Journey Through Tudor England

by Suzannah Lipscomb

  Born in 1478, More was sent as a child to the household of Cardinal John Morton — who, legend has it, prophesied that More would ‘prove a marvellous man’ — before being educated at Canterbury College, Oxford and New Inn. He was then admitted to Lincoln’s Inn, where his father was already a Bencher, on 12 February 1496, having just turned eighteen years of age. He was called to the Bar five or six years later.

  The Lincoln’s Inn that More knew centred on the Old Hall, built between 1489 and 1492, only a few years after Henry VII came to the throne and before Christopher Columbus headed for the New World. This beautiful building would have been where the young More ate and drank, debated with his friends, or watched the Christmas revels when a ‘Lord of Misrule’ (often some lowly person, dressed in motley) presided over the Feast of Fools, a bacchanalian time of drinking and partying. The hall was enlarged with two bay windows in 1582, and has been remodelled over the years (in the eighteenth century, a disproportionately heavy plaster ceiling was added which was removed when the hall was rebuilt stone by stone in 1924—8), but it would still be familiar to More, whose arms are now shown in two of the windows. In later years, More would also have regularly walked into the Inn through the old gatehouse on Chancery Lane, which was built in 1521 (the gates themselves date from 1564).

  It was Thomas More’s early adult life at Lincoln’s Inn that fundamentally shaped both his identity and destiny. Here, More made some influential friends: scholars like John Colet, the future Dean of St Paul’s, and Thomas Linacre, the noted physician. They were humanists, which in the sixteenth century did not imply atheism but an intellectual focus on the rediscovery of classical learning, including an interest in reforming the Church by turning to the original Greek scriptures. Through another scholar, Lord Mountjoy, More met the greatest humanist of the age, Desiderius Erasmus, who became his lifelong friend, and in whose company, in 1499, More walked from Lincoln’s Inn to Eltham Palace to meet the young Prince Henry, who would ultimately determine his fate.

  More was attracted to the austere monastic life and spent time at nearby Charterhouse. Later, his son-in-law recorded that More wore a hair shirt and practised self-flagellation. More, however, decided against the monastic life and chose instead to marry — in 1505 to Jane Colt and, after her death in 1511, to Alice Middleton — and accounts of his character suggest a cheerful, charismatic and intelligent man. Erasmus called him ‘a man for all seasons’ — the moniker Robert Bolt used as the title to his famous play and film about More’s life — because of his jovial disposition, while in 1521, Richard Whittington described him as ‘a man of angel’s wit and singular learning’. This wit found its apogee in his book Utopia (‘utopia’ is an ambiguous word that suggests both the Greek for ‘no place’ and ‘happy place’). This is a satirical account of a traveller in a fabled land in which pride and greed do not exist, war is thought only fit for beasts, all property is communal and potential spouses can inspect each other’s naked bodies before deciding to marry. The book remains one of the founding texts of political science and philosophy, and is still on undergraduate reading lists around the world.

  More eventually entered the public sphere. He sat in Parliament, acted as a diplomat and became a member of Henry VIII’s council. Henry was very fond of More: there are accounts of the two going up onto a palace’s lead roofs to study the stars and planets together, and of Henry visiting More at his house in Chelsea and walking with him in the garden ‘by the space of an hour, holding his arm about his neck’.

  Henry was particularly pleased with More’s help in composing the riposte to Martin Luther that won the King the title of ‘Defender of the Faith’. It was the first of More’s many antiheretical actions: in 1525, More was involved in raids on Lutheran books, and four years later produced a sharp and brilliant volume called Dialogues Concerning Heresies which challenged and refuted the teachings of William Tyndale, among others. After Cardinal Thomas Wolsey fell from grace [see CHRIST CHURCH] and More took his role as Lord Chancellor, he used his new powers to further his campaign against heretics, including approving several executions.

  Despite the honour of his elevated position, More knew better than to trust the man who had deposed the ‘wise and honourable’ Wolsey. His remarks — that he couldn’t rely on Henry’s favour for ‘If my head could win him a castle in France … it should not fail to go’, and that ‘Politics be King’s games … and for the more part, played upon scaffolds’ — show a shrewd understanding of the corrupting nature of power and, in particular, Henry’s tendency to punish failure in those on whom he most relied.

