6

MARTYRS AND MATRIMONY

Anne and Catherine

IN MARCH 1522, Henry VIII, Defender of the Faith, led a band of knights in an assault on a castle. It was not very dangerous: the castle was timber and tinfoil, centrepiece of a courtly masque organized by Wolsey to impress visiting imperial ambassadors. It was ‘garrisoned’ by ladies of the court, each taking the identity of a romantic virtue, embroidered in gold on her headdress. One was a young gentlewoman, recently returned from France. Her name was Anne Boleyn, and the word emblazoned on her fashionable Milan bonnet was ‘Perseverance’.1

Henry was not in love with Anne in 1522. Indeed, he was probably pursuing a dalliance with her elder sister, Mary Carey, a relationship that ended in 1525 when Mary gave birth to a son, reputedly her husband’s. A previous lover, Elizabeth Blount, was the mother of an acknowledged bastard, Henry Fitzroy, born in 1519. Royal mistresses were neither shocking nor unusual presences at late medieval courts. When Anne caught Henry’s eye, in 1525 or early 1526, no one expected the affair to last, or the world to change as a result. But Anne was an unusual woman, and her perseverance was the catalyst for a religious and political revolution, joining in unstable union the insurrectionary energies of evangelical reform and the imperial aspirations of the English crown.

Anne was not in any strict sense of the term a ‘Lutheran’. But her imagination was enthralled by visions of Christian renewal that owed little to the clerical-humanist agenda of a Warham or Fisher. She was brought up at the French court, where she went in 1514 as part of the retinue accompanying Henry’s sister Mary on her journey to wed the ageing Louis XII. Here, amidst shows of courtly dalliance – and the serial adulterizing of Louis’ successor, Francis I – was a mood of moral seriousness and an impulse for reform, of which Francis’s sister, Marguerite of Angoulême, was a significant patron. The moving force was Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, humanist, biblical scholar, friend – and occasional critic – of Erasmus. Lefèvre was scarcely the French Martin Luther. Like Erasmus, he remained within the Church, and gave priority to the cultivation of piety. But he was a sharp critic of clerical abuses, and a passionate advocate of vernacular scripture. Lefèvre’s 1512 commentary on the Letters of St Paul advocated a position on justification, which, in its denigration of human effort and emphasis on the free grace of God, fell only slightly short of Luther’s own.2

Anne came home in 1521 marked with the stamp of French ‘evangelical’ reformism. Her chaplain would later recall Anne ‘exercising herself continually in reading the French bible and other French books of like effect’, while a Protestant gentlewoman remembered her merchant father telling her that in his youth Anne commissioned him to get for her ‘gospels and epistles written in parchment in French together with the Psalms’. The strength of the French connection was recognized by Anne’s brother George, who personally translated as a gift for his sister two volumes of Lefèvre’s biblical commentaries.³

It was not a shared interest in biblical commentaries that caused Henry to fall madly and doggedly in love. Anne was skilled at dancing and playing the lute, vivacious, quick-witted, unconventionally beautiful; she had the knack of drawing attention to herself. Yet biblical commentary would soon be the constant companion to their courtship.

Whether Henry’s desire for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon preceded, or proceeded from, his attraction to Anne will never be certainly known. Most likely, the growing infatuation crystallized doubts Henry already entertained about the status of his marriage. It was reported in 1532 that he discussed the question of its legality with his confessor, John Longland, ‘some nine or ten years ago’.⁴ By the spring of 1527, those doubts had hardened into an unshakeable conviction that Catherine was not his lawful wife. Henry wanted an annulment – a formal and legal declaration of the marriage’s invalidity. Yet the word contemporaries used, divorce, captures better the legal and emotional turmoil. What Henry referred to in intimate love letters as ‘Our Matter’, and others euphemistically called ‘the King’s Great Matter’, would dominate official policy-making for the next six years, and change the lives of every one of the King’s subjects.

Henry married Catherine, daughter of the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, in the year of his accession, 1509. Doing so required formal permission from the Pope. Catherine had been married for just under five months to Henry’s elder brother Arthur, prior to his premature death in April 1502. Henry and Catherine were thus related in the first degree of affinity, and the marriage required a dispensation, which Julius II duly supplied in 1503, while negotiations between England and Spain rumbled on. This was not meddlesome papal interference, but a favour to the monarchs concerned. The bull of dispensation candidly admitted that maintenance of their alliance was a compelling argument in favour of permission.

For a dozen and more years, the marriage was, as far as we can tell, a contented one. Yet, among a succession of miscarriages and stillbirths, it produced only one living child: a daughter, Mary, born in 1516. By 1525, the pregnancies had come to an end. Catherine was forty, six years her husband’s senior, and the prettiness of youth was faded. The King’s taking of mistresses, and perhaps also his adoption around this time of a beard, which Catherine supposedly disliked, suggests a growing physical estrangement.5

A male heir mattered. Violent contentions over the succession were still well within living memory, and Henry did not know the ‘Wars of the Roses’ were finally over. On the eve of invading France in 1513, he executed a potential Yorkist rival, Edmund de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, a nephew of Edward IV. Edmund’s exiled younger brother, Richard, went on to spend a decade and more intriguing with the French. Henry’s relief was palpable – and the public celebrations lavish – when Richard was killed in the defeat of the French army at Pavia in Italy in February 1525. Richard de la Pole was the last Yorkist openly asserting a superior claim. But there were plenty of English noblemen with Yorkist blood in their veins. The later Plantagenets, unlike the Tudors, were effortlessly fecund. Dynastic anxieties were a factor in a great cause célèbre of 1521, the trial and execution for treason of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, a descendant of Edward III, who carelessly flaunted his royal ancestry.

And what of Mary? Her grandmother, Isabella of Castile, was a formidable Queen Regnant in her own right. Catherine likely saw no reason why her own daughter should not rule in due course. In 1523 she invited to England the most illustrious of Spanish humanists, Juan Luis Vives, who recommended a programme of scriptural and classical reading suitable for a future sovereign. Henry, meanwhile, hedged his bets. In 1525, a new Council was established for the governance of Wales, and Mary was despatched to Ludlow as its nominal head. Both her uncle Arthur and a great-uncle (Edward IV’s son Prince Edward), served in similar capacities as part of their (abortive) preparations for kingship. But in the same year, Henry pointedly invested Henry Fitzroy with the double dukedom of Richmond and Somerset – titles with symbolic Lancastrian associations – and sent him to Yorkshire as titular head of a revived Council in the North.⁶

No illegitimate son had succeeded to the English throne since William the Bastard bloodily imposed himself in 1066. The precedents for female rule were scarcely more encouraging. Henry I’s daughter, Matilda, was named successor by her father in the early twelfth century. But the arrangement was rejected by significant sections of the aristocracy, and precipitated a twenty-year civil war. Henry VIII wanted – needed – a son born in wedlock. Catherine could not give him one; Anne, perhaps, would.

It is impossible, however, to understand what happened next if we suppose Henry was motivated solely by pragmatic calculations about the succession, or was cynically seeking nothing more than a tint of legality to daub over his desire for Anne Boleyn. The King’s actions only make sense in light of his protestations of being truly, utterly convinced his marriage was unlawful, an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. Why else would God punish him by withholding the son his rank and piety had earned? Henry’s ‘scruple of conscience’ was self-serving and self-pitying. But it was not phoney. There would be opportunities for fudge and compromise, but Henry would ultimately reject all of them, refusing to waver from his conviction that the marriage was invalid. No pope should ever have allowed it. At the heart of the matter was the authority of the bible.

Leviticus and the Legates

The marriage restrictions of the medieval Church (see p. 71) were rooted in the taboos of the ancient Hebraic world. The Book of Leviticus, Chapter 18, laid out a series of forbidden relationships: with father, mother, sister, brother, step-mother, half-brother, grandchild, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law. Some theologians believed all the permutations to be unbreakable prohibitions under divine law. Others inferred that only directly vertical unions (parent–child–grandchild) were inimical to God’s law of nature, other proscriptions being part of the ceremonial law of Moses, from which popes could legitimately dispense. Several late medieval kings and noblemen were indeed permitted to wed sisters-in-law.7

The scriptural texts were nonetheless eye-catching: ‘Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife: it is thy brother’s nakedness’ (Lev. 18:16). A later verse (Lev. 20:21) added: ‘And if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.’ In these passages, Henry saw his own situation laid painfully bare. In marrying Catherine, he blatantly broke the law of God, and had paid for it in a doleful tariff of dead infants.

Others read the matter differently, noting Henry was not, in fact, childless. There was also a strong body of opinion – represented in England by John Fisher – that believed prohibitions on sleeping with a brother’s wife applied only while the brother was alive. Inconveniently for Henry, another Old Testament verse (Deut. 25:5) seemingly qualified the Levitical prohibition, commanding a man to take to wife his deceased brother’s widow, if there had been no child.

A further complication was the actual status of Catherine and Arthur’s marriage. Catherine herself protested it had never been consummated. During negotiations between Henry VII and Ferdinand over the remarriage to Prince Henry, the Spanish and English took different views of this question, with Ferdinand and Isabella protesting vehemently to Julius II when it seemed the bull of dispensation would confirm that Catherine and Arthur had slept together. The final version stated the marriage was forsan consummatum (‘perhaps consummated’).

This mattered, because if Catherine and Arthur – a nervously inexperienced teenage couple – did not actually have sex, then Henry and Catherine were not after all related in the first degree of affinity, which coitus created. They were widely believed to be, so there was an impediment of ‘public honesty’ to overcome. The question of whether the 1503 bull adequately covered public honesty, or whether Julius II carelessly issued the wrong sort of dispensation, was something for lawyers to get their teeth into.

But Henry never showed much enthusiasm for squeezing through this loophole in the law. The King stuck rigidly to his conviction that his marriage was nullified by the unambiguous Word of God. Henry’s confrontation with the Pope is often characterized as an ‘act of state’, devoid of meaningful spiritual content. On the contrary, it was a confrontation created by a fully primed religious conscience, and its weapon of choice was the principle of sola scriptura.

In May 1527, the King’s conscience broke cover. Anne appeared in public with Henry for the first time, at a Greenwich reception for the French ambassador. Around the same time, Wolsey was taken aside and told of the King’s ‘scruple’. On 17 May, the cardinal opened a private legatine court in his house at Westminster, and summoned Henry to appear. What Wolsey did not know was that Henry was seeking an annulment with the intention of marrying Anne. For years the spider at the centre of the web of government, the cardinal was being left out of loops spun by his rivals, principally the Boleyns themselves – Anne, her father, Sir Thomas, and brother, George.

While Wolsey chewed over the prospects for finding a technical defect in the dispensation, Henry secretly sent an envoy to seek a new dispensation in Rome, allowing him to remarry if his first marriage were annulled, and to someone related to him in the first degree of affinity. An irony of this sordid entanglement was that – owing to sexual relations with her sister – Henry was ‘related’ to Anne as he was to Catherine, though without the direct Levitical prohibition. Henry’s impatience was a tactical blunder: he revealed at an early stage how his conscientious ‘scruple’ was intimately linked to the prospects of Mistress Boleyn, and thus damaged its moral force.8

There was, as yet, little suggestion any of this might involve repudiation of papal authority. The strategy was to galvanize domestic support, and persuade the current pope, Clement VII, to pass favourable and definitive sentence, or allow Wolsey to do so. First step – in a humanistic show of concern with textual meaning and impartial search for truth – was to invite scholars to investigate the rights and wrongs. Wolsey informed Henry in July 1527 that he had ‘sworn certain learned men in the law, to write their minds in that matter’. In the meantime, someone briefed the Queen. She took it, as Wolsey understatedly reported, ‘displeasantly’, and blamed the cardinal for her predicament.9 Catherine had no intention of going quietly.

Ostensibly at least, the King was seeking opinions, intending nothing but ‘the searching and trying out of the truth’. From the outset, those opinions would be contradictory, producing divisions at the heart of English humanism. Wolsey discussed the matter with Fisher in the summer of 1527, and found him unconvinced that the impediment was de jure divino (of divine law). Fisher soon set his thoughts on paper, the first of several treatises on the divorce. Deuteronomy was the key: how could God have commanded, in any circumstances, an act repugnant to his own natural law?

The answer Henry wanted came from a friend and protégé of Fisher, Robert Wakefield, fellow of St John’s, and Cambridge’s first official Lecturer in Hebrew. In a treatise prefaced by a letter from the King himself, Wakefield argued that because Deuteronomy did not use the explicitly sexual phraseology of Leviticus, it must refer only to unconsummated marriages, and so did not contradict the natural law prohibition. Wakefield also supplied the welcome argument that while the Latin bible referred to incestuous marriages to sisters-in-law as being without children, the Hebrew specified an absence of ‘sons’. The jury remains out on the correctness of this translation. But it was a decidedly convenient application of the Erasmian technique of critiquing the Vulgate by philological comparison with the original languages, a signal of the King’s commitment to truth, not custom and tradition.¹⁰

The fraternity of English clerical humanism presented a united front to the threat of Lutheran heresy in the early 1520s, but splintered under the pressure of the King’s Great Matter. Its godfather, John Fisher, remained unwaveringly opposed, despite the daunting experience, in the Long Gallery at Westminster, of an interview with the King, flanked by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk. Fisher secured Wakefield’s dismissal as Hebrew lecturer at St John’s, and the appointment of a replacement, Ralph Baines, who shared his loyalty to the Queen. Warham, Tunstall, Vives and Bishop Clerk of Bath and Wells were unpersuaded of the merits of Henry’s case in morality or law. But other scholars were carefully positioning for royal favour. John Stokesley helped enlist Wakefield to the campaign, and Wolsey’s secretaries, Edward Foxe and Stephen Gardiner, were similarly active in canvassing support.¹¹

Over the course of 1527, the people whose opinion mattered were put on the spot. In October, Thomas More, light of learning and avuncular friend of the King, walked with Henry in the gallery at Hampton Court. Henry broke off their conversation to explain how his marriage was discovered to be ‘not only against the positive laws of the Church and the written law of God, but also in such wise against the law of nature, that it could in no wise be dispensable by the Church’. More was aware of the arguments about the sufficiency of the dispensation. But this was his first intimation of the unbending fundamentalism of the King’s intended path. Henry, the pupil instructing the master, laid a bible open before More and read out the portentous words of Leviticus. What did Sir Thomas think? The answer was a disappointment. Nevertheless, Henry accepted More’s demurs ‘benignly’, though he commanded him to read a book ‘that then was making for that matter’.12

More was given a pass, for now. He was not present when Henry and Wolsey assembled a group of bishops and legal experts at Hampton Court in November, to receive and revise the book setting out the King’s case. Perhaps due to Wolsey’s influence, the tone was more moderate than that of Wakefield’s tract, and there was more attention to possible defects in the original dispensation. Like the 1521 Assertio, the 1527 text was a royal composition heavily edited by advisors, and designed to impress with its sweeping erudition and reflective piety. In March 1528, ambassadors presented a copy to Clement VII.¹³

If the King’s case hinged on the open-mindedness of the Pope, it was in deep trouble from the start. Clement’s hands were, almost literally, tied. The legatine trial of May 1527 took place under a dreadful shadow. On 6 May, unpaid and ill-disciplined imperial soldiers – many of them German Lutheran mercenaries – sacked Rome, in an orgy of unrestrained pillage, rape and murder. For the rest of the year the city was in turmoil, with the Pope holed up in the Castel Sant’ Angelo as a virtual prisoner of Charles V, the son of Catherine of Aragon’s sister, Joanna of Castile. For Charles, Henry’s intended repudiation of his aunt was both a personal slight and an alarming lurch of policy towards France. As French and imperial armies pecked and scratched in the military cock-pit of Italy, a positive response from the papacy depended on freedom of manoeuvre purchased by French victory in the field.

In March 1528, with French arms in the ascendant, Foxe and Gardiner were despatched to Italy, to a run-down papal court-in-exile at Orvieto. Clement was a shrewd enough negotiator not to give the English exactly what they wanted: a formal papal document or ‘decretal commission’, allowing Wolsey to settle matters definitively in England. Instead, they received only a dispensation for Henry to marry Anne if his first marriage were dissolved, and a general commission for the case to be heard, without any guarantees it would not later be revoked to Rome. In June, Clement named a second legate-judge to sit alongside Wolsey: Lorenzo Campeggio, absentee bishop of Salisbury, and current English cardinal-protector in Rome. Arriving in late September 1528, he looked like a safe pair of hands.¹⁴

Frustration, however, followed in his wake. Campeggio was ill, then prevaricated about opening the trial. He wanted to explore two unlikely eventualities: reconciliation, and Catherine dissolving her marriage voluntarily by entering a nunnery. Catherine herself did her best to disrupt proceedings. In October 1528 she produced the ‘Spanish Brief’. This rabbit-from-a-hat was an alternative version of Julius II’s dispensation, preserved at the Spanish court, with small but significant differences. Because the terms of Wolsey and Campeggio’s commission referred specifically to the previously known bull, it had the potential to scupper Henry’s whole case. The King exploded in fury. Meanwhile, in Italy, the tide of French arms began to recede.15

Henry was also realizing that while he could flatter, bribe and browbeat churchmen and scholars, he could not so easily control what the people as a whole thought about a now open secret: that he intended to cast the Queen aside. In November 1528, the Spanish ambassador reported that as Henry and Catherine passed through a gallery from the royal residence at Bridewell to the next-door Dominican convent, ‘the Queen was so warmly greeted by immense crowds of people, who publicly wished her victory over her enemies … that the King ordered that nobody should be again admitted to the place’. A London chronicler, sympathetic to Henry, admitted frankly that ‘women and other that favoured the Queen’ spread the rumour Henry sent for the legate because he ‘would for his own pleasure have another wife’, and that anyone who spoke against the marriage ‘was of the common people abhorred and reproved’.

News management was required: Henry summoned nobles, councillors, judges, mayor and aldermen to the Great Hall at Bridewell to learn ‘our true meaning’, which they should then ‘declare to our subjects’. It was King Francis, Henry informed them, wishing to marry his son to the Princess Mary, who first sought reassurances about her legitimacy. Henry’s bishops and theologians then persuaded him that he sinned mortally in his marriage. ‘Think you, my lords,’ he asked with shimmering pathos, ‘these words touch not my body and soul; think you these doings do not daily and hourly trouble my conscience and vex my spirits?’ If the matter were not settled, people could expect ‘mischief and manslaughter’ of the sort that in years past nearly destroyed the realm. There was nothing Henry wanted more than to be reassured his marriage was valid: the Queen was a lady ‘of most gentleness, of most humility and buxomness’. All being equal, ‘I would surely choose her above all other women’. Henry was a powerful and persuasive orator, but his audience was left troubled and divided: ‘Every man spake as his heart served him.’¹⁶

The King’s speech made no mention of Anne Boleyn. Yet at the start of 1529, Campeggio’s letters to Rome distastefully noted how Henry ‘caresses her openly and in public as if she were his wife’. Anne herself, so the Spanish ambassador observed, had begun to suspect Wolsey was sabotaging the divorce campaign, ‘from fear of losing his power the moment she becomes Queen’. She had formed an alliance with the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk to bring about the cardinal’s ruin, and Wolsey was ‘no longer received at court as graciously as before’.¹⁷

English diplomacy adopted a Boleyn-backed strategy of intimidation. At the end of 1528, a new envoy was sent to Clement VII: Anne’s bluntly spoken cousin, Francis Bryan, nicknamed ‘the vicar of Hell’. He was to impress upon the Pope that, much as the King loved him, if he continued to prevaricate, it would so alienate Henry ‘that he, with many other princes, his friends, with their nobles and realms, will withdraw their devotion and obedience from his Holiness and the See’.

In 1511, Henry had condemned Louis XII’s defiance of Julius II as an impious laceration of the seamless robe of Christ; now he openly threatened schism. Another Boleyn policy was to present the Pope with a monster petition from all the leading men of the kingdom. Ambassador Mendoza scoffed that hardly anyone could be prevailed upon to sign it. But that would change. Smart rats were starting to leave Wolsey’s leaking ship. Early in 1529, Stephen Gardiner wrote to Anne promising his unswerving devotion. ‘I do trust in God,’ she replied, ‘you shall not repent it.’18

The legatine court finally got under way on 30 May 1529, with the legates summoning Henry and Catherine to appear before them at Blackfriars on 18 June. The trial was brief, and – from Henry and Wolsey’s viewpoint – an unmitigated disaster. It was Catherine’s finest hour. Against expectations, she appeared in person on the opening day to condemn the proceedings and appeal publicly to Rome. A few days later, both King and Queen were present.

Henry, seated in state, declared his well-rehearsed scruple of conscience. Catherine, on her knees, and in heavily accented English, addressed her husband directly: ‘Twenty years I have been your true wife (or more), and by me ye have had divers children, although it hath pleased God to call them out of the world.’ She swore, with God as her judge, that the marriage to Arthur was unconsummated, reminded everyone that learned men of good judgement, in England and Spain, reckoned the match lawful, lamented her lack of ‘indifferent counsel’, and declared an intention of acting as ‘my friends in Spain will advise me’. She then rose and departed, the calls of the crier – ‘Catherine Queen of England, come into the court’ – ringing ineffectually in her ears.¹⁹

If Catherine had said her final words, her supporters had not. Her defence was conducted by Fisher, assisted by Robert Ridley and Henry Standish, two critics of Erasmus standing with one of his firmest English friends. Fisher had been the trusted spiritual advisor to Henry VIII’s mother, the theological mainstay of the King’s campaign against Luther, a living pledge of royal commitment to humanist piety and educational reform. Now he was openly at war with his master. In a resounding speech, he declared himself, like John the Baptist, ready to lay down his life for the sanctity of marriage. This cast Henry in the role of Herod, condemned by the Baptist for unlawfully divorcing one wife and taking another. Stephen Gardiner, in the King’s name, accused Fisher of arrogance and disloyalty.²⁰

The trial limped along. Witnesses supplied lurid testimony concerning consummation of the marriage to Arthur. Sir Anthony Willoughby, former household servant of the prince, recalled him emerging from his bedchamber demanding a thirst-quenching cup of ale, ‘for I have been this night in the midst of Spain’. Proceedings were soon, however, tied up in technicalities. The King and Wolsey did what they could to keep the Pope in the dark. But Catherine’s English supporters ensured Clement was fully aware of her formal appeal to Rome. In late June 1529, a crushing French defeat at the battle of Landriano in Lombardy increased the pressure on a stressed and vacillating pontiff.

By the middle of July Clement made the decision to revoke the case to the Roman curia. Even before this news arrived, Campeggio insisted on adjourning until the end of the summer. Again, the King was furious, and sent Norfolk and Suffolk to protest. ‘By the mass,’ spluttered the latter, ‘now I see that the old said saw [proverb] is true, that there was never legate nor cardinal that did good in England!’21 It was – in retrospect – a pivotal moment. If the Pope would not play by Henry’s rules, then the nature of the game would have to change.

Praemunire and Parliament

On 9 August 1529, the King sent out writs for a Parliament, the first since 1523. The French ambassador expected a demonstration of ‘absolute power, in default of justice being administered by the Pope in this divorce’.²² But it is unlikely there was as yet any thought of formally turning to Parliament to settle the Great Matter. Rather, its summoning was a continuation of the petitioning campaign begun at the end of 1528 – a measure to rally the support of the nation, and ramp up the pressure on the Pope.

After the ignominious failure of his divorce strategy, Wolsey’s enemies circled. Anne poisoned the King’s ear against him, but Wolsey, after years of lording it over the nobility, had critics aplenty. ‘When the nobles and prelates perceived that the King’s favour was from the Cardinal sore minished,’ wrote Edward Hall, ‘every man of the King’s council began to lay to him such offences as they knew by him.’ A book of thirty-four charges was presented to the King before he set off on summer progress. And prior to this, at the start of July, Lord Darcy drafted a memorandum of matters for Parliament. Among the proposals: ‘that never legate nor cardinal be in England’. Eustace Chapuys, the shrewd and sophisticated Savoyard lawyer just arrived in England in September 1529 as new imperial and Spanish ambassador, heard various theories why Parliament was convening. Some believed it was to pass an act ‘forbidding any more papal legates being admitted into the kingdom’.²³

Wolsey’s fall was not immediate. But his humiliation over the Blackfriars trial was compounded by a failure to maintain English interests in his greatest area of expertise: foreign policy. While Wolsey was distracted by the proceedings of the legatine court, the French and Imperialists were edging towards an understanding. The Treaty of Cambrai (5 August 1529) temporarily reconciled Henry’s French ally with his imperial rival, and strengthened papal dependence on the Emperor. English interests were embarrassingly sidelined; the cardinal had to go.24

In autumn 1529, the talk was of parliamentary attainder, a declaration of treason demanding Wolsey’s head. In the end, the King chose another path: on 9 October Wolsey was indicted in King’s Bench on a charge of praemunire, specifically for obtaining from Rome the papal bulls making him a legate. On 30 October, he was found guilty, and all goods and possessions declared forfeit to the crown.²⁵ If anyone felt it unreasonable of Henry to prosecute a servant for exercising forms of authority the King himself laboured to obtain for him, they took care not to say so.

