A Journey Through Tudor England (15 page)

Not every scheme that Wolsey spearheaded for the King was successful, but Wolsey had always managed to find a gracious way out of trouble until, that is, Henry sought to annul his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. Despite the Cardinal’s best efforts, after the Pope was taken captive by Katherine’s nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and with Katherine’s refusal to accept the authority of the 1529 court at Blackfriars, even the great Wolsey could not figure out a way to secure Henry’s ‘Great Matter’ through the proper papal channels. It is a huge injustice that for one so devoted to furthering his master’s interests, Wolsey became the scapegoat for the incident.

On 9 October 1529, he was indicted on a charge of
praemunire
(allegiance to a foreign power), deprived of his position and required to surrender all his properties and possessions, among them, Cardinal College. According to one observer he did this willingly, saying: ‘I would all the world knew that I have nothing but it is his [Henry’s] of right, for by him, and of him I have received all that I have: therefore it is of convenience and reason, that I render unto his Majesty the same again with all my heart.’

In the following months, though banished from court, there still seemed a chance of his reinstatement. But his rivals, nobles who had resented Wolsey as an ambitious upstart, agitated for his removal. Wolsey was urged to visit his diocese at York, and finally travelled north in April 1530. Events took a turn for the worse in November with a rumour that Wolsey had opened negotiations to acquire a papal order to force Henry and Anne Boleyn to separate. William Walsh, gentleman of the Privy Chamber, was sent to arrest Wolsey on a charge of high treason. But he would never face a trial or punishment. On the journey south to the Tower of London, Wolsey fell ill of dysentery, and died at Leicester Abbey on 30 November 1530. According to Cavendish, in these last days he mused ruefully, ‘If I had served God as diligently as I have done the King, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs.’

Known for some years as ‘King Henry VIII’s College’, Cardinal was refounded by Henry as Christ Church in 1546. During the Civil War, it became a royalist stronghold and was briefly Charles I’s court. Wolsey’s great quadrangle was completed in gratitude after the restoration of the monarchy.

Among Christ Church’s alumni are thirteen prime ministers and the great and good of literature and art, philosophy, theology (John and Charles Wesley founded Methodism as students here) and science. In the end, Wolsey achieved his goal of creating a famous place of learning and enduring splendour, even if he himself did not live long to see it.

‘We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’

I
n the centre of Broad Street in Oxford, outside Balliol College, an unceremonious small cross of cobblestones set in the middle of the tarmac road marks the site of the 1555 and 1556 burnings of the ‘Oxford martyrs’: Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer, formerly the bishops of Worcester and London, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. This inconspicuous reminder, together with the doors of Balliol College that were scorched by the fire and that now hang between the front and garden quadrangles, testify to the ugly side of the revival of Roman Catholicism in England when Mary I came to the throne.

During Mary’s reign, from 1553 to 1558, 312 people were either burned as the penalty for heresy, or died in prison after being charged with heresy. This scale of punishment for heretics was unprecedented, and ‘Bloody’ Mary’s reign remains the most intense period of Christian persecution in English history.

Mary aimed to eliminate all religious dissidents, but it is worth noting that she was not alone in believing that there could only be one true faith. Religious tolerance was not considered a virtue in the sixteenth century. All right-thinking Christians believed that it was necessary to purge the world from the polluting influence of heresy or else the spread of these diabolical errors would, they thought, incur divine wrath and threaten to overturn the social and moral order; Protestants and Catholics just differed in their understanding of what heresy was. In the Tudor period, what one believed about what happened during the Eucharist or how one was made right with God could therefore be, literally, life and death issues.

In Oxford, unlike the big burning towns of London, Canterbury and Colchester, only three Protestants were martyred. But these three were the most important leaders of the Protestant movement and, among them, Thomas Cranmer was pre-eminent. Together, they symbolised everything Mary’s Catholic government thought had gone wrong in England since the break with Rome.

Cranmer was a reforming cleric, who was constantly mired in the murky world of Tudor politics. He had risen to prominence when he acted for Henry VIII to produce the academic case for the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon, Mary’s mother. It was he who, as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533, declared the marriage to Katherine null and void, and played an important role in the coronation of Anne Boleyn. He also had the unpleasant duty of alerting Henry VIII to Katherine Howard’s infidelity in 1541 [see P
ONTEFRACT
C
ASTLE
]. But his really important work, and lasting legacy, was writing the Book of Common Prayer, the first English prayer book, published in 1549. Modified only marginally since, Cranmer’s words are still spoken in Anglican churches every Sunday.

When Mary became Queen, he was, understandably, her number one target. His support for the Protestant Queen Jane
(Lady Jane Grey) meant that he was tried and found guilty of treason at the London Guildhall in late 1553, but although this came with a death penalty, Mary wanted more: she wanted Cranmer to be officially deprived of his position and declared not only a traitor, but a heretic.

At first, Cranmer was imprisoned with Ridley, Bishop of London, and Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, in the Tower of London, and then in Bocardo, the Oxford town prison (near present-day St Michael’s Northgate on Cornmarket), although the three were later separated.

Each of the three faced a disputation (a sort of religious cross-examination) with Cambridge theologians in the Oxford University Church of St Mary the Virgin in April 1554, followed by a trial for heresy in September 1555. In the first, they were interrogated on the question of transubstantiation: did they believe that the bread and the wine actually became the body and blood of Christ after words spoken by a priest? In the second, their entire lives were on trial. They were, of course, found guilty.

