All England was talking of the changes confronting them. Throckmorton liked to meet a group of Parliament friends for dinner or supper in an inn called the Queen’s Head in Fleet Street. Others met and talked to him in private places around the City: the garden of the Hospital of St John, just north of the walls; or in a private room in the Serjeants’ Inn near the Temple; or at other inns in Cheapside, the shopping hub of the City where he had been mugged years before. London was full of these evening conversations between like-minded conservative gentry. ‘Every man showed his mynde and divers others of the parliament house wolde come thither to dyner & soup and comun with us.’ Usually, ‘we wolde bidde the servaunts of the house go out and in lik maner our owne servaunts because we thought it not convenient that they shulde here us speke of such mattiers’.8 But conversations were reported and to Cromwell this joint and repeated privacy looked conspiratorial.
George’s distinguished cousin and priest William Peto, a Franciscan friar and Catherine of Aragon’s confessor, summoned him for a private and urgent conversation. He told George it was his duty to defend the old church in Parliament, and ‘advised me if I were in the parliament house to stick to that matter as I would have my soul saved’.9 Death, and with it a sense of martyrdom, was in the air. But Peto also had some more intriguing information. He had just preached a sermon to the king at Placentia, the Tudor pleasure palace in Greenwich, violently denouncing anyone who repudiated his wife, lambasting the courtly flatterers in the stalls beneath him and warning Henry that Anne Boleyn was a Jezebel, the harlot-queen who had worshipped Baal, and that one day, dogs would be licking Henry’s blood, as they had her husband Ahab’s.
A tumultuously angry king left the chapel and summoned the friar to come out into the palace garden. In this atmosphere of alarm and terror, Peto took his life in his hands and addressed the King directly. Henry could have no other wife while Catherine of Aragon was alive; and he could never marry Queen Anne ‘for that it was said he had medled with the mother and the daughter’.10 To have slept with one Boleyn, let alone two, would in the eyes of the church make marriage to any other Boleyn girl illegal.
Peto fled for the Continent but left Throckmorton in London with his injunctions to martyrdom. How far was this from the comforts of Coughton, fishing in the Arrow or improving his house, completing his father’s new gateway! Throckmorton was swimming beyond his ken. Sir Thomas More, probably just on the point of resigning as Lord Chancellor,
then sent saye [word] for me to come speke with hym in the parliament chamber. And when I cam to hym he was in a little chamber within the parliament chamber, where as I do remember me, stode an aulter or a thing like unto an aulter, wherupon he did leane. And than he said this to me, I am viry gladde to here the good reporte that goeth of you and that ye be so a good a catholique man as ye be; and if ye doo continue in the same weye that ye begynne and be not afrayed to seye yor conscience, ye shall deserve greate reward of god and thanks of the kings grace at lingth and moche woorship to yourself: or woordes moche lik to thies.11
Throckmorton was flattered that these great men should be considering him as their advocate in Parliament. He was as vulnerable as anyone to the vanity of the martyr and prided himself on his courage and forthrightness as a man who was not frightened by princes or power. He wanted to be known, he wrote, as ‘a man that durst speake for the comen wilth’.12 He was not only a Catholic; he was a Warwickshire knight, whose tradition was to speak for the Commons of England. Peto had told Henry himself that his policies would lose him his kingdom, precisely because the commonwealth could not follow them. But for Throckmorton how could that position play out in the high-talent bear garden of the Tudor court? How could he survive if he were to defend the ancient Catholic truths?
In search of guidance, Throckmorton visited John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, soon like More to be martyred (when his headless body was left, as a lesson to others, stripped and naked on the scaffold all day until evening came), as well as the monk Richard Reynolds at Syon in Middlesex. He too would soon be dragged on a hurdle from the Tower to Tyburn, where with four others he would be hanged in his habit for resistance to Henry’s supremacy laws. Everyone Throckmorton consulted, to various degrees, advised him ‘to stick to the same to the death’. And everyone knew that word was no figure of speech. ‘And if I did not, I shulde surely be damned. And also if I did speke or doo any thing in the parliament house contrarie to my conscience for feare of any erthly power or punyshment, I shulde stande in a very havie case at the daye of Judgement.’13
The choice they put to him was to suffer now or suffer in eternity, suicide or spiritual suicide. This advice ‘entered so in my heart’ that it set George Throckmorton on a path of courage. God had to come before man, whatever the consequence for him or his family. He was remaining loyal to the inheritance his father had left him and in doing so was endangering his children’s future.
