8

Submission

By the time King Henry delivered his ultimatum to convocation, almost everyone with a connection to his court was tangled in a web of hostility and dread.

Old friendships were being sundered by the tension. Even Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, close to the king from boyhood and now his brother-in-law, was ordered to withdraw to his country home and take his family with him. Suffolk himself was loyal enough, but his wife, Henry’s sister Mary, was too open about her contempt for the Boleyns.

The Tudors were not the only family being torn apart. Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, though he kept his place at court, was compromised by his wife’s outspoken opposition to the divorce and tormented by the angry outbursts of his high-strung niece Anne Boleyn.

Careers were being made and ruined. Stephen Gardiner, royal secretary and bishop of the rich diocese of Winchester, had damaged himself irretrievably by insisting, in his response to the Supplication Against the Ordinaries, that church law was above the reach of the secular authorities. He was now an outsider, still officially secretary but no longer trusted. The eagerness of Thomas Cranmer to find scholarly support for the king’s every act and desire, by contrast, had lifted him into the bright sunshine of royal favor. He was back on the continent now, taking up new duties as Henry’s ambassador to the court of Charles V.

Strange things were happening. One morning the whole household of Bishop John Fisher became violently ill. One of the bishop’s servants died, as did an indigent woman who had come to Fisher’s door for that day’s distribution of free food. The bishop himself escaped, saved by his practice of not eating until the beggars had been fed.

It was discovered that the morning’s batch of porridge had been poisoned. According to some of the surviving accounts, someone had given a powder to Fisher’s cook, one Richard Roose, who thought it was a laxative and put it into the porridge as a practical joke. By other accounts Roose claimed complete innocence, saying that he knew nothing about any powder and that if anything had been added to the porridge, it must have been done while he was away from the kitchen, possibly by a nameless stranger who had shown up that morning and later disappeared. Rumors arose to the effect that the poisoning had been arranged by the king, whose motive would have been to put an end to Fisher’s unceasing criticism, in writing and in person, of his pursuit of a divorce and his attacks on the church.

What is most interesting is the king’s reaction to these rumors—a reaction so extreme that it stirred up further suspicion. He visited the House of Lords and delivered an impromptu speech on the evils of poisoning, a subject of which he appears to have had a deep horror. He then hurried through Parliament a bill that made the use of poison an act of high treason, and he had Roose attainted (a step, to be much used in the years ahead, that made it possible to punish and even execute a suspect without holding a trial). The unfortunate Roose, whose degree of complicity can never be known, became the first person to suffer the penalty prescribed for poisoners. He was deep-fried alive in a cauldron of boiling oil.

Next Henry himself became a target, though of words only. On Easter morning he attended mass in the church of the Observant Franciscans adjacent to the royal palace at Greenwich. The Observant friars, so called because they were stricter than other Franciscans in adhering to the rule laid down by their order’s founder, Francis of Assisi, were respected throughout Europe as a model of how men in holy orders should conduct themselves. They had been invited into England by Edward IV, Henry VII had taken them under his patronage early in his reign, and their connection to the royal family remained strong. Catherine of Aragon had always been especially devoted to the Observants, choosing John Forest of the Greenwich friary as her confessor. Henry VIII on more than one occasion had written to the pope to commend their blameless way of life and their “hard toil day and night” to bring souls to God.

The preacher at this year’s Easter mass was William Peto, former warden of the order’s house at Richmond (another place where a Tudor palace stood side by side with an Observant friary), newly elected head of its English province and onetime confessor to the king’s daughter Mary. Henry must have been expecting an edifying homily appropriate to the holiest day in the liturgical calendar and attuned to his lofty understanding of matters theological. What he got instead must have stunned him; it is difficult to believe that he would have set foot in the church had he known what Peto was intending. The friar addressed him directly, personally, telling him in so many words that he had no right to end his marriage, that there was no way to do so except by proving, contrary to what the queen continued to swear, that her marriage to Prince Arthur had been consummated. Moving into even more shocking territory, Peto compared Henry to Ahab, the Old Testament king who had been enchanted by the wicked Jezebel, was seduced into thinking himself above the law, and so had come to a terrible end. “I beseech your Grace to take good heed,” Peto said in conclusion, “lest if you will need follow Ahab in his doing, you will surely incur his unhappy end also, and that the dogs lick your blood as they licked Ahab’s, which God avert and forbid.” Henry showed impressive sangfroid, not only sitting stoically through what must have sounded to him like incredible insults but staying behind after mass to talk with Peto, hoping perhaps to win him over with the royal erudition. Peto proved immovable, however. He warned the king that all England was restless because of his actions and that if he persisted he could put his very throne in danger.

