Great Harry

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  The scene remained long in Hussey's memory, an image to inspire

  fidelity and fondness. Yet like all those who frequented the court Hussey kept in mind another image of the king, as the stem monarch who had sent many to execution, the changeable lord who had sworn "that there was not a head so fine that he would not make it fly."^^

  In 1538 his wrath fell on his first cousin Henry Courtenay, marquis of Exeter, and on the relatives of Cardinal Reginald Pole. Exeter, his wife Gertrude Blount and their little son were imprisoned in the Tower, and the marquis was executed. Henry had suspected his cousin's loyalty for years, ever since he and his wife had given comfort and support to Katherine of Aragon. Now he believed the marquis guilty of conspiring to marry his son to Henry's daughter Mary, endangering Prince Edward's right to the throne, and of being in league with Reginald Pole's brother Lord Montague.

  The Poles were under suspicion on several counts: Reginald Pole, in exile on the continent, was actively opposing the king and everything he stood for, and his brothers Henry and Geoffrey and his mother Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury, were believed to be in communication with him. Henry Pole, Lord Montague, had no love for the king and had spoken treasonous words against him. In return for his testimony against his brother, Geoffrey Pole was allowed to go free, on condition that he leave England; Lord Montague, his young son, and his mother were imprisoned. Montague was executed along with Exeter. The aged countess was spared, though forced to remain in the Tower. No one ever saw the boy again.

  Before the wave of executions ended sixteen persons had died. Of these, the Courtenays and Poles had undeniable, if somewhat remote, claims to the throne. They were undeniably conspirators, or would-be conspirators, though their ineptness made them innocuous.^^ That the heads of these Yorkist families should be kept under guard, perhaps even killed, was understandable. But only vindictiveness, it seemed, could account for the hounding of their womenfolk and young children.

  A Protestant writer tried to make Henry the hero of the incident, describing in a treatise how God himself had warned the king against the evil done by the "arch-traitor" Pole and his allies. But such propaganda left the wary men and women of the court unconvinced. Many of them preferred to heed Lord Montague's sour warnings about Henry shortly before his execution. "He would be out of his wits one day," Montague had said, "for when he came to his chamber he would look angrily, and after fall to fighting."^^ The doomed courtier had seen at close range the dark si de of the k in g's nature : he at least believed that Henry's ebullient exterior was losing ground to anothejr^self. Without knowing it Montague had foretold his own fate. "The king never made [a] man," he was overheard to say, "but he destroyed him again either with displeasure or with the sword."

  Great was the crying, the running and riding, Which at that season was made in that place; The beacons were jyred, as need then required; To hyde their great treasure they had little space. Dub a dub, dub a dub, thus strike their drums; Tantara, tantara, the Englishman comes.

  On the high towers and battlements of the medieval town of Aigues-Mortes in the Rhone delta soldiers of Francis I and Charles V kept careful vigil. Within the town their royal masters were meeting face to face for the first time in many years, to make peace.

  Francis and Charles had been at war in earnest for two years, ever since the French had invaded the Savoy and Piedmont in the spring of 1536 and the imperialists had retaliated by overrunning Provence and Burgundy. The conflict had been inconclusive, and dispiriting. The French failed to secure Milan as they had hoped, and succeeded only in provoking a massive counterattack. Challenging Francis to personal combat, the emperor led an army of fifty thousand into the Languedoc, where his men burned and killed and tore down every object in their path. Peasants fleeing across their smoldering fields could find neither food nor refuge; their beasts slaughtered and their granaries emptied, they starved before they could make their way to safer ground.

  Yet in the end the imperialists suffered even greater losses. The mighty army drew up before town after town, only to find them too well fortified to assault and too well provisioned to besiege. Before long the besiegers were themselves entrapped. They were short of food, and when they tried to draw water they found the wells poisoned. Raids and ambushes drew blood along the outskirts of the camp; within it dysentery was an even more effective scourge. With thousands dying and little hope of a major conquest Charles ordered his army to retreat, but the long march back across the frontier was fatal to many among his weakened troops. Two men in five died, and the dying were left by the wayside. "All the roads were strewn with dead and dying men," an eyewitness wrote, *'with lances, pikes, arquebuses and other weapons, with horses abandoned because they could not keep up." Mounds of corpses, horses and men together, marked the route of retreat—a victory of sorts, if a costly one, for the ravaged French.

  Years of such bruising yet futile combat left both sides enfeebled.

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  Francis had been cheated of his hoped-for gains in Italy, while Charles had been prevented from meeting major threats on the other frontiers of his wide empire. Turkish fleets menaced his holdings in Italy, and Turkish pirates raided the Barbary coast; Turkish armies pressed him on the eastern frontiers of his empire. The sultan, Suleiman, was in league with the French king, who wryly excused his unholy alliance on grounds of expediency. "When wolves fall on my flock," Francis said, ''it is necessary to call upon dogs for help." Within the German-speaking lands of Charles V the Lutherans, also allied with France, were dominant everywhere but in the palatinate, Bavaria and the Austrian territories, and there was unrest at Ghent in the Netherlands.

  The pressure for peace was great, yet no one could have foreseen the spectacle of amity the two sovereigns displayed at their historic meeting. They embraced as brothers. Charles showed tender affection for Francis' sons—one of whom, Henri, he had once kept as a hostage. "My brother," Francis exclaimed to Charles with extravagant mendacity, "I am your prisoner once again!" The oblique reference to the aftermath of the battle of Pavia was meant as a chivalrous compliment; the emperor returned it by removing from his own neck the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece and placing it around the French king's throat. The negotiations were as amicable as the public politeness. In two days a ten-year truce was agreed to, with Charles and Francis pledging themselves to join forces against all those who opposed Christian unity—by which they meant Francis' allies the Turks and the Lutherans and, in all probability, the renegade king of England.

  Aigues-Mortes had been built in the thirteenth century by the sainted Louis IX as a launching point for his crusades. The agreement reached there in 1538 had the aura of a crusade about it, for it symbolized the launching of an offensive by Catholic Europe. Hapsburg and Valois, the two great Catholic powers, seemed to be drawing together at last. The pope, Paul III, had summoned a General Council of the church to try to heal the religious schism, and was about to release the time-honored weapon of excommunication against Henry in an effort to return him to the fold. In December he issued a bull renewing the execution of the excommunication drawn up three years earlier. Henry was declared deposed, and his subjects were freed from all obligations to him. In the eyes of the Roman church, England was now forfeit to the pope's champion—a prize of conquest to be seized in the name of the faith.

  As Henry stood by in isolation the battle lines were being drawn around him. What comfort he had taken from the divisions among his enemies now dwindled, and the prospect of invasion and incited rebellion, always a hovering possibility, began to loom as an immediate challenge. "The king is at present very much surprised, bewildered and perplexed at what has happened," Chapuys wrote to Charles V just after the Franco-imperial treaty was signed. "He has evidently lost a good deal of his former bravery and buoyancy of spirits, showing at present greater mildness of temper and even simplicity than was his wont before."^ The imperial ambassador noted that worry glazed the king's eyes and d
oubt checked his air of command; the French ambassador Castillon recorded

  only his camouflage of hauteur and empty boasts. 'The friendship will not last long," the king told him contemptuously. Surely some issue would arise to cloud the newfound accord—probably the much-debated issue of Milan, which had not been mentioned during the recent discussions at Aigues-Mortes. Actually, Henry told Castillon, the emperor had offered Milan to him, more than once, and had renewed the offer within the last few days.^

