3

The Courtier and the Maid

And I looked up, and, behold, a hand was sent to me, wherein a book was rolled up: and he spread it before me: and it was written within and without; and there was written in it lamentations and canticles and woe.

Ezekiel 2:9

As winter beat its familiar dogged retreat in 1512, John Fisher made ready to attend the fifth Lateran Council in Rome as one of a team of England’s representatives that included Silvestro de Gigli, absentee Bishop of Worcester, who was already present in the Holy City, Richard Kidderminster, Abbot of Winchcombe, and Sir Thomas Docwra, senior lay baron and Grand Prior of the Knights Hosptaller. And although political developments would eventually frustrate his plans, Fisher, on this occasion at least, appears to have been a more than willing candidate for his appointed role – so much so, indeed, that when the offer of attendance was renewed in 1514, he readily appointed the Priors of Rochester and Leeds (in Kent) to act for him at home during his absence. For when it came to the internal politics of the Church, especially where the issue of ecclesiastical reform was concerned, Fisher was invariably ready, if only for limited periods, to divert his gaze from the bustle and hugger-mugger routine of his diocesan and academic involvements. It was on these grounds, indeed, that he had played a leading part at the Convocation of 1510–11, and for this reason, too, that he remained a prominent ecclesiastical politician throughout the 1520s, though the wider world of secular politics would always remain decidedly cold fare for one of his temperament. Never a State official of any kind and never one of the royal council’s inner circle, his attendance at its more infrequent larger sessions was initially conscientious enough, but his last recorded attendance occurred, nonetheless, as early as 25 January 1512. If he had sought it, there seems little doubt that advancement as a royal councillor was his for the taking, particularly in light of his administrative expertise. But high principles and high office, as Fisher wisely appreciated, were uneasy bedfellows at the Tudor court, and he kept his distance accordingly.

Yet there was an irony, too, about Fisher’s reluctance, since from the time of Henry VII, and especially under Henry VIII, the central importance of the council had, in any case, begun to shift elsewhere. Certainly, the king’s councillors were numerous and active, consisting of as many as forty individuals, all appointed by the monarch personally for their expertise and political weight. But they rarely met as one body. Instead, the council’s only regular members were, in effect, the kingdom’s state officials, while others, like John Fisher, might be called upon to render advice solely when occasion demanded. And it was for this very reason, in fact, that the so-called ‘Privy’ Council would eventually harden into a discrete organ of state under Henry VIII. Throughout, the council’s major advisory role was maintained. During the reign of Henry VII, moreover, its various ‘committees’ or ‘by-courts’ had already become the key executive instruments of Tudor government. But despite this role, the council had no independent authority of its own. On the contrary, it gave advice merely when the king asked and exclusively on those subjects he chose to lay before it, while the ‘by-courts’ were not true committees of the council at all, since they reported back not to it but to the king once again, who alone defined their areas of activity and conferred their power, making him, to all intents and purposes, not only his own prime minister and treasurer, but, likewise, his own de facto secretary of state.

And this independence would have crucial ramifications for the entire nature of Tudor politics. For while the gravity of the council and glitter of the royal court remained essential ingredients of government, the centre of power came increasingly to lie beyond the richly carved door known as the King’s Threshold, and within the apartment of the royal household, known as the Privy Chamber. Here, as in the court itself, hung rich tapestries behind heavy oak sideboards heaped with gold and silver plate. Here, too, resided guards, musicians and attendants in silk and gold chains, all playing their carefully prescribed parts in the great moments of the court day, when the king processed to chapel, or dined, or received a foreign ambassador. But the Privy Chamber was also much more besides, since it was the intimate arena where an altogether smaller cast of servants, more highly favoured and still more magnificently dressed, attended the king himself in his more private hours, making it a centre of unofficial yet potentially limitless political power, depending upon the personality of the monarch concerned. For if a king were to prove impressionable or frustrated by, say, the age and conservatism of his council, the Privy Chamber’s upper servants stood poised to become the lynchpins of government, both at the centre and on the periphery. And if the king concerned was none other than Henry VIII, not only impressionable and frustrated by his councillors at one and the same time, but infinitely prone to whim and flattery, the implications were obvious.

At first, the so-called ‘Great Chamber’ of the royal household had been precisely that: one great, draughty, largely ‘open plan’ room, in which, as in a royal bedsit, too many conflicting functions – political, administrative, personal and recreational – had been crammed. But in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as the desire for greater privacy increased in tandem with the wish to emphasise the majesty and mystique of the monarch himself, the single room of the Great Chamber had evolved into a suite of three more-or-less specialised apartments, which the early Tudors came to describe as: the Great or Watching Chamber, the Presence Chamber and the Privy or Secret Chamber. The first was primarily a guard room, staffed by the Yeomen of the Guard, while the Presence Chamber served as the throne room, the king’s public dining room, and a thronging rendezvous for the court, where everyone who mattered met to gather news and to gossip. As such, the Tudor Presence Chamber closely resembled the Great Chamber of the Middle Ages: a humming, bustling, semi-public reception room, constantly astir with comings and goings and continually awash with the more trivial everyday etiquette, ceremonial and formalities of court life – all of which made the secluded world of the Privy Chamber increasingly important, not only as what amounted to a regal refuge but, much more importantly still, as a political melting pot where whispers, casual asides and innuendoes might mould and shape, or make and break. For Henry VII had been an altogether more private person than his predecessors, and under the Tudors in general, the Privy Chamber would become the monarch’s personal space in a way that the old, unitary Great Chamber never could be: his private realm, peopled by those he liked best and those who became most intimate with him, as well as those whom he could trust, since men like Francis Marzen, who was described in 1501 as ‘oon of the groomes of the privie chamber’, not only monopolised access to the king, but frequently undertook confidential missions, both within the kingdom and abroad.

Henry VII, it is true, was not without his pleasures or, for that matter, a carefully constructed public persona, which he was keen to cultivate studiously. Certainly, he enjoyed hunting, cards and shooting, and at the same time performed his courtly obligations dutifully. But perhaps because of the very slenderness of his claim to the throne, he took particular pains to invest the notion of kingship with a mystique all of its own. It was he, after all, who introduced the very term ‘majesty’ into the English language, and he, too, who came to ensure that solemn processions, the shouting of loyal salutations, the doffing of caps and reverent genuflexions in the royal presence all formed part of the underlying propaganda message that such spectacle was designed to drive home. The grooms, pages, servers and sundry menials in constant attendance were suitably attired in the Tudor livery of white and green embossed with the Tudor rose, and lest any should doubt or forget the might and splendour of England’s new dynasty, there were, likewise, not only roses in the chains and necklaces worn by the king and queen, but on the wooden ceilings and tiled floors of all royal dwellings, and even on the gilded harnesses of royal horses. Most important of all, however, the king made sure that his accessibility was strictly limited, so that when it came to the jousts and revels and other public entertainments of the court, he carefully kept his distance. Never taking part personally, Henry VII remained, in fact, ‘a princely and gentle spectator’ at all times, and, in doing so, applied the same principle institutionally, by reforming the royal household and developing the role of the Privy Chamber within it. Hitherto, as one contemporary put it, those responsible for tending the king’s most private needs had been ‘persons of little worth except in the matter of giving good personal service’. But an ordinance of 1494 laid down that only specifically chosen gentlemen ‘ought to array and unarray the king, and noe man else to sett hand on the Kinge’, while by that time, too, the Groom of the Stool – the person responsible for assisting the king’s toileting – had emerged as a figure of unique standing in his own right, heading the entire Privy Chamber establishment.

