The citizens of London were less sanguine about the punishment and many were horrified that monks should suffer in their habits. It was observed that, since the day of their death, it had never ceased to rain. The corn harvest was a failure, yielding only a third of the usual crop. All this was conceived to be a sign of divine displeasure. Yet who now would dare to speak out against the king? Certain noblemen, however, sent secret messages to Spain in an effort to spur an invasion; it was said that the king had lost the hearts of all his subjects.
In a memorandum book belonging to Thomas Cromwell are the following notes:
Item – to advertise with the king of the ordering of Master Fisher.
Item – to know his pleasure touching Master More.
Master Fisher was indeed put on trial in the middle of June, accused of high treason for having said that ‘the king our sovereign lord is not supreme head in earth of the Church of England’. His fate was not averted by the decision of the pope to grant him the red hat of a cardinal. To Henry this seemed to be mere meddling in the affairs of England, and he promised that his head would be off before the hat was on. The hat got as far as Calais.
A jury of twelve freeholders condemned the aged cleric to a traitor’s death, in the manner of the Carthusians, but true to his word Henry commuted the punishment to a simple beheading. Five days later, on 22 June 1535, Fisher was taken to the scaffold; emaciated and ill, he was too weak to walk to the site of execution on Tower Hill, and so he was carried in a chair where before his execution he besought those present to pray for him. ‘I beseech Almighty God,’ he said, ‘of His infinite goodness to save the king and this realm . . .’ His head was taken off at the first stroke, and the observers were astonished that so much blood should gush from so skeletal a body.
The day after the execution the king attended an anti-papal pageant, based upon the Book of Revelation. Such spectacles and dramas were becoming more frequent. The imperial ambassador observed that the king sat retired ‘but was so pleased to see himself represented as cutting off the heads of the clergy that, in order to laugh at his ease and encourage the people, he discovered himself’.
Thomas More followed John Fisher to the scaffold. Four days after Fisher’s death a special commission was established to consider his case. Ever since his imprisonment in the Tower he had been cajoled and bullied by Cromwell, in the hope that he might relent. Cromwell even insinuated that More’s obstinacy, by providing a bad example, had helped to bring the Carthusians to destruction. This proved too much for even his patience to bear. ‘I do nobody harm,’ he replied, ‘I say none harm, I think none harm, but wish everybody good. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith I long not to live.’
The trial was held in Westminster Hall, where he conducted himself with acuity and dignity. But the verdict was never for a moment in doubt. He was convicted of treason and five days later was led to Tower Hill where the axe awaited him. His last words were a jest to the executioner. ‘You will give me this day,’ he told him, ‘a greater benefit than ever any mortal man can be able to give me. Pluck up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thine office. My neck is very short; take heed, therefore, thou strike not awry for saving of thine honesty.’
Katherine of Aragon, witnessing the destruction of those whom she considered saints, sent an urgent letter to the pope with the message that ‘if a remedy be not applied shortly, there will be no end to ruined souls and martyred saints. The good will be firm and suffer. The lukewarm will fail if they find none to help them.’ But no help was at hand. The execution of More and Fisher, together with that of the Carthusian monks, was considered by the Catholic countries of Europe to be an act of barbarism, the Christian princes conveniently forgetting their own savage measures against supposed heretics. There was no Inquisition in England.
In the search for allies, therefore, it became advisable to reach some accord with the Protestant leaders of Germany. In a message to the elector of Saxony, for example, Henry congratulated him for his ‘most virtuous mind’ and declared that the two countries ‘standing together would be so much stronger to withstand their adversaries’. It was hoped that a league of the reforming nations of Europe might then be formed. It was also hoped that the king might be persuaded to sign the Lutheran confession of faith, known as the Confession of Augsburg, that had been drawn up five years before by the German princes. The proposals came to nothing.
