The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (23 page)

Anne was not only the King’s consort but also the queen of his court. In the conventions of chivalry and courtly love, the queen must be, by her virtue, most unattainable, most deserving of chaste love and faithful service. But with courtly love might come real love, with all love’s malign attendants: jealousy, betrayal, revenge. The game of courtly love had rules, and Anne broke them. Courtly lovers wrote poetry, but Anne mocked Henry’s. With her brother, she had joked about the King’s prowess, or lack of it, in the royal bed. Unwise certainly, but was it treasonable? More dangerously, she had teased Henry Norris, the Groom of the Stool, about his desire for her: ‘You look for dead men’s shoes.’ To sleep with a queen, if with her consent, was, although remarkably foolhardy, not treason; a queen’s adultery was, for it slandered the royal issue. And for a queen and her lovers – for anyone – conspiratorial gossip about the king was treason under the ‘law of words’. Looking for a treason which would condemn not only the Queen but all her friends, Cromwell had found it.

After the May Day jousts the Queen and her alleged lovers were taken to the Tower. On 8 May Thomas Wyatt joined his friends there. They might ‘make ballads well now’, said Queen Anne. Wyatt’s own relationship with Anne Boleyn, before her marriage, had been close, too close. In the vision of fugitive love and futile chase which he portrayed in the sonnet ‘Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind’ we may even glimpse what it was like to desire a woman whom the King claimed. Henry was only too willing to be persuaded of the guilt of his queen and his friends. Self-pityingly, he wrote a tragedy about it, claiming that Anne had had a hundred lovers. Probably she had had none but him, but once in the Tower, with false witness brought against her, there was no way but one. On 17 May Viscount Rochford, Henry Norris, Francis Weston, William Brereton and Mark Smeaton went to the block. The following day, the eve of Anne’s execution, the candles on Queen Catherine’s sepulchre lit spontaneously, so it was said. Wyatt, who watched the Queen and his friends die from his prison chamber in the Bell Tower, wrote their epitaph:

Wyatt escaped; so did Sir Francis Bryan, who had been sent for ‘upon his allegiance’, the ultimate, terrifying demand upon any subject. With the remorseless reciprocity of the politics of Henry’s reign, the engineers of Anne’s destruction were soon themselves destroyed. Her enemies were charged, not unjustly, with working to restore the Lady Mary to the succession. After long resisting, and to save her friends, Mary acknowledged the invalidity of Queen Catherine’s marriage and her own bastardy. The King married Jane Seymour who, on 12 October 1537, produced the longed-for heir, Prince Edward. He was the death of her, for she died, as so many Tudor women did, of ‘childbed fever’. The conservatives at court were eclipsed, but lived; though not for long.

Everyone believed that there was one true faith and one Catholic – that is, universal – Church, with a monopoly of spiritual truth, but there was no agreement regarding which Church this should be. The debate ‘between Tyndale and me,’ More had written, was ‘nothing else in effect but to find out which Church is the very Church.’ At the Reformation, because of the Reformation, division in religion seemed inevitable, because everyone agreed that anyone not of their Church was against it, and therefore heretic and schismatic. Contention was to be expected, and might even be necessary in a greater cause. Erasmus had once thought that faith and charity would dispel religious difference, but unity came to seem impossible. Latimer counselled his evangelical brethren that where there ‘is quietness… there is not the truth’. It took an extraordinary determination to reconcile differences between the faiths – like that attributed to Cardinal Pole and like that which More may have discovered at the very end – to see that ‘heretics be not in all things heretics’. The break with Rome made reconciliation between the confessional sides more difficult than ever.

Violence, even civil war, seemed possible. In Calais, England’s last bridgehead in France, its ancient governor, Lord Lisle, was so scared that one sect would rise against another that throughout 1538 he slept
in armour. The spectre which haunted Henry and Cromwell as they ventured into the political unknown was of rebellion at home, led by a conservative nobility and clergy, allied with a crusading force sent by the Emperor with papal sanction. Reports came of priests in the confessional – ‘the privy chamber of treason’ – counselling steadfastness or even resistance. The nobility, with many reasons to resent the expansion of royal power, might move into opposition. In secret interviews with the Imperial ambassador late in 1534, Lords Hussey and Darcy called for the Emperor’s aid in ‘God’s cause’, and promised to ‘animate’ the people of the North to rise and defend the Church. Conspiracy did turn to rebellion, if not in the ways they had intended, and not until changes were made to traditional religion that were worse than any they could yet have imagined.

