Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  As the second divorce trial neared its abortive end, the duke of Suffolk had expressed contempt at Wolsey’s powerlessness to do the king’s bidding. Wolsey replied that he was but a ‘simple cardinal’. It was a humbling admission. Henry had no time for such creatures. Throughout his reign, Henry had been able to maintain his independence from Rome and even be seen as superior to it. Had he not taken the moral leadership of Christendom as the bringer of peace? If the pope was supposedly an equal partner and Henry supreme in his own kingdom, Wolsey’s weakness had exposed it all as a sham. This failure cost him his job as the king’s minister, and it would have cost him his head, if he had lived longer. Wolsey died cursing Anne for causing his downfall, and predicting the ruin of the Church.

  Before he fell, Wolsey warned the pope that if the divorce was blocked, Henry would be forced ‘to adopt those remedies which are injurious to the Pope, and are frequently instilled into the King’s mind’. The refusal of Rome to deal with Henry honourably meant that ‘the sparks of that opposition here, which have been extinguished with such care and vigilance, will blaze forth to the utmost danger of all’. This was an allusion to the Lutheran heresy, which was flourishing in Germany and the Low Countries and creeping into England, despite government repression of heretics and the public burning of heretical books. And there was no secret as to who had ‘instilled’ such radical ideas in Henry’s mind. Blocked in Rome, Anne Boleyn, who was a Lutheran sympathizer, encouraged Henry to turn to Rome’s English opponents.

  Anne was an avid reader of heretical books that had been banned by the orthodox and loyal Catholic king. But these blasphemous books became increasingly appealing to Henry. When a radical clergyman was arrested for distributing Lutheran tracts and William Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible, Anne stepped in to save him. It was a crucial moment. For not only did Anne protect heretics, she also brought their books to her lover’s attention. One of them, Tyndale’s Obedience of the Christian Man, had a particular relevance for him. As the books of Kings and Romans in the Bible made clear, it was kings whom God ordained with His power, not priests. Kings had rights as spiritual leaders. Such an argument flattered Henry’s ambition. Kingship gave him a special place in Christendom, but that God-given authority had been usurped through the centuries by others. ‘This is a book for me and all kings to read,’ he declared, animated by this new vision of kingship. That might be true, but Henry needed more: he needed to find a way round the long-acknowledged authority of the pope, an authority that, a few years earlier, he had defended to the hilt.

  It’s not what you know but who you know, we’re told. In the case of Thomas Cranmer it was both. When the divorce crisis began, Cranmer was an obscure theology don at Cambridge. But in the summer of 1529, a chance meeting with two Cambridge acquaintances brought Cranmer to the notice of Henry and Anne. The consequences transformed Cranmer, his world and ours.

  For Henry, Cranmer insisted, had been going about the divorce in the wrong way. He had been treating it as a legal matter. But it wasn’t: it was moral. And in morals the Bible supplied absolute answers as to what was right and what was wrong. And there were experts who knew which was which – they were university theologians, like Cranmer himself.

  Let Henry only consult the universities, therefore, and he would have a clear, unambiguous verdict in favour of the divorce which even Rome and the pope would have to recognize.

  ‘That man hath the sow by the right ear,’ the king exclaimed. Henry was already coming to believe that the pope was not the sole judge in Christendom. Now Cranmer had confirmed it with all the weight of his theological scholarship. Immediately, the canvass of university opinion began, starting, like so many new ideas, in Cambridge itself. Cranmer had thought that it would be high minded and straightforward. In fact both sides played dirty and used every device known to the academic politician: rigged committees, selected terms of reference and straightforward bullying and bribing. But after two days toing and froing, the university delivered the verdict that Henry wanted. Cambridge would be on the side of the winners in Tudor England.

  With Cambridge and (more reluctantly) Oxford secured, Henry’s envoys set out for the Continent to pit the arguments of the king of England against the authority of the pope. In universities across Europe they bribed, cajoled and threatened theologians to give a verdict in Henry’s favour.

