5 Thomas Cromwell ascendant, 1535–1537
‘Everlasting God which hast ordained and constituted the services of all angels and men in a wonderful order: mercifully grant that they which alway do the service in heaven, may by thy appointment succor and defend us in earth, through Jesus Christ our Lord.’1
Obedience and the Henrician Church
At the time of the executions of Bishop John Fisher and Sir Thomas More in mid-1535, the theology of the English Church was about to undergo substantial reconsiderations. However, Henry VIII was fundamentally resistant to making changes in doctrine unless he could be convinced that they were to his advantage. The king feared that disagreements among his subjects over matters of religion would lead his realm into such total confusion that the English commonwealth would be destroyed. What God expected of him was governance that encouraged agreement in only one persuasion of faith.2 For the rest of his reign, Henry sought peace in the religious unity of his kingdom. After the Act of Supremacy was passed by Parliament in November 1534, the paramount value for Church and state became obedience to the king as supreme head. Obedience was equated with the word of God in Scripture, an idea that had initially been developed by William Tyndale and other evangelicals as a weapon to repudiate the pope. The obedience of the king’s subjects was essential for the peace of the realm and for the salvation of their souls.3
The royal supremacy opened opportunities to reform the English Church. From the beginning of her rise, Anne Boleyn hoped to make England more evangelical, and from late 1529, as we have already noted, she tried to persuade the king to allow the legalization of the Bible in English. Thomas Cromwell as vicegerent and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer shared that goal, although they also wanted to move England closer, politically and doctrinally, to the Lutherans of the League of Schmalkalden. The historian Rory McEntegart has shown that in the 1530s only Wittenberg offered well-developed theological alternatives to Rome. Cromwell worked with all his might to bring England into the League, and at times he made overtures to the Lutherans without Henry’s knowledge.4 Had England’s alliance with the League of Schmalkalden succeeded, prompt changes in doctrine and patterns of worship would have been implemented in the English Church. As we have already seen, Cranmer found his early consensus among the Lutherans. He longed to bring Philip Melanchthon to England. The visit of Simon Grynaeus of Basel in 1531 also introduced Cranmer to the leaders of Swiss Reform. Every month, letters from the continent arrived for him in Canterbury. Although only a small portion of Cranmer’s correspondence survives, we know that he was in regular, often secret contact with a wide spectrum of Protestant leaders that included his wife’s uncle Andreas Osiander of Nuremberg, Martin Bucer of Strasbourg, John Calvin of Geneva, and Huldrych Zwingli’s successor in Zűrich, Heinrich Bullinger.
Initially, Cranmer, Cromwell, and the queen thought that they would be able to persuade Henry to reform the Church. Courtiers warned each other never say no to the king, and never oppose him. They believed with Proverbs 21 that the heart of the king was in the hands of God. Just as gentle raindrops eventually wear down the hardest stone, they believed Henry could be won over in time. Anne was recognized as a ‘mediatrice’ with the king for many good causes.5 Nevertheless, Henry wanted to exercise his own authority without interference, and although he weighed the evidence every side presented to him, he played one set of courtiers against the others, expecting them to get along, but without giving any side complete satisfaction. Hugh Latimer noted the difficult efforts that were required to take an idea out of the king’s mind.6 Only by persuading Henry that their ecclesiastical policies would encourage obedience did Cromwell and Cranmer make some limited progress in their goals towards the reformation of the Church. Every other effort to give the English Church greater direction remained partial and unfinished. One new initiative after another was begun, only to be cast aside with bloody violence as the king permitted one set of courtiers to destroy another.
The Church that ultimately emerged under Henry VIII was not a kind of ‘Catholicism without the pope’. Conservative bishops like John Stokesley of London or Stephen Gardiner of Winchester were hard put to find a theological standard that they could rally around once they were deprived of the papacy, and like Cranmer they were forced to promote the royal supremacy through obedience.7 From 1532 Gardiner had been out of Henry’s favour after he defended Convocation’s independence to make Church law. In 1535 he climbed back into the king’s good graces with his book De Vera Obedientia.8 The ecclesiastical historians Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie have argued that Henry’s Church was like a Lutheran Church, but without the essential Protestant tenet of justification by faith alone.9 Henry’s Church was a distinctive interval in the history of Christianity in England, unmatched by any other. Owing to the king’s insurmountable opposition, in the 1530s and 1540s Cranmer could not introduce most of the changes that he suggested. Henry’s reign cast a long shadow, and it gave rise to competing claims in doctrine that could not be completely reconciled, not in the next reign, nor in the reigns of his daughters, and perhaps never.
Approach to the League of Schmalkalden
The period of greatest opportunity for Cromwell and Cranmer to attempt to make substantial changes in the English Church occurred in the mid-1530s, when Henry was willing to entertain the idea of forging an alliance with the League of Schmalkalden. We have already observed that for the first time in late 1533, the king sent requests to Saxony and Hesse for the establishment of closer diplomatic ties as a means to protect himself against the threat of papal excommunication. The king’s first efforts to establish ambassadorial posts did not succeed, probably because Duke John Frederick and Landgrave Philip were wary of offending the emperor. They were reluctant too because of Henry’s long-standing disagreements with Martin Luther, and they refused to invalidate the king’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon. Although Henry had said in 1530 that he wanted to provide his subjects with an accurate translation of the Bible, nothing had been done towards fulfilling his promise. The laity was forbidden to read the Bible in English under medieval laws that had been passed against the Lollards, the followers of John Wycliffe (d. 1384), who had made their own unauthorized translations of the Gospels into English.10 The Lutherans made plain that Henry must promote the Gospel if he intended to join the League of Schmalkalden. Until then they could not consider the king a friend of the word of God.
But in that first approach, unknown to the king, Cromwell sent the Lutherans secret assurance that an alliance would enable those English councillors, like Cranmer, who favoured a Protestant approach to the Gospel, to have a greater chance of success in prompting Henry to bring Lutheran beliefs into England. Cromwell and Cranmer’s intent was to use the Lutherans as an instrument to encourage Henry to make substantial changes in English Church doctrine, for they all stood together in their opposition to the papacy.11
The next overture to the Lutherans in mid-1535 offered even greater promise of success, because the dangerous diplomatic scene again threatened England. To confound the Habsburgs, King Francis I of France entered into negotiations with the Ottoman Empire. The Emperor Charles V was in Tunisia where he was conducting a successful military campaign to safeguard Italy against France’s ally, the Ottoman admiral Barbarossa (d. 1546). Francis used the emperor’s absence in North Africa to work towards reconciliation between the Lutherans and Rome. Francis invited Philip Melanchthon to meet him and discuss the prospect. Henry began to fear that the General Council that he had called for in 1533 might become a new tool that Pope Paul III could use against him. Alarmed that England was becoming ever more isolated, Henry instructed Cromwell to send Robert Barnes to bring Melanchthon to England.
This new approach to the Lutherans represented an important shift in English diplomatic policy. Melanchthon dedicated to Henry the latest edition of his most influential book, the Loci communes, and Alexander Alesius (1500–1565) was sent to England bearing copies as gifts for the king and for Cranmer. Alesius was a Scot who had gone into exile in Wittenberg. From the time of his arrival in England, the archbishop confided in him. The queen, whose connections with France had been an asset until now, was consulted for her approval for the new initiative to the Lutherans. They had refused to endorse Henry’s case against his first marriage, and the king wanted them to concede that he had made a valid marriage with Anne. In Wittenberg, Barnes was able to persuade Luther to appeal to John Frederick to permit Melanchthon to go to England. In an audience with the duke, Barnes said that Henry wished to apply for admittance to the League.12
Many of the preparations for the forthcoming embassy were left in Cromwell and Cranmer’s hands as the king and queen left Windsor for their summer’s progress, which took them almost as far as Bristol, along the same route Cranmer had taken the previous year on his metropolitical visitation.13 They were joined by Cromwell in late July, when he began his visitation of the religious houses in the initial stage of his vicegerency.14
The royal progress culminated at Winchester Cathedral on 19 September 1535, where Cranmer consecrated three new bishops. The diplomat Edward Fox was rewarded with the bishopric of Hereford for his many years of service in the king’s Great Matter, and for bringing Cranmer to Henry’s attention in 1529. Hugh Latimer became bishop of Worcester. He had been indispensable in rendering Cambridge’s decision for Henry in 1530, and he served the queen as one of her chaplains. Like Fox, he was one of Cranmer’s most important friends.15 John Hilsey (d. 1539) was a Dominican friar who had come to notice first for opposing Latimer in his sermons in Bristol in 1532, and then for being converted by him. As a further insult to the papacy, Hilsey was consecrated bishop of Rochester. The martyred Fisher was replaced by a friar who enthusiastically embraced the king’s supremacy over the English Church.
