Henry VIII's Last Victim (17 page)

But the European Reformation was a protean beast, constantly evolving, dividing, reforming and adapting to the peculiarities of circumstance and country. There was no one leader and there was no single, unifying creed. Nor could there be. The Reformation, by its very nature, opposed the imposition of any authority other than God’s Word. There were spokesmen who tried to clarify the main points of the Scriptures, but men and women had a responsibility to read and interpret them themselves until they discovered their faith. From studying the same source, some people emerged with extreme new views on transubstantiation, the sacraments, predestination and much, much more. Other, no less committed, evangelicals abhorred the radicalism of their contemporaries. Second, third and subsequent readings of the Scriptures might crystallise beliefs or fundamentally alter them. Nor was it unusual for people to flirt with reform only to revert to their original orientation. Faith was fluid and there were no clear lines of demarcation. France, during the middle years of Francis I’s reign, is said to have experienced a period of ‘magnificent religious anarchy’.
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So too did England under Henry VIII.

That is why confessional labels can be anachronistic and misleading. The term ‘Protestant’, so often bandied about, did not exist until 1529 and thereafter Surrey’s generation saw it as a term peculiar to the German states. Enemies to reform regarded all their opponents as heretics and tended to lump them into one uniform category, ‘Lutheran’ being the preferred pejorative. Reformist groupings did form, especially at the Henrician Court, and while they were eclectic and heterogeneous, they shared similar orientations (towards the Gospel) and aspirations (the dissemination of the Word and the reform of the Church). In the interests of clarity, a point of reference is necessary and so, following the lead of many Tudor historians today, the term ‘evangelical’ shall henceforth be used to describe the outlook of these reformers.

Although Anne Boleyn was by no means the first to take up strands of the new faith, she had the highest profile and she took her role very seriously. Leaning towards the form of French evangelism sponsored by Francis I’s sister, Marguerite of Navarre, Anne launched herself into the Scriptures and especially the Epistles of St Paul. Her piety was
intentionally conspicuous. She encouraged scriptural debate at her table, kept an open Bible at her desk and provided her ladies with prayer books to hang from their girdles. She protected and patronised like-minded reformers and defied the law by importing reformist literature from overseas. She even dared to recommend some of these works to Henry VIII. On completing William Tyndale’s
Obedience of a Christian Man
, the King reportedly declared that ‘this book is for me and all kings to read’.
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Henry VIII’s beliefs are almost impossible to pin down. They tended to fluctuate according to his inconsistent cogitations and in response to domestic and foreign circumstances. In 1521 he had written a diatribe against Martin Luther, the
Assertio Septem Sacramentorum
, to which the grateful Pope had responded by bestowing upon Henry the title ‘Defender of the Faith’.
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But, as the King pursued his Great Matter, he tended to embrace proposals, even the more controversial ones, that put pressure on the Pope. In November 1533, for example, the French ambassador reported that Henry had ‘made up his mind to a final and complete revolt from the Holy See. He says that he will have the Holy Word of God preached throughout the country.’
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Whether or not the King meant this, his mood was seized upon by evangelicals like Cromwell and Cranmer, who saw the annulment campaign as a heaven-sent opportunity for spreading the Gospel throughout the realm.

As Supreme Head of the Church of England, Henry had the sole right to decide the religion of his people. His actions were therefore subjected to close scrutiny. In January 1535 he appointed Cromwell Vice-Gerent in Spirituals, a post that effectively made the minister Henry VIII’s deputy in all matters of the Church. In the summer Henry and Anne staged a progress through the West Country and showed open favour to the evangelicals based there. The following autumn Henry sent an embassy to the Lutheran Princes of the Holy Roman Empire and even made noises about joining their League. A stream of evangelical propaganda was issued in February 1536 to coincide with the opening of the last session of the Reformation Parliament and, the following month, an act for the dissolution of England’s smaller monasteries was passed.

To conservative stalwarts like the Duke of Norfolk and Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, these developments were sinister indeed.
They considered the ‘New Learning’ anathema and dangerous – a threat not only to centuries-old customs, but to the very foundations of Church and State. Particularly alarming to more
politique
conservatives like Norfolk was the evangelical challenge to the Church hierarchy based on Luther’s tenet that the faithful belonged to the ‘priesthood of all believers’. In some parts of the Holy Roman Empire this had been misinterpreted as an argument for emancipation, and was used to justify the Peasants’ War of 1525. Who was to say that disgruntled members of the underclass might not enact a similar revolt in England? What then for the nobility? For others, like Thomas More, John Fisher and the Carthusian monks, the traditional faith had been worth dying for. Although some people invariably used religion for their own political ends, the battle between the conservatives and reformers was not just petty factionalism. People thought they were fighting for God against the devil. Souls were at stake. The ultimate prize was salvation; failure meant damnation. It was a holy war.

It was into this savage, frenetic environment that the Earl of Surrey was summoned in the spring of 1536. He had experienced the Court before, but mainly on ceremonial occasions such as the French interviews or during the merry days at Windsor. Then, safely cocooned within Richmond’s circle, he had watched with detached amusement the fawning and frenzied competition that surrounded the King. Now Howard stock was falling, Norfolk’s relationship with Anne Boleyn was at breaking point and the reformers were gaining ground. Surrey was going to have to learn for himself the art of advancement at Court.

The Henrician Court was the political, social and cultural heart of England. It was the ‘great theatre’, where men and women swarmed for power and patronage, gossip and entertainment, reputation, riches and revenge. There, basking in the limelight, at least for now, was Thomas Cromwell. His late father Walter, described variously as an innkeeper, a tanner and a blacksmith, had been a petty criminal with convictions for fraud, drunkenness and assault. The resourcefulness and steely determination that Thomas Cromwell had needed to escape the shadows of his childhood were put to good use at Court, where he ascended the slippery pole with alacrity. It was Cromwell who had made Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine and marriage to Anne a reality and, within three-and-a-half years, the grateful King had made him Master of the King’s Jewels, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Principal
Secretary, Master of the Rolls, Vice-Gerent and Vicar General. He was the King’s chief minister in affairs both temporal and spiritual. A self-made man, Cromwell was no friend to the nobility. Dynamic, erudite, personable but inscrutable, nothing escaped his gimlet eye.

Scurrying about nearby in a flurry of archiepiscopal robes was Thomas Cranmer, another beneficiary of the Break with Rome: earnest, seemingly sincere, but to the conservatives a dangerous man with dangerous aspirations, who had vowed at his consecration ‘to prosecute and reform matters wheresoever they seem to me to be for the reform of the English Church’.
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Never far away was the Seymour clan, a Wiltshire gentry family, the rising stars of the Tudor Court. Surrey knew the eldest son Edward, who had been Richmond’s Master of the Horse. Just recently he had been made a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber. At his side was his attractive but pretentious wife Anne, his amorous brother Thomas, and Jane, the demure little sister.

Shuffling after his master with his pet monkey perched upon his hunchback was Will Somers, Henry VIII’s fool, the only man to get away with calling Anne Boleyn a ‘ribald’. Another colourful character was Sir Francis Bryan, a Howard ally, who had lost an eye in a jousting accident; his reputation for drinking, gambling and whoring had earned him the sobriquet ‘Vicar of Hell’. Surrey would have recognised a large contingent from East Anglia: the Knyvets, the Cleres, the Sheltons and the Southwells, all members of the sprawling Howard affinity. Then there was a host of extras: young ladies, old nobles, heralds splendid in their tabards, churchmen murderously divided, astrologers, doctors, minstrels, artists and hangers-on. Keeping out the ubiquitous vagabonds was a phalanx of halberdiers – ‘By God,’ one Venetian had exclaimed ‘they were all as big as giants!’
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Loitering in the wings were the ambassadors: watching, whispering, colluding, ever poised, quill at hand, for the latest scoop. Behind the scenes, making it all happen, was an army of cooks, bakers, barbers, chandlers, tailors, launderers, carpenters, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, messengers, stableboys and scantily clad scullions. It was only in 1526 that they had been made to wear clothes at all.

