Great Tales from English History, Book 2

by Robert Lacey

  Chief among these was Anne herself, who had a radical taste in reading. Sometime in 1530 she placed in Henry’s hands a copy of the recently published Obedience of a Christian Man by the reformer William Tyndale, a controversial little volume that had been denounced as‘a holy boke of disobedyence’ by Thomas More, Wolsey’s successor as Lord Chancellor How Christian Rulers Ought to Govern was Tyndale’s subtitle, and he argued that, since the Bible made no mention of the Pope (nor of bishops, abbots, church courts or of the whole earthly edifice of church power and glory), the Church should be governed like the state, by a‘true Christian prince’ — without interference from the so-called‘Bishop of Rome’.

  ’This book is for me and for all Kings to read,’ mused Henry — here was the solution to his troublesome‘Great Matter’. Why should the King not effectively award himself his own divorce, as governor of the English Church, in order to secure the heir that his country needed?‘England cares nothing for popes,’ Anne’s brother George Boleyn would declare to a papal official visiting England in the summer of 1530.‘The king is absolute emperor and pope in his own kingdom.’

  The Boleyns were thrusting members of the rising Tudor gentry — landowners and former merchants whose personal beliefs were traditional but who had no special fondness for the Pope, and still less for the power and privileges of the clergy with their unearned wealth and their special exemptions from the law. Scrounging was the Church’s speciality, according to a scurrilous tract of the time, A Supplication for the Beggars, which pretended to be a petition from the‘Beggars of England’ to the King, complaining that crafty churchmen were putting them out of business by begging so much better than they could. Stealing land, money and even, on occasion, the virtue of good men’s wives and daughters, the clerics had filched‘the whole realm’, complained the Supplication.

  This jeering anticlerical sentiment was mobilised in the autumn of 1529, when Parliament gathered for what was to prove an historic series of sessions. Discontented laymen were invited to draw up lists of their grievances against the clergy, and the result, finally codified in May 1532, was a formidable roundup of just about everything that people found irritating about the often complacent and greedy ways of the all-too-earthly Church. It was exactly what the King wanted to hear.‘We thought that the clergy of our realm had been our subjects wholly,’ declared Henry menacingly as he studied the list of complaints.‘But now we have well perceived that they be but half our subjects.’

  Here was an area where the King and a fair number of the merchants, lawyers, country gentlemen and landed magnates who dominated Parliament clearly felt as one. England, they argued, should have control over its own Church — and between 1529 and 1536 Parliament passed a series of laws to accomplish that, transferring the many aspects of church life and business to the Crown.

  The immediate consequence was that Henry was able to marry Anne and cast off Katherine. But the long-term consequence of these new laws went far beyond Henry and his need for a son.’This realm of England is an empire… declared the Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533,‘governed by one supreme head and king… furnished with plenary, whole and entire power… without restraint or provocation to any foreign princes or potentates of the world’.

  Henry’s‘Great Matter’ turned out to be greater than anyone, including himself, had guessed. English kings now acknowledged no superior under God on earth.

  LET THERE BE LIGHT’ WILLIAM TYNDALE AND THE ENGLISH BIBLE

  1525

  HENRY VIII’S HISTORIC BREAK WITH ROME was fundamentally about earthly power, not spiritual belief. Even while Henry was demolishing the Pope’s authority over the English Church in the early 1530s, a Sunday service in the average English parish was still shaped by the comforting chants and Catholic rituals hallowed by the centuries.

  But in Europe, belief was changing more radically. In October 1517 the rebellious German monk Martin Luther, a miner’s son turned theologian and philosophy professor, had nailed his famous ninety-five theses — or‘propositions’ — to the church door in Wittenberg in Saxony. Luther was appalled by the materialism of the Roman Church, and his ninety-five propositions were a particular attack on the sale of‘indulgences’, Church-approved coupons that people purchased in the belief that they were being let off their sins — printed tickets to heaven. The Pope had no authority to forgive people’s sins, argued Luther, let alone offer forgiveness for sale, like bread or beer. It was faith alone that would bring salvation, and men had no need of priests to mediate with God. Believers could commune directly with their Maker through prayer, and by reading God’s word in the Bible. Within a few years several dozen of Germany’s duchies and principalities had thrown off papal authority and signed up to Luther’s protests and to his call for reform — generating the movement that historians would later call the Protestant Reformation.

