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At the start of 1536 Catherine of Aragon, hidden away at Kimbolton Castle far from London, was on her deathbed. She asked that her daughter be permitted to visit, but though the two had not seen each other in years, the king once again refused. He had been as unsuccessful in getting Mary to accept his supremacy and her illegitimacy as he had been in persuading Catherine of those two things, and perhaps he feared that if the two met they would strengthen each other’s resolve. Possibly he was motivated by nothing more calculating than a mean-spirited desire to punish his onetime queen by denying even her dying wish. Certainly his current queen could have had no argument with Henry’s refusal: understandably, Anne regarded the very existence of Catherine and Mary, now a marriageable woman of twenty, as a threat to her own position and the futures of her daughter Elizabeth and the additional children she expected to bear. She had had Mary sent away from court and placed in the custody of her—Anne’s—aunt, who pestered her daily with demands that she stop claiming that she was a royal princess and her little half-sister was not.
No longer strong enough to take pen to paper, Catherine dictated a last letter to the man she continued to regard as her husband. She touched on many subjects, gently calling Henry to account for having “cast me into many calamities, and yourself into many troubles,” forgiving him for everything and asking God to forgive him also. She asked him to be good to Mary, and to provide the three ladies remaining in her service with dowries so that they could marry, and her servants with a year’s pay. “Lastly, I make this vow,” she said, “that mine eyes desire you above all things. Farewell.” A few days later she was dead, an aged, worn-out, heartbroken woman just three weeks past her fiftieth birthday. An autopsy revealed that she apparently had been in good health except for a growth, “completely black and hideous,” on her heart. Centuries later pathologists would conclude that this growth was a secondary cancer, a reflection of the apparently undetected sarcoma that must have been the actual cause of death. But in 1536, inevitably, a rumor traveled through England to the effect that Henry had had her poisoned. Catherine had asked to be buried at one of the houses of the Observant Franciscans, but thanks to her husband no such houses remained. Three days after her death he decided that she should be buried at Peterborough Cathedral. Her tomb was decorated with the arms of Spain combined with those of Wales rather than England. She could be honored as Princess of Wales, but not as queen of anything.
Henry was reported to have shed a tear or two upon reading Catherine’s letter, but to be so jubilant when this was followed by news of her death that he dressed in yellow with a white feather in his hat and ordered up a banquet and a tournament in celebration. He and Anne—she too was festively adorned in yellow—brought little Princess Elizabeth to court that day and ostentatiously showed her off. To her parents she must have seemed an augury of still better things to come: her mother was once again pregnant. Anne and the king would have been ecstatic, Henry because once again he could look forward to the arrival of his long-yearned-for son, Anne because by giving birth to the next king of England she could make herself secure.
Ironically, the death of Catherine left Anne more vulnerable than she had been before. In the eyes of the Roman church Anne was the king’s mistress rather than his wife, whereas Henry was now a widower, free to wed whom he chose. If he put Anne aside, he would be free to take a Hapsburg bride or a Valois bride or whatever bride he preferred. And he was obviously no longer as enchanted with Anne as he had been before their marriage. For months now he had been openly flirting with one of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting, Jane Seymour. Anne, quick to notice, must have wondered if history might be repeating itself. In her anger and fear she had lashed out both at Henry, whose complaints about his wife’s flaming temper were taking on a sharper edge, and at the apparently unoffending Jane. Henry, remembering the restraint with which Catherine had carried herself when faced with evidence of a romantic entanglement involving her husband and one of her ladies, could not have been pleased to hear of “much scratching and by-blows between the queen and her maid.” But none of that mattered compared to the fact of Anne’s latest pregnancy. If she could bring this child to term, if it proved to be male and survived, she would have nothing to fear from any woman in England and little to fear even from Henry himself.
But it was not to be. On January 29—the day of Catherine’s burial—Anne miscarried a fetus that appeared to be in its fourth month of development, and to be male. Anne of course was deeply, wretchedly, almost hysterically unhappy, but when Henry visited her bedchamber he displayed more self-pity than concern for his wife. According to one story, she tried to arouse his sympathy by telling him that the miscarriage had been triggered by the force of her love: six days before, he had been unconscious for two hours after a hard fall from his horse, and Anne is supposed to have claimed that her fear for his life had caused her to lose the child. An alternate story has it that Anne went into labor after discovering Henry with Jane on his knee. Whatever the truth, the end of the pregnancy was the end not only of the marriage but of Anne. She now became a victim of history, of domestic and international politics, and of course of her husband.
