16

The Last of Henry

It was January 27, 1547, and the ulcers on King Henry’s thighs were once again alarmingly inflamed. Clogged veins had swollen his legs until the skin seemed about to split, old open sores filled his bedchamber with an atrocious stench, and the royal body was jolted at unpredictable intervals by electric stabs of pain. This was the third such episode in less than a year; with a single brief remission it had been going on for more than a month, and this time Henry really was dying. At age fifty-five he was an old man at the end of his strength, bald, wrinkled, and gray-bearded, unable to read without spectacles, so grotesquely fat that he could no longer climb stairs and even on level ground had to be rolled about on chairs fitted with wheels. His physicians were cauterizing the ulcers with red-hot irons, adding to his agony. His many other afflictions—the headaches, the itching, the hemorrhoids—now seemed trivial by comparison.

He was, essentially, alone. Even his wife Catherine Parr, who had been twice widowed before becoming the king’s sixth bride and was an experienced and solicitous nurse, had been sent away before Christmas and not summoned back to court since. His children—Mary, in her late twenties now and still unmarried, Elizabeth, who was just entering adolescence, and the child Edward—also were kept away. No one had access to the king except his physicians and the gentlemen of his privy chamber, who were busy fending off questions about his condition and denying that he was seriously ill or even, as some believed, already dead. On January 16, during a temporary resurgence of some of his old vitality, Henry had been strong enough to meet with the ambassadors of his old friends and enemies Francis of France and the emperor Charles, and that had put the rumors to rest for a while. The world, however, had seen nothing of him since then.

Though Henry’s physicians didn’t know why he was dying, exactly, it was obvious to all of them that he could not last long. The breakdowns had been coming with increasing frequency in recent years, the periods of recovery progressively shorter and less complete. His once-powerful constitution was so overburdened with problems (thrombosed varicose veins, possibly infected bones, possibly, too, a condition called Cushing’s syndrome that would explain both his distended torso and face and his savagely irrational behavior) as to be in a state of general collapse. Whatever the facts of his condition—a condition far beyond the reach of sixteenth-century medical science—no one who could get close enough to the king to tell him that his life was at an end, to suggest that perhaps he might want to prepare himself for death, was willing to do so. Even now Henry was too dangerous to be trusted. Just eight days earlier he had had put to death, on a flimsy charge of treason, young Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and son and heir of the Duke of Norfolk. In addition to being a poet of considerable brilliance, the originator of what would come to be known as the Shakespearean sonnet, Surrey had been arrogant and reckless. But he was not a traitor by any reasonable definition of the term. Even less was his father the duke a traitor, but now he, too, after an often hard life of service to the Crown, was in the Tower awaiting execution. Small wonder that none of the men huddled in the king’s bedchamber dared to tell him the one thing that might, in his extremity, have been of some use to him. Long before, Henry had made it a crime to foretell the king’s death. People had been punished severely on charges of having done so. And so Henry lay in solitude among the deep pillows of his great bed, while his retainers hung back and left him alone with his thoughts.

He had no shortage of things to think about. If he suspected that he was dying—and he surely did, having spent the last of his strength making arrangements for the management of the kingdom after he was gone—his thoughts would have turned inevitably to the old question of the succession. Prince Edward, the heir whose birth had been made possible by so many deaths, was still only nine years old. He was a bright child, perhaps exceptionally so, and like his half-sisters he gave every evidence of worshipping his mighty father. But he was a frail reed on which to hang the future of the dynasty—years before, when the boy was sick with fever, the court physicians had warned that he was not likely to live long—and far too young to take a role in governing or even protecting his own interests. Henry would have wished that the boy were older and more robust, or that he had a brother or two. His thoughts might have turned to the efforts he had made to produce more sons even as his potency ebbed away. To the three marriages he had contracted after the death of Jane Seymour—marriages that had cemented his reputation as England’s bluebeard while at the same time making him the laughingstock of Europe.

There was sweet, dull Anne of Cleves, “the mare of Flanders,” to whom he had betrothed himself sight unseen in 1538 when France and Charles were allied against him, an invasion of England seemed not only possible but likely, and a marital connection with the Protestant princes of Europe (of whom the Duke of Cleves was one) seemed the only safe haven. The marriage was a fiasco from the start; Henry found his bride so unappealing, her big, slack body so repellent, that though for a while he shared her bed he never attempted consummation. A pretext was found for having the marriage annulled, and Anne, who had no wish to return to the continent, was contentedly pensioned off with two handsome houses, a staff appropriate to her new station as the king’s “sister,” and an annual stipend of £500.

