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They all attend Mass every day and say many Paternosters in public – the women carrying long rosaries in their hands, and any who can read taking the Office of Our Lady with them, and with some companion reading it in church, verse by verse, in a low voice after the manner of churchmen. They always hear Mass every Sunday in their parish church, and give liberal alms, because they may not offer less than a piece of money, of which fourteen are equivalent to a golden ducat; nor do they omit any form incumbent on good Christians; there are, however, many who have various opinions concerning religion.
From The Italian Relation, an account of the island of England, written by a Venetian in 1497.
For those in search of English history’s most momentous documents, a worthy candidate may surely be found approximately 6 miles south-west of the bustling Spanish metropolis of Valladolid, on the road to Zamora and the right bank of the river Pisuerga, in the small but picturesque town of Simancas. Home to slightly more than 5,000 souls, the place is these days primarily an agricultural centre, boasting a deserved reputation for its poultry. But it remains also the location of an impressive citadel, built in the sixteenth century by the architects Juan de Herrera, Alonso Berruguete and Juan Gómez de Mora, which has the distinction of being the first building of the modern era created exclusively to house a nation’s archives. Lodged in some forty-six rooms and arranged in upwards of 80,000 bundles containing no fewer than 33 million documents, are to be found each and every major record produced by government bodies relating to the Spanish monarchy since the time of the Catholic Monarchs, dating from 1475, through to the establishment in 1834 of what became known as the Liberal Regime. And it is within this same Archivo General de Simancas, established by Philip II in 1563 and sometimes called the Archivo General del Reino, that there resides a striking parchment of outstanding significance, lettered in gold and beautifully embellished with the royal arms of Spain and red rose of Lancaster, which would change the course of history: the marriage treaty between the future Henry VIII, at that time newly heir to the Tudor throne, and the Trastámara princess known to posterity as Catherine of Aragon, daughter to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Finally signed by Henry VII on 3 March 1504, after its agreement at Richmond during the previous summer, the treaty set the seal upon a marriage like few others before or after – one that was to prove problematic from its very conception, and which marked, unbeknown to its progenitors, the beginning of the end for the entire fabric of Roman Catholic influence in England.
Yet never, arguably, had the Roman Catholic Church in that realm been more securely entrenched nor the prospect of Catholic martyrs from within its ranks more remote than upon Henry VIII’s succession in 1509. On the one hand, the so-called Ecclesia Anglicana – a term encompassing the entire clerical estate within the kingdom – was not only firmly protected by sanctions and support from its base abroad, but strengthened by wide-ranging privileges and immunities enshrined in native law and consecrated by long custom. At the same time, its leading bishops were central to the council of the king, whose bureaucracy, such as it was, still largely comprised clergymen. Its services were necessary on all important occasions in life – at christenings, marriages and funerals. Its courts determined all matrimonial cases, ratified or refused to ratify all wills, and took cognisance, too, of all transgressions of the moral law, rendering both the fornicator and the village scold alike subject to its punishment. And this was merely the iceberg tip of the Church’s more general prominence in the fabric of everyday life. For merchant guilds and craft guilds still boasted their own thriving chantry chapels to succour the souls of their departed, and besides administering all charitable funds, the clergy almost entirely controlled education and hospitals, amply assisted at other levels by the kingdom’s parish churches, which remained indispensable centres of social life.
Shortly before his death at the age of 88 early in the next century, Roger Martyn, churchwarden of Long Melford in Suffolk, left a rich and vivid account of a religious world that was by then already a distant memory: a world closely replicated, moreover, throughout the other 9,500 parishes of Tudor England, and, in consequence, one that was never likely to be lightly supplanted when the time for reformation finally dawned. For Martyn, unlike the small minority of Protestant sceptics who actively endorsed the changes, would find the spiritual reorientation from a Catholic mental universe of supportive saints and saving sacraments to a Protestant one of justifying faith, nurtured by sermons and Bible-reading, a decidedly painful one. And for most others too, if only out of long familiarity with its everyday rhythms and undoubted consolations, the abandonment of the old religion’s ways was equally perplexing. On the one hand, Martyn lovingly recalled the festivals of the Church’s year, when on Palm Sunday, for example, the people of Long Melford processed around their churchyard with the consecrated host (a communion wafer) borne aloft under a canopy carried by four yeomen of the village. On Maundy Thursday, meanwhile, candles were set in a painted frame before the Easter sepulchre, and on Good Friday the priest sang the Passion service from the rood loft, standing next to the rood itself, which had been veiled throughout Lent. On St Mark’s day, too, and at Corpus Christi there were processions around Long Melford’s green, once again with the consecrated sacrament featuring prominently, along with bell-ringing and singing, while in Rogation week there were prayers ‘for fair weather or rain, as the time required’, as well as great celebrations involving ale and a parish dinner on Rogation Monday, a breakfast of cheese at the rectory on Tuesday, followed later by ale at the manor house chapel, and ale at Melford Hall on the Wednesday.
And this, of course, was only one limited segment of a packed parish calendar that bound the Church of Rome so inextricably to the habits and sentiments of ordinary Tudor men and women. On the eve of St James’s day there was a village bonfire, with a tub of ale and bread for the poor, and there were bonfires and ale, too – this time in front of the Martyns’ own house – on Midsummer eve as well as the eve of Saints Peter and Paul. For the St Thomas’s eve bonfire, in its turn, the family provided mutton pie and peascods in addition to the usual bread and ale, ‘and with all these bonfires’, Martyn tells us, some of the friends and ‘more civil poor neighbours’ were called in to dine by candlelight with his grandfather, as a taper burned before the image of St John the Baptist in the hall. Always there were priests on hand, and usually in numbers, since Long Melford was a prosperous cloth-producing village, boasting no fewer than four chaplains, three of whom were chantry priests, whose main duty was to perform the all-important task of celebrating Masses for the salvation of souls nominated, more often than not, by wealthy benefactors. Reducing by their prayers the time spent by dead souls in purgatory, these same chantry priests were also responsible for assisting in the daily worship of the parish at large, and in some cases teaching at schools supported by patrons’ endowments. And when it is remembered that these same men were frequently assisted by additional clergy, sometimes employed for a year or two by a local guild, as well as the sixty or so monks housed at the great Benedictine monastery of nearby Bury St Edmunds, the scale of the Church’s presence, as well its ability to intervene in everyday life, becomes all the more apparent.
No doubt, Martyn paints an idyllic picture of a merry Melford of yesteryear, where goodwill flourished, and parish life followed a timelessly untroubled course. He makes no mention of the fact that the village’s poorer workers had joined an anti-tax rebellion in 1525, or that, for much of his childhood, his local church was in the spiritual charge of William Newton, a frequently absent pluralist rector, who held various ecclesiastical offices throughout East Anglia. Enjoying an annual income of £28 2s 5d from Long Melford alone – more than three times the average income of most English priests, and perhaps ten times that of an agricultural worker – Newton was hardly the most shining example of priestly diligence, let alone Christian poverty. Yet he, and others like him much less worthy still, were nevertheless rendered wholly credible to the vast majority of their flocks by the huge and complex organisation that sustained them. For each and every one of the 2.5 million men, women and children of early Tudor England were automatically members of the Church of Rome. All were required to attend Mass on Sundays and festivals, to fast on appointed days, and to make confession to a priest and receive communion at least at Easter, while those with wages, profits or produce were bound to contribute to the upkeep of their parish priests and churches by tithes.
And in the meantime, clerics of various types and categories continued to abound, as did the ceaselessly chiming bells in town and village steeples, calling the king’s subjects to prayer and devotion. For although the recruitment of clergy had slumped in the late fourteenth century, by the mid-fifteenth it was booming once again, not least as a result of energetic lay endowment of Masses, and the improved reputation of priests resulting from the fact that criticism of churchmen had become associated with heresy and threats to the social order. Between the Parliament of 1410 and that of 1529, there had even been less lay complaint about the customary bugbear of clerical wealth, so that new recruits to the priesthood came forward confidently and with healthy prospects for the future. In Kent, where parishes were small, there were nevertheless two clerics on average to serve their parishioners’ needs, while in Lancashire, where parishes were very large, there might sometimes be as many as seven or eight, even excluding those other clergy, found in Long Melford and up and down the country at large, who, as we have seen, said Masses for cash and found occasional work where they could. As a result, there were some 40,000 so-called ‘secular’ priests, alongside another 10,000 in the ‘regular’ orders of monks and friars, complemented by a further sub-category of deacons and subdeacons progressing towards priesthood, and as many as 2,000 nuns. No other body could compare in scale or boast a bureaucracy to rival the king’s own, and no other organisation could potentially offer such resistance to the Crown, in the unlikely event of a contest. For Church professionals numbered roughly one fortieth of the population, and about 4 per cent of all males, and the Church itself controlled enormous wealth, derived from ownership of at least one fifth of the kingdom’s land. Should any ruler therefore attempt a challenge, let alone a wholesale frontal assault, the enterprise was likely be risky. To attempt a root and branch dismantlement was sure to be. Certainly, there would be resistance: the only question its scale, intensity and duration. And where resistance occurred, there were equally sure to be casualties – particularly among those representing figureheads, however unconsciously, reluctantly or otherwise.
Even so, under all normal circumstances, the likelihood of any significant confrontation between State and Church remained minimal, not least because the Church itself was so anxious, wherever possible, to accommodate the wishes of the princes falling under its theoretical ambit. In 1208, Innocent III had suspended all church services in England, and excommunicated King John, to impose Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury. But even Henry II, who had made humble submission to Rome after Thomas Becket’s murder, ultimately achieved most of his objectives, while the confrontation between Edward I and Archbishop Winchelsey in 1297, over royal taxation of the clergy, had resulted in a speedy resolution in the king’s favour. Even in 1341, when Archbishop Stratford claimed that Edward III was infringing the privileges of the clergy over jurisdiction and taxation, and subsequently excommunicated Crown servants, the eventual outcome was a compromise solution, in which both sides backed down. And when Clement VI’s appointments of clerks to English benefices proved too numerous, the result was the Statute of Provisors – a countermeasure enacted in 1351 and followed by further restrictions four decades later. Churchmen themselves, significantly enough, had protested against papal intrusion at that time, and when Martin V appointed Bishop Beaufort his legate a latere, the nomination was successfully rejected by both Henry V and Archbishop Chichele. Thereafter, there was no serious conflict between England and the Holy See, merely disputes over abuse rather than struggles over principle. Never were there martyrs. And nor was it ever likely to be otherwise when so many leaders of the English Church were themselves royal officials, with no taste for constitutional crises, and when hard political reality guaranteed that a king, with the assistance of his lay magnates, could invariably bend the clergy to his will. As a result, English bishops gladly embraced royal authority, and in return kings readily supported churchmen against heresy and lay critics of their role.
Yet this is not to suggest, of course, that an organisation so pervasive was without flaws, or to deny that there were those all too ready to rail against ecclesiastical abuses of various descriptions. In The Obedience of a Christian Man, published in 1528, William Tyndale scoffed at the ‘wily tyranny’ of ecclesiastical authority and exhibited nothing but cold contempt and sarcasm for the clergy in general and bishops in particular, who, in his view, were not merely content ‘to reign over king and emperor and the whole earth’, but sought to ‘challenge authority also in heaven and in hell’. From the highest to lowest ranks of the Church hierarchy, if Tyndale is to be believed, there was nothing but unbridled avarice. ‘The parson sheareth,’ he wrote, ‘the vicar shareth, the parish priest polleth, the friar scrapeth, and the pardoner pareth; we lack but a butcher to pull off the skin’. And in the meantime, through practices like confession, whereby they ‘knew all secrets’, the clergy kept their flocks in passive subservience, though they themselves could often scarcely read – a bone of particular contention, it seems, for many reformers of Tyndale’s scholarly mould:
I daresay that there are some 20,000 priests, curates this day in England, and not so few that cannot give the right English unto this text in the Paternoster, Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in coelo et in terra, and the answer thereunto.
The supposedly heavy financial burdens imposed in the form of tithes, mortuary and probate fees, Peter’s Pence, annates, indulgences, dispensations, etc., were another regular source of dissatisfaction for those with axes to grind. ‘Is it not unreasonable,’ asked Thomas Starkey, ‘the first fruits to run to Rome, to maintain the pomp and pride of the Pope, yea, and war also, and discord among Christian princes as we have seen by long experience?’ Similarly, the materialism and worldliness of cardinals and bishops, which contrasted so starkly with the ideals of apostolic poverty and Christian humility that they claimed to espouse was also being loudly condemned in some quarters. It was John Colet, for instance, who first coined the phrase ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’ in connection with the English episcopacy, and nepotism, simony, pluralism and absenteeism had all become favourite targets of anticlerical bile. To cap all, the leading clergyman in England, Thomas Wolsey, seemed to epitomise all that was wrong with the institution whose power he wielded so domineeringly. ‘One cross,’ declared the Italian Polydore Vergil, ‘is insufficient to atone for his sins.’
Monks, in their turn, attracted more than their fair share of criticism at a time when tales of decadent ‘abbey lubbers’ abounded and it was widely mooted that if the Abbot of Glastonbury bedded the Abbess of Shaftesbury their bastard would surely become the richest landowner in England. Christopher St German, on the other hand, pointed to priests who played ‘at Tables’ and other illicit games, while even Thomas More observed of the parish clergy that ‘many were lewd and naught’. Erasmus’s Colloquies make taunting reference to prebendaries and their concubines, and parsons who were sots, while as early as 1486 Cardinal John Morton had condemned priests addicted to field sports, as well as those who wore secular clothes and let their hair grow long, or who loitered in taverns. And before the 1520s were out, Simon Fish, a barrister of Gray’s Inn, would publish his famous Supplication of Beggars, which amply reflected the full venom of the Church’s most vociferous critics. In it, among other things, he denounced the pope as a ‘cruel and devilish bloodsupper drunken in the blood of saints and martyrs of Christ’. The clergy, too, were depicted as immoral perverters of God’s word, and Fish beseeched his sovereign accordingly ‘to tie these holy idle thieves to the carts to be whipped naked about every market town’.
Yet a prudent judge reads the work of an agitator like Fish with appropriate caution and, in spite of his passionate rantings, the old religion, though embattled, was far from crisis. In fact, complaints about corrupt or decadent clergy were neither new, as any student of Langland and Chaucer can attest, nor especially widespread. By no means all members of the episcopacy were as corrupt as Wolsey, and the much maligned parish clergy were, in the main, a willing enough bunch, in spite of all the anticlerical vitriol that Fish and others might pour upon them. Nor were the judicial and financial burdens imposed upon the king’s subjects as intolerable as high-profile scandals and lurid tales of the day might suggest. Besides which, many of the Church’s deficiencies were, in any case, readily acknowledged by some of its most eminent leaders, while schemes for improvement remained ongoing. Indeed, when denunciations of the Church’s worldliness occurred, they tended in the main to come from priests themselves: from moral reformers such as Thomas Gascoigne, chancellor of Oxford University at various points between 1439 and 1453, or from humanist scholars such as John Colet, enthused by their exposure to the so-called ‘New Learning’.
