The Parliament of 1529
The representatives of England's influential classes, the nobles of the House of Lords and the merchants of the House of Commons, met in Parliament at Westminster (3 November 1529). They voted to reduce Church property, to continue trade with Flanders, and to support the king's wish for a male child. What passed in Parliament did not confirm the need for the king to marry Anne Boleyn, whom the public took for an adventuress, and it did not stop people's sympathy for Catherine. The lower classes of English society, who had no political influence, opposed Henry's separation from Catherine, and the Catholic north obeyed the pope without question. By keeping conservative in all spheres of life except cutting the pope's hand from England's internal affairs, Henry for the time silenced his opponents. National feeling, stronger and broader in England than in Germany, helped the king in his struggle with the pope. Even clergy who feared the king's headship of the Church wished to free themselves from the rule of a pope openly subservient to the policy of a foreign power.
About 1528 one Simon Fish had published a six-page tract, which Henry read without public objection and which the English welcomed warmly. In this Supplication of the Beggars the king was asked to seize all, or part, of the property of the English Church. It said that in the time of his noble ancestors lazy, "holy" beggars and vagrants had entered his realm: bishops, abbots, deacons, archdeacons, suffragans, priests, monks, canons, friars, pardoners and summoners. These idle wretches, who, without submitting to work, had by begging plundered more than a third of the king's wealth, had taken the best lands and estates. Not content with that, they claimed a tenth of the grain, meadows, pastures, fodder, wool, colts, calves, lambs, pigs, geese and hens, so that poor women had to give them one egg in ten or be shut out of what had belonged to them since the time of Christ. And what woman would care to work, it asked, when dealings with friars, monks and priests could earn many times a day's wage (I soften the wording)?
The nobles and merchants, who wanted the Church's property seized for the commonwealth, apparently overlooked the extravagant slanders the tract laid on the clergy. The French ambassador, Jean du Bellay, wrote, "These gentlemen mean to seize all the Church's property by defaming the Church. Since they do not hide their aim, there is no need for me to hint at it in cipher ... It is clear that the clergy's influence and power in the government are declining, and this Parliament will put their position in great danger." Wolsey had refrained from attacking Church lands, but his fall left the clergy no support but the people's (decayed and shaky) faith and the pope's influence, and the pope was now out of favor with the king and a plaything of the emperor's policy. Custom required that laws concerning the Church be confirmed or issued by the Convocation of the clergy under the archbishops of Canterbury and York. But it was unclear whether Convocation could calm the anger of king and Parliament.
The Commons Attack the Clergy
The attack began in the Commons. In a petition to the king the House, while affirming the true beliefs of the Church, sharply criticized the clergy and accused Convocation of making laws without the consent of king and Parliament, laws that limited Christians' freedom and bound them to heavy fines. Convocation, it said, required the laity to pay large sums to Church leaders for the performance of sacraments; bishops called young, ignorant men their nephews and put them into rich Church posts; and the courts of the dioceses, abusing their powers, extorted money from the people, arrested and jailed people without naming their offense, drew up indictments for the slightest heresy and punished the accused harshly. At the end the king was asked to act to reform the Church of these evils. Henry, who was probably the instigator of the petition, sent several of its main points to Convocation and demanded an answer. The bishops admitted that abuses and violations existed in the Church, but ascribed them to the chance acts of individuals and praised the piety of a king who had answered Luther with such courage and helped the clergy suppress heresy. But unaware of the king's hot temper, they angered him further with sharp words. They said that they held their power to legislate from God's Scripture and the will and interest of his holy Church; that they would not make the performance of the duties God had surely entrusted to them depend on the king's approval; and they humbly begged him graciously to support the laws made and enforced by their hands, with the Creator's permission, for the glory of God's name, the spread of piety and the guarding of faith in Christ.
