HENRY VIII.
AFTER succeeding to the throne, Henry VIII. passed a few tranquil days in the Tower, but his sanguinary nature soon showed itself, and his first victims were his father’s most trusted counsellors. Having formed a new Council, Henry had Sir Henry Stafford (the Duke of Buckingham’s brother), Sir Richard Empsom, and Edmund Dudley arrested, the former on some slight charge of disaffection of which he was able to clear himself, and the two others on the charge of extortion during the late reign.
Empsom and Dudley were disliked throughout the country, having been the tools of the late King’s intense avarice, which became his consuming passion towards the close of his life; both men appear to have enforced his tyrannical policy with extreme harshness. Henry VIII. benefited by his father’s miserliness, however, for the seventh Henry left the colossal sum, for those times, of one million eight hundred thousand pounds. His son, in order to obtain popularity at the beginning of his reign, gave up his father’s ministers to gratify the popular clamour against them, and although Empsom and Dudley both deserved punishment, it was deemed necessary for form’s sake not to condemn them without a specified charge. The Council was instructed, therefore, to trump up a charge of conspiracy against the King’s person; and, upon this the two men were condemned and executed upon Tower Hill.
Henry then bethought himself of marriage, and took to wife his sister-in-law, Catherine of Arragon, he being then only nineteen years of age, and Catherine five-and-twenty. For the first few years this appears to have been a happy union; but it was one much to be regretted, as it brought Mary Tudor into the world.
Henry possessed a handsome presence and a genial bluff manner, and as long as all went well with him, and his least wish was carried into instant execution, he could be amiable and even attractive. But his character was both cruel and crafty, and, in later years, these defects became more strongly marked. With old age and infirmity, he became more akin to a wild animal than to aught human; and although he was personally popular amongst the great bulk of the people, on account of his magnificence and prodigality, no greater tyrant ever sat upon the English throne.
Froude has in vain tried to whitewash Henry’s character. The early years of his reign were indeed years of promise, but Henry must be judged, not by his promise, but by his life and deeds; and the butcher of Anne Boleyn, of More and Fisher, can only be regarded as a worthy colleague of the worst tyrants that have from their height of place been the curse and bane of their subjects.
Henry, with his love of show and splendour, gave himself and Catherine a gorgeous wedding ceremony. They had held their court at the Tower previous to their nuptials, and on the 21st of June the wedding took place. Never had the English court made so magnificent a show as at this time. The costumes of the men vied in splendour with those of the women, and many of the great nobles literally bore their fortunes upon their backs. The King blazed in a habit of crimson velvet, lined with ermine and covered with diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and other gems. And as he rode through the streets, bareheaded, on a charger arrayed in damasked cloth of gold, he was surrounded and followed by a suite of knights and nobles, all in crimson velvet or scarlet cloth, Sir Thomas Brandon, the Master of the Horse, being the most splendid figure in the procession next to the King. Brandon, the chronicler tells us, was arrayed in “tissue broudered with roses of fine gold, and having a massy balderick of gold.” He led the King’s spare horse by a silken rein, “trapped barde wise, with harneis broudered with bullion golde,” and he was followed by nine children of honour, “apparelled in blewe velvet, poudered with floure delices of gold and chains of goldsmithes woorke, every one of their horses trapped with a trapper of the King’s title.”
The Queen’s cortege was no less magnificent. Catherine was seated in a chariot drawn by two white palfreys, and was attired “in white satyn embroidered, her heire hangyng downe to her backe, and on her hedde a coronall, set with many rich orient stones.” She was followed by a crowd of ladies riding white palfreys, dressed in cloth of gold and silver, these again being followed by an army of attendants.
The coronation was soon followed by executions; Henry seems to have required blood-shedding as a kind of relaxation, and to have caused it to flow with as much delight as he participated in the pomps and splendours of his regal state. His next victim, after Empson and Dudley, was Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk. Although the only crime that could be brought against him was his consanguinity to the Blood Royal of the Plantagenets, it was quite a sufficient excuse for the King, and Suffolk was beheaded in 1513. He had been born in 1464, his father being John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, and his mother Elizabeth Plantagenet, daughter of Richard, Duke of York, consequently he was of the Blood Royal by his mother’s side, and, through her, nephew to Edward IV. and Richard III. Edmund de la Pole had surrendered the Dukedom of Suffolk in 1493, but was attainted in 1504, imprisoned in the Tower in 1506, and executed seven years later. “Audacious, strong and prompt in council” is the character given to Suffolk by a contemporary writer. The title of Duke of Suffolk was bestowed by Henry upon his brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, who had made such a fine figure at his marriage.
Half-a-dozen years passed, and again the Tower prisons were filled, some of the prisoners there having been concerned in a City riot. With these was a Dr Bell, charged with “inflammatory and seditious preaching.” During this riot the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Roger Cholmondeley (whose effigy is in St Peter’s Chapel), fired the Tower guns upon the City, but the damage done by the cannonade seems to have been very slight.
In 1521 a descendant of Edward II. was brought to the fortress; this was Edward Bohun, Duke of Buckingham, who traced his descent from the grandfather of Richard II. through Anne the eldest daughter of Thomas of Woodstock. Wolsey, now all-powerful, hated Buckingham for the arrogance of his manner towards him, the Duke never troubling to conceal his contempt for the lowly born, but ambitious Cardinal. Wolsey’s opportunity for being revenged upon the nobleman for his insolence came, when some ill-guarded expressions uttered by Buckingham were repeated to him; the Duke was immediately arrested and taken to the Tower. This was on the 16th of January 1521, and on the 13th of the following month he was tried on the charge of high treason and sentenced to death. Holinshed, in his Chronicle, describes how Buckingham was taken by water from the Tower to Westminster. A barge had been furnished for the occasion with a carpet and cushions, and when the Duke was brought back from Westminster in the same manner, but with the axe’s edge turned towards him, he refused to take the seat which he had occupied on his way to his trial, saying to Sir Thomas Lovel, “When I came to Westminster I was Lord High Constable, and Duke of Buckingham, but now, poor Edward Bohun.” It is interesting to see how closely Shakespeare has followed Holinshed’s description of this episode in Buckingham’s condemnation, in his play of Henry VIII.:
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Vaux. |
Prepare there, the Duke is coming: see the barge be ready; |
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Buckingham. |
Nay, Sir Nicholas, |
In Brewer’s Introduction to the third volume of “Foreign and Domestic State Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII.,” is the following interesting account of Buckingham’s trial and execution:—
“As trials for treason were conducted in those days it was little better than a question of personal credibility, assertion against assertion; and very few reasonable men could entertain doubts as to the issue. The King had already pronounced judgment, he had examined the witnesses, encouraged and read their correspondence, and expressed his belief in the Duke’s guilt. Who was to gainsay it? Who should be bold enough to assert that the King had arrived at a false conclusion, and that such manners of procedure were fatal to justice? In a court also, constituted of men who were not lawyers by profession, who had received no training for such nice questions, who understood nothing of the salutary laws of legal evidence, what hope could there be for the accused? How could he expect that protection which not only innocence but guilt had a right to demand until the charge be fairly and fully proven? The only lawyer employed was the Attorney-General, on behalf of the Crown. But in those days Attorneys-General regarded themselves as the servants of the Crown, who had to earn their wages by establishing the guilt of the prisoner. So the Lords retired, and on their return into court the sentence of each peer was taken one by one. Then said the Duke of Norfolk to the Duke of Suffolk, ‘What say you of Sir Edward, Duke of Buckingham, touching this high treason.’ ‘I say that he is guilty,’ answered the Duke, laying his hand upon his heart. Every peer made the same response; and against each of the names entered on the panel—a little scrap of dirty parchment, still preserved in the Record Office—there is to be seen to this day, in the handwriting of the Duke of Norfolk, ‘Dicit quod est culpabilis.’
“Then was the Duke brought to the bar to hear his sentence. For a few moments he was overpowered by his situation. In the extremity of his agony, he chafed and sweat violently.[8] Recovering himself after a while, he made his obeisance to the court. After a short pause, a death-like silence! ‘Sir Edward,’ said the Duke of Norfolk, ‘you hear how you be indicted of high treason, you pleaded thereto not guilty, putting yourself to the judgment of your peers, the which have found you guilty.’ Then bursting into tears (he was an old man, and had faced death unmoved in the field of Flodden), he faltered out: ‘Your sentence is, that you be led back to prison; laid on a hurdle, and so drawn to the place of execution; there to be hanged, to be cut down alive, your members cut off and cast into the fire, your bowels burnt before your eyes, your head smitten off, your body quartered and divided at the King’s will. God have mercy on your soul. Amen.’ The Duke heard this horrible sentence with proud dignity and composure. Turning to the Duke of Norfolk, he quietly replied, ‘You have said, my lord, as a traitor should be said unto; but I was never one.’ Then addressing the court, he requested that those present would pray for him, assuring them that he forgave them his death, and expressing his determination not to sue for mercy. In compliance with the custom of the time he entered his barge at Westminster stairs, and was delivered, on landing at the Temple, to Sir Nicholas Vaux and Sir William Sandys, by whom he was conducted through the city to the Tower. This was about 4 P.M. The trial had lasted some days, having commenced on a Monday, and on the following Friday (17th of May), between eleven and twelve in the forenoon, when the hills of Surrey were cloathed in their freshest verdure, and the then unoccupied banks of the Thames, steeped to the water’s edge with the tender green and delicate blossom of the white thorn, the Duke’s favourite flower, the sombre procession threaded its way through the dark passages of the Tower, and emerged upon the Green. Amidst the sobs and tears of the spectators, the Duke, led by the Sheriffs, mounted the scaffold with a firm and composed step. Turning himself to the crowd, he requested all men to pray for him, ‘trusting,’ he said, ‘to die the King’s true man; whom through his own negligence and lack of grace he had offended.’ With this brief request, he kneeled at the block. There was a sudden glimmer for an instant in the air, then a dull thud, and the head rolled heavily from the body. The headsman wiped his axe; the attendants threw a cloak over the headless trunk, to conceal the blood which streamed in a torrent over the scaffold and dripped through the platform on the grass beneath. In rough frieze, barefooted and bareheaded, six poor Augustinian friars, shouldering a rude coffin, emerged from the shuddering and receding crowd. Gathering up the remains of the once mighty Duke of Buckingham, for the King, satisfied with his condemnation, had commuted the last extremities of the sentence, they carried the corpse to the church of the Austin Friars. The Duke in his lifetime had been kind to poor religious men, and this was the last and only office they could render him.”
Queen Anne Boleyn
(From an Engraving after a portrait of the time.)
Thus closed the life of Edward Bohun, Duke of Buckingham, Earl of Hereford, Stafford, and Northampton.
Lords Montague and Abergavenny, and Sir Edward Nevil, were also committed to the Tower with Buckingham, being charged with having concealed their knowledge of his so-called treason; but they were all three liberated after an imprisonment of some months duration.
In the fifth volume of “Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic,” in the reign of Henry VIII. is the following memorandum of repairs made in the Tower during the summer of 1532:—“Work done by carpenters and taking down old timber, etc., at St Thomas’s Tower; and for alteration in the Palace.” “There has also been taken down the old timber in the four turrets of the White Tower; and the old timber of Robyn the Devil’s Tower—that is, Julius Cæsar’s Tower; and of the tower near the King’s Wardrobe. Half of the White Tower is new embattled, coped, indented, and cressed with Caen stone to the extent of 500 feet.” The return to this memorandum estimates the total expense of the alteration at £3593, 14s. 10d.
The Tower was again the scene of festivities when, in the month of May 1533, Anne Boleyn—to whom Henry had been secretly married on January 25 of the previous year—was taken there in state. Again, as five-and-twenty years previously, the old fortress put on its gala apparel and became splendid for the new Queen’s coronation. The old chronicler Hall describes the wondrous scene of “marvellous cunning pageants,” of the fountains running wine, “Apollo and the Muses, the Graces and all the Virtues, Mary, the wife of Cleophas, and her children” welcoming the beautiful Queen, coming in all the glory of youth and loveliness from Greenwich to the Tower, where she landed at “five of the clocke, where also was such a pele of gonnes as hathe not byn harde lyke a great while before, and on her landing was met by the Kyng, who received her with loving countenance, at the Posterne by the Water syde, and kyssed her.”
The next day, through streets strewn with gravel and gay with tapestry, silks, and velvets, Anne wended her triumphal way to the old Abbey at Westminster. The order of Anne’s coronation has been given at full length by Shakespeare in the scene in the Abbey in Henry VIII.:
“At length her grace, and with modest paces
Came to the altar; where she kneel’d, and saintlike
Cast her fair eyes to heaven and pray’d devoutly.
Then rose again and bow’d her to the people:
When by the Archbishop of Canterbury
She had all the royal makings of a queen;
As holy oil, Edward Confessor’s crown,
The rod, and bird of peace, and all such emblems
Laid nobly on her: which performed, the choir
With all the choicest music of the kingdom,
Together sung ‘Te Deum.’ So she parted
And with the same full state paced back again
To York Place where the feast is held.”
(Henry VIII., Act iv. scene 1.)
Three short years passed away and a pall of darkness falls over this brilliant scene, and Anne’s regal state and “royal makings of a queen” are changed to the prison and the scaffold.
In September 1533, Anne brought a daughter into the world, the future Queen Elizabeth. In the following year Parliament passed an Act of Succession, devised by Henry, by which his former marriage with Catherine of Arragon was declared to be an unlawful one, and Anne’s daughter was made successor to the Crown, thus excluding the Princess Mary from the succession. All the King’s subjects were commanded to acknowledge this new Act, but the Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, and Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, whilst willing to obey the Act as an Act of Parliament, declined to allow that the King’s marriage with the Spanish Princess was illegal. Henry, on hearing this, burst into one of his Tudor furies, and both More and Fisher were, by his orders, sent to the Tower. At the same time Henry sent Commissioners through the length and breadth of England to suppress all the religious communities that refused to obey the Act, and also those who were not willing to conform to his new Law of Succession.
Thomas Cromwell was the principal agent in carrying out Henry’s commands against the monasteries. No fitter man for the task could have been found. Risen from a humble station, Cromwell, who had been introduced to the King’s notice by Wolsey, after his patron’s fall had become private secretary to the sovereign; and in 1534 he was appointed Henry’s Vicar-General in all matters appertaining to Ecclesiastical affairs.
One of the Orders of Friars, styled Friars Observant, had openly expressed their opinion concerning Henry’s second marriage, and for this the Order was ruthlessly suppressed, many of its members being executed. The same fate befell the Carthusians, some of whom were imprisoned in the Tower for refusing to conform to the oath of this Act of Succession. The Prior of Sion Hospital was hanged as a felon, and many other priests and friars were put to death with every brutal detail appertaining to the manner of execution for high treason.
Among all these martyrs for their faith, none were more eminent for holy living than the aged prelate, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. He was in his seventy-ninth year when Henry ordered him to be imprisoned in the Tower; he appears to have been a frail, emaciated old man, and, to judge from the life-like drawing of him by Holbein, had the look of a man who has but a few years before him. So beloved was he in his diocese, that when the order came to remove him from his see, the whole city of Rochester turned out to bid its revered Bishop farewell. The grounds for the charge of treason that was brought against him were that he had listened to the prophecies of a woman known by the name of the “Nun of Kent”; but Henry’s real reason for ridding himself of Fisher was the Bishop’s refusal to comply with the Act of Succession. Fisher, being a fervent servant of Rome, declared that Henry’s first marriage had the sanction of the Pope, and consequently of the Church, and therefore could not be declared illegal and invalid. Neither would he acknowledge Henry’s new title of “On earth supreme Head of the Church of England,” a title assumed by the King in 1534. This combined refusal was, in the eyes of Henry and his Council, tantamount to a penal offence, and both More and Fisher were condemned and executed for denying the King’s supremacy in the State.
Fisher was imprisoned in the Bell Tower on the 21st April (1534), and in the following November an Act of Parliament declared him to be attainted of high treason, and his Bishopric to be vacant. His household goods were seized and his library, which he had intended bequeathing to his College of St John’s, Cambridge, was confiscated. In the chapel of that same College the good Bishop had prepared his tomb, which, however, was fated never to contain his shrunken frame. The aged Bishop suffered much from the cold of the winter, 1534–35, in his prison, and there is a piteous letter from him, still existing, addressed to Cromwell, in which he describes his hardships. “Furthermore,” he writes, “I byseche you to be gode, master, unto me in my necessite; for I have neither shirt nor sute, nor yett other clothes that are necessary for me to wear, but that bee ragged, and rent so shamefully. Notwithstanding I might easily suffer that, if they would keep my body warm. But my dyett also, God knoweth how slender it is at any tymes, and now in myn age my stomak may nott awaye but with a few kynd of meats, which if I want, I decay forthwith, and fall into coafs and diseases of my bodye, and kan not keep myself in health.” He then begs Cromwell to soften the King’s heart on his behalf; he might as well have asked Cromwell to soften the nether millstone.
John Fisher. Bishop of Rochester
(From the drawing by Holbein at Windsor.)
Bishop Burnet has written that news of Fisher’s sufferings reached the ears of Pope Clement, who, “by an officious kindness to him, or rather to spite King Henry, declared him a Cardinal, and sent him a red hat. When the King heard of this, he sent to examine him about it; but he protested that he had used no endeavour to procure it, and valued it so little that, if the hat were lying at his feet, he would not take it up. It never came nearer him than Picardy, yet did this precipitate his ruin.” Henry had sworn that before the cardinal’s hat could arrive the Bishop should have no head upon which to place it.
When asked by the Lord Chancellor, after he had been declared guilty of high treason, what he had to say in arrest of judgment, the venerable old man answered: “Truly, my lord, if that which I have said be not sufficient I have no more to say; but only to desire Almighty God to forgive them who have condemned me, for I think they know not what they have done.” The Chancellor then read out the sentence by which the Bishop was doomed, by the usual ghastly form of words, to a traitor’s death. As Fisher was passing under Traitor’s Gate, where he had been landed on his return to the Tower from his trial, he turned to his guard of halberdiers and said: “My masters, I thank you for all the great labours and pains which ye have taken with me to-day. I am not able to give you anything in recompense, because I have nothing left, and therefore I pray you accept in good part my hearty thanks.” Those who were present were struck by the “fresh and lively colour in his face, as he seemed rather to have come from some great feast or banquet rather than from his trial and condemnation, showing by all his carriage and outward behaviour nothing else but joy and satisfaction.” Three more days of prison and the good old man’s troubles ceased.
At five o’clock in the morning, on the 22nd of June, the Lieutenant of the Tower awoke Fisher from his sleep, telling him that he had come with a message from the King—namely, that he was to die that day. “Well,” answered the Bishop, “If this be your errand you bring me no great news, for I have sometime looked for this message. I most humbly thank his Majesty that it pleases him to rid me of all this worldly business, and I thank you also for your tidings. But pray, Mr Lieutenant,” he added, “when is my hour that I must go hence?” “Your hour,” said the Lieutenant, “must be nine of the clock.” “And what hour is it now?” said Fisher. “It is now about five.” “Well then, let me by your patience sleep an hour or two, for I have slept very little this night; and yet, to tell you the truth, not for any fear of death, thank God, but by reason of my great weakness and infirmity.” “The King’s further pleasure is,” said the Lieutenant, “that you should use as little speech as may be upon the scaffold, especially as to anything concerning his Majesty, whereby the people should have cause to think otherwise than well of him and his proceedings.” “For that,” remarked the Bishop, in answer to this practical confession of the injustice of his sentence, “for that you shall see me order myself so, by God’s grace, as that neither the King nor any one else shall have occasion to dislike what I say.”
He then slept on for two hours more, when he rose and was helped to dress; a hair shirt, which he wore next to his body, he removed, replacing it with a clean white one. Upon his ordering his attendant to give him his best clothing, the latter remarked upon the care and attention that he was bestowing upon his dress that day. “Dost thou not mark that this is our wedding-day,” said Fisher in answer, “and it behoves me therefore to be more nicely dressed than ordinary for the solemnity of the occasion.”
At nine o’clock the Lieutenant called for him. “I will wait upon you straight,” said the Bishop, “as fast as this body of mine will give me leave.” He then called for his furred tippet, which he placed round his neck, “Oh, my Lord,” said the Lieutenant, “what need you be so careful of your health for this little time, which you know is not much above an hour.” “I think the same,” said Fisher, “but yet, in the meantime, I will keep myself as well as I can to the very time of my execution. For I tell you truly, though I have, I thank our Lord, a very good desire and a willing mind to die at this present, and so that of His infinite goodness he will continue it, yet will I not willingly incommodate my health in the meantime one minute of an hour, but I will still continue the same as long as I can by such reasonable ways and means as God Almighty hath provided for me.” With that, taking a little book in his hand—it was a Latin New Testament—that lay by him, he made the sign of the cross upon his forehead, and then went out of the chamber with the Lieutenant, being so weak that he could scarcely go down the stairs. For this reason he was placed in a chair, and carried by two of the Lieutenant’s men to the Tower Gate, surrounded by a small number of guards. At the Gate he was to be delivered over to the Sheriffs of London and Middlesex for his execution, but when the procession arrived there it had to wait until a messenger, who had been sent to the Sheriffs, returned to say whether those officials were ready to receive him. During this waiting the Bishop rose from his chair, and stood leaning against the wall with his eyes raised to the sky. Then he opened the Testament he was carrying in his hand, and said, “O Lord, this is the last time that I shall ever open this book, let some comfortable place now chance to me, whereby I, Thy poor servant, may glorify Thee in this my last hour!” Looking into the book, the first words he espied were these! “And this is the life eternal, that they might know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. I have glorified Thee on the earth, I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify Thou me with thine own self.” Fisher then closed the book, saying, “Here is learning enough for me to my life’s end.” From the Gate he was carried to the scaffold on Tower Hill, praying as he went, and when several persons offered to help him to mount the steps, he turned to them and said, “Nay, masters, seeing that I am come so far, let me alone, and you shall see me shift for myself well enough.”
The sun shone brightly on the old man’s face when, standing on the scaffold, with uplifted hands, he pronounced the words “Accedite ad eum et illuminamini, et facies vestrae non confundentur.” The headsman, as was the custom, knelt and asked the Bishop’s forgiveness for the task he was about to perform. “I forgive thee with all my heart, and I trust thou shalt see me overcome this storm with courage,” answered the Bishop. Before kneeling down, he spoke a few words to the dense crowd gathered around the scaffold. He had come there, he said, to die for the Faith of Christ’s Holy Catholic Church, he begged their prayers that he might be enabled at the point of death, and at the moment of the supreme stroke, to continue steadfast without wavering in any one point of that Faith. Then he prayed for the King, and for the realm, being so cheerful that he seemed glad to die, and “although he looked death itself in the human shape,” according to one of the writers of the time, “his voice was full, strong, and clear.” When on his knees before the block, the venerable Bishop repeated certain prayers, the Te Deum, and the Thirty-first Psalm, “In te Domine speravi.” Then the axe fell, and his head rolled on the scaffold. Thus died John Fisher, a true martyr to his Church and Faith, far worthier of canonisation than many enrolled in the long list of hagiology.
Henry was not content with merely putting this aged and venerable man to death, but, if Cardinal Pole is to be believed, he ordered the headless body of the Bishop to be treated with insult. It was left naked for hours on the scaffold, until some charitable soul with a touch of humanity, cast some straw over the poor remains of one who, but a short time before, had been among the best, if not the greatest of English Churchmen (Dr Hall’s “Life of the Bishop of Rochester”). Fisher’s head was stuck upon a pike and placed on London Bridge. Dodd, in his history of the Church, recounts that after the head had been some days on the Bridge, it was taken down and thrown into the river, the reason for this being that rays of light were seen shining around it. Hall, in his “Life of the Bishop,” states that “the face was observed to become fresher and more comely day by day, and that such was the concourse of people who assembled to look at it, that almost neither cart nor horse could pass.”
Sir Thomas More
(From the drawing by Holbein at Windsor.)
The Bishop of Rochester’s judicial murder was immediately followed by that of Sir Thomas More; it would not be easy to say which execution was the greater crime: their blood lies e