October 2007

Parish History Episode 78 - The Dying King

During the years from 1541 to 1547, the young and newly-ordained Bernard Gilpin seems to have remained in and around London, as mentioned in last month’s “Signpost”, conducting services and preaching sermons, at the invitation of parish priests. He was at this time of a decidedly conservative cast of mind, and seems to have been happy to preach in accordance with the doctrines laid down in the Six Articles.

King Henry had probably never heard of him, but the King would have been happy to learn that there was at least one gifted preacher, of conservative views, at work in London. Henry was aware that many of the leading men in the affairs both of the Church and of the Kingdom were “heretics”, and he sometimes joked about it. Others at his Court - Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, for instance, or Bishop Gardiner of Winchester - were, he knew, of a very different disposition. Such “conservatives” were very pleased at the way things now seemed to be going.

But then, in 1543, things seemed suddenly about to change. The King, rumour had it, was going wooing. He intended to take a sixth wife. But who was the lucky lady going to be?

Henry no longer wanted a young, flighty bride. He realised that the choice of Catherine Howard had been a disaster. He now wanted a woman of some maturity, educated and able to discuss serious matters with him, but still young enough to bear children. (He seemed to have forgotten his experience with Anne of Cleves.)

His choice fell upon Catherine Parr, a widow prominent in London society (the third Catherine whom he had married). She had also been prominent in circles which liked to discuss the ideas brought in by the New Learning - ideas which soon led on to a questioning of the authority of the traditional Church. In other words, the King’s new bride seemed to be something of a Protestant.

Like Anne of Cleves, she did not see the rôle of a queen as simply being a matter of looking pretty and smiling graciously. But she had more sense than to argue with her husband, or to try and correct his misunderstandings. Instead, she devoted much time to the upbringing and education of the King’s three legitimate (or once-legitimate) children: Catherine of Aragon’s daughter, Mary; Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth; and Jane Seymour’s son, Edward. Mary and Elizabeth had formerly both been declared illegitimate, and struck out of the Succession, but now they were restored to the rank of princesses, and acknowledged by the King. An Act of Parliament established that the Succession to the Throne would go to the king’s eldest son (or to that son’s son, if the heir died while his father was still alive), then to younger sons, in order of age, and then to daughters - such rules have ever since applied to the Succession to the English Crown.

Thus, when King Henry died, the succession should go to Prince Edward; or, if Edward died first, to the Princess Mary, and then to the Princess Elizabeth.

Having established that, Queen Catherine set about making herself responsible for the education of the three royal children. She secured learnèd men to tutor them in classical and modern languages, in Divinity and other sciences, as well as mentors to instruct them in skills appropriate to their rank and gender, such as riding, fencing, music, dancing, and embroidery. Above all, Catherine saw to it that all three children had religious instruction from teachers of a Protestant sympathy.

These arrangements were of little importance as far as Princess Mary was concerned, for she was twenty-seven years old at the time of her father’s sixth marriage, and she could make up her mind for herself, and indeed she had already done so. Naturally indignant at the way that her father had cast out her mother, and at the way that she had, for a time, been disinherited and declared illegitimate, she blamed all the troubles of England on her father’s lust, volatility and greed, and on the way that he had been influenced by what she saw as false religion. Protestant tutors had little effect on her mind. But Princess Elizabeth was only ten, and her mind was more malleable; while Prince Edward was (in 1543) only six. They would both be easy to influence. And they were being influenced by their educators.

With King Henry prematurely old, and possibly dying, and Prince Edward likely soon to succeed to the Throne, the “conservative” faction realised that it was essential that the royal children must be got away from the influence of Queen Catherine and her theologians. The simplest way to achieve this, it was felt, was to get rid of the Queen. Henry, after all, had used and discarded five previous queens. Why not bring a credible accusation against the present Catherine?

As there seemed no possibility of making a plausible accusation of infidelity (to her husband) against Queen Catherine, it was decided to charge her with heresy. Many other men and women were at this time being accused of heresy (generally, denying one or more of the Six Articles), and those found guilty were being publicly burned to death. One of the most renowned victims was a lady called Anne Askew, who had been a member of a close circle of friends, who had met regularly at Catherine Parr’s house, to discuss matters of scholarship and religion, until the time that Catherine was summoned by the King to be his sixth wife.

One evening in 1546, therefore, when the Court was in residence in Hampton Court Palace, Bishop Gardiner and others approached the King, to report to him that the crowd who had watched Anne Askew burn, had appeared to be sympathetic to the victim, and that, instead of hurling insults or missiles at the woman, they had sung psalms of praise and comfort, apparently to try and assure her of her salvation. Gardiner suggested that the only way to halt the tide of Lutheran heresy (now re·inforced by even more extreme ideas emanating from the Swiss theologians Zwingli and Calvin) from spreading over the land was to be merciless in stamping out all infection, even at the highest levels.

He and his friends then appalled the King by describing the really radical ideas that had been circulating amongst Catherine and her friends. She, like Anne Askew, obviously deserved to be burned. But, in view of her rank, it might be better to be merciful, to send her to the Tower, to make enquiries into her beliefs, and then to have her head chopped off, “in the usual manner”.

The King was indeed appalled, and a decision was made to arrest the Queen in the morning. A horseman was despatched to London, to give orders that the Tower be made ready to receive another of the King’s wives. It was late at night that the horseman arrived, and it was not until the following morning that a detachment of Yeomen of the Guard, under the command of one Captain Wriothesley, marched out from London, with orders to arrest the Queen, and to take her to the Tower for interrogation.

Unfortunately for them, and for Bishop Gardiner, there had apparently been a reconciliation between Henry and Catherine that night as they lay in bed, and when the Yeomen arrived the following day to effect the arrest, they found the King and Queen sitting on a bench in Hampton Court Gardens, looking like a couple of young lovers. Wriothesley, who seems to have been a man of remarkably low perspicacity, stepped forward, coughed politely, and announced that he was arresting the Queen. The King shouted at him to be off. Wriothesley defended himself, saying that he was only obeying orders, whereupon the King ordered him to do various impossible things, and the squad of Yeomanry retreated in disarray.

This incident, in 1546, sounds like a silly scene from a stage comedy (or rather a farce). But it was to be an important milestone in England’s steady drift towards Protestantism. The influence of Bishop Gardiner was, from this moment, at an end (his nephew also became a Catholic martyr that year, for denying the Royal Supremacy, which didn’t do Bishop Gardiner any good). Queen Catherine continued to control the education of the royal children. And the King had, as it turned out, less than a year to live. And he would be succeeded by the young and malleable Prince Edward.

On a cold January day in 1547, King Henry died. The bells of London tolled in mourning for the passing of a monarch who had reigned for nearly forty years. They then rang out in joy, in proclamation of a new king, a few days short of his tenth birthday. The King is dead! Long live the King!

King Henry’s will was opened and read. Much of it concerned directions for the payment of numerous priests to chant Masses for Henry’s soul.

Young Edward read it over, and smiled at the idea that any priests could sing his father’s soul into Paradise. His ministers of state pointed out that there might be better things to do with the money than to pay priests to sing.

Chronicling the reign of Henry VIII in terms of his series of marriages can make it seem like one long, sick comedy. But England, along with much of the rest of Europe, was at this time gong through a much more serious economic crisis. As was mentioned in an earlier article, the flow of gold and silver which the Spaniards were bringing into Europe from the mines of Mexico and Peru was causing inflation, and destabilising the currencies. England, perhaps as a consequence of King Henry’s extravagances, seems to have suffered more than many other kingdoms.

Despite the loot from hundreds of monasteries, Henry found it impossible to live within his means. Besides the ostentation of his Court, he was fond of foreign, and largely pointless, wars. He engaged in three bouts of war, in 1512-4, 1522-6, and 1544-6, simultaneously with both France and Scotland. The first of these wars remains in English memory because of our victory of Flodden. The wars with France had been all but forgotten, until the recent raising of the battleship “Mary Rose”, which capsized and sank while defending Portsmouth from a French raid.

Henry tried to overcome his economic difficulties by debasing the currency, a trick equivalent to devaluing it, as we do in modern times with paper banknotes. The first debasement, in 1536, seemed successful, and kept things ticking over for a year or two, but later debasements, down to that of 1549, in his son’s reign, proved less and less successful. Many people lost confidence in the currency, though speculators seemed to cope all right, and even to grow rich.

Nowadays (or at any rate, until very recently) the industrial power of the workers can generally keep wages more or less in balance with inflation. That certainly was not the case in Tudor times. Labourers had once been able to better their standard of living in the years after the Black Death, but that was most of two hundred years in the past. However, the gains they won in the late Fourteenth Century had been maintained throughout most of the Fifteenth Century. But, from about 1500 onwards (from the time when the first gold shipments reached Spain), the purchasing power of a man’s wages seems to have continually declined, to reach an all-time low about 1600, when, it has been estimated, a building labourer’s wage would buy just about a quarter of what the same man could have purchased with his pay a century earlier.

This was in part the result of debasement and inflation, and in part due to unemployment forcing down wages. The unemployment in turn was due, in contemporary opinion, to such factors as land enclosures, the substitution of sheep-rearing for arable farming, the dissolution of the monasteries (though labour would still be needed by whoever bought up the monastic estate), and by the relative peace which had prevailed since the end of the Wars of the Roses, which reduced the need for the landed aristocracy to retain private armies of paid retainers.

In the middle of the Sixteenth Century, however, a further cause of poverty was the rising price of bread: too many bad harvests (a punishment from God, because of Henry’s eccentric religious policies ?) had sent the price of wheat and other grains soaring. A table of the varying prices for wheat, at different periods, shows that the normal price in the late Fifteenth Century was about six shillings a quarter, and that, after some fluctuations, was what the price was after the 1538 harvest.

Thereafter the price rose dramatically, doubling by 1543, and trebling by 1545. The next three harvests were relatively bountiful, but then prices rose steeply again, reaching a pound a quarter in 1551, and then, after two better years, soaring again in ’54, ’55, and ’56, so that the price was as much as thirty shillings a quarter after the 1556 harvest (God not satisfied with Mary’s return to traditional religion either?) Deaths were recorded that year in parish registers, particularly in London, as being due to dearth - the Tudor word for famine.

It was townsmen who suffered most from the rising prices. The peasant on the land, particularly if he inhabited a remote spot like Houghton, may have felt little effect from the debasements. The parish priest and his curates were also paid in kind (through the tithe system), and so they also used cash relatively little. Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall, living in state in Auckland Castle, also, I assume, managed to “get by”.

Bernard Gilpin probably found the situation difficult. He depended on fees paid to him by the parishes where he assisted. But he could ask for more, and he was probably better off than his former chamber-fellow, Tom Neal. Tom was now a Professor of Hebrew, and would be living on a fixed income, which every year would be of less and less value.

[Economic statistics are always rather confused, and difficult to interpret properly. Perhaps some historians would hold a different view of the economy of Tudor England. I have taken the above statistics from a work by C. S. L. Davies, called “Peace, Print and Protestantism”. Davies draws his statistical tables from works by P. J. Bowden and by Brown & Hopkins.]

Dick Toy

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