Yet there was genuine fear, with some people denounced for speaking ill of the king and his new marriage. They could now be condemned as traitors. One villager complained that if three or four people were seen walking together ‘the constable come to them and will know what communication they have, or else they shall be stocked’. A fragment of a conversation is recorded in a court document: ‘Be content, for if you report me I will say that I never said it.’ Erasmus wrote that ‘friends who used to write and send me presents now send neither letters nor gifts, nor receive any from any one, and this through fear’. He went on to say that the people of England now acted and reacted ‘as if a scorpion lay sleeping under every stone’. Between 1534 and 1540 over 300 executions were ordered on the charge of treason. A large number of people fled the realm.
Thomas Cromwell himself took up the investigation of those who were accused. A letter from him to a priest in Leicestershire stated: ‘The king’s pleasure and commandment is that, all excuses and delays set apart, you shall incontinently upon the sight hereof repair unto me …’ It was one of many unwelcome invitations. To speak of a surveillance state would be anachronistic and wrong, but it is apparent that Cromwell and his agents had created an effective, if informal, system of control. ‘I hear it is your pleasure,’ one lord wrote, ‘that I should go into the country to hearken if there be any ill-disposed people in those parts that would talk or be busy any way.’ There was in any case no sense of privacy in the sixteenth-century world; men commonly shared beds, and princes dined in public. The individuals of every community were under endless scrutiny from their neighbours, and were subject to ridicule or even punishment if they breached generally accepted standards. There was no notion of liberty. If it was asked, ‘May I not do as I wish with what belongs to me?’, the answer came that no man may do what is wrong. In every schoolroom, and from every pulpit, the virtue of obedience was emphasized. It was God’s law, against which there could be no appeal.
The clergy were asked to supervise their parishioners, and the local justices were supposed to watch the bishops to see if they ‘do truly, sincerely, and without all manner of cloak, colour or dissimulation execute and accomplish our will and commandment’. ‘Taletellers’ and ‘counterfeiters of news’ were to be apprehended. The Act of Succession was nailed to the door of every parish church in the country, and the clergy were ordered to preach against the pretensions of the pope; they were forbidden to speak of disputed matters such as purgatory and the veneration of the saints. The royal supremacy was to be proclaimed from every pulpit in the land. Henry demanded no more and no less than total obedience by methods which no king before him had presumed to use. He made it clear that, in obeying their sovereign, the people were in effect obeying God. In the same period the king and Cromwell were reforming local government by placing their trusted men in the provincial councils. In Ireland and Wales and northern England, the old guard was replaced by new and supposedly more loyal men. The country was given order by a strong central authority supervised by Thomas Cromwell, who sent out a series of circular letters to sheriffs and bishops and judges.
The oath attendant upon the Act of Succession was rapidly imposed. The whole of London swore. In Yorkshire the people were ‘most willing to take the oath’. The sheriff of Norwich reported that ‘never were people more willing or diligent’. In the small village of Little Waldingfield in Suffolk, ninety-eight signed with their name, and thirty-five with a mark.
A few refused to sign, however, believing that it was contrary to the will of the pope and of the whole Church. Among these brave, or stubborn, spirits were the Carthusian friars of Charterhouse. It is reported on good authority that the king himself went in disguise to the monastery, in order to debate with them on the matter. Those who stood firm were soon imprisoned. On 15 June 1534 one of the king’s men reported to Thomas Cromwell that the Observant Friars of Richmond were also refusing to conform; ‘their conclusion was,’ he wrote, ‘they had professed St Francis’s religion, and in the observance thereof they would live and die’. And, yes, they would die. Two days later, two carts full of friars were driven through the city on their way to the Tower.
The recalcitrant bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, refused to take the oath and was also consigned to the Tower; from his prison he wrote to Cromwell beseeching him to take pity and ‘let me have such things as are necessary for me in mine age’. A visitor reported that he looked like a skeleton, scarcely able to bear the clothes on his back.
Thomas More was also summoned before Cranmer and Cromwell at Lambeth Palace, where the oath was given to him for his perusal; but he also refused to subscribe. He was happy to swear that the children of Anne Boleyn could succeed to the throne, but he could not declare on oath that all the previous Acts of Parliament had been valid. He could not deny the authority of the pope ‘without the jeoparding of my soul to perpetual damnation’. He too was consigned to the Tower, where he would remain until his execution. Another notable refusal came from the king’s first daughter, Mary, who could not be persuaded to renounce her mother. She was not yet put to the test of formal signature, but her position was clear enough. When Anne Boleyn heard the news she declared that the ‘cursed bastard’ should be given ‘a good banging’. Mary was in fact confined to her room, and one of her servants was dispatched to prison. She soon became ill once more and the king’s physician, after visiting her, declared that the sickness came in part from ‘sorrow and trouble’.
Some last steps had to be taken in the long separation from the pope. The final Act of the parliament, assembled at a second session in November, was to bring to a conclusion and a culmination all of its previous work. The oath of succession was refined, in the light of experience with More and others, and a new Treasons Act was passed that prohibited on pain of death malicious speech against the king and the royal family. It would be treason, for example, to call the king a heretic or a schismatic or a tyrant. Now it was a question of loyalty rather than theology.
A Supremacy Act was also passed that gave legal and coherent form to all of the powers that the king had assumed, with the statement that ‘the king our sovereign lord, and his heirs and successors, shall be taken, accepted and reputed as the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England, called Anglicana Ecclesia’. He could reform all errors and correct all heresies; his spiritual authority could not be challenged. He lacked only potestas ordinis; because he was not a priest, he had no right to administer the sacraments or to preach. He was the Catholic head of a Catholic Church. Thus, in the words of John Foxe, the pope was ‘abolished, eradicated and exploded out of this land’. The king was effectively acting upon a principle of English thought and practice that had first manifested itself in the twelfth century. The opposition between William Rufus and Anselm of Canterbury was similar to that between Henry and Archbishop Warham. One of the servants of the king’s father, Edmund Dudley, had stated twenty years before that ‘the root of the love of God, which is to know Him with good works, within this realm must chiefly grow by our sovereign lord the king’. This veneration of the Crown was one of the abiding aspects of English history.
The frontispiece to Miles Coverdale’s translation of the Bible, published in 1535, displayed an image of the king sitting on his throne beneath the Almighty. Henry holds in each hand a book on which is written ‘The Word of God’; he is giving copies to Cranmer and to another bishop, saying ‘Take this and preach’. In the lower part of the frontispiece the people are shouting ‘Vivat Rex! Vivat Rex!’ while children who know no Latin are saying ‘God save the King!’