The Tudors (23 page)

When Pole confessed that on the basis of what he then knew he was unable to support the king, Norfolk advised him to take a month to learn more about the issues involved. In the weeks that followed he studied the relevant commentaries on Scripture and canon law and discussed the matter with scholars. Finally, perhaps in part because of his brothers’ fears of conflict with the king, Pole announced that he had
thought his way to a position that Henry was likely to find acceptable. He was summoned to see the king, who was eager to receive him as an ally and ready to reward him. Once in the royal presence, however, Pole found the arguments he had constructed in his mind collapsing under the realization that he was not being honest even with himself. He tried to explain why, to his own intense regret, he could not agree with Henry on the divorce. The king, furious, walked out on him, leaving him in tears. Lord Montague and Sir Geoffrey Pole, too, were furious when they learned what their brother had done. They accused him not only of destroying his own prospects but of putting the whole family at risk. Reginald wrote to the king, trying to explain why he had found himself unable to be more helpful and asking permission to go abroad once again. Lord Montague, expecting the worst, went to see the king to say how much
he
regretted his brother’s conduct.

“My lord,” a surprisingly good-humored Henry told Montague, “I cannot be offended with so dutiful and affectionate a letter. I love him in spite of his obstinacy, and were he but of my opinion on this subject, I would love him better than any man in my kingdom.” This was the king at his magnanimous best, and a demonstration of Reginald Pole’s ability, which only a tiny number of men would ever possess, to somehow bring out that best. Pole was allowed not only to leave England for Italy—where he must have hoped to stay well clear of the king’s matrimonial troubles—but to keep his allowance. His brothers and their mother, all of them descended from kings stretching back to William the Conqueror, must have breathed easier when he was gone. But if they thought the worst was over for any of them, they could not have been more wrong.

When Parliament and the Southern Convocation assembled yet again in January 1532, no one outside the king’s innermost circle had any way of knowing what to expect. That something extraordinary was in the air, however, must have been made obvious by the selective character of the royal summons. Cuthbert Tunstal, the bishop of Durham who had disputed Henry’s claim to be supreme head, was not present because he had received no call. John Fisher, the scrappy old bishop of Rochester, was among the others not summoned, but he traveled to London all the same. The general sense of anticipation had sharpened his readiness for a fight.

Henry remained impossible to read. Pope Clement, who a year earlier had forbidden the king to remarry while the divorce case remained unsettled, received a letter from Queen Catherine reporting that she was no longer allowed to be under the same roof with her husband and asking for a ruling on the marriage. This prompted him to write to Henry and tell him that he dishonored himself in treating his wife as he did. He added that reconciliation with Catherine would be the greatest favor that he, Henry, had ever done for the papacy. Henry scoffed at this as he had scoffed at an earlier order from Clement to send Anne Boleyn away. The pope was giving signs of running out of patience, and the king was responding in kind.

On February 8 Henry showed his hand. He had sixteen clergymen and six laymen, all of them men in positions of considerable authority, indicted on charges that required them to explain to the King’s Bench by what right or authority—
quo warranto
—they claimed to be able to appoint coroners, take possession of discovered treasure, and supervise local trading in bread and beer. Here again the clergy (the inclusion of six laymen in the indictment remains unexplained) found themselves accused of breaking the law by doing things that men in their positions had been doing for centuries. It made no sense except as harassment and intimidation, an attempt to add to the pressure applied earlier through the threat of praemunire. What was stunning was the identity of those indicted. The list began with the name of William Warham, a dignitary of unimpeachable reputation and unquestionable loyalty to the Crown. Also listed were a bishop and the heads of seven monasteries and several colleges. Obviously no one was safe from the king’s displeasure.

These indictments seem almost childishly petty today, and probably they seemed so when they were issued. The supreme oddity, in any case, is that the charges were never pressed and no bill was ever proposed in Parliament for the criminalization of the acts—the supposed offenses—that had been the basis of the indictments. Instead, Henry changed course and delivered a different, harder blow from an equally unexpected direction. His agents in Parliament introduced a bill abolishing annates, one of the principal means by which England and the other countries of Europe had for centuries provided financial support to the papal court in Rome. In accordance with ancient practice, whenever a new bishop was appointed to a vacant see his first year’s net income
went to the pope as an annate—payment of what was called “first fruits.” The sums involved could amount to several thousand pounds in a single year, especially when the wealthier dioceses were involved. It was not difficult to rouse the taxpaying knights and gentry of the House of Commons to a state of indignation over the sending of this money out of the kingdom at a time when the financial demands of the Crown had become so burdensome.

The scholars whom Henry had put to work searching for historical evidence of his supreme headship had turned up documents indicating that annates had originated as a way of providing the papacy with the means to defend itself against the barbarian invasions that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. The transformation of such presumably temporary assistance into an eternal entitlement, the king and Cromwell now argued, was an example of how the bishops of Rome had, over the centuries, taken things to which they had no right. The annates bill was the most radical attack yet on the prerogatives of the church, and its introduction may have reflected Cromwell’s growing influence and his willingness to push the king to new extremes. As originally proposed, it would have required any bishop who paid first fruits to Rome to forfeit everything he owned and the income from his diocese for as long as he remained in office. It would have established a new procedure by which any bishop-elect whom the pope refused to approve could be consecrated by his archbishop or two other bishops, and it would have ordered that anything attempted by the pope in the way of retribution—anything up to and including excommunication, which had always been the papacy’s ultimate weapon—was to be ignored.

