THE SAME MONTH that Princess Elizabeth was born, Henry’s illegitimate son returned from France with his companion, the Earl of Surrey. The timing was significant. Bitterly disappointed by the birth of a girl after all the turmoil he had suffered to marry Anne Boleyn, Henry was determined to flaunt the fact that he was capable of siring healthy sons. FitzRoy’s recall may also have been intended as both a punishment and a warning to Anne. Henry could have sent no clearer message about what was expected of her now.
FitzRoy’s status as the king’s only living son made his marriage a matter of intense interest. There had even been a suggestion some years earlier that the boy should marry his own half-sister, the Princess Mary. Aware that this would prevent the annulment of her parents’ marriage, the Pope had expressed himself willing to grant a special dispensation. Perhaps not surprisingly, the king had disapproved of the scheme and it had come to nothing. This left the way open for FitzRoy’s protector, the Duke of Norfolk, who began scheming to marry the young man to his own daughter Mary. The king had no objections to such a match, and in November 1533 the negotiations were concluded.
FitzRoy was then just fourteen and his bride was about the same age. Their youth sparked fearful memories for the king. His elder brother Arthur had been just a year older when he had married Catherine of Aragon. Convinced that too much sexual activity had hastened Arthur’s death, Henry ordered the couple not to consummate their marriage. It is possible that his son’s health was already failing. A miniature painted by the artist Lucas Horenbout the following year shows FitzRoy in an open-necked nightshirt and nightcap, which suggests that he was bedridden. This must have frustrated Norfolk because an heir born of the union would strengthen his position still further, but he was obliged to be patient and wait for his son-in-law to gain in strength and years.
The duke soon had other matters to attend to. The rivalry between his ally Gardiner and their mutual enemy Cromwell was growing ever more intense. It may have been at the chief minister’s instigation that Gardiner found himself dispatched to France in autumn 1533. His task was to give formal notice to Francis I of Henry’s intention to appeal to a general council against Pope Clement VII’s judgment that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was valid. Gardiner’s diplomatic skills seem to have been lacking, however, for he displeased the French king. He also fell foul of his own royal master for failing to commit himself absolutely to the split from Rome. He was named, along with several other conservative clerics and noblemen, in a papal dispensation allowing them to celebrate mass even in the event of a papal interdict.
By the time that Gardiner returned to court, he found that his influence with Henry had slipped even further. This was due in no small part to Cromwell, who had made the most of his absence by acting as de facto secretary to the king. In April 1534, he formally replaced Gardiner in this role, thus confirming his position as Henry’s chief minister. Contemporaries were quick to grasp the significance. ‘The credit and authority which he [Cromwell] enjoys with this King just now is really incredible,’ Chapuys reported to Charles V, ‘as great indeed as the Cardinal ever enjoyed, besides which he is daily receiving fresh bounties from him.’1 By contrast, Gardiner seemed to have lost Henry’s regard. Soon after his rival’s promotion, he retreated to his diocese, where he remained until late 1535.
Another of the king’s men who found himself out in the cold was Thomas More. In February 1534, Henry turned decisively against him by insisting that his name be included in a bill of attainder for conspiring with the so-called ‘Maid of Kent’, Elizabeth Barton, who had prophesied disaster if the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn went ahead. Although More has often been portrayed as living in seclusion at his home in Chelsea, seeking only peace and solitude away from the corruption and backbiting of the court, this is wide of the mark. In fact, ever since his resignation, he had continued to court controversy by engaging in a series of disputes with religious reformers, and had penned various treatises aimed at whipping up popular loathing for heretics. He was always careful to speak well of the king, and to make it clear that his attacks were aimed only at those who tried to steer Henry from the paths of righteousness, but this was not enough to protect him from the royal wrath. When the Elizabeth Barton scandal broke, Henry had no hesitation in accusing More of complicity.
Cromwell had drawn up two lists in the attainder: one against those who ‘shall be attainted of high treason and suffer death except the king’s majesty do pardon [them]’, and the other against those who ‘shall be attainted of misprision (concealment of treason) and have imprisonment at the king’s will and lose all their goods’. At the king’s specific command, More’s name was included in the latter. He was by now so incensed with his former Chancellor that he was determined to make an example of him.
