The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (36 page)

On 6 July 1535 a messenger came to More’s cell to tell him that he would be taken out and executed. More was utterly composed, pausing only to pen a quick farewell letter to his wife and daughter, begging them to ‘pray for me, as I will for thee, that we may merrily meet in heaven’. Then he strolled over to Tower Green just outside his lodgings as calmly as if he were about to have his breakfast, and when the executioner told him that as a special personal favour of the king he would only have his head cut off, not be disembowelled too, as was the usual practice for traitors, More quipped, ‘God preserve my friends from all such favours.’ But the king had also issued another order. Sir Thomas More was to be allowed no last speeches to the crowd. Even at that last moment, Henry feared More’s power. So More simply said that he died a faithful subject to the king and a true Catholic before God. Then the executioner silenced his silver tongue for ever.

In 1536, a year after the execution of More and Fisher, there was a series of risings in the north called the Pilgrimage of Grace. The northern counties of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Lincolnshire still had a monastic tradition which inspired respect among their inhabitants and were far removed from the New Learning and the new ideas which had entered England via the south-eastern seaports. Under the leadership of a Yorkshire country gentleman named Robert Aske, a great gathering at Doncaster demanded that Cromwell be dismissed and the country return to the old faith. But Henry handled the crisis with his usual aplomb. The Duke of Norfolk, who was generally acknowledged to be the leader of the more Catholic faction at court, was sent up to promise that the king would listen to the rebels’ requests if they would disperse peacefully, which they did. The momentum was lost. When the next year rioting began again, it provided the excuse to execute Aske and the rest of the leaders. A Council of the North staffed by Tudor officials removed most of the last vestiges of the old Catholic families’ influence, though it did not destroy their attachment to the ancient faith.

With the Dissolution of the Monasteries the Henrician Reformation shifted into a more radical phase. It became common practice to loot shrines for their jewels on the grounds that they encouraged superstition and idol worship and distracted from true religion. St Thomas à Becket’s shrine at Canterbury, one of the most famous places of medieval pilgrimage, was stripped of all its gold and silver. Two groaning wagonloads carried this booty to the eagerly awaiting king. Under the crude and greedy hands of Cromwell’s men village churches were frequently ransacked for their plate and chalices. In 1545 Henry dissolved the chantries, those characteristic buildings of medieval England often founded by guilds as well as the colleges of secular clergy. This removed many a source of education, hence the proliferation of schools still flourishing today which were founded in the reign of Henry’s son, Edward VI.

Yet despite Cranmer’s readiness to appoint advanced Protestants to vacant sees, including Hugh Latimer, the king himself continued to behave like a Catholic. He remained fearful that the pope might give the command for Catholic countries to invade England and bring her back to the true faith, while his superb political antennae forced him to take note of the meaning of the Pilgrimage of Grace. He knew that the bulk of the nation was instinctively Catholic and silently resentful. So, even though he had patronized the translation of the Bible into English, he still asked Charles V to pursue Tyndale its translator as a heretic. Three years after the Pilgrimage of Grace, by publishing the Act of the Six Articles which punished with death anyone who did not believe that Christ was present in the Communion wafer, Henry showed England and the pope that in all essentials he was a most orthodox Catholic.

For by this time the religious debate raging in Europe had moved on. Thinkers such as the Frenchman Jean Calvin and the Swiss Ulrich Zwingli had taken Luther’s dismissal of most sacraments many steps further. In Henry VIII’s reign the greatest controversy was the issue of the Mass itself. Zwingli held that examination of the texts suggested that Communion was not a sacrament but simply a commemoration of the Last Supper: Christ’s body and blood were not present in the host and wine. Although to the end of his days Cranmer could not decide what he believed, Henry was quite emphatic that he believed in the Real Presence at the Mass. At Smithfield the king burned any Protestant heretics straying into England who purveyed the new ideas percolating through Europe. Nevertheless the battle for the soul of the Protestant Reformation continued for the rest of his reign and beyond. And in the king’s lifetime the Catholic and Protestant factions within the Church of England each gained a little advantage according to the king’s marital state.

