1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (22 page)

It is not because I scorn or mock
The power of them to whom Fortune hath lent
Charge over us, …

but in doing so, he signals precisely how that rule is presently enforced –

… of right to strike the stroke

– with a sword. It seems probable that Wyatt’s vision from the Bell Tower on 17 May – the ‘bloody days’ that had broken his heart – came to mind as he wrote these words. Wyatt makes another reference to the executioner’s death in another poem, ‘Stand whoso list’, whose dating is uncertain, concluding that it is preferable to die ‘aged after the common trace’ than ‘dazed, with dreadful face’, words he adds to his Latin source, Seneca. The trouble for the speaker in ‘Mine Own John Poyntz’ is that he finds himself unable to give counsel to one who ignores it –

I cannot frame my tune to feign
To cloak the truth for praise, without desert,
Of them that list all vice for to retain

nor fawn and flatter with the rest: ‘Grin when he laugheth that beareth all the sway, / Frown when he frowneth and groan when he is pale’. That Wyatt uses a singular ‘he’ here is a deliberate alteration from Alamanni’s many ‘masters’ and focuses the attention on a single oppressive ruler. The identity of this ruler becomes clear as the speaker protests that he –

…cannot crouch nor kneel to do such wrong
To worship them like God on earth alone
That are like wolves these silly lambs among.

Even in the context of standard anti-court satire, this was strong stuff because ‘on earth alone’ and the picture of the ravenous wolf among the lambs are both additions to the text by Wyatt and strikingly conspicuous imagery. The first echoes Henry’s adoption of the title of Supreme Head of the Church and is unwittingly similar to Bishop Gardiner’s description of Henry VIII as the image of God upon earth. The second is reminiscent of one of Thomas More’s epithets on tyranny: ‘What is the good king? He is the watchdog, the guardian of his flock, who by barking keeps the wolves from the sheep. What is the bad king? He is the wolf.’ This reference to savagery is matched by the speaker’s insistence that he ‘cannot wrest the law to fill the coffer / With innocent blood to feed myself fat…’, which in the context of the deaths of Anne Boleyn and the gentlemen of the privy chamber seems remarkably close to the bone. Finally, at the climax of the poem, the speaker’s most devastating blow is in his refusal to call ‘The lecher a lover, a tyranny / To be the right of a prince’s reign.’ Wyatt had come perilously close to committing high treason by calling his king a tyrant.
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Surrey, whose eulogy of Wyatt indicates his admiration for the older poet, was to follow suit, though within the confines of biblical and classical allusion. In 1541, Wyatt, back at Allington, wrote a version of King David’s penitential psalms, which Surrey subsequently circulated in holograph manuscript prefaced by one of his own sonnets, ‘The Great Macedon’. The similarities between Henry VIII and David – as wise rulers, close to God – had been emphasized by Henry in his depiction in the miniatures of his private psalter as David. Wyatt had, in his psalms, been circumspect about those less imitable aspects of David’s character – his adultery and tyrannical abuse of royal power – but Surrey’s preface was far less cautious. Here, Surrey explicitly directed the reader’s attention to the example David gave of lustfulness:

Of just David by perfect penitence,
Where Rulers may see in a mirror clear
The bitter fruit of false concupiscence…

The indiscretion of this allusion, and the implications for Henry’s version of himself, were immense. It also puts the opening lines of Surrey’s later poem, ‘Th’ Assyrian king’ into a different light. Was Surrey making reference to his own king when he wrote ‘Th’ Assyrian king, in peace, with foul desire / And filthy lusts that stain’d his regal heart’? Although this poem ostensibly focused on the Assyrian king Sardanapalus, a character conventionally used to symbolise intemperate behaviour, the link between his lusts and the ‘false concupiscence’ of David drew parallels that were dangerous to draw. Cloaked in literary precedent, the poets of Henry VIII’s court were also quietly, but powerfully expressing their disapproval of the king’s increasing despotism.
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C
HAPTER
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Did Henry VIII Become a Tyrant?

