Henry VIII and the break with Rome

A kingdom does not leave a church the way a man leaves a room. It leaves by statute, by oath, by the slow grinding of a parliament that has been taught what to want. The break, when it comes, is not a thunderclap but a clerk's quill scratching across vellum on a Tuesday afternoon in November, and a Norman-French formula spoken by a chancellor on behalf of a king who has decided that the Bishop of Rome is, henceforth, a foreign prelate.

THE SECOND TUDOR

Henry, second of that name and second of his house, came to the throne in April 1509 at seventeen years old, the son of the Welshman who had won England on a field in Leicestershire twenty-four years before. The Tudor claim was thin and recent. His father had spent a reign making it look ancient. Henry inherited a full treasury, a settled succession, and a Catholic kingdom that had stood under Roman jurisdiction for nine hundred and thirty-seven years, since Augustine landed in Kent in the year 597. He inherited also a wife, his brother Arthur's widow Catherine of Aragon, and a dispensation from Pope Julius II that had made the marriage canonically clean. For eighteen years the marriage was the public face of the reign. Then it became the problem of the reign. By 1527 he was forty and there was no living son. He had read Leviticus. He had read it again. If a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing, the verse said, they shall be childless. He took the verse personally. He sent to Rome for an annulment.

Rome did not give it. Catherine was the aunt of the Emperor Charles V, whose troops had sacked the city in May of that same year and now held the Pope as a polite hostage. Clement VII delayed, and delayed, and delayed. The years passed. Wolsey fell. Anne Boleyn waited. The cause that had begun as a private question of Levitical conscience became, in the hands of a Putney lawyer's son named Thomas Cromwell, a public question of jurisdiction. If Rome would not loose the king, the king would loose himself from Rome. The Reformation Parliament sat from 1529. It submitted the clergy in 1531. It restrained appeals in 1533. It was now November 1534, and the last clause was about to be set in place.

THE THIRD OF NOVEMBER

Westminster, twenty past three in the afternoon, pale autumn light through the Perpendicular tracery of the Lords' chamber. The king sits on the throne-platform in crimson velvet and ermine, his father's crown on his head. Below him on the benches are twenty-eight bishops in their rochets, fifty-seven temporal peers in their robes, and the Commons delegation standing behind their Speaker Sir Humphrey Wingfield. On the clerks' table lie three large parchment folios: the Act of Supremacy, the Act of Succession, the Act of Treasons. The chamber smells of beeswax and damp wool and the river. Outside, the Thames is at low tide; the watermen can be heard calling on the stairs. Audley the Lord Chancellor stands at the woolsack with the bills in order. The clerk reads the title of the first.

THE HINGE

The fourteen clauses run their course in the reading, and Henry watches the bishops as the words pass. He has spent six years arriving at this sentence, and the sentence is shorter than the years. He is to be called the only Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England. The title, drafted by Cromwell, has the dryness of a clerk and the weight of a coronation. He has rehearsed in his own mind what it dissolves. Nine hundred and thirty-seven years of Roman jurisdiction in this island, gone by statute on a Tuesday. The pallium that came to Canterbury from Gregory the Great, the appeals to the Curia, the legates and their courts, the annates and the Peter's Pence, the whole apparatus by which a foreign bishop had taxed and judged Englishmen since before there were Englishmen, struck through with a single Act. He thinks of More in the Tower, who will not swear; of Fisher in the Tower, who will not swear; he thinks that within the year both their heads will be on the bridge, and that this too is the price of the sentence. He thinks of the abbeys, fat with three centuries of bequest, and of Cromwell already counting them. He thinks, with the cold accuracy of a man who has done the arithmetic, that the Bishop of Rome may pronounce excommunication when he hears, and that excommunication from a foreign prelate without legal standing in the realm is a noise made in another country. The clerk finishes the reading. Audley turns to the throne. The king nods once. The chancellor speaks the formula in the old Norman-French of the Plantagenet courts, Le Roy le veult, and the Act of Supremacy is law at twenty-five past three on the third of November in the year of grace fifteen hundred and thirty-four.

THE TWO ACTS THAT FOLLOWED

The Act of Succession followed at half past three. Sir Thomas More, who would not subscribe to its preamble, was already in the Tower for refusing it the previous April. The Act of Treasons followed at twenty to four. It made it treason, by spoken word as well as written, to deny the Royal Supremacy. By four o'clock the Reformation Parliament had risen. The peers went out under the lanterns to their barges. The bishops who had voted yes went home to write to their dioceses. Convocation had already submitted in 1531; this was the secular ratification of an ecclesiastical surrender that had been three years in the doing.

THE TOWER

In a cell in the Bell Tower, a fifty-six-year-old former Lord Chancellor sat on a stool and read his Latin breviary. Thomas More had been told what passed at Westminster that afternoon. He said little. He had foreseen the Acts before they were drafted and had refused, with the precise courtesy that was his way, to give an opinion on them. He would refuse the oath when it was offered him, and he would refuse to give a reason for refusing it, and the silence itself would in time be construed as treason by the Act of that same November afternoon. I do nobody harm, I say none harm, I think none harm, but wish everybody good, he would write to his daughter Margaret from this cell. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith, I long not to live. He would walk out to the scaffold on Tower Hill on the sixth of July following, eight months after the Act, and ask the headsman to spare his beard, which had committed no treason. Bishop Fisher had gone before him by a fortnight. The Pope, hearing of Fisher's death, made him a cardinal posthumously. It was the gesture of a foreign prelate without legal standing in the realm.

THE COUNTING-HOUSE

Cromwell did not waste the Act. The Suppression of Religious Houses Act of 1536 took the smaller monasteries; the Second Suppression Act of 1539 took the rest. Some eight hundred and fifty houses were dissolved between those dates. About two and a quarter million acres of arable England, roughly a quarter of the cultivated land of the kingdom, passed from monastic ownership to the Crown, and from the Crown by sale and grant to the gentry and the new aristocracy who would, within a generation, be the political class of Tudor England. The annual monastic income of some hundred and thirty thousand pounds went into the royal exchequer and out again into pensions, ships, coastal forts, and the founding-endowments of cathedral grammar schools. It was the largest single transfer of land in English history before the nineteenth century. It was made possible by the Act read at Westminster on the third of November 1534, and by no other instrument.

WHAT WAS LEFT

Henry died on the twenty-eighth of January 1547, having outlived four of his six wives, his elder daughter's mother, his only legitimate son's mother, and the cardinal who had failed to get him his divorce. The English Reformation moved through the Edwardian phase under his son, the Marian counter-phase under his elder daughter, and the Elizabethan settlement under his younger, who in 1559 fixed by Act of Uniformity the church that stands today as the Established Church of England. The Tudor dynasty ended with Elizabeth's death in March 1603 and the accession of her cousin's grandson from Edinburgh. The Welsh Acts of Union of 1536 and 1543, drafted in the same Cromwellian workshop as the Supremacy, joined the country of Henry's grandfather to the kingdom he had inherited. The crown, the rose, the squat brick gatehouses with their twisted chimneys: these are what the dynasty left to the eye. What it left to the law was a sentence of fourteen clauses passed on a Tuesday afternoon, and a country that had stopped being part of Christendom in the medieval sense and started being something newer, harder to name, and entirely its own.

A kingdom does not leave a church the way a man leaves a room. It leaves by oath and by Act, and the Act, once made, makes its own descendants. On the south wall of the Lords' chamber, until the fire of 1834 took the old palace down, the parchment of the Supremacy was kept in its iron-bound chest with the other statutes of the Reformation Parliament, in the quiet of a strong-room beneath the river light.