The scope of the ‘visitations’ of the smaller monasteries was extended in the autumn of 1535. The visitors had previously confined their attentions to the west of England; when their work was completed there, they moved on to the east and to the south-east before travelling to the north at the beginning of 1536. The speed of their researches did not augur well for their reliability. Yet the visitors continually questioned and investigated the priors, the abbots, the monks and their servants: ‘Whether the divine service was kept up, day and night, in the right hours? And how many were commonly present, and who were frequently absent?’ ‘Whether they kept company with women, within or without the monastery? Or if there were any back-doors, by which women came within the precinct?’ ‘Whether they had any boys lying by them?’ ‘Whether any of the brethren were incorrigible?’ ‘Whether you do wear your religious habit continually, and never leave it off but when you go to bed?’
There were in all eighty-six questions. One prior was accused of preaching treason and was forced to his knees before he confessed. The abbot of Fountains kept six whores. The abbot of Battle was described to Cromwell as ‘the veriest hayne, beetle and buserde, and the arrentest chorle that ever I see’. A hayne was a wretch; a beetle was a blockhead; and a buserde was a stupid person. An arrentest chorle may be described as a thoroughly boorish wretch. The canons of Leicester Abbey were accused of buggery. The prior of Crutched Friars was found in bed with a woman at eleven o’clock on a Friday morning. The abbot of West Langdon was described as the ‘drunkenest knave living’. The visitor, Richard Leyton, described to Cromwell how he had entered the abbot’s lodging. ‘I was a good space knocking at the abbot’s door; no voice answered, saving the abbot’s little dog that within his door fast locked bayed and barked. I found a short poleaxe standing behind the door, and with it I dashed the abbot’s door in pieces . . . and about the house I go, with that poleaxe in my hand, for this abbot is a dangerous desperate knave, and a hardy.’
The visitors also noted the number of shrines and relics that they observed in the course of their labours; they marked them under the heading of ‘superstitio’, a sign of the direction in which Cromwell and his servants were moving. At the abbey of Bury St Edmunds, for example, they found one of the stones with which St Stephen was killed and one of the coals with which St Lawrence was roasted. In the same establishment they came across the skull of St Petronilla that people sick of the fever placed on their heads. The monasteries were therefore considered to be beds of papistry, and it was said that the monks were in a sense the reserve army of Rome. Thomas Cromwell described them as ‘the pope’s spies’. If there was no evidence of wrongdoing, the visitors merely concluded that the monks were engaged in a conspiracy of silence. When sins are being actively looked for, they can always be found.
A parliament was called in February 1536, the last session of a body that had been assembled seven years before. It has since become known as the Reformation Parliament, and can perhaps be called the most important in all of English history. The king came into the House of Lords with a ‘declaration’ about the state of the monasteries, no doubt based upon the various reports of the visitors. Hugh Latimer, appointed bishop of Worcester in the previous year, was present on the occasion and records that ‘when their enormities were first read in the parliament house, they were so great and abominable that there was nothing but down with them’. Some dissent may have been expressed. According to one report the king summoned members of the Commons to the royal gallery. ‘I hear,’ he said, ‘that my bill will not pass, but I will hav
e it pass, or I will have some of your heads.’
An Act for the Dissolution of Monasteries was indeed passed, by which all religious houses with an annual income of less than £200 were to be ‘suppressed’. This was a large sum of money, and in theory 419 monastic houses were obliged to close; yet the abbots made petitions for exemptions, and 176 of the monasteries were granted a stay of execution. It is also clear Cromwell and his servants were bribed in money or in goods. Yet this was not a general dissolution. The larger monasteries had not been touched, and the monks of the smaller establishments were given leave to transfer to them. All was still well in the ‘great and solemn monasteries wherein (thanks be to God) religion is right well kept and observed’. It is hard to believe, however, that piety only began at £200 per year.
