The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (21 page)

Henry gained unwonted power in Europe, and a new freedom to allege the ancient claims to France without the likelihood of imminent retaliation. But France could, and did in 1513 and 1521–4, reinstate her ‘auld alliance’ with Scotland and thereby threaten England on her northern border. The ambivalence of English relations with France was never so apparent as at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 where the two kings, attended by their courts in all their splendour, met to proclaim their friendship, while all the while the magnificence covered their enmity and the betrayal of the peace which Henry was already negotiating with the Emperor. By May 1522 England was at war with France again, and being urged by her Imperial ally to invade. Henry’s freedom to intervene on the Continent was constrained by the perpetual prospect of war on his borders at home. The great lords of Ireland – not only his ‘Irish enemies’, the Gaelic chiefs like O’Neill and O’Donnell, but also the Anglo-Irish feudatories, such as the Earl of Desmond – intrigued perpetually with England’s foreign enemies and, as sovereign princes, from time to time made alliances with the kings of France and Scotland and with the Emperor.

Though Wolsey wanted peace, he countenanced war – despite opposition in the Council – rather than lose England’s new-found prominence in European affairs, and, more compellingly, because Henry still hankered after it. In August 1523 a new invasion of France was mounted, English troops were soon within fifty miles of Paris, and Henry believed, mistakenly, that the French crown was within his grasp. In February 1525 that inheritance seemed even closer when Francis I was defeated and captured by Imperial forces at Pavia. At that battle too Richard de la Pole, the White Rose of York, who was the French candidate for the English throne, was killed. Henry urged Charles V to seize the moment
and partition France between them, but – to Henry’s disappointment and humiliation – Charles held back, and at the end of August 1525 England was at peace with France once more. The Cardinal then helped to create a league against the Emperor, which England sponsored but would not join: another attempt to engineer peace by force. That peace was traumatically broken when in May 1527 Imperial troops sacked Rome, desecrated the Eternal City and took Christ’s Vicar into captivity. Wolsey ordered processions and fastings for the Pope’s release, but the lack of popular response was telling. The common people ‘little mourned for it’, wrote Edward Hall, the chronicler. England was a Catholic country, but not a papalist one, and now the resentment which grew, in London particularly, against the Cardinal Legate was transferred from servant to master.

Wolsey ruled outside the court, against the court, from his own great household which became its rival. Around the King his friends and favourites exerted a crucial political influence. To the inner sanctum, his Privy Chamber, Henry had introduced not the nonentities who had served his father, but a new generation of young gentlemen. Highborn and high-spirited, they were dashing enough to amuse him, confident enough to be ‘homely and familiar’ and to play ‘light touches with him’. They ‘forgot themselves’ and the awe-inspiring distinctions of rank which should have set them apart from their monarch. In emulation of Francis I’s court, these young gentlemen were elevated in 1518 to
Gentlemen
of the Privy Chamber, a new rank, with new pretensions. Between Wolsey, with his uniquely privileged position as pre-eminent councillor, and the King’s arrogant young favourites, a state of hostility – sometimes latent, often open – prevailed. Their battles were always for royal favour, patronage and influence. In 1519 Wolsey succeeded in exiling them to darkest Calais, for a while; in 1526 he purged the Privy Chamber, for a time. Soon they returned, to greater favour than before. As men ‘near about the King’, they were respected, even feared. They were empowered to represent the King beyond the court. As special messengers embodying the royal will, they were sent to summon or arrest the King’s greatest subjects; as diplomats they went on missions to ‘decipher’ the secrets of ‘outward princes’ at other courts; they were given high military command against the King’s enemies, foreign or domestic; they were entrusted with positions of influence throughout the country as leading members of the Tudor affinity. As royal representatives and royal retainers, they were part of the new
world of Renaissance courts and an older one of bastard-feudal affinities.