In short, then, for Henry VII, the private royal apartments were the place in which he could put off his ‘magnificence’ and be unobserved by the outside world. Indeed, in 1501 he had specifically restricted access to his ‘Secret Chamber’ to ‘the groom of the stoole, with a page with hym, or such as the kyng woll commande ought to wayte in the Kinges secrete Chamber especially and no one else’. And by the reign of Henry VIII, attendance upon the king in what had become his increasingly complex ‘privy lodging’ of bedrooms, libraries and closets beyond the Presence Chamber had swiftly come to rank among the most prized of courtly appointments, carrying with it not only boundless opportunity for patronage and preferment but greater potential than ever for influencing the political agenda. For as the second Tudor’s reign opened, the ‘ancient and grave’ members of his council were, as we have seen, ill-matched to either his personality or his priorities. Faced with a new ruler, nine weeks and four days short of his eighteenth birthday at the time of his accession – a glittering, massive, puffed up and impressionable young man, bent on ushering in a new golden age of glory, light and learning – Henry VIII’s advisers were, indeed, both baffled by his impetuosity and burdened by their residing fear that, as John Stow put it, ‘such abundance of riches … the King was now possessed of should move his young years into a riotous forgetting of himself’. Yet the conservatism that had made the new king’s councillors so highly valued in the previous reign, where consolidation was the watchword, and, in particular, their strenuous efforts ‘to acquaint him with the politique government of the realm, with which at first he could not endure to be much troubled’ served merely to compound their predicament, as the Privy Chamber progressively transmogrified from its original role as a place of concentration and austerity – an orderly, harmonious zone where unobtrusive efficiency and discretion were the highest virtues – into a teeming playground in which the new monarch could enjoy ‘pastime with good company’, surrounded not only by a vastly swollen formal establishment of grooms and pages, but a boisterous host of musicians, revellers and ‘boon companions’ or ‘minions’, unashamedly intent upon bringing him up ‘in all pleasure’, so that he might be prevented, as one contemporary suggested, from growing ‘too hard upon his subjects as the King his father did’.

Among this hugely influential intimate circle were the Earl of Surrey’s second son, Sir Edward Howard; Sir Thomas Knyvet, who had married Surrey’s eldest daughter; and Sir Thomas Boleyn, who had married the Earl of Wiltshire’s eldest daughter. All equally patrician and some years older than the king, they were joined in turn by Henry Bourchier, Earl of Essex; Sir Henry Guildford, who as Master of the Revels was responsible for the fairy-tale entertainments so beloved of his sovereign; William Compton, chief gentleman of the bedchamber; and another who towered, it seemed, above all: the hulking, broad-shouldered, spade-bearded Charles Brandon – seven years older than the king, and, though ‘brought up out of nought’, in all respects the kind of dashing, reckless individual whom any hot-blooded boy with a showy streak was sure to follow. For while Brandon’s blood pedigree was humble enough for Erasmus to refer to him later as a ‘stable boy’, and notwithstanding the indisputable fact that his gifts of mind were few, he more than made up for this by sharing to the full with his royal companion a marked physical exuberance and a headstrong delight in excelling at wrestling, hunting, tilting and jousting that would lead him ultimately to be regarded as ‘a second king … one who does and undoes’. Larger than life in every respect, no figure could have encapsulated the spirit of the new reign more fully, nor embodied more aptly the gaping gulf between the prevailing ambience of the Privy Chamber and the king’s council, whose members were old indeed at 55 and 60, and among whom only Thomas Wolsey, it seems, offered sufficient dynamism for the new ruler’s taste.

But even Wolsey was in his forties by the time he achieved his ascendancy, and he, too, could not entirely ignore the possibility of being somehow circumvented. For while by 1513 Knyvet and Howard had been killed fighting the French, and others of their circle had lost favour, the result was not only an influx of new blood but a further, more worrying sea-change in the Privy Chamber’s ambience, as a smaller, younger and even more privileged group of individuals, closer to Henry’s own age, came to enjoy an added status all of their own. They included Edward Neville, Henry Courtenay and Nicholas Carew, all of whom would be condemned to traitors’ deaths in later life by the young man with whom they now revelled, and the first, in particular, achieved an especial significance. Indeed, as a kinsman of Warwick the Kingmaker, Neville enjoyed the particular distinction of sharing Henry’s colouring and husky physique to such an extent that he was even rumoured in some quarters to be the prince’s bastard brother, and together the two young men had achieved an unusually close bond – enjoying the same boisterous pastimes and, on other occasions, donning exotic costumes at splendid court functions that invariably offered the chance to pose brashly before the fairest females on hand. As Neville shone and thrived, moreover, so he and his colleagues came to form what amounted to an exclusive private club with their sovereign as president. Letting him win at tennis, while taking his money at dice, this self-same laughing crew not only shot with the king at the butts, served at his table and formed the glittering stage army for the innumerable court masques he loved so heartily, but caroused, carolled and cavorted with him into the small hours, fuelling his ego all the while by reflecting, or so he believed, his own physical prowess and zest for all things martial.

But as the distinction between service and camaraderie became increasingly blurred, so concern among the older heads at court grew more pressing, and for none more so than Thomas Wolsey, who came to see in the influence of the Privy Chamber’s members a dangerous counterweight to his own. According to the chronicler Edward Hall, all were increasingly guilty of over-exuberance and lack of due deference in the company of the king. ‘Not regarding his estate or degree,’ said Hall, they were too ‘familiar and homely with him and played such touches with him that they forgot themselves,’ while the Abbot of Woburn, in a specific to reference to Henry’s favourite of favourites, Sir Francis Bryan, observed not only how ‘the said Sir Francis dare boldly speak to the King’s Grace the plainness of his mind’ but ‘that his Grace doth well accept the same’. Not only was such familiarity irreverent, of course, it was also breeding the kind of intimacy that threatened the cardinal’s own monopoly of the king’s ear, and it was this, above all, that made a reckoning of the kind that occurred in May 1519 inescapable. For at a meeting held at Greenwich in that month, Henry’s council, led by Wolsey, finally called upon him to put a stop to the intolerable effrontery that was being given free licence within the confines of the court. And though no formal criminal charges were preferred against them, the king duly complied, dispatching Carew to govern a fort in Calais, and admonishing Neville, Bryan and a selection of other culprits to tend their other commitments outside the court more dutifully.

‘Within the past few days,’ wrote the Venetian ambassador, ‘King Henry has made a great change to his court’ by dismissing some of those young companions ‘who had enjoyed very great authority in the kingdom, and had been the very soul of the king’. And the accompanying change to the ethos of the Privy Chamber was swift in following. For the mantle of callow youth, which the king himself had encouraged so enthusiastically, had become, in any case, increasingly inappropriate to a ruler who now stood on the threshold of his thirties. True, his preference for the company of younger men would abide, and his devotion to the members of his Privy Chamber would remain as intense as ever. But the need now was for an infusion of more sober blood, and a relationship more paternalistic in nature. The same intimacy with the king would apply, yet on a more reverential basis. And while the glitter, the pomp, the courtly graces would also still hold, the gentlemen of the Privy Chamber were henceforth to become persons capable of bridling their worldliness and bearing their high status with dignity and decorum: individuals of solid background, appropriate to royal service, yet humble enough in origin to appreciate their promotion and be suitably awed by their access to their sovereign’s private world. Service, in short, rather than camaraderie, was once again to become the order of the day. And from Thomas Wolsey’s perspective especially, the denizens of the king’s secret world were to be figures disinterested in political influence. No longer sources of ‘evil counsel’ or figures ‘intent on their own benefit to the detriment, hurt and discredit’ of their sovereign, they were to be immune, likewise, to the broader temptations entailed by their proximity to the king. For according to the Venetian agent Giustiniani, the cardinal had at one point perceived the former minions ‘to be so intimate with the king that in the course of time they might have ousted him from the government’.

That new entrants to the Privy Chamber should be otherworldly to the point of sanctity or, even less likely, to the level of accepting martyrdom in defence of their principles was not, of course, a prerequisite. But these, remarkably enough, were precisely the hidden characteristics of one particular young man who entered the king’s service in the wake of Wolsey’s purge of the royal inner sanctum. Born in 1500 at Harefield Place in Middlesex, which lies midway between Northwood and Rickmansworth, at a distance of about 2.5 miles from either place, Sebastian Newdigate appears to have displayed few outward hints of distinction, let alone saintliness, when he first arrived at court in his early twenties. He was the son of John Newdigate, Esquire, lord of the manor of Harefield, and his wife Amphelissa, daughter and heiress of John Nevill, Esquire, of Sutton, in the county of Lincoln, who was the son of Anne Holland, daughter of John Holland who was the son of Elizabeth, Duchess of Exeter, herself the daughter of John of Gaunt. As such, Sebastian was descended on his mother’s side from the royal house of Lancaster – a fact that would be crucial to his entrance to the Privy Chamber in the first place – but beyond his blood line there was little, it seems, to distinguish him significantly from similar young men of his class. On the one hand, he was neither his father’s principal heir, nor remembered for his exploits at Cambridge where he was educated. Indeed, there is no record even of the college he attended, or the subject he studied, though John Newdigate is known to have been a product of Lincoln’s Inn, making the son’s preparation for a career in law a distinct likelihood.

