B
barryatlake
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ebia, here is just part of the article on that subject===
in 1529 supporters of Queen Catherine still had the upper hand in Parliament. Nearly everyone opposed to the divorce believed that Henry’s desire for Anne would pass. Henry had discarded mistresses aplenty. Catherine wrote the pope telling him that if Henry were restored to her for a mere two months, she could make him forget Anne.
Knowing this, Catherine’s enemies—Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer, and the Boleyn family—kept Catherine away from the King and introduced a new game plan: directly challenge the pope’s authority not only on the question of the divorce, but also his authority as head of the Church.
Their playbook was a tract called The Obedience of a Christian Man, written by a heretical priest named William Tyndale. Tyndale was a Cambridge student who, like Cranmer, fomented heresy at the White Horse Inn, a tavern in Cambridge nicknamed "little Germany" for the budding heretics who gathered there.
Tyndale, like Luther (much of Tyndale’s work is Luther in English), argued that Scripture should be available to every man in his own tongue and that God spoke directly to any man through his prayerful consideration of Scripture. In Obedience of a Christian Man, Tyndale carried this argument into political life. Where once the princes of Europe acknowledged that their power to rule came from Christ through the pope, Tyndale argued that a king’s authority came directly from God.
Anne gave a copy of this book to Henry. Although Henry had earlier condemned the works of Tyndale, his vision was now clouded.
Scholars for Hire
More nevertheless was determined to save Henry from himself. There was reason to hope. Although the divorce effort had been underway for more than three years, Henry still sought the moral authority that would come with a favorable decision from Rome. In an effort to influence such a decision, Cranmer suggested that Henry obtain opinions on his divorce from scholars throughout Europe.
What Cranmer really meant, and what Henry did, was to pay for the opinions of what we would today call expert witnesses. While many of these hired guns supported Henry’s aims, at least one Italian rabbi, Jacob Rafael Yehiel Hayyim Peglione of Modena, concluded that Henry was married to Catherine in the eyes of God and that the marriage could not be dissolved.
The expert opinions carried no weight in Rome, so to get the pope’s attention, Henry, with a complicit Parliament, attacked the whole English clergy. For months Cromwell had been fomenting public opinion against the clergy with the tracts of Tyndale and other heretics. Now Cromwell suggested to Henry that since the clergy were obedient to Rome they were only "half citizens of the realm." Charged with praemunire, a kind of treason, the clergy were forced to pay Henry a sum of 100,000 pounds to purchase a pardon for the imagined offense and were forced to acknowledge Henry as the "protector and Supreme head of the Church in England." Bishop John Fisher attempted to salvage the bitter moment by seeing that the words, "so far as the law of Christ allows" were added, but the end was obviously near.
In 1532 Henry made a personal visit to Parliament and influenced the lawmakers to pass an edict forbidding English clergy to make their annates or "first fruits" payments to Rome, an important source of income for the Holy See. On the heels of that edict came the Submission of the Clergy, in which the clergy lost all right of legislation except through the king. The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, prepared a stirring rejection of this suppression of Church authority, but he failed to deliver it in Parliament, prompting Bishop Fisher to tell More that the "fort had been betrayed even by those who should have defended it."
The Storm Breaks
The suppression of the clergy was the last straw for More. He told his king that he was "not equal to the work" and resigned his post. Keeping his opinion about the divorce to himself, save in private conversations with the king, More hoped to escape the gathering storm by retreating from public life to the quiet of his home in Chelsea. Even then it seemed possible: After More’s resignation, twice, and in the presence of Parliament, Henry praised More for his service as chancellor. But Henry’s handlers could not leave More alone.
A man with More’s profound understanding of the law and his reputation for honorable conduct could not be allowed to be silent. His was a silence heard throughout Europe, and it was silence that encouraged others to resist the king’s divorce and ever-expanding power.
Then Anne got pregnant and the storm broke with fury. Henry married her in secret. She bore a child, Elizabeth. Archbishop Cranmer declared Henry’s first marriage null. He had no power to do so, but on the day that he was made Archbishop of Canterbury he made a private oath not to submit to the authority of the pope. Anne was crowned queen. Pope Clement finally condemned the divorce.