These men were the nearest to friends that a king could have. Educated, well versed in scripture and the writings of classical antiquity, bound by the chivalric ideal of fidelity, Henry’s courtiers thought about the virtue of friendship. One of the first classical works to be translated into English and printed was Cicero’s
Of Friendship
(1481). The duties of friends were analogous to the duties of true counsel: telling the truth and constancy; virtues which were at once public and private. Constancy in friendship – or more evidently, its loss and betrayal – was a pervasive theme in the lives and writings of those who served at Henry VIII’s court. At the Christmas festivities at Greenwich in 1524 a captain and fifteen gentlemen offered to defend Castle Loyal and its attendant ladies against all comers. Among the defenders were the poet Thomas Wyatt, and with him Francis Bryan, whom Henry called his ‘Vicar of Hell’, and John Poyntz, both of whom inspired Wyatt’s mordant reflections upon the courtier’s life. They shared the Renaissance conception of an ideal courtier who told his prince the truth, but their own experience was of the mendacity and malignity of life at court. People were reading Castiglione’s
The Courtier
– in April 1530 Edmund Bonner reminded Thomas Cromwell of his promise to lend him
Il Cortegiano
and make him a good Italian – but it was harder to learn its lessons. Flattery – feigned friendship – was the enemy of both friendship and true counsel, and the besetting sin of courts. ‘One unhappy thing is in the court’, wrote Bryan: many who will doff their cap to you ‘gladly would see your head off by the shoulders.’ Flattery posed the greatest danger to monarchy, for only honest counsel preserved it from descending towards tyranny. Yet at court plain speaking was rare. Courts always had a dark reputation for intrigue and danger: the collective noun for courtiers was a ‘threat’. ‘Your ladyship knoweth,’ wrote John Husee to Lady Lisle in July 1537, ‘the court is full of pride, envy, indignation, and mocking, scorning and derision.’ Cardinal Pole, Henry’s cousin, asked: ‘Who will tell the prince his fault? And if one such be found, where is the prince that will hear him?’ The normal way at courts, so Wyatt told his friend Poyntz, was to call the crow a swan, and the lion a coward; to praise flattery as eloquence and cruelty as justice. Many at Henry’s court were masters of these silken arts. ‘I played the jolly courtier, faith,’ Thomas Wriothesley told his friend Wyatt, whom he would betray.

In 1519 Henry declared that ‘for our pleasure… one we will favour
now and another at such time as we shall like’. That fluctuating royal pleasure invited competition. The King boasted that he could tell his good servants from the flatterers, but he deceived himself in this as in much else. With time he grew restless, insecure, capricious and, captive in the court he had created, he could be played upon by the men he had advanced and had constantly about him. The contradictory nature of this king, the unstill centre around whom everything at court turned, had consequences for its life. Any king might be susceptible to persuasion, but Henry became exceptionally so. ‘King Henry, according as his counsel was about him, so was he led,’ wrote John Foxe, the Church historian and martyrologist, and he had spoken to those who knew. Men and women had always come to the royal household, and still did, to further the interests of their family and kin. The court was not a male preserve, save in its heart, the Privy Chamber, for women of high birth and high ambition came also, seeking more or less the same things: influence, connection and the advancement of their kin. They, too, were drawn into the plots and counter-plots which became characteristic of life there. Family honour and advancement remained at the centre of the competitiveness at court, but where once no principle more abstract than ‘good governance’ had been adduced, times were changing.

To guide the king was the part of a loyal counsellor, but to challenge the royal will, or to seek to subvert or overrule it, was conspiracy and treason. This was the problem for those in the court who opposed royal policy; they must work by devious means. In such political circumstances faction flourished. In England, as in ancient Rome, faction had malign connotations: the enemies of a group would call it a faction while those within it thought in terms of friendship. What factions sought was the ear of the king and thereby his favour; to persuade him to one course or another, or to give patronage to their clients. They waited for an occasion to insinuate themselves or to oust their rivals. In the personal polity of the court factions, too, were personal. Fleeting, welded together more by promise of mutual service than by unity of principle, they lasted only so long as friendship and common interest lasted.

Away from the court, in the country, there were suspicions that the King was a prisoner of its tiny world. In 1536 the vicar of Eastbourne, walking in his churchyard, declared, ‘They that rule about the King make him great banquets and give him sweet wines and make him drunk, and then they bring him bills and he putteth his sign to them.’ In these ways his subjects were pleased to explain changes they hated. But
they were wrong. This was a king who was determined to rule. Princes cannot err, of course, and Henry’s vaunting self-righteousness always led him to blame others for events for which he was responsible, or might have prevented. He knew what he wanted, if not always how to get it, and was seldom thwarted. Although the King was often kept in the dark, and often deceived, the truth could not be kept from him indefinitely, and, once he knew it, he would act. He came to understand well enough that perpetual intrigue surrounded him and that his counsellors and courtiers maligned their rivals. If, and when, he chose, he could protect the vulnerable and those who had been sequestered from his presence. In 1543 he rescued Archbishop Cranmer from the best-laid schemes of Bishop Gardiner, warning Cranmer that, if he were once in prison, his enemies would procure false witnesses against him. But by that time the nature of court politics had been fundamentally transformed.

In November 1527 ambassadors from France had been entertained at court by a Latin play. The dramatis personae included Religion, the Church and Truth, dressed as religious novices; Heresy, False Interpretation and Corruption of Scripture appeared as ladies of Bohemia. Players took the parts of the ‘heretic Luther’ and his forbidden wife (a former priest, he had married a former nun). The play’s main theme was of the Cardinal rescuing the Pope from captivity, saving the Church from falling, and defending orthodoxy from heresy. This was almost the last time that so Catholic an interlude could be played to general approbation, for the new religion had invaded the court and had profoundly changed life there. Now men and women might contend, not for power alone, but for a cause. Also in November a yeoman usher of the court did penance for heresy. But there was now another at court, more influential by far than any yeoman usher, who had been touched by evangelical reform, and whose power over the King was unrivalled: Anne Boleyn.

Anne had returned early in 1522 from long years away at the most glittering courts of Europe, a grand court lady. She arrived at Henry VIII’s court to become maid-of-honour to Queen Catherine, and to break hearts. Anne had charm, style and wit, and a will and savagery which made her a match for this king. In her music book, sent to please her, there was an illustration of a falcon pecking at a pomegranate. The falcon was Anne’s badge; the pomegranate of Granada, Catherine’s. The pomegranate was itself the symbol of a fecundity which had brought
Catherine many children, but no living prince. By Easter 1527 the King was imploring Anne to become his mistress (as her sister Mary had been), but she consented only to be his queen. In an illuminated book of hours Henry scrawled, below an image of Christ as Man of Sorrows:

And Anne replied:

With evident promise, she wrote this under a picture of Archangel Gabriel announcing to the Virgin that she would bear a son. Neither promise was fulfilled, but from 1527 Anne’s influence over the infatuated King seemed secure. Her enemies became the King’s enemies; her friends, his friends.

The reign of Henry VIII, like that of Solomon, had begun well. An exquisite portrait miniature drawn by Holbein in about 1534 depicted Henry as Solomon, receiving the homage of the Queen of Sheba, representing the Church of England. Above the throne was the text: ‘Blessed be the Lord thy God, who delighted in thee, to set thee upon His throne, to be king elected by the Lord thy God.’ Henry delighted to see himself as a godly prince, and to compare himself with Solomon in his justice and wisdom. He forgot that Solomon’s reign degenerated, but soon he was reminded, when his own reign did also. Erasmus had written in his
The Education of a Christian Prince
, ‘these expressions of a tyrant “Such is my will”, “This is my bidding”… should be far removed from the mind of the prince’. Wolsey remembered kneeling before the King in his Privy Chamber for hours at a time, trying to ‘persuade him from his will and appetite’, but rather than abandon any part of it Henry ‘will put one half of his realm in danger’. This was a king with the power and will to advance his private conscience as a principle to bind not only the bodies but the souls of his subjects, and to set that private conscience against the whole of Christendom.