There had followed the far greater catastrophe, the profound public humiliation, of Catherine Howard. The nineteen-year-old niece of the Duke of Norfolk and first cousin of Anne Boleyn, petite and vivacious if rather mindless, Catherine had been dangled before the king like a juicy morsel by courtiers who thought that if they could draw him into marrying her the consequences would be good for the whole sprawling Howard clan, good for the religious conservatives, and bad for the brothers of Jane Seymour, evangelicals who had been prospering mightily since the birth of their nephew Prince Edward. Henry rose to the bait with a speed that must have astonished the anglers. His infatuation with Catherine became obvious well before the end of his marriage to Anne of Cleves, and he made her his wife eighteen days after the Cleves marriage was annulled. He was enchanted with the girl, lavished gifts on her, proudly put her on display during his annual summer progress. But there was much, sadly, that Henry did not know. Catherine, whose ne’er-do-well father had been absent through much of her childhood and died before she was brought to court, had had an undisciplined upbringing in the crowded household of her stepgrandmother the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk. She brought to her position as maid of honor to Anne of Cleves a good deal more sexual experience than the king would have found acceptable had he been aware of it. Trouble probably was inevitable from the day she was married, through no choice of her own, to an obese and diseased man some thirty years her senior, and when it came it came in squadrons. Soon after becoming queen, in an act of astounding recklessness, Catherine appointed her lover Francis Dereham to be her private secretary, later transferring her favors to a young gentleman of the king’s privy chamber named Thomas Culpeper. In due course she was found out and reported, and the end of her story was similar to that of Anne Boleyn except that this time the queen was guilty. Dereham and Culpeper both were executed in December 1541, the latter receiving the mercy of a simple beheading but Dereham subjected to the protracted horrors reserved for traitors. The foolish and unfortunate Catherine was beheaded the following February. With her died her friend and accomplice in deceit Lady Jane Rochford, who on an earlier occasion had saved her own neck by providing damning testimony against her husband, George Boleyn. The king showed far more grief, for far longer, than he had after the death of Jane Seymour. Probably it was not grief so much as chagrin at having been cuckolded before the eyes of all Europe.

Why Henry would choose to marry yet again must remain a mystery. There could have been little chance of his becoming a father at this point, but hope may have sprung eternal in a man so proud. And Henry, in his increasingly brutal and self-defeating way, had always been hungry for affection. In any case marry he did, and wisely this time. Catherine Parr, who made little secret of being motivated by duty rather than love in accepting the king’s proposal, was an attractive thirty-one-year-old widow of great dignity and self-possession. She proved skillful at adapting herself to her husband’s moods and maintaining a pleasant household not only for him but for all three of his children—the first and only time that Henry’s offspring were ever together even intermittently in something resembling a normal family home. But Henry proved a dangerous partner even in her case, at one point not only professing outrage at her evangelical beliefs but issuing a warrant for her arrest and dispatching guards to search her quarters and take her to the Tower. He soon changed his mind, however—if the whole episode was a kind of malicious practical joke, it was not the first time he had toyed cruelly with people close to him in this way—and as the queen learned to keep her theological opinions to herself domestic tranquillity was restored. The fact that she was kept at a distance throughout the painful final weeks of Henry’s life, however, suggests that there must have been rather severe limits to whatever intimacy the two had achieved. In any event there was little about his marital history that Henry could have considered with satisfaction as he approached his final hour on earth. He could sentimentalize only about Jane, who had done him the supreme favor of bearing a son and then dying before he could lose interest.

Nor is he likely to have wanted to give much thought to the subject of money. No ruler in the history of England had reaped a bounty of gold to compare with Henry’s, and yet somehow it had all ended with the economy of the kingdom in a parlous state and its government virtually bankrupt. And there had been absolutely no reason why things had to end up this way: it had all been Henry’s doing, and he had done it for no better reason than the satisfaction of his own appetites and the demands of his swollen ego. The floodgates had opened wide in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace, when the campaign began to bully and bribe the inhabitants of the larger religious houses into surrendering their lands and possessions (and to kill them when neither bullying nor bribery would suffice). The climax of that campaign came in May 1539 with Parliament’s passage of the Second Act of Dissolution, which declared all the church property confiscated since 1536 (when the smaller houses were condemned) and all the church property to be confiscated in the future to be lawfully the property of the Crown. This statute remedied an awkward legal flaw in the surrenders signed by the leaders of the larger houses: those leaders were not the owners of the monasteries they headed and had no right to give them away. It speeded the completion of the greatest redistribution of English land and wealth since the Norman Conquest in 1066. The whole suppression worked to the direct and immediate advantage of the king, who rather abruptly became richer than any other monarch in Christendom. By the spring of 1540 not a single monastic establishment remained in existence in England or Wales. Hundreds if not thousands of the monks and nuns expelled from them had become itinerant beggars, wandering from village to village in search of work or charity. The number of England’s schools, hospitals, and institutions for the care of the aged and indigent had undergone an abrupt collapse from which it would not recover for centuries.

At the same time that all this was happening, Henry ordered the destruction of the shrines that had long been objects of veneration and destinations for pilgrims not only from England but the whole Christian world. The most famous of these was the fabulous tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, where for many generations wealthy visitors had been leaving offerings of jewels, gold, and silver. It was targeted for liquidation not only because of the immense treasure it contained (a treasure that had itself become a kind of tourist attraction, visible behind iron bars) but also because the man it honored had been murdered for defending the liberties of the church in defiance of an earlier King Henry. A farce was played out in which an order was issued for Becket, who had been dead for 370 years, to appear in court and face charges of rebellion and treason. When after thirty days he had not appeared, a trial was held at which the saint was represented by counsel appointed by the king and, upon being found guilty, was sentenced to have his bones burned and scattered. Not coincidentally, the court ordered also that the treasures of Becket’s tomb should go to the Crown. The valuables hauled away from the tomb filled twenty-four wagons—this in addition to two chests so laden with precious gems that “six or eight strong men could do no more than convey one of them.” Similar if less awesome troves were gathered up elsewhere. Particularly disgraceful was what happened at Winchester, where, in the course of looting the ancient shrine of St. Cuthbert, the king’s agents broke open the coffin and scattered the bones of the most heroic figure in all of English history, the only English king ever to be called “the Great,” the ninth century’s genuinely courageous, good, and wise Alfred, King of Wessex. The loot from all these tombs went of course into the royal treasury.

Quite apart from the colossal sums that flowed into the king’s coffers from the shrines, and ultimately dwarfing them, was the £140,000 in rent generated annually by the monastic lands that now came into the king’s possession. Parliament, in being asked (“instructed” would be a better word) to approve Henry’s appropriation of possibly as much as five percent of all the rental income in the kingdom, was told that this would make wondrous things possible. The king would be able to rule—even to wage war—without ever having to levy taxes. He would be able to expand the ranks of the nobility (an exciting thought for wealthy and ambitious families), increase spending on education, and advance religion by creating and endowing eighteen new bishoprics. This was Cromwell’s great plan: to make the Crown financially independent and Parliament very nearly irrelevant. If carried out, it could have changed English history by giving future kings an endowment sufficient to support all the operations of their governments for any number of generations.

Nothing of the kind came to pass. Instead Henry ran through his windfall with a speed that defies belief. Almost as soon as the church lands fell into his hands he began selling them, in some cases even giving them away to a fortunate few. In the last eight or nine years of his life he divested himself, and his heirs, of land with a value of approximately £750,000. There were political advantages in this: by giving the most powerful families a share of the monastic spoils, and by allowing other families to become powerful from feasting on the pillage, he created a potent constituency with the strongest possible reason for supporting what he had done. Most of the sold lands went for prices approaching fair market value, rather than being deeply discounted or given away. If Henry had husbanded his receipts, they could have not only given him unprecedented and potentially permanent autonomy but also funded at least some of the good things promised to Parliament. But instead he squandered it, almost literally threw it away, creating a legacy of financial neediness that would cripple his successors for a hundred years and finally contribute to the collapse of the monarchy under his great-great-grandnephew King Charles I.

He squandered his riches at home first, spending half a million pounds on building in the 1540s, much of it on coastal fortifications but as much as £170,000 on the construction, expansion, and unending improvement of his many palaces. (Even Hampton Court, which grew to more than a thousand rooms with luxurious sleeping accommodations for three hundred guests, was dwarfed by Nonsuch Palace, which was still a work in progress when Henry died, would never become an important royal residence, and in the space of a few generations would disappear from the landscape almost without leaving a trace.)

But what ruined the Crown financially was Henry’s resumed pursuit, as the 1530s ended and his mastery of church and state seemed complete, of military glory. As in the first years of his reign and again in the 1520s, he made war on both France and Scotland, and as before, there was no real point in attacking either. As before, he accomplished nothing of consequence, did nothing to enhance his reputation at home or abroad, and aggravated problems that would torment his successors. Even in their most farcical aspects, Henry’s last international adventures were painfully like his first. They began in 1543, when Francis of France and the emperor Charles—who five years earlier had signed a meaningless ten-year truce and then, with equal lack of seriousness, pledged that neither would enter into additional alliances without the other’s consent—once again went to war with each other and began to court England. Henry, who had no good reason to involve himself in this sterile old quarrel and many good reasons to stay out, nevertheless entered into a treaty with Charles by which both promised to invade France in the following year. Henry did in fact lead an army into France in July 1544—his deplorable physical condition made him less the army’s leader than a cumbersome part of its baggage—but predictably he and Charles neither cooperated nor even attempted to coordinate their operations.

Within two months Charles was making a separate peace with Francis, ending whatever chance Henry might ever have had of accomplishing anything. The conflict with Scotland was equally confused, confusing, and intermittently ridiculous. In 1542 Henry insisted on making a major issue of the kinds of skirmishes that had long been routine in the borderlands that separated the two kingdoms, demanding that the Scots acknowledge him as overlord of their king. The death of his his nephew King James V after the English victory at Solway Moss in that year (Henry did not participate) opened up the possibility not only of peace but of union between the two countries. In 1543 Scotland’s infant queen was betrothed to little Edward, Prince of Wales, as part of the Treaty of Greenwich, but the Scots were soon repelled by England’s “rough wooing.” In each of the following two years an angry Henry sent armies under the late Queen Jane’s brother Edward Seymour not only to invade Scotland but—these were Seymour’s specific instructions—to cause as much mayhem as possible. One result was an outlandish amount of death and destruction. Another was the raising of Scottish hatred of the English to a pitch rarely seen before. The Scots turned to France for support, and the stage was set for the marriage of their queen into the French royal family. In the end the only result of Henry’s aggressive policy was the cementing of a French-Scottish alliance.

