Through the autumn, the Maid’s network of clerical supporters was rounded up, arrested and interrogated, and a welter of incriminating papers scrutinized. The regime presented the damning parts of all this information to an extraordinary Great Council of notables, which met in Westminster for three days in mid-November. Cromwell was later to describe it in the course of a bad-tempered correspondence with Bishop Fisher as being ‘as great assembly and council of the Lords of this realm as hath been seen many years heretofore, out of a Parliament’.6 Fisher could have retorted that this was not true, for it was merely the first such meeting since the Great Council which had humiliated Cardinal Wolsey in October 1529. Just as then, the subject was exhibited in person before the assembled company; evidently the government were now sure enough of Barton’s self-annihilation to risk this public exposure.
Chancellor Audley’s speech to this Great Council summarized the state of play on the King’s quarrel with the Pope, before proceeding to evidence on the Maid. He named prominent people implicated in her seditious conversations, such as Archbishop Warham, but ostentatiously confined identifications only to those (like Warham) no longer alive, while making it clear that others could be named. With that encouragement, the assembled company of England’s great and good roared for Barton’s execution at the stake: another extraordinary turnaround from nationwide burnings of evangelical heretics only a year before. The rhetorical destruction of the Maid and her indicted associates was then carefully crafted for a wider public, in a sermon preached on 23 November from England’s most prominent pulpit, the open-air ‘Paul’s Cross’ beside St Paul’s Cathedral. The first performer was one of a new crop of bishops, John Capon alias Salcott, elect of Bangor, brother of Cranmer’s and Cromwell’s old associate ex-Dean William Capon of Cardinal College Ipswich.* Sir Thomas More was among the audience, whether willingly or under coercion he does not record.7 The same text was then repeated a fortnight later in Canterbury by one of Cranmer’s staff, just after Cranmer’s triumphant enthronement; on both occasions, Barton and her chief supporters were paraded as objects of shame.
Audley’s speech menacingly left open the fate of the long list of notables who had hearkened to the Maid. It was worth trying to preserve the show of unity created at Princess Elizabeth’s christening, and so a week after the Great Council King Henry began to place boundaries around those to suffer, by pardoning the Marchioness of Exeter for her contacts with Barton. Vastly relieved, she begged Cromwell to protect her and her husband from any further royal anger and enclosed for his information a draft of the abject response she had sent to the King’s letter of pardon.8 In the course of her reply to Henry, she had played up the useful rhetorical escape-route that she was ‘a woman, whose fragility and brittleness is such as most facilely, easily and lightly is seduced and brought into abusion and light belief’, and prudently emphasized how angry the Marquess was with her for what she described to Cromwell as misjudgements out ‘of simplicity and for lack of knowledge’. These two fine performances of femininity, no doubt crafted by the Marquess’s secretaries, for the moment saved the Exeters’ position at Court and carefully insulated them from whatever judgement might fall on ‘so many wise persons who have been equally abused, as I hear say’. Pardoning the Marchioness also gave the King one less reason to confront her father, William Lord Mountjoy, who was in the process of shedding the increasingly intolerable office of Chamberlain to ex-Queen Katherine.