W
hy did it matter that Henry VIII’s subjects had started to call him a tyrant? It mattered because in the sixteenth century, it was one of the worst insults one could use against a king. It was also a statement about Henry VIII’s character and how he had changed. It mattered, perhaps above all, because these mutterings of tyranny among his subjects were not without substance. The actions of Henry in 1536 were not those of a man who was ‘affable and gracious [and] harmed no one’, as he had once been described. From around this time, Henry VIII appears to have become more suspicious, and the government that he commanded more repressive and brutal. He increasingly condemned his enemies to die without due process of law. This was partly a rational response to changed circumstances: after the divorce from Katherine, the break with Rome and Fisher and More’s deaths, Henry VIII did have more enemies. There were plots and traitors, and those continuing their allegiance to Rome could be seen as a dreaded fifth column. There were also external threats: it must have seemed that Francis I and Charles V were poised for invasion and, although the threat of the papal bull was not realized in 1536, it was an ever-present threat that was eventually published in 1538. Nevertheless, Henry’s new enthusiasm for revenge still seems disproportionate, and there was a palpable shift in his personal response to perceived threats. The origin of some of this was pain and age – over time, ill-health combined with age to make him more anxious and insecure, and the constant pain in his leg produced by his ulcer made him increasingly irascible. It is after this stage that the records start to speak of the king’s displays of bad temper. More serious, as we shall explore below, was the way Henry now reacted to alleged betrayal or treason. While it is impossible to prove, the timing and nature of this change in his behaviour makes it seem likely to be the result of an aggrieved, overblown and readily mobilized sense of betrayal in the light of Anne Boleyn’s apparent adultery and later, the Pilgrimage of Grace. Henry had become markedly more distrustful and despotic – in short, a tyrant.
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Being a Tyrant

Calling Henry VIII a tyrant has, over the intervening years, raised all sorts of issues – and hackles. The doyen of Tudor political history, G. R. Elton, argues tirelessly that Henry VIII’s rule was constitutional and limited, maintaining the exclusive legislative authority of parliament and preserving the principle of the superiority of the king-in-parliament over the king alone. In addition, Elton and others have pointed out how dependent the king was on the cooperation of the nation, as the Pilgrimage of Grace tellingly shows. Steven G. Ellis, analyzing the reprisals that Henry took against a rebellion in Ireland in 1534, says they were necessarily limited in order not to alienate the local community and argues that this means ‘Henry VIII was so far from establishing a despotism that he could not even be sure of enforcing undoubted rights’. Both historians have pointed to how Henry’s actions conformed to the rule of law, although both also admit that there were a few ‘notorious examples’ of ‘acts of doubtful legality’. It is absolutely true that Henry VIII was often painstaking in his adherence to the letter of the law. But as several scholars have pointed out, that is not necessarily incompatible with tyranny. Even Elton concludes that in the sixteenth century, the rule of law permitted horrors.
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In the sixteenth century, being a tyrant was less a question of what a king did than who he was. The crux of tyranny was the spirit or character that gave rise to tyrannical behaviour. William Thomas, Henry VIII’s first biographer, quoted an unnamed Italian, who after Henry VIII’s death in 1547, called him ‘the greatest tyrant that ever was in England’ before going on to describe a tyrant in the following terms:

The principal token of a tyrant is the immoderate satisfaction of an unlawful appetite, when the person, whether by right or wrong, hath power to achieve his sensual will, and that person, also, who by force draws unto him that which of right is not his, in the unlawful usurping commits express tyranny.

A tyrant could principally be identified by his character with its inclination to unbridled greed and avarice, having unrestrained lusts and appetites for things not belonging to him. When he possessed and used his power unlawfully to usurp such things, his tyranny was expressed – but was it always latent in his flawed character?
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By a modern definition (though framing the question within the standard of the period in which the subject lived), a tyrant is

a ruler who exercises arbitrary power beyond the scope permitted by the laws, customs and standards of his time and society and who does so with a view to maintaining or increasing that power.

If we wanted to test Henry VIII against this definition, we could examine vast amounts of evidence to see where arbitrary power was exercised with a view to enhancing that power. In fact, there is so much evidence that a study of the indices of tyranny in Henry VIII’s reign could produce a complete book in and of itself. Yet even a cursory survey suggests that the evidence of tyranny emerges primarily from the 1530s and later, reaching increasing pace towards 1536 and maintaining this until the end of Henry VIII’s reign.
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One of the characteristics frequently associated with tyranny is the creation of a totalitarian state and the suppression of dissent. This is hard to measure in the sixteenth century, because while contemporary thought extolled the virtues of freedom, it was not a freedom with which the modern mind would be familiar. The Henrician state was undeniably extremely intrusive into the lives of its subjects and curtailed a vast range of personal freedoms. It introduced a large number of new laws to control the behaviour of English subjects, including the Beggars Act of 1531. This legislated that vagrants, beggars and vagabonds should be half-stripped and whipped through the town or set in the stocks for three days and nights on bread and water. Other new statutes included the introduction of the penalty of death by hanging for those found guilty of buggery in 1534 (first enacted in 1540) and the first law against witchcraft in 1542. Other acts created new felonies – fishing in private ponds after dark or selling horses to the Scots both became capital offences! There was also never freedom to believe what one wanted: it was perfectly accepted that some religious beliefs were heretical, and even Thomas More, who is often championed as a defender of free speech, had as Lord Chancellor been a great persecutor of heretics. It was usual to wish to control men’s thoughts to some extent. Yet, even set in this context of the customs and standards of his time, Henry VIII’s ambitions to govern men’s minds were unusual. The manner in which Henry attempted to command men’s thoughts in order to suppress all opposition to his rule are the actions of a tyrant. The Acts of Succession and Supremacy of 1534 required that subjects swear oaths subscribing to their terms, which ‘they shall truly, firmly and constantly without fraud or guile observe, fulfil, maintain, defend and keep to their cunning, wit and uttermost of their powers’. Here was an attempt to coerce all subjects into committing themselves to Henry’s controversial policies in mind and spirit, as well as deed. As C. S. L. Davies wrote, ‘a regime which demands a show of unanimous consent is more coercive than one which merely imposes its will from above’. It effectively forbade dissent, as the chronicler Edward Hall illustrated by his comment on the Catholic Friar Forest, ‘how could he say the King was not supreme head of the church, when he himself had sworn to the contrary’. Henry believed that as Supreme Head his role encompassed the direction of theology, and his initiatives, such as the Ten Articles of 1536 designed to ‘establish Christian quietness and unity among us, and to avoid contentious opinions’ or the 1539 act ‘abolishing diversity in opinions’, were intended to conform all men to a uniform belief.
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Other evidence of the onset of tyranny is perhaps more tangible. There were convictions obtained on the basis of flimsy evidence, such as that of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, condemned as a traitor in 1521 (it was alleged that Buckingham had listened to prophecies saying he would become king when Henry died), or on the evidence of minimal witnesses, as shown by Cromwell’s note of November 1539 concerning Giles Heron, and ‘what shall be done with him, for as much as there is but one witness’. Heron was executed in 1540. The incidence of rigged trials is worthy of investigation, as is the passing of new laws to permit execution. Thomas More was, for example, originally imprisoned for refusing to swear the Oath of Succession in April 1534. He was, however, executed on 6 July 1535 on the grounds that he had rejected the king’s new title of Supreme Head, following the passing of the Act of Supremacy of November 1534 and the Treasons Act, which came into force in February 1535 and made words treasonous. One could also examine grey areas in the law, including the treatment and use of torture in the period between arrest and trial. In 1535, three Carthusian monks were chained by their necks and arms, and had their legs fettered with locks and chains in the Tower for thirteen days before their hanging and quartering, and even gentlefolk such as Anne Askew were illegally tortured: Anne was racked to make her confess to heresy and to implicate others, including Queen Kateryn Parr, in 1546. The new punishments that were introduced during Henry’s reign, including the horrific capital sentence of boiling in cases of poisoning, meted out to Richard Roose in 1531, might also be judged as evidence of tyranny. The treatment of the church and the manner in which the monasteries were dissolved could be considered, as could the issue of consent to new laws. Further evidence could be supplied by the work of other historians who have explored the king’s judicious and unpredictable use of pardons – there was a tendency for general pardons to remit fewer and fewer crimes of importance as the reign wore on – and Henry’s dangerous and manipulative role in the attempted coups against Archbishop Cranmer, Bishop Gardiner and Kateryn Parr in the 1540s. Another key discussion has been about the 1539 act which decreed that proclamations made by the king should be obeyed; historians have questioned the extent to which this was a despotic measure that sought to give royal proclamations the same status and power as acts of parliament. This could be compared with the 1536 Minorities Act, which gave Henry’s heir, on reaching the age of twenty-four, ‘full power and authority’ to revoke by letters patent any act of parliament made before that point, and the extent to which Henry VIII’s use of parliament made it an unchecked instrument of the royal will. To what extent did Tudor statutes add to the personal power of the king? Maurice Latey believes that tyrants often become convinced of their own divinity, and Henry VIII’s assumption of the title of Supreme Head of the Church of England suggests a version of this.
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