Yet all was not well within the royal palace. The unanticipated birth of a daughter, and the emergence of a royal mistress, made it plain to Anne Boleyn that her position was not as secure as it once had been. At a banquet she told a French envoy that she dared not speak as freely as she wished ‘for fear of where she was, and of eyes that were watching her countenance’. The royal court was a fearful and suspicious place, full of whispers and devices. She knew also that she was far from popular with the people. Her time of lamentation would soon come.
7
The king’s pleasure
The pace of religious change was quickened by the king’s statutes against the pope. Henry wanted no innovations in belief or in worship, but his first measures would surely lead to others. The papacy was the keystone of the arch of the old faith; once it was removed, the entire structure was likely to weaken and to fall. The emergence of a national Church would in the end result in a national religion. A radical preacher, Hugh Latimer, had been intoning in Bristol against ‘pilgrimages, the worshipping of saints, the worshipping of images, of purgatory’; but he had also been a prominent supporter of the separation from Katherine, and in 1533 Cromwell enlisted him in the court’s service. Latimer was soon dispatching preachers of his persuasion to several parts of the country. It was enough for Henry’s purposes that they were opposed to the pope, but they advocated more radical measures in other aspects of devotion. So the causes of religious reform and of the royal supremacy were associated.
Some occasions of iconoclasm were also reported. John Foxe, the author of Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Dayes, Touching Matters of the Church, more commonly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, records that in 1531 and 1532 religious images were ‘cast down and destroyed in many places’. The rood – the image of Christ on the cross that hung between the nave and the chancel – was seized from the little church of Dovercourt, a village in Essex. It was then carried for a quarter of a mile before being burned ‘without any resistance of said idol’. Since the rood was reported to have the miraculous power of keeping the door of the church open, this was a signal defeat for those who venerated it. Three of the perpetrators were apprehended and hanged.
In the autumn of 1533 it was reported that statues were being thrown out of churches as mere ‘stocks and stones’; the citizens and their wives pierced them with their bodkins ‘to see whether they will bleed or no’. These were not simply incidents of random destruction. It was said that if you take off the paint of Rome, you will undo her. There must have been some who saw religious imagery as one of the instruments of their slavery, but many people also regarded the gilded statues and paintings as an affront to the poor. ‘This year,’ an Augustinian canon wrote in 1534, ‘many dreadful gales, much rain, lightning, especially in summertime, and at odd times throughout the year; also divers sudden mortal fevers and the charity of many people grows cold; no love, not the least devotion remains in the people, but rather many false opinions and schisms.’ The times were out of joint. Henry was denounced by some as the Mouldwarp of English legend who would be ‘cursed with God’s own mouth’.
Parliamentary work had still to be done in matters of religion. At the end of 1533 the royal council was meeting daily in order to prepare policy, and summoned several learned canonists for their advice. Parliament was called and assembled at the beginning of the new year. It sat for the first three months of 1534, during the course of which it confirmed and ratified all of the measures proposed by the king and his council. The Submission of Clergy Act recognized the previous submission of the clergy; the Absolute Restraint of Annates Act prohibited the sending of moneys to the pope and concurred with the election of bishops; the Dispensation and Peter’s Pence Act confirmed that the archbishop of Canterbury was now in charge of dispensations from canon law.
In March 1534 Pope Clement VII decreed that the king’s first marriage to Katherine was still valid, thus consigning Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth to oblivion. It is reported that Henry took no account of it. Yet in retaliation the pope’s name was removed from all prayer books and litanies; it was further ordered that it should be ‘never more (except in contumely and reproach) remembered, but perpetually suppressed and obscured’. If the pope was ever mentioned at all, it was only as the bishop of Rome. This is the period when the word ‘papist’ became a term of contempt. In the winter of that year a priest, supporting the royal supremacy, fashioned an image of the pope out of snow; 4,000 people came to watch as it slowly melted away.
Just days after the papal decision an Act of Succession was passed by parliament, by which the royal inheritance was settled on the children of Anne Boleyn. Yet the Act was also enforced by an oath, whereby every person of full age was sworn to defend its provisions. It was in effect an oath of loyalty, so that any refusal to swear was deemed to be an act of treason. It passed through parliament after some debate, and the removal of certain ambiguous words, but there is no doubt that it was generally supported. Such was the measure of co-operation with the king, in fact, that a new subsidy Act guaranteed him revenue from taxation in times of peace as well as war. So the Commons supported him; the nobility supported him, or at least did not speak out publicly against him; the bishops supported him, albeit with secret doubts and reservations. A popular phrase of the time was that ‘these be no causes to die for’. Two men, in particular, refused to follow this advice.
Yet there was genuine fear, with some people denounced for speaking ill of the king and his new marriage. They could now be condemned as traitors. One villager complained that if three or four people were seen walking together ‘the constable come to them and will know what communication they have, or else they shall be stocked’. A fragment of a conversation is recorded in a court document: ‘Be content, for if you report me I will say that I never said it.’ Erasmus wrote that ‘friends who used to write and send me presents now send neither letters nor gifts, nor receive any from any one, and this through fear’. He went on to say that the people of England now acted and reacted ‘as if a scorpion lay sleeping under every stone’. Between 1534 and 1540 over 300 executions were ordered on the charge of treason. A large number of people fled the realm.
