13
On Thursday, July 1, 1535, dressed in a plain robe of the coarsest wool, his once clean-shaven face covered by a long gray beard, filthy after long confinement and leaning heavily on a staff, Thomas More emerged from the Tower of London like some terrible vision out of the Old Testament. A week had passed since the killing of John Fisher, and now it was More’s turn to stand trial for high treason. He was led under guard through the capital’s busiest streets to the seat of government at Westminster—put on display, in effect, so that the people could see yet again the price of failing to believe what the king believed.
At Westminster More was taken before a panel of eighteen judges, among whom were Thomas Cromwell, Chancellor Thomas Audley, the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, and Anne Boleyn’s father and brother. No longer able to stay on his feet as he had through the innumerable interrogations to which he had been subjected during his imprisonment, More accepted the offer of a seat. Promised release if he would affix his signature to the oath of supremacy, he thanked the gentlemen and politely declined. He then listened as the indictment was read aloud. It was ridiculously long, piling item upon item and burying each in a heap of explanatory verbiage, but essentially it boiled down to four charges: that More had committed treason by refusing during interrogation to acknowledge the king’s supremacy, by conspiring with Fisher while both were prisoners, by describing the Act of Supremacy as a double-edged sword that killed either the body or the soul, and finally by telling Richard Rich—that name again—that the act was not legitimate.
More would have understood, even more clearly than Fisher, that this was a show trial, the outcome of which could not have been more certain. In defending himself, therefore, he focused not on trying to save his life—he could have entertained no hope in that regard—but on creating an indelible record of the absurdity of the proceedings and his reasons for declining to swear as ordered. His best weapons were the power of his own mind and the fact that his case really was being handled in an outrageously unfair manner. One by one he was able to dispose of the charges. He invited his accusers to show that he had ever uttered a word in opposition to the Act of Supremacy, and they were unable to do so. He asked for evidence of any conspiracy between Fisher and himself and was shown none. He acknowledged having described the Supremacy Act as a sword that would destroy the soul of anyone who falsely swore to it—swore without believing it to be true—but repeated that he had never spoken against it. He turned the judges’ attention to the fact that even under the king’s new laws it was not possible to construe silence as treason. On point after point the prosecution was stymied.
Which left Richard Rich as the Crown’s last hope not of convicting More—his conviction remained inevitable—but of making the trial seem something less ignoble than a lynching. What Rich had to say was similar in significant respects to his testimony in the Fisher trial. Again he told the court of having visited the defendant in the Tower, and of a conversation that culminated in a statement—an undeniably incriminating statement—of opposition to the Act of Supremacy. There were important differences this time, however. Rich said that on June 12 he had gone to the Tower not with a message from the king but simply to take away the last of More’s personal belongings, his books and writing materials. (Obviously this had been done as part of the steadily intensifying effort to make life in prison unbearable. Until deprived of the means to do so, More had devoted his empty hours to composing two books, devotional works titled A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribution and On the Sadness of Christ.) While waiting for More’s things to be bundled up, supposedly just to pass the time, Rich had engaged the prisoner in a kind of lawyerly word game. Suppose, he had said, that Parliament declared that I, Richard Rich, were king. And suppose Parliament declared also that it would be treason to deny that I were king. Would you then agree that I was king? More said that he would, because Parliament had the power to declare who was king of England. Then he offered a question of his own. How would Rich respond if Parliament declared that God was not God and made it treason to say otherwise? Would he accept that? Rich replied that he would not—that “no parliament may make any such law.”
This was Rich’s account of the first part of the conversation, and More never disputed it. What happened next, however, has been a puzzle ever since. According to Rich’s testimony, he threw another question at More—a question that the surrounding circumstances loaded with all-too-obvious significance. What, he claimed to have asked, if Parliament declared the king to be supreme head of the English church? What would More say to that? Rich swore that More replied that Parliament could do no such thing, because England was forever part of the Christian community that had always recognized the bishop of Rome as its head. Such words were clear and certain treason as Parliament had defined treason in 1534—assuming that More spoke them.
