Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (25 page)

Today, we would recognise the culture of relics as pure and simple marketing. But for Cromwell and the Protestant reformers, the issue was very clear-cut: these bits of dusty old bone and graven images were merely superstitious hokum and sinful idolatry, to be ruthlessly swept away in the virtuous act of cleansing Henry’s Church. There was also, of course, the valuable bonus of the ‘great riches’ stripped from the shrines, which rapidly accumulated in the King’s secret treasury in the Tower of London, an imperative that must always have been at the forefront of Cromwell’s mind.
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The fragment of the True Cross, upon which Christ was crucified, kept at the Benedictine priory at Bromholme, Norfolk, was proudly
proclaimed to have brought thirty-nine dead men back to life and cured the sight of nineteen blind pilgrims. Commissioner Thomas Legh told Cromwell that at Chertsey Abbey in Surrey the monks had the arm bone of St Blaise ‘through which they give wine in cases of illness’ and an image of St Faith, before which they placed candles on behalf of the sick. They ‘hold that if the candle remains lighted till it is consumed, the sick person will recover, but if it goes out he will die’.
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One fears how draughty the abbey was.

A cell of St Dogmael’s Abbey, 1 mile (1.61 km) west of Cardigan in Dyfed, Wales, boasted a figure of Our Lady bearing a taper, said to have been found miraculously in the nearby River Teifi, the candle burning brightly in its hand.
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William Barlow, the energetic Bishop of St David’s, visited the abbey in March 1538 and branded it a ‘devilish delusion’. He interrogated the prior, Thomas Hore, who claimed he had been innocently deceived by the taper, and the Bishop, huffing and puffing over such heinous superstition, issued injunctions that the prior and local vicar should

declare to the people the abominable idolatry and deceitful juggling of their predecessors there, in worshipping and causing to be worshipped a piece of old rotten timber, putting the people in belief the same to be a holy relic and a taper which had burned away without consuming or waste.

The prior and vicar shall do away [with] or cause to be done away [with] all manner of clothes, figured wax, delusions of miracles, shrouds and other enticements of the ignorant people to pilgrimage and idolatry.
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Barlow also confiscated relics he found at the religious house at St David’s, which included two heads of silver plate enclosing two rotten skulls stuffed with putrefied cloths, two arm bones and a worm-eaten book covered with silver plate.

The state’s assault on relics began in those religious houses exempted from the dissolution of the smaller monasteries from 1536. The images of St Anne at Buxton in Derbyshire and St Modwen at Burton upon Trent in Staffordshire stood in niches over local holy wells and were believed to possess healing qualities. Both statues were sent to Cromwell’s London home at Austin Friars, as was the image of Our Lady of Ipswich in July
1538 from the shrine located just outside the Suffolk town’s west gate. His steward Thomas Thacker, in a series of letters, described their safe arrival in disappointed tones, like a pawnbroker valuing new but mediocre stock: ‘I have received … the image of Our Lady of Ipswich which I have bestowed [put] into your wardrobe of beds till your lordship’s pleasure be known. There is nothing about her but two half shoes of silver and four stones of crystal set in silver.’
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Later, he reported receiving the two images from the Midlands:

The image of St Anne of Buxton and also the image of St Modwen of Burton, with her red hair and her staff which women labouring of child in those parts were very desirous to have with them to lean upon and walk with and had great confidence in the staff.

[These] two images I have bestowed by Our Lady of Ipswich. There came nothing with them but the bare images.
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But a few days later, Thacker took delivery from Ipswich of ‘Our Lady’s coat with two gorgets
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of gold to put about her neck and an image of Our Lady of gold in a tabernacle of silver and gilt, with the feather in the top of gold and a little relic of gold and crystal with Our Lady’s milk in it, as they say’.
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There were other valuable items in the same consignment of loot, this time from the dockside church of St Peter’s, Ipswich – a silver-gilt cross with figures of the Virgin Mary and St John; a silver pax;
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a silver-gilt chalice; a gilt censer; and two silver cruets.
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What happened to these precious sacred objects remains a matter of conjecture – probably they were appropriated by Cromwell himself and turned into ready cash. He certainly ordered the images to be burnt at Chelsea.

