9
And as for my part, I would that all such obstinate persons of them, who be willing to die for the advancement of the bishop of Rome’s authority, were dead indeed by God’s hand; that no man should run into obloquy for their just punishment. For the avoiding whereof, and for the charity that I owe to their bodies and souls, I have taken some pains to reduce them from their errors, and will take more if I be commanded, specially to the intent that my sovereign lord, the king’s grace, should not be troubled or disquieted by their extreme folly.
Letter from Thomas Bedyll, commissioner for the enforcement of the Oath of supremacy, to Thomas Cromwell, August 1534.
As all England teetered on the brink of come what may during the spring of 1533, one place, at least, within the kingdom’s capital, just outside the city wall and close to Smithfield, remained entirely untouched by the gathering storm: a 30-acre haven of peace, forming a parallelogram almost 300 by 600 yards in extent, bounded today on the east by Goswell Road, on the north by Clerkenwell Road, and on the west by gardens at the rear of the houses of modern St John’s Street. Set five centuries ago in orchards and gardens running up among the town houses of the great and boasting its own hayfield, along with a wilderness to the north, which harboured at least the smaller species of game, the House of the Salutation of the Mother of God, better known as the London Charterhouse, could scarcely have failed, in view of its location, to be a centre of considerable religious influence. But particularly after the priorate of William Tynbygh from 1500 and the arrival in 1531 of his equally influential successor, John Houghton – a man of exceptional spiritual and leadership qualities – the small community of Carthusian monks, some twenty of whom were under the age of 35, had also established a universally acknowledged reputation for godliness and rigorous self-discipline, which distinguished their home as a shining beacon of sprituality.
‘Short, with a graceful figure and dignified appearance, his actions modest, his voice gentle, chaste in body, in heart humble’, Houghton was sprung of gentle family in Essex, and had taken a degree in laws at Cambridge from Christ’s College before becoming, first, a secular priest and then taking the monastic habit in 1515. After this he had distinguished himself throughout the next sixteen years by the exceptional devotion and constancy that would prove so infectious for those eventually entrusted to his charge, many of whom were of wealthy or distinguished family, and some of whom, like Sebastian Newdigate, had arrived at the Charterhouse’s gates consciously seeking shelter from all association with the activities of their monarch. For, according to a dispatch from Eustace Chapuys, dated January 1534, it was not only Newdigate, sometime member of the king’s Privy Chamber, who had found his royal master’s example intolerable, but at least one other high-ranking courtier in the shape of the king’s vice-chamberlain, Sir John Gage, ‘who is of the council, and one of the wisest and most experienced in war of the whole kingdom, and has renounced his office and gone to the Charterhouse, intending with the consent of his wife to become a Carthusian’.
Unlike their Observant Franciscan counterparts, or, of course, the Bishop of Rochester or the Holy Maid of Kent, all were content with the stillness of the cloister in preference to the white-hot heat of conflict and controversy. Seeking deliverance from the city’s clamour and the worldliness of high politics by subjecting themselves to the austerity of a monastic Rule established by St Bruno some four centuries earlier, not one had been active in opposition to the king’s new marriage and none had appeared conspicuously as a champion of Queen Catherine. Instead, each had stuck placidly to the solace of isolation and pursuit of spiritual perfection, sternly adhering, we are told, to the rules of fasting and silence, and forgoing fires in their cells save in extreme cold. Their night choirs in winter, when the lessons were long, began shortly after 10 p.m. and lasted until 3 a.m., and it was commonly remarked that if a man should wish to hear the divine service carried out to perfection, he need look no further than their Charterhouse, two of whose residents, Brothers Roger and John, were reputed by another of their colleagues, Dom Maurice Chauncy, to be frequently raised from the ground by divine agency while praying in ecstasy. And if Chauncy himself, with his excessive love of the wondrous and other shortcomings of temperament and judgement, was not always the most reliable of sources, it remained small wonder, nevertheless, that Sebastian Newdigate’s departure from court and preference for the unquestionable challenges of the Carthusian way should have so surprised his sister Jane – to such an extent, indeed, that she would not be persuaded of the authenticity of his decision until she had spoken in person to Prior Tynbygh himself.
Yet for all their commitment to tradition and orthodoxy, the members of the Charterhouse had continued to distance themselves from the looming challenge to their way of life. On 3 June 1531 John Fisher had conferred the diaconate upon Newdigate, but there is no record of any association with the bishop thereafter. And unlike their Carthusian counterparts at Sheen – at least five of whom, along with the sexton, were in contact with Hugh Rich and Henry Gold – the London Carthusians had forged no significant connection with Elizabeth Barton. The Bridgettines of Syon Abbey, the Friars Observant at Richmond, and the Knights of St John of Jerusalem had all been hosts to Rich and Gold, but although the Maid visited Prior Houghton’s community once, she had been treated to nothing more than the hospitality required by convention, as demonstrated by the charges eventually laid against her, which made no effort to mark the Carthusians out as her advisers or abettors. Early in 1533, she was claiming to have received a ‘golden letter’ from Mary Magdalene, a copy of which Dom Edward Bocking had preserved for display in Canterbury as ‘a solemn relic’. And John Fisher, in particular, had been so impressed by her claim that he sent his own chaplain, Dr John Adeson, to St Sepulchre’s for a definitive answer to his own researches into one of the knottiest problems of Christian textual criticism: the question of whether there were, in fact, three Mary Magdalenes or one. Fisher’s De Unica Magdalena of 1519 had argued in favour of one, and when the Maid confirmed as much, in spite of what new-fangled students of Scripture were claiming, he not only concluded that she was every bit as orthodox as himself, but was more than ever disposed to believe her when she spoke on other topics – including the king’s divorce – on her two subsequent visits to him.
Yet if the Bishop of Rochester was amenable, the residents of the London Charterhouse gave even less encouragement to the Maid and her advocates than Sir Thomas More, who had also been sought out by Father Rich over the golden letter, but remained characteristically circumspect, as he was very much at pains to make clear in a message penned to Cromwell in February 1534. Acknowledging that she was probably ‘a good, virtuous woman’, since he had heard ‘so many good folk so report her’, and thinking it ‘well likely’ on the same basis that ‘God worketh some good and great things by her’, the former Lord Chancellor nevertheless left no doubt that these ‘strange tales’ formed ‘no part of our creed’, warning Rich ‘not to wed yourself so far forth to the credence of them as to report them very surely for true, lest that if they should hap that they were afterward proved false’. Ever the lawyer and still nurturing that instinct for survival that would so signally elude John Fisher, More had also thwarted Richard Risby when the friar visited him at his Chelsea home around Christmas 1532 during his pious – and increasingly impoverished – retirement from State affairs:
I said unto him [Cromwell was told] that any revelation of the King’s matters I would not hear of; I doubt not but the goodness of God should direct his Highness with his grace and wisdom, that the thing should take such end as God should be pleased with, to the king’s honour and surety of the realm … And he and I never talked any more of any such matter.