The French and Scottish campaigns cost England, in the five years leading up to Henry’s death, the stupendous total of more than £2.2 million—this at a time when the Crown’s customary revenues (those exclusive of the money from the monastic suppression) were in the neighborhood of £200,000. Just the three-month incursion into France in 1544 cost £586,000, and the subsequent defense of that campaign’s one trophy (the city of Boulogne, which had little real value to England, and which in any case the English had no chance of holding on to permanently) cost another £426,000. The war against Scotland, conducted at Henry’s insistence with gratuitous and self-defeating savagery, consumed £350,000, and the building up of an English navy took another £265,000. England had never seen spending on this scale. In almost any previous reign the burden imposed on the king’s subjects would have sparked resistance, even revolt. So cowed were the people by the 1540s, however, that Henry had little difficulty in matching his unprecedented spending with unprecedented taxation. Almost literally, he pulled out all the financial stops.

Students of the subject have calculated that as early as 1535, with Wolsey and Cromwell showing the way, Henry had accomplished the amazing feat of taking in (and just as quickly spending) more tax revenues than all his predecessors combined. But in the following dozen years the Crown would take in more than twice as much again—and again we are speaking of taxes only, the riches taken from the monasteries not included. From 1540 to 1547 Parliament approved six of the traditional payments known as “fifteenths and tenths,” a percentage of the value of movable property. Each of these grants yielded approximately £29,000. During these same years Parliament also approved three “subsidies,” each requiring the clergy to give the Crown 20 percent of their income for three successive years and the laity to pay an annually increasing percentage of the value of their real and personal property. Nor was this all, or even nearly all. In 1542 Henry borrowed £112,000 from his wealthier subjects (everyone known to have an income of at least £50 received a letter informing him of how much he was expected to “lend”), and two years later Parliament declared the king free of any obligation to repay any such debts incurred since the start of 1540. Next Henry demanded and got something that Richard III had abolished because of its unpopularity and even Wolsey had been unable to revive because of parliamentary opposition: a so-called “benevolence,” a gift to the Crown that in this instance totaled £270,000. Two London aldermen dared to object. One was required not only to join the war against Scotland but to take with him a troop of soldiers raised at his own expense; soon captured, he had to pay a hefty ransom to secure his freedom. The other was simply sent to prison, where he remained for three months until being allowed to purchase his release. Throughout all this Henry was also borrowing from continental moneylenders. Foreign loans totaled some £272,000 in all, at interest rates of up to 14 percent. Much of this debt remained unpaid at the time of Henry’s death.

Even this was not enough to keep the Crown solvent. Something more was needed, and it was found in the most underhanded device available to the governments of the time: a systematic debasement of the coinage. As early as the reign of Henry VII, England had, in a legitimate response to a lowering of the value of continental currencies, occasionally and by modest amounts decreased the amount of silver or gold in its coins. In 1544, however, the royal mint began mixing more and more base metal into the coinage, not to keep in step with the Europeans but as a way of skimming off wealth. Soon its coins were only half gold or silver, and not long after that they were two-thirds base metal. Henry reaped £373,000 by this expedient, which caused his cash-strapped last chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, to gratefully describe the royal mint as the regime’s “holy anchor.” Few outside the government had reason to celebrate. Prices rose some 25 percent in the last two years of the reign, and the increasingly dubious value of the coinage became an embarrassment to Englishmen trying to trade abroad.

The cumulative effects of Henry’s changes were profound. If the old vision of a society in which wealth brought obligations had never come close to fulfillment, now even the ideal was dying. Stability was replaced by plunder, the institutions of government became the tools of the plunderers, and their aim, when it was not to pull in still more plunder, was to make sure that no one threatened the bounty that Henry’s revolution had funneled to them. There is no better measure of the kind of England that Henry had created than a statute passed by his Parliament at the instigation of his ministers just months after his death. Under this law, anyone who “lived idly and loiteringly for the space of three days” could have the letter V (for vagabond) branded on his chest and could be required to spend two years serving whoever had reported him (or, presumably, her). Those impressed into bondage in this way were entitled to nothing more than bread and water, could be made to wear iron rings around their necks, and were legally obliged to do whatever work their masters ordered “however vile it might be, by beating, chaining or otherwise.” Any who made themselves unavailable to their masters for two weeks or more were to have an S (for slave) burned into their faces and their two years of bondage extended into a life sentence. Further offenses could result in execution. No such law would have been conceivable in England between the coming of Christianity and the last years of Henry VIII’s reign. It was a classic case of punishing the victim, singling out for final humiliation the very people left most helpless by the pillaging of institutions that for centuries had attended to the needs of the weak and the destitute. It was too outrageous to be tolerated even by the new oligarchy for more than a few years, but it expressed in extreme form something of the spirit of the age. In a sense it was the zenith of Henry’s achievement, the highest expression of the new values that were growing out of the ruins of the old order.