Much more was in play now than Anne’s failure to produce a son or the king’s latest infatuation with one of the ladies of his court. Anne was also dangerously exposed because, for the first time, she was seriously at odds with Thomas Cromwell. What separated the two was the question of the monasteries: not whether to continue the attack on them, because she as an evangelical was no more sympathetic to the religious houses than he was, but what to do with the riches that the attack was making available. Parliament, obediently accepting the king’s assurances that Cromwell’s visitations had shown the smaller monasteries to be sinkholes of degeneracy sexual and otherwise, passed in March a bill authorizing the seizure and closing of all religious houses (the bill said they were to be “converted to better uses”) with annual revenues of less than £200. All the larger and richer houses, the “great and solemn monasteries,” were spared on the grounds that “(thanks be to God) religion is right well kept and observed” by them. Obviously it was implausible that all the smaller establishments were so corrupt as to be beyond saving while all the larger ones were above reproach, but targeting only the weakest allowed Cromwell to win the acquiescence of those abbots of great houses who sat in the House of Lords. As for the lay lords and the Commons, quite apart from their fear of the king, they could be brought along by the twofold hope that the liquidation of the smaller monasteries might spare them from being taxed and possibly even enable them to share in the spoils. Cromwell, responsible as he now was for paying the bills of a financially irresponsible monarch, naturally intended to claim the property and income of the monasteries for the Crown (which would, of course, make it possible to divert some part of the resulting windfall into his own hands and those of his henchmen). Queen Anne, more nobly if naïvely, proposed that the money in question, once it had been cleansed of papist corruption, should continue to be used for religious or at least quasi-religious purposes—for education and charity. The stakes were high, and feelings were correspondingly intense on both sides. One result, a fateful one for the queen, was that Cromwell now had a positive reason to fear her continued influence over Henry. The most powerful man in England after the king thus became the enemy of a queen who already had too many enemies—all those numberless people who harbored resentments over how Catherine had been rudely discarded and Mary was even now being shabbily treated. Cromwell had chosen a good issue over which to break with Anne and her party. Where the disposition of the wealth of the church was concerned, he could be confident of his free-spending king’s support.
Internationally, too, events were unfolding in ways that seemed almost calculated to leave Anne alone and vulnerable. The greatest danger to Henry was the possibility that Francis of France and the emperor Charles V would put their differences aside, ally themselves with the pope, and launch a military crusade aimed at driving the English apostate from his throne. This was not inconceivable: Charles was an ardent Catholic who might easily be persuaded to see such an undertaking as his duty if it had any real chance of success, and Francis was ambitious and restless enough to be drawn into almost any adventure that carried the promise of gold or glory. England’s great need—Henry’s desperate need—was to keep Charles and Francis apart. The best way to accomplish that was to enter into an alliance with one of them so as to neutralize both with a single stroke.
He could hardly have been luckier in this regard. For nearly eight years Francis had been biding his time, waiting for France to recover its strength sufficiently for him to avenge the humiliations inflicted after the battles of Pavia and Landriano. By the spring of 1536 he felt ready. Charles having sailed off to North Africa to attack the Turkish stronghold of Tunis, Francis invaded and overran part of the Hapsburg dominions in northern Italy. Charles returned to find that he had good reason to repair his relationship with England, and he was pleased to learn that Cromwell was receptive. The old obstacle, Henry’s divorce of Charles’s aunt Catherine, had been removed by Catherine’s death; though Charles had apparently found it necessary to be mortally offended by the insult done to his mother’s sister, he was too much of a realist and in 1536 too badly in need of friends to allow policy to be determined by what had been done once upon a time to his insane mother’s dead sister. Now the problem was on the English side: it was Henry’s insistence that everyone, not just everyone in England but everyone, recognize his marriage to Anne. In the case of Charles, this was asking too much. He could only have seen such a step as compromising his honor.
But Henry was no longer as devoted to Anne as he once had been. He was definitely less disposed to put his throne at risk for her sake. Perhaps his marriage was not something the whole of Christendom must be made to accept but a problem, a source of danger even, a barrier standing between himself and safety. He suspected that Anne’s miscarriages, like Catherine’s, must be signs of divine displeasure. Knowing that God could not be unhappy with him, he reasoned that Anne or the marriage must be the cause of the trouble. He began to complain that Anne had somehow bewitched him into marrying her “by means of sortileges [sorcery] and charms.” He ordered the same churchmen who had provided him with grounds for annulling his first marriage to find reasons for annulling the second. Henry Percy, who years earlier had been in love with the young Anne Boleyn and would have married her if not for Wolsey’s interference, was asked to testify that he and Anne had been bound together in a precontract of marriage that rendered her ineligible to marry the king or anyone else. Percy’s refusal put an end to what might have been an easy solution, but it freed Cromwell to pursue a more ambitious course. He saw a way not only of ridding the king of another marital problem but of fortifying his own position by eliminating a whole power bloc, the court’s Boleyn party.
