CHAPTER THREE

The Hunt for Heretics

‘Consider, gentle reader, how full of iniquity this time is, in which the high mystery of our religion is so openly assaulted … Be desirous of the very truth and seek it as thou art ordered, by direction of Christ’s church, and not as deceitful teachers would lead you, by their secret ways.’

BISHOP STEPHEN GARDINER, A DETECTION OF THE DEVIL’S SOPHISTRY (LONDON, 1546).

On 16 November 1538, King Henry publicly grasped the nettle of heresy. John Lambert, alias John Nicholson, had been arrested for persistently denying the holy presence of Christ in the consecrated wafer and wine of the Mass, the so-called ‘Real Presence’. The prisoner had been educated at Cambridge – he had been a fellow of Queens’ College in 1521 – and later had become a radical evangelical, serving as a chaplain to the English community in Antwerp. He was jailed in England in 1532 for his beliefs but later released and went on to run a school in London. Arrested again, Lambert now had to confront Henry personally in an elaborately staged propaganda trial for his life.

The king’s religious policies sometimes seem contradictory during the second half of his reign, as he flip-flopped between conservative and reformist measures pressed upon him by the vociferous opposing factions within his court. Whilst remaining very much an orthodox and devout Catholic in many aspects of doctrine and liturgy, he veered to and fro between executing members of both the evangelical and conservative factions,¹ sometimes as heretics, more often as traitors, as well as staging very public bonfires of profane books.² Much earlier in his reign, he had been an ardent supporter of the Holy Catholic Church, yearning for what he saw as due papal recognition of his piety. It came on 11 October 1521, when the spendthrift Pope Leo X declared Henry – his ‘most dear son in Christ’ – Fidei Defensor, ‘Defender of the Faith’, for his authorship of a 30,000-word book in Latin, the Assertio Septem Sacramentorum or ‘Assertion of the Seven Sacraments’. This had been written, with some academic assistance, specifically to mock and attack the new Protestant beliefs then being promulgated by the apostate monk Martin Luther in Germany. The book went through twenty editions, eagerly devoured by Henry’s pious and loyal subjects.³ Then came the thorny and self-serving issue of the king’s divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Henry’s assumption of the supremacy of the Church in England and the break with Rome followed in December 1533, when the Privy Council ordered that Pope Clement VII no longer had authority over the realm and should henceforth be referred to merely as ‘the Bishop of Rome’. The Act of Supremacy, passed in November 1534,⁴ confirmed Henry’s rule over the Church in English law and was to cause much bloodshed amongst those, great and low, priest and secular, who could not bring themselves in good conscience to take the oath of allegiance to the king as head of the Church. The subsequent Act for Extinguishing the Authority of the Bishop of Rome of 1536 impolitely railed against

The pretended power and usurped authority of the Bishop of Rome, by some called the Pope … which did obfuscate and wrest God’s holy word and testament a long season from the spiritual and true meaning thereof, to his worldly and carnal affections, as pomp, glory, avarice, ambition and tyranny, covering and shadowing the same with his human and politic devices, traditions and inventions, set forth to promote and establish his only dominion, both upon the souls and also the bodies and goods of all Christian people, excluding Christ out of his kingdom and the rule of man his soul as much as he may and all temporal kings and princes out of their dominions which they ought to have by God’s law upon the bodies and goods of their subjects.⁵

Most importantly, not only did the pope ‘rob’ the king as supreme head of the realm of England ‘immediately under God of his honour, right and pre-eminence due to him by the law of God, but spoiled this realm yearly of innumerable treasure’. It was typical Henrician propaganda: smug, self-justifying and arrogant. A staunch Lutheran in Germany could happily have written it. The Act marked an important continuum of the king’s campaign against Rome, should any of his subjects be reckless enough to retain any doubts as to the wisdom of his religious policy.

Cromwell staged a public and very graphic demonstration of the royal supremacy in London on 17 June 1539. Today we would regard it as crude, obvious propaganda, but the chief minister knew his audience well and unsubtly combined his political and religious message with a spectacular designed to entertain and amuse, as well as subliminally create support for the king’s policies. Two vessels – the king’s barge and a ‘papal’ barge – rowed up and down the River Thames between Westminster and the King’s Bridge. On board the pontifical barge were a number of men dressed as the pope and cardinals who ‘made their defiance against England’. The two boats exchanged gunfire (presumably firing blanks) and ‘at last, the pope and cardinals were overcome and all his men cast overboard into the Thames’ to the great merriment of the watchers on the banks,⁶ including Henry himself. Other, less ambitious pageants against the pope were also staged in towns and cities throughout the realm.

