Young and Damned and Fair: The Life and Tragedy of Catherine Howard at the Court of Henry VIII. Gareth Russell
all men could be saved.
A celebrated person’s execution, their final public performance, was such an exciting event that people made the journey into London especially for it. Vast crowds surged through London, converging on Tower Hill to watch the annihilation of the detested commoner who had somehow risen to become Earl of Essex – a sign of royal favour given to him only a few weeks before he was arrested at a meeting of the Privy Council and taken to the Tower. The last ascent in the life of the Englishman who had risen farther than anyone else in his century were the wooden steps to the scaffold. Thomas Cromwell had not been a popular figure, but royal advisers seldom are. Snobbery played a large role in his reputation – an English diplomat described Cromwell as a man who had been ‘advanced from the dunghill to great honour’ – but so did his actions.10 Ruthless, determined, brilliant, and utterly Machiavellian, Cromwell had overseen the destruction of many an aristocratic career and the evisceration of the old religion in England. Many of his opponents blamed him for tearing asunder the spiritual framework that they had lived, and hoped to die, by. The sacraments and liturgies of the Church had given a rhythm to the year, they had bestowed the tools for salvation on the faithful for centuries, and marked every major moment in a Christian’s life. In 1536, Cromwell had weathered the Pilgrimage of Grace, a traditionalist uprising which spread through most of northern England and which had demanded his removal from power. However, he could not survive the loss of the king’s favour four years later. His enemies surrounded him and he was condemned to death on a long list of crimes that included heresy, treason, and financial corruption.
The crowds entering the capital on 28 July 1540 came from every background, with well-born women wearing veils to shield their faces from the sun, while urchins wore battered hand-me-down cheap leather shoes which prevented their feet from being cut on the animal bones and refuse that littered the city streets. With no rain, the mud in the streets had become a dry dust that would turn into ankle-depth filth when the clouds broke in autumn. The spectators passed through the capital’s eighteen-foot high defensive walls via one of the seven gates. Those travelling in from the Hampshire and Surrey countryside entered through Newgate, while those from nearby Smithfield, home to a bustling meat market, accessed the City at Aldersgate. Smithfield also contained London’s designated red-light district, the aptly named Cock Lane. Subtlety in the assigning of place names was not a medieval strongpoint. The southwestern city of Exeter had renamed one of its rivers Shitbrook, because of the amount of faeces and waste it contained, and in Oxford, students hoping for an early sexual experience courtesy of the town’s prostitutes could find it on Gropecunt Lane, a narrow alley that ran from just opposite the university church of St Mary the Virgin down to the entrance of Oriel College.11
Rather more elegant sights awaited those who were travelling towards Cromwell’s execution via the Strand, a long straight road lined with the episcopal palaces and impressive homes of the aristocracy. The Strand had been the site of the Savoy Palace, principal residence of Richard II’s powerful uncle John of Gaunt, until it was burned down during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. It was eventually replaced by the Hospital of St John the Baptist, one of the most impressive medical establishments in early modern Europe, founded under the patronage of Henry VIII’s father. Near the hospital was one of the Eleanor Crosses, funerary monuments erected by a grief-stricken Edward I in 1290 to mark each of the fourteen spots where his wife’s coffin rested on its final journey to Westminster Abbey. This, the last halt before the interment, was now where professional water-sellers took advantage of the area’s excellent plumbing, which on occasion pumped the local fountains with wine or beer to celebrate an especially significant royal event – the last time had been for the birth of the heir to the throne, Prince Edward, in 1537. On a hot and busy day like this, as families and groups of friends swarmed towards the Tower, the Charing Cross water-sellers could reasonably have expected to turn a handsome profit.12
London in July 1540 was the perfect capital for Henry VIII’s domains: a broken society whose fracture lines were both reflected and grotesquely magnified throughout the city. Along the banks of the Thames, formerly semi-rural areas like Deptford and Woolwich were now shipyards for the Royal Navy, where titanic amounts of money poured into the construction of warships designed to repel the French and Spanish, if they ever came. Londoners grumbled at the despoiling of some of the few green areas left to them; they valued their leaf-dappled refuges so much that earlier in the king’s reign thousands had rioted over plans to encroach on the area of parkland around Soho, a district which got its name from a traditional hunting cry, ‘So, ho!’
Riots were rare in Henrician England, but tensions were constant and none were more intense than those caused by the country’s break with Rome. Seven years before Cromwell’s execution, the king had repudiated papal authority and embarked upon his own version of the Reformation in what rapidly became one of the least articulate government policies in British history. There was absolutely no clear strategy for where the Church of England should go once it was commanded from London rather than Rome. The king, who had harnessed anti-clericalism in Parliament to secure his dream of annulling his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, had then hurled himself into what initially looked like the wholesale dismemberment of English Catholicism. The severing of obedience to the Vatican was the initial step in a legal, cultural, and economic revolution. The monasteries were dissolved, or pressured to surrender, first the smaller abbeys, then the larger and wealthier. On the eve of the Reformation, about one-third of the land in England belonged to the Church and so the seizure of its assets became an unsavoury bonanza for the government and its supporters, whose loyalty to the regime was often bought with gifts of land taken from the religious orders.
The first human casualties after the break with Rome had been the conservatives who could not in good conscience abjure their oaths of loyalty to the pope. There were some among them who, despite their misgivings, were prepared to acknowledge that canon law just about permitted the king’s banishment of Katherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn, whom even Thomas More had acknowledged as ‘this noble woman royally anointed queen’, but under no circumstances could they accept that Henry had the right to make himself Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England and Ireland.13 Thomas More, the country’s former Lord Chancellor, and the esteemed scholar Cardinal John Fisher went to the block in 1535. The leaders of the Carthusian order of monks were hanged until they were half dead, cut down to be castrated, disembowelled and only then beheaded. The country folk coming into London through Newgate for Cromwell’s death had to pass by the looming, grey-stoned edifice of Newgate prison, where three hermits, one deacon and six monks had been stripped, chained to posts with their hands tied behind their backs and simply left to starve to death in their cells, rotting towards martyrdom in excruciating pain and their own gathering excrement. One plucky Catholic lady, a doctor’s wife, disguised herself as a milk maid, bribed the guards to let her into the cell and fed, watered and bathed the condemned gentlemen. The gaolers tightened security after the king irritably asked how the condemned men had remained alive for so long.14
A few miles to the west of the prison was Tyburn, the site of near-daily executions of criminals – rapists, horse thieves, forgers and murderers. It was here that many of the Carthusian monks met their end after being processed through the streets tied to a wicker hurdle pulled by a slow-moving horse. Back at Smithfield, within sight of the grubby walkways of Cock Lane, Father John Forest had been burned to death atop a pyre that consisted of religious statues, including one of Saint Derfel, taken from a pilgrimage centre in north Wales. There was a hideous poetic irony in using the symbols of pre-Reformation Christianity to incinerate one of its most vocal sympathisers.
For the poorest of the poor, the Reformation initially brought a different kind of martyrdom. Admittedly, the Church had not always done all that it could to alleviate poverty, but as medieval Catholicism’s emphasis on charity as a means to secure salvation came under attack by reformers, beggars would have been a depressingly and increasingly familiar sight for the spectators. This was especially true for those from Smithfield whose monastic hospital and poorhouse, St Bartholomew’s Priory, had been shut down during the dissolutions, leaving the