The gilded youth who had won the nation’s hearts was rapidly degenerating from the attractive Renaissance monarch into both a tyrant and a serial wife-killer. No one in England, whatever their position in the establishment, was safe. In 1538 on the grounds of conspiracy Henry executed two close royal cousins, the Marquis of Exeter and the Countess of Salisbury, mother of the Catholic Cardinal Pole who was in exile at Rome. The seventy-year-old countess’s end had been especially frightful. Once on the scaffold the vigorous old lady ran round and round the block declaring, ‘My head never yet committed treason, you must take it as you can.’ The axeman had to hold her down over the block himself to chop her head off.

But the axe also fell on Anne Boleyn just three years after her coronation. Instead of the hoped-for male heir the queen had only produced a puny red-headed little girl who was born alive. Henry, by now very bloated from over-indulgence in food and drink, convinced himself that this was a sign that this marriage too was cursed. Despite the many ornamental testaments to his passion for Anne, the entwined initials HA he had had carved all over Hampton Court and St James’s Palace, the king began to look for another wife. The lively Anne, who was hated by many for her insolence and her Protestantism, suddenly found herself arrested and accused of adultery.

Anne was removed without ceremony from the royal palace at Greenwich to the Tower. She went by barge and began screaming as soon as she saw the Barbican Gate and realized where she was heading, an eerie and horrible sound, which could be heard on the south bank of the river. The Constable of the Tower tried to comfort her by saying that she would be lodged not in a dungeon but in the apartments she had stayed in before her coronation. But she gave a loud mocking laugh, and an even more mocking one when he told her sincerely that she could be certain that every inhabitant of King Henry’s realm could be assured justice. Anne Boleyn then seems to have lost control of herself. The screaming, alternating with hysterical laughter, went on for the next few weeks until she was condemned to death for treason. As a last favour from her husband a special sword was sent from Calais to cut off her head because she had expressed a fear to her jailers that a blunt axe would hurt her little neck.

The very day after Anne Boleyn stepped on to the scaffold and wound her long black hair up into a white linen coif so that the executioner might see her neck more clearly, Henry married his new favourite, the quiet Jane Seymour. At last the king was lawfully married and in 1537 Jane produced the longed-for boy, a new Prince of Wales who was christened Edward. But his mother died only twelve days after his birth. Once more there was a vacancy at the king’s side. Out of genuine sadness and respect for his dead wife no one filled it for two years.

Jane Seymour’s family were convinced Protestant supporters of the New Learning, particularly her two brothers, who were close to Cranmer and Cromwell. In the late 1530s the Protestant influence round the king appeared to be at its height when he acquiesced in Cromwell’s suggestion of Anne of Cleves as a new bride. Her brother was the Protestant Duke of Cleves, on the Lower Rhine, and it looked as if England would soon be publicly allied to the north German princes of the Schmalkalden League who had strenuously embraced Protestantism against the emperor.

The king was in any case beginning to tire of Cromwell and was increasingly inclined towards the religious conservatives, Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London. The many real reforms that had been achieved by Cromwell such as introducing parish registers of births, deaths and marriages, did not make up for the government’s unpopularity. When Anne of Cleves arrived in London, the marriage having been arranged on the basis of a flattering portrait by Hans Holbein because the king was too busy to meet her, Cromwell’s career began to take a downward path. For Anne of Cleves looked nothing like her portrait, which may be seen at the Louvre in Paris. To Henry she seemed big, raw-boned and ungainly; moreover she could speak only a very few words of English. ‘A Flanders mare, I like her not,’ Henry is said to have hissed angrily at Cromwell when he first met her. Meanwhile despite the grandeur of the wedding, no alliance was forthcoming from the League of Protestant princes. Although the king could not withdraw from the marriage Cranmer swiftly produced suitable reasons as to why it was invalid, and Queen Anne of Cleves retired on a pension, presumably glad to have escaped with her head.

The king soon yielded to the Catholic faction’s petitions, led by the ambitious and unscrupulous Duke of Norfolk, to dismiss Cromwell. Having presided over the trial of one niece Anne Boleyn, he was dangling another, Catherine Howard, before the king as a future bride. When in the summer of 1540 it was discovered that a Protestant preacher named Dr Barnes was Cromwell’s confidential agent to the German Protestant princes, it seemed good evidence that Cromwell was the agent of Protestant heretics in England. Within weeks Cromwell too had been executed, deserted by all his friends save Archbishop Cranmer, who begged the king to show clemency to a man who had been such a faithful servant. It was to no avail.

