User:Serial Number 54129/Tudor treason laws

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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".

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.

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

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.

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".

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. 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".

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". 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". Poisoning was "all too easy a crime for the weak and marginal to commit against their social superiors", and was thus seen as being not only against the law but against nature.

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.

Executions
Kesselring has noted that Tudor punishments often contained deliberately "novel shaming elements" as part of the visual spectacle of execution. 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. They also suffered attainder, and, as with Roose, it was parliament that decreed they should be executed, although not the precise manner of it.

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. 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".

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. An attempt was made to reintroduce a law specifically against poisoning in March 1563, but it failed to pass the House of Commons.

Future

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 * 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
 * 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