Fox spent the summer of 1535 at Lambeth with Cranmer preparing for the embassy he would lead to the Lutherans.16 He was not empowered to make agreements with them, but when he reached Saxony he told officials that Henry wanted an embassy to be sent to England to discuss theological matters. Fox said that the king was interested in joining the League, and that he had no intention of restoring the pope’s authority in England. A few days later, Fox made the same points when he addressed the League’s Diet. In response, the Diet stipulated that the king must promote the gospel and be willing to defend the Augsburg Confession, the articles of faith that defined the League. Then Fox and his party settled down in Wittenberg for three months of strenuous theological negotiations with Luther and Melanchthon. They took up divisive questions concerning the Eucharist, private Masses for departed souls, and clerical marriage. Although Fox was not allowed to come to any resolution with the Lutherans, his embassy was essential for opening the next serious phase of the discussions between England and the League.17
Preaching obedience
While the court was still in Winchester, word arrived from the French ambassador that Pope Paul had responded to the executions of Fisher and More with his greatest censure: he drew up a second decree that excommunicated Cranmer and the king. The pope called for Henry’s dethronement.18 The king held an emergency meeting of the Council and decided to re-intensify the preaching campaign that Cromwell had ordered on 3 June 1535. The bishops were to command the clergy to preach the royal supremacy throughout the realm every Sunday without ceasing.
Henry’s order represented a major new initiative to defend his supremacy. From this time forward, if not earlier, the sermon became a highly politicized weapon in service to the king. Cranmer welcomed the opportunity to reassert his authority in his own diocese through the pulpit, and immediately he took his chaplains to Kent. In Canterbury Cathedral, Cranmer delivered two sermons that exemplified the anti-papal rhetoric that he was now making the standard in Henry’s Church. The ‘bishop of Rome was not God’s vicar in earth’, he declared. To maintain the authority of the bishop of Rome was ‘contrary to God’s word’. Cranmer denounced ‘the glory and pomp of Rome, the covetousness, the unchaste living and the maintenance of all vices’ there. Cromwell’s visitation of the religious houses had already begun in Canterbury and Cranmer insinuated that the members of the regular orders were guilty of betraying their vows of celibacy through sexual irregularities. He hinted that it was better for priests to marry than to sin. He explained that the laws of the bishop of Rome were contrary to God’s laws, and did not lead to salvation. Rather, ‘our sins be remitted by the death of our Saviour Christ Jesus’. To attribute remission of sins to any man’s laws was to do injury to Christ himself. Nevertheless, Cranmer maintained that the king’s laws were for ‘good order and quietness’ and they disposed men to peace and justice. For many years he had prayed daily that ‘I might see the power of Rome destroyed’, and ‘I thanked God that I had now seen it in this realm’.19 Obedience to the king was a matter of salvation as well as a political virtue.
Initially, Cranmer thought that his message was received quietly. But in light of the summer’s events his sermons had a sensational effect. The family of Sir Thomas More’s son-in-law William Roper (d. 1578) had a large house near the cathedral in the parish of St Dunstan’s, and local feelings ran high against More’s execution. Cranmer’s sermons were answered by the prior of Canterbury’s Dominican convent who preached ‘clean contrary’ against him. The prior said that the Church never erred. God’s law was equal with the laws of the Church, or as he implied, the law of the Church of Rome. When Cranmer examined him afterwards, the prior said he knew of no vices that had been committed by any of the bishops of Rome. The prior accused him of being ‘uncharitable’ in his sermon. Cranmer was challenged and discountenanced in his own cathedral city. To his chagrin, he was unable to call the prior to account for more than a year because of fading support from the king and Cromwell.20
Henrician canons
Meanwhile, another initiative that had been necessitated by the royal supremacy was making slow progress that ground to a halt. In 1532, as a consequence of the Submission of the Clergy, the king and his advisors realized that the laws governing the Church should be re-evaluated to allow no further legal force to canons that supported the papacy or conflicted with the statutes of the realm. The existing corpus of canon law was extensive, and a review was too sensitive to be entrusted to the clergy alone. After Archbishop William Warham died, a commission of thirty-two was proposed to take up the work, half of whom were to be clergymen and the rest from Parliament. However, the commission was never officially appointed, although a small committee, led by Richard Gwent, started the review. As we have already observed, Gwent was made dean of the Arches while Cranmer was still on embassy to the imperial court, and it is not clear that they saw eye to eye about the project. After many months of effort, ‘the Henrician Canons’, a draft of some three hundred and sixty new laws was ready, and Gwent asked Cromwell on 27 October 1535 for an opportunity to show it to the king.
Nothing further happened to pass them into law. Once Convocation capitulated in 1532, parliamentary statutes dominated canon law. Glaring problems, like the danger of appeals to Rome, were addressed quickly by statute. The modern editor of the Henrician canons has suggested that events were moving so quickly in the mid-1530s, especially concerning the approach to the Lutherans, that any attempt to make new laws for the Church would be out of date before they were completed. Cromwell, as vicegerent, did not wish to be hampered by an ecclesiastical law code that might not prove sufficiently supple to meet the changing needs of his office and the Church.21 Ecclesiastical courts in every diocese ruled on marriage disputes, wills, and tithes. Parliament did not intrude upon the Church courts immediately. In fact, Roman canon law proved to be remarkably resilient in England despite the breach with the papacy.22 As a stopgap measure, Parliament stipulated that until the review resulted in a new code of law for the Church, the existing canons would remain in force unless they defied English law or customs or infringed on royal authority. This meant that Cranmer had to work within the existing framework of canon law until 1551, when he could review the problem again in the new reign, as we will see in Chapter 9.
The religious houses and the fall of Anne Boleyn
Rather surprisingly, Cranmer lost the confidence of the king and his vicegerent towards the end of 1535. Part of the problem was his absence from court over the summer and while he was preaching in Kent. Dangerous disagreements emerged between Anne and Cromwell concerning the fate of the immensely valuable property that was about to be confiscated when the religious houses were suppressed. Estimates vary, but perhaps as much as one-quarter of the productive land in England had been ceded over the centuries into the hands of the Church, primarily to endow Masses for souls in Purgatory, much of it invested in the monasteries. Not every religious house had the incentive to develop the economic potential of its property, even though the greatest abbots sat in the House of Lords.
Evangelicals argued, following Luther, that the religious orders had become wealthy at the expense of the rest of society. Intercessory institutions like monasteries and convents were redundant if one of their main purposes, to pray for the souls of the dead, was discredited. In cities like Strasbourg or Nuremberg, the religious houses were closed in the 1520s, because the merchant classes were persuaded by Luther’s challenge to impose their own control over the Church.23 Cranmer had been able to observe the effects of this policy in 1530 when he was in Nuremberg, and he shared many of the same ideas. In England, however, there was much less enthusiasm for closing the religious houses. Because the loyalty of the religious orders to the king was suspect, monks, friars and nuns began to be characterized as greedy drones, living in idle ignorance. Their routine of prayer was dismissed by Latimer and Edward Crome as mere ‘lip labour’ that did nothing to improve society.24 They were criticized for valuing the usurped authority of the bishop of Rome more than the obedience they owed to their sovereign.
The queen, with Cranmer and Latimer, believed that once the monks and friars were turned out, many houses would have new roles to play in evangelizing England because they should be converted into places of study where the needs of the poor could be relieved. In market towns across England, the former convents and abbeys should be remade into centres of preaching and education that would prepare scholars for university. Preachers would teach the people that their duty lay in their obedience to the king and not to the bishop of Rome. By promoting the Gospel, the repurposed religious houses would provide a monumental contribution to the welfare of the entire realm. Had their plans been realized, the new institutions very likely would have had a dramatic and lasting effect.25
In contrast, Cromwell promoted a policy that he believed was essential in guaranteeing permanent support for the king and the royal supremacy: that the property of the religious houses should be confiscated by the Crown. The king would enjoy the immediate benefits of a huge financial windfall. Then the lands would be parcelled out to members of the local gentry (and to the merchants of market towns and London) as rewards for their support for the royal supremacy. Locally, the gentry would have a larger role to play because they would be fully invested in the regime. Those who wished to stay in religion would be sent for the time being to the larger houses of their orders. Cromwell had other plans for legislation that would relieve poverty. Poor people would be assisted in their parishes, an intention that was not fully realized until the Poor Laws were passed late in the century. Cromwell’s plans had the potential of securing the loyalty of the gentry to the crown.