Seeking to understand how the great transformation in religion and ecclesiastical authority that was the Reformation could ever have happened, its opponents declared, ‘This may well be called a tragedy which began with a marriage.’ Throughout the 1520s, the first decade of evangelical reform, Henry VIII had been preoccupied by an intractable problem of conscience, his ‘Great Matter’. His desperate need to secure the succession and his consequent desire to rid himself of a queen who could bear him no living sons, became inescapably a theological problem. Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon had only been made possible because the Pope had dispensed from the Church’s prohibition of a man marrying his brother’s widow. As child after child died, Henry began to search for the cause of God’s judgement against him, and looking in the Old Testament he seemed to find it: in Leviticus 18:16 and 20:21 – ‘Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife…’ and ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife… they shall be childless.’ To Catherine’s insistent denial that Arthur had ever uncovered her nakedness Henry never listened. What was needed was for one pope to overrule what another had allowed. Best of all would be to prove that Julius II’s dispensation was insufficient in law; Cardinal Wolsey recognized that this was so. But a mere legal solution no longer sufficed. Henry saw that his marriage contravened divine law; it had angered God and affronted his own conscience. He had found the Levitical argument for himself, and would countenance no alternative.

The King stood upon principle: no pope could contradict a biblical command. This was to begin to challenge papal authority. Wolsey urged him against so radical a course, but unavailingly. Divorce was impossible, but Henry now took the first and secret steps to annul his marriage to his queen, secret even from her. On 17 May 1527 Wolsey, as papal legate, set up a clandestine court, summoning the King to answer the charge of living incestuously with Catherine. Then Henry and Wolsey drew back. If they had lost their nerve, it was hardly surprising, because the divorce was difficult in law, and provocative in its challenge to the papacy; diplomatically and politically it seemed impossible, because that May Rome had been sacked by Imperial troops, and the Pope was virtually the prisoner of the Emperor, Catherine’s
nephew. But at this time Henry assumed – and would never relinquish – the direction of his campaign for an annulment.

Henry’s ‘scruple of conscience’ about his damned marriage was sincere enough, but when he became captivated by Anne Boleyn his desire to rid himself of his first queen became compelling. Anne’s influence upon this king, who was so profoundly open to influence, now took a remarkable form. Not the least of the marks of Anne’s originality was her commitment to evangelical reform. From her youth spent in France, she was convinced by the Christian humanist imperative to set forth the vernacular Bible, and to return the Church to the true religion. As soon as she held sway over the King she dared to use her influence to advance reform and to protect her friends in the evangelical underworld. Somehow Simon Fish, in exile, knew that if he sent Anne a copy of his anticlerical tract
A Supplication for the Beggars
it would please her: so it did. She sponsored Tyndale’s forbidden New Testament, and interceded for those persecuted for its sake. Just at the time when the new faith most needed protection Anne Boleyn was there to offer it. Once reform began to infiltrate and the seemingly adamantine authority of the Church began to be questioned, there could be no going back. All those who blamed religious change upon Anne’s enchantment of the King were not wholly wrong.

On 18 June 1529 an extraordinary legatine court opened at Blackfriars in London. Its task was to pass sentence upon the royal marriage. Queen Catherine appeared before the court in person and, before the King and the judges, pleaded that she should not be discarded, dishonoured. Only Rome, she insisted, could determine the legality of her marriage, and to Rome she formally appealed. Bishop Fisher and other leading clerics fiercely championed her cause. The trial was adjourned at the end of July, mired in political and legal wrangling. Now Henry, who had tried to stampede the Pope into judging in his favour, was summoned to Rome, as if he were any ordinary suppliant, to put his case before the Rota, the supreme court of the Roman Church, where the decision was likely to go against him.

