Thomas Cromwell: The Rise And Fall Of Henry VIII's Most Notorious Minister (28 page)

The prisoner had no escape. ‘It is not his Body. I deny it.’

Henry doubtless dramatically exploited the intakes of breath that must have echoed around the great banqueting hall at the reply, before commenting sonorously: ‘Mark well – for now you shall be condemned even by Christ’s own words: “This is my Body.”’

For five long hours the well-prepared bishops railed against Lambert’s heretical beliefs in impeccable Latin, with Gardiner rudely interrupting Cranmer’s discourse as he felt the Archbishop ‘argued but faintly’.
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The ‘general applause’ at the end unsurprisingly gave the victory to Henry, who asked the prisoner: ‘Will you live or die? You have yet a free choice.’ But Lambert, unbowed by the gruelling experience, merely committed his soul to God and his body to the King’s mercy.

That was never on offer. Henry shrugged his shoulders and told him: ‘That being the case, you must die. I will not be a patron to heretics.’
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Cromwell stepped forward. In a loud voice, he pronounced the prisoner an incorrigible heretic and condemned him to die. Six days later, on 22 November, Lambert was executed at Smithfield, ironically six months
to the day after the Catholic John Forrest had perished in the flames on the same site. When Lambert’s thighs and legs had been burnt off to stumps, the fire sank lower and two officers lifted up his still-living body on the points of their halberds and let it fall back into the flames. As death finally came to kindly end his sufferings, he cried out: ‘None but Christ! None but Christ!’
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Two Dutch Anabaptists, a man and a woman, quickly followed him to the stake at Smithfield on 29 November ‘for heresy against the sacrament of the altar’, and elsewhere, ‘a goodly young man and about twenty-two years of age’, was also burnt at Colchester, Essex, for the same beliefs.
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On 16 November 1538, the same day as Lambert’s trial was staged, a royal proclamation was issued seeking to control the purchase and use of Bibles printed in English; banning clerical marriage; ordering the execution or expulsion of Anabaptists or Sacramentarians; and insisting on the strict adherence to those religious rites not abolished.
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The first eight injunctions listed in the proclamation had been substantially annotated personally by Henry, with the text of the eighth article significantly starting off with the word ‘finally’. But bizarrely, another two injunctions had been added later, no doubt by Cromwell’s hand, to the original proclamation. These two interlopers attacked both false superstitions and the population’s adoration of St Thomas Becket, and ordered that

the said Thomas Becket shall not be esteemed, named, reputed, nor called a saint but ‘Bishop Becket’, and that his images and pictures through the whole realm shall be put down and avoided out of all churches, chapels and other places; and that from henceforth, the days used [as a] festival in his name shall not be observed; nor the service, office, antiphons, collects and prayers in his name read, but erased and put out of all the books because it is found that he died like a traitor and rebel to his Prince.

The late addition of these two extra injunctions suggests long, drawn-out arguments between the religious factions on the King’s Council over the content of the proclamation. Clearly, a compromise had been hammered out at the eleventh hour.

In the case of Archbishop Thomas Becket and its uncomfortable
undertones of previous ecclesiastical opposition to the monarch, Cromwell, always a master of propaganda, simply rewrote history to match his political needs of the moment. Utilising old Lollard
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tales dating back more than a century, he wove a cunning tale that the Archbishop had not really been assassinated in Canterbury Cathedral by knights anxious to obey a royal tantrum of King Henry II (remember ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’)
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Instead, the saint died ingloriously during a common riot – according to Cromwell, that is. Like all good propaganda, the Lord Privy Seal’s version of events had a mixture of truth – about Becket’s character – and blatant omission to enhance its veracity.

The Archbishop had wilfully resisted his King’s laws, established to correct the ‘enormities of the clergy’, and when one of his servants was arrested, Becket had tried to rescue him, causing an unseemly brawl or riot. Becket had then used ‘opprobrious words’ and grabbed one of his opponents ‘by the bosom and violently shook him and plucked him in such a manner that he almost overthrew him to the pavement of the church’. Cromwell’s version adds: ‘And so in the throng he was slain’ – a death ‘which they untruly call martyrdom’.
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Canonisation of Becket ‘was made only by the Bishop of Rome because he had a champion to maintain his usurped authority and a bearer of the iniquity of the clergy’.

