The Gentry: Stories of the English. Adam Nicolson

William Peto, a Franciscan friar and Catherine of Aragon’s confessor, summoned him for a private and urgent conversation. He told George it was his duty to defend the old church in Parliament, and ‘advised me if I were in the parliament house to stick to that matter as I would have my soul saved’.⁹ Death, and with it a sense of martyrdom, was in the air. But Peto also had some more intriguing information. He had just preached a sermon to the king at Placentia, the Tudor pleasure palace in Greenwich, violently denouncing anyone who repudiated his wife, lambasting the courtly flatterers in the stalls beneath him and warning Henry that Anne Boleyn was a Jezebel, the harlot-queen who had worshipped Baal, and that one day, dogs would be licking Henry’s blood, as they had her husband Ahab’s.

      A tumultuously angry king left the chapel and summoned the friar to come out into the palace garden. In this atmosphere of alarm and terror, Peto took his life in his hands and addressed the King directly. Henry could have no other wife while Catherine of Aragon was alive; and he could never marry Queen Anne ‘for that it was said he had medled with the mother and the daughter’.¹⁰ To have slept with one Boleyn, let alone two, would in the eyes of the church make marriage to any other Boleyn girl illegal.

      Peto fled for the Continent but left Throckmorton in London with his injunctions to martyrdom. How far was this from the comforts of Coughton, fishing in the Arrow or improving his house, completing his father’s new gateway! Throckmorton was swimming beyond his ken. Sir Thomas More, probably just on the point of resigning as Lord Chancellor,

      then sent saye [word] for me to come speke with hym in the parliament chamber. And when I cam to hym he was in a little chamber within the parliament chamber, where as I do remember me, stode an aulter or a thing like unto an aulter, wherupon he did leane. And than he said this to me, I am viry gladde to here the good reporte that goeth of you and that ye be so a good a catholique man as ye be; and if ye doo continue in the same weye that ye begynne and be not afrayed to seye yor conscience, ye shall deserve greate reward of god and thanks of the kings grace at lingth and moche woorship to yourself: or woordes moche lik to thies.¹¹

      Throckmorton was flattered that these great men should be considering him as their advocate in Parliament. He was as vulnerable as anyone to the vanity of the martyr and prided himself on his courage and forthrightness as a man who was not frightened by princes or power. He wanted to be known, he wrote, as ‘a man that durst speake for the comen wilth’.¹² He was not only a Catholic; he was a Warwickshire knight, whose tradition was to speak for the Commons of England. Peto had told Henry himself that his policies would lose him his kingdom, precisely because the commonwealth could not follow them. But for Throckmorton how could that position play out in the high-talent bear garden of the Tudor court? How could he survive if he were to defend the ancient Catholic truths?

      In search of guidance, Throckmorton visited John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, soon like More to be martyred (when his headless body was left, as a lesson to others, stripped and naked on the scaffold all day until evening came), as well as the monk Richard Reynolds at Syon in Middlesex. He too would soon be dragged on a hurdle from the Tower to Tyburn, where with four others he would be hanged in his habit for resistance to Henry’s supremacy laws. Everyone Throckmorton consulted, to various degrees, advised him ‘to stick to the same to the death’. And everyone knew that word was no figure of speech. ‘And if I did not, I shulde surely be damned. And also if I did speke or doo any thing in the parliament house contrarie to my conscience for feare of any erthly power or punyshment, I shulde stande in a very havie case at the daye of Judgement.’¹³

      The choice they put to him was to suffer now or suffer in eternity, suicide or spiritual suicide. This advice ‘entered so in my heart’ that it set George Throckmorton on a path of courage. God had to come before man, whatever the consequence for him or his family. He was remaining loyal to the inheritance his father had left him and in doing so was endangering his children’s future.

