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furious rages causing him to aim blows at anyone within reach: Cromwell was beaten about the head at least twice a week. Yet this ferocity – he became the only English monarch to burn women alive for treason – owed more to an already unbalanced temperament than brain damage. The collapse of his health did not so much change his personality as aggravate an innate savagery. 2 Even before the fall, he had been fearsome enough. His religious revolution had gathered pace after the Act of Supremacy of 1534 completed the break with Rome and created him ‘Supreme head on earth of the Church of England’. Gifted with an insight denied to previous English monarchs, Henry had realized during the impasse over his divorce that the Bishop of Rome possessed no more authority outside his diocese than any other bishop, and that the provinces of York and Canterbury formed a separate Church. Anyone who disgreed with this revelation risked losing his life.
    A new Treason Act proscribed the death penalty for anyone who should ‘deny’ the king any of his titles, or who stated in writing or by word of mouth that he was ‘a heretic, a schismatic, a tyrant or an infidel’. (A testimony to what many people thought of Henry VIII and his policies.) Also denounced in the Treason Act was anyone who declared ‘our sovereign lord’ was ‘a usurper of the crown’. Generally overlooked, this can only refer to Yorkists. 3
    England soon realized that it had become a very dangerous place. In April 1535 three Carthusian priors were executed at Tyburn with spectacular cruelty for refusing to accept Henry as head of the Church. Opposition or criticism infuriated him. When Pope Paul III made Bishop John Fisher a cardinal in May as a reward for his uncompromising loyalty to Rome, the enraged king had him beheaded the next month – although he did not carry out his threat of sending Fisher’s skull to Rome so that it could wear the red hat.
    Sir Thomas More, the former Lord Chancellor, a brilliant scholar and writer who was admired not just in England butall over Europe, followed the bishop to the scaffold in July. Once upon a time he had been among Henry’s closest friends. They were keen astronomers and had watched the stars together from the roof of Greenwich Palace. The king had liked to arrive unannounced at his house in Chelsea, to dine and then stroll around the garden with him arm in arm. However, because of his reputation Sir Thomas was capable of rallying massive opposition, so that it made political sense to eliminate him.
    While the pair undoubtedly died for their consciences, the king’s decision to kill them was prompted by more than their loyaty to Rome. Where Fisher was concerned, Cromwell was only stating the facts when he told Sir John Wallop to tell Francis I they had been executed because of ‘their treasons, conspiracies and practises secretly practised as well within the realm as without’ – for planning ‘the destruction of the King’. Although Cromwell could not produce any evidence, by now he had plainly learned something about Fisher’s attempts to start a rebellion. As for More, even if he had not been actively involved he would certainly have approved whole heartedly of Henry’s replacement by the impeccably Catholic Lady Mary. 4
    Behind the executions, the White Rose party saw a message from on high that Henry was too wicked to remain King of England. Devout Catholics, both Lady Salisbury and Lady Exeter must already have been shocked by the spread of the ‘New Learning’. The break with Rome horrified them. Attributing it entirely to Henry’s passion for Anne Boleyn, they felt, as Elizabethan papists would put it, that the reformed Church of England had come out of the king’s codpiece.
    Although Bergavenny’s death in June 1535 was a heavy blow for the White Rose, Lord Darcy remained determined to overthrow Henry. It says volumes that for many months the authorities would not let him return to the North.