One result of the King’s attempted balancing act – on the one hand, to have the Pope denounced, his own authority asserted, and to promote moderate reform in the Church; on the other, to keep radical reform and doctrinal disputation at bay – was that people at both poles of opinion could fall foul of the law and find themselves in deep trouble. At one pole were the reformers, such as Frith and Huet, who strayed too far from orthodoxy for their own safety. And at the other were the irreproachably orthodox figures of Bishop John Fisher, Thomas More, and the prior and monks of London’s Charterhouse, who found themselves unable in conscience to accept the rejection of papal authority over the English Church and who were convinced that such a rejection would open the way for all sorts of pernicious heresy to enter.
The link between Henry’s rejection of papal authority and the ideas of the reformers is nowhere clearer than in William Tyndale’s The Obedience of the Christian Man (published in 1528, with the subtitle and how Christian rulers ought to govern), one of the texts which had tempted Richard Bayfield away from the paths of orthodoxy and which had been banned in England in June 1530. Tyndale was ahead of the King’s advisers in setting out Henry’s position in relation to the Church. In this book, which Anne Boleyn herself was said to have presented to the King, Tyndale wrote ‘the first whole-hearted defence of the godly prince’. Setting Henry, as a king approved by God, in a line of descent from the monarchs of the Old Testament, Tyndale maintained that his subjects owed him their entire allegiance, of both body and soul. Early in the text he quoted from the thirteenth chapter of St Paul’s Letter to the Romans: ‘The powers that be are ordained by God. Whoever therefore resists power, resists God’; he underlined this stricture with the words: ‘indeed, even though he is pope, bishop, monk, or friar’.
The London Carthusians, whose monastery the Charterhouse was but a few hundred yards away from St Bartholomew’s Priory (the two foundations being situated at two apexes of a triangle, the third being the Priory of St John of Jerusalem), were in the spring of 1534 required, like everyone else, to swear to the first Act of Succession, assent to which implied agreement with the annulling of Henry’s marriage to Katherine and the legitimization of Henry’s children by Anne Boleyn. They were also instructed not to refer to the Bishop of Rome as Pope, either in public or in private, or to pray for him as Pope. Having initially refused to swear – and the prior (John Houghton) having been imprisoned for a month for his hesitation – they were visited a second time by the commissioners responsible for enforcing submission to the oath, and this time (on 29 May 1534) Houghton and half a dozen of his monks agreed to swear. Clearly anxious to preserve the lives of those entrusted to his care, the prior insisted that the rest of the monks should swear too, which they finally did at a third visit (on 6 June) – encouraged, no doubt, by the presence of men-at-arms. Nevertheless, they succeeded in swearing only conditionally, with the addition of the phrase ‘as far as it is lawful’.
After the coming into force of the Treason Act on 1 February 1535, and the further requirement to swear that the King was supreme head on earth of the Church in England, the situation of the Carthusians became more intensely difficult, and the possibility of prevarication ended.
Having learnt that this oath was compulsory, and reaching the conclusion that he and his monks could not deny papal authority without simultaneously denying their faith in ‘one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church’ – the formula laid down in the ancient creeds of the Church – Prior Houghton arranged three days during which the monks were to confess to one another and be reconciled, in preparation for martyrdom. Cromwell, whom Houghton and two other Carthusian priors had, as a last-ditch attempt to avert disaster, invited to discuss the King’s supremacy with them – how could, asked Houghton, a layman be head of the Church? – committed the priors to the Tower as rebels. They were then indicted at Westminster for ‘treacherously machinating’ to deprive the King of his rightful title. The trial lasted two days, the jury (after some pressure had been applied by Cromwell) returning verdicts of ‘guilty’.