      Then, quite suddenly, he was sent for by the King. When they met, Cromwell was standing at the King’s shoulder. Confronted with this, Throckmorton bore himself with a directness and integrity of which his mentors would have been proud. He repeated to the King what his cousin Peto had told him:

      I feared if ye did marye quene Anne yor conscience wolde be more troubled at length, for that it is thoughte ye have meddled bothe with the mother and the sister. And his grace said never with the mother and my lorde privey seale [Cromwell] standing by said nor never with the sister nethir, and therfor putt that out of yor mynde.¹⁴

      It must have been one of the most terrifying tellings of truth to power in English history. Henry had admitted his affair with Anne Boleyn’s elder sister but this candour and apparent intimacy did Throckmorton little good. He appeared in Cromwell’s papers as one of those Members of Parliament to be watched and not to be trusted. Cromwell was not replying to letters from George himself but instead wrote to him, advising him ‘to lyve at home, serve God, and medyll little’.¹⁵ Sewn in amongst Tudor tyranny and threat were these repeated moments of forgiveness and advice, like sequins of grace, anti-sweets, sugar coated in bile.

      But ‘meddle little’? Cromwell’s language might have been tolerant; it was scarcely forgiving. There is a plaintive recognition of that in Throckmorton’s letter to him: ‘Ye shall see I wyll performe all promesys made with you.’

      From other places around the country, off-colour notes arrived on Cromwell’s desk. From Anthony Cope, a Protestant Oxfordshire squire and Cromwell loyalist: ‘It grieves me to find [the King] has so fewe frendes in either Warwick or Northamptonshire. Mr. Throkmerton promised he would assist me to the best he cold. Nevertheless, secretly he workith the contrary.’ From Sir Thomas Audley, one of Henry’s hatchet men, who presided over a sequence of show trials and executions in the mid-1530s: ‘Mr. Throgmorton is not so hearty in Warwickshire as he might be.’¹⁶

      Not to be hearty in mid-1530s England, at least after the passing of the Treasons Act in 1534, one of the ‘sanguinolent thirstie Lawes’ by which men and women ‘for Wordes only’¹⁷ were condemned to death, was a dangerous position to be in. Thomas More and John Fisher would both be executed the following year on the basis of words alone. Anne Boleyn and her so-called lovers (which included her brother) were beheaded on the same grounds. Many monks were executed in the 1530s for doing no more. And George had been firmly identified with them as part of this verbal opposition. In January 1535, he wrote from Coughton to the worldly diplomat and trimmer Sir Francis Bryan: ‘I hear that the kynges grace shuld be in displeasure wythe me. And that I shuld be greatly hyndred to hym, by whom I know not.’¹⁸

      Throckmorton was a marked man, if not yet a condemned one, and as an escape from that predicament, he attended to his lands in Warwickshire and Worcestershire, retreating to the comforts of Coughton, consolidating estates, negotiating with his neighbours and with Cromwell for advantages and openings for himself and his children. Life had to go on. Acting as the King’s servant, Throckmorton continued with his normalities, sending in accounts of the royal woods at Haseley, where he was the bailiff, and serving as a commissioner in collecting tax from clergy in Warwickshire, guiding church money towards the royal coffers. On his new gateway at Coughton, he put up two coats of arms: his own and Henry Tudor’s.

      But in October 1536, as the first of the monasteries was being dissolved, his life deepened into something much more dangerous. Large-scale rebellions, which broke out first in Lincolnshire and then in Yorkshire and the north-west, turned those months into the most threatening of Henry’s reign. Known to history as the Pilgrimage of Grace, they were deeply conservative uprisings, driven partly by poor harvests, partly by anger and despair at the first suppressions of the smaller monasteries, partly by the sense that Cromwell’s new religious and political policies were betraying old England and partly by the fear that the old aristocratic leaders of the country were no longer in charge. Wolsey had been a butcher’s son, Cromwell a brewer’s, and even Thomas More was the grandson of a baker. That was not how conservative England liked the world to work.

      A longing for past certainty hung over the Pilgrimage of Grace as it did over everything George and his allies had been talking about for years. The rebels demanded that the Catholic princess, Mary Tudor, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon,