The Triumphant Reign of Henry the Viii-V02

“Alexandru Ioan Cuza” National College Specialization: Philology - Bilingual English Discipline: English The triumphant reign of Henry the VIII Coordinating Professors: Mariana Gaiu Sorina Soaica Student: Irina Stan 2011 Contents Introduction2 1. Social background of the age3 2. Henry VIII9 2. 1 Henry VIII’s character10 2. 2 Cardinal Wolsey11 2. 3 Henry VIII & Christianity12 a)Popular religious idealism12 b)Christian Humanism and the influence of Greek learning14 2. 4 Henrician Reformation16 a)Henry VIII’s first divorce16 )Supreme head of the Ecclesia Anglicana18 c)The dissolution of the religious houses20 2. 5 The matrimonial adventures of Henry VIII22 2. 6 An extension of English hegemony23 a)The Union of England and Wales23 b)Tudor Irish policy24 c)The need to control Scotland25 Conclusions28 Bibliography29 Introduction The age of the Tudors has left its impact on Anglo-American minds as a watershed in British history. Hallowed tradition, native patriotism, and post imperial gloom have united to swell our appreciation of the period as a true golden age.

Names alone evoke a phoenix-glow – Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Mary Stuart among the sovereigns of England and Scotland; Wolsey, William Cecil, and Leicester among the politicians; Marlowe, Shakespeare, Hilliard, and Byrd among the creative artists. The splendors of the Court of Henry VIII, the fortitude of Sir Thomas More, the making of the English Bible, Prayer Book, and Anglican Church, the development of Parliament, the defeat of the Armada, the Shakespearian moment, and the legacy of Tudor domestic architecture – there are the undoubted climaxes of a simplified orthodoxy in which genius, romance, and tragedy are superabundant.

Reality is inevitably more complex, less glamorous, and more interesting than myth. The most potent forces within Tudor England were often social, economic, and demographic ones. Thus if the period became a golden age, it was primarily because the considerable growth in population that occurred between 1500 and the death of Elizabeth I did not so dangerously exceed the capacity of available resources, particularly food supplies, as to precipitate a Malthusian crisis. Famine and disease unquestionably disrupted and disturbed the Tudor economy, but they did not raze it to its foundations, as in the fourteenth century.

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More positively, the increased manpower and demand that sprang from rising population stimulated economic growth and the commercialization of agriculture, encouraged trade and urban renewal, inspired a housing revolution, enhanced the sophistication of English manners, especially in London, and (more arguably) bolstered new and exciting attitudes among Tudor Englishmen, notably individualistic ones derived from Reformation ideals and Calvinist theology. In order to present a clear picture of 16th century England, we considered depicting Henry VIII reign in a period of instability from the point of view of religion and state limits.

The king’s egoism, self-righteousness, and unlimited capacity to brood over suspected wrongs, or petty slights, sprang from the fatal combination of a relatively able but distinctly second—rate mind and a pronounced inferiority complex that derived from Henry VII’s treatment of his second son. For the first of the Tudors had found his younger son unsatisfactory; on Arthur’s death, Henry had been given no functions beyond the title of Prince of Wales—a signal of unmistakable mistrust. As a result, Henry VIII had resolved to rule, even where, as in the case of the Church, