Henry VIII’s Break with Rome

In 1521 Henry VIII was the pope’s champion. He had written a book defending the seven sacraments against Martin Luther, and Pope Leo X rewarded him with the title Defender of the Faith, which British monarchs still use. Six years later the same king set out on a course that would end papal authority in England.

The problem was the succession. Henry had married Catherine of Aragon in 1509. She was the widow of his elder brother Arthur, who had died in 1502, and the marriage had needed a dispensation from Pope Julius II. Catherine bore several children, but only a daughter, Mary, born in 1516, survived. England had known civil war within living memory, and Henry believed he needed a son. By 1527 he was also in love with Anne Boleyn, a lady of the court, who would not simply become his mistress.

Henry came to believe that his marriage was cursed. The Book of Leviticus says that a man who takes his brother’s wife will be childless, and he argued that no pope could set aside such a law. What contemporaries called the King’s Great Matter was a request for an annulment, a ruling that the marriage had never been valid. Popes had granted such requests to kings before, but this time politics stood in the way. In 1527 the troops of Emperor Charles V, Catherine’s nephew, sacked Rome, and Pope Clement VII could not afford to offend him. Catherine herself insisted that her marriage to Arthur had never been consummated and that she was Henry’s true wife.

Clement played for time. In 1529 a court under the papal legates Cardinal Wolsey and Cardinal Campeggio sat at Blackfriars in London, where Catherine appealed to Rome in person, but it adjourned without a verdict. Wolsey, who had failed his master, lost his offices and died in 1530 on his way to face charges of treason.

Henry’s new advisers, above all Thomas Cromwell, offered another solution: if the pope would not decide, the English Church could decide for itself. Step by step, Parliament and the clergy were pushed into line. In 1532 the clergy submitted to royal control over church law. Early in 1533 Henry secretly married Anne, who was pregnant, and the Act in Restraint of Appeals declared England an ‘empire’ from which no appeal to Rome was allowed. The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, then declared the marriage to Catherine void. Anne was crowned, and in September gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth. The pope condemned the new marriage.

In 1534 the Act of Supremacy recognised the king as ‘the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England’. An Act of Succession required subjects to swear an oath accepting Anne’s children as heirs, and a new Treasons Act made it treason to deny the king’s titles, even in words. Payments to Rome were stopped, and the pope’s name was removed from prayer books.

These measures were framed as a restoration, not a revolution. Cromwell and his writers argued that English kings had always held authority over the Church in their realm, and that the popes had usurped it over the centuries. Clergy had to preach the royal supremacy from the pulpit, and bishops renounced papal authority in writing. Most of the clergy and the nobility complied, some from conviction, many from caution. Few could foresee how far the changes would go once the king had taken control of the Church.

The new laws soon claimed lives. In 1535 several Carthusian monks of the London Charterhouse were executed for refusing the supremacy. John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, whom the pope had just made a cardinal, was beheaded in June. Thomas More, Henry’s former Lord Chancellor and a celebrated humanist scholar, had resigned in 1532 and refused the oath. He was convicted of treason on disputed evidence and beheaded on 6 July 1535. Both were canonised by the Catholic Church in 1935.

Cromwell then turned to the monasteries. Royal commissioners visited them in 1535 and reported abuses, often exaggerated to suit the government. An act of 1536 dissolved the smaller houses, and the rest surrendered over the following years, until the last abbeys closed in 1540. Historians estimate that around 800 religious houses were closed. Monks and nuns were pensioned or dismissed, buildings were stripped of lead and stone, shrines were broken up, and land passed to the crown and then, by sale, to nobles and gentry. In 1536 the dissolution and other changes helped provoke the Pilgrimage of Grace, a great rising in the north, which ended with the execution of many of its leaders.

Henry did not become a Protestant. He remained attached to the Mass and to traditional doctrine, and he burned Protestants as heretics as well as executing Catholics as traitors. The Act of Six Articles of 1539 reaffirmed transubstantiation, clerical celibacy and confession. Yet the king also allowed reforms: an English Bible was placed in every parish church from 1538–1539, pilgrimages and many saints’ days were curbed, and shrines such as that of Thomas Becket at Canterbury were destroyed.

The deepest change was one of authority. The king, not the pope, now ruled the Church in England, and its wealth had flowed into royal and lay hands. After Henry’s death in 1547 his son Edward VI’s advisers made the Church clearly Protestant, his daughter Mary I restored Catholicism and papal authority, and Elizabeth I created the lasting settlement of the Church of England in 1559. Historians still debate how much the English people wanted these changes. Eamon Duffy and others have shown how vigorous traditional religion was on the eve of the break, while others stress the reformers’ growing support. What is clear is that a dispute over one royal marriage became a turning point in English history.