But at this point More’s story diverges radically from Fisher’s. Whereas Fisher never denied saying the things that Rich had reported him as saying, complaining instead that he had opened himself in response to the king’s request and under a promise of confidentiality, More vehemently denied having said anything to incriminate himself. There is of course no documentary evidence to establish who was and was not speaking truthfully. Two potential witnesses—the men who were packing More’s books while he and Rich had their exchange—were called to testify but claimed to have paid no attention to the conversation. (It would be understandable if they had no wish to get involved in such a foul and dangerous business.) Be that as it may, More was unquestionably the more credible witness. He knew that he faced certain death, nothing could be more obvious than his determination to prepare himself for a “good” death, and for a man of his convictions lying under oath would have been tantamount to self-damnation. Nor is it easy to believe that a man as intelligent and careful as More, a man of his skill in the law, could have fallen into such an obvious trap. More himself asked his judges if they found it credible that he would have allowed himself to be drawn by Richard Rich, of all people, into revealing thoughts that he had been keeping from the whole world, even from his own family, from the beginning of his troubles.
“Can it therefore seem likely unto your honorable lordships,” he asked,
that I would, in so weighty a cause, so unadvisedly overshoot myself as to trust Master Rich, a man of me always reputed for one of so little truth as your lordships have heard, so far above my sovereign lord the king or any of his noble counselors, that I would unto him utter the secrets of my conscience touching the king’s supremacy—the special point and only mark at my hands so long sought for? A thing which I never did, nor never would, after the statute thereof made, reveal either to the king’s highness himself or to any of his honorable counselors, as it is not unknown to your honors, at sundry several times sent from his grace’s own person unto the Tower unto me for no other purpose. Can this, in your judgments, my lords, seem likely to be true?
Regardless, he was that same day found guilty. Before sentence was passed, he requested and was granted the customary right of a convicted prisoner to address his judges, the usual strategy at this point being to argue that there should be no punishment because the conviction had been illegitimate. Being a good lawyer, More did exactly this, saying that the acts of Parliament that had brought him before the bench were “directly repugnant to the laws of God and his whole church.” But he did so in a way that offered not the slightest possibility of saving him from execution. He was speaking now not to the men who had judged him but to posterity, hoping to put himself on record forever. He said that no layman, not even a king, could be supreme head of the church even in a single country. He said that England was one part of the great thousand-year-old community of Christendom, and that it could make no laws contrary to the ancient understanding that bound that community together. He spoke for an ideal that was even then passing out of existence. When he had finished he was condemned to die, exactly as he and everyone present had known he would be from the start of the day’s proceedings.
Later he was informed that the king, as a special favor, had ordered him like Fisher to be beheaded rather than hanged, drawn, and quartered. “God preserve all my friends from such favors,” he said cheerfully. On the Tuesday following his conviction he was awakened early and informed that he was to die at nine o’clock. He was advised that the king wished him to say little before dying. He said he was grateful to be so informed, because although he had planned to say nothing that would displease the king, he had intended to speak at some length. “I am ready,” he said, “obediently to conform myself to his grace’s commandments.” When his hour came round, he found himself too weak to climb the stairs of the scaffold unassisted. “I pray you, master lieutenant,” he told the man in charge, “see me safe up, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself.” Hoisted to the chopping block, he kissed the executioner, telling him that “thou wilt render me today the greatest service in the power of any mortal.” He asked the crowd of onlookers to bear witness that he was dying “in and for the faith of the Catholic Church,” and that he died “the king’s good servant, but God’s first.” His last words came as he lowered himself to the floor, placed his head on the block, and moved his beard out of the way. The beard had committed no treason, he said, and did not deserve to be cut in two. His head joined Fisher’s on London Bridge.