Of Sebastian’s nine brothers and seven sisters, meanwhile, we know that John was the eldest and that at least five others took seniority over him. Silvester and Dunstan would become Knights Hospitaller, while George took monastic vows, Jane went on to marry the knight Sir Robert Dormer of Wenge in Buckinghamshire, and another sister married into the Stonor family, well-known recusants of the reign of Elizabeth I. Two other brothers died early – an unusually low number, given the number of siblings involved – and two sisters also became nuns: Mary, at Syon, and Sybil who became Prioress of Halliwell in Middlesex. And if there is nothing to support the proud family legend that their estate was first awarded by the king to a great hunter who, in ancient times, cleared large tracts of Surrey from wolves, neither is there any doubt that the Newdigate line can actually be traced back over some twenty-two generations to the reign of King John. The first to settle at Harefield, Sir John de Newdigate, had been knighted by Edward III for his services in the French wars and awarded a fleur-de-lys argent for his crest, before obtaining in 1356 what would become the long-term family manor and residence through his wife Joanna, heiress of Richard de Bacheworth and sister of William de Swanlond, Lord of Harefield, who died without issue and left his estate to her. It was there, moreover, that the red brick mansion of Old Harefield Place eventually arose – a little to the north of the nearby church lying about half a mile from the village of Harefield – and there too that Sebastian eventually came to spend the peaceful years of his happy boyhood, before the edifice was finally burned down in the seventeenth century, leaving only traces of its former character to later observers: some fragments of walls jutting out from the turf; a curious row of fifty or so arched recesses that formerly supported a terrace overlooking a garden; a portion of the walls of the adjoining farm buildings; and a moat, along with the reservoirs that once fed it.

But while the house is no more, the connection of the area with the Newdigates is still maintained vividly enough within the walls of the local church, which bears ample testament to their local prominence. Built of flint and stone, with a square tower to the north-west corner, St Mary the Virgin continues to stand proudly on the side of a gentle slope, set amid ancient yew trees and vast cedars, and, save for the lengthening of an aisle, it has endured no change major enough to make it unrecognisable to those who might have worshipped within its walls, alongside Sebastian Newdigate himself, some five centuries since. His family’s tombs and monuments, indeed, have survived in almost every conceivable form to this day, from a fourteenth-century brass, with its pious appeals for prayers, to the post-Reformation mural tablet proclaiming the virtues of a later Newdigate clearly wishing to be commemorated as a champion of Protestantism. Along the south aisle, encompassing the Brackenbury Chapel where the greater part of the Newdigate monuments reside, there is also an altar tomb, placed under the east window, where the remains of Sebastian’s parents still lie, though not in the place initially intended by John Newdigate himself, since his will, dated ‘June 23, 20 Henry VIII’, i.e. 1528, had directed his body to be buried in his ‘chapell at Harefield at the north end of the awter’.

Clearly, even a figure of Newdigate’s undoubted substance could not withstand from his grave the tide of future events, which not only shifted his tomb from its original site, but left its Latin inscription upside down after the relocation:

Here lie buried the bodies of John Newdegate, sergeant at law, and Amphelys his wife, daughter and heiress of John Nevill, Esquire: the which John Newdegate died August 12, 1528, and the aforesaid Amphelys July 15, 1544, on whose souls may God have mercy.

Yet the worthy sergeant is finely represented, nevertheless, on his brass in coif, gown and hood, his hands folded in prayer, while from his mouth proceeds a scroll bearing the invocation, Sancta Trinitas Unus Deus (Holy Trinity One God). Opposite him stands his wife in the kind of headdress familiar to us in portraits of Catherine of Aragon, a long girdle bearing a pomander encircling her waist, while her shoulders are draped with a cloak bearing the Neville arms, including arguably the proudest device in all England, a saltire ermine. Even more significantly, perhaps, her scroll, in its turn, bears a prayer to the Virgin Mary, Miserere nobis miseris (Pray for us sinners), confirming her dedication to the old religion in whose defence her son had been martyred some nine years before her own death and ten years before the death of her eldest son, John.

How she reacted to Sebastian’s eventual martyrdom may well be imagined. But if one tantalising possibility holds true, then even a mother’s natural grief may well have been magnified beyond all normal bounds by another of her son’s dealings. For while Sebastian held fast to Rome to the point of agonising death, his eldest brother seems to have embraced the new religious changes with no little enthusiasm. In St Mary the Virgin’s chancel, indeed, stands his own impressively appointed altar tomb, surmounted by a canopy of perpendicular work in accordance with a man of some considerable status, but otherwise bearing all the hallmarks of the reformed religion, complete with an English inscription and a marked absence of references to either the Blessed Virgin or the saints, or to prayers for his departed soul.

Off your charite [the inscription runs] pray for the soules of John Newdigate Esquyer and Anne | his wyff y^e whiche John decessyd the xix^th day of June in the year of o^r Lorde | God a thousand fyve hundred fourtie fyve and y^e said Anne decessyd y^e | __ day of _____ in the year of o^r lorde God a thousand five hundred ____ On whose Soules and all Christen soules Jhū have mercy Amen.

Curiously, the date of the wife’s death was never specified, and it is equally curious in its way, perhaps, that John himself should have died on the tenth anniversary of his martyred brother’s death, by which time, it seems, he had profited in no small measure from the religious changes of the time. For St Mary the Virgin itself had come into his hands in 1542 in the wake of the dissolution of the monasteries, and while the eldest of his seven sons, George, had himself become a monk at Chertsey, the eventual marriage of another, Francis, to the widow of Edward Seymour, Lord Protector and uncle of Edward VI, confirmed not only the father’s thoroughgoing Protestant credentials but, much more significantly still, the family’s strikingly successful integration into elite circles under his auspices. And nor is this the end of either the curiosity or the irony, since a John Newdigate Esquire is found not only among the jurors who eventually condemned John Fisher to death, but on the self-same jury responsible for the condemnation of Sebastian himself.

Whether the juror and the lord of the manor of Harefield were indeed one and the same is unknown, but, in other respects at least, John Newdigate was certainly not alone in advancing his fortunes by surfing the tides of religious change in sixteenth-century England. On the contrary, opportunism was, as might be expected, far more common than martyrdom, and the Newdigates were in any case already making hay by loyal compliance long before their king saw fit to break with Rome. John’s father, for instance, had been advanced to the Order of the Coif on 18 November 1510, opening the way for his appointment as a justice of the Court of Common Pleas and the King’s Bench, and ten years later he had been appointed King’s Sergeant – promotions that eventually opened the way, no doubt, for his son Sebastian’s career at court, first as a page and then, much more prestigiously still, as a gentleman of the Privy Chamber. Probably about 21 at that point, and in all likelihood married, Sebastian was already, according to Henry Clifford’s Life of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria, ‘a gentleman of good parts’ and ‘not a little favoured by the king’. And there is no reason to believe that either his domestic circumstances or the fascinating splendours of court life did anything initially beyond captivating him. For if the tone of the Privy Chamber had indeed by that time changed, not least because of the king’s wish to affirm his own maturity, its prestige and attractions for any young man remained as potent as ever.

Within a year of their banishment, Neville, Bryan, Carew and their colleagues had, in fact, re-surfaced at Henry’s side at the Field of Cloth of Gold for what would be the most extravagant chivalric spectacle in which any of them, including Henry himself, had yet been involved. And both they and now Sebastian Newdigate, too, would continue to earn their keep, not least by parading as striking embellishments to great ceremonial spectacles, such as those involving Emperor Charles V’s state visit of 1521. Sumptuously attired in black or blue velvet, as occasion demanded, and emblazoned with golden fleurs-de-lys and other majestic emblems, they acted as escorts and outriders, and, if both the laughter and politics of the Privy Chamber were henceforth more muted, its members enjoyed the same intimacy with the king as before, and perhaps for the newcomers an altogether deeper emotional bond, as Henry now embraced more and more fully the posture of an older, wiser head and father figure, nurturing the altogether more awed, respectful and less flamboyant members of his private brood. Though no pious wet, if the comments of his sister Jane are to be trusted, Newdigate’s discretion and comparative moderation are likely to have rendered him particularly dear to the king, who often admired most in others what he most signally lacked himself, not the least of which was the kind of model family life also apparently enjoyed by his fresh young servant. For during the courtier’s three-year residence within the Privy Chamber a daughter named Amphelys was born, who is mentioned in the will of Richard Newdigate, dated 1545, which cites ‘Amphilis Newdigate, daughter of Sebastian Newdigate, of Herefilde, co. Middlesex’.

Nor, in spite of his eldest sister’s warnings about ‘the deceits of the world and the snares of the devil’ entailed by life at court and the king’s company, does the young courtier appear to have served his wife’s needs any less dutifully than those of his royal master. For although he would imply to his sister that he had lived the courtier’s life fully and on one occasion even defended his ‘infamous behaviour’ when she laboured the point, he nevertheless downplayed his excesses and, in doing so, also suggested that ‘the report and her opinion of the king were worse than he merited’. Yet if Newdigate maintained, as duty required, as judicious a silence on his master’s shortcomings as he might, those flaws were already assuming increasing prominence around the very time of his own arrival at court. Certainly, the king’s extra-marital excursions were already old news when sister Jane saw fit to counsel her brother, and the brother’s response had not, in any case, been entirely unequivocal. For when pressed, Newdigate duly conceded that ‘if the king should prove as bad as the world suspecteth or speaks of him’, he would ‘have in memory what she advised him’. Much more curiously still, however, he then concluded with an astonishing revelation that betrayed for the first time the true extent of his inner turmoil: nothing less indeed than an admission of his intention to abandon the court altogether, as Sir Thomas More had once considered, in preference for the solitude of London’s famous Carthusian monastery.

The episode is described thus by Clifford, who was a trusted retainer of long-standing in the household of Jane’s granddaughter and namesake, the Duchess of Feria:

At which word, pausing awhile, leaning his head upon his hand, he replied: ‘Sister, what shall you say if the next news you hear of me shall be that I am entered to be a monk in the Charterhouse?’

And the sister’s response was one of wonderment – not only further confirming her suspicions about the kinds of influences to which her brother had been subject, but reflecting too, perhaps, the unrivalled rigour of the particular monastic order to which he was now on the verge of committing himself: ‘“A monk!” she saith. “I fear, rather, I shall see thee hanged. I pray God keep thee a good Christian, for such perfection is fit for men of other metal than loose courtiers.”’

The Carthusian way of life could hardly have been more starkly at odds with the splendour and pitfalls of the Tudor court. On the contrary, the Order founded by St Bruno in 1084 was a model of austerity at a time when other monastic brotherhoods had become a byword for corruption and soft living. Nunquam reformata quia nunquam deformata (never reformed, because never deformed) ran the saying, and if their everyday lifestyle was any guide, it is easy to see how the claim that their Charterhouses had never been reformed because they had never been defiled in the first place held true. Eating only bread, fruit, herbs, and vegetables, and fasting at least once a week on nothing more than bread, water and salt, Carthusians traditionally lived out their silent lives confined to two-storey cells: the lower floor a workshop in which they spent part of their day labouring, and an upper level consisting of two rooms, one for sleeping, furnished with a board covered with a blanket, and the other containing a stall and prie-Dieu, a work table, bookshelf, two chairs, and a ‘refectory’ set in the window recess. And the broader rigours of their lifestyle were no less taxing, since the Carthusian left the confines of his cell only for the three daily services held in the monastery chapel and for the community meals on Sundays and solemn feast days, which were also held in silence. Indeed, his only other relief from meditation and prayer were his private garden, in which he was required to grow food for himself and the broader community, and the twice-yearly, day-long community recreations, which consisted of a walk in the Charterhouse’s surrounding grounds in the company of his fellow monks.

Plainly, it was the furthest possible cry from what Newdigate had experienced for at least three years. But by 1524 his wife had died and with rumours awash everywhere concerning the security of the king’s marriage, the young courtier set his course accordingly. Notwithstanding ‘the favour of the king, nor his hopes of higher advancement’, he would retire from court and leave its frequenters to their own devices, offering neither judgement nor condemnation, and maintaining to the end the loyalty to his royal master’s name that he had demonstrated to his sister before intimating his decision. Martyrdom, of course, was as yet unthinkable, and not least because the full ramifications of the coming course of events were still obscure to all, including the king himself. But it was a remarkable turn of circumstance, nevertheless, when, within a year of his conversation with his sister, Newdigate did indeed make good his prediction. By which time, another individual of far less exalted but altogether more explosive potential – a young serving girl from south-east England’s rural hinterland, with a gift for ‘prophesy’ and, as it happened, an insouciant disregard for the sensibilities of the high and mighty – was also on the verge of surprising one and all around her.

Known variously as the Holy Maid of Kent, the Holy Nun of Kent, and the Nun of Canterbury, Elizabeth Barton was born – if Dom Edward Bocking, the man who was to become her spiritual mentor, is to be relied upon – in 1506. But her birthplace is unrecorded and we have only local tradition to tell us that it was the village of Aldington, about 12 miles from Canterbury. To complicate her origins even further, Barton’s parentage remains completely unknown, though her surname suggests that her forebears may once have earned their livings on church lands, the manager of which in the Middle Ages was known as a bertonarius. If so, it was by curious coincidence, therefore, that in 1525, she entered history for the first time, employed in the household of Thomas Cobb, bertonarius of Aldington on behalf of the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose residence had been at the manor since the eleventh century. Yet even her relation to Cobb is unclear, since in one early account produced by her contemporary biographer, Edward Thwaites, she is described as ‘servant to one Thomas Cobb’, while in the Act of Attainder responsible for her death, there is reference only to her ‘having dwelt with one Thomas Cobb’.

Since the status of servants in Kentish households of the period, as elsewhere, was in fact surprisingly fluid, it is far from inconceivable, therefore, that Elizabeth Barton was either a needy relation who worked for her keep, or even that she was an illegitimate connection, though no mention is made of her in Thomas Cobb’s will, dated 1528, and at no point was she ever smeared with the stigma of bastardy amid the barrage of charges ultimately levelled against her by hostile propagandists. Indeed, an undated letter written to her by Archbishop Warham’s secretary, Henry Gold, probably in 1532, suggests that she had a sister, though this was almost certainly the limit of any blood relatives she may have possessed. For none were named or interrogated upon her arrest in 1533, as was usual in such cases, and at no stage was she accused of attempting to bring material advantage to either herself or her family by her activities. As such, it seems that death may have deprived her of her parents before she was of marriageable age and that it was for this reason that she found herself from around the age of 8 onwards at the Cobb family home of Goldwell – situated in the parish of Aldington, which lay on the land-locked cliffs overlooking the Marsh and the port of Hythe – where she became part of a large and thriving rural establishment, presided over by a man of no little substance in his own right, whose connections to influential local figures, not to mention the highest levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy at Canterbury, would play an indispensable role in bringing her ultimately to national prominence.