On 4 May 1535 Prior Houghton, Richard Reynolds (a Bridgettine monk of the convent of Syon near Isleworth in Middlesex), John Hale (the Vicar of Isleworth) and the priors of two other Carthusian houses, Augustine Webster and Robert Lawrence, were dragged on horse-drawn hurdles three miles through the streets of London, from the Tower to Tyburn. Thomas More, for whom the Charterhouse had been a spiritual home in his youth, watched them setting out on their arduous journey from a window of his own cell in the Tower. According to his biographer and son-in-law William Roper, he asked his daughter who was visiting him at the time: ‘Dost thou not see, Meg, that these blessed fathers be now as cheerfully going to their deaths as bridegrooms to their marriage?’
At Tyburn, in front of a large crowd that included many nobles and members of Henry’s Privy Council, the five men were hanged, cut down while they were still alive, drawn and quartered. This was the gruesome method of execution especially reserved for traitors – it involved having their hearts cut out, their intestines unwound and pulled out of their bodies (all this while still conscious), and then their limbs, and finally their heads, chopped off. Their dismembered bodies were then parboiled, again in front of the crowd, and their limbs taken away to be displayed in various parts of the city – including Prior Houghton’s arm being nailed to the gate of the Charterhouse itself. Three more members of that house, Humphrey Middlemore, William Exmewe and Sebastian Newdigate, were imprisoned for two weeks in the Marshalsea prison in a standing position, bound to stone pillars with iron collars around their necks. They were likewise hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 19 June.
Three days later, on Tower Hill, John Fisher was beheaded – a concession to his episcopal status and perhaps to his age. On 6 July Thomas More was likewise executed by beheading.
Richard Rich, at this time Solicitor-General, was implicated in the convictions of both Fisher and More, and it is indeed for his alleged part in the condemnation of Thomas More that he has been chiefly remembered. In both cases, his role was to get the accused men to talk with him, with a promise – which he later betrayed – that nothing they said to him would be used against them. He seems to have persuaded Fisher that the King himself wanted to know his true opinion about the changes he was forcing through, without wishing him harm. And so Fisher, trusting in what he believed to be a message from the King (whom he had known well since the latter’s boyhood, having at one time been his tutor), declared his opposition to the royal supremacy and, despite denying that he had done so ‘maliciously’, found himself convicted of treason for what he had said.
The conversation between Rich and the imprisoned More is alleged to have taken place on 12 June 1535, Rich arriving at More’s cell in the Tower, with Sir Richard Southwell and two servants, in order to take away all the prisoner’s books and writing materials. While Southwell and the servants busied themselves parcelling up the books, Rich engaged More in conversation – the type of sparring conversation two lawyers or students of the law might indulge in together professionally, a form of theoretical disputation and oratory with which they would have been familiar from their training in the Inns of Court, when one young barrister would ‘put a case’ to the other, in a practice known as ‘mooting’. As it has been described by Wilfrid R. Prest, the essence of mooting was the ‘formulation and debate of a hypothetical case or set of circumstances involving one or more controversial questions of law’.
On returning from this visit, Rich wrote a report of the conversation for Cromwell, a report which still exists. Rich claimed to have begun by asking More: ‘Supposing that it were enacted by Parliament that I should be king, and that it should be treason to deny the same, what would be the offence if you were to say that I was King?’ More replied that he would be bound by such an Act of Parliament not to deny that Rich was king, but that this was a ‘light case’ and he would therefore put a ‘higher case’ to Rich. ‘Suppose it should be enacted by Parliam
ent that God should not be God,’ said More – would Rich be committing an offence if he refused to affirm that God was not God? Rich’s reply was that this would not be an offence, as it was impossible that God should not be God. And then, claiming to be putting a ‘medium case’, he came to the crux of the matter. ‘You know,’ he said to More, ‘that our lord the King is constituted Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England; and why ought not you, Master More, to affirm and accept him so, just as you would in the preceding case, in which you admit that you would be bound to accept me as king?’ To this More replied (according to Rich) that the cases were not similar, for a king could legitimately be made and deprived by Parliament, and every person present at Parliament was able to give his assent to such an Act, but that no such power existed in regard to primacy over the Church, and a subject could not be bound by something to which he could not legitimately give his assent in Parliament.