Cromwell now turned his attention to one of the main pillars not only of the church but of English society as it had evolved through the Middle Ages, the more than eight hundred monastic institutions that dotted the landscape from the cliffs of Dover to the Irish Sea. In January he had been given, as an addition to the offices he already held, that of vice-regent, first “for the sole purpose of undertaking a general ecclesiastical visitation” but later and more broadly as “vicar-general and principal commissary with all the spiritual authority belonging to the king as head of the church, for the due administration of justice in all cases touching the ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the godly reformation and redress of all errors, heresies and abuses in the said church.” It was not only a lofty commission but an improbable one, conferring virtually absolute authority over the practices and beliefs of the church in England on a man with no background in theology, canon law, or related disciplines and no experience in ecclesiastical administration aside from the financial work done years earlier for Wolsey. The king had demonstrated the fact of his supremacy, the extent to which the church was now subordinate to the civil government and the civil government to his every whim, by placing Cromwell above every clergyman including the archbishop of Canterbury, every nobleman including even the dukes, and every other officer of the Crown including the lord chancellor. To drive home the point, he next suspended by royal edict all the traditional powers of the bishops—the authority to ordain priests, for example, as well as to administer the ecclesiastical courts and probate wills. The bishops were required to petition the Crown for permission to resume their work, and by doing so they would acknowledge that they derived their authority solely from the king. As a final insult, the bishops were told that their petitions were being granted not because they were essential to the proper functioning of the church but because the vicar-general was unfortunately unable to do everything himself. That the lords of the church submitted to this humiliation virtually without complaint shows what they had learned from the examples of Fisher and More: to resist was to die, to protest was to die, even to do nothing was, if the king wished it, to die.
Whether any action on Rome’s part might have made a difference is a moot question, because Rome did not act. In the aftermath of Fisher’s execution, members of the papal court had demanded that Pope Paul do something. A bull was drawn up giving Henry ninety days in which to admit his errors and either appear in Rome personally or send representatives. The penalties for failing to comply were to be weighty if theoretical: excommunication, loss of the English crown, loss of the right of Henry’s descendants by Anne Boleyn to inherit the crown, the withdrawal of all clergy from the kingdom, a papal order for Henry’s subjects to rebel, and more. But the pope, when the bull was ready for publication, thought better of it. He realized that the only men in Europe who might conceivably back it up with force were the emperor Charles and Francis of France, and that neither was likely to prove able (or for that matter willing) to do so. He realized also that to issue such a document under current circumstances could only underscore the impotence of the papacy and expose it to ridicule. Thus it was locked away. The new pope remained, as far as anyone in England could tell, as passive as his predecessor Clement.
There was a second reason, one more substantial than a symbolic demonstration of the king’s might, for suspending the powers of the bishops at precisely this time. The Reformation Parliament, in taking from the bishops their ancient responsibility to make occasional visits of inspection to the monastic houses, had placed a new and potent weapon in the king’s hands. Visitation was now the Crown’s business, which meant it was Cromwell’s, and no man of the new vice-regent’s vitality, ambition, and determination to please the king could have been given such an opportunity without finding use for it. By the time of More’s death, Cromwell was ready to move against the religious orders and their houses. Aside from the monks and nuns living in those houses, the people most likely to object were those men who until recently had regarded the monasteries as theirs to oversee, to protect, and sometimes to exploit: the bishops. Suspension of their authority deprived them of even an historical basis for protesting: what had traditionally been regarded as their rights were no longer rights at all but privileges conferred by the king. The requirement that they ask the Crown to restore their ability to function made it indelibly clear to the bishops themselves, to the whole of the church including the religious orders, and to anyone else inclined to take an interest that none of them had any rights except those the king might choose to grant them.
Commissioners appointed by Cromwell were dispatched to make formal visitations to religious houses across the kingdom and to the two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, which were still so focused on the education of the clergy by the clergy as to be essentially religious establishments themselves. What Cromwell and the king intended in undertaking this program of visitation has been a matter of controversy ever since. Students of the subject who approve of what Henry VIII did to and with the church have tended, understandably, to argue that the visits were necessary and well intended. On the most practical level their stated purpose was to find out what the various monasteries owned and owed and what their annual income amounted to, so that the government could determine how much they should be required to pay under the new statute of First Fruits and Tenths. From a loftier perspective they were intended to search out and eradicate the many and supposedly horrible abuses of which the church’s most radical critics had long been complaining.
Other factors, too, help to explain why Henry and Cromwell turned their attention to the monasteries as soon as their grip on the church was assured. The old religion was still a force to be feared: no student of Henry VIII’s reign will deny that in the 1530s and for decades afterward the break with Rome was incomprehensible where not outright repugnant to very large numbers of the English people. The religious houses were symbols and instruments of a way of life that the population had not rejected even if the king had. If few of the leaders of those houses had thus far shown much inclination to follow the Friars Observant and the Carthusians to violent deaths, neither were many of them overly careful to conceal their dislike of what the king was doing. Thus they were natural, conspicuous targets for anyone determined that there should be no restoration of the connection with Rome—and exactly that determination was shared by everyone from Cromwell to Queen Anne, from Cranmer to the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk. The more Lutheran or Protestant of the reformers (the word Protestant was just then being born in Germany) wanted the monasteries condemned as cesspits of hypocrisy, sexual deviancy, and general moral corruption. They saw them as unconnected to the true spirit of Christianity, and therefore to require elimination.
Cromwell was aware that the church—the monasteries perhaps most obviously, but the dioceses, colleges, hospitals, and other clerical institutions as well—owned a great deal of land and controlled the revenues generated by that land. He had seen this firsthand while in Wolsey’s service, where he had been among the first Englishmen to taste the fruits of shutting down religious houses and seizing their assets. And it happened that the mid-1530s were a singularly hard time financially for the English nation and its government. The grain harvest failed almost completely in 1535 (people said it had been raining almost without stop since the killing of the Carthusian priors), and this was but the latest in a series of seriously lean years. Thousands were literally on the verge of starvation, and in June riots broke out in London over the scarcity and price of wheat. The people who farmed the king’s lands were unable to pay their rent, owners of land were unable to pay their taxes, and the treasury was so empty that officers of the Crown went without their meager pay. The men responsible for guarding Catherine of Aragon reported being unable to keep her household supplied with food. The king, meanwhile, remained as financially insatiable as ever, spending freely on his varied pleasures and seemingly oblivious to the suffering of his subjects. No one in Cromwell’s position could have been unmindful of the immense sums of money represented by the church whose master he now was. Nor was he unaware of the religious eruptions taking place in Germany, or of how Germany’s elites were gorging on the property of the church. On the other hand, no one could have cared less than Cromwell and his master about the extent to which church revenues were used for the benefit of the population, or how important the benefactions of the monasteries became when conditions were as hard as they now were.
However appropriate it may have been for the Crown to examine the monasteries, however noble the motives of the king and Cromwell may conceivably have been in launching their program of visitations, as executed that program was a sordid affair. The men Cromwell chose for the job were largely a brutish lot, bent not on informing themselves about the state of the monasteries but on collecting or even fabricating as much negative information as possible as quickly as possible and hurrying it to court. It soon became clear that nearly their only aim was to give Cromwell what he had made clear he wanted—a quick harvest of money in the short run, a basis for harvesting vastly greater amounts later—so that they, in their turn, could be rewarded with a share of the spoils. Several of them became hugely wealthy in just a few years. The details of how they succeeded are almost comic in what they reveal about the malice and greed driving the whole project, tragic in their consequences for hundreds and ultimately thousands of blameless people.
Monastic visitations, whether by the local bishop or by officials of the order to which a particular house belonged, had traditionally been painstaking affairs in which residents and their superiors were interviewed separately about their daily routine, their perceptions of the orderliness of the community or its lack thereof, their questions, suggestions, problems, and complaints. Reports of misconduct or lapses of discipline were investigated to establish their accuracy and seriousness, and eventually the results of all this became the basis of an overall evaluation—a report card, in effect—that prescribed the changes that the visitors regarded as desirable or necessary. Follow-up visits ensured that corrective action was actually taken. The visits by Cromwell’s people in 1535 and early 1536 were different: hurried and cursory, with all the emphasis on tallying alleged misdeeds, no exploration of the accuracy of what was reported, and no attempt at correction as opposed to condemnation. Two of the most active and prominent visitors, Richard Layton and Thomas Legh, traveled more than a thousand miles and supposedly visited 121 houses in two months—more than fifteen miles and two monasteries per day, on average. They carried with them eighty-six “articles of inquiry” (questions to which they were supposed to get answers everywhere they went) and twenty-five injunctions or rules to which every house was being required to subscribe. Obviously none of this could be done with even minimal care or thoroughness in the time available.