In February 1538, a representation of the Crucifixion of Christ – the famous ‘Rood of Grace’ – at the Cistercian abbey of Boxley, near Maidstone in Kent, was jubilantly exposed as a fraud. It had long been the object of virtuous pilgrimage, as the figure’s eyes rolled, the lips moved and it could nod and shake its head, hands and feet. This regular performance, undertaken strangely only when money was donated to the abbey, was believed by the faithful to be a recurrent and wondrous miracle. In reality, that miracle was more one of medieval engineering:
the monks caused the movements of Christ’s effigy simply by secretly tugging on a system of wires, levers and pulleys. Cromwell’s long-time friend Geoffrey Chambers jubilantly reported to the Lord Privy Seal that on plucking down the images he had found ‘certain engines and old wire [and] rotten sticks, in the back of the same that did cause the eyes … to move and stare in the head, like … a lively thing and also the nether lip likewise to move as though it should speak’. The abbot ‘with other [of] the old monks’ naturally denied any knowledge of the automaton, but were sent to London to be questioned by Cromwell, even though the abbot pleaded piteously that he was ‘sore sick’. Chambers took the contraption to Maidstone market and demonstrated its workings ‘to all the people there present to see the false, crafty and subtle handling thereof, to the dishonour of God and illusion of the people’.
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It was then taken to Westminster and shown triumphantly to Henry, who plainly could not decide whether to celebrate the fraud’s exposure or lament at the deception inflicted upon his faithful subjects.
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On 12 February, the Rood made positively its last performance at Paul’s Cross, outside the great London cathedral, when John Hilsey, Bishop of Rochester, happily smashed it into a hundred pieces. The destruction revealed the figure to be made of ‘paper and clouts [patches of cloth] from the legs upward; each leg and arm were of timber and so the people had been deluded and caused to do great idolatry by the said image of long continuance to the derogation of God’s honour and great blasphemy of the name of God’.
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The huge crowd of people that witnessed the Rood’s destruction now laughed at ‘that which they adored but an hour before’.
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The ‘rude people and boys’ then joyfully hurled the remains of the automaton onto a bonfire.

Then there was the notorious case of the ‘Blood of Hailes’, which, wonder of wonders, liquefied only when penitents handed over their donations to its Cistercian guardians. It was held at the thirteenth-century Hailes Abbey, near Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, contained in a tiny glass phial and proudly held to be the sacred blood of Jesus, after being guaranteed authentic by the Patriarch of Jerusalem. The relic was obtained from the Count of Flanders in 1267 and given to the abbey three years later by Edward, Duke of Cornwall. A new apse at the east end of the abbey church had been specially built behind the high altar for the
new shrine. Six years earlier Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, when vicar of West Kington, Wiltshire, complained: ‘I live within half a mile of the Fosse Way
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and you would wonder to see how they come by flocks out of the West Country to many images … but chiefly to the Blood of Hailes.’

The Abbot of Hailes, Stephen Whalley, had now cannily discerned which way the wind was blowing and hastened to distance himself from the relic’s reputed miracles. In September 1538, he sought permission from the Lord Privy Seal to destroy the shrine, offering a generous bribe for his agreement:

That feigned relic called the Blood … stands yet in the place still … so that I am afraid lest it should minister to any weak person, looking there … to abuse his conscience.

Therefore I do beseech you to be a good lord to me … to give me licence that I may put it down, every stick and stone, so that no manner of token or remembrance of that feigned relic shall remain.

Touching the value of the silver and gold therein, I think it is not worth £40, scant £30 by estimation …

