The fate of the ten refuseniks was to be sent to Newgate, confined in the worst conditions which that never hospitable prison offered. Within a month, five of the ten were dead and two others appeared on the point of death.34 Their deaths have provoked some of the darkest accusations against Henry VIII and Cromwell amid many that cannot be denied; but the notion that they were deliberately starved to death is a myth, founded on the heroic actions of Thomas More’s adopted daughter Margaret Giggs, who brought them comfort in their imprisonment. Such a calculated atrocity is impossible, given that a great many eyes (many sympathetic) were upon them in London, including that vigilant observer John Husee, reporting back to his master Lord Lisle in Calais.35 What seems to have happened, certainly suggested by Thomas Bedell’s report to Cromwell that the Carthusians had died ‘by the hand of God’, was that they were carried off by an outbreak of infectious disease, the scourge of always crowded and ill-run Tudor prisons: perhaps typhus, or the plague which was particularly virulent in London that summer.
We know that more than one of the remaining five Carthusians survived, since a year later Bishop Hugh Latimer (a man less admirable the more one gets to know him, not least for his grim single-mindedness towards his enemies) complained to Cromwell about the mild conditions for the monks of the Charterhouse in Newgate, ‘in a fair chamber more like to indurate [harden] than to mollify’.36 In a curious triangulation of opposite partisan agendas, evidence against deliberate starvation is provided by the Carthusian hagiographer Maurice Chauncy, who wrote that when Cromwell heard that most of the monks had died he was furious, and said with an oath that he had had something far more unpleasant in mind for them.37 No doubt Cromwell meant a public traitor’s death; that would not have been out of character for him. One of the imprisoned monks, William Horne, listed as sick in Bedell’s report of June 1537, survived another three years, when his execution was part of a fresh round of belated savagery from Henry VIII.
For all the wretchedness of the Carthusian deaths, the fact remains that in May 1537 Cromwell secured assent to the royal supremacy from the majority of the Charterhouse community, in fact two-thirds of them. Maurice Chauncy records with deep remorse and commendable honesty in the later version of his reminiscences that he was one; they were trying to preserve the community for the future. For the moment the monks must have felt justified, for the Charterhouse was still there. They were living on borrowed time: on the urging of Cromwell and Bedell, they formally surrendered their house to the King within a month of the fatal vote.38 Perhaps this surrender was Cromwell’s latest effort to ‘temper’ the King’s fury with them. Meanwhile, as revealed in final suppression accounts at the end of 1538, they meticulously maintained their celebrated orchard and gardens.39 This contrasts with the growing demoralization, asset-stripping and decay among the kingdom’s friaries that year. No doubt gardening was a welcome distraction from Cromwell’s widening Reformation.
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The power of the Vice-Gerent in Spirituals found new uses in 1537. Building on his issue of ecclesiastical injunctions in summer 1536, Cromwell called together leading clergy under his own auspices – not a Convocation of Canterbury or York or a joint session of the two, but a body for which contemporaries found it difficult to provide a name, vaguely calling it an ‘assembly’. It did in fact have a model in both past and future: the legatine synods for all England called by Cardinal Wolsey in 1519 and later by Cardinal Pole in Mary’s reign for the restored Roman Catholic provinces of Canterbury and York. Once more Wolsey had set a pattern which Cromwell creatively adopted. We can be justified, therefore, in calling it a vice-gerential synod; it began meeting on 17 or 18 February 1537.40
The great advantage of such a new body, apart from the fact that it straddled the York/Canterbury border, was that since it had no exact precedent, its membership was up to Cromwell. If he needed any model for such a free-form assembly apart from Wolsey’s, it was the secular Great Council, which was simply a gathering of whichever notables the King decided to choose. A Great Council had in fact just met for a number of days beginning on 26 January. It achieved little beyond showing that King Henry had decided to repudiate his agreement with the Pilgrims to summon a Parliament at York; subsequently in the Tudor age only Queen Mary briefly revived any such meeting. Cromwell’s synod went on to be a good deal more drawn out and constructive than the January Great Council. It sat in the end for around six months, though increasingly as a private committee which the Vice-Gerent left to get on with doctrinal business: the goal was a comprehensive book-length statement of what the new Church of England believed. For its membership, he chose all the bishops of the kingdom able to attend (including Archbishop Lee of York) plus a hand-picked set of senior clergy, archdeacons and academics – notably, not a single monk or friar, suggesting that by now he did not see the regulars as having anything especially useful to contribute to the future of English theology.41
We are lucky to have another intervention of the garrulous Alexander Alesius to illuminate the early stage of the synod, while Cromwell still presided over it in person. Alesius had been forced out of his Cambridge lectureship during 1536 and was now in London badgering Cranmer and Cromwell for further support. His narrative formed part of an English polemical work printed in Germany (intended for subsequent Latin translation, since it was addressed to Johann Friedrich Elector of Saxony); it was too personal and indiscreet for any English printer to handle.42 The Scots theologian’s entrance to the synod came after a chance encounter with the Lord Privy Seal on the road to Westminster. Cromwell ordered him to accompany him to the meeting.43 On Cromwell’s entrance,
all the bishops and prelates did rise up and did obeisance unto him as to their Vicar General; and after he had saluted them, he sat him down in the highest place, and right against him sat the Archbishop of Canterbury, after him the Archbishop of York, and then London, Lincoln, Salisbury, Bath, Ely, Hereford, Chichester, Norwich, Rochester and Worcester and certain other whose names I have forgotten. All these did sit at a table covered with a carpet, with certain priests standing about them.44
The business that day concerned the sacraments – three or the traditional seven in number? – one of the issues left untidy in the Ten Articles the previous summer. Cromwell opened proceedings with a plea in the King’s name for calm debate on the business solely on the basis of scripture, without reference to ‘any papistical laws or by any authority of doctors or Councils’, still less to Church tradition – tradition or ‘unwritten verities’ were a constant refuge for conservative theologians, who maintained the authority of ‘unwritten verities’ independent of scripture.