In the years between the failure of the Pilgrimage of Grace and Henry’s death, the ancient understanding that there were and must be limits on royal power even in the secular sphere, slowly hammered out during centuries of conflict, was crushed underfoot and left behind. The possibility that anyone other than the king might possess rights or powers not deriving from the king became something that no one dared mention. The king’s word literally became law as early as 1539, when a Proclamations Act gave royal pronouncements the same force under the law as statutes passed by Parliament, prescribed imprisonment and fines for anyone failing to obey them, and made it high treason to flee England to escape punishment. This was such an extreme expansion of the power of the Crown that even the craven Parliament that Cromwell had put in place balked, but passage was secured by amendments which forbade the use of proclamations to override statutes already on the books, confiscate private property, or deprive subjects of life or liberty. There followed, within weeks, a fresh delineation of exactly which religious beliefs were now acceptable through an Act for Abolishing Diversity of Opinion. This law, better known as the Six Articles, prescribed the death penalty and confiscation of all possessions for anyone denying transubstantiation, the real presence of the body of Jesus in the Eucharist. It also, remarkably, forbade the extending of mercy to anyone willing to withdraw his denial. It was somewhat less harsh in meting out punishments for the denial of other things that the king was determined to make everyone believe (that it is not necessary to receive communion under the two forms of bread and wine, that priests must not marry and vows of chastity are irrevocable, that private masses are acceptable and confession to a priest necessary for forgiveness). The penalty in connection with these doctrines was merely imprisonment and loss of property for first offenders; a second conviction was necessary for the death penalty to be imposed. Archbishop Cranmer, who almost certainly did not himself believe in the Six Articles at this point in the evolution of his theology, responded by quietly shipping back to Germany the wife whose existence he was at this point still keeping secret from the king.

Despite the increasing severity of the penalties for dissent—sanctions more far-reaching and inflexible than anything previously seen in England—uniformity remained unattainable. One wag compared Henry, with his insistence on rejecting Rome while preserving nearly every Roman Catholic practice and dogma, with someone who has thrown a man off a high tower and then commanded him to stop halfway down. The middle ground that Henry wanted all of England to occupy really was, in practical terms, as impossible as that. On the continent, in Switzerland especially, reform had already moved far beyond anything that Henry was prepared to tolerate, and increasing numbers of England’s reformers wanted to follow the Swiss model. There was no way, in a society where the old consensus had been shattered but faith was still taken so seriously that Parliament engaged in lengthy and passionate debates on transubstantiation, to get everyone to believe what the king told them to believe and to conduct themselves accordingly.

Henry’s insistence on making his truth the universal truth led him deeper and deeper into futility and frustration. Even one of the centerpieces of the English Reformation, the delivery to the people of a Bible written in their own language, is a case in point. Such a Bible had been one of the supreme objectives of English reformers long before Henry was born, and nothing was more important to Luther and those who followed him than their conviction that true Christianity was to be found not in the rules and teachings of the church but in Scripture, especially the New Testament writings of the evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. (Hence the name “evangelicals” for those reformers who went furthest in rejecting church tradition.) The early radicals had regarded as an outrage the banning of the translation of the New Testament produced by William Tyndale in the 1520s, scornfully brushing aside the hierarchy’s contention that it objected not to translation as such but to Tyndale’s ideologically motivated distortions (his use of “congregation” rather than “church,” for example, and of “senior” rather than “priest”). Brushed aside, too, were the warnings of orthodox theologians that the Bible is an elusive work, easily misinterpreted by readers with little understanding of its linguistic and historical roots. In England as on the continent, the Reformation arrived on a wave of enthusiasm for Scripture as the one doorway to enlightenment and salvation. In 1538, as part of the enforcement of his second set of injunctions for the clergy, Cromwell ordered every parish church in England to obtain a copy of his so-called Great Bible (which was mainly Tyndale’s translation and long afterward would provide more than 80 percent of the text of the King James Version). It became government policy to make the Bible directly accessible to every literate man and woman in England.

But Henry soon found the translated Bible an obstacle to uniformity. Readers found the interpretation of many passages open to debate; many of them naturally began interpreting such passages in whatever way they themselves thought best, and inevitably their conclusions did not always agree with the truth according to Henry or Cranmer or anyone else in a position of authority. Translation launched the English church into diverging assertions of what Scripture does and does not say and hence into a bewildering array of sects. Henry, witnessing the start of this process, was offended by it and undertook to stop it in his usual way: by ordering it to stop or else. Thus in 1543 he drew out of Parliament an Act for Advancement of True Religion, the operative word being “true.” True religion was to be preserved by removal of the Tyndale translation, condemned now as what the more conservative of Henry’s bishops had persuaded him that it was: “crafty, false and untrue.” Henceforth only clergymen were to read the Bible aloud in public, only nobles and gentlemen were to read it to their families, and only male heads of households, gentlewomen, and ladies of noble birth were to read it even in solitude. It was not to be opened by “prentices, journeymen, serving men of the degrees of yeomen or under, husbandmen nor laborers,” and any caught doing so were to be jailed for a month. By such means the king sought to separate people “of the lower sort” from their “diverser naughty and erroneous opinions” and save them from “great division and dissension among themselves.” The impact of this act on the lower orders is, at a remove of nearly five centuries, impossible to judge. Evangelicals, for the most part, maintained a prudent but resentful silence and bided their time. They took comfort in Henry’s marriage to Catherine Parr, who saw to it that reformers of decidedly Protestant inclination were appointed as tutors to Prince Edward and Princess Elizabeth or otherwise provided with employment or patronage.

The king meanwhile soldiered on with the thankless and unending task of showing his people the way to salvation, to all appearances unaware that he could have spent his time more productively by trying to herd cats. Almost simultaneously with the Act for Advancement of True Religion he approved the issuance of what came to be known as the King’s Book (its official title was The Necessary Doctrine and Erudition of Any Christian Man), an attempt to correct the flaws of the Bishops’ Book and lay out yet again a system of beliefs that in most respects was Roman Catholicism purged of what even many conservative reformers often saw as superstition. The conservatives were generally pleased, the evangelicals unimpressed, and nothing really changed. The results were the same on Christmas Eve 1545, when Henry surprised Parliament by addressing it for what would prove to be the last time. Angrily, even tearfully, he complained of the divisions within the clergy, where “some be too stiff in their old Mumpsimus, others be too busy and curious in their new Sumpsimus.” Somewhat oddly, considering that he was demanding an end to discord, he urged his listeners to report preachers of “perverse doctrine” to him and his council, saying that he was “very sorry to know and hear how irreverently that precious jewel, the word of God, is disputed, rhymed, sung and jingled in every alehouse and tavern.” He found much to complain of that day, and he complained at length, but any who were moved by his sincerity could do little in response and nothing happened as a result. The man who had done more than anyone to make the religion of England a changeable and changing thing, to create and magnify confusion and division, was now very nearly begging his subjects to somehow come together as a united and happy fellowship of faith. If his lament was touching, it was also a bit ridiculous.

Not that the old man was to be scoffed at. To the contrary, at the time of his Mumpsimus speech, with only a little more than a year to live, he remained as murderous as ever, a hardened killer ruling by terror. There was no sure safety for anyone except of course his son and heir—not for his own relatives, not for strangers or those who had served him longest and best, not for reformers or conservatives. The whole last decade of his life was studded with the slaughter of men and women of every stripe, often in the most terrible ways that the technology of the time could make possible.

A representative sampling of Henry’s reign of terror might well begin with the story of John Forest, who in the happier days of the 1520s had been a prominent member of the Observant Franciscans, Catherine of Aragon’s confessor, and therefore connected to the royal family. He was among the first of the friars to speak out against the king’s plan to divorce Catherine and marry Anne Boleyn, and he may already have been in prison by the time Fathers Peto and Elston challenged Henry in the Franciscan church at Greenwich. Later, however, he took the oath of succession, thereby escaping the grisly fate of his compeers, and was allowed to withdraw to the north of England. Still later it was reported that he was claiming to have sworn the oath “with his outward man, but his inward man never consented thereunto.” This is plausible in light of the fact that in 1538, for reasons unknown, he was again taken into custody and returned to London for execution as a heretic. What makes Forest’s killing noteworthy is the way it was turned into a kind of horrible joke. His death sentence came at the time when Cromwell was shutting down religious shrines and pilgrimage destinations all across England. It happened that at one of these shrines, Llandderfel in Wales, a wooden statue called Darvel Gadarn, an object of veneration from time immemorial, had recently been seized and was slated for destruction. There was a legend about Darvel Gadarn: one day, it was said, the statue would set a forest on fire. This gave someone a bright idea of the kind that no doubt appealed powerfully to officials with a broad enough sense of humor. Darvel Gadarn was hauled from North Wales to London for the burning not of a forest but of John Forest. On the day of his execution the friar, bound in chains, was suspended above a pyre on which lay the statue. Hugh Latimer, probably the most radical of Henry’s bishops, preached a sermon at the end of which he offered to release Forest if he would acknowledge the royal supremacy. When Forest refused, the fire was lit, and for two hours he was slowly broiled until dead. He would remain the only papist executed for heresy rather than treason, and therefore burned rather than hanged. The less theatrical executions at about the same time of the abbot of Woburn and the prior of Lenton, both of whom had refused to sign over their houses, could pass almost unnoticed.

If fidelity to Rome could bring on a terrible death, so too could the rejection of things Roman. In the same year that Forest perished, John Lambert, a Cambridge-educated priest who had long been associated with the radical evangelicals and had been in trouble with the authorities even before Henry’s break with Rome, was accused of having heretical opinions concerning, among other things, “the sacrament of the altar,” the Eucharist. He appealed to the king, with consequences that must have gone far beyond anything he could have hoped for or feared. Henry decided to turn the case into another of his show trials, a demonstration of his mastery of theology. The great hall at York Place was transformed into a theater for the occasion, with scaffolds erected for onlookers and the walls hung with tapestries. When the trial opened on the morning of November 16, Henry presided from a high throne surrounded by phalanxes of nobles, bishops, judges, and scholars. He was resplendent in a costume of white silk, a kind of corpulent angelic vision. One can only imagine what poor Lambert must have thought, escorted into the center of this display of power and subjected to interrogation by such luminaries as Archbishop Cranmer (who, there can be no doubt, shared many of the beliefs that had brought Lambert to this pass), half a dozen bishops, and finally, most terrifyingly, the king himself, who as the day wore on took an increasingly prominent part in the proceedings.