More had refused to attend the wedding. But the greater matter was More’s refusal to swear to the Act of Succession which declared Catherine’s daughter, Mary, a bastard and the issue of Henry and Anne heirs to the throne. More did not object to Parliament ruling on the succession of the throne, but he refused to take the oath because the Act rejected papal authority. In February 1534, Henry requested More’s indictment on charges of treason. The House of Lords refused three times. He was interrogated repeatedly by Cromwell, Cranmer, and the new chancellor, Lord Audley, who were unsuccessful in their attempts to bribe him, ensnare him, and link him with known traitors. Henry then cut off More’s salary and his family was thrust into poverty. On April 13, 1534, More was taken to Lambeth Castle and, in the company of other nobles and clerics, asked to swear to the Act of Succession. He refused. Having been convicted of no crime and without any legal grounds for arrest, he was confined to the Tower of London.
His trial was held on July 1, 1535. He was convicted on the basis of the perjured testimony of Richard Rich. "In good faith, Master Rich," More said, "I am sorrier for your perjury than for my own peril."
Death and Destruction
On July 6, 1535, St. Thomas More was martyred for his defense of the sanctity of Christian marriage and his defense of the authority of the Vicar of Christ. He was beatified by Leo XIII in 1886 and canonized on the fourth centenary of his death by Pius XI.
In the spring of 1536, less than a year after More’s death, Queen Catherine was dead, the divorce affair over, and Anne Boleyn was not far from the scaffold herself, though only Henry knew it.
Thus it was that that Henry VIII brought sorrow to merry old England.
The brutal suppression of the monasteries would soon follow. More than one thousand monasteries and convents were destroyed and monks and nuns turned out into the street to find, in Cromwell’s words, "real work." In destroying them, Henry introduced the modern welfare state. Once, the poor were cared for in dignity and charity by men and women religious. Now they were dependent on the state. Anyone with a passing familiarity with public housing projects can appreciate this bitter fruit of the Protestant rebellion in England.
Indeed, because England was destined for "a unique good fortune in the leadership of the world it is through its effect in England that the Reformation survives today as a world force," (Philip Hughes, A Popular History of the Reformation, 161) and the worst manifestations of it, from Christendom’s first state-sanctioned regicide, to the ugliness of industrialization, to the treatment of indigenous peoples, including American Indians, are this so-called Reformation’s darker legacy. With the exception of literature, English intellectual life declined, and even within English literature, it is the Catholics—Shakespeare, Dryden, Chesterton—who shine. English philosophers are more political theorists, and their ideas sparked the errors of the Enlightenment. The suppression of the Church in England was the dress rehearsal for the French Revolution, the Italian Risorgimento, the Mexican Revolution, and the Spanish Civil War. Henry VIII’s divorce is the reason America is a Protestant country.
It is not fitting, however, for Christians to end with even a hint of despair. Thomas More prayed for the men who sent him to his death, saying that he hoped they would all share eternity together. Catholics, with such charitable and courageous advocates as Sts. Thomas More, John Fisher, Augustine of Canterbury, and all the English martyrs, have good cause to hope and pray for the unification of all Christians in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.
SIDEBARS
Quick Lesson in Canon Law
Canon Law acknowledges a number of impediments to marriage. The three dealing with family relationships are:
So far as affinity is concerned, Canon Law today forbids marriages between persons related by affinity in the direct line (that is parent to child.) So, if my wife dies, I can’t marry her mother, but I could marry her sister. Interestingly, the Church allows that such a second marriage (to my wife’s sister) might, in fact, benefit my children—that is, in the event of their mother’s death, the Church is open to the possibility that it could be better for my children to have their aunt, whom they know, as their new mother. In the sixteenth century, the impediments of affinity were more restrictive. A man could not marry his dead brother’s widow without a dispensation from this Canon Law.
The question is what kind of dispensation was required. Catherine testified that the marriage between her and Arthur had never been consummated. Henry accepted the testimony and later said that he found Catherine a virgin. Thus, a dispensation of quasi-affinity or public decency would have been sufficient. In other words, the first marriage was never consummated, but for the sake of public appearances, a dispensation to marry should be granted.
One more detail about affinity in the Canon Law tradition: Marriage is the consent of the partners to be conjugally united. If they are baptized, it is also a sacrament. Consummation expresses the intimate sense and purpose of the marital consent. Consequently, the Church held that any act of intercourse, whether conjugal or illicit (as in fornication or adultery), created a relation by affinity among the relatives of the persons involved. Thus, a man who fornicated with a woman was not free later to marry her sister. This restriction no longer exists in Canon Law, but it did in the sixteenth century.
Lady Anne Boleyn
"Lady" is the title that courtesy and history have bestowed on Anne, but to the Spanish ambassador to England, Eustace Chapuys, she was the king’s "concubine." To the common people of England, who loved Catherine, Anne was "the goggle-eyed" harlot and a "sorceress," names routinely flung at her when she appeared in public. Henry VIII had kept a string of mistresses, but Anne was not content to be another one of these. She wanted to be queen. The fact that there was already a queen in place was just a matter to be overcome. Anne was an unattractive creature. She had a wart and six fingers on one hand, and, according to contemporary accounts, a pronounced goiter. She was too skinny. She did possess, however, a pair of large, dark eyes and fantastic powers to seduce. Her father was Thomas Boleyn, first Earl of Wiltshire, a member of the new nobility created by wealth and ambition rather than blood and tradition. Anne took her formation as a lady in waiting in the notoriously anti-Catholic court of Marguerite of Navarre, sister to Francis I, king of France. At court, Anne and her older sister Mary would have reveled not only in the salacious writings of Marguerite but also in the heretical ideas so popular in that French court. When she returned to England in 1522, she was, in Chapuy’s words, "more Lutheran than Luther." Anne and her sister took positions as attendants to Queen Catherine. First Mary, and then Anne, sometime around the beginning of the year 1527, captured the king’s attention. Mary was content to be Henry’s concubine for a time. Anne had bigger plans.
Repugnant to the Laws of God
After being convicted, St. Thomas More had this to say about the Act of Parliament which made Henry VIII head of the church in England:
Christopher Check is Director of Development at Catholic Answers. A graduate of Rice University, for nearly two decades he served as vice president of The Rockford Institute. Before that he served for seven years as a field artillery officer in the Marine Corps, attaining the grade of captain....
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in 1529 supporters of Queen Catherine still had the upper hand in Parliament. Nearly everyone opposed to the divorce believed that Henry’s desire for Anne would pass. Henry had discarded mistresses aplenty. Catherine wrote the pope telling him that if Henry were restored to her for a mere two months, she could make him forget Anne.
Knowing this, Catherine’s enemies—Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer, and the Boleyn family—kept Catherine away from the King and introduced a new game plan: directly challenge the pope’s authority not only on the question of the divorce, but also his authority as head of the Church.
Their playbook was a tract called The Obedience of a Christian Man, written by a heretical priest named William Tyndale. Tyndale was a Cambridge student who, like Cranmer, fomented heresy at the White Horse Inn, a tavern in Cambridge nicknamed "little Germany" for the budding heretics who gathered there.
Tyndale, like Luther (much of Tyndale’s work is Luther in English), argued that Scripture should be available to every man in his own tongue and that God spoke directly to any man through his prayerful consideration of Scripture. In Obedience of a Christian Man, Tyndale carried this argument into political life. Where once the princes of Europe acknowledged that their power to rule came from Christ through the pope, Tyndale argued that a king’s authority came directly from God.
Anne gave a copy of this book to Henry. Although Henry had earlier condemned the works of Tyndale, his vision was now clouded.
Scholars for Hire
More nevertheless was determined to save Henry from himself. There was reason to hope. Although the divorce effort had been underway for more than three years, Henry still sought the moral authority that would come with a favorable decision from Rome. In an effort to influence such a decision, Cranmer suggested that Henry obtain opinions on his divorce from scholars throughout Europe.
What Cranmer really meant, and what Henry did, was to pay for the opinions of what we would today call expert witnesses. While many of these hired guns supported Henry’s aims, at least one Italian rabbi, Jacob Rafael Yehiel Hayyim Peglione of Modena, concluded that Henry was married to Catherine in the eyes of God and that the marriage could not be dissolved.
The expert opinions carried no weight in Rome, so to get the pope’s attention, Henry, with a complicit Parliament, attacked the whole English clergy. For months Cromwell had been fomenting public opinion against the clergy with the tracts of Tyndale and other heretics. Now Cromwell suggested to Henry that since the clergy were obedient to Rome they were only "half citizens of the realm." Charged with praemunire, a kind of treason, the clergy were forced to pay Henry a sum of 100,000 pounds to purchase a pardon for the imagined offense and were forced to acknowledge Henry as the "protector and Supreme head of the Church in England." Bishop John Fisher attempted to salvage the bitter moment by seeing that the words, "so far as the law of Christ allows" were added, but the end was obviously near.
