Henry VIII & his reign

Francis I of France tried to take advantage of this breakdown between Henry and Charles. He gave tacit support to Henry’s call for the Pope to nullify his marriage to Catherine. As a result both men met in great splendour at Calais in October 1532, where Francis greetedAnne Boleyn as if she was queen. Francis planned to help Henry further. In October 1533, Francis was due to sign a treaty with Pope Clement VII, which Francis hoped would include some settlement to Henry’s problem. Francis was not being altruistic – he simply wanted to create a powerful bloc against the Habsburgs. Henry ended this try by Francis when he made it plain that he planned to resolve the issue by himself.   

Henry himself had to play a delicate diplomatic game. He knew with a degree of certainty that Francis was only ‘befriending’ him as part of an alliance against Charles V. The last thing Henry wanted was to become involved in a war between France and the Habsburgs – yet he did not want to antagonise Francis. The geographic distance between Vienna and England was sufficient to convince Henry that England was safe from Charles V. However, France was a different matter. When Francis made discreet overtures about marriage between his son and either Mary or Elizabeth, Henry failed to respond. He simply did not want to become embroiled in France politics.

Francis and Charles concentrated on one another after the death of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, in 1535. Both concentrated their efforts on who should succeed him – thus leaving Henry with a degree of freedom with regards to his foreign policy. He pursued his desired for policy of neutrality. English diplomats in France were told to keep relations with Francis “cold”.

 Henry could play this policy while Charles and Francis directed their foreign policies at one another. The one thing that Henry feared was an alliance between the two. Such an alliance seemed a distinct possibility by 1538. Charles and Francis met at Aigues Mortes in July 1538 in the presence of Pope Paul III. To Henry it appeared as if the major Catholic powers of Europe were pooling their power. On paper, Henry was in a weak position against such united powerful opponents and he tried to break up the Habsburg-Valois entente - he even offered himself for marriage to various French princesses but this came to nothing. In November 1538 Henry involved himself in negotiations for marriage to the niece of Charles V – but this too came to nothing. His position in a Catholic dominated Europe became even weaker when in December 1538 a papal order was dispatched supporting the deposing of Henry. The papal order called Henry “the most cruel and abominable tyrant”. This order made Henry fair game to any Catholic.  

In response to this threat – a threat Henry took very seriously – Henry did a great deal to develop the navy. In 1539, Marillac, the French ambassador in England, wrote of 120 naval ships being based in the mouth of the Thames and 30 in Portsmouth – a considerable increase on the five ships he inherited from Henry VII. Henry ordered the modernisation of all coastal defences on the south coast – much of the material needed for repairs came from nearby monasteries. 

One way that Henry countered this threat was to court the Lutheran princes of North Germany. On paper, they would not have been able to counter the military might of a combined French-Habsburg attack but they held a strategic position in Europe that could have inconvenienced the emperor. In January 1539, talks were held with the Schmalkaldic League but they got bogged down in theological arguments and came to nothing. 

In July 1539, Henry received the agreement of William of Cleves for his sister, Anne, to marry Henry. William was a Catholic in the same mould as Henry and needed an ally of some standing as his position in Europe was threatened by Roman Catholics loyal to the Pope – men such as Francis I and Charles V. On January 6th 1540, Henry married Anne at Greenwich. Francis had allowed Charles to march across his lands in December 1539 to facilitate the putting down of a rebellion in Ghent – the co-operation between the two was a clear worry to Henry. Charles put down the Ghent rebellion but it did not usher in an era of more co-operation between the two, much to the relief of Charles.

 Henry’s ability to maintain a degree of separation from Europe relied, to a great extent, on the fact the Charles and Francis were to all intents, enemies. Any reconciliation was invariably followed by conflict – and this meant that their attention was concentrated on themselves. The 1539 agreement between Charles and Francis was followed in July 1541 by war between the two. Henry could only benefit from this. In February 1543, Henry allied with Charles. They agreed on upholding ancient trade agreements and guaranteeing the other against invasion. They also agreed that there would be a major attack on France within two years. In particular, Henry wanted to gain Boulogne. Henry committed 5,000 troops to an attack on France. On September 14th 1544, Boulogne surrendered to the English and Henry seemed to be on the ascendancy with regards to his position with Francis. However, on September 18th, Charles deserted Henry and made his own peace arrangements with Francis.

 1545 was a year of crisis for Henry. Many expected a French attack and in July 1544 a French force landed at Bembridge on the Isle of Wight. The fleet also intended a landing at Seaford but disease put paid to this. The one saving grace for Henry was that Francis was not in a strong position and he sued for peace. He granted Henry Boulogne for eight years and agreed to pay Henry a pension of 95,000 crowns for the duration of Henry’s lifetime.

Reformation

Henry never formally repudiated the doctrines of the Catholic Church, but he declared himselfsupreme head of the church in England in 1534. This, combined with subsequent actions, eventually resulted in a separated church, the Church of England. Henry and his advisors felt the pope was acting in the role of an Italian prince involved in secular affairs, which obscured his religious role. They said Rome treated England as a minor stepchild, allowing it one cardinal out of fifty, and no possibility of that cardinal becoming pope. For reasons of state it was increasingly intolerable to Henry that major decisions in England were settled by Italians. The divorce issue exemplified the problem but was not itself the cause of the problem.

Henry's reformation of the English church involved more complex motives and methods than his desire for a new wife and an heir. Henry asserted that his first marriage had never been valid, but the divorce issue was only one factor in Henry's desire to reform the church. In 1532–37, he instituted a number of statutes – the act of appeal (Statute in Restraint of Appeals, 1533), the various Acts of Succession (1533, 1534, and 1536), the first Act of Supremacy (1534), and others – that dealt with the relationship between the king and the pope and the structure of the Church of England. During these years, Henry suppressed monasteries and pilgrimage shrines in his attempt to reform the church. The king was always the dominant force in the making of religious policy; his policy, which he pursued skilfully and consistently, is best characterised as a search for the middle way.

 Questions over what was the true faith were resolved with the adoption of the orthodox "Act of Six Articles" (1539) and a careful holding of the balance between extreme factions after 1540. Even so, the era saw movement away from religious orthodoxy, the more so as the pillars of the old beliefs, especially Thomas More and John Fisher, had been unable to accept the change and had been executed in 1535 for refusing to renounce papal authority. Critical for the Henrician reformation was the new political theology of obedience to the prince that was enthusiastically adopted by the Church of England in the 1530s. It reflected Martin Luther's new interpretation of the fourth commandment("Honor thy father and mother") and was mediated to an English audience by William Tyndale. The founding of royal authority on the Ten Commandments, and thus on the word of God, was a particularly attractive feature of this doctrine, which became a defining feature of Henrician religion. Rival tendencies within the Church of England sought to exploit it in the pursuit of their particular agendas. Reformers strove to preserve its connections with the broader framework of Lutheran theology, with the emphasis on faith alone and the word of God, while conservatives emphasised good works, ceremonies, and charity. The Reformers linked royal supremacy and the word of God to persuade Henry to publish the Great Bible in 1539, an English translation that was a formidable prop for his new-found dignity.

Response to the reforms was mixed. The reforms, which closed down monasteries that were the only support of the impoverished alienated most of the population outside of London and helped provoke the great northern rising of 1536–37, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. It was the only real threat to Henry's security on the throne in all his reign. Some 30,000 rebels in nine groups were led by the charismatic Robert Aske, together with most of the northern nobility. Aske went to London to negotiate terms; once there he was arrested, charged with treason and executed. About 200 rebels were executed and the disturbances ended. Elsewhere the changes were accepted and welcomed, and those who clung to Catholic rites kept quiet or moved in secrecy. They would reemerge in the reign of Henry's daughter Mary (1553–58).

Dissolving the monasteries

England possessed numerous religious houses that owned large tracts of land worked by tenants. Henry dissolved them (1536–1541) and transferred a fifth of England's landed wealth to new hands. The program was designed primarily to create a landed gentry beholden to the crown, which would use the lands much more efficiently.

