8
When the lion roars, who can help feeling afraid?
When God himself speaks, who dare refuse to prophesy?
Amos 3:8
If Henry VIII was in fact contemplating a new course in the early months of 1531, his tactics for achieving it remained hopelessly inadequate. For the attempt to smother the pope with a welter of archival evidence, like Cranmer’s appeal to the universities before it, was never more than a powder puff effort. Like it or not, the pope remained diplomatically manacled and neither words nor sticks nor stones could force him to comply. So while the king finally began to ponder his only realistic alternative, he remained hopelessly unable, all the same, to strike upon the appropriate method for achieving it. As the new year dawned, indeed, both Henry’s ministers and his strategies were proving nakedly unproductive. Eustace Chapuys, for his part, noted that, ‘Parliament is prorogued from time to time as though they do not know their own minds about the measures proposed therein.’ But if Henry was edging blindfold towards the notion of a national Church under his direct control, it would require somebody else to furnish the means for its achievement and the intellectual case upon which it might be founded – an outsider who might also drive the sluggish Reformation Parliament by fair or foul persuasions towards a more ‘constructive’ goal. And though few, if any, knew it at this stage, precisely such a figure was now at hand.
Thomas Cromwell, whose origins may well have been rather less auspicious than is generally recognised these days, was born in the small village of Putney, which then lay some 4 miles from the capital. Though not, therefore, quite a Londoner, it is nevertheless certain that he will soon have felt the irresistible pull of the many-spired and malodorous city in which his years of power were to be passed. Appropriately enough, the year of his birth is thought by some to have coincided with the Battle of Bosworth and the triumph of the Tudor dynasty with whose fortunes he would be so closely linked. And if Cromwell’s arrival did indeed occur in 1485, he shared his birth year with a cluster of famous figures, including Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, and Catherine of Aragon, whose marriage would greatly influence the minister’s rise to eminence. Yet the chronological link between the boy from Putney and such individuals would have seemed at the time to be the likely limit of any connection, for when he entered the world wrapped in anonymity and burdened with the dead weight of humble parentage, none could have predicted for him so prominent a place in history. Bereft of rank, connection or fortune, even the prospect of formal schooling was to be denied him. And if, as some have suggested, he was descended from the rich Nottinghamshire magnate Ralph Lord Cromwell, there was little evidence of it in his upbringing. Indeed, his will of 1529 made more than one reference to ‘poor kinsfolk’ still living and in later life he is known to have shaken the hand of an old bell-ringer at Syon House before a crowd of courtiers, confessing, according to one source, that during his childhood ‘this man’s father had given him many dinners in his necessities’.
Cromwell’s own father, meanwhile, had been a man of many parts – with few of them particularly worthy. Though often described as a brewer, Walter Cromwell was primarily a blacksmith and fuller, who, as a sideline, apparently brewed bad beer, for he was more than once condemned at the assize of ale. Moreover, as well as being prone to dishonesty and occasional bouts of drunkenness, he was also quarrelsome and known to the local magistracy for assault and overgrazing the common pasture. But in spite of the fact that he led a life of more than typical commotion, the elder Cromwell was not without his fair share of native wit and it is highly probable that the influence of such an artful, devil-may-care fellow upon his son was considerable. Certainly, young Thomas appears to have acquired a patina of tough unconventionality, which he carried into adulthood, even proudly. Never one to hide behind airs and affectation, he later confessed to the ever-earnest Cranmer, doubtless with some glee, that ‘he had been a ruffian in his youth’, and Chapuys would confirm that ‘for some offence he was thrown into prison and obliged afterwards to leave the country’. Yet if this may sound an unpropitious start, it was not without benefit, too, for it set him upon a European odyssey lasting a decade, which would equip him most fittingly for the tasks ahead.
Although we cannot be sure if Chapuys was correct about the reasons for Cromwell’s departure from England, we do know that in December 1503, at the age of 18, he was with the French army in Italy as either a soldier or page. We know, too, that after his military adventures ceased, he remained in Italy in the service of the Florentine banking family of Frescobaldi and travelled widely there, operating mainly in Florence, but also in Pisa and Venice. Significantly, it was during his Italian sojourn that he came into contact with a range of new ideas and approaches, and readily absorbed the emerging rationalistic ethos of the day, which would prove so important in equipping him for his later role. Not least of all, he was introduced to Marsiglio of Padua’s seminal work, Defensor Pacis, which emphasised the primacy of the secular ruler in ecclesiastical affairs. But more importantly his considerable commercial experience reinforced his natural tendency to think in terms of efficiency and outcomes rather than hidebound traditions. On his travels, too, he encountered and was genuinely influenced by the writings of religious reformers, although contrary to what is still a widely held misapprehension, the impact of reforming ideas upon him at this stage may not necessarily have been quite as substantial as is often assumed. Curiously, the inventory of his London home for the year 1527 mentions numerous pious objects that were wholly in keeping with the devotion of the old religion, including two images in gilt leather of Our Lady and St Christopher, as well as a golden leather image of St Anthony tucked away under the stairs. Furthermore, the centrepiece of Cromwell’s ‘new chamber’ appears to have been an ornate gilded altar of Our Lord’s Nativity. Even his jewels, for that matter, included a golden Agnus Dei with an engraving of Our Lady and St George.
In truth, almost all aspects of Cromwell’s early years are obscure, but what can be said with certainty is that upon his return to England he was a highly marketable commodity in his own right. This, after all, was the age when a quick-witted person with a practical knowledge of men and affairs and an eye for the main chance could vie with lords and dukes, provided that he doffed his cap with all due humility to those who held the keys to advancement. Then again, as one of the ‘new men’ brought to the fore by the increasingly flexible outlook of the sixteenth century, he had developed a cutting edge, based upon a simple knack for grasping the internal logic of policies and the momentum of events, which would prove invaluable in any position of impasse. Endowed with great energy and vision, Cromwell displayed, finally, an unerring determination to pursue to the bitter end all he attempted, and not altogether surprisingly, therefore, we next hear of him operating between 1520 and 1524 as a thriving solicitor whose expertise in the Common Law was bringing him important business from Wolsey himself. By 1525 he was established as one of the leading lights of the cardinal’s household where he was employed – somewhat portentously – upon the task of suppressing twenty-nine monasteries.
It would be in Wolsey’s service, in fact, that the really substantial opportunities for advancement materialised and, upon the cardinal’s fall, Cromwell was fortunate to be able, at long odds, to sustain his rise. With the Duke of Norfolk’s help he was duly elected to the first session of the Reformation Parliament as the new member for Taunton, and now, in addition to the talented beavering that had already carried him far, he demonstrated both an intuitive grasp of the epoch he would help to shape and what amounted to a sixth sense for timing. In particular, Cromwell’s prominent role in the anticlerical debates that occupied Parliament during November and December 1529 happened to coincide perfectly with the king’s mood and needs. At the same time, he was given ample opportunity, as we have seen, to engage in the kind of earnest posturing that is so vital for any aspiring public servant. Unlike others, such as Stephen Gardiner, for instance, who fled Wolsey’s cause at the first hint of impending disaster, Cromwell chose to remain steadfast until the last possible moment. Indeed, while the vultures circled hungrily, he alone of Wolsey’s household was prepared to speak up on his master’s behalf, attempting to persuade the Commons to reject the Lords’ Bill of Attainder against him and engineering ultimately a formal pardon for the beleaguered cardinal under the Great Seal.
In this way, the blacksmith’s son fuelled his reputation for loyalty, and hereafter his rise was swift. For by the autumn of 1530, Cromwell had at last become personally known to his sovereign as a dependable man of service. Moreover, in helping Henry to replenish the treasury with the spoils from Wolsey’s forfeited see of Winchester and abbacy of St Albans, this rising political star gave clear notice of his ability to deliver – something, of course, that seemed so sorely lacking in Henry’s existing aristocratic advisers. He now also demonstrated that infinite capacity for taking pains, which would always be one of his outstanding characteristics. Whether drafting laws, overhauling the machinery of government or vigorously pursuing enemies of the State, Cromwell’s meticulous eye for detail would never waver. Towards the end of 1530, therefore, he joined the king’s council and, within a year, he belonged to its inner ring. In fact, as he wove his subtle magic in loosing Henry’s bonds to Rome during the next few years, his ascent would prove unstoppable. By early 1533, he was the king’s chief minister, while in 1534 came the really decisive consolidation of his influence when he was appointed Henry’s principal secretary. His father, Walter, might well have been proud, though by now, some two decades after the old man’s death in 1510, the son had altogether bigger thoughts to fill his head.
Throughout 1531 the government’s blind and unavailing threshing had continued, as had the rancour it engendered, for the second session of the Reformation Parliament, which began in January, had yielded only resistance and altercation. On 30 March, Sir Brian Tuke had brought the House of Lords an unexpected and unwelcome message from his sovereign in the form of a long letter, exposing the troubled state of the king’s conscience and reiterating the opinions of the universities against his marriage. The Bishop of Lincoln, Henry’s confessor, also delivered a carefully prepared speech in favour of the royal divorce that was solemnly seconded by the Bishop of London. To the dismay of the government, however, two other bishops, Bath and St Asaph’s, offered instant hot rebuttal and Sir Thomas More, when appealed to, also refused to support the divorce. Thereafter, it was left to George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, to voice his displeasure in no uncertain terms, and the general hum of comment that accompanied his words left no doubt concerning the overall opposition of the peers. In a hasty and less than dexterous face-saving manoeuvre, the Duke of Norfolk rose awkwardly on the Crown’s behalf in a vain attempt to reassure all present that the king’s message was only for the information of the Lords rather than for their action. And at an uncomfortable signal from the duke, Tuke swiftly retreated, flanked by his supporting bishops, to try his luck in the Commons. There, once again, he read the king’s long-winded message and again the two bishops spoke in turn, taking it upon their consciences that the king’s marriage was null. But the MPs ‘little edified, returned no answer’. Even the Speaker, it seems, was silent, and Tuke and his bishops beat a second retreat before Henry abruptly prorogued Parliament until October.
Nor were Henry’s continued assaults upon the queen’s resolve any more fruitful, even though the pope’s procrastination in opening the case in Rome was placing her under untold pressure. Having at last informed the emperor that the hearing was to begin not later than September 1530, Clement had still done nothing by June 1531, at which point Henry embarked upon another frontal attack upon his wife’s determined stand. The tactic this time involved a mob-handed harangue, which was delivered as Catherine prepared for bed on the Tuesday evening after Whitsunday. Led by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and the Earl of Wiltshire, a party of some thirty privy councillors, reinforced by half a dozen bishops and a clutch of frowning canonists, attended upon the queen to convince her of her folly. It was Norfolk, in fact, who began proceedings by launching into a characteristically pompous and garbled prelection, which soon trailed off into a maze-like account of how her father’s conquest of Navarre had been made possible only by English assistance. Eventually regaining a tenuous thread of sorts, Norfolk then emphasised the king’s pain and surprise at his wife’s continued insistence that her case should be opened at Rome. That the pope should have summoned Henry there in person was, said the duke, an unparalleled humiliation and if she was determined not to abandon her vain request for a legal judgement, she should at least be content with a neutral hearing in England conducted by impartial judges.
Predictably, perhaps, Catherine’s response to this rambling attack upon her judgement was as unflinchingly resolute as her confidence in her cause. Though no living person, she said, could regret Henry’s inconvenience more than she, it was, nevertheless, her husband who had first laid this case before the pope. Besides which, she added with scarcely concealed bitterness, she had no especial reason to expect favour at the hands of His Holiness, since he had so far offered her little succour and, if anything, caused her much injury by his persistent delay. Concerning the king’s new title of Supreme Head of the Church of England, which Norfolk had touched upon, Catherine readily accepted that her husband was lord and master of the whole kingdom in things temporal, but as for spiritual matters it was the pope alone who ‘has the power of Our Lord Jesus Christ on this earth, and is, in consequence, the mirror image of eternal truth’. On this principle she could never bend, and she prayed God that her husband would never think otherwise.
This, then, was the point at which Henry’s rubicon was finally reached. Standing in her nightclothes, the embattled queen had seen off an assemblage of England’s great and mighty with consummate ease and loosed the first pebble in a landslide of undreamed magnitude. Unquestionably, the costs of a breach with the papacy were difficult to estimate. If it did entail war with Charles V and a subsequent severing of commercial relations between England and Flanders, the government might well be thrown into the most serious danger. The projected marriage with Anne was, of course, already notoriously unpopular in its own right, and if it was to be accompanied by the burden of war taxation and a grievous disruption to trade, there was no telling where things might end. The events of the year had, after all, shown that public opinion was being violently stirred and when the praemunire fine was demanded of the London clergy, a riotous assault upon the bishop’s palace ensued. Mutinous words had also been voiced in the House of Commons, when it was suspected that the laity might, too, be mulcted under the pretext of praemunire. ‘The King,’ it was said, ‘had burdened and oppressed his kingdom with more imposts and exactions than any three or four of his predecessors and should consider that his strength lay in the affections of his people.’ At the same time, the threat from without continued to loom, since the defences of the Scottish border were weak and in Ireland a Spanish envoy had appeared just at the time when the Earl of Desmond was throwing off his allegiance to Henry.
By the time that the third session of the Reformation Parliament and a fresh meeting of Convocation began in January 1532, therefore, there were ominous rumblings on all fronts. In Parliament itself there were soon unwelcome warnings from the lower chamber about attempts to extract further taxation, as well as a call for the king to restore his wife and daughter to favour. And the government’s attempts to advance its case by a campaign of bribery and intimidation and an accompanying flood of propaganda in the country at large were clearly proving no more successful either. For when a priest inveighing against the divorce at St Paul’s was arrested in full flow, and when Henry subsequently commanded every priest in the kingdom to preach in his favour, few dared to do so after one who did was hissed and torn from the pulpit at Salisbury. Even in the Commons, for that matter, an MP named Temse took the occasion of a money bill to say that if the king would take back his true wife, he would not have an enemy in Christendom and would not need to oppress his people with exactions. More worryingly still, the London merchants who traded with Flanders and feared war with the emperor applauded this opinion, while among the lay peers Anne’s insolence had alienated many of her earlier supporters. And though for a year she fought back at them, forcing Sir Henry Guildford’s dismissal from the council and boasting always that a few months would see her married, she could not cow or neutralise them all. Even the Duke of Norfolk, Chapuys thought, was so disgusted with his niece, and so frightened by the popular outcry, that he, too, would have opposed the king’s divorce except that he was ‘one of those men who will do anything to cling to power’. Certainly, his own wife, who by now had become estranged from him, was still among the most forthright supporters of the queen, as were other noblewomen like the Marchioness of Exeter and the Countess of Salisbury.
