House Of Treason: The Rise And Fall Of A Tudor Dynasty Read online

  As the dissolutions progressed, Norfolk continued to eye the potential spoil as greedily as anyone else of his class. While in the north during the bleak aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace, he spoke approvingly of the Augustinian priory at Bridlington, East Yorkshire, which had ‘a barn all covered with lead, [with] the largest, widest and deepest roofs that I ever saw’. The richness of its shrine of St John excited him still further: ‘If I [dared] be a thief I would have stolen [three carved retables4] to have sent . . . to the Queen’s grace.’5 At long last, he had been granted the Benedictine nuns’ house at Bungay, which fell like an over-ripe plum into his lap on 18 December 1537, at a modest rental of £6 4s 3d per year - only a tenth of its regular annual income. But the duke’s hopes had been frustrated at Woodbridge, where the priory site was granted to Sir John Wingfield and his wife Dorothy, of Letheringham, Suffolk.6 At least he had the consolation of the prime catch of Lewes Priory’s substantial possessions in East Anglia, notably Castle Rising, another huge bargain.7 Other houses also came Norfolk’s way: he was keen to secure the Franciscan friary in Norwich and told Cromwell on 21 September 1538 that he had intended to ride into the city from Kenninghall the previous day to take the surrender of the house, but fell ill and so sent Surrey instead. The duke took pity on the ‘very poor wretches’ he had expelled and gave the grey friars forty shillings each to buy clothes for their new secular life.8 He systematically demolished the friary buildings, sold off the materials for a quick profit and left the site barren and empty.9

  His receipts for 1537 show considerable profits. Cash that ‘remains to me clear’ totalled £2,638 (or more than £1 million at 2009 prices) after deductions of £400 to his estranged wife and son and other costs. That year, he sold lands worth £568 and purchased new property worth £1,739.10

  Norfolk, however, was faced with the uncomfortable problem of the Cluniac priory of Our Lady at Thetford, the resting place of his ancestors, which faced an uncertain future after its surrender. In 1539, the duke suggested its conversion into ‘a very honest parish’ church of secular canons, governed by a dean and chapter. He proposed the first dean should be the existing prior, William Inxworth. With an eye to the religious reforms under way, with its focus on the importance of God’s Word, Norfolk also suggested the appointment of a doctor or bachelor of divinity to act as a preacher in the new church, to be paid an annual stipend of £20.

  He petitioned Henry for approval of his plans, astutely pointing out that the priory church held the remains of the king’s natural son, the Duke of Richmond; Norfolk’s first wife Lady Anne (Henry’s aunt), as well as the tombs of his own father (the second duke) and his grandfather. Norfolk was at pains to point out that he was spending £400 in erecting an impressive monument for Richmond and another for himself, ready for when he shuffled off his own mortal coil.

  His arguments struck a chord of pious resonance in Henry’s normally grasping heart, and Thetford was included in a list of five new collegiate churches to be created by the king himself. But then Henry unexpectedly changed his mind and insisted that the priory should, like all the others, be dissolved.

  This duly followed on 16 February 1540, when Prior William and his thirteen Cluniac monks signed the deed of surrender.11 Prudently, the duke had already seized the conventual seal, without which no transactions concerning the priory could be legally completed. On 9 July, Norfolk acquired the site and the priory’s extensive lands and properties throughout East Anglia on exceptionally favourable terms as the king’s ‘special gift’. He paid up £1,000 in cash and faced an annual outlay of £59 5s 1d in rent.12

  Although he ensured that the priory church was still maintained, Norfolk remained uneasy about what could happen in the future. Accordingly, he began planning a new family mortuary chapel at the parish church of St Michael, at Framlingham in Suffolk, where the remains of his first wife and ancestors could be safely re-housed.

