The Tudors (13 page)

Henry’s life had turned into a series of setbacks and embarrassments. Even before being adjourned, and even in the absence of a defense by Catherine’s counsel, the tribunal had failed utterly to advance his agenda. On June 28, one of the several occasions when the queen refused a summons to attend, there occurred an exchange that was almost as damaging as her last appearance to Henry’s hopes of winning public opinion to his side. The king himself was present that day, and in the course of the proceedings he asserted that all the bishops of England had affixed their signatures and seals to a document calling for a formal inquiry into his marriage, thereby showing that they regarded the validity of that marriage to be questionable at least. When this was confirmed by Archbishop Warham, John Fisher angrily denied that it was true. “No, my lord, not so,” he told Warham. “Under your favor, all the bishops were not so far agreed, for to that instrument you have neither my hand nor seal.” Warham, pressed, admitted that he had signed for Fisher and used Fisher’s seal, claiming that he had done so with Fisher’s consent. “No, no, my lord,” said Fisher again, “by your favor and license, all this you have said of me is untrue.” He was ordered by the king to say no more. The impression left with onlookers was that the king and the archbishop had resorted to forgery in order to misrepresent Fisher’s position, and that when caught out they had denied him an opportunity to put the record straight. In all likelihood there had been no intent to deceive. Old Warham, a man of good character and certainly no clumsy forger, had probably misunderstood Fisher’s position before signing for him. In any case the public contradiction of the king’s claim to the unanimous support of the bishops did his cause no good.

Fisher himself was deeply frustrated, and before the end of that same day’s session he erupted. Henry had said that he wanted a just resolution of the question at issue and had asked his subjects to shed whatever light
they could on it; therefore he, Fisher, owed it to the king to state openly what he had learned in studying the matter for two years. He felt obliged to do this (so Campeggio wrote to Rome a day later, describing Fisher’s speech as “appropriate” and with that one word revealing a great deal about his own sentiments) “in order not to procure the damnation of his soul” and “not to be unfaithful to the king, or to fail in doing the duty which he owed to the truth, in a matter of such great importance.” On the basis of what he now knew, he said, he was prepared “to declare, to affirm, and with forcible reasons to demonstrate to them that this marriage of the king and queen can be dissolved by no power, human or divine; and for this opinion he declared that he would even lay down his life.” He described himself as prepared to die just as John the Baptist, in the New Testament, had sacrificed his life by condemning the marriage of Herod and Herodias. These were shocking words, especially from a man of Fisher’s stature, a prelate long associated with the royal family. By unmistakable implication, the bishop was drawing a parallel between the king of England and a despot complicit in the death of Jesus. It is especially striking to see Fisher, at this stage in his long conflict with Henry, already speaking of his own death as a possible consequence of that conflict. Evidently he knew the king well enough to understand where this drama was likely to lead.

The time had not yet arrived, however, when refusal to believe what the king believed could result in death. That time would come, but just now it was Wolsey, not Fisher, whose life was in danger.

A CONSIDERABLE EXERCISE OF THE IMAGINATION IS REQUIRED, even of people who live in England today, to get a sense of what the kingdom was like during the reigns of the first Tudors.

It was economically simple, almost backward, even by the standards of its time. It had little manufacturing aside from the cloth and leather-goods industries that had arisen as offshoots of England’s huge numbers of sheep (vastly greater than the human population) and the extraction, still on a minuscule scale, of its rich reserves of coal, tin, lead, timber, and stone. An overwhelming majority of the population grew its own food on land that it did not own, living in cottages that we would regard as hovels. Almost no specimens of the homes of ordinary people survive from the fifteenth century or earlier, because they weren’t built to last much longer than their occupants. The walls, typically, were made of webs of interwoven sticks coated with mud or clay. Few houses even had chimneys; smoke from the cooking fires had to escape through holes in the thatched roofs.

