by Simon Schama
The picture of an orderly, even authoritarian, Church of England is exactly what can be seen on the frontispiece of the Great Bible, commissioned by Cromwell and published in 1539. At the top the king-emperor, prince and high priest receives the Verbum Dei (Word of God) directly from the Father on High, just like a Solomon, and then passes this to his two trusty lieutenants, Cranmer, on the left, the lord of the spiritual realm, and Cromwell, on the right, the lord of the temporal realm, each of whom in their turn passes it along to grateful throngs of clergy and laity.
Thomas Cromwell may have been the least sentimental Englishman ever to run the country, but he was certainly not the inventor of Tudor coercion. He had been a diligent student of Wolsey’s own way with force, and it had, after all, been the king himself who had thought it a splendid idea to celebrate the first year of his independent reign by staging the show trial and execution of his father’s ministers. Cromwell made sure that he reminded Thomas More during his interrogation that More had not exactly been averse to using force to ensure obedience to Rome. But in the last resort Cromwell knew it fell to him to be Henry’s hard man: to collude in the lie that, when brutal things needed to be done, the king could be shielded from their ugliness. Above all, Cromwell understood, with a clarity that Henry could never manage, that it would never be enough for the break with Rome to be proclaimed and then expect everyone to fall over themselves in expressions of loyal celebration. He was anticipating a fight, and he was prepared to fight dirty.
Cromwell knew very well that, sooner or later, the pope would wheel his big gun, excommunication, into the battle, and if the king were to win (where John had lost) he had better be prepared to fight back with something more or less novel in the language of politics, namely patriotism. The country had to be aroused to a new sense of its own sovereignty and potency. Rome had to be demonized as ‘the foreigner’ and ‘the enemy’, and so it had to be parliament, the voice of the nation, that enacted the laws instituting the royal supremacy, that would drown out any apprehension with a crude kind of bludgeoning, patriotic euphoria, the rejoicing of the demolition squad and the cheer-leading of the ‘England, England’ brigade. Propagandists like Thomas Starkey and Richard Morison were hired to present this unnerving alteration as a kind of national self-awakening. The pope would now be called the ‘Bishop of Rome’ and his obstinate adherents would be called ‘papists’ – a word as yet unknown. The word ‘Papa’ was to be excised from church services, and sermons were to be preached in the name of the Supreme Head.
To this engine of xenophobic publicity Cromwell added the heavy machinery of state terror. An oath had to be sworn recognizing the royal supremacy, the legitimacy of the heirs of Henry and Anne and the bastardization of the Lady (no longer Princess) Mary. Insulting the new queen was treason; calling the king a schismatic or a heretic was treason. It was treason to write these things or to plot these things, and, for the very first time in English law, it was a crime to say these things.
Cromwell managed to turn England into a frightened, snivelling, jumpy place, where denunciation was a sanctimonious duty and countless petty little scores got settled by people who protested they were just doing the right thing. There were plenty of incautious victims. Mrs Amadas, the self-appointed prophetess, said out loud that the king was ‘cursed with God’s own mouth’ and prophesied that he would be banished and the kingdom conquered by the Scots. There was the Welsh priest, William ap Lli, who wanted to get the king up on Snowdon where ‘he would souse the king about the ears till he had his head soft enough’. And there was the Oxfordshire midwife who said she would be happy to attend on Queen Catherine, but as for Anne, she was far too good for the likes of her, she being ‘a whore and a harlot for her living’.
These were all loudmouths. But Thomas More was keeping his mouth shut. He had let it be known that parliament was entitled to determine the succession. As for the supremacy itself and the destruction of the pope’s jurisdiction in England, More refused to say a word or to take the oath. When Cromwell sent him to the Tower, along with the much more outspoken Fisher and the king’s ex-confessor, it was in the hope of extracting concessions from them. The confessor did, in fact, relent and got off free. But Fisher wouldn’t shut up and More wouldn’t open up. When the pope made Fisher a cardinal, Henry’s rage boiled over. More and Fisher were to be made examples as ingrates and traitors. Originally sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, they were spared the torment by the royal mercy of the executioner’s axe. But although both died heroically and for the sake of their consciences, they certainly did not die for the liberty of anyone else’s. After he had been sentenced, More let it be known that all along he had rejected the supremacy as an abomination to God and if he had remained chancellor he would certainly have enforced his version of the truth every bit as fiercely as Cromwell now prosecuted his.
