The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (23 page)

Perhaps by now more than weary of the ceaseless wrangling between the religious factions within his court and the doctrinal conflicts and controversies throughout the realm, he moved his regal sights on to the bishops:

I see and hear daily of you of the clergy who preach one against another; teach contrary to [one] another; inveigh one against another, without charity or discretion … All men almost be in variety and discord and few or none preach truly and sincerely the word of God, according as they ought to. Alas! How can the poor souls live in concord when you preachers sow amongst them in your sermons
debate and discord? To you, they look for light and you bring them darkness.

Amend these crimes, I exhort you, and set forth God’s word both by true preaching and good example giving.

Henry went on to add an ominous ‘or else’ – he was, after all, the supreme head of the Church of England and wherever and whenever he had seized power, he was never afraid to exercise it, remorselessly and pitilessly. It was time for a firm reminder to them all of the true and unchanging realities of the state they lived in:

I, whom God hath appointed his vicar and high minister here, will see these divisions extinct and those enormities corrected, according to my very duty, or else I shall be accounted an unprofitable servant and untrue officer.

The secular lords and MPs were also singled out for similar criticism:

You of the temporality be not clean and unspotted of malice and envy, for you rail on bishops, speak slanderously of priests and rebuke and taunt preachers, both contrary to good order and Christian fraternity.

If you know surely that a bishop or preacher … teaches perverse doctrine, come and declare it to some of our Council or to us, to whom is committed by God the high authority to reform and order such causes and behaviour and be not judges of your own fantastical opinions and vain expositions for in such high cases you may lightly err.

Although you are permitted to read Holy Scripture, and to have the Word of God in your mother tongue, you must understand that you have this licence only to inform your own conscience and to instruct your children and family and not to dispute and make Scripture a railing and a taunting stock against priests and preachers as many light persons do.

The king was also deeply shocked by the way in which the Word of God was being misused by all and sundry:

I am very sorry to know and hear how irreverently that most precious jewel, the Word of God is disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern, contrary to the true meaning and doctrine of the same.

It was really time for Parliament and realm finally to forget their religious differences:

For of this I am sure: that charity was never so faint amongst you and virtuous and godly living was never less used nor God himself amongst Christians never less reverenced, honoured or served.

Therefore, as I said before, be in charity one with another, like brother and brother. Love, dread and serve God (to which I, as your supreme head and sovereign lord, exhort and require you) and then I doubt not the love and league … shall never be dissolved or broken between us.
⁵

Even the king’s own officials were taken aback by his articulacy and passion, which reportedly reduced many to tears, although some at least were comforted by the session ending shortly before noon, allowing time for many members to ride home in time for the Christmas celebrations. Sir William Petre, appointed Privy Councillor and secretary the year before, wrote enthusiastically about the speech to his colleague Sir William Paget, Henry’s other secretary of state, then away on diplomatic duties in France. It was given, he said, with gravity,

so sententiously, so kingly, or rather fatherly, as peradventure
⁶
to you that have been used to his daily talks should have been no great wonder … but to us, that have not heard him so often, was such a joy and marvellous comfort as I reckon this day one of the happiest of my life.

The toadying Paget thanked him for sending him a copy of ‘the most godly, wise and kingly oration’, which he would have given anything to hear personally – even eating fish every day for a year, the food he hated so much.
⁷
Emotion would have overcome him, too, if he had been
present: ‘I am sure my eyes would largely have uttered the affections of my heart.’ He adds: ‘Our Lord save him, good king, and make his subjects good.’

Prosaically, the always businesslike Paget ends his letter with the postscript: ‘If we come not home shortly, you must help us with more money.’

The leader of the conservative faction in Henry’s council, Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, was abroad in January 1546 on diplomatic duties, tasked with cementing England’s rickety alliance with the imperial emperor, Charles V. Cranmer, after some discussions with Henry, had decided to take advantage of Gardiner’s absence to sweep away some of the last vestiges of ritual surviving from the unreformed religion – the giant veil that shrouded church chancels during Lent, the congregation’s creeping to the cross on Good Fridays and the pealing of church bells during the nocturnal vigil of All-Hallows. He carefully drafted a letter for the king to send to Gardiner, describing the new policy, which was read out to Henry in his Privy Chamber late one afternoon by Sir Anthony Denny. The king abruptly stopped him with a sharp, ‘I am now otherwise resolved.’ Henry then brusquely ordered:

Send my lord of Canterbury word that since I spoke with him about these matters, I have received letters from my lord of Winchester … and he writes plainly to us that the league [with Spain] will not prosper nor go forward if we make any other innovation, change or alteration, either in religion or ceremonies.
⁸

There could be no gainsaying, no argument against this sudden change of Henry’s mind. Gardiner, although overseas, was still clearly well informed about events at court. He had cleverly stymied Cranmer, playing the diplomatic card to halt further reforms. The king’s mercurial decision heralded a period of six months when Gardiner’s party held almost total sway in the desperate infighting for supremacy amongst Henry’s Council.

The religious conservatives had reached the zenith of their power within the court when they hatched an audacious plot to strike at the
very heart of the king’s world: his loving wife and companion, Queen Katherine Parr, who by January 1546 was leaning more and more towards the reformist religion. In July of that year, van der Delft reported conversations he had had with Gardiner and Paget,

whom I found very favourable to the public good and to the interests of his majesty [Charles V]. As these are the councillors most in favour with the king, I doubt not that they will be good instruments for maintaining the existing friendship and for preventing the protestants [sic] from gaining footing or favour here. [The bishop and Paget] have confidently promised this.
⁹

The queen, her Privy Chamber full of women with voluble and dangerous evangelical opinions, became the target of a conspiracy, probably stage-managed by the Bishop of Winchester and involving Norfolk, Paget, Wriothesley and the perjured Sir Richard Rich. Katherine’s ladies had long been perpetual thorns in the sides of the conservatives. The lively and irrepressible Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, the last wife of the late Charles Brandon, even kept a pet dog at court mischievously named ‘Gardiner’, which she teased and taunted outrageously in public. This time, sexual misconduct was not a viable means by which to entrap the queen, a lady of well-known propriety and impeccable morals. Heresy looked to be the best bet – and as a possible ‘plan B’, they also sought to use Norfolk’s daughter, the Duchess of Richmond, as another femme fatale to seduce the king’s affections away from Katherine. But first the conspirators had to soften up their prime target.

Their plot initially manifested itself as a widespread whispering campaign against Henry’s consort. On 27 February, van der Delft wrote to Charles V:

I hesitate to report that here are rumours of a new queen. Some attribute it to the sterility of the present Queen while others say there will be no change during the present war.

Madame Suffolk is much talked about and in great favour but the king shows no alteration in his demeanour to the queen although she is said to be annoyed at the rumours.
¹⁰

On 7 March, Stephen Vaughan, Henry’s financial agent in Antwerp, wrote to Wriothesley and Paget that

This day came to my lodging a High Dutch, a merchant of this town, saying he had dined with certain friends, one of whom offered to lay a wager with him that the king’s majesty would have another wife and he prayed me to show him the truth.

He would not tell who offered the wager and I said; ‘that I never heard of any such thing and that I was sure that there was no such thing.’

Many folks talk of this matter and from whence it comes I cannot learn.
¹¹

Gardiner, perhaps significantly, was in Antwerp that day
¹²
on his way back from diplomatic discussions with the emperor in Utrecht. The rumours were spreading like wildfire. Cornelius Sceppurus, a member of the emperor’s Council, coyly wrote to Dr Louis Schore, President of the Council of Flanders, from London on 6 April:

I dare not write the rumours current here with regard to the feminine sex. Some change is suspected to be pending.
¹³

Katherine felt increasingly under threat: in February, she ordered secure coffers and boxes for her private apartments with new locks to prevent any unauthorised prying into her papers.
¹⁴
Some of her more controversial religious books were hidden in her garderobe (toilet) and others smuggled out of the palace and into the safekeeping of her uncle at his house in Horton, Northamptonshire.
¹⁵
She was prudent: the conspirators’ net was drawing in around her. A later Protestant writer claimed that the hunt for heretics within the court that summer ‘grew exceeding hot. [As there were] many men and women that stood well affected to religion, it was thought expedient for a terror to the rest to begin with them’.
¹⁶

One of the first to be ensnared was Norfolk’s second son, the reformist Lord Thomas Howard. He was dragged before the Privy Council on 7 May, charged with ‘disputing indiscreetly of Scripture with
other young gentlemen of the court’
¹⁷
and offered mercy if ‘he would confess what he said in disproof of sermons preached in court last Lent and his other talk in the Queen’s chamber.’ He escaped with a stern adjuration to reform his ways.

Gardiner’s pack was in full cry by the early summer of 1546, still spreading rumours of the queen’s imminent downfall. Richard Worley, a page of the pallet chamber, was sent to prison for his ‘unseemly reasoning of the Scripture’ and the hunt cornered the fashionable preacher Dr Edward Crome in June. He had given a sermon at the Mercers’ Chapel in London two months before in which he denied the reality of Purgatory and had been ordered to recant at Paul’s Cross. This he refused but later faced the agonies of indecision. The London merchant Otwell Johnson sarcastically wrote to his brother in Calais:

Our news here [is] of Dr Crome’s canting, recanting, decanting or rather double canting.
¹⁸

Dr William Huicke, probably a relation of Henry’s physician Robert Huicke, was arrested for his support of Crome, as was John Lassels, a sewer of the Privy Chamber who, five years earlier, had provided the damning information to Cranmer about Katherine Howard’s teenage depravity.

The minor poet and evangelical Sir George Blagge, one of Henry’s cronies, was also detained in Newgate and sentenced at the Guildhall to be burnt after being accused of heresy by Sir Hugh Caverley and a man called Littleton. But Blagge was freed through the personal intervention of the outraged king. Henry remonstrated with Wriothesley over his arrest – ‘for coming so near to him, even to his Privy Chamber’. The Lord Chancellor then quickly pardoned Blagge, who laboured under the king’s nickname of ‘my pig’. When Henry next saw him, he called out: ‘Ah, my pig! Are you safe again?’ Blagge, bowing low, replied: ‘Yes, sire. And if your majesty had not been better to me than your bishops, your pig had been roasted ere this time.’
¹⁹

On 18 June, Henry Hobberthorne, Lord Mayor of London, arraigned Anne Askew, or Ascough, for preaching against the ‘Real Presence’ in
the wafers and wine of the Mass. She had already been in trouble in London the previous year over the same issue, when she lived in The Temple, on the city’s western edge. The then mayor, Sir Martin Bowes (who, as one of the sheriffs, had wretchedly presided over the execution of Robert Barnes in 1540), had questioned her but had been confounded by her wit and knowledge:

The Mayor
: You foolish woman. Do you say that the priests cannot make the Body of Christ?

Anne Askew
: I say so, my lord, for I have read ‘God made man,’ but that man can make God I [have] never yet read, nor, I suppose, ever shall read it.

Mayor
: After the words of consecration is it not the Lord’s body?

Askew
: No, it is but consecrated bread or sacramental bread.

Mayor
: What if a mouse eat it after the consecration? What shall become of the mouse? What say you, you foolish woman? I say that mouse is damned.

Askew
: Alack, poor mouse!
²⁰

She had been set free then, but was now again accused of heresy after the interception of a letter she had written.
²¹
Anne, aged twenty-five and an ‘elegant beauty and rare wit’, had been thrown out of her Lincolnshire home by her incompatible older husband Thomas Kyme for her vocal and unorthodox religious views. The Jesuit Robert Parsons wrote four decades later that she ‘was a coy dame and of very evil fame for wantonness’ and had

gad[ded] up and down the country, gospelling and gossiping where she might and ought not. This for diverse years before her imprisonment; but especially she delighted to be in London near the court.
²²