This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  This, too, was the period of the European Renaissance, the revival of art and letters based on classical forms and classical models. It had begun in Italy and was now spreading into northern Europe. One of the first effects in England was Christian humanism. The humanists offered biblical piety and the study of the Greek New Testament including the texts from Desiderius Erasmus who was finishing his Novum Instrumentum, a new version of the New Testament. He published tracts against the superstitions of Catholicism and thus the Pope.

  Having escaped the frustrations and considerable anger of the Church in Amsterdam, Erasmus came to the comparative freedom of Cambridge to finish his New Testament and, as part of the ‘new learning’, indeed an important figure in it, he was embraced by the new scholars in England, including Thomas More and John Colet. The Dean of St Paul’s, Colet had been to Italy, mastered Greek, wrote of divine truths and the importance of original texts, and preached of Church reform from within and spiritual revival. Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, presented an imaginary society of pagans and suggested that Christians could learn from such wretches. More, of course, was to go to the Tower eventually and his head would be hung over London Bridge.

  Perhaps the first signs of the change of fortunes of those trusted by Henry came with the slide of Wolsey. Already doubted by Henry because of his part in the failure of further policies towards the French, Wolsey now found himself vulnerable to the King’s ambition to get rid of his wife, Catherine of Aragon. We will not rehearse the stories of the six wives – Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves and the last two Catherines, Howard and Parr. However, Catherine of Aragon, the widow of Henry’s late brother Arthur whom Henry had married, is a special case. Catherine was ageing; Anne Boleyn was not. The religious and political objections to this first discard created a highly charged atmosphere at court and set in place the increasing determination of Henry to have his way. Opposition came from very powerful people other than the learned bishops of England. They included Charles V, the Emperor of the Habsburgs. Italy had fallen to the Habsburgs and the Pope, although he needed Henry on his side, more or less had to do whatever Charles V wanted. The importance of Charles V was that his aunt was Catherine of Aragon. Wolsey was told to negotiate a solution. Wolsey failed and his stock fell. He was eventually arrested for high treason. As for Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, they married in secrecy and on 7 September 1533 the future Queen Elizabeth was born.

  After all the agonies, the diplomatic and military risks, Henry had not the male heir he so desperately wanted, but another daughter. It is said that in his anger he went to stay at the house of Sir John Seymour. There he fell in love with Sir John’s daughter, Jane. Anne Boleyn’s days were numbered, and before their daughter Elizabeth reached her third birthday, Anne was accused (perhaps falsely so) of treasonous adultery and was beheaded with a double-edged sword at the Tower.

  The decision to abandon Catherine of Aragon was followed by a whirlwind of legislation. The Acts of Appeals discarded the Pope’s right to rule in English Church lawsuits. The Act of Supremacy made the English monarch the supreme head of the Church of England. And the Treasons Act made it a high treasonable offence, that is, punishable by execution, to deny the monarch’s supremacy. The Act against the Pope’s authority, the Act of Reformation, was to come.

  The administrative and constitutional revolution was led by Henry, with the help of Thomas More, against the doubts of John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester. When both More and Fisher rebelled and refused to swear to the supremacy of the King, they fell. Rome appointed Fisher a cardinal. Henry had him executed in June 1535 (More, the following month) and sent his head to Rome so that the Vatican could fit Fisher with his cardinal’s hat. Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Thomas Cromwell stood by the King. By the following year Henry was married to Jane Seymour, perhaps the truest love of his life. The marriage lasted but eighteen months. The new Queen died apparently under crude surgery, after the birth of their son, the future Edward VI. For the moment Henry’s grief had to be set aside. Other affairs, those of State, were calling. The need to replenish his Treasury was uppermost in his mind and the obvious source was the fount of the greatest wealth in the land: the Church.

  Henry VIII wished to suppress the 400 or so small monasteries which were in any case in decline and whose endowments were, in Henry’s view, wasted on intellectually shabby monks. This wording, from the 1536 Act of Parliament, makes very clear that there was not much regard for the smaller houses, as the monasteries were known:

  Forasmuch as manifest sin, vicious, carnal and abominable living is daily used and committed amongst the little and small abbeys, priories, and other religious houses of monks, canons, and nuns, where the congregation of such religious persons is under the number of twelve persons, whereby the governors of such religious houses and their convents, spoil, destroy, consume, and utterly waste as well their churches, monasteries, priories, principal houses, farms, granges . . .

  And so it goes on. To the lawmakers, under the will of the monarch, the small monasteries were to be closed and the inmates – and this is often forgotten – were to be transferred to ‘great and honourable monasteries of religion in this realm, where they may be compelled to live religiously for reformation of their lives’. Equally, this was not a simple religious intent to clean up the small monasteries and convents. The Act here simply reflects the intent to provide a public and moral justification of what was to follow.

  For our purposes it is important to reflect that even Henry felt a need to justify what he was about to do – or what Thomas Cromwell (c.1485–1540) was to do on his behalf. Between 1536 (the date of the above Act) and 1540, the monasteries were suppressed and their contents became the King’s. Cromwell, Henry’s first minister, was thorough. He had served Wolsey well and had learned his craft and courtiership under that man without particularly envying the trappings of the office of first minister. He understood the need to reform and so took each department in what was still a medieval Royal Household and set them on the road to becoming what we would today call Departments of State. For that remarkable distinction, Cromwell is often forgotten. In 1536 the Privy Council replaced the King’s Council as a sort of executive board of advisers and governors. It enforced policy, made sure the law courts worked – or tried to – and managed the economy. Through this system Cromwell began the financial reforms of England which eventually distanced the financing of royalty – what is now called the Civil List – from that of government.

  Cromwell’s main task, though, was to oversee the break up of the monasteries: the Dissolution. Monasteries often owed their allegiance to institutions outside England but this now contravened Henry’s supreme power over the Church. Moreover, if Henry were to keep the nobility on his side, he had to make sure, with Cromwell’s help, that they were looked after. The best way to do that was with patronage and money.

  The events of the 1530s had a profound effect on the practice of religion: England was still a Catholic nation. Yet the access of worshippers to religious texts, and certainly the Bible, was severely controlled. The elders of the Church including the conservative laity believed the texts and testaments were dangerous documents, even subversive in the wrong hands and so should only be read by priests. However, the Tyndale and Coverdale translations of the Bible were appearing as early as 1535. Cromwell saw the inevitability of translated texts and ordered that Bibles in English (rather than Latin) should be available and read in churches everywhere, including the north of England where there was so much rebellion by the laity. There was also an adjunct to this uneasiness – tax collecting. There was a conservative reaction to what was happening under Henry and Cromwell, and this included the so-called, but very short-lived, Pilgrimage of Grace in which the rebellious captured Henry’s tax commissioners. The King would not have this. Some 250 leaders of the Pilgrimage were executed.

  It was at this point that Henry ordered the printing of more copies of
the Bible, its reading in churches and its availability for parishioners to read it for themselves. It is this Bible that, through its revisions, including the King James Version, exists in the twenty-first century in parish churches throughout England. Henry the theologian and uncompromising religious revisionist did not rest his reputation in the pews. There was little holy in what remained of the reign of this Henry, once trained in the priesthood. His plundering of the institutions of the monasteries, 560 of them, continued until there was no booty left. The cost of wars that followed in the 1540s probably wiped out the financial gains and the material losses were obvious: the melting of fine jewellery and ornaments, the wanton destruction of Gothic buildings and the shredding of libraries.

