10
I care nothing for the Church. Will you consent or not?
Words attributed to Thomas Cromwell during an interrogation in the Tower of London in May 1534.
From Dom Maurice Chauncy, Historia aliguot nostri sæculi Martyrum cum pia, tum piicunda, nunquam antehac typis excusa (1550).
By no means all the residents of the London Charterhouse were spiritual athletes of the calibre of Prior John Houghton and Sebastian Newdigate or the sixteen others who would ultimately suffer martyrdom at the hands of a government bent upon their eradication. On the contrary, some seventeen in all, including a certain Maurice Chauncy, would eventually accept the royal supremacy and surrender their possessions to the Crown in return for modest pensions received of his majesty’s ‘mercy and grace’ when the Charterhouse finally succumbed to the fate of England’s other monasteries on 10 June 1537. Educated at Oxford, ‘in an ancient place of literature’, before proceeding to Gray’s Inn as a student of the Common Law, Chauncy had subsequently assumed the habit of a Carthusian monk after living a life of pleasure until censured by his father. But unlike his martyred counterparts, he would fail to stand firm when the supreme trial of conscience finally arrived, and became, as he himself admitted in his own agonised confession some years afterwards, a Saul among the prophets, a Judas among the apostles, a cowardly child of Ephraim turning himself back in the day of battle. Haunted by his frailty in taking the oath of supremacy, he would finally produce a history of the Charterhouse’s last years, which – for all its prolixity, superstitious embellishments and frequent inaccuracy in small matters of fact – stands alone among the documents of the time as an intrigung eye-witness account of the extraordinary fortitude of a small community of men determined to stand united against the irresistible forces of political necessity ranged against them.
When the royal commissioner Thomas Bedyll first arrived at the London Charterhouse in the spring of 1534 to obtain the oath of succession from Prior John Houghton, it had come as no surprise. Late the previous year, Chauncy tells us, Houghton had left the choir one morning to pray in the cemetery where his dead brethren lay, and beheld a terrifying portent: a blood-red globe suspended in mid-air above the Charterhouse. But, upon their meeting, Bedyll found his quarry initially evasive. For, when asked his opinion about the king’s marriage, the prior replied how ‘it pertained not to his vocation and calling nor to that of his subjects to meddle in or discuss the king’s business’. He maintained, indeed, that ‘it did not concern him whom the king wished to divorce or marry, so long as he was not asked for any opinion’. Yet when instructed to summon his brethren in chapter for the purpose of extracting the oath from all concerned, Houghton’s hand was at once forced, notwithstanding the heavy consequences that were certain to ensue. And in response to the question whether the king’s first marriage was indeed invalid, and whether the monks would obey the heir of the second marriage in the event of the king’s demise, Houghton became more forthright, declaring plainly that ‘he could not understand how it was possible that a marriage ratified by the Church and so long unquestioned should now be undone’: a viewpoint endorsed by the entire community – Sebastian Newdigate among them – and in particular the convent’s procurator, Humphrey Middlemore, who at once found himself dispatched to the Tower along with Houghton himself. By the law, as it stood, neither Bedyll nor his fellow agents were in fact empowered to make inquisition of a man’s opinion on the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Nor, for that matter, had Houghton’s response actually entailed an explicit rejection of the king’s prospective heirs by Anne Boleyn. But as England prepared to enter its season of bloodshed and one humble Berkshire man reflected ruefully how ‘thy father’s father never saw such a world’, this was manifestly no time for niceties.
Accordingly, for the next month, Houghton and Middlemore found themselves subject to persuasion by Edward Lee, Archbishop of York, and John Stokesley, Bishop of London, to the effect that the question of the succession was not a cause for which they should sacrifice their lives on grounds of conscience. But if the testimony of Maurice Chauncy and the treatment meted out to a certain ‘Mr Legge’, chaplain of the confessor of Syon Convent, who was also imprisoned in the Tower at this time, are any guide, the blandishments to the two Carthusians’ consciences are sure to have consisted of altogether more than words alone. For in addition to the dirt and pestilential atmosphere of the dungeon in which they were confined, there was also the prospect of an absolute want of food, should their limited funds run out. Legge, indeed, had been confined with only three shillings in his purse, and his relatives had been informed by Cromwell in person that ‘if he lacks money he will have neither meat, drink nor bread’. And if this was not enough to depress the prisoner’s spirits, he could expect neither fire to warm his bones nor the comfort of restful sleep to console him, since there would have been ‘no bed but the boards for him’, we are told, were it not for the kindness of the gaoler’s wife who saw fit to bring him a mattress and clothes to lie upon.
Marginally better perhaps, but far from pampered, was the treatment offered to John Fisher and Sir Thomas More, who were also by this stage under strict confinement close by: Fisher in the Bell Tower and More, it is usually contended, in the Beauchamp Tower – both kept strictly apart as they had been on the two days when they appeared before the king’s commissioners at Lambeth, and likewise refused access, initially at least, to books, writing materials and visitors. Each was allowed one servant – in Fisher’s case, Richard Wilson, and in More’s, John à Wood – but, as with humble ‘Mr Legge’, the cost of all necessities was borne by the prisoners themselves. Upon More’s arrival in the Tower the porter, in the presence of the lieutenant, had demanded of him his upper garment as a down payment for expenses, and when the former Lord Chancellor feigned to misunderstand him and offered his cap with the quip, ‘I am very sorry it is no better for thee,’ the response was unsmiling: ‘No, sir, I must have your gown.’ Since bishops, as lords, were charged on a higher scale than commoners, moreover, Fisher would have to pay £1 a week for himself and his servant, in comparison to More’s 15s – a sum that had already, when he appealed to Cromwell in December, exhausted his limited funds and reduced him to abject misery. For, as he made clear at that time:
I have neither shirt nor sheet, nor yet other clothes that are necessary for me to wear, but that be ragged and rent so shamefully. Notwithstanding I might easily suffer that, if they would keep my body warm. But my diet also, God knoweth how slender it is at many times, and now in mine age my stomach may not away but with a few kinds of meats, which if I want I decay forthwith and fall into coughs and diseases of my body, and can not keep myself in health. And as our Lord knoweth, I have nothing left unto me to provide any better, but as my brother [Robert] of his own purse layeth out for me to his great hindrance.
The bishop’s well-wishers were, it is true, allowed to offer him some minimal assistance, not least because of fears that he might die in incarceration – with all the attendant suspicions that might raise – and more importantly still escape trial and conviction, so that when Robert Fisher died in the spring of 1535, some help was provided by a certain William Thornton and another whose name is now illegible in the relevant documents. George Gold, the lieutenant’s servant, mentions how he visited Thornton’s house in Thames Street for the bishop’s diet, which was supplemented too, it seems, by the good offices of a Florentine merchant long resident in London, named Antonio Bonvisi, who had been an intimate friend of Sir Thomas More, and subsequently undertook to supply Fisher with a quart of French wine every day and three or four dishes of jelly after his health had worsened considerably from February 1535 onwards.
Around that time, too, Bonvisi seems to have consulted medical opinion about the nature of the bishop’s physical deterioration. For, according to the deposition of John Pennoll, who had been Fisher’s falconer, a letter from his former master had been carried by him to the Italian, who then contacted the physician Mr Clement, another of More’s friends and one of his household. In response, Clement sent word that Fisher’s liver was wasted and that he should take goat’s milk to help, while, according to the evidence of twenty-one mutilated papers containing the depositions of other witnesses, there was further contact concerning appropriate medicine involving another doctor, as well as letters to Edward White, Fisher’s brother-in-law, asking him to seek help. According to one testimony provided by a doctor named Hall, the king himself sent ‘divers physicians’ to the bishop at one point, ‘to give him preservatives’ and ‘spent upon him in charge of the physic the sum of forty or fifty pounds’ – though only, it seems, with the intention, that the patient ‘might the rather be able to come to his public trial and cruel punishment, which the king above all things desired’.
Yet, notwithstanding the ongoing determination to pursue him to the bitter end, by the latter months of the bishop’s incarceration the restrictions on his contact with the outside world had slackened somewhat, and in a deposition delivered shortly before his death, Sir Thomas More acknowledged that, while neither man ever met, both had been able to send each other little presents of meat and drink received from their friends. Unlike Fisher, in fact, More had actually been allowed initially to attend Mass and to roam occasionally under guard in the Tower’s precincts, receiving, into the bargain, occasional visits from his family, at least one of which occurred in an enclosed garden. Both men too were eventually given limited access to books and writing materials. But such meagre privileges could scarcely conceal the much starker realities of their incarceration in what More’s daughter, Margaret, described as ‘a close, filthy prison’ where her father was ‘shut up among mice and rats’. Nor did both men’s proximity to the lieutenant’s lodgings imply either warmth from his fires or dainties from his own table. And when Rowland Lee, the new Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, consecrated by Cranmer in the same month as the imprisonment of Houghton and Middlemore, visited Fisher in another vain attempt to persuade him to concede, he, too, left no doubt about the captive’s condition: ‘Surely the man is nigh gone and doubtless cannot stand [survive] unless the king and his council be merciful to him, for the body cannot bear the clothes on his back.’
