The first records of this prophecy being used against Henry VIII date from 1535. John Hale, the vicar of Isleworth, was cross-questioned in April 1535, having been accused of calling the king ‘the Molywarppe that Merlin prophesised of’, and adding that ‘the King was accursed of God’s own mouth and that the marriage between the King and Queen [Anne] was unlawful’. The grounds Hale gave for this assertion are an extraordinarily colourful condemnation of the king, a ‘robber and pillager’ of the commonwealth who,
boasteth himself to be above and to excel all other Christian king and princes, thereby being puffed with vain glory and pride, where, of a truth, he is the most cruellest, capital heretic, defacer, and treader under foot of Christ and his Church… he doth impoverish, destroy, and kill, for none other intent but that he may enjoy and use his foul pleasures, and increased to himself great treasure and riches… And if thou wilt look deeply upon his life, thou shalt find it more foul and more stinking that a sow, wallowing and defiling herself in any filthy place; for how great so ever he is, he is fully given to his foul pleasure of the flesh and other voluptuousness. And look how many matrons be in the court, or given to marriage; these almost all he hath violated, so often neglecting his duty to his wife and offending the holy sacrament of matrimony; and he hath taken to his wife of fornication this matron Anne, not only to the highest shame and undoing of himself, but also of all this realm.
Hale admitted hearing prophecies of Merlin from a man called Laynam and confessed to having repeated them but pleaded that he was ‘aged and oblivious’, had been very sick and ‘troubled in his wits’ and asked the forgiveness of God and the king and queen. The unfortunate Hale was sentenced to a traitor’s death at Tyburn. William Saunderson of Lounsburgh was also cross-examined in 1535 for having said that the king would be ‘destroyed by the most vile people in the world’ and flee the realm, which sounds like a fragment of the Mouldwarp prophecy.4
It was from 1536 and the Pilgrimage of Grace, however, that the prophecy really got wings. The evidence for most of these rumours stems from Cromwell’s attempt to start collecting prophecies and hunting down those who offended against the 1534 Act of Treason by citing them. In 1536–37, three people sent Cromwell books or texts of prophecies to add to his collection – Norfolk, Lord Hungerford of Windsor and Bishop Latimer. Others found themselves under investigation for reciting prophecies. One of those charged in 1536 was Thomas Syson, the abbot of Garendon. He had declared ‘that in the year of Our Lord a thousand and 500 and 35… the church by my book will have a great fall and by the 39… it will rise again and be as high as it ever was’, adding that ‘the eagle shall rise with such a number that the King shall go forth of the realm’ and be slain on his return. He described Henry as ‘the mole… curst of God’s own mouth, for he rooteth up the churches as the mole rooteth up the hills’. Such talk clearly fell into the category of imagining bodily harm to be done to the king and came very close to calling Henry a heretic, schismatic or infidel. Themes of the prophecy also emerge in the examination of William Todd, the prior of Malton, who was charged with inciting the rebels of Sir Francis Bigod and John Hallom’s revolt with prophecies in early 1537. He had said that the king ‘should be fain to fly out his realm’ and, returning, would give up two thirds of the land, to settle on one third of it. Richard Bishop’s version described Henry as a mole who would be ‘subdued and put down’, leaving the land to be fought over by three kings. Finally, in late 1537, John Dobson, the vicar of Muston, was tried for repeating certain prophecies against the king. The theme of the king being driven from the land and returning to a third part of it was reiterated here, with the addition, like Thomas Syson, that the eagle (the Emperor) ‘should spread his wings over all this realm’ and the dun cow, a symbol for the Pope, ‘should jingle his keys and come into this realm and set it in the right faith again’. For saying these things, Dobson became yet another victim for the executioner in 1538.5
Cromwell’s investigations convey how seriously the establishment took these prophecies. It was believed, with good reason, that they encouraged English subjects to rebellion. One document which attests to both their power and to government attempts to diminish them is a poetic account of the Pilgrimage of Grace called ‘The Fall and Evil Success of Rebellion’, which was written by an evangelical Yorkshire schoolmaster called Wilfred Holme in 1537. Holme devoted the final section to tackling one of the Pilgrims’ beliefs by attempting to prove that Henry VIII was not the Mouldwarp, because he was not the sixth king after John nor cowardly, caitiff or hairy:
The prophecy of the Mouldwarp, declareth he shall be
A Caitiff, a Coward, with an elderly skin:
But is he a Caitiff, when plainly we may see
His portraiture and vigour a very Herculine?
And is he a coward the truth to define,
When in France and in Scotland his noble chivalry,
And in many mo[re] so gloriously doth shine,
That he is accounted a gem in activity?
However, Holme’s reasoning does not seem, in the years after the Pilgrimage of Grace, to have stopped people continuing to apply the appellation of Mouldwarp to Henry. By 1542, the government was so concerned about the identification of Henry VIII with the Mouldwarp that a law was passed against the communication of such prophecies, under threat of death and forfeiture of goods. Crucially, given the identities of the prophesiers, there would be no benefit of clergy or sanctuary. All the way up until Henry’s death, the authorities continued to try to scotch the rumours by confiscating books of prophecy and imprisoning offenders.6
The resurgence of this ancient prophecy and its levelling against Henry VIII suggests an important shift in perspective: from the splendid young king of 1509, Henry was now, for the first time, seen as an evil king, cursed by God, who should be driven from his land. From 1536, clerics and, increasingly, laymen, like many of the Pilgrims, were calling Henry ‘Mouldwarp’. Hale’s 1535 denunciation focused on Henry’s pride, greed and lust and reacted to Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and the Act of Supremacy. From 1536, the new emphasis was, above all, on the ‘rooting up’ and despoliation of the church, seen in the suppression of the monasteries. By claiming as a prophecy the ‘great fall’ of the church in 1535, a barely veiled reference to Henry’s Act of Supremacy, the prophesiers brought weight to their auguries that the church would rise again by 1539, and the Pope would put England back ‘in the right faith again’. They also foretold an invasion by the emperor, who would defeat the king and drive him from the realm. From this point on, the government would have to battle the resurgence of this prophecy, and others similar, until Henry’s death. In some ways, the Mouldwarp prophecy marked a ‘before’ and ‘after’ for Henry: it signified the transition from Henry VIII being thought of as a splendid young king, to conjecture that he had become a tyrant.
CHAPTER 17
Courtly Dissent
The Pilgrims of Grace were not the only ones covertly expressing their reservations about the king’s behaviour in 1536. At much higher levels of society, there were those who, with even more caution and circumspection, voiced their concerns. Chief among them was the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt. He had been one of the group of courtiers arrested in May 1536 as part of Queen Anne’s entourage. His verse of the 1520s suggests an early flirtation, courtship or even relationship with Anne Boleyn, but in 1536 he escaped execution because there was little evidence of any recent indiscretions and, perhaps more importantly, because Cromwell may have acted on his behalf, at the behest of Wyatt’s father. So instead of dying with the others, Wyatt had probably watched the executions on Tower Hill from his cell and subsequently wrote two poems, ‘Who list his wealth and ease retain’ and ‘In mourning wise’. After his release from the Tower, Wyatt, on the king’s orders, went into exile from the court at his family estate in Allington, and in the poetry he wrote there and subsequently, Wyatt criticizes Henry VIII’s seemingly tyrannical behaviour. One of course needs to tread carefull
y when hunting for the real world of the court in courtly poetry; else, to quote Wyatt himself, ‘sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind’. There was no freedom of speech in this court where words could be treason, and poets’ self-revelation needed to be obscured in esoteric verse never intended for publication. Wyatt, whom the poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, would later describe as ‘A heart, where dread was never so impressed,/To hide the thought, that might the truth advance’, was aware of the danger of speaking candidly and perceptive enough to realize that Castiglione had underestimated the difficulty of honest service to dishonest princes. Yet it is possible to see, in both Wyatt and Surrey’s poetry, glimpses of a sixteenth-century tyrant king.1
Like many of Wyatt’s poems, his satire ‘Mine Own John Poyntz’, composed at Allington in the summer of 1536, was a translation and paraphrase. All translations are to some extent also interpretations, and it is Wyatt’s specific additions to or alterations of the text of his original that are particularly important. ‘Mine Own John Poyntz’ was based on a political satire by Luigi Alamanni which had been published in Lyons in 1532–3. It expresses an aversion to the court – the poet flees it ‘rather than to live thrall under the awe / Of lordly looks’. Such anti-court rhetoric was a common humanist trope and Wyatt had previously written of the ‘brackish joys’ and ‘slipper top / Of court’s estates’, but there is evidence in this poem that Wyatt was reacting to a specific court and, even more so, a specific king.