  Over the next few years the whole power of the Tudor state was to be thrown against Rome and Catherine. But Catherine wasn’t without her defenders. One of the boldest was her chaplain, Thomas Abell, who combined the very different roles of scholar and man of action.

  In the winter of 1528, Henry sent Abell on a mission to Catherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V, in Spain, where Abell played the desperately dangerous game of double agent. Outwardly he was working for Henry; secretly he was undermining the king’s whole strategy on Catherine’s behalf. Mission accomplished, Abell returned to England, where he quickly emerged as Catherine’s most effective and outspoken scholarly propagandist.

  Abell called his principal work, with magnificent defiance, Invicta Veritas, ‘truth unconquered and unconquerable’. In it he attacked the verdict of the universities which provided the whole intellectual basis of Henry’s case. The attack struck home, as the king’s infuriated scribbles throughout the book show. At one point, Henry’s irritation actually overcomes his scholarship and he scribbles in the margin in mere English: ‘it is false’. But by the time he’d finished, Henry’s composure had recovered sufficiently for him to deliver his damning verdict on the book in portentous Latin, on the title page. ‘The whole basis of this book is false. Therefore the papal authority is empty save in its own seat.’

  Not even that magisterial royal rebuke was enough to shut Abell up. Instead, it took the full weight of the law. He was twice imprisoned in the Tower, where he carved his name and bell symbol on the wall of his cell, and was eventually executed as a traitor in 1540. Even so, Abell’s courage proved fruitless. As learned opinion in England swung in his direction, Henry became bolder. He now asserted that, by virtue of his God-given office, the king of England was an ‘emperor’. As such, he was subject to no authority on Earth, not even that of the pope. When the papal nuncio came to Hampton Court to protest, the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and the earl of Wiltshire told him that ‘They cared neither for Pope nor Popes in this kingdom, not even if St Peter should come to life again; that the king was absolute both as Emperor and Pope in his own kingdom.’

  Once Henry had been the stoutest defender of papal authority. But that had changed with the divorce, which had blown open the ambiguities of the monarchy’s relationship with Rome. Now the achievement of his most fervent hopes for Anne and for an heir depended on the idea that religious truth was to be found not in Rome but in the Bible. Rome instead was the obstacle that had delayed his divorce for five long years. It was the enemy that stood between him and Anne.

  But what of the pope himself ? Here again, the Bible spoke. For there were no popes in scripture, but there were kings. And it was kings, Cranmer and his radical colleagues argued, who were God’s anointed, ordained by Him to rule His Church on Earth. The idea appealed to Henry’s thirst for glory. It offered a means to cut the Gordian knot of the divorce, and it even promised to make Henry, not the pope, heir to the power and status of ancient Roman emperors.

  It was intoxicating. Henry now stood on the threshold of a decision that would transform the monarchy and England utterly, and for ever.

  IV

  On 19 January 1531, Convocation, the parliament of the English Church, met in the chapter house of Westminster Abbey. It faced an unprecedented charge of exceeding its spiritual authority. Henry offered it pardon, in return for £100,000. Fatally, the clerics agreed to pay. Having forced them to admit their error, Henry increased his price: the clergy must acknowledge that the king was ‘sole protector and also supreme head of the Church in England’ with responsibility for the ‘cure of souls’ of his subjects. Ove
r the next two weeks they fought that demand word by word and letter by letter.

  Finally, subject to overwhelming royal pressure, the archbishop of Canterbury proposed that Henry should be accepted as Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England ‘as far as the law of Christ would allow’. His announcement was greeted with a stunned silence, which the archbishop ingeniously took to mean consent. The weasel words ‘as far as the law of Christ allows’ meant what anybody wanted them to mean, and the next year they were dropped. Until then, the pope had still been acknowledged as nominal head of the international Church. But Henry’s new direction was radical. The pope was left as a sort of figurehead, but kings in their realms held a power directly from God. Also, in 1532, the House of Commons, having been given the green light by Henry’s council, submitted a provocatively worded petition against the Church’s remaining independent legislative power. This was a step too far and Convocation repudiated the arguments of the petition with outrage.

