Whatever Happened to the English Reformation?

The story goes that a revisionist historian was once asked, 'What's new about the English Reformation?' 'There wasn't one,' came the reply. Of course, we should not take this sort of anecdote too literally, but it does introduce us to an important theme in the study of English religious history in the early modern period. So far, revisionist scholarship has always stressed that the State's attempts to alter the people's religion were slow to take effect and did little to eliminate popery as the greatest threat to the stability of the realm. Never was this more so than during Henry VIII's 'Reformation'.

Revisionism has given us a healthy scepticism when it comes to the grand designs of history. We have turned our attention away from looking exclusively at the 'official reformation' and devoted more time to its grass- roots effects. We have moved from the Public Record Office to diocesan archives. In political history, we have studied the semi-official organs of government, such as the Household, and relied nearly as much on draft material as on final government acta to work out the 'history behind the history'. But by taking popular changes in religious practice as the historical yardstick and by presuming that factional conflict is inimical to following a coherent policy, we have built into our enquiries the assumption that there could exist only one type of successful religious change: a radically Protestant evangelisation of the masses.

Such assumptions are evident in the work of leading revisionists. After a lifetime's meticulous research on the huge diocese of Lincoln, Margaret Bowker firmly concluded that this bishopric was barely less traditional in religion at the end of Henry's reign than it had been at the beginning. Christopher Haigh, whose seminal work on Tudor Lancashire first exposed the slow pace of change in religious practice in the sixteenth century, recently brought in the work of revisionist historians of the Tudor court to Iend further support to the view that Henry's policies towards the Church were of little consequence: 'work on factional politics... has shown the contingency of ecclesiastical policy [under both Henry and his son], and the official reformation now seems hesitant and ineffectual'. The opinion of the foremost historian of court politics, David Starkey, is indeed that the early English reformation was largely the 'work of a court faction'. Given his suggestion, presented in History Today, November 1982, that Henry could be 'in the right hands, supremely manipulable’; it is hardly surprising that other revisionist historians see Henry's ecclesiastical policies as little more than a hotch- potch of contradictory and largely irrelevant reforms.

What we might want to call a 'post- revisionist' view, however, should acknowledge the recent advances in historical technique but couple with it an awareness that there existed in the sixteenth century more than one legitimate form of reformation or reform. There was no 'high road' leading only in the direction of a preaching-based, radically Protestant Reformation which delivered individual souls from a belief in the saving power of an institutionalised Church. By bringing together the official and the grass-roots reformations, we see that the State's coercive power could itself influence the religious beliefs and practices of the people in ways similar to later evangelical sermonising.

The results of recent research into Henry's reign are now available, much of it revealed here for the first time. The moment is therefore particularly well suited for a reassessment. In the absence of any 'political testament' by the king, it is the declarations of faith, Parliamentary statutes, and the general shape of the religious settlement which first reveal what the Crown (and not modern historians) understood to be the objectives in its self-appointed task. Three major points then emerge about the Henrician reform: it was, from first principle, an intellectually coherent and satisfying movement; second, this reform had aims fundamentally different from those of the Edwardian and Elizabethan reformations and the extent of its success needs to be judged accordingly; and finally the development of policy after the break with Rome was based on a perfectly rational appraisal by the king of his own interests and those of his Church.

From the outset, however, we must be clear that we are making a distinction between the calibre of the policies and the calibre of the man. (Only the foolhardy would try to deny that the shabby business of the divorce triggered off the break with Rome.) Whether Henry VIII was 'sincere' in denying papal sovereignty or in believing that Anne Boleyn deserved to die is not relevant. There is no test we can apply to the evidence which would give answers to such questions. On close inspection, motives, like economies, tend always to be mixed. But what we can say is this. The Henrician Supremacy was not just cooked up overnight to get the king out of a tight spot. Rather it was the unforseen culmination of trends that went back to the start of the reign. Most important of all, we can say that proof at least of Henry's commitment to the Supremacy was the adherence throughout his reign to the original implications of the kind of headship that he was politically obliged to erect.

It was tempting to begin this reassessment thus: 'The English Reformation began in June 1509'. It is conceivable that at this date Henry rewrote the coronation oath and, from the moment of his accession, he cultivated a high notion of his kingship. Certainly we have an undated copy of the oath revised in the king's hand. It originally required the monarch to swear to uphold the ancient liberties of the Church, including its right to make laws binding on his subjects. The eighteen-year-old monarch (if such was his age) altered it to read that a king need uphold the Church's rights only so far as his royal conscience would permit and, most important, so long as these privileges were 'lawful and not prejudicial to his Crown or Imperial Jurisdiction'. Possibly the oath was only revised in the 1530s, that is around the time that Parliament in 1533 declared 'This Realm of England is an Empire', yet we can point out that the oath fits in with similar high-flown claims about his kingship which Henry was making in the 1510s.