Colet, in fact, had returned from study in Italy in 1496 and thereafter lectured in Oxford on St Paul’s epistles, bringing with him a new style of scriptural exegesis, which applied the principles of Renaissance classical scholarship to the biblical text, and led him to a renewed fervour for the re-creation of primitive Christianity. As a result, in 1498 he condemned the Church’s compromises with the world and its values, and demanded that bishops and priests should eschew royal service and the race for profits and promotion. After which, as Dean of St Paul’s, he preached the same message to the Canterbury Convocation in 1510, pointing out that the clergy were guilty of ‘pride of life’, ‘lust of the flesh’, ‘covetousness’, and ‘worldly occupation’, and calling for ‘the reformation of ecclesiastical affairs’ on the grounds that ‘never was it more necessary’. Elsewhere, moreover, he was even more outspoken. In his lectures on the Hierarchies of Dionysius, for example, he seemed so obsessed with the wickedness of the day that he could see nothing else:
O Priests! O Priesthood! O the detestable boldness of wicked men in this our generation! O the abominable impiety of these miserable men, of whom this age contains a great multitude, who fear not to rush from the bosom of some foul harlot into the temple of Christ, to the altar of Christ, to the mysteries of God.
Yet even so outspoken a critic as Colet recognised, too, that ‘the diseases which are now in the Church were the same in former ages’, and acknowledged that canon law had provided the requisite remedies. ‘The need, therefore,’ he concluded, ‘is not for the enactment of new laws and constitutions, but for the observance of those already enacted.’
This, then, was certainly no proto-Protestant, embittered to the point of rebellion by either the ecclesiastical structure or the Church’s sacramental system. On the contrary, Colet was a high clericalist, anxious to maintain the privileges of priests by raising their prestige. And the same was equally true of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester from 1504, whose famous preaching skills were often turned to good effect in echoing Colet’s themes. The clergy, in Fisher’s view, ‘were wont, and indeed ought still, like lights to the world to shine in virtue and godliness’, though at the present time ‘there cometh no light from them but rather an horrible misty cloud or dark ignorance’. For as Fisher made clear in his Penitential Psalms, only the ministrations of a virtuous priesthood could bring the laity to Christ and through him to salvation:
All fear of God, also the contempt of God, cometh and is grounded of the clergy, for if the clergy be well and rightfully ordered, giving good example to others of virtuous living, without doubt the people by that shall have more fear of Almighty God. But contrary-wise, if the clergy live dissolutely in manner, as if they should give no account of their life past and done before, will not the lay people do the same?
Like Colet, therefore, Fisher clearly held the highest possible view of the priesthood and its privileges, since both his theology and personal spirituality led him to stress the prevalence of sin and the necessity of repentance to avoid God’s fearsome punishment. And it was this, above all else, that explains his fears that the worldly clergy of his day were failing to proclaim Christ’s call for penitence with proper evangelical fervour. Yet just like Colet, too, he was conscious of the deficiencies of the clergy, not because they were acute or worsening, but because any defects – even comparatively minor ones – were bound to threaten the salvation of men and women. As such, it was Fisher’s pastoral concern to save souls rather than the actualities of clerical life that made him such a critic of priests. And it was this self-same concern for souls that made him a model bishop in his own right, amply fulfilling the episcopal ideal set before Convocation by Colet.
No member of the episcopacy could, in fact, have embodied more effectively the self-same diligence that Fisher demanded from his peers, though most already were doing much of what both he and Colet demanded. For while Bishop James Stanley of Ely, a son of the first Earl of Derby, did indeed sire three children (apparently by his housekeeper) and live the life of a great lord – hunting with neighbours and retainers, building magnificently, especially at Manchester, and neglecting his pastoral duties at every turn – he remained a striking exception to the general rule: an unworthy aristocrat foisted on the Church by family connection and royal patronage. By contrast, bishops like Blythe of Lichfield, Mayhew of Hereford, Nykke of Norwich, Oldham of Exeter, Sherburne of Chichester, Smith of Lincoln, and, of course, Fisher of Rochester were all energetic administrators, determined to maintain clerical discipline, along with the highest possible level of pastoral care. And while Archbishop William Warham’s attention may have been distracted from Canterbury by his responsibilities as primate and Lord Chancellor, he too found time to take part in a careful diocesan visitation of 1511–12 and employed effective deputies, such as Cuthbert Tunstall, to meet those needs he himself could not. Likewise, Fox of Winchester, who had previously been immersed in his role as Lord Privy Seal, nevertheless withdrew from government in 1516, to throw himself into diocesan business, while only two English bishoprics – those of Bath and Wells, and Worcester – were held by absentee Italians, hired by the king as his representatives in Rome.
Even the sullied reputation of the papacy itself, for that matter, had no more destroyed the allegiance of most Englishmen to the See of Rome than the commitment of their kings to the faith they considered themselves born to protect. Lewd tales heard outside the Flaminian Gate in Rome had certainly lost nothing in the telling by the time they reached English shores, while stories that in Italy were lightly dismissed as little more than merry yarns continued to excite grating indignation in London taverns and Cotswold cottages alike. Some popes, as not a few of the king’s subjects well knew, had become far more renowned for their toxicological wizardry than for their pastoral gifts as ‘Vicars of Christ’, while others, such as Julius II, seemed to confirm the papacy’s widespread reputation for greed and immorality. Not only did this particulary dazzling example of papal excess personally conduct an armed vendetta against his rivals in vice, the Borgias, but he did so in specially commissioned silver armour. Moreover, when not demolishing his enemies, Julius seemed to busy himself mainly with marvellously extravagant building projects, involving Raphael, Bramante and Michelangelo. It was he, for instance, who laid the foundation stone of the new Basilica of St Peter and bequeathed to posterity the Sistine Chapel. But, in the meantime, he also saw fit to fashion a family of at least three illegitimate daughters before finally falling prey to the scourge of syphilis in 1513. And his successor, Leo X, was, it seems, no less inclined to cherish visibility. The son of Lorenzo de Medici, he had been an abbot at the age of 7, a canon at 8 and a cardinal at 13, while later, as pope, he would trade in more than 2,000 ecclesiastical appointments with a value of 3 million ducats and be accompanied on procession by Persian horses, a panther, two leopards and, for additional effect, his pet elephant, Hanno, whose portrait was painted by Raphael.