The disagreements between Anne and Cromwell grew so dangerous that they nearly destroyed each other. We do not know how early Cromwell decided that he had to move against Anne, but he took threatening measures against Cranmer in late 1535. Cranmer was surprised to receive a letter of warning from Latimer at the end of October that the king believed he was doing ‘nothing’ to promote the royal supremacy in satisfaction of the orders Henry had given at Winchester. Latimer told Cranmer that it was rumoured at court that he was only looking at the king’s business through his fingers.26 News of his preaching campaign in Kent had not filtered back to London.
Latimer’s warning may have also been related to the Cranmers’ dispute about property that had belonged to a house of nuns at Davington in Kent. The house had already failed, perhaps because it could not afford to pay the new tax of the Tenths. It closed a few months before legislation clarified what should happen to the property, and Cranmer relied on existing law to establish his claims. For many years, the house had held some sixty wooded acres from the archbishops of Canterbury. It had one appropriated benefice whose tithes were collected by the archdeacon. Edmund Cranmer had already taken them when his brother wrote Cromwell in mid-October to request that the lands should not go to the king. Cranmer maintained that it had to be determined before the law whether or not the property should revert to him in ‘the right of the see of Canterbury’. Unfortunately, some of the facts of the case remain obscure. It may be that Edmund (or the archbishop himself) actually stayed a legal verdict that found for Henry, though Cranmer denied it. Much later, Edmund obtained some advantageous leases as the religious houses closed, including one for their sister Alice, which may have been the source of Thomas Seymour’s unfounded accusation that the archbishop did not maintain due standards of hospitality because he wished to enrich his family.27 Whatever actually happened in the autumn of 1535, Cromwell was informed that Edmund and his brother had interfered in the case to the disadvantage of the king. Cromwell instructed one of his officers to confiscate the tithes from Edmund, and he sent Cranmer a blistering letter that contained a threat: Cromwell would be sorry should Henry have to learn that the archbishop had weighed against him in this or in any other matter.28
What is remarkable about this episode was how far Cranmer pressed forward his interests even though the disputed property was worth relatively little. Edmund’s tithes may have been no more than five shillings, but with surprising vigour, Cranmer refused to back down. At the beginning of November he asked Cromwell for the return of the tithes. He protested that neither he nor Edmund had stayed any legal verdict, even though many told him that he had a just title to the property. As for Cromwell’s threat to inform the king, ‘I would you saw the very bottom of my heart’ because Cranmer said his sense of justice would prevent him from delivering a judgment contrary to the right against even the king’s poorest subject. If he knew that it was the king’s pleasure to have his title for the lands, then he would want to give it to the king more than Henry could want to have it. But what if Henry really wanted Cranmer to have the lands? Then ‘if my title be good, I must needs make my claim’.29
This evidence should give pause to those who characterized Cranmer as unable to stand up to Henry and Cromwell. We can see that in this case Cranmer resisted an arbitrary or premature claim made on behalf of the king. With special persistence, he defended the right of the archbishopric under the law, perhaps because in recent months his see had suffered heavy losses of prestige and influence. Moreover, Cranmer energetically defended his brother. In the long term, Cranmer very likely was correct that the tithes belonged to Edmund. From the Valor Ecclesiasticus, we know that in due course the retired prioress received a pension from the house, and Edmund was accorded the right to take tithes from the property. We may marvel that the archbishop was willing to jeopardize the good will of the king in order to gain small tithes and sixty acres in Kent, but as we shall see, he could not dare to do so again. Disagreements over the fate of the property of the religious houses were among the most dangerous issues to emerge from the royal supremacy, and they were an important element in the destruction of the queen.
Katherine of Aragon’s health broke in the closing weeks of the year, and she died in isolation at Kimbolton Castle on 7 January 1536. Henry greeted the news with joyous relief, for he believed that now it was less likely that Charles would strike against England. Anne had conceived a child towards the end of the summer’s progress. Rather than mourn, and with fresh hope that this next child would be a son, the king and queen celebrated. On 21 January, while he was jousting in the tiltyard at Greenwich, Henry’s horse fell. For two hours the king lay unconscious while the court erupted in a frenzy of fear.30
If Henry had died that day, under the terms of the Act of Succession, Anne would have been regent until Elizabeth or her next child reached the age of majority. Her baby was expected in late summer. Months of uncertainty would be spent waiting for the birth. If her pregnancy resulted in a boy, he would become king immediately. Otherwise, Elizabeth, not yet three years old, would succeed her father. Under those circumstances, it is not certain how well Anne and Elizabeth would have prevailed against Mary if, as the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys thought, the English people wanted to rise for Katherine’s daughter. Only five days after his fall, on 29 January, the same day that Katherine’s body was interred in Peterborough Abbey, Anne suffered a miscarriage. Her pregnancy was far enough along to tell that the child had been a boy.
We cannot know how much the shock of his accident may have shaped Henry’s subsequent behaviour. Recent medical research has suggested that he may have suffered from McLeod’s Syndrome, a rare malady that caused his health to fail gradually and painfully after the age of forty, which occasioned the irascibility and swings in mood that made him so dangerous to serve. Its origins were genetic in nature as a recessive trait on his X chromosome. Once passed to his offspring, though a first pregnancy could succeed, his wives became sensitized, which meant that their second and subsequent pregnancies had a high rate of failure.31 We will probably never know for certain if the king suffered from McLeod’s Syndrome or from some other type of illness that blasted his hopes for children. After Elizabeth’s birth Anne had had at least one other miscarriage, and Henry thought briefly of discarding her, but he did not, because he would have been forced to go back to Katherine. After this miscarriage he was heard to say that he could see that God would not give him sons.32 Alesius thought that Henry began to hate Anne because she could not give him a son. In hindsight it was understood that Anne ‘had miscarried of her saviour’.33
Henry began to confide to his intimates that he desired to take another wife. From the beginning of the year he had become attracted to Jane Seymour (1509–1537), who served first Katherine and now Anne as lady-in-waiting. On their progress in September 1535, the king and queen stayed at Wolf Hall, the house of Jane’s father near Marlborough in Wiltshire. In March 1536 Jane’s brother Edward (c. 1500–1552) was admitted as a member of the king’s privy chamber.
Meanwhile, in the first three months of the year, an intense new preaching campaign was unleashed at Paul’s Cross. This had not been possible before now. Stokesley as bishop of London defended the existence of Purgatory, and he did not allow anyone to preach there who refused to lead the audience in prayers for departed souls. Several of Cromwell’s preachers were turned away.34 In December 1535, in an extraordinary demonstration of his authority as vicegerent, Cromwell removed Stokesley’s prerogative to appoint the Paul’s Cross preachers. He could have reassigned the authority to Cranmer, but he did not. Rather, he gave it to Bishop Hilsey of Rochester.35 Cromwell’s reassignment was almost as much a reproof of Cranmer as it was of Stokesley.
Parliament and Convocation reopened in the first week of February 1536. The series of sermons that were delivered at Paul’s Cross as the Reformation Parliament concluded were unusual for their dramatic attacks against the Carthusians, the papacy and Charles V, and for their efforts to protect Queen Anne’s faltering position.36
Cranmer preached at Paul’s Cross on 6 February. Preaching in the prophetic mode, his sermon was a daring and scathing indictment of the pope and the emperor. Although its text does not survive, we have some indication of what he said from those who heard it. He explained the diplomatic overtures that the king was making to the Lutheran princes. He denounced canonizations, dispensations, pardons, jubilees, and indulgences that he claimed the Roman Church had used to raise money by exploiting the credulity of the faithful. Cranmer declared that all of the passages in Scripture that mentioned Antichrist were references to the pope, and idea he may have borrowed from the writings of William Tyndale, who was awaiting execution in the Castle of Vilvorde near Brussels, a prisoner of Charles V’s sister Mary, the regent of the Low Countries. Cranmer declared that Antichrist would appear when the Habsburg empire was ruined. And it was already ruined, he said, because few German princes still obeyed the emperor. Henry’s subjects should know that the pope was the true Antichrist. Chapuys was in the audience, and he was scandalized that Cranmer, who had been entertained so generously at the imperial court, could so insult his prince.37
Three weeks later Cranmer returned to Paul’s Cross, this time to listen to Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall (1474–1559) make a public declaration of his acceptance of the king’s authority over the Church. Tunstall had been one of Sir Thomas More’s closest friends. More mentioned Tunstall in the opening sentences of the Utopia. Together they had hunted heretics. But Tunstall had sworn the oaths. His sermon on 27 February 1536 was an open acknowledgement of his submission to the king. Cranmer and several other bishops sat beneath the pulpit where the crowd could see them. The dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and other lords crowded behind Tunstall inside the pulpit cross. During the sermon, four Charterhouse monks were exposed to censure for their refusal to reject the papacy. They had endured months of unremitting pressure, and yet they continued to refuse to take the supremacy oath. Tunstall declared that the popes were bound to obey the terms of the eight General Councils of the early Church, but instead, they had usurped their powers over Christendom. The pope had dispensed the king to make an unnatural marriage with his brother’s wife. God had given every king the power to be supreme head over the priests in their realms.38 Tunstall made the kind of open submission that Cranmer had hoped Fisher and More might make.
