A Brief History of Britain 1485-1660

by Ronald Hutton

  One final reflection may help to set Wolsey in perspective. In the early fifteenth century, England was also ruled on behalf of a young king called Henry by a brilliant, hardworking, arrogant, greedy and sensual man who was both a cardinal and a royal minister. This was Cardinal Beaufort. Yet he has always been remembered with general admiration as a great statesman. Could it be that Beaufort was lucky enough to live in a less demanding age, with no Reformation swelling up behind him? Or could it be that he was a member of the royal family, and so everybody expected him to lead and to show off? It may be worth wondering how much of the traditional animosity towards Wolsey has been bound up with the English class system.

  The Royal Marriage Crisis

  In addition to his failures as a warlord and conqueror, by the late 1520s Henry VIII had failed in another respect that referred directly to his manhood – in the production of an heir. On becoming king, he had impulsively married the widow of his elder brother Arthur, the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon. The union at first seemed extremely happy, despite the fact that Henry soon displayed a lax sense of marital fidelity, but resulted in only one child which survived infancy, and that was a daughter, Mary. In 1527 he decided at last to get rid of Catherine and marry a new, fertile, queen. He could actually have done so through Wolsey himself, who had accumulated enough delegated authority to settle the whole matter in England. One of the great unanswered questions concerning the whole affair is why he did not, but chose instead to seek an annulment from the highest authority, the Pope himself. It is possible that he believed that only such a ruling would carry complete legal security. It is also possible, however, that to make the supreme head of the Church do his will, in front of the leaders of Europe, suited the ostentation which was the stylistic trademark of both Henry and Wolsey. This view is supported by the grounds on which Henry chose to make his case. Wolsey had told him that he could get what he wanted on a legal technicality, an apparent error in the original papal order allowing the king to marry Catherine. Instead, Henry decided to fight over the interpretation of Scripture, and to prove his superiority in it. Back in 1521 he had written a book to defend the traditional teachings of the Church against those of Martin Luther. It had been Wolsey’s suggestion that he do so, and it duly netted the king another title, of Defender of the Faith, conferred by a grateful papacy at a time when war and diplomacy were bringing Henry little glory. The exercise seems to have given him a taste for proving his prowess in theology. Wolsey said that the decision to fight for annulment mainly on scriptural grounds was Henry’s own, and its essential idiocy surely confirms this judgement; for in theological terms it was too shaky to win easily unless the court concerned were blatantly in its favour.

  For a while it seemed as though a papal court actually would be, because just as Henry decided on his suit, the Emperor Charles V quarrelled with the reigning Pope, Clement VII, and sacked Rome. The Pope was now the emperor’s prisoner, and likely to do anything that the English king wanted if Henry would rescue him. Henry and Wolsey, however, did not have the resources to attack Charles directly, and so tried instead to exploit Clement’s misfortune by declaring that the papal authority was now suspended. Wolsey attempted to take over the Church himself, summoning the other cardinals to a meeting under his leadership, which would annul Henry’s marriage as one item on its agenda. Clement scotched that plan by forbidding it, and Henry and Wolsey tried instead to get other European nations to rescue the Pope by force, with English encouragement but not English participation. Over the following two years, as Charles V defeated these attempts, Clement slowly concluded that he could best regain freedom and influence by befriending his captor Charles; and Charles, as the nephew of Catherine of Aragon, was determined to prevent Henry’s annulment. Wolsey strove hard, instead, to get the French to take up its cause, by getting Henry to promise to marry a French princess once he was free to do so. This was indeed the one price which could have bought French support, and it failed because, at this point, Wolsey found out that his monarch was determined to marry one of his own courtiers, a nobody called Anne Boleyn.

  There was now no real hope of obtaining the annulment, and any alternative easy resolution to the crisis was forfeited when all the men concerned in it, at home and abroad, found themselves trapped between two extraordinary women. On one side was Catherine, who surprised most people with the courage and tenacity with which she strove to remain queen. Clement’s great hope was that she would agree to enter a nunnery, which would automatically dissolve her union with the king and let everybody off the hook; but she refused point-blank to do so. On the other was Anne, proving herself to be a powerful and determined politician and steeling the king’s will to marry her at virtually any cost. By 1529, Wolsey’s complete failure to obtain the annulment was clear. Given Henry’s nature, the only thing that could have saved Wolsey’s position as chief minister after that would have been the intervention of powerful friends on his behalf, and he had never made any. This was partly because of his own bossy nature, and partly because one of his chief attractions, in Henry’s eyes, was his utter dependence on royal favour. It was his final misfortune that his failure had made a lasting enemy of Anne, the one person capable of a more intimate and potent relationship with Henry than Wolsey could ever form himself. None the less, although the cardinal was stripped off his political office and his palaces, he retained his dignity and wealth as Archbishop of York, which carried the status of a rich noble. He could probably have enjoyed them in peace until the end of his days. Instead, old, tired and ill as he was, he intrigued relentlessly to regain political power. By the summer of 1530 he had decided that he could never do so as long as Anne was around, and began trying to ally with Catherine and the emperor to ruin her. Instead, it was probably Anne who ruined him, by revealing his plotting to Henry and playing on the king’s ingrained hostility to any servant who attempted to undermine declared royal policy. Wolsey was arrested, and collapsed and died of natural causes on his way to trial. Had he faced condemnation and execution instead, he would have died as a failed politician, and not as a martyr. He had always used the Church as a motor for secular ends, even though he tried to do it good on the way. In 1530, at last given the chance to devote himself to it, and to his soul, he still reached out instinctively for the state – and the state destroyed him.

