1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (17 page)

Henry VIII was also the first English king to authorize the translation and publication of the Bible in English. Ordering that an English Bible be put in every parish church in the land, allowed, for the first time, the access of all English people to this crucial religious text in the vernacular – even despite the act of 1543, for this was a very difficult act to enforce. As many recent commentators have noted, the English language was decisively shaped by translations of the Bible into English in Henry VIII’s reign. The translation by William Tyndale and the adoption of many of his turns of phrase into the officially sanctioned Great Bible of 1539 gave us classic formulations such as ‘the powers that be’, ‘signs of the times’, ‘all things to all men’, ‘let there be light’, ‘a law unto themselves’, ‘my brother’s keeper’, ‘a man after his own heart’, ‘scapegoat’, ‘give up the ghost’, ‘the salt of the earth’ and ‘blessed are the peacemakers’. The irony is that while Henry insisted on his right to tell people what to believe, his actions allowed ordinary people to engage with scripture and God directly, and the legacy of this tenet of evangelicalism has fundamentally fashioned our ideas about the personal nature of religion and spirituality.

While there is a horror in the twenty-eight people burned as heretics after 1540, and the fourteen executed for papistry, Henry’s accommodation with Protestantism meant that England did not see the bloody inter-Nicene wars of the continent. In Holland, in 1539–45, 105 people died, while the later Wars of Religion in France were bloody affairs – 2,000 people died in Paris alone on 24 August 1572 in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Yet it is ironic that Henry’s desperate anxiety about religious unity could not prevent the religious extremes and reverses the reigns of his son, Edward, and his daughter, Mary. The tutors that Henry VIII chose for his son – Richard Cox and John Cheke – were reformist, evangelically inclined scholars from Cambridge, and Edward, together with his Lord Protector (the brother of Jane Seymour), presided over a thorough reformation during his reign. Had Henry VIII known or guessed this would be the case? Mary’s accession to the throne turned the tide the other way, and 300 were executed for heresy in her five-year reign, including the former archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, in Oxford on 25 March 1556. It was the idiosyncrasy of Henry’s religious beliefs that made the division likely.
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Perhaps the real successor to Henry’s reformation was Elizabeth I. It may be easy to contrast the policies of the queen who famously had no desire ‘to make windows into men’s hearts’ with the king who published an act ‘abolishing diversity in opinions’. Yet in reality the substance of the Elizabethan religious settlement reflected, in large part, the priorities and values of Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII. The Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity of 1559 powerfully echoed Henry’s commitment to the English Crown as Supreme Head (although Elizabeth became Supreme Governor, partly in deference to her gender), and to Henry’s preoccupation with unity. They illustrated Elizabeth I’s intention to keep religion under the control of the Crown, as her father had done. The Spanish ambassador to her court, Count de Feria, reported that she ‘resolved to restore religion as her father left it’. Under her archbishop, Matthew Parker, who had been Henry VIII’s chaplain, Elizabeth mediated a course between the extremes of Edward and Mary as if determined to adhere to Henry VIII’s middle way between the ‘abominations of the bishop of Rome’ and ‘novelties and… things not necessary’. In addition, following Henry VIII, the Elizabethan Royal Injunctions of 1559, and later, in 1563, the Thirty-nine Articles, showed a resolve to continue the eradication of idolatry and superstitious practices, such as pilgrimages, invocation of saints and the worship of images and relics, while avoiding the intense iconoclasm of Edward VI’s reign. The wording of the Act of Uniformity, in contrast to the original Reformation bill, allowed for a continued understanding of the Eucharist as the real presence of Christ, a view that Henry VIII had insisted upon. Elizabeth told Feria that ‘she differed very little from [Roman Catholics], as she believed that God was in the sacrament of the Eucharist and only dissented from two or three things in the Mass’, even though the Thirty-nine Articles of 1563 explicitly rejected ‘transubstantiation’. Henry and Elizabeth may well also have shared opinions on purgatory and the sufficiency of scripture and, although clerical marriage was permitted in Elizabeth’s reign, she herself appears to have abhorred it, and never received the wives of clerics at court.
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Only in one crucial aspect did Henry’s daughter substantially alter her religious inheritance. The Thirty-nine Articles adopted that most Protestant of doctrines, that the justification of man came by faith and not by works. As a result, only two sacraments (baptism and the Eucharist) were to be recognized by the Anglican Church – not the three of Henry’s Ten Articles (or the four of the King’s Book). The third, penance, had no place in this new Protestant understanding of justification. Yet even here, the change appears to be simply one that was a logical result of the passing of time and changing attitudes towards what were the extremities of faith in the 1530s. Few mainstream evangelicals during Henry’s reign held to this Lutheran doctrine. In addition, the Thirty-nine Articles were keen to stress, immediately after the assertion of
solafidenism
, the need for good works that ‘spring necessarily of a true and lively faith’, suggesting a continued deference to the faith of her father, in spirit if not in letter.

Henry VIII was a more pious and devout man than is currently touted in popular history. His personal beliefs came to define the religion of a kingdom. From 1536 until Henry’s death in 1547, there was, between Catholicism and Protestantism, ‘Henricianism’, and while it was unable to protect England from the confessional divisions of Edward and Mary’s reigns, it greatly influenced the Elizabethan religious settlement, which has shaped and defined Anglicanism to this day.
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I
n 1521, Cardinal Wolsey commissioned the master craftsman Giovanni del Maiano to make him eight terracotta roundels to adorn his palace at Hampton Court. These painted and gilded roundels were busts of Roman emperors, and in this age of humanism, they symbolized the qualities of a good ruler, which Wolsey, in commissioning them, was celebrating in his king. When Henry VIII took over Hampton Court a few years later, the roundels remained. Yet the paragons of good rule either side of the Great Gatehouse at Hampton Court were – and still are – busts of the emperors Tiberius and Nero. One was not afraid to be hated and famously bestowed severe punishments on traitors and the other known for persecuting Christians and pursuing his lusts; both, in other words, renowned tyrants. Although in 1521, Henry was regarded as England’s golden prince, in 1536, observers may have had good reason to link these unfortunate examples of oppression more closely to the kingdom’s crown. For such injudicious choices inadvertently prefigured an opinion that was gaining ground in England in the 1530s, culminating in 1536 – that Henry VIII was, in fact, a tyrant.

This is the image of Henry VIII that has descended to posterity. It is the one that fills films and popular literature today. Even mere decades after Henry VIII’s death, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote, in the preface to his
History of the World
, the infamous lines:

Now for King Henry the Eighth; if all the pictures and patterns of a merciless prince were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life, out of the story of this king. For how many servants did he advance in haste (but for what virtue no man could suspect) and with the change of his fancy ruined again, no man knowing for what offence? To how many others of more desert gave he abundant flowers, from whence to gather honey and in the end of harvest burned them in the hive? How many wives did he cut off, and cast off, as his fancy and affection changed? How many princes of the blood (whereof some of them for age could hardly crawl towards the block) with a world of others of all degrees (of whom our common chronicles have kept the account) did he execute?

Yet, for those who lived during Henry’s reign, it was a perilous thing to call one’s king a tyrant. From 1535, it could even be fatal. A remarkable act passed in 1534, which came into effect in February 1535, stated that ‘if any person or persons… do maliciously wish, will or desire by words or writings, or by craft imagine, invent, practise or attempt any bodily harm to be done or committed to the King’s most royal person’ or to ‘slanderously and maliciously publish and pronounce… that the King our sovereign lord should be heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or usurper of the crown’, they would be guilty of high treason. The charge was often not directly spoken in England, for walls had ears. But it was the talk of foreigners, was alluded to in English court poetry and was whispered among commons; for 1536 saw the largest ever single popular uprising against a reigning English monarch. This uprising was a series of linked rebellions in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire of up to 50,000 rebels from the north who called themselves Pilgrims of Grace, and whom Henry did not have sufficient troops to face, let alone defeat, in battle. It was whispered among these Pilgrims that perhaps the king was the ‘mouldwarp’ or mole, an evil and tyrannous king prophesied by Merlin, who would bring down the kingdom. Why had the country, which had rejoiced at Henry’s accession, broken faith with him? Opposition stemmed, in part, from the dubious legality and shocking treatment of Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher in 1535, but this further disloyalty, in a year of challenge and betrayal, only entrenched Henry’s position such that the events of 1536 and afterwards were to make More and Fisher’s deaths look like harbingers of worse to come. By these latter years of his reign, Henry VIII had become intransigent, volatile, reactionary and dangerous to know.
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C
HAPTER
15

The Pilgrimage of Grace

T
he events of early 1536 had exposed Henry VIII to betrayal, ill health and his own mortality, all of which had made him both disillusioned and mistrustful. But the accompanying challenge and ridicule of his virility, which carried with it the question of his ability to rule a household (and thus a kingdom), helped produce in the king a reaction that cemented his pride and obduracy. These elements were all present in his response to those who rebelled against him between October and December 1536, and the cycle of perceived treachery and reaction was to be repeated again and again, with important and long-lasting consequences.

The rebellion, which was actually a series of linked local revolts, started with an uprising in Louth in Lincolnshire. Two days after Michaelmas, on Sunday 1 October, Thomas Foster, a yeoman with land worth £10, had warned the congregation assembled to process around the church after Mass that they ‘be like to follow [the crosses] no more’. He was referring to the valuable silver processional crosses belonging to the church. His outburst ignited the currents of fear that were sweeping through the area as a result of the religious changes of the last few years, namely the break with Rome, the royal supremacy, the new doctrine recently set out in the Ten Articles, the treatment of the clergy and the act commanding the dissolution of the lesser monasteries. In October 1536, three sets of government commissioners were working simultaneously in Lincolnshire: one to evaluate the resources of the smaller monasteries; one assessing and collecting a government subsidy; and another investigating the morals and competence of the clergy. The presence of these commissioners had sparked anxious rumours about the pace of religious change and the future intentions of the government towards those things which the commons regarded as their own and central to the spiritual well-being of the kingdom: the parish churches, the monasteries and the jewels and plate used in processions and Masses, of which the silver crosses at Louth were fine examples.
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