1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (23 page)

In all these areas, I am persuaded that symptoms of tyranny were rare until the 1530s (Buckingham’s execution in 1521 is a notable, but singular, exception), when gradually the incidence of questionable and inhumane practices accelerated, reaching its apogee in 1535–6: after this point, as we shall see, the evidence of tyranny became compelling.

Henry VIII’s Revenge

We can chart change in Henry VIII’s character from the differing reports that observers made of him in these later years, compared with those made when the king was a young man, which primarily stressed his ease of companionship and gentle graciousness. In the guarded, diplomatic and understated language of ambassadors, comments were now made about Henry’s increasingly irascible temper – that the ‘King was irritated and that his ministers were at a loss to account for it’ and capricious unpredictability – ‘people worth credit say he is often of a different opinion in the morning than after dinner’. Other remarks were made about the pig-headedness that made him ‘very stern and opinionate’, or how he mistreated his counsellors – he would, for example, ‘beknave’ Thomas Cromwell twice a week, hitting ‘him well about the pate’. After Cromwell’s death, Henry turned his fury on his other counsellors, reproaching them for forcing his hand and blaming them that ‘upon light pretexts, by false accusations, they made him put to death the most faithful servant he ever had’. In March 1541, when his leg was particularly bad, Henry was said to have a ‘
mal d’esprit’
, and he responded angrily to tales that his subjects were murmuring at the charges imposed upon them and their ill-treatment over religious matters, by complaining that ‘he had an unhappy people to govern whom he would shortly make so poor that they would not have the boldness nor the power to oppose him’. It was reported that Henry had also ‘conceived a sinister opinion of some of his chief men’ and railed against them ‘that most of his Privy Council, under pretence of serving him, were only temporising for their own profit, but he knew the good servants from the flatterers, and …would take care their projects should not succeed’. While those at Henry’s court could hope for glory, wealth and position, the dangers and trials of being in close proximity to this mercurial and volatile king were great.
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Charles de Marillac, the French ambassador, provided a damning analysis of Henry VIII in August 1540, which is worth quoting at some length:

This Prince seems tainted, among other vices, with three which in a King may be called plagues. The first is that he is so covetous that all the riches in the world would not satisfy him… Everything is good prize, and he does not reflect that to make himself rich he has impoverished his people, and does not gain in goods what he loses in renown…. Thence proceeds the second plague, distrust and fear. This King, knowing how many changes he has made, and what tragedies and scandals he has created, would fain keep in favour with everybody, but does not trust a single man, expecting to see them all offended, and he will not cease to dip his hand in blood as long as he doubts his people. Hence every day edicts are published so sanguinary that with a thousand guards one would scarce be safe… The third plague, lightness and inconstancy, proceeds partly from the other two… and has perverted the rights of religion, marriage, faith and promise…