The closure of the religious houses was the most important piece of business that came before the final session of the Reformation Parliament. The king and Cromwell decided to dissolve them in stages, starting with the smaller houses, which were easier to suppress. Those that had a yearly income of ₤200 or less were to be shut first. As an exclusionary tactic to reduce opposition, most of the abbots from the greater houses were warned against taking their seats in the Lords when Parliament assembled again. The preamble of the bill referred to the ‘manifest sin, vicious, carnal, and abominable living’ that was committed daily by members of the religious orders. Bishop Latimer noted that when the bill had its first reading in the Lords the ‘enormities’ revealed were ‘so great and abominable’ that there were calls in the chamber: ‘“down with them.”’ Only three abbots were present, and they did not dare to object in the hope that their own houses might be spared.39
The disagreements between Anne and Cromwell deepened, and she threatened to destroy him. She instructed her chaplains to deliver pointed messages in their sermons at court against the closure of the religious houses. In one of his most provocative court sermons, Latimer begged the king to convert the abbeys and priories into ‘better uses’ as places of learning and relief of the poor. When they heard that sermons were being delivered at court against their suppression, a delegation of priors and abbots approached the queen in a desperate bid for her protection. After she castigated them for the evils of their ‘licentious life’, they offered to give generous sums to her trustees to support preachers and needy students at the universities. She became even more convinced that the smaller houses should not be swept away wholesale. She believed that Cromwell and his friends were acting in their own interests under the cover of their devotion to the Gospel because they intended to take bribes and enrich themselves as the properties of the religious houses were distributed. Anne began to warn the king against Cromwell. Her chaplains began to imply in their sermons that he was one of England’s ‘strong thieves’ who deserved to be hanged.40
The king came to the Commons on 11 March to present the bill to dissolve the smaller priories and convents. The Reformation Parliament came to its final end on Good Friday, 14 April 1536. As soon as the bill about the smaller religious houses passed, Cranmer spoke to Cromwell at court on behalf of his brother-in-law Harold Rosell, for whom he asked for the lease of the priory of Shelford, or for another religious house in Nottinghamshire.41 After Easter, the archbishop went first to Knole and then to Otford. Cranmer was still in Kent at the beginning of May when Anne was accused of adultery.
Katherine’s death revealed how weak Anne’s position really was. Anne was an anathema to the emperor and her marriage had been condemned by two popes. She was unpopular with Henry’s subjects. It was a damaging fact that the Lutherans, with whom Anne encouraged an alliance, did not want to endorse her. Doubts about the validity of Henry’s second marriage dominated the negotiations in Wittenberg. Luther and Melanchthon were willing to concede that the king’s arguments had merit. Osiander sent them a letter that supported the doctrinal grounds of Henry’s case. But they stopped short of ruling in his favour.42 Gardiner had been sent as ambassador to France after the new bishops were consecrated at Winchester. Writing to Cromwell in mid-February, Gardiner said the diplomatic problem was now simplified because ‘God hath given sentence for the most part by the death of the Dowager’, but he warned that an alliance between England and the League of Schmalkalden would cause Henry to lose his independence of action without providing him any advantages.43
Katherine’s death also removed the impediment that prevented a new alliance between Henry and Charles, who returned to Rome from North Africa in April 1536. The emperor decided that he must protect Mary and work for her restoration in the line of succession. To conciliate Henry, the emperor prevented the release of Paul’s sentence of excommunication.44
According to Alexander Alesius, Gardiner triggered the crisis that destroyed Anne when he wrote to warn Thomas Wriothesley, the king’s secretary, that there were rumours at the French Court about the queen, and letters were discovered there that were used to accuse Anne of adultery.45 No such letters have survived. In all probability, the charges of adultery against Anne were fabrications. Her privy chamber (like that of any court in Europe) was a hothouse of gossip, innuendo, and flirtations. The queen was probably guilty of nothing worse than minor indiscretions that her enemies manipulated to be rid of her and her most powerful supporters, including her brother George, Lord Rochford.46 Suddenly, the queen’s privy chamber was closely monitored. Alarmed, the queen entrusted the spiritual care of her daughter to her chaplain Matthew Parker.47 Anne was accused with her brother and four other men. On 2 May 1536 Cromwell and Lord Chancellor Audley conveyed her to the Tower.48
Cranmer was immediately summoned to Lambeth Palace, but he was warned not to come into the king’s presence, a deliberate strategy by the queen’s enemies to isolate Henry from Anne’s friends. Cranmer was prevented from pleading directly with the king for her life. On 3 May he wrote Henry the most difficult and controversial letter of his life. When he began it, he could not know the details of what had happened, but from what he had heard in the previous twenty-four hours he must have concluded that the queen was all but lost. A week after Easter, Cranmer had been deeply worried about the direction that matters of religion were taking, and while he was still in Kent, he had asked Cromwell for the opportunity to ‘break my mind’ with him, though it seems unlikely that they spoke again before the queen’s arrest.49 Cranmer could not know if Henry was willing to sacrifice evangelicalism along with Anne.
Cranmer began with a long, cautious expression of concern that the king would take all adversities from God ‘both patiently and thankfully’. He noted that the king’s honour was impugned ‘whether the things that commonly be spoken of be true or not’. Cranmer reminded him of the example of Job, who despite being tested, remained obedient to God and was abundantly rewarded.50 He wrote that if what people ‘openly reported of the queen’s grace’ was true, then if they considered the matter correctly, they should think that only the queen’s honour was impugned, and not Henry’s. But Cranmer found what he had heard difficult to believe: ‘I am in such a perplexity, that my mind is clean amazed; for I never had better opinion in woman, than I had in her; which maketh me to think, that she should not be culpable’. And yet, it was just as difficult for him to believe that Henry would have had her imprisoned if she had not been guilty.
Cranmer confessed that next to the king himself, ‘I was most bound unto her of all creatures living’ and he begged the king to permit him to do what ‘God’s law, nature, and also her kindness bindeth me unto’: to pray for her so that she could ‘declare herself inculpable and innocent’. However, if she was found guilty, then no loyal subject could wish otherwise than that the offence would be punished without mercy as an example.
‘And as I loved her not a little for the love which I judged her to bear towards God and his gospel’, then if she were really guilty, no one who loved the Gospel could support her. Rather, they must hate her, and the more they favoured the Gospel, the more they must hate her for her hypocrisy. If she was guilty, then God had sent her this punishment for pretending when she did not really live by the Gospel ‘in heart and deed’. Because that cause that the archbishop and the queen had shared might be in jeopardy, Cranmer pleaded for the Gospel. Henry must recognize that like every Christian he was a sinner, and the king should be willing to admit that he had offended God before now. ‘Wherefore I trust that your grace will bear no less entire favour unto the truth of the gospel, then you did before’ because it had not been led by his affection for the queen, but rather, stemmed from Henry’s own ‘zeal unto the truth’.
Some historians have criticized Cranmer for weakness in defending the queen in such an ineffectual manner. But he took a tremendous risk in writing Henry as he did. For all he knew, England might be required to return to Rome as the price for rapprochement with Charles, and if so, Cranmer very likely would have been destroyed with Anne as the scapegoat for passing judgement against Katherine’s marriage.51
After he closed his letter, Cranmer was summoned to the Star Chamber by Audley and other councillors, where they told him what the king wanted him to know. In a postscript, Cranmer wrote, ‘I am exceedingly sorry that such faults can be proved by the queen, as I heard of their relation’. Had Cranmer truly accepted that Anne was guilty of adultery, he would have had no reason to send his letter. He would have discarded it, rather than expose himself as the queen’s friend. We may conclude that Cranmer doubted that Anne was guilty, but he also did not think that she could be saved. Instead, the cause of the Gospel had to be rescued from the impending disaster.
