Henry’s piety and interest in religion had always been a matter for comment. Of course, medieval and early modern kings were expected to be decently religious. Nobody ever suggested that Henry’s father was anything other than a loyal son of Holy Mother Church. Yet there were degrees of commitment even among kings. Henri III of France, who later in the century participated in public processions of penitential flagellants, was widely seen as taking his religion to extremes. Henry VIII was pious and conscientious without being extravagant. It is tempting to write his piety off as so much hypocrisy. But if it was perhaps hypocritical, it was far from cynical. Henry may have been at times obnoxiously self-righteous, spotting splinters in other people’s eyes despite the heaps of timber blocking his own lights, but nobody could say he was not sincere.
More remarkably, but still acceptably in an age when, if it was understood that philosophers would hardly become kings, it was felt that kings might profitably endeavour to be philosophers, he had an educated interest in the faith he professed. In 1515 Henry took a personal interest in the furore over the death in an episcopal gaol of Richard Hunne, alleged by the clergy to be a heretic but regarded by the citizens of London as a man victimised by the clergy for taking legal action against them in the king’s courts. While the clergy maintained that Hunne had hanged himself, the coroner’s jury returned a verdict of murder by his captors. Attempts to bring them to justice turned the episode into a full-scale dispute over ‘benefit of clergy’, the jurisdictional privileges of churchmen with respect to the law of the land. It was Henry who presided over a thorough airing of the issues involved and managed to cobble together a compromise solution. Henry loved theological arguments, and topics such as the value of mental prayer and the merits of Erasmus’s radical edition of the New Testament in Greek were debated in his presence at court. Many books were dedicated to this intellectual among monarchs, and, if he did not always have time to read them himself, he would pass religious books to a couple of his chaplains for review and sit in judgement while they argued to and fro.
Title page of a later edition (1523) of Henry Vlll’s Assertio Septem Sacramentorum. Henry’s book against Martin Luther, written and first printed in 1521, was at first only circulated to the Pope and other selected recipients. This title page advertises the supplementary materials now added, including the papal bull naming Henry ‘Defender of the Faith’, and an open letter from the king to the Dukes of Saxony (originally sent 20 January 1523), urging them to take firm action against Luther.
Note the description of the king as ‘his royal majesty’ (‘regiam maiestatem’), a usage rare before Henry’s break with Rome.
Henry’s theological interests went beyond this dilettante dabbling. Famously, he composed a book against Martin Luther in 1521, when the radicalism of Luther’s teachings had finally become apparent and had earned the German friar papal condemnation and excommunication. It was generally rumoured at the time, and has been generally accepted ever since, that the Assertion of the Seven Sacraments (as his book was called) was by no means his own unaided effort. There were at the worst of times troops of learned priests within hailing distance of the royal study, and it also looks as though Henry summoned professional theologians from Oxford and Cambridge to vet its orthodoxy and check its references. Besides which Thomas More was called in to apply some stylistic polish. Yet there is no disputing that Henry laboured upon it himself, for hours at a time in the first flush of enthusiasm. We can see his hand in the fact that the bulk of the book defends Catholic doctrines of the Mass against Luther. The Mass was a central and lifelong preoccupation of the king’s.
Now, Henry had long been anxious to add a religious dimension to the English royal title in emulation of the ‘Catholic’ kings of Spain and the ‘Most Christian’ kings of France. This book earned him the papal accolade of Fidei Defensor (defender of the faith) which still adorns the coin of the realm. The Pope was no doubt especially pleased with Henry’s comments on papal authority:
I have no intention of insulting the pope by discussing his prerogative as though it were a matter of doubt... Luther can hardly deny that all the churches accept and revere the holy Roman see as mother and ruler of the faithful...
Yet it should not be thought that Henry’s aversion to Luther was anything other than heartfelt. In addition to the Assertion, Henry wrote a couple of other pieces against Luther. First of all there was an open letter to the Dukes of Saxony, urging them to suppress this troublesome friar before he did any more damage. A few years later he wrote a rather longer open letter to Luther himself - this, unlike the Assertion, was translated into English for the benefit of his own people.
The Catholic world was duly impressed by the English king’s efforts. Catholic writers agonised over which to praise more highly, his learning or his virtue. That was the sort of reaction Henry had been expecting. The ‘philosopher king’ was one of his favourite roles. What he was not expecting was the thundering riposte which Luther launched. The man who had braved papal anathema and Imperial outlawry was not to be intimated by the royal pen. Luther was quite possibly the only person who ever dared address Henry in such roundly offensive terms (even from such a safe distance). Henry found himself in the unwelcome situation of being impotent against defiance, and never forgave the affront. Luther’s intemperate reaction ensured that, even after Henry himself had broken with the Roman Church, the Lutheran brand of Reformation would not find many friends in England. In the meantime, the task of dealing with Luther was delegated to Thomas More. Luther had lowered the discussion to the level of the dungheap, and More cheerfully kept it there, out-Luthering Luther in one of the most sustainedly and inventively vituperative tirades ever to be published under the guise of theology. The urbane author of Utopia was understandably anxious for this tour de force to appear under a nom de plume.
World History