Why all this sudden interest in St Thomas Becket?

Three months earlier, in August, Archbishop Cranmer had sought a royal commission to be issued to examine the phial of his martyred predecessor’s blood, which Cranmer suspected was merely red ochre. Then, some time around 8 September, Becket’s tomb in the Trinity Chapel of Canterbury Cathedral
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had been sacrilegiously looted for the gold, silver and jewels that sumptuously adorned it. His shrine had been constructed by Archbishop Thomas Langton and dedicated on 7 July 1220, with its decoration created by the goldsmith Walter of Colchester. It consisted of a tomb, supported on four pillars, containing an effigy of Becket in ecclesiastical vestments, surmounted by a jewel-encrusted gable covering a casket containing the holy relics. This was covered with oriental pearls, rubies, diamonds, emeralds and sapphires, mounted on plates of gold.
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No wonder both Henry and Cromwell saw it as a prime target for
attack in September 1538. The spoils were carried off in twenty oxen carts to the jewel house in the Tower for Henry’s personal use. Moreover, the saint’s remains had been scattered – ‘his bones, skull and all, which was there found, with a piece broken out by the wound of death, were all burnt in the same church by [order of] the lord Cromwell’ according to the chronicler Raphael Holinshed.
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The ‘disgarnishing’ of Becket’s shrine, as the despoilment was coldly called at the time, took the Lord Privy Seal’s agent Richard Pollard several days of wanton iconoclasm to complete.
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Henry was particularly anxious to get his avaricious hands on a famous jewel ‘of great lustre’, a large ruby known as the ‘Royal of France’ that had been donated to the shrine by the French King Louis VII in 1179; Henry later proudly wore it as a ring on his thumb.
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An account of a visit to the magnificent monument, written only a week or so before its destruction began, is preserved in a letter written, ironically, to Cromwell from William Penison.

Yesterday my Lady of Montreuil,
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accompanied with her gentlewomen and the ambassador of France, arrived in this town … where I showed her St Thomas’s shrine … at the which she was not little marvelled of the great riches thereof; saying [them] to be innumerable, and that if she had not seen it, all the men in the world could never [have] made her to believe it.

Thus looking over and viewing more than an hour as well at the shrine as St Thomas’s head, being at both set cushions to kneel, and the Prior, opening St Thomas’s head, saying to her three times: ‘This is St Thomas’s head,’ and offered her to kiss it.

Wisely, perhaps, and with an eye for hygiene far ahead of her time, she declined. She also refused to kneel, preferring to ‘view the riches thereof’ instead.
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By Cromwell’s commandment, Becket’s image was torn down from the high altar of the Church and Hospital of St Thomas Acon (or Acre) on the north side of Cheapside in the City of London. The stained glass in the windows of the church, which included images of his martyrdom, were also smashed ‘so that there shall be no more mention be made of him ever’.
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Government archives and legal documents were searched
and Becket’s name effaced by pen, or crudely sliced out with a knife. The city of Canterbury had to change its coat of arms. St Thomas Becket was being brutally erased from the pages of history – by an official diktat worthy of any modern totalitarian state.

