10
Two dams broke in 1534. One was in Parliament, where resistance to the Crown snapped at last under Cromwell’s relentless pressure and a torrent of revolutionary new laws began to change the character of English government and society. The other was inside the mind of a monarch who, perhaps swept away by the ecstatic realization that in the whole kingdom there was no force capable of keeping him from doing exactly as he wished, threw off all restraint and showed himself ready to destroy not only anyone who opposed him but anyone withholding approval of whatever he wanted to do.
The first victim, both of the newly docile Parliament and of the newly savage king, was a twenty-seven-year-old nun named Elizabeth Barton. Possibly epileptic, Barton, while a servant girl still in her teens, had been mysteriously healed of some affliction and begun falling into trances, having visions, and predicting the future. This caused her to become famous first locally, in her home county of Kent, and then more widely. She came to be revered as the Holy Maid of Kent and then, after she entered a convent, as the Nun of Kent. By all accounts she lived a blameless life and made a favorable impression on practically everyone who met her, including skeptical clergymen assigned to question and report on her. But, tragically for herself, eventually she was making pronouncements on the king’s efforts to divorce Queen Catherine and warning that evil would befall him if he did not desist. She sent a message to the pope, saying that he too would be cursed if he did as Henry asked. The attention that she attracted is evident in the fact that at various times Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop Warham, Bishop Fisher, Chancellor More, and even the king himself all met with her. All who had firsthand exposure to her and left a record of their impressions said that Barton seemed virtuous, humble, and possibly even holy. Even Henry was favorably disposed until she began to talk about the divorce.
Barton’s fame, and the increasingly inflammatory nature of her opinions, made trouble inevitable. Cromwell’s power and confidence were in full flower by this time—he had been given a seat on the Royal Council before the end of 1532 and made chancellor of the exchequer the following April—and in July 1533 he had Barton arrested. He and Cranmer questioned her at length, after which she was confined in the Tower along with a half dozen of the churchmen (an assortment of parish priests, Benedictine monks, and Franciscan friars) who had made themselves her supporters and, so it was said, her manipulators in the national debate over the divorce and the king’s claim to ecclesiastical supremacy. The idea, clearly, was to discredit Barton and make her a frightening example of the price to be paid for opposing the Crown.
In November the Nun and her adherents were put on public display, made to listen to a preacher who ridiculed and vilified them, and finally, according to accounts left by people in the pay of Cromwell, required to confess that her entire career had been a fraud intended to mislead the gullible. It is not certain that these reported confessions actually occurred; no record of them was left by witnesses who can be considered impartial. Even if the accused did in fact confess, the men in whose custody they had been for months were quite capable of using torture to get what they wanted. Barton’s own confession, as recorded for posterity, was obviously not the work of a barely literate serving girl but of a ghostwriter of some sophistication.
The confessions were not the end of the story, in any case. An effort was mounted to convict Barton and her companions of high treason by establishing that she had prophesied the death of the king and so had effectively threatened his life—and to draw in other, bigger prey on grounds that anyone who had encouraged her or even listened to her without reporting her words was guilty of treason as well. This effort came to nothing. The king’s judges reported that the case was too weak even for them—there never was a shred of evidence that Barton at any time encouraged anyone to oppose the king actively or to use violence for any purpose—and there was at this point no basis in English law for charging someone with treason because of what he or she had said. Treason was still an act. Remarkably, some of Barton’s judges were reported to have declared that they would die themselves rather than find her guilty.
Cromwell responded by finding yet another new way to make Parliament useful to the Crown. At his direction both houses approved a bill of attainder that declared Barton and her six closest associates guilty of high treason. Six others, Thomas More and Bishop Fisher among them, were attainted for misprision of treason—that is, for knowing of another person’s treason and failing to report it. From the king’s standpoint, this simplified everything beautifully. Not only Barton and her cohorts but several of the most eminent personages in the kingdom could be disposed of without the inconvenience of a trial, attainder being a legislative rather than a judicial device. The fact that no one including Barton herself could possibly have committed treason as the word was then understood in English law became irrelevant.
More and Fisher defended themselves, or tried to. More requested permission to appear before Parliament to address the charge against him. Upon being refused he wrote to Cromwell and the king, explaining how, in his meetings with the Nun of Kent, he had refused to hear her opinions of political matters and had advised her to share those opinions with no one. He told them also that when visited by admirers of Barton who wanted to discuss her visions, he had not allowed them to do so. Cromwell advised Fisher to throw himself on the king’s mercy—good advice where saving his own skin was concerned, as Henry was always most likely to be generous when his victims submitted abjectly—but predictably the bishop refused. He said, sensibly enough, that he had been told by men he trusted (Archbishop Warham for one) that Barton was an honest and virtuous woman, and that his willingness to believe them, whether wise or foolish, could not possibly have been a crime. He said he had talked with Barton on three occasions, but only because she visited him uninvited. He had not reported Barton’s dark predictions, he said, because he knew for a fact that she herself had already shared them with the king.
