Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity. David Starkey

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ known as ‘The Pilgrimage of Grace’. The first uprising was in Lincolnshire, and spread quickly across the North of England. Under their banner of the Five Wounds of Christ, noblemen and peasants joined together, demanding the restoration of the monasteries and the return of the old religion. Monks and priests played a leading part in the revolt, preaching incendiary sermons and even wearing armour. Adam Sedbar, abbot at Jervaulx Abbey, wasn’t one of them. Instead, when the rebel hordes turned up at the gates of his monastery, he fled to the surrounding moorland. But the threat to burn down his monastery forced him to return, however reluctantly, and join the revolt.

      Secure in their control of the North, the formidable, welldisciplined rebel army marched south. By the time they reached Doncaster, only the king’s much smaller forces stood between them and London and, perhaps, Henry’s throne.

      Scawsby Leys, now an unprepossessing track, was once the line of the Great North Road where it crosses the broad plain of the northern bank of the River Don. And it was here at dawn on the morning of 26 October that the rebels called a general muster of their troops. The flower of the North was there, and when the final count was taken they numbered 30,000 men with another 12,000 in reserve at Pontefract. It was the largest army that England had seen since the Wars of the Roses, and it wasn’t the king’s. But even though the rebels faced only 8000 of Henry’s forces, they chose to negotiate. They persuaded themselves that the attack on the Church was the work not of the king but of his wicked advisers like Cranmer. They were also double-crossed by the king’s representative. He promised them pardon and, believing him, the huge rebel army dispersed.

      But a few months later, a new minor revolt in the North gave Henry the excuse he needed to break his promises and exact revenge. The leaders of the revolt were arrested and sent to London for trial. Henry was especially severe on clerics who had been involved, even when, like Abbot Sedbar of Jervaulx, they had been coerced into joining the revolt. Sedbar was arrested with the rest and sent to the Tower. Then he was tried, condemned and saw Jervaulx Abbey confiscated. The aristocratic leaders of the revolt were beheaded, but the rest, including Sedbar himself, suffered the full horrors of hanging, drawing and quartering. Henry’s supreme headship of the Church, which had begun in the name of freeing England from the papal yoke, was turning into a new royal tyranny, to be enforced in blood.

      No one was exempt. In May 1536, after only three years of marriage, Anne was executed on trumped-up charges of adultery, incest and sexual perversion. But her real crimes were less exotic. She had failed to adjust from the dominant role of mistress to the submissive role of wife and, above all, like Catherine before her, she had failed to give Henry a son.

      Within twenty-four hours of Anne’s execution Henry was betrothed again, and on 30 May he married his third wife, Jane Seymour. Demure and submissive, conservative in religion, Jane was everything that Anne was not. And in October 1537 she did what Anne and Catherine had both failed to do, and gave birth to a healthy son and heir, Edward. Jane died a few days later of puerperal fever, but the boy lived and became Henry’s pride and joy.

      All the problems that had led to the break with Rome – the king’s first two disputed marriages, his lack of a male heir – were now solved. With the occasions of the dispute out of the way, why didn’t the naturally conservative Henry return to the bosom of the Roman Church?

      The answer lies in Hans Holbein’s great dynastic mural of Henry VIII (page 6 of plate section). The original, of which only a copy survives, was sited in the king’s private apartments and as such takes us into his very mind. The date, 1537, is the year of Prince Edward’s birth. In the foreground is the proud father, Henry VIII, together with the recently deceased mother, Jane Seymour. Behind are Henry’s own parents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, while in the middle there are inscribed Latin verses which explain the meaning of the painting. ‘Which is the Greater,’ the verses ask, ‘the father or the son?’ ‘Henry VII was great,’ they reply, ‘for he brought to an end the Wars of the Roses. But Henry VIII was greater, indeed the greatest for while he was King true religion was restored and the power of Popes trodden under foot.’

      This, then, is why Henry refused to return to Rome. The Supremacy may have begun as a mere convenient device to facilitate his marriage to Anne Boleyn. But it had quickly taken on a life of its own as Henry had persuaded himself that it was his birthright, raison d’être and above all his passport to fame, not only in relation to Henry VII and all the other Kings of England, but in the eyes of posterity as well.

      Henry had got what he wanted. But to do so he’d had to use ideas based on Lutheranism, which he detested. The symbol of these compromises was the new English translation of the Bible. The title page shows how literally Henry took his new grand title of ‘Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England’. At the top of the page, of course, appears Christ as God the Son, but he’s very small. Instead, the composition is dominated by the huge fleshly presence of Henry VIII. As king and Supreme Head, he sits enthroned in the centre with, on the left, the bishops representing the clergy and Church and, on the right, the Privy Council representing the laity and the state. Below there are the people, who all join together in the grateful, obedient acclamation of ‘Vivat, vivat Rex’: Long live the King, God Save the King.

      The title page of the Great Bible represents in microcosm the extraordinary achievement of Henry’s reign. He had broken the power of the Pope, dissolved the monasteries, defeated rebellion, beheaded traitors and made himself supreme over Church and state. All the powers and all the passions of a ferocious nationalism were contained in his person and at his command. No other monarch had ever been so powerful. Fortescue believed that the liberties of Englishmen consisted of the independence and power that nobles and yeomen had in relation to the Crown. But that balance had been upset by the Royal Supremacy. The monarchy, rich in land, money and spiritual authority, had no competition in the kingdom – not from overmighty subjects, not from freeborn yeomen. Henry had been seeking glory all his life. At last he had found it.

      But the Royal Supremacy also contained the seeds of its own destruction. For in employing the new biblically based theology, Henry had allowed into England those very subversive religious ideas he had once tried so hard to suppress. The genie of Protestantism was out of the bottle.

      And it was Protestantism which, only a hundred years later, would first challenge the powers of the monarchy, and finally dethrone and behead a King of England.

      

       SHADOW OF THE KING

      EDWARD VI, MARY I , ELIZABETH I

      IN 1544 KING HENRY VIII, now in the third decade of his reign, bestrode England like an ageing colossus. By making himself Supreme Head of the Church of England he had taken the monarchy to the peak of its power. But at a huge personal cost.

      For the supremacy had been born out of Henry’s desperate search for an heir and love. The turmoil of six marriages, two divorces, two executions and a tragic bereavement had produced three children by these different and mutually hostile mothers. It was a fractured and unhappy royal family. Now the king felt it was time for reconciliation.

      Henry’s reunion with his family is commemorated in a famous painting, known as ‘The Family of Henry VIII’. The painting shows Henry enthroned between his son and heir, the seven-year-old Edward, and, to emphasize the line of dynastic succession, Edward’s long-dead mother Jane Seymour. Standing farther off to the right is Henry’s elder daughter Mary, whom he bastardized when he divorced her mother, and to the left his younger daughter Elizabeth, whom he also bastardized СКАЧАТЬ