Transcription
Hello, welcome back to our lecture series, Forum Western Civilization 102. We heard on our previous lecture from Dr. Price, and he, of course, discussed Ulrich Zwingli and the radical Reformation, the Anabaptists as well. And so our topic seems to be, because the, the title for this unit is the Renaissance and the Reformation, and so obviously we have quite a lot to say about the Reformation. There wasn't one huge Reformation in Europe; we have different parts of this. So today's topic by Dr. Robinson, he will discuss the English Reformation.
Now, England was a bit different. You'll, he'll go into more detail about the differences between the English Reformation and, say, Martin Luther, but it definitely didn't progress the way that the Reformation did on the European continent because, you know, England is an island. It's, it's off of the European continent, separated from France by the English Channel. Um, it seems that in England, the Reformation begins not for religious reasons, for the most part, but the king at the time, King Henry VIII. He has been mentioned in a previous lecture by Dr. Robinson. He wanted a divorce. He wanted a divorce. He had been married for quite a few years, but his wife at the time didn't, had not given him a son, and Henry VIII was obsessed with getting an heir to continue the Tudor dynasty. And so he knew that his wife was related to, um, the Holy Roman Emperor, who was Charles V at the time. Remember how Dr. Robinson mentioned in a previous lecture that it's like a cast of characters on so many different rulers, especially in Western Civilization 102. We've talked about Charles V and how powerful he was. He was the Holy Roman Emperor. Charles V had also been the King of Spain. He was known as Charles I if you referred to him as the King of Spain. He became Charles V when he became Holy Roman Emperor. Well, he was controlling the Pope at the time, and the Pope wasn't going to be very cooperative, it seems, with Henry VIII. So Henry VIII decided, "Hey, we'll just break away from the Catholic Church. I'll create my own church, the Church of England." Eventually becomes known as the Anglican Church, and then I'll do what I need to do. Um, and he does it. This does not mean, I'm sure Dr. Robinson will point out, this does not mean that England becomes Protestant in nature. That's not the case at all. England remains Catholic in doctrine. Henry VIII did not want, did not seem to care, or, or he didn't seem like it was very important to him to change the basic church and move it away from Catholicism. He didn't have a problem with that. It's not until, um, much later, not under his reign, but it's not until later on that England becomes a Protestant country. So even though, you know, you see with Martin Luther, the movement, um, to reform the church, and the movement, Martin Luther had issues with the church and the, in the practices of the church, and he was a muck. He was just an everyday person. In England, you have the king starts the movement. It's not the people in England that get things rolling.
Now, Dr. Robinson, in this lecture, you know, he will discuss more about the Reformation and how Henry manages to break away from the Catholic Church. Dr. Robinson also will discuss the fact that Henry VIII will have issues. He's known for his many, many wives. That Dr. Robinson will mention the different wives, and of course, we'll have to find out if he gets a son. Does he eventually get a son? Nice to know that his last wife outlived him, a little poetic justice, because he's also known for killing a few of his wives as well. One probably because she was guilty of adultery, the other probably not, but either way, they were executed. You cannot be a queen and commit adultery because then the heir, you wouldn't know if the heir was the king's or somebody else's, and that's not a good thing. So he's known for that as well. So he's known for the English Reformation, but he's also known for his personal life, his marriages. You also heard Dr. Robinson mention in a previous lecture that Henry VIII was a Renaissance man. He was very accomplished as a young man. He composed music. You know, he was a Renaissance man means that you're pretty much good at everything, and that was Henry VIII. He wasn't the only one, as we discovered in, in, um, other lectures that were, you know, that were Renaissance people. There were other rulers. There was quite a few rulers of the time that were accomplished in different pursuits.
Now, also with the English Reformation, talk a little bit about everything that's happening in England. Um, will lay the foundation, I guess you can say, for, for it to become truly Protestant. Dr. Robinson also discusses Henry's kids, the kids that he has. I mean, he has six wives. He does end up having kids. We'll see if he has a son, but his kids will be his daughter, actually, his daughter's named Elizabeth I. I'm sure most of us know who Elizabeth I is, very famous Queen of England, very powerful and very popular, very strong Queen of England as well. So it's a little ironic, I guess you could say, that Henry VIII has done all of this to get this son and to have his dynasty rule on, but yet the most famous queen or monarch in England is actually his daughter. He has other kids, and, and all of his kids seem to rule England at one time or another. Um, some are Catholic, some are Protestant. We'll have to see how that plays out. So let's take a look. It's a very interesting topic. It, it's very fascinating to, to see how Henry VIII picks his wives, I guess you could say, and just anything about his personal life is pretty interesting, and then to tie it in with an English Reformation just makes it even better.
The English Reformation was not the work of a reformer like Martin Luther or Ulrich Zwingli or John Calvin, although Lutheranism, Zwinglianism, and Calvinism all would later have influence in England. Neither was the English Reformation a mass movement from the lower classes of the sort that we saw with the Anabaptists, although there would be Anabaptists in England too. Rather, the English Reformation was a Reformation, initially at least, from the top, the very top, from the King, Henry VIII. And in fact, the English Reformation took place in two stages: the first stage, a political stage, and the second stage, a religious stage.
Now, I want to mention that much of the material we're about to discuss has recently been the subject of a number of movies and also of a long-running television series, "The Tudors." I would caution you against taking any of those films too literally. They're very entertaining in a lot of ways, but historically not necessarily very accurate. At any rate, we have a two-stage Reformation: political and then religious. The political being instigated by Henry VIII. But as a matter of fact, in England, in the years just before the Reformation, there were a number of forces that might have led to a religious Reformation there, and that would, in fact, key into religious changes that took place later on.
First of all, in England, there was a long and very deeply embedded anti-papal tradition, a tradition of hostility towards the Pope. One of the odd things about the English Reformation is that Henry VIII probably had a better relationship with the Popes of his early years than any English king since William the Conqueror back in the 11th century. In between, the relationship between English kings and Popes had been very fraught, and there had been a growing anti-papal tradition over that whole period of centuries. This had been manifested even in laws in the 14th century which were intended to limit the Pope's power in England. There was in 1351 a statute passed in Parliament called the Statute of Provisors, which limited the Pope's ability to appoint church officials in England. There was also a statute soon to become very significant in the Reformation, passed in 1353, called the Statute of Praemunire, and that prohibited any Englishman from appealing over the head of the king to the Pope. So you have this long tradition of anti-papal feeling of the same kind that you find in Germany and with Luther, of the same kind that you find in Switzerland with Zwingli and later on with Calvin. But that didn't really lead to the English Reformation, at least not initially.
A second factor that might have led to a religious Reformation in England has to do with the movement that emerged in the late 14th century that was really the creation of a churchman by the name of John Wycliffe. John Wycliffe was a priest, a theologian, and a professor at the University of Oxford, and a number of his teachings about the church anticipate those that Luther came up with a century and a half later. Wycliffe questioned the authority of the Pope. Wycliffe emphasized the need to read scripture and the authority of scripture over all other forms of authority. He advocated and helped to create an English language Bible, which, interestingly enough, became illegal in the 15th century. He also questioned the need for seven sacraments, ultimately settling on only three: baptism, confession and penance, and communion, and was a very vocal critic of the church for its wealth and its involvement in politics. Wycliffe lived to a ripe old age and died peacefully in his bed because he had a strong protector in the royal family. But he left behind a group of followers known as the Lollards, many of whom were persecuted in the 15th century, some of whom were burned at the stake, and those that survived did the, the obviously smart thing and went underground. But there were still Lollards around several generations later in the time of Henry VIII, and they might well have started a religious Reformation, but it was not them who started it.
A third group who might have contributed to the beginning of a religious Reformation were the Christian humanists in England, Christian humanists of the same sort that we discussed a few lectures ago, who combined the study of the ancient world, and especially of ancient languages and literature in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, with a propensity for Christianity. Indeed, the greatest of the Christian humanists, Erasmus, was a close personal friend of Henry VIII and also of many of the Christian humanists in England. Another close friend of Henry VIII was the famous Sir Thomas More, who in his early days was a great advocate of reform in the church and who criticized many of the same things that Protestant reformers criticized, but he did so without ever giving up his Catholic faith. Still another example was a main man by the name of John Colet, who founded the first grammar school in London, the St. Paul's Grammar School, and was also a great advocate of reform. So these individuals might have given rise to a Reformation, but in fact, they did not.
A fourth group who might have contributed to the onset of religious Reformation was a handful of Lutherans who could be found in England by the early 1520s. There were not a lot of these people yet, but Lutheranism, of course, had become quite famous, quite quickly, and Lutheran literature had spread into England, particularly among people who were well-educated and at Cambridge University, which is not that far from the coast and therefore not that far from the continent. There were a number of professors who became familiar with Lutheranism and who embraced his ideas. Many of them met on a fairly regular basis at a place called the White Horse Inn, and they became known as the White Horse Inn group, and they advocated Lutheran-style reform, which, by the way, was dangerous in the early 1520s. But had there been enough of them, had circumstances been a little bit different, they too might have led to the creation of a religious Reformation, but they didn't either.
By now, no doubt, you are wondering, "Well, what exactly happened?" Well, what happened is this: Henry VIII started out his life as a very loyal, very devout Catholic. In fact, Henry VIII was a younger brother. When he was mere Prince Henry, his older brother Arthur was destined for the throne, and it's quite likely that had Arthur had lived, Henry would have ended up being an Archbishop. So he was well-educated, he knew his theology, he knew his scripture, and he was fascinated by it. In his youth, he was a loyal son of the church. As I said earlier, he got along very well with the Popes, and in fact, when Martin Luther began his Reformation on the continent, Henry was furious. He responded in 1521 by writing a book called "In Defense of the Seven Sacraments," in which he challenged Luther's whole sacramental theology. He, in fact, made such a hit with this with the Papacy that the Pope awarded Henry the title of Defender of the Faith. And so, up until that point, everything seemed fine between Henry and the traditional church. In fact, during his years in the 1520s, a number of Lutherans in England were persecuted by the government. There was a Lutheran by the name of William Tyndale, who translated or created a new translation, I should say, of the Bible into English. He had to leave the country in fear of his life. Later, he smuggled English Bibles back into the country, but it remained a crime to do so in the 1520s, and he ultimately was caught by the authorities on the continent and burned at the stake in 1536. There were other Lutherans who were arrested, some of them intimidated into keeping quiet, others, in fact, burned at the stake for heresy. So there was very little to indicate in the early 1520s that Henry VIII would do anything to run afoul of the traditional Roman Catholic Church.
And then came what we often refer to as the King's Great Matter. The King's Great Matter has to do with his first marriage and with the fruits, or lack thereof, from that first marriage. Henry VIII's first wife, as many of you may know, was a woman named Catherine of Aragon. She was the daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, who, among other things, were the patrons of Christopher Columbus. She also had previously been married to Henry's older brother, Arthur. Catherine was originally brought to England as part of a diplomatic arrangement between England and Spain that was cemented by a marriage between the two royal houses, with Catherine from Spain marrying Arthur of England. That's how it would have remained undoubtedly, but for the fact that in 1502, Arthur, who was a rather sickly young man, fell ill and died. This left young Catherine a widow with a very uncertain future. But Henry VIII's father, Henry VII, having lost this first attempt at cementing an alliance with Spain, let the rulers of Spain know that he would be interested in a second marriage between Catherine of Aragon and his younger son, Henry. Now, this sort of thing is unusual. It would be particularly unusual today for somebody to marry his dead brother's wife or his dead wife's sister, but among royalty, the rules sometimes got bent. In fact, it was not that unusual where an alliance, a political alliance, was concerned for just this sort of thing to happen. But technically, it violated the canon law of the church. So, in order to do so, you had to get the approval of the Pope. You had to get what was called a Papal Dispensation. Henry VIII, who is a very careful man, approached Pope Julius II and asked for just such a dispensation, allowing Henry to marry Catherine, and he got it. Julius issued a dispensation saying that Henry and Catherine might be married.
Now, in fact, for the next several years, they were not. Henry VIII continued to play his options, the possibility of marrying young Henry off to somebody that would be even more valuable than a princess of Spain. But he let it be known towards the end of his life that what he really wanted was for Henry to marry Catherine. And so when Henry VII died in 1509, and the young, not quite 18-year-old Henry VIII became king, one of the first things that he did was to honor his father's wishes and to marry Catherine of Aragon. And at first, it seemed like a marriage made in heaven. The two of them were very much alike. They were both very well-educated, they were both multilingual, they were both well-read in the literature of the Renaissance and in the classics and in scripture and in theology. They saw eye to eye about many things, and Henry seems to have fallen genuinely in love with Catherine, and vice versa, something that's not required of kings and queens, but it's nice when it happens.
Now, of course, one of the duties of a king is to produce an heir. Indeed, the two greatest duties of a king are to defend the realm and to produce an heir, and those two go closely together, because as long as the king has no heir, it's a threat to the kingdom. Henry VIII was well aware that just half a century earlier, England had been torn apart by a civil war known as the Wars of the Roses, and he wanted no repetition of that sort of thing. Therefore, it was his goal to produce a son and then more sons as rapidly as possible. But that's not what happened. Although Catherine of Aragon became pregnant on a number of occasions, all of the sons with which she became pregnant either died in infancy or were stillborn. The only child she produced who lived past infancy was a daughter, Princess Mary, the future Queen Mary I, also sometimes known as Bloody Mary. So Henry was convinced that this would not work. At this point, a woman had never ruled in England. It's rather ironic that two of Henry's daughters would rule England, but up to this point, no one ever had, and Henry believed that it was not possible. He believed that if a daughter inherited his throne, the result would be civil war, a revolution, or worse, and therefore he remained determined to have a son. The problem is that Catherine was getting older. She was older than Henry to start with. She had had several unsuccessful pregnancies. She was really reaching the outer limits at which a woman might be expected to conceive in the 16th century, and so the chances of her producing a son were less and less.
Now, remember that Henry VIII was a very devout man. If you've seen the portrayals of Henry in film and on television, you know that he was also a man who was very much fond of his appetites, but as a matter of fact, these kinds of things were not incompatible with kings. It was possible to be both very devout and also very worldly in some ways. And as a matter of fact, the propensity of Henry for the opposite gender has been somewhat exaggerated. It is true that he was married many times. It's also true that he had a string of mistresses, but it is not true that he was simply wanton about these things. He seldom had more than one wife and one mistress at the time, although most people would suggest that that's one person too many. In any case, he began to ask himself, "Why have I, a devout man, a man who tries to do everything right, why have I not had a son?" And he began searching in theology and in scripture for an answer to that question, and he found it. So he believed in the Book of Leviticus in the Old Testament, where it says that a man who uncovers the nakedness of his brother's wife shall be childless. Now, of course, Henry wasn't quite childless, and at the time that he married Catherine, she was no longer Arthur's wife; she was his widow. But in Henry's mind, at least, this formed a scriptural prohibition of his marriage. He came to believe, and he came to believe this quite firmly, that his marriage was unlawful in the eyes of God, and that was why he had not had a son. So he's got two reasons now for wanting to make a change: Catherine is too old to have a son, and he is convinced that their marriage was never legitimate in the first place.
There's also a third motive. By 1527 at the latest, Henry VIII had fallen in love with another woman, a woman named Anne Boleyn. He, in fact, had had mistresses earlier, but Anne Boleyn refused to become his mistress. Perhaps because her older sister Mary had already been the king's mistress and had been discarded. Anne was determined that that would not happen, and was very well-educated. She had spent time on the continent in the Netherlands and in France, and she was every bit a match for Henry intellectually. He found her absolutely irresistible, but she resisted him. She refused to become his mistress, that is, she refused to go to bed with him unless he first married her. That's not the sort of thing Henry VIII was used to, but it fascinated him, and he became obsessed with the idea that he must marry Anne, and that she was the answer to his problems, that if he could simply divorce Catherine and marry Anne, she would give him a son, and all problems would be solved.
Now, this would not be easy for most people to pull off, but Henry was not most people. He was the King of England, a man much in favor with the Papacy, much in favor with the church, and so what he proceeded to do was to send a request to Rome, to the Pope, who at this time was Pope Clement VII, asking permission to divorce Catherine and to marry Anne Boleyn. Now, what he actually called it was an annulment, but essentially what he was asking to do was to divorce her and to remarry on the grounds that his first marriage was not legitimate. In a different time, this might very well have worked. Clement VII was friendly to Henry VIII, Clement VII was eager to help Henry VIII, but Clement VII was not free to do what he wished. Clement VII, in 1527, was essentially the prisoner of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, whose troops had captured Rome just recently, and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was the nephew of Catherine of Aragon. Charles V did not want to see a divorce take place, a divorce that would dishonor his aunt, that would illegitimize his cousin Mary, and that would bring disgrace to the Habsburg family. And so he made it clear to Clement VII that no such divorce was acceptable. Clement found himself caught between a rock and a hard place, wanting to please Henry VIII, but unable to resist Charles V. And so he did what most people would do: he stalled, he equivocated, he suggested that more time was needed, and eventually, at the request of Henry VIII's chief minister, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, he agreed to a hearing being held in England to determine the legitimacy of the king's marriage.
Now, because Cardinal Thomas Wolsey was the highest-ranking churchman in England, and because he was also the closest associate of the king, it was felt that allowing him to make such a decision alone would not look good. So Clement VII sent another Cardinal over to work in conjunction with Wolsey, Cardinal Campeggio. Cardinal Campeggio and Cardinal Wolsey convened a trial in 1527 to determine the legitimacy of the king's marriage. They actually went through the motions of putting Henry VIII himself on trial for having an illegitimate marriage. So far so good. Henry humbly complied, but Catherine did not. Catherine showed up for the first session of the court, she listened to the charges being made, she fell on her knees and appealed to Henry not to do this, and when he ignored her, she walked out, and she never came back. Without her, there it was very difficult to proceed, and the upshot of a very long story is that eventually Cardinal Campeggio and Clement VII revoked the case back to Rome. That is to say, in order to continue, Henry VIII would have to go to Rome himself, something that he was not about to do.
Over the next couple of years, from 1527 to 1528 to 1529, Henry VIII and Wolsey tried all sorts of things to persuade or to force the Pope into agreeing to the divorce, but none of them worked. Ultimately, the failure to help Henry VIII get a divorce led to Thomas Wolsey's fall from power, and in 1529, he was completely disgraced. He died shortly thereafter. In 1529, looking for a different sort of solution, Henry VIII called a session of the English Parliament. So, and that Parliament began an investigation of the clergy, an investigation that would give Henry VIII a way of pressuring the Pope into giving him what he wanted. The Parliament were eager to investigate. Some of them, perhaps, were infected with reformist ideas, but in any case, many of them had no fondness for the great lords of the church in England, and they went looking for abuses, and they found examples. They found examples of pluralism, they found examples of simony, the sale of church office, they found examples of absenteeism, and they found examples of churchmen not obeying their vows. But more significantly, what they suggested to Henry was that perhaps his clergy were not entirely his subjects. They gave him the idea, or perhaps he conceived it himself, that the clergy who all swore an oath of obedience to the Pope had thereby gone over his head, committed the crime of praemunire, and therefore were guilty of breaking the law. When Henry presented this idea to the clergy, they were dumbfounded, but they also realized that he had them over a barrel. The trouble is, no matter how much pressure he put on the clergy, Clement VII was still the prisoner of Charles V, and no matter how much he might want to, there was little that he could do.
Sometime around 1530, perhaps earlier, certainly by then, Henry came into contact with two more Thomases who would have a great deal of influence over how things would develop over the next few years. Why are there so many Englishmen named Thomas in this era? They're all named after Saint Thomas of Canterbury from the days of Henry II. At any rate, these two Thomases were Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell. Thomas Cranmer was a hitherto fairly little-known clergyman who was nonetheless very well-educated, who had been associated with the White Horse Inn group at Cambridge, and who had some sympathies with Lutheranism, although he kept those, uh, fairly close to the vest at this time. He suggested to Henry that Henry, in fact, had a strong scriptural case for seeking a divorce, and what he recommended is that Henry actually poll all of the theological faculties of all the universities in Europe and get their opinions and seek their support. As a matter of fact, that's exactly what Henry did. He drew up a list of arguments, it was circulated to the universities, and surprisingly perhaps, a majority of the universities that looked at it agreed with Henry's position. Again, the difficulty, though, is no matter how much they might agree, Clement VII is still Charles V's prisoner.
So Thomas Cromwell, a man who had previously worked for Thomas Wolsey, now caught the king's attention and gradually became, over the next few years, his chief advisor. And one of the first, most important pieces of advice that he gave to Henry was the idea, based on some very fabricated history, but a useful fabrication, that Henry really owed no allegiance to the Pope. Cromwell's argument was that the kings of England had always enjoyed Imperial power, the same power as the Holy Roman Emperors or as the ancient Roman Emperors, and that the Popes therefore had no independent authority in England, that the Popes had no right to govern the English church, that the Popes had no right to command the king of England, that, in fact, in reality, the king of England was head of the church himself. The implications of that are clear: if Henry is the head of the church, then that changes everything. He can grant himself what he wants. Over a period from about 1531 to 1534, Parliament carried out a program of legislation that gradually made this into a statutory reality, whatever the history behind it might be. They passed something called the Act in Restraint of Appeals, which cut off all appeals to the Pope, the ability of anyone, clergyman or layman, to appeal outside of England to the Pope on any matter. They passed something called the Statute of Annates, which cut off revenue from England to the Pope, and ultimately they passed something called the Act of Supremacy, which declared that Henry VIII, not the Pope, was the Supreme Head of the Church in England.
Now, in the meantime, other things had happened. Henry had sent Catherine of Aragon away from court. Henry had continued his wooing of Anne Boleyn, and by 1532, she had become convinced that the divorce would happen, and she began cohabiting with Henry VIII. As a result of which, by January of 1533, she was pregnant. Now, this is problematic. Henry is technically still married to Catherine. He is technically not married to Anne. If Anne has an illegitimate child, that's of no use whatsoever. So in January, they were secretly married. Secretly. Then, in the spring, the old Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest-ranking church official in England at the time, died. And Henry VIII appointed in his place Thomas Cranmer, the reform-leaning priest who earlier had suggested to Henry how to go about getting a divorce. Cranmer proceeded to grant Henry his divorce. He also presided over the wedding between Henry and Anne Boleyn, and so they became publicly, legally husband and wife in May of 1533. In the summer, Anne was crowned, and in September, she gave birth to a daughter, another daughter, a daughter whom she named Elizabeth, a daughter at whose birth Henry was ironically rather disappointed, having hoped for a son. What makes it ironic is that she would go on to be arguably the greatest ruler in English history, but at the time, he was determined to continue trying to have a son. He and Anne were both young. He was hopeful. Over the next couple of years, she became pregnant at least once, probably twice. Unfortunately, both times led to miscarriages or stillbirths.
As a result, by 1536, Anne had begun to fall into disfavor with the king. Moreover, she had begun to seem a threat to two important groups at the royal court: more conservative, religiously conservative people at court, people who still felt loyalty to the old church, did not like Anne because she was an enthusiastic supporter of reform. But even reformers like Thomas Cromwell, for example, who very much embraced the new Lutheranism, were worried about Anne having too much influence over the king. And so they conspired to bring her down. In 1536, charges were trumped up against Anne, claiming that she had committed adultery against the king with four of the members of his court and with the fifth individual, her own brother. Almost certainly none of this is true. There's one historian, a guy by the name of George Bernard, whose recently written a book arguing that it may be, but the weight of scholarly opinion suggests that these charges were trumped up. It would have required a degree of foolishness on Anne's part that is almost unbelievable in any case. She was accused of adultery, and by virtue of that, she was also accused of treason. The king could commit adultery; in fact, the king did. The king's wife could not do so, because if she did, she might become pregnant by another man and might give birth to a child who is not really the king's child, but who would be passed off as one, and who would therefore violate the, the sacredness of the succession. The upshot of this is that Anne was put on trial, she was found guilty, and she was beheaded in 1536.
Henry almost immediately took a third wife, Jane Seymour, who the following year gave birth to his long-wished-for son, who he named Edward, and who would be the future King Edward VI. Unfortunately for Henry and for Edward, Jane Seymour became ill as a result of giving birth. She developed a fever, and she died a few days later, leaving the king in perhaps the worst depression of his life, and leaving the young prince without a mother. For the time being, Henry determined that he would not remarry. At the same time, lots of things were going on with the church. Thomas Cromwell, using his greater and greater power, became what's called the Vicegerent of Ecclesiastical Affairs. That is, the king put him in charge of reforming the church. He carried out visitations of the monasteries, visitations of the various parishes, in conjunction with the bishops, especially Cranmer. They tried to eliminate corruption and bring reform wherever they went, and little by little, they also began to advocate a more Protestant form of worship, something that was eventually embodied in a document called the Ten Articles. The Ten Articles basically laid down the fundamental doctrines for the reformed English church, and while they don't go all the way to Lutheranism, they were definitely a deviation from Catholicism, which alarmed a lot of the old followers of the traditional religion, just as it delighted a lot of reformers. Where Henry stood on this remains a subject of debate. He went along with it initially, although he would later change his mind, but remember, he was very busy with marital politics in 1536 and 1537.
Another thing that happened is that Thomas Cromwell began a process known as the Dissolution of the Monasteries. There were a great many monasteries in England which had fabulous wealth associated with them. Not that the monks themselves were wealthy, but their monasteries owned a great deal of land. There was a lot of gold and silver in the churches in the form of candlesticks and communion ware and what have you. Uh, even, even the roofs were worth a great deal because of the copper on them. And over the course of several years, the monasteries were dissolved. They were dissolved at least hypothetically on religious grounds, on the grounds that monasticism was not a necessary part of true Christianity. If, in fact, Luther was right and salvation is a matter of faith and not of good works, then monasticism seems like a useless exercise, and that was Cromwell's rationale. Of course, many people went along with it, including a lot of religious conservatives, because the dissolution of the monasteries freed up a tremendous amount of land that Henry passed on to others, often selling it, sometimes giving it away. It also enriched the king to an enormous degree, but it infuriated a great many people. And in 1536, a rebellion broke out against Henry VIII in northern England, a rebellion known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. The Pilgrimage of Grace had both religious and non-religious causes. There was hostility to the reforms, hostility to the dissolution of monasteries. There were all sorts of rumors and conspiracy theories floating around, particularly there were tales that the king planned all sorts of new taxes, especially one on horned animals like cattle and goats, and this led to the most serious rebellion that Henry VIII ever faced. It was put down with great difficulty. It broke out again in 1537, and again was put down with great difficulty, and ultimately with considerable brutality.
In the meantime, there was a, a more peaceful but ultimately more deeply rooted backlash against the reformers at the royal court. If Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer represented the forces of reform, there was a Bishop of Winchester named Stephen Gardiner, who was one of the representatives of traditional religion, and the highest-ranking nobleman in the kingdom, Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, was hand in glove with Bishop Gardiner. They favored a return to a more conservative form of worship, something more similar to the Catholicism of old, even though neither of them publicly opposed Henry's headship of the church. They began to push for a revision of the Ten Articles that led in 1539 to the publication of a new set of religious articles called the Six Articles, which reaffirmed a number of fundamental Catholic beliefs. The Ten Articles had not mentioned transubstantiation either in agreement or disagreement, but the Six Articles affirmed that transubstantiation was the truth. The Ten Articles had not required clerical celibacy; the Six Articles did, and so on. So by 1539, there had been a swing, an official doctrine apparently endorsed by the king, back towards the traditional religion. That's not to say that Cromwell and Cranmer went away. In fact, Cromwell remained the most influential man in the kingdom after the king, and one of the things that he influenced the king to do was to take a new bride in 1540.
Cromwell believed that with England now having broken away from the Roman Catholic Church, and with the two most powerful rulers on the continent, Francis I of France and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, both being Catholic, that Henry needed some Protestant allies. And where better to look for them than Northern Germany, which had become Lutheran? So Cromwell began to cultivate the Duke of Cleves, a state in Northern Germany that was Lutheran. The Duke of Cleves had two sisters, one of whom was named Anne, and ultimately Cromwell persuaded Henry that he should ask Anne to marry him. By the way, there were a number of other candidates proposed, several of whom turned Henry down as not the most dependably safe husband to be had. By this time, but Anne of Cleves ultimately agreed. Henry, being Henry, of course, wanted to know what she looked like. Henry was, was a very untraditional king in terms of marriage. He kept marrying for love and for attraction, when everybody knew that what kings were supposed to marry for was policy. So he wanted to know what she looked like, and he sent over his, his greatest portrait painter, Hans Holbein the Younger, who painted her and brought back what looks like a fairly attractive picture. It is possible that Hans Holbein might have made her look a little bit better than she did in reality. Uh, we, there's no way to know for sure, but what we do know is that when she showed up in England to wed the king, he was sorely disappointed. Exactly why remains subject to some question, but he told his ministers, "I like her not," and he later claimed, at least for the legal, the law's sake, that he believed that she was not a virgin. The upshot of this was that he arranged a divorce with her, a divorce which she does not seem to have resisted very much, particularly since she was allowed to stay in England, given a nice house, given the title of the Queen's Dear Sister, and allowed to participate in court functions and live to a ripe old age in considerable comfort. But this was a big part of the downfall of Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell's religious ideas were going against the grain at the moment. He had suggested the Anne of Cleves marriage, and in the summer of 1540, his enemies struck, accusing him of treason to the king, who temporarily bought into the idea and allowed Cromwell to be arrested and executed.
It seemed as though the religious conservatives had triumphed, especially when later in the year Henry married a niece of Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, a very young woman, Catherine Howard, who seemed certain to live long enough to give him still more sons, and with whom he was madly infatuated. Henry, of course, by this time was an older man. He was overweight. He had lost his youthful virility and athleticism, and he sort of experienced, uh, you might say, a midlife crisis with Catherine Howard. With Catherine Howard, who's at most 21, probably 17. Unfortunately, his joy was short-lived. Catherine was not the wisest woman to ever marry Henry VIII. She conducted an affair with one of his courtiers practically right under his nose. She also had concealed the fact that she had had a rather active personal life before marrying him, and when this came out, she was disgraced. Whereas the charges against Anne Boleyn were almost certainly trumped up, those against Catherine Howard were unquestionably true. She had committed adultery, and therefore she was guilty of treason, and in fact, subject to the penalty for that, which was death. She was disgraced, her, the Howard family was disgraced, and the religious conservatives suffered a terrible setback, particularly for two reasons: one is that Henry VIII married a sixth time to a widow, this time a woman named Catherine Parr, who was among other things a reformer. The other is that Henry was approaching the end of his life. Everyone knew that he had only a few more years to go, and people began to look to his son, Prince Edward, as the future king. Prince Edward, already as a boy, had shown an inclination towards Protestant reform, and his two uncles, the brothers of his mother Jane Seymour, Edward Seymour and Thomas Seymour, also favored reform. So between the Seymours and Thomas Cranmer, who remained around, Henry VIII was gradually pulled back in the direction of reform. Not that Gardiner didn't try to stop it. He tried accusing Catherine Parr of treason, but it failed, or rather, he accused her of heresy, and it failed. Ultimately, Henry died in 1547 with the Protestants holding the upper hand.
His young son Edward became King Edward VI. Still a boy, he needed guidance, and Henry VIII had appointed a council of regents to govern the kingdom for Edward until he came of age. On that council of regents was Edward's uncle, Edward Seymour, but very quickly, Edward Seymour managed to manipulate the situation so that he became the sole Lord Protector of England, exercising all royal power for his nephew by himself. He also got his nephew to make him the Duke of Somerset, and as Duke of Somerset, he wielded enormous power for the next several years. Eventually, he ran into difficulty of his own and was overthrown by the other members of the council and replaced in power, if not in title, by John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland. But both Seymour and Northumberland were reformers. So throughout Edward's short reign, he ruled only until 1553, when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 16, but throughout that reign, a reformer was king, his uncle, a reformer, was protector, later Northumberland, a reformer, controlled the government, and Cranmer, a reformer, head of the church. Small wonder that under Edward, we have stage two of the English Reformation, a religious Reformation.
Now, there was nothing to stop the influx of Lutheran ideas, of Zwingli's ideas, and of the ideas coming out of Geneva from John Calvin, about whom you'll be hearing more later in this course. In 1549, Thomas Cranmer produced something called the Book of Common Prayer, an English language Protestant form of worship for the Church of England. English Bibles were made widely available so that the English could read scripture for themselves in their own language. Cranmer produced a Book of Homilies, that is, a book of English language sermons. As you know, one of the great strengths of the Protestants early on is that they were great preachers, very persuasive from the pulpit, and very good at winning out over their Catholic adversaries. Later on, in 1552, there was a further reform, a new second edition of the Book of Common Prayer with even more Protestant practices in it, and under Edward VI, the church issued something called the Forty-Two Articles, a very extensive statement of Protestant doctrine. And thus, the English Reformation reached what looked like full fruition here, except that in 1553, Edward died. Rather than growing up to marry and have heirs of his own who would perpetuate his line and perpetuate the Protestant religion, he died at the age of 16. His older sister, Mary, who remained devoutly Catholic, took the throne, and in 1553, England began a sharp turn back towards Catholicism, a turn that would last until Mary's own death in 1558, when her younger sister Elizabeth would become queen, and England would arguably become permanently Protestant.
Under Mary, the church returned to its allegiance to Rome. It returned to the Catholic form of worship. Mary herself married Prince Philip of Spain, later Philip II of Spain, one of the most powerful Catholic rulers in Europe, and famously, or infamously, Mary burned at the stake some 300 Protestants who refused to convert back to Catholicism. It's only when she dies and Elizabeth becomes queen that we can begin to see the steady growth of a religious Reformation that will not be turned back.
Now, one of the very significant things about this is that in every case, in the reforms that Henry VIII carried out, whether they were his idea or Cranmer's or Cromwell's, he did it through Parliament. He did not do it by royal fiat, by royal proclamation, by ramming it down the throats of people. He did it through acts of Parliament. Parliament, of course, was nothing like democratic at this point. The House of Lords, you sat in by virtue of birth. The House of Commons was elected by only a small handful of the well-to-do, but it was the closest thing there was to a representative of the kingdom. And rather than make religious changes by himself, the king legislated them through Parliament. When Edward VI took England in a further Protestant direction, he again did it through acts of Parliament. When Queen Mary, Bloody Mary, took England back to the Catholic, to Catholicism, same thing, through acts of Parliament. And when Elizabeth carried out what is known as the Elizabethan Settlement, restoring Protestantism once and for all, once again, she did this through Parliament.
Now, this greatly, greatly enhances the stature of Parliament in England. Parliament had been around for a long time, since the 13th century. Parliament had increasingly inquired, required, or acquired more powers. In particular, the king could not tax without Parliament, and Parliament also legislated on a number of things, both private and public. But beginning with Henry VIII, Parliament is legislating on the most important thing imaginable to a 16th-century person. Bear in mind that during the Reformation, Catholics assumed that Protestants were going to hell. Protestants assumed that Catholics were going to hell. Some Protestants assumed that other Protestants were going to hell. So it was extraordinarily important that you follow the right faith if you wanted to spend eternity in heaven rather than in hell. Parliament is legislating on what is the true faith. It's legislating, in a sense, not only on this life but on the next, and there's nothing, arguably, more important than that. This enhancement in Parliament's stature will continue in the 17th century, and this is especially important for us as Americans, because our own Constitution, our own democratic system, draws so directly on the Parliamentary tradition in England. Therefore, in a very real sense, the English Reformation is one of the pillars upon which American political democracy is based.
I love that topic. I love Henry VIII. Well, I love to hear about Henry VIII, and of course, the English Reformation is fascinating because it's different than what was happening in Europe, so that was very, very interesting. Well, for our next lecture, when we come back, Dr. Price is back again, and he will discuss a little bit more about Reformation practices here. He will discuss Calvinism. We've had a discussion about Martin Luther, and we've learned about Ulrich Zwingli. We've learned about the English Reformation and Henry VIII and, and how the church progresses from that. And now we're going to focus on John Calvin. John Calvin was from France. He was French, but he is probably most famous for his city in Switzerland. It's called Geneva, because Calvin eventually will reorganize it based on his religious beliefs. Okay, no separation of church and state for John Calvin. It's also interesting to find out from Dr. Price, John Calvin is extremely, extremely important figure for the Protestant Reformation because he influences so many other people. He influences the Presbyterians in Scotland. He influences the Puritans in England, of course, that will influence the, the new world that the English discovers, that they settle in. Puritans immigrate over there into Massachusetts, very important for American history as well. So I can't wait to hear about John Calvin. Until next time.