A Student's History of England, v. 2: 1509-1689

19. The King's Marriage and the Act of Appeals. 1533.– Henry, however, found that Clement was not to be moved, and his patience coming at last to an end, he was secretly married to Anne Boleyn on January 25, 1533. Now that he had reluctantly given up hope of obtaining a favourable decision from the Pope, he resolved to put an end to the Papal jurisdiction in England. Otherwise if he obtained a sentence in an English ecclesiastical court declaring his marriage with Catharine to be null from the beginning, his injured wife might appeal to the superior court of the Pope. He accordingly obtained from Parliament the Act of Appeals, declaring that the king held the supreme authority in England, and that as under him all temporal matters were to be decided by temporal judges, and all spiritual matters by spiritual judges, no appeals should hereafter be suffered to any authority outside the realm. Henry was capable of any meanness to serve his ends, but he also knew how to gain more than his immediate ends by connecting them with a large national policy. He almost made men forget the low design which prompted the Act of Appeals by fixing their eyes on the great object of national independence.

20. Archbishop Cranmer and the Court at Dunstable. 1533.– Henry found a convenient instrument for his personal as well as for his national policy in Thomas Cranmer, whom he appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in the spring of 1533. Cranmer was intellectually acute, and took a worthy part in the further development of the English Church; but he was morally weak, and inclined to carry out orders whatever they might be, especially if they came from a king as strong-willed as Henry. He had already thrown himself as an active agent into the cause of Henry's divorce, and he was now prepared as archbishop to give effect to his arguments. In March Convocation was half persuaded, half driven to declare Catharine's marriage to be void, and in May Cranmer, sitting at Dunstable in his archiepiscopal court, pronounced sentence against her. In accordance with the Act of Appeals the sentence was final, but both Henry and Cranmer feared lest Catharine should send her counsel to make an appeal to Rome, and they were therefore mean enough to conceal from her the day on which sentence was to be given. The temporal benefits which the Pope derived from England were now to come to an end as well as his spiritual jurisdiction, and in July the king ratified the Act of Annates.

21. Frith and Latimer. 1533.– When a man of special intellectual acquirements like Cranmer could descend to the trick which he had played at Dunstable, it was time that some one should be found who, in the steadfastness of his faith, would refuse to truckle to the king, and would maintain the rights of individual conscience as well as those of national independence. The teaching of Zwingli, a Swiss reformer, who held that the bread and wine in the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper was a mere sign of the Body and Blood of the Redeemer, was beginning to influence the English Protestants, and its reception was one more reason for the mass of Englishmen to send to prison or the stake those who maintained what was, in their eyes, so monstrous a heresy. Amongst the noblest of the persecuted was John Frith, who whilst he stoutly held to the belief that the doctrine of transubstantiation was untrue, begged that men should be left 'to think thereon as God shall instil in any man's mind, and that neither part condemn other for this matter, but receive each other in brotherly love, reserving each other's infirmity to God.' Frith was in advance of his time as the advocate of religious liberty as well as of a special creed, and he was burnt alive. Henry meant it to be understood that his supreme headship made it easier, and not harder, to suppress heresy. He might have succeeded if he had had merely to deal with a few heroes like Frith. That which was beyond his control was the sapping process of the spirit of the Renascence, leading his bishops, and even himself, to examine and explain received doctrines, and thus to transform them without knowing what they were doing. Hugh Latimer, for instance, a favourite chaplain of the king, was, indeed, a preacher of righteousness, testing all things rather by their moral worth than by their conformity to an intellectual standard. The received doctrines about Purgatory, the worship of the saints, and pilgrimages to their images seemed to him to be immoral; but as yet he wished to purify opinion, not to change it altogether, and in this he had the support of the king, who, in 1535, made him Bishop of Worcester.

