The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

On 10 May the King demanded that the Church should renounce all authority to make laws without
royal license. His mood was ominous. Once he had believed, so he told a Commons delegation, that
'the clergy of our realm had been our subjects wholly', but now he understood that 'they be but half
our subjects, yea, and scarce our subjects'. On 15 May 1532 the liberty of the English Church was
lost. The Submission of the Clergy was subscribed on the following day, and they yielded all authority
to make canons without royal permission. A wave of suicides in London was seen as a malign prodigy
'foreboding future evil'. Thomas More resigned as Chancellor: his political battle lost, he claimed
now to be resolved to keep silent, never more 'to study nor meddle with any matter of this world'.
But in his writings and his secret communications with conservative exiles, he proved still a desperate
defender of the Church against heresy. As More yielded the Great Seal, Henry assured him that he
would never 'put any man in ruffle or trouble of his conscience', but even if he meant it, the logic
of events made this a promise impossible to keep. At the destruction of the royal marriage - as happens at the end of marriages - loyalties among the wider circle of the family and friends were
bitterly divided. Murder was committed in April 1532 in Westminster sanctuary when rival retinues
of the Dukes of Norfolk's niece, spoken by the King's own sister, the Duchess of Suffolk.
Other noblewomen openly supported Catherine and her daughter, including Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk (who was estranged from her own husband), Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter, and Margaret,
Countess of Salisbury. Because they were all of the 'royal race', of Yorkist descent and Henry's
cousins, their disloyalty was more dangerous. The King, in his sense of self-righteousness and
injured innocence, grew bitter and unforgiving. Lord Montague remembered that when Henry 'came
to his chamber he would look angerly and fall to fighting'. In the opinion of Lord Thomas Howard,
it was this king's 'nature never again to hold in affection any person he had cast from him that formerly
he had loved'.
A way out of the Aragon marriage became imperative when in October 1532 Henry took Anne to
France in state. This was, at last, their prenuptial honeymoon (their journey hom from Dover to
Eltham took ten days), and Anne was soon pregnant. The death of Archbishop Warham, a stalwart
opponent of the divorce, made way for Cranmer's consecration as Archbishop of Canterbury, and for
a marriage ceremony between Henry and Anne at the end of January 1533. They may have married,
secretly, already, in mid November upon their return from Calais. This was not a marriage made in heaven. Not for long was Anne 'the most happy'.
There followed, one by one, statutes culminating in the Act of Supremacy in November 1534, which
separated the English Church from Catholic Christendom, and surrendered it to a king who, as Supreme Head, claimed even the power to determine doctrine. This was a power which was unprecedented, and which shocked even Luther. The Supremacy was made by Parliament, although
the draftsmen of the legislation insisted that Parliament was merely asserting an ineluctable historic truth. The Act in Restraint of Appeals - the first of the revolutionary statutes - was based on the testimony of 'divers and sundry ancient histories and chronicles'. The King's marriage to Anne Boleyn in January 1533, and the birth of Princess Elizabeth that September, necessitated a new succession,
and the usurpation of the right of his first-born, Princess Mary. The new laws met opposition in both Lords and Commons. In confession at Syon Abbey Sir George Throckmorton was counselled to oppose to the death the anti-papal legislation, or 'he should stand in a very heavy case at the Day of Judgement'. But there were new and terrifying reasons for compliance.
'It were a strange world as words were made treason,' said Lord Montague. Opponents of the Royal Supremacy could, after the Treason Act of 1534, be executed by this 'law of words'. The act had made it treasonable to call the King a heretic, a schismatic, a tyrant, an infidel or a usurper. Its first victims
were the Holy Maid of Kent and her followers. On the day that they were executed - 20 April - an oath of compliance to the new succession was demanded from the people; the first time a spiritual instrument of commitment had been used as a political test. Everyone swore, even More's fool swore.
But More could not swear. In the Tower he thought on last things and wrote upon the Passion and upon tribulation. From his window he watched the prior and monks of the London Charterhouse leave the Tower for Tyburn and martyrdom, as 'bridegrooms for Christ'. They had refused to swear the Supremacy oath, for they could not deny Christ's trust to St Peter and repudiate the papal primacy.
A year later More went to block, as both traitor to a king and martyr for the universal Church whose
unity that king had broken.