Wolsey prepared for a novel experience: to behave like a bishop and pastor of souls. He made plans to travel to the archdiocese of York, held since 1514, but never seen. Some of his followers – like Gardiner – had already deserted. But others remained loyal and grief-stricken. On 1 November, at Wolsey’s house at Esher, his gentleman usher George Cavendish came across another of the cardinal’s servants, the London lawyer Thomas Cromwell, seated by a window in the great hall, his eyes filled with tears, praying the matins of Our Lady from a Book of Hours.

Cromwell feared he was ‘like to lose all that I have travailed for all the days of my life, for doing of my master true and diligent service’. He was associated with the unpopular policy of culling small monasteries to endow Oxford and Ipswich colleges. Darcy’s draft indictment wanted Parliament to investigate ‘whether the putting down of all the abbeys be lawful and good’. Cromwell was also bitter that Wolsey’s ‘idle chaplains’ departed with profitable spiritual preferments, while lay servants were left with nothing.

Anticlericalism was far from the converse of piety (see pp. 64–5), though the sight of Cromwell with a traditional Catholic prayer book was one that Cavendish, recalling the scene years later, thought ‘had since been a strange sight’. A man of action not contemplation, Cromwell told Cavendish he intended to head for the court ‘where I will either make or mar’. Shortly after, through the patronage of Wolsey’s Winchester steward, he secured election to Parliament as member for Taunton.²⁶

The Parliament opened on 3 November. Wolsey’s successor as Lord Chancellor opened proceedings with an eloquent oration explaining how the King, a good shepherd of his flock, summoned Parliament to make necessary laws, and to tackle ‘divers new enormities’ – an oblique reference to heresy. The King had also, in his wisdom, spied out a rotten ‘great wether’ (castrated ram), which sought to deceive him with ‘fraudulent juggling’.²⁷

This anti-eulogy for Wolsey was given by Thomas More. The appointment of a known opponent of the divorce to the highest office of state was, all things considered, a surprising development. The chancellorship was customarily given to a leading churchman. Archbishop Warham had held the office previously, but was unwilling to serve again. Tunstall was long considered a likely successor to Wolsey, but these were unusual times. According to Hall, the councillors tasked with discussing names all understood that the successful candidate was to be ‘no man of the spirituality’. Bishops, the Pope’s men in England, were to be put in their place. Another office conventionally held by a prelate, Lord Keepership of the Privy Seal, was taken from Tunstall in January 1530 and given to Anne Boleyn’s father, now elevated to the earldom of Wiltshire. Suffolk was gung-ho to take the chancellorship, but Norfolk vetoed him.28

More was the compromise candidate, admirably qualified for the legal aspects, and a pair of clean hands untainted by association with Wolsey’s regime. Henry was delighted at the nomination. It was a sign of his irrepressible confidence about prospects for the divorce that he was prepared to accept a man unwilling to play any part in bringing it about. More was reluctant, but acquiesced to a direct royal command. There was hard but necessary work ahead; a rising tide of heresy a determined chancellor might still be able to stem.

The session of Parliament sitting between November and December 1529 had business of various kinds to conduct. But it would be remembered – in the words of a 1542 chronicle – as ‘a Parliament for the enormities of the clergy’. Chapuys thought its chief business was ‘to legislate against all classes of the clergy’, and a monastic chronicler in Suffolk characterized proceedings as a ‘vehement schism between the clergy and the laypeople’.²⁹ Edward Hall – like Cromwell, a carpet-bagging London lawyer elected to Parliament as burgess for a West Country town – recalled that as soon as the Commons assembled, ‘they began to commune of their griefs wherewith the spirituality had before time grievously oppressed them’.

The list of oppressions included excessive fines for probate of wills, as well as ‘extreme exaction’ in taking of mortuaries – a particularly sore point among Londoners harbouring memories of the Hunne case. There were complaints about abbots and priors keeping tanning houses, and undercutting lay merchants by dealing in cloth; about priests monopolizing tenancies of monastic farms and granges, and overcharging for agricultural products; and about pluralism and non-residence. The poor were being deprived of charity, and parishioners were starved of ‘preaching, and true instruction of God’s Word’.³⁰

This haphazard compendium of anticlerical grievances hardly amounted to a full-frontal assault on the institution of the Church. A draft commons petition to the King did point to the anomaly of Lords Spiritual having a say in making of laws in Parliament, while ‘they with the clergy in their Convocation make laws and ordinances whereby, without your royal assent, or the assent of any your lay subjects, they bind your said lay subjects’. But the actual legislative measures were relatively modest. An act against pluralism banned clergy from holding more than one benefice worth £8 a year, and insisted on residence for ten months annually. Priests were also banned from seeking papal dispensations for non-residence, a small snip at the web of ties between the English Church and Rome. Two other statutes retained the fees for probate and mortuaries, but regulated them on a sliding scale according to income.

Wolsey was the lightning rod for lay indignation. A joint committee of commons and lords produced an impressive list of forty-four charges – from usurping the jurisdiction of the bishops to exposing Henry to ‘the foul and contagious disease of the great pox’. There was an anti-Wolseyan flavour to the three statutes. Excessive fees were associated with his legatine court, and his ecclesiastical career was pluralism personified. But – with Thomas Cromwell working discreetly for his old master’s rehabilitation – Henry was for now disinclined to further action.31

Parliamentary anticlericalism, however, went beyond anti-cardinalism. Issues from 1512–15 resurfaced, as once again the spectre of heresy haunted the spaces between lay and ecclesiastical notions of legitimate authority, due process and necessary reform. In closing his list of largely fiscal grievances, Edward Hall remarked that ‘these things before this time might in no wise be touched nor yet talked of by no man, except he would be made a heretic’. It was an old suspicion, voiced during the Hunne case, and now revived – at a time when ‘real’ heresy stalked the land, the church tribunals in active pursuit. A draft bill proposed procedural changes to protect the rights of the accused, and complained that clergy were arresting ‘under the colour and name of heresy’ all who ‘preach, speak or reason against their detestable and shameful living’.³²

If this was the fear, churchmen in Parliament did little to assuage it. The probate bill faced impassioned opposition, and accusations that laymen were dead-set to undermine the liberties and authority of the Church. Fisher led the counter-charge in the Lords, condemning hypocritical attempts to criticize the behaviour of priests so as ‘to bring them into contempt and hatred of the laity’. He was likely thinking of Simon Fish’s explosive pamphlet, recently scattered in the London streets. Laymen, Fisher stiffly reminded his audience, ‘have no authority to correct’ the clergy – the very point Fish bitterly emphasized. England was facing the fate of Bohemia or Germany, lands ruined by the heresies of Hus and Luther. And all this, Fisher suggested, ‘ariseth from lack of faith only’.

It was a serious provocation, recalling Bishop Fitzjames’s notorious remark in 1515 that any London jury would convict his official for Hunne’s murder because they were ‘so set upon the favour of heresy’. In the Lords, Norfolk commented ruefully that the greatest clerks were not always the wisest men. The Commons reacted with fury to the implication that ‘they were infidels and no Christians, as ill as Turks or Saracens’. Speaker Thomas Audley and a delegation of MPs were sent to present a ‘grievous complaint’ to the King. Henry summoned Fisher, who, according to which of two sixteenth-century accounts we choose to believe, robustly ‘spake his mind in defence and right of the Church’, or limply explained he meant the Bohemians, not members of the Commons, acted from lack of faith. Either way, the bishop’s explanation ‘pleased the Commons nothing at all’.33

Heresy and the Court

Henry’s desire for a divorce and the evangelical yearning for sweeping reform of the Church were separate matters, connected only by coincidence in time. There was no reason why the paths should have crossed. But they did. If either demand had arisen isolated from the other, outcomes would have been different. Yet from the very start of life, the English Reformation as an ‘act of state’, and the English Reformation as a spiritual movement, were not remote and distant cousins; they were conjoined twins, dependent, sometimes resentfully, one upon the other.

Already, at Easter 1529, Campeggio discovered that ‘certain Lutheran books, in English, of an evil sort, have been circulated in the King’s court’. He tried to persuade Henry that the call in one of these books for disendowment of the Church was ‘the devil dressed in angels’ clothing’. Henry replied coolly that Lutherans believed churchmen sought possessions for their own advantage, lived wicked lives and ‘erred in many things from divine law’. But Campeggio need not worry: he ‘had been and always would remain a good Christian’.³⁴

Good Christian or no, Henry’s flirtations with the language of radical reform became more flagrant over the course of 1529. At a dinner at the end of November, Chapuys was subjected to a lecture about ‘vain and superfluous ceremonies’ in Rome, and the papacy’s responsibility for numerous wars, discords and heresies. If Luther had simply castigated vices and errors of the clergy, rather than attacking the sacraments, Henry said he would have written for rather than against him. There was heresy mixed up in his books, but also ‘many truths he had brought to light’. The King was set upon ‘the reformation of the Church in his dominions’, introducing reforms and eliminating scandal ‘little by little’. When Chapuys saw him a week later, Henry claimed credit for the recent parliamentary statutes. The ambassador did not believe this concern for clerical standards was genuine or disinterested. He heard from the Queen that when she and Henry dined together on 30 November he bluntly told her that if the Pope continued to ignore well-founded theological judgements that they were not man and wife, he ‘would denounce the Pope as a heretic, and marry whom he pleased’.35

Henry’s table-talk at this time was peppered with references to a corrupt and over-funded Church needing to be recalled to its gospel mission, and to the responsibility of popes for the past and present ills of Christendom – popes who were potential heretics rather than arbiters of truth. Who had the King been talking to, or what had he been reading?

We know, in part, the answer to those questions. According to John Foxe, Simon Fish arranged for a copy of his Supplication for the Beggars to be sent to Anne, who, after consulting with her brother George, put it into Henry’s hands. Foxe’s chronology is confused, but his informant was Fish’s widow, and the account looks sound in its essentials. Henry reportedly received her, and granted a petition for her husband’s safe conduct. When Fish returned from Antwerp, Henry ‘embraced him with loving countenance’, and took him on a hunting trip. He also instructed Chancellor More to leave Fish alone.³⁶

The Supplication might well be Campeggio’s ‘Lutheran book’. But the King’s new opinions resembled arguments found in a still more radical text. Shortly after its publication at Antwerp in October 1528, Anne Boleyn got hold of Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man, and began marking up passages to bring to Henry’s attention. In the interim, she lent the book to a lady-in-waiting, whose fiancé was caught poring over it by Richard Sampson, dean of the Chapel Royal. Anne hurried pre-emptively to the King and successfully demanded the return of the confiscated volume, which she then encouraged him to consult. Henry, seemingly, was delighted with what he found: ‘This is the book for me and all kings to read!’³⁷

Some refrains in Obedience were certainly music for royal ears. Tyndale adapted Luther’s concept of temporal and spiritual ‘regiments’ (spheres of authority) to argue that all claims of Pope, bishops and clergy to independent power and jurisdiction were bogus and unscriptural. Structures of law, financial demands, regulation of property must rest solely in the hands of the King, for ‘the King is in the room of God, and his law is God’s law’. As shock waves from the German Peasants’ War of 1525 continued to reverberate around Europe, Tyndale was anxious to refute allegations that the new theology was intrinsically subversive of authority. Attack, he decided, was the surest form of defence. It was the clergy who fomented rebellion and disobedience, acting as an autonomous order within the realm, and as agents for a foreign power outside it.

For centuries, Tyndale argued, popes intrigued to undermine and emasculate English rulers, resorting to violence when they could not get their way: papal lackeys murdered Richard II and Duke Humphrey of Gloucester (d. 1447), on account of their talent for spying out fake miracles. King John was no wicked tyrant, but a patriotic hero, excommunicated simply for performing ‘that office which God commandeth every king to do’. The clergy always sought to doctor the historical record. But they could not erase all traces of their treachery and duplicitousness: ‘read the Chronicles of England’.38

The fugitive Tyndale, ‘captain of our English heretics’ as More called him, was beginning to look like a potential royal asset. In November 1530, Wolsey lay dying at Leicester Abbey, and recalled how his final advice to the King was to ‘have a diligent eye to depress this new perverse sect of the Lutherans’.³⁹ Yet in the same month, Cromwell’s agent Stephen Vaughan departed for the continent with instructions to recruit Tyndale for the King’s cause. The pair met outside Antwerp, and Vaughan conveyed the offer of a royal pardon. Tyndale, however, did not feel safe returning to England, and would not supply the guarantees about future conduct that Henry demanded. He did, though, promise to stop writing books if the King would allow only ‘a bare text of the scripture [i.e. one without prologues and glosses] to be set forth among his people’.⁴⁰ Henry looked hard at this option in 1530 – the needs of the divorce made the idea of putting vernacular scripture, and the text of Leviticus 18, directly in front of the people a very tempting one. But in the end, he endorsed the clergy’s opinion that the times were too unsettled.

Evangelicals nonetheless saw grounds for optimism. In the wake of the 1530 proclamation pledging a future vernacular translation, Latimer petitioned the King to remain true to his promise. The clergy withheld scripture to forestall criticism of their avarice. They were using ‘means and craft’ to get around the restrictions of the 1529 Parliament. And rather than lose one penny of their endowments, they would incite ‘rebellion against the temporal power’.⁴¹ These were the right notes to strike with a frustrated and anticlerical king.

Within the royal orbit, there was freedom to say the previously unsayable. In March 1531, Chapuys reported the arrest by Archbishop Warham of a priest, ‘the finest and most learned preacher in England’. The cleric in question, the Cambridge scholar Edward Crome, refused to answer, on the grounds no secular lords were present at his trial, and he appealed to the King. In Henry’s presence, several bishops preached against Crome, but Henry noticed one of the charges was denying the Pope to be head of the Church. This, said the King, ‘ought not to be entered among the heresies, for it was quite certain and true’. Crome was let off with a token recantation. This, Chapuys believed, was at the behest of Anne Boleyn and her father, ‘who are more Lutheran than Luther himself’.

Tyndale remained in the relative safety of Antwerp, and so, for the moment, did Frith, despite attempts by Cromwell and Vaughan to persuade him he would find Henry ‘mercifully disposed’.⁴² In November 1531, Vaughan sent Cromwell a new work by Robert Barnes, a Supplication to Henry, justifying his conduct since 1525, and blaming his troubles on the machinations of the clergy. Henry was less interested in the force of Barnes’s arguments than in the quality of his connections. Since fleeing from England he had become intimate with Luther, Melanchthon and Bugenhagen. In the summer of 1531, a discrete approach was made for him to sound out Luther’s opinion on the divorce. It was not what the King of England wanted to hear. Luther ruled that Deuteronomy had precedence over the merely Jewish ceremonial law of Leviticus, and saw no way forward for Henry other than ‘the example of the patriarchs’ (bigamy).

Nonetheless, Luther’s letter was Barnes’s passport. Thomas More wrote with clenched pen at Christmas 1531 that Friar Barnes ‘is at this day come into the realm by safe conduct’. His agents kept close watch on Barnes, who took the precautions of shaving his beard and dressing like a merchant. Yet, with Cromwell’s protection, he moved relatively freely, visiting evangelicals in London, and surviving a robust verbal encounter with Stephen Gardiner, who took exception to Barnes’s account of the role he played in the ex-friar’s troubles in 1526. With a known Lutheran swanning around the capital, graced by an interview with the King himself, official heresy policy was observably out of joint. Chapuys noted that Barnes was much in the company of a Franciscan friar, ‘one of the chief writers in favour of the King’. The Franciscan was an Oxford-based Florentine, Nicholas de Burgo, and for two years he had been at the heart of a hopeful new strategy for cracking the divorce.43

The Determinations of the Universities

The strategy emerged from a chance meeting in early August 1529, in the aftermath of the Blackfriars trial. In the end it did little to advance Henry’s objective. But the meeting launched a career of immense significance. Stephen Gardiner and Edward Foxe were staying overnight in the Essex market town of Waltham Abbey, with a gentry family called Cressy. Another guest was a Cambridge scholar, Thomas Cranmer, a temporary refugee from the university following a seasonal outbreak of plague. Over dinner, conversation turned to the prospects for Henry’s divorce – the political classes talked of little else in the summer of 1529. Cranmer thought they were going about it the wrong way. There was ‘but one truth in it’. Rather than getting tangled up in legal arguments, the King should seek judgement from the experts in truth, theologians. Universities should be canvassed for their opinions. Foxe relayed the idea to Henry, who liked its blend of principle and pragmatism. Henry summoned Cranmer, and commended him to Anne Boleyn’s father, who hired him as a chaplain. It was the birth of a formidable political and religious partnership.⁴⁴

Cranmer joined an action force of royalist intellectuals, assembled in the late summer of 1529: Gardiner, Foxe, Nicholas de Burgo, Edward Lee and John Stokesley. Foxe, de Burgo and Cranmer visited More shortly after his appointment as chancellor, in a renewed effort to bring him round. But More was unmoveable, secure, so he thought, in a personal promise from the King that he need do only ‘as his conscience served him’. Stokesley, Lee and Foxe had no more luck the following year with Fisher – ‘self-willed and obstinate’, they reported.45

Other theologians proved only somewhat more amenable. Foxe and Gardiner were sent to Cambridge, where, on 9 March 1530, a carefully selected panel of scholars pronounced it ‘more probable’ that marriage to a deceased brother’s wife contravened divine law, though only if the marriage were consummated – an ambiguous rider in light of Catherine’s public protestations that it had not been. Foxe and de Burgo secured a similar declaration of lukewarm support in Oxford on 8 April. But while the theologians deliberated, pro-Catherine feelings in the town ran high. De Burgo and another delegate, John Longland, were pelted with stones by a mob of angry women.⁴⁶

Meanwhile, royal agents, copiously furnished with bribe money, solicited decisions from universities overseas. The biggest prize was Paris, with its prestigious theology faculty. In 1528, the theologians of the Sorbonne were deadlocked in an earlier debate on the King of England’s marriage. But with Francis I leaning towards Henry, an unequivocally favourable determination was secured in July 1530. Other French universities – Orleans, Toulouse, Bourges, and the Paris Law Faculty – delivered similar verdicts. The Law Faculty at Angers agreed, though the theologians – perhaps out of cussedness towards a rival faculty – upheld the papal view. In Italy, the universities of Bologna, Ferrara and Padua concluded, in vague terms, that popes did not have power to dispense for marriage to a widowed sister-in-law. At the same time, English scholars were busy combing through chronicles in European university and private libraries – even, cheekily, those of the Vatican itself – for helpful historical precedent.

It hardly amounted to overwhelming international endorsement. Discounting Oxford and Cambridge, fewer than ten universities provided support, and in a surge of around fifty printed works by European canonists and theologians, many staunchly opposed the divorce.⁴⁷ Still, it was enough to freight the ship for a new course.

On 12 June 1530, Henry summoned leading nobles and office-holders to revive the policy mooted in late 1528: a giant petition of English subjects to Pope Clement, based on ‘the opinion of the most famous universities and most learned men in Christendom’. The first draft, which raised the spectre of transferring allegiance to a General Council, was too radical for some, and an (unnamed) ‘chief favourite’ threw himself on his knees to warn Henry of the dangers of popular rebellion. But the redrafted petition, despatched to Rome in July, was only slightly less provocative, warning darkly that English people would ‘seek our remedy elsewhere’ if the Pope, ‘whom we justly call father’, proved determined to make them orphans. It was endorsed by no fewer than forty-four of the secular nobility, starting with Norfolk and Suffolk, along with twenty-two heads of religious houses. Only six bishops were apparently asked to sign: Archbishops Warham and Wolsey (in one of his last public acts), Longland (the King’s confessor), the aged Sherburne of Chichester, and the nonentities John Kite of Carlisle and Richard Rawlins of St David’s. On a key issue of spiritual judgement, the chief pastors of the English Church were decisively sidelined.

As far as Henry was concerned, authoritative theological and moral judgement on the divorce had now been declared, and he wrote to Clement announcing ‘we do separate from our cause the authority of the see apostolic’. This was not – yet – a complete withdrawal of obedience: Henry had no wish ‘further to impugn your authority, unless ye do compel us’.48

The time had come to lay the case before the public. As popular demonstrations in favour of Catherine had shown, the King needed to persuade as well as command. The determinations of seven foreign universities were presented to Parliament in the spring of 1531 by Chancellor More, who also had the disagreeable task of denying rumours that the King pursued the divorce ‘out of love for some lady, and not out of any scruple of conscience’. These Censurae academiarum (judgements of the academies) were published by the royal printer Thomas Berthelet, and in November appeared in Cranmer’s English translation as The Determinations of the Most Famous and Most Excellent Universities of Italy and France – the half-hearted endorsements of Oxford and Cambridge were quietly laid aside. The determinations themselves were brief and formulaic. But an accompanying treatise, jointly authored by Stokesley, Foxe, de Burgo, Gardiner and Cranmer, examined in detail the arguments over marriage to a brother’s widow, and the necessity of dissolving such marriages, whatever the Pope might say about it.⁴⁹

The Lion’s Strength

As the Censurae was prepared for the press in the last months of 1530, royal positions hardened. Ambassadors in Rome were told to impress upon the Pope not only that he had no legitimate jurisdiction in this case, but that it was the custom and privilege of England that no one could be cited to submit to judgement outside the realm. In England, Suffolk and Wiltshire harangued the nuncio: they ‘cared neither for Pope or Popes in this kingdom, not even if St. Peter should come to life again’. The King ‘was absolute both as Emperor and Pope in his own kingdom’. Writing to Clement in December, Henry avoided the language of empire, but asserted that the laws of England did not permit his case to be heard beyond the realm, and that church councils, and the great Saints Bernard and Cyprian, believed disputes should be settled in lands where they arose.

Touchy statements that kings of England recognized no superior but God, and that privileges, laws and customs of England forbad subjects to be cited out of the realm by papal summons – these were time-honoured assertions of prerogative; often dormant, but periodically activated via the laws of provisors and praemunire (see pp. 83–4). As More would later say to Cromwell, ‘If a lion knew his own strength, hard were it for any man to rule him.’50

But something novel was now at work. To claim that English kings enjoyed historically privileged exemption from external citation was one thing; it was another to suggest – as a universal principle – that causes must invariably be settled in whatever ecclesiastical province they originated. This was to begin to reimagine the very nature of the western Church, and the role within it of the bishop of Rome. As recently as 1526, Henry had castigated Luther as a ‘perpetual enemy to the Pope’, someone ‘to whose highness I well know how far the estate of a king is inferior’.⁵¹ If he knew it then, he did not know it now.

The divorce produced answers to questions Henry did not initially think to ask. The intellectuals tasked with finding persuasive arguments ranged widely and, consciously or not, they heeded Tyndale’s advice – ‘read the chronicles of England’. In the course of 1530–1, a wealth of evidence from history, scripture and Church Fathers was brought to bear on the marriage, and on the respective powers of king and popes. The main body of extracts was later catalogued with an inelegant title: Collectanea satis copiosa, ex sacris scriptis et authoribus Catholicis de regia et ecclesiastica potestate (Sufficiently large collections, from holy scripture and Catholic authors, concerning royal and ecclesiastical authority). Henry was shown the work in progress in the summer of 1530. He was thrilled with what he saw, and avidly annotated the collection with observations, headings and queries.⁵²

The Collectanea contained a startling revelation: centralized authority in the Church under the papacy was a recent and dubious development. In the early – and therefore, according to contemporary ways of thinking, authentic – Church, individual provinces had autonomous jurisdiction. Moreover, historical evidence ‘proved’ that in each realm of Christendom supreme spiritual as well as secular authority belonged rightfully to the king. Henry’s imagination was particularly caught by a letter from Pope Eleutherius to the second-century British king, Lucius I. (In fact, the letter was a thirteenth-century forgery; Lucius a mythical figure.) Lucius wrote to the Pope requesting Roman law for England, and was told he didn’t need it. As a Christian king he had the scriptures, and could legislate from them for both realm and clergy. Vicarius vero Dei estis in regno: ‘you are truly the vicar of Christ in your realm’.⁵³

In the summer of 1530, Henry discovered a startling truth about himself: he was rightfully supreme head of the Church in England. If he had not hitherto exercised that role to the full, it was because he and his predecessors had carelessly allowed their powers to devolve into the hands of a usurping foreign prelate. It was nothing less than a moment of conversion, and, like other conversions, it took root because it confirmed much of what Henry already knew and felt to be true.

