Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (24 page)

The Middle Ages were a time of high Christian endeavour and the Tudors, inheriting a part of this legacy, could not help but show their religion in their lives; but the manifestations seemed odd, inconsequential. Henry VII, the founder of the dynasty, was a simple, orthodox son of the Church. Three successive popes resisted his attempt to have Henry VI canonized, lest the King’s naïvety should bring sainthood into disrepute. Henry VIII wrote on theology and for his work against Luther was proclaimed by the pope ‘Defender of the Faith’; within a few years Henry had utterly repudiated the papal claims. Marillac, the French ambassador, was amazed that the King, in the same hour, could condemn three men to death for Protestant heresy and another three for speaking in favour of the Pope. Edward VI was a pious Reformer with an interest in theology; his half-sister Mary was the most rigorous of Catholics. Elizabeth amused herself with religious argument but showed little religious feeling. In the interests of the State she executed Catholic and Puritan impartially.

The true religion of the people was equally puzzling. Only his confessor knew that Wolsey, the proudest and most worldy of prelates,
wore a hair shirt beneath his cardinal’s silken robes. The noble piety of Sir Thomas More was an example to his time, yet the faith he gave to the inhabitants of his
Utopia
was a kind of deism: ‘there is a certain Godly power unknown, everlasting, incomprehensible, inexplicable, far above the capacity and reach of man’s work, dispersed throughout all the world, not in bigness but in virtue and power.’ In the three years of his chancellorship, the humane, gentle More was no friend to heretics. In 1500 the English people were commended for their religious practice. The Venetian ambassador reported that ‘they always hear Mass on Sunday in their parish church and give liberal alms’, and he found the churches well furnished: ‘there is not a parish church in the kingdom so mean as not to possess crucifixes, candlesticks, censers, patens, and cups of silver.’ Yet some notable churches were put to strange use. Fair booths were set up in Exeter Cathedral, and St Paul’s in London was the business place for merchants, lawyers, pickpockets and prostitutes. Another commentator feared that the rich decoration of the churches was but for show; ‘men do it more for pomp and pride of this world to have a name and worship thereby in the country.’ At the dissolution of the monsteries the same men were quick enough to strip the riches from the monastic churches.

The religion of the masses was for the most part a question of habit; and the English Church, even in the days before the Reformation, had acquired English habits. It acknowledged the papal jurisdiction, but England was far from Rome, and to the Pope and the Curia these northern islands were cold, inhospitable, unattractive. Almost free from Roman intervention, the English Church was hiddenly national. In 1351, in the reign of Edward III, the Statute of Provisors prevented the Pope from making appointments to English ecclesiastical positions; two years later the first Statute of Praemunire decreed that there should be no appeals beyond the realm. And the doctrinal arguments of the fourteenth century only encouraged the latent nationalism of the English Church. The reformer Wyclif demanded that local men be appointed to local offices, that the Scriptures be translated into English and the laity instructed in the vernacular tongue. Thomas Fuller, describing the burning of Wyclif’s corpse by order of the Council of Constance, saw Wyclif as the inevitable precursor of the Reformation. The ashes were cast into the Swift; this brook led
into the Avon, that into the Severn, and so by degrees to the ocean. ‘And thus the ashes of Wyclif are the emblem of his doctrine, which is now dispersed all the world over.’

Nationalism lay hidden, but close to the surface, barely covered by old habits, old traditions, old objects of reverence. It was the conscious task of the Tudors to bring nationalism out, to tend it and strengthen it for the safety of the crown. In 1485 Henry VII came to the throne of a lawless country. The feudal barons were puffed up with independent power and ambition, the populace was turbulent. Henry packed his coffers by new taxes and used the money to establish a strong centralized administration; he broke the power of the old nobility, and he gave a new form and authority to Parliament. In all this he was helped by the ardent desire of a tired, impoverished nation for peace. But with the ghost of discord and rebellion so close behind, the monarchy was still uneasy. If the ‘very and true commonweal’ was to be founded in England, the Tudors needed some doctrine which made it a religious duty to obey their authority. Henry VIII, with an obscure but intuitive understanding of what was required, set about the fashioning of this doctrine. And the lucky tool that came to hand, enabling him to shape the country to his wishes, was the Protestant Reformation.

