8

PILGRIMAGE ENDS

Follow the Cross

WILLIAM BREYAR WAS a criminal, branded in the hand. He was a ‘sanctuary man’ at Colchester, and spent the summer of 1536 wandering around the Midlands and the north, on his travels picking up a badge that identified him as a servant of the King. At the end of September, he turned up in Dent, a village in the north-western Yorkshire Dales.

Breyar arrived to find the place in uproar. A few days earlier, on 25 September, 500 men from the surrounding parishes gathered to swear solemn oaths ‘to suffer no spoils nor suppressions of abbeys, parish churches, or their jewels’. A local blacksmith spotted Breyar’s royal livery, and started to pick a fight. ‘Thy master is a thief, for he pulleth down all our churches in the country.’ But others interjected: ‘It is not the King’s deed but the deed of Crumwell.’ They added that ‘If we had him here we would crum him and crum him that he was never so crummed, and if thy master were here we would new crown him.’1 Was Henry a tyrant to be resisted, or a liege lord to be rescued from wicked advisors? It was a dilemma the northerners never quite managed to resolve.

Henry VIII was not pulling down all churches. But he was closing monasteries, and people feared where that might lead. A hundred miles to the south-west of Dent, in the Lincolnshire village of Louth, with its magnificent church and spire (see p. 14), those fears erupted still more forcibly. On Sunday 1 October, the vicar, Thomas Kendall, urged his flock to ‘go together and look well on such things as should be inquired of in the visitation’. Dozens of priests were due in Louth the next day, to be examined by Bishop Longland’s chancellor. It was a time of unprecedented official inspection and intrusion: the clergy visitation was taking place alongside the roving commission for dissolution of monasteries, and another making assessments for a parliamentary subsidy.

Bold talk during the mass procession preceded Kendall’s sermon. Thomas Foster, yeoman and singing-man, shouted, ‘Masters, step forth and let us follow the cross this day; God knoweth whether ever we shall follow it hereafter.’ After evensong, a band of parishioners, headed by ‘Captain Cobbler’ – the shoemaker, Nicholas Melton – took the keys from the wardens and stood overnight guard in the church. A cold welcome awaited Longland’s commissary, John Frankish, when he arrived the next morning. The insurgents issued a proclamation, demanding ‘new books’ be handed over. English New Testaments were collected and consigned to the flames, along with a work by John Frith.2 Nowhere in England, it seemed, was untouched by the hand-print of heresy.

The concerns of Louth were local, practical: people feared new taxes, and confiscation of their crosses and treasures. But they saw an underlying pattern: ‘heretics’ were subverting the commonwealth, the good ordering of society. Vicar Kendall was a local man, but he was also an Oxford-trained theologian with experience of heresy-hunting in Essex. Kendall later claimed the immediate cause of the trouble was a rumour that inhabitants of Hull had been forced to sell church jewels to buy off the royal commissioners. But beyond this, ‘people grudged very sore that the King’s grace should be the supreme head, and the bishop of Rome put down’. For six months, a rising was spoken of, as everyone detested new opinions concerning Our Lady and purgatory.³

Events after 1 October moved fast. Contagious ringing of church bells across northern Lincolnshire signalled to villagers that neighbouring parishes were ‘up’. From Louth a contingent marched to interrupt officials suppressing the nearby nunnery of St Mary’s, Legbourne. At Caistor, subsidy commissioners were seized and forced to draft a letter to the King. One of their captors, the gentleman John Porman, admitted ‘the King to be the supreme head of the Church’ – there was a spectrum of opinion on this within the rebel ranks. But there must be no more arbitrary taxation or monastic suppressions. Despite professions of loyalty to the King, the rebels had murder on their minds: Cromwell was to be handed over, along with Bishops Cranmer, Latimer, Longland, Hilsey, Goodrich and Browne of Dublin, so that all could be put to death.

The conservative Longland sits incongruously in this list of evangelical reformers, but he was the local face of hated government policies. At Horncastle on 4 October, Longland’s chancellor, Dr John Raynes, was brutally done to death. A suspected royal spy, bearing the eye-catching name of Thomas Wolsey, was summarily hanged.⁴

Through the first week of October Lincolnshire’s army swelled. It was as a force of at least 10,000 that the rebels entered Lincoln on 6 October, trashing Longland’s episcopal palace. Priests, secular and regular, flocked to the cause: perhaps as many as 800 were directly involved in the Lincolnshire Rising.

Landed gentry – the natural custodians of order – also got involved, while the most senior local nobleman, Catherine of Aragon’s former chamberlain Lord Hussey, tried to negotiate with the rebels, before fleeing the county on 7 October. For some landowners, it was a case of ride the tiger or be mauled by it, but others shared their poorer neighbours’ concerns about religious changes. Gentry had their own grievances: an act passed in the spring of 1536 clamped down on ‘Uses’, legal trusts to prevent the King levying inheritance tax on landed estates. A petition for its repeal was the second of six articles drawn up at Lincoln on 9 October. Others demanded an end to monastic dissolution and excessive taxation, and dismissal for councillors of ‘low birth and small reputation’ – Cromwell and Richard Rich. Cranmer, Latimer, Hilsey, Browne, Shaxton and Barlow were named as bishops who ‘subverted the faith of Christ’, along with Longland as an author of ‘vexation’.5

Henry’s reaction was predictably intemperate. His reply to the articles wondered how the commoners of one shire, ‘the most brute and beastly of the whole realm’, presumed to lecture him on appointments to the episcopate or Council.

In the event, the Lincolnshire rebels’ nerve broke. There was talk of marching south, but on 11 October, with a small but well-equipped force under the Duke of Suffolk near at hand, the rebels obeyed the Earl of Shrewsbury’s order to disperse. Shortly after, Suffolk received secret royal instructions: if trouble resumed, he should ‘destroy, burn, and kill man, woman and child, to the terrible example of all others’.⁶

Vengeance would have to wait. Before the Lincolnshire Rising burned itself out, sparks had ignited in half a dozen other counties, and the north was ablaze. At the centre of the flames was a hitherto obscure figure, a one-eyed Yorkshire lawyer, about thirty-six years old. Robert Aske entered Lincolnshire on 4 October, supposedly making his way to London for the new law term, and was persuaded by the rebels to take up reins of leadership. Whether Aske was already contemplating rebellion is unclear. But he was undoubtedly his own man, and not merely an agent of the northern nobles whose legal business he occasionally handled.⁷ Like Thomas More, Aske was that unlikely beast, a common lawyer passionately committed to the defence of the Church. More looked on impotently as the old order was dismantled, but Aske almost succeeded in restoring it.

On 11 October, as ‘chief captain’ of a spate of risings breaking out across the East Riding of Yorkshire, Aske issued a proclamation, calling upon his countrymen ‘to preserve the church of God from spoiling’. A couple of days later, on a hill above the small town of Market Weighton, Aske’s troops met with a force commanded by William Stapleton. On parting, Aske declared that ‘they were pilgrims, and had a pilgrimage gate to go’. Proclamations over the coming days repeated the idea of ‘a pilgrimage of grace for the commonwealth’. It rapidly caught on. The ‘pilgrims’ were loyally petitioning for favour, ‘grace’, just as devotees might seek the blessing of a beloved saint. But the imagery was also provocative and insubordinate, a direct riposte to attacks on pilgrimage in the recent Royal Injunctions. And when pilgrims took up arms in defence of the faith, it had a special name: crusade.8

The government recognized the ‘Pilgrimage’ for what it was: armed rebellion on an unprecedented, unmanageable scale. By late October, eight well-equipped rebel armies were on the march, together comprising some 50,000 men.⁹ It was a force far larger than any the King could hope to put into the field; larger than any army deployed by the crown in the entire course of the sixteenth century. With Suffolk pacifying Lincolnshire, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, was given command of what troops were available. Outnumbered and outmanoeuvred, he had little choice but to temporize. On 26 October, Norfolk arrived at Doncaster, and proposed a truce. The rebel forces drew up in array facing him, on the far side of the River Don. Immediate danger was averted: heavy overnight rain rendered the river temporarily unfordable. To the evangelical chronicler Edward Hall it seemed ‘a great miracle of God’.¹⁰

Over the preceding weeks, the pilgrims had achieved remarkable things. On 16 October they entered York in triumph, and posted on the door of the Minster an order for the restoration of religious houses. Meanwhile, rebel armies in North Yorkshire, and in Lancashire, Cumberland and Westmorland put the aspiration into practice. From County Durham, a force marched south under a potent symbol of everything despised by the Cromwell regime: the banner of St Cuthbert, long reputed to work miracles in battle, festooned with ancient relics. Another Cuthbert – Tunstall, bishop of Durham – fled before the banner’s approach.

A second conservative prelate, Archbishop Lee, prudently left York for the King’s castle at Pontefract, whose custodian, Lord Darcy, represented royal authority in south-west Yorkshire. But on 20 October, without much hesitation, Darcy surrendered Pontefract to the rebels. Both he and Lee took the oath Aske composed: to be true to ‘God’s faith and to holy church militant and the maintenance thereof, the preservation of the King’s person and his issue, and the purifying of the nobility and to expulse all villeins’ blood and evil councillors against the commonwealth’.

Virtually all participants in the Northern Risings – gentry, clergy and commons – swore some such oath. It took its cue from the Oath of Succession, turning a mechanism of government control into an instrument of subversive popular politics. Once again, questions would arise about the validity of a coerced oath: in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage, numerous gentlemen insisted they swore under duress, and in fear of their lives.¹¹

Darcy’s own later protestations of loyalty were not entirely disingenuous. In September 1534 he had discussed with one of Chapuys’ men the prospects for a rebellion in the north. But the events of 1536 were not the expected culmination of his plans. Surprised by the scale and speed of a genuinely popular rebellion, Darcy assumed a role of leadership while working for a peaceful resolution.12

Peaceful resolution was far from certain. Norfolk’s proposal of truce was sent along with a face-saving challenge to battle if the rebels refused to disperse, and the commanders of the Pilgrim vanguard were eager to take up the offer to fight. Among the commons, it was taken for granted the host would march on London ‘to sue the King to have certain statutes revoked and the makers punished’. Only a few days before Norfolk’s arrival at Doncaster, Aske himself told Lancaster Herald his intention was ‘to go with his company to London on pilgrimage to the King … to have the faith of Christ and God’s laws kept, and restitution for wrongs done to the Church’. But with an offer of negotiation on the table, Aske, Darcy and Lee argued hard for restraint, trusting in Henry and Norfolk’s good faith and willingness to make concessions. Agreement was reached on 27 October. Norfolk, master dissembler, had already written to the King, asking him to ‘take in good part whatever promises I shall make unto the rebels, for surely I shall observe no part thereof’.¹³

The following weeks were as taut as a drawn bowstring. The fate of the Pilgrimage, of religious reform, and of Henry’s throne itself, all hung precariously in the balance. Sir Ralph Ellerker and Robert Bowes, men who joined the movement under pressure, were chosen to carry the rebels’ articles to the King, while the commons in the north were left wondering how far the gentry could be trusted not to betray them. The demands, as reported by the imperial ambassador in Rome, were for restoration of the Pope’s authority, recognition of Princess Mary (and her parents’ marriage) as legitimate, reversal of monastic dissolution, calling of a free Parliament, without royal servants, and repeal of recent statutes.

Henry was apoplectic. In a hastily drafted reply, he was adamant he had ‘done nothing that may not be defended by God’s law and man’s’. He would consent to neither pardon nor Parliament. There would be mercy only after ten named ringleaders were handed over for exemplary punishment. The letter was a lighted match to gunpowder. Norfolk and other councillors, serving their master more ably than he served himself, were able to prevent its despatch northward, under the pretext that the rebels were ordering fresh musters, contrary to the truce.¹⁴

The hope in London was for the Pilgrimage, like the Lincolnshire Rebellion, to simply collapse. But the Pilgrims’ resolution held, and Darcy – a man of honour – resisted Norfolk’s inducements to switch sides and betray Aske. Worse, with a third of the realm openly defiant, there were reasons to fear for the loyalty of the rest. As early as 10 October, London aldermen were commanded to confiscate all weapons larger than a meat knife from priests between the ages of sixteen and sixty. Many among the clergy, like William Gibson of Whittington College, believed ‘the Northern men rose in a good quarrel’. In Reading, priests and laymen copied out the rebel demands, and such transcripts were said to be ‘universal at London’. George Throckmorton managed easily to acquire one, along with a copy of the Pilgrim Oath, and a proclamation by Aske.15

The reformers’ enemies were emboldened; some violently so. On 13 November, a misty early morning, Robert Packington, leading mercer and evangelical, a drafter of anticlerical legislation in Parliament, was shot dead in Cheapside. There were many theories, but no one was ever arrested. Robert Barnes preached defiantly at Packington’s funeral on 15 November, but such oil to the flames was the last thing the authorities wanted, and he was packed off to the Tower. Other prominent London evangelicals – John Field, John Goodale, George Marshall and possibly John Bale – were likewise imprisoned by Cromwell, for their own protection.

Later that week, Henry penned a circular to the bishops on his favoured theme of divisions inflamed by ‘contrariety of preaching’. The King observed that offence taken at the railing of seditious preachers against ‘honest rites, customs and ceremonial things’ was the principal cause of the ‘commotion and insurrection’.¹⁶ This was a disingenuous half-truth. What was dividing the nation were official policies – the dissolution of monasteries, the banning of saints’ days, the promotion of ‘heretic’ bishops, the royal supremacy itself. But Henry was distancing himself from the unpopular face of reform, and – perhaps – mentally preparing for the possibility of yet more dramatic reversals.

Further evidence of southerners’ sympathy for the Pilgrimage came to light in subsequent years, though never its full extent. Only later did the authorities learn that, in late November 1536, a ‘secret friend’ came to Aske from London with news of troop movements, confirmation that Cromwell was widely hated, and assurances that ‘the south parts long for our coming’.¹⁷

That was optimistic. Ancient antagonisms between southerners and northerners might have made a march on London seem more like invasion than liberation. But the commotion of 1536 was never simply destined to remain a regional phenomenon, or even a self-contained English one. In November, as the Pilgrims waited anxiously for the return of Ellerker and Bowes, Darcy, Aske and Sir Robert Constable decided to send an emissary to Mary of Hungary, Charles V’s regent in the Netherlands. They asked for money, 2,000 hand-gunners and 2,000 horsemen. At the last minute, the messenger was recalled – a symptom of the high-level prevarication that was to be the Pilgrimage’s undoing.¹⁸

In the end, what mattered most were the calculations of a handful of nobles. The Earls of Shrewsbury, Derby, Cumberland, Huntingdon and Rutland, as well as the Duke of Norfolk, despised Cromwell and sympathized with many of the Pilgrims’ aims. For as long as the movement remained contained, natural loyalty and raw self-interest bound these men to the King. Regions where trouble might have been expected, but little was reported – south Lancashire and Cheshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire – were places where the influence of one or other of these magnates was strong. The terminal indecision of Henry Percy, 6th Earl of Northumberland, gave licence for rebellion to spread across much of Yorkshire.19

Loyalty and trust were commodities in which the King and his councillors cynically traded. Aske believed Henry would deal fairly, and could be persuaded or pressured into making concessions. Playing for time, the King complained that the demands conveyed by Ellerker and Bowes were unhelpfully vague. So the Pilgrim leadership reconvened at Pontefract at the beginning of December to draw up a definitive statement of their programme for reform. This was no deal behind closed doors. The twenty-four articles in the Pilgrims’ final manifesto were agreed in consultation with representatives of all the rebel hosts. Items drafted by an assembly of gentlemen were presented for approval to parallel meetings of commons and clergy. Inevitably, there was something for everyone. The Statute of Uses was again roundly condemned, and complaints of the north-western peasantry about oppressive landlordism were prominently aired. The priests inserted a demand to reinstate full benefit of clergy.

But the Pontefract Articles were more than a patchwork of sectional grievances, bound with a thin stitching of traditional piety. They were a largely coherent manifesto of counter-revolution, beginning with a naming of the heretics whose pernicious opinions were injurious to ‘our faith’: ‘Luther, Wyclif, Hus, Melanchthon, Oecolampadius, Bucer, Confessio Germaniae [the Augsburg Confession], Apologia Melanchthonis [the Apology of Melanchthon], the works of Tyndale, of Barnes, of Marshall, Rastell, St German, and such other heresies of Anabaptist’.²⁰

The list was a shrewd one, conveying a traditional Catholic understanding of heresy as at once infinitely varied and basically always the same. It amalgamated historical heresiarchs, leading contemporary German and English reformers, and clients and agents of Thomas Cromwell: William Marshall, who published the heretical 1534 primer; John Rastell, who first defended, and then attacked, purgatory; the arch-anticlerical Christopher St German. Marshall and St German may have been known as sponsors of a recent parliamentary bill attacking pilgrimage and relics.²¹ Far from ignorantly supposing ‘Anabaptist’ to be a person, or failing to understand the basics of evangelical theology, the Pilgrims astutely sought to tar Cromwell’s regime with the brush of radicalism. In a variant version, the sacramentarian Frith is also named.

Other articles carried the critique of heresy into the realm of practical politics, with demands for the punishment of unorthodox bishops, and of Cromwell, ‘maintainer of the false sect of those heretics’. Mary was to be restored to the succession, and a Parliament held at Nottingham or York, far from the controlling hand of the court. Most provocative of all was the second article: ‘to have the supreme head of the Church touching cure animarum to be reserved unto the see of Rome as before it was accustomed to be’. This was to tell Henry straight that he was less than he thought himself; that his hard-won spiritual enlightenment was merely a pitiful self-delusion.

The article was not as confrontational as it might have been, limiting Rome’s authority to spiritual matters: cure animarum means ‘care of souls’. Headship of the Church was an issue on which the Pilgrims were divided. This was evident from proceedings in the clerical assembly, which functioned, in effect, as a meeting of the Convocation of the Province of York. Archbishop Lee, like other bishops who crossed the line in 1534, had the instincts of a Henrician. He caused dismay when, in a sermon preached in All Saints, Pontefract, on Sunday 3 December, he denied the right of subjects to take up arms without leave of the King. Others, like Robert Sherwood, chancellor of Beverley, resolutely defended Henry’s headship.

But these were a minority. In their discussions, most delegates were unabashed to use the forbidden word ‘pope’, and showed themselves to be either unreconstructed papalists, or else committed to the view that royal ‘supremacy’ was solely political. There was some support for reinstating the formula Convocation adopted in 1531, a supreme headship extending ‘as far as the law of Christ allows’. But the position finally endorsed was an uncompromising one: the Pope was head of the Church ‘by the laws of the Church, General Councils, interpretations of approved doctors and consent of Christian people’. Archbishop Lee balked at this, but eventually agreed to the article on the grounds that papal authority did indeed command the consent of Christian people.22

That consent manifested itself in the winter of 1536–7. It is often supposed that papal headship was a preoccupation of Aske and other leaders, and a matter of relatively little concern in the parishes. In fact, the opposite may be true. Commons and gentry alike, thought Aske, ‘grudged chiefly at the acts of suppression of abbeys and the supremacy of the Church’. John Dakyn, rector of Kirkby Ravensworth, heard ‘ignorant persons of my parish’ say ‘the alteration of the power of the bishop of Rome was not good and should not stand’; he experienced angry reactions in Richmond when he exhorted townsfolk to accept the King as supreme head. In many parishes, layfolk demanded that priests bid the bedes after the old fashion, and pray publicly for the Pope. Bills expressing the same sentiment appeared attached to the doors of churches. Harry Gyll, subprior of Watton in the West Riding, thought the headship of the Church was ‘in every man’s mouth’. People were saying of the royal supremacy that, if it ‘were not laid down, it should not do well’.²³

This was the heart of the matter. Lay protest against the break with Rome was muted in 1533–4 because it was far from clear what the change actually meant. Three years on – after monastic suppressions, royal injunctions and lashings of heretical preaching on purgatory and saints – it had begun to seem that communion with Rome might after all be the guarantor of right faith and traditional ways. Henry’s propaganda sought to persuade people that the bishop of Rome was the enemy of England and the enemy of truth. But other lessons were being learned in the practical school of schism.

Henry himself received a hard lesson in humility. With Norfolk and Suffolk arguing that there was no alternative to a general pardon and the promise of a free Parliament, the King reluctantly gave way. At a meeting in the Carmelite friary in Doncaster on 6 December, Norfolk relayed these terms, and (more or less on his own authority) agreed there should be no further suppressions until a Parliament could convene to resolve the religious issues. Two days later, Aske knelt in front of the Pilgrim delegates and begged them to call him captain no longer. He tore from his tunic the emblem the Pilgrims adopted: the Five Wounds of Christ enclosing a eucharistic chalice and host. All present did likewise, and called out, ‘We will all wear no badge nor sign but the badge of our sovereign lord.’24

It was, it seemed, a total victory. Robert Aske had become one of the most powerful men in the kingdom. There was an unexpected invitation to spend Christmas at court, where Henry, in the company of his new wife, Jane Seymour, greeted Aske with all the false bonhomie of which the King was so effortlessly capable. But the commons were restive, suspicious. Many distrusted both the King and the gentry leaders who handled the negotiations and now consulted with them no more. They were right to be sceptical. The northern Parliament remained no more than a vague promise, and nothing beyond the pardon itself was committed to the Pilgrims in writing.