Why Henry did not, in the autumn of 1530, openly annul his marriage and repudiate Rome’s authority is a good question. Most likely, and for all the bluster of his private and public pronouncements, he feared he would not be able to carry the political nation with him. Key advisors like Gardiner, and also Norfolk and other lords on the Council, favoured a continuation of the policy of bullying the Pope into submission. Another figure was rising in the King’s favour, and admitted to the Council about this time: Thomas Cromwell. His advice was to affirm the consent of the nation by acting through Parliament.

In advance of the new session, in October 1530, Henry summoned leading clergy and lawyers to a meeting to consider whether an Act of Parliament might empower the archbishop of Canterbury to pronounce on the divorce. The experts said they did not think so, and Henry angrily postponed the Parliament till February the following year. There was more anger a couple of weeks later when the nuncio delivered Clement’s negative answer to the monster petition. Using ‘very threatening language’, Henry pointed to a disastrous recent flooding of the Tiber as a clear sign of God’s displeasure. His cause, and the larger purposes of the Almighty, were fully in alignment.

Not all subjects saw it that way. The clergy, so vigorous in their defence of ‘liberties’ in the past, were not prepared to roll over in front of the latest lay assaults. Fisher was uncowed by his dressing-down after his speech in Parliament against the probate bill. With two other bishops, John Clerk of Bath and Wells and Nicholas West of Ely, he attempted to appeal to Rome against the anticlerical statutes passed in 1529, perhaps in response to a minor flood of lay-instigated exchequer prosecutions generated by them. Astonishingly, the bishops invited Clement simply to annul the statutes, as infringements on ecclesiastical jurisdiction. This was a frankly implausible prospect in 1530, or at any other time. But it underlines how seriously conscientious bishops took the notion that the reform of the Church pertained to them alone.54

Henry’s response, in September 1530, was a proclamation forbidding the importation of papal bulls prejudicial to the King’s prerogative, and the three were placed under arrest. Moves to prosecute clergymen under the praemunire statute began earlier in the summer, when fourteen were indicted by the attorney general in King’s Bench on charges of making compositions with Wolsey that abetted his legatine authority. In addition to Fisher, Clerk and West, five bishops were indicted: Blythe of Coventry and Lichfield, Sherburne of Chichester, Nykke of Norwich, Standish of St Asaph, and Skevington of Bangor. Standish was a strong partisan of Queen Catherine. Sherburne, Blythe and Nykke were disciplinarians, steeled in the use of church courts against heresy. Nykke in particular had a track record of opposing praemunire suits, and of voicing dark suspicions about the orthodoxy of those mounting them (see pp. 86–7) The targets were carefully singled out, but the individual cases were not pursued. Already in October Cromwell had ‘another way devised’: an unprecedented scheme to charge the entire English clergy with praemunire.55

In January 1531, as Parliament reconvened, Convocation assembled in parallel at Westminster Abbey.⁵⁶ Its priorities were well-established issues of clerical reform, lent urgency by the spread of Lutheran heresy. But it was to be made clear to the bishops that reformation of the Church’s procedures and personnel was no longer a matter just for them.

Proceedings began with a demand from the King that the clergy compensate him for the expenses of pursuing his suit at Rome, and for securing opinions from the foreign universities – all the fault of Wolsey and other conniving bishops. The amount of the demand – £100,000 – was as outrageous as the reasoning behind it. It was accompanied by threats that the whole clergy was fallen into peril of praemunire – no longer just for collusion with Wolsey’s legatine authority, but for operating a system of spiritual jurisdiction independent of royal justice. Convocation was taken aback, but not excessively intimidated. The clergy would pay, but in return wanted guarantees of immunity from prosecution, as well as clear and restricted definitions of the scope of praemunire, a modification of the statutes of 1529, and a general confirmation of the ancient rights and liberties of the Church.

It was never really about the money. Clerical assertiveness stirred Henry to greater assertiveness of his own. He now insisted the clergy acknowledge that God had committed to him the ‘cure of souls’ of his subjects, and recognize him as ‘sole protector and supreme head’ of the English Church. Through a week of urgent discussions, Henry’s demands were watered down. Royal cure of souls became a vague responsibility for souls committed to clerical oversight, and the clergy agreed to recognize Henry’s supreme headship ‘as far as the law of Christ allows’. Fisher was instrumental in getting Convocation to adopt this cleverly subversive qualification. In early March 1531, the clergy were pardoned by parliamentary statute for breaching the acts of provisors and praemunire, and the terms of the subsidy were agreed.

The clergy felt they had won a victory, but it was a limited and tactical one. The Boleyns and their allies, eager for unilateral action, felt the wind stirring in their sails. Anne’s brother George, now Lord Rochford, brought to Convocation a tract arguing that Henry’s supreme authority, ‘grounded on God’s Word, ought in no case to be restrained by any frustrate decrees of popish laws’. Anne was said to have reacted to the demand for supremacy with ‘such demonstrations of joy as if she had actually gained paradise’. Religious conservatives on the Council dutifully parroted the Collectanea line. In mid-January, Norfolk tried impressing Chapuys with a potted Arthurian history of Henry’s ‘right to empire’. The supposed clincher was an inscription copied from the seal or tomb of the great King Arthur himself – ‘Britanniae, Galliae, Germaniae, Daciae Imperator’. Chapuys had no idea who Norfolk was talking about: ‘I was sorry he was not also called Emperor of Asia.’57

In 1531 there was little sign of the English clergy collapsing in the face of royal demands. The Convocation of the Province of York accepted a similar pardon, but with a bold proviso that the King’s new title did not infringe the authority of the Holy Father. Tunstall wrote to the King explaining that temporal supremacy could in no wise extend to spiritual matters. There was protest too from the lower house of Southern Convocation. A document was sent to Rome, signed by eighteen delegates on behalf of the others. It trenchantly asserted that nothing they conceded was intended to weaken the laws and liberties of the Church, the unity of Christendom, or the authority of the Pope. The lead signatories were, predictably, charged with praemunire.⁵⁸

The early part of 1531 brought stalemate. Henry had in all likelihood now decisively shed his remaining attachment to Rome, and assumed in his own mind his God-given destiny as supreme head of an English ‘Empire’. Yet with resolution of the divorce ever the priority, policy proceeded fitfully. It was probably still something like the official line when, in January, Norfolk conceded to Chapuys that popes had jurisdiction over matters of heresy. Wolsey’s death at the end of the previous year created episcopal vacancies for members of the ‘think-tank’ – Edward Lee went to York, and Stephen Gardiner to Winchester. York was initially offered to Henry’s cousin, Reginald Pole, but he failed to give satisfactory assurances of support for the divorce. Both Lee and Gardiner were appointed in the time-honoured way: papal provision at the request of the King.⁵⁹ A final, irrevocable breach was not yet inevitable.

Raising the Stakes

On 23 February 1530, Thomas Hitton, a Norfolk priest, was burned to death at Maidstone in Kent. Hitton was a courier for the evangelical exiles. Letters were found sewn in his coat, after he was arrested in Gravesend on suspicion of pilfering washing drying on a hedge. In the course of interrogations before Archbishop Warham he held unrepentantly to various heretical opinions, including the Zwinglian (or Lollard) view that, after consecration in the mass, there was nothing ‘but only the very substance of material bread’.⁶⁰

An undistinguished man – though a brave one – Hitton was the first evangelical to be put to death for his beliefs, giving the lie to Thomas More’s taunt that heretics dared not stick to their opinions. They would scarcely admit it, but the brethren were perhaps secretly relieved. Martyrdom was uniquely potent as a gauge of truth, just as persecution was a sure indicator of the Antichrist. Soon after Hitton’s death, George Joye included his name as that of a saint and martyr in the calendar prefacing his Ortulus Anime (Garden of the Soul), a subversively familiar-looking vernacular version of a traditional Catholic primer.61

To Thomas More, Hitton was ‘the devil’s stinking martyr’. What particularly galled him was that to make room for this new ‘Saint Thomas’, Joye ejected from his calendar the name of the second-century Christian martyr St Polycarp.⁶² Sixteenth-century opinion bitterly contested the claims of true and false martyrdom. All agreed with the ancient dictum of St Augustine: what created a martyr was the rightness of the cause, not the manner of the death. But the spectacle of suffering might stiffen the resolve of the victim’s supporters just as much as demoralize or intimidate them. And it invariably heightened their hatred for those inflicting the punishments.

Between 23 February 1530 and 16 May 1532, when More stepped down as chancellor, at least six Englishmen – Hitton, Thomas Bilney, Richard Bayfield, John Tewkesbury, James Bainham and Thomas Benet – were burned as heretics.⁶³ Thomas Harding, Lollard turned quasi-Lutheran, went to the stake a fortnight later, and John Frith and his associate Andrew Hewet were burned at Smithfield the following summer. Even as the climate of relations between England and the Holy See was starting to freeze over, the temperature of persecution was – quite literally – rising.

Thomas More deserves much of the credit, or blame, for this. As chancellor, he harnessed the legal machinery of the state to the campaign against heresy, using the police powers of the Court of Star Chamber, and working closely with sympathetic bishops: Tunstall, and then Stokesley of London. The King was sidetracked and increasingly ill advised. But More, convinced of the spiritual and moral vacuity of heresy, believed the evangelicals could be defeated if bishops rose to the challenge, and dutiful laymen did their best to help. A pair of 1530 proclamations (likely drafted by More) stressed the King’s detestation of ‘malicious and wicked sects of heretics and Lollards’, and urged state officials to ‘give their whole power and diligence’ to destroying them. The proclamation of June 1530, hazily promising a future vernacular bible, more concretely banned Tyndale’s New and Old Testaments, his Wicked Mammon and Obedience, as well as Fish’s Sum of Scripture and Supplication. It ordered the immediate arrest of anyone possessing such ‘books in English tongue, printed beyond the seas’.⁶⁴

Through 1530–1, More increasingly put the squeeze on the book-runners, receiving information from a network of informers, and arresting and interrogating suspects, some of whom were detained in his house at Chelsea.⁶⁵ Names were given up. The authorities arrested a clutch of heretics in London in the latter part of 1530, and paraded them through the streets facing backwards on horseback, cloaks heavy with tacked-on New Testaments. Chapuys worried about the lenience of the sentence and complained that ‘where one spoke of them before, a hundred speak of them now’.⁶⁶

But More’s policies were securing results. He broke open a Bristol cell, headed by Richard Webbe. Rather than selling heretical books, its members were scattering them in the streets, and leaving them on doorsteps at night. ‘They would of their charity,’ scoffed More, ‘poison men for nothing.’ Webbe recanted. So – in a propaganda coup for the authorities – did William (Jerome) Barlow, who denounced his former confederates in a printed dialogue on the ‘Lutheran Factions’. Evangelicals suspected it was ghostwritten by More. The greatest success was the 1531 arrest of George Constantine, who supplied both operational secrets of the book-smuggling and names of those involved – Robert Necton, the book-binder John Birt, the monk Richard Bayfield. In London, the close working partnership of two old Erasmians, More and Stokesley – one an opponent and one a supporter of the divorce – generated dozens of abjurations.67

Some of those tangled in the net had been caught before; there were no second chances for relapsed heretics. Richard Bayfield, former Benedictine of Bury, was tried by Stokesley and burned at the end of November 1531. John Tewkesbury was a London haberdasher who recanted before Tunstall in 1529. According to Foxe, the example of Bayfield made him ‘return and constantly abide in the testimony of the truth’; More claimed Tewkesbury would have abjured all his heresies, ‘and have accused Tyndale too, if it might have saved his life’. Either way, he was burned at Smithfield on 20 December.⁶⁸

The fires of the early 1530s were beacons of evangelical resolve. Abjurations produced agonies of remorse that earlier Lollards do not seem to have felt. The lawyer James Bainham made himself conspicuous by marrying the widow of Simon Fish, and was arrested in late 1531. More and Stokesley worked hard to get him to recant, and after public penance at Paul’s Cross, he was released in February 1532. But within a month, his conscience got the better of him. Bainham went to ask forgiveness of an evangelical congregation meeting secretly in a warehouse in Bow Lane. The following Sunday, he stood up in the church of the Austin Friars, ‘the New Testament in his hand in English, and The Obedience of a Christian Man in his bosom’, to make a tear-filled public confession: he had denied God, and would not ‘feel such a hell again as he did feel, for all the world’s good’. At a second trial, Bainham denied purgatory and transubstantiation, and was condemned to burn. The Venetian ambassador recorded a huge crowd present at his execution in April 1532, and that ‘he died with the greatest fortitude’.⁶⁹

