1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (16 page)

The third event that is seen as evidence of reaction against reform is the publication of Henry VIII’s reworking of a theological text put together by his bishops in 1543. This was called ‘A Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man, set forth by the King’s Majesty of England’, but became known as the King’s Book. It was Henry’s final and definitive statement of doctrine. The King’s Book differed from the Ten Articles in that it reinstated the sacrament of matrimony. It once again rejected the view that had been put forward by his bishops – that justification was by faith alone. Instead, it confirmed Henry’s conviction that justification resulted from a combination of God’s work and man’s own deeds – but this was not new: it had been announced in 1536! In addition, the King’s Book reiterated Henry’s unchanging stance on the Eucharist as the ‘very body and blood of Christ in its very substance’. Even on the subject of purgatory, the tone was very similar to the articles of 1536, again concluding that, while praying for the souls of the departed was a good thing, the place and condition of such souls was uncertain. The papist abuses of purgatory were again distained, but this time it was explicitly stated ‘we therefore abstain from the name of purgatory, and no more dispute or reason thereof’. This final clause suggests that above all what Henry wanted to avoid was undue dispute on the subject. The reason for this new statement of doctrine is explained in its preamble. It praised the initial progress of Henry’s reformation, stating that ‘in the time of darkness and ignorance, finding our people seduced and drawn from the truth by hypocrisy and superstition’ the king had powerfully ‘travailed to purge and cleanse our realm’. But people’s hearts had become inclined to ‘sinister understandings of scripture, presumption, arrogancy, carnal liberty and contention’, so the King’s Book was intended – just as the Ten Articles and the Six Articles had been – to eradicate ‘diversity in opinions’ by setting forth a clear, uniform doctrine for everyone to follow. It was not new – just a necessary repeat.
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The final piece of evidence used to suggest reform had ended in 1539 is the 1543 ‘Act for the Advancement of True Religion’. This Act put restrictions on who could read the new English Bible, limiting access to nobles, gentry and merchants, and barring all ‘women, artificers, apprentices, journeymen, serving men… husbandmen and labourers’ from reading the scriptures. Was this reactionary? It does seem to be, but not to the idea of an English Bible – instead the restriction suggests that the step of handing out the Bible to the masses was now perceived to have caused more contention than clarity. The goal had been to remove ignorance – the result appeared to be yet greater disputes and divisions. In 1545, Henry complained at ‘how unreverently that most precious jewel the word of God is disputed, rimed, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern’ and explained that the scriptures had been translated into English ‘only to inform your own conference, and to instruct your children and family, and not to dispute’. This is in keeping with Henry’s depiction of the proper ordering of society on the frontispiece of the Great Bible: he had only ever intended the Word of God to be taught by superiors to those under their care. No doubt in his mind, this was not a deviation from his earlier pronouncements – just a change of method to achieve the same result.
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A change of method is also, I suggest, why historians have intimated that the last years of Henry VIII’s reign saw a reaction and return to conservatism. While Henry’s theology might have remained relatively unchanged, his methods of dealing with dissidents did change. After 1536, he became vastly more repressive and harsh towards those who disagreed with his religious views. This increased despotism became a marked feature of his character and stemmed from an inflamed response towards betrayal, treason and rebellion – which Henry VIII had started to conflate – as a result of the events of this year (see chapter 18 for more on this subject). Perhaps as Luther later mockingly commented, Henry ‘want[ed] to be God and to do as he please[d]’.
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13

Henry VIII’s Theology

Henry VIII’s theology seems to have situated itself somewhere between the later identities of Protestant and Catholic, and even somewhere between the contemporary beliefs of evangelicals and conservatives.

There appear to have been six key characteristics of Henry VIII’s theology, which were all present in the statements of doctrine produced in 1536. This is not to suggest nothing changed in Henry’s thinking – as we’ve clearly seen, his reaction to the rebellion of 1536 significantly altered his approach to monasticism, while his thinking on access to the vernacular scriptures fluctuated in response to the priority he gave to knowledge or unity. The people around him mattered too. Henry did not make policy in isolation and was in fact always quick to highlight the role played by his bishops and nobility in the creation of religious statutes and proclamations. Yet key values and themes emerge which do appear to be roughly consistent.
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The first was that for Henry VIII, the royal supremacy and his divine-right kingship under God, with responsibility for the cure of souls and the righting of religious abuses in the church, had become an article of faith. Henry had grown convinced of his unique position as God’s anointed deputy on earth, believing that the Supreme Headship was his birthright, and expected others to believe it too. This was contrasted in his mind with excessive clerical power and status. This was evident in the message clergy were told to preach in 1536, the king’s promulgation of doctrine, the stunning visual depiction of the supremacy on the title-page of the Great Bible and even in his questioning of John Lambert. His self-identification with leaders of the Old Testament, such as Abraham and David, is seen in such acts as his commissioning of the vastly expensive Abraham tapestries in 1540 to hang in his Great Hall at Hampton Court. It is also seen in the representation of David on the frontispiece of the Great Bible (suggesting Henry had picked up where David left off) and his approval of his depiction as David in the illustrations of his personal psalter which was presented to him in 1542 by Jean Mallard. Henry, like Abraham and David, was a leader who had a close relationship with God, modelled theocratic kingship and had a mandate to lead his people out of error into truth. In return for his royal care, he expected obedience from his subjects, in conscience as well as action.
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Secondly, Henry was preoccupied with preserving unity and concord in his kingdom. The Ten Articles had been entitled ‘articles devised… to establish Christian quietness and unity… and to avoid contentious opinions’, and the Six Articles and King’s Book reiterated this theme. So did an English primer, or prayer book, that Henry VIII issued in 1545. Designed to set forward one uniform manner of praying ‘for the avoiding of strife and contention’, it included a five-page-long prayer for the peace of the church, which vividly expresses Henry VIII’s horror of the ‘chaos’ of ‘evil wavering opinions’. A particularly striking example of this concern was Henry’s Christmas speech of 1545 to parliament (what Diarmaid MacCulloch has called the ‘pioneer Christmas broadcast’). Henry took the unusual step of speaking for himself (rather than via the Lord Chancellor) for he alone could ‘open and set forth my mind and meaning, and the secrets of my heart’. It was an impassioned and eloquent speech; one of those who heard him remarked how Henry’s kingly, fatherly speech ‘was such a joy and marvellous comfort’ that the listener reckoned the day one of the happiest of his life. In it, Henry lamented the religious divisions in his kingdom, pleading with his subjects about the lack of charity and concord amongst them and the presence of much discord and dissension in their place. Henry brought himself to tears as he beseeched his people to live in unity and, according to William Petre, few of his audience could refrain from weeping too.
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Henry’s third article of faith was the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist. He asserted this in the Ten Articles in 1536 and in all later statements of doctrine, always avoiding the contentious and papist term ‘transubstantiation’ but, similarly, rejecting the sacramentarian view of the Eucharist as a mere memorial. This is why he presided over Lambert’s trial and maintained the Mass in his own private chapel until his death. Error in this also seems to have caused greatest offence – of twenty-eight people burned as heretics in 1540–46, twenty of them were sacramentarians.
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A fourth doctrine of great importance to Henry was his conviction that Christian belief should manifest itself in good and lawful behaviour, and that anything discouraging this was erroneous. This meant Henry refused to follow Luther and consistently rejected the evangelical notion of ‘justification by faith alone’, stalwartly arguing that justification was by faith and grace ‘joined with charity’. This conviction informed the changes he made to the Bishop’s Book to produce his definitive statement of theology, the King’s Book. It was on this basis that William Jerome, the vicar of Stepney, was sent to the Tower on the king’s command after he had preached at St Paul’s Cross on 7 March 1540. There, Jerome had said that ‘the promise of justification is without condition, for he that putteth a condition on it doth exclude grace’. It was a thesis that Henry could not accept. The king’s antipathy towards it was probably rooted in his concern that without the restraining power of a doctrine of justification by good works, wicked, immoral and rebellious behaviour would be unleashed among his subjects. One can only speculate on the personal and psychological reasons for his aversion to free grace.
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Henry was also convinced of the duty incumbent upon him to preside over the reform of religious abuses in the church. 1536 saw the beginning of this process with the dissolution of the lesser vice-ridden monasteries, a reduction in the number of saints’ days and reform in attitudes towards images, shrines and pilgrimages. In a letter of 1537 to his bishops, Henry urged them to eliminate ‘all manner of idolatry, superstition, [and] hypocrisy’. It was a theme that recurred in the injunctions of 1538, the King’s Book and in Henry’s primer of 1545 in which, unusually, the saints were not individually mentioned by name. Perhaps it is most obvious in the way Henry, in his annotations to his psalter, associated himself, not only with David, but also Josiah and Phineas, king and judge of the Old Testament, ordained by God to reform religious abuses, rescue Israel from idolatry and destroy superstitious images and shrines. The role that Henry had conceived for himself was one that showed a commitment to reform and renewal in the church, while insisting on unity and the essential truths of the faith.
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Finally, Henry appears to have believed that he was establishing a workable reformed way between the religious extremes of heresy and papistry. His purpose was, as he declared in January 1536, that his flock should be