Such self-conscious prudence was, of course, understandable enough as the tide of events duly followed what had long been the only possible course. For in July, Pope Clement not only declared King Henry’s marriage invalid, but gave him two months to put away his mistress or face excommunication. And this was not all, since on 7 September, with the pope’s deadline passed, Anne Boleyn was delivered of a child: a healthy baby girl.
‘God has forgotten him entirely,’ observed Eustace Chapuys of the King of England, ‘hardening him in his obstinacy to punish and ruin him.’ And surely enough, six days before Easter, the papal diplomat Silvestrio Dario had arrived in England from Scotland, to confirm even further the growing scale of the task ahead. Native of Lucca and sub-collector of papal revenues in England since 1528, Dario was responsible for gathering and dispatching to Rome the annates, Peter’s Pence and other ecclesiastical dues that Henry VIII and his House of Commons so bitterly resented. Yet he was a congenial man, whom the king had entrusted with diplomatic business of his own from time to time, not least because the pope had appointed his fellow countryman Apostolic Nuncio to Scotland, in recognition of his capability in dealing with far-off foreigners. Ever the shrewd and seasoned professional, he was, indeed, typical of his kind: watchful always, cautious continually, and unbendingly devoted to the furtherance of papal interests. And with his current mission duly completed in April 1533, Dario was accordingly set for his return journey to Rome – though not without a brief stop at Canterbury to visit the woman whose reputation, as a result of the scandal stirred by the English king’s divorce, was now so firmly planted even within the Holy See itself.
On 21 April, in fact, Dario had been routinely issued with a passport to leave the country, but a day or two later duly spoke to Elizabeth Barton on his way to Dover, assisted by the elderly priest, Thomas Lawrence, Registrar to the Archdeacon at Canterbury, who at that time was transcribing the first volume of the Maid’s revelations, and now acted as interpreter. According to Father Rich’s subsequent words to John Wolff, Barton had foreseen the nuncio’s arrival in Canterbury by means of an angel, who had also instructed her to warn him that the pope should be ‘scourged of God’, were he to ‘give sentence against the Queen that then was’, by whom she meant Queen Catherine. The nature of the message was confirmed, too, by Thomas Goldwell, who had it from the Maid herself, that she had informed Dario how, if Clement weakened, ‘God would plague him from it.’ And there was also, if Nicholas Heath’s Sermon is to be trusted, a repetition for the Italian’s benefit that, if the king should marry Anne Boleyn, he would not remain king for more than a month. For Henry’s bigamous marriage in January still remained a close secret.
How Dario reacted is unknown. But as he rode away from St Sepulchre’s with the pope’s fees, fines and indemnities jingling in the saddle bags of his mules, he may well have suspected that, just as the woman he was leaving could not remain at liberty indefinitely, so these jinglings were to be the last. Less than one month later the Marchioness of Exeter, also deeply alarmed at the gathering pace of events, staged her own remarkable journey to consult the Kentish prophetess. Devoted intimate of Queen Catherine, daughter of the queen’s old chamberlain Lord Mountjoy, friend of the Imperial ambassador, and wife of the very man whom Barton saw as Henry VIII’s prospective replacement, the marchioness – ‘lying at Kew’ on the other side of the Thames to Syon Abbey – had seen fit to disguise herself as the servant of her waiting-woman, Constance Bontayn, and ridden over 60 miles to Canterbury on a mysterious mission kept secret even from Bontayn herself. For, according to the waiting-woman’s’s later testimony to Thomas Cromwell’s inquisitors:
The Lady Marquess never showed her the cause of her going, neither what communication she had with the said nun, saving only that the said Nun had showed her that she, the said Nun, should come to a very shameful death.
In fact, the marchioness had travelled to receive a political oracle of her own and, in doing so, discovered that Elizabeth Barton was already resigned to her fate. For by June, of course, the king’s marriage was no longer secret, and the supposedly final month of his reign at hand, making her an object of greater interest than ever.
In the final week of that month, meanwhile, the Maid was back at Syon Abbey, where she met and talked not only to Sir Thomas Arundell, but once more to Sir Thomas More, who informed her at once that:
My coming to her was not of any curious mind, anything to know of such things, as folk talked, that it had pleased God to reveal and show unto her, but for the great virtue that I had heard for so many years every day and more spoken and reported of her.
The meeting occurred, it seems, in a ‘little chapel’ with only the two present, and related only, according to More, to ‘herself and myself’, with a passing reference to the dealings of another contemporary visionary, Helen of Tottenham, whom Barton considered deluded. Whereupon, claimed More, ‘after no long communication, came my time to go home. I gave her a double ducat and prayed her to pray for me and mine, and so departed from her and never spake with her again.’ Yet the former Lord Chancellor’s visit at such an intensely sensitive moment leaves much to be explained, as does his actual account of what transpired, which is directly contradicted by the testimony of the Observant Friar, John Lawrence, who deposed that autumn that Barton had declared her revelation to More ‘at divers times: which Sir Thomas at the first time did little regard the said revelations. But finally, he did greatly rejoice to hear them and he did give faith to them.’
Certainly, the significance of Syon as a clearing-house of Yorkist intelligence was well known, and More would not make the same error of meeting the Maid again, as the stakes continued to increase. For on Friday, 27 June, while Barton was still there and the prophecy concerning the king had only three days to run, she received an invitation from the Marchioness of Exeter to spend the weekend at her family’s country mansion in Exeter, ostensibly to enlist her prayers during the marchioness’s pregnancy, so that ‘she might have issue and fruit that might live’. But there was talk too, according to Barton’s later confession under interrogation, ‘that we should have war’, and confirmation that Lady Exeter’s concern about her pregnancy sprang not only from the grief of frustrated motherhood, but from the keen awareness that her husband, as heir presumptive to the throne of England, had no son to succeed him. Moreover, when the marquess was himself finally arrested in 1538, the Maid’s statement made five years earlier was pored over in minute detail and evidence relating to her visits recorded in a summary of testimony taken from members of the Exeter household, which, though torn, charred, soaked and half-obliterated, can still be identified unmistakably as Thomas Cromwell’s own. Nor does the summary in Cromwell’s distinctive hand make any mention of short-lived children or prayers for their survival. Instead, the emphasis, even at five years’ distance, fell entirely upon the burning questions that high and low alike were asking in 1533: how much longer could King Henry’s reign last, and who was the right man to succeed him?
Catherine Bontayn, the marchioness’s waiting-woman, was also able to throw particular light on the Maid’s weekend visit to Horsley, and what transpired there:
That after the Lady Marquess was come from Canterbury again, the said Nun came to Horsley and there fell into a trance … Also she heard that men of noble blood were put out and the king taketh in other at his pleasure [a reference to Cromwell]. She says also, she heard it spoken in my Lord Marquess’s house and elsewhere, that the said Nun should say that the king should flee the realm one day.
Why Sir Thomas More, of all people, had therefore been sufficiently injudicious to leave the comparatively safe haven of his home on the bank of the Thames, to risk a meeting with a woman whose days, of her own admission, were now numbered, continues to puzzle across the centuries. And the explanation, perhaps, lies simply in the kind of naivety to which he was sometimes prone on other occasions – not least when he incriminated himself fatally in conversation with Richard Rich the following year. Certainly, he was not a natural martyr, and in the wake of his visit to Syon was determined to re-establish the distance from Barton that he had hitherto maintained so assiduously, issuing strict orders, according to a fragmentary deposition made by an unnamed female member of his household, that ‘neither she … nor none of his household should speak to her’.
On 1 July, too, More was at pains to write to the Maid, not only distancing himself once more from all hint of political subterfuge and counselling her against disloyalty, but even making direct reference to the Duke of Buckingham’s fate just under fifteen years earlier:
Now, Madam, I consider well that many folk desire to speak with you, which are not peradventure of my mind on this point. But some hap to be curious and inquisitive of things that little pertain unto their parts; and some peradventure hap to talk of such things as might peradventure after turn to much harm: as I think you have heard how the late Duke of Buckingham [was] moved with the fame of one that was reported for a holy monk, and had such talking with him, as after was a great part of his destruction and disinheriting of his blood, and great slander and infamy of religion.
It sufficeth me, good Madam, to put you in remembrance of such thing, as I nothing doubt your wisdom and the Spirit of God shall keep you from talking with any persons, especially with lay persons, of any such manner things as pertain to princes’ affairs, or the state of the realm; but only to commune and talk with any person high and low of such manner things as may to the soul be profitable for you to show and them to know.
How readily Barton will have grasped the full import of such a complexly worded letter is itself by no means certain. But by More’s own standards it was bluntness personified, and his message in any case was intended as much for Thomas Cromwell’s consumption as for the woman to whom it was sent. For he had cannily copied the original and duly produced it when the time for his own interrogation came.
Neither was that time to be long in arriving after the final threads linking England to Rome were systematically severed during the fifth session of the Reformation Parliament, which would open in mid-January 1534 and last until March. One of the new laws, the Act for the Submission of the Clergy, put the clergy’s submission after the Supplication Against the Ordinaries of 1532 into statutory form and imposed the penalty of fine or imprisonment on all who acted contrary to its provisions. Similarly, appeals to Rome, which the act of the previous year had prohibited only in certain cases, were now forbidden under all circumstances. But it was not until the Act of Succession in March that the political objective supposedly driving the king throughout the preceding years of trouble was at last obtained. For, aside from settling the succession to the throne upon the progeny of Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, the new law also embodied an oath to the succession, which any subject could be called upon to swear and which included in its preamble clear-cut recognition of the royal supremacy. Surely enough, it was within this oath rather than the outer casing of the act that the terrorist explosive was, in fact, subtly packed by Cromwell. And not surprisingly either, two of its primary targets were John Fisher and Thomas More, since neither would be able in conscience to subscribe to the preamble, which repudiated papal authority.
In the meantime, however, the government’s initial priority was to move against the rogue female who was showing no signs of moderating her prophecies. On 4 July 1533 – curiously enough, only three days beyond the one-month period foretold by Elizabeth Barton as the limit of Henry’s reign were he to marry Anne Boleyn – the pope had not only quashed Thomas Cranmer’s judgement repudiating the king’s former marriage, but conditionally excommunicated the king himself, rendering Barton’s prophecy at least more-or-less defensible in terms of its accuracy. And when Antonio Pulleo, Apostolic Nuncio to England since September 1530, was subsequently withdrawn from England, he not only met Barton, but was once again charged, like Silvestro Dario before him, to deliver a further warning to the pope ‘that if he did not his duty in reformation of kings’, God would destroy him: an extraordinary effrontery on the Maid’s part by any standards. Yet when the Draft of Charges was compiled against her, even Thomas Cromwell seems to have considered that her prognostications may actually have had some effect upon the pontiff’s actions: ‘By reason whereof, it is to be supposed that the Pope hath shown himself so double and so deceivable to the King’s Grace in his great cause of marriage as he hath done.’
That Barton’s discourse with another papal emissary should have occurred at all is, of course, remarkable enough, but that a claim like the one in Cromwell’s Draft of Charges should have been considered sufficiently credible for inclusion in a document specifically designed to condemn her is perhaps the most compelling proof of all that she would now have to be silenced permanently.
Even so, the task was a delicate one, necessitating the appearance at least of due process, and accordingly that process was to be initiated by the newly appointed – and excommunicated – Archbishop of Canterbury, who had not yet ventured to his cathedral city, and was spending the summer at Otford, a few miles north of Sevenoaks, on an estate belonging to his archbishopric. Enjoying, perhaps, what would prove to be the last comparatively untroubled holiday of his life, Cranmer would observe to his archdeacon that December how ‘about Midsummer last, I, hearing of these matters, sent for this holy maid to examine her’.
But the precise date of the meeting appears to have been Wednesday, 6 August 1533, for by Monday, 11 August Dr Richard Gwent, Dean of the Court of Arches, had drawn up his report of the archbishop’s interrogation of the Maid for Thomas Cromwell, who was observing the conduct of Cranmer every bit as intently as that of the Maid herself. And not, perhaps, without good reason, since England’s primate was noted neither for toughness nor his ability to intimidate, and duly allowed his visitor to ride back to Canterbury a free woman, in time for the greatest feast of the ecclesiastical calendar on Assumption Day, 15 August, and the near-certain announcement of another round of oracles.
According to Gwent, the Maid had declared ‘many mad follies’ to Cranmer during their meeting and requested a licence to travel to Court-at-Street, where she anticipated ‘without fail’ a further trance in which she would ‘know perfectly’ additional information concerning the king’s marriage. And Cranmer had indeed granted her wish, on the grounds, Gwent tells us, that he might then ‘plainly perceive her foolish dissimulation’. But such indulgence, though prudent for the man on the spot, with a clear appreciation of the Maid’s local popularity, was altogether less acceptable to the government’s prime mover in London, and Cromwell duly followed up with a questionnaire to be used by the archbishop in a further interview with the Maid, which had the desired effect of eliciting answers bearing on the king’s marriage. For by the end of September, Barton had been ‘had to Mr Cromwell in London’, as Cranmer put it, and Sir Christopher Hales, the Attorney-General, was at Canterbury preparing to round up the selected victims from Barton’s circle. ‘As I can catch them, one after other,’ he wrote Cromwell, ‘I will send them to you’, before adding with no apparent sense of irony how ‘the two religious men [Bocking and Dering] are of as good reputation as any in their degree in these parts’ – a fact that Hales, as the Member of Parliament for Canterbury and a resident of the north-eastern suburbs of the city, could be relied upon to know with confidence, though even his recognition of the victims’ good names was further glossed for Cromwell’s consumption with the qualification, ‘wherefore they may the sooner deceive many persons, if indeed they be of evil disposition’.
