Journey Through Tudor England

by Suzannah Lipscomb

  Of all Henry’s wives, Anne was the one who truly survived. She lived the longest and, when she died in 1558, Mary I buried her in a prominent tomb in Westminster Abbey. Anne’s fate rested on that serendipitous moment at Rochester when she found baited bulls more compelling than a bullheaded old man.

  If you’ve time, it’s worth driving past nearby Allington Castle. It’s not open to the public (if you must see its interiors, you will have to get married there), but this thirteenth-century stone-moated castle has an important role in Tudor history as the home of the Wyatts. Sir Henry Wyatt entertained Henry VIII here in the summer of 1527 but, more importantly, it was the birthplace of his son, Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, famed poet of Henry VIII’s court. In the 1520s, Wyatt was probably in love with Anne Boleyn, who lived down the road at Hever, but he was prevented from courting her by his existing unhappy marriage. It is suggested that he is alluding to Anne and Henry’s love for her in his sonnet ‘Whoso list to hunt’ — in which the hunter abandons his vain pursuit of a deer after seeing that her collar indicates that she belongs to Caesar. Perhaps as a result of this flirtation, in 1536 Wyatt was accused of committing adultery with Anne and was imprisoned in the Tower, from where he watched the execution of the other accused men, but miraculously escaped the chop. He retired to Allington to lick his wounds. Allington was also the birthplace of his son, Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger, who led a vast rebellion against Mary I in 1554 [see WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL]. Unlike his father, he could not escape execution, and was beheaded for treason at the Tower.

  ‘I would all the world knew that I have nothing but it is the King’s of right, for by him, and of him I have received all that I have.’

  Christ Church is Oxford’s largest and arguably most impressive college. As well as a seat of learning, it is, or has been, a priory, cathedral, royal court and, more recently, a double for Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films. Its chapel, which is also the City of Oxford’s Cathedral, dates from the twelfth century when it was part of an Augustinian priory dedicated to St Frideswide, Oxford’s patron saint. The college itself was originally called Cardinal College and was founded in 1524 by Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England and Henry VIII’s right-hand man.

  Wolsey was famously born — as his Tudor biographer and gentleman-servant, George Cavendish, described — ‘an honest poor man’s son’ in 1470. His father, Robert, was an Ipswich butcher and cattle-farmer, but Wolsey rose from these humble origins with the help of a degree from Magdalen College, Oxford, and a clerical benefice from the Marquess of Dorset. Under Henry VII, he became a royal chaplain and the Dean of Lincoln Cathedral.

  But it was in Henry VIII’s reign that his rise became truly meteoric. Starting off as the royal almoner and member of the King’s Council, Wolsey’s list of promotions in a few short years reads like a panoply of church hierarchy: in 1513, he was made Dean of York and Bishop of London; in 1514, Bishop of Lincoln and Archbishop of York; in 1515, Cardinal. These appointments brought him great wealth, but his real power was derived from the King’s increasing dependence upon him as Lord Chancellor of England from 1515. Before long, the Venetian ambassador would observe that Henry, ‘leaves everything in charge of Cardinal Wolsey’, while Erasmus noted that he governed ‘more really than the King himself’.

  Cavendish attributed Wolsey’s success to his charisma and ‘special gift of natural eloquence … with a filed [polished] tongue … he was able … to persuade and allure all men to his purpose’. Wolsey was indispensable to Henry because he took the burden of state affairs off the young King’s shoulders, ‘putting the King in comfort that he shall not need to spare any time of his pleasure for any business’. Wolsey also worked tremendously hard. His servant recalls one occasion when he rose at 4 a.m. and worked straight through until 4 p.m., during which time ‘my Lord never rose once to piss, nor yet to eat any meat but continually wrote his letters with his own hands, having all that time his night cap and keverchief on his head’.

