The Tudors (40 page)

Which simply went to show that neither understood what kind of man Henry had by now turned into, or where things stood in England in the summer of 1536. Henry had taken immense risks in claiming supremacy over the church, and his success had been profoundly satisfying to his unfathomably needy ego. He would have seen little reason to relinquish any substantial part of all that he had won even if other factors had not complicated the situation. Foremost among those factors was the suppression of the monasteries and the seizure, by and for a Crown that desperately needed money, of their lands, revenues, and treasures. The information gathered by Cromwell’s visitors indicated that 372 religious houses in England and another 27 in Wales—somewhat more than half of all the monastic institutions in the kingdom—had annual revenues below £200 and so were subject to liquidation under the statute enacted by Parliament in March. A new Court of the Augmentations of the Revenues of the King’s Crown was established to manage the torrent of income that soon followed, and the administration of that court was entrusted to a man who would show himself capable of exploiting its full potential on the king’s and Cromwell’s behalf and also
on his own: the same Richard Rich whose testimony had provided legal cover for the killing of Fisher and More. By April fat trunks were being hauled into London filled with gold and silver plate, jewelry, and other treasures accumulated by the monasteries over the centuries. With them came money from the sale of church bells, lead stripped from the roofs of monastic buildings, and livestock, furnishings, and equipment. Some of the confiscated land was sold—enough to bring in £30,000 in the first two years—and what was not sold generated tens of thousands of pounds in annual rents. Taken all together, it was a tremendous boost to the Crown’s revenues, though as great as it was it failed to close the deficit. The longer the confiscations continued, the smaller the possibility of their ever being reversed or even stopped from going further. The money was spent almost as quickly as it flooded in—so quickly that any attempt to restore the monasteries to what they had been before the suppression would have meant financial ruin for the Crown. Nor would those involved in the work of suppression—everyone from Cromwell and Rich to the obscure men whose work it was to strip the monasteries bare and haul away what they contained—ever be willing to part with what they were skimming off for themselves.

Parliament’s suppression bill had reserved to the king the power to allow any religious houses of his choosing to continue in operation. In practice this power rested with Cromwell as vicar-general, and in his hands it became another potent tool for self-enrichment. Desperate to save their houses by any possible means in spite of being offered pensions in return for cooperation, the heads of scores of abbeys and priories offered to pay not to be shut down. In many cases they had nothing to offer except the very treasures that would be confiscated if their houses were seized, or whatever money they could raise by leasing or borrowing against the land that was their chief support. The Crown stood to gain nothing by accepting such payment rather than taking possession of everything; Cromwell and his people, by contrast, stood to profit tremendously. The number of houses that survived in this way was surprisingly large—more than a hundred, ultimately—and the extent to which the king’s men benefited was no less impressive.

All the same, the suppression was disruptive on a painfully large scale. The number of monks and nuns expelled from the seized houses was probably on the order of two thousand, and taking into account servants,
dependants, and tenants makes it likely that as many as ten thousand people were displaced. It is impossible to believe, on the basis of the available evidence, that all or most or even a substantial minority of the closed houses were morally corrupt, unable to sustain themselves financially, or of no use to the broader society. In the archives there survive many letters written from members of the gentry to Cromwell and his agents, explaining why some establishment should not be destroyed and begging that it not be. “We beseech your favor,” one such letter states, “for the prior of Pentney, assuring you that he relieves those quarters wondrously where he dwells, and it would be a pity not to spare a house that feeds so many indigent poor, which is in a good state, maintains good service, and does so many charitable deeds.” Interestingly, the same prior who was defended in these terms had earlier been singled out for particularly harsh criticism in the visitation reports that preceded the suppression. Similarly, a letter asking mercy for the priory at Carmarthen in Wales asserted that its revenues exceeded £200 per annum, but that the total had been understated by the visitors in order to make suppression possible. This same letter describes the Carmarthen house as well built and in good repair, and the conduct of the twelve monks living there as impeccable. It adds that “hospitality is daily kept for poor and rich, which is a great relief to the country, being poor and bare … alms are given to eighty poor people, which, if the house were suppressed, they would want … [and] strangers and merchantmen resorting to those parts are honestly received and entertained whereby they are the gladder to bring their commodities to that country.” Such documents provide a more objective picture than the reports of Cromwell’s agents of the true state of the smaller monasteries and their role in the life of the kingdom. The appeals of the writers, however, were less effective than cash payment in determining which houses were closed and which were allowed to continue.