22. Completion of the Breach with Rome. 1533-1534.– Before 1533 was over Henry appealed from the Pope to a General Council. Clement not only paid no heed to his appeal, but gave sentence in favour of Catharine. When Parliament met in 1534, therefore, Henry was obliged to strengthen his position of hostility to the Pope. He procured from it three Acts. The first of these was a second Act of Annates, which conferred on him absolutely not only the first-fruits of bishoprics which had been the subject of the conditional Act of Annates in 1532 (see p. 388), but also the first-fruits of all the beneficed clergy, as well as a tenth of each year's income of both bishops and beneficed clergy, all of which payments had been hitherto made to the Pope. Incidentally this Act also regulated the appointment of bishops, by ordering that the king should issue a congé d'élire to the chapter of the vacant see, together with a letter missive compelling the choice of his nominee. The second was an Act concerning Peter's pence, abolishing all minor payments to the Pope, and cutting away all interference of the Pope by transferring his right to issue licences and dispensations to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The third confirmed the submission of the clergy and enacted that appeals from the courts of the Archbishop should be heard by commissioners appointed by the King, and known as the delegates of Appeals. It was by these Acts that the separation between the Churches of England and Rome was finally effected. They merely completed the work which had been done by the great Act of Appeals in 1533. The Church of England had indeed always been a national Church with its own ecclesiastical assemblies, and with ties to the Crown which were stretched more tightly or more loosely at various times. It had, however, maintained its connection with the Continental Churches by its subordination to the Pope, and this subordination had been made real by the subjection of its courts to appeals to Rome, and by the necessity of recurring to Rome for permission to do certain things prohibited by English ecclesiastical law. All this was now at an end. The old supremacy of the king was sharpened and defined. The jurisdiction of the Pope was abolished. Nominally the English ecclesiastical authorities became more independent; more capable of doing what seemed to them to be best for the Church of the nation. Such at least was the state of the law. In practice the English ecclesiastical authorities were entirely at Henry's bidding. In theory and in sentiment the Church of England was still a branch of the Catholic Church, one in doctrine and in discipline with the Continental Churches. Practically it was now, in a far more unqualified sense than before, a national Church, ready to drift from its moorings and to accept new counsels whenever the tide of opinion should break strongly upon it.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE ROYAL SUPREMACY. 1534-1547

LEADING DATESReign of Henry VIII., 1509-1547

• The Acts of Succession and Supremacy 1534

• Execution of Fisher and More 1535

• Dissolution of the smaller monasteries and the Pilgrimage of Grace 1536

• Destruction of relics and images 1538

• The Six Articles and the Act granting to the king the greater monasteries 1539

• Fall of Cromwell 1540

• Henry VIII. king of Ireland 1541

• Solway Moss 1542

• Death of Henry VIII. 1547

1. The Act of Succession. 1534.– In September 1533 Anne had given birth to a daughter, who was afterwards Queen Elizabeth. In 1534 Parliament passed an Act of Succession. Not only did it declare Anne's marriage to be lawful and Catharine's unlawful, and consequently Elizabeth and not Mary to be heir to the crown, but it required all subjects to take an oath acknowledging their approval of the contents of the Act. More and Fisher professed themselves ready to swear to any succession which might be authorised by Act of Parliament; but they would not swear to the illegality of Catharine's marriage. It was on this point that Henry was most sensitive, as he knew public opinion to be against him, and he threw both More and Fisher into the Tower. In the year before the language held in the pulpit on the subject of Henry's marriage with Anne in his wife's lifetime had been so strong that Cranmer had forbidden all preaching on the subject of the king's laws or the succession to the throne. Of the clergy, the friars were still the most resolute. Henry now sent commissioners to visit the friaries, and those in which the oath was refused were summarily suppressed.

2. The Acts of Treason and Supremacy. 1534.– In 1534 Parliament also passed a new Act of Treasons which made it high treason to wish or practise harm to the king, the queen, and their heirs, to use words denying their titles, or to call the king a 'heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or usurper of the crown.' Later in the same year, but in a fresh session, Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, which confirmed the title of Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England, a title very similar to that to which the king had obtained the qualified assent of the clergy in 1531 (see p. 386). From that time anyone who denied the king to be the Supreme Head of the Church of England was liable to a traitor's death.