Historians have often wondered whether Henry did tell Wolsey at a semi-public gathering of lawyers in 1515 that English kings had no superior but God. John Guy has convincingly argued for the authenticity of this statement. We know that Henry's judges at this time were happy to support an elevated conception of the King's power: they fully supported his one-man stand against the abuse of clerical sanctuaries such as Westminster Abbey, and in 1519, when Henry decreed that papal grants had to be confirmed by him, Judge Fyneux asserted that the common law was the same as the law of God!

It is not difficult to imagine that the legal profession was able to accept the Supremacy when it came not because they were weak men who had an inordinate respect for ostensible authority, but because their careers under the young king had inadvertently prepared them to accept – it necessary – the legitimacy of ultimate royal responsibility for the affairs of the Church.

Why were these high-flown claims for royal power any more significant than similar claims over previous centuries? The answer is easy; the political context was different, as shown by the conjunction of the row with the Papacy and the belief widespread among intellectuals that something needed to be done about the' Church. Several German princes had already wrested ecclesiastical authority from the Pope, who had also been forced to surrender a considerable degree of control over the Church to the kings of France. and Spain. Christopher Haigh in a classic examination of anticlericalism dissected the so-called evidence for widespread feelings against the clerical estate. He showed that the clamour for reform came not from the population as a whole but just from very specific interest-groups, such as lawyers, proto-Protestants, or just plain enemies of Cardinal Wolsey. Quite right: but this is to redefine anticlericalism, and to redefine it in a much more plausible and therefore useful way.

It would be wrong to give the slightest suggestion that Henry was at the start of his reign anything other them a devoted son of the Roman Church. In 1521 he made some rather fulsome claims for papal power. in the tract against Martin Luther which earned him the title of Defender of the Faith. (Ironically, it was Sir Thomas More who 'tried to dissuade the king from making such claims for the papacy on the grounds that the King might one' day tall out with Rome.) It is important to realise, though, that when Henry decided on, or realised the divine compulsion for, a divorce, there had already been within the span of his own reign years of discussion of the sorts of ideas that were to pave the way for a solution to his marital problems. There were alternative 'modes of thinking' just waiting to be tapped in the event of a crisis between the Church and the Crown; this does not tell us whether Henry's reform was wrapped in sincerity, but it should persuade us that his reform was not intellectually naked.

Let us look at one specific example. It was long ago pointed out that the vast majority of Henry's bishops who had studied law at the two Universities remained conservative in religion and readily accepted the Royal Supremacy, whereas theologically trained bishops tended to be either martyrs for Rome or more likely supporters of a more radical approach to reforming the English Church. At first it was thought this simply reflected on a lawyers' penchant for the ostensible authority of the State. Recent historians have hinted at how an education in the civil law could make it intellectually easier, as it were, for someone to accept the Supremacy. For an example we need look no further than to what became in effect the official defence of the Supremacy, 'On True Obedience', written in 'l535 by the conservative bishop of Winchester. Bishop Gardiner was originally sceptical about the Legitimacy of the king's headship, but when commanded to justify it in print one of the ways in which he did so was precisely by reverting back to 'alternative ways of thinking'. To prove a secular ruler's right to legislate in matters of faith, Gardiner just copied out – one by one – the first dozen headings on such matters of faith that he found in the Codex Justinianus, the law-code'. of the Byzantine emperor of the sixth century, one of the more basic set of texts that he had used during his under- graduate days at Trinity Hall in Cambridge.

In the past few years, we have come to recognise the importance of a set of documents which formed the blue- print for the break with Rome, the Collectanea Satis Copiosa or, as it is more quaintly known, the Sufficiently Large Collection. It gathers together evidence to prove how the issue of the divorce could be settled in England without reference to the Pope. Strongly influenced by biblical humanism, this document placed more reliance on the example of the Old Testament kings than on Byzantine emperors to show that princes were ordained of Cod to rule over both body and soul of their subjects. The Collectanea was assembled by the Autumn of l530, or at the latest by 1531, its authors including Edwvard Foxe, the king's Almoner, and the already influential Thomas Cranmer.

The Collectanea is as scholarly as it is dull. Whether there is a connection between the two is not for me to say, but it is important to note that it proved more than a little difficult for Henry's secular politicians to handle. The theologically sophisticated king annotated the document in over forty places, but when the Duke of Norfolk attempted to summarise some of its arguments, he came hopelessly and embarrassingly unstuck. On one occasion the duke tried to persuade the Imperial ambassador that King Arthur had been Emperor of Germany, to which the envoy effectively replied, and why not Asia as well!

