Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (10 page)

The soaring stone pillars of the chapel are decorated with the Beaufort portcullis and with the double rose that would become
the symbol of the Tudors, giving graphic shape to the healing, but oversimplified, myth that the warring flowers had been
melded into a flourishing new hybrid. One of the chapel’s stained-glass windows shows a crown wreathed in a thorn bush, and
later legend relates how Henry actually
plucked his crown from such a bush at Bosworth. In fact, contemporary accounts of the battle made no mention of bushes — they
describe the crown as simply being picked up off the ground. But it is fair enough to think of Henry as the King who redeemed
England from a thorny situation.

A
FTER THE PENNY
-
PINCHING WAYS OF
Henry VII, the profligate glamour of his red-blooded, redheaded son, the new King Henry VIII, exploded over England like
a sunburst. Just seventeen years old, the athletic young monarch was the nation’s sporting hero.

’It is the prettiest thing in the world to see him play,’ purred an admirer of Henry’s exertions at tennis,‘his fair skin
glowing through a shirt of the finest texture.’ When the young King, tall and energetic, joined the royal bowmen for target
practice, his arrow‘cleft the mark in the middle and surpassed them all’. He was a superlative horseman, a champion in the
jousts, an all-round wrestler — and when the
music started, he could pluck a mean string on the lute. Recent research has revealed that Henry may even have played football,
a game usually considered too rough and common for the well born. In February 2004 a fresh look at the inventory of his Great
Wardrobe discovered that alongside forty-five pairs of velvet shoes the King kept a pair of purpose-made football boots.

The other side of bluff King Hal was evident within three days of his accession. With the vicious eye for a scapegoat that
was to characterise his ruling style, the King authorised the show trials of Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, two of his
father’s most effective and unpopular money-raisers. The pair had done nothing worse than carry out royal orders and line
their own pockets. But Henry had both men executed — then promptly embarked on a spending spree with his father’s carefully
hoarded treasure. He had an insatiable capacity for enjoying himself. Masques, mummeries, jousts, pageants — the festivities
went on for days when Henry was crowned in June 1509 alongside his fetching and prestigious new Spanish wife Katherine of
Aragon.

Four years older than Henry, Katherine was embarking on her second marriage. Having married Henry’s brother Arthur in November
1501, she had found herself widowed before that winter was out. Young Henry had stepped forward to take Arthur’s place both
as Prince of Wales and as Katherine’s betrothed, and when he came to the throne he made their marriage his first order of
personal business. The couple exchanged vows and rings in a private ceremony at Greenwich on II June 1509, and set about the
happy process of procreation. When, after one miscarriage, a son was born
on New Years Day 1511, Henry’s joy knew no bounds. As bonfires were lit and salutes cannonaded from the Tower, the proud father
staged a vast tournament, mingling with the crowds and delightedly allowing them to tear off as souvenirs the splendid gold
letters‘H’ and‘K’ that adorned his clothes.

But the baby boy, who had been christened Henry, died within two months, and disappointment would prove the pattern of Katherine’s
childbearing. One daughter, Mary, born in 1516, was the only healthy survivor of a succession of ill-fated pregnancies, births
and stillbirths, and after ten years of marriage without a male heir, Henry came to ponder on the reasons for God’s displeasure.

He thought he found his answer in the Bible.‘Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife,’ read
chapter 18
of the Old Testament Book of Leviticus — and two chapters later, the consequences were set out clearly: If a man shall take
his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing… they shall be childless.’ This apparently firm prohibition had been overruled
at the time of Henry and Katherine’s betrothal in 1504 by special licence from the Pope, who based his action on the contradictory
instruction in the Book of Deuteronomy that it was a man’s duty to take his brother’s widow‘and raise up seed for his brother’.
Katherine, for her part, firmly maintained that she was free to marry Henry because her five-month marriage to the fifteen-year-old
Arthur had never been consummated.

But as Katherine remained childless through the 1520s, her discontented husband started to lend a ready ear to those who suggested
that his wife could easily have been lying,
’Bring me a cup of ale,’ brother Arthur was said to have cried out contentedly on the first morning of his married life,‘I
have been this night in the midst of Spain!’

To Henry the solution seemed simple. Since a pope had fixed his improper, heirless marriage to Katherine, a pope should now
unfix it, freeing the English King to take the fertile young wife his dynastic duty required — and by the spring of 1527 the
thirty-six-year-old Henry knew exactly who that wife should be. He had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn, a self-assured beauty
ten years or so his junior, notable for a pair of mesmeric dark eyes and a steely sense of purpose.

But as Henry set his mind to making a new marriage, events in Italy made it highly unlikely that the Pope would give him any
help. In May that year Rome was captured and sacked by the troops of Charles V, the powerful Habsburg ruler who was also Katherine’s
nephew. Charles controlled Spain, the Netherlands, much of Germany and Italy — and now the Pope. There was no way he would
allow his aunt to be humiliatingly cast aside by the King of England.

Until now Henry had been content to leave the handling of his divorce to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, the talented church statesman
who ran the country for him, as Cardinal Morton had taken care of business for his father. But the normally competent cardinal
was left helpless after the shift of power in Rome — and he had made the mistake of offending the now powerful Anne Boleyn.
He called her the‘night crow’. After fourteen years of effectively running England, Wolsey was disgraced. Charged with treason,
he died from the shock. Henry took over Hampton Court, the magnificent
palace the portly cardinal had built for himself down the Thames from Richmond — and started lending an ear to advisers who
were considerably more Popo-sceptic.

Chief among these was Anne herself, who had a radical taste in reading. Sometime in 1530 she placed in Henry’s hands a copy
of the recently published
Obedience of a Christian Man
by the reformer William Tyndale, a controversial little volume that had been denounced as‘a holy boke of disobedyence’ by
Thomas More, Wolsey’s successor as Lord Chancellor
How Christian Rulers Ought to Govern
was Tyndale’s subtitle, and he argued that, since the Bible made no mention of the Pope (nor of bishops, abbots, church courts
or of the whole earthly edifice of church power and glory), the Church should be governed like the state, by a‘true Christian
prince’ — without interference from the so-called‘Bishop of Rome’.

’This book is for me and for all Kings to read,’ mused Henry — here was the solution to his troublesome‘Great Matter’. Why
should the King not effectively award himself his own divorce, as governor of the English Church, in order to secure the heir
that his country needed?‘England cares nothing for popes,’ Anne’s brother George Boleyn would declare to a papal official
visiting England in the summer of 1530.‘The king is absolute emperor and pope in his own kingdom.’

The Boleyns were thrusting members of the rising Tudor gentry — landowners and former merchants whose personal beliefs were
traditional but who had no special fondness for the Pope, and still less for the power and privileges of the clergy with their
unearned wealth and their special
exemptions from the law. Scrounging was the Church’s speciality, according to a scurrilous tract of the time,
A Supplication for the Beggars,
which pretended to be a petition from the‘Beggars of England’ to the King, complaining that crafty churchmen were putting
them out of business by begging so much better than they could. Stealing land, money and even, on occasion, the virtue of
good men’s wives and daughters, the clerics had filched‘the whole realm’, complained the
Supplication.

This jeering anticlerical sentiment was mobilised in the autumn of 1529, when Parliament gathered for what was to prove an
historic series of sessions. Discontented laymen were invited to draw up lists of their grievances against the clergy, and
the result, finally codified in May 1532, was a formidable roundup of just about everything that people found irritating about
the often complacent and greedy ways of the all-too-earthly Church. It was exactly what the King wanted to hear.‘We thought
that the clergy of our realm had been our subjects wholly,’ declared Henry menacingly as he studied the list of complaints.‘But
now we have well perceived that they be but half our subjects.’

Here was an area where the King and a fair number of the merchants, lawyers, country gentlemen and landed magnates who dominated
Parliament clearly felt as one. England, they argued, should have control over its own Church — and between 1529 and 1536
Parliament passed a series of laws to accomplish that, transferring the many aspects of church life and business to the Crown.

The immediate consequence was that Henry was able to marry Anne and cast off Katherine. But the long-term consequence
of these new laws went far beyond Henry and his need for a son.’This realm of England is an empire… declared the Act in Restraint
of Appeals of 1533,‘governed by one supreme head and king… furnished with plenary, whole and entire power… without restraint
or provocation to any foreign princes or potentates of the world’.

Henry’s‘Great Matter’ turned out to be greater than anyone, including himself, had guessed. English kings now acknowledged
no superior under God on earth.

H
ENRY VIII
’
S HISTORIC BREAK WITH ROME
was fundamentally about earthly power, not spiritual belief. Even while Henry was demolishing the Pope’s authority over the
English Church in the early 1530s, a Sunday service in the average English parish was still shaped by the comforting chants
and Catholic rituals hallowed by the centuries.

But in Europe, belief was changing more radically. In October 1517 the rebellious German monk Martin Luther, a miner’s son
turned theologian and philosophy professor, had
nailed his famous ninety-five theses — or‘propositions’ — to the church door in Wittenberg in Saxony. Luther was appalled
by the materialism of the Roman Church, and his ninety-five propositions were a particular attack on the sale of‘indulgences’,
Church-approved coupons that people purchased in the belief that they were being let off their sins — printed tickets to heaven.
The Pope had no authority to forgive people’s sins, argued Luther, let alone offer forgiveness for sale, like bread or beer.
It was faith alone that would bring salvation, and men had no need of priests to mediate with God. Believers could commune
directly with their Maker through prayer, and by reading God’s word in the Bible. Within a few years several dozen of Germany’s
duchies and principalities had thrown off papal authority and signed up to Luther’s protests and to his call for reform —
generating the movement that historians would later call the Protestant Reformation.

Henry VIII was outraged. He thought that Luther’s views undermined civil obedience, and left people with no reason to be good.
When Luther’s message reached England, the King was still on warm terms with the Pope, and with the help of Thomas More he
fired off an indignant diatribe against the heretical German, earning himself the title
Fidei Defensor,
’Defender of the Faith’. To this day the abbreviations
Fid. Def,
or
FD.,
appear on the face of every English coin, commemorating the title by which in 1521, only a decade before the break with Rome,
the grateful Pope declared Henry his favourite and most faithful prince in Europe. On Henry’s orders, Cardinal Wolsey organised
public
burnings of Luther’s books, and even hunted down the reformer’s translation of the New Testament into German.