Doubtless, Fisher was treated more harshly than More, as a consequence of the unrelenting opposition he had exhibited both in his writings and in Parliament, as well as from the pulpit. And as he faced the rough stone whitewashed walls of his cell and slowly paced the same flagged floor that has changed little to this day, peering through the same windows, which were then rough glazed, and the narrow shuttered apertures, out on to Tower Hill to the west and the church of All Hallows, he found himself denied, above all, the consolations of his religion. For he had pleaded with Cromwell that, ‘I may take some priest within the Tower by the assignment of master lieutenant to hear my confession against this holy time,’ but the request was denied and his ban from Mass in one of the Tower’s chapels was ongoing. Indeed, even in the final hours before their executions, neither Fisher nor More would be allowed the ministrations of a priest and the all-important consolations of a last communion.
Before then, however, some fourteen long months would have to pass, as the cumbersome machinery of due Tudor process ground out its familiar arduous course. Naturally enough, no time had been lost in ensuring initially that the bishop’s papers and goods were secured in accordance with the Act of Attainder by which he had been convicted. Indeed, the lists of his possessions at Rochester and Halling are dated 27 April 1534, only ten days after he had been sent to the Tower and before he had been formally arraigned. But if the commissioners appointed for the task were expecting rich pickings they were to be sorely disappointed, as the following extract from the detailed inventory of his Rochester belongings make clear:
In his own bedchamber. A bedstead and mattress, a counter-pane of red cloth lined with canvas. A tester of old red velvet nothing worth. A leather chair with a cushion. An altar with a hanging of white and green satin of Bruges with Our Lord embroidered on it. Two blue silk curtains. A cupboard with a cloth. A little chair covered with leather and a cushion. A close stool with an old cushion upon it. An andiron, a fire-pan, and a fire shovel.
In the great study within the same chamber. A long spruce table and other tables. Three leather chairs. Fire irons. Eight round desks and shelves for books.
In the north study. Divers glasses with waters and syrups and boxes of marmalade. A table, four round desks and bookshelves.
In the south gallery. Fifty glasses of sorts with a curtain of green and red say.
In the chapel in the end of the south gallery. A cushion in the seat of the chapel, the altar cloths, two pieces of old velvet and an altar stone. Four gilt images with a crucifix.
In the broad gallery. Old hangings of green say. Old carpets of tapestry. An altar cloth painted with green velvet and yellow damask. A St John’s head standing at the end of the altar. A pontifical book. A painted cloth of the image of Jesus taken down from the Cross.
In the old gallery. Certain old books pertaining to divers monasteries.
In the wardrobe. A tunic of stamnel [coarse woollen cloth], a Spanish blanket, an alembic to distil aquae vitae, with divers old trash. A trestle bedstead, a pair of sheets, six boards, two pair of trestles.
In the great chapel. The altar hung with red silk crosses, and under it two hangings of yellow silk of Bruges and blue damask; eight gilt images upon the altar; two latten [a type of brass] candlesticks … An old carpet on the ground before the altar. Hangings of painted red say. An altar beneath in the same chapel hung with old dornick, and a painted cloth of the three kings of Cologne. Five images of timber …
In the little chapel next the great chapel. Hangings of old painted cloths, a great looking glass broken. An old folding bed.
Plainly, the royal agents were nothing if not thorough, but their findings strike a curiously melancholy note, as they went about their humdrum business noting numerous ‘old’ items and other tired paraphernalia, all reflecting in their own way a dowdy otherworldliness on behalf of the owner, which stands in such contrast to similar lists drawn up for Thomas Wolsey’s possessions at the time of his attainder. The residing impression is of a ‘bachelor bedsit’ rather than an episcopal palace, and though there is an accompanying inventory of plate, this too suggests a notable lack of ostentation. ‘Cruets, altar basins, &c, with the portcullis upon them’ had almost certainly been the gift of Lady Margaret Beaufort, but the total weight of plate in Fisher’s possession was only just over 2,000oz Troy weight – a very modest amount by comparison to his peers – and half of this in any case was gilt, with much of the remainder so-called ‘white silver’.
All, however, was duly dispatched to ‘my master Cromwell to the king’s use’, along with the bishop’s letters and papers, among which were several addressed to Queen Catherine by an unknown writer whose name Fisher would claim during his first lengthy interrogation in the Tower to have forgotten. Nor did he admit at that time to any complicity in the dispatch overseas of a book written by him that one correspondent – a representative of ‘a German prince’ – claimed to have received, or to any other wrongdoing implied by his inquisitors as they pressed home their investigation of his dealings with Warham, More, Thomas Abell and a range of more obscure figures. The possibility of linking Fisher to a foreign ruler was, of course, a particularly tempting prospect even at this stage, since it would have provided grounds at once for a charge of treason, and this indeed may well have been the aim. For there was no mention as yet, significantly, of the oath of succession, which remained, ostensibly, the reason for Fisher’s imprisonment, and a heavy emphasis instead upon other potentially incriminating correspondence, including that with Ralph Baynes, fellow of St John’s and a leading Hebrew scholar, who had sent letters, it was claimed, ‘in which the king’s cause was defamed’. There is the possibility, too, that the questioners were seeking some new disclosure against the former queen herself, since it was widely rumoured that a further Bill of Attainder was to be brought before Parliament against both her and the Princess Mary. But in all respects the search proved barren, as Fisher, sickly though he was, watched his words and held his ground. His responses, it is true, were weary rather than challenging, displaying little of the belligerence that had characterised his more notable performances in Parliament and Convocation and at Blackfriars. Nor did he employ the craft and counter-play of Thomas More under similar interrogation. Yet if the fire in his belly seemed to have waned with the strength of his body, the impression was deceptive, since his spirit was as resilient as ever.
And the same was no less true of John Fisher’s Carthusian counterparts, notwithstanding the fact that within a month of their initial imprisonment, both had taken the oath of succession and been subsequently placed at liberty. For Cromwell, unlike his royal master, had already realised that terror is never more potent than when suitably rationed, and was equally aware by now that the two Carthusians had been confined wholly illegally, since the words of the requisite oath had been included only within the preamble to the Act of Succession rather than the act itself – a technical blunder of the kind not usually associated with its architect, though one of which a sharp legal mind like Thomas More’s had been immediately aware. ‘I may tell thee, Meg,’ More told his daughter at the time of his own imprisonment, ‘they that have committed me hither for refusing this oath not agreeable with the statute are not by their own law able to justify my imprisonment.’ Indeed, the error concerned would actually necessitate a second Act of Succession when Parliament reassembled in November 1534, though such technicalities are unlikely to have featured in the thinking of Houghton and Middlemore who may, in all likelihood, have been kept ignorant of the offending preamble with its implicit repudiation of papal authority. In any event, they were careful to accept the oath only insofar ‘as it might be lawful’, though this was enough to secure their release, on the assumption, no doubt, that, as altogether smaller fry than More and Fisher, they could be consumed at leisure thereafter, when time and opportunity afforded.
In consequence, both arrived home at the Charterhouse as yet unharmed, albeit to a reception that was by no means unequivocal, since even now, it seems, they had moved too far and fast for the rest of their community, most of whom were still intent upon refusing the oath altogether. Indeed, when royal commissioners returned to administer it, they received no adhesions at all, while at a second attempt no more than half a dozen swore. Only on the third occasion, in fact, did the entire community submit – and only then when surrounded by men-at-arms and under express orders from their prior who was still determined, if at all possible, to avoid the sacrifice of his entire community by incurring the brunt of royal displeasure himself. Though the lord mayor had been present, the sullen reluctance of a determined hard core ensured, in fact, that the swearing itself occupied two separate days, since even Prior Houghton’s entreaties did not yield the desired effect at once. Instead, on 24 May, when the commissioners were Bedyll and Edward Lee, only fourteen subscribed, among whom were Houghton and Middlemore, and not until the second day, 6 June, did the rest of the community finally conform in the presence of Lee and another visitor, Thomas Kitson.
But if the submission might nevertheless have implied acceptance of the new status quo, appearances were deceptive, even though for Chauncy, it is true, the danger appeared to have passed:
We all swore as we were required, making one condition, that we submitted only so far as it was lawful for us so to do. Thus like Jonah, we were delivered from the belly of this monster, this immanis ceta [vast fish], and began again to rejoice, like him, under the shadow of the gourd of our home.
Yet even he would appreciate with hindsight that ‘it is better to trust in the Lord than in princes, in whom is no salvation’. ‘God,’ he added, ‘had prepared a worm that smote our gourd and made it perish.’ And the reason was simple, since the Carthusians’ initial opposition to the king was based wholly upon a strong disapproval of his actions rather than a clear appreciation of the more fundamental principles at stake that had already been grasped so readily by Fisher and More alike. As such, the monks could submit at this stage without wholly compromising their consciences upon a matter of faith, though this, as their prior already fully appreciated, could not last indefinitely. Upon his release from the Tower, indeed, Houghton had not only informed his brethren of his submission, but added how he was convinced that his yielding would not protect him long from the destruction he foresaw:
Our hour, dear brethren [he declared in the monastery’s chapter house], is not yet come. In the same night in which we [himself and Middlemore] were set free I had a dream that I should not escape thus. Within a year I shall be brought again to that place, and then I shall finish my course.
Far from being a solution, then, the oaths of May and June were nothing more than a prelude and a final parting point between those monks made for martyrdom and others less stalwart, one of whom subsequently wrote to Cromwell imploring his aid and relating how he had furnished Bedyll with important information about his brethren in the chapter house ‘on Friday after Corpus Christi’ – for which, he complained, the prior had subsequently kept him ‘like an infidel out of sight and speech of all friends’.
In light of what was now to follow, of course, the anonymous informant might well be forgiven his weakness, since the seventh session of the Reformation Parliament, which met from 3 November to 18 December 1534, provided the government with all the requisite tools to crush its opponents definitively. Initially, the government’s policy of religious nationalisation was effectively completed by the Act of Supremacy, which not only granted the king control of clerical discipline, but accorded him the right to try heresy cases and, as such, confirmed his ultimate control of all religious teaching. Much more ominously still for the London Carthusians, however, and especially John Fisher and Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell also seized the opportunity for silencing all opposition by means of a Treason Act, passed simultaneously with the Act of Supremacy, which entailed an unprecedented broadening of the concept of treason to encompass all types of ‘malicious’ attack upon the king, Queen Anne or the succession, including those made even orally or in writing. Designed to root out the seditious ‘imps of the said bishop of Rome’, this so-called ‘law of words’ both legalised the imprisonment of Fisher and More retrospectively and left few, if any, hiding places within the legal foliage. Henceforth, it would be treasonable to call the king a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or usurper, and although it was not made an offence to refuse to answer questions relating to the supremacy until 1536 with the Act Extinguishing the Authority of the Bishop of Rome, there was now little refuge to be had even in honourable silence, as Sir Thomas More would find to his cost.
‘It was,’ said Lord Montague at the time, ‘a strange world as words were made treason,’ and it was a measure of the Treason Act’s stringency that it would be repealed in the very first Parliament of the next reign on the grounds that it was likely to ‘appear to men of exterior realms and many of the king’s majesty’s subjects very strait, sore, extreme and terrible’. It was undeniable that men had been executed for words rather than actions well before 1534 when their utterances had been ‘constructed’ as treason. And dubious evidence, likewise, had always been a feature of political trials: the cases of the Duke of Clarence in 1478 and of the Earl of Warwick in 1499 are striking examples of such miscarriages. Nor, it must be said, were all those arraigned under the new law of treason necessarily subjected to its full rigours. On the contrary, only one in every three prosecutions led to condemnation. When Cromwell heard, for instance, that an absent-minded canon nearing his eightieth year had mistakenly offered prayers for ‘Catherine the Queen’ instead of Anne, he did not press for punishment. Similarly, a drunken servant of the Duchess of Northumberland who had been ‘in danger of his limbs’ for criticising the king was eventually released from prison when his mistress interceded for him on the grounds that he had been insensible at the time and now had no memory of his offence.
Yet the arrest or interrogation of the king’s subjects for such ill-considered remarks undeniably served to create what would become by degrees a pervasive culture of suspicion and denunciation. And even if some two-thirds of those accused of treason were acquitted, pardoned or had their cases dropped, up to 130 people had still lost their lives for ‘treasonable words’ before the decade was out. Certainly, Fisher and More were now brought nearer to the block than ever, though attempts to persuade them of their error remained ongoing. In Fisher’s case, we are told, he was visited ‘several times’ by Bishop Stokesley of London, Stephen Gardiner of Winchester and Cuthbert Tunstall of Durham who acted, the early biographer suggests, ‘against their stomachs, and rather for fear of the king’s displeasure in whom they knew was no mercy’. On another occasion, moreover, a further panel of some ‘six or seven bishops’ came ‘by the king’s commandment’ in hope of prevailing upon Fisher, only to be rebuked by the prisoner for their own inconstancy. ‘The fort is betrayed even of them that should have defended it,’ Fisher is said to have uttered, before telling his audience how he was an ‘old man and looked not long to live’. And when Richard Wilson, his attendant, asked him why he should ‘stick’ more than the rest of the bishops had done, Fisher remained adamant:
Tush, tush, thou art but a fool and knowest little what this matter meaneth but hereafter thou may knowest more. But I tell thee it is not for the supremacy only that I am thus tossed and troubled, but also for an oath, which if I would have sworn, I doubt whether I should ever have been questioned for the supremacy or no.
Gleaned no doubt from Wilson himself, the early biographer’s account leaves little doubt of the pressure to which Fisher was subject as even those close to him enticed him to submit. And there was trickery too, it seems, as both the bishop and Sir Thomas More were assured that the other had actually taken the oath. Fisher, indeed, seems to have accepted this as fact, ‘because he mistrusted not the false trains [deceits] of the councillors’.
Yet this, likewise, ‘could not move him’ and even now in his isolation, cut off from the sacraments of the Church, there were consolations of a kind, not the least of which was a message sent up to him on behalf of the fellows of St John’s College by ‘two of their company, Mr Seton and Mr Brandesby’, which was intended ‘partly to salute him and visit him in the name of the whole house and partly to desire of him the confirmation of their statutes under his seal, which he himself had long before made and drawn in writing but never yet confirmed’. Under the circumstances, perhaps, it was small beer, but though the letter that Seton and Brandesby carried may not have been seen by him directly, it reaffirmed his standing within the institution that had always featured so prominently in his thoughts, and, like a similar letter sent around the same time by Erasmus, was written with deepest warmth and reverence. Referring to ‘the bitter and troublesome cares which of late’ had overtaken him, the writers admitted how they were contacting the prisoner ‘more because they are ashamed to be silent than because they know what is fit for them to say’ and declared that ‘when all others who bear the Christian name, or love their country, lament at this time his troubles and distress, they should be very ungrateful did they not feel a still greater grief’.
You [the letter continues] are our father, our teacher, our preceptor and lawgiver, and above all our pattern of virtue and holiness. To you indeed we owe our sustenance and learning, and whatever we have or know that is good. We have no way of showing our gratitude or of repaying these benefits save by the prayers we continually offer to God on your behalf.
There was an offer, too, of whatever material assistance the college could offer during his stay in the Tower, and above all a reminder that ‘if he pleased men, he would not be the servant of Christ’.
But even such limited consolations were swiftly outpaced by further events. For Fisher would learn only a few weeks later how those same Cambridge colleagues had nevertheless, out of sheer fear, both taken the oath of supremacy and renounced all allegiance to Rome. And as his own university finally deserted his cause, so he found himself cut off, too, before long from the beloved diocese that he had served so devotedly for thirty years. For although the congé d élire to the chapter at Rochester is dated 8 August 1535, Fisher’s removal had actually occurred more than eight months earlier, on 2 January, as a result of an early deployment of the king’s new ecclesiastical authority, and represented in effect the final act of punishment on the Crown’s behalf, short of the executioner’s axe itself. No protest on Fisher’s behalf was forthcoming, no stirring of dissent was even remotely visible, though the irony of the king’s choice of replacement was particularly wounding, since the man concerned was selected from the very Dominican Order whose name was usually synonymous with orthodoxy. For some time, in fact, John Hilsey, the new Bishop of Rochester, had regarded Cromwell as his patron and had actually spent much of the summer of 1534 administering the oath of succession to friaries throughout England. But this was not all. For in claiming poverty upon his appointment, Hilsey would even deign to beg Cromwell for Fisher’s mitre, staff and seal, and be granted his wish – though not without a sneering observation from his benefactor that he was guilty of ‘covetousness’ – before preaching at Catherine of Aragon’s funeral in January 1536, and producing, as a further token of his integrity, a wholly implausible allegation that, in the hour of death, she had acknowledged how she had never been Queen of England.
