CHAPTER 4

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FIRES OF FAITH

My wife was an impediment to our marriage. Why she was is the subject of this chapter for, 500 years later, the events of the Reformation still cast shadows through history: I was, again, Catholic while she was, for the time being, Church of England. When we filled in the form at my (Catholic) parish church (with a priest who had once been an Anglican vicar) there was a box to tick on “impediments to marriage”. Harriet, being Anglican, was an impediment, and the box was duly ticked, to her chagrin until this day. Of course, things have improved between Catholics and Anglicans and this was, really, little more than a box-ticking exercise, but that little tick spoke for centuries of separation, distrust, hatred, and propaganda. And, at least in England, it all began nearly 500 years ago and most of it happened in London. So I thought I had better find out why Harriet was an impediment to our marrying. I started studying the history of the Reformation. And then, I stopped…

The late Douglas Adams – whom I earnestly pray is swapping rueful surprised atheist stories with God as I write – said, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” I’m the opposite: I love deadlines for setting me to write, while I hate letting them slide past, which I never do. Until this book. This is the first (and I hope only) time I’ve ever missed a deadline and it was this bloody (“bloody”) chapter that made me miss it. I’d finished writing the medieval chapter, I was buzzing along, full of ideas, and then I came to the Reformation and… I stopped. For days, weeks, and even a month or two I could not bring myself to sit down and write, for even now, nearly five centuries afterwards, it hurts too much. Men, women, and children, almost all of them committed to the truth and to God with a depth and passion that I can only dream of, good men and good women, did each other to death over the right way to believe in and worship God.

It is impossible to write about this without facing the capacity for death dealing and destruction that lies at the heart of religion, and thus the possibility that Douglas Adams was, in fact, right. The answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything may really be forty-two, a mundane, divisible, as near-to-ordinary number as any number can be, and the man himself, rather than smiling ruefully at a God revealed to be an even better humourist than him, may now be dust and ashes, unable even to take satisfaction in his own confirmation. There is no better argument for the falsity of Christianity than Christians, and in the Reformation, Christians provided an infinite army of internet atheists with enough ammunition for the ages.

That is why I found this chapter so difficult to write. But we must face the horror and see if, beneath the stripes and lashes and burning flesh, there is anything apart from further levels of horror.

How did this happen? How could the Church – a moral presence once so overwhelming that it could make a king walk barefoot in penance and then, stripped naked, be lashed publicly for his part in murder – how could it be torn apart, destroyed, and remade in a new form by a different king?

So, what happened? For the Crown, as for the Church, the City was vital: whether the old faith or the new prevailed would be decided, above all, in London. I’ve read book after book on the subject, and the wealth of detail and opposing views threatened to make my brain boil so, in the end, to bring some order to my thoughts I had to reduce the main events of the Reformation down into a few points from which I could work. I suspect it will be no easier for my readers, so here I present my eight-point instant-expert breakdown of the English Reformation, from Henry’s divorce to Elizabeth’s virginity:

That, in eight bullet points, is the outline of the first part of the English Reformation. In the end, the Reformation played out differently in England as compared to the rest of Europe because of its early adoption by the powers in the land: Henry; two of his three children; and, most importantly in the end, the entire class of the rich and the noble who filled their treasuries and their land portfolios with the expropriated possessions of England’s dissolved monasteries and friaries. In a notable example of family fortunes taking precedence over religious recompense, even families that remained stubbornly and devotedly Catholic through Henry’s and Edward’s reigns had not the slightest inclination to hand back land they had acquired from the old monastic orders during Mary’s brief attempt to restore land to its former owners.

Looked at overall, as a historical narrative, I think the English Reformation is best described as a revolt of the aristocracy against the Church, of the rich against the poor, of lawyers against clerics. Throughout Europe, the determining factor for whether countries reformed or not was the decision of kings and princes. England, ever since late-medieval times, had a dissenting “protestant” minority before Protestantism existed: the Lollards. They were followers of John Wycliffe, a fourteenth-century theologian and preacher, who advocated that the Church should divest itself of temporal power: in particular, he argued that the secular power need not answer to the pope, and that authority lay in the Bible. As his teaching came under pressure, he grew more extreme in his views, finally denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. Wycliffe proceeded, with others, to translate the Bible into English. Although his translation was officially suppressed, more copies of his translation survive from that time than of any other text, indicating how widely it was disseminated and how spellbinding the prospect of reading God’s word in their own language was to some people.

We live in a visual age, one in which it is difficult to imagine the power of words over people for whom the aural and textual were far more important than the visual. But people would die for words. The Lollards were suppressed after Wycliffe’s posthumous condemnation for heresy and, as is the way with persecuted groups, their own doctrines, under pressure, grew more extreme. The first layman to be executed in England for heresy, in 1410, was the Lollard John Badby, who denied, and persisted in denying, that the bread and wine offered during Mass become the body and blood of Christ – and this despite the apparent anxiety of the secular authorities to find Badby a way off the pyre (the crown prince, who became Henry V, tried to get Badby to recant, offering him both life and a lifelong pension should he do so). But Badby burned – in the flesh, as one of the first Lollard martyrs, and in the spirit, with the God madness that infected these first champions of God’s word.