  Henry VIII was outraged. He thought that Luther’s views undermined civil obedience, and left people with no reason to be good. When Luther’s message reached England, the King was still on warm terms with the Pope, and with the help of Thomas More he fired off an indignant diatribe against the heretical German, earning himself the title Fidei Defensor, ’Defender of the Faith’. To this day the abbreviations Fid. Def, or FD., appear on the face of every English coin, commemorating the title by which in 1521, only a decade before the break with Rome, the grateful Pope declared Henry his favourite and most faithful prince in Europe. On Henry’s orders, Cardinal Wolsey organised public burnings of Luther’s books, and even hunted down the reformer’s translation of the New Testament into German.

  The Roman Church’s own version of the Bible was in Latin — the fourth-century Latin of St Jerome, whose precise meaning might be accessible to learned priests and scholars but which floated sonorously over the heads of most churchgoers, rather like a magical incantation, heavy on comfort and light on explanation. The Roman priesthood’s control over faith relied heavily on its virtual monopoly of Latin, and most churchmen felt deeply threatened by the idea of people reading the Bible in their own language and interpreting it for themselves.

  But this was precisely the ambition of the young priest, William Tyndale, who was working in Gloucestershire in the early 1520s. This area, on the border with Wales, had long been a stronghold of the Lollards, the prayer-mumbling disciples of John Wycliffe who, back in the 1380s, had argued that the Bible should be made accessible to ordinary people in their own tongue.If God spare my life,’ declared Tyndale in a heated argument with an establishment cleric who had railed against the translating of the Bible,‘ere many years, I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough, shall know more the Scripture than thou dost.’

  The talented and scholarly Tyndale had command of eight languages, notably Greek and Hebrew, which were virtually unknown in England at this time. He was also blessed with an extraordinary ability to create poetic phrases in his native tongue, and his memorable translations live on to this day —‘the salt of the earth’,‘signs of the times’,‘the powers that be and even’bald as a coot’ we owe to William Tyndale. All these vibrant expressions flowed from his pen as, through the 1520s, he laboured to render the word of God into ploughboy language. When he could not find the right word, he invented it —‘scapegoat’ and‘broken-hearted’ are two of his coinages. As he translated, he was helping to shape the very rhythm and thought patterns of English:‘eat drink and be merry’ —‘am I my brother’s keeper?’ —‘fight the good fight’ —‘blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth’…

  To avoid the wrath of Wolsey, who was having heretics whipped and imprisoned, Tyndale had to compose his fine phrases abroad. In 1524 he travelled to Europe, where he dodged from printing press to printing press in cities like Hamburg and Brussels — shadowed by the cardinal’s agents, who had identifieed this prolific wordsmith as a home-grown heretic quite as dangerous as Luther. In 1526, Tyndale managed to get three thousand copies of his New Testament printed in the German city of Worms, and wit
hin months the books were circulating among freethinkers in England, smuggled in by Hull sailors in casks of wax and grain. It was four years later that a copy of Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man reached Anne Boleyn, providing encouragement for Henry’s break from the Pope.

  But then in 1530, Tyndale dared to address the great question of the King’s marriage from a biblical point of view, and with the perversity of the dyed-in-the-wool nonconformist he concluded in his book The Practice of Prelates that the Bible did not authorise Henry to jettison his wife.

  It was his death sentence. The growing number of reformers among the English clergy were advocating the use of the Bible in English, and Tyndale’s accurate and powerful translation was the obvious version to use. But the King was infuriated by Tyndale’s criticism of his divorce and of his proposed marriage to Anne. The English agents kept up their pursuit of the fugitive, and in May 1535 they got their man. Now aged about forty, he was captured in Antwerp, to be condemned as a heretic and sentenced to be burned to death.

  On 6 October 1536, William Tyndale was led out to his execution. As a small token of mercy he was granted the kindness of being strangled in the moments before the fire was lit. But the executioner bungled the tightening of the rope, painfully crushing Tyndale’s throat while leaving him still alive as the flames licked around him.

  ’Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!’ cried the reformer as he died.

  The executioner piled on more fuel until the body was totally consumed, since the purpose of burning heretics was to reduce them to ashes that could be thrown to the winds — no trace of their presence should be left on earth. But William Tyndale left more than ashes:‘In the begynnynge was the worde and the worde was with God and the worde was God… In it was lyfe and the lyfe was the light of men. And the light shyneth in the darknes, but the darknes comprehended it not.’

  THOMAS MORE AND HIS WONDERFUL‘NO-PLACE’

  1535

  YOUNG HENRY VIII LOVED THE COMPANY OF the learned and witty Thomas More. The King would take him up on to the roof of his palace to gaze skywards and consider with him the diversities, courses, motions and operations of the stars’. Travelling in his barge down the Thames one day, he decided to drop in unexpectedly on the Mores’ sprawling riverside home in Chelsea. He invited himself for dinner, then walked in the garden with his host‘by the space of an hour, holding his arm about his neck’.

  More’s son-in-law William Roper was much impressed by this intimacy with the King, but More himself had no illusions.‘Son Roper, I may tell thee…’ he confided,‘if my head could win His Majesty a castle in France it should not fail to go.’

  Thomas More was literally a Renaissance man, playing his own part in the great’re-birthing’ of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. South of the Alps, the Renaissance was famously embodied by such artists as Michelangelo and Leonardo. In the north, it was the so-called‘Christian humanists’ like More and his Dutch friend Erasmus who struck sparks off each other — to memorable effect. In 1509, Erasmus dedicated his great work In Praise of Folly to Thomas (its Latin name, Encomium Moriae, was a pun on More’s name). More responded with his own flight of intellect, Utopia — his inspired combination of the Greek words for‘no’ and’place’.

  Utopia is the tale More claimed to have heard when, coming out of church one day, he bumped into an old seaman:‘his face was tanned, he had a long beard, and his cloak was hanging carelessly about him’. This philosopher-sailor had been travelling with the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, after whom the Americas would shortly be named. Having chatted with More for a while about all that was presently wrong with the kingdoms of Europe, he started describing his experiences on the island of’Utopia’ where, he said, there was no shortage of life’s essentials. When people went to the market, everything was free, and because of that‘there is no danger of a man’s asking for more than he needs… since they are sure that they shall always be supplied. It is the fear of want that makes any of the whole race of animals either greedy or ravenous.’

  Like space travel in our own day, the sixteenth century’s voyages of discovery were stirring people’s imaginations, and More’s Utopia was a sort of science fiction, a fantasy about a super-perfect society where thoughtful people had worked out a life of benevolent equality. In this ideal’No-Place’, couples who were‘more fruitful’ shared their children with those who were not so blessed, while lawyers were totally banned — they were a profession who disguised the truth, explained More quizzically, whose own wealth came from his prosperous legal practice. Living according to nature, striving for health and dying cheerfully, the Utopians offered a satirical commentary on the‘moth-eaten’ laws and the hypocrisy of European society — and More himself tried to put some of Utopia’s ideas into practice, encouraging his daughters to debate philosophy in front of him.’Erudition in women is a new thing,’ he wrote,‘and a reproach to the idleness of men.’

  But More’s visionary thinking was tethered to a deep religious conservatism — he was steadfastly loyal to the Pope and to the old ways of the Church. In the style of Thomas Becket, he wore a hair shirt beneath the glorious liveries of the public offices that he occupied — though unlike Becket, he kept his prickly garment maggot-free: it was regularly laundered by his daughter Margaret Roper. Thomas shared his royal master Henry VIII’s indignation at Martin Luther and his reforming ideas, outdoing the King in his furious invective. In one diatribe, More described Luther as merda, stercus, lutum, coenum — shit, dung, filth, excrement. And for good measure, he then denounced the German as a drunkard, a liar, an ape and an arsehole who had been vomited on to this earth by the Antichrist.

  More joined Henry’s Council in 1517, the same year that Luther nailed his theses to the church door in Wittenberg, and set about waging a personal war on the new ideas for reform. He had a little jail and a set of stocks built in his garden so he could cross-question heretics personally, and he nursed a particular hatred for the translations of William Tyndale, whom he described as‘a hell-hound in the kennel of the devil’. When More got back to Chelsea after his work on the King’s Council he would spend his evenings penning harangues denouncing Tyndale, while defending the traditional practices of the Church.

  But while More and Tyndale might differ over popes and sacraments, they were agreed on the subject of kings’ wives. More actually shared Tyndale’s opinion that the Bible did not authorise Henry VIII’s annulment of his marriage with Katherine — and their highly inconvenient conviction set both men on a tragic collision course with the King. When, after the disgrace of Wolsey, Henry invited Thomas to become his new Lord Chancellor, More at first refused. He could see the danger ahead. He only accepted after Henry promised not to embroil him in the divorce, leaving the’Great Matter’ to those‘whose consciences could well enough agree therein’.

  But detachment became impossible as Henry’s quarrel with the Pope grew more bitter. By the early 1530s royal policy was being guided by the gimlet-eyed Thomas Cromwell, a former agent of Wolsey’s who, in the spring of 1534, pushed a new statute through Parliament, the Act of Succession. This required men to swear their agreement to the settlement, rejecting the rights of Katherine and her daughter Mary. When More refused to swear, he was promptly escorted to the Tower.

  ’By the mass, Master More,’ warned the Duke of Norfolk, an old friend and one of several visitors who tried to persuade him to change his mind,‘it is perilous striving with princes…I would wish you somewhat to incline to the king’s pleasure for, by God’s body, indignatio principis mors est — the wrath of the king is death.’

  ’Is that all, my lord?’ responded Thomas.‘Then in good faith is there no more difference between your Grace and me, but that I shall die today and you tomorrow.’

  More was led out to the scaffold early on the morning of 6 July 1535, and he kept up his graceful, ironic humour to the end.‘I pray you, Master Lieutenant, see me safe up,’ he said as he mounted the ladder,’and [for] my comi
ng down, let me shift for myself.’

  Worn and thin from his months in prison, loose in his clothes, with a skullcap on his head and a long straggling beard, the former chancellor looked not unlike the old sailor-philosopher he had once imagined telling stories of‘No-Place’ — and that name he invented for his imaginary island remains to this day the word people use when they want to describe a wonderful but impossible dream.

  DIVORCED, BEHEADED, DIED…

  1533-7

  ANNE BOLEYN SAILED DOWN THE THAMES to her coronation at the end of May 1533 in a Cleopatra’s fleet of vessels. Anne herself rode in Katherine of Aragon’s former barge — from which the discarded Queen’s coat of arms had been hacked away — and her costume made clear the reason for her triumph. The new Queen had added a panel to her skirts because she was visibly pregnant. In just four months she would be delivered of the heir for which her husband had schemed so hard.

  But the child born on 7 September that year turned out to be a girl. She was christened Elizabeth, and the pre-written letters announcing the birth made embarrassingly clear that this had not been the plan — a last-minute stroke of the pen had made the word‘Prince’ into‘Princes [s]’. The jousting that had been organised to celebrate the new arrival was cancelled, and it was noted ominously that Henry did not attend the christening. Anne Boleyn might‘spurn our heads off like footballs’, prophesied Thomas More,‘but it will not be long ere her head will dance the like dance’.