Never had the king’s plans lay at such a critical juncture, and it was against this background that Thomas Cromwell was finally set at the head at the head of a rudderless and foundering cause. With the opening of the third session of the Reformation Parliament, Cromwell soon emerged as the manager of government business, and now for the first time, as his sovereign’s frustration reached breaking point, he would be given the green light to implement his more radical plans, and lock horns with any like the Bishop of Rochester who might stand in his way. For now, more than ever, John Fisher was a marked man, and Cromwell the designated troubleshooter to meet him head on in a way that none of his predecessors had yet been capable of doing. Already, as Chapuys’s correspondence was making abundantly clear, the bishop was seen not only in England but on the Continent, too, as the lynchpin of resistance and prime target for retribution. Indeed, shortly before the meeting of Parliament, the ambassador had reported to the emperor that:
Respecting the Bishop of Rochester, I will inform him as soon as possible of the paragraphs in your majesty’s letter that concern him. This will be done in writing and through a third person, as there is no other means at present of communicating with that prelate, for he has lately sent me word that, should we meet anywhere in public, I must not approach him, or make any attempt whatever to speak.
Clearly, the Cambridge academic and dutiful diocesan bishop was finding himself sucked into a world of political subterfuge, both domestic and foreign, that was as unfamiliar and undesirable to him as any sphere of affairs possibly could be. But circumstances had brought him to this extraordinary pass, along, of course, with his own unbending temperament, which, once entrenched in the unassailable logic of a particular set of premises, could not be compromised.
Nor was it any coincidence that Fisher had not been summoned by the king to attend the House of Lords, though this, as Chapuys confirms, would not be enough to silence him. For on 22 January, the ambassador sent this further dispatch:
The assembly (Parliament) is numerous, being attended by almost all the lords, temporal as well as spiritual. Only the Bishop of Durham [Tunstall], one of the queen’s good champions has not been called in; no more has Rochester, as I have been informed, though this last has not failed to come, and is actually in town, intending to tell the king the plain truth about the divorce and speak without disguise. No sooner did the king hear of the bishop’s arrival than he sent him word he was very glad at his coming, and had many important things to say to him. The bishop, fearing lest the communication which the king said he had to make should be for the purpose of begging him not to speak on the subject, seized the moment when the king was going to mass, attended by the gentlemen of his household, to make his reverence and present his respects, thus avoiding, if possible, the said communication. The king received him more graciously, and put on a better mien than ever he had done before, deferring the conversation till after the mass; but the good bishop, owing to the above fears, prudently retired before mass was over.
It was an extraordinary state of affairs and an extraordinarily revealing episode. For Henry was never more dangerous than when at his most affable, and Fisher had at last exhibited some of the acuity and finesse that might have been worthy of any practised courtier enmeshed in high affairs of State. Not only had he timed his entrances and exits, his silences and utterances with careful forethought, he was also communicating with the ambassador of a foreign power that at that very time was the primary obstacle to the successful operation of his own sovereign’s policies. Plainly, his loyalties were already, at the very least, divided and in all likelihood fatally compromised. For if ever an individual could apprehend the overall direction of events and chart their inexorable course, it was John Fisher – just like the man who now opposed him and stood poised to guide the king at last through the tides and eddies that had so far thwarted his progress.
Irrespective of whether Thomas Cromwell did indeed utter the following words attributed to him by Reginald Pole in his Apologia ad Carolum Quintum, they could not have summarised his thinking more aptly, as the King of England now slipped all too readily into the new and fateful path laid down for him by his servant:
Let the King, with the consent of Parliament, declare himself Head of the Church of England, and all his difficulties would vanish. England at present is a monster with two heads. If the King should take to himself the supreme power, religious as well as secular, every incongruity would cease; the clergy would immediately realise they were responsible to the King and not to the Pope, and forthwith become subservient to the royal will.
Given its complexities, not to mention the potential opposition involved, the process could not be rushed, but for Thomas Cromwell’s tidy mind, there had been far too many untied threads to date. Accordingly, therefore, with the greatest possible craft, he now deliberately decided to stir the one issue that he knew still smarted with the swarms of common lawyers so influential in the Commons: the activities of the Church courts. Linking this with the legislative power of Convocation, which the Crown wished to control, he thus devised a powerful bait that even the most vacillating of MPs would find difficult to resist, and on 18 March 1532, Cromwell’s ‘Supplication of the Commons against the Ordinaries’ was duly drawn up. It was a list of ‘particular griefs’ that incorporated a wide range of abuses associated with the episcopacy, but concentrated mainly on abuses associated with ecclesiastical courts and particularly those relating to the expense of litigation and the delays involved. In particular it attacked nepotism, the free use of excommunication, the number of secular posts held by clergy, and Convocation’s independent power to frame canon law. And in the process the singularly potent demands for a single sovereignty and individual allegiance within the realm were inserted almost innocently – so innocently, in fact, that few, if any, of those who lent their names to the measure could have fully realised what they were now committing themselves to so irrevocably.
Fisher, ironically, had been stricken with illness and absent throughout at the critical moment when Convocation was presented with the Supplication, though he had been one of the bishops who had judged the heresy case involving Hugh Latimer in March. No doubt, he would have welcomed the opportunity to deliver another blistering onslaught on the measure that, according to Chapuys, now dictated that, ‘Churchmen will be of less account than shoemakers who have the power of assembling and making their own statutes.’ But any resistance, beyond the ultimate option of martyrdom itself, was by now vain, and even that was premature for the moment, since for now at least, the breach with Rome, however inevitable in the longer term, had not yet been sealed formally. Instead, on 11 May, the king, flanked by his chief councillors, merely ordered Convocation to submit all its legislation, past and present, for his consent, and five days later that august body duly submitted and presented the king with the so-called ‘Submission of the Clergy’, in which they acceded to all his demands. Beforehand, while John Fisher lay in his sickbed at Lambeth, Henry had told his ‘well-beloved subjects’ how, hitherto:
We thought that the clergy of our realm had been our subjects wholly, but now we have well perceived that they be but half our subjects, yea, and scarce our subjects: for all the prelates at their consecration make an oath clean contrary to the oath that they make to us, so that they seem to be his [i.e. the pope’s] subjects, and not ours.
In their alarm at these fresh attacks on their authority, the clergy had decided to send a deputation to Fisher. But without the Bishop of Rochester’s steely resolve directly on hand to fortify them, and notwithstanding a ‘great protest’, reported by Chapuys, by the archdioceses of Canterbury and York and the diocese of Durham, Convocation duly crumbled before the king – who was nevertheless ‘greatly displeased’, irrespective of the fact that he himself had gone against all he had supported for most of his life.
At a single stroke, then, the English Church had been subordinated, Henry had been offered a way forward and Thomas Cromwell had found his niche. In the meantime, moreover, even Sir Thomas More found himself unable to shelter any longer in the moral undergrowth and duly resigned the chancellorship, though promising, nevertheless, to keep silent and never more ‘to study nor meddle with any matter of this world’, while John Fisher and a handful of Observant Franciscan friars, along with the most unlikely figure of the hitherto compliant William Warham, were left to assume the role of loan gladiators for their Church’s cause. In his report to the emperor on 21 June 1532, Chapuys wrote:
About twelve days ago the Bishop of Rochester preached in favour of the queen, and has been in danger of prison and other trouble. He has shut the mouths of those who spoke in the king’s favour, but the treatment of the queen is not improved.