A corrupted conscience, and the compulsion to cleanse it with an open profession of faith, were the key ingredients of a more famous martyrdom. Since his abjuration in December 1527, and his return to Cambridge in 1529, Thomas Bilney had lived under a cloud of depression and remorse. Late one evening, sometime in 1531, he announced to friends his intention to ‘go up to Jerusalem’ – an echo of Christ’s words foretelling the passion. Norwich was Bilney’s Jerusalem. He preached there, in defiance of a prohibition, and delivered copies of Tyndale’s works to Katherine Manne, an anchoress attached to the Dominican priory, whom he had ‘converted to Christ’.70

Bilney was tried by Bishop Nykke’s chancellor, Thomas Pelles, convicted as a relapsed heretic and burned at the Lollards’ Pit just outside the city walls of Norwich on 19 August 1531. Everything about the case was murky and controversial. During the trial proceedings, Bilney played the same card as Edward Crome: direct appeal of his cause to the King. Pelles’s dismissal of the petition created disquiet among a citizenry with experience of the heavy-handed episcopal regime of Bishop Nykke. Worried lest he should have impeded the sentence, Edward Reed, mayor and MP for the city, collected witness statements with the intention of raising the matter in the next session of Parliament. In anticipation of a parliamentary inquiry, Pelles requested Chancellor More to launch a parallel investigation through Star Chamber. It emerged that Reed was reluctant to implement Pelles’s sentence: ‘Master Doctor, ye know that the King hath a new title given him by the clergy, and ye were at the granting of it, of what effect it is, I know not.’⁷¹

The other crux of investigation was whether Bilney made a formal admission of heresy and recanted at the stake. Opinion on this was divided, but there was no doubt that before his death he was judged worthy to receive the sacrament. Within months, More was insisting that Bilney died fully reconciled to the Catholic Church – a poke in the eye for Tyndale and his tawdry tally of martyrs.⁷²

Yet the perception, widespread in Norwich, that Bilney was at heart a sound Catholic, punished with unreasonable harshness, was fraught with danger for the bishops. Nykke paid a backhanded tribute to it when he heard of the preaching in Cambridge of Anne Boleyn’s protégé, Nicholas Shaxton: ‘Christ’s Mother! I fear I have burnt Abel and let Cain go!’⁷³ To many, Bilney seemed another Hunne, a victim of the reactionary strategy of labelling with heresy mere honest critics of ecclesiastical abuses.

Another incident encapsulated a mood of bitterness and recrimination. A Gloucestershire gentleman, William Tracy of Toddington, died in October 1530 leaving a will that denied purgatory and asserted justification by faith. Not only did the ecclesiastical courts refuse probate, the case passed to Canterbury Convocation, which in 1531 posthumously convicted Tracy of heresy, and ordered the exhumation of his body from consecrated ground. Thomas Parker, chancellor of the diocese of Worcester, then overstepped his authority by burning the disinterred corpse, without the necessary writ for the sheriff. Encouraged by Cromwell, Tracy’s son Richard went to law, and Parker was fined a swingeing £300. Meanwhile, Convocation’s action served only to publicize the will, copies of which circulated in London as a reformist manifesto. Tyndale and Frith composed commentaries for an edition printed in Antwerp. Tracy was only indirectly an evangelical martyr. But the humanist monk Robert Joseph – a friend of the vicar of Toddington – feared he ‘has done more harm to the Christian religion in his death than by his pestiferous contentions before’.74

Only a small number of English people at the start of the 1530s were active supporters of the evangelicals. Bishop Nykke was a pessimist who feared erroneous opinions were likely to ‘undo us all’, but he nonetheless judged that in his diocese ‘the gentlemen and the commonality be not greatly infected’; the problem lay with ‘merchants, and such that hath abiding not far from the sea’. Convocation expressed satisfaction in 1532 that ‘no notable personage’ had yet embraced ‘the abominable and erroneous opinions lately sprung in Germany’; only ‘certain apostates, friars, monks, lewd priests, bankrupt merchants, vagabonds and lewd idle fellows’.⁷⁵ Large swathes of England had hardly seen a heretic. But in the parts that had, a sense was growing that the cure, in the form of episcopal zero-tolerance, might be worse than the disease. John Ashwell, Augustinian prior of Newnham in Bedfordshire, reported George Joye to Bishop Longland, but begged him to keep the denunciation secret, ‘for then I shall lose the favour of many in my country’.⁷⁶

Heresy was no longer something whispered behind closed doors. Thomas More feared it was making progress by default, through the inertia and complacency of the orthodox: ‘It beginneth to grow almost in custom that among good Catholic folk they be suffered to talk unchecked.’ Worse, juries at county sessions and manor courts were reluctant to present heretics. The overwhelming majority were sound in faith. But even a few birds, ‘always chirking and flying from bush to bush’, might seem like a great number. Similarly, busy heretics were to be found, talking and arguing, ‘in every ale house, in every tavern, in every barge, and almost every boat’. Between their relentless zeal and the apathy of ordinary Catholics ‘appeareth often times as great a difference as between frost and fire’.⁷⁷

Evangelical confidence was a by-product of the King’s Great Matter, which by 1530 was playing topsy-turvy with demarcations of heresy and orthodoxy. Nykke complained heretics in the diocese of Norwich were boasting that ‘by Michaelmas day there shall be more that shall believe of their opinions than they that believeth the contrary’. He found his efforts against heretical books hampered by brazen claims that ‘the King’s Grace would that they should have the said erroneous books’. It seemed as if everyone was saying ‘the King’s pleasure is the New Testament in English should go forth, and men should have it and read it’.⁷⁸

An evangelical manifesto was left in the grounds of the London palace of Bishop Tunstall, shortly before his translation to Durham: it promised ‘there will come a day’. Thomas More saw it, and thought it idle boasting. Yet he also knew of unprecedented shows of evangelical strength: at one place in the diocese of London, a hundred persons assembled to attempt to rescue a known heretic from episcopal hands; elsewhere, the bishop’s commissary nervously let a suspect priest go, after reports that a mob of two or three hundred was preparing to descend and burn his house. Around the same time, the Duke of Norfolk received word from Edmund Knyvet, absentee lord of the manor of Mendlesham in Suffolk, that groups of up to a hundred people had been convening there ‘for a ghostly purpose’. In subversive parody of forms of local governance, they elected their own mayor, sheriff, lord and bailiff.79

The Christian brethren of Mendlesham were probably re-energized Lollards. A new Lollard-evangelical militancy expressed itself in 1531–2 in a wave of iconoclastic attacks along the Stour Valley and the Essex–Suffolk border. Foxe reported ‘many images cast down and destroyed in many places’: a roadside crucifix near Coggeshall, an image of St Christopher at Sudbury, a cross and two other images at Stoke, an image of St Petronella in the church of Great Horkesley, and another in a chapel outside Ipswich. St Petronella was a focus of local East Anglian devotion, her skull preserved as a healing relic at Bury St Edmunds. The fact she was reputedly a daughter of St Peter, first pope, perhaps increased Lollard animus against her.

The most audacious attack was directed in 1532 against the Rood of Dovercourt, a reputedly miraculous crucifix which made the eponymous village, just outside the Essex port of Harwich, a centre of regional pilgrimage. Four men travelled ten miles from Dedham by moonlight, carried the rood from the building and burned it. The Dedham iconoclasts were stirred up by the preaching of Thomas Rose, curate of nearby Hadleigh. The rood-burners gave him the coat of the ‘idol’, and Rose burned that too. Rose was an associate of Bilney: it seems likely the Dovercourt outrage, and perhaps other attacks too, were reprisals for Bilney’s burning.⁸⁰

Militancy was not confined to areas with a Lollard tradition. In October 1531, an Exeter schoolmaster, Thomas Benet, posted bills on the doors of the cathedral denouncing veneration of saints, and the Pope as Antichrist. Here too there was a Bilney connection: Benet was intimate with him while a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Sometime in 1523–4, finding himself ‘very much cumbered with the concupiscence of the flesh’, Benet travelled to Wittenberg, in search of Luther’s counsel. The advice was predictable: choose marriage rather than ordination to sinful celibacy. Benet acquired a wife and an obscure posting in Devon, till conscience impelled him to speak out. For some, the liberation of the Gospel was a sexual liberation. In July 1532, Thomas Cranmer, on diplomatic mission in Germany, quietly married a niece of the Nuremberg Lutheran theologian, Andreas Osiander.

Benet was burned at the stake in January 1532, despite efforts by the Exeter clergy to get him to recant. Leading those efforts was a Franciscan friar, Gregory Basset. Only a few years earlier, Basset was imprisoned for reading Luther, but he recanted and became (in Foxe’s words) ‘a mortal enemy to the truth all his life’.81 Curious seekers might decide that the traditional Church had the right answers after all.

More’s son-in-law, William Roper, came to that conclusion sometime before the end of the 1520s, putting his flirtations with heresy behind him. Shortly before the divorce burst onto the public stage, he commented to Sir Thomas on the happy state of the realm – a noble Catholic prince, virtuous and learned clergy, orthodoxy prevailing. More’s reply was darkly prophetic:

And yet, son Roper, I pray God, that some of us, as high as we seem to sit upon the mountains, treading heretics under our feet like ants, live not in the day that we gladly would wish to be at league and composition with them, to let them have their churches quietly to themselves, so that they would be content to let us have ours quietly to ourselves.⁸²

Submission

On 15 January 1532, the day Thomas Benet burned in Exeter, Parliament reconvened in London. The divorce remained log-jammed. Henry did not lack for advice, but much of it was contradictory. The Boleyns and their allies – Cranmer, Edward Foxe and Cromwell – wanted decisive action to settle the divorce in England, in defiance of the Pope. The Queen’s supporters, represented in government by Lord Chancellor More, were doing all they could to prevent this, hoping against hope that in a time of heresy an orthodox king would return to his senses. Norfolk and other conservatives favoured an attritional policy of bullying the Pope until Henry got what he wanted.

For his part, Henry was as determined as ever to bring matters to a conclusion, and convinced of the scope of his ‘imperial’ rights over the Church. But something – fear, pragmatism, remembered piety? – held him back from finally and formally repudiating the Holy See.

In the meantime, the Pope was punched in his purse. At the start of the session, the government introduced a bill to abolish annates – payments made to Rome by newly beneficed senior clergy. The tone was anti-papal, with inflated claims about ‘great and inestimable sums’ conveyed out of the realm, and defiant assertions that religious and sacramental life would continue in the face of any interdict. Nonetheless, the act was conditional, dependent on the King’s pleasure. The Pope (‘our holy father’) was to be compensated for administrative expenses, and no one should doubt that the King and all the English were ‘as obedient, devout, Catholic and humble children of God and Holy Church as any people within any realm christened’. Henry disingenuously informed the papal nuncio that the measures ‘were not taken by his consent, but were moved by the people, who hated the Pope marvellously’, while Norfolk sent messages through the ambassador in Rome that ‘nothing hurtful shall be done’, so long as the Pope did not pronounce favourably on Catherine’s appeal to Rome.83

In the end, ‘heresy’ broke the stalemate. Following More and Stokesley’s intensified campaign, the Commons’ sense of grievance about clerical high-handedness in heresy proceedings had grown. Norfolk was exaggerating for effect when he warned the Pope that feelings against misuse of spiritual authority were ten times what they had been in any previous Parliament. But many were clearly riled. Edward Hall recalled that as soon as the Commons began to sit, ‘they sore complained of the cruelty of the Ordinaries’. Edward Reed probably brought up the case of Bilney, while London MPs were agitated about the fate of the draper Thomas Patmore, condemned to perpetual imprisonment in November 1531, despite performing public penance.⁸⁴

The Commons’ grievances were collated in a document known as ‘The Supplication Against the Ordinaries’, presented to the King by Speaker Audley on 18 March 1532. The Supplication drew on papers and petitions generated in the 1529 session, and Thomas Cromwell played an important role in drafting it. Was it a spontaneous expression of anticlerical frustration, a put-up job by the government, or a clever attempt by Cromwell to ‘bounce’ Henry into radical action? On balance, the evidence suggests Henry was not directly involved, and that though Cromwell saw an opportunity, and egged MPs on, the document was a genuine reflection of feelings in the lower house.⁸⁵

The Supplication was a litany of miscellaneous charges about excessive fees and corrupt practices in the church courts. But the last and weightiest of the accusations complained that bishops and their officials habitually used ‘such subtle interrogatories, concerning the high mysteries of our faith, as are able quickly to trap a simple, unlearned, or yet a well-witted layman without learning’.⁸⁶

The arguments owed much to an elderly common lawyer, Christopher St German, who set out his views on the respective scope of legal systems in a Latin text of 1528: a dialogue between a doctor of canon law and a student of the laws of England. In 1530, Doctor and Student was extended and translated, with a further volume of New Additions brought out by the royal printer, Thomas Berthelet, in 1531. The running themes were a denial that ecclesiastical law was intrinsically superior to statute or common law, and an insistence the clergy be made subject to the authority of Parliament.

