Henry VIII’s Reformation

This is the fourth of a series of articles describing formative movements and ideas in the history of the church. These were the crises of thought and conviction which brought us to where we are.

The previous article in this series examined the constituency for a ‘popular’ Reformation stemming from a native heretical tradition - Lollardy. Here, we will explore the official, political or ‘magisterial’ Reformation instigated by Henry VIII’s break from Rome by 1534 and assess its impact upon the religious life of Kent in the early sixteenth century. That the Reformation brought about a dramatic cultural revolution in English history cannot be overstated. For this reason it is appropriate to depict religious developments under the Tudors as a mere side-show to the story of Henry VIII’s marital affairs. It is also misleading to define the English Reformation as marking a theological halfway house between Catholicism and Protestantism. Beginning under Henry, but more fundamentally continuing apace during the brief reign of his son Edward VI (1547-53), the English church was severed from its medieval pastoral past, its formularies and liturgy finally being remodelled after the Swiss Reformation of Huldrych Zwingli’s Zurich and afterwards John Calvin’s Geneva.

By this it should not be taken to imply that religious change was inevitable or always welcomed when it arrived. The European Reformation commenced as a series of challenges to the ritual practices of the Western Church - ‘a works based religion’ - sustained by the notion that remission of sin could be sought through the fulfilment of pious actions. Reading the Bible, reformers viewed dependency upon works as impeding access to divine truth. Yet to speak of ‘Henry VIII’s Reformation’ is something of a misnomer since the king, who hated the principal Continental reformer Martin Luther - the feeling was mutual - was never converted to the central Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone (solafideism), the idea that all salvation was achieved by God’s grace conveyed through the divine gift of faith in Christ, regardless of any human endeavour in good works. This held little appeal for Henry, a monarch assured of his role as Supreme Head of the Church, the guardian of his subjects’ spiritual well-being. However, while the king, once a pious son of the Catholic Church, made for an unlikely evangelical reformer, his repudiation of the Papacy following his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, ensured that some restructuring of the royal outlook would occur. One outcome of the King’s Great Matter was a deep mistrust of the clergy’s claims to act as an intercessory priesthood. Closely allied to Henry’s emergent anticlericalism lay an increasing detachment from a belief in purgatory, an intermediary place between heaven and hell where souls were purged with the help of prayers offered by the living. Purgatory formed the linchpin of the Catholic devotional system. Henry’s abandonment of it in the Ten Articles of 1536, his first statement of doctrine, as being ‘uncertain by scripture’, held grave ramifications for traditional practices in England.

The first victims of the king’s rejection of aspects of his Catholic upbringing were the monasteries. These great conduits of the purgatory industry were primarily dissolved to furnish money for defence of the realm, although as one religious reformer Hugh Latimer observed, the founding of monasteries argued purgatory to be, ‘the putting off them down argueth it not to be’. Possibly this motive was uppermost in the mind of Henry’s vicar-general and ardent hatchet man Thomas Cromwell, responsible for the piecemeal liquidation of all religious houses from 1535 until 1540. Kent was no exception, the county’s 28 extant foundations - 22 monasteries and nunneries, along with 6 friaries - being coerced into surrendering by the end of 1539, their lands and property being put up for sale, their former inmates being pensioned off. For Cromwell, ending the monastic life in England meant denouncing the regular clergy as mischievous deceivers. In his rationale against cause célèbre for the vicar-general and his supporters was provided by Boxley Abbey with its miraculous ‘Rood of Grace’ fame for responding to penitents by moving its eyes and lips. Exposed as a fraud in January 1538, the rood was held up to public ridicule in London. The Boxley incident also set a convenient precedent for Cromwell’s injunctions of September 1538, which inveighed against the veneration of shrines and images and commanded every church to purchase ‘one book of the whole Bible’ in English, realising reformers’ concerns that Scripture be made accessible to all. Across Kent these orders prompted action to remove images from churches. A famous casualty of this spate of iconoclasm, a sure sign of Reformation on the move, was the shrine of St Thomas Becket, which as a lingering symbol of ecclesiastical resistance to the crown had to go.

The sudden loss of the monasteries and major pilgrimage sites caused irreparable damage to traditional Catholicism in Kent. On the other hand, the 1538 injunctions marked the high-tide of Protestant reform in Henrician England, which receded after Cromwell’s fall - ultimately for misjudging the king’s tastes in women with wife number four, Anne of Cleves. Henry retreated into his instinctive conservatism for the rest of his reign as traditionalists and evangelicals vied for royal attention. Faction fighting occurred in Kent, where despite the county’s early exposure to Continental reformed ideas, the Reformation remained a hotly contested affair, impeded by a predominantly conservative clergy and gentry linked to Archbishop William Warham - the force behind the heresy trials of 1511-12 and his protégé John Fisher of Rochester. In the early 1530s, they had backed the self-proclaimed mystic and critic of the royal divorce, Elizabeth Barton, the ‘Holy Maid of Kent’. In September 1543, remnants of this earlier group conspired to undermine the evangelical cause again by attempting to discredit Warham’s immediate successor, Thomas Cranmer, the most prominent patron of reform in Canterbury diocese. Cranmer is best remembered as the compiler of the Book of Common Prayer. Less well known is his work as a local diocesan governor, the result of a meteoric rise to the