Then, quite suddenly, he was sent for by the King. When they met, Cromwell was standing at the King’s shoulder. Confronted with this, Throckmorton bore himself with a directness and integrity of which his mentors would have been proud. He repeated to the King what his cousin Peto had told him:
I feared if ye did marye quene Anne yor conscience wolde be more troubled at length, for that it is thoughte ye have meddled bothe with the mother and the sister. And his grace said never with the mother and my lorde privey seale [Cromwell] standing by said nor never with the sister nethir, and therfor putt that out of yor mynde.14
It must have been one of the most terrifying tellings of truth to power in English history. Henry had admitted his affair with Anne Boleyn’s elder sister but this candour and apparent intimacy did Throckmorton little good. He appeared in Cromwell’s papers as one of those Members of Parliament to be watched and not to be trusted. Cromwell was not replying to letters from George himself but instead wrote to him, advising him ‘to lyve at home, serve God, and medyll little’.15 Sewn in amongst Tudor tyranny and threat were these repeated moments of forgiveness and advice, like sequins of grace, anti-sweets, sugar coated in bile.
But ‘meddle little’? Cromwell’s language might have been tolerant; it was scarcely forgiving. There is a plaintive recognition of that in Throckmorton’s letter to him: ‘Ye shall see I wyll performe all promesys made with you.’
From other places around the country, off-colour notes arrived on Cromwell’s desk. From Anthony Cope, a Protestant Oxfordshire squire and Cromwell loyalist: ‘It grieves me to find [the King] has so fewe frendes in either Warwick or Northamptonshire. Mr. Throkmerton promised he would assist me to the best he cold. Nevertheless, secretly he workith the contrary.’ From Sir Thomas Audley, one of Henry’s hatchet men, who presided over a sequence of show trials and executions in the mid-1530s: ‘Mr. Throgmorton is not so hearty in Warwickshire as he might be.’16
Not to be hearty in mid-1530s England, at least after the passing of the Treasons Act in 1534, one of the ‘sanguinolent thirstie Lawes’ by which men and women ‘for Wordes only’17 were condemned to death, was a dangerous position to be in. Thomas More and John Fisher would both be executed the following year on the basis of words alone. Anne Boleyn and her so-called lovers (which included her brother) were beheaded on the same grounds. Many monks were executed in the 1530s for doing no more. And George had been firmly identified with them as part of this verbal opposition. In January 1535, he wrote from Coughton to the worldly diplomat and trimmer Sir Francis Bryan: ‘I hear that the kynges grace shuld be in displeasure wythe me. And that I shuld be greatly hyndred to hym, by whom I know not.’18
Throckmorton was a marked man, if not yet a condemned one, and as an escape from that predicament, he attended to his lands in Warwickshire and Worcestershire, retreating to the comforts of Coughton, consolidating estates, negotiating with his neighbours and with Cromwell for advantages and openings for himself and his children. Life had to go on. Acting as the King’s servant, Throckmorton continued with his normalities, sending
in accounts of the royal woods at Haseley, where he was the bailiff, and serving as a commissioner in collecting tax from clergy in Warwickshire, guiding church money towards the royal coffers. On his new gateway at Coughton, he put up two coats of arms: his own and Henry Tudor’s.
But in October 1536, as the first of the monasteries was being dissolved, his life deepened into something much more dangerous. Large-scale rebellions, which broke out first in Lincolnshire and then in Yorkshire and the north-west, turned those months into the most threatening of Henry’s reign. Known to history as the Pilgrimage of Grace, they were deeply conservative uprisings, driven partly by poor harvests, partly by anger and despair at the first suppressions of the smaller monasteries, partly by the sense that Cromwell’s new religious and political policies were betraying old England and partly by the fear that the old aristocratic leaders of the country were no longer in charge. Wolsey had been a butcher’s son, Cromwell a brewer’s, and even Thomas More was the grandson of a baker. That was not how conservative England liked the world to work.
A longing for past certainty hung over the Pilgrimage of Grace as it did over everything George and his allies had been talking about for years. The rebels demanded that the Catholic princess, Mary Tudor, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, should be reinstated as the heir to the throne. Cromwell’s centralizing state was eroding the localities: ‘And the profites of thies abbeys yerley goith out of the contrey to the Kinges highness.’ This was the cause shared between the rebels in the north and the group of Catholic gentlemen around Throckmorton: protest and despair against the dismantling of the past.
To demonstrate his loyalty at this most fearsome test, Throckmorton raised 300 men from his Midlands estates for the royal army gathered to suppress the rebels. They marched down to Bedfordshire, with Throckmorton’s sons appointed captains of the different bands. But his own soldiers let him down, claiming that if the great Catholic lords joined the rebellion, Throckmorton would turn rebel too.
This was dangerous talk – it is impossible to tell if it was true – and Cromwell got to hear of it. He also heard that two of Throckmortons’ soldiers ‘were with the rebels’ – again probably untrue, but in the age of ‘Wordes only’, adding yet more dissonant notes to what was already a frightening reputation.
George came down to London, met his friends again in the Queen’s Head and the perilous chat started up:
I do well remember sitting at a supper but I do not so well remember where, won at the boorde did axe what were the demawnds that ye rebels of the northe requirid, and everi man lokkid upon other & no man wolde make awnser. & then I said that it no matter for yt was in every man’s mouth, and we were all true men there, so we mai talke of yt; and said the false knave Aske would rule the King and all his realms. & so rehearsid his demawnds, as far as I remembered them … amongst others that to have my ladie Mary made legittymate, not approving that more than other. Who were at the boorde I do not well remember.19
It was convenient not to remember much. Fear was in the air. When the Duke of Norfolk had warned Thomas More that the wrath of the King meant death, More replied, ‘Is that all, my Lord? Then in good faith is there no more differens betweene your grace and me, but that I shall dye today and yow tomorowe.’20 Few could manage that level of calm. Thomas Wyatt’s poem, written in May 1536, when imprisoned in the Bell Tower of the Tower of London, expresses what no one else dared say. From his barred window he witnessed the executions of Anne Boleyn’s brother and the other four young men accused of sleeping with her. ‘These blodye dayes haue brokyn my hart,’ Wyatt wrote, as if he were the only voice of conscience in this terrible decade. ‘The bell towre showed me such syght/That in my hed stekys day and nyght.’21 That in my head sticks day and night: it is a literal truth that these people were living with their nightmares.
On Sunday 19 November, when the first Lincolnshire phase of the Pilgrimage of Grace was over and the trouble had spread north into Yorkshire, Throckmorton heard the sermon preached in St Paul’s in London. After it he went with an old friend, Sir John Clarke, ‘to dine att ye Horse Hedde, yn Chepe, … with the goodman off ye howse yn a littill lowe parler’,22 another of those small dark London rooms in which the key conversations of the age occurred.
After we had dinid & ye goodman & his goodwife had left the boorde he & I fell yn to comunion of the rebellions off ye Northe, & he axid of me what I hard of yem yn ye cuntre as I came upp. He said it a saying yn London that thei be upp in Holderness [in Yorkshire]. I axid him, ‘I prai yow, do yow know what be their demawnds & he said, Have yow not sene them I awnserid no but I said I had sene the bokke yn printe, the awnser to the Lincolneshere men’s demawnds. He said so fairly I will send them yow them sone to lokke upon.23
Nothing too suspect there, the natural conversation of two men engaged with politics. They hadn’t spoken in front of the proprietor of the Horse’s Head nor his wife, but that was only necessary caution. Clarke’s servant delivered the printed papers to Throckmorton that evening ‘and after I had read them I threw them yn mi chamber window’.24 The papers were explosive material: they described Cromwell as a ‘simple and evil disposed person’, who had ‘spoiled and robbed, and further intending utterly to spoil and rob the whole body of this realm’. His policies were ‘contrary [to] the faith of God and honour to the king’s majesty and the commonwealth of this realm’. The oath the rebels took in Yorkshire swore ‘to expulse all villain blood and evil councilors against the commonwealth from his grace and his privy council of the same’.25
Anyone who could be suspected of disseminating these words would clearly die. Throckmorton kept them in his room, lying in the window, until another old friend, Sir William Essex, came to London.
