But events in England were moving swiftly onward, propelled by the king’s passion for Anne Boleyn–who, her enemies whispered, had a sixth finger on one hand, the sure sign of a witch–and by the excitement abroad aroused by the Reformation. It was becoming increasingly obvious that the pope, still held captive by the Emperor Charles V, was going to find every reason why he should not grant a divorce against the emperor’s aunt Catherine of Aragon. The answer therefore, as far as Henry was concerned, was to show that the pope was wrong. Henry began his campaign by canvassing learned opinion among scholars at the universities.
This radical solution would have been unthinkable before the sixteenth century. But just as the papacy was profoundly unpopular in Germany, it was also profoundly unpopular in England. The Church at Rome had always been an intrusive institution, taking a great deal of money out of the country. But just when the English were beginning to flex their muscles again and take pleasure in their national life and culture, its power seemed especially irksome, particularly when the clergy were a byword for laziness and corruption. For many centuries awe and respect for the hallowed institution that St Peter had established had kept England within the Church of Rome. But now in the changed atmosphere of the New Learning among the educated–whether at the universities, the inns of court or Parliament–a harsh daylight had been let in which had destroyed what was left of the papacy’s magic. The climax had come with the pope’s imprisonment by the emperor. More than ever before the papacy simply seemed a foreign, secular institution whose peculiar law courts were places where murderers in holy orders could still take refuge from English justice.
But scholars rarely give single-line answers, and in response to Henry’s revolutionary consultation they gave a most inconclusive and useless reply. The king therefore decided to put pressure on the clergy themselves. In all his doings Henry had no intention of creating a Church doctrinally different from the Church of Rome; his Church of England was to be Catholicism without the pope. First Henry alarmed the clergy sitting in their national gatherings known as Convocation of Canterbury and York, by telling them that they had broken the ancient Statute of Praemunire by recognizing Wolsey as papal legate. For this he was levying on them a colossal fine of some £100,000. Next, in order to assuage his anger, the clergy had to acknowledge that he was the supreme head of the Church of England. At this point the king still hoped that Pope Clement or his successor Paul III would see reason and grant the divorce, but they did not do so.
By a series of acts over the seven years from 1529 to 1536, passed by what is known as the Reformation Parliament, Henry VIII separated the Church in England from the pope in Rome and created his own Church, the Church of England. By 1534, with the Act of Supremacy, Henry had completed the separation of England from the Roman Catholic Church, and all the incomes hitherto due to Rome were now paid to the crown. The Statute of Praemunire, which had existed from the fourteenth century but which had been honoured more in the breach than in the observance, was reinforced so that no appeals were allowed from England to Rome. It was made treason to deny Henry’s headship.
These acts were pushed through Parliament not against its will, but with its active participation. The members of the Reformation Parliament were keen to assert themselves as independent Englishmen, and felt that by casting off the pope they were carving out their uniquely English destiny. Though Henry’s reign might slowly degenerate into tyranny and terror, the gift he had of handling his Parliaments, his hail-fellow-well-met manner and his larger-than-life magnificence meant that in some way he continued to represent an ideal Englishman. This ensured his continuing popularity, a vital matter for him. For what historians call Tudor despotism or absolute rule, unlike the despotism of continental powers, was effected without a standing army. Just as English kings theoretically needed popular acclamation to ascend the throne, control over England was to be had by the support of the local gentry whom Henry charmed in Parliament and made his allies. They enforced his rule in their counties in their capacities as justices of the peace.
Under Henry VIII that sense of Englishness which had been growing since the Hundred Years War and had been given voice in the Reformation Parliament would be reinforced by weekly attendance at Church service. By the end of Henry’s reign the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments were all spoken in English. Moreover from 1540 an English Bible was placed in every parish church, with effects almost as incalculable for the national literature as Caxton’s return to England with a continental printing press. It was in fact Tyndale’s version revised by Miles Coverdale, with a preface by Archbishop Cranmer. Henry VIII had completed what is known as the nation state.