For it was a sort of madness. A madness for God and for his truth, as revealed in the Bible, that brooked no compromise. Following the failed Lollard uprising led by Sir John Oldcastle in 1414, when the knight attempted first to kidnap Henry V and then, when that failed, to lead a general uprising with the aim of overthrowing both clergy and nobility, the Lollards formed clandestine groups in England’s towns. It took a particular sort of one-eyed religious genius to unite clerics and knights against you, but by taking aim at everyone with power and status in late-medieval England, the Lollards succeeded in doing just that. Those that survived the purge following the failed revolution and Oldcastle’s eventual capture and execution went underground, many gravitating towards the one place where there were sufficient people to hide their activities and where were concentrated the printers that could feed their overriding addiction for books: London.

And now, in this, I find a union of belief between myself, a twenty-first-century Catholic, and these late-medieval sectarians. For my first and most profound belief was also in books, in their power and wisdom and, indeed, their beauty. Even those Lollards who were illiterate – which might seem an impossible contradiction but which in fact illustrates the talismanic power ascribed to God’s word made visible on paper – loved their books, sometimes unto death. For example, Robert Benet, a wool racker and water carrier (about as humble an occupation as could be found in London), paid over 3s. 4d. for a copy of the Gospels, selling his looms and shears to raise funds for the book, even though he could not read it; instead, he kept his treasure secret and safe in his belt. Or John Harrydance, a bricklayer from Whitechapel, who, despite trying and failing for thirty years to learn how to read, kept his copy of the New Testament always by his side. While Benet and Harrydance might not have been able to read the great words that they carried on their person as intimately as their neighbouring Catholics might carry crucifixes, these truths were presented to them at the Lollards’ clandestine gatherings, where the Bible was proclaimed and its message expounded. To receive God’s word, aloud or by sight, was the Lollard sacrament, as sacred as the Mass was for their Catholic countrymen.

But in placing God’s written word above all else, the Lollards struck at the core of the faith of their neighbours. For while they also placed no value in pilgrimage or prayers for the dead in purgatory – the rope that tied generations living and dead together in Catholic practice – it was in their denial of the real presence of Christ in the sacrament of Mass that they pulled apart the unity of belief that had underlain English society for centuries. And as the political Reformation approached, some among these underground believers, unable to hold silence any longer in the face of what they saw as abominable idolatry, began to speak out.

“I will not give my dogs that bread that some priests doth minister at the altar when they be not in clean life, and also said that thy self could make as good bread as that was and that it was not the body of Our Lord, for it is but bread, for God cannot be both in Heaven and earth.”20 So testified Elizabeth Sampson in 1510. But as long as the Lollards remained an underground movement, without power or influence, they posed little real danger to the contract of beliefs that made up late-medieval society. And as Lollardy was mainly concentrated among the artisan and lower classes in the city it could largely be ignored by the powers, clerical and secular.

But Henry’s determination to place himself at the summit of the church in England meant that, suddenly, all was possible, for whoever had the ear of this most mercurial but implacable of kings had the chance to steer England towards the outcome they desired. Thus the court became a pit of contesting factions, where the penalty for falling from the king’s grace was death.

The other great factor in bringing reform to the centre of English life and thought was what was happening elsewhere in Europe. Johannes Gutenberg had invented the first modern printing press around 1439 and, once he had established himself, the technology spread rapidly, with William Caxton establishing the first press in England at Westminster in 1476. With printing in place, the means for a new kind of revolution had been established: a media revolution. For when, in 1517, Martin Luther wrote his Ninety-Five Theses against a travelling Dominican indulgence-seller, Johann Tetzel, the printing press meant that, once his original Latin document was translated into German and published the next year, copies of it spread across Europe almost instantaneously. The printing press magnified the individual voice as a telescope magnified the heavens.

And what Luther said, in prose that was supple and muscular and in his vernacular, was that faith in Christ alone saved the sinner: faith alone, without deeds or actions or virtues or chantries of priests mumbling Masses to perpetuity to release your soul from purgatory. At the cut of his pen, he broke the chain of charity, obligation, and duty that bound the Catholic community to its living and its dead through the offices of priest and monk, saints and prayers and penance. All the doubts and fears and guilt that had built up over 1,500 years of Christian practice and thought were dissolved at a stroke: but only believe, and be saved.

The effect was that of lightning; everything became illumined, and seen, by the light of this one piercing statement. Then, when Luther added his polemic against the papacy, identifying it with the biblical Antichrist, he substantially completed the rhetoric of Reformation. On its positive side, Christians were saved by God’s grace alone, through faith alone. On its negative side, the traditions of the Catholic Church, its councils and clergy and the papacy, were traduced, spiritual authority lying only with Scripture, temporal authority with the secular powers.

Although Henry VIII initially set his face against Luther, writing a Defence of the Seven Sacraments that won him the title of Fidei Defensor from Pope Leo X, the reformer’s ideas were smuggled into the country. The Reformation became a war of pamphlets, of short, quickly produced booklets in the vernacular, cheap and easy to print, and straightforward to reply to. This was the war of ideas played out in front of the public rather than hidden away in the universities and courts.

But first the public had to find these secret texts.

I am a Catholic. I had not thought to find any point of contact with the sacrament-denying Lollards or their Protestant successors. But there was a time when I went searching furtively through obscure London bookshops, looking for texts that no one else knew of, but which seemed to me to contain the secret of the world’s religions. This was in the days before the internet, when to find books like this meant browsing shelves in second-hand and occult bookshops, sending off for dog-eared publication lists and, slowly, realizing that there was a shadow second world, where people passed these books among themselves, and met and discussed them. Then, one day, I got off the tube at Hatton Cross and walked a long road, beneath the roar of planes landing and taking off, to knock on a suburban door and enter into another world. That story is for later. But I realized I understood something of the electric, life-changing thrill of finding such secret knowledge.

