The Tudors (15 page)

Those were bold words to be addressed to Henry VIII, especially by a man who remained desperately hopeful, throughout his final tribulations, of being restored to royal favor. Henry encouraged Wolsey’s hopes, periodically sending him little tokens of goodwill. Perhaps he was merely playing with his victim, as a cat will toy with a mouse. Perhaps, in spite of everything that Anne and her father and her uncle the Duke of Norfolk were doing to poison his mind against Wolsey, Henry was not yet certain that he could spare the cardinal. When he learned that Wolsey had fallen ill, he dispatched three court physicians to attend him. “God forbid that he should die!” Henry said. “I would not lose him for twenty thousand pounds.”

But Henry had learned many things from Wolsey over the years, and now he was learning from Wolsey’s destruction. He was even learning how to get along without Wolsey while making full use of his example. By achieving domination over the administrative machinery of church and state alike, the cardinal had demonstrated how the secular and ecclesiastical dimensions of English life might be pulled together into a single entity entirely subordinate to the Crown. By closing monasteries as a way of filling his coffers, he had demonstrated—Cromwell would soon show that he had understood this lesson best—how to tap a reservoir of seemingly limitless wealth. By not defending himself against ridiculous charges, Wolsey had shown the king how potent a weapon the praemunire statutes could be. By yielding without argument to the king’s every demand, he had given Henry what must have been a deeply gratifying demonstration of how infinitely more powerful he was than even the mightiest of his subjects.

Henry was by this time developing a lofty conception indeed of the extent of his authority. On October 26, in conversing with an ambassador newly sent by Charles V, he concluded a monologue about the need for church reform, and the responsibility of rulers to effect reform, by stating that the clergy had no power over laymen except the power, through the sacrament of penance, to forgive sins. It can be difficult to grasp just how astonishing an assertion this was in the Catholic Europe of the 1520s. The word of the church had long been accepted as final in many areas of life, and in an age when religious faith was so nearly universal
as to be taken for granted, those areas were widely regarded as more important than the ones under secular jurisdiction. The result was a division of power between church and state, a balance that by Henry’s time had been in shifting and sometimes precarious equilibrium for hundreds of years. It had been sustained less by raw political (or military or economic) power than by an enduring consensus on how and for what purposes society should be organized. The papacy if not the church itself would have been extinguished many times over, between the end of the Roman Empire and the start of Henry’s reign, except that an overwhelming majority of Europe’s people were content to let it continue. Part of the consensus was an understanding, more often assumed than asserted or discussed, that the church must be free to govern itself, and that it was the church’s responsibility to bring God and God’s word to the people. Henry’s comment to the ambassador provides a glimpse into a mind that was ceasing to believe such things, that wanted to move the boundary between church and state drastically in the state’s (meaning in his own) favor. Over the centuries many European rulers, in England and elsewhere, had wanted something similar. Virtually all had failed, often paying a high price for their failure. None of those who succeeded had done so to such an extent as to overturn the ancient consensus.

But the world was changing. The foundations of the old equilibrium had grown brittle, and were more eroded than most people imagined. In the north of Germany the revolt of a single Augustinian friar, Martin Luther, had been enough to bring the whole traditional structure crashing down. Timbers were creaking in France and elsewhere. Everywhere people expressed discontent with the wealth and power of the church and its departures from its own standards, though the breadth and intensity of that discontent and the extent to which it was justified are impossible to measure. Throughout Europe, and for varied reasons, the general tendency of the sixteenth century was toward strong central governments dominated by monarchs who inevitably regarded the church skeptically, as a dangerous rival needing to be subdued. In country after country the church was on the defensive, and it would have been so even if the conduct of the clergy had been above reproach. It was under attack both by increasingly powerful princes and by religious reformers of many different kinds with widely differing aims.