Foreigners commented on the filthiness of English homes. The great humanist scholar Erasmus, who as an honored visitor from the continent would likely have entered few houses except those of the privileged, observed more than a generation after Bosworth that “the floors are made of clay and are covered with layers of rushes, constantly replenished, so that the bottom layer remains for twenty years harboring spittle, vomit, the urine of dogs and men, the dregs of beer, the remains of fish, and other nameless filth.” The quantities of alcohol consumed (in the form of beer and ale mostly, wine being too expensive for the majority of people) also provoked comment. Bathing was scarcely feasible much of the year, but its absence does not appear to have been much lamented. In England as elsewhere, May was a popular month for weddings because,
with winter well past, brides and grooms could be given a scrubbing without undue discomfort or perceived risk. Any odors not removed by a plunge into the nearest stream could be camouflaged, or such was the hope, behind a wedding bouquet.

As with so many aspects of life at the end of the Middle Ages, the extent of literacy is impossible to measure. Schools as we understand the term were uncommon except in cathedral towns and the larger market towns (a category that included any community with a few thousand inhabitants), where reading and even writing were often part of the training of choirboys. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that illiteracy was nearly universal. The fifteenth century saw a great increase in primary education; it was provided by the parish churches to be found in all but the tiniest villages, by clergy connected with “chantries” (chapels, commonly attached to parish churches, established primarily to provide prayers for the souls of the families that endowed them), and the numberless guilds to which people throughout the kingdom belonged. By the first Henry Tudor’s time, elementary schooling of this kind, a grassroots phenomenon neither promoted nor supported by the central government, was widespread. Grammar or secondary schools, though less common, also were spreading and attracting increased numbers of students not preparing for careers in the church.

Nothing worthy of being called medical science existed. The wealthiest classes probably had the worst of it, because they had the misfortune of being able to afford the services of university-trained physicians, whose education was focused on the works of ancient authorities and on acquiring a mastery of astronomy (it being considered essential to understand how the stars and planets affected various sicknesses and the efficacy of remedies). These worthies commonly prescribed without ever seeing their patients, depending instead on the examination of urine specimens. Below them were the surgeons, essentially craftsmen with no more education than, say, carpenters or stonemasons. In 1518 London’s surgeons joined with one of their peer trades to incorporate as the royally chartered “Masters or Governors of the Mystery and Commonalty of Barbers and Surgeons.” Even their services were generally beyond the financial reach of mere villagers, who were required to make use of folk remedies of which little is known; in all likelihood they were better
off for it. Life expectancy was short. Thirty was the portal to middle age, and those who lived to fifty had reason to think of themselves as fortunate—and as old.

It is easy, and a mistake, to think of medieval society as static and unchanging. In fact it underwent steady, sometimes convulsive change. England, from the fourteenth century, was literally transformed by disease. Like all of Europe, but for some reason more than many parts of the continent, England in the late fifteenth century was still staggering from the effects of the demographic catastrophe known as the Black Death. This was not a single epidemic but a series of outbreaks that first struck in 1348 (when it may have wiped out a third of all the people in England), returning in 1361, 1369, 1375, and six more times between 1413 and 1485. It was not one disease, almost certainly, but a combination of bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, septicemia, and finally yet another mysterious and fatal affliction, sweating sickness or “the sweat,” which arrived in England in the same year as Henry Tudor’s invasion force and may have been brought across the Channel by it. The population, which in the year 1300 had reached a total of approximately six million, fell to about a third of that by 1450 and to perhaps only three hundred thousand in all of Wales. (By way of comparison, more than sixty million people lived in the United Kingdom at the start of the present century.) By 1485 the population was again growing, but as plague, smallpox (never seen in England until 1514), and pneumonia continued to return at unpredictable intervals, the rate of increase was held to perhaps three percent per generation. The deserted remains of hamlets in which everyone had died were still scattered across the landscape, and towns were studded with long-abandoned houses.