The old narrative, triumphantly proclaimed by Whiggish historians and apologists for Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was that the English people had risen up against the foreign domination of popes and Church, taking control of a moribund and corrupt clerical structure and taking power back into their own hands. However, the work of historians over the last half-century has shown quite definitively that the Catholicism of England just before the Reformation was far from moribund.

Just how traditional religious beliefs remained in London through the cauldron of the early Reformation is shown by Susan Brigden’s analysis of wills in London and the Reformation – for what and to whom a man or woman commends their soul reveals as much as we can know of the hearts of Londoners through this period. The vast majority of wills still invoked the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and called down prayers for the remission of sins and the pains of purgatory; only 6 per cent of wills in the 1530s and 13 per cent in the 1540s were written with a distinctly Protestant language and theology.

But there was one area of festering resentment that the Church had never addressed and which the reformers seized upon. Given the nature of London, it was an appropriate sore: money.

There were a lot of priests in London. There were also a lot of parishes, over a hundred, but these were, on the face of it, overserved: one chronicler counted the clergy as they processed through London in 1535 and reached a figure of 718, and that is leaving aside the monks, friars, and nuns in the city’s religious houses. Many served as chaplains. Indeed, Thomas More noted how almost every household in his social circles now included a priest among its members. This many priests cost a lot of money, and Londoners were expected to support them by giving a tenth of their income to their priest. In the countryside, parishioners handed over a tenth of the harvest, so as the harvest went, so went the priest’s income: he feasted or starved alongside the people he served. But in London, the tithe was fixed in monetary terms by a bull of Pope Nicholas V, issued in 1453: 3s. 5d. for every £ paid in house rent. Those who owned their houses paid according to the rental value of their home, while parishioners who were not householders, servants, the poor, or apprentices gave a token 8d. over Easter.

Many householders fell into arrears on these payments, a fact attested by the number of wills that included payments for unpaid tithes: while the debts might be delayed in life, they were better paid off at death, lest the soul be called to account for them. Tithe disputes between clergy and parishioners were often bitter and, just as often, came to law: between 1520 and 1546 one-third of London parishes came to court over such matters.

When the eventual success of the Reformation in London is assessed, this factor stands high for why the populace acquiesced in the changes imposed from above.

A significant percentage of priests did not even serve the parishes that paid them. This was not always because the priest was grasping or incompetent: priests had to be provided for while they were being educated. Nor were diocesan clergy, nor chaplains to Crown and nobility, provided with sufficient livings. To make up the shortfall, their masters installed them as the beneficiaries of London parishes, but of course, their time was taken serving court or bishop. Roughly a quarter of London parishes had absent parish priests: in their absence, the care of souls was left to a poorly paid and, usually, worse-educated curate.

It was this wound of resentment against clergy more concerned with Mammon than souls that the reformers salted. Even half a millennium later the vitriol from their pamphlets still burns: “Yea, and they look so narrowly upon their profits that the poor wives must be countable to them for every tenth egg, or else she getteth not her rights at Easter and shall be taken as an heretic.”21 With Henry disposed to bring the church to his heel, and having himself read William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man, which asserted that the clergy had usurped unlawfully the power of princes, it was only a matter of time before the dogs were set to feast upon the fat of the church. When Henry set them loose, he chose his target well: the monasteries.

For Londoners, most of the city’s monasteries, convents, and friaries had become bywords for indolence, spiritual sloth, and worldly acquisitiveness. So when, in 1534, Thomas Cromwell sent his commissioners to visit the monasteries of England, ostensibly to check their religious practice but in reality to find out how much each was worth, there was little resistance among populace or nobility to the commissioners’ report that said, in coded language, that here were riches, ripe for the taking. The reaction of London’s religious houses when they were required to swear the Oath of Royal Supremacy, recognizing Henry VIII as head of the church in England, suggests that public opinion was accurate. The priors and abbots signed, the monks and friars were given pensions, and the churches were stripped of all items of value, while relics and holy images were destroyed. What was left, and the land, was sold to the nobility, providing Henry with a huge windfall and, since land was wealth in Tudor times, hugely enriching the aristocratic families that bought out the monastic estates.

But three houses in London refused to accept the king’s supremacy. And, embarrassingly for the government, these were the three houses universally acknowledged among Londoners to have kept to the terms of the most stringent religious life: the Observant Franciscans, the Bridgettines and, most severely, the Carthusians of the Charterhouse.

In other, more remote, parts of the country the bones of dead monasteries still lie exposed to the air – to me a voiceless cry to the future against the power of kings; to most visitors picturesque ruins to pose in front of for photographs. But in London, there’s nothing left of these old foundations. John Stow, the great London chronicler, writing in 1596 after years of walking the city’s streets, still saw the rubble heaps where monastic churches had stood, but London’s appetite for space soon swallowed them. There is one exception though: the Charterhouse. I first visited it back in the early 1980s, when my job was delivering and repairing TVs, and one of the retired clergymen who lived there ordered a television from John Lewis. Labouring under the weight of the twentieth century, I entered the square and went into the past.

Cartusia nunquam reformata quia nunquam deformata. “The Charterhouse has never been reformed because it has never been deformed.” Pope Pius XI, writing in 1924, reaffirmed the old adage. By then the Carthusians had endured 900 years without slippage. Certainly, in 1535 there was no question of the London Charterhouse being found wanting in religious life. Yet still, and perhaps precisely because of this, Henry required the prior and monks of the Charterhouse to swear to his supremacy.

Carthusians live as hermits in community, each monk having his own cell where he spends most of his time in solitary prayer, the community coming together only for weekly meals. In the city, the throbbing, heaving, bustling city, they bring a great silence. And in that silence they would gladly have remained, having done with all worldly things, but the world, and princes, being what they are, would not, could not, leave them be.

The prior of the Charterhouse was John Houghton. He was born in 1486/7 in Essex and entered the Carthusian order in 1515. Houghton was unanimously elected prior of the London Charterhouse – monks were early democrats – in 1531.

Thomas Cromwell’s commissioners first called on the Charterhouse in 1534, requiring Houghton and his monks to swear to the Act of Succession, whereby Henry declared his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon null and void, debarring Mary, daughter of that union, from the throne, while making his marriage to Anne Boleyn valid and thus the children of that marriage next in line to the throne. The Carthusians, and indeed almost all the wives of London, sided with Catherine on this, but when Houghton demurred, pointing out that as solitary monks they had given over dealing with the world, Houghton and his procurator were arrested and sent to the Tower. There, the bishop of London persuaded them that it was possible to square the Act with their consciences so, with reservations, Houghton swore on behalf of his order and was released to the Charterhouse.

But the monks must have known what was to come.

By spring 1535, they knew Henry would have them swear to his supremacy as governor of the church in England, under pain of high treason.

Houghton and his monks prepared themselves through Masses and confession, cleansing their souls for the trial to come. Then, with the priors of the Charterhouses in Axholme and Beauvale, Houghton sought audience with Thomas Cromwell, asking that, as men withdrawn from the world, they be spared the oath-taking. Cromwell put them in the Tower, then interrogated them, along with one of the monks of Syon Abbey, on 26 April. Houghton took notes of the interrogation, sending them to the bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, and his monks in the London Charterhouse.

Under pressure from Cromwell, Houghton and his fellow monks said they were willing to agree to whatever God’s law permitted. But, for Cromwell, that was not enough. “I admit no exception. Whether the law of God permits it or no, you shall take the oath without any reserve whatsoever, and you shall observe it too.”22 For Cromwell, the king’s agent, there could be no will above that of the monarch.

When Houghton pointed out that what the king asked went against the church’s teaching, Cromwell replied, “I care nothing for what the Church has held or taught. I will that you testify by solemn oath that you believe and firmly hold what we propose to you to profess; that the king is Head of the English Church.”23

Houghton and his fellows were dead, and they knew it.

The trial followed swiftly, on 28/29 April, and when it did not come to the right sentence on two occasions, Cromwell arrived in person to ensure there was no mistake the third time.

Treason. Penalty: to be hung, drawn, disembowelled, decapitated, and quartered.

The sentence was carried out on 4 May 1535 in front of a large crowd at Tyburn. Houghton, as senior, was first, followed by Augustine Webster and Robert Lawrence, priors of Axholme and Beauvale; then Richard Reynolds, monk of Syon Abbey; and a secular priest, John Hale, vicar of Isleworth.

The executioner begged pardon of Houghton, and the prior embraced him. Then, turning to the crowd, Houghton said:

“I call on Almighty God to witness, and I beseech all here present to attest for me on the dreadful danger of judgement, that, being about to die in public, I declare that I have refused to comply with the will of His Majesty the King, not from obstinacy, malice, or a rebellious spirit, but solely for fear of offending the Supreme Majesty of God. Our Holy Mother the Church has decreed and enjoined otherwise than the king and Parliament have decreed. I am therefore bound in conscience, and am ready and willing to suffer every kind of torture, rather than deny a doctrine of the Church. Pray for me, and have mercy on my brethren, of whom I have been the unworthy Prior.”24

Houghton was hanged, but only briefly, so he was still fully conscious when cut down. Then the executioner disembowelled him. Houghton’s last words, as the executioner reached to rip the heart from his body, were, “Good Jesu, what will ye do with my heart?” Then he was decapitated and his body quartered. Houghton’s head went onto London Bridge; one of his arms was nailed, in warning, to the door of the London Charterhouse.

His four fellows followed him as martyrs.

The monks of the Charterhouse ignored the warning. Five died as their prior did, ten others were starved to death in Newgate prison.

Many others would die as martyrs during the Reformation, Catholic and Protestant, but amid the welter of blood shed in the name of religion, one fact shines out: Houghton and his companions, Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer for the Protestants, died as true martyrs; that is, as ones faithful unto death and giving witness to the truth (as they saw it) by their deaths. This is the true meaning of the red crown of martyrdom, and it is well, when its meaning is being perverted today, that we remember that.

But what is notable is that, other than these few, when the clergy of England were faced with the choice of swearing to their king or taking death in faith for their father in Rome, they chose life. Swing conscience how they might, the vast majority of the Catholic clergy in England put on the robes of discretion rather than the crown of martyrdom. If the clergy of England had refused, as a body, to accept the royal supremacy, maybe matters would have turned out differently, although Henry would have shed much blood at such defiance. But with Thomas More, their main advocate at court, also gone, there was no stomach for defiance among the majority of the clergy – most chose the apparent wisdom of waiting and prayer, that these evil days might pass.

Thomas More, when he accepted the Chancellery from Henry VIII in 1529, knew well that he dined with a man of no more conscience than a lion, and as implacable in his desires. “If my head would win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go,” More said to his son-in-law.25

It didn’t win him a castle in France, but it did quiet the conscience of the king in the matter of his remarriage.

