Unfortunately, Henry’s annulment was not destined to stand or fall upon the theological issue of whether a papal dispensation could set aside such a prohibition, for Catherine was not simply the king’s wife; she was also the aunt of the emperor Charles V, the most powerful sovereign in Europe. Both Henry and his cardinal knew that the annulment would never be granted unless the emperor’s power in Italy could be overthrown by an Anglo-French military alliance and the pope rescued from imperial domination, and for three years Wolsey worked desperately to achieve this diplomatic and military end. Caught between an all-powerful emperor and a truculent English king, Pope Clement VII procrastinated and offered all sorts of doubtful solutions short of annulment, including the marriage of Princess Mary and the king’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, duke of Richmond; the legitimizing of all children begotten of Anne Boleyn; and the transfer of Catherine into a nunnery so that the king could be given permission to remarry. Wolsey’s purpose was to have the marriage annulled and the trial held in London. But in 1529, despite the arrival of Lorenzo Cardinal Campeggio to set up the machinery for a hearing, Wolsey’s plans exploded. In July the pope ordered Campeggio to move the case to Rome, where a decision against the king was a foregone conclusion, and in August Francis and the emperor made peace at the Treaty of Cambrai. Wolsey’s policies were a failure, and he was dismissed from office in October 1529. He died on November 29, just in time to escape trial for treason.
Clement VIIClement VII, detail from a portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo; in the National Museum and Galleries of Capodimonte, Naples.Alinari/Art Resource, New York
The Reformation background
Henry now began groping for new means to achieve his purpose. At first he contemplated little more than blackmail to frighten the pope into submission. But slowly, reluctantly, and not realizing the full consequences of his actions, he moved step by step to open defiance and a total break with Rome. Wolsey, in his person and his policies, had represented the past. He was the last of the great ecclesiastical statesmen who had been as much at home in the cosmopolitan world of European Christendom, with its spiritual centre in Rome, as in a provincial capital such as London. By the time of Henry’s matrimonial crisis, Christendom was dissolving. Not only were late medieval kingdoms assuming the character of independent nation-states, but the spiritual unity of Christ’s seamless cloak was also being torn apart by heresy. Henry possibly would never have won his annulment had there not existed in England men who desired a break with Rome, not because it was dynastically expedient but because they regarded the pope as the “whore of Babylon.”
The religious life of the people was especially vibrant in the early decades of the 16th century, and, although there were numerous vociferous critics of clerical standards and behaviour, the institutional church was generally in good heart. Only during the extraordinary period in the 12th and 13th centuries, when money was being poured into the creation of parishes and the building of several thousand parish churches and 19 great cathedrals, was more spent on religion than in the decades between the arrival of the Tudors and the Reformation. And now it was not just great landowners but the people in general who poured money into their churches. Perhaps one in three parish churches underwent major refurbishments in this period. Hundreds of elaborate chantry chapels and altars were erected, money invested in parish guilds doubled (for the benefit of the living in the form of pensions and doles and for the benefit of the dead in the form of masses), and the number of those seeking ordination reached a new peak. In Bedfordshire at least charitable giving was highly selective; some religious orders were much more favoured than others. There is also some evidence that the monastic life and the endowment of monasteries were slowing down, but in essence the church was successfully meeting the spiritual needs of huge numbers of people.
Precisely because of the religiosity of the people, there was a growing volume of complaint about clerical absenteeism and pluralism in general and about the unavailability of the bishops in particular. Many prelates served as the top civil servants of the crown rather than as shepherds of Christ’s flock. And as inflation began to take off, so did attempts by clerics to maximize their incomes by a rather ruthless determination to collect everything to which they were entitled—such as the “best beasts” demanded as mortuary fees from grieving and impoverished parents of dead children. Spasmodic persecution had failed to eradicate the Lollard legacy of John Wycliffe in substantial pockets of southern England, and the infiltration of Lutheran books and of printed Bibles opened the eyes of some among the learned and among those who traded with the Baltic states and the Low Countries to the possibility of alternative ways of encountering God. The powerful force of the “Word” took hold of some and made the mumbling of prayers, the billowing of incense, and the selling of indulgences to rescue souls from the due penalty of their sins seem the stuff of idolatry and not of true worship. But in 1532, when Henry VIII began to contemplate a schism from Rome, embracing Protestantism was the last thing on his mind, and very few of his subjects would have wished him to do so. The break with Rome
With Wolsey and his papal authority gone, Henry turned to the authority of the state to obtain his annulment. The so-called Reformation Parliament that first met in November 1529 was unprecedented; it lasted seven years, enacted 137 statutes (32 of which were of vital importance), and legislated in areas that no medieval Parliament had ever dreamed of entering. “King in Parliament” became the revolutionary instrument by which the medieval church was destroyed.
Cranmer, ThomasThomas Cranmer, detail of an oil painting by Gerlach Flicke, 1545; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London
The first step was to intimidate the church, and in 1531 the representatives of the clergy who were gathered in Convocation were forced under threat of praemunire (a statute prohibiting the operation of the legal and financial jurisdiction of the pope without royal consent) to grant Henry a gift of £119,000 and to acknowledge him supreme head of the church “as far as the law of Christ allows.” Then the government struck at the papacy, threatening to cut off its revenues; the Annates Statute of 1532 empowered Henry, if he saw fit, to abolish payment to Rome of the first year’s income of all newly installed bishops. The implied threat had little effect on the pope, and time was running out, for by December 1532 Anne Boleyn was pregnant, and on January 25, 1533, she was secretly married to Henry. If the king was to be saved from bigamy and if his child was to be born in holy wedlock, he had less than eight months to get rid of Catherine of Aragon. Archbishop William Warham had conveniently died in August 1532, and in March 1533 a demoralized and frightened pontiff sanctioned the installation of Thomas Cranmer as primate of the English church.