The appeals of the monks, begging not to be thrown out, were ignored except where enough gold could be found to touch the consciences of the king’s commissioners. The suppressions proceeded with such speed that by early July 1536 Ambassador Chapuys was writing that “it is a lamentable thing to see a legion of monks and nuns, who have been chased from their monasteries, wandering miserably hither and thither seeking means to live; and several honest men have told me
that, what with monks, nuns and persons dependent on the monasteries suppressed, there were over twenty thousand who knew not how to live.” Chapuys’s number may have been high, but the picture he painted was accurate. A new kind of pauperism was being created across England as a direct consequence of the actions of the king. It was a pauperism for which, with the disappearance of the monasteries, there could be no adequate relief. It would plague the reigns of Henry’s children. As the government began to seek remedy by punishing the paupers themselves, yet another dimension would be added to the horrors of the age.

The response of the religious orders to the destruction of their houses was almost uniformly passive. They were, after all, communities of monks and nuns, not of politicians or soldiers, and they were receiving no support from their bishops or even from the larger, more influential houses. A striking exception occurred in late September in the north. As the four men charged by Cromwell with shutting down monasteries in Northumberland approached the town of Hexham, they found armed men blocking their way. The townsfolk had turned out to stop them, and had turned the local monastery into a fortress. The monks inside, informed that the commissioners had been sent in the king’s name to execute the bill of dissolution, replied that “we be twenty brethren in this house and we shall die all, or that ye shall have the house.” The visitors withdrew and did not return. Hexham was left in peace—for the time being. The fact that this act of defiance had taken place in the north would soon prove symptomatic of that whole region’s hostility to the king’s program.

Henry had other things to concern himself with than a small community of recalcitrant monks and their supporters in a distant corner of the kingdom. For many months, through his court chaplain, he had been badgering his young cousin Reginald Pole to provide a written statement of his position on the annulment of his first marriage and, especially, the supremacy. Pole was still on the continent, buried in the studies to which he had been allowed to return after infuriating the king and alarming his own family with his refusal to take Henry’s side. During his absence the king had grown more confident than ever that no intelligent, informed, and open-minded person could possibly fail to see the irrefutability of his claims, and he had not stopped thinking of
young Pole. By 1537, apparently, he was sure that Pole’s years of reading and reflection must have brought him around. He sent him books refuting the idea of papal primacy (such works were being written in great numbers by clergymen eager to win the attention of the king), learned that he had begun researching and writing a book of his own on the question, and was eager to see the result. Winning over Pole would be a victory, a vindication, of international consequence.

But the fruit of Pole’s labors, a work that he titled
De Unitate Ecclesiastica
, turned out to be the opposite of what Henry expected. Assuming the role of Old Testament prophet, casting the king as a tyrant in desperate need of being saved from the consequences of his own errors, Pole expressed himself recklessly, in terms that could hardly have been better chosen to offend a man of Henry’s immense pride. After comparing Henry not only to Richard III—the archfiend in the Tudor version of English history—but to the emperor Nero as well, Pole charged that he “did not merely kill, but tore to pieces all the true defenders of the old religion in a more inhuman fashion than the Turk.” Henry’s actions, he said, made a mockery of his papal title Defender of the Faith, and without quite saying so explicitly he suggested in unmistakable terms that Henry’s actions were so repellent to his own subjects as to make a revolt likely if not inevitable. Compared with this invective, Pole’s scholarly denial that any secular ruler could claim to be supreme head of the church even within his own realm was familiar almost to the point of being merely tiresome. If at any point there had existed a real possibility that Henry might opt to settle his differences with Rome, Pole’s little work (which he had not had printed, claiming that it was intended for the king’s eyes only) ended that possibility absolutely. Pole’s mother and brothers, when they learned of what he had done this time, denounced his actions as “folly.” Though Henry took no action against them, he lashed out in other directions.