  Their reply was brought before the king, who reacted by screwing up the pressure. On 10 May, he ordered the clergy to submit to royal authority: all new clerical legislation would in future be subject to royal assent and existing law would be examined and annulled by a royal commission. This was a direct order from the king. Nevertheless, the clergy persisted in their defiance, citing scripture in defence of their rights and privileges against secular interference. The king’s response was a hammer-blow. He summoned a delegation from Parliament and uttered those famous and emotive words: ‘well beloved subjects, we thought that the clergy of our realm had been our subjects wholly, but now we have well perceived that they be but half our subjects, yea, and scarce our subjects: for all the prelates at their consecration make an oath to the Pope clean contrary to the oath they make to us’.

  In effect, Henry was accusing the clergy in its entirety of treason for giving oaths of loyalty to someone other than the king. In the face of this, Convocation had little choice but to surrender. On 15 May, it caved in, and gave up its independence. Parliamentary statute would dot the i’s on Henry’s new title of Supreme Head. But all the crucial steps had been taken. Henry had also broken Magna Carta and the first clause of his own coronation oath, by which he had sworn that the Church in England should be free.

  And he had become a bigamist as well. In October 1532, Anne finally gave in and slept with Henry. By Christmas she was pregnant, and in January 1533, in strictest secrecy, Henry married her, despite the fact that Catherine was still legally his wife. A solution was now urgent. If Henry’s second marriage was not declared valid, then the child (a boy if all was well) would be a bastard. The future of the Tudor dynasty would once again be in danger. The next month, Cranmer was made archbishop of Canterbury. He was placed in the uncomfortable position of having to swear loyalty to the pope, even though his purpose, as archbishop, was to implement the divorce and complete the break with Rome. ‘I did not acknowledge [the pope’s] authority’, he swore in a secret disclaimer, ‘any further than as it is agreed with the express word of God, and that it might be lawful for me at all times to speak against him, and so impugn his errors, when time and occasion should serve me.’

  Time and occasion arrived very soon. Cranmer derived his authority from Henry, God’s representative in England, not the pope, despite the oath he had made. It was Henry, in this capacity, who gave him permission to determine the validity of his marriage to Catherine, ‘because ye be, under us, by God’s calling and ours, the most principal minister of our spiritual jurisdiction within this our realm’.

  A new trial was held at Dunstable Priory in Bedfordshire. Catherine was not represented, and crucial documents were missing. This did not matter. Using the verdict of the universities, Cranmer ruled the first marriage void and upheld Henry’s marriage to Anne. There would be no appeal to Rome. After seven years, Henry had the woman and queen he wanted. The London crowds grumbled, Charles V was furious and the pope eventually excommunicated the king. But Henry and Anne defied them all.

  Henry’s second marriage and its intellectual foundation in the Act of Royal Supremacy, which finally passed into statute in November 1534, were profoundly divisive. Some opposed them viscerally because they hated Anne or loved the old Church. Others were more nuanced and, subtlest of all, as befits the man who warned Henry about exaggerating the pope’s powers when the king wrote the Assertio, was Henry’s old friend and counsellor, Sir Thomas More. Opponents of whatever sort were whipped into line by laws, which required them to swear oaths upholding the new settlement. They had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Royal Supremacy. They also had to swear to the Act of Succession, which declared that Henry and Anne’s baby daughter Elizabeth was the true heir. The implications went deeper than merely ratifying the king’s marital and dynastic decisions. By agreeing, the country was being made to acknowledge that the break with Rome was permanent, and to assent to it. To refuse the oath meant treason and death. Thomas More was still loyal to the papacy, and he knew that his conscience forbade him to take the oath.

  Thomas More was imprisoned in steadily worsening conditions in a cell in the Tower for over a year. But when, on 1 July 1535, he was removed for his trial at Westminster Hall, it looked as though he might escape with his life. More now did what he had hitherto steadfastly refused to do and spoke his mind. He could not be guilty, he said, because the English Parliament could not make Henry VIII Supreme Head of the Church, for the common consent of Christendom, of which England was a tiny part, gave that title to the pope and had done for over a thousand years. The judges reacted with consternation to the force of More’s argument. But the Lord Chief Justice recovered the situation with a characteristic piece of English legal positivism. English law was what the English Parliament said it was, he asserted. More was condemned and beheaded on 6 July.