Yet when Julius II was elected in 1513, the mayor and aldermen of London attended a Te Deum at St Paul’s in honour of the occasion, and nationwide prayers for the Holy Father and the good of the Church continued to be conducted long afterwards. In 1490, they had been commanded in conjunction with similar prayers for the king and his realm, but as late as 1527 they were directed to the restoration of the pope’s liberty, following the sack of Rome. In the meantime, as papal appeals for assistance against the advance of Islam in the eastern Mediterranean and along the Danube valley continued to attract support in England, the Holy City remained a popular destination for English pilgrims. Records of the English College in Rome, for example, reveal a constant stream of visitors who were received in the English hospital there: eighty-two in the six months from November 1504 to May 1505; 202 in the year between May 1505 and May 1506; and 205 in the year after that. Not all, it is true, were necessarily pilgrims, since some described as merchants and sailors may well have been in Rome in the normal course of their work. But a letter to Thomas Wolsey written in 1518 made clear that increasing numbers of pilgrims were indeed creating extra costs for the hospital, and there is little doubt either that some Englishmen were already prepared to hazard their lives on the Church’s behalf. For according to a contemporary Durham register, three men – from Brancepeth, Chester-le-Street and Morpeth – made vows of commitment in 1499 in response to a crusading indulgence issued by the pope the previous year. And while Henry VII resisted papal attempts to levy a crusading tenth directly, he, too, nevertheless agreed to donate money to the fight against the Turk, as did Henry VIII later. Various English Knights of St John are known at the same time to have served in Rhodes, and when English representatives at Valladolid reported on Spanish campaigns against the Moors, there were references not only to English fighters but to those English soldiers captured and in need of ransom.
Similar enthusiasm had, in fact, also infected the very king who would eventually see fit to sunder all ties with Rome – not least because crusading ideals conformed so neatly with his own ongoing perception of himself as a Christian warrior-prince. Piety was, after all, an integral part of the chivalric culture that Henry VIII had absorbed from his Burgundian forebears, and his own Knights of the Garter, in their turn, remained every bit as devoted to their faith as they were to deeds of heroism. Henry saw himself, in fact, quite literally in the mould of the Arthurian Sir Belvedere, and early in the reign when his blood was running especially freely, he had not hesitated to speak boldly of conquering Jerusalem with a mighty army of 25,000 men. Indeed, he had even seen fit to request four galleys from Venice to assist his proposed exploits. And although this particular rush of blood had soon abated, it was not long before he was stirred to even wilder flights of fancy. For when, in 1516, Selim the Grim’s Ottoman Turks subdued the Holy Land, Henry was soon aflame once more after Leo X’s earnest appeal for aid from Christian knights, proclaiming at the time of Cardinal Campeggio’s visit to England two years later how he would not hesitate to place everything in his possession at the pope’s disposal. His personal wealth and treasure, his royal authority and even his kingdom itself, he declared, might all be gladly rendered up in the sacred cause of defending Christendom against the infidel.
But no less important to the Church’s well-being, arguably, than the endorsement of kings was the ongoing support and devotion of altogether humbler folk, held fast, on the one hand, by the grip of long-standing custom, and consoled, on the other, by a range of practices offering hope at a time when life expectancy was low, pain an unavoidable price of life, and divine judgement ever-impending. For every parish church in Tudor England had on its walls the sad fading garlands betokening the death of young virgins, while both purgatory and hell itself – with its everlasting agonies ‘more grievous and hard than all the nails and pikes in the world’ – were never more than a failed heartbeat or horse’s stumble away, making the Church not only an indispensable prop in this life but an equally compelling investment for the next. In consequence, even individuals like Etheldreda Swan, a woman of very modest means who lived in a village near Cambridge, saw fit to endow their parish churches with what little they had left upon their deaths – in her case, a shilling apiece for the local church’s high altar, bells and torches; 20d towards its repairs; her best coverlet and a sheet to one of the chapels, along with 6s 8d to another church nearby. Most significantly of all, perhaps, she gave 13s 4d to ‘Our Lady’s light’ in comparison to merely 7d for her own funeral (including 2d for the bellringers).
Nor was the piety prompting such death-bed generosity confined to the poor and sparsely educated. In July 1532, in the western extremity of Somerset, an affluent gentleman called James Hadley left one shilling to every church in four of the county’s hundreds and one shilling to every parish priest. He left a shilling, too, to every unbeneficed cleric in the diocese of Bath and Wells, and £1 to every religious house – except Glastonbury, which was to have £2. The sum of 5s was bequeathed to the high altars of six named churches and a shilling to their side altars, so that he might have his name entered on their beadrolls (the list of deceased folk to be remembered at Mass). And still the list of Hadley’s bequests went on: £2 for the repair of a reliquary in his parish church; money for thousands of Masses; 4d for every householder in eight towns; and gifts of money not only for his tenants, but for prisoners in Wells and Bristol, as well as for a bridge, some hospitals and a lazar house. And as a final benevolence, ‘forasmuch as I have been negligent to visit holy places and going on pilgrimage’, he also left gifts of money to twelve shrines, including Walsingham, Canterbury, Hailes Abbey, Henry VI’s tomb and pilgrimage centres nearer home, along with a further £5 for the construction of a chapel in honour of the Visitation and St Christopher.
Hadley’s will and the sheer volume of others like Etheldreda Swan’s could not, in fact, have demonstrated more aptly either the ongoing vitality of the old religion or the belief system that sustained it, however vulnerable they both eventually proved to be. For the intellectual and political ferment that would ultimately underpin the drive to reformation was still a gaping gulf away from the sympathies, sentiments and concerns of ordinary, and indeed more exalted, folk, who continued to adhere so comfortably to those habits disdained by the standard bearers of religious change. No amount of detailed reasoning or high-browed biblical exegesis could, for example, dislodge believers from their long-held devotion to the saints, which had rendered St Apollonia a tried and trusted cure of toothache, St Osyth an indispensable aid to women who had lost their keys, and left even pickpockets with their very own patron in St Nicholas. The females at Arden made offerings to St Bridget for their sick cows, while in St Paul’s Cathedral stood the statue of St Wilgefort, known appropriately as the Maid Uncumber, who was said to rid women of their unwanted husbands, if they offered her oats. And where there was the prospect of saintly assistance, so there was once again ample scope for pious endowments. At Morebath in Devon, for instance – a parish consisting of no more than thirty-three households in 1531 – there were nevertheless regular bequests from comparatively poor folk like Alice Obelye, a servant, for the veneration of St Sidwell and the gilding of his image. And when, in November 1534, a thief broke into the church and stole the saint’s silver shoe, the ‘young men and maidens of this parish’ swiftly ‘drew themselves togethers and with their gifts and provisions’ attempted to make good the loss. At Ashburton too, to take but one example from innumerable others, there were substantial contributions from the laity for saints’ images: an improved St George between 1526 and 1529, a new St Thomas Becket in 1529, along with a new St Christopher as late as 1538. The parish of Wing in Buckinghamshire, in the meantime, was only one of many to set up separate funds in its accounts to supply candles before its altars – for Saints Katherine, Margaret, Thomas and Mary Magdalene – while at Bassingbourne in Cambridgeshire one of the local church’s main benefactors was the guild of St John the Baptist, another figure attracting widespread devotion throughout the kingdom, including the capital, where parish processions on the feast day of his heavenly counterpart, St Barnabas, frequently rivalled those conducted on Corpus Christi itself.
Plainly, there could be no doubting the powerful hold exerted over the popular imagination by the Church’s saints and their wondrous images, nor of the awe generated by the endless stock of relics that were readily available to heal the sick, save the sinner and comfort the forlorn. As early as the fourth century, St Augustine had denounced men who, in the habit of monks, wandered about North Africa peddling spurious relics, and almost a thousand years later Chaucer was equally dismissive of pardoners travelling his own land with their fardels stuffed with ‘pigges bones’. But righteous indignation had failed to stem the influx of sham memorials and faked religious curios originally palmed off by enterprising Levantines on credulous Crusaders, or the systematic dismembering of saints’ corpses finally prohibited by Gregory the Great. And when one marvels at the later childlike naivety of our Tudor forebears, it is worth remembering, too, how even Blaise Pascal, some 200 years later, would attribute the sudden recovery of his little niece from illness to her touching of the holy thorn. At Hailes Abbey, a crystal vase was purported to contain the very blood shed by Christ on Calvary, and the people, wrote Hugh Latimer in 1533, ‘came by flocks to see it’, believing that the sight ‘certified them that they be of clean life, and in state of salvation without spot of sin, which doth bolden them to many things’. Such, indeed, was the celebrity attached to possession of holy objects that one particular Bishop of Lincoln was said to have bitten off and brought home part of Mary Magdalene’s finger, which had been on display at Fécamp, while elsewhere, at Caversham, the head of the lance of Longinus, apparently delivered by an angel with a single wing, sat in a little chapel – not far from the ‘holy halter’ with which Judas had hung himself – as fresh as the day it had pierced the Saviour’s side.
And when a handful of more rationalistically inclined critics like the London merchant Richard Hilles publicly demurred, they generally foundered on an unyielding coral reef of popular prejudice and hostility. In 1531, for example, the outspoken Hilles was forced to seek employment from Thomas Cromwell, because other merchants refused to deal with him. Yet five years later he was still declaring himself hated by his neighbours for refusing to contribute towards candles set before images. Likewise, when Grace Palmer of St Osyth’s in Essex attempted in 1531 to dissuade her neighbours from participating in pilgrimages to holy images – ‘for there you shall find but a piece of timber painted’ – she was promptly turned in by those she sought to enlighten: a fate reserved, too, for John Hewes of Farnham in Surrey, who was reported in the same year for scorning a man who had knelt in the street as a crucifix was borne aloft by a passing procession. ‘Thou art a fool!’ declared Hewes. ‘It is not thy maker, it is but a piece of copper or wood!’ Elsewhere, when a couple of Wiltshire heretics expressed similar sympathies, they swiftly lost their cattle – to the hearty approval of their peers – and when in 1537 William Senes of Rotherham stood up for common sense in preference to the old-established ways, the result was a tongue-lashing from the Earl of Shrewsbury. ‘Come near, thou heretic and kneel near!’ declared the outraged nobleman. ‘Thou art an heretic, and but for shame I should thrust my dagger into thee!’
But it was the Virgin Mary, above all, who had captured the imagination of contemporaries and inspired such unquestioning devotion, triggering a cult of Our Lady that continued to flourish at a host of pilgrimage centres and eventually underpinned much of Elizabeth Barton’s extraordinary prestige. Curiously enough, even the arch-heretic John Wycliffe had written how ‘it is impossible for us to be crowned in heaven without Mary’s good offices. She was the cause of Christ’s Incarnation and Passion, and consequently of all the world’s salvation.’
And on this issue at least, his sentiments were wholly at one with the sympathies of those Tudor men and women who, in 1516, almost a decade before Barton’s emergence, provided a dramatic demonstration that images and miraculous stories – especially those involving the Blessed Mother of Christ – could still inspire not only the king’s subjects but also queens and cardinals. For in East Anglia the convulsions suffered by the daughter of Sir Roger Wentworth had apparently been alleviated by a vision of Our Lady of Ipswich, and when the child subsequently made pilgrimage to the shrine at Gracechurch, where a famous image of the Madonna resided, she was escorted by no fewer than 1,000 devotees who had swiftly caught wind of the rumour. When, furthermore, the girl’s parents delayed a promised return visit to Gracechurch, it was alleged that her fits had recurred until a further pilgrimage – this time with upwards of 4,000 in attendance – achieved a complete cure. Inspired by her experience, the girl urged the people to be ‘more steadfast in their faith’, and proceeded to relieve her brother of a similar affliction. Nor was it long before a local notable had reported the episode to Henry VIII, with the result that both Queen Catherine and Cardinal Wolsey made pilgrimage to the shrine. More importantly still, by 1526 the latter had ensured Gracechurch’s lasting fame by obtaining a new indulgence for anyone visiting it. Three years later, indeed, even that confirmed sceptic Sir Thomas More was prepared to relate the story in print, as proof that miracles could still happen:
Miracles we find largely reported in the godly books of St Gregory, St Augustine, St Jerome, St Eusebius, St Basil, St Chrysostom and many other holy doctors of Christ’s Church whose books were not unwritten this thousand year. And when ye say yet of miracles many be now-a-days feigned, so may it be that some were then also: but neither then nor now neither were all feigned.
Since the early days of Christian worship, in fact, churches had been devoted to Christ’s mother, and in AD 431 the Council of Ephesus had not only acknowledged that she was widely held in ‘special veneration’ but laid down that every church should have some special place where the faithful could revere her. The eventual result in England was the flowering of the so-called Lady Chapel in each and every parish church, usually containing a representation of the Madonna herself, sometimes in the form of wall paintings like those surviving at St Mary’s Church, Dalham, near Newmarket, or icons, such as the example at West Grinstead, which was copied from one brought by St Eusebius from the Holy Land in the fourth century. More often still, the representation would take the form of a statue or statuette, frequently dubbed in accordance with one or other of the specific virtues locally associated with the Blessed Mother: ‘Our Lady of Pity’ (London); ‘Our Lady, Mother of Mercy’ (York); ‘Our Lady Refuge of Sinners’ (Stone in Kent); ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Succour’ (Liverpool); ‘Our Lady of Grace’ (Ipswich). And in many cases these images themselves had come to acquire miraculous reputations, helping to fuel the medieval proliferation of shrines, which had seen the emergence of at least sixteen in Suffolk alone: at Beccles, Cherington, Eye, Ipswich, Ixworth, Melford, Mildenhall, Mutford, Norton, Stoke-by-Clare, Stowmarket, Sudbury, Thetford, Weston, Woodbridge and Woolpit.
Not infrequently, it seems, such intensity of devotion went hand in hand with superstitions and corruptions that became the easy object of attack by religious reformers. The Golden Legend, compiled by Jacobus de Voragine in 1260 and published by William Caxton in 1483, still enjoyed a wide readership and told, among other things, of a lecherous monk condemned by Christ but nevertheless rescued by Our Lady on the grounds that he had always saluted her image. Likewise, when Christ’s mother was alleged to have brought the first scapular to the Carmelites with the promise that ‘whosoever dies in this garment will not suffer everlasting fire’, it was not long before wicked men were wearing similar strips of brown cloth around their necks on the assumption that they might pass straight through purgatory to heaven. Rosaries, too, were prone to the same kind of abuse, as Sir Thomas More made clear in his account of a Franciscan friar who conducted a mission at Coventry, proclaiming eternal salvation for those reciting the prescribed cycle of prayers, notwithstanding the protests of the local rector who ‘found his flock infected with such a disease that the very worst were especially addicted to the rosary for no other reason that they promised themselves impunity in everything’.
Yet in spite of – perhaps in part because of – its abuses, the veneration of the Blessed Virgin remained unstinting and had also made Walsingham in particular one of the greatest religious centres not only in England but in Europe as a whole. Rivalling both Glastonbury and Canterbury, it had come to serve as a popular substitute for visits to Jerusalem, Rome and Compostella, when warfare and political upheaval rendered them inaccessible during the period of the crusades. And the reputed Marian apparitions to Lady Richeldis de Faverches in 1061 had lost none of their ability to inspire by the start of the sixteenth century. A noblewoman known for her good works who was married to the lord of the manor of Walsingham Parva in Norfolk, Lady Richeldis, or Rychold, lived during the reign of Edward the Confessor, and experienced, it was said, a series of three visions in which she was shown the house of the Annunciation in Nazareth and instructed to build a replica of it in the Norfolk village of Walsingham as a place of pilgrimage where people might honour the Virgin Mary. ‘Whoever seeks my help there will not go away empty-handed’, she was allegedly told, and this promise was reinforced, it seems, by angelic intervention after Richeldis had heard singing in her garden and witnessed the miraculous completion of the ‘Holy House’ – some 200 yards from its original site, where she had been endeavouring with no little difficulty to build it. This alone, it seems, was enough not only to inspire the local populace but to generate a nationwide cult and enlist substantial royal patronage from the time of Henry III through to the reign of Henry VIII himself. By 1513, indeed, even Erasmus was overwhelmed by what he witnessed at the shrine’s so-called Slipper Chapel, constructed in 1340, where visitors left their shoes before tramping barefoot the final mile to the shrine itself. ‘When you look in,’ he wrote, ‘you would say it is the abode of saints, so brilliantly does it shine with gems, gold and silver.’ And the magnetism of Walsingham’s appeal was enough not only to make Catherine of Aragon a regular visitor, but to attract even Anne Boleyn, who publicly announced an intention to stage a pilgrimage, although this was never eventually made good.
Yet it was not altogether surprising, perhaps, that contemporary men and women should also have indulged a rather less respectable fascination for the other side of the same superstitious coin. For alongside the teachings and practices of ‘official’ religion, there co-existed a parallel world of even more irrational elements that lapped against them at every level, loading nature itself with various layers of occult meaning. There were charms, for example, to be spoken during childbirth and at the foaling of horses, while others helped ale to brew and milk to churn more quickly. In time of sickness, incantations were recited to staunch bleeding, and fevers and rheums were abated by a magical process known as ‘casting of the heart’. Country folk, in the meantime, hung rue around their necks as a safeguard against witchcraft, and put boughs of mountain ash and honeysuckle in their barns on the second day of May to turn aside spells cast on their cattle. Hot wax from a paschal candle dropped between the beasts’ horns and ears gave additional protection, while burying an aborted calf in the roadway prevented cows from miscarrying. Equally, just as the future might be gauged from the chattering of birds, so lumps of coal could be relied upon to keep the evil one at bay. And where pre-Christian traditions of this kind existed, so the Church had readily supplemented the existing stock with colourful tales and images of its own, so that few doubted how the world of human affairs was intimately linked to an ever-present celestial world, populated with highly corporeal and active agents in the form of cherubim and seraphim and other supernatural intelligences, including angels and archangels, who, it was said, conducted divine services ‘all the day long’ and only took time off to listen to the appeals of men ‘just before their matins and their evensong’.
No less for many wealthy London merchants than thousands of illiterate Tudor plough-hands was there any serious doubt that hailstones the size of eggs fell freely from the sky with the devil’s face upon them, that rain might readily turn to blood by wondrous means, or that decapitated traitors regularly chased about the country holding their heads in their arms. And when a high wind blew down St Alkmund’s church steeple in Shrewsbury, the news that Satan’s very own talons had left great scratches on the fourth bell would have come as no real surprise to either unschooled Shropshire housewives or their God-fearing sheep-farmer husbands. Well into the sixteenth century and long after the yoke of Rome had finally been cast off, enlightened bishops were still forbidden to denounce the existence of so-called ‘dismal days’ on which weddings, travel, blood-letting etc. were to be avoided. And nor at any stage of his reign would Henry VIII himself submit to his own Archbishop of Canterbury’s request that he assign both astrology and physiognomy to the list of ‘unlawful and superstitious crafts’. For this, after all, was a king who, of his own confession, saw much greater need ‘to contemplate the severe and inflexible justice of God than the caprice of his mercy’, and one who in 1512, when his male child lay close to death, had not hesitated, albeit in vain, to ensure the infant’s life by conducting, over all of ten days, a secret and barefoot pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham, where he said his prayers, kissed the relic of the Virgin’s milk and made offerings of £1 13s 4d.
Nothing, moreover, could have demonstrated more eloquently the hold of the ways of the old religion in England than the very obsequies accompanying the death of Henry’s own father. Henry VII had breathed his last at Richmond in April 1509, and on the morning of 10 May a solemn funeral Mass was celebrated at St Paul’s by the Bishop of London and the Abbots of Reading and St Albans. Appropriately enough, it was Bishop John Fisher, generally acknowledged as the finest episcopal preacher of the day, who delivered the funeral sermon, emphasising the transitoriness of human existence and the role of Mother Church as intercessor, by pointing out how even so great a king had ultimately had to forgo ‘all his goodly houses, so richly dekte and apparayled, his gardens large and wylde’ at his Creator’s summons. And it was no less fitting either that the Gothic tomb in which the former king was laid, originally prepared for the remains of his miracle-working predecessor, Henry VI, should have been so suitably embellished with sacred relics: a piece of the True Cross set in gold and adorned with pearls and jewels, as well as ‘oon of the legs of St George set in silver parcel gilt’.
For when the first Tudor made such provisions, he could never have doubted that the religious system in which he had been brought up would endure as long as the world itself. His kingdom, after all, like Europe as a whole, was still at religious peace, while he himself was always his pious mother’s son: a man as committed to a magical conception of the Mass and a mechanical conception of prayer as any of his predecessors, and equally convinced that only by membership of the mystical body of Our Lord, under the guidance of the Holy Father in Rome, could both he and his subjects ultimately achieve political harmony in this life and eternal salvation in the next. That the precious relics of his magnificent tomb might one day be lost or that a Protestant granddaughter would come to sit in the chapel that housed it beneath a canopy fashioned from the confiscated Florentine copes of his priests, was almost as unimaginable as the thought that the Puritan, Sir Robert Harley, might eventually cast down its altar and hack in pieces its reredos – that miracle of Torrigiano’s art. But such desecrations would indeed become fact, before a certain ‘Captain Walter Lee of the Yellow Regiment, haberdasher’ ultimately saw fit to complete the vandals’ task by breaking the tomb’s stained glass windows, more than a century after its occupant’s own son had proclaimed himself Supreme Head of the Church, laid waste the monasteries and left a scarlet trail of martyrs’ blood in his wake.
No less inconceivable, of course, was the prospect that the very bishop entrusted to preach at the first Tudor’s funeral service would himself be awaiting execution on Tower Hill little more than a quarter of a century later. For the only martyrs in Henry VII’s kingdom were a tiny handful of Lollard heretics, who, without organisation, learning or leaders of distinction, went largely unrecorded by history. More often feared and hated by their peers, these courageous but isolated adherents to the fourteenth-century teachings of John Wycliffe had long since declined in prominence from their heyday at the time of Sir John Oldcastle’s uprising in 1415, and were now mainly to be found in London and the eastern counties. Where they or their offshoots appeared at all, moreover, they were quickly and effectively suppressed, as the ambassador of Ludovico Sforza made clear in 1499 when he wrote from London of a sect of heretics who declared ‘baptism unnecessary for the children of Christians, marriage a superfluous rite, and the sacrament of the altar a fiction’, before adding how the bishops had already begun to eradicate them. Francis Bacon, too, would note in his history of Henry VII’s rule how proceedings against heretics were ‘rare in this king’s reign’, observing that where action was taken at all, it was in most cases ‘rather by penance than fire’ – as, indeed, in 1498 when Henry himself converted a Canterbury heretic at the stake, not only sparing the man from imminent burning, but rewarding him with a coin thereafter for his good sense in recanting.
