It was Warham’s death that started the countdown. The obvious choice to replace him was Stephen Gardiner, who, after a glittering career at Cambridge University, had joined Cardinal Wolsey’s service in the i5zos and had then been poached by the king in 1529 to serve as his principal secretary. He had been tireless in his efforts for the divorce, and in 1531 he had been rewarded with appointment as bishop of Winchester. However, since then he had blotted his copybook. For early in 1532 he drafted the clergy’s reply to the ‘Supplication against the Ordinaries’, a misjudgement which for a while cost him Henry’s trust and favour. Gardiner was therefore passed over, and the see of Canterbury was bestowed upon the still little-known Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer had now risen far enough in royal service to be posted as Henry’s ambassador to the court of Charles V in Germany, but his summons to Canterbury was a surprise to everybody - not least to him. While in Germany, Cranmer had become attracted to the new ‘evangelical’ teachings of Luther and his followers, and had rather rashly (and, for a Catholic priest, strictly illegally) taken a wife: Margaret, the niece of a prominent German reformer, Andreas Osiander. Concealing this alliance from his sovereign, who set his face firmly against allowing priests to marry, was not the least of the challenges which Cranmer faced over the next fifteen years.
Before Cranmer had even made it back from Germany, Henry was preparing the diplomatic chessboard for the dramatic moves that he was planning. Another crossChannel summit meeting with the king of France was arranged. It was not the Field of Cloth of Gold, and there were no wrestling matches this time - both men were a little old for such youthful high-jinks. But the meeting was far more momentous in terms of practical politics. Its most important aspect was that Henry took with him not Catherine - whom he certainly no longer considered in any sense his wife - but Anne Boleyn, who on i September i532 was made a peeress in her own right, Marchioness of Pembroke, to let her rank second only to the king in his entourage. The trip itself lasted over a month (ii October-14 November), and secured French support for a divorce and second marriage which would detach Henry from the Imperial camp.
The Act of Appeals (1533), with its portentous opening claim ‘that this Realme of Englond is an Impire [Empire]’. By this act, passed after Cranmer had obtained from Rome the necessary bulls for his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry, through the English Parliament, made the first open breach with the Holy See. For the Act of Appeals not only declared England to be an empire governed by one supreme head and king: it stated that the king’s jurisdiction was competent to adjudge finally all spiritual cases which might arise in his realm, and definitively forbade all appeals to the Pope and to ‘any foreign princes or potentates’.
Even more importantly, it was probably on this trip that Anne finally surrendered to the king’s advances. Counting backwards from her daughter’s birth in early September 1533, we can see that she became pregnant shortly after the trip to France. According to one source, Henry actually married Anne secretly upon their return, on 14 November. Other sources, however, suggest a date in January.
Anne’s pregnancy added urgency to proceedings. Whatever else happened, the child had to be born within lawful wedlock to be capable of inheritance under English law. If to modern eyes Henry’s decision to remarry before securing his divorce looks like bigamy, we must remember that he had already convinced himself that his first marriage was contrary to God’s law and that he was therefore not married at all. In the meantime, Thomas Cromwell, emerging now as the king’s chief minister, was busy drafting the enabling legislation under which the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury would deliver the required verdict on Henry’s marriage. The resultant Act of Appeals (forbidding judicial appeals to Rome) opened with a ringing declaration:
Where by divers sundry old histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed, that this realm of England is an empire... governed by one supreme head and king... unto whom a body politic... ought to bear, next unto God, a natural and humble obedience...
This claim to ‘imperial’ status, tantamount to what we understand by ‘sovereignty’, was the basis on which the act maintained that no English person could lawfully be summoned to answer before any foreign jurisdiction, nor, for that matter, lawfully appeal to any such jurisdiction. It did not need to spell out the fact that the papacy was the target of this law. There was no other foreign jurisdiction to which English people at that time addressed legal petitions or appeals.
Thomas Cranmer set foot once more upon English soil early in the new year, and was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury on 30 March 1533. Almost his first task was to put in place the final groundworks for the divorce. The Convocation of the clergy was presented in April with two crucial questions: whether marriage to
A letter from Cranmer at Dunstable (17 May 1533), informing Henry VIII of the date when ‘your graces grete matter’ will be resolved, and apologising because the liturgical calendar for the week meant it could not happen earlier than Friday.
A deceased brother’s widow was forbidden in the Bible, and whether the Pope had any power to suspend this prohibition in particular cases. Three years of anticlerical agitation and fiscal pressure had done their work. The required answers (respectively, yes and no) were given on 5 April, with only a handful of clergymen daring to defy the king. Their last-ditch resistance was led by John Fisher, who was arrested next day (Palm Sunday) to prevent him from preaching against the decisions, and was kept under house arrest until after Anne’s coronation in June. This was an era when a well-judged sermon at a critical moment could provoke a riot or even a rebellion, and Cranmer now issued a general ban on preaching.
Armed with the conclusions of Convocation, and shielded by the Act of Appeals, Cranmer summoned Henry and Catherine before him at Dunstable on 10 May to defend the legitimacy of their marriage. The proceedings were relatively simple, as Henry offered no defence and Catherine refused to come. Cranmer annulled the marriage on 23 May and Catherine was consigned to internal exile under the title of ‘Princess Dowager’, which she refused to accept.
Henry had been unable to give Anne a splendid wedding, but he made up for this with her coronation, on Whit Sunday (i June) 1533. Although the pamphlet published to record the event insisted on the joyous acclaim of the people, the Imperial ambassador’s account suggests at best a sullen acquiescence. The show was spectacular, but it did not win people over. Nor was the coronation an overwhelming success among the aristocracy. Even some peers failed to attend, most notably George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, one of the king’s oldest and closest companions (who was represented, in his absence, by his son). Thomas More was deliberately provocative about it. Some of his clerical friends clubbed together and sent him ?20 to buy some new clothes and make his peace with the king by turning up to the coronation. He refused their invitation but took their money anyway! A satisfying gesture, no doubt, but perhaps for once his taste for a sharp jest betrayed him. The joke was hardly calculated to soften Henry’s heart towards him.
Catherine was not short of friends abroad, however, and her appeal was pressed at Rome, where, in September, the Pope adjudged her marriage to Henry valid, and began to take sanctions against Henry for divorcing her. As Anne had now borne Henry’s child (disappointingly for him, another daughter, Elizabeth), it was essential to safeguard the claim to the throne of that child, and of any further offspring. In the meantime, there was also unfinished business with the Holy Maid of Kent. She had predicted, according to one version of her prophecies, that if Henry divorced Catherine, he would lose his throne within six months. Six months to the day since Cranmer had annulled that marriage, Elizabeth Barton was compelled to stand outside St Paul’s Cathedral and publicly confess herself a fraud. Was there an element of caution as well as showmanship in the timing?
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