This day, the Nun of Kent, with two Friars Observant, two monks and one secular priest, were drawn from the Tower to Tyburn, and there hanged and headed. God, if it be his pleasure, have mercy on their souls.
John Hussee to Lord Lisle, Lisle Papers, v, 95.
In the early morning of Monday, 20 April 1534, as the sun ascended balefully upon her appointed day of destiny, a 28-year-old Benedictine nun by the name of Elizabeth Barton was awoken from her no-doubt meagre slumbers in the Tower of London, along with two Benedictine monks, two Franciscan friars and a former secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to face her ultimate ordeal as an enemy of the Tudor state. Since no one in England had hitherto been executed in clerical garb, or would be until the following year, she was dressed on departure, we may safely assume, in a plain shift typical of the kind worn by condemned women, while her male counterparts, likewise convicted of high treason, wore cast-off gowns donated by the charitable. Bound on their backs, without ceremony or sympathy, to four wooden hurdles, their ankles securely lashed together and their hands tied in the attitude of prayer, the condemned were watched over by members of King Henry VIII’s Privy Council and in particular the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edmund Walsingham, who had assumed responsibility for their handover after his superior, Sir William Kingston, the Tower’s Constable, had been taken ill. It was a heavy responsibility: weightier, certainly, than any the deputy lieutenant is likely to have envisaged when in 1520 he first succeeded Sir Richard Cholmondley in his current post at an annual salary of £100. For, like others that day, he too was henceforth tightly harnessed, though not to an executioner’s hurdle, but to a revolution that would lead he knew not where: one of unprecedented scale and significance, and one that would lead him before long to supervise a long line of illustrious prisoners, including Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, the Countess of Salisbury, the Marquess of Exeter, Lord Henry Montagu, the Duchess of Norfolk, and arguably the most famous, if not the most significant, of all the king’s martyrs, Sir Thomas More, England’s one-time chancellor.
It was to Walsingham, indeed, that More is said to have delivered his final ironic quip upon ascending the scaffold the following year: ‘I pray you, Master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself.’ By that time, the full import of the government’s intentions was clear: nothing less than the enactment of a seismic breach with the ancient Church of Rome and the systematic suppression of all those resolved to take that Church’s part. Neither statesman nor theologian and certainly no freethinker, Walsingham, in keeping with the vast majority of others caught up in the tumultuous events of these years, would dutifully follow his government’s lead, trusting its judgements and executing its wishes out of an unquestioning mix of inbred loyalty and solid self-interest. Nor, of course, was it ever remotely likely to have been otherwise. He was, after all, a long-standing servant of the Crown, knighted by Thomas Howard four days after the Battle of Flodden more than twenty years earlier, and appointed a sewer in the royal household in 1521. Then, with an eagle eye for the main chance and by a judicious combination of earnest enterprise and the sixteenth-century equivalent of modern-day political correctness, he had become both a freeman of the Mercers’ Company, and, much more significantly still, a dutiful member of the packed jury that had tried and convicted Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, a decade earlier. For such an upstanding member of England’s elites, the royal will was sacrosanct, its dictates irresistible, its retribution ineluctable.
Yet, for an intractable few, such ready compliance was never so straightforward an option, and the humble nun now laid supine before the Tower’s lieutenant in one of its many inter-connected courtyards was not only the first of that line chronologically, but at one point, arguably, a figure of no less potential significance than the altogether more exalted victims that succeeded her: a clear and present existential threat to the king’s marital designs and the trigger for much that followed. Such was Elizabeth Barton’s celebrity, in fact, that, according to one likely eyewitness, the Protestant cloth merchant Richard Hilles, she was now afforded pride of place and the dubious distinction of a hurdle to herself, as Walsingham duly entrusted her sorry body, and those of her associates, to the capital’s two High Sheriffs, Thomas Kitson and William Forman, in return for the written receipt invariably engendered by the niceties of Tudor bureaucracy. Whereupon, the waiting horses were harnessed to their wretched human cargo, and the heavy escort of soldiers in attendance duly shouldered pikes in readiness for a clattering departure over the fortress’s cobbled pathways. Passing by turns through the successive portcullises of the Bloody Tower and over the groaning drawbridge releasing them to the outside world, troops and officials alike were from this point onwards self-conscious participants in a carefully stage-managed public spectacle – playing an indispensable supporting role to the helpless victims themselves, bound feet-first behind the horses as they bumped and jarred like cumbersome harrows over the uneven ground and unmade roads stretching far ahead of them through the heart of London and on to Tyburn Crossroads.
