The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (35 page)

But Wolsey was not only a show-off. He was also a serious intellectual, a supporter of the New Learning who was the protector of the Cambridge scholar William Tyndale–the first Englishman since the Lollards to translate much of the Bible into English. Tyndale had smuggled 3,000 copies of his translation into England with the help of Martin Luther. Despite his arrogance, and like all men of intelligence at that time, Wolsey believed that the Church was in need of drastic reform. Many of the monasteries, particularly the lesser ones, were contributing little to the spiritual life of the nation. If they were closed down, the money from selling their lands could be used to found schools which would do much more to spread learning. So in 1523 Wolsey sent in commissioners to investigate some of these smaller monasteries, and the dismal way of life they found there, with little or no religious impulse, led to the break-up or dissolution of several of them. With the proceeds Wolsey founded a splendid new college at Oxford which he called Cardinal College, later known as Christ Church.

The end came for Wolsey quite suddenly. In 1526 the king’s eye was caught by a bewitching, black-eyed nineteen-year-old girl named Nan Bullen or Anne Boleyn, whose mother was the sister of the Duke of Norfolk. Henry had begun to despair of his union with Catherine. A papal dispensation had been required to allow him to marry his brother’s wife. Now the absence of any surviving children save Lady Mary, after many miscarriages and stillbirths, convinced him that the marriage was cursed. Henry was obsessed with obtaining a son for a dynasty that was still less than half a century old. Anne Boleyn and her uncle were equally obsessed with the king marrying her and not merely making her his mistress, as her elder sister Mary had been. The answer was to get the pope, Clement VII, to declare the original marriage invalid–which was how all divorces were resolved in the middle ages. Unfortunately, though, the international situation and Wolsey’s diplomatic machinations meant that Henry was hardly in a position to influence the pope.

At the beginning of 1527, angered by the pope’s support for France, Queen Catherine’s nephew Charles V had captured and sacked Rome, and Clement VII became his prisoner. Two years earlier, during the interminable struggle with France in Italy, Charles had also managed to capture Francis I at the Battle of Pavia. This striking event had convinced Wolsey once more to assert his theory of the balance of power, and Henry had agreed to make peace with Francis and become his ally instead of the emperor’s. But in the context of what was becoming a real crisis at the English court, with the king determined to have his way, this diplomatic revolution could not have come at a more inconvenient time.

When the imprisoned pope failed to dissolve immediately Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine but instead instituted a Decretal Commission to inquire into the situation, Henry’s anger knew no bounds. For a scapegoat he turned on the great instigator of the pro-French alliance, Wolsey, who had also been in charge of the diplomatic negotiations with the Vatican. Evidently, despite his cardinal’s title, Wolsey had no sway at Rome. When the Papal Commission moved back to Rome for further hearings after gathering evidence in London, including the impassioned testimony of Catherine of Aragon that her marriage to Henry’s elder brother Arthur had never been consummated, it was the end of Wolsey.

Thwarted and showing the furious temper which was to become such an overwhelming characteristic of his later years, Henry VIII turned on his former favourite. He was encouraged by Anne Boleyn and her uncle the Duke of Norfolk, who both believed that Wolsey disapproved of the Boleyn marriage. The affection, even love, which the king had borne for his chancellor vanished in the twinkling of an eye. All the cardinal’s property, Hampton Court and York Place and Cardinal College, was seized by the king, who soon occupied Hampton Court himself. Wolsey sought refuge in his archdiocese at York, and had he not died at Leicester in 1530 on his way south to the Tower to be tried for treason, he would have been executed. As the lieutenant of the Tower waited by his bed the cardinal told him of his fears for England now that he sensed death was near. Who would curb the king’s strong will? he said. There was no one now in the Council who would dare to. Wolsey’s last words were ‘Had I served God as carefully as my king, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs.’

But events in England were moving swiftly onward, propelled by the king’s passion for Anne Boleyn–who, her enemies whispered, had a sixth finger on one hand, the sure sign of a witch–and by the excitement abroad aroused by the Reformation. It was becoming increasingly obvious that the pope, still held captive by the Emperor Charles V, was going to find every reason why he should not grant a divorce against the emperor’s aunt Catherine of Aragon. The answer therefore, as far as Henry was concerned, was to show that the pope was wrong. Henry began his campaign by canvassing learned opinion among scholars at the universities.

