The king’s response was just as vehement. Following his lead, Parliament passed thirty-two religious bills, which, among other things, cut off all revenues to Rome, and confiscated all Church lands—by a conservative Catholic estimate, 20 percent of the land in England. Other measures suppressed monasteries, decreed that spiritual appeals by English Christians must be made to Canterbury or the king, required new clergymen to swear loyalty to the crown before they could be consecrated, and stipulated that only royal nominees could become bishops and archbishops. Then Henry took the ultimate step. In the Act of Supremacy (November 1534) he abandoned Rome completely, founding a new national church, Ecclesia Anglicana, and appointing himself and his successors its supreme head.
Sir Thomas More, Wolsey’s successor as high chancellor, had followed Henry for a time, but he had been in agony, trapped between conflicting loyalties. More was the king’s humble servant. However, he was also a devout Catholic. The less his sovereign saw of him, he reasoned, the better. Therefore he resigned the chancellorship in 1532. It was in vain. He could not hide; he was too eminent; the king was watching him closely. His personal crisis reached a climax in the spring of 1534. When the king demanded that his subjects take an oath to obey the Act of Succession, he was asking more than More could give. It meant swearing fealty to Henry and repudiating the papacy. Most of the English clergy meekly obeyed. More didn’t protest; he simply remained mute. He condemned neither the oath nor those who had taken it, but though remaining loyal to the crown in word and deed, he refused to renounce Rome—a devastating silence, because Henry was taking an enormous risk. Although he was a powerful monarch, his reign was confined to the living. England’s rising national spirit supported him, as Germany’s had supported Luther, but if the pope excommunicated his entire kingdom, condemning every Englishman to eternal flames, the possibility of an uprising would be far from remote. In this exigency the king could not hesitate.
More had already opposed Henry’s marriage to Anne and refused to attend her coronation, a mortal insult. Any tolerance of further lèse majesté by Henry would be interpreted as weakness, especially since the former chancellor, garlanded with royal honors, was the most influential man in English public life. The king could be merciless or he could forfeit his crown, and for this king that was no choice. More was charged with treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London.
At his trial More finally spoke out. Splitting the Church was a tragic crime, he said; he could not, in all conscience, be an accomplice to it. Nor, he added, could he bring himself to believe that “any temporal man could be the head of the spirituality.” He was one of the most eloquent men of his generation, but he spoke in a hubbub and could scarcely be heard. The hearing was a formality. The verdict had already been decided. His judges included Anne’s father, her uncle, and her brother, Lord Rochford. They condemned him to be “hanged, drawn, and quartered”—the extreme penalty for betrayal of the sovereign. It meant that the chancellor’s shrunken cadaver, cut into four parts, would be left to rot on the London docks.
That was too much for the king. As Anne sulked—Sir Thomas had succeeded Wolsey as the object of her malice—Henry changed the sentence to simple beheading. The scholar who had served him so faithfully went to the ax with his head high. As he mounted the scaffold it trembled and seemed about to collapse. Turning to a king’s officer he said calmly, “I pray you, Mr. Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.” Then, altering the ghastly ritual by blindfolding himself, he asked the hushed crowd to witness his death “in the faith and for the faith of the Catholic Church, being the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” He died. Afterward his head was affixed to London Bridge.
England was shocked. No one in the kingdom believed the former lord chancellor even capable of betraying crown and country. Erasmus mourned his friend, “whose soul was more pure than any snow, whose genius was such that England never had and never again will have its like.” The Vatican proclaimed him a Christian martyr. In time the papacy beatified and then canonized him.
LESS THAN A YEAR later Anne Boleyn followed him to the block. Her thousand-day reign had been a disaster, so calamitous that the prestige of the papacy was enhanced; only divine intervention, men reasoned, could have visited such punishment upon the rebel monarch in London. His conviction that she would present him with an heir had been wrong. Her first baby, like Catherine’s, was female. No one could blame her for that, but the failure of her womb was the least of it. Once on the throne she seemed to change personality. Her gaiety vanished and was replaced by temper tantrums, sharp-tongued imperiousness, and innumerable petty demands which left the king exasperated. Catherine at least had been gentle, and he began to miss that; when she died, he wept, and ordered the court to go into mourning. Anne refused. After she presented him with a second, dead child—a boy, born prematurely and badly deformed—he no longer desired her. He told friends Anne had bewitched him, and cited the baby’s deformities as evidence of her sorcery. To her fury, he began sliding his hand under the skirts of one of her maids, the nobly born Jane Seymour. *
If the evidence later arrayed against her is to be believed, Anne was the last wife in England entitled to protest her husband’s dalliance. According to sworn testimony, she had scarcely recovered from her daughter’s birth when she began taking lovers, and her intrigues continued through her three-year marriage. If a youth aroused her desire, witnesses declared, she would invite him to her bedchamber by dropping a handkerchief at his feet; if he picked it up and wiped his face, her proposition had been accepted, and her personal maid would be alerted to his arrival that evening at midnight.
These charges may have been trumped up—later it was said that several of the men accused of sleeping with the queen were homosexuals—but this was not apparent at the time. Henry, according to the record, learned that he was being cuckolded. Told of the handkerchief signal, he watched it happen, moved in that night with armed yeomen, and struck hard. The new lord chancellor took Anne to the Tower and read out the charges against her. She fell to her knees, sobbing and protesting her innocence.
In the preliminary hearing three knighted gentlemen of the privy chamber and a court musician confessed to “criminal intercourse with the queen.” Then the earl of Northumberland, as he now was, testified that he, too, had been intimate with her. The greatest sensation came at the end, when Lord Rochford, Anne’s brother—who had found Sir Thomas More guilty—was led into the dock and accused of coupling with his own sister, a charge supported, by what is said to have been convincing evidence, by Rochford’s wife. Tried by a jury which included Anne’s father, the musician pleaded guilty and, as a commoner, was merely hanged. The knights then were beheaded.
Three days later, twenty-six peers, chaired by Anne’s uncle, the duke of Norfolk, sat in judgment of her and her brother. Both were found guilty of adultery and incest and condemned to death by their uncle. Violent death being commonplace and a life hereafter assumed, the condemned in that age often accepted their fate with an insouciance which would be astonishing today. After praying that she be forgiven her crimes, Anne, still only twenty-nine, asked that her head be struck off as soon as possible. She remarked wryly that she drew comfort from the thought that “the executioner I have heard to be very good, and I have a little neck,” then laughed. On the scaffold she asked the crowd to pray for the king: “A gentler and more merciful prince there never was, and to me he was ever a good, a gentle, and sovereign lord.” She and Rochford were decapitated within a few minutes of each other, the queen, by precedence of rank, meeting the blade first.
This extraordinary cataract of events, precipitated by a king’s yearning for a male heir, led, ironically, to two royal heiresses, each of whom reigned memorably. Catherine’s daughter, Mary, survived her mother’s humiliation and briefly visited a terrible retribution upon those she held responsible for it. The fears of Charles V were at first realized; after the divorce Mary was declared illegitima
te. Later, however, after the birth of a male heir to Henry—the future Edward VI, his son by Jane Seymour—Parliament relented, passing a complex act which, among other things, restored Catherine’s daughter to the royal line of succession and permitted her to occupy the throne for five years, beginning in 1553, as Queen Mary I.
Mary was not a beloved sovereign, nor did she mean to be. Popularity was not among her priorities. Juan Luis Vives had done his work well; she had never renounced her Roman Catholicism, nor—understandably—had she forgiven the zealous new Protestants who had refused to let her visit her mother, even when Catherine had lain on her deathbed. As sovereign she swore to turn back the clock, wiping out the Reformation. It was impossible, but she tried very hard. As her chief adviser she appointed Reginald Cardinal Pole, an English cardinal who had remained loyal to Rome, and whom the pope designated as Mary’s papal legate. Pole shared her bitterness. He had quarreled with Henry over the divorce and predicted, in the king’s presence, that he would be consigned to hell.
That had been lèse majesté with a vengeance, and it had been swiftly punished. The angry sovereign had set a price on Pole’s head; the cardinal had fled for his life, eluding capture but suffering nevertheless, for during his fugitive years both his mother and brother were beheaded. Now, at his urging, Mary made her attempt to restore papal supremacy over England. The penal laws against heresy were revived. On her orders, Archbishop Cranmer was burned at the stake—other famous martyrs were Bishops Ridley and Latimer—and Pole was then consecrated in Canterbury as Cranmer’s successor. Over three hundred Englishmen, whose only crime had been following Mary’s father out of the Roman Church, were also executed. Perhaps her most significant achievement, which she shared with Henry, was her demonstration that England could be just as barbaric as the rest of sixteenth-century Europe. Even today she is remembered as Bloody Mary.
