Henry VIII and the English Reformation: The Break with Rome

The English Reformation began with a royal marriage crisis. Between 1527 and 1534 Henry VIII of England tried and failed to persuade the pope to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and then used Parliament to cut England’s ties with Rome. The Act of Supremacy of November 1534 made the king Supreme Head of the Church of England, a decision that reshaped English religion, politics and society for centuries.

Background: a king without a son

Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509 and, in June of that year, married Catherine of Aragon, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Catherine had first been married to Henry’s elder brother Arthur, who died in 1502. Because church law forbade marriage to a brother’s widow, Pope Julius II had issued a dispensation allowing the match.

The marriage lasted almost two decades, but of Catherine’s many pregnancies only one child survived infancy: Princess Mary, born in 1516. England had never had an undisputed reigning queen, and memories of the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses made a secure male succession seem vital to the king.

Henry was also, at this stage, a firm defender of the papacy. In 1521 he published a book attacking Martin Luther, the Assertion of the Seven Sacraments, and Pope Leo X rewarded him with the title Defender of the Faith. The ideas Luther had launched with his 95 Theses were then still heresy in England.

The King’s Great Matter

By 1527 Henry had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn, a lady of the court, and had become convinced that his marriage was cursed. He pointed to a verse in the Book of Leviticus that threatened childlessness to a man who took his brother’s wife, and argued that Julius II’s dispensation had been invalid. Catherine insisted that her marriage to Arthur had never been consummated, which, if true, weakened Henry’s case.

The case, known at court as the King’s Great Matter, ran into political trouble at once. In May 1527 troops of the Emperor Charles V carried out the Sack of Rome, leaving Pope Clement VII dependent on the emperor. Charles was Catherine’s nephew and had no wish to see his aunt set aside.

Clement played for time. He allowed a legatine court to sit in England under Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and the Italian Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio. It opened at Blackfriars in London in 1529, where Catherine made a famous appeal to Henry in person before walking out. In July 1529 Campeggio adjourned the hearings and the case was recalled to Rome.

From Wolsey to Cromwell, 1529–1532

The failure ruined Wolsey, Henry’s chief minister for some fifteen years. He was stripped of the office of Lord Chancellor in October 1529 and died in November 1530 on his way to face charges of treason. The story is told in The Fall of Cardinal Wolsey.

Henry now turned to new advisers and new methods. Sir Thomas More, a lawyer and humanist, became Lord Chancellor, but the rising figure was Thomas Cromwell, a former servant of Wolsey who joined the king’s council and from about 1532 became his leading minister. Cromwell saw that Parliament could be used to settle the matter inside England, without the pope.

The Parliament that met in November 1529, later called the Reformation Parliament, sat in several sessions until 1536. Its anticlerical members were ready to attack church privileges, and the king’s ministers fed them legislation step by step.

In 1530–1531 the whole English clergy was accused of praemunire, the offence of recognising a foreign jurisdiction, because they had accepted Wolsey’s authority as papal legate. To obtain a pardon, the Convocation of Canterbury agreed in 1531 to pay £100,000 and to acknowledge Henry as Supreme Head of the Church, adding the qualifying phrase “as far as the law of Christ allows”.

In May 1532 the clergy went further in the Submission of the Clergy, agreeing that they would make no new church laws without royal approval. The next day Thomas More resigned as Lord Chancellor. Parliament also moved to cut the annates, payments that new bishops sent to Rome.

The death of the elderly Archbishop William Warham in August 1532 gave Henry a decisive opening. He chose Thomas Cranmer, a Cambridge scholar who favoured the annulment and had quiet Protestant sympathies, as the new Archbishop of Canterbury. The pope, still hoping for compromise, confirmed the appointment, and Cranmer was consecrated in March 1533.

The break: 1533–1534

Anne Boleyn was pregnant by the end of 1532, and Henry married her secretly in about January 1533. The Act in Restraint of Appeals, passed in spring 1533, declared England an “empire” and forbade appeals in church cases to Rome, so that Catherine could no longer take her case to the pope.

On 23 May 1533 Cranmer, sitting at Dunstable, declared Henry’s marriage to Catherine void. Days later he confirmed the marriage to Anne, who was crowned queen on 1 June. Their daughter Elizabeth was born on 7 September 1533. Clement VII responded by threatening excommunication and, in March 1534, ruled in Rome that the marriage to Catherine was valid, but by then it made no practical difference in England.

In 1534 Parliament completed the separation. The Act of Succession settled the crown on the children of Henry and Anne and required subjects to swear an oath accepting it. The Act of Supremacy, passed in November 1534, declared the king “the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England”. A new Treasons Act made it treason to deny the king’s titles, even in words, and another act diverted to the crown the church taxes once paid to Rome.

Key people

• Henry VIII (1491–1547): king from 1509; he wanted a male heir and came to believe sincerely in his God-given authority over the Church.
• Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536): Henry’s first queen, who never accepted the annulment and died at Kimbolton in January 1536.
• Anne Boleyn (c. 1501–1536): Henry’s second queen and mother of Elizabeth I, sympathetic to religious reform; she was executed in May 1536.
• Thomas Cromwell (c. 1485–1540): the king’s chief minister, who drafted much of the legislation and later ran the Church as the king’s vicegerent.
• Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556): Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533, who annulled the first marriage and later shaped the Book of Common Prayer.

Consequences

The break with Rome was enforced harshly. Those who refused the oaths faced death: Carthusian monks of the London Charterhouse were executed in May 1535, Bishop John Fisher in June and Sir Thomas More on 6 July 1535, as described in Execution of Thomas More.

The royal supremacy also gave the crown control of the Church’s vast wealth. Under Cromwell’s direction, a survey of church property, the Valor Ecclesiasticus, was compiled in 1535, and the closure of the monasteries followed between 1536 and 1541. Opposition in the north, the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536, was crushed.

Doctrine, however, moved unevenly. The Ten Articles of 1536 leaned towards reform, and an English Bible, the Great Bible, was placed in parish churches from 1539. In the same year the Act of Six Articles reaffirmed traditional beliefs such as transubstantiation and clerical celibacy. Pope Paul III published a bull of excommunication against Henry in December 1538.

Legacy

After Henry’s death in January 1547, his son Edward VI’s government introduced a fully Protestant Church. Mary I, Catherine’s daughter, restored papal authority in 1554, but her half-sister Elizabeth I reversed this again in 1559, when a new Act of Supremacy named her Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The Church of England that emerged combined Protestant doctrine with bishops and many older forms of worship.

The break also strengthened the authority of Parliament, since the king had chosen to make his revolution through statute. Historians still debate how far ordinary English people welcomed change. Older accounts portrayed a corrupt Church collapsing under popular pressure, while more recent studies stress that traditional religion remained popular and that reform was largely imposed from above.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Henry founded the Church of England simply to get a divorce. Fact: the annulment was the trigger, but the break also reflected long-running quarrels over church jurisdiction and money, Henry’s growing belief in royal authority, and the ambitions of reformers around him.
• Myth: Henry made England Protestant. Fact: he rejected the pope but kept most Catholic doctrine and executed both Catholics who denied his supremacy and Protestants who denied the Mass.
• Myth: Henry divorced Catherine. Fact: legally the marriage was annulled, meaning declared never to have existed.

Timeline

• 1509, 11 June: Henry VIII marries Catherine of Aragon.
• 1527, May: Henry begins secret proceedings to end his marriage; imperial troops sack Rome.
• 1529, July: the legatine court at Blackfriars is adjourned without a verdict.
• 1531, February: the clergy acknowledge Henry as Supreme Head “as far as the law of Christ allows”.
• 1532, May: Submission of the Clergy; Thomas More resigns as Lord Chancellor.
• 1533, 23 May: Cranmer declares the marriage to Catherine void.
• 1533, 7 September: birth of Princess Elizabeth.
• 1534, March: First Act of Succession; Clement VII rules the first marriage valid.
• 1534, November: Act of Supremacy names the king Supreme Head of the Church of England.

Why it matters

Henry VIII’s break with Rome turned a dynastic problem into a constitutional and religious revolution. It placed the English Church under the crown, transferred huge wealth from the Church to the state and its supporters, and set England on a separate religious path from much of Catholic Europe. Its effects can still be seen in the established Church of England, whose Supreme Governor is the reigning monarch.