Henry made radical changes in traditional religious practices. He ordered the clergy to preach against superstitious images, relics, miracles, and pilgrimages, and to remove most candles. The catechism of 1545, called the King's Primer, left out the saints. Latin rituals gave way to English. Shrines to saints were destroyed – including the popular one of St. Thomas of Canterbury – and relics were ridiculed as worthless old bones.

King’s great matter : 1525-1533

Henry became impatient with Catherine's inability to produce the heir he desired. All of Catherine's children died in infancy except their daughter Mary. Henry wanted a male heir to consolidate the power of the Tudor dynasty.

In 1525, as Henry grew more impatient, he became enamoured of a charismatic young woman in the Queen's entourage, Anne Boleyn. Anne at first resisted his attempts to seduce her, and refused to become his mistress as her sister Mary Boleyn had. She said "I beseech your highness most earnestly to desist, and to this my answer in good part. I would rather lose my life than my honesty. This refusal made Henry even more attracted, and he pursued her relentlessly.

Eventually, Anne saw her opportunity in Henry's infatuation and determined she would only yield to his embraces as his acknowledged queen. It soon became the King's absorbing desire to annul his marriage to Catherine.

Henry appealed directly to the Holy See, independently from Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, from whom he kept his plans for Anne secret. Instead, Henry's secretary, William Knight, was sent to Pope Clement VII to sue for the annulment. The grounds were that the bull of Pope Julius II was obtained by false pretences, because Catherine's brief marriage to the sickly Arthur had been consummated. Henry petitioned, in the event of annulment, a dispensation to marry again to any woman even in the first degree of affinity, whether the affinity was contracted by lawful or unlawful connection. This clearly had reference to Anne.

However, as the pope was at that time imprisoned by Catherine's nephew, Emperor Charles V, Knight had difficulty in getting access to him, and so only managed to obtain the conditional dispensation for a new marriage. Henry now had no choice but to put the matter into the hands of Wolsey. Wolsey did all he could to secure a decision in the King's favour, going so far as to arrange an ecclesiastical court to meet in England, with a representative from the Pope. Shakespeare's play, Henry VIII, accurately records Catherine of Aragon's astounding coup in that remarkable courtroom in Act II, scene iv. She bows low to Henry, put herself at his mercy, states her case with irrefutable eloquence and then sweeps out of the courtroom, a woman both formidable and clearly wronged. However much this moment swayed those present and the rest of the world to her side, the Pope had never had any intention of empowering his legate. Charles V resisted the annulment of his aunt's marriage, but it is not clear how far this influenced the pope. But it is clear that Henry saw that the Pope was unlikely to give him an annulment from the Emperor's aunt. The pope forbade Henry to proceed to a new marriage before a decision was given in Rome, not in England. Wolsey bore the blame. Convinced that he was treacherous, Anne Boleyn maintained pressure until Wolsey was dismissed from public office in 1529. After being dismissed, the cardinal begged her to help him return to power, but she refused. He then began a plot to have Anne forced into exile and began communication with Queen Catherine and the Pope to that end. When this was discovered, Henry ordered Wolsey's arrest and had it not been for his death from illness in 1530, he might have been executed for treason. His replacement, Sir Thomas More, initially cooperated with the king's new policy, denouncing Wolsey in Parliament and proclaiming the opinion of the theologians at Oxford and Cambridge that the marriage of Henry to Catherine had been unlawful. As Henry began to deny the authority of the Pope, More's qualms grew.

A year later, Queen Catherine was banished from court and her rooms were given to Anne. With Wolsey gone, Anne had considerable power over political matters. She was an unusually educated and intellectual woman for her time, and was keenly absorbed and engaged with the ideas of the Protestant Reformers. When Archbishop of Canterbury William Warham died, Anne had the Boleyn family's chaplain, Thomas Cranmer, appointed to the vacant position. Through the intervention of the King of France, this was conceded by Rome, the pallium being granted to him by Clement.

