In 1534 the English Parliament completed the revolt of the English Church from the pope by assigning to the king the right to appoint all the English prelates and to enjoy all the income which had formerly found its way to Rome. In the Act of Supremacy, Parliament declared the king to be "the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England," and that he should enjoy all the powers which the title naturally carried with it. Two years later every officer in the kingdom, whether lay or ecclesiastical, was required to swear to renounce the authority of the Bishop of Rome. Refusal to take this oath was to be adjudged high treason. Many were unwilling to deny the pope's headship merely because king and Parliament renounced it, and this legislation led to a persecution in the name of treason which was even more horrible than that which had been carried on in the supposed interest of religion.
Henry VIII no Protestant.
The English Bible.
It must be carefully noted that Henry VIII was not a Protestant in the Lutheran sense of the word. He was led, it is true, by Clement VII's refusal to declare his first marriage illegal, to break the bond between the English and the Roman Church, and to induce the English clergy and Parliament to acknowledge him as supreme head in the religious as well as in the temporal interests of the country. No earlier English sovereign had ever ventured to go so far as this in the previous conflicts with Rome. He was ready, too, as we shall see, to appropriate the property of the monasteries on the ground that these institutions were so demoralized as to be worse than useless. Important as these acts were, they did not lead Henry to accept the teachings of Protestant leaders, like Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin. He shared the popular distrust of the new doctrines, and showed himself anxious to explain the old ones and free them from the objections which were beginning to be urged against them. A proclamation was made, under the authority of the king, in which the sacraments of baptism, penance, and the Mass were explained. Henry also authorized a new translation of the Bible into English. A fine edition of this was printed (1539), and every parish was ordered to obtain a copy and place it in the parish church, where all the people could readily make use of it.
Henry's anxiety to prove himself a good Catholic.
Henry was anxious to prove that he was orthodox, especially after he had seized the property of the monasteries and the gold and jewels which adorned the receptacles in which the relics of the saints were kept. He presided in person over the trial of one who accepted the opinion of Zwingli, that the body and blood of Christ were not present in the sacrament. He quoted Scripture to prove the contrary, and the prisoner was condemned and burned as a heretic.
The 'Six Articles.'
In 1539 Parliament passed a statute called the "Six Articles." These declared first that the body and blood of Christ were actually present in the bread and the wine of the Lord's Supper; whoever ventured publicly to question this was to be burned. For speaking against five other tenets[303] of the old Church, offenders were to suffer imprisonment and loss of goods for the first offense, and to be hanged for the second. Two bishops, who had ventured to go farther in the direction of Protestantism than Henry himself had done, were driven from office and some offenders were put to death under this act.
Henry's tyranny.
Execution of Sir Thomas More.