Henry VIII.

by A. F. Pollard

In November Parliament[923] reinforced the Act of Succession by laying down the precise terms of the oath, and providing that a certificate of refusal signed by two commissioners was as effective as the indictment of twelve jurors. Other acts empowered the King to repeal by royal proclamation certain statutes regulating imports and exports. The first-fruits and tenths, of which the Pope had been already deprived, were now conferred on the King as a fitting ecclesiastical endowment for the Supreme Head of the Church. That title, granted him four years before by both Convocations, was confirmed by Act of Parliament; its object was to enable the King as Supreme Head to effect the "increase of virtue in Christ's Religion within this Realm of England, and to repress and extirp all Errors, Heresies and other Enormities, and Abuses heretofore used in the same". The Defender of the Faith was to be armed with more than a delegate power; he was to be supreme in himself, the champion not of the Faith of any one else, but of his own; and the qualifying clause, "as far as the law of Christ allows," was omitted. His orthodoxy must be above suspicion, or at least beyond the reach of open cavil in England. So new treasons were enacted, and any one who called the King a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or usurper, was rendered liable to the heaviest penalty which the law could inflict. As an earnest of the royal and parliamentary desire for an increase of virtue in religion, an act was concurrently passed providing for the creation of a number of suffragan bishops.[924]

Henry was now Pope in England with powers no Pope had possessed.[925] The Reformation is variously regarded as the liberation of the English Church from the Roman yoke it had long impatiently borne, as its subjection to an Erastian yoke which it was henceforth, with more or less patience, long to bear, or as a comparatively unimportant assertion of a supremacy which Kings of England had always enjoyed. The Church is the same Church, we are told, before and after the change; if anything, it was Protestant before the Reformation, and Catholic after. It is, of course, the same Church. A man may be described as the same man before and after death, and the business of a coroner's jury is to establish the identity; but it does not ignore the vital difference. Even Saul and Paul were the same man. And the identity of the Church before and after the legislation of Henry VIII. covers a considerable number of not unimportant changes. It does not, however, seem strictly accurate to say that Henry either liberated or enslaved the Church. Rather, he substituted one form of despotism for another, a sole for a dual control; the change, complained a reformer, was merely a translatio imperii.[926] The democratic movement within the Church had died away, like the democratic movements in national and municipal politics, before the end of the fifteenth century. It was never merry with the Church,[927] complained a Catholic in 1533, since the time when bishops were wont to be chosen by the Holy Ghost and by their Chapters.

Since then the Church had been governed by a partnership between King and Pope, without much regard for the votes of the shareholders. It was not Henry who first deprived them of influence; neither did he restore it. What he did was to eject his foreign partner, appropriate his share of the profits, and put his part of the business into the hands of a manager. First-fruits and tenths were described as an intolerable burden; but they were not abolished; they were merely transferred from the Pope to the King. Bishops became royal nominees, pure and simple, instead of the joint nominees of King and Pope. The supreme appellate jurisdiction in ecclesiastical causes was taken away from Rome, but it was not granted the English Church to which in truth it had never belonged.[928] Chancery, and not the Archbishop's Court, was made the final resort for ecclesiastical appeals. The authority, divided erstwhile between two, was concentrated in the hands of one; and that one was thus placed in a far different position from that which either had held before.

The change was analogous to that in Republican Rome from two consuls to one dictator. In both cases the dictatorship was due to exceptional circumstances. There had long been a demand for reform in the Church in England as well as elsewhere, but the Church was powerless to reform itself. The dual control was in effect, as dual controls often are, a practical anarchy. The condition of the Church before the Reformation may be compared with that of France before the Revolution. In purely spiritual matters the Pope was supreme: the conciliar movement of the fifteenth century had failed. The Pope had gathered all powers to himself, in much the same way as the French monarch in the eighteenth century had done; and the result was the same, a formal despotism and a real anarchy. Pope and Monarch were crushed by the weight of their own authority; they could not reform, even when they wanted to. From 1500 to 1530 almost every scheme, peaceful or bellicose, started in Europe was based on the plea that its ultimate aim was the reform of the Church; and so it would have continued, vox et præterea nihil, had not the Church been galvanised into action by the loss of half its inheritance.

In England the change from a dual to a sole control at once made that control effective, and reform became possible. But it was a reform imposed on the Church from without and by means of the exceptional powers bestowed on the Supreme Head. Hence the burden of modern clerical criticism of the Reformation. Objection is raised not so much to the things that were done, as to the means by which they were brought to pass, to the fact that the Church was forcibly reformed by the State, and not freed from the trammels of Rome, and then left to work out its own salvation. But such a solution occurred to few at that time; the best and the worst of Henry's opponents opposed him on the ground that he was divorcing the Church in England from the Church universal. Their objection was to what was done more than to the way in which it was done; and Sir Thomas More would have fought the Reformation quite as strenuously had it been effected by the Convocations of Canterbury and York. On the other side there was equally little thought of a Reformation by clerical hands. Henry and Cromwell carried on and developed the tradition of the Emperor Frederick II. and Peter de Vinea,[929] of Philippe le Bel and Pierre Dubois, of Lewis the Bavarian and Marsiglio of Padua[930] who maintained the supremacy of the temporal over the spiritual power and asserted that the clergy wielded no jurisdiction and only bore the keys of heaven in the capacity of turnkeys.[931] It was a question of the national State against the universal Church. The idea of a National Church was a later development, the result and not the cause of the Reformation.

Henry's dictatorship was also temporary in character. His supremacy over the Church was royal, and not parliamentary. It was he, and not Parliament, who had been invested with a semi-ecclesiastical nature. In one capacity he was head of the State, in another, head of the Church. Parliament and Convocation were co-ordinate one with another, and subordinate both to the King. The Tudors, and especially Elizabeth, vehemently denied to their Parliaments any share in their ecclesiastical powers. Their supremacy over the Church was their own, and, as a really effective control, it died with them. As the authority of the Crown declined, its secular powers were seized by Parliament; its ecclesiastical powers fell into abeyance between Parliament and Convocation. Neither has been able to vindicate an exclusive claim to the inheritance; and the result of this dual claim to control has been a state of helplessness, similar in some respects to that from which the Church was rescued by the violent methods of Henry VIII.[932]

CHAPTER XIII.

THE CRISIS.

Henry's title as Supreme Head of the Church was incorporated in the royal style by letters patent of 15th January, 1535,[933] and that year was mainly employed in compelling its recognition by all sorts and conditions of men. In April, Houghton, the Prior of the Charterhouse, a monk of Sion, and the Vicar of Isleworth, were the first victims offered to the Supreme Head. But the machinery supplied by Parliament was barely sufficient to bring the penalties of the statute to bear on the two most illustrious of Henry's opponents, Fisher and More. Both had been attainted of misprision of treason by Acts of Parliament in the previous autumn; but those penalties extended no further than to lifelong imprisonment and forfeiture of goods. Their lives could only be exacted by proving that they had maliciously attempted to deprive Henry of his title of Supreme Head;[934] their opportunities in the Tower for compassing that end were limited; and it is possible that they would not have been further molested, but for the thoughtlessness of Clement's successor, Paul III. Impotent to effect anything against the King, the Pope did his best to sting Henry to fury by creating Fisher a cardinal on 20th May. He afterwards explained that he meant no harm, but the harm was done, and it involved Fisher's friend and ally, Sir Thomas More. Henry declared that he would send the new cardinal's head to Rome for the hat; and he immediately despatched commissioners to the Tower to inform Fisher and More that, unless they acknowledged the royal supremacy, they would be put to death as traitors.[935] Fisher apparently denied the King's supremacy, More refused to answer; he was, however, entrapped during a conversation with the Solicitor-General, Rich, into an admission that Englishmen could not be bound to acknowledge a supremacy over the Church in which other countries did not concur. In neither case was it clear that they came within the clutches of the law. Fisher, indeed, had really been guilty of treason. More than once he had urged Chapuys to press upon Charles the invasion of England, a fact unknown, perhaps, to the English Government.[936] The evidence it had collected was, however, considered sufficient by the juries which tried the prisoners; Fisher went to the scaffold on 22nd June, and More on 6th July. Condemned justly or not by the law, both sought their death in a quarrel which is as old as the hills and will last till the crack of doom. Where shall we place the limits of conscience, and where those of the national will? Is conscience a luxury which only a king may enjoy in peace? Fisher and More refused to accommodate theirs to Acts of Parliament, but neither believed conscience to be the supreme tribunal.[937] More admitted that in temporal matters his conscience was bound by the laws of England; in spiritual matters the conscience of all was bound by the will of Christendom; and on that ground both Fisher and he rejected the plea of conscience when urged by heretics condemned to the flames. The dispute, indeed, passes the wit of man to decide. If conscience must reign supreme, all government is a pis aller, and in anarchy the true millennium must be found. If conscience is deposed, man sinks to the level of the lower creation. Human society can only be based on compromise, and compromise itself is a matter of conscience. Fisher and More protested by their death against a principle which they had practised in life; both they and the heretics whom they persecuted proclaimed, as Antigone had done thousands of years before,[938] that they could not obey laws which they could not believe God had made.

It was the personal eminence of the victims rather than the merits of their case that made Europe thrill with horror at the news of their death; for thousands of others were sacrificing their lives in a similar cause in most of the countries of Christendom. For the first and last time in English history a cardinal's head had rolled from an English scaffold; and Paul III. made an effort to bring into play the artillery of his temporal powers. As supreme lord over all the princes of the earth, he arrogated to himself the right to deprive Henry VIII. of his kingdom; and he sent couriers to the various courts to seek their co-operation in executing his judgment. But the weapons of Innocent III. were rusty with age. Francis denounced the Pope's claim as a most impudent attack on monarchical dignity; and Charles was engaged in the conquest of Tunis. Thus Henry was able to take a high tone in reply to the remonstrances addressed to him, and to proceed undisturbed with the work of enforcing his royal supremacy. The autumn was occupied mainly by a visitation of the monasteries and of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge; the schoolmen, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and others were deposed from the seat of authority they had held for so many centuries, and efforts were made to substitute studies like that of the civil law, more in harmony with the King's doctrine and with his views of royal authority.