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Forgery and Miracles in the Reign of Henry Viii*

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Forgery and Miracles in the Reign of Henry Viii* FORGERY AND MIRACLES IN THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII* In June 1534, as the final ties connecting the English Church to Rome were inexorably being severed, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer issued an order for the preservation of ‘unity and quietness’. For the space of a year, preachers were to steer clear of six topics which ‘have caused dissension amongst the subjects of this realm’, namely, ‘purgatory, honouring of saints, that priests may have wives, that faith only justifieth, to go on pilgrim- ages, to forge miracles’.1 The first four items on this list represent important doctrinal flashpoints of the early Reformation; the fifth, an increasingly contentious ingredient of popular religious cul- ture. But the sixth — ‘to forge miracles’ — is a more puzzling and arcane inclusion, which those scholars noticing the document have generally passed over without comment, or glossed as a reference to miracles in the round.2 Starting from this textual loose end, my essay aims to unravel a thread which can be found running through the course of the Reformation in Henry VIII’s reign: a persistent concern to identify and accentuate instances of the fraudulent and the counterfeit.3 From asking why the idea of ‘forged miracles’ might have been at the forefront of Cranmer’s thinking at this particular juncture, it goes on to consider the broader implications of the theme for understanding profound and long-term shifts in religious and political culture taking place from the 1530s. A significant achievement of recent scholarship * Earlier versions of this article were given over the course of 2001–2 at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in Denver, Colorado, the Reformation Studies Colloquium at the University of Exeter and seminars at the Universities of Birmingham and St Andrews. I learned much from participants on all these occasions, and particu- larly wish to thank Bernard Capp, Eamon Duffy, Brad Gregory, Andrew Pettegree, Richard Rex, Robert Swanson and Alexandra Walsham. 1 Thomas Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters, ed. John Edmund Cox (Parker Society, Cambridge [hereafter PS], 1846), 460–1. 2 Jasper Ridley, Thomas Cranmer (Oxford, 1962), 91; Alan Kreider, English Chantries: The Road to Dissolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 105–6; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven and London, 1996), 124. 3 There has been no sustained attention to this theme, though there are insights in Margaret Aston’s magisterial contributions on image-breaking: England’s Iconoclasts: Laws against Images (Oxford, 1988), 235–6; Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion, 1350–1600 (London, 1993), 263–4, 266–70. © The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2003 40 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 178 has been to reinsert the miraculous as a core element of early modern religious experience, and to insist upon the fundamental lineaments of the ‘supernatural universe’ inhabited by Catholic and Protestant Europeans alike throughout the sixteenth century and beyond.4 But the following discussion stands in a somewhat contrapuntal relationship to this approach, aiming to elucidate the development of a particular strain of scepticism, and its connection to a distinct moment of cultural rupture. Close atten- tion to the meanings of ‘forgery’, I will argue, brings into focus important questions about the intellectual parentage of Henrician religious policy, and about its doctrinal and functional consist- ency. It also helps us better to comprehend the perplexing fragil- ity exhibited by what Eamon Duffy has termed ‘traditional religion’ in the early years of the English Reformation.5 I Public ‘dissension’ over forged miracles in the early summer of 1534 may have been largely of the government’s own making. A few weeks prior to the issuing of Cranmer’s edict, on 20 April 1534, the execution took place at Tyburn of Elizabeth Barton, the Nun or ‘Holy Maid’ of Kent, a figure once a mere footnote in the historiography of the period, but recently the focus of con- siderable scholarly interest, emerging as perhaps the most formid- able of all Henry’s early opponents.6 Barton was a maidservant 4 The most important works here include Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997); Raymond Gillespie, Devoted People: Belief and Religion in Early Modern Ireland (Manchester, 1997); Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999). Effective distillations of the theme are R. W. Scribner, ‘Incombustible Luther: The Image of the Reformer in Early Modern Germany’, in his Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London, 1987); Philip M. Soergel, ‘The Afterlives of Monstrous Infants in Reformation Germany’, in Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (eds.), The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2000). 