Later that September, Thomas Wriothesley, en route for Flanders on a mission for Cromwell, encountered Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, returning from his ambassadorship to France, on the road between Rochester and Sittingbourne in Kent, the proud prelate riding at the head of an impressive and colourful cavalcade of retainers. Wriothesley asked the Bishop’s companion what Gardiner thought of ‘our doings here’ – a coy reference to the destruction of Becket’s shrine. He was told the religious conservative ‘misliked not the doing at Canterbury, but rather seemed to like it, saying that if he had been at home he would have given his counsel to the doing thereof and wished the like were done at Winchester’.
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Unbeknown to Gardiner, his surprising and perhaps uncharacteristic wish was about to become true. After his sacrilegious vandalism at Canterbury, Pollard, with Wriothesley and John Williams, had ridden westwards to Winchester to attack the shrine of St Swithun. This was second in popularity to that of Becket at Canterbury and from 1200 had stood in the priory’s retrochoir, later flanked by the chantries of Bishops Beaufort and Waynflete.
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They began their work at ‘three o’clock this Saturday morning’, the early hour selected doubtless because of fears of local opposition. Pollard and his colleagues planned to ‘sweep away all the rotten bones’ in case it was thought ‘we came more for the treasure than for avoiding of the abomination of idolatry’.
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Here was a man now entirely happy in his work. However, disappointment lurked inside the great Romanesque church: all the jewels on the saint’s tomb were found to be merely glass and paste, but the iconoclasts had the consolation of the £1,300 worth of spoil (or £490,000 at 2006 prices) they sequestered. Pollard told Cromwell later that Saturday morning:

We have also received into our possession the cross of emeralds, the cross called Jerusalem, another cross of gold, two chalices of gold with some silver plate … of the vestry. The old prior made the plate of the house so thin [disposed of it] that we can diminish none of it and leave
the prior anything furnished. We found the prior and all the convent very conformable.
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The destruction of Becket’s shrine at last galvanised the Vatican into action against Henry. On 17 December 1538, Pope Paul III prepared to promulgate the bull of excommunication drawn up by his predecessor, Clement VII, five years before. It declared the English King a heretic and fully discharged his subjects from their oaths of allegiance to him. The Catholic monarchs of Spain and France were urged to unite to return England to papal authority, and Cromwell, ‘that limb of Satan’, was singled out personally to be cast into Hell’s all-consuming fire. Plainly, the bull could not be published in England, so it was read out rather lamely at the nearest locations safe from Henry’s vengeance: at Cold-stream, across the border in Scotland, and across the English Channel at Boulogne and Dieppe, within the realm of His Most Christian Majesty Francis I.
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Papal anger was not just confined to the damning words of anathema: two days after Christmas, Cardinal Pole was dispatched secretly once more from Rome to rally Europe against Henry, that ‘most cruel and abominable tyrant’.

The forces of the Catholic Church were at last being marshalled to attack England and her recalcitrant, egotistical monarch.

Both were terribly vulnerable to invasion by the European superpowers.

CHAPTER NINE

The Distant Sound of Conflict

Come, my lord of Winchester. Answer the king here, but speak plainly and directly and shrink not, man! Is not that which pleases the king a law?

CROMWELL TO BISHOP STEPHEN GARDINER, 1539
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Throughout the early months of 1539, Cromwell marshalled the defences of the realm in fearful expectation that French and Spanish troops could land on the shores of England at any time. The signing of the Treaty of Toledo by Charles V and Francis I on 12 January was another straw in the wind of impending war. Under its terms, both rulers agreed they would not conclude any alliance or diplomatic pact with Henry without first obtaining the other’s full agreement. In addition, Pope Paul III also made the conservative Scottish abbot David Beaton
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a cardinal and commissioned him to inveigle James V of Scotland into attacking England from the north. In London, all this European hurly-burly raised the spectre of a simultaneous three-pronged invasion of the realm and appeared to place it in the unenviable position of being ‘but a morsel amongst choppers’, as a gloomy Wriothesley graphically wrote.

Henry appealed to the nobility, warning that the Pope – that ‘pestilent idol, enemy of all truth and usurpator of all princes’ – was now conspiring to corrupt England’s religion and strip her of all her wealth. He sought pledges that they each would supply at least forty men, preferably archers and gunners, to be available, rather optimistically, at
one hour’s notice.
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Persistent rumours that the imperial and French ambassadors would both be recalled from London heightened the jittery fears of an imminent outbreak of war
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and just before the Frenchman Castillon departed, Cromwell pointedly escorted him around the Tower of London so he could see the large stocks of armour and weaponry stored there.

To underline his less-than-subtle warnings of English military might, the Minister read out interminable lists of ordnance, munitions, warships and volunteers, all of which, he claimed, were ready for immediate mobilisation. The Lord Privy Seal later told the King that he had also allowed the ambassador to visit his own personal armoury,