Religious Injunctions of 1536 and 1538, issued by Cromwell, also required the clergy ‘to the uttermost of their wit, knowledge and learning, purely, sincerely and without any colour of dissimulation’ to preach against the ‘Bishop of Rome’s usurped power and jurisdiction’ as a direct means of re-educating the minds of Henry’s subjects. Moreover, the Injunctions prohibited the setting up of images (religious statues) or extolling ‘relics or miracles for any superstition or lucre, nor allure the people by any enticements to the pilgrimage of any saint’. The later set of injunctions went further, imposing on the clergy of England the duty, once every three months, of warning their congregations

not to repose their trust … in any other works devised by men’s fantasies besides Scripture; as in wandering to pilgrimages, offering of money, candles or tapers to images or relics … saying over a number of beads not understood or minded on, or in such-like superstition.⁷

Most importantly, the Injunctions of 1538 required priests to provide

on this side of the Feast of Easter next coming [1539], one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English and the same set up in some convenient place within the … church that you have cure of, whereas your parishioners may most commodiously resort to the same and read it.⁸

This refers to the so-called Great Bible, printed in London in 1539–40 by Richard Grafton after the French Inquisition stopped production of it in Paris, which showed Henry in a woodcut on the main title page, as well as Cranmer and Cromwell,⁹ and the people loyally crying ‘Vivat Rex’ and ‘God Save the King’. It boldly declared: ‘This is the Bible appointed to the use of the churches.’¹⁰ But Henry’s subjects’ enjoyment of the Bible in their own language was short-lived. The Act of 1543 for the Advancement of True Religion¹¹ withdrew his government’s permission for everyone to read the English Bible, limiting it to noblemen, gentlemen and merchants (who could peruse it in private), but women, workers, apprentices and others were strictly prohibited from reading it in public or privately. Generously, the Act allowed those of noble or gentle rank of both sexes to read it to themselves silently – certainly not to others.

Back in November 1538, Chief Minister Cromwell and Archbishop Cranmer had launched an active campaign against members of the growing Anabaptist¹² sects throughout the realm – in particular, those who argued against the ‘Real Presence’ in the sacrament of communion. The chief minister, now also the king’s vice-regent in matters spiritual, had decided that a public example was needed to underline Henry’s fervent opposition to heresy. Lambert was selected as that example, probably by Bishop Stephen Gardiner. Lambert had earlier appeared before Cranmer on a charge of heresy and had been found guilty. Henry’s propagandists then turned his appeal into a show trial in all but name. Within the banqueting hall of the Palace of Westminster, temporary wooden scaffolding had been erected along the walls to seat spectators, to enable them to witness their king determinedly defending the sacred beliefs of the Church of England – ‘the reverence of the holy sacrament of the altar’, as Cromwell remarked. The nobility and clergy were specially invited to attend. They would have seen what transpired, but as virtually all the proceedings were to be conducted in Latin, not everyone would have understood what was said. Promptly at noon, Henry entered the hall attired head to foot in the splendour of white silk, escorted by his yeoman guards, also dressed in white uniforms. He climbed the short flight of steps to his throne beneath the canopy of estate and sat, flanked on his right by Cranmer and the bishops, and on his left by the temporal peers, led by Cromwell, and the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber. The great hall was hushed as Lambert was brought in to stand on a special wooden stage, facing his accusers, ‘fearful and timorous’.¹³

The beginning was cheery enough. ‘Ho! Good fellow, what is thy name?’¹⁴ Henry asked Lambert, after the buzz of the audience had died away. It sounded very much like a jocular ‘hail fellow, well met’ sort of greeting, but what followed was not anything like so genial. When the prisoner explained that he had changed his name to escape persecution, the king, his ‘look, his cruel countenance and his brows bent unto severity’, told him bluntly, ‘I would not trust you, having two names, although you were my brother.’ Lambert naïvely then tried flattery, humbly thanking Henry for hearing his case and commending his ‘great judgement and learning’. But the king, now standing before the throne, an imposing, tall figure in the hall, quickly interrupted him: ‘I did not come here to hear my own praises.’

George Day, provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and a famed public orator,¹⁵ explained the true reason why everyone was gathered there. The ‘assembly was not at all convened to dispute about any point of faith, but the king, being supreme head, intends openly to condemn and confute that man’s heresy’ – and he pointed accusingly at Lambert – ‘in all their presence’.

So Henry pressed on with the grave business of the day. Removing his cap piously as he mentioned the Name of Christ, he demanded to know whether the defendant believed that the consecrated wafer and wine in truth represented the body of God the Son.

Lambert answered that he was ‘with St Augustine, that it is the body of Christ – after a certain manner’.

Back swiftly came the king’s bullying, hectoring retort: ‘Answer me neither out of St Augustine, nor by the authority of any other, but tell me plainly whether you say it is the body of Christ, or no.’

The prisoner, abashed, answered, ‘It was not his body. I deny it.’

‘Mark well,’ said the king, ‘for now you shall be condemned even by Christ’s own words: “This is my body.”’

Lambert had been forced to produce a written statement in advance of his trial, laying down ten cogent reasons for his denial of the ‘Real Presence’. Cromwell, always the careful stage manager, had wanted to allow him enough wooden faggots to burn himself with. One after the other, Henry’s bishops took each of the prisoner’s reasons and, well prepared, argued strongly against them during the five gruelling hours of the trial. The reactionary and impatient Bishop Gardiner believed the good-natured Cranmer was ‘arguing but faintly’ and rudely interrupted his discourse with his own forceful opinions.¹⁶

As the hearing drew to an end, ‘the general applause of the hall gave victory to the king’. As the polite clapping died down, Henry asked the prisoner: ‘Wilt thou live or die? You have yet a free choice.’¹⁷

But Lambert obstinately refused to change his beliefs. He committed his soul to God and submitted his body to the king’s clemency. Henry shrugged his shoulders and told him loudly: ‘That being the case, you must die, for I will not be a patron unto heretics.’¹⁸He pointedly looked up at the serried ranks of spectators as his words rang around the hall, now lit by torches in the late-winter afternoon. The culmination of the trial had served his purpose well.

Cromwell stepped forward and loudly pronounced Lambert an incorrigible heretic and condemned him to be burnt. Six days later, on 22 November, he was to suffer a markedly cruel death at Smithfield. When his legs and thighs had been burnt to the stumps, the fire sank lower, so two officers raised up his still living body on their halberds and let him fall back into the flames. He cried out ‘None but Christ, none but Christ’ before he was burnt to ashes.¹⁹

The chief minister wrote after the ‘open and solemn’ trial of this ‘miserable heretic sacramentary’ that it was

a wonder to see how fiercely, with how excellent gravity and inestimable majesty his highness exercised there the very office of a supreme head of his Church of England; how benignly his grace assayed to convert the miserable man, how strong and manifest reasons his highness alleged against him.

He added sycophantically that if the potentates of Christendom had seen the king in action, they would have marvelled at his wisdom and thought him ‘the mirror and light of all other kings and princes’.²⁰ The London agent of the orthodox Catholic Viscount Lisle wrote to his master in Calais:

His grace alone had been sufficient to confound [Lambert] … It was not a little rejoicing unto all his grace’s commons and also to all others that saw and heard how his grace handled and used this matter, for it shall be a precedent while the world stands. I think there will be none so bold hereafter to attempt any such like cause.²¹

On the same day as the trial, to emphasize Henry’s strong beliefs on religious doctrine, the government issued a proclamation banning the printing of any Bible without an official licence and ordering his subjects to denounce Anabaptists promptly to the religious authorities. Married priests were to lose their livings and any who married thereafter were to be imprisoned. Rituals such as creeping to the cross during the Good Friday services and the use of candles at Candlemas would continue. One senses the firm hand of Gardiner in the announcement. Two Anabaptists, a Dutch man and woman, were burnt as heretics at Smithfield on 28 November, and a ‘goodly young man about twenty-two years of age’ was executed for being a Sacramentarian at Colchester, Essex.²²

Ironically, less than a month after the trial in December 1538, Pope Paul III prepared to promulgate the long-awaited Bull excommunicating Henry, first drawn up in 1533 by Clement VII and later revised. The decision was triggered by the sacking of the shrine of St Thomas Becket, that much-revered martyred archbishop, in Canterbury Cathedral. The Bull declared Henry irrefutably a heretic and thus legally deposed him from the throne of England. His subjects were solemnly discharged from their oath of allegiance to him, and all Catholic monarchs in Europe were urged to unite to return England to her proper, traditional allegiance to papal authority in Rome. Cromwell, ‘that limb of Satan’,²³ was cast into Hell’s all-consuming fire. The Bull obviously could not be published in England, so it was rather lamely read out at various safe locations closest to Henry’s realm: in the north at St Andrew’s and Cold-stream in Scotland, and in the south at Boulogne and Dieppe in France.

Bishop Gardiner was also probably the inspiration behind the creation of the ‘Six Articles’ of religion in 1539, the legal instrument that stopped Protestant reforms dead in their tracks – they called it the ‘whip with six strings’ – and pulled the Church back to orthodox doctrine. Henry, far more conservative in his religious beliefs than many realised, was a fervent supporter of the Six Articles, as he was painfully aware that the vast majority of his subjects were probably ‘more inclined to the old religion than the new opinions’. The Act, introduced into Parliament by Norfolk in May 1539, laid down that the body of Christ was truly and legally present in the consecrated bread and wine during Mass. The penalty for denying this was death by burning at the stake – even after a recantation. The other Articles covered the validity of vows of celibacy within the religious orders, a repeated prohibition of the marriage of priests, the continuation of private Masses, the importance of the sacrament of confession and the administration of communion. Penalties for denying these were death by hanging and forfeiture of the miscreants’ lands and goods. In addition, anyone who tried to flee England to escape such prosecutions was also guilty of treason and would be hanged, drawn and quartered if captured. Those priests already married had to leave their wives and those who married after the law came into force were also to face the death penalty.

Moreover, the Six Articles comprehensively defined heresy as a secular offence: any person ‘by word, writing, imprinting, ciphering²⁴ or in any other wise, to publish, teach, say, affirm, declare, dispute, argue or hold any contrary opinion’ together with their aiders and abetters ‘shall be adjudged heretics and shall therefore have [to] suffer judgement, execution, pain and pains of death by way of burning’. It was a piece of uncompromising, harsh legislation intended to brook no argument in the enshrinement of the doctrines of the Church of England in law. Many were to die in the flames of martyrdom as a result.

Cranmer, himself married, had vigorously disputed the terms of the Six Articles during a hotly contested three-day debate in the House of Lords in May 1539, attended each day by Henry himself. The archbishop lost the argument, probably because of Henry’s personal intervention, and An Act Abolishing Diversity in Opinions²⁵ was granted the Royal Assent on 28 June. Cranmer promptly sent his wife back to Germany.²⁶ What his enemies’ eyes could not see, they could not use against him.

Protestants in Germany were horrified by news of the new legislation. The Lutheran reformer Philip Melanchthon wrote to Henry on 1 November 1539, his words tumbling angrily on to the page, protesting that the Articles ‘play into the hands of the Pope’. Presumably

it was your bishops who were responsible … not you. Really wise Princes are capable of reconsidering their decisions … Do not take up the cause of the Antichrist against us. Your bishops may pretend to take your part but they are in league with the Pope.

The Articles are full of sophistry and deceit. They are inconsistent with church history, for example, in saying private Masses as necessary and [that] the marriage of priests is against Divine Law.

I blame the bishops, especially Winchester. They are concerned about their own incomes.

No one can deny that the Church has come through a period of horrible darkness, like paganism, as is still the case in Rome.

Now at the end of time, God has intervened against the Antichrist [but] I thought England was leading the way. But your bishops are still plotting to retain idolatry, hence the Articles.²⁷

Melanchthon pleaded, ‘I suggest you think again. Otherwise your bishops will tyrannise the church. Christ will judge.’ Strong stuff indeed. But his appeal fell on deaf ears; indeed, as Henry played so active a part in the creation of the legislation, the letter may well have incensed him.²⁸

There is a bizarre anecdote about the aftermath of the Six Articles. Cranmer later wrote detailed notes on the reasons behind his opposition to them, backed up by citations from the Bible and from accepted learned scholars’ writings, which he planned to present to Henry. His secretary, the faithful Ralph Morice, made a fair copy of them in a small book and on his way to Westminster with it met with a startling accident on the Thames. Bishop Burnet, in the next century, related the story:

Some others that were with him in the wherry²⁹ needed to go to the Southwark side to look at a bear-baiting that was near the river, where the king was in person.

The bear broke loose into the river [with] the dogs after her. Those that were in the boat leaped out and left the poor secretary alone there. But the bear got into the boat, with the dogs about her, and sank it. The secretary, apprehending his life was in danger, did not mind his book, which he lost in the water.

But being quickly rescued and brought to land, he began to look for his book and saw it floating in the water.

So he desired the bearward [bear-keeper] to bring it to him; who took it up, but before he could restore it, put it into the hands of a priest that stood there, to see what it might contain.³⁰

Turning the sodden pages, the priest immediately realised that the contents disputed the Six Articles and told the bearward that whoever claimed it would be hanged. Burnet, always partisan, adds: ‘This made the bearward more intractable, for he was a spiteful papist and hated the archbishop, so no offers or entreaties could prevail on him to give it back.’ Morice, panicking, urgently sought assistance from Cromwell, and the next day they discovered the bearward at court, seeking to hand the book over to one of Cranmer’s enemies, no doubt in return for a handsome reward. Cromwell ‘took the book out of his hands, threatening him severely for his presumption in meddling with a privy councillor’s book’.³¹ Cranmer was thereby saved. Others were not so fortunate.

Amongst the earliest to be arrested, held in the Tower and put on trial were a number of priests and soldiers from the Calais garrison who, like Lambert, were also accused of denying the ‘Real Presence’. Legally, their heresy dated from before the Six Articles became law, so they were spared after making full recantations. They were merely paraded through the London streets as a humiliation, carrying a faggot or bundle of wood – the fuel normally used to burn heretics alive – on their shoulders before beginning various terms of imprisonment.

On 12 April 1540, Cromwell, in the king’s name, told a new session of Parliament of the importance of a ‘firm union’ amongst all of Henry’s subjects. He knew that

there were many incendiaries and much cockle grown up with the wheat. The rashness and licentiousness of some, and the inveterate superstition and stiffness of others in the ancient corruptions, had raised great dissensions, to the sad regret of all good Christians.

Some were called papists, other[s] heretics; which bitterness of spirit seemed the more strange, since now the holy Scriptures, by the king’s great care of his people, were now in all their hands, in a language they understood.

But these were grossly perverted by both sides who studied rather to justify their passions out of them than to direct their belief by them.

Significantly, he added:

The king leans neither to the right nor to the left hand, neither to the one nor the other party, but set[s] the pure and sincere doctrine of the Christian faith only before his eyes.³²

Henry was anxious to see ‘decent’ religious ceremonies continued, Cromwell went on, ‘and the true use of them taught, by which all abuses might be cut off and disputes about the exposition of the Scriptures cease’. The king was also ‘resolved to punish severely all transgressors of what sort or side, [who]soever they were’ and was determined, Cromwell added portentously, ‘that Christ, the gospel of Christ and the truth should have the victory’.

In just over fourteen weeks, Cromwell himself was dead, beheaded as a traitor and heretic. Despite his considerable political and administrative skills and his eloquence in laying out the king’s religious policies, Henry’s chief minister fell because many of his noble and episcopal rivals had become intolerant of his influence with the king and jealous of his continued advancement, both in status and wealth. They chose his failure over the disastrous marriage to Anne of Cleves as the moment to strike, as Henry nursed his burning resentment at being ‘ill used’ by Cromwell. His alleged heresy was his declaration on 30 March 1539, in the parish of St Peter the Poor in London, that teaching in the reformed religion was ‘good’ and ‘if the king would turn from it, yet I would not turn’. If Henry did reject it ‘and all his people, I would fight in this field in mine own person with my sword in my hand against him and all other’. Then he pulled out his dagger, held it up and vowed: ‘Or else this dagger thrust me to the heart, if I would not die in that quarrel against them all.’³³

He was not the only one to perish for heresy. Three notorious evangelical priests – William Jerome,³⁴ Robert Barnes and Thomas Garret³⁵ – had been arrested in 1540. Barnes had returned to London from exile in Antwerp in 1535 at Cromwell’s invitation. He made the great mistake of preaching against Gardiner during Lent 1540 at Paul’s Cross (a covered churchyard pulpit outside the north-east wall of the great London cathedral). Barnes punningly and mockingly referred to the bishop as a ‘gardener setting ill plants in a garden’.³⁶ A vibrant sense of humour was not one of the prickly Bishop of Winchester’s most abundant assets. The preacher was forced to seek Gardiner’s pardon and the bishop ‘being twice desired by him to give some sign that he forgave him, did lift up his finger’. All three were brought before the king soon after and Garret, for his part, signed a document acknowledging that ‘his highness, being assisted by some of his clergy, had so disputed with him that he was convinced of his rashness and oversight and promised to abstain from such indiscretions’. The Tudor propaganda machine was at work again. Barnes also submitted to the king, but was quickly snubbed. Henry walked to the altar within his chamber, devoutly genuflected and told him: ‘Submit not to me. I am a mortal man, but yonder is the Maker of us all – the author of truth.’³⁷ The three accused were required to preach at St Mary’s Church, Spitalfields, in London that Easter, to demonstrate their new support of orthodox doctrine. But this was not enough for Gardiner. Despite his denials, it seems plain that he was behind their immediate imprisonment in the Tower after their interview with Henry on charges of heresy. Once behind bars and only too conscious of their impending fate, they withdrew their recantations.

On 30 July 1540 they were burnt at Smithfield. In a macabre public demonstration of Henry’s even-handiness in his determination to stamp out heresy and treason, they were dragged face down on sheep hurdles through the streets alongside three papists – Richard Featherstone, Thomas Abel³⁸and Edward Powell – who themselves faced execution by hanging, drawing and beheading for treason because of their denial of the royal supremacy. Thus, one heretic and one papist were strapped to each hurdle and as they were bumped along the cobbles through the mud, horse droppings and foul sewage, they reportedly argued furiously about which one of them was truly facing a martyr’s death.³⁹ Barnes generously reassured his fellow victim: ‘Cheer up, brother, today we shall be in glory.’⁴⁰

At the place of execution, standing at the stake above a huge pile of wood faggots, Barnes raised his voice to ask Sir William Laxton and Martin Bowes, the two sheriffs of London, the reason why he was about to die. The wretched sheriffs, shaking their heads, did not know.⁴¹ Barnes then repeated the question to the watching crowd and asked them whether ‘they had been led into any errors by his preaching’. Defiantly, he went on: ‘Let them now speak and I will make them answer.’ No one spoke out. Then, said Barnes, he had ‘heard I was condemned to die by act of Parliament, seemingly for heresy, since we are to be burned’. He prayed to God to forgive those responsible and, in particular, the Bishop of Winchester:

If he had sought or procured my death either by word or deed, I pray to God to forgive him, as heartily, as freely, as charitably and as sincerely as Christ forgave them that put Him to death.

In a strange display of loyalty in his last moments of life, Barnes urged the people to pray for the king ‘and after him that godly prince Edward’. He added:

I have been reported a preacher of sedition and disobedience to the king’s majesty. But here, I say to you that you are all bound by the law of God to obey your prince with all humility, not only for fear, but for conscience.⁴²

All three evangelicals prayed for the pardon of their sins and the constancy and patience to endure their sufferings. They embraced, kissed each other and then were tied to their stakes. A horror-struck silence fell on the crowd as their pyres were lit.

Their deaths were not popular in Protestant London. One contemporary commentator wrote:

Most men said it was for preaching against the doctrine of Stephen Gardiner … who chiefly procured this their death. God and he knoweth, but a great pity it was that such learned men should be so cast away without examination, neither knowing which was laid to their charge, nor never called to answer.⁴³

The burnings and executions continued, including three in Salisbury and two in Lincoln on the same day. In January 1541, Henry issued instructions to Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, and Sir Richard Gresham, the Lord Mayor, to root out once and for all those in the capital who rejected the ‘Real Presence’ during communion. One case stands out from many: that of the orphan Richard Mekins, ‘a boy not above fifteen years of age and both illiterate and very ignorant’ who denied the corporeal presence of Christ in the sacrament and, additionally, praised Robert Barnes for his beliefs. When he appeared on trial for his life at the Guildhall, two witnesses reported his words, but the jury foreman said the case had not been proved.

Upon which Bonner cursed and was in a great rage and caused them to go aside again.

So they being overawed, returned and found the indictment [true].

But when he was brought to the stake, he was taught to speak much good of Bonner and to condemn all heretics and Barnes in particular.⁴⁴

The chronicler Edward Hall said contemptuously that

the poor boy would for the safeguard of his life have gladly said that the Twelve Apostles taught it him, for he had not cared of whom he had named it, such was his childish innocence and fear.⁴⁵

Mekins was executed anyway at Smithfield on 30 July.

Another youth called John Collins, who lived in Southwark, within Gardiner’s diocese of Winchester, had objected to what he saw as idolatrous worship of a wooden statue of Christ within a chapel used by Spanish sailors arriving in the port of London to offer up prayers of thanks for their safe passage. He shot an arrow at the statue, which lodged in one of its feet, and loudly called on the crucifix to defend itself and punish him for his sacrilege.⁴⁶ Collins had been kept in prison for two or three years and had been confined with Lambert. He was quite possibly insane, but Henry’s Act, passed for use against Lady Jane Rochford, which permitted the execution of those found guilty of heresy or treason even if they were deemed insane, was conveniently used against Collins. He, too, was burnt to death.⁴⁷ Again, he was popularly thought to have been a victim of Gardiner.

Despite his continued pleas for religious unity in his realm, by 1540 Henry’s Privy Council and court were riven by what had become two opposing factions over the proper future direction of the Church of England. Those supporting the more traditional doctrines were led by Gardiner and Norfolk and included the king’s long-time friends Southampton and Sir Anthony Browne, Master of the King’s Horse, as well as Sir William Paulet, Lord St John; Sir John Baker, Attorney-General; Sir Richard Rich (who had perjured himself so shamefully at the trial of Sir Thomas More in 1535 and was a prime informant against Cromwell)⁴⁸ and Wriothesley. Opposing them were the evangelicals: Cranmer and Sir Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford and Suffolk, Henry’s old jousting partner. In view of the constant plots and counterplots, it is not surprising that Henry’s religious policies during this period of his reign appear sometimes incongruous as he tried to maintain a precarious balance by cunningly playing off one faction against the other.

Two weeks after Henry’s marriage to Katherine Parr, there was another case against Sacramentarians, this time rather closer to home – at the court in Windsor. John Marbeck, organist of the Chapel Royal, St George’s, and local men Anthony Pearson – a priest from Winkfield, Berkshire, Henry Filmer – a tailor, Robert Testwood – ‘a singing man’, and another called Bennet had been charged with heresy and held in the Marshalsea Prison, Southwark. They were brought to trial on Thursday 26 July 1543 at Windsor before the former Benedictine monk John Capon, now Bishop of Salisbury, William Franklin, Dean of Windsor, and a jury drawn from the Chapel Royal’s own tenants. Testwood was so ill that he arrived in court only with the aid of crutches; Bennet was sick with the plague and was left in the Marshalsea,⁴⁹ the sickness incongruously saving his life. Therefore only four appeared in the dock and all were found guilty after a controversial trial in which the case against Testwood included the vacuous charge that he avoided looking at the Host when it was raised during Mass, instead of acknowledging it devoutly. Marbeck was, however, reprieved by royal pardon because Gardiner apparently enjoyed his music⁵⁰ and pleaded with Henry for his life.

