Henry VIII, Master of Church and State

It is easy enough for us, looking back, to see that Henry's effort to be the strong man of Europe was an expensive flop. It was not so easy for Henry to see it, for he lived magnificently and was surrounded by people who tried to please him.

There was, however, one big failure which nobody could conceal from him; he had not been able to get a legitimate son. Catherine of Aragon had given him only a daughter, Mary. It was this failure which led to the really important events in Henry VIII's reign.

Henry decided that he must be rid of his wife. He had a political motive: it would be dangerous to leave the kingdom to a girl because, as most people then believed, ruling a kingdom needed the full strength of a man. He had a religious motive: Catherine had been married to Arthur, and it was against God's law to marry your brother's widow.

True, the Pope had given special permission. But perhaps this was not enough, and God was punishing Henry and Catherine by not letting them have a boy. He also had a personal motive. Her name was Anne Bullen, or Boleyn.

Historians have argued about which of these motives was the strongest. It is almost impossible to say, because they were all urging Henry in the same direction.

Henry thought that he would be able to persuade the Pope easily to do as he wanted, to declare that there had been a mistake and that Henry and Catherine had never been properly married. But this is where the trouble started. The Pope hedged.

Catherine was the aunt of the Emperor Charles, and the Pope was even less willing to offend the emperor than the king of England. Months slipped by, then years. Henry became furious. Wolsey failed to persuade the Pope, so the king sent him off to York, in disgrace, to spend his time on his Church duties.

While Wolsey was away from Court, the king became even more furious when he thought of the way the cardinal had failed him. So Henry called Wolsey back, and would have had him tried and executed for treason if the cardinal had not died on his journey to London.

Henry next tried to put real pressure on the Pope. He called Parliament, and at the government's suggestion they began to pass acts against the Pope, little ones, gradually cutting down the fees and offerings which went from England to the Papal treasury in Rome. (Henry was cunning. If the Pope were to give way, and Henry were to become his devoted friend once more, it would be possible to put all the blame for these acts on to Parliament.)

The Pope tried to please Henry in most things, even appointing one of Henry's supporters, Thomas Cranmer, as the new archbishop of Canterbury; but he would not give way on the one point which Henry really wanted, annulling the marriage.

So Henry took his big decision. Remember that he had been educated to know a great deal about Church matters. He felt no doubt that he was right, and the Pope was wrong. In 1534 he had Parliament declare that the king was Supreme Head of the Church in England. Already, over a year earlier, Archbishop Cranmer had married Henry to Anne Boleyn, who thus became queen instead of Catherine of Aragon. Catherine was sent to live quietly in the country, and died in 1536.

Henry's Act of Supremacy broke a link with Rome that had lasted a thousand years. England now was going to have a Church of her own, instead of belonging to the great Church of western Christendom. Henry, however, did not see it that way. He claimed that he was not changing religion, that he was right and the Pope was wrong, that he was only correcting errors.

Though he did approve of putting into the churches English translations of the Bible, chained to reading-desks so that anyone could use them, Henry would have nothing to do with the 'Protestants' who followed Martin Luther. Henry still thought as badly of Luther as when he had written his book, still thought Lutherans were wicked heretics, and went on having them burnt at the stake.

As for any Catholic who remained loyal to the Pope, he was treated not as a heretic, but as a traitor. The punishment was either beheading or hanging, drawing and quartering. Nobody was spared. Henry's 'friend', Thomas More, who had been made chancellor in place of Wolsey, could not agree and tried to retire quietly. This was not allowed.

He was ordered to swear obedience to the king's religious ideas, and, when he would not do so, he was beheaded. Thomas More was one of the very few who stood out against what the king did. Yet this was an enormous change, which made the king supreme in Church as well as state, in religion as well as politics. Why was there so little protest?

It may well have been that few people realised how big the change was, because the church services went on with very little alteration. As for the ordinary people, most of them were used to doing what they were told, and they believed - you see this in the Robin Hood legends, for instance - that a genuine king was always good and trustworthy.

The middle classes, as you know, were on the king's side anyway, and many of them seem to have lost their respect for the Church long before Henry took over. They seem to have thought churchmen lazy, slack, old-fashioned; and maybe it would be easier to make money if there were fewer holy-days.

The nobles of the old families may have disapproved of the king's ideas, but there was no leader among them. This may seem cowardly, but you can hardly blame anyone else when you learn that the bishops themselves gave in meekly. Only one of them, John Fisher, bishop of the rather small see of Rochester, had the courage to oppose the king. He was executed.

Dissolution of the Monasteries

Serious trouble only broke out when Henry did something further. He had a new chief adviser, Thomas Cromwell, who had sharpened his mind by studying in Italy and then working for Wolsey. It was Cromwell who had skillfully enlisted Parliament as a partner against the Pope, and he improved and operated the Tudor system of government so effectively that some historians think he did more even than Henry VII to build a modern state in England.

With his aid, Henry confiscated the monasteries, nunneries and friaries. He took the smaller ones in 1536, the larger in 1539. The reason he gave was that they were slack, not doing their job properly. Henry's true reason was that he wanted the wealth of the monasteries, the lands and the precious ornaments which had been given during the past five or six centuries by countless thousands of men and women, often pilgrims, who wished the monks to pray for them.

If the monks went quietly they were given other jobs or pensions. If they resisted, they were just turned out. Really troublesome ones were executed.

This Dissolution of the Monasteries was something which made a real difference, especially in the poorer parts of the country. In these parts the people more often needed the help of the monks, and anyway they tended to be more ready to fight. In the north, especially in Yorkshire, men took their bows and bills and iron caps from the wall, and began to move south.

This rising is known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, and it took place in 1536. Religion was not the only motive. Some of the leaders were jealous of the King's advisers and resented the way the royal government seemed to be trying to take control of everything.

There was no standing royal army, and the king could send only a weak force to stop the thousands of warlike 'pilgrims'. But the English people trusted their king. Most of the rebels believed that Cromwell was to blame and when the king himself heard the truth he would put everything right. So when the king promised to investigate their complaints and not to punish anybody, they agreed to go home. They should have known better.

When there was no longer any danger, the king sent his men these orders: 'You must cause such dreadful execution upon a good number of the inhabitants, hanging them on trees, quartering them, and setting the quarters in every town, as shall be a fearful warning.' This was quite legal and so it was done.

In spite of all his efforts and success, though, the king did not get as much benefit as he should have done from the wealth he had taken from the monasteries. It should have made him the richest king in Europe, if he could have kept it, but he had to spend it on armaments, such as his artillery castles.

Francis I and Charles V, who were usually deadly enemies, made peace, and it looked as though they would attack England. Henry needed money so badly that he had to put many of the monastery lands on the market.

The people who could afford to buy were, of course, the nobles and the middle classes, especially those working for the king, in the government and at court. Think of the number of English 'stately homes' called 'X Abbey' or 'X Priory', places which were once monasteries and were converted into houses after being bought from the king.

This did help the king in one way, because the new owners would obviously try hard to prevent the return of the monks; they were bound to support the king's Church.

Did the Dissolution of the Monasteries make much difference to the ordinary people? Historians have argued about this. There is no doubt that there were many beggars, vagabonds and rogues in Tudor England, and that they were a serious problem until a workable Poor Law was made at the very end of the Tudor century. Was the problem so bad because there were no monasteries to give charity?

At first sight, this may seem likely, but nobody has been able to prove that in fact the new masters were less generous than the old. One idea is that many of the beggars were peasants who had been turned off their strips of land so that the landlords could 'enclose' the old open fields for sheep-farming. It needed only a few shepherds and their dogs to look after huge flocks, on land which had supported many peasants, and there were good profits to be made from selling wool.

Thomas More remarked that once men had eaten sheep, but that now sheep were eating men. Yet we cannot be certain how bad this wave of enclosures was, nor even when it really took place. Most of it may have been over before the monasteries were dissolved. Besides, it is impossible to be sure that the monks were usually kinder landlords than laymen were, especially as many monasteries had been employing business men to run their estates for them.

It is sometimes very difficult indeed, in history as in the events you read about in newspapers, to be certain of the causes and the effects of even the most famous happenings. We have spent time on the first two Tudor kings. One reason for this is that if you know what happened in England you will find it easier to understand the work of the other 'new monarchs', the Renaissance, the Reformation (as the great religious changes are called) and the wars which involved most of western Europe. The English story fitted in with the drama which was taking place on the main European stage.

As for Henry VIII, we must leave him with much of his story unfinished. He had many disappointments with his wives. Anne Boleyn gave him only a girl, Elizabeth, and eventually was beheaded. Only one wife gave him a son, and this was a weak, sickly child, and she died soon afterwards.

Meanwhile, the king became fat. We can measure the girth of his suits of armour. He was ill, had painful ulcers on his legs, could hardly walk. Do you think that a knowledge of the king's health might help to explain some of the things he did? He was only fifty-five when he died.