More’s reputation as a man of intelligence, honour, and integrity was Europe-wide. He and Erasmus, the most famous of the Christian Humanist scholars who prepared the way for Renaissance (by design) and Reformation (by accident), were friends for thirty-five years; indeed, Erasmus wrote Praise of Folly while staying with More in England. Its Latin title (Moriae Encomium) can also be read as “in praise of More” – the double meaning was intentional.

More had not pursued the king’s friendship – quite the opposite. But Henry took to calling unexpectedly at More’s house – one can only imagine the kitchen panic when the king decided to stay for dinner – and More, a member of parliament and, latterly, its Speaker, could not remain outside the royal orbit any longer; he became the Chancellor in 1529.

But when Henry asserted his supremacy over the Church, More found he could no longer serve the king. In 1532, pleading ill health, he asked to be relieved of office, and he was. However, the factions vying for Henry’s favour all knew well the fickleness of the king: a fallen favourite could not be left to return to favour, but had to be destroyed entirely.

In 1533, Thomas More was called to trial for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy, declaring Henry governor of the church in England, with the power to declare the church’s doctrine – a power that even unsettled Luther. His chief inquisitor was Thomas Cromwell, the man who had supplanted him as Henry’s key counsellor. The jury was composed of More’s enemies: Cromwell, the new Chancellor, and the father, brother, and uncle of the king’s new wife; even so, they could find nothing on which to condemn him – for More held silence, refusing either to affirm or deny his acceptance of the king’s supremacy over the church – until Richard Rich, the solicitor general at the time, testified that in private conversation More had told him the king could not be the true head of the church.

Taken by surprise, More still responded with the wit of his long years of legal training:

In good Faith, Mr. Rich, I am more concerned for your Perjury, than my own Danger; and I must tell you, that neither my self nor any body else to my knowledge, ever took you to be a Man of such Reputation, that I or any other would have any thing to do with you in a Matter of Importance. You know that I have been acquainted with your manner of Life and Conversation long time, even from your Youth to the present Juncture, for we lived in the same Parish; and you very well know, I am sorry I am forced to speak it, you always lay under the Odium of a very lying Tongue, of a great Gamester, and of no good Name and Character either there or in the Temple, where you was educated. Can it therefore seem likely to your Lordships, that I should in so weighty an Affair as this, act so unadvisedly, as to trust Mr. Rich.26

The jury took fifteen minutes to find him guilty. The sentence was to be hanged, drawn, and quartered; Henry commuted that to decapitation.

Thomas More was executed on 6 July 1535. As he prepared to ascend the scaffold, he told the executioner, “Pray, Sir, see me safe up; and as to my coming down, let me shift for myself.”27 As he stood upon the scaffold, More told the crowd, “I die the King’s good servant, and God’s first.”28 Then, laying his head upon the block, the executioner struck it off with a single stroke.

But the king he served was turning from the golden hope of his youth to the murderous favouritism of his maturity. And nowhere was that favour more tragically bestowed than upon the woman who was the cause of More’s death: Anne Boleyn.

For where More had used the short years of his chancellorship in a furious attempt to root heresy from the realm, it had already been implanted in the very bed of the king, for Boleyn herself was won to the Gospel.

The old heresy of the Lollards, confined largely to the artisan classes and shorn of political strength by its history of rebellion, could never have been other than a minor sect. But the new faith of the evangelicals won converts through all levels of society, its promise of salvation through faith alone cutting through the slow encrustation of medieval devotional practices like a saw through rotten wood. Rather than having, as some saw, to achieve salvation through the mediation of a church that, in its personal embodiment, was all too often flawed, faith, and faith alone, expressed in and through the innermost room of the heart, was not just the key to salvation but salvation itself. But believe, and you will be saved. For some people, particularly those prone to scrupulosity, the simplicity of this message must have cut to the core. And Anne was one of them.

The woman who was to be queen had spent most of her childhood and her teenage years at the great courts of Europe as maid of honour to queens and, while there, she seems to have developed the commitment to the vernacular Gospel and reform that was to make her short period of influence the most transformative in English history.

By 1522, when Anne returned to England, Catherine was thirty-six. Her last pregnancy had been four years before and there would be no more. Anne was stylish and intelligent, with a fierce humour that made her a match for the king, and he was soon pursuing her, as he had pursued her elder sister, Mary. But Anne was not satisfied to be a royal mistress: she would be queen if Henry would have her in his bed. In a book of hours, Henry wrote:

I am yours

Henry R forever.

In reply Anne wrote:

By daily proof you shall me find

To be to you both loving and kind.

This message was written beneath a picture of the annunciation, when the Archangel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would bring forth a son. Anne was making Henry a promise. In the end, it was her failure to keep this promise that cost her her life.

But that was later. Anne was crowned queen on 1 June 1533, although her influence had been considerable for the previous four years. She was already pregnant. As queen, Anne promoted reform, placing men committed to the Gospel in positions of power and working to protect others. In this stratagem, she had an ally, and a vital one, in the new Thomas who had taken the place of Thomas More as her husband’s most important adviser: Thomas Cromwell.