Yet while no action was in fact taken against Fisher, and he was back in his diocese by July, the same was not the case for the Archbishop of Canterbury, who now found himself, though over 80 and too ill to speak in his own defence, threatened with a writ of praemunire for having, in 1518, consecrated Henry Standish as Bishop of St Asaph’s before royal consent had been given. Already, as early as 8 February, Warham had been facing prosecution, along with a number of senior clergy, concerning the right by which they exercised a number of manorial privileges – all of the most commonplace type, sanctioned by ancient custom, and inseparable from the administrative system obtaining in England from the days of the Norman Conquest. But the subsequent charge of praemunire now proved too much even for the man who had so far kowtowed to royal pressure so readly.
In truth, there had always been something intrinsically moth-eaten about England’s primate: qualities aptly captured by Hans Holbein in the portrait preserved in the Royal Collection. And his part so far in the royal divorce had certainly been anything but heroic. This, after all, was the man who had been, as Wolsey assured the king, ‘sufficiently instructed’ on how ‘to order himself in case the Queen demands his counsel’. And when called upon to defend Queen Catherine in 1529, the archbishop, with his lymphatic eyes, dewlap, and fusty fur collar, had offered her no more inspiring advice than that to anger a prince was to court death. Likewise, during the Blackfriars hearing, his only significant contribution had been to obstruct John Fisher, after which, in December 1530, he summoned Fisher to retract a book written in defence of the queen – a book so able that, as we have seen, it made headlines on the Continent after its publication. And in 1531, he let the royal title pass in the kind of lugubrious silence that had become his trademark. A grave, devout, learned man, trained as a Wykehamist canon lawyer and one of the leading humanists of the day, who had been elected to a fellowship of New College, Oxford, more than fifty years earlier, he had from the outset harboured doubts about Pope Julius’s dispensation, which may also help to explain his previous reticence. But now at last, even this sickly elder statesman was prepared to fire up sufficiently to take his ebbing life in his hands and assert not only the jurisdiction of the pope but the privileges of the see founded by St Augustine long before the Crown of England existed.
In March 1532 the archbishop had spoken contrary to the king’s wishes for the first time and been treated for his trouble to a burst of foul language and a declaration from Henry that were it not for his age, he should have been made to repent for his words. Yet the malice underlying the archbishop’s prosecution for praemunire merely strengthened his defence of the Holy See and that of Canterbury to which he had been consecrated long ago in the previous reign. And in an extraordinary draft declaration prepared shortly before his death, he now emphasised in clear, incisive terms the importance with which he viewed the spiritual as compared with the temporal power. He did so, moreover, with a forthrightness and defiance worthy almost of John Fisher: ‘I intend [declared the 82-year-old archbishop] to do only what I am bound to do by the laws of God and the Holy Church.’
And there was a potent reference, too, to Thomas Becket’s struggle against Henry II for the freedom of the Church and, in particular, the saint’s eventual martyrdom. For Becket, he said:
Was rewarded by God with the great honour of martyrdom, which is the best death that can be … which thing is the example and comfort of others to speak and do for the liberties of God’s Church … I think it is better for me to suffer the same than in my conscience to confess this article to be a praemunire for which St Thomas died.
Long ago, Erasmus had lauded Warham’s qualities of mind and character, even speaking of him in terms similar to those he had applied to Fisher, and at the very last the archbishop had indeed proved his mettle, becoming, in the process, perhaps the greatest ‘martyr that never was’ of the Henrician Reformation. For on 23 August 1532, before the ultimate sacrifice became an option, he died of natural causes.
But if Warham’s death removed one more obstacle and opened the way for a more complaisant successor, in all other respects the year had remained an uncomfortable one for the king, even within the confines of his own home. For on Easter Sunday, which that year fell on 31 March, Henry and his court heard Mass in the chapel of Greenwich Palace, only to be exposed to a remarkable tirade from the pulpit by Father William Peto, one-time Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, and in 1532 the Minister of the English Province of the Friars Observant. The subject of Peto’s sermon was the life and death of King Ahab, the ruler who ruined his reign and his dynasty by marrying a heathen woman of no morals – an Old Testament theme, the topicality of which had early been recognised by John Fisher and other controversialists. And now it was hammered home, in the direct presence of Henry himself, with a force that left all present dumbfounded:
Your Highness’s preachers [Peto thundered] are too much like those of Ahab’s days, in whose mouths were found a false and lying spirit. They flatter, and proclaim falsehoods, and are consequently unfaithful to your Highness. Theirs is a gospel of untruth. They dare to speak of peace when there is no peace, and are not afraid to tell of license and liberty for monarchs which no king should dare even to contemplate.
To say that with these comments the friar was sailing close to the wind would, of course, be an understatement of the most egregious kind. But Peto’s most vigorous assault was still to come when, seized by the spirit of prophecy like Micaiah of old, he ended his sermon with this dire threat:
I beseech your Grace to take good heed, lest if you will need follow Ahab in his doings, you will surely incur this unhappy end also, and that the dogs lick your blood as they licked Ahab’s – which God avert and forbid!
These were words such as no man had ever used before the king. Certainly, Warham had never come close to such language even in his ultimate act of defiance, while for Sir Thomas More, of course, such boldness was simply inconceivable. When Fisher spoke to the king, moreover, he had done so mainly in fatherly tones, and if the Maid of Kent had spoken thus in her unrecorded interviews with her sovereign, her rebukes had at least been delivered in comparative privacy or within the closed circle of the king and Boleyns en famille. But Peto held forth for all in the Chapel Royal to hear, and in doing so he spoke, equally significantly, to London and to the kingdom at large.
Nor was this the end of the matter. For when Hugh Curwen, one of the royal chaplains – an Oxford doctor of civil law whose services to the Crown ultimately brought him the archbishopric of Dublin – delivered a refutation of Peto from the self-same pulpit the following Sunday, the results were no less explosive, as the penetrating voice of Father Henry Elstow, Guardian of the Greenwich Observants, suddenly rang out from the rood loft in Peto’s defence:
Good Sir, you know well that Father Peto, as he was commanded, is now gone to a Provincial Council being held at Canterbury, and never fled from fear of you [as Curwen had suggested in his sermon]; for tomorrow, God willing, he will be here again.
In the meantime, I am another Micaiah. Even unto thee, Curwen, I say, who art thyself one of the four hundred lying prophets, into whom the spirit of lying is entered; thou seekest by proposing adultery to establish a succession. In this, thou art betraying the king to everlasting perdition, more for thine own vain-glory and hope of temporal gain by promotion, than for the discharge of the thing you call your conscience or for the King’s eternal salvation.
Clearly, the situation was escalating, and to a degree that the above account by Father Thomas Bourchier, written almost half a century after the event, does not fully reveal. For Peto had not, in fact, gone to Canterbury during the previous week, as Elstow claimed, but to Toulouse – and not with the intention of attending a chapter meeting there, as he himself claimed, but for the express purpose of arranging the publication in the Low Countries of a treatise against the royal divorce, which rumour attributed to John Fisher.
Upon his return, moreover, Peto was immediately commanded to deprive Elstow of office, and the result was a further angry exchange within the royal council chamber itself, where Peto’s interrogation took place. For when the Franciscan refused to comply, the Earl of Essex resorted to the following outright threat: ‘You shameless friar! You shall be sewn up in a sack and thrown into the Thames, if you do not speedily hold your tongue.’ To which the dauntless Peto is said to have retorted: ‘Make those threats to your fellow-courtiers. As for us friars, we make little count of them indeed, knowing well that the way lieth as open to heaven by water as by land.’