For a quarter of a century of the next reign, too, it must be said – until the watershed of Elizabeth Barton’s execution at Tyburn – religious martyrs remained a comparative rarity, consisting exclusively of known and recalcitrant heretics. In 1511, it is true, Andreas Ammonius wrote a gossiping letter from London to Erasmus, full of sprightly exaggeration:
I do not wonder that the price of faggots has gone up, for many heretics furnish a daily holocaust, and yet more spring up to take their place. And, so please you, the brother of my man Thomas – more a stick than a man – has not only started a sect, but has disciples.
Erasmus, moreover, loving warmth and yearning for a Dutch stove, played along with the joke by declaring from his Cambridge residence how, with winter upon us, he will hate heretics all the more for raising the price of fuel. But the hard evidence to the contrary was overwhelming. For, shortly after Henry VIII’s accession, Bishop Fitzjames of London began a heresy hunt in the capital, which exposed little more than Richard Hunne’s suspect Bible with all its ‘naughty’ annotations. And even John Foxe’s martyrological scourings years later could uncover nothing more than forty cases between 1509 and 1527 in the entire diocese of London, which included Essex. In all instances but the two cases involving the relapsed heretics Sweeting and Brewster, the accused duly abjured and did penance by standing, as was customary, with faggots on their shoulders before Paul’s Cross during Sunday sermon time.
Nor should it be assumed that the burning of heretics excited much resentment on those occasions that it did occur, or that their cause had much appeal. When Thomas Bennet went to the stake at Exeter in 1532, for example, he was threatened by one zealot in the crowd brandishing a blazing furze-bush on a pike, who declared to him: ‘Ah! whoreson heretic! Pray to Our Lady and say Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis, or by God’s wounds I will make thee do it!’ Whereupon the crowd raged at the victim and threw sticks and furze into his fire. Likewise, when Thomas Harding was burned at Chesham in 1532, even children took wood to the fire as the crowd rejoiced at his suffering. Before James Bainham’s burning in the same year, there were similar scenes, which left the victim in further agonies for the fate of his innocent wife. ‘For my sake she shall be an approby unto the world,’ he declared, ‘and be pointed at of every man on this sort, “Yonder goeth the heretic’s wife!”.’ And it was no mere coincidence, of course, that Dr John London would seek to deter his nephew from heresy in 1534 by emphasising the resulting shame to his family:
Your mother, after that she shall hear what an abominable heretic she hath to her son, I am well certain that she will never eat more bread that shall do her good. Alas, remember that hitherto there was never heretic of all our kin.
Known heretics, after all, including those who had abjured, were widely ostracised and ill-treated. When Humphrey Monmouth, for instance, acquired a reputation as ‘a Scripture man’, even his poor neighbours in Barking refused to take charity from him, or to borrow money. And after John Hig, a Dutch Lutheran living in London, abjured his heresy in 1528, he was soon forced to petition for release from his so-called ‘faggot badge’, since no one would employ him wearing it.
By that time, of course, as the impact of Lutheranism became more pronounced, there was greater government concern and a sprinkling of higher-profile victims. Thomas Bilney, for example, who was eventually executed in July 1531, had been born around 1495 in Norfolk, most probably in Norwich, and entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to study law, before taking Holy Orders in his mid-twenties. Introspective by nature, and with a supersensitive conscience to boot, he had tried and failed to establish his own righteousness in the eyes of God, until rescued from his spiritual torment by the words of St Paul in Erasmus’s translation of the New Testament, which convinced him, not unlike Luther before, ‘that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the chief and principal’. ‘Immediately’, he later recorded, ‘I felt a marvellous comfort and quietness, insomuch that my bruised bones leapt for joy,’ after which ‘the Scripture began to be more pleasant unto me than the honey or the honeycomb; wherein I learned that all my labours, my fasting and watching, all the redemption of masses and pardons’ were valueless ‘without truth in Christ, who alone saveth his people from their sins’. Preaching throughout the diocese of Ely from 1525 onwards, denouncing the veneration of saints and relics, together with pilgrimages to Walsingham and Canterbury, he was eventually pulled from the pulpit of St George’s, Ipswich, after producing a series of inflammatory sermons, which resulted in his arraignment before Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop William Warham of Canterbury, and Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, in the chapter house at Westminster Abbey where he was convicted of heresy.
But such was the comparative moderation of the court that Bilney’s sentence was actually deferred while efforts were made to induce him to recant, which, to his subsequent overwhelming remorse, he duly did after two days of intensive cross-examination. The result was his eventual release from the Tower in 1529 and subsequent return to Cambridge where he experienced the full agony of conscience accompanying his apostasy and finally resolved to ‘come again like one rising from the dead’, as one of his protégés, Hugh Latimer, later put it. Delivering passionate sermons in the open fields of Norfolk, since his licence to preach in church had been revoked, he returned to his former themes, distributing New Testaments and exposing the errors of Rome – all of which, wholly predictably, led to his arrest by Bishop Nykke of Norwich and sentence to burning by the civil authorities at the so-called ‘Lollards Pit’. The night before his death, after eating his last meal, Bilney had, it was said, placed his finger in the flame of a lamp and only withdrawn it after it had been burned down to the first joint. And when questioned by friends about such an extreme course of action, he had replied: ‘I am only trying my flesh; tomorrow God’s rods shall burn my whole body in the fire.’
Plainly, then, the fortitude required to resist unto death was not confined to Catholics, and the types of personality involved in both cases were not always dissimilar. Just under two years later, for example, John Frith, the son of a Kentish innkeeper, took a similar route to martyrdom for denying that either purgatory or transubstantiation were founded upon Holy Scripture. Born in 1503 in Westerham and educated initially at Sevenoaks Grammar School and Eton College, Frith had finally been admitted as a scholar at Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he encountered both Thomas Bilney and William Tyndale as a frequenter of the White Horse Tavern – a well-known meeting place for evangelically inclined intellectuals. While at Cambridge, too, his tutor was none other than Stephen Gardiner, the eventual Bishop of Winchester who would later take part in condemning him to death. But it was at Oxford, where, after graduating in 1525, he became a minor canon at Thomas Wolsey’s new Cardinal College, that he first ran foul of the authorities. For, like other Cambridge emigrants, he was already tainted with heresy and found himself imprisoned – in a cellar where fish were stored – for possession of heretical books, only to escape to Antwerp after Wolsey had himself rescued him on condition that he travel not more than 10 miles from Oxford.
Renewing his connection with William Tyndale, Frith may well have assisted in the translation of the former’s New Testament. But it was his polemical writing against John Rastell’s defence of purgatory, for which he gained more lasting fame, along with two return visits to England, that brought him once more to the attention of the authorities. For in 1530, probably while attempting to make contact with the heretical Prior of Reading, he had been arrested as a vagabond and confined to the stocks upon refusal to disclose his identity. There the town schoolmaster encountered him, conversed with him in Latin and heard him recite lines from Homer’s Iliad, which was enough, it seems, to secure his release. Even so, like other restless souls of his kind, Frith could not accommodate himself to compliance for long, and by 1532 he had returned to his activities, this time to be arrested in Essex and lodged in the Tower, as a result of what John Foxe later attributed to ‘the great hatred and deadly pursuit of Sir Thomas More, at that time chancellor’, irrespective of the fact that Frith had arrived in July, a full two months after More had already resigned the Great Seal. In fact, the grounds for the reformer’s arrest are unknown, though he was soon engaged, in spite of his incarceration, in a literary controversy with More over the issue of transubstantiation, which would ultimately cost him his life.