He was able to make his move early in May: Anne was arrested on charges of adultery and locked in the Tower. Accused with her were five men: a court musician, three members of the king’s inner circle including a knight who had long been one of Cromwell’s rivals for royal favor, and Anne’s own brother. She could not possibly have been guilty; her alleged lovers were offered pardon if they would confess, but only one did so and he had probably been tortured. Nor could Henry possibly have believed her guilty, unless he had sunk so deep into paranoia as to be out of touch with reality. That is unlikely: Henry was vicious by this point, but far from insane. Anne’s destruction is adequately explained by Cromwell’s opportunism, her husband’s weariness with her, possibly his wish to punish her (it was revealed at her trial that she had ridiculed his sexual performance), and the changing international landscape. At times during her imprisonment (nothing could be more understandable) she broke down in fits of hysterical laughter or weeping, but during her farce of a trial she displayed regal composure and firmly maintained her innocence. On May 19, in the moment before being beheaded, she called upon Jesus to “save my sovereign and master the king, the most godly, noble and gentle prince that is.” George Boleyn and the other accused men, the one who had been promised mercy for confessing included, had been executed two days before. Thomas Boleyn had been excused from sitting as a judge at his children’s trials (their uncle the Duke of Norfolk presided and passed sentence), but he lost his position as Lord Privy Seal (Cromwell took the title for himself) and withdrew permanently to his country home.
Anne just missed out on the distinction of being the first queen of England to be executed; on the day of her death she was no longer Henry’s wife and therefore not queen. Shortly after her arrest Henry had instructed the infinitely flexible Archbishop Cranmer to nullify the marriage. Even for Cranmer, this must have been an unwelcome assignment. It was he, after all, who had at the king’s behest undertaken to review the two royal marriages and solemnly proclaimed the first to have been invalid and the second to be sound and true. Now he had to undo his own work. He went dutifully through the necessary motions, summoning Anne and inviting Henry to appear before him and offer, if they wished, reasons why their union should not be annulled. At the appointed hour a representative of the king presented arguments not in support of the marriage but against it. Two men claiming to represent the queen confessed themselves to be unable to answer such a convincing case, and all asked for a speedy judgment. Two days after Anne was found guilty of treason—an event celebrated with a pageant on the Thames, where “the royal barge was constantly filled with minstrels and musicians”—Cranmer declared that she was not married to Henry and never could have been, because of the king’s relationship with her sister Mary. His master was content. The child Elizabeth, like her half-sister Mary, was now illegitimate. Henry was once again a bachelor with no legitimate offspring, free not only to marry but to generate children who would have an uncontestable right to succeed him.
He wasted no time. On the morning following Anne’s execution, after a short delay that allowed Cranmer to issue a dispensation permitting Henry to marry Jane in spite of the fact that both were descendants of King Edward III and therefore distant cousins, it was announced that the two were betrothed and would be wed on May 30. Once again Henry was besotted with a bride-to-be. He had established Jane in apartments at Whitehall, with her brother Edward Seymour and his wife quartered nearby to act as chaperones when Henry made his frequent visits. The Seymours were a vigorous and ambitious clan—Jane had many brothers and sisters—and by captivating the king she had created thrilling opportunities for all of them. She herself was an intelligent woman in her late twenties, not beautiful but experienced in the ways of the court, modest in her demeanor and far more submissive than the temperamental Anne had ever been. As a longtime lady-in-waiting she had witnessed the fall not only of Anne but of Catherine before her, and she had seen the Boleyns raised high by their king only to be destroyed. She could not have been unaware of what dangerous waters she and her siblings would have to navigate when she became queen, and one can only wonder how she felt about having been singled out in this extraordinary way. Certainly her bridegroom was not, in physical terms, the stuff of which dreams are made. The onetime golden young king had become grossly overweight, afflicted with chronic headaches and stinking ulcers of the thigh and leg.
With Catherine and Anne both dead and Henry truly and entirely unattached for the first time in a quarter of a century, there was no longer any reason—any matrimonial reason, in any case—why Henry and his kingdom should not be reconciled with the papacy and the universal church. The marriage to Jane presented no problem at all: it was a valid union by anyone’s reckoning, and Jane herself was known to be, in her quiet way, more drawn to the old religion than to the reformist party that the Boleyns had so energetically championed. Jane even, as the suppression of the smaller monasteries got under way, attempted to intervene with her husband on the monks’ behalf, drawing back when Henry warned her that her predecessor had not benefited from injecting herself in matters that were none of her affair. Pope Paul and Charles V were not only hopeful that Henry could be brought back into the fold but expectant that it was going to happen. Both were prepared to make it as easy for Henry as possible. Paul was prepared to forgive and forget such inconvenient matters as the killing of Cardinal-designate John Fisher.
Which simply went to show that neither understood what kind of man Henry had by now turned into, or where things stood in England in the summer of 1536. Henry had taken immense risks in claiming supremacy over the church, and his success had been profoundly satisfying to his unfathomably needy ego. He would have seen little reason to relinquish any substantial part of all that he had won even if other factors had not complicated the situation. Foremost among those factors was the suppression of the monasteries and the seizure, by and for a Crown that desperately needed money, of their lands, revenues, and treasures. The information gathered by Cromwell’s visitors indicated that 372 religious houses in England and another 27 in Wales—somewhat more than half of all the monastic institutions in the kingdom—had annual revenues below £200 and so were subject to liquidation under the statute enacted by Parliament in March. A new Court of the Augmentations of the Revenues of the King’s Crown was established to manage the torrent of income that soon followed, and the administration of that court was entrusted to a man who would show himself capable of exploiting its full potential on the king’s and Cromwell’s behalf and also on his own: the same Richard Rich whose testimony had provided legal cover for the killing of Fisher and More. By April fat trunks were being hauled into London filled with gold and silver plate, jewelry, and other treasures accumulated by the monasteries over the centuries. With them came money from the sale of church bells, lead stripped from the roofs of monastic buildings, and livestock, furnishings, and equipment. Some of the confiscated land was sold—enough to bring in £30,000 in the first two years—and what was not sold generated tens of thousands of pounds in annual rents. Taken all together, it was a tremendous boost to the Crown’s revenues, though as great as it was it failed to close the deficit. The longer the confiscations continued, the smaller the possibility of their ever being reversed or even stopped from going further. The money was spent almost as quickly as it flooded in—so quickly that any attempt to restore the monasteries to what they had been before the suppression would have meant financial ruin for the Crown. Nor would those involved in the work of suppression—everyone from Cromwell and Rich to the obscure men whose work it was to strip the monasteries bare and haul away what they contained—ever be willing to part with what they were skimming off for themselves.
Parliament’s suppression bill had reserved to the king the power to allow any religious houses of his choosing to continue in operation. In practice this power rested with Cromwell as vicar-general, and in his hands it became another potent tool for self-enrichment. Desperate to save their houses by any possible means in spite of being offered pensions in return for cooperation, the heads of scores of abbeys and priories offered to pay not to be shut down. In many cases they had nothing to offer except the very treasures that would be confiscated if their houses were seized, or whatever money they could raise by leasing or borrowing against the land that was their chief support. The Crown stood to gain nothing by accepting such payment rather than taking possession of everything; Cromwell and his people, by contrast, stood to profit tremendously. The number of houses that survived in this way was surprisingly large—more than a hundred, ultimately—and the extent to which the king’s men benefited was no less impressive.
All the same, the suppression was disruptive on a painfully large scale. The number of monks and nuns expelled from the seized houses was probably on the order of two thousand, and taking into account servants, dependants, and tenants makes it likely that as many as ten thousand people were displaced. It is impossible to believe, on the basis of the available evidence, that all or most or even a substantial minority of the closed houses were morally corrupt, unable to sustain themselves financially, or of no use to the broader society. In the archives there survive many letters written from members of the gentry to Cromwell and his agents, explaining why some establishment should not be destroyed and begging that it not be. “We beseech your favor,” one such letter states, “for the prior of Pentney, assuring you that he relieves those quarters wondrously where he dwells, and it would be a pity not to spare a house that feeds so many indigent poor, which is in a good state, maintains good service, and does so many charitable deeds.” Interestingly, the same prior who was defended in these terms had earlier been singled out for particularly harsh criticism in the visitation reports that preceded the suppression. Similarly, a letter asking mercy for the priory at Carmarthen in Wales asserted that its revenues exceeded £200 per annum, but that the total had been understated by the visitors in order to make suppression possible. This same letter describes the Carmarthen house as well built and in good repair, and the conduct of the twelve monks living there as impeccable. It adds that “hospitality is daily kept for poor and rich, which is a great relief to the country, being poor and bare … alms are given to eighty poor people, which, if the house were suppressed, they would want … [and] strangers and merchantmen resorting to those parts are honestly received and entertained whereby they are the gladder to bring their commodities to that country.” Such documents provide a more objective picture than the reports of Cromwell’s agents of the true state of the smaller monasteries and their role in the life of the kingdom. The appeals of the writers, however, were less effective than cash payment in determining which houses were closed and which were allowed to continue.
The appeals of the monks, begging not to be thrown out, were ignored except where enough gold could be found to touch the consciences of the king’s commissioners. The suppressions proceeded with such speed that by early July 1536 Ambassador Chapuys was writing that “it is a lamentable thing to see a legion of monks and nuns, who have been chased from their monasteries, wandering miserably hither and thither seeking means to live; and several honest men have told me that, what with monks, nuns and persons dependent on the monasteries suppressed, there were over twenty thousand who knew not how to live.” Chapuys’s number may have been high, but the picture he painted was accurate. A new kind of pauperism was being created across England as a direct consequence of the actions of the king. It was a pauperism for which, with the disappearance of the monasteries, there could be no adequate relief. It would plague the reigns of Henry’s children. As the government began to seek remedy by punishing the paupers themselves, yet another dimension would be added to the horrors of the age.