As a consequence the protests were few and uncoordinated. It might be thought that Cromwell’s strategy was to proceed slowly and cautiously, removing one obstacle at a time. It is more likely, however, that the king and his chief minister were trying to find their way in unfamiliar territory; they were not yet clear about their final objective and fashioned their policy as they went along. The senior clergy in convocation were in the meantime formulating the principles of the new faith under the royal supremacy. The imperial ambassador noted that ‘they do not admit of purgatory nor of the observance of Lent and other fasts, nor of the festivals of saints, and worship of images which is the shortest way to arrive at the plundering of the church of St Thomas of Canterbury and other places of resort for pilgrims in this country’. In this conclusion, the ambassador was correct. It was a practical and financial, rather than a dogmatic and doctrinal, decision.
Parliament, in its last session, also established a Court of Augmentations through which all the revenues from the dissolution of the monasteries – all the rents and tithes – were to be adjudicated and passed to the Crown. Other parties were also interested in the spoils. One lord wrote to Cromwell ‘beseeching you to help me to some old abbey in mine old days’. The court was duly set up in the spring of 1536. This was, in a word Thomas Cranmer now used for the first time, the ‘world of reformation’.
8
A little neck
On 7 January 1536 Katherine of Aragon died. Rejected and humiliated by her husband, deprived of the company of her daughter, her last years had not been happy ones. She had been alternately abused and threatened, but she could not be moved from the fact that Henry was her lawful husband. She clung to this certainty as the world around her shifted. It was even rumoured that the king was ready to behead her, but it is unlikely that he would have made so egregious a mistake. She had written to her daughter, Mary, that ‘he will not suffer you to perish, if you beware to offend him’; it is not exactly a ringing endorsement of his clemency. She also advised her daughter that ‘in whatsoever company you shall come, obey the king’s commandments, speak few words and meddle nothing’. She had not meddled; she had simply endured. The Spanish were always associated, in this period, with formality and self-control; she had those qualities to the highest degree. In a letter written to her husband, hours before her death, she implored him to preserve his soul from the peril of sins ‘for which you have cast me into many miseries and yourself into many cares’. She signed it as ‘Katherine the Queen’. It was suspected by some that she had been poisoned, but in fact a cancerous tumour was found around her heart.
On hearing the news of her death the king rejoiced. ‘God be praised,’ he said, ‘we are free from all suspicion of war!’ He had been concerned that her nephew, Charles V, might form a Catholic league with France and the pope against the infidel of England. On the following day he and Anne Boleyn appeared at a ball, both of them dressed in brilliant yellow.
It is not known how Mary learned of the death of her mother, but the news provoked another bout of illness. She was once more threatened by Anne Boleyn. ‘If I have a son, as I hope shortly,’ Anne wrote, ‘I know what will happen to her.’ ‘She is my death,’ Anne had once said, ‘and I am hers.’ Mary was now alone in the world, and her thoughts turned to the prospect of escape to her mother’s imperial family in Brussels. She spoke to the imperial ambassador about the possibility of fleeing across the Channel, but he advised caution and circumspection. In the meantime, he said ‘she is daily preparing herself for death’. She was in a most invidious position. In certain circumstances she might be considered a pretender to the throne. Those who wished to rebel against the new order of religion, for example, would welcome her at their head. She was surrounded by perils.
On the day of Katherine’s burial in the abbey church of Peterborough, 29 January, Anne Boleyn miscarried a male child; it was one more link in the chain of fate that bound together the two women. Anne blamed the accident on the shock she had received, five days before, on hearing the news that the king had fallen from his horse during a jousting match at the tiltyard in Greenwich; he had lain unconscious on the ground for two hours. Yet the king believed, or chose to believe, that the hand of divine providence lay behind the event. ‘I see,’ he is reported to have said, ‘that God will not give me male children.’
The king’s attentions were already wandering once more. Thomas Cromwell had told the imperial ambassador that ‘in future he was to lead a more moral life than hitherto – a chaste and marital one with his present queen’. Yet the minister had put a hand to his mouth in order to hide his smile, so the ambassador concluded that he was not necessarily telling the truth. Henry was in fact pursuing Jane Seymour, a young lady in the household of Anne Boleyn herself, whose rather sharp features were later bequeathed to her son. It was reported that Anne Boleyn found the girl on her husband’s knee and flew into a rage, but this may just be later gossip.
