Six Wives (105 page)

    Lady Hussey, the Dowager Countess of Northumberland, and Margaret Cheyney, the mistress-cum-wife of Sir John Bulmer, all behaved similarly. But not, apparently, Lady Latimer. Not one scrap of evidence was produced against her and her name appears in none of the multitude of depositions which were gathered after the event.
²⁶

    At first sight, this is surprising. As we have seen, Catherine's mother, born Maud Green, had been one of Catherine of Aragon's ladies-inwaiting and had left her elder daughter a rosary of the Queen's gift as an heirloom. Catherine herself was probably the old Queen's god-daughter. And Catherine Parr was, or soon became, close to Catherine of Aragon's daughter Mary. It was ties of this kind which turned Lady Hussey into a more or less open partisan of the Pilgrims. And nothing, not even an earlier spell in the Tower for continuing to refer to Mary as 'Princess' after she had been stripped of her title, seemed to deter her.

    But somehow Lady Latimer remained immune. Was it the combined 'wisdom' of the Greens and the Parrs, to which Lord Dacre referred so appreciatively, which led her to keep her distance? Or had she already begun to lose sympathy with the 'old religion', which provided the driving force of the Pilgrimage?
²⁷

    Here we enter a minefield. We know, because Catherine herself later lamented the fact, that she had once been an enthusiastic Papist. 'I sought', she confessed, 'for such riffraff as the Bishop of Rome had planted in his tyranny and kingdom, trusting with great confidence by the virtue and holiness of them to receive full remission of sins.'
²⁸

    That she underwent conversion, as all the first generation of Reformers did, is therefore clear. The question is when?

    Recent fashionable academic opinion has tended to place the moment as late as 1544, when she was in her mid-thirties. I followed this, without much thinking about it, in my
Elizabeth
. But what if her conversion was much earlier, while she was in her twenties? It was, after all, the young who were most susceptible to Reform, as the young always tend to be to extravagant new doctrines. But, it will be objected, she spent her twenties in the north, which was Catholic and conservative. Actually, Yorkshire in the mid-1530s was far from this caricature of homogeneous conventionality. There
were
passionate Reformers and outstanding preachers and Catherine, as we shall see, had close family ties with the most radical of them.
²⁹

    What if she had begun to listen to them? What if she had begun to believe them?

* * *

But, despite Catherine's caution and whatever the nature of her religious belief, the Pilgrimage finally caught up with her. It did so in a particularly ugly way.

    Like the other chief leaders of the Pilgrimage, Latimer had been summoned to Court at New Year 1537. But when he reached Buntingford in Hertfordshire on his journey south, he was informed that he had been countermanded because, on 16 January, Norfolk had been redespatched to the north with orders to pacify the countryside and punish offenders. Latimer was to return home and assist him. He can only have been away a week or two at most. But the damage had been done. The common people were now suspicious that the gentry and nobility were preparing to double-cross them with a covert deal with the King. Latimer's sudden departure for the Court seemed to confirm these fears, and his home and family became a target. 'The Commons in coming forward', Darcy heard on about 18 January, 'have been at the houses . . . of . . . the Lord Latimer and other gentlemen who have been with your Highness in London and taken inventories of all their goods'.
³⁰

    Latimer himself learned the news two days later at Stamford on his return journey and he poured out his distress in a letter to Admiral Fitzwilliam. 'I learn', he wrote, 'that the commons of Richmondshire, grieved at my coming up, have entered my house at Snape, and will destroy it if I come not home shortly.' 'If I do not please them', he continued, 'I know not what they will do with my body and goods, wife and children.'

    Latimer was now caught between the King and the common people. He was mistrusted by both and whatever he did would give offence to both. Faced with this impossible situation, he desperately sought a way out. 'If it were the King's pleasure that I might live upon such small lands as I have in the South', he concluded, 'I would little care of my lands in the North.'
³¹

    But he was to be allowed no such easy escape. Nor was Catherine. She had already faced the fury of the commons, who had burst into her house and (taking a leaf out of the King's book) had listed its contents for seizure. They had also, or so Latimer believed, threatened her and her step-children. All that was bad enough. But worse was to come since she would now have to try to protect her husband from the slower, but more terrible, wrath of the King.