Anne could not simply be demoted or discarded without tacitly acknowledging that Henry’s marriage to Katherine had been valid all along and that Mary was rightfully his heir, which would have given the Emperor Charles an enormous advantage. After Parliament rose, Cromwell explored the possibilities that would release the king from his marriage. At the beginning of 1534, Stokesley had told the king that although Convocation had ruled the previous year that Henry’s marriage with Katherine was against the law of God and could not be dispensed by the pope, Convocation had not validated the king’s marriage to Anne.52 Cromwell asked him about the feasibility of a second divorce. Stokesley replied that he would give his opinion to no one but to the king himself, and before he spoke, he would like to know what Henry wanted. Cromwell also spent four days in conference with Richard Sampson, dean of the chapel royal, for his insights about canon law. As long as Anne was alive, the legitimacy of any children Henry might have with another wife would be jeopardized.53
The decision to execute Anne and invalidate her marriage, therefore, was taken before Cranmer was involved, and he was given no choice but to comply with what was expected of him. The queen and Rochford were tried in the Great Hall of the Tower, and they were condemned on Monday 15 May 1536.54 At the same time, in a chapel beneath Lambeth Palace, Cranmer convened a secret inquisition to nullify the queen’s marriage. The hearing was attended by Cromwell and Audley, and Sampson once again served as the king’s proctor.
On Tuesday 16 May 1536, Cranmer went to the Tower to hear Anne’s confession. Before now, the queen had regularly confessed to Cranmer or Latimer.55 The next day, when her brother and the other men went to the block, Cranmer nullified her marriage on the basis of causes that had only recently been revealed, by ‘certain just, true, and lawful impediments’ recently ‘brought to light and open knowledge’ and that were supposedly ‘confessed’ by Anne to Cranmer.56
Historians have speculated whether Anne made a damaging revelation in her confession, after she was condemned, that completed the case against her marriage. This seems unlikely. When Cranmer’s decree was presented before Parliament on 10 June, the impediments that invalidated her marriage were not specified. Cranmer had been willing to bargain for lives before now, but not this time. Anne had nothing that the king wanted in exchange, and Cranmer did not offer her false hope to entrap her. She told her jailor that she was the king’s true wedded wife, which would seem to preclude the possibility that one of her earlier promises of marriage – to Thomas Wyatt; or to Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland; or to someone else – had been consummated secretly before she wed the king. Awaiting execution, Anne twice received communion from her chaplain John Skyp (d. 1552). She told those guarding her, on pain of eternal damnation, that she had never been unfaithful to Henry.57
It is difficult to be certain how much Cranmer could have known about the intimacies of life at court a dozen years earlier, while he was still in Cambridge, and if he had been aware before now that Henry had had an affair with Anne’s older sister. Nor was Cranmer in England in 1532 when Archbishops Warham and Lee examined Northumberland about the nature of his relationship with Anne. Under the terms of the 1534 Act of Succession, with its list of Levitical prohibitions, Henry and Anne were forever ineligible to be married because of the king’s affair with her sister Mary. The lack of detail in Cranmer’s decree, as well as in the next Act of Succession, may have been meant to screen the king’s misbehaviour. As incredible as it may seem, Henry embarked upon his marriage with Anne on the strength of a papal dispensation that Gardiner had obtained for him in 1528 that had absolved both Anne of a previous intent to wed another man, and Henry of his affinity in the first degree with her sister. Although members of the court may have known of Henry and Mary’s affair when it happened, it is possible that Cranmer may have learned about it, or some other intractable problem, only now. In his study of Henry’s matrimonial trials, Henry Ansgar Kelly (b. 1934) raised the possibility that there may also have been several impediments that Clement had not dispensed that Cranmer used to nullify Anne’s marriage.58 Even if that was so, Henry and Anne’s marriage was doomed both under the strictures defined by Leviticus as well as by the Act of Succession that made her children heirs to the throne. That Anne and Henry were never properly married was also later implied by their daughter, for as queen, Elizabeth made no move to have Parliament overturn her bastardization.59
Before dawn on the morning of 19 May 1536, Alesius went to Lambeth Palace. He wrote Elizabeth in 1559 that he found Cranmer walking alone in the garden. Alesius had been at home for several days, and he told Cranmer he knew nothing of what was going on. The archbishop raised his eyes to heaven as he said that ‘“She who has been Queen of England on earth will today be a Queen in heaven”’, and he burst into tears.60 At mid-morning, Anne was beheaded by a French executioner, specially brought over from Calais for his skill in wielding a sword. Before the day was over, Cranmer dispensed the king and Jane Seymour from an affinity in the third and fourth degrees and from the reading of the banns. Their marriage was solemnized at Whitehall on 30 May.61
In Elizabeth’s reign, the years of Anne’s brief ascendency were portrayed by her clients as a golden age, a moment of great promise that came to an abrupt end when the Fates ‘tripped her’ before half her race was run. Anne was sacrificed, as Katherine had been, for Henry’s dynastic imperatives. If Alesius was correct, Cranmer’s private opinion about Anne was revealed in the garden on the morning of her execution. Just as he had anointed and crowned her, in all probability he absolved her when he heard her confession. He considered her both guiltless and a martyr.62
The sacrifice of Anne Boleyn completed Cromwell’s rise as the unchallenged leader of England’s evangelicals. Anne had made many bishops, and Cranmer was her greatest. He had become archbishop of Canterbury under one set of expectations that, with Anne’s death, were never fulfilled. Anne’s Reformation was a lost opportunity for England.
Circumstances called for an immediate if excruciating series of readjustments. Cranmer had no other choice but to adapt to Cromwell’s ascendency, for he could not be certain that he would not be destroyed also if it so pleased the king and his chief minister. Anne’s fall brought home to the archbishop yet again how limited were his powers and influence, and how much the regime constrained him to do what was against his best interests and against his own conscience. In time, Cranmer accepted that he was not permitted to achieve as much for the cause of evangelicalism as could the vicegerent. Within a year, the archbishop assured Wolfgang Capito (1478–1541) of Strasbourg that Cromwell ‘has done more than all others together’ in ‘the reformation of religion and of the clergy’ in England.63
The Parliament and Convocation of 1536
Many people believed that Anne’s destruction meant that the papacy would be reinstated and Mary restored to the succession. Less than two months after the close of the Reformation Parliament, a new Parliament opened on 8 June to complete Anne’s destruction by passing a new Act of Succession. The grounds of Cranmer’s decree of nullity that invalidated her marriage were not specified, but they were declared to be sufficiently proved. Elizabeth was bastardized. Yet again, Katherine’s marriage to Henry was nullified on the strength of the decisions that the universities had taken in 1530, as well as Cranmer’s ruling at Dunstable that her marriage to Arthur had been consummated. The Act made the king’s children with Jane his lawful heirs. Failing any issue from this marriage, the Act empowered Henry to name his own heir, a startling and ultimately destabilizing innovation that had serious repercussions in the next reign.64
The Act Extinguishing the Authority of the Bishop of Rome, passed by this Parliament, severed England’s final links to the papacy. Any expression of support for the pope’s authority became an offence punishable by loss of property under praemunire. To refuse another round of oath-taking was treason.65 Henry insisted that his daughter Mary acknowledge the royal supremacy and the invalidity of her mother’s marriage, and when she refused, he fully intended to send her to the Tower and to her death. Her friends were arrested and marked for execution.
At enormous risk to himself, Cranmer interceded with the king on her behalf, provoking Henry’s anger. For the first (but not the last) time, Cranmer was ejected from the Council. However, Mary submitted on 22 June 1536, and her friends were spared. Cranmer also returned to the king’s good graces, though according to Morice, Henry told him that he would live to regret intervening for his daughter.66
A double session of Convocation, in which both ecclesiastical provinces were represented, combined as a synod, opened on 9 June at St Paul’s, when Cromwell was given his fullest powers as vicegerent and vicar general in spirituals in representing the king. When he entered, all members of the Upper House rose to their feet and bowed to him. Cromwell was seated with the bishops at a table, with Cranmer on one side and Archbishop Edward Lee of York on the other. On 20 June, Cromwell and every member of Convocation signed a new oath that England was an independent monarchy and an imperial see unto itself. Because Henry was supreme head, he was not bound to appear should Charles or Pope Paul call a General Council. All papal laws were invalidated in England except for those made by the first four General Councils of the Christian Church, which had been summoned by the Roman emperors of their times despite the reluctance of their popes.
The next day Cranmer’s decree of nullity for Anne’s marriage was introduced in Convocation. Henry’s second marriage was invalidated, and with it, the past three years were negated because Anne had never been the lawful queen of England. Cranmer had set the crown upon her head, but now her coronation was undone. A few days later, her father surrendered the office of lord privy seal, and he was succeeded by Cromwell.67 At the feast of Corpus Christi, Cranmer’s friend Abbot William Benson welcomed Queen Jane to Mass in Westminster Abbey.68
The next most important achievement of the 1536 Convocation’s was in enacting the Ten Articles, the first definition of the theological positions in Henry’s Church, which was to be used as a guide for preachers in the parishes. Fox returned from his negotiations in Wittenberg in time to take part in the session. With Cromwell and Cranmer, he wanted the Ten Articles to reflect the directions that his discussions with the Lutherans took.69 The tone for their discussions was set by the sermon Bishop Latimer delivered at the opening of the session. He accused his hearers of permitting the laity to die in superstition because they had not repaired abuses in the Church before now. He raised questions about pilgrimages, images, and the cult of saints. His sermon’s most memorable phrase, from its English translation, was ‘purgatory pickpurse’.70
Although Stokesley, Lee and other traditionalists resisted, Cromwell and Cranmer pushed the discussions towards Lutheran positions. They were assisted by bishops Fox, Latimer, Goodrich, and Shaxton. Serious disagreements occurred about the number of sacraments. Cranmer urged the bishops to consider what Scripture meant by a sacrament. What was the true use of a sacrament? Did the sacraments justify, or were Christians justified instead by faith? Could all the ceremonies that were called sacraments compare in importance with baptism and the supper of the Lord? Were some ceremonies, like the washing of feet on Maundy Thursday, actually sacraments, as St Ambrose suggested, even though they were not considered one of the seven?71
Stokesley insisted that there were seven sacraments. Luther maintained that there were only two sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, a point raised by Alesius, who spoke as a guest during the bishops’ disputation until Cromwell and Cranmer saw that his presence offended Stokesley. Cranmer referred to the Eucharist as the Lord’s Supper, as the Lutherans did. In the final version of the Ten Articles, they compromised on three sacraments: baptism, penance, and the sacrament of the altar.
The first four articles listed in the final document concerned baptism, penance, the sacrament of the altar, and justification. They were essential for all Christians because God commanded them as necessary for salvation. The other six articles dealt with images, the honouring of saints, praying to saints, rites, ceremonies, and Purgatory, but they were given only second place as ‘laudable ceremonies’ that Henry wanted to be kept for ‘decent order’ in the Church, even though they were not expressly required by God.
By omitting the other four sacraments, confirmation, matrimony, holy orders, and extreme unction, the Ten Articles implied that they were not sacraments at all and that they were rejected in Henry’s Church. There were other important omissions as well. The article on the sacrament of the altar required that all people believe that the very same body and blood of Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, who suffered on the cross for redemption, was really contained and comprehended in the sacrament under the form and figure of bread and wine. However, the dogma of transubstantiation was not mentioned, nor was the traditional idea that the Mass was a sacrifice. The article on Purgatory advised that it was ‘a very good and charitable deed to pray for souls departed’, though the place where they were, its name, and the kinds of pains suffered there ‘be to us uncertain by Scripture’.72
In addition to the Ten Articles, Convocation approved the abrogation of some popular saints’ days that fell during harvest or at other inconvenient times. They included the feasts that honoured Thomas Becket on 7 July and 29 December, whose cult Henry wished to destroy as a reproach to his supremacy.
The Reformation Parliament had met over six-and-one-half years. The Parliament and Convocation of 1536 lasted six weeks. On the afternoon of the last day, Henry came to the House of Lords, where he knighted his lord privy seal and raised him to a new dignity as Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon. The new nobleman was given lands at Wimbledon and Mortlake that, until now, had belonged to the archbishops of Canterbury. Cranmer was forced to surrender them to ennoble the son of a Putney brewer.73
The northern risings 1536–1537
The Ten Articles were what the parliamentary historian S. E. Lehmberg called an exercise in ‘studied ambiguity’. Mild in tone, they were meant to be inclusive and un-alarming. He discerned in them the beginnings of what would become, much later, the distinctive character of the mature English Church, especially in its ability to accommodate fine shades of opinion.74 Cromwell opened the debates in the Upper House with the warning ‘that the king studieth day and night to set a quietness in the Church’. All matters of disagreement should be concluded ‘by the word of God’ in ‘a godly and a perfect unity’. Cranmer also said at the outset that as they considered ‘weighty controversies’ they must ‘agree in the substance and effect’.75
Even so, the Ten Articles helped to provoke the greatest crisis of Henry’s reign: the risings that began in the north of England in October 1536. The Ten Articles reached into every parish in the land, a fact that was compounded in August when Cromwell issued the first Royal Injunctions and the order that suppressed some of the most popular saints’ days. The Injunctions denounced as superstitious the images and relics that had for generations inspired devotion and pilgrimages. They were not to be permitted further, because the reformers believed that they distracted people from understanding that God was the author of all goodness, health, and grace. The clergy should teach the people how to say the Paternoster, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments ‘in our mother tongue’. And ‘because the goods of the church are called the goods of the poor’, new charges were levied in many parishes. Every priest with an income of one hundred pounds or more was to give an exhibition to a university student. Non-resident clergy who had a yearly income of twenty pounds or more were to give a tenth to distribute among the poor of the parish, under the supervision of the churchwardens. The new charges were to be levied in addition to the annual payment of the Tenths, the new tax that burdened every parish in England.76
The taking of the oath of supremacy in 1535 had disturbed parishioners everywhere, especially across northern England, and they were made uneasy again by the sheer number of visitations and tax subsidies that were imposed on them. In addition to Cranmer’s metropolitan visitation, a visitation had been made in 1535 for the Valor Ecclesiasticus to assess the wealth of the Church so that the Tenths could be levied. An assize for a subsidy for the king was made, and Cromwell’s vicegerential visitation of the religious houses convinced many laypeople that if the monasteries were closed, then the parish churches would follow soon afterwards. The laity would lose many generations’ worth of investment and ornamentation that had been lavished on their parishes.
The Ten Articles and the Injunctions were also the first real intrusion of the royal supremacy into the daily life of ordinary churchgoers. The language of the Church was Latin. St Jerome’s Latin Vulgate was the legal text of the Bible.77 Worshippers followed the Mass in their Latin Books of Hours and their primers. Every child learned his or her Paternoster in Latin. In 1536, many people were dubious whether God would answer their petitions if their prayers were not in Latin.
The rising began at Louth in Lincolnshire on 1 October 1536, when the vicar incited the parishioners against Cromwell’s agents. Rapidly the insurgency spread to Caistor and Horncastle and then to Yorkshire, where it has become known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. Ultimately six counties were involved, and more than twenty-two thousand rose in rebellion. Its leaders were important men locally: the attorney Robert Aske (d. 1537), Sir Robert Constable (d. 1537), and the baron Thomas Darcy (d. 1537).
The rebels seized Cromwell’s commissary and beat him to death. They took local gentlemen hostage and made them swear a new oath of loyalty to the rising. Archbishop Lee was taken prisoner at the surrender of Pontefract Castle and he was forced to take the rebels’ oath. They believed that the papacy had been repudiated over a personal quarrel between the king and the pope, and they did not want to be forced to become heretics.78
Against them, Henry sent armies led by his brother-in-law the duke of Suffolk, and the duke of Norfolk. The rebels vastly outnumbered their armies, but in Lincolnshire, the rebellion collapsed quickly, because the gentlemen who had reluctantly accepted the leadership that the rebels imposed upon them were no match when they were faced by the king’s men. Cranmer’s friend Sir John Markham held Newark for the king. In Yorkshire, heavy rains damaged the rebels’ weapons, and before the end of October they asked Norfolk to sue for pardon. They explained that they were so oppressed by taxes and poverty, that if the religious houses were put down they would have neither occupation nor relief.
For a few weeks, the crisis seemed to be over, but after Christmas there was a dangerous new skirmish at Hull, led by the maverick Sir Francis Bigod who believed that reform was not happening fast enough.79 The uprisings made further negotiations with the Lutherans impossible for the time being. Complete order was not restored until mid-1537.
The arrival of a prince
Cromwell’s reaction to the northern risings was to demand further reforms. In February 1537 he summoned to Westminster a vicegerential synod of bishops and theologians from both provinces. Archbishop Lee had emerged from the Pilgrimage of Grace with little credit, and over the next few months he continued to lose power and influence. In the negotiations that continued through the summer, Cromwell entrusted Cranmer and Fox with giving an evangelical direction to the synod. The conservatives were defeated in the Pilgrimage of Grace, but Cromwell too lost. His announcements, especially the first Royal Injunctions and the abrogation of saints’ days, were so heavy-handed that they had contributed to the risings. By engaging prelates from the north and the south to work together, the synod of 1537 was meant to erase the independent action of the two provinces, especially to control volatility in the north. The goal of the synod was to bring about both ‘union and reformation’ in the entire Church of England.80
Through the spring and early summer of 1537, the leaders of the risings were brought to London for trial and execution. A dozen from Lincolnshire were executed in the capital, and another thirty or so in Lincoln, Louth, and Horncastle, nearly half of them monks belonging to Kirkstead or other abbeys. Constable and Ask were returned to Yorkshire for death.81 Contagious illnesses visited London again that summer while the synod was deliberating, and Cranmer warned Cromwell that ‘in Lambeth they die at my gate even at the next house to me’.82
In the midst of this grim business, on Trinity Sunday in May an announcement was made that Queen Jane had ‘quickened’ with child. A Te Deum was celebrated at St Paul’s and Bishop Latimer preached. Across London, bonfires were lit and free wine was given out.83
In early August 1537, Cranmer received a new translation and printing of the Bible that was dedicated to the king, known from the pseudonym on the title page as the ‘Thomas Matthew’ Bible, but whose New Testament was actually Tyndale’s. He sent it to Cromwell with a request that he gain the king’s approval for its release. Cranmer admitted that he was not quite satisfied by the translation, although it was better than any other he had yet seen, and he warned Cromwell that it was unlikely that the bishops would ever produce a better version. When Cranmer heard that the king approved, he told Cromwell that the news did him more good than a gift of a thousand pounds.84 At the end of the month Cromwell was brought to Windsor and made a Knight of the Garter.85
The work of the synod in 1537 resulted in The Institution of a Christian Man, known as the Bishops’ Book, as a replacement of the Ten Articles. Its preface was written by archbishops Cranmer and Lee, in the form of a petition to the king, because the Bishops’ Book was issued before it received Henry’s full approval. Its purpose was to set out ‘a plain and sincere doctrine’ based on Holy Scripture, that would remove errors, doubts, superstitions and abuses and that would establish ‘good unity and concord’, and the ‘quietness’ of the king’s subjects in body and soul.
Its contents were more carefully arranged than the Ten Articles, and the Institution of a Christian Man was a much longer, as well as a more cautious book. The northern risings meant that reforms could not be imposed rapidly without engendering dangerous opposition. Many familiar prayers and tenets that had not been discussed in the Ten Articles were clearly presented in the Bishops’ Book.
It began with an exposition of the Creed that included long explanatory passages. All seven sacraments appeared. The section on the sacrament of the altar was brief and like the Ten Articles, it avoided any mention of transubstantiation or the sacrifice of the Mass. The Bishops’ Book also discussed the Ten Commandments, the Paternoster and Ave. The sections on justification and Purgatory were almost unchanged from the Ten Articles.86 The Bishops’ Book represented the same kind of compromise, the same useful ambiguity, the same desire for inclusiveness, the same desire for peace in the realm as the Ten Articles that were becoming some of the true defining features of the Henrician Church.
In the second week of October, Jane went into labour at Hampton Court Palace. To general rejoicing, she gave birth to a son on 12 October 1537. Bells were rung in every steeple in London, guns were fired from the Tower, and open barrels of wine set out for poor people to drink as much as they wanted. Three days later, in the chapel at Hampton Court, Cranmer christened the prince and confirmed him in the Christian faith. He was born on the eve of the feast of the translation of St Edward the Confessor, who remained (despite the demotion of many feast days) essential to the identity of the Tudors as the greatest of their saintly forebears. And so he was given the name Edward, and Cranmer shared with the duke of Norfolk the privilege of being the future king’s godfather.87 Jane’s brother Edward was made earl of Hertford.
At long last, the birth of Henry’s son gave the dynasty hope for the future that not even Jane’s death from a haemorrhage on 24 October could overshadow. Just as he presided at the christening, so Cranmer conducted the solemn requiem Mass for the queen’s funeral at Windsor on 12 November 1537.
Edward’s birth seemed to solve the crisis of the succession. As we will see in the next chapter, Cromwell and Cranmer were emboldened to re-establish their connections with the League of Schmalkalden, only to meet unexpected disappointment.
Notes
1Cranmer’s collect for St Michael and All Angels (Michaelmas) for 20 September from the 1549 Prayer Book: The booke of the common prayer and administracion of the sacramentes and other rites and ceremonies of the Churche: after the vse of the Churche of England (London: Edward Whitchurch, March 1549, RSTC 16267), 117v.
2Henry VIII to the University of Cambridge in 1530: CCCC, MS 242, 17v–18v, printed in Lamb, 26–7. Similarly, Alexander Alane [Alesius], Of the auctorite of the word of god against the bisshop of London ([Strasbourg: 1544], RSTC 292), A5v–A6v and the preface to the Ten Articles of 1536: Articles Devised by the Kinges Highnes Maiestie (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1536, RSTC 10033).
3R. Rex, ‘The Crisis of Obedience: God’s Word and Henry’s Reformation’, HJ, 39 (1996), 863–94; R. M. Reeves, English Evangelicals and Tudor Obedience, c. 1527–1570 (Leiden, 2003).
4R. McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, and the English Reformation (Woodbridge, 2002), 46–51.
5William Marshall’s dedication to the queen in his translation of The forme and maner of subue[n]tion or helping for pore people /deuysed and practysed i[n] the cytie of Hypres in Flaunders (London: Thomas Godfray, 1535, RSTC 26119), A4r.
6Sermons by Hugh Latimer, ed. G. E. Corrie, PS (Cambridge, 1844), 231–2.
7See the sermon of Stokesley’s chaplain Simon Matthew made between Fisher’s execution and More’s A Sermon made in the Cathedrall churche of saynt Paule of London (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1535, RSTC 17656).
8Stephen Gardiner, De Vera Obedientia (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1535, RSTC 11584).
9A. Ryrie, ‘The Strange Death of Lutheran England’, JEH, 53 (2002), 64–92; P. Marshall, ‘Papist as Heretic: The Burning of John Forest, 1538’, HJ, 41 (1998), 351–74; Rex, ‘Crisis of Obedience’, 894.
10Statutes: (1382) 5 Richard II, st. 2, c. 5; (1401) 2 Henry IV, c. 15; (1414) 2 Henry V, st. 1, c. 7. See also S. Wabuda, ‘The Woman with the Rock: The Controversy on Women and Bible Reading’, in Belief and Practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to Patrick Collinson from His Students, eds. S. Wabuda and C. Litzenberger (Aldershot, 1998), 40–59.
11McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 20–31, 50, 154.
12McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 26–31, 59; ‘William Latymer’s Chronickille of Anne Bulleyne’, ed. Maria Dowling, in Camden Miscellany XXX, CS, 4th series, 29 (1990), 23–65; Alesius to Elizabeth I: TNA/PRO, SP 70/17, 6r–6v (Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, 1, no. 1303); LP, 8, nos. 1061–2.
13McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 31–6.
14F. D. Logan, ‘Thomas Cromwell and the Vicegerency in Spirituals’, EHR, 103 (1988), 658–67.
15Latimer was given Worcester following the deprivation of Ghinucci: 25 Henry VIII, c.27; S. E. Lehmberg, The Later Parliaments of Henry VIII 1536–1547 (Cambridge, 1977), 185.
16McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 31–2, 60.
17McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 37–8, 42, 95.
18Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 334.
19Cranmer described his sermons in a letter to the king of 26 August [1536], Miscellaneous, no. 177.
20Cranmer’s letter to Cromwell, 2 November [1535]: BL, Cotton MS Cleopatra E. VI., 234r–235r, printed in Miscellaneous, no. 160, and his letter to the king of 26 August [1536], no. 177.
21F. D. Logan, ‘The Henrician Canons’, BIHR, 47 (1974), 99–103; G. Bray, ed., Tudor Church Reform: The Henrician Canons of 1535 and the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, Church of England Record Society, 8 (2000), xxvi–xxix, xxxviii–xliv, lxiv.
2224 Henry VIII c. 12 (1533); 25 Henry VIII c. 19/4 (1534); Bray, Tudor Church Reform, lxxiii–lxxvi; R. H. Helmholz, Roman Canon Law in Reformation England (Cambridge, 1990), 28–54, 159.
23M. Greschat, Martin Bucer: A Reformer and His Times, trans. S. E. Buckwalter (Louisville, 2004), 50–2.
24Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 339.
25Cronickille of Anne Bulleyne’, 57–9; E. W. Ives, ‘The Fall of Anne Boleyn Reconsidered’, EHR, 107 (1992), 665–74.
26Cranmer’s letter to Cromwell, 2 November [1535]: BL, Cotton MS Cleopatra E. VI., 234r–235r, printed in Miscellaneous, no. 160, and his letter to the king of 26 August [1536], no. 177.
27Morice, 260–4; G. Baskerville, ‘A Sister of Archbishop Cranmer’, EHR, vol. 51 (1936), 287–9; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 323.
28Cranmer to Cromwell, letters of 17 October and 2 November [1535], Miscellaneous, nos. 157, 160.
29Cranmer to Cromwell, letters of 17 October and 2 November [1535], Miscellaneous, nos. 157, 160.
30Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 348; Ives, Anne Boleyn, 296–7.
31K. B. Whitley and K. Kramer, ‘A New Explanation for the Reproductive Woes and Midlife Decline of Henry VIII’, HJ, 54 (2010), 827–48.
32Kelly, Matrimonial Trials, 242; Ives, Anne Boleyn, 191–2, 296–301; LP, 10, no. 282–3, 351.
33Alesius to Elizabeth: TNA/PRO, SP 70/17, 6v; Ives, Anne Boleyn, 343–8; J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth (London, 1934), 17.
34TNA/PRO, SP 1/94, 98r–99v (LP, 8, nos. 1054; 1019).
35S. Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2002), 131–2.
36Hilsey to Cromwell, [December 1535], TNA:PRO, SP 1/99, 140r (LP, 9, no. 989). See also M. MacLure, The Paul’s Cross Sermons 1534–1642 (Toronto, 1958) in his ‘Register of Sermons Preached at Paul’s Cross, 1534–1642’, 185–6.
37Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 33–4; LP, 10, no. 283; Latimer, Sermons, 49–50; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 149–50; P. Ayris, ‘Preaching the Last Crusade: Thomas Cranmer and the “Devotion” Money of 1543’, JEH, 49 (1998), 683–701.
38Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 34–5.
39BL, Cotton MS Cleopatra E. IV, 131r–132v; Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 218–19, 226; Latimer, Sermons, 123.
40Cronickille of Anne Bulleyne’, 57–9; Alesius to Elizabeth, TNA:PRO, SP 70/17, 6r–6v. Remarks drawn from Latimer’s sermon were included in Dorset’s letter of 13 March 1536: BL, Cotton MS Cleopatra E. IV, 131r–132v (LP, 10, no. 462); E. Ives, ‘Anne Boleyn and the Early Reformation in England: The Contemporary Evidence’, HJ, 37 (1994), 389–400, and Anne Boleyn, 306–18; Wabuda, Preaching, 130–5.
41Cranmer to Cromwell, Lambeth, 25 March [1536], Letters, no. 170.
42See the letter that Philip Melanchthon wrote to Martin Bucer, 8 November 1531, printed in OL, 2, no. 258; McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 39–44.
43Gardiner to Cromwell [February 1536], Letters, no. 53 (p. 75).
44Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 334, 361; Kelly, Matrimonial Trials, 167.
45Alesius to Elizabeth: TNA/PRO, SP 70/17, 6r.
46Kelly, Matrimonial Trials, 242–4.
47Parker to Nicholas Bacon, 1 March 1559, printed in Correspondence of Matthew Parker, eds. J. Bruce and T. Perowne, PS (Cambridge, 1853), nos. 46 and 54.
48Alesius to Elizabeth: TNA/PRO, SP 70/17, 7r–7v; Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 35–6.
49Cranmer to Cromwell, Knole, 22 April [1536]: Miscellaneous, no. 172.
50Cranmer to Henry VIII, Lambeth, 3 May [1536]: Miscellaneous, no. 174.
51Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 335–6; Ives, Anne Boleyn, 319–337.
52Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation, 56–7 from SP 1/82, fol. 11r (LP, 7, 15); Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 311–12.
53Kelly, Matrimonial Trials, 243–4, 251; Ives, Anne Boleyn, 319–37; LP, 10, nos. 752–3.
54Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 36–9.
55Alesius to Elizabeth: TNA/PRO, SP 70/17, 3r–12r.
5628 Henry VIII, c. 7; Statutes of the Realm, 3, 655; Wilkins, Concilia, 803–5; Kelly, Matrimonial Trials, 244–9, 256–7. Anne’s marriage was also invalidated under 28 Henry VIII, c. 16.
57Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 40–1; Kelly, Matrimonial Trials, 244.
58Kelly, Matrimonial Trials, 38–54; LP, 4, no. 3913.
59Kelly, Matrimonial Trials, 255–9; Ives, Anne Boleyn, 338–56.
60Alesius to Elizabeth: TNA/PRO, SP 70/17, 7v–8r (my translation).
61LP, 10, no. 915; Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 349; Ives, Anne Boleyn, 338–56.
62‘Cronickille of Anne Bulleyne’, 64. See also Foxe, AM, 5, 44. Parker also thought Anne was guiltless: Parker to Elizabeth I, 1559, Correspondence of Matthew Parker, no. 54.
63Cranmer to Capito, 1537, printed in OL, 1, no. 8.
6428 Henry VIII, c. 7; Statutes of the Realm, 3, 655; Lehmberg, Later Parliaments, 20–9; Kelly, Matrimonial Trials, 244–9, 256–7.
6528 Henry VIII, c. 10; Lehmberg, Reformation Parliament, 25–9; Ives, Anne Boleyn, 357–64.
6628 Henry VIII, c. 10; Morice, 259; Lehmberg, Later Parliaments, 25–8; Ives, Anne Boleyn, 357–64.
67Alesius, Of the auctorite of the word of God, A5r–A5v; Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 41, 49, 52–3; Cranmer, Miscellaneous, 463–4; Lehmberg, Later Parliaments, 37; Logan, ‘Vicegerency’, 666.
68Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 47–8.
69McEntegart, League of Schmalkalden, 51, 58–61, 66–73.
70Wriothelsey, Chronicle, 1, 47, 54; Luke 16: 1–13; Concio quam habuit reuerediss. in Christo pater Hugo Latimerio in conuentu spirtualitum (Southwark, 1537, RSTC 15285), translated in Latimer, Sermons, 33–57.
71Alesius, Of the auctorite of the word of God, A6r–A8v.
72The Ten Articles (RSTC 10033); G. Bray, ed., Documents of the English Reformation 1526–1701 (Cambridge, 1994, 2004), 162–74.
73Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 52; Logan, ‘Vicegerency’, 666; MacCulloch, Cranmer, 166–7.
74Lehmberg, Later Parliaments, 38–9.
75Alesius, Of the auctorite of the word of God, A6r–A8v.
76The text of the First Royal Injunctions of 1536, printed in London by Berthelet, is found in RSTC 10084.7. Wriothesley, Chronicle, 1, 54–5.
77Eyal Poleg, ‘The First Bible Printed in England’, JEH, vol. 67 (2016), 760–80.
78M. E. James, ‘Obedience and Dissent in Henrician England: The Lincolnshire Rebellion of 1536’, Past and Present, 48 (1970), 3–78.
79Wriothesley’s Chronicle, 1, 60; A. G. Dickens, Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York 1509–1558 (London, 1972), 53–113.
80Wriothesley’s Chronicle, 1, 65.
81Wriothesley’s Chronicle, 1, 61–5.
82Cranmer to Cromwell, 21 July 1537, Miscellaneous, no. 190.
83Wriothesley’s Chronicle, 1, 64.
84Cranmer to Cromwell, August 1537, Miscellaneous, nos. 194, 197–8; Matthew Bible: The Byble, which is all the holy scripture, trans. Thomas Matthew [pseud. for William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale] (Antwerp, 1537, RSTC 2066).
85Wriothesley’s Chronicle, 1, 65.
86The Institvtion of a Christen Man (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1537, RSTC 5164), sig. a2r.
87Wriothesley’s Chronicle, 1, 65–8.