Frith’s death for what he – and indeed the authorities responsible for his condemnation – believed to be the salvation of his soul casts much additional light, moreover, on the kinds of drives and personal psychology that, in some cases, inspired both Protestants and Catholics alike to resist to the limit. Certainly, during the five months before a commission was finally appointed to examine him, Frith had received at least one letter from Tyndale enlarging upon the glories of martyrdom:
Fear not threatening therefore, neither be overcome by sweet words, with which twain the hypocrites will assail you. Neither let the persuasions of worldly wisdom bear rule in your heart. No, though they be your friends that counsel you. Let Bilney be a warning to you. Let not their vision beguile your eyes. Let not your body faint. He that endureth to the end shall be saved.
There were references, too, to the heroic men in the Netherlands and France who had already sacrificed their lives ‘to the glory of God’, and a final message delivered on behalf of Frith’s own wife: ‘Your wife is well content with the will of God, and would not for her sake have the will of God hindered.’
After such exhortations, what else could a sensitive young man do? Suitably exposed to the comradely inducements and self-propagating fixations of a persecuted underground circle comprised of charismatic individuals like Tyndale, who had themselves become cut off from the mainstream attitudes of contemporary society, Frith and others like him found their resistance fuelled not only by the white-hot coals of a faith offering eternal salvation, but, likewise by the promptings of those they held most dear. Indeed, it was sometimes the love of those nearest and dearest – almost as much as service to God and the principle of a higher truth, to which only they were privy – that consecrated such individuals for the flames so readily.
Even so, however, every effort was in fact made to save Frith, like Bilney before him, from the agonies of the stake – efforts of a kind that would often be strikingly absent only a little later when the king’s own hand was more directly involved in proceedings. The bishops examining Frith, for example, had, as Thomas Cranmer was at pains to point out, in a ‘fatherly manner, laboured and travailed for the amendment of that ungracious child’. Cranmer, indeed, who had presided over the commission, recorded how ‘I myself sent for him three or four times, to persuade him to leave that his imagination’, before even encouraging what appears to have been an abortive escape attempt. For on his way to a meeting with Cranmer at Croydon, Frith’s guards suggested that he should slip away into the woods of Brixton and make for Kent, while they pursued him in the direction of Wandsworth: an offer that Frith promptly refused, with the result that he was subsequently referred to John Stokesley, Bishop of London, who by that point had no option other than to pronounce the sentence of excommunication. Handed over to the lord mayor and sheriff, as laid down by the law, De Haeretico Comburendo, which had been passed by Henry IV in 1401 for the specific purpose of punishing those who ‘do wickedly instruct and inform people ... and commit subversion of the said catholic faith’, Frith was then duly burned at Smithfield in the company of a young disciple named Andrew Hewet. A tailor’s apprentice, Hewet could only confess at his trial that he believed as Frith believed, and was ready to die with him, though such loyalty evoked no apparent sympathy from the presiding London parson, Dr Cooke, who informed the watching crowds that it was as wrong to pray for the condemned as to pray for a dog.
In such circumstances, of course, it is easy to feel that the heavy hand of the State had been applied with excessive force to men of genuine principle whose direct threat was always likely to be limited. Thomas Bilney, indeed, had to the very end remained entirely orthodox on the authority of the pope, the sacrifice of the Mass, and the doctrine of transubstantiation. But peace and order were always fragile prizes in Tudor England, rarely to be taken for granted and therefore all the more worthy of protection at any cost against those who threatened them, intentionally or otherwise. No one, moreover, had digested this principle more thoroughly than Henry VII or his successor – and for very good reason. Never wholly at ease on his throne and never personally popular, the first Tudor had nonetheless overcome all obstacles. But the effort involved encouraged the blind court poet, Bernard André, to compare his achievements with the twelve labours of Hercules. And André’s analogy was undoubtedly a good one; 1497, in particular, had proved a year of especial crisis, as Scots continued to threaten the border, and Cornishmen led by the lawyer Thomas Flamank and a giant blacksmith from St Keverne called Michael Joseph saw fit to march in anger across the breadth of England against the ‘crafty means’ by which the king had elicited his ‘outrageous sums’. Not until they reached Blackheath, in fact, did the rebels finally ‘suffer vengeance’, but only then after some 15,000 of them, ‘stout of stomach, mighty of body and limb’, had encamped at Farnham, causing London’s citizens to pile up great mounds of timber against the city’s gates. And the need thereafter for absolute obedience and unwavering uniformity would never, in consequence, desert either the king or the son who came after him, as the grave mounds left at Blackheath in the aftermath of the 1497 rebellion attested all too graphically. Still visible two centuries later, they were potent reminders not only of the Tudor state’s authority but of its very fragility, and the clearest possible warning that any attempt to provoke a religious revolution of the kind launched in the 1530s could only succeed in a largely orthodox kingdom on the back of systematic and uncompromising repression. For the Catholic Church in England would continue to retain the leadership of its flock as a moral, spiritual and indeed social force right up to the moment of its unexpected demise: an organisation not so flawless, it is true, as the idealists may have wished, but neither so diabolically mired as its most passionate critics contended.
Certainly, when Roger Martyn was a small child, not only his own Long Melford church, but the Church in England as a whole had seemed effectively impregnable. For if, on the one hand, there was an occasional bishop like James Stanley to breed scandal, there was always a John Colet to denounce him and a John Fisher to set a saintly example. And if there were opportunities for clashes of interests involving what was, after all, a great national institution boasting integral relations with the king, secular courts and civic authorities, the Church’s officials nevertheless muddled on dutifully enough in the main and got on with their business in the time-honoured fashion. No doubt there was some local contention between priests and people, since the Church was ultimately, of course, a collection of parish communities, each with their own idiosyncrasies. But while few would eventually refuse whatever gains might fall their way, neither king nor nobles, nor gentry nor Parliament were systematically plotting to seize its wealth and jurisdiction. And just as there was no organised resistance to Long Melford’s tithes or, once again, the Church’s tithes in general, so the few heretics who denied parts of the Church’s teachings, even in Long Melford, had been around for a century and more, with little hint of lasting damage.
Whatever undoubted difficulties Ecclesia Anglicana may therefore have faced, there were no Reformations on any horizon as the sixteenth century dawned. On the contrary, for the vast majority of its adherents, the Church remained a homely sanctuary – familiar, tolerable and sacrosanct out of long habit, while offering security in this world and eternal bliss in the next. And if the Catholic Church in England had, perhaps, grown flabby from undue comfort, it remained, too, an organisation to be respected by lay rulers, especially when, for a tiny minority of its adherents, it was something much more potent still: nothing less, in fact, than a divinely appointed institution meriting defence unto death itself, and therefore a challenge of formidable proportions to any hoping to destroy it. For if prophetic visions of doom like those proclaimed by Elizabeth Barton were to receive credence among common folk, let alone those in high places, or, worse still, become combined with active resistance from the likes of John Fisher or passive non-compliance from otherworldly monks like Sebastian Newdigate and his Carthusian colleagues, the ramifications might well prove momentous, since Tudor England was not an easy country to govern at the best of times. On the contrary, even on the smaller, day-to-day scale, the threat of disorder was an ever-present feature of contemporary society, making the prospect of what Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell were ultimately prepared to attempt all the more daunting. As such, there seemed but one conclusion to be drawn by those in power when the time of reckoning finally beckoned: if the yoke of Rome was to be broken, the recalcitrant minority who refused to bow would have to be broken, too.