For the organisers, in particular, it was an occasion of much personal significance. High Sheriff Kitson, on the one hand, had come to London from Lancashire in his youth as an apprentice to the London mercer Richard Glasyer, but risen steadily to become Warden of the Mercers’ Company in 1533, by which time only ten other English merchants could compete with his cloth-dealing activities in Antwerp, Middleburg, and elsewhere in Flanders. Nor would the smooth running of the day ahead be any less crucial to his further prospects. Already the owner of the Duke of Buckingham’s former manors of Hengrave in Suffolk and Colston Basset in Nottinghamshire, he was indeed to be knighted within the month, which made the faultless prosecution of his current task all the more pressing, since it was he, along with his counterpart William Forman, an alderman from the Cripplegate Ward in the City of London, who now assumed primary responsibility for the safe delivery of the condemned prisoners to Tyburn and the attentions of a certain ‘Mr Cratwell’, the capital’s newly appointed executioner who, as a man of considerable consequence in Tudor society in his own right, was likewise keenly primed that morning. For this was his debut, and along with his assistants – who numbered the men in charge of the brazier for burning the victims’ entrails and the cauldron for parboiling their quartered remains – he too had much to prove, sedulously calculating the precise degree of torment entailed by the law and directing the various other underlings tending the Tyburn gallows, which consisted of two dark oaken uprights, high enough to ensure an unimpeded view for spectators, and a stout crossbeam, from which hung several well-oiled and flexible ropes. ‘A conninge butcher in quartering of men’, the executioner would himself be hanged for theft before a crowd of 20,000 baying spectators at Smithfield only four years later. But for now at least, on this spring day, he was lord of his calling, caught up in the most significant political execution of its kind for more than a decade, and surrounded by a busy throng of willing apprentices anxious to learn his craft.
For the moment, in fact, the arrival of the condemned woman and her associates was still some way off, since the distance from the Tower to Tyburn was all of 5 miles, and the procession, if it was to achieve its intended purpose as a potent affirmation of regal power, was not to be rushed. Passing slowly along Tower Lane and Cheapside, under the Arch of Newgate with its statue of the Virgin and Child, it was making, with all due gravity, for the spot known today as Marble Arch, where Oxford Street and its prolongation, the Bayswater Road, are intersected by Park Lane and Edgware Road. And both the cruelty of the occasion and the raucous carnival atmosphere surrounding it were intended to be savoured. A year later, when processions of this kind had become less novel and their implications altogether more ominous, a guild of charitable ladies would offer posies and cups of mulled wine to the victims at the venerable church of St Sepulchre’s before they left the City. But this time, there was no such kindness to be had. On the contrary, the capital’s citizens, still unused as yet to the employment of terror as an everyday instrument of government policy, played their full role as tormentors. Heartless brutes and merry housewives harangued the victims on their way, flinging taunts and missiles from the over-hanging houses under which the helpless slow-moving targets passed, while buffoons with inflated pigs’ bladders, buskers and ribald ballad-singers, specially hired for the occasion by the government, tweaked the victims’ noses, pulled their ears, mimicked their spasms of pain, and inquired facetiously how they liked their rough passage. Even the horses contributed their torrents of steaming piss and periodic bombardments of hot dung.
At the brook that gives its name to Holborn – the halfway mark of the journey, lying just outside the City, and the customary spot both for the horses to be watered and for the soldiers to relax after jostling their way through the crowded, narrow streets behind them – there was, at least, a break in proceedings. Yet the way ahead would offer no further respite once the journey was resumed along the Oxford Road, which today has become High Holborn. With dwellings here and there at considerable intervals, some of them high-gabled timber houses, others gentlemen’s mansions with greenswards all around, the route now traversed pleasant fields on either side with spreading oak and elm trees and thick forests stretching out northwards and southwards beyond the high road to Tottenham. All around, in fact, there were varied undulations of both pasture and arable land, while to the north lay the wooded valley of the Kill-bourne, as well as the Mary-bourne, a stream noted for its grayling. Tyburn itself, indeed, notwithstanding its notoriety as a place of execution since at least 1196, was justly regarded as an otherwise wholesome location – the site, anciently, of the blue and sparkling stream of Teo-bourne, which passed very near to the place of execution and supplied the conduit at Cheapside with clear, untainted water. But from this point forward the road was entirely unpaved and therefore even rougher than previously, while brambles trailing from the uncut hedges round about tore the prisoners as they were dragged along before the noisily pursuing crowds – some riding, most walking, drawn from every section of society – the vast majority of whom were keenly intent upon witnessing the heady climax of the kill itself.