John Fisher’s name was also included in the second part of the attainder. Despite his arrest in 1533, he had continued to speak out against the annulment since his ill-advised comparison of Henry to King Herod in 1529. During the years that followed, Henry had gradually given up on his attempts to win over or intimidate Fisher, instead resorting to defamation and imprisonment. It may have been this that incited the bishop to begin treasonable dealings. Since the beginning of 1532, Fisher had maintained a secret correspondence with Charles V via his ambassador Chapuys. By the end of September 1533, Fisher had begun inciting the emperor to lend his military might to opposing Henry’s annulment, urging him that such intervention would be tantamount to a crusade. The king never discovered these letters, but it mattered little because his ministers had already found damning evidence of another of the bishop’s connections.
In 1534, Fisher was accused of conducting several interviews with Elizabeth Barton, but of failing to report any of her disloyal prophecies to the king. Cromwell seized upon this as an opportunity to discredit this troublesome opponent and claimed that he had been neglectful in his duty to Henry. He wrote to upbraid the bishop in February 1534, having already spoken ‘heavy words or terrible threats’ to him.2 The letter is one of the clearest indications of Cromwell’s pre-eminence in Henry’s favour at this time. ‘I believe that I know the king’s goodness and natural gentleness so well’, he told the bishop, ‘that his grace would not so unkindly handle you, as you unkindly write of him, unless you gave him other causes than be expressed in your letters.’3
Cromwell capitalised upon Henry’s increasing paranoia about those men who had once been loyal, and used the Barton controversy to further condemn them. Henry was soon so convinced that Thomas More was plotting against him that he declared that the former Chancellor had not just colluded with Barton, but was the ‘deviser’ of her evil words. Ever the lawyer, More asked for a formal hearing before the Lords, no doubt confident that he could prove his innocence. Henry had no intention of giving him such a prominent arena, however, and insisted that he be interrogated by a commission of four of his other men: Cromwell, Cranmer, Norfolk and Audley. Perhaps, despite his animosity towards More, the king also hoped that they would persuade him to relent. Norfolk certainly tried hard to do so. ‘Master More, it is perilous striving with princes,’ he urged, ‘and therefore, I would wish you somewhat to incline to the King’s pleasure.’4
In the event, however, Henry was persuaded to remove More’s name from the bill because Cromwell and his fellow commissioners shrewdly judged that parliament was unlikely to pass it if it remained. More reacted to the news in typically philosophical manner, telling his daughter Margaret: ‘quod differtur non aufertur’ (‘what is set aside is not put away’).5
For all Henry’s hostility towards More, the king knew that if his former Chancellor conformed, it would substantially improve the prospects of his subjects accepting Anne Boleyn as queen and all of the associated religious reforms. As it was, More – who was still officially a member of the council – stood as a figurehead for the old, accepted order, and even though the king denied him the opportunity to voice his objections in public, they were well enough known to be severely hampering his cause.
