by G. J. Meyer
The ideas of Tyndale, Fish, and other reformers represented a radical departure from traditional political thought in England. Certainly kings had always been exalted above mere holders of high office. Their coronations were quasi-sacramental occasions, centered upon an anointing with holy oil that made the person of the monarch almost, if not quite, sacred. From 1066, when William the Conqueror sailed from Normandy to win the English crown, to the first Tudor’s capture of the same crown at Bosworth Field in 1485, successful claimants had offered the fact of their success as evidence that God wanted them to succeed. Those who never had to fight for the crown similarly regarded their possession of it as proof of divine favor.
But none of this was the same as saying that kings were God’s unique representatives on earth and must be obeyed in exactly the same way that God must be obeyed: absolutely, at all times, and in all things. What the Tyndales and Fishes were preaching, what Henry and other princes were eagerly professing to believe, required the repudiation of the prevailing thought of the Middle Ages. If it had roots anywhere in the Western past, they were to be found in the despotism of the Roman Empire and perhaps (as the most zealous reformers liked to claim) in the kings of the Old Testament. It is hard to know what could have motivated it except a burning hatred of the old religion.
For an expression of what was still Europe’s living tradition, the tradition that the most radical of the new thinkers wanted to cast aside, one need look no further than to the man Henry chose as Wolsey’s replacement in the office of lord chancellor. (The king’s great friend the Duke of Suffolk had wanted the post, but the jealous opposition of the Duke of Norfolk made his appointment seem inadvisable.) Sir Thomas More was a prominent exponent of the so-called “new learning” but a traditionalist in every really deep sense—a man who loved and revered the church, England’s heritage of individual rights under the common law, and the whole ordering of society that had taken shape in medieval times. He embodied nearly everything that the radical reformers sought to reject. For centuries he would be cast, throughout most of the English-speaking world, as the defender of precisely those things that had to be jettisoned in order for what is best in the modern world to emerge. Henry, by contrast, would long be seen as the man who had liberated his people from those same dark things. Today the truth appears to be very near to the reverse.
Henry, whose opinion of himself had always been grandiose (early in his reign he had boasted of not being able to see “any faith in the world, save in me,” so that “God Almighty, who knows this, prospers my affairs”), was by 1529 arriving at the conviction that God intended him to have dominion over every aspect of the lives of his subjects, and that in ruling his kingdom he required the consent of no one other than God. But when on November 3 a new Parliament opened at Westminster, its members heard an opening address by More as chancellor that did not sit at all easily with what the king was coming to believe. Indulging the interest in philosophical questions that had already helped make him one of the best-known humanist thinkers in Europe, drawing upon ideas that he had earlier developed in his famous book Utopia and in a biography of King Richard III that would not be published in his lifetime, More invited his listeners to consider the question of where the princes of the world derive their power. His answer, which sounds startlingly modern, was based solidly on the mainstream thought of the preceding centuries. Genuine and legitimate power, More said, comes to the prince not from above but from below, from the community that is governed, “so that his people make him a prince.” Society functions as it should when a prince, a monarch, acts in harmony with the will of the people. When on the other hand a prince acts at cross-purposes to what his people believe and want, the result is disorder.
These words were not thrown down as a challenge to the king, who stood at More’s side as he spoke them. On the contrary, much of More’s speech was a tiresomely commonplace exercise in political flattery. It praised Henry for his wisdom, his mercy, and most pointedly (if perhaps somewhat ignobly) for his ability to see through the schemes of Cardinal Wolsey and cast him aside. Henry loved flattery and easily mistook it for truth, and there is no evidence that he even noticed what More had said about the true source of his power. Nonetheless that part of the speech stands as an unmistakable early signal of just how far apart were the tradition represented by More, a tradition embodied in the Magna Carta and Parliament and indeed in the established relationship between church and state, and Henry’s increasingly ambitious view of his place in the world.
It was a clear signal that, even at the start of his chancellorship, More was too far out of step with the king ever to become as powerful or even as useful as Wolsey had been. That the gulf between them was so wide that it would have been better for both if More had never become chancellor.
Background
THE OLD CHURCH
THE ENGLAND OF 1530 CONTAINED SOME NINE THOUSAND parish churches, each a center of community life for the people living nearby. Each church had at least one resident priest, and attached to many were chantries, chapels with their own endowments for the support of additional clergy.
These parishes, along with those of Wales, were organized into twenty-one dioceses, each headed by a bishop or archbishop and supporting a cathedral with its chapter of canons and other clerics. The dioceses, in turn, made up two separate provinces: York in the north with only three sees, Canterbury with eighteen.
Additionally, nearly ten thousand monks and sixteen hundred nuns lived in more than six hundred monasteries scattered across the landscape. Nearly two hundred other houses, many of them situated in cities and towns, were occupied by the various orders of mendicant friars.
