than a small community of recalcitrant monks and their supporters in a distant corner of the kingdom. For many months, through his court chaplain, he had been badgering his young cousin Reginald Pole to provide a written statement of his position on the annulment of his first marriage and, especially, the supremacy. Pole was still on the continent, buried in the studies to which he had been allowed to return after infuriating the king and alarming his own family with his refusal to take Henry’s side. During his absence the king had grown more confident than ever that no intelligent, informed, and open-minded person could possibly fail to see the irrefutability of his claims, and he had not stopped thinking of young Pole. By 1537, apparently, he was sure that Pole’s years of reading and reflection must have brought him around. He sent him books refuting the idea of papal primacy (such works were being written in great numbers by clergymen eager to win the attention of the king), learned that he had begun researching and writing a book of his own on the question, and was eager to see the result. Winning over Pole would be a victory, a vindication, of international consequence.
But the fruit of Pole’s labors, a work that he titled De Unitate Ecclesiastica, turned out to be the opposite of what Henry expected. Assuming the role of Old Testament prophet, casting the king as a tyrant in desperate need of being saved from the consequences of his own errors, Pole expressed himself recklessly, in terms that could hardly have been better chosen to offend a man of Henry’s immense pride. After comparing Henry not only to Richard III—the archfiend in the Tudor version of English history—but to the emperor Nero as well, Pole charged that he “did not merely kill, but tore to pieces all the true defenders of the old religion in a more inhuman fashion than the Turk.” Henry’s actions, he said, made a mockery of his papal title Defender of the Faith, and without quite saying so explicitly he suggested in unmistakable terms that Henry’s actions were so repellent to his own subjects as to make a revolt likely if not inevitable. Compared with this invective, Pole’s scholarly denial that any secular ruler could claim to be supreme head of the church even within his own realm was familiar almost to the point of being merely tiresome. If at any point there had existed a real possibility that Henry might opt to settle his differences with Rome, Pole’s little work (which he had not had printed, claiming that it was intended for the king’s eyes only) ended that possibility absolutely. Pole’s mother and brothers, when they learned of what he had done this time, denounced his actions as “folly.” Though Henry took no action against them, he lashed out in other directions.
No longer satisfied merely to make the life of his daughter Mary a hell of humiliation and deprivation, he sent representatives to her place of confinement with a demand that she do what her late mother had taught her to regard as unthinkable: take the oath of supremacy and, the crowning blow, acknowledge that she herself was illegitimate. Mary refused, was threatened, and refused again. The screws were tightened further. The woman who was her closest friend, almost the last companion she was still permitted, was taken away to the Tower. Two men suspected of being sympathetic to her were purged from the Privy Council, and Cromwell himself began to fear that he was going to suffer for efforts he had made earlier to reconcile father and daughter. He wrote to Mary, calling her “an obstinate and obdurate woman, deserving the reward of malice in the extremity of mischief.” He provided her with a draft letter that he suggested she transcribe in her own hand and send to her father; it recognized Henry as supreme head, repudiated the pope, and described her parents’ marriage as “incestuous and unlawful.” Rumors reached Mary of the king’s intention—what better way to increase the pressure on a daughter with little fear for herself?—to move not only against her but against everyone regarded as friendly to her. Finally even the one man of any importance who had remained unflinchingly loyal to her and her mother, her cousin Charles’s ambassador Eustace Chapuys, urged her to submit. And so she copied out Cromwell’s draft word for word, signed it, and sent it to her father. In doing so she abjectly denied her own deepest beliefs, but she was not utterly crushed: later, when ordered to give up the names of those persons who had encouraged her to resist the king’s demands, she said she would die before doing any such thing. Still later, sufficiently rehabilitated to be permitted to dine in her father’s company, she heard him jokingly rebuke members of his council because “some of you were desirous that I should put this jewel to death.” This revelation of just how close she had been to losing her life caused her to faint.
When Lord Thomas Howard, half-brother of the Duke of Norfolk, neglected to obtain royal permission before contracting to marry Lady Margaret Douglas, the king’s sister Margaret’s daughter by her second husband, Henry chose to interpret this, absurdly, as an attempt on Howard’s part to make himself king of England. Howard was attainted for treason, and along with his bride-that-might-have-been he was imprisoned in the Tower, where he would remain until his death. (Lady Margaret survived to become the mother-in-law of Mary, Queen of Scots, and so paternal grandmother of England’s King James I. Unlike Henry—who, one suspects, would be deeply chagrined if he knew—she is therefore an ancestor of all the subsequent kings and queens of England down to the present day.)
