A parliament was called at the beginning of 1543. Its first task was to grant a subsidy to the king to pay for the war in Scotland and ‘for his other great and urgent occasions’, by which was meant the coming invasion of France. An Act was also passed ‘for the advancement of true religion, and abolishment of the contrary’; one more attempt to quell the religious dissension of the country. No plays or interludes could mention the Scriptures; no one could read from the Bible in an open assembly. Merchants and gentlemen might study it in the quietness of their homes ‘but no women, nor artificers, apprentices, journey-men, serving-men under the degree of yeomen; nor no husbandmen, or labourers, might read it’.
In the late spring of the year, yet another formulation of the English faith was issued from the press. It was entitled A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man; set forth by the King’s Majesty of England. It became known simply as the King’s Book. Although it is in essence a conservative document, it promulgated once more the middle way between Catholicism and Lutheranism. The power of the pope was denied, but the sacrifice of the Mass was upheld. Purgatory was not quite abolished, but it was growing ever dimmer. The miracle of transubstantiation was affirmed. Faith and works were equally urgent for salvation; shrines and pilgrimages were not.
The king’s council was busy with matters of heresy in this period. In a space of some five days, from 15 to 19 March, seven suspects were brought before it or committed to several prisons. On 17 March, for example, one cleric was dispatched to the Fleet for ‘evil opinions touching the Sacrament of the Altar’. It was said that the principal member of the conservative faction, Stephen Gardiner, ‘had bent his bow to shoot at some of the head deer’. In his Easter Day sermon Gardiner grouped together Anabaptists and those who questioned the cult of Mary, crying out from the pulpit ‘Heretics! Faggots! Fire!’ When one chaplain of Canterbury was buried in the cathedral, the bell-ringer took the censer from the thurifer and poured its burning coals over the new grave; the dead cleric was suspected of heresy.
Yet one man of Canterbury escaped. Archbishop Cranmer, the chief supporter of the cause of reform, was also suspected. At a sermon in the cathedral he was supposed to have preached that the sacrament of the altar was ‘but a similitude’; it was not Christ’s body but a token or remembrance. If he had thus spoken, then he was going much further than any other English dignitary dared. Some of the canons at his own cathedral began to whisper against him. The more orthodox members of the king’s council were heard to suggest that it was invidious to burn poor men but to allow the principal instigator of heresy to stay in favour. By the spring of 1543 they sent a declaration to the king in which a commission of inquiry into Cranmer’s teaching was suggested.
Some evenings later the royal barge was moored at Lambeth, and the king invited the archbishop for a river journey. When they were comfortably seated the king turned to Cranmer. ‘Ah, my chaplain, I have news for you. I know now who is the greatest heretic in Kent.’ He pulled out the document of accusations, collected from Canterbury by the council. Cranmer read it, and then knelt before the king. He wished the matter to be brought to a trial. He acknowledged that he still opposed the spirit of the Six Articles, but declared that he had done nothing against them. The king had always trusted, and confided in, the archbishop. He also wished to avoid further disunity and controversy in an already troubled Church.
So he asked Cranmer himself to be the judge in the whole matter. The archbishop demurred, but the king insisted. The cleric thereupon appointed his chancellor and his registrar to examine those who had accused him of heresy. The homes of the principals were searched, and papers were found that suggested a conspiracy among them; certain letters from Stephen Gardiner were recovered. Cranmer also learned that some of his apparent allies had been implicated. But he was not a man of vengeance. Quietly he allowed the matter to rest. When the king requested that he call one of his secret enemies a ‘knave’ to his face, he replied that this was not the language of a bishop.
A further attempt upon Cranmer was made at the end of November. The king now played a game of hazard. He authorized his council to summon the archbishop on the charge of heresy and ‘as they saw cause, to commit him to the Tower’. Yet that night he summoned the archbishop into his presence. When Cranmer arrived in haste, Henry told him precisely what the council planned to do.
