Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity. David Starkey

boldest was her chaplain, Thomas Abell, who combined the very different roles of scholar and man of action.

      In the winter of 1528 Henry sent Abell on a mission to Catherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V, in Spain, where Abell played the desperately dangerous game of double agent. Outwardly he was working for Henry – secretly he was undermining the king’s whole strategy on Catherine’s behalf. Mission accomplished, Abell returned to England, where he quickly emerged as Catherine’s most effective and outspoken scholarly propagandist.

      Abell called his principal work, with magnificent defiance, Invicta Veritas – ‘truth unconquered and unconquerable’. In it he attacked the verdict of the universities which provided the whole intellectual basis of Henry’s case. The attack struck home, as the king’s infuriated scribbles throughout the book show. At one point, Henry’s irritation actually overcomes his scholarship and he scribbles in the margin in mere English: ‘it is false’. But by the time he’d finished, Henry’s composure had recovered sufficiently for him to deliver his damning verdict on the book in portentous Latin, on the title page. ‘The whole basis of this book is false. Therefore the papal authority is empty save in its own seat.’

      Not even that magisterial royal rebuke was enough to shut Abell up. Instead, it took the full weight of the law. He was twice imprisoned in the Tower, where he carved his name and bell symbol on the wall of his cell, and was eventually executed as a traitor in 1540. Even so, Abell’s courage proved fruitless. As learned opinion in England swung in his direction, Henry became bolder. He now asserted that, by virtue of his God-given office, the King of England was an ‘Emperor’. As such, he was subject to no authority on earth – not even that of the Pope. When the papal nuncio came to Hampton Court to protest, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and the Earl of Wiltshire told him that ‘They cared neither for Pope nor Popes in this kingdom, not even if St Peter should come to life again; that the king was absolute both as Emperor and Pope in his own kingdom’.

      Once Henry had been the stoutest defender of papal authority. But that had changed with the divorce, which had blown open the ambiguities of the monarchy’s relationship with Rome. Now the achievement of his most fervent hopes for Anne and for an heir depended on the idea that religious truth was to be found not in Rome but in the Bible. Rome instead was the obstacle that had delayed his divorce for five long years. It was the enemy that stood between him and Anne.

      But what of the Pope himself ? Here again, the Bible spoke. For there were no popes in scripture, but there were kings. And it was kings, Cranmer and his radical colleagues argued, who were God’s anointed, ordained by Him to rule His Church on Earth. The idea appealed to Henry’s thirst for glory. It offered a means to cut the Gordian knot of the divorce, and it even promised to make Henry, not the Pope, heir to the power and status of ancient Roman emperors.

      It was intoxicating. Henry now stood on the threshold of a decision that would transform the monarchy and England utterly, and for ever.

      IV

      On 19 January 1531, Convocation, the parliament of the English Church, met in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey. It faced an unprecedented charge – of exceeding its spiritual authority. Henry offered it pardon, in return for £100,000. Fatally, the clerics agreed to pay. Having forced them to admit their error, Henry increased his price: the clergy must acknowledge that the king was ‘sole protector and also supreme head of the Church in England’ with responsibility for the ‘cure of souls’ of his subjects. Over the next two weeks they fought that demand word by word and letter by letter.

      Finally, subject to overwhelming royal pressure, the Archbishop of Canterbury proposed that Henry should be accepted as Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England ‘as far as the law of Christ would allow’. His announcement was greeted with a stunned silence, which the archbishop ingeniously took to mean consent. The weasel words ‘as far as the law of Christ allows’ meant what anybody wanted it to mean, and the next year they were dropped. Until then, the Pope had still been acknowledged as nominal head of the international Church. But Henry’s new direction was radical. The Pope was left as a sort of figurehead, but kings in their realms held a power directly from God. Also, in 1532, the House of Commons, having been given the green light by Henry’s council, submitted a provacatively-worded position against the Church’s remaining independent legislative power. This was a step too far and Convocation repudiated the arguments of the position with outrage.

      Their reply was brought before the king who reacted by screwing up the pressure. On 10 May he ordered the clergy to submit to royal authority: all new clerical legislation would in future be subject to royal assent and existing law would be examined and annulled by a royal commission. This was a direct order from the king. Nevertheless, the clergy persisted in their defiance, citing scripture in defence of their rights and privileges against secular interference. The king’s response was a hammerblow. He summoned a delegation from Parliament and uttered those famous and emotive words: ‘well beloved subjects, we thought that the clergy of our realm had been our subjects wholly, but now we have well perceived that they be but half our subjects, yea, and scarce our subjects: for all the prelates at their consecration make an oath to the Pope clean contrary to the oath they make to us.’

      In effect, Henry was accusing the clergy in its entirety of treason for giving oaths of loyalty to someone other than the king. In the face of this, convocation had little choice but to surrender. On 15 May, it caved in, and gave up its independence. Parliamentary statute would dot the i’s on Henry’s new title of Supreme Head. But all the crucial stops had been taken. Henry had also broken Magna Charta and the first clause of his own coronation oath, by which he had sworn that the Church in England should be free.

      And he had become a bigamist as well. In October 1532, Anne finally gave in and slept with Henry. By Christmas she was pregnant, and in January 1533, in strictest secrecy, Henry married her, despite the fact that Catherine was still legally his wife. A solution was now urgent. If Henry’s second marriage was not declared valid, then the child (a boy if all was well) would be a bastard. The future of the Tudor dynasty would once again be in danger. The next month, Cranmer was made Archbishop of Canterbury. He was placed in the uncomfortable position of having to swear loyalty to the Pope, even though his purpose, as archbishop, was to implement the divorce and complete the break with Rome. ‘I did not acknowledge [the Pope’s] authority’, he swore in a secret disclaimer, ‘any further than as it is agreed with the express word of God, and that it might be lawful for me at all times to speak against him, and so impugn his errors, when time and occasion should serve me.’

      Time and occasion arrived very soon. Cramner derived his authority from Henry – God’s representative in England – not the Pope, despite the oath he had made. It was Henry, in this capacity, who gave him permission to determine the validity of his marriage to Catherine, ‘because ye be, under us, by God’s calling and ours, the most principal minister of our spiritual jurisdiction within this our realm’.

      A new trial was held at Dunstable Priory in Bedfordshire. Catherine was not represented, and crucial documents were missing. This did not matter. Using the verdict of the universities, Cramner ruled the first marriage void and upheld Henry’s marriage to Anne. There would be no appeal to Rome. After seven years, Henry had the woman and queen he wanted. The London crowds grumbled, Charles V was furious and the Pope eventually excommunicated the king. But Henry and Anne defied them all.

      Henry’s second marriage and its intellectual foundation in the Act of Royal Supremacy, which finally passed into statute in November 1534, were profoundly divisive. Some opposed them viscerally because they hated Anne or loved the old Church. Others were more nuanced and, subtlest of all, as befits the man who warned Henry about exaggerating the Pope’s powers when the king wrote the Assertio, was Henry’s old friend and counsellor, Sir Thomas More. Opponents of whatever sort were whipped into line by laws, which required them to swear oaths upholding the new settlement. They had to swear an oath of allegiance to the Royal Supremacy. They also had to swear to the Act of Succession, which declared that Henry and Anne’s baby daughter Elizabeth was the true heir. The implications went deeper than merely ratifying the king’s marital and dynastic decisions. By agreeing, the country was being made