the same nyght he and I mette met att supper at the queins hedde betwixte the tempull gates. And afterwards, when we two remained alone, we fell in communion of the rebells off the northe and then he axid me if their demawnds and those of the Lincolne shere men were all won. & I said they were much the same, as yt apperith bi the bokke yn printe, which he had seen. Then I sent mi servant to my chamber for them, and lent them to Sir William, who put them yn his purse and so departid.26
Sir George had said, ‘Your servant may copy it if you will’: now the seditious words were out and spreading in London and beyond, with Throckmorton and Essex perceived as the source. Essex’s clearly literate chamber boy, Geoffrey Gunter, made another, secret copy for himself. When he accompanied Sir William down to his house at Lambourn in the Berkshire Downs, he gave it to a friend of his en route at Reading, where it rapidly travelled around the community of priests, innkeepers and no doubt their customers, copied at every turn. This was viral rebellion, first in print, then word of mouth, then by manuscript.
Essex discovered what had happened, knew how catastrophic it was and ‘had but little rest all night’. Throckmorton made his way down to Berkshire, ignorant of what was happening, only to find a posse of Berkshire officials riding to court, with copies of the papers Throckmorton had shown to Essex only days before. When Throckmorton reached Essex’s house the next day, he found Sir William in bed, having not been able to sleep the night before, but he got up and first in the parlour and then in the privacy of the garden, the repeated setting for secret and intimate Tudor conversations, they discussed the crisis.
They decided, quickly enough, to tell everything and to hurry to London, where they could divest themselves of the truth. Essex was to send his servant first and then to follow himself, and Throckmorton to follow only ‘if the matter were not well taken. He should send me word, and I would come up myself.’ No word came and Throckmorton, in early December, returned to London. On the road, his own servant met him and told him that Sir William Essex had been put in the Tower. When Throckmorton arrived in London, he too was arrested and by 11 December had joined him there, in the place of torture, terror and death.
We only know these intimate and concrete details of George Throckmorton’s movements in the autumn of
1536 – his toings and froings, his dinners and suppers – because the interrogation in the Tower dragged it out of him. His confession is still in Cromwell’s papers. No fact was too small to convince the Lord Privy Seal that the truth was being told: the papers lying in the window, the dinner with the landlord of the Horse’s Head in Cheapside, the chamber boy, the rebellious servants, Sir William’s exhaustion after his night of worry.
Yet Throckmorton was not entirely open in this confession. He said he couldn’t quite remember where or with whom he had been sitting at supper when he talked the dangerous rebel talk. It was only six or eight weeks earlier; he must have been lying. To lie to the King and Cromwell in the Tower in the murderous police state of mid-1530s England showed some mettle. He signed his confession with ‘the heaviest heart that ever had living man’ and he told the King that ‘yt makith mi harte blede withyn mi bodie’27 to imagine that he thought him disloyal, but there is no doubt that, to some extent, he was. It seems clear that at Christmas 1536, Throckmorton thought he could get away with his double game a little longer. He and Essex were held in confinement on into January 1537. Those in the know at court ‘doubted of their lives’ but they were wrong. Before the end of the month both men were released and Throckmorton was restored as a Justice in Warwickshire.
It was, as Peter Marshall has said, ‘a close shave’,28 but far more desperate events were to unfold the following September. A high-glamour Knight of St John, Sir Thomas Dingley, an international warrior on behalf of all the deep-rooted, crusading and Turk-fighting traditions of the Catholic church, had been heard abusing the King and talking about rebellion. He was betrayed, arrested and sent to the Tower, where among much else he described to Cromwell’s interrogators all the subversive remarks George Throckmorton had made to him in the early 1530s: how Throckmorton had talked so loosely in St John’s Hospital in Clerkenwell, in the garden there, about the King’s dabbling with all three Boleyn women, the frighteners which Cromwell put on Members of Parliament, all this in front of ‘light’ people, people of no substance, people who were bound to spread the rumours.
The Gentry Page 7