The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

At the end of 1538, at the close of the first phase of its Reformation, England stood alone in Europe,
and never in greater danger. The constant warfare between Habsburg and Valois had, until now, ensured that both the French King and the Emperor needed England's amity, but in 1538 the novel
prospect of peace between the two enemies threatened to make England, as Thomas Wriothesley put
it, 'but a morsel amongst these choppers'. The break with Rome had made the King a heretic and England schismatic and vulnerable to a Catholic crusade. Henry dreaded the imminent threat of a General Council of the Church which would demand the restoration of England to papal obedience.
A Catholic League of the Emperor and the Kings of France and Scotland seemed poised to invade and
to partition England. Now Henry completed what he had begun: the destruction of the nobility of
the White Rose, the surviving Yorkist line in England. There was evidence enough of their treason,
under a law which made words treason. After the Pilgrimage of Grace had failed, Lord Montague had
said: 'Lord Darcy played the fool; he went about to pluck away the Council. He should first have begun with the head.' Partly in reprisal for Cardinal Pole's papal legation of 1537 to persuade the Catholic powers to crusade against England, Henry moved, lethally, against Pole's family, and Pole
himself was lucky to escape the royal agents, Wyatt and Bryan, sent into the courts of Europe to kidnap or even assassinate him.
In the Parliament of 1539 penal legislation against heresy was passed: the Act of Six Articles, 'Gardiner's Gospel'. The intransmutable penalty for denying transsubstantiation was death by burning,
with no chance given for abjuration. The break with Rome had never been meant to augur the end of
persecution, but for six years persecution of evangelicals had been in abeyance. Apart from John Lambert, only Anabaptists, Europe's most radical heretics, had been burnt. Now many evangelicals
were fugitive and fearful. Catholics rejoiced at the passage of the 'bloody act', looking for an imminent
return of traditional religion, but it did not happen, for the eclipse of the evangelical party at court was not lasting. Some of the gospellers could not be silenced. During Lent in 1540 leading evangelicals -
Barnes, Garrett and Jerome - preached the quintessential message of Christ's saving passion, and called upon the rich to succour the poor. Their defiance was fatal for them, but also for Cromwell because his enemies now used his patronage of radicals to destroy him.
Cromwell had once said, though with a smile, that if the same fate befell him as his predecessors, he
would trust to God. That Christian resignation was now tested. His conservative enemies returned to
challenge him, exploiting rifts between him and the King. Cromwell's initiative to ally with the Lutheran princes of Germany culminated in a marriage between Henry and Anne of Cleves. Henry married in January 1540, but found his fourth wife repellent. He could, he insisted, 'never in her company be provoked and steered to know her carnally'. There would never be an heir from Anne:
'I like her not.' The events of the spring and summer of 1540 confused those who lived through them.
Political fortunes were shifting and the prospects for reform or reaction in religion were unpredictable.
Cromwell seemed higher in favour than ever. In April, in addition to to his offices as Viceregent, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord Privy Seal, he was created Earl of Essex and made Great Chamberlain, which gave him at last formal mastery of the royal household. By May he sensed a trap closing, and moved against the conservatives, sending Lord Lisle to the Tower for alleged collusion with Pole and Rome. But Cromwell's own arrest followed soon after, and once in the Tower, denied access to the King or trial by his peers, his condemnation was a foregone conclusion. The charges against him were many, accusing him of overweening power, of treason, but overwhelmingly of heresy. Once persuaded - though wrongly - that Cromwell had impugned the Mass, the King allowed
his counsellor to be sacrificed. Cromwell went to the block on 28 July, on the same day that Henry
married his fifth queen, Catherine Howard: both Cromwell's fall and the marriage were Howard conspiracies. Two days later, in a grotesque demonstration of Henry's 'mean, indifferent' way in religion, the evangelicals Barnes, Garrett and Jerome were burnt, while at the same time three conservatives suffered the death of traitors.
Conservatives now looked for a reaction, and Cromwell's bereft 'factionaries' were fearful for the Gospel. As soon as the coup against Cromwell was completed, a major inquisition for heresy began.
Persecution had been the conservatives' first objective. What they discovered horrified them. Cromwell had promised, allegedly, that if he lived another year his party would inculcate evangelical
reform irreversibly, so that 'it should not lie in the King's power to resist it'. Persecution failed that
summer because the evangelicals who were found were so many and so influential that they could not
all be punished: 500 were denounced in London alone. Thomas More, as Lord Chancellor, had once told William Roper:

I pray God . . . that some of us, as high as we seem to sit upon the mountains
treading heretics under our feet like ants, live not in the day that we gladly
would wish to be at a league and composition with them to let them have their
churches quietly to themselves, so that they would be content to let us have ours
quietly to ourselves.

That day had not come yet, but evangelical ideology and principles had invaded England and infiltrated powerful sections of society. If the new religion were to be extirpated, ways must be found.
Archbishop Cranmer lay now, asking 'Whom shall the King trust hereafter?' Henry thought to rule
alone. Cromwell had no successor. Always suspicious, Henry became more so with age and found disloyalty everywhere. Illness and pain made him irascible and unpredictable, and in such circumstances court rivalries flourished. Cromwell's fall, itself made possible because he was outnumbered at the Council board, opened the way for the Council, once again a stronghold of noblemen, to reassert itself as a powerful executive in a way denied to it during Wolsey's and Cromwell's ascendancy. The royal Council had been reconstructed in the aftermath of the crisis
engendered by the Pilgrimage of Grace as an institutional Privy Council, a corporate board with a
finite membership, including the great office-holders, and with important advisory and executive
functions. With Cromwell removed, the new Privy Council could exercise and assert its authority.
Cromwell had left a legacy which transformed the politics of Henry's last years. Into the Privy Chamber itself, as the King's constant attendants, he had introduced his own clients, zealous evangelicals whose determination to advance their faith was only slightly tempered by their knowledge that Henry would hardly countenance it. The royal doctors held untold influence, because the King grew daily more dependent upon them, and they, too, were committed to the new religion.
Leading ladies at the English court also had a powerful influence upon the spread of evangelical doctrine. But their faith made all the court evangelicals vulnerable. The conservatives, led by Gardiner
and Norfolk, became convinced that the best way to extirpate the new sect was to remove its leaders,
permanently: 'Stone dead hath no fellow.' Their own experience had shown that exiled opponents
could return. The device of bringing down evangelicals by accusing them of the worst heresies had succeeded against Cromwell, and was used with a vengeance for the remainder of the reign.
With time the struggle at court, which became polarized between evangelicals in the Privy Chamber
and conservatives in the Privy Council, became ever more bitter with the certainty that the King could
not live for ever. But while Henry lived, he ruled, and his obsession at the end of his reign, as at the beginning, was war.
Once again, Henry conceived a grand military enterprise against France, with a secondary campaign against France's ally, Scotland. The renewed war between Habsburg and Valois in July 1541 gave Henry the chance to venture into Europe again. But first, in August 1542, troops were sent north to
lay waste the Borders. In November a Scottish army was put to flight at Solway Moss, a catastrophe
almost as complete for Scotland as Flodden, for three weeks later James V was dead and Mary, Queen of Scots, only one week old, was on the throne. Endemic feuding between the Scottish nobility was
exacerbated in that 'broken world' as rival groups contended for power and formed bonds to build
up alliances and for self-protection. The divisions centred upon which foreign alliance Scotland should make. The faction which fell at James V's death, led by Cardinal Beaton, stood for the old alliance
with France, and feared that Scotland would fall to England. The new regent and heir-presumptive,
James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, and the Earls of Lennox and Angus led the pro-English party, but with such vacillation that they failed to commit themselves to the Treaty of Greenwich of July 1543 with
its proposed union to be created by the marriage of Prince Edward to Mary, Queen of Scots. The punitive English 'Rough Wooing' followed, and the vengeful sack of Edinburgh in May 1544 ended
any possibility of friendship between Scotland and England, or indeed of peace.
In England the conservatives had been thwarted. 1541 and 1542 were years of evangelical advance as
the King, guided by Archbishop Cranmer, determined to purify his new Church. Moreover, the Howards' queen had disgraced them. For months everyone - except Henry - knew that Catherine was
unfaithful. Who would tell him? On All Souls' Day 1541 Cranmer presented him with written testimony of her infidelities, not only before, but during her marriage. Her affairs while queen were fatal to her. The distraught King turned once again to theology, and to war. There was no retreat from reform until 1543, when the new alliance with the Emperor for a common assault on France made Henry anxious to assert his orthodoxy. The Act for the Advancement of the True Religion which,
contrary to its name, forbade all dependents and servants, all men under the rank of yeoman, and all
women except noble- and gentlewomen from reading the Bible the foundation of true religion, was
a disaster for evangelicals, who saw their cause betrayed. 'Died not Christ as well for craftsmen and
poor men as for gentlemen and rich men?', asked Robert Wisdom, a leading preacher. Bishop Gardiner
chose Easter 1543 as his moment to 'bend his bow to shoot at some of the head deer', directing his
aim at the Privy Chamber. The discovery of a nest of evangelicals in St George's Chapel at Windsor
implicated sympathizers at court. At Canterbury, in the little court of the cathedral chapter, there was
faction too, and the prebendaries gathered evidence against their archbishop, whom the King, with
deliberate irony, called 'the greatest heretic in Kent'. From time to time, and when he chose, Henry
moved to protect persecuted courtiers and favourites, and now he saved Cranmer. Though he hated
 the heresy, he hated too the secret interventions into his own household, and conspiracy in the name
of hope over experience. His sixth wife, Catherine Parr, came to reveal evangelical leanings.
Holding daily scripture readings in her chamber, she encouraged the younger reforming generation
at court. The invasion of France now preoccupied the King; Scotland, far less a prize had been, for
Henry, an inglorious diversion. In June 1544 a massive English army crossed to Calais, though with
little sense of where to go thereafter. Henry determined to campaign himself and arrived in July to
lay siege to Boulogne, which fell in September. This was an empty victory for England: her Imperial
allies had defected to France, and the overwhelming cost in men and money far outweighed any advantage, save to the King, who was prouder of 'our daughter Boulogne' than he was of his others.
English foreign policy was in disarray; campaigns against France and Scotland were financially ruinous, and by the summer of 1545 invasion was threatened from an offensive alliance of France
and Scotland which Henry himself had provoked. From August 1545 the glorious commander of English forces in France, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, urged the King to further conquest, against all prudence, and against the defeatist advice of the Council to make peace and cede Boulogne.
At court the political atmosphere was tense as partisans for rival stances in religion and foreign policy
awaited the outcome of the diplomacy. In the spring of 1546 Henry painfully decided to abandon war
and hopes of conquest, and by the summer, England and France were at peace. Surrey had returned from France early in the year, in disgrace, malcontent and vengeful. He began to quarrel with others
at a court in which he saw himself as the guardian of chivalry and ancient nobility, stranded in a
base world of arrivistes. The dispute between the old nobility and the new men became explicit as
rival groups began to vie for control of the regency which must follow the awaited accession of the
boy king Edward. The Howards believed that theirs was the strongest claim, and even now, when the
King was too ill and bloated to walk - 'moved by engines and art rather than by nature', as Lord Thomas Howard wrote - conspired to provide another Howard royal mistress. But Mary, Duchess of
Richmond, Surrey's sister, was too appalled by the prospect to play her inglorious part.
The King's choice of advisers and confidants became even more significant since the group ascendant
at his death would hold power in the new reign. The consequences for the losers would be alarming:
not only for themselves, but also for the religion for which they stood. The struggles assumed a new
ferocity and now centred around the persecution. 'What news in London?' they asked in the country:
the news that spring was that a leading preacher, Dr Crome, had been broken by the Privy Council.
His confession might implicate the whole network of his evangelical supporters at court, and so might
that of Anne Askew, for so many were her friends at court that she might prove the perfect instrument
to destroy the evangelicals there. In the Tower she was racked by the Lord Chancellor himself, to force her to name the others of her sect. Which great ladies at court had supported her? Who had sent her
money? Through the indescretions of their wives the husbands might be betrayed. But the conservatives failed in their attempts to bring down the evangelicals in the summer. George Blage,
the King's favourite, 'his pig', was condemned for heresy, but Henry protected him. Bishop Gardiner
failed in a more desperate ploy: no less than to destroy the Queen by persuading the King that she was
a heretic. At the very end of the reign counsellors and courtiers who had been at odds over foreign policy, religion and place, made common cause to bring down the Howards, the most dangerous pretenders to the regency, even to the throne. The King was more than ever obsessed by the security
of the succession. With tremulous hand (his interpolations are marked here in capital letters), he helped to frame the charges against them. 'If a man compassing WITH HIMSELF TO GOVERN
THE REALM, DO ACTUALLY GO ABOUT TO RULE THE KING . . . what this importeth?'
Henry had looked for a regency for his son which would be strong enough to govern but not strong
enough to threaten the throne. Ambition disqualified the Howards. Surrey went to the block on 19 January, ostensibly for lése-majesté of usurping the royal heraldic arms. Yet his treason was clearest
in his poetry, where the shadow of the tyrant looms. Instead of a Supreme Head leading his people
in religious truth and virtue, Surrey portrayed a royal throne and an apocalyptic beast, persecuting
the innocent:

I saw a royal throne whereas that Justice should have sit;
Instead of whom I saw, with fierce and cruel mood,
Where wrong was sat, that bloody beast, that drunk the guiltless blood.

Here was treason. But even at Henry's court some secrets remained secret, and it was not in the manuscripts of Surrey's poetry that his treason was sought and found.
The reign ended as it had begun, with blood, silence and conspiracy. Late in January 1547, as the King
lay dying, those around him in the Privy Gallery conspired to overturn the provisions of his will.
Henry VIII had the will, but not the power, to rule beyond the grave.