The Tudors

by G. J. Meyer

  Then came the strangest episode of the entire affair. Aske received a letter from the king, inviting him to spend Christmas at court because “we have conceived a great desire to speak with you and to hear of your mouth the whole circumstance and beginning of that matter [the rising].” The letter repeated Norfolk’s assurances of “our general and free pardon, already granted unto you.” Aske accepted—such an invitation was an almost unimaginable honor—and found himself treated with stupefying friendliness all through his visit. At Henry’s request he wrote an account of the Pilgrimage, receiving from the king’s hands the gift of an expensive coat. When he returned to the north, he did so in the conviction that Henry was his ally, supporter, and friend. In the next few months he would repeatedly show himself to be the supporter and friend of a king who had concealed his hatred under a blanket of hospitality and was now waiting until it became safe to exact his revenge.

  None of the other pilgrim leaders had been exposed to the king’s charm, and few were able to share Aske’s enthusiasm. What they saw, rather, was that a new year had begun and nothing was being done to put into effect any of the promises made at Doncaster. Cromwell and Cranmer and the other officials of whom the pilgrims had complained all remained at their posts, the Crown continued to collect its ten percent of every kind of church revenue (though this, too, was among the things the pilgrims wanted stopped), and government troops were being moved north to fortify strongholds. Aske wrote to warn his new friend the king that feelings were again running high, asking Henry “to pardon me in this my crude letter and plainness of the same, for I do utter my poor heart to your grace to the intent your highness may perceive the danger that may ensue; for on my faith I do greatly fear the end to be only by battle.” When he learned that former pilgrims were planning to attack Hull and Beverley, which were under royal control, Aske vainly begged them not to proceed and urged others not to join them. When the attacks failed and their leaders had been captured, Henry sent him a letter of thanks. Scattered and uncoordinated outbreaks of violence continued, each one sapping whatever strength and cohesion the remaining fragments of the Pilgrimage still had, and when eight thousand Westmorland men tried to take the city of Carlisle and failed miserably, it became clear that the movement was exhausted. Norfolk was able to move his troops into pilgrim territory, impose martial law, and begin a program of summary executions that quickly took scores and then hundreds of lives. Those monks who had returned to their suppressed monasteries at the invitation of the pilgrims were singled out for especially harsh treatment.

  So, inevitably, was Robert Aske. With the north subdued, Henry was free to remove the mask of conciliation. Aske and other Pilgrimage leaders, members of the nobility among them, were arrested and put on trial in York. Norfolk, in a nice touch of sadism that brings to mind his own prominent role in the trial and sentencing of his niece Anne Boleyn, arranged to have Aske’s brother put on the jury. The defendants were found guilty on two counts of treason, first for conspiring to deny the king his “dignity, title, name, and royal state … of being on earth the supreme head of the English church,” second for trying to force the king “to summon and hold a parliament and convocation.” Aske pointed to the fact that he had been pardoned both by the king and by Cromwell and had done nothing to oppose either of them since his pardon, but that counted for nothing. The convicted men were transferred to London, where they were condemned to death. Most of them, along with two abbots and three priors caught up in Norfolk’s dragnet, were hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. Aske alone was hauled back to York and hanged there, not by rope but in a tangle of chains around his body so as to make his death a slow agony of exposure and dehydration. His body was kept on public display until nothing remained but bones. The population was paralyzed with fear, the king more firmly in control than ever.

  Henry’s triumph was capped with glorious news: Queen Jane was pregnant. The joyful couple departed on a celebratory summer progress, keeping well clear of the north in spite of a pledge Henry had made to show himself to his subjects there. It was left to Norfolk to complete the subjugation of the northern counties, and to Cromwell to resume the destruction not only of the smaller monasteries but, more broadly, of anyone refusing to align himself with the new English church. In May, the month of Aske’s death, the Crown’s choice as new prior of the London Charterhouse formally recognized Henry as supreme head and signed the house over to him. Twenty of the house’s monks and lay brothers, broken by the two years of harassment that had followed the execution of John Houghton, gave up their resistance. The ten who refused were chained up in Newgate Prison and left to starve in their own filth. By mid-June half of them were dead, and by September only one remained alive. The sole survivor was then moved to another place of confinement, where he clung to life so tenaciously that at last he had to be butchered. With that single exception, however, Henry and Cromwell were able to eliminate the last of the Carthusians by allowing them to perish slowly, horribly, and in deepest obscurity, avoiding the kind of anger that would have resulted from the public execution of such transparently innocent men.

  One of the most striking aspects of King Henry’s reign, his determination to make all of his subjects change their beliefs exactly as he changed his, became more painfully awkward with the passage of time. Complete uniformity would have been unachievable under any circumstances during the decades of Henry’s rule; even if he had remained Roman Catholic and wanted his subjects to do the same, the ideas of Luther and the other continental reformers would have attracted English adherents and made doctrinal strife unavoidable. But Henry had compounded the discord in breaking with Rome, accelerating the process by which his subjects came to be divided into a multitude of contending sects, and his subsequent insistence on conformity made the situation impossible. By the time of his third marriage three religious factions were numerous or influential or both. One—the only one acceptable to the king—was made up of those many people who welcomed or at least had no objection to the break with Rome but wanted to retain their traditional beliefs and practices (the sacraments, for example, and the idea of purgatory). Another, probably larger, stood by the entire conservative package including the leadership of the pope. Finally, definitely smallest in numbers but afire with the zeal of the continental Reformation, was the circle for whom the whole of the old religion was superstitious nonsense that had to be swept aside in order for a simpler, purer Christianity based on the inerrancy of the Bible to become possible. To arrive at a single set of doctrines acceptable to all three of these groups would have been impossible, and the king’s inextinguishable hopes of imposing uniformity, after he himself had done so much to create division, were both ironic and doomed. His efforts in that direction would have been pathetic if they had not also been so tragically destructive. They were yet another reflection of Henry’s infantile belief in himself as a flawlessly wise ruler.

  Late in 1536, annoyed that the dissemination of his Ten Articles had failed almost completely to settle the many roiling questions about what England was now supposed to believe, Henry turned the problem over to the bishops, instructing them to produce a more comprehensive, less ambiguous set of answers. But the bishops themselves were divided. At one extreme were men like Stephen Gardiner of Winchester, John Stokesley of London, and Cuthbert Tunstal of Durham, conservatives who almost certainly regretted the break with Rome and hoped to retain as much of the old ways as possible. At the other end of the spectrum there stood, for example, Hugh Latimer of Worcester, who went so far in his rejection of tradition that even other militant reformers accused him of heresy. The debates in which the bishops tried to decide how to carry out the king’s instructions were long and contentious and never came close to achieving agreement. The result of the bishops’ labors, a document whose official title was The Institution of a Christian Man, was less a thought-through compromise or a coherent response to the many questions stirred up by the establishment of an autonomous national church than a semide
sperate packing together of incompatible, sometimes conflicting positions.

  But the king had demanded action, and the bishops had done as well as anyone should have expected considering the depth of their differences. Most of them wanted to satisfy the king, certainly; they were all too aware of what could befall any cleric who failed to do so. But on both sides of the doctrinal gulf were men prepared to fight if perhaps not to die in defense of their beliefs. In the absence of specific royal guidance, with nothing to fall back upon but their own divergent convictions and their impressions of what Henry was likely to find acceptable, ultimately they had little choice—unless they could find the courage to do nothing—but to give everyone some voice in what they finally produced. When they finished in mid-July, no one could be entirely comfortable with what had been accomplished. Though the Institution was in many respects conservative—upholding, for example, the validity of all seven sacraments, whereas the earlier Ten Articles had specifically recognized only three—the most conservative bishops were neither satisfied that it was conservative enough nor confident of how the king would react to it. The evangelicals hated much of it; Latimer wrote to the king to protest that the Institution should not be printed until cleansed of Catholic “old leaven.” It was offered to the king and Cromwell as a working draft, and accompanied by a timorous request that they review it and decide whether the bishops could tell the world that it had royal approval. They got no answer. When it appeared in print in September, it contained a most peculiar preface in which the bishops abjectly “confess that we have none authority either to assemble ourselves together for any pretence or purpose or to publish any thing that might be by us agreed on and compiled.” This preface asked the king to approve or amend what the bishops had done as he saw fit. Printed with it was a curious message from the king himself, declaring that he had not found time to read the book but had merely “taken as it were a taste of it.” From that day to this The Institution of a Christian Man has been better known as the Bishops’ Book, an unofficial title that makes clear that it should not be taken as a guide to the beliefs of the supreme head of the Church of England because, according to the head himself, he had little idea of what it contained. How anyone could have regarded such a work as worth printing, how anyone could have expected it to be of the slightest value even to subjects eager to be scrupulously faithful to the royal theology, surpasses understanding. Perhaps Cromwell or Henry assumed it must be close enough to the king’s truth to be of some use for the time being.

  When he did read it at last, some three months after publication, the king was not at all happy with what he found. Much of it was obviously calculated to please and surely must have done so. The bishops had explicitly denied the supremacy of the pope and asserted that of the king, declared the king to be accountable to God only, and warned that nothing could justify rebellion against him (a reflection of the fact that they completed their work shortly after the failure of the Pilgrimage of Grace). The only legitimate way of seeking relief from political oppression, their book said, was to ask God to change the monarch’s heart. Henry entered more than 250 comments in the margins of his copy. Many of these were challenges and objections that led him into a debate with Archbishop Cranmer, who had used his influence as primate to inject his own increasingly evangelical views into the text. In the end, of course, Henry’s opinion was the only one that mattered. No doubt to Cranmer’s intense disappointment, a new edition was prepared with all passages that referred favorably to justification by faith expunged. The new version also affirmed belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Such changes were inevitable considering the king’s conservative approach to almost all questions of doctrine, but in 1537 he was also affected by what the Pilgrimage of Grace had revealed about popular attachment to the old religion. He had been given reason to proceed carefully in separating the mass of his subjects from the faith in which they had been raised.

  Some of Henry’s changes rose out of that contempt for almost everyone except himself that had become an integral part of his character. The Bishops’ Book as first published had asserted that God sees all men as equal; the king inserted a clarification to the effect that equality must be seen as “touching the soul only,” whatever exactly he might have meant by that. A passage about the duty of Christians to attend to the needs of the poor was amended to exclude from charity those “many folk which had liever live by the graft of begging slothfully”—easy words for a man who since adolescence had been able to regard the wealth of all England and Wales as his to do with as he wished and had rarely in his adult life been obliged to do anything he didn’t want to do. Because Henry kept a court astrologer, he deleted astrology from the bishops’ list of superstitions to be shunned. He also deleted a passage stating that rulers have a duty to “provide and care” for their subjects, and changed a warning that rulers in forcing their subjects to obey must act “by and according to the just order of their laws” so that it applied only to those acting in the ruler’s name, not to the ruler himself. Some of Henry’s changes were difficult even for Cranmer to swallow. What the archbishop found particularly irksome was the king’s rewriting of the First Commandment (where, in an absurd anachronism, he inserted the name “Jesu Christ”) and the closing words of the Lord’s Prayer. That Henry felt no hesitation in changing such ancient and supposedly divine texts is perhaps the most striking evidence we have of the heights to which his arrogance could rise, his exalted view of his own place in the hierarchy of the living and the dead.

  Between the first appearance of the Bishops’ Book and the point where Henry found time to undertake its improvement, there occurred an event that he himself would have considered among the greatest of his life and reign. At two in the morning on October 12, after a labor of more than two days, Queen Jane gave birth to a healthy son. Henry was not present for the birth, having fled days before to his residence at Esher to escape an outbreak of plague. Upon receiving the news he rushed back to Hampton Court, ordering celebrations that soon had bells ringing from every church tower in England and the guards at the Tower firing two thousand rounds of artillery. Henry was said to have wept when he held his son for the first time. Almost exactly ten years had passed since he first undertook to rid himself of Catherine of Aragon, and at last, at forty-six, he had his heir. Amid great precautions aimed at keeping the plague out of the palace, the boy was baptized on October 15. He was given the name Edward, less in honor of his grandfather Edward IV than because he had been born on the eve of St. Edward’s Day. His godfathers were Thomas Cranmer and the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk. His godmother was his half-sister, the recently humbled and rehabilitated Mary. The baptismal oil was carried by the four-year-old Elizabeth. She in turn was carried in procession by Queen Jane’s brother Edward Seymour, who, being now the uncle of a future king, was shortly made the Earl of Hertford.

  The celebrations continued, but two days after her son’s christening Jane was taken ill and soon was in gravely serious condition. Henry departed on a long-planned hunting trip—it was, after all, the start of the season—but returned to court on the evening of October 24 after receiving word that his wife had hemorrhaged and was not expected to live. She died that midnight of causes that can never be known with certainty. It has often been stated that a cesarean section had been performed to save her child after two days and three nights of fruitless labor, but this cannot be the case; a cesarean meant certain death in the sixteenth century, and though it is hardly inconceivable that the court physicians would have sacrificed Jane to save their master’s heir, in the days following Prince Edward’s birth Jane was expected to recover and appeared to be doing so. A more plausible explanation is that she died because part of the placenta had been left inside her womb after she gave birth. By a sad irony, midwives of the kind who assisted at almost all deliveries in Tudor times, and who were well schooled in such practicalities as removal of the placenta, had been excluded from the royal birthing chamber. Only physicians o
f the loftiest reputation had been permitted to attend the queen. The state of academic medicine being what it was in the sixteenth century, such worthies probably knew less about the realities of childbirth than any experienced midwife. Henry left Hampton Court and went to Windsor Castle. Three weeks later, when the queen’s embalmed body arrived at Windsor for interment, he moved again, this time to Whitehall. It would be ungenerous to doubt that his grief over the death of his wife was as great as his joy over the birth of a son, but his recovery appears to have been swift. In rather short order he was reported to be in good spirits—“in good health and merry as a widower may be”—and to be scheming with Cromwell about where to find his next wife.

  One would have thought that Henry might be a satisfied man by this point. He was definitely the most feared, and arguably the most powerful, king in the history of England. Not only the government but the church were his to command. His word was law, almost literally, and his word was religious doctrine as well; no noble or bishop would have dared to contradict him. And now at last, on the threshold of what in his time was old age, with a lifetime of self-indulgence taking its toll on his mighty physique, there was a male heir to the throne. Suddenly it was at least possible that the Tudor dynasty, which just recently had passed its fiftieth anniversary, might have a future. A lesser man than Henry might have decided that, having done as much as any of his predecessors and far more than most, he had done enough. A better man might have decided that he had shed enough of his subjects’ blood.