Dan Snow's History Hit - Henry VIII's Break with Rome

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

King Henry VIII was deeply religious and started out as a staunch supporter of the Pope and the Roman Catholic church. But everything changed when Henry's need to produce a male successor led to his wanting to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. In this first of an occasional series of Explainer podcasts, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb offers everything you ever wanted to know about one of the most famous and far-reaching episodes in British history.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Now, you ask a lot of people about podcasts, they say, oh I know what these are about. These are about like middle-aged guys who like the sounds of their own voice monologuing. And I say, well, they're a cop. But today I'm bringing you the opposite, folks. I'm bringing you a very brilliant woman monologuing. She's going to teach guys like me exactly how to monologue on the pod. I'm of course talking about Professor Susanna Lipscomb. She has a sibling podcast to this one. It's called Not Just the Tudors. And I encouraged her the other day. Usually she interviews fantastic guests. You're going to love the guests. I'm always

jealous of the guests that she gets. In fact, I try and cherry pick the best ones to bring them on to this podcast. But I encourage her to do one where she talks. So she is, well, one of the world's leading experts on Henry VIII on the 16th century. She's brilliant. And I want to hear more from her. So in this episode, Not Just the Tudors, which broke all the records over on that podcast, she gives us an explainer of Henry VIII's break with Rome. One of the most seismic moments in English and British history. A moment that echoes right through to the present. You're going to love it. It's a moment much mythologized. It's a moment festooned with fake news and bad

interpretations, bad takes. But this is the real take. This is Professor Susanna Lipscomb telling her loyal audience exactly what went down in the 1530s as Henry needed to produce a male heir, get rid of Catherine of Aragon and his first wife, and marry his beloved, briefly, Anne Boleyn. It's awesome. It's a great podcast. Again, I love it, everybody. If you want to see more of Professor Susanna Lipscomb, she's coming to History Hit TV. We've just signed her up to do a multi-part series on Henry VIII and his wives. It's going to be fantastic. You can get ahead of the game. Go to historyhit.tv.

You get 30 days free if you sign up now. And you join the revolution. It's like Netflix, but just for history. I was on Netflix the other day looking around for history. It's rubbish. Absolutely rubbish. If you want to watch proper history shows, you do so at historyhit.tv. Head over there.

You can watch all sorts of cool shows. And soon you'll be able to see Susanna Lipscomb taking you on a trip through some extraordinary locations and some extraordinary stories of her rather troubled marital life. But in the meantime, you have to listen to an audio experience. Here's Professor Susanna Lipscomb talking about Henry VIII's Break with Rome. Enjoy. Today, I just want to talk about the break with Rome, which is something that we all know so much about at one level, but the detail of which may be surprising. So let's start by looking at Henry VIII's faith. Henry VIII was a very devout man. He expressed it in 1511, after the birth of his son, who didn't live long, the Prince Henry, by going on

pilgrimage to the shrine of Walsingham. And perhaps if that boy had lived longer than seven weeks, he might have continued to make pilgrimages to shrines of Roman Catholic saints throughout his life. But throughout his life, he was a devout man. He heard several masses a day, and he maintained it in its Latin splendor until his death. He cherished his beautiful rosary, which you really must see. Incredible carved work. After he died, he left £1,300 for the clergy at St George's Chapel, Windsor, to pray for his soul in perpetuity. And, of course, in 1521, he wrote, perhaps with the help of some friends, a book defending the Pope, his Assertio Septum Sacramentorum, his assertional defense of the seven sacraments, which was a rebuttal of Martin Luther. Henry, although he had much in common with Martin Luther, hated the man.

Luther had compared the Pope to the whore of Babylon, and Henry was feeling particularly defensive of the Pope at the time. And Henry's Assertio was something of a bestseller in the 16th century. It went through 20 editions and translations. This is the book, famously, that earned Henry the title Fidei Defensor, Defender of the Faith. And this was the title that he had joined to the English crown in perpetuity in 1543. He was obviously quite fond of it. One historian has pointed out that actually the defining moment of Henry's reign only played out as it did because, quote, Henry refused to see the question as anything other than theological. And it's certainly true also that in moments of his life when he was a bit down, Henry would turn to, well, one of three things to entertain him.

