The Parliament

In August 1529, Henry VIII summoned Parliament to meet.

Its programme of revolutionary legislation required eight sessions, which lasted to 1536. After Wolsey’s fall, Henry decided to take command of policy-making, but as a result he could not settle on a policy from 1529 to 1532. He was swayed by competing factions (groups of councillors at court pursuing different agendas). Even his appointment of to succeed Wolsey as Lord Chancellor backfired. Intended to unite his council, instead it fractured it, because More’s conscience could not accept the divorce and Henry grew increasingly unwilling to exempt More’s conscience from his need for political obedience.

More instead became, thanks to his brilliant legal mind, the head of the Queen’s group - the supporters of Katherine of Aragon united against heresy. The Queen’s group determined to defend both the Queen’s rights and the Catholic Church. At first more active in council than in Parliament, this Council party was assisted in the House of Commons by a loose grouping of Catholic MPs who discussed tactics over dinner at the Queen’s Head tavern. Allied against them in council were ’s supporters: Thomas Cranmer, Edward Foxe, Thomas Cromwell, Sir George Boleyn, and Thomas Audley, Speaker of the House of Commons. They had ambitious ideas of using Parliament to extend royal power in Church and State at the expense of the clergy. More powerful than both groups were the nobility who had combined to destroy Wolsey, who had no ideological or religious axe to grind, but were intent on preserving their status by maintaining the status quo.

Yet Henry could not obtain his divorce through the status quo, and to break the impasse he gave Parliament the lead in pursuing radical courses against the clergy and their immunities from secular law. Soon the common coin of politics became arguments that the king-in-parliament was absolutely sovereign in the realm. Henry now put pressure on the Church through accusations of praemunire (allegiance to a foreign power), intending both to raise money for defending the realm against threatened invasion by Katherine’s nephew, Charles V, and to force the papacy to grant his divorce.

The clergy surrendered and paid a massive fine, and very soon Henry developed an imperial concept of his kingship. Even Thomas More compromised his conscience enough to defend Henry’s arguments for his divorce before both the Lords and Commons. Yet he failed to prevent the triumph of the Boleyn group in May 1532, when Cromwell whipped up support amongst the MPs to force the clergy to submit completely to Henry’s authority. More resigned the next day.

With Anne Boleyn’s pregnancy confirmed by December 1532 and Cranmer nominated to become Archbishop of Canterbury the next month, Cromwell’s group were in the ascendant, and in April 1533 Parliament passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals, despite the determined opposition of a core of Catholic MPs. The Act repeated historical arguments for Henry’s imperial powers that had been developed by the Boleyn Group, though opinions would always differ over whether the monarch or the monarch-in-parliament enjoyed the absolute supremacy. For this reason a majority of the Catholic bishops in the Reformation Parliament supported Henry’s claim to imperial rule over the Church. That was at least preferable to Cromwell’s threatened parliamentary supremacy, where anti- clerical legislation might emerge without Henry being able to impose any restraints. The secular nobility in the House of Lords went along with the changes because they did not threaten their status, and made Henry more grateful for their support. He offered the future prospect of rewards from an enriched crown.

In 1534 Parliament cemented the break with Rome through a succession Act, legitimating the claims of Henry and Anne’s children, and the Act of Supremacy, defining Henry’s position as both Emperor and effective over the English Church. The statute made anyone who refused to accept Henry’s ancient, God-given status subject to the Treason Act. At the local level Cromwell worked tirelessly to cement the new legislation into the legal and political structures of the shires. The new legislation was used to convict More on the evidence of one perjured witness before a rigged jury, and he was executed. A year later Anne Boleyn followed him to the scaffold for her failure to produce a male heir, but the Reformation Parliament would conclude its labours in a new world.

How legitimate was the power of Henry, the nobility, or the Parliament?