Occasional famines, too, were an inescapable part of the experience of the common people. When the population peaked toward the end of the thirteenth century, it did so in part because it had reached a Malthusian ceiling: the agriculture of the day was incapable of feeding more. Even after the demographic collapse, many people lived on the margins of survival, vulnerable to going hungry or even to starving when not enough rain or too much rain caused crops to fail. They responded by deferring marriage until their mid-twenties or even later (the same pattern of behavior would occur in Ireland centuries later, in the aftermath of the potato famine), and this too contributed to keeping the population down.

The consequences were dramatic and far-reaching. Wages rose as labor became scarce, and landowners suddenly faced a shortage of tenants. Serfdom disappeared without being formally abolished: families that for centuries had been bound to the land by the old feudal obligations found it possible to pack up and go, moving to wherever they found opportunities to rent vacant land at attractive rates. Suddenly if temporarily, upward mobility became widely possible. Onetime serfs became free laborers and even tenant farmers, the most industrious of their children could rise to become yeomen, and within a few generations grandchildren of yeomen would be sufficiently prosperous to claim the status of gentlefolk. Landowning families, meanwhile, began converting acres traditionally used for growing crops into pastures for sheep, which required little labor. They found themselves profiting handsomely as a result: Europe, the cloth-making centers of Flanders especially, proved to have an insatiable appetite for good English wool.

Great fortunes were made in the wool trade, but for most people the good times were short-lived. As more and more arable land was given over to sheep and the population slowly resumed its growth, good farmland would again become scarce, wages would fall, and the “enclosures” would become a cause of instability as resentful rural communities demanded that they be stopped or even reversed. The old iron law of population imposed itself once again; agricultural output proved sufficient for the exporting of grain only when harvests were bountiful, and when harvests were sparse those who suffered nothing worse than months on short rations could count themselves lucky. The Crown found itself occupying an uncomfortable middle ground, unable to ignore protests about the enclosures but also unable to balance its books without the income that the tariffs on the wool and cloth trade provided.

The political and economic life of the time is incomprehensible without some understanding of how rare money was, and how valuable. In the fourteenth century the imposition of a poll tax of twelve pennies per person gave rise to the Peasants’ Revolt, because twelve pence equaled many workers’ monthly wage. Things were not greatly different in the early sixteenth century: more than a decade after Henry VII’s death the richest noble in England, the Duke of Buckingham, had a total annual income of £6,045. The incomes of most lords—and there were only about fifty in the entire kingdom—were little more than a fifth, even a
tenth, of Buckingham’s. The kingdom’s five hundred or so knights received on average less than £200 per annum from their lands, but that was usually enough to make them the richest men in their localities. The thousand or so “esquires” (no more than one such personage existed for every ten villages) averaged about £80 annually. Landed income of £10 was enough to keep a family among the gentry, itself only a tiny part of the population. The wages of working people continued to be measured in pennies per day—a
few
pennies per day, and even less when a meal or two came with the job. Cash was universally necessary, however, if only in the smallest denominations. Most houses lacked ovens for baking bread, few people made their own clothes or beer, and so small exchanges of pennies for goods and services were essential to the functioning of even the remotest districts.

As had been true throughout the Middle Ages, land continued to be the primary source of wealth and political power and was concentrated in very few hands. The king had so much land scattered across England and Wales that his income from it, when combined with the duties collected on foreign trade and the fees generated by the royal courts, was expected by the wealthiest prospective taxpayers (who, being human, had no wish to pay any taxes at all) to cover the costs of government except in time of special need—which meant in time of war. The church, taken as a whole, owned even more land than the Crown, possibly as much as a third of all the acreage in England, with most belonging to cathedrals, parish churches, colleges, hospitals, and the like—not, as is commonly believed, to the monasteries. The extent to which this ecclesiastical wealth can be considered scandalous varies with the uses to which it was put, and those uses covered a broad spectrum. Much church income went to provide the population with the only semblance of a social security system then in existence—meals and shelter for those in need, stores of food for distribution when harvests failed, lodging for travelers, care for the sick—and to support a network of schools that included the nation’s two universities. Conspicuous sums also went, however, to support those men at the top of the ecclesiastical hierarchy who chose to live in princely splendor.