Within the next few days Peto departed Greenwich for a general conference of the Observants’ English province. As soon as he was gone, Henry issued instructions for one of the royal chaplains, Dr. Richard Curwen, to preach the following Sunday at the friars’ church. This was irregular because Curwen was not a Franciscan, and it was unwelcome because he was known to be willing to do or say anything to win the king’s attention and favor. Henry Elston, warden of the Greenwich friary, objected but was ignored. Curwen appeared on Sunday as instructed, and as he rose to speak the king was once again in attendance.

Things did not go according to plan. Curwen, knowing what was expected of him but going perhaps a bit far in his eagerness to please, not only repudiated Peto’s words of a week earlier but denounced him as “dog, slanderer, base, beggarly friar, closeman, rebel and traitor.” The friars in his audience absorbed this in silence. The king did the same, no doubt with considerable satisfaction. But when Curwen went on to accuse Peto of being absent out of cowardice—”not to be found, being fled for fear and shame as being unable to answer my arguments”—a voice called out from the loft above the king. “Good sir,” said Elston the warden loudly, “you know that Father Peto, as he was commanded, is now gone to a provincial council held at Canterbury, and not fled for fear of you, for tomorrow he will return again.” Elston declared himself ready to “lay down my life to prove all those things true which he hath taught out of the holy scripture, and to this combat I challenge you before God and all equal judges.” Noisy confusion ensued, and quiet was not restored until Henry himself ordered everyone to be silent.

Peto and Elston were called before the King’s Council. There they were roundly chastised, the Earl of Essex exclaiming that they deserved to be bundled up in a sack and thrown into the Thames. Elston was not impressed. “Threaten these things to rich and dainty folk who are clothed in purple, fare delicately, and have their chiefest hope in this world,” he replied. “For we esteem them not, but are joyful that for the discharge of our duties we are driven hence. With thanks to God we know the way to heaven to be as ready by water as by land, and therefore we care not which way we go.” The two were taken into custody, and Henry petitioned Rome for license to have them tried by the compliant provincial of a different order, the Augustinians. Before anything came of this they were sent into exile on the continent. They went to Antwerp, where they took up the production of books rebutting Henry’s claims on the divorce and supremacy. Their persistence did nothing to encourage the king to allow those who disagreed with him to leave England and remain at liberty.

Just days after Elston’s clash with Curwen, an outbreak of violence showed that tension was reaching dangerous levels even inside Henry’s court. The dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk were by this point less influential with the king than the upstart Cromwell, and were disgruntled and perhaps even fearful as a result. The pressure they were under put them and their followers at odds to an extent that soon threatened to get out of hand. One day, after an altercation of some kind, one of Suffolk’s retainers took refuge in Westminster Abbey to escape pursuit by a group of Norfolk’s men. The abbey was a recognized place of sanctuary, but the pursuers entered anyway and killed Suffolk’s man. When Suffolk learned of this (he was back at court, though without his wife), he assembled an armed gang of his own and headed for Westminster in pursuit of vengeance. The king was alerted in time to dispatch a messenger with an order for Suffolk to stop, and the duke and his men were obliged to swear that they would refrain from violence. They did so unhappily, and their mood was not improved by news that the murderers of their comrade had been let off lightly.

