Back in November 1528, when the English negotiations in Rome were about to enter their last, desperate phase, Wolsey had instructed Henry’s ambassador to remind the Pope of the terrible consequences that would follow if the Divorce failed. Pope Clement VII was to be told that Henry VIII would be driven ‘to adopt those remedies which are injurious to the Pope, and are frequently instilled into the King’s mind’. ‘I cannot bear up against the storm,’ Wolsey had continued. The Devil himself was at work. And ‘the sparks of that opposition here, which have been extinguished with such care and vigilance, will blaze forth to the utmost danger of all’.1
Wolsey, even more obscure and orotund in Latin than in English, had failed to name names. But his words were all too easy to gloss. The ‘injurious remedies’ or ‘the spark of opposition’ were the Lutheran heresy. And the person ‘frequently instilling [them] into the King’s mind’ was the individual best placed to do so: Anne Boleyn.
Anne Boleyn’s religious preferences, like most other aspects of her character, seem to have been formed by her years in France. France, in common with the rest of western Europe, was undergoing religious ferment in these first decades of the sixteenth century. There were three key figures: the scholar and humanist, Jacques Lefevre d’Étaples; Guillaume Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux; and Marguerite of Angoulême, Francis I’s beloved sister.
Lefevre was the creative spark. Like Luther, he became convinced that true Christianity could reach the people only if they could read and hear the Word of God in their own language. Accordingly, in 1523 he published a translation of the New Testament in French. Like Luther again, he attached particular importance to the Epistles of St Paul, from which he also derived the doctrine that faith, not works, saves mankind. Unlike Luther, however, he trusted to reform from within, and never formally broke with the Catholic Church. Briçonnet, for his part, put Lefevre’s theory into practice in his own diocese of Meaux, while Marguerite supplied the high-level political patronage that was needed to protect the reformers against the highly conservative Faculty of Theology in Paris, known as the Sorbonne, and its allies in the powerful and quasi-independent law court, the parlement of Paris.
But the main events in all this had happened late in Anne’s stay in France or after her departure. It was only in 1518 that Briçonnet invited Lefevre to Meaux and only in 1521 (the year of Anne’s return to England) that the bishop began to correspond with Marguerite. Nevertheless, Anne seems to have got a real sense of what was underway. And certainly she kept up with developments, from England, and came to regard Marguerite, whom she had met, as a role model.2
The evidence comes from the early stages of her relationship with Henry. In January 1530, Louis de Brun, a French teacher resident in England, gave her a French treatise on letter writing as a New Year’s gift. Addressing her as Madame de Rochford (the title she had acquired, rather irregularly, by her father’s elevation to his earldoms the previous month), De Brun commended her reading habits.
One never finds you [he noted] without some French book in your hand…such as Translations of the Holy Scriptures…And principally, last Lent and the one before last…I always saw you reading the salutary Epistles of St Paul that contain the complete teaching and rule of good living according to the best moral principles.
Paul’s Epistles were, as we have seen, the prime source for Lefevre’s religious revolution. And, no doubt, Anne paid particular attention to the passages the great Frenchman highlighted. ‘Therefore being justified by faith’, Anne would have read in the Epistle to the Romans, ‘we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.’ But this faith, she would also have learned, was not dead or passive but a living, breathing thing: a ‘faith’, according to the Epistle to the Galatians, ‘which worketh by love’ and which, according to the Epistle to the Corinthians, revealed itself by ‘charity’. Indeed, it was empty without it:
Though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
…
And now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
Now there is nothing accidental about this. Anne’s Scriptural readings were noticed and were, of course, intended to be noticed. And she continued this practice of conspicuous piety throughout the days of her prosperity, reading improving works herself and encouraging her ladies to read them as well.3
There is every reason to think that these activities of Anne’s were sincere. But she was also following the example set by Marguerite in France. And she had another role-model nearer home in England. For Anne’s rival Queen Catherine was also notably devout. But Catherine’s piety was very different. It was Catholic, orthodox and Spanish. Anne set herself up as a sort of equal and opposite force to Catherine, in this as so much else. In place of Catherine’s unbending conformity she embraced Reform. She was not Protestant of course (even the word had yet to be invented). But her passionate attachment to the Scriptures shows her to have been an evangelical. And if Catherine’s piety was Spanish, with Spanish devotional practices, Spanish books and a Spanish confessor, Anne’s was proudly and consistently French.
