The Tudors (29 page)

The first victim, both of the newly docile Parliament and of the newly savage king, was a twenty-seven-year-old nun named Elizabeth Barton. Possibly epileptic, Barton, while a servant girl still in her teens, had been mysteriously healed of some affliction and begun falling into trances, having visions, and predicting the future. This caused her to become famous first locally, in her home county of Kent, and then more widely. She came to be revered as the Holy Maid of Kent and then, after she entered a convent, as the Nun of Kent. By all accounts she lived a blameless life and made a favorable impression on practically everyone who met her, including skeptical clergymen assigned to question and report on her. But, tragically for herself, eventually she was making pronouncements on the king’s efforts to divorce Queen Catherine and warning that evil would befall him if he did not desist. She sent a message
to the pope, saying that he too would be cursed if he did as Henry asked. The attention that she attracted is evident in the fact that at various times Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop Warham, Bishop Fisher, Chancellor More, and even the king himself all met with her. All who had firsthand exposure to her and left a record of their impressions said that Barton seemed virtuous, humble, and possibly even holy. Even Henry was favorably disposed until she began to talk about the divorce.

Barton’s fame, and the increasingly inflammatory nature of her opinions, made trouble inevitable. Cromwell’s power and confidence were in full flower by this time—he had been given a seat on the Royal Council before the end of 1532 and made chancellor of the exchequer the following April—and in July 1533 he had Barton arrested. He and Cranmer questioned her at length, after which she was confined in the Tower along with a half dozen of the churchmen (an assortment of parish priests, Benedictine monks, and Franciscan friars) who had made themselves her supporters and, so it was said, her manipulators in the national debate over the divorce and the king’s claim to ecclesiastical supremacy. The idea, clearly, was to discredit Barton and make her a frightening example of the price to be paid for opposing the Crown.

In November the Nun and her adherents were put on public display, made to listen to a preacher who ridiculed and vilified them, and finally, according to accounts left by people in the pay of Cromwell, required to confess that her entire career had been a fraud intended to mislead the gullible. It is not certain that these reported confessions actually occurred; no record of them was left by witnesses who can be considered impartial. Even if the accused did in fact confess, the men in whose custody they had been for months were quite capable of using torture to get what they wanted. Barton’s own confession, as recorded for posterity, was obviously not the work of a barely literate serving girl but of a ghostwriter of some sophistication.

The confessions were not the end of the story, in any case. An effort was mounted to convict Barton and her companions of high treason by establishing that she had prophesied the death of the king and so had effectively threatened his life—and to draw in other, bigger prey on grounds that anyone who had encouraged her or even listened to her without reporting her words was guilty of treason as well. This effort came to nothing. The king’s judges reported that the case was too weak
even for them—there never was a shred of evidence that Barton at any time encouraged anyone to oppose the king actively or to use violence for any purpose—and there was at this point no basis in English law for charging someone with treason because of what he or she had said. Treason was still an
act
. Remarkably, some of Barton’s judges were reported to have declared that they would die themselves rather than find her guilty.

Cromwell responded by finding yet another new way to make Parliament useful to the Crown. At his direction both houses approved a bill of attainder that declared Barton and her six closest associates guilty of high treason. Six others, Thomas More and Bishop Fisher among them, were attainted for misprision of treason—that is, for knowing of another person’s treason and failing to report it. From the king’s standpoint, this simplified everything beautifully. Not only Barton and her cohorts but several of the most eminent personages in the kingdom could be disposed of without the inconvenience of a trial, attainder being a legislative rather than a judicial device. The fact that no one including Barton herself could possibly have committed treason as the word was then understood in English law became irrelevant.

More and Fisher defended themselves, or tried to. More requested permission to appear before Parliament to address the charge against him. Upon being refused he wrote to Cromwell and the king, explaining how, in his meetings with the Nun of Kent, he had refused to hear her opinions of political matters and had advised her to share those opinions with no one. He told them also that when visited by admirers of Barton who wanted to discuss her visions, he had not allowed them to do so. Cromwell advised Fisher to throw himself on the king’s mercy—good advice where saving his own skin was concerned, as Henry was always most likely to be generous when his victims submitted abjectly—but predictably the bishop refused. He said, sensibly enough, that he had been told by men he trusted (Archbishop Warham for one) that Barton was an honest and virtuous woman, and that his willingness to believe them, whether wise or foolish, could not possibly have been a crime. He said he had talked with Barton on three occasions, but only because she visited him uninvited. He had not reported Barton’s dark predictions, he said, because he knew for a fact that she herself had already shared them with the king.

None of this had any effect on Henry, who obviously was interested not in the guilt or innocence of the accused but in their elimination. His friends, however, saw that he was in danger of overreaching; in the end More’s name was removed from the bill of attainder, but only because Cranmer, Cromwell, and the Duke of Norfolk literally got down on their knees and implored the king to permit its removal. The three were willing to beg less because they wished to save the former chancellor than because, as they warned Henry, even a supine Parliament could not be depended upon to destroy a man of More’s reputation on such thin evidence.

Fisher’s name remained on the bill, and after its passage he was imprisoned. After a while, however, he was allowed to pay a fine of £300, the yearly income of his little Diocese of Rochester, and set free. Barton and five others—two Benedictine monks, two Observant friars, and Barton’s confessor—were taken to the royal killing ground at Tyburn. There Barton, perhaps because she was a woman and allegedly confessed to being “a poor wench without learning” and having fallen into “a certain pride and fantasy with myself,” was shown the mercy of simple death by hanging. The priests endured a good deal more. They too were hanged, but then they met the full fate of traitors: cut down while still alive and brought back to consciousness, they had their genitals cut off and stuffed into their mouths, their intestines torn from their bodies and thrown into a fire, and their beating hearts pulled out of their chests and held up where they could see them. Finally their bodies were cut into four quarters for display in different parts of London, their heads boiled and put on stakes. As they had never been tried, it was impossible for anyone to know how, exactly, they had committed treason, or whether, given the opportunity, they might have been able to establish their innocence. The public was left free to conclude that they had died for displeasing the king. The king, no doubt, wanted it to conclude exactly that.

Henry, meanwhile, was occupied elsewhere. The future of his dynasty was a question that never went away, the birth of the baby Elizabeth had done nothing to answer it, and now that he was in his forties the king was giving evidence of being more seriously concerned about his lack of a male heir than he had ever been before. The previous November he had married his only living son, the illegitimate fourteen-year-old
Henry Fitzroy, to Mary Howard, who as a daughter of the Duke of Norfolk was also Anne Boleyn’s cousin. This was another coup for the Howard family, another joining of its blood to that of the Tudors, potentially of vast importance because of the possibility, which had been in the air for years, that Henry might choose in the end to make the playful young Fitzroy, on whom he doted, his heir. By January, however, Anne was pregnant for the second time. As preparations began anew for the arrival of a crown prince—Henry was always touchingly certain that his next child would be a boy—the king took as his mistress yet another young Boleyn cousin, a girl named Madge Shelton. The magic was going out of the royal marriage by this time; the increasingly insecure Anne upbraided her husband for his dalliances, and Henry turned his back on her in mute disbelief. The situation was not improved when Anne miscarried. This happened in the middle of a remarkably busy spring, when the Nun of Kent was being readied for execution, the papal court in Rome was taking up the divorce case at last, and Parliament was pouring out laws that would have been unimaginable a few years earlier.

Pope Clement, under pressure from Charles V and provoked into action at last by Henry’s taking of a second wife without being released from his first, assembled a council of cardinals—a consistory—to consider the divorce case. On March 23, rather to the pope’s surprise (he knew that agents of the king of France had been lobbying hard to line up support for Henry, spending the English king’s money freely), nineteen of the twenty-two assembled cardinals voted to deny the annulment, uphold the validity of Henry’s marriage to Catherine, and declare that Catherine had been dealt with unjustly and should be restored to her place as queen. The remaining three voted not in Henry’s favor but merely for further delay, at which point, after so many years, the king’s great matter was settled even in Rome. But Clement, his hopes of somehow avoiding a final break with Henry being practically inexhaustible, postponed issuing a formal judgment.

