Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity. David Starkey

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СКАЧАТЬ it was the empire and its vassal Pope against England. But the crunch came with the second divorce trial in 1529 – for Henry and for Wolsey most of all.

      Getting the trial underway at all was something of a triumph for Wolsey. But it soon became clear that, faced with the brute fact of Charles V’s power, Wolsey, for all his cleverness and confidence, and for all his claims of supremacy over the Church in England, had been unable to persuade the Pope to disavow his predecessor’s dispensation. Henry’s patience was at an end. So, just as importantly, was Anne’s. Without that, all the formalities of the trial were empty and the court, once again, was adjourned without a verdict.

      As the second divorce trial neared its abortive end, the Duke of Suffolk had expressed contempt at Wolsey’s powerlessness to do the king’s bidding. Wolsey replied that he was but a ‘simple cardinal’. It was a humbling admission. Henry had no time for such creatures. Throughout his reign, Henry had been able to maintain his independence from Rome and even be seen as superior to it. Had he not taken the moral leadership of Christendom as the bringer of peace? If the Pope was supposedly an equal partner and Henry supreme in his own kingdom, Wolsey’s weakness had exposed it all as a sham. This failure cost him his job as the king’s minister, and it would have cost him his head, if he had lived longer. Wolsey died cursing Anne for causing his downfall, and predicting the ruin of the Church.

      Before he fell, Wolsey warned the Pope that if the divorce was blocked, Henry would be forced ‘to adopt those remedies which are injurious to the Pope, and are frequently instilled into the King’s mind’. The refusal of Rome to deal with Henry honourably meant that ‘the sparks of that opposition here, which have been extinguished with such care and vigilance, will blaze forth to the utmost danger of all’. This was an allusion to the Lutheran heresy, which was flourishing in Germany and the Low Countries and creeping into England, despite government repression of heretics and the public turning of heretical books. And there was no secret as to who had ‘instilled’ such radical ideas in Henry’s mind. Blocked in Rome, Anne Boleyn, who was a Lutheran sympathizer, encouraged Henry to turn to Rome’s English opponents.

      Anne was an avid reader of heretical books that had been banned by the orthodox and loyal Catholic king. But these blasphemous books became increasingly appealing to Henry. When a radical clergyman was arrested for distributing Lutheran tracts and William Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible, Anne stepped in to save him. It was a crucial moment. For not only did Anne protect heretics, but she brought their books to her lover’s attention. One of them, Tyndale’s Obedience of the Christian Man, had a particular relevance for him. As the books of Kings and Romans in the Bible made clear, it was kings whom God ordained with His power, not priests. Kings had rights as spiritual leaders. Such an argument flattered Henry’s ambition. Kingship gave him a special place in Christendom, but that God-given authority had been usurped through the centuries by others. ‘This is a book for me and all kings to read,’ he declared, animated by this new vision of kingship. That might be true, but Henry needed more: he needed to find a way round the long-acknowledged authority of the Pope, an authority that, a few years earlier, he had defended to the hilt.

      It’s not what you know but who you know, we’re told. In the case of Thomas Cranmer it was both. When the divorce crisis began, Cranmer was an obscure theology don at Cambridge. But in the summer of 1529, a chance meeting with two Cambridge acquaintances brought Cranmer to the notice of Henry and Anne. The consequences transformed Cranmer, his world and ours.

      For Henry, Cranmer insisted, had been going about the divorce in the wrong way. He had been treating it as a legal matter. But it wasn’t: it was moral. And in morals the Bible supplied absolute answers as to what was right and what was wrong. And there were experts who knew which was which – they were university theologians, like Cranmer himself.

      Let Henry only consult the universities, therefore, and he would have a clear, unambiguous verdict in favour of the divorce which even Rome and the Pope would have to recognize.

      ‘That man hath the sow by the right ear,’ the king exclaimed. Henry was already coming to believe that the Pope was not the sole judge in Christendom. Now Cranmer had confirmed it with all the weight of his theological scholarship. Immediately, the canvas of university opinion began, starting, like so many new ideas, in Cambridge itself. Cranmer had thought that it would be high minded and straightforward. In fact both sides played dirty and used every device known to the academic politician: rigged committees, selected terms of reference and straightforward bullying and bribing. But after two days toing and froing, the university delivered the verdict that Henry wanted. Cambridge would be on the side of the winners in Tudor England.

      With Cambridge and (more reluctantly) Oxford secured, Henry’s envoys set out for the Continent to pit the arguments of the King of England against the authority of the Pope. In universities across Europe they bribed, cajoled and threatened theologians to give a verdict in Henry’s favour.

      Over the next few years the whole power of the Tudor state was to be thrown against Rome and Catherine. But Catherine wasn’t without her defenders. One of the boldest was her chaplain, Thomas Abell, who combined the very different roles of scholar and man of action.

      In the winter of 1528 Henry sent Abell on a mission to Catherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V, in Spain, where Abell played the desperately dangerous game of double agent. Outwardly he was working for Henry – secretly he was undermining the king’s whole strategy on Catherine’s behalf. Mission accomplished, Abell returned to England, where he quickly emerged as Catherine’s most effective and outspoken scholarly propagandist.

      Abell called his principal work, with magnificent defiance, Invicta Veritas – ‘truth unconquered and unconquerable’. In it he attacked the verdict of the universities which provided the whole intellectual basis of Henry’s case. The attack struck home, as the king’s infuriated scribbles throughout the book show. At one point, Henry’s irritation actually overcomes his scholarship and he scribbles in the margin in mere English: ‘it is false’. But by the time he’d finished, Henry’s composure had recovered sufficiently for him to deliver his damning verdict on the book in portentous Latin, on the title page. ‘The whole basis of this book is false. Therefore the papal authority is empty save in its own seat.’

      Not even that magisterial royal rebuke was enough to shut Abell up. Instead, it took the full weight of the law. He was twice imprisoned in the Tower, where he carved his name and bell symbol on the wall of his cell, and was eventually executed as a traitor in 1540. Even so, Abell’s courage proved fruitless. As learned opinion in England swung in his direction, Henry became bolder. He now asserted that, by virtue of his God-given office, the King of England was an ‘Emperor’. As such, he was subject to no authority on earth – not even that of the Pope. When the papal nuncio came to Hampton Court to protest, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and the Earl of Wiltshire told him that ‘They cared neither for Pope nor Popes in this kingdom, not even if St Peter should come to life again; that the king was absolute both as Emperor and Pope in his own kingdom’.

      Once Henry had been the stoutest defender of papal authority. But that had changed with the divorce, which had blown open the ambiguities of the monarchy’s relationship with Rome. Now the achievement of his most fervent hopes for Anne and for an heir depended on the idea that religious truth was to be found not in Rome but in the Bible. Rome instead was the obstacle that had delayed his divorce for five long years. It was the enemy that stood between him and Anne.

      But what of the Pope himself ? Here again, the Bible spoke. For there were no popes in scripture, but there were kings. And it was kings, Cranmer and his radical colleagues argued, who were God’s anointed, ordained by Him to rule His Church on Earth. The idea appealed to Henry’s thirst for glory. It offered a means to cut the Gordian knot of the divorce, and it even promised to make Henry, not the Pope, heir to the power and status of ancient Roman emperors.

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