The Tudors (32 page)

The year had brought astonishing things: proof of Henry’s ability to make Parliament deliver practically anything he demanded, the enshrinement
of his ecclesiastical supremacy in the law of the land, the crushing of domestic opposition, a conclusive repudiation of Rome, and a great deal of badly needed money. But all of it seemed merely to whet the king’s appetite. He wanted more. He became more determined than ever that everyone in England was going to conform to his will and embrace his definition of the truth.

Queen Anne, tragically, was failing to conform: her second pregnancy ended in miscarriage. Henry was still hopeful, still trying, still sleeping with the queen for whom he had waited so long, but he was becoming weary of her tantrums and her jealousy and her failure to produce the expected heir. He began to wonder if something was wrong—not with himself, of course, but with Anne, or with their union. He began to suspect that his second marriage must be as displeasing to God as his first had been. Evidently he also—as Anne would be heard to complain—began to have difficulty performing sexually. A long time would pass before Anne became pregnant again.

Fisher and More were still refusing to conform. Maddeningly, they sat in their stone cells in the Tower and under the closest scrutiny said nothing and did nothing that could make it possible to have them put to death. Henry therefore resorted to what was becoming a favorite way of destroying those he saw as his enemies when they were not within reach of the law. He had them attainted for misprision of treason, and this time the penalty would be no mere fine. Attainder provided a basis for keeping them in prison for the rest of their lives if that was what the king wished, and for confiscating everything they owned. More’s Chelsea household, which included a large extended family, was reduced to destitution. More himself was no longer allowed visitors or access to the Tower gardens.

As one of his last acts of the year, Henry appointed Cromwell to serve as his vice-regent, empowered to administer the church on his behalf. Even the most reform-minded of the bishops, the ones most antagonistic toward Rome and most eager to cast off the old ways, found this hard to accept. Suddenly they were subordinate not only to their king but to a rough upstart commoner who had never taken holy orders at even the lowliest level and had no training in theology or canon law or anything of the kind.

Cromwell and Henry, of course, knew exactly what they were doing.

They were positioning themselves to use for their own purposes a power that traditionally, virtually from time immemorial, had belonged to the bishops and the heads of the religious orders. This was the power of visitation—the right and responsibility to enter the religious houses of England and Wales, examine their operations, and impose such corrective measures as might be found necessary.

For the first time in history, thanks to the parliamentary enactments of 1534, this power now resided in the king.

And the king had in his vice-regent a man who understood what kinds of opportunities this created, knew how to exploit them to the full, and would feel no hesitation in doing so.

Cromwell was now ready, as one of the most momentous years in the history of England came to its end, to begin using the king’s new powers in ways that the king himself may not yet have imagined.

FOR AT LEAST FOUR CENTURIES AFTER HENRY VIII’S DEATH, British conventional wisdom insisted confidently that his assault on the religious orders and their houses was not only justified but little short of imperative. The people of England were taught that by the 1530s monasticism was dying, was sunk in a moral decay too awful to be discussed in mixed company—fabricated stories about secret tunnels connecting the sleeping quarters of nuns and monks had become part of the national folklore—and needed to be put out of its misery.

About one thing, at least, this national mythology was right. Monasticism in England
was
dying when Henry decided to kill it—in fact, it had been dying for centuries. But that is only part of the story, and not the most interesting part. What is equally true, and more significant because so greatly at variance with what is commonly believed, is that England’s monasteries had also been reviving, reinventing, and renewing themselves all through the centuries of their decline. Which is simply to say that the institution of monasticism, in the sixteenth century no less than in the fourteenth or the twelfth or long before that, remained a living, multifaceted, endlessly changing thing—a
dynamic
thing. If in some ways it was not entirely healthy when Henry launched his attack on it—and it certainly was not—in others it had rarely been more robust. Some parts of it were withering even as others flourished, and up to the end it appears to have been changing for the better in at least as many ways as it was changing for the worse.

It had always been so. Recurrent, frequently radical reform had been one of the main threads in the history of European monasticism from its beginnings. Monasticism had arisen out of an urgent impulse to create something new—to find a way by which people in pursuit of the transcendental might organize themselves into supportive communities—and naturally it was the seekers themselves who did the creating. The
waves of reform that followed one after another were almost without exception the work not of some disapproving outside authority but of the monks and nuns themselves. There should be nothing surprising in any of this. The monastic vocation being almost by definition a way of life for men and women wanting something not easily found in ordinary experience, it is only to be expected that some of the people who enter it will be dissatisfied with what they find and that some of those will insist upon going deeper. It has always been inevitable that the very success of different varieties of monasticism would spark a desire to experiment with other, newer (and sometimes older) forms.

Britain’s first great experience of monastic reform came as early as the tenth century, the time of the Anglo-Saxons, when the perhaps two hundred small monasteries then functioning on the island agreed to organize themselves in a new way and subject themselves to a new system of discipline. Throughout the preceding four centuries, during what later times have named the Dark Ages (they were distinctly less dark north of the English Channel than on the European mainland), the monasteries of England and Wales and even more so those of Ireland had been very nearly the only institutions in all of Western Christendom to preserve the cultural and intellectual heritage that had collapsed with the Roman Empire. Many of these earliest monasteries were, in addition to unique centers of learning, bases from which parties of monks set out to carry the gospel, and with it literacy, to barbarian tribes on the continent. Each was organized and governed according to whatever system it had worked out for itself or borrowed from some convenient source. Each adopted whatever practices and purposes it chose, and the differences between houses could be extreme and controversial. Through many generations there was no widely accepted answer to the question of how religious communities might best manage their affairs, and the extent of dissatisfaction with this situation can be inferred from the readiness with which a remedy was embraced as soon as a potentially workable one became available.