The response of the religious orders to the destruction of their houses was almost uniformly passive. They were, after all, communities of monks and nuns, not of politicians or soldiers, and they were receiving no support from their bishops or even from the larger, more influential houses. A striking exception occurred in late September in the north. As the four men charged by Cromwell with shutting down monasteries in Northumberland approached the town of Hexham, they found armed men blocking their way. The townsfolk had turned out to stop them, and had turned the local monastery into a fortress. The monks inside, informed that the commissioners had been sent in the king’s name to execute the bill of dissolution, replied that “we be twenty brethren in this house and we shall die all, or that ye shall have the house.” The visitors withdrew and did not return. Hexham was left in peace—for the time being. The fact that this act of defiance had taken place in the north would soon prove symptomatic of that whole region’s hostility to the king’s program.
Henry had other things to concern himself with than a small community of recalcitrant monks and their supporters in a distant corner of the kingdom. For many months, through his court chaplain, he had been badgering his young cousin Reginald Pole to provide a written statement of his position on the annulment of his first marriage and, especially, the supremacy. Pole was still on the continent, buried in the studies to which he had been allowed to return after infuriating the king and alarming his own family with his refusal to take Henry’s side. During his absence the king had grown more confident than ever that no intelligent, informed, and open-minded person could possibly fail to see the irrefutability of his claims, and he had not stopped thinking of young Pole. By 1537, apparently, he was sure that Pole’s years of reading and reflection must have brought him around. He sent him books refuting the idea of papal primacy (such works were being written in great numbers by clergymen eager to win the attention of the king), learned that he had begun researching and writing a book of his own on the question, and was eager to see the result. Winning over Pole would be a victory, a vindication, of international consequence.
But the fruit of Pole’s labors, a work that he titled De Unitate Ecclesiastica, turned out to be the opposite of what Henry expected. Assuming the role of Old Testament prophet, casting the king as a tyrant in desperate need of being saved from the consequences of his own errors, Pole expressed himself recklessly, in terms that could hardly have been better chosen to offend a man of Henry’s immense pride. After comparing Henry not only to Richard III—the archfiend in the Tudor version of English history—but to the emperor Nero as well, Pole charged that he “did not merely kill, but tore to pieces all the true defenders of the old religion in a more inhuman fashion than the Turk.” Henry’s actions, he said, made a mockery of his papal title Defender of the Faith, and without quite saying so explicitly he suggested in unmistakable terms that Henry’s actions were so repellent to his own subjects as to make a revolt likely if not inevitable. Compared with this invective, Pole’s scholarly denial that any secular ruler could claim to be supreme head of the church even within his own realm was familiar almost to the point of being merely tiresome. If at any point there had existed a real possibility that Henry might opt to settle his differences with Rome, Pole’s little work (which he had not had printed, claiming that it was intended for the king’s eyes only) ended that possibility absolutely. Pole’s mother and brothers, when they learned of what he had done this time, denounced his actions as “folly.” Though Henry took no action against them, he lashed out in other directions.
No longer satisfied merely to make the life of his daughter Mary a hell of humiliation and deprivation, he sent representatives to her place of confinement with a demand that she do what her late mother had taught her to regard as unthinkable: take the oath of supremacy and, the crowning blow, acknowledge that she herself was illegitimate. Mary refused, was threatened, and refused again. The screws were tightened further. The woman who was her closest friend, almost the last companion she was still permitted, was taken away to the Tower. Two men suspected of being sympathetic to her were purged from the Privy Council, and Cromwell himself began to fear that he was going to suffer for efforts he had made earlier to reconcile father and daughter. He wrote to Mary, calling her “an obstinate and obdurate woman, deserving the reward of malice in the extremity of mischief.” He provided her with a draft letter that he suggested she transcribe in her own hand and send to her father; it recognized Henry as supreme head, repudiated the pope, and described her parents’ marriage as “incestuous and unlawful.” Rumors reached Mary of the king’s intention—what better way to increase the pressure on a daughter with little fear for herself?—to move not only against her but against everyone regarded as friendly to her. Finally even the one man of any importance who had remained unflinchingly loyal to her and her mother, her cousin Charles’s ambassador Eustace Chapuys, urged her to submit. And so she copied out Cromwell’s draft word for word, signed it, and sent it to her father. In doing so she abjectly denied her own deepest beliefs, but she was not utterly crushed: later, when ordered to give up the names of those persons who had encouraged her to resist the king’s demands, she said she would die before doing any such thing. Still later, sufficiently rehabilitated to be permitted to dine in her father’s company, she heard him jokingly rebuke members of his council because “some of you were desirous that I should put this jewel to death.” This revelation of just how close she had been to losing her life caused her to faint.
When Lord Thomas Howard, half-brother of the Duke of Norfolk, neglected to obtain royal permission before contracting to marry Lady Margaret Douglas, the king’s sister Margaret’s daughter by her second husband, Henry chose to interpret this, absurdly, as an attempt on Howard’s part to make himself king of England. Howard was attainted for treason, and along with his bride-that-might-have-been he was imprisoned in the Tower, where he would remain until his death. (Lady Margaret survived to become the mother-in-law of Mary, Queen of Scots, and so paternal grandmother of England’s King James I. Unlike Henry—who, one suspects, would be deeply chagrined if he knew—she is therefore an ancestor of all the subsequent kings and queens of England down to the present day.)
Henry used his expanding powers not only to blight lives but to bend England’s unwritten constitution into bizarre shapes. A new Act of Succession, pushed through Parliament without difficulty, voided the statute that had declared Anne Boleyn to be the king’s only wife and their descendants to be the only legitimate heirs to the throne. Now Jane Seymour was the only wife, her (as yet unborn) children by Henry the sole line of succession. In a truly extraordinary step, one without precedent in law or tradition, Parliament bestowed upon the king the power, if he left no legitimate children, to name as his heir and successor “such person or persons in possession and remainder as shall please your Highness.” At the same time the definition of treason was again broadened to make it easier to ensnare anyone bold or mad enough to follow the examples of Fisher and More. Now it became a capital crime not only to reject the new Succession Act but to remain silent when asked for an opinion. The act also provided—whoever thought this up must have smiled at his own ingenuity—that anyone who attempted to repeal it would be guilty of high treason by virtue of having done so.
The 1530s being a period of such astonishing religious ferment, with Protestantism taking firm root on the continent and splintering into sects virtually all of which found adherents in England, it was inevitable that Henry would set about to impose his will in the realm of dogma and doctrine. His confidence in himself as England’s one source of truth, and his determination to cast aside the old connection to Rome, were accompanied by an equally strong determination to make all his subjects not only believe but actively profess exactly what he believed. This presented no small number of challenges. Being essentially conservative in his approach to questions of dogma, Henry was repelled by such defining Protestant beliefs as justification by faith alone (a rejection of the notion that individuals could improve their chances of salvation through prayer and good works). Likewise he was infuriated by the reformers’ rejection of purgatory and transubstantiation (the belief that, in the mass, the bread and wine of the Eucharist become the flesh and blood of Jesus). But many of the people who at various times were closest and most important to him—Cranmer and the Boleyns among others—gradually came to embrace the very ideas that Henry himself most abhorred. From the time of his break with the papacy until the end of his life, Henry had to walk an often fuzzy and crooked line between Roman Catholicism and an evolving evangelical Protestantism. In doing so he had to remain mindful that there were politically powerful forces on both sides of that line. On the whole he was skillful at playing the factions off against one another, balancing conservative (but not necessarily Roman) Catholic interests against the evangelicals, allowing the two sides to neutralize one another to his advantage. But in the strictly religious dimension, in his efforts to explain what he wanted his people to believe and get them to believe it, he was not only less successful but ultimately a nearly complete failure. His problems in this regard began in the summer of 1536 with the issuance of the so-called Ten Articles, officially the work of convocation but really an expression of Henry’s thinking at the time, the first in what would become his increasingly confusing efforts to tell England what to believe and how to worship. The Articles were wordy and ambiguous, and at points they were nearly self-contradictory in dealing with the issues that most sharply separated Catholic doctrine from the various Protestant and evangelical subgroups. Even today scholars disagree as to whether and to what extent they show Henry to have been holding to a firmly conservative line or leaning in a radical direction.
About one thing there can be no uncertainty. Henry wanted everyone in his kingdom to agree on religion, and he expected agreement on his terms. This is unmistakable in the preface to the Ten Articles, which states that it is the king’s responsibility to assure “that unity and concord in opinion, namely in such things as doth concern our religion, may increase and go forthward, and all occasion of dissent and discord touching the same be repressed and utterly extinguished.” Shortly after the Articles were published, Cromwell issued a set of injunctions ordering the clergy to preach and promote them in their Sunday sermons. At the same time, however, he forbade the churchmen to say anything about such inflammatory subjects as images, miracles, and relics—popular aspects of the old religion that the evangelicals despised as superstitious. No doubt this enforced silence was partly a reflection of Cromwell’s (and the king’s) reluctance to stir up unnecessary trouble. But it may have been rooted also in uncertainty on Henry’s part about what he himself currently believed. He was determined to have uniformity, but he was not in every case sure what uniformity should entail. In shattering the consensus on which the old religion had been based, he had let a whole flock of doctrinal genies out of the bottle. To expect all of them to reassemble in a new bottle of his choosing was to expect a great deal, all the more so as Henry remained unclear about what he wanted the shape of that bottle to be.
