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Thomas More and Henry VIII at Cross-Purposes I. the English Situation in Early 1532

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Thomas More and Henry VIII at Cross-Purposes I. the English Situation in Early 1532 CHAPTER FOUR THOMAS MORE AND HENRY VIII AT Cross-PURPOSES I. The English Situation in Early 1532: More’s Confutation Preface On July 23, 1529, Cardinal Campeggio adjourned the legatine court which had been considering Henry VIII’s request for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and transferred the case to Rome.1 This development contributed directly to Thomas Wolsey’s fall from power and to the elevation of Thomas More to the position of Lord Chancellor on October 25. It also contributed to Henry’s deci- sion to summon what would become known as the Reformation Parliament, a body that would sit from November 1529 until April 1536 and which would radically change the course of English political and religious history. In his classic work, The Early Tudor Theory of Kingship, Franklin Le Van Baumer divided the transformative years that followed into four phases.2 During the first period, which lasted from 1529 until 1531, the focus of Parliament and the government was perceived abuse within the Catholic Church in England. The second period, in 1532, was “one of hesitation.”3 Henry still hoped that Clement VII (r. 1523–1534) might be persuaded to grant his divorce. However, the discovery that Anne Boleyn was pregnant with what Henry hoped would be a legitimate male heir led the king to move forward. In this third phase in 1533, the government took deci- sive steps that fundamentally altered England’s relationship with the papacy. On March 30, 1533, Thomas Cranmer was consecrated as the 1 The pope’s unwillingness to grant Henry’s request for a divorce was primarily a result of the influence of Emperor Charles V, who was Catherine’s nephew. Charles had effectively controlled Rome and thus the pope since his forces sacked the papal city in 1527. The decision to adjourn the divorce trial in the summer of 1529 was probably precipitated by the imperial defeat of the French at the Battle of Landriano in June of that year [Richard Marius, Thomas More: A Biography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 357]. 2 Franklin Le Van Baumer, The Early Tudor Theory of Kingship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), 26. 3 Ibid., 26. 104 chapter four new Archbishop of Canterbury.4 During this same period, Parliament passed and Henry enacted the Act in Restraint of Appeals, which famously declared England an empire and thus sovereign and not subject to external authorities. On May 23, Cranmer declared Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon invalid and on June 1, Anne was proclaimed queen.5 In 1534, England entered its fourth and most revo- lutionary phase when a series of legislative acts would institute the royal supremacy. In early 1532, however, most of these tumultuous events were still in the future and it was unclear what Henry VIII intended to do next, a situation leading one modern scholar to observed the “seemingly contradictory attitudes and actions of the authorities” during this period.6 The uncertainties of this year are perhaps best illustrated by the preface of Thomas More’s Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer, prob- ably finished in the first few months of 1532 and published soon after by William Rastell. The Confutation was More’s third English polemi- cal work, after his Dialogue Concerning Heresies and Supplication of Souls of 1529, but the first new work he had found time to publish since assuming the duties of chancellor more than two years earlier in October 1529. More’s evaluation of the situation in England in these thirty-seven pages reflects both his successes in his efforts to counter English heretics and the growing rift between More and his master Henry VIII. Despite More’s attempt to preserve the appearance of a united front, his preface reveals the emergence of contradictory agen- das and objectives among England’s religious and political authorities in the face of the heretical threat. Earlier efforts to deal with the spread of heretical works from the Continent had not been very effective. In October of 1526, Cuthbert Tunstal had warned London booksellers of the consequences of par- 4 The standard work on Cranmer isD iarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). News of Cranmer’s elevation soon reached the reformers abroad. In a letter to Hugh Latimer dated April 29, 1533, George Joye said of the new archbishop, “he is in a perellose place but yet in a gloriose place to plant the gospell” [quoted in Charles Butterworth and Allan Chester, George Joye, 1495?–1553: A Chapter in the History of the England Bible and the English Reformation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), 96]. 5 Mortimer Levine, “Henry VIII’s Use of His Spiritual and Temporal Jurisdictions in His Great Causes of Matrimony, Legitimacy, and Succession,” The Historical Journal, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1967): 5. 6 William Clebsch, England’s Earliest Protestants 1525–1535 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 101..
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