Martyrs of Henry VIII

Repression, Defiance, Sacrifice

John Matusiak

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780750987950
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750993548
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

When Henry VIII passed through Canterbury in 1532, a young woman in her mid-twenties named Elizabeth Barton, widely revered as a visionary and prophetess, burst into his presence and warned him that he was 'so abominable in the sight of God that he was not worthy to tread on hallowed ground'. Two years later, the self-same 'Holy Maid of Kent' would suffer a grisly fate at Tyburn and trigger a wave of bloody repression that consumed not only Sir Thomas More, but two other less widely-known individuals, whose exceptional sacrifices were, arguably, even more compelling. One was a combative cleric as renowned for his integrity as his intellect, prepared to sacrifice both life and country in defence of Queen Catherine of Aragon and the old religion; the other a courtier-turned-ascetic, plucked from the shelter of the cloister by a religious and political revolution, in which he had little stake beyond the dictates of his own conscience. For these three unique individuals of widely contrasting backgrounds, temperaments and motives, drawn together at a critical watershed in English history by a common cause and destiny, the path to Tyburn was a long and painful one, paved with fear, hardships, vilification and intrigue.

1

A CHURCH TO DIE FOR

They all attend Mass every day and say many Paternosters in public – the women carrying long rosaries in their hands, and any who can read taking the Office of Our Lady with them, and with some companion reading it in church, verse by verse, in a low voice after the manner of churchmen. They always hear Mass every Sunday in their parish church, and give liberal alms, because they may not offer less than a piece of money, of which fourteen are equivalent to a golden ducat; nor do they omit any form incumbent on good Christians; there are, however, many who have various opinions concerning religion.

From The Italian Relation, an account of the island of England, written by a Venetian in 1497.

For those in search of English history’s most momentous documents, a worthy candidate may surely be found approximately 6 miles south-west of the bustling Spanish metropolis of Valladolid, on the road to Zamora and the right bank of the river Pisuerga, in the small but picturesque town of Simancas. Home to slightly more than 5,000 souls, the place is these days primarily an agricultural centre, boasting a deserved reputation for its poultry. But it remains also the location of an impressive citadel, built in the sixteenth century by the architects Juan de Herrera, Alonso Berruguete and Juan Gómez de Mora, which has the distinction of being the first building of the modern era created exclusively to house a nation’s archives. Lodged in some forty-six rooms and arranged in upwards of 80,000 bundles containing no fewer than 33 million documents, are to be found each and every major record produced by government bodies relating to the Spanish monarchy since the time of the Catholic Monarchs, dating from 1475, through to the establishment in 1834 of what became known as the Liberal Regime. And it is within this same Archivo General de Simancas, established by Philip II in 1563 and sometimes called the Archivo General del Reino, that there resides a striking parchment of outstanding significance, lettered in gold and beautifully embellished with the royal arms of Spain and red rose of Lancaster, which would change the course of history: the marriage treaty between the future Henry VIII, at that time newly heir to the Tudor throne, and the Trastámara princess known to posterity as Catherine of Aragon, daughter to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Finally signed by Henry VII on 3 March 1504, after its agreement at Richmond during the previous summer, the treaty set the seal upon a marriage like few others before or after – one that was to prove problematic from its very conception, and which marked, unbeknown to its progenitors, the beginning of the end for the entire fabric of Roman Catholic influence in England.

Yet never, arguably, had the Roman Catholic Church in that realm been more securely entrenched nor the prospect of Catholic martyrs from within its ranks more remote than upon Henry VIII’s succession in 1509. On the one hand, the so-called Ecclesia Anglicana – a term encompassing the entire clerical estate within the kingdom – was not only firmly protected by sanctions and support from its base abroad, but strengthened by wide-ranging privileges and immunities enshrined in native law and consecrated by long custom. At the same time, its leading bishops were central to the council of the king, whose bureaucracy, such as it was, still largely comprised clergymen. Its services were necessary on all important occasions in life – at christenings, marriages and funerals. Its courts determined all matrimonial cases, ratified or refused to ratify all wills, and took cognisance, too, of all transgressions of the moral law, rendering both the fornicator and the village scold alike subject to its punishment. And this was merely the iceberg tip of the Church’s more general prominence in the fabric of everyday life. For merchant guilds and craft guilds still boasted their own thriving chantry chapels to succour the souls of their departed, and besides administering all charitable funds, the clergy almost entirely controlled education and hospitals, amply assisted at other levels by the kingdom’s parish churches, which remained indispensable centres of social life.