3. The Monks of the Charterhouse. 1534.– It can hardly be doubted that Henry's chief adviser in these tyrannical measures was the able and unscrupulous Cromwell. It was Cromwell's plan to exalt the royal authority into a despotism by means of a subservient Parliament. He was already Henry's secretary; and in 1535 was appointed the king's Vicar-General in ecclesiastical matters. He was quite ready to push the Acts of Parliament which had recently been passed to their extreme consequences. His first object was to get rid of the Friars Observant, who had shown themselves most hostile to what they called in plainness of speech the king's adultery. All their houses were suppressed, and some of the inmates put to death. Then Cromwell fell on the London Charterhouse,3 the inmates of which had been imprisoned in the year before simply for a refusal to take the oath of the Act of Succession, though they had not uttered a word against the king's proceedings. They could now be put to death under the new Treason Act, for denying the king's supremacy, and many of them were accordingly executed after the usual barbarous fashion, whilst others perished of starvation or of diseases contracted in the filthy prisons in which they were confined. "I profess," said the Prior, Houghton, "that it is not out of obstinate malice or a mind of rebellion that I do disobey the king, but only for the fear of God, that I offend not the Supreme Majesty; because our Holy Mother the Church hath decreed and appointed otherwise than the king and Parliament hath ordained." Houghton and his fellows were as truly martyrs as Frith had been. They at least had sown no seeds of rebellion, and they died because a tyrannical king insisted on ruling over consciences as well as over bodily acts.

4. Execution of Fisher and More. 1535.– Fisher and More were the next to suffer on the same charge, though their sentences were commuted to death by beheading. More preserved his wit to the last. "I pray you," he said as he mounted the scaffold, "see me safe up, and for my coming down I will shift for myself." After he had knelt to place his head on the block, he raised it again to move his beard aside. "Pity," he muttered, "that should be cut that has not committed treason."

5. The Dissolution of the Smaller Monasteries. 1536.– Money never came amiss to Henry, and Cromwell now rooted himself firmly in his master's favour by pointing out to him fresh booty. The English monasteries were rich and weak, and it was easy to trump up or exaggerate charges against them. Cromwell sent commissioners to inquire into their moral state (1535), and the commissioners, who were as unscrupulous as himself, rushed round the monasteries in such a hurry that they had no time to make any real inquiry, but nevertheless returned with a number of scandalous tales. These tales referred to some of the larger monasteries as well as the smaller, but, when Parliament met in 1536, Henry contented himself with asking that monasteries having property worth less than 200l. a year should be dissolved, and their estates given to himself, on the ground that whilst the smaller ones were dens of vice the larger ones were examples of virtue. Parliament granted his request, and the work of spoliation began. There can be no doubt that vice did exist in the monasteries, though there was not so much of it as the commissioners asserted. It would have been indeed strange if innocence had been preserved in communities living in enforced celibacy, with no stress of work to occupy their thoughts, and with the high ideals of their profession neglected or cast aside. On the other hand, the monks were easy landlords, were hospitable to the stranger and kindly to the poor, whilst neither the king himself nor those to whom he gave or sold the lands which he acquired cared for more than to make money. The real weakness of the monks lay in their failure to conciliate the more active minds of the age, or to meet its moral needs. The attack upon the vast edifice of Henry's despotism in Church and State could only be carried on successfully by the combined effort of men like the scholars of the Renascence, whose thoughts were unfettered, and of those who, like the Protestants, were full of aggressive vigour, and who substituted for the duty of obedience the duty of following their own convictions.

6. The Execution of Anne Boleyn. 1536.– Before the end of 1536 there was a new queen. Henry became tired of Anne, as he had been tired of Catharine, and on a series of monstrous charges, so monstrous as to be hardly credible, he had her tried and executed. Her unpardonable crime was probably that her only living child was a daughter, and not a son. Ten days after Anne's death Henry married a third wife, Jane Seymour. As Catharine was now dead, there could be no doubt of the legitimacy of Jane's offspring, but to make assurance doubly sure, a new Parliament passed an Act settling the succession on Jane's children, and declaring both Mary and Elizabeth illegitimate.

