More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
G.J. Meyer
Read between
December 3, 2021 - August 1, 2022
The aristocracy, by contrast, continued to live by a code that exalted martial values above all others; in their world, education beyond the rudiments long seemed to have little point or purpose. It was in the church alone, therefore, that kings could find the levels of literacy and intellectual sophistication needed for diplomacy, the creation and functioning of a system of justice, financial management, and general administration.
The church, for its part, kept the ladder of mobility in good working order by offering nearly unlimited opportunities, first in education and then in educational and ecclesiastical management, to the most able and ambitious of its recruits. Noble and gentle credentials were useful, inevitably, but rarely to the exclusion of talent.
Catholic doctrine, that no human being is more or less a child of God than any other and the mighty have no better chance of salvation than the destitute.
Aristocratic resentment at the rise of clerical leaders with roots in the peasantry, to the extent that it existed, was tempered by the clerical commitment to celibacy. An archbishop might dispense more money than a duke, but neither his title nor his wealth could be made hereditary, even if he had children.
By 1530 England had changed to such an extent that it no longer needed Wolseys. Education was no longer almost exclusively the province of the church. Laymen such as John More were becoming eminent jurists, and in the next generation lawyers such as More’s son Thomas were among Europe’s leading humanist scholars.
With the old ladder of mobility destroyed, England’s class divisions would become more rigid, more impermeable, than ever.
martyr Thomas Becket. A canonized saint whose tomb was a pilgrimage site that drew thousands of visitors from around England and the continent, Becket had been murdered in 1170 by a trio of knights who thought, probably mistakenly, that they were carrying out the wishes of King Henry II. Becket and the king, once the closest of friends, had come to be bitterly at loggerheads over the latter’s insistence on trying clerics in his own courts and blocking appeals to Rome.
she was in no danger of being cast aside. The only disquieting note was the failure of any of the female members of the French royal family to appear: evidently they found the relationship between Anne and Henry insufficiently respectable. Concerns on that score were not assuaged by the refusal of Henry’s own sister Mary, herself a onetime queen of France, to join the festivities in Calais; she remained infuriatingly loyal to Catherine.
Francis for his part pledged not to proceed with a plan to marry his second son to the pope’s niece Catherine de’ Medici until Clement nullified Henry’s marriage.
Cromwell was ready with an answer, and as usual his solution was to cut the Gordian knot. Long before the end of 1532 he had had in preparation a draft bill that would become famous as the Act in Restraint of Appeals
last. The next necessary step was to consecrate the new archbishop. This happened on March 30, and it happened in a way so peculiar that it might not have been possible had Cranmer not already shown himself to have a relaxed view of vows.
Until Henry turned this oath into a weapon with which to charge the bishops with praemunire, this procedure had never posed a problem.
make their apprentices do the same. The stage was now set for the final act, an ecclesiastical hearing at which Cranmer and a selected panel of his fellow divines would hear arguments on the validity of Henry’s marriage to Catherine and pass final judgment. The result was a foregone conclusion.
On July 11, the same day that Henry signed the letters needed to implement the long-deferred Act in Restraint of Annates and terminate all payments to Rome, Pope Clement declared Henry’s marriage to Anne invalid and warned him that unless he recognized Catherine as his wife he would be excommunicated—but not until the following September,
Only one thing remained for the scenario to be complete. Anne still had to give birth to her son. The child, when born on September 7, was named Elizabeth, after Henry’s mother.
At a time when being educated meant reading Latin, a controversialist like Martin Luther—or like Fisher or More—could become famous from Vienna to Lisbon in a matter of months.
And it is curious, in light of his later history, that although belief in the immortality of the soul is mandatory (because essential to mortality) on the island, unbelievers are not punished but converted through instruction. More appears to have written the book for his amusement and that of his friends rather than for publication, and when Erasmus published it in Louvain in 1516 he did so without the author’s knowledge or consent.
In any case it was nothing that Utopia said but simply the fame it had brought to its author that drove Henry VIII to the belief that he had to make an example of More one way or another.
And although movable type first appeared in China by the eleventh century and in Europe three centuries later, no one knew how to produce raised letters that were hard or durable enough to make mass production possible. Only in the fifteenth century did the goldsmiths, silversmiths, and jewelers of Germany and the Rhineland take up the challenge, slowly developing the alloys and production methods with which Johannes Gutenberg was able to produce his magnificent two-volume Bible in 1455.
More had committed treason by refusing during interrogation to acknowledge the king’s supremacy, by conspiring with Fisher while both were prisoners, by describing the Act
Supremacy Act as a sword that would destroy the soul of anyone who falsely swore to it—swore without believing it to be true—but repeated that he had never spoken against it.
What, he claimed to have asked, if Parliament declared the king to be supreme head of the English church? What would More say to that? Rich swore that More replied that Parliament could do no such thing, because England was forever part of the Christian community that had always recognized the bishop of Rome as its head. Such words were clear and certain treason as Parliament had defined treason in 1534—assuming that More spoke them.
that as it may, More was unquestionably the more credible witness. He knew that he faced certain death, nothing could be more obvious than his determination to prepare himself for a “good” death, and for a man of his convictions lying under oath would have been tantamount to self-damnation.
Cromwell now turned his attention to one of the main pillars not only of the church but of English society as it had evolved through the Middle Ages, the more than eight hundred monastic institutions that dotted the landscape from the cliffs of Dover to the Irish Sea.
Whether any action on Rome’s part might have made a difference is a moot question, because Rome did not act. In the aftermath of Fisher’s execution, members of the papal court had demanded that Pope Paul do something. A bull was drawn up giving Henry ninety days in which to admit his errors and either appear in Rome personally or send representatives. The penalties for failing to comply were to be weighty if theoretical: excommunication, loss of the English crown, loss of the right of Henry’s descendants by Anne Boleyn to inherit the crown, the withdrawal of all clergy from the kingdom, a
...more
There was a second reason, one more substantial than a symbolic demonstration of the king’s might, for suspending the powers of the bishops at precisely this time. The Reformation Parliament, in taking from the bishops their ancient responsibility to make occasional visits of inspection to the monastic houses, had placed a new and potent weapon in the king’s hands. Visitation was now the Crown’s business, which meant it was Cromwell’s, and no man of the new vice-regent’s vitality, ambition, and determination to please the king could have been given such an opportunity without finding use for
...more
The old religion was still a force to be feared: no student of Henry VIII’s reign will deny that in the 1530s and for decades afterward the break with Rome was incomprehensible where not outright repugnant to very large numbers of the English people. The religious houses were symbols and instruments of a way of life that the population had not rejected even if the king had.
However appropriate it may have been for the Crown to examine the monasteries, however noble the motives of the king and Cromwell may conceivably have been in launching their program of visitations, as executed that program was a sordid affair. The men Cromwell chose for the job were largely a brutish lot, bent not on informing themselves about the state of the monasteries but on collecting or even fabricating as much negative information as possible as quickly as possible and hurrying it to court. It soon became clear that nearly their only aim was to give Cromwell what he had made clear he
...more
Several of them became hugely wealthy in just a few years. The details of how they succeeded are almost comic in what they reveal about the malice and greed driving the whole project, tragic in their consequences for hundreds and ultimately thousands of blameless people.
The story of how Henry VIII extracted himself from the most dangerous crisis of his life by lying to his subjects and betraying honest men who had put their fate in his hands is essentially the story of Robert Aske.
Wherever such men fell into the hands of the demonstrators, they were threatened with hanging if they refused to swear “to be true to almighty god to christ’s catholic church to our sovereign lord the king and unto the commons of this realm so help you god and holy dam and by this book.”
When coupled with the demands that the demonstrators had already sent south and would be repeating many times in the months ahead, the words of the oath lost all ambiguity. They were a call for a full restoration of the old ways and the removal and punishment of those—the king alone excluded—who had undertaken the work of destruction. There is nothing surprising about the exemption of the king from criticism; anything else would have been astounding. In a society where the person of the king was quasi-sacred, at a time when the idea that the king derived his authority from God was winning wide
...more
But the rebels had delayed and thereby lost their momentum, their leaders were quarreling confusedly among themselves, and for all they knew they stood on the brink of annihilation. Frightened and discouraged, they disbanded and began to head for home. Their rising had collapsed without encountering serious opposition.
As before there was much emphasis on reversing the religious reforms of the past several years, strengthened now with an explicit call for an end to the separation from Rome, and a number of striking new items were added. The pilgrims wanted the legitimacy of Henry’s daughter Mary restored, the statute that allowed the king to choose his successor repealed, and a new Parliament summoned to meet not at Westminster as usual but in the north—specifically at York or Nottingham. Their articles went into considerable detail where the proposed Parliament was concerned: they called for less royal
...more
It was a startling document. If implemented, it would have reversed virtually everything that Henry had accomplished since first deciding to divorce Catherine. By weakening his grip on Parliament, it would have moved England closer to democracy than it had ever been, or would be for centuries.
To a man like Norfolk, too, a proud exemplar of the old warrior nobility, they were an affront, a despicable attempt by presumptuous commoners to overturn the natural order.
Richard had issued his call, but not enough men had responded because not enough wanted to save him. Now it seemed possible that, if the pilgrims marched, much of the kingdom would not only do nothing to impede them but might join them in bringing the second Henry Tudor to heel. Thus the king, despite being toweringly indignant, had no choice but to accept Norfolk’s insistence that there was no possibility of defeating the “traitors” by direct attack. It remained necessary to stall.
Under such circumstances, some argued, it would be madness for them to lay down their arms. Aske saw things differently. For him it was inconceivable that the king would not be as good as his word, would not honor promises made to loyal subjects who wanted only to free him from evil subordinates.
the next few months he would repeatedly show himself to be the supporter and friend of a king who had concealed his hatred under a blanket of hospitality and was now waiting until it became safe to exact his revenge. None of the other pilgrim leaders had
Aske alone was hauled back to York and hanged there, not by rope but in a tangle of chains around his body so as to make his death a slow agony of exposure and dehydration. His body was kept on public display until nothing remained but bones. The population was paralyzed with fear, the king more firmly in control than ever.
Another, probably larger, stood by the entire conservative package including the leadership of the pope. Finally, definitely smallest in numbers but afire with the zeal of the continental Reformation, was the circle for whom the whole of the old religion was superstitious nonsense that had to be swept aside in order for a simpler, purer Christianity based on the inerrancy of the Bible to become possible.
The year after that, as if in confirmation that what goes around comes around, even Thomas Cromwell was abruptly stripped of his offices and put to death.
In the days before his death Cromwell begged Henry for “mercy, mercy, mercy,” and just before being executed he professed to having always been a good Catholic. (He could not have meant a good Roman Catholic.) It was not long before Henry realized that he did need Cromwell, and that in executing him he had deprived himself of as effective a chief minister as any monarch could ever have hoped for.
Two days after Cromwell’s execution the prominent evangelicals Robert Barnes, William Jerome, and Thomas Garrett were all burned at the stake for heresy, and three distinguished Roman Catholics were hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason. All these deaths remain shrouded in mystery.
This was the Henry who, on January 27, 1547, having been told at last by a brave gentleman of his privy chamber that he was dying and asked if he wished to confess, replied that he was confident that his sins would have been forgiven even if they were far greater than in fact they were. Again he was asked if he wished to see a confessor. He said perhaps Cranmer, safe old Cranmer, but not quite yet, not until he had slept awhile. He drifted into a sleep that became a coma, so that later, when his gentlemen tried to rouse him, they were unable to do so. Cranmer was summoned and came in a hurry,
...more
Something very big had come to an end. It was time for the aftermath, whatever that might prove to be. As for Henry, perhaps his best hope was that he had been wrong all along and the evangelicals right, and all that was needed to save his soul was the gift of faith. No doubt he himself would have been willing to be judged by his works, but it might not have been a good bet.
With the death of Henry VIII, the supreme headship of the church in England, the authority to decide what every man and woman in the kingdom was required to believe about God and salvation and the nature of ultimate reality, passed to a nine-year-old child. Little Edward Tudor, upon becoming King Edward VI, was recognized by church and state alike as the one person empowered by God to resolve conflicts over doctrine and practice that divided the most powerful and learned of his subjects.
With a restless population kept quiet only by the threat of armed force, and with court and church divided into factions that hated each other mortally, the chances that Edward’s minority could be passed without serious difficulty must have seemed slim indeed.
The church of Henry’s making was, at the time of his death, emphatically not Roman Catholic but just as emphatically not Lutheran
The new theology contradicted itself so boldly on so many points as to border on incoherence:
