To speak of a foreign policy holiday through the 1530s would be an exaggeration, as English ambassadors criss-crossed Europe seeking alliances, trying to forestall papal countermeasures, and spreading Henry’s new gospel of royal supremacy. But Henry’s policies had put him into virtual isolation, and for years he was all but irrelevant to the rivalry between the Habsburg and Valois monarchies, which was the central axis of European affairs. In 1538, when he ceased to be an irrelevance, it was only so as to become a potential target. But some well-timed displays of religious conservatism had helped avert that danger. Now, in the 1540s, his dynastic problems had been resolved, and the pace of religious change had been slowed almost to a standstill. In addition, the consequent tensions in English politics had been relaxed thanks to the destruction of Cromwell, and the plunder of the Church had made him richer than any previous English king. Henry was once more in a position to contemplate a return to his overriding political ambition: that of conquests in France. The monarchy was very different after the turmoil of the 1530s. But the monarch was very much the same, even if he had added some new ideas to the old ones.
The military campaigns of the 1540s were in some ways a replay of those of the 1510s. However, this time Henry decided to deal with the threat of Scottish intervention by a pre-emptive strike. Diplomatic pressure and border incidents of increasing ferocity culminated in English military action which was as politically decisive in the long term as it was tactically futile at the time. The Duke of Norfolk was entrusted with the task of chastising the Scots in October 1542, but his raid was a fiasco, and probably cost the raiders more than their victims. Norfolk’s stock sank: the hero of 1536 now looked something of a clown, and Henry would look elsewhere for military leadership in future. However, the Scottish riposte was the customary catastrophe. A huge force of Scots underwent a crushing defeat at Solway Moss (November 1542). Where James IV had died in battle, James V died from the shock on hearing of the scale of the defeat. Now, inspired by the imperial rhetoric of the royal supremacy and by the knowledge of traditional English claims to sovereignty over Scotland which had been unearthed in the course of researching that supremacy, Henry went fully onto the offensive against Scotland. He demanded the new queen of Scots, the infant Mary, as a bride for Prince Edward, to unite the crowns in perpetuity. Initially, the Scots conceded the demands in the Treaty of Greenwich (i July 1543), but the kaleidoscopic rotations of Scottish politics soon saw the treaty repudiated. As Henry prepared for war with France, a second, punitive strike against Scotland was planned. It was not to Norfolk that Henry turned this time, however, but to Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford and uncle to Prince Edward, whose honour had thus been injured. In May 1544 he attacked Edinburgh by land and sea, devastating the Lowlands. Returning laden with plunder, Seymour’s stock rose as Norfolk’s had fallen.
With the Scots knocked out of the war, Henry trained his sights on France. Several years of assiduous diplomacy had restored the traditional Anglo-Imperial axis, and in the previous year Henry had already provided troops to fight for Charles V in the Netherlands. Now, despite his declining health - the problems in his legs alone would have immobilised a lesser man - Henry VIII crossed the Channel for the fourth and last time in July 1544, once more bent on conquest. He was no longer in a position to lead his men in battle, so he established a central command in Calais while two armies sallied forth against the French. The first, under the Duke of Norfolk, laid siege in vain to Montreuil. The second, under the Duke of Suffolk, successfully laid siege to Boulogne, taking it in September. Norfolk’s stock continued its fall. The campaign of 1544 expired when, as before in the 1510s, Henry was suddenly let down by his ally, who made a separate peace at Crepy just days after the fall of Boulogne. At least Henry came away with something.
A more welcome lesson learned in the 1540s was the absolute importance to English security of a strong navy. Henry himself was perhaps more interested in his ships as an offensive force, or at least as a display of might. But even if glory and display were his aims, Henry’s concern with and expenditure on the navy were vindicated in 1545. Having made peace with Charles V, Francis I attempted to turn the tables on Henry by invading across the Channel. But his fleet was beaten back from the Isle of Wight in a naval action second only to the defeat of the Spanish Armada in the annals of Tudor seamanship, but now, somewhat unfairly, remembered chiefly for the foundering of the Mary Rose before she had even left the harbour approaches. (The over-gunning of the Mary Rose, which contributed to its foundering, is somehow typical of Henry, both in the boundless and groundless faith in his own ingenuity which caused him to interfere in the design and refitting of the ship, and in the naive faith that more is always better which flawed the design itself.) This setback to the French was the first of many which would frustrate enemies over the next 400 years, as increasing naval strength rendered England increasingly secure from invasion. Politically and militarily, the campaigns of 1545 blooded the new generation of Tudor statesmen and commanders. Around 100,000 men were mobilised at home against the threat of invasion. John Russell (Lord Russell) commanded by land, and the rising star John Dudley (Lord Lisle) by sea. Seymour, at first entrusted with the defence of Boulogne, was later in 1545 once more unleashed against the Scots.