fed and nourished with wholesome and godly doctrine and not seduced with the filthy and corrupt abominations of the bishop of Rome or his disciples and adherents, nor yet by the setting forth of novelties and the continual inculcation of things not necessary, brought and led to unquietness of mind and doubt of conscience.

In his 1545 speech to parliament, the king complained about those ‘too stiff in their old mumpsimus’ and others ‘too busy and curious in their new sumpsimus’. ‘Mumpsimus’ was a common evangelical jibe at the Latin mutterings of the conservatives; ‘sumpsimus’ is derived from the Latin
sumere
, to take up. His impartiality was brutally enacted at Smithfield in July 1540 when three papists, Richard Fetherston, Edward Powell and Thomas Abel were hanged at the same time that Robert Barnes, Thomas Garrett and William Jerome were burned for heresy. The parallel execution of three religious radicals and three papists was a dramatic, striking event. The French ambassador at the time, Charles de Marillac, commented, ‘it was a strange spectacle to see the adherents of two opposite parties die thus on the same day and at the same hour… the scene was as painful as it was monstrous’. The historian Christopher Haigh has described the deaths of the six martyrs as a ‘gruesome symmetry’.
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There were other strands of thought in Henry’s theology – the abhorrence of clerical marriage, for instance, and the insistence on social hierarchy and order in spirituality (quite unlike the Protestant commitment to a ‘priesthood of all believers’), but these six values were constants – and all had been articulated (if not in all fullness) in 1536, when Henry, as Supreme Head, started to prescribe the theology of the nation. His conclusions derived from his own studies of scripture, together with the judgments of his advisers, but there was a strong sense that some of his judgments were also influenced by his reactionary approach to circumstances, chiefly, the 1536 threat of rebellion and disobedience.

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The Aftermath of the Reformation

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n his role as Supreme Head of the Church of England, Henry VIII’s reformation brought great upheaval and uncertainty to many and altered traditional religious practices. The dissolution of the monasteries and sale of monastic lands changed the religious, social, architectural and topographical face of Britain. The destruction of monastic buildings was of huge architectural consequence, even while it preserved important buildings through the setting up of secular cathedrals. The sale of monastic lands created a land market in England, enriching a new British aristocracy and redefining where the nobility lived. It could be argued that the buying and selling of land and the building of new houses for the nobility on the outskirts of London in fact created the Home Counties and the ideal of the English country house.