Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (10 page)

It had been intimated to the cardinal that he should retire to a small episcopal palace in Esher and, as he rode there on his mule, a messenger came from the king bearing with him a ring and a letter. Henry had written to tell him that he need not despair and that he could at any time be raised higher than before. The cardinal alighted from his mule and knelt down on the earth in prayer. The motives of the king are not immediately apparent. It was said at the time that there was a mystery or secrecy about royalty that no observer should attempt to penetrate. Yet it may be that Henry wished to test the success of his new council before irrevocably destroying the cardinal.

A parliament was summoned at the beginning of November as a way of informing the nation of the king’s will. The members of the Commons, in large part lawyers and country gentlemen, were quite at ease with the royal prerogative; their role was to register the king’s decrees and to shield him from blame for unpopular measures. When Thomas Cromwell was first nominated as a member of parliament he was told to consult with the duke of Norfolk ‘to know the king’s pleasure how you shall order yourself in the parliament house’. The Speaker was a royal official whose salary was paid by the king and, as Edward Hall states in his
Chronicle
, ‘the most part of the Commons were the king’s servants’.

The parliament of 1529 was no different from its predecessors. The king sat upon his throne while the lord chancellor, Thomas More, standing at his right hand, delivered an oration on the causes for its summons. He adverted to Wolsey as ‘the great wether [a castrated ram] which is of late fallen’. The members of the Commons soon showed their loyalty with an Act ‘to release the king from repayment of the loans he borrowed’. When one member opposed the measure the king wondered aloud whether he was ‘on my side’. The parliament passed bills on the rearing of calves and the price of woollen hats beyond the sea, but its attention was largely trained on the economic exactions of the Church. It was riding in the wake of the anti-clerical anger released at the fall of Wolsey. A general petition was drawn up in which the vices and corruptions of the clergy were denounced in strident terms as the fruit of the seven deadly sins; the ‘ordinaries’ or secular clergy were vicious and ravenous and insatiable and idle and cruel.

The clamour was then given the shape of formal bills against the payments demanded by clerics for proving wills and for funerals; the clergy were also to be prohibited from holding any land on lease and from engaging in trade. It is quite clear that the royal council had inspired, if not exactly orchestrated, these complaints. It was another way of striking at the pope by reminding him that parliament would always uphold the wishes of the king. He had his people behind him. It is characteristic of the early reform of religion in England, however, that it should begin with pragmatic and financial concerns. The English instinct has always been towards practice rather than theory.

When their bills were sent to the upper house John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, complained that the Commons were trying to destroy the Church and that they acted ‘for lack of faith’; when the Commons complained to the king, Fisher was obliged to withdraw his remarks. It was generally believed, however, that the bishops of England were too eager to defend the financial abuses that had been condemned. When they claimed that their practices were based on prescription and custom, a lawyer from Gray’s Inn remarked: ‘The usage hath ever been of thieves to rob on Shooter’s Hill,
ergo
, is it lawful?’ The hunt had begun.

In the autumn of this year Anne Boleyn gave to her royal
master a copy of a pamphlet that had recently been issued. It has been argued that Anne was a Lutheran in all but name, but it may be that she simply wished to advise Henry on a possible extension of his powers and of his income. Simon Fish’s
A Supplication for the Beggars
was an anti-clerical manifesto in which the author directly addresses the king on the scandalous practices of the ‘ravenous wolves’ of the clergy who are devouring his kingdom. From the bishop to the summoner, this ‘idle ravenous sort . . . have gotten into their hands more than the third part of all your realm’. They had also debauched 100,000 women. What was the remedy? Make laws against them. Fish added that ‘this is the great scab, why they will not let the New Testament go abroad in your mother tongue’. It is reported that Henry ‘kept the book in his bosom three or four days’, and he is likely to have agreed with much of its contents. The bishop of Norwich wrote in alarm to the archbishop of Canterbury that ‘wheresoever they go, they hear say that the king’s pleasure is, the New Testament in English should go forth, and men should have it and read it’. Did not Anne Boleyn have a French translation of the New Testament?

Throughout the autumn and winter of 1529 the king’s team of scholars were busily investigating volumes of forgotten lore in order to find precedents for Henry’s separation from Katherine. But in the course of their work Cranmer and others came upon, or were invited to consider, material that might entirely change the relations between king and pope. In an ancient book entitled
Leges Anglorum
they discovered that in ad 187 a certain Lucius I became the first Christian king of England; Lucius had asked the pope to entrust him with Roman law, whereupon the pope had replied that the king did not need any Roman intervention because ‘you are vicar of God in your realm’. This of course was highly significant in the charged atmosphere of the time. By invoking ancient precedent Henry might be able to claim spiritual supremacy as well as secular power. The canons of various Church councils were scrutinized to elicit the opinions that no bishop could assume the title of ‘universal bishop’ and that no see need defer to the authority of Rome. The papers were eventually given the title of
Collectanea satis copiosa
, or a ‘large enough collection’.

The document was given to Henry in the summer of 1530 and
he examined it very carefully; he made notes on forty-six separate points. In a conversation with an envoy from the king of France he declared that the pope was an ignorant man and not fit to be any kind of universal pastor. Henry was also well informed about the anti-clerical works coming out of Antwerp and Hamburg. After he had read William Tyndale’s
The Obedience of a Christian Man
, in which it is argued that the king’s authority should be extended over ecclesiastic affairs, he is reported to have said that ‘this is the book for me and all kings to read’.

In that summer the king’s ambassadors in Rome declared to the pope that no Englishman could be cited in a foreign court. When Anne Boleyn’s father, the earl of Wiltshire, came as an envoy before the pontiff he refused to kiss the pope’s foot even though it was graciously stretched out to him. In this year Henry himself wrote to the pope expostulating with him for using ignorant counsellors. ‘This truly is a default, and verily a great fault, worthy to be alienate and abhorred of Christ’s vicar, in that you have dealt so variably, yes rather so inconstantly and deceivably.’ He went on to declare that ‘never was there any prince so handled by a pope as your holiness has treated us’. The question at the English court now concerned the best path by which to advance.

The last days of Wolsey were at hand. He was harried north, to his archbishopric of York. The duke of Norfolk advised Thomas Cromwell to ‘tell him if he go not away shortly, but shall tarry, I shall tear him with my teeth’. When he was informed that his proposed school at Ipswich was being deferred, and that the construction of Cardinal College in Oxford had been diverted for the king’s purposes, the cardinal told Cromwell that ‘I cannot write more for weeping and for sorrow’. Yet he still asserted his own power. He set the date for his enthronement as archbishop of York and wrote to the king asking for his mitre and pall. Henry then spoke aloud of his ‘brazen insolence’. ‘Is there still arrogance in this fellow,’ he asked, ‘who is so obviously ruined?’ On 4 November, three days before the planned enthronement, Wolsey was arrested. It was alleged that he had engaged in secret correspondence with the pope and with the French and Spanish sovereigns. There may have been some truth in this, since in his
extremity he had sought assistance wherever he could find it, but it is most unlikely that he had committed treason. It is also possible that he was trying to promote the cause of Katherine and to hinder that of the woman whom he called ‘the night crow’.

After his arrest he was taken south at a slow pace, stopping at the abbeys and monastic houses along his route. His once sturdy constitution was by now fatally undermined, and on his journey he was attacked by a violent case of dysentery. It was said to have been brought on by a surfeit of Warden pears, but there were other reasons for his dissolution. The keeper of the Tower, Sir William Kingston, was ordered to meet Wolsey at Sheffield; his destination was now in sight. When Wolsey heard of Kingston’s arrival, he clapped his hand on his thigh and gave a great sigh. His gentleman usher tried to put the best interpretation on the events, saying that Kingston had come to conduct the cardinal into the presence of the king. The cardinal was not convinced. ‘I perceive,’ he said, ‘more than you can imagine or can know. Experience of old has taught me.’

Kingston was then introduced to the prelate and knelt before him. ‘I pray you, stand up,’ Wolsey said, ‘kneel not unto a very wretch, replete with misery, not worthy to be esteemed, as a vile object, utterly cast away.’ Kingston also tried to reassure him, but the cardinal was not to be comforted. ‘I know’, he said, ‘what is provided for me.’ He knew that it would be a traitor’s death, with beheading as the best fate he could expect. His dysentery became more violent still, and by the time he reached Leicester Abbey most of his strength had gone. ‘Father Abbot,’ he said on his arrival, ‘I am come hither to leave my bones among you.’ He was laid in a bed, where he waited for his end. He spoke of the king. ‘He is a prince of royal courage, and has a princely heart; and rather than he will miss or want part of his appetite he will hazard the loss of one half of his kingdom.’ At the stroke of eight in the evening, Wolsey lost consciousness and died. He still lies buried somewhere within the ruins of Leicester Abbey, and a monument stands on the supposed site of his grave. Yet this was more than the passing of an individual life. The fall of Wolsey was intimately associated with the demise of the Church.

Henry had determined to act on behalf of what he called ‘entire Englishmen’ against ‘Englishmen papisticate’. In the early autumn of 1530 he claimed that fourteen senior clerics, among them eight bishops and three abbots, were guilty of
praemunire
; they were accused of colluding with Wolsey in his role as papal legate. Only days after the death of the cardinal, the same ‘information’ was filed against all of the clergy of England; they were charged with the offence because they had administered canon law or Roman law in the ecclesiastical courts, a crime which of course they had been committing for many centuries. The Spanish ambassador reported that the bishops and abbots were ‘terrified’. No one understood the workings of this new-found principle, and its interpretation was widely believed to reside only in the king’s head. Parliament was recalled at the beginning of 1531, and at the same time the convocation of the clergy was transferred from St Paul’s to Westminster. Both bodies would be under the king’s thumb.

In this atmosphere of fear and threat it was learned that the king would graciously accept a large sum of money to allay the offences of the clergy. In effect they were being forced to pay a subsidy. The province of Canterbury duly obliged by offering £100,000 but the offer was accompanied by a series of conditions. The bishops and abbots asked for a clear definition of
praemunire
,
in case of future difficulties, and demanded that the Church itself be confirmed in all its ancient privileges as stated in Magna Carta. These proposals seem to have infuriated the king, who did not wish to bargain with his subjects. The invocation of Magna Carta also posed a threat to any unilateral action he might wish to take on religious matters.

So he attacked. In February 1531 he sent five articles to be added to the proposal on the clerical subsidy. In the first of them he called upon convocation to recognize him as ‘sole protector and supreme head of the English church and clergy’. This was the fruit of his reading the ancient sources, suggested to him by Cranmer and others, where the supreme leadership of the Church in England was first bestowed upon King Lucius. In the second article the king proposed the theory that it was he who truly had the ‘
cura animarum
’ or ‘cure of the souls’ of his subjects. No king had ever proposed such sweeping powers; no king had ever presumed so much.

Consternation ensued among the leaders of the clergy. They may not have had the opportunity of reading
Leges Anglorum
, as well as the other sources made available to the king, and so Henry’s assumption of sovereignty over the Church was an extraordinary and almost unthinkable innovation. He wished to replace the papacy that had governed the Church for more than a thousand years. And what did he mean by the ‘cure’ or ‘care’ of souls? That was the office of a priest duly ordained.