The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (14 page)

Cranmer was the target of the conservative conspirators once more, probably in November 1545 after the archbishop had been permitted to publish an English primer earlier in the summer. Henry was again told of his archbishop’s heresy and was urged to send him to the Tower. The king agreed to Cranmer’s arrest, which was planned for the next day during a Privy Council meeting at Westminster. But that night, at eleven o’clock, Henry sent the ubiquitous Sir Anthony Denny to Lambeth to summon Cranmer to his presence. The archbishop was roused from his bed, immediately crossed the River Thames and met the king in a darkened gallery of the Palace of Westminster. He was quickly warned of the plot against him. Henry told him:

I have granted their requests but whether I have done well or not, what say you my lord?

Cranmer thanked his royal master for the information but said he was happy to be committed to prison and to be tried for his beliefs, because he knew Henry would not allow him to have an unfair hearing. Always realistic, the king tried to make him understand what he was now confronting:

Oh Lord God! What fond simplicity you have!

If you permit yourself to be imprisoned, your every enemy may take advantage of you. Do you not think that once they have you in prison, three or four false knaves will be procured to witness against you and to condemn you? Whilst at liberty, [no one] dares to open their lips or appear before your face.

No, not so, my lord, I have better regard towards you than to permit your enemies to so overthrow you.

At least Henry fully understood how his leading administrators could be entrapped. He gave the archbishop his ring, which ‘they well know I use for no other purpose but to call matters from the Council into my own hands to be ordered and determined’. Show them the ring, said the king, when they make their accusations and order your arrest, and all will be well.

The next morning at eight o’clock, the Privy Council sent for Cranmer but kept him waiting outside the door of their chamber. He stood ‘among serving men and lackeys above three-quarters of an hour, many councillors and other men now and then going in and out’. Presently, the king’s favourite doctor, William Butts, another well-known evangelical, arrived and chatted to Cranmer. Then the physician went inside and told Henry:

Yes, I have seen a strange sight … my lord of Canterbury has become a lackey or a serving man, for he has been standing among them for almost an hour … so that I was ashamed to keep him company there any longer.

Cranmer was immediately called inside and told that a ‘great complaint’ had been made both to the Council and the king. Cranmer and others, ‘by his permission, had infected the whole realm with heresy and therefore it was the king’s pleasure that they should commit him to the Tower … [to] be examined for his trial’. Cranmer, pale-faced but calm, replied:

I am sorry, my lords, that you drive me to this exigency – to appeal from you to the king’s majesty, who, by this token has taken this matter into his own hands and discharges you thereof.

And with that, he held up Henry’s ring. There was an astonished silence. John, Lord Russell, was the first to speak. ‘Did I not tell you, my lords, that the king would never permit my lord of Canterbury to have such a blemish as to be imprisoned, unless it were for treason?’ Henry taunted them:

Ah! My lords, I had thought that I had a discreet and wise council but now I perceive that I am deceived. How have you handled my lord of Canterbury here?

What makes you [treat him like] a slave, shutting him out of the council chamber amongst serving men? Would you be so handled yourselves?

Then he became deadly serious:

I would you should well understand that I believe Canterbury as faithful a man towards me as ever was prelate in this realm and one to whom I owe many ways beholden, by the faith I owe to God (and he laid his hand upon his breast) and therefore, who so loves me will regard him [so] thereafter.

Norfolk, who had undoubtedly played a leading role in the conspiracy against Cranmer, hurriedly told the king, rather disingenuously,

We meant no manner of hurt to my lord of Canterbury in that we requested to have him in durance [prison]. We only did [so] because he might, after his trial, be set at liberty to his own glory.

Just who was he fooling? Certainly not Henry:

Well, I pray you not to use my friends so. There remains malice among you, one to another. Let it be avoided out of hand, I would advise you.
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So the councillors – some of them who had, mere minutes before, been planning to burn Cranmer alive – hastened to shake his hand warmly as a token of their friendship and goodwill, under the stern eye of the king.

