500 Years Ago⤒🔗

Henry VIII, the Tudor ruler who was born 500 years ago this summer, is among the best known of English kings. Most schoolchildren remem­ber him as the English Bluebeard: the man who married six times, divorced two of his wives, beheaded two oth­ers, and was generally quite liberal with the execution­er's axe. Practically all his courtiers and councilors were, at one time or another, in danger of their lives, and several shared the fate of the two unfortunate queens and lost their heads by the king's command.

Henry is of course also known for his offspring. He was the father of three monarchs: the boy-king Ed­ward VI, the Roman Catholic Mary I (also known as Bloody Mary), and the wom­an who would become the most famous of the Tudor monarchs, if not of all En­glish rulers: Elizabeth I. Last but not least, he is remem­bered as the man who in the course of one of his divorce proceedings quarreled with the pope, and so opened the way for England's protes­tant Reformation.

Altogether Henry made enough of an imprint on his­tory to justify a birthday cel­ebration, and England has decided to have one. A vari­ety of festivities, including expositions and concerts complete with Tudor cos­tumes and Tudor music, has been planned for this year. In addition there is the usual spate of memorial articles analyzing Henry's personality, or his contributions to his­tory, or both. With this arti­cle we join the throng. Our main concern will be the sto­ry of Henry's break with the pope and the consequences this had for the English church and, ultimately, for the cause of international protestantism.

Henry the Man←⤒🔗

As the reference to the Bluebeard tradition already suggests, Henry has had a bad press, and deservedly so. He was a rather nasty man: self-righteous, self-serving, suspicious, unforgiving, cold and calculating. Nor did he mellow with age. Quite to the contrary: increasingly tyrannical and reactionary, Henry in his fi­nal years merely confirmed his reputation as a cruel, vi­olent, and essentially unpre­dictable autocrat.

Even so, the picture is not all black. Henry had def­inite leadership qualities, appeared to be a shrewd judge of men, and was, on the whole, an efficient ruler. In spite of all the turmoil he caused, he remained reason­ably popular. Tall, of mas­sive build, and (according to most judges) good-looking, he was a prince of majestic bearing. In many respects he was the typical Renaissance man: lusty, self-confident, intelligent, involved in the new learning, a lover of art and music, of the dance, the joust, and the hunt, a fine athlete, and a good linguist — in short, a man of wide-ranging abilities and tastes and interests.

One of his intellectual hobbies was the study of theology. Until his dying day, and in spite of his breach with Rome, Henry remained a Roman Catholic at heart. In his early days he gave proof of his orthodoxy by writing a book against Luther, entitled On the Sev­en Sacraments. The pope rewarded the effort by be­stowing on him and his suc­cessors the honourary title "Defender of the Faith." Later, when trying to con­vince the pope that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon should be an­nulled, he began the study of the church law dealing with divorce. According to one prelate, he ended up knowing a lot more about it than most canon lawyers did.

Catherine of Aragon←⤒🔗

And that just about brings us to our topic: Henry's break with Rome. To sketch in the background, however, a bit must be said about Henry's early days. His father, Henry VII, was the founder of the Tudor dynasty. After thirty years of intermittent civil war, he had brought peace and renewed prosperity to Eng­land. Although his country was only a second-rate power, Henry VII's prestige soon rose high enough that he could mar­ry his heir apparent, Arthur, to Cather­ine of Aragon, the daughter of the Span­ish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella. Upon Arthur's premature death his younger brother Henry inherited both his right to the throne and his widow. Henry suc­ceeded his father as king in 1509, when he was not quite 18. Shortly later he married Catherine, who was five or six years his senior.

The momentous consequences of this step are well known. Catherine gave Henry a daughter, the future Mary I, but she failed to provide him with a male heir. Without such an heir, Henry and all his subjects believed, the future security of England would be in jeop­ardy. This, then, was the crucial factor in the failure of the marriage and Hen­ry's growing determination to get a di­vorce. There were additional reasons. Having suffered a string of miscarriages and still-births, Catherine soon lost her good looks, and Henry's dallying with the ladies at court intensified. By 1526 or thereabouts he had fallen in love with the dark-eyed Anne Boleyn. Anne was willing to become Henry's queen but refused to be his mistress. She would, indeed, have to be his lawful wife if the son Henry was sure she would someday bear him was to be le­gitimate. Henry therefore considered the more earnestly the need for a di­vorce from Catherine.

