1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (13 page)

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10

The Reformation in England

T
he story of the Reformation in England is far from straightforward. Histories of it have been confused by an assumption that the later polarized categories of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ had meaning in Henry VIII’s England; they didn’t. This was a period of exploration and fluidity – when these later polarized categories were just being created. In recent years, there has been vigorous debate among historians about the progress of reform, stemming in large part from reactions to the classic Protestant history of the Reformation, as symbolized by John Foxe’s
Acts and Monuments
. Popularly known as Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
, it was published in 1563 and ever since has been hugely influential in telling the story of the English church. The essential story Foxe told was of the inexorable rise of Protestantism: that the Reformation was necessary and wanted. Historians following Foxe, like A. G. Dickens, pointed to substantial evidence of decadence and moral decay in the Roman Catholic Church, with a flourishing industry of unscriptural practices, including the selling of indulgences and forged relics, and among the clergy, who ranged from ill-educated parish priests to sickeningly wealthy bishops, widespread practices of simony or the sale of offices, pluralism or the holding of more than one benefice at a time, clerical absenteeism and the keeping of concubines. At the time, even those who ultimately resisted Protestantism, such as Erasmus and Thomas More, recognized the need for reform.
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But recent revisionist historians like Eamon Duffy and Christopher Haigh have done a good job of reminding us that, in fact, the English pre-Reformation Catholic Church was far from unpopular. There is strong evidence of piety in the 1520s and, rather than being in terminal decline, the strength and rigour of the late medieval church suggests that not all people would have happily accepted the Reformation. In contrast with the colour, pageantry, sights, sounds and smells of traditional religion, the Reformation brought a religion which stripped away the externals in favour of an interior intimate experience which relied on the printed scriptural word. Haigh has concluded that Protestantism could not have been an attractive religion for the masses because of the high levels of illiteracy, and that reformation was, by many, neither expected nor welcomed. There is evidence of opposition to implementing the changes of the Reformation at parish level. Thomas Wylley, vicar of Yoxford, wrote a letter to Thomas Cromwell saying that in his parish loyalty to traditional religion ran deep. Haigh also found a reluctance to erase the Pope’s name from service books as ordered in April 1535, with reports of disobedience in Warwickshire, Rutland, Suffolk, Essex, Croydon, Kent and Somerset. The evidence of people’s wills showed that even in the 1540s a majority of people making wills in London still sought the intercession of the Virgin and saints in heaven at their deaths. This revisionary research is important because it has helped us recognize that the church before the Reformation was strong and rich but it leaves an unanswered question: if the church was so vital and dynamic, why did it shatter so easily?
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For the Reformation in England did happen and, apart from the rebels in the Pilgrimage of Grace (explored in chapter 15), enthusiasm for the old church was not sufficient in Henry’s reign to produce the sort of civil war and violence seen on the continent in response to reform. Although Duffy and Haigh’s evidence makes clear that there was loyalty and affection for the old church, it masks the fact that some of this loyalty was born of indifferent traditionalism, as well as sincere conviction. In addition, in the early sixteenth century, a number of people were searching for a new depth of religious experience and were dissatisfied by the old ways. So, in Henry VIII’s England, there were important pockets of evangelical belief. These believers were disproportionately important, wealthy and powerful, and geographically concentrated so as to magnify their influence – mainly in urban areas like London, Cambridge and Norwich. These evangelical reformers believed that the church needed to be reformed in accordance with the scriptural text of the Gospels. They believed a new depth of intimacy with God was possible and that they were justified by faith alone. This meant that humans could be made right with God by simply believing in the sufficiency of Christ’s death on the cross to pardon sins and that this belief would be formed by reading and hearing the scriptures in the vernacular. They considered monasteries, images, shrines, vows, masses, pilgrimages, the veneration of saints and confession to priests to be unhelpful distractions, and worship of the Virgin Mary and a belief in purgatory to be erroneous. In other words, their beliefs turned old ways of relating to the church, God, life and death on their heads. A key text for evangelicals was William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament. It had been banned in England since its publication in 1526 because it controversially reinterpreted key words. The Greek word
metanoeite
, for instance, was retranslated as ‘repent’ instead of ‘do penance’, as in the traditional Latin version. Doing penance required confession to priests and meant good works needed to be done to compensate for sin, so the retranslation of this one word had huge implications for the power of the church and for beliefs about salvation. Other evangelical books decried the abuses of the Catholic Church. Simon Fish’s
A Supplication for the Beggars
said that purgatory was a ‘thing invented by the covetousness’ of the church. A work by Cambridge graduate John Frith,
Disputacion of Purgatory
went even further and he was captured and burned at the stake as a heretic at Smithfield in July 1533. The extent to which these evangelical beliefs would be adopted by the new Anglican Church remained to be seen.