Henry’s motivation in this tense little human drama remains unclear, if not downright Machiavellian. He had patently agreed to his archbishop’s arrest, if not actively encouraging his enemies amongst the conservative faction. But Henry then proceeded to tip Cranmer off about his impending doom in a melodramatic late-night meeting. From that moment, in the empty corridor at Westminster, the archbishop was never in danger. Yet the king happily let the plot run its course before firmly and publicly stamping upon it. Humiliation plays an important part in the story – Henry teases his advisers about it: the humiliation of Cranmer, kept waiting amongst the common lackeys; the humiliation of his Privy Council accusers by the sudden production of the lifesaving king’s ring mere moments before the planned arrest; the humiliation caused by Henry’s rebuke. That flourish by Cranmer, in holding up the royal ring, immediately showed Gardiner, Norfolk and the rest of his enemies that the game was up and that they had been outmanoeuvred. And that must have been Henry’s intention all along. His aim, this time, was to mortify the conservative faction as part of his delicate balancing act in the difficult area of developing religious policy. The constant conspiracies and divisions amongst his councillors must also have exasperated him, as did similar controversy amongst his subjects.

Much of what we have as evidence of what actually happened during those turbulent times comes from obviously militant Protestant sources or apologists. After nearly 500 years, it is difficult to separate true fact from skewed propaganda, a weapon as freely and effectively used by both sides during the Reformation as it is in politics today. But there is no disputing the bloodshed, cruelty and horror as so many died on both sides, as martyrs, for their faith and beliefs. Richard Hilles wrote of those years:

It is now no novelty among us to see men slain, hung, drawn, quartered, beheaded. Some for trifling expressions, which were explained or interpreted as having been spoken against the king; others for the Pope’s supremacy; some for one thing, some for another.
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It is all too easy in the twenty-first century to shrink back in revulsion at the endless slaughter caused by religious differences in the sixteenth. It was, to our modern eyes, a cruel, hard time and it is difficult for us to distinguish what happened in Henry’s reign from the conditions we tragically witnessed in twentieth-century totalitarian states. But we should judge the remedies aimed at curing dissent and punishing crime by the standards of mid-sixteenth-century England and by what was occurring concurrently in Europe. No doubt the population supped deeply from the spoon of horror when they saw those suffering harsh penalties for transgression, but some may have judged the crimes just as terrible. And horror there was. One example may serve to illustrate the point. In 1531, Parliament passed an Act against poisoners
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that decreed that those found guilty should be sentenced to the hideous death of being boiled alive. It was a swift riposte to a crime that was, according to the Act, ‘most rare, and seldom committed or practised’ in England, a knee-jerk official reaction to assuage what they perceived to be mounting public concern. The law was passed following the case of Richard Roos who, for unknown motivations aside from his ‘wicked and damnable disposition’, poisoned porridge that was being heated in the kitchen of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. Not only were ‘seventeen persons of his family which did eat of that porridge’ poisoned, one later dying, ‘but also certain poor people which resorted to the said bishop’s palace and were there charitably fed with the remains of the porridge’ were also afflicted. One pauper woman also died. Roos was duly boiled to death at Smithfield.
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There was another case in March 1542, when Margaret Davy, ‘a maid’, was boiled alive after she poisoned people in the three London households she had lived in, murdering three individuals.
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Life was cheap for the great and mighty of the land as well as for the lowborn and poor. Judicial execution, for transgression against the king’s will or against the law of the land, had to be a spectacle to prove a deterrent. Almost always, these were synonymous. These were hard, merciless days in Henry Tudor’s England.

