Bloody Mary (8 page)

Examples of learned women were equally numerous. Mary’s great-grandmother Margaret Beaufort translated French works into English and was praised as a “right studious” woman with an “upholding memory”; she kept an apartment at Cambridge and founded Christ’s College there. On the continent, the Italian courts were noted for their learned women, and the daughters of the German humanist Pirckheimer were famous throughout Europe for their scholarship. Closer to home, Thomas More’s daughter Margaret was a brilliant scholar whose treatise on the
Four Last Things
More pronounced superior to his own.

The most obvious exemplar at Henry’s court of female strength, courage and intellect was the queen. Born in a military camp as her mother’s forces were besieging Granada, Katherine had survived a bitter adolescence in a strange country, suffered the deaths of a young husband and all but one of her children, and now lived with the ignominy of her husband’s infidelities. Yet she did not give way to frustration or resignation. She took pride in her ancestry, her capabilities as a ruler in Henry’s absence, her imperturbable dignity and her ever gracious smile. She took pride also in her learning, for which Erasmus called her “a miracle of her sex.” Vives concurred in this judgment, but here the compliment to Katherine the woman ended and the insistence on woman’s weakness began again. For Vives’ highest praise of the queen was that it was only an “error of nature” that she was not a man. “There was in her feminine body a man’s heart,” he insisted.
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“But for her sex,” Thomas Cromwell would say of Katherine later, “she would have surpassed all the heroes of history.”
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Both Mary’s education and her observation taught her in childhood that as a woman she must fear her nature for its weakness and her character for its tendency to sin. Her wit might be considerable, but it would never be trustworthy or profound. She must fear to think or judge or act on her own, and must limit her aspirations to a retired life of quiet obedience to a husband chosen for her by others. If she surpassed herself, she might someday, like Katherine, be compared to a man—but only in a way that pointed to lost opportunities and futile hopes.

O heresy, thou walkest a-wrye,

Abrode to gadde or raunge;

Like false brethren, deceave children,

This Churche nowe for to chaunge:

Her praier by night to banish quight,

With new inventions straunge.

On April 17, 1521, a thickset young monk with the coarse features of a peasant stood before the German Diet at Worms. The emperor, Charles V, was present, along with the leading figures in the German church and state. The young monk, Martin Luther, was confident yet overawed by the assembly. For he had been summoned to Worms in hopes that he might take back the heresies he taught—that the pope was only a fallible man, and that salvation did not come through the seven sacraments of the church.

The pope, who saw Luther as just another heretic, had excommunicated him, but in the empire he was already a popular hero. His writings were eagerly received by Germans of all classes who resented the political and economic stranglehold of Rome and saw in his teachings a rallying point for rebellion. North of the Alps, Luther was a dangerous man. Rather than force him into open revolt by publishing the papal bull of excommunication the emperor summoned him to Worms. Here he was shown a pile of his books. Would he stand by everything he had written, he was asked, even where it went against the age-old teachings of the church? How could he be certain that he was right and all those who had gone before him were wrong?

Luther appeared to falter under the pressure of his examiners and the solemn weight of the occasion. He asked for time to prepare his reply. He went back to the freezing attic that was the only lodging he had been
able to find in the city and pondered whether he might have overstated his views. The next day he returned to face the Diet, convinced that he could alter none of what he had written. If he did not yield, the officials warned him, the only possible outcome would be bitter division and civil war throughout the German lands. But Luther was adamant. He had to follow scripture and his conscience, and no one else. Charles V left the room, unconvinced. Luther was outlawed, and left Worms in fear of his life. In the following year the first in a wave of bloody revolts that would devastate German society in the 1520s was under way.

On the day the Diet of Worms ended Henry VIII’s secretary Richard Pace found the king in his chamber reading one of Luther’s works. It was his new treatise
On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church,
in which he argued that there ought to be only two sacraments, the Lord’s Supper and baptism, and not the seven defined by Rome. The treatise provided Henry with just the focus he needed for a project he had long had in mind. Since 1515 he had been at work on and off on a theological treatise of his own. Now he would turn it into an assault on Luther. The grateful pope would, he hoped, reward him by giving him another clause to add to his official title. A medieval pope had conferred on the line of French kings the title “Most Christian.” Henry wanted a similar designation for himself and his heirs.

