1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (21 page)

The Mouldwarp Prophecy

A
fascinating aspect of the Pilgrimage of Grace is the proliferation of rumours and prophecies among the rebels. Quasi-historical, cryptic and mystical, political prophecies claimed a centuries-old heritage and consequently carried great authority and power. The inclusion of recognizable historical events in the prophecies gave credence to what followed. As the originators of the stories were quite hard to trace, these myths and riddles could easily be deployed as a form of resistance against the powerful in society. They were classic examples of what has been called ‘a social space in which offstage dissent to the official transcript of power may be voiced’.
¹

There were many prophecies doing the rounds in the 1530s and they shared both a tone and a sort of coded vocabulary. The tone was pseudo-biblical or allegorical; prophecies were often inspired by the book of Revelations or the apocryphal book of Esdras. Other prophecies were said to date back to Myrddin or Merlin, and featured in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century book
Prophetiae Merlini
or the seventh book of his
Historia Regum Britanniae
. People were alluded to in the prophecies by their initials, plays on words or references to beasts, often those depicted in their heraldry: the eagle was, for instance, a symbol of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, because it appeared in the Hapsburg badge. Both of these elements are used by Shakespeare, in
Henry IV Part One
, who puts a complaint about the currency of these prophetic animal symbols in the mouth of Hotspur:

…sometimes he angers me
With telling me of the moldwarp [
sic
] and the ant,
Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies,
And of a dragon and a finless-fish,
A clip-wing’d griffin and a moulten raven,
A couching lion and a ramping cat,
And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff
As puts me from my faith.

The deployment of these motifs suggests that Shakespeare was confident of his audience’s familiarity with these old tales and knew their value: the playwright signals that by dismissing them and Glendower who speaks them, Hotspur is exhibiting his weaknesses of rash judgment and hot-headedness.
²

The first prophecy mentioned by Shakespeare was one that, in particular, caught the imagination of the Pilgrims. Probably dating from the early fourteenth century, the Mouldwarp prophecy, or to give it its proper name, ‘The Prophecy of the Six Kings to Follow King John’ was thought to be a prophecy of Merlin’s devising. It portrayed the six kings after King John as animals: a Lamb (Henry III), a Dragon (Edward I), a Goat (Edward II), a Lion or a Boar (Edward III), an Ass (Richard II) and an evil Mole or, using the ancient English word for a mole, ‘Mouldwarp’ (Henry IV). The Mouldwarp, a representative of the devil, was said to be cursed of God’s own mouth, proud, caitiff (a villain) and cowardly, with a rough, hairy hide like a goat. He would at first be greatly praised by his people, then would be ‘cast down with sin and with pride’. After losing a battle for his kingdom, he would be driven from the land by a dragon from the north, a wolf from the west and a lion out of Ireland. England would be divided into three parts and the Mouldwarp would be forced to give up two parts of his land to his enemies, in order to rule one third of it in peace. Although the chronology was incorrect for Henry, the identification of Henry VIII as the Mouldwarp seems to have spread extensively by word of mouth in the mid-1530s. It was particularly popular among the clergy, was championed by the Pilgrim rebels, and Catholic sympathizers spread the word that Henry, as the Mouldwarp, would have to flee the realm.
³

The first records of this prophecy being used against Henry VIII date from 1535. John Hale, the vicar of Isleworth, was cross-questioned in April 1535, having been accused of calling the king ‘the Molywarppe that Merlin prophesised of’, and adding that ‘the King was accursed of God’s own mouth and that the marriage between the King and Queen [Anne] was unlawful’. The grounds Hale gave for this assertion are an extraordinarily colourful condemnation of the king, a ‘robber and pillager’ of the commonwealth who,

boasteth himself to be above and to excel all other Christian king and princes, thereby being puffed with vain glory and pride, where, of a truth, he is the most cruellest, capital heretic, defacer, and treader under foot of Christ and his Church… he doth impoverish, destroy, and kill, for none other intent but that he may enjoy and use his foul pleasures, and increased to himself great treasure and riches… And if thou wilt look deeply upon his life, thou shalt find it more foul and more stinking that a sow, wallowing and defiling herself in any filthy place; for how great so ever he is, he is fully given to his foul pleasure of the flesh and other voluptuousness. And look how many matrons be in the court, or given to marriage; these almost all he hath violated, so often neglecting his duty to his wife and offending the holy sacrament of matrimony; and he hath taken to his wife of fornication this matron Anne, not only to the highest shame and undoing of himself, but also of all this realm.