Lambert was afforded no counsel, but he defended himself and his opinions heroically through hours of hard questioning. The climax came late in the day when, asked yet again to declare whether he believed that the bread and wine of the altar really were transformed during the mass into the body and blood of Christ in spite of undergoing no change in appearance, texture, or taste, Lambert replied that he believed it in the same way that Augustine of Hippo, one of the fathers of the church, appeared in his writings to have done. The king jumped on this.

“Answer neither out of St. Augustine, nor by the authority of any other,” he demanded, “but tell me plainly whether thou sayest it is the body of Christ or nay.”

“Then I deny it to be the body of Christ.”

“Mark well!” said Henry. “For now thou shalt be condemned even by Christ’s own words. Hoc est corpus meum [here is my body].”

And condemned meant condemned. When in the end Lambert simply abandoned the fight and threw himself on the king’s mercy, Henry responded with contempt. He ordered Cromwell to declare the verdict, and the verdict was guilty. Six days later Lambert was dragged—literally dragged, shackled to the traditional hurdle—through the streets of London. Then he too was burned to death. Every sycophant at court praised and thanked the king for the brilliance of his performance.

The year ended with a final outburst of savagery that had only a tangential connection to religion but rose more directly out of the old questions about whether Henry, and his father before him, were rightfully kings of England. At the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the pope, having already made the king’s cousin Reginald Pole a cardinal though he was not yet an ordained priest, had sent him north to see if the revolt might have inclined Henry to return to the Roman fold or, failing that, if Francis of France and the emperor Charles might be disposed to join forces for an invasion of England. Pole’s mission came to nothing—by temperament he was a professional student, sometimes ineffectual in practical matters and sufficiently aware of his limitations to avoid politics—but news of it finished whatever affection Henry had retained for his troublesome young kinsman. It also inflamed his long-smoldering distrust of the entire Pole family. He saw an opportunity to accomplish something that he probably had long desired: the extermination of his remaining Yorkist cousins.

Reginald Pole’s elder brother Sir Geoffrey was arrested and interrogated. He must have been a weak man; terrified, he tried to save himself by telling his captors whatever he could about ways in which members of his family had shown themselves to be unfriendly to the new church and therefore disloyal to their king. The evidence he provided was thin stuff, a secondhand account of vague idle talk about unhappiness with the current state of affairs and a longing for the old ways, but in the hands of Cromwell and the king it became sufficient for the arrest of Geoffrey and Reginald’s eldest brother Henry, Lord Montague, who as the senior male member of the family and grandson of a brother of Edward IV and Richard III had a claim to the crown that he had never been foolish enough to pursue. Arrested with him were Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter, who like Henry VIII was a son of one of Edward IV’s daughters, and his twelve-year-old son Edward, Earl of Devon. Into the Tower they all went. The charges against them were worse than dubious—the Poles and the Courtenays alike had remained loyal to Henry through the various disturbances of the mid-1530s—but their royal blood doomed them all the same. On December 6 Montague and Exeter were beheaded, and the executions of others accused of involvement in the supposed Pole conspiracy went on until in the end sixteen people were dead. Montague’s little son, who had been sent to the Tower with his father, was never seen again and is assumed to have died in confinement. Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, the Pole brothers’ mother and onetime governess of the king’s daughter Mary, was arrested soon after Montague’s execution and, after long days of questioning in which nothing could be found to suggest that she might be guilty of anything, attainted of high treason. Exeter’s widow, too, was imprisoned and attainted.

It went on in this way year after year, killing following gratuitous killing and every death ugly in its own new way. In the months following the attack on the Poles, as the last and largest of England’s religious houses were pulled down and their valuables carted off to London, the abbots of the three great Benedictine monasteries at Colchester, Glastonbury, and Reading became the last to refuse to submit. No one could have been surprised, after what had already transpired, to see them arrested on charges of treason and condemned without trial. But their ends were shocking all the same. The eighty-year-old Abbot Richard Whiting of Glastonbury, a man so far above reproach that even Cromwell’s commissioners had praised him and his house at the end of their first visit, was not merely executed. After a debilitating period of imprisonment in London he was returned to his monastery, dragged prostrate to the top of Glastonbury Tor, a conelike geological freak that is the highest promontory in its region, and there put to death along with two of his brother monks. His body was quartered, with the four parts put on public display in the towns of Wells, Bath, Ilchester, and Bridgwater. His head was mounted atop the entrance to the abbey. Henry, keeping his scales balanced, was at this same time having evangelicals imprisoned and burned for failing to conform to the Six Articles.

