1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (24 page)

The year of 1540 was a bumper one for attainders. Six papists, including Richard Fetherston, Thomas Abel and Edward Powell, were attained for denying the king’s supremacy. A further nine, including papists accused of adherence to the Pope and Protestant heretics, were attainted next. This is the only recorded use of attainder to convict heresy in English history. On the strength of these attainders, Fetherston, Abel and Powell were hanged at Smithfield as traitors on the same day as the three Protestants – Robert Barnes, William Jerome and Thomas Garrett – were burned there. William Bird and Walter, Lord Hungerford, were also attainted in 1540 for treasonable conversation, and, in Lord Hungerford’s case, for ‘the abominable and detestable vice and sin of buggery with William Maister, Thomas Smith and other his servants’.
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Finally, and most shockingly of all, in June 1540, Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex – the king’s chief minister and vicegerent in spirituals – was arrested, imprisoned and convicted of high treason by attainder. The attainder, which was written in the style of a petition to the king, accused Cromwell – and simultaneously found him guilty – of being ‘the most false and corrupt traitor, deceiver and circumventor against your most royal person, and the imperial crown of this your realm, that hath been known, seen, or heard of in all the time of your most noble reign’. Cromwell had, despite being ‘a person of as poor and low degree as few be within this your realm’, allegedly usurped ‘your kingly estate, power and authority’ and acted in many weighty affairs without the king’s knowledge or consent. He had claimed too great an intimacy and influence with the king, ‘pretending to have so great a stroke about you’ and being ‘sure of you; which is detestable and to be abhorred… that any subject should enterprise or take upon him so to speak of his sovereign liege lord and king’. Finally, he was a ‘detestable heretic’ and had caused ‘damnable errors and heresies to be inculcated, impressed and infixed in the hearts’ of the king’s subjects. The real reason for Cromwell’s fall – whether it was a result of his evangelical beliefs and support for reformed causes, his implication in heresy, the failure of Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves or that he had simply over reached himself – is unclear. One persuasive theory suggested by Miles F. Shore is that Henry VIII relied in all but seven years of his reign on one single, trusted and idealized person of power and influence, who each in turn took an equally disproportionate amount of blame when they failed to live up to perfection. Henry’s vindictiveness towards them can thus be explained by the transformation of his shame and humiliation at failure, into rage at the person he blamed for the failure. This must explain Henry’s lack of pity despite Cromwell’s ardent and impassioned letters of petition, even if it still does not answer the question of how Henry felt that Cromwell had let him down so badly. Under arrest, Cromwell wrote to Henry, ‘prostrate at your Majesty’s feet’ on 12 June 1540,

if it were in my power to make you live for ever, God knows I would; or to make you so rich that you should enrich all men, or so powerful that all the world should obey you. For your Majesty has been most bountiful to me, and more like a father than a master. I ask you mercy where I have offended.

