As Henry and Norfolk represented the landed magnates, so Cromwell represented the mercantile community; and when the alliance between these two monied interests had been perfected, by the appointment of Cromwell as secretary of state, some time previous to April, 1534, events moved with precision and rapidity. They crowned Anne Boleyn on June 1, 1533; in July the breach between the king and pope became irreparable; in November, 1534, Parliament declared Henry “Supreme Head” of the Church; and in the following winter the whole administration, both civil and ecclesiastical, was concentrated in Cromwell’s hands. He acted with astonishing energy.
In the autumn of 1535 he set on foot a visitation, preparatory to the dissolution of the convents, and Parliament passed the bill for suppression the next February. Cromwell also, as vicar general, presided over the convocation of Canterbury, which made the first reformation of faith. This convocation met in June, 1536, only shortly before the Pilgrimage of Grace, and, under the fear of violence, Henry and the conservatives were reduced to silence. The evangelical influence for the moment held control, and the “Ten Articles,” the foundation of the “Thirty-nine Articles,” together with the “Institution of a Christian Man,” which were produced, were a great departure from orthodoxy.
In the fourth article, the dogma of the “Supper” was made broad enough to include Lutherans, and in the sixth, image worship was condemned. On the other hand, “Justification by Faith” began to assume the importance it must always hold in all really Protestant confessions. In one of his homilies Cranmer, at a later time, showed the comparative futility of good works:—
“A man must needs be nourished by good works; but first he must have faith. He that doeth good deeds, yet without faith, he hath no life. I can shew a man that by faith without works lived, and came to heaven: but without faith never man had life.”[242]
“Never had the Jews, in their most blindness, so many pilgrimages unto images ... as hath been used in our time.... Keeping in divers places, as it were marts or markets of merits; being full of their holy relics, images, shrines, and works of overflowing abundance ready to be sold.... Holy cowls, holy girdles, holy pardons, heads, holy shoes, holy rules, and all full of holiness.... Which were so esteemed and abused to the great prejudice of God’s glory and commandments, that they were made most high and most holy things, whereby to attain to the everlasting life, or remission of sin.”[243]
The anti-sacerdotal movement under Henry VIII. culminated in 1536 and 1537, when the country rebelled, and the land-owners were in need of help from the towns. As long as the latter felt uncertain of their grip on Church lands, the radical mercantile interest was permitted to mould doctrine; but when Norfolk had triumphed in the north, and Aske and Darcy had been executed, a reaction set in. In November, 1538, Lambert was burned for denying transubstantiation, and in 1539 the chapter in the statute book[244] which followed that providing for the suppression of the mitred abbeys, re-established auricular confession, communion in one kind, private masses, and, in a word, strict orthodoxy, saving in the single tenet of the royal supremacy. To have conceded that would have endangered property. Twelve months later the landed magnates felt strong enough to discard the tradesmen; the alliance which had carried through the Reformation was dissolved, and Cromwell was beheaded.
Never did pope enforce the worship of the miracle more savagely than did Henry. By the act of the “Six Articles,” the denial of the miracle of the mass was punished by burning and forfeiture of goods, without the privilege of abjuration. Purity of faith could not have been the ideal of reformers.
Until quite recently, Protestants have accepted the tradition that the convents of England were suppressed by the revolt of a people, outraged by the disclosure of abominations perpetrated under the shelter of monasticism. Within a few years, the publication of the British archives has thrown a new and sombre light upon the Reformation. They seem to prove, beyond a doubt, that as Philip dealt with the Templars, so did Henry deal with all the religious orders of his realm.
In 1533 Henry’s position was desperate. He confronted not only the pope and the emperor, but all that remained of the old feudal society, and all that survived of the decaying imaginative age. Nothing could resist this combination save the rising power of centralized capital, and Henry therefore had to become the mouthpiece of the men who gave expression to this force.
He needed money, and money in abundance, and Cromwell rose to a practical dictatorship because he was fittest to provide it. On all that relates to Essex, Foxe is an undoubted authority, and Foxe did not hesitate to attribute to Cromwell Henry’s policy at this crisis:—