The year after that, as if in confirmation that what goes around comes around, even Thomas Cromwell was abruptly stripped of his offices and put to death. Contrary to what has often been asserted, he did not die because he had used a deceptive painting by Hans Holbein to trick the king into marrying a miserably homely Anne of Cleves. He died, rather, because he had become too closely identified with the evangelical party in England and the Protestant cause in Europe, and because the collapse of the latest alliance between Francis of France and the emperor Charles gave Henry a choice of Catholic allies and made Cromwell not only expendable but a diplomatic liability. Henry dispensed with him because he thought he no longer needed him, and because he thought he would be better off without him. The endlessly useful Richard Rich (he was Sir Richard now, on his way to becoming Lord Rich) testified against his longtime master with effect as deadly as his earlier contributions to the destruction of Fisher and More. He quoted Cromwell as saying that he was prepared, if necessary, to fight for the evangelical cause even in defiance of the king. It is not easy to believe that the wily Cromwell would have said any such thing within Rich’s hearing, but the standards of evidence were even lower in his case than in Fisher’s or More’s because he had no actual trial. Interestingly, at the moment of his arrest, Cromwell pulled off his hat and angrily flung it to the ground. It was the exasperated gesture of a gambler learning that he had made a bad bet, a trickster tricked. There would be no more opportunities to roll the dice.

In the days before his death Cromwell begged Henry for “mercy, mercy, mercy,” and just before being executed he professed to having always been a good Catholic. (He could not have meant a good Roman Catholic.) It was not long before Henry realized that he did need Cromwell, and that in executing him he had deprived himself of as effective a chief minister as any monarch could ever have hoped for. Characteristically, he blamed the loss not on himself but on Cromwell’s enemies at court—men and women who had in fact wanted to see the secretary ruined but would have been powerless to accomplish any such thing without the king’s active cooperation. Throughout the 1540s Henry would pay and pay again for having extended that cooperation.

Two days after Cromwell’s execution the prominent evangelicals Robert Barnes, William Jerome, and Thomas Garrett were all burned at the stake for heresy, and three distinguished Roman Catholics were hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason. All these deaths remain shrouded in mystery. As with the abbots and Cromwell, there had been no trial, no presentation of evidence, no defense; the king was now simply killing whomever he chose without taking the trouble to explain. The atrocities went on and on. Some, such as the 1541 execution of the seventy-year-old Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, the mother of the Poles, were small affairs barely deserving notice except for their brutality.

The countess, whose father, brother, and son had been murdered by Edward IV, Henry VII, and Henry VIII respectively, and whose small grandson had disappeared while in prison, was obviously guilty of nothing. All her life she had been a loyal if independent-minded member of the royal family, though her early support of Catherine of Aragon had caused her to be dismissed from court and the defection of her son Reginald to the old religion had brought trouble down on the entire family. When brought to the chopping block, Margaret refused to cooperate. “No,” she said, “my head never committed treason. If you will have it, you must take it as you can.” Her death became a grotesquely protracted affair. The executioner had to chase her around the scaffold, slashing at her awkwardly with his blade until at last he had “literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces in a most pitiful manner.”

Some of the atrocities were on a vastly bigger scale. In late 1543, after the Scots repudiated the Treaty of Greenwich and the betrothal of their infant queen to Prince Edward, Henry sent Edward Seymour on an unnecessary and ultimately counterproductive invasion. Seymour’s orders were to annihilate every man, woman, and child wherever resistance was encountered, which was likely to mean wherever English troops appeared. Every place of habitation was to be destroyed “so that the upper stone may be the nether and not one stick stand by another.” Seymour questioned these instructions, sensibly thinking that an approach with less resemblance to genocide might be more conducive to long-term peace. When told to proceed as ordered, he did so with such diligence that most of Edinburgh was reduced to rubble and the countryside around was scoured clean. The following year, when Seymour again crossed into Scotland, his orders were the same as before: to carry out a program of wholesale and indiscriminate destruction. This time he demolished sixteen castles, seven major abbeys, five towns, and 243 villages, killing uncounted hundreds or thousands of Scots. Henry, still not satisfied, ordered the execution of several Scottish hostages whom he had been holding for more than two years and gave his support to a plot (which succeeded) to assassinate the Cardinal Beaton who had long been the leader of the most anti-English faction in Edinburgh. This last he did secretly, however, “not misliking the offer” of the men who volunteered to murder Beaton, thinking it “good they be exhorted to proceed,” but regarding such a project as “not meet to be set forward expressly by his majesty.”

This was the Henry who, on January 27, 1547, having been told at last by a brave gentleman of his privy chamber that he was dying and asked if he wished to confess, replied that he was confident that his sins would have been forgiven even if they were far greater than in fact they were. Again he was asked if he wished to see a confessor. He said perhaps Cranmer, safe old Cranmer, but not quite yet, not until he had slept awhile. He drifted into a sleep that became a coma, so that later, when his gentlemen tried to rouse him, they were unable to do so. Cranmer was summoned and came in a hurry, taking the king’s hand and trying to talk with him but getting no response. Finally he asked Henry to signify his faith in Jesus Christ by squeezing his hand. The king, Cranmer said later, squeezed hard and died.

Something very big had come to an end. It was time for the aftermath, whatever that might prove to be. As for Henry, perhaps his best hope was that he had been wrong all along and the evangelicals right, and all that was needed to save his soul was the gift of faith. No doubt he himself would have been willing to be judged by his works, but it might not have been a good bet.