Catherine Howard (14 page)
Religious discord was rife – all was either ‘as black as pitch, vice, abomination, heresy, and folly’ or ‘all fair roses and sweet virtue’.
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The King’s ‘simple loving subjects’ were ‘arrogantly and superstitiously’ arguing and disputing ‘in open places, taverns, and ale houses’ upon spiritual topics and theological questions.
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On all sides there were tactless, if sincere, ministers of God who were voicing new and disturbing notions; and it was noted in London that the city was teeming with preachers, ‘but they come not from one Master, for, as it is reported, their messages be divers.’
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When one impassioned reformer and idealist could suggest that the gospel be read and set forth in all places ‘even in brothels’, while an equally stern advocate of the old faith could preach that he ‘would like to see the head of every maintainer of the New Learning upon a stake’, there was little doubt that the time for a positive and official statement of religious faith had arrived.
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The only question that remained was whether conformity of mind would be enforced upon the basis of a Catholic or a Protestant interpretation of the Christian faith.
Religious sentiment at court and in the King’s own mind during 1539 was beginning to swing in the direction of retrenchment and orthodoxy, and the Norfolk-Gardiner faction was optimistic that uniformity of religious thought would be decided once and for all on the basis of Catholicism without the Pope. On
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An ecclesiastical committee of the upper house was selected to inquire into the nature of religious discord, and to suggest some basis for banishing contention from the realm. If the royal council thought that such a committee would produce the desired unanimity of sentiment, it was sadly mistaken, because the members were evenly divided between the advocates of the new and old learning. Within eleven days they had battled to a hopeless deadlock, and so great was the tension that society was put in mind of Erasmus’s words that, ‘to all appearance the long war of words and writings will terminate in blows.’
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Then on 16 May, the secular authority stepped in to end the religious stalemate. Significantly, it was Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, who suggested that the issue be introduced for debate upon the floor of the House of Lords and the decision be enforced by parliamentary statute. In other words, for the first time the temporal authority was accepting responsibility for both enforcing and prescribing religious conformity. The King himself listened to the debate, and, finally, on 28 June, the Act for Abolishing Diversity of Opinion was passed by a unanimous vote representing little except that the monarch had thrown his influence behind the Bill. The Whip with the Six Strings, as the Bill was popularly termed, re-avowed basic Catholic doctrines such as transubstantiation, communion in one kind, celibacy of the clergy, private masses and auricular confession. All these points had been a source of endless controversy, and they were now decided in a markedly Catholic fashion. The nation was vastly impressed by the spectacle of its sovereign displaying his theological talents and assuming his responsibilities as Defender of the Faith, and most men agreed with John Hussey that the Bill was the ‘wholesomest Act ever passed.’
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Though the conservatives had won a resounding victory, ultimate success in the form of the destruction of the Vicar-General and his disciples had to wait upon the coming of Catherine Howard to court and Cromwell’s diplomatic blunder that saddled Henry with the German princess of Cleves.
During the summer and autumn of 1539, diplomatic considerations began to cloud the clarity of the theological atmosphere. Six powers faced one another; each claimed the special sanction of the deity in support of its cause, but none of the six ever allowed religion to stand in the way of political self-interest. The Sultan of Turkey was Caliph of the True Believers; Charles V was Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and His Most Catholic Majesty of Spain; England’s sovereign proudly displayed his theological title of Defender of the Faith; Francis I was the Most Christian King of France; and the Pope laid claim to the keys of the kingdom of heaven as Christ’s vicar on earth. International relations in the sixteenth century have an
Alice-in-Wonderland
quality about them. Chivalric monarchs shed endless tears, but continued their predatory policies of national and political aggrandizement; France and Spain maintained a noisy but singularly inconsequential battle for the mastery of Italy; and the Poe, that elderly white knight, was constantly falling off one side or the other of his horse, and being stuck together with bits of wire so that he might continue at the doubtful game of the balance of power in Europe. The international kaleidoscope was constantly changing, but, as
Alice
discovered, the more things changed, the more they remained the same.
English diplomacy of the 1530s was based upon what were accepted as the three constants of European relations. Primary among the principles of Tudor diplomacy was the rivalry between the vast Habsburg possessions – united in the person of Emperor Charles V – and
Valois
France
– personified by Francis I, that elegant sovereign with the fine calf to his leg. An equally important consideration was the embarrassment caused by Henry’s divorce from his first wife and his consequent break with the Apostolic See. Finally, no English foreign policy reckoned without the time-honoured conflict between
England
and
France
. The first consideration could be depended upon to keep France and the Emperor at odds, while
England
held the crucial balance; the second might be expected to guarantee the enmity of both the Emperor, who was Catherine of Aragon’s nephew, and of the papacy, whose dearest desire was to lead a united Habsburg- Valois force against the English heretics. As for the English-French rivalry, this was a sacred axiom of international relations, treasured almost to the point of insanity, since no one could recall or even conceive of a time when the two nations had not been snarling at each other. Thus the international tangle was predicated upon the
sine qua non
that both Charles and Francis disliked their brother Henry, but detested each other even more.
In the spring and early summer of 1538 the impossible happned – Charles began to betray signs of ultimate lunacy by indicating a willingness to accept an invitation extended by his rival brother of
France
, to pay a State visit to
Paris
. More incredible still, the Emperor was planning to place the safety of his imperial person in the hands of his traditional enemy, with no greater warranty of protection than Francis’s chivalric word of honour. For an instant it appeared as if the two states would submerge their own enmity in a holy alliance aimed at exterminating the heretical menace across the Channel. As a further blow to English safety, the sovereigns of
France
and
Spain
in January of 1539 agreed to make no new alliances with the anathematized English without each other’s consent. Isolated and alarmed by the possibility of a Catholic crusade, Henry suddenly found himself anxious to win the friendship of the other Protestant princes of
Europe
, and in March of 1539 Cromwell commenced negotiations for the hand of the daughter of the Duke of Cleves.
The marriage treaty, which was eventually signed on
Spain
and
France
would ever unite against either the heretic or the infidel. It soon became obvious that the King had allowed himself to be panicked into an alliance, which had no observable merits except to encumber him with an unattractive wife, whose sole accomplishment was to grunt in German. In fact, the entire marriage alliance retained the usual
Alice-in-Wonderland
atmosphere – it never made any sense. Had the papacy really been able to patch up the ancient feud between Habsburg and Valois and direct their united forces against
England
, Cromwell’s alliance with the Protestant powers of
Europe
would have been almost worthless. As one astute observer of these times noted:
These three, the bishop of
Rome
, the French King, and the Emperor, be all one, and the King of Scots is the French King’s man; and so we be left alone, and nobody with us but these Germans, a sort of beggarly knaves, and they are able to do nothing.
Finally, to cap the diplomatic blunder, it quickly became manifest that thc much-heralded meeting between Charles and Francis in Paris when it actually took place in January of 1540 was a brittle, if sumptuous, display of chivalric posing and lavish courtesy, and Henry was gratified to discover that each side continued the tricky and damnable game of negotiation with the English heretics.
Henry had good reason to be unhappy in the spring of 154o, and the ranks of the conservative opposition were confidently anticipating the fruits of the royal discomfort, for the King’s matrimonial disappointments had a peculiar tendency to coincide with political, social and religious change. Thomas Cromwell had risen in the royal estimation because he alone had been able to offer a means of marrying Anne Boleyn and divorcing Catherine of Aragon. That method had been the daring and successful policy of a break with
Rome
and the settlement of the divorce in an English court in defiance of the Catholic world. It now remained to be seen whether the Vicar- General could ride out another matrimonial storm and offer his sovereign escape from the marital yoke imposed by the alliance with Protestant Germany. The moment the King’s shocked sensibilities had recovered from the sight of his bride, violent and unpredictable change both in ministers and policy was almost inevitable. The only question now concerned the nature of that change, and whose head would fly – Cromwell’s, or
Norfolk
and Gardiner’s?
Francis Bacon once remarked that Elizabeth’s guiding principle in government was that matters of conscience, ‘when they exceed their bounds and grow to be matter of faction, lose their nature’.
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Whether it is worse to murder and intrigue in the name of factional hatred or of idealistic principle, is a debatable point, but the situation in the winter of 1539-40 was following Bacon’s prescription – personal rivalry and the strife of personalities were beginning to outweigh both religious and diplomatic considerations. The aim of each faction was not so much a godly policy in religion, but simply the destruction of certain key individuals.
First, there was ‘busy Gardiner’, the wily Bishop of Winchester, ‘the wittiest, boldest, and best learned of his faculty’.
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Choleric and touchy, so unmanageable that only Henry’s iron will and strong hand could curb him, and possibly a better Englishman than a Christian, the Bishop was the brains of the conservative forces.
Winchester
’s opposite number and persistent rival was Thomas Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal and Vicar-General in matters spiritual. Both men were lawyers by instinct and training, both had the saving grace of humour and both could be terrifyingly ruthless, but here the similarity ceases.
There is something almost satanic about the King’s chief minister, whose origins and education included soldiering, the law, moneylending, trading and the civil service. While Stephen Gardiner often gibbered with rage and blundered simply through exasperation, Cromwell never seemed to do anything without a calculated reason. His anger may at times have been real, but more often it was feigned. His ruthlessness was strangely impartial – he destroyed, but rarely hated his victims. Possibly this was why he was feared and detested by his contemporaries, for somehow Thomas Cromwell never seemed to have expressed the proper human emotions. He was far too impervious; he was immune to insults because he never made a pretence at being a gentleman; he was coldly tolerant, if only because he felt no passion. Outwardly bland and imperturbable, he ruled by the sheer force of his intelligence. For his own society he remained an enigma, and one baffled critic shook his head and said that for himself he would not be in Cromwell’s shoes, ‘for all that ever he hath, for the King beknaveth him twice a week, and sometimes knocks him well about the pate; and yet when he hath been well pummelled about the head’, the Vicar-General would enter the great chamber ‘shaking off the bush with as merry a countenance as though he might rule all the roost.’
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Looking more like a pub-keeper than a minister of state, the man harboured a massive pride, and the agility and brilliance of his mind made him more than a match for wily Winchester. When the great oak finally fell, it was almost as though it crashed before the gale of historic necessity rather than to the ineffectual chopping of the Bishop’s axe.
Behind each individual, Tudor society aligned itself.
Norfolk
, cunning and mercurial, was Gardiner’s ally in favouring conservatism in religion, a pro-French policy in diplomacy, and an intense distaste for the hated Cromwell. If Gardiner supplied the brains and the pen of the conservative position, Thomas Howard lent it his sword and his brawn. Unpopular but indispensable, the Duke was a necessary evil, since Norfolk alone was able to supply the means of crushing rebellious subjects and curbing the unpredictable Scots.
Norfolk
was neither intelligent nor strong enough to be a serious threat to the Vicar-General, who allowed him to retain his rather uncomfortable seat upon the King’s Council. In the conservative fold was also Cuthbert Tunstal, the venerable and affable Bishop of Durham, whose ‘stillness, soberness, and subtlety’
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won him the respect of both sides, and earned him a permanent place among Henry’s closest advisers.
