Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII: a historiographical Review by Nadine Lewycky Introduction

Introduction

Broadly speaking, reformation historiography has moved through three distinct phases: first, historians asserted that the doctrinal and practical innovations were legislated in parliament and originated from purely political and dynastic considerations. These were imposed upon the populace by the royal government. Secondly, historians focussed on the implementation of novel religious doctrine and practices, and the attitudes towards traditional and reformed religion in society at large. Lastly, historians have adopted an approach which accords the general populace more agency but examines their role in carrying out or resisting religious changes.(52)

Since the 1990s, the prevailing interpretation has been that the Reformation was a political initiative which was widely resisted because people were largely satisfied with the pre-Reformation church.(53) Self-styled ‘post-revisionists’ have argued that not only was late medieval religion generally acceptable, but that in attempting to preserve community harmony, the religious reforms were met with conformity, popular acceptance, and obedience in the parishes, thereby facilitating their implementation despite the absence of popular conversion to Protestant beliefs.(54) Ethan Shagan has argued that governmental initiatives forced people to choose between three camps of actors: collaborators, resisters, and those who were indifferent, thus identifying the reformation as essentially political, but emphasising that cooperation was necessary for its achievement.(55)

The Influence of Social History

These various arguments also demonstrate the influence of studying society ‘from below’ by abandoning parliamentary legislation as the foremost source in favour of wills and churchwardens’ accounts which more accurately reflect popular religious convictions.(56) In order to study popular beliefs more effectively, historians have restricted their studies to small geographical boundaries such as counties or dioceses.(57) Studies on the progress of the Henrician reformation continue to be broken down into increasingly smaller administrative units, where scholars emphasise the internal political and social dynamics of the parish community as the site for analysing the reception of religious changes.(58)

Historians are also focussing on the effect of space in communal relations, and using sacred space as a site for discerning modifications in religion in the physical and mental world of the early modern population.(59) Thus, identifying the parish as the site for micro-level politics and the interaction between political actors draws a link between historiography on the reformation and the intensification of the crown’s authority throughout the kingdom. Through this approach, historians can analyse the process of negotiation by which the crown and the general population mediated the introduction of social, political, economic and religious changes.

Humanism

As part of the more general revisionism of the Tudor period in the 1980s, the progress of humanism and its influence on politics was reassessed, as was the development of a humanist-inspired curriculum at the universities, stimulated by social historians’ studies on the quality and availability of education in the early modern period.(63) This revisionist examination of humanism also focussed on the growing number of laity attending university where they received an education in the humanities. Such a course of study was considered a means to social advancement by equipping them with the tools for participating in the governance of the polity. These studies have contributed to identifying the changing standards for defining noble status, in which lineage was gradually being replaced by education and virtue as the most important characteristics, and the increasing demands of civil government which required a new set of administrative skills.(64) Revisionism of the humanist movement in England has also provided scholars with an additional approach for analysing the reception and acceptance of the Henrician religious changes among the educated gentry who were the leading government figures in the localities.

Like religion and politics in the sixteenth century, the historiography on these themes is connected to such a degree that they both move in the same direction, influenced by similar trends in historical thought and theoretical contributions from other social sciences and humanities. In seeking to discover the origins of contemporary British society, scholars have traditionally glorified the sixteenth century as the dawn of modernity. Geoffrey Elton pinpointed the development of a bureaucratic and professional government to one decade alone. From the earliest reformation historians onwards, the Henrician Reformation, which included the break from Rome, and the genesis of the present-day Anglican Church, represented the triumph of reason, rationality and self-discipline over magic, superstition and immorality.