The King's Great Matter←⤒🔗

Or rather, he looked for an annul­ment of his marriage. Henry was still de­voutly Roman Catholic, and the Roman Catholic church forbade divorce. It could, however, legitimately dissolve a marriage by granting an annulment as long as it could be proved that the marriage had been illegitimate in the first place.

Henry was con­vinced that he had the necessary proof. Cather­ine was his brother's widow, and marriage to one's sister-in-law vio­lated church law. At the time the pope had al­lowed the marriage on the grounds that Arthur and Catherine had been young and, according to Catherine, their marriage had not been con­summated. Henry him­self had asked for the special dispensation, but now that he was anxious to be free of Catherine he began to argue that the pope had been wrong in granting the dispensation.

It was at this point that he began his study of the canon law and the theology of di­vorce. One of his favourite arguments was from the chapters of Leviticus for­bidding all manner of incest and adultery, including carnal relationships with the wife of one's brother. Somehow he seems to have overlooked the clear bib­lical rules legitimizing a marriage with a brother's widow. In any event, the more he looked at the matter, the more he became convinced that the deaths of his and Catherine's children were signs of divine judgment upon their mar­riage. When he appeared unable to con­vince the pope he enlisted the opinions of universities and church lawyers all over Europe.

Legal proceedings about the divorce began around 1527. Catherine was about 41 at the time and it was clear that her years of child-bearing were past. With these divorce-proceedings Henry inaugurated what became known as "The King's Great Matter." It dragged on for six long years. The stumbling block for the pope was not the moral issue. If enough pressure was applied, popes usually granted dispensations to the rich and the mighty, even on the flimsiest of pretexts. The problem with Henry was, however, that he was married to the aunt of Charles V, ruler of much of western Europe, and Holy Roman Emper­or of the German Nation to boot. In 1527 the impe­rial army had, moreover, conquered and sacked Rome, and the pope had virtually become the emperor's prisoner. Charles V made it clear to pope Clement VII that he did not want his aunt to be discarded, and Clement had no alternative but to obey the imperial command. In a sense, therefore, it was Charles V, the great champion of Roman Catholicism, who was responsible for England's turn­ing away from Rome.

Breach with Rome←⤒🔗

The breach came in 1533. For years Anne Boleyn had refused to share Hen­ry's bed until she should be his wedded wife. In 1532, however, she relented and before the end of the year she was able to inform the king of her pregnancy. It now became a race against time: if the baby was to be legitimate, the parents had to be married, and therefore the divorce had to be concluded. And since Rome refused to cooperate, the appropri­ate measures had to be taken in England.

They were. The death of the Arch­bishop of Canterbury made it possible for Henry to get the reform-minded Thomas Cranmer appointed in his place. With Cranmer's help and with the sup­port of Henry's "Reformation Parlia­ment" all the hurdles were cleared. In January 1533 Henry and Anne were se­cretly married; in May Cranmer annulled Henry's first marriage and declared the second one lawful, and on June 1 Anne was crowned Queen of England. When Rome responded by excommunicating the archbishop, the king, and various others, Henry and his Parliament severed the remaining links with Rome and pro­claimed the English Church to be fully independent of the pope. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 completed the trans­fer by legislating that not the pope, but the king "is and ought to be the supreme head of the Church of England."

The English Reformation←⤒🔗

Henry VIII's break with Rome was not a reformation. Initially nothing changed except the headship of the church: the king replaced the pope. Hen­ry did not really want a reformation. He had always been a conservative in reli­gious matters, and toward the end of his life he turned into a virtual reactionary. Doctrinal changes were to be kept to a minimum.

But powerful though he was, the king was un­able to control the forces he had unleashed. Ever since the days of John Wycliffe in the 14th cen­tury there had been de­mands for reform in England. These demands were reinforced by strong feelings of anti-clerical­ism and nationalism: Englishmen more and more resented the world­liness of the clergy and the control exercised over their church by an Italian pope.

In recent decades a strong impetus to the reformatory current was provided by the work of Christian humanists like Colet, More, and Erasmus, and soon by the writings of Luther, Zwingli, and oth­er continental reformers. Of overriding importance was the fact that, for the first time since Wycliffe, the Bible was trans­lated into English. Already under Henry VIII the order was issued that a copy of this English Bible be placed on every pulpit. Henry indeed opened the flood­gates, but it is reasonable to argue that some sort of reformation would have come to England sooner or later, even if the king had not quarreled with the pope. The course and nature of such a reformation might well have been dras­tically different, however.

Under Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth←⤒🔗

Under Henry's reign a few changes were made in doctrine and ceremonial, but on the whole the English Church stayed close to its Roman Catholic pro­totype. The reformation progressed rapidly, however, during the reign of the boy-king Edward VI (1547-53), Henry's son by his third wife, Jane Seymour. (After the birth of her daughter, Eliza­beth Henry had quickly tired of Anne Boleyn and in 1536 he had had her beheaded on trumped-up charges of adultery and reason.) Educated under the supervision of archbishop Cranmer, Ed­ward although only nine when he came to the throne, appears to have been genuinely interest­ed in church reformation. His regents also be­longed to the reform par­ty and in these six years, under Cranmer's leader­ship, the church was quite thoroughly protes­tantized.

Much help was re­ceived from continental reformers. This was the time when the prospect of renewed per­secutions in the realms of Charles V brought many religious exiles to England. Among them were such reformers as Calvin's friend Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr, and John a Lasco. Some of these exiles became professors at the universi­ties of Oxford and Cambridge, both of which strongly influenced the progress of the reformation. It was as a result of these developments during the Edwar­dian years that Calvinist teachings first became influential in England.

There was a complete reversal un­der the rule of Edward's stepsister Mary, Catherine's daughter. Mary, who married her cousin Philip II of Spain, the son of Charles V, was a convinced Roman Catholic. She restored papal over in England and cruelly persecut­ed English protestants. Some of them escaped to Geneva, Strasbourg, and other continental Reformation capitals. In time they would return and further strengthen the Reformed elements in the Church of England.

After a brief rule (1553-58) Mary was succeeded by the last Tudor ruler, Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn's daughter. Like her mother, Elizabeth favoured protestantism. Like her father, she was a conservative and an autocrat, also in re­ligious matters. She steadfastly refused the requests of Presbyterians and others for the introduction of a more scriptural form of church government, for the abo­lition of 'popish remnants' in church rit­ual, ceremonial, and vestments, and for the introduction of a better educated clergy and firmer church discipline. And she, too, turned reactionary, ultimately persecuting Presbyterians and Puritans as severely as she did Roman Catholics. Yet only a relatively small number of the doctrinal changes intro­duced during the Edwardian years was abolished. Organizationally the Church of England retained its ancient episcopal form, but doctri­nally the Reformed ele­ment remained strong.

The Reformation and Foreign Policy←⤒🔗

It was also under Elizabeth that the En­glish reformation began strongly to affect En­glish foreign policy. Al­though much against Elizabeth's inclinations, England really had no choice but to become the champion of inter­national protestantism, and to extend help to beleaguered protestants in Scotland, France, and the Netherlands. Elizabeth's own involvement climaxed in the open war with Spain on behalf of the Dutch, and the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The tradition reached another climax with the work of William of Orange and Mary II (of Glorious Revolution fame) a hundred years later.

These foreign policy involvements belong, of course, to another story. Yet we should keep them in mind when con­sidering the legacy of Henry VIII. In God's providence he became instrumen­tal not only in inaugurating the English Reformation, but also, at least indirect­ly, in providing for the protection and preservation of the churches of the Reformation elsewhere. Let us therefore join the English in remembering Henry VIII. We have good reasons to do so.