User:Serial Number 54129/Tudor treason laws

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Praemunire

By the 16th century, praemunire or praemunire facias (Ecclesiastical Latin: [prɛˈmuː.ni.rɛ ˈfaː.t͡ʃi.as]) was an offence in English law in which ecclesiastical bodies—which could range from Parish courts to those of the Pope—were deemed superior to those of the King. Although various laws had sought to restrict appeal to church courts since the 14th century, this was generally on limited terms against a small number of clergy in individual cases. By 1531, however, it was being used wholesale against the English clergy, who were effectively condemned for over ruling the King's law by the very existence of their own jurisdictions.[1]

Reformation parliament

Lehmberg has described this parliament as vying with Long Parliament (1640–1660) and that of 1831—which resulted in the Great Reform Act—as "one of the most important assemblies ever to gather in England". The bulk of this parliament's work was devoted to the supremacy of the King over the Papacy in the realm of England; at the time of the Roose affair, the main statutory offensive against the church was yet to take place.[2]

A year later, the Earl of Essex made almost exactly the same threat—"that they deserved to be put into a sack and thrown into the Thames"—to the friars of Greenwich Palace.[3]

The precise nature of Fisher's illness is unknown, but Dowling has noted that much of his ill-health generally was due to digestive problems. Whatever his complaint, it was still with him before he died, although it was not the cause of his death: he was beheaded for treason on 22 June 1535, and was so ill by then that he had to be carried to the scaffold in a chair.[4]

Poisoning

Pollard notes that "if poison was not a frequent weapon at Rome, Popes and Cardinals at least believed it to be". Alexander VI was believed to have been poisoned; Cardinal Bainbridge was suspected of having been poisoned by his colleague; Leo X only narrowly avoided such a fate.[5]

Attainders

Prior to the Roose case, attainder had only been used on one occasion so far into Henry's reign—of the conventional medieval kind—convicting Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham of treason in 1523 following his beheading two years earlier.[6] From the Roose case onwards, suggests the early-modernist D. Alan Orr, acts of attainder augmented extant treason by broadening their application and "brought the full force of the law-making power of the sovereign to bear directly on the accused".[7]

Since the passing of the original Treason Act of 1352, Justices of the Peace had been expressly limited to hearing cases of petty treason only.[8]

Legal scholar Molly Murray argues that attainder became "an efficient means of confining and condemning his enemies without cumbersome and time-consuming judicial proceedings".[9] In neither of the two cases introduced by Cromwell was the target a high-profile prisoner of state.[10]

Stacy calculates that, rather than Roose being a standalone case, between 1531 and Henry's death in 1547, there were 20 attainders, of which 17 addressed treason, involving 104 people of whom 68 were condemned with no prior proceedings. Of those, 34 were executed.[11]

The historian Geoffrey Elton has argued that such attainders—without conviction—existed since 1459, Stacy qualifies this, noting that in those cases the attainted were in open rebellion against the King—"and either dead or in flight"—with, effectively, a form of martial law was in operation; "but Roose, neither a fugitive nor dead, had not levied war upon the king or committed any other recognized treason".[12]

Most of the more well-known attainders which followed that of Roose were over matters of high state, but two—introduced by Thomas Cromwell—were directly influenced by the precedent of the 1531 attainder. These both favoured a parliamentary attainder absent of the need for prior judicial proceedings.[10] This, says the legal scholar Molly Murray, made attainder "an efficient means of confining and condemning his enemies without cumbersome and time-consuming judicial proceedings".[9]

Treason

The 1351 Statute of Treason codified the killing of a master by a servant as petty treason, although the crime was rare: "when a servant slayeth his master or a wife her husband, or when a man secular or religious slayeth his prelate to whom he oweth faith and obedience".[13] Platts argues that although "the killing of a master by a servant was a rare occurrence, it struck at the root of a fundamental relationship [and] was not just treason but an act of anarchy".[14] Poisoning was "all too easy a crime for the weak and marginal to commit against their social superiors",[15] and was thus seen as being not only against the law but against nature.[16]

Stacy notes, for example, that the Acte' of Poisonynges' makes no attempt to demonstrate beyond doubt who the intended target actually was; rather, it expounds on the abomination of the atrocity generally.[17]

Executions

Kesselring has noted that Tudor punishments often contained deliberately "novel shaming elements" as part of the visual spectacle of execution.[18] For example, husband and wife John and Alice Woolf, attainted in 1535 for murdering two Genoese merchants as they sailed on the Thames, were sentenced to be hanged in chains at the river's low tide and so gradually drown.[19] They also suffered attainder, and, as with Roose, it was parliament that decreed they should be executed, although not the precise manner of it.[20]

Roose's was not the first execution carried out by this method; the Greyfriars' chronicle also records the boiling of a man convicted of a mass-poisoning in 1523.[21][22] Not long before Roose's execution, a maidservant had suffered the same punishment in King's Lynn marketplace. As a result, there was some confusion among contemporaries as to if "the new statute was merely a re-enactment of a previous Act, or whether it gave legal countenance to a practice which had been in use from some earlier date".[23]

Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew, was hanged at Tyburn in 1594 for conspiring to poison Queen Elizabeth, for example, and the same year one Edward Squyer suffered disembowelment for supposedly attempting to assassinate her by touching her horse's saddle and thereby imparting a powerful Spanish poison.[24] An attempt was made to reintroduce a law specifically against poisoning in March 1563, but it failed to pass the House of Commons.[25][26]

References

  1. ^ Elton 1995, p. 339.
  2. ^ Lehmberg 1970, p. vii.
  3. ^ Bridgett 1890, p. 213.
  4. ^ Dowling 1999, pp. 5, 157.
  5. ^ Pollard 1902, p. 179.
  6. ^ Stacy 1986b, p. 2.
  7. ^ Orr 2002, p. 13.
  8. ^ Sillem 1936, p. xl.
  9. ^ a b Murray 2012, p. 20. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFMurray2012 (help)
  10. ^ a b Stacy 1986a, p. 93.
  11. ^ Stacy 1986b, p. 13.
  12. ^ Stacy 1986a, p. 88.
  13. ^ Sillem 1936, p. lxxi.
  14. ^ Platts 1985, p. 253.
  15. ^ Bellany 2016, p. 559.
  16. ^ Simpson 1965, p. 4 n. 10.
  17. ^ Stacy 1986a, p. 90.
  18. ^ Kesselring 2000, p. 197.
  19. ^ Kesselring 2001, p. 895 n. 6.
  20. ^ Stacy 1986b, pp. 7, 8.
  21. ^ Nichols 1852, p. 102.
  22. ^ Wilson 2014a, p. xviii.
  23. ^ Pettifer 1992, p. 163.
  24. ^ Buckingham 2008, p. 84.
  25. ^ Bellany 2016, p. 561.
  26. ^ Stacy 1986a, p. 108 n. 17.

Sources

  • Bellany, A. (2016), Smuts, R. M. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 559–580, ISBN 978-0-19966-084-1
  • Bridgett, T. E. (1890), Life of Blessed John Fisher: Bishop of Rochester, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church and Martyr under Henry VIII (2nd ed.), London: Burns & Oates, OCLC 635071290
  • Buckingham, J. (2008), Bitter Nemesis: The Intimate History of Strychnine, London: CRC Press, ISBN 978-1-42005-316-6
  • Dowling, M. (1999), Fisher of Men: A Life of John Fisher, 1469–1535, London: Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-0-23050-962-7
  • Elton, G. R. (1995), The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary (3rd repr. ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521287579
  • Kesselring, K. J. (2000), To Pardon and To Punish: Mercy and Authority in Tudor England (PhD thesis), Queen's University Ontario, OCLC 1006900357
  • Kesselring, K. J. (2001), "A Draft of the 1531 'Acte for Poysoning'", The English Historical Review, 116 (468): 894–899, doi:10.1093/ehr/CXVI.468.894, OCLC 1099048890
  • Lehmberg, S. E. (1970), The Reformation Parliament 1529-1536, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-5210-7655-5
  • Murray, M. (2012), "The Prisoner, the Lover, and the Poet: The Devonshire Manuscript and Early Tudor Carcerality", RenaissanceandReformation/RenaissanceetRéforme, 35: 17–41, OCLC 880686711
  • Nichols, J. G., ed. (1852), Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London, London: Camden society, OCLC 906285546
  • Orr, D. A. (2002), Treason and the State: Law, Politics and Ideology in the English Civil War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-1-13943-945-9
  • Pettifer, E. W. (1992), Punishments of Former Days, Winchester: Waterside Press, ISBN 978-1-87287-005-2
  • Platts, G. (1985), Land and people in Medieval Lincolnshire, Lincoln: History of Lincolnshire Committee for the Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, ISBN 978-0-90266-803-4
  • Pollard, A. F. (1902), Henry VIII, London: Goupil, OCLC 1069581804
  • Sillem, R., ed. (1936), Records of Some Sessions of the Peace in Lincolnshire: 1360–1375, Publications of the Lincoln Record Society, vol. XXX, Lincoln: Lincoln Record Society, OCLC 29331375
  • Simpson, A. W. B. (1965), "The Equitable Doctrine of Consideration and the Law of Uses", The University of Toronto Law Journal, 16: 1–36, OCLC 54524962
  • Stacy, W. R. (1986a), The Bill of Attainder in English History (PhD thesis), University of Wisconsin-Madison, OCLC 753814488
  • Stacy, W. R. (1986b), "Richard Roose and the Use of Parliamentary Attainder in the Reign of Henry VIII", The Historical Journal, 29: 1–15, OCLC 863011771
  • Wilson, D. (2014a), In The Lion's Court: Power, Ambition and Sudden Death in the Reign of Henry VIII, London: Random House, ISBN 978-0-75355-130-1

Future

  • Bennett, Michael J. (Michael John), 1949-. “Table tittle-tattle and the Tudor view of history.” People, places and perspectives : essays on later medieval & early Tudor England in honour of Ralph A. Griffiths. Eds. Dockray, Keith and Fleming, Peter, 1958-. Stroud: Nonsuch, 2005. 155-65.
  • Bernard, G. W.. “The tyranny of Henry VIII.” Authority and consent in Tudor England : essays presented to C.S.L. Davies. Eds. Bernard, G. W. and Gunn, Steven J.. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. 113-29.
  • Betteridge, Thomas. “"As a Shadow to a Body" : Heresy, Treason and the Law in the Sixteenth Century.” The anatomy of Tudor literature : proceedings of the first International Conference of the Tudor Symposium (1998). Ed. Pincombe, Michael John. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. 52-62.
  • Head, D. M.. “"Being ledde and seduced by the Devyll" : the attainder of Lord Thomas Howard and the Tudor law of treason.” Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 13, no. 4, 1982, pp. 3-16.
  • LaCroix, Alison L.. “A man for all treasons : crimes by and against the Tudor state in the novels of Hilary Mantel.” Fatal fictions : crime and investigation in law and literature. Eds. LaCroix, Alison L., McAdams, Richard H. and Nussbaum, Martha Craven, 1947-. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 65-88.
  • Loades, David Michael. Intrigue and treason : the Tudor Court, 1547-1558. Harlow: Pearson, 2004.
  • Marcus, R. L.. “The Tudor treason trials : some observations of the emergence of forensic themes.” University of Illinois Law Review, vol. 3, 1984, pp. 675-704.
  • Murray, M. (2012), "The Prisoner, the Lover, and the Poet: The Devonshire Manuscript and Early Tudor Carcerality", RenaissanceandReformation/RenaissanceetRéforme, 35: 17–41, OCLC 880686711
  • Newcombe, D. G. (2004), "Tunstal [Tunstall], Cuthbert 1474–1559)", Oxford, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/27817, archived from the original on 19 November 2019, retrieved 19 November 2019
  • Marshall, Peter, 1964 October 26-. “The Making of the Tudor Judas : Trust and Betrayal in the English Reformation.” Reformation, vol. 13, 2008, pp. 77-101.
  • Orlin, Lena Cowen. “Spaces of treason in Tudor England.” Center or margin : revisions of the English Renaissance in honor of Leeds Barroll. Ed. Orlin, Lena Cowen. The Apple-Zimmerman series in early modern culture. Selinsgrove (PA): Susquehanna University Press, 2006. 158-95.
  • Rezneck, Samuel. “The trial of treason in Tudor England.”. 258-88.
  • Sil, Narasingha Prosad. “"My bitter comedie" : Treason Trial of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton and the Rule of Law in Tudor England.” Politics and reformations : communities, polities, nations, and empires : essays in honor of Thomas A. Brady, Jr. Eds. Ocker, Christopher and others. Studies in medieval and Reformation traditions; 128. Leiden: Brill, 2007. 381-405.
  • Smith, Lacey Baldwin, 1922-2013. Treason in Tudor England : Politics and Paranoia. 1986.
  • Walker, Greg, 1959-. John Heywood : comedy and survival in Tudor England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
  • Wood, Andy, 1967-. “"A lyttull worde ys tresson" : Loyalty, Denunciation, and Popular Politics in Tudor England.” Journal of British Studies, vol. 48, no. 4, 2009, pp. 837-47. Doi: 10.1086/603603
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