by G. J. Meyer
The answer is that it didn’t happen that way. The whole process of surrender was little more than a sham. In fact, only three members of convocation’s upper house—three out of all the bishops and leading abbots in England and Wales—signed the document of submission without adding reservations. Two refused outright, and more absented themselves from the proceedings than showed up either to sign or refuse. The lower house was even less cooperative; so many members refused to vote that there was no way even to pretend that the king’s demands had been accepted. When the “submission of the clergy” was presented to the king, therefore, it bore the signatures of only a tiny minority of those men whose positions gave them at least some right to act on behalf of the church. As an expression of the will of the hierarchy or the whole clergy, therefore, it had an extremely dubious legitimacy. This fact appears to have troubled the king not at all. He had what he needed: an official document, bearing the signature and seal of the archbishop of Canterbury and a few others, that proclaimed him to be the ultimate master of ecclesiastical law in his kingdom. He still did not have a divorce, and difficult questions about the relationship with Rome remained to be resolved, but Henry had won one of the great victories of his life. He held in his hand a basis for claiming that the clergy now lay prostrate at his feet. That this is what he had wanted all along—that he had no real interest in a comprehensive revision of canon law—is clear in the fact that though Warham’s submission agreed to the creation of a review committee, no such body was ever appointed. As for the troublesome fact that most of the clergy had not really submitted, that detail could either be corrected later, if necessary, or simply forgotten.
On the day after Henry received the submission, the Duke of Norfolk escorted Thomas More to the gardens of York Place, the great London palace that had previously been the residence of Cardinal Wolsey and was now home to the king and Anne Boleyn. There the chancellor met briefly with Henry, handed over the Great Seal that symbolized his office, and quietly ended his career in government. It is natural to suppose that More had decided to resign upon learning of the submission, realizing that he could not serve a monarch with whom he was in deep disagreement about matters of such great importance to both of them. But in fact May 16 was merely the day on which More, after an extended and unhappy wait, was at last allowed to resign. His position had become untenable long before, first because of the lengths to which the king was going in pursuit of his divorce and then because of his threats to the unity of the church. More had recruited Norfolk, with whom he had maintained an uneasy friendship in spite of the duke’s impatience with the idea of papal authority, to ask the king to allow him to resign. For a long time Henry turned a deaf ear. He could not permit his subjects and the whole world to see the highest-ranking officer in his government quitting in protest of royal policy. Such a spectacle was especially impossible at a time when the king was seen to be locked in conflict with convocation and Parliament and neither could be depended upon to obey his instructions.
But now the annates battle was won, the hierarchy had surrendered if only in a formal sense, and neither Parliament nor convocation remained in session and capable of raising protests. If More remained in office, he could only be an awkwardness, and if he were still in office when Parliament or convocation reconvened he might become a figure around whom others could rally. It was the right time to let him go. The king accepted the Seal, and More withdrew gratefully to his home in Chelsea, saying that he hoped to spend whatever time remained to him preparing his soul for the hereafter.
Background
OTHER REFORMATIONS
IT SEEMS AN EXCEEDINGLY STRANGE COINCIDENCE THAT the greatest turning point in the history of the church in England, the crisis after which nothing would ever be the same, occurred at almost precisely the same time that the religious life of central Europe was also being violently transformed. What is strange is that these two simultaneous revolutions happened independently of each other, rose out of radically different circumstances and causes, and ultimately unfolded in distinctly different ways.
Certainly at some deep level having to do with the spirit of the age, this wasn’t a coincidence at all. Be that as it may, when Martin Luther fastened his ninety-five theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517 he set off a powder keg of a kind that simply did not exist in England. His revolt was neither the cause of nor the inspiration for the upheaval that Henry VIII put in motion a decade and a half later. Henry in fact loathed what he knew of Luther, and loathed many of the defining ideas of Luther’s theology. Long before declaring war on the pope, Henry made himself the avowed enemy of Friar Luther and his war on the pope. For the book in which he responded to Luther’s heresies (he had help in writing it, especially from Thomas More and John Fisher), he was rewarded with the title Defender of the Faith by—it would become the ultimate irony—the pope in Rome himself.
Luther repaid the king in full. First he declared in a book of his own that Henry was a villain and fool and tool of the Antichrist, a “damnable rottenness and worm.” Later he denied that Henry had any right to divorce Catherine of Aragon, suggesting instead that he commit bigamy.
And yet, though both would have been pained to think so, Henry and Luther were intimately linked. Such intellectual support as Henry found for his revolution came largely from Englishmen whose thinking had been strongly influenced by Luther’s. And Luther’s impact could never have been as widespread as it finally proved to be if not for the resources that Henry’s revolt made available to the Protestant cause.
