Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  In response to these failings, humanist authors such as More, John Colet (1467–1519), Simon Fish (d. 1531), and William Tyndale (ca. 1494–1536), influenced by the satirical and scholarly writings of Erasmus, began to argue for reform of the practice, if not the doctrine, of the English Church. They were concerned, first, not only with the lack of priests, but its consequences: pluralism and absenteeism.

  Plate 4 Diagram of the interior of a church before and after the Reformation. Reproduced from S. Doran and C. Durston, Princes, Pastors and People: The Church and Religion in England, 1529–1689 (London, 1991) by permission of Taylor and Francis Ltd.

  As we have seen, Cardinal Wolsey was a great pluralist, probably out of greed. But for most clergymen, holding multiple livings was necessary both because there were so few priests to go around and because country parishes often paid so poorly (frequently less than £10 a year) that their pastors might have to hold down several just to make ends meet. Since it was impossible for a clergyman holding plural livings to say mass in more than one place at once, he almost necessarily became an absentee; that is, some parishes simply were not served on Sundays. One way of getting around this problem was to hire curates, or deputy priests. But these men were often poorly educated and therefore unable to perform the many tasks demanded of a pastor. The inevitable result was lay ignorance or indifference.

  The poverty of most clergy contrasted infamously with the worldly wealth of the Church. Once again Cardinal Wolsey provides the most extreme example of this, but most bishops lived like princes. The diocese of Winchester yielded £3,580 a year and 10 others were worth over £1,000. The 21 English and Welsh bishops held around 177 palaces and houses in 1535. While there was, perhaps, nothing inherently wrong in this, it did not sit well in a religion that preached the blessedness of poverty and the acceptance of one’s earthly lot. Worse, materialism seemed to be accompanied by corruption. Corruption is a catch-all word that can mean many things. Some priests were accused of greed, charging excessive fees for performance of services, such as burial of the dead (see the Hunne case, below) and the probate of wills. Others were accused of violating their vows of celibacy or of drinking too much. Admittedly, these are human failings, not the actions of fiends. Moreover, it should be understood that, given the limited number of professions open to younger sons and daughters at the beginning of the early modern period, becoming a clergyman or woman was, for many, a practical career choice, not a calling. About 4 percent of the male population were priests. But it was only natural for lay people to resent clerical failings all the more given the priesthood’s responsibility to preach moral rectitude and set a good example. In fact, the Henrician bench of bishops was filled with men of great intellectual ability and decent morals. The vast majority of priests were almost certainly overworked and underpaid, yet conscientious ministers to their flocks. And the educational and ethical standards of the clergy were improving at the beginning of the sixteenth century. But a few “bad apples” can spoil the reputation of many; in early modern England some Catholics began to worry that much of the barrel was rotten. Again, it is difficult to measure the prevalence of this anticlericalism. But the fact that it was dangerous to criticize the Church suggests that these complaints should be taken seriously.

  Two groups, one old, one new, mounted a coherent criticism of the Church, its leaders, its personnel, and even its doctrine at the beginning of the early modern period. The old group was known as the Lollards, a word of uncertain derivation. Lollardy was a set of beliefs associated with John Wycliff (ca. 1320s–84), an Oxford-based theologian of the fourteenth century. He and his followers, dismayed at what they saw as the growing corruption of the Church hierarchy, the politicization of the Avignon papacy, and their distance from ordinary people, tried to go back to basics. They emphasized the importance of Scripture, arguing that the Bible was the only sure guide to God’s will and that anything not found in its pages was unnecessary, even detrimental to Christian belief. This idea was quite revolutionary. The Roman Catholic Church had long argued that Scripture was only one source of God’s truth; that the traditions of the Church and the authoritative teachings of its hierarchy were equally important (see chapter 3). In rejecting everything not found in Scripture, Lollards did away with many Catholic beliefs and rituals, and even with the power of the clergy itself. They denied the authority of the pope, the sacramental role of the Church, and transubstantiation (the belief that at mass the celebrating priest’s words of consecration actually change the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ). Equally revolutionary, they sought to put the Bible into people’s hands by translating and copying it. Three things hampered their efforts: the lack of a printing press until the late fifteenth century, the low level of literacy in medieval society, and government hostility.

  At first, Lollard ideas had been tolerated, even encouraged in government circles because their attack on papal power seemed to enhance royal power. Thus, the fourteenth-century Statutes of Praemunire and Provisors (see Introduction) embodied one of Wycliff’s most radical ideas: that no authority should be superior to royal authority in the king’s own realm and that, therefore, it was his right and responsibility to reform the Church. But while Medieval English kings may have resented a French or Italian pope’s authority within their realm, that does not mean that they wanted to encourage their subjects to criticize a fellow authority figure. Thus, in 1382 Parliament also passed a statute against heretical sermons and, in 1401, an act authorizing the burning of heretics at the stake. After a Lollard revolt in 1414 English kings enforced the Act for Burning Heretics with enthusiasm. Over the next century there were over 500 trials, though only 30 people were actually burned. Lollardy went underground, surviving only in isolated pockets, especially among poor urban tradesmen in London and the Thames Valley, Essex, Kent, and the Midlands. While Lollardy did not evolve into the English Reformation, it did anticipate many of the reformers’ ideas and so predisposed its followers to accept them.

