Cromartie Alan. The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450-1642 (Ideas in Context)

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chapter 3

Reformation and the body politic

The sharp-eyed Venetian who visited in 1497 thought that the English peo-

ple had ‘various opinions concerning religion’.

He had probably heard of

the Lollards, but otherwise we do not know precisely what he meant;

we can be sure, however, that if variety is a sign of vigour, English

religious culture was extremely vigorous, not least because its intellectual

leaders showed some capacity for self-criticism. The Standish affair was an

excellent example: Standish was a Franciscan with a friar’s indifference to

merely institutional privileges, while the leader of his critics, the abbot of

Winchcombe, was not a comical reactionary, but a reformer of another

type, ‘the most distinguished English monk’ of the early Tudor period.

was entirely ﬁtting that a serious-minded monk should favour the reception

of the canons of the recent Lateran council.

In the ﬁrst part of the reign of Henry VIII, an obvious feature of this

lively scene was the support of church and state for humanist endeavours.

William Warham, the archbishop of Canterbury, was a signiﬁcant patron

of Erasmus, as was Richard Fox, the bishop of Winchester, who may for a

time have been Henry VII’s most inﬂuential servant. In his retirement from

politics, Fox was also the founder of Corpus Christi, Oxford, a college he

provided with a lecturer in Greek. Henry VII’s widow, Margaret Beaufort,

set up two Cambridge colleges in close association with John Fisher, while

Wolsey went out of his way to attract the great Spanish humanist Juan Luis

VivestoEngland. Henry VIII chose a noted Greek scholar, the humanist

Thomas Linacre, as his personal physician; appointed Erasmus’s close friend

Cuthbert Tunstall to the plum bishoprics of London and Durham; and

made Sir Thomas More Lord Chancellor. When Oxford was divided, in

1518, between the factions known as ‘Greeks’ and ‘Trojans’ (a party that

Arelation or rather a true account of the island of England,tr. C. A. Sneyd, Camden Society 37 (1847),

23.

David Knowles, The religious orders in England, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1959), iii, 91.

60 The Constitutionalist Revolution

wished to encourage the study of Greek and one that saw it as unnecessary),

Henry ensured the triumph of the ‘Greeks’.

A fashionable interest in the latest scholarship did not invariably imply

reformist inclinations: we know that Warham’s piety, for instance, was

utterly conventional in nature.

Butitwas rather difﬁcult to offer sup-

port for good letters without at the same time granting some respectabil-

ity to an ‘Erasmian’ critique of the existing order. The authorities thus

encouraged distaste for those mechanical devotions that could be stigma-

tised as ‘superstitious’; a high valuation of knowledge of the scriptures;

intensiﬁed respect for secular duties; and a contempt for the traditional

methods, based as they were in Aristotelian logic, of Western academic

institutions. According to Erasmus, these attitudes were ideally united

in the leading English humanist John Colet (c. 1467–1519);

but none

of them prevented his rise in the church. Colet out-did Erasmus in his

contempt for Aristotelian methods, but his famous Oxford lecture course

on Romans, combining literal interpretation with an unusual Christian

Platonism, did nothing to stop him becoming the dean of St Paul’s

or being asked, in 1510,topreach the opening sermon to that year’s

Canterbury Convocation. Nor does anybody seem to have objected to

his use of this last establishment position for a denunciation of the

clergy for being excessively concerned with perquisites like tithes and

mortuaries.

At one time, Colet’s sermon was routinely used by scholars as proof

of the decadent state of the country’s religion. More recent Reformation

scholarship has tended to reveal a different picture; there is impressive

evidence that a wide range of traditional devotions continued to attract

support from all but a small minority of people.

Such evidence has perhaps

been pushed too far; an oddity of English history-writing is that expressions

of lay zeal, which have often been supposed, in other contexts, to be a sign of

‘rising expectations’ that would be satisﬁed by Protestantism, are generally

seen, when encountered in England, as nothing but a barrier to reform.

It has long been clear, however, that Protestants were very few in number

(except in a few parts of the South-East) until at least the reign of Edward

VI and that it is misleading to speak of ‘Anglicans’ – of principled believers

in an English compromise – before the last years of Elizabeth. Where

most historians have been less successful has been in specifying the relation

M. J. Kelly, ‘Canterbury jurisdiction and inﬂuence during the episcopate of William Warham, 1503–

32’, unpublished Cambridge PhD dissertation (1963), 38–9.

The correspondence of Erasmus,tr. R. A. B. Mynors (Toronto, 1988), viii, 232–44.

Eamon Duffy, The stripping of the altars: traditional religion in England, c. 1400–c. 1580 (Yale, 1992).

Reformation and the body politic 61

between the abstract notions of intellectuals and the religious practices of

the majority.

One inﬂuential school has avoided the problem by privileging the type of

source (wills, churchwardens’ accounts, and best-selling devotional man-

uals) that gives the impression of registering popular practice. It postu-

lates that the patterns of behaviour that were the norm in 1525 ought to

be grasped as a coherent system that was the passive object of an alien

assault. This may be, for some purposes, a valuable approach, but its adop-

tion is anachronistic, if only in ignoring that sixteenth-century concept:

‘superstition’. To grasp the web of practice as a system that stood or fell as

a coherent whole was to have attained a clarity of vision that was a product

of the Reformation. It is revealing that a favourite source of these revision-

ist historians is an effective piece of propaganda–adetailed evocation of

arrangements at early sixteenth-century Long Melford – by an Elizabethan

recusant.

In fact, a major weakness of the early Tudor church was its confusion on

doctrinal matters. As Colet’s life and thinking showed, the leaders of the

church were open-minded, but readiness to favour new religious attitudes

made orthodoxy harder to determine. In any case, lay piety was changing;

it is, for example, suggestive that no traditional monastic house (excluding

friaries) had been established anywhere in England in the whole period

since 1450.

Moreover, there was some degree of regional divergence in

behaviour. The ﬁfteenth-century boom in church construction was still

continuing in northern parts, but it seems to have died away in southern

England. In Lancashire during the 1520s, almost 80 per cent of testators

made bequests for intercessions; in the archdeaconries of Buckingham and

Lincoln, the proportion was approximately a quarter.

The primary agent of religious change in this extremely ﬂuid situation

was not, as it turned out, a Lutheran heresy, but a revaluation of lay authority

that formed a part of the revaluation of labour in an ordinary ‘calling’.

Intellectuals who prized the life of action (including the vocation of a ruler)

were led to aspire to a political order in which intensive public regulation

would minimise vice, superstition, and above all idleness. It may be that

these ‘Erasmian’ objectives were not particularly original – we know that

small communities in late medieval England found reason, intermittently,

for proto-puritan attempts to discipline their members

– but humanist

Robert Whiting, ‘Local responses to the Henrician Reformation’, in The reign of Henry VIII: politics,

policy and piety, ed. D. MacCulloch (London, 1995), 205.

Ibid., 214.

M. K. McIntosh, Controlling misbehaviour in England (Cambridge, 1998).

62 The Constitutionalist Revolution

recovery of ancient civic values gave intellectuals a special motive to hope

for more government efforts to stimulate virtue. One reason that Henry

succeeded in altering his church was that he could present his policies as a

fulﬁlment of these aspirations.

Another was that English kings could operate through existing insti-

tutions. Over much of Western Europe – especially the territories in

Switzerland and the Empire in which the Reformation ﬁrst emerged –

the church as an organisation was a major obstacle to humanist schemes

of cultural renewal. It ﬁgured as the patron of popular superstition and

monastic idleness, and its internal structure (which overlapped politi-

cal boundaries) posed problems for reforming governments. In England,

however, things were different. The ecclesiastical provinces of Canter-

bury and York were co-extensive with the English nation, and kings con-

trolled episcopal appointments. Thomas Wolsey had further enhanced the

king’s control by wielding the near-papal powers of a legate a latere,an

ofﬁce he used, anticipating Cromwell, to perform a visitation of both the

provinces and even to dissolve some monasteries. All parties thus had rea-

sons for preserving the church’s bureaucratic apparatus. The few but well-

connected Protestants, who came to include the Primate of All England,

could hope to turn it into an instrument for spreading Protestantism;

the king could use its malleability to maximise his scope for religious

manoeuvre.

In his dealings with the leaders of the church, Henry was helped by

three considerations. The ﬁrst was that his government’s policies (attacks on

superstition, promotion of Bible-reading, even suppression of the monas-

teries) were not in principle objectionable to many Catholic Erasmians,

whatever might be said about the methods by which those policies were

implemented. The second was that his critics had no obvious sticking-

point; the abiding weakness of conservatives (apart from a few rigorous

papalists) was that they had no clear criterion by which they could exclude

collaboration. The third was that a high view of the king’s authority had

atremendous positive appeal, which drew upon, but went beyond, the

standard humanist desire to attach a religious importance to secular duties.

The English were hardly unusual in looking to the magistrate to settle

their religion. They were unique, however, in that their breach with Rome

was over a claim about royal jurisdiction and in that subsequent develop-

ments encouraged stress upon this disagreement. The great advantage of

the radicals, even in periods of adversity, was their ability to claim that their

antagonists were really ‘papists’, that is, adherents of a foreign power. Their

arguments were ultimately successful; in the end, it was the acceptance by

Reformation and the body politic 63

some conservatives that a conservative future must be papist that forced

them to abandon the national church. But though the Royal Supremacy

to some extent explained the Protestants’ triumph, it also gave the English

Reformation a lastingly unusual character.

King Henry had always been hostile to any social force or institution that

might be thought to qualify his crown’s ‘imperial’ status, his status, that is,

as a monarch who had no temporal superiors. At the time of the Standish

affair, he regarded himself as ‘wishing to maintain the right of our crown

and of our temporal jurisdiction’.

innovations. But such behaviour was

not at all unprecedented; Richard II had set store by his ‘imperial’ status

and even passed an anti-papal statute declaring that the crown of England

‘hath been so free at all times that it hath been in no earthly subjection,

but immediately subject to God in all things touching the regality of the

said crown’.

During the 1530s, though, Henrician policy broke with this tradition.

What Henry was really attempting in that decade was less an expansion in

temporal jurisdiction at the expense of its church counterpart than a total

integration of every kind of visible coercion, including the act of excommu-

nication. Henry was not asserting a power of external supervision; instead,

he was maintaining that all varieties of jurisdiction had a common because

royal origin. He had arrived at this idea by February 1531, the month in

which he startled the convocation of the southern province by demanding

recognition as ‘sole protector and supreme head of the English church and

clergy’ and even as enjoying the ‘cure of souls’.

When the York convoca-

tion protested, a letter in Henry’s name to Cuthbert Tunstall explained his

underlying theory. The convocation’s protest seems not to have survived,

but the northern clergy evidently distinguished between the temporal and

the spiritual, ‘whereof the one, ye say, [Christ] committed to princes, the

other sacerdotibus [to priests]’. Henry thought that the clergy’s own evidence

subverted any claim to be immune from royal jurisdiction: ‘for princes ye

allege texts which show and prove obedience due to princes of all men with-

out distinction, be he priest, clerk, bishop, or layman, who make together

the church’. The king’s responsibilities were virtually unbounded. It was

Caryll, Reports, ii 691.

16 Richard II c.5.

John Guy, ‘Henry VIII and the praemunire manoeuvres of 1530–31’, English Historical Review 97

(1982), 495.

64 The Constitutionalist Revolution

the monarch’s duty to bear the sword ‘against him also that in any wise

breaketh God’s laws; for we may not more regard our law than God nor

punish the breach of our laws, and leave the transgression of God’s laws

unreformed’.

Though Henry acknowledged that the sacraments, ‘whereby

grace is of [God’s] inﬁnite goodness conferred upon his people’, escaped

the control of any temporal head, the clergy were free of royal authority

only ‘for the time they do that, and in that respect’. If the incorrect perfor-

mance of ministerial duties caused a scandal, the conduct complained of

fell within the cognizance of monarchs.

The workings of Henry’s own sharp, if uncritical, mind can be recovered

from his annotations upon the manuscript now known as the Collectanea

satis copiosa. This somewhat unfocused collection of anticlerical materials,

which probably reached its present form in 1532,

includes some quite

traditional conciliarist ideas, but Henry’s underlinings and marginalia reveal

the different tendency of his opinions. He marked a couple of passages on

the superiority of councils but his purpose in so doing was probably more

anti-papal than pro-conciliar. The claims that most excited him were those

that assigned a positive role to kings in church affairs or that excluded

churchmen from any role in matters temporal. He underlined a passage

comparing a king in his kingdom to ‘the soul in the body’ and ‘God in

the world’.

He also singled out the biblical excerpt in which Jehoshaphat,

the King of Judah, is said to have issued orders to the Levites about the

principles that governed judgements; his approving marginal comment was

‘an instruction (praeceptum)tothe priests’.

The Collectanea refer to the traditional notion of ‘two swords’, contrast-

ing purely corporal pains inﬂicted by the state with spiritual ones inﬂicted

by the church, but there are signs that Henry was, if anything, a ‘one-sword’

theorist. Thus he underlined the biblical quotation that ‘in those days there

was no king in Israel, but each man did that which seemed right to him’ –

a state of affairs that the Collectanea attributed to the absence of a higher

kingly power ‘by whose sword they might be coerced from vices’.

He twice

drew attention to Christ’s admonition to Peter that those who take the

David Wilkins (ed.), Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae a synodo Verulamensi A.D. 406 ad

Londiniensem, 4 vols. iii, 763.

Ibid., iii 764.

British Library, Cotton MS Cleopatra E 6.Current scholarly consensus acknowledges that some at

least of Henry’s annotations must post-date the Submission of the Clergy (1532), but insists that the

earlier part of this particular collection had a decisive impact upon Henry during the later months

of 1530.Itseems just as likely, however, that Henry’s views derive from other sources; his marginalia

impose some fairly coherent principles of selection upon material with no single message.

Cleopatra E 6,fo.26v.

Ibid., 24.

Ibid., 25–25v.

Reformation and the body politic 65

sword will perish by it.

‘The sword’ was thus a matter for the lay author-

ities. Moreover, the residual scope for excommunication could never be a

threat to secular power. Henry underlined a passage disapproving of clergy-

men who shunned the monarch’s friends, and added a marginal comment –

‘a most beautiful privilege’ (pulcherrimum privilegium)–to one that pro-

nounced that a tenant-in-chief should be immune from excommunication

till the king or (in his absence) the king’s court had been consulted.

From one perspective, what was happening was just a stretching of the

commonplace that things promoting temporal happiness were properly a

part of the temporal sphere (the Collectanea quoted from Aquinas, but

statements of this general type could doubtless have been found in almost

any writer touched by Aristotelianism). The lengths to which the monarch

took this ordinary idea are probably explained by his involvement in a

debate that focused on the act of legislation. The House of Commons’s

recent ‘Supplication against the Ordinaries’ complained of the church mak-

ing ‘laws, constitutions, and ordinances, without your knowledge or most

royal consent, and without the assent or consent of any of your lay sub-

jects’.

The complaint was superﬁcially familiar: a memorable passage in

Bracton described the barons responding ‘with one voice’ to the new Roman

principle that marriage could legitimise a bastard, allegedly by saying that

‘wedonot wish to change the laws of England which have hitherto been

used and approved’.

More recently, the Standish case evoked a claim that

alien law required a reception and that the English nation could modify its

principles by usage. But the emphasis on such earlier occasions had been

on temporal results of some particular piece of legislation. What was novel

in Henry’s position in the thirties was his denial that the church qua church

had any power to legislate at all.