The promise of the Pilgrimage withered where it first bloomed, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. John Hallam, a former captain of the commons, feared a military crackdown, and hatched a conspiracy to pre-empt it by seizing the ports of Hull and Scarborough. He made common cause with the gentleman Sir Francis Bigod – an unlikely alliance, as Bigod was a convinced evangelical. But he strongly opposed the dissolution of monasteries, places he idealistically imagined transformed into centres of reformed worship. Bigod also disliked the very concept of royal supremacy. Their rising began, ill-planned and thinly supported, on 16 January 1537, and collapsed within a few days. Nonetheless, the attempt caused a ripple of renewed insurrection across the North and West Ridings, Lancashire, Cumberland and Westmorland.²⁵

The pardon was breached. Unencumbered by moral or legal constraint, Norfolk returned to restore order. He was assisted by some who had opposed him the previous year: gentlemen like Robert Bowes and Ralph Ellerker. The gentry held aloof from the new rebellions, and, hoping the December agreement could remain intact, moved to suppress them. Outside Carlisle, on 17 February, a substantial rebel army of 6,000 was crushed by a force of borderers commanded by Sir Christopher Dacre: 800 were taken prisoner, an unknown number killed. The ideal of a harmonious commonwealth unravelled into frayed strands of mistrust and recrimination.

Retribution was swift and thorough. About 150 of those involved in the new outbreaks were hanged under martial law, including around twenty clergymen. The government also moved against Lincolnshire rebels not covered by the December pardon. The principal leaders of the Pilgrimage – Aske, Darcy, Constable – were summoned to London in February and March. They went, naively expecting royal gratitude for their efforts to uphold the King’s authority. All were tried and executed on shaky evidence of renewed treason, along with Lords Hussey and Lumley, Sir Thomas Percy, and a dozen other gentlemen. A couple of dozen more fled to Scotland, there to brood, plot, and enflame the King’s anger.26 There would be no Parliament at Nottingham or York.

The Pilgrimage makes nonsense of a frequently asked question: why there was ‘so little opposition’ to Henry’s religious policies. It was a massive movement of protest, which wrested a third of the kingdom from the royal grasp, and enjoyed unknown but considerable levels of sympathy in the rest. It gave Henry, quite literally, the fright of his life. Heads were bound to roll, but if the Pilgrims had pressed their advantage, they would have been different heads.

The failure of the Pilgrimage of Grace is explicable, but it was far from inevitable. Nonetheless, that failure was a watershed moment: the champions of the old order had drawn themselves up to their full height, and had been faced down. Contemporaries drew contrasting conclusions. Some pointed to the dangers of affronting the traditionalist instincts of the populace. For others, the rebellion proved the connection of old-fashioned religion to treasonous subversion, and the necessity of pressing on boldly with reform. In a tract against the rebels, Henry’s propagandist Richard Morison insisted that ‘preaching of the gospel is not the cause of sedition, but rather lack of preaching of it’.²⁷ The contest between these contradictory counsels, among the King’s advisors, and in the King’s own head, produced political conditions of unprecedented volatility in the years following.

Sugar and Mustard

‘It is evident that the King of England is running openly to his ruin and that God means to punish him.’ The papal nuncio in France, Rodolfo Pio, bishop of Faenza, had from the first seen the Pilgrimage of Grace as a heaven-sent opportunity to humble the heretic king of England. In February 1537, he urged the Pope to consider that ‘now is perhaps the time to make use of the Cardinal of England’.²⁸

Reginald Pole was raised to the Sacred College in December 1536; at the start of the following year Paul III named him legate to the Valois and Habsburg courts. The letter of appointment designated him ‘an angel of peace’, mandated to promote the General Council the Pope had formally announced in June, and to secure pledges of assistance against the Turks. The real plan was to send him secretly to England, to join the Pilgrims and publicly command Henry to return to obedience.

It was all too late. Pio’s letter was written a day after the rebels were routed outside Carlisle. At the end of March, Paul III handed Pole a powerful piece of spiritual weaponry: a bull granting the benefits of a crusading indulgence to anyone taking up arms to return Henry VIII to the faith (‘better that he and his supporters die, than for them to take others to hell’).29 But by then, Aske was on his way to London, and an appointment with the hangman.

For papalists, the Pilgrimage was an opportunity lost. Evangelicals were determined to capitalize on its defeat. Cranmer wrote on 3 April to Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor in Zürich, that the conservative bishops and clergy had been humbled and weakened. He drew a parallel with the downfall of the German peasants in 1524–5. Just as that defeat stabilized the conditions for an orderly advance of reform, ‘so we hope it will be for us’. A similar message was passed to the leadership of the Lutheran Schmalkaldic League, via Cranmer’s agent in Strassburg, Thomas Theobald: ‘as a result of the recent uproar in England, the evangelical bishops very much have the King’s ear, and … there is good hope of furthering the cause of the gospel’. The hope on Cranmer and Cromwell’s part was that stalled negotiations with the German Protestants would now recommence.³⁰

In January 1537, Henry summoned a ‘Great Council’ of notables to advise him on responding to the rebels’ demands; it seems likely they recommended looking again at the Ten Articles. The task was delegated to another body meeting towards the end of February, a clerical synod convened under Cromwell’s vicegerential authority.³¹ Attendees included our main source of information on proceedings, a wandering Scottish Lutheran, Alexander Alesius, apparently invited to join the discussions after running into Cromwell in the street. That no abbots or priors seemingly took part indicated how the remaining religious houses were living on borrowed time.

The King, Cromwell informed delegates, was determined ‘to set a quietness in the Church’, and to resolve consciences about the controversies raging throughout Christendom. The divines were to debate ‘friendly and lovingly’, but Henry would not countenance doctrines that could not be proved from scripture, nor ‘suffer the Scripture to be wrested and defaced by any glosses, any papistical laws, or by any authority of doctors or councils’.³²

The most contentious issue was whether the sacraments omitted from the Ten Articles – confirmation, marriage, holy orders and extreme unction – were to be readmitted. Cranmer’s view was that they ‘cannot be proved to be institute of Christ, nor have any word in them to certify us of remission of sins’. He was backed by the prelates for whose heads the rebels had called – Latimer, Shaxton, Goodrich, Foxe – but opposed by a phalanx of conservatives not nearly as cowed and docile as Cranmer’s letter to Bullinger made out: Lee of York (lucky to be pardoned after reluctantly throwing in his lot with the Pilgrims), Stokesley of London, Clerk of Bath and Wells, Sampson of Chichester, and Repps of Norwich. Gardiner was absent as ambassador in France, but Tunstall soon added heavyweight support.

Stokesley was the most forthright, questioning the ground rules Cromwell laid down. He refused to accept that ‘nothing pertaineth unto the Christian faith but that only that is written in the Bible’, boldly asserting that unwritten traditions transmitted from the apostles ‘be of like authority with the Scripture’. This, according to Alesius, elicited wry smiles from the evangelical bishops as they saw him revert ‘unto his old rusty sophistry’.33

Vigorous lobbying continued, in committee and subcommittee, through to the summer – at Lambeth Palace, at Foxe’s London residence and elsewhere. The conservative bishops conspired on Tunstall’s barge journeying back and forth to Lambeth on the Thames. Sampson later remembered poring with Stokesley over some texts of the Greek Fathers – a useful source of tradition untainted by papal endorsement.³⁴

In the end, there was an agreed text: The Institution of a Christian Man, known, then and since, as ‘The Bishops’ Book’. It was the outcome of tough negotiation, and concessions on all sides. Gardiner heard how drafts passed between Stokesley and Foxe, each making insertions and deletions, ‘and so to a new article’. Latimer found it exhausting, and prayed ‘we shall not need to have any more such doings’. It was ‘a troublous thing to agree upon a doctrine in things of such controversy … every man (I trust) meaning well, and yet not all meaning one way’.

The result pleased everybody and nobody. Gardiner later described it as ‘a common storehouse, where every man laid up in store such ware as he liked, and could tell where to find to serve his purpose’. It was a mixture of ‘sugar and mustard’.³⁵ The missing sacraments were, as Archbishop Lee gleefully put it, ‘found again’. But the evangelicals ensured the scriptural principle remained paramount. They were placed in a separate section of the text, reflecting ‘a difference in dignity and necessity’. Only baptism, penance and the eucharist were ‘instituted of Christ, to be as certain instruments or remedies necessary for our salvation’.³⁶

The conservatives scored some tactical victories. In defiance of Cranmer, the article on extreme unction affirmed an efficacy for ‘remission of sins’.³⁷ But such coherence as the Bishops’ Book possessed tended in an evangelical direction, and there was no real dilution of the semi-Lutheranism of the Ten Articles, whose sections on justification, purgatory and the three sacraments ‘instituted of Christ’ it simply reproduced. Passages on the Creed, the Commandments, Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary were extensively indebted to William Marshall’s Primer of 1535, which in turn drew heavily on Luther’s writings.38

In one crucial respect, Marshall went further than Luther himself, and the Bishops’ Book, remarkably and momentously, followed him. There was, since earliest Christian times, disagreement about the numbering of the Ten Commandments, which, as preserved in Exodus and Deuteronomy, actually contain a quantity of injunctions that could be construed as between nine and fourteen. St Augustine’s view – retained by Luther – was normative for the medieval western Church: the prohibition on making ‘graven images’, and on worshipping them, was part of the first commandment, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’. But Jewish tradition, followed by the Orthodox Churches of the east, always saw these as separate commandments.

Zwingli’s church at Zürich, preoccupied with the dangers of ‘idolatry’, was responsible for reintroducing the Hebrew enumeration to the Christian west. The idea was picked up by English reformers, including Tyndale and George Joye, from whose Ortulus Anime the revised numbering found its way into Marshall’s Primer.³⁹ The Bishops’ Book drew back from the Zürich inference: that the second commandment prohibited all images of Christ or the saints. But the tone of its exposition was bracing, stressing the undesirability of representations of God the Father, and castigating those who ‘be more ready with their substance to deck dead images gorgeously and gloriously, than with the same to help poor Christian people, the quick and lively images of God’.⁴⁰ This was the language of Latimer, and of the Lollards.

Evangelicals knew they had won a victory, albeit narrowly on points. Cranmer reacted furiously when word reached him that servants of the conservative Kentish gentleman Sir Thomas Cheyney were saying ‘all things are restored by this new book to their old use’. If people were to read it carefully, Cranmer expostulated, ‘they shall well perceive that purgatory, pilgrimages, praying to saints, images, holy bread, holy water, merits, works, ceremony, and such other be not restored to their late accustomed abuses, but shall evidently perceive that the word of God hath gotten the upper hand of them all’.⁴¹

The Word of God continued to press its advantage in the summer of 1537, as Cranmer and Cromwell strove to overcome the embarrassing anomaly of the 1536 Injunctions ordering parishes to acquire a vernacular bible, without the authorities managing to make an approved vernacular version available. In Antwerp, John Rogers completed Tyndale’s translation and published it under the name of Thomas Matthew. The evangelical printer Richard Grafton financed the edition and arranged for its importation into England, sending copies to Cromwell and Cranmer with requests for a royal licence to protect his monopoly. By the second week in August, Cromwell had shown this ‘Matthew Bible’ to the King and obtained authorization for it to be sold throughout the realm. On hearing the news, Cranmer told the vicegerent he had given him more pleasure ‘than if you had given me a thousand pound’.42

Their morale high, the evangelicals pushed forward. In the week the Bishops’ Book was completed, Cranmer presided at an interrogation of the vicar of Croydon, Rowland Philipps, a friend of More and Fisher, who swore the oath only reluctantly in 1534, and remained a marked man thereafter. Over two days Philipps was examined closely over comments about evangelical preaching, the relationship between faith and works, and the scope of scriptural authority.

Philipps was no ignorant country curate, to be browbeaten with episcopal learning. An intricate dance of question and response illustrates how well the two sides now understood each other. Cranmer demanded to know ‘whether the apostles preached to the gentiles that which the evangelists wrote?’ But Phillips tartly riposted that ‘the evangelists wrote that that the apostles had preached’. It was the issue at the heart of the confrontation between Tyndale and More: which came first, the bible or the Church?

A careless reply to one question might have cost Philipps his head: ‘whom he meant by the Catholic Church, when he said that the Catholic Church shall never err in things that be necessary for salvation?’ His answer was a masterclass in the kind of creative obfuscation Henry’s Reformation unintentionally but persistently encouraged: ‘He meant the universal multitude of Christian people, as well laymen as the clergy, subjects as rulers.’ Philipps did enough, for within a month William Marshall was complaining about the vicar of Croydon as one of several London clergy ‘which have preached both erroneously and seditiously, and without punishment have escaped’.⁴³

Although finished in July, events conspired to delay printing of the Bishops’ Book and its presentation to the King: plague in London, the chronic illness of its principal compiler, Bishop Foxe, who, like his episcopal colleagues, remained unsure ‘whether the book shall go forth in the King’s name or that of the Bishops’. Not until the end of August 1537 was the final product ready for royal perusal.⁴⁴

That perusal was, apparently, perfunctory. In a reply to the authors, Henry professed to be pleased with what he saw, and commanded that for three years it should be taught to the people, with parts read from the pulpit every Sunday and feast day. But he also claimed he had ‘no time convenient’ to look properly through the book, and being ‘much otherwise occupied, we have taken, as it were, a taste’. It would not go out under the King’s name.⁴⁵

The King, of course, had much on his mind; not least, the condition of Queen Jane, seven months pregnant. But it stretches credulity that, in a matter of such importance, and involving one of his keenest interests (theology), he really only glanced lightly through the work. In fact, Henry did not entirely like what he saw, but was not ready publicly to repudiate the efforts that his bishops had gone to. It was, or should have been, a warning sign: Henry was prepared to extend the evangelicals credit, but not to underwrite their debts. It also revealed the surprising pragmatism of a king who talked much of the need to ensure unity, and to provide secure guidance to his subjects, but who in matters touching their eternal salvation was happy to refer them to a merely draft handbook.

The Bishops’ Book was printed five times before the end of 1537, but already on 10 October, Cromwell’s secretary Thomas Wriothesely was writing to Thomas Wyatt, English ambassador at the imperial court, to say he had not bothered to send him a copy ‘because the same shall be reformed, as it had need in many points’.46 The King himself took the task in hand, and through the remaining weeks of the year produced dozens of pages of detailed objections and emendations. He threw himself more energetically into the work after joy at the birth of the longed-for male heir, Prince Edward, on 12 October, turned into grief for the death of the baby’s mother just under a fortnight later.