With the demise of Wolsey, for the rest of his reign Henry relied on advice in religious matters from a sensitive and eager-to-please Cambridge scholar named Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer, whom Henry made chaplain to Anne Boleyn’s family, became head of the new Church of England in 1533 as Archbishop of Canterbury. He announced that the king’s first marriage to Catherine of Aragon had been invalid. The king was therefore free to marry Anne Boleyn–who was about to have a baby, the future Queen Elizabeth I.
Thomas Cromwell, a fuller’s son from Putney who had helped develop the theory of Royal Supremacy, was now the king’s right-hand man in governing the country. It soon occurred to him that the immense wealth of the monasteries accumulated over the previous 600 years–they owned perhaps one-third of the land in England–might be used to ensure the loyalty of the people who counted in the Tudor state. If he closed them down and redistributed their land among the upper and middle classes–the magnates, gentry, lawyers and merchants–he would underpin the new Church and destroy the last bastions of loyalty to the pope.
The majority of the monasteries had long ago lost their power and influence. There were fewer than 10,000 monks and nuns to contend with, and they were unworldly, gentle people. In a spirit of triumphant nationalism inspired by Wolsey’s earlier suppression of certain monasteries, Cromwell dissolved all the smaller ones and embarked on an investigation which would result in the dissolution of the rest. And with the dissolving of the monasteries and the carving up of their lands among some 40,000 people the Protestant Reformation was secured on property. Many great English families, such as the Cavendishes and Russells, merchants, lawyers and shire knights, acquired their fortunes in the lands once owned by the monasteries. They made stately homes out of the ancient abbeys–for example, the Russells, later the dukes of Bedford, received Woburn Abbey. As far as these people were concerned, there would be no going back to Rome if it meant the end of their country estates.
The English Reformation had been accomplished upon the sturdiest and most durable of foundations: land. Nevertheless, despite the fear the king inspired as an increasingly bloody tyrant, the royal revolution had not been achieved quite as smoothly as Henry wished, particularly in his immediate circle at court and in government. He might be a religious conservative who disagreed as much as ever with Luther and who burned heretics for promulgating advanced Protestant ideas, but his chancellor Thomas More and the aged John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, could not accept the king as substitute for the pope. Their historical sense and Catholicism refused to let them. So when the 1534 Act of Royal Supremacy required the clergy and government officials to swear an oath of loyalty to Henry as supreme head of the Church of England, More and Fisher refused. They would take the Oath of Succession–that is, they would swear loyalty to Anne Boleyn’s children–but to the king’s embarrassment and fury they also declined to accept Anne Boleyn as Henry’s lawful wife. Both men were promptly sent to the Tower.
The spectacle of More–so recently the equivalent of prime minister and one of the leading figures of English life, a scholar, a notably eloquent lawyer and a member of Parliament internationally renowned for his learning and for his book Utopia– being dragged in his shirt through the streets from the Tower to his trial for treason at Westminster increased the atmosphere of terror that began t
o surround the king. Until very recently More had been a close friend of his. Henry had often been seen walking in More’s lovely garden in Chelsea (the Chelsea Physic Garden today) with his arm affectionately round his chancellor’s shoulders. It had even been the king’s habit to turn up unexpectedly at More’s house after dinner to chat and pass the time in a merry way. He had seemed so good tempered on these occasions that More’s son-in-law Thomas Roper had remarked that the king’s growing reputation for ruthlessness seemed ill-founded. More had responded wryly, ‘Howbeit, Sir Thomas More, made Lord son Roper, I may tell thee I have no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head could win him a castle in France it should not fail to go.’ There is an echo of this in Henry’s response to the news that the pope had made Fisher a cardinal. When he heard this the king remarked, ‘The Pope shall soon have his head in Rome so that he can put the cardinal’s hat on it himself.’