The Catholic Church was then, as it always had been, ripe for reform. The King could count on the hearty national prejudice of the English who for two hundred years had taken scant notice of the Pope. He had also the enthusiastic support of the landed and wealthy classes who coveted the possessions of the Church. Jean Bodin in France and Sir Thomas More in England, the greatest political thinkers of their time, both concluded that the sixteenth-century reformation in Church and State sprang from greed. ‘When I consider and weigh in my mind all these commonwealths, which nowadays everywhere do flourish’, More wrote in
Utopia,
‘so God help me, I can conceive nothing, but a certain conspiracy of rich men, procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth.’

The time was right, then, for Henry VIII to proclaim himself the head of the native English Church. The dangers of this action came more from Henry’s unstable and despotic character than from the opposition of the people. The English, then as now, were not theologians. They had no understanding of the arguments for papal supremacy; and since they did not love the Pope saw no
reason why they should not change religious masters, putting their palpable, haughty and powerful King in the place of some obscure foreigner in Rome. When the Reform Parliament met in 1529 it had behind it not only the vague approval of the masses, but also a weight of argument, as tedious as it was long, proving that God had intended national kings to rule national churches. The Scriptures proved, said the
De Vera Differentia
, setting out the characteristic Protestant argument in 1534, that the Pope’s claims were unfounded and that authority lay only in the prince. And Tyndale complained that the priest had stolen the power of the prince. ‘Kings they are, but shadows; vain names and things idle, having nothing to do in the world but when our holy father needeth their help.’ The title that Henry VIII assumed in the Acts of Supremacy was said to be merely the re-assertion of the ancient powers of the English monarchy. The power, said Bishop Gardiner, was there already, and Archbishop Cranmer agreed, saying that ‘all Christian Princes have committed unto them immediately of God the whole cure of all their subjects, as well concerning the administration of God’s Word for the cure of souls, as concerning the ministration of things political and civil governance’. That was the legal and ecclesiastical argument, and those who were too Catholic to be convinced by it were executed.

The Acts of Supremacy gave Henry what he needed. Obedience to the sovereign now became a religious duty, and the King felt safer from sedition and rebellion. And when that stroke of policy was done, Henry saw no necessity to go any further towards Protestantism. When he dissolved the monasteries in 1536, he was merely after their property; the dissolution implied no doctrinal change, and there were many good Catholics who wished to see the slack monastic orders rigorously shaken. Henry’s reformation made so few alterations to the ordinary religious practice of the people that it might have passed almost unremarked but for the exceptional wilfulness and bestiality of the King’s own conduct. The squalid affair with Anne Boleyn, which Henry used as the excuse for the break with Rome, was very much resented by the people. ‘The king’s grace’, the mouths of rumour muttered in 1532, ‘is ruled by one common stewed whore, Anne Boleyn, who makes all the spiritualty to be beggared and the temporalty too.’ They called for the King to take back Queen Catherine, and when that silent, dignified lady, after the crowning of Anne, was reduced
to princess-dowager and banished to Buckden, the crowd, in defiance of the royal proclamation, lined the way and saluted her respectfully as still the Queen. When Catherine died at Kimbolton, on 7th January 1536, Henry ordered the court to wear yellow and danced all night. ‘God be praised,’ he said, ‘We are now free from all fear of war.’

The King’s fear of opposition, his rage at being denied, his callous and intemperate character brought in a new age of pain and death. Cranmer and the bishops preached the King’s supremacy from the pulpit, but the lay minister, Thomas Cromwell, was the King’s vicar-general in spiritual matters, and the clergy took their orders from him. With his usual ruthless efficiency he sent spies and informers to sniff out contrary opinions. In April 1535 orders were given for the arrest of those who still recognized the jurisdiction of the Pope. Among the first to be taken in were the monks of Charterhouse in London, and of Sion in Middlesex. At the end of April they were condemned by a special commission under the Duke of Norfolk, and on 4th May six men were led out to execution. An astounded crowd, unused to such barbarity, saw their limbs chopped off, their chests ripped open and the spurting hearts torn out and ground into their faces. Faced with the possibility of such a death, most of the clergy very willingly and meekly followed the royal will. And the execution a month later of John Fisher, the saintly old bishop of Rochester, and of Sir Thomas More, the noblest Englishman of his age, convinced the country that the tyrant would have his way. For the rest of the century, religious argument in England, as on the continent, was carried on against the sombre music of the drum roll on the scaffold.

The reformation of Henry VIII was more an act of polity than an act of religion; it was a triumph of nationalism. The scriptural text from Corinthians, that ‘the spiritual man judgeth all things; and he himself is judged by no man’, was completely turned about. ‘Lo, I have set thee this day over the nations, and over the kingdoms’, Pope Pius V proudly quoted from Jeremiah when he attempted to depose Elizabeth in 1570. In England his words were as empty as the air, for the Tudors had made the Crown in Parliament the only governor of English life. The reform of church law which Cranmer drew up in the reign of Edward VI declared that it was for the sovereign to decide, in the last resort, what was
heresy. The English position was summed up in 1583 by Sir Thomas Smith: ‘Parliament legitimateth bastards, establisheth forms of religion, altereth weights and measures.’ The State was supreme.

Religious questions are not solved by political acts. From the death of Henry VIII to the time of the religious settlement made by Elizabeth, the belief of Englishmen was confused and changeable. What Henry himself believed may only be guessed. At the bottom of his profound egotism perhaps there lay only a simple belief in the supremacy of his own will. He certainly had not made England Protestant, but his acts of national self interest and his defiance of the Pope agreed with the thinking of the European Reformation, and so were an invitation to Protestantism. Continental Reformers such as Bucer, Peter Martyr and Ochino were attracted to England; their disputations and their command of the Protestant arguments no doubt helped the English Church to become more Protestant under Edward VI. But in the muddled years after Henry the English episcopacy could include men like Bonner and Gardiner, supporters of the Acts of Supremacy but Catholics for all that, and men like Ridley and Hooper, Calvinists in all but name. Many good men, worried in conscience and harried by prying commissions and coercive Acts of Parliament, hardly knew what they were. And for those whose belief was capriciously individual there was always the possibility of martyrdom. Many good men changed their opinions as the theology of the Church swung to Protestantism under Edward VI and severely back to Catholicism under Mary. Mary, who like her grandfather Henry VII had a strong and simple piety, was forced by her father to sign a paper disavowing the Pope, declaring her mother’s marriage incestuous and her own birth illegitimate. Elizabeth, who like her father Henry VIII looked on religion as a mere adjunct of state policy, pretended a devotion to Catholicism as long as her sister reigned.

In 1553, with the coronation of Mary, a true religious fervour intruded itself into the English confusion of religion with politics. The Queen was a Catholic and wished her realm to become Catholic once more. At first she was not intolerant; she asked her subjects to live together ‘in quiet sort and Christian charity’ avoiding the ‘new found devilish terms of papist and heretic’. But her Catholic enthusiasm had appalling consequences. In the name of
religion she seemed about to undo the independent national state which her father had so carefully created. Her chief adviser was the Emperor Charles V, and under his influence and from her own desire she made the calamitous decision to marry the detested foreigner, Philip II of Spain, despite the urgent appeal of Parliament that she should marry an Englishman. She had, after all, been treated extremely badly by the English, and supported her injured Spanish mother against her brutal English father, boasting, so the Venetian ambassador said, of her Spanish descent. At the thought of a Spanish king and a hated pope taking away the English liberties, Parliament and the country became thoroughly alarmed. Though she was warned by Wyatt’s rebellion in 1554, Mary pressed forward the restoration of Catholicism. With an acquiescent Parliament, packed with her supporters, behind her, and encouraged by the grim orthodoxy of Philip, who firmly believed in the execution of heretics, Mary began the religious policy which sent nearly three hundred Protestants to their deaths in the four years of her reign, a catalogue of executions which Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
has never allowed English people to forget. She was the only Tudor who persecuted for faith and not for treason. It is a mark of her misunderstanding of her country and her people, that she should consider acts against the State hardly important and acts against belief as worthy of death, while her subjects thought differences of religion of no account, but acts against the State to be the ultimate sin. Mary caused one final blow to national pride. At the end of her reign England lost Calais, the last of her continental possessions, and the Queen was powerless to recapture it. When Mary died in November 1558 ‘all the churches in London did ring, and at night men did make bonfires and set tables in the street, and did eat and drink, and made merry for the new queen’.