The bishops knew that their answer had failed to satisfy the king or the parliament, and so they immediately offered one concession. They pledged that in the king’s lifetime they would never introduce legislation in matters unconnected with faith; the qualification was a very slender one, and did not resolve anything. On 11 May the king once more invited a delegation for a formal interview. ‘I have discovered,’ he said, ‘that the clergy owe me only one half of an allegiance. All the prelates at their consecration make an oath to the pope clean contrary to the oath they make to us so that they seem his subjects and not ours.’ This was disingenuous, but the king’s intention was becoming clear. He was intent upon fundamentally destroying the power and the authority of the pope.
He sent another memorial to the convocation or, rather, he issued a series of demands. No new canons, or legislative orders, were to be proposed or enacted without royal licence. All existing ecclesiastical laws were to be reviewed by a panel of ecclesiastics and parliamentarians, sixteen on either side, and a majority verdict would suffice for abolition. Any such majority verdict would then be upheld by the king, whose authority was supreme.
The convocation debated the matter for five days, but by that time the king had grown impatient. He demanded an answer. With one exception, the bishop of Bath, all the clergy then replied that they accepted the proposals in full knowledge of the king’s ‘excellent wisdom, princely goodness and fervent zeal to the promotion of God’s honour’. Their answer, or surrender, became known as the ‘Submission of the Clergy’. The Spanish ambassador wrote that ‘churchmen will now be of less account than shoemakers, who at least have the power of assembling and making their own statutes’. At a later date the great historian Lord Acton would describe the ‘Submission’ as representing ‘the advent of a new polity’. The independent nation state of England could not truly have emerged without this radical separation from the authority of Rome. Yet the change can be put in more immediate terms. An absolute monarch needed absolute rule over all his subjects, lay and clerical.
On the day after the ‘Submission’ Thomas More resigned, or was forced to resign, as chancellor. He had become too prominent a supporter of the pope, and of the old rights of the Church. ‘If a lion knew his own strength,’ he had once said of the king, ‘hard were it for any man to rule him.’ There was one other who still resisted the wishes of the king. John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, was in secret communication with the Spanish ambassador; they agreed that, if they accidentally met in public, they would ignore one another. Yet within months Fisher was suggesting that a Spanish invasion force should sail to England and overthrow the king. The archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, dictated to his scribes a testament in which he denounced the legislation against the Church. ‘By these writings,’ he said, ‘we do dissent from, refuse, and contradict them.’ Then he lay down and died, beyond the reach of the king at last. Out of the habit of obedience, and of loyalty to the throne, all the other bishops acquiesced. It is probable, also, that they feared the wrath of the king.
Henry sought the support of parliament at every stage in these proceedings largely for the sake of safety. The king himself went to parliament on three separate occasions in order to sway the vote. He could not be sure how the country would receive the great changes he was preparing. So he tried to make it seem that the Commons, in particular, were instigating or seeking the measures against the Church. Although he was in effect the sole mover of the anti-clerical legislation, he deemed it best to appear above the fray.
In the process the Commons itself acquired additional authority and came to be regarded as a partner to the king. In a later address the king told parliament that ‘we be informed by our judges that we at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in the time of parliament, wherein we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit together in one body politic’. This was effectively a new doctrine of state whereby ‘the king in parliament’ wielded supreme authority in a newly united nation.
In the early autumn of 1532 the king placed a mantle of crimson velvet, and a golden coronet, upon Anne Boleyn. She had been given a hereditary peerage, as marquess of Pembroke, the first woman to be so honoured in England. It was clear that she was soon to be further exalted. A number of the queen’s jewels were now transferred to her, despite Katherine’s vehement protests. Yet all was not well. When the king took her on progress through the southern counties the response of the people was at best sullen when not overtly hostile. Henry scrutinized the faces of all the members of the court, when they were in her presence, to ensure that they paid her the right measure of respect. It was reported that the king ‘begged the lords to go and visit and make their court to the new queen’.
A number of tracts were published around this time by the king’s printer, Thomas Berthelet, supporting the king’s ‘great matter’. One of them, A Glass of the Truth, may have in part been written by the king himself. It defended Henry’s decision to separate from Katherine by reason of biblical injunction, but also included some private details about her supposed wedding night with Prince Arthur.
He took Anne with him on a journey to France; now that he had come close to an open breach with Charles V, the nephew of the queen, he was obliged to maintain his alliance with Francis I. But the sister of the French king, and other ladies of the court at Paris, declined to meet her; Henry’s own sister, Mary, had also refused to accompany them across the Channel. Anne was obliged to remain in Calais, while Henry proceeded to Boulogne for his interview with the French sovereign. Their visit lasted far longer than they intended, when severe gales and storms prevented them from embarking in the Swallow for a fortnight. When they did eventually return to England they were confronted at Canterbury by Elizabeth Barton, ‘the mad nun of Kent’, who once more lectured them on their transgressions and prophesied calamity.
Yet the mind and intention of the king could not now be changed. It seems that, a few days later, he slept with Anne Boleyn. Certainly, by the beginning of December, she was pregnant. The birth of Elizabeth occurred nine months later. The only possible reason for the decision to begin sexual relations was the certainty that the two had now agreed upon an immediate marriage. There are reports that a secret ceremony took place two days after their return from France, with only Anne’s close family as witnesses, but they cannot be proven. It is likely, however, that the king would have taken the precaution of some official ritual before inseminating his lover. The risk of an illegitimate child was too great.
A formal marriage did take place in the following month when, just before dawn on 25 January 1533, they were united by the king’s chaplain in the ‘high chamber’ above the newly built Holbein Gate at Whitehall Palace. The other circumstances of the marriage are not known, but it is believed that two or three of the king’s privy chamber were present. Soon afterwards the preachers of the court began to pray for ‘Anne, the queen’, and Katherine was ordered to omit the title. By the following month the condition of Anne Boleyn was widely known, and the lady herself began to joke about her newfound craving for apples; her laughter rang around the hallways. She told the Venetian ambassador that ‘God had inspired his Majesty to marry her’.
Their union took place in the full anticipation of a final break with Rome. A parliament had been called at the beginning of February. Its first measures were concerned with the quality of shoe leather and the fair price of goods; crows and ravens were to be destroyed, and the road from the Strand to Charing Cross should be paved. Only then did the members direct their attention to more spiritual matters. The Act in Restraint of Appeals declared that all ecclesiastical cases should be determined within England itself with no reference to any supposed higher authority; this meant that the matter of the king’s separation would be adjudicated in London and Canterbury rather than in Rome. It has been described as the most important statute of the sixteenth century, for it was the one that effectively destroyed the polity of the Middle Ages.