Henry was dreading the effect of More’s famous eloquence at his trial, fearing that he would rally the country against his reforms. Unlike Fisher who was too old and tired to mount a defence, which ensured a rapid guilty verdict and his immediate execution, More showed that his luminous intellect had been unimpaired by prison. Although he was bowed and his hair had turned grey over the summer of his incarceration, mental torture had robbed him of none of his natural authority. His defence was clear and to the point. He had not offended against the law nor tried to oppose the king’s wishes. All he had done was to remain silent, and silence had not yet been declared treason. But nothing could avert his fate. As soon as the sentence of death was pronounced More declared that the Oath of Supremacy was indeed unlawful. ‘How can you argue with the whole of England?’ one man called from the crowd, amazed at More’s courage. ‘Ah, but I have the whole history of Christendom behind me,’ said More smiling.
On 6 July 1535 a messenger came to More’s cell to tell him that he would be taken out and executed. More was utterly composed, pausing only to pen a quick farewell letter to his wife and daughter, begging them to ‘pray for me, as I will for thee, that we may merrily meet in heaven’. Then he strolled over to Tower Green just outside his lodgings as calmly as if he were about to have his breakfast, and when the executioner told him that as a special personal favour of the king he would only have his head cut off, not be disembowelled too, as was the usual practice for traitors, More quipped, ‘God preserve my friends from all such favours.’ But the king had also issued another order. Sir Thomas More was to be allowed no last speeches to the crowd. Even at that last moment, Henry feared More’s power. So More simply said that he died a faithful subject to the king and a true Catholic before God. Then the executioner silenced his silver tongue for ever.
In 1536, a year after the execution of More and Fisher, there was a series of risings in the north called the Pilgrimage of Grace. The northern counties of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Lincolnshire still had a monastic tradition which inspired respect among their inhabitants and were far removed from the New Learning and the new ideas which had entered England via the south-eastern seaports. Under the leadership of a Yorkshire country gentleman named Robert Aske, a great gathering at Doncaster demanded that Cromwell be dismissed and the country return to the old faith. But Henry handled the crisis with his usual aplomb. The Duke of Norfolk, who was generally acknowledged to be the leader of the more Catholic faction at court, was sent up to promise that the king would listen to the rebels’ requests if they would disperse peacefully, which they did. The momentum was lost. When the next year rioting began again, it provided the excuse to execute Aske and the rest of the leaders. A Council of the North staffed by Tudor officials removed most of the last vestiges of the old Catholic families’ influence, though it did not destroy their attachment to the ancient faith.
With the Dissolution of the Monasteries the Henrician Reformation shifted into a more radical phase. It became common practice to loot shrines for their jewels on the grounds that they encouraged superstition and idol worship and distracted from true religion. St Thomas à Becket’s shrine at Canterbury, one of the most famous places of medieval pilgrimage, was stripped of all its gold and silver. Two groaning wagonloads carried this booty to the eagerly awaiting king. Under the crude and greedy hands of Cromwell’s men village churches were frequently ransacked for their plate and chalices. In 1545 Henry dissolved the chantries, those characteristic buildings of medieval England often founded by guilds as well as the colleges of secular clergy. This removed many a source of education, hence the proliferation of schools still flourishing today which were founded in the reign of Henry’s son, Edward VI.
Yet despite Cranmer’s readiness to appoint advanced Protestants to vacant sees, including Hugh Latimer, the king himself continued to behave like a Catholic. He remained fearful that the pope might give the command for Catholic countries to invade England and bring her back to the true faith, while his superb political antennae forced him to take note of the meaning of the Pilgrimage of Grace. He knew that the bulk of the nation was instinctively Catholic and silently resentful. So, even though he had patronized the translation of the Bible into English, he still asked Charles V to pursue Tyndale its translator as a heretic. Three years after the Pilgrimage of Grace, by publishing the Act of the Six Articles which punished with death anyone who did not believe that Christ was present in the Communion wafer, Henry showed England and the pope that in all essentials he was a most orthodox Catholic.
