CHAPTER I The condition of Europe and England--Retrospect--Religious Affairs--A reign of terror--Cranmer in danger--Katherine Howard.

In 1546 it must have been evident to most observers that the life of the man who had for thirty-five years been England’s ruler and tyrant—of whom Raleigh affirmed that if all the patterns of a merciless Prince had been lost in the world they might have been found in this one King—was not likely to be prolonged; and though it had been made penal to foretell the death of the sovereign, men must have been secretly looking on to the future with anxious eyes.

Of all the descendants of Henry VII. only one was male, the little Prince Edward, and in case of his death the succession would lie between his two sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, branded by successive Acts of Parliament with illegitimacy, the infant Queen of Scotland, whose claims were consistently ignored, and the daughters and grand-daughters of Henry VII.’s younger daughter, Mary Tudor.

The royal blood was to prove, to more than one of these, a fatal heritage. To Mary Stuart it was to bring captivity and death, and by reason of it Lady Jane Grey was to be forced to play the part of heroine in one of the most tragic episodes of the sixteenth century.

The latter part of Henry VIII.’s reign had been eventful at home and abroad. In Europe the three-cornered struggle between the Emperor Charles V., Francis of France, and Henry had been passing through various phases and vicissitudes, each of the wrestlers bidding for the support of a second of the trio, to the detriment of the third. New combinations were constantly formed as the kaleidoscope was turned; promises were lavishly made, to be broken without a scruple whensoever their breach might prove conducive to personal advantage. Religion, dragged into the political arena, was used as a party war-cry, and employed as a weapon for the destruction of public and private foes.

At home, England lay at the mercy of a King who was a law to himself and supreme arbiter of the destinies of his subjects. Only obscurity, and not always that, could ensure a man’s safety, or prevent him from falling a prey to the jealousy or hate of those amongst his enemies who had for the moment the ear of the sovereign. Pre-eminence in rank, or power, or intellect, was enough to give the possessor of the distinction an uneasy sense that he was marked out for destruction, that envy and malice were lying in wait to seize an opportunity to denounce him to the weak despot upon whose vanity and cowardice the adroit could play at will. Every year added its tale to the long list of victims who had met their end upon the scaffold.

For fifteen years, moreover, the country had been delivered over to the struggle carried on in the name of religion. In 1531 the King had responded to the refusal of the Pope to sanction his divorce from Katherine of Aragon by repudiating the authority of the Holy See and the assertion of his own supremacy in matters spiritual as well as temporal. Three years later Parliament, servile and subservient as Parliaments were wont to be under the Tudor Kings, had formally endorsed and confirmed the revolt.

“The third day of November,” recorded the chronicler, “the King’s Highness held the high Court of Parliament, in the which was concluded and made many and sundry good, wholesome, and godly statutes, but among all one special statute which authorised the King’s Highness to be supreme head of the Church of England, by which the Pope ... was utterly abolished out of this realm.”1 Since then another punishable crime was added to those, already none too few, for which a man was liable to lose his head, and the following year saw the death upon the scaffold of Fisher and of More. The execution of Anne Boleyn, by whom the match had, in some sort, been set to the mine, came next, but the step taken by the King was not to be retraced with the absence of the motive which had prompted it; and Catholics and Protestants alike had continued to suffer at the hands of an autocrat who chastised at will those who wandered from the path he pointed out, and refused to model their creed upon the prescribed pattern.

In 1546 the “Act to abolish Diversity of Opinion”—called more familiarly the Bloody Statute, and designed to conform the faith of the nation to that of the King—had been in force for seven years, a standing menace to those persons, in high or low place, who, encouraged by the King’s defiance of Rome, had been emboldened to adopt the tenets of the German Protestants. Henry had opened the floodgates; he desired to keep out the flood. The Six Articles of the Statute categorically reaffirmed the principal doctrines of the Catholic Church, and made their denial a legal offence. On the other hand the refusal to admit the royal supremacy in matters spiritual was no less penal. A reign of terror was the result.

“Is thy servant a dog?” The time-honoured question might have risen to the King’s lips in the days, not devoid of a brighter promise, of his youth, had the veil covering the future been withdrawn. “We mark curiously,” says a recent writer, “the regular deterioration of Henry’s character as the only checks upon his action were removed, and he progressively defied traditional authority and established standards of conduct without disaster to himself.” The Church had proved powerless to punish a defiance dictated by passion and perpetuated by vanity and cupidity; Parliaments had cringed to him in matters religious or political, courtiers and sycophants had flattered, until “there was no power on earth to hold in check the devil in the breast of Henry Tudor.”2

Such was the condition of England. Old barriers had been thrown down; new had not acquired strength; in the struggle for freedom men had cast aside moral restraint. Life was so lightly esteemed, and death invested with so little tragic importance, that a man of the position and standing of Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, when appointed to preach on the occasion of the burning of a priest, could treat the matter with a flippant levity scarcely credible at a later day.

“If it be your pleasure, as it is,” he wrote to Cromwell, “that I shall play the fool after my customary manner when Forest shall suffer, I would that my stage stood near unto Forest” (so that the victim might benefit by his arguments).... “If he would yet with heart return to his abjuration, I would wish his pardon, such is my foolishness.”3

Yet there was another side to the picture; here and there, amidst the din of battle and the confusion of tongues, the voice of genuine conviction was heard; and men and women were ready, at the bidding of conscience, to give up their lives in passionate loyalty to an ancient faith or to a new ideal. “And the thirtieth day of the same month,” June 1540, runs an entry in a contemporary chronicle, “was Dr. Barnes, Jerome, and Garrard, drawn from the Tower to Smithfield, and there burned for their heresies. And that same day also was drawn from the Tower with them Doctor Powell, with two other priests, and there was a gallows set up at St. Bartholomew’s Gate, and there were hanged, headed, and quartered that same day”—the offence of these last being the denial of the King’s supremacy, as that of the first had been adherence to Protestant doctrines.4

No one was safe. The year 1540 had seen the fall of Cromwell, the Minister of State. “Cranmer and Cromwell,” wrote the French ambassador, “do not know where they are.”5 Cromwell at least was not to wait long for the certainty. For years all-powerful in the Council, he was now to fall a victim to jealous hate and the credulity of the master he had served. At his imprisonment “many lamented, but more rejoiced, ... for they banquetted and triumphed together that night, many wishing that day had been seven years before; and some, fearing that he should escape although he were imprisoned, could not be merry.”6 They need not have feared the King’s clemency. The minister had been arrested on June 10. On July 28 he was executed on Tower Hill.

If Cromwell, in spite of his services to the Crown, in spite of the need Henry had of men of his ability, was not secure, who could call themselves safe? Even Cranmer, the King’s special friend though he was, must have felt misgivings. A married man, with children, he was implicitly condemned by one of the Six Articles of the Bloody Statute, enjoining celibacy on the clergy, and was besides well known to hold Protestant views. His embittered enemy, Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, vehement in his Catholicism though pandering to the King on the subject of the royal supremacy, was minister; and his fickle master might throw the Archbishop at any moment to the wolves.

One narrow escape he had already had, when in 1544 a determined attempt had been hazarded to oust him from his position of trust and to convict him of his errors, and the party adverse to him in the Council had accused the Primate “most grievously” to the King of heresy. It was a bold stroke, for it was known that Henry loved him, and the triumph of his foes was the greater when they received the royal permission to commit the Lord Archbishop to the Tower on the following day, and to cause him to undergo an examination on matters of doctrine and faith. So far all had gone according to their hopes, and his enemies augured well of the result. But that night, at eleven o’clock, when Cranmer, in ignorance of the plot against him, was in bed, he received a summons to attend the King, whom he found in the gallery at Whitehall, and who made him acquainted with the action of the Council, together with his own consent that an examination should take place.

“Whether I have done well or no, what say you, my lord?” asked Henry in conclusion.

Cranmer answered warily. Knowing his master, and his jealousy of being supposed to connive at heresy, save on the one question of the Pope’s authority, he cannot have failed to recognise the gravity of the situation. He put, however, a good face upon it. The King, he said, would see that he had a fair trial—“was indifferently heard.” His bearing was that of a man secure that justice would be done him. Both he, in his heart, and the King, knew better. “Oh, Lord God,” sighed Henry, “what fond simplicity have you, so to permit yourself to be imprisoned!” False witnesses would be produced, and he would be condemned.

Taking his precautions, therefore, Henry gave the Archbishop his ring—the recognised sign that the matter at issue was taken out of the hands of the Council and reserved for his personal investigation. After which sovereign and prelate parted.

When, at eight o’clock the next morning, Cranmer, in obedience to the summons he had received, arrived at the Council Chamber, his foes, insolent in their premature triumph, kept him at the door, awaiting their convenience, close upon an hour. My lord of Canterbury was become a lacquey, some one reported to the King, since he was standing among the footmen and servants. The King, comprehending what was implied, was wroth.

“Have they served my lord so?” he asked. “It is well enough; I shall talk with them by and by.”

Accordingly when Cranmer, called at length and arraigned before the Council, produced the ring—the symbol of his enemies’ discomfiture—and was brought to the royal presence that his cause might be tried by the King in person, the positions of accused and accusers were reversed. Acting, not without passion, rather as the advocate of the menaced man than as his judge, Henry received the Council with taunts, and in reply to their asseverations that the trial had been merely intended to conduce to the Archbishop’s greater glory, warned them against treating his friends in that fashion for the future. Cranmer, for the present, was safe.7

Protestant England rejoiced with the Protestant Archbishop. But it rejoiced in trembling. The Archbishop’s escape did not imply immunity to lesser offenders, and the severity used in administering the law is shown by the fact that a boy of fifteen was burnt for heresy—no willing martyr, but ignorant, and eager to catch at any chances of life, by casting the blame of his heresy on others. “The poor boy,” says Hall, “would have gladly said that the twelve Apostles taught it him ... such was his childish innocency and fear.”8 And England, with the strange patience of the age, looked on.

Side by side with religious persecution ran the story of the King’s domestic crimes. To go back no further, in the year 1542 Katherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife, had met her fate, and the country had silently witnessed the pitiful and shameful spectacle. As fact after fact came to light, the tale will have been told of the beautiful, neglected child, left to her own devices and to the companionship of maid-servants in the disorderly household of her grandmother, the Duchess of Norfolk, with the results that might have been anticipated; of how she had suddenly become of importance when it had been perceived that the King had singled her out for favour; and of how, still “a very little girl,” as some one described her, she had been used as a pawn in the political game played by the Howard clan, and married to Henry. Only a few months after she had been promoted to her perilous dignity her doom had overtaken her; the enemies of the party to which by birth she belonged had not only made known to her husband misdeeds committed before her marriage and almost ranking as the delinquencies of a misguided child, but had hinted at more unpardonable misdemeanours of which the King’s wife had been guilty. The story of Katherine’s arraignment and condemnation will have spread through the land, with her protestations that, though not excusing the sins and follies of her youth—she was seventeen when she was done to death—she was guiltless of the action she was specially to expiate at the block; whilst men may have whispered the tale of her love for Thomas Culpeper, her cousin and playmate, whom she would have wedded had not the King stepped in between, and who had paid for her affection with his blood. “I die a Queen,” she is reported to have exclaimed upon the scaffold, “but I would rather have died the wife of Culpeper.”9 And it may have been rumoured that her head had fallen, not so much to vindicate the honour of the King as to set him free to form fresh ties.

However that might be, Katherine Howard had been sent to answer for her offences, or prove her innocence, at another bar, and her namesake, Katherine Parr, reigned in her stead.

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