Hale admitted hearing prophecies of Merlin from a man called Laynam and confessed to having repeated them but pleaded that he was ‘aged and oblivious’, had been very sick and ‘troubled in his wits’ and asked the forgiveness of God and the king and queen. The unfortunate Hale was sentenced to a traitor’s death at Tyburn. William Saunderson of Lounsburgh was also cross-examined in 1535 for having said that the king would be ‘destroyed by the most vile people in the world’ and flee the realm, which sounds like a fragment of the Mouldwarp prophecy.
⁴

It was from 1536 and the Pilgrimage of Grace, however, that the prophecy really got wings. The evidence for most of these rumours stems from Cromwell’s attempt to start collecting prophecies and hunting down those who offended against the 1534 Act of Treason by citing them. In 1536–37, three people sent Cromwell books or texts of prophecies to add to his collection – Norfolk, Lord Hungerford of Windsor and Bishop Latimer. Others found themselves under investigation for reciting prophecies. One of those charged in 1536 was Thomas Syson, the abbot of Garendon. He had declared ‘that in the year of Our Lord a thousand and 500 and 35… the church by my book will have a great fall and by the 39… it will rise again and be as high as it ever was’, adding that ‘the eagle shall rise with such a number that the King shall go forth of the realm’ and be slain on his return. He described Henry as ‘the mole… curst of God’s own mouth, for he rooteth up the churches as the mole rooteth up the hills’. Such talk clearly fell into the category of imagining bodily harm to be done to the king and came very close to calling Henry a heretic, schismatic or infidel. Themes of the prophecy also emerge in the examination of William Todd, the prior of Malton, who was charged with inciting the rebels of Sir Francis Bigod and John Hallom’s revolt with prophecies in early 1537. He had said that the king ‘should be fain to fly out his realm’ and, returning, would give up two thirds of the land, to settle on one third of it. Richard Bishop’s version described Henry as a mole who would be ‘subdued and put down’, leaving the land to be fought over by three kings. Finally, in late 1537, John Dobson, the vicar of Muston, was tried for repeating certain prophecies against the king. The theme of the king being driven from the land and returning to a third part of it was reiterated here, with the addition, like Thomas Syson, that the eagle (the Emperor) ‘should spread his wings over all this realm’ and the dun cow, a symbol for the Pope, ‘should jingle his keys and come into this realm and set it in the right faith again’. For saying these things, Dobson became yet another victim for the executioner in 1538.
⁵

Cromwell’s investigations convey how seriously the establishment took these prophecies. It was believed, with good reason, that they encouraged English subjects to rebellion. One document which attests to both their power and to government attempts to diminish them is a poetic account of the Pilgrimage of Grace called ‘The Fall and Evil Success of Rebellion’, which was written by an evangelical Yorkshire schoolmaster called Wilfred Holme in 1537. Holme devoted the final section to tackling one of the Pilgrims’ beliefs by attempting to prove that Henry VIII was not the Mouldwarp, because he was not the sixth king after John nor cowardly, caitiff or hairy:

The prophecy of the Mouldwarp, declareth he shall be
A Caitiff, a Coward, with an elderly skin:
But is he a Caitiff, when plainly we may see
His portraiture and vigour a very Herculine?
And is he a coward the truth to define,
When in France and in Scotland his noble chivalry,
And in many mo[re] so gloriously doth shine,
That he is accounted a gem in activity?

However, Holme’s reasoning does not seem, in the years after the Pilgrimage of Grace, to have stopped people continuing to apply the appellation of Mouldwarp to Henry. By 1542, the government was so concerned about the identification of Henry VIII with the Mouldwarp that a law was passed against the communication of such prophecies, under threat of death and forfeiture of goods. Crucially, given the identities of the prophesiers, there would be no benefit of clergy or sanctuary. All the way up until Henry’s death, the authorities continued to try to scotch the rumours by confiscating books of prophecy and imprisoning offenders.
⁶

The resurgence of this ancient prophecy and its levelling against Henry VIII suggests an important shift in perspective: from the splendid young king of 1509, Henry was now, for the first time, seen as an evil king, cursed by God, who should be driven from his land. From 1536, clerics and, increasingly, laymen, like many of the Pilgrims, were calling Henry ‘Mouldwarp’. Hale’s 1535 denunciation focused on Henry’s pride, greed and lust and reacted to Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and the Act of Supremacy. From 1536, the new emphasis was, above all, on the ‘rooting up’ and despoliation of the church, seen in the suppression of the monasteries. By claiming as a prophecy the ‘great fall’ of the church in 1535, a barely veiled reference to Henry’s Act of Supremacy, the prophesiers brought weight to their auguries that the church would rise again by 1539, and the Pope would put England back ‘in the right faith again’. They also foretold an invasion by the emperor, who would defeat the king and drive him from the realm. From this point on, the government would have to battle the resurgence of this prophecy, and others similar, until Henry’s death. In some ways, the Mouldwarp prophecy marked a ‘before’ and ‘after’ for Henry: it signified the transition from Henry VIII being thought of as a splendid young king, to conjecture that he had become a tyrant.

C
HAPTER
17

Courtly Dissent

T
he Pilgrims of Grace were not the only ones covertly expressing their reservations about the king’s behaviour in 1536. At much higher levels of society, there were those who, with even more caution and circumspection, voiced their concerns. Chief among them was the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt. He had been one of the group of courtiers arrested in May 1536 as part of Queen Anne’s entourage. His verse of the 1520s suggests an early flirtation, courtship or even relationship with Anne Boleyn, but in 1536 he escaped execution because there was little evidence of any recent indiscretions and, perhaps more importantly, because Cromwell may have acted on his behalf, at the behest of Wyatt’s father. So instead of dying with the others, Wyatt had probably watched the executions on Tower Hill from his cell and subsequently wrote two poems, ‘Who list his wealth and ease retain’ and ‘In mourning wise’. After his release from the Tower, Wyatt, on the king’s orders, went into exile from the court at his family estate in Allington, and in the poetry he wrote there and subsequently, Wyatt criticizes Henry VIII’s seemingly tyrannical behaviour. One of course needs to tread carefully when hunting for the real world of the court in courtly poetry; else, to quote Wyatt himself, ‘sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind’. There was no freedom of speech in this court where words could be treason, and poets’ self-revelation needed to be obscured in esoteric verse never intended for publication. Wyatt, whom the poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, would later describe as ‘A heart, where dread was never so impressed,/To hide the thought, that might the truth advance’, was aware of the danger of speaking candidly and perceptive enough to realize that Castiglione had underestimated the difficulty of honest service to dishonest princes. Yet it is possible to see, in both Wyatt and Surrey’s poetry, glimpses of a sixteenth-century tyrant king.
¹

Like many of Wyatt’s poems, his satire ‘Mine Own John Poyntz’, composed at Allington in the summer of 1536, was a translation and paraphrase. All translations are to some extent also interpretations, and it is Wyatt’s specific additions to or alterations of the text of his original that are particularly important. ‘Mine Own John Poyntz’ was based on a political satire by Luigi Alamanni which had been published in Lyons in 1532–3. It expresses an aversion to the court – the poet flees it ‘rather than to live thrall under the awe / Of lordly looks’. Such anti-court rhetoric was a common humanist trope and Wyatt had previously written of the ‘brackish joys’ and ‘slipper top / Of court’s estates’, but there is evidence in this poem that Wyatt was reacting to a specific court and, even more so, a specific king.

The speaker in the poem makes it clear that his antipathy is not because he rejects hierarchy or the rule of kings in general: