Chesapeake (12 page)

Nations had found through sad experience that family life could not be secure if brothers felt free to steal each other’s wives. Royalty in particular had learned that younger brothers must understand from the start that they would not profit from the deaths of their older brothers. For the Widow Catherine to marry the brother of her dead husband would be immoral, illegal and contrary to church custom.

But the dynastic pressures continued. King Henry was an old man now, all of forty-five, and never in the best of health. He must take any steps necessary to secure the future of his hard-won crown, and the surest way to accomplish this would be to preserve and reinforce the alliance with Spain. Catherine must be kept in England.

So he sought out lesser divines who had not hastily committed themselves when the marriage had first been proposed, and sure enough, when these scholars searched the Bible they uncovered that fortunate passage at Deuteronomy 25:5 which contradicted Leviticus and not only permitted a man to marry his brother’s widow, but actually commanded him to do so.

There could hardly be a more concise instruction than that, or one which covered England’s dynastic problem better, and when King Henry heard this injunction read aloud he clapped his hands and ordered an engagement to be arranged for his eleven-year-old son.

The king did not live long enough to see his heir happily married; he died on April 21, 1509, and out of respect for his memory—for he had been a sturdy king—young Henry, against his own best judgment, went ahead with his marriage to a woman six years his elder. The wedding took place a few weeks after the old king’s burial and had happy consequences, except in the matter of providing an heir to the throne. Catherine was fertile enough, and seemed to be constantly pregnant: she bore child after child—boys among them—but they all died. One sickly daughter, Mary, did survive, but it was not a daughter that Henry sought.

In 1533 King Henry belatedly convinced himself that his marriage to this aging Spanish paragon had from the start been illegal and immoral. In the end he returned to Leviticus, abandoning Deuteronomy. With increasing rage he stormed among the Catholic clergy, demanding that they find scholars who would support him in his contention that Catherine had never been properly married to him and was therefore technically divorced. He found such scholars, of course, but not of high standing, and the Pope in Rome refused to acquiesce in their findings on various sensible grounds: that whereas the marriage might have been initially suspect, it had been performed; it had been consummated, as the child Mary proved; and it had endured for nearly a quarter of a century. Divorce was denied.

Now, King Henry was as staunch a Catholic as the kings of Europe provided; eleven years earlier he had written with his own hand and circulated widely a pamphlet refuting the renegade Martin Luther and reconfirming the leadership of the Pope. In gratitude for this advocacy, the Pope had officially proclaimed Henry ‘Defender of the Faith,’ a cherished title which all future sovereigns of England would hold. Since Henry had proved himself a veritable right hand of the Pope, he could not easily reject the pontiff because of one unpalatable decision; moreover, Henry honestly accepted the doctrines of the church and would have been appalled if anyone had accused him of lacking in enthusiasm for Catholicism. The upshot was that Henry could not divorce Catherine, which meant that he could not marry the toothsome young court attendant on whom his fancy had fallen, Mistress Anne Boleyn.

What to do? One cynic in London whispered, ‘The Pope’s bull has tied up the King’s balls,’ and later, when the issue had been resolved, this witticism would be remembered. The charge against this jokester would first be
lèse-majesté,
later blasphemy, and finally treason, for which he would be strangled in the Tower. For one clever phrase he died.

Now the rumor began to circulate that Anne Boleyn was pregnant,
with what everyone hoped would be a son, so a speedy resolution of the conflict with the Pope became imperative, lest the future king be born a bastard. The impasse was resolved rather cleverly: King Henry stated that whereas England and all Englishmen remained as Catholic as ever, acknowledging as before the Pope’s spiritual supremacy, they rejected his temporal leadership. Henceforth there would be a Catholic church in various parts of Europe presided over by the Pope, and there would be another in England, equally Catholic but governed in all managerial matters by King Henry.

In a blaze of religious fervor he divorced Catherine the Spaniard and married Anne the lusty English girl. This caused such turmoil throughout Europe that he was goaded into proving he really was head of the local church, and he did this by a most practical maneuver. It occurred to him one night as he lay with Anne Boleyn that the Pope controlled more than one third the land of England; cathedrals, monasteries, churches, nunneries all owned vast estates and the peasants who worked them. With one simple edict Henry expropriated all those holdings, closed down the monasteries, denuded the cathedrals of their lands and, as he said, ‘kicked the monks and friars and nuns into the village streets, forcing them to earn an honest living.’ Then in his canny way he devised the most brilliant stratagem of all: he did not keep the new possessions for himself, nor did he deliver them to powerful dukes and earls who might later combine against him; he handed them instead to those stalwart men of the middle class who had supported him in his fight against the Pope. In this way he converted one third of England into his bounden supporters, and it was during this transfer that the ancestors of Edmund Steed entered the picture.

In the County of Devon, southeast of London, in the little town of Bishop’s Nympton, halfway between Dartmoor and Exmoor, there had lived for several hundred years a distinguished and stubborn local family named Steed. They had been farmers of some wealth; the fathers had served as justices of the peace and the sons had gone off to Oxford. Both sons and daughters had married conservatively, and no scandal had ever touched the family, which, if it had produced no barons or earls, did produce a steady supply of men on whom the kings could rely.

Such a man was Devon Steed, forty-nine years old when his king, Henry, sought to divorce the Spanish queen. When the debate was most acrimonious, the king sought support from rural gentlemen of good reputation, and Cardinal Wolsey himself, the one who constantly connived to become Pope, asked Steed to rally assistance in his district.

Such a request posed a serious moral problem for Steed: he was a devout Catholic, he loved the Pope, he tithed, he led his family to the local chapel every Wednesday and Sunday, and he personally provided the priest’s living. To side with a king against the Pope in an argument
over the two contrasting verses in the Bible was a most grievous responsibility, and for some weeks he refrained, wrestling with his conscience over that passage in Leviticus which specifically forbade the kind of marriage Henry had been forced into with Catherine.

Could it be that the Pope was ignoring the Bible? Devon Steed would never concede that. But was it not possible that King Henry was right in claiming that he had had no legitimate male children because the curse of God was upon him, due to his incestuous marriage? Did not Leviticus warn that such a marriage would have no children?

For some days he stood on this precarious ledge, inclining now toward the Pope, now toward Henry. The dilemma was resolved ingeniously: Cardinal Wolsey sent a personal emissary, young Hugh Latimer, related to the Steeds and godfather of Devon’s son Latimer, all the way to Bishop’s Nympton with an argument that could not be refuted: ‘Cousin Steed, are you not aware that our king has already fathered no less than six sons, illegitimately of course, but sons nevertheless. The barrenness cannot be his fault. You know Henry Fitzroy, he who was made Duke of Richmond at the age of six. He’s Henry’s son, and so are five others of less degree. If he can shed himself of the Spanish clod and marry lively young Anne, we’ll have a future king, and England will be protected.’ Latimer, an austere man, winked and added, ‘You know, I suppose, that Mistress Anne is heavy with child right now, a son the midwives assure us, so we must act promptly.’

Satisfied as to the facts, Devon Steed led the western counties in their support of the divorce; he backed the king against the Pope. He neither solicited nor expected anything in return for having obeyed his conscience, but when the dissolution of the monasteries took place, and great estates were distributed to loyal supporters, especially those of the middle class like the Steeds, Hugh Latimer saw to it that his Cousin Devon was placed on the list of eligibles.

When agents came to inquire which of the eight hundred monasteries he would prefer, he replied in some innocence, ‘Glastonbury. It’s nearby and I’ve always admired the buildings Richard Bere erected there when he was abbot.’

The agent coughed and said, ‘Glastonbury’s so big it’s been reserved.’

‘I am sorry,’ Steed apologized. ‘What did the king have in mind for me?’

‘He rather likes to have the new recipients move out of their established localities. Conflicting loyalties, you know. There’s a splendid monastery at Queen’s Wenlock over in Berks.’

‘I know it!’ Steed said with enthusiasm. He had stopped there once on his way to Oxford and remembered the place with affection: low towers, a modest cloister, innumerable chimneys, and four noble Gothic arches enclosing the gates at which the poor assembled to receive their charity.
‘Fifteen hundred acres accompany the monastery buildings,’ the agent said, ‘and two villages populated with sturdy farmers. You will own the entire as Sir Devon Steed.’

He assumed the knighthood in 1537 as Sir Devon; he had five Christian names and none of them was Devon. That was a nickname given him at Oxford, and it had become accepted; now as Sir Devon he moved his family to his new estate. The first thing he did upon arrival at the old monastery, built in 1387 by Good Queen Anne of Bohemia, wife of King Richard II, was to hold prayers in the former chapel, and as he knelt on those ancient and sacred stones he reconfirmed his abiding faith in Catholicism and the spiritual supremacy of the Pope.

Nothing changed much, actually. England remained Catholic. King Henry, vastly disappointed when Anne Boleyn gave him another daughter and no son, shortly thereafter had her head chopped off, and again Sir Devon supported him, as did his counterparts in the other 799 expropriated monasteries: they called Boleyn ‘the Whore of the Howards,’ and were glad to see her disposed of.

Ugly gossip circulated when certain court circles, always scheming to protect the line of inheritance to the throne, proposed that little Princess Mary, daughter of Henry’s first wife Catherine, be married to the Duke of Richmond, her own half brother. Those who broached the subject to Steed argued, ‘Don’t you see? This would unite all strands which might have a just claim. The position of the couple would be impregnable, and when they produced a son he would be king in every sense of the word.’

‘If they produced a son,’ Steed snapped, ‘he would have two heads.’

Fortunately, King Henry, always a moral man, was revolted at the idea of his daughter’s marrying her illegitimate half brother, and he rejected it. When he heard that Sir Devon Steed at Queen’s Wenlock had rejected the proposal on the same grounds, he felt additional warmth for the new knight and added to his acreage.

As long as King Henry lived, Sir Devon experienced no religious pangs. Both he and the king remained devout Catholics, and when the latter ordered two heretical Lutherans burned at the stake, Sir Devon applauded. ‘We want no schismatics here,’ he told his son Latimer.

He died three months after his king, thus escaping the chaos into which England fell when the boy, Edward VI, reigned briefly. Sir Latimer Steed, who inherited the title and the considerable estate which went with it, was even more devotedly attached to Catholicism and the Pope than his father had been, and he was appalled at the crass manner in which the young king’s advisors sought to convert England into a Protestant country. Sir Latimer fulminated against it, and he allowed to all who visited the former monastery that ‘the honest men of England will never embrace the heresies of Geneva.’ He was much relieved when Edward, always sickly, as if God had cursed his father for having had six wives and beheading two of them, died.

Now Mary, thirty-seven years old and tested in the furnace of Tudor wrangling, assassination and piety, approached the throne, determined to put everything right. It was a glorious day for good Catholics like Sir Latimer when she accepted the crown, and it was not long before the heretical leaders who had tried to lure England away from Rome paid the penalty for their treason. One after another went to the stake, and Sir Latimer, praying in the chapel which his father had stolen from the church, gave his benediction to the fires—‘It’s the only way to keep England pure.’

The first sign he received that things were going strangely came on October 19, 1555, when his son Fairleigh rushed in from London with shocking news: ‘Hugh Latimer was burned at the stake.’

It was unbelievable. The Steeds had known the Latimers for more than a hundred years, and they had watched with shared pride as young Hugh progressed up the various rungs of the church. When Cardinal Wolsey missed being elected Pope, it had not been too much to hope that Latimer might succeed, and now he had perished at the stake. What dreadful miscalculation had caused such injustice?

It could not be said of young Fairleigh that he was a devout Catholic; he was much more. He loved the church; as a child playing in the vast rooms of the former monastery, now circumspectly called the grange, he gained a vision of what a sovereign church should be, and at Oxford he had led the young men who set bonfires at the accession of Queen Mary, for in her cleansing arrival he saw the salvation of the church. He understood that harsh steps must be taken before England could be brought back into its proper channels, and he applauded her force of character.