The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (24 page)

The evangelicals, knowing that their time might be short, now moved to bring the Gospel to the people, so that they would never lose it, and to wage war against idolatry and superstition. Ideas which only a while before had been heretical were now enforced as a new orthodoxy, but this was an orthodoxy hard to defend, challenged by zealots who tried to extend the campaign to purify the Church to attack fundamental Catholic doctrine, and also by conservatives who waited and worked for the return of the old ways. Distinctions between true and false worship were always relative. Evangelicals pointed out the inconsistencies in official actions: for Parliament to dissolve the monasteries, while the Church still maintained the doctrine of purgatory was ‘uncharitableness and cruelness’. The people must be taught the truth and given certainty. The King might see himself as a purifying Old Testament monarch, but the idols Josiah had destroyed were pagan, not the familiar and sacred images of the Catholic present and past. This king who had boasted himself ‘
defensor fidei
’ was now seen as ‘
destructor fidei
’.

In the war against idolatry it was the governing orders who now destroyed the old world of which they had been guardians. Their priority was to inculcate a scriptural faith, but their energies often seemed destructive. An iconoclastic campaign began in 1538 to destroy the idols which led the people to false worship and to confound false miracles with true ones. The most famous and spectacular images were wrested from their shrines and brought to London, a ‘jolly muster’, to be dishonoured and destroyed. The Rood of Grace of Boxley Abbey, a miraculous crucifix which was believed to speak to its supplicants, was revealed as a puppet, operated by strings. Latimer and Cromwell devised grim iconoclastic carnivals. An ancient prophecy that the image of Dderfel Gadarn, ‘the great god of Wales’, would set a forest on fire was horribly fulfilled in May 1538: while Latimer preached, the traitor Friar Forest was burned alive with, and by, the image. Such ceremonies were profoundly shocking and subversive: the benefit sought from the miraculous Rood of Grace was no less than the assurance of being in a state of
grace; to Dderfel Gadarn was attributed the power to rescue damned souls from hell. And the images failed to respond to the reformers’ challenge to defend themselves.

Commissioners were sent round the country to seize ‘abused’ images, relics and shrines, and record the people’s ‘fond trust’ in them. From Burton-on-Trent they sent St Modwyn, with her red cow and her staff, which women in labour borrowed to ease their pains. At Caversham in Berkshire, they found a piece of the noose which hanged Judas, and an angel with one wing which had brought to Caversham its proudest possession: the spear’s head which had pierced Our Saviour’s side. Now Caversham lost the mana or spiritual power of that sacred relic, so long in its keeping, and other places lost other treasures. A pathetic tally of the votive offerings found at the shrines was recorded. The cynicism of the commissioners contrasted with the simple devotion of the people, who lost their sacred treasures before they lost their faith in them. In most places the parishioners had looked on, helpless, before the sacrilege; in some, the commissioners moved secretly, by night, for fear of resistance, just as the clandestine, unofficial iconoclasts did. The images of wood and stone could be annihilated, yet the idols in the mind, the imagining of Mary with her child in her arms, which the most fervent and uncompromising reformers would come to condemn, remained. From the Bible the people must learn that God was a spirit, to be worshipped in spirit and truth.

The reformers sought to replace a religion of seeing as believing by a religion of the Word. Tyndale had once promised a learned Catholic that ‘If God spare my life… I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the scripture than thou dost.’ In exile, suffering countless setbacks, he had almost completed his translations of both Old and New Testaments when he was betrayed. Yet his martyrdom in Antwerp in October 1536 came only shortly before the first official English Bible was published, mostly in his translation, which marked English religion and the English language thereafter. In 1538 the same Injunctions which outlawed the veneration of relics, ordered an English Bible to be placed in every church. At first the Bibles lay gathering dust, largely unread, and were no compensation for the irrecoverable loss of the painted images and shrines. The people were forcibly deprived not only of numinous artefacts, symbolic of a world unseen, but also of objects of beauty in lives of privation. Religious art was often their only art. Yet even the loss of such treasures was not as traumatic as the
shattering of the beliefs they had symbolized. The desecration threatened the end of mediation, propitiation and spiritual solace, in this world and beyond, and very many were left bewildered and bereft. No one watching the destruction, powerless to prevent it, could be oblivious to doctrinal change.

The evangelicals had brought scripture to the people, yet their own downfall was prefigured in their triumph. The reforms in religion were threatened by their divisive consequences. Zealots demanding further reformation moved to commit reckless acts of iconoclasm and to challenge the most sacred mysteries of the Catholic and evangelical faiths alike. Tyndale had warned John Frith, unavailingly but presciently, ‘Of the presence of Christ’s body in the sacrament, meddle as little as you can; that there appear no division among us.’ But there were divisions among the evangelicals, as well as an abyss between them and the Catholics, who grew more resolute in opposition as they saw the extremist tendency in reform. Dissension appeared in every community where the ‘new’ faith had penetrated, and reports of the trouble reached Cromwell daily from every part of the country; reports which he tried to hide from the King.