For as land agent to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cobb was responsible not only for the management of his own farm, but the archbishop’s land, too, and for supervising the entire manor of Aldington with all that this entailed: the collection of rents and tithes; the sorting, storing and recording of his ecclesiastical landlord’s produce; and the supervision of other local farms to ensure that they were kept, as the saying went, ‘in good heart’. Such was its extent, indeed, that in former days the manor of Aldington had stretched practically from Dover to Hastings, and though it had shrunk over the centuries and was subjected to royal depredations shortly after Thomas Cobb’s death, in 1608 it still had more than 200 tenants on its rent-rolls, including eighteen Kentish knights with total holdings amounting to 6,000 acres in twenty-three parishes, exclusive of forty-four enclosures in the Weald. How much of this may have fallen under the ambit of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s bertonarius is unfortunately unknown, but Thomas Cobb was nevertheless certainly responsible for at least the ecclesiastical lands of Aldington and Stowting, of which the demesne lands attached to the archiepiscopal residence in Aldington, including the park, alone accounted for more than 1,000 acres. And as manager of such an estate, he therefore became a man of virtually unchallengeable authority in the locality, particularly since Archbishop Warham himself spent much of his time commuting between Canterbury and Lambeth. Deals involving the interests of the manor of Aldington and those of neighbouring landowners were, indeed, negotiated by Cobb as a magnate among magnates, and it was a measure of his standing that upon his death in 1528, it was a Baron John Hales of the Exchequer whom he named as overseer of his will.

Not only land agent to the Primate of England, but boasting a family coat of arms in his own right, consisting of a ducal coronet and demi-leopard on its crest, Thomas Cobb’s bloodline was, in fact, without question very old and reasonably wealthy into the bargain – traceable to at least 1324 when a certain John Cobb, Esquire, was said to have been awarded the manor of Organers in the parish of Newchurch on the levels of Romney Marsh. The farm of Aldington itself, meanwhile, also appears to have enjoyed a number of special advantages over its neighbours, not least because the village from which it drew its name was comparatively densely populated and even seems to have had the makings of a small town, complete with what amounted to a budding high street and, of course, the archiepiscopal residence itself – with its five kitchens, six stables, nine barns, seven fodder-houses and eight dove-houses – where Warham’s predecessor, Cardinal Morton, staged amateur theatricals featuring Sir Thomas More, who was by no means the only illustrious visitor of his kind. For in 1511, Erasmus of Rotterdam, the celebrated scholar, was appointed rector of Aldington by Archbishop Warham, and lived at the rectory next to the church in what is now called Parsonage Farm. Speaking only Latin and Dutch but no English, the new incumbent was unable to preach to the English congregation, and resigned one year later as a result of a kidney complaint, which he blamed on the local beer. But he would certainly have been known to Cobb and was equally certain to have been a visitor to Cobb’s own house, which still stands today – on the road running from Aldington Corner to join the A20 between Ashford and Sellinge – looking in its modern incarnation more like a comparatively modest Victorian villa, but substantial enough, even now, to be divided comfortably into two, and with much more room than the current frontage, which is all that can be glimpsed from the road, might suggest.

Named, according to tradition, as a result of the perpetual spring that rose in its cellar, Goldwell remains a treasure trove of architectural detail, which allows us to capture tantalising snapshots of the domestic surroundings and everyday life of the young woman who began her rise to cult status while employed within its walls almost five centuries ago. For although extensively refaced, cut about and shaken by Second World War landmines into the bargain, the house still retains a number of contemporary features, particularly in the upstairs of the north-east end of the house, where the original plan seems not to have been modified at all, beyond the fact that the ceilings have been raised a little. A large bedroom, for instance, with south aspect, contains an ogival stone fireplace, which was almost certainly the master bedroom belonging to Thomas Cobb himself, since in Kentish farmhouses of the day, a bedroom with a fireplace was the exclusive privilege of the master. Equally intriguingly, on the landing outside the bedroom, a window dating to the period exactly frames the parish church and the length of the footpath that ran across the fields from the farm itself to the churchyard, ensuring that Thomas Cobb had merely to step out of his bedroom door to command a sweeping view not only of the church itself, but of the parson’s house slightly to the right, not to mention the archbishop’s country palace slightly to the left, and the nine enormous tithe barns, mentioned in Purley’s Weald of Kent, for the filling of which he, as bertonarius, was responsible. Should Archbishop Warham, on a visit from Canterbury, have therefore chosen to dispatch a nimble cleric up the unfinished church tower to hoist a signal, or if Mistress Cobb or a dawdling servant lingered on the way home from Mass, the master of Goldwell would have been sure to notice from this vantage point. And it was in this spot, too, that his wife and servants gathered at night, for, to the right of the bedroom door, on the landing outside, resides a rectangular recess, which was once home to a ‘praying cross’ around which domestic prayers were said before the household retired for sleep. Mustered conveniently outside the master’s chamber, on the same landing made sufficiently wide for the purpose, the servants of Goldwell, including young Elizabeth Barton, would have made their nightly devotions before making finally for their own quarters, which lay in a vast attic running the length of the original house and as high as the pitch of the roof.

Lit only by a single dormer window, which was destroyed during the Second World War, the attic was still roughly floored with thick wooden planks as late as the 1970s and divided up into thirds in much the same way that it had been centuries earlier: one third lying over the master bedroom, extending as far as the central chimney, while the remaining area was divided in half by an ancient partition, of which the wooden framework still stood only fifty years ago, supporting panels of cow-dung plaster that were by then falling away to dust. In the middle of the partition, meanwhile, lay a wooden door, behind which the dimmest part of the attic was divided longwise by a low course of worm-eaten boarding. And it was beyond this securely fastened door, we may assume, that Elizabeth Barton and her fellow female servants took their rest, since it was usual for the men, who were more inclined to bedtime unruliness, to sleep within earshot of their master, directly above his own bedroom. Reclining on truckle-beds, palliasses, bare straw or sacking, communicating from time to time perhaps in hushed voices through the thin cow-dung partition, it was in this spot that the day’s labours ended for one and all, as they slumbered not only beneath open rafters but, where cracks existed, beneath the stars themselves. And it was here too that these self-same folk lay to be nursed if sick, just as happened in Easter 1525, when Elizabeth Barton, aged about 19, first fell prey to a very severe, persistent and curious illness, the details of which were recorded by a wealthy and cultured justice of the peace named Edward Thwaites, who visited Goldwell that December.

For what should have been a routine visit by a local office-holder – perhaps in his capacity as inspector of Romney Marsh’s water table – actually proved nothing of the kind, since Thwaites was so struck by an extraordinary story related to him by Cobb about the apparently astonishing gift of the ailing girl in his employ that he would become her earliest biographer and indeed advocate. Consisting of twenty-four pages and printed in 1527 under the title A Marvellous Work of Late Done at Court-of-Street in Kent and Published to the Devout People of this Time for their Spiritual Consolation, Thwaites’s account of what he was told and subsequently witnessed in person is largely preserved in William Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent (1570), and ascribes, not altogether surprisingly, a directly supernatural interpretation upon the events that would soon lead to the creation of a shrine centred upon his subject’s visions of the Blessed Virgin. Indeed, his pamphlet was effectively a brochure for the shrine of Our Lady at Court-at-Street – which was known to contemporaries as Court-of-Street – popularising the findings of an episcopal commission of 1526, and explaining to the multitudes that visited as pilgrims the remarkable circumstances in which the shrine became active. Divided into two parts (the first dealing with Barton’s girlhood, her supposed cure at Court-at-Street and subsequent entry into a nunnery; the second detailing the subsequent miracles performed at Court-at-Street by the intercession of the Virgin Mary) Thwaites’s Marvellous Work remains, in fact, not only our sole eye-witness account of Barton’s activities, but by far the most valuable, too, since the author was both an educated man and magistrate, and, as such, well used to hearing potentially suspect tales and appropriately equipped to weigh their reliability.

Even more than Thomas Cobb, Thwaites was a man of substance, influence and connections – a figure whose support and advocacy not only carried considerable weight in its own right, but extended far beyond Aldington and its confines. His marriage to the Kentish family of Elynden had, for instance, made him master of the very extensive manor of Easture and East Stour – ‘held of the King by ward of the Castle of Dover by the payment of 7s’ – with lands in six different Kentish parishes: Chilham, Godmersham, Waltham and Petham, all contiguous and in the immediate neighbourhood of Canterbury; along with Stourmouth and Preston, also contiguous, near Sandwich. Equally significantly, however, the marriage had also enabled him to claim that the so-called ‘Lieutenancy of the Lantern’ at Calais was his by right of inheritance, and when the first Mrs Thwaites died early, possibly in giving birth to his son Thomas, an even more advantageous union had followed – with the widow of Sir George Warham, nephew of the archbishop and brother of his archdeacon. For Thwaites’s new bride, Dame Anne Warham, was a member of the St Leger family of Leeds Castle, whose head was frequently sheriff of the county and had been for the previous two decades, to all intents and purposes, the hereditary Member of Parliament for Kent. Indeed, the influence of the St Legers ran clean through Church and State alike – on into the nobility, and even into the royal family itself, since one of Dame Anne’s great uncles had married a widowed princess, Anne, Duchess of Exeter, and another had married the daughter and heiress of the Earl of Ormonde, while her nephew was Sheriff of Kent and later Lord Deputy of Ireland.

