Foundations of the Anglican Church CXX

King's Chapel, Boston MA

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 deposing James II and offering the Crown to his daughter and son-in-law, William and Mary, marks an immensely critical shift in the British Constitution, and co-incidentaly in the Church of England.  Going back to Anglo-Saxon days, the Crown of England had always been seen—in theory—as “elective,” but the consistent practice of male-primogeniture had obscured the elective element of English Kingship and the theories of “Divine Right of Kingship” advanced during the Tudor/Stuart dynasties created a real moral dilemma for the Bishops of the Church of England at Parliament’s deposing James and inviting William and Mary to take the throne.  There had been dynastic shifts before, of course, such as when Henry VII seized the Throne after defeating Richard III, but the process had not been as blatantly parliamentary as the 1688 coup.  Henry VIII’s having Parliament ratify the Act of Succession granting the Throne to his son, Edward, and then—should Edward die without issue—to his daughters who were seen as illegitimate (his marriages to their mothers having been annulled) rather than to the next legitimate heir is another trace of the Crown being constitutionally elective (remember, the British Constitution is unwritten and subsists in the tradition rather than in a document), but even though it was by act of Parliament, the Crown was passing from father to children and male primogeniture sequence.  So following the 1688 coup, the bishops, in having to make a choice as to whether or not swear allegiance to the new monarchs, were on some pretty untested ice.  The Archbishop of Canterbury and the other eight bishops who refused to take the oath all subscribed to the theory that the King ruled not at the invitation and consent of Parliament but by Divine Right.  A cynic would suppose—and there is probably some truth to it, that the remaining bishops who did take the oath did so for the sake of political convenience—so that they could keep their jobs. To give them some moral credit, however, they also were concerned about the survival of their Protestant faith and preferred the Protestant William and Mary to the Catholic James—who had shown himself somewhat antagonistic to the Established Church.  But they—and others who favored the new monarchy—also perceived a wider reality.  They recognized that the Crown is not personal, that is that there is a difference between the Crown—the institution of kingship—and the individual who wears it.   An oath of loyalty to the King is not a pledge to an individual but to the institution he—or even more precisely—his crown, represents: the rule of Law in the nation. 

I bring this up because I think we religious people are often literalists who cannot see beyond the literal face of our symbols to the realties they represent.  Religious people are inclined to imprison themselves in thinking inside the box rather than apprehending the broader and more profound perspectives.  I think we are seeing this sort of blindness today in those who struggle with Pope Francis and his new vision for the Church.  They can’t move from a Church of power, a religious institution, a “we have always done it this way” (even when we haven’t), into the sorts of possibilities that Francis is presenting for the Church to grow into to better serve the world and the spiritual needs of its people.  For some the Church subsists in its traditional liturgy—or even its pomp—and its canon law.  When a Pope comes with a vision of how to make the Church’s mission to proclaim the Kingdom of God in a post-modern world, they see this as a departure from Tradition rather than the preservation of what has always been at the heart of the Tradition. 

In any event, as the High Church party among the bishops represented this stuck-in-the-past model of Church and Crown and thus supported James and (what was perceived to be) traditional kingship, under William and Mary there was a favoring of Whig government both in Parliament and in the Church. The Whigs believed in a dynamic approach to the English Constitution, not a static and preservationist approach.  Whigs were optimists who saw change as a positive factor permitting institutions to evolve into ever better forms. Whig bishops were particularly important to the government as the bishops sat in the House of Lords, which in the 18^th century, was still the more powerful House of Parliament.  When Queen Anne came to the Throne, she favored the Tories but found that she too needed the Whigs to govern.  England was rapidly evolving from its old aristocratic/oligarchic monopoly on power to what was becoming a bourgeois democratic constitutional monarchy and there was no reversing the trend.  The economic vitality of the expanding British Empire was creating a new social class with the merchant and industrialist forces making their political power felt and the new rich were Whigs.  When upon Anne’s death the Hanoverians Georges (I, II, and III) reigned, the Whigs found themselves more often than not in power and the candidates put forward to the various episcopal sees tended to represent their social and political agenda.  Whigs tended to be Latitudinarian (Tories were High Church) in theology and Church polity.  This made for some pretty mediocre leadership in the Church of England in the 18^th century. 

Many of the Latitudinarian bishops of the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries sought to re-integrate the Dissenters (Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists) into the Church of England and consequently were both soft on enforcing the official liturgy and did not see the importance of the doctrines that made the Church of England a via media between Protestantism and Catholicism.  Gone was the intellectual and spiritual vitality of the Caroline Divines.  The Church of England acquired the reputation for doctrinal vagueness that persists even today when there is no consistency of doctrine among Anglicans on such questions as the nature of the Eucharistic Presence, the nature of the ordained ministry, or even what constitutes the Church. In the 18^th century even Unitarianism was condoned in Anglican circles leaving closet Arians secreted among clergy and laity alike, our American George Washington apparently being one.  Another example is King’s Chapel in Boston, an Anglican church founded in 1686 and whose minister, James Freeman, and congregation adopted Unitarianism in 1785.   Although the historic creeds have continued to be used in the Anglican liturgy they are often more formulaic than actually reflecting the faith of the Church’s members.  This spills over too into moral issues where often precise theological methodology has been trumped by a rather superficial liberalism and feeling of good will that has not asked some of the hard questions that need to be part of the theological critique regarding issues such as abortion, human sexuality, and Christian marriage.  And much like the situation at the time of the Glorious Revolution, Anglicanism is threatening to come apart at the seams because of a theological latitude that is more an indifference or at least an unwillingness to face hard issues rather than to sit down and hammer out a consistent theological framework rooted in tradition but able to respond to the contemporary world.  Other than N.T. Wright and Rowan Williams (and with no disrespect to the late John Macquarrie and J.A.T. Robinson), these days Anglican theologians are rare birds and you have buffoons like John Shelby Spong being sported as the intellectual du jour. Well, my biases are showing and I had better get back to the 18^th century. 

One example of Whigish episcopal mediocrity in the Established Church was Thomas Tenison who, as Rector of the prominent London parish, Saint Martin in the Fields had preached the funeral sermon for Nell Gwynn in 1687.  Gwynn, an actress whose life had been marked by numerous sexual liaisons as she climbed her way up from the gutter (not just a figure of speech: her mother, drunk, had drowned in a gutter) to the palace, was the somewhat notorious mistress of Charles II by whom she bore two children.  Tenison pretended in his sermon that “pretty, witty Nell” (so termed by Samuel Pepys) had repented of her somewhat sordid life, a claim that was widely scoffed at by contemporaries.  Gwynn was a famously witty person and not one to take herself seriously.  Once, when her coachman attacked a man for calling Nell “a whore,” she broke up the fight insisting: “I am a whore; find something else to fight about.”  But courtesan though she was, she had been courtesan to a King and so Tenison was rewarded for his pastoral sensitivity to the King’s “Protestant whore” (to distinguish her from the King’s “Catholic whore,” the Duchess of Portsmouth), by being made Bishop of Lincoln and eventually Archbishop of Canterbury.  Today I think we would commend the generosity of a clergyman who conducted so public a funeral for a person of such shady repute: after all, prostitutes and tax collectors are entering the Kingdom of God before most of us more reputable Pharisees.  In the 18^th century though it would have been thought more proper for the duty to bury such a sinner to be delegated to a more obscure clergyman than the Rector of Saint Martin in the Fields.  

Foundations of the Church of England CIV

Charles I

We haven’t finished with the Caroline Divines but as they span the better part of the 17^th century we are going to intersperse postings on them with what was going on politically and religiously to shape the Church of England.  To understand the next phase of development in the Church of England we need to take a look at the English Civil War and to understand the Civil War we need to keep a few things in mind.

1.     There was as yet no Great Britain.  There were the separate kingdoms of England (and Wales) and Scotland.  (There was also the Kingdom of Ireland, but as that is on a different island and as in this phase of the development is not germane to our story, let’s just put it aside for the moment.)  England and Scotland were separate kingdoms with separate parliaments and separate Churches, but James VI (of Scotland) & I (of England) was king of both Kingdoms.  He was succeeded upon his death by his son Charles who also ruled each kingdom. 

2.     The Scots did not have as strong a parliamentary tradition as did the English and the English grew fearful that under these Scots Kings, the monarchy would grow stronger at Parliament’s expense. 

3.     James and his son Charles were highly influenced by the theory of the “Divine Right of Kings” that they held their thrones from God and ruled by his authority regardless of the consent of the people or the parliaments of their kingdoms.