Plainly, there were healthy pickings to be gleaned from compliance with the new status quo, and Hilsey was not the only figure – whether from self-interest, conviction or a curious mixture of both – to seek them, since the world was changing helter-skelter and, in such circumstances, it was easy enough for those in its midst to be swept along by events and settle for the wisdom and comforts of the herd. For others immured from the world and its ways, however, and therefore more inclined to seek guidance from within than without, absolutes and ‘truth’ were, of course, always likely to be more compelling, so that even Sir Thomas More had by now closed the shutters of his cell, to sit all day in contemplation of the joys of heaven after his correspondence with John Fisher had been discovered and his books removed. When the Tower’s lieutenant had remarked the closed shutters, More had jestingly replied how the shop may be shut when the goods are gone. But Fisher too, it seems, having long since accepted his own fate, if not his kingdom’s, had by this time opted for a similar resort to prayer and devotion. ‘I came to my master while he was saying evensong,’ recorded his servant Richard Wilson in May 1535, confirming that in spite of his abject condition, Fisher was continuing to cling faithfully to the consolations of the only book now in his possession – his breviary.
During his solitary hours, More had already written his Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, and Fisher, likewise, had been busy with his quill before its final removal. Three short books, in fact, were produced by him during his captivity, the most enduring of which are A Spiritual Consolation and The Ways of Perfect Religion, written to his half-sister Elizabeth White, by then a Dominican nun at Dartford in Kent, who was said, at the time of the books’ publication in the reign of Queen Mary, to be ‘so like the said Bishop of Rochester in person’ that the queen herself revered her. Though no match for More’s masterpiece, perhaps, which for wit, pathos and eloquence has, arguably, few equals among literature of its kind, The Ways of Perfect Religion, in particular, is nevertheless a testament to the fruits of a lifetime’s meditation – the summing up, in some respects, of a man’s entire goals – and an inspiring entrée into the thoughts of an individual faced with the ultimate sacrifice for principles that it was now beyond him to forsake. Though Fisher’s treatment of the vanity of life and the need for repentance, not to mention his preoccupation with death, judgement and the wrath to come, may sit uneasily with modern readers, he was no less constant in reminding sinners of the infinite mercy of God and the eternal joys of those who learn to love him. And his final writings show him, in fact, at his rounded, most humane best: more keenly aware than ever that spiritual gain, powered by love, is, in effect, unattainable without physical sacrifice – a point that he makes most famously by reiterating his favourite comparison between the life of the true Christian and that of a hunter:
What life is more painful and laborious of itself than is the life of hunters which most early in the morning break their sleep and rise when others do take their rest and ease, and in his labours he may use no highways and soft grass, but he must tread upon the fallows, run over the hedges, and creep through the thick bushes, and cry all the day long upon his dogs, and so continue without meat or drink until the very night drive him home; these labours be unto him pleasant and joyous, for the desire and love that he hath to see the poor hare chased with dogs. Verily, verily, if he were compelled to take upon him such labours, and not for this cause, he would soon be weary of them, thinking them full tedious unto him. Neither would be rise out of bed so soon, nor fast so long, nor endure these other labours unless he had a very love therein. And therefore I may well say that love is the principal thing that maketh any work easy, though the work be right painful of itself and that without love no labour can be comfortable to the doer.
Though never a sociable or, for that matter, easy man, Fisher’s physical weakness and final incarceration had, from the evidence of his final writings, largely rid him of the pugnacity and irascibility that had, from some perspectives, brought him to this final pass in the first place – leaving, much more visibly than ever, the inner ardour that had driven him all along. Always more a man of the spirit than a man of affairs, his impending martyrdom was indeed his life’s realisation and, as he himself undoubtedly saw it, an essentially welcome release from the vanities that had always sat so uncomfortably with him. As such, it was only fitting, of course, that his final little work should conclude as it did with eight ‘considerations’ or meditations upon the main theme:
O blessed Jesu, make me to love thee entirely.
O blessed Jesu I would fain, but without thy help I can not.
O blessed Jesu, let me deeply consider the greatness of thy love towards me.
O blessed Jesu, give unto me grace heartily to thank thee for thy benefits.
O blessed Jesu, give me good will to serve thee, and to suffer.
O sweet Jesu, give me a natural remembrance of thy passion.
O sweet Jesu possess my heart, hold and keep it only to thee.
The literary tropes and flourishes of scholarship that are so characteristic of Fisher’s earlier works are gone, and we are left with what may be the only true expression of his inner life laid bare, other than a five-page fragment among his miscellaneous papers, tattered and badly mutilated, which contains the following prayer, likely to have been written during the final term of his stay within the Tower: ‘Rescue me from these manifold perils that I am in, for unless thou wilt of thine goodness relieve me, I am but a lost creature.’
How Fisher’s papers were removed from the Tower, we know not. Perhaps Robert Fisher or Richard Wilson smuggled them out, just as the manuscript of Thomas More’s Dialogue of Comfort escaped the authorities, most probably by the skill of his daughter Margaret. Certainly, not all their gaolers were insensitive to both men’s bravery and sufferings. But if lone sympathisers were still inclined to acts of compassion, and the surrounding ring of security remained less than watertight, there was nevertheless no question of ultimate mercy or hesitation on behalf of a government set on sealing what already amounted to a revolution.
As the wheels of State continued to turn, furthermore, it was only to be expected that any brief respite for Carthusian community of the London Charterhouse would be woefully short lived. Indeed, the efforts to bring the monks to compliance with the royal will had been continued throughout the period after their initial acceptance of the oath of supremacy. And since the prior of the Bridgettines of Syon was considered by Cromwell to be particularly zealous in the king’s service, several Carthusians had already been sent to him for advice in the hope of peeling away those of more compliant temperament. Needless to say, Sebastian Newdigate and his fellow future martyrs were spared the effort, but two, William Broke and Bartholomew Burgoyn, both of whom were priests and professed monks, eventually changed sides after long argument, and subsequently thanked the prior for the ‘great pains’ he had taken to win over two others as well, albeit in vain. Maurice Chauncy, too, seems to have forsaken his martyr’s mantle by the same means, since he, along with another Carthusian, was sent to Syon at the end of August 1534, bearing a letter signed by an agent of the government, entreating the prior to reason with them and ‘show charity to them as you have done to others’. They are scrupulous, the writer says, ‘about the bishop of Rome’, but are not ‘obstinate’, and each has a ‘book of authorities’ that must be answered.
But by the time that the term ‘Supreme Head’ was formally incorporated into the king’s title by decree of council on 15 January 1535, it was abundantly clear both to Cromwell and the king himself that whatever the few weaker spirits among the Charterhouse community might do, the Carthusians as a body would resist to the death any further demand for the rejection of papal authority. And now, therefore – with an authority ‘to visit, repress, redress, reform, order, correct, restrain, and amend heresies, errors, abuses, offences, contempts and enormities, whatsoever they be’ – royal commissioners would indeed descend once more upon Prior Houghton’s monks, and not only submit them to an interrogation intended to lay bare at last their secret hostility to the king’s second marriage and ongoing allegiance to Rome, but administer the retribution laid down in law by the new Treason Act, which came into force officially on 1 February. Though no oath was attached to the act, all religious houses in the kingdom were to find themselves forced to swear upon the Gospels their acceptance of the royal supremacy, while any refusal to accept the ‘dignities or titles’ of the king was now to be considered a ‘malicious’ offence, since all loopholes had been closed and any room for manoeuvre finally excluded. As a result, the monks of the Charterhouse, like John Fisher and Sir Thomas More, would have to risk what they considered their eternal salvation or face instead the daunting road to Tyburn.
According to Chancy’s account of what followed, Prior Houghton’s chief concern was for the many younger members of his community whose vocations he had carefully fostered and whose professions he had received. But initially at least, his fears were not so much for their lives as for their religious perseverance if the Charterhouse were suppressed and they found themselves at large once more in the wider world:
When we were all in great consternation [writes Chauncy], he said to us: ‘Very sorry am I, and my heart is heavy, especially for you, my younger friends, of whom I see so many round me. Here you are living in your innocence. The yoke will not be laid upon your necks, nor the rod of persecution. But if you are taken hence and mingle among the Gentiles, you may learn the works of them, and, having begun in the spirit, you may be consumed in the flesh.’
Hoping even now that some accommodation might yet be found, he once again intended to save his monastery and its residents by taking responsibility on behalf of all, and swearing alone to the supremacy, with some words of reservation. But the response, if Chauncy is to be believed, was unanimous: ‘Then all who were present burst into tears, and cried with one voice, “Let us die together in our integrity, and heaven and earth shall witness for us how unjustly we are cut off.”’ And at this, Houghton moderated his position accordingly, still maintaining that the government sought only the elder monks as quarry, yet accepting now that all should die, were he to be wrong:
The prior answered sadly – ‘Would, indeed, that it might be so; that so dying we might live, as living we die. But they will not do to us so great a kindness, nor to themselves so great an injury. Many of you are of noble blood; and what I think they will do is this: Me and the elder brethren they will kill; and they will dismiss you that are young into a world which is not for you. If, therefore, it depend on me alone – if my oath will suffice for the house – I will throw myself for your sakes on the mercy of God. I will make myself anathema; and to preserve you from these dangers I will consent to the king’s will. If, however, they have determined otherwise – if they choose to have the consent of us all – the will of God be done. If one death will not avail, we will all die.’