‘She was’, her former Chaplain, William Latymer, recalled many years later, ‘very expert in the French tongue, exercising herself continually in the reading of the French Bible and other French books of like effect and conceived great pleasure in the same.’ ‘Wherefore’, he continued, she ‘charged her chaplains to be furnished with all kinds of French books that reverently treated of the whole Scriptures.’
Latymer can hardly have seen De Brun’s treatise, but his testimony is an almost word-for-word echo of the earlier tribute.
But of course the books that Latymer and De Brun had seen Anne reading were not only in French, they came from France. ‘I remember’, the daughter of William Lock, King Henry’s silk merchant, recalled in her memoirs, ‘that I have heard my father say that when he was a young merchant and used to go beyond sea…Anne Boleyn…caused him to get her the Gospels and Epistles written in parchment in French together with the Psalms.’
Some of these books, or their first cousins, survive. One is Anne’s splendidly illuminated Psalter. It is decorated with Anne’s arms, badges and mottoes, and gives the text of the Psalms in a new, radical French translation probably by Lefevre’s disciple, Louis de Berquin, who was burned for heresy in 1529. Another is Anne’s French Bible, in Lefevre’s own translation. This is printed rather than written, but it still has its original binding, gold-tooled with Henry’s and Anne’s cipher, ‘HA’, and evangelical mottoes.4
This trade in foreign religious books was illegal. Lock, no doubt, was able to use his status as a royal merchant to conceal books among his bundles of precious silks. Even more impudent was Anne’s brother George. He went on five diplomatic missions to France and seems to have used his diplomatic bag to smuggle back increasingly controversial works that were banned in France as well as England. They were small, cheaply produced volumes, and were designed for concealment, not display. But, taking advantage of the immunity conferred by status and family connexion, George had two turned into magnificent presentation manuscripts for his sister.
The original works on which the manuscripts were based were again by Lefevre. The first was his Epistres et Evangiles des cinquante et deux sepmaines de l’an (The Epistles and Gospels for the Fifty-two Weeks of the Year). This gives the Biblical reading for each day of the liturgical calendar, followed by a commentary. The second was also a Biblical text and commentary–the text in this case being the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes or The Preacher with its refrain of ‘Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!’ In both books, the texts and readings were in French, while the commentaries emphasise, in clear and vivid language, the need for a living Faith in Christ as opposed to the moribund practices of the orthodox Church. Finally, the books were the product of the same printer/publisher, Simon du Bois, who had fled from an increasingly hostile Paris and found refuge with Marguerite in Alençon, the capital of her husband’s duchy.
When George Boleyn had Du Bois’s modest volumes turned into magnificent manuscripts, he left the Scriptural texts in their original French, but he gave the commentaries in English, in his own translations. George also prefaced The Epistles and Gospels for the Fifty-two Weeks of the Year with a dedicatory letter to Anne, in which, as ‘her most loving and friendly brother, [he] sendeth [her] greeting’, and invoked as well ‘the perpetual bond of blood’ between them.5
And it was blood that was to be spilled, at least in part, because of their joint commitment to religious reform.
But it is time to return to De Brun’s treatise and its date. ‘Last Lent’ was Lent 1529 (10 February–13 March), while ‘the one before last’, when De Brun had first seen Anne reading the Pauline Epistles, was Lent 1528 (26 February–4 April).
It was in January 1527 that Anne and Henry had exchanged their pledges of love. Now, a mere thirteen months later, Anne was advertising her piety conspicuously, and in ways which were heterodox at least.
And soon she moved from advertisement to action.
It was probably in the autumn of 1528 that Anne added a postscript to a letter to Wolsey. ‘My lord,’ she wrote, ‘I beseech your Grace with all my heart to remember the Parson of Honey Lane for my sake shortly’.