Both themes have undergone revision in several ways: for example, scholars have attempted to abandon traditional period divisions to place the developments of the Tudor era in a broader temporal context. The process of political and religious transformation occurred over a longer continuum, which implicitly questioned the originality and endurance of the changes in the sixteenth century. Scholarship on administrative personnel in both the late medieval period, and the seventeenth century, has highlighted continuities in methods of governance.(65) Recent scholarship on the reigns which buttress Henry VIII’s has put political and religious developments of his reign in a more comprehensible context.(66)

In the realm of religious reformation, scholars have noted the persistence of beliefs in the supernatural well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the supposed ‘age of reason’.(67) The rhetorical use of ‘reason’ and ‘rationality’ by early Protestant writers has obscured historians’ view of the fact that the supernatural, and in particular Providentialism, in its own way a superstitious belief in the ability of God to intervene in daily life, were central tenets of English Protestantism.(68)

The close relationship between the historiography of politics and that of religion in the Tudor period is encapsulated by current research on communal space and politics in the parish. Further, scholars are exploring the connections between the doctrinal changes engendered by Protestant thought, such as the refutation of the efficacy of religious imagery, and the physical acts of dissolution, such as smashing church windows and burning religious images, as they were undertaken by parish communities.(69)

Recently, Alex Walsham has cautioned against interpreting a linear development in religious doctrine and intellectual thought from one dominated by superstition and magic to one of reason and rationality. Instead she argues that the intellectual and cultural movements in the early modern period as it is broadly defined are best considered ‘in terms of cycles of desacralization and resacralization, disenchantment and re-enchantment’. While such an analytical tool is useful for guarding against interpreting the alterations in religious doctrine and practice as inevitable, if we are to view the Reformation and Counter or Catholic Reformation as part of the same intellectual continuum deriving from the Humanist movement as she suggests, then we must take care not to associate Catholic and Protestant influences with ‘resacralization’ and ‘desacralization’ respectively, or with applying this model to doctrinal developments in the later years of Henry VIII’s reign which has often been interpreted in terms of conservative and evangelical factional politics.(70)

1. 
   David Starkey, ed., The inventory of Henry VIII : Society of Antiquaries MS 129 and British Library MS Harley 1419, transcribed by Philip Ward (Society of Antiquaries of London, 56, 1998); State Papers Online, http://gale.cengage.co.uk/statepapers/, went live in November 2008.Back to (1).
   
2. 
   R.B. Wernham, ‘Tudor Revolution in Government by G.R. Elton [Review]’, English Historical Review, vol. 71, no. 276 (Jan., 1956), p. 93.Back to (2).
   
3. 
   See in particular the debate waged in the pages of Past & Present: G.L. Harriss and Penry Williams, ‘A Rev in Tudor History?’, Past & Present, 25 (1963), 3-58; J.P. Cooper, ‘A Revolution in Tudor History?’, ibid, 110-12; G.R. Elton, ‘The Tudor Revolution: a Reply’, P&P, 29 (1964), 26-49; G.L. Harriss and Penry Williams, ‘A Revolution in Tudor History?’, P&P, 31 (1965), 87-96; G.R. Elton, ‘A Revolution in Tudor History?’, P&P, 32 (1965), 103-9. A good summary of recent historiographical re-evaluations of Elton’s work can be found in Natalie Mears, ‘Court, Courtiers and Culture in Tudor England’, Historical Journal, 46:3 (Sep., 2003), 703-22.Back to (3).
   
4. 
   David Starkey, ‘Court and Government’, in Revolution Reassessed: revisions in the history of Tudor government and administration, ed. Christopher Coleman and David Starkey (Oxford, 1986), p. 35.Back to (4).
   
5. 
   John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, 1988). Back to (5).
   
6. 
   John Guy, The Cardinal’s Court: The Impact of Thomas Wolsey in Star Chamber (Sussex, 1977), p. 26.Back to (6).
   
7. 
   Christopher Coleman and David Starkey, ed., Revolution Reassessed: revisions in the history of Tudor government and administration (Oxford, 1986); David Starkey, ‘A Reply: Tudor Government: The Facts?’, Historical Journal, 31:4 (Dec., 1988), p. 931; Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Introduction’, p. 2 and Eric Ives, ‘Henry VIII: the Political Perspective’, p. 14 in The Reign of Henry VIII: Politics, Policy and Piety, ed. Diarmaid MacCulloch (Basingstoke, 1995); D.M. Loades, Power in Tudor England (Basingstoke, 1997), p. 8.Back to (7).
   