On 16 October 1555, Ridley and Latimer accused of the same crime as Cranmer, were burned in a ditch outside the city gate, in what is now Broad Street. Latimer’s last words were moving and memorable: ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’

Latimer perished quickly, but poor Ridley suffered in protracted agony. Cranmer was made to watch, and was traumatised by the sight.

The deaths of his friends, his prolonged isolation from family and supporters and the terror of his own impending death began to tell on Cranmer. He wrote several statements, each varying in their degree of capitulation to the Catholic Church, and most followed by retractions. Finally, when after more than two years of
imprisonment, on 24 February 1556, the writ was issued for his burning, Cranmer collapsed and signed a full recantation of his Protestant faith.

Under normal canon law, his repentance should have saved his life, but Mary was unyielding and the burning was ordered to proceed. To celebrate his reconversion, on the day of his execution, the authorities paraded Cranmer in University Church and permitted him to pray aloud to demonstrate his repentance. Halfway through, though, he started to deviate from his text. Over the resulting commotion, he just managed to make his key message heard: ‘And as for the Pope, I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy, an antichrist with all his false doctrine.’

He was pulled from the stage and hurried through the rain and streets of Oxford to the stake. To punish the hand that had signed the recantation, Cranmer stretched out his arm into the heart of the fire, repeating, ‘This hand hath offended,’ and then ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit … I see the heavens open and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.’ Cranmer had turned his death, which could have been a great victory for the Catholic Church, into a huge coup for the Protestant cause.

The blood of the martyrs remained fixed in the English Protestant imagination for centuries. The Victorians built a memorial to the Oxford martyrs sixty-five feet away on St Giles, but it is the door licked by the flames of these human pyres, and the simple stone cross in the ground, that most evoke the terrible sacrifice of these men for the cause in which they so fervently believed.

‘Invidiae claudor, pateo sed semper amico.’
‘I am shut to envy, but always open to a friend.’

(Motto over inner door at Loseley.)

J
ust outside Guildford, at the centre of miles of picturesque parkland, is a beautiful Elizabethan mansion belonging to the More-Molyneux family. It is a lovely house with many treasures but, above all, it offers a glimpse into one of Henry VIII’s missing palaces.

An ancestor of the More-Molyneuxes, Sir William More built Loseley House in the 1560s using 860-year-old stone from the ruins of nearby Waverley Abbey. Elizabeth I visited the house on at least three occasions (1577, 1583 and 1591) and the house is suitably elegant inside as well as out.

It has some gems of Tudor portraiture and craftsmanship. The Great Hall has many important portraits, including those of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Edward VI (wearing the gold collar also worn by Henry VIII in his picture at the W
ALKER
A
RT
G
ALLERY
). Look out, too, for the painted coats of arms on the windows, which are original, from the sixteenth century. In the wood-panelled library, there is an ornately decorated overmantle bearing the arms and
initials of Elizabeth I, while the chimneypiece in the Great Chamber (or drawing room) was elaborately sculpted by French carvers in 1565 from one solid block of chalk. Elizabeth I herself is believed to have sewn the needlework cushions that you can see on the low Elizabethan ‘maid-of-honour’ chairs either side of the fireplace. Also in the Great Chamber, there are portraits of Sir William More, and his relative by marriage, the Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More, and an eighteenth-century image of Anne Boleyn.

But the real treasures at Loseley Park come from one of the most celebrated English buildings of the sixteenth century, the greatest of all Henry’s palaces: Nonsuch. Henry VIII spent over £24,000 (today, roughly £7.4 million) and nine years building Nonsuch Palace at Cuddington in Surrey, and it was still unfinished when he died. This lavishly decorated hunting lodge was built, as its name suggests, to be a palace nonpareil: a house without equal. As construction started on 22 April 1538, thirty years to the day after Henry VIII’s accession, it was almost certainly intended to be a celebration of his rule, and of his recently born son and heir, Edward.

It also had another purpose. By this stage, Henry VIII, as he was described in 1548, had ‘waxed heavy with sickness, age and corpulences of body and might not so readily travel abroad, [so] was constrained to seek to have his game and pleasure ready at hand’: because of his painful, weeping ulcer and great weight, the King could not go hunting on long progresses far from London. So he enclosed the chase of Hampton Court, and built Nonsuch within it, to provide such entertainment nearer to home. For Henry, hunting now meant sitting on a horse while his minions scared deer directly into his path!

Nonsuch was unlike any palace before it. Unusually, Henry did not build onto an existing structure; in fact, he swept away the manor house and village at Cuddington to create an ornate palace that was one of the finest examples of Renaissance architecture in
England. Rather than build a medieval-style Great Hall, as at Hampton Court, Henry ordered a long gallery — one of the first in England. In addition, while the outer courtyard had a normal turreted gatehouse in brick and stone, the inner court was timber-framed, and those timbers, hidden by plaques of carved slate, held
stucco duro
or fine plasterwork panels that created a dazzlingly ornamented display. William Camden in his
Britannia
of 1586 wrote that Nonsuch was, ‘built with so great sumptuousness and rare workmanship, that it aspireth to the very top of ostentation for shew, so as a man may think, that all the skill of Architecture is in this one piece of work bestowed, and heaped up together’.