  Cromwell, meanwhile, was intent on driving through a programme of religious reform and launched state attacks on shrines and relics, probably sparked by Henry’s belief that such ‘idolatry’ was the last vestige of Rome’s spiritual hold on his subjects. As Norfolk was to point out later, on issues of religion he had promised Henry that ‘I shall stick to whatsoever laws you make and for this cause, diverse [people] have borne me ill will, as appears by casting libels abroad against me’.13

  If the king wanted to rule over the spiritual as well as the temporal lives of his subjects, Norfolk was perfectly content. The Latin phrase Deo et regi fidelis - ‘faithful to God and king’ - aptly sums up his rather self-righteous beliefs, even if confronted by the unpalatable, as in May 1535, when his former chaplain Robert Lawrence was executed for treason at Tyburn, still scandalously wearing his Carthusian robes.14 Hence the duke’s enthusiastic persecution of Anthony Browne, in July 1538, who had chosen the life of a hermit after leaving his community, that hotbed of sedition, the Friars Observants in Greenwich.15

  Browne had declared his opposition to Henry’s supremacy and had pleaded guilty to the indictment for treason when he appeared before the Norwich justices. His execution was delayed for ten days to allow Norfolk and one of his own gentlemen, Sir Roger Townshend, 16 to win some political capital by persuading him to publicly recant. However, their attempts proved unsuccessful as the friar insisted that ‘no temporal prince was capax [able to hold] that name and authority’. The duke then summoned reinforcements - a reformed grey friar and the retired Bishop of Norwich, the theologian Richard Nykke - to dispute with the recalcitrant prisoner. Even though the bishop’s arguments, according to Norfolk, were ‘sufficient to have turned the opinion of any man not given to wilfulness as this fool’, Browne remained obdurate. The duke wrote to Cromwell, inquiring whether the friar should be sent to London to be ‘more straitenly examined and . . . put to torture’ in the Tower.

  The friar’s fate is unrecorded but he was probably executed at Norwich.17

  The supremacy was thus a rigidly enforced fact of life, although Norfolk believed that Henry did not support further radical religious change.18 Growing fears of an impending revolution in doctrine spawned a faction at Henry’s court, led by the duke and Stephen Gardiner (appointed Bishop of Winchester back in November 1531), who opposed any more liturgical reform, particularly some ideas espoused by Archbishop Cranmer.19 In Norfolk’s and his fellow conservatives’ view, it was high time to halt the damaging drift from the much-loved and secure religion of their forefathers.

  They may have been mirroring the king’s own concerns. By late 1538 and early the following year, Henry began to disapprove of suggested further reforms. Many of his subjects shared the traditionalists’ standpoint on the liturgy and one London radical reformer, Henry Brinklow, lamented how the city’s ‘inordinate rich, stiff-necked citizens processed through the filthy streets during epidemics, calling upon the saints with their cries of ora pro nobis [Pray for me . . .]’. They refused to have the English translation of the New Testament in their homes, ‘nor suffer their servants to read it, neither yet gladly read it, or hear it read’.20

  The first sign of Henry’s obsession with religious orthodoxy was the proclamation, issued in late 1538, that reaffirmed that heretics were not to be tolerated. These included Anabaptists, who recognised only the baptism of adults, and the so-called ‘sacramentaries’ who denied Christ’s corporal presence in the holy wafer and wine of the Eucharist. Upholding their beliefs meant death by being burned alive at the stake.

  A more rigorous legal regime followed that stopped the evolutionary religious reforms dead in their tracks.

  Cromwell was laid low with a fever and missed the opening of Parliament on 28 April 1539 but had recovered enough to take up his seat on 10 May. The new Speaker was one of Norfolk’s protégés, Sir Nicholas Hare,21 and the stage was set for a policy coup against the minister, which could only have been approved by the king himself. On 16 May Norfolk stood up in Parliament and, after accusing Cromwell of ‘slothfulness’ in his role
as Vice-Regent in matters spiritual,22 announced that Henry desired legislation to create new tenets of religion in England ‘to abolish diversity in opinion’. He posed six profound questions to their temporal and spiritual lordships (fully anticipating six conservative answers) which later formed the meat of the Bill. These were probably the handiwork of the irascible Gardiner, but a surviving copy of them, profusely amended in Henry’s own hand, indicates his own close involvement as God’s own deputy on earth. He edited the description of his own title in the Act’s preamble - amended from ‘Supreme Head of this Church in England’ to the resounding ‘by God’s law, Supreme Head of this Church and Congregation of England’.23

  The Bill seemed draconian. It came to be called the ‘Six Articles’ or, in Protestant eyes, the ‘whip with six strings’ or the ‘Bloody Act’. In its final version, it laid down:1. That in the most blessed Sacrament of the Altar, by the strength and efficacy of Christ’s mighty word, it being spoken by the priest, is present really, under the form of bread and wine, the natural Body and Blood of Our Saviour Jesu Christ, conceived of the Virgin Mary, and that after the consecration, there remains no substance of bread or wine, nor any other substance but the substance of Christ, God and man.

  2. Communion in both kinds is not necessarily ad salutem [the way to salvation] by the law of God to all persons and that it is to be believed and not doubted that in the flesh under form of bread is the very Blood and with the Blood under form of wine is the very Flesh as well apart, as they were both together.

  3. Priests . . . received [into the priesthood] as afore may not marry by the law of God.

  4. Vows of chastity or widowhood by man or woman made to God advisedly ought to be observed by the law of God and that it exempts them from other liberties of Christian people which without that they might enjoy.

  5. It is meet and necessary that private masses be continued and admitted in this, the King’s English Church and Congregation, as whereby, good Christian people, ordering themselves, do receive both godly and goodly consolations and benefits and it is agreeable to God’s law.

  6. Auricular [private] confession is expedient and necessary to be retained and continued, used and frequented in the Church of God.24

  Anyone who scorned, refused or abstained from confession or to receive the Sacrament ‘shall suffer such imprisonment and make such fine and ransom to the king’. On a second offence, they ‘shall suffer pains of death and forfeit all . . . goods, lands and tenements, as in cases of felony’.

  There is much talk here of ‘God’s law’ - but this was very much Henry’s law, and there were grievous secular penalties for breaking it, the severity of which bear Bishop Gardiner’s own individual stamp of intolerance.25 Transgressors faced death by hanging, drawing and quartering, and forfeiture of goods and estates - exactly the same punishment as that for traitors. Those trying to escape the new law by fleeing England would be automatically guilty of treason and therefore also liable to suffer the same terrible fate after capture.

  The Act consolidated existing laws against religious dissent and deviation: heresy was now a secular offence and closely redefined. Any person ‘by word, writing, imprinting, ciphering or any other ways to publish, teach, say, affirm, declare, dispute, argue, or hold contrary opinion’ who, together with their aiders and abettors, would be ‘adjudged heretics and therefore had [to] suffer judgement, execution, pain, and pains of death . . . by burning’.

  The debate on Norfolk’s proposals continued vociferously over three successive days, 19-21 May 1539. Henry attended each day’s debate and spoke strongly in support of the Six Articles on each occasion. Inevitably, he ‘confounded them all with God’s learning’. His presence in the House of Lords and his personal interventions meant that opposition by the likes of Archbishop Cranmer and his six reforming bishops had become nugatory. Only ‘that lewd fool’, Nicholas Shaxton, Bishop of Salisbury, persisted in his dissent, but he missed the final vote because his household was infected with the plague.26 The Act duly passed into English law on 28 June by royal assent.27

  The next morning the king joined Norfolk, Cromwell and the Duke of Suffolk at what was planned to be a conciliatory dinner with an apprehensive and bruised Archbishop at Lambeth Palace. After a strained and difficult meal at the high table, punctured by long silences, Cromwell decided to lighten the conversation.

  Courteously, he favourably compared his friend Cranmer with Wolsey, claiming that the Cardinal had ‘lost his friends by his haughtiness and pride’ but the Archbishop ‘gained on his enemies by his gentleness and mildness’. From there, the conversation went downhill very quickly.

  Norfolk, who bitterly recalled that he had saved the minister from political oblivion after the Cardinal’s downfall, sneered that at least Cromwell could speak well of Wolsey, as ‘he knew him well, having been his man’. Cromwell snapped back that, yes, he had worked for Wolsey, ‘yet he never liked his manners’. Furthermore, he ‘was never so far in love with Wolsey as to have waited on him in Rome, as he thought Norfolk would have done’, adding mischievously that, if the Cardinal had become Pope, the duke would have served him as his Lord Admiral.

  Norfolk, who had hated Wolsey with a passion, retorted ‘with a deep oath’ that Cromwell had lied.28

  A few days after the Act of Six Articles came into force, the minister’s own chaplain, Henry Molet, panicked over its provisions. He tried to recall a biblical tract from the printers, as he feared its contents would bring the full force of the law down upon him: ‘I dare not be so bold over such statutes as I can be with doctors upon scriptures,’ he bleated.

  The reformist bishops found themselves in an equal measure of distress. There were wild rumours that Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, had been arrested in disguise at Gravesend in Kent, illegally trying to flee England for the friendlier regime of the Lutheran states in Germany. The gossip was groundless, but Latimer and his fellow evangelical bishop, Shaxton, resigned their bishoprics within the week and quickly found themselves under house arrest in London.

  Within days, a barber-surgeon, a soldier and two priests, all from Calais29 and suspected of heretical sacramentary views, were interrogated in London. The Bishop of Winchester attended the examination of the soldier, Ralph Hare, at Lambeth on 6 July. When the prisoner was warned that his opinions would cost him his life, unsurprisingly he was transfixed by terror. Gardiner told him bluntly:By my troth [faith] I pity you much. For in good faith I think you a good simple man . . . [and well-meaning], but you have had shrewd and subtle schoolmasters . . . It is a pity that you should be burned, for you are a good fellow, a tall man, and have served the king right well in his wars.

  You know my lord of Canterbury’s grace here is a good, gentle lord, and [who] would be loath [that] you should be cast away. Tell me, can you be content to submit yourself to him?

  The soldier fell to his knees, crying piteously, and willingly submitted.30 As his and the other prisoners’ heresy dated from before the Six Articles had entered law, they were spared, after making full recantations. They were still paraded through the London streets as a public humiliation, each one carrying a symbolic faggot, or bundle of firewood - the fuel for heretics’ pyres - before beginning various terms of imprisonment.31

  The Act’s provisions struck very close to home for Cranmer. He had married Margaret, the niece of the Lutheran divine Andreas Osiander, at Nuremberg, while serving there as ambassador to Germany in 1532 - the year before his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury. Then, as seven years later, clerical marriage was illegal. Cranmer plainly believed in the wisdom of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ and so he packed Margaret off, back to Germany.

  He also was unable to conceal his opposition to the Six Articles, and spent many hours writing down closely reasoned arguments, supported by relevant citations from the Bible, to present to the king. His secretary, Ralph Morice, made a fair copy of his master’s treatise in a small notebook, and departed by boat from Lambeth for the short journey
downriver to Westminster, to deliver it to Henry. But he faced an alarming emergency en route:Some others that were with him in the wherry32 needed to go to the Southwark side to look at a bear-baiting that was near the river, where the king was in person.

  The bear broke loose into the river [with] the dogs after her. Those who were in the boat leapt out and left the poor secretary alone.

  But the bear got into the boat, with the dogs about her, and sank it. The secretary, apprehending [that] his life was in danger, did not mind his book, which he lost in the water.

  But being quickly rescued and brought to land, he began to look for his book and saw it floating on the river.

  So he desired the bearward [bear-keeper] to bring it to him: who took it up, but before he could restore it, put it into the hands of a priest that stood there, to see what it might contain.33

  The illiterate bear-keeper, who was employed in Princess Elizabeth’s household, was told by the priest, after a swift glance through its sodden pages, that whoever claimed the book would face certain death. The rank smell of ample reward filled the bearward’s nostrils and ‘no offers or entreaties could prevail on him to give it back’. The Archbishop’s secretary panicked, sought out Cromwell for assistance, and next day they discovered the bearward at the Palace of Westminster, seeking to hand over the book to Cranmer’s enemies, Norfolk or the odious Gardiner. The minister snatched it ‘out of his hands [and] threatened him severely for his presumption in meddling with a Privy Councillor’s book’. Cranmer was safe.