Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power. David Scott

upstart like Anne Boleyn. To persuade any pope to grant an annulment on Henry’s terms would have been difficult, but with Clement in thrall to the Imperialists it was impossible. Henry’s next move was to have the case heard and settled in England. In 1529 a legatine court was convened at Blackfriars in which Henry was confronted by his now estranged queen. Katherine protested on her knees that she had always been a faithful wife; and she may have gone further and insisted that she had never consummated her marriage to Arthur (undermining Henry’s argument of consanguinity) and challenged her husband to deny it. What she certainly did do was formally appeal her cause to Rome and walk out of the court. All this while, Cardinal Wolsey had been working tirelessly to secure an annulment at Rome, but his mounting failures lost him first Anne’s support and finally the king’s. Dismissed as lord chancellor in the autumn of 1529, he died the following year before he could be brought to trial for high treason. For the first time in over fifteen years, Henry was without a chief minister.

      The king’s ‘great matter’ portended a major constitutional upheaval. Like most of his royal predecessors, Henry had been keen to manage the Church as far as was prudently possible. He had not denied papal jurisdiction as such. He had simply asserted the traditional right of the temporal authority to circumscribe the spiritual. But the impasse over his annulment led him to consider an altogether more radical approach to Church–state relations. In the autumn of 1530 he informed the Imperial ambassador and the pope that as supreme ruler within his dominions he was answerable to no external authority, and that his annulment could therefore be settled only in England, if necessary by appeal to Parliament. He followed this up in 1531 by demanding that the clergy acknowledge him as ‘sole protector and supreme head of the English church’ with spiritual care over the souls of his subjects. He felt on firm ground here, having received a dossier from a team of royal scholars that proved to his and their satisfaction that God had granted kings of England ‘imperial’ authority – that is to say sovereign power, free from any foreign jurisdiction – in spiritual as well as temporal matters. He was also emboldened by the alliance he had formed with Francis I in 1527, believing that he enjoyed the French king’s approval in challenging the authority of the pope, although Francis supported Henry only in so far as it served his own interests, particularly in his continuing power struggle with Charles V. Moreover, like most of those watching the unfolding drama in England, Francis was convinced that all Henry wanted was to vindicate his princely authority and honour on the annulment issue. That Henry would take matters to the point of actual schism seemed scarcely credible.

      What gave the king’s great matter a specifically religious dimension was his receptiveness to the Erasmian critique of traditional worship. The fall of Wolsey cleared the ground for the ‘evangelicals’ at court (the label ‘Protestant’ was German in origin and was not applied to English reformists until the late 1540s), a faction headed by Anne and her clients, among them the brilliant scholar Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) and Wolsey’s protégé Thomas Cromwell (c.1485–1540). During the early 1530s the evangelicals gradually persuaded the king of the theological and political merits of adopting at least some of their ideas on church reform. The last thing Henry wanted was to encourage heresy, particularly in doctrinal matters. He detested Luther – a feeling Luther heartily reciprocated – and the Lutheran belief common to most evangelicals that Christians were saved by God’s free gift of faith to individual believers. Not that the king’s own ideas on how to attain salvation were exactly orthodox. Rather than adhere to the official Catholic line that God’s grace was conveyed through the Church, he came to believe that faith (which he understood merely as assent to the creeds) and good works were essential. Yet as much as Henry disliked Luther’s doctrinal ideas, they had the same practical effect as the humanists’ attack on superstitious practices, in that they challenged the Church’s emphasis on the saving power of pilgrimages, ritual fasting and other traditional works of penance. Because Henry shared some of the humanists’ concerns, and was desperate to believe that in leading England towards schism he was doing God’s will, he cautiously backed the evangelicals’ call for purifying reform and a return to a more Bible-based faith. Moreover, he was beginning to find one evangelical idea particularly compelling: that for a king to submit to the power of the Church was ‘a shame obove all shames … one kynge, one lawe, is Gods ordinance in every realme’.⁴

      Henry’s campaign against the Church became even more direct and aggressive in 1532. His patience was now wearing very thin, to the point where he committed the Parliament he had called in 1529 (later dubbed the Reformation Parliament) to a full-blooded attack on the clergy and papal jurisdiction in England in an effort to bludgeon the pope into submission. The legal theorist Christopher St German had argued in print that ‘the king in parliament [is] the high sovereign over the people which hath not only charge on the bodies but also on the souls of his subjects’, and Henry evidently agreed.⁵ The man largely responsible for turning this doctrine into a legislative programme and steering it through Parliament was Thomas Cromwell, who had emerged by 1534 as the king’s principal secretary and new chief minister. A man of wide experience and learning, full of roguish charm and good conversation, Cromwell also possessed all the necessary skills of a brilliant politician and administrator. He was remembered by John Foxe as ‘pregnant in wit … in judgement discreet, in tongue eloquent, in service faithful, in stomach courageous, in his pen active’.⁶

      The switch to a more binding, legislative solution to the problem reflected Henry’s confidence that Francis I was firmly in his corner; indeed, in the summer of 1532 an Anglo-French treaty was signed in which Francis promised Henry military support if England was attacked by Charles V. The fact that the Lutheran states of northern Germany and Scandinavia had either rejected papal authority or were moving in that direction must also have given Henry confidence. But he nevertheless regarded Francis as his most powerful ally in defying the pope.

      It was while Henry and Anne were at Calais in the autumn of 1532, celebrating their alliance with Francis, that they finally slept together. By December she was pregnant, giving Henry nine months in which to divorce Katherine and marry Anne or have his longed-for son born a bastard. He and Anne were married in secret in January 1533, and in April, Parliament passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals, preventing Katherine or any other subject appealing their case to Rome. Armed with this legislation, the new archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer pronounced Henry’s marriage to Katherine illegal and therefore invalid. Katherine spent the remaining three years of her life in sorrowful seclusion. Anne’s delivery of a daughter – the future Queen Elizabeth (1533–1603) – in September 1533 disappointed Henry. But he was sure that Anne would provide him with a male heir at some point (wrongly, as it turned out); and anyway, his great matter had long ceased to be simply a dynastic issue. Francis I, meanwhile, looked on appalled. He had never meant to condone schism. Yet it had been French assurances of support against the pope – or what Henry had chosen to interpret as such – that had persuaded Anne to climb into the royal bed in the first place. And from the moment she became pregnant the die was cast.

       The royal supremacy

      The legislation that effected the decisive break with Catholic Christendom was the 1534 Act of Supremacy, which pronounced Henry ‘the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England’.⁷ The king took this to mean that he had the divinely ordained authority, indeed duty, to determine and if necessary reform church government and doctrine, although he stopped short of claiming the sacramental powers of the ordained clergy. At the same time an act was passed that made it treason to deny the royal supremacy or to call the king a heretic, schismatic or tyrant. Only the zealously committed or the foolhardy would now challenge Henry’s right to play the Old Testament patriarch. His subjects, if they knew what was good for them, must conform their piety to his own – a shifting, eclectic and theologically unstable blend of orthodox and Erasmian beliefs. It can best be described as Catholicism shorn of the pope and certain unscriptural elements and practices closely associated with Rome, such as belief in purgatory, the intercession of saints, pilgrimages and monasticism. The veneration of images, ‘feigned relics’ and saints’ shrines was denounced as idolatrous, and the objects themselves held up to public ridicule and destroyed. But woe betide anyone who denied the royal supremacy or the miracle of transubstantiation (the turning of the bread and wine during Mass into the body and blood of Christ). The first were deemed traitors,