This was the atmosphere that hung over the Southern Convocation as it struggled uncertainly to respond to the king’s ultimatum. The bishops in particular were in an excruciatingly difficult position. Most of them held their positions less because of any special piety or wisdom or devotion to the church than because over the years they had demonstrated an ability to make themselves agreeable to the king. They were better trained in obedience to the Crown than in loyalty to a distant, unseen papacy, they had more reason to fear their prideful and determined king than a pope who sometimes must have seemed little more than an abstraction, and if any of them had looked to Rome for guidance since the start of the divorce crisis the only response had been a troubled silence. Archbishop Warham, who since the fall of Wolsey had stood alone at the top of the hierarchy, only added to the confusion. Many years before, he had expressed doubts about the propriety of a marriage between Catherine of Aragon and her late husband’s brother, but of course he accepted the pope’s decision on the matter and even presided at the wedding. From the start of the crisis he had seemed lost in irresolution, sometimes questioning but at least as often appearing to accept the king’s arguments. Not long before Henry delivered his ultimatum, Warham had publicly criticized some of the king’s more aggressive initiatives. But after receiving the ultimatum and getting a taste of the Crown’s hard tactics, he withdrew into silence.

Convocation as a whole, however, was showing signs of willingness to resist. The lower chamber especially, less accustomed than the bishops to the compromises required for political preferment, displayed an angry understanding of what was at stake in this latest confrontation. Henry, aware of its restiveness, reacted indirectly but pointedly, summoning a group of his most dependable parliamentary supporters. Among them were thirteen members of Commons, the king’s hand-picked speaker among them, and eight lay lords. Their function that day was to provide an audience for a theatrical performance in which the king would play not just the starring but the only role. “Well-beloved subjects,” Henry told them (it is easy to imagine him expressing innocent surprise followed by righteous indignation), “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!”

This would have been the listeners’ cue to feign astonishment and indignation. How was such a thing possible? How could the clergy not be true subjects of their glorious king? Henry then revealed the supposedly shocking truth (which of course had been obvious for centuries): “All the prelates, at their consecration, make an oath to the pope, clean contrary to the oath that they make to us, so that they seem to be his subjects, and not ours. The copy of both the oaths I deliver here to you, requiring you to invent some order that we be not thus deluded of our spiritual subjects.” The opacity of the king’s second sentence is likely to have been intentional: it leaves unclear exactly what Henry was threatening, but there could be no doubt that he was accusing the bishops of something serious, something smelling of treason, and that he would welcome the involvement of his friends in Parliament. In delivering this little talk, however, he may have been bluffing; it would have been far from clear at this point that Parliament as a body was prepared to support his most radical demands. If his words were a bluff, however, the bluff worked. Two days later convocation offered a compromise that had been hashed out between the bishops and the lower chamber, with the latter continuing to show more firmness than the lords of the church. The response to the king’s ultimatum conceded much of what he had demanded, promising that the clergy would not legislate without royal permission. However, it repeated a familiar qualification along with a familiar request. The new rule was to be effective only during Henry’s lifetime (the bishops had been willing to make it permanent, but the lower house would not agree), and as before, the king was asked to confirm the traditional liberties of the church.

Again Henry was not satisfied. Having no further need for Parliament at this point, and probably not wanting its more restless members to remain together at Westminster as he pushed his conflict with the clergy to a climax, he sent it home. Convocation was told that it, too, was to adjourn—not quite immediately but in twenty-four hours—but that he wanted a better answer before it did so. He sent envoys including the Duke of Norfolk and the Boleyns, father and son, to make certain that the churchmen understood that he meant business—that failure to cooperate would bring consequences.

Thus it was that May 15 became one of the most significant days not only of the Tudor century but in English constitutional history. It was the day on which, in the person of Archbishop Warham, the clergy of the Southern Convocation utterly, absolutely, and forever surrendered such independence as their church possessed to King Henry VIII and his heirs. In doing so, they abandoned rights and immunities that reached back into the dimmest early years of Christianity in England, prerogatives that their predecessors had fought repeatedly and sometimes sacrificed much to maintain. The question that arises is how such a momentous surrender could have happened so quickly and apparently so easily—how the stewards of an institution rooted so deeply in English society and culture came to agree unconditionally to even the most extreme of Henry’s demands less than a week after he first made them.