St German was the likely framer of a 1531 draft bill, which called for church reform and regulation across a number of fronts – abuses at pilgrimage shrines, fees for burials and masses, standards of pastoral service. The instrument of the proposed reforms was to be a ‘great standing council’, with authority delegated to it from Parliament. This council would also take over principal responsibility for investigation of heresy, screening cases and delivering only the truly recalcitrant for trial in the church courts.87

Like most common lawyers, St German was a Catholic and no Lutheran. But he was convinced that much of the blame for the spread of heresy fell on the clergy. If priests and monasteries were required by law to pray for souls without charge, ‘there would be but few that would say there were no purgatory’. With the bishops unable to put their own house in order, remedies lay with ‘the King in his Parliament … which hath not only charge on the bodies, but also on the souls of his subjects’.⁸⁸

Henry’s initial response to the ultra-royalist Supplication was studiously measured. He was at that moment annoyed with the Commons for reluctance to pass a bill reforming ‘Uses’ – trust arrangements allowing landowners to evade ancient feudal obligations to the King. Henry piously urged charity on all parties, and said he would hear what the clergy had to say before passing judgement. Ten days later Parliament was adjourned for its Easter recess, leaving several simmering pots about to come to the boil.⁸⁹

On Easter Sunday, 31 March 1532, Henry and his courtiers attended mass at Greenwich, where the royal palace and Observant Priory stood conjoined in an architectural testament to Tudor patronage of reformed monasticism. William Peto, Minister Provincial of the English Observants, preached a sermon, the like of which Henry can scarcely have heard before. Peto took as his text the story of King Ahab, who, cursed with false and flattering councillors, married the heathen princess Jezebel, and allowed her to pervert him into false worship prior to his untimely death in battle. Peto warned Henry that if he followed this Old Testament pattern, ‘dogs [would] lick your blood as they did his’. If this were not frank enough, after the sermon Peto told the King he was endangering his crown, for ‘both great and little were murmuring at this marriage’. In no circumstances could he marry Anne, for ‘it was said ye had meddled with the mother and the sister’.⁹⁰

In riposte, Henry arranged for a royal chaplain, Richard Curwen, to preach at Greenwich the following Sunday, ‘contrary to the custom of the convent’. This was too much for the warden, Henry Elstow, who openly contradicted Curwen in the King’s presence. Peto, who had been treated with surprising leniency, refused to take action against Elstow, and Henry ordered both men arrested. Remarkably, his next step was to send to Rome for a commission to have members of the traditionally exempt order put on trial.⁹¹

These were ominous developments: Henry’s actions were being publicly condemned by the most admired exemplars of English religious life. ‘Murmuring’ against the divorce was increasing. Chapuys reported a pro-divorce preacher in the diocese of Salisbury being violently heckled, particularly by women, and having to be rescued by the authorities. Another preacher in London, according to the Venetian ambassador, was told by a woman in his audience that the King’s actions ‘would be the destruction of the laws of matrimony’. A little before the recess of Parliament, a clergyman was arrested for denouncing the divorce from the pulpit of St Paul’s.

Opposition in Parliament was much in evidence during the passage of the annates bill. In the Lords, all the bishops opposed it, along with the Earl of Arundel. Other lords voted in favour, but Henry had to appear in the House himself on three separate occasions. Its initial reading in the Commons was also strongly contested, and in the end involved the unusual procedure of a formal division. The Lords Spiritual also voted en bloc against the Citations Act, a measure limiting the ability of bishops to cite laymen to appear outside their own diocese.92

The epicentre of opposition remained the Convocation of Canterbury. Its members received with anger and disbelief the indictment of their stewardship contained in the Commons’ Supplication. Archbishop Warham was particularly outraged by aspersions cast on his own court of audience. Maligned in the Supplication as corrupt and self-serving, the higher clergy were in fact engaged on an unprecedentedly earnest and intense programme of reform. A remarkable twenty-six new constitutions were formally ratified or proposed in 1532. They included measures to improve the quality of ordinands, provide regular preaching, tighten residence requirements, specify penances for unchaste priests, and punish simony. To show they were not deaf to lay concerns, Convocation advocated limiting fees for court officials, and – on the perennially hot-button issue of benefit of clergy – it was proposed that, in particularly scandalous cases, criminous clerks be imprisoned for a year.

This was a full-blooded revival of the policy Warham announced long ago at the Convocation of 1510, with the blessing of clerical humanists like Melton and Colet. Its watchword was reform by example, and the new statutes began by ordering every bishop, ‘the pattern of the flock’, to be present in his cathedral on major festivals to celebrate mass.⁹³ As in the past, internal reform went hand-in-hand with suppression of heresy. Convocation condemned a list of over sixty heretical books, including Frith’s 1531 Disputation of Purgatory, a subversively clever deconstruction of the traditional doctrine, produced as a riposte to defences of it by Fisher and More. It was over purgatory that Convocation went after Hugh Latimer, now a regular court preacher and a favourite of Anne Boleyn. Like Crome and Bilney, Latimer’s response was to appeal to the King. Henry allowed the case to proceed, and, after delays and evasions, Latimer made a token admission that he had erred, upon which he was again ‘received into grace at the special request of the King’.⁹⁴

The clericalist vision of reform had never aligned fully with royal priorities; now it seemed in direct conflict with them. The aged primate William Warham, so long overshadowed by Wolsey and younger colleagues like Tunstall and Fisher, sensed his moment to take a stand had come. In February 1532, he took the extraordinary step of formally registering his refusal of consent to all statutes passed in Parliament since 1529, or still to be passed, which threatened the authority of the Pope or the liberties of the Church. Warham’s speeches in the Lords during passage of the annates bill were said to have made Henry so angry he swore ‘were it not for his age, he would make him repent’. A trumped-up praemunire suit was prepared against the archbishop.95

Warham’s response was to draft a defiant and brilliant defence, probably intended as a speech in the Lords, declaring the intrinsic unfairness of the case against him. Through it ran a haunting historical analogy: the refusal of his predecessor archbishop, Thomas Becket, to agree to Henry II’s Constitutions of Clarendon, which aimed to abolish benefit of clergy. Becket’s death at the hands of Henry II’s knights was ‘the example and comfort of others to speak and to do for the defence of the liberties of God’s Church’. Still more bluntly, Warham reflected on the fates of earlier kings who made laws in derogation of the liberties of the Church: Henry II, abandoned by his servants to a shameful death; Edward III, dying in poverty, hated by his subjects; Richard II, starved or murdered in prison; Henry IV, stricken with leprosy – all ‘punished by the hand of God’.⁹⁶

Prophesies of disaster for the King were arising from another quarter too. Elizabeth Barton, known as the Maid or Nun of Kent, was a teenage visionary who, like Anne Wentworth a decade earlier, experienced a miraculous cure through the intervention of the Virgin Mary, and subsequently entered a convent. Her reputation for sanctity won loyal followers among the regular clergy and gentry of Kent, and brought her to the attention of the archbishop. But from the later part of 1528, her visions and prophesies began to focus on the divorce, and to hint that Henry would not remain king for six months if he repudiated Queen Catherine. Warham met her several times; Thomas Cranmer thought the nun’s influence was critical in stiffening the old archbishop’s sinews against the divorce.⁹⁷

In this atmosphere Convocation, reassembled on 12 April, began to consider its response to the Supplication. It was drafted by Stephen Gardiner, newly consecrated bishop of Winchester, and a prominent cheer-leader for the divorce. But Gardiner felt as keenly as any of his episcopal colleagues the scandal of lay encroachment on the Church’s domain. The statement conceded no ground to the Church’s critics. It dismissed complaints against ecclesiastical jurisdiction out of hand, or regarded them as individual misdemeanours to be dealt with under existing regulations. Rather than apologize for harsh punishment of heretics, the clergy were proud of their diligence in this ‘duty and office whereunto we be called’. On the fundamental issue of principle raised by the Supplication – the making of ecclesiastical canons without lay consent or royal permission – the answer was polite but firm. The clergy would listen gratefully to the King’s ‘mind and opinion’, but he must understand that there could be no veto on a power ‘grounded upon the Scripture of God and the determination of Holy Church’. The bishops could hardly have made clearer their understanding of how far ‘the law of Christ’ allowed Henry’s supremacy to extend.98

In retrospect, it seems a disastrous error of judgement, a red rag to a royal bull. It is probably true that Gardiner’s involvement ruled out his chances of succeeding Warham at Canterbury. Yet to concede the Supplication’s demands would have meant abandoning the visions of reformation in head and members which had animated the best clerical minds for a generation and more. There was also no reason to suspect the King’s hand behind the Commons’ Supplication.

But the clergy’s blunt assertion that their independent corporate status was prescribed by God came just when Henry’s limited patience was stretched to breaking point. Opposition in the Commons to a taxation request for the improvement of coastal defences took the form of arguments that the best and cheapest form of defence was continued friendship with the Emperor. Thomas Temys, MP for Westbury in Wiltshire, had the temerity to suggest the Commons should petition the King ‘to take the Queen again into his company’.

When Henry summoned Speaker Audley and a Commons delegation to an audience on 30 April, he expressed surprise and displeasure that members dared to speak openly of matters that ‘touched his soul’. He also handed Convocation’s statement to Audley, with words calculated to incite further anticlerical indignation: ‘We think their answer will smally please you, for it seemeth to us very slender.’⁹⁹

Henry now demanded a more satisfactory answer to the Supplication’s first point about legislative competence. The bishops offered a compromise that was no compromise, retaining control over heresy and everything concerning ‘the reformation and correction of sin’. In Warham’s absence, clergy in Convocation’s lower house seized the initiative, producing treatises on the power of ecclesiastical authority to repress heresy, and the exemption of clerics, ‘by divine law’, from jurisdiction of laymen. They also petitioned the upper clergy to despatch a delegation to the King for defence of their liberties. The bishops had sufficient tact to send royal favourites – Stokesley, Longland, Foxe, Dean Sampson of the Chapel Royal, and Abbots John Islip of Westminster and William Benson of Burton. But the effect of their mission was simply to harden the King’s resolve.

On 10 May Convocation was presented with three royal demands: no new canons to be enacted without the King’s permission, offensive ones to be annulled after assessment by a committee of clergy and laity, existing good canons to stand by royal assent. This was the moment of truth. Warham moved into crisis-management mode, transplanting Convocation from the chapter house of Westminster Abbey to the more secluded next-door chapel of St Katherine. He despatched a delegation to Rochester, to seek counsel from the convalescing Bishop Fisher. Its gist can be imagined from a short tract, circulating at this time, which may be Fisher’s composition: ‘that the bishops have immediate authority to make such laws as they shall think expedient for the weal of men’s souls’. Convocation was preparing to defend the rights of the Church; the archbishop of Canterbury was preparing for martyrdom.100

Henry’s counter-stroke was to unleash the anticlerical Commons. On 11 May, he again summoned Speaker Audley and a delegation of MPs. He did not quite, like Henry II, say ‘who will rid me of these turbulent priests?’ But he bewailed how the clergy seemed to be ‘but half our subjects; yea, and scarce our subjects’. Proof was in the oath bishops made to the Pope on their consecration, ‘clean contrary to the oath that they make to us’. Copies of the two oaths were produced, ‘requiring you to invent some order that we be not thus deluded of our spiritual subjects’. Audley arranged for the texts to be read in Parliament, to great indignation. The two oaths, one qualifying the terms of the other, were certainly anomalous, but had long co-existed as practical mechanisms of co-operation between Church and state. Now, they were diagnosed as symptoms of a malignant growth on the heart of the English body politic.¹⁰¹

Cromwell, influenced by St German, was convinced parliamentary statute was Henry’s means to establish supremacy over the Church, and consequently bring about the divorce. He set about drafting a bill to remove the Church’s legislative autonomy and clarify the status of ‘the imperial crown of this realm’. Chapuys thought, if it were to pass, clergymen would be reduced ‘to a lower condition than the shoemakers, who have the power of assembling and framing their own statutes’.¹⁰²

Parliamentary opinion was divided. A group of members, dining regularly at the Queen’s Head Tavern, sympathized strongly with the Queen. One of them, the Warwickshire gentleman Sir George Throckmorton, son of a pious pilgrim to Jerusalem (see p. 25), became conspicuous as a government critic. He was a cousin of the fiery Franciscan, William Peto, who asked Throckmorton to visit him in prison, and urged him to stick to his guns ‘as I would have my soul saved’. There was also a summons to an interview with the King himself, Cromwell at his side. Perhaps encouraged to speak freely, Throckmorton said to the King’s face that he would be compromised by marriage to the Lady Anne ‘for that it is thought ye have meddled with the mother and the sister’. ‘Never with the mother,’ Henry responded, with honesty, and surprising meekness. ‘Nor never with the sister neither,’ Cromwell interjected angrily.

