1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII

by Lipscomb, Suzannah

  Other letters to Cromwell came from those coveting monastic lands and hoping to get a share of the spoils.7

  The real question is why the monasteries were attacked in this way. It is certainly true that their great wealth made them an obvious target for a revenue-hungry king. It is hardly laudable that Henry installed the church windows of Rewley Abbey outside Oxford in his bowling alley at Hampton Court. The monasteries were also suspected of treasonous tendencies, being tainted by their allegiance to a foreign ruler, the Pope. Equivocation towards the monasteries perhaps also represented Henry VIII’s ambiguity towards the idea of purgatory. One of the primary roles of monasteries was to pray for the souls of the dead in purgatory but Henry VIII’s official statements from 1536 would start to cast doubt on this belief. Until late 1536, though, there are reasons to believe that the dissolution of the smaller monasteries was also positively intended to bring about religious reform. The act of 1536 specifically refers to monks and nuns moving from the smaller monastic houses into ‘such honourable great monasteries in this realm wherein good religion is observed’, suggesting that a wholesale destruction of monasticism was not intended and that morally upright monasteries were thought to exist. The act was the first deployment of the power of the supremacy to change the religious landscape of England by reforming abuses and rectifying vice.8

  The Ten Articles and Royal Injunctions

  In July 1536, the Ten Articles were agreed and published. These Articles were a quickly composed yet authoritative statement of doctrine for the new Anglican Church. According to a letter Henry sent to his bishops in November 1536, the Articles were largely conceived by the king himself. Like many of Henry’s later proclamations, they show a preoccupation with bringing unity and concord to his kingdom. They were entitled ‘articles devised by the King’s Highness Majesty, to establish Christian quietness and unity among us, and to avoid contentious opinions’. The preamble explained that they were written because ‘of late, to our great regret, [we are] credibly advertized of such diversity in opinions, as have grown and sprung in this realm’. In order to avoid ‘the danger of souls’ and ‘outward inquietness’, after much pain, study, labour and travail, the king and his clergy had agreed which matters are ‘commanded of God and are necessary to our salvation’. It was a striking new implementation of the king’s prerogative as Supreme Head to assert his competence with his clergy to determine precisely what beliefs and practices were necessary for the salvation of souls.9

  The doctrine was an odd mix of conservative and evangelical. The first noticeable feature of this doctrinal statement was the recognition of only three sacraments: baptism, Eucharist and penance. This was in contrast to the Roman Catholic Church, which recognized seven sacraments. On the other hand, the articles stated, in line with traditional belief, that baptism was necessary for attaining everlasting life, because infants were born in original sin. Penance, that is, confession and absolution by priests and the performance of good works, was ‘necessary for man’s salvation’. For ‘although Christ and his death be the sufficient oblation, sacrifice, satisfaction and recompense… yet all men truly penitent, contrite and confessed must needs also bring forth the fruits of penance… and also must do all other good works of mercy and charity… or else they shall never be saved’. This, taken with the fifth article that declared sinners attain ‘justification by contrition and faith joined with charity’, was a clear rejection of the evangelical conviction that man was made righteous in the sight of God by faith alone, and not by the performance of good works. The articles added that Christ’s body and blood were ‘verily, substantially and really’ present in the Eucharist, though the emotive term ‘transubstantiation’, associated with Catholicism, was absent.10

  The Articles also modified certain traditionally integral religious practices. One article praised the honouring of saints, but ‘not with that confidence and honour which are only due unto God’, nor in the ‘vain superstition’ that prayer to a saint would be more readily answered than that to God. Another proclaimed that while it was right to have images in church, people should not cense them, kneel before them, offer things to them or ‘other like worshippings’. Finally, the last article ambiguously concluded that, while it was a good and charitable deed to pray for souls departed, it was admitted that ‘the place where they be, the name thereof and kinds of pain there’ were uncertain and unknown, and that the abuses committed by the Roman church under the name of ‘purgatory’ should ‘be clearly put away’. One could pray for the dead, but what such prayers would do was unclear.

  In other words, the Ten Articles, as a doctrinal statement of a reformed church, actually set out an ambiguous programme of a little reform mixed in with substantial amounts of conservatism, especially because salvation depended on good works as much as faith, a tenet that Henry held to until his death. This was perhaps partly because it was not a full and comprehensive statement of doctrine but a limited one only dealing with the controversial issues of the day. But as we shall see, it also seems to have reflected Henry VIII’s key concerns and convictions. The most significant innovation was to reduce the number of sacraments from seven to three (which was bumped up to four in 1543, when marriage was reinstated, an unsurprising addition for a king who obviously esteemed it greatly). In one fell swoop, this downgraded the sacraments which boosted clerical power and status: confirmation, extreme unction and priestly ordination. By reducing the power of the clergy, Henry boosted his own sacred status. It was crucial, in this year, for Henry to defend the supremacy that he had created.11

  The theme of Henry’s Supreme Headship was also dominant in a set of royal injunctions issued to the clergy in August 1536. These were essentially designed to enforce the Ten Articles at parish level and suggest that the impact of the Articles in practice may have been more than mildly reformist. The crux of them was to ensure that the clergy continued to preach against papal supremacy while expounding the content of the Ten Articles, so people would know ‘which of them be necessary to be believed and observed for their salvation, and which be not necessary’. The clergy were reminded that for the

  abolishing and extirpation of the Bishop of Rome’s pretended and usurped power and jurisdiction… and for the establishment and confirmation of the king’s authority and jurisdiction within the same, as of the supreme head of the Church of England, [they] shall to the uttermost of their wit, knowledge and learning, purely, sincerely, and without any colour or dissimulation declare, manifest, and open for the space of one quarter of a year now next ensuing, once every Sunday, and after that at the leastwise twice every quarter, in their sermons and other collations, that the Bishop of Rome’s usurped power… was of most just causes taken away and abolished…

  This was not the first time that the clergy had been ordered to preach on royal supremacy – in June 1535, they had similarly been instructed to preach on the subject every Sunday – but this reiteration suggested that the issue remained – or had again become – deeply topical and important. In July 1536, Henry also revoked a number of licences to preach, citing the number of ‘indiscreet persons, with neither learning nor judgment, who… blow abroad their folly’, and instructing Cranmer to ensure that ‘our people may be fed with wholesome food, neither savouring the corruption of the bishop of Rome nor led into doubt by novelties’. The corruption meant was repeated in the injunctions, which repeated the command that no one should extol images, relics, miracles or go on pilgrimages for any saint, ‘to the intent that all superstition and hypocrisy, crept into divers man’s hearts, may vanish away’. This was in keeping with the Ten Articles but a radical departure from traditional religion. For the vast majority of illiterate people in early Tudor England, their faith was something forged in the visual and kinaesthetic – it was a religion of the eye and not the written word. These alterations to their relationship with objects they could see and touch, while stopping far short of the iconoclasm of Edward VI’s reign, was to make that relationship fraugh
t and uncertain; it was to rob their faith of some of its colour and confidence. In addition, the rhythm of their faith was also to change. A proclamation, issued between the Articles and injunctions, decreed that saints’ feast days were to be issued between the Articles and injunctions, decreed that saints’ feast days were to be kept on the first Sunday in October and not on the traditional saints’ days, when work would continue as usual. ‘At one stroke,’ says one commentator, ‘the Crown decimated the ritual year’. The church had been shaken up, while still maintaining conservative perspectives that would have disappointed those hoping for the sort of reform seen on the Continent. It was a peculiarly Henrician settlement.12

  CHAPTER 12

  The Role of Henry VIII in Later Reformation

  The promulgations of 1536 suggest that Henry VIII intended to shape the Church of England in line with his own personal religious beliefs. Yet the progress of the Reformation in England after 1536 has produced two debates in recent scholarship – one questioning the personal involvement of Henry VIII in the shaping of religious policy, and the other asking whether reform was halted and reversed in the late 1530s and 1540s.1

