12
The body of Christ
At the beginning of 1539 fears emerged over the threat of invasion, encouraged by the papal edict against the king; the French king and the Spanish emperor were rumoured to be in alliance with the pope, while the king of Scotland, James V, promised to support them. ‘We will be’, one courtier wrote, ‘a morsel among choppers.’ It was said that 8,000 mercenaries were gathering in the Low Countries. A fleet of sixty-eight ships was sighted off Margate. This would be the first concerted attack since the time of the Norman invasion. Henry had been excommunicated but his enemies declared that the people were still in slavish obedience to a heretic king; one merchant wrote from London that they would all be taken ‘for Jews or infidels’ and could lawfully be enslaved by the enemy.
Henry reviewed his fleet, consisting of 150 ships, and ordered military musters to be summoned throughout the country; he then toured the more vulnerable areas along the south coast and ordered new fortifications. The fortresses along the border with Scotland were strengthened. The king’s ships left the Thames for Portsmouth. The building stone from the abandoned monasteries was employed to build defences. The privy council met daily in preparation for war. The bodyguard of the king were known as ‘gentlemen pensioners’; they wore velvet doublets and coats complete with gold chains, and each gripped a large poleaxe in his right hand.
At the beginning of May thousands of men, from the age of sixteen to sixty, mustered whatever armour and weapons they possessed before marching from Mile End, the traditional meeting point of armed bands, into the city; the fields of Stepney and Bethnal Green ‘were covered with men and weapons’, with the battalions of pikes ‘like a great forest’. In the following month Thomas Cromwell staged a battle between two barges on the Thames; one was commanded by men dressed as the pope and his cardinals, while in the other stood figures representing the king and the court. The Vatican was of course overpowered and ditched into the river.
Henry himself was in a state of high anxiety. It was the one eventuality he had most feared. The French ambassador in London wrote in alarm to his court, begging to be relieved of his duties on the grounds that he feared the wrath of the king; he was ‘the most dangerous and cruel man in the world’, and seemed to be in such a state of fury that he had ‘neither reason nor understanding’. The ambassador professed to believe that the king might attack or even kill him in the course of an audience.
Yet the enterprise against England was prevented by quarrels between France and Spain. It is also likely that the spies of those nations had reported to their masters that there was little evidence of internal disaffection; the people would not rise up in arms against their king. No invading navy arrived, and the general alarm soon subsided. But the king knew very well that it would be unwise to stir up domestic discontent any further; he had pushed the people to the edge of their religious tolerance. He deemed it wise, therefore, to placate the conservative or orthodox faithful who comprised the majority of the population. In that spirit, too, he was following his own instincts.
Henry was clearly moving away from the path of religious reform. In a declaration for ‘unity of religion’, devised in the spring of 1539, the king blamed the indiscriminate reading of the English Bible for the incidence of ‘murmur, malice and malignity’ within the realm. He had hoped that the Scriptures would be read ‘with meekness’ but instead they had provoked rivalry and dissension. The people disputed ‘arrogantly’ in taverns and even in churches, angrily denouncing rival interpretations as heretical or papistical. The Bible should, in future, only be read in silence. The declaration was in fact never issued, and was replaced by a more formal proclamation.
Evidence of religious disputes can be found in the records of the church courts. Mrs Cicely Marshall of St Albans parish was accused of ‘despising holy bread and holy water’, while a fellow parishioner was blamed for ‘despising our Lady’. John Humfrey of St Giles, Cripplegate, was summoned for ‘speaking against the sacraments and ceremonies of the church’. A woman from the parish of St Nicholas in the Flesh Shambles was presented ‘for busy reasoning on the new learning, and not keeping the church’. Margaret Ambsworth of St Botolph without Aldgate was summoned ‘for instructing of maids, and being a great doctress’. Robert Plat and his wife ‘were great reasoners in scripture, saying they had it of the Spirit’. All of these people, and many more, were given the common name of ‘meddlers’.
A parliament was also summoned in the spring of 1539 to consider matters of religion. A contemporary reported that it was assembled to negotiate ‘a thorough unity and uniformity established for the reformation of the church of this realm’. Unity was not easily to be won.
Various opinions, for example, were maintained over the bread and the wine offered in the Mass. The orthodox Catholic faithful upheld the doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby the bread and wine became in actual fact the body and blood of Christ. This is a mystery of the faith. It is believed because it is impossible, and proof of the overwhelming power of God. Luther also believed in the real presence of Christ in the sacrament, but denied that He was there ‘in substance’; his belief was in something that became known as consubstantiation or sacramental union, whereby the integrity of the bread and wine remain even while being transformed by the body and blood of Christ.
The more radical reformers, intent upon destroying priestly power and what were for them superstitious rituals, declared that the Eucharist was only a commemoration or remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice that had been performed once and for ever; it could not be endlessly rehearsed at the altar. ‘Hoc est corpus meum’ should therefore be translated as ‘This signifies my body’. Christ was in heaven; He was not on the earth, even at Mass.
Endless permutations could of course be devised between these three statements of belief. Thus one reformer declined to believe that the bread and wine are miraculously changed, but conceded that ‘the Body and Blood of Christ are truly received by faith’ when the worshipper partakes of them in perfect piety. This was known as ‘virtualism’. In an age when religion was the single most important aspect of social life, these debates were also matters of state. At the beginning of the parliamentary session a small committee was set up to examine all of the issues, the most tendentious being the question of the Blessed Sacrament.
The committee comprised four conservative and four reforming bishops, with Cromwell presiding as vicegerent in religious matters. Of course they could come to no shared conclusions, and Henry stepped forward. He allowed the conservative duke of Norfolk to present six simple questions to the House of Lords that were so framed as to yield only one possible answer. The result of their deliberations emerged in the document known as the Act of the Six Articles that clearly restated the orthodox position on such matters as confession and clerical celibacy. It was essentially a device to quell religious controversy and forge unity in matters of doctrine. It became known to those who detested it as ‘the whip with six strings’ or ‘the bloody act’.