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11

1536: The Church Established

M
any contemporaries expected that Anne Boleyn’s downfall would lead to a reversal of the royal supremacy and the break with Rome. It had been, in fact, a constant hope across Catholic Europe ever since Henry and Anne’s marriage in 1533. After Henry fell from his horse in January 1536 the papal nuncio in France, Bishop de Faenza, had raised the possibility of Henry’s return to Rome, together with his conviction that ‘if the Pope gave the sentence against the king of England and acted with strictness, he [Henry VIII] would probably give in, seeing that the Pope and the Emperor were his enemies, and that he could hope for nothing [from the French]’. The nuncio was referring to the ever-present threat posed by the as yet unpublished papal bull, which would deprive Henry VIII of his kingdom and make insurgence against his rule entirely legitimate. Writing in March 1536, Charles V offered advice to his ambassador at the English court, Eustace Chapuys, on how to influence the king to return to the church of Rome and suggested that he stress the division, confusion and manifest danger that would result from the bull’s publication.
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After May 1536, with now both Katherine and Anne out of the way, the obstacles preventing Henry’s return to Rome seemed few. It seemed as if there were now many good reasons for Henry to mend the breach and restore himself to the open, welcoming arms of the Roman church. On 24 May, Faenza reflected that ‘it would be easy to bring back the King if it were not for his avarice’, adding ‘there was not a better opportunity of wiping out the stains on his character and making himself the most glorious King in the world’. Another European correspondent gossiped about the news of Anne’s death and the possibility of a change of religion by linking her execution to the fact that ‘images have been restored and purgatory is declared again’. Not only conservatives hoped for this, evangelicals feared it – if Cranmer’s letter to Henry on discovering the news of Anne’s apparent adultery is representative. He entreated Henry, perhaps a little disingenuously, ‘I trust… you will bear no less zeal to the Gospel than you did before, as your favour to the Gospel was not led by affection to her’. Marrying Jane also gave Rome further cause for hope. Reginald Pole, Henry’s cousin, a high-ranking noble of royal blood, who was studying abroad, would write in August that year, I ‘had trusted that that woman [Anne] has been the cause of all these dishonours had taken away all dishonour with her, especially hearing what a good lady the king hath now taken’. In June 1536, it was rumoured that Jane had ‘five times thrown herself publicly at the King’s feet, requesting him to send for his daughter and declare her Princess’. Later, another story that she ‘threw herself on her knees before the King and begged him to restore the abbeys’, suggests her loyalties were firmly with traditional religion and that she was the ideal woman to lead the king back home. Observers convinced themselves that this process would start with legitimating Mary as his heir, and putting her back in the line of succession. Chapuys expressed his hope of this on the day of Anne Boleyn’s execution and Cromwell seems to have fuelled this belief. Faenza hoped Mary would be declared princess in the parliament of June 1536, because ‘the King was much softened’, and ‘after this would follow the King’s return to the Church’. In other words, there was a very real possibility, in the minds of European contemporaries, that Henry would drop all his pretensions to the royal supremacy and reunite his country with Rome. They had reason to suspect this would happen in 1536 – and how different history would have been if it had.
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They were, however, mistaken. They calculated without realizing the depth of Henry’s investment in the royal supremacy, or the vehemence with which, after the ego-bruising episodes of the fall and Anne’s perceived treachery, he would assert his right to exercise in practice the pre-eminent directorial role in the church that he had previously claimed only in law. Henry’s self-esteem had also recently suffered another blow, aimed directly at his position as Supreme Head. His own cousin, Reginald Pole, had in March 1536 written a treatise in the form of a letter to Henry VIII, ostensibly for the king’s eyes only. This treatise, which became known as