8. 
   David Starkey, ‘Introduction’, p. 9 and Idem, ‘Intimacy and Innovation: the rise of the Privy Chamber, 1485-1547’, p. 71 in The English Court: from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, ed. David Starkey, D.A.L. Morgan, John Murphy, Pam Wright, Neil Cuddy, Kevin M. Sharpe (London, 1987).Back to (8).
   
9. 
   J.E. Neale had previously drawn attention to the role of factions in the struggle for patronage, ‘The Elizabethan Political Scene’, reprinted in Essays in Elizabethan History (London, 1958), p. 70; E.W. Ives, Faction in Tudor England. Second Edition. (London, 1986). The debate about the circumstances surrounding fall of Anne Boleyn has provided fruitful ground for discussions on factional politics, see: E.W. Ives, Anne Boleyn (Oxford, 1986); Retha M. Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: family politics at the court of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1989); ‘Anne Boleyn Revisited’, Historical Journal, 34:4 (1991), 953-4; and their debate along with G.W. Bernard in English Historical Review, Bernard, ‘The fall of Anne Boleyn’, 106:420 (1991), 584-610; Ives, ‘The fall of Anne Boleyn Reconsidered’, 107:424 (1992), 651-64; Bernard, ‘The fall of Anne Boleyn: a rejoinder’, 107:424 (1992), 665-74; Warnicke, ‘The fall of Anne Boleyn Revisited’, 108 (1993), 653-65; E. W. Ives, ‘The Fall of Anne Boleyn Reconsidered’, EHR, 107 (1992), 651-664. Other useful discussions on faction in Tudor England can be found in Antoni Mączak, ‘From Aristocratic Household to Princely Court: Restructuring Patronage in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Princes, Patronage and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age c.1450-1650, ed. Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke (Oxford, 1991), 315-27; Robert Shephard, ‘Review: Court Factions in Early Modern England’, Journal of Modern History, 64:4 (Dec., 1992), 721-45; Joseph S. Block, Factional Politics and the English Reformation, 1520-1540 (London, 1993); G. Walker, Persuasive Fictions: factions, faith and political culture in the reign of Henry VIII (Aldershot, 1996); Joseph S. Block, ‘Political Corruption in Henrician England’ in State, Sovereigns and Society in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of A.J. Slavin, ed. Charles Carlton, R.L. Woods, M.L. Robertson and J.S. Block (Stroud, 1998).Back to (9).
   
10. 
    Ives, Faction in Tudor England, p. 5.Back to (10).
    
11. 
    David Starkey, ‘The age of the household: politics, society and the arts, c. 1350-c. 1550’, in The Later Middle Ages, ed. Stephen Medcalf (London, 1981), pp. 261-3; Helen Miller, Henry VIII and the English Nobility (Oxford, 1986), pp. 78-9; Neil Samman, ‘The Henrician Court During Cardinal Wolsey’s Ascendancy’, (Unpublished Ph.D., University of Wales, 1988); Ronald G. Asch, ‘Introduction: Court and Household from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries’ in Princes, Patronage and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age c.1450-1650, ed. Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke (Oxford, 1991), pp. 1-5Back to (11).
    
12. 
    E.W. Ives, Faction in Tudor England (London, 1979); Robert Shephard, ‘Review: Court Factions in Early Modern England’, Journal of Modern History, 64:4 (Dec., 1992), 721-45. For a summary of the types of political structures in the Tudor period that historians should be considering in addition to faction and how they should go about doing it, see Steven J. Gunn, ‘The structures of politics in early Tudor England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 5 (1995), 59-90.Back to (12).
    
13. 
    G.W. Bernard, ‘The Making of Religious Policy, 1533-1546: Henry VIII and the Search for the Middle Way’, Historical Journal, 41:2 (Jun., 1998), pp. 321-5.Back to (13).
    
14. 
    G.R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge, 1972)Back to (14).
    
15. 
    Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, community and the conflict of cultures, 1470-1603 (London, 1985); Idem., ‘Tudor state formation and the shaping of the British Isles’, in Conquest and union: fashioning a British state, 1485-1725, ed. Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (London, 1995), 40-63; Idem with Christopher Maginn, The making of the British Isles: the state of Britain and Ireland, 1450-1660 (Harlow, 2007).Back to (15).
    
16. 
    J.P.D. Cooper, Propaganda and the Tudor State: Political Culture in the West Country (Oxford, 2003), pp. 6-7.Back to (16).
    
17. 
    Stuart Carroll, Noble Power during the French Wars of Religion: The Guise Affinity and the Catholic Cause in Normandy (Cambridge, 1998), p. 7; Christine Carpenter, ‘The Beauchamp Affinity: a study of bastard feudalism at work’, English Historical Review, 95 (1980), p. 515; Chris Given-Wilson, The Royal Household and King’s Affinity: service, politics and finance in England, 1360-1413 (New Haven, CT, 1986), p. 203.Back to (17).
    
18. 
    Simon Adams, ‘Baronial Contexts? Continuity and Change in the noble affinity, 1400-1600’, in The end of the middle ages? England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ed. John Lovett Watts (Stroud, 1998), p. 160; Carpenter, ‘Beauchamp Affinity’, p. 514.Back to (18).
    
19. 
    Given-Wilson, Royal Household and the King’s Affinity, p. 265; Simon Adams, ‘The patronage of the crown in Elizabethan politics: the 1590s in perspective’ in The Reign of Elizabeth I: court and culture in the last decade, ed. John Guy (Cambridge, 1995), p. 31.Back to (19).
    
20. 
    Steven Gunn, ‘Sir Thomas Lovell (c.1449-1524): A New Man in a New Monarchy?’, in The End of the Middle Ages? England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, ed. John Lovett Watts (Stroud, 1998), p. 135; John Guy, ‘Wolsey and the Tudor Polity’ in Cardinal Wolsey: Church, State and Art, ed. S.J. Gunn and P.G. Lindley (Cambridge, 1991), p. 67.Back to (20).
    
21. 
    Gunn, ‘The Structures of Politics in Early Tudor England’, TRHS, 6th Ser., 5 (1995), p. 62; Christine Carpenter, ‘Who ruled the Midlands in the later middle ages?’, Midland History, 19 (1994), pp. 1-2. Back to (21).
    
22. 
    Michael Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (London, 1995), pp. 3-4; Peter Coss, ‘An age of deference’, in A Social History of England, 1200-1500, ed. Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod (Cambridge, 2006), p. 42. Back to (22).
    
23. 
    K.B. McFarlane, ‘Bastard Feudalism’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 20:61 (1945), 161-80; J.M.W. Bean, From lord to patron: lordship in late medieval England (Manchester, 1989); Idem, The decline of English feudalism, 1215-1540 (Manchester, 1968).Back to (23).
    
24. 
    Carpenter, ‘The Beauchamp affinity’, p. 514; Scott L. Waugh, ‘Tenure to contract: lordship to clientage in thirteenth-century England’, EHR, 101 (1986), esp. pp. 812-8 provides a good summary of the legal and financial changes which gave rise to the alteration in retaining; see also the debate between Peter Coss, David Crouch and D.A. Carpenter in Past and Present: P.R. Coss, ‘Bastard Feudalism Revised’, No. 125 (Nov., 1989), 27-64; David Crouch and D.A. Carpenter, ‘Bastard Feudalism Revised’, No. 131 (May, 1991), 165-89 and Coss, ‘Bastard Feudalism Revised: Reply’, 190-203.Back to (24).
    
25. 
    Alistair Dunn, ‘Inheritance and Lordship in Pre-Reformation England: George Neville, Lord Bergavenny (c. 1470-1535)’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 48 (2004), p. 117.Back to (25).
    
26. 
    Given-Wilson, Royal Household and the King’s Affinity, pp. 263-6; D.A.L. Morgan, ‘The King’s Affinity in the Polity of Yorkist England’, TRHS, 5th Ser., 23 (1973), p. 24.Back to (26).
    
