1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (15 page)

C
HAPTER
12

The Role of Henry VIII in Later Reformation

T
he 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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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 hanged and quartered, his head was left to rot above the abbey gate.
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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.
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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’.
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There are four developments which are thought to chart the king’s reaction to reform and repudiation of his earlier religious decisions. Firstly, in November 1538, Henry presided over the trial of John Lambert. Dressed ostentatiously in white, the colour of theological purity, Henry personally disputed theology with Lambert, who had been denounced as a heretic for being a sacramentarian (sacramentarians were radical evangelical Protestants who believed that the bread and wine of the Eucharist did not become the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ). It is a salutary thought that this difference of opinion was sufficient for Lambert to be classified as an extremist and a heretic – matters of theology were life and death issues in the sixteenth century. After five hours of hearing authorities speak on the Eucharist, Henry asked Lambert whether he would accept the arguments for the real presence of Christ in the sacrament of communion that had been put before him. Lambert’s answer hedged his bets: ‘I commend my soul into the hands of God, but my body I wholly yield and submit unto your clemency.’ But it seems that on this issue, Henry was not inclined to be merciful. He replied, ‘In that case you must die, for I will not be a patron unto heretics’ and Lambert was condemned to be burned as a heretic at Smithfield. But this wasn’t so much reaction against reform as a way – admittedly a rather hideous one – for Henry to delineate the boundaries of his reformation. It was a powerful enactment of the definition of the Eucharist as the ‘real presence’ of Christ that had featured in the Ten Articles of 1536.
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Secondly, a key piece of evidence cited by those who say the reformation ended in 1539 is the Act of Six Articles. This act, designed to abolish ‘diversity in opinions’, affirmed six points of doctrine and had a conservative flavour. It reiterated the real presence of the Christ in the bread and the wine and stated that communion of both kinds (that is, both bread and wine) was unnecessary for the laity. More controversially, it decreed that priests were not to marry and that vows of chastity and widowhood were to be kept. Finally, it concluded that private Masses were to continue (though it conceded they were not necessary) and again insisted on the obligatory nature of auricular confession. Terrible penalties were threatened for those who failed to keep these articles. Many historians have considered this act a retrograde step into conservative reaction, following the chronicler Edward Hall who described it as the ‘whip with six strings… the bloody statute’. In reality though, the articles did not actually undo any of the reforms of the 1530s. The purpose of the Six Articles was to proclaim the Henrician orthodoxy of 1536 and to signal that some areas were off-limits for Henry’s reformation. Having said that, the clause forbidding the marriage of clergy was an area in which English evangelicals had seriously hoped for further reformation. Expecting imminent change on this issue, Cranmer himself had secretly married the niece of the reformer Andreas Osiander when on a diplomatic mission to Nuremberg in 1532, and had had to send her into hiding before banishing her completely.
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