De Unitate
(On the Unity of the Church), attacked Henry’s assumption of the title of Supreme Head, sided with the men who had defied him – Fisher and More exhorted Charles V and Francis I to invade and referred to ‘whole legions’ of a fifth column lurking in England. Pole warned Henry he would never get away with disinheriting Mary and urged the king to repent and do penance. Finally, he compared Henry to past tyrants and the Great Turk, and called him a wild beast, incestuous, a robber, a murderer and an enemy of Christianity. Perhaps it was supposed to shock Henry into submission. Instead, it riled him and further inflamed his sense of outrage and betrayal, which flared out into reaction.
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An outline of events suggests how profound this reaction was. Firstly, in March 1536, parliament passed the crucially important Act for the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries. In June, after the arrest and death of Anne Boleyn, and Henry’s remarriage, Henry signalled he had no intention to resubmit to the authority of the pope. This was illustrated by his requirement that Mary should swear the oath that declared her father’s royal supremacy, the invalidity of his marriage to her mother and, therefore, her own illegitimacy. This insistence on Mary’s submission was echoed by significant developments in the doctrine and theology of the Anglican Church that suggested the king was starting to exercise his expanded role in the theological leadership of the church (one that had previously been claimed in word but not implemented in deed). Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief minister and, crucially, a layman, had previously exercised authority over the visitation of the English church in the run-up to the act suppressing the lesser monasteries. Now, after being made keeper of the privy seal, Baron Cromwell and a knight, Cromwell was appointed vicegerent in spirituals and vicar-general for the whole church and over
all
ecclesiastical affairs. The king was centralizing religious control. This centralized power was mobilized in July 1536 when Henry VIII published his ‘Ten Articles’. This consisted of ten points of doctrine which represented the first doctrinal statement of the Anglican Church and defined acceptable religious belief in England. At the same time, an act was passed in parliament ‘extinguishing’ papal authority and incurring penalties for all who upheld the rights of the Pope. The act referred to the manner in which the Pope had ‘rob[bed] the King’s Majesty, being only the supreme head of this his Realm of England immediately under God, of his honour, right and pre-eminence due unto him by the law of God’. The act, therefore, sought to bolster such honour and pre-eminence. These innovations were followed in August 1536 by Cromwell’s publication of royal injunctions or orders to enforce the doctrine set out in the Ten Articles.
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The overall intention of all these developments was clearly and adamantly to assert Henry VIII’s position and rights as Supreme Head of the Church of England. The specific timing of these manoeuvres and their defiant quality in the light of European opinion and the threat of the papal bull seems likely to have been linked to the challenge that recent humiliations had posed to the king’s self-esteem and power. By both demanding Mary’s submission and demonstrating that as Supreme Head he could dictate doctrine, Henry reasserted the superiority of his status. It was the perfect antidote to a scenario in which Henry VIII’s ability to govern had been implicitly questioned. In addition, the theology revealed in these dictates, as in later theological outputs, was particularly focused on the ideas of kingship and obedience, rule and submission, orders and compliance – a set of binaries, that Henry would, as the events of the year unfolded, enshrine even more vehemently. From this point on, we can chart the efforts made to shape English subjects into religious conformity and obedience, and the destruction of the institutions, observances and spectacle of the piety of the late middle ages.
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