For his part, determined though he was not to sacrifice his principles, More was still desperate to win back his sovereign’s esteem. He therefore begged for an audience with Henry, knowing that this was the surest means of achieving it. When his request was denied, he was forced to content himself with penning a letter beseeching his master that ‘no sinister information move your noble Grace, to have any more distrust of my truth and devotion toward you, than I have, or shall during my life, give the cause’. He declared himself ‘in my most humble manner, prostrate at your gracious feet’, and assured Henry that he would forsake all of his worldly goods, liberty and even his life if he could ‘meet with your Grace again in heaven’.6
In April 1534, More learned that Barton and five of her associates had been executed. He knew that he was living on borrowed time. As he confided to his son-in-law, he had crossed a line with Henry and ‘could never go back again’.7 Although he is always hailed – justifiably – for his bravery and unwavering principles, More harboured a terror of a traitor’s death and admitted to feeling relieved that in spite of this he was able to resist the overwhelming pressure to relent. The more pressure that was heaped upon his shoulders, the more sanguine, even jovial he appeared. He adopted a gallows humour when Norfolk warned him that if he continued to defy the king, it would mean death. ‘Is that all, my Lord?’ More retorted. ‘Then in good faith is there no more difference between your grace and me, but that I shall die today and you tomorrow.’8
For all that, though, More was still a shrewd man and, far from being the willing martyr that he is so often portrayed as, he tried to chart the hazardous course between upholding his principles and retaining just enough royal favour to avoid the block. Having made his stand by refusing to acknowledge Anne as queen and resigning the chancellorship, he resolved to do nothing further to provoke the king’s ire. The only hope he had of achieving this was to keep his counsel. He implied as much to Cromwell in a letter of March 1534, insisting that where the king’s new marriage was concerned, he would never ‘murmur at it, nor dispute upon it, nor never did nor will’.9 Given his vigorous actions against the annulment and subsequent reforms, this was somewhat disingenuous. But if he was not promising to go back on his word, he was at least vowing to be silent thereafter. And he knew his fellow lawyer Cromwell would understand that under English law silence implied consent.
Silence, though, was a luxury that More would not long be afforded. In April, he was invited to swear to the Act of Succession. The oath’s preamble included a rejection of papal authority, so if More was to comply, it would be taken as a public rejection of all his former principles. Having pored over the Act in its entirety, he told Cranmer that he was prepared to swear allegiance to the king and queen and their heirs, but that he would not sign the preamble. The archbishop consulted with Cromwell, who presented this suggestion to the king as persuasively as he could. But Henry was in no mood to compromise: More would have to put his signature to the Act as a whole, or face the consequences. It was obvious that the two men’s shared history, which stretched back over four decades, did not entice the king to show any greater leniency than he would to a stranger. He expected absolute obedience from his men and would not flinch from meting out the ultimate penalty if they proved intransigent. ‘This Act’, More protested, ‘is like a sword with two edges, for if a man answer one way it will destroy the soul, and if he answer another it will destroy the body.’10
Backed into a corner, he decided to adhere to his conscience rather than his king. But, aware of the repercussions, he did his best to allay his royal master’s fury by refusing to give his reasons, insisting that if he ‘should open and disclose the causes why, I should therewith but further exasperate his Highness, which I would in no wise do’.11 If More hoped to thus placate the king, he was soon to learn that he had failed. Furious at More’s ‘obstinacy’, Henry sent him to the Tower on 17 April 1534, shortly followed by Fisher, who had also refused to take the oath.12 For the king, silence meant not consent, but opposition, and he was no longer prepared to tolerate it.
During the early days of his imprisonment, More sought solace in his writings. He penned a series of treatises on the Eucharist, one of which, the Dialogue of Comfort, has been described as his greatest work. A narrative on human suffering, it was undoubtedly an expression of More’s own internal battle as he faced the increasingly certain prospect of death. Only if he recanted would he be allowed his liberty, but despite his terror, he was still not prepared to forsake his principles.
More’s imprisonment reflected Henry’s fury, but it also spelt danger for his reforms. Already More had courted widespread popular sympathy, even though his resistance had been relatively low key. Now he was holed up in the most notorious prison in the country, he had been transformed from figurehead to tragic hero. Realising this, Cromwell made several visits to the Tower, determined to heap pressure upon his rival to submit. He also acted as a barrier between More and what he knew to be the implacable wrath of his royal master. He told the prisoner that he would rather send his own son Gregory to the block than see a man who was once high in royal favour antagonise Henry further. ‘The King’s Highness would be gracious to them that he found comformable,’ Cromwell urged, ‘so his Grace would follow the course of his laws toward them such as he shall find obstinate.’ His choice of words was deliberate: he knew that More would have been stung by Henry’s own accusation of obstinacy.13
To More, Cromwell seemed like the devil sent to tempt him, and he had no intention of conceding to this base-born heretic. The respect, even affection, that the chief minister felt towards More was certainly not reciprocated. It is interesting to speculate what might have happened if the king had gone to the Tower himself, rather than entrusting it to his most powerful servant. There can be little doubt that More would have found it a great deal more difficult to refuse him. As it was, he contented himself with continuing to profess his loyalty to Henry, for example in June 1535 when he wrote to his daughter Margaret. Even after enduring fourteen months of increasingly uncomfortable imprisonment, during which ‘divers times … I thought to die within one hour’, he still bore nothing but love for his sovereign. ‘I am … the King’s true and faithful subject and daily beadsman, and pray for his Highness and all his and all the realm.’14
Throughout his long sojourn in the Tower, More had continued to adhere to his policy of silence. ‘I do nobody harm,’ he told Margaret, ‘I say none harm, I think none harm, but wish everybody good. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith I long not to live.’15 But if saying nothing had not been enough to save him when he was first arrested, now, as the whole kingdom watched and waited to see what he would do, only a full recantation would buy his freedom.