The request seems innocence itself; in fact, as Anne well knew, it was acutely provocative. For the ‘Parson of Honey Lane’ was up to his eyes in a programme to import religious books that were more radical and more dangerous than anything Anne’s agents handled: they were in Latin or English, not French, and their author was not the carefully moderate Lefevre, but the firebrand, Martin Luther himself, or some or other of his disciples.6
Thomas Forman was a Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge, where Erasmus had studied. He took his Doctorate in Divinity in 1524, and in 1525 was given the rectory of Allhallows, Honey Lane in the City of London. The same year, he was also elected president of his college. He had fallen foul of Wolsey because of the activities of his curate, Thomas Gerard or Garrett.7
Garrett is a figure straight from R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: he was part missionary and part entrepreneur. And it was in this double role that he arrived in Oxford on Christmas Eve 1527 as a sort of travelling salesman for radical reform. There he won souls for God, and also turned in a nice profit by selling his converts the key works of the New Learning. His catalogues, neatly arranged and marked up with the prices, included Luther’s De captivitate babylonica (The Babylonian Captivity [of the Papacy]), William Tyndale’s New Testament in English, and the key source book, Unio dissidentium. The Unio is an anthology of extracts from the Church Fathers, which covers the main topics of Reformation controversy, including Faith and works, the Eucharist, the veneration of saints, and the Antichrist.
Garrett had brought a full selection of such books with him in his luggage; he also seems to have replenished supplies by getting ‘two fardells [parcels]’ shipped from London to Oxford that were ‘very heavy’, as the servant who bore them to the carriers testified. To Wolsey’s genuine distress, Garrett had particular success with the students of Wolsey’s own great new foundation of Cardinal College–like bright young men everywhere, they were eager for the latest thing.
A two-pronged investigation was launched in both Oxford and London. In Oxford, Garrett was first arrested; then escaped in disguise after picking the lock of his prison; only to be recaptured, interrogated and forced to recant. In London, Forman, an altogether weightier figure, was also picked up. Interrogated by Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, he denied sending suspect books to Oxford, but freely admitted having several in his own possession. When Tunstall asked him why, he replied smoothly that it was ‘to the intent that he might see what opinions were among the Lutherans and be the more ready to impugn them, for the defence of the Church’. Tunstall was unconvinced and advised Wolsey to take sureties of Forman for good behaviour. ‘I think he might find a great sum to be forthcoming’, he observed meaningfully.8
It was presumably at this stage, while Wolsey was pondering Forman’s fate, that Anne intervened on his behalf.
Her intervention came at a crucial moment. Hitherto, England had been the vanguard of the resistance to Luther. Henry himself had written his Assertio septem sacramentorum against the heresiarch and had been rewarded with the title of Fidei Defensor by the grateful Pope Leo X in 1521.
And Wolsey had not been far behind. According to Henry himself he had ‘moved and led’ him to write the Assertio and therefore deserved to be the ‘partner of all honour and glory he had obtained by that act’. More particularly, while the King strutted on the European stage, the Cardinal-minister concerned himself with enforcement in England. Correctly, the Church had identified imported heretical books as the prime source of ‘infection’ (as the inquisitors themselves called it) and Wolsey, as legate, set himself to stamp them out. He presided, in the full panoply of his legatine rank, over the first public burning of heretical books in St Paul’s churchyard on 12 May 1521. And another book-burning, in the same location, took place a few months after the first publication of Tyndale’s New Testament in 1525.
Wolsey was equally active against individual dissenters and, at the opening of the first trial of the proto-martyr Thomas Bilney, he made a formal declaration of his legatine jurisdiction over heresy. Tunstall, as Bishop of London, objected to this encroachment on his power as diocesan. But the matter was quickly smoothed over and the two co-operated effectively in matters such as the Garrett/Forman investigation.9
Of course, the persecutions were not as successful as the orthodox would have wished. For every book that was burned another dozen seemed to get past the searchers at the ports. And though some recanted, many evangelicals quietly and quickly reverted to their real beliefs.
Nevertheless, Wolsey could take a measure of pride in what had been achieved. Under his leadership, the English Church had, as he reminded Pope Clement VII, shown ‘care and vigilance’. And if the ‘sparks’ of Lutheranism were not as fully ‘extinguished’ as he claimed, they had been thoroughly damped down.
But would they remain so? Or, as he warned Clement, would they ‘blaze forth to the utmost danger of all’? And why, in the early winter of 1528, did Wolsey show such sudden alarm?
The answer, almost certainly, was Anne’s intervention on behalf of Forman. Anne had an irritating and un-business-like habit of not dating her letters. Nevertheless her intervention must have taken place in the autumn of 1528, between her father’s letter to Wolsey of 20 August (to which the body of Anne’s letter was a sequel) and Forman’s death (whether as a result of his harassment is not known) in about October 1528. A month later, Wolsey was unburdening himself of his fears to Clement.10
Wolsey was right to be alarmed. It was political support that had turned Lollardy under Richard II from mere academic deviance into a major, if temporary, force. And it could have the same effect on Lutheranism.
Anne had dared to reveal her hand as a patroness of dissent. Whether it proved to hold trumps would depend, as both Wolsey and Anne well knew, on Henry.
It would also depend on the direction taken by the opponents of the Church. Hitherto, led by Luther abroad and Tyndale in exile, they had mounted a frontal challenge to the central dogmas of Catholic belief, including the nature of the sacraments and the nature of grace. At Easter 1529 there was an apparent change of strategy. It was reported, in anxious terms, by Campeggio in a letter to Clement VII’s confidant Sanga:
During these Holy Days certain Lutheran books, in English, of an evil sort, have been circulated in the King’s Court…. Iunderstand that by this book the Lutherans promise to abrogate all the heresies affecting the articles of the Faith and believe according to the Divine law, providing that this King…will undertake to reduce the ecclesiastical state to the condition of the primitive Church, taking from it all its temporalities.
‘I told the King’, Campeggio continued, ‘that this was the Devil dressed in angels’ clothing.’ Henry (as we have already briefly seen) teased Campeggio, now blowing hot, now cold about the ‘Lutheran’ scheme.11
It is impossible to identify the ‘book’ for certain. But it seems very likely that it was Simon Fish’s A Supplication for the Beggars. Fish was unusual among religious controversialists in that he was a layman and married, rather than a priest. And, in the Supplication, he wrote an equally unusual and effective piece of propaganda.
Little is known of Fish’s life. According to Foxe, who is our chief informant, he was a lawyer and member of Gray’s Inn. While he was in the Inn, he had taken the key part in a satirical play directed against Wolsey; he was also a leading figure in the Garrett/Forman ring and traded in illicit books, especially the Tyndale New Testament, on a substantial scale. Naturally London soon became too hot for him and he fled to join Tyndale in the Low Countries. And there he composed his masterpiece.12
The first peculiarity of the Supplication, and the one from which all its other distinctive features sprang, was that it was written by a layman for laymen. This meant that, amid the welter of theological point and counterpoint that passed for Reformation argument, it struck a refreshing note of simplicity and brevity. It was only 5,000 words long and took up only fourteen small pages. It could be read at a sitting and was easy to conceal. It was also cheap enough to scatter free, as seems to have been done on a subsequent occasion. The language was straightforward too, addressing laymen’s issues in laymen’s words. Finally, and what lifted it quite out of the ordinary, it had a Big Idea, that caught the contemporary imagination and set the agenda for supporters and opponents alike.
A ‘supplication’ is a petition: in this case from the Beggars of England to the King. The Beggars complain that they are starving because Churchmen beg so much more effectively than they do. Churchmen have begged away the substance of England, stealing land from the King and the Lords, and wives from every husband, and daughters from every parent. They are corrupt, deceitful and parasitical. Only once they are justly deprived of their ill-gotten gains will England recover prosperity and religion its purity.13
This was music to the ears of a powerful strand of opinion that was instinctively anticlerical. Anticlericals (who were opposed to the power and wealth of the Church, rather than to its beliefs) were to be found among the lawyers and burgesses (or leading townsmen) who made up a significant part of Parliament. Some gentry families were also affected by anticlerical beliefs, as were a handful of the nobility. But what they lacked in numbers, anticlericals made up for in influence–especially if the King could be brought in on their side.
And it was to that end that Fish bent his propagandist’s genius. For the Supplication’s address to the King was much more than a nominal device. Instead, Fish with a virtuoso’s skill played on Henry’s prejudices. Henry liked his policy papers short. The Supplication was a masterpiece of brevity. It also pandered to Henry’s vanity, to his theological learning and to his fondness for playing the role of Solomon as king and judge. Fish similarly probed and irritated tender spots in Henry’s memory, such as the humiliation inflicted on him by the tax-payers’ strikes of 1525 and 1527, which had hamstrung his grandiose schemes for European military intervention. Both strikes still rankled and both were now attributed to widespread impoverishment as a result of clerical exactions. Fish even knew the right names to mention as exemplars of clerical excesses–including Wolsey’s former ‘audiencer and commissary’, Dr Alen, whose name so stank in Henry’s nostrils in 1527 that Secretary Knight begged Wolsey, absent on his ill-fated mission to France, on no account to use him as his messenger to Court.
But Fish’s masterstroke was, according to Foxe, to send his pamphlet to Anne.
Anne, ‘who lay then at a place not far from the Court’, began to read it. Her brother George, always on the look-out for religious novelty, noticed the new pamphlet and read it too. He immediately recognised its potential and ‘willed her earnestly’ to show it to Henry, ‘which thing she did’. Henry, as George foresaw, was impressed. He questioned Anne about the authorship of the anonymous pamphlet, summoned Fish’s wife and recalled Fish himself from exile. He even had a personal interview with him.14
Some historians have questioned Foxe’s story. But, it seems to me, for no good reason. Foxe’s source was Fish’s own wife, who played a significant role in events. Even more importantly, Foxe’s critics have ignored the Forman incident. Fish, as we have seen, was part of the same ring of illicit book-dealers as Forman and Garrett. In the close-knit world of London proto-Protestantism, he would certainly have known of Anne’s intervention on behalf of Forman; conversely, Anne herself would have been aware of Fish’s identity, commitment and energy. Each therefore was prepared to play the part Foxe allots them. He is to be believed.
But the most important testimony is that of the bitterest enemy of Fish, Anne and George Boleyn and everything they stood for: Thomas More.
Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London, was in the front-line of the fight against heresy. He was also one of the most intelligent and widely read of the bishops. So he quickly grasped that persecution alone was not enough; there must also be persuasion. And it must be persuasion in English, since that was the language that the heretics and their friends were using so effectively. But who was to produce the counterblast?
The greatest English theologian and controversialist was John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. Fisher had joined battle against Luther early, writing three important Latin books, as well as delivering two set-piece sermons, in 1521 and 1526, that were printed in both Latin and English. These works have been described as a ‘massive contribution’ to the defence of orthodoxy. And so they were–up to a point.15
For Fisher was, inescapably, a cleric. And he wrote and thought like a cleric, even in English and even in his works that were intended primarily for a lay audience, such as his sermons. These are peppered with Latin quotations, admittedly translated. And their whole structure of argument depends on analogy, similitude and authority. They are a world away from Fish. For Fish, like Charles Dickens’s Mr Gradgrind, had no interest in tropes and poetry and other such fine stuff. Instead, what Fish wanted and what he gave were facts and anecdotes–or whatever tendentious assertion he could pass off as fact, and whatever tall story he could dress up as true.
It is a style with which we are familiar and which strikes us (unlike Fisher’s) as being somehow modern. This is because Fish and his like were journalists, though the word had yet to be invented.
All this was, in today’s fashionable phrase, a paradigm shift, and adapting to it was beyond Fisher. But More was a better bet. For he was a Londoner, a layman and a lawyer. He came, in other words, from the same milieu as the most effective reformers. If knowing your enemies was the issue, More did. He could think like them and write like them. He too could be a journalist.
In March 1528, therefore, at the height of the campaign against Garrett and Forman, Tunstall decided to commission More to mount a counter-attack. The heretics, Tunstall explained in his florid Latin commission to More, were ‘translating into our mother tongue some of the vilest of their booklets and printing them in great numbers’. By these means they were ‘striving with all their might to stain and infect this country’. If good men did nothing, they would succeed.
Therefore heresy must be answered with orthodoxy and lies with truth. And it must be done in English, in print and in works intended for the man in the street (simplicibus et ideotis hominibus).
Here More came in. For he was able, Tunstall proclaimed, to ‘play the Demosthenes in our native tongue just as well as in Latin’. He was also a doughty fighter, ‘wont in every fight to be a most keen champion of Catholic truth’. Finally, he was following in the distinguished footsteps of another layman–those ‘of our most illustrious Lord King Henry VIII, who stood forth to defend the Sacraments of the Church against Luther’.