The printed propaganda that accompanied the destruction of the Maid’s reputation during the autumn took the form of uninhibited public statements of England’s independence from papal jurisdiction, published for domestic consumption. This was an audacious rejection of five centuries during which the Pope’s ultimate place in English Christianity had never been officially denied, whatever his quarrels with previous monarchs like King John and Edward I. Cranmer led a campaign of sermons attacking the notion of papal authority in the universal Church. A pamphlet, whose wide distribution throughout the realm necessitated a second edition, proclaimed instead the final authority of a General Council, just as in the King’s formal appeal lodged with the Pope, and it vigorously defended the Boleyn marriage through history and theology. Maybe its text incorporated parts of Audley’s speech to the Great Council, which might be implied by the pamphlet’s title Articles devised by the Whole Consent of the King’s Most Honourable Council. It is notable as the first official English publication to deploy an evangelical sneer-word with a long future, ‘papist’.9 In an apparent innovation, a meeting of the regular royal Council ordered the separate printing of a single Parliamentary statute as if the text were a royal proclamation, and ordered it set on every parish church door in the land. That statute was, of course, the Act in Restraint of Appeals.10
These moves were designed to convince every subject of Henry VIII just how very wrong the Maid was. ‘Surely I think that she did marvellously stop the going forward of the King’s marriage by her visions,’ Cranmer reflected to his friend Ambassador Hawkins on 20 December, relaxing after the drama and in the wake of his own emphatic assertion of authority in Kent by his enthronement and first visitations. The Archbishop had gone so far as to ensure that in that twice-repeated sermon Barton was labelled a heretic, laying her open to being burned at the stake as the Great Council had demanded. All this official blackening of her reputation did have an effect. Two ultra-conservative monastic chroniclers, one a monk of St Augustine’s Canterbury in Barton’s heartland and the other Wolsey’s former critic the anonymous Austin canon of Butley in Suffolk, both used their very traditional vehicle of historical record to reflect on her career as a story of imposture; in fact both used the word ‘hypocrite’, meaning actor, prominent in the official propaganda.11
All this was the domestic counterpart of King Henry’s momentous defiance of his papal excommunication in July. The breach was exacerbated by the diplomatic incompetence of the principal royal envoy in southern Europe, Bishop Gardiner. If anything was necessary to convince the King that Cromwell was a better option as chief minister than the Bishop of Winchester, it would have been events in the south of France in autumn 1533. The Pope had travelled to Marseille to confer with King François over their carefully prepared alliance, sealing it with his niece’s marriage to the King’s second son, so the English diplomatic delegation were outsiders to one of the decade’s most important meetings. Gardiner and his colleagues were joined by the civil lawyer Edmund Bonner, chosen to deliver in person the royal appeal to a General Council initiated in Greenwich after Anne’s coronation. Bonner’s partnership with Gardiner was inherently uncomfortable; he had been a Wolsey loyalist to the last, and further bonded with Cromwell through their mutual enthusiasm for all things Italian, from literature to Parmesan cheese.12 Bonner’s own Italian was coming on, but in case conversation with the Pope or his entourage became too quickfire for him he took to the meeting William Penizon, a native Italian-speaker long in Tudor service, and friend to Cromwell.13
The 7th of November was an exhausting and humiliating day for them. Their much deferred personal interview with the Pope was interrupted by the King of France, arriving with elaborate casualness, paying little attention to the English delegation and pointedly engaging his newly acquired papal relative in cheerful conversation for three-quarters of an hour. After that, his Holiness enjoyed himself making Bonner feel uncomfortable for two more hours while Vatican officials reviewed the paperwork. Over the next few days, Bonner and Gardiner between them managed to infuriate both the papal delegation and the King of France, who had been doing his best for a year now to save King Henry from papal wrath and who nevertheless now found himself harangued by an English bishop for his unhelpfulness.
Gardiner’s report back to the King was at least admirably full in depicting this disaster, perhaps under pressure from his fellow-envoys to cover their backs. What his appalled sovereign would have carried away from that report was the Most Christian King’s crisp judgement to
Winchester that ‘ye have marred all’.14 Henry would have been even less impressed had he learned that Gardiner was keeping his own future options open with Rome during his prolonged embassy. In summer 1533 he had clandestinely obtained a papal indulgence to hear mass even during any prospective interdict, via the genial permanent English ambassador to the Vatican, William Benet, an old friend. One could argue that he and other English envoys needed such permission if they were not to stand out uncomfortably during their embassies by not attending mass, but that does not apply to some others named in this and other grants of the same period, patently those unreliable in the King’s break with Rome – Archbishop Lee of York, the Marquess and Marchioness of Exeter, William Lord Sandys.15
There was no going back now. Parliament once again must push matters forward, enacting a clutch of measures branching out of the King’s defiance of the Pope.16 For the third year in a row, a planned session, sixth of this freakishly prolonged Parliament, was postponed through the autumn by pressure of events, finally reassembling on 15 January 1534. Informed observers saw that the logic of previous moves suggested a major trimming of the Church’s landholdings – their ‘temporalities’. ‘Some presuppose the spiritualty shall depart with their temporalities, whereof many be glad and only few bemoan them,’ reported John Husee to Lord Lisle in Calais. Chapuys heard from the Scots diplomatic delegation that Cromwell had said much the same thing to them. This was not just talk, and might have led to major confiscations of Church institutions and estates earlier than actually happened over the next few years.17 In fact through 1534 some startlingly radical proposals had less spectacular outcomes for churchmen, but action enough began in the first session affecting both Church and realm: clerical taxation and privilege, explicit statements on succession of the Boleyn line, plus the major task of tidying away the Maid of Kent and her associates, defined as widely as politically necessary. The result was the first round of political executions since the death of the Duke of Buckingham in 1521. It was characteristic of Wolsey’s years in power that fewer people had died for political reasons than over many previous decades; that was about to change.
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With so much to process in bringing the Church to heel, it would be useful to manage the bench of bishops in the Lords (mitred abbots in the Lords rarely caused difficulties to government plans). It was already depleted by a handy crop of vacancies through death. Cromwell took pains to license Archbishop Lee’s absence, a move suiting them both.18 Bishop Tunstall was one of the other episcopal absentees in 1532, and so he was again in 1534; that meant that the Northern Province was represented only by the never-troublesome John Kite of Carlisle.* John Fisher made the excuse (more than an excuse) of illness, and there was no sign of the venerable Richard Nix of Norwich either, cowed as he was by the government’s politically inspired charge of praemunire, with a crushing fine to follow.
There can rarely have been so few bishops present in the House before the 1640s when the English Civil Wars swept them all away for a while; but the one virtually constant attendee among the episcopal contingent was Archbishop Cranmer (forty-one days out of forty-six) during the passage of legislation which furthered the ruin of traditional religion. The attending bishops were forced to show their loyalty in public by joining a rota of preaching against the Pope at Paul’s Cross. Meanwhile, most unusually, the Convocation of Canterbury was hardly allowed to meet at all during the Parliamentary session; its substantive business had to wait until the Lords and the Commons had gone home. The government probably did not trust its membership to refrain from distracting and negative noise, even after the submission of the clergy two years before.19
The show of unity which the government sought from Parliament was once again best achieved by exclusion or voluntary absence. There are signs that in the Commons some of the prominent knights of the shire who had met during previous sessions at the Queen’s Head Tavern to share their unhappiness were unenthusiastic about being in a position where they would have to express further dissent. Cromwell had given Sir George Throckmorton pointed advice in 1533 ‘to live at home and serve God and meddle little’, counsel which that spirited gentleman quoted back to its author on two occasions.20 It looks as if Throckmorton sat out most if not all the Parliamentary session of winter 1534 back home at Coughton Court, for halfway through he asked Cromwell to do his best to get him leave of absence for the rest of the session. Throckmorton’s fellow-diner at the Queen’s Head Sir Marmaduke Constable used the same excuse of local administrative duties in Yorkshire to ask Cromwell for licence to arrive three weeks late into Parliament’s sittings.21
Often in previous accounts of this Parliament and similar occasions, these absences have been interpreted as the result of government pressure, but that is too crude an interpretation of the transaction. Unity was a prized good in medieval and Tudor England: division was an aberration from the norm, hence the government’s use of voting by division in Parliamentary proceedings as a way to shame people into conformity. Respected county leaders like Throckmorton or Constable, or long-term Crown servants, would not wish to show open defiance to royal policy: absence was a useful middle way between defiance and assent. We should compare these absences with the retirement of two major figures in Court life in the previous months: Cromwell’s friend and patron Vice-Chamberlain Sir John Gage, and William Lord Mountjoy, Chamberlain to Queen Katherine. Gage said goodbye to the King in August 1533 ‘with the water standing in his eyes’; his final departure for the Charterhouse of Sheen came that December, around the same time Mountjoy also got his discharge. Mountjoy had begged Cromwell to get him released from his long-held office, sickened by constant confrontations with Katherine and her loyal servants as he tried to impose the fiction of her dowager status upon her.22
The two sessions of Parliament in 1534 transacted a great deal of routine business which was in effect catch-up; so much legislation had rained down from above in sessions from 1529 that many private suits were held up.23 Now it was a sensible ploy to please members by beginning the session with a substantial succession of private bills for completion: such matters as protection for trades and their gilds, remedies for problems in particular cities and boroughs, and private matters for magnates and churchmen. Yet one of the earliest pieces of legislation, actually the first considered in the Lords after Parliament opened, was a curious initiative for which one would expect a history of previous public grievance or discussion, but there is little previous trace. It was a statute making buggery a felony, that is a criminal offence in common law, with the death penalty attached to it.
The annoyingly unnamed peer who advocated this Act for the Punishment of the Vice of Buggery linked it to misuse of ecclesiastical sanctuary jurisdictions, which suggests a context: this was the first symptom of the new attack on Church privilege. That well-informed anonymous commentator on the Reformation whose fragmentary account remains in the Wyatt papers directly linked its enactment not just to the unnaturalness of clerical celibacy generally but to monastic corruption in particular, and so the buggery statute looks like a new try-out in Cromwell’s programme of intervention in the affairs of monasteries and friaries.24 Over the previous four years, William Tyndale in his literary duel with More had launched the long English Protestant tradition of linking sodomy to clerical celibacy. Yet the Act had a wider significance, quite apart from forming the basis of all punitive action in England against male homosexuals up to the nineteenth century. After the Papacy had created a body of canon law and church courts to administer it in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such matters of morality as this had been the concern of church lawyers in the Western Church, and not of the King’s courts. The Act was the first major encroachment in England on that general principle, a phenomenon which occurred right across sixteenth-century Europe, Catholic and Protestant alike, and actually rather earlier in other European temporal jurisdictions. It is one of the features of Cromwell’s innovations which E
ngland’s official Protestant Reformation steadily expanded.25
Rather more directly tied to current struggles was much skirmishing on heresy, which continued beyond the first session. First it involved the Commons raising the case of the last-remaining prisoner from Thomas More’s evangelical victims, a citizen of London called Thomas Philips. Philips had been arrested by the Bishop of London, John Stokesley, for charges including reading the Bible in English. Cromwell clearly enjoyed disliking Stokesley, on several grounds. He was one of the main agents of Wolsey’s humiliation in autumn 1529; additionally, despite his religious conservatism, he was a client of the Boleyns, as that had revealed.26 His appointment as Bishop in 1530 had predated Cromwell’s ability to deflect it, like the promotions of Archbishop Lee and Bishop Gardiner, but Cromwell took care to harass him throughout his episcopate. The Philips brouhaha was the first in their confrontations. It linked to Cromwell’s concerns on another front: while still Lord Chancellor, Thomas More took up the Philips case and used his powers in a highly unusual move to get the accused diverted to the Tower of London from incarceration in Bishop Stokesley’s prison.
Defending his action subsequently, More observed that he had wanted to avoid Philips suffering the fate of Richard Hunne, the London Lollard whose death in 1514 in the episcopal prison had caused nationwide outrage against the Church hierarchy. The similarities of the cases, More would have realized, were uncomfortable. He made this comment in print in 1533, when he was out of office but still struggling to champion traditional religion and, as far as he could, hold the regime to it against Cranmer and Cromwell. His discussion of the Philips case came in his Apology, during the last stages of his literary spat with William Tyndale. Philips was the only new heretic he named in his text, and he was careful to underline that the King had told ‘certain of the greatest Lords of his Council’ that Philips should have been obedient to Stokesley.27 Parliament’s pursuit of justice for Philips was therefore handily an assault on both the traditionalist Church authorities and on Thomas More. Moreover, the City’s fury at Philips’s continuing imprisonment produced a direct confrontation between Commons and Lords.28
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