At this point, Chauncy tells us, Houghton’s voice faltered and he became extremely troubled, as a result of the struggle between his love of God, which made his fear of offending Him intolerable, and, on the other hand, the fear of losing the souls committed to his charge. But he recovered himself sufficiently to set aside three days of preparation within the community for the ordeal ahead: on the first all were to make a general confession of their sins; on the second, led by Houghton himself, all would ask pardon from each of his brethren in turn for any offence caused during their stay together; and on the third, the entire community would attend Mass, sung by the prior himself, in quest of guidance from the Holy Spirit.
No specific mention at this stage is made in Chauncy’s account of the role or reaction of Sebastian Newdigate or any other of the ‘many’ monks ‘of noble blood’ within the Charterhouse. But they, like others, were swept up, it seems, in what Chauncy suggests was the indescribable fervour accompanying the ensuing sung Mass of the third day. For when the moment came for the elevation of the consecrated Host, we are told:
There came, as it were, a soft whisper of the air, faint indeed to outward hearing, but of mighty power within the soul. Some perceived it with their bodily senses; all felt it as it thrilled into their hearts. And there came a sound of melody most sweet, whereat the venerable prior was so much moved, God being thus abundantly manifested, that he melted into a flood of tears, and could not for a space continue the offering of the Mass. The community meanwhile remained stupefied, hearing the melody and feeling its marvellous and sweet effects upon their spirits, but not knowing whence it came nor whither it went. Yet their hearts rejoiced as they perceived that God was with them indeed.
Whether Chauncy, with his characteristic love of the supernatural, had merely embellished the episode or altogether invented it, there is nevertheless little doubt that the Charterhouse’s residents were suitably galvanised as events now gathered pace. For while Houghton awaited the summons from Cromwell, his fellow priors of Beauvale and Axholme visited him. The former, Robert Laurence, was in origin a monk of London; the latter, Augustine Webster, had professed at Sheen. And together all three men now decided to forestall the arrival of Cromwell’s commissioners by seeking an interview with him in which to seek exemption from the obligation of the oath.
Unsurprisingly, however, the quest was in vain, and after a series of three interrogations conducted by the minister in person, they found themselves locked in the Tower on 13 April or thereabouts. When subsequently examined by the members of the king’s council, moreover, Houghton took careful notes, and these – after being somehow read by Fisher – were, it seems, conveyed to the Charterhouse where Chauncy claimed, not altogether implausibly, to have seen them, before they were apparently destroyed. If true, Cromwell roughly brushed aside all qualifications when the three monks professed their willingness to consent to the oath ‘so far as the law of God might allow’. Likewise, when they asserted that the Church had always held otherwise, and that St Augustine had set the authority of the Church above that of Scripture, the minister replied that he cared naught for the Church and that St Augustine might hold as he pleased. His only wish was to know whether they would swear a direct oath or no. At this point the monks refused absolutely – Laurence and Webster both declaring how they could ‘not take our sovereign lord to be supreme head of the Church, but him that is by God the head of the Church, that is the bishop of Rome, as Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine teach’.
Not long before, Houghton and his two colleagues had been joined in the Tower by Father Richard Reynolds, a Bridgettine monk of Syon, and he too was equally adamant, boldly declaring that though ‘he would spend his blood for the king’, the pope’s status remained sacrosanct, and that in stating as much he was merely maintaining what ‘a thousand thousand that are dead’ had maintained before. In all cases, the monks were influenced solely, it seems, by their conviction that a matter of divine faith was at stake. Certainly, the Carthusian Order was in no direct dependence upon the papacy, nor did the pope figure in their statutes. Nor, for that matter, had Houghton and his companions any concern, like Sir Thomas More, with the unity of Christian nations. All that Chauncy suggests, and all that can be extracted from the fragments of Houghton’s notes and recorded sources, confirms that the Carthusian priors, along with Sebastian Newdigate and the other monks of the Charterhouse still awaiting their own ordeal to come, stood purely and simply by the traditional axioms of their Church in the divine commission delivered to St Peter – which made them in the most literal sense of the term, ‘martyrs of the faith’.
Realising as he had no doubt done from the outset that their constancy was unassailable, Thomas Cromwell therefore lost no time in appointing a special commission to try all four men for treason under the Act of Succession. On 24 April 1535 the grand jury was returned, and the trial appointed for Wednesday 28th, on the grounds that the accused ‘did on 26 April, at the Tower of London, in the county of Middlesex, openly declare and say, “the king our sovereign lord, is not supreme head in earth of the Church of England”’ – an offence of verbal treason under the terms of the new Treason Act. The venue for the trial, which occurred over two days, was to be Westminster Hall, though, if both Chauncy and the following account contained in the so-called ‘Arundel Manuscripts’ of the British Library are to be relied upon, the monks’ ultimate conviction was not obtained without considerable browbeating of the jurors:
The jury could not agree to condemn these four religious persons, because their consciences proved them they did not it maliciously. The judges hereupon resolved them, that whosoever denied the supremacy denied it maliciously, and the expressing of the word maliciously in the act was a void limit and restraint of the construction of the words and intention of the offence [i.e. any denial was by definition malicious]. The jury, for all this, could not agree to condemn them, whereupon Crumwell, in a rage, went unto the jury and threatened them if they condemned them not. And so being overcome by his threats found them guilty, and had great thanks, but they were afterwards ashamed to show their faces, and some of them took great [harm] for it.
Thereafter, Archbishop Cranmer made one of his characteristically cautious attempts to save the condemned men, but his offer was unacceptable to Cromwell, and the sentence was duly carried out at Tyburn on Tuesday, 4 May. By royal command, the victims were executed in their monastic habits, with the hair shirts of their Rule beneath, after each in turn had received a further offer of pardon beforehand that was duly spurned. Houghton, the first to die, embraced his executioner and addressed the vast crowd thus:
I call Almighty God to witness, and all good people, and I beseech all here present to bear witness for me in the day of judgement, that being here to die, I declare that it is from no obstinate rebellious spirit that I do not obey the king, but because I fear to offend the majesty of God. Our holy mother the Church has decreed otherwise than the king and parliament have decreed, and therefore, rather than disobey the Church I am ready to suffer. Pray for me and have mercy on my brethren, of whom I have been the unworthy prior.
Whereupon, kneeling down, he recited a few verses of Psalm 31 and resigned himself to the hands of the executioner. Like the other men that followed him – including not only the other Carthusian priors of Axholme and Beauvale but also the Bridgettine, Reynolds, and John Hale, Vicar of Isleworth – Houghton bore the subsequent barbarity, aggravated by the tough hair shirt, with what seemed a more than human patience, invoking the Lord he loved and had followed to the Cross at the age of 48.
That morning, Sir Thomas More’s daughter had been allowed to visit him, and as both watched the beginning of the martyrs’ dreadful journey, More had coined another of his most memorable observations: ‘Lo dost thou not see, Meg, that these blessed fathers be now as cheerfully going to their deaths as bridegrooms to their marriage.’ Whether John Fisher had witnessed the same scene from the Bell Tower is unknown. Certainly, it may have been arranged for him to do so, since the presence of Margaret Roper with her father had probably been specifically intended to weaken her father’s own resolve. Yet, if so, any attempt to influence Fisher was no more effective than in More’s case, as Richard Wilson makes clear in his record of the bishop’s single comment after the execution:
They be gone. God have mercy on their souls.
During the monks’ examination, Wilson recalled, Fisher had prayed only that ‘no vanity subvert them’, though his final remark on their butchery was reserved for George Gold, the lieutenant’s servant, two days after the deed had been done, when he remarked upon the Treason Act how ‘he saw not so great peril in the statute, unless it were done or spoken maliciously, and he marvelled much that the monks were put to execution, saying that they did nothing maliciously nor obstinately’. But if Fisher did indeed remain somehow credulous about his oppressors’ regard for due process, the victims themselves, of course, were already beyond all such qualms and quiddities. Indeed, in the wake of Houghton’s slaughter, and as a fitting token of the king’s wrath, one of his quartered arms had been hung over the archway of the Charterhouse to awe the remaining brothers into submission – albeit in vain, since the ordeal of Sebastian Newdigate, as well as Humphrey Middlemore and another Carthusian, William Exmew, was about to be played out with greater brutality still.
