A Journey Through Tudor England (35 page)

On 2 November 1541, the very day after Henry had publicly offered prayers of thanks for his happy marriage, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer reportedly left a letter on Henry’s chair in the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court detailing the allegations of Katherine’s misbehaviour: he was too terrified to tell Henry face to face. Katherine was immediately confined to her chambers and never saw Henry again.

Henry was utterly devastated, and took his revenge. In December 1541 Culpeper was beheaded at Tyburn, and Dereham soon after suffered the usual traitor’s death of hanging, drawing and quartering. Katherine, meanwhile, was condemned by an Act of Attainder, passed through Parliament, which meant she had no chance to defend herself as she would have done at trial. The last few paragraphs of this Act created in law the general principles that consensual adultery by a queen was treasonous (previous Acts had
only made provision for ‘violation’ of the queen) and that any queen who failed to disclose her past ‘unchaste life’ would also be guilty of treason (thereby creating the law and condemning her in the same document). On 10 February 1542, Katherine was transported by barge to the Tower of London, passing under Culpeper and Dereham’s rotting heads on London Bridge. She was executed three days later.

If Pontefract seems desolate now, just imagine how it felt to Henry VIII.

‘It is a lamentable thing to see a legion of monks and nuns who have been chased from their monasteries wandering miserably hither and thither seeking means to live.’

Eustace Chapuys, Imperial ambassador to England, 1537

D
esignated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1986, Fountains Abbey has the largest monastic ruins in the country, gorgeously set in 800-acre grounds that include a beautiful landscaped Georgian water garden complete with neoclassical follies, and a deer park.

Founded as a Benedictine abbey in 1132, the monks at Fountains Abbey adopted the Cistercian rule, which meant a rigorous and austere way of life. This didn’t stop Fountains becoming, by the thirteenth century, one of England’s richest monasteries. It is still possible to wander through the fine cloisters, enjoy the vaulted ceiling of the cellarium and see evidence of the monastery’s great wealth in the warming room with its vast fireplace, the muniment room — for the storage of documents — and the abbey’s twelfth-century corn mill.

The evident beauty of the ruined medieval abbey reveals the extent of the damage and cultural trauma caused by the dissolution of the monasteries. The first sign of the coming storm came when Henry VIII’s first minister, Thomas Cromwell, ordered a survey and visitation of all monastic houses in 1535. Commissioners were sent to find out the annual income of each house, and to search diligently for hints of scandal. The resulting report, called the
Valor Ecclesiasticus
, is a colourful and gossipy list of sins and abuses, which also mocks the monasteries’ treasured relics. At Fountains, the commissioners reported finding four ‘sodomites’ and six
‘incontinentia’
(monks guilty of sexual relations with women). One of the latter was the abbot, William Thirsk, whom, they said, had greatly dilapidated his house, ‘wasted the wood’, committed theft and sacrilege and, worst of all, ‘notoriously kept six whores’.

As a result of the survey, in March 1536, an Act of Parliament was passed to dissolve the ‘lesser’ monasteries — those with an annual income of £200 or less — and to donate their land, plate, jewels and investments to the Crown. This was presented as an attempt to reform weak houses where scandalous misconduct was rife, with the Act drawing attention to the ‘manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living’ in these monasteries, in comparison to the example of the ‘great and honourable monasteries of religion in this realm wherein … religion is right well kept & observed’. This suggests that Henry VIII and Cromwell had no plans to dissolve all the monasteries at this stage.

This changed after the Pilgrimage of Grace [see P
ONTEFRACT
C
ASTLE
]. Convinced of the perfidy of the monks and the dangers of their allegiance to a power outside England, Henry became increasingly hostile to monasticism itself. Every religious house in England was now to be dissolved by the ‘voluntary’ surrender of their abbots, who would be induced by a combination of threats and incentives. So began the total eradication of monasticism in
England, with very few voices raised in dissent or resistance [see G
LASTONBURY
T
OR
].

The dissolution was still couched in the language of reform: abbots, monks, nuns and friars who surrendered their houses often signed documents expressing contrition and shame for their past way of life. Some went willingly: the abbot at Fountains (a wily monk called Marmaduke Bradley who bought his way into the abbotship after Thirsk resigned) surrendered the Abbey to the King’s commissioners on 26 November 1539 in exchange for an annual pension of £100 — which was very handsome indeed.

Between 1536 and 1540, over 800 religious houses were suppressed, and 7,000 monks, nuns, friars and their servants were turned out into the community. It was an act of incalculable cultural vandalism: invaluable medieval libraries were ransacked, irreplaceable jewellery was dissipated, finely crafted plate was melted down and architecturally important Gothic buildings were demolished. The only ones to survive intact were those established as secular cathedrals.

It has been estimated that the dissolution brought £1.3 million (today, about £400 million) to the Crown between 1536 and 1547, through the rents from, and the sale of, confiscated lands, and the acquisition of gold, silver plate and jewels. Buildings like Nonsuch Palace and Hampton Court, or coastal fortifications [see P
ENDENNIS AND ST
M
AWES
C
ASTLES
] were funded from the proceeds of the dissolution.

The Crown sold many of these lands to the nobility and gentry: it was the largest redistribution of wealth since the Norman Conquest. The dissolution created a land market in England that enriched the aristocracy and permanently changed the religious and architectural landscape of England.

At Fountains, the ruins testify to the scale of the loss. They also typify the fate of many abbeys. When the estate was sold to Sir
Stephen Proctor, he used the sandstone from the abbey’s ruins to build a grand new Elizabethan house, Fountains Hall, in the style of master mason Robert Smythson, who designed Hardwick. This elegant house, like many of the century’s architectural masterpieces, could not have been completed without raiding the fabric of the old, ruined monasteries that fell increasingly into decay.

Another abbey worth visiting in North Yorkshire is the dramatically ruined eleventh-century Whitby Abbey, on its windswept, rocky headland, jutting out into the North Sea. It, too, was suppressed in 1539 and later served as the setting for Bram Stoker’s novel
Dracula
.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In writing this book, I have depended much on the expertise and generosity of others, especially at each of the fifty places featured in this book. I particularly want to thank: Lesley Smith, Curator of Tutbury Castle; Dr Gareth Williams at the British Museum; Jane Apps, Head Steward at Hever Castle; John K. Wingfield Digby of Sherborne Castle; Jon Culverhouse, Curator, and Carolyn Crookall at Burghley House; Nigel Wright, Curator, and National Trust volunteer guide, Chiara, both at Hardwick Hall; my old colleagues and friends Mark Wallis and Stephanie Selmayr at Past Pleasures; Tudor food historian Richard Fitch; Dr Kent Rawlinson, Curator of Historic Buildings at Hampton Court Palace; and Jane Spooner, Curator of Historic Buildings at the Tower of London. Particular mention must be made of all those at Trinity College, Cambridge, who welcomed me when the college was closed to the public, namely Lord Rees of Ludlow; Pauline Smith, Porter; Professor Robin Carrell; Sue Fletcher; and Sandy Paul, Librarian. I would especially like to thank Brian Jarvis, General Manager of Thornbury Castle, for his great generosity, and the time he gave up to show me around. There are also countless members of staff and volunteers at the National Trust, English Heritage, Historic House Association and independent sites along the way, whose names I didn’t get a chance to learn, but who have helped me enormously. Thank you to you all.

I have also relied on the scholarship of numerous Tudor historians, too many to name (although I have recommended a good number in the list of further reading). I would also like to
acknowledge my debt to the authors of the guidebooks of each historic house (even if one or two proved occasionally erroneous!). I am used to recording such debts through footnotes, and crave indulgence from scholars for their absence: this book is intended as an introduction to non-specialists. Those familiar with the field will spot my influences. Any errors are mine alone.

On my travels, I enjoyed the hospitality of some marvellous people. My thanks go to Polly and Steve Bennett, Julie and Malcolm Dunn, Rufus and Cherry Fairweather, Stephen and Alice Lawhead, and Richard and Chrissy Sturt for comforting a weary traveller with good food, good wine and good company.

I am grateful, too, for the support of my colleagues at the University of East Anglia and, latterly, at New College of the Humanities, for their input, wisdom and forbearance. Thank you, too, to my virtual history community on Twitter for thoughts and contributions along the way.

I would also like to thank my editors at Ebury, Liz Marvin and Andrew Goodfellow, and my literary agent, Andrew Lownie, for all their work on this book. Thank you to my illustrator, Angela Beal, whose beautiful drawings enhance the text greatly. I am also immensely grateful to Tony Morris for putting me in touch with Random House in the first place.

Finally and above all, my very great thanks go to my parents and to my husband, Drake, for their continuing and wonderful support. Both Drake and my mother read and commented on every chapter, and both were also taken around a good many Tudor houses! Drake encouraged me to write this book from the very start and gave up a week’s holiday, and more than a few weekends, to accompany me on an intense schedule of Tudor sightseeing. Thank you to you all.

Suzannah Lipscomb

Surrey, October 2011

SDG

FURTHER READING

Architecture: general guides

Mark Girouard,
Life in the English Country House
(1978)

Mark Girouard,
Elizabethan Architecture: Its Rise and Fall
,
1540—1640
(2009)

Maurice Howard,
Early Tudor Country House: Architecture and Politics, 1490—1550
(1987)

Harry Mount,
A Lust for Window Sills: A Lover’s Guide to British Buildings from Portcullis to Pebble-Dash
(2008)

Nikolaus Pevsner,
Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England

Simon Thurley,
The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life 1460—1547
(1993)

Portraiture

Xanthe Brooke and David Crombie,
Henry VIII Revealed:
Holbein’s Portrait and Its Legacy
(2003)

Antonia Fraser and Tarnya Cooper,
A Guide to Tudor and Jacobean Portraits
(2008)

Brett Dolman, ‘Wishful Thinking: Reading the Portraits of Henry VIII’s Queens’, in
Henry VIII and the Court: Art, Politics and Performance
ed. Thomas Betteridge and Suzannah Lipscomb (2012)

Bendor Grosvenor (ed.),
Lost Faces: Identity and Discovery in Tudor Royal Portraiture
(2007)

Tatiana C. String, ‘Projecting Masculinity: Henry VIII’s Codpiece’
in
Henry VIII and his Afterlives: Literature, Politics and Art
ed. Mark Rankin, Christopher Highly and John N. King (2010)

Henry VII

S. B. Chrimes,
Henry VII
(1999)

Sean Cunningham,
Henry VII
(2007)

Michael K. Jones,
Bosworth 1485: The Psychology of a Battle
(2003)

Henry VIII