A Journey Through Tudor England by Suzannah Lipscomb

Author:Suzannah Lipscomb [Lipscomb, Suzannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2014-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

‘Great, goodly, and so princely that we have not seen the like.’

Perhaps most famous now as the site of Britain’s biggest music festival, Glastonbury has an ancient and deeply spiritual history. Legend has it that Joseph of Arimathea travelled to Glastonbury bearing the Holy Grail, and the hawthorn bush you can see here is said to be an offshoot of his staff where he planted it in the ground. It is reputed to be the fabled Isle of Avalon where King Arthur was buried: in 1191, a coffin of a man and a woman with golden hair was unearthed under Glastonbury Abbey on the site where Arthur and Guinevere were said to be entombed. Glastonbury is also well known for its tor — a natural, 518-foot-high conical hill visible for miles — that many hold to be an uncommonly mystical place, but in Tudor times, it became notorious for one particularly gruesome event.

In the early sixteenth century, Glastonbury Abbey was a vast and famous Benedictine monastery; the church at the Abbey, at 580 feet long, was the longest monastic church in the country. The central towers rose to 216 feet, two or three times the height of the remaining ruins of the Lady Chapel. It was important enough for Henry VII and his retinue to visit in 1497.

Like all the abbeys, Glastonbury would suffer as a result of the dissolution of the monasteries [see FOUNTAINS ABBEY]. Unlike most, however, not only the Abbey, but its abbot, too, would perish in the process.

When Henry VIII’s commissioners visited Glastonbury in September 1539, they reported that the Abbey was so ‘great, goodly, and so princely that we have not seen the like’, ‘a house meet for the King’s Majesty’. It held enormous wealth for the King’s coffers, but Henry was not going to get it without a fight: the abbot, Richard Whiting, refused to surrender the monastery.

The King’s commissioners set about building the case against him. They cross-examined the abbot, allegedly finding evidence of his ‘cankered and traitorous heart and mind’. They ransacked his study and discovered a book that opposed the King’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon. Finally, they came across a gold chalice, and other plate and ornaments that had been hidden from the commissioners ‘in walls, vaults, and other secret places’. They considered this embezzlement and ‘manifest robbery’. In all, Whiting’s crimes amounted to high treason. Though a ‘very weak man and sickly’, the abbot was confined to the Tower of London, and on 14 November he was tried and condemned.

If these deeds seem insufficient to qualify as treason, it is probably because they were: they were the pretext that Thomas Cromwell needed to get rid of Whiting because he was an obstacle to the King’s plans. A note in Cromwell’s files makes this clear. It reads, ‘Item the Abbot of Glastonbury to be tried at Glastonbury and also executed there with his accomplices.’ Not only does it order Whiting’s arraignment, it also assumes his guilt and decides his punishment before he had even been tried.

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