5 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400– 1580 (New Haven and London, 1992). Puzzlement about the apparent inability of local communities to resist reformist inroads into a thriving religious culture has been a notable by-product of the ‘revisionist’ surge in English Reformation studies. For a helpful summary of the issues, see Christopher Marsh, Popular Religion in Sixteenth- Century England (Basingstoke, 1998), ch. 5: ‘Conclusions: The Compliance Conundrum’. 6 See Richard Rex, ‘The Execution of the Holy Maid of Kent’, Hist. Research, lxiv (1991); Diane Watt, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997), ch. 3; Diane Watt, ‘Reconstructing the Word: The Political Prophecies of Elizabeth Barton (1506–1534)’, Renaissance Quart.,i (cont. on p. 41) FORGERY AND MIRACLES IN THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII 41 in a Kent gentry household, who began to experience visions and trances after falling ill in 1525, and was cured of her sick- ness after a pilgrimage to the image of Our Lady in the chapel of Court-at-Street. Her reputation as a visionary and worker of miracles continued to grow after she became a nun at St Sepulchre’s in Canterbury, and her revelations (mostly con- cerning purgatory, confession and prayer to the saints) were widely publicized by a group of clergy around the Canterbury Benedictine Edward Bocking. But as the divorce campaign gathered pace, her revelations took a dangerously political turn, and she prophesied that Henry would not remain king for six months if he put aside Queen Catherine. Barton’s importance for this article resides in the orchestration of her end, a campaign of denigration channelled primarily through two public narratives: a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross, and again at Canterbury, in late 1533; and an act of attainder passed in March 1534.7 Both texts relentlessly cast Barton as a fraud and a faker, and are determined to demonstrate, rather than merely assert, the falseness of her claims. Assurances were repeatedly given that she had confessed all to be ‘counterfeited and feigned’. In her cell at St Sepulchre’s had been found ‘brim- stone, arcefetida, and other stinking gommes and powders’ for staging dramatic diabolical visitations. Satan had reportedly spat in her face after his advances to her were spurned, and the napkin which wiped the spittle away was presented to her confessor, ‘black as soot and as stinking as carrion’. But Barton had simply taken soot ‘and mingled it with a stinking thing, you wot what I mean’. Another ‘solemn relic’, a letter penned for Barton by St Mary Magdalene, was ‘by much inquisition’ traced to a Canterbury monk named Hawkhurst. Barton’s veil, scorched by demonic fire, was also ‘shewn as a relic to divers’, but ‘she was the devil herself which burned the veil’.8 Not simply the deluded (n. 6 cont.) (1997); Ethan H. Shagan, ‘Print, Orality and Communications in the Maid of Kent Affair’, Jl Eccles. Hist., lii (2001); Ethan H. Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), ch. 2. Collectively, these works supersede the overly hagiographical account in Alan Neame, The Holy Maid of Kent: The Life of Elizabeth Barton, 1506–1534 (London, 1971). 7 ‘The Sermon against the Holy Maid of Kent and her Adherents, Delivered at Paul’s Cross, November the 23rd, 1533, and at Canterbury, December the 7th’, ed. L. E. Whatmore, Eng. Hist. Rev., lviii (1943); Statutes of the Realm, ed. A. Luders et al., 10 vols. (London, 1810–28), iii, 446–51 (25 Hen. VIII, c. 12). 8 ‘Sermon against the Holy Maid’, 469–70, 471, 473–4; Statutes, iii, 448, 450. 42 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 178 dupe of conservative forces, Barton was an artful instigator, her spiritual productions premeditated deceits. In the attainder, the words ‘feign’ and ‘feigned’ appear no fewer than thirty-seven times, along with much ‘hypocrisy’, ‘craft’ and ‘dissimulation’. The imperatives here were candidly admitted. Barton’s trances had brought her into ‘marvellous credit’ with the people; more- over, ‘the great grudge and contradiction, which have been made against the lawful and godly marriage’ (Henry’s to Anne Boleyn), were said to have been specially grounded upon ‘false miracles and revelations’. Now that the falsehood was detected, however, the king’s subjects would never again be lured into sedition by such ‘false persuasions’.9 This was a set of equations pregnant with future possibility. Reinterpreted by the regime’s apologists, the life of Elizabeth Barton brought together a number of motifs which were to re-emerge with growing insistence over the course of the Henrician Reformation: unverifiable private revelations, mired in dark ulterior motives; false relics, exhibited to the credulous; contrived ‘miracles’, with entirely naturalistic explana- tions; pilgrimages to wonder-working images, fostered ‘for lucre’.10 Barton was an exceptionally dangerous opponent of the king’s proceedings because her manipulation of the supernatural order met expectations deeply rooted in contemporary religious culture.11 But by the same token, the reshaping of her narratives as exemplary stories of ‘forged miracles’ drew on a range of long- established interpretative possibilities.
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