Taken with evidence of Henry’s spiteful interest in the manner of Anne Boleyn’s death and the viciousness of his letters on how to deal with the Pilgrims, this all adds considerably to the body of evidence that suggests Henry VIII had become tyrannical. This is not to suggest that temper, egoism, pride and obstinacy sprang suddenly from a character who had always previously shown peace and light. According to the sixteenth-century’s notion of tyranny, tyranny would always have been latent in his character. We know that although Henry was kind, affable and generous in his younger years, he was also wilful and egotistic. Nevertheless, this wilfulness and egoism had now reached a new level: something had catalyzed this latent tyranny into reality.
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The necessarily muted and circumspect language of diplomats at Henry’s court means, though, that our best evidence for the king’s changing character is his actions; specifically, as Marillac described it, the way he dipped his hand in blood. A classical story gives a hint about how tyranny manifests itself. Periander, a tyrant who ruled Corinth in seventh century
BC
, was once asked for advice on how to rule by Thrasybulus of Miletus. Periander took the messenger out into the fields and, without saying a word, lopped off the tallest ears of corn with his stick. In his book,
In the Lion’s Court,
Derek Wilson argues that Henry did just that after 1536: ‘most of the reign’s acts of sanguinary statecraft occurred during the last decade… It was in 1536 that bloodletting of those close to the Crown became frequent…[and] in his later years the lion’s claws were out more often’. For a striking difference between Henry’s early reign and his last decade is the way that Henry treated those he knew personally whom he thought had wronged him. The incidence and circumstances of such executions before and after 1536, and, especially, the increasing tendency not to pursue conviction through due process and common law trial but through parliamentary attainder and a widening definition of treason, provides compelling evidence of Henry VIII’s increasingly savage temper and misanthropic character.
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Prior to 1536, there had been a handful of executions of high-status victims following conviction of treason by common law. Sir Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, who had been councillors to Henry VII, were executed in August 1510. This was probably either because they were held to blame for the injustices and oppressions of Henry VII’s reign, and because the young king, who had come to the throne only a year before, needed to prove his justice, or as the result of a court coup. The charge of treason came from the fact that on 22 April 1509, both had, allegedly, conspired ‘to hold, guide and govern the King and his Council’ by summoning a force of men to come to London as Henry VII lay dying – the suggestion being that they had intended to stage a coup d’état and destroy the new king, Henry VIII. Having been imprisoned in the Tower since 1506, Edmund de la Pole was finally executed (despite Henry VII’s earlier promise that he would not be) in May 1513 on a charge of treason. This was because of his previous association with a recently re-emerged Yorkist conspiracy led by his brother, Richard. The Duke of Buckingham was, as we have seen, executed in 1521, having been found guilty of treason before a jury of peers. Like Edmund de la Pole, his royal blood (by descent from Edward III) made him dangerous and, while his conviction for treason was on the basis of allegation, hearsay and speculation, it is likely that his ambitions for the throne were plausible. At a time when Henry VIII was starting to worry about his succession, Buckingham was perceived as a threat to the crown. Finally, More and Fisher’s deaths, along with the Carthusian monks in 1535, more than a year after they went to the Tower and on the basis of laws enacted during their incarceration, were particularly notable as evidence of Henry’s steadily growing despotism.
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It all came to a head in 1536, when Anne Boleyn, Rochford, Henry Norris and the others were tried by common law and found guilty of high treason. The actual charge of treason was conspiracy to procure the king’s death (referring presumably to Anne’s conversations with Norris) but this was dressed up with a charge of adultery, even though adultery by or with a queen was actually not an act of treason by law. The charges of adultery were prefaced by the repetition of the words ‘treasonably violated the queen’, but if the intercourse had been consensual, no crime remained. This is highlighted by the fact that adultery with the queen was created a treason in later legislation to deal with Catherine Howard’s infidelity.
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Other significant figures indicted and tried after this point include the rebels of 1536 – Aske, Darcy and Constable etc., on the basis of evidence constructed to prove treason after the December pardon – and a group of alleged conspirators in 1538, including Henry’s cousins, Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter and Henry Pole, Lord Montague (Reginald Pole’s brother). The alleged conspirators were charged with two counts under the 1534 Act of Treason: desiring the king’s death and denying him his title of Supreme Head. Of their supposed armed rebellion there is little evidence. They were followed a few months later by Henry VIII’s close companion and childhood friend, Nicholas Carew, after he had responded angrily to an insult made by the king, for his part in ‘abetting’ Exeter’s conspiracy. All three deaths provide a striking example of Henry’s willingness, by this point in his life, to send those near him to the block in cases of perceived threat or personal betrayal. As examined in chapter 7, the king had suffered great humiliation in Anne and Rochford’s trial. Perhaps the hope of avoiding a repeat of this incident helps explain why after this point, of all the influential and high-status people executed at the king’s behest, only the Pilgrims’ leaders and the Exeter conspirators were tried and executed by judicial process. Everyone else of high status accused of high treason was convicted and executed on the basis of parliamentary attainder – a route that was just about legal but one which entirely circumvented the due process of trial and defence, and which thus removed any possibility of the accused being found innocent and released. It is not simply that the number of people close to the king who were executed increased after 1536 – something which could, in part, be justified on the basis of increased threats to the throne – it was also that the method of dealing with these miscreants became more savage; for Henry had changed.
