without first examining the career and persona of the monarch who presided over it, Henry VIII. Indeed, here we have one of history’s great ironies, because Henry regarded himself, with some justification, as a great defender of the papacy and a devout and strong Catholic. Luther’s impact on England might have been very different had Henry decided to embrace Lutheranism. But the king’s initial response to Luther was wholly negative.
Lutheran ideas were eagerly discussed by a scattering of English intellectuals – particularly a group who met at the White Horse Tavern in Cambridge – and humanists. The leading English humanist, however, was Sir Thomas More – a man who detested Lutheranism with an almost deranged, scatological intensity.
The greatest English non-political reformer was William Tyndale, who was doggedly independent. He was, essentially, a loner. He had the protection of no king or prince; he had no devotees and followers. A brilliant scholar from Gloucestershire, Tyndale was educated at Oxford. He was arguably the finest writer of English prose there has ever been, bar none. Tyndale’s great and abiding desire was to make the Bible available to all the people of England in their own language. When Luther’s teachings were first discussed in England, Tyndale sought permission to produce and publish his own translation of the Bible. But he could find no-one to support him in the English Church. He left for Germany in 1524.
Henry VII’s reign had been one of consolidation and stability; his son Henry VIII’s was the precise opposite. One of its economic features was a vast transfer of land and wealth, almost all of it from the Church. The recipients were the crown, the aristocracy – already wealthy – and a new breed of up-and-coming gentry.
But, while the landholding of the crown, considerably enhanced by Henry VII, grew even more, the most durable consequence of Henry VIII’s reign was not an extension of kingly significance but rather a shift of power from the monarch to Parliament. The process was not fully manifest for several generations, but the English Reformation was very much a political reformation, and it could be argued that the real long-term beneficiary was Parliament rather than the new Church of England. It was certainly not the monarch. This was because the Reformation was accomplished by parliamentary statute. Parliament was now on the way to becoming supreme, sovereign in a way that monarchs no longer could be, though various future monarchs failed to grasp this.
Henry VIII was born in 1491, the younger brother of Arthur, who was to die in 1502 not long after he had married Catherine of Aragon. Henry was 17 when he became king in 1509, and one of his first moves was to marry his brother’s widow Catherine (after receiving a papal dispensation to do so). Catherine was six years older than he was; at first, their marriage was happy and successful.
Physically, Henry was huge. He was also a monster, ever capable of wickedness and duplicity, though these characteristics became much more obvious as he grew older. He always had large appetites, though his sexual appetite seems to be have been far from voracious, despite his six wives.
He had an insatiable hunger for hunting; he could wear out six or seven horses in the course of a day. He enjoyed jousting at tournaments. He wrote poetry and was an accomplished musician. He was clever and very competitive; he could speak several languages, and he fancied himself as a theologian. And he was obsessed with religion. One characteristic of Renaissance monarchs was that they were eager propagandists – and this was certainly true of Henry VIII. He was self-righteous, and his personal religion was tainted by a self-serving smarminess.
Thus, when his army routed the Scots at Flodden, the victory was presented as punishment to the Scots for challenging not Henry but the pope. There was, in truth, some justification for this spin, as the pope had not wanted James IV to renew the Auld Alliance with France; but it gave an early indication that Henry liked to pose as the champion of the papacy and the old Church. This neatly fitted in with the power politics of the time, because the papacy was an enemy of France, and the king of France, Francis I, was in turn Henry’s great adversary.
When news of Martin Luther’s teachings and exploits filtered over to England, Henry was not impressed. As a monarch, and a strong one at that, he disliked the idea of direct attack on papal authority. After the pope, who next? Kings? Kings could and did squabble constantly with popes about finance and about foreign policy; but it was not a monarch who was stirring things up in Germany. It was some vulgar, obscure friar. Henry regarded Luther as no more than a jumped-up chancer who was shaking the established order in a most dangerous way.
Further, Luther provoked Henry’s religious conservatism. When Erasmus of Rotterdam met Henry in 1520, the king expressed his disapproval of Luther virulently. Encouraged by the sycophantic Wolsey, and puffed up with his own theological aspirations, Henry decided to write a book condemning Luther.
When the pope appealed to all monarchs in Christendom to burn Luther’s books and to persecute Lutherans as heretics, Wolsey and Henry were eager to oblige – but not before Wolsey was appointed the permanent papal legate in England. Once this was confirmed, Wolsey proceeded to organise a spectacular anti-Luther extravaganza in London. It attracted more than 30,000 spectators – an amazing gathering at that time. As Bishop John Fisher of Rochester, who had taught the young Henry, preached a protracted sermon which was really just an anti-Luther rant, the reformer’s books were thrown into a huge bonfire.
Henry was helped by Fisher and by the leading humanist thinker Sir Thomas More in researching his anti-Luther book. They may well have written parts of it. Henry was to execute both men later when they refused to renounce the papacy; but, for the time being, he was delighted with their support. He saw himself as the most cerebral of kings, a confident and leading member of Europe’s intellectual elite. His book, called The Assertion of the Seven Sacraments, defended both indulgences and papal authority, and attacked Luther for promoting sedition.
A special luxury edition of the completed work, bound beautifully in gold cloth, was presented to the pope in October 1520 by John Clerk, Henry’s ambassador in Rome. Leo X was delighted with the efforts of his ‘most dear son in Christ’ and immediately started to read the book, somewhat patronisingly (or sarcastically?) noting that it was a marvel that a king could have written such a tome. Although the book became an unlikely bestseller, its merits were dubious. Catholic theologians have regarded it as unimpressive, essentially assertive rather than analytical.
But the pope was in no mood to attend to the detail of the text. He was delighted that a significant king had taken the trouble to write a book defending him and his office against the upstart German. So, Henry – and his successors – were formally granted the title of Fidei Defensor (Defender of the Faith). Future events were to render this title utterly ridiculous, though for some reason it continued to appear on English coinage, and the marks FD or Fid Def are to be seen on newly minted British coins to this day. Luther himself replied with an offensive and outspoken broadside against Henry. Although Henry was soon to break with Rome, he never regarded Luther as anything but an enemy.
Henry VIII was thus doing fine in his role as an eager defender of the papacy. What was to change everything was the simple matter of his wife Catherine’s inability to produce a male child. A daughter, Mary, had been born in 1516, but it was unclear whether the English people would accept a queen reigning over them. Henry became increasingly concerned about his lack of a male heir. He was worried about a renewal of the dynastic feuding and indeed warring that his father had managed to squash.
By the 1520s, it was clear that Catherine’s childbearing days were behind her. Henry decided that he needed a divorce. But he had to move carefully. Catherine was very well connected; her nephew was none other than the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The fiasco of the divorce took many twists and turns until eventually it became clear that the pope, whom Henry had so publicly endorsed, would not grant it. Part of the problem lay in Henry’s theological bombast. He would not be satisfied with some fudge based on the obscurities of Catholic canon law. He looked directly to the Bible (in a way that might have pleased his adversary Luther)
