The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

The damned - unrepentant and unconfessed, beyond help, human or divine - were consigned to hell
after death. There they became servants of the Devil, the tyrant of hell, condemned eternally to
suffer the torments which he and his evil spirits had prepared for them. Punishments were devised
to mirror sins on earth. So John Mirk, writing in the early fifteenth century and still read a century
later, warned that worms ceaselessly devoured those who 'eat their even christen here in earth with
false back biting'. Some had visions of hell. The visionary Nun of Kent, Elizabeth Barton, claimed
to have watched the disputation of devils for the soul of Cardinal Wolsey. Infernal spirits were believed to have the power to rise from hell to tempt the living. The torments of the damned were
terrifyingly portrayed in sermons and in the doom paintings above every chancel arch. Anyone foolish enough not to believe in the afterlife would discover in a terrible and irreversible way that hell was
not a fable: so they were warned. It was a defining belief of Christians of the later middle ages -
a belief that the Church finally endorsed in the late thirteenth century - that a third other-worldly
place existed beyond heaven and hell. This was purgatory, through which the sinful soul must pass
on its journey to God. To the faithful in the later middle ages purgatory was real; they could even
visit St Patrick's Purgatory at Lough Derg in the north-west of Ireland, an outlet of purgatory on
earth. Purgatory was a place of fire and torment, incessant pain and seemingly endless languishing,
but also of profound hope and consolation, for the torment was not endless; the dark fire was a
cleansing fire. Like hell in its pains, it was contrary to hell in its promise, for the soul freed from
purgatory would at last see God. Only those without sin could escape purgatory, but anyone who
felt the least penitent, even if not until their dying moment, could hope for a penitential stay in
purgatory and for heaven at last. The greater the sins on earth and the greater the penance unperformed
by the living, the longer the stay in purgatory; perhaps thousands of years, when every moment
seemed endless there. The faithful should perform due penance while on earth, in the time of grace,
foor after death, the time of justice, penance for sins was harder; yet where they failed, their family
and friends could work by intercession for the ultimate redemption of their souls.
The faithful believed and the Church taught that merit could be transferred by the faithful on earth
or the saints in heaven to those who were paying for their sins in purgatory. Kinship and fellowship
did not end with death, nor were family boundaries circumscribed by mortality. 'Your late acquaintance, kindred, spouses, companions, play fellows and friends' had special claims, wrote
Thomas More, but a duty in charity was owed to all Christian souls. The belief that the living could
hasten the soul's release from purgatory held late medieval Catholics in thrall, for would it not be
unforgivably cruel to abandon souls who were suffering so dreadfully? 'What heart were so hard . . .
that it could sit in rest at supper or sleep in rest in bed, and let a man lie and burn?' asked Thomas More's imagined souls in his Supplication of Souls (1529). But they had found the old saying true:
'Out of sight, out of mind.' Ghosts returned to describe the horrors, haunting not places but people,
appearing to those who through allegiance of blood had a duty to obey their commands. So Shakespeare's King Hamlet, murdered unshriven, 'cut off even in the blossoms of my sin', called
upon his son to avenge him. Christians on earth owed a duty to their fellow Christians departed: to
remember them in their prayers. Gravestones and memorial brasses bore messages adjuring passers-
by 'of your charity, pray for the souls of . . . ', as they would that others would do for them, later.
To friends, people left rings inscribed: 'Have pity on me'. The faithful prayed for their own dead,
and they prayed for 'all Christian souls', those they did not know, on All Souls' Day.
Most powerful of the intercessors between God and men was the transcendental society of the
saints. Their intercession healed the breach between God and the fallen world. Jesus was the more
eloquent advocate to His Father, and Mary, the first of the human race to be redeemed, had special
influence. Heaven, it was popularly believed, was ordered like this world, with God as ruler, Christ
as prince, Mary as queen, and the saints, like courtiers, acting as 'holy patrons' in the 'blessed court
of heaven'. The saints were figures of awe and power; powerful enough to atone for the sins that
called down destructive forces in the natural world, to ward off the disasters that daily threatened
their supplicants. They were believed to protect against fire, flood and disease; to bring travellers
safely to home, and to save them from shipwreck. Their aid was often invoked for reasons which
hardly seem Christian, because the safety of votaries might depend on the destruction of enemies.
So unhappy wives prayed to St Uncumber when they wished to be rid of their husbands.
In 1487 Henry VII prayed before the image of Our Lady at Welsingham to be delivered from his
many enemies, and after his victory at Stoke sent the battle standard to her in thanks. Rulers prayed
to the Virgin for victory in war; the poor prayed to her for daily favours and protection.