In reality, Rome had become a sideshow in Henry’s plans, as Cromwell’s tardy responses to Casali’s conscientious stream of letters demonstrated. The royal supremacy flattered the King’s ego and had at long last delivered Cromwell the open consolidation of his existing powers in the Church into the Vice-Gerency. Neither of them would seriously have contemplated surrendering these gains to the Holy Father. In May 1535, the new Pope took a symbolic step prompting Henry VIII to his most reprehensible act of judicial cruelty yet, which in turn made the breach well-nigh irreparable. Pope Paul decided to appoint as cardinals six internationally respected churchmen who compensated for his first two appointments (members of his own family worse than undistinguished). Two among the new half-dozen were likely to infuriate the King of England: one was Girolamo Ghinucci, admittedly an Anglophile with a long record of faithful service to the English Crown, but recently ejected in absentia from his English diocese of Worcester alongside Campeggio’s removal from Salisbury. The other was John Fisher, a year into his imprisonment in the Tower of London.
The Pope probably intended this honour to give Cardinal Fisher some protection from harm, but he soon realized how badly he had miscalculated. The announcement cut across continuing efforts by the King’s servants to secure a full declaration of conformity from Fisher and Thomas More: on 7 May Cromwell had led a deputation of royal councillors to them, at which he read Fisher the Act of Supremacy and spelled out that a denial of the supremacy now meant treason. After news of the Cardinal’s hat, there was no more effort at dialogue, merely detailed examination of Fisher’s servants to push forward a final verdict.5 On 22 June the aged Bishop, already desperately ill, was beheaded. Thomas More followed him on 6 July. Incredulity and horror in mainland Europe for once united the Emperor and the King of France, and made Casali’s position in Rome untenable; after feeble attempts to justify Fisher’s death, he stayed away from the city for the rest of the year.6 His eclipse had not been reversed when he died at the end of 1536.
No one serving prominently in royal government can be dissociated from the King’s actions. Stephen Gardiner, former voice of dissidence, devoted his energies in late summer and early autumn to writing a reply to the papal denunciation of Fisher’s death, stressing the newly made Cardinal’s treason. Bishop Tunstall, who had sailed even closer to the wind, wrote a telling letter to Cromwell six months after Fisher’s execution in which he had occasion to refer to Wolsey and Fisher in the same sentence: as a good traditionalist, he added the customary ‘whose soul God pardon’ to his reference to Wolsey, but not to his mention of Fisher.7 Over the next few years, while traditionalists did their best to defend the Catholic faith expounded in Fisher’s magisterial writings, very few dared to cite his name until his complete rehabilitation in the reign of Queen Mary. Even then, it remained an embarrassment that Gardiner, the Queen’s first Lord Chancellor, had written the most effective of all the denunciations of Fisher as a traitor to his King.
Amid the collective guilt, it is still inescapable that Cromwell had been in charge of the two prisoners’ fates since the beginning of 1534, and once the King had shown the depth of his malevolence in Fisher’s death, the minister choreographed the judicial procedures which briskly led to More’s execution.8 The court’s decision was based on evidence from Richard Rich, Solicitor-General and already firmly within Cromwell’s circle of patronage, in front of jurors carefully picked by Master Secretary. Few historical accounts have managed to make the tale of Rich’s career anything better than despicable in its opportunism and chameleon-like profession of religious belief; he is likely to have distorted what he had heard in interviews with More on 12 June.9
At the trial itself, More left inhibition behind, liberated by the prospect of death from years of watching every phrase he uttered. His attack on the King was devastating. He accused him of nothing less than perjury in breaking his coronation oath by which he had sworn to defend the Church. His final words on the scaffold were equally searing; there was no propaganda advantage for the King in any of this. At least Henry remembered their old friendship enough to allow More to die cleanly by beheading alone, a small mercy the King had already afforded his grandmother’s favourite priest. His head and Fisher’s nevertheless stood spiked among the traitors on London Bridge. Does anything mitigate the record? It can only have been with Cromwell’s permission that Antonio Buonvisi, so long his friend as well as More’s, had continued to supply wine and decent food which sustained the morale of the two prisoners in the Tower until early spring.
It is also noticeable that Cromwell’s feelings towards More remained much more ambiguous than towards Fisher, who had contributed to Wolsey’s humiliation in autumn 1529 (and who, though Cromwell did not know it, had recently advocated invasion of the realm by Habsburg armies). It is significant that in Cromwell’s jottings of remembrances for action in late June he could not bring himself to name More in relation to the business of execution, amid a series of references to them both: the note read ‘When Master Fisher shall go to execution, and also the other.’10 The squeamishness continued in his circle: three years after the event, his servant Thomas Knight, a former Oxford don turned diplomat, reported to Cromwell from the Low Countries about devotional pamphlets on sale on local bookstalls commemorating More and Fisher as holy martyrs and calling them saints, but Knight could only describe them likewise as ‘the Bishop of Rochester and the other’.11
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There is an equal ambiguity in Cromwell’s attitude towards further Catholic martyrs in England whose deaths just predated Fisher and More, and had stirred fury across mainland Europe before the news of those paired atrocities spread.12 The victims were various members of the Carthusian Order, who after their uncomfortable confrontation with oath-taking the previous summer continued despite the Treason Act ostentatiously to refuse the oath of supremacy and would not co-operate with commissioners for the Valor ecclesiasticus who appeared at their houses. Their tragic story and its aftermath reveal much about the subtleties of Cromwell’s relationship with this most austere and impressive of late medieval English monastic orders, and also how personal and intense that relationship was.
The victims of the King’s savagery on 4 May 1535 were heads of the Carthusian convents in the Midlands at Beauvale and Axholme, with Prior John Houghton of London, accompanied by one non-Carthusian, a prominent priest of Syon, Richard Reynolds. In April, after the Carthusians had travelled to London on business, Cromwell personally examined them during his convalescence at The Rolls in what turned into preliminaries to a hearing for treason.13 He also licensed the verbose intellectual Thomas Starkey to make an effort to win over Father Reynolds, as Starkey reported meaningfully to his former patron in Italy, Reginald Pole, rehearsing the arguments in a further effort at persuasion. These conversations may have been a response to a plea from Archbishop Cranmer, who knew Reynolds and the Prior of Axholme well, and after previous discussions with them hoped they could be brought round.14
Before Father Houghton had been tried and condemned, Cromwell took a startling gamble. The maverick Carthusian polymath Andrew Borde had been imprisoned in the London Charterhouse under the discipline of the order; it is not often remembered in the Carthusian story that until this moment the monks had their own powers of coercion and intimidation. There was something of a tussle for Borde’s soul between Cromwell and the Carthusians. While he was still their prisoner, his fellow-monks had forced him to write to Prior Houghton in the Tower to encourage him in his defiance. Yet Borde was a spirit too wild for Carthusian or probably any discipline, and like his former fellow-prisoner Thomas Salter (whom we encountered in the previous round of Carthusian confrontation) he saw Cromwell as a lifeline out of his tangled relationship with the order.15 Cromwell equally recognized his talent, and constituted Borde as the most extraordinary of roving ambassadors overseas. Among his other purposes, Borde must visit the Grande Chartreuse itself, mother house of all Ca
rthusian houses.16
In that remote valley amid Provençal mountains, Borde used his undoubted charm on the Prior-General, along with a no doubt edited version of events in England, to secure a remarkable open letter to all the Carthusians of England. The addressees were headed by the Prior and Convent of the London Charterhouse; it is clear that at this stage Borde was blissfully ignorant that Prior Houghton had been executed soon after his own departure. The Prior-General exhorted his English brethren to obedience to King Henry, and more astonishing still, as Borde reported to his now-deceased Prior, ‘the aforesaid reverend father hath made the right honourable Esquire Master Cromwell and my Lord of Chester brethren of all the whole religion, praying you that you do nothing without their counsel.’17 ‘My Lord of Chester’ was of course Roland Lee, one of Cromwell’s commissioners in the first unsuccessful round of trying to secure oaths from the Charterhouse monks, as well as from Bishop Fisher.18 For good measure, Borde secured a positive verdict from the Prior-General on Henry VIII’s annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, among a string of other favourable verdicts on the same theme from French provincial universities. Subsequent news of the executions of Houghton, Fisher and More would have changed all their minds, and Borde’s audacious adventure led nowhere.19
While Borde was in France that summer, the government put special efforts into keeping the remaining Carthusian communities in obedience, both in the provinces through Cromwell’s nationwide monastic visitors and in the London house through representatives whom he chose specially for the task.20 Just after Prior Houghton’s death on 5 May, Thomas Bedell, a near neighbour of the Charterhouse in Aldersgate, visited the house to argue with them about papal supremacy. Sebastian Newdigate, a former gentleman of the King’s Privy Chamber turned monk, who had a sister among the nuns of Syon, was one of the spokesmen who faced him down. Bedell disillusioned Cromwell of any expectations that the execution might have intimidated the monks, ‘regarding no more the death of their father, in word or countenance, than he were living and conversant among them’.21 That summer Newdigate, the acting head Humphrey Middlemore and the Proctor of the house William Exmew followed Prior Houghton to the scaffold, three days before Bishop Fisher.
Bedell’s letter to Cromwell in May gives a glimpse of the high-temperature atmosphere of inspired utterance he faced in the house: he warned his defiant audience that their truculent attitude came from the false spirit in the mouths of the deceitful prophets of King Ahab of Israel. Perhaps this led Cromwell to determine on an extraordinarily elaborate and painstaking strategy, mapped out in special vice-gerential instructions for lay ‘governors’ who took over the running of the house from the executed Prior. The aim was not to dissolve the house but to turn it into a reformed evangelical monastic community with a changed ethos, based on intensive Bible study (Bibles to be provided). All this was backed up by a royal pardon for any of the surviving community ‘for all heresies and treasons by any of them committed before that day’.22
Cromwell envisaged a two-pronged programme to persuade to conformity those members of the Charterhouse who had not been executed. One in a conservative direction included more visits from Bedell, a staid traditionalist lawyer, plus a sequence of sermons from well-known preachers of the same character who were toeing the royal line on supremacy. Yet Cromwell also confronted the Carthusians with a different variety of religion, as high-temperature and extrovert as their own. His agents as ‘governors’ were not clergy but laymen, two of his intensely evangelical associates from the London mercantile community, Jasper Fyllol and John Rastell. Fyllol, at his own request, was installed in a cell in the Charterhouse itself to work more systematically on the monks.23 By the end of September 1535, he had produced a critical report and financial analysis of the community for Cromwell to decide on the house’s future.24
Fyllol and Rastell make a close and resonant pair. Both were MPs in the Reformation Parliament still in session in 1535. Both were elderly, which had not stopped them embracing evangelical religion. Fyllol, a servant of Cromwell, was probably nearly seventy and it may be remembered that at the height of the break with Rome, perhaps at Cromwell’s instigation and certainly with his approval, he published two pamphlets so radically anti-clerical that he might be suspected of Lollard connections.25 Rastell, at the end of a long printing career as a Catholic, likewise made an abrupt about-turn when he published an anti-clerical tract around 1532. He was such an identifiable evangelical that after his Charterhouse service traditionalists secured his arrest, probably during a temporary political advantage in autumn 1536. He died in prison, most likely in 1537.26
Maybe Cromwell hoped that their venerable years in combination with their evangelical opinions and their enthusiasm for clerical poverty would strike a chord with the Carthusian fathers. Just as importantly, Rastell was Thomas More’s brother-in-law, showing the Charterhouse traditionalists that despite that relationship he had seen the error of his ways and enthusiastically embraced evangelical truth: Carthusians could do so too. In fact this bold and labour-intensive initiative did not produce very impressive results. Fyllol could report that three of the convent had been encouraged to leave and enter the wider ministry of the Church, but otherwise both he and Rastell met with consistent hostility from senior monks in distributing literature in favour of the royal cause, and the seniors forced the rest of the community into line in opposition.27
Fyllol’s efforts at importing more evangelicals for face-to-face discussions with individual dissidents met with no more success. Neither Rastell’s fellow-printer William Marshall nor an outspoken Scotsman called John McDowell or Maydewell (a friar about to leave the Dominican Order) made any more impression on them.28 Not long afterwards, the imperial ambassador noted that Cromwell was having to forbid printed pamphlets with new Carthusian visions of the martyrs’ crowns bestowed on Henry VIII’s spring and summer crop of victims.29 Still Cromwell did not give up on his efforts with the house. In December 1535, while John Husee was trying to satisfy his master Lord Lisle’s worries about the demolition of weirs, he said he would try to find the minister in a good mood, ‘but he is now much busied with the monks of the Charterhouse.’ At the same time Cromwell made similar strenuous efforts with the priests and nuns of Syon, as did a number of other senior figures including Queen Anne herself.30
In his report to Cromwell Fyllol had left open the possibility of suppressing the London Charterhouse, no doubt thinking of the Observants’ fate in summer 1534, but the instructions to the ‘governors’ had not envisaged that, and it did not happen. John Gostwick clearly thought the Charterhouse’s future was secure when in October 1535 he wrote to Cromwell for the appointment of a protégé to the vacant chaplaincy for Sir Robert Rede’s chantry in the monks’ church. Gostwick, now administrator of First Fruits and Tenths for Cromwell, was in a position to know his thinking, and was always alert for personal advantage. Any hint of imminent suppression would no doubt have brought an eager request for some pickings from the house’s dissolution.31 The London Charterhouse remained without a prior until April 1536, when Cromwell appointed William Trafford, previously Proctor at Beauvale Charterhouse to the martyred Prior Laurence. This was one of Cromwell’s successes in wooing the Carthusians, because it was a clear message that Trafford had abandoned defending papal power ‘usque ad mortem’, his defiant proclamation when his Prior was arrested.32
Trafford’s appointment can be read alongside an exceptionally revealing later letter to Cromwell from his old servant Ralph Sadler, who had become Cromwell’s eyes and ears in the King’s private apartments. The letter was written on 27 September 1536 last thing at night because of its urgency. It reminds us that Cromwell (now Lord Privy Seal) was not a free agent in dealings with the Charterhouse, and that much of the murderous violence there was the responsibility of his master.33 Sadler told Cromwell that that evening he had happened to remind the King that the Bridgettines at Syon needed a new superior; this jerked Henry’s m
emory to an allied subject, and not in a good way. The King snapped at Sadler:
‘the Charterhouse in London is not ordered as I would have had it. I commanded’, quoth he, ‘my Lord Privy Seal a great while ago to put the monks out of the house; and now he wrote to you . . . that they be reconciled, but seeing that they have been so long obstinate, I will not now . . . admit their obedience, and so write to my Lord Privy Seal.’ This His Grace commanded me to write to your Lordship (as I do), which as you shall have opportunity ye may temper with His Grace, as by your wisdom shall be thought convenient.
In other words, Sadler knew that Cromwell was trying to preserve the Charterhouse against the King’s evident determination that it should be destroyed. After appropriate ‘tempering’ with his royal master, Cromwell succeeded for two more years.
Ultimately one cannot expect the chief minister of an angry and ruthless king to do much more than obey his will or face the consequences. Yet there are other reasons to view the executions of the Carthusians, Fisher and More as Cromwell will have seen them in order to understand his sense of retribution, emergency and opportunity; they died alongside a varied array of other deaths for religion across the seas. First and most immediately relevant was the betrayal and arrest in the Habsburg Low Countries of William Tyndale; his execution in 1536 was as emblematic and as much a perversion of justice as those of the English Catholic martyrs.34 By 1535 Tyndale had been living in Antwerp for around six or seven years, fearsomely productive in propaganda and Bible translation, and benefiting from the indulgence of the city’s leading printers, who were happy to publish his works with a false imprint; the considerable demand for this sacred contraband back in England was too good to neglect, whatever the risks. For much of this time he counted on protection and shelter from evangelical English merchants living in Antwerp, latterly the well-connected London merchant Thomas Poyntz, who was of the same family as the West Country knight to whom Tyndale had acted as domestic tutor in the early 1520s. Poyntz was to sacrifice his prosperity and inheritance in the cause of Tyndale and godly religion.35
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