More, however, denied at his trial that any such conversation had taken place, protesting that, given how circumspect he had been throughout the years of his disagreement with the King, never having divulged ‘the secrets of his conscience’ about the King’s supremacy and refusing even to explain his motives in resisting, he was hardly likely to have chosen Rich, of all people, to confide in, even in a hypothetical discussion. More’s judgement of Rich’s character is preserved in the account of William Roper. ‘Neither I nor no man else to my knowledge ever took you to be a man of such credit as in any matter of importance I or any other would at any time vouchsafe to communicate with you,’ More is recorded as having said. And he spoke from personal experience: ‘I, as you know, of no small while have been acquainted with you and your conversation, who have known you from your youth hitherto.’
The chalk-and-ink sketch of Rich executed by Hans Holbein the Younger sometime between 1532 and 1543 is strikingly similar in composition to the artist’s earlier drawing and portrait of More. Did Rich long to be like the man in whose downfall he participated? Did jealousy, and a thwarted desire for approval, constitute part of his (probably unconscious) motivation? The sitters are drawn at exactly the same angle, have the same hairstyle, the same beardlessness but shading of the lower jaw, and Rich attempts the same steady gaze, though his eyelids come down slightly lower over his eyes – as though he cannot maintain such steadfastness of intent, or such candour. Where More is all focus, emanating intelligence and willpower, Rich looks somehow lightweight. Where More’s lips are pressed together in determination, Rich’s are slightly petulant. Yet, despite these differences and despite Holbein’s having produced a number of sketches of Tudor dignitaries in a similar profile pose, the impression remains that Rich is deliberately emulating his fallen idol, this man who refused to take him seriously.
Those who might have overheard the alleged conversation offered no corroboration, one way or the other. One of the servants declared: ‘I was so busy about the trussing up of Sir Thomas More’s books in a sack, that I took no heed of their talk.’ Sir Richard Southwell asserted that he too had been otherwise engaged: ‘Because I was appointed only to look unto the conveyance of his books, I gave no ear unto them.’
Either way, Rich does not come well out of this episode: according to one version, he tricked More into uttering opinions that would get him executed and then revealed them to Cromwell; according to the other version, he invented the conversation and committed perjury in helping to ensure More’s conviction. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle – the conversation, as an exercise in mooting, may well have taken place, but in his retelling Rich amended what had been said, particularly as regards the conclusion to the game of putting the case. It has been pointed out that the usual termination of such a game was a so-called moot point – a position that is ‘mootable’ and consequently open-ended – and, according to Rich’s version with its resounding conclusion, this did not happen, making that version even less plausible. But, whatever the truth of the matter, the jury chose to believe Rich and found More guilty of having ‘denied the King’s supremacy, maliciously depriving him of his title’.