Henry had somehow come to think that any institution that both made

laws and punished their infraction was of its very nature a purely tempo-

ral phenomenon. As his adviser Edward Fox was to explain in 1534,‘the

common gloss doth interpret the sword to mean power in judgments’, but

‘neither the scripture of the evangelists nor of the Apostles do give [the

clergy] judicial power nor court to make examination or determination of

punishment’.

Thus the church as a political organisation, an organisation

equipped with laws and courts, was constituted by the monarchy. This

Ibid., 29v., 72v.

Ibid., 41.

Gerald Bray (ed.), Documents of the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1994), 52.

Bracton, Laws and customs, iv 296.

Edward Fox, The true dyfferens betwen ye regall power and the ecclesiasticall power,tr.Henry Lord

Stafford (1548), 68a.

66 The Constitutionalist Revolution

principle was pushed to extraordinary lengths. It might have been thought,

for example, that bishops had inherent jurisdiction over such crimes as

heresy committed by their clerical inferiors, even if it were granted that

such a power, in a Christian state, was subject to the monarch’s supervi-

sion. But Henry’s government disdained such compromise positions. The

deﬁnitive Act of Supremacy (1534) declared that all the crimes committed

by the clergy were the immediate concern of monarchs. Henry was to enjoy

‘full power and authority from time to time to visit, repress, redress, reform,

order, correct, restrain and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offences,

contempts and enormities, whatsoever they be, which by any manner spiri-

tual authority or jurisdiction ought or may lawfully be reformed, repressed,

ordered, redressed, corrected, restrained or amended’.

In the event, this power of visitation was exercised by a layman, Thomas

Cromwell, from 1536 to 1540.Itistrue that the emergence of a lay ‘vice-

gerency’ may have been something of an accident, the result of Cromwell

keeping the powers that he acquired in order to dissolve the monasteries.

But the fact that such an outcome could be semi-accidental revealed the

extent of the collapse of the ideal of a self-governing clergy. By the end of the

reign, the regime made a positive virtue of the admission of laymen to sacred

ofﬁces. The parliament of 1545 empowered married laymen to exercise all

‘censures and coercions’ in the church, including the act of pronouncing

the penalty of excommunication. The draftsman appears to have seen this

remarkable step as a natural implication of Henry’s settlement, because he

thought the church law to the contrary was ‘directly repugnant to your

Majesty of Supreme Head [sic]ofthe church and prerogative royal, your

grace being a layman’.

As this revealing statement showed, the Headship was not a sacerdotal

function. By making the king central to the church of England’s life, Henry

admittedly did much to sacralise his ofﬁce, thus easing the mutation that

transformed ‘His Grace’ King Henry into ‘His Most Sacred Majesty’ King

James. But the indispensable core of Henrician theory, his claim to power

within the church and not just over it, derived from a view of his function in

the community; the metaphor of ‘Headship’ demanded a body, and it was

his natural connection with that body, the people of England considered

as Christian believers, that was the essence of Supremacy. As we shall see,

this point had some importance for the development of parliament. It also

Elton, Constitution, 365.

F. D. Logan, ‘Thomas Cromwell and the vicegerency in spirituals: a revisitation’, English Historical

Review 103 (1988), 658–67.

37 Henry VIII c.17.

Reformation and the body politic 67

helped to ensure the speedy failure of the attempt to introduce political

Lutheranism.

The classic English statement of the Lutheran position was the bibli-

cal translator William Tyndale’s The obedience of a Christian Man (1528).

Tyndale reminded readers that ‘thou shalt ﬁnd in the English chronicle,

how that King Adelstone caused the holy Scripture to be translated’, but

this was the only moment in his work at which he admitted that the king

might have religious functions. Tyndale’s principal concern was to rebut

the prelates’ accusation that Protestants were revolutionary, so he empha-

sised that the duty of obedience was ‘not to be understood in bowing the

knee and putting off the cap only’ but also promoting the rulers’ ‘worship,

pleasure, will and proﬁt in all things, counting them worthy of all hon-

our...remembering that thou art their good and possession’.

