Why, in 1529, did the Church in England begin to come under attack?

History Essay

Mr Gloag

In 1529, the Church in England came under attack from Henry VIII after Pope Clement VII refused to grant him an annulment for his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. It is conventionally believed that there were two main factors which led to the English Reformation: Henry’s failure to receive a divorce, and general discontent amongst the laity towards the Church.

Traditional historians have long believed that ‘if one thing can be said of the English people early in the sixteenth century it is that they thought little of priests.’ They also believe that, even without the divorce, the Church in England would have experienced some form of reformation, due to widespread anti-clericalism. ‘The higher clergy were disliked because they were wealthy and ostentatious; Wolsey provided a suitable epitome of this alleged trait. The lesser clergy – parish priests and unbeneficed men – earned contempt and dislike by rapacity and pretensions with which their intellectual equipment, material means, and private morality too rarely kept pace.’ No aspect of the Church was same from attack. These historians, such as Elton or A.G. Dickens, believe that there were several reasons why the laity had become so anti-clerical.

The first of these was the wealth of the Church, which was concentrated mainly in the hands of the ‘larger monasteries, the bishops, and some prosperous incumbents.’ Approximately one third of all the land was held by the Church, and the incomes of some of the great abbeys, such as Glastonbury and St. Albans, or bishoprics, like Winchester and Durham, exceeded the revenues of the greatest temporal lords. The Church, and particularly the monasteries, held great wealth, but had lost the respect and devotion which permitted and encouraged the accumulation. Their wealth was resented by the laity, as they felt that they could make better use of it. People objected to tithe, the payments due upon the probate of wills, and mortuary payments. However, says Elton, their ‘chief grievance’ was the Church courts, and more specifically the rights of benefit of clergy and clerical sanctuary. ‘Their rapid decline after the Reformation demonstrated their essential superfluity well enough.’

This is a preview of the whole essay

Contemporary opinion also seems to support the view that the Church was in a bad state. Evangelicals, such as Simon Fish, a lawyer and Lutheran activist, had new ideas, and believed that the Church was wrong. In 1528, Fish’s pamphlet ‘A Supplication for the Beggars’ was circulating in London, and was an example of anti-clericalism in its most extreme form, which asked the King ‘To tie these holy idle thieves to the carts to be whipped naked about every market town.’ Even members of the clergy seemed to be dissatisfied with the work of the Church. In 1512, John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s, emphasised the need for reform within the Church in one of his sermons, and then laid the blame for its current state with the clergy, from the most ill-paid of priests to the bishops. Christian Humanists, like Erasmus, wanted a better and more accurate version of the Bible, and even totally devout laypeople such as Sir Thomas More were criticising the work of the Church. It was generally believed that ‘The parish clergy were often ill-educated and ignorant, unable to understand and sometimes even to read the Latin of the services; often, too, they were wretchedly poor.’ It seems, on this evidence, that the state of the Church by 1529 was so poor that reformation was inevitable.

However, modern historians are now taking a kinder view of the pre-Reformation Church. There were contemporary complaints, but no more than there had been previously, and the English Church was in a much better state than others, such as the European Church. Professor J J Scarisbrick and Dr Christopher Harper-Bill have presented a picture of a Church which, although far from perfect, was acceptable to the majority of its members and continued to enjoy considerable support at all levels of society. The contemporary evidence is not as reliable as it would seem at first, and therefore the views that have been based upon it are somewhat shaky. People such as Colet and More who demanded reform were not condemning the Church, but simply measuring it by their own, extremely devout standards. Lollards, who aimed much criticism at the Church, and Evangelicals, who actually had very little support in England, were fundamentally opposed to the Church because they were ideologically different, which is why they criticised it. ‘Heresy was not common…it would seem that Englishmen were well enough satisfied with the traditional faith as far as its teachings were concerned.’ There is also much evidence over and above the contemporary complaints which supports the view that the Church was actually in a very good condition before the Reformation.