4.     In England the king could not levy taxes without the consent of Parliament.

5.     The Church of England had always been an Episcopal Church (governed by bishops) and had since the reign of Elizabeth been strongly Calvinist in its theology.  However there was a strong faction in the Church of England that wanted Presbyterian government (Boards of Clergy replacing bishops in setting policy) which was more typical of the Calvinist tradition.  The Church of Scotland, on the other hand, had been Presbyterian but James had gradually re-introduced bishops to it, over and against the preferences of most of its staunchly Presbyterian members.  By and large, Scotland was not happy with bishops. 

6.     During the reign of King James and especially after the accession of Charles, there developed a faction in the Church of England that theologically and liturgically began to move away from the Calvinism that characterized Anglicanism since Cranmer and particularly since the reign of Elizabeth.

7.     James reputed homosexuality and his attachment to a number of “favorites,” especially George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, caused significant scandal to the Puritan (Calvinist) faction of the Church of England.   Given James’ piety and general good nature, it pretty much only remained as grumbling during his reign, but when Charles ascended the throne and kept Buckingham as a chief advisor, the Puritan faction began to openly challenge royal policy. 

8.     Charles’ marriage to the openly Catholic Henrietta Marie, a French princess, angered the Puritan faction, not only because she was a Catholic but because of the persecution of French Calvinists by the Crown in France. 

The pot came quickly to a boil in the reign of Charles.  He became king in 1625 and by 1628 the English Parliament was determined to limit his power with the “petition of right.”  Charles needed Parliament to grant him new taxes to support English participation in the Thirty-Years War.  This was an essentially Catholic-Protestant War and England was to come in on the Protestant side, but Parliament used the King’s need to wring from him agreement that

1.     the King would not levy taxes without parliamentary consent

2.     soldiers would not be billeted in private homes without the owners’ consent

3.     martial law would not be imposed to quell political unrest

4.     Englishmen would not be arbitrarily imprisoned for dissent from royal policy

Charles had no choice but to agree to the petition, but he determined not to call Parliament again and for eleven years ruled without it.   Tensions mounted.  We mentioned Archbishop Laud and his revival of a certain amount of ceremonial in the Church of England and this did not sit well with the Puritan faction.  Laud and other High Churchmen also renounced the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination in favor of Free Will.  Laud also enforced the laws on Church attendance, fining or imprisoning those Puritans who refused to attend the Prayer Book liturgy.  Those who criticized the Archbishop and his leadership of the Church, were dragged before Church courts which had the right to various punishments such as lashings or cutting off of an ear.   Laud’s unpopularity with the Puritan faction—which was also the Parliamentary faction—only increased the unpopularity with King Charles.

When Charles and Laud tried to force a new Prayer Book on the Church of Scotland—a very “High Church” Book (for the day) rebellion broke out in Scotland with the so-called “Bishops’ Wars”  (There were actually two, on in 1637 and the other in 1640.)  Charles ended up being trounced by the Scots and he needed money to pay the war debts.  This led to the calling of Parliament in April 1640.  Parliament, once assembled, was not about to limit itself to voting the needed revenues for the King, but began to debate their grievances against the King.  Charles dissolved Parliament after only three weeks.  This was the “Short Parliament.” 

Charles turned to Ireland for revenues where his viceroy, Lord Wentworth, was able to raise funds by persuading the Irish Catholic Lords to vote the King funds in return for greater religious liberty for Catholics.  Trust me, this only enraged the Puritan faction all the more.  Emboldened by the new monies, Charles could not stop himself from poking the hornet’s nest and once again invaded his Scots Kingdom to assert his authority.  Once again he got trounced.  To keep the Scots from invading England he had to pay the Scots army £ 850 a day.  He also had to fund his English army to defend England against these Scots.  In other words, he was paying to support both sides in a war.  Desperately short of funds, he had no choice but to call Parliament again in November 1640.  This Parliament had cojones.  It arrested Laud in 1640. It would have him executed in 1645.  It convicted Wentworth (the fellow who raised the money for Charles in Ireland) of treason and executed him in 1641.  It passed a Law that the King could not dissolve Parliament without its consent.  It passed another Law that Parliament had to meet at least every three years.  It declared that the King’s advisors were subject to Parliamentary review.  It abolished the Courts of High Commission and Star Chamber—two of the Courts subject directly to the King.  In 1646 this parliament—known as the “Long Parliament”—abolished episcopacy making the Church of England Presbyterian in government.    To be cont.  

Foundations of the Anglian Church XLVII

An Anglican Bishop attired for a

session in the House of Lords.

When we look at Henry’s separation of the English Church from the Roman Communion we how it was done for the most part not by royal decree but by act of Parliament.  Henry—unconsciously for sure—created a revolution in government by his strategy, a revolution of which we Americans are heirs.   Henry was unsure of the authority of the Crown—the Tudors had not been wearing it long enough to act with the impunity of absolute monarchs—and so bolstered it with the authority of having Parliament behind him.  To get what he wanted—the annulment, the legitimacy of his heirs, and the separation from Rome—he bargained away his sovereignty.   He gave Parliament, and the House of Commons in particular, a taste for power which they were never willing to yield after that.  He could have acted absolutely as King by decree.  He probably would have gotten away with it.  He was a stronger monarch than he seems to have realized.  But by bringing his legislation all to parliament for their consent he set a precedent that the King rules with the consent of Parliament. 
In his turning to Parliament Henry needed to depend on the House of Commons.  The House of Lords was not as friendly to his projects as were the Commons.  The Lords was top heavy with Bishops and Abbots and they were bound to resist Henry’s wishes, especially in regard to separation from Rome.   (Cranmer, along with Gardiner and perhaps one or two others was the exception among the Bishops.)  The Peers, for the most part, were not anxious to play into Henry’s hands—they preferred a weaker monarch so that their power was unchallenged.  Moreover, while the Duke of Norfolk supported the marriage to Anne—who was his niece—Queen Katherine had many friends among the Peers and they were not anxious to see her replaced.  Thus Henry needed the Commons. 
Henry would eventually throw the Abbots out of the Lords and appoint Bishops friendly to his cause.  He also would flood the peerage with new members and get his majorities.  But in the meantime his strategy was to give the Commons more and more power in return for their support. 
The Commons, for their part, were mostly self-made men.  They were business men, merchants, who represented the towns and boroughs.  They were not interested in questions of theology.  As men of business they resented the immense sums being drained from England by the papacy and thought the money could be better spent in England—increasing the navy to protect trade, opening schools and colleges to educate the sons of their constituents, sending explorers out to find new sources of raw materials and new markets as Spain, Portugal, and France were doing.  In fact, over the next century it would be these men of business who would increasingly set the course of religion in England.
The rise of the Commons gave the Englishman a sense that he had the right to be heard in government, whether in regard to matters political or matters spiritual.  Democracy and religion became tied in the English mind.  This would have drastic implications a century later for the English and two and a half-centuries later for the Americans.  But all things in time. 
Some historians rank Henry as the greatest of English monarchs for “The Tudor Revolution” and the emergence of the democratic tradition.  As Henry had no intention of causing this “revolution” the credit is misplaced.  But the fact remains that for various reasons, and the emergence of the House of Commons in the government not least among them, Henry was a great monarch and perhaps second only to one—his daughter, Elizabeth.  But all that must come later as well. 

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. 