  Historians have been divided over Henry VIII’s role in the Reformation and his influence on religious policy, which really comes down to a difference of opinion about Henry VIII’s character. One set of historians has described the divorce and break from Rome as a politically expedient act to satisfy the king’s desire for an heir, and every attendant or subsequent act of religious reformation as incidental and unintended by the king. These historians paint Henry as a king easily manipulated by his close associates. The king was a puppet, whose suspicious, fickle and callous personality meant that he could be controlled by the dominant group or faction at court. These historians attribute bursts of religious reform, for instance in the 1530s, wholly to the influence of evangelicals at court, such as Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer, Henry’s archbishop of Canterbury from 1533. Similarly, they hold the new power of conservatives at court responsible for the apparent retreats from reform in the 1540s. In this reading, evangelicals at court could tempt and confound the king into religious reform that Henry never intended nor foresaw.2

  But a recent theory has rejected this view of Henry as a vacillating pawn of his ministers and stressed instead the evidence of the king’s firm direction of the Reformation. For some, this had an erratic and unpredictable quality. Diarmaid MacCulloch describes Henry’s beliefs as a ‘ragbag of emotional preferences’. Others stress its controlled coherence along a via media or middle way. ‘The Henrician Reformation was,’ says Greg Walker, ‘just that, a Reformation begotten, nurtured and finally almost smothered in its infancy, by its creator; Henry VIII himself.’ It was Henry’s undertaking, and not Cromwell’s, though the latter was undoubtedly important and influential. Henry may have been ruthless, but he was also deliberate and rational, choosing to do what he considered to be in the best interests of his country and church. The impetus of the Reformation was the conscience of the king, and his conscience defined the religious system of a whole kingdom.3

  If this is true, Henry’s own devotion and religious fervour are very important. We know Henry was devout. In his early years, he went on pilgrimage to Walsingham and he heard several Masses a day. He also defended the Pope, battling both by sword against Louis XII of France and by pen, in writing the Assertio Septum Sacramentorum [Defence of the Seven Sacraments] in 1521, a diatribe refuting Luther’s criticisms of the papacy. Throughout his life, Henry cherished his beautiful rosary and maintained the Latin Mass in all its splendour. His break from Katherine and Rome, and his marriage to Anne only played out as it did because Henry ‘refused to see the question as anything other than theological’. He also took time off from hunting and fighting wars to read and write theology. In the great crises of his life – after Jane Seymour’s death and Catherine Howard’s infidelity – Henry patiently and eagerly corrected theological drafts. In November 1536, he scolded his bishops for their contemptuous words against the articles he had set forth. The king who said it pained him to write penned around 100 corrections and annotations to the text of the Bishops’ Book, a statement of doctrine prepared by his bishops in 1537. This is a testament to his zeal. Finally, some of his meditative annotations to his personal psalter, which was given to him in 1542, are touching. In response to the first few verses of the modern Psalm 28, ‘To you I will cry, O Lord my rock: Do not be silent to me’, Henry has added in the margin, ‘extollatione manuum’, ‘with hands raised’. To his reading of the modern Psalm 102:9–11

  For I have eaten ashes like bread,

  And mingled my drink with weeping,

  Because of Your indignation and Your wrath:

  For You have lifted me up, and cast me away.

  My days are like a shadow that lengthens;

  And I wither away like grass.

  he adds, ‘non in perpetuum irascetur’, ‘he will not be angry for ever’. Such heartfelt engagement with the psalms of David, with whom he identified, suggests true religious feeling. He also left money in his will to ensure that prayers were said for his soul (although the amount he left suggests that this may have been him hedging his bets).4

  Others have concluded, though, that Henry’s faith was dutiful and ritualistic. J. J. Scarisbrick described it as ‘a formal, habitual thing, devoid of much interiority’. Henry’s elevation of the authority figure of the Pope in his Assertio and his original deference to the Pope and to the law over the divorce issue (it was undoubtedly to Clement VII’s surprise that Henry insisted on marrying Anne rather than taking her as a mistress) illustrates a tendency to inflated conceptions of authority and to legalism. In adopting the title of Supreme Head, his elevated sense of authority was being transferred from the Pope to a recognition of his own responsibility and authority as king to govern the church in his kingdom.5

  The second question historians have asked is whether steps towards Protestantism were halted in the later part of Henry VIII’s reign. Many have argued that by 1539 Henry VIII felt too much reform had occurred and so he inaugurated a period of reaction and increased conservatism. In fact, the evidence strongly suggests that Henry stayed true to the legacy of 1536. In only one major idea – Henry VIII’s attitude towards monasticism – was there significant change. Otherwise, every important principle of doctrine that Henry set out in 1536 was retained throughout his reign. The religious developments after 1536 show that it was decisive in the formation of the Anglican Church.