He would either go hunting, or he would be feted by his fool, Will Summer, or he would turn to writing and reading theology. So he liked to think about these matters. So we have to ask, why did such a devout man a man who elevated the pope and defended him against the man who catalyzed the reformation in europe come to fight against him so let's think about the timeline and circumstances of henry's break with rome a key part of it was the lack of issue male. From around 1527 onwards, after nearly 20 years of marriage, Henry sought to separate from his wife, Catherine of Aragon. And this was in large

part because although Catherine had been pregnant six times, the couple had suffered this awful string of stillbirths and infant mortalities. Only one child, Princess Mary, had survived. And so by 1527, Catherine of Aragon was in her 40s, had perhaps even gone through menopause, and Henry had no reason to think that she would conceive again. She certainly hadn't conceived for almost a decade by that point. And Henry needed a male heir. And this isn't just Henry being a misogynist. Henry VIII, and most people at the time, believed that one of his principal responsibilities as a king was to produce an adult male heir. In other words, a boy of at least 15 years old who could succeed

peacefully when Henry died and secure the dynasty. And a princess just wouldn't do, because princesses were generally married to other kings and princes. And so Henry feared that if he had a daughter, Mary, and she became queen, then when she married, England could be ruled or dominated by a foreign power. And of course, when Mary did marry a foreign prince, there were great negotiations to make sure that didn't happen. But Henry didn't have any precedent to look at. A woman hadn't successfully ruled England before. We could only look to the sort of chaos around the Civil War and around Matilda's reign and Stephen. So he needed a boy, and he

needed that boy to have grown up because children couldn't rule by themselves. They tended to be ruled either by a regent or by a group of councillors. And anyone who knew their history of England at this point knew that a regent could be a dangerous thing. Think about Richard III and knew that a group of counsellors could also be a dangerous thing. He didn't want to plunge the country back into the civil war that his father had rescued it from. So he worried that if he didn't have one or more legitimate sons by his early 30s, he might easily die in his 50s, as his father had done, without an adult male heir. And in a nutshell, what happened was that Henry became convinced, possibly even genuinely, that the lack of a surviving legitimate male heir meant that he was in some ways being

punished by God. He came to suspect that the Pope who had given him a dispensation allowing him to marry his brother's widow, Catherine of Aragon, had been wrong to do so. In 1529, George Cavendish, who was Cardinal Thomas Wolsey's gentleman usher and who wrote A Life of Wolsey, I highly recommend reading it, stated that Henry said the following. A certain scrupulosity pricked my conscience, which doubt pricked, vexed, and troubled so my mind, and so disquieted me, that I was in great doubt of God's indignation, which seemed to me appeared right well, for all such issues male as I have received of the queen died incontinent after they were born, so that I doubt the punishment of God in that behalf. We'd say I doubt not. Thus being troubled in waves of a scrupulous conscience, and partly in despair of any issue

male by her, it drave me at last to consider the estate of this realm, and the danger it stood in for lack of issue male to succeed me in this imperial dignity. The lack of issue mail was a very real problem, but his conscience's scruples had no doubt been somewhat compromised by 1529, because he had fallen in love. Enter Anne Boleyn. Henry probably noticed Anne Boleyn at some point in maybe 1525-26. We have a letter from him to Anne Boleyn, which has been roughly dated to 1527, saying that for more than a year he had been struck by the dart of love. He had previously, famously, had an affair with her sister Mary. What do we know of Anne, and indeed of Mary? We know that their father, Thomas Boleyn, was a man who had risen

in court circles. He was from a merchant's family, but he'd been made Knight of the Garter at the coronation of Henry VIII, in part for travelling north with Henry's sister, Margaret Tudor, for her marriage to James IV of Scotland. He had risen before that, however, under Henry VII, Henry VIII's father, because the first Tudor king had sought to promote men not on the basis of noble blood, but on merit. These have been called by Stephen Gunn, the new men, the people who acquired their roles through education, intelligence and ambition. continued to rise because he was a loyal servant and also because, despite being older than the young king, he showed the same sort of mad passion and considerable skill at jousting as Henry himself. Thomas and his wife Elizabeth, who was a member of the Howard family, a very important family at the court, made sure that their children Mary, George and Anne were very well educated and trained in the sophisticated world of the court. Anne was sent abroad to the courts at Mechelin and in France to become one of the

most polished women of her generation and then came back to take up her place at the English court. And interestingly, Anne was not conventionally beautiful by contemporary standards. I'm saying that on the basis of documentary reports, as we have no agreed surviving portraits from her lifetime. All those that exist are from later in the 16th century, probably produced under Elizabeth I. There's reason to suspect they may have been made to flatter. But Anne was bright. She was witty. She was sophisticated. She danced well. She wore fashionable clothing. She was certainly very attractive. She was sexy and she was intelligent.

The traditional explanation for why Henry wanted to marry Anne rather than take her as his mistress is that Anne, unlike her sister, refused to consummate their relationship before marriage, that she held out for the greater prize of being queen. And there are two things about this that seem a little suspect to me. One is that it casts Henry in the sort of role of lovesick, manipulated teenage boy. And the second is that we arrive at this on the basis of the evidence that we have. We have, in an accident of history, Henry VIII's letters to Anne Boleyn, and we don't have her letters to him. And I think so much of what we understand about the relationship comes from this very fact, that so much is read into what Anne must have been saying and doing into the attitudes of the two. Her letters to him might have been as ardent as his to her, but we don't know that. I suspect

that there's something a little more complex and adult going on. I mean, the letters do show us that there was definitely some sexual play between the couple. Sometimes they're quite explicit. One of his letters to her says he couldn't wait to kiss her pretty ducks, which is the Tudor slang for breasts. But they almost certainly waited until late 1532, so some six or seven years to have sex. And given that there was no reliable contraception in this period, the first mention of a condom made of pig's intestines is mentioned in a treatise on syphilis in 1564, I suspect that they both decided to wait until they were legally, legitimately married to have sex. Because the whole point of this was that they needed a legitimate male heir. And if they already had a child, if Anne was already pregnant,

that was going to hinder their chances of securing an annulment from the Pope. And then actually, I think there's the question of Henry's character. Henry was a very legalistic man. He was also quite a romantic man. That may seem surprising. He wanted to be right. He wanted to be exonerated. He wanted it to be declared that he had not been married to Catherine of Aragon, and that therefore he was single and perfectly allowed to marry Anne. So, on the 17th of May 1527, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who was Henry's great servant, his first minister, his Lord Chancellor, began a secret trial in Westminster to test the validity of

Henry's marriage to Catherine on the grounds that the dispensation granted back in the early 1500s by Pope Julius II, which had allowed Henry to marry his brother's widow, had been inadequate and that the marriage was thus unlawful. In September 1527, Henry sent a messenger, William Knight, to Rome, and he carried with him two draft papal balls, orders for the Pope to sign. The first was to allow Henry to take a second wife while still married to Catherine, a proposal that was rapidly dropped, and the second provided a dispensation

that would, in the event of Henry's marriage to Catherine being declared invalid, allow Henry to marry a woman with whom he had affinity. Because he had affinity with Anne Boleyn because of his affair with Anne's sister. So otherwise his marriage to Anne counted under canon law as incest. So he needed a dispensation to marry her. Listen to Dan Snow's history. We've got Susanna Lipscomb talking about Henry VIII's break with Rome. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores,

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Now, you'll notice that he was taking for granted the fact that he was going to get an annulment from his marriage to Catherine. And there was good reason for that, because papal annulments of royal marriages were not common, but they weren't exactly unusual. Louis XII of France had had his marriage annulled in 1498. Henry's sister, Margaret Tudor, Dowager Queen of Scotland, had had her second marriage to the Earl of Angus, annulled by the Pope Clement VII in March 1527. So going in late 1527 to ask for an annulment didn't seem like a big deal. The problem for Henry was that his timing was off by a mere matter of months. And if you want to look at this timeline blow by blow, I really recommend Catherine Fletcher. I recommend her book, Our Man in Rome. But in summary, what she says is this, William Knight was finally admitted to the Pope's presence in December 1527, but in May 1527,

troops belonging to Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, had sacked Rome, and so Pope Clement VII had been made a prisoner in his own fortress of Castle Sant'Angelo. Charles V was Catherine of Aragon's nephew, and he wasn't about to allow his aunt to be besmirched by the dishonour of the so-called divorce. So the Pope's hands were tied. So what he did was buy time. He appointed his representative in England, Cardinal Warsy, to try the case. And he also said he would send an additional legate from Rome to judge the case with Wolsey, Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio. But he was still concerned about upsetting Charles V, so he prevaricated further. There was a great delay about Campeggio's departure. He also had gout, which didn't help. He finally set out in June 1528, and he arrived

in England two months later, so he'd even taken time to get there. And he was basically under orders to drag the business out as long as possible. Campeggio's first suggestion was that Catherine should enter a convent. She would have none of it. She produced a copy of a papal brief providing for the dispensation that allowed her to marry Henry after being married to his brother Arthur, which completely undermined Henry and Wolsey's arguments and complicated matters. So six months after Campeggio's arrival, the trial had not begun. Meanwhile, Henry's servant, Sir Francis Bryan, was sent to Rome to look for proof that Catherine's papal brief was a forgery. By this point, Clement VII was seriously ill, and this led to hopes that he would die and a successor could be elected who might be

more amenable to Henry's cause, perhaps even Wolsey himself. In March 1529, however, Brian wrote to Henry saying, the Pope will do nothing for you. But still, even in these circumstances in early 1529, no one was yet seriously predicting an English break with Rome. no one was yet seriously predicting an English break with Rome. Finally, on the 18th of July 1529, the trial began at Blackfriars, and it was almost immediately scuppered by Catherine herself. Unexpectedly, she appeared in person, and she fell on her knees at Henry's feet, and this is the record that we have of what she said. This twenty years I have been your true wife or more, and by me ye have had divers children, although it has pleased God to call them out of this world which hath been no default in

me. And she swore, taking God to be her judge, that she was a true maid without touch of man when they first were married. She also protested that she could not get a fair trial in England and she refused the judge's authority. And some days later she appeared again to give notice that she was appealing the case to Rome. And accordingly, on the 16th of July, the Pope, Clement VII, revoked the case to Rome and suspended further hearing of the king's case. the hearing of the king's case. So here we are in mid to late 1529. Two years have passed since Henry had first sought an annulment. And it's obviously after waiting two years that he now lost faith in Wolsey's ability to deliver what he wanted. Because on the 9th of October, Wolsey was indicted for the crime of primunereerie or treason by obedience to a foreign ruler.

He surrendered his position as Lord Chancellor. So Henry now started to look for another plan. He called Parliament, the so-called Reformation Parliament, in November 1529 and they started passing a number of measures that limited the power of the church and Henry also appointed a team of theological experts, led by one Thomas Cramer, to study the scriptures and other ancient texts for him, to buttress Henry's claims that his annulment was justified and it should be decided in England, not in Rome. And two years later, these scholars produced a manuscript compilation called the Collectanie Satis Copiosa, the sufficiently full collection, that argued, on the basis of two verses from Leviticus,

that the union of a man and the wife of his brother was unclean and contrary to the law of God, and any papal dispensation pretending to allow it was worthless. One of the verses from Leviticus was also used to explain why Henry and Catherine had not had sons. It said that if a man shall take his brother's wife, they shall be childless. Never mind that a verse in Deuteronomy said the polar opposite, that it urged a man to marry his brother's widow. Never mind the fact that Henry and Catherine weren't actually childless. One of Henry's Hebrew experts, Robert Wakefield, concluded that the word childless in Leviticus actually, conveniently,

meant a lack of sons. But there was another strand of thought influencing Henry too. This was the growing conviction that he, and not the Pope, ought to have legal and ecclesiastical jurisdiction in his lands, that he should be supreme head of the church in England. And historian J.J. Scarisbrick, in his wonderful biography of Henry published in 1968, was so convinced of Henry's growing commitment to the principle of the royal supremacy and how it paralleled the divorce crisis that he asserted, if there had been no divorce, Henry might yet have taken issue with the church. It's certainly true that the idea didn't spring from nowhere. Back in November 1515

at Baynard's Castle, Henry had declared in a speech, by the ordinance and sufferance of God, we are King of England and the Kings of England in times past never had any superior but God alone. And I think Anne contributed as well. Anne had been influenced during her years in France by what we might call early Protestant, more technically evangelical belief. She was almost certainly an evangelical herself. And it seems that at some point after 1528, Anne had given Henry a copy of a book by William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, to read. This was an evangelical work that asserted that papal claims to authority over kings were a shame above all shames, that it defied and inverted God's order, that princes

should not submit to the power of the church. And Henry reportedly said, this is the book for me and all kings to read. And it seems that for Henry, the royal supremacy, the idea of his direct position under God, became an article of faith. In legal terms, this meant English sovereignty. The scholars examining the case for the divorce backed this up by reaching the conclusion that England was an empire. Now, in the language of the time, this meant that English kings had always enjoyed a spiritual supremacy in their dominions, that they possessed a sacral kingship. In other words, the Pope had no jurisdiction in England. And therefore in August 1530,