Cranmer seemed to receive the news meekly enough and said something to the effect that he expected a fair hearing. The king rebuked him. ‘Do you not think that if they have you once in prison, three or four false knaves will soon be procured to witness against you and to condemn you, which else now being at your liberty dare not once open their lips or appear before your face?’ Henry was acquainted with the nature of trials for heresy.
Henry then gave Cranmer his personal ring, which was a sure token of royal support; it was a sign that he had determined to take the matter into his own hands. With this, Cranmer returned to his palace at Lambeth. On the following morning he was duly summoned to come before the council, but he suffered the indignity of being kept waiting for three-quarters of an hour ‘among serving men and lackeys’. The king was informed of this very quickly, and thundered in his rage. ‘Have they served me so?’ he asked. ‘It is well enough. I shall talk with them by and by.’ It has all the making of a stage play which, from the pen of Shakespeare, it eventually became.
Cranmer stood before the council, where he was informed by his erstwhile colleagues that he was under arrest on suspicion of heretical teachings. He then showed them the king’s ring, at which they were astounded. ‘Did I not tell you, my lords?’ one of them cried out. The errant councillors were led before the king, who lectured them on the need for amity and unity. ‘Ah, my lords,’ he told them. ‘I had thought that I had had a discreet and wise council, but now I perceive that I am deceived. How have you handled here my lord of Canterbury?’
The duke of Norfolk, one of the leaders of the plot against Cranmer, said that ‘we meant no manner of hurt unto my lord of Canterbury in that we requested to have him in durance; that we only did because he might after his trial be set at liberty to his more glory’. It was, at the best, a very weak excuse. ‘Well,’ the king replied, ‘I pray you, use not my friends so. I perceive now well enough how the world goes with you. There remains malice among you one to another. Let it be avoided out of hand, I would advise you.’ Cranmer was safe for the rest of the king’s reign.
Henry had protected his archbishop out of genuine affection but also out of policy. He did not want his nation, or indeed his religion, to be further divided. It seemed, however, that in essential matters of doctrine the reformers had lost their cause. One of them wrote that a man might journey the length and breadth of the kingdom without finding one preacher who ‘out of a pure heart and faith unfeigned is seeking the glory of our God. He [the king] has taken them all away.’ The action was of a piece with Henry’s new alliance with Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and the most Catholic king of the Spanish empire.
Yet there was a chance that reform might find a new champion. In the summer of 1543 Henry married his sixth and last wife. In the immediate court environment, to which Katherine Parr belonged, the king had, according to the Spanish ambassador, become ‘sad, pensive and sighing’. He pined for female companionship and affection. Katherine Parr – twice widowed and one of Lady Mary’s entourage – was in love with one of the king’s courtiers, Thomas Seymour. The king, however, dispatched him to Brussels as an ambassador and decided to marry Katherine Parr himself. There was no question of refusal. He may have been fat and infirm but he was the sovereign; it was her duty to accept. ‘A fine burden,’ Anne of Cleves is reported to have remarked, ‘Madam Katharine has taken on herself!’
Katherine Parr was learned, by the standards of the day, and she was also pious; she even wrote two devotional manuals, one of them entitled The Lamentations of a Sinner. So she had become interested, to put it no higher, in the case of religious reform. �
�Every day in the afternoon for the space of one hour,’ it was reported, ‘one of her chaplains, in her privy chamber, made some collation to her and to her ladies and gentlewomen . . .’ Among these ladies were a number of tacit Lutherans – Lady Elizabeth Hoby, Lady Lisle, Lady Butts and the duchess of Suffolk among them. One of the more interesting features of the late Henrician court lies in this recrudescence of female piety. One contemporary noted that the ‘young damsels . . . have continually in their hands either psalms, homilies, or other devout meditations’. Katherine Parr was among them and, according to John Foxe, was ‘very zealous towards the Gospel’. In good time this would bring her trouble.
Throughout this year, and the beginning of 1544, preparations were made for the great invasion of France under the combined leadership of Henry of England and Charles of Spain. The cost of the undertaking was so vast, however, that the general coinage of the realm was debased by introducing a larger amount of alloy into its gold and silver coins. By these means the king’s mint acquired large sums of money, since the face value of the currency was the same despite the smaller amount of precious metal. Prices naturally rose, at a rate of approximately 10 per cent each year, and the economy took twenty years to recover. These were the results of the king’s passion for war.
Other ways of making money were also found. It was decided to exact a ‘benevolence’ from the nation. Those who owned lands worth more than an annual value of 40 shillings were to be requested to contribute to the king’s coffers; it was their duty to the sovereign. Those who refused were punished. One alderman of London was sent as a common soldier to the Scottish border, where his commander was told to subject him to the harshest and most dangerous duties. Another alderman was simply sent to the Tower, where he remained for three months.
The preparation for the invasion had already cost much blood. Scotland had renounced all its promises and agreements with the king, concluded after the disaster at Solway Moss, and once more established the old alliance with France. Henry could not contemplate the prospect of an enemy at his back door, and so he resolved to punish the Scots for what he regarded as their duplicity and faithlessness. At the beginning of May an English fleet sailed up the Firth of Forth and their commander, Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, was ordered to ‘burn Edinburgh town, so razed and defaced when you have sacked and gotten what you can of it, as there may remain forever a perpetual memory of the vengeance of God’. He was commanded to overthrow the castle and beat down Holyrood House, while at the same time putting to the flame all the towns and villages in the immediate vicinity. The campaign of terror was then to continue to Leith and St Andrews ‘putting man, woman and child to fire and sword, without exception, where any resistance shall be made against you’. Once more the wrath of the king meant death.
Hertford duly obeyed the orders of his sovereign and reported on 9 May that he had made ‘a jolly fire and smoke upon the town’ of Edinburgh. Nine days later he wrote that his mission was accomplished to the effect that ‘we trust your Majesty shall hear that the like devastation hath not been made in Scotland these many years’. A French fleet came to the aid of their allies and landed a considerable force which, with the Scottish army, marched to the border country; their campaign of fire and fury was duly challenged by another invasion by the earl of Hertford who in the autumn of the year destroyed 243 villages, five market towns and seven monasteries. This dance of death between the two nations would continue, at intervals, until the time of Oliver Cromwell.
The army of the English set out for France itself in the summer of 1544. The largest invasion force ever was dispatched abroad: 48,000 men took to the Channel. It needed the combined strength of 6,500 horses to drag the guns and carts of ammunition. The bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, had been appointed somewhat quixotically as Purveyor General; he said that he had been a ‘continual purveyor of cheese, butter, herrings and stockfish’. His enemies now referred to him as ‘Stephen Stockfish’.
The first scheme of war provided that the armies of the king and the emperor should march upon Paris, but Henry detected flaws in the proposal; it would leave his forces dangerously unprotected in the rear. It was first necessary for him to subdue the towns of Boulogne and Montreuil before passing the Somme on his way to the capital. By the end of June the English army had gathered about Boulogne, and on 14 July Henry crossed the Channel. A few days later he rode out from the gates of Calais, then an English garrison town, and came upon the territories of France; across his saddle he placed a great musket with a long iron barrel. He was travelling 25 miles south to join his army at Boulogne. The siege guns were soon blasting at the castle on the eastern side of the hilltop town.
Diplomatic, as well as military, activities were under way. In the summer of 1544 Francis wrote to the two kings, privately urging each of them to come to terms with him and thus hoping to divide their counsels: Henry sent the letter on to his ally, Charles, and replied to the French king that he was suggesting a policy ‘wherein you greatly touch our honour, the which, as you are aware, having always guarded inviolably to this present, I will never consent in my old age that it shall be any way distained’. In the following month he wrote – or rather dictated – a letter to Katherine Parr even as he sustained the siege of Boulogne. He told her that ‘we be so occupied, and have so much to do in foreseeing and caring for everything ourself, as we have almost no manner of rest or leisure to do any other thing’. This is the king at war, energetic and ever busy. He was delighted to be once more in arms, and one of his commanders reported that he was ‘merry and in as good health as I have seen his grace at any time this seven year’. He was in pursuit of glory, which was really the only reason for warfare.
Charles V was detained at the town of Dizier or St Didier for seven weeks, thus losing half the time that had been calculated for the march upon Paris itself. But the emperor then pressed forward, even though in the process his communications were broken and his supplies cut off. The advance surprised Henry, but the king could not have foreseen the duplicity of his ally. Francis and Charles had settled the terms of a separate peace, leaving out Henry, and needed only an excuse to enact it. With Charles’s army in perilous circumstance, the emperor declared himself obliged to make a treaty. The Spaniards and the French once more joined hands in the diplomatic dance.
The siege of Boulogne had been protracted beyond anticipation. The valour of the defenders of the town provoked even the king’s admiration. ‘They fought hand to hand,’ he wrote to the queen, ‘much manfuller than either Burgundians or Flemings would have done . . .’ Yet finally he prevailed, and the people of the town marched out in surrender. Montreuil still held out, however, and it was clear to all that the English army would never reach the gates of Paris. At this juncture Charles sealed the treaty with Francis, leaving Henry the only belligerent. The king’s anger and incredulity at the treachery of his ally are understandable, but the relative failure of the invasion is not in doubt. He had taken Boulogne, but not Paris, at an estimated cost of some £2 million; that was roughly equivalent to ten years of normal spending. The bulk of the crown lands, acquired from the Church, were sold off. This led directly to the frailty of the royal finances in subsequent years, and was one of the contributing factors to the Civil War. Yet this is to move too far forward. In the immediate context of 1544 the treasury was exhausted and Stephen Gardiner was moved to write, in emulation of Colet thirty-three years before, that ‘the worst peace is better than the best war’. On the last day of September Henry sailed back to England.
The threat from France remained, more dangerous than ever after the peace with Spain. It became clear by the spring of the following year that Francis was planning an invasion and was gathering a large fleet of ships for the purpose; galleys were even being brought overland from the Mediterranean to join the flotilla. The fortifications along England’s shores were strengthened further and the trained bands of local fighters were put on alert. In the event the French force got precise
ly nowhere; inclement winds propelled the ships back to their own coastline, and the supplies of food began to run low. So the French commanders ordered a retreat. An attempt was made at battle near Portsmouth, when some French galleys fired at the English ships, but once more an unfavourable wind forced them back. A French fleet was sighted off Shoreham, but again it turned around; an outbreak of disease had felled the sailors. In the course of this flurry of maritime activity one ship, the Mary Rose, managed to sink itself in Portsmouth harbour. This can be taken as a symbol of the armed struggle between England and France.
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A family portrait
In 1545 a family portrait had been commissioned by the king from an unknown artist. It displays Henry in full might, sitting on his throne between his heir and the long-dead Jane Seymour; on the right stands Lady Elizabeth, and on the left Lady Mary. Henry’s hand rests upon his son’s neck. The setting is the king’s lodging on the ground floor of the royal palace at Whitehall. Katherine Parr is not a part of this dramatic tableau, but she was now very much part of the family. During the king’s absence in France, she had become the regent of England. She stayed generally at Hampton Court, where Mary and then Elizabeth resided with her. They were educated in the broadly based humanism associated with the name of Erasmus that soon became an aspect of early Protestantism.
Katherine also helped to guide the studies of the young Prince Edward. He called her ‘his most dear mother’, and told her that ‘I received so many benefits from you that my mind can hardly grasp them’. She herself was receiving instruction and Edward wrote that ‘I hear too that your highness is progressing in the Latin tongue . . . wherefore I feel no little joy, for letters are lasting’. This is a conventional expression, and need not necessarily reflect Edward’s real sentiments. Yet he did persevere with his classical studies. He had read and memorized, for example, four books of Cato. He read Cicero in Latin and Herodotus in Greek. Soon enough he began the study of French; he was, at least in theory, one day to become the king of France. He also became immersed in geography and history as a way of preparing himself for sovereign rule. He informed his tutor, John Cheke, that ‘I have only done my duty’. In such a position of eminence, and with such an overweening father, his sense of his role and responsibilities was already immense. It was remarked that, even as a young boy, he had the mannerisms of an adult.
Tudors (History of England Vol 2) Page 19