None of this had any effect on Henry, who obviously was interested not in the guilt or innocence of the accused but in their elimination. His friends, however, saw that he was in danger of overreaching; in the end More’s name was removed from the bill of attainder, but only because Cranmer, Cromwell, and the Duke of Norfolk literally got down on their knees and implored the king to permit its removal. The three were willing to beg less because they wished to save the former chancellor than because, as they warned Henry, even a supine Parliament could not be depended upon to destroy a man of More’s reputation on such thin evidence.
Fisher’s name remained on the bill, and after its passage he was imprisoned. After a while, however, he was allowed to pay a fine of £300, the yearly income of his little Diocese of Rochester, and set free. Barton and five others—two Benedictine monks, two Observant friars, and Barton’s confessor—were taken to the royal killing ground at Tyburn. There Barton, perhaps because she was a woman and allegedly confessed to being “a poor wench without learning” and having fallen into “a certain pride and fantasy with myself,” was shown the mercy of simple death by hanging. The priests endured a good deal more. They too were hanged, but then they met the full fate of traitors: cut down while still alive and brought back to consciousness, they had their genitals cut off and stuffed into their mouths, their intestines torn from their bodies and thrown into a fire, and their beating hearts pulled out of their chests and held up where they could see them. Finally their bodies were cut into four quarters for display in different parts of London, their heads boiled and put on stakes. As they had never been tried, it was impossible for anyone to know how, exactly, they had committed treason, or whether, given the opportunity, they might have been able to establish their innocence. The public was left free to conclude that they had died for displeasing the king. The king, no doubt, wanted it to conclude exactly that.
Henry, meanwhile, was occupied elsewhere. The future of his dynasty was a question that never went away, the birth of the baby Elizabeth had done nothing to answer it, and now that he was in his forties the king was giving evidence of being more seriously concerned about his lack of a male heir than he had ever been before. The previous November he had married his only living son, the illegitimate fourteen-year-old Henry Fitzroy, to Mary Howard, who as a daughter of the Duke of Norfolk was also Anne Boleyn’s cousin. This was another coup for the Howard family, another joining of its blood to that of the Tudors, potentially of vast importance because of the possibility, which had been in the air for years, that Henry might choose in the end to make the playful young Fitzroy, on whom he doted, his heir. By January, however, Anne was pregnant for the second time. As preparations began anew for the arrival of a crown prince—Henry was always touchingly certain that his next child would be a boy—the king took as his mistress yet another young Boleyn cousin, a girl named Madge Shelton. The magic was going out of the royal marriage by this time; the increasingly insecure Anne upbraided her husband for his dalliances, and Henry turned his back on her in mute disbelief. The situation was not improved when Anne miscarried. This happened in the middle of a remarkably busy spring, when the Nun of Kent was being readied for execution, the papal court in Rome was taking up the divorce case at last, and Parliament was pouring out laws that would have been unimaginable a few years earlier.
Pope Clement, under pressure from Charles V and provoked into action at last by Henry’s taking of a second wife without being released from his first, assembled a council of cardinals—a consistory—to consider the divorce case. On March 23, rather to the pope’s surprise (he knew that agents of the king of France had been lobbying hard to line up support for Henry, spending the English king’s money freely), nineteen of the twenty-two assembled cardinals voted to deny the annulment, uphold the validity of Henry’s marriage to Catherine, and declare that Catherine had been dealt with unjustly and should be restored to her place as queen. The remaining three voted not in Henry’s favor but merely for further delay, at which point, after so many years, the king’s great matter was settled even in Rome. But Clement, his hopes of somehow avoiding a final break with Henry being practically inexhaustible, postponed issuing a formal judgment.
Rome was no longer relevant, however; things had gone too far in England for papal rulings to matter. By coincidence March 23 was also the day on which Parliament, with Cromwell issuing the instructions, passed an Act of Succession that not only gave the force of civil law to Cranmer’s nullification of the king’s first marriage and validation of his second but erected around the archbishop’s findings a protective barrier of punishment for anyone who failed to assent. The act’s assertion that Henry was to be succeeded on the throne by the children of his “most dear and entirely beloved lawful wife Queen Anne” (the sheer number of adjectives heaped upon the lady’s name is suggestive of royal defensiveness) could have surprised no one by 1534. Its failure to mention Princess Mary, implying that she was illegitimate and therefore excluded from the succession, would have offended many but surprised few. Much more startling, for anyone who knew the law, was the act’s broadening of the crime of high treason to encompass anyone acting or writing in defiance or rejection of the Boleyn marriage. Even speaking against the marriage was made misprision of treason. With these provisions the king closed the loopholes—it would be more accurate to say he destroyed the protections—that had made it impossible to bring the Nun of Kent’s case into a court of law.