The atmosphere in England by the 1540s was one of muted terror. Cardinal Pole would rightly ask, ‘Is England Turkey that she is governed by the sword?’ Protestant and Catholic martyrs were dragged on the same hurdles to Smithfield for burning, for if it was treason to recognize the Papal Supremacy it was also treason to deny Catholic doctrine! The court was full of the manoeuvring of the two implacably opposed religious parties, who frequently informed against one another.

The Catholic faction were delighted when in the very month of Cromwell’s execution the king at last took as his fifth wife the lovely little Catherine Howard. All were hopeful the marriage would last–but it was not to be. In Catherine Howard’s case, for once there was good reason for the king’s suspicious mind, now as inflamed as his massive leg with its running ulcer, to doubt her. The new queen, aged only eighteen, could not help finding the young blades at court more attractive than her fifty-year-old husband, as the king observed. Less than two years after Catherine had married him, the king vanished after dinner at Hampton Court and departed for his new palace at Whitehall. He never saw the queen again. A few days later, one icy mid-November morning, men came for Catherine and arrested her at Hampton Court. There, in the so-called ‘haunted gallery’ which links the chapel with the State Apartments, a woman dressed in white is said to haunt the long corridor, crying and moaning as she walks–the ghost of Catherine Howard.

After a period of house arrest at Syon House in Chiswick, the queen–like her cousin Anne Boleyn–was executed for treason on the grounds of adultery. During her captivity her jewels were ripped from all her splendid clothing and sent back to the outraged king. All her friends had been interrogated and she herself had secretly confessed to Archbishop Cranmer, thinking it might help her if she made a clean breast of things and pleaded youth and foolishness.

Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife, whom he married a year later in 1543, was Catherine Parr. She was much older than his other wives and a pragmatist with a good sensible head firmly screwed on to her shoulders. She managed to keep it there by outliving the king. She was also a very good nurse, which was by far her most important quality to a king crippled by thrombosis. By the late 1540s Henry VIII had long lost the athletic prowess of his youth; the hunting and music-making were a thing of the past. Though he still managed to lead his troops to the siege of Boulogne in 1544, mostly he had to be wheeled round his palaces in a mechanical contraption, so enormously swollen had his legs become. Too unfit even to sign his own name, a rubber stamp had to be invented to do the job.

The new queen was kind and dutiful to her stepchildren, Mary, Elizabeth and Edward. The two girls, having both been declared illegitimate by Henry, had been brought up in penniless obscurity far from court. To an unenthusiastic Henry, Catherine insisted that the nervous and religious Lady Mary and the clever Lady Elizabeth, whose mother’s head had been cut off when she was under three, should come to live with her and the king. Catherine Parr made sure that after years of neglect they were treated as befitted their rank as their father’s daughters.

As the king’s ill-health signalled that the end of his life was approaching, members of the court began jockeying among themselves for power. Most significant were the two brothers of Jane Seymour, Edward and Thomas. As uncles of the sickly nine-year-old-heir Edward they hoped to rule the country, with the elder uncle Edward Seymour becoming lord protector. Meanwhile, however, rumours had reached the king’s suspicious ears that the Duke of Norfolk, who had now been uncle to two queens, and his son the Earl of Surrey were openly stating that their royal blood showed that on the king’s death Norfolk would be the best regent. Surrey indeed had taken to wearing the arms of Edward the Confessor. For this
lèse-majesté
Surrey was executed on 19 January 1547 and Norfolk would have been executed on the 28th had Henry VIII not died the day before. The king passed away holding the gentle Cranmer’s hand. It was one of the few of Henry’s relationships that had endured.

The succession to the English throne of a minor had always tended to be a recipe for disaster. On the other hand the kingdom Edward VI’s father bequeathed to him was more unified under royal government and more closely linked to Westminster than ever before. As partly Welsh with lands and a following in Wales, it had been a relatively easy matter for Henry by the 1536 Statute of Wales finally to do away with the ancient marcher jurisdictions, and the whole country was finally organized into shires along the English model. In Ireland a Fitzgerald rising proved the perfect excuse for Henry to send in an army to reduce the country to some semblance of order. He extended the Reformation to Ireland on the same principles as he had done in England, giving Irish lords the extensive lands of the monasteries in return for their loyalty. Since Lord of Ireland had been a papal title, Henry now called himself King of Ireland.