But it was not their purpose to be thorough or careful. Their mission was to make trouble, blacken reputations, and spread fear. Some of the injunctions could only have been intended to weaken the houses visited and make the maintenance of discipline impossible. It was ordered, for example, that any residents of religious houses under the age of twenty-four, and any who regardless of their current age had taken their vows before the age of twenty, should be discharged into the world whether that was what they wished or not. This had a devastating impact on the manpower (or womanpower) of many houses, the smaller ones especially, and it became a nightmare for individuals unprepared to be sent out into society and wanting nothing except to remain in the communities that had long been their homes. Some of the discharged men were given or at least promised small payments of money and, in the case of the old and infirm, small pensions. Discharged nuns, on the other hand, were given only gowns before being sent away. Those not forced to depart were encouraged to do so voluntarily (the number who agreed to do so appears to have been very small) and—in a step surely calculated to undercut good order and discipline—were told that if they had problems with their superiors they could appeal directly to Cromwell. Any costs incurred in connection with such appeals were to be paid by those same superiors. Another injunction forbade anyone to leave or enter a monastery without the permission of the royal commissioners. When used to stop all traffic in or out—and some of the commissioners used it in exactly this way—this could prevent a monastery from conducting essential business or even supplying its members with food. The new restrictions were rendered all the more odious by the introduction of preachers selected by Cromwell and Cranmer for their eagerness to propound ideas that the residents of the monastic houses were almost certain to find repellent.
The results of all this were sometimes as ridiculous as they were ruinous to the houses. Increasingly, Cromwell received letters from monks complaining not of immorality in their houses but rather of the strictness with which the rules were observed. He encouraged complaints of almost any kind and bestowed favors on those who complained. “Thanks for excusing my getting up for matins at midnight,” John Horwoode, a monk of the Benedictine abbey at Winchcombe, wrote to him. “The abbot says this has given cause to some murmurs and grudging among the convent. The truth is, I do not like the burdens and straightness of religion, such as their accustomed abstinence, the ‘frayer’ (recreations), and other observances of the rule.” Before the start of the visitation program, William Fordham, a monk of the priory of Worcester, had been removed as procurator on grounds of extravagance and dishonesty. When he and a former subprior who also had lost his position because of misconduct appealed to Cromwell, the vice-regent responded (one can imagine his glee) by putting the two in charge of the house over the protests of the other monks and throwing the prior in prison on a charge of treason. When Chancellor Audley could find no basis for putting the prior on trial, it was decided to let him rot in confinement. Complaints were rare—surprisingly so, considering the rewards that Cromwell was prepared to bestow on anyone willing to help stir up trouble—but their nature was ironic all the same. A frenzied hunt for evidence of monastic laxity more frequently produced evidence that discipline was often so strict as to offend the less zealous religious.
Among the unstated objectives of the visitations was to harass the superiors, making their lives so unpleasant that finally they would give up and voluntarily surrender their establishments to the Crown. There is no reason to think that Eustace Chapuys, Charles V’s ambassador to England, was misunderstanding the situation when, in September, he sent the emperor his report on what was happening: “Cromwell goes round about visiting the abbeys, making inventories of their goods and revenues, instructing them fully in the tenets of the new sect, turning out of the abbeys monks and nuns who made their profession before they were twenty-five, and leaving the rest free to go out or remain. It is true they are not expressly told to go out, but it is clearly given them to understand that they had better do it, for they are going to make a reformation of them so severe and strange that in the end they will go, which is the object the king is aiming at, in order to have better occasion to seize the property without causing the people to murmur.” Chapuys was an alien at the English court of 1535, a man known to be hostile to Henry’s whole religious program and to represent an emperor who was equally hostile. That even he knew not only what was happening but why, and that he knew it long before Henry made his real intentions explicit, indicates rather strongly that the king’s and Cromwell’s objectives, if they were secret at all, must have been the worst-kept secret in England.