In 1532 Henry made a personal visit to Parliament and influenced the lawmakers to pass an edict forbidding English clergy to make their annates or "first fruits" payments to Rome, an important source of income for the Holy See. On the heels of that edict came the Submission of the Clergy, in which the clergy lost all right of legislation except through the king. The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, prepared a stirring rejection of this suppression of Church authority, but he failed to deliver it in Parliament, prompting Bishop Fisher to tell More that the "fort had been betrayed even by those who should have defended it."
The Storm Breaks
The suppression of the clergy was the last straw for More. He told his king that he was "not equal to the work" and resigned his post. Keeping his opinion about the divorce to himself, save in private conversations with the king, More hoped to escape the gathering storm by retreating from public life to the quiet of his home in Chelsea. Even then it seemed possible: After More’s resignation, twice, and in the presence of Parliament, Henry praised More for his service as chancellor. But Henry’s handlers could not leave More alone.
A man with More’s profound understanding of the law and his reputation for honorable conduct could not be allowed to be silent. His was a silence heard throughout Europe, and it was silence that encouraged others to resist the king’s divorce and ever-expanding power.
Then Anne got pregnant and the storm broke with fury. Henry married her in secret. She bore a child, Elizabeth. Archbishop Cranmer declared Henry’s first marriage null. He had no power to do so, but on the day that he was made Archbishop of Canterbury he made a private oath not to submit to the authority of the pope. Anne was crowned queen. Pope Clement finally condemned the divorce.
More had refused to attend the wedding. But the greater matter was More’s refusal to swear to the Act of Succession which declared Catherine’s daughter, Mary, a bastard and the issue of Henry and Anne heirs to the throne. More did not object to Parliament ruling on the succession of the throne, but he refused to take the oath because the Act rejected papal authority. In February 1534, Henry requested More’s indictment on charges of treason. The House of Lords refused three times. He was interrogated repeatedly by Cromwell, Cranmer, and the new chancellor, Lord Audley, who were unsuccessful in their attempts to bribe him, ensnare him, and link him with known traitors. Henry then cut off More’s salary and his family was thrust into poverty. On April 13, 1534, More was taken to Lambeth Castle and, in the company of other nobles and clerics, asked to swear to the Act of Succession. He refused. Having been convicted of no crime and without any legal grounds for arrest, he was confined to the Tower of London.
His trial was held on July 1, 1535. He was convicted on the basis of the perjured testimony of Richard Rich. "In good faith, Master Rich," More said, "I am sorrier for your perjury than for my own peril."
Death and Destruction
On July 6, 1535, St. Thomas More was martyred for his defense of the sanctity of Christian marriage and his defense of the authority of the Vicar of Christ. He was beatified by Leo XIII in 1886 and canonized on the fourth centenary of his death by Pius XI.
In the spring of 1536, less than a year after More’s death, Queen Catherine was dead, the divorce affair over, and Anne Boleyn was not far from the scaffold herself, though only Henry knew it.
Thus it was that that Henry VIII brought sorrow to merry old England.
The brutal suppression of the monasteries would soon follow. More than one thousand monasteries and convents were destroyed and monks and nuns turned out into the street to find, in Cromwell’s words, "real work." In destroying them, Henry introduced the modern welfare state. Once, the poor were cared for in dignity and charity by men and women religious. Now they were dependent on the state. Anyone with a passing familiarity with public housing projects can appreciate this bitter fruit of the Protestant rebellion in England.
Indeed, because England was destined for "a unique good fortune in the leadership of the world it is through its effect in England that the Reformation survives today as a world force," (Philip Hughes, A Popular History of the Reformation, 161) and the worst manifestations of it, from Christendom’s first state-sanctioned regicide, to the ugliness of industrialization, to the treatment of indigenous peoples, including American Indians, are this so-called Reformation’s darker legacy. With the exception of literature, English intellectual life declined, and even within English literature, it is the Catholics—Shakespeare, Dryden, Chesterton—who shine. English philosophers are more political theorists, and their ideas sparked the errors of the Enlightenment. The suppression of the Church in England was the dress rehearsal for the French Revolution, the Italian Risorgimento, the Mexican Revolution, and the Spanish Civil War. Henry VIII’s divorce is the reason America is a Protestant country.
It is not fitting, however, for Christians to end with even a hint of despair. Thomas More prayed for the men who sent him to his death, saying that he hoped they would all share eternity together. Catholics, with such charitable and courageous advocates as Sts. Thomas More, John Fisher, Augustine of Canterbury, and all the English martyrs, have good cause to hope and pray for the unification of all Christians in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.