  Wolsey’s greatest achievements were in the realm of foreign diplomacy. He negotiated the marriage of Henry’s younger sister, Mary [see ST MARY’S, BURY ST EDMUNDS] to the French King, Louis XII, and managed to position the relatively puny England as a peace broker between the great kingdoms of France and the Holy Roman Empire. His Treaty of Universal Peace in 1518 was his stellar accomplishment and was celebrated in glorious, spectacular fashion at the Field of Cloth of Gold [see LEEDS CASTLE], in a masterly display of organisation that epitomised his consummate skill as a civil servant, politician and diplomat.

  Wolsey, the butcher’s son, lived as befitted his status as a Prince of the Church and was known for the splendour and richness of his court. At his death, he owned over 600 tapestries of incalculable value; when he received the King, or ambassadors, he served up courses of 100 dishes and entertained with ‘masques and mummeries in so gorgeous a sort and costly manner that it was an heaven to behold’. He travelled in the sort of pomp that might seem absurd today, processing astride a mule trapped in crimson velvet and gilt stirrups, dressed all in red and swathed in sable fur, behind men carrying aloft two silver crosses, two silver pillars, the Great Seal of England and his red Cardinal’s hat. Christ Church’s badge still features Wolsey’s hat, and his very hat is preserved in the college library.

  Like his house at Hampton Court, Wolsey intended Cardinal College to proclaim his magnificence, as well as his cultural patronage of, and commitment to, learning. He did it, however, by getting permission from the Pope to suppress St Frideswide’s Monastery in 1524 (well before Henry’s later dissolution), and use the land and funds to build his new college. Parts of the original monastery do still exist, however, and form the oldest parts of the college: the Chapter House, cloisters and refectory.

  The rest of the monastery was demolished to make way for Wolsey’s grand new project. He completed three sides of the enormous Tom Quad (named after the Great Tom bell in Sir Christopher Wren’s later Tom Tower), which at 264 by 261 feet is the largest quadrangle in Oxford. Wolsey also had the kitchens and the Great Hall built. The hall’s original hammer-beam ceiling was replaced in the eighteenth century after a fire. The college was so impressive that Thomas Cromwell proclaimed in 1528 that, ‘every man thinks the like was never seen for the largeness, beauty, sumptuous, curious and substantial building’.

  Not every scheme that Wolsey spearheaded for the King was successful, but Wolsey had always managed to find a gracious way out of trouble until, that is, Henry sought to annul his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. Despite the Cardinal’s best efforts, after the Pope was taken captive by Katherine’s nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and with Katherine’s refusal to accept the authority of the 1529 court at Blackfriars, even the great Wolsey could not figure out a way to secure Henry’s ‘Great Matter’ through the proper papal channels. It is a huge injustice that for one so devoted to furthering his master’s interests, Wolsey became the scapegoat for the incident.

  On 9 October 1529, he was indicted on a charge of praemunire (allegiance to a foreign power), deprived of his position and required to surrender all his properties and possessions, among them, Cardinal College. According to one observer he did this willingly, saying: ‘I would all the world knew that I have nothing but it is his [Henry’s] of right, for by him, and of him I have received all that I have: therefore it is of convenience and reason, that I render unto his Majesty the same again with all my heart.’

  In the following months, though banished from court, there still seemed a chance of his reinstatement. But his rivals, nobles who had resented Wolsey as an ambitious upstart, agitated for his removal. Wolsey was urged to visit his diocese at York, and finally travelled north in April 1530. Events took a turn for the worse in November with a rumour that Wolsey had opened negotiations to acquire a papal order to force Henry and Anne Boleyn to separate. William Walsh, gentleman of the Privy Chamber, was sent to arrest Wolsey on a charge of high treason. But he would never face a trial or punishment. On the journ
ey south to the Tower of London, Wolsey fell ill of dysentery, and died at Leicester Abbey on 30 November 1530. According to Cavendish, in these last days he mused ruefully, ‘If I had served God as diligently as I have done the King, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs.’

  Known for some years as ‘King Henry VIII’s College’, Cardinal was refounded by Henry as Christ Church in 1546. During the Civil War, it became a royalist stronghold and was briefly Charles I’s court. Wolsey’s great quadrangle was completed in gratitude after the restoration of the monarchy.

  Among Christ Church’s alumni are thirteen prime ministers and the great and good of literature and art, philosophy, theology (John and Charles Wesley founded Methodism as students here) and science. In the end, Wolsey achieved his goal of creating a famous place of learning and enduring splendour, even if he himself did not live long to see it.

  ‘We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’

  In the centre of Broad Street in Oxford, outside Balliol College, an unceremonious small cross of cobblestones set in the middle of the tarmac road marks the site of the 1555 and 1556 burnings of the ‘Oxford martyrs’: Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer, formerly the bishops of Worcester and London, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. This inconspicuous reminder, together with the doors of Balliol College that were scorched by the fire and that now hang between the front and garden quadrangles, testify to the ugly side of the revival of Roman Catholicism in England when Mary I came to the throne.

  During Mary’s reign, from 1553 to 1558, 312 people were either burned as the penalty for heresy, or died in prison after being charged with heresy. This scale of punishment for heretics was unprecedented, and ‘Bloody’ Mary’s reign remains the most intense period of Christian persecution in English history.

  Mary aimed to eliminate all religious dissidents, but it is worth noting that she was not alone in believing that there could only be one true faith. Religious tolerance was not considered a virtue in the sixteenth century. All right-thinking Christians believed that it was necessary to purge the world from the polluting influence of heresy or else the spread of these diabolical errors would, they thought, incur divine wrath and threaten to overturn the social and moral order; Protestants and Catholics just differed in their understanding of what heresy was. In the Tudor period, what one believed about what happened during the Eucharist or how one was made right with God could therefore be, literally, life and death issues.

  In Oxford, unlike the big burning towns of London, Canterbury and Colchester, only three Protestants were martyred. But these three were the most important leaders of the Protestant movement and, among them, Thomas Cranmer was pre-eminent. Together, they symbolised everything Mary’s Catholic government thought had gone wrong in England since the break with Rome.

  Cranmer was a reforming cleric, who was constantly mired in the murky world of Tudor politics. He had risen to prominence when he acted for Henry VIII to produce the academic case for the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon, Mary’s mother. It was he who, as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533, declared the marriage to Katherine null and void, and played an important role in the coronation of Anne Boleyn. He also had the unpleasant duty of alerting Henry VIII to Katherine Howard’s infidelity in 1541 [see PONTEFRACT CASTLE]. But his really important work, and lasting legacy, was writing the Book of Common Prayer, the first English prayer book, published in 1549. Modified only marginally since, Cranmer’s words are still spoken in Anglican churches every Sunday.

  When Mary became Queen, he was, understandably, her number one target. His support for the Protestant Queen Jane (Lady Jane Grey) meant that he was tried and found guilty of treason at the London Guildhall in late 1553, but although this came with a death penalty, Mary wanted more: she wanted Cranmer to be officially deprived of his position and declared not only a traitor, but a heretic.

  At first, Cranmer was imprisoned with Ridley, Bishop of London, and Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, in the Tower of London, and then in Bocardo, the Oxford town prison (near present-day St Michael’s Northgate on Cornmarket), although the three were later separated.

  Each of the three faced a disputation (a sort of religious cross-examination) with Cambridge theologians in the Oxford University Church of St Mary the Virgin in April 1554, followed by a trial for heresy in September 1555. In the first, they were interrogated on the question of transubstantiation: did they believe that the bread and the wine actually became the body and blood of Christ after words spoken by a priest? In the second, their entire lives were on trial. They were, of course, found guilty.

  On 16 October 1555, Ridley and Latimer accused of the same crime as Cranmer, were burned in a ditch outside the city gate, in what is now Broad Street. Latimer’s last words were moving and memorable: ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’

  Latimer perished quickly, but poor Ridley suffered in protracted agony. Cranmer was made to watch, and was traumatised by the sight.