No one was entirely safe from the devious intrigues at court. Almost certainly encouraged by Gardiner and Sir John Baker, some of the seven conservative canons of Canterbury Cathedral accused Cranmer himself of encouraging heretical sermons within the diocese of Canterbury in 1543. Their complaints and accusations were dispatched to the king. As Henry was rowed upriver on his royal barge one evening, he saw Cranmer standing outside the gates of his palace at Lambeth. The vessel pulled into the bank and the archbishop, coming aboard, was stunned by the king’s light-hearted greeting: ‘Ah, my chaplain! I have news for you. I know now who is the greatest heretic in Kent.’ Henry then pulled the paper listing the accusations against Cranmer from his sleeve and showed it to him.⁵¹ The king liked Cranmer, perhaps was even fond of him, for his easy-going honesty, otherworldliness, compassion and total lack of personal ambition. With a neat sleight of hand, Henry appointed him to head the commission of inquiry into the accusations against himself. After lengthy deliberations, a general pardon was issued to all concerned.

The Bishop of Winchester also moved against a number of Cromwell’s former protégés who remained in court and shared his reformist views on religion. At Easter 1543, Gardiner seized his opportunity to ‘bend his bow against the head deer’, as he described it, and arrested the diplomat Sir Philip Hoby, shortly to join Katherine Parr’s household as receiver of foreign receipts, for sheltering a Sacramentarian. Hoby’s companions Sir Thomas Carwarden, Edmund Harman, Thomas Sternhold (a Groom of the Robes) and Thomas Weldon were also caught up in Gardiner’s sweep for heretics but all were later pardoned, presumably because of their closeness to the royal family.⁵²

Gardiner himself had a narrow escape in January 1544 when his cousin and secretary Germain was executed for upholding the papal supremacy. Suffolk believed that the miscreant had been protected from justice by his powerful patron and urged Henry to bring Gardiner to trial as a traitor. But the bishop’s allies on the Privy Council warned him and he hastened to the king’s side to head off any attempt to arrest him. Gardiner humbled himself, was forgiven and kept both his head and his position at court.

Cranmer was the target of the conservative conspirators once more, probably in November 1545 after the archbishop had been permitted to publish an English primer earlier in the summer. Henry was again told of his archbishop’s heresy and was urged to send him to the Tower. The king agreed to Cranmer’s arrest, which was planned for the next day during a Privy Council meeting at Westminster. But that night, at eleven o’clock, Henry sent the ubiquitous Sir Anthony Denny to Lambeth to summon Cranmer to his presence. The archbishop was roused from his bed, immediately crossed the River Thames and met the king in a darkened gallery of the Palace of Westminster. He was quickly warned of the plot against him. Henry told him:

I have granted their requests but whether I have done well or not, what say you my lord?

Cranmer thanked his royal master for the information but said he was happy to be committed to prison and to be tried for his beliefs, because he knew Henry would not allow him to have an unfair hearing. Always realistic, the king tried to make him understand what he was now confronting:

Oh Lord God! What fond simplicity you have!

If you permit yourself to be imprisoned, your every enemy may take advantage of you. Do you not think that once they have you in prison, three or four false knaves will be procured to witness against you and to condemn you? Whilst at liberty, [no one] dares to open their lips or appear before your face.

No, not so, my lord, I have better regard towards you than to permit your enemies to so overthrow you.

At least Henry fully understood how his leading administrators could be entrapped. He gave the archbishop his ring, which ‘they well know I use for no other purpose but to call matters from the Council into my own hands to be ordered and determined’. Show them the ring, said the king, when they make their accusations and order your arrest, and all will be well.

The next morning at eight o’clock, the Privy Council sent for Cranmer but kept him waiting outside the door of their chamber. He stood ‘among serving men and lackeys above three-quarters of an hour, many councillors and other men now and then going in and out’. Presently, the king’s favourite doctor, William Butts, another well-known evangelical, arrived and chatted to Cranmer. Then the physician went inside and told Henry:

Yes, I have seen a strange sight … my lord of Canterbury has become a lackey or a serving man, for he has been standing among them for almost an hour … so that I was ashamed to keep him company there any longer.

Cranmer was immediately called inside and told that a ‘great complaint’ had been made both to the Council and the king. Cranmer and others, ‘by his permission, had infected the whole realm with heresy and therefore it was the king’s pleasure that they should commit him to the Tower … [to] be examined for his trial’. Cranmer, pale-faced but calm, replied:

I am sorry, my lords, that you drive me to this exigency – to appeal from you to the king’s majesty, who, by this token has taken this matter into his own hands and discharges you thereof.

