In the year Henry VII died his minister Edmund Dudley had written that the king's purpose had been "to have many persons in his danger at his pleasure." Henry VIII had executed Dudley in the first days of his reign. Now, it seemed, he had begun to incarnate the dead man's epitaph for his father.
Here take thy queene, our King Harry, And love her as thy life, For never had a king in Christentye, A truer and fairer wife.
Nothing could possibly interest him less, Henry said publicly after Anne Boleyn's execution, than to marry again. When the subject of his remarriage arose—as it did the very day after the king became a widower—he dismissed the possibility out of hand. The French ambassador offered him Francis I's daughter Madeleine, and almost before the words were out of his mouth Henry refused her, saying that at sixteen she was too young for him and that "he had had too much experience of French bringing up and manners" besides. The reference to Anne's Gallican education was unmistakable; the ambassador hastily withdrew the suggestion.^
The weeks of waiting while Anne and her accused accomplices were tried and executed had put Henry under little apparent strain. Just as he had separated himself from Wolsey and Katherine, suddenly and finally, he now cut himself off from Anne and the men he believed to be her lovers. To make certain no unpleasant confrontations arose he confined himself indoors during the day, coming out only to walk in the gardens of the palace. Late at night, though, he had himself dressed in silk and velvet and, sparkling with jewels, called for his bargemen to row him downriver to his evening's pleasures.
The courtiers who entertained the king during these weeks went out of their way to adorn their banqueting halls with beautiful women, and tried to smile good-humoredly while he loudly—some thought too loudly— slandered Anne for her transgressions, and enjoyed himself with conspicuous exuberance. He told anyone who would listen that Anne had betrayed him with a hundred men, that her faults were without number and her treason unforgivable. He behaved himself, one observer noted, as a man who had just rid himself of a "thin, old and vicious hack," and was looking forward to acquiring a new mount.
After showing the king lavish hospitality one evening, the bishop of Carlisle told Chapuys how Henry had displayed "an extravagant joy" as he dined, surrounded by ladies, and had unburdened himself at length about his misalliance with Anne. He had long expected to find his queen unfaithful, he said, and had gone so far as to compose a tragedy on the theme. So saying he took a little manuscript out of his pocket and offered
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it to his host. The disconcerted bishop forbore to read the book, but Chapuys speculated later that it might have contained some of Henry's ballads—ballads Anne and her brother were accused, at their trials, of ridiculing.^
Henry's effusive merrymaking was meant to disguise his lingering misgivings about Anne's fate, and to distract him during the final suffering of the woman who was, after all, the great love of his life. His nightly revelry had another purpose as well: to deflect curiosity about what company he kept during the day. For by day he was making final arrangements enabling him to marry Jane Seymour.
"The king hath come out of hell into heaven," wrote one of Henry's privy chamber gentlemen when he heard Jane was to replace Anne, "for the gentleness in this and the cursedness and the unhappiness in the other." The contrast between the two women was indeed striking. Jane was fair, even pale, where Anne had been dark. Jane was well mannered, steeped in the courtliness Henry prized; Anne had been at best impertinent, at worst unmanageable. Anne had been wild, but Jane was tame— "the most virtuous lady and veriest gentlewoman that liveth"—and beyond her docility of temperament she seemed eminently fit for the chief queenly responsibility of bearing the king sons.
The Seymours were prolific. Jane was the eldest daughter in a family often, and her brother Edward fathered a dozen children. This enhanced Henry's liking for her, as did her modest refusal of his gifts and, in all probability, his advances. While Anne lived Jane behaved with demure respectability, though Henry's unmistakable attraction to her caused Anne "intense rage." But with Anne disgraced and awaiting death in the Tower the marriage plans went forward, and on May 20, the day following the queen's execution, Henry and Jane were formally betrothed.
Because the prospective bride and groom were both descended from Edward III (and thus were too near by blood to marry under church law), Archbishop Cranmer had to issue a dispensation permitting the marriage. There were none to object, however, as both the betrothal and the marriage were secret. Eleven days after Anne's death Henry married Jane in the queen's closet at York Place, and began to make elaborate plans for her coronation. She would be crowned in October, he decided, with the crown that had been Anne's and Katherine's, a heavy gold coronal set with sapphires and rubies and pearls. The festivities would outshine any yet seen, with the queen riding from Greenwich to the city in a huge ship built in imitation of the famous Bucentaur of Venice and saluted with pageantry and music of surpassing beauty.^
With the new alliance came changes in the succession. Three-year-old Elizabeth, less than unwanted now as the daughter of a traitress, was declared to be not the king's child at all, but the daughter of Anne and her convicted lover Henry Norris. (There were those who said she was not even Anne's child, but a supposititious baby represented as Anne's to disguise her childlessness.'*) Twenty-year-old Mary was reconciled to her father, but not before she had undergone much agony of conscience. What had kept her sane during years of mistreatment had been her
unshakable defense of her mother's marriage and her own right to the throne; now, to preserve her Hfe, she swore an oath denying her legitimacy. Henry's old affection for his daughter returned, reinforced by their similarities in face and voice and strength of presence. But they were from now on tacit political enemies, and it was Mary's emerging purpose to undo all that her father was doing should she come to the throne.
By an irony of fate Henry's only surviving son died less than two months after Jane Seymour became queen. Henry Fitzroy had been unwell for some time; were it not for his illness, Cromwell said, the king '^certainly intended to make [him] his successor, and would have got him declared so by Parliament."^ As it was his death was untimely, for both Mary and Elizabeth had been declared ineligible to succeed and Jane had yet to conceive. To minimize uncertainty about the succession the king gave orders that his son's body should be transported into the country and buried secretly, and entrusted the delicate matter to Fitzroy's father-in-law Norfolk. Through the carelessness of Norfolk's servants the arrangements lacked both secrecy and dignity. In place of the closed cart the king ordered the corpse was borne in a wagon covered with straw, and there were no mourners save two attendants who followed at a distance.^
Hearing of this Henry was gravely displeased, and his anger fell on Norfolk, whose influence was in any case waning as that of the Seymours rose. A rumor reached the duke that the king meant to send him to the Tower. Norfolk was as fearful as he was enraged, and hurriedly wrote out his will before pouring out his feelings in a letter to Cromwell, written "with the hand of him that is full, full, full of choler and agony." He longed to challenge the rumor-monger who spread the story to a duel, the duke wrote, not only to "prove himself the more honest man" but because of the monstrous injustice of the accusation. The Tower was for traitors; Norfolk was the most steadfast servant the king had. "When I deserve to be there," he wrote with aristocratic contempt, "Tottenham shall turn French."
The rumor that troubled Norfolk was as much a product of the unsettled times as it was of the king's uncertain temper. The popular reaction to Henry's religious policies, to his vengeful executions, to the atmosphere of suspicion and fear fed by informers and presided over by the hated Cromwell was building to a climax. Even as the king and his new bride hunted together in the summer months, taking dozens of red deer in each park they visited and enjoying "good sport," the dissatisfactions grew unrestrained. Finally in October, as the hunting season ended, a season of rebellion began.
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The risings that erupted in the fall of 1536 created the greatest single crisis Henry would face as king. Beginning in Lincolnshire in the early days of October rioting spread to the entire East Riding, then westward until the rest of the north was up. Altogether the rebels numbered at least twenty thousand—some said forty—while the king could send only eight thousand against them. The army of the discontented could not at first be overcome, merely held in check by a promise of royal pardon. Throughout the fall and into the winter of 1536-37, the northern men held
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undisputed sway over the king's lands and cities and castles, and came near to sparking a greater upheaval that might have brought invasion from the Scots border and from the armies of the continental powers as well.
It was afterward clear that the north country risings were less spontaneous than planned, less an explosion of popular disaffection than an organized bid for political power led by nobles and local gentry frustrated by increasing royal authority.^ But to those who took part in it the rebellion had the character of a massive popular outcry against all that the king had purposed and done in the last decade—his repudiation of Katherine and her daughter, his transformation of the church, his harsh punishments for treasonous words and his reliance on unworthy, lowborn advisers such as Cromwell. Above all it seemed an outcry against the most recent and most visible of his assaults on the old religion: his dissolution of the monasteries.
A year and a half before the unrest in the north broke out an official scrutiny of the wealth and inner life of England's monastic institutions began. Royal investigators examined the estate books and accounts of the monks and nuns, noting with care the extent of their landed property, the profits of their rents and tithes, their mining and milling and fishing interests. At the same time, monastic visitors gathered evidence about the lives of the religious, inquiring into their observance of the monastic rule, their regard for holiness and wholesome surroundings, the sincerity of their vocations. The results of these investigations—which were by no means unprejudiced—were damning in the extreme. The decay, criminality and moral corruption documented by the examiners were appalling; to the king and his vicar general, Cromwell, they seemed to reaffirm the label one of Cromwell's correspondents had given the religious houses— ''slaughterhouses of the conscience."®
The physical circumstances of many monasteries and convents bore witness to a way of life in decline. Clathercott, a house of Gilbertines, the visitors found to be "old, foul and filthy." At the Benedictine priory of Wymondham the mass vestments were in tatters, and the bread and wine too moldy and sour to be used in the eucharist. At Dorchester near Oxford the buildings were in an advanced state of dilapidation; the locks had disappeared from all the doors, and the church and cloister had become almost "a public highway." Poverty accelerated the deterioration. Often the monks had no money to make repairs or to replace worn furnishings or habits. The monks of Westacre were so impoverished, they told the king's representatives, that they had been forced to pawn one of their most revered relics—a piece of Saint Andrew's finger.^
If the external decay in the monasteries and convents was lamentable the decline in their spiritual lives was even more to be deplored. The inmates themselves gave eloquent testimony to the atmosphere of mean-spirited turbulence to be found in the cloister. A monk of Wynchelcomb wrote to Cromwell begging to be released from the monastic "prison" he had entered as a boy of thirteen. Holiness was foreign to his fellow-monks, he wrote. He had never seen less charity and more envy, less quietness and more disharmony than among his brethren. Strife and
dissension were more common at Wynchelcomb than in the outside world, and the hypocrisy of men who professed goodness and practiced evil was almost more than he could stand. A similar pattern of hypocrisy was discovered among the nuns of Redingfield, where the sub-prioress had a vicious temper and struck the nuns, and at a Lincolnshire priory where the prioress kept her half-starved nuns in the stocks. Another monastic superior was reported to be "occasionally mad," and was given to drawing his sword against the monks.^^
Corroboration for the examiners' findings about convent violence came from no less a partisan of the old regime than Thomas More, who knew at first hand of an incident concerning the prior of a religious house and a band of cutthroats he hired to commit murder and sacrilege. The evil was carried out at the prior's direction, but before the murderers began their work the prior paid an odd respect to his vocation by taking them into his cell and forcing them to pray on their knees to the virgin. ^^
Sexual sins accounted for the majority of monastic irregularities, according to the royal visitors. Monks with mistresses, nuns with bastard children, homosexuality and even incest were documented in abundance. Among the monks of Bath were some who kept ten mistresses, others who had nearly as many; at Farley the prior kept company with eight prostitutes, and immorality of many kinds was so commonplace, the royal deputies wrote, that *'the place was a very brothel." When they came to the London house of the Crossed Friars they found the prior "in bed with his whore, both naked, about eleven o'clock in the forenoon upon a Friday." Rather than make excuses the prior leaped out of bed, knelt before the officials and begged them to accept thirty pounds and say nothing. ^^
Few religious sinned as ebulliently, though, as the abbot of Ceme, who let the lands and buildings of his house go to ruin while he cultivated an extravagantly secular life and indulged his monks when they followed his example. He kept concubines in the cellars, so the report ran, but brought them up to the refectory table to sit beside him at mealtimes, and squandered the abbey's income on supporting them and the children they bore him. The abbot tolerated similar lapses from saintliness in his monks, allowing them to gamble at dice and cards and to keep company with women, asking only that the female companions be out of the house by evensong so as not to hinder vespers.^^
In actuality much that was reported about convent life was distorted by half-truths; some of the visitors' claims were either outright lies or the product of highly biased observation. Where the royal examiners saw vice others noted industriousness and dedication. The prior of Folkstone, condemned as lax by the monastic visitors, was in fact in process of repairing his house at his own expense when they arrived, laying down a new pavement, rebuilding the bakehouse and the monks' sleeping quarters, and buying new vestments.^^ The men sent to tear down the religious houses not infrequently noted contradictions between the official reports and what they found, and in the absence of systematic counterevidence the commissioners' findings must be read with some skepticism.
Nor were the commissioners themselves above suspicion. One of their
number, Dr. John London, led a thoroughly vice-ridden life and was even accused of attempting to seduce the nuns in the course of his visitations.^^ On balance, however, even the most sympathetic students of sixteenth-century monasticism concede that the spiritual life of the religious had become dulled, and that immorality, violence and excess corroded the sacred observances. If the king's visitors overlooked evidence of revivifying forces at work among the monks and nuns, they also found the corruption they sought.
In the spring of 1536 Parliament approved the dissolution of all monastic houses with incomes of less than two hundred pounds a year— some three hundred institutions—condemning them for their "manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living." Some eighty houses bought temporary exemptions from the king, and so staved off destruction for a time, but for the rest the process of closure soon got under way. The monks were given pensions and turned out (nuns received nothing); the animals and tools were sold off, the chalices and plate and other treasure removed, along with the furnishings. Eventually teams of skilled workmen arrived to tear down the ancient walls, and by the time they left the cloisters were reduced to ruins of stone and shattered glass.
For the most part the work of destruction went smoothly, but some resistance was encountered. When the royal commissioners in Northumberland arrived at th
e canonry at Hexham, they found the religious armed and in harness, and prepared for a siege. As soon as they entered the town of Hexham the common bell began to ring, signaling an emergency. Then the great bell of the monastery was sounded, and as the town gates were shut one of the canons appeared on the roof in full armor and informed the commissioners that he and his twenty brethren were prepared to defend their house to the death before they would turn it over peaceably for destruction.
"Afore any of our lands, goods or house be taken from us," he announced, "we shall all die, and that is our full answer." Rather than challenge the canons' determination the commissioners left, but in the end the king won out. The canons were "arrant traitors," Henry claimed, and deserved to be treated as such; if they would not yield, then force would have to be used, "for force is the chief rein [of] such sudden enterprises and easethe them to be redressed." Finally, five months after the initial confrontation, Norfolk succeeded in dissolving the monastery "with very good exhortations to the inhabitants," ejecting the canons.^^
Everywhere houses of contemplation became sites of public spectacle. As the country people looked on in fascinated bewilderment, teams of workmen demolished sacred buildings so old they seemed part of the landscape. The destruction followed a common pattern. First carpenters built scaffolding around the walls and laborers dug under the foundation and shored it up with temporary wooden props. Then the props were set on fire, and when they crumbled to ashes they brought the walls down on top of them. Plumbers set to work at once salvaging the lead and carrying it to a furnace where it was melted down and carted away, while smiths sorted through the debris for useful scraps of iron and other metal.
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