It emerged later that another eminent figure spoke privately with Throckmorton at this time. While Cromwell’s bill to muzzle the clergy was being debated, Thomas More arranged a meeting in a little room within the Parliament. The chancellor’s words were coded, yet hardly ambiguous: ‘I am very glad to hear the good report that goeth of you, and that ye be so good a Catholic man as ye be; and if ye do continue in the same way that ye began and be not afraid to say your conscience, ye shall deserve great reward of God and thanks of the King’s grace at length’. This hardly constitutes conclusive evidence that More was masterminding a behind-the-scenes campaign of concerted opposition. But he was willing discreetly to encourage dissent when he found it, in anticipation of the King returning to his senses.103

In the first days of May, More’s opposition moved from the shadows into the light. Along with the bishops in the Lords, he strenuously opposed a bill proposing to remove from churchmen the power to arrest heresy suspects – the measure proposed by St German a year earlier, and one that, if passed, would represent the reversal of More’s policy as chancellor over the preceding two and half years. Chapuys reported that Henry was ‘exceedingly angry’ with More over this, and with Bishop Gardiner.

There was no new law subordinating clergy to the King-in-Parliament in the spring of 1532. On 14 May, Henry abruptly suspended parliamentary proceedings until November, perhaps because of opposition in the Lords, perhaps because of an outbreak of plague at Westminster.¹⁰⁴ But there was no further compromise with Convocation. The following day, Henry sent Norfolk, Wiltshire and other councillors to enter the hallowed space of Convocation Chamber and require immediate and unreserved submission to the King’s articles, and to the novel assertion that Convocation ‘always hath been and must be’ convened solely by royal command.

There was consternation and confusion. The lower house very likely voted to reject the demands, and in the upper, probably a mere seven bishops were present. Of these, only three – Warham, West and Veysey – subscribed unconditionally. Clerk flatly refused. Standish and Longland – crown loyalists of long standing – added qualifying clauses to the effect that good constitutions should remain unaffected; Stokesley, more bluntly, agreed to sign ‘if it were not contrary to divine law, or general councils’. Only four heads of religious houses set their names to the document, on behalf of a suspiciously vague number of ‘other abbots and priors’. The Submission was a document of dubious legality, and supplies no evidence that a majority of the clergy ever ‘agreed’ to the granting away of their rights. But it was enough. For all the talk of Magna Carta, rights, liberties and the law of the Church, the King called the clergy’s bluff and exacted a public surrender.

A collapse of episcopal resistance was not inevitable, but nor was it inexplicable. Options were limited once Henry rejected all attempts at negotiation. Statutory declaration of the subordination of canon law to royal law – a still less desirable outcome – remained a real possibility. Maybe, the bishops reasoned to themselves, it was all bluster and posturing, designed to put pressure on the Pope to settle the divorce, and a crisis that would pass. Minds may have turned to the ancient maxim Warham brought to Catherine of Aragon’s attention the previous year: ira principis mors est (‘the anger of a prince is death’).¹⁰⁵

For the Christian, there are worse things than death. Warham was much preoccupied with the martyrdom of Becket. As the belligerent noblemen laid out Henry’s demands perhaps the archbishop saw the glowering faces of Henry II’s knights. If so, he looked them in the eye, and then he looked away.

The following afternoon, 16 May 1532, two old friends met in the garden of Wolsey’s former palace of York Place. Thomas More placed into the King’s hands a white leather pouch containing the great seal of England, tendering his resignation as chancellor on the grounds that he did not consider himself equal to the task. He intended, he said, ‘to bestow the residue of my life, in mine age now to come, about the provision for my soul in the service of God, and to be your grace’s beadsman and pray for you’. Henry promised to be ever after a ‘good and gracious lord’.106 On both sides, the sentiments were – perhaps – genuine. But it was clear that More had fought – for the traditional relationship of crown and Church; for prioritizing heresy prosecution over the divorce – and lost badly. The same day, the Submission of the Clergy was formally subscribed before special royal commissioners, among them Thomas Cromwell. Four days later, Cromwell’s ally, the Commons’ Speaker, Thomas Audley, became Keeper of the Great Seal, and a few months later Lord Chancellor.

Matters of Opinion

Change of personnel was change of direction. Erasmus, in failing health, but as active a correspondent as ever, heard More had been dismissed, and that evangelicals were jubilant. His successor immediately released many ‘Lutherans’ from prison – forty in number, Erasmus told one correspondent; twenty, he more cautiously informed another.¹⁰⁷

A second change of personnel provided further cause for evangelical rejoicing. On 22 August 1532, death came for the archbishop. Warham passed away at his archdeacon’s residence at Hackington in Kent. He was buried in the chantry chapel he prepared for himself in the north transept of Canterbury Cathedral, as near as could be to the spot where Becket had fallen.¹⁰⁸ Had he stuck to his guns, refused to submit and suffered the fate of his illustrious predecessor, things might just have been different. As it was, Warham’s tragedy was to be remembered to posterity as a competent administrator, but not a glorious martyr.

With Gardiner in temporary disgrace, and most remaining bishops known to be at best lukewarm about the divorce, the King’s prerogatives, or both, the net was cast wide. Perhaps even before Warham’s demise, word reached a flabbergasted Thomas Cranmer, on embassy in Germany, that the King wanted him to be next successor to St Augustine of Canterbury. An immediate thought must have struck him: what on earth was he going to do with his wife?

The nomination was a surprise, but not a mystery. Cranmer was the Boleyns’ man, and in the summer of 1532, Anne could feel her day dawning. On 1 September, Henry created her Marquess of Pembroke, a noblewoman in her own right. She was at the King’s side, consort in all but name, at a state reception for Francis I at Calais in October, and danced with the French King at a masked ball. On this trip, or very shortly afterwards, Henry and Anne began sleeping together, hope or fear of papal judgement no longer a bar to dreams of conjugal happiness.

Within a week of the couple’s return from France, a pamphlet was rushed out – almost certainly with official connivance – describing The Manner of the Triumph at Calais and Boulogne. ‘My Lady Marques of Pembroke’ was conspicuously listed first among the ladies dancing at the royal masque. The second to step out was her sister, Mary Carey, but description of this person simply as ‘my Lady Mary’ looks suspiciously like an attempt to imply Princess Mary was present, and that she consented to the precedence allotted to Anne.109

Modern scholarship worries whether, in the early Tudor period, we can speak of a ‘public’, ‘public opinion’ or a ‘public sphere’. Yet even in a profoundly hierarchical and undemocratic age, the authorities cared deeply about what people below the level of the elite were thinking. With limited means of coercion at the government’s disposal, it was vital, not merely to command, but to persuade. All political authority rests, to some degree, on consent. In periods of conflict and division, consent must be more explicitly secured. There had been ‘propaganda’ campaigns before: by various sides, for example, during the Wars of the Roses. The printing industry was then in its infancy, but a generation later had achieved a level of mature sophistication. The convergence of this technological flowering with the appearance of two issues – the royal divorce and the challenge to traditional orthodoxy – on which literate people at least were expected to have an opinion was a truly momentous one.

The government’s 1531 experiment with vernacular translation of The Determinations of the Universities was followed in the autumn of 1532 by the publication, undertaken by the royal printer, of A Glass of the Truth. Addressed to all ‘sincere lovers of the truth’, it took the form of a dialogue between a canon lawyer and a divine on ‘the great weighty cause of Christendom concerning the King’s separation from the Queen’.

Earlier coyness about discussing matrimonial law other than in the abstract was now abandoned. Having surveyed the respective claims of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the tract showed an extraordinary willingness to float in public intimate details of the Queen’s first marriage. Some ‘noblest men of this realm’ knew Arthur and Catherine to have been ‘fit, apt and prone to that natural act’, and had sworn to hearing Arthur’s lewd joke about being ‘often in Spain’. A delay in granting Henry his title of Prince and heir was lest Arthur’s widow might be pregnant, and inconsistencies between the bull of dispensation and the Spanish Brief suggested that Catherine had shifted her position on the fact of consummation. The Glass as good as called the Queen a brazen liar, saying whatever ‘maketh most for her purpose’. Lawyer and doctor galloped through the doctrinal and historical findings of the Collectanea, and hinted that a resolution of the divorce by the archbishops in England was close, ‘their unjust oath made to the Pope notwithstanding’.

Did the King himself have a hand in this anonymous treatise? Informed contemporaries believed he did, and matters of such delicacy could scarcely have been aired without Henry’s explicit assent. Significantly, the tract finished on a note of entreaty rather than command, recognizing that many would condemn its arguments. Therefore, ‘we most heartily pray you, gentle readers, that neither sinister affection, nor yet malicious report, do hinder the accepting of this our treatise in your hearts and judgements’. Henry was willing to place his cause squarely before the court of fair-minded public opinion. And he expected it to agree that he was right.110

The divorce was not the only question on which an English ‘public’ was being invited to form opinions. Evangelical attacks on traditional doctrine were countered with argument as well as coercion, and – since Tunstall’s 1528 commission to Thomas More – in the vernacular as well as Latin. More managed – remarkably – to publish the first part of his gigantic Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer at the start of 1532 while still serving as chancellor. But resignation freed him to devote time and energy to the literary defence of the Church.

At the end of 1532, or beginning of 1533, there appeared several editions of A Treatise Concerning the Division between the Spiritualty and the Temporalty. The work was anonymous, and purported to be a neutral analysis of reasons for discord between clergy and laity, with suggestions on how to repair relations. In fact, as More well knew (though he pretended not to) the author was Christopher St German, and the treatise continued his anticlerical campaign to bring the clergy firmly under control of the civil power. More rapidly composed an Apology – a word that in the sixteenth century meant assertion rather than retraction – combining sarcastic rebuttals of the suggestions of this ‘pacifier’ with renewed attacks on the evangelicals.

‘It is a shorter thing, and sooner done, to write heresies than to answer them.’¹¹¹ The inequality of power between the evangelical rebels and the ecclesiastical establishment was redressed in the world of words and argument. It was easier to launch pithily destructive attacks on traditional beliefs and practices than to develop reasoned defences of rituals whose origins were frequently uncertain, and whose underlying rationales were often unspoken, social and customary. More did his frequently brilliant best. But in the preface to the Confutation, he confessed to reservations about the effort: ‘surely the very best way were neither to read this nor theirs’.

There was a risk – of which More was acutely aware – that rebuttal would simply publicize further the heretics’ views. He delayed circulating his response to Frith’s unpublished treatise against the sacrament, for ‘I would wish that the common people should of such heresies never hear so much as the name’. Yet hear them they did – in condemnations from the pulpit, in lists of (enticingly?) forbidden works, and indeed in More’s own books. The contemporary habit of quoting at length from opponents in order to refute them meant a virtually complete text of Tyndale’s Answer was folded into More’s Confutation. The ex-chancellor recognized readers might choose to ‘leave my words out between, and read but Tyndale alone’. But silence in the face of the heretics’ onslaught was not really an option: discussion of their ideas, More lamented, ‘is now almost in every lewd lad’s mouth’.112 From an early stage, and with no one intending for it to happen, the disputed tenets of both royal divorce and religious doctrine conferred on ordinary English people new opportunities to judge, discern and choose. For those with eyes to see, a subtle shift in the balance of power between rulers and ruled was starting to manifest itself.

At the close of 1532, the evangelical movement was pressed but not crushed. Its strongholds were few, and tenuously occupied, but its appeal to some devout and questing Christians was undiminished, and its fortunes had become entwined in unpredictable ways with the political and personal ambitions of the King. More than ever, an instinctively consensual and conformist culture was being forced to confront the possibility of choice, to weigh the risks of commitment, and calculate the price of division. Barely visibly, the seeds of Thomas More’s hellish harvest, where adherents of rival churches might actually be forced to co-exist, were already beginning to germinate.