Even while Houghton lay mouldering in prison, government agents were still busy among the residents of the London Charterhouse, endeavouring to secure their compliance, and one of Cromwell’s men, John Whalley, who appears to have been specially appointed to guard the monastery, had written revealingly to his master not only of the resistance he encountered but of what he considered the most appropriate response:
It is of no use for one Mr Rastall [Cromwell’s commissioner] to come there. He pleads, indeed, that you wished him daily to resort hither [but the monks] laugh and jest at all things he speaketh. No question of it, they be exceedingly superstitious, ceremonious, and pharasaical, and wonderfully addict to their old mumpsimus; nevertheless, better and more charitable it were to convert them, than to put them to the extremity of the law.
But if humble John Whalley was hoping somehow to prevail upon his master in the interests of lenity, he was sorely mistaken, and he was no less misguided either in thinking that the resistance now centring upon Middlemore, Exmew and Newdigate could be realistically extinguished by the arguments of ‘some honest, learned’ preachers. For only two days after Houghton’s execution, the ever-dutiful Thomas Bedyll, commissioner for the enforcement of the oath of supremacy, wrote to Cromwell how these three monks in particular were beyond all persuasion. On the very day of the martyrdom of their prior, indeed, he had gone to the Charterhouse, bearing:
Divers books and annotations both of mine own and others against the primacy of the bishop of Rome and also of St Peter, declaring evidently the equality of the apostles by the law of God. And after long communication of more than an hour and a half with the vicar [Middlemore] and procurator of the house [Exmew], I left those books and annotations with them, that they should see the Holy Scriptures and doctors thereupon concerning the said matters, and thereupon conform themselves. And yesterday they sent me the said books and annotations again home to my house by a servant of theirs without any word or writing. Wherefore, I sent to the procurator to come and speak with me, seeing I kept my bed by reason of sickness and could not come to him; and at his coming I demanded of him whether he and the vicar and other of the seniors had seen or heard the said annotations, or perused the titles of the books making the most for the said matters. And he answered that the vicar and he and Newdigate had spent time upon them till nine or ten of the clock at night, and that they saw nothing in them whereby they were moved to alter their opinion. I then declared to him the danger of this opinion, which was like to be the destruction of them and their house forever; and as far as I could perceive by my communication with the vicar and procurator on Tuesday, and with the procurator yesterday, they be obstinately determined to suffer all extremities rather than to alter their opinion, regarding no more the death of their father [Houghton] in word or countenance than [if] he were living and conversing among them.
That Newdigate was mentioned without further elaboration is proof enough that Cromwell was already familiar with his name, and the acquaintance can only be explained, it would seem, by the king’s particular interest in him. Until now, after all, the monk had avoided any degree of prominence, but his resistance at this point was plainly of special personal concern to the king who had known him as both courtier and intimate within his most private circle. If Houghton, therefore, might be dismissed and dispatched as a largely faceless obstacle to the king’s wishes, the same was hardly true of this new figurehead of resistance to the royal will.
Yet far from evoking compassion, the result of the two men’s previous intimacy, as so often with Henry, was merely an increase in outrage and vengefulness on his part, ensuring that Newdigate’s treatment would be even more barbaric. For on 25 May, Newdigate, Middlemore and Exmew were – in the words of Henry Clifford, biographer of Newdigate’s great-niece Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria – ‘drawn out of the cloister with inhuman violence’ and lodged in Marshalsea Prison. Just over two weeks earlier, two of the Charterhouse’s lay brethren had been standing by the gate where Houghton’s severed arm was nailed, when the gory relic supposedly fell down at their feet. Already in possession of the blood-stained hair shirt in which the prior had been martyred, the monks of the monastery then not only removed it, but proceeded to revere it, so that more than a decade later, John Stow would record how on:
July 1 1547, two priests were arraigned and condemned in the Guildhall for keeping of certain Reliques, amongst the which there was a left arme and shoulder of a monke of the Charterhouse, on the which arme was written: ‘It was the arme of such a monke which suffered martirdome under King Henry the Eight.’
And now, in full knowledge of what had occurred and with full awareness of its deathly significance for what lay ahead in his own case, Newdigate no doubt contemplated the relic from the darkness of his Marshalsea dungeon where he and Middlemore and Exmew – men ‘not very aged in years’ yet ‘ancient and reverent in deportment’ – were, according to Clifford, kept ‘fourteen days bound to pillars, standing upright with iron rings about their necks, hands and feet’. Another account, contained in the Arundel Manuscripts, speaks also of a seventeen-day period of confinement, in which the men were bound by ‘great fetters fast ryved [riveted] on their legs with great iron boltts’, as well as ‘iron collors’ and other chains loaded with lead. Unable throughout to sit, ‘never loosed for any naturall necessitie [nor] voiding of ordure or otherwise’, they ate, according to this description, only bread, since the ‘fleshe’ that was offered to them was ‘contrary to ther rule and profession’.
Before their confinement, we are told, the monks had first been brought to Cromwell – ‘to his howse at Stebunheyth [Stepney] a myle frome London’ – where they had persisted in ‘refusing constantlie to acknowledge the Kyng’s supremacie’. But even by the standards of the time, the subsequent harshness of their treatment was exceptional – so exceptional, indeed, that the king himself appears to have momentarily wavered. For on 8 June 1535, the Bishop of Faenza recorded not only how Newdigate and his fellows were ‘in prison with chains around their necks’ but that the king had tried in person to persuade them to recognise his supremacy. Only three days into his confinement at Marshalsea, Newdigate had, it seems, been visited again by Henry, who, according to Clifford’s account, pleaded with him thus:
See how sincerely I love you, Sebastian, and how deep an interest I take in your welfare! Think what kind of return my affection deserves. Return loving obedience for loving condescension, and submit to my laws before it is too late.
Already, the Bishop of Faenza believed, the Carthusians were certain to be condemned – ‘but perhaps not publicly, for fear of the displeasure of the people, which was shown at the death of the others’. Yet this had not prevented a further effort by the king to ease his nagging conscience, which he concluded, characteristically enough, by a reminder to Newdigate of all the graces and favours he had received by royal gift and the subsequent ingratitude he had now displayed in siding with the tiny handful of recalcitrants still resisting. If he were to submit even at the very last, Henry told him – or so, at least, Clifford suggests in his account – the former courtier need not remain a Carthusian at all, and would be loaded instead with riches and honours.
It was, said Clifford, ‘a mighty temptation and a great encounter!’ and one not inconsistent with what we know of the king’s pendulations on other occasions between gusts of fury, remorse, mawkish sentimentality and, of course, shameless self-pity. Clifford, it should be remembered, was an intimate of the granddaughter of Newdigate’s sister, and someone who had resided for many years in her household, witnessing her death and assisting at her funeral. And while he doubtless embellished Newdigate’s subsequent response no less than his description of Henry’s initial pleas, there is little reason to question either the encounter between the king and monk itself, or that he captured the essence of what remains a wholly plausible exchange. For in acknowledging the ‘special and great honour’ that the king had accorded him in visting ‘so undecent a lodging’ and while offering to pray for the king’s ‘health, prosperity and happiness’, Newdigate is said to have remained adamant that, as ‘a religious man’, he was all ‘the more obliged sincerely to speak the truth’. He had retired from court in the first place to protect his soul from ‘the hazards and dangers of the world’, and could not now forsake it when Christ himself had redeemed it ‘with so great cost as the price of His life and the shedding of His most precious blood’. Never, Newdigate concluded, had he been guilty of ‘contempt or obstinacy’ – ‘nor discontent, nor intent of gainsaying, nor counsel of any that hath power to withdraw my submission to the law’ – but had acted only according to ‘the doctrine of the holy Church and law of God, the offence whereof I may not incur’.
Within a fortnight, Newdigate, Middlemore and Exmew were brought before selected members of the Privy Council, examined separately and again questioned about the new Act of Supremacy, which they were told had banished all foreign authority. But, according to Henry Clifford, they remained constant in the face of all interrogations, threats and promises, maintaining throughout that ‘the authority of the Church was not foreign in any Christian country; and that in no sort could they yield to anything not agreeable to the law of God or contrary to the doctrine of our holy Mother the Church’. Nor, it seems, did they waver when subsequently dispatched to the Tower, where Clifford suggests that Newdigate received a further visit from the king, which this time involved more menaces than persuasion. ‘Art thou wiser and holier than all the ecclesiastics and seculars of my kingdom?’ Henry asked, and followed the monk’s denial with a harangue to the effect that just as Newdigate had sought to emulate his former prior in life, so he should now do so in death. For on 1 June a special commission of Oyer and Terminer, including among others the new chancellor, Sir Thomas Audley, Anne Boleyn’s father, the Earl of Wiltshire, the Duke of Suffolk, and Thomas Cromwell as its secretary, was empanelled to try the case, along with a jury, including, as we have seen, a certain John Newdigate Esquire – in all probability the brother of the accused monk.
