Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr by Linda Porter Page A

Henry refuted Tunstall’s points line by line. Yet this was much more than an academic difference of opinion that could be confined to written exchanges. It made the king realize that he must bring Tunstall to heel.
    The bishop had expected to attend parliament in early 1534 but he was directed to stay in the north; Henry did not want dissidents present while vital legislation was being passed. But once that legislation was on the statute books, Cuthbert Tunstall was summoned south to take the oath to the Act of Succession. In his absence, his home at Bishop Auckland in County Durhamwas searched, by order of the king, but no incriminating documents or books were found, mainly because Tunstall had been forewarned to remove anything that might endanger himself. Once he took the oath (however unwillingly) he found that there was no going back. Both he and Archbishop Lee of York were required to explain to the imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, and subsequently to the very angry Katherine of Aragon herself, the justification for the annulment of her marriage. They did not succeed in getting her to agree or to acknowledge that she would cease to use the title of queen.
    Tunstall’s experience at the time of Katherine Parr’s second marriage must have been a harrowing one. Fisher and Thomas More, with whom he essentially agreed on all points concerning the divorce and the break from Rome, were in the Tower. His own loyalty was highly suspect, as the secret raids on his property showed. There is some indication that More advised him not to endanger himself any further, because it would achieve nothing. Perhaps he thought that, by staying alive, he could at least keep the worst excesses of Lutheranism out of England. He knew he was no martyr yet he bridled at the accusation of infirmity aimed at him by the diplomat and theologian Reginald Pole in 1536: ‘where ye do find fault with me, that I fainted in my heart, and would not die for the Bishop of Rome[’s] authority; when this matter was first purposed unto me, surely it was no fainting that made me agreeable thereunto’. 4 He had struggled, one cannot know how much, with his conscience and he emerged from a perilous time alive, but compromised. The politician in Tunstall had survived; he retained his post as bishop of Durham and president of the Council of the North. Above all, like many of the upper ranks of the clergy and the aristocracy, he put loyalty to the king first. But Henry never really trusted him again. For the king, it was a simple matter. Those who were not fully committed to his break with Rome, the new Royal Supremacy and all the raft of legislation that underpinned his Reformation, were against him. They could submit, or die. A few, like ThomasMore, saw it as a clear choice. A man like Tunstall, a seasoned diplomat but also long-standing churchman, found the predicament agonizing.
    He could only watch as More and Fisher went to the block in the summer of 1535 and the attack on the religious orders gained momentum. Any hopes that the final outcome of the divorce and the split with Rome would see an end to instability were crushed as it became apparent that the government’s religious policy was still evolving. The king and Cromwell needed to be sure that the split from Rome could not be undone insidiously. They were well aware that there were many important men (such as Tunstall) and many sectors of the community where acquiescence to the royal command did not equate to conviction. And where these doubts lingered, there was the potential for undermining the achievements so purposefully put in place in London. Two obvious sources of concern were the attitude of the universities and, more crucially still, that of the monasteries, whose first loyalty had so recently been to Rome and not to Henry VIII. It has been suggested that too much has been read into the assessment of monastic wealth, the Valor Ecclesiasticus , ordered by Cromwell early in 1535 and