Just exactly when Catherine was selected by the conservative party for such a role is not known. It could not have been when she first arrived at court in late November or early December of 1539, for as yet no one suspected that Henry would evidence such a positive distaste for his new bride that he would risk political and international crisis to free himself. There is some indication that Catherine’s fate was irrevocably written the instant Henry laid eyes upon her, for it was reported to the Dowager Duchess at Lambeth that the ‘King’s Highness did cast a fantasy to Catherine Howard the first time that ever his Grace saw her.’1 If the Dowager was so apprised, one can feel assured that those two astute and well-informed gentlemen, the Duke of Norfolk and the Bishop of Winchester, also knew of this important and hopeful event and planned their strategy accordingly. The first positive indication that the King’s conscience had again crept too near another lady of the court, appeared in April of 1540, when Mistress Catherine became the recipient of a steady flow of royal gifts and favours.
If the sequence of events leading to the political crisis of 1540 did not necessarily begin when the King’s Highness first ‘cast a fantasy to Catherine Howard’, it might be said that it did so when he first beheld the other lady. The German princess of Cleves had landed at Deal Castle on Saturday, 27 December 1539, and her official welcome by the King was scheduled for 3 January at Greenwich. Henry, with his accustomed impatience and impetuousness, could not wait to judge the words of his Vicar-General, who had assured him that his future wife excelled the Duchess of Milan in beauty as ‘the golden sun did the silver moon’.2 Disguised and laden with gifts, he waylaid his bride at Rochester and dumbfounded the conventionalminded Flemish maiden by prancing unannounced into her tent. The meeting, even under the most auspicious circumstances, was likely to have been strained, for Anne knew no tongue but her own and Henry spoke no German. Linguistic difficulties only in part caused the King’s tongue-tied silence, for it was reported that his grace was ‘marvellously astonished and abashed’ by the sight of his new bride; and later Henry growled that the lady was ‘nothing so well as she was spoken of’.3
The thunderhead of the storm that cost Thomas Cromwell his head, lost Anne of Cleves her regal dignity, and swept Norfolk and Gardiner into political pre-eminence in the wake of the King’s marriage to Catherine, had begun to form many months before the fateful meeting with Anne at Rochester. The twenty embarrassed and hurried words that the King managed to blurt out, and his hasty retreat in the face of the lady’s phlegmatic and pockmarked features, were only the signal for the storm to break. The instant that Henry ‘very sadly and pensively’ fled back to Greenwich and complained that he was not well handled by his councillors,4 the man who had been responsible for the fiasco walked in the shadow of the block. The cruel and reproachful eye of an unhappy and embarrassed sovereign was constantly upon the Vicar-General, and Cromwell’s enemies took new hope that the King’s emotional disappointment and brooding disposition would bring about the eventual destruction of the hated upstart. Their fondest hopes were realized in July of 1540 when Henry claimed his Vicar-General’s head, but the political convulsions that led to Cromwell’s death had their roots back in the reaches of Tudor history. The scheming and manoeuvring of the early summer of 1540 represented the culmination of three quite separate but intimately related crises in religion, in foreign policy, and in personalities; and Catherine Howard found herself hopelessly enmeshed in all three.
The term Reformation is at best a deceptive word. In England it is a singularly inaccurate description for the religious upheaval that took place when Henry’s tender conscience was strained beyond endurance by the fascination of Anne Boleyn and by his failure to beget a male heir by his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Little was reformed by the English Reformation under Henry VIll, but much was transferred; the temporal authority of the Pope in Rome was assumed by the King in London; much of the spiritual power claimed by the vicar of Christ was shouldered by God’s anointed lieutenant on earth; and the monastic lands were turned over to a national aristocracy. As one disillusioned and embittered Lutheran complained: ‘Harry only wants to sit as anti-christ in the temple of God, and that Harry should be Pope. The rich treasures, the rich incomes of the Church, these are the Gospel According to Harry.’5
The Reformation in England was never the work of a single will. The seizure of the ecclesiastical machinery in England, the denial of papal supremacy, and the destruction of an independent clerical organization were in a sense the culmination of the main currents of English and Western European history. The eighth Henry achieved what the second had failed to do – the subjugation of an international priestly order that recognized an authority beyond and above that of the national monarch. The Pope was a foreigner living in dissolute luxury in Rome, and Englishmen had for centuries resented the jurisdiction and financial extractions of an alien potentate. The Tudor sovereigns were dedicated to the destruction of any supremacy outside their own, and as the feudal magnates of the northern shires ended their lives upon the scaffold, so did those abbots and bishops who acknowledged a law higher than that of the Crown. They died upon the altar of the sovereign national state that recognizes no power on earth except its own.
