The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (22 page)

Though Henry was still, at the turn of 1532, unprepared to countenance schism, Cromwell had seen a way to achieve Royal Supremacy little by little, and to break with Rome. Parliament would be used to make laws to enshrine Royal Supremacy and national sovereignty, with the assent of the King’s subjects, or, at least, the illusion of it. As Parliament met again in January 1532 the antagonism of the Commons towards the clergy was now deliberately revived. On 18 March the Commons submitted to the King a Supplication against the Ordinaries. Most of the Supplication’s nine charges were extremely specific, concerning the powers of the Church courts, and the abuses within the system. Old fears of the clergy’s powers in heresy trials were heightened as the
Church moved with new severity against people in high places. The King’s heart now hardened against his clergy. On Easter Day 1532 at Greenwich William Peto, the head of the Observant Franciscan order in England, warned Henry that ‘great and little were murmuring’, and that if he married Anne dogs would lick his blood, as once they had licked Ahab’s. For a king who identified himself so closely with sage Old Testament monarchs, not tyrants such as Ahab, that sermon may have been decisive. The King’s will was made clear to the Speaker of the Lower House; the clergy’s answer to the Commons’ Supplication must be rejected, and the royal message was minatory: ‘We think their answer will smally please you…’

On 10 May the King demanded that the Church should renounce all authority to make laws without royal licence. His mood was ominous. Once he had believed, so he told a Commons delegation, that ‘the clergy of our realm had been our subjects wholly’, but now he understood that ‘they be but half our subjects, yea, and scarce our subjects’. On 15 May 1532 the liberty of the English Church was lost. The Submission of the Clergy was subscribed on the following day, and they yielded all authority to make canons without royal permission. A wave of suicides in London was seen as a malign prodigy ‘foreboding future evil’. Thomas More resigned as Chancellor: his political battle lost, he claimed now to be resolved to keep silent, never more ‘to study nor meddle with any matter of this world’. But in his writings and his secret communications with conservative exiles, he proved still a desperate defender of the Church against heresy. As More yielded the Great Seal, Henry assured him that he would never ‘put any man in ruffle or trouble of his conscience’, but even if he meant it, the logic of events made this a promise impossible to keep. More’s silence marked a conscience opposed to each new move towards Reformation, and was a silence to which all Europe listened.

At the destruction of the royal marriage – as happens at the end of marriages – loyalties among the wider circle of family and friends were bitterly divided. Murder was committed in April 1532 in Westminster sanctuary when rival retinues of the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk fought to avenge an insult against Anne, Norfolk’s niece, spoken by the King’s own sister, the Duchess of Suffolk. Other noblewomen openly supported Catherine and her daughter, including Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk (who was estranged from her own husband), Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter, and Margaret, Countess of Salisbury. Because
they were all of the ‘royal race’, of Yorkist descent and Henry’s cousins, their disloyalty was more dangerous. The King, in his sense of self-righteousness and injured innocence, grew bitter and unforgiving. Lord Montague remembered that when Henry ‘came to his chamber he would look angerly and fall to fighting’. In the opinion of Lord Thomas Howard, it was this king’s ‘nature never again to hold in affection any person he had cast from him that formerly he had loved’.

A way out of the Aragon marriage became imperative when in October 1532 Henry took Anne to France in state. This was, at last, their prenuptial honeymoon (their journey home from Dover to Eltham took ten days), and Anne was soon pregnant. The death of Archbishop Warham, a stalwart opponent of the divorce, made way for Cranmer’s consecration as Archbishop of Canterbury, and for a marriage ceremony between Henry and Anne at the end of January 1533. They may have married, secretly, already, in mid November upon their return from Calais. This was not a marriage made in heaven. Not for long was Anne ‘the most happy’.