  Such high talk was hardly credible; more important, it did nothing to increase England's security. Clearly what Henry needed was an ally, but which? Superficially at least the natural choice would seem to be the German Protestants. Despite the mutual invective of the 1520s—when Henry referred to Luther as "a great limb of the devil," and Luther dismissed Henry as a ''damnable rottenness and worm"—there had been frequent contact, both political and theological, between England and the Lutheran principalities during the following decade. Henry was disappointed in his hope for Lutheran support for his marriage to Anne Boleyn (though for a brief, fantastic time England was allied with the thriving Protestant town of Liibeck and Henry was promised endorsement for his marriage to Anne, twelve gunships, and the crown of Denmark).^ But there was extensive communication on doctrinal matters, and in 1536 English envoys at Wittenberg came to preliminary agreement with Lutheran leaders on a joint statement of faith. Meanwhile the Lutheran princes had been creating a vital Protestant political organization, the Schmalkal-dic League, with its own officials and treasury, and its own troops. The more powerful the League grew, the more advantageous an alliance came to seem. All that remained was to achieve theological concord.

  Here the Lutherans were to be disappointed. The theologians they sent to Henry's court in the summer of 1538 to draw up a definitive declaration of faith found compromise with their English counterparts impossible on several points. The English refused to take a stand against private masses, or to permit priests to marry. Nor had they moved toward the Lutheran practice of offering both bread and wine to the laity during the mass. Months of deliberation ended in a stalemate, and in the end the Germans returned home, their mission and the hopes of both parties for an alliance temporarily abandoned.

  When the Lutherans presented detailed written arguments in defense of their views they were somewhat taken aback to receive replies written by the king himself. As earnest and vigorous a controversialist as he had been while his nullity suit hung in the balance, Henry devoted hours of labor to doctrinal questions. He read the drafts his bishops drew up line by line, phrase by phrase, critically assessing each word and noting alternative choices in the margins. Often he made dozens of corrections. On such major theological formulations as the Ten Articles, put forth as the benchmark of faith for the English people in 1536, Henry determined the very nature of belief, defining a middle ground between Catholic orthodoxy and the teachings of the reformers on baptism, penance and the eucharist and diverging sharply from Catholicism in omitting the remaining sacraments entirely.

  As the author of his subjects' faith Henry had his disadvantages. His

 

  292 GREAT HARRY

  learning was impressive—he was able to detect errors in Bishop Tunstall's reading of Greek, and to inform him that in construing Chrysostom he had "gathered a wrong sense upon his words"—and his opinions were thoughtfully taken. But it was the learning of a gifted layman, a dilettante capable, as Archbishop Cranmer found to his dismay, of making the sort of alterations in a crucial passage that turned it into error or nonsense. What was more, though the king could argue with the overfine exactness of a medieval schoolman his religious mentality was Erasmian; caring more for the quality of belief than for its external signs, he preferred to define a range of tolerated opinions than to prescribe a single narrow path. And on some points he was simply idiosyncratic. Rejecting the existence of purgatory he found distasteful, and he held a peculiar view of the Christian's need for divine grace in order to be saved—a heretical opinion known to the early church as semi-Pelagianism.'*

  Whatever the vagaries of the king's personal religious taste his realm appeared to be squarely in the reform camp. Nowhere in Europe was the destruction of.lhej3^ld_church so evident to the eye. By 1538 at least half the religious houses in the country had been emptied, dismantled and torn down, the greatest of them now going the way of the lesser. Visitors to London were struck by the transformation of the monastery churches, some partly destroyed, others converted to a startling variety of secular uses. The church of the Crutched Friars was serving as a quarry for stone to repair the Tower. A nobleman had bought the church of the Austin Friars in order to store his com and coal supplies in the steeple, while his son, having sold off all the usable building materials, stabled his horses in the nave. Convent buildings housed factories, friary churches government storehouses. The king's hunting nets and tents were kept at the Charterhouse, while St. Mary Graces was crammed with naval supplies, including huge ovens for baking biscuit for the seamen.^

  A more recent outrage had been the despoiling of the holiest shrine in Christendom, the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Since the twelfth century pilgrims had come by the thousands to kiss the silver-encased skull of the martyr and to lay their offerings before the gilded coffin that held his remains. In gratitude for the miracles he had performed kings and nobles had brought jewels by the hundreds to be set into his shrine, many of them gems of extraordinary size and brilliance. Over time the tomb had become an incomparably dazzling monument to piety and wealth, the earthly riches of the saint echoing his heavenly merits. When the king issued a proclamation denying Becket's martyrdom at the hands of Henry II (the archbishop had been "slain in the throng," the document read, after provoking a violent quarrel) the public outcry was considerable; when he ordered the tomb stripped of its ornaments, the shrine demolished and the relics burned, the lamentation reached the Holy See. It was said that the cardinals in Rome were more horrified by the news from Canterbury than by the Turkish destruction of the Christian fleet, and their dismay at Henry's brutal sacrilege was shared by most of the Christian world.

  But though evidence of England's breach with her Catholic past was everywhere, doctrinal chan ge,Jiad_been_relativdy,siight. Having severed its ties to Rome, the new English church had entered a period of consolidation, and was in fact moving further to the right on points of belief. In May of 1539 the Ten Articles were superseded by another doctrinal formulary, the Six Articles, which marked a return to Catholic orthodoxy and a final rejection of Lutheran tenets. The conservative voices in the Council—chiefly Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, and Norfolk, men whose views paralleled the king's own—had won out over the Protestant moderates Cranmer and Cromwell. And as the Six Articles were to remain the official theology while Henry lived, their victory was permanent.

  Those who opposed the new distillation of belief were subject to be hanged as felons; in particular, those who denied the authorized teaching of transubstantiation (the doctrine that the bread and wine of the mass are miraculously transformed into Jesus' body and blood when consecrated by the priest) were to be burned as heretics. To an extent these severe measures were called forth by the appearance of a new religious population. For the first time in 1538, sacramentaries, followers of Zwingli who denied transubstantiation, and Anabaptists, radical Protestants advocating re-baptism of adults, began to arrive from the continent. Unlike the Lutherans, these reformers had no stable leadership or traditional political organization. Even to moderate Protestants they seemed outcasts, dangerous carriers of spiritual and social anarchy. To Henry and his advisers they were intolerable, a scourge to be banished, exterminated, or, just possibly, persuaded of better views.

  On a November afternoon in 1538 the king's great hall at York Place was readied for an unprecedented event. King Henry was to engage in theological debate a priest who dared to deny the miracle of transubstantiation. That the Supreme Head of the church should take note of t
he opinions of a renegade cleric was remarkable. As a rule, he confined his participation in doctrinal controversies to meticulous written glosses or commentaries, though when the Six Articles were being debated in Parliament six months later he joined in the discussions in person, "confounding them all with God's learning." When learned treatises came to his attention he customarily handed them over to one of his advisers to read, then to another "of an opposite way of thinking," and finally arrived at an opinion from their comments.^ But if this debate was extraordinary it had a special purpose: to display with memorable formality the king's zeal for truth, and to refute utterly the radical teachings that threatened the Henrician church.

  Scaffolding had been built up around the walls for the spectators, and at one end of the hall was a dais with a throne for the king. Colorful tapestries had been hung around the walls and behind the throne, and when Henry entered and mounted the dais, dressed from head to foot in white silk, he seemed to shine with an unearthly brilliance. Most of the lords and great churchmen were present, along with a battery of theologians and judges. All of these stood ready to support the king's argu-

  ments, which considering their source must after all be irrefutable. There was no one to speak for Henry's opponent, John Lambert, but himself, and given his isolation, the peril under which he stood and the pointed arguments of the king and his supporters it is amazing Lambert lasted as long as he did.

  The arguing went on for hours, with Lambert upholding the view that it was impossible for the bread and wine of the mass to retain the outward appearance of bread and wine (their "accidents," in Aristotelian logic) after their essential nature (or Aristotelian "substance") had changed. No miracle takes place during the eucharistic celebration, he maintained, only a commemoration of Jesus' passion, enacted to encourage piety. Lambert's position was radical in the extreme, and it was a relatively easy task to cite the writings of both Catholic and moderate Protestant theologians against him. This the king did, "fulminating the most vehement articles" to confute his opponent's reasoning and "sundry times confounding him" by scripture as well.