Cromwell wrote himself a memorandum early in 1536 concerning ‘the abomination of religious persons throughout this realm, and a reformation to be devised therein’. In the Cardinal’s service, he had helped to dissolve a few religious houses too small or otherwise unworthy to deserve the name, and to apply their wealth to found colleges. The memory had stayed with him. In 1535, as newly-created lay Vicegerent of the King in the new Church, outranking even his evangelical ally, Archbishop Cranmer, he was in a powerful position to effect reform. He instituted a commission to enquire into the wealth and state of the religious houses throughout England. Henry’s religious zeal was now directed against the monasteries, which happened to be the richest franchise in his kingdom. The monasteries’ defenders believed they understood Cromwell’s motives – ‘the false flatterer says he will make the King the richest prince in Christendom’ – and they compared Henry’s assault upon the religious houses to Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of Jerusalem. The commissioners prepared the case for the prosecution; their alleged discovery of ‘not seven, but more than 700,000 deadly sins’ delighted evangelicals. Even the most charitable witness of religious life in the monasteries would have seen more spiritual torpor than fervour there. In England, as in Ireland, intense religious life was usually the preserve of the reformed orders of friars. Nothing England or Ireland had so far known prepared for the desecration to come.

The Act for the suppression of the lesser monasteries in England (those with an income of less than £200 per annum; 372 houses in England and twenty-seven in Wales) was passed in March 1536.
Communities centuries old and institutionally immortal were under threat. This was not an attack on monasticism in principle, otherwise a quarter would not have been reprieved, nor would the religious have been allowed to transfer to the greater houses. But in the religious houses a mood of desperation prevailed, and a sense of impending disaster; the greater houses, surely, could not escape the fate of the lesser. The testimony of their great defender, Robert Aske, given after he was condemned and had nothing left to lose, is compelling: ‘When the abbeys stood the people not only had worldly refreshing in their bodies but spiritual refuge’; without the abbeys, ‘The service of God is much minished… to the decrease of the Faith and spiritual comfort to man’s soul.’ The religious, however unworthy their individual lives, stood for an ideal of Christian life, ‘of ghostly [spiritual] living’. Their first purpose was to pray, to pray for souls, in a society which believed that prayers availed the dead. ‘The abbeys were one of the beauties of this realm’, ancient and numinous landmarks, now to be plundered and laid waste.

In the summer of 1536, for the first time, the King used his newly assumed power to define doctrine, and many people believed that the Catholic faith itself was threatened. The Ten Articles of religion of July 1536 were meant to end confusion, but marked instead a long period of uncertainty in the life of the parish. Prayers for the dead were still allowed, but with the proviso that scripture named no such place as purgatory, nor its pains; images of saints remained, but reverence to them was ‘only to be done to God, and in His honour’; both veneration of saints and prayers for the dead stood quite apart from things necessary to salvation. Ominously, only three of the sacraments were named. In the North they warned: ‘See, friends, now is taken from us four of the seven sacraments, and shortly ye shall lose the other three also, and thus the faith of Holy Church shall utterly be suppressed.’ Injunctions to the clergy followed upon the Articles. The conjunction of assaults upon traditional practice revealed the Government at its most destructive. Rumours spread of the impending destruction of parish churches and of treasure given by popular devotion over generations, and when the dissolution of the monasteries began it seemed to prove all the rumours true.

As the parish of Louth in Lincolnshire went in procession on 1 October, following its silver cross, a parishioner shouted: ‘Masters, step forth and let us follow the cross this day; God knoweth whether ever we
shall follow it hereafter.’ Within days 10,000 were in revolt; ‘The country rises wholly as they go before them.’ The ‘dangerest insurrection that hath been seen’ followed; a series of rebellions through six northern counties, lasting through the autumn and winter of 1536–7, raising ‘all the flower of the North’, a force so large that no royal army could have suppressed it if it had come to battle. The Lincolnshire rising was a spontaneous rising of the common people, spurred by their disaffected clergy. But it was inchoate, and soon the disparate elements among the rebels turned against each other.

