The Tudors (48 page)

The year ended with a final outburst of savagery that had only a tangential connection to religion but rose more directly out of the old questions about whether Henry, and his father before him, were rightfully kings of England. At the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the pope, having already made the king’s cousin Reginald Pole a cardinal though he was not yet an ordained priest, had sent him north to see if the revolt might have inclined Henry to return to the Roman fold or, failing that,
if Francis of France and the emperor Charles might be disposed to join forces for an invasion of England. Pole’s mission came to nothing—by temperament he was a professional student, sometimes ineffectual in practical matters and sufficiently aware of his limitations to avoid politics—but news of it finished whatever affection Henry had retained for his troublesome young kinsman. It also inflamed his long-smoldering distrust of the entire Pole family. He saw an opportunity to accomplish something that he probably had long desired: the extermination of his remaining Yorkist cousins.

Reginald Pole’s elder brother Sir Geoffrey was arrested and interrogated. He must have been a weak man; terrified, he tried to save himself by telling his captors whatever he could about ways in which members of his family had shown themselves to be unfriendly to the new church and therefore disloyal to their king. The evidence he provided was thin stuff, a secondhand account of vague idle talk about unhappiness with the current state of affairs and a longing for the old ways, but in the hands of Cromwell and the king it became sufficient for the arrest of Geoffrey and Reginald’s eldest brother Henry, Lord Montague, who as the senior male member of the family and grandson of a brother of Edward IV and Richard III had a claim to the crown that he had never been foolish enough to pursue. Arrested with him were Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter, who like Henry VIII was a son of one of Edward IV’s daughters, and his twelve-year-old son Edward, Earl of Devon. Into the Tower they all went. The charges against them were worse than dubious—the Poles and the Courtenays alike had remained loyal to Henry through the various disturbances of the mid-1530s—but their royal blood doomed them all the same. On December 6 Montague and Exeter were beheaded, and the executions of others accused of involvement in the supposed Pole conspiracy went on until in the end sixteen people were dead. Montague’s little son, who had been sent to the Tower with his father, was never seen again and is assumed to have died in confinement. Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, the Pole brothers’ mother and onetime governess of the king’s daughter Mary, was arrested soon after Montague’s execution and, after long days of questioning in which nothing could be found to suggest that she might be guilty of anything, attainted of high treason. Exeter’s widow, too, was imprisoned and attainted.

It went on in this way year after year, killing following gratuitous killing and every death ugly in its own new way. In the months following the attack on the Poles, as the last and largest of England’s religious houses were pulled down and their valuables carted off to London, the abbots of the three great Benedictine monasteries at Colchester, Glastonbury, and Reading became the last to refuse to submit. No one could have been surprised, after what had already transpired, to see them arrested on charges of treason and condemned without trial. But their ends were shocking all the same. The eighty-year-old Abbot Richard Whiting of Glastonbury, a man so far above reproach that even Cromwell’s commissioners had praised him and his house at the end of their first visit, was not merely executed. After a debilitating period of imprisonment in London he was returned to his monastery, dragged prostrate to the top of Glastonbury Tor, a conelike geological freak that is the highest promontory in its region, and there put to death along with two of his brother monks. His body was quartered, with the four parts put on public display in the towns of Wells, Bath, Ilchester, and Bridgwater. His head was mounted atop the entrance to the abbey. Henry, keeping his scales balanced, was at this same time having evangelicals imprisoned and burned for failing to conform to the Six Articles.

The year after that, as if in confirmation that what goes around comes around, even Thomas Cromwell was abruptly stripped of his offices and put to death. Contrary to what has often been asserted, he did not die because he had used a deceptive painting by Hans Holbein to trick the king into marrying a miserably homely Anne of Cleves. He died, rather, because he had become too closely identified with the evangelical party in England and the Protestant cause in Europe, and because the collapse of the latest alliance between Francis of France and the emperor Charles gave Henry a choice of Catholic allies and made Cromwell not only expendable but a diplomatic liability. Henry dispensed with him because he thought he no longer needed him, and because he thought he would be better off without him. The endlessly useful Richard Rich (he was
Sir
Richard now, on his way to becoming Lord Rich) testified against his longtime master with effect as deadly as his earlier contributions to the destruction of Fisher and More. He quoted Cromwell as saying that he was prepared, if necessary, to fight for the evangelical cause even in defiance of the king. It is not easy to believe
that the wily Cromwell would have said any such thing within Rich’s hearing, but the standards of evidence were even lower in his case than in Fisher’s or More’s because he had no actual trial. Interestingly, at the moment of his arrest, Cromwell pulled off his hat and angrily flung it to the ground. It was the exasperated gesture of a gambler learning that he had made a bad bet, a trickster tricked. There would be no more opportunities to roll the dice.

In the days before his death Cromwell begged Henry for “mercy, mercy, mercy,” and just before being executed he professed to having always been a good Catholic. (He could not have meant a good
Roman
Catholic.) It was not long before Henry realized that he
did
need Cromwell, and that in executing him he had deprived himself of as effective a chief minister as any monarch could ever have hoped for. Characteristically, he blamed the loss not on himself but on Cromwell’s enemies at court—men and women who had in fact wanted to see the secretary ruined but would have been powerless to accomplish any such thing without the king’s active cooperation. Throughout the 1540s Henry would pay and pay again for having extended that cooperation.