The answer is that it didn’t happen that way. The whole process of surrender was little more than a sham. In fact, only three members of convocation’s upper house—three out of all the bishops and leading abbots in England and Wales—signed the document of submission without adding reservations. Two refused outright, and more absented themselves from the proceedings than showed up either to sign or refuse. The lower house was even less cooperative; so many members refused to vote that there was no way even to pretend that the king’s demands had been accepted. When the “submission of the clergy” was presented to the king, therefore, it bore the signatures of only a tiny minority of those men whose positions gave them at least some right to act on behalf of the church. As an expression of the will of the hierarchy or the whole clergy, therefore, it had an extremely dubious legitimacy. This fact appears to have troubled the king not at all. He had what he needed: an official document, bearing the signature and seal of the archbishop of Canterbury and a few others, that proclaimed him to be the ultimate master of ecclesiastical law in his kingdom. He still did not have a divorce, and difficult questions about the relationship with Rome remained to be resolved, but Henry had won one of the great victories of his life. He held in his hand a basis for claiming that the clergy now lay prostrate at his feet. That this is what he had wanted all along—that he had no real interest in a comprehensive revision of canon law—is clear in the fact that though Warham’s submission agreed to the creation of a review committee, no such body was ever appointed. As for the troublesome fact that most of the clergy had not reallysubmitted, that detail could either be corrected later, if necessary, or simply forgotten.

On the day after Henry received the submission, the Duke of Norfolk escorted Thomas More to the gardens of York Place, the great London palace that had previously been the residence of Cardinal Wolsey and was now home to the king and Anne Boleyn. There the chancellor met briefly with Henry, handed over the Great Seal that symbolized his office, and quietly ended his career in government. It is natural to suppose that More had decided to resign upon learning of the submission, realizing that he could not serve a monarch with whom he was in deep disagreement about matters of such great importance to both of them. But in fact May 16 was merely the day on which More, after an extended and unhappy wait, was at last allowed to resign. His position had become untenable long before, first because of the lengths to which the king was going in pursuit of his divorce and then because of his threats to the unity of the church. More had recruited Norfolk, with whom he had maintained an uneasy friendship in spite of the duke’s impatience with the idea of papal authority, to ask the king to allow him to resign. For a long time Henry turned a deaf ear. He could not permit his subjects and the whole world to see the highest-ranking officer in his government quitting in protest of royal policy. Such a spectacle was especially impossible at a time when the king was seen to be locked in conflict with convocation and Parliament and neither could be depended upon to obey his instructions.

But now the annates battle was won, the hierarchy had surrendered if only in a formal sense, and neither Parliament nor convocation remained in session and capable of raising protests. If More remained in office, he could only be an awkwardness, and if he were still in office when Parliament or convocation reconvened he might become a figure around whom others could rally. It was the right time to let him go. The king accepted the Seal, and More withdrew gratefully to his home in Chelsea, saying that he hoped to spend whatever time remained to him preparing his soul for the hereafter.

  Background  

OTHER REFORMATIONS

IT SEEMS AN EXCEEDINGLY STRANGE COINCIDENCE THAT the greatest turning point in the history of the church in England, the crisis after which nothing would ever be the same, occurred at almost precisely the same time that the religious life of central Europe was also being violently transformed. What is strange is that these two simultaneous revolutions happened independently of each other, rose out of radically different circumstances and causes, and ultimately unfolded in distinctly different ways.

Certainly at some deep level having to do with the spirit of the age, this wasn’t a coincidence at all. Be that as it may, when Martin Luther fastened his ninety-five theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517 he set off a powder keg of a kind that simply did not exist in England. His revolt was neither the cause of nor the inspiration for the upheaval that Henry VIII put in motion a decade and a half later. Henry in fact loathed what he knew of Luther, and loathed many of the defining ideas of Luther’s theology. Long before declaring war on the pope, Henry made himself the avowed enemy of Friar Luther and his war on the pope. For the book in which he responded to Luther’s heresies (he had help in writing it, especially from Thomas More and John Fisher), he was rewarded with the title Defender of the Faith by—it would become the ultimate irony—the pope in Rome himself.

Luther repaid the king in full. First he declared in a book of his own that Henry was a villain and fool and tool of the Antichrist, a “damnable rottenness and worm.” Later he denied that Henry had any right to divorce Catherine of Aragon, suggesting instead that he commit bigamy.

