Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (24 page)

January 1536 was doubly fateful for Anne Boleyn, for it also saw the death of Catherine of Aragon. This left Cromwell and the king free to move against Anne without having to worry about a revival of support for her predecessor. In April 1536, with Cromwell’s approval, a secret committee was appointed to find evidence of adultery against the Queen. She was accused, almost certainly unjustly, of five counts of infidelity with a variety of young men at court, including her own brother, George, Lord Rochford (b. ca. 1504). Queenly infidelity was high treason, for it could jeopardize the legitimate succession of the king’s heirs. It is impossible to know Henry’s role in the matter: was he the author of this scheme or had Anne’s many enemies duped him into believing the charges? In any case, he accepted the verdict. As usual when the king wished it, Tudor justice moved with brutal swiftness. On May 15, 1536 Queen Anne was tried and convicted; on the 17th her marriage was declared null and void; and on the 19th she was executed along with the five male “adulterers.” None protested their innocence, probably out of a desire to protect their families from further royal retribution. On May 30 Henry married Jane Seymour. On October 12, 1537 she gave birth to a son, christened Edward (d. 1553). Henry had finally achieved his goal of siring a male heir.

Twelve days later Queen Jane died from complications of the birth, leaving Henry VIII an eligible bachelor for the first time in a quarter-century. Henry’s single state presented opportunities to both the king and his chief minister, for the former needed not only a new wife but a new alliance and religious settlement. These three matters would be intertwined. At first, Henry sought to return to his old alliance with the emperor. To do this, he would have to show signs of returning to Rome as well. In fact, his government had already enacted a compromise statement on doctrine called the Ten Articles. This document reaffirmed the importance of good works, as well as of baptism, confession, and transubstantiation. On the other hand, it failed to reassert the necessity of confirmation, matrimony, holy orders, and the anointing of the sick. At this point, Henry also appointed a number of conservative bishops. But this was not Catholic enough for Charles V, who did not take the bait for an alliance. Neither, when approached, did Francis I of France. By 1538, the pope, seeing no hope for reconciliation, began excommunication proceedings against Henry VIII. In threatening to declare the king an apostate and a heretic, the Holy See was, in effect, threatening to absolve good Catholics of their obligation to be loyal to him. Worse, the following year saw a peace treaty between France and the Holy Roman Empire, clearly leaving them in a position to unite against the heretic on the throne of England. Henry, fearing invasion, scrambled to strengthen his defenses. He had, over the course of the reign, virtually created the Royal Navy, founding dockyards and building some 40 men-of-war. To this he now added a series of coastal forts. But these would be of little use if he had to face France and the Empire alone.

Realizing this, Secretary Cromwell began to pursue a third way in foreign policy between 1537 and 1540 by sounding out northern German princes, who tended to be Protestants and were often at odds with their nominal superior, the Holy Roman emperor. There were two elements to his strategy. First, Cromwell promoted Protestantism by dissolving the monasteries and by issuing two sets of Injunctions (in 1536 and 1538, respectively) for regulating individual parish churches. These required that every such church have a copy of the new English translation of the Bible by William Tyndale as revised by Miles Coverdale (1488–1569); that all images and statues be removed; and that the clergy preach and teach their flocks, in English, the “Ten Commandments” and prayers such as the “Our Father” (formerly the Latin
Pater Noster).
In addition, the number of holy days was reduced, shrines dismantled, and pilgrimages denounced. Finally, in a move for which social historians have been ever grateful, every parish in England was required to keep a record of its baptisms, marriages, and burials. The Injunctions and related legislation represented the first tangible break with Roman practice for the vast majority of English churchgoers and they were controversial. Perhaps most significantly, while the king did not oppose them, he did little to indicate support. Henry was taking a wait-and-see attitude to reform.