There followed, one by one, statutes culminating in the Act of Supremacy in November 1534, which separated the English Church from Catholic Christendom, and surrendered it to a king who, as Supreme Head, claimed even the power to determine doctrine. This was a power which was unprecedented, and which shocked even Luther. The Supremacy was made by Parliament, although the draftsmen of the legislation insisted that Parliament was merely asserting an ineluctable historic truth. The Act in Restraint of Appeals – the first of the revolutionary statutes – was based on the testimony of ‘divers and sundry ancient histories and chronicles’. The King’s marriage to Anne Boleyn in January 1533, and the birth of Princess Elizabeth that September, necessitated a new succession, and the usurpation of the right of his first-born, Princess Mary. The new laws met opposition in both Lords and Commons. In confession at Syon Abbey Sir George Throckmorton was counselled to oppose to the death the anti-papal legislation, or ‘he should stand in a very heavy case at the Day of Judgement’. But there were new and terrifying reasons for compliance.

‘It were a strange world as words were made treason,’ said Lord Montague. Opponents of the Royal Supremacy could, after the Treason Act of 1534, be executed by this ‘law of words’. The Act had made it treasonable to call the King a heretic, a schismatic, a tyrant, an infidel or a usurper. Its first victims were the Holy Maid of Kent and her
followers. On the day that they were executed – 20 April – an oath of compliance to the new succession was demanded from the people; the first time that a spiritual instrument of commitment had been used as a political test. Everyone swore, even More’s fool swore. But More could not swear. In the Tower he thought on last things and wrote upon the Passion and upon tribulation. From his window he watched the prior and monks of the London Charterhouse leave the Tower for Tyburn and martyrdom, as ‘bridegrooms for Christ’. They had refused to swear the Supremacy oath, for they could not deny Christ’s trust to St Peter and repudiate the papal primacy. A year later More went to the block, as both traitor to a king and martyr for the universal Church whose unity that king had broken.

‘What will be the end of this tragedy, God knows,’ wrote one friend to another in July 1534. In breaking with Rome, Henry had never meant, he insisted, to follow the ‘Lutheran sect’ or to ‘touch the sacraments’. With the Supremacy, he assumed not only the right, but also the duty before God, to promote true religion. The Act of Supremacy claimed as its purpose the ‘increase in virtue in Christ’s religion’ and the repression of abuses. The Supreme Head would decide which was Christ’s religion, which the abuses. From the mid 1530s it pleased Henry to present his Church as balanced between Catholic tradition and evangelical innovation. This was not simply a matter of expediency, but the consequence of the King’s insistent, if wayward, theological cogitation. This Church would be at once scriptural and sacramental; it would denounce superstition while holding to devotional traditions; attack idolatry while showing the proper use of images. Successive religious formulations, drawn up after backroom battles between the King and his bishops, and between the bishops themselves, revealed what the Church believed, to the consternation of its clergy and parishioners. As Henry himself became unconvinced by the doctrine of purgatory, doubtful about the sacraments of ordination, extreme unction, confirmation and, finally, confession, traditional religion was undermined. But as the King himself denied the central Lutheran teaching of justification by faith alone, no alternative doctrine of salvation was propounded for his people. The royal intention might have been to hold a ‘mean [middle], indifferent, true and virtuous way’ between two alternative visions of salvation, but his people were left confused, and he himself
was inconstant, manipulable, and unable to control the pace of events.

Preachers were found to exalt the Royal Supremacy. The talents of such evangelicals as Hugh Latimer, Edward Crome, John Bale and Robert Barnes, whose sermons had been anathematized before, were now called upon to denounce the papal usurpation. The preaching campaign against the Pope – now called merely Bishop of Rome – had consequences which the King had not foreseen. The evangelicals, believing that the papal primacy was only a human tradition, believed that other Catholic doctrines were derived from ‘men’s fantasies’ rather than from scripture, the sole rule of faith. Some of the preachers used their new freedom to denounce ‘the Bishop of Rome and all his cloisters’ as licence to deny also purgatory and the intercessory power of saints. A few even dared to question the nature of the Mass itself. Even so the Supremacy of a king who still protested his Catholic orthodoxy was used to promote evangelical religion.

The impassioned sermons of the ‘preachers of novelties’ moved those who came to listen: one way or another. Resolute Catholics hated them, fearing their influence. ‘These preachers’ who took it upon themselves to preach the Gospel ‘not truly, but after the new sect, called themselves Children of Christ, but they were Children of the Devil,’ protested one outraged vicar. The conservative curate of Harwich complained in 1535 that ‘The people nowadays would not believe… the captains of the Church, but when a newfangled fellow doth come and show them a new story, him they do believe.’ Battle lines were drawn in many places between evangelicals and conservative clergy. Reports came to Calais from London late in 1533: ‘Many preachers we have here, but they come not from one master; Latimer many blameth, and as many doth allow.’ The preachers had introduced ‘divisions and seditions among us’, never seen before, which threatened universal disorder. ‘The Devil reigneth over us now.’ Diversity of preaching had sown doubt and disobedience, as well as division. Thomas Starkey warned in the summer of 1536 that ‘With the despising of purgatory, the people begin little to regard hell, heaven, or any other felicity to be had in another life.’

Religious divisions were nowhere deeper or more bitter than at court. At the Corpus Christi procession on 15 June 1536, the great celebration of the Mass and affirmation of Christian community, Henry publicly took part. Queen Anne did not come with him, for she was nearly a month dead. He brought his third queen, Jane Seymour, instead. Anne had dared a great deal to become queen, and dared still more once she
was queen. With her came her faction. Her lieutenant in the Privy Chamber was her brother, Lord Rochford. The purposes and presence of that faction were most visible in matters of religion. ‘Who in the Mass do use to clap their fingers on their lips and say never a word?’ a preacher was asked, and his reply was, ‘Some great men in court did so’ – Anne’s friends. Anne determined to advance the Gospel and promote evangelical schemes for the reform of the commonwealth. But she intervened in causes which the King did not support, when for her to intervene at all outraged him. On Passion Sunday, 2 April 1536 John Skip, Anne’s almoner, preached a sermon at court which Anne must have countenanced. He told the Old Testament story of King Ahasuerus, persuaded by his evil counsellor Haman to proscribe the Jews against the pleas of the ‘good woman’ whom the King loved. A court as well versed in scripture as Henry’s would have understood the message: Anne was good Queen Esther, trying to prevent the King from listening to the blandishments of Cromwell, who promised him wealth beyond measure; wealth acquired from the Church but not to be spent upon the poor but upon palaces and war. More dangerously, the preacher reminded the court how King Solomon’s rule grew degenerate as lust overruled his judgement, just as Henry, who saw himself as Solomon in his wisdom, contemplated taking a third queen.

Having cast off the Roman allegiance, and his first queen, all for Anne (so many believed), Henry tired of her. They danced together in January 1536 at the news of Catherine of Aragon’s death, but their mutual delight was short-lived. On 29 January Anne miscarried. She lost not only the prince who might have saved her, but the King also. Anne’s enemies at court, who were enemies of her religion too, had discovered in Jane Seymour the perfect candidate for queen for Henry, who never found a wife for himself. They were teaching her a demeanour of self-abnegation and passivity which, after Anne’s fierceness, would best please the King. Confronted by this personal betrayal and by the conspiracy of the conservatives against her, Anne fought, but she failed to recruit the most politic of all her co-religionists to her side. At the end of March 1536 Cromwell told the Imperial ambassador that Anne, his erstwhile patron, would like to see his head cut off. His own prospects were grim if Anne survived, but grim also if she did not, for a conservative group at court were now determined to destroy the reforms he had made, and surely him with them. In the most brilliant and deadly stratagem in Tudor court politics, Cromwell plotted to remove Anne
and all her allies – despite the religion and ideals for the commonwealth he shared with them – and to do this by allying with the conservatives; but only for a while. Cromwell must devise a way to rescue himself and the achievements for reform while removing Anne and her friends, and permanently. But how? On 30 April a court musician was arrested and tortured, and the tragedy began rapidly to unfold.