Where Henry knew what he wanted, however, he had little difficulty translating his wishes into civil law and church doctrine. His all-but-godlike status under the new dispensation was captured vividly on the title page of a new translation of the Bible. The woodcut drawing that the court artist Hans Holbein created for this page under Cromwell’s direction has as its dominant figure not God the Father or Jesus Christ, not the prophets of the Old Testament or the apostles of the New, but Henry VIII. He is shown seated center stage on his throne, the sword of justice clutched firmly in his right hand, passing the Sacred Scriptures to a cluster of bishops kneeling not before their creator but at the feet of their king. The dedication offered to that king by the new Bible’s translator—“He only under God is the Chief Head of all the congregation and church”—is so modest by comparison with the illustration that one wonders if Henry found it disappointing.
But the real world had not been abolished. It lurked in the background mainly, but occasionally it intruded into the world of Henry’s making with a reminder that the king was not God and could not bend everything to his will. In July his sixteen-year-old son Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the possible successor on whom he had doted and lavished honors and riches, died of tuberculosis. And the months were passing without any sign that Queen Jane was with child.
And then the kingdom itself, to all appearances so submissive, so worshipful of its great ruler, suddenly exploded.
Background
THEY WERE WHAT THEY ATE
SIXTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE WAS A WORLD IN WHICH conspicuous consumption really mattered. It wasn’t just that wealth meant power—has there ever been a society in which that wasn’t true?—but that wealth had to be seen to be believed. Emperors and kings, nobles and bishops, landowners and merchants all understood that they could never be more important than they were able to appear to be. Appearance was reality. Only a man rich enough to look rich could expect to be taken seriously in the great marketplace of patronage and influence.
Hence all the emphasis, in England as elsewhere, on wearing extravagantly expensive clothes, and living in extravagantly grand houses, and trying to win friends by giving extravagantly costly gifts.
And on eating—more important, on serving—extravagant quantities of extravagantly expensive food. In dining as in all things, it was an age of excess for everyone who could afford it.
The roots of all this went back to early feudal times, if not further. When society was utterly dominated by the warlords, a man’s importance was a function of the amount of land he controlled and the number of fighting men his land could support. To be of the highest importance, one needed a large following of lesser nobles, knights, and soldiers, a great hall in which these subordinates could be sheltered, and food and drink for all of them. If the Norman kings and barons fed their liegemen with deer and wild boars that they themselves had killed in their own hunting parks, that simply added to the aura of power that stayed with them everywhere they went.
None of this changed under what historians call the “bastard feudalism” of later centuries, when the old sacred oaths of loyalty to an overlord came to matter less than how much cash a man could raise and how big a following he could buy. Leaders were still expected to maintain and feed extensive households, and to receive and feed steady streams of guests, and to do so in a style that made a statement. Those lesser men who aspired to rise, to establish themselves as leaders, naturally tried to do the same. If the amounts of cash required could be painfully, even dangerously high (they inevitably were, food being much more expensive relative to income than it is today), that had to be accepted as part of the cost of doing business.
The most conspicuous consumers of all were the kings. Their responsibilities made an extensive administrative apparatus necessary, so their courts had to be larger than those of even the greatest nobles. They also had to surpass even their mightiest subjects in grandeur; anything less would have compromised their dignity and raised questions about the reality of royal power. Even Henry VII, that supposed miser, expended huge sums to impress England and the world with the splendor in which he lived. Following the French example to which he had been exposed during his years in exile, he established a personal bodyguard of uniformed “gentlemen pensioners” and put his pages, grooms, and other staff in green and white livery. His court became the setting of elaborate rituals, processions, and ceremonies, with much bowing, scraping, and genuflecting whenever royalty appeared. Hospitality remained, as it had been for the Plantagenets, a central element in Tudor ostentation: as many as seven hundred people would dine simultaneously in Henry VII’s great hall (the royal family sitting apart on a raised gallery), and on the most special occasions as many as sixty different dishes might be served.
In the next generation the young Henry VIII’s hunger for grandeur and indifference to cost raised court and kitchen to levels previously unimagined. Most of the royal household was managed by a lord steward whose annual budget was, at least in peacetime, the largest in the kingdom. His 225 subordinates (virtually all of them men, incidentally; the Tudor “serving wench” is a mythical figure) staffed not only enormous kitchens but such satellite operations as the bakehouse, pantry, saucery, spicery, wafery, confectionery, scullery, boiling house, and scalding house. The sheer numbers of people being fed made all this necessary; the record survives of a single day when, though the royal household was smaller than usual because temporarily in Calais rather than in England, it consumed six oxen, eight calves, forty sheep, a dozen pigs, 132 chickens, seven swans, twenty storks, thirty-four pheasants, one hundred ninety-two partridges and an equal number of cocks, and many other things. Waste and pilferage were inevitable in an operation of such enormous dimensions and occurred on a scale commensurate with the quantities being prepared. Effective financial management was somewhere between difficult and impossible, and as Henry added more and more embellishments—eventually he employed sixty court musicians, compared with five in the reign of his grandfather Edward IV—the household sometimes teetered on the brink of being completely out of control.