But perhaps the most important point remained unspoken. Not only was More following in Henry’s footsteps, he was also personally close to the King, who had consulted him in the preparation of the Assertio and had used him to polish and arrange the finished work. If anybody could persuade Henry’s subjects, More could; with luck, he might even persuade the King himself.
Accordingly, Tunstall licenced More to possess and read heretical books, blessed him and sent him forth into battle ‘to aid the Church of God by your championship’.16
Thus equipped, More produced a stream of controversial works in English. The second was a reply to Fish. It was called A Supplication of Souls and it was written in the summer months of 1529. How More found the time is a mystery, since he spent the whole of July and much of August as a delegate (along with Tunstall) at the international peace conference at Cambrai. Nevertheless, he somehow managed to turn out a work that was more than ten times as long as Fish’s–if probably less than half as effective.
Why did More think it necessary to use so large a hammer to crack so small a nut? The answer lies in More’s analysis of Fish’s strategy. So far, More says towards the end of the first book of his Supplication of Souls, the heretics had gone ‘forth plainly against the Faith and Holy Sacraments of Christ’s Church’. But this frontal attack had rebounded. Instead, they had decided to ‘assay the Second Way’: they would avoid open impiety and ‘make one book specially against the Church and see how that would prove’. And Fish’s was the book.
We have heard all this before, of course, as Campeggio had said as much (and in much smaller compass) in his letter to Sanga in early April. It is unlikely that Campeggio had come up with the idea himself. He understood English only imperfectly and had not, he admitted, seen the offending work. Instead, it is much more probable that Campeggio had spoken to More, and had taken his analysis straight from him.
This realisation is important: it means that More had understood immediately Fish’s line of attack. He had also realised that it was deadly in its efficacy. The ‘Second Way’ worked.
And, above all, More feared, it would work on Henry. So he saved his bitterest words for Fish’s attempts to enlist Henry’s sympathy. ‘Rolling his rhetoric from figure to figure’, More sneered, ‘[Fish] falleth to a vehement invocation to the King’. But nothing, he protested, could be less plausible than his subsequent arguments. Fish misunderstood English history, with his appeal to the reign of King John. He misunderstood parliamentary procedure (said More, who had been Speaker of the Lower House and was about to preside over the Upper). Above all, he misunderstood the King. For Henry, More insisted, had already decided. He had written the Assertio. He was Defender of the Faith. He would never be Enemy of the Church.17
They were bold words. But, even as they were written, they were only half true.
The Supplication of Souls was published in the late summer of 1529 as the work of Sir Thomas More, knight, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. But, within a few weeks, Wolsey fell and More exchanged the Chancellorship of the Duchy for the Chancellorship of England. It was Wolsey’s old office and More seemed marked out as the great minister’s immediate successor. He delivered, as was then customary, the speech at the opening of the 1529 parliament and he used it to launch a savage attack on his predecessor as the ‘great wether’, who, diseased and deceitful, had led the flock astray.18
The reality of course was more complex. According to Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador, More got the office of Chancellor only as a compromise, after Norfolk vetoed Suffolk’s appointment to such a powerful position. Indeed, it has been claimed, it was Suffolk who was in the driving seat in these months, with a parliamentary programme that drew directly on Fish’s anticlerical masterpiece.19
The evidence comes from a paper prepared by Thomas, Lord Darcy. Darcy, a leading councillor to Henry VII, had commanded the English army sent to assist Ferdinand, Catherine’s father, in Guienne in 1512. Subsequently, he became an ardent partisan of Catherine’s cause in the matter of the Divorce. And in 1537 he was executed for his treasonable complicity in the great Catholic rising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace.20
His is not a biography that would seem to typecast its subject as a radical anticlerical. But that is how Darcy has been presented on the basis of an item in the ‘Memorandum [on] Parliament Matters’, which he drew up on 1 July 1529. ‘Item’, the eleventh of Darcy’s eighteen points began, ‘that it be tried whether the putting down of all the abbeys be lawful and good or no, for great things hang thereupon’. The words seem straightforward. In fact, they are ambiguous. What is their tense? Do they deal with the past or the future: with the abbeys that have been ‘put down’ by Wolsey to fund his colleges at Oxford and Ipswich; or with those that would be put down by the King on parliamentary authority? And what is the intentionality of the writer? Is Darcy against such ‘putting down of all the abbeys’? Or is he for it?21
The current interpretation favoured by scholars plumps in both cases for the second of these alternatives: Darcy is assumed to be raising the legality of a future general dissolution. And he is presumed to be as heartily in favour of it as the notorious Simon Fish himself.