The speaker in the poem makes it clear that his antipathy is not because he rejects hierarchy or the rule of kings in general:
It is not because I scorn or mock
The power of them to whom Fortune hath lent
Charge over us, …
but in doing so, he signals precisely how that rule is presently enforced –
… of right to strike the stroke
– with a sword. It seems probable that Wyatt’s vision from the Bell Tower on 17 May – the ‘bloody days’ that had broken his heart – came to mind as he wrote these words. Wyatt makes another reference to the executioner’s death in another poem, ‘Stand whoso list’, whose dating is uncertain, concluding that it is preferable to die ‘aged after the common trace’ than ‘dazed, with dreadful face’, words he adds to his Latin source, Seneca. The trouble for the speaker in ‘Mine Own John Poyntz’ is that he finds himself unable to give counsel to one who ignores it –
I cannot frame my tune to feign
To cloak the truth for praise, without desert,
Of them that list all vice for to retain
nor fawn and flatter with the rest: ‘Grin when he laugheth that beareth all the sway, / Frown when he frowneth and groan when he is pale’. That Wyatt uses a singular ‘he’ here is a deliberate alteration from Alamanni’s many ‘masters’ and focuses the attention on a single oppressive ruler. The identity of this ruler becomes clear as the speaker protests that he –
…cannot crouch nor kneel to do such wrong
To worship them like God on earth alone
That are like wolves these silly lambs among.
Even in the context of standard anti-court satire, this was strong stuff because ‘on earth alone’ and the picture of the ravenous wolf among the lambs are both additions to the text by Wyatt and strikingly conspicuous imagery. The first echoes Henry’s adoption of the title of Supreme Head of the Church and is unwittingly similar to Bishop Gardiner’s description of Henry VIII as the image of God upon earth. The second is reminiscent of one of Thomas More’s epithets on tyranny: ‘What is the good king? He is the watchdog, the guardian of his flock, who by barking keeps the wolves from the sheep. What is the bad king? He is the wolf.’ This reference to savagery is matched by the speaker’s insistence that he ‘cannot wrest the law to fill the coffer / With innocent blood to feed myself fat…’, which in the context of the deaths of Anne Boleyn and the gentlemen of the privy chamber seems remarkably close to the bone. Finally, at the climax of the poem, the speaker’s most devastating blow is in his refusal to call ‘The lecher a lover, a tyranny / To be the right of a prince’s reign.’ Wyatt had come perilously close to committing high treason by calling his king a tyrant.2
Surrey, whose eulogy of Wyatt indicates his admiration for the older poet, was to follow suit, though within the confines of biblical and classical allusion. In 1541, Wyatt, back at Allington, wrote a version of King David’s penitential psalms, which Surrey subsequently circulated in holograph manuscript prefaced by one of his own sonnets, ‘The Great Macedon’. The similarities between Henry VIII and David – as wise rulers, close to God – had been emphasized by Henry in his depiction in the miniatures of his private psalter as David. Wyatt had, in his psalms, been circumspect about those less imitable aspects of David’s character – his adultery and tyrannical abuse of royal power – but Surrey’s preface was far less cautious. Here, Surrey explicitly directed the reader’s attention to the example David gave of lustfulness:
Of just David by perfect penitence,
Where Rulers may see in a mirror clear
The bitter fruit of false concupiscence…
The indiscretion of this allusion, and the implications for Henry’s version of himself, were immense. It also puts the opening lines of Surrey’s later poem, ‘Th’ Assyrian king’ into a different light. Was Surrey making reference to his own king when he wrote ‘Th’ Assyrian king, in peace, with foul desire / And filthy lusts that stain’d his regal heart’? Although this poem ostensibly focused on the Assyrian king Sardanapalus, a character conventionally used to symbolise intemperate behaviour, the link between his lusts and the ‘false concupiscence’ of David drew parallels that were dangerous to draw. Cloaked in literary precedent, the poets of Henry VIII’s court were also quietly, but powerfully expressing their disapproval of the king’s increasing despotism.3
CHAPTER 18
Did Henry VIII Become a Tyrant?
