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Home , Catherine Howard, Edward Powell, Francis Dereham, Thomas Culpeper

book 1, chapter 43 Of , Henry’s Fifth Wife, and How, after Ordering Her Put to Death, He Married Katherine Parr1

Within eight days, the king married Catherine Howard, the ’s niece (his brother’s daughter).2 But though the king was pleased beyond mea- sure with his new bride, that did not stop him from inflicting his cruelty on Catholics. Thus, on July 30, he put to death three saintly doctors of theology for having defended the cause of Queen Doña Catherine and for now denying the king’s pontifical power. Alongside them he condemned three Zwinglian heretics, ordering that they be paraded two by two, a Catholic together with a heretic, as a blacker mockery of religion and a worse torment to the Catholics, who received more pain from this awful company than from their own deaths. When a knight of the king’s household saw them borne off to death, com- panioned in this manner, and learned that some were condemned for being Catholics and the others for not being so, he said, “On this account I will take care henceforth to be of the king’s religion—that is to say, none at all!”3 Then, on August 2, he also dispatched the prior of Doncaster with three other monks and two laymen, on the same grounds, as well as for refusing to acknowledge the royal supremacy.4

1 Sander, De origine ac progressu, 214–19. 2 Henry and Catherine were married on June 28, 1540, several weeks after the finalization of the divorce from Anne. 3 Sander identifies the three Catholics as Thomas Abell, a former chaplain to Catherine of Ara- gon, Edward Powell, a canon of Lincoln and , and , archdeacon of Brecon, and the three evangelical activists as (c.1495–1540), Thomas Gar- rard (1498–1540), and William Jerome (d.1540). All were executed at Henry’s order on June 30, 1540. The Catholics were hanged, drawn, and quartered as traitors, while the Protestants were burnt as heretics. Gary G. Gibbs, “Abell, Thomas (d. 1540),” in odnb, 1:69–70. Ethan H. Shagan, “Powell, Edward (c.1478–1540),” in odnb, 45:79–80. Ethan H. Shagan, “Fetherston, Richard (d. 1540),” in odnb, 19:453. Carl R. Trueman, “Barnes, Robert (c.1495–1540),” in odnb, 3:1006–09, here 1009. Susan Wabuda, “Garrard, Thomas (1498–1540),” in odnb, 21:515–16. For a sixteenth-century Catholic rendering of these martyrdoms, see Book 1 Figure 37.1. 4 De origine ac progressu identifies three of these men: the Carthusian Lawrence Cook (d.1540); William (whom Sander strangely calls “Eegidio”) Horn (d.1540), a laybrother of the London Charterhouse; and Clement Philip (d.1540), a layman. Sander, De origine ac progressu, 217.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004323964_050

304 book 1, chapter 43

At this time, the king was continually hounded by the pangs of his con- science and by certain (albeit weak) desires to return to God and the unity of his Church. For he saw that he had proved himself to be neither altogether Catholic nor altogether heretic, and therefore both Catholics and heretics ab- horred him, and that in the sects of the misbelievers there were alterations and innovations every day, and only in the Catholic faith certainty, constancy, and safety. On this account, he sent ambassadors to the emperor, who was at the imperial diet of Germany, to discuss some means of being reconciled with the Roman pontiff.5 But he wanted to preserve his honor, and he would neither publicly admit his error, nor do penance for it, nor restore any property to the churches—all of which was repugnant to the sacred canons and to the eternal salvation of his soul. And so all these good thoughts and intentions ended in smoke and withered away, for they had no roots, being founded more upon the glory of men than upon that of God.6 And, just as this accursed king had been disloyal to his first wife and a traitor to God, so his wives were to him—for Catherine Howard had not yet enjoyed two years of marriage to the king when, on his own accusations, she was con- victed, condemned, and executed for adultery,7 and with her the adulterers, and .8 Because it was known that these men had been Catherine’s lovers not only as queen but well before, and to avoid such a mishap in the future, parliament passed a law stating that any woman the king intended to marry who was taken for a virgin without in fact being so, and did not reveal the truth to the king, had committed the crime of

5 In November 1540, Henry sent Gardiner to Regensburg, where Charles v had summoned the imperial diet. Though Henry implied that his break with Rome might be negotiable, the diet collapsed under the weight of theological differences before any real watershed was reached—although an Anglo-Imperial alliance was concluded. Haigh, English Reformations, 155–56. 6 Ps. 101:4; John 12:43. 7 Catherine married Henry on June 28, 1540. Less than two years later, in October 1541, was informed of her infidelities and her downfall began. She was condemned by a bill of on February 7, 1542 and beheaded on February 13. David Loades, Catherine Howard: The Adulterous Wife of Henry viii (Stroud: Amberley, 2012), 153, 157. 8 Thomas Culpeper (c.1514–41), a gentleman of the king’s privy chamber, had been slated to marry Catherine before Henry chose her. Thomas and the queen began an affair in the spring of 1541. Francis Dereham (c.1513–41) was a courtier and kinsman of the , with whom Catherine became sexually involved in late 1538. Though their relationship ended when Catherine became a maid of honor to late the following year, she made him her secretary in 1541 (probably in an attempt to buy his silence). After the discovery of Catherine’s infidelity, both Culpeper and Dereham were convicted of on December 1, 1541, and beheaded at on December 10. Ibid., 42–43, 115, 123, 149–50.