The Act of Succession did not stop even there. Not satisfied with forbidding criticism, Henry had added a requirement that every subject “observe, keep, maintain and defend the act and all the whole contents and effects thereof, and all other Acts and Statutes made since the beginning of this present parliament”—since, that is, December 1529, when the king had ventured his first hesitant attack on ecclesiastical privilege. To ensure compliance, every subject was to take an oath of loyalty not only to the king but to his heirs by Anne, and refusal to swear was made treason. Conveniently, Parliament neglected to specify what the words of the oath should be. This left Henry and Cromwell free to put it into whatever form best pleased them and even to require different people to swear to different things.
This was not the only law approved by Parliament in furtherance of the king’s agenda that spring. An Act for the Submission of the Clergy gave statutory form to, and therefore enhanced the legitimacy of, the submission so dubiously wrung out of convocation two years earlier. An Act in Absolute Restraint of Annates removed the conditional aspects of the earlier annates legislation, diverted the payment of annates from Rome to the Crown rather than eliminating them as might have been expected, and laid down curious new rules for the selection of bishops. The king would henceforth send the name of his nominee to the clergy of the diocese involved. The clergy would then be accorded the privilege of approving the king’s candidate. If somehow such approval was not forthcoming, the royal choice would take office anyway and the clergy of that diocese would lose the honor of being consulted in future. Yet another act took the awarding of dispensations away from Rome and gave it to the archbishop of Canterbury, assigning two-thirds of the fees thus generated to the Crown. Anyone appealing a ruling by Canterbury was to turn henceforth not to Rome but to the King’s Chancery Court, and of course it was no longer heresy to refuse to recognize the pope—the bishop of Rome, as he was now to be called—as head of the English church. Those monasteries which until now had been under the jurisdiction of the orders with which they were affiliated rather than their local bishops were put under the authority not of the bishops but of the Crown.
What it all added up to was a wholesale chopping away of the English church’s traditional connections to Rome and their replacement with new obligations to the king. Henry was creating, not a church free of domination by any external power, but a church that he himself would dominate totally. Parliament, too, was being made newly subordinate to the Crown. Cromwell continued to take care, in preparing the latest statutes, to make clear that Parliament was merely recognizing the king’s supremacy rather than conferring supremacy upon him. The king’s authority was acknowledged as coming directly from God, not from any earthly source and certainly not (as Thomas More had dared to suggest years before, in his first public appearance as chancellor) from his subjects. To oppose the king was to oppose God. This was the high-water mark of royal authority in England, the opening of an era—it would not last long—in which the Crown claimed, and for a while actually possessed, mastery over the lives, the property, and even the consciences of its subjects. Cromwell’s reward for making it happen was to be appointed, that spring, King Henry’s principal secretary. He would turn the position into the most powerful in the government. From it he would reach out to control both houses of Parliament, the courts, and the council.
The destruction of ecclesiastical authority was final: after the 1530s the bishops as a body never again played a major role in the political life of the kingdom. It is arguable, some would say certain, that this and the other changes of the spring of 1534 were an improvement over traditional arrangements. Most of them were, in any case, irrelevant to the everyday lives of the overwhelming majority of English men and women. Few of them could ever have had occasion to appeal to Rome or even to Canterbury, to request a dispensation or become involved in questions of heresy. Aside from being required to take an oath that must have struck many of them as more odd than important, most people would have had little reason even to be aware that new laws had supplanted the old. Parish life, the age-old Latin Mass, the seven sacraments, beliefs that had been part of the heritage of every man and woman in England through more centuries than most of them had knowledge of—none of this had been altered at all.
Still, the popularity of Catherine of Aragon and the widespread sense that she had been dealt with unfairly ensured that the Act of Succession would not be well received. And many, almost certainly most of the best-informed and most influential of the king’s subjects, those who had some sense of the significance of the new laws, would have been uneasy at least about what was happening. The making into treason of things that had never been treason before—had never even been crimes before—would have unsettled any reasonable mind. The requirement that everyone swear to defend and uphold innovations condemned by some of the best men in the kingdom could easily have seemed an outrage. Henry was discarding beliefs and customs and understandings that his people had been raised with. To require those people not simply to accept his changes but to champion them, to swear that they believed them to be right, was an assault on the integrity of the individual of a kind never before seen in England. It was inevitable that the people would be skeptical. Outbreaks of popular discontent, too, were probably inevitable, though they would not be quick in coming.
Further initiatives by the king would be quick in coming. The butchering of the Nun of Kent and her group was barely the beginning.
