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In the Lion's Court
Power, Ambition, and Sudden Death in the Reign of Henry VIII
By Derek Wilson St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2001 Derek Wilson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8634-6
CHAPTER 1
A Question of Identity
It was the end of time; it was the beginning of time. For those who knew their almanacs or listened to the apocalyptic rhetoric of fiery preachers the approach of the year 1500 had a doom-laden significance. Fins de siècles always possessed a special interest for men and women who knew that the world ticked to the rhythm of an inexorable divine clock but at the conclusion of this particular century the consciousness of standing on the threshold of a new epoch was particularly strong. Ever since the twelfth-century monk Joachim of Fiore had prophesied the imminence of creation's third and final age, star watchers and interpreters of human affairs had been writing the script for the inauguration of the Janus era which would be both the beginning of the end and the end of the beginning. Now, as the world reached the halfway point of the second Christian millennium, a multiplication of momentous events seemed to be hastening mankind towards a decisive turning point.
Christian civilisation was on the march. Constantinople, its eastern bastion, may have fallen to the forces of Islam in 1453, but Sultan Mehemed, the 'Conqueror', was long dead and his empire under increasing pressure. In the West the year 1492 – Anno 7000 in the Byzantine calendar and long prophesied as the date for Armageddon – brought the end of a centuries-old culture conflict as the Moors were expelled from Spain. The decade ended on a flurry of maritime activity associated with the names of Columbus, Dias, Da Gama, Cabot, Ojeda, Vespucci and Cabral, which, as geographers believed, made the whole of Asia vulnerable to the Gospel and commercial exploitation.
Yet, what was this Christendom poised to extend its boundaries so dramatically? Visionaries proclaimed it to be nothing but a ship of fools. Such was the title of both a book and a painting presented to the world at this very fulcrum moment in human destiny and whether we read Sebastian Brant's impassioned derision:
The whole world lives in darksome night,
In blinded sinfulness persisting,
While every street sees fools existing
or gaze upon Hieronymous Bosch's boatload of doomed merrymakers, the message is the same: the madness of sin has possessed all sorts and conditions of men. From pope to peasant, from emperor to eremite, from monk to merchant, from priest to prostitute and pederast, the denizens of a supposedly Christian society wallow insanely in pride, gluttony, avarice, fornication and warmongering, while from despairing saints the cry is torn, 'How long, O Lord, how long?'
There was, of course, nothing new about denunciations of sin and exhortations to righteousness. If it were possible to gauge such things we should probably discover that Europe was no more or less a sink of iniquity than it had been for centuries. What was new was the prowling abroad of an intense, rampant, questing spirituality. Ardent souls were seeking, perhaps as never before, a meaningful faith-life for themselves and their society. Gospel revivalism surfaced in scores of different ways: renewed monastic asceticism; increased traditional devotion at altars, shrines, chantries and pilgrimage sites; publication of vernacular catechisms and holiness manuals for the growing number of literate men and women (Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ received its first English translation in 1503); a plethora of lay communities for those who wished to be in the world but not of it; translation and colportage of Bible fragments – some clandestine, some officially blessed – many illustrated with affecting woodcuts and loaded glosses (the equivalents of the sensationalising photography and banner headlines of today's tabloids); clandestine heretical networks comprised for the most part of artisans, harmless in themselves but corporately a sufficient irritant to justify sporadic investigation and attempts at suppression.
All these contributed to and were nourished by a ragout of popular attitudes, comprising confusion about what the Church actually taught, superstitious adherence to religious externals, scepticism and a growing indignation with the power – spiritual and temporal – exercised by the clergy. In this world, through tithes, fees, indulgence sales and papal taxation, the priestly caste battened on men's material goods and, in the next world, through their privileged access to the court of heaven, they held a lien over the souls of believers and their departed loved ones. Yet, as the common gossip ran in alehouse, marketplace and royal antechamber, the ecclesiastical establishment exhibited few of those virtues of humility, self-control and charity to which its members exhorted the laity. Men in the upper levels of society who received their information along diplomatic, political and mercantile supply lines knew just how bad things were at all levels of the Church, right to the very top.
Corruption had reached new depths with the scandalous regime of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, but the Lord had chastised him through the French army of Charles VIII which rampaged through Rome in 1494. At least, such was the spin put on this shocking event by the Florentine apocalypticist Girolamo Savonarola, and Charles was not the only one to believe that God had raised him up to be the Last Emperor, the scourge of the Antichrist, the harbinger of the Age of Gold. His invasion of papal territory and his demand for a general council to reform the Church amounted to a sword point demonstration that Vatican power, expressed through excommunication, interdict and inquisition, was on the wane. National rulers were demanding greater control over the ecclesiastical institutions within their boundaries and they did not lack for scholars whose scriptoria were stuffed with theological justifications.
What was sauce for the goose was sauce for the goslings. Criticism, invective and ribaldry directed against inadequate clergy and the religious whose lives were less than exemplary were the stuff of common culture and had been for generations, but as the year 1500 drew near scepticism was more widespread than ever before. It was strongest among those who cared most. Devout clergy and laity, idealistic students and indignant preachers urged the need for reform and there were those whose passionate concern convinced them of the divine judgement about to come crashing down on God's disobedient people.
O prostitute Church, thou hast displayed thy foulness to the whole world, and stinkest unto Heaven. Thou hast multiplied thy fornications in Italy, in France, in Spain, and all other parts. Behold, I will put forth my hand, saith the Lord, I will smite thee, thou infamous wretch; my sword shall fall on thy children, on thy house of shame, on thy harlots, on thy palaces, and my justice shall be made known. Earth and heaven, the angels, the good and the wicked, all shall accuse thee, and no man shall be with thee; I will give thee into thy enemy's hand ... O priests and friars, ye, whose evil example hath entombed this people in the sepulchre of ceremonial, I tell ye this sepulchre shall be burst asunder, for Christ will revive His Church in His spirit.
So Savonarola thundered from the pulpit of Florence's Duomo and many throughout Europe not cursed with the gift of prophecy shared a gut feeling that things could no longer be suffered to continue as they were. Such conviction was not stifled with the deaths of both Savonarola and his unlikely champion in 1498 – the one crushed by the Vatican machine, the other expiring in apoplectic rage on a pile of urine-soaked straw.
The most effective group of critics at the turn of the century and in the years which followed was a Christendom-wide band of brothers known to historians, but known inadequately, as 'Christian humanists'. These members of Europe's intellectual avant-garde were the draughtsmen of a redeemed society. Like visionary architects aspiring to raise innovative cityscapes upon the rubble of decayed slums, they sought to sweep away the wasteful belligerence of princes, the corruption of churchmen, the exploitation of landowners and all the ills to which their world was prey and to raise a beautiful and magnificent new order in which peace, justice and humanity should prevail. The foundation of this brave new world was to be, in a word, education. A new generation of society's leaders, instructed in the wisdom of the ancients and, more especially, in the lively oracles of God as contained in Holy Scripture, would effect the transformation for which the humanists longed.
It was a century and a half-since Petrarch had attacked the traditional teaching methods of the universities which equated learning with intellectual conviction based on the study of hallowed proof texts: 'This prattling of the dialecticians will never come to an end; it throws up summaries and definitions like bubbles, matter indeed for endless controversies.' Petrarch and his Italian followers were largely concerned with rediscovering the 'virtues' advocated by classical authors through a return to the original texts, as opposed to comparative studies of what later authorities had written about them. It was only a matter of time before radical scholars applied the same principles to the teaching and learning of Christian doctrine. And it was only a matter of technology before this novel approach became the basis for revolution. The invention of printing with movable type, the most stupendous development in human communication between the appearance of the scriptorium and that of the Internet, delivered scholars from their semi-isolation in Europe's centres of higher learning and unleashed an excitement at the ready exchange of ideas equivalent to that which now gives a buzz to surfers on the World Wide Web.
Christian humanists were angry with and scornful of a Church hierarchy which had colluded in the obfuscation of the Gospel and which, therefore, bore much of the responsibility for the appalling state of contemporary society. They aimed to reform the educational system by a study of original Greek, Latin and Hebrew texts, especially the books of the Bible, by producing new translations purified from mistaken readings and scribal errors, by expounding ancient wisdom in ways which spoke to the heart and the will as well as the intellect, and by making this 'New Learning' as widely available as possible. Some even went so far as to advocate that ploughboys should learn to read so that they could study the Bible in the vernacular. They doubted not that this evangelical revival, once begun, would permeate and reform the whole of society.
That may strike the modern cynic as naïve but the Christian humanists were no bunch of irresponsible junkies shooting up on some ideological narcotic which made a harsh world suddenly seem cosily pink and furry at the edges. The past bore frequent testimony to the bouleversant power of Holy Scripture on the lives of individuals and communities, and the immediate future would confirm the brightest dreams (or darkest nightmares) of those who knew how devastating could be the unsheathed 'sword of the Spirit which is the word of God'. The great monastic reforms of the Middle Ages, no less than the ebullition of heresies such as Lollardy and Waldensianism, had been inspired by the rediscovery of New Testament truths. Examples were legion of individual conversions wrought by the bursting of biblical light into lives darkened by ignorance and sin. A fourteenth-century Archbishop of Armagh was far from alone in being able to testify, 'I used to think that I had penetrated to the depths of your truth with the citizens of your heaven, until you, the solid truth, shone upon me in your Scriptures, scattering the cloud of my error and showing me how I was croaking in the marshes with the toads and frogs.' If God had enlightened groups and individuals sporadically throughout history, what might he not do in the dawning new age through the words of the Bible widely available to devout scholars and dynamically expounded by a new breed of preachers? The man acknowledged as the leader of the humanist revolt, and whom we shall now meet, enthusiastically prophesied that whole nations 'sworn to idolatry, by a sudden change of life, shall embrace the teachings of true piety'. What the humanists were proposing was an effective, interiorised and essentially lay religion which could be followed outside the cloister and did not depend ultimately upon those means of grace in which the institutionalised Church held a monopoly. It is difficult for us to comprehend the zeal and joy with which this vision was embraced by educated Latin-speakers throughout western Christendom and, beyond them, by humbler men and women who saw for themselves a new destiny not dominated by a monolithic ecclesiastical establishment.
Of course, not everyone in 1499 was aware that society was trembling on the brink of change. Most people were preoccupied most of the time with the usual mundane pursuits of making a living, making a career, making love, making friends and making enemies. Nevertheless this was one of those ages which was self-conscious and introspective. When people lifted their eyes to the horizon they did see lightning flashes and lurid clouds. The world in which Henry VIII and his six Thomases grew up was one in which the pious dreamed new dreams, the learned thought new thoughts and the powerful dared new deeds. It is this which gives significance to a mundane event in the middle of 1499.
On a summer's morning in the last year of the fifteenth century a witty young man about town, a crotchety Dutch scholar and an eight-year-old boy held a brief, learned conversation in a fine Kentish house. This is the earliest recorded meeting between the future King Henry VIII and Thomas More, the first of six remarkable men who shared the same 'chrysten' name and were to share the privileges and perils of power beneath the Crown when the little boy at Eltham Palace became the most capricious tyrant ever to occupy the English throne. The third member of this ad hoc symposium was Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam and we only know of this event, trivial in itself, because he wrote an account of it a quarter of a century later when the twists and turns of time rendered it worthy of record. The brief encounter in the summer of 1499 has possessed a curiosity value for later generations because it brought together for the first time the scholar who more than any other championed the new ideas that were to devastate English society, the Prince who would give those ideas legal force and the lawyer who would die resisting them.
The man who took his friend to visit the royal children in the summer of 1499 was twenty-one years of age and about to enter his fourth year at Lincoln's Inn. On the face of it he had just about everything going for him: a comfortable home; a father who was an ambitious, prominent barrister well able to pull the strings necessary to establish his son in the same profession; the best education money could buy; and he already had valuable contacts in high places (not many citizens of London enjoyed access to royal palaces). Better than all these, he possessed the qualities and talents necessary to make the most of his material advantages: a brilliant analytical mind; a ready wit; a conscientious application to study; a natural gift for acting; and an ability to make friends.
More's progress through the law's nursery was at this time proceeding rapidly. The combination of his own talents and his father's influence (John More was a senior member of Lincoln's Inn) set him on the fast track to qualification as a barrister, which took less favoured mortals upwards often years.
He attended lectures delivered by 'readers' who were so called because they expounded from the great medieval standard works but by 1499 he was sufficiently well versed in the texts to become a reader himself at one of the Inns of Chancery (Furnival's). He took an increasingly prominent part in the 'moots', the debates on points of law arising from current cases. At Westminster Hall he was allowed to assist the pleading barristers. The lofty and already ancient building was divided by partitions into several enclosures or courts where the justices of King's Bench heard criminal or other cases affecting the Crown, those of Common Pleas determined civil actions and those of Exchequer dealt with revenue matters. More may also have accompanied, out of term, the justices who went on circuit to preside over civil and criminal cases in the provinces.
There was, as there always is, more to student life than dry books and dryer expounders of books. London offered a host of diversions to young men with long purses or indulgent parents. The narrow, gorged streets of the capital were a bustle with taverns, cook shops, brothels and the unscrupulous hawkers of fashion accessories, bawdy ballads, cheap ale and sundry items 'fallen off the back of a wagon'. They were the battleground for affrays between bands of students and apprentices. In Smithfield a prodigal away from home could find horse races and wrestling bouts to waste his substance on, while for the more energetic there was archery on Bunhill or Finsbury Fields or the 'beastly fury and extreme violence' of football. The City corporation and the livery companies provided public spectacles in the form of pageants, processions, mystery plays and bonfires. And the inns themselves had an annual routine of banquets, plays and seasonal revels.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In the Lion's Court by Derek Wilson. Copyright © 2001 Derek Wilson. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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