This radical solution would have been unthinkable before the sixteenth century. But just as the papacy was profoundly unpopular in Germany, it was also profoundly unpopular in England. The Church at Rome had always been an intrusive institution, taking a great deal of money out of the country. But just when the English were beginning to flex their muscles again and take pleasure in their national life and culture, its power seemed especially irksome, particularly when the clergy were a byword for laziness and corruption. For many centuries awe and respect for the hallowed institution that St Peter had established had kept England within the Church of Rome. But now in the changed atmosphere of the New Learning among the educated–whether at the universities, the inns of court or Parliament–a harsh daylight had been let in which had destroyed what was left of the papacy’s magic. The climax had come with the pope’s imprisonment by the emperor. More than ever before the papacy simply seemed a foreign, secular institution whose peculiar law courts were places where murderers in holy orders could still take refuge from English justice.

But scholars rarely give single-line answers, and in response to Henry’s revolutionary consultation they gave a most inconclusive and useless reply. The king therefore decided to put pressure on the clergy themselves. In all his doings Henry had no intention of creating a Church doctrinally different from the Church of Rome; his Church of England was to be Catholicism without the pope. First Henry alarmed the clergy sitting in their national gatherings known as Convocation of Canterbury and York, by telling them that they had broken the ancient Statute of Praemunire by recognizing Wolsey as papal legate. For this he was levying on them a colossal fine of some £100,000. Next, in order to assuage his anger, the clergy had to acknowledge that he was the supreme head of the Church of England. At this point the king still hoped that Pope Clement or his successor Paul III would see reason and grant the divorce, but they did not do so.

By a series of acts over the seven years from 1529 to 1536, passed by what is known as the Reformation Parliament, Henry VIII separated the Church in England from the pope in Rome and created his own Church, the Church of England. By 1534, with the Act of Supremacy, Henry had completed the separation of England from the Roman Catholic Church, and all the incomes hitherto due to Rome were now paid to the crown. The Statute of Praemunire, which had existed from the fourteenth century but which had been honoured more in the breach than in the observance, was reinforced so that no appeals were allowed from England to Rome. It was made treason to deny Henry’s headship.

These acts were pushed through Parliament not against its will, but with its active participation. The members of the Reformation Parliament were keen to assert themselves as independent Englishmen, and felt that by casting off the pope they were carving out their uniquely English destiny. Though Henry’s reign might slowly degenerate into tyranny and terror, the gift he had of handling his Parliaments, his hail-fellow-well-met manner and his larger-than-life magnificence meant that in some way he continued to represent an ideal Englishman. This ensured his continuing popularity, a vital matter for him. For what historians call Tudor despotism or absolute rule, unlike the despotism of continental powers, was effected without a standing army. Just as English kings theoretically needed popular acclamation to ascend the throne, control over England was to be had by the support of the local gentry whom Henry charmed in Parliament and made his allies. They enforced his rule in their counties in their capacities as justices of the peace.

Under Henry VIII that sense of Englishness which had been growing since the Hundred Years War and had been given voice in the Reformation Parliament would be reinforced by weekly attendance at Church service. By the end of Henry’s reign the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments were all spoken in English. Moreover from 1540 an English Bible was placed in every parish church, with effects almost as incalculable for the national literature as Caxton’s return to England with a continental printing press. It was in fact Tyndale’s version revised by Miles Coverdale, with a preface by Archbishop Cranmer. Henry VIII had completed what is known as the nation state.

With the demise of Wolsey, for the rest of his reign Henry relied on advice in religious matters from a sensitive and eager-to-please Cambridge scholar named Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer, whom Henry made chaplain to Anne Boleyn’s family, became head of the new Church of England in 1533 as Archbishop of Canterbury. He announced that the king’s first marriage to Catherine of Aragon had been invalid. The king was therefore free to marry Anne Boleyn–who was about to have a baby, the future Queen Elizabeth I.

Thomas Cromwell, a fuller’s son from Putney who had helped develop the theory of Royal Supremacy, was now the king’s right-hand man in governing the country. It soon occurred to him that the immense wealth of the monasteries accumulated over the previous 600 years–they owned perhaps one-third of the land in England–might be used to ensure the loyalty of the people who counted in the Tudor state. If he closed them down and redistributed their land among the upper and middle classes–the magnates, gentry, lawyers and merchants–he would underpin the new Church and destroy the last bastions of loyalty to the pope.

The majority of the monasteries had long ago lost their power and influence. There were fewer than 10,000 monks and nuns to contend with, and they were unworldly, gentle people. In a spirit of triumphant nationalism inspired by Wolsey’s earlier suppression of certain monasteries, Cromwell dissolved all the smaller ones and embarked on an investigation which would result in the dissolution of the rest. And with the dissolving of the monasteries and the carving up of their lands among some 40,000 people the Protestant Reformation was secured on property. Many great English families, such as the Cavendishes and Russells, merchants, lawyers and shire knights, acquired their fortunes in the lands once owned by the monasteries. They made stately homes out of the ancient abbeys–for example, the Russells, later the dukes of Bedford, received Woburn Abbey. As far as these people were concerned, there would be no going back to Rome if it meant the end of their country estates.

The English Reformation had been accomplished upon the sturdiest and most durable of foundations: land. Nevertheless, despite the fear the king inspired as an increasingly bloody tyrant, the royal revolution had not been achieved quite as smoothly as Henry wished, particularly in his immediate circle at court and in government. He might be a religious conservative who disagreed as much as ever with Luther and who burned heretics for promulgating advanced Protestant ideas, but his chancellor Thomas More and the aged John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, could not accept the king as substitute for the pope. Their historical sense and Catholicism refused to let them. So when the 1534 Act of Royal Supremacy required the clergy and government officials to swear an oath of loyalty to Henry as supreme head of the Church of England, More and Fisher refused. They would take the Oath of Succession–that is, they would swear loyalty to Anne Boleyn’s children–but to the king’s embarrassment and fury they also declined to accept Anne Boleyn as Henry’s lawful wife. Both men were promptly sent to the Tower.

The spectacle of More–so recently the equivalent of prime minister and one of the leading figures of English life, a scholar, a notably eloquent lawyer and a member of Parliament internationally renowned for his learning and for his book
Utopia–
being dragged in his shirt through the streets from the Tower to his trial for treason at Westminster increased the atmosphere of terror that began to surround the king. Until very recently More had been a close friend of his. Henry had often been seen walking in More’s lovely garden in Chelsea (the Chelsea Physic Garden today) with his arm affectionately round his chancellor’s shoulders. It had even been the king’s habit to turn up unexpectedly at More’s house after dinner to chat and pass the time in a merry way. He had seemed so good tempered on these occasions that More’s son-in-law Thomas Roper had remarked that the king’s growing reputation for ruthlessness seemed ill-founded. More had responded wryly, ‘Howbeit, Sir Thomas More, made Lord son Roper, I may tell thee I have no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head could win him a castle in France it should not fail to go.’ There is an echo of this in Henry’s response to the news that the pope had made Fisher a cardinal. When he heard this the king remarked, ‘The Pope shall soon have his head in Rome so that he can put the cardinal’s hat on it himself.’

Henry was dreading the effect of More’s famous eloquence at his trial, fearing that he would rally the country against his reforms. Unlike Fisher who was too old and tired to mount a defence, which ensured a rapid guilty verdict and his immediate execution, More showed that his luminous intellect had been unimpaired by prison. Although he was bowed and his hair had turned grey over the summer of his incarceration, mental torture had robbed him of none of his natural authority. His defence was clear and to the point. He had not offended against the law nor tried to oppose the king’s wishes. All he had done was to remain silent, and silence had not yet been declared treason. But nothing could avert his fate. As soon as the sentence of death was pronounced More declared that the Oath of Supremacy was indeed unlawful. ‘How can you argue with the whole of England?’ one man called from the crowd, amazed at More’s courage. ‘Ah, but I have the whole history of Christendom behind me,’ said More smiling.