The Six Articles were a strong rebuff to reformers such as Cranmer and Cromwell, and were a clear victory for the conservative faction. Transubstantiation was upheld in all but name, although Cranmer had finally managed to remove the term itself. But Henry had the last word; in his own hand he amended the draft of the Act so that the bread and wine were now ordained to be ‘none other substances but the substance of his foresaid natural body’. After Henry’s death Cranmer declared that ‘Christ is eaten with the heart. Eating with the mouth cannot give life. The righteous alone can eat the Body of Christ.’ But for the moment he was forced to remain silent.
At a later date he also recorded his opinion that the Act of the Six Articles ‘was so much against the truth, and common judgements both of divines and lawyers, that if the king’s majesty himself had not come personally into the parliament house, those laws had never passed’. Yet they seem to have been welcomed by the populace. The French ambassador wrote to his court that ‘the people show great joy at the king’s declaration touching the sacrament, being much more inclined to the old religion than to the new opinions’. The people were not even prepared to read their prayers in English. ‘How loath be our priests to teach the commandments,’ one reformer lamented, ‘the articles of faith and the pater noster, in English! Again how unwilling be the people to learn it! Yea, they jest at it calling it the new pater noster …’
The denial of transubstantiation was now to be punished by death in the fire, while the refusal to subscribe to the other five articles led to the forfeiture of all goods and imprisonment at the king’s pleasure. It was the most severe religious law in English history. The articles were essentially the king’s declaration of faith. It was a faith shaped by the will of the ruler and by the power of punishment. It is reported that some 200 were arrested and held in prison; they had, in the phrase of the period, been ‘brought into trouble’. Some free spirits were not hindered. John Harridaunce, known as the inspired bricklayer of Whitechapel, was still preaching out of his window between nine and twelve at night, where he referred to the religious reformers as ‘setters forth of light’. When a neighbouring baker warned him that he was breaking the tenets of the Six Articles he replied that ‘it is fit for me to be burnt as for thee to bake a loaf’.
The duke of Norfolk remarked to his chaplain, ‘You see, we have hindered priests from having wives.’
‘And can your grace’, the chaplain replied, ‘prevent also men’s wives from having priests?’
Two bishops were forced to resign their sees as a result of the new measures; Hugh Latimer left Worcester and Nicholas Shaxton left Salisbury. Archbishop Cranmer was obliged to send his wife and children into exile. In the early summer the archbishop summoned a Scottish evangelical, Alexander Alesius, to Lambeth palace. ‘Happy man that you are,’ he said, ‘you can escape! Would that I were at liberty to do the same; truly my see would not hold me back.’ He then admitted that he had signed the decree when ‘compelled by fear’. The Lutherans of Germany were horrified by the Act, which they regarded as the end of religious reform in England. The king had shown his true colours. He was not in the least evangelical. He only wished to augment his revenues, with the treasures of the old Church, and to increase his power.
There was a significant epilogue to the passing of the Act. Thomas Cranmer, wrestling with his highly developed conscience, made a series of scholarly notes on the mistakes and misjudgements contained in the articles. His secretary, Ralph Morice, took a wherry from Lambeth to deliver the notebook to the king himself. On the south side of the river, at this moment, a bearbaiting was being held. The bear broke loose from its tormentors and plunged into the Thames, hotly pursued by the dogs.
All the passengers in the wherry, with the exception of Cranmer’s secretary, leaped into the water. The bear then clambered into the boat, at which point Morice lost his nerve and jumped overboard. All thought of the notebook left him in his desire to be rescued. When he finally reached land, however, he saw the book floating on the water. He called out to the bear-ward to retrieve it. But when the man took up the book, he handed it to a priest. The cleric saw immediately that these were notes against the Six Articles and accused Morice of treason. In the ensuing argument Morice foolishly confessed that the notes had been written by the archbishop of Canterbury himself. The priest refused to hand them back.
Morice now fell into a panic and in his distress called upon Thomas Cromwell. On the following morning Cromwell summoned the priest, who was about to hand the book to one of Cranmer’s enemies. Cromwell ‘took the book out of his hands, and threatened him severely for his presumption in meddling with a privy councillor’s book’. The story is an indication, if nothing else, of the fears and tensions within the court itself. Reports circulated at the time that Cranmer had been sent to the Tower and even that he had been executed. In the same period Thomas Cromwell and the duke of Norfolk had a furious quarrel at Cromwell’s house; the subject of the dispute is not known. Could it be that Cromwell himself was now no longer safe?
13
The fall
Henry had been seeking another wife ever since the death of Jane Seymour; another son was likely to guarantee the future of his dynasty. The wives of kings were generally considered to be little more than brood mares. Charles V had proposed the duchess of Milan to him, and the French court had suggested various other ladies for the dubious honour of obtaining his hand. He asked the French ambassador to convey eight of them to Calais, where he could inspect them all at once; the invitation was declined.
Yet Cromwell, favouring a union with the Protestant princes of northern Europe, took the part of Anne of Cleves. Her father, only recently dead, had been a reformer if not precisely a Lutheran; Anne’s older sister was already married to the elector of Saxony. They would be invaluable allies. Henry also feared the collaboration between the French king and the emperor, together with the pope, in any future enterprise against England. At that very moment Charles V was travelling from Spain into France. Henry needed friends.
It was whispered that Anne of Cleves was as modest as she was beautiful; a portrait of her, executed by Hans Holbein, was brought to England. The king gazed upon it and pronounced her to be eminently worthy of marriage. It was reported at the time that she spoke no language but German and that she had no ear for music. Yet in matters of state these are trifles. After the conclusion of some months of negotiation, the lady was shipped to England at the end of 1539. Henry was so eager to see her that he rode incognito to Rochester, where he looked upon her secretly. He did not like what he saw, comparing her to a Flanders mare. He berated the earl of Southampton for having written, from Calais, about her beauty. The earl excused himself on the grounds that he believed matters had gone too far to be reversed. The king’s anger then fell upon Cromwell. He told him that the proposed bride was ‘nothing so well as she was spoken of’. He then asserted that ‘if I had known what I know now, she should not have come into this realm’. At a later meeting he asked him, ‘Is there none other remedy but that I must needs, against my will, put my neck in the yoke?’
There was no remedy. He did not dare to renounce her at the cost of alienating his new allies in northern Europe and, as he put it, ‘for fear of making a ruffle in the world’. ‘I am not well handled,’ he told Cromwell. Cromwell would pay the price at a later date. The marriage was duly solemnized on 6 January 1540, even as the king was making it clear to his court that he had taken a great dislike to his bride. He was always scrupulously polite to her and, knowing no English, she may have been unaware of his aversion. The morning after the marriage Cromwell asked him if he now liked her more. No. He suspected that she was not a virgin, and she had such ‘displeasant smells’ about her that he loathed her more than ever. He doubted if the marriage would ever be consummated. In that speculation he proved to be right. The royal couple were married for a little over six months and, although on occasions they lay in the same bed, there was no progeny. Instead the king told one of his doctors that he had ‘duas pollutiones nocturnas in somno’ or, in common parlance, two wet dreams.