The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (12 page)

Back in November 1538, Chief Minister Cromwell and Archbishop Cranmer had launched an active campaign against members of the growing Anabaptist
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sects throughout the realm – in particular, those who argued against the ‘Real Presence’ in the sacrament of communion. The chief minister, now also the king’s vice-regent in matters spiritual, had decided that a public example was needed to underline Henry’s fervent opposition to heresy. Lambert was selected as that example, probably by Bishop Stephen Gardiner. Lambert had earlier appeared before Cranmer on a charge of heresy and had been found guilty. Henry’s propagandists then turned his appeal into a show trial in all but name. Within the banqueting hall of the Palace of Westminster, temporary wooden scaffolding had been erected along the walls to seat spectators, to enable them to witness their king determinedly defending the sacred beliefs of the Church of England – ‘the reverence of the holy sacrament of the altar’, as Cromwell remarked. The nobility and clergy were specially invited to attend. They would have seen what transpired, but as virtually all the proceedings were to be conducted in Latin, not everyone would have understood what was said. Promptly at noon, Henry entered the hall attired head to foot in the splendour of white silk, escorted by his yeoman guards, also dressed in white uniforms. He climbed the short flight of steps to his throne beneath the canopy of estate and sat, flanked on his right by Cranmer and the bishops, and on his left by the temporal peers, led by Cromwell, and the Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber. The great hall was hushed as Lambert was brought in to stand on a special wooden stage, facing his accusers, ‘fearful and timorous’.
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The beginning was cheery enough. ‘Ho! Good fellow, what is thy name?’
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Henry asked Lambert, after the buzz of the audience had died away. It sounded very much like a jocular ‘hail fellow, well met’ sort of greeting, but what followed was not anything like so genial. When the prisoner explained that he had changed his name to escape persecution, the king, his ‘look, his cruel countenance and his brows bent unto severity’, told him bluntly, ‘I would not trust you, having two names, although you were my brother.’ Lambert naïvely then tried flattery, humbly thanking Henry for hearing his case and commending his
‘great judgement and learning’. But the king, now standing before the throne, an imposing, tall figure in the hall, quickly interrupted him: ‘I did not come here to hear my own praises.’

George Day, provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and a famed public orator,
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explained the true reason why everyone was gathered there. The ‘assembly was not at all convened to dispute about any point of faith, but the king, being supreme head, intends openly to condemn and confute that man’s heresy’ – and he pointed accusingly at Lambert – ‘in all their presence’.

So Henry pressed on with the grave business of the day. Removing his cap piously as he mentioned the Name of Christ, he demanded to know whether the defendant believed that the consecrated wafer and wine in truth represented the body of God the Son.

Lambert answered that he was ‘with St Augustine, that it is the body of Christ – after a certain manner’.

Back swiftly came the king’s bullying, hectoring retort: ‘Answer me neither out of St Augustine, nor by the authority of any other, but tell me plainly whether you say it is the body of Christ, or no.’

The prisoner, abashed, answered, ‘It was not his body. I deny it.’

‘Mark well,’ said the king, ‘for now you shall be condemned even by Christ’s own words: “This is my body.”’

Lambert had been forced to produce a written statement in advance of his trial, laying down ten cogent reasons for his denial of the ‘Real Presence’. Cromwell, always the careful stage manager, had wanted to allow him enough wooden faggots to burn himself with. One after the other, Henry’s bishops took each of the prisoner’s reasons and, well prepared, argued strongly against them during the five gruelling hours of the trial. The reactionary and impatient Bishop Gardiner believed the good-natured Cranmer was ‘arguing but faintly’ and rudely interrupted his discourse with his own forceful opinions.
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As the hearing drew to an end, ‘the general applause of the hall gave victory to the king’. As the polite clapping died down, Henry asked the prisoner: ‘Wilt thou live or die? You have yet a free choice.’
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But Lambert obstinately refused to change his beliefs. He
committed his soul to God and submitted his body to the king’s clemency. Henry shrugged his shoulders and told him loudly: ‘That being the case, you must die, for I will not be a patron unto heretics.’
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He pointedly looked up at the serried ranks of spectators as his words rang around the hall, now lit by torches in the late-winter afternoon. The culmination of the trial had served his purpose well.

Cromwell stepped forward and loudly pronounced Lambert an incorrigible heretic and condemned him to be burnt. Six days later, on 22 November, he was to suffer a markedly cruel death at Smithfield. When his legs and thighs had been burnt to the stumps, the fire sank lower, so two officers raised up his still living body on their halberds and let him fall back into the flames. He cried out ‘None but Christ, none but Christ’ before he was burnt to ashes.
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The chief minister wrote after the ‘open and solemn’ trial of this ‘miserable heretic sacramentary’ that it was

a wonder to see how fiercely, with how excellent gravity and inestimable majesty his highness exercised there the very office of a supreme head of his Church of England; how benignly his grace assayed to convert the miserable man, how strong and manifest reasons his highness alleged against him.

He added sycophantically that if the potentates of Christendom had seen the king in action, they would have marvelled at his wisdom and thought him ‘the mirror and light of all other kings and princes’.
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The London agent of the orthodox Catholic Viscount Lisle wrote to his master in Calais:

His grace alone had been sufficient to confound [Lambert] … It was not a little rejoicing unto all his grace’s commons and also to all others that saw and heard how his grace handled and used this matter, for it shall be a precedent while the world stands. I think there will be none so bold hereafter to attempt any such like cause.
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On the same day as the trial, to emphasize Henry’s strong beliefs on religious doctrine, the government issued a proclamation banning the
printing of any Bible without an official licence and ordering his subjects to denounce Anabaptists promptly to the religious authorities. Married priests were to lose their livings and any who married thereafter were to be imprisoned. Rituals such as creeping to the cross during the Good Friday services and the use of candles at Candlemas would continue. One senses the firm hand of Gardiner in the announcement. Two Anabaptists, a Dutch man and woman, were burnt as heretics at Smithfield on 28 November, and a ‘goodly young man about twenty-two years of age’ was executed for being a Sacramentarian at Colchester, Essex.
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Ironically, less than a month after the trial in December 1538, Pope Paul III prepared to promulgate the long-awaited Bull excommunicating Henry, first drawn up in 1533 by Clement VII and later revised. The decision was triggered by the sacking of the shrine of St Thomas Becket, that much-revered martyred archbishop, in Canterbury Cathedral. The Bull declared Henry irrefutably a heretic and thus legally deposed him from the throne of England. His subjects were solemnly discharged from their oath of allegiance to him, and all Catholic monarchs in Europe were urged to unite to return England to her proper, traditional allegiance to papal authority in Rome. Cromwell, ‘that limb of Satan’,
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was cast into Hell’s all-consuming fire. The Bull obviously could not be published in England, so it was rather lamely read out at various safe locations closest to Henry’s realm: in the north at St Andrew’s and Cold-stream in Scotland, and in the south at Boulogne and Dieppe in France.

Bishop Gardiner was also probably the inspiration behind the creation of the ‘Six Articles’ of religion in 1539, the legal instrument that stopped Protestant reforms dead in their tracks – they called it the ‘whip with six strings’ – and pulled the Church back to orthodox doctrine. Henry, far more conservative in his religious beliefs than many realised, was a fervent supporter of the Six Articles, as he was painfully aware that the vast majority of his subjects were probably ‘more inclined to the old religion than the new opinions’. The Act, introduced into Parliament by Norfolk in May 1539, laid down that the body of Christ was truly and legally present in the consecrated bread and wine during Mass. The penalty for denying this was death by burning at the stake
– even after a recantation. The other Articles covered the validity of vows of celibacy within the religious orders, a repeated prohibition of the marriage of priests, the continuation of private Masses, the importance of the sacrament of confession and the administration of communion. Penalties for denying these were death by hanging and forfeiture of the miscreants’ lands and goods. In addition, anyone who tried to flee England to escape such prosecutions was also guilty of treason and would be hanged, drawn and quartered if captured. Those priests already married had to leave their wives and those who married after the law came into force were also to face the death penalty.