Quite what Henry felt about his former favourite’s ongoing ‘obstinacy’ is not recorded. Doubtless he desperately hoped that he might relent: More had already caused enough trouble for his marriage and reforms, and he would be even more dangerous dead than alive. But there was no doubt personal regret too. Henry had loved and respected More since childhood, and even the king’s considerable fury could not completely obliterate the feelings of tenderness that he had cherished for so long. The fact that, once won, Anne Boleyn had proved a disappointment as a wife and queen might have further softened Henry’s attitude towards the man who had opposed her from the start. But it could never be enough to save More. If the king had excused such a high-profile advocate of the old regime from conforming to the new, it would have made a mockery of everything for which he and his ministers had striven for almost a decade.
For his part, More’s former affection for his royal master had gradually been replaced by disapproval. Despite his protestations of loyalty and devotion to Henry, he had come to regard him as being as much of a tyrant as his late father. His seemingly light-hearted quip that if his head could win the king a castle in France, it would be struck off without a thought had been telling. Overlooking his own relentless persecution of evangelicals, he now presented himself as an innocent victim of a tyrant’s regime.
In November 1534, parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, recognising the king as Supreme Head of the Church of England. It was the epitome of all Cromwell and Cranmer had striven for, and they now seemed at the peak of their influence with Henry. By contrast, it set the seal on More’s doom. Now that the Act was in force, even more pressure was applied upon him to accept the king’s status and associated reforms.
At the same time as he was putting the statutory framework in place for a religious revolution, Cromwell was beginning to introduce known reformers into the king’s service. They included Christopher Mont from Cologne, who had been a member of Cromwell’s service for some time and was now dispatched by his master to the Protestant states of Germany with orders to foster good relations with England. A letter from the French poet and radical Nicholas Bourbon reveals the extent to which reformers had penetrated Henry’s inner sanctum. As well as Cranmer and Cromwell, whom he describes as being ‘aflame with the love of Christ’, he mentions the king’s physician William Butts, his astronomer Nicholas Kratzer, the painter Hans Holbein and the reformist Bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer.16 Bourbon had lodged with Butts at the queen’s expense during a visit to London, and he said that the physician was like a father to him. To More and the other religious conservatives, it seemed that these dangerous radicals were forcing the king – and England – down the road to heresy and ruin.
In January 1535, Henry appointed Cromwell Vicegerent in Spirituals, or vicar-general. This gave him considerable new powers over the clergy, enabling him to stamp out opposition to the reforms from this influential sector, just as he had among the king’s ordinary subjects. It was one of the clearest indications of Henry’s faith in his chief minister that he was content for him to dominate spiritual affairs as he did political ones. But the king perhaps did not envisage just how far his minister would exercise his new powers during the years that followed. The consequences would be dramatic – not just for Henry’s subjects, but for his relationship with Cromwell, pushing both to the edge of their endurance.