Thomas Cromwell himself took up the investigation of those who were accused. A letter from him to a priest in Leicestershire stated: ‘The king’s pleasure and commandment is that, all excuses and delays set apart, you shall incontinently upon the sight hereof repair unto me . . .’ It was one of many unwelcome invitations. To speak of a surveillance state would be anachronistic and wrong, but it is apparent that Cromwell and his agents had created an effective, if informal, system of control. ‘I hear it is your pleasure,’ one lord wrote, ‘that I should go into the country to hearken if there be any ill-disposed people in those parts that would talk or be busy any way.’ There was in any case no sense of privacy in the sixteenth-century world; men commonly shared beds, and princes dined in public. The individuals of every community were under endless scrutiny from their neighbours, and were subject to ridicule or even punishment if they breached generally accepted standards. There was no notion of liberty. If it was asked, ‘May I not do as I wish with what belongs to me?’, the answer came that no man may do what is wrong. In every schoolroom, and from every pulpit, the virtue of obedience was emphasized. It was God’s law, against which there could be no appeal.
The clergy were asked to supervise their parishioners, and the local justices were supposed to watch the bishops to see if they ‘do truly, sincerely, and without all manner of cloak, colour or dissimulation execute and accomplish our will and commandment’. ‘Taletellers’ and ‘counterfeiters of news’ were to be apprehended. The Act of Succession was nailed to the door of every parish church in the country, and the clergy were ordered to preach against the pretensions of the pope; they were forbidden to speak of disputed matters such as purgatory and the veneration of the saints. The royal supremacy was to be proclaimed from every pulpit in the land. Henry demanded no more and
no less than total obedience by methods which no king before him had presumed to use. He made it clear that, in obeying their sovereign, the people were in effect obeying God. In the same period the king and Cromwell were reforming local government by placing their trusted men in the provincial councils. In Ireland and Wales and northern England, the old guard was replaced by new and supposedly more loyal men. The country was given order by a strong central authority supervised by Thomas Cromwell, who sent out a series of circular letters to sheriffs and bishops and judges.
The oath attendant upon the Act of Succession was rapidly imposed. The whole of London swore. In Yorkshire the people were ‘most willing to take the oath’. The sheriff of Norwich reported that ‘never were people more willing or diligent’. In the small village of Little Waldingfield in Suffolk, ninety-eight signed with their name, and thirty-five with a mark.
A few refused to sign, however, believing that it was contrary to the will of the pope and of the whole Church. Among these brave, or stubborn, spirits were the Carthusian friars of Charterhouse. It is reported on good authority that the king himself went in disguise to the monastery, in order to debate with them on the matter. Those who stood firm were soon imprisoned. On 15 June 1534 one of the king’s men reported to Thomas Cromwell that the Observant Friars of Richmond were also refusing to conform; ‘their conclusion was,’ he wrote, ‘they had professed St Francis’s religion, and in the observance thereof they would live and die’. And, yes, they would die. Two days later, two carts full of friars were driven through the city on their way to the Tower.
The recalcitrant bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, refused to take the oath and was also consigned to the Tower; from his prison he wrote to Cromwell beseeching him to take pity and ‘let me have such things as are necessary for me in mine age’. A visitor reported that he looked like a skeleton, scarcely able to bear the clothes on his back.
Thomas More was also summoned before Cranmer and Cromwell at Lambeth Palace, where the oath was given to him for his perusal; but he also refused to subscribe. He was happy to swear that the children of Anne Boleyn could succeed to the throne, but he could not declare on oath that all the previous Acts of Parliament had been valid. He could not deny the authority of the pope ‘without the jeoparding of my soul to perpetual damnation’. He too was consigned to the Tower, where he would remain until his execution. Another notable refusal came from the king’s first daughter, Mary, who could not be persuaded to renounce her mother. She was not yet put to the test of formal signature, but her position was clear enough. When Anne Boleyn heard the news she declared that the ‘cursed bastard’ should be given ‘a good banging’. Mary was in fact confined to her room, and one of her servants was dispatched to prison. She soon became ill once more and the king’s physician, after visiting her, declared that the sickness came in part from ‘sorrow and trouble’.
Some last steps had to be taken in the long separation from the pope. The final Act of the parliament, assembled at a second session in November, was to bring to a conclusion and a culmination all of its previous work. The oath of succession was refined, in the light of experience with More and others, and a new Treasons Act was passed that prohibited on pain of death malicious speech against the king and the royal family. It would be treason, for example, to call the king a heretic or a schismatic or a tyrant. Now it was a question of loyalty rather than theology.
A Supremacy Act was also passed that gave legal and coherent form to all of the powers that the king had assumed, with the statement that ‘the king our sovereign lord, and his heirs and successors, shall be taken, accepted and reputed as the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England, called Anglicana Ecclesia’. He could reform all errors and correct all heresies; his spiritual authority could not be challenged. He lacked only potestas ordinis; because he was not a priest, he had no right to administer the sacraments or to preach. He was the Catholic head of a Catholic Church. Thus, in the words of John Foxe, the pope was ‘abolished, eradicated and exploded out of this land’. The king was effectively acting upon a principle of English thought and practice that had first manifested itself in the twelfth century. The opposition between William Rufus and Anselm of Canterbury was similar to that between Henry and Archbishop Warham. One of the servants of the king’s father, Edmund Dudley, had stated twenty years before that ‘the root of the love of God, which is to know Him with good works, within this realm must chiefly grow by our sovereign lord the king’. This veneration of the Crown was one of the abiding aspects of English history.
The frontispiece to Miles Coverdale’s translation of the Bible, published in 1535, displayed an image of the king sitting on his throne beneath the Almighty. Henry holds in each hand a book on which is written ‘The Word of God’; he is giving copies to Cranmer and to another bishop, saying ‘Take this and preach’. In the lower part of the frontispiece the people are shouting ‘Vivat Rex! Vivat Rex!’ while children who know no Latin are saying ‘God save the King!’
In retaliation for the Act of Supremacy the pope issued a bull of interdict and deposition against the king. Henry was now a thing accursed; on his death his body should be denied burial, while his soul could be cast into hell for ever. The people of England would be declared contumacious unless they rose in instant rebellion; their marriages would be deemed illegal and their wills invalid. No true son of the Church should now trade, or communicate, with the island. On the urgent wish of the French king, however, the pope did not publish this general excommunication for three years. At this juncture, foreign politics came to the assistance of Henry.
The more conservative of the bishops believed that Henry would now be the bulwark against German heresy, while Cranmer hoped that the king would be the instrument of reform. In this expectation he was joined by Thomas Cromwell, who knew that his master could now grow rich as well as powerful. A document had been prepared entitled ‘Things to be moved for the king’s highness for an increase and augmentation to be had for the maintenance of his most royal estate’. It was proposed that the lands and incomes of the Church should in large part be diverted to the king’s treasury.
At the beginning of 1535, therefore, a survey of the Church’s worth was undertaken. It was the largest such report since the Domesday Book of the eleventh century. The officials from every cathedral and every parish church, every monastery and every hospital, every convent and every collegiate church, were obliged to open their estate books and their accounts; they were questioned on oath about their income from tithes and from lands. They were asked to give an account of their gold chalices and their silver candlesticks. Within a short time the king knew exactly how much he could expect from church revenue, having already laid down that a tenth of its income should be his. In the process he took much more than the pope ever did.
In the same period Thomas Cromwell had been appointed ‘vicegerent’, or administrative deputy in spiritual matters, precisely in order to supervise the collection of revenue. He was accustomed to questions of church money; it had been he who, under Wolsey, had appropriated the incomes of certain monasteries for the sake of the cardinal’s new college at Oxford. In the summer of the year the ‘visitations’ of the smaller monasteries began in the west of England, seeking out instances of venality and immorality among the monks and abbots; the visitors were given power to discipline or remove recalcitrant clergy, and encouraged the brothers to denounce one another for various sins. It was said of one prior that he ‘hath but six children and but one daughter . . . he thanks God he never meddled with married women, but all with maidens the fairest that could be got . . . the pope, considering his fragility, gave him licence to keep an whore’. It was decreed that no abbot or monk should be permitted to walk outside the walls of the monastery. It was also determined that all religious under the age of twenty-four were to be dismissed. Some novices had appeared at service in top-boots and hats with satin rosettes.
The visitors then turned their attention to the universities, wh
ere it was decided that the learning of the scholastics and the medieval doctors should be abandoned in favour of the humanist learning approved by Erasmus and other reformers. Daily lectures in Latin and in Greek, central to the principles of Renaissance learning, were instituted. The study of canon law was discontinued. If the visitations were primarily concerned with the raising of revenue, they also engaged themselves with matters of religious and educational renovation.
This was also the dying time. The monks of the Charterhouse were the first to be executed, having been arraigned under the Treasons Act just passed by parliament. The jury were not eager to sentence to death such holy men, but Cromwell told them that they would themselves suffer death if they refused. When their prior, John Haughton, heard the verdict he simply said, ‘This is the judgment of the world.’ On 4 May 1535, they were brought in their habits to the scaffold, the first time in English history that clergy have suffered in their ecclesiastical dress. Haughton was the first to die. He was partially hanged before his heart was ripped out and rubbed in his face; his bowels were then pulled from his stomach, while he still lived, and burned before him. He was beheaded and his body cut into quarters. Two more followed, and then three in the next month. Many lords and courtiers were part of the crowd, including two dukes and an earl, and it was reported that ‘the king himself would have liked to see the butchery’. It was an image of his power over the Church and the people.
Tudors (History of England Vol 2) Page 10