Foundations of the Anglican Church LI

Grave of Katherine of Aragon in Peterborough

Cathedral, England

Let’s go back and pick up our story of the Anglican Church.  We had only gotten as far as the break of this ancient Church with the Roman Communion.  I have tried to demonstrate that Henry VIII did not “found” the Anglican Church—that it had existed from the time of the Roman settlement in Britain and was from ancient times “in communion” with the Roman Church and its Bishop but at the same time a Church with a distinct identity and traditions including a variety of liturgical usages unique to itself in its various dioceses.  The ties of communion strengthened after the time of the missionary work of St. Augustine at Canterbury and St. Paulinus in York and after the Norman Conquest the continental pattern of subjection to Rome gradually replaced the idea of being in communion with Rome.  Nevertheless, as in all the pre-Tridentine Churches of Europe, papal authority was not felt nearly as strongly as it would be after Trent and especially after the post-Napoleonic settlements and concordats by which the Holy See wrested away the last vestiges of autonomy-within-communion that remained to the various local Churches now reduced to dioceses. 
While we had come so far as the break between the Church of Henry’s England and the Papacy, we still have a long way to go: Henrician Catholicism, The Protestantizaiton of England under Edward VI, the Marian Catholic Restoration, Elizabeth’s Church, the Puritan ascendancy, Archbishop Laud and Stuart Episcopalianism, Cromwell and the dissolution of Anglicanism and—well, about twenty more topics to bring us up to the beginning of the 20^th century where I intend to leave off.  But to start to dig into this mountain of history, let’s pick up the fate of Henry’s Queen, Katherine of Aragon. 
We left off with our story when Henry failed in his attempts to win an annulment from the Legatine Court under the joint presidency of Cardinals Wolsey and Lorenzo Campeggio—sent by Clement VII from Rome to hear the case.  While Wolsey would have done anything to keep on Henry’s good side, Campeggio was under secret instructions to drag the matter out and give no judgment.  After the better part of a year dragging out, the case was prorogued to Rome for the judgment of the Pope.  (We had covered in earlier postings the connivance of Clement and Katherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles, to insure that Katherine was not disgraced by having her long-time marriage annulled.  Check out the entry of September 7, 2013.)   Henry knew that he had lost in the game of international politics and we can see from this time that he laid the groundwork for separation of the Church of England from its bonds of Communion with the Roman Communion.  (You can check the blog entry for October 3, 2013 to see the gradual process beginning in 1529 and culminating with the 1536 Act in Restraint of Papal Authority by which Henry—with the help of Parliament—severed the cords of Roman communion.) 
The Pope could prevent Henry from getting his annulment; he could not prevent Henry from ending his marriage.  In 1531 Henry banished Katherine from court, giving the Queen’s apartments to Anne Boleyn.  It is unclear if Anne was yet Henry’s Mistress—it probable that they did not sleep together until 1532 and perhaps—though I think doubtfully—until after their secret marriage in January of 1533.  But we will deal with Anne in a future posting.  Katherine was sent to exile at More Park, a palace belonging to Wolsey until his disgrace.  It was a fine house, one of the most elegant great houses in England.  Actually it was such a fine house that Henry and Anne regretted its being turned over to Katherine and the following spring (1532) she was removed to more spartan lodgings Kimbolton Castle  in Cambridegshire.   At Kimbolton, Katherine remained in her chambers, leaving only to hear Mass.  She laid aside all fine clothes and wore the simple habit of the Secular Franciscan Order to which she belonged.  She gave herself, in the Spanish manner, to rigid fasting and penances.  But she would not yield on the point that she was Henry’s Wife and Queen. 
Henry’s parliamentary legislation in 1533 empowered the Archbishop of Canterbury to perform—by royal warrant—certain duties and powers previously reserved to the Holy See.  The dutiful Archbishop thus, in May 1533, supplied the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Katherine that Clement had been unwilling to give.  Henry had secretly married Anne the previous January and by May she was clearly pregnant with Cranmer decreeing the January wedding to have been valid since the marriage to Katherine had been invalid.   
Henry decreed that Katherine should henceforth be known and addressed as the Dowager Princess of Wales since she was the widow of Henry’s older brother, Arthur who had been Prince of Wales in the reign of their father, Henry VII.  Katherine would not accept this and Henry prohibited her from seeing their daughter, Mary, until she accepted her own reduced status and Anne as Queen.  Neither Katherine nor Mary would ever acknowledge Cranmer’s annulment proceedings and thus never saw each other again.  Though they were forbidden to correspond, various Ambassadors passed letters back and forth between mother and daughter.  Katherine soon began to suffer from serious stomach ailments and the unhealthy marshy atmosphere of Cambridgeshire was particularly unconducive to her health.  By December 1535 she clearly was dying.
Katherine wrote Henry shortly before her death:

My most dear lord, King and husband

The hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I owe you forces me, my case being such, to commend myself to you, and to put you in remembrance with a few words of the health and safeguard of your soul which you ought prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and pampering of your body, for the which you have cast me into many calamities and yourself  into many troubles. For my part, I pardon you everything, and I desire to devoutly pray God that He will pardon you also. For the rest, I commend unto you our daughter Mary, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired. I entreat you also, on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage portions, which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants I solicit the wages due them, and a year more, lest they be unprovided for. Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.
Katharine the Queen.

The letter went unanswered.