Inevitably two of the great issues of the day, the condition of the church and the nature of kingship, became entangled. From an early age Henry had displayed an exceptionally keen appreciation of the powers and prerogatives of kings—exceptional even for the time, and even for a ruling monarch—while simultaneously making a great show of his Catholic orthodoxy and loyalty to the pope. As early as 1515 during a dispute with the clergy, he had angrily declared that “kings of England had never had superiors but God alone.” Wolsey had defused that crisis by leading his fellow bishops in submission to the king, and by dissolving a Parliament that was raising unwelcome questions about the mysterious death of an accused heretic while in the custody of the bishop of London. But the idea of limitless royal authority to which Henry had briefly given voice continued to simmer not only in his own brain but in those of the most alienated and ambitious reformers. It also had the enthusiastic approval of some of the most powerful nobles in England, men who hated and feared Wolsey and after his fall directed their hatred at the ecclesiastical system that had produced him. In London and at Cambridge University and port cities like Bristol, those lawyers and merchants and scholars who were embracing the Lutheran ideas coming out of Germany supported this idea as well.

By 1529 those ideas were bursting into print, a still-novel phenomenon made possible by Johann Gutenberg’s invention of movable type almost a century before. The year before, two remarkable works had been widely circulated and much talked about in London. The well-named
Obedience of a Christian Man
by William Tyndale, one of the first translators of the Bible into English, claimed for the king as much authority and as much right to the unqualified loyalty of every subject as any tyrant could have wished for. “God hath made in every realm [the king] judge over all, and over him there is no judge,” Tyndale wrote. “He that judgeth the king judgeth God; and he that layeth hands on the king layeth hands on God; and he that resisteth the king resisteth God, and damneth God’s law and ordinance.” To justify these words, which would have raised the eyebrows of anyone familiar with English law and tradition, Tyndale invoked the example of the priest-kings of the Old Testament, chosen by God to rule Israel. Henry read Tyndale’s book, possibly with the encouragement of Anne Boleyn, and of course was charmed. “This,” he is supposed to have said, “is a book for me and for
all kings to read.” Tyndale’s time as a royal favorite would be brief: within a year he infuriated Henry by condemning his efforts to rid himself of Catherine, dismissing the divorce case as the work of the papist archfiend Wolsey, and rejecting items of church doctrine that the king was determined to uphold.

Out of Antwerp there came at the same time
A Supplication for the Beggars
by an English lawyer named Simon Fish. It was a depiction of the abuses of the church so impossibly exaggerated as to be self-defeating where credibility was concerned. England was crowded with paupers, said Fish, because its wealth was being drained away into the church. England was flooded with women turned into whores by a lascivious clergy. The orders of friars that supported themselves by begging were draining £40,000 pounds or more out of the economy annually. (This utterly impossible number rivaled the regular revenues of the Crown.) Fish’s diatribe was of course welcomed by those willing to use any stick to beat the church, but what particularly pleased Henry was his insistence that all these terrible abuses must be corrected
by the king
, the church itself being too sunk in corruption. Henry is said to have summoned Fish, extended assistance to him and his wife, and shielded him from prosecution.

The ideas of Tyndale, Fish, and other reformers represented a radical departure from traditional political thought in England. Certainly kings had always been exalted above mere holders of high office. Their coronations were quasi-sacramental occasions, centered upon an anointing with holy oil that made the person of the monarch almost, if not quite, sacred. From 1066, when William the Conqueror sailed from Normandy to win the English crown, to the first Tudor’s capture of the same crown at Bosworth Field in 1485, successful claimants had offered the fact of their success as evidence that God wanted them to succeed. Those who never had to fight for the crown similarly regarded their possession of it as proof of divine favor.

But none of this was the same as saying that kings were God’s unique representatives on earth and must be obeyed in exactly the same way that God must be obeyed: absolutely, at all times, and in all things. What the Tyndales and Fishes were preaching, what Henry and other princes were eagerly professing to believe, required the repudiation of the prevailing thought of the Middle Ages. If it had roots anywhere in the
Western past, they were to be found in the despotism of the Roman Empire and perhaps (as the most zealous reformers liked to claim) in the kings of the Old Testament. It is hard to know what could have motivated it except a burning hatred of the old religion.