In any case, Cromwell’s hopes of bullying the heads of the religious houses into giving up came to almost nothing. By the end of the winter of 1535–36, in spite of incessant interference, threats of worse to come, and promises of pensions for those religious who agreed to depart, only five monasteries had gone out of existence. All five were poor, tiny establishments forced to yield to the hard fact that, after the expulsion of some of their members and the financial exactions of the Crown, they simply had no way of surviving. Still, the visitations had been far from a waste of Crown resources. The government had been able to intrude itself deeply into the internal affairs of every monastery in the kingdom. One house after another had seen the number of its residents reduced, with few except the aged left behind in some instances, and almost all had been weakened financially. In a number of cases it had proved possible to remove superiors unfriendly to the work of the visitors and to inject new leaders of Cromwell’s choosing. Every such change had been another assertion of royal mastery, and as such had deepened the demoralization of men and women who were finding it increasingly difficult to believe that they were going to be permitted to continue living in the old way. Cromwell and his men, meanwhile, had taken a first big step down a road that promised to lead them to great wealth. Cromwell had long since shown himself to be expert at extracting money from the people with whom he did business. Now he was able to apply his skills on an immeasurably expanded scale. Money fell into his coffers from terrified abbeys and priories hoping to buy their way out of destruction, from people eager to buy their way into the leadership of abbeys and priories and thereby gain control of their assets, and from his own agents as they moved across the country shaking down their victims and taking care to send their master a share of the booty.
Most important for the long term, the visitations led to the creation of documents that Cromwell could offer to the king and Parliament as proof of the horrifying state of monasticism in England. That this report had been assembled with impossible haste, that it was the work of men interested only in negative findings, that it had involved no serious effort to distinguish fact from fiction—none of this was given the slightest attention. Nor was there any acknowledgment that in some cases the truth had been grossly distorted; masturbation was classified as “sodomy,” for example, and when nuns admitted to having illegitimate children no effort was made to determine whether they had borne those children before entering religious life or after.
The fact that the visitors had been able to turn up evidence of possible immorality among only a tiny percentage of the monastic clergy was absolutely irrelevant as far as Cromwell was concerned. He had his report in hand—not a coherent report in any serious sense, but a jumbled assortment of mainly vague and unsubstantiated accusations—and it was up to him alone to decide what it actually meant. Whatever he decided, neither Parliament nor the bishops would be likely to disagree. He had planned to recall Parliament late in 1535, but widespread sickness related to continuing famine made a postponement necessary. When Parliament did reconvene, he would be ready to use it for a new and far more ambitious attack on the monastic houses. The report on the visitations, crooked though it was, would be his weapon.
One other event of 1535 merits attention. A group of zealous religious reformers arrived in England from the continent that year. They were Anabaptists, regarded as dangerous radicals even by the Lutherans because of their rejection of infant baptism and much traditional doctrine. They must have traveled to England in search of refuge, their movement having come under intense persecution in Germany, Switzerland, and elsewhere. Immediately upon arrival, however, they were taken into custody. The fourteen of their number who refused to renounce the tenets of their sect were promptly burned at the stake. Obviously it was not sufficient in Henry VIII’s England to be anti-Rome. Safety was going to require being anti-Rome in whatever way Henry himself decided to find acceptable.
Background
POPES
WHAT IS CALLED THE RENAISSANCE PAPACY WILL STINK IN the nostrils of history to the end of time. Its story is a litany of violence and deceit, of greed and pride and murderous ambition—finally of a corruption that reached such depths as to defy belief. It is an embarrassment to every Catholic who knows about it, a gift to anyone wanting to believe that the Catholic Church really is the Whore of Babylon.
