The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

                                                            ROYAL SUPREMACY

Seeking to understand how the great transformation in religion and ecclesiastical authority that was
the Reformation could ever have happened, its opponents declared, 'This may well be called a tragedy
which began with a marriage.' Throughout the 1520s, the first decade of evangelical reform, Henry VIII had been preoccupied by an intractable problem of conscience, his 'Great Matter'. His desperate
need to secure the succession and his consequent desire to rid himself of a queen who could bear
him no living sons, became inescapably a theological problem. Henry's marriage to Catherine of
Aragon had only been made possible because the Pope had dispensed from the Church's prohibition
of a man marrying his brother's widow. As child after child died, Henry began to search for the cause
of God's judgement against him, and looking in the Old Testament he seemed to kind it: in Leviticus
18:16 and 20:21 - 'Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother's wife . . . ' To Catherine's
insistent denial that Arthur had ever uncovered her nakedness Henry never listened. What was needed
was for one pope to overrule what another had allowed. Best of all would be to prove that Julius II's
dispensation was insufficient in law; Cardinal Wolsey recognized that this was so. But a mere legal
solution no longer sufficed. Henry saw that his marriage contravened divine law; it had angered God
and affronted his own conscience. He had found the Levitical argument for himself, and would
countenance no alternative.
The King stood upon principle: no pope could contradict a biblical command. This was to begin to
challenge papal authority. Wolsey urged him against so radical a course, but unavailingly. Divorce
was impossible, but Henry now took the first and secret steps to annul his marriage to his queen,
secret even from her. On 17 May 1527 Wolsey, as papal legate, set up a clandestine court, summoning
the King to answer the charge of living incestuously with Catherine. Then Henry and Wolsey drew
back. If they had lost their nerve, it was hardly surprising, because the divorce was difficult in law,
and provocative in its challenge to the papacy; diplomatically and politically it seemed impossible,
because that May Rome had been sacked by Imperial troops, and the Pope was virtually the prisoner
of the Emperor, Catherine's nephew. But at this time Henry assumed - and would never relinquish -
the direction of his campaign for an annulment.
Henry's 'scruple of conscience' about his damned marriage was sincere enough, but when he became
captivated by Anne Boleyn his desire to rid himself of his first queen became compelling.
Anne's influence upon this king, who was so profoundly open to influence, now took a remarkable
form. Not the least of the marks of Anne's originality was her commitment to evangelical reform.
From her youth spent in France, she was convinced by the Christian humanist imperative to set
forth the vernacular Bible, and to return the Church to the true religion. As soon as she held sway
over the King she dared to use her influence to advance reform and to protect her friends in the evangelical underworld. Somehow Simon Fish, in exile, knew that if he sent Anne a copy of his anticlerical tract A Supplication for the Beggars it would please her: so it did. She sponsored Tyndale's
forbidden New Testament, and interceded for those persecuted for its sake. Just at the time when the
new faith most needed protection Anne Boleyn was there to offer it. Once reform began to infiltrate
and the seemingly adamantine authority of the Church began to be questioned, there could be no
going back. All those who blamed religious change upon Anne's enchantment of the King were not
wholly wrong. On 18 June 1529 an extraordinary legatine court opened at Blackfriars in London.
Its task was to pass sentence upon the royal marriage. Queen Catherine appeared before the court in
person and, before the King and the judges, pleaded that she should not be discarded, dishonoured.
Only Rome, she insisted, could determine the legality of her marriage, and to Rome she formally
appealed. Bishop Fisher and other leading clerics fiercely championed her cause. The trial was adjourned at the end of July, mired in political and legal wrangling. Now Henry, who had tried to stampede the Pope into judging in his favour, was summoned to Rome, as if he were any ordinary
suppliant, to put his case before the Rota, the supreme court of the Roman Church, where the decision
was likely to go against him.
By the Autumn of 1529 Henry determined upon a more radical policy. Anne had shown him Tyndale's
The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), and to a king struggling with a pope and thwarted by a
cardinal, Tyndale's argument that the Church had not only nullified God's promises but usurped
the magistracy of the prince was appealing. In conversation with the Imperial ambassador in October
1529, Henry announced a startingly radical credo. Luther was right, Henry said, to attack the vices
and corruption of the clergy; and if he had not challenged the sacraments as well, Henry would have
defended, not opposed him. The only clerical power over the laity the King now acknowledged was
absolution from sin. In 1515 he had already declared, 'The kings of England in time past have never
had any superior but God alone.' Henry began to make moves against the Church from which there
was no return.
The failure of the legatine court of 1529 to procure an annulment, and the massive indignity of the King's summons to Rome to decide the case had proved the Cardinal's downfall. At last, Wolsey
could no longer give the King what he wanted, and royal favour faltered. Wolsey's enemies waited
to overthrow him. The noble councillors whom he had for so long displaced and who hated his prelatical pretensions, now circled. In 1527 Wolsey's absence in France had given them the chance
to 'deprave' him to the King, but Wolsey survived, and would have survived again, had it not been
for the enmity of Anne, whom he called the 'midnight crow'. According to Wolsey's gentleman usher,
at dinner, téte-á-téte with the King, she talked of politics: 'Consider what debt and danger the Cardinal
hath brought you in all your subjects.'
'How so, sweetheart?' asked the King.
In October 1529 Wolsey's enemies in the Council prepared charges against him which were specious,
but ominous for the whole clergy, for the charge which stuck concerned the exercise of his authority
as papal legate. The King was unwilling to sacrifice him, although, as Wolsey saw, he might find it
easier to do so than restore Wolsey's confiscated properties or admit that he himself had been wrong.
Wolsey was dismissed from the Council and deprived of the office of Lord Chancellor: although the
King sent him a ring for comfort, there could be none. In disgrace, Wolsey gave substance to the
charges of treason by plotting with the King's enemies; first Francis I of France, then the Emperor.
In November 1530 he died on his way south from York, where he had been living for the first time
in his hitherto non-resident career as Archbishop. Wolsey's fall left the court and Council more divided
than ever; between the Queen's supporters, who saw in her cause both the safety of traditional religion
and the assurance of the power of the nobility; and a radical group who countenanced the abandonment of the Roman allegiance and saw the royal divorce as just the beginning of a more dangerous and revolutionary course. In Wolsey's place as Lord Chancellor Henry appointed Thomas More, the author of Utopia, the most radical criticism yet of the society he was now to govern.
He came determined to stay out of the King's Great Matter, yet he saw what Henry's struggle with
Rome portended, and he hoped against hope that confrontation with the English Church could be
prevented, and that it was not too late to stop the advance of heresy.
The summoning of Parliament at the end of 1529 offered hopes of reform and redress, but diverse kinds. There was already in this Parliament a group opposed to the King's purposes, the staunchest
defenders of the Queen's cause; a group which ventured perilously close to treason. Thomas More
came to reform, seeking new laws against heresy. Others came to reform other abuses: the 'enormities of the clergy.' That common lawyers and citizens of London were so influential in the Commons was
the Church's misfortune, for these lawyers had long been jealous of spiritual jurisdiction.
Those who warned reform wanted action, and law, parliamentary statue, was the way to achieve it.
Anticlerical feeling was running high and the Church's critics came with a case prepared. Not only
was there resentment against clerical exactions and privileges, but also growing fears of the clergy's
unfettered powers to summon the laity before their courts and to punish them, acting as both accuser
and judge. A Commons' petition demanding reform of the clergy was turned into a series of parliamentary bills demanding the prohibition of the abuses of which the petition complained; such
as clerical fees, holding secular office, buying and selling, holding more than one benefice with
cure of souls (pluralism), and not being resident in their cures. This was not yet a fundamental assault
upon the nature of spiritual authority, but it was regarded darkly by the Church's most prescient defenders. Bishop Fisher compared the Commons to the heretical Hussite Kingdom of Bohemia.
Daring to criticize the clergy now incurred the suspicion of heresy, and a campaign began against heretics, who were unprepared to recant, led by a Chancellor and bishops who became more desperate
as the heresy spread.
Henry had not directed the anticlerical assault, but he now drew conclusions from it. Through these
months it became clear that Catherine's supporters would not move Henry's conscience, but it was
still unclear how the annulment would be achieved. But in the autumn of 1530 a way was found.
Henry now claimed to be absolute as Emperor and Pope in his own kingdom. The Great Matter
could be settled without Rome, within the realm, and by royal authority. Here was the assertion of
the Royal Supremacy over the English Church. In the devising of his caesaro-papal claims, Henry
was a student, applying himself diligently to studying the manuscript which contained the - dubious -
historical precedents for his Supremacy. Edward Foxe and John Stokesley (who would be rewarded
with the bishoprics of Hereford and London) had been compelling evidence to support the King's
position, including legal judgements, chronicles, scriptures, and arguments from the Church Fathers
and the General Councils of the Church. This was the Collectanea satis copiosa. 'Ubi hic? (Where does this come from?)'; 'Hic est vera (Here is the truth)', the King wrote in the margins. Henry was now
convinced - he needed little convincing - that England had long been, and still was, an empire, within
which he had both temporal and spiritual jurisdiction (regnum and sacerdotum). By October 1530
the King had convinced himself that his imperial authority empower him to prevent appeals outside
his realm. A group of scholars had known the arguments before the King did, indeed had devised
them for him, and for some of them solving the Divorce crisis was a way towards reform in religion
and society as well as towards transformation of authority within the Church. From the obscurity
of his Cambridge colleg Thomas Cranmer became prominent in the King's counsels from 1531, soon
abandoning his conservative humanism for Lutheran evangelicalism. A common lawyer, who had
been faithful among Wolsey's faithless servants, was taken into the King's service in the spring of 1530, and into the Council by the end of the year: this was Thomas Cromwell, whose introduction
into the counsels of the King was to be of the greatest significance.
Cromwell, possessing a creative intelligence and a vision of a reformed commonwealth, led the King
towards policies more radical than he would otherwise have countenanced. Cardinal Pole claimed
later that Cromwell had made a pact with Henry, promising to make him the most powerful king
yet known in England: royal power would grow at the clergy's expense, and the wealth of the Church
would finance reform. This was an unrealistic view: Cromwell was only the King's servant.
Yet his influence was profound, for he led the King out of an impasse. Cromwell had learnt the
New Testament by heart while on a journey to Rome in 1517: his visit to the papal court and his
knowledge of scripture marked him thereafter. Among Cromwell's early friends were leading evangelicals, the advance guard of religious reform in England; men and women whom it was dangerous for him even to know. Cromwell determined to use his new influence to further their
cause, which was his own: to advance the Gospel. From 1533 Cromwell and Cranmer worked closely together. Henry was convinced that England was an empire and he its emperor; but he was anxious,
uncertain how to turn this idea into political reality. He could not escape the fear that his subjects
might rise in defence of Pope and Queen. Thomas More might still have prevailed over Thomas Cromwell in the battle for the King's conscience, and Queen Catherine had powerful supporters.
Many women were outraged by the King's repudiation of her. Unlikely rumours reached the Venetian
ambassador in 1531 that thousands of London women had stormed Anne Boleyn's love nest by the
Thames and attempted to seize her. The visionary nun Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent,
claimed to have had visitations from the Virgin, and prophesied disaster if Henry pursued his adulterous course. In Parliament, Bishop John Fisher was the Queen's unswerving champion.
When the first direct assault on the whole Church came in January 1531 - no less than to break the
clergy's spirit by bringing a Praemunire charge against all of them (accusing them of illegally asserting papal jurisdiction in England) - Fisher strengthened their resolve. He won victory from defeat by
adding to the clergy's acknowledgement that the King was head of the English Church the vital saving
clause: 'so far as the law of Christ allows'; that is, for all those who thought like Fisher, not at all.
Fisher called for holy war: by September 1533 he was urging the Emperor to invade England and to
depose the Turk. England's most learned, austere and saintly bishop had turned traitor. How had it
come to this?
Though Henry was still, at the turn of 1532, unprepared to countenance schism, Cromwell had seen
a way to achieve Royal Supremacy little by little, and to break with Rome. Parliament would be
used to make laws to enshrine Royal Supremacy and national sovereignty, with the assent of the King's subjects, or, at least, the illusion of it. As Parliament met again in January 1532 the antagonism
of the Commons towards the clergy was now deliberately revived. On 18 March the Commons submitted to the King a Supplication against the Ordinaries. Most of the Supplication's nine charges
were extremely specific, concerning the power of the Church courts, and the abuses within the
system. Old fears of the clergy's powers in heresy trials were heightened as the Church moved with
new severity against people in high places. The King's heart now hardened against his clergy.
On Easter Day 1532 at Greenwich William Peto, the head of the Observant Franciscan order in
England, warned Henry that 'great and little were murmuring', and that if he married Anne dogs
would lick his blood, as once they had licked Ahab's. For a king who identified himself so closely
with sage Old Testament monarchs, not tyrants such as Ahab, that sermon may have been decisive.
The King's will was made clear to the Speaker of the Lower House; the clergy's answer to the Commons' Supplication mustbe rejected, and the royal message was miniatory. 'We think their answer
will smally please you . . . '