What crossed to England in the tenth century was the so-called Rule of St. Benedict, a system of monastic governance that had been drawn up by an obscure abbot in Italy fully four hundred years before. This set of regulations, rigorous but not fanatically severe, proved to be the most workable of many early efforts to show people wanting the religious life how
to form communities that would not fall apart under the strain of human interaction. Benedict of Nursia’s plan met so many needs so well that it was adopted throughout Italy and from there spread north. Eventually it became so universal a standard that, for a time, nearly every monastery in Europe was “Benedictine.” In 970, at a church synod at Winchester, the abbots and abbesses and priors and prioresses of England accepted Benedict’s system as their “one uniform observance.” A form of monasticism that would remain familiar across the island for the next five and a half centuries began to take shape. It was a simple system and not easily abused. Men and women were strictly segregated. The members of each community elected their superiors, who exercised absolute authority but could be removed for unsatisfactory performance and were adjured in Benedict’s writings to consult with the members before making decisions. The monastic day began at two
A.M.
(three
A.M.
in summer, when darkness fell later) and was divided into periods of prayer, labor, and study. The schedule varied only with the seasons and the demands of the liturgical calendar of “feast days” and fasts. There were two meals a day in summer, when more daylight hours were available for work, but only one in winter, and only the sick were allowed meat. All visitors were to be offered food and shelter, and providing for the local poor and sick became a primary responsibility of every house. This was not a life likely to attract anyone without a serious commitment to spiritual pursuits. A system of periodic visitations by authorities from the outside helped to ensure fidelity to the rule, and in the centuries following its adoption there were strikingly few grave or systemic failures of discipline. Problems did not go unaddressed. A typical problem, one characteristic of the time, was the practice, carried forward from pre-Benedictine days, by which wealthy families not wishing to divide property among multiple heirs would deposit their surplus children at the abbeys, presumably for life. The worst consequences of this were removed by a rule forbidding anyone to take monastic vows before reaching the age of consent, which was usually eighteen.

Success bred prosperity and complexity. Some of the houses grew large and rich: forty-five (eight of them communities of women) were important enough to figure in the public records of 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest, and the Normans in their turn endowed new establishments on a sometimes lavish scale. The Benedictines—now formally
an international order—grew increasingly sophisticated. The abbots of the greatest houses sat in the House of Lords. It came to be the norm for the monks to be ordained as priests, whereas Benedict himself had not regarded monks as being clergy in the strict sense, and when the first universities were founded one of their primary purposes was to educate young men sent from the monasteries. The religious observances of the houses became so elaborate that little time was left for work or solitude. A growing perception that all this marked an unacceptable departure from the spirit of the rule led first to discontent and then to the establishment, in France initially, of the breakaway order of Cistercians, whose garments of unbleached wool caused them to be called the “white monks” in contrast to the black-robed Benedictines. (The “black monks,” not pleased with this implicit criticism of their presumably more comfortable attire, accused the Cistercians of making an ostentatious display of humility and austerity. Members of different religious orders were not above jealousy and resentment.)

The emergence of the Cistercians was a real revolution, and from their arrival in England in the twelfth century they attracted astonishing numbers of recruits. They settled in wild and unpopulated districts, set out to support themselves by draining marshland and converting it to pastures for sheep, and gradually grew rich by doing so. Within a generation the order had almost a dozen English houses. Its growth was only part of what is called the twelfth century’s Monastic Renaissance, during which more than 250 new houses for men were opened in England along with more than 100 for women. Among them were the first English houses of the so-called canons regular and also of the Carthusians, a hybrid order of hermits-in-community that would grow to nine houses, only to be singled out for early destruction by Henry VIII and Cromwell. These and other orders—Norbertines, Bridgettines, the English Order of Sempringham, Knights Templar, and Knights Hospitalers—adhered to orthodox doctrine (though disputes about how well they did so were common) while pursuing their different missions in their distinctive ways.

The thirteenth century brought yet another revolution: the arrival of the friars, new mendicant (the word means “begging”) orders that had started on the continent, spread with startling speed, and were focused not on maintaining houses of prayer and seclusion but on outreach to the laity—especially the growing and increasingly sophisticated urban
laity, an emerging social force that had received much attention at the Lateran Council of 1215. The Order of Preachers, or Dominicans, first appeared in England in 1221, the year that its founder, the Spaniard Dominic, died. When the Friars Minor or Franciscans followed three years later, their founder Francis of Assisi was still alive. Both orders emphasized poverty and simplicity of life along with helping ordinary people to live Christian lives in a world of towns and cities. They proved popular wherever they settled, though in doing so they often attracted the unfriendly attention of the secular clergy—the diocesan and parish priests who belonged to no order.

Soon there were Dominican and Franciscan houses for women, and still other orders of friars, Augustinians and Carmelites, also arrived from the continent. Both within the oldest Benedictine houses and among the more recent arrivals, the old struggle over how best to live the religious life went on as ever. The problem was perhaps most acute among the Franciscans. We have already encountered the Friars Observant, especially favored by the royal family until they refused to accept Henry VIII’s annulment suit and his claims to be supreme head. They called themselves “observant” to distinguish themselves from those Franciscans who, in their opinion, were no longer sufficiently faithful to the precepts of their founder. Such splinterings were far from unusual, and they were hardly evidence of decay. They were evidence, rather, that the monastic impulse had not grown cold—that people drawn to the religious life still regarded themselves as on a quest that had to be taken seriously.