Thanks to his second marriage, therefore, Thwaites found himself rubbing shoulders and sharing the local administration with individuals who constituted the sixteenth-century pantheon of Kent: the congeries of leading families, who, between them, by cousinship and alliance, controlled power-lines running straight into the royal household itself, as well as the Privy Council, the law courts, Convocation and the highest echelons of the clergy, not to mention the ecclesiastical courts, the magistrates’ courts, the manorial courts, the local garrison towns, castles and ports, the customs and excise, and down into the marshes, where he and his peers determined the very height of the water table – itself no mere trifle, since this in turn materially affected the pasturage for hundreds of thousands of sheep. Wealthy by his first marriage, influential as a result of his second, it was only natural that Thwaites should have promoted the social rank of his relatives, with the result that Thomas his son would marry the younger daughter of his wealthy neighbour Sir William Finch, of the Mote near Canterbury, while Ursula Thwaites (his daughter?) was married to the same Sir William’s grandson, becoming Lady Finch, mother of Baron Finch of Fordwich in Kent, aunt of the first Earl of Winchelsea and Viscount Maidstone, great-aunt of the first Earl of Nottingham, and great-great-aunt of the first Earl of Aylesford.

So when Edward Thwaites became captivated by young Elizabeth Barton’s tale on a routine visit to Goldwell and took up her cause, it was to prove an event of considerable significance, both for the girl herself and, as events would prove, for the king and government in faraway London. For in view of his rank, background and ongoing ambition, Thwaites is unlikely to have championed her lightly. Nor, in light of the style of the pamphlet that he wrote in 1527, did he do so for the sake of his own publicity. For A Marvellous Work suggests an individual of undoubted piety, who while conservative and orthodox and genuinely impressed by the unusual, was nevertheless admirably sympathetic to human suffering, and commendably ordered in his thoughts. Writing a more direct and uncluttered English than many of his more learned or famous contemporaries, and exhibiting a decided flair for telling an intriguing tale in a vivid and convincing manner, he was, in fact, eminently suited to deliver his account, which focused, initially at least, upon the onset and symptoms of her illness itself, which he described thus:

About the time of Easter, in the sixteenth year of the reign of King Henry VIII [spring 1525], it happened a certain maiden named Elizabeth Barton (then servant to one Thomas Cobb of the Parish of Aldington, twelve miles distant from Canterbury) to be touched with a great infirmity in her body, which did ascend at divers times up into her throat, and swelled greatly; during the time whereof, she seemed to be in grievous pain, in so much as a man would have thought that she had suffered the pangs of death itself, until the disease descended and fell down into the body again.

Offering no further insight into the causes or nature of the girl’s illness, beyond the fact that it ‘continued by fits, the space of seven months and more’, Thwaites does, however, make clear that the Cobbs were not only willing to accommodate the sufferings of their sickly servant girl but to delegate staff to nurse her during the seven busiest months of the farming year, and to bring her from her attic resting place to the comfort of the main house – by which time, it seems, ‘a young child of her master’s lay desperately sick beside her’.

And it was this somewhat unusual decision to place the sickly young woman with Thomas Cobb’s ailing infant that would ultimately become the springboard for Barton’s astonishing ascent to celebrity thereafter. For, as Thwaites tells:

She, being vexed with the former disease, asked with great pangs and groaning whether the child were yet departed this life or no; and when the women that attended upon them both in their sickness, answered no, she replied that it should be anon. Which word was no sooner uttered, but the child fetched a great sigh and withal the soul departed out of the body of it.

In the presence, then, of at least two women, and with the greatest physical effort, Elizabeth Barton had, it seems, delivered her first ‘divination and foretelling’, under what had appeared some strong compulsion, as though she were forced to speak in spite of herself. Doubtless, the impact upon both her attendants and the Cobb household in general must have been considerable, and the implication, too, is that the incident was rapidly mooted more widely, since, as Thwaites makes clear, this was ‘the first matter that moved her hearers to admiration’. Seen as much more than any mere coincidence, Barton had, it was believed, prophesied the child’s demise with supernatural assistance. And further acts of clairvoyance, often relating to events occurring at some distance, coupled to utterances on religious matters – all delivered in writhing agony or trance-states – were not long in following: this time frequently witnessed by Thwaites himself who left accounts, like the one below, of what occurred:

But after this in sundry of her fits following, although she seemed to the beholders to lie as still as a dead body (not moving any part at all), as well as in the trances themselves as after the pangs passed also, she told plainly of divers things done at the church and other places where she was not present, which nevertheless she seemed (by signs proceeding from her) most likely to behold as it were with her eye.

How she managed to speak in the first place, while ‘not moving any part at all’, is in itself a matter of some interest, of course, not least because the manner, as described in a letter written by Thomas Cranmer in 1533 – which drew, it seems, upon a passage from Thwaites’s narrative later suppressed by Lambarde – was dramatic enough to leave little doubt about its impact upon those witnessing it:

Then [Cranmer relates] was there a voice heard within her belly, as it had been in a tun [barrel] her lips not greatly moving; she all that while continuing … in a trance.

The which voice, when it told anything of the joys of heaven, it spake so sweetly and heavenly that every man was ravished with the hearing thereof. And contrary, when it told anything of hell, it spake so horribly and terribly that it put the hearers in a great fear.

‘She spake’, moreover, not only of ‘heaven, hell and purgatory’, but, as Thwaites informs us, ‘of the joys and sorrows that sundry departed souls had, and suffered, there’. And there were moral and spiritual messages, too. For, according to Lambarde’s abridgement of Thwaites:

She preached frankly against the corruption of manners and evil life: she exhorted repair to the Church, hearing of masses, confession to priests, prayer to our Lady and saints, and (to be short made in all points), confession and confirmation of the Popish creed and catechism, and that so devoutly and discreetly (in the opinion of mine author) that he thought it not possible for her to speak in this manner [i.e. with a level of knowledge and authority beyond the capabilities of a young woman of her age and background].

Revelations about the conditions of departed souls would continue, in fact, throughout the remainder of Elizabeth Barton’s brief life. Indeed, they would eventually come to encompass not only the celestial fates of Cardinal Wolsey and Archbishop Warham, but of Henry VIII himself. Yet even in the winter of 1525–26, before she had emerged from the farmhouse into the world of national -– and indeed international – politics, her statements were already increasingly loaded with broader significance. For her observations on the need for attendance at Mass, sacramental confession, the cult of saints, pilgrimages, prayers for the dead and so on, cut straight to the heart of the clash between orthodox Catholicism and the propaganda of the continental Reformation that was already combining so potently with English anticlericalism.

It was a propaganda, moreover, as violent as it was diverse, and typified by the ‘great errors and pestilent errors’ of William Tyndale, recorded in the register of Archbishop Warham for 1530. In seven selected works, the register noted, no fewer than 251 errors, blasphemies and heresies were detectable to the eyes of orthodox theologians. But although Tyndale’s writings did not begin to appear in print in 1526, the ailing servant girl of Thomas Cobb’s household had already, in effect, identified and forewarned against the most central a year in advance. For while Tyndale might declaim against the pope and St Thomas Aquinas or contend that there was no scriptural warrant for monasticism, it was his denunciation of the Mass and the Church’s sacramental system that represented the most radical threat, and it was these, curiously enough, that Elizabeth Barton was most inclined to defend in her trance pronouncements. More importantly still, while the ploughboy in the field might be disinterested in the issue of whether Elijah and Elisha were or were not the fathers of Christian monasticism or whether Aquinas ‘savoured of the spirit of God’, he was sure to be vitally concerned about whether or not to hear Mass, attend confession, ‘go to sermon’ or make pilgrimage to Canterbury, all of which were powerfully endorsed by Barton – and with an authority that impressed not only Edward Thwaites, but other contemporaries like the anonymous biographer of John Fisher, who also bore witness to it, though he did not reside even in the diocese of Canterbury, and was equally impressed by her trenchancy, as the following observation makes clear:

True it is, that divers times, being in her trance wherein she happened to fall very often, she uttered such words touching the reproving of heresies which then began fast to spread: declaring what mischief would ensue this realm by admitting the same, that it was thought wonderful to be heard at the mouth of such a woman.

