He sent a delegation to her, under the leadership of the duke of Norfolk, urging her to take the oath of allegiance; this would entail repudiating the marriage of her mother and her own legitimacy. It would also require her to accept the king as supreme head of the Church. On all these matters, she declined to swear. The duke of Norfolk then declared that she was guilty of treason. It was clear enough that Henry was willing to prosecute her, with all the unhappy and perhaps even unbearable consequences. Thomas Cromwell wrote to her that ‘I think you the most obstinate and obdurate woman … that ever was’; he urged her to repent ‘your ingratitude and miserable unkindness’. He warned that otherwise she would reach ‘the point of utter undoing’ which might include a traitor’s death. She was now twenty-one years of age.
A short while after, she surrendered. The imperial ambassador had remonstrated with her, telling her that it was her duty to survive the chaos and the terror. He persuaded her that her destiny might lie in rescuing the nation for the true faith, and that nothing in the world should prevent this. Martyrdom would be a failure of responsibility. She did not read the declaration of submission, but simply signed it. She had declared ‘the King’s Highness to be the supreme head in earth under Christ of the Church of England’ and that the marriage between her mother and the king ‘was by God’s law and man’s law incestuous and unlawful’.
She could go no further. In her abject state she wrote to her father declaring that ‘my body I do wholly commit to your mercy and fatherly pity, desiring no state, no condition nor no manner or degree of living but such as your grace shall appoint unto me’. She was at once welcomed back into royal favour, but the damage to her conscience and sense of self had been done. She would never bend, or weaken her will, again. The guilt of repudiating her mother would remain with her, perhaps to be in part allayed by the fires of Smithfield. It is reported that she was overcome with sorrow and remorse, immediately after signing the document, and asked the imperial ambassador to obtain for her a special dispensation from Rome. Yet she seems to have adjusted to her return to court very well, purchasing jewellery and fine clothes; she gambled, modestly but continuously, and had her own group of minstrels. She also had her own ‘fool’, a lady called Jane, with a shaven head.
After the beheading of Anne Boleyn it was clear that the party of religious change, which had profited by her intervention in the affairs of the realm, might be destined for an eclipse. In Rome dislike of the king was replaced by something like sympathetic pity, in the pious hope that Henry might now return to the embrace of the Church after his experiences with the ‘witch’. That was of course entirely to misunderstand the nature of Henry’s reform. He had never been opposed to the doctrines of the Church, only to its leadership. His understanding of the power, and profits, he had thereby gained was enough to prohibit any return to Rome. He believed also that religious unity was the prerequisite of political unity.
He saw himself in the role of the Old Testament kings who were determined to enforce the law of God upon their kingdoms in the fear that they might be consumed by divine wrath. Had not Jehoash, king of Israel, stripped the priests of their gold? Had not Josiah renovated the Temple of the Lord? Had not Solomon sat in judgment? The bishop of Durham, Cuthbert Tunstall, declared that Henry acted ‘as the chief and best of the kings of Israel did, and as all good Christian kings ought to do’.
His assertion of royal supremacy, however, was aligned with a desire for reform of the monasteries and the colleges. The king attended several Masses each day and never proclaimed or believed himself to be a Lutheran. He was also attached to various forms of popular piety, including the ritual of ‘creeping to the cross’. All his life he fingered a personal rosary, now in the possession of the duke of Devonshire, and ordained many requiem Masses at the time of his death. He was in most respects an orthodox Catholic.
A meeting of parliament was called at the beginning of June in order to discuss the circumstances of the realm after the recent execution of Anne Boleyn. It cancelled the two Acts favourable to Anne Boleyn and her offspring, thus reducing Elizabeth to the same status as Mary. The lord chancellor extolled the third marriage of the king, who, ‘at the humble entreaty of his nobility, has consented once more to accept that condition and has taken to himself a wife who in age and form is deemed to be meet and apt for the procreation of children’.
The key was the begetting of a male heir and, if the king should die (which God forbid!) or the new queen prove infertile ‘he desires you therefore to nominate some person as his heir apparent’. Their answer may already have been agreed and rehearsed. In the absence of a legitimate male heir, parliament granted the king the power to bequeath his crown at his will. The way, therefore, was open to the illegitimate duke of Richmond. He was the least bad alternative. Yet the frailty of the dynasty was confirmed when, in the summer of 1536, Richmond died of tuberculosis or some other undiagnosed lung complaint; Henry ordered that the body should be buried secretly, to prevent public disquiet, but nothing could conceal the fact that the succession now rested on two daughters who had been declared illegitimate. The young man’s ornate tomb is still to be seen at the church of St Michael the Archangel in Framlingham, Suffolk.
The evidence of the king’s anxiety at this time emerged when in the summer Lord Thomas Howard, the younger brother of the duke of Norfolk, was accused of treason; his crime was to contract himself to Lady Margaret Douglas, the daughter of the queen of Scots. Since the queen was Henry’s sister, Henry suspected that Howard was aiming at the succession. Howard was confined to the Tower where he died in the following year.
In June 1536 the convocation of the senior clergy had been assembled at St Paul’s. Hugh Latimer, the recently consecrated bishop of Worcester and principal reformer, had been chosen to preach to them. His text came from the sixteenth chapter of St Luke’s Gospel, namely ‘the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light’. He asked them to examine their hearts and enquire what they had achieved in convocation after convocation. The odious fictions of Rome survived even still, including ‘the canonizations and beatifications, the totquots and dispensations, the pardons of marvellous variety’ as well as ‘the ancient purgatory pickpurse’. You know the proverb, he told them. An evil crow, an evil egg. At the end of his sermon he warned them that ‘God will visit you. He will come. He will not tarry long.’
The reaction of the 500 clerical delegates is not known, but two weeks later they presented the king with a petition of complaint against the numerous blasphemies and heresies that were now circulating through the kingdom. It was a barely disguised attack on Latimer and other radicals. They were aggrieved that the sacrament of the altar was being described as a ‘little pretty piece Round Robin’. The hallowed oil of extreme unction was ‘the bishop of Rome’s grease and butter’. Our Lady was only a woman ‘like a bag of saffron or pepper when the spice was out’. Mass and matins were ‘but roaring, howling, whistling, mumming, conjuring and juggling’. It was an implicit invitation to the king to bring to a halt the process of reform. There was no question of ‘toleration’. The concept was only rarely mentioned. Matters of religion were too powerful and too important to be treated with circumspection. Falsehood was to be prosecuted by every means available.
In response Henry, with the help of Cranmer and others, drew up a summary of the articles of faith that the people of England were required to believe. The preface to the Ten Articles declared that their purpose was to bring ‘unity and concord in opinion’. In truth the king wished to assert the royal supremacy, and the general renovation of the Church, without embracing Lutheran doctrine. He seems to have concurred with the reformers’ emphasis upon only three of the sacraments – those of baptism, penance and the Eucharist – without denying the efficacy of the other four. Purgatory was denounced as a pernicious invention of the bishop of Rome, but it was also declared that ‘custom of long continuance approving the same, we agree that it is meet and expedient to pray for the souls departed’. It was a question of balance. A manuscript draft of one page survives; it shows the rival scribblings of the reformer Cranmer and the conservative Tunstall vying for authority.