The task facing Henry's scholars was to find a solution to the specific problem of annulling a king's marriage to the former wife of his own brother. This point is central to our rehabilitation of Henry's policies, as it laid down a kind of 'internal logic' for the Henrician reform.

Two things were required of Henry's ecclesiological settlement. On the one hand there needed to be established the doctrinal principle that scripture was superior to papal or canon law in interpreting the will of God (the nub of the king's argument being that scripture forbade the very marriage to Katherine which the papacy was prepared to permit); and on the other it needed to affirm a belief in what is called the 'Church Visible' (that is, a Church which was not just an informal gathering of like-minded Christians or 'true believers). We could describe it as a legally definable corporation, over which the lay ruler could wield the authority necessary to procure his divorce and which was imbued with the power to ratify that divorce. A collection of autonomous congregations or an episcopally-led attack on papal authority could not have guaranteed these requirements. We will return to this important point about the Church Visible.

The result of these two necessities gave a coherence to the nature and task of Henry's Church which earlier revisionist historians, with an eye to the Elizabethan and Edwardian reformations, have not appreciated. For instance, the need to emphasise scripture ensured that the Catholic Church in England would be purified along biblical lines. This is precisely what the Henrician Reform did. In intention at least it caused nothing less than a turnabout in the practices of the parish church. To grasp the magnitude of this change we have to understand a little about the context. Owing to the fear of the native lay heresy, Lollardy, England had up till this time been the only major European country without an fairly accessible vernacular translation of the scriptures. Yet, within less than a decade of the break with Rome, the English parish church had gone from being one in which the scriptures had been largely taboo to one where the Bible had a place of honour. Henry authorised the first legal English translation of the Bible; in 1538 his Vicegerent-in-Spirituals not only ordered that a copy should be placed in every parish church but in 1543 it was further ordained that extracts from each Testament should be read during all services on Sundays or holy days.

Certainly it is extremely hard to tell how far anyone took any notice of those innovations. We know there was great resistance to paying out the fourteen shillings or so for a copy of the Great Bible; but even in the one division of darkest Lancashire for which we have figures it would appear that by 1552 well over half the churches had a copy of this most expensive book.

The authority of scripture became the paramount means of establishing what was God's will during the Henrician Reform. Yet the fact that the English king's supremacy was over a national church also insulated it from the extreme fundamentalism of some continental reforms. To the reformers of, say, a Strassburg or other versions of the Godly Republic of Geneva, the true church had consisted throughout Christian history of little more than small bands of true believers. Hussites or Albigensians were examples. They were not only persecuted throughout history by the established Church but were also, horror of Henrician horrors, self-disciplining, potentially outside the scope of a state church. Henry's great formularies of faith issued in 1537 and, in modified form, in 1543 – the Bishops' Book and the King's Book – both made clear that, though the Church contained false or hypocritical members, so long as they did:

Consent and agree... outwardly in the doctrine of the Gospel and in all other things appertaining to Christ's religion, they must be accepted and reputed here in the world for the very members of Christ's mystical body and that they ought not nor can be dissevered from [it] until the day of judgement.

As a nationwide community, Henry's Church had to incorporate all his subjects, so the division of Christians into the elect or saved (who, incidentally, formed the Church Invisible) and the reprobate or damned had few if any practical considerations.

Now it follows from the concept of the Visible Church that the testimony of its institutions had some value, at least as a witness to the historical importance of biblical doctrine. In other words, the English Church under Henry was entitled to interpret scripture in the light of the traditions of the early church, before the Bishop of Rome 'usurped' the power of princes. The Henrician reform could claim to be a scriptural church – it had to be to get Henry his divorce – yet was nonetheless able to retain all those bishops and images, neither of which strictly speaking is sanctioned in the Bible and so annoyed radical would-be friends of Henry on the continent. The sorts of limited reforms which Henry initiated, say in his Injunctions of 1536 and 1538 (regulating the cult of saints, for instance), are not then half-hearted or hesitant. Nor do they form an Erasmian 'middle way' in religion, picking and choosing between various theological standpoints. Political considerations shaped Henry's Church, which therefore retained essential Catholic doctrine. It only resorted to 'Protestant' measures in the guise of vernacular statement of faith, bibles, and prayers in order to transmit that doctrine. Individuals like Archbishop Cranmer in Kent or protégés of Thomas Cromwell admittedly went further than the king wished in questioning traditional doctrine by supporting radical evangelisation in their localities. Their uncoordinated efforts were, however, insignificant so long as nationally the Crown's policies towards the Church were a consistent and legitimate working out of the logic of the religious settlement.

It is not difficult to show that the official aims of the Henrician Reform were fundamentally different from those of the Edwardian or Elizabethan Churches (which is why it is helpful to distinguish between an earlier Reform and the subsequent desire for Reformation). We need only to take a little further the implications of Henry's setting up of a headship over a Visible Church, a Church whose origins stretched back through the interlude of papal aggrandisement to the age of Christ and the Old Testament kings. The Church had conveyed through the centuries the meaning and interpretation of what was scripturally necessary for salvation. The Church as an institution was itself important: its priests were the only people who could administer the sacraments necessary for a full Christian life, principally the eurharist with its miraculously transformed body of Christ. In other words, the concept of a Visible Church implied that all that was necessary for salvation was given by the Church to the people.

The conversion of the individual is, of course, the acid test of a radical Protestantism. It requires an abandonment of faith in the Church as an historical and uniquely sanctifying institution. But under Henry VIII the Church continued to save, and so the best way to help the man in the pew was by making the Church as an institution and even as a building more efficient. Far from being hesitant or ineffectual, Henry's reforms were solid and practical. They were not meant to be much else. No new Church exclusively of the elect was being established. An old one was simply being restored to an earlier purity and effectiveness.

Take for example the reorganisation of the Church's structure. Half a dozen new dioceses were created. The massive diocese of Lincoln, mentioned earlier, was 'rationalised' by being split up into three, more coherent, bishoprics with the creation out of its south-western archdeaconries of the sees of Oxford and of Peterborough. The fact that they were under-endowed represents at best Henry's distance from everyday finance. At worst – and much more likely – it represents Henry's niggardliness. Being such a conservative, Henry had the delightful notion that you could get better for less. (Who else but Henry would have set up a 'semi-detached' cathedral as he did at Oxford?) Equally we could take the question of idolatry. The best way of preventing the people from falling into the error of worshipping false gods was to remove any images that were abused. If we accept the recent findings of Robert Whiting on the south-west of England, improper images were removed quickly and efficiently by the government's agents with the minimum of fuss. Whiting has also found that, though images which were not worshipped remained perfectly legal, parish churches ceased abruptly to purchase in the l530s any new statues of saints or even rood lofts. The cult, if it had not been eliminated, then at least had suffered a grievous and possibly terminal injury. This is at the heart of the post- revisionists point of view: an unsolicited practical intervention from above resulting in an alteration to popular attitudes. Post-revisionism indeed!

The twin characteristics of Henry's Reform were not to survive into his son's reign. Under Edward VI, the notion enshrined in Henry's settlement that the Church saved lost ground to a view that salvation was something ' like 'everyman for himself, which crudely speaking is how sixteenth-century Catholics denounced justification by faith alone. In the writings of the radical Protestant, John Bale, who returned from exile in the old king's reign to become bishop of Ossory in the new; the Pope became in the biblical term, Antichrist, that is, the very personification of evil. Surprisingly perhaps, this had never been the case in the Henrician Church. Henry needed to preserve the historical continuity of his Church and all that it entailed, even through the Papalist interlude of the Middle Ages. Anti-papal legislation was careful to acknowledge the Pope's legitimate authority over the Roman diocese's, and the act 'extinguishing the authority of the' Bishop of Rome' stressed the temporary nature of the Pope's 'pretended power and usurped authority', which 'for a long season had been beguiling Englishmen. Perhaps most surprising, of all, the Henrician apologist Stephen Gardiner had been permitted to say' in 'On True Obedience' that the Bishop of Rome (far from being Antichrist) had once stood guard over true doctrine and might yet exercise' an informal supremacy over matters spiritual!

This 'post-revisionist' view must end with an all too brief examination of the complicated relationship between court faction and religious policy. If we accept the political coherence of the Reform, then by default comparatively little' scope is left for courtly manipulation of Henry's concern for his Church. The influence first of Anne Boleyn then Cromwell, and finally the Duke of Norfolk and the bishop of Winchester coloured but did not obliterate the ground rules for the settlement.

Henry was capable of making up his own mind concerning the direction of religious policy, that is whenever he felt the urge to be decisive. During the drafting of the Act of Six Articles of 1539, which reaffirmed the English position of maintaining essential Catholic doctrine despite the break with Rome, the king overturned the opinion of the majority of his prelates by deciding that confession to a priest was not necessary according to the law of God. He also arbitrarily added the vow of widowhood to a list of other vows which were to be legally enforceable – Henry was always concerned for other people's chastity.