Such a bare-knuckles assault on ancient practice was too much for the bishops of 1532 to accept, and they along with several of the abbots who sat with them in the House of Lords declared themselves opposed. The bill was too much even for many in the Commons, where resistance proved formidable. Clearly rough tactics would be needed if the bill were to have any chance of passage. Henry showed himself ready to use them. He made three bullying visits to Commons, finally going so far as to order the members to divide themselves physically into two groups: those who supported his bill were to line up beside him on one side of the room and those opposed were to withdraw to the other. Even this exercise, intimidating as it must have been for country gentry, proved to
be not enough. Henry did not secure passage until the proposal was considerably softened. Most important, it was made provisional: it would not take effect until Easter of the following year, and even then it would not become law unless Henry issued the letters of patent necessary for implementation.

The king’s position remained ambiguous. In its original form the annates measure had been without precedent, overturning every Englishman’s understanding of the kingdom’s connection to the see of Rome and imposing ruinous penalties on anyone who attempted to maintain the old ways. But by delaying implementation for a year, thereby giving the king ample opportunity to change his mind, Parliament left a door open for reconciliation with the pope. Probably the king accepted this compromise less because he still harbored hopes of reconciliation, or would have accepted reconciliation if it became possible, than because doing so was the only way of getting the needed majorities: Parliament had not yet been pummeled into docility. Cromwell at this point had neither won Henry’s full confidence nor brought Parliament under control, and he may have been trying to move faster than either king or Parliament was prepared to go. Henry, for his part, appears to have been adopting some but not all of Cromwell’s ideas, trying them out, measuring the reaction.

Even as the king hesitated, however, Cromwell was helping him to see Parliament in an entirely new light. In the first twenty years of his reign, Henry had followed his father’s example, doing his best to govern without Parliament, summoning it only in times of dire necessity. Wolsey had certainly favored this approach, all the more so as his money-raising expedients earned him the hatred of both houses. For two years Henry got little out of the Parliament first summoned in 1529, the one destined to be remembered as the Reformation Parliament. But then Cromwell, once his star had risen and his genius had ripened, showed him how to transform Parliament from a nuisance, an obstacle, into a tool of immense value. Together the two of them began using Parliament, at first almost against its will, to spread a canopy of legitimacy, of legal propriety, over their most radical initiatives. They maneuvered it into approving, or at least
appearing
to approve and sometimes even to initiate, the things they wanted done. By this means they could claim to be doing nothing beyond what the people of England
wanted. It was in opening such new vistas to the king that Cromwell, a self-described onetime “ruffian” who even at the height of his power never lost the savage instincts of a backstreet knife-fighter, first showed himself to be one of the most brilliant political operators that England has ever produced.

Transforming Parliament required meticulous and skillful management. It required carrots and sticks—a balanced application of the Crown’s power to reward and its power to destroy. Above all, in the beginning especially, it required creating the illusion that Crown and Parliament were in agreement even when a majority in Commons could not be depended upon to vote with the king. Thus even more attention had to be paid than in the past to finding the right kinds of men to sit in positions of leadership in Commons, and to culling candidates who were not likely to conform. Luckily for Henry, Cromwell was not only as painstakingly careful a manager as Wolsey had ever been but also, where Parliament was concerned, far more adroit. He was also more ruthless and much less inhibited by established law and custom. Once again Henry had been blessed with a lieutenant into whose hands he could confidently place full responsibility for the achievement of his own most urgently desired objectives.

If Cromwell was still learning early in 1532, he was learning fast and becoming capable of dazzling moves. On March 18 Parliament formally presented to the king a document called the Supplication Against the Ordinaries (an “ordinary” being, in ecclesiastical parlance, a bishop or archbishop—someone with jurisdiction over church courts and administration). It was a supplication in the sense that, after making numerous complaints about the church hierarchy’s abuse of its rights in such areas as the handling of heresy cases, excommunication, and fees and tithes, it asked the king to take corrective action. It was radical in looking, contrary both to law and to tradition, to the Crown rather than to the church itself for correction of the alleged abuses. Although supposedly a spontaneous work of Commons, in actuality it was mainly Cromwell’s doing. (Several early drafts, all in Cromwell’s hand and dated before March 18, are among his surviving papers.) By having his allies in Commons offer the Supplication as an expression of popular discontent, Cromwell was able to raise Henry above the fray. Now the king, rather
than attacking the church and challenging the traditions of the realm, was being called upon as an impartial judge. He was asked to consider the grievances of his people against a church that had, presumably, conducted itself so disgracefully as to give rise to deep and widespread unhappiness. Henry was no longer in the position of having to prod Parliament to act on his instructions; Parliament in presenting the Supplication had taken the initiative, and Henry was free to respond if and as he chose.

It was a neat trick, and Cromwell had pulled it off in spite of the fact that serious discontent with the church or its hierarchy was
not
widespread among the people or even dominant in the Commons. Resentment certainly existed, but with nothing like the intensity found in Germany, where a church immeasurably more entangled than England’s in secular politics had in many places made itself the object of burning popular hatred. Anticlericalism in England was centered mainly in London, especially among the lawyers and merchants of the city’s growing middle class. It was the representatives of these professions, together with Londoners serving as members for boroughs far from the city, who had pressed their complaints about the church in the Reformation Parliament’s first session at the end of 1529 and been satisfied with a small number of limited reforms. It was those same men who now, under Cromwell’s firm direction, asked the king to give his attention to the Supplication’s fresh complaints. By involving the speaker of the house—an appointee of the Crown—Cromwell was able to create the impression that the Supplication represented the thinking of the majority. In fact, the membership at large had been given no opportunity to express an opinion.

Henry forwarded the Supplication to convocation and invited it to respond. On the face of it, this was an eminently fair and reasonable thing to do. But it was also tactically astute. It put the hierarchy in the position of having to acknowledge the accusations of some of its most intemperate critics, and to dignify those accusations with a reply to the king.