The Tudors (49 page)

The main points of dispute were familiar by now. They ranged from free will to justification by faith, from whether the eucharistic bread and wine were literally the body and blood of Jesus Christ (Henry and Luther had both affirmed this, but increasingly influential Swiss theologians denied it and were winning over Englishmen as eminent as Archbishop Cranmer) to whether religious statues and pictures should be destroyed as idolatrous and practices that had been at the center of English religious life for a millennium should be banned as superstitious. Disagreement was almost boundless, debate smoldered just below the surface of public life in spite of Henry’s readiness to condemn anyone who disputed his truth, and the dangers of the situation were compounded by the fact that so many people believed the questions at issue to be matters of eternal life and death. People in every camp, if not always prepared to die in defense of their positions, were prepared to kill to prevent others from luring the population into the fires of hell.

In the final weeks of Henry’s life, as the various organs of his huge body began to malfunction and he became incapable even of rising from his bed, he had focused the last of his strength on arrangements for holding the kingdom together until his son grew old enough to take charge. Someone, or some group, was going to have to manage the kingdom in Edward’s name, probably for almost a decade. Finding such a person would not be as simple as it had been in similar situations in the past. The royal family was small: Henry had no brother or uncle entitled by blood to rule on the boy-king’s behalf, and his only adult child, Mary, the former princess, remained illegitimate in consequence of the annulment of her parents’ marriage. Mary’s legal status would have made her an unsuitable candidate to serve as regent during her half-brother’s minority even if Henry had trusted her on the supremacy, which he rightly did not.

The central contest continued to be between the traditionalists, who wanted the religion of their ancestors regardless of whether they secretly accepted the leadership of the pope, and the evangelicals, a diverse party united by its contempt for the old church and a determination to restore what its adherents believed to have been the purity and simplicity of earliest Christianity. Henry, whether by craft or good luck, had since his break with Rome been able to maintain a balance between the two sides, dividing the highest offices of church and state between them while leavening his own conservative pronouncements on doctrine and dogma with enough reformist measures to keep both sides insecure. The traditionalists, the most prominent of whom were by the mid-1540s Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, undoubtedly represented by a wide margin the greatest part of England’s population. Though evangelicals hostile to the old ways had been prominent at court at least since the days of Anne Boleyn, King Henry’s conservatism had always required them to tread carefully and appear more conservative than they actually were. This had become more true than ever after Thomas Cromwell began to fall out of favor; it was then that Henry lost his appetite for religious innovation and made it a crime punishable with death to reject Catholic orthodoxy in favor of the Lutheran beliefs he despised. By the early 1540s it must have seemed inevitable that, if Henry ever made provision for the governing of England after he was dead and before Edward attained his majority, he would reinforce the position of the traditionalists. Even if he made no such provision, conservative dominance after his death must have seemed practically certain. Most of England’s clergy, most of the bishops included, belonged to the traditionalist camp. So did most of the population, the nobles, and the gentry. On their side they had the law of the land: the Six Articles, with which Parliament had upheld the real presence and clerical celibacy. On their side, too, they had the King’s Book, which to the horror of the evangelicals had affirmed the traditional creed and all seven of the Catholic sacraments. As a final bulwark they had Henry’s heresy laws, which made it a capital crime not to believe as the king believed.

Thus the evangelicals could preach as they believed only at the risk of their lives. Even if they had been left free to express themselves, they would have been a tiny and scorned minority almost everywhere except
at the universities and in London and southeastern England, and even in those places they remained a minority, though not such a tiny one or nearly so scorned. Remarkably, however, from the start of Edward’s reign they assumed a position of such complete dominance that with astonishing speed the official religion became more radically evangelical and reformist than Henry could ever have intended or imagined. And it was Henry, improbably enough, who had made this possible. How did it happen? The answer is almost certainly not to be found in anything like an end-of-life shift in the king’s thinking in favor of justification by faith or any of the other foundation stones of evangelical thought. It lay, more likely, in the fact that in the last years of his life Henry was a solitary and profoundly lonely man.

Henry was alone as only a man can be who is feared by nearly everyone with whom he has contact, who believes that he alone has the truth on every subject of real importance so that there is no need to converse or listen but only to pronounce, and who has cast away or even destroyed one after another of the people to whom he had been closest earlier in his life when he was still capable of being close to anyone. At the end of his life he was no longer capable of any such thing. He exalted his little son as the jewel of England but rarely saw him. If he dined with his daughters, they sat not at the same table as their father but beneath him, and at a distance. He had threatened the life of his sixth and last wife, Catherine Parr, for her reformist religious views and summoned neither her nor any of his children to be with him for his last Christmas or the beginning of what would turn out to be his last year.

Still, the very fact that he had married Catherine despite being far along in his physical decline is suggestive of neediness, and the marriage was significant even if it produced no offspring and in all likelihood was never consummated. Catherine like Anne Boleyn before her was a fervent evangelical, and as the king’s wife she was able to take a hand in the education of his children. Thus was the child Edward placed in the care of tutors who began the process by which he became an evangelical of an exceptionally militant bent. Thus, too, Queen Catherine’s brother William Parr, an elegant gentleman of deficient judgment but like her a supporter of religious reform, was made Earl of Essex (the same title that Cromwell had been given not long before his death) and joined the
increasingly influential evangelical faction on the Privy Council, the innermost circle of royal advisers.