  Firstly, after 1536, Henry VIII’s perspective towards the monasteries changed. In October–December 1536, a huge rebellion in the north of the country against the king in reaction to, among other things, the suppression of the monasteries (explored in detail in chapter 15), fanned into flame Henry’s ire towards monasticism and cemented his association between monks and treason. His responses to his commanders dealing with the rebellion constantly reveal his belief in the monks’ scandalous behaviour, hypocrisy, vice and ‘traitorous conspiracies’, and his commanders were instructed to deal with them most severely. From 1537, the erstwhile ‘honourable great monasteries’ also came under attack. They suffered fresh pressures, harassments and taxes. Further investigations were made into their behaviour, and one by one, abbots were persuaded into surrendering their houses ‘voluntarily’ to the king’s commissioners. Some resisted – the abbot of Glastonbury, Richard Whiting, was one of a handful who never conceded. In September 1539, commissioners were sent to interview him and, although his answers did not give them the proof they needed, a search of his study produced treasonable and papist literature. This evidence of ‘his cankered and traitorous heart and mind against the King’s majesty and his succession’ were grounds enough for his imprisonment in the Tower and trial two months later in Wells. The justice of this trial can perhaps be judged by the fact that the execution had already been arranged for the following day on Glastonbury Tor, overlooking the deserted shell of his former abbey. Once he had been hang
ed and quartered, his head was left to rot above the abbey gate.6

  What had started in 1536 as a reformation became, as a result of the events of late 1536, nothing less than a determined destruction of monasticism, culminating in the Act for the Dissolution of the Abbeys in 1539. In total, some 800 religious houses were dissolved between 1536 and 1540. The monks and nuns within them were pensioned off and put back into the community, while the lands and income of the foundations were absorbed by the Crown or sold to nobility as the Crown saw fit. This was a decisive and dramatic change, considerably more dramatic than the Reformation in many princely Lutheran states. Across the country, people had witnessed the dissolution and destruction of the monasteries, and it permanently altered the religious and physical landscape of England.7

  Aside from the dissolution of the monasteries, there were two royal decisions after 1536 that clearly continued the path towards reform. In September 1538, the order was given for English Bibles to be put in every parish church in the land, and extracts from the New Testament to be read out every Sunday and holy day. This decision was, in comparison to Henry’s early beliefs, an extraordinary volte-face, and it has a haunting link to 1536. William Tyndale had been condemned for heresy by Henry VIII (despite Henry’s fondness for the doctrines of his book, The Obedience of a Christian Man); he fled and was eventually arrested in Flanders in 1535. After a long imprisonment, Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake in October 1536; his dying words were a prayer, ‘Lord, open the king of England’s eyes!’ His prayer was answered. In 1538, Cromwell commissioned Miles Coverdale to produce a Bible in English, which was printed from late 1538 and distributed in 1539. The magnificent title-page of Coverdale’s Great Bible shows Henry, in the full regalia of a sacred king and under a rather squashed God, munificently handing out the Word of God to the people. The title-page was a visual reinforcement of Henry VIII’s royal supremacy, making it clear that papal authority had been replaced in England by a direct relationship between God and the king. The illustration showed how Henry’s position as Supreme Head gave him Henry temporal power, symbolized by Cromwell, and spiritual authority, symbolized by Cranmer. The fact that this powerful image would have been present in every parish church means that it truly can be called a ‘consciously planned act of mass propaganda’. The title-page also contained another crucial message, which deliberately responded to king’s promulgation of doctrine in 1536 and the rebellion of later that year: it reaffirmed the role of the king in guiding the spirituality of his people and reasserted that this guidance would happen through the established social and political hierarchy. The role of the lowest ranks in society is depicted as one of simple obedience – they cry ‘God save the King!’ Also, in 1538, Henry VIII issued a new set of injunctions, which expressed the 1536 concern to avoid the worship of images, but which were more strongly worded, stating the need to avoid ‘the most detestable sin of idolatry’.8