For an expression of what was still Europe’s living tradition, the tradition that the most radical of the new thinkers wanted to cast aside, one need look no further than to the man Henry chose as Wolsey’s replacement in the office of lord chancellor. (The king’s great friend the Duke of Suffolk had wanted the post, but the jealous opposition of the Duke of Norfolk made his appointment seem inadvisable.) Sir Thomas More was a prominent exponent of the so-called “new learning” but a traditionalist in every really deep sense—a man who loved and revered the church, England’s heritage of individual rights under the common law, and the whole ordering of society that had taken shape in medieval times. He embodied nearly everything that the radical reformers sought to reject. For centuries he would be cast, throughout most of the English-speaking world, as the defender of precisely those things that had to be jettisoned in order for what is best in the modern world to emerge. Henry, by contrast, would long be seen as the man who had liberated his people from those same dark things. Today the truth appears to be very near to the reverse.

Henry, whose opinion of himself had always been grandiose (early in his reign he had boasted of not being able to see “any faith in the world, save in me,” so that “God Almighty, who knows this, prospers my affairs”), was by 1529 arriving at the conviction that God intended him to have dominion over every aspect of the lives of his subjects, and that in ruling his kingdom he required the consent of no one other than God. But when on November 3 a new Parliament opened at Westminster, its members heard an opening address by More as chancellor that did not sit at all easily with what the king was coming to believe. Indulging the interest in philosophical questions that had already helped make him one of the best-known humanist thinkers in Europe, drawing upon ideas that he had earlier developed in his famous book
Utopia
and in a biography of King Richard III that would not be published in his lifetime, More invited his listeners to consider the question of where the princes of the world derive their power. His answer, which sounds startlingly modern, was based solidly on the mainstream thought of the preceding
centuries. Genuine and legitimate power, More said, comes to the prince not from above but from below, from the community that is governed, “so that his people make him a prince.” Society functions as it should when a prince, a monarch, acts in harmony with the will of the people. When on the other hand a prince acts at cross-purposes to what his people believe and want, the result is disorder.

These words were not thrown down as a challenge to the king, who stood at More’s side as he spoke them. On the contrary, much of More’s speech was a tiresomely commonplace exercise in political flattery. It praised Henry for his wisdom, his mercy, and most pointedly (if perhaps somewhat ignobly) for his ability to see through the schemes of Cardinal Wolsey and cast him aside. Henry loved flattery and easily mistook it for truth, and there is no evidence that he even noticed what More had said about the true source of his power. Nonetheless that part of the speech stands as an unmistakable early signal of just how far apart were the tradition represented by More, a tradition embodied in the Magna Carta and Parliament and indeed in the established relationship between church and state, and Henry’s increasingly ambitious view of his place in the world.

It was a clear signal that, even at the start of his chancellorship, More was too far out of step with the king ever to become as powerful or even as useful as Wolsey had been. That the gulf between them was so wide that it would have been better for both if More had never become chancellor.

THE ENGLAND OF 1530 CONTAINED SOME NINE THOUSAND parish churches, each a center of community life for the people living nearby. Each church had at least one resident priest, and attached to many were chantries, chapels with their own endowments for the support of additional clergy.

These parishes, along with those of Wales, were organized into twenty-one dioceses, each headed by a bishop or archbishop and supporting a cathedral with its chapter of canons and other clerics. The dioceses, in turn, made up two separate provinces: York in the north with only three sees, Canterbury with eighteen.

Additionally, nearly ten thousand monks and sixteen hundred nuns lived in more than six hundred monasteries scattered across the landscape. Nearly two hundred other houses, many of them situated in cities and towns, were occupied by the various orders of mendicant friars.