At court as elsewhere, what one ate was largely a function of one’s position in the social pyramid. As the list of things cooked one day in Calais indicates, courtiers like other people of wealth and prominence subsisted to an extraordinary extent on meat and poultry, which may have made up as much as eighty percent of the elite diet. The harvest (and eating) season for fruit and vegetables was short in England, it was difficult to import most such produce, and in any case ancient medical authorities including Galen had pronounced it unhealthful. People of means could afford to keep and butcher livestock throughout the winter and thus had year-round access to fresh meat. Where preservation was necessary it was accomplished through drying, smoking, or immersion in granular salt or brine. Salt was expensive, however, and so was used only with varieties of fish and meat that had demonstrated a capacity for surviving the preservation process in a reasonably appetizing state and were therefore regarded as “worth their salt.” Cod from the abundant fisheries of recently discovered Newfoundland was an increasingly important example.
The Crusades had long since exposed western Europe to the spices and condiments of the East, and by the sixteenth century the trade in commodities ranging from pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, saffron, and caraway to cardamom, coriander, mustard, and garlic was a major element in international commerce. By Tudor times, as a result, recipes like the following for stew had become possible:
Take a necke of mutton and a brest to make the broth stronge and then scum it cleane and when it hath boyled a while, take part of the broth and put it into another pot and put thereto a pound of raisins and let them boyle till they be tender, then strayne a little bread with the Raisins and the broth all together, then chop time, sawge and Persley with other small hearbes and put into the mutton then put in the strayned raysins with whole prunes, cloves and mace, pepper, saffron and a little salt and if ye may stew a chicken withall or els sparrowes or such other small byrdes.
Other culinary delights, including some that would soon transform European cuisine, were beginning to arrive from the New World. Among them were corn and sweet peppers, potatoes and tomatoes, turkey and peanuts and vanilla, and still other things so familiar today that their absence is almost unimaginable. In the lifetime of Henry VIII, however, most such commodities remained unknown. Chocolate and coffee, when they first arrived, were used for medicinal purposes only. Potatoes were not seen in England until almost a century after Henry’s death.
The high price of spices and other exotic foodstuffs was one reason for the so-called sumptuary laws that were first introduced in England in the fourteenth century and, with frequent revisions, would remain in effect for hundreds of years thereafter. These laws, difficult to enforce, were a somewhat oblique attempt to limit costly imports and thereby reduce the outflow of capital. Another of their purposes was to preserve class distinctions by prohibiting the unworthy from presuming to imitate the lifestyles of their betters (for a time only high nobles were allowed to wear fox fur, for example), and they could become remarkably detailed in what they prescribed. In 1517, probably at the direction of a Thomas Wolsey eager to emphasize his superiority over everyone in England except the royal family, it was decreed that whereas cardinals could be served nine dishes in the course of a single meal, dukes, archbishops, marquesses, earls, and bishops were to have no more than seven each, and nobles below the rank of earl a mere six. Gentlemen with annual incomes of between £40 and £100—was there ever a time when such careful attention was paid to exactly how much money a man had?—were to receive only three. Pains were taken, at banquets, to seat people in precisely the right order of precedence, and the most eminent guests received not only the most but the costliest dishes. Table manners were better than is often supposed today, and for the most practical of reasons. Guests wore the most expensive clothing that the law and their purses or credit permitted, with laces and ruffles not only around their necks but on their cuffs as well, and they had no wish to carelessly spoil costumes that sometimes cost more than a laborer could earn in years. Forks were still exotic, rarely seen, and when dining out people knew that they were expected to bring their own knives and spoons. Even high nobles expected to share the dishes they were served with at least one person of equal rank.
Such was the life of the elite and near-elite only, and it would be a mistake to suppose that it had any connection with the lives of the common people. With food as with so many things, the mass of the population lived in virtually a parallel universe, one in which spices and sugar were so expensive as to be unattainable and even meat and salt were rarities. A working family’s typical meal might consist of dark bread made of rye or barley rather than more expensive wheat flour (often a slab of this bread would be used as a “trencher” or edible dinner plate), cheese or the whey that is a by-product of cheese-making, a “pottage” or soup of oats or barley, perhaps a portion of curds or whatever fruits or vegetables happened to be in season. Though vitamin deficiencies were commonplace, especially in winter and early spring, and though crop failures could lead to malnutrition, outright starvation was almost unheard of except in the far north during the worst years. Perhaps the ultimate irony—the term “poetic justice” comes to mind—is that except in times of exceptional shortage, the diet of the plain folk was much more healthful than that of their meat-and sugar-devouring masters. Possibly that explains why so many of the Tudors were so worn out and sick at such early ages. Elizabeth, the longest-lived of them, was notably abstemious in her diet.