House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty (48 page)

55. National Archives, SP 1/115/175. Partially reprinted in
LPFD
, vol. 12, pt i, p. 145. Norfolk sent a copy of the ‘seditious prophecy’ on to Cromwell, but kept the original ‘to try out the writer by the hand’. He told the Lord Privy Seal: ‘There are many seditions in these parts, yet I trust the nobles and substantial yeomen.’

56.
LPFD
, vol. 12, pt i, p. 145. The first verse of the song, hardly a catchy number, ran: ‘The hunt is up, the hunt is up. / The masters of art and doctors of divinity / Have brought this realm out of a good unity / Three nobleman have take[n] this to stay: / My lord of Norfolk, Lord Surrey and my lord of Shrewsbury. / The duke of Suffolk might a made England merry.’

57. ‘Religious’ - meaning abbots, priors and monks.

58. National Archives, SP 1/116/92, reprinted in
State Papers
, vol. 1, pp. 538-9 and Byrne,
Henry VIII Letters
, pp. 168-71.

59. National Archives, SP 1/115/244.

60. National Archives, SP 1/116/83. See also Elton,
Policy and Police
, p. 297.

61. National Archives, SP 1/116/108. Those to be executed were selected ‘by the advice of the council and gentlemen of these parts’.

62. Cited by Wilson, p. 402.

63. Burial of the executed rebels was forbidden by priests in several places. At Brigham, Richard Cragge’s remains were not allowed interment in the churchyard, so his widow and a cousin buried him in a ditch. Percival Hudson’s body was buried in God’s Acre at Torpenhow secretly at night. See Moorhouse, p. 313.

64. Norfolk was continually looking over his shoulder, worried about Henry’s opinion of him. On 24 February 1537 he wrote to an unidentified official at court, begging him to speak well -‘befriend’ - of him to the king. See BL Cotton MS Vespasian F, xiii, fol. 78B.

65. Hutchinson,
Cromwell
, p. 117.

66.
LPFD
, vol. 12, pt i, p. 277.

67. Cited by Elton,
Policy and Police
, p. 297, and Pickthorn, p. 357. The reprieve for the prisoners was short-lived. On 11 and 12 April, sixteen of the accused were found guilty of treason and condemned to death. See Bush and Bownes, fn, p. 382.

68.
LPFD
, vol. 12, pt i, pp. 322-3.

69. The Privy Council wrote to Norfolk, insisting that ‘the conscience of such persons as did acquit Levening should be examined ...’ and requiring that he send the jury to London to answer for their wilfulness and also to ‘travail all you can to beat out the mystery thereof’. See
Hardwick State Papers
, vol. 1, pp. 46-7. Henry’s anger at the acquittal was deepened by the escape from justice, earlier that month, of sixty-five Lincolnshire rebels, of whom two were acquitted and the remainder found guilty but pardoned. See Bush and Bownes, p. 382.

70. He was also Bishop of Chalcedon, now part of the city of Istanbul on the Asia Minor side of the Bosphorus. After 1623, the title of Bishop of Chalcedon was given to Catholic Bishops of England. Mackerell’s confession, dated 20 October 1536, is in
LPFD
, vol. 11, pp. 311-12.

71. Cited by Robinson, p. 31.

72. National Archives, SP 1/130/24, and
LPFD
, vol. 13, pt i, pp. 177-9 and 268. For more information, see Jonathan K. van Patten, ‘Magic, Prophecy and the Law of Treason in Reformation England’,
American Journal of Legal History
, vol. 27 ( January 1983), pp. 1-32, and Elton,
Policy and Police
, pp. 57-8.

73. Caitiff - a vile, wicked and cowardly individual.

74. National Archives, SP 1/120/6 and 14-15.

75.
State Papers
, vol. 5, p. 99, and
LPFD
, vol. 12, pt ii, p. 186.

76. Childs, pp. 123-4.

77. National Archives, SP 1/121/96.

78. BL Add. MS 6, 113, fol. 81, and Egerton MS 985, fol. 33, give contemporary accounts of the christening of Prince Edward. See also Strype’s account in
Ecclesiastic Memorials
, vol. 2, pt i, pp. 3-9.