And the evidence that Bocking, at least, was a man of ill intent was already conveniently to hand, with the startling news that his great book of the Maid’s revelations was already in print and ready for distribution. A list of things to be done by Cromwell, undated but written not later than 23 September, is devoted almost entirely to the activities of the Maid and her associates, and by the following day orders for the arrest of Bocking, William Hadleigh, Richard Master and Thomas Lawrence, who had transcribed Bocking’s manuscript, were duly delivered to Hales at Canterbury, where the Quarter Sessions over which he was presiding were already under way. By the evening of 25 September, moreover, as Hales informed Cromwell, Bocking and Hadleigh were already under arrest and on their way to London, though Lawrence was ‘yet forth in the country’ and awaiting apprehension, while the ‘parson of Aldington’ was due to be taken next day. Along with a letter explaining his actions, the Attorney-General had also sent Cromwell ‘sundry writings’ discovered in Bocking’s chamber and the burnt fragments of the Maid’s veil that he had apparently preserved for some reason as a memento. But there was a hint, too, in the footnote to his letter that even Hales was now uneasy about the project he was assisting: ‘Sir, I pray you, if no cause to the contrary shall appear unto you, help to dispatch these religious men homewards again as soon as conveniently it may be so.’
And when Master and Lawrence were duly packed off to the capital on the evening of 29 September, their treatment too had begun to prick the Attorney-General’s conscience, though not enough, of course, to make him challenge the orchestrator’s motives outright. For, as he made clear in the letter that accompanied the two new prisoners:
I have no acquaintance of the parson but he is a good man. And if the Official [Lawrence] have not offended in the matter presupposed, I can speak largely for his honesty. I can find in his house no spot of matter to be signified unto you; nevertheless, your industry herein to make the matter open in God or Christ, as of truth it is, shall be most honourable in my mind before God and the world.
In truth, of course, there was little of honour in Hales’s role and less still underlying the motives of Cromwell who, with his usual sense of purpose, had determined to seize the opportunity for what amounted to a show trial exposing the imposture of the king’s excommunication in Rome on 4 July. For if the pope had been influenced in his action by the Maid, and the Maid herself was nothing more than a deluded criminal, encouraged and abetted by men of ‘evil disposition’, the conclusion was inescapable.
Yet the minister’s task was, even now, still no less sensitive than ever, and Barton in particular would have to be carefully softened before the endgame ensued. Writing to Emperor Charles V on 20 November, therefore, Chapuys noted that, upon her arrival in London, Barton had been treated ‘all the while like a grosse dame’, i.e. a lady of rank and consequence. Indeed, she may even have lived for some brief time in Cromwell’s house in Fenchurch Street, a few minutes’ walk from the Tower. But it was to the Tower, once suitably softened, that she was soon committed, and there, too, that she was swiftly broken down. Taken across the Thames to Lambeth Palace for periodic interrogation by a specially empanelled commission, comprising Cromwell, Cranmer and Hugh Latimer, Barton’s treatment at once changed drastically, as she now encountered the kind of concentrated hostility to which she had never before been subjected and with which she was wholly ill-equipped to cope. Each of her inquisitors, ironically enough, would suffer violent deaths of their own at the hands of either the king or his daughter Mary. But they formed an irresistible trio for a young country woman from Kent, who, as the account of the Protestant controversialist Richard Morison makes clear, was soon yielding to the whirlwind, and conceding to the developing narrative that she had been moulded and manipulated by her clerical associates:
The business [wrote Morison of Barton’s interrogation] was handed over to men well-known for their great prudence and erudition, to ferret out whether her miracles were performed by the power of God or by the ingenuity of the monks. When she was asked now whether she could divine what people had done in the past, she found very little to say. When the commissioners insisted, she said it was necessary for the questioners to be in good faith and in a state of grace: and that perchance the time was no more, when God wished her to do that sort of thing.
Cast adrift on a melting ice floe, she was clearly floundering, and before long, if the account in Nicholas Heath’s Sermon can be relied upon, had confessed ‘without any fear of compulsion’ that:
She had never in her whole life any revelation from God, but that they were of her own feigning, wherein she had used much craft to make and devise them consonant and agreeable to the minds of them that were resorting to her.
The principal charge, predictably enough, was that Barton had influenced opinion against the king’s divorce and second marriage, and particularly the opinions of Warham, Wolsey and the pope himself. And by 23 October, when Cromwell produced another revealing memorandum of things to be done concerning the Maid, an immense amount of hard information had emerged to ease the way for a double indictment of treason and heresy, much of it delivered with the assistance of Solicitor-General Richard Rich, who had already provided a detailed report on Edward Bocking’s book. The origins of the copy of St Mary Magdalen’s supposed letter had been tracked down to St Augustine’s Abbey. Thomas More’s letter to the Maid, with its reference to the Duke of Buckingham now offering an allegedly sinister clue to the objectives of her mission, was also known, while Edward Thwaites, author of A Marvellous Work, was also currently under arrest. And the net was closing, too, on a number of more marginal figures, such as John Dering, William Hawkhurst and an anchorite named Christopher Warriner of the Dominican Friary at Canterbury. Most important of all, however, it was tightening upon one prize individual whom Cromwell had long been stalking. For the minister ended his memorandum with a note to determine ‘whether the king will have my Lord of Rochester sent for’.
Richard Risby, meanwhile, was ‘taken’ in early November and ‘his readiness and promptness to confess the truth at his first examination’ had also put Cromwell on the trail of Hugh Rich who, for the next week or so, assumed top priority on the list of targets until the king formally sanctioned the friar’s arrest on the 12th. On the same day, too, a threat to Prior Thomas Goldwell, warning of imminent arrest were he not to provide a full and candid account of his connection to the Maid, provided what amounted to the final ammunition. For when suitably caged, the bird duly sang, beseeching Cromwell ‘to continue good master to me and to my church here and to take no displeasure with me’, while distancing himself from the misdemeanours of Bocking and his confederates, ‘seeing that it is done against my will and knowledge’. The Maid’s revelations against the king were confirmed, including the threat that if ‘he married another woman, he should not reign one month thereafter’, as were her dealings ‘touching my Lord of Canterbury that was [i.e. Warham], and my Lord Cardinal [Wolsey]’. In sending ‘such matters as I could call to mind concerning the matter of the Nun’, moreover, Goldwell not only promised Cromwell his ‘daily prayers’ for the rest of his days but offered a further declaration of gratitude for his clemency, ‘seeing that I am somewhat in age, and weak, and much disposed to a palsy’.
But according to Morison’s account, it would take one last demeaning examination before the Privy Council to ensure, like Joan of Arc before and Edmund Campion after, the definitive confession from Barton herself:
Ordered several times to fall down, distort her face and distend her jaws in the presence of the Duke of Norfolk and other senior councillors, she fell down, distorted and distended as often as they pleased, after which she admitted that she had learnt men’s sins from the priests and that the Roman nuncios had often promised her that Clement would do everything he could to deprive the king of his realm.