As a preliminary to his personal assault against Lutheran doctrines Henry and Wolsey planned a formal denunciation. The king was not able to preside in person—a tertian fever confined him to his bed—but the cardinal conducted the proceedings with impressive solemnity. He sat under a golden canopy on a platform in the churchyard of St. Paul’s, and his magnificence was awesome—worthy of the pope himself, in the view of one eyewitness. The proceedings were opened by John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, who spoke for some two hours to the assembled clergy, lay lords and commoners, praising Wolsey and announcing that Henry was at work on a theological refutation of Luther’s heresies. Wolsey then rose to promulgate the papal bull excommunicating Luther and cursed him and all his followers. To dramatize the condemnation he ordered quantities of Lutheran writings heaped up in the churchyard and set on fire, and the smoke from the burning books and pamphlets rose over the platform as he spoke.
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The elaborate denunciation of Luther was prompted, at least in part, by the embarrassing accuracy of his criticisms. The English church, like the German, was a highly imperfect vehicle of belief. Some clerics were pious and self-sacrificing, but many others disgraced their offices. They wore bright-colored clothing and silver girdles like laymen; they curled their hair like courtiers; wealthy bishops trapped their horses with costly furs and wore gold buttons and lacings on their caps. To meet a priest
was, in the words of one church critic, “to behold a peacock that spreadeth his tail when he danceth before the hen.” And while many parish priests were so poor they could barely feed themselves, some among the higher clergy were extravagantly wealthy. Ruthal, bishop of Durham and Wolsey’s chief factotum, carried about with him an inventory of his extensive lands and treasure, and Wolsey, easily the richest ecclesiastic in England, had a personal income larger than the king’s.

Wolsey’s wealth came from another clerical vice condemned by Luther: pluralism. By church law every cleric could hold only one parish, deanery, diocese or archdiocese. In 1521, Wolsey held at least two such benefices—the archbishopric of York and the bishopric of Bath and Wells—and in addition he enjoyed the income from the bishopric of Worcester whose bishop, an Italian, was out of the country. Beyond his own numerous offices Wolsey gained most of the profits from the church livings bestowed on his bastard son Thomas Wynter. While he was still a schoolboy Wynter became dean of Wells; later he was made provost of Beverly, archdeacon of both York and Richmond, and chancellor of Salisbury, holding in all a group of livings earning some twenty-seven hundred pounds a year.
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Cardinal Wolsey was fast becoming a symbol of the worldly power and wealth concentrated in the English church. In the king’s name he claimed authority over every other noble or cleric in the land, and did not hesitate to bully and rough up foreign dignitaries if they threatened England’s interests. He caused a scandal in 1516 by seizing the papal nuncio Chieregato, taking him into a private chamber and “laying hands on him,” demanding to know whether Chieregato was conspiring with the French and Venetians. In “fierce and rude language,” Wolsey made it clear that unless the nuncio confessed freely, he would be put to the rack, and in fact he was not allowed to leave the kingdom until his house had been ransacked and all his papers and ciphers seized and read.
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On another occasion Wolsey summoned Giustinian and threatened him in the strongest possible language against sending dispatches abroad without his personal consent, “under pain of the indignation of the king.” As he spoke Wolsey became more and more beside himself, until in his frustration he began to gnaw at the cane he was holding in his hand and scrape it roughly against his teeth.
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If Wolsey did no more than threaten, other clerics were not above criminal intrigues. In 1514 Cardinal Bainbridge, archbishop of York, was poisoned at Rome by a self-proclaimed agent of the bishop of Worcester. Conclusive proof of the bishop’s guilt was lacking, but it was thought the matter was hushed up because Wolsey succeeded to Bainbridge’s see and later Worcester helped Wolsey to become cardinal.
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Clearly the English church was marred by abuses, vice and worldliness,
but the idea of a fundamental change of religious sentiment was as foreign to the English as it was welcome to Luther’s eager supporters in Germany. If the Lutherans were ridiculing the veneration of relics, the English were still taking to the roads in spring and summer on pilgrimages to the shrines of St. Cuthbert at Durham, the two Hughs at Lincoln, the Saxon St. Etheldreda at Ely, St. Joseph of Arimathea at the holy shrine of Glastonbury and, most beloved of all, the jewel-encrusted tomb of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury. If Lutheran doctrine condemned the sale of indulgences—papal pardons which claimed to shorten the sinner’s time in purgatory—the English were still moved to buy them for themselves and their dead relatives. Thomas More conjured a piteous image of the torment of souls in purgatory, condemned by God’s inexorable judgment to writhe in fire hotter than any earthly flame, “sleepless, restless, burning and broiling in the dark fire one long night of many days,” and torn by “cruel, doomed sprites, odious, envious and hateful.” To ease this unthinkable anguish English men and women were glad to pay for indulgences that promised them a year, or five hundred years, or, as in one formula from Salisbury, 32,755 years of pardon. The love of saints, the fear of punishment for sin, the place of the church feasts in the timeless cycle of the agricultural year—these and not theological disputes were for the majority of the English the unchallenged substance of belief in the 1520s.