The kingdom’s only universities, Oxford and Cambridge, were ecclesiastical institutions, administered by churchmen and dedicated chiefly to the education of clerics (many of whom, upon completing their studies, found employment in government or the service of leading men). The church operated an overwhelming majority of the lower schools and virtually every “hospital” (a broad category covering not just treatment of the sick but many charitable functions). Its courts had responsibility for everything from matrimonial law to the probating of wills.
The church was, in short, a massive and all-pervading institution, an essential and conspicuous part of England’s public and everyday life. It was so big and so diverse, changing constantly as the society and economy with which it was intertwined changed, that evidence can be found to support almost anything said about it, whether in support or condemnation.
Was its leadership corrupt? Anyone wishing to say so need look no further than the greatest churchman of them all, Thomas Wolsey, archbishop of York, lord chancellor, cardinal, and papal legate. He had a bastard son, Thomas Winter, for whom he secured appointments as dean of Wells Cathedral, rector of several churches, and canon of still others. Together these offices generated annual income of £2,700, more than that of most bishops and many barons. And all while Winter was still a child. But to portray Wolsey as only corrupt would be an injustice. We have already seen him intervening to prevent a well-connected woman of bad character from becoming head of an important abbey. He spent years making the law courts more accessible to ordinary subjects and less biased in favor of the wealthy.
Nor was Wolsey’s corruption typical. Other men, William Warham and Richard Fox among them, spent long years at the pinnacle of church and royal court without a whiff of scandal, cheerfully leaving the king’s service as soon as they became free to do so and devoting themselves exclusively to their ecclesiastical duties.
Was the church the enemy of progress? Did it try, for example, to bar the door against the so-called “new learning” coming northward out of Renaissance Italy? This has often been alleged, but few charges could be more absurd. That the church contained conservatives who felt threatened by innovations such as critical analysis of the ancient sacred texts cannot be denied and is hardly surprising. But such men were not only balanced but outnumbered by the many promi
nent churchmen—Warham and other bishops among them—whose encouragement and support and own writings caused Erasmus to call England the great hope for the future of European scholarship.
Were the parish priests, especially those in the poorest and remotest districts, an ill-educated and brutish lot? Were the denizens of the convents and monasteries lazy, self-indulgent, and sexually licentious? Human nature being what it is, and considering that we are speaking of tens of thousands of people living under almost infinitely varied conditions, it would be a miracle if some were not. For centuries after the Tudor era it was taken for granted that many or even most were, but the writers who encouraged that assumption had axes of their own to grind. More recent scholarship, the kind that became possible only when sectarian passions cooled, has shown the reality to have been considerably less horrifying.
Anyone relying on movies and television for a depiction of England’s bishops and abbots before the Reformation could come to no other conclusion than that their lives were devoted to oppression and denial, to forcing obedience to the most rigid orthodoxy on an unwilling but impotent people and crushing any departure from discredited ways of thinking. But it becomes clear, when one looks closely, that life in England before the 1530s could not have felt like that at all—certainly not for the vast majority of the people. “Heresy” was feared not only by the hierarchy but by people generally. It was feared because it appeared to threaten not just the prerogatives of the institutional church but the structure of society itself, even the meaning of life. But until the religious convulsions of the sixteenth century raised such fears to an unprecedented intensity, extreme measures for the punishment of heresy remained rare. Few English churchmen in positions of authority went out actively looking for trouble, at least where arcane questions of theology were concerned. One way in which Wolsey was typical of pre-Reformation English bishops was his lack of interest in searching out, never mind punishing, possible cases of heresy.
The documentary record—even the archaeological record—suggests that the people of England were strongly attached to their church in Henry VIII’s time. The era was remarkable for the number of people remembering the church in their wills, endowing chantries, hospitals, and the work of the friars. Ordinary people contributed on an unprecedented scale—and, it must be said, voluntarily—to the improvement and adornment of their parish churches. The guilds that were an integral part of parish and therefore community and family life were not only active and prosperous but growing increasingly so.
Perhaps the most alien thing about England of the early sixteenth century, from a twenty-first-century perspective, is the extent to which almost the whole population believed—really believed—what the church taught. The result was not just consensus but something very close to unanimity, with all the advantages (a feeling of security, an immensely strong sense of community) and disadvantages (smugness, intolerance rooted in fear of the unfamiliar) that unanimity can bring. The “one true faith” encompassed not just every walk of life throughout the British Isles, not just all of Europe, but every past generation back to where history dissolved into legend. Few things could be more foreign to the sensibilities of the world we live in now.
England was not intensely anticlerical or anything of the kind. The church saw itself, and taught the faithful to see it, as a family of sinners rather than saints, of pilgrims making their way along the winding road to salvation. Its members generally accepted that in the family of faith, no less than in families of blood, there were drunken uncles as well as loving ones, that some uncles could be loving as well as drunk, and that even when their behavior was unacceptable, even when something had to be done about it, they were still part of the family. This is the spirit that suffuses The Canterbury Tales: some of Chaucer’s clerical characters are absurd and some are unworthy of their positions, but they are not hated and the disappearance of their kind would be unthinkable. Such an attitude still prevailed in early Tudor times. England was not simply formally Catholic, affiliated officially with Rome; it was a deeply Catholic culture.
That culture came early to Britain—rather astonishingly so, considering the island’s remoteness from the Holy Land and even Rome. At the end of the sixth century, when Pope Gregory I dispatched missionaries to Britain, he did so less to convert the inhabitants—he knew that many of them had been Christian for hundreds of years—than to make sure that the church already established there did not lose its connection to his own. That almost aboriginal church (sometimes called “British” by historians, more often “Celtic”) had first taken root in the third or even the second century, when much of Britain was still a thriving province of the Roman Empire. During the generations following the departure of Rome’s legions at the beginning of the fifth century, Britain’s first Christians were able to maintain only informal, mainly commercial contact with the outside world. And though they clung with an odd stubbornness to ideas of their own on such questions as the proper dating of Easter, on essential doctrine they appear to have remained entirely orthodox. Recognition that the church was a unitary international community, and that the bishop of Rome was its leader, seems never to have been an issue: Britain was sending representatives to ecclesiastical councils on the continent even when the so-called Dark Ages were at their darkest. After the arrival of Gregory’s missionaries, the indigenous church (which was especially well established in southwestern England and western Wales, the places most easily reached by traders sailing from the Mediterranean) was absorbed by gradual stages into the structures introduced by Rome.
By the time the future Henry VIII was born, Roman Christianity extended from the islands beyond Scotland to the islands of the eastern Mediterranean, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the western border of Russia. It was an essential element in Western civilization’s understanding of itself, and England had been part of it much longer than it had been a kingdom, longer in fact than it had been “England.” The first English diocese had been established in the year 597 at Canterbury (there were dioceses in Wales much earlier), which thereby became the home of the national church. Other dioceses soon followed—London and Rochester in 604, even York in the far north as early as 625.
It was a church with firm core beliefs, but it offered many different ways of living those beliefs—ways expressed, for example, in the very different rules of the various religious orders. It claimed to have been founded by Jesus Christ himself. It taught that Jesus had charged his apostles and their successors with bringing salvation to all the peoples of the world; that the bishops were those successors with the bishop of Rome as their chief; and that, as the instruments of salvation, Jesus had instituted seven sacraments—seven means by which the saving grace of God was conferred upon the faithful. One of these, the sacrament of penance or confession, was anchored in the belief that priests were empowered to forgive sin. Another, the Eucharist, was believed to return Jesus physically to Earth in the bread and wine that only priests could consecrate during the “sacrifice” of the mass. The church taught—and as the sixteenth century advanced would be reviled for teaching—that human beings were endowed with free will, so that they could accept or reject salvation, and that acceptance entailed earning divine favor by doing good and avoiding evil. It taught, too, that even most of the saved were at death not yet worthy of union with God, that to be made worthy they had to undergo purification in a process called “purgatory,” and that the process could be speeded by the prayers of the living. It taught that the Bible was the word of God but not the only way of knowing God’s will—that the core traditions of the church, teachings passed down orally from the apostles, carried comparable authority.
Of course, none of this could be “proved” on the basis of empirical evidence. All of it lay beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. It could be dismissed as pure invention, even as a conspiracy by which a cynically self-serving clergy had betrayed Christ and gained control over the minds and pocketbooks of Europe, and in due course it would. In the England
of 1530, however, almost no one was prepared to see it in any such way.
Not that there was no trouble. There had always been trouble—how could there not be, with the church exercising so much authority at every level of English life? But the worst of it had generally occurred at a high level, with hierarchy pitted against Crown and the beliefs and practices of most people not affected. This happened in the twelfth century, with the murder in Canterbury Cathedral of Henry II’s onetime friend and great adversary Thomas Becket. It happened later and in different ways under Kings John, Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV. These episodes demonstrated that pushing the church too hard could be dangerous, but overall the monarchy more than held its own. Thus it came to be accepted that the king selected England’s bishops, subject only to the formality of papal approval. And that the rules for the clergy of Canterbury and York were set neither by Rome nor by the Crown but by the convocations of the two provinces—regular clerical gatherings, divided like Parliament into upper and lower houses and usually dominated by friends of the king.
When Henry VIII set out to obtain the nullification of his marriage, there were already many points of friction between England’s religious and secular authorities. Most of these involved old and even tiresome questions: whether cases of slander and libel really belonged in the ecclesiastical courts, whether it was necessary for the church’s calendar to allow working people quite so many holidays, whether even holders of minor orders should be able to elude punishment by the civil authorities, how much priests should be allowed to charge for conducting funeral and other services. It can easily seem outrageous, today, that any church should have so much authority over so many things. There is, however, another way of viewing the subject. Twenty years into Henry’s reign, the church was the only element of English society with any real possibility of opposing the Crown. Only it stood between the king and absolute power.