Henry asserted that no Englishman could be summoned out of his homeland to a foreign jurisdiction, or in other words, to a divorce court in Rome. And this is the first clear indication of Henry's conviction that he was rightfully the spiritual supreme head in his own country. And so this was turned into the doctrine of the royal supremacy, thereby the break with Rome, by a series of laws over the next few years. So in January 1531, Henry issued a charge of priminary against the whole clergy of England. The whole clergy of England were charged with being traitors because of their obedience to a foreign power, the Pope. They were all granted a pardon in exchange for £100,000. In March 1533, Parliament passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals. This has a very dull title, but it's crucial because in its

preamble it claimed England's sovereignty on the basis of findings by Cranmer's team. So it says this in the preamble, by diverse, sundry, old, authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire. So this built the idea of England and the king's sovereignty into law. It made the king de facto spiritual head and final legal authority on all matters religious and secular. And it forbade appeals to the Pope, so it meant that Catherine couldn't appeal to Rome about the divorce. And then finally, in 1534, the Act of Supremacy declared

that Henry was the supreme head of the church in England, was and always had been. It always reminds me slightly of 1984. Meanwhile, in December 1531, Catherine had been excluded from court life and sent to live at the Moor in Hertfordshire. Henry didn't even bid her farewell. And what's really devastating about this is that she was separated from her daughter, Mary, and she would never see her again. When she sent the king a wrought gold cup as a new year's gift as the convention had it he returned it to her a clear indication that he had rejected her as his wife

in september 1532 anne was made marquess of pembroke in her own right and in october henry formally presented anne to francois premier the King of France, Francis I, as his consort. And Dermot McCulloch, in his book on Cramer, have a look at the appendix, has argued that it's probably at this time that Henry and Anne married in secret and started to have sex, which makes sense with the timings for the next year. In November 1532, Clement, the Pope, issued a warning to Henry to leave Anne and to take Catherine back within one month on pain of excommunication. But, you know, matters had clearly already moved far beyond his control. On the 25th of January, 1533, Henry and Anne

were married privately. And then after the Act in Restraint of Appeals, which forbade those appeals to the Pope, they married officially on the 4th of May 1533. This is like a QI question. How many times did Henry VIII marry? You've got to take into account at least these three weddings to Anne Boleyn. So these three, or possibly two weddings, all occurred before Thomas Cranmer, now newly appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury, declared Henry's marriage to Catherine null and void in May 1533.

On Whitsunday, which was the 1st of June 1533, Anne Boleyn, her belly now swollen with pregnancy, was in great pomp and circumstance crowned Queen of England. So here we go again. The marriages to Anne happened before the marriage to Catherine was annulled. In July, the Pope gave Henry until September to take Catherine back on pain of excommunication. But as his excommunication came into force, Queen Anne went into labour, and on the 7th of September 1533, gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth. In 1534, an act of succession stated the lawfulness of Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn and that their children would be true heirs

to the throne. And all English male subjects, by which all subjects were supposed to be covered, were required to swear an oath agreeing this. The oath read that they would be true to Queen Anne and believe and take her for the lawful wife of the King and rightful Queen of England and utterly to think the Lady Mary daughter to the King by Queen Catherine but as a bastard and thus to do without any scrupulosity of conscience. Henry wanted the whole kingdom to be complicit in his decision, even in their thoughts. Everyone was forced to agree to the king's divorce, and according to the oath's preamble, to his position as supreme head of the church in place of the pope. Thomas More, alone among the laity, John Fisher, alone among the bishops, along with three Carthusian monks, refused to swear.

All were sent to the tower, and the hastily passed act of treasons, also from 1534, made it treason to call the king a heretic, a tyrant, an infidel, or a schismatic. I always think there's something slightly ironic there, something slightly tyrannous, one might say, in making it illegal for someone to call you a tyrant. It was also treason to imagine the death of the king in words, or, quote, maliciously to deny the royal supremacy. And as a result, the three monks were hanged, drawn, and quartered in June 1535. A foreign report on the event is pretty graphic, actually. It says they were dragged to the place of execution in their habits to the great grief of the people. They were hanged, cut down before

they were dead, opened, and their bowels and hearts burned. Their heads were then cut off, and their bodies quartered. And another shocking report added the detail that the executioner caused them to be ripped up in each other's presence, their arms torn off, their hearts cut out and rubbed upon their mouths and faces. And then, in an act that shocked the world, John Fisher, who'd newly been made a cardinal, and Thomas More were both beheaded. The attachment to Rome had been well and truly broken, and Henry's piety, I suppose, seems to have become linked primarily to a concept of himself as first under God in England. But arguably, the Reformation, if we are to take that to mean anything beyond the assertion of Henry's royal supremacy, was yet to occur.

I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks for listening, everyone. That was an episode of Not Just the Tudors on my feed. Professor Susanna Lipscomb is a complete legend. She's one of my greatest friends and colleagues in the world of history. If you enjoyed it, please head over to Not Just the Tudors wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe and rate and review and all that kind of thing. Share it with friends. It just makes a really big difference to us and we're really, really grateful for you guys doing that. thank you very much