Finally brought to the bar on Friday, 11 June by Sir Edmund Walsingham, Deputy Lieutenant of the Tower, all three men pleaded their innocence to the charge of treason, and proceeded to defend themselves by ‘citing and alleging divers authorities of the divine Scripture, of the ancient Fathers and of the sacred Canons’. Dressed in their Carthusian habits, they boldly maintained that they were ‘commanded by the word of God’, which ‘it were temerity and sin to opugn’, and confirmed once more their unbending conviction that ‘no temporal prince can arrogate to himself the Church’s government, which the King of kings and supreme Lord Christ Jesus gave and granted to St Peter and his successors’. At which point, according to the following description by Clifford, Sebastian Newdigate was singled out for special attention just as the trial reached its climax:
But before the judge would pronounce sentence of death, he used many reasons and persuasions now at last to yield and conform themselves; assuring them, upon submission, of the king’s mercy, and withal wishing them to consider the loss of so many good parts which might be serviceable to God and beneficial to their country. He spoke of the hastening of their end with an infamous death; the grief of their friends; the scandal of their kindred. In particular he addressed himself to Father Sebastian, repeating to him the nobility of his blood, the honourable allies [links] he had in the kingdom, the duty he owed to His Majesty, having been his servant; the many favours he had received from him; which if they would consider and be submissive, he did assure them that there was place for mercy and pardon.
Once again, however, neither Newdigate nor the others made any reckoning, we are told, ‘of these vain and worldy considerations’. Nor did they react, Clifford suggests, when told of the fate awaiting them. On the contrary:
The Reverend good Fathers heard and received this cruel sentence, answering with alacrity of countenance, Deo Gratias, giving praise to our Saviour Jesus Christ for His gracious favour to make them worthy to suffer for His Faith and the defence of His Church.
Not all were so fulsome in their praise of the monks’ conduct. Writing from the perspective of a convinced Protestant, the MP and chronicler Edward Hall, for instance, described their behaviour thus:
These men, when they were arraigned at Westminster, behaved themselves very stiffly and stubbornly; for, hearing their indictment read, how traitorously they had spoken against the king’s majesty, his crown and dignity, they neither blushed nor bashed at it, but very foolishly and hypocritically acknowledged their treason, which maliciously they avouched, having no learning for their defence: but rather, being asked divers questions, they used a malicious silence, thinking as by their examinations afterwards in the Tower of London it did appear, for so they said, that they thought these men, which was the Lord Cromwell and others that sat upon them in judgement, to be heretics, and not of the Church of God, and therefore not worthy to be answered or spoken unto. And therefore as they deserved, they … were hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyborne, and their quarters set up about London, for denying the king to be supreme head of the Church.
Doubtless, too, there were others of Hall’s persuasion as Newdigate, Middlemore and Exmew made their final, wretched journey to the great triangular gibbet upon which their final agonies were to be played out, though Chauncy tells us how ‘they went to death as to a banquet, receiving it with the greatest alacrity of body and gladness of visage, in the hope of life everlasting’.
The date was 19 June 1535, and ‘being arrived at the place of execution’, Clifford relates, ‘they praised almighty God’. Whereupon:
They untied Father Sebastian from the hurdle with the rope about his neck and put him in a cart; there he commended himself to the prayers of the good assistants; prayed for the king that God almighty would give him long life and health, and His grace to have care of his salvation and of the good of his kingdom that had flourished so long in the Christian religion and in the unity and obedience of Christ’s Catholic Church. He intimated his own innocence both to the king and all the world, and that his death was only for the testimony and defence of the Catholic Church, as their judges could do no less than testify. And so preparing himself to die said in Latin the psalm: ‘In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped, let me never be confounded,’ to the verse, ‘Into Thy hands I commend my spirit: Thou hast redeemed me, O Lord, Thou God of truth.’
Then, Clifford continues:
The cart being drawn away, he remained hanging a very little or no space; or both he and the two other Fathers were cut down, being yet alive; presently bowelled; their bowels cast into the fire, their heads cut off, their bodies quartered, and their quarters set up in the high ways and upon the gates of London.
And so the deed was done, bringing about what Clifford described as the ‘violent death but most happy end of Father Sebastian, an approved valorous gentleman, a perfect religious, and a glorious martyr of Christ Jesus’. ‘Somewhat tall of stature, his body well-proportioned and comely, his aspect lively and settled’, Newdigate had also been blessed, it seems, not only with ‘great courage’ but a pleasing demeanour, ‘carrying with it a natural honesty and remarkable modesty’, all of which, we are told, were ‘much magnified’ by his retirement to the Charterhouse as a young man. His great-niece, meanwhile, would eventually spend the last twelve years of her life at Louvain, becoming ‘a foot to the lame, an eye to the blind, a staff to the weak, a true mother of orphans, and a patroness of widows’, sheltering in her house many of the exiled priests who eventually followed in her great-uncle’s footsteps in the reign of Elizabeth I. And in doing so, she would also keep alive her forebear’s memory by means of her retainer and biographer, relating to him the recollections handed down to her before her death in 1591 and subsequent burial, appropriately enough, in the church of the Louvain Charterhouse – in the midst of the choir, just before the high altar.
By that time too, of course, John Fisher was already long cold in his grave – another casualty of the religious revolution that had driven Lady Jane Dormer and numerous others like her into permanent exile. For three days after Sebastian Newdigate’s execution, Thomas Cromwell and other members of the council, along with Thomas Bedyll, visited the bishop in his cell, in an effort – described in the following account of a subsequent interrogation of Richard Wilson – to extract a definitive incriminating declaration from him that the king could never be Supreme Head:
On Friday [7 May] after Ascension Day last, Mr Secretary [Cromwell] and others of the Council, came to examine Fisher on the Act of the Supreme Head, and this respondent [Wilson] standing in the chamber without the partition, heard some part of the examination. Mr Secretary said they were sent for two things touching the Act of Supremacy; the second point respondent did not hear. Mr Secretary read the Act, and Fisher replied he could not consent to take the king as Supreme Head. The Act was also read to him making it treason to deny the king to be Supreme Head. After supper respondent told his master that he thought Mr Bedyll’s reason weak when he said the king was head of his people, and the people was the Church, with some further observations. The bishop asked if he had been too quick with Mr Bedyll, and respondent said no.
If accurate, it would seem from this that Cromwell now already had what he required: an explicit denial from Fisher of the royal supremacy. But the waters are muddied by a later statement from Wilson affirming that two days after his interrogation, the bishop himself could remember ‘no such thing’, and by the fact that Wilson would subsequently affirm, at one point at least, that he too was unable recall any direct denial of the supremacy on Fisher’s behalf. Worried, nevertheless, that he may unwittingly have uttered the fatal words to Bedyll, Fisher had therefore checked his memory of the encounter against Wilson’s recollection of events, and been assured by his servant that no slip had been made. Moreover, the fact that Wilson was interrogated at such length both initially and subsequently suggests that Fisher had not provided his inquisitors with any clear-cut statement, and that the servant was being pressed for precisely the kind of damning evidence that the bishop himself had failed to provide.
Ultimately, however, Wilson went on to testify how he had visited Fisher later the same day, while he was saying evensong, to tell the bishop that he had indeed told his interrogators ‘that he did not think the king might be Supreme Head’. But Wilson’s evidence, of course, now remained partially tainted by the contradictory nature of his statements – making a further, altogether less ambivalent, declaration necessary to achieve the required outcome in court. Wilson’s evidence had, moreover, been gleaned from the other side of a partition, making his deployment in court even less ideal still. As such, another tack was required, and, if the account of one contemporary, William Rastell, is to be relied upon, the fateful decision was now taken to incriminate Fisher by stealth and deception rather than direct attack. For, according to Rastell, who was a student at Lincoln’s Inn at the time and later a judge during the reign of Mary Tudor, the government secretly dispatched at this point ‘a crafty caitiff’ to tell Fisher that the king required an honest answer regarding the supremacy, on the assurance that ‘no manner of hurt nor harm should come to him’, even were he to suggest that it was ‘directly against the laws of God’.
The message, it seems, was accompanied by a guarantee of good faith upon ‘the word of a prince’, which proved enough, in Rastell’s opinion, to bring forth from Fisher an open declaration that:
He believed directly in his conscience and knew by his learning precisely that it was very plain by the holy scripture, the laws of the Church, the general council, and the whole faith and practice of Christ’s Catholic Church from Christ’s ascension hitherto, that the king was not, nor could be, by the law of God, supreme head of the church of England.
Whereupon, Rastell continues:
When the king was by this messenger ascertained that the bishop had thus plainly declared his opinion against his supremacy, then he was very glad thereof, because he had thereby some plain matter to lay to the bishop’s charge, to arraign him and condemn him for speaking against his supremacy, where before this time by no means any such advantage could be caught against the bishop.
Nor was this particular explanation of Fisher’s final downfall put forward by Rastell alone. For it is also cited by the bishop’s anonymous early biographer, who goes on to name the man responsible for delivering the deception as none other than Richard Rich: the very man who would ensnare Sir Thomas More by similar means, and the only person to provide testimony at Fisher’s trial.
Deception had, of course, already been used against both prisoners when each was told that the other had agreed to the supremacy, in an attempt to break their resistance, and there is no reason to doubt the general opinion, handed down across the centuries, that Rich was more than capable of compromising his conscience in the lucrative service of his master, Thomas Cromwell. Appointed Solicitor-General in 1533, as a direct result of Cromwell’s patronage, Rich had formerly served in Sir Thomas More’s household, but been held in low esteem, ‘always reputed light of his tongue, a great dicer and gamester, and not of any commendable fame’. But both the king and Cromwell were now, with good reason, anxious to conclude matters, especially after news reached England at the end of May that the new pope, Paul III, had taken the offensive in the most drastic fashion possible by appointing Fisher ‘Cardinal-Priest’ of San Vitale. His ostensible motive, as expressed to Gregory Casale, Henry’s agent in Rome, was to gain Fisher’s release for a forthcoming General Council of the Church, since ‘the writings of Rochester were held in great esteem, especially in Germany and Italy’. But his real desire, it appears, was to stage a final attempt to save Fisher’s life, since no cardinal had ever been executed previously, and, at the same time, to throw down a direct challenge to the King of England, presenting him with a Rubicon beyond which there could be no further hope of reconciliation, and trusting that he would blink at last when faced with the precipice.
Certainly it was a bold, and arguably long overdue, step. But it was also one that would effectively ensure the prisoner’s execution. For, as Casale told the pope directly upon hearing the news, ‘no greater blunder had ever been committed’, and it was a view shared, it seems, by the King of France, who was also enlisted by Rome to do what he could for the endangered bishop, but told the papal nuncio in Paris how ‘this [cardinal’s] hat’ was likely to bring only harm. ‘Strange measures’, as he put it, had already been used against the Carthusians, and Henry ‘was the hardest friend to bear in the world: at one time unstable, and at another obstinate and proud, so that it was almost impossible to bear with him’. ‘Sometimes,’ the French king continued, ‘he treats me like a subject. In effect, he is the strangest man in the world, and I fear I can do no good with him.’ And if further proof of Francis I’s contention was required, it was rapidly furnished by Henry’s actual reaction, which was described in a letter from Chapuys to the Holy Roman Emperor, dated 16 June:
As soon as the king heard that the Bishop of Rochester had been created a cardinal, he declared in anger several times that he would give him another hat, and send the head afterwards to Rome for the cardinal’s hat. He sent immediately to the Tower those of his council to summon again the said bishop and Master More to swear to the king as head of the Church, otherwise before St John’s day [24 June] they should be executed as traitors.
Fisher, meanwhile, had heard the rumour of his elevation to the cardinalate from George Gold, servant to the Tower’s Lieutenant, and greeted the news with comparative indifference:
Then said Mr Fisher, ‘A cardinal! Then I perceive it was not for nought that my Lord Chancellor [Thomas Audley] did ask me when I heard from my master the pope, and said there was never a man that had exalted the pope as I had.’
Indeed, according to an official report of Fisher’s own response under interrogation, he had declared, before both Gold and Richard Wilson, that ‘if the cardinal’s hat were laid at his feet, he would not stoop to pick it up’, though that eventuality would never arise, since the hat was blocked at Calais, and all haste was now made to make good the king’s subsequent quip to Thomas Cromwell that ‘whensoever it cometh, he [Fisher] shall wear it on his shoulders, for head shall he have none to see it on’.
On 11 June the interrogation turned to more marginal figures – Richard Wilson, servant to ‘Mr Fisher, doctor of divinity, late bishop of Rochester’; John à Wood, More’s servant; as well as George Gold, John Pewnoll, falconer at Rochester, William Thorneton of Thames Street who supplied the bishop’s food, and Edward White, brother-in-law to Fisher – with the intention of establishing that the prisoner had been in correspondence with Rome regarding his promotion. If so, such letters would have come under the terms of the new laws, and Wilson, in particular, was therefore subjected to especially intense pressure, being ‘very closely shut up also and terribly threatened to be hanged’. Yet neither he nor any of the others produced anything of value, and subsequent interrogations of both Fisher and More bore out the substantial truth of the servant’s answers. Indeed, even when Fisher admitted under examination by Thomas Bedyll on 12 June that letters – ‘four or thereabouts’ – had been passed by Gold between himself and More, nothing treasonous could be established about their content, though all had been ‘burned as soon as he read them’.
Plainly, the semblance, if not the spirit, of due legal process was still intact. But if the government could not convict by guesswork and imputation, it could nevertheless condemn by suspect laws and crudely contrived evidence, as was demonstrated all too forcefully when ‘one John Fisher, late of the city of Rochester, otherwise called “Dominus” John Fisher, late Bishop of Rochester’, finally faced his accusers in Westminster Hall on 17 June, charged with ‘falsely, maliciously and traitorously’ declaring on 7 May that ‘the king our Sovereign Lord is not Supreme Head in earth of the Church of England’. ‘Not having God before his eyes’, the indictment declared, the accused had been ‘seduced by diabolical instigation’ and traitorously imagined, invented, practised, and attempted to deprive the king of his full and rightful dignity, ‘contrary to the form of another act passed the twenty-sixth year of the King’s reign’, i.e. the Treason Act. As with all State trials of the period, Fisher was to be allowed no counsel, nor could his witnesses, if the court allowed them to be called, be heard on oath. And in consequence, the hearing, true to type, amounted to little more than a verbal duel between the defendant and Crown lawyers who held all the advantages before a jury that was expected to deliver but one verdict. Separated by a high barrier from the main part of Westminster Hall, the spectacle – or what one contemporary, William Rastell termed ‘this woeful tragedy’ – would be played out in the court known as King’s Bench.
In the meantime, Fisher had been brought from the Tower, it seems, ‘part by horseback, part by water, because he was yet so little recovered of his feebleness and infirmity that he was not able to walk or go anything’. But Rastell’s account adds, too, how he travelled ‘with a great number of bills, and glaives and halberts and the axe of the Tower borne before him’. Wearing ‘a black cloth gown’, he had known his fate, of course, long before the king’s ‘secret messenger’ had finally elicited the necessary evidence from him, though he delivered, nevertheless, a plea of not guilty, on the grounds, Rastell tells us, that his final denial of the royal supremacy had been made upon the specific request of the king and under guarantee ‘that I should never be impeached nor hurt by mine answer … which I would never have spoken had it not been in trust of my prince’s promise and of my true and loving heart towards him’. Whereupon, Rastell continues:
This shameless beast, this mischievous messenger [i.e. Richard Rich], said that true it was that he declared unto him that message from the king and by the king’s commandment made him that assured and faithful promise from the king, and sware also to him as he said. ‘But all this,’ quoth this wicked witness, ‘do not discharge you any wit.’
Even by the flimsy standards of the day, the evidence was not only tainted, but undisguisedly so. Yet on Richard Rich’s testimony alone, Fisher’s judges remained wholly entitled to conclude that ‘he by the statute committed treason’ and that ‘nothing might discharge him now of the cruel penalty of death appointed by the statute for speaking against the king’s supremacy, howsoever the words were spoken’.
Beyond the fact that the whole process was concluded within a day, little else is known of the trial. In 1836, the legal records of the Court of King’s Bench were transferred to the custody of the Master of the Rolls, and among these was what had become known as the Baga de Secretis, comprising ninety-one pouches, the seventh of which contained the records of the trials of Fisher, More and the three Carthusian monks. But there was no record of evidence tendered or speeches made, and we are left primarily with the description left by Rastell, which also formed the basis of the account produced by the anonymous early biographer. Whether, therefore, the Crown had indeed done more to prove its case remains unknown, though Rich, as one more member of that merry band of ambitious politici who abounded in sixteenth-century affairs of state, would certainly play an identical role at Sir Thomas More’s trial a fortnight later, while Rastell himself was certainly present at Fisher’s execution and may well have been an eyewitness to the trial itself. Certainly, as a judge of the same court during the reign of Queen Mary, he was well placed to glean the evidence and gather the recollections of those who really were present. But now, in any event, John Fisher was at last a dead man, returning under sentence to the Tower, and followed – as the Imperial ambassador, Chapuys, told his counterpart Dr Ortiz in Rome – ‘by a crowd of men and women in great grief who demanded his blessing when he crossed the water’.