Next day, 17 November, Eleanor Lady Rutland wrote to her father, Sir William Paston, how she had just heard that the ‘Holy Woman of Kent’ had been examined by the Privy Council and confessed ‘one of the most abonimablest matters that ever I heard of in my life, as shall be published openly to all people within these three or four days at the farthest’. And the climax duly arrived at a meeting described by the apostate Benedictine monk, Dr John Capon, as ‘as greate an assembly and counsel of the lords of this realme as hath been seene many yeares heretofore out of a parliament’: a gathering like none Barton had previously witnessed, including not only a nucleus of councillors but the principal judges in the land, a number of bishops and a throng of nobles from ‘almost all the counties of the kingdom’, who for three whole days together proceeded to debate, no doubt in the wider context of the threat from Rome, what Chapuys now saw fit to describe as ‘the crimes, or rather the foolish superstitions of the nun and her adherents’.
At the height of proceedings, which were held in public session at the Palace of Westminster, Barton, Edward Bocking, John Dering, Hugh Rich, Richard Risby, Henry Gold, Richard Master, Thomas Lawrence, Edward Thwaites and Thomas Gold were all present, though William Hadleigh and others questioned had apparently been discharged. And it fell to Chancellor Thomas Audley to thank God for bringing to light the ‘damnable and great wickedness of the said Nun and her adherents’, as well as those ‘accomplices’ still at liberty at that time – a scarcely veiled allusion to John Fisher in particular. Naturally enough, there were references to ‘a certain invalid sentence said to have been given by the pope against the king’ and a declaration, too, that ‘the most lawful marriage which the king had made with this Lady [Anne]’ was not for his own gratification but to procure a lawful successor in the kingdom. Yet it remained ‘the diabolical plot of the said Nun’ that dominated, and especially her relationship with the pope, to whom she had written ‘a thousand false persuasions’, proffered ‘in a spirit of prophecy and divine revelation in case he should not give sentence’. As such, Audley concluded, no credit should be accorded to those papal sentences induced by the nun’s ‘damnable and diabolic intrumentality’ or to her prophecies that the king would shortly be faced with rebellion and dethronement, and ultimately the prospect of eternal damnation. At which point, Chapuys informs us, ‘some people began to interrupt, shouting that she should be burnt alive’.
Throughout, it seems, Barton had been present ‘without exhibiting the least fear or astonishment’, though making no attempt at any stage to exonerate herself. And just as no defence was offered, so no witnesses were called and no sentence delivered, albeit contrary to the express wishes of the king who was keen to ensure that ‘there is no one who will dare to contradict him, unless he wishes to be taken for a fool or a traitor’. For the Common Law, in fact, precluded such an option, since verbal treason was not yet criminal by statute, and no charge of misprision of treason could be levelled against those who had merely heard what Barton had actually told the king to his face. Nor, to add to Cromwell’s frustration in particular, had any evidence been uncovered establishing Queen Catherine’s complicity in the affair. Indeed, it was at this point, while conferring with Chapuys during the proceedings, that the minister openly confessed, as we have seen, how he ‘had used all the devices possible to draw from the Nun whether the Queen had any intelligence with her, but he could find none’ – for which the ambassador in turn ‘praised the Queen greatly for not allowing the Nun to speak with her, saying that God must have given her her wit and senses’.
But where the law could not suffice, as Cromwell all too keenly appreciated, propaganda could, of course, be made to supply the deficit, even though the Maid herself was now a broken reed. After years of celebrity, she had been confined to the Tower, and not only repeatedly subjected to searching and pitiless interrogation by a trio of extremely able and tendentious commissioners, but almost certainly exposed to the kind of unrelenting moral pressure so vividly revealed in the later letters of Cromwell to Sir Thomas More and John Fisher, and in the reports of their trials. In the immediate aftermath of her initial ‘confession’, Barton had apparently encountered Thomas Gold, one of her associates in the Tower, and told him that her admission of guilt had been inspired by the visit of an angel who had informed her ‘that the time is not come that God will put forth the work’. But now her credit was destroyed beyond hope of recall, and she had neither the inner reserves of heroism nor even, perhaps, the clarity of mind that would ultimately allow her more sophisticated successors to face their time of testing with greater fortitude. Though never likely to have been so entirely a tool or ‘medium’ of her clerical associates in the way suggested, she was nevertheless defenceless without them, and they without her, as Cromwell now decided to seal his victory by heaping contempt and ridicule upon one and all.
Working on the principle that the idea must necessarily be killed before the body, the means to this end was to be a public denunciation and open penance, first at St Paul’s Cross in the City of London, and then in the graveyard of Canterbury Cathedral, centring upon the sermon composed by Nicholas Heath and Thomas Cranmer, and delivered by Dr John Capon, who would soon be forsaking his Benedictine cowl for the bishopric of Salisbury. And accordingly, on Friday and Saturday, 21 and 22 November, workmen were to be found erecting a ‘high scaffold’ opposite the great churchyard cross and open-air pulpit outside St Paul’s Cathedral. They were busy, too, constructing the temporary staging intended to seat the more eminent of the many spectators expected. For this was to be a show of the first order, involving the barefoot arrival of the ‘penitents’ from the Tower, their ‘vilification’, as Chapuys described it, by means of a sermon dripping with scandal and innuendo, and a bill of confession ‘to be openly read before the people’. There would be penitential psalms in plenty, ardent litanies, solemn tolling of bells and passionate cursings, resulting, or so it was hoped, in a final triumphant exorcism of the sympathies that had rendered the Maid’s activities so unsettling in the first place. Equally, there would be a further – invisible – platform established for the subsequent extinction of John Fisher.
On the Sunday morning, according to the London cloth merchant Richard Hilles, there was consequently a larger throng of Londoners at St Paul’s than any seen in ‘forty winters’, and Dr Capon did not disappoint. For in addition to ‘deprecating and condemning with all the force of which he was master, the king’s first marriage’ and ‘vehemently exhorting the people not to attach faith to those who maintained its lawfulness’, the sometime monk lost no opportunity to pepper his speech with tales of ‘stinking gums and powders’, used by Barton to convince her fellow nuns of diabolic visitations, and night-time excursions, ‘twice or three a week’, at which she satisfied base urges ‘when she perceived her sisters in deep sleep’. ‘Then,’ declared Capon, ‘she went not about the saying of her Pater Noster!’ Even without its introduction, which has been lost, the Sermon runs to approximately 5,000 words, and when delivered in the slow, histrionic manner required by the conventions of the time, it could certainly not have lasted less than an hour. But with pauses for laughter and cries of execration from the audience, and with the introduction of dramatic pauses, repetitions and intervals for refreshment, the entire spectacle is likely to have extended to double that time, as Barton, Bocking, Dering, Rich, Risby, Gold, Master, Lawrence and Thwaites stood lightly clad and barefoot in the late November chill.
Thereafter, with Capon finally seated after his exertions, came the confessions, as the king’s officers stepped forward on cue and delivered each one a written confession that they duly handed to a presiding dignitary who read it aloud while the penitent concerned was displayed to the outraged and jeering crowd. Certainly manufactured by the government, the manuscript copy of Baton’s declaration of guilt still exists today and is written in the same hand as the text of the Sermon – evidence that it was prepared in advance by Nicholas Heath. Nor is there any evidence to suggest that either Barton or her associates knew in advance the contents of their confessions, since none, it seems, were signed. Indeed, the confessions formed as routine an element of a public penance as the platform on which the penitents were displayed and the staging on which their accusers sat. Brief, formulaic and utterly unequivocal, Barton’s declaration followed, in fact, the standard pattern in every detail:
I, Dame Elizabeth Barton, do confess that I, most miserable and wretched person, have been the original of all this mischief, and by my falsehood have grievously deceived all these persons here and many more, whereby I have most grievously offended Almighty God and my most noble sovereign the King’s Grace.