And yet, though both would have been pained to think so, Henry and Luther were intimately linked. Such intellectual support as Henry found for his revolution came largely from Englishmen whose thinking had been strongly influenced by Luther’s. And Luther’s impact could never have been as widespread as it finally proved to be if not for the resources that Henry’s revolt made available to the Protestant cause.

There is irony in all this. From the beginning of his reign to the end, Henry thought of himself as not only a good Catholic but literally the best and most orthodox of Catholics—better than the pope, in the end, because better connected to God. Hence his revulsion toward the books, written in Latin mainly and reproduced in great numbers thanks to the recent invention of movable type, that Luther was turning out with dazzling speed and spreading to every corner of Europe as his dispute with the papacy escalated into schism. His beliefs as they matured—that man is so corrupted by original sin as to be incapable of acting freely, that therefore he can do nothing to merit salvation, that therefore faith alone can “justify” him or free him from the consequences of sin, and finally that acts of charity and self-denial and prayers for the dead must all be without effect—added up to a blunt repudiation of Henry’s very Catholic views. Luther insisted that the Bible is the sole source of truth, that baptism and the Eucharist are the only valid sacraments and priests have no more power than any layman, that people are predestined to salvation or damnation and can do nothing to alter their fate—ideas no less offensive to the English king than to Rome. They were no more consistent with Henry’s expanding view of his own role than with the most ambitious assertions of the popes.

Luther’s first moves onto radical theological ground were viewed with enthusiasm, even with excitement, in a Germany where many people had long regarded Rome as an alien force, remote, exploitive, and corrupt. The accusations that he leveled against the institutional church received so much support and encouragement, even from powerful nobles and influential members of the clergy, that Luther himself must have been taken by surprise. Certainly he was emboldened to carry his attack further. When the emperor Charles tried and failed to silence him and even had him outlawed without effect, Luther found himself free to follow his ideas wherever they led. What he found, in developing them, was release from agonies experienced during years of struggle with an intense sense of his own sinfulness. The resolution at which he arrived, the conviction that neither he nor anyone could do anything to merit salvation but salvation was possible all the same as an undeserved gift from God, persuaded him that his struggle had always been not only futile but unnecessary. He thereby brought that struggle to an end. But this answer also reduced to futility his monastic vocation, which he had always pursued so rigorously, so self-punishingly, that his Augustinian superiors had warned him against excessive scruples. In fact it rendered the church itself futile—left no place for the church as it then existed. Thus it left no place for a pope. The gulf that opened between Luther and Henry VIII never narrowed even as Henry changed from one of the pope’s most dutiful sons into one of his most implacable enemies. Luther, having crossed swords with Rome and emerged not only unharmed but a German national hero, became contemptuous of the very idea of ecclesiastical hierarchy. He decided that the papacy must be the shadowy enemy of Christ that the New Testament’s Book of Revelation calls the Whore of Babylon. This took him down paths where the king of England had no intention of following.

One trait that Henry and Luther shared was a conviction that the whole world should agree with them, reinforced by an expectation that it would. The resistance that both encountered should not have surprised them but did. What was worst for Luther, what enraged him because it made a mockery of his determination to construct a new religious unity on the ruins of the old, was the way the reform movement itself began to fragment and fragment again as men who had begun by rejecting Catholic doctrine went on to reject Lutheran doctrine as well.

The first aberration was the most dangerous, and the most horrible in its consequences. By 1524, only seven years after Luther had first challenged Rome’s practice of selling “indulgences” (which were rather like get-out-of-Purgatory-free cards), common people across Germany were inspired by his example to mount challenges of their own not only to the ecclesiastical authorities (hated in Germany to a degree unimaginable in England) but to the secular rulers as well. The result was the Peasants’ War, as large an uprising by an underclass as Europe had ever seen. The aims of the rebellion were more secular than religious—an end to enclosures of farmland long held in common, for example, and a restoration of the feudal rights of the peasantry—but the rebels looked to Luther as their natural leader. This put him in a severely awkward position. The peasants were doing what he himself had done: not only questioning but defying traditional authority. But if he endorsed their rebellion he would alienate the many princes who, by separating their domains from Rome and confiscating church lands, had helped to make his revolt a world-changing event. He took the safer course, condemning the rebels in the most hateful terms imaginable and urging their rulers not only to suppress but to exterminate them. What followed was the butchering of an estimated one hundred thousand people, many of them armed only, where they were armed at all, with farm implements. The idea that Christians owe unqualified obedience to the state became at that point deeply implanted in Lutheranism and therefore in the psyche of Protestant northern Germany. What was implanted in southern and western Germany and Austria, where the rebellion had been most widespread and the reprisals most savage, was a deep popular antipathy for the whole Lutheran phenomenon. In Switzerland, too, where the reformist leader Huldrych Zwingli had supported the rebels, the Peasants’ War opened up new divisions.

