Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [422]
This was the will of the Protestant boy king Edward VI.
The Reformation had come to Sarum.
As Shockley left the little drama at St Thomas’s and made his way slowly across the town, his mind turned to another scene that had taken place an hour before in his own house. As he remembered it, he winced.
His five-year-old daughter, Celia, staring at him with wide, frightened eyes. His wife Katherine, her look of hurt and reproach before she burst into tears.
It was his fault, of course.
If it had not been for the Reformation, he would not have needed to lie.
But then who in Sarum could ever have expected that a Tudor king would start a Protestant Reformation in England?
Ever since 1485, when their victory over the unpopular Yorkist Richard III at Bosworth had put the upstart Welsh dynasty on the throne, the Tudors had done everything to make their rule unquestioned, and, above all, orthodox. Since their own claim to the throne, through a lucky marriage into the house of Lancaster, was rather obscure, Henry VII had married a Yorkist princess. The great feudal nobles were tired and weakened by the Wars of the Roses: the Tudors with their strong central government and their courts, like the mighty Star Chamber, soon awed them into submission. And where Henry VII consolidated his position, his son Henry VIII shone.
He was everything a northern Renaissance prince should be. Scholar, musician, poet, athlete. Under Henry, had England not defeated the invading Scots at Flodden, and trounced the French at the Battle of the Spurs? He was extravagant, certainly, but when he went to meet the French king at the sumptuous pageant known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, he showed himself to be magnificent.
Above all, in matters of religion, he was orthodox. For his writings in support of Rome, the pope had given young Henry VIII his glorious extra title: Defender of the Faith. Was his wife not the daughter of the most Catholic King of Spain, and aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles? When Luther’s Protestant movement had begun in Germany, and when milder reformers like Erasmus had questioned the malpractices of the Roman Church, the northern island of England with its faithful king had remained conservative and sternly apart.
Certainly, nothing could have been more Catholic than Sarum and its bishop.
For Henry’s great servant Wolsey had given the bishopric of Salisbury with its great estates to no less a person than the legate to England, Cardinal Campeggio.
Of course, the great Italian Cardinal was seldom present. The running of the diocese was lax. The cathedral choristers had dwindled to under a dozen. But what did that matter as long as England and Sarum were orthodox? When seditious printed books such as a series of Lutheran tracts, or Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament into English, appeared in England, King Henry VIII and Wolsey very properly burned them and Campeggio wrote, from Rome, to assure them: ‘no holocaust could be more pleasing to God.’
Sarum would never have known the Reformation but for that cruel accident of nature. It was not that Queen Katherine failed to give the king a son – for she had given him no less than four sons and three daughters in their almost twenty years of marriage; but except for one daughter, Mary, all her children died in infancy. True, the king had one son, born out of wedlock, whom he had made Duke of Richmond. But it was a legitimate heir that was needed.
And Sarum would never have