The happy family, however, was about to be disturbed by tensions concerning religion. Henry himself was still much exercised over matters of faith. When he appeared in parliament, at the end of 1545, he burst into tears when he began to address the divisions in the kingdom. ‘I hear’, he said, ‘that the special foundation of our religion being charity between man and man is so refrigerate as there was never more dissension and lack of love between man and man … some are called Papists, some Lutherans, and some Anabaptists; names devised of the devil …’ He went on to declare that ‘I am very sorry to know and hear how unreverendly that precious jewel the Word of God is disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern’.
Cranmer himself was in the process of modifying his most sacred beliefs. In this transition, by a slow and gradual process of meditation and study, the archbishop repudiated the idea of transubstantiation by which the bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ. Eventually he would come to believe that the miracle took place in the heart of the communicant, whereby he or she is spiritually changed on reception of the host. Everything was in flux.
Argument and debate, therefore, exercised the more acerbic or inquisitive spirits. Henry had wanted a purified Catholic Church, cleansed of its more egregious superstitions; he had also wanted a national Church under his sovereignty. What he had created, however, was a fragile and in some ways inconsistent alternative. The fact that it changed utterly after his death is a measure of its instability. A new English litany was published in the summer of 1545, but the Mass and the other services of the Church were still performed in Latin. In the same year a bill against heretics, more severe than any before, was thrown out by the Commons in parliament; this is another sign of division. The ceremony of ‘creeping to the cross’ on Good Friday was abolished at the beginning of 1546; when Cranmer sought to remove all ceremonies involving bells and crucifixes the king first agreed, but then changed his mind. He still wanted to preserve the image, to the king of France and to the emperor, of an orthodox sovereign. He was even then in the process of negotiating with them.
After the abortive end of hostilities it became clear that France and England would have to treat with one another before squandering any more resources on useless threats and counter-threats. So there began a process of diplomatic conversations that Henry caustically described as ‘interpretations’; he told his envoy that ‘you must stick earnestly with them, and in no wise descend to the second degree, but upon a manifest appearance that they would rather break up than assert to the first degree’. It was a matter of subtleties and feints and manoeuvres in a situation of mutual suspicion and distrust. The result was the Treaty of Ardres, signed in the summer of 1546, by which Henry was allowed to occupy Boulogne for eight years before returning it for the sum of 2 million écus. It was the last treaty he would ever sign.
That ‘charity between man and man’, upheld by the king in parliament, was notably lacking among some of Henry’s councillors. The more conservative of them held considerable doubts about the nature of Katherine Parr’s influence upon the household. The fact that Mary was translating Erasmus is itself significant, and the scholar’s paraphrase of the Gospel according to St John played some part in the later reformation under Edward’s rule. So Katherine was encouraging the kind of reformed spirituality that humanism inspired.
The king had complained, in the early months of 1546, about the way in which his wife brought up the subject of faith. John Foxe, whose evidence is generally reliable, quotes him as saying sarcastically to Stephen Gardiner that it is ‘a thing much to my comfort to come in mine old days to be taught by my wife’. At a later opportunity Gardiner whispered to the king that the queen’s opinions were, according to the law, heretical and that ‘he would easily perceive how perilous a matter it is to cherish a serpent within his own bosom’. These words also come from Foxe. Henry then allowed Gardiner to interview the ladies closest to the queen.
Such matters emerged at a time when the prosecution of heretics was increased, and in particular the persecution of a woman close to the queen and the queen’s ladies. Anne Askew had friends at court, and her brother was gentleman pensioner and cup-bearer; but she was being watched. One spy who had lodgings opposite her own reported that ‘at midnight she beginneth to pray, and ceaseth not in many hours after …’ In March 1546 she was summoned before the commissioners of heresy at Saddlers’ Hall in Gutter Lane; here she confessed to having said that ‘God was not in temples made with hands’. She was asked whether a mouse, eating a consecrated host, received God. She made no answer, but merely smiled.
She was consigned to a London prison before being brought before the bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, who later earned the nickname of ‘Bloody Bonner’. On this occasion he was a mild persecutor and, being approached by her ‘good friends’, released her on the understanding that she had submitted. Yet then she relapsed into heresy, and in the summer of the year was brought before the council at the palace in Greenwich. She was of ‘worshipful stock’ but her recalcitrance was therefore all the more notable; it was also hoped by the conservatives on the council that the prospect of torture or of burning might prompt her to implicate some ladies of the court. She was asked to confirm that the Holy Sacrament was ‘flesh, blood and bone’ to which she replied that ‘it was a great shame for them to counsel contrary to their knowledge’. When pressed for her views on the Eucharist she responded that ‘she would not sing the lord’s song in a strange land’. When Stephen Gardiner charged her with speaking in parables she borrowed some words from Christ and replied, ‘if I tell you the truth, you will not believe me.’ Gardiner declared that she was a parrot. By now, weary of imprisonment, she was ‘sore sick, thinking no less than to die’. When in prison she composed a ballad, of which one verse runs:
I saw a ryall trone
Where Justyce shuld have sitt
But in her stede was one
Of modye [angry] cruell wytt.
In the Tower she was charged to reveal the others of her sect; when she maintained her silence, she was put on the rack and tortured. Still she did not name her secret allies. She wrote her own account, published in the following year in Germany. ‘Then they did put me on the rack because I confessed no ladies or gentlewomen to be of my opinion, and thereon they kept me a long time; and because I lay still and did not cry my Lord Chancellor and Master Rich took pains to rack me with their own hands, till I was nigh dead.’ On 15 July she was brought to Smithfield for burning, but she had been so broken by the rack that she could not stand. She was tied to the stake, and the faggots were lit. Rain and thunder marked these proceedings, whereupon one spectator called out ‘A vengeance on you all that thus doth burn Christ’s member.’ At which remark a Catholic carter struck him down. The differences of faith among the people were clear enough.