* * *

Henry, as we have often seen, was capable of dissimulating his anger until the moment was ripe to strike. By June 1537, Latimer's turn had come, and he seemed particularly exposed. For in 1534, the year after his marriage to Catherine, he had entered into an agreement for the marriage of his daughter and Catherine's favourite, Margaret Neville, with Ralph, the son and heir of Sir Francis Bigod. Bigod was a substantial knight of the East Riding, with his seat some forty-five miles to the east of Snape at Mulgrave Castle, on the coast near Whitby.
³²

    A marriage agreement between neighbouring county families was of the most commonplace. But Bigod was not. Instead, though aged only thirty, he had already emerged as one of the most singular men of his age. He was a scholar and a gentleman, an MP and a published author, an Henrician loyalist and – at the last – a rebel. But, above all, he was an ardent believer in Reform. This he worked for, at every level: in Parliament, where he was an activist MP; at Court, where he lobbied Cromwell; in his Household, where he maintained distinguished (and very radical) chaplains; and in his 'country' of Yorkshire, where he mounted a one-man campaign 'in setting forth the word of God, having there preachers of my own cost, and rode all over the country with them'.
³³

    He even, he told Cromwell, who was his friend and confidant since their days together in Wolsey's Household, aspired to be a priest himself. 'Specially, afore anything', he begged the minister, 'help me to be a priest, that I may preach the Word of God, or else dispense with me, that being no priest I may do it.'
³⁴

* * *

A priest – especially perhaps a priest
manqué
like Bigod – requires a congregation: to move, to convert and eventually to answer and echo his certainties with their own. And it seems likely that Bigod found a willing listener in Catherine and probably in her husband too. For connexions between the two families were close. Apart from the marriage agreement, for which 'Mr Parr' (probably Catherine's uncle, Sir William) acted as a trustee, Latimer had helped out the perpetually indebted Bigod by buying a large chunk of his lands for £600 cash, payable in instalments. Latimer's servants evidently frequented Bigod's house and Latimer's brother William Neville and his wife spent Christmas 1536 with the Bigods at Mulgrave.
³⁵

    The result of this intercourse was that the Latimers' Household borrowed some of the features of Reform. Robert Plumpton of Knaresborough, about twenty miles to the south-west of Snape, who had been won over to Reform by Tyndale's translation of the New Testament, was eager 'not only to be [Latimer's] servant, but of his household and attending unto him'. And Margaret Neville, Catherine's step-daughter and Bigod's intended daughter-in-law, received a 'godly education' at Catherine's hands, for which, as she later acknowledged, 'I am never able to render to her . . . sufficient thanks'.
³⁶

* * *

    But the strange saga of Bigod's life was not yet complete. As a convinced Reformer, his first reaction to the Pilgrimage had been to try to flee. He took ship at Mulgrave and set sail for London. But the treacherous winds of the North Sea in autumn drove him back to land. Eventually, he was captured by the rebels and, like others of his class, forced to swear the Pilgrims' oath and to 'lead' a detachment of the rebellion.
³⁸

    There is no doubt that the process was even more fraught in Bigod's case than most: he was contemptuous of the rebels as Papist reactionaries; they were suspicious of him as a meddling Reformer. But the chemistry of revolt wrought a remarkable change in Bigod's opinions. He, unlike Henry and Cromwell, had never seen the Supremacy as an end in itself. Instead, he acclaimed it as a historic moment, in which 'we be delivered from the hard, sharp and ten thousand times more than judicial captivity of that Babylonical man of Rome, to the sweet and soft service, yea, rather liberty, of the Gospel'.
³⁹

    But what had happened to these extravagant, almost Millennarian, hopes? They had been dashed. Indeed, as Bigod was one of the first to see, the Supremacy, as interpreted by Henry and enforced by Cromwell, was leading not to liberty, of the Gospel or anything else, but to servitude and tyranny.

