Henry VIII her father’s will and make her peace with him. Following Thomas Cromwell’s helpful advice, she subscribed to the royal supremacy, the repudiation of the papacy, and the ‘incestuous and unlawful’ nature of her parents’ marriage. Even so, the price of his forgiveness was high. Her rehabilitation was completed only when Henry deigned to receive from her a letter couched in terms of repentance and humility befitting an address to the Deity: Most humbly prostrate before the feet of your most excellent Majesty, your most humble, faithful and obedient subject, which hath so extremely offended your most gracious Highness, that mine heavy and fearful heart dare not presume to call you father, nor Your Majesty hath any cause by my deserts, saving the benignity of your most blessed nature doth surmount all evils, offences, and trespasses, and is ever merciful and ready to accept the penitent calling for grace, in any convenient time...
Mary’s self-abasement secured her return to court and favour – and may even have saved her life. Though the stigma of illegitimacy remained, she would in due course regain her place in the line of succession. In the meantime, led by Cromwell and Cranmer, the ‘evangelicals’ continued to make all the running in the Church of England and sowed the seeds of religious change, partly by spreading Protestant ideas at the grass roots (though real Protestants remained in a distinct minority), but more importantly by persuading the king himself to take tentative steps towards a thorough reformation. Three major religious policies were sold to the king during the three years following the executions of Fisher and More: the dissolution of the monasteries, the abolition of pilgrimages and associated practices, and the publication of the Bible in English. Henry took some convincing over the first two, but had always had some sympathy for the third. If almost anyone in England in 1535 had been told that within five years every monastery, convent and friary in the kingdom would have been closed down and their vast assets transferred to the king, they would never have believed it. Looking back at the process, and especially at its sheer speed, it is easy to conclude that it was the outcome of some master plan. Cardinal Pole later claimed that Thomas Cromwell had bought Henry VIII’s favour by promising to make him richer than any previous king of England. Henry himself, looking back from the vantage point of the 1540s, credited himself with extraordinary sagacity and subtlety in implementing a grand plan to close down the monasteries. Yet the story looks very different when seen from the front rather than the back. The valuation of all Church property which the government organised in 1535 was undertaken not with a view to expropriating the Church, but in order to tax it more effectively now that all Church taxes went to the Crown. The visitation of all the monasteries undertaken in late 1535 and early 1536 was designed to gather material to discredit monks and thus smooth the way for the statute which, in 1536, declared that, unless specifically spared by the king, all religious houses whose gross income was 69