Moreover, the Six Articles comprehensively defined heresy as a secular offence: any person ‘by word, writing, imprinting, ciphering
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or in any other wise, to publish, teach, say, affirm, declare, dispute, argue or hold any contrary opinion’ together with their aiders and abetters ‘shall be adjudged heretics and shall therefore have [to] suffer judgement, execution, pain and pains of death by way of burning’. It was a piece of uncompromising, harsh legislation intended to brook no argument in the enshrinement of the doctrines of the Church of England in law. Many were to die in the flames of martyrdom as a result.

Cranmer, himself married, had vigorously disputed the terms of the Six Articles during a hotly contested three-day debate in the House of Lords in May 1539, attended each day by Henry himself. The archbishop lost the argument, probably because of Henry’s personal intervention, and An Act Abolishing Diversity in Opinions
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was granted the Royal Assent on 28 June. Cranmer promptly sent his wife back to Germany.
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What his enemies’ eyes could not see, they could not use against him.

Protestants in Germany were horrified by news of the new legislation. The Lutheran reformer Philip Melanchthon wrote to Henry on 1 November 1539, his words tumbling angrily on to the page, protesting that the Articles ‘play into the hands of the Pope’. Presumably

it was your bishops who were responsible … not you. Really wise Princes are capable of reconsidering their decisions … Do not take
up the cause of the Antichrist against us. Your bishops may pretend to take your part but they are in league with the Pope.

The Articles are full of sophistry and deceit. They are inconsistent with church history, for example, in saying private Masses as necessary and [that] the marriage of priests is against Divine Law.

I blame the bishops, especially Winchester. They are concerned about their own incomes.

No one can deny that the Church has come through a period of horrible darkness, like paganism, as is still the case in Rome.

Now at the end of time, God has intervened against the Antichrist [but] I thought England was leading the way. But your bishops are still plotting to retain idolatry, hence the Articles.
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Melanchthon pleaded, ‘I suggest you think again. Otherwise your bishops will tyrannise the church. Christ will judge.’ Strong stuff indeed. But his appeal fell on deaf ears; indeed, as Henry played so active a part in the creation of the legislation, the letter may well have incensed him.
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There is a bizarre anecdote about the aftermath of the Six Articles. Cranmer later wrote detailed notes on the reasons behind his opposition to them, backed up by citations from the Bible and from accepted learned scholars’ writings, which he planned to present to Henry. His secretary, the faithful Ralph Morice, made a fair copy of them in a small book and on his way to Westminster with it met with a startling accident on the Thames. Bishop Burnet, in the next century, related the story:

Some others that were with him in the wherry
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needed to go to the Southwark side to look at a bear-baiting that was near the river, where the king was in person.

The bear broke loose into the river [with] the dogs after her. Those that were in the boat leaped out and left the poor secretary alone there. But the bear got into the boat, with the dogs about her, and sank it. The secretary, apprehending his life was in danger, did not mind his book, which he lost in the water.

But being quickly rescued and brought to land, he began to look for his book and saw it floating in the water.

So he desired the bearward [bear-keeper] to bring it to him; who took it up, but before he could restore it, put it into the hands of a priest that stood there, to see what it might contain.
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Turning the sodden pages, the priest immediately realised that the contents disputed the Six Articles and told the bearward that whoever claimed it would be hanged. Burnet, always partisan, adds: ‘This made the bearward more intractable, for he was a spiteful papist and hated the archbishop, so no offers or entreaties could prevail on him to give it back.’ Morice, panicking, urgently sought assistance from Cromwell, and the next day they discovered the bearward at court, seeking to hand the book over to one of Cranmer’s enemies, no doubt in return for a handsome reward. Cromwell ‘took the book out of his hands, threatening him severely for his presumption in meddling with a privy councillor’s book’.
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Cranmer was thereby saved. Others were not so fortunate.