During his youth, spent travelling – obscurely in the eyes of history – around Europe, Cromwell had learned by heart the New Testament. Of humble stock, he knew full well his advancement at court lay solely in the king’s power, and as such he sought always to see that Henry’s will be done; although, where possible, that will might be shaped to advance the other cause to which he was committed alongside his own power: that of the Gospel. Indeed, since every man is the hero of his own story, I am sure that Cromwell told himself – and he might even have believed – that he sought power for the sake of advancing the Gospel and not for his own aggrandizement. So the present evil done is excused for the future good it will allow. By such easy, small steps a good man becomes, in time, a monster.

With the queen and the king’s chief adviser both committed to the Gospel, the evangelicals had in place vital protection during these early, crucial years, when their numbers were still few and their penetration of society only patchy. If Henry had turned to stamping out heresy with the implacability he brought to his other wishes, there is little doubt that the new religion would have been burned from England before it ever had a chance to take root. But, instead, the Reformation twisted and reacted through the rest of his reign, as one faction after the other gained the king’s ear, and Henry’s own theological meanderings dictated and halted change.

A king changeable in his theological opinions was malleable of heart too. Having divorced a queen for Anne, and having split the Church for Anne, Henry grew weary of her. A fiery spirit rouses to pursuit but it may less easily be lived with, particularly when the first issue of the gamble upon which Henry had risked all was a girl. The king had convinced himself that his failure to produce an heir with Catherine was due to God’s displeasure at his having married his brother’s betrothed. Now, when Anne brought forth as firstborn a daughter – despite all the predictions of the court astrologers (and this was a time when those claiming arcane knowledge might gain entrance into the highest circles) – the self-righteous certainty of doing what was right in God’s eyes that had sustained Henry through his divorce began to crumple. If God was on his side, then Anne should have borne him his longed-for son and heir.

For her part, Anne had brought into the highest circles of the court her own men, including her brother, Lord Rochford. They advanced the cause to which the queen herself was committed but, being her men, they were vulnerable should she fall, as they well knew. But, in the end, the queen’s enemies were to use her men to bring her down.

Catherine of Aragon died on 7 January 1536. When news reached the court, Henry and Anne appeared, dressed both in yellow, and they danced. Anne was pregnant, while Catherine, who had signed her last letter to Henry “Katharine the Queen”, was gone and thus, by any lights, queen no longer. The king, rubbing salt into her demise, had her buried as dowager Princess of Wales and prevented Mary from attending her mother’s funeral.

Less than three weeks later, Anne miscarried the boy child she was carrying. God, it must have seemed to Henry, had turned his face from him. For his part, the king turned his face from Anne to Jane Seymour, whom the contending faction at court presented to him as the antithesis of his fierce queen.

As the contending factions fought by whisper and rumour and honeyed smile, Cromwell realized that, if he was identified with Anne, then he would be lost – and the Gospel cause too – if she fell. By this time he must have thought the queen wild and fey, for she sanctioned her almoner, John Skip, to preach on 2 April 1536, Passion Sunday itself, on how King Solomon, once so wise, became a fool for lust and how Queen Esther had sought to persuade her king not to follow the advice of his evil counsellor, Haman. There was only one man the court would think on when hearing such preaching: Thomas Cromwell, the man who dangled the seemingly unlimited wealth of England’s monasteries in front of Henry’s cash-strapped eyes. The Gospellers were serious in their commitment to using such money for the relief of the poor; Henry was even more serious in his quest for martial glory. But war did not come cheap. What Anne and her faction would have given to the poor and to establish the Gospel, Thomas promised to the king.

For the greater good, such evil is done. Thomas Cromwell, so committed to the Gospel that he had imprinted it upon his mind and in his heart, joined with Anne’s enemies – with the faction that most bitterly opposed the vision of religion he himself sought – that he might bring the queen down rather than share in her ruin. Thus he might be saved and, with his saving, the Gospel might still have voice in the king’s chamber.

As Lord Thomas Howard, Anne’s uncle, remarked, the king was not inclined “to hold in affection any person he had cast from him that formerly he had loved,”29 but this was not simply a matter of casting aside a mistress: this was the queen for whom Henry had broken the Church. Her downfall must needs be as absolute as her rising.

Cromwell moved fast. On 30 April a court musician was arrested and put to torture. He confessed to adultery with Anne and implicated others of higher standing, including Anne’s own brother, George, to whom she had complained that the king had “neither talent nor vigour” in bed. George had let the aspersion slip and, for a king of Henry’s overweening vanity – think on the size of Henry’s armoured codpiece, now on display at the Tower of London – such an insult was fatal. Anne was arrested on 2 May 1536 and put in the Tower.

The adultery of a queen was treason. The men accused of it, though most probably innocent, were executed on 17 May. Anne followed them two days later. All accounts agree on her bravery when faced with execution and even as she stood upon the scaffold her quicksilver mind stopped any bitter words against the husband and king who was about to murder her, lest Henry, ever implacable, use them against her daughter.

The king was not there to see her die, but Cromwell was.

The next day, Henry was betrothed to Jane Seymour.

Ten days later, they married.

For her part, Seymour was generous to the children of Henry’s first two marriages, in particular trying to convince Henry to restore Mary to the line of succession – after any children that she bore, naturally.

But Jane’s first task was to produce a son and heir. On 12 October 1537 she gave birth to a son and he lived. But the boy was the death of her. Jane Seymour died on 24 October 1537. Ten years later, when Henry himself died, he was buried beside her.

