John Foxe, Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perillous Dayes
(London, 1563), ‘To the Persecutors of Gods truth, commonlye
called Papistes, an other preface of the Author’
The king’s great matter
The story of the English Reformation was until quite recently a reassuringly familiar one – of a people languishing in spiritual bondage, held captive by a moribund and decadent Church, until Henry VIII’s marital problems provided the catalyst for a swift and popular Protestant exodus. It was a tale sealed with the blood of martyrs, illuminated by the fires of Smithfield, and hymned in all its thrilling horror and triumph by England’s greatest Protestant hagiographer John Foxe (1516/17–87) in his Acts and Monuments. Whether or not we accept this version of events, there is little question that the English and Scottish Reformations have been the most momentous and transformative developments to have occurred in Britain and Ireland for almost a thousand years. The British empire would be conceived and perceived through a haze of ideas and myths that Foxe and the early Reformers inspired. It was Protestantism, patriotism and the lure of plunder – the three became inextricably linked – that propelled the English from their European coastal waters out onto the Atlantic and the sea lanes of empire. And it was commitment to the Protestant cause and the fight against ‘popery’ at home and abroad that spawned Leviathan – the so-called fiscal–military state – in the mid-seventeenth century. Yet for all their long-term consequences, the British Reformations were among the least likely of contingencies. If Henry VIII had produced a healthy son by Katherine of Aragon the English Reformation, and very likely the Scottish too, would probably never have happened. Similarly, if Elizabeth I had died of the smallpox in 1562, as she very nearly did, England might well have been plunged into religious civil war just as France was that very year, and emerged, as France would do, a Catholic kingdom.
The problem with the old-school version of Reformation history, based as it was on the assumption that most people were thirsting for Protestantism, is that the English Church on the eve of Henry’s break with Rome was in remarkably rude health. In fact, there was something of a religious revival occurring in Europe during the early sixteenth century, driven in large part by the laity’s desire to gain remission for their own souls and those of their departed loved ones in purgatory. Prayers and Masses for the dead lay at the heart of a thriving body of devotional practices that included pilgrimages, veneration of saints and their relics, and all kinds of communal celebrations and festivities associated with the religious calendar. Devout fraternities or religious guilds to raise money for intercessory prayers and Masses were flourishing. London alone had at least 150 such fraternities. Donations for the decoration or repair of churches remained popular among the laity. Never was more money spent by ordinary men and women on rebuilding their parish church than in the fifty years before 1530. Monasteries still played a central role in the devotional and social life of northern England, while in the south there was an exuberant parish piety. A few urban sophisticates, particularly those influenced by humanism, might demand a more lively personal faith and an improvement in the standards of clerical training, but late medieval Catholicism was generally more responsive to the needs of the laity, more satisfying to the senses (if not necessarily the intellect), more effective at binding local communities, and less open to state interference than much of what followed. The overlap between the average lay person’s social and religious life was extensive and generally harmonious; certainly disputes between priests and their parishioners were relatively infrequent. Overall, the pre-Reformation English Church was unusually well run by contemporary standards elsewhere in Europe.
If the Church was vulnerable, it was from the top down rather than the bottom up. Henry VIII was the first king of England whose intellectual resources included the potential for virulent scepticism about the value and godliness of certain aspects of popular worship. Henry VII had been a man of largely conventional piety. He had bullied the Church, to be sure, and created valuable precedents for Henry VIII to do likewise, but there had been no questioning of church doctrine on his watch. Henry VIII, on the other hand, was an admirer of Erasmus and other humanist scholars, some of whom were critical of the mechanical and superstitious elements in traditional religion, particularly those without scriptural foundation. The ideas of these ‘orthodox’ reformers for religious and social renewal did not necessarily challenge papal authority or the central tenets of Catholicism. The faith that Erasmus and many other humanists put in education and human reason was actually easier to square with the Church’s teaching on salvation through good works than was the Protestant emphasis on the uniquely saving power of God’s arbitrary grace to a fallen and corrupt mankind. Katherine of Aragon and Sir Thomas More are prime examples of Erasmians who remained committed to orthodox religion. But in the hands of a king who was exceptionally touchy about any perceived challenge to his authority, and who was driven to question ‘the bishop of Rome’s usurped power’, the humanist critique could be a formidable weapon against the Church.1
Henry’s quarrel with the papacy – the lightning before the storm of Reformation – was provoked not by humanist idealism, however, but by dynastic insecurity. Convinced by 1527 that his ageing wife was incapable of supplying him with a male heir, Henry made a formal request to Pope Clement VII for an annulment of his marriage – not, strictly speaking, a divorce, but a papal declaration that no valid marriage had been contracted. The argument that Henry used to satisfy his own scrupulous conscience in this matter was based upon the question of consanguinity. Katherine had been his sister-in-law, the widow of his elder brother Arthur. In order to marry her in the first place, Henry had needed a papal dispensation, and he had never been entirely convinced that their union was lawful in the eyes of God. The couple’s failure to produce a male heir seemed to confirm his worst suspicions. He was minded of Leviticus 20:21: ‘if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing … they shall be childless’ – conveniently ignoring the fact that this passage apparently referred not to a brother’s widow but to a brother’s wife. By arguing that the dispensation which had been granted to allow his marriage to Katherine had contravened divine and natural law, and had therefore been invalid, Henry was implicitly challenging papal authority itself.
The role of Anne Boleyn (c.1500–36) in Henry’s dynastic drama was not initially that of queen-in-waiting. Policy and precedent demanded that Katherine’s shoes be filled by another princess from one of Europe’s ruling houses. Henry, a practised adulterer, began pursuing Anne early in 1526 as his mistress, having recently discarded her elder sister Mary. The daughter of a leading diplomat, Anne had been brought up in the most fashionable courts in Europe, and like Henry she could speak French and was an accomplished musician. To look at she was no great beauty. ‘Madame Anne’, observed the Venetian ambassador in 1532, ‘is not one of the handsomest women in the world; she is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the English King’s great appetite, and her eyes, which are black and beautiful.’2 But her vivacious personality and sophisticated French manners made her the most exciting woman at court. Henry was besotted, and her refusal to become maîtresse-en-titre seems to have inflamed ‘the great love that he bare her in the bottom of his stomach’.3 In the summer of 1527 therefore, a few months after deciding to seek an annulment of his marriage to Katherine, he threw policy out of the window and asked Anne to marry him. The couple apparently agreed not to have sex until they were man and wife, for Henry no less than Anne wanted their first child to be legitimate. But it was to be over five years before they could marry and finally consummate their relationship, which to a man of Henry’s sexual appetite and dynastic anxieties must have required immense restraint.
The course of British history might have been very different if Henry’s request for a papal annulment had not coincided with a decisive moment in the long-running Franco-Habsburg struggle for control of the Italian peninsula. In 1527 Imperial troops sacked Rome, killed almost 50,000 of the city’s inhabitants, and left the pope under