  Yet More also had a conscience: one that proved to be his downfall. He felt unable to accept Henry’s repudiation of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, both resigning from his post as Lord Chancellor in May 1532 and refusing to attend Anne Boleyn’s coronation in June 1533. Like John Haughton and the monks of Charterhouse he then refused to consent to the King’s displacement of the Pope in the role of Supreme Head of the Church by swearing the Oath of Succession. As a result of this disloyalty, he was imprisoned in the Tower, and tried over a year later under an act passed in the interim that made it treason to deny the Ring’s supremacy. Silent in the face of his accusers, he was eventually convicted by the perjury of the villainously named Sir Richard Rich [also see THE TOWER OF LONDON].

  On 6 July 1535, More was beheaded. His wit did not desert him at the last. He joked with an officer on the scaffold, ‘I pray you, master lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself’, and comforted the executioner, ‘Pluck up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thine office. My neck is very short.’ Four hundred years later, Pope Pius XI canonised More as a Catholic saint and martyr.

  Lincoln’s Inn remembers its famous son. A copy of Hans Holbein’s portrait of More as Lord Chancellor, with his rich gown and chain of office, hangs in the Great Hall, but the greatest treasure is hidden in a nearby committee room. Here, a prized Holbein miniature of More ensures that in this place, where many great men and women have studied and worked, More’s profound determination to act according to his conscience will never be forgotten.

  ‘On 18 July, in the first year of our reign.’

  Letter signed ‘Jane the Queen’, from July 1553

  Guildhall, which is situated at the centre of the City’s square mile on the site of an old Roman amphitheatre, is one of London’s great survivors. It was the only secular building to escape the Great Fire of London in 1666 and it survived the Blitz in 1940, though in both instances it lost its roof and windows. In the fifteenth century, it was the second largest edifice in London, after the Old St Paul’s Cathedral, and the formidable Great Hall and undercroft date from that period. It is now on its fifth roof, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott to recreate what the medieval roof may have looked like, but everything beneath window-height is to the design of the original master mason, John Croxton, who built the Great Hall between 1411 and 1430. It is Gothic perpendicular in style, and an impressive 151 feet long, 48 feet wide and 89 feet high. The five-foot-thick walls may partly explain its durability.

  In the Tudor century, it was the setting for important trials: notably the momentous trial of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury [see BROAD STREET, OXFORD]; Guildford Dudley and his wife, Lady Jane Grey.

  The traditional version of Jane’s story is littered with misapprehensions, not least of which is that she is known as the ‘Nine Days’ Queen’. In fact, her reign extended for thirteen days, from the death of Edward VI on 6 July 1553 to the declaration of Mary as Queen on 19 July. She is also known to history as Lady Jane Grey, but after her marriage on 25 May 1553, she always signed herself with her husband’s surname, Jane Dudley. Most tellingly of all, she is thought of as a rebellious pretender to the throne, thrust into the limelight by her ambitious father-in-law, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland.

  The truth is that, according to the provisions of Edward VI’s ‘device for the succession’, Jane was Edward�
�s rightful chosen heir and Mary the illegitimate rebel, and it was not only Northumberland, but the whole political establishment who originally backed Jane. When Edward died, it looked likely that Queen Jane would have a long and prosperous rule.

  Instead, Jane became one of history’s victims. Just sixteen years old, pretty, petite and slender, with brown eyes, auburn hair and fair, lightly freckled skin, she seems to have been a serious but charming bluestocking. Her extraordinary gift for study and languages is best illustrated by the fact that when Roger Ascham, Elizabeth I’s tutor, arrived at the Greys’ house at Bradgate in August 1550, he found everyone out hunting except for the fourteen-year-old Jane, who sat alone, reading Plato in the original Greek.

  But Jane’s eventual downfall had nothing to do with her character: it was a matter of birth. Her parents were Henry Grey, Marquess of Dorset (later Duke of Suffolk), and Lady Frances Brandon, daughter of Henry VIII’s younger sister, Mary [see THE CHURCH OF ST MARY, BURY ST EDMUNDS]. When the sick and childless Edward VI was looking to provide himself with a legitimate heir, his gaze landed on Jane, and her fate was sealed.

  Under Henry VIII’s last will, and a statute from 1544, if Edward died without children, the English throne was to pass to Mary, and then to Elizabeth. But Edward’s half-sisters were only in the line of succession because in 1536 Henry VIII had established that it was the king’s right to determine his successor beyond the usual principle of male primogeniture. This meant Henry could later add Mary and Elizabeth to the line of succession while retaining his profound belief in their illegitimacy — for they had been declared bastards when his marriages to their mothers failed. Their claim to the throne was not by right: it was a gift from the King, and what one monarch had given another could take away.

  As King, Edward also had the right to determine the succession, and since his half-sisters were officially bastards, he never seems to have considered their claim. Edward was also desperate not to hand the crown to his Catholic sister Mary, for he had been busy entrenching the Protestant reformation in England. When he fell ill in early 1553, and his mind turned to his mortality, his first plan for the succession intended that only male heirs would succeed. Later, when he realised his illness was terminal, he — or someone with his consent — made a crucial change to his ‘device for the succession’, amending it in favour of ‘Lady Jane and her heirs male’. On 21 June 1553, Edward signed and sealed this legal document, and 102 witnesses added their support.

  Yet, when Edward died a fortnight later on 6 July, the government was unprepared. For several days Edward’s death remained a badly kept secret. Jane was not informed that she was queen until Sunday 9 July. The council also underestimated Mary, failing to anticipate her bold and rebellious actions after sources told her that Edward was dying. When Robert Dudley was sent to collect her the day after Edward’s death, he found that Mary had already escaped to her strongholds in East Anglia and, a day later, had had herself declared queen [see FRAMLINGHAM].

  Meanwhile, in London, Jane was proclaimed queen on 10 July, and escorted, with her husband, Guildford Dudley, to the Tower in great pomp and ceremony to await her (and possibly his) coronation.

  Having let Mary escape, the government now needed to muster an army to tackle her rebellion, but they failed to do so with sufficient speed. Northumberland was given charge of the troops but, taking the long way towards Mary’s base at Framlingham, via Cambridge, in the hope of picking up reinforcements, he didn’t reach Suffolk until 18 July. In the interim, Mary had amassed a force of close to 10,000 and had probably even acquired artillery.

  To both the council in London and Northumberland on the march, it became evident that might was on Mary’s side. In the afternoon of 19 July, sensing their hand had been forced, the council performed a volte-face and proclaimed Mary queen. On 20 July, Northumberland followed suit. Ten days after being told she was queen, Jane was told she was not.

  Keen to evade punishment, the council looked for a scapegoat and pointed the finger at the absent Northumberland. After Mary had taken full power, he was tried for treason on 18 August, even though most of the jury had been just as committed to Queen Jane as he.

  Jane remained in the Tower, now a prisoner, until her trial on 13 November 1553. Staging the trial at Guildhall, rather than in the privacy of Westminster or the Tower, was in itself an act of humiliation. Dressed in black and carrying a Bible, Jane maintained her composure, even when the sentence to be ‘burned alive on Tower Hill or beheaded as the Queen should please’ was pronounced in Guildhall’s cavernous Great Hall.

  Few, however, believed it would end that way. It was still expected that Jane, whom even Mary accepted had done little wrong herself, would, in time, be released.

  This all changed after Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger’s rebellion in early February 1554 [see WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL]: an uprising about which Jane had no knowledge and with which she could not have been involved, imprisoned as she was in the Tower. Seeing her as a target for rebellion, and perhaps in revenge at Jane’s father’s involvement, Mary decided to execute Jane and Guildford. The sentence was carried out almost immediately: both were beheaded on 12 February 1554. Jane had not yet reached her seventeenth birthday.

  In the years after her death, Jane’s story was rewritten by the victors: their guilt obscuring her legal claim to the throne. At Guildhall, remember the young, bright Jane Dudley, whose fate was decided by forces greater than herself.

  ‘The Prince of Wales was kept under such strict supervision that he might have been a young girl.’

  Eltham Palace was the childhood home of Henry VIII. Perched on a hill with magnificent views over London, it was built as a moated mansion for Anthony Bek, the Bishop of Durham in 1295, and became a royal home ten years later. Among its many royal residents and builders were Edward III, Richard II, Henry IV — who spent most of his Christmases as King here — and Edward IV. At its zenith, it was a vast palace, far bigger than Hampton Court, with an outer court (you can see the Lord Chancellor’s lodgings, which made up part of this court, to the left over the moat bridge), substantial chapel, apartments for the King and Queen, a Great Hall, an array of kitchens and lodgings for courtiers. Edward IV and his wife, Elizabeth, entertained 2,000 people here during Christmas 1482. Now, it is a masterpiece of a different sort, having been turned into an art deco wonderland by the Courtauld family in the 1930s. Nevertheless, there is an important Tudor history to the palace to discover.

  Henry VIII was born on 28 June 1491 at Greenwich Palace (which sadly no longer stands). He was the third child and second son of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Like his elder brother, Arthur [see LUDLOW CASTLE], he had symbolic titles bestowed on him as an infant, becoming the nominal Constable of Dover Castle, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, Earl Marshal and Lieutenant of England, Duke of York, Warden of the Scottish Marches and Knight of the Garter. The most memorable of these investitures for him must have been when as a child of nearly three and a half (doting parents take note), he rode a great warhorse through London and was bathed in a wooden tub in order to be dubbed a Knight of the Bath the following day.

  Throughout his childhood at Eltham, Henry was often separated from his father, who had his hands full dealing with the threat posed by pretenders to his throne. He also lived almost entirely apart from his elder brother, who had been given a separate establishment at Farnham and was then shipped off to Ludlow at the age of six. Henry was left with his mother, Elizabeth, his two surviving sisters, Margaret and Mary, and the overbearing figure of his grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort.

  Into this female world came the poet John Skelton, who was Henry’s tutor from the mid-1490s to 1502. Under his influence, Henry became an accomplished musician and linguist. He learnt to play the lute, virginals and organ, to sing well, and to speak and write a number of languages, including Latin. When the renowned humanist Desiderius Erasmus visited the young Duke of York with Thomas More in 1499 [see LINCOLN’S INN], he was so impressed that he later
noted ‘when the King was no more than a child … he had a vivid and active mind, above measure to execute whatever tasks he undertook’. ‘You would say,’ he added, ‘that he was a universal genius.’ Skelton also entrusted Henry with a dedicated book of advice, Speculum Principis, or The Mirror of Princes, in which he exhorted him to ‘pick a wife for yourself and love but her alone’ — advice that Henry imperfectly followed on a total of six occasions.

  In these seminal years of education and female affection, Henry would have walked under the spectacular oak hammer-beam ceiling of Eltham’s Great Hall, erected by Edward IV and still there today. In Henry VIII’s youth, it would have been partly gilded and we know it had an impact on the young Henry, because he recreated it at his pleasure palace of Hampton Court thirty years later. He would also have known the medieval stone bay windows in the Great Hall, but little else would have been exactly as it is now. The timber screen at the dais end with the carved beasts is a good guess — it is based on a fifteenth-century rood screen — but it was added by the architects John Seely and Paul Paget in the 1930s, while the stained glass in the windows dates from 1936.

  Henry’s world changed when he was ten years old. In the first of several losses, his brother Arthur died before Henry turned eleven. Less than a year later, his mother died on 11 February 1503, on her thirty-seventh birthday and, four months after that, his elder sister, Margaret, moved to Edinburgh to marry James IV. Henry never saw her again. In the place of relatives came further titles — Duke of Cornwall, Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester.

  The spate of deaths in the family — including five infant mortalities — in so short a time also rocked Henry’s father. He responded by sheltering his remaining son from danger. Unlike Arthur, who had been sent to the Welsh Marches (the part of England bordering Wales) as a training for kingship, Henry was to receive no such apprenticeship. In early 1508, a Spanish envoy called Gutierre Gomez de Fuensalida visited England and reported that ‘the Prince of Wales was kept under such strict supervision that he might have been a young girl’ and was ‘so subjected that he does not speak a word except in response to what the King asks him’. It is not wild to speculate about a link between his sheltered and repressed childhood and his extravagant adulthood, or the excessive masculinity he displayed as a grown man compared with his upbringing ‘like a young girl’.