For by this time the religious debate raging in Europe had moved on. Thinkers such as the Frenchman Jean Calvin and the Swiss Ulrich Zwingli had taken Luther’s dismissal of most sacraments many steps further. In Henry VIII’s reign the greatest controversy was the issue of the Mass itself. Zwingli held that examination of the texts suggested that Communion was not a sacrament but simply a commemoration of the Last Supper: Christ’s body and blood were not present in the host and wine. Although to the end of his days Cranmer could not decide what he believed, Henry was quite emphatic that he believed in the Real Presence at the Mass. At Smithfield the king burned any Protestant heretics straying into England who purveyed the new ideas percolating through Europe. Nevertheless the battle for the soul of the Protestant Reformation continued for the rest of his reign and beyond. And in the king’s lifetime the Catholic and Protestant factions within the Church of England each gained a little advantage according to the king’s marital state.
The gilded youth who had won the nation’s hearts was rapidly degenerating from the attractive Renaissance monarch into both a tyrant and a serial wife-killer. No one in England, whatever their position in the establishment, was safe. In 1538 on the grounds of conspiracy Henry executed two close royal cousins, the Marquis of Exeter and the Countess of Salisbury, mother of the Catholic Cardinal Pole who was in exile at Rome. The seventy-year-old countess’s end had been especially frightful. Once on the scaffold the vigorous old lady ran round and round the block declaring, ‘My head never yet committed treason, you must take it as you can.’ The axeman had to hold her down over the block himself to chop her head off.
But the axe also fell on Anne Boleyn just three years after her coronation. Instead of the hoped-for male heir the queen had only produced a puny red-headed little girl who was born alive. Henry, by now very bloated from over-indulgence in food and drink, convinced himself that this was a sign that this marriage too was cursed. Despite the many ornamental testaments to his passion for Anne, the entwined initials HA he had had carved all over Hampton Court and St James’s Palace, the king began to look for another wife. The lively Anne, who was hated by many for her insolence and her Protestantism, suddenly found herself arrested and accused of adultery.
Anne was removed without ceremony from the royal palace at Greenwich to the Tower. She went by barge and began screaming as soon as she saw the Barbican Gate and realized where she was heading, an eerie and horrible sound, which could be heard on the south bank of the river. The Constable of the Tower tried to comfort her by saying that she would be lodged not
in a dungeon but in the apartments she had stayed in before her coronation. But she gave a loud mocking laugh, and an even more mocking one when he told her sincerely that she could be certain that every inhabitant of King Henry’s realm could be assured justice. Anne Boleyn then seems to have lost control of herself. The screaming, alternating with hysterical laughter, went on for the next few weeks until she was condemned to death for treason. As a last favour from her husband a special sword was sent from Calais to cut off her head because she had expressed a fear to her jailers that a blunt axe would hurt her little neck.
The very day after Anne Boleyn stepped on to the scaffold and wound her long black hair up into a white linen coif so that the executioner might see her neck more clearly, Henry married his new favourite, the quiet Jane Seymour. At last the king was lawfully married and in 1537 Jane produced the longed-for boy, a new Prince of Wales who was christened Edward. But his mother died only twelve days after his birth. Once more there was a vacancy at the king’s side. Out of genuine sadness and respect for his dead wife no one filled it for two years.
Jane Seymour’s family were convinced Protestant supporters of the New Learning, particularly her two brothers, who were close to Cranmer and Cromwell. In the late 1530s the Protestant influence round the king appeared to be at its height when he acquiesced in Cromwell’s suggestion of Anne of Cleves as a new bride. Her brother was the Protestant Duke of Cleves, on the Lower Rhine, and it looked as if England would soon be publicly allied to the north German princes of the Schmalkalden League who had strenuously embraced Protestantism against the emperor.
The Story of Britain Page 33