Centre stage was the ‘majestic awing presence’ of King Henry VIII.
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In the first two decades of his reign, Venetian diplomats had exalted Henry’s physical beauty. According to Hironimo Moriano, there was no man in the world ‘handsomer, more elegant and better proportioned’ than Henry. Indeed, he concluded, ‘nature, in producing this Prince,
did her utmost to create a perfect model of manly beauty in these times.’ While Piero Pasqualigo was impressed by Henry’s accoutrements – the diamond pendant on his gold collar was ‘the size of the largest walnut I ever saw’ and his fingers were ‘one mass of jewelled rings’ – Sebastian Giustinian observed that it was the King himself that dazzled. His auburn beard shone like gold while, on the tennis court, ‘it is the prettiest thing in the world to see him play, his fair skin glowing through a shirt of the finest texture’.
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By the mid-1530s, though, some of Henry’s lustre had faded. His left leg was afflicted by an ulcer, either the result of varicose veins or an infection of the bone. It caused severe discomfort and, when it swelled, fevers and acute pain. The King’s once youthful physique now bore an overcoat of fat. If his waist had not yet ballooned to the fifty-four inches measured for a suit of armour in 1545, it had certainly expanded well beyond the thirty-two inches of 1512.
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On 24 January 1536, while running in the lists at Greenwich, he was thrown from his horse. Clattering to the ground in his armour, he was knocked unconscious for two hours. Thereafter, his ulcer became chronic and another soon developed on his right leg.
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The pressures of state also bore down on Henry. His jousting accident had made him all too aware of his own mortality and the fact that he still had no male heir was an open sore that tormented him as relentlessly as his ulcers. The Break with Rome had spawned powerful enemies. Machiavelli had argued that it was better for rulers to be feared than loved, and Henry, like his father before him, was beginning to favour the security of fear. As Supreme Head of the Church of England, he also had a responsibility to project the appropriate level of spiritual dignity. This meant less levity, flamboyance and familiarity, and more gravity, solemnity and distance.

The new image required a new iconography, a manifestation of which was the Whitehall mural produced by Holbein in 1537 for the entrance to the King’s Privy Chamber. Here a full-length Henry VIII stood in the foreground, a larger, mightier presence than his father Henry VII, whose image shrivelled into the background. The sheer proportion of Henry VIII’s frame in contrast to the mural’s other figures, his aggressive stance – legs astride, one hand on hip, the other edging towards his dagger – the broad shoulders, enormous codpiece and direct, penetrating stare, brows raised as if in interrogation, combined to overawe the onlooker, just as the King himself was supposed to do in
person. Visitors, we are told, now stood before Henry ‘astonished and abashed, so trembling and quaking, utterly in a manner mute, as if they had been taken with the palsy, such is the majesty of the Prince.’
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When Surrey came to Court in the spring of 1536, he was nineteen years old to Henry’s forty-four. The King still enjoyed the company of exuberant young men and in Surrey’s restless energy, aggressive sense of honour and political naivety, he may have found a tonic. It has been suggested that Surrey reminded Henry of his own once-youthful self.
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Despite the King’s increasingly fearsome temper, he seems to have treated the young Earl with avuncular indulgence. But Surrey would have done well to learn that even Henry’s greatest favourites were expendable. ‘If my head could win him a castle in France,’ Thomas More once said, ‘it should not fail to go.’
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There was still fun to be had at Court and ample opportunity for ‘pastime with good company’. There were tennis courts and tilting yards, bowling alleys and dicing tables. In the evenings, troupes of minstrels swept merrily through the Hall and a constant round of masques and dances entertained all comers. According to the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, courtiers worshipped ‘Venus and Bacchus all their life long’.
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The febrile ‘press’ of so many young people at Court created an atmosphere that was highly charged. Tokens of love and pledges of faith were given and received. High-minded poetry mingled with bawdy doggerel and the games of courtly love sometimes, inevitably, gave way to less innocent pleasures.