Unruly, p.34
Unruly, page 34
Yes, ancient Troy, as in the stories – the guys that fell for a fake horse and then some of them supposedly went off and founded the Roman Empire. They probably didn’t really do either of those things but what they definitely didn’t do, ever, is go to England at all. If you were looking for a story to make the one about Joseph of Arimathea coming here with the Holy Grail seem comparatively realistic, then Brutus of Troy founding Brutuan is a good choice. But that’s what came out of Henry’s historians’ brainstorm – if it had been raining that day, they’d probably have said the place was founded by Noah, who’d landed at Noahquay in Cornwall.
What this fabricated backstory meant, they said, was that England and Henry, unlike other kings and kingdoms, were not subject to any external European jurisdiction. The idea that someone on the continent could overrule any aspect of English governance would not be stood for. Sound familiar? The notion of Little Englander exceptionalism was established. This pattern of thinking would develop into a way of bolstering national self-esteem without incurring the expense of attempting to take over France.
Three queens down
Henry and Anne did not have a happy marriage. She kept answering back, which, you’ll be amazed to hear, Henry VIII didn’t like, and she gave birth to a daughter, which he liked even less. Also, she managed to fall out with Thomas Cromwell despite both of them being Protestants, which fact gave them enemies aplenty without needing each other.
In January 1536, after three years of marriage, the trajectory of Anne and Henry’s relationship enjoyed a dead-cat bounce when the news of Catherine of Aragon’s death broke. They dressed up in yellow, which was the colour of mourning in Catherine’s native Spain, but they didn’t mean it respectfully. They did a little celebratory victory dance together. This grubby knees-up may have been the last happy moment in the marriage.
Anne was pregnant again by this point and had a strong sense that it was extremely important that she give birth to a boy. An attractive, quiet, amenable and deferential young woman called Jane Seymour had started hanging round the court and laughing at the king’s jokes and this made Anne anxious.
Then, one day, Henry had a jousting accident in which he hurt his leg and, by one account, was unconscious for two hours. The leg injury troubled him for the rest of his life as it developed into a revolting, purulent ulcer which stank and caused him agony. Some reckon that the unconsciousness damaged his brain and caused him to turn into an intolerant, irascible tyrant. I’m not sure about this as he wasn’t exactly a pussycat before the accident. Henry post-1536 seems to me entirely consistent with the man he was before – just a bit grumpier because he was old, his leg hurt all the time and he was getting fatter and fatter as a result.
The shock of the jousting accident is said to have been what caused Anne to miscarry a male child a few days later. Henry was not very sympathetic and allowed charges of adultery to be trumped up against her. She was executed in May 1536 and Jane Seymour was betrothed to Henry the next day.
Jane Seymour was Henry’s ideal wife: she didn’t argue, she gave birth to a boy and then she promptly died without his having to kill her. What a catch. Henry claimed to be heartbroken at her passing, but there’s a certain amount of self-pity that has to be waded through before we can properly discern the sincerity of the emotion. I’m sure he thought he was very sad, but he’d known wives die before and bounced back very quickly. On the first occasion he got dressed up in a bright colour and had a party, and on the second, which he had ordered, he was about to get engaged to someone else. So let’s keep the size of the violin we play for him under control.
This was 1537 and it’s important to note that England had changed hugely in the last few years in a way that was freaking a lot of people out. The European Reformation, this huge schism in the western Christian church, revolutionized the context in which everything was happening. For centuries, there’d been rulers and there’d been the pope – and they argued or got on well, they denounced each other, and made up, and sometimes the one called a crusade and the other trooped off to the eastern Med for some fighting and diarrhoea.
There’d been times when there’d been an antipope – i.e. a rival pope that some people considered to be the real pope. But the notion that the real pope just didn’t matter and was some sort of diabolical impostor, an unwanted intercessor between God and man who obstructed the salvation provided by the scriptures, was a massive shift. If that’s what you believed then the pope and all devout Roman Catholics were now heretics. And if you were a Catholic, this new evangelical, reforming, Protestant agenda was itself a worse heresy than Islam.
This complete polarization of views is familiar to us today from social media. Some of the horrendous consequences of the Reformation, such as the Thirty Years’ War which raged in Europe during the seventeenth century, and remained unsurpassed in its brutal, martial murderousness until 1914, led to a few centuries in which toleration started to be valued as a mindset, and people in the liberal west could agree to differ. That civilized instinct has no place amid the electric mob rule of a Twitter discussion. The loneliness of pariah status will be familiar to many who have neglected to entirely agree with one or other of two savagely opposed points of view.
Henry VIII was in just such a lonely position, though he probably didn’t realize it. His views were unacceptable to both Catholics and Protestants – too keen on transubstantiation for the latter, too down on the pope for the former. The English Reformation is weird: it was shaped by the way different religious groups manipulated Henry’s needs, desires and theological musings. The reformers got as much as they could out of him, but were careful not to push their luck. Then the Catholics would try and nudge things back a bit, but were equally careful not to say anything nice about the pope.
One traumatic change that was being implemented by Cromwell was the dissolution of the monasteries. The reformers despised these ancient institutions, and with reason: they were often corrupt and hypocritical. Still, they had been part of the fabric of English life for a lot longer than a sole English monarchy, let alone a parliament. Getting rid of them was bound to cause trauma.
The reformers dreamed of the monasteries’ vast wealth being used to improve the conditions of the people. The Catholics, conversely, considered their ancient role of praying for humanity’s salvation, as well as providing vital services such as alms and medicine, to be irreplaceable. The compromise that was reached was to get rid of them but for the crown to keep all their wealth for Henry to build palaces and wage wars. This was how Cromwell got the king onside with the plan.
The process was made all the more sickening for religious conservatives and members of monastic institutions because it happened in two waves. A large number of smaller monasteries were dissolved in 1536 and then the remaining smaller number of large ones got closed down in 1538. In between there were rebellions and, in general, outpourings of national agony, most notably a vast uprising in the north called the Pilgrimage of Grace.
These are a reminder of how quick and radical the changes were – the whole rationale of religious existence was suddenly transformed, and by a diktat from central government rather than through any grass-roots evolution of religious feeling. However flawed many of the monasteries were, this imposition was bound to appal and frighten many. The uprisings caused stress for Henry and Cromwell and, for the rest of the reign, the king was constantly worried that some sort of rebellion would break out and be supported by an invasion from a great Catholic continental ruler, most likely Charles V. It didn’t happen, though, because Henry, whatever he thought, was a pretty lucky guy.
Was the dissolution of the monasteries the moment when England started to become accustomed to the unsettling effect of what its authority figures insist is progress? It’s often struck me as a lamentable trait in the modern British, and I think it manifests most in England, of glumly accepting change that no one likes or wants. Post office closures, the decline in manufacture, the decimation of shops and pubs in high streets, the requirement to do everything online. These are developments that very few of us like but the consensus seems to be that we need to grow up and take it: things can’t be nice, this is the real world. That’s life. Shit happens. Nothing pleasant can be made economically viable.
The French don’t take the same view. They’re much happier using their collective power to sustain a way of life they like. Hence they have a law which prevents people from staying at their desk in an office over lunch. An actual law! I only know about it because, during the Covid lockdown, it was temporarily suspended on the basis that all the restaurants and cafés were closed. Imagine having a law about something like that! Don’t work at your desk: get out and have a proper lunch. Go to a brasserie, or go home and cook. The food will be nicer and so will your experience of the day, one of a finite number you will live through.
We’d never vote for a government proposing that sort of law in England. It would get condemned as ‘Nanny State’. The notion of freedom, of English exceptionalism, would be deployed by the harsh anti-protectionist right and we’d dutifully carry on eating sandwiches over our keyboards, gradually developing ulcers and then, at the weekend, moaning that there aren’t any decent places to eat round here.
Two of these queens actually make it!
Cromwell was riding high in 1539 when he organized the king’s next marriage to someone called Anne of Cleves. Her father was the Duke of Cleves and this was part of Cromwell’s plan to cement an alliance with the leading Protestant states of western Europe. He dispatched the great painter Hans Holbein the Younger to do a portrait of Anne to show to Henry.
The king responded enthusiastically to the portrait, which is interesting because I wouldn’t say it looked exactly sexy. It wouldn’t make it into a Pirelli calendar. It’s quite a plain picture of a normal-looking woman dressed extremely oddly. The oddness of the dress is to do with it being the sixteenth century so we have to ignore that. Almost everyone I mention in this book dressed very strangely by our standards. All in all, it’s not a picture that would make you rule out marrying its subject, but it wouldn’t clinch the deal for me.
Nevertheless it clinched the deal for Henry and a marriage was organized. Poor Anne travelled to England, all nervous and excited, and then Henry took one look at her and decided he didn’t fancy her at all. But he still married her a few days later, which seems to me to compound the awkwardness. Henry couldn’t get it up, and decided that was entirely Anne’s fault and not his for being a boozy old fatso with a rotting leg.
By the standards of most relationships, Anne was quite badly treated. By the standards of Henry’s wives, she’s probably second luckiest. The marriage was swiftly annulled and for the rest of her life she lived in England in quiet retirement, accorded the status of ‘the King’s Beloved Sister’.
Nevertheless the whole episode was pretty embarrassing for floppy-cocked Henry, so Cromwell’s days were numbered. In April 1540, in the wake of the Cleves fiasco, he was made earl of Essex – a meteoric elevation for a man whose background was just as humble as Wolsey’s. But it seems Henry was just toying with him. Two months later, he was arrested, attainted and, on 28 July, executed. Henry didn’t watch it happen because he was getting married that day.
Henry’s fifth queen was Catherine Howard, niece of the Duke of Norfolk. The Howards are still the dukes of Norfolk today and they’re also still Catholics so you won’t be surprised to learn that Henry’s new marriage, and Cromwell’s demise, were signs that a conservative faction was on the rise at court. The king soon regretted this shift. He never had a minister as capable as Cromwell again and Catherine Howard was as unfaithful as Anne Boleyn was accused of being. She was executed in 1542.
But the bloated, wheezing, rotting, increasingly enraged and immobile old romantic hadn’t given up on love. The following year he married Catherine Parr. She was a reformer, so marked a turn away from the Howards’ religious conservatism and having sex with other men, but Henry’s mood continued to oscillate between Catholic and evangelical in a way that made everyone, even his new queen, episodically fear for their lives.
Catherine seems to have been an intelligent, humane woman who managed to make the old wreck of a king feel attractive and loved. She was also instrumental in reconciling him with all his children. His daughter by Anne Boleyn had been removed from the succession and declared a bastard by act of parliament just as her half-sister Princess Mary had been but, under a Third Succession Act in 1543, all of the king’s children by his various marriages were legitimized and returned to the line of succession.
One great big, extremely fucked-up family. They would now have the same inheritance rights as if they’d all been born to the same queen. Edward first, because he was a boy, and then the girls starting with Mary and followed by Elizabeth. And that is exactly what happened: they all reigned one after another and died childless. The Tudor line, which Henry had wreaked so much havoc trying to secure, was doomed anyway.
36. King Edward VI
I once saw the diplomatic genius of the Good Friday agreement of 1998 explained as having allowed both sides of the argument over Northern Ireland’s sovereignty to exist almost in parallel universes where each had got what it wanted. To Irish republicans, there was now no border so Ireland was united. Practically speaking, that was the reality. Meanwhile, to unionists, Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom – this too was an undeniable fact. Both sides could feel like they’d basically won. Everyone was sick of all the killing and this gave both sides the excuse to give the killing a rest.
In terms of the Reformation, Henry VIII acted almost like a big, terrifying, smelly and angry Good Friday agreement. His muddled and changing conception of the church allowed both sides to think that the national religion was basically what they wanted. At core, Henry remained a Catholic who believed in most of Catholic doctrine and was deeply suspicious of the more egalitarian elements of the reformers’ agenda – so the Catholics could feel like the church was still fundamentally theirs. Meanwhile the reformers could rightly reflect on the huge changes that had been made: the break with papal authority and the destruction of all monastic institutions and all the heretical praying for the souls of the dead in non-existent purgatory that that entailed. They must have felt in the ascendant too.
This fudge could not last. It didn’t have enough sugar in it. There was no way of bringing up the new king to believe the same jumble of stuff his father had, because it wasn’t at all coherent without Henry’s presiding personality. Edward had to be brought up either as a Catholic or as a Protestant. Well, it was Protestant and he really took to it.
He was only nine when he became king but he had received a top-class education. He was articulate, pious and he hated the pope. At the start of his reign, his uncle, Jane Seymour’s brother Edward, snatched the reins of power from the regency council that Henry VIII had planned and had himself made lord protector of the realm and duke of Somerset. He ran things relatively badly, paying for England’s desultory wars against France and Scotland by debasing the coinage.
This led to inflation and exacerbated the agrarian hardship already being caused by the widespread practice among landowners of enclosing common land, preventing the peasantry from using it. Somerset seemed sympathetic to the plight of those affected by this and set up a couple of commissions to look into it. They achieved nothing other than elevating the hopes of the poor, who then rebelled when their circumstances failed to improve. In 1549 there were widespread insurrections on a level not seen since the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
Weapons of mass destruction
It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the church. Of the two major rebellions, the one focused around Norwich was primarily a response to enclosure – and indeed claimed to be acting legally on behalf of Somerset’s commissioners. But the other one, down in the West Country, was about the imposition of Protestantism. The Act of Uniformity of 1549 imposed Protestant worship, via Archbishop Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, on the whole kingdom. To most people at the time, this was shocking and ungodly.
Even to some of the ruling class. Despite the overt Protestantism of the king and his regime, a party of religious conservatives still existed at court and they took the popular rebellions during Somerset’s rule as an excuse to remove him, by allying with his Protestant opponents. Most notable among these was John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. He supplanted Somerset, had himself made duke of Northumberland and then sloughed off his Catholic backers by appealing to the dyed-in-the-wool Protestantism of the king. He declared Edward ready for rule and so was made not lord protector but lord president of the Council. Effectively it was Somerset’s role, though Northumberland filled it more competently.
So a newly self-created duke of Northumberland was in charge in place of the newly self-created Duke of Somerset. In a way, this unprepossessing wrangle was the inevitable consequence of a minority – the magnates will always squabble for influence. But this was also a Seymour being supplanted by a Dudley. These were not old families; these men are not royal dukes. In the Tudor age, the horizon of ambition is widening and I’m not talking about the rise of the middle class. These families saw what the Tudors had done and didn’t see why they couldn’t do the same. Now that the bossy fatso had died and his wan orphan was the nominal root of power, it felt like a perfect time to change the royal family’s surname.
Throughout this Cranmer was working away making everything Protestant in a steady parliamentary way which appalled Catholics and also appalled some reformers who thought he should be acting more quickly and upsettingly. In 1550 Stephen Gardiner, the staunchly Catholic Bishop of Winchester who was in prison at the time, threw a spanner in Cranmer’s reforming works by expressing approval for the Book of Common Prayer, basically saying that it could be interpreted in a Catholic way.