Other matters briefly put off the king's struggle with the clergy. Above all Henry wished, with Parliament's consent, to shake off his debts to his subjects. The Commons, after protesting the request, passed it. Three more bills were brought in to stop the clergy from meddling in matters of inheritance, to restrict mortuary fees and to curb the holding of several rich Church offices. These passed the Commons but met hard opposition from the bishops and abbots in the Lords. After amendments they too passed and became law. Parliament adjourned on 17 December.
The Universities and the Submission of the Clergy
In the summer of 1530 Thomas Cranmer, a doctor of theology at Cambridge, proposed to Henry that the leading universities of Europe be asked whether the pope has power to allow a man to marry his brother's widow. The market in bribes and inducements again flourished. Henry's agents strove to get a negative answer. Charles's agents also resorted to force to make European universities affirm the pope's competence. The Italian universities gave conflicting answers; Lutheran universities refused to give an opinion in favor of the "Defender of the Faith"; but the University of Paris, under pressure from Francis, gave an answer that satisfied Henry. Oxford and Cambridge, at the government's strong urging, affirmed Henry's right to annul his marriage.
Henry, now more powerful, announced through his attorney (December 1530) that the government had decided to prosecute and punish all the clergy who had recognized Wolsey as papal legate, for defying the Statute of Praemunire. After Parliament and Convocation reopened (16 January 1531), the king's agents told the clergy that if they admitted their fault and paid a fine of 118,000 pounds they would be spared prosecution and punishment. The clergy answered that they had recognized Wolsey as legate because the king himself had brought his suit before a court composed of Wolsey and Campeggio. The clergy were right. But Henry badly needed money. At last the clergy reluctantly agreed to collect the fine from those under their jurisdictions. Henry went further and demanded that the clergy recognize him as "protector and only supreme head of the Church and clergy of England," that is, break with the pope. The clergy offered several amendments to soften the king's view, but Henry, stubborn and unforgiving, accepted none. At last (10 February 1531) Warham, the archbishop, then eighty-one, against his inner wish, took the king's demand to Convocation with the qualifying phrase "as far as the law of Christ allows." No voice rose in the assembly; the clergy's silence was taken for consent; and the king's demand acquired the force of law. Henry, now master of the English Church and clergy, allowed the bishops to prosecute opponents of the Church.
Parliament and Convocation adjourned again (30 March 1531). In July Henry left Catherine for good at Windsor. Some time later, when Princess Mary lived at Richmond, Catherine went to Amthill. Henry took back the jewels he had given Catherine and gave them to Anne. Pope Clement VII, at Charles's urging, charged Henry with adultery (25 January 1532) and warned him that until a ruling was given on his divorce petition he must give up Anne Boleyn and live with his lawful wife, Catherine. Henry ignored the warning and pursued his love affair. About then he wrote Anne one of his affectionate letters, telling her his loneliness since parting was painful, time dragged more heavily since they had parted, he thought always of her love and his own burning love, and that his grief had eased now that he was coming to her, hoping to pass especially the nights in her warm embrace (I soften the wording). He signed, "Henry, who is, was and shall be yours."
Laws Against the Church
When Parliament and Convocation reopened (15 January 1532), Henry passed other laws against the clergy. By them accusations of crime against clergy below the rank of deacon were tried in civil courts; fines of church courts were reduced; payments owed to the Church at Christians' deaths or the probate of their wills were reduced or abolished; no newly appointed church officer could send the first year's income to the pope; and the transfer of English money to Rome as annates, the price of indulgences, or under any other title the pope had formerly received was stopped. To deceive the pope he was told that if Henry's marriage to Catherine were annulled, the first-year income of church leaders would still be sent to Rome. Most English bishops now accepted that the separation of the English Church from Rome would not reduce their power or income. In March 1532 Convocation announced its readiness to break with the pope and wrote the king a petition: may it please him to end the unjust extortion in question, and, so that the pope should not again take the Church's revenues of this land, may he command this same Parliament to declare the end of the obedience of the king and the English people to the court of Rome. On 15 May Convocation asked the king to let the review of its future enactments, and the judgment of their benefit or harm to England, be given to a plenipotentiary committee, half of whose members would be clergy and half lay. In this historic period of the "Reformation Parliament" and Convocation, the Church of England came into being and became a part of the state and so subject to it.
Thomas More, who had not been able to quench the anger of the opponents of the clergy, resigned the chancellorship on 16 May and withdrew to his home. In August Warham, after condemning on his deathbed the clergy's surrender to the king, died. Henry named Thomas Audley in More's place and Thomas Cranmer in Warham's. The defiance of England's rulers toward papal authority kept gaining strength. In February 1533 Parliament passed the Act of Appeals, which provided that all petitions formerly sent to Rome for decision should henceforth be heard "in the spiritual and temporal courts of England, regardless of foreign orders, prohibitions, protests and excommunications." On 15 January 1533 Henry married Anne, who had been four months pregnant. The king now had a better reason to annul his marriage to Catherine. So, after another fruitless appeal to the pope, he asked Convocation for the divorce (April 1533). On 23 May Cranmer, now Archbishop of Canterbury, declared Henry's marriage with Catherine unlawful and void, and on the 28th of that month recognized Anne as Henry's lawful wife. Three days later Anne, in cloth of gold adorned with jewels, set out for her coronation as queen of England in a carriage designed in traditional form by Hans Holbein. Despite the great honors paid her, Anne sensed the people's displeasure in their silence, and perhaps wondered how long the crown would stay on her head. Pope Clement called Henry's second marriage illegitimate, his future children bastards, and excommunicated Henry himself (11 July 1533). On 7 September Elizabeth was born. Charles's ambassador wrote the emperor that the king's mistress had borne a bastard.
Parliament, adjourned on 4 May, resumed on 15 January 1534. Church leaders' revenues and the sums paid to the pope now went to the king, and the naming of bishops, practically in the king's hands for some time, became his legal right. The power to prosecute for heresy passed from church courts to civil courts.
The Nun of Kent
In 1533 Elizabeth Barton, a nun of Kent, announced that God had made known to her the king's guilt through his second marriage and shown her the place prepared for him in hell. The court, by torture, obtained from her a confession that she had falsely made this claim and had given opponents a pretext to plot the king's overthrow. The House of Lords condemned the nun and six of her "accomplices" to death, and the sentence was carried out on 5 May 1534. Bishop Fisher too was accused of knowing of the plot and not informing the government. He was also charged with knowing, with Catherine, of a plan drawn up by Chapuys, with Charles's backing, for an attack on England at the time of a rising of Catherine's supporters. Though Fisher denied the charge, he was held guilty and a traitor.
Thomas Cromwell
In these affairs Thomas Cromwell was Henry's chief aide. Born in 1485 to a blacksmith's family of Putney, he spent his early years in poverty and hardship and wandered four years through France and Italy. After returning to England he took up weaving and then money-changing and made a fortune. He served Wolsey faithfully for five years, stood by him in his bad days, and by his skill and loyalty drew close to the king. He became in turn chancellor of the exchequer, master of the rolls and the king's secretary (May 1534). From 1531 to 1540, in complete obedience to the king, Cromwell was the main director of the government's affairs. The nobles who opposed him despised him as a rival upstart merchant and accused him of applying the principles of Machiavelli's Prince, of bribery, selling offices and excessive love of money and power. Cromwell's basic aim, which he did not hide, was to make the king absolute and unchallenged ruler of England and to strengthen his autocratic rule by seizing Church property. In pursuit of it he showed extraordinary ability, increased his own wealth, and in all quarrels but the last trial of strength overcame his enemies.
The Acts of Succession and Supremacy
Apparently at his suggestion and planning, Henry, fearing the growing hostility of the English, got Parliament to pass the Act of Succession (30 March 1534). This law declared Henry's marriage to Catherine illegitimate, called Mary a bastard, made Elizabeth, if Anne bore no son, lawful heir to the English throne, and made any objection to the lawfulness of Henry's marriage to Anne and the legitimacy of her children a capital crime.