Two days after Cromwell’s execution the prominent evangelicals Robert Barnes, William Jerome, and Thomas Garrett were all burned at the stake for heresy, and three distinguished Roman Catholics were hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason. All these deaths remain shrouded in mystery. As with the abbots and Cromwell, there had been no trial, no presentation of evidence, no defense; the king was now simply killing whomever he chose without taking the trouble to explain. The atrocities went on and on. Some, such as the 1541 execution of the seventy-year-old Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, the mother of the Poles, were small affairs barely deserving notice except for their brutality.

The countess, whose father, brother, and son had been murdered by Edward IV, Henry VII, and Henry VIII respectively, and whose small grandson had disappeared while in prison, was obviously guilty of nothing. All her life she had been a loyal if independent-minded member of the royal family, though her early support of Catherine of Aragon had caused her to be dismissed from court and the defection of her son Reginald to the old religion had brought trouble down on the entire family. When brought to the chopping block, Margaret refused to cooperate. “No,” she said, “my head never committed treason. If you will have it,
you must take it as you can.” Her death became a grotesquely protracted affair. The executioner had to chase her around the scaffold, slashing at her awkwardly with his blade until at last he had “literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces in a most pitiful manner.”

Some of the atrocities were on a vastly bigger scale. In late 1543, after the Scots repudiated the Treaty of Greenwich and the betrothal of their infant queen to Prince Edward, Henry sent Edward Seymour on an unnecessary and ultimately counterproductive invasion. Seymour’s orders were to annihilate every man, woman, and child wherever resistance was encountered, which was likely to mean wherever English troops appeared. Every place of habitation was to be destroyed “so that the upper stone may be the nether and not one stick stand by another.” Seymour questioned these instructions, sensibly thinking that an approach with less resemblance to genocide might be more conducive to long-term peace. When told to proceed as ordered, he did so with such diligence that most of Edinburgh was reduced to rubble and the countryside around was scoured clean. The following year, when Seymour again crossed into Scotland, his orders were the same as before: to carry out a program of wholesale and indiscriminate destruction. This time he demolished sixteen castles, seven major abbeys, five towns, and 243 villages, killing uncounted hundreds or thousands of Scots. Henry, still not satisfied, ordered the execution of several Scottish hostages whom he had been holding for more than two years and gave his support to a plot (which succeeded) to assassinate the Cardinal Beaton who had long been the leader of the most anti-English faction in Edinburgh. This last he did secretly, however, “not misliking the offer” of the men who volunteered to murder Beaton, thinking it “good they be exhorted to proceed,” but regarding such a project as “not meet to be set forward expressly by his majesty.”

This was the Henry who, on January 27, 1547, having been told at last by a brave gentleman of his privy chamber that he was dying and asked if he wished to confess, replied that he was confident that his sins would have been forgiven even if they were far greater than in fact they were. Again he was asked if he wished to see a confessor. He said perhaps Cranmer, safe old Cranmer, but not quite yet, not until he had slept awhile. He drifted into a sleep that became a coma, so that later, when his gentlemen tried to rouse him, they were unable to do so. Cranmer
was summoned and came in a hurry, taking the king’s hand and trying to talk with him but getting no response. Finally he asked Henry to signify his faith in Jesus Christ by squeezing his hand. The king, Cranmer said later, squeezed hard and died.

Something very big had come to an end. It was time for the aftermath, whatever that might prove to be. As for Henry, perhaps his best hope was that he had been wrong all along and the evangelicals right, and all that was needed to save his soul was the gift of faith. No doubt he himself would have been willing to be judged by his works, but it might not have been a good bet.

A New Beginning

W
ith the death of Henry VIII, the supreme headship of the church in England, the authority to decide what every man and woman in the kingdom was required to believe about God and salvation and the nature of ultimate reality, passed to a nine-year-old child. Little Edward Tudor, upon becoming King Edward VI, was recognized by church and state alike as the one person empowered by God to resolve conflicts over doctrine and practice that divided the most powerful and learned of his subjects.

It would have been a challenging situation under the best of circumstances. England’s experience of being ruled by boys had been mercifully limited but not very happy. Even in the days before the Crown was responsible not only for the government but for a fractured and fractious church, it had been an experience of struggles for power punctuated with betrayal, bloodshed, and disorder. In the late 1540s, under the circumstances that Henry had created with his jumble of innovations, rule by a child-king was a recipe for trouble, little better than an absurdity. With a restless population kept quiet only by the threat of armed force, and with court and church divided into factions that hated each other mortally, the chances that Edward’s minority could be passed without serious difficulty must have seemed slim indeed.

The church of Henry’s making was, at the time of his death, emphatically not Roman Catholic but just as emphatically not Lutheran (the
king having made it a capital crime to follow Luther in denying free will or believing in justification by faith alone). The new theology contradicted itself so boldly on so many points as to border on incoherence: in the King’s Book of 1543, for example, Henry had forbidden the very use of the word
purgatory
, but then in his will he made provision for thousands of masses to be said for the repose of his soul (which could only have benefited if it were in something like purgatory). The result was confusion, contention, and division on a scale without precedent.