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

completed by the autumn of that year. 5 But even if this exercise was not the first step in a far-reaching plan to gain hold of monastic property and wealth – and, with hindsight, it certainly looks that way, but it is easy to confuse cause with effect – its underlying assumption that the religious houses were not to be trusted, that many of them had strayed far from the simple path laid out by St Bernard of Clairvaux in the eleventh century, pointed to an uncomfortable, uncertain future. It remained to be seen who would benefit by reform of the monastic way of life, yet one thing was clear: whatever course was followed, it would be dictated by the Crown.
    A year after the completion of the Valor Ecclesiasticus , after the high-profile deaths of his former chancellor, the bishop of Rochester and leading members of the Carthusian monastic order, Henry was more determined than ever to extend his authority.Thus far he had dealt successfully with dissidents. The Latimers, living unremarkably at Snape, would nevertheless have been aware of Cuthbert Tunstall’s dilemma and may have known of the opposition to the king’s divorce by Sir George Throckmorton, a Warwickshire knight who was Katherine’s uncle by marriage. William and Anne Parr, though silent on national affairs and well connected at court, had themselves crossed Thomas Cromwell in 1533, when he tried to help himself to lands that they owned. These kind of indirect embarrassments were not, however, unique to the Latimers and they might have managed to avoid criticism had calm prevailed. But there was no tranquillity for England in 1536. Voices of resistance were not silenced; in fact, they were growing stronger. Nowhere were these louder than in the north.

 

CHAPTER FIVE
     

The Pilgrimage of Grace

‘When time enlarged villainy to commit all profane and sinister acts, no thing was spared, how holy soever it was. All was turned upside down, and the bodies of saints and other heroical persons being wrapped in lead were turned out thereof, and lead sold to plumbers, books and pictures were burned, evidences not regarded; all was subject to violence and rapine.’

Yorkshireman Thomas Meynell’s view
of the assault on traditional religion 1

    T HE YEAR 1536, the most momentous of Henry VIII’s reign, started quietly enough. Yet by 8 June 1536, when the brief parliament of that year opened in London, the king’s first two wives were dead and he was already married to a third. Katherine of Aragon had succumbed to failing health and heartbreak at the beginning of January, her love of Henry undiminished. She was buried with muted ceremony in Peterborough Cathedral. The position of the queen who had supplanted her was, however, far from secure. Anne Boleyn was a mercurial, difficult woman who made enemies easily. She had certainly made one of Thomas Cromwell, the chief minister, who knew her well enough to realize that the breach between them threatened his career and possibly his life as well. But despite her volatile relationship withHenry VIII, made more uneasy still by the fact that she had not born him a male heir, had recently miscarried and was now in her mid-thirties, Anne does not seem to have understood that her husband could become her enemy as well. The loss of the king’s love, whether or not it amounted to actual hatred, combined with Cromwell’s belief that she stood in his way. For Anne, it was a fatal brew. On 19 May she went to the block on trumped-up charges of adultery, ruthlessly abandoned by those who had fawned on her during the long years of the divorce from Katherine of Aragon. Only ten days later Henry married Jane Seymour, carefully groomed as the meek, blonde successor to Anne, the brunette termagant. By 22 June he had finally suppressed the one woman of his family who remained defiant, his elder daughter, Mary, forcing her to acknowledge that her mother’s marriage was unlawful and that she herself was illegitimate. Her supporters,