Why did it matter that Henry VIII’s subjects had started to call him a tyrant? It mattered because in the sixteenth century, it was one of the worst insults one could use against a king. It was also a statement about Henry VIII’s character and how he had changed. It mattered, perhaps above all, because these mutterings of tyranny among his subjects were not without substance. The actions of Henry in 1536 were not those of a man who was ‘affable and gracious [and] harmed no one’, as he had once been described. From around this time, Henry VIII appears to have become more suspicious, and the government that he commanded more repressive and brutal. He increasingly condemned his enemies to die without due process of law. This was partly a rational response to changed circumstances: after the divorce from Katherine, the break with Rome and Fisher and More’s deaths, Henry VIII did have more enemies. There were plots and traitors, and those continuing their allegiance to Rome could be seen as a dreaded fifth column. There were also external threats: it must have seemed that Francis I and Charles V were poised for invasion and, although the threat of the papal bull was not realized in 1536, it was an ever-present threat that was eventually published in 1538. Nevertheless, Henry’s new enthusiasm for revenge still seems disproportionate, and there was a palpable shift in his personal response to perceived threats. The origin of some of this was pain and age – over time, ill-health combined with age to make him more anxious and insecure, and the constant pain in his leg produced by his ulcer made him increasingly irascible. It is after this stage that the records start to speak of the king’s displays of bad temper. More serious, as we shall explore below, was the way Henry now reacted to alleged betrayal or treason. While it is impossible to prove, the timing and nature of this change in his behaviour makes it seem likely to be the result of an aggrieved, overblown and readily mobilized sense of betrayal in the light of Anne Boleyn’s apparent adultery and later, the Pilgrimage of Grace. Henry had become markedly more distrustful and despotic – in short, a tyrant.1
Being a Tyrant
Calling Henry VIII a tyrant has, over the intervening years, raised al
l sorts of issues – and hackles. The doyen of Tudor political history, G. R. Elton, argues tirelessly that Henry VIII’s rule was constitutional and limited, maintaining the exclusive legislative authority of parliament and preserving the principle of the superiority of the king-in-parliament over the king alone. In addition, Elton and others have pointed out how dependent the king was on the cooperation of the nation, as the Pilgrimage of Grace tellingly shows. Steven G. Ellis, analyzing the reprisals that Henry took against a rebellion in Ireland in 1534, says they were necessarily limited in order not to alienate the local community and argues that this means ‘Henry VIII was so far from establishing a despotism that he could not even be sure of enforcing undoubted rights’. Both historians have pointed to how Henry’s actions conformed to the rule of law, although both also admit that there were a few ‘notorious examples’ of ‘acts of doubtful legality’. It is absolutely true that Henry VIII was often painstaking in his adherence to the letter of the law. But as several scholars have pointed out, that is not necessarily incompatible with tyranny. Even Elton concludes that in the sixteenth century, the rule of law permitted horrors.2
1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII Page 16