The Foundations of the Anglican Church XXVI

As stated in the previous post, the chief challenge facing the new Tudor dynasty after Henry VII Tudor seized the Crown from Richard III, was creating the political stability that would bring an end to the dynastic struggled that had divided England throughout the fifteenth century. 
The major threat to Tudor power and the peace of the realm came from the old nobility.  The peerage was comparatively small.  Many of the noble titles had become extinct when their holders had perished in the One Hundred Years War with France or in the subsequent dynastic Wars of the Roses. Others had lost their titles for being on a losing side as the Crown shifted back and forth during the struggles between the Lancastrians and Yorkists.  Sometimes titles were restored; sometimes they weren’t.   In 1500, there were the Dukes of Norfolk, Buckingham, York, and Cornwall—but these later two were held by the heir to the Crown and so were royal title as differentiated from title of nobility.  That leaves two dukes among the nobility.  The remainder of the peerage consisted of approximately one marquess, ten earls, three viscounts, and seventy barons. 
The nobility was a small group but very proud of their family lineages and anxious to preserve their traditional power and influence.  Henry Tudor, on the other hand, was anxious to centralize power in the Crown in order to create a modern English nation state out of the competing and rival feudal holdings.  It was a time when Kings in France and Spain were consolidating royal power at the expense of the old nobility and Henry Tudor was a man with his eye on the future. 
An important tool in the balance of power between King and nobility was the Church.  The nobility sat in Parliament as the House of Lords.  But they were not the only members of that august body.  Two archbishops and fourteen bishops also sat as Peers.  They were joined by approximately forty-five abbots and mitered priors. 
The nobility found that while their legislative role increased, their personal power diminished during the reign of Henry VII and this made them restless.  They wanted to preserve the old feudal order and could not understand Henry’s vision of an English nation.  Henry, for his part, was anxious to compete with the major European powers which were the Spain, Portugal, and France.  As France was a long-time foe of England, he decided to throw his lot in with the emerging nation of Spain—then a confederation of the Kingdoms of Castile (ruled by Isabella) and Aragon (ruled by her husband, Ferdinand.)  Henry was anxious to marry his older son, Arthur, to Katherine, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella.  This would not only cement an alliance of England with the rich and powerful Iberian Kingdoms, but Katherine would bring a heavy dowry to England—something that the cash-strapped Henry could use as he tried to develop his realm, all but impoverished by a century of war, into a modern nation state.  On November 14, 1501 Arthur and Katherine were married.  The dowry was 200,000 crowns worth about ₤85,000.  Now, ₤85,000 was a fortune in 1501.  This was a world in which a well to do merchant might earn ₤100 a year and live handsomely on that.  It is never precise to convert money over a five hundred year span because it is a question of buying power rather than exact conversions.  But let us say that a merchant could live comfortably on   ₤ 100 a year and that today a businessman to have a comparable life would need an income of $85,000.00.  That would render the value of Catherine’s dowry at approximately seventy million modern dollars.  In fact, it was probably worth much more as it exceeded the annual income of the English Crown in 1501.  Henry could not afford to lose this dowry.  But it would ultimately demand a high price. 

Foundations of the Anglican Church XVII

Henry III's shrine of Saint Edward the
Confessor in Westminster Abbey

Well, I am back.  I was having some computer issues.  And then there is the usual end of term craziness.  But I think we are back in business and on with our story about the history of the Church of England.  We left off with the story of King John—one of England’s worse monarchs—and his struggles with the Church.  John took on the Church and lost valuable ground—actually losing his kingdom to the Pope and receiving it back, not in his own right but as a papal fief.  While this surrender and regrant were more a symbolic gesture and a legal fiction than a practical loss of power, in an age where symbol carried far greater meaning than it does today, indeed where symbol carried far greater meaning than actual political clout, John’s failure was the apex of political power of the papacy in Britain.  But under John’s son, Henry III, the relationship of crown to Church deteriorated even more. 
Unlike his cynical and even agnostic father, Henry was an exceptionally pious man.  Henry was only a boy of nine when John died—some allege from a surfeit of peaches, though more likely from dysentery (which most unpleasant symptoms are not unlike a surfeit of peaches) and Henry inherited the throne.  As a minor, his authority was exercised by a regent, William Marshall, who was, according to Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton,  “the greatest knight who ever lived.”  William died however before Henry reached his majority and Hubert de Burgh, justicar of England and Ireland, took the regency into his own hands.  It was not as satisfactory an arrangement as might be hoped.  Henry found much of his reign a struggle with the barons of England who were trying to fend off the royal authority that was threatening their own customary feudal rights and privileges.  The issue at hand was the efforts for a central and national government (the King) to emerge from the feudal society based on regional powers exercised by local nobility.   The Church favored, not only in England but generally, the emergence of strong central monarchy and Henry depended on the structures both of the English Church and the papacy for his support. 
Henry’s ties to the papacy led him into a war in Sicily when Pope Innocent IV tried to name Henry’s son, Edmund, King of Sicily to replace Conrad IV Hohenstaufen as king there.  It was a fruitless effort.  Sicily was too far away for English victory and this war simply meant expense in money and life.  In fact, Henry was just a pawn of the pope who—like other thirteenth century popes—was determined to break the power of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in Italy.  The English barons revolted against the king’s policy and Simon de Montfort emerged as head of the baronial resistance.  de Montfort defeated and captured Henry at the battle of Lewes in 1264.  Henry was reduced to a figurehead and de Montfort, in the King’s name, summoned the Great Council of the Realm—an assembly of the nobility which had met from the time of the Norman invasion and which itself had been preceded in Anglo Saxon days by the Witenagemot, an assembly the leading men of the realm—to which de Montfort added representatives of the gentry from each shire and the burgesses from each town.  This effectively created the institution which today we know as Parliament.  Henry was freed from his captivity in 1265 and took savage retribution on his enemies among the barons. 
Henry was a complex character.  He was a passive man, lacking strength of character, but vicious in his retribution to his enemies once he had the upper hand.  He was pious to a fault and that political indecisiveness, even weakness, was probably related to being overly pious.  His hero was Edward the Confessor.  He rebuilt not only Edward’s tomb in Westminster Abbey but the Abbey itself at great expense, hiring the architects of the new Gothic styles from France.  Reading that Edward dressed simply and without ornaments, Henry did likewise. And he named his first son and heir Edward so that an Edward would once again sit on the throne of England.  By his reign one could say that the once autonomous Church of England was thoroughly absorbed into the Roman Communion, no longer a Church in communion with Rome but definitively “under” papal rule.   For all his efforts to overcome the barons and establish a strong crown, Henry, in  his piety,  missed the threat the Church presented to royal authority.   
Henry’s son, Edward, was as strong a king as his father had been weak.  Like his father, Edward was a prisoner of the barons from 1264 until his escape the following year.  He rallied the royalist party against the barons and defeated de Montfort at the battle of Evesham in 1265.  He was responsible for the mutilation of de Montfort’s corpse in retaliation for his father’s, King Henry, captivity.  Edward succeeded Henry in 1272.  Edward was off on Crusade at the time of Henry’s death, but his reputation cause sufficient fear among the baronage that there was no challenge to his authority during the time it took for him to return to England.  And in fact Edward had the confidence to take his time on the return, stopping off to oversee his French possessions.  Edward was a great king but like his father, who was a good man but a bad king, Edward was a great king but a bad man.  It very often goes that way.  Edward is often remembered for two things.  In 1295 he summoned “the model parliament.”  Following on the precedent set by de Montfort in the 1265 assembly, the peers were joined by two knights from each shire and two burgesses from each town.  Moreover, these “commons” (as opposed to the nobles) insisted that they should not merely assent to the decrees of their betters, but have a direct role in shaping the decisions.  (They did not meet separately as a “House of Commons” for almost another fifty years, but sat in council with the nobles.) 
Edward had a long history of anti-Semitism.   The Jews in England “belonged” to the Crown—just as the Jews of Rome belonged to the Pope.  The King was free to do with them as he liked.  Edward taxed them into poverty.  He exploited their unpopularity among the common folk—the Jews were the moneylenders since usury (the charging of interest) was forbidden to Christians—for the popularity of the monarchy.  In 1279 he had three hundred Jews executed for “coin clipping”—the practice of shaving the edge of coins to accumulate the small amounts of gold or silver such shaving might yield, but, at the same time, debasing the coinage.  In 1280, he forced the Jews to submit to listen to sermons preached by Dominican friars in efforts to convert them.  Finally in 1290 he confiscated their property and ordered all Jews expelled from the realm.  Jews were only allowed to return to England in 1656 by Oliver Cromwell during the Commonwealth.   The seizure of Jewish property gave the crown great financial advantage and would be copied by Philip the Fair of France in 1306. 
Edward’s need for money made him turn against the Church as well as the Jews.  In 1279 and again in 1290 Edward enacted “statutes of mortmain.”  Mortmain, from the old French morte (dead) and main (hand) was the practice of leaving land to the Church.  If Lord Jones owns a field and leaves it to his son, his son pays an inheritance tax on it.  And when the son dies and the grandson inherits it, the grandson pays an inheritance tax on it.  And so to the great grandson and each future generation—they must pay the tax again and again.   The land would in each generation provide income to the Crown.  But when Lord Jones leaves that same land to the Church, the land passes into “the dead hand” of the Church, that is to say it no longer passes from one generation to the next but now is owned in perpetuity by an institution that never dies and thus never is subject to the inheritance tax.  That land passes out of the Crown’s income.  Modern folk don’t tend to leave land to the Church or to other institutions.  We may leave money, even trusts, but not land.  But in the Middle ages such bequests were not only common—they were all but universal.  More and more land was being left to parish churches, abbeys, hospitals, friaries, collegiate churches, bishoprics and other religious institutions.  The wealth of the Church was growing exponentially. Edward was determined to stop this but it was perceived to be an attack on the Church.  Nevertheless, ways around the statutes of mortmain were devised and the Church continued to benefit from the generosity of the faithful.  It would in the long term be fateful, however, as the wealth of the Church would prove to be too tempting a plum for King Henry VIII to resist.