No longer satisfied merely to make the life of his daughter Mary a hell of humiliation and deprivation, he sent representatives to her place of confinement with a demand that she do what her late mother had taught her to regard as unthinkable: take the oath of supremacy and, the crowning blow, acknowledge that she herself was illegitimate. Mary refused, was threatened, and refused again. The screws were tightened further. The woman who was her closest friend, almost the last companion
she was still permitted, was taken away to the Tower. Two men suspected of being sympathetic to her were purged from the Privy Council, and Cromwell himself began to fear that he was going to suffer for efforts he had made earlier to reconcile father and daughter. He wrote to Mary, calling her “an obstinate and obdurate woman, deserving the reward of malice in the extremity of mischief.” He provided her with a draft letter that he suggested she transcribe in her own hand and send to her father; it recognized Henry as supreme head, repudiated the pope, and described her parents’ marriage as “incestuous and unlawful.” Rumors reached Mary of the king’s intention—what better way to increase the pressure on a daughter with little fear for herself?—to move not only against her but against everyone regarded as friendly to her. Finally even the one man of any importance who had remained unflinchingly loyal to her and her mother, her cousin Charles’s ambassador Eustace Chapuys, urged her to submit. And so she copied out Cromwell’s draft word for word, signed it, and sent it to her father. In doing so she abjectly denied her own deepest beliefs, but she was not utterly crushed: later, when ordered to give up the names of those persons who had encouraged her to resist the king’s demands, she said she would die before doing any such thing. Still later, sufficiently rehabilitated to be permitted to dine in her father’s company, she heard him jokingly rebuke members of his council because “some of you were desirous that I should put this jewel to death.” This revelation of just how close she had been to losing her life caused her to faint.

When Lord Thomas Howard, half-brother of the Duke of Norfolk, neglected to obtain royal permission before contracting to marry Lady Margaret Douglas, the king’s sister Margaret’s daughter by her second husband, Henry chose to interpret this, absurdly, as an attempt on Howard’s part to make himself king of England. Howard was attainted for treason, and along with his bride-that-might-have-been he was imprisoned in the Tower, where he would remain until his death. (Lady Margaret survived to become the mother-in-law of Mary, Queen of Scots, and so paternal grandmother of England’s King James I. Unlike Henry—who, one suspects, would be deeply chagrined if he knew—she is therefore an ancestor of all the subsequent kings and queens of England down to the present day.)

Henry used his expanding powers not only to blight lives but to bend
England’s unwritten constitution into bizarre shapes. A new Act of Succession, pushed through Parliament without difficulty, voided the statute that had declared Anne Boleyn to be the king’s only wife and their descendants to be the only legitimate heirs to the throne. Now Jane Seymour was the only wife, her (as yet unborn) children by Henry the sole line of succession. In a truly extraordinary step, one without precedent in law or tradition, Parliament bestowed upon the king the power, if he left no legitimate children, to name as his heir and successor “such person or persons in possession and remainder as shall please your Highness.” At the same time the definition of treason was again broadened to make it easier to ensnare anyone bold or mad enough to follow the examples of Fisher and More. Now it became a capital crime not only to reject the new Succession Act but to remain silent when asked for an opinion. The act also provided—whoever thought this up must have smiled at his own ingenuity—that anyone who attempted to repeal it would be guilty of high treason by virtue of having done so.