But there would be more deaths and more burnings before Henry’s end. The Gospellers, with Cromwell still holding his place in the king’s counsels, moved to banish superstition and idolatry from the nation. In place of images and relics, there would be the word; but the first could not be allowed to exist, lest they pollute the purity of Scripture. Commissioners of religious purity were dispatched around the country to root out pictures and relics and shrines, and to bring them to London for burning. An innocent faith that had been sustained by such physical supports as the Rood of Grace of Boxley Abbey was defamed and desecrated, local parishioners looking on helplessly as the king’s commissioners ripped the objects of veneration from their churches. Such was the iconoclastic fury that, when the holy images and relics were brought for burning, the destroyers taunted the statues and images and pathetic relics to defend themselves from the flames.

In place of these, the Gospellers had the Bible. At the same time as the age-old relics were gathered and destroyed, an English-language Bible was placed in every church. With the breaking of the old, everything now seemed possible. Evangelical zealots defamed the Mass, dissent and division spread through the land. For his part, knowing that the king would not tolerate such religious extremes, Thomas Cromwell tried to keep reports of the unrest from reaching the king, but in the swirling pit of rumour and news that was the Henrician court, even Cromwell could not keep the king from hearing what was happening in what was now his church.

Dressed all in white, Henry himself tried a Gospeller for denying the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and, finding the man guilty, had him burned. This was his church and the king was not and never would be a Gospeller. In the face of the enthusiasm of the evangelicals, the Act of Six Articles was passed in 1539, making the penalty for denial of transubstantiation death by burning; once found guilty, not even recantation could save the accused from the flames. The act had all the implacability of the king and, when some Gospellers defied it, they increased the pressure on their erstwhile protector, Thomas Cromwell.

As it is a truth universally acknowledged that a king in possession of a kingdom must be in want of a queen, Cromwell had set to work to find a bride for Henry. The king was still mourning. Henry, although never a slight man, only became the bloated figure known to history after Jane’s death – his appetites, physical, moral, and spiritual, revealed in his body. To that end, Cromwell engineered Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves in January 1540, hoping to cement an alliance with those princes in Germany who had aligned themselves to the Lutheran cause. Unfortunately for Cromwell, Henry found her physically repellent: he could “never in her company be provoked and steered to know her carnally”30. The marriage was annulled, on the grounds of non-consummation – an annulment that Anne did not oppose – and Cromwell was confined to the Tower.

The many men and women whose deaths Cromwell had engineered over the decade of his power had met death with extraordinary bravery. From the Tower, Cromwell wrote to Henry, pleading for his life in the most unctuous terms:

If I have not, to the uttermost of my remembrance, said the truth, and the whole truth in this matter, God never help me… beseeching Almighty God… so he now will vouchsafe to counsel you, preserve you, maintain you, remedy you, relieve and defend you, as may be most to your honour, wealth, prosperity, health and comfort of your heart’s desire. For the which, and for the long life and prosperous reign of your most royal Majesty, I shall during my life, and while I am here, pray to Almighty God, that he of his most abundant goodness will help, aid and comfort you, and after your continuance of Nestor’s years, that the most noble imp, the Prince’s Grace, your most dear son, may succeed you to reign long, prosperously, felicitously to God’s pleasure: beseeching most humbly your Grace to pardon this my rude writing, and to consider that I am a most woeful prisoner, ready to take the death, when it shall please God and your Majesty; and yet the frail flesh inciteth me continually to call to your Grace for mercy and pardon for mine offences; and thus Christ save, preserve and keep you. Written at the Tower this Wednesday, the last of June, with the heavy heart and trembling hand of your Highness’s most heavy and most miserable prisoner and poor slave,

Thomas Cromwell
Most gracious Prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy!31

Cromwell might as well have asked mercy of a lion, yet still he begged. Henry heard him not, and his death, when it came on 28 July 1540, was one of the most bungled in Tudor history, a cack-handed executioner taking three strikes of the axe to finally detach Cromwell’s head and send him to judgement.

All Cromwell’s political power and patronage of reformers was based on his being able to find means to achieve Henry’s will. Mrs Thatcher said of one of her ministers, “Others bring me problems, David brings me solutions.” Cromwell was such an operator in Henry’s court, but when his solution failed, he fell.

Henry himself had seven more years of life ahead of him. He would be adulterously betrayed by his next wife, Catherine Howard, and, naturally, he had her executed too. The most handsome prince in Christendom became so bloated that he needed help to move, and his body became covered with boils. Death, when it came, took its time; for nine days Henry lay abed, unable to move, the abscesses in his legs bursting, the king himself kept in ignorance that death stalked him for, by his own statute, to prophesy the death of the king was treason.

Finally, Sir Anthony Denny, a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, told Henry that “in man’s judgement you are not likely to live”. A few hours later the king died.

Ten years before, with their abbey and the intricate web of prayer and obligation and oath that bound together Catholic England lying in ruins, the monks of St Albans Abbey had asked how all had come to nothing.

“The king hath done it on his high power,” they answered.

They were right.

Through the cataclysmic events of Henry’s reign the fear of a rising, by the general population that the reformers knew only too well was still attached to the old ways, lay under the savagery of the punishments meted to those who spoke against the king and his will. Nowhere were there more people than in London; nowhere was the fear of popular rising greater and yet, and yet… nothing. The people of London did not rise to defend monks or abbeys, nor yet their rood screens and relics. When the north rose, in the Pilgrimage of Grace, London seethed with rumour but nothing more. Indeed, the single greatest outbreak of popular anger in the capital was directed not against Henry but against Anne, who was trapped by a mob of thousands of women in a house by the river, only managing to escape by boat.