The second prong of Cromwell’s strategy was to arrange a diplomatic marriage for Henry with Anne of Cleves (1515–57), the sister of a powerful Catholic but anti-Imperial and anti-papal prince in the west of Germany, the duke of Cleves. In order to interest the king, Cromwell commissioned Hans Holbein, the great portraitist of the Tudor court, to travel to Germany to paint the potential bride. According to legend, Holbein followed the practice of most court painters: he flattered Anne. When Henry saw the portrait, he professed himself enchanted and signed a treaty in October 1539. But when his bride arrived in January 1540 the king was repulsed, nicknaming her “the Flanders mare.” Realizing that more was at stake than his marital happiness, Henry went through with the ceremony. But by July the political and diplomatic situation changed again, as explained below. As a result, Henry was able to divorce Anne on the entirely plausible grounds of non-consummation. He granted her lands and a generous financial settlement and the former couple seem to have maintained a regard for each other for the rest of their lives. In the end, Anne was, perhaps, the luckiest of Henry’s wives.

Obviously, Cromwell’s failure to work out a successful Protestant marriage and foreign policy left him badly exposed to his enemies in the spring of 1540. Despite his elevation as earl of Essex in April, events were beginning to overtake him. A Catholic party led by Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, and the Howard family opposed Cromwell. While this group was less numerous in Henry’s court and government than Cromwell’s followers, they did have the king’s ear. This was not least because, as we have seen, Henry was naturally attracted to Catholicism so long as it did not involve the pope. Moreover, in the spring of 1540, Henry fell in love with the young Catherine Howard (ca. 1518/24–42), niece of the Catholic duke of Norfolk. While Cromwell ran the king’s government in London, Norfolk, Gardiner, and Catherine attended his person at Greenwich. As the first two poisoned Henry’s mind against his secretary and principal minister, Catherine won his heart.

Perhaps as a result of this influence, perhaps out of his own conservative convictions, perhaps in hopes of placating the Catholic powers, the king now began to distance himself from Cromwell’s reforms. As early as November 1538 he had issued a proclamation condemning
Anabaptists
, clerical marriage, and attacks on Church ceremonies. In May 1539, over Cromwell’s objections, he forced his secretary to steer through Parliament the Act of Six Articles, which denounced clerical marriage and upheld the efficacy of all seven sacraments as well as masses for the dead. Finally, to ensure that there would be no pretender in the wings for an invader to place on the throne, the king rounded up and executed every important Yorkist claimant within his obsessive grasp. During the summer of 1540 he went further, divorcing Anne of Cleves, marrying Catherine Howard in secret, and (in June and July) imprisoning, attainting, and then executing Thomas Cromwell, earl of Essex, on charges of abetting heresy and misusing his authority. In August, the marriage to Queen Catherine was made public. With a Catholic queen sharing the throne, the Catholic faction ascendant at court, the mass defended in the churches, and the architect of the Royal Supremacy dead, the Catholic triumph was complete.

But it was also short-lived, for Henry soon had reason to doubt the loyalty of his Catholic subjects and even his Catholic queen. In the spring of 1541 he put down a number of Catholic plots in the North. That autumn, the Privy Council acquired evidence that Catherine Howard had been sexually indiscreet with several young men, both before and after her royal marriage. After some hesitation on Henry’s part, Parliament passed a bill of attainder against her on February 7, 1542. Catherine was taken to the Tower on February 10 and beheaded on the 13th. To save himself and what was left of the Catholic party, Norfolk joined in the accusations against his niece.

In the summer of 1541 France and the Empire once again resumed hostilities, thus ending all fears of invasion, and relieving the pressure on Henry to appear more “Catholic.” Both sides courted the English king, who eventually joined his old ally, the emperor. His first move was to invade France’s ally, Scotland, in the autumn of 1542 after its ruler, James V, had spurned a summit meeting. This campaign resulted in a crushing victory over the Scots at Solway Marsh in November. The dejected James V died within the month. He was succeeded by his infant daughter, Mary, known to history as “Queen of Scots” (1542–87; reigned 1542–67). Henry, negotiating from strength, forced her diplomats to promise that she would marry the 5-year-old Prince Edward in July 1543. But after Henry went further and attempted to reassert feudal sovereignty over the northern kingdom, a pro-French, pro-Catholic Scottish government under David, Cardinal Beaton (1494?–1546), repudiated the treaty and resumed the “Auld Alliance.” In response, Henry dispatched another invasion force, placing it under the command of the late Queen Jane’s brother, Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford (ca. 1500–52). Hertford sacked Edinburgh in May 1544, but at the cost of over £1 million on the English side, much life on both sides, and the last shreds of good will which might have led to a peaceful union of the two kingdoms.

In the meantime, Henry VIII began his last French campaign in July 1544. By this stage, the king was prematurely aged, suffering from obesity, gout, dropsy, and, possibly, syphilis. As a consequence, the English Colossus had to be carried about the French countryside on a litter. From this position he commanded a huge army of 48,000 men. This force managed to capture the French port of Boulogne, but at the astronomical cost of £1.3 million. To this should be added another £1 million for the navy and coastal garrisons, and, of course, the above-noted cost of the Scottish campaigns. To pay for all this, Henry could draw on an annual revenue of perhaps £160,000. With Cromwell off the stage, he lacked an effective minister and parliamentary manager to reduce expenses or raise revenue. While Parliament did its best, raising well over £1 million in the 1540s, this was obviously not enough to cover all of Henry’s military adventures. So the king resorted to selling vast quantities of monastic lands, extorting forced loans and illegal benevolences from his subjects, taking out foreign loans at the rate of 14 percent, and debasing the coinage. These last two expedients, in particular, emptied the treasury, increased the royal debt (Henry would die owing his foreign creditors over £750,000), and exacerbated an economic situation that was already inflationary. The price of food rose 85 percent, that of labor 50 percent. In short, the king’s diplomatic and fiscal irresponsibility undid many of Cromwell’s reforms, wrecked royal finances for a hundred years, and weakened the English economy as a whole for at least twenty.

Henry VIII’s Last Years

It is often difficult to tell precisely what the declining king had in mind during his last years. Perhaps, in his supreme self-centeredness, he felt betrayed by all those who surrounded him. Certainly he was suspicious of the Protestants for their doctrinal heterodoxy and rejection of hierarchy; and of the Catholics for their loyalty to the pope. It is typical of the hot-tempered king that, in July 1540, two days after executing Cromwell, he had three Catholic priests hanged as traitors and three Protestant preachers burned as heretics in Smithfield, London’s meat market, simultaneously. It is equally characteristic that in his last speech to Parliament in December 1545, he – of all people – called for charity and tolerance.

But gradually, the king seems to have realized that some decision had to be made, not so much for himself as for his son. In the end, he appears to have concluded that, whatever his personal feelings about Protestantism, Catholics could not be trusted to maintain their allegiance to the dynasty and its achievements. That is, only Protestants, whether reform-minded theologians or lukewarm gentry who had purchased monastic lands, owed everything to a Tudor succession and had everything to fear from a usurpation or revolution. Subsequent actions by English Catholics confirmed his inclinations. Henry was annoyed when, three times between 1543 and 1545, the Catholic party attempted to pry Cranmer out of his archbishopric by accusing him of heresy. The king was alarmed when, in 1546, Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (b. 1516/17), son of Norfolk, a descendant of Edward I, and a Catholic, began to include the royal arms in his personal crest. The king interpreted this as a threat to Prince Edward’s succession. He had Surrey executed in January 1547 and condemned his father, Norfolk, to follow. In a final blow to the Catholic party, Bishop Gardiner was stricken from the roll of privy councilors.

In fact, as the reign came to a close, the king was increasingly isolated, relying for his domestic service and advice on a circle of Protestant courtiers led by his former brother-in-law, the earl of Hertford, and his first gentleman of the Privy Chamber, Sir Anthony Denny (1501–49). Henry’s Protestant family connections were further strengthened when, in July 1543, he married for the last time. The new queen was a middle-aged widow of reformist sympathies named Catherine Parr, Lady Latimer (1512–48). She knew how to handle, even mother, the aging monarch, and she proved to be a good mother to his three children as well. Finally, in 1547 the king buttressed the Protestant circle around the prince by naming Protestant peers to his Regency Council and humanist scholars as his tutors.