Moreover, new evidence has come to light which shows that the 1540s continued to a greater degree than previously realised the kinds of reforming policies associated with Thomas Cromwell's period of office. They did not end with the greater political influence accorded to Norfolk, Gardiner, and Lord Chancellor Wriothesley. (It was, after all, the decade of the English Litany, which first introduced the vernacular into the routine worship of the Church.) We now understand that the 1542 meeting of Convocation, the Church's parliament, was not an attempt to sabotage the authorised English translation of the Bible by turning back some of its most theologically important passages into Latin. It was instead an abortive attempt by the more old-fashioned bishops to have a better (meaning more conservative), translation in English provided for the people. The Great Bible then in use was a hand-me-down version based on a Protestant original. Though drafted into official service it had never fitted in with the statements of faith that Henry's bishops sanctioned.

Henry's own 'Golden Speech' to Parliament in 1545 shows that, as far as the king was concerned, the spiritual coherence implicit in his particular religious settlement did not fade towards the end of his life. Taking the unusual step of speaking from the throne and not through the Lord Chancellor, the king attacked both the 'murnpsimus' of those too attached to the unreformed practices of Rome and the 'sumpsimus' of those keen to overthrow what had been sanctioned by earlier Christians. Stressing his idiosyncratic mixture of the authority of scripture with that of the Church, he told those permitted to read Holy Writ that if they had doubts about its interpretation they were to 'resort unto the learned or at least to the higher powers'.

We must be careful not to diminish, though, our new-found understanding of the importance of factional politics. But we have seen that this has on occasion been employed to belittle the coherence of the Henrician settlement. It is a moot point whether the true significance of factional politics was really that groups of politicians and courtiers used the king to further their preferred religious or military alliances. Henry was well aware that individual ministers favoured certain policies and alliances and not others. The preferences of certain factions rather gave Henry room for political manoeuvre (indeed for the breaking up of old alliances), without his having to forgo that air of intimacy with courtiers which we now accept was the hallmark of Henry's kingship. This explains why Thomas Cromwell and his circle achieved such prominence in the 1530s, though at the cost to the king of encouraging their more radical followers among the clergy. If Henry was to protect the type of reform of the Church to which he was committed (not to mention his crown!), he needed to promote highly motivated courtiers who would relish the fight against the Catholic powers in Europe which still paid at least lip-service to Rome – France and the Habsburg Empire. Cromwell was more than willing to work towards an understanding with the radical German princes. His genius was to hold together this anti-papal alliance, enlarging in the process a network of friends at the courts of German princes who were hostile to the Papacy. Consequently there were numerous contacts between English and Lutheran divines when invasion threatened in the 1530s. Though we tend to forget that no agreement on a radical doctrinal statement was forth- coming (the king had not intended one), the flurry of activity nonetheless produced by such conferences achieved Henry's aim of creating the veneer of an anti-Roman front in the face of the military threat posed by papal supporters. Such discussions were not continued in the last years of the reign. The fear of invasion had ceased to the extent that England and the Emperor invaded France.

By 1540, Cromwell had outlived his usefulness. The Franco-Imperial alliance had collapsed and Henry was able to rid himself of a minister whose identification with the Lutheran princelings of Germany had become an embarrassment for a monarch conscious of his own royal status as well as determined to preserve essential Catholic doctrine. The king was not bamboozled into destroying Cromwell on false charges of heresy. It has recently been demonstrated that these only came later in the parliamentary history of the minister's attainder. Therefore Henry seems to have consciously made up his mind to permit Cromwell's enemies to destroy the one and only Vicegerent-in- Spirituals on charges of treason which were patently absurd. With Cromwell out of the way, the king was able to promote more old-fashioned councillors who would now work to reinvigorate the old alliance with the Catholic emperor in a war against France. Similarly there were good politico-religious reasons for destroying Anne Boleyn in 1536. The death of Katherine of Aragon earlier in the year had paved the way for a marriage that would be recognised throughout Europe. But the price that Henry had to pay for employing factional rivalries was to sacrifice other victims besides Anne. Far from being the vacillating monarch – a prisoner of his own courtiers – the court conflicts of the reign may well indicate that Henry adopted a level-headed, though thoroughly ruthless, attitude to what he rightly or wrongly saw as in the best interests of his Church.

Lord Herbert of Cherbury wrote in the seventeenth century that, because Henry so frequently burnt both reformers and papists, 'his enemies said... he seemed to be of no religion. 'Howbeit', Herbert went on, 'this was pure calumny, for Henry stood firmly to his own reformation.' The king was certainly no saint, but the policies he pursued were not entirely inconsistent with his role as Supreme Head of the Church.