Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity. David Starkey

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of a decision that would transform the monarchy and England utterly, and for ever.

      IV

      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 СКАЧАТЬ