Breaking the power of Rome in England proceeded slowly. In 1532, a lawyer who was a supporter of Anne, Thomas Cromwell, brought beforeParliament a number of acts including the Supplication against the Ordinaries and the Submission of the Clergy, which recognised Royal Supremacy over the church. Following these acts, Thomas More resigned as Chancellor, leaving Cromwell as Henry's chief minister.

In the winter of 1532 Henry attended a meeting with Francis I of France at Calais in which he enlisted the support of the French king for his new marriage. Immediately upon returning to Dover in England, Henry and Anne went through a secret wedding service. She soon became pregnant and there was a second wedding service in London on 25 January 1533. On 23 May 1533, Cranmer, sitting in judgment at a special court convened at Dunstable Priory to rule on the validity of the king's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, declared the marriage of Henry and Catherine null and void. Five days later, on 28 May 1533, Cranmer declared the marriage of Henry and Anne to be valid.

Catherine was formally stripped of her title as queen, and Anne was crowned queen consort on 1 June 1533. The queen gave birth to a daughter slightly prematurely on 7 September 1533. The child was christened Elizabeth, in honour of Henry's mother, Elizabeth of York. Rejecting the decisions of the Pope, Parliament validated the marriage of Henry and Anne with the First Succession Act (Act of Succession 1533). Catherine's daughter, Mary, was declared illegitimate, and Anne's issue were declared next in the line of succession. Most notable in this declaration was a clause repudiating "any foreign authority, prince or potentate". All adults in the Kingdom were required to acknowledge the Act's provisions by oath; those who refused were subject to imprisonment for life. Any publisher or printer of any literature alleging that the marriage was invalid was automatically guilty of high treason and could be punished by death.

Separation from Rome 1533-1540

Meanwhile, Parliament had forbidden all appeals to Rome and exacted the penalties of praemunire against all who introduced papal bulls into England. Parliament prohibited the Church from making any regulations (canons) without the king's consent. It was only then that Pope Clement at last took the step of launching sentences of excommunication against Henry and Thomas Cranmer, declaring at the same time the archbishop's decree of annulment to be invalid and the marriage with Anne null and papal nuncio was withdrawn from England and diplomatic relations with Rome were broken off. Several more laws were passed in England. The Ecclesiastical Appointments Act 1534required the clergy to elect bishops nominated by the Sovereign. The Act of Supremacy in 1534 declared that the King was "the only Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England" and the Treasons Act 1534 made it high treason, punishable by death, to refuse to acknowledge the King as such. In response to the excommunications, the Peter's Pence Act was passed in and it reiterated that England had "no superior under God, but only your Grace" and that Henry's "imperial crown" had been diminished by "the unreasonable and uncharitable usurpations and exactions" of the Pope.

In defiance of the Pope the Church of England was now under Henry’s control, not Rome's. Protestant Reformers still faced persecution, particularly over objections to Henry's annulment. Many fled abroad where they met further difficulties, including the influential William Tyndale, who was eventually burned at King Henry's behest. Theological and practical reforms would follow only under Henry's successors (see end of section).

The king and queen were not pleased with married life. The royal couple enjoyed periods of calm and affection, but Anne refused to play the submissive role expected of her. The vivacity and opinionated intellect that had made her so attractive as an illicit lover made her too independent for the largely ceremonial role of a royal wife, given that Henry expected absolute obedience from those who interacted with him in an official capacity at court. It made her many enemies. For his part, Henry disliked Anne’s constant irritability and violent temper. After afalse pregnancy or miscarriage in 1534, he saw her failure to give him a son as a betrayal. As early as Christmas 1534, Henry was discussing with Cranmer and Cromwell the chances of leaving Anne without having to return to Catherine. Opposition to Henry's religious policies was quickly suppressed in England. A number of dissenting monks were tortured and executed. The most prominent resisters included John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and Sir Thomas More, Henry's former Lord Chancellor, both of whom refused to take the oath to the King and were subsequently convicted of high treason and beheaded at Tower Hill, just outside the Tower of London.