Wherefore I humbly, and with heart most sorrowful, desire you to pray to Almighty God for my miserable sins and, ye that may do me good, to make supplication to my most noble Sovereign for me for his gracious mercy and pardon.
But there would be no pardon, of course, and when the ordeal of Barton and her adherents was finally over, ‘they went’, the Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London tells, ‘to the Tower of London again’ along with ‘much people through all the streets of London’.
Chapuys, meanwhile, concluded his account of events as follows:
It is said that on the next two Sundays, the Nun and the above-mentioned persons will play their respective parts in this comedy – for it hardly deserves any other name. And that afterwards, they will be taken through all the principal towns of the kingdom to play out a similar charade, in order to efface the general impression that the Nun is a saint and prophet.
Though no believer himself, he would claim, nevertheless, that the people of England were still thirsting for ‘prophecies and divinations of this kind’. But if so, no more would be had from the lips of Elizabeth Barton. On the contrary, she had been utterly tied and trussed, so that the only way forward for her and her circle now was along the path to Tyburn. For Henry Man, the Sheen Carthusian to whom Barton had been ‘my good mother Elizabeth, in whom is my trust’, she was a figure ‘who has raised a fire in some hearts that you would think like unto the operation of the Holy Spirit in the primitive church’. But Sir Thomas More had been present at St Paul’s Cross and was in no doubt that she had been ‘proved nought’ – ‘a false, deceiving hypocrite’. And if More was unprepared to accept, as seems likely, that some at least of her self-deception was intrinsically sincere – or, in other words, that she was a type of mystic manqué who had been too readily exposed by Bocking in particular to the credulous adulation of her devotees – he was not, it must be said, alone. For her credit had been decisively undermined and the fire, not only of her credibility but also her threat, wholly extinguished, as her most influential supporters rapidly deserted her.
On 25 November, for example – a much luckier St Catherine’s Day for one of her leading advocates than for the Maid herself – the king had granted a pardon to the Marchioness of Exeter, as an act of clemency to mark the marriage of his illegitimate son. Wondering whether her own secret visit to Canterbury had been revealed in the gloom of the Tower, and under the combined effects of pregnancy and raw terror, the marchioness had, in fact, initially taken to her bed at the prospect of what appeared to await her, before pulling herself together, under Thomas Cromwell’s far from disinterested advice, and appealing for mercy on the grounds that she was ‘a woman whose fragility and brittleness is such as most facilely, easily and lightly is seduced and brought into abusion and light belief’. At this the king had duly relented, though not without the severest of covering letters for the abject petitioner, and a dressing-down for her husband soon after Christmas, which included not only a warning that neither he nor any other of the king’s vassals must ‘put a foot wrong, or waver, on pain of losing their heads’, but a further promise to put an end to Princess Mary’s ‘nonsense’ in refusing to serve her infant half-sister as a waiting-woman.
Nor, with the king so firmly intent upon retribution, and Thomas Cromwell already set to become the master of killing entire flocks with a single stone, could the quiddities of the Common Law long prevent a final reckoning with either Elizabeth Barton and her intimates or, more importantly still perhaps, any other unhappy enough to persist in resistance. In the Star Chamber, Audley had loudly denounced Barton’s crimes and misdeeds but declined nevertheless ‘for many good reasons to specify what they were’. There was, after all, no evidence of any actual plot, and by the same token it was therefore impossible to establish the complicity of others in crimes that could not be proven to have been committed in the first place. A series of more wide-reaching open trials under the Common Law, moreover, might offer John Fisher, the government’s primary target at this point, not only the right to defend himself, but to denounce the king’s actions far more expertly than either the Maid herself or her devotees had ever been able to do, with the even more dreaded prospect of acquittal thereafter. Yet there was still no doubt that Henry and Cromwell were shaping for a broader and indeed definitive assault upon the final obstacles to their plans. For on 28 November, as Chapuys had predicted to the emperor earlier that week, ‘the king sent for his judges and certain others that were servient to the law, and propounded the case unto them, acquainting them with that which every one [i.e. the existing prisoners and other suspects still at liberty] had done, desiring to know their opinions therein’.
Accordingly, with the king hectoring and bullying them to ignore the Common Law and convict on the royal will, the kingdom’s leading judges opted for a compromise, by which the Maid and her immediate circle were, for reasons of State, to be condemned for treason by Act of Attainder – that is to say, by special Act of Parliament, without further legal process of any kind – and certain named sympathisers were to be attainted for misprision of treason, i.e. culpable complicity, which entailed lifetime imprisonment and forfeiture of all goods. Nor was there to be any delay in pressing forward. For on Sunday, 7 December, the eve of Our Lady’s Conception, the Maid and her companions did public penance all over again, as laid down earlier at the Westminster hearing, ‘in the churchyard of the monastery of the Holy Trinity [i.e. Christ Church at Canterbury] at the sermon time’, and by January the requisite Bill of Attainder, which included the names of John Fisher, Sir Thomas More, John Adeson, Fisher’s chaplain, and Thomas Abell had already been framed. Beforehand, Barton and her friends had stood in the biting wind of a December morning on a platform like the one erected at St Paul’s Cross, ‘grievously rebuked of their horrible fact’. And though Barton was described by the presiding preacher as ‘fat and ruddy’, Richard Master was already ill with pneumonia. But they, in any case, were now merely the hors d’oeuvres to the 3,000-word Draft of Charges currently being drawn up for the primary purpose of entrapping Fisher and those others still at liberty.
Upon learning of the Bill of Attainder, Sir Thomas More wrote at once to Cromwell, to establish how limited his association with the nun had been, enclosing the copy of the letter in which he had told her to avoid the king’s affairs. But Cromwell also received a letter from Fisher, which, though no longer in existence, can be gauged in some degree from a further letter sent in response to the minister’s own reply. For in it Fisher complained of the ‘heavy words’ and ‘terrible threats’ employed against him, plainly indicating that, unlike More, he had been anything but defensive about his dealings with the Maid. Yet if the bishop was still set for conflict, so too was his protagonist who duly claimed that he had sent him ‘no heavy words, but words of great comfort’ that had merely confirmed ‘how benign and merciful’ the king was, along with an invitation to seek pardon for his ‘offences’, which ‘his Grace would not deny you now in your age and sickness’. Already assumed to be guilty, though no formal investigation had been conducted against him, Fisher was also treated to the claim, again unsubstantiated, that his own self-professed ‘great opinion’ of the holiness of the Maid was premised on no more than the fact that her sentiments were in agreement with his own:
My lord, all these things moved you not to give credence unto her, but only the very matter whereupon she made her false prophecies; to which matters ye were so affected, as ye be in all matters which ye enter once into, that nothing could come amiss for that purpose. And here I appeal your conscience, and instantly desire you to answer, whether if she had showed you as many revelations for the confirmation of the king’s grace’s marriage, which he now enjoyeth, as she did to the contrary, ye would have given as much credence to her.
It was a simple, but ingenious tack on Cromwell’s part, which may in its own condescending way have achieved no little depth in plumbing Fisher’s personality and the common weakness of human reason in the midst of conflict. For the bishop was not a man, once committed, to be persuaded from his premises and conclusions, and was prone, perhaps, like others before and after to seize more readily upon evidence that supported those self-same conclusions than materially challenged and contradicted them.
In any event, Cromwell would not confine his approach to that of gentle father confessor. For while he assured Fisher once again that his royal master ‘would benignly accept you into his gracious favour’ were the bishop to acknowledge his ‘negligence, oversight and offence’, the undertone of subtly applied menace remained, as he added how ‘men report that at the last convocation, ye spake things which ye could not well defend’. One year earlier, Stephen Vaughan, one of the leading members of Cromwell’s elaborate spy system, had recommended from Antwerp that ‘privy search be made’ of Fisher’s house for incriminating literature, and the minister had little, if any, reason now to believe that persuasion might yet avail. Instead, his correspondence at this point was little more than a nicety – perhaps no more, in fact, than a regrettable but nevertheless delectable first turn of the screw against, as he saw it, an unbending defender of an archaic, dysfunctional and soon-to-be-dismantled old order. For cling as the intended victim might to the claim that he had kept from the king nothing that the king had heard from the Maid directly, Cromwell was now set to sweep John Fisher away with the same kind of efficacy that he had applied to Elizabeth Barton herself.
When Parliament met on 15 January 1534, therefore, the words of the indictment summoning the old, sick prelate to appear were already formulated:
And the said John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester … having knowledge of the said false and feigned and dissembled Revelations, traitorously conspired against our said sovereign lord, did nevertheless make concealment thereof, and uttered not the same to our said sovereign, nor any of his honourable council, against their duties and allegiance in that behalf.
Nor, if his response of 28 January is any guide, was there much to suggest at first that Fisher had any more resources for further resistance than the Maid herself would exhibit when faced with the inevitable and overwhelming force of the impending final showdown. For the bishop sent little more than a sicknote, beseeching Cromwell ‘to have some pity of me, considering the case and condition I am in’:
For in goodsooth, now almost this six weeks I have had a grievous cough, with a fever in the beginning thereof, as divers other here in this country have had, and divers have died thereof. And now the matter is fallen down into my legs and feet with such swelling and ache that I may neither ride nor go, for the which I beseech you eftsoons to have some pity upon me and to spare me for a season, to the end the swelling and aches of my feet may assuage and abate; and then by the grace of Our Lord, I shall with all speed obey your commandment.
Even though acutely aware of the tightening net around him, Fisher could offer only this. And while the weakness of his condition is not in doubt, a further letter, written three days later and asking Cromwell to trouble him with no further letters, confirms the impression that, with the inevitable in process, he wished merely to minimise his participation in the preliminaries. Already clearly convinced that anything he said would be wilfully misinterpreted, Fisher’s message is a mixture of resignation and ongoing weary defiance, tinged with an undertone of barely disguised contempt for the man who was now openly his persecutor:
After my right humble commendations, I most entirely beseech you that I no farther be moved to make answer unto your letters, for I see that mine answer must rather grow into a great book, or else be insufficient, so that ye shall still thereby take occasion to be offended, and I nothing profit. For I perceive that everything I write is ascribed either to craft, or to wilfulness, or to affection, or to unkindness towards my sovereign; so that my writing rather provoketh you to displeasure than it furthereth me in any point concerning your favour, which I most effectually covet. Nothing I read in all your letters that I take any comfort of, but the only subscription wherein it pleased you to call you my friend; which undoubtedly was a word of much consolation unto me, and therefore I beseech you so to continue, and so to show yourself unto me at this time.
There are, as might be expected, the customary courtesies, but the overall import is never remotely in doubt, especially when Fisher makes subsequent reference to the clash of conscience involving himself and the king, and his own reluctance to declare his inner feelings ‘any more largely than I have done’ for fear of ‘offending his grace in that behalf’: ‘Not that I condemn any other men’s conscience. Their conscience may save them, and mine must save me.’
Ignoring Cromwell’s advice to write at once to the king, the bishop would not, in fact, do so until 27 February, citing once again his weakness from ‘so many perilous diseases one after another which began with me before Advent’. Nor did he frame his letter in the form of a plea for forgiveness as Cromwell had suggested. On the contrary, he insisted upon his innocence concerning the ‘Nun of Canterbury’, emphasising that he ‘conceived not by her words’ that ‘any malice or evil was intended or meant unto your highness or any mortal man’, and affirming that he had never counselled her unto her ‘feigning nor was privy thereunto nor to any such purposes as it is now said they went about’. Significantly, too, there was a further reference to the central premise of Fisher’s defence, namely that Barton had assured him that she had already delivered the self-same revelation to the king. If so, of course, he could hardly be guilty of misprision, and had risked even further displeasure at the prospect of delivering an unwelcome message of which Henry already had knowledge:
But since she did assure me therewith that she had plainly told unto your grace the same thing I thought doubtless that your grace would have suspected me that I had come to renew her tale again unto you rather for the confirming of my opinion than for any other cause.
He wished, he said, to be ‘delivered of this business, and only to prepare my soul to God, and to make it ready against the coming of death, and no more to come abroad in the world’.
But, as Fisher surely knew, none of these requests were feasible, and soon afterwards a lengthy unsigned letter ‘from the Bishop of Rochester’ – written, as a result of his infirmity, not in his own hand – was delivered to the House of Lords, reiterating his innocence concerning Barton and requesting that he should be tried according to the established law of the land, whereby ‘I can declare myself to be guiltless herein’, rather than by Bill of Attainder. Even now, however, he could not resist a biting sideswipe at the men expected to condemn him, warning them to ‘look upon your own perils’ lest the law of attainder should one day be turned on them, ‘for there sitteth not one lord here but the same or other like may chance until himself that now is imputed unto me’. It was, of course, a prophetic statement, but, equally, one that could never stem the overwhelming tide of events. For on 12 March the intended Bill of Attainder was indeed agreed in the House of Lords, and sent on the 17th to the Commons where it was passed at once – ‘per communes expedita’. According to Chapuys, ‘the good Bishop of Rochester, who is a paragon of Christian prelates both for learning and holiness, has been condemned to confiscation of body and goods. All this injustice is in consequence of his support of the queen.’
But the penalty of confiscation was in fact remitted for a fine of one year’s revenue from his bishopric, while Richard Master would ultimately be reprieved in July 1534. Clearly, a semblance of clemency and due process was still desirable, which would explain why Sir Thomas More escaped with nothing more at this stage than the loss of his pension, and why Fisher’s chaplain, John Adeson, appears to have lost only his benefices rather than his life. Similarly, Thomas Gold, Thomas Lawrence and Edward Thwaites were to suffer only imprisonment, while Thomas Abell was left to linger in the Tower until his martyrdom in 1540.
Yet if a few were to be spared for now, there was no residing shadow of doubt, as Lords and MPs prepared to consider the forthcoming bill, that their overriding function was not only to eradicate all traces of Elizabeth Barton and her circle, but ‘to provide such remedy as, by fear of punishment, men shall not be so bold hereafter to attempt any such thing’. On 16 February, five days before her case was even presented to the House of Lords, the Maid’s few belongings were inventoried and valued, and by the time that An Act Concerning the Attainder of Elizabeth Barton eventually passed through Parliament, she had already long been dead in all but dying. Consisting of some 6,700 words, the act had stipulated:
That the said Elizabeth Barton, Richard Master, Edward Bocking, John Dering, Hugh Rich, Richard Risby and Henry Gold, for their several offences above rehearsed, by time recognised and confessed, shall be convict and attainted of High Treason, and shall suffer such execution and pains of death as in cases of High Treason hath been accustomed.
Nor was the time long in coming when the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edmund Walsingham, would proceed to the cells of the convicted, with his turn-key before him, to announce in solemn tones the nature of their punishment and to lead them thence for its enactment. On 23 March, John Wolff’s ‘harlot’ wife, Alice, had received a similar visitation prior to her own execution alongside her informant husband, who had failed to save himself by his treachery, and at that time Walsingham offered her words of consolation at her fate, bidding her ‘take it well and thank God for it’. Whether similar comfort was offered to the one-time ‘Holy Maid’ as she prepared to leave the confines of her cell for the final occasion, a little less than one month later, is unknown.
Upon the scaffold at Tyburn, having made her required reverences to the officials and to the crowd, she spoke up, we are told, as follows:
Hither am I come to die, and I have not been the cause only of mine own death, which most justly I have deserved, but also I am the cause of the death of all of these persons which at this time here suffer.
And yet, to say the truth, I am not so much to be blamed, considering it was well known to these learned men [Bocking et al.] that I was a poor wench without learning; and therefore they might have easily perceived that the things that were done by me could not proceed by no such sort but their capacities and learning could right well judge from whence they proceeded and that they were altogether feigned.
But because the things which I feigned were profitable unto them, therefore they much praised me and bare me in hand that it was the Holy Ghost and not I that did them.
And then I, being puffed up with their praises, fell into a certain pride and foolish fantasy with myself, and thought I might feign what I would.
Which thing has brought me to this case; and for the which now I cry God and the King’s Highness most heartily mercy, and desire all you good people to pray to God to have mercy on me and all them that here suffer with me.
It was no small irony, of course, that one of those also awaiting the executioner’s attention that day was Henry Gold, one of the early students of St John’s. For the college’s founder had already been summoned to Lambeth only one week earlier to take the oath of supremacy required by the Act of Succession, that would mark the beginning of his own final journey to the scaffold. According to Fisher’s early biographer, who apparently based his account on the recollections of members of the bishop’s household, the news of the summons ‘cast such a fear and terror among his servants and after among other of his friends abroad in the country, that nothing was there to be heard of but lamentation and mourning on all sides’, though Fisher himself, it seems, was ‘nothing at all dismayed therewith’, accepting his impending execution ‘as a thing he daily and hourly looked for before’. Certainly, he did not expect to return, telling his ‘family to be of good cheer’ and informing them that ‘being once gone, you may doubt of the time of my return hither to you again’. Yet he was sure that what followed ‘should be to the glory of God and his own quietness’, and set off next day, having made arrangements for the disposition of his goods, and leaving just enough ‘to defend his necessity in prison whereof he counted himself sure as soon as he was come before the commissioners’.
In his book Pro ecclesticae unitatis defensione, Reginald Pole records how he ‘heard afterwards that when he [Fisher] was summoned to London to be imprisoned, on the journey he swooned away for some time for weakness’, and though he ‘dined openly in the air’ along the way at Shooter’s Hill – ‘nigh twenty miles from Rochester, on the top whereof he rested himself and descended from his horse’ – the bishop’s early biographer also makes clear that ‘he feared himself to be entered into a consumption’. As such, the prospect of interrogation must have been more daunting than ever, though his own weakness may even have been a consolation of sorts, since he had hardly the strength to perturb himself in the old familiar fashion, and his protagonists were unlikely to prolong an encounter that was already a fait accompli. Shortly before his arrival, Sir Thomas More had already refused the oath before Cromwell, Cranmer, Audley and William Benson, Abbot of Westminster, and been committed to the charge of the abbot in the vain hope that he might change his mind. But the process had been almost routine, and after his own unfussy refusal, Fisher, too, was ‘granted space for four or five days’ to reflect at his own house in Lambeth Marsh, albeit in the charge of Cranmer, whose archbishop’s palace lay next door.
Not until 17 April, in fact, was the oath once again proffered to both More and Fisher, and only then were both men committed to the Tower – the latter, we are told by William Rastell, being ‘closely imprisoned and locked up in a strong chamber from all company saving one of his servants, who, like a false knave, accused his master to Cromwell afterwards’. On the same day, moreover, Cranmer was still prepared to write to Cromwell in search of a compromise, whereby both the accused might be required merely to accept the Act of Succession without the offending preamble and its ‘diminution of the authority of the Bishop of Rome’. If so, the archbishop reasoned, ‘it should be a good quietation to many other within this realm’, pacifying at a stroke all others of ‘an indurate and invertible conscience’. But Cromwell’s response was predictable and, under the circumstances, entirely logical:
For, in case they be sworn to the succession, and not to the preamble, it is to be thought that it might be taken not only as a confirmation of the Bishop of Rome’s authority, but also as a reprobation of the king’s second marriage. Wherefore, to the intent that no such things should be brought into the heads of the people by the example of the said Bishop of Rochester and Master More, the king’s highness in no wise willeth but that they shall be sworn as well as to the preamble as to the Act. Wherefore, his grace specially trusteth that ye will in no wise attempt or move him to the contrary, for as his grace supposeth, that manner of swearing, if it shall be suffered, may be an utter destruction of his whole cause, and also to the effect of the law made for the same.
There could be no plainer proof, of course, of the paramount importance of both Fisher’s and More’s punishment for the government’s plans. Cranmer had emphasised how their acceptance of the succession might guarantee that ‘not one within this realm would once reclaim against it’, and not only ‘stop the mouths of the princess-dowager and the Lady Mary … but also of the emperor and other their friends’. But for Cromwell the solution to the agreed problem was not compromise but eradication, particularly at so critical a juncture. For, only the next month, the oath was refused by the king’s first wife with an ominously strident riposte to the threats raised against her in the event of her non-co-operation: ‘If one of you has a commission to execute this penalty upon me, I am ready. I ask only that I be allowed to die in the sight of the people.’ And nor was this all. For on 4 May royal commissioners duly arrived at the gates of the London Charterhouse, to raise another whirlwind tending who knew where.