Читать книгу Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity - David Starkey - Страница 19

On 19 January 1531, Convocation, the parliament of the English Church, met in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey. It faced an unprecedented charge – of exceeding its spiritual authority. Henry offered it pardon, in return for £100,000. Fatally, the clerics agreed to pay. Having forced them to admit their error, Henry increased his price: the clergy must acknowledge that the king was ‘sole protector and also supreme head of the Church in England’ with responsibility for the ‘cure of souls’ of his subjects. Over the next two weeks they fought that demand word by word and letter by letter.

Finally, subject to overwhelming royal pressure, the Archbishop of Canterbury proposed that Henry should be accepted as Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England ‘as far as the law of Christ would allow’. His announcement was greeted with a stunned silence, which the archbishop ingeniously took to mean consent. The weasel words ‘as far as the law of Christ allows’ meant what anybody wanted it to mean, and the next year they were dropped. Until then, the Pope had still been acknowledged as nominal head of the international Church. But Henry’s new direction was radical. The Pope was left as a sort of figurehead, but kings in their realms held a power directly from God. Also, in 1532, the House of Commons, having been given the green light by Henry’s council, submitted a provacatively-worded position against the Church’s remaining independent legislative power. This was a step too far and Convocation repudiated the arguments of the position with outrage.

Their reply was brought before the king who reacted by screwing up the pressure. On 10 May he ordered the clergy to submit to royal authority: all new clerical legislation would in future be subject to royal assent and existing law would be examined and annulled by a royal commission. This was a direct order from the king. Nevertheless, the clergy persisted in their defiance, citing scripture in defence of their rights and privileges against secular interference. The king’s response was a hammerblow. He summoned a delegation from Parliament and uttered those famous and emotive words: ‘well beloved subjects, we thought that the clergy of our realm had been our subjects wholly, but now we have well perceived that they be but half our subjects, yea, and scarce our subjects: for all the prelates at their consecration make an oath to the Pope clean contrary to the oath they make to us.’

In effect, Henry was accusing the clergy in its entirety of treason for giving oaths of loyalty to someone other than the king. In the face of this, convocation had little choice but to surrender. On 15 May, it caved in, and gave up its independence. Parliamentary statute would dot the i’s on Henry’s new title of Supreme Head. But all the crucial stops had been taken. Henry had also broken Magna Charta and the first clause of his own coronation oath, by which he had sworn that the Church in England should be free.

And he had become a bigamist as well. In October 1532, Anne finally gave in and slept with Henry. By Christmas she was pregnant, and in January 1533, in strictest secrecy, Henry married her, despite the fact that Catherine was still legally his wife. A solution was now urgent. If Henry’s second marriage was not declared valid, then the child (a boy if all was well) would be a bastard. The future of the Tudor dynasty would once again be in danger. The next month, Cranmer was made Archbishop of Canterbury. He was placed in the uncomfortable position of having to swear loyalty to the Pope, even though his purpose, as archbishop, was to implement the divorce and complete the break with Rome. ‘I did not acknowledge [the Pope’s] authority’, he swore in a secret disclaimer, ‘any further than as it is agreed with the express word of God, and that it might be lawful for me at all times to speak against him, and so impugn his errors, when time and occasion should serve me.’

Time and occasion arrived very soon. Cramner derived his authority from Henry – God’s representative in England – not the Pope, despite the oath he had made. It was Henry, in this capacity, who gave him permission to determine the validity of his marriage to Catherine, ‘because ye be, under us, by God’s calling and ours, the most principal minister of our spiritual jurisdiction within this our realm’.

A new trial was held at Dunstable Priory in Bedfordshire. Catherine was not represented, and crucial documents were missing. This did not matter. Using the verdict of the universities, Cramner ruled the first marriage void and upheld Henry’s marriage to Anne. There would be no appeal to Rome. After seven years, Henry had the woman and queen he wanted. The London crowds grumbled, Charles V was furious and the Pope eventually excommunicated the king. But Henry and Anne defied them all.

Henry’s second marriage and its intellectual foundation in the Act of Royal Supremacy, which finally passed into statute in November 1534, were profoundly divisive. Some opposed them viscerally because they hated Anne or loved the old Church. Others were more nuanced and, subtlest of all, as befits the man who warned Henry about exaggerating the Pope’s powers when the king wrote the Assertio, was Henry’s old friend and counsellor, Sir Thomas More. Opponents of whatever sort were whipped into line by laws, which required them to swear oaths upholding the new settlement. They had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Royal Supremacy. They also had to swear to the Act of Succession, which declared that Henry and Anne’s baby daughter Elizabeth was the true heir. The implications went deeper than merely ratifying the king’s marital and dynastic decisions. By agreeing, the country was being made to acknowledge that the break with Rome was permanent, and to assent to it. To refuse the oath meant treason and death. Thomas More was still loyal to the papacy, and he knew that his conscience forbade him to take the oath.

Thomas More was imprisoned in steadily worsening conditions in a cell in the Tower for over a year. But when, on 1 July 1535, he was removed for his trial at Westminster Hall, it looked as though he might escape with his life. More now did what he hitherto steadfastly refused to do and spoke his mind. He could not be guilty, he said, because the English Parliament could not make Henry VIII Supreme Head of the Church, for the common consent of Christendom, of which England was a tiny part, gave that title to the Pope and had done for over a thousand years. The judges reacted with consternation to the force of More’s argument. But the Lord Chief Justice recovered the situation with a characteristic piece of English legal positivism. English law was what the English Parliament said it was, he asserted. More was condemned and beheaded on 6 July.

Working with Parliament rather than against it, Henry had hugely outdone his father. He had invested the so-called Imperial Crown with a truly imperial authority over Church and state. He would even get his hands on more land and money than the ravenous Henry VII could have dreamt of, and he got it by plundering the wealth of the Church.

Henry’s personal authority over the Church gave him access to incredible riches. There were about five hundred monasteries scattered over England, some desperately poor but many rich and well run, and maintaining a thousand-year-old tradition of prayer, work and learning. But a change of intellectual fashion away from monasticism made them vulnerable, and their collective wealth made them tempting. So in 1536, the process of dissolving the monasteries began. At first, the objective was presented as reform. The habits of the religious community were investigated and vices and irregularities were found, many petty and some serious. In the guise of enforcing the rules, all the smaller monasteries and abbeys were dissolved and ransacked. But it soon turned to outright abolition: the zeal of the investigators ensured that abuses were found in every aspect of monastic life. By 1540 the last abbey had gone and the Crown had accrued a fortune. The monks were pensioned off and their lands, buildings and treasures confiscated. A few abbeys were retained as parish churches or cathedrals, but most were not. They were stripped of the lead on their roofs, the gold and jewels on their shrines, and left to rot. It was desecration and sacrilege on the grandest scale.

It provoked shock, outrage and, finally, open revolt. If the full implications of the Supremacy were not fully appreciated at the time, the spoliation of the monasteries made real the break with Rome and the change in the nation’s religious life. And it was too much for many. The result was that in the autumn of 1536 Henry faced the worst crisis of his reign, the rebellion known as ‘The Pilgrimage of Grace’. The first uprising was in Lincolnshire, and spread quickly across the North of England. Under their banner of the Five Wounds of Christ, noblemen and peasants joined together, demanding the restoration of the monasteries and the return of the old religion. Monks and priests played a leading part in the revolt, preaching incendiary sermons and even wearing armour. Adam Sedbar, abbot at Jervaulx Abbey, wasn’t one of them. Instead, when the rebel hordes turned up at the gates of his monastery, he fled to the surrounding moorland. But the threat to burn down his monastery forced him to return, however reluctantly, and join the revolt.

Secure in their control of the North, the formidable, welldisciplined rebel army marched south. By the time they reached Doncaster, only the king’s much smaller forces stood between them and London and, perhaps, Henry’s throne.

Scawsby Leys, now an unprepossessing track, was once the line of the Great North Road where it crosses the broad plain of the northern bank of the River Don. And it was here at dawn on the morning of 26 October that the rebels called a general muster of their troops. The flower of the North was there, and when the final count was taken they numbered 30,000 men with another 12,000 in reserve at Pontefract. It was the largest army that England had seen since the Wars of the Roses, and it wasn’t the king’s. But even though the rebels faced only 8000 of Henry’s forces, they chose to negotiate. They persuaded themselves that the attack on the Church was the work not of the king but of his wicked advisers like Cranmer. They were also double-crossed by the king’s representative. He promised them pardon and, believing him, the huge rebel army dispersed.

But a few months later, a new minor revolt in the North gave Henry the excuse he needed to break his promises and exact revenge. The leaders of the revolt were arrested and sent to London for trial. Henry was especially severe on clerics who had been involved, even when, like Abbot Sedbar of Jervaulx, they had been coerced into joining the revolt. Sedbar was arrested with the rest and sent to the Tower. Then he was tried, condemned and saw Jervaulx Abbey confiscated. The aristocratic leaders of the revolt were beheaded, but the rest, including Sedbar himself, suffered the full horrors of hanging, drawing and quartering. Henry’s supreme headship of the Church, which had begun in the name of freeing England from the papal yoke, was turning into a new royal tyranny, to be enforced in blood.

No one was exempt. In May 1536, after only three years of marriage, Anne was executed on trumped-up charges of adultery, incest and sexual perversion. But her real crimes were less exotic. She had failed to adjust from the dominant role of mistress to the submissive role of wife and, above all, like Catherine before her, she had failed to give Henry a son.

Within twenty-four hours of Anne’s execution Henry was betrothed again, and on 30 May he married his third wife, Jane Seymour. Demure and submissive, conservative in religion, Jane was everything that Anne was not. And in October 1537 she did what Anne and Catherine had both failed to do, and gave birth to a healthy son and heir, Edward. Jane died a few days later of puerperal fever, but the boy lived and became Henry’s pride and joy.

All the problems that had led to the break with Rome – the king’s first two disputed marriages, his lack of a male heir – were now solved. With the occasions of the dispute out of the way, why didn’t the naturally conservative Henry return to the bosom of the Roman Church?

The answer lies in Hans Holbein’s great dynastic mural of Henry VIII (page 6 of plate section). The original, of which only a copy survives, was sited in the king’s private apartments and as such takes us into his very mind. The date, 1537, is the year of Prince Edward’s birth. In the foreground is the proud father, Henry VIII, together with the recently deceased mother, Jane Seymour. Behind are Henry’s own parents, Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, while in the middle there are inscribed Latin verses which explain the meaning of the painting. ‘Which is the Greater,’ the verses ask, ‘the father or the son?’ ‘Henry VII was great,’ they reply, ‘for he brought to an end the Wars of the Roses. But Henry VIII was greater, indeed the greatest for while he was King true religion was restored and the power of Popes trodden under foot.’

This, then, is why Henry refused to return to Rome. The Supremacy may have begun as a mere convenient device to facilitate his marriage to Anne Boleyn. But it had quickly taken on a life of its own as Henry had persuaded himself that it was his birthright, raison d’être and above all his passport to fame, not only in relation to Henry VII and all the other Kings of England, but in the eyes of posterity as well.

Henry had got what he wanted. But to do so he’d had to use ideas based on Lutheranism, which he detested. The symbol of these compromises was the new English translation of the Bible. The title page shows how literally Henry took his new grand title of ‘Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England’. At the top of the page, of course, appears Christ as God the Son, but he’s very small. Instead, the composition is dominated by the huge fleshly presence of Henry VIII. As king and Supreme Head, he sits enthroned in the centre with, on the left, the bishops representing the clergy and Church and, on the right, the Privy Council representing the laity and the state. Below there are the people, who all join together in the grateful, obedient acclamation of ‘Vivat, vivat Rex’: Long live the King, God Save the King.

The title page of the Great Bible represents in microcosm the extraordinary achievement of Henry’s reign. He had broken the power of the Pope, dissolved the monasteries, defeated rebellion, beheaded traitors and made himself supreme over Church and state. All the powers and all the passions of a ferocious nationalism were contained in his person and at his command. No other monarch had ever been so powerful. Fortescue believed that the liberties of Englishmen consisted of the independence and power that nobles and yeomen had in relation to the Crown. But that balance had been upset by the Royal Supremacy. The monarchy, rich in land, money and spiritual authority, had no competition in the kingdom – not from overmighty subjects, not from freeborn yeomen. Henry had been seeking glory all his life. At last he had found it.

But the Royal Supremacy also contained the seeds of its own destruction. For in employing the new biblically based theology, Henry had allowed into England those very subversive religious ideas he had once tried so hard to suppress. The genie of Protestantism was out of the bottle.

And it was Protestantism which, only a hundred years later, would first challenge the powers of the monarchy, and finally dethrone and behead a King of England.