The Last White Rose (41 page)

Early in 1535 Reginald Pole, studying at Padua, received a letter from his old friend Thomas Starkey, who had recently become a chaplain and a trusted confidant of King Henry. At one time Starkey had been a student with Pole at the ‘Bo’, and later acted as his chaplain-secretary in France and Italy. Theletter contained an urgent request from the king for Reginald’s opinion on the royal divorce. Henry believed that support from so respected a scholar would be particularly valuable.

Later, in October 1535, Reginald wrote to thank Cromwell for having ensured that the king still regarded him with favour,
insisting that he was always ready to serve Henry ‘as payment for my education’.
⁴
Shortly after writing this, however, he decided that Mr Secretary was a messenger of Satan. According to Pole, when Henry had said that if Rome refused to let him divorce Queen Katherine he would abandon the idea, it was Comwell who suggested he should make himself head of the Church in England and transform any criticism of the divorce into treason.

Pole did not complete his reply until the following year. He did so in an entire treatise with the title of
Pro Unitatis Ecclesiasticae
Unitatis Defensione
(A Defence of the Church’s Unity), which he had written for royal eyes alone. In this little book, which is generally known as
De Unitate,
he begins by thanking Henry for having singled him out from all other English noblemen by ensuring he received a superb education. Otherwise, the work is violently critical of his former patron. He was brutally frank about the royal divorce, insisting that Henry’s scruples about the validity of his marriage were a disguise for his lust. His true motive, said Reginald, was desire for Anne Boleyn. In addition, Pole suggested it was Anne herself who had come up with the idea of pretending the marriage was invalid, which was ‘how the whole lying business first began’.

He did not restrict himself to the divorce. The king had ‘repaid with death those who tried to teach him’, said the author in the first section. During the last twenty-six years he had wrung more money out of his people and clergy than any king in five hundred: ‘I know because I’ve seen the accounts,’ he told Henry.

No one thought of pouring expensive wine into a barrel empty for a long time without cleaning the barrel first, wrote Pole, and Henry’s mind was like an uncleaned barrel. He had destroyed his lords on the flimsiest pretexts, he had packed his court with vile men. His public works were pleasure-houses for himself, together with ruined monasteries and wrecked churches. His butchery and ghastly executions had turned England into a slaughterhouse for innocent people. Yet the King was the man
who claimed that the Pope could not be head of the Church because of his moral turpitude.

Henry had made civil war inevitable by disinheriting the Lady Mary, Pole continued, because so many English noble families would fight for her rights. Why for the past three years had Henry been taking these rights away from a daughter who had been his heir for the past twenty? What sort of a parent was it who could confiscate a lawfully begotten child’s inheritance and give it to one begotten of a concubine? If the king’s father came back, would he not be astonished to find that Pole – a nephew of an innocent man [Warwick] whom he had sent to his death because he was too near the throne – was having to defend the Tudor succession? After all, Pole belonged to the same man’s family.

He went on to say that the present king was more dangerous for Christendom than the Sultan of Turkey, and that his kingdom ought to be taken away from him. Even if the emperor had been fighting the Turks and on the point of conquering the Bosphorus, Reginald would have asked Charles to make his ships alter course for England, where ‘there is a worse enemy of the Faith and a greater heretic than any in Germany’. His final gibe was to remind Henry of what had happened to Richard III.
⁵
A little surprisingly, he ended by offering to submit to the king if he would take his advice.

Pole wrote so emotively because he believed the previous pope, Clement VII, had been too weak in dealing with Henry. Instead of listening politely to his threats, Clement should have excommunicated the king early on in the divorce dispute. The treatise was designed to remedy the pope’s mistake. Reginald insisted on sending it despite his friend Cardinal Contarini’s attempts to dissuade him. Later, he explained he had sent it to Henry, ‘just after he got rid of the woman who was reckoned to be the cause of this calamity for the whole kingdom [Anne Boleyn], for though he had bought her at such a price, his love was soon sated and turned into hatred. Everybody expected a change for the better.’
⁶

However, Reginald had altogether misread Henry. Quite apart from the abuse, it was particularly unwise to compare him with Richard III, while in view of the king’s increasing girth, likening the royal mind to a barrel was no less tactless. Only Luther had been so rude to Henry, in his diatribe against ‘Junker Heinrich’, but he was a German – no Englishman had ever dared to address the king in such a way. What made it worse was that Pole, a man whose scholarship was admired by the king, owed his education to royal generosity. Yet Reginald saw his book as an appeal, not a denunciation, begging Henry to change his misguided ways – as ‘your friend, your physician, your former favourite’.

The book arrived in June 1536. Although the king did not read it at once and it was given to a committee of scholars to study, he obtained a good idea of what was in it from a synopsis by Richard Moryson, one of Cromwell’s experts. Both the king and the new Lord Privy Seal realized the impact it might have on public opinion.
⁷
Graciously, Henry invited Pole to return home, where more learned men than he would be able to put his own point of view. Reginald declined, privately quoting the parable of the fox refusing an invitation to visit the lion’s cave after noticing that no animal that did so ever came out. In writing his treatise he had hoped the king might still be redeemable, but by now Pole was convinced that Henry really was a monster. As for the king, he realized there was a new White Rose.

25. Summer 1535: A New White Rose?

1
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit
., vol. V (ii), 72.

2
. Mayer,
Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet
, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 98.

3
.
CSP Ven
, vol. V, 806.

4
. T.F. Mayer (ed.),
The Correspondence of Reginald Pole,
Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002, vol. 1, p. 86.

5
. For
De Unitate
, see T.F. Mayer,
Reginald Pole, Prince and Prophet
, Cambridge, Cambridge University Presss, 2000, pp. 13–61; also see the summary in
LP Hen VIII
, vol. X, p. 975.

6
.
LP Hen VIII
,
op. cit
., vol. XIV (i), 200.

7
. T.F. Mayer, ‘A Diet for Henry VIII: The Failure of Cardinal Pole’s 1537 Legation’, in
Journal of British Studies
26 (1987), p. 305.

26

Autumn 1536: The Pilgrimage of Grace

Christ crucified!

For thy wounds wide

Us commons guide.

Which pilgrims be

Through God’s grace

For to purchase

Old wealth and peace.

The Pilgrims’ Ballad, 1536
¹

Henry VIII’s religious policies, implemented by Thomas Cromwell (his ‘Vicegerent in Spirituals’ who oversaw all clerical matters), caused widespread indignation. Most Englishmen objected not so much to repudiating the pope as to closing down monasteries and convents, and abolishing customs of great antiquity. Laws introduced by Parliament suggested that the crown intended to intrude into every aspect of life, while in all counties there seemed to be commissioners or government
spies, or both. The surprising efficiency of Tudor administration contributed to the climate of suspicion. (In 1535 an investigation known as the
Valor Ecclesiasticus
took only five months to inform Mr Secretary Cromwell of the income of every single clergyman in the kingdom, from bishops down to parish priests and chantry chaplains.)

During the coming explosion, the Northeners would sing a wistful doggerel written by a Lancashire monk, a verse from which is quoted above. Again and again, the ballad makes it clear that they wanted things to remain as they always had been, whether worldly or spiritual; the king’s men should stop meddling and leave them in peace.
²

In April 1536 a number of rebels were executed in Somerset, while 140 other persons in the same county sued for pardons after making unlawful assemblies. Almost nothing is known about this rising, but it anticipated far more dangerous disturbances in the North and we can safely assume that it was about religion.
³
Many of the nobles and gentry were angry and resentful, and not just the ‘commons’, but were too frightened to take action.

In particular, there was real anger in the North Country at the closure of the smaller monasteries, which had been popular because they had supplied not only careers for younger sons and unmarriageable daughters but rudimentary social services: some basic education, a certain amount of accommodation for the elderly, hospitality to travellers, and above all food and clothing for the destitute. In addition, they had built roads, bridges and sea walls that nobody else in the area could provide. In the opinion of Robert Aske (about to play a leading role in the subsequent upheaval), their suppression was a serious loss for the communities in their neighbourhood: ‘the abbeys was one of the beauties of this realm to all men and [to] strangers passing through … gentlemen were much succoured in their needs with money, their young sons there succoured, and in nunneries their daughters brought up in virtue’.
⁴

The proposed new registers of births, marriages and deaths caused almost as much disquiet. There were rumours that swingeing new taxes were to be introduced on every baptism, wedding and funeral, that church plate and ornaments would be confiscated, and that many parish churches were to be closed down. It was said, too, that there would be fines on eating goose, chicken or white bread.

In Lincolnshire these unsettling rumours appeared to be confirmed by the appearance during the autumn of three bodies of commissioners in the north-east of the county: one charged with closing down smaller monasteries, another with inspecting the clergy and a third with (supposedly) imposing a new tax called the ‘subsidy’. Early in October 1536, led by a cobbler, the people around the market town of Louth rose in protest, attacking any government officials they could catch. The Bishop of Lincoln’s unpopular chancellor was beaten to death with staves, while another man was (wrongly) reported to have been blinded, sewn in a newly flayed bullhide and then baited to death by dogs. Although the report turned out to be untrue, it showed the wild uneasiness of the times.