There is irony in all this. From the beginning of his reign to the end, Henry thought of himself as not only a good Catholic but literally the best and most orthodox of Catholics—better than the pope, in the end, because better connected to God. Hence his revulsion toward the books, written in Latin mainly and reproduced in great numbers thanks to the recent invention of movable type, that Luther was turning out with dazzling speed and spreading to every corner of Europe as his dispute with the papacy escalated into schism. His beliefs as they matured—that man is so corrupted by original sin as to be incapable of acting freely, that therefore he can do nothing to merit salvation, that therefore faith alone can “justify” him or free him from the consequences of sin, and finally that acts of charity and self-denial and prayers for the dead must all be without effect—added up to a blunt repudiation of Henry’s very Catholic views. Luther insisted that the Bible is the sole source of truth, that baptism and the Eucharist are the only valid sacraments and priests have no more power than any layman, that people are predestined to salvation or damnation and can do nothing to alter their fate—ideas no less offensive to the English king than to Rome. They were no more consistent with Henry’s expanding view of his own role than with the most ambitious assertions of the popes.
Luther’s first moves onto radical theological ground were viewed with enthusiasm, even with excitement, in a Germany where many people had long regarded Rome as an alien force, remote, exploitive, and corrupt. The accusations that he leveled against the institutional church received so much support and encouragement, even from powerful nobles and influential members of the clergy, that Luther himself must have been taken by surprise. Certainly he was emboldened to carry his attack further. When the emperor Charles tried and failed to silence him and even had him outlawed without effect, Luther found himself free to follow his ideas wherever they led. What he found, in developing them, was release from agonies experienced during years of struggle with an intense sense of his own sinfulness. The resolution at which he arrived, the conviction that neither he nor anyone could do anything to merit salvation but salvation was possible all the same as an undeserved gift from God, persuaded him that his struggle had always been not only futile but unnecessary. He thereby brought that struggle to an end. But this answer also reduced to futility his monastic vocation, which he had always pursued so rigorously, so self-punishingly, that his Augustinian superiors had warned him against excessive scruples. In
fact it rendered the church itself futile—left no place for the church as it then existed. Thus it left no place for a pope. The gulf that opened between Luther and Henry VIII never narrowed even as Henry changed from one of the pope’s most dutiful sons into one of his most implacable enemies. Luther, having crossed swords with Rome and emerged not only unharmed but a German national hero, became contemptuous of the very idea of ecclesiastical hierarchy. He decided that the papacy must be the shadowy enemy of Christ that the New Testament’s Book of Revelation calls the Whore of Babylon. This took him down paths where the king of England had no intention of following.
One trait that Henry and Luther shared was a conviction that the whole world should agree with them, reinforced by an expectation that it would. The resistance that both encountered should not have surprised them but did. What was worst for Luther, what enraged him because it made a mockery of his determination to construct a new religious unity on the ruins of the old, was the way the reform movement itself began to fragment and fragment again as men who had begun by rejecting Catholic doctrine went on to reject Lutheran doctrine as well.
The first aberration was the most dangerous, and the most horrible in its consequences. By 1524, only seven years after Luther had first challenged Rome’s practice of selling “indulgences” (which were rather like get-out-of-Purgatory-free cards), common people across Germany were inspired by his example to mount challenges of their own not only to the ecclesiastical authorities (hated in Germany to a degree unimaginable in England) but to the secular rulers as well. The result was the Peasants’ War, as large an uprising by an underclass as Europe had ever seen. The aims of the rebellion were more secular than religious—an end to enclosures of farmland long held in common, for example, and a restoration of the feudal rights of the peasantry—but the rebels looked to Luther as their natural leader. This put him in a severely awkward position. The peasants were doing what he himself had done: not only questioning but defying traditional authority. But if he endorsed their rebellion he would alienate the many princes who, by separating their domains from Rome and confiscating church lands, had helped to make his revolt a world-changing event. He took the safer course, condemning the rebels in the most hateful terms imaginable and urging their rulers not only to suppress but to exterminate them. What followed was the butchering of an estimated one hundred thousand people, many of them armed only, where they were armed at all, with farm implements. The idea that Christians owe unqualified obedience to the state became at that point deeply implanted in Lutheranism and therefore in the psyche of Protestant northern Germany. What was implanted in southern and western Germany and Austria, where the rebellion had been most widespread and the reprisals most savage, was a deep popular antipathy for the whole Lutheran phenomenon. In Switzerland, too, where the reformist leader Huldrych Zwingli had supported the rebels, the Peasants’ War opened up new divisions.
Zwingli would have been lost to Luther in any case, because in Luther’s eyes he went too far in his rejection of established dogma and practice. Luther believed, in almost the same way as Catholics, that the living Jesus really was present in the Eucharist, holy communion; Zwingli believed that the Eucharist was merely symbolic. Luther believed that religious art—paintings, statues, crucifixes, stained-glass windows—fostered piety and should be encouraged; to Zwingli such things were idolatrous. Zwingli separated himself from Luther on the question of free will, arguing that with the help of God people are capable of choosing to live in accordance with the commandments. Luther believed no such thing: in his view, Scripture offers its admonitions to do good and avoid evil only to impress upon believers how impossible it is for them to do either, so that they will put all their faith in God’s undeserved mercy and attach no value to the actions of their unworthy selves.