Nowhere in Cromwell’s strong-arm regime did his myrmidons enjoy their work more than in the ‘visitations’ to the monasteries, carried out with lightning speed during 1535 and early 1536. The uprooting of nearly 15,000 monks and nuns and the destruction of an entire, ancient way of life had little to do with reforming zeal. It was, in the first instance, driven by money. The monasteries and abbeys were to be plundered to establish a war chest for the conflict with Catholic Europe that now seemed inevitable. Officially, Cromwell presented the project, not as the weakening but as the strengthening of the monasteries, with the decaying non-viable establishments liquidated, their property and land passing to the Crown for resale, and some of the brothers and sisters consolidated into the bigger, better-run institutions. But Cromwell’s flying squads – Leigh and Layton, ap Rees and Tregonwell, who descended on convents, demanding accommodation while they reduced abbots to trembling jellies of misery – do not seem much like men who thought of themselves as renovators. For a start, they enjoyed their work a little too much. ‘I laid unto him the concealment of treason,’ wrote one of Cromwell’s hit-men to his chief about a prior he had at his mercy. ‘Called him heinous traitor in the worst names I could devise, he all the time kneeling and making intercession unto me not to utter to you the premises for his undoing.’ Such were the pleasures of reform.
Cromwell’s ‘Visitors’ covered an enormous amount of territory very fast – 121 houses and 1000 miles in one dramatic swing through the north. When they arrived they knew exactly what they wanted: a self-incriminating catalogue of sex, fraud, conspiracy and superstition. Sex was at the top of their list of helpful confessions, the juicier the better. The word ‘sodomy’ (sometimes meaning homosexual practices, sometimes just masturbation) recurs over and again in the reports. ‘Incontinence’ – another favourite – meant fornication between the sexes. Reports of children born to nuns, abbots in bed with prioresses. Slanders against the king and queen, obstinate deference to Rome or just a suspicious silence was enough to prove ‘conspiracy’. ‘Superstition’ proved extremely fruitful for the Visitors, who carried off cartloads of purported relics – jars of doubtful goop said to be the Virgin’s milk, bits of rusting iron venerated as the ‘chains of St Peter’, which pregnant women bound around them at the time of their delivery, were all merrily itemized for Cromwell’s entertainment. In Bury St Edmunds the nuns of the convent remained silent, even though the Visitors used ‘much diligence in the examination’, but at the abbey the Visitors hit the jackpot. The abbot was a gambling addict, ‘much delighted in playing cards and dice’; the abbey gate was a turnstile for tarts; and the closets disgorged a Portobello Road of sacred junk: ‘as the coals of St Lawrence was toasted withal; the parings of St Edmund’s nails; St Thomas Canterbury’s pen knife and boots and divers skulls for the headache’.
For the tens of thousands of men and women cast out into the world, what happened in 1536 and the years that followed was no joke. The property redistribution was on a scale that no other English revolution ever approached. Priories, like Lacock in Wiltshire, were offered at bargain prices, and loyalty to the new order was secured wi
th bricks and mortar. The former residents were soon forgotten or reduced to family legends of headless nuns and spectral monks. And by filling the Crown’s coffers with the proceeds, the dissolution gave Henry the wherewithal to stand up to the worst that the Catholic powers could throw at him. It was an achievement of realpolitik that Wolsey in his wildest dreams could hardly have imagined.
But Cromwell had been close enough to Wolsey to treat the cardinal’s fate as a cautionary lesson. Beware, lest you think yourself invulnerable. Watch out for backbiting aristocrats who, however patronizing their smiles, actually despise you as a jumped-up, power-mad, inky-fingered oik. The king is your saving grace. Do what he wants before he knows he wants it and they can’t lay a finger on you. And Cromwell was only too painfully aware that what Henry wanted, desperately, achingly, miserably, was a son. Anne had, so far, failed to give him the promised prize. A baby daughter, Elizabeth, was born in September 1533. Henry laid his hand on the baby’s head, acknowledging her as his legitimate daughter and hoped for better luck next time. Eighteen months later Anne was pregnant again. In January 1536 there was more good news. Catherine of Aragon had died. ‘God be praised,’ said Henry. ‘We are free from all suspicion of war.’ It may have been at this point that Cromwell’s machinery of anticipation began to buzz and whir. With the emperor’s aunt, Catherine, dead, why not bring about a reconciliation between Charles and Henry? But the price of peace would be the re-legitimizing of Lady Mary, and to that Anne would never agree. The logical conclusion was that she must go.
Everything turned on the result of Anne’s pregnancy. On 19 January she miscarried. The child would have been a boy. The disaster reawakened Henry’s pessimism and rage. ‘I see now that God will never give me a male heir,’ he told Anne, before curtly informing her that he would see her when she left her bed. Black melancholia began to fester into something much more grotesque as he thrashed around looking for someone to blame. The curse was still on him. It was not God but the devil who had brought him this marriage, and he had been seduced into it by witchcraft. Witches were known to induce impotence, and the virile king was having a little problem. The marriage was unclean, doomed to sterility. It needed a quick exorcism.
Cromwell knew that few would grieve for the Boleyns. Catherine’s death had stimulated another outpouring of sympathy for the Lady Mary, and Anne’s family were detested by the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk as greedy and presumptuous parvenus. Personally, Cromwell didn’t give a fig one way or the other. The Boleyns were in the way of state business; that was all. But he respected Anne too much to do anything by half. If she was going to be removed, she and everyone around her had better be destroyed, flattened, with no chance of getting off the mat.
What he then cooked up was a thing of pure devilry; a finely measured brew, one part pornography, one part paranoia. Moments of dalliance, nothing really untoward in the Renaissance court – a handkerchief that did not belong to the king dropped at a May Day tilt; a dance taken with a young man, also not the king; a blown kiss, a giggle – were twisted by Cromwell into a carnival of unholy, traitorous sex. As a witness under oath at Anne’s trial put it, ‘the Queen, following her daily frail and carnal lust did procure diverse of the King’s daily and familiar servants to be her adulterers’. Anne, it seems, had done it with everyone. She’d had sex with her court musician; she’d had sex with the Groom of the Stole; she’d screwed the king’s tennis partner Francis Weston and the courtier William Brereton; she had even slept with her own brother. Anne had presided like some possessed Messalina over a diabolical orgy of treason, perhaps planning to pass off the poisoned fruit of all this hectic copulation as a royal heir.
It was the confession of the carpenter’s son and court musician, Mark Smeaton, extracted under torture, that provided a fig leaf of legality for Cromwell’s judicial murders. On 27 April Smeaton’s confession was given to Henry, and he bought every word of it. Three days later, holding her baby Elizabeth in her arms and with cannon booming in the Tower as the first of her friends was brought to prison, Anne made a desperate attempt to plead with the king to make him see reason. It was in vain. Terrified by the monster that Cromwell had let loose, the great and the good ran for cover just as fast as they could. The glamorous Duke of Norfolk, Anne’s own uncle, presided over the kangaroo court. Cranmer, who without Anne would still have been toasting his own muffins in a Cambridge college, fussed and fretted, having believed the queen the noblest and most virtuous woman that ever lived but now seeing that he had been most wickedly deceived. Most obscenely, her father Thomas Boleyn decided to pretend that the adulteries were true in order to save his own neck while his children lost theirs. Others from Anne’s past came very close to destruction. Thomas Wyatt, her old flame, was arrested on suspicion of (what else?) adultery and sent to the Tower, where through a grating in his cell in the Bell Tower he watched the execution of Anne’s brother and friends.
