Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (21 page)

The translation has been described as one of the most significant moments in the history of reformation. It immediately identified the English Bible with the movement of religious change, and thus helped to associate what would become the Protestant faith with the English identity. In the seventeenth century, in particular, cultural history also became religious history. The career of Oliver Cromwell, for example, cannot be understood without a proper apprehension of the English translation of the Scriptures; it is perhaps worth remarking that Oliver Cromwell was a distant relation, through the marriage of his great-grandfather, to Thomas Cromwell. The translated Bible also introduced into England a biblical culture of the word, as opposed to the predominantly visual culture of the later medieval world; this refashioned culture was then to find its fruits in Milton and in Bunyan, in Blake and in Tennyson.

The English Bible also helped to fashion a language of devotion. Coverdale was the first to introduce such phrases as ‘loving kindness’ and ‘tender mercy’. A tract of the time declared that ‘Englishmen have now in hand, in every church and place, the Holy Bible in their mother tongue’. It was said that the voice of God was English. A seventeenth-century historian, William Strype, wrote that ‘everybody that could bought the book, or busily read
it, or got others to read it to them’. It was read aloud, in St Paul’s Cathedral, to crowds who had gathered to listen. The king’s men also hoped that the reading of the Bible would inculcate obedience to the lawful authorities, except that obedience was now to the king rather than to the pope.

In the same set of injunctions Thomas Cromwell decreed that every parson or vicar ‘should keep one book or register, wherein he shall write the day and year of every wedding, christening and burying’. The parish register has been kept ever since, and must mark one of the most notable innovations of the reformed faith. It was also decreed that the images of the saints were no longer to be regarded as holy, and that the lights and candles placed before them should be removed. The Catholic Church of England was to be cleansed and renovated, but not overturned.

Cromwell also ordered the clergy to keep silent on matters of biblical interpretation, not to be ‘babblers nor praters, arguers nor disputers thereof; nor to presume that they know therein that they know not’. It was of the utmost importance to be quiet on matters of doctrine for fear of provoking more discord and discontent in a country that had narrowly avoided a damaging religious war.

The deliberate ambiguity of the religious reforms was itself enough to reduce the possibility of any endorsement of Lutheranism. In the summer of 1538 some Lutherans arrived from Germany to explore the possibility of a union on matters of faith; they had been lured to London by the king in the belief that it might be possible to reach an agreement with German leaders, such as the elector of Saxony and the landgrave of Hesse, in opposition to the pope and the emperor. One problem, however, could not be removed. One of Henry’s own negotiators, Robert Barnes, had once told Luther himself that ‘my king does not care about religion’. And so it seemed.

The German embassy of three got precisely nowhere. They were lodged in poor accommodation and complained that ‘multitudes of rats were running in their chambers day and night, which is no small disquietness, and their kitchen was so near the parlour that the smell was offensive to all that came to them’; one of them fell seriously ill. On matters of faith the king was polite but
unmoving; they wished to extirpate such abuses as private Masses and the enforced celibacy of the clergy, but Henry could not be persuaded. They stayed for almost five months before returning with relief to Germany. The Lutheran reformer Melanchthon sent a private letter to Cranmer deploring the maintenance of popish superstition.

From Germany, too, arrived the first Anabaptists; they believed that infant baptism is not New Testament baptism, and that they were the true elect of God who did not require any external authority. All goods (including wives) should be held in common, in preparation for an imminent Second Coming. In a proclamation of November 1538, they were ordered by the king to leave the realm; those who remained were persecuted and burned.

The king’s distaste for anyone tainted with unorthodox doctrine became amply evident during proceedings in the same month against a schoolmaster, John Lambert, who was prosecuted for denying Christ’s presence in the consecrated bread and wine of the Mass. Henry himself presided at the heresy trial, dressed entirely in white silk as a token of purity; his guards also wore white. Cromwell wrote that ‘it was a wonder to see how princely . . . and how benignly his grace assayed to convert the miserable man, how strong and manifest reasons his highness alleged against him’.

The trial took place in the banqueting house of the palace at Westminster. ‘Ho, good fellow,’ the king began, ‘what is your name?’ He sat beneath a canopy with his lords on the left side and with his bishops on the right. Lambert had in fact used an alias to avoid official detection, and tried to explain this to the king. Henry stopped him with a voice of thunder. ‘I would not trust you, having two names, although you were my brother.’ The trial, from Lambert’s point of view, was of course already lost:

‘Tell me plainly whether
you
say it is the body of Christ.’

‘It is not his body. I deny it.’

‘Mark well – for now you shall be condemned even by Christ’s own words. “
Hoc est enim corpus meum
.” This is my body.’

The interrogation lasted for five hours. ‘Will you live or die?’ the king asked the prisoner at the conclusion. ‘You have yet a free choice.’

‘I commit my soul to God and my body to the king’s mercy.’

‘That being the case, you must die. I will not be a patron to heretics.’

Six days later Lambert was executed at Smithfield. The flames took off his thighs and legs, but the guards lifted up his still living body with their halberds and thrust it into the fire. ‘None but Christ!’ he called out. ‘None but Christ!’ Then he expired.

A religious envoy also came from another quarter. An English cardinal, Reginald Pole, had been sent from Rome as a papal legate but, hearing of his mission, the king naturally refused him entry to the country; he also surrounded him with spies and assassins. Henry himself sent a letter to Charles V, in which he warned that the cardinal was eager to promote discord among nations; his disposition is ‘so cankered that from it can no good thing proceed, but weeping crocodile tears he will, if it be possible, pour forth the venom of his serpent nature’.

When the cardinal arrived in France Henry wrote to his ambassador there that ‘we would be very glad to have the said Pole trussed up and conveyed to Calais’; Pole himself was informed that 100,000 pieces of English gold would be given to the man who brought him to England dead or alive. He was not killed, but he returned to Rome with his mission thwarted.

The king also proceeded against the members of Pole’s family. ‘Pity it is,’ Cromwell wrote, ‘that the folly of one brainsick Pole, or to say better of one witless fool, should be the ruin of so great a family.’ Pole was one of a distinguished line that issued directly from the Plantagenet dynasty; his mother, Margaret Pole, the countess of Salisbury, was the daughter of the duke of Clarence who was popularly supposed to have been drowned in a butt of malmsey in the Tower on the orders of Edward IV. Their lineage alone would have been enough to place the cardinal and his relatives under grave suspicion. The fact that they were of the old faith only increased the risks against them. They themselves were aware of their peril and made some effort to avoid one another in public for fear of supposed conspiracy. But they were undone by the open sedition of Reginald Pole.

The cardinal’s younger brother, Sir Geoffrey Pole, was arrested and interrogated; he was of unstable temper and at the first sign of pressure he conceded. He revealed all that he knew of his family’s activities and perhaps embellished certain details. As a result another of his brothers, Henry, Lord Montague, was arrested together with his cousin, the marquis of Exeter. Geoffrey Pole then tried to suffocate himself with a cushion while incarcerated in the Tower. Margaret Pole herself was questioned and fiercely denied any imputations against her. ‘We have dealed with such an one,’ her interrogator said, ‘as men have not dealed with tofore; we may rather call her a strong and constant man than a woman.’ She was eventually imprisoned and taken to her death.

On coming to the scaffold she told the executioner that she would not lay her head upon the block, saying that she had received no trial. When she was forcibly held down the man, apparently not very experienced in his task, hacked away at her head and neck for several minutes. It was weary work but ultimately the head was off. On hearing the news of his mother’s death, Cardinal Pole declared that ‘I am now the son of a martyr’. He continued in a similar vein. ‘Let us be of good cheer,’ he said. ‘We have now one more patron in heaven.’

Geoffrey Pole testified that Lord Montague had said that the king ‘will one day die suddenly – his leg will kill him – and then we shall have jolly stirring’. Montague had also feared that, when the world ‘came to stripes’, there would be ‘a lack of honest men’. He said that ‘I trust to have a fair day upon those knaves that rule about the king; and I trust to see a merry world one day’. A ‘merry world’ was a truism of the period, meaning whatever the speaker wished it to mean. There was much more to the same effect. It was also revealed that the Poles had stayed in contact with their brother overseas, and had even warned him that his life was in danger. It was professed at the time that this was a serious Catholic conspiracy to depose the king, but it looks like the isolated murmurings of a disaffected, if distinguished, family. Yet the king was not likely to overlook any sign of dissent to his religious policy. If the sovereign does not feel secure, then no one is secure. Montague and Exeter were duly condemned to death and hanged as traitors. Against their names in the register of the Order of
the Garter was written ‘
Vah, proditor!
’ – ‘Oh, traitor!’ Exeter’s son, Edward Courtenay, was consigned to the Tower, where he remained for the next fifteen years. He was freed only when Mary became sovereign. This was the way to deal with potential claimants to the throne.

Yet Henry’s dynastic ambitions were already secure. By the spring of 1537 Henry’s new wife was pregnant, and on 12 October gave birth to a healthy boy. The child was named Edward, since he had been born on the day dedicated to St Edward the Confessor. The line of kings would continue. Jane Seymour herself, however, became sick with puerperal fever, perhaps from an injury at the time of delivery, and died twelve days after giving birth. She was twenty-nine years old.

The period of court mourning lasted for almost three weeks, and on 12 November her body was laid in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. The king ordered that 12,000 Masses should be said in the churches of London in order to intercede for her soul, a striking instance of Henry’s attachment to the beliefs and rituals of the old faith. The king wore purple, the colour of royal mourning; Lady Mary wore black with a white headdress, as a token of the fact that the queen had died in childbed. A man was arrested for repeating a prophecy, in the Bell Inn on Tower Hill, that the prince ‘should be as great a murderer as his father’ since he had already murdered his mother at his birth.

A macabre scene was enacted a few months later when some idlers were watching the funeral of a child in a London churchyard. A priest in their company found the demeanour of the mourners to be peculiar and, hastening over to them, he opened the shroud; there was no baby in the folds, but the image of a child made out of wax with two pins stuck through it. The death anticipated was said to be that of the infant prince, and the news of the magical funeral spread through the kingdom.

Elaborate precautions and regulations were in any case established within the royal nursery. No one could approach the cradle of the infant prince without a royal warrant in the king’s own hand. The baby’s food was to be tested in case of poison. His clothes were to be washed by his own servants, and no one else was allowed to touch them. All the rooms of the prince’s quarters
had to be swept and scrubbed with soap three times a day. The fear of disease was always present for infants and small children. A charming cameo can be found, in the Royal Collection, of Henry with his arm around the infant boy; it is one of the few images that show the king as a natural human being. In the spring of the following year the king spent much time with his son ‘dallying with him in his arms . . . and so holding him in a window to the sight and great comfort of all the people’. For the next six years Lord Edward would be brought up, as he himself put it in his diary, ‘among the women’. This had also been the fate of his father.

Henry was soon in active pursuit of another wife. He told his ambassadors at the imperial court in Brussels that ‘we be daily instanted by our nobles and Council to use short expedition in the determination of our wife, for to get more increase of issue to the assurance of succession, and upon their admonitions of age coming fast on, and that the time slippeth and flyeth marvellously away, we be minded utterly to be within short space at a full resolution, one way or other, and no longer to lose time’. ‘Marvellously’ is an appropriately sixteenth-century word. ‘I marvel’ may mean ‘I wonder’ or ‘I am amazed’. So a short dialogue might be: ‘I marvel that . . .’; ‘I marvel that you marvel . . . ’

Although he was preparing himself for a fourth marriage, Henry never wholly forgot Jane Seymour. He made two subsequent journeys to her familial home, Wolf Hall, and in his will he ordained that ‘the bones and body of our true and loving wife Queen Jane’ be placed with his in the tomb. He himself might have been placed in it sooner than he intended. In the spring of 1538 the ulcers on his swollen legs became blocked, and it was said that ‘the humours which had no outlet were like to have stifled him’. It seems possible that a blood clot entered his lungs; for twelve days he lay immobile and scarcely able to breathe, his eyes and veins standing out with the protracted effort. Rumours spread that the king of England was dead, and arguments arose over the relative claims of Edward and Mary to the throne. Yet the fury of the fit eventually passed. Soon enough, he was recovered.