Henry’s editorial interventions were pedantic and idiosyncratic. Most notoriously, he took it upon himself to improve the wording of both the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. He wanted the final petition of the latter to read ‘and suffer us not to be led into temptation’ (rather than ‘lead us not into temptation’). And he amended the First Commandment (‘Thou shalt have none other gods but me’) to read ‘Thou shalt not have nor repute any other God, or gods, but me Jesu Christ’. Cranmer took a deep breath and responded, with commendable restraint, that ‘we should not alter any word in the scripture, which wholly is ministered unto us by the Ghost of God’.

There were patterns to the King’s nit-pickery. One was systematic reinforcement of his authority as supreme head, and a downgrading of the spiritual powers of bishops and clergy. Where, with respect to the clergy, the book spoke of laypeople ‘committed to their spiritual charge’, Henry inserted a revised order of priority – ‘our and their spiritual charge’. ‘Holy orders’ became merely ‘orders’. The other tendency was an effort to weaken, even undermine, the book’s emphasis on the sufficiency of faith for salvation; Henry made numerous insertions about the need for perseverance in obedience, laws, duty and ‘Christian life’.⁴⁷

Henry’s revisions were written up in neat scribal copy, and by 14 January 1538 passed to Cranmer, who set aside all business to produce twenty-nine pages of detailed counter-commentary. He hoped the King would pardon his presumption, ‘that I have been so scrupulous and as it were a picker of quarrels to his Grace’s book, making a great matter of every light fault, or rather where no fault is at all’. The courtesy was sugar-dust on a courageous and excoriating critique. At every point, Cranmer argued against the assumption Henry inherited from late medieval Catholicism – that God’s offer of saving grace was something to which the human will could productively respond with good works. For Cranmer, as for Luther, good works followed from faith. This faith was itself a gift of God – not intellectual assent, but an ‘assured hope and confidence’ in the boundless mercy of Christ. The emendations show Cranmer following the logic of Luther’s teaching on justification further than Luther himself was prepared to go. If human free will played no part in salvation, then of his own unrestrained volition God decided the fate of every human soul: some were ‘predestined’ to salvation, others to damnation. ‘The elect’, Cranmer was convinced, would never ultimately fall away.48

It did little good. Henry incorporated a few suggestions, but largely stuck to his theological guns. A neat scribal copy of the Bishops’ Book, so heavily emended it deserves to be called a first ‘King’s Book’, was soon produced, but never authorized or published. The Church of England had been given a definitive statement of doctrine by its supreme temporal and spiritual head, but only Henry, and a handful of advisors, knew what it was. For the moment, as Bishop Sampson told his commissary, the King was content that ‘the book lately put out … should be obeyed and may be taught till that His Majesty shall otherwise order’.⁴⁹

Things Tending to Idolatry

The King had signalled – privately – his instinctive preference for the old over the new in the great battle of ideas over salvation. But there was to be no reprieve for the institutions that epitomized the centrality of good works in late medieval Catholicism. The monasteries’ part in the Pilgrimage of Grace confirmed Henry’s suspicions that the religious were the least reliable of his subjects. ‘All these troubles have ensued,’ he confided to Norfolk in February 1537, ‘by the solicitation and traitorous conspiracies of the monks.’⁵⁰

The suppression of the Pilgrimage suggested new ways forward. Several superiors, implicated to varying degrees, were executed in the spring of 1537: the heads of houses at Kirkstead and Barlings in Lincolnshire, Whalley in Lancashire, Jervaulx and Bridlington in Yorkshire. The lands and goods of traitors were forfeit to the crown, and, on the legally dubious argument that a monastery’s possessions were the property of its abbot, these houses were seized and dissolved. A similar fate lay in store for Roger Pyle, Cistercian abbot of Furness in remote north-west Lancashire. He played a risky double game during the Pilgrimage, fleeing before the rebels while allowing his monks to raise tenants in their support. Henry’s lieutenant, the Earl of Sussex, under orders to investigate Pyle’s conduct, suggested a lifeline, and Pyle eagerly grabbed it. In a document dated 5 April 1537, the abbot declared he did ‘freely and wholly surrender, give and grant unto the King’s Highness’ all lands, rents and properties of the house, citing ‘the misorder and evil life, both unto God and our Prince, of the brethren of the said monastery’ as the reason.⁵¹

A crucial precedent was thus established: for ‘voluntary’ surrender of monasteries to the crown. It was at its least voluntary in the case of the next monastery to go – the London Charterhouse, still traumatized by the execution of its prior in 1535. The monks there had sworn to the succession, but thereafter continued to resist pressure to make an unequivocal acknowledgement of the supremacy. In May 1537, as Darcy, Hussey and Aske went on trial, commissioners returned to demand it again. Ten Carthusians – three priests, a deacon and six lay brothers – refused and were carted off to Newgate, starving to death there through the stifling summer months. Twenty others, including the prior, William Trafford, reluctantly agreed to subscribe, though, according to the later account of one of their number, they did so after beseeching God to forgive the sin they were about to commit with their lips ‘contrary to the law of our mind’. A month later this shattered remnant was cajoled by Cromwell’s agent Thomas Bedyll into setting their seal to a surrender document, confessing that their offences merited ‘the severest death’, and throwing themselves on the mercy of the King.52

Further surrenders followed towards the end of 1537: Lewes in Sussex, Castle Acre in Norfolk, Wardon in Bedfordshire, Titchfield in Hampshire. It may have been around now that Henry made the final decision to sweep monasticism away in its entirety.⁵³ But if so, the intentions of the government, and the inclinations of the King, remained hard for people to read. In December, a lavish royal refoundation of the Benedictine abbey of Chertsey was completed, on the site of the dissolved priory of Austin canons at Bisham in Berkshire. The abbot and thirteen monks were to offer prayers for the King’s good estate during his life, ‘and for the soul of Jane his late queen’. Latimer believed the founding of monasteries to be an argument for the existence of purgatory, yet in the final, unissued, royal revision of the Bishops’ Book, that word was conspicuously removed.⁵⁴

By the beginning of 1538 the end of monasticism was widely believed to be at hand. Richard Layton wrote to Cromwell from Norfolk on 18 January to report rumours ‘that the King was determined to suppress all monasteries’. Layton publicly declared that those who said so ‘slandered their natural sovereign’, and ordered abbots and priors ‘they should not, for any such vain babbling of the people, waste, sell, grant or alienate any of their property’. In March, Cromwell despatched a circular to abbots and priors commanding such practices to stop, and assuring them the King ‘does not intend in any way to trouble you or devise for the suppression of any religious house that standeth, except they shall desire it themselves’.⁵⁵

Cromwell’s denial that any such decision had been taken virtually confirms for us that it had. Maybe, in anticipating a total dissolution, the monks helped bring it on themselves: the government needed to move fast to ensure that the very considerable financial assets of the religious houses flowed undiminished into the newly established government department known as the ‘Court of Augmentations’. A trickle of ‘voluntary’ surrenders through the early months of 1538 had by late summer become a steady flow, with commissioners travelling in circuits to bully and cajole the religious into giving up their communal life.

The dissolution of the monasteries was not only – or even primarily – an exercise in aggressive state fiscalism. It was a spectacular, public, evangelical campaign, announcing the purification of the English Church, and denigrating the values and ideals the monasteries had stood for. Deeds of surrender, their wording dictated by royal commissioners, repudiated monastic life as a farce and a fraud. The Franciscans of Bedford now realized that ‘perfection of Christian living doth not consist in dumb ceremonies, wearing of a grey coat, disguising ourselves after strange fashions, ducking and becking, in girding ourselves with a girdle full of knots, and other like papistical ceremonies’. Benedictines, like those of St Andrew’s, Northampton, confessed to having lived lives filled with pride, idleness and luxury. Worse, for ‘damnable lucre’, they seduced layfolk from the true faith of Christ, ‘stirring them with all persuasions, engines and policy, to dead images and counterfeit relics’.56

People had been piteously deceived. That was the message the King and his advisors wanted the world to learn, as a forest of monasteries came crashing down in 1538, laying waste to a spiritual eco-system of shrines, pilgrimages and cultic images. Instances of monastic ‘fraud’ supplied potent justification for the King’s proceedings. In February, commissioners suppressed the Cistercian monastery of Boxley (Kent), whose famous crucifix, the ‘Rood of Grace’, had long attracted pilgrims and offerings. They discovered, on prising it from the wall, that it had ‘certain engines and old wires’ in the back, allowing the eyes and lips to be moved. It is likely these mechanisms originally served some ceremonial or liturgical purpose, but the authorities seized upon this ‘proof’ that miracles were being faked, and pilgrims hoodwinked. The rood was paraded in the marketplace at Maidstone, then shown to King and courtiers in London. On 24 February, it was exhibited at Paul’s Cross, where Bishop Hilsey denounced its ‘idolatry and craft’ before handing it to apprentices in the crowd for ritual dismemberment. In the same sermon, Hilsey produced another shocking revelation: the relic of Christ’s Blood in the shrine at Hailes in Gloucestershire, he had it on good authority, ‘was but a duck’s blood’.⁵⁷

The spring and summer of 1538 saw open season on relics and images. In March, Lord Lisle’s man of business, John Husee, wrote ruefully to his master in Calais that ‘pilgrimage saints go down apace’. The London chronicler Charles Wriothesley designated this as the year when ‘all manner [of] images that were used for common pilgrimages both in England and Wales were taken down throughout this realm in every shire by the King’s commandment’, adding loyally ‘that the people should use no more idolatry to them’.

London was the crucible of the campaign. Prominent crucifixes were removed from Bermondsey Abbey, and from the north door of St Paul’s Cathedral. In May, iconoclasts destroyed the much venerated rood at St Margaret Pattens, believing, so they claimed, they had Cromwell’s mandate for the action.58 But efforts by zealous commissioners and evangelical bishops extended the purge into the furthest corners of the land. Sir William Basset sent Cromwell images associated with two healing wells, St Anne from Buxton, and St Modwen from Burton-on-Trent, assuring him he had confiscated the offerings and defaced the tabernacles, so that ‘there should be no more idolatry and superstition there used’. In Wales, Bishop Barlow seized relics associated with the titular saint at his own cathedral of St David’s, and put an end to a ‘devilish delusion’ at Cardigan Priory, where a miraculous candle, ‘Our Lady’s taper’, supposedly flickered eternally. The clergy were ordered to declare to the people ‘the deceitful juggling of their predecessors there’. At Worcester, Latimer removed from the cathedral the renowned image of Our Lady, ‘the devil’s instrument to bring many (I fear) to eternal fire’. Fire was what Latimer had in mind: he wrote to Cromwell suggesting ‘our great Sibyll’ be burned at Smithfield, along with ‘her old sister of Walsingham, her young sister of Ipswich, with their other two sisters of Doncaster and Penrice’. In July, the two famous Virgins, of Walsingham and Ipswich, were indeed brought up to London, ‘with all the jewels that hung about them’, and on Cromwell’s orders burned at Chelsea.⁵⁹

For the citizens of London, these spectacles of the ritual execution of spiritually treasonous objects were interspersed with the putting to death of politically treasonous subjects. In February 1538, an Irishman and an English priest, Sir John Alane, were hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, and in March the same fate befell a Plymouth gentleman, Thomas Harford, ‘for seditious words of treason against the King’s Majesty’.

On 22 May, the two forms of exemplary destruction came together in gruesomely spectacular fashion. A Franciscan Observant, John Forest, was burned in a suspended cage before a huge crowd at Smithfield, after a three-hour sermon by Latimer. Wood for the pyre was provided by a giant pilgrimage statute from North Wales, the image of St Derfel or Dderfel Gadarn, reputed to rescue from hell anyone who made offerings before it.

Forest reportedly made similar claims about the powers of Catholic confessors, which may have prompted the idea – on the part of Cromwell, Cranmer or Latimer – of staging this bizarre dual execution. But the principal reason Forest was burned as a heretic, rather than hanged as a traitor, was his refusal to abjure the opinion that ‘the Holy Catholic Church was the Church of Rome’. Here, in its purest, most brutal form, was the logic of the royal supremacy as a religious dogma; a declaration of all-out theological war. Yet it was an experiment never to be repeated. Henry and Archbishop Cranmer shared a hatred of friars, particularly ones who hypocritically conformed (Forest took the oath with his ‘outward man’) while secretly proselytizing for Rome. But classifying papalists as heretics risked causing great and gratuitous offence to the Catholic powers in Europe. Ominously, just a week before Forest’s execution, delegates of Charles V and Francis I began negotiations for a treaty of amity, an outcome fraught with dangers for England.60

In August, the truce between the Emperor and the King of France was concluded. At Nice, the two old foes swore to unite to protect Europe from the Turks, while agreeing to persuade heretics ‘amicably’ to return to the Church. The Pope’s legate, Reginald Pole, once again saw ‘the finger of God’ at work, and an opportunity to remove once and for all ‘that tyrant’, Henry VIII.⁶¹

As the summer of 1538 drew to a close, traitors – political and spiritual, living and dead – loomed large in the King’s imagination. Two events, seemingly unconnected, followed close upon each other with suspicious despatch. On 18 August, Cranmer wrote to Cromwell to voice his suspicion that the relic of the blood of St Thomas Becket, venerated in the cathedral at Canterbury, ‘is but a feigned thing, and made of some red ochre or of such like matter’; he had ordered an investigation. On 29 August, Cromwell decided to act on information coming into his hands earlier that summer: Sir Geoffrey Pole, Reginald’s younger brother, was arrested and sent to the Tower.⁶²

Two exterminations proceeded in parallel: of Cardinal Pole’s English family, and of the cult and memory of England’s premier saint. Psychologically broken in the Tower, Geoffrey Pole began to talk. On his evidence, others were taken: Pole’s elder brother, Lord Montagu, and his cousin, the Marquis of Exeter, along with their wives and children; Montagu’s brother-in-law, Sir Edward Neville; Pole’s mother, Margaret, Countess of Salisbury; a clutch of family chaplains and dependants. It emerged that Pole’s kin had retained contact with him during his exile, and that there had been much disaffected talk among Lady Margaret’s circle at Warblington Castle in Hampshire. But despite the claims of government propagandists, there was no ‘Exeter Conspiracy’. Almost the worst that could be proved against the Marquis was his saying, ‘I trust to see a merry world one day.’