Shortly before his death at the age of 88 early in the next century, Roger Martyn, churchwarden of Long Melford in Suffolk, left a rich and vivid account of a religious world that was by then already a distant memory: a world closely replicated, moreover, throughout the other 9,500 parishes of Tudor England, and, in consequence, one that was never likely to be lightly supplanted when the time for reformation finally dawned. For Martyn, unlike the small minority of Protestant sceptics who actively endorsed the changes, would find the spiritual reorientation from a Catholic mental universe of supportive saints and saving sacraments to a Protestant one of justifying faith, nurtured by sermons and Bible-reading, a decidedly painful one. And for most others too, if only out of long familiarity with its everyday rhythms and undoubted consolations, the abandonment of the old religion’s ways was equally perplexing. On the one hand, Martyn lovingly recalled the festivals of the Church’s year, when on Palm Sunday, for example, the people of Long Melford processed around their churchyard with the consecrated host (a communion wafer) borne aloft under a canopy carried by four yeomen of the village. On Maundy Thursday, meanwhile, candles were set in a painted frame before the Easter sepulchre, and on Good Friday the priest sang the Passion service from the rood loft, standing next to the rood itself, which had been veiled throughout Lent. On St Mark’s day, too, and at Corpus Christi there were processions around Long Melford’s green, once again with the consecrated sacrament featuring prominently, along with bell-ringing and singing, while in Rogation week there were prayers ‘for fair weather or rain, as the time required’, as well as great celebrations involving ale and a parish dinner on Rogation Monday, a breakfast of cheese at the rectory on Tuesday, followed later by ale at the manor house chapel, and ale at Melford Hall on the Wednesday.

And this, of course, was only one limited segment of a packed parish calendar that bound the Church of Rome so inextricably to the habits and sentiments of ordinary Tudor men and women. On the eve of St James’s day there was a village bonfire, with a tub of ale and bread for the poor, and there were bonfires and ale, too – this time in front of the Martyns’ own house – on Midsummer eve as well as the eve of Saints Peter and Paul. For the St Thomas’s eve bonfire, in its turn, the family provided mutton pie and peascods in addition to the usual bread and ale, ‘and with all these bonfires’, Martyn tells us, some of the friends and ‘more civil poor neighbours’ were called in to dine by candlelight with his grandfather, as a taper burned before the image of St John the Baptist in the hall. Always there were priests on hand, and usually in numbers, since Long Melford was a prosperous cloth-producing village, boasting no fewer than four chaplains, three of whom were chantry priests, whose main duty was to perform the all-important task of celebrating Masses for the salvation of souls nominated, more often than not, by wealthy benefactors. Reducing by their prayers the time spent by dead souls in purgatory, these same chantry priests were also responsible for assisting in the daily worship of the parish at large, and in some cases teaching at schools supported by patrons’ endowments. And when it is remembered that these same men were frequently assisted by additional clergy, sometimes employed for a year or two by a local guild, as well as the sixty or so monks housed at the great Benedictine monastery of nearby Bury St Edmunds, the scale of the Church’s presence, as well its ability to intervene in everyday life, becomes all the more apparent.

No doubt, Martyn paints an idyllic picture of a merry Melford of yesteryear, where goodwill flourished, and parish life followed a timelessly untroubled course. He makes no mention of the fact that the village’s poorer workers had joined an anti-tax rebellion in 1525, or that, for much of his childhood, his local church was in the spiritual charge of William Newton, a frequently absent pluralist rector, who held various ecclesiastical offices throughout East Anglia. Enjoying an annual income of £28 2s 5d from Long Melford alone – more than three times the average income of most English priests, and perhaps ten times that of an agricultural worker – Newton was hardly the most shining example of priestly diligence, let alone Christian poverty. Yet he, and others like him much less worthy still, were nevertheless rendered wholly credible to the vast majority of their flocks by the huge and complex organisation that sustained them. For each and every one of the 2.5 million men, women and children of early Tudor England were automatically members of the Church of Rome. All were required to attend Mass on Sundays and festivals, to fast on appointed days, and to make confession to a priest and receive communion at least at Easter, while those with wages, profits or produce were bound to contribute to the upkeep of their parish priests and churches by tithes.

And in the meantime, clerics of various types and categories continued to abound, as did the ceaselessly chiming bells in town and village steeples, calling the king’s subjects to prayer and devotion. For although the recruitment of clergy had slumped in the late fourteenth century, by the mid-fifteenth it was booming once again, not least as a result of energetic lay endowment of Masses, and the improved reputation of priests resulting from the fact that criticism of churchmen had become associated with heresy and threats to the social order. Between the Parliament of 1410 and that of 1529, there had even been less lay complaint about the customary bugbear of clerical wealth, so that new recruits to the priesthood came forward confidently and with healthy prospects for the future. In Kent, where parishes were small, there were nevertheless two clerics on average to serve their parishioners’ needs, while in Lancashire, where parishes were very large, there might sometimes be as many as seven or eight, even excluding those other clergy, found in Long Melford and up and down the country at large, who, as we have seen, said Masses for cash and found occasional work where they could. As a result, there were some 40,000 so-called ‘secular’ priests, alongside another 10,000 in the ‘regular’ orders of monks and friars, complemented by a further sub-category of deacons and subdeacons progressing towards priesthood, and as many as 2,000 nuns. No other body could compare in scale or boast a bureaucracy to rival the king’s own, and no other organisation could potentially offer such resistance to the Crown, in the unlikely event of a contest. For Church professionals numbered roughly one fortieth of the population, and about 4 per cent of all males, and the Church itself controlled enormous wealth, derived from ownership of at least one fifth of the kingdom’s land. Should any ruler therefore attempt a challenge, let alone a wholesale frontal assault, the enterprise was likely be risky. To attempt a root and branch dismantlement was sure to be. Certainly, there would be resistance: the only question its scale, intensity and duration. And where resistance occurred, there were equally sure to be casualties – particularly among those representing figureheads, however unconsciously, reluctantly or otherwise.

Even so, under all normal circumstances, the likelihood of any significant confrontation between State and Church remained minimal, not least because the Church itself was so anxious, wherever possible, to accommodate the wishes of the princes falling under its theoretical ambit. In 1208, Innocent III had suspended all church services in England, and excommunicated King John, to impose Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury. But even Henry II, who had made humble submission to Rome after Thomas Becket’s murder, ultimately achieved most of his objectives, while the confrontation between Edward I and Archbishop Winchelsey in 1297, over royal taxation of the clergy, had resulted in a speedy resolution in the king’s favour. Even in 1341, when Archbishop Stratford claimed that Edward III was infringing the privileges of the clergy over jurisdiction and taxation, and subsequently excommunicated Crown servants, the eventual outcome was a compromise solution, in which both sides backed down. And when Clement VI’s appointments of clerks to English benefices proved too numerous, the result was the Statute of Provisors – a countermeasure enacted in 1351 and followed by further restrictions four decades later. Churchmen themselves, significantly enough, had protested against papal intrusion at that time, and when Martin V appointed Bishop Beaufort his legate a latere, the nomination was successfully rejected by both Henry V and Archbishop Chichele. Thereafter, there was no serious conflict between England and the Holy See, merely disputes over abuse rather than struggles over principle. Never were there martyrs. And nor was it ever likely to be otherwise when so many leaders of the English Church were themselves royal officials, with no taste for constitutional crises, and when hard political reality guaranteed that a king, with the assistance of his lay magnates, could invariably bend the clergy to his will. As a result, English bishops gladly embraced royal authority, and in return kings readily supported churchmen against heresy and lay critics of their role.

Yet this is not to suggest, of course, that an organisation so pervasive was without flaws, or to deny that there were those all too ready to rail against ecclesiastical abuses of various descriptions. In The Obedience of a Christian Man, published in 1528, William Tyndale scoffed at the ‘wily tyranny’ of ecclesiastical authority and exhibited nothing but cold contempt and sarcasm for the clergy in general and bishops in particular, who, in his view, were not merely content ‘to reign over king and emperor and the whole earth’, but sought to ‘challenge authority also in heaven and in hell’. From the highest to lowest ranks of the Church hierarchy, if Tyndale is to be believed, there was nothing but unbridled avarice. ‘The parson sheareth,’ he wrote, ‘the vicar shareth, the parish priest polleth, the friar scrapeth, and the pardoner pareth; we lack but a butcher to pull off the skin’. And in the meantime, through practices like confession, whereby they ‘knew all secrets’, the clergy kept their flocks in passive subservience, though they themselves could often scarcely read – a bone of particular contention, it seems, for many reformers of Tyndale’s scholarly mould:

I daresay that there are some 20,000 priests, curates this day in England, and not so few that cannot give the right English unto this text in the Paternoster, Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in coelo et in terra, and the answer thereunto.

The supposedly heavy financial burdens imposed in the form of tithes, mortuary and probate fees, Peter’s Pence, annates, indulgences, dispensations, etc., were another regular source of dissatisfaction for those with axes to grind. ‘Is it not unreasonable,’ asked Thomas Starkey, ‘the first fruits to run to Rome, to maintain the pomp and pride of the Pope, yea, and war also, and discord among Christian princes as we have seen by long experience?’ Similarly, the materialism and worldliness of cardinals and bishops, which contrasted so starkly with the ideals of apostolic poverty and Christian humility that they claimed to espouse was also being loudly condemned in some quarters. It was John Colet, for instance, who first coined the phrase ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’ in connection with the English episcopacy, and nepotism, simony, pluralism and absenteeism had all become favourite targets of anticlerical bile. To cap all, the leading clergyman in England, Thomas Wolsey, seemed to epitomise all that was wrong with the institution whose power he wielded so domineeringly. ‘One cross,’ declared the Italian Polydore Vergil, ‘is insufficient to atone for his sins.’

Monks, in their turn, attracted more than their fair share of criticism at a time when tales of decadent ‘abbey lubbers’ abounded and it was widely mooted that if the Abbot of Glastonbury bedded the Abbess of Shaftesbury their bastard would surely become the richest landowner in England. Christopher St German, on the other hand, pointed to priests who played ‘at Tables’ and other illicit games, while even Thomas More observed of the parish clergy that ‘many were lewd and naught’. Erasmus’s Colloquies make taunting reference to prebendaries and their concubines, and parsons who were sots, while as early as 1486 Cardinal John Morton had condemned priests addicted to field sports, as well as those who wore secular clothes and let their hair grow long, or who loitered in taverns. And before the 1520s were out, Simon Fish, a barrister of Gray’s Inn, would publish his famous Supplication of Beggars, which amply reflected the full venom of the Church’s most vociferous critics. In it, among other things, he denounced the pope as a ‘cruel and devilish bloodsupper drunken in the blood of saints and martyrs of Christ’. The clergy, too, were depicted as immoral perverters of God’s word, and Fish beseeched his sovereign accordingly ‘to tie these holy idle thieves to the carts to be whipped naked about every market town’.

Yet a prudent judge reads the work of an agitator like Fish with appropriate caution and, in spite of his passionate rantings, the old religion, though embattled, was far from crisis. In fact, complaints about corrupt or decadent clergy were neither new, as any student of Langland and Chaucer can attest, nor especially widespread. By no means all members of the episcopacy were as corrupt as Wolsey, and the much maligned parish clergy were, in the main, a willing enough bunch, in spite of all the anticlerical vitriol that Fish and others might pour upon them. Nor were the judicial and financial burdens imposed upon the king’s subjects as intolerable as high-profile scandals and lurid tales of the day might suggest. Besides which, many of the Church’s deficiencies were, in any case, readily acknowledged by some of its most eminent leaders, while schemes for improvement remained ongoing. Indeed, when denunciations of the Church’s worldliness occurred, they tended in the main to come from priests themselves: from moral reformers such as Thomas Gascoigne, chancellor of Oxford University at various points between 1439 and 1453, or from humanist scholars such as John Colet, enthused by their exposure to the so-called ‘New Learning’.

Colet, in fact, had returned from study in Italy in 1496 and thereafter lectured in Oxford on St Paul’s epistles, bringing with him a new style of scriptural exegesis, which applied the principles of Renaissance classical scholarship to the biblical text, and led him to a renewed fervour for the re-creation of primitive Christianity. As a result, in 1498 he condemned the Church’s compromises with the world and its values, and demanded that bishops and priests should eschew royal service and the race for profits and promotion. After which, as Dean of St Paul’s, he preached the same message to the Canterbury Convocation in 1510, pointing out that the clergy were guilty of ‘pride of life’, ‘lust of the flesh’, ‘covetousness’, and ‘worldly occupation’, and calling for ‘the reformation of ecclesiastical affairs’ on the grounds that ‘never was it more necessary’. Elsewhere, moreover, he was even more outspoken. In his lectures on the Hierarchies of Dionysius, for example, he seemed so obsessed with the wickedness of the day that he could see nothing else:

O Priests! O Priesthood! O the detestable boldness of wicked men in this our generation! O the abominable impiety of these miserable men, of whom this age contains a great multitude, who fear not to rush from the bosom of some foul harlot into the temple of Christ, to the altar of Christ, to the mysteries of God.

Yet even so outspoken a critic as Colet recognised, too, that ‘the diseases which are now in the Church were the same in former ages’, and acknowledged that canon law had provided the requisite remedies. ‘The need, therefore,’ he concluded, ‘is not for the enactment of new laws and constitutions, but for the observance of those already enacted.’

This, then, was certainly no proto-Protestant, embittered to the point of rebellion by either the ecclesiastical structure or the Church’s sacramental system. On the contrary, Colet was a high clericalist, anxious to maintain the privileges of priests by raising their prestige. And the same was equally true of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester from 1504, whose famous preaching skills were often turned to good effect in echoing Colet’s themes. The clergy, in Fisher’s view, ‘were wont, and indeed ought still, like lights to the world to shine in virtue and godliness’, though at the present time ‘there cometh no light from them but rather an horrible misty cloud or dark ignorance’. For as Fisher made clear in his Penitential Psalms, only the ministrations of a virtuous priesthood could bring the laity to Christ and through him to salvation:

All fear of God, also the contempt of God, cometh and is grounded of the clergy, for if the clergy be well and rightfully ordered, giving good example to others of virtuous living, without doubt the people by that shall have more fear of Almighty God. But contrary-wise, if the clergy live dissolutely in manner, as if they should give no account of their life past and done before, will not the lay people do the same?

Like Colet, therefore, Fisher clearly hel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue: The Road to Tyburn
• 1 A Church to Die For
• 2 Martyr-in-Waiting
• 3 The Courtier and the Maid
• 4 Tyrant’s Whim
• 5 Gathering Storm
• 6 Truth on Trial
• 7 Anger, Portents, Potions, Gunfire
• 8 Deadly Pilot
• 9 Holy Innocents?
• 10 Cold Stone Walls, Heavy Iron Chains
• Epilogue
• A Note on Sources
• Picture Section