Rather than lower standards, as traditional historians have claimed, the large number of people becoming members of the clergy raised competition for jobs, and therefore of the Church as a whole. The clergy was the best educated and the keenest that England had ever had, and the Church was very well staffed. Studies into the extent of pluralism and non-residence have shown that most of the parish clergy carried out their duties conscientiously and to the satisfaction of their parishioners. A study of episcopal records in the diocese of Lincoln between 1514-1521, for example, shows that only 4 per cent of parishes complained about inadequate performance of spiritual duty by their clergymen. There were actually very few complaints about the level of taxation by the Church, and the fact that people were willing to leave money to the Church in their wills shows the faith that they had in it. The Hunne case, which has often been cited as an example of the level of corruption within the Church, was a one-off circumstance which was certainly not typical, and cannot be used as a generalised view of the Church. The Church was flexible, and prepared to work with Henry on issues such as benefit of clergy, as shown by its agreement with the Acts of 1491 and 1512. Finally, the Church courts were efficient, speedy and cheap in comparison to the normal courts, which was grossly disliked by the common lawyers, such as Fish.

It seems, therefore, that it was external political factors that caused the English Reformation, and the Church coming under attack in the first place. ‘The entry of England into the Reformation movement was an accident, the result of a side issue…the desire of King Henry VIII to get an annulment of the marriage between himself and his legitimate wife Catherine.’ Henry wanted a divorce from Catherine for many reasons. He needed a male heir to the throne, as the spectre of the Wars of the Roses still hung over the Tudors. Catherine had suffered many miscarriages, and now seemed incapable of bearing any more children, as she had not been pregnant for seven years. ‘Finally, and least honourably of all, Henry had fallen violently in love with another woman – Anne Boleyn.’

Henry, as an amateur theologian, based his request to the Pope for an annulment on Leviticus 20:16 - ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an impurity: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.’ Whether or not he actually believed that God was punishing him for marrying his brother’s widow is questionable, but at the Palace of Bridewell, in November 1528, Henry assembled his nobility, judges and counsellors in order to express to them his views. He needed support in order to argue with the Church, and tellingly invited no clergymen. According to Professor Scarisbrick, Henry believed ‘that it was not only his right to throw away his wife, but it was also his duty – to himself, to Catherine, to his people, to God.’ However, it is likely that he thought that gaining an annulment would be easy, as they were fairly common if approached in the right fashion (for example, the Duke of Suffolk had obtained one in order to marry Mary). The Pope would want to please a King whose support he regularly sought in diplomatic manoeuvrings, and Wolsey, who Henry chose to appeal to the Pope, was a very senior churchman and was owed favours by the Pope’s advisors.

The main problem was that Henry approached the Pope in the wrong way. Instead of surreptitiously wangling a divorce out of him, he directly challenged the Pope’s power, and effectively asked him to admit that his predecessor, Pope Julius II, was wrong to have granted a Papal Dispensation. This would question the notion of Papal Infallibility, and cause the international Church to lose face. The international situation was also not particularly beneficial, as in 1527 Charles V’s forces sacked Rome and took the Pope prisoner: the result was that the Pope was vulnerable to any pressure from Charles, who as Catherine’s nephew was against any divorce. It was also pointed out that the Bible encouraged Henry’s situation, as in Deuteronomy it indicates that it is a brother’s duty to marry a brother’s widow should she be childless in order to secure the continuation of the family name. Although the Pope agreed to the divorce proceedings being heard in England, this was only a delaying tactic: in July 1529, Campeggio, who had been sent to England to preside over the hearing, insisted on a summer recess, at which point the Pope decreed that the case would be heard in Rome after all. Wolsey had failed to secure Henry a divorce, and he was destroyed by it. Henry, on the other hand, had to look for different means to marry Anne Boleyn.

It therefore appears that, rather than the traditional view of the people in England completely dissatisfied with the state of the Church and clamouring for reform, they were actually, in general, quite content with the Church, and that it was, in fact, Henry’s need for a divorce which caused the Reformation in England. ‘Though so much else was at work, it will be seen that if Henry had not weakly allowed himself to be captured by Anne Boleyn, and then allowed himself to be pushed into the extreme position of breaking with the Papacy rather than disappoint the woman who had infatuated him, England would be Catholic today; and if England had remained Catholic the Reformation elsewhere would certainly have died out.’ Although this appears to be rather an extreme view, it does show that some historians do believe that the divorce was the one and only reason behind the Reformation.