Where Henry was concerned, though, nothing was ever quite as it seemed. Although the king had vested enormous powers in Cromwell, who was reported to now enjoy ‘supreme authority’, More still had cause to hope that his fickle favour might turn once more towards him.17 In May 1535, Chapuys sent a revealing dispatch to his master about an uncharacteristic mistake that Cromwell had made. Henry had instructed him to show the ambassador a letter that he had written to the English envoy in France, but Cromwell had forgotten to do so, perhaps because of the considerable pressure of work under which he was labouring. When he learned of this, Henry was utterly unforgiving and upbraided his minister as ‘a fool and a man without discretion’.18 It was a warning shot for Cromwell, and the minister stepped up his efforts to enforce the Act of Supremacy as if by way of recompense.
Having enjoyed little success with More himself, Cromwell resolved upon a new tactic and sent his deputy, Richard Rich, a gifted and ambitious young lawyer who hailed from a family of London mercers, to consult with the fallen Lord Chancellor. Rich had been appointed solicitor-general in 1533 and was rapidly rising through the ranks. He had already snared Fisher in May 1535 by persuading him, with honeyed words, that the king wished to know for his own conscience’s sake Fisher’s true opinion. Rich assured him that he could confide in strict secrecy. Fisher fell into the trap and stated that Henry was not the supreme head of the Church. His fate was sealed. Lord Chancellor Audley presided over his trial on 17 June, and the bishop was condemned to death.
Now aged sixty-five, Fisher was one of Henry’s oldest servants, but the king did not hesitate to see the sentence carried out. The bishop’s defiance had been confounded – albeit unintentionally – by Pope Paul III’s declaration on 21 May that he intended to elevate Fisher to the position of cardinal. By making Fisher a prince of the Church, he no doubt hoped to deter Henry from taking any extreme measures against him. In fact, it had the opposite effect. Upon receiving the news of this promotion, Henry darkly quipped that he could give Fisher a red hat of his own, or else see he had nowhere to put it. He subsequently gave orders for Fisher’s execution, which took place on 22 June. This was one of the clearest demonstrations yet of the king’s brutality. He had always been capable of lashing out against those who defied him, but the seemingly callous way in which he dispatched the aged bishop hints at a growing ruthlessness. It would become increasingly evident as his reign progressed.
Fisher was immediately proclaimed a martyr by the Catholic authors and theologians of Europe. In England, too, there were stirrings of a martyr’s cult. Reports began to circulate that Fisher’s head, which had been displayed on London Bridge alongside those of other convicted traitors, was growing rosier and more lifelike every day. The rumour was recorded in a pamphlet by the Catholic polemicist Johannes Cochlaeus, which attacked Henry VIII and claimed that the victims of his regime should be accorded the status of martyrs. Alarmed, Henry commissioned one of his most skilful propagandists, Richard Morison, to write a tract refuting these claims. He went further still by ordering the destruction of the tomb that Fisher had built for himself in the chapel of St John’s College, Cambridge. His heraldic emblems were defaced, and the college statutes were in due course redrafted to eliminate all mention of him.
The brutality of the response bears the mark of Cromwell, not just his royal master. Even before Fisher’s death, the chief minister had instructed Rich to turn his attention to More. During a visit to his cell in the Bell Tower on 12 June, the solicitor-general engaged the prisoner in friendly conversation. But More was not so easily drawn, and when Rich subsequently claimed that the former Chancellor had verbally rejected the king’s supremacy over the Church, he was almost certainly lying. More strenuously denied it, dismissing Rich as ‘always reputed light of his tongue, a great dicer and gamester, and not of any commendable fame’.19
Whether Rich spoke the truth, it was enough to have More indicted and brought to trial on 1 July 1535. Audley again presided over this, and Rich stood as witness for the government’s case. The Lord Chancellor was subsequently criticised for allowing the weight of the conviction to rest on Rich’s testimony and for overruling More’s objections to this in his defence. The outcome seemed even more assured when Audley began to pass sentence on More without allowing him the opportunity to argue against his conviction. Rich’s testimony may have been the lynchpin of the case, but Sir Christopher Hales, the attorney-general, declared that he was ready to convict More for his silence alone, which he claimed was ‘a sure token and demonstration of a corrupt and perverse nature, maligning and repining against the statute’.20
Only when the verdict had been delivered did More at last break his silence. With his enemies looking on, he gave vent to a forceful and persuasive repudiation of the king’s supremacy over the Church, declaring it to be ‘directly repugnant to the laws of God and his holy Church’. He went on to claim that separating England from Rome would render the kingdom subject to the narrow views of England’s bishops, depriving her of the universal teachings of the Pope and his bishops across the globe. ‘I have, for every Bishop of yours, above one hundred,’ he told the judges, ‘and for one Council or Parliament of yours (God knoweth what manner of one), I have all the councils made these thousand years. And for this one kingdom, I have all other Christian Realms.’21 In short, England would become little more than a backwater, unable to benefit from, or play any role in, the bounty of international politics and religion.