By the autumn of 1529 Henry determined upon a more radical policy. Anne had shown him Tyndale’s
The Obedience of a Christian Man
(1528), and to a king struggling with a pope and thwarted by a cardinal, Tyndale’s argument that the Church had not only nullified God’s promises but usurped the magistracy of the prince was appealing. In conversation with the Imperial ambassador in October 1529, Henry
announced a startlingly radical credo. Luther was right, Henry said, to attack the vices and corruption of the clergy; and if he had not challenged the sacraments as well, Henry would have defended, not opposed him. The only clerical power over the laity the King now acknowledged was absolution from sin. In 1515 he had already declared, ‘The kings of England in time past have never had any superior but God alone.’ Henry began to make moves against the Church from which there was no return.

The failure of the legatine court of 1529 to procure an annulment, and the massive indignity of the King’s summons to Rome to decide the case had proved the Cardinal’s downfall. At last, Wolsey could no longer give the King what he wanted, and royal favour faltered. Wolsey’s enemies waited to overthrow him. The noble councillors whom he had for so long displaced and who hated his prelatical pretensions, now circled. In 1527 Wolsey’s absence in France had given them the chance to ‘deprave’ him to the King, but Wolsey survived, and would have survived again, had it not been for the enmity of Anne, whom he called the ‘midnight crow’. According to Wolsey’s gentleman usher, at dinner, tête-à-tête with the King, she talked of politics: ‘Consider what debt and danger the Cardinal hath brought you in with all your subjects.’

‘How so, sweetheart?’ asked the King.

In October 1529 Wolsey’s enemies in the Council prepared charges against him which were specious, but ominous for the whole clergy, for the charge which stuck concerned the exercise of his authority as papal legate. The King was unwilling to sacrifice him, although, as Wolsey saw, he might find it easier to do so than restore Wolsey’s confiscated properties or admit that he himself had been wrong. Wolsey was dismissed from the Council and deprived of the office of Lord Chancellor: although the King sent him a ring for comfort, there could be none. In disgrace, Wolsey gave substance to the charges of treason by plotting with the King’s enemies; first Francis I of France, then the Emperor. In November 1530 he died on his way south from York, where he had been living for the first time in his hitherto non-resident career as Archbishop. Wolsey’s fall left the court and Council more divided than ever; between the Queen’s supporters, who saw in her cause both the safety of traditional religion and the assurance of the power of the nobility; and a radical group who countenanced the abandonment of the Roman allegiance and saw the royal divorce as just the beginning
of a more dangerous and revolutionary course. In Wolsey’s place as Lord Chancellor Henry appointed Thomas More, the author of
Utopia
, the most radical criticism yet of the society he was now to govern. He came determined to stay out of the King’s Great Matter, yet he saw what Henry’s struggle with Rome portended, and he hoped against hope that confrontation with the English Church could be prevented, and that it was not too late to stop the advance of heresy.

The summoning of Parliament at the end of 1529 offered hopes of reform and redress, but of diverse kinds. There was already in this Parliament a group opposed to the King’s purposes, the staunchest defenders of the Queen’s cause; a group which ventured perilously close to treason. Thomas More came to reform, seeking new laws against heresy. Others came to reform other abuses: the ‘enormities of the clergy’. That common lawyers and citizens of London were so influential in the Commons was the Church’s misfortune, for these lawyers had long been jealous of spiritual jurisdiction. Those who wanted reform wanted action, and law, parliamentary statute, was the way to achieve it. Anticlerical feeling was running high and the Church’s critics came with a case prepared. Not only was there resentment against clerical exactions and privileges, but also growing fears of the clergy’s unfettered powers to summon the laity before their courts and to punish them, acting as both accuser and judge. A Commons’ petition demanding reform of the clergy was turned into a series of parliamentary bills demanding the prohibition of the abuses of which the petition complained; such as clerical fees, holding secular office, buying and selling, holding more than one benefice with cure of souls (pluralism), and not being resident in their cures. This was not yet a fundamental assault upon the nature of spiritual authority, but it was regarded darkly by the Church’s most prescient defenders. Bishop Fisher compared the Commons to the heretical Hussite Kingdom of Bohemia. Daring to criticize the clergy now incurred the suspicion of heresy, and a campaign began against heretics, who were unprepared to recant, led by a Chancellor and bishops who became more desperate as the heresy spread.

Henry had not directed the anticlerical assault, but he now drew conclusions from it. Through these months it became clear that Catherine’s supporters would not move Henry’s conscience, but it was still unclear how the annulment would be achieved. But in the autumn of 1530 a way was found. Henry now claimed to be absolute as Emperor and Pope in his own kingdom. The Great Matter could be settled without
Rome, within the realm, and by royal authority. Here was the assertion of the Royal Supremacy over the English Church. In the devising of his caesaro-papal claims, Henry was a student, applying himself diligently to studying the manuscript which contained the – dubious – historical precedents for his Supremacy. Edward Foxe and John Stokesley (who would be rewarded with the bishoprics of Hereford and London) had been compiling evidence to support the King’s position, including legal judgements, chronicles, scriptures, and arguments from the Church Fathers and the General Councils of the Church. This was the
Collectanea satis copiosa
. ‘
Ubi hic?
(Where does this come from?)’; ‘
Hic est vera
(Here is the truth)’, the King wrote in the margins. Henry was now convinced – he needed little convincing – that England had long been, and still was, an empire, within which he had both temporal and spiritual jurisdiction (
regnum
and
sacerdotum
). By October 1530 the King had convinced himself that his imperial authority empowered him to prevent appeals outside his realm. A group of scholars had known the arguments before the King did, indeed had devised them for him, and for some of them solving the Divorce crisis was a way towards reform in religion and society as well as towards transformation of authority within the Church. From the obscurity of his Cambridge college Thomas Cranmer became prominent in the King’s counsels from 1531, soon abandoning his conservative humanism for Lutheran evangelicalism. A common lawyer, who had been faithful among Wolsey’s faithless servants, was taken into the King’s service in the spring of 1530, and into the Council by the end of the year: this was Thomas Cromwell, whose introduction into the counsels of the King was to be of the greatest significance.

Cromwell, possessing a creative intelligence and a vision of a reformed commonwealth, led the King towards policies more radical than he would otherwise have countenanced. Cardinal Pole claimed later that Cromwell had made a pact with Henry, promising to make him the most powerful king yet known in England: royal power would grow at the clergy’s expense, and the wealth of the Church would finance reform. This was an unrealistic view: Cromwell was only the King’s servant. Yet his influence was profound, for he led the King out of an impasse. Cromwell had learnt the New Testament by heart while on a journey to Rome in 1517: his visit to the papal court and his knowledge of scripture marked him thereafter. Among Cromwell’s early friends were leading evangelicals, the advance guard of religious reform in England; men
and women whom it was dangerous for him even to know. Cromwell determined to use his new influence to further their cause, which was his own: to advance the Gospel. From 1533 Cromwell and Cranmer worked closely together.

Henry was convinced that England was an empire and he its emperor; but he was anxious, uncertain how to turn this idea into political reality. He could not escape the fear that his subjects might rise in defence of Pope and Queen. Thomas More might still have prevailed over Thomas Cromwell in the battle for the King’s conscience, and Queen Catherine had powerful supporters. Many women were outraged by the King’s repudiation of her. Unlikely rumours reached the Venetian ambassador in 1531 that thousands of London women had stormed Anne Boleyn’s love nest by the Thames and attempted to seize her. The visionary nun Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, claimed to have had visitations from the Virgin, and prophesied disaster if Henry pursued his adulterous course. In Parliament, Bishop John Fisher was the Queen’s unswerving champion. When the first direct assault on the whole Church came in January 1531 – no less than to break the clergy’s spirit by bringing a
praemunire
charge against all of them (accusing them of illegally asserting papal jurisdiction in England) – Fisher strengthened their resolve. He won victory from defeat by adding to the clergy’s acknowledgement that the King was head of the English Church the vital saving clause: ‘so far as the law of Christ allows’; that is, for all those who thought like Fisher, not at all. Fisher called for holy war: by September 1533 he was urging the Emperor to invade England and to depose the King, a crusade which would be as pleasing to God as war against the Turk. England’s most learned, austere and saintly bishop had turned traitor. How had it come to this?