Reform could continue no longer once the King knew that ideas more radical than he could countenance, particularly concerning the Mass, were spreading within his Church. At the end of 1538 a repressive proclamation was issued in which the King’s hand was visible – not least in the implacability of its penalties. Free discussion of the ‘Holy and Blessed Sacrament’, and its mysteries by the unlearned was punishable by death and forfeiture. Clergy who married, contrary to their vow, would be deprived. A new wave of persecution began. Henry himself, dressed in the white of theological purity, tried John Lambert, who had been denounced by his fellow reformers, men who held more moderate views than he did upon the nature of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, and who feared that Lambert’s radicalism would endanger the whole evangelical cause. Lambert was condemned, and burnt, for beliefs about the Mass which were very close to those which Cranmer would hold himself within a few years. Reform was at a crossroads. Cromwell had determinedly sustained the evangelicals, but he could not protect them, or himself, for much longer. Henry was alarmed by the spread of heresy and sacrilege at home, and by the divisions which the new faith had generated. When he learnt early in 1539 that Calais had become an enclave of ‘gospellers’ through Cromwell and Cranmer’s patronage, his
fears were confirmed. Cromwell’s conservative opponents, the Duke of Norfolk and Bishop Gardiner, long excluded from court, returned determined to destroy their evangelical enemies and reverse the Reformation.

At the end of 1538, at the close of the first phase of its Reformation, England stood alone in Europe, and never in greater danger. The constant warfare between Habsburg and Valois had, until now, ensured that both the French King and the Emperor needed England’s amity, but in 1538 the novel prospect of peace between the two enemies threatened to make England, as Thomas Wriothesley put it, ‘but a morsel amongst these choppers’. The break with Rome had made the King a heretic and England schismatic and vulnerable to a Catholic crusade. Henry dreaded the imminent threat of a General Council of the Church which would demand the restoration of England to papal obedience. A Catholic League of the Emperor and the Kings of France and Scotland seemed poised to invade and to partition England. Now Henry completed what he had begun: the destruction of the nobility of the White Rose, the surviving Yorkist line in England. There was evidence enough of their treason, under a law which made words treason. After the Pilgrimage of Grace had failed, Lord Montague had said: ‘Lord Darcy played the fool; he went about to pluck away the Council. He should first have begun with the head.’ Partly in reprisal for Cardinal Pole’s papal legation of 1537 to persuade the Catholic powers to crusade against England, Henry moved, lethally, against Pole’s family, and Pole himself was lucky to escape the royal agents, Wyatt and Bryan, sent into the courts of Europe to kidnap or even assassinate him.

In the Parliament of 1539 penal legislation against heresy was passed: the Act of Six Articles, ‘Gardiner’s Gospel’. The intransmutable penalty for denying transubstantiation was death by burning, with no chance given for abjuration. The break with Rome had never been meant to augur the end of persecution, but for six years persecution of evangelicals had been in abeyance. Apart from John Lambert, only Anabaptists, Europe’s most radical heretics, had been burnt. Now many evangelicals were fugitive and fearful. Catholics rejoiced at the passage of the ‘bloody act’, looking for an imminent return of traditional religion, but it did not happen, for the eclipse of the evangelical party at court was not
lasting. Some of the gospellers could not be silenced. During Lent in 1540 three leading evangelicals – Barnes, Garrett and Jerome – preached the quintessential message of Christ’s saving passion, and called upon the rich to succour the poor. Their defiance was fatal for them, but also for Cromwell because his enemies now used his patronage of radicals to destroy him.

Cromwell had once said, though with a smile, that if the same fate befell him as his predecessors, he would trust to God. That Christian resignation was now tested. His conservative enemies returned to challenge him, exploiting rifts between him and the King. Cromwell’s initiative to ally with the Lutheran princes of Germany culminated in a marriage between Henry and Anne of Cleves. Henry married in January 1540, but found his fourth wife repellent. He could, he insisted, ‘never in her company be provoked and steered to know her carnally’. There would never be an heir from Anne: ‘I like her not.’ The events of the spring and summer of 1540 confused those who lived through them. Political fortunes were shifting and the prospects for reform or reaction in religion were unpredictable. Cromwell seemed higher in favour than ever. In April, in addition to his offices as Vicegerent, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord Privy Seal, he was created Earl of Essex and made Great Chamberlain, which gave him at last formal mastery of the royal household. By May he sensed a trap closing, and moved against the conservatives, sending Lord Lisle to the Tower for alleged collusion with Pole and Rome. But Cromwell’s own arrest followed soon after, and once in the Tower, denied access to the King or trial by his peers, his condemnation was a foregone conclusion. The charges against him were many, accusing him of overweening power, of treason, but overwhelmingly of heresy. Once persuaded – though wrongly – that Cromwell had impugned the Mass, the King allowed his counsellor to be sacrificed. Cromwell went to the block on 28 July, on the same day that Henry married his fifth queen, Catherine Howard: both Cromwell’s fall and the marriage were Howard conspiracies. Two days later, in a grotesque demonstration of Henry’s ‘mean, indifferent’ way in religion, the evangelicals Barnes, Garrett and Jerome were burnt, while at the same time three conservatives suffered the death of traitors.

Conservatives now looked for a reaction, and Cromwell’s bereft ‘factionaries’ were fearful for the Gospel. As soon as the coup against Cromwell was completed, a major inquisition for heresy began. Persecution had been the conservatives’ first objective. What they discovered
horrified them. Cromwell had promised, allegedly, that if he lived another year his party would inculcate evangelical reform irreversibly, so that ‘it should not lie in the King’s power to resist it’. Persecution failed that summer because the evangelicals who were found were so many and so influential that they could not all be punished: 500 were denounced in London alone. Thomas More, as Lord Chancellor, had once told William Roper: