Sir Francis Walsingham Read Free Page B

but when the king became involved with hisdaughters – first Mary and then Anne – titles, lands and favours were poured out on the Boleyn clan. In 1529 Sir Thomas became Earl of Wiltshire and Ormonde. Ambitious courtiers now clamoured for his friendship and patronage. This, in turn, meant that they had to support King Henry’s campaign to dump his wife and make Anne his queen. The Walsinghams and the Dennys were on the outer rim of the Boleyn circle. Sir Francis Bryan, Anthony Denny’s patron, was a cousin of the Boleyn girls and dedicated to their advancement. Denny seems to have been groomed by Bryan to succeed him in office, for he became a member of the privy chamber staff in about 1533 and took Bryan’s place as second chief gentleman in 1539. He will certainly have been instrumental in securing Boleyn kinship for his sister by her marriage to Sir John Carey.
    But much more was involved in all this than a few ambitious families jostling for power, influence and promotion. The ‘King’s Great Matter’ (the divorce crisis) coincided with the arrival in England of the radical religious ideas of Martin Luther. In 1517 this German monk had challenged the power of the pope to absolve the departed from the pains of purgatory. In 1521 he had defied pope and emperor at the Diet of Worms and been condemned as a heretic but, protected by his prince, he had embarked upon a mammoth programme of books, pamphlets and sermons calling for a root-and-branch reform of the church. This evangelical revival was the cause célèbre of the age. The new ideas touched so many chords of indignation and dissatisfaction among the thinking classes of Europe that they spread with astonishing rapidity. In England students at the universities and the inns of court, merchants, tradespeople and courtiers were eagerly reading banned books smuggled into the country. From 1525 the English New Testament, translated and printed by William Tyndale from the safety of Germany, was being studied with as much clandestine zeal as the bishops were expending in tracking down the subversive volumes and making bonfires of them. The clamour for ecclesiastical reform and spiritual revival coincided with Henry VIII’s personal disagreement with Rome and, though it did not provide justification for the king’s action (Luther actually opposed the divorce), it did provide theological support for resisting papal authority.It is not surprising that the Boleyns and their friends favoured the new movement (though we should not dismiss this as mere cynical opportunism) and gave cautious support to radical preachers.
    Henry VIII failed to appreciate the full implications of the emerging Reformation. He could see that it might be useful to him but he had no desire to be tarred with the brush of heresy. For that reason court evangelicals had to tread warily. One man who saw more clearly than most the revolution in English church and state which might be accomplished was Thomas Cromwell, whose rapid rise to the position of chief minister between 1529 and 1531 took all observers by surprise. Cromwell, a convinced evangelical and ‘a layman of protean talents’, 1 convinced the king, not only that he could solve the matrimonial problem, but that he could free the Crown entirely from papal authority and vastly increase its wealth to boot. Cromwell made common cause with the Boleyn faction and embarked on a series of measures that would make the 1530s the most momentous decade in English history.
    Francis Walsingham was born, probably, in 1532 and his early years were shaped by the religious fervour and social upheaval of the Reformation. Within months of his birth Henry VIII had married Anne Boleyn and disembarrassed himself of Queen Catherine. Sir Thomas More, the leading opponent of the king’s Great Matter, had resigned as Lord Chancellor and would soon find himself in the Tower. Cromwell had embarked on a series of parliamentary measures which would, one-by-one, sever