The fall of Cromwell was to some extent a result of the halting of religious changes in the later 1530s, and it seemed to open the way to a reversal of those changes. In the event, Henry was characteristically reluctant to retreat. The tone for the remainder of his reign was set by the black humour of 30 July 1540, two days after Cromwell’s execution, when Henry sent six dissidents to their deaths. Three of them (Edward Powell, Thomas Abel and Richard Featherstonehaugh) were Catholic priests who had spent years in the Tower after supporting Catherine of Aragon and refusing the oaths of succession and supremacy. The other three were Protestant preachers (Robert Barnes, William Jerome and Thomas Garrett) who had enjoyed royal patronage in the 1530s and had been zealous in promoting the supremacy. None had been tried in a court of law: an act of attainder spared the expense of a trial. They were drawn to their deaths in pairs, a Catholic and a Protestant side by side on a hurdle, the Catholics to be hanged and butchered, the Protestants to be burned at the stake. The point was unmistakable. The fact that Henry was not prepared to tolerate heresy did not for one moment mean that he was going to compromise on the royal supremacy.
It was around this time that Henry turned his attention to the official doctrinal position of his Church, giving close personal scrutiny to the Bishops’ Book which he had approved on a temporary basis in 1537. He was far from happy with the tone of much of it, and engaged in a vigorous debate with Cranmer and others about how it should be amended. Eventually, it was handed over to a select committee of bishops and theologians for revision. Their revisions were almost all of a markedly conservative character, in accordance with the clear wishes of the king. For example, they reiterated traditional teachings on the eucharist, and left rather more room than the Bishops’ Book had done for the intercession of the saints and prayer for the dead. The outcome of their labours was published in 1543 as A Necessary Doctrine and
Erudition for any Christian Man (and was given statutory backing by the Act for the Advancement of True Religion later that year). It was commonly known as the ‘King’s Book’, because it was described on the title page as ‘set forth by the king’s majesty’, and had a preface written by him. Henry was as happy as ever to play the theologian, preening himself on his efforts ‘to purge and cleanse our realm’ from ‘hypocrisy and superstition’, and reproving his subjects for their ‘inclination to sinister understanding of scripture, presumption, arrogancy, carnal liberty and contention’.
Henry’s ecclesiastical policy in the 1540s combined the repression of heresy, especially sacramentarian heresy, with some mild measures of reform and continued plunder of the Church. Having disposed of the monasteries, he turned his attention to the collegiate churches, first picking them off piecemeal by ‘surrender’ and later passing a statute (1545) permitting him to dissolve ecclesiastical institutions at will. In addition, he carried on cherry-picking houses and estates from his bishops by means of exchanges which were distinctly to his advantage. to methods such as these, by the end of the reign he had more houses than he knew what to do with. Such reform as transpired was mainly the work of his archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, who was continually proposing alterations designed to edge the Church of England a little closer towards the Protestantism of Europe without alarming Henry about heresy. Thus he was able to persuade Henry to sanction an English version of the Litany (prayers of general intercession) in 1544, and next year to follow this with a complete English prayer book, or ‘primer’, for private use. The way in which he sold this policy to the king can be seen from the prayer book’s preface, written in Henry’s name. Here, the king proclaimed his confidence that this new book would help his subjects learn their ‘duties to God, their king, and their neighbour’. Placing himself between God and neighbour, he showed not only his sense of his own special place in the order of creation, but also his complacent assumption of the viability of his peculiar ecclesiastical compromise. If there was any kind of direction in the development of English religion in these years it was not so much towards Protestantism as, precisely, towards a more English religion.
The religious fissures which had opened among English elites during the 1530s assumed considerable importance in politics after Cromwell. Court faction, which at its extreme became a matter of life and death for the leading players, took religion as its badge. The combination of political rivalry with theological division was a powerful mixture under a suspicious and religious king. The evangelicals regained some ground thanks to the indiscretions of Catherine Howard, and benefited further from Henry’s last marriage, as Catherine Parr herself developed evangelical sympathies. In 1543 Bishop Gardiner sought to destroy his great rival, the evangelical Archbishop Cranmer, by gathering evidence that he was fostering heresy in Kent. But Henry refused the bait, and Cranmer survived. A counter-coup in 1544 sought to implicate Gardiner in treason, but he likewise survived - although his nephew and secretary, Germain Gardiner, went to the block. Henry himself sought to stand above this endemic factional strife by adopting a pose of Olympian loftiness. He attached more and more importance to the rhetoric of the ‘middle way’, and in his public pronouncements, most notably in an address to Parliament in December 1545, he presented himself as the honest broker, as the wise Solomon protecting his Church from the squabbles of its own bishops and preachers, of whom, he said, invoking a recent scholarly proverb, ‘some be too stiff in their old Mumpsimus, others be too busy and curious in their new Sumpsimus’.
In 1546 Henry’s declining health signalled that his reign was drawing to a close. Factional struggle intensified. Summer saw the conservatives in the ascendant. Anne Askew, a gentlewoman with connections to Catherine Parr and the court, was convicted of the sacramentarian heresy which Henry abominated, and the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, personally set his hand to the rack in his desperation to extract information which would compromise evangelical rivals at court. But Anne gave him nothing of value. She was burned, along with a number of other heretics, in the presence of the Lord Chancellor and the Duke of Norfolk. Meanwhile, the bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, was striking fear into the heart of London’s small but growing minority of Protestants, and heretical books were being burned as late as the end of September.
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