Exeter, Montagu and Neville were beheaded on Tower Hill in December. The plebeian traitors – Montagu’s servant, Hugh Holland (a bearer of letters to the cardinal), his chaplain John Collins, the chancellor of Chichester, George Croftes – were hanged and quartered at Tyburn. Geoffrey Pole was pardoned in return for his evidence, and, after two unsuccessful attempts at suicide, slunk pitifully to Rome to seek fraternal pardon for his role as the instrument of Henry VIII’s vengeance.⁶³

That vengeance reached down the centuries to trouble the long-dead. While Geoffrey Pole was being taken apart by his interrogators in the Tower, Cromwell was at work on a new set of Royal Injunctions. These reiterated the order from 1536 for parishes to acquire an English bible. No priest, ‘privily or apertly’, should discourage any man from consulting it, but rather exhort every person in his parish to read ‘the very lively word of God’, though the explanation of ‘obscure places’ was referred to ‘men of higher judgement’. The purgative iconoclasm of the preceding months now extended to the heart of parish worship. Images ‘abused’ with pilgrimage offerings must be taken down and destroyed (‘delayed’). No lights were to burn in front of images, other than on the rood loft before the crucifix. They were also allowed at the Easter sepulchre, and before the reserved sacrament. But the banning of one of the most routine of religious acts – lighting a candle in front of the statue of a saint – signalled a profound change of devotional repertoire. Such age-old habits, along with praying on rosary beads, were ‘works devised by men’s fantasies’, ‘things tending to idolatry and superstition’.64

By the time the Injunctions were issued at the end of September, a further clause was added: there was to be no celebration of any kind around the feast of ‘Thomas Becket, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury’. St Thomas of Canterbury was the premier domestic saint of medieval England; his shrine at Canterbury a site of European significance. But as a martyr for the liberties of the Church against royal encroachment, he embodied everything Henry VIII had grown to detest. The King himself arrived in Canterbury on 5 September, towards the end of a progress through Kent. His coming was planned to coincide with the most audacious iconoclastic spectacle of the reign to date. King and court were treated to a performance of a new play by the ex-friar John Bale, ‘On the Treasons of Becket’, and royal commissioners dismantled the shrine in the cathedral, removing cartloads of treasure, and burning the bones of the saint.⁶⁵

Much that Henry sanctioned over the preceding years had scandalized opinion in Catholic Europe. But the action against Becket ramped up international indignation to new levels. In December 1538, it provoked Paul III to issue publicly the excommunication lying suspended, and in hope of Henry’s amendment, since August 1535. The bull alleged that a formal trial and condemnation of Becket had taken place (improbable, but not impossible), and roundly condemned a ruler who, ‘not contented with the cruel slaughter of living priests and prelates, has not been afraid to exert his savagery also upon the dead’. To Pole, writing to Charles V, it seemed that what had taken place was nothing less than an ‘extraordinary and unique ungodliness’. What, he asked rhetorically, would this king not dare to do – ‘Will he rewrite history?’⁶⁶

People within England had differing perspectives of the remarkable, dizzying events of 1538. Evangelicals rejoiced: a spate of poems and treatises applauded the King’s proceedings and mocked the superstitious follies swept away by them.⁶⁷ The decision to target suspect relics, forged miracles and superstitious image-worship was tactically adept. This was the soft underbelly of popular religion, equally unpalatable to the humanist reformism of the King, and the more full-blooded evangelicalism of Cromwell, Cranmer and Latimer. Conservatives could scarcely protest at the unmasking of ‘abuses’, and even Gardiner, returning from diplomatic service at the end of September, was able to say, perhaps through gritted teeth, that he ‘misliked not’ the proceedings at Canterbury. Some even deluded themselves that, shorn of ‘superstition’, traditional religious life might continue as before. In November 1538, Katharine Bulkeley, Benedictine abbess of Godstow in Oxfordshire, wrote solemnly to reassure Cromwell that ‘there is neither pope, purgatory, image nor pilgrimage, nor praying to dead saints used amongst us’.68

To others, what was taking place was nothing less than sacrilege, more likely to provoke than to placate the avenging powers of heaven. A fire that broke out in the London parish of St Margaret Pattens in May 1538, taking nine lives, was thought to be a judgement on the recent destruction of the rood. In the summer, rumours spread in Salisbury that an angel had appeared to the King, commanding him to go on pilgrimage to St Michael’s Mount, a message reinforced by the ghost of Jane Seymour. In the January snows of 1539, the Norfolk magistrate Roger Townsend placed in the stocks a woman from Wells for starting a rumour that Our Lady of Walsingham performed miracles after her removal to London the previous summer. He feared that, despite its destruction, ‘the said image is not yet out of some of their heads’.⁶⁹

Many Walsingham folk, robbed not only of a beloved icon but of a means of attracting wealth and trade to their little town, surely sympathized with the woman shivering in the stocks. But the young people and boys pelted her with snowballs. Here, and almost everywhere, opinion was divided, polarized – still more so than in 1533. In the garrison town of Calais, so the Welsh soldier Elis Gruffydd recalled, St Thomas of Canterbury caused ‘much discussion among the people, some simple folk saying that he was a holy and saintly man, others that he was a wilful traitor to his king’. In the dedicatory epistle to the King attached to his 1538 English–Latin New Testament, Miles Coverdale bemoaned the tendency among enemies of the Gospel to break out into ‘blasphemous and uncomely words’. They called loyal subjects ‘heretics, new-fangled fellows, English biblers, cobblers of divinity, fellows of the new faith’.⁷⁰

The devotees of vernacular scripture were every bit as fractious as its detractors. A Rotherham schoolmaster, William Senes, scorned the parish clerk’s pious affirmation that he would believe as his father had done. ‘Thy father was a liar and is in hell, and so is my father in hell also. My father never knew scripture, and now it is come forth.’ At Barking in Suffolk, in autumn 1538, Hugh Buck crossed swords with the traditionalist priest John Adryan, who ordered him to believe as ‘thy father and mother taught thee’. All they ever taught him, Buck riposted, was ‘my paternoster, ave and credo in Latin’, as well as ‘idolatry’. Had they not, Adryan objected, ‘bade thee love thy Lord God above all thing’? ‘Nay, that was taught me since.’

Senes and Buck were men remorselessly repudiating everything that went before, including ties of ancestry and blood. It was an instinct shared by William Maldon, a young apprentice from Chelmsford in Essex, who in 1539 told his devout mother that praying in front of the crucifix was ‘plain idolatry, and plainly against the commandment of God’. She was not prepared to be schooled by her own son: ‘Thou thief! If thy father knew this, he would hang thee.’ To Maldon, ‘the glad and sweet tidings of the Gospel’ heralded the dawn of a new age, just as they did for Robert Towson, instigator of a row in a Cambridge shop in April 1538. Until recently, he pronounced, there was never a good man in England – except for a few who were burned. When someone artfully asked him if the King were not a good man, Towson refused to waver: ‘No, all was nought till within this six years.’71

In his own mind, Henry VIII’s religious reforms were shaped by three core principles: unity, obedience and the refurbishment of ancient truth. Their manifest effect was to fracture unity beyond the point of obvious repair, and to stretch obedience to its very breaking point. At the same time, both opponents and supporters of the changes saw in them not stately restoration, but a transpicuous and challenging novelty. As religious houses disappeared apace from the physical and cultural landscape of the nation, the meanings of ‘religion’ itself were starting to alter and mutate. What had once been an inherited stake in the ritual life of the community was becoming – for some – an alternative, ideological marker of individual and group identity. In the years remaining to him, the King would redouble his efforts to compel his subjects into uniformity, while the English people increasingly worked out for themselves what, and how, to believe.