The general indifference of his subjects to the new doctrines from Germany put no damper on King Henry’s enthusiasm for his new project. He rushed ahead with his treatise during May and June of 1521, calling it the
Assertion of the Seven Sacraments
and adding to the copy being prepared for the pope a verse of dedication in his own handwriting. By August the
Assertion
was completed, and twenty-eight copies were sent to the English ambassador in Rome, John Clerk, who took them to Pope Leo. The pope was immediately taken with his own copy, which was bound in cloth of gold, and urged Clerk to stay while he read the first five pages or so, nodding his head in approval as he read. Looking up from his reading he remarked on Henry’s “wit and clerkly conveyance,” and paid him the high compliment of comparing his work favorably to that of men who devoted their entire lives to learning. Leo’s eyesight was almost too dim to make out Henry’s dedicatory verse, but once it was pointed out to him he read it again and again, and praised it and the king in the most grateful terms,
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Leo presented the
Assertion
later at a private consistory, and on the following day he announced his intention to give Henry his coveted title Defender of the Faith. The pope requested copies of the royal book for his cardinals as if he expected it to be used against Luther, but in fact the twenty-eight presentation copies were allowed to gather dust in his library,
and a year later Clerk noticed them there, still unread.
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Other clerics welcomed Henry’s efforts with extravagant praise, however, calling the
Assertion
a “golden book” and its author an “angelic rather than a human spirit.” Outside Rome Henry’s treatise was read, and translated from Latin into German and English. Certainly it did not hurt the papal cause to have such a celebrity as the king of England declare himself in opposition to Luther at a time when most humanists were reluctant to denounce him and the German knights were rebelling in his name. One of Luther’s opponents exclaimed that Henry’s work was “multiplied into many thousands,” and “rilled the whole Christian world with joy and admiration”; another was ready to turn over to him the whole field of learning. “If kings are of this strength,” he wrote, “farewell to us philosophers.”

Of course there were those who claimed that Henry could not have written his book without help; some said More or Erasmus or, as Luther believed, Erasmus’ enemy Edward Lee was the true author. Modern scholars are equally reluctant to give the king credit for the
Assertion,
although at least one cites the mediocrity of the treatise as proof of its royal authorship. By his own admission Henry disliked putting pen to paper, but he may have dictated the treatise to a secretary. And if he had help in choosing and organizing his arguments, still the impetus to write it and the persistence to complete it were his. Henry disliked allowing others to take recognition he could earn for himself, and he rarely took credit for other men’s feats. In all probability the
Assertion of the Seven Sacraments
was largely the king’s own book.

Certainly the abuse heaped on the reformer in the treatise was worthy of Henry. He called Luther a “venomous serpent, a pernicious plague, an infernal wolf ... an infectious soul, a detestable trumpeter of pride, calumnies and schism, having an execrable mind, a filthy tongue, and a detestable touch.”
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To Luther, “Squire Harry” was nothing but “a damnable rottenness and worm,” and he showed no deference to royalty in his rude response to the
Assertion.
Henry and Luther proved themselves masters of invective, if not of theological argument, but after their first exchange the king left it to others to defend his side of the controversy. Under a pseudonym Thomas More took up the battle against “Lousy Luther,” and Henry shifted his assault on the reformer from the religious to the diplomatic realm.

It was no coincidence that Luther’s chief enemy, after the pope, was the man Henry and Wolsey were courting most assiduously, the Emperor Charles V. When Henry wrote to Charles execrating Luther as “this weed, this dilapidated, sick and evilminded sheep,” his abuse was intended to echo Charles’ own view and to convey England’s readiness to support the emperor in his fight against the Lutheran rebels. Charles was
Katherine’s nephew, the son of her mad sister Joanna. He was Henry’s nephew by marriage, and in recent years Henry had been taking full advantage of his avuncular role to court an imperial alliance, inviting Charles to England and entertaining him lavishly. In features and temperament Charles fell far short of the handsome, chivalric image of monarchy dear to Henry’s heart, but his wealth and power more than made up for these shortcomings.