THE IMMORTAL Maid of Orleans still dominated memories of the prior century. But now the sixteenth was more than half gone and it had produced no woman to match her; indeed, no heroines at all. Then, late in its sixth decade, irony intervened to produce a woman who would rank with the greatest sovereigns in English history, giving her name to a new age which would redeem the squalor of the old. She was the daughter of the disgraced Anne Boleyn, who had lain in Anne’s womb, awaiting birth, during the coronation Sir Thomas More had ignored. On the day of her birth, she had been declared illegitimate by the Vatican. In the wake of her mother’s execution the archbishop of Canterbury—after ruling that Anne had, in fact, been married to Percy at the time of her royal wedding and had thus been bigamous as well as adulterous and incestuous—had concurred with Rome, pronouncing the child a bastard.
Anne having been formally declared a common slut—thus placing her far beneath Catherine, whose status as a divorcée was relatively respectable—the royal solicitors concluded that Henry’s second marriage had had no legal status whatever. Since it had never occurred, the three-year-old waif who had been its only issue had no legal existence. Like her half-sister, however, and indeed because of her, Anne’s daughter was to be rescued from oblivion. The restoration of Mary’s legitimacy created a precedent. After Jane Seymour’s death in childbirth, Parliament, bowing to Henry’s will, recognized all three of his children, conceived in various wombs, thus establishing the final order of Tudor succession: first Edward, son of Jane; then Mary, daughter of Catherine; and finally, Elizabeth, daughter of Anne.
Crowned in 1558 at the age of twenty-five, Elizabeth I restored Protestantism, revived her father’s Act of Supremacy, and reigned over England for forty-five glorious years. In light of the tragic consequences of her parents’ sexual excesses, which had typified European nobility in their time—the promiscuity, the proliferation of bastards, the hasty coupling in palace antechambers—she was perhaps wise to live out her long life unaccompanied by a connubial consort, and to be remembered in history as the Virgin Queen.
III
ONE MAN ALONE
IN THE TEEMING Spanish seaport of Sanlúcar de Barrameda it is Monday, September 19, 1519.
Capitán-General Ferdinand Magellan, newly created a Knight Commander of the Order of Santiago, is supervising the final victualing of the five little vessels he means to lead around the globe: San Antonio, Trinidad, Concepción, Victoria, and Santiago. Here and in Seville, whence they sailed down the river Guadalquivir, Andalusians refer to them as el flota, or el escuadra: the fleet. However, their commander is a military man; to him they are an armada—officially, the Armada de Molucca. They are a battered, shabby lot, far less imposing than the flota Christopher Columbus led from this port twenty-one years ago, leaving Spain for his third crossing of the Atlantic.
Nevertheless the capitán-general’s armada is more seaworthy than it appears—he has seen to that. Now approaching his forties, the man who will become the greatest of the sixteenth-century explorers is a precise, even fastidious mariner. Every plank and rope has been personally tested by him; he has directed the replacement of all rotten timbers and overseen the installation of new shrouds and new sails of strong new linen, each stamped with the cross of St. James, patron saint of Spain. Each of the five requires a lot of looking after. The small ships—San Antonio, the largest, displaces only 120 tons—are actually naos, three-masted, square-rigged hybrid merchantmen derivative of fourteenth-century cogs and Arabian dhows. Unless carefully attended, all are potential shipwrecks. Therefore they have been repeatedly scoured and caulked from stem to stern. Now their grizzled commander is patiently checking the stores for a two-year expedition—never dreaming that the great voyage will take three years, and that he will not survive it.
Physically Magellan is unimpressive. He was born to one of the lower orders of Portuguese nobility, but his physique is that of a peasant—short, swart, with a low center of gravity. His skin is leathery, his black beard bushy, and his eyes large, sad, and brooding. Long ago his nose was broken in some forgotten brawl. He bears scars of battle and walks with a pronounced limp, the souvenir of a lance wound in Morocco. He had acted recklessly then (and will again, in the last hours of his life), but he is rarely impulsive. On the contrary; his reserve approaches the stoical. He is a man who lives within, saving the best of himself for himself, enjoying solitude. As a commander he can be ruthless—“tough, tough, tough,” in the words of a fellow captain. Subordinate officers dislike this dureza, though they concede his supreme competence and the quickness with which he rewards those who perform well—rare traits among commanders of the time. Because of this, he is popular among his crews.
Proud of his lineage, meticulous, fiercely ambitious, stubborn, driven, secretive, and iron-willed, the capitán-general, or admiral, is possessed by an inner vision which he shares with no one. There is a hidden side to this seasoned skipper which would astonish his men. He is imaginative, a dreamer; in a time of blackguards and brutes he believes in heroism. Romance of that stripe is unfashionable in the sixteenth century, though it is not altogether dead. Young Magellan certainly knew of El Cid, the eleventh-century hero Don Rodrigo, whose story was told in many medieval ballads, and he may have been captivated by tales of King Arthur. Even if he had missed versions of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, he would have been aware of Camelot; the myths of medieval chivalry had persisted for centuries, passed along from generation to generation. Arthur himself was a genuine, if shadowy historical figure, a mighty English Dux Bellorum who won twelve terrible battles against Saxon invaders from Germany and was slain at Camlann in A.D. 539. Less real, but enchanting to children like the youthful Magellan, was the paladin Lancelot du Lac, introduced in 1170 by the French poet-troubadour Chrétien de Troyes. De Troyes was also celebrated for his Perceval, ou Le Conte du Graal, the first known version of the Holy Grail legend, which was retold in 1203 by the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach as the story of Parzival. Both De Troyes and Von Eschenbach were translated into other European languages, including Portuguese. And there were others. At his death in 1210 Gottfried von Strassb
urg left his epic Tristan und Isolde. In 1225 France’s Guillaume de Lorris wrote the first part of the allegorical metrical romance Roman de la Rose, distantly based on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria. Chaucer translated it in the next century. And in 1370 or there-abouts Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a poetic parable of Arthur’s elegant nephew, appeared in England.
Magellan, a man of boundless curiosity, has found reality equally enthralling, devouring the works of Giovanni da Pian del Carpini, who in 1245 had traveled east to Karakorum in central Asia, and Marco Polo’s account of his adventures in the Orient,
Ferdinand Magellan (c. 1480–1521)
dictated to a fellow prisoner in 1296. More important, the commander of the five little ships has been inspired by the feats of Columbus and the discoverers since. Other Europeans have dreamed of following their lead. What sets Magellan apart is his unswerving determination to match them and thus become a hero himself. Erasmus and his colleagues are admirable, but they are writers and talkers; Magellan believes that deeds are supreme. He would agree with George Meredith—“It is a terrific decree in life that they must act who would prevail”—and in his struggle for dominance his most valuable possession will be his extraordinary will. He can endure disappointment and frustration, but can never accept defeat. He simply does not know how.
Yet thus far his career has been one of unfulfilled promise. Although he craves recognition, his very directness—his complete lack of guile, or even tact—has repeatedly cost him the support of those in a position to honor him. In Lisbon, for example, he disdained the silken subtleties at the royal court, and, as a result, encountered disaster. To the urbane courtiers surrounding the fatuous king, he seemed an awkward boor. Having suffered from a false accusation of larceny, and having then cleared his name, he sought an audience with Dom Manuel I, the Portuguese sovereign. He wanted royal support for his great voyage. Both Portugal and Spain coveted the Spice Islands; Magellan urged the king to help him stake Portugal’s claim there. But he had handled the interview badly. Manuel, a fop, expected his subjects to fawn over him. Ignoring court protocol, Magellan went straight to the point. His sovereign responded by dismissing him in the rudest possible manner, turning his royal back while the courtiers tittered. His Majesty had even told the supplicant that the Portuguese crown had no further need for his services —that he could take his proposal elsewhere. Magellan, single-mindedly pursuing his vision, then put himself at the disposal of Spain’s eighteen-year-old King Carlos I, soon to become Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. On March 22, 1518, acting in his own name and that of his insane mother Johanna, Carlos signed a formal Yo el Rey agreement, or capitulación, underwriting the capitán-general’s voyage and appointing him governor-to-be of all new lands to be discovered by the expedition.
A world lit only by fire: the medieval mind and the Renaissance Page 24