  Cromwell did much to ease the consequence of constitutional and philosophical vandalism, but even he was eventually thrown to his enemies and to execution. Anne of Cleves, Henry’s fourth wife, was indirectly responsible for Cromwell’s death. Cromwell had encouraged the marriage as a means of creating a union with the north German Lutheran princes, the best hope of an alliance on the Continent. But the marriage was never consummated – Henry thought Anne plain and uninteresting – and the failure of Cromwell’s match-making made him vulnerable. The Duke of Norfolk, who detested Cromwell, plotted against him. For good measure, Norfolk encouraged one of his nieces to display much of her talents before the King. Henry fell for Catherine Howard’s charms and listened to her uncle’s poisonous words. He married the niece and on 28 July 1540 Cromwell was executed. The twenty-two-year-old Catherine may have been pretty and sparkly eyed, but she perhaps would have done better to keep her charms for her very middle-aged liege. Instead, she dallied with her cousin, Thomas Culpeper, and in February 1542 her head dropped into the same executioner’s basket that had fielded the blindfolded head of Anne Boleyn.

  Eighteen months later, Catherine Parr was Queen and nurse to Henry. Henry had long suffered from an enormous ulcer in his leg. Even his largely ceremonial armour had to be shaped to cope with the increasing pain. Craftsmen and tailors were not, however, able to cope with his increasing rages, perhaps gingered by his illness. Nor was it possible to calm his antagonism against Scotland and France.

  Henry wanted war with France, but he understood that given the long alliance with Scotland, France would always be in a strong position to encourage the Scots to raid England should Henry’s army cross the Channel in any great numbers. Indeed, Henry understood, even if he resisted, the notion that bringing England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales into some form of reasonable coexistence was a foremost responsibility of any King of England. The easiest part of this task, to some extent set in motion by Cromwell, was to achieve unity with Wales. In 1543, the year of Henry’s marriage to Catherine Parr, the Act for the Government of Wales was passed. This meant that Wales was now under English law, including the system of administration by counties. From that date, twenty-four Welsh Parliamentary representatives would be sent to Westminster, and new Courts of Great Session were established to oversee the judiciary. It is from this date that the Welsh language would appear to have reached its most popular point. By the end of the Tudors, hastened by the introduction of English legal and commercial documentation and the accompanying officialdom, the language was on its way to a minority status from which it never recovered. Religious texts, including the Welsh Bible of 1588, are in the Late Modern Welsh, but the population was never large enough to support an expanding language and with the influx of foreign tradesmen and workers – certainly during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – the Welsh language was overwhelmed by English. None of this was of concern to Henry VIII whose preoccupations were with events east, south and north of the Welsh border.

  He had captured Boulogne but the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, his supposed ally, was at the same time making a separate treaty with King Francis. The outcome for Henry was a treaty of sorts which allowed Boulogne to remain English for eight years from 1546, but was then to be handed back, complete with new fortifications. The cost of this to England was enormous. At the same time, everything was going wrong for Henry in Scotland. Raids by English forces, and in particular the attack on Edinburgh, only united the Scots against him. So now Henry had exactly what he had tried so hard to avoid: war with Scotland and France at the same time.

  Since the execution of Cromwell, Henry, perhaps arrogantly, had believed that he could be his own chief minister, leaving the everyday running of the country to the Privy Council. Although increasingly ill, he was never up to this grand scheme. Nevertheless, Henry seemed satisfied that he could hold apart the rival factions – the radicals of Thomas Cranmer, and the old guard of his Secretary Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, and the Duke of Norfolk. All three supported Henry, but for different reasons. But the question in the minds of everyone at court was simple: who would become Protector to the young King Edward when Henry VIII died? These were ever turbulent times. In 1545, the French had set ashore and burned Brighton, although it was then a relatively unimportant fishing village called Brighthelmstone. The following year the truce was signed with France, but peace did not settle easily in the fast ailing Henry’s England, where religious dissension lingered on. Anne Ayscough (sometimes Askew, 1521–46) was tortured for confession then burned as a heretic. The same year, George Wishart (c.1513–46) preached in favour of Calvin and he too was executed. There were bloodier years to come, but King Henry VIII would not see them. He died the following year, 1547.

  He had ruled since 1509 and his reign is remembered as the time of the break with Rome, of six wives, of savage persecution, torture and execution. Yet the English Church was in need of reform and throughout Europe there was a revolt against papal authority. The Reformation, the new thinking, Erasmus and Luther would have meant change was inevitable whoever ruled England.

  With Henry gone, England needed a strong man at the centre of power to fend off the threat of constitutional and political implosion. Instead, the nation now had a weakling nine-year-old King and the vacillating Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, as his Protector.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  1547–58

  The new monarch was the son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, and was titled Edward VI (1537–53). There was no doubt in the minds of his people that, although England was under a Regency – for two years, Edward’s uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, was Lord Protector – the young king was a Protestant. This was important because the court needed a clear distinction that would not revive the Catholic persuasion. However, this could not prevent the disturbances in the realm that had travelled over from Henry’s reign. There were ruptions in East Anglia where Robert Ket led a rebellion against land closures and in the West Country where rioters attacked Exeter. It was Edward Seymour’s inability to cope with these disturbances, which became crises for the State that made him so vulnerable to other ambitions at court. The Ket rebellion was a case in point.

  It was John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who marched to Ket’s camp to suppress the uprising; but when a small urchin spoke and gestured rudely the boy was immediately shot. The murder enraged Ket’s followers and fighting began. Around 3,500 peasants were killed and there were no wounded. Ket was hanged at Norwich Castle. Warwick, strengthened by his management of the incident, became the leader of the opposition and his party, the Lords in London, met to take measures against the Protector. Warwick was now virtual ruler of England and none of any standing supported Somerset. In January, 1552, he was executed.

  Warwick created himself Duke of Northumberland, restructured the Privy Council and, instead of calling himself Protector, he became Lord President of the Council – a title that survives into the twenty-first century. Northumberland also tidied up England’s silly wars and turbulences, returned Boulogne to the French and withdrew English soldiers from Scotland. He had aligned himself with the Protestant cause and this decision had long-lasting results. For when Cranmer published the second edition of his Book of Common Prayer in 1552,
it had to be approved by Parliament and supported by the Acts of Uniformity. It was from this point that the authority of the Church of England became reliant upon Parliament, and it still does. For good measure, Northumberland imprisoned a dissenting voice, the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, a man hardly impressed with the Protestant persuasion.

  So the laity triumphed over the Church. But Northumberland had an immediate constitutional conundrum, a puzzle that would result in his own death. Edward VI, always a sickly youth, was dying. Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was the constitutional successor, followed by Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn. But Mary was a Catholic. Northumberland persuaded the dying Edward VI to disinherit Mary and Elizabeth in favour of Lady Jane Grey (1537–54), the teenage daughter of the Marquess of Dorset and the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary. Jane Grey was a devout Protestant and so fitted the ideal of what Northumberland desired as monarch. She was, reluctantly, married off in 1553 to Northumberland’s son, Lord Guildford Dudley.

  On Edward’s death, Jane Grey was proclaimed queen. It was 9 July 1553. The Crown was not really hers, nor would it be. The Catholic following was not vanquished. Mary Tudor’s soldiers routed Northumberland’s following. Northumberland was executed and there was little to protect the Protestant factions (as opposed to the true followers) from Mary’s revenge. She released the deposed Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, from the Tower and made him Lord Chancellor. Even allowing for the biased record writing of a later time, between them, the Queen and Gardiner – and after him the Papal Legate, Cardinal Reginald Pole – were probably responsible for more than 200 people being burned at the stake. The Queen’s single ambition was reunion with Rome. Jane Grey and her husband were executed in 1554. As for the Queen, Mary married her cousin, the future Philip II of Spain, in spite of her denial of a request that could have changed British history: Philip, or his advisers, demanded the execution of the young Elizabeth. She was, they pointed out, in line to the throne and therefore a threat. Mary refused and they had to make do with Elizabeth’s imprisonment.