Once again, the exchange could hardly have been more extraordinary, and a fortnight later the king was writing to Rome for a commission to try both Peto and Elstow, while Chapuys and the papal nuncio were submitting a counter-plea, which eventually achieved the friars’ release after a few months’ imprisonment. For even now, it seems, the king lacked the killer instinct towards the clergy that was soon to be stirred and satisfied so adeptly by the agency of Thomas Cromwell. In the autumn of 1532, indeed, Henry still saw fit to authorise alms of £6 13s 4d to the Observants in chapter in Richmond, leaving Peto and Elstow to pursue not the ‘way to heaven’ along the Tyburn road, as would soon be the case for their successors, but the route to Antwerp, where they continued their activities against the divorce and remained in frequent contact with their fellow Observants at Greenwich, who now found themselves led by a man of even more intransigent temper: Fr John Forest, Queen Catherine’s confessor, who would himself be martyred on 22 May 1538.
Palpably, the resistance of the Greenwich Observants was to be no mere nine-days’ wonder. For while Peto and Elstow were deprived the lasting publicity of martyrdom and headed instead for history’s byways in exile, their action had nevertheless signalled the overt opposition of the most popular religious order in the country: an order enjoying considerable royal patronage and wielding great influence at court. As such, their defiance was, in some respects, altogether more far-reaching in its implications than Warham’s protests that year about the rights of the pope and the see of Canterbury, or even, perhaps, John Fisher’s speeches before the legatine court at Blackfriars or the House of Lords and Convocation. Certainly, it was more dangerous, potentially, than any number of learned treatises published in Latin on the Continent. For the friars were an order of preachers in close touch with every section of society, from princes and princesses to lepers and outcasts. They had seven houses spread throughout the kingdom and 200 members – the vast majority of whom were English, with a few French and Flemish additions – as well as a solid reputation for strict observance, uncompromising if uncultured orthodoxy, and a forthright bluntness of speech that was in stark contrast to the conventional outlook of the majority of England’s other friars.
They were, in a word, most ‘Catholic’ in temper, resembling very nearly the Spanish and other Latin friars of the time, and when roused, they were not likely to be cowed by intimidation or ignored by the king’s subjects. For unlike even the most zealous secular clergy, the Observant Franciscans, as we know, had foresworn worldly possessions and position, and in consequence had nothing to lose for Christ’s sake but their very lives. Unlike monks, moreover, they were not confined to monasteries. On the contrary, they had a duty to be ‘in the world’, preaching the Gospel, relieving distress and correcting error wherever the need arose. And while one of their number, John Lawrence, would become an agent and informer for Thomas Cromwell after complaining of his ill-treatment at Greenwich for supporting the king, the majority followed the line taken by Peto, Elstow and Forest over the months and years to come. Indeed, when most others yielded, the Observants held firm, so that at Eastertide 1534 we hear how the warden of the Southampton house was ‘wanted’ by Cromwell for a sermon upholding papal supremacy delivered at Winchester on Passion Sunday, while two years later Cromwell’s commissioners were still complaining how, in spite of extensive efforts to persuade the friars at Richmond to abandon their allegiance to Rome, ‘all this reason could not sink into their obstinate heads’. Nor, it seems, had the Observants even by then exhausted their penchant for bold speaking – or daring action. For at precisely the same time that Cromwell’s commissioners were foundering at Richmond, John Hilsey, commissioner to the friars as a whole, found himself chasing two Newark Observants from Bristol through Devon and Cornwall and back again to Cardiff whither they had shipped themselves in clerical attire. There they were arrested and taken off to Westminster – though their captor still felt danger in keeping the slippery pair ‘so near the sanctuary’ – and interrogated, among other things, about their apparently reluctant role as assistants at Princess Elizabeth’s baptism, leading one to quip how she had been dipped in water that was hot, but ‘not hot enough’.
Ultimately, despite their bravado, both men would eventually break during imprisonment and deny that they had spoken against the king. But well before then, another of their number would pay with his life, though for an offence far more grievous than impertinent banter: namely, his association with Elizabeth Barton, who in the summer of 1532 was once again about to assume her central role in resistance to the king’s wishes and Thomas Cromwell’s designs. The friar concerned was Fr Richard Risby who, at Dom Edward Bocking’s request, had already introduced the Holy Maid to Thomas Goldwell, the Prior of Christ Church, Canterbury – a man, as we have seen, possessing years of administrative experience, and one, too, of great simplicity and little malice. Yet, for all his more admirable qualities as a gifted and learned cleric, not to mention his craft in avoiding political quicksand, Goldwell certainly remained unfit for the pressures that had devolved upon him with the death of Warham and his subsequent role of temporary stand-in until a replacement for the archbishop was appointed. Nor, as events would now prove, was he even equipped to remain entirely untouched by the overtures of the Maid of Kent who, in Warham’s absence, now sought him out. Hitherto, quite wisely, he had studiously avoided all association with her on the grounds that he chose ‘not to be familiarly acquainted with women’. But, under pressure from Bocking through the agency of Risby, Goldwell’s splendid isolation from the growing clamour surrounding Barton was at last to be compromised.
Richard Risby himself, meanwhile, was beyond reproach in either background or spirituality. Born in 1490, he had been raised in Reading and educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, graduating as a Bachelor of Arts in 1510, before entering the Franciscan Order in 1513. By 1531 he was a member of the small Observant community at Canterbury, of which he would become Guardian only eighteen months after his arrival. His acquaintances, as listed by John Wolff at the time of his imprisonment in the Tower, were in fact mainly clerical, and for the most part confined to his own order, while his contacts in the broader world were merely the fruit of introductions from his friend, Fr Hugh Rich, the fashionable evangelist and Guardian of the Observant house next door to Richmond Palace. Nor was this surprising, for if the charges eventually levelled against him are any guide, he was typical of a number of the clerical devotees of the Holy Maid, who, we are told, preached on her behalf and ‘gave themselves to great fasting, watches [vigils], long prayers, wearing of shirts of hair and great chains about their middle’. Having heard and believed the prophecies uttered by the Maid, the charges tells, ‘the said Risby, Friar Observant, was one of them that took upon him the high penance as is afore rehearsed’. And it was probably Risby’s reputation for zeal and asceticism that finally encouraged Goldwell to accede to his pleas that a meeting with Barton should finally take place. ‘I suppose,’ wrote the prior in November 1533, ‘an [if] his motion had not been I had never been acquainted with her.’
By the time Goldwell made this statement, moreover, he was indeed already regretting the acquaintance and distancing himself from Barton in the way that he had clearly attempted to do from the very outset of her activities. For as the momentum of the royal divorce increased, so too did the Maid’s prominence, and Goldwell’s stomach was never a martyr’s. And by no means all her revelations at this time were political. On the contrary, some were comparatively mundane and others narrowly personal to the many visitors who sought her counsel. According to Sir Thomas More, for instance, Father Hugh Rich had told him of ‘strange things as concerned such folks as had come unto her, to whom (as she said) she had told the causes of their coming ere themselves spake of’. On another occasion, meanwhile, according to the testimony of Richard Risby as related to John Wolff, she appears to have saved three monks from breaking their vows and of aggravating this sin by adultery:
The angel warned her [according to Item vii of Wolff’s testimony] that she should go unto an Abbot and warn him to take three of his brethren by name, for they were purposed to have run away, the night, with three men’s wifes; and that God would, they should have better grace, etc.
At the same time, there were merciful interventions, too, on behalf of those in mental anguish, including ‘a certain gentleman dwelling about Canterbury, that had long time been tempted to drown himself by the sprite of a woman that he had kept by his wife’s days’. ‘A long and strange matter,’ Wolff adds, but one that is more significant, perhaps, for the light it throws on the social status of Barton’s growing list of clients. For as Jonathan Strype relates in his Memorials Ecclesiastical, she was now known ‘to ramble about the countries unto gentlemen’s houses’.