Beseeching you … to accept this poor token, a strange piece of gold.
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The abbot’s perceptive change of heart was timely, although his gift was regarded as wholly inadequate. Whalley subsequently had to hand over an extra £140, his mitre and best cross and ‘a thing or two’ to the Minister, who knew a thing or two about monastic wealth and was experienced in squeezing a defenceless victim in a tight spot.
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Latimer meanwhile worked diligently to reveal the relic to be a fraud. He wrote to Cromwell on 29 October: ‘We have been … sifting the blood all this forenoon. It was wonderfully closely and craftily enclosed and stopped up and cleaved fast to the bottom of the glass … Verily, it seems to be an unctuous gum. It has a certain … moisture and though it seems like blood while it is in the glass, yet when any parcel of the same is taken out, it turns to a yellow colour.’
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The phial was taken to London and on 24 November, Bishop Hilsey, that earnest debunker of miracles, waved it contemptuously before his
astonished congregation at Paul’s Cross and loudly denied it was the Saviour’s blood. No, it was not even duck’s blood, as a former abbot had allegedly admitted to his concubine.
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Its contents were simply ‘honey clarified and coloured with saffron and lying like a gum, as evidently had been proved and tested before the king and his council’. Would you have tasted it to find out its true ingredients? The Bishop duly handed the phial around to allow ‘every man to behold’ the fraud.
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So the state attacks on idolatry and superstition continued. In September 1538, John London seized the ‘spearhead that pierced our Saviour’s side upon the Cross’ during his suppression of a chapel at Caversham, Berkshire, apparently brought there by an angel with one wing. During his suppressions in and around Reading, he also discovered a dagger allegedly used to kill King Henry VI and ‘the knife that killed St Edward’, but failed to confiscate ‘the piece of holy halter [with which] Judas was hanged’. London reported to Cromwell: ‘I have required my lord abbot [of Reading] the relics of his house which he showed me with goodwill. I have taken an inventory of them and have locked them up behind their high altar and have the key in my keeping and they be always ready at your lordship’s commandment.’
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A vindication of the religious changes being enforced in England, written by Cromwell’s privy seal clerk Thomas Derby in 1539, dismissed scornfully such ‘feigned’ relics ‘as the blood of Christ [which] was but a piece of red silk enclosed in a thick glass; instead of the milk of Our Lady, a piece of chalk … [and] more of the Holy Cross than three carts can carry’.
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The destruction of the shrines must have come as an enormous emotional shock to the faithful of England. Much of what they had believed in – and relied upon – was suddenly and literally swept away. Many supposed, more in hope than reason, that the obliteration of all that they held most dear must only be a temporary aberration in government policy. Thomas Cowley, alias Rochester, the traditionalist vicar of Ticehurst in rural East Sussex, steadfastly continued to urge his parishioners to venerate the images. During a sermon, he held up a groat – a coin worth four pennies, or £6.20 in 2006 money – bearing Henry’s head on the reverse and demanded of his congregation:

Dare you spit upon this face? You dare not do it. But you will spit upon the image [and so] spit upon God.

Hold you there, hold for a while! For … within four years, we shall have it as it was again.

Therefore do as you have done. Offer up a candle to St Loys [Eliguis or Eloi] for your horse and to St Anthony for your cattle.
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In Shropshire, the vicar of Highley defiantly regilded the statue of the Virgin Mary in his church (to which ‘much offerings was made in the past’) because his flock firmly believed it had cured a woman of her blindness when she touched it.
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He was betrayed to Cromwell by John Harford, a loyal yeoman of the crown.

In January 1540, a ‘poor woman’ from Wells-next-the-Sea in Norfolk was still claiming miracles were being performed by the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham
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two years after Cromwell had burnt it in London. She suffered for her rash claims – but only through humiliation and discomfort, rather than anything more penal or painful. The Minister was told that she was sat in the stocks

in the morning and about nine of the clock when the market was fullest of people, with a paper set about her head written … with these words: ‘a reporter of false tales’. [She] was sat in a cart and so carried about the market and other streets in the town, staying in diverse places where most people assembled, young people and boys of the town casting snowballs at her.

This done and executed, [she] was brought to the stocks again and there sat until the market ended. This was her penance, for I knew no law otherwise to punish her but by discretion; trusting it will be a warning to other light persons … but the said image is not yet out of their heads.
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Cromwell, always having an eye for the main chance, decided to use an image as a vehicle for his propaganda.

John Forrest, a Friar Observant
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and Doctor of Divinity, had been interrogated in April 1538 at Lambeth by Cranmer over his ‘most abominable heresies and blasphemy’ against both God and England. These included his beliefs that the Holy Catholic Church was the Church of
Rome; that Englishmen should believe in the Pope’s pardon for the remission of sins; and that priests could reduce the time spent in the pain of Purgatory for truly penitent and contrite sinners. Moreover, although he had sworn the oath confirming Henry’s supremacy over the Church in England, he secretly claimed this had been taken ‘by his outward man, but his inward man never consented’.
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