27. 
    A. Goodman, John of Gaunt: the exercise of princely power in fourteenth-century Europe (Harlow, 1992), pp. 371-5. The degree to which John of Gaunt’s wealth and power were subsumed as an extension of royal power is not wholly accepted by historians, see Simon Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity, 1361-1399 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 104-5 who viewed Gaunt’s retainers as distinct from royal administrators.Back to (27).
    
28. 
    A.J. Pollard, North-Eastern England During the Wars of the Roses (Oxford, 1990), p. 100; M.E. James, Family, Lineage and Civil Society: A Study of Society, Politics and Mentality in the Durham Region, 1500-1640 (Oxford, 1974), p. 26; Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401-1499 (Cambridge, 1992), p. 244.Back to (28).
    
29. 
    R.B. Smith, Land and Politics in the England of Henry VIII: the west riding of Yorkshire, 1530-46 (Oxford, 1970), p. 254; Barbara English, Great Landowners of the East Riding (Hemel Hempstead, 1990), pp. 7-9; J.T. Cliffe, Yorkshire Gentry from Reformation to Civil War (London, 1969), p. 8.Back to (29).
    
30. 
    Smith, Land and Politics, p. 258; English, Great Landowners, pp. 41-5.Back to (30).
    
31. 
    Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (London, 1965), pp. 8-10.Back to (31).
    
32. 
    Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, CT and London, 1992); George W. Bernard, ‘Introduction’, in The Tudor Nobility, ed. G.W. Bernard (Manchester, 1992), p. 6; Helen Miller, Henry VIII and the English Nobility (Oxford, 1986), p. 256.Back to (32).
    
33. 
    Adams, ‘The patronage of the crown in Elizabethan politics’, p. 26.Back to (33).
    
34. 
    Hicks, Bastard Feudalism, pp. 3-4; Bean, The Decline of English Feudalism; Bernard, ‘Introduction’, p. 19; Arthur Joseph Slavin, Politics and Profit: a study of Sir Ralph Sadler, 1507-1547 (Cambridge, 1966), p. 132; Miller, Henry VIII and the English Nobility, p. 79.Back to (34).
    
35. 
    Mervyn James, English politics and the concept of honour, 1485-1642, Past and Present Supplement, 3 (1978), pp. 43-63. James uses the terms faithfulness and obedience in describing a process he calls the ‘moralisation of politics’. The traditional concept of honour, in which faithfulness to one’s lord and friends was central, and which was closely connected with violence and political dissent, was no longer tenable in the new political climate under the Tudors in which the crown’s ability to swiftly and comprehensively eradicate all rival claims to succession meant that obedience to the crown replaced faithfulness to one’s lord as the most prominent of a man’s political ties. It was also a climate in which political dissent was expressed as the desire to uphold obedience to the monarch.Back to (35).
    
36. 
    Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke, ‘Introduction’, in Princes, patronage and the nobility: the court at the beginning of the modern age c.1450-1650, ed. Asch and Birke (London, 1991), p. 4; Miller, Henry VIII and the English Nobility, p. 79; Christopher Haigh, Elizabeth I (London, 1988), pp. 88-9Back to (36).
    
37. 
    David Starkey, ‘Court and Government’, in Revolution Reassessed, ed. Coleman and Starkey, pp. 30-1, 35.Back to (37).
    
38. 
    E.W. Ives, ‘Henry VIII: the political perspective’, in The Reign of Henry VIII: politics, policy and piety, ed. Diarmaid MacCulloch (Basingstoke, 1995), pp. 17-8. Back to (38).
    
39. 
    David Loades, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, 1504-1553 (Oxford, 1996).Back to (39).
    
40. 
    Steven Gunn, ‘Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex (1472-1540)’, in The Tudor Nobility, ed. G.W. Bernard, p. 134.Back to (40).
    
41. 
    M.E. James, Change and Continuity in the Tudor North: The Rise of Thomas First Lord Wharton, Borthwick Paper, no. 27 (York, 1965). Back to (41).
    
42. 
    Steven Gunn, ‘Sir Thomas Lovell (c. 1449-1524): A New Man in a New Monarchy?’, in
    
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