A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  But it was, of course, a replay of the tactics of 1381, when the king had temporized by appeasing the Peasants’ Revolt. Once the immediate threat had vanished, Henry outdid Richard II at his most autocratic, swearing retribution on the rebels. ‘Our pleasure,’ the king wrote to the Duke of Norfolk, ‘[is] that you shall cause such dreadful execution to be done upon a good number of every town village and hamlet that have offended as they may be a fearful spectacle to all others hereafter that would practise any like matter.’ And we can be sure that he complied.

  Different lessons were drawn from the Pilgrimage of Grace by different factions. The more traditionally minded, like Norfolk, believed that the rising had shown the need to rein in some of the more intrusive innovations, to avoid provoking future outbreaks. But Cranmer and Cromwell drew precisely the opposite conclusion: that the unwitting association of Catholicism and treason had given them an opportunity to push their theological offensive faster and further than they had previously dared. In 1538 Cromwell sent out a new batch of ‘Injunctions’ to the clergy, designed to lean heavily on ‘superstition’. His targets were all those traditional practices that brought together large numbers of people, for he understood very well that crowds, especially crowds that believed they had Christ and the saints on their side, might get up the courage to do things that individuals might shrink from. So pilgrimages, saints’ days and the display of relics were banned, and the most egregious objects of veneration were smashed and burned in public, the better to cow the credulous. In one economical act of terror, the miracle-working statue of St Derfel was burned alongside a Franciscan friar who refused to accept the new order.

  The two most famous pilgrimage shrines in England were the object of special displeasure. At Canterbury the travelling evangelical playwright, John ‘Bilious’ Bale, was hired to rewrite the Becket story as a play, The Treason of Becket, in which the traitorous archbishop dies as the result of an accidental scuffle. It was performed at Canterbury while Cromwell’s iconoclastic goons comprehensively demolished the shrine. No more old ladies stumbling to the tomb for a cure; no more processions of the barefoot on the roads of Kent. And at Walsingham, where Henry had given thanks for the birth of a son twenty-seven years before, the statue of the Virgin was burned. The account book for 1538 records, for the first time: ‘Payment for the King’s great candle; salary for the abbot: nil.’

  Cranmer and Cromwell were gambling that, since they could present their iconoclastic offensive as an attack on the enemies of the king’s royal state, they could take him with them. But their confidence was misplaced. For as Henry grew older the distinction between the royal supremacy (good) and a Protestant reformation (bad) became more, not less, absolute in his own mind. Matters like chantries and the excessive veneration of obscure saints had, after all, been the objects of criticism in the time of his father and grandmother as part of the programme of Catholic reform. But in all the issues of doctrine that most offended Protestantism – the real presence of Christ in the mass, the celibacy of priests and the relevance of good works to salvation – Henry was not just a conservative, he was a perfectly orthodox Catholic. So when Cranmer and his protégés produced a ‘Bishop’s Book’ publicizing a heavily Protestant version of the new Church, Henry not only refused to authorize it but filled page after page with his own corrections. In the preface to the second edition of the Great Bible, Cranmer expressly said that it was ‘for all manner of persons, men, women, young, old, rich, poor priests, laymen, lords, ladies, officers, tenants and mean men, virgins, wives, widows, lawyers, merchants, all manner of persons of whatever estate and condition’. But Henry had no intention of tolerating this commonwealth of believers, and in 1543 he expressly forbade women and the lower classes (that is, the vast majority of his subjects) from reading the English Bible lest they be led astray. For many this was a grievous deprivation. On the fly leaf of a small religious tract is an inscription by an Oxfordshire shepherd: ‘I bought this book when the testament was abrogated that shepherds might not read it. I pray God amend that blindness. Writ by Robert Williams, keeping sheep upon Saintbury Hill.’

  Cromwell was really pushing his luck, then, when he attempted to align Henry with the league of Lutheran princes by contracting a marriage alliance with a German princess. The union with poor Anne of Cleves collapsed as soon as Henry discovered that she was a lot less appealing than Holbein’s adorable miniature had advertised. Cromwell, just elevated to the earldom of Essex, was swept away in a court coup, organized by Norfolk and Suffolk, that was every bit as ruthless as those he himself had managed. Parliament passed the Six Articles, which outlawed marriage for priests on pain of death and upheld the real presence of Christ in the mass. Somehow, Cranmer, whose own marriage was, of course, still kept a deathly secret from the king and who, after briefly defending Cromwell, prudently repudiated him just as he had repudiated Anne, was spared. Although he supposed him misguided, the king was somehow emotionally attached to the archbishop who had steered him through so many storms. Increasingly, though, real theological power lay with much more conservative bishops, like Stephen Gardiner.

  In the last years of his reign the king was becoming more rigid, both physically and theologically. He was now in his fifties, and the body that had once caused swooning fits of admiration on the tennis court had become a vast, bloated, arthritic hulk. A little cart was built to wheel him from room to room in Hampton Court. But for a dizzy moment he deluded himself that Norfolk’s nubile niece, Catherine Howard, was actually as besotted with him as he was with her and he embarrassingly played the part of the lusty husband, until, that is, he discovered that queen number five (unlike queen number two) had been to bed with her cousin Thomas Culpeper. His last wife, Catherine Parr, was exactly what Henry needed in his fading years: nurse, auntie and matron. She would humour his rages and indulge his fantasy that he was still the great warlord, provoking him to a last disastrous campaign against the French. But when his prize warship, the Mary Rose, sank in Portsmouth harbour it was as if the whole, top-heavy Henrician fantasy empire had gone to the bottom of the sea with it.

  Chief among the fantasies with which Henry consoled himself was the notion that by slamming on the brakes he had healed the bitter divisions in the country. In the massive portrait from the studio of Holbein, which was done for the College of Barber Surgeons, Henry appears not just as an unearthly English Caesar, but also as ‘Great Physician’, which is exactly how the king liked to see himself: the Tudor medicine man, who had laid out the body of England on the operating table and had cut out the cankers of papist superstition. The patient was now recovered; the nation was grateful, the operation a complete success.

  Except, of course, it wasn’t. Henry would be followed by his three children, each of whom had utterly different ideas about what was best for the spiritual and political health of the country. Between Edward, the heir apparent, and his half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, England would move right through the spectrum of belief from intense Protestant evangelicalism to equally militant Catholicism. And the direction taken by the English Church would, more than ever, depend not on any confessional programme, as on the lottery of royal births, marriages and deaths.

  Henry’s funeral, as vast and imposing as he had been, offered no guidance for what was about to happen. Dirges and masses were sung for the repose of his soul, and his mighty entrails were ceremonially interred at Whitehall. The most conservative bishops – Stephen Gardiner at Winchester and Edmund Bonner in London – were still in their sees, but in the very last year of Henry VIII’s reign the Catholic party had been fatally compromised by over-confidence. The Earl of Surrey had gone to the block, and his father, the Duke of Norfolk, was a prisoner in the Tower. So Cranmer, Edward’s godfather and one of the executors of the late king’s will, was in a position to become the dominant figure in the Edwardian cultural revolution. Quite soon, wearing the beard that made him look like an Old Testament prophet, Cranmer sounded a new note when in a sermon he spoke of
the nine-year-old boy as ‘Josiah’. Josiah was the boy-king of Israel whose mission had been the smashing of idolatry, and solemn little Edward was to take this very much to heart. Although St Edward’s spurs had to be taken off him at his coronation in Westminster Abbey lest he trip over them, he was still God’s little crusader, and during his reign a transformation would take place so sweeping as to make everything that happened in his father’s time seem just a stiff breeze before the whirlwind.

  Cranmer was the moving spirit; Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and the Lord Protector, provided the power. Together they unleashed a true reformation. In the first year of the reign, in July 1547, a special ‘injunction’ from the royal council banned almost all the traditional customs and ceremonies. There would be no more blessings of the candles at Candlemas, no more ‘creeping to the cross’ on Good Friday. Doves would no longer be released from the roof of St Paul’s on Whit Sunday. In the second year the religious guilds and fraternities went. In their place, poor boxes were posted in the churches. Any cults of saints and processions that had survived Cromwell’s onslaught were now done away with. In due course, Edward himself took care to expunge any mention of St George from the Order of the Garter. Carts and wagons were filled with the smashed-up debris of the old church: roods, stained glass, vestments and vessels. Bells were taken down from the belfries. At Durham a commissioner jumped up and down on a large Corpus Christi monstrance to make sure it was battered to destruction. Pots of lime wash were brought into the churches of England to obliterate the wall paintings; this was probably the moment when the saints of Binham Priory were whitened out. Sounds as well as sights were banished from the liturgy. ‘Alas, gossip,’ bewailed one woman. ‘What shall we do at church since all the godly sights we were wont to have are gone and we cannot hear the piping, singing, chanting and playing upon the organ that we could before?’

  In the third year, 1549, disreputable literature was done away with and in its place came translated Bibles, no fewer than sixty of them during Edward’s reign and available now to all those dangerous people whom Henry had wanted to keep away from the evangelion. Books of homilies explained to the laity how their salvation was a free gift of God’s grace, made possible by the sacrifice of his son. And a new Book of Common Prayer, required in all parishes for the first time, made English the dominant language of the church service. There would be no exorcism of the salt at baptism, no blessing of the ring at marriages.

  To take the measure of the Edwardian revolution, one need only go to Hailes church in Gloucestershire. Years before, Anne Boleyn had sent her own commissioners to the abbey to inspect the cross, which was said to liquefy with the blood of Christ. They had exposed the fraud as a mixture of wax and duck’s blood. But in 1550 something much more radical took place at the church. Instead of the stone altar, set in the place of honour at the east end of the church where bread and wine had become the flesh and blood of Christ, a plain wooden table was placed in the middle of the chancel, and the priest, dressed in a simple surplice like a parish clerk, broke bread and gave it to the congregation, who were sitting alongside him. The redesign of the church was expressly meant to abolish the distance between the priest (as he was still called) and the flock. The screen, which had acted as a barrier protecting the mystery of the mass, was now just a way in to the communion, a gathering of the faithful along with their priest. No room was left for any kind of miraculous transformation, just a symbolic remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice. As if this were not shocking enough, at some point in 1550 the priest would have invited the congregation to partake of communion using those English words never before heard in church, ‘Dearly beloved’. The familiarity of the address must have bewildered many and made others feel uncomfortable, rather like being exhorted to call the vicar ‘Bob’. Worse, men and women were supposed to line up for communion on opposite sides of the table, which must have reminded everyone of the opening of a country dance.

  But momentous things were happening to the relations between the sexes as a result of the Edwardian reforms. Priests could, and did, now live openly with their wives. Thomas Cranmer, the first married Archbishop of Canterbury, composed a wedding service with English texts that, for the first time, treated marriage not as a sacrament but as a moral human relationship, ‘for mutual help, society and comfort . . . that the one ought to have of the other both in prosperity and adversity’. And if marriage were no longer a sacrament, then it could be broken by divorce. Another first during Edward’s reign were the women who took advantage of this freedom to obtain divorces as a result of the adultery of their husbands, and this might include the ‘spiritual adultery’ of his obstinate attachment to papism!

  England was now a divided country. It was, in the first instance, divided by generation. In the cities and towns of the southeast, where the Reformation was strongest, Edward’s own generation could have had no memory of the old pre-1530 Church. Teenagers, especially male teenagers, watched as all sorts of old stuff – relics, statues, glass – were breezily trashed by the commissioners. Now they were free to have some fun at the expense of the back-number Church, too. Priests were pelted with stones or subjected to joke masses or just bad-mouthed by smart-alecks standing around on street corners. Miles Huggarde, an indignant Catholic, complained bitterly that the young had ‘no regard at all to repair to the church upon the holy days but flock in clusters upon stalls either scorning the passers-by or with their testaments utter some wise stuff of their own device’. But in places like Norwich and London there was a different kind of church to attract the young. For the first time going to hear itinerant preachers, sometimes outdoors, became a pastime. In fact, you could go to the same place – like the Privy Garden – and see bear-baiting one day and a hot gospeller the next. Star turns delivered thundering sermons on the iniquities of mankind that got the blood racing and the heart pounding: thrill time for the sinful. This was their religion – of the word, the psalms turned into English rhymes – and they felt the surge of excited loyalty that came from membership of the troops of the righteous.

  It wouldn’t do to sell the exhilarating appeal of Protestantism short by representing it as some sort of frivolously adopted counter-culture. The very simplicity of its call to sweep away all the encrusted custom and unquestioned authority of the centuries was viscerally thrilling. If there was destruction of the false gods and idols, it was only so that the purity of the gospel truth could be brilliantly revealed. Being told that each and every believer might find for themselves that gospel truth in scripture alone was a genuine liberation. For the first time in the history of Christianity individualism was sanctified. To those who experienced this rush of freedom and self-sufficiency, it was like being reborn: like drinking clear water, breathing the purest oxygen.

  The Roman Church had always been described as a mother. Well, now it was time to grow up. Leaving home, though, was not for everyone. In Lancashire or Cornwall in the 1540s the young were just as attached to the old ways as their elders, perhaps more so. In the west and north priests kept the Latin mass alive surreptitiously, nervously aware that Edmund Bonner and Stephen Gardiner, the bishops who had protested at Cranmer’s new regime, were now in prison and their sees given to reformers. But there were some who were determined to resist, whatever the cost. At Helston on 6 April 1547 William Body, who was overseeing the destruction of images in Cornwall, was beaten to death in front of the church. Two years later the forcible introduction of the Book of Common Prayer triggered a massive rebellion in the southwest, culminating in a thirty-five-day siege of Exeter and a pitched battle at Sampford Courtenay in which 4000 Devonians and Cornishmen were killed.

  As if this wasn’t bad enough, rebellions against the Book of Common Prayer broke out in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and a much more serious revolt, driven by social and economic grievances in hard times of high prices and land enclosures, occurred in East Anglia, with 3000 artisans, urban craftsmen and yeomen camped at Mousehold Heath outside Norwich. They w
ere led by the tanner, Robert Kett, who ‘hath conceived a wonderful hate against all gentlemen and taketh them all as their enemies’. Specifically, the Mousehold rebels demanded a prohibition on lords using common land or keeping sheep at the expense of the tillage of the common people. Before this revolt was also suppressed with more thousands dead, Somerset’s authority was in ruins. For a while there was talk of making Princess Mary regent, but with the support of the new leading magnate, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, Cranmer held stubbornly to the principles of his reformation, if anything sharpening them, confiscating the redundant vessels of the mass and inviting famous (or, depending on your point of view, notorious) Protestants to live in England and take up posts in Oxford and Cambridge.

  None of this could have happened without the active endorsement of the king himself. And as he grew from child to teenager, it became apparent that Edward VI was very much his father’s son and not at all the pasty-faced weakling of popular myth. Edward had the same insatiable appetite for riding, hawking and hunting as Henry; the same volatile temper (especially when failing to get what he thought a proper allowance); and the same conviction that he was perfectly qualified to be Supreme Head of the Church. But unlike his father, Edward had no reservations about the old religion. Along with friends and relatives – his half-sister Elizabeth, and the grandchildren of Charles Brandon and Mary Tudor – he had been educated by enthusiastic and learned Protestants, including John Cheke, his tutor. From the beginning he was primed, loaded and ready to blast away at the idolatry of benighted papists. Even when he had been just ten years old he had let it be known that the pope was ‘the true son of the Devil, an anti-Christ and an abominable tyrant’. In 1550 he learned that, despite the Act of Uniformity of 1549, which outlawed the mass, his half-sister Mary not only persisted in her Catholic forms of worship but made no attempt to hide them. Edward himself reported on the ill-fated meeting that took place to try to resolve the issue. ‘The Lady Mary, my sister, came to me at Westminster where after salutations she was called of my Council into a chamber where it was declared how long I had suffered her Mass. She answered that her soul was God’s and her face she would not change nor would she dissemble with contrary doings.’ But although Mary was emotionally devoted to her brother, she was much more devoted to the old Church and actually increased her attendance at the mass to two and even three times a day. ‘When they send me orders forbidding me the Mass, I shall expect to suffer as I suffered once during my father’s lifetime,’ she said. ‘I am like a little ignorant girl and I care neither for my goods nor for the World but only for God’s service and my conscience.’