Henry used his expanding powers not only to blight lives but to bend England’s unwritten constitution into bizarre shapes. A new Act of Succession, pushed through Parliament without difficulty, voided the statute that had declared Anne Boleyn to be the king’s only wife and their descendants to be the only legitimate heirs to the throne. Now Jane Seymour was the only wife, her (as yet unborn) children by Henry the sole line of succession. In a truly extraordinary step, one without precedent in law or tradition, Parliament bestowed upon the king the power, if he left no legitimate children, to name as his heir and successor “such person or persons in possession and remainder as shall please your Highness.” At the same time the definition of treason was again broadened to make it easier to ensnare anyone bold or mad enough to follow the examples of Fisher and More. Now it became a capital crime not only to reject the new Succession Act but to remain silent when asked for an opinion. The act also provided—whoever thought this up must have smiled at his own ingenuity—that anyone who attempted to repeal it would be guilty of high treason by virtue of having done so.
The 1530s being a period of such astonishing religious ferment, with Protestantism taking firm root on the continent and splintering into sects virtually all of which found adherents in England, it was inevitable that Henry would set about to impose his will in the realm of dogma and doctrine. His confidence in himself as England’s one source of truth, and his determination to cast aside the old connection to Rome, were accompanied by an equally strong determination to make all his subjects not only believe but actively profess exactly what he believed. This presented no small number of challenges. Being essentially conservative in his approach to questions of dogma, Henry was repelled by such defining Protestant beliefs as justification by faith alone (a rejection of the notion that individuals could improve their chances of salvation through prayer and good works). Likewise he was infuriated by the reformers’ rejection of purgatory and transubstantiation (the belief that, in the mass, the bread and wine of the Eucharist become the flesh and blood of Jesus). But many of the people who at various times were closest and most important to him—Cranmer and the Boleyns among others—gradually came to embrace the very ideas that Henry himself most abhorred. From the time of his break with the papacy until the end of his life, Henry had to walk an often fuzzy and crooked line between Roman Catholicism and an evolving evangelical Protestantism. In doing so he had to remain mindful that there were politically powerful forces on both sides of that line. On the whole he was skillful at playing the factions off against one another, balancing conservative (but not necessarily Roman) Catholic interests against the evangelicals, allowing the two sides to neutralize one another to his advantage. But in the strictly religious dimension, in his
efforts to explain what he wanted his people to believe and get them to believe it, he was not only less successful but ultimately a nearly complete failure. His problems in this regard began in the summer of 1536 with the issuance of the so-called Ten Articles, officially the work of convocation but really an expression of Henry’s thinking at the time, the first in what would become his increasingly confusing efforts to tell England what to believe and how to worship. The Articles were wordy and ambiguous, and at points they were nearly self-contradictory in dealing with the issues that most sharply separated Catholic doctrine from the various Protestant and evangelical subgroups. Even today scholars disagree as to whether and to what extent they show Henry to have been holding to a firmly conservative line or leaning in a radical direction.
About one thing there can be no uncertainty. Henry wanted everyone in his kingdom to agree on religion, and he expected agreement on his terms. This is unmistakable in the preface to the Ten Articles, which states that it is the king’s responsibility to assure “that unity and concord in opinion, namely in such things as doth concern our religion, may increase and go forthward, and all occasion of dissent and discord touching the same be repressed and utterly extinguished.” Shortly after the Articles were published, Cromwell issued a set of injunctions ordering the clergy to preach and promote them in their Sunday sermons. At the same time, however, he forbade the churchmen to say anything about such inflammatory subjects as images, miracles, and relics—popular aspects of the old religion that the evangelicals despised as superstitious. No doubt this enforced silence was partly a reflection of Cromwell’s (and the king’s) reluctance to stir up unnecessary trouble. But it may have been rooted also in uncertainty on Henry’s part about what he himself currently believed. He was determined to have uniformity, but he was not in every case sure what uniformity should entail. In shattering the consensus on which the old religion had been based, he had let a whole flock of doctrinal genies out of the bottle. To expect all of them to reassemble in a new bottle of his choosing was to expect a great deal, all the more so as Henry remained unclear about what he wanted the shape of that bottle to be.
Where Henry knew what he wanted, however, he had little difficulty translating his wishes into civil law and church doctrine. His all-but-godlike status under the new dispensation was captured vividly on the title page of a new translation of the Bible. The woodcut drawing that the court artist Hans Holbein created for this page under Cromwell’s direction has as its dominant figure not God the Father or Jesus Christ, not the prophets of the Old Testament or the apostles of the New, but Henry VIII. He is shown seated center stage on his throne, the sword of justice clutched firmly in his right hand, passing the Sacred Scriptures to a cluster of bishops kneeling not before their creator but at the feet of their king. The dedication offered to that king by the new Bible’s translator—“He only under God is the Chief Head of all the congregation and church”—is so modest by comparison with the illustration that one wonders if Henry found it disappointing.
But the real world had not been abolished. It lurked in the background mainly, but occasionally it intruded into the world of Henry’s making with a reminder that the king was not God and could not bend everything to his will. In July his sixteen-year-old son Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the possible successor on whom he had doted and lavished honors and riches, died of tuberculosis. And the months were passing without any sign that Queen Jane was with child.
And then the kingdom itself, to all appearances so submissive, so worshipful of its great ruler, suddenly exploded.
