LITMIR.BIZ

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London it was the same, with those who had relied on the Church either for charity or work, wandering the streets, joined by the hundreds who poured in from the countryside where the dissolutions had closed off many traditional forms of employment or benefice. Nor were the seized properties being put to edifying use in the post-monastic world. Courtiers, lawyers and merchants who benefited from the government’s liberality often turned the former abbeys and churches into stinking tenements, overpacked and overpriced, where families lived in pathetically cramped quarters with rampant disease and indifferent landlords. The church of St Martin-le-Grand was demolished to make way for a tavern; Bermondsey Abbey, where Henry VIII’s grandmother Elizabeth Woodville had spent the final few years of her life, became a bull-fighting arena, before it was demolished to make way for the private home of a lawyer who worked on the Court of Augmentations, the legal body set up to deal with former monastic lands; the Priory of St Mary Overy became a bear-baiting pit. Statues of saints and angels had been torn from their niches and burned in a crusade against the old ways; yet even with such zeal from the iconoclastic reformers, clear religious policy, vital in an age which still carried the death penalty for heresy, proved elusive.

      Thomas Cromwell, rising to power during the break with Rome and then securing his position at the king’s side thanks to his indefatigable work on the dissolutions, was seen as the Reformation’s henchman by its opponents and ‘an organ of Christ’s glory’ by its supporters; he seems to have believed in the Reformation’s mission and to have risked much to support those who shared his spirituality.15 Whether he was as indifferent to its human cost as is usually supposed is unclear, but that he never shirked from unpleasant tasks is certain. The quartered limbs and parboiled heads of dead traitors were on prominent display throughout the capital, with the skulls of the most famous offenders sitting atop pikes that jutted out over the nineteen arches of London Bridge. They would stay there until they had been stripped clean by birds and the elements.

      Bile and viciousness increased on both sides of the confessional divide as the king, with God in one eye and the Devil in the other, brooded like Shelley’s Ozymandias over a kingdom riven by divisions. Who was in and who was out at the centre of government changed constantly and, unlike most of his predecessors, Henry VIII seemed to want his fallen favourites to vanish into the vast silence of mortality rather than simply leave the sunlight of his presence. Cromwell had previously helped arrange the exits of other favourites, now he was enduring the same agony.

      We may know now that the Tudor dynasty was successful in holding on to power, and in preventing both civil war and foreign invasion, in the same way we know that the United States and her allies prevailed in the Cold War, but those attending Cromwell’s execution had no such assurances, and paranoia was rampant, a communal insecurity for which the king’s glamorously bizarre behaviour must bear a large portion of the blame. To have embarked upon something as seismic as the schism with the Vatican without having a clear strategy for the years ahead was foolish, but to then change his mind as often as he did with something as sacred and vital to his people’s understanding of themselves was criminally incompetent. When Henry VIII had exhausted the wealth of the Church, he began to lose interest in the Reformation; his natural conservatism reawakened and he was appalled by the many Protestant sects that were using the newfound availability of the Bible to interpret God’s Word for themselves, in many cases reaching conclusions that Henry regarded as rank heresy. The pendulum began to swing in the opposite direction, with legislation known as the Six Articles reaffirming the government’s commitment to Catholic theology. Protestants nicknamed the laws ‘the whip with six strings’ and the arrests of religious radicals began once their patron, Cromwell, was no longer in a position to protect them. At Smithfield, the local authorities were busy setting up another pyre to burn three Lutherans, Robert Barnes, Thomas Gerard and William Jerome, who had once preached their gospel with Cromwell’s support. They were to die on the 30th, two days after Cromwell. With intimidation, espionage, cancerous fears of enemies foreign and domestic, and bitter sectarian tensions, Henrician England and Ireland were countries tottering permanently on the edge and many blamed Thomas Cromwell for organising the march to the precipice.

      In the countryside, beyond the stench and sweat of the crowd assembled to watch Cromwell’s and Hungerford’s deaths, Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, prepared to preside over the king’s wedding service to Catherine Howard. The pretty palace of Oatlands sat in a rolling deer park, its loveliness marred only by the building work that the king, with his passion for architecture, had ordered three years earlier when the manor had come into his possession.16 A fortune was spent on transforming the seldom-used Oatlands into a retreat fit for the sovereign – an octagonal tower, still a work in progress on the day Cromwell was struck down, was added to the courtyard. Terraced gardens were constructed with multiple fountains, each one an enormous extravagance splashing cooling streams of water. An orchard, its mature trees groaning under the weight of fruit, offered shade to the heads of courtiers and servants, as they endured the stifling heat. The trees were old, but the orchard was not. They had been uprooted from St Peter’s Abbey at nearby Chertsey, a nine-century-old monastery founded by Saint Erkenwald, one of the earliest bishops of London, and brought to grace the king’s gardens when the abbey was shut down, its brothers expelled and its possessions stripped by Cromwell’s inspectors. The stones that built the little palace’s extension had come from the Augustinian priory at Tandridge as it was pulled down to make way for aristocratic demesnes. The price paid by many of his subjects for the king’s religious revolution weighed heavily and silently on Oatlands, but as thick carpets from the Ottoman Empire, chairs upholstered in velvets and cloth of gold, gilt cups, bejewelled table services, and beds hung with cloth of silver were all processed into Oatlands, there was little outward sign of the stresses and tribulation that had gone into making it suitable for the royal household.17

      An Oxford graduate in his early forties, Edmund Bonner had risen from relative obscurity, which encouraged accusations that he had been born out of wedlock, to become England’s ambassador to France and, after that, Bishop of London.18 He had secured both his ambassadorship and episcopacy through Thomas Cromwell’s patronage, yet like everybody else he had abandoned Cromwell in his hour of need. The latter’s frantic letters from prison, entreating royal mercy from Henry, written in a disjointed and panicky mess compared to his usual precise calligraphy, had gone unanswered, as Cromwell’s former dependants turned their faces from him, as if he had never existed.

      We cannot say for certain where in Oatlands Catherine Howard resided during her wedding visit. Recent excavations of the palace have given us a better picture of its layout and the safest guess would be that her rooms were in the queen’s apartments, located in the palace’s southern towers between the inner and outer courtyards. From any eastern- or western-facing windows above the quadrangle, she would have had beautiful views of either the orchard with its purloined apple trees, the octagonal dovecote or the ornamental gardens circling the fountains. From just above the entrance to the inner courtyard, she would have been able to see the ramp that had recently been installed to help her husband-to-be mount what must have been a particularly sturdy steed. Beyond the walls lay the deer park where she and the king would spend a few days of hunting as part of a ten-day honeymoon.

      She was in her late teens, slender, like most of the Howard women, with a ‘very delightful’ appearance, according to the French ambassador.19 The court’s temporary reduction in size and then its removal to the relative obscurity of Oatlands fuelled speculation that she was already pregnant; Catherine’s petite frame gave the lie to the story, but it would be weeks before she was unveiled to the public again and the stories could finally be put to rest.20 Sixteenth-century weddings were not usually romantic occasions and the modern idea of writing one’s own vows or of putting the couple’s affection for one another at the centre of the ceremony would have struck Catherine and her contemporaries as bizarre. It was, like an execution, a formal occasion governed by established precedent; there was a proper way of doing things and as she made her way down to the recently renovated chapel near her husband’s tower to stand in front of Edmund

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