A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660

by Hutton, Ronald

  In some respect, the Henrician Reformation resembled not so much a programme as a series of toppling dominoes. Between 1531 and 1535 Henry obtained a series of Acts of Parliament, replacing the Pope’s power over the Church in England with his own, and declaring it treason to oppose this step. Examples were then made of individuals who had emerged as the most prominent defenders of papal authority, and who were now tried and executed: the most famous, finally canonized as Catholic saints, were the Bishop of Rochester, John Fisher, and the statesman and political philosopher, Sir Thomas More. Having taken over the Church, Henry had to justify his new authority by reforming it to take account of some of the most vehement criticisms made during the previous three decades. In 1536, accordingly, he obtained a parliamentary statute dissolving the smaller monasteries, with the declared aim of improving and preserving those which survived. Convocation issued a statement of belief concerning salvation, the sacraments and Purgatory which mixed ideas from the traditional Church and different kinds of continental reformer. The Crown followed by abolishing the feasts of minor saints. Though very limited, these measures were sufficient to provoke both considerable popular resentment and fear of much more drastic changes to follow. The result was the biggest English rebellion of the entire sixteenth century, the Pilgrimage of Grace, which covered the northern third of the realm and had to be talked away rather than repressed directly.

  Once this work was done, and the leaders executed, Henry pushed forward with further reforms. Between 1538 and 1540 the remaining monasteries and the friaries were all dissolved, pilgrimage abolished and the cults of saints’ relics, shrines and images suppressed. In part, these measures suited Henry’s own inclinations, for he had never been personally enthusiastic about any of these features of traditional religion. They had also been among the aspects of it which had drawn most criticism from proponents of reform. There may also, however, have been contingent factors behind the new moves. Monks and friars had proved to be the most determined opponents of the royal takeover of the Church and the subsequent reforms, and northern abbeys were prominent in the Pilgrimage of Grace. Henry’s savagery against them smacked of retaliation, but there was also something of fear in it.

  The surrender of the monasteries brought the Crown huge amounts of lucrative land, at a time when it was acutely vulnerable to enemies at home and abroad. Indeed, at the end of 1538 the worst-case situation came about in foreign affairs, as Charles V and the French made friends at the plea of the Pope, in order to prepare a joint campaign against heretical England. This moment of rapprochement was short-lived, but its impact on Henry’s nerves is visible along the English sea coast to this day. A hugely expensive building programme was commenced, which sealed off the approaches to most harbours and anchorages between East Anglia and the toe of Cornwall with forts of the latest design, built to mount heavy guns and withstand their fire. Their construction and the ruin of the abbeys were twin royal initiatives. In the same manner, it is possible that the assault on the cult of saints, and especially of their relics, was motivated in part by the fear that Henry himself, in executing defenders of the old Church, might be creating future candidates for canonization and veneration. The reforms were enforced by a powerful machinery of interrogation and supervision. A series of commissions and visitations, instituted by the Crown, bishops and archdeacons, summoned representatives of each parish and interrogated them to ensure that they had received the directions and were enacting them in full. At the height of the process of Reformation, an average parish could expect to face two or three of these in every year. Their effects are visible in the parish accounts. In 1538, it was officially directed that each parish should purchase a Bible translated into English; but few did so. Three years later, a penalty was imposed for failure to do so, and most rapidly complied.

  Why did Henry’s Reformation not provoke either a war of religion or an uprising so powerful and determined that it turned back the tide of reform? In part this was because of its idiosyncratic and half-baked nature. It offered enough to those who wanted a reformation of the continental sort to make them support Henry in the hope of more and better from them. At the same time, it could plausibly be represented as an improved form of Catholicism, for Henry upheld key aspects of traditional devotion such as clerical celibacy and the performance of the mass, with the bread and wine transformed into the body and blood of Christ. If anything is needed to establish that Henry himself was the driving force behind his Reformation, as George Bernard has pointed out, it is the adoption of his unique, crazily mixed and deeply personal theology. But there were also structural reasons for its success. The Church in England was led by its bishops, who were by this period all either hand-picked or approved by the monarchs. Both Henry VII and Henry VIII generally favoured conscientious administrators with a good record of loyalty to the Crown. As a group they were typified by the dutiful mediocrity of the reigning head of the English Church under the Pope at the time of the annulment controversy, the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham. Furthermore, bishops were generally relatively elderly at the time of appointment, and tended to die swiftly. This meant that, during the seven years in which Henry’s breach with the papacy ripened, gaps regularly opened in their ranks, which the king could fill with supporters of his cause. In 1532, when Warham seemed at last to be nerving himself up to resist Henry, he dropped dead, allowing the king to put in a new archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, who was personally devoted to him and a keen supporter of the royal supremacy over the Church and of progressive reform of it. The unity of the bishops was thus broken up, a solid proponent of reformation was put at their head, and the single prelate who made a determined stand against it, Fisher, was put to death.