    By the time of the Pontefract Council of 2– 4 December, Bigod's fluent pen had expressed these doubts in a thesis. It examined, from first principles, 'what authority belonged to the Pope, what to a Bishop, and what to a King'. And it concluded that 'the Head of the Church of England might be a spiritual man, as the Archbishop of Canterbury or such'. 'In no wise', however, might the Headship belong to the King, 'for he should with the sword defend all spiritual men in their right'.
⁴⁰
*

Bigod, though starting from the opposite religious position, had now reached the same conclusion about the Royal Supremacy as Aske and Darcy. It was wrong and illegitimate, and Henry must be made to give it up. But having come to agree on ends, they now differed on tactics. Aske and Darcy were confident that their demonstration and Henry's apparent surrender to it were enough. Bigod was shrewder. Only force, he argued, would compel Henry to give up what he had acquired. The common people in the north felt the same and Bigod, with a series of bold and impassioned speeches, put himself at their head in a new uprising in January 1537.
⁴¹

    The uprising fizzled out quickly, largely because Aske and Darcy refused their support. Instead, they persisted in trusting to Henry's promises, and acting as good subjects meanwhile. In vain. Henry used Bigod's rising as an excuse comprehensively to break his word with the Pilgrims. His lawyers twisted Aske and Darcy's careful distancing of themselves from Bigod into evidence of treasonable intent and they and the rest were executed.

    Would Latimer meet the same fate?

* * *

It seemed very likely. On 2 June, Norfolk thanked Cromwell 'for his information that the King does not much favour Lord Latimer'. But what if Latimer made the short journey from Snape to consult Norfolk at his headquarters at Sheriff Hutton? How, the Duke of Norfolk wanted to know, should he deal with him? Cromwell's instructions were that the Duke should trick Latimer into coming to London. Norfolk obeyed. He had 'contrived', he wrote to Cromwell on 16 June, 'to make him go to London as a suitor on his own affairs'.
⁴²

    Latimer, aware that it might be his last journey, travelled at a fairly leisurely pace and stopped off en route to visit his brother Thomas, who lived at Aldham near Colchester in Essex. There Latimer was arrested by the neighbouring magnate, the Earl of Oxford, and sent to London. He arrived by the end of the month and was promptly clapped in the Tower.
⁴³

    Latimer had, semi-voluntarily, placed himself in the King's power. Was this suicide? His brother Thomas Neville certainly thought so. 'Alas, Mary', he said to his wife, 'my brother is cast away.' 'By God's Blood', he added, 'if I had the King here I would make him that he should never take man into the Tower!' Thomas was also sure that it was Latimer's great wealth that made him such tempting prey. Would her master, the Parson of Aldham, who had been arrested on suspicion of treason, be put to death? Margaret Towler asked Thomas on 4 July. 'No, Margaret', he replied, 'he shall not be put to death, for he hath no lands nor goods to lose.' 'But', he added bitterly, 'if he were either a knight or a lord that had lands or goods to lose, then he should lose his life.' Surely, Margaret remonstrated, 'the King's Grace will put no man to death neither for goods nor lands?' 'Yes, by God, Margaret', Thomas Neville countered, 'but he would.'
⁴⁴

Thus Latimer's brother. But what of Latimer's wife?

* * *

Once again, as six months earlier in the Pilgrimage, Catherine was silent. And once more the silence is eloquent. For Catherine never wavered in her judgement of Henry. She followed neither Bigod nor her brother-inlaw into a cynical reading of Henry's motives. Always, for her, whatever the King did was for the best. He was just. He was virtuous.

    But being just and virtuous are merely human qualities. The Henry she saw was more than that. He was God's chosen instrument. He was 'our Moses', as she put it in her posthumously published
Lamentations of a
Sinner
, '[who] hath delivered us out of the captivity and spiritual bondage of Pharaoh (that is, the Pope)'. He was even, she seemed to suggest, a Messiah, who 'hath taken away the veils and mists of errors, and brought us to the knowledge of the truth by the light of God's Word'.