79.
LFPD
, vol. 12, pt ii, p. 339.

80.
LPFD
, vol. 12, pt ii, p. 360.

81. The right to present a priest to an ecclesiastic benefice.

82.
LPFD
, vol. 12, pt ii, p. 355.

83.
State Papers
, vol. 1, pt ii p. 574, and BL Cotton MS Nero C, x, fol. 2. A knell was also rung in every London church tower or steeple on 12 November from noon to six that evening. See Wriothesley, vol. 1, p. 71.

84. Wriothesley, vol. 1, p. 70.

1. Henry Brinklow,
The Complaynt of Roderick Mors . . . unto the parliament house of Ingland
, Strasbourg, 1542, sigs D1
v-
2
r.

2. Cromwell boasted to Sir Thomas Wyatt in July 1537: ‘The realm [goes] from good quiet and peace, to better and better. The traitors have been executed ... so that, as far as we can perceive, the cankered hearts are weeded away.’ Ellis,
Original Letters
, third series, vol. 3, p. 60.

3. 31 Henry VIII,
cap
. 13. A total of 376 smaller houses were affected by the First Act of Dissolution of 1536 (27 Henry VIII,
cap
. 28) and 200 larger by the second, with a further 200 friaries.

4. Decorated panels, with religious iconography, raised above the back of an altar.

5. Knowles, p. 267. Norfolk sent the prior, William Wood, to London for trial for treason on 17 May 1537. There seems little doubt that he helped the insurgents during the Pilgrimage of Grace, but would have been covered by the royal pardon. He was executed.

6.
VCH Suffolk
, vol. 2, pp. 81-3 and 111-12.

7. Norfolk paid an annual rent of £44 19s
for Castle Rising. In the 1535
Valor ecclesiasticus
in 1535, it had an income of £306 11s
, including the average 10s a year donated by pilgrims at the shrine containing the relic of the arm of St Philip, patron saint of hatters and pastry-makers. See
VCH Norfolk
, vol. 2, pp. 356-8.

8.
VCH Norfolk
, vol. 2, p. 430.

9. Rawcliffe and Wilson,
Medieval Norwich
, p. 26. The site was rented by the duke to a brewer but was purchased by the city of Norwich in 1559 and used as a public wharf. It was then broken up into a number of smallholdings.

10. National Archives, SP 1/116/8.

11. Martin,
Thetford
, appendix xvii.

12. The properties are listed in the indenture. See Norfolk Record Office MC 67/35 511X9.

13.
LPFD
, vol. 21, pt ii, p. 273.

14. Wriothesley, vol. 1, p. 27. He was prior of the house at Beauvale in Nottinghamshire.

15. Henry had declared on 17 March 1537 that the Greenwich friars were ‘disciples of the bishop of Rome and sowers of sedition’ and ordered that they should be arrested ‘and placed in other houses as friars as prisoners, without liberty to speak to any man till we decide our pleasure concerning them’.

16. Townshend, of Rayham, Norfolk, was a member of Norfolk’s household and did well out of the monastic suppressions, being granted twenty manors in that county.

17. Knowles, pp. 254-5.

18. See G. W. Bernard’s ‘The Making of Religious Policy 1533-36: Henry VIII and the Search for the Middle Way’, in
Historical Journal
, vol. 41 (1998), pp. 321-49, which argues that the king was the dominant force in making religious policy and his efforts should be seen as a search for a middle road between reform and tradition.

19. In the next century, the polemicist Thomas Fuller claimed that Gardiner had a ‘head, if not a hand in the death of every eminent Protestant, plotting, though not acting, their destruction’. The bishop, he maintained, ‘managed his malice with cunning’. See Fuller,
Church History
, book 18, pp. 12 and 17.

20. Henry Brinklow,
The Lamentacyon of a Christen Agaynst the Cytye of London
... , ed. J. M. Cowper, in the Early English Text Society’s ‘extra series’, vol. 22 (London, 1874), pp. 79 and 82.