Katherine died on January 7^th 1536.  The same day Anne Boleyn miscarried a boy, sealing her fate with Henry who had begun taking an interest in one of Anne’s maids—even as Anne had been one of Katherine’s—Jane Seymour.  Katherine’s embalmed body was carried in procession the fifty miles from Kimbolton to the Abbey of Saint Peter at Peterborough.  On January 29^th, in the presence of 200 mourners and illuminated by a thousand candles lit for her soul, Katherine was buried, not as Queen but as Dowager Princess of Wales.
Her rightful title was denied her in death but not in history.  Her grave today in Peterborough Cathedral is marked as “Katherine, Queen of England.”  Five years after her death, the monastic community was expelled from Peterborough when Henry dissolved the last of the monasteries.  The former monastic church became the Cathedral for a new diocese Henry established as one of his (very needed) reforms of the Church.  Today, Katherine’s death and funeral are commemorated every year at Peterborough Cathedral with Anglican Evensong and Procession the night before and a Catholic Mass in the morning—a sign of the growing reconciliation in the split Henry’s divorce from Katherine caused almost five centuries ago.    

Foundations of the Anglican Church, XLVI

Henry VIII at the time of the Separation

of the Church of England from the Roman

Communion

Sorry for the unscheduled hiatus.  I was travelling in the remote wilds of some place or other without an internet connection.  It happens.  And then when I finally returned home there was a death in my immediate circle and I have  been tied up with funeral details.  And—as if that wasn’t enough—my on-line course had also been interrupted and I needed to get back to my students and make sure everyone is on track.   Actually, I am still in the middle of that task.    And all this happened right when we are at the crucial point of Henry separating the English Church from Rome.   As we have seen throughout this series, the English Church had a distinct identity from its very origins in the first century during the time of the Roman colonization of Britain.  It was distinct in liturgy and discipline and was a Church in communion with the Roman Church but not “under it.”  During the period of the Christian Anglo-Saxon kings the ties between Rome and the English Church were strengthened by Augustine’s Mission to Britain and by the devotion of the Anglo-Saxon Christians to the Apostle Peter and to his shrine at Rome, but it was only after the conquest and through the efforts of Archbishops such as Saints Anselm and Thomas a Becket that the English Church was brought more into line with continental Catholicism and gradually found itself “under” papal authority rather than in communion with it.  This paralleled the evolution of authority in the wider Church as the communion of local Churches gradually gave way after the fifth century to the pentarchy model of local Churches being subjected to the benevolent overlordship of the five great patriarchates (Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem).   Rome, like Constantinople, gradually drew in the net to encapsulate its subject Churches and while Charlemagne pretty much delivered most of Western Europe into papal control by the beginning of the ninth century, England was the last big fish to be trapped by the beginning of the twelfth.  (Ireland came slightly later and that is a story in itself but for another time.)  So now let’s look at how Henry undid in about six years this process that took eleven centuries.

Henry began after the fall of Wolsey, with some royally mandated reforms that had nothing to do with separation from Rome and were continuations of minor reforms begun by Wolsey. Henry had legislation introduced into Parliament in 1529 to reduce the fees the Church charged for funerals and for probating wills.  (Probate belonged to the Church courts, not the Royal Court.)  Parliament also reduced the right of sanctuary whereby those accused of certain crimes—including capital crimes—could place themselves under the protection of the Church and avoid punishment.   Finally certain financial abuses were cleared up.  No prelate could hold more than four salaried posts and lands leased by the Church were subject to royal taxation.  Wolsey had had the authority for reform because he was a papal legate—the Pope had given him certain powers in England over the Church.  Henry had no such power and he acted not on papal authority but on the authority of Parliament.  It is a significant difference.  Henry was asserting the right of Parliament—or rather of the “Crown in Parliament” over the Church.  These reforms were all reasonable reforms—indeed they really didn’t go far enough.  Many clergy were not happy however, especially those who held multiple benefices.  It was not uncommon for churchmen to hold several different jobs, collecting the salaries and then paying a lesser priest to perform the duties.  This was called pluralism and it was very common in the Church at the time.  It would not be unusual for a man to hold two or more dioceses, an abbacy or two (or three or four), a cathedral deanery, several canonries at various cathedrals, and maybe a few parishes—collecting all the revenue and paying others to do the work.  No one wanted to lose their salaries.  Henry’s reforms were reasonable reforms and good for the Church.  The issue was not the reforms—but the authority on which the reforms were basked. 
In 1531 Henry took the next step and had Parliament pass an act naming him Head of the Church in England.  This was phrased very carefully so as not to rule out the Pope’s authority but simply to assert the King’s right to regulate the Church in his realm, but he wanted to the people to get used to the idea that the King was Head of the Church.  It was certainly a warning to Clement that the annulment had better be forthcoming.  It was a sufficiently ambiguous act however as not to cause either Thomas More—the Lord Chancellor—nor Bishop John Fisher of Rochester, a defender of Papal authority—enough qualms to have them object    
In March 1532 Henry had a bill introduced into the Commons that limited the payment of Church fees to Rome.  Traditionally every churchman sent his first year’s salary to Rome in gratitude for Rome’s confirming his appointment.  (Remember, bishops were usually elected by their cathedral chapters and abbots by their monasteries, not appointed by the Pope.  Lesser prelates were appointed in a variety of ways—some by election, some by appointment by the bishop, some appointed by the Crown, some nominated by lay benefactors and confirmed by the local bishop.  But all major appointments went to Rome for confirmation—and were accompanied by handsome gifts.)  This act drastically reduced the amount of money that could go to Rome.  Again, it was a warning to the Pope to move on the annulment.  And Henry was very serious about this—he made the extraordinary move of marching into the House of Commons personally (since the 17^th century the monarch is barred from the Commons but at the time—well, who was going to stop Henry?) and demanding that the house “divide” with those in favor of the bill going to one side and those opposed to the other.  Henry could see who his friends were.  You didn’t want to be one of those whom he noticed on the other side. 
Three months later in 1532 Henry presented a document to the clergy demanding their signature.  It is referred to as The Submission of the Clergy.  It required three things
1.     That Convocation (the assembly of the clergy) would make no new laws without royal consent
2.     That the existing canons would be subject to revision by a royal commission
3.     That Convocation would not meet without the King’s consent.