This double assertion, for it is no more, has been little debated. This is extraordinary. For, if it were correct, the whole history of the Divorce and Reformation would surely have been different. Instead of a long, slow process that dragged itself out over almost a decade, there would have been a Big Bang. For Darcy was an out and proud religious conservative who looked back to a golden age of universal pious observance, when ‘the Lents, Embers, vigils and other days accustomed of Commandments and Councils of Holy Church, [were] justly observed and kept, and the offenders, if any, were duly punished’. If such a man was signed up to the dissolution, why did it not happen in the first session of the ‘Reformation’ Parliament of 1529? And why did not Parliament, as Catherine feared it would, move immediately to authorise Henry’s divorce and remarriage?22
Why, in short, did Henry and Anne have to wait so long? And why did Anne have to fight so hard? And why did More, Tunstall, Fisher and the rest even bother to go through the motions of fighting a battle that was–it would seem–already lost?
The answer of course is that Darcy has been comprehensively misunderstood. He was not looking forward (in both sense of the words) to a parliamentary dissolution. Instead he was looking back to Wolsey’s ‘putting down’ of several monasteries–and he was looking back in anger. What Wolsey had done, Darcy insisted, was an ‘abomination’. Wolsey’s actions, and the ‘seditious and erroneous violations used at the pulling down of the abbeys by his commissioners…may be weighed to the worst act or article of Martin Luther’s, as will be proved if good trials and examinations be had thereof ’. He should be punished accordingly.23
That and no other was the meaning of Darcy’s eleventh article.
It contained no comfort, of course, for Wolsey. But equally it contained little either for Henry or for Anne. For Darcy was as traditional in his politics as in his religion. He objected to Wolsey for trespassing in the temporal sphere (as well as trampling on the rights of his fellow clergy). But he would react with equal horror to any intrusion by the temporal power on the rightful authority and liberties of the Church. And such an intrusion was what was needed if the deadlock over the Divorce were to be broken. Darcy would never countenance it.
Nor, it turned out, would his fellow members of Parliament–at least for the time being. Following the clear lead of More’s opening speech (as well as the detailed suggestions of Darcy’s ‘Memorandum’), the parliamentary session that began on 4 November 1529 clipped some of the more luxurious growths of clerical power that had flourished under Wolsey.
Probate, that is the authorisation of wills, was then a matter for the Church. Wolsey had introduced a steeply rising scale of fees for the granting of probate, so that large estates paid much more heavily than small. Nowadays this would be called social justice; then a Parliament of property-owners denounced it as an outrageous exaction and proposed a cap on the amount payable. There were also complaints in the Lower House that abbots were trading as tanners and wool-merchants, like laymen.24
This sort of thing was inconvenient to the Church. But it hardly merited Bishop Fisher’s angry intervention in the Lords when he accused the Commons of acting ‘for lack of Faith’. Norfolk replied sensibly that the greatest clerks were not always the wisest men. And Henry brokered an awkward compromise in which Fisher ungraciously explained away his words without retracting them.25
The compromise pleased neither the Commons nor the Lords Spiritual. But, when the session ended on 17 December, just in time for the Christmas festivities, the great edifice of the English Church still stood intact. Parliament had indeed limited a few clerical ‘abuses’. But they all related to the Church’s claims on lay property. And lay property, it was agreed by all but a few ultramontanist clerics such as Fisher, belonged absolutely to the temporal sphere. As such, it was subject to Common Law, which was properly made and unmade in Parliament. For all the skirmishes and alarms, both sides had finally respected these distinctions.
The result was a triumph for Darcy’s programme (his real programme, that is) of restoring the proper relationship between the spirituality and temporality. This had been damaged by Wolsey’s overweening and encroaching power. Now Parliament had restored the balance. But of course it had done nothing about Henry’s marriage. For that belonged as firmly to the spiritual sphere as lay property did to the temporal.
Indeed, the Divorce had not even been mentioned–to Catherine’s surprised relief and, no doubt, to Anne’s corresponding irritation.
Other remedies, more or less injurious, would have to be tried.