However, it had essentially nothing to do with Henry VIII’s destruction of the old church. Tudor England was too far away to be much affected by or even very aware of it, and in any case the worst was already over when Henry came to the throne. By the time he was killing the likes of John Fisher and launching his attack on the monasteries, a new era of reform was dawning in Rome itself.
The papacy had touched bottom when Henry was a child, during the dozen years when the Spaniard Rodrigo Borgia ruled as Pope Alexander VI. A man so vile that when he died in 1503 the priests of St. Peter’s Basilica refused to bury him, Alexander had begun his career as the nephew of an earlier Borgia pope thanks to whom he became a bishop, a cardinal, and finally vice-chancellor of the whole church. (He really was Calixtus III’s nephew, by the way; the word was not always an oblique way of referring to a pope’s illegitimate son.) Once he was pope himself, Alexander devoted his reign to advancing the fortunes of the favorites among his numerous bastard children, the most notorious of whom were his son Cesare (a ruthless adventurer who became archbishop of Valencia at age seventeen, and for whom Machiavelli wrote The Prince) and his oft-married daughter Lucrezia, rumored though never proven to have been a skilled poisoner and to have committed incest with her brother. Alexander tried to turn vast expanses of church property in central and northern Italy into private domains for his sons, not hesitating to start wars for this purpose or to involve Spain, France, Venice, Milan, and Naples. At one point he was in such serious trouble that he appealed to the Ottoman Empire, which by that time posed a threat to the very survival of Christianity in eastern Europe, for help. His rather mysterious death, sometimes said to have been the result of an accidental poisoning by his son Cesare, came as a relief to everyone except his offspring. His successor refused to have masses said for him on grounds that it was blasphemous to pray for the damned.
If Alexander’s reign was the worst, it differed from what came just before more in degree than in kind. The degradation of the throne of St. Peter had begun in the fourteenth century, during the seventy-three years when seven consecutive popes, all of them French, resided not at Rome but in Avignon and were under the control of the kings of France. This was followed by the Great Schism, four decades during which there were never fewer than two popes, each with his own court and college of cardinals. By the time the Council of Constance resolved this mess and reestablished a single pope at the Vatican, the reputation both of the papacy and of the city of Rome (its population down to twenty-five thousand) was in ruins. From that point, however, the popes began to rebuild their economic and political power, steadily increasing the size of the Papal States and making themselves major players in the cutthroat world of Italian politics. (They were less assiduous in attempting to rebuild their moral authority.) Each new pope tried to outdo his predecessor in restoring the Eternal City to its former splendor, in the process making the papal court Europe’s leading source of patronage for artists and the new humanist learning.
The negative aspects of all this success were evident by the reign of Sixtus IV, which began in 1471. Sixtus had risen from modest beginnings to become a Franciscan friar, a university lecturer, minister-general of his order at age fifty, a cardinal at fifty-three. At the time of his election he was regarded as a reformer, so that great things were expected of his reign, but he devoted himself instead to power politics and to making his relatives rich. Though he had no children (like some other Renaissance popes he was probably homosexual), he went to outrageous lengths to advance the interests of his family, the della Roveres. He was implicated in a plot not merely to defeat but to exterminate the rival Medicis of Florence. (In fairness it must be acknowledged that there is no proof that Sixtus himself approved the committing of murder.) Though the scheme fell short of its objective, it did result in the stabbing death, in Florence’s cathedral, of the Medici whose then-still-unborn son would one day have the misfortune of serving as Pope Clement VII when Henry VIII sued for his annulment. Perhaps Sixtus’s greatest achievement was arranging the marriage that brought the Dukedom of Urbino into the possession of the della Rovere family, his greatest shame that he permitted Ferdinand of Aragon to launch the Spanish Inquisition. He started work on the Sistine Chapel, which is how it got its name.
Nothing much changed under Sixtus’s successor, the ludicrously misnamed Innocent VIII. He was yet another assiduous nepotist, marrying the eldest of his numerous illegitimate children to an illegitimate daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence and raising Lorenzo’s thirteen-year-old son, Giovanni, to the College of Cardinals as part of the deal. (The boy would grow up to become the first Medici pope, Leo X.) Innocent was followed by the monstrous Alexander VI, of whom enough has already been said, and then by Sixtus IV’s nephew Giuliano della Rovere, who as Julius II presided from 1503 to 1513 over what is often called the Renaissance papacy’s golden age and in fact was, at a minimum, a gilded age. Della Rovere had been Alexander’s bitter enemy—so much so that he spent the latter’s papacy in exile—and upon becoming pope himself he made it his first priority to recover the papal territories controlled by Cesare Borgia and his brothers. That accomplished, Julius went on to make war on a much grander scale, organizing the so-called Holy League against France, inviting England to join, and thereby giving young Henry VIII a supposedly religious reason to pursue his dreams of military glory. As a ruler Julius was an epic figure: warrior, builder, patron of great artists. As a religious leader, he was perhaps the last of Rome’s sick jokes.
Julius’s death brought an end to the worst of the outrages. Leo X, the onetime thirteen-year-old Medici cardinal, was elected in 1513, and though he possessed none of the majesty of his predecessor he was also not a bad man. He raised the quality of the College of Cardinals (one of his appointees was the respected Lorenzo Campeggio, who much later would be sent to England to judge King Henry’s annulment suit) and even tried without success to convene a council for the purpose of effecting reforms. It was during his eight-year reign that the Lutheran revolt erupted in Germany, which is one reason his death resulted in the election of a scholarly and almost saintly Dutchman, Adrian VI, who died before being able to accomplish anything (and would prove to be, incidentally, the last non-Italian pope for more than four hundred years). Next came another Medici, Clement VII, the intelligent, conscientious, but also indecisive and unlucky pontiff whose whole reign turned into a stalemated struggle with problems among which the English king’s wish to be rid of his wife was far from the most difficult or dangerous. If Clement solved none of those problems, he also never disgraced his office. He had been a champion of reform long before becoming pope and recognized the need for reform on the largest possible scale, but he declined to call a general council of the church out of fear that such a body might become yet another threat to papal authority.
The 1534 election of Alessandro Farnese as Pope Paul III must have been a troubling development for at least some reformers. Early in his career Farnese had been a protégé of Alexander VI, who made him a cardinal in 1493 when he was only twenty-five, and almost his first major act upon becoming pope was to bestow red hats on two of his own grandsons, both of them barely out of childhood. After that appalling start, however, he changed course, making the papacy not only friendly to the reform cause but its driving engine. He set remarkably high standards for his subsequent appointments, looking for men of unquestionably good character, impressive intellectual credentials, and a demonstrated commitment to the purging of abuses. It was he who added John Fisher to the College of Cardinals in 1535, and he would do the same to Henry VIII’s cousin Reginald Pole a year later. Pole was also named to, and became a conspicuously active member of, a commission responsible for identifying areas where reform was most urgently needed. Paul had begun his reign believing that it was still possible to close the rifts that in less than twenty years had shattered the unity of Western Christendom, and unlike Clement VII he saw a general council as a possible way of achieving reconciliation. In this he was perhaps naïve: when he announced plans for a council to meet at Mantua, the German Protestant states declared that they would attend no assembly held in Italy under papal auspices. A council remained one of his highest objectives, however, and with the support of the emperor Charles he would continue to try to convene one.
Paul definitely thought, in the early going, that reconciliation with England was still possible. His years as dean of the College of Cardinals had persuaded him that Henry VIII was well disposed toward him—the impression was probably not wrong when originally formed, Cardinal della Rovere being rich in the skills of diplomacy and Henry at first eager for friends at the papal court—but he appears never to have understood the island kingdom of the distant north. He even believed, evidently, that Henry would welcome his decision to make John Fisher a cardinal. News of Fisher’s execution set him straight soon enough, and the killing soon afterward of Thomas More left no room for doubt. Obviously Henry would never voluntarily reconnect with Rome on anything resembling traditional terms, and henceforth Paul would shape his English policy accordingly.