Six Wives (57 page)

    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.
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    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:

'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.
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    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.
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    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.
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    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.
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    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 setpiece 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.
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    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'.
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    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.
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    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.
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