The Bell Tower showed me such a sight
That in my head sticks day and night
There I did learn out of a grate
For all favour, glory, or might
That yet circa Regna tonat [around the throne the thunder roars].
Two days later, on 19 May, four months to the day after her miscarriage, it was Anne’s turn. As a special boon, an expert swordsman had been imported from France. ‘I hear the executioner is very good,’ Anne is said to have told the constable of the Tower, ‘and I have a little neck.’ And then she put her hands around her throat and burst out laughing. On the scaffold, dressed in black damask trimmed with ermine, she declared: ‘I am come neither to accuse no man nor to speak anything of that whereof I am accused and brought here to die but I pray God save the king and send him long to reign over you for a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never.’ Among those watching the first execution of a queen of England were her own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, Thomas Cromwell, the Earl of Suffolk and the Lord Mayor of London. Wyatt’s sister, Margaret, was probably one of the ladies waiting on the queen to the last. He himself watched the final act through his little grating.
These bloody days hath broken my heart.
And lust, my youth did them depart . . .
Still, Wyatt not only survived Anne’s ruin but actually became close to Cromwell and was duly rewarded by being made sheriff of Kent.
The beheading was a tonic for Henry VIII. The day before Anne’s execution he had his marriage annulled by Cranmer on the grounds of her adultery, making Elizabeth as well as Mary a bastard, a fact that seemed to cheer up the older sister enormously. The day after the execution the king announced his betrothal to Jane Seymour. Eighteen months later he was a father again, this time to the long-awaited boy, and less than two weeks after that he was, once more, a widower. Well, no matter, a queen had at last done her job.
When the news of Anne Boleyn’s death reached Dover, it was said that church tapers spontaneously re-lit. For the vast majority of the country, which despite the break with Rome still regarded itself as Catholic, her death seemed a long-overdue judgement on those they called heretics and twopenny bookmen. With the king now so thoroughly undeceived, they assumed he would put matters back the way they had been. And when this failed to happen right away, they took it on themselves to rescue him from the evil councillors who were obviously obstructing his true will. Marching under the banner of the Five Wounds of Christ, an army of 10,000 in the north and east demanded a restoration of the old ways. Or rather petitioned, for their leader, Robert Aske (as so many insurgents before and after him), adopted a posture of loyal supplication. His anthemchanting host was, he believed, not a rebellion but a pilgrimage, the Pilgrimage of Grace, and it asked the king to do only what they truly believed he wished to do, once free of the wicked Cromwell and Cranmer: restore the monasteries, legitimize Mary, prosecute heretics with the ardour shown by Wolsey and More, and preserve the old ceremonies.
The crusade, as it imagined itself, caught fire. By December 1536 there may have been as ma
ny as 40,000 mustered beneath the banner of the Five Wounds. By now, not only country gentlemen like Aske but also leading northern aristocrats, like the Percys, were involved. It was, in effect, the first act of the English wars of religion that mapped itself – as it would for centuries – as a Catholic north and west against a more reform-minded, or at least more heavily governed, southeast. For the moment, however, since it could not yet mobilize a force strong enough to confront and defeat the rebels, the government had no alternative but to pretend that it would at least listen to their demand for a general amnesty and a Catholic restoration. The Duke of Norfolk, who was known to be hostile to the evangelicals and had just sent his niece, Anne, to the execution block, was dispatched to do the dirty work at Doncaster and did so with aplomb, agreeing on the king’s behalf to most of the demands, the restoration of the monasteries excepted. Robert Aske pulled off his badge of the Five Wounds, proclaiming, ‘we will wear no badge but the badge of our sovereign lord,’ and the pilgrims went home ecstatic, believing the king, in his goodness, had granted their wishes.