  Working with Parliament rather than against it, Henry had hugely outdone his father. He had invested the so-called Imperial Crown with a truly imperial authority over Church and state. He would even get his hands on more land and money than the ravenous Henry VII could have dreamt of, and he got it by plundering the wealth of the Church.

  Henry’s personal authority over the Church gave him access to incredible riches. There were about five hundred monasteries scattered over England, some desperately poor but many rich and well run, and maintaining a thousand-year-old tradition of prayer, work and learning. But a change of intellectual fashion away from monasticism made them vulnerable, and their collective wealth made them tempting. So in 1536, the process of dissolving the monasteries began. At first, the objective was presented as reform. The habits of the religious community were investigated and vices and irregularities were found, many petty and some serious. In the guise of enforcing the rules, all the smaller monasteries and abbeys were dissolved and ransacked. But it soon turned to outright abolition: the zeal of the investigators ensured that abuses were found in every aspect of monastic life. By 1540 the last abbey had gone and the crown had accrued a fortune. The monks were pensioned off and their lands, buildings and treasures confiscated. A few abbeys were retained as parish churches or cathedrals, but most were not. They were stripped of the lead on their roofs, the gold and jewels on their shrines, and left to rot. It was desecration and sacrilege on the grandest scale.

  It provoked shock, outrage and, finally, open revolt. If the full implications of the Supremacy were not fully appreciated at the time, the spoliation of the monasteries made real the break with Rome and the change in the nation’s religious life. And it was too much for many. The result was that, in the autumn of 1536, Henry faced the worst crisis of his reign, the rebellion known as the ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’. The first uprising was in Lincolnshire, and spread quickly across the north of England. Under their banner of the Five Wounds of Christ, noblemen and peasants joined together, demanding the restoration of the monasteries and the return of the old religion. Monks and priests played a leading part in the revolt, preaching incendiary sermons and even wearing armour. Adam Se
dbar, abbot at Jervaulx Abbey, wasn’t one of them. Instead, when the rebel hordes turned up at the gates of his monastery, he fled to the surrounding moorland. But the threat to burn down his monastery forced him to return, however reluctantly, and join the revolt.

  Secure in their control of the north, the formidable, well-disciplined rebel army marched south. By the time they reached Doncaster, only the king’s much smaller forces stood between them and London and, perhaps, Henry’s throne.

  Scawsby Leys, now an unprepossessing track, was once the line of the Great North Road where it crosses the broad plain of the northern bank of the River Don. And it was here at dawn on the morning of 26 October that the rebels called a general muster of their troops. The flower of the north was there, and when the final count was taken they numbered 30,000 men with another 12,000 in reserve at Pontefract. It was the largest army that England had seen since the Wars of the Roses, and it wasn’t the king’s. But even though the rebels faced only 8000 of Henry’s forces, they chose to negotiate. They persuaded themselves that the attack on the Church was the work not of the king but of his wicked advisers such as Cranmer. They were also double-crossed by the king’s representative. He promised them pardon and, believing him, the huge rebel army dispersed.

  But a few months later, a new minor revolt in the north gave Henry the excuse he needed to break his promises and exact revenge. The leaders of the revolt were arrested and sent to London for trial. Henry was especially severe on clerics who had been involved, even when, like Abbot Sedbar of Jervaulx, they had been coerced into joining the revolt. Sedbar was arrested with the rest and sent to the Tower. Then he was tried, condemned and saw Jervaulx Abbey confiscated. The aristocratic leaders of the revolt were beheaded, but the rest, including Sedbar himself, suffered the full horrors of hanging, drawing and quartering. Henry’s Supreme Headship of the Church, which had begun in the name of freeing England from the papal yoke, was turning into a new royal tyranny, to be enforced in blood.