Henry VIII and the English Reformation

Richard Rex

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9781403992734
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350306899
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Abandoning the traditional narrative approach to the subject, Richard Rex presents an analytical account which sets out the logic of Henry VIII's shortlived Reformation. Starting with the fundamental matter of the royal supremacy, Rex goes on to investigate the application of this principle to the English ecclesiastical establishment and to the traditional religion of the people. He then examines the extra impetus and the new direction which Henry's regime gave to the development of a vernacular and literate devotional culture, and shows how, despite Henry's best intentions, serious religious divisions had emerged in England by the end of his reign. The study emphasises the personal role of Henry VIII in driving the Reformation process and how this process, in turn, considerably reinforced the monarch's power.

This updated edition of a powerful interpretation of Henry VIII's Reformation retains the analytical edge and stylish lucidity of the original text while taking full account of the latest research. An important new chapter elucidates the way in which 'politics' and 'religion' interacted in early Tudor England.

Chapter 1: Divorce and Supremacy

Sixteenth-century Catholic historians of the English Reformation were convinced that its cause was Henry VIII’s decision to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. Their Protestant opponents were happy to acclaim Henry’s decision as the instrument of divine providence, resulting as it did not only in the abrogation of papal jurisdiction but also in the birth of the Protestant heroine and deliverer of the Anglican Church, Queen Elizabeth. More recent historians, preferring to ‘assign deep causes for great events’, have been reluctant to attach such importance to Henry’s attempt to resolve the problem of the succession. Yet it can scarcely be denied that had Pope Clement VII agreed to annul the king’s marriage to Catherine (or had the crisis been resolved in some uncontroversial way), the Act of Supremacy would not have been needed and there would have been no subsequent royal toleration of evangelical clergy (in the interests of supporting the divorce and the supremacy) to foster new doctrines at the highest levels in both the English church and the royal court. The divorce alone does not account for the ultimate triumph of Protestantism over Catholicism in England. But it was of the utmost importance in securing a foothold for evangelical preachers and their doctrines, and the idiosyncratic Reformation of Henry’s reign is inconceivable without it. It is therefore essential to gain a clear idea of how personal and political relationships combined to induce the ‘Defender of the Faith’ to overthrow the authority which had granted him his title, and to transform himself into the ‘Supreme Head of the Church’.

The primary motivation for the divorce lay not, as the Catholic polemicists would have had it, in Henry’s wanton lust, nor purely, as he himself maintained, in scruples of conscience. The problem was the lack of a legitimate male heir to inherit the crown. Fifteen years of marriage to Catherine of Aragon had left Henry with only one surviving legitimate child, Princess Mary, born in 1516. Besides her he had acknowledged one bastard, Henry Fitzroy, son of Elizabeth Blount. English history offered no successful precedent for a regnant Queen, nor had a royal bastard ever succeeded his father. In the light of the Wars of the Roses, the dynasty looked insecure. Until 1525 a Yorkist pretender remained at large: Richard de la Pole, the ‘White Rose’ who died in the service of the French King at the Battle of Pavia, has seemed a marginal figure to historians, but when news of his death reached England an order was given for the bells to be rung in every church in London, and a State religious procession was held through the city.

Only after de la Pole’s death does Henry seem to have given consideration to any way of resolving the dynastic problem other than trusting to providence. His first thought was perhaps to prepare for the succession of his son. For in 1525 Fitzroy was plucked from relative obscurity to become, as Duke of Richmond, the premier nobleman of the realm. The title hints at the king’s plans, for Richmond had been the title of his grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, through whom the Tudors derived their claim to the throne. However, it was not long afterwards that Anne Boleyn first came to Henry’s attention.¹ Her sister Mary had already been his mistress, but from the start Anne seems to have aimed higher. Precisely when Henry first gave serious thought to disencumbering himself of his barren wife will probably never be known. But the idea was hardly surprising. Throughout the middle ages kings with dynastic problems had resorted to such solutions, formerly at pleasure, but latterly by means of annulments and dispensations from the pope. Henry’s own marriage had only been possible by virtue of a papal dispensation. On this turns the whole problem of Henry’s conscience and divorce.

