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THE TUDORS
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Traitors and Heretics
God hath opened the Press to preach
whose voice the Pope is not able to stop
with all the power of his triple crown.
John Foxe (1516/17ā1587)
Around Eastertime in the year 1525, during the reign of Henry VIII, in the village of Aldington, 65 miles south-east of London, a young servant named Elizabeth Barton suffered a sudden seizure. She collapsed, lost consciousness, her body stiffened and then began a violent jerking. It was reported that while in this state, she spoke about the nature of heaven, hell and purgatory, and correctly foretold the death of a child sheād met. When she awoke, she remained very ill. In the sixteenth century, prolonged sickness usually ended only one way. But Elizabeth didnāt die. Not yet.
Uttering religious prophesies was a dangerous thing to do in the reign of Henry VIII. It could mean you were a heretic and might have to be burned at the stake. So, an episcopal commission was set up to investigate, headed by a learned friar named Dr Edward Bocking. He cleared Elizabeth of any heresy. But Bocking himself had some views that were controversial in England of the 1520s, and he now realised that he could use Elizabeth Barton to help him convert others to his own beliefs.
An early nineteenth-century representation of Elizabeth Barton in a seizure. Her elaborate clothing is a fanciful idea ā she was a servant girl. Itās not recorded which of the men is Edward Bocking, although the shifty-looking one keeping a written record is the most likely candidate.
That autumn, Bocking arranged for the still sick young woman to appear before a large crowd at the nearby Chapel of Our Lady in the hamlet of Court-at-Street. There she spoke in a mysterious voice, declaring to the people that sheād made a promise to God during a vision sheād experienced at the time of her seizure. After that, she stood up and ā miraculously, it was believed ā was cured. Elizabeth then entered the Convent of St Sepulchre in Canterbury and became a nun, with Bocking acting as her advisor, or ā as her detractors said later ā her āghostly fatherā.
Elizabeth Barton now became a pawn in a momentous and dangerous national and international contest between the king and the pope. Henry VIIIās marriage to Catherine of Aragon had become a disappointment to him. After two stillbirths, two miscarriages and two deaths in infancy, Catherine finally produced a baby that survived in 1516. But it was a girl, christened Mary ā and daughters were risky. Queens were more likely to be overthrown.
Henry, whoād already fathered an illegitimate son, concluded that the marriage was the problem. It had been cursed by God. And he could see another ā more attractive ā way forward. Heād fallen in love with an English commonerās daughter, Anne Boleyn. He decided he would marry her and she would bear him the longed-for son and heir. But he needed to get a divorce from Catherine first.
Divorce, in the sense we understand it, was impossible in the sixteenth century. Legal separation could be achieved only by the popeās ruling. So, the kingās representatives would have to negotiate a deal with Pope Clement VII.
There was opposition in the country from conservative Catholics to the kingās planned marriage, and one of the opponents was Dr Bocking, Elizabethās āghostly fatherā. By 1528 Bocking had the young nun firmly under his influence, and he managed somehow to get her close enough to the king to confront him face to face. She told His Royal Majesty to burn English translations of the Bible and to remain faithful to the pope and all he represented. She then warned the king that if he married Anne Boleyn, he would die within a month and that within six months the people would be struck down by a great plague. Henry was disturbed by her prophesies and ordered that she be kept under observation. She wasnāt punished, however ā something that would soon change as her fame as a holy prophetess spread.
By 1533, political events were moving fast. In January that year, Henry lost patience with the papal negotiations, and he married Anne. Now it was necessary to pass laws which would justify Henryās marriage. And in rapid succession, Acts of Parliament removed the English Church from the popeās jurisdiction and made Henry its head instead. Other acts declared his marriage to Catherine void, and his offspring by Anne to be his legitimate successors.
The kingās enemies were enraged, and royal advisors identified a conspiracy to overthrow him, with Elizabeth Barton, the āNun of Kentā, its chief inspiration. It was at this point that printed books and pamphlets began to appear on the streets of London, and beyond, which told of the Nun of Kentās miraculous cure and the revelations sheād uttered, revelations that made difficult reading for Henry and his courtiers.
Henry now came to the view that Elizabethās words, as reported in print, were heretical and treasonous ā the two, amid the politico-religious dramas of Henry VIIIās reign, wrapped up in each other. She was guilty of heresy because, according to the books being circulated, sheād delivered a dead man from the terrors of hell, companies of angels and martyrs had paid homage to her, the Devil himself had come ālike a jolly gallantā to woo her to be his wife, and sheād been sent a letter from heaven by Mary Magdalen.
The treasonous element of the nunās words was even more dangerous. Her prophesy that the king would die one month after marrying Anne Boleyn had turned out not to be true, and Elizabeth Bartonās followers were now claiming this meant Henry was no longer a monarch in the eyes of God, and that heād die a āvillainās deathā.
The kingās advisors condemned these claims in words that might have come straight out of Donald Trumpās White House. The prophesies were āfalse fables and talesā, said Henry VIIIās men. And a 1533 Act of Parliament claimed that the nunās reputation had been built up in order to put the king in the āevil opinion of his peopleā. The treasonous and heretical printed works were to be used, said the official account, in sermons to be preached throughout England on a signal from the nun, in order to put the king, ānot only in peril of his life but also in the jeopardy, loss and deprivation of his crown and dignity royalā. The problem for the government was made far worse because these books and pamphlets were becoming ā by sixteenth-century standards ā bestsellers.
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And so it was that a war began. Not a conventional war, with armies fighting in the field, but a war of words. Whoever said āThe pen is mightier than the swordā was wrong. If you write a letter and send it to a friend who reads it and then puts it in a drawer, thereās little power in it. The old adage should have said, āThe press is mightier than the swordā. Print lots of copies of what you wrote and distribute them, and then your words can reach a multitude of people, prompt debates, cast doubts, make converts, even maybe stir up rebellion.
And this war didnāt die with Henry VIII. Itās been fought, century in and century out, ever after. Not over the same ground, of course ā thatās changed countless times according to the great issues of the day and how the government has dealt with them ā but from 1533 onwards, those in power have always had to worry about āthe pressā (what would soon be newspapers, and then, nearer our own time, would expand to include broadcasting and the Internet, all nowadays under the label āthe mediaā). Itās a term thatās come to mean the people who control and use it, as much as the technology itself. At stake in this war has always been a prize more valuable than any land won by force of arms. Itās a war to win possession of the minds of the people. And that threatens the power of those at the top.
Johannes Gutenberg
The technology that triggered this war ā the printing press ā had been around for a century before the anti-government books and pamphlets appeared in Henry VIIIās day, and in its first decades it had been used for largely peaceful purposes. It was born sometime around 1439, when a German goldsmith, named Johannes Gutenberg, realised there might be a way of making hundreds ā if not thousands ā of copies of a handwritten page. This was a leap of imagination in an age when the only way of reproducing such a document was by laboriously copying it out again and again with quill and ink, or possibly by making the odd smudgy re-version of an illustration with a primitive carved stamp. Mass production was out of the question ā until Johannes Gutenberg had an idea.
Gutenberg, like all talented inventers, built on existing technologies but with the tweaks, modifications and combinations of mechanisms that can only come from the mind of a genius. In his workshop in Mainz, he took a screw press, a device which had been used since Roman times to squeeze olives into oil and grapes into the makings of wine, and he added to it āmovable typeā. That is, small metal blocks with the raised, reverse shape of a letter on one side. He didnāt invent movable type ā it had been around, though not much used, for at least 200 years ā but he did make his type from a special hardwearing alloy, and at the same time he devised a mould that could mass-produce the metal letters in the kinds of numbers needed for a document that might have hundreds of pages.
Replica of a Gutenberg Printing Press from around 1450 on display at the International Printing Museum in Southern California. The massive frame was needed to withstand the force of the tightening screw as it pressed the paper onto the inked type.
Now, in Gutenbergās press, each page was separately set, with the letters held firmly in a tray known as a ācoffinā, before ink ā another first for Gutenberg, it was oil-based ā was applied with balls of sheepās wool. A sheet of paper was then fixed onto a flat surface, and the coffin ā with the inked letters face down ā was placed on top. This was pushed hard onto the paper by means of the screw press. The result was text printed on paper.
Over the next sixty years, Gutenbergās invention slowly caught on across Europe, and by the end of the fifteenth century was turning out pamphlets and books in 110 cities. Itās been estimated that 20 million volumes, of various lengths, had by this stage been pressed and bound.
Although there was a market for ballads and romances, it was mainly religious works that were printed. In the 1450s, Gutenberg himself had produced around 180 copies of the Bible in Latin, a work that still bears his name.
In London, because the Church was the biggest customer of the printing business, the presses were set up in workshops around St Paulās Cathedral, and thatās where the presses were still to be found until the 1980s. If you stand today on Ludgate Hill with the great west door of the cathedral behind you, and look ahead, you can see down the length of Fleet Street, for centuries a synonym for the national newspaper industry in Britain.
Gutenberg could not have guessed that the device heād created in his workshop would change the world forever. The so-called digital revolution of our own age canāt compete with the invention of the Gutenberg press. In effect, heād invented mass communication.
Itās almost impossible for us today to imagine living in the world before Gutenberg when, for 99 per cent of us, 99 per cent of the time, all we would have known would be either happenings in our own village or town, or occasionally some oft-repeated ā and undoubtedly oft-embellished ā rumour of great events far away. And because knowledge is power, the printing press would, step by step, change forever the structure of society. It started to break the hold of the elite on learning and education, and so it boosted the rise of middle-class merchants and tradespeople. There was also an increase in the number of those who could read during the first half of the sixteenth century, encouraged by the availability of printed books.
But literacy levels were only part of the reason for the growing popularity of whatever the presses could produce. Thereād always been a strong oral tradition throughout the Middle Ages, with storytelling around the fire being the main way that legends and traditions were passed from generation to generation. However, word of mouth didnāt now die out. In fact, it gave more power to the press, because those who could read often did so out loud, telling friends, family and neighbours what was in the latest book or pamphlet.
This newfound ability to spread information relatively rapidly made possible mass movements in politics and religion. Ideas could more easily cross borders. And all of this would soon be a terrible threat to the most powerful institutions, the Church and the monarchy. Heresy, treason and sedition could suddenly catch on right across the country.
In the early sixteenth century, Europe was becoming increasingly split between those who followed traditional religious practices defined by the pope in Rome, and newcomers who chose the beliefs of Martin Luther and the Protestants. The press was the means of disseminating these new ideas.
The first attempt in England to stop them flooding in from across the Channel had come in May 1521, when a pile of Lutheran volumes, considered heretical, was burned outside St Paulās. But smuggling continued, and the Bishop of Norwich, wringing his hands in despair, declared, āIt passeth my power or that of any spiritual man to hinder it now, and if this continue much longer it will undo us allā.
Henry VIII would have sympathised with the bishopās frustration. As he was about to discover ā like many a king, president and prime minister who came after him ā there was no easy way to stop the onslaught from āthe pressā.
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Henry tried. In July 1533, under fire from these treasonous and heretical printed volumes, he fought back on two fronts. He attacked the source of the āfalse tales and fablesā, while at the same time trying to suppress the mechanism that had published them.
The source was Elizabeth Barton, and the king now ordered his secretary, Thomas Cromwell, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer to take action against her. Royal agents entered the Convent of St Sepulchre in Canterbury, seized the nun, and brought her before the archbishop for questioning. Cranmer adopted a soft, manipulative approach in his interrogation, pretending he believed her every word ā and it paid off. He won her confidence, and by November sheād confessed to a conspiracy against the king. Names were named. Arrests were made.
Those accused were thrown into the Tower of London, and on 23 November they were subjected to a staged public humiliation. While they stood, heads bowed, on a scaffold before a huge crowd outside St Paulās Cathedral, the Abbot of Hyde read out extracts from a printed book of Elizabeth Bartonās revelations. He reviled both them...