  In the meantime, Lollard beliefs could still get one into trouble. In 1511, Richard Hunne, a London merchant with Lollard sympathies, refused to pay mortuary fees for the burial of his infant son – a common complaint. Over the next two years the priest involved brought suit in the archbishop’s court to demand payment; Hunne countered by taking out a writ of praemunire, arguing that the Church court had usurped the jurisdiction of the king’s common law by judging his case according to canon law. In 1514, while the case was being decided, the bishop of London began heresy proceedings against Hunne. Two days later he was found dead in his cell in the bishop’s prison. Suspicion fell on the jailer and his clerical superiors. But Bishop Richard FitzJames (d. 1522) exonerated them, and instead tried Hunne post mortem for heresy, found him guilty, and burnt his corpse at the stake. While Hunne’s case was an odd and isolated incident, that did not stop reformist writers like Fish and, later, John Foxe (1516/7–87) from claiming that it was typical. Stories like this helped to create the English Protestants’ vision of themselves as a chosen, righteous, but beleaguered people, even though most would have been horrified by more radical Lollard positions. Henry VIII drew his own lesson from Hunne’s run-in with the Church, arguing in 1515 that “Kings of England … have never had any superior but God alone.”11 This would have obvious significance in the 1530s.

  More immediately serious was the critique of the Church mounted by the Lutherans. In 1517, Martin Luther, a German monk and theology professor, began to write against its structure, practice, and doctrine in ways so similar to the Lollards that historians have debated their influence on him ever since. Wycliff, Luther and other reformers attacked what they saw as a corrupt and worldly Church, neglecting its true spiritual mission. Like Wycliff, Luther argued for the primacy of Scripture (sola scriptura) and the rejection of beliefs, offices, and practices not found in its pages – such as papal power, the doctrine of Purgatory, and the selling of indulgences (see chapter 3). Luther also argued that faith alone justifi
ed salvation (sola fide), as opposed to the Catholic idea that salvation was to be earned through a combination of faith and good works. And, of course, he decried the clerical abuses noted above. We will explore Luther’s ideas further in the next chapter. For now, it is important to understand that he was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church in 1520; that Henry VIII rejected his ideas in print; and that Lutheran heretics seem to have been generally unpopular in England. Nevertheless, Luther’s ideas had a small but growing following in cities, at the universities (especially Cambridge), and, most ominously for the Roman Catholic Church in England, in the court circle forming around Anne Boleyn.

  The Henrician Catholic Church had one more set of difficulties, rarely mentioned or apparently understood at the time. Because Cardinal Wolsey had so aggrandized power to himself, his fall caused a dangerous vacuum at the top of the Church’s hierarchy. First, Wolsey had weakened papal authority by rarely consulting Rome. Many bishops were Henry’s or Wolsey’s nominees. That proved, inadvertently, that the pope was not so very necessary to run the English Church. It could be done quite effectively from England by an Englishman. Further, because Wolsey had so monopolized Church offices, other able men had been kept out of positions of authority. It took some time to fill these places, contributing to the lack of strong leadership after his fall. Finally, Wolsey’s habit of acting without consulting others meant that there was no tradition of corporate deliberation and solidarity among the Church leaders. This left them weak, demoralized, and without a field general just as they were about to face their greatest enemy.

  The Royal Supremacy

  As we saw in the king’s reaction to Hunne’s case, Henry VIII had long claimed a right to legislate for the Church in England. From the late 1520s, a team of scholars associated with the Boleyn faction, such as Christopher St. German (ca. 1460–1540/1), Edward Foxe (1496–1538), and Thomas Cranmer, began to suggest that this might be the key to the King’s Great Matter. But it was Henry’s next great minister, Thomas Cromwell, who showed him how to do it. Cromwell was born at Putney, a suburb of London, just as Henry VII was establishing the Tudor regime. Like Wolsey, he was of humble birth, the son of a clothworker and tavern-keeper. Clearly, early Tudor government offered opportunities for ambitious and able young men irrespective of social status. Unlike Wolsey, Cromwell had no formal education. Rather, he spent his youth traveling on the continent and working as a soldier, a merchant, and a secretary or clerk. Along the way he picked up a smattering of legal education; this would prove significant. A decade after after his return to London in 1514, he entered Wolsey’s service, eventually becoming the cardinal’s legal secretary. This brought him to the king’s attention. Cromwell remained loyal to his master even after his fall, but by the early 1530s he had made the transition to royal service. By early 1531 he was the handling the king’s parliamentary business.