Background
THEY WERE WHAT THEY ATE
SIXTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE WAS A WORLD IN WHICH conspicuous consumption really mattered. It wasn’t just that wealth meant power—has there ever been a society in which that wasn’t true?—but that wealth had to be seen to be believed. Emperors and kings, nobles and bishops, landowners and merchants all understood that they could never be more important than they were able to appear to be. Appearance was reality. Only a man rich enough to look rich could expect to be taken seriously in the great marketplace of patronage and influence.
Hence all the emphasis, in England as elsewhere, on wearing extravagantly expensive clothes, and living in extravagantly grand houses, and trying to win friends by giving extravagantly costly gifts.
And on eating—more important, on serving—extravagant quantities of extravagantly expensive food. In dining as in all things, it was an age of excess for everyone who could afford it.
The roots of all this went back to early feudal times, if not further. When society was utterly dominated by the warlords, a man’s importance was a function of the amount of land he controlled and the number of fighting men his land could support. To be of the highest importance, one needed a large following of lesser nobles, knights, and soldiers, a great hall in which these subordinates could be sheltered, and food and drink for all of them. If the Norman kings and barons fed their liegemen with deer and wild boars that they themselves had killed in their own hunting parks, that simply added to the aura of power that stayed with them everywhere they went.
None of this changed under what historians call the “bastard feudalism” of later centuries, when the old sacred oaths of loyalty to an overlord came to matter less than how much cash a man could raise and how big a following he could buy. Leaders were still expected to maintain and feed extensive households, and to receive and feed steady streams of guests, and to do so in a style that made a statement. Those lesser men who aspired to rise, to establish themselves as leaders, naturally tried to do the same. If the amounts of cash required could be painfully, even dangerously high (they inevitably were, food being much more expensive relative to income than it is today), that had to be accepted as part of the cost of doing business.
The most conspicuous consumers of all were the kings. Their responsibilities made an extensive administrative apparatus necessary, so their courts had to be larger than those of even the greatest nobles. They also had to surpass even their mightiest subjects in grandeur; anything less would have compromised their dignity and raised questions about the reality of royal power. Even Henry VII, that supposed miser, expended huge sums to impress England and the world with the splendor in which he lived. Following the French example to which he had been exposed during his years in exile, he established a personal bodyguard of uniformed “gentlemen pensioners” and put his pages, grooms, and other staff in green and white livery. His court became the setting of elaborate rituals, processions, and ceremonies, with much bowing, scraping, and genuflecting whenever royalty appeared. Hospitality remained, as it had been for the Plantagenets, a central element in Tudor ostentation: as many as seven hundred people would dine simultaneously in Henry VII’s great hall (the royal family sitting apart on a raised gallery), and on the most special occasions as many as sixty different dishes might be served.
In the next generation the young Henry VIII’s hunger for grandeur and indifference to cost raised court and kitchen to levels previously unimagined. Most of the royal household was managed by a lord steward whose annual budget was, at least in peacetime, the largest in the kingdom. His 225 subordinates (virtually all of them men, incidentally; the Tudor “serving wench” is a mythical figure) staffed not only enormous kitchens but such satellite operations as the bakehouse, pantry, saucery, spicery, wafery, confectionery, scullery, boiling house, and scalding house. The sheer numbers of people being fed made all this necessary; the record survives of a single day when, though the royal household was smaller than usual because temporarily in Calais rather than in England, it consumed six oxen, eight calves, forty sheep, a dozen pigs, 132 chickens, seven swans, twenty storks, thirty-four pheasants, one hundred ninety-two partridges and an equal number of cocks, and many other things. Waste and pilferage were inevitable in an operation of such enormous dimensions and occurred on a scale commensurate with the quantities being prepared. Effective financial management was somewhere between difficult and i
mpossible, and as Henry added more and more embellishments—eventually he employed sixty court musicians, compared with five in the reign of his grandfather Edward IV—the household sometimes teetered on the brink of being completely out of control.
At court as elsewhere, what one ate was largely a function of one’s position in the social pyramid. As the list of things cooked one day in Calais indicates, courtiers like other people of wealth and prominence subsisted to an extraordinary extent on meat and poultry, which may have made up as much as eighty percent of the elite diet. The harvest (and eating) season for fruit and vegetables was short in England, it was difficult to import most such produce, and in any case ancient medical authorities including Galen had pronounced it unhealthful. People of means could afford to keep and butcher livestock throughout the winter and thus had year-round access to fresh meat. Where preservation was necessary it was accomplished through drying, smoking, or immersion in granular salt or brine. Salt was expensive, however, and so was used only with varieties of fish and meat that had demonstrated a capacity for surviving the preservation process in a reasonably appetizing state and were therefore regarded as “worth their salt.” Cod from the abundant fisheries of recently discovered Newfoundland was an increasingly important example.
The Crusades had long since exposed western Europe to the spices and condiments of the East, and by the sixteenth century the trade in commodities ranging from pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, saffron, and caraway to cardamom, coriander, mustard, and garlic was a major element in international commerce. By Tudor times, as a result, recipes like the following for stew had become possible: