Part 13

In the autumn came an attempt to include More, with Bishop Fisher and certain monks and friars, in the treason of the “Holy Maid of Kent,”--Elizabeth Barton, a Canterbury nun. The “treason” amounted to this, that the nun, who was given to prophesying, declared that God had revealed to her to speak against Henry’s divorce, and it was sufficient to bring her to Tyburn. But against Sir Thomas More no shred of evidence could be procured, for none existed. He had seen the nun, and talked with her, and “held her in great estimation,” but would neither commit himself to a belief in her visions, nor permit any discussion on the king’s doings; but wrote to the nun a letter which could not have been more prudent, as he exhorted her “to attend to devotion, and not meddle in the affairs of princes.”

The name of Sir Thomas More was struck out of the bill of attainder, but the days of his liberty were already numbered.

The Act of Succession, passed in March, 1534, made Mary, the daughter of Henry and Catherine, illegitimate, and Elizabeth, Anne’s child, the heir to the throne. The act also declared that “all the nobles of the realm, spiritual and temporal, and all other subjects arrived at full age, should be obliged to take corporal oath, in the presence of the king or his commissioners, to observe and maintain the whole effect and contents of the act,” under the penalties for treason for refusal. The words of the oath were not inserted in the act, and the commissioners drew up a formula, requiring all persons to affirm in addition that the marriage with Catherine was invalid, and the marriage with Anne valid, and further to recall and repudiate allegiance to any foreign authority, prince, or potentate. This was a much larger demand than parliament had authorised, for it contained a denial of the papal supremacy, while all that the act had required was an acknowledgment of the succession to the crown. The pope had only just given his final decision on Henry’s appeal for divorce (March, 1534), and the decision had been against the king and in favour of the marriage. The oath now administered was in direct opposition to the supremacy of Rome, and as such was impossible to the consciences of men like Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher, though the great bulk of the clergy took it without giving any trouble.

More was quite prepared to swear to the succession of Elizabeth. Parliament had, in his eyes, a plain right to decide who should wear the crown, and the doctrine of divine hereditary kingship does not come in till the Stuarts. But this mere willingness to comply with the letter of the law was not sufficient. More’s silent want of sympathy with the divorce, and with the breach it involved with Rome, was intolerable to Henry, who had counted More amongst his dearest friends; for friend or foe, in Henry’s power, could only live by abject agreement with the royal pleasure. No king had three more faithful servants than Henry VIII. had in Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, and Thomas Cromwell, and no king destroyed his ministers with such fierce caprice.

Sir Thomas More, unable to take the oath, was sent to the Tower in April, 1534, Bishop Fisher having already been lodged there. In November parliament met again, and passed the Act of Supremacy, making Henry VIII. “the supreme head of the Church of England,” and declaring that on and after the first of February, 1535, it was high treason “to deprive the king’s most royal person, the queen’s, or their heirs apparent of their dignity, title or name of their royal estates, or slanderously and maliciously publish or pronounce, by express writing or words, that the king, our sovereign lord, should be heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, etc.” Under this act Sir Thomas More was to be assailed and to die. That the martyrdom was a “judicial murder” is plain--to Lord Campbell it was “the blackest crime that ever has been perpetrated in England under the form of law.”[90]

The indictment was for treason, and on July 1st, a week after Bishop Fisher’s execution, Sir Thomas More was brought before the judges. To the charge of having refused the king, “maliciously, falsely, and traitorously, his title of supreme head of the Church of England,” More answered that the statute had been passed while he was in prison, and that he was dead to the world, and had not cared about such things--“your statute cannot condemn me to death for such silence, for neither your statute nor any laws in the world punish people except for words and deeds--surely not for keeping silence.”

“To this the king’s proctor replied that such silence was a certain proof of malice intended against the statute, especially as every faithful subject, on being questioned about the statute, was obliged to answer categorically that the statute was good and wholesome.” “Surely,” replied More, “if common law is true, and he who is silent seems to consent, my silence should rather be taken as approval than contempt of your statute.”

To the first article charging him with having always maliciously opposed the king’s second marriage, More had answered that anything he had said had been according to his conscience, and that for “this error,” he had already suffered fifteen months’ imprisonment, and the confiscation of his property.

The trial was soon over, for the king had decided on More’s death when Fisher was executed, ordering the preachers to set forth to the people the treasons of the late Bishop of Rochester and of Sir Thomas More; “joining them together though the later was still untried.”[91] The jury, after a quarter of an hour’s absence, declared him guilty of death for maliciously contravening the statute, and sentence was pronounced by the chancellor “according to the tenour of the new law.”

Death being now in sight, and faith having been kept with his conscience, More has no longer any reason to observe silence. To the usual question whether he has anything to say against the sentence, he replied, that for the seven years he had studied the matter he could not find that supremacy in a church belonged to a layman, or to any but the see of Rome, as granted personally by our Lord when on earth to St. Peter and his successors; and that, as the city of London could not make a law against the laws of the realm of England, so England could not make a law contrary to the general law of Christ’s Catholic Church; and that the Magna Charta of England said that “the English Church should be free to enjoy all its rights,” as the king had sworn at his consecration. Interrupted by the chancellor with the inquiry whether he wished to be considered wiser and better than all the bishops and nobles of the realm who had sworn to the king’s supremacy, More retorted, “For one bishop of your opinion, my lord, I have a hundred saints of mine; and for one parliament of yours, and God knows of what kind, I have all the general councils for a thousand years.” The Duke of Norfolk said that now his malice was clear.

On the sixth of July, 1535, Sir Thomas More was beheaded on Tower Hill, for the king remitted the ferocious mutilations that accompanied the executions for treason at Tyburn. “The scaffold was very unsteady, and putting his feet on the ladder, he said, merrily, to the lieutenant of the Tower: “I pray thee see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.”[92]

Then, with a simple request to the people standing round to pray for him, and to bear witness that he died a Catholic for the faith of the Catholic Church, a friendly word to the executioner, and a last prayer--the 51st Psalm--the axe fell, and More was dead.

Beyond More’s scholarship and wit, and his affection for his family and friends, stands out his great, unflinching quality of loyalty to conscience. When the power was in his hands as lord chancellor, no one was put to death by Sir Thomas More for heresy in England, though he did what he could by his pen to check the innovations of Luther, which he hated,--not only because they broke up the unity of Christendom, but because, it seemed to him, they struck at all social morality and decency.[93] The violence of Luther’s outbreak, the determination of the Lutherans--sure of their own possession of the truth--to allow no liberty to Catholics, and the antinomian communism of the anabaptists--all these things made Protestantism detestable to men like Sir Thomas More and Erasmus, and made More declare that dogmatising heretics ought to be repressed by the state as breeders of strife and contention. But his own record is clear: “And of all that ever came in my hand for heresy, as help me God, saving (as I said) the sure keeping of them, had never any of them any stripe or stroke given them, so much as a fillip on the forehead.”[94]

“What other controversialist can be named, who, having the power to crush antagonists whom he viewed as the disturbers of the quiet of his own declining years, the destroyers of all the hopes which he had cherished for mankind, contented himself with severity of language?”[95]

The author of the _Utopia_ was a critic, as Colet and Erasmus were, of abuses in the Church; but like his friends he lived and died a Catholic. He saw Lutheranism as the source of a thousand ills, and with Erasmus opposed it; but though heretics were anti-social and factious, he would not put one to death for error.

It is all through Sir Thomas More’s character--this respect for conscience. There is no going back on the wide toleration of his early manhood, and high office and responsibilities of state no more cramp or belittle his faith than they destroy his playfulness or the warmth of his affections.

He died a martyr for the religion of his life, for the simple right to abide in the old Catholic paths of his fellow-countrymen.

As Sir Thomas More was not the first of the Catholic martyrs at the Reformation, for he had seen his old friends, the Carthusian monks, carried to Tyburn, so he was not the last. For the next fifty years of Henry and Elizabeth, English men and women were to suffer for the old faith of England, and in Mary’s reign to die as bravely for Protestantism.

In spite of monasteries and priories destroyed, and parish churches stripped and plundered, in spite of penal laws which banned its priesthood and proscribed its worship, the Catholicism More died for has endured in England. All that parliament could do to exterminate the belief in papal supremacy has been done; all that panic and prejudice could accomplish by “popish plots” to the same end has been accomplished. These things have been no more successful than the mad “no popery” riots of Lord George Gordon in crushing the faith of the Roman Catholic minority. The penal laws have gone, Catholic emancipation has been obtained, a Catholic hierarchy has been set up, and to-day in England the freedom of conscience that was refused to Sir Thomas More is the accepted liberty of all.

In 1887 Sir Thomas More, with Bishop Fisher and the Carthusian martyrs, were beatified by Pope Leo XIII. Serving their religion in life and death, they served the cause of human liberty, withstanding Henry as Anselm withstood the Red King, and as Langton withstood John.

Robert Ket and The Norfolk Rising

1549

AUTHORITIES: _The Commotion in Norfolk_, by Nicholas Sotherton, 1576 (Harleian MS.); _De Furoribus Norfolciensum_, by Nevylle, 1575 (Translated into English by Wood, 1615); Holinshed--_Chronicle_; Sir John Hayward--_Life of Edward VI._; Strype--_Memorials_; Blomefield--_History of Norfolk_; F. W. Russell--_Kett’s Rebellion_; W. Rye; _Victoria County History--Norfolk_.

ROBERT KET AND THE NORFOLK RISING.

1549.

The Norfolk Rising of the sixteenth century was a land war, caused directly by the enclosing of the common fields of the peasants, and the break up of the accustomed rural life.

The landowners finding greater profit in breeding sheep and cattle than in the small holdings of peasants, began, about 1470, to seize the fields which from time immemorial had been cultivated by the country people in common, and to evict whole parishes by pulling down all the dwelling places. For eighty years these clearances were going on. Acts of Parliament were passed in 1489 and 1515 to prohibit the “pulling down of towns” and to order the rebuilding of such towns, and the restoration of pasture lands to tillage, but both acts were quite inoperative. In 1517, Cardinal Wolsey’s Royal Commission on Enclosures reported on the defiance of the law in seven Midland counties, where more than 36,000 acres had been enclosed; but legal proceedings against the landowners were stayed on the latter promising to make restitution.

Thomas More, in the first part of his _Utopia_, in 1516, described for all time what the enclosures he witnessed meant for England.

“For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen, yea, and certain abbots, holy men no doubt, not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure--nothing profiting, yea, much annoying the public weal--leave no ground for tillage, they inclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down towns and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made a sheep fold.... They turn all dwelling-places and all glebe land into desolation and wilderness. Therefore, that one covetous and insatiable comorant may compass about and inclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or hedge, the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else either by cunning and fraud, or by violent oppression, or by wrongs and injuries they be so wearied, that they be compelled to sell all. By one means therefore or another, either by hook or by crook they must needs depart away, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, mothers with their young babies, and their whole household small in substance and large in number, as husbandry requireth many hands. Away they trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in.... And when they have wandered abroad till the little they have be spent, what can they then else do but steal, and then justly be hanged, or else go about a begging. And yet then also they be cast in prison as vagabonds, because they go about and work not: whom no man will set a work, though they never so willingly proffer themselves thereto. For one shepherd or herdsman is enough to eat up that ground with cattle, to the occupying whereof about husbandry many hands were requisite.”

This was social England in the early years of Henry VIII., and every year saw things grow worse for the rural folk, in spite of further royal proclamations against enclosures in 1526. A series of bad harvests drove a starving population to riot in Norfolk in 1527 and 1529. In 1536 came the suppression of 376 lesser monasteries, followed two years later by the dissolution of all remaining monasteries and priories, and in 1547 by the royal confiscation of the property of the religious guilds and brotherhoods.

The landowners having established a starving unemployed class by the simple process of depriving people of access to the land, and the crown having removed the only source of relief to the unemployed by destroying the monasteries, it remained for parliament to deal with the “social problem” thus created by declaring poverty a crime, and the unemployed person a felon. The lash and the gallows were to solve the problem.

In 1531, an act of parliament granted licences to the impotent beggar, and ordered a whipping for all other mendicants. Five years later stronger measures were adopted, and whipping was only permitted to first offenders: mutilation and hanging were the subsequent penalties on conviction, and thousands of unemployed men and women suffered under this act. But still the unemployed existed, for the enclosures had not been stopped; and so the first year of Edward VI. saw an act passed declaring the convicted unemployed “a slave.” (As it seemed to many that parliament had got rid of papal authority only to bring back slavery in England, this act was repealed in two years, and the act of 1531 revived.)

The bitterness of the agrarian misery, the violent destruction of all the old religious customs and habits of the people, the confiscation of the funds of the guilds, the open despoiling of the parish churches of the people[96]--all these things plunged the country into confusion and despair. The general rising in Lincolnshire and the north in 1536 (known as the “Pilgrimage of Grace”) against the suppressions of the monasteries, and the rising in Cornwall and Devon in 1549 against Edward’s VI.’s new Book of Common Prayer were strong manifestations of the popular dislike of the changes made in religion by Henry VIII. and the ministers of Edward VI.

In Norfolk, in 1537, the people made an insurrection against the suppression of the monasteries; but the later risings of 1540 (at Griston, when one John Walker “exhorted the people to destroy the gentry”), and in 1549, under Ket, were not concerned with the religious troubles of the times, but were frankly agrarian. The Norfolk rising, which Ket led, was no more connected with Protestantism than the Peasant Revolt of 1381 was with Lollardy. Agrarian disturbances took place in a number of counties in 1549. In May the peasants of Somerset and Lincoln were in revolt, and in July there were tumults in Essex, Kent, Wiltshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire. A rude Cambridge ballad of the time extols the pulling down of enclosures:

Cast hedge and ditch in the lake, Fixed with many a stake; Though they be never so fast, Yet asunder they are wrest. Sir, I think that this work Is as good as to build a kirk.

In 1548 Protector Somerset had followed Wolsey’s footsteps in issuing a proclamation for a royal commission to inquire and report concerning enclosures, and to give the names of all who kept more than two thousand sheep or who had “taken from any other their commons.”[97] The commissioners were also “to reform” any cases of the enclosing of commons and highways, “without due recompense,” which they might find; “and to the intent your doings may proceed without all suspicion, and the people conceive some good hope of reformation at your hands, we would that as many of you as be in any of the cases to be reformed, do first, for example’s sake, begin to the reformation of yourselves.”

Somerset’s ingenuous suggestion was naturally disregarded by the commissioners, and beyond making inquiries and publishing a report--to the effect that in the counties of Suffolk, Essex, Hertford, Kent, and Worcester nearly all the common lands[98] had been enclosed, while in Norfolk and Northampton large enclosures had been made--the commission of 1548 was as fruitless as its predecessors. Somerset, however, got some reputation by it as an enemy to the enclosures, and certainly incurred the dislike of the landowners. But where Wolsey, in the hey-day of power, had failed, there was small chance of success for Somerset, with the country in a state of anarchy, and the nation rent and distracted by a violent revolution in the Church.

The only strong movement to prevent the utter downfall of the country-people was the Norfolk Rising, which Robert Ket directed in the summer of 1549. It failed in the end, but for more than six weeks the power of the landlords was broken round Norwich, their enclosures were stopped, and the hope of better things filled the hearts of the peasants.

The rising began at Attleborough on 20th June when Squire Green, of Wylby, set up fences and hedges round the common lands at Harpham and Attleborough, and the people, excited by news that in Kent similar fences had been destroyed, proceeded to pull them down. For the next fortnight the revolt had neither leaders nor organization. “There were secret meetings of men running hither and thither, and then withdrawing themselves for secret conferences, but at length they all began to deal tumultuously and to rage openly.” On July 7th the annual feast at Wymondham, in honour of the translation of St. Thomas of Canterbury, brought the country folk together from miles round; and at the close of the fair they all set off to break down the fences set up round the common lands at Hetherset by one Sergeant Flowerdew.[99]

Flowerdew, unable to save his fences, proposed a diversion. The Kets at Wymondham had made enclosures, why shouldn’t the rioters deal with them in similar fashion? Flowerdew actually paid over 40d. to encourage an attack on the Kets.

Robert Ket and his brother were well-known men. Both were craftsmen, Robert, a tanner, and William, a butcher. They were landowners besides, and men of substance and of old family, for it was said the Kets had been in the land since the Norman Conquest. Robert Ket held three manors from the Earl of Warwick; his yearly income was put down at £50, and his property valued at 1,000 marks. Like other landowners, the Kets had made enclosures, but on the arrival of the people from Hetherset they at once declared themselves willing to stand by the movement for freeing the land. Robert Ket felt the misery of his neighbours. He saw that if the revolt was to be anything more than a local riot it must have necessary guidance, and his sympathies were entirely on the democratic side. And so from that time forward he gave up the quiet of a country gentleman’s life at Wymondham for the strenuous movement of an insurgent camp.

To the appeal of the people for help, Ket answered passionately, “I am ready, and will be ready at all times, to do whatever, not only to repress, but to subdue the power of great men. Whatsoever lands I have enclosed shall again be made common unto ye and all men, and my own hands shall first perform it.”

Then Robert Ket went on to commit himself body and soul to the movement, resolved that the peasants should not be left unaided in the struggle they had begun, and willing to take upon himself the burden and responsibility of leadership.

“You shall have me, if you will, not only as a companion, but as a captain; and in the doing of the so great a work before us, not only as a fellow, but for a leader, author and principal.”

If the ambition which clutches at sovereignty and rule is despicable, even more despicable is the weakness which refuses to take command at times of peril.

To Robert Ket and his brother there was no promise of the world’s honour and glory should the rising be successful. At the best would be the satisfaction of a battle fought and won for the deliverance of long-suffering peasants. At the worst the laying down of life in a good cause, as Geoffrey Litster and many a Norfolk man had done in bygone days.

Robert Ket’s leadership was acclaimed with enthusiasm, nor was it ever disputed throughout the rising. In this, the last of the great popular risings in England, the Norfolk men were as loyal to their leader as the men of Kent were to Wat Tyler and Jack Cade. And in each case that loyalty had ample justification.

There were but a thousand men involved when the rising began, but under Ket’s command the movement passed rapidly from the fluid “running hither and thither” condition of the first fortnight, and became the march of an organized army.

On July 10th, two days after Ket took command, this army was on the road to Norwich, and after crossing the river at Cringleford, lay encamped at Eaton Wood.