21. Hare was recorder of Norwich in 1536 and appointed master of requests the following year. He died in 1557.

22. Bindoff,
History of Parliament
, vol. 1, p. 733.

23. BL Cotton MS Cleopatra, E, v, fols 313-20. Elsewhere in this volume there is an exposition of the meaning of the twelve articles of the Creed. The eighth article - ‘I believe in the Holy Catholic Church’ - carries the most comments and amendments by the king. See Byrne,
Letters of Henry VIII
, pp. 252-4 and p. 255.

24. Tanner, pp. 97-8.

25. The staunchly Protestant John Ponet, who was Cranmer’s chaplain before 1547 and therefore no friend to Gardiner, described him as ‘having a swarthy colour’ and ‘a hanging look, frowning brows, eyes an inch within the head, a nose hooked like a buzzard, wide nostrils like a horse ... a sparrow mouth, great paws like the devil, talons on his feet like a [griffin] two inches larger than the natural toes ... and so tied ... with sinews that he could not abide to be touched’. See: Ponet,
A Short Treatise of Politike Power
... (London, 1556), p. 178. Gardiner was one of those happy people who were always sure of himself: ‘I do not trifle with my wit to undo myself, but travail with my honesty to preserve my country, to preserve my prince or to preserve religion’ (Muller,
Gardiner Letters
, p. 422).

26. Lacey Baldwin Smith,
Mask
, p. 138.

27. 31 Henry VIII,
cap
. 40.

28. Burnet, vol. 1, pt i, book iii, p. 195.

29. On France’s north-east coast. The town and its immediate hinterland (the ‘Pale of Calais’ - hence the expression ‘beyond the pale’) were an English possession between 1347 and 1558 and regarded as a bridgehead on the European mainland.

30. Quoted in Muller,
Tudor Reaction
, p. 82.

31. Hutchinson,
Last Days of Henry VIII
, p. 92. Hare continued to serve the king as a soldier, and was paid a grant of 9d (almost 4p) a day in 1542, for his loyal service in Ireland.

32. A light shallow-draught rowing boat that conveyed passengers on rivers.

33. Burnet, vol. 1, pt i, book iii, p. 195, and see also Nichols,
Narratives
, p. 237.

34. The Duchy of Cleves is in modern Germany and covers today’s districts of Cleves, Wesel, Duisburg, Jülich and Berg.

35. George Paulet claimed in June 1538 that the ‘king [calls Cromwell a knave] twice a week and sometimes knocks well about the pate [head] and yet when he has been well pummelled ... he would come out of the great chamber ... with a merry countenance’.
State Papers
, vol. 2, fn, pp. 551-2.

36. Edmund Howard, commander of the right flank at Flodden and later Comptroller of Calais and its marches, died on 19 March 1539. He had borrowed money (?from Cromwell) at exorbitant rates and had to adopt various disguises to outwit his creditors. See Strickland, vol. 2, p. 337.

37. Lacey Baldwin Smith,
Tudor Tragedy
, p. 103. Ellis,
Original Letters
, first series, vol. 1, pp. 201-2.

38. Nichols,
Narratives
, p. 259.

39. For a discussion on Henry’s medical problems see Hutchinson,
Last Days of Henry VIII
, chapter five, and on Cushing’s syndrome, pp. 207-9.

40. Elton, ‘Cromwell’s Decline and Fall ...’, p. 171.

41.
State Papers
, vol. 8, pp. 265-9.

42. Wilson, p. 451.

43.
LPFD
, vol. 15, p. 206. Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham (1474-1559), had prohibited Protestant books and took a leading role in the passing of the Act of Six Articles. John Clerk, Bishop of Bath (d. 1541), tried to obtain the papacy for Wolsey in 1523.

44. Hume, p. 98.

45.
LPFD
, vol. 8, p. 255.

46. Cromwell’s wife Elizabeth had died sometime before 1529, possibly from the fatal infectious fever called ‘the sweating sickness’ that swept England in 1528. His two daughters, Anne and ‘little Grace’, both died young, possibly in the same epidemic. See Hutchinson,
Thomas Cromwell
, p. 23.