This is the law that ended the independence of the Church.  Thomas More realized that the Rubicon had been crossed and resigned as Lord Chancellor pleading ill health.  He knew that there would be no turning back now though not everyone else saw it that way.    

In April 1533 Parliament passed a law forbidding appeals to any foreign tribunal—including the Pope.  All matters were now to be settled in England.  Henry was at this time already married (albeit secretly) to Anne Boleyn who was pregnant.    Henry had to get this matter of an annulment resolved and resolved quickly.  That wasn’t going to happen in Rome and this bill reserved jurisdiction to an English tribunal.  About five weeks later Henry’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, declared the marriage of Henry and Katherine to be null, freeing the way for the marriage to Anne to be recognized. 
In December 1533 Parliament passed a decree declaring that the Pope had no more jurisdiction in England than any other foreign bishop.  While some historians date the actual break with Rome a year or two later, from this point the English Church can be considered in schism though Parliament would still pass several more acts on the matter.
In 1534 Parliament declared that the King was supreme head of the Church in England.  All revenues formerly paid to the Pope would now go to the King.  Moreover, the King would confirm the election of bishops and abbots as the Pope previously had.  A second act passed at the same time prohibited papal dispensations from being issued in England.  The Peter’s Pence was discontinued.  And the King was given the right to visit and reform religious houses.  Yet another act that spring granted the King a tax of 10% of all clergy incomes.  In the summer of 1534 it was mandated that the Pope’s name should be eliminated from the Mass and from all public prayers.  Some historians date the break from this elimination of the Pope’s names from the public prayers—and from a theological sense this would be the breaking point, though I would argue it for the bill denying papal authority. 
November 1534 saw the Act of Supremacy. Yet other historians say that it is only with this act that the Church of England is separated from Rome.  The Act declared that Henry was "the only supreme head on earth of the Church in England" and that the Crown of England shall enjoy "all honors, dignities, preeminence, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits, and commodities to the said dignity." Furthermore the King had the right to “visit, redress, reform, correct or amend all errors, heresies and enormities” that would have previously been dealt with by papal authority.  The King had the right to appoint to all ecclesiastical offices.  The Bill made it very clear that Parliament was recognizing this headship, not conferring it.  It belonged to the King by Divine Right, not by Parliamentary consent. 
At the same time Parliament passed the Treason Act declaring that anyone who denied the King any of his titles was guilty of treason.  It was under this act and for denying the King’s headship of the Church that Saints John Fisher and Thomas More were executed in the summer of 1535.
There was one more Act of Parliament.  In 1536 Parliament passed an Act in Restraint of Papal authority declaring that the Pope had no right in England to interpret disputed passages of scripture or otherwise exercise spiritual authority.  It also made it clear to the religious orders that they must not acknowledge any authority outside the King’s, thus snapping their ties with their continental brothers and sisters.  Thus we see that the break with Rome was not a sudden thing but done rather subtly and step-by-step.   Meanwhile, the Mass remained as it had always been—minus the mention of the Pope’s name in the Synaxis—but still in Latin with the full ritual.  Vestments and incense and holy water and fast days and all else were unchanged.  The clergy were still forbidden to marry.  The cults of the Virgin and the Saints remained.  England was as Catholic as ever, save for the Pope. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church XLV

The Family of Sir Thomas More by Rowland Lockey

after a sketch by Hans Holbein the Younger,

Well, we should, I suppose, next look at Thomas More as he plays a crucial role in the development of the separation of the Church of England from the See of Rome.  Catholics have been steeped in the stories of this martyr for the faith—the Catholic Faith that is—but as in the case of most hagiography, the stories are somewhat selective and highly edited to the point of distortion.
More was a Londoner, born in 1478, to a prominent London jurist who was sufficiently well connected to place his son as a page in the household of Archbishop Morton, the Lord Chancellor of Henry VII.  Here More was exposed to the new humanism of the Renaissance and received an excellent education in Latin and Greek.  He went on to Oxford but remained only two years when, at his father’s insistence, he returned to London to study at the Inns of Chancery in preparation for a career in the civil service.  He went on to Linconl’s Inn in the Inns of Court and was called to the bar in 1502. 
More was prepared to cause his father grave disappointment by, like Luther, embracing the monastic life.  He lived near the Carthusian monastery, the London Charterhouse, and regularly joined the monks for the Divine Office and other spiritual exercises.  However he abandoned the idea of monastic life, finding celibacy a struggle which he did not think he could win.  He married Jane Colt in 1504 and they had three daughters and a son before Jane died in 1511.  In less than a month after his wife’s death, More remarried.  His second wife was Alice Middleton, a widow of considerable means.  She was, according to one source, a shrew of the first order and not a pretty woman either.  She certainly was a contrast to the gentle and docile Jane.  It was not a love match but a marriage of convenience as More needed a mother for his four young children.  More adopted Alice’s daughter in to his family as well and raised her as his own.  While romance may not have been the motive for the marriage, More deeply loved Alice and she certainly brought life into the household with her fiery temper and outspoken ways.  But beneath her attempts to dominate her husband and push his career, she loved him deeply too.
More had been in Parliament since 1504 and served as undersheriff of London, a position which brought him to the royal attention.  He was named Master of Requests—a position of handling requests to be brought to the King’s attention and a member of the Privy Council in 1514.  He was knighted and made under-treasurer of the Exchequer in 1521 and elected Speaker of the House of Commons in 1525.  This last advancement he owed to Cardinal Wolsey with whom he often worked closely in advancing the plans of the King.
Henry took a genuine liking to More.  Henry seems to have had a natural bonding with men somewhat older than himself, perhaps due to his strained relationship with his father, Henry VII.  In any event, as Wolsey began to fall, More began to rise in the royal favor.  This was not an auspicious time to find oneself in the public gaze however, as Henry’s desire of an annulment and his passion for Anne  Boleyn were both coming to the boiling point and unless the valve were released, the pot was about to blow.  In 1529, with
Wolsey being dismissed from the Lord Chancelorship, More was named to the post.  It was a fateful choice.
It was also an interesting choice however.  Henry obviously had confidence that More would go where Wolsey could not vis a vis the annulment.  Henry had no doubt in More’s absolute loyalty.  More, for his part, played the game very cagily.  More was opposed to the annulment and refused to sign the petition to Clement VII to annul the marriage.  But he was the King’s good servant and played both sides of the street in as that he signed the opinions of the Universities that the marriage to Katherine had been unlawful.  When Henry married Anne and had her crowned Queen in June 1533, More avoided going to the coronation, pleading ill health.  By that time, however, he had already resigned as Lord Chancellor and so the avoidance, while conspicuous, was not sufficiently grave a misstep to cause him trouble—at the moment.
In any case, it was not his refusal to subscribe to the marriage that was his undoing; it was his avoidance of the issues of the King’s supremacy over the Church, i.e. the rejection of papal authority.  More declared that he would subscribe to the 1534 Act of Succession both in recognizing Anne as Queen and in recognizing her offspring as next in succession to the Crown over Princess Mary, the daughter of Henry and Katherine.  This is an interesting detail because while we think of the Crown as inherited  by the male and then female children of the Sovereign in order of their age, More understood that the English Crown is indeed an elective Crown and that Parliament has a right to choose who will be Sovereign.  This principle would not be settled definitively until when in 1688 Parliament took the Crown from James II and gave it to his daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, but it had already been established in principle from Anglo-Saxon times and More was affirming that Parliament had a right to choose the Sovereign over any right that an individual might claim as rightful heir of the previous Sovereign. 
But, as I said, the issue was not the marriage, it was the Royal Supremacy.  Henry’s separation from Rome was not a sudden move nor done in one act.  We will look at the process in a future posting, but beginning in 1531 there was a series of bills passed in Parliament weakening the ties with Rome and strengthening the King’s position over the Church in England.  The 1532 Act of Submission of the Clergy led More to resign as Lord Chancellor under the pretext of his health. More avoided a face-down with the King—he was no one to go out of his way to die for a principle, even an important one,  unless he had no choice. Indeed, in his service to the King he was not unlike some contemporary politicians who have to juggle conscience and public duty. In the end, for More, conscience would triumph, but only in the end.   More could see that a break was coming and he wanted no part of it.  It was in 1534 that the payment of Peter’s Pence was suspended and later that year that the Pope’s name was removed from the Liturgy.  However it was only in 1536 that the final act denying papal authority in England was passed.  By that time More was dead. 
In 1534 More was arrested for denying that part of the 1534 Act of Supremacy that granted the King headship of the Church.  The trial began on July 1, 1535.  Anne Boleyn’s father was one of the judges. More had never spoken, even in private, on this matter and claimed that no one knew his thoughts on the matter because he had never shared them, even with his wife or family members.   Yet his silence spoke volumes as everyone knew.  He was convicted by the perjury of one Sir Richard Rich. More argued
 Can it therefore seem likely to your Lordships, that I should in so weighty an Affair as this, act so unadvisedly, as to trust Mr. Rich, a Man I had always so mean an Opinion of, in reference to his Truth and Honesty, ...that I should only impart to Mr. Rich the Secrets of my Conscience in respect to the King's Supremacy, the particular Secrets, and only Point about which I have been so long pressed to explain my self? which I never did, nor never would reveal; when the Act was once made, either to the King himself, or any of his Privy Councillors, as is well known to your Honours, who have been sent upon no other account at several times by his Majesty to me in the Tower. I refer it to your Judgments, my Lords, whether this can seem credible to any of your Lordships.
Only after his conviction did More speak out and affirm his belief that neither King nor Parliament had the right to usurp the authority of the Pope over the Church which came from God’s gift.  Five days later, Thomas More was beheaded on the Tower Green in London and his head displayed on London Bridge as a traitor.  His request that his body be returned to his family for burial was denied and his headless body was buried in the chapel of St Peter in Chains in the Tower of London.   His daughter Margaret paid to have the head stolen from the bridge before it could be tossed into the Thames and it was eventually buried in her husband’s family vault in the Anglican Church of Saint Dunstan in Canterbury. 
In his time as Lord Chancellor More had been responsible for the execution of six “heretics” who had been spreading Protestant ideas in England and for the imprisonment of several more.  Some were actually imprisoned in his home.  John Foxe, the great Protestant Apologist and author of the Actes and Monuments, more commonly known as the Book of Martyrs, claimed that More had been responsible for cruel torture of these prisoners.  More, in his own lifetime, denied that he had ever tortured any prisoner and it is likely that they were confined in his home precisely to make sure they were not tortured by jailers.  Nonetheless, the facts are not known and it is today more a matter of polemics than of history as we cannot know from an objective source.  Of course, whether or not he tortured people before having them burned at the stake makes the torture somewhat of a moot point.  Execution of religious dissenters was common at the time and heretics continued to be burned in England even after Henry’s separation from Rome.  Henry’s daughter Mary burned several leading Anglicans and that has tarnished her reputation even today.  Elizabeth, on the other hand, never executed a person for religious dissent—but she had another way of dealing with those who denied her to be head of the Church.  But more on that later.  

Foundations of The Anglican Church XLIV--The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey II

Cardinal Wolsey's Coat of Arms

can still be seen above gateways

at Hampton Court

By the time that Henry had decided on seeking an annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, Wolsey was running the English government single-handedly.  Henry had entrusted everything to him.  This is not to say that Wolsey was setting policy—he was always very careful to follow royal policy though he could often persuade the King to follow a particular course of action as in the instance of when the King’s sister, Mary, the Dowager Queen of France,  in 1515 married Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk, without Henry’s permission.  (Keep this marriage in mind as it will have complications a little later in our story when a Protestant grand-daughter of Mary and Brandon claims the throne against the Catholic heir.)  Henry wanted to imprison the couple, and even considered executing Brandon (to marry an heir to the throne without permission of the monarch was an act of treason), but Wolsey talked Henry into forgiving the couple.  Mary was always Henry’s favorite sister and Wolsey’s healing the breach worked greatly to his advantage and Mary always remembered him as an ally.  When Henry would try to annul his marriage to Katherine, however, in favor of Anne Boleyn, Mary was strongly opposed.  She was a friend of Katherine’s and an enemy of Anne’s.
Wolsey too was an enemy of Anne.  Wolsey had been responsible for ending her romance with Henry Percy.  Some claim that Wolsey was only pimping for the King in breaking up the romance.  Others think he was working with the Boleyn family who had—before they saw the possibility of snagging the King—a more advantageous marriage in mind for the young lady.  Wolsey may have wanted to see Anne married to remove her as a threat to Katherine as he preferred the Spanish alliance over a French one.  But when Henry was determined for an annulment, Wolsey set about his work, promising the king it would be no problem.
And it should not have been a problem except for the complications caused by the relationship between Pope Clement VII Medici and Katherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V.   Whether from fear of Charles’ army that had sacked Rome in 1527 or in hopes of a Medici-Hapsburg alliance that would restore the Medici to Florence, Clement was determined to prevent the annulment.  After sending Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio to England to “hear” the case along with Wolsey, Clement recalled the Cardinal in 1529 and said the case would be resolved in Rome. In other words, it would not happen.
This was Anne’s chance to attack Wolsey.  To paraphrase an episode of The Big Bang Theory, Anne was pushy and Henry was whipped.  Wolsey was finished.  Anne drew Henry’s attention to the Wolsey’s lavish residences in London—York Place and, upriver outside the city, Hampton Court.  Where did Wolsey get the resources, she wondered, to build such marvelous palaces.  Why did the King’s servant live even more grandly than did the King?  In 1529 Henry dismissed Wolsey as Lord Chancellor, replacing him with Sir Thomas More.  Hampton Court and York Place were confiscated.  Wolsey was particularly disturbed about signing over York Place as it was not his—it belonged to him only because he was Archbishop of York; it belonged not to him personally but to the Archbishopric.  Nevertheless, Henry got what Henry wanted; or what pushy Anne wanted.  York Place was renamed Whitehall, and would become the principle royal residence for the next 168 years.  (It was destroyed by fire in 1698.)  Hampton Court became the King’s favorite residence and it too would remain a royal palace throughout the Stuart period.  It is not to be missed if you go to London today.
Wolsey was forced to retire to his see in York—which he had not yet visited though he had been Archbishop there for fifteen years.  In 1530 he was arrested for treason—Henry sent Henry Percy—Anne’s old boyfriend—to arrest him in Yorkshire.  On his way south to London he stopped at Leicester Abbey, an Augustinian foundation where he told the Abbot and canons, “I have come to lay my bones among you.”  And so he did, taking ill and dying there on November 29, 1530.  His final words were allegedly: If I had served my God as diligently as I have served my King, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs.”
Prior to becoming a bishop, Wolsey had been in long term monogamous relationship with Joan Larke who bore him two children, both of whom survived to adulthood.  As his advancement drew more attention to himself, he arranged a marriage for Joan and provided her a handsome dowry.  The King built a home for the couple, though given Wolsey’s running the government, Henry may not have been aware of it. 
In the end, Wolsey had been a most industrious servant to the King and was treated quite shabbily but then that is the fate of those who step on people on their way up and who must suffer the consequences of how others treat them on their fall from power.  Henry and his daughter Elizabeth would each be served by several great ministers who took the day to day affairs of government into their hands.  The difference is that Henry didn’t watch closely what these ministers did while Elizabeth was assiduous in her attention to government.  Despite the impression Catholic historians give, Henry was a great King—and I will give reasons for that over several postings to come—but Elizabeth is undoubtedly the best monarch England would ever have.  That is ironic given Henry’s fears that a woman could not rule England, but then Mary—his daughter by Katherine of Aragon and his first heir—would prove his point and be a disaster on the English throne.  But all that is a ways down the road yet. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church XLII

Anne Boleyn

Henry’s seeking an annulment was not dependent on his relationship with Anne Boleyn.  Henry had been questioning the rightness of his marriage even before meeting Anne.  Henry began  his formal search for an annulment  just about the time he noticed Anne, one of Katherine’s ladies-in-waiting,  and most likely he had no intention of marrying Anne but only of making her the next in his series of mistresses.  Anne was a commoner, the daughter of a petty government official and the granddaughter of a cloth merchant, albeit a wealthy cloth merchant, indeed Lord Mayor of London in 1457.  But a commoner nonetheless and kings did not marry commoners.  They might sleep with them, but not marry them, 
Anne, for her part, was not about to be used by the King and then cast off.  Her sister Mary had been Henry’s mistress and borne Henry a child but had never even been acknowledged as the King’s Mistress.  When Henry tired of her, she was left more or less to fend for herself.  Henry showed her no favor whatsoever even though it was likely that the two children she bore were his and not her husband’s.  Anne was not going to be used; Anne was far more ambitious and had the audacity of foresight to see that if she played her cards right, despite all odds she could be queen.
Anne was encouraged in her plans by her mother’s brother, the Duke of Norfolk.  Norfolk saw that he could increase his own prestige if he could advance the cause of his niece.  Moreover, Norfolk was an archenemy of Cardinal Wolsey.  Norfolk, the premier noble of the realm, resented that England was being run by this upstart prelate who allegedly was the son of a butcher.
This surfaces a problem that will be key in the history of the Reformation in England.  You had the old nobility whose families went back to the time of the Conquest and they represented the old feudal system where the nobles were a check on the power of the King.  The nobility—Dukes, Earls, etc. were used to exercising power in their own areas of jurisdiction and they also were used to being able to hold back the power of the King by the King’s being required to have their assistance in time of war.  Moreover, the law of England was that the King needed their consent in Parliament to introduce taxes.  A strong nobility meant a weak King.  The nobles liked that.  Kings, especially the Tudor Kings Henry VII and Henry VIII did not like that.
Wolsey’s capable administration of the government managed to bypass the power of the nobles who saw the King growing stronger and stronger and their own power eroding.  But it was not only Wolsey.  On Wolsey’s advice, Henry depended more and more on choosing officials not from the old noble families but from new and up-and-coming families.  The old families were jealous of their prerogatives and had nothing but contempt for the new blood.  Anne Boleyn, though she came herself from the new blood, was connected by marriage to the old nobility and she represented an opportunity to break the power of Wolsey who represented the royal policy of using new comers to advance the strength of the monarchy.
Anne also represented the ascendency of the pro-French party in its struggle against the pro-Spanish.  Her years at the French court and her preference for French fashions and styles would indicate a change in influence over the King in his foreign policy.  The French ambassador did what he could behind the scenes to increase her prestige; the Spanish ambassador circulated vile rumors about her. 
Anne represented a challenge of the nobility to Wolsey’s power and she represented those who wanted a change in foreign policy, but don’t think Anne was just a pawn.  She was a very clever woman who saw her chance for greatness.  She was willing to sacrifice much to attain it.  Henry was considerably older than she and by this point of his life he was no longer the young and lithe athlete.  He may not have yet attained the gouty obesity of his later years but he was gettng heavy.  His auburn hair was going grey.  This was about power, not romance.    
Anne had been in love with Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland and in fact had secretly been engaged to him, but his family demanded that the engagement be broken as she, a commoner, was beneath him.  Again this is an example of the resentment of the old nobility towards the up and coming gentry.   Wolsey was involved in this breakup as well and Anne harbored a grudge against Wolsey for the breakup that would lead to Wolsey’s downfall.  It is unlikely however than Anne’s family would have permitted the marriage in any event as they had planned a marriage for her to her cousin, James Butler, in an attempt to secure the Earldom of Ormond, an Irish title to which he had claim but to which the Boleyns also had claim through the marriage of Anne’s father to a Butler.  All this is terribly confusing, I admit, but was such were the struggles of the wealthy gentry like the Boleyns to rise to nobility and the resentment of the old nobles to them. 
There is another factor which caused some to advance Anne’s cause.  During her time in France, she had been mentored by Marguerite of Navarre, the sister of the King, and a woman given to the new Evangelical ideals coming from Germany.  Anne was hardly a Lutheran, much less a rabid proto-Protestant.  She had and would have through her life a deep devotion to the Blessed Virgin.  She didn’t seek to overthrow the Latin Mass or Catholic doctrines, but she cherished the ideals of Christian humanism and wanted to see the Church purified of many of its medieval accretions that obscured the core of the faith.  Despite Henry’s avid conservativism in matters religious, there was at the universities, and Cambridge in particular, growing interested in Evangelical ideals.  The possibility of a Queen that would influence Henry away from the Spanish Catholicism of Katherine was attractive to this party which had some important contacts in the Court.  
Henry’s noticing Anne brought her father noble titles of his own.  In an attempt to win the young lady’s favor, Henry named Thomas Boleyn Viscount Rochford and several years later the first Earl of Wiltshire.  He also was made a Knight of the Garter.  Anne herself was given the title Marques of Pembroke, a title that put her just beneath a Duke and gave her sufficient status to qualify as potential royal bride.   All this got Henry lot’s of attention and flirtatious promises, but it didn’t get her into his bed.  As Henry’s passion increased Anne was able to extract a promise of marriage.  This became necessary in January of 1533 when Anne found herself pregnant.
Anne had played her cards well, but here was the hitch.  She had Henry firmly on the hook but there was as yet no annulment.   It was a gamble, but one that was fairly secure.  There was the concrete possibility of an heir; Henry would have to fish or cut bait.  What would he do? 
Before we go further,   it is important to note an important change in the cast.  Wolsey was out of the picture and in disgrace.  We will come back to that in a post in the near future.  More to the point of Henry’s quandary, William Warham the old Archbishop of Canterbury had died and was replaced by Henry’s nominee, Thomas Cranmer.  All had been done properly with the required papal bulls but Cranmer was an Evangelical Trojan Horse in Catholic Troy.  He was a King’s man, not a pope’s man.  When Anne found herself pregnant, Henry married her on January 25, 1533 in a private ceremony without a papal annulment.   Cranmer granted the required annulment on May 23^rd of the same year and declared the marriage of Henry and Anne consequently valid.  Anne was crowned Queen in June. 
We are going to have to come back to this point several times from different perspectives to more fully explain what happened and how it affected the relationship of the Church of England to the See of Rome.   

Foundations of the Anglican Church XXXII

Anne Boleyn

I am sorry for not having given more attention to this blog as we are in the middle of our Henry VIII saga.  And there is so much that I want to comment on after World Youth Day and other recent events in the Church.  I have recently started a new job and am learning how to manage the work more effectively but a lot of balls get dropped in the juggling act.  Nevertheless, let’s go back to Henry and the English Church for a few more entries and then I want to talk about Francis’ comments on the flight back to Rome from Rio and WYD as well as the neo-traditionalists disillusionment with Francis’ Church and the attempts of neo-trads such as Judie Brown of the American Life League and Michael Voris of Church Militant TV to undermine Francis’ leadership by sabotaging the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, Catholic Charities and other outreach programs that embody Francis’ vision for the Church at the service of the world.  But back to Henry. 
I mentioned that Henry began to take mistresses fairly early in his marriage to Katherine of Aragon even though that marriage was initially a happy one.  The sixteenth century was not a time noted for strict rules of moral behavior and it was not unusual for kings and noblemen—or bishops and popes—to take a mistress or a male lover according to their particular tastes.  The popes of Henry’s early years—Julius II and Leo X—were men of the world.  Julius had both male and female lovers, fathering several illegitimate children by his lady loves.  Leo was gay and had several lovers before and during his papacy.  Adrian VI who was pope briefly from 1522-1523 was noted—and somewhat despised—for his personal integrity, but his successor, to whom Henry would appeal for an annulment, Clement VII, was a man of relaxed morals and, as we shall see, valued the marital alliances of his children over the good of the Church.  But that story is a bit down the line yet.
Katherine made no objection, at least as far as we know, to Henry’s dalliances.  She did not see them as a threat to her position as his wife and Queen.  She loved Henry and was slow to recognize his falling out of love with her, but more to the point, her own royal blood kept her secure—she thought—from replacement as wife and Queen by any of the commoners Henry was indulging himself in.  Katherine realized that men of Henry’s stature commonly took mistresses and his dalliances relieved her of too frequent obligations of her “wifely duties.”  And indeed Henry’s fancy for Elizabeth Blount, his only acknowledged mistress, and his relationship with Mary Boleyn, a married woman of aristocratic but not noble birth, were no threat to Katherine’s position.
But as Henry tired of Mary Boleyn, Mary’s younger sister, Anne, came to his notice.  Anne was of a different stripe than Mary.  Mary was a practical sort and understood her duty was to relieve the King’s sexual needs.  She loved Henry but she had no illusions about the social gulf that separated them.  The Boleyn family could not exactly be held up for noble virtue.  Mary Boleyn had been a lady-in-waiting to Henry’s Sister, Mary Tudor when the princess was sent to France to marry the King, Louis XII.   Louis died not long after the marriage and the widowed princess Mary Tudor returned to England, but Mary Boleyn remained behind as a lady-in-waiting to the new Queen, Claude, wife of Francis I.  She earned a bit of a reputation, having affairs with several different men and possibly with King Francis himself.  She returned to England in 1519 and became a lady-in-waiting to Katherine of Aragon.  It was then that she was noticed by Henry.  She shortly after married William Carey, a knight in the King’s service, and her relationship with Henry commenced under the guise of her marriage and her accommodating husband. 
Just as her husband was willing to share her favors with the King in hopes of advancement at court, her father realized that his daughter’s royal intimacy could advance his position as well.  These were not highly moral people.  The father, Thomas Boleyn, was married to a woman far above his station, Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk and both husband and wife were anxious, even desperate, for his advancement.  Thomas Boleyn had no noble title of his own though through his mother he had a remote hope of someday claiming the Irish title of Earl of Ormond.  Lack of a noble title does not mean that Boleyn was insignificant however.  He had served both Henry VII and Henry VIII well in diplomatic posts and had been named a Knight of the Bath by Henry VIII.  He was Henry’s ambassador to the court of Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands in 1512, as ambassador to France from 1518 to 1521, and as Henry’s ambassador to the Emperor Charles V from 1521-1523.  Indeed for a man of common birth, he held very important positions at Court. 
When Henry lost interest in Mary Boleyn around 1526, Thomas Boleyn panicked.  He saw this liaison amoureuse as his ticket to better things and he was much relieved when Henry, looking for his next fling, looked not far but to the second daughter Anne.  Anne, as a young girl, had been a  lady-in-waiting to Margaret of Austria and then, like her sister Mary, to Mary Tudor during her marriage to Louis XII of France,  to Queen Claude, the wife of Francis I, successor to Louis XII. 
Catholic polemicists in the past were quick to project on Anne the promiscuity of her sister Mary.  Indeed the court of Claude of France was not known for its high moral standards and Anne could not afford to be naïve. It would have been expected of her to be somewhat generous with her “favors” to the flirtatious young men around Queen Claude.  Yet at the court Anne became friends, and to some degree, a protégée of the King’s sister, Marguerite of Navarre.  Marguerite was a highly educated woman and much respected in humanist circles.  Like many of the humanist circle, she was anxious for religious reform and embraced the new theology coming from Germany and Switzerland where Luther, Zwingli, and others were embracing evangelical ideals.  Anne seems to have become devoutly religious though skeptical about papal Catholicism in this period.  Part of that developing anti-papalism—both for Anne and for her patron, Marguerite of Navarre—was the close ties between the papacy and the Court of the emperor Charles V.  Navarre, on the border with Charles’ Spain, was particularly vulnerable.  France was the Empire’s chief rival in Europe both for control of the Netherlands and for influence in the Italian peninsula.  That dependency of the papacy on Charles and his empire would have terrible consequences for the Church of England.
Despite the stories later circulated about her by the religious conservatives of her day and subsequent years, Anne probably retained her virginity through this period.  Virgin she may have been, but Anne was in every other way a high-spirited lady of the French Court.  She was a remarkably intelligent woman to whom languages came easily and she spoke French and read Latin.  She possibly knew some Italian as well.  She was used to the intelligent conversations of humanist circles and had a more than rudimentary knowledge of philosophy and theology.  In addition she was accomplished at dancing, cards, hunting, archery, falconry, lawn tennis, and lawn bowling.  She had very fine taste in clothing, art, and music.  The liveliness and culture of the French court had made its impression on her and when Henry met her, he was smitten.  This was no mere roll-in-the-royal-hay—Anne was entertaining to be with, a match for Henry who was himself highly gifted and inclined to be bored with most of his more mundane companions.  But Anne had noted how Henry had “loved and left” her sister and she was not to be trifled with in that same way.  Soon after Anne’s return to England from France in 1522 Henry made his suit; Anne refused him, leaving court to return to the family home at Hever Castle. 
Anne was coy.  Moreover, her father and her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, knew that they could exploit the situation for their own advancement.  Anne was named a Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Katherine which kept her at Court and she used her position to charm the King but at the same time to frustrate his desires.   But Henry had more matters on his mind than Anne.  He needed an heir to secure the dynasty and prevent the struggles over the throne that had led to the Wars of the Roses.  He had, of course, a daughter, Mary, his daughter with Katherine of Aragon.  But could a woman rule?  There was no good historical precedent.  Katherine was beyond the years when she could bear a new heir.  But a new Queen could bear a child.   

  

Foundations of the Anglican Church XXXI

Mary Boleyn

Henry married Katherine in June 1509 and the marriage was initially a very happy one.   There is no doubt that Henry loved Katherine and even after the marriage soured he seems to have had conflicted feelings towards her.  Nevertheless, it was not long before Henry began having a series of extra-marital affairs.  Katherine did not protest.  Though her own parents were probably faithful to one another in their marriage, the prevalent mores of the day not only tolerated a husband taking a mistress, it encouraged it and Katherine turned a blind eye to her husband’s wanderings.  Among the more privileged classes it was understood that sexual relations were a duty for the wife and an inconvenience at that, whereas a husband needed the release of frequent sexual outlet.  A mistress was no threat to a wife and her position.  A nobleman, much less a king, could not forsake his noble—or royal—partner for the woman of lesser status who accommodated his sexual needs.  If widowed and in old age, and with the succession secure,  he might enter into a morganatic marriage but in the years when he is expected to sire an heir, a king needs a wife of royal—or at least noble—blood.  (Kate Middleton is the first commoner to marry into the British Royal Succession since Katherine Paar, the sixth and final wife of Henry VIII. Elizabeth Bowes Lyon—the late Queen Mother—was the first non-royal to marry a King or potential heir to the English Throne since  wives 2m 3, and 5 of Henry VIII four centuries before.  And Bowes Lyon—as the daughter of an earl, noble but not royal, did not marry the heir presumptive but his younger brother who was expected to take a wife of higher station to provide for the succession.  It was only the abdication that put Elizabeth in the role of mother an heir to the throne.  Technically it could be argued, I supposed, that Mary Stuart, daughter and presumed heir of James II, married outside the blood royal when she married the hereditary Stadtholder  of the Netherlands, William III.  William was Prince of Orange but that was not a royal title but a noble one.  Nevertheless, William’s position as Head of State for the Dutch Republic combined with his title made  him equivalent to a royal even if his blood was not of the purple.)  All that being said about the wife of a King needing to be of the blood royal allowed Katherine to feel secure that her husband might wander from bed to bed, but would come home to hers at the end of the day.  And he did come back.   Katherine became pregannt at least seven times between her marriage and the birth of a daughter who lived only six days in 1518.  Well into the 1520’s no one thought that the marriage of Katherine and Henry was not to last.
Most of Henry’s affairs were discreet adulteries but in 1515 Henry publically took Elizabeth Blount as his mistress.  Blount was a commoner, the daughter of a knight in Henry’s service.  She was about fourteen years old and a maid of honor to Queen Katherine when she came to Henry’s notice.  Henry was about 23.  In 1519 Blount gave birth to a son, the only illegitimate child Henry was to acknowledge.  Shortly after the boy’s birth, however, Henry ended the affair and took a new mistress, Mary Boleyn.   
Mary Boleyn was the daughter of Thomas Boleyn, 1^st earl of Wiltshire.  The Boleyns were part of the new nobility.  They did not descend from the grand old noble families of medieval England.  To the contrary—Thomas Boleyn’s grandfather (great-grandfather of Anne and great-great grandfather of the future but as yet unborn Queen, Elizabeth) was a merchant dealing in cloths.  He was quite successful as a merchant, wealthy enough to be elected Lord Mayor of London in 1457.  The family’s wealth pushed them up into the nobility Thomas’ father married into the Butler Family who held the Irish Title of the Earls of Ormond.    Thomas Boleyn was a valuable servant to Henry serving as an envoy to the Netherlands, to France, and to the Emperor.  His position brought his daughters to the notice of the King and the King, in turn, kept heaping responsibilities and honors on the Father.  In other words, Thomas could be said to have pimped his daughters to the King.
Mary, the older Boleyn sister and the first to be sexually involved with Henry seems to have begun her liaison royale about the time of her marriage in 1520.  Henry was a guest at the wedding and it may have been at that time that he first noticed her, though she had served for several months as a lady in waiting to Queen Katherine.   Mary’s husband, William Carey, seems not to have protested the King sharing his wife’s bed and it is thought that at least one of her two children, if not both, were Henry’s children, not Carey’s.  However, after the birth of the second child, Henry, in 1526, King Henry terminated the affair.  Henry never acknowledged either of the Carey children as his own, nor did ever publicly acknowledge Mary’s role as his mistress.  Mary never benefitted from the relationship either in being give wealth or title.  William Carey died in 1528, deeply in debt.  By that time her sister Anne had come to the King’s favor and Anne arranged some financial relief for her sister.  Mary married William Stafford in 1534.  Stafford was a common soldier and the marriage embarrassed the Boleyn family and angered Henry.  Anne and her family disowned Mary.  Mary’s situation was one of dire poverty but in the end Anne relented and gave her some financial help.  The Boleyn family fell from influence with the execution of Anne  and while the Family was in disgrace and their lands confiscated, Henry sent Mary some funds that relieved the worst of her poverty.  She died in 1543, her husband lived another 13 years. 
Henry’s indifference to Mary once he had finished with her was a lesson to the younger sister, Anne.    But it also marks a change in Henry’s personality and attitude.  More about that in a future posting.