Parliament required all the men and women of England to swear loyalty to the king. The king's agents, with soldiers, entered houses, castles, monasteries and abbeys throughout the country and took the people's oaths. Among the few who would not swear were Bishop Fisher and Thomas More. They agreed with the part of the law that fixed the heir to the throne but refused to confirm its appendages; all were arrested. By the Act of Supremacy, passed by Parliament on 11 November 1534, the headship of the new national Church of England, thenceforth called the "Anglican Church," was given to the king, with the right to oversee morals, doctrine, discipline and reform in the Church, which had formerly belonged to the Church. The law made it treason for anyone in speech or writing to call the king a usurper, tyrant, hypocrite, heretic or infidel. The bishops were again made to pledge acceptance of the king's political and religious supremacy "without reservation so far as Christ's law allows" and not to let the pope extend his power again over England.
The Carthusians and Persecution
All the state's power was mobilized to suppress opponents of these unprecedented enactments. All the clergy of the Anglican Church pretended to agree with Parliament's measures. But many monks and friars who had stayed loyal to the pope refused to submit to the government, and their resistance was one of the factors that soon moved Henry to dissolve the English monasteries. The obstinacy of the Carthusian friars of the London Charterhouse angered Henry and Cromwell most. Three Carthusian priors went to Cromwell and told him they opposed the headship of the Church by any lay authority in England. Cromwell sent them to prison too. On 26 April 1535 these friars, with another friar and a secular priest, were tried in the king's private court.
The king's judges were inclined to acquit them, but Cromwell, fearing that their acquittal would encourage other opponents to defy the state, kept the judges from returning an acquittal. On 3 May all five, still opposing the Supremacy, were taken to Tyburn on hurdles and put to death by hanging, and their bodies were then dismembered (I omit the details). The arm of one was hung at the entrance of the Charterhouse as a warning to the other friars. Even so, not one friar of that house gave up his belief. Three others were kept standing in prison seventeen days, chained at the neck. During this time they were fed but not unchained even for the needs of nature. The other Carthusian friars who opposed the king's supremacy were scattered among other monasteries, and ten were held in Newgate, where nine died of "gaol fever."
Henry was now the sole political and religious authority in England, and everyone had to follow his political and religious line. Since, despite cutting the pope's hand from England, he was still a Catholic, he troubled the Protestants who criticized the Catholic Church's dogma and the Catholics who opposed his rule over the Church. To the end of his life he never stopped persecuting Protestants and opponents of Catholicism. In 1531, by order of Thomas More, as the book says, Thomas Bilney was burned for insulting a religious image and opposing pilgrimages and intercession for the dead. James Bainham, who held that Christ is present in the sacrament only spiritually, was arrested and by torture forced to name others who shared his view. He stayed firm and died in the fire at Smithfield in April 1532. In that same year two others were burned for heresy, and the Bishop of Lincoln announced that devout Christians who carried faggots to light the fire would be pardoned forty days of sin.
Fisher and the Cardinal's Hat
The prosecution and killing of people for heresy reached its height in the days of Fisher and More. Erasmus called the Bishop of Rochester "a man in whom all virtues are joined." But Fisher had stained himself by the killing of people and by working with the Spanish ambassador to urge Charles to invade England and depose Henry. His loyalty to the Church does not atone for his treason to his country. The new pope, Paul III, erred in raising the imprisoned bishop to a cardinal's rank. Although Fisher himself said he had not sought name or rank, Henry took his elevation as hostility to himself. On 17 June 1535 Bishop Fisher, now eighty, was tried for the last time and again refused to sign a document making Henry head of the English Church. On the 22nd he was taken to Tower Hill, where an axe had been made ready. One who saw him then said, "Nothing was left of him but a handful of skin and bone, so that many wondered how a man whose strength had wasted so could still be alive!" At the place of execution he was told once more that if he signed the document of the king's supremacy over the Church he would be pardoned; but he still refused. His head was hung on London Bridge so that, as Henry put it, it might go from there to Rome and receive the cardinal's hat.
But the most stubborn enemy of England's national Church was still alive.