The ambassador also tells another story that hints at the complications of the court. While speaking to ‘the brother of the damsel the king is now courting’, he witnessed an argument when ‘angry words seemed to be passing between the king and Cromwell for, after a considerable interval of time, the latter came out of the embrasure of the window where the king was standing, on the excuse that he was so thirsty he could go on no longer, and this he really was, from sheer annoyance, for he went to sit on a chest, out of the king’s sight, and asked for something to drink’. Eventually Henry came looking for him.
A courtier once described how ‘the king beknaveth him [Cromwell] twice a week, and sometimes knocks him well about the pate; and yet when he hath been well pummelled about the head and shaken up as it were a dog, he will come out of the Great Chamber . . . with as merry a countenance as though he might rule all the roost’. This is the human aspect of court life, rarely observed, where we are able to glimpse the constant personal tensions that fashioned the decisions we now call history.
Great and malign changes, indeed, were soon to occur at the court. It was reported that the king had expressed his horror of Anne Boleyn to an intimate in the privy chamber, and accused her of luring him into marriage through the use of witchcraft. That is why he had been abandoned by God. So the story goes. Yet in practice he still behaved to her with every courtesy and attention, and the records show that she was spending a great deal of money on fine garments for herself and her daughter. There was every reason to suppose, despite the fears of the king, that she might bear another child. Anne Boleyn herself professed to believe so.
But then the calamity struck. On 24 April two separate commissions, under the conditions of utmost secrecy, were established to search into occasions and suspicions of treason. On one of them sat Thomas Cromwell and the duke of Norfolk, Anne Boleyn’s uncle but no longer her friend. Three days later it was suggested that the king might wish for a divorce. What had happened? One of the ladies at the court had spoken unwisely about the queen’s affairs and had mentioned a certain ‘Mark’. Once it had been spoken, it could not be unsaid. To conceal or to attempt to suppress information about the queen’s alleged infidelity would be equivalent to treason – or, in the phrase of the time, misprision or concealment o
f treason. The rumour or report had immediately taken on a life of its own.
On 30 April Mark Smeaton, a court musician and a groom of the privy chamber, was taken from Greenwich to the Tower where he confessed to having been Anne’s lover; that confession may have smelled of the rack, but it might have been a true account prompted by terror. He never retracted it and repeated it at the foot of the gallows. On the following day at the May Day jousts Anne’s brother, George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, rode against Sir Henry Norris; Norris was the intimate friend of the sovereign and the chief gentleman of the privy chamber. They were both soon to die for the suspicion of having lain with Anne Boleyn.
After the joust was over the king rode from Greenwich to Whitehall, taking Norris with him as one of a small company. During the journey he turned on Norris and accused him of pursuing an affair with his wife. To meddle with the queen of England was treason. The king promised him a pardon if he confessed the truth, but Norris vehemently denied the charge. He was taken to the Tower at dawn on the following day. George Boleyn had already been arrested, and charged with having sexual relations with his own sister. The evidence for the incest came from his wife, Lady Rochford, who may have spoken out of malice towards her promiscuous husband. The ladies of the queen’s household had also been interrogated and may have revealed interesting information. Some five men were accused of having slept with her – Mark Smeaton, George Boleyn, Henry Norris, William Brereton, Francis Weston – and were executed. Three others, including Thomas Wyatt the poet, were acquitted. These commissions of inquiry were not necessarily show trials.
The queen herself was interrogated by the king’s council. At one point Anne Boleyn was seen entreating the king in Greenwich Palace, with her baby daughter in her arms; but this was not enough. The cannon was soon fired, as a token that a noble or a royal had been taken to the Tower. When she arrived at that place she fell on her knees and prayed ‘God to help her, as she was not guilty of the thing for which she was accused’. When she was told that Smeaton and Norris were among those incarcerated she cried out: ‘Oh Norris have you accused me? You are in the Tower with me, and you and I will die together; and Mark, so will you.’
Tudors (History of England Vol 2) Page 11