Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (25 page)

In reprisal, a Scottish army of some 15,000 men advanced into Cumberland in the last week of November. They were not met by English forces, whose commanders were taken wholly by surprise by the Scottish movement, but rather by the farmers and farm labourers of the county who promptly took up their arms and mounted their horses; in this part of England, it was always wise to be prepared for combat. Then they launched a series of attacks upon the Scots, dividing their forces and killing any stragglers. When an unexpected company of horsemen suddenly appeared on the horizon, the cry went up that the duke of Norfolk had come with his men.

Norfolk was not in the vicinity at all; nevertheless the Scots fled towards the border pursued by a few thousand English soldiers hurriedly assembled by a northern magnate, Sir Thomas Wharton. Yet the Scottish forces lost their way and began to flounder in the Solway and its reaches just as the tide began to flow. They drowned, or were killed; most of them met their end in Solway Moss, a quagmire between Gretna and the Esk where they were surrounded and dispatched. Many of the greatest nobles of the land were seized and taken to London. ‘Worldly men say that all this came by misorder and fortune,’ John Knox said, ‘but who has the least spunk of the knowledge of God may as evidently see the work of His hand . . .’

James V, on hearing the news, became disconsolate and pined to death. In a literal sense he suffered from loss of power. On 8 December he heard the news that his wife had given birth to a child, Mary, who became the woeful queen of Scots. ‘The devil go with it,’ he said. ‘It will end as it began. It came from a lass and it will end with a lass.’ By this he meant that the Stuart dynasty had
been established by the daughter of Robert the Bruce, and would end with his own newborn daughter. But Mary, queen of Scots, was not destined to be the last of the line. It only came to an end with the demise of Queen Anne 172 years later. Ten days after making this semi-accurate prophecy, he was dead. The English king was jubilant. This was what sovereigns were put on earth to achieve. To win glory. To conquer their enemies. All the heaviness that had fallen upon him after the disgrace of Katherine Howard seemed to have left him.

A parliament was called at the beginning of 1543. Its first task was to grant a subsidy to the king to pay for the war in Scotland and ‘for his other great and urgent occasions’, by which was meant the coming invasion of France. An Act was also passed ‘for the advancement of true religion, and abolishment of the contrary’; one more attempt to quell the religious dissension of the country. No plays or interludes could mention the Scriptures; no one could read from the Bible in an open assembly. Merchants and gentlemen might study it in the quietness of their homes ‘but no women, nor artificers, apprentices, journey-men, serving-men under the degree of yeomen; nor no husbandmen, or labourers, might read it’.

In the late spring of the year, yet another formulation of the English faith was issued from the press. It was entitled
A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man; set forth by the King’s Majesty of England
. It became known simply as the King’s Book. Although it is in essence a conservative document, it promulgated once more the middle way between Catholicism and Lutheranism. The power of the pope was denied, but the sacrifice of the Mass was upheld. Purgatory was not quite abolished, but it was growing ever dimmer. The miracle of transubstantiation was affirmed. Faith and works were equally urgent for salvation; shrines and pilgrimages were not.

The king’s council was busy with matters of heresy in this period. In a space of some five days, from 15 to 19 March, seven suspects were brought before it or committed to several prisons. On 17 March, for example, one cleric was dispatched to the Fleet
for ‘evil opinions touching the Sacrament of the Altar’. It was said that the principal member of the conservative faction, Stephen Gardiner, ‘had bent his bow to shoot at some of the head deer’. In his Easter Day sermon Gardiner grouped together Anabaptists and those who questioned the cult of Mary, crying out from the pulpit ‘Heretics! Faggots! Fire!’ When one chaplain of Canterbury was buried in the cathedral, the bell-ringer took the censer from the thurifer and poured its burning coals over the new grave; the dead cleric was suspected of heresy.

Yet one man of Canterbury escaped. Archbishop Cranmer, the chief supporter of the cause of reform, was also suspected. At a sermon in the cathedral he was supposed to have preached that the sacrament of the altar was ‘but a similitude’; it was not Christ’s body but a token or remembrance. If he had thus spoken, then he was going much further than any other English dignitary dared. Some of the canons at his own cathedral began to whisper against him. The more orthodox members of the king’s council were heard to suggest that it was invidious to burn poor men but to allow the principal instigator of heresy to stay in favour. By the spring of 1543 they sent a declaration to the king in which a commission of inquiry into Cranmer’s teaching was suggested.

Some evenings later the royal barge was moored at Lambeth, and the king invited the archbishop for a river journey. When they were comfortably seated the king turned to Cranmer. ‘Ah, my chaplain, I have news for you. I know now who is the greatest heretic in Kent.’ He pulled out the document of accusations, collected from Canterbury by the council. Cranmer read it, and then knelt before the king. He wished the matter to be brought to a trial. He acknowledged that he still opposed the spirit of the Six Articles, but declared that he had done nothing against them. The king had always trusted, and confided in, the archbishop. He also wished to avoid further disunity and controversy in an already troubled Church.

So he asked Cranmer himself to be the judge in the whole matter. The archbishop demurred, but the king insisted. The cleric thereupon appointed his chancellor and his registrar to examine those who had accused him of heresy. The homes of the principals were searched, and papers were found that suggested a conspiracy
among them; certain letters from Stephen Gardiner were recovered. Cranmer also learned that some of his apparent allies had been implicated. But he was not a man of vengeance. Quietly he allowed the matter to rest. When the king requested that he call one of his secret enemies a ‘knave’ to his face, he replied that this was not the language of a bishop.

A further attempt upon Cranmer was made at the end of November. The king now played a game of hazard. He authorized his council to summon the archbishop on the charge of heresy and ‘as they saw cause, to commit him to the Tower’. Yet that night he summoned the archbishop into his presence. When Cranmer arrived in haste, Henry told him precisely what the council planned to do.

Cranmer seemed to receive the news meekly enough and said something to the effect that he expected a fair hearing. The king rebuked him. ‘Do you not think that if they have you once in prison, three or four false knaves will soon be procured to witness against you and to condemn you, which else now being at your liberty dare not once open their lips or appear before your face?’ Henry was acquainted with the nature of trials for heresy.

Henry then gave Cranmer his personal ring, which was a sure token of royal support; it was a sign that he had determined to take the matter into his own hands. With this, Cranmer returned to his palace at Lambeth. On the following morning he was duly summoned to come before the council, but he suffered the indignity of being kept waiting for three-quarters of an hour ‘among serving men and lackeys’. The king was informed of this very quickly, and thundered in his rage. ‘Have they served me so?’ he asked. ‘It is well enough. I shall talk with them by and by.’ It has all the making of a stage play which, from the pen of Shakespeare, it eventually became.

Cranmer stood before the council, where he was informed by his erstwhile colleagues that he was under arrest on suspicion of heretical teachings. He then showed them the king’s ring, at which they were astounded. ‘Did I not tell you, my lords?’ one of them cried out. The errant councillors were led before the king, who lectured them on the need for amity and unity. ‘Ah, my lords,’ he told them. ‘I had thought that I had had a discreet and
wise council, but now I perceive that I am deceived. How have you handled here my lord of Canterbury?’

The duke of Norfolk, one of the leaders of the plot against Cranmer, said that ‘we meant no manner of hurt unto my lord of Canterbury in that we requested to have him in durance; that we only did because he might after his trial be set at liberty to his more glory’. It was, at the best, a very weak excuse. ‘Well,’ the king replied, ‘I pray you, use not my friends so. I perceive now well enough how the world goes with you. There remains malice among you one to another. Let it be avoided out of hand, I would advise you.’ Cranmer was safe for the rest of the king’s reign.

Henry had protected his archbishop out of genuine affection but also out of policy. He did not want his nation, or indeed his religion, to be further divided. It seemed, however, that in essential matters of doctrine the reformers had lost their cause. One of them wrote that a man might journey the length and breadth of the kingdom without finding one preacher who ‘out of a pure heart and faith unfeigned is seeking the glory of our God. He [the king] has taken them all away.’ The action was of a piece with Henry’s new alliance with Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and the most Catholic king of the Spanish empire.

Yet there was a chance that reform might find a new champion. In the summer of 1543 Henry married his sixth and last wife. In the immediate court environment, to which Katherine Parr belonged, the king had, according to the Spanish ambassador, become ‘sad, pensive and sighing’. He pined for female companionship and affection. Katherine Parr – twice widowed and one of Lady Mary’s entourage – was in love with one of the king’s courtiers, Thomas Seymour. The king, however, dispatched him to Brussels as an ambassador and decided to marry Katherine Parr himself. There was no question of refusal. He may have been fat and infirm but he was the sovereign; it was her duty to accept. ‘A fine burden,’ Anne of Cleves is reported to have remarked, ‘Madam Katharine has taken on herself!’

Katherine Parr was learned, by the standards of the day, and she was also pious; she even wrote two devotional manuals, one of them entitled
The Lamentations of a Sinner
. So she had become interested, to put it no higher, in the case of religious reform.
‘Every day in the afternoon for the space of one hour,’ it was reported, ‘one of her chaplains, in her privy chamber, made some collation to her and to her ladies and gentlewomen . . .’ Among these ladies were a number of tacit Lutherans – Lady Elizabeth Hoby, Lady Lisle, Lady Butts and the duchess of Suffolk among them. One of the more interesting features of the late Henrician court lies in this recrudescence of female piety. One contemporary noted that the ‘young damsels . . . have continually in their hands either psalms, homilies, or other devout meditations’. Katherine Parr was among them and, according to John Foxe, was ‘very zealous towards the Gospel’. In good time this would bring her trouble.

Throughout this year, and the beginning of 1544, preparations were made for the great invasion of France under the combined leadership of Henry of England and Charles of Spain. The cost of the undertaking was so vast, however, that the general coinage of the realm was debased by introducing a larger amount of alloy into its gold and silver coins. By these means the king’s mint acquired large sums of money, since the face value of the currency was the same despite the smaller amount of precious metal. Prices naturally rose, at a rate of approximately 10 per cent each year, and the economy took twenty years to recover. These were the results of the king’s passion for war.

Other ways of making money were also found. It was decided to exact a ‘benevolence’ from the nation. Those who owned lands worth more than an annual value of 40 shillings were to be requested to contribute to the king’s coffers; it was their duty to the sovereign. Those who refused were punished. One alderman of London was sent as a common soldier to the Scottish border, where his commander was told to subject him to the harshest and most dangerous duties. Another alderman was simply sent to the Tower, where he remained for three months.

The preparation for the invasion had already cost much blood. Scotland had renounced all its promises and agreements with the king, concluded after the disaster at Solway Moss, and once more established the old alliance with France. Henry could not
contemplate the prospect of an enemy at his back door, and so he resolved to punish the Scots for what he regarded as their duplicity and faithlessness. At the beginning of May an English fleet sailed up the Firth of Forth and their commander, Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, was ordered to ‘burn Edinburgh town, so razed and defaced when you have sacked and gotten what you can of it, as there may remain forever a perpetual memory of the vengeance of God’. He was commanded to overthrow the castle and beat down Holyrood House, while at the same time putting to the flame all the towns and villages in the immediate vicinity. The campaign of terror was then to continue to Leith and St Andrews ‘putting man, woman and child to fire and sword, without exception, where any resistance shall be made against you’. Once more the wrath of the king meant death.

Hertford duly obeyed the orders of his sovereign and reported on 9 May that he had made ‘a jolly fire and smoke upon the town’ of Edinburgh. Nine days later he wrote that his mission was accomplished to the effect that ‘we trust your Majesty shall hear that the like devastation hath not been made in Scotland these many years’. A French fleet came to the aid of their allies and landed a considerable force which, with the Scottish army, marched to the border country; their campaign of fire and fury was duly challenged by another invasion by the earl of Hertford who in the autumn of the year destroyed 243 villages, five market towns and seven monasteries. This dance of death between the two nations would continue, at intervals, until the time of Oliver Cromwell.