  The deaths of his friends, his prolonged isolation from family and supporters and the terror of his own impending death began to tell on Cranmer. He wrote several statements, each varying in their degree of capitulation to the Catholic Church, and most followed by retractions. Finally, when after more than two years of imprisonment, on 24 February 1556, the writ was issued for his burning, Cranmer collapsed and signed a full recantation of his Protestant faith.

  Under normal canon law, his repentance should have saved his life, but Mary was unyielding and the burning was ordered to proceed. To celebrate his reconversion, on the day of his execution, the authorities paraded Cranmer in University Church and permitted him to pray aloud to demonstrate his repentance. Halfway through, though, he started to deviate from his text. Over the resulting commotion, he just managed to make his key message heard: ‘And as for the Pope, I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy, an antichrist with all his false doctrine.’

  He was pulled from the stage and hurried through the rain and streets of Oxford to the stake. To punish the hand that had signed the recantation, Cranmer stretched out his arm into the heart of the fire, repeating, ‘This hand hath offended,’ and then ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit … I see the heavens open and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.’ Cranmer had turned his death, which could have been a great victory for the Catholic Church, into a huge coup for the Protestant cause.

  The blood of the martyrs remained fixed in the English Protestant imagination for centuries. The Victorians built a memorial to the Oxford martyrs sixty-five feet away on St Giles, but it is the door licked by the flames of these human pyres, and the simple stone cross in the ground, that most evoke the terrible sacrifice of these men for the cause in which they so fervently believed.

  ‘Invidiae claudor, pateo sed semper amico.’

  ‘I am shut to envy, but always open to a friend.’

  (Motto over inner door at Loseley.)

  Just outside Guildford, at the centre of miles of picturesque parkland, is a beautiful Elizabethan mansion belonging to the More-Molyneux family. It is a lovely house with many treasures but, above all, it offers a glimpse into one of Henry VIII’s missing palaces.

  An ancestor of the More-Molyneuxes, Sir William More built Loseley House in the 1560s using 860-year-old stone from the ruins of nearby Waverley Abbey. Elizabeth I visited the house on at least three occasions (1577, 1583 and 1591) and the house is suitably elegant inside as well as out.

  It has some gems of Tudor portraiture and craftsmanship. The Great Hall has many important portraits, including those of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Edward VI (wearing the gold collar also worn by Henry VIII in his picture at the WALKER ART GALLERY). Look out, too, for the painted coats of arms on the windows, which are original, from the sixteenth century. In the wood-panelled library, there is an ornately decorated over
mantle bearing the arms and initials of Elizabeth I, while the chimneypiece in the Great Chamber (or drawing room) was elaborately sculpted by French carvers in 1565 from one solid block of chalk. Elizabeth I herself is believed to have sewn the needlework cushions that you can see on the low Elizabethan ‘maid-of-honour’ chairs either side of the fireplace. Also in the Great Chamber, there are portraits of Sir William More, and his relative by marriage, the Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More, and an eighteenth-century image of Anne Boleyn.

  But the real treasures at Loseley Park come from one of the most celebrated English buildings of the sixteenth century, the greatest of all Henry’s palaces: Nonsuch. Henry VIII spent over £24,000 (today, roughly £7.4 million) and nine years building Nonsuch Palace at Cuddington in Surrey, and it was still unfinished when he died. This lavishly decorated hunting lodge was built, as its name suggests, to be a palace nonpareil: a house without equal. As construction started on 22 April 1538, thirty years to the day after Henry VIII’s accession, it was almost certainly intended to be a celebration of his rule, and of his recently born son and heir, Edward.

  It also had another purpose. By this stage, Henry VIII, as he was described in 1548, had ‘waxed heavy with sickness, age and corpulences of body and might not so readily travel abroad, [so] was constrained to seek to have his game and pleasure ready at hand’: because of his painful, weeping ulcer and great weight, the King could not go hunting on long progresses far from London. So he enclosed the chase of Hampton Court, and built Nonsuch within it, to provide such entertainment nearer to home. For Henry, hunting now meant sitting on a horse while his minions scared deer directly into his path!