And with that, he held up Henry’s ring. There was an astonished silence. John, Lord Russell, was the first to speak. ‘Did I not tell you, my lords, that the king would never permit my lord of Canterbury to have such a blemish as to be imprisoned, unless it were for treason?’ Henry taunted them:

Ah! My lords, I had thought that I had a discreet and wise council but now I perceive that I am deceived. How have you handled my lord of Canterbury here?

What makes you [treat him like] a slave, shutting him out of the council chamber amongst serving men? Would you be so handled yourselves?

Then he became deadly serious:

I would you should well understand that I believe Canterbury as faithful a man towards me as ever was prelate in this realm and one to whom I owe many ways beholden, by the faith I owe to God (and he laid his hand upon his breast) and therefore, who so loves me will regard him [so] thereafter.

Norfolk, who had undoubtedly played a leading role in the conspiracy against Cranmer, hurriedly told the king, rather disingenuously,

We meant no manner of hurt to my lord of Canterbury in that we requested to have him in durance [prison]. We only did [so] because he might, after his trial, be set at liberty to his own glory.

Just who was he fooling? Certainly not Henry:

Well, I pray you not to use my friends so. There remains malice among you, one to another. Let it be avoided out of hand, I would advise you.⁵³

So the councillors – some of them who had, mere minutes before, been planning to burn Cranmer alive – hastened to shake his hand warmly as a token of their friendship and goodwill, under the stern eye of the king.

Henry’s motivation in this tense little human drama remains unclear, if not downright Machiavellian. He had patently agreed to his archbishop’s arrest, if not actively encouraging his enemies amongst the conservative faction. But Henry then proceeded to tip Cranmer off about his impending doom in a melodramatic late-night meeting. From that moment, in the empty corridor at Westminster, the archbishop was never in danger. Yet the king happily let the plot run its course before firmly and publicly stamping upon it. Humiliation plays an important part in the story – Henry teases his advisers about it: the humiliation of Cranmer, kept waiting amongst the common lackeys; the humiliation of his Privy Council accusers by the sudden production of the lifesaving king’s ring mere moments before the planned arrest; the humiliation caused by Henry’s rebuke. That flourish by Cranmer, in holding up the royal ring, immediately showed Gardiner, Norfolk and the rest of his enemies that the game was up and that they had been outmanoeuvred. And that must have been Henry’s intention all along. His aim, this time, was to mortify the conservative faction as part of his delicate balancing act in the difficult area of developing religious policy. The constant conspiracies and divisions amongst his councillors must also have exasperated him, as did similar controversy amongst his subjects.

Much of what we have as evidence of what actually happened during those turbulent times comes from obviously militant Protestant sources or apologists. After nearly 500 years, it is difficult to separate true fact from skewed propaganda, a weapon as freely and effectively used by both sides during the Reformation as it is in politics today. But there is no disputing the bloodshed, cruelty and horror as so many died on both sides, as martyrs, for their faith and beliefs. Richard Hilles wrote of those years:

It is now no novelty among us to see men slain, hung, drawn, quartered, beheaded. Some for trifling expressions, which were explained or interpreted as having been spoken against the king; others for the Pope’s supremacy; some for one thing, some for another.⁵⁴

It is all too easy in the twenty-first century to shrink back in revulsion at the endless slaughter caused by religious differences in the sixteenth. It was, to our modern eyes, a cruel, hard time and it is difficult for us to distinguish what happened in Henry’s reign from the conditions we tragically witnessed in twentieth-century totalitarian states. But we should judge the remedies aimed at curing dissent and punishing crime by the standards of mid-sixteenth-century England and by what was occurring concurrently in Europe. No doubt the population supped deeply from the spoon of horror when they saw those suffering harsh penalties for transgression, but some may have judged the crimes just as terrible. And horror there was. One example may serve to illustrate the point. In 1531, Parliament passed an Act against poisoners⁵⁵ that decreed that those found guilty should be sentenced to the hideous death of being boiled alive. It was a swift riposte to a crime that was, according to the Act, ‘most rare, and seldom committed or practised’ in England, a knee-jerk official reaction to assuage what they perceived to be mounting public concern. The law was passed following the case of Richard Roos who, for unknown motivations aside from his ‘wicked and damnable disposition’, poisoned porridge that was being heated in the kitchen of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. Not only were ‘seventeen persons of his family which did eat of that porridge’ poisoned, one later dying, ‘but also certain poor people which resorted to the said bishop’s palace and were there charitably fed with the remains of the porridge’ were also afflicted. One pauper woman also died. Roos was duly boiled to death at Smithfield.⁵⁶ There was another case in March 1542, when Margaret Davy, ‘a maid’, was boiled alive after she poisoned people in the three London households she had lived in, murdering three individuals.⁵⁷ Life was cheap for the great and mighty of the land as well as for the lowborn and poor. Judicial execution, for transgression against the king’s will or against the law of the land, had to be a spectacle to prove a deterrent. Almost always, these were synonymous. These were hard, merciless days in Henry Tudor’s England.