7. The Ten Articles. 1536.– It is probable that when Henry took the title of Supreme Head he intended to maintain the doctrines and practices of the Church exactly as he found them. In 1536 the clergy were crying out not merely against attacks on their faith, but against the ribaldry with which these attacks were often conducted. One assailant, for instance, declared the oil used in extreme unction to be no more than the Bishop of Rome's grease or butter, and another that it was of no more use to invoke a saint than it was to whirl a stone against the wind. Many of the clergy would have been well pleased with mere repression. Henry, however, and the bishops whom he most trusted wished repression to be accompanied with reasonable explanations of the doctrines and practices enforced. The result was seen in the Ten Articles which were drawn up by Convocation, and sent abroad with the authority of the king. There was to be uniformity, to be obtained by the circulation of a written document, in which the old doctrines were stripped of much that had given offence, and their acceptance made easy for educated men. Of the seven sacraments, three only, Baptism, Penance, and the Sacrament of the Altar, were explained, whilst the other four – those of Marriage, Orders, Confirmation, and Extreme Unction – were passed over in silence. On the whole the Ten Articles in some points showed a distinct advance in the direction of Lutheranism, though there was also to be discerned in them an equally distinct effort to explain rather than to reject the creed of the mediæval Church.

8. The Translation of the Bible authorised. 1536.– The same tendency to appeal to educated intelligence showed itself in the sanction given by the king and Cromwell in 1536 to a translation of the Bible which had been completed in 1535 by Miles Coverdale, whose version of the New Testament was founded on an earlier one by Tyndale. It is probable that Henry, in authorising the circulation of this version, thought of the support which he might derive from the silence of the Bible on the Papal claims. The circulation of the Bible was, however, likely to work in a direction very different from that of the Ten Articles. The Ten Articles were intended to promote unity of belief. The Bible, once placed in the hands of everyone who could read, was likely to promote diversity. It would be the storehouse in which Lutherans, Zwinglians, and every divergent sect would find weapons to support their own special ideas. It would help on the growth of those individual opinions which were springing up side by side with the steady forward progress of the clergy of the Renascence. The men who attempted to make the old creed intellectually acceptable and the men who proclaimed a new one, under the belief that they were recurring to one still older, were together laying the foundations of English Protestantism.

9. The Pilgrimage of Grace. 1536-1537.– Slight as these changes were, they were sufficient to rouse suspicion that further change was impending. The masses who could neither read nor write were stirred by the greed and violence with which the dissolution of the smaller monasteries was carried on, and by the cessation of the kindly relief which these monasteries had afforded to the wants of the poor. A rumour spread that when Cromwell had despoiled the monasteries he would proceed to despoil the parish churches. In the autumn of 1536 there was a rising in Lincolnshire, which was easily suppressed, but was followed by a more formidable rising in Yorkshire. The insurgents, headed by Robert Aske, called it the Pilgrimage of Grace, and bore a banner embroidered with the five wounds of Christ. They asked among other things for the restoration of the monasteries, the punishment of Cromwell and his chief supporters, the deprivation of the reforming bishops, the extirpation of heresy, and the restoration of the Papal authority in a modified form. Their force grew so large that the Duke of Norfolk, who was sent to disperse it, did not venture to make the attempt, and the king found himself obliged to issue a general pardon and to promise that a Parliament should meet in the North for the redress of grievances. On this the insurgents returned home. Early in 1537 Henry, who had no intention of keeping his word, took advantage of some new troubles in the North to declare that his engagement was no longer binding, and seized and executed, not merely the leaders, but many of the lesser supporters of the insurrection. Of the Parliament in the North nothing more was heard, but a Council of the North was established to keep the people of those parts in order, and to execute justice in the king's name.

10. Birth of a Prince. 1537.– In 1537 Jane Seymour gave birth to a boy, who was afterwards Edward VI. Henry had at last a male heir of undoubted legitimacy, but in a few days his wife died.

11. The Beginning of the Attack on the Greater Monasteries. 1537-1538.– The failure of the Pilgrimage of Grace brought in fresh booty to Henry. Abbots and priors who had taken part in it, or were accused of doing so, were hanged, and their monasteries confiscated. Where nothing could be proved against the greater monasteries, which had been declared by Parliament to be free from vice, their heads were terrified into an appearance of voluntary submission. Cromwell had his spies and informers everywhere, and it was as easy for them to lie as to speak the truth. In 1537 and 1538 many abbots bowed before the storm, and, confessing that they and their monks had been guilty of the most degrading sins, asked to be allowed to surrender their monasteries to the king. Cromwell's commissioners then took possession, sold the bells, the lead on the roof, and every article which had its price, and left the walls to serve as a quarry for the neighbourhood. The lands went to the king. It not unfrequently happened that Henry promoted to ecclesiastical benefices those monks who had been most ready to confess themselves sinners beyond other men. There is no doubt that the confessions were prepared beforehand to deceive contemporaries, and there is therefore no reason why they should deceive posterity.

12. Destruction of Relics and Images. 1538.– The attack on the monasteries was accompanied by an attack on relics and such images as attracted more than ordinary reverence. The explanation of the zeal with which they were hunted down is in many cases to be found in the gold and jewels with which they were adorned. Some of them were credited with miraculous powers. The figure of the Saviour on the rood at Boxley, in Kent, moved its head and eyes. A phial at Hales, in Worcestershire, contained a substance which had been brought from Germany in the thirteenth century, and was said to be the blood of the Saviour. Pilgrims thronged in numbers to adore, and their offerings brought in no small profit to the monks who owned such treasures. What was fondly believed by the common people was derided by critical spirits, and Henry was well pleased to destroy all reverence for anything which brought credit to the monks. The rood of Boxley was exhibited in London, where the Bishop of Rochester pulled the wires which caused its motions, and the blood in the phial of Hales was declared to be no more than a coloured gum. An ancient wooden figure, worshipped in Wales under the name of Darvel Gathern, served to make a fire which burned Friar Forest, who maintained that in spiritual things obedience was due to the Pope and not to the king. Instead of hanging him under the Treason Act (see p. 392) Henry had him burnt as a heretic. It was the first and only time when the denial of the royal supremacy was held to be heresy. When war was made against superstition, the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury could hardly be allowed to escape. Thomas was a saint who had bearded a king, and his shrine, which had attracted such crowds of pilgrims that the marks which they left as they shuffled forward on their knees towards it are still to be seen on the stone floor, was smashed, and the bones of the saint burnt. Shrines were usually covered with gold and jewels, and all shrines shared the fate of that of St. Thomas.4 The images in parish churches, not being attractive to the covetous, and being valued by the people for ordinary purposes of devotion, were still left untouched.

13. The Trial of Lambert. 1538.– Henry's violence against monasticism and superstition made him extremely anxious to show his orthodoxy. The opinion held by Zwingli, the reformer of Zürich, that the Body and Blood of Christ were in no way present in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper was now spreading in England, and those who held it were known as Sacramentaries. One of these, John Lambert, was tried before Henry himself. Henry told Lambert scornfully that the words of Christ, 'This is My Body,' settled the whole question, and Lambert was condemned and burnt.

14. The Marquis of Exeter and the Poles. 1538.– Amongst the descendants of the Duke of Clarence was Reginald Pole.5 He had been scandalised by the divorce, had left England, had been made a Cardinal in 1536, and had poured out a torrent of invective against the wickedness of Henry. In the end of 1538 Henry, having been informed that some of Pole's kinsfolk had been muttering dissatisfaction, sent them to execution together with his own cousin, the Marquis of Exeter, the son of his mother's sister.