Zwingli would have been lost to Luther in any case, because in Luther’s eyes he went too far in his rejection of established dogma and practice. Luther believed, in almost the same way as Catholics, that the living Jesus really was present in the Eucharist, holy communion; Zwingli believed that the Eucharist was merely symbolic. Luther believed that religious art—paintings, statues, crucifixes, stained-glass windows—fostered piety and should be encouraged; to Zwingli such things were idolatrous. Zwingli separated himself from Luther on the question of free will, arguing that with the help of God people are capable of choosing to live in accordance with the commandments. Luther believed no such thing: in his view, Scripture offers its admonitions to do good and avoid evil only to impress upon believers how impossible it is for them to do either, so that they will put all their faith in God’s undeserved mercy and attach no value to the actions of their unworthy selves.

Thus did reform separate first into two main branches, German Lutheranism and a more austere, puritanical Swiss variant, and then, after surprisingly few years, into a multitude of sects. The most notorious were the Anabaptists, so named because they rejected the ancient practice, which Luther had retained, of infant baptism. Some of the Anabaptists were radical to the point of lunacy. In 1534 they seized control of the German city of Münster from the Lutherans who had recently expelled the local Catholic bishop. Under the leadership of a man named Jan Beuckelson, who declared himself king of the new Jerusalem and said he was following the example of the Old Testament patriarchs in taking sixteen wives, they announced that the second coming of Jesus was imminent and that it was the duty of believers to make war on their oppressors. They were considered such a threat that Catholics and Lutherans joined forces to take Münster back from them, after which Anabaptists everywhere were ferociously suppressed. Those who fled to England were rounded up and jailed, and those who refused to recant, Henry had burned.

As it broke into divergent and even warring factions, the evangelical movement—a name signifying elevation of the Bible over other authority—lost the momentum of its rapid early growth. The violent rise and fall of the Münster Anabaptists worsened the fear of innovation to which the Peasants’ War had given rise. Even in England, as early as 1531, a king already at loggerheads with Rome was putting evangelicals to death. Thomas Bilney, a popular young preacher who attached more importance to Scripture than Henry found acceptable, was burned at the stake at Smithfield. John Frith, another young evangelical with many admirers, met the same fate for his Zwinglian views on the Eucharist.

Luther and his followers had long entertained hopes of winning over Europe’s leading humanist and scriptural scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam. They had reason to do so: like Luther a disaffected Augustinian friar, Erasmus was for years a vocal and influential critic of a church that he saw as badly in need of reform. But he had not left the church, and for years he did not respond to appeals from evangelicals and traditionalists alike that he enter the fray on their side. When he finally did so, it was in a way that gave Luther fresh cause to be furious. In an austerely scholarly treatise, carefully limiting himself to only one of the issues separating Luther from Rome and to evidence taken from Scripture because he knew that Luther would accept no other authority, Erasmus argued that the father of the Reformation was wrong—that man does have free will. It was a restrained testament to say the least, but it put an end to any thought that the greatest humanist of the age would be joining forces with the greatest reformer. Protestantism continued to split into so many factions over so many issues that it seemed, in Luther’s words, to have “nearly as many sects as there are heads.”

As for England, from where Luther sat it must have been a very hard place to understand. The church of Henry VIII was not evangelical and it was not Roman Catholic. No one in either camp could have imagined that in the next three decades it would become first the former, then the latter, and finally go off in a third direction of its own devising.