He signed it off ‘written with the quaking hand and most sorrowful heart of your most sorrowful subject and most humble servant and prisoner’. His appeal to Henry was ‘Most gracious prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy!’ None was forthcoming. A brave letter from Cranmer to the king suggests something of the reaction to Cromwell’s fall when he wrote ‘who cannot be sorrowful and amazed that he should be a traitor against your majesty, he that was so advanced by your majesty… he who loved your majesty (as I ever thought) no less than God’, and also neatly summed up Henry’s new quandary, ‘for who shall your grace trust hereafter, if you might not trust him?’ For our purposes, though, it is striking that once again, someone previously so close to the king lost their footing so dramatically. Later, Henry would rue Cromwell’s loss but it is terrifying that at the time, he precipitously lashed out at one of his closest confidants and paid no heed to his appeals. Henry’s later regret was too little and too late. It is also conspicuous that Henry and his associates chose to stage Cromwell’s downfall through parliament, rather than risk the earl’s defence in a trial by jury.
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The last two celebrated cases of conviction by attainder involved more members of the Howard family and people particularly close to Henry VIII. On 2 November 1541, Henry VIII was told that his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, whom he had married just over a year earlier in July 1540, had committed adultery with Francis Dereham and Thomas Culpepper. Henry was shocked and horrified by this betrayal, so like his first, and after his initial disbelief had prompted further investigation, the privy council reported back their findings – that Henry Manox had been intimate with Catherine before her marriage and that Francis Dereham confessed to having known her carnally ‘both in his doublet and hose between the sheets and in naked bed’. At this, ‘the King’s heart was pierced with pensiveness, so that it was long before he could utter his sorrow’ until finally he spoke ‘with plenty of tears’. The similarities between Catherine’s case and that of Anne Boleyn are striking. In both, there was talk of a pre-contract before the royal marriage and of adultery with more than one man. Unlike Anne though, Catherine seems to have been sexually involved with Dereham before her marriage, and historians generally assume her guilt with Culpepper after it. Having had Anne tried before a court of her peers to his great dishonour and shame, the king was not about to repeat his mistake. Although Catherine was only imprisoned in the Tower on 10 February 1542 and executed three days later, her fate had been decided far in advance of this: on 22 November 1541, she had forfeited her title of queen; the very next day, summons had been sent to peers to attend a parliament and by 10 December, Dereham and Culpepper had been found guilty of treason (again, for an offence – consensual adultery with the queen – that was still not technically treasonous) and executed. The summons to parliament indicated Henry’s intention to use the mechanism of attainder to avoid open trial and declare Catherine’s guilt through parliament. In the event, the attainder was even given the king’s assent by letters patent under the Great Seal (that is,
in absentia
), a decision amazingly justified on the grounds that the execution should not be delayed until the end of the parliamentary session. The text stated that Catherine and her accomplice, Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford (widow of Anne Boleyn’s brother George, who had apparently aided and abetted Catherine’s infidelity), had committed abominable treasons ‘to the most fearful peril and danger of the destruction of the king’ and had been ‘lawfully indicted… convicted and attainted of high treason’ by parliament. The attainder also added to the statute book the ruling that adultery with the queen constituted treason, as did the failure of a woman to declare a previously unchaste life before marrying the king, and, additionally, convicted fifteen of Catherine’s relatives and servants of misprision (or concealment) of treason (although all pleaded for the king’s mercy and were eventually pardoned).
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The final attainder of Henry VIII’s reign was in late 1546, when Parliament was summoned to deal with the offences alleged against Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and his father, the Duke of Norfolk. Surrey was accused, not on the basis of his poetry, but for having quartered his arms with those of the kings’, a clear heraldic sign of his royal blood and an apparent suggestion of the Howards’ place in the line of succession – or at least, this is how the king understood it. Surrey was actually tried before a court but both he and his father were subsequently attainted through parliament without any further evidence (or details of the alleged offences) being raised in the attainder. The attainder had not even been passed by the lords when Surrey’s sentence was carried out: the young poet was executed on 19 January 1547. Norfolk’s fate was serendipitous – his execution was ordered on 27 January but Henry VIII died in the night and Norfolk awoke the next morning a free man. He was released by Edward VI and died aged eighty in 1554.

In total, in Henry VIII’s reign, sixty-eight people were condemned without trial by common law. Thirty-four of them were executed (the others fled or their fates are unknown). Many of these had been condemned by parliamentary attainder precisely because they had either not technically committed treason or there was insufficient evidence to prove their guilt, leaving the record vague and unspecific as to their crimes. It was a legalistic way of evading the law, of acting illegally. Many attainders had also expanded the legal definition of treason – by the end of the reign, it now newly encompassed marriage to the king’s relatives without royal consent, a royal bride’s concealment of a previously immoral life and heresy – on top of other statutes, which, besides the attainders, had widened the definition of treason even further. These were lawful statutes but were designed to make arbitrary action possible. They were, in fact, tyrannical. Bellamy has concluded ‘they were without respectable precedent and based on no principle save anything which annoyed the king was to his peril and thereby traitorous’.
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Some sense can, however, be made of the use of trial and attainder to convict sundry persons of high treason in Henry VIII’s reign, and this rationale further exposes the king’s nature. Several cases can be categorized as genuinely perceived threats to the Crown, mostly after 1536: Buckingham, Lord Thomas Howard, the Pilgrim rebels, Exeter and Montague, Surrey and Norfolk. Nevertheless, for the most part, the evidence used to convict these men was inadequate and unconvincing or, as in the case of Lord Thomas, no actual offence had been committed but there were grounds for the king’s concern that the royal succession and possibly even his person were endangered. There is a second category of people who committed treason by their failure to conform to the royal will: Barton, More, Fisher and the heretics, papists and abbots of the late 1530s and early 1540s. This was possible on the basis of a definition of treason that had expanded to include thoughts as well as words. Finally, there were those close to the king who let him down: Anne Boleyn, Rochford and Norris, Nicholas Carew, Thomas Cromwell and Catherine Howard (and the sixteen condemned with her). This group were all executed in or after 1536. The savagery of the king’s reaction to their betrayal seems bound to have been linked to the deep sense of betrayal and treachery felt by Henry as a result of Anne Boleyn’s alleged infidelities and cemented by the unfaithfulness of the Pilgrim rebels. For these people, treason had been unofficially expanded so that it equated to disloyalty and betrayal, personal as well as political. Their deaths were products of an injured pride from a man whose egoism no longer confined itself to showy displays in the tiltyard.

Historians are often loath to classify Henry VIII as a tyrant. This is partly to avoid the unfortunate, ahistorical hyperbole and caricature of some popular representations of Henry, but there is also another reason. The king’s first biographer, William Thomas, wrote of Henry in 1547 that he was

undoubtedly the rarest man that lived in his time. But I say not this to make him a god, nor in all his doings I will not say he hath been a saint… I will confess that he did many evil things… but not as a cruel tyrant, or as a pharisaical hypocrite… I wot [know] not where – in all the histories I have read, to find one private king equal to him.

There is a charm and charisma about Henry VIII that dissuades one from applying the dreaded epithet. I think the crux of this is that Henry VIII didn’t think of himself as a tyrant. It is important to grasp that Henry believed that he had fulfilled Erasmus’s instructions and he remained convinced of the lawfulness, wisdom and benevolence of his actions. Thomas More had, like Erasmus, defined the difference between a good king and a tyrant as ‘a king who respects the law differs from a cruel tyrant thus: a tyrant rules his subjects as slaves, a king thinks of his subjects as his own children’. The tone of Henry’s letters to the Pilgrims was strikingly like that of a father reprimanding his ungrateful and disobedient children. He reminded them of his love for them, described his ‘chief charge both of your souls and bodies’ and exhorted them ‘in Christ, as a pitiful shepherd over his sheep’ to

offend no more so grievously your undoubted king and natural prince, which always hath shown himself most loving unto you, and remember your duty of allegiance and that ye are bound to obey us your king, both by God’s commandment and law of nature.

By Henry’s own estimation, he was doing the things a good king did – it was only his rebellious subjects who were deviating from the orthodox and proper way.
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Yet it is an inescapable conclusion that in the last decade of his reign, Henry VIII had begun to act as a tyrant. The glittering, brilliant monarch of the accession, toppled into old age by betrayal, aggravated into irascibility and suspicion as a result of ill health and corrupted by absolute power, had become a despot.

Legend has it that Thomas More, advising the young Thomas Cromwell, told him

if you will follow my poor advice, you shall, in your counsel-giving unto his grace, ever tell him what he ought to do but never what he is able to do. So shall you show yourself a true faithful servant and a right worthy counsellor. For if a lion knew his own strength, hard it were for any man to rule him.

The old lion had learned his strength. The estimation of one priest during the Pilgrimage of Grace suggested that Wolsey’s terracotta roundels had been dreadfully prescient, for he called the king

a tyrant more cruel than Nero, for Nero destroyed but a part of Rome, but this tyrant destroyeth this whole realm.
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