Whether or not momentous events are the result of inevitable forces that underlie the sweep of history, or simply further evidence of the infuriating perversity of human destiny that can transform the loss of a horseshoe into the loss of a kingdom, the indisputable fact remains that the English Reformation was an act of State. What began, however, simply as an extra-legal manipulation of the constitutional structure governing a cosmopolitan Church with its head in Rome, rapidly involved the entire fabric of Tudor society. The royal divorce quickly became a social, economic, and emotional revolution in which far more was at stake than mere political expediency. Henry VIII did not have to be told the truth of one confirmed Protestant’s warning that ‘if there be no better stay for the maintenance of these godly preachers, the King’s authority concerning his supremacy shall lie post alone, hidden in the act of parliament, and not in the hearts of his subjects.’6 It was far safer if political necessity could be linked with religious conviction, and consequently the State found and fostered the support of that militant minority, which was confident that Mistress Rose of Rome was in fact the ‘stinking whore of Babylon’ and looked upon the Reformation as not only politically wise but spiritually just and godly.
The English Reformation may have received its characteristic features from the fact that its driving force was political and governmental rather than religious and emotional, but it is a tragic misconception to view the events in England of the 1530s as separate from the spiritual crisis that was convulsing all Christendom. When in 1555 Hugh Latimer turned to Nicholas Ridley, as both stood chained to the stake, and said: ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out,’7 the defrocked Anglican bishop was speaking the simple truth. It was not Henry’s ‘great matter’, not the need for a male heir, nor the fact that the Pope was un- English, that kept the candle burning and gave the Protestant martyrs the strength to ‘play the man’; it was the conviction and discovery that in Protestantism they had something worth the torments of the Stake – a sense of spiritual satisfaction and personal salvation.
The faith that moved these Protestants was deep and esoteric; it glowed with the intense flame of inner conviction, which alone was sufficient to sustain them. They needed none of the props which the medieval Church had afforded the average man, and they were impervious to the beauty of religious ceremony or the magnificence of stained glass windows. There could be no mediator between the faithful and the Divinity other than Christ himself, for it was faith and faith alone that could open the gates to the kingdom of heaven. It was this profound belief – this passionate insistence that they alone in a depraved and sinful world were the elect of God – that gave to the reforming
Protestant divines the determination not merely to deny papal authority, but to spiritualize the world and to create on earth the standards of heaven. It was not enough simply to denounce the Bishop of Rome and abhor idolatry and superstition; the man who sought the joys of the afterlife on the sands of such insincerity was told to ‘depart in the devil’s name, thou wicked person, to eternal pain’.8 No excuses could be made for the busy citizen who complained that ‘I am busied about matters of the common-wealth’, or who argued that it was not for him to read and study the scriptures.9
Uncompromising in their morality, destructive in their determination to improve both men and society, and rigid in their idealism, the Protestant radicals became invaluable storm-troopers in the army of the Lord’s anointed. For them, the divorce and constitutional break with Rome were merely first steps – a prelude to the future community of saints on earth. They saw the existing Church as deformed and debased, a harlot grovelling in the lust of the flesh and in the pride of life – a mockery saddled with sumptuous and unbelieving prelates, idolatrous ceremonies, fornicating clerics, and the Devil’s disciple presiding in Rome. It was not enough that the strange voice of the Bishop of Rome be silenced in England; instead the Church of England had to be thoroughly revised and revitalized, and the cry went up to ‘get rid of the poison with the author’. ‘Our King,’ lamented Bishop Hooper, ‘has destroyed the Pope, but not popery.’10 Henry’s divorce had loosed upon the realm a force that would not be controlled, and the inner spiritual drive that belonged to Protestantism did not always sit easy with the cautious doctrines of political expediency and constitutional manipulation. Men who felt close upon them the fires of hell and the joys of salvation turned their eyes heavenward, not earthward; they felt obliged to control life, not countenance it. The militant soldiers of the Protestant ranks were the useful, if unruly, revolutionaries of their age and the godly, if dangerous, allies of the Crown.
Political advisability stood behind the original break with Rome and the advent of the Reformation in England, but by 1539 the forces of carefully controlled religious change were evincing an alarming tendency to deteriorate into unrestrained revolution. As one contemporary Catholic put it: Henry ‘was like to one that would throw down a man headlong from the top of a high tower and bid him stay when he was half way down.’11 The King remained the Defender of the Faith, and for him the faith continued to be the ancient creed – with the slight modification that it was Catholicism without the Pope. Unfortunately, by the late 1530s such a middle position was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, for the monarch, in consolidating his constitutional revolution, had placed the safety of the new regime in the hands of individuals who had no intention of stopping half-way.
Religious discord was rife – all was either ‘as black as pitch, vice, abomination, heresy, and folly’ or ‘all fair roses and sweet virtue’.12 The King’s ‘simple loving subjects’ were ‘arrogantly and superstitiously’ arguing and disputing ‘in open places, taverns, and ale houses’ upon spiritual topics and theological questions.13 On all sides there were tactless, if sincere, ministers of God who were voicing new and disturbing notions; and it was noted in London that the city was teeming with preachers, ‘but they come not from one Master, for, as it is reported, their messages be divers.’14 When one impassioned reformer and idealist could suggest that the gospel be read and set forth in all places ‘even in brothels’, while an equally stern advocate of the old faith could preach that he ‘would like to see the head of every maintainer of the New Learning upon a stake’, there was little doubt that the time for a positive and official statement of religious faith had arrived.15 The only question that remained was whether conformity of mind would be enforced upon the basis of a Catholic or a Protestant interpretation of the Christian faith.
Religious sentiment at court and in the King’s own mind during 1539 was beginning to swing in the direction of retrenchment and orthodoxy, and the Norfolk-Gardiner faction was optimistic that uniformity of religious thought would be decided once and for all on the basis of Catholicism without the Pope. On 5 May, 1539, Henry’s government served notice that dissension in religion had gone far enough! The Lord Chancellor warned the two houses of Parliament that His Majesty desired, ‘above all things that diversities of religious opinions should be entirely rooted out and destroyed with all dispatch from his dominions’.16 An ecclesiastical committee of the upper house was selected to inquire into the nature of religious discord, and to suggest some basis for banishing contention from the realm. If the royal council thought that such a committee would produce the desired unanimity of sentiment, it was sadly mistaken, because the members were evenly divided between the advocates of the new and old learning. Within eleven days they had battled to a hopeless deadlock, and so great was the tension that society was put in mind of Erasmus’s words that, ‘to all appearance the long war of words and writings will terminate in blows.’17
Then on 16 May, the secular authority stepped in to end the religious stalemate. Significantly, it was Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, who suggested that the issue be introduced for debate upon the floor of the House of Lords and the decision be enforced by parliamentary statute. In other words, for the first time the temporal authority was accepting responsibility for both enforcing and prescribing religious conformity. The King himself listened to the debate, and, finally, on 28 June, the Act for Abolishing Diversity of Opinion was passed by a unanimous vote representing little except that the monarch had thrown his influence behind the Bill. The Whip with the Six Strings, as the Bill was popularly termed, re-avowed basic Catholic doctrines such as transubstantiation, communion in one kind, celibacy of the clergy, private masses and auricular confession. All these points had been a source of endless controversy, and they were now decided in a markedly Catholic fashion. The nation was vastly impressed by the spectacle of its sovereign displaying his theological talents and assuming his responsibilities as Defender of the Faith, and most men agreed with John Hussey that the Bill was the ‘wholesomest Act ever passed.’18
Though the conservatives had won a resounding victory, ultimate success in the form of the destruction of the Vicar-General and his disciples had to wait upon the coming of Catherine Howard to court and Cromwell’s diplomatic blunder that saddled Henry with the German princess of Cleves.
During the summer and autumn of 1539, diplomatic considerations began to cloud the clarity of the theological atmosphere. Six powers faced one another; each claimed the special sanction of the deity in support of its cause, but none of the six ever allowed religion to stand in the way of political self-interest. The Sultan of Turkey was Caliph of the True Believers; Charles V was Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and His Most Catholic Majesty of Spain; England’s sovereign proudly displayed his theological title of Defender of the Faith; Francis I was the Most Christian King of France; and the Pope laid claim to the keys of the kingdom of heaven as Christ’s vicar on earth. International relations in the sixteenth century have an Alice-in-Wonderland quality about them. Chivalric monarchs shed endless tears, but continued their predatory policies of national and political aggrandizement; France and Spain maintained a noisy but singularly inconsequential battle for the mastery of Italy; and the Poe, that elderly white knight, was constantly falling off one side or the other of his horse, and being stuck together with bits of wire so that he might continue at the doubtful game of the balance of power in Europe. The international kaleidoscope was constantly changing, but, as Alice discovered, the more things changed, the more they remained the same.
English diplomacy of the 1530s was based upon what were accepted as the three constants of European relations. Primary among the principles of Tudor diplomacy was the rivalry between the vast Habsburg possessions – united in the person of Emperor Charles V – and Valois France – personified by Francis I, that elegant sovereign with the fine calf to his leg. An equally important consideration was the embarrassment caused by Henry’s divorce from his first wife and his
consequent break with the Apostolic See. Finally, no English foreign policy reckoned without the time-honoured conflict between England and France. The first consideration could be depended upon to keep France and the Emperor at odds, while England held the crucial balance; the second might be expected to guarantee the enmity of both the Emperor, who was Catherine of Aragon’s nephew, and of the papacy, whose dearest desire was to lead a united Habsburg- Valois force against the English heretics. As for the English-French rivalry, this was a sacred axiom of international relations, treasured almost to the point of insanity, since no one could recall or even conceive of a time when the two nations had not been snarling at each other. Thus the international tangle was predicated upon the sine qua non that both Charles and Francis disliked their brother Henry, but detested each other even more.
In the spring and early summer of 1538 the impossible happned – Charles began to betray signs of ultimate lunacy by indicating a willingness to accept an invitation extended by his rival brother of France, to pay a State visit to Paris. More incredible still, the Emperor was planning to place the safety of his imperial person in the hands of his traditional enemy, with no greater warranty of protection than Francis’s chivalric word of honour. For an instant it appeared as if the two states would submerge their own enmity in a holy alliance aimed at exterminating the heretical menace across the Channel. As a further blow to English safety, the sovereigns of France and Spain in January of 1539 agreed to make no new alliances with the anathematized English without each other’s consent. Isolated and alarmed by the possibility of a Catholic crusade, Henry suddenly found himself anxious to win the friendship of the other Protestant princes of Europe, and in March of 1539 Cromwell commenced negotiations for the hand of the daughter of the Duke of Cleves.
The marriage treaty, which was eventually signed on 4 October 1539, was a disastrous blunder. From the start, Henry showed signs of being a reluctant groom; he disliked the thought of committing himself to a lady upon whom he had never set eyes; and he could not bring himself to believe that those two Christian monarchs of Spain and France would ever unite against either the heretic or the infidel. It soon became obvious that the King had allowed himself to be panicked into an alliance, which had no observable merits except to encumber him with an unattractive wife, whose sole accomplishment was to grunt in German. In fact, the entire marriage alliance retained the usual Alice-in-Wonderland atmosphere – it never made any sense. Had the papacy really been able to patch up the ancient feud between Habsburg and Valois and direct their united forces against England, Cromwell’s alliance with the Protestant powers of Europe would have been almost worthless. As one astute observer of these times noted:
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