Background
THE TOWER
MAKE A CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF ALL THE NOTABLE ENGLISH men and women who were ever imprisoned in the Tower of London and then put to death there, and a remarkable fact leaps out: such executions were overwhelmingly concentrated in the Tudor era, with few happening afterward and even fewer earlier, during the supposedly terrible Middle Ages. There is no better measure of just how big a deviation from the norm the Tudors were—of how much more savage their politics were than anything seen before or since.
Though the Tower had loomed ominously over London for four and a half centuries by the time Henry VIII had Elizabeth Barton and her associates locked up in it and then killed, throughout almost all of its history it had not been a particularly bloody place. In its earliest manifestation it was an improvised motte-and-bailey affair—a wooden stockade on a hilltop—hurriedly erected shortly after the Norman Conquest of 1066 not as a defense against possible invaders but to intimidate the Anglo-Saxon population of the adjacent and still tiny city of London. After ten years William the Conqueror decided to rebuild it in stone and began work on the massive keep that came to be known as the White Tower. It, with the four “onion domes” added by Henry VIII in 1530, became the centerpiece of a complex of surrounding fortifications and remains one of England’s most familiar landmarks down to the present day. Here as elsewhere the Normans built for eternity: constructed of stone carried by ship from northern France, the White Tower was ninety feet high with a 118-by-107-foot foundation and had walls that were fifteen feet thick at the base and eleven feet thick at the top with towers at each corner. The entry was well above ground level, and the stairs leading to it were removable in case of attack.
When completed by William II in 1097, the Tower was by far the most impressive structure ever seen in London. Though its location near the lowest bridgeable point on the River Thames would make it increasingly important as a defensive stronghold in case of invasion, as the twelfth century began its prime purpose continued to be to give the Normans an impregnable base from which to dominate a subject population. From the start it served multiple purposes—fortress, royal residence, place of worship, armory, prison—and as the generations passed so many kings expanded and altered it in so many ways that it became, as it remains today, a kind of museum of medieval castle architecture. Three generations after the completion of the White Tower, King Richard the Lion-Hearted returned from the Third Crusade with new ideas about defensive stoneworks and ordered the construction of so-called “curtain walls” around the original tower. Even more extensive additions, the most important by Richard’s nephew Henry III and Henry’s son Edward I, extended the perimeter out farther and farther until finally what was still called “the Tower” covered eighteen acres and included twenty-one distinct towers, all behind two concentric walls of overwhelming height and a broad moat filled with water from the Thames. There was no more powerful fortress anywhere in Europe. It retained all of its original functions, becoming an increasingly opulent home for the royal family, and also provided a virtually impregnable home for the Crown jewels, the mint, the government’s records, and even a royal zoo complete with lions.
Though its radically increased size and strength made the Tower an ideal place for the confinement of important prisoners, it remained remarkably free of political violence for almost four centuries. Within a few years of the White Tower’s completion and King William II’s death, his hated minister Ranulf Flambard (Ranulf the Torchbearer) was imprisoned in it, but he escaped by climbing down a rope smuggled to him inside a wine cask. Richard II was forced to abdicate in the Tower in 1399, but his death took place elsewhere. The climactic years of the Wars of the Roses brought the Tower’s first major eruption of mayhem: the 1471 murder of Henry VI; the 1478 execution of Edward IV’s and Richard III’s brother George, Duke of Clarence; the 1483 killing of Edward’s chamberlain Lord Hastings by Richard; and the disappearance of Edward’s two young sons in that same year. Things were again quiet for a decade and a half until, as we have seen, Henry VII had both the imposter Perkin Warbeck and Clarence’s son the earl of Warwick taken from their cells and put to death.
The Tower was still a royal residence when Henry VIII was a boy (it would remain one into the Stuart dynasty in the seventeenth century), and he must have known it well while growing up. When he was not quite six years old, he and his mother, Queen Elizabeth, took refuge in the White Tower when a force of rebels professing support for Warbeck came out of the west and threatened London. Six years later Elizabeth died in the Tower shortly after giving birth, and her body lay in state there before being taken to Westminster for interment. A year after Henry inherited the throne he reached into the Tower to deliver to the executioner his father’s hated henchmen Dudley and Empson, and three years after that, before leaving England for his first war in France, he did the same with his cousin Edmund de la Pole. But then quiet returned for two decades—the last bloodless decades that the Tower would know until the Tudors were no more. The change came in 1534, when Elizabeth Barton and her five associates were sent to their deaths and replaced in the Tower by Sir Thomas More, the onetime lord chancellor, and John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester. From then on, to be a significant character in the Tudor story—even to be a Tudor—would be to run a high risk of being sent first to the Tower and from there to a gruesome death.