  If the bishops were the people who might have taken a stand against the king’s ambitions, then those whose support was needed to make this militarily effective were the nobility and gentry. To them the king could offer a massive bribe: a share in the land taken from the monasteries and friaries, which Henry proceeded to sell off or grant away at a great pace. The most powerful nobleman in the land by this stage was the Duke of Norfolk, who virtually doubled his property as a result. Those aristocrats with doubts about the process had no obvious leaders: the bishops, as said, could not function effectively as an opposition, and the lack of other male Tudors removed the chance that it might rally around a prince. At parish level, the core religious ceremonies, doctrines and decorations remained intact, as did the chantries and guilds. Some acquired the trappings of local monastery churches, while individual parishioners sometimes helped themselves (illegally) to the fabric of the dissolved houses. It counted for a great deal that Henry and his supporters ensured that his takeover of the Church was sanctioned by Parliament, as the representative community of the whole realm. This was a long and difficult process, requiring careful management by the government, which it applied with great skill. The resulting statutes were given preambles which justified each measure in terms of the common good and represented it as an improvement of the existing, and familiar, religion. On the whole, the process was over by 1540, but thereafter the king continued to nibble away at further aspects of the old Church, removing or reforming minor rites, casting doubt on the existence of Purgatory and taking an ominous interest in the wealth of guilds. Parish accounts and wills suggest a steep decline in the willingness of people to give money to support a traditional religion which could be under further threat.

  Two further factors can be suggested for the success of the royal takeover. One is that the laity was not supposed, at this date, to be expert in theology. When the reforming statutes touched on matters of property or law, they were vigorously contested in Parliament. Few, if any, nobles or MPs could have felt qualified to dispute the need for religious reform, however, with the king and most bishops apparently set upon it. Another element in Henry’s success was summed up famously in a letter from the head of an Oxford college, John London, in 1536: that what had occurred had essentially been a quarrel be
tween the king and the Pope, and that none of the royal actions could be construed as heresy, of the kind preached by Luther and his followers.

  Monarchs and Popes had long been falling out, and then usually composed their differences, and there was still a chance that this dispute might in time be healed; indeed, at this period, this remained true of the European Reformation as a whole. The least tangible of the forces that worked in Henry’s favour was the sheer novelty of what he was attempting. As nobody had ever known of a similar situation before in Western Christendom, and as the government was careful to represent itself as producing a better version of the old religion, the sheer enormity of what was happening could not be appreciated by most of the English people.

  The Henrician Reform of Government

  During the 1530s and early 1540s, in addition, Henry’s government carried out an extensive overhaul of its own structures. Four new departments were established to handle the increased royal revenue, turning financial administration into a series of well-defined packages; though in practice their duties overlapped and much cash was still creamed off to private royal coffers. The king’s Council was streamlined into a smaller ‘Privy Council’ of ministers and politicians, which acted as an increasingly important and formalized executive agent as well as a panel of advisers to the monarch. The royal secretary became the chief executive agent of government, though his political importance varied according to his personality. Wales, which had emerged from the Middle Ages as a patchwork of estates owned and governed by the Crown and a set of noble families, was divided into counties on the English model. With these came the English apparatus of local government and parliamentary seats; the reform was probably propelled by the injustice of applying the statutes which enforced the Reformation to a region which had no representation in the Parliaments which made them. A new approach was also taken to the government of Ireland, which like Wales had entered the Tudor period as a mosaic of different medieval lordships. About half of these owed direct allegiance to the English Crown, being owned by families of English or Norman descent. The rest were in the hands of native dynasties, some of which owed allegiance to the Tudors. An added complication was that the rulers of England did not in theory own Ireland; instead, they had conquered much of it during the Middle Ages on behalf of the papacy, which remained the notional overlord.

  Henrician policy towards Ireland evolved in two phases. In the 1530s, a royal army finally broke the power of the main branch of the Fitzgeralds, the Earls of Kildare, who had ruled the island on behalf of the Yorkists and Henry VII. Most of the family’s adult males were beheaded and its supporters massacred, bringing a new level of atrocity to Irish warfare. The religious houses in the regions within reach of the Crown’s officials were dissolved, and the proceeds shared with the main surviving Anglo-Irish families, bringing them into the new system. In the 1540s, Henry was proclaimed King of Ireland, evicting the papal overlordship, and the new kingdom was given a set of governmental institutions to parallel those of England. A policy was pursued, with considerable initial success, of persuading the main native lords to recognize Henry as their ruler in exchange for confirmation of their lands and powers with the titles of barons and earls on the English pattern. It seemed for a time that the whole land might be brought under Tudor rule, while retaining most of its traditional local leaders.

  Meanwhile Henry struggled with the problem of the royal succession. Anne Boleyn had failed to produce the expected male heir, instead delivering a daughter, Elizabeth, and in 1536 he executed her on a charge of infidelity. Catherine died naturally in the same year, leaving Henry completely and legally free to remarry another lady from his court, Jane Seymour, who did produce a healthy boy, named Edward. She died of an infection resulting from the birth. Henry then married again, successively to a German princess, Anne of Cleves, and two more Englishwomen, Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr. The first was divorced because the king disliked her, and the second beheaded, like Anne, for alleged adultery; the third survived him and was personally the most impressive, becoming a successful author of devotional books. Not one became pregnant, however, and it seems that by this time the ageing king’s virility was failing. He repeatedly redefined the line of succession in conformity with his current wishes. Everybody agreed that Edward was the obvious heir, but all Henry’s matrimonial adventures had failed to produce a son in reserve. Instead he had Parliament rule that his daughters Mary and Elizabeth were next in line, even though he had previously declared both illegitimate. If all three died, then in common law the next heir should be the current ruler of Scotland, as the descendant of the king’s sister, but Henry had this line disinherited by Parliament in favour of the Grey family, who came from his younger sister. It was a situation with a very dangerous potential for conflict and confusion.

  In the 1540s Henry felt secure enough to turn back from domestic to foreign affairs as the main focus for his quest for glory. The fortification of the southern English coast and the proclamation of the Kingdom of Ireland were two aspects of his attempt to bequeath to his son a realm which was more secure and more extensive than that which Henry himself had inherited. Another was a further increase in the permanent royal navy. This had started near the opening of the reign, but was now accelerated: nineteen warships were built in 1544–6 alone. It was Henry who turned the English fleet from an occasional event into an institution. Most important, the sales of the monastery lands, combined with heavy taxation, had renewed the king’s capacity to wage war. He accordingly tried to unite Scotland and England by a marriage alliance, using first diplomacy and then military pressure, and then attacked France once more. The Scottish war was indecisive, but the French one gained a port on the English Channel, Boulogne, to add to England’s surviving French town, Calais. This conquest marked a new policy, of forgetting the former English possessions in France and attempting instead to acquire and hold strongholds on the coast opposite England. It was to have a history even longer than the Hundred Years War itself, not being abandoned until the 1660s. It was also hugely popular: in fact, to judge by signs of public rejoicing, the capture of Boulogne accompanied his siring of a healthy male heir as one of his two most acclaimed achievements. In reality, it was of little practical use and hugely expensive: the total cost of its reduction and maintenance was to exceed a million pounds.

  Whether all the administrative changes added up to a ‘Tudor Revolution in government’, as Sir Geoffrey Elton once thought, is open to doubt. Those in Wales and Ireland were revolutionary in their scale and impact, and the creation of the Church of England was as important a shift. The reforms in English secular government, on the other hand, are better viewed as one stage in a process that spanned the first two-thirds of the century. Nor is it possible, in most cases, to determine how policy was made. At particular places and times, certain individuals feature as pivotally important: for example, Thomas Cromwell was undoubtedly the king’s main executive agent and source of ideas in England during the 1530s and Sir Anthony St Leger was responsible for the reconciliation of Irish chiefs to the new Kingdom of Ireland in the 1540s. In many ways, Cromwell, who had been trained by Wolsey, represented his true successor, taking over the Church and reforming it directly, and using parliamentary legislation to drive home the improvements in urban life that the cardinal had encouraged. Never again, however, did a royal minister wield as much power as Wolsey had done, and how Henry reached specific decisions, and under whose influence, if any, is probably for the most part impossible to determine: we shall probably never know, for example, whether Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard were innocent of the charges of infidelity for which they were executed. The evidence for Henrician court politics consists of inadequate and competing accounts left by courtiers and foreign ambassadors, and so a choice really consists of privileging one piece of gossip over another. What seems certain is that the overall thrust of government continued to reflect Henry’s own dreams and desires, and that his personal involvement in government in
creased notably in his last ten years as his appetite for pleasure waned.

  The Kingship of Henry VIII

  In popular memory, Henry seems to rank as the most colourful English king of all time. He has appeared in films and on television more than any other, and is the only one commemorated in an enduring music-hall song (‘I’m ’enery the Eighth I am’). This achievement, and the fact that he has been played on screen by (apparent) Cockneys such as Sid James and Ray Winstone, indicates part of his appeal – a sense of accessibility and laddishness. His image is one of the best-known of all English kings, largely thanks to one painting, by the German artist Hans Holbein, showing him standing, hands on hips, his massive frame and square-cut beard giving an impression of solidity and confidence. This persona, of inherent majesty and physical and moral bulk, is exactly the one that Henry himself set out to convey, to overshadow his predecessors and match or surpass the most powerful of his fellow rulers.

  Why he did so is open to question. Clearly the answer must lie partly in his father’s lack of willingness (for whatever reason) to entrust him with power and wealth. What is certain is that Henry’s relentless quest for glory began as soon as he became king. In reaching for it he initially had two role models: King Arthur, the greatest legendary monarch of Britain, and Henry V, the victor of the battle of Agincourt and the most flamboyantly successful of England’s medieval rulers. Our Henry identified with both. He had his own portrait painted in the royal seat on what was then believed to be King Arthur’s Round Table, and was actually a medieval fake, displayed at Winchester Castle. Before launching his first war against France, he commissioned a new biography of Henry V, and during the war he imitated some of that king’s actions. Later he reached beyond these British prototypes to identify instead with the godly kings of the Old Testament, such as David.