At the time of Elizabeth Barton’s arrest and confession the king was reported to be ‘very merry’. He had come through. He was pope and Caesar. He was compared to Solomon and to Samson. ‘I dare not cast my eyes but sidewise,’ a contemporary wrote, ‘upon the flaming beams of the king’s bright sun.’ He was building a new cockpit for his palace at Whitehall, and his new queen was pregnant with what was hoped to be a male heir. The dynasty was at last secure.
During the queen’s pregnancy, however, he was unfaithful. The identity of the woman is not known, but she was described by the imperial ambassador as ‘very beautiful’; he also said that ‘many nobles are assisting him in this affair’, perhaps as a way of humiliating Anne Boleyn. On discovering the relationship Anne confronted Henry and used ‘certain words which the king very much disliked’. His royal temper flared up and he is reported to have told her to ‘shut her eyes and endure as her betters have done’; he also declared that he could lower her as well as raise her.
The storm passed, and Anne Boleyn still held the future within her. The astrologers and physicians of the court prognosticated the birth of a son, and Henry was hesitating between the names of Henry and Edward for his heir. Yet on 7 September, in a room known as the Chamber of the Virgins, Anne was delivered of a girl. ‘God has forgotten him entirely,’ the imperial ambassador wrote to his master. The infant was named Elizabeth after the king’s mother, Elizabeth of York. Henry was disappointed, but he professed to be hopeful that a son would soon follow. A week after the birth, Princess Mary, now seventeen, was stripped of her title; she was to be known now as ‘the Lady Mary, the king’s daughter’. She wrote a letter of gentle complaint, declaring that she was ‘his lawful daughter, born in true matrimony’. In his reply the king accused her of ‘forgetting her filial duty and allegiance’ and forbade her ‘arrogantly to usurp’ the title of princess. Three months later Elizabeth was taken in state to Hatfield House, in Hertfordshire, where her court was established. On the following day Mary was ordered to Hatfield, also, but only to enter ‘the service of the princess’. It was said that the king wished her to die of grief.
Yet all was not well within the royal palace. The unanticipated birth of a daughter, and the emergence of a royal mistress, made it plain to Anne Boleyn that her position was not as secure as it once had been. At a banquet she told a French envoy that she dared not speak as freely as she wished ‘for fear of where she was, and of eyes that were watching her countenance’. The royal court was a fearful and suspicious place, full of whispers and devices. She knew also that she was far from popular with the people. Her time of lamentation would soon come.
7
The king’s pleasure
The pace of religious change was quickened by the king’s statutes against the pope. Henry wanted no innovations in belief or in worship, but his first measures would surely lead to others. The papacy was the keystone of the arch of the old faith; once it was removed, the entire structure was likely to weaken and to fall. The emergence of a national Church would in the end result in a national religion. A radical preacher, Hugh Latimer, had been intoning in Bristol against ‘pilgrimages, the worshipping of saints, the worshipping of images, of purgatory’; but he had also been a prominent supporter of the separation from Katherine, and in 1533 Cromwell enlisted him in the court’s service. Latimer was soon dispatching preachers of his persuasion to several parts of the country. It was enough for Henry’s purposes that they were opposed to the pope, but they advocated more radical measures in other aspects of devotion. So the causes of religious reform and of the royal supremacy were associated.
Some occasions of iconoclasm were also reported. John Foxe, the author of Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Dayes, Touching Matters of the Church, more commonly known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, records that in 1531 and 1532 religious images were ‘cast down and destroyed in many places’. The rood – the image of Christ on the cross that hung between the nave and the chancel – was seized from the little church of Dovercourt, a village in Essex. It was then carried for a quarter of a mile before being burned ‘without any resistance of said idol’. Since the rood was reported to have the miraculous power of keeping the door of the church open, this was a signal defeat for those who venerated it. Three of the perpetrators were apprehended and hanged.
In the autumn of 1533 it was reported that statues were being thrown out of churches as mere ‘stocks and stones’; the citizens and their wives pierced them with their bodkins ‘to see whether they will bleed or no’. These were not simply incidents of random destruction. It was said that if you take off the paint of Rome, you will undo her. There must have been some who saw religious imagery as one of the instruments of their slavery, but many people also regarded the gilded statues and paintings as an affront to the poor. ‘This year,’ an Augustinian canon wrote in 1534, ‘many dreadful gales, much rain, lightning, especially in summertime, and at odd times throughout the year; also divers sudden mortal fevers and the charity of many people grows cold; no love, not the least devotion remains in the people, but rather many false opinions and schisms.’ The times were out of joint. Henry was denounced by some as the Mouldwarp of English legend who would be ‘cursed with God’s own mouth’.
Parliamentary work had still to be done in matters of religion. At the end of 1533 the royal council was meeting daily in order to prepare policy, and summoned several learned canonists for their advice. Parliament was called and assembled at the beginning of the new year. It sat for the first three months of 1534, during the course of which it confirmed and ratified all of the measures proposed by the king and his council. The Submission of Clergy Act recognized the previous submission of the clergy; the Absolute Restraint of Annates Act prohibited the sending of moneys to the pope and concurred with the election of bishops; the Dispensation and Peter’s Pence Act confirmed that the archbishop of Canterbury was now in charge of dispensations from canon law.
In March 1534 Pope Clement VII decreed that the king’s first marriage to Katherine was still valid, thus consigning Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth to oblivion. It is reported that Henry took no account of it. Yet in retaliation the pope’s name was removed from all prayer books and litanies; it was further ordered that it should be ‘never more (except in contumely and reproach) remembered, but perpetually suppressed and obscured’. If the pope was ever mentioned at all, it was only as the bishop of Rome. This is the period when the word ‘papist’ became a term of contempt. In the winter of that year a priest, supporting the royal supremacy, fashioned an image of the pope out of snow; 4,000 people came to watch as it slowly melted away.
Just days after the papal decision an Act of Succession was passed by parliament, by which the royal inheritance was settled on the children of Anne Boleyn. Yet the Act was also enforced by an oath, whereby every person of full age was sworn to defend its provisions. It was in effect an oath of loyalty, so that any refusal to swear was deemed to be an act of treason. It passed through parliament after some debate, and the removal of certain ambiguous words, but there is no doubt that it was generally supported. Such was the measure of cooperation with the king, in fact, that a new subsidy Act guaranteed him revenue from taxation in times of peace as well as war. So the Commons supported him; the nobility supported him, or at least did not speak out publicly against him; the bishops supported him, albeit with secret doubts and reservations. A popular phrase of the time was that ‘these be no causes to die for’. Two men, in particular, refused to follow this advice.