The bishops immediately divided on predictable party lines, set out accurately by Alesius, with Cranmer taking advantage of not being in the chair to put forward a frankly evangelical view of the sacraments, reducing them to the two central sacraments of eucharist and baptism, undeniably witnessed in scripture. Cromwell then showed how cavalier he could be, given the lack of fixed rules in his new assembly; he asked Alesius himself to speak, to the fury of the conservative Bishop of London, Stokesley. After some charged exchanges, the following day one of Cranmer’s staff indicated that it might be better if the Scotsman held his peace, as some of the bishops resented his irregular presence there. Cromwell saw the point, but he made sure that Alesius left his notes for his intended speech for the benefit of Stokesley and others in the meeting.
Cromwell did not attend the gathering in person for more than a few days; he had plenty else to do, while the clergy’s professional business was theological construction (and horsetrading). They continued this in a variety of less formal settings, where they might be less inclined to strike aggressive party attitudes, far into the summer. On the way, the synod was diverted from preparing doctrinal instruction by the need for some robust statements denouncing current papal plans for a General Council of the Church at Mantua. The King was still terrified of such a council for
mally denouncing him, backed by combined support from the King of France and the Holy Roman Emperor. Manuscript treatises clearly related to the synod survive on this subject, and an allied tract printed in 1538 by the royal press of Thomas Berthelet has often been attributed to Alesius; Cromwell would have found this a useful alternative means of occupying his talents.45
The synod’s work on General Councils served the useful purpose of uniting the opposed camps in the episcopate, smoothing the way to steady evangelical encroachment on the uncomfortable doctrinal balance set out in the Ten Articles of 1536. The extent of evangelical success was evident when in autumn 1537 Berthelet published the synod’s work, after much final tinkering by Bishop Foxe, as The Institution of a Christian Man. Reflecting the combined authorship of prelates and ecclesiastical dignitaries announced in its preface (interestingly not including the Vice-Gerent), it quickly acquired the informal name ‘the Bishops’ Book’. It was a long and comprehensive theological statement in terms which any thoughtful person could understand. In a manner pioneered for teaching documents by Martin Luther, it was structured on the principal Christian texts everyone would encounter from an early age: Apostles’ Creed and Ten Commandments, Lord’s Prayer and Ave Maria. Discussion of sacraments followed, now seven not three, though the four lesser sacraments (confirmation, ordination, unction, marriage) were carefully differentiated from the greater.46
This document was the high-water mark of evangelical doctrinal change in Henry VIII’s Church. He wrote a rather lukewarm endorsement not in the end printed in the book; it would not have enhanced its credibility. He had in fact not completed his read-through by the publication date, and took some time after that, for understandable and tragic reasons after the death of his third Queen, but it was his custom in emotional crises to bury himself in theology, and he soon decided on a revision. He scribbled detailed comments on his copy, which after much theological sparring with Cranmer and others formed the basis of a rather different and more conservative text.47 Events nevertheless postponed its publication until 1543, and in the meantime the Bishops’ Book stood as the statement of English Church belief. Henry’s lack of enthusiasm was more justified than he realized, because via a primer (lay devotional book) published by Cromwell’s favoured printer William Marshall in 1535 certain passages entered the text which started life in the German of Martin Luther. It is another example of Cromwell quietly slipping unacceptably evangelical material past the King’s notice.
One distinctive feature of the Bishops’ Book had a major effect on the future of the Church of England: its numbering of one basic building-block of the text, the Ten Commandments. The importance of this requires some explanation. Although all Christians agree on the sacred number ten, they have never agreed on how to divide up the biblical passages which make up the Commandments into that number. The issue is whether to classify a rather long-winded commandment to destroy ‘graven images’ as a separate free-standing commandment, or amalgamate it with the snappy first commandment to ‘have no other Gods but me’. In the latter case, the rationale is to assume that this anomalously wordy piece of text is just a comment on the basic thought (having done that, the total of ten commandments is made up by dividing commands about covetousness towards the end of the commandment material). If on the other hand the graven image commandment stands separately, as Commandment Number Two, rather than Commandment Number 1B, then it forms one of God’s basic priorities. The issue extended in the Reformation beyond graven images as such, since devotion to images shaded into devotion to physical objects and locations generally, in shrines and sacred places. That in turn was the basis of the vast medieval enterprise of pilgrimage.
Protestants all agreed that shrines and pilgrimages were bad ideas, but they flatly disagreed on numbering the Commandments, and therefore on the status of sacred art in church. Because Luther considered sacred images not a matter of importance either way, he was as ready as Roman Catholics to downgrade the image prohibition into an appendix to the First Commandment, and indeed he often even omitted it when discussing the Commandments. It was the Swiss who made the change back to a separate image prohibition and an independent Second Commandment, recalling that this was the ancient custom of the Jews and indeed of the Eastern Christian Churches (Easterners scrupulously observe it by not allowing ‘graven’ or carved images in churches, but making a great many painted images on flat painted surfaces: icons). The Swiss were followed by all Protestants in the Reformed tradition. The Reformed made idolatry into a major theological issue, one of the greatest human sins and a constant danger to the worship of God, especially in church buildings.48
Which way would the Bishops’ Book jump on this vital matter of numbering the Commandments? It parted company with Luther as well as with the Pope and joined the Swiss in making the prohibition of graven images the Second Commandment. Its discussion under that heading was admittedly not long and was also cautiously phrased, concentrating on inappropriate devotion to images, but this was the first sign that Protestant sympathies within Henry’s Church might move away from Luther towards the Reformed. It came in the very year that the young Züricher Rudolph Gwalther paid his visit to England.49 In Cromwell’s absence, Archbishop Cranmer or Bishop Foxe chaired the discussions which resolved the question; in the end the bishops rejected a draft text from conservative bishops which would have included an explicit defence of shrines and pilgrimage in the Bishops’ Book. Cromwell would fully have backed the evangelical bishops in approving this change of direction. It was in line with the attacks which from summer 1535 his visitors made on relics in monasteries, and with his wider campaign against shrines and venerated images, which actually began at the same time as his synod, in winter 1537.
The pioneering example was a dissolution under the 1536 Act of a small Cluniac priory on the Norfolk coast. Bromholm happened to be home to a fragment of the True Cross, filched from Constantinople during its Western occupation in the thirteenth century. This ‘Good Rood of Bromholm’ had become a major national goal of pilgrimage. Revenue from pilgrims made up for the priory’s modest endowment in land which nevertheless brought it within the scope of the dissolution Act. No comparably charismatic sacred site in the kingdom had so far faced closure, but Cromwell followed the logic of the Act, using as his agent Richard Southwell, Gregory Cromwell’s Norfolk host from the previous year. Bromholm was dissolved in February 1537 and Southwell’s brother got the lease, specifically including the income from offerings to the Rood.50
That provision might suggest some uncertainty in government circles about tackling such a popular focus of devotion: might the relic and pilgrimage survive the closure of the host monastery? Southwell seems to have had an equal sliver of doubt when he wrote to Cromwell on 2 February: he had taken possession of the Rood, he said, ‘which in case it may so stand with your pleasure, I will personally (after the suppression finished) bring unto you, or more soon as it shall like you [to] devise for the convenient conveyance of the same’. By the end of the month Southwell had his instructions; Cromwell wanted custody of the relic in London. It duly travelled down in the reliable care of one of Southwell’s friends, the ex-Prior of Pentney, another little Norfolk house dissolved that month.51 Six months later, the discussion of the Second Commandment finally agreed in the Bishops’ Book went out of its way to praise representations of the Rood in churches ‘as an open book’ of Christ’s Passion; evidently this did not apply to relics which purported to be the real thing.52
The Good Rood of Bromholm began a collection of such items quarantined in Cromwell’s houses for eventual destruction. The fact that this was the future direction of policy was confirmed in May, when the Duke of Norfolk included in his thorough and otherwise unsentimental survey of the late priory at Bridlington in Yorkshire a proposal to save the shrine of St John of Bridlington in the priory church, now designated for the use of the parish there. Cromwell and the King briskly vetoed that idea and told him to send the metal fabr
ic of the shrine down to London. Interestingly, the message Cromwell relayed to Norfolk was that the King would have the shrine taken down ‘to the intent that his people should not be seduced in the offering of their money’. This was a very Erasmian sentiment, one of the points at which King Henry’s jackdaw’s nest of theology happened to coincide with the developing Protestant Reformation.53
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A parallel story of reformation this summer was Cromwell’s final securing of an officially authorized vernacular Bible. A Bible available for all to read or hear was essential if Henry’s idiosyncratic Church could make any claim to evangelical godliness. The Vice-Gerent pursued this goal in close partnership with Archbishop Cranmer and an ideologically committed printer, Richard Grafton, who supervised the production in Antwerp of yet another development of William Tyndale’s texts into a complete Bible. This time the general editor was John Rogers, chaplain to the English merchants in Antwerp when Tyndale was in the city, and the man responsible for rescuing unpublished parts of the pioneer translator’s work on his arrest.54
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