Yet it was not so much these activities that rendered Goldwell so uneasy, nor even such claims, as related to Sir Thomas More by Richard Risby, that the soul of Thomas Wolsey ‘was saved by her mediation’. For, much more worryingly still, the death of the archbishop had, in fact, marked the removal of an effective restraining hand, and opened the door for new, more energetic, capable and indeed full-time recruits to her ministry, which would further its transformation into something fast approaching an organised movement. Before long, as rumours of Princess Mary’s bastardisation circulated amid growing outrage in the country at large and the prospect of foreign intervention, Barton’s declarations would also assume an increasingly political, if not treasonous tone, as the Draft of Charges raised against her would eventually make abundantly clear:
Where she surmised herself to have made a petition to God to know, when fearful war should come, whether men should take my Lady Mary’s part or no, she feigned herself to have had answer from God by revelation, that no man should fear but she [i.e. the princess] should have succour and help enough, that no man should put her from her right that she was born unto.
Plainly, a whole new level of provocation had been reached and a whole new raft of dangers created. And now such declarations would have the more than capable talents not only of Richard Risby but men like Henry Gold, the unemployed chaplain of the late Archbishop Warham, to reinforce, sustain and propagate them.
Known to Barton and her friends as ‘Harry’, Gold was probably born at St Neots in Huntingdonshire between 1495 and 1498, graduating as Bachelor of Arts at Cambridge in 1514–15. Such were his intellectual accomplishments that John Fisher admitted him as one of the foundation fellows when St John’s College first opened in 1516. Six years later, by which time he had become a Master of Arts, he was chosen as one of the designated preachers to the university, and it was in this capacity that he had attracted William Warham’s attention, although it was not until 1525, while Elizabeth Barton was still living at Aldington, that the up-and-coming don was called from supervising undergraduates and the spare-time study of Greek, to join the archbishop’s household. Leaving Cambridge for good, he was presented to the vicarage of Ospringe, a country parish on Watling Street in Kent, 10 miles west of Canterbury – a living worth £10 a year, and one to which Gold was instituted on 17 June, 1525 – whereupon he also assumed the role of secretary to the archbishop, and continued, it seems, to distinguish himself in that capacity too. For on 10 December 1526, he was further rewarded with a London living as well: the rectory of St Mary Aldermary, which, as its name indicates, was the oldest church dedicated in honour of the Blessed Virgin within the walled city.
While discharging his not inconsiderable secretarial duties, Gold also maintained a private correspondence with a number of Cambridge intellectuals, including William Gonell – a distinguished scholar, friend of Erasmus and sometime tutor to St Thomas More’s children – as well as Nicholas Darington, fellow of St John’s, who had by that time moved across the Channel to Louvain. Clearly no mere time-serving hack of the variety so common among parish priests of the time, Gold duly resigned the living of Ospringe in September 1527 to become vicar of Hayes in Middlesex fifteen months later. And from surviving drafts of his sermons delivered there, we can begin to gauge the temper of the man who was soon to become one of Elizabeth Barton’s most ardent advocates. All are roughly written, much corrected and interlineated, and difficult to read, reflecting an intensity and restlessness, if not agitation, of thought that is reflected in their content, which rails against sinners and sinfulness to such a degree that his Hayes parishioners finally carried a case to Star Chamber refuting the charges that Gold had laid against them: that they did not pay their tithes properly; that they played unlawful games, such as bowls, football, dice and cards; and that they had committed riots. He had been overly free, it seems, in condemning those whose ‘chief delight and felicity’ lay ‘in feeding their bodies’, and had not hesitated to remind his congregation how ‘the everlasting woe and sorrow of the pains of hell shall light upon all such’. Scorners of the word of God, Gold stigmatised as mad dogs and filthy stinking swine more damnable than Sodom and Gomorrah, and none more so than those hypocrites who ‘do daily sing the holy psalms of the Psalter so solemnly that they think themselves to behave like clean vessels’, though ‘their bellies be filled with delicious wines and with swans, cranes and fat venison pasties’.
But if Gold was all too ready to chide his flock in the most intemperate language he could muster, there could be no doubting either the sincerity of his faith or his absolute conviction in the everyday intervention of God in human affairs, the second of which, in particular, guaranteed his unwavering loyalty to Elizabeth Barton and her circle, which now also included Dom John Dering, a Benedictine of Christ Church, Canterbury, whose family was connected by marriage to the St Legers of Leeds Castle. For by 1532, as he made clear in a gushing letter introducing himself to Dering, Gold was not only acquainted with the Maid – ‘my spiritual sister’ – but so captivated by her that anyone who had received her approval was to be embraced with equally ‘vehement heart’:
For I know by experience [he told Dering], not of my own merit but only of the great mercy of God, that she do neither love nor accept as her familiars any but such as God loveth and accepteth cordially, or, at the less-wise, such as hath a great zeal to God and godliness.
‘Commend me to your confessor, Father Risby, my Lady Prioress and to all other as you will,’ the letter concludes, before adding how, ‘I have sent you a little piece of figs de horto [from Gold’s London garden], and another of raisins of the sun,’ along with the following final message: ‘My servant shall tarry with you at your pleasure [to await an answer]. Show nothing to him of the contents of my letter.’
And it was this very last sentence of all, of course, that reflected the temper of the times most tellingly. For even Gold had reason to be wary now, lest a servant’s indiscretion should betray connections and activities best kept hidden, and thereby pre-empt the most flagrant assault on the royal divorce to date. For Dering was already compiling a book, De duplici spiritu (The Lying Spirit), which would be published in 1533 and was to be a vindication of the Maid’s oracles against the king’s divorce in the wake of Fr Peto’s sermon at Greenwich. In all probability, Dom Edward Bocking had suggested the theme to him, then mediated his subsequent correspondence with the Maid. And since Gold acknowledges that he was present when she received letters from Dering – ‘not with a little gladness’ – it seems clear that he must have known, too, that the object of Dering’s visit to Canterbury was to collect material from Barton’s own lips at the very time that the friar was preparing his own counter-blast against the king in the form of an extraordinary sermon, entitled Sanctificetur nomen tuum (Blessed be thy name). As Gold presents it, the Maid was now relishing the prospect of broadening her audience even further and of escalating her onslaught, and if the content of Gold’s own sermon is any guide, he too was merely awaiting the right moment to take to another new pitch the struggle against a king ‘wrapped over and over in stinking mire and dirt of obstinate rebellion against the preaching of the holy laws of God, like a stinking and filthy swine’.
For if desperate times require desperate measures, the progress of the divorce was once again achieving a fresh momentum, which left Barton and her circle with little choice but to stage one final all-out effort to rock the kingdom’s ruler from his chosen course. Baulked by the emperor and the pope on all fronts, Henry had begun in 1531 to put out feelers for a rapprochement with the King of France, and one year later negotiations had evolved so effectively that the two monarchs had decided to meet for the first time since the chivalric extravaganza of the Field of Cloth of Gold twelve years earlier. Though there was now no Wolsey on hand to stage-manage every detail, the meeting of October 1532 was intended to be hardly less sumptuous or spectacular. Involving the transport of 2,000 persons or more across the Channel, the odyssey was to serve, too, as the ultimate confirmation of the newfound status of Anne Boleyn, who was to accompany her would-be husband, bathed in the afterglow of her creation as Marchioness of Pembroke – a rank second only to that of a royal duke and one intended to lend a sheen of sorts to the somewhat dowdy heraldic shield of her forebears, in preparation for her imminent marriage. Holding her new title in her own right and duly granted lands worth more than £1,000 a year in Hertfordshire, Somerset and Essex, Anne had worn her hair long at the splendid investiture ceremony conducted on 1 September in St George’s Chapel, so that Henry might easily slip a coronet over her head. And now she was bound for France, once more in the lap of luxury, amid swirling rumours that the king was to make the most of his opportunity and marry her outside the country.
With no small irony, as events would prove, orders had been given for the expedition to muster at Canterbury on 27 September, and it was there, in the hurly-burly of the little walled city – with the bells ringing out their welcome to the king, and the funeral tapers barely quenched around the tomb of Archbishop Warham; with the inns packed with noblemen and gentlemen and their retinues; and the streets jammed with baggage waggons transporting the royal bed and all the other paraphernalia entailed by the journey – that Elizabeth Barton and her circle prepared to stage their most spectacular gesture to date. Every Canterbury lane from the West Gate to the Riding Gate and from the Castle to North Gate was blocked with dukes and marquesses and viscounts and their retinues – not to mention the retinues of four bishops and the household of the king’s bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, as well as the teeming staffs of the various royal departments, incorporating accounts, kitchen, bakehouse, larder, pantry, buttery, chandlery, confectionery, laundry, boiling-house, scullery, scalding-house, pastry, woodyard and picture-house. Accordingly, in the midst of the turmoil the king and his loved one had seen fit to disport themselves in the quiet and privacy of the enclosed garden of the Abbot of St Augustine’s. But their hoped-for seclusion was short lived. For it was here, according to local tradition, that, with all the drama befitting the tale of a kingdom at the crossroads, Elizabeth Barton duly burst in upon them through a postern-gate; not to kneel and plead as she had done previously at Hanworth, but to threaten and harangue like a female Elijah pronouncing God’s damning verdict in Naboth’s vineyard.
In the account of the Act of Attainder that eventually condemned her, the words of her pronouncement were as follows:
That in case he [Henry] desisted from his proceedings in the said divorce and separation but pursued the same and married again, that then within one month after such marriage he should no longer be king of this realm, and in the reputation of God should not be a king one day nor one hour, and that he should die a villain’s death.
And the significance this time was, of course, altogether different from any prediction delivered by the Maid before. For when her personal warnings to the king had been delivered in 1528 and again in 1529, his marriage to Anne Boleyn had still hung in the balance and the tone of the Maid’s message had been moderated accordingly. But now in 1532, the obstacles had largely fallen: Wolsey was gone, freeing Henry from what seemed to many a twenty-five years’ tutelage; Sir Thomas More, who made the king’s conscience uneasy, had betaken himself into obscure retirement; Warham’s potential last stand had been circumvented by his death; the Church was tied in knots; and even John Fisher, increasingly sickly and accosted by the wear and tear of his advancing years, seemed curiously quiet of late. At home, in a word, there seemed no effective opposition at all. And abroad, too, the horizon had brightened for the king, since his French counterpart was planning a marriage between his second son and Clement VII’s niece, Catherine de Medici, and seemed willing to make the match dependent upon papal recognition of Henry’s divorce – if only to spite his enemy, the Emperor Charles. The French, even more encouragingly, had two new cardinals who were willing, for a fee, to plead the English king’s case in Rome, so that after five years of planning and manoeuvring in a political minuet of the most complex kind, Henry VIII’s affairs had at last reached a point where the marriage, so long desired and almost despaired at, was finally in touching distance – possibly within a matter of weeks.
How Henry and Anne reacted to Barton’s intervention at this point can only be guessed. But if it shocked and vexed them, as it undoubtedly must have, nor did it delay or deter them from their chosen destination. For, with plague raging in London as a further token of divine displeasure, the royal cavalcade nevertheless went riding past St Sepulchre’s shortly afterwards on its way out of Canterbury to Dover, which it reached on 10 October. Soon after, the Maid was experiencing further visions of ‘the blood of our Lord’s side in a chalice’. And nor when Henry finally left England was he beyond the Maid’s mystical interference, it seems, since, according to Thomas Goldwell, who had heard her account of the incident from her own lips: ‘She also said that, when the King was at Calais, a priest being there at mass, the sacrament was taken from the altar and brought to her, and she received it.’
Such was the importance of this particular incident, moreover, that it was specifically cited in the Act of Attainder against her, which not only referred to her claim that the sacred Host had indeed been removed from the priest’s chalice and divinely transferred to her, but also mentioned her explanation ‘that God was so displeased with his King’s Highness, that his Grace saw not that time at the mass the Blessed Sacrament in the form of bread’. And as if this was not worrying enough, Barton’s gift of prophecy was apparently spreading, since she was now said to have prevailed upon her guardian angel to let the wife of Thomas Gold, her old master, experience a vision of her own concerning Queen Catherine, which confirmed another of the Maid’s revelations, detailed in the Act of Attainder: ‘That the said Lady Catherine should prosper and do well, and that her issue, the Lady Mary, the King’s daughter, should prosper and reign in his kingdom and have many friends to sustain and maintain her.’
A large number of those ‘friends’, moreover, were now being actively cultivated by the Guardian of the Richmond Observants, Fr Hugh Rich – a somewhat shadowy figure whose activities were already sufficient for him to be mentioned on a list of suspects drawn up by Thomas Cromwell on 13 September 1532. Though little is known of him, including the date and circumstances of his first meeting with the Holy Maid, Rich is likely to have encountered her on one of her tours to either the Bridgettine convent of Syon Abbey, the Charterhouse at Sheen, or, most likely of all, the Observant house at Richmond, which occurred in 1531 or at the latest early 1532. And according to the testimony of John Wolff, the nun’s impact upon her latest adherent was immediate:
‘Father Rich,’ she said, ‘my Guardian Angel bids you believe in me.’
‘What sign can you give me that what you say is true?’
‘I can tell you the names and anniversaries of dead people written in your notebook, of people for whom you are bound to pray and of those for whose intentions you have agreed to offer the Holy Sacrifice.’
‘Indeed, and what are they?’
‘They are such-and-such; furthermore in the cell of Friar So-and-so there is a picture of St So-and-so, and in the refectory, where no woman has ever penetrated, there is a lectionary open at such-and-such a page.’
‘Extraordinary!’ cried the Guardian. ‘I believe’.
Such, then, was the power of the Holy Maid to win new disciples to her cause. And by the beginning of Lent, 1533, Rich, too, was informing Sir Thomas More how ‘he had seen her lie in her trance in great pains, and that he had at other times taken great spiritual comfort in her communication’.
Nor, significantly, was the former Lord Chancellor of England the only individual of high status with whom Rich fostered links. For along with Henry Gold, according to statements extracted from both men in 1533, he now became the busiest of all the Maid’s adherents, sowing her seed among both the royal and aristocratic and clerical and mercantile elites of the kingdom, including Queen Catherine herself; Princess Mary; Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury and governor to Princess Mary; Gertrude Courtenay the Marchioness of Exeter and her husband, Marquess Henry Courtenay, who at that time remained heir presumptive to the throne; Dorothy Stanley, the Countess of Derby; Sir Edward Seymour and his family; John Lord Hussey, chamberlain to Princess Mary; Lady Anne Hussey; the Reverend Thomas Abell; and a number of prominent courtiers like Sir Thomas Arundell, Sheriff of Dorset, Sir John Arundell, Vice-Admiral of the West and Sheriff of Cornwall, and Sir John and Sir George Carey. Thomas White, Richard Daubney, Thomas Percy and a certain ‘Mr & Mrs Nele’ were among those contacts described as ‘merchants of London’, and John Baker, Recorder of London, was also listed, alongside Lady Kingston, wife of Sir William Kingston, Constable of the Tower and Captain of the Royal Body-Guard, and ‘other unnamed ladies’.