Henry’s desire both to assert his royal supremacy and to reform aspects of the Church was evident in the first definition of various doctrines and ceremonies to be issued under the new dispensation – the so-called Ten Articles which were drawn up by Archbishop Cranmer on behalf of the Crown and promulgated in 1536. The Ten Articles are brief. They stipulate that the creeds are to be taken as necessary for salvation, and provide explanations of the sacraments of baptism, penance and the altar, followed by an account of justification (insisting that ‘good works’ were still necessary) and short statements on images, saints, prayers to saints, rites and ceremonies, and purgatory. They were not intended as a full statement of doctrine, but simply dealt with some contentious issues. Their primary purpose, backed up by a royal letter sent to the bishops in January 1536 regretting the preaching of divisive and extreme views, seems to have been to promote conformity among the King’s subjects and to avoid the kinds of ructions being experienced on the continent of Europe. The Ten Articles were succeeded a year later by the first full statement of belief of the Henrician Church, the Institution of a Christian man or Bishops’ Book, containing an exposition of the Creed, the Seven Sacraments, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria, and a discussion of the disputed doctrines of justification and purgatory, and the human origin of the papacy. The Bishops’ Book was uncompromising as to what was expected of faithful subjects: ‘whosoever being once taught will not constantly believe [these articles] … be very infidels or heretics, and members of the devil, with whom they shall perpetually be damned’. Henry’s ecclesiastical policies at this time could certainly not be viewed as endorsing ‘Protestantism’, except in one fundamental respect – the denial of papal primacy. From July 1536 the Act Against Papal Authority had prohibited the extolling, setting forth, maintaining, or defending of the authority of the Pope, whether by writing, ciphering, printing, preaching or teaching. Furthermore, Cromwell had insisted in his Injunctions to the Clergy that every parish priest was to declare at least four times a year in his sermons ‘how the bishop of Rome’s usurped power and jurisdiction having no establishment nor ground by the law of God was of most just causes taken away and abolished’.
It was only five years previously that, in succumbing (briefly) to orthodoxy, James Bainham had been forced to agree that it was an offence to God to keep books prohibited by ‘the Church, the Pope, the Bishop, or the King’, and yet orthodoxy now demanded that the Pope be scrubbed from that list of authority figures. The implications of previous orthodoxies having become heresy, and of heresy having become also a crime of treachery, were played out in the story of the life, and horrific death, of Father John Forest.
John Forest was born in about 1470. Nothing is known of his background or youth, and there are no extant records of his having attended either of the two universities (Oxford and Cambridge), though his contemporaries frequently referred to him as ‘doctor’. By 1512 he was a member of the Observant Franciscan community at Greenwich, where Friar William Peto was the guardian. The Observant wings of the old orders were those which adhered rigidly to the letter of their Rules, rejecting the perceived laxity of modern times. Edward IV had set up the first Observant Franciscan house at Greenwich in 1482; Henry VII obtained papal permission to transfer Franciscan friaries at Canterbury and Newcastle upon Tyne to the Observants; and in 1499 an English province of Observant Friars was created, soon joined by two new houses, Richmond, founded in 1500, and Newark, founded in 1507. With their reputation for austerity, and their siting near the royal palaces of Greenwich and Sheen, the Observant Franciscans served the families of both Henry VII and Henry VIII as confessors, preachers and counsellors. The future Henry VIII was actually baptized in the friary church at Greenwich in 1491, and he had his two daughters baptized there too: Mary in February 1516 and Elizabeth in September 1533 (Bishop Stokesley officiating at this latter event).
According to Lives of the English Martyrs, John Forest was seventeen years old when he entered the monastery at Greenwich. He may subsequently have been sent to Oxford to study theology in the house of the Franciscans without-Watergate. By the early 1530s he was a senior figure in the community at Greenwich, as well as a regular preacher at Paul’s Cross.
Members of the Observant Franciscans, with their close links to the monarchy, were quick to become embroiled in the controversy over the King’s ‘great matter’. On Easter Day (31 March) 1532, Friar William Peto had denounced King Henry’s advisers, referring to them as false prophets, in a sermon he preached at Greenwich in front of the King. Speaking later to the King himself, he told him directly that he was wrong to attempt to divorce Katherine; there were no legitimate grounds for doing so and he was endangering his throne in the process, by fostering opposition from all sections of society. This was not at all what Henry wanted to hear, and there were inevitable consequences for Peto and his fellow preacher, Friar Elston. They were imprisoned and subsequently exiled to Antwerp. From there they continued to militate against the King’s attempts to divorce, writing books about it and getting them imported into England. Thomas Cromwell was kept informed about these activities via Stephen Vaughan, who combined in Cromwell’s service the roles of merchant, diplomat and spy, and this did not bode well for the future of the Franciscan Observants in England.
The Burning Time Page 9