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Parliamentary attainder had traditionally been used to convict fugitives in exile or to extend the terms of convictions already passed through common law, generally to ensure that the estates of those who had been convicted and executed through common law were forfeited to the Crown. In the first twenty years of his reign, Henry VIII used them in this traditional and infrequent manner. But studies by scholars Stanford Lehmberg and William Stacy show that the use of the attainder dramatically increased in the 1530s – in fact, this decade saw the heaviest use of parliamentary attainder in English history – and, moreover, the attainder was being used in an entirely new manner. Now, an act passed through parliament could in itself declare the accused guilty and condemn them to death – even when defendants were available for trial by common law – without needing to cite specific evidence or name precise crimes.
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The first attainder of this ilk was in February 1531, when Richard Roose, a cook in Bishop John Fisher’s household, was attainted of high treason by parliament after mixing poison into the porridge. Fisher hadn’t eaten it but both a guest and one of the charitable poor fed at the bishop’s gate had died, and presumably the grave crime of attempting to kill a bishop (an irony perhaps not lost on others four years later) had prompted an attainder for high treason for what was not a treasonous act, without indictment or trial. Roose was the poor soul ordered to be boiled alive. Three years later, the same procedure – attainder without indictment or trial – was directed at Elizabeth Barton and her associates. Barton, also known as the Holy Nun of Kent, was charged with having preached that Henry was not the rightful king and that if he married again, he would soon die. There was no judicial process, but, in contrast to later attainders, her offences (which prefigured the Treason Act of 1534) were described in great detail and she and her followers were convicted and sentenced to death on the basis of alleged confessions. John Bellamy has suggested that attainder was used in her case because the crimes with which she was charged were not treasonous and judges refused to declare them as such; Cromwell and Henry used the attainder to demonstrate that they would get their way, nonetheless.
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These were important cases, but it remains undeniable that the use of attainder snowballed from 1536, especially for those towards whom the king was likely to have felt personal antipathy. In July 1536, Thomas Fitzgerald, the Earl of Kildare, was attainted anew for his involvement in the Irish Kildare rebellion of 1534, along with five of his uncles (at least two of whom had previously been scheduled to receive a pardon). All of them were executed in February 1537. None were given common law trials. For attempting to marry the king’s niece, Lady Margaret Douglas, without royal consent, Lord Thomas Howard was also attainted that year. His offence was his indirect claim to the throne but the ‘high treason’ for which he was convicted only became a crime in the text of the bill that attainted him, a rather circular and not wholly legal process that evinces Henry’s paranoia. Lord Thomas was sentenced to be executed as a traitor, but in fact died in the Tower in October 1537 before his sentence was carried out. In 1536, Sir Thomas More was also posthumously attainted for treason, and the attainder was applied to two suspected common murderers, John Lewes and John Wolf (the latter had fled making his attainder more traditional, though he had only been charged with felony).
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What is important is that after this point a number of astonishingly high-profile and high-status individuals, in other words, people the king knew, were attainted and executed without trial. In 1539, fifty-three people were condemned by attainder – more than a third of all those condemned in this way over the course of the whole century! Twenty-seven had faced trial, including the Pilgrim leaders, Exeter, Montague and Carew, who were all attainted after their trials in the conventional way. Five others had been indicted but not tried, because they had fled abroad. The rest, however, were convicted of high treason and sentenced to death without any indictment or trial at all. These included Gertrude Courtenay, marchioness of Exeter, and Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, accused of conspiring with Exeter and Carew. The marchioness had the fortune to remain in the Tower (if such a statement can be made) until Mary’s accession in 1554, when she was freed. The Countess was, however, executed in 1541, and Greg Walker has remarked that ‘the death of the septuagenarian Countess, so infirm and weakened by interrogation that she had to be carried to the scaffold in a chair… marked the nadir of royal vindictiveness’. It was a chilling example of Henry’s capacity for despicable and unnecessary cruelty. The Countess might have had royal blood but she was evidently no threat to Henry. Sir Adrian Fortescue was also attainted on the basis of unnamed ‘divers and sundry detestable and abominable treasons’ and he and three others (including two of Exeter’s servants) were executed in July 1539.
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