In that summer the king’s ambassadors in Rome declared to the pope that no Englishman could be cited in a foreign court. When Anne Boleyn’s father, the earl of Wiltshire, came as an envoy before the pontiff he refused to kiss the pope’s foot even though it was graciously stretched out to him. In this year Henry himself wrote to the pope expostulating with him for using ignorant counsellors. ‘This truly is a default, and verily a great fault, worthy to be alienate and abhorred of Christ’s vicar, in that you have dealt so variably, yes rather so inconstantly and deceivably.’ He went on to declare that ‘never was there any prince so handled by a pope as your holiness has treated us’. The question at the English court now concerned the best path by which to advance.
The last days of Wolsey were at hand. He was harried north, to his archbishopric of York. The duke of Norfolk advised Thomas Cromwell to ‘tell him if he go not away shortly, but shall tarry, I shall tear him with my teeth’. When he was informed that his proposed school at Ipswich was being deferred, and that the construction of Cardinal College in Oxford had been diverted for the king’s purposes, the cardinal told Cromwell that ‘I cannot write more for weeping and for sorrow’. Yet he still asserted his own power. He set the date for his enthronement as archbishop of York and wrote to the king asking for his mitre and pall. Henry then spoke aloud of his ‘brazen insolence’. ‘Is there still arrogance in this fellow,’ he asked, ‘who is so obviously ruined?’ On 4 November, three days before the planned enthronement, Wolsey was arrested. It was alleged that he had engaged in secret correspondence with the pope and with the French and Spanish sovereigns. There may have been some truth in this, since in his extremity he had sought assistance wherever he could find it, but it is most unlikely that he had committed treason. It is also possible that he was trying to promote the cause of Katherine and to hinder that of the woman whom he called ‘the night crow’.
After his arrest he was taken south at a slow pace, stopping at the abbeys and monastic houses along his route. His once sturdy constitution was by now fatally undermined, and on his journey he was attacked by a violent case of dysentery. It was said to have been brought on by a surfeit of Warden pears, but there were other reasons for his dissolution. The keeper of the Tower, Sir William Kingston, was ordered to meet Wolsey at Sheffield; his destination was now in sight. When Wolsey heard of Kingston’s arrival, he clapped his hand on his thigh and gave a great sigh. His gentleman usher tried to put the best interpretation on the events, saying that Kingston had come to conduct the cardinal into the presence of the king. The cardinal was not convinced. ‘I perceive,’ he said, ‘more than you can imagine or can know. Experience of old has taught me.’
Kingston was then introduced to the prelate and knelt before him. ‘I pray you, stand up,’ Wolsey said, ‘kneel not unto a very wretch, replete with misery, not worthy to be esteemed, as a vile object, utterly cast away.’ Kingston also tried to reassure him, but the cardinal was not to be comforted. ‘I know’, he said, ‘what is provided for me.’ He knew that it would be a traitor’s death, with beheading as the best fate he could expect. His dysentery became more violent still, and by the time he reached Leicester Abbey most of his strength had gone. ‘Father Abbot,’ he said on his arrival, ‘I am come hither to leave my bones among you.’ He was laid in a bed, where he waited for his end. He spoke of the king. ‘He is a prince of royal courage, and has a princely heart; and rather than he will miss or want part of his appetite he will hazard the loss of one half of his kingdom.’ At the stroke of eight in the evening, Wolsey lost consciousness and died. He still lies buried somewhere within the ruins of Leicester Abbey, and a monument stands on the supposed site of his grave. Yet this was more than the passing of an individual life. The fall of Wolsey was intimately associated with the demise of the Church.
6
Old authentic histories
Henry had determined to act on behalf of what he called ‘entire Englishmen’ against ‘Englishmen papisticate’. In the early autumn of 1530 he claimed that fourteen senior clerics, among them eight bishops and three abbots, were guilty of praemunire; they were accused of colluding with Wolsey in his role as papal legate. Only days after the death of the cardinal, the same ‘information’ was filed against all of the clergy of England; they were charged with the offence because they had administered canon law or Roman law in the ecclesiastical courts, a crime which of course they had been committing for many centuries. The Spanish ambassador reported that the bishops and abbots were ‘terrified’. No one understood the workings of this new-found principle, and its interpretation was widely believed to reside only in the king’s head. Parliament was recalled at the beginning of 1531, and at the same time the convocation of the clergy was transferred from St Paul’s to Westminster. Both bodies would be under the king’s thumb.
In this atmosphere of fear and threat it was learned that the king would graciously accept a large sum of money to allay the offences of the clergy. In effect they were being forced to pay a subsidy. The province of Canterbury duly obliged by offering £100,000 but the offer was accompanied by a series of conditions. The bishops and abbots asked for a clear definition of praemunire, in case of future difficulties, and demanded that the Church itself be confirmed in all its ancient privileges as stated in Magna Carta. These proposals seem to have infuriated the king, who did not wish to bargain with his subjects. The invocation of Magna Carta also posed a threat to any unilateral action he might wish to take on religious matters.
So he attacked. In February 1531 he sent five articles to be added to the proposal on the clerical subsidy. In the first of them he called upon convocation to recognize him as ‘sole protector and supreme head of the English church and clergy’. This was the fruit of his reading the ancient sources, suggested to him by Cranmer and others, where the supreme leadership of the Church in England was first bestowed upon King Lucius. In the second article the king proposed the theory that it was he who truly had the ‘cura animarum’ or ‘cure of the souls’ of his subjects. No king had ever proposed such sweeping powers; no king had ever presumed so much.
Consternation ensued among the leaders of the clergy. They may not have had the opportunity of reading Leges Anglorum, as well as the other sources made available to the king, and so Henry’s assumption of sovereignty over the Church was an extraordinary and almost unthinkable innovation. He wished to replace the papacy that had governed the Church for more than a thousand years. And what did he mean by the ‘cure’ or ‘care’ of souls? That was the office of a priest duly ordained.
They were also aware that there would be some intimate connection with the king’s wish to separate himself from Katherine. Of this, too, they could know nothing certain. They could only look on with trepidation. The country, and the capital, were deeply divided on the ‘great matter’. When a minister of the church of Austin Friars in London asked for prayers to be said on behalf of Anne Boleyn, ‘queen’, most of the congregation rose from their seats and walked out. It was said that the women of the country took the queen’s part – all of them, that is, except for Anne Boleyn. The Spanish ambassador wrote that ‘the Lady Anne is braver than a lion . . . She said to one of the queen’s ladies that she wished all Spaniards were in the sea. The lady told her such language was disrespectful to her mistress. She said she cared nothing for the queen, and would rather see her hang than acknowledge her as her mistress.’
Agonized debate now took place among the members of the convocation, torn between their duties to the pope and their loyalty to the king. They also knew that it would be dangerous, and even fatal, to incur the wrath of the sovereign. Yet under the nominal leadership of John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, who had already spoken out on behalf of the queen, they tried to withstand the pressure of the king. In this period Fisher was under severe threat from person or persons unknown. A gun was fired at his episcopal palace beside the Thames, and the shot seemed to have come from the house of the earl of Wiltshire on the other side of the water
; the earl of Wiltshire was of course the father of Anne Boleyn. One of Fisher’s early biographers says that the bishop decided to return to Rochester at the earliest opportunity.
Another odd event increased his alarm. A porridge had been prepared for the bishop’s household, of which several of his servants had partaken. Fisher himself had not been hungry and had not tasted it. In the event one servant, and a poor woman fed out of charity, died; many others became ill. The porridge had been poisoned by the cook, who confessed that he had added laxatives to the food; but he insisted that it was simply a joke, or prank, that had misfired. The king’s reaction was ferocious. He determined that an Act should be passed through parliament rendering murder by poisoning an act of treason, for which the penalty was to be boiled alive. The cook was duly placed in a boiling cauldron at Smithfield. Some at court whispered that Anne Boleyn, or one of her supporters, had persuaded him to commit the crime. Henry may have acted with sudden ferocity in order to remove any such suspicions.
The king’s own advisers were uncertain about the full consequences of his demands upon the convocation, and they were divided into what might be called radical and conservative factions. The Boleyns wished to press forward very quickly. If the king were head of the Church, the pope’s opinion on the matter of the separation would be of no consequence; the marriage with Anne could be duly solemnized. Others feared that a papal interdict, or excommunication of the nation, might bring war with Spain and a general disruption of trade with the Catholic powers of Europe. The king himself was not clear about his future strategy; he was proceeding by degrees, testing his ground with every step.
That is why he came to an agreement with the convocation that seemed to take away the spirit of their submission. After much debate, and much consultation between the archbishop of Canterbury and the king, it was agreed that Henry would be the supreme head of the Church in England ‘quantum per Christi legem licet’ – ‘so far as the law of Christ allows’. Some sources render it as ‘Dei legem’, ‘the law of God’, but the purport is the same. When this proposal was put to the convocation, a general silence followed. ‘Whoever is silent,’ the archbishop told them, ‘seems to consent.’ A voice called out that ‘then we are all silent’. So the proposal was agreed. It was one of the defining moments in the reformation of the Church and opened a schism that has lasted ever since. It also threw into doubt the concept of a united Christendom. The Turks, then pressing down upon the eastern borders of Europe, might have taken comfort from that fact.
Yet the phrase invoking Christ’s law was open to manifold interpretations, and in extreme form might be thought to cancel any spiritual sovereignty that the king claimed. It was not at all clear whether Henry had decided finally to supplant the papacy; he had, as it were, issued a warning to Rome. In any future confrontation, the clergy of England would be bound to him. As everyone knew, no one would in practice be able to defy his authority. Now that he had been granted the money from the clergy, however, he seemed disinclined to pursue the matter – for the time being, at least.
Henry had withdrawn further into a private set of rooms that were known as the ‘privy chamber’, the ‘privy lodgings’ and the ‘secret lodgings’ at his palace in Whitehall, and in Hampton Court. He had now also withdrawn himself from Katherine. She wrote to her nephew that her life was ‘now so shattered by misfortune that no human creature among Christians ever suffered so intense an agony’. Her agony materially affected her daughter, Princess Mary, who in the spring of 1531 fell ill for three weeks with some kind of stomach disorder; her physicians diagnosed it as ‘hysteria’, by which they meant a fault within the womb. When Katherine asked permission to visit her, the king suggested that she should stay with her permanently. At the end of May a delegation from the privy council was dispatched to her, imploring her to be ‘sensible’ in the matter of the separation. She turned upon them with all the fervour of an unjustly maligned woman. ‘I am his true wife,’ she told them. ‘Go to Rome and argue with others than a lone woman!’
Two months later he formally renounced her. In midsummer she accompanied Henry to Windsor, but then without warning he rode to Woodstock after ordering her to stay where she was. Having received an indignant letter from her, he replied in somewhat abusive terms. She had subjected him to the indignity of a citation to Rome. She had turned down the advice of his counsellors. He wanted no more letters. She was removed to the More, a large house in Hertfordshire that had previously belonged to the cardinal; then she was dispatched to Ampthill Castle in Bedfordshire. Her large court remained with her, and she was inevitably seen as the central figure for those opposed to the Boleyns and to the radical religious strategy they pursued. The queen herself became more strict in her observances. She rose at midnight to attend Mass; she confessed and fasted twice a week; she read only works of devotion and beneath her court dress she wore the habit of the third order of St Francis.
A marked signal of the popular mood emerged in the winter of this year. On 24 November Anne had gone with a few others to dine at a friend’s house beside the Thames. The word of her arrival soon spread through the city, and a mob of 7,000 or 8,000 women (or, perhaps, men dressed as women) descended upon the location with the intention of frightening her or seizing her. Fortunately she heard the rumour of their approach and left quickly by means of the river. The king ordered that the whole incident should remain unreported, but the Venetian ambassador had already recorded the event.
The animus against Anne grew. She was commonly known as the ‘goggle-eyed whore’, and the abbot of Whitby was arrested and prosecuted for calling her ‘a common stewed whore’. General excitement and contention arose in the parishes of the kingdom, as the people debated every aspect of the king’s ‘great matter’ in respect of the separation from Katherine and the supremacy of the pope. It is reported that the air was filled with wild rumour and speculation, with talk of witches and devils and stories of saints and apparitions. Thomas Cranmer himself saw a portent in the sky. He observed a blue cross above the moon, together with a horse’s head and a flaming sword. ‘What strange things do signify to come hereafter,’ he wrote, ‘God alone knows.’
In the winter of 1531 a young woman appeared in the role of an inspired prophet forecasting doom. Elizabeth Barton was a young serving girl from Kent who worked in the household of a steward for the archbishop of Canterbury. She had previously been invaded by an unknown ailment and, after some months of suffering, began to fall into clairvoyant trances in which ‘she spoke words of marvellous holiness’. Her reputation began to spread until it was magnified beyond measure; she announced that she had been visited by the Virgin, who had promised her release from suffering on a certain day. On that day she was conducted in a procession of 2,000 people to a chapel of the Virgin, where she fell into a trance; a voice issued from her belly speaking ‘so sweetly and so heavenly’ of religious joy but ‘horribly and terribly’ of sin.
A book of her oracles was sent to the king, who did not take it seriously. An angel commanded her to seek an audience with him, and it seems that she was granted an interview on three separate occasions. In 1528 she had also held a private interview with Thomas Wolsey. For the time being, at least, the king left her alone. But she proved to be more dangerous than he thought. By 1531 her prophecies touched Henry himself. If he divorced his wife he should not ‘reign a month, but die a villain’s death’. He must address himself to three matters, the first ‘that he take none of the pope’s right, nor patrimony from him, the second that he destroy all those new folks of opinion and the works of their new learning [religious reform], the third that if he married and took Anne to wife the vengeance of God should plague him’.
She made other declarations of a similar nature, all of which served only to inflame the people who believed implicitly in divine revelation. A network of priests and friars was now gathered around her, carrying her message in the pulpit and beside the market cross. She began to converse with the courtiers around Katheri
ne; John Fisher wept as he listened to her, believing that he heard the words of God. The young woman was becoming dangerous. As Thomas Cranmer confessed at a later date, ‘Truly, I think, she did marvellously stop the going forward of the king’s marriage by the reasons of her visions.’
More unwelcome words came from the pulpit. On Easter Sunday 1532 a Franciscan friar preached before Henry and Anne Boleyn at Greenwich; Father Peto bravely denounced the king for his behaviour and prophesied that if he should marry Anne he would be punished as God had punished Ahab: ‘The dogs would lick up your blood – yes yours!’ It was fortunate that the friar did not lose his life for imagining the king’s death; instead he was eventually banished from the realm.
Against this background of unrest parliament was once more convened, in which the king determined to continue his campaign against Pope Clement VII. An Act was introduced effectively to cancel what were known as ‘annates’, the payments made to Rome by newly elected bishops and archbishops. The measure was delayed for a year, to be introduced at the king’s discretion; it was in other words a bribe for the pope’s good behaviour. The Act met very strong resistance in the Lords, particularly among the spiritual peers who were deeply concerned about Henry’s ultimate intentions. Yet they were in the minority.
Then the Commons, more compliant to the court’s wishes, presented to the king a long petition containing its grievances against the Church; in particular it questioned the right of the clergy to pass legislation in convocation. The Commons also complained about such matters as the ecclesiastical courts, the trial of heretics and the size of ecclesiastical fees. These were familiar complaints, but they were given added force in the light of the king’s new role as supreme head of the Church.
Tudors (History of England Vol 2) Page 8