Barring supernatural agency, then, it would seem that Elizabeth Barton was by no means the ignoramus later depicted in hostile propaganda. Certainly, Thomas Cobb was no hayseed himself and the fact that Barton was retained in his household even when unable to perform her duties, and indeed nurtured in illness with such care, leaves little doubt of the regard in which she was held. If she could not read, moreover, it is hard to see how she would eventually become a professed nun by October 1528, after entering the Benedictine novitiate only the year before. And this is not the only reason for acknowledging her intelligence. For, according to the government’s own charges levelled against her in January and February 1534, we hear that by the early 1530s, even the brother of Archbishop Warham’s chaplain had entrusted his two daughters to her as a competent and instructed person. Certainly, Thwaites makes no suggestion of meanness of background or provides the vaguest hint of any simple-mindedness on Barton’s part. On the contrary, he praised her lucidity and discretion of speech, which appeared to contrast so markedly with the muddled lewdness of so many contemporary controversialists.

Doubtless, too, a quick-witted young girl could have learned much from Thomas Cobb himself, whose will was a model of orthodox piety and, as such, indicative of a man who may well have been inclined to voice his distaste for heresy both to Barton and anyone else at hand within his household. As was customary, he ‘bequeathed’ his soul ‘to Almightyful God, to our blessed Lady S. Mary and to all the holy company of heaven’, and, apart from bequests for a new north window in the local church and assistance totalling 12s for ‘twelve of the poorest people being householders within the said parish of Aldington’, there was a further sum of 40s left to the priory of Horton Monkyn (about 4 miles from Aldington) ‘for to sing a trental of masses for my soul’, along with the sum of 13s 4d yearly to ‘have an obit done for my soul and all Christian souls in the church of Aldington by the space of seven years’. Certainly, Tyndale would have winced at the contents, just as Cobb was sure, while living, to have bristled at growing news of heresy and anticlericalism both in Kent and the broader world. And as a long-standing member of a business-like household where Catholic piety was habitual and where she may well have enjoyed a comparatively familiar relationship with that household’s head, Barton herself, of course, was unlikely to have remained unmoved by the challenges to the religion of her upbringing or the opinions of her master, whose staunch conservatism in religious matters was effectively guaranteed by his position.

Nor is it difficult to see in such circumstances how the humble servant girl’s pronouncements might also have acquired the sophistication that they do indeed appear to have done. For there was the influence, too, of another figure – no less substantial from another perspective than Thomas Cobb and cited in Cobb’s own will: namely, the ‘honest priest’ who had been appointed at a cost of £7 13s 4d ‘to sing for my soul and all my friends’ souls in the church of Aldington aforesaid for the space of one whole year next immediately following my death’. The priest concerned was Richard Master, another of the distinguished men who had for some time been appointed, like Erasmus before him, to serve the parish of Aldington by direct appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. For prior to the Dutchman, Thomas Linacre – physician, classical scholar and another leading intellect of the day – had held the living between 1509 and 1511, before becoming Latin tutor to Henry VIII’s eldest daughter, Mary. And when Erasmus, likewise, had eventually moved on to greater things, he in turn had been replaced by John Thornton, prior of St Martin’s, Dover, who had already been consecrated as suffragan to Archbishop Warham in 1508 under the title Bishop of Smirnium. All three, in fact, were a far cry from the kind of hack curate to be found in so many contemporary parishes, and this was hardly surprising, since Aldington’s church was, in effect, so closely associated with the archiepiscopal palace that it became nothing less than a local chaplaincy for the Primate of England’s itinerant court. As such, it had become reserved only for men of genuine substance with a significant ecclesiastical career before them. And upon his appointment in 1514, Richard Master appears to have fallen squarely within this category.

Born at Maidstone in 1484, the latest incumbent of the parish of Aldington had been educated at the royal foundation of Eton, and in 1504 went up to Cambridge as a scholar of the twin foundation of King’s College, where, after impressing with apparently lightning speed, he became a fellow from 1505 to 1515 and won the reputation of ‘an excellent natural and experimental philosopher’. He had graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1506–7 and Master of Arts in 1510, before ordination to the subdiaconate at Lincoln in March 1511 and incorporation as a member of the University of Oxford in 1513, after which he served as Junior Proctor at Cambridge from 1513 to 1514, bringing him into direct contact with John Fisher. But by 1515 he had also been granted his degree of Bachelor of Divinity, by which time Erasmus was already acknowledging Master as a young man of promise, ‘learned in divinity, and of good and sober life’ – an opinion obviously shared by Archbishop Warham, who appointed him to the valuable living of Aldington, and all that that entailed, on 18 November 1514, in the thirty-first year of his life.

With Aldington, moreover, went not only the adjacent chapelry of Smeeth, as well as a further living of Eastry, 17 miles north-west of Aldington in the neighbourhood of Sandwich, but ultimately the friendship of Thomas Cobb, the closeness of which was demonstrated ultimately by the latter’s last will. For when Cobb framed it just under fourteen years later, Master was the only legatee mentioned with any trace of affection. The others, in fact, including even Cobb’s wife and five children, were so many names and no more, and in the wife’s case, indeed, there had actually been the following undisguised threat:

I will that, if my said wife be not contented with such portions as I have assigned to her in this my testament and last will, but she or any other person for her or in her name, will or do trouble, interrupt or vex my executors in anything concerning my said last will and testament, then I will that she shall lose and not have the aforesaid 53s. 4d. by year nor no part thereof.

But Richard Master, by contrast, remained ‘my honest priest’, who, by that time had effectively shared the rule of Aldington’s affairs for more than a decade, presiding over its spiritual well-being just as Thomas Cobb controlled material matters, and becoming in the process, we may safely assume, one half of a firm friendship.

Significantly, when the inventory of his possessions was taken by government agents in 1534, Master was the owner of a very sizeable library, consisting of ‘forty-two great books covered with boards, and thirty-three small books covered with boards, and thirty-eight books covered with leather and parchment’. And it was this cultivated man, conscientious in his duties, up-to-date but orthodox, who, in befriending Thomas Cobb, became familiar with Elizabeth Barton, an impressionable young girl who, from the age of 8 to 19, heard his vernacular sermons, Sunday by Sunday, confessed her sins to him and received his visits when illness overtook her. According to The Sermon against the Holy Maid of Kent and her Adherents – composed by Nicholas Heath, amended by Thomas Cranmer, and delivered at Paul’s Cross in London on 23 November 1533 – Master had supped at Thomas Cobb’s table after those visits, before returning to his church, no more than a stone’s throw away. And it was he, ultimately, who, in compliance with canonical regulations, became compelled to inform the relevant ecclesiastical authorities of young Elizabeth Barton’s growing repute. Since his parish was exempt from the aegis of the Rural Dean of Lympne, as also from the Archdeacon of Canterbury, he would have no alternative, moreover, than to deliver his report to Archbishop of Warham, and, in doing so, elevate the whole affair to an entirely new level.