It was More’s last stand and he knew it. The relief at finally being able to express his true opinions was tempered only by the certain knowledge of the price he would pay. His sentence was the one that he had long feared: a traitor’s death. This was soon commuted to beheading – ostensibly out of deference to his former office. Perhaps, in the end, Henry had relented enough to show his former favourite this final kindness – if it could be described as such. But it might equally have been prompted by a desire to appear merciful.
If the king felt any anguish at the prospect of More’s death, he did not show it. No matter how much affection he cherished towards his men, if they did not do his bidding then his feelings could swiftly change to cold, implacable hostility. There may have been an element of self-preservation in this attitude. Henry would surely have been driven mad by remorse if he had allowed any more tender feelings to creep in whenever he dispatched a former friend. He was also adept at convincing himself of the justice of his actions, as the annulment had proved. And he was surrounded by men who were quick to assure him that he was right.
More, too, remained tight-lipped about his feelings towards his royal master. He had every reason to despise him – morally, ideologically and personally – but he resisted any temptation that he might have felt to speak out. His silence was typical of those who had been condemned to die: consideration for the loved ones they would leave behind often prevented any openly expressed vitriol against their king. It is equally possible, though, that even now More bore no grudge against the man whom he had admired for thirty-six years. Perhaps he believed that Henry’s only crime had been in heeding the advice of his ‘evil’ councillors, and that they – not the king – were responsible for his impending death.
On 6 July, More was led from the Bell Tower up to the scaffold on Tower Hill. He appeared calm and in good humour, and even shared a joke with the officer who assisted him onto the scaffold: ‘I pray you, master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.’22 In contrast to the executions of other high-profile prisoners, there were few witnesses. Henry was too fearful about the mood of the people to allow the event to become the usual crowded spectacle. Perhaps this is why More chose not to make any final speech in defence of his principles, but instead went quietly to his death.
More’s head was set on a spike on London Bridge, as Fisher’s had been. It was then given to his beloved daughter Margaret, and may have been buried with her in Chelsea church when she died in 1544.23 The rest of More’s remains were interred in St Peter ad Vincula, the Tower chapel that houses the bones of other eminent victims of Henry’s regime. Determined to impede More’s progress towards martyrdom, the king banned any accounts of the execution from being published in England. But within weeks, a French pamphlet was being circulated in London.
None of the measures that Henry and his ministers took could prevent the outrage that spread across Catholic Europe when the news of More’s execution was pronounced. Henry’s most powerful rival, the Emperor Charles V, upbraided the English ambassador, saying that he ‘would rather have lost the best city of our dominions than have lost such a worthy counsellor’.24 Accounts of More’s life soon filled the pages of printing presses across the Continent, and even in England there was a huge underground market for biographies by the likes of William Roper and Nicholas Harpsfield. In short, More was even more troublesome to Henry in death than he had been in life.
Henry’s reaction to More’s execution and the subsequent backlash among his European rivals is not recorded. He expressed no regret: to do so would have been to imply that he sympathised with More’s stance, which in turn would have seriously undermined his reforms, not to mention his marriage. It is possible that Henry’s other men – Cromwell in particular – applied themselves to blackening More’s character in the run-up to his execution so that their master did not change his mind. But it is also possible that the king was already set firmly upon his course. Henry did not flinch from punishing those who crossed him, no matter how high in his favour they might have been. And, once resolved, he rarely changed his mind.