Just over one year later, when the Carthusian priors of Axholme and Beauvale made the same lamentable journey, along with the prior of the London Charterhouse, the Bridgettine monk, Dr Richard Reynolds, and John Hale, Vicar of Isleworth, the whole Boleyn clique turned out in force to witness the spectacle. On the one hand, the Duke of Norfolk was there with his nephew, Viscount Rochford, as was the Duke of Richmond, the king’s bastard son. And to complete the ghoulish congregation, the royal chamberlain, Henry Norris, would also see fit to arrive with forty horsemen, all masked for additional dramatic effect. It was ‘something new’, wrote the Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, that Richmond, Norfolk, and other magnates, including Anne Boleyn’s father, the Earl of Wiltshire, had stood ‘quite near the sufferers’ during their final agonies. Even the king himself, it was rumoured, had been present, since, among some courtiers disguised as Scottish borderers, there was one, or so some said, to whom extraordinary deference had been paid. Chapuys, indeed, considered Henry’s presence ‘very probable … seeing that all the court was there’ to witness the crude castration and evisceration of those who had fallen victim to Thomas Cromwell’s notorious law of December 1534 – a measure of unprecedented harshness that had extended the concept of treason to encompass all types of ‘malicious’ attack upon the king, Queen Anne or the succession, including those made even orally.
It was of no little significance either that this so-called ‘law of words’, designed to root out the seditious ‘imps of the said bishop of Rome’, had in fact been directly prompted by the visions and prophecies of Elizabeth Barton herself, though the nun, as a woman, was now merely to be hanged until dead and thereafter beheaded rather than endure the full rigour of hanging, drawing and quartering. At Canterbury in October 1532 she had denounced King Henry in his very presence, warning him of his death within the month, should he marry Anne Boleyn, and telling him in no uncertain terms how she had seen the place reserved for him in hell, were he to proceed. To those who sought to hear from heaven on the king’s divorce, she had spoken, too, of other visions: of Christ re-crucified, as a result of the king’s adultery, and of Anne Boleyn as a Jezebel whom dogs would eat. As such, there was no prospect of mercy either for her or for those unfortunate men who had endorsed her pronouncements and were now accompanying her to the gallows. But for the latter those same considerations of public decency, which would at least spare Barton the unspeakable agonies of ritual disembowelment, were not to apply. Indeed, by the time of their arrival at Tyburn, the tools of executioner Cratwell’s trade were not only already honed and heated, but purposely placed on display before the victims, who, according to a Latin history of the English Franciscan martyrs, written by Father Thomas Bourchier and published in Paris in 1582, ‘were obliged to inspect the instruments of execution, partly to increase their sufferings, partly in the hope of breaking their holy resolution’.
In return for the usual private undertaking from the Crown that their families, friends and associates would remain unmolested if they professed their guilt, all, including Barton, delivered carefully contrived confessions from the gallows after the writ of execution had been read. Whereupon Cratwell, after first kneeling, as was customary, to receive his victims’ forgiveness for what was to follow, warmed to his appointed task, dispatching the nun first before inflicting the more prolonged sufferings of the men. Continuing in prayer as the rope was tightened, each man in turn was duly positioned on a supporting ladder, which was finally kicked away at a signal from the supervising sheriff. After that the suspending hemp rope was cut, leaving what amounted to a demi-corpse to fall to the ground like a dead weight prior to the final desecration of its members. Crudely revived by slaps, punches, shaking and dowsing in cold water, and duly propped up so that they could witness the full horror of what ensued, the five members of the clergy then suffered, one after the other, the agony of seeing their entrails torn from their bodies and cast into the waiting brazier after their genitals had been hideously severed and thrust into their mouths.
The heart of one friar, Bourchier suggests, was still quivering after it had been squeezed and ripped from the gaping visceral cavity below, as was confirmed, it seems, when Cratwell ‘held it aloft for the inspection of the crowd’, though even by this point the whole ghastly spectacle had still not run its final course until the corpses were subsequently hacked into four parts and the severed heads parboiled ‘to diminish the smell when later put on poles for the citizens to see’. Bagged up by Cratwell and taken back to the capital, ‘the nun’s head’, we are told by John Stow, ‘was set on London Bridge, and the other heads on the gates of the City’, though as a result, it seems, of some dwindling regard for clerical privilege, which was to have disappeared entirely only fourteen months later, the quarters themselves were not, on this occasion, exhibited as gruesome symbols of royal might. Instead, as the contemporary Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London makes clear, Barton’s remains were eventually placed in the cemetery of the Grey Friars in Newgate Street, along with those of the two friars, while the others found a final resting at the London cemetery of the Dominican Fathers at Blackfriars.
It was the day after the feast of St Alphege, martyred by the Danes in 1012 for refusing to ransom his life with the funds of the Church, and the eve of the feast of St Anselm, who had also battled and suffered for the Church’s rights against William II and Henry I, founding in the process Elizabeth Barton’s own Benedictine convent of St Sepulchre’s in Canterbury. But by the time that Anselm’s feast had dawned for those nuns still present there, the remains of both their executed sister and her fellow martyrs had already been quietly gathered by the Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem at Clerkenwell, who, as one of the seven corporal works of mercy to which they were sworn, had by long tradition undertaken to fetch the corpses of plague victims, suicides, and felons executed at Tyburn for burial – usually in the Pardon Churchyard, a cemetery between their own priory and the adjoining London Charterhouse. Placing the bodies of Barton and the other victims upon the cart kept specially for the purpose, which was covered in a black pall, with a large white cross running its length, and a small cross of St John in front, they went about their sombre task at dead of night to the sound of a solitary bell, signalling their approach to those in the vicinity.
Only five years later, the same Knights of St John would themselves be objects of suspicion and attack, their Clerkenwell headquarters dissolved by Thomas Cromwell with his sovereign’s avid consent, and two of their number, Sir Thomas Dingley and Sir Adrian Fortescue, executed, like Barton before them, not according to the rights laid down by the Common Law of the land, but by Bill of Attainder, as the summary justice of the day had by that time come to dictate. On the night of Elizabeth Barton’s death, moreover, the net was already tightening not only for the so-called Knights Hospitaller bearing her remains to their chapel for distribution thereafter, but for the Carthusian monks of the adjacent London Charterhouse, some of whom are certain to have heard the melancholy ringing of the hand bell announcing her passing. Indeed, within the year, ironically enough, they too would be ripped from the seclusion of their austere lives of prayer and contemplation by the self-same swirling winds of religious change engulfing the kingdom. Sir Adrian Fortescue, by curious coincidence, had once enjoyed high favour at Henry VIII’s own court as the son of Alice Boleyn, Anne Boleyn’s aunt, and had been made a Knight of the Bath in 1503, along with the king himself, whom he later accompanied to Calais and the Field of Cloth of Gold. And a similar privileged status had also been the lot of 35-year-old Sebastian Newdigate, a former courtier of the king’s own Privy Chamber, who had some time since renounced the world of politics and ambition after his wife’s death, to seek instead the consolations that only the Carthusian life seemed fully able to offer. Though he did not know it at the time in the shelter of his lonely dwelling within the Charterhouse, young Newdigate, too, was bound for a cell of an altogether less inviting kind, and eventually a martyr’s fate of his own at Tyburn. For, like Fortescue after him, he would make his way by turns to the infamous jail at Marshalsea, where, along with two fellow Carthusians, he was tied to a post by an iron collar, his legs riveted to ‘great fetters’, and left for seventeen days, loaded with lead, unable to sit and ‘never loosed for any natural necessity’, before meeting his own grisly end at executioner Cratwell’s accomplished hands.
Notwithstanding personal visits from the king himself, who allegedly offered him wealth and preferment in return for compliance with the royal supremacy, Newdigate would remain unyielding. And there was to be one further twist to his eventual martyrdom on 14 June 1535. For not only was he by then following the road to Tyburn already travelled five weeks earlier by the man most instrumental to his spiritual development at the Charterhouse, his prior, Father John Houghton, he was also preceding to a martyr’s fate – and by only one week – the very individual who had ordained him a deacon barely four years earlier and gone on to become the most dogged and dangerous of all the king’s opponents. Described by Chapuys as the ‘paragon of Christian prelates, both for learning and holiness’, Bishop John Fisher had in fact been an outspoken adversary of the royal divorce from its very inception, defending Queen Catherine at Blackfriars in 1529 and declaring openly that he would willingly die like St John the Baptist on behalf of the indissolubility of her marriage. And that bold promise had indeed been made good six years later when, already emaciated and dying from consumption, he knelt before his masked executioner at Tower Hill on 22 June 1535. Described by one eyewitness as ‘a very image of death and (as one might say) Death in a man’s shape and using a man’s voice’, he was nevertheless to ‘suffer cheerfully his impending punishment’. After which, his ‘headless carcass’ was left ‘naked on the scaffold for the rest of the hot June day, saving that one, for pity and humanity, cast a little straw upon it’.
From the king’s perspective, of course, Fisher, like Barton and Newdigate before him, was both wilful and deluded, and, above all, threatening – fully meriting the treatment meted out to him. Nor were such opinions confined solely to those within the king’s circle. To the MP and chronicler Edward Hall, for instance, ‘the bishop was a man of very good life, but wonderfully deceived therein’. He stood accused, after all, of entering into a treasonous correspondence with Emperor Charles V, which had been intercepted on the Continent by Thomas Cromwell’s spies, and by September 1533 was urging the emperor to invade England and depose Henry altogether, in what amounted to a religious war: a crusade, which, he maintained, would be as pleasing to God as war against the Turk. Under such circumstances, the king’s subsequent remark that Fisher’s death had been the least cruel that could be devised, since he had been neither hanged, nor quartered, nor burned, nor boiled in lead but merely ‘sworded’, may not seem quite so casually callous – or any more insupportable, for that matter, than the tag of ‘hypocrite nun’ applied by government propaganda to Barton, who, in the view of Chancellor Thomas Audley, expressed to Parliament in November 1533, had manufactured her visions and ‘feigned prophecies’ purely in search of celebrity, and thereby inveigled a number of great personages into questioning her sovereign’s marriage to Anne Boleyn.
From a similar perspective, too, even the monks of the London Charterhouse, cut off though they were from the outside world in their abode of peace and seclusion, could be neatly construed by Thomas Cromwell as intolerable threats to the new and better order he was feverishly engaged in creating. Certainly, for an administrator of Cromwell’s tremendous energy and breadth of vision, the liberal anachronisms and genteel prejudices that typify twenty-first-century attitudes to selective political terror were utterly foreign, warranting no more consideration than the stubborn adherents of papal authority themselves or the hidebound religious attitudes to which they clung. He was, after all, first and foremost an institutional thinker, a bold and original statesman and patron of like-minded political philosophers, who was convinced of the rectitude and creativity of his revolutionary work in delivering his countrymen from servility to foreign interference and religious error. And if a Barton, a Newdigate or a Fisher saw fit to block the way to progress in God’s name on grounds of conscience, then that same way might just as cheerfully be cleared by force, or so Cromwell believed, in God’s name. He made this clear in a long letter delivered to Bishop Nicholas Shaxton in March 1538, in which he professed that he aimed only for constructive results and was no less engaged upon God’s work than any cleric protecting his flock:
I do not cease to give thanks that it has pleased His goodness to use me as an instrument and to work somewhat by me, so I trust I am as ready to serve him in my calling as you are … My prayer is that God give me no longer life than I shall be glad to use mine office in edification and not in destruction.
Nor, manifestly, was Cromwell the only statesman or public servant of early Tudor England to exhibit little sense of the ‘tears of things’. On the contrary, his peers, to a man, would surely have marvelled that the imagination of later generations should find cause to linger at any length at all over a deluded nun, a disobedient monk or a recalcitrant bishop.
But whether the claim made by Cromwell to Shaxton really did spring from the honest operation of a ‘higher’ morality and the harsh necessities imposed by circumstance upon a suitably supple conscience, or reflected rather the self-justifying sophistry of a cynical political hatchet man, ideally suited to further the interests of the tyrant he served, remains a matter for dispute. Plainly, his was a stance that not only set his master’s kingdom on a new and perhaps necessary course, but one that would also ensure a steady income for executioner Cratwell and his successors for years to come – long after John Fisher had mounted the scaffold on Tower Hill and the road to Tyburn had been traced by Elizabeth Barton and Sebastian Newdigate. Yet if Cromwell’s methods were undoubtedly ruthless, were his victims themselves no more than holy innocents? Each, after all, had chosen the path of resistance at a time when opposition to the Crown’s designs might engender untold repercussions for the peace and future development of the kingdom as a whole, not least because the very violence of the State was, from many perspectives, as much a token of its weakness as its strength. If so, then where, if at all, are blame and guilt actually to be laid? And why, equally intriguingly, had a religious faith considered moribund and decadent by its critics nevertheless continued to generate such fervour among those who saw fit to lay down their lives on its behalf? What were the stakes and allegiances, passions and principles involved, and what, ultimately, the underlying events and processes – not to mention the misconceptions, miscalculations and twists of chance – that finally brought Barton, Newdigate and Fisher to their fatal pass? More than four and a half centuries later in our own troubled age, when martyrdom for a sacred cause is once again a cherished goal for some, the need for reflection is surely far from over. And if timeless lessons are indeed to be had from the bloody precedents of the past, what might they prove to be?