‘Ay, be they up in Lincolnshire?’ asked Lord Darcy, who was one of those northern lords who had known that ‘it will never mend without we fight for it’. Within a week of the first rising a movement began which was more coherent by far: the Pilgrimage of Grace. Led by Robert Aske, their Grand Captain, who was both visionary and politic, the Pilgrimage united the grievances of a whole society against alien innovations from the South, devised by heretic ‘evil counsellors’ around the King. The pilgrims’ grievances were inevitably economic, social and political, as well as narrowly religious, but only the defence of Holy Church, ‘now lame and fast in bounds’, could have united so many different groups in this mass demonstration and overlaid it, through long waiting days, with an almost mystical aura.

‘God be with them,’ said Aske; ‘they were pilgrims and had a pilgrimage… to go.’ This was no less than a crusade. The pilgrims sang as they marched –

– and they marched behind the talismanic banners of the five wounds of Christ and of St Cuthbert for protection. Religion sanctified their actions as rebels, and their clergy promised them heaven if they died in that quarrel. True, someone had to invent the oath, compose the songs, contrive the thousands of banners and badges, but that does not negate the pilgrims’ faith. True, the people lamented the loss of the religious houses for reasons which were not only spiritual, and feared the intrusion of southern landowners and new ways and the upsetting of their ‘old, ancient customs’. Yet the course of the Pilgrimage supports Aske’s contention that the suppression of the abbeys was the first cause of the
rising. ‘Rather than our house of St Agatha should go down, we shall all die,’ vowed the people of Richmondshire. The religious were restored by the rebels in sixteen out of fifty-five of the suppressed houses, and there they stayed while the pilgrims held the North. In the aftermath of the rising the King, blaming these ‘corrupters of the temporalty [laity]’, ordered the monks and friars to be hanged in chains.

The Pilgrimage was never suppressed by a royal army, although large forces marched North under Norfolk, Suffolk and Shrewsbury. The chronicle stories of providential rain which swelled the rivers and prevented battle hid the ignominy that the King was forced to treat with rebels. Henry sent a Gentleman of his Privy Chamber to summon Aske to the royal presence. Aske came south and had ‘good words and good countenance’ with the King. The rising collapsed because of a paradox within it: that the pilgrims were sworn not only to Holy Church but to their King. Henry was outraged by these protests of obedience, and it was true that the pilgrim oath to defend Holy Church militant might exert a more compelling claim. Lord Darcy, ‘Old Tom’, faithful servant of the Tudors for nearly fifty years, would not hand over the traitor Aske, to whom he had sworn loyalty, for ‘What is a man but his promise?’ The pilgrims had a higher loyalty still; they must ‘set more by the King of Heaven than by twenty [earthly] kings’.

When the rebels insisted, ‘Forward now, or else never,’ they were prescient. The rebellion failed, and Holy Church was ‘undone’. There were many who regretted not standing with the pilgrims, and though some might warn of another rising – ‘Beware the third’ – this was the last protest against the assault on the Church and ancient customs which might, just might, have halted the advance of Reformation in England. Later, when people reflected on the deep allegiance to the old Church and wondered why it had not been better defended, they might have remembered the pilgrims. Henry called the Pilgrimage a ‘tragedy’; he meant a tragedy for the northern nobility, fallen from high estate. It was a tragedy, too, for those Cumberland widows who cut down the bodies of their dead husbands from the gallows; for the monks who, though often unworthy of the sacrifice made for them, were now cast out; for the religious houses, left open to the sky; for the evangelicals, who had looked for the plunder to be spent upon the commonwealth, not to bloat the coffers of the King and his favourites. Nothing could save the greater monasteries from dissolution and oblivion. Within eight years all the monasteries, nunneries and friaries within England and Wales – though
not in Ireland – were put down. The nobility of the North, who persisted in their old allegiance, suffered an eclipse. The people dreaded more radical reform, and were powerless to prevent it. Who would stop the heretics now?