Great Tales from English History, Book 2 (12 page)

When Anne’s second pregnancy ended in a miscarriage in January 1536 her fate was sealed, since Tudor medical science — or
the lack of it — meant that one miscarriage might well be the first of an unbreakable series. This had been the case with
Katherine, and once again Henry had not been slow in lining up a possible replacement for his non-productive Queen. He had
set his cap at Jane Seymour, a soft-spoken young woman who was as meek and submissive as Anne had proved complicated and assertive.

Having made the Boleyn marriage possible, Thomas Cromwell was now given the job of destroying it. Anne had always been flirtatious,
and this proved the route to her undoing. Playful glances and gestures were interpreted as evidence of actual infidelity.
Men were tortured and‘confessions’ produced. A court musician pleaded guilty to adultery. Her own brother was charged with
incest. The facts were outlandish, but the servants of a Tudor government knew that‘proof’ had to be found so that the defective
Queen could be condemned. As Anne Boleyn prepared to step out on to Tower Green on 19 May 1536, the first Queen of England
ever to be executed, she seemed to have reached her own peace.’I hear the executioner is very good,’ she said,
and I have a little neck.’ Then she put her hands around her throat and burst out laughing.

Henry wasted no time. No sooner had he received the news of Anne’s beheading than he set off upriver on his barge to see Jane
Seymour. Engaged the next day, the couple were married ten days later, and Jane was formally enthroned on Whit Sunday 4 June
1536 — in the very chair where Anne had sat only five weeks earlier.

From Henry’s point of view, it was third time lucky. A kindly and level-headed woman in her late twenties, Jane worked hard
to reconcile Henry with his elder daughter Mary, whose place in the succession he had given to Anne’s daughter Elizabeth,
and the lottery of fertility finally yielded the King the male heir that he wanted. At Hampton Court on 12 October 1537, Queen
Jane was delivered of a healthy baby boy, whom Henry christened Edward, after the Confessor, the patron saint of English royalty.
Henry at last had the token of divine blessing he had sought.

But his wife had suffered a disastrous delivery. According to one account, she had undergone the then primitive and almost
invariably fatal surgery of a Caesarean section. Other evidence suggests blood poisoning of the placenta — puerperal fever.
Either way, Prince Edward’s mother died after twelve days of blood loss and infection that the royal doctors were helpless
to reverse.

Henry was prostrated with unaccustomed sorrow. Jane Seymour lay in state for three weeks, and then, alone of Henry’s wives,
she was buried in pomp and glory in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. It was later said that her name
was on Henry’s lips when he died, and certainly his will was to direct that he should be buried beside her. When the King
of France sent his congratulations on the birth of a healthy heir, Henry’s reply was uncharacteristically subdued.’Divine
Providence,’ he wrote,‘bath mingled my joy with the bitterness of the death of her who brought me this happiness.’

Diplomatic dispatches are seldom to be taken at their face value, still less when worded by Henry VIII. But in this case we
might, perhaps, give Henry the benefit of the doubt.

E
ARLY
-
SIXTEENTH
-
CENTURY LIFE WAS INTER
-woven with the joy of religious rite and spectacle — effigies of saints, stained-glass windows; the washing of feet on Maundy
Thursday, the‘creeping to the cross’ on Good Friday. In London every Whit Sunday, doves were released from the tower of St
Paul’s Cathedral to symbolise the Holy Spirit winging its way to heaven. This age-old texture of symbol and ritual provided
a satisfying structure to most people’s lives. The English were devout folk, reported one European traveller:‘they all attend
mass every day’.

The miracle of the mass — the Holy Communion service when bread and wine were offered up at the altar —
was graphically described in Thomas Malory’s
Morte D’Arthur,
the bestselling epic first printed and published by Caxton in 1485. As the bishop held up a wafer of bread, there came a figure
in likeness of a child, and the visage was as red and as bright as any fire, and smote himself into the bread, that all they
saw it that the bread was formed of a fleshly man’.

This was the moment of‘transubstantiation’ when, according to Catholic belief, the bread and wine on the altar were literally
transformed into the body and blood of Christ. It provided the awe-inspiring climax of every mass. Bells rang, incense wafted,
and heads were bowed as Jesus himself, both child and‘fleshly man’, descended from heaven to join that particular human congregation
— to be devoured as the people ate his flesh and the priest alone drank his blood (the liquid that had once been wine was
too precious to risk being passed around and spilled).

By the 1520S and 30s, the evangelical followers of Luther and Tyndale were openly scoffing at this potent but, to their mind,
primitive and sacrilegious Catholic theatre. How could the Lord’s sacred body be conjured up on earth by imperfect men in
gaudy vestments? The exhilarating idea at the heart of the Reformation, that every man could have his own direct relationship
with God, challenged the central role of the priest in religious ceremonies — and from this spiritual doubt followed material
consequences. By what right did the clerics control their vast infrastructure of earthly power and possessions, notably the
vast landed estates of the monasteries? The Church was by far the largest landowner in England.

In 1535 Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell,
seized on this appetising question: if the Church was corrupted by its involvement with worldly goods, why should he not relieve
it of the problem? So he sent out his‘Visitors’, crews of inspectors who descended on the eight hundred or so monasteries
and nunneries in England and duly discovered what they were sent to find. Laziness, greed and sexual peccadilloes: it was
not difficult to unearth — or indeed, invent — evidence that some of the country’s seven thousand monks, nuns and friars had
been failing to live up to the high ideals they set themselves. Cromwell’s inquisitors gleefully presented to their master
plenty of examples of misconduct, along with some improbable relics — the clippings of St Edmund’s toenails, St Thomas Becket’s
penknife. Their hastily gathered dossiers provided the excuse for the biggest land grab in English history, starting in 1536
with the dissolution of the smaller monasteries.

But the destruction of the country’s age-old education, employment and social welfare network was not accomplished without
protest. The monasteries represented everything that, for centuries, people had been taught to respect, and in October 1536
the north of England rose in revolt. Rallying behind dramatic banners depicting the five wounds of Christ, some forty thousand
marchers came to the aid of Mother Church in a rebellion they proudly called the Pilgrimage of Grace.

The‘pilgrims’ set about reinstating the monks and nuns in sixteen of the fifty-five houses that had already been suppressed.
They demanded the legitimisation of Queen Katherine’s daughter, Mary. They also called for the destruction of the disruptive
books of Luther and Tyndale, and for the
removal of Thomas Cromwell along with his ally Thomas Cranmer, the reforming Archbishop of Canterbury. The rebels had a fundamental
faith in the orthodoxy of their monarch — if only King Henry’s wicked advisers were removed, they believed, he would return
to the good old ways.

This loyalty proved their undoing when Henry, unable to raise sufficient troops against them, bought time by agreeing to concede
to the‘pilgrims’ some of their demands; he invited their leader, Robert Aske, to come down to London and present his grievances
in person, under safe conduct. But once the rebels were safely dispersed back home in their villages, Henry seized on the
excuse of new risings in the early months of 1537 to exact revenge.’Our pleasure,’ he instructed his army commander, the Duke
of Norfolk,‘[is] that you shall cause such dreadful execution to be done upon a good number of every town village and hamlet
that have offended as they may be a fearful spectacle to all others hereafter that would practise any like matter.’

Norfolk carried out his orders ruthlessly. Some seventy Cumberland villagers were hanged on trees in their gardens in full
sight of their wives and children; the monks of Saw-ley, one of the monasteries reopened by the pilgrims, were hanged on long
timber staves projecting from their steeple. Aske was executed in front of the people who had so enthusiastically cheered
him a few months earlier.

The rebels had not been wrong in their hunch that Henry was at heart a traditional Catholic — the King believed in the miracle
of transubstantiation to the day he died. Even as the Reformation progressed, he burned the reformers who dared to suggest
that the bread and wine of the communion
were mere symbols of Christ’s body and blood. But he needed to fill his coffers. By 1540 England’s last religious house, the
rich Augustinian abbey of Waltham, had been closed and the royal treasury was richer by £132,000 (more than £50 million today)
from the sale of the monastery lands.

Even richer in the long term were the squires, merchants and magnates who had been conscripted into the new order of things,
picking up prime monastic acres all over the country. The Dissolution of the Monasteries was Henry’s payoff to the landed
classes, and it helped make the Reformation permanent.

But to this day we find corners of the English countryside curiously sanctified by the remains of high gothic arches, haunted
towers and long-deserted cloisters. Rievaulx in north Yorkshire, Tintern in the Wye Valley, and Whitby on the windswept North
Sea coast where St Hilda preached and the cowherd Caedmon sang: all these ghostly ruins are visible reminders of what was
once the heart of English learning, education and history-making — a civilisation that consoled and inspired rich and poor
alike for centuries.

I
N THE SUMMER OF
1539
HENRY VIII STAGED
a pageant on the River Thames. Two barges put out on to the water, one manned by a crew representing the King and his Council,
the other by sailors in the scarlet costumes of the Pope and his cardinals. As Henry and crowds of Londoners looked on, the
two boats met and engaged in mock battle, with much capering and horseplay until the inevitable happened — the scarlet-clad
Pope and his cardinals were pitched into the river.

Real life was not so simple. In 1538 the Pope had issued a call to the Catholic powers of Europe to rally against Englands
’most cruel and abominable tyrant’ and England now found herself dangerously isolated. Thomas Cromwell’s solution was to look
for support among the Protestant princes of Germany. He could see how his royal master had been moping since the death of
Jane Seymour a year or so earlier: perhaps business and pleasure could be combined by marriage to a comely German princess.

Inquiries established that there were two promising candidates in Cleves, the powerful north German duchy with its capital
at Dusseldorf. The duke had a pair of marriageable sisters, Anne and Amelia, and early in 1539 Cromwell asked the English
ambassador Christopher Mont to investigate their beauty. Mont reported back positively, and two locally produced portraits
were sent off for the King’s inspection. But were the likenesses trustworthy?

The answer was to dispatch the King’s own painter, Hans Holbein, the talented German artist whose precise and luminous portraits
embody for us the personalities and textures of Henry’s court. Working quickly as usual, Holbein produced portraits of both
sisters in little more than a week. That of Anne showed a serene and pleasant-looking woman, and legend has it that Henry
fell in love with the portrait. In fact, the King had already decided that now, at forty-eight, he should go for the elder
of the two sisters — the twenty-four-year-old Anne. The gentle, modest face that he saw in Holbein’s canvas simply confirmed
all the written reports he had received.