Thus did reform separate first into two main branches, German Lutheranism and a more austere, puritanical Swiss variant, and then, after surprisingly few years, into a multitude of sects. The most notorious were the Anabaptists, so named because they rejected the ancient practice, which Luther had retained, of infant baptism. Some of the Anabaptists were radical to the point of lunacy. In 1534 they seized control of the German city of Münster from the Lutherans who had recently expelled the local Catholic bishop. Under the leadership of a man named Jan Beuckelson, who declared himself king of the new Jerusalem and said he was following the example of the Old Testament patriarchs in taking sixteen wives, they announced that the second coming of Jesus was imminent and that it was the duty of believers to make war on their oppressors. They were considered such a threat that Catholics and Lutherans joined forces to take Münster back from them, after which Anabaptists everywhere were ferociously suppressed. Those who fled to England were rounded up and jailed, and those who refused to recant, Henry had burned.
As it broke into divergent and even warring factions, the evangelical movement—a name signifying elevation of the Bible over other authority—lost the momentum of its rapid early growth. The violent rise and fall of the Münster Anabaptists worsened the fear of innovation to which the Peasants’ War had given rise. Even in England, as early as 1531, a king already at loggerheads with Rome was putting evangelicals to death. Thomas Bilney, a popular young preacher who attached more importance to Scripture than Henry found acceptable, was burned at the stake at Smithfield. John Frith, another young evangelical with many admirers, met the same fate for his Zwinglian views on the Eucharist.
Luther and his followers had long entertained hopes of winning over Europe’s leading humanist and scriptural scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam. They had reason to do so: like Luther a disaffected Augustinian friar, Erasmus was for years a vocal and influential critic of a church that he saw as badly in need of reform. But he had not left the church, and for years he did not respond to appeals from evangelicals and traditionalists alike that he enter the fray on their side. When he finally did so, it was in a way that gave Luther fresh cause to be furious. In an austerely scholarly treatise, carefully limiting himself to only one of the issues separating Luther from Rome and to evidence taken from Scripture because he knew that Luther would accept no other authority, Erasmus argued that the father of the Reformation was wrong—that man does have free will. It was a restrained testament to say the least, but it put an end to any thought that the greatest humanist of the age would be joining forces with the greatest reformer. Protestantism continued to split into so many factions over so many issues that it seemed, in Luther’s words, to have “nearly as many sects as there are heads.”
As for England, from where Luther sat it must have been a very hard place to understand. The church of Henry VIII was not evangelical and it was not Roman Catholic. No one in either camp could have imagined that in the next three decades it would become first the former, then the latter, and finally go off in a third direction of its own devising.
9
Consummation
In August 1532, three months after receiving the submission of the clergy, King Henry learned of the death of William Warham. He must have been pleased with the news. Though both as primate of England and as onetime chancellor Warham had long been a friend to the Crown, his great age had reduced his ability to be useful even when he wished to be so, his swings of opinion since the start of the divorce case had brought his dependability into question, and his unhappiness with the direction of royal policy was becoming increasingly worrisome.
His passing meant that Henry was now free, assuming that he met with no interference from the pope, to fill the highest clerical office in the kingdom with a man of his own choosing. He would not have been slow to appreciate the potential benefits.
But Warham’s death was an even bigger stroke of luck than Henry appears to have realized. The archbishop had been a man of exceptional abilities and great learning, with doctorates in civil and canon law, and his early performance in the royal service had caused him to be singled out for advancement by no less demanding a judge than Henry VII. And unlike Wolsey, w
ho eventually succeeded him in the chancellorship (possibly but not certainly by elbowing him aside—Warham appears to have been genuinely happy to focus exclusively on his ecclesiastical responsibilities), he had always maintained the highest standards in both his professional and his personal life. Erasmus, an unsparing critic of clerical politicians, called him “a man worthy of the memory of all posterity.” Though age had diminished his ability to provide consistent and decisive leadership, he remained a formidable potential adversary, and after his death it was discovered that he had been preparing to speak out. He had been drafting, presumably for delivery in the House of Lords when Parliament reconvened, a speech invoking the example of his most celebrated predecessor in the seat of Canterbury, the martyr Thomas Becket. A canonized saint whose tomb was a pilgrimage site that drew thousands of visitors from around England and the continent, Becket had been murdered in 1170 by a trio of knights who thought, probably mistakenly, that they were carrying out the wishes of King Henry II. Becket and the king, once the closest of friends, had come to be bitterly at loggerheads over the latter’s insistence on trying clerics in his own courts and blocking appeals to Rome. The reaction to Becket’s murder was so powerful that Henry, one of the most forceful and dynamic monarchs of the English Middle Ages, was not only defeated in his challenge to the church but forced to do public penance. The veneration in which Becket was held explains why such an extraordinary number of fifteenth-century Englishmen had been given the name Thomas. His legend was a potent one for Warham to draw upon.