The king’s neediness helps to explain the survival, almost alone among the men who had been important in church or state when Henry was still married to Catherine of Aragon, of Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer’s religious views had never meshed well with Henry’s, really, and for years he had to conceal the fact of his marriage from a king who to the end of his life insisted on a celibate clergy. But Cranmer became and was able to remain archbishop of Canterbury because no matter what happened, no matter what the king demanded, he was always compliant. Though he had his own beliefs and his own agenda for reform, and though those beliefs became increasingly radical with the passage of the years and he became increasingly ambitious in pursuit of his agenda, the side of himself that he allowed the king to see was unfailingly submissive. He lived in a style reminiscent of Wolsey’s, with four palaces and a small private army, but he was unfailingly careful never to do anything that might be construed as a challenge to royal authority. Thus Henry found it possible to trust Cranmer as he trusted no other man, perhaps even, in a way, to love him. And thus the senior bishopric of the English church remained in the hands of a confirmed enemy of the old religion, a man who in his innermost being utterly rejected many of the things that the conservatives, his royal master among them, believed most strongly. Cranmer was infinitely easier to work with, to manage, than the most prominent of the conservative bishops, Stephen Gardiner. Gardiner was
too
conservative, too proud, too firm in his beliefs ever to coexist comfortably with a ruler as self-willed as Henry even though the two of them were never far apart in doctrine. Gardiner came as close to displaying a mind of his own as it was possible for a bishop to do while retaining his position (and staying alive) in the England of the 1530s and 1540s. He never seemed as dependable as Cranmer made himself appear. And so it was almost inevitable, when Henry began to plan seriously for the succession, that Gardiner would be dismissed and Cranmer would prosper.

The same sort of dynamic worked to the advantage of other men whose religious opinions had little in common with Henry’s. The excellent family connections that had brought Jane Seymour to Henry’s
court as a lady-in-waiting first to Catherine of Aragon and then to Anne Boleyn also created opportunities for her brothers Edward and Thomas. The elder of the pair, Edward, was about thirty-five years old when his sister became queen and had been in royal service almost from childhood. He had had some success, being knighted while with the English army in France in 1523 and later becoming master of horse to King Henry’s illegitimate son the Duke of Richmond, but he was still a mere esquire of the body when his sister was chosen as the king’s third bride. The marriage changed his life completely. In 1536, the year of the wedding, he was made a gentleman of the privy chamber—one of the privileged few with free access to the king’s private apartments—and raised to the nobility as Viscount Beauchamp. The following year, the year of Prince Edward’s birth and Jane’s death, he was made Earl of Hertford and given a number of coveted offices including a seat on the Privy Council.

Little is known of whether Edward and Jane Seymour had a close relationship—before her death she showed herself to be attached to the old religion, while he was strongly inclined in the other direction—but in any case her death did nothing to interrupt his rise. He retained the confidence of the king, who, when he resumed his wars in 1544, appointed Seymour lord lieutenant in the north and gave him an army with which to invade Scotland. Seymour proved a capable commander, hesitantly at first but then energetically carrying out the king’s instructions not only to capture Edinburgh but to lay waste to it and everything surrounding. Later that same year he was with Henry at the capture of Boulogne, which he was rumored to have made possible by bribing the commander of the French defenders. In 1545 he was in command at Boulogne, routing a superior French force that attempted to retake it. He then returned to Scotland, where he conducted a scorched-earth campaign even more devastating than the one of the previous year. In 1546, yet again in command at Boulogne, he negotiated a treaty under which England was to retain possession of that city until 1554 and then allow the French king to buy it. By this point it was clear that Henry had come to rely heavily on his brother-in-law in war and diplomacy, and that Seymour was not unworthy of the king’s confidence.

Henry had another reason to put his trust in Seymour. Born a commoner though with a tincture of royal blood, Seymour could never possibly
aspire to the throne. He owed his place in the world, his title and position and the wealth he was rapidly accumulating, entirely to the fact that he was uncle to the Prince of Wales, who of course had no uncles on the paternal side. Seymour had every reason to want Edward to live and prosper, and everything to lose if Edward were to die or somehow be removed from the throne. In searching for someone who seemed capable of managing the kingdom during his son’s minority, of waging war if necessary and holding the government together, Henry had to look no further than to Seymour. Best of all, it was not necessary to fear that in a crisis Seymour would subordinate his nephew’s interests to his own. Seymour could never become a Richard III. He could help himself, save himself from the enemies that his rapid rise and his unfriendliness to the conservatives had inevitably created, only by preserving the child. The interests of the two were inextricably intertwined.

It was much the same in the case of the leading lay conservative, the leader of one of the last of the grand old noble families that for centuries had possessed so much land and had at their command so many armed men as to make them an effective counterweight to royal power. Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, was seventy-three in 1546, still tough and vigorous though nearly old enough to be the father of a king supposedly dying of old age, and he had spent his long life serving the Tudors at home and abroad, in peace and in war. Grandson of the Duke of Norfolk who had died fighting on the side of Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485, son of the Howard who was restored to the Norfolk title after destroying a Scots army at Flodden in 1513, he himself had led his father’s vanguard at Flodden and had gone on to serve as lord lieutenant in Ireland and commander of English armies in the north and in France. His shrewd if unscrupulous management of the Pilgrimage of Grace may very well have saved King Henry from ruin. Though the Howards like the Seymours (and, for that matter, like a number of noble and gentry families) had a touch of royal blood from generations back, and though Norfolk’s first wife had, like Henry VIII’s mother, been one of the numerous daughters of Edward IV (she died young, and none of their four children survived), the family had no plausible claim to the throne and no illusions on that score. Three times in the space of a decade, marriages had created the possibility that the Tudors and the Howards would be permanently linked by blood. Norfolk’s daughter
Mary had been wed to Henry Fitzroy, the king’s bastard, but that had come to nothing as a result of Fitzroy’s early death. King Henry’s disastrous marriages to two of Norfolk’s nieces, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, had served as persuasive reminders of the dangers of aspiring too high. As an ambitious but sensible dynast, Norfolk would have been content to remain first among the peers of the realm and a faithful servant first of Henry and then of his son.