Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie
1523 that he could abandon his celibacy and turn his lands into a secular principality. He liked the prospect, and so in 1525 made himself duke of Prussia and his subjects into Lutherans. The wife he chose came from another northern early-adopter territory: the powerful kingdom of Denmark, which extended south into Germany and included modern Norway, and by the 1530s was caught in a civil war between two claimants to the throne. One of them allied himself with the reformers, and when he emerged as King Christian III in 1536, he led his whole kingdom out of the Catholic Church. For the next century, Denmark would remain the single most substantial Lutheran state.
Sweden’s case was more idiosyncratic. After more than a century under Danish rule, Sweden had broken free in the early 1520s. The rebel leader turned king, Gustav Vasa, had no intention of ceding an inch of his new sovereignty to anyone. So when German merchants in his ports began buzzing with tales of princes to the south sloughing off papal authority, his interest was piqued. The Reformation that he slowly imposed on a reluctant Sweden was clearly influenced by Luther and implemented by churchmen and ministers who were true Lutheran believers, but it was Gustav Vasa’s Reformation, not Luther’s. Its distinctive features were his seizure of huge amounts of church property and his iron insistence that the Swedish church’s hierarchy and courts be under royal control.
Even Gustav Vasa, however, looks tame compared with the Reformation era’s most megalomaniacal opportunist. Henry VIII was not a natural Lutheran. His greatest talent was political display, an invaluable skill for the ruler of a kingdom whose fading grandeur was not matched by much real power. His piety was as theatrical as the rest of his persona – which is not to doubt its sincerity: no better way to persuade others than to persuade yourself first. So when Luther’s movement erupted, Henry threw himself into the fray with characteristic panache.
Like the Renaissance scholar he fancied himself to be, Henry wrote a book. Despite his ghostwriters’ efforts, I Assert That There Are Seven Sacraments is no great piece of theology; but celebrity sells, and it became one of the few anti-Luther pamphlets to be a commercial success in Germany. Whether anyone was persuaded by Henry’s argument, we may doubt. But in two quarters, at least, it struck home. For one, Luther could not ignore such a high-profile challenger. He wrote a vitriolic reply, much to the fury of the English king, who only liked polemical rough-and-tumble on his own terms. More important, however, Henry’s book found its mark in Rome. He had long resented the pope’s gift of glorious titles to the kings of Spain (“the Catholic King”) and France (“the Most Christian King”), while England was left out. Now, finally and after some negotiation, Henry got his prize and became “Defender of the Faith.”
So Henry’s initial response to the Reformation was to remain ostentatiously Catholic and thereby to extort favours from Rome. Other Catholic kings were also discovering that the pope now needed them more than they needed him. But for Henry VIII, this turned out not to be enough. He ran up against one of the pope’s few undisputed powers: canon law, which included the law of marriage. In 1527, fretted by his lack of sons and entranced by a young noblewoman named Anne Boleyn, Henry convinced himself that his long-standing marriage to the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon was invalid. Only the pope could grant the annulment Henry suddenly, desperately wanted. Yet Henry’s case in law was flimsy, and the pope was loath to offend Queen Catherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V. Henry tried every diplomatic trick in the book, but Rome would not cooperate.
In another generation, that drama would have resolved itself some other way. But the precedent set by the German princes, and the arguments made by some opportunistic English readers of Luther, raised an enticing possibility. What if the pope did not, in fact, have the right to judge an English king’s marriage? What if God intended that the king himself should be head of the church in his own realm? If German princelings could get away with it, then why not the king of England, the Defender of the Faith? The idea grew on Henry until it had him absolutely in its grip. By the time he formally repudiated the pope’s authority in 1534, his marital adventures had almost become a side issue. He was now convinced that he was, by God’s appointment, Supreme Head of the Church of England.4
Lutherans might have swallowed that self-important title. They could not, however, accept what Henry did with it, which went beyond what any other prince of the age attempted and would not be surpassed until the French revolutionaries tried to impose the newly invented Cult of the Supreme Being. It was not merely that Henry took control of the church’s courts and senior appointments. Nor that he seized its property, although the scale of the plunder was staggering; something like a third of the land area of England passed into royal control when the monasteries were dissolved. German princes usually simply closed the monasteries to new entrants and allowed them to wind down gradually, but Henry shut them down. Monks who cooperated were pensioned off. Those who resisted might or might not escape with their lives. He promised to use the proceeds on pious projects. Instead, he spent most of them on futile wars, such that, despite this vast influx of cash, by the end of his life he was facing bankruptcy.
Money and jurisdiction, however, were only the beginning. Henry earnestly believed he was Supreme Head of the church, and woe to those who defied him. Few did, but those few included some monumental figures. Erasmus’s friend Thomas More and the famed bishop and theologian John Fisher were both beheaded in 1535. It was the public-relations equivalent of decapitating a pair of Nobel Prize winners, and won Henry a Europe-wide reputation as a tyrant, only underlined by the killing of his second wife the following year. More and Fisher died for their loyalty to Rome, but in 1536 the leading English Protestant theologian, William Tyndale, was burned alive with Henry’s approval and connivance, for daring to disapprove of the king’s remarriage. That pattern, of parallel judicial murders of Catholics and Protestants, would persist to the end of Henry’s reign.
The English church’s new orthodoxy, in other words, was defined by its king’s whim. Luther, appalled, claimed “that king wants to be God”. Henry did not quite put it that way, but he did believe God had delegated a great deal of spiritual authority to him. He toyed with the idea that he could ordain priests. He certainly thought that he could tell his bishops what to believe, debating with them and browbeating them into submission. His own extensive notes on doctrinal reform include such choice snippets as his attempt to rewrite the Ten Commandments. The biblical text forbids coveting others’ property, but Henry wanted it only to forbid coveting “wrongly or unjustly”. Usually he was persuaded to pull back from the more outrageous positions, but his own fickle, inconsistent theological prejudices were at the root of his entire Reformation. He loathed the pope and eagerly promoted the English Bible. He also loathed Luther’s doctrine of salvation and was extravagantly devoted to the Catholic Mass. It did not really make sense, but who was going to tell him that?5
When he died in 1547, England began to return to religious coherence. The regency regime of the new boy king, Edward VI, was controlled by a Protestant clique who had prudently kept their convictions muted while the old tyrant lived. Even so, Henry’s legacy was pervasive. The principle of state control over religion was firmly established. England’s religion changed with its monarchs. After Edward’s death, a Catholic queen, his half-sister Mary, returned the kingdom briefly to Rome, and after her death England obediently followed a Protestant queen, Elizabeth I, back into schism again.
Elizabeth was subtler than Henry VIII, and in any case, with orthodoxies hardening across Europe, the time for theological swashbuckling was over. Yet while she presided over an unmistakably Protestant church, her own prejudices could still override religious logic. She had a taste for trappings of traditional religion like vestments, choirs, and crucifixes, whether or not they were compatible with her new church’s doctrines. Her Protestantism in medieval dress left her subjects split between ceremonialists who treasured those echoes of the old ways and “Puritans” who wanted to complete the journey to the new. Her idiosyncrasies are not exactly to blame for the Civil War that engulfed England forty years after her death, but they helped make it possible.
Henry VIII’s legacy to England was a state church in the fullest sense. British monarchs and prime ministers continued to choose the Church of England’s bishops until 2007. Parliament defined its liturgy, structures, and even doctrines deep into the twentieth century. The Church of England has never quite been a puppet of the state, but it has certainly been kept on a short leash. Its