Catherine of Aragon had previously, though briefly, been married to Henry’s elder brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales. After Arthur’s death in 1502, Henry VII hoped to perpetuate the dynastic alliance with the ruling house of Spain by remarrying Catherine to his second son. But marriage to the wife of a deceased brother had been forbidden in the Catholic Church since earliest times, and a papal dispensation was therefore necessary. This was easily obtained from Pope Julius II, although the king then kept Catherine a virtual hostage for the remainder of his reign, leaving his options open to seek a better match for his son elsewhere. Once Henry VIII succeeded to the throne in 1509, though, he rushed through the solemnisation of his marriage to Catherine.

When in the mid-1520s Henry began to reconsider his position, he examined the basis of the church’s prohibition of such marriages as his. It was founded upon two biblical texts, Leviticus 18:16 and 20:21, which stated respectively: ‘Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife: it is thy brother’s nakedness’ and ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness: and they shall be childless.’ The second text especially worried the king, for in it he could find an explanation of his own predicament: his lack of a male heir was a divine judgement. But despite the apparent clarity of the biblical texts, there was an obvious problem – the papal dispensation. If he was to free himself from his wife, this had to be impugned. Two routes were available. One was the legalistic route: to go through the dispensation with a fine-toothed comb and tease out some verbal or technical defect by which it could be invalidated. The radical route was to deny the validity of the dispensation in principle, that is, to argue that the biblical prohibition was of such authority that no pope could legitimately issue a dispensation from it.

From the start, Henry preferred the radical alternative. Although an initial consideration of his case by canon lawyers in May 1527 concentrated on the technical route, it is clear that as early as June Henry himself was more interested in the biblical texts. Cardinal Wolsey asked England’s leading theologian, John Fisher (Bishop of Rochester and Chancellor of Cambridge University), for an opinion on whether or not the Levitical prohibition was a matter of ‘natural law’. The point of the query was that according to scholastic theory ‘natural law’ was the highest type of law. It was the immutable ordinance of God by which creation was governed. While other kinds of law could justifiably be broken under certain circumstances – in dire need or by papal dispensation – a breach of natural law was always wrong and could not be permitted even by a pope. It must be emphasised that even the strongest supporters of papal authority agreed that the pope could not lawfully issue dispensations from natural law. So in pursuing the radical route to a divorce, Henry was in no sense impugning papal authority.

Fisher’s first response to the royal query was to report, truly enough, that theologians disagreed over the question. However, a few days later he produced a fuller account arguing that the reasons for seeing the Levitical prohibition as part of natural law were not compelling. By this time he had come across what was to remain throughout the ensuing controversy the main objection to the royal position: a biblical text (Deuteronomy 25:5) which, far from prohibiting marriage to a deceased brother’s wife, actually commanded it under certain circumstances – circumstances which exactly fitted Henry’s own case, namely that of a married brother dying without children. The argument Fisher adumbrated here and expanded subsequently was that God could not have commanded as a rule an act which he had banned under natural law and which was therefore intrinsically immoral.² His fallback position, which also recurred throughout his writings on the divorce, was that since the interpretation of the texts in question was undeniably a matter of controversy, the final judgement must reside with the pope – who had de facto decided the matter by issuing the dispensation in the first place. This was the major obstacle to the royal case. In terms of the theology and canon law accepted by both parties, it was irrefutable. However, a way out had to be found. It was provided by a skilled but slightly unscrupulous scholar, a former protégé of Fisher called Robert Wakefield. Wakefield, the leading teacher of Hebrew in England, produced a novel interpretation of the relevant texts. According to him, the commandment in Deuteronomy to marry the wife of a childless deceased brother could apply only when the original marriage had not been consummated. For the Hebrew idiom used in the Levitical prohibitions to denote marriage, ‘to uncover the nakedness’ of a person, manifestly implied a sexual relationship. Only if the original marriage had been unconsummated could a brother who married his deceased brother’s wife be deemed not to have uncovered the nakedness of his brother, and thus not to have transgressed against Leviticus. This interpretation offered the only escape from the dilemma, and it stayed at the centre of the royal case throughout the controversy. Although immense quantities of paper were over the next six years to be covered with further arguments, these arguments of Fisher and Wakefield were the crux. The issue was whether to qualify Leviticus in the light of Deuteronomy (Fisher’s position) or Deuteronomy in the light of Leviticus (Wakefield’s position).³