  By the time of Wolsey’s death, Henry had been left with a straight choice: to give up hope of escaping his marriage in the near future or to follow the example of the Lutherans and the other Protestant movements now appearing on the Continent, and cast off papal authority. He might have played a waiting game, for a new Pope or a change of relations between the current one and emperor, but this suited neither his nature nor his desire to wed Anne and sire an heir. Instead, the situation held out the temptation to compensate for his humiliations on the European scene during the past decade and become the first monarch in Western or Central Europe to renounce papal authority and set himself up as the direct mediator between his people and their deity. This would at once pay back Clement and give himself a power and sanctity sought by neither of his rivals abroad and none of his English predecessors. To somebody of Henry’s personality, it was an irresistible temptation.

  The Henrician Reformation

  Between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, there was a remarkable consensus among historians concerning the pre-Reformation Church in England. It was that the once vibrant and dynamic Christianity of the Middle Ages had run down into a complex of lax and depopulating monasteries, worldly and absentee bishops, ignorant parish clergy and a popular religion bogged down in superstition and fear, focused on the cult of material objects and on buying a way out of the terrors of Purgatory, a place of torment where sins were purged away, which was presumed to await most people on death. These views were based on contemporary criticisms, by educated laity and prominent churchmen who were to produce both Protestant and Catholic leaders in the struggle that followed. The division among h
istorians was over the remedy. Most scholars followed the dominant English tradition, of declaring that Protestantism had been an effective and appropriate one; modern Catholics, of course, argued that an overhaul within the existing doctrinal and structural framework would have been more appropriate. At least both sides had the same starting point.

  That point vanished during the 1970s, because of a practical development in research techniques. A proliferation of county record offices made huge quantities of local sources easily available to scholars, drawing their attention to categories of material – the records of church courts, visitations, parish finances and wills – that had been relatively neglected before. At the same time, the expansion of the British university system, and the establishment of the doctoral thesis as the main qualification for a post in it, propelled an unprecedented number of historians onto them. By the 1980s, enough local studies had been published to support broader surveys of the results. They were undertaken first by Christopher Haigh and then by Jack Scarisbrick and Eamon Duffy, and revealed the early Tudor Church to have been one of the most successful and popular branches of Western Christendom. The monasteries were in slight trouble, hit by a general slump in population and agriculture and by a relative decline in support from the laity. They were still, however, almost all viable institutions. The friars were in worse financial trouble, but remained popular and dynamic. One of the reasons for the relative subtraction of support for these regular clergy was a boom in the popularity of new institutions. In the case of the rich, these were chantries, chapels where prayers were offered for the founder’s soul, and in the case of commoners, parish guilds. The latter could be joined by all but the poorest people, and were open to most age groups and both sexes. Each member paid a small subscription per year to retain a priest to pray for the souls of its members. They afforded the joint comforts of a club and an insurance policy.

  The parish was another institution flourishing in this period, its church being the main building of the local community. Parish accounts prove that churches were being constantly rebuilt and embellished at this time, with money provided by individual and collective efforts. The parish was also increasingly the centre of communal festivity and celebration. By 1520 it was the dominant custom in villages and provincial towns to meet the expenses of keeping up the liturgy and fabric by holding regular parties, dances and games. Another great focus of religious enthusiasm and loyalty was the cult of saints, who were thought to operate as powerful intercessors on behalf of their devotees. They seemed to provide ordinary people with personal friends and patrons in heaven. Many had special responsibility for curing particular illnesses or looking after particular occupations or age groups. There were almost as many female as male saints, and each parish church had not only a patron saint but side-chapels for the cults of up to twenty more. Shrines containing their relics or images were targets for pilgrimage, an activity which combined the pleasure of religious reassurance and a summer holiday. For those who wanted their help outside the formal parish structure, there were wayside chapels and holy wells. The church courts were cheap and fast compared with the royal courts and accordingly more popular. They were heavily used by ordinary people to deal with neighbourhood quarrels and slander and to enforce communal codes of good behaviour. Parish priests were generally commoners drawn from the district in which they served, so that they understood their neighbours. They were not expected to be very learned, because their job was to offer up ritual on behalf of their parish, especially in the regular enactment of the mass. Some were personally unpopular, but there was little overall tension between clergy and laity at the local level. Preaching was provided by the friars. The Church also remained, as spectacularly illustrated in the case of Wolsey, the surest means for a talented commoner to rise to wealth and power.

  If the true picture of pre-Reformation English religion was so rosy, then the obvious problem is how to explain the need for the Reformation at all. Here four other factors have to be taken into account. The first was that, since the fourteenth century, England had harboured its own brand of radical heresy, known to the orthodox by the insulting general name of Lollardy (i.e. gabbling). To some extent these Lollards do matter as ancestors to English Protestantism, as some of their ideas, especially their hatred of the mass and the cult of saints, were to correspond to particular features of England’s Reformation. They were not, however, a serious menace to the pre-Reformation Church. They were a small minority of the population, concentrated in a few areas of the south-east and often in a few families there. They were remarkably, and courageously, tenacious, but isolated and unpopular. Their main priority was not evangelism but survival.

  In addition, the early Tudor Church did have clashes of interest with particular groups of laity. In general, lay people were becoming better educated in the later Middle Ages, more inclined to think about religion for themselves and more inclined to push for top administrative jobs, traditionally held by clerics. Common lawyers in particular were fighting a range war with the clergy over jurisdiction. Nobles were inclined to get touchy about the political power of bishops every time that the latter attempted to call the tune of policy-making as well as shouldering the tasks of government. Both could get a hearing from kings at moments when the latter were getting on badly with the papacy. More generally, the educated laity were starting to express some concern, and contempt, for aspects of popular piety, such as pilgrimage and the cult of saints, which they felt to be peripheral to true religion.

  It is also quite true that some prominent churchmen complained about the failings of the Church in England. It is important to note, however, that they generally recognized that it was in need of further improvement, rather than essentially rotten, and that it was an unusually successful part of the Church as a whole. They deplored the very characteristics of it that recent historians have found so impressive: its localism, diversity and popular dynamism. What they wanted was something more structurally uniform and cohesive, better supervised and more focused on the Trinity and the essential doctrines of Christian salvation. They worried deeply that it was getting out of control, and becoming too diluted by popular wishes and local traditions and too preoccupied with externals.

  The fourth factor followed on from this, and was the most important: that what was to become known as Protestantism presented the English with a wholly different way of approaching worship and the problem of salvation. To simplify this, it taught that all that was needed to reach heaven was to avoid and repent sin, and to have a genuine faith in Christ, as defined, in the last analysis, by the Bible. Purgatory did not exist, the intercession of saints was unnecessary, and most of the ceremonies of the medieval Church were either superfluous or dangerous. To the credit of the Reformation, it did not push over a decayed and tottering edifice, but seized, gutted and totally refurbished a strong and viable one. It did not convert, in the main, those who were lukewarm about the old church or in personal dispute with its members. It won over people who had formerly been enthusiastic about traditional religion: to adopt Diarmaid MacCulloch’s phrase, white-hot Catholics became white-hot Protestants, and the most dynamic geographical centres of the old Church (such as East Anglia) became powerhouses of the new one. This is why the story and the study of the English Reformation are now even more exciting than before.

  This is part of the context for Henry VIII’s treatment of the Church, but another is provided by previous royal policy towards it. The Yorkist kings had, on the whole, bought the support of churchmen for their seizure of the throne by confirming and extending many of the Church’s privileges within English society. Henry VII set about restricting these as part of his work of restoring the traditional strength of the monarchy. In particular, he increasingly sought to extend the power of the royal courts of justice over clergy. Henry VIII carried on this policy, and began to provoke protests that he was taking it too far. In 1510 the national assembly of English churchmen, Convocation, protested that its members were being thr
eatened by ‘wicked men’. Two years later a council of high clerics sitting at Rome angrily discussed the encroachment of English royal power on ecclesiastical privileges, and in 1514 two papal declarations called on the church in general to defend itself against secular rulers. In the next year there was almost a full-scale showdown. The flashpoint was the latest Act of Parliament restricting the legal privileges of clergy. The Abbot of Winchcombe, in Gloucestershire, denounced it, and with it the power of all royal courts over people in holy orders. Henry set up the warden of the English Franciscan friars, Henry Standish, to argue against him. The current House of Commons demanded that the abbot retract his words, whereupon Convocation insisted that Standish do the same. The royal judges declared that Convocation was breaking the law of the land.

  An explosion was prevented by Wolsey’s elevation to the office of Cardinal Legate of the Pope, in stages between 1515 and 1518. This managed to preserve all the outward forms of papal authority while laying the Church in England open to royal taxation and management as never before. In ceremonial and theoretical terms, it made Wolsey the equal of Henry. Each time that they appeared together on state occasions, the banners of the papacy, representing Wolsey’s authority, were placed alongside those of the king. In practice, Wolsey never forgot that he was the king’s servant. There is no doubt, likewise, that Wolsey’s legatine office represented a major concession by the papacy rather than a compromise, granted at a moment when the current Pope needed English help against the French. The Pope concerned, and those who immediately followed, soon realized that it had not earned them much in return, as both Henry and Wolsey paid little regard or honour to them and neglected to build up a party at the papal court. This of course cost them both very dear when they needed papal goodwill to annul Henry’s marriage, and the resulting removal of Wolsey destroyed the existing solution to the problem of the relationship between Church and Crown. It is not surprising that, under these circumstances, Henry felt that he had a straight choice between a humiliating submission to the papal will and a direct takeover of the Church in England. Given his personality, there was only one course to take.