Rome was no longer relevant, however; things had gone too far in England for papal rulings to matter. By coincidence March 23 was also the day on which Parliament, with Cromwell issuing the instructions, passed an Act of Succession that not only gave the force of civil law to Cranmer’s nullification of the king’s first marriage and validation of his
second but erected around the archbishop’s findings a protective barrier of punishment for anyone who failed to assent. The act’s assertion that Henry was to be succeeded on the throne by the children of his “most dear and entirely beloved lawful wife Queen Anne” (the sheer number of adjectives heaped upon the lady’s name is suggestive of royal defensiveness) could have surprised no one by 1534. Its failure to mention Princess Mary, implying that she was illegitimate and therefore excluded from the succession, would have offended many but surprised few. Much more startling, for anyone who knew the law, was the act’s broadening of the crime of high treason to encompass anyone acting or writing in defiance or rejection of the Boleyn marriage. Even speaking against the marriage was made misprision of treason. With these provisions the king closed the loopholes—it would be more accurate to say he destroyed the protections—that had made it impossible to bring the Nun of Kent’s case into a court of law.

The Act of Succession did not stop even there. Not satisfied with forbidding criticism, Henry had added a requirement that every subject “observe, keep, maintain and defend the act and all the whole contents and effects thereof, and all other Acts and Statutes made since the beginning of this present parliament”—since, that is, December 1529, when the king had ventured his first hesitant attack on ecclesiastical privilege. To ensure compliance, every subject was to take an oath of loyalty not only to the king but to his heirs by Anne, and refusal to swear was made treason. Conveniently, Parliament neglected to specify what the words of the oath should be. This left Henry and Cromwell free to put it into whatever form best pleased them and even to require different people to swear to different things.

This was not the only law approved by Parliament in furtherance of the king’s agenda that spring. An Act for the Submission of the Clergy gave statutory form to, and therefore enhanced the legitimacy of, the submission so dubiously wrung out of convocation two years earlier. An Act in Absolute Restraint of Annates removed the conditional aspects of the earlier annates legislation, diverted the payment of annates from Rome to the Crown rather than eliminating them as might have been expected, and laid down curious new rules for the selection of bishops. The king would henceforth send the name of his nominee to the clergy of the diocese involved. The clergy would then be accorded
the privilege of approving the king’s candidate. If somehow such approval was not forthcoming, the royal choice would take office anyway and the clergy of that diocese would lose the honor of being consulted in future. Yet another act took the awarding of dispensations away from Rome and gave it to the archbishop of Canterbury, assigning two-thirds of the fees thus generated to the Crown. Anyone appealing a ruling by Canterbury was to turn henceforth not to Rome but to the King’s Chancery Court, and of course it was no longer heresy to refuse to recognize the pope—the bishop of Rome, as he was now to be called—as head of the English church. Those monasteries which until now had been under the jurisdiction of the orders with which they were affiliated rather than their local bishops were put under the authority not of the bishops but of the Crown.

What it all added up to was a wholesale chopping away of the English church’s traditional connections to Rome and their replacement with new obligations to the king. Henry was creating, not a church free of domination by any external power, but a church that he himself would dominate totally. Parliament, too, was being made newly subordinate to the Crown. Cromwell continued to take care, in preparing the latest statutes, to make clear that Parliament was merely recognizing the king’s supremacy rather than conferring supremacy upon him. The king’s authority was acknowledged as coming directly from God, not from any earthly source and certainly not (as Thomas More had dared to suggest years before, in his first public appearance as chancellor) from his subjects. To oppose the king was to oppose God. This was the high-water mark of royal authority in England, the opening of an era—it would not last long—in which the Crown claimed, and for a while actually possessed, mastery over the lives, the property, and even the consciences of its subjects. Cromwell’s reward for making it happen was to be appointed, that spring, King Henry’s principal secretary. He would turn the position into the most powerful in the government. From it he would reach out to control both houses of Parliament, the courts, and the council.