It is easy

to see why Anne Boleyn is said to have given a copy to her lover.

Butitisalso evident that Tyndale’s way of thinking was not a possible

ideological basis for Henry’s move against the papacy. Tyndale’s conception

of authority followed the early Luther’s in its indifference to law and virtue.

He thought of worldly power, in other words, as something authorised

by providence ‘to take vengeance of evil-doers, that others might fear’,

something that strictly speaking had no relevance at all to the religious lives

of proper Christians. From a purely religious perspective, it was the actions

of bad kings that might be salutary. A Christian thought of tyrants as ‘the

rod and scourge wherewith God chastiseth us; the instruments wherewith

God searcheth our wounds’, but the activities of virtuous kings did not

impinge on his behaviour: ‘he now that is renewed in Christ keepeth the

law without a law written, or compulsion of any ruler or ofﬁcer, save by the

leading of the spirit only’.

The ruler’s function was extremely narrow: ‘in

time of judgement he is no minister in the kingdom of Christ; he preacheth

no Gospel, but the sharp sword of vengeance’, which was why it would be

wrong for royal judges ‘to break up into the consciences of men’.

The weakness of this theory was its atomistic vision; both the leading of

the spirit and the vengeance of the king addressed themselves to isolated

individuals. Tyndale’s analysis of secular power as providentially sanctioned

violence discouraged more positive attitudes to social interaction. His view

of the church’s life was just as meagre. His only mention of the sacra-

ments was a jeer at superstitions surrounding baptism – ‘if aught be left

William Tyndale, Doctrinal treatises and introductions to different portions of the holy scriptures, ed.

Henry Walter, Parker Society 32 (Cambridge, 1848), 149, 168.

Ibid., 185.

Ibid., 197, 185.

Ibid., 203.

68 The Constitutionalist Revolution

out . . . How tremble they! How quake they’

– and the one ministerial duty

in which he showed much interest was evangelical preaching. A country in

which church and state were both such well-developed and coherent insti-

tutions was never likely to accept such doctrines. In the event, rejection of

the Lutheran position was exempliﬁed by the fate of Robert Barnes, whose

work A supplication unto King Henry the VIII (1531) originally included a

long section explaining that ‘the constitutions of men’ were not in con-

science binding. The second edition of 1534 omitted the whole passage.

But when Barnes and his fellow Lutheran William Jerome were burned for

heresy in 1540,Jerome is said to have maintained that magistrates lacked

the authority to make ‘that thing which of itself is indifferent to be not

indifferent’. In this, he followed ‘Dr Barnes’ book where he teacheth that

men’s constitutions bind not the conscience.’

As it turned out, the king was not content with such an impoverished

view of the royal position. Nor did he wish to sweep away the institutional

church; some of the spoils from the monastic lands went into the creation

six new bishoprics equipped with the same apparatus of deans, chapters,

and church courts as any of their medieval predecessors. From the letter to

Tunstall onwards, his arguments worked by identifying ‘the church’ with the

community of English Christians (as opposed to just its clerical personnel)

and treating his role in governing that church as one department of his

general duty of working to promote the common weal. In consequence,

the famous opening passage of the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) was

less concerned with kingship than with England:

Whereas by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly

declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been

accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity

and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic,

compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of

spiritualty and temporalty, be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and

humble obedience.

What is most interesting about this text is its unnecessary radicalism, a

radicalism still more marked in the unpublished draft material. As G. R.

Elton long ago discovered, the opening passage can be found in all surviv-

ing versions. Study of this material also shows that ‘An Act in Restraint of

Appeals’ would have been a misnomer for the measure that the government

Ibid., 277.

W. D. J. Cargill Thompson, ‘The sixteenth-century editions of A supplication’, Transactions of the

Cambridge Bibliographical Society 3 (1960), 141.

Elton, Tudor constitution, 353.