While not exactly a comprehensive inventory of Tudor England’s power elite, the list was nevertheless more than sufficient to convince Thomas Cromwell that the necessity for action was increasing drastically – and especially at a time when the culmination of his intended revolution was so close at hand. The Countess of Derby alone controlled through her husband vast territories and reserves of manpower throughout the north of England, while the Arundells wielded immense influence in the west. The Earls of Derby, by changing their allegiance in the past, had, moreover, already overthrown one dynasty, and a coalition of such magnates now, with the added influence of the Seymours and the Careys, and a little winking of the eye by the Captain of the Royal Body-Guard, was more than enough, conceivably, to end another reign overnight – especially when the mood of the more common breed of English men and women was also taken into account. For, according to a report reaching Venice from France, a furious mob of between 7,000 and 8,000 women had already gathered in London on the night of 24 November 1531 and marched to the riverside house where Anne Boleyn was dining in the company of only her host and a few attendants. The crowd, which was said to have included a number of men dressed as women, was apparently set upon lynching the king’s mistress, and might well have succeeded had word not reached her of their approach.
Making her way to safety across the river, Anne escaped, it seems, in the very nick of time. But this was by no means the limit of the mounting groundswell of hostility, as a wave of suicides swept London ‘foreboding future evil’ and the final details of Cromwell’s plans clicked neatly into place between May 1532, when Parliament was prorogued, and February 1533, when it reassembled. For on 23 August 1532, Henry’s threats duly extracted the necessary bulls from the pope for Warham’s replacement by the ever amenable Cranmer. And thereafter, with a suitably compliant archbishop properly consecrated and granted the authority of legatus natus, Henry was at last securely placed to have his previous marriage annulled in a way that satisfied his curious desire to abide by ‘legality’. Only the formalities remained and accordingly in January 1533, after a stint as ambassador to the Imperial court, Thomas Cranmer did indeed become Archbishop of Canterbury, declaring openly at his consecration on 30 March that his oath to the pope could not bind him to violate England’s laws or God’s prerogative.
In consequence, Cromwell could now proceed unhampered to address the end game – and not before time. For, around September 1532, Anne had finally consented to share the king’s bed with the result that in December 1532 or January 1533 she became pregnant, finally encouraging Henry to marry her in secret on 25 January, within his private chapel at Whitehall. In a hushed ceremony quite unlike the one she had wished for, only four or five witnesses were said to have been present, one of whom, ironically, was Henry Norris of the king’s Privy Chamber, who would later be accused of adulterous dealings with the new bride. But if the marriage lacked lustre, it did at least allow Cromwell, by one deft magician’s tug, to pull the carpet from Queen Catherine once and for all, as the Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome became law that March. Henceforth, she would be denied legal recourse to the pope, and on 2 April a depleted Convocation speedily declared that it was unlawful for a man to marry his deceased brother’s wife; that papal dispensations were void; and that the consummation of Catherine’s marriage to Prince Arthur had been proven beyond doubt. Within a few days she was also told of her husband’s new marriage, as a consequence of which she would revert to the status of Princess of Wales, leaving her bitter rival to be crowned queen on 1 June, amid festivities described by the Imperial ambassador as ‘cold, meagre and uncomfortable and dissatisfying to everybody’.
‘All the world is astonished at it,’ wrote one contemporary of Henry’s marriage to Anne, ‘for it looks like a dream and even those who take her part know not whether to laugh or cry.’ At best, the court had for years shown only feigned deference to the new queen for her royal lover’s sake. Indeed, during that time she had progressively alienated most leading men and women, including her own blood relatives. Anne’s disapproving aunt, the Duchess of Norfolk, had, on the one hand, predictably refused to attend her niece’s coronation, while the Duke of Norfolk, continued to consider his niece a ‘she-devil’ – and not without reason, it might be added, for she was said by now to have heaped more insults upon him ‘than a dog’. At her Eastertide appearance in 1533, moreover, the king was reported to be ‘very watchful’ of his courtiers’ reaction to his second wife, even begging them afterwards ‘to go and visit and make their court to the new queen’. And if Henry’s courtiers held Anne in low esteem, the commons would continue to hate her as roundly as ever. ‘It is a thing to note that the common people always dislike her,’ wrote the Spanish merchant, De Guaras, and even if this Spaniard’s observation was not entirely impartial, it was confirmed by other reports. For as early as August 1530 the Venetian ambassador had been expecting a rebellion were the marriage to proceed, and in the same year, too, Chapuys was reporting ‘the wishes of the whole country for the preservation of the marriage and the downfall of the Lady’. Royal representatives who came to Oxford to justify the annulment had been met by furious females armed with rocks; another preacher in Salisbury who supported the king’s actions had to be rescued before he ‘suffered much at the hands of women’; and at St Paul’s in London, a woman responded to a sermon favouring the divorce by calling the preacher a liar and claiming that the king should be chastised for undermining the institution of marriage.
As the drama unfolded in Parliament, however, the lone voice raised in protest had once again been John Fisher’s. ‘No one,’ wrote Chapuys, ‘dared open his mouth to contradict except the Bishop of Rochester,’ before adding how ‘his single voice cannot avail against the majority’. And on 6 April, Fisher had been placed under house arrest in the care of Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, while the new Archbishop of Canterbury neatly tied the remaining loose ends of the royal divorce. The excuse for Fisher’s detainment was his claim that George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, had been guilty of bribery in securing adherents for Henry’s cause in France, though he was allowed, it seems, to carry on diocesan business, and a fortnight after the coronation of Anne Boleyn he was allowed to return to Rochester, as rumours of war now added further tension to the prevailing mood of foreboding. For the Imperial ambassador had been continuing to urge direct intervention upon Emperor Charles for some months, and on 10 April duly dispatched another appeal to the same effect:
Considering the great injury done to Madame your aunt, you can hardly avoid making war now upon this king and kingdom … an undertaking which would be, in the opinion of many people here, the easiest thing in the world at present, for this king has neither horsemen nor captains and the affections of the people are entirely on the side of the queen and your majesty.
In fact, the proposal was wholly implausible, since Chapuys’s talk of ‘innumerable people’ in England anxious to welcome Charles V as their saviour and deliverer was as wide of the mark as his underestimation of the emperor’s pressing distractions in coping with the manifold problems of his own scattered dominions. Even more importantly, there was the dogged refusal of Queen Catherine herself to countenance any such action, since she had already made clear to her nephew that ‘she would consider herself damned eternally were she to consent to anything that might provoke war’.
But the dispatch of the message was in this case, arguably, as significant as the practicality or otherwise of the proposal itself, since it reflected a further escalation of the stakes, and a further justification for swingeing action by a government now deprived of options for retreat – especially when John Fisher himself was now convinced that, in the words of Chapuys, ‘strong action must be taken’. For the Act in Restraint of Appeals and the increasing evidence of Thomas Cromwell’s guiding hand upon events had finally persuaded even Fisher that armed intervention was now the only option:
As that excellent and holy man, the Bishop of Rochester, told me some time ago [Chapuys informed Charles in September], the pope’s weapons become very fragile when directed against the obdurate and pertinacious, and therefore, it is incumbent upon your majesty to interfere in this affair, and undertake a work which must be as pleasing in the eyes of God as war upon the Turk.