The majority of Londoners, as with their clergy, had kept their heads low through Henry’s reign. The analysis of wills indicates that the majority still believed in much of the old way, asking for the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints, but an increasing minority cast wills in explicitly evangelical terms. So far had such thought spread that when one of a group of neighbours drinking in the Bell tavern, Aldgate, said, “Masters, let us make our reckoning that we may go to church and hear our High Mass,” another answered, “Tarry,” and, taking bread, raised it, then signed the cross over a cup of wine before raising it too. “Have ye not heard Mass now?” The man who thus mocked the Mass was Giles Harrison, the king’s ale brewer and one of the richest men in London.

Could such changes be reversed? That was what evangelicals feared and Catholics hoped. The king was dead; long live the king.

Edward was not yet ten. A child, to the nation he was a blank slate upon which hopes and fears might be painted. But the kingdom and the city he inherited had been fundamentally altered. The holy stones that knitted London into the kingdom of heaven and the communion of the dead, the priories and abbeys and friaries, were despoiled, their roofs ripped off, leaving dead stone to the elements and their carcases to be picked over by the grandees who governed in Edward’s stead until he came of age. John Stow, first chronicler of London, looked on the vandalism with despair.

But others saw this new reign as the chance to bring in, for good and all, the pure, reformed religion of which they dreamed. London’s parishes were each power centres, some driving on reform, some pulling back to the old ways. At St Martin Ironmonger Lane, the rood screen was torn down, the statues removed, and the walls washed pure, new white. “Thou shalt make no graven images, lest thou worship them.” So the rector wrote upon the white, and other messages from Scripture. With a boy king and, until he married and produced a child, the next in line to the throne being the defiantly Catholic daughter of Catherine of Aragon, all stood yet in balance. Or so it must have seemed.

In truth, the Tudor religious settlement had been pretty well reached by the end of Henry’s reign, although nobody knew it yet. The religious radicals surrounding the boy king – and the boy himself, no whit less radical – would try to push reform further; Mary, defining herself and defined by her faithfulness to her mother and the old order, attempted to burn away the new; but both were defined, in the end, by the briefness of their reigns. What, in the end, decided the religion of London and England was longevity: Henry reigned for thirty-eight years, Edward VI for six years, Mary for five, and Elizabeth for forty-four years. In a country where there were many more people under twenty-five than over forty-five, even by the time Mary came to the throne the proportion of the population who remembered the old religious order was small; by the end of Elizabeth’s rule, it had almost vanished.

Also, by the end of Elizabeth’s reign one-half of the argument was over: England was no longer a Catholic country. The people that had for centuries held a special reverence for the office of Peter, with Anglo-Saxon monarchs raised on the tale of how Pope Gregory the Great had sent his great mission to their country at the end of the world, had rejected the Petrine office. England and the English were to be a new people, a chosen people, singled out by reason of geography and faith for a singular mission. What remained to be settled was what sort of a Protestant country England was to become. That argument was to be settled by civil war, and the reaction to that war.

But now, looking back over the Tudor era from a life in which my wife became an obstacle to our marriage and I found myself governor at a Church of England school, what can I say? That the most fraught period in English history can best be understood as the reactions of Henry’s traumatized children to the monstrous shadow he cast over them – and Henry himself as the vainglorious rebellion of a man whose self-worth came to be fundamentally based on fear. In this respect, Henry was a true Renaissance prince – Machiavelli would have been proud.

Edward, the longed-for son, bore the fewest scars from his upbringing; if he had lived, his reign would no doubt have been secure and, as a prince committed to the Gospel, he would have completed the reformation of religion.

Mary. Poor, bloody Mary. Forced from the succession, her mother and her own legitimacy denied, is it any wonder that she clung with all the force of her not inconsiderable courage to the religion of her childhood, when all must have been secure? But then, and this must be faced, when the longed-for child proved but a phantom of her hope, she tried to burn the country back to the old ways, as if the blindness of God in his heaven could be pierced by the smoke of heretics.

Burning human flesh has a peculiar, utterly distinctive sweet smell. Nothing else smells like it and, once smelled, it is never forgotten. I know, from smelling my own flesh burn beneath a lighted cigarette32 (you know how it goes; you’re young, you’re stupid, depressed and daring, and wanting something to make you feel alive, so, well, you stub out a cigarette on your arm. And then another. And another).

It hung, thick and sweet, in the alleys and streets of London. The Protestants had their martyrs, as the Catholics had theirs, and all agreed that there was one Church and one Faith, but all were sure it was theirs.

For Londoners in particular, both clergy and laypeople, the choice lay between partisanship or a careful navigation of the conflicting streams of royal policy. Most chose the latter, keeping the secrets of their faith in their hearts and their observance in line with what was required of them. Where the rulers of France long knew to fear the Parisian mob, in London, whose crowds were just as feared, the people did not rise. They adapted, they trimmed and adjusted and saw the zealots burn and the “traitors” dismembered, and they remembered the dreadful sanctions of the Tudor state.

But as the wars of religion spread through Europe, running from 1524 to the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, and the Protestant cause waxed and waned, London, as the capital of the greatest European state to have declared against Rome, became a refuge for many reformers fleeing the continent. The religious air was slowly changing. Under Elizabeth, it became clear that the Catholics had lost the battle against the Reformation: England was now a Protestant country; indeed, a country increasingly defined by its Protestantism. But the Reformation had pulled apart… well, everything. And through the cracks crawled all sorts of ideas that it had not even been possible to think in the old medieval world.