After the Franco-Spanish truce of 1538 with its consequent threat of invasion, Henry’s attention turned to his northern border with the troublesome Scots in the early 1540s. The English border forces had launched frequent hit-and-run raids on Scottish villages across the frontier, burning and destroying homes and driving back captured livestock into England. After negotiations to secure the marriage between Prince Edward and the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, broke down and a dispute flared up over the English capture of some Scottish ships on the high seas, the king’s impatience boiled over. He ordered Suffolk to attack Edinburgh when the winter rains ended in March 1544, with his army of 8,000 men, based in Darlington. These plans were dropped when a much larger force under Hertford, drawn from Ipswich, King’s Lynn, London and Hull, was embarked in 114 ships at Tynemouth at the end of April for a punitive assault on the Scottish capital. The Privy Council cold-bloodedly told Hertford that Henry’s pleasure ‘was that you shall put
to fire and the sword’ all the communities along the shores of the Forth Estuary and burn Edinburgh ‘without taking either the castle or town to mercy, though they would yield, for you know the falsehood of them all’. On 4 May, the English force successfully landed near the port of Leith, entering nearby Edinburgh three days later after blasting open its gates, and burnt the city – although the virtually impregnable castle, high up above on its sheer cliffs of volcanic rock, withstood Hertford’s assaults.

With the Scots now thoroughly cowed by this scorched-earth policy, the king could turn his martial attentions to his old enemy, France. In an unlikely diplomatic alliance between the Imperial Emperor Charles V and the heretic Henry, both sides pledged themselves to invade the realm of that ‘Most Christian’ king, Francis I. Imperial forces had been fighting the French in the Low Countries to further Spanish claims to Burgundy and in an effort to end France’s relations with the Turks, ‘the inveterate enemy of the Christian name and faith’. The Spanish were aided by 5,600 English troops under Sir John Wallop in the Siege of Landrecies, and by Henry’s subsidies for mercenaries. England and Spain were now committed to fielding armies, numbering 42,000 each, by 20 June 1544 in a twin-pronged offensive aimed at the French capital – the so-called ‘Enterprise of Paris’ – from the springboards of English-held Calais and the emperor’s lands to the north. War preparations began.

But Henry’s health had deteriorated, delaying his departure to Europe, and his army set out before him under the command of the experienced generals Suffolk and Norfolk. Through his sheer determination (if not bloody-mindedness) and the anxious ministrations of his physicians, Henry recovered and happily and enthusiastically prepared for war – his last great adventure as a military leader. Finally, on the evening of 14 July, he landed at Calais to take the field of battle at the head of his troops, proudly riding ‘a great courser’ or heavy-armoured horse, with an absurdly large wheel-lock pistol martially, if not nonchalantly, laid across the pommel of his saddle. The banner of St George flew bravely behind him. His great helm and lance were borne by William Somerset, Lord Herbert,
son of the Second Earl of Worcester,
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riding ahead of the king. Henry’s final chance for military glory irresistibly beckoned.

It was the first time he had worn armour in the field since his campaign against France long ago in 1513; indeed, he may not have ridden in armour since a bad jousting accident in 1536.
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In preparation for the wars, an existing armour had to be enlarged to fit what was now his vast bulk, but Henry changed his mind
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about the alterations after work had begun. He probably ordered two new field armours to be made in his Almain (German) armoury at Greenwich, but settled on an Italian design imported by the Milanese Francis Albert. This beautifully etched, blackened and gilt three-quarter armour
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was almost certainly the one Henry wore on his journey to Boulogne.
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It is difficult not to compare and contrast Henry’s gamecock self-certainty with his bloated immobility: the Shakespearian caricature of Sir John Falstaff somehow lurks in the back of one’s mind, but the king clearly lacked his constant joviality. The violent thunderstorm and torrential rain that greeted him and his column of English troops when they arrived at Marquise, twenty miles from Calais, on 25 July may have considerably dampened Henry’s ardour for campaigning.

Before embarking for France, he had needed to ensure that England was secure and stable, particularly on the borders with Scotland, traditionally an ally of the French kings and potentially the source of a crippling diversionary attack that would disrupt the campaign across the English Channel. Like all responsible soldiers about to go into action, he prudently made a new will and, cannily, appointed Queen Katherine as regent to rule in his stead, with the Earl of Hertford as the military lieutenant or commander of all homeland forces. At the same time, as a mark of his especial favour, he settled the rich manors of Mortlake, in Surrey, and Chelsea and Hanworth, both in Middlesex, upon her.