The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

'What will be the end of this tragedy, God knows,' wrote one friend to another in July 1534. In breaking with Rome, Henry had never meant, he insisted, to follow the 'Lutheran sect' or to 'touch the sacraments'. With the Supremacy, he assumed not only the right, but also the duty before God, to
promote true religion. The Act of Supremacy claimed as its purpose the 'increase in virtue in Christ's
religion' and the repression of abuses. From the mid 1530s it pleased Henry to present his Church as
balanced between Catholic tradition and evangelical innovation. This was not simply a matter of
expediency, but the consequence of the King's insistent, if wayward, theological cogitation. This Church would be at once scriptural and sacramental; it would denounce superstition while holding
to devotional traditions; attack idolatry while showing the proper use of images. Successive religious
formulations, drawn up after backroom battles between the King and his bishops, to the consternation
of its clergy and parishioners. As Henry himself became unconvinced by the doctrine of purgatory,
doubtful about the sacraments of ordination, extreme unification, confirmation and, finally, confession, traditional religion was undermined. But as the King himself denied the central Lutheran
teaching of justification by faith alone, no alternative doctrine of salvation was propounded for his
people. The royal intention might have been to hold a 'mean [middle], indifferent, true and virtuous way' between two alternative visions of salvation, but his people were left confused, and he himself was inconstant, manipulable, and unable to control the pace of events. Preachers were found to exalt the Royal Supremacy. The talents of such evangelicals as Hugh Latimer, Edward Crome, John Bale and Robert Barnes, whose sermons had been anathematized before, were now called upon to denounce
the papal usurpation. The preaching campaign against the Pope - now calld merely Bishop of Rome - 
had consequences which the King had not foreseen. The evangelicals, believing that the papal primacy
was only a human tradition, believed that other Catholic doctrines were derived from 'men's fantasies'
rather than from scripture, the sole rule of faith. Some of the preachers used their new freedom to
denounce 'the Bishop of Rome and all his cloisters' as license to deny also purgatory and the intercessory power of saints. A few even dared to question the nature of the Mass itself. Even so the
Supremacy of a king who still protested his Catholic orthodoxy was used to promote evangelical
religion.
The impassioned sermons of the 'preachers of novelties' moved those who came to listen: one way
or another. Resolute Catholics hated them, fearing their influence. 'These preachers' who took it upon
themselves to preach the Gospel 'not truly, but after the new sect, called themselves Children of Christ,
but they were Children of the Devil,' protested one outraged vicar. The conservative curate of Harwich
complained in 1535 that 'The people nowadays would not believe . . . the captains of the Church,
but when a newfangled fellow doth come and show them a new story, him they do believe.' Battle lines were drawn in many places between evangelicals and conservative clergy. Reports came to Calais from London late in 1533: 'Many preachers we have here, but they come not from one master;
Latimer many blameth, and as many doth allow.' The preachers had introduced 'divisions and seditions
among us,' never seen before, which threatened universal disorder. 'The Devil reigneth over us now.'
Diversity of preaching had sown doubt and disobedience, as well as division. Thomas Starkey warned in the summer of 1536 that 'With the despising of purgatory, the people begin little to regard hell, heaven, or any other felicity to be had in another life.'
Religious divisions were nowhere deeper or more bitter than at court. At the Corpus Christi procession on 15 June 1536, the great celebration of the Mass and affirmation of Christian community, Henry
publicly took part. Queen Anne did not come with him, for she was nearly a month dead. He brought his third queen, and dared still more once she was queen. With her came her faction. He lieutenant in the Privy Chamber was her brother, Lord Rochford. The purposes and presence of that faction were most visible in matters of religion. 'Who in the Mass do use to clap their fingers on their lips and say never a word?' a preacher was asked, and his reply was, 'Some great men in court did so' - Anne's
friends. Anne determined to advance the Gospel and promote evangelical schemes for the reform of
the commonwealth. But she intervened in causes which the King did not support, when for her to intervene at all outraged him.On Passion Sunday, 2 April 1536 John Skip, Anne's almoner, preached
a sermon at court which Anne must have countenanced. He told the Old Testament story of King Ahasuerus, persuaded by his evil counsellor Haman to proscribe the Jews against the pleas of the 'good woman' whom the King loved. A court as well versed in scripture as Henry's would have understood the message: Anne was good Queen Esther, trying to prevent the King from listening to the blandishments of Cromwell, who promised him wealth beyond measure; wealth acquired from the Church but not to be spent upon the poor but upon palaces and war. More dangerously, the preacher
reminded the court how King Solomon's rule grew degenerate as lust overruled his judgement, just as
Henry, who saw himself as Solomon in his wisdom, contemplated taking a third queen.
Having cast off the Roman allegiance, and his first queen, all for Anne (so many believed), Henry tired of her. They danced together in January 1536 at the news of Catherine of Aragon's death, but their mutual delight was short-lived. On 29 January Anne miscarried. She lost not only the prince who
might have saved her, but the King also. Anne's enemies at court, who were enemies of her religion too, had discovered in Jane Seymour the perfect candidate for queen for Henry, who never found a
wife for himself. They were teaching her a demeanour of self-abnegation and passivity which, after Anne's fierceness, would best please the King. Confronted by this personal betrayal and by the conspiracy of the conservatives against her, Anne fought, but she failed to recruit the most politic of
all her co-religionists to her side. At the end of March 1536 Cromwell told the Imperial ambassador
that Anne, his erstwhile patron, would like to see his head cut off. His own prospects were grim if
Anne survived, but grim also if she did not, for a conservative group at court were now determined
to destroy the reforms he had made, and surely him with them. In the most brilliant and deadly stratagem in Tudor court politics, Cromwell plotted to remove Anne and all her allies - despite the
religion and ideals for commonwealth he shared with them - and to do this by allying with the conservatives; but only for a while. Cromwell must devise a way to rescue himself and the achievements for reform while removing Anne and her friends, and permanently. But how? On 30 April a court musician was arrested and tortured, and the tragedy began rapidly to unfold.
Anne was not only the King's consort but also the queen of his court. In the conventions of chivalry
and courtly love, the queen must be, by her virtue, most unattainable, most deserving of chaste love
and faithful service. But with courtly love might come real love, with all love's malign attendants:
jealousy, betrayal, revenge. The game of courtly love had rules, and Anne broke them.
Courtly lovers wrote poetry, but Anne mocked Henry's. With her brother, she had joked about the King's prowess, or lack of it, in the royal bed. Unwise certainly, but was it treasonable? More dangerously, she had teased Henry Norris, the Groom of the Stool, about his desire for her: 'You look
for dead men's shoes.' To sleep with a queen, if with her consent, was, although remarkably foolhardy,
not treason; a queen's adultery was, for it slandered the royal issue. And for a queen and her lovers -
for anyone - conspiratorial gossip about the king was treason under the 'law of words'. Looking for
a treason which would condemn not only the Queen but all her friends, Cromwell had fount it.
After the May Day jousts the Queen and her alleged lovers were taken to the Tower. On 8 May Thomas Wyatt joined his friends there. They might 'make ballads well now', said Queen Anne.
Wyatt's own relationship with Anne Boleyn, before her marriage, had been close, too close. In the
vision of fugitive love and futile chase which he portrayed in the sonnet 'Whoso list to hunt, I know
where is an hind' we may even glimpse what it was like to desire a woman whom the King claimed.
Henry was only too willing to be persuaded of the guilt of his queen and his friends.. Self-pityingly,
he wrote a tragedy about it, claiming that Anne had had a hundred lovers. Probably she had had none
but him, but once in the Tower, with false witness brought against her, there was no way but one.
On 17 May Viscount Rochford, Henry Norris, Francis Weston, William Brereton and Mark Smeaton
went to the block. The following day, the eve of Anne's execution, the candles on Queen Catherine's
sepulchre lit spontaneously, so it was said. Wyatt, who watched the Queen and his friends die from
his prison chamber in the Bell Tower, wrote their epitaph:

These bloody days have broken my heart;
My lust, my youth did then depart,
And blind desire of estate;
Who hastes to climb seeks to revert:
Of truth, circa Rena tonat [it thunders around thrones].

Wyatt escaped; so did Sir Francis Bryan, who had been sent for 'upon his allegiance', the ultimate, terrifying demand upon any subject. With the remorseless reciprocity of the politics of Henry's reign,
the engineers of Anne's destruction were soon themselves destroyed. Her enemies were charged, not unjustly, with working to restore the Lady Mary to the succession. After long resisting, and to save
her friends, Mary acknowledged the invalidity of Queen Catherine's marriage and her own bastardy.
The King married Jane Seymour who, on 12 October 1537, produced the longed-for heir, Prince Edward. He was the death of her, for she died, as so many Tudor women did, of 'childbed fever'.
The conservatives at court were eclipsed, but lived; though not for long. Everyone believed that there was one true faith and one Catholic - that is, universal - Church, with a monopoly of spiritual truth,
but there was no agreement regarding which Church this should be. The debate 'between Tyndale and me,' More had written, was 'nothing else in effect but to find out which Church is the very Church.'
At the Reformation, because of the Reformation, division in religion seemed inevitable, because everyone agreed that anyone not of their Church was against it, and therefore heretic and schismatic.
Contention was to be expected, and might even be necessary in a greater cause. Erasmus had once
thought that faith and charity would dispel religious difference, but unity came to seem impossible.
Latimer counselled his evangelical brethren that where there 'is quietness . . . there is not truth'.
It took an extraordinary determination to reconcile differences between the faiths - like that attributed
to Cardinal Pole and like that which More may have discovered at the very end - to see that 'heretics
be not in all things heretics'. The break with Rome made reconciliation between the confessional sides more difficult than ever.

Violence, even civil war, seemed possible. In Calais, England's last bridgehead in France, its ancient
governor, Lord Lisle, was so scared that one sect would rise against another that throughout 1538 he slept in armour. The spectre which haunted Henry and Cromwell as they ventured into the political
unknown was of rebellion at home, led by a conservative nobility and clergy, allied with a crusading
force sent by the Emperor with papal sanction. Reports came of priests in the confessional - 'the privy
chamber of treason' - counselling steadfastness or even resistance. The nobility, with many reasons
to resent the expansion of power, might move into opposition. In secret interviews with the Imperial
ambassador late in 1534, Lords Hussey and Darcy called for the Emperor's aid in 'God's cause', and promised to 'animate' the people of the North to rise and defend the Church. Conspiracy did turn to
rebellion, if not in the ways they had intended, and not until changes were made to traditional that were worse than any they could yet have imagined.
Cromwell wrote himself a memorandum early in 1536 concerning 'the abomination of religious persons throughout this realm, and a reformation to be devised therein', In the Cardinal's service,
he had helped to dissolve a few religious houses too small or otherwise unworthy to deserve the
name, and to apply their wealth to found colleges. The memory had stayed with him. In 1535, as
newly-created lay Vicegerent of the King in the new Church, outranking even his evangelical ally,
Archbishop Cranmer, he was in a powerful position to effect reform. He instituted a commission to
enquire into the wealth and state of the religious houses throughout England. Henry's religious zeal
was now directed against the monasteries, which happened to be the richest franchise in his kingdom.
The monasteries' defenders believed they understood Cromwell's motives - 'the false flatterer says
he will make the King the richest prince in Christendom' - and they compared Henry's assault upon
the religious houses to Nebuchadnezzar's destruction of Jerusalem. The commissioners prepared the case for the prosecution; their alleged discovery of 'not seven, but more than 700,000 deadly sins'
delighted evangelicals. Even the most charitable witness of religious life in the monasteries would have seen more spiritual torpor than fervour there. In England, as in Ireland, intense religious life
was usually the preserve of the reformed orders of friars. Nothing England or Ireland had so far
known prepared for the desecration to come.
The Act for the suppression of the lesser monasteries in England (those with an income of less than
£200 per annum; 372 houses in England and twenty-seven in Wales) was passed in March 1536.
Communities centuries old and institutionally immortal were under threat. This was not attack on
monasticism in principle, otherwise a quarter would not have been reprieved, nor would the religious
have been allowed to transfer to the greater houses. But in the religious houses a mood of desperation
prevailed, and a sense of impending disaster; the greater houses, surely, could not escape the fate of
the lesser. The testimony of their great defender, Robert Aske, given after he was condemned and
had nothing left to lose, is compelling: 'When the abbeys stood the people not only had worldly refreshing in their bodies but spiritual refuge'; without the abbeys, 'The service of God is much minished . . . to the decrease of the Faith and spiritual and comfort to man's soul.' The religious,
however unworthy their individual lives, stood for an ideal of Christian life, 'of ghostly [spiritual]
living'. Their first purpose was to pray, to pray for souls, in a society which believed that prayers
availed the dead. 'The abbeys were one of the beauties of this realm', ancient and numinous landmarks,
now to be plundered and laid waste.