  It will be recalled that Henry VIII had called Parliament in 1529 to put pressure on the pope. But the noble lords and honorable gentlemen who sat in that body were not so much concerned with the pope or even the King’s Great Matter as they were with “bread and butter” issues like corruption in the Church, excessive fines, and pluralism. And so, they passed laws regulating mortuary and probate fees, and attacking plural livings. In the meantime, Henry decided in December 1530 to charge the whole English clergy with praemunire. They submitted and he pardoned them after they paid a fine of just over £118,000. Ominously, in the prologue to the document of submission, Henry insisted upon being referred to as the “sole protector and supreme head of the English church and clergy.” Under pressure from Cromwell, Convocation, the official body representing the clergy, agreed to the fine, but qualified Henry’s claim with the phrase “as far as Christ’s law allows.” Thus Henry had already claimed dominance – albeit a qualified and ambiguous dominance – over the Church in England. Admittedly, none of this was indicative of a long-term plan and, given Henry’s advancing age and barely suppressed libido, time was running out.

  Fortunately, the intersecting circles of Cromwell and the Boleyn faction had a plan: if the current head of the English Church (the pope) would not grant the king a divorce, then the king would have to take that position himself, in deed as well as word. This was a simple, but radical, idea. While kings had sometimes tried to limit papal power in England, they had never seriously tried to eliminate it altogether. Cromwell realized, shrewdly, that such a step had to be taken gradually and with the appearance of parliamentary support. That way, Henry could claim to have broken with the pope and assumed control of the Church only reluctantly and at the insistence of his subjects. But how could Parliament be persuaded to support even a gradual move in this direction? By exploiting their anticlericalism.

  Cromwell began the attack early in 1532 by introducing legislation suspending the payment of annates (fees, also known as First Fruits and Tenths, paid by newly appointed bishops and, later, all clergy) to Rome and giving the archbishop of Canterbury the power to consecrate bishops and priests. Though approved by Parliament, Henry withheld his confirmation to await the pope’s reaction. When this did not produce the desired effect, Cromwell took a gamble. In March 1532, speaking without royal permission, he urged the House of Commons to draw up a list of clerical abuses in need of reform. The Commons Supplication Against the Ordinaries charged the clergy with making laws binding the English people without parliamentary permission, in violation of the royal prerogative and English law. Less spectacularly, it also attacked delays in Church courts and the harshness of recent proceedings against heretics. This document was then sent to Convocation for an answer. In fact, no satisfactory answer was possible: either the clergy admitted the abuses, thus vindicating its enemies, or denied them, thus appearing to be uncooperative. At first, Convocation chose the latter course. This infuriated Henry, who remarked, angrily, that the clergy “be but half our subjects, yea, and scarce our subjects.”12 Intimidated by the display of royal temper, Convocation caved in on May 15, 1532, issuing the “Submission of the Clergy.” This gave Henry what he wanted. He was now, in effect, the head of the Church in England in the same way that he was head of state. As with Parliament, only he could call a Convocation; as with parliamentary statutes, only he could approve its legislation. Subsequent acts of parliament would merely spell this out.

  Not everyone fully appreciated the implications of these events. But Sir Thomas More did. He resigned the chancellorship the next day. Cromwell, whose official position was king’s secretary, was now Henry’s undisputed first minister. As we have seen, he was a brilliant parliamentary tactician, as well as an able debater and a tireless worker. John Foxe summed up Cromwell’s other virtues as “pregnant in wit …, in judgment discreet, in tongue eloquent, in service faithful, in stomach courageous, in his pen active.”13 He could be cunning and ruthless in pursuit of his goals or in defense of his position. These qualities would enable him to dominate the political scene for the rest of the 1530s and secure for the king not only his divorce, but a great deal more besides.

  With the English clergy brought to heel, things began to move quickly. Toward the end of 1532, Anne became pregnant. In January 1533 Thomas Cranmer, the king’s choice as the next archbishop of Canterbury, secretly married the two lovers. (Since Henry believed his first marriage to be invalid, this would not have constituted bigamy in his eyes.) In the spring of 1533 Cromwell opened the parliamentary front once again – and this time decisively – with the Act in Restraint of Appeals. This statute forbade appeals of ecclesiastical cases (like Catherine’s) to foreign jurisdictions (like Rome). That is, it stated explicitly that the king’s justice was the highest justice to which an English subject could appeal; there was no further recourse beyond England. Cromwell justified this in the Act’s preamble, which stated: “this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same” (24 Henry VIII, c. 12).

/>   Put simply, the medieval concept of dual loyalty to a separate king as head of the State and pope as head of the Church was over. The king was to be regarded as the head of all. No other loyalty was to interfere. These words and the Act which they introduce can be viewed as the capstone of Henry VII’s attempt to unify the English people under Tudor rule. As we shall see, some historians have argued that it laid the foundation for the English state’s later assumption of power in other areas, such as law enforcement, social welfare, and education.

  Of more immediate point, the Act in Restraint of Appeals marks a clear break with Rome: since no other authority but the monarch was to have power over or be appealed to by English subjects, the pope’s authority in England was a dead letter (although technically the Act retained papal oversight over heresy cases). As a result, the Vatican could do nothing to prevent Henry’s long-sought-after divorce. In May 1533 Cranmer heard the divorce case and, predictably, pronounced the marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon to be null and void. In June, he set the crown on Queen Anne at Westminster. In September, Anne gave birth – to a daughter, named Elizabeth. The king did not conceal his disappointment.