Doubtless, therefore, it was with some misgivings that Master rode forth from Aldington at some point in the winter of 1525–26, leaving behind him the parish church of St Martin’s, where Elizabeth Barton herself was a worshipper, and which still stands today much as it did then – a potent link to the extraordinary events about to unfold. Though the bell tower begun by Archbishop Warham would take another four centuries to complete, it remains as impressive a structure as the day that Master set out, with its nave and chancel flanked by a south aisle and what used to be the Lady Chapel. In Barton’s time, too, there were statues of the Blessed Virgin and St Martin as well as St Erasmus, a little known early martyr, whose image was installed in recognition of the church’s association with his much better-known namesake. And these were not the only signs of the small collegiate church’s comparative affluence, since the screen and parcloses of the choir, which dated from Cardinal John Morton’s time, were unusually elaborate, not unlike the stalls themselves, which terminated in rich poupée-headed finials and boasted elaborate knee-boards carved with foliage and a pin-cushion device of the Five Wounds. As an added flourish, moreover, Master’s own stall boasted an angel carved on its end-post, which still survives today, albeit as a mutilated, wingless, headless figure, seated with a scroll across its lap, but as another poignant link, nonetheless, to the past and, in its own way, the dilemma facing its occupant at this time. For the hand of Richard Master must often have touched it, as he sang his office and puzzled over the strange case presented by Thomas Cobb’s servant, knowing full well that in spite of their willingness to acknowledge supernatural intervention in everyday life, the ecclesiastical authorities did not in fact do so lightly, thereby guaranteeing that any priest presenting such a possibility – particularly one of Master’s status – risked his reputation accordingly.

When the time came, moreover, Archbishop Warham was indeed appropriately non-committal about Barton’s revelations, merely instructing Master ‘to be at them as nigh as he could mark them well’. Or this at least was the account of the meeting provided in The Sermon against the Holy Maid of Kent and her Adherents eight years later. But both the Sermon and the Act of Attainder, drafted under the supervision of Thomas Cromwell in January and February 1534, also went on to suggest that, upon his return to Aldington, Master now went much further than his brief, not only refusing to await the findings of the episcopal commission soon to be set up by Warham to investigate the case, but, in the meantime, actively encouraging Barton to continue with her oracles. As The Sermon put it:

[He] showed her that the said Archbishop took the matter very well and said it was notable, and commanded him to be present if she had any more speeches and to mark the same: [the parson] affirming that the speeches she had spoken came of God, and that she should not refuse, neither hide, the goodness and works of God. And likewise said unto Thomas Cobb, her master.

If true, the last part of the account clearly renders Master a provocateur – a cynical exploiter of a troubled young woman for his own nefarious purposes. Worse still, it was also suggested that the rector of Aldington directly persuaded her that ‘her words proceeded of the inspiration of the Holy Ghost’, and in doing so convinced both her and her circle of what amounted to her newfound celebrity status, bringing visitors from further afield – including Edward Thwaites, who now regularly travelled the not inconsiderable distance of some 11 miles across country to meet her – and elevating her own status within the Cobb household. For in the words of The Sermon: ‘As soon as she was able to sit up, her master now caused her to sit at his own mess with her mistress and this parson of Aldington.’ Intoxicated by her new circumstances and prompted by a clerical Svengali, Barton would, it seems, be given free rein to deliver her pronouncements under the direct supervision of her exploitative guide and mentor.

But does this depiction of Master, let alone the Maid herself, square with what we know of a sometime proctor of the University of Cambridge, reckoned hitherto by all who recorded their thoughts of him to be ‘of good and sober life’? And is it likely, too, that such a man would have stirred the coals so readily and pre-empt the findings of the impending episcopal commission at such potential risk to both his own career and Barton’s personal safety? For there was always the possibility, of course, that any supernatural intervention at Goldwell might ultimately be deemed demonic in nature, with all the ramifications that might entail. Certainly, as early as 1528, William Tyndale was teaching that the Maid’s visions and prophecies, if not the result of human trickery, were ‘done of the Devil, to prove us [Protestants], whether we will cleave fast to God’s word; and to deceive them [Catholics] that have no love to the truth of God’s word, nor lust to walk in his laws’, while by 1537 Richard Morison was declaring without reservation that at the outset of her rise to prominence ‘she fell under the sway of a demon’. If true, then the risk clearly existed that Barton might be detained in an ecclesiastical gaol on suspicion of witchcraft, or that Thomas Cobb might be stripped of his honourable and lucrative position for nurturing such a woman.

That Cobb was closely involved with his servant’s activities is demonstrated by the following passage from Thwaites, which also demonstrates the ongoing evolution of Barton’s claims after Master’s visit to Canterbury, by which time the claim that ‘she should go home’, i.e. to the chapel at Court-at-Street where she was supposedly transported in her trances, was ‘ever much in her mouth’:

Whereupon, being in a time of another trance demanded where that home was, she answered: Where she saw and heard the joys of heaven, where St Michael weighed souls, where St Peter carried the keys, and where she herself had the company of our Lady of Court-of-Street, and had heartily besought Her to heal her disease; Who also had commanded her to offer unto Her a taper in Her chapel and to declare boldly to all Christian people that our Lady of Court-of-Street had revived her from the very point of death; and that Her pleasure was that it should be rung for a miracle.

Which words when her master heard, he said: that there were no bells in that chapel.

Notwithstanding Cobb’s need to correct her about the chapels bells, or more precisely the lack thereof, Barton’s pronouncements were therefore clearly growing in scope, as the nearby shrine of Court-at-Street featured more and more prominently in her utterances. For there, she declared, ‘Our blessed Lady will show more miracles shortly,’ so that ‘if any depart this life suddenly or by mischance in deadly sin … he shall be restored to life again to receive shrift and housel, and after to depart this world with God’s blessing.’

In the context of the time, of course, this was a particularly potent claim, and one, as events would soon prove, with ample scope to transform the little tumbledown chapel that she revered so ardently from one of the many humbler shrines to the Virgin Mary, scattered up and down the kingdom, into a place where multitudes might visit – and not only to plead for the intercession of Christ’s mother in their humdrum affairs, but to marvel at the ‘Holy Maid’ herself. Known in Barton’s time as Court-of-Street, the chapel lay halfway between Aldington Corner and the old Roman port and fortress-town of Lympne, and had originated as the domestic chapel of a fortified manor house built by John de Hadlow in the early fourteenth century. With the disappearance of Hadlow’s house, however, the chapel had ceased to be used for regular liturgical use and fallen into decay, so that by the start of the sixteenth century it was tended by no more than a solitary hermit, who was not a priest and could therefore neither say Mass nor administer sacraments. Nor were his efforts at the chapel’s preservation from the meagre alms he received likely to have been particularly successful, for in 1504 we find the sum of only 3s 6d being spent on upkeep, and by 1527, some twenty years later, the building was still not equipped with the bare necessities required for divine worship – lacking, as Thomas Cobb noted, even a bell.

According to an architectural survey of 1929, there were indications of a large perpendicular east window, and by the 1970s there was still the remnant of the four-centred west doorway, enclosed in a rectangular hood mould with triangular spandrels, and within it, on the north side, a cavity once containing a holy water stoup. But even in Elizabeth Barton’s day, Court-at-Street was hardly an architectural gem. On the contrary, it was a remote and dilapidated outpost of the local religious landscape, just under 3 miles away from Goldwell and set deep in vast woodland through which its hermit resident is said to have piloted those benighted wayfarers unfortunate enough to have become lost there. Yet it did have a venerable statue of the Virgin Mary, and henceforth it would now have the growing celebrity of the ‘Holy Maid of Kent’ herself to sustain it. For after a nine-day period during Lent in 1526, involving two separate visits and a prolonged fast during which she remained ‘eating nothing and drinking little’, Elizabeth Barton was finally promised a cure for her long-standing ailment, and thus emerged as a ready-made cult figure in her own right.

According to a supernatural voice heard at the scene, her abstinence had been proof in its own right of ‘a true miracle’, and although the cure itself was still to come, hereafter, we are told, the ‘fame of the marvellous Maiden was to spread abroad’ – on a scale, moreover, that now made the summons of the ecclesiastical commission, mooted earlier by Warham, a pressing priority. Were it to legitimise Barton’s revelations, it might render the failing chapel of Court-at-Street a latter-day Walsingham, and the maid herself another in the long line of visionary mystics dating back to St Theresa of Avila and earlier. Indeed, the possibilities were virtually limitless. But they were also explosive. For if the prophecies issuing from Barton’s lips were to become political, they would not be ignorable – by either the authorities in general or the king, in particular, who, at this very moment, was hell-bent on severing all ties with his long-suffering wife.