SIDEBARS
Quick Lesson in Canon Law
Canon Law acknowledges a number of impediments to marriage. The three dealing with family relationships are:
- Consanguinity deals with the possibility of marriage between blood relatives. Nowadays, brothers and sisters and first cousins may not marry.
- Affinity deals with the possibility of marriage between a person and the relatives of his or her spouse (presuming the bond with the spouse has ceased to exist, usually by death).
- Public decency (some medieval authors called it quasi-affinity) deals with the possibility of marriage between one person and the relative of another with whom the first person has been engaged or has had an unconsummated marriage.
So far as affinity is concerned, Canon Law today forbids marriages between persons related by affinity in the direct line (that is parent to child.) So, if my wife dies, I can’t marry her mother, but I could marry her sister. Interestingly, the Church allows that such a second marriage (to my wife’s sister) might, in fact, benefit my children—that is, in the event of their mother’s death, the Church is open to the possibility that it could be better for my children to have their aunt, whom they know, as their new mother. In the sixteenth century, the impediments of affinity were more restrictive. A man could not marry his dead brother’s widow without a dispensation from this Canon Law.
The question is what kind of dispensation was required. Catherine testified that the marriage between her and Arthur had never been consummated. Henry accepted the testimony and later said that he found Catherine a virgin. Thus, a dispensation of quasi-affinity or public decency would have been sufficient. In other words, the first marriage was never consummated, but for the sake of public appearances, a dispensation to marry should be granted.
One more detail about affinity in the Canon Law tradition: Marriage is the consent of the partners to be conjugally united. If they are baptized, it is also a sacrament. Consummation expresses the intimate sense and purpose of the marital consent. Consequently, the Church held that any act of intercourse, whether conjugal or illicit (as in fornication or adultery), created a relation by affinity among the relatives of the persons involved. Thus, a man who fornicated with a woman was not free later to marry her sister. This restriction no longer exists in Canon Law, but it did in the sixteenth century.
Lady Anne Boleyn
"Lady" is the title that courtesy and history have bestowed on Anne, but to the Spanish ambassador to England, Eustace Chapuys, she was the king’s "concubine." To the common people of England, who loved Catherine, Anne was "the goggle-eyed" harlot and a "sorceress," names routinely flung at her when she appeared in public. Henry VIII had kept a string of mistresses, but Anne was not content to be another one of these. She wanted to be queen. The fact that there was already a queen in place was just a matter to be overcome. Anne was an unattractive creature. She had a wart and six fingers on one hand, and, according to contemporary accounts, a pronounced goiter. She was too skinny. She did possess, however, a pair of large, dark eyes and fantastic powers to seduce. Her father was Thomas Boleyn, first Earl of Wiltshire, a member of the new nobility created by wealth and ambition rather than blood and tradition. Anne took her formation as a lady in waiting in the notoriously anti-Catholic court of Marguerite of Navarre, sister to Francis I, king of France. At court, Anne and her older sister Mary would have reveled not only in the salacious writings of Marguerite but also in the heretical ideas so popular in that French court. When she returned to England in 1522, she was, in Chapuy’s words, "more Lutheran than Luther." Anne and her sister took positions as attendants to Queen Catherine. First Mary, and then Anne, sometime around the beginning of the year 1527, captured the king’s attention. Mary was content to be Henry’s concubine for a time. Anne had bigger plans.
Repugnant to the Laws of God
After being convicted, St. Thomas More had this to say about the Act of Parliament which made Henry VIII head of the church in England:
Inasmuch, my lord, as this indictment is grounded upon an Act of Parliament directly repugnant to the laws of God and his Holy Church, the supreme government of which, or of any part thereof, may no temporal prince presume by any law to take upon him, as rightfully belonging to the See of Rome, a spiritual preeminence by the mouth of our Savior Himself, personally present upon the earth, only to St. Peter and his successors, bishops of the same See, by special prerogative guaranteed, it is therefore in law among Christian men insufficient to charge any Christian man. (Gerard Wegemer, St. Thomas More: A Portrait in Courage, 215; cf. William Roper, Lives of St. Thomas More, 45)
A Defensione III.LXXVI.LXXVI
Christopher Check is Director of Development at Catholic Answers. A graduate of Rice University, for nearly two decades he served as vice president of The Rockford Institute. Before that he served for seven years as a field artillery officer in the Marine Corps, attaining the grade of captain....
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Well stated ! Good illustration CryptoLutheran.... 