The diplomatic manoeuvres in pursuit of the divorce are too complex to be fully narrated here. But some account is essential. Cardinal Wolsey, faithful servant as ever, threw himself into the project. Hoping to exploit the divorce in order to secure a marriage alliance with France, he broached the matter on his embassy to François I in 1527. In the meantime, Henry was widening the scope of his search for academic support, recruiting those scholars who, as his ‘spiritual learned counsel’, were to produce reams of canonistic and theological argumentation on his behalf.⁴ The most significant early moves were the negotiations with Rome that culminated in the dispatch in 1528 of two special ambassadors, Stephen Gardiner and Edward Foxe. Unfortunately for the king, the unfavourable political situation of the Pope left the chances of an easy resolution slim. For in 1527 troops of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V had stormed Rome and rendered Clement VII a virtual prisoner within his fortress of Castel Sant’ Angelo. This gave Charles considerable influence over papal policy. As Catherine of Aragon was the emperor’s aunt, the pope was understandably reluctant to court his displeasure by inflicting on his family the dishonour of a divorce. Moreover, the objective of the divorce was still believed to be marriage to some French princess. Such an alliance would clearly be against the emperor’s interests. Faced with the choice of offending one or other of Europe’s most powerful monarchs, Clement took the only possible course: he played for time.

The royal ambassadors were to seek papal permission to have the case tried and judged by Wolsey in England. This was not unprecedented. The previous king of France, Louis XII, had rid himself of an unwanted wife in this way a mere 30 years before. After protracted negotiations, Gardiner obtained the concession – though not in such generous terms as had been hoped. Clement sent to England a papal legate, Cardinal Campeggio, with power to annul the old marriage and issue any necessary dispensations for a new one. He was to preside over the hearing with Wolsey. But Clement was still playing for time. Campeggio arrived in October and at once began to seek a settlement out of court. His idea was that Catherine should become a nun and thus by ‘spiritual death’ leave her husband free to marry again. The theological and legal viability of this solution was at best dubious, but it was never put to the test. Catherine refused on the grounds that her vocation was to marriage.

Procrastination was therefore Campeggio’s only option, and he managed to delay judicial proceedings until June 1529. Once they were under way, Catherine again wrecked his plans. Maintaining that she could hardly expect a fair trial in England, she attended only twice, to lodge her protest against the tribunal, and to give notice of her appeal to Rome and make a dramatic personal appeal to Henry’s finer feelings. Despite this, the trial proceeded in desultory fashion for a few weeks until Campeggio – playing for time as ever – adjourned the court on 31 July 1529, arguing that it should follow the legal calendar of the Roman courts. Before the court could reconvene, letters came from Rome accepting Catherine’s appeal and revoking the case.⁵

The revocation to Rome was the beginning of the end for Wolsey. As the events surrounding Wolsey’s fall have received particularly close attention in recent research, they will not be further investigated here.⁶ Suffice it to say that Henry threw him to the wolves who always await the political corpse of a disgraced minister. This marked a new stage in Henry’s dealings with Rome. The Parliament which met soon after passed a handful of strongly anticlerical bills whose ulterior motive was to put pressure on the pope. Indeed, the toppling of Wolsey itself, it has recently been argued, was part of that same policy – an indication that Henry was prepared to strike even at a prince of the church in pursuit of his aims.⁷ The point was driven home late in 1530 when three bishops who appealed to the pope against the legislation (Fisher of Rochester, Nicholas West of Ely and John Clerk of Bath and Wells) were briefly imprisoned.⁸

Henry’s subsequent policy on the divorce, however, was two-pronged. Some time after the failure of the legatine tribunal, a suggestion by a Cambridge theologian, Thomas Cranmer, came to Henry’s ears. This was that the universities of Christendom should be canvassed for opinions on the Levitical prohibition and on the pope’s authority to dispense from it. The campaign was soon under way, with opinions solicited from Cambridge, Oxford, Paris, and Orleans, among others. Precisely what Henry hoped to gain from this, apart from propaganda victories and the exertion of moral pressure on the pope, is far from clear. There may have been an element of ‘Gallicanism’ in the appeal to the universities, an attempt to force the pope’s hand by producing against him a consensus of the church. But the division of academic opinion and the notorious use of bribery by both sides left matters where they started. Most universities judged according to the instructions of their political masters. The English universities came down in Henry’s favour – although opposition was vocal. Thanks to François I’s decisive intervention, the French universities judged likewise, with the partial exception of Angers (where the theology faculty contradicted the law faculty by coming down on Catherine’s side). Henry did not consult the Spanish universities, but Catherine’s supporters found it rewarding to do so. In Italy and Germany, the outcomes depended on financial inducements or the influence of local political authorities.⁹

In Rome itself, delay was still the policy. And it has been plausibly argued that Henry, fearful of an adverse decision, was beginning to share the pope’s preference. From late 1530 new notes were struck in the royal campaign for the divorce – questions about the nature of papal jurisdiction over the king, denials that a king of England could be lawfully summoned outside his realm, and hints that an unsatisfactory papal decision would be referred to a future general council (a familiar recourse of kings in dispute with popes). The Duke of Suffolk’s claim in September that Henry was emperor and pope in his own kingdom is perhaps the earliest hint of this from sources around the king. At much the same time, Henry was telling the papal nuncio that he could not be summoned to judgement outside his realm, and next month he consulted a committee of lawyers and clergy on whether Parliament could empower the English clergy to grant the divorce irrespective of the pope.¹⁰ In the fascinating collection of texts which the king’s scholars put together around this time, the ‘Collectanea satis copiosa’, are a number of passages called in evidence of such claims and also of more general claims about the prerogatives of provincial or national churches. It was from material accumulated here that the doctrine of the royal supremacy over the church was to be derived.¹¹ The importance of all this activity is hard to assess. Its objective was probably still to have the case tried in England. ‘Constitutional’ claims were being advanced not out of commitment to principles but out of political exigency. It was becoming clear that the divorce case was a major jurisdictional conflict. But it must be emphasised that even at this point, in 1530, no absolute autonomy from the papacy was being formally claimed.

The emergence of the doctrine of the royal supremacy is inextricably bound up with the pursuit of the divorce. In analysing the doctrine, it is essential to distinguish it from a number of the ideas and images with which it was successfully foisted upon the English people. The doctrine that within his realms a king was not only the head of State (to use a slightly anachronistic term) but also the head of the church – that he was the source of not only temporal but spiritual jurisdiction – was unprecedented. Even Roman law, which gave the emperor wide powers in ecclesiastical matters, went nowhere near so far – and in fact recognised that the bishop of Rome was the ‘head of all the holy churches’. The notion of ‘imperial monarchy’, then much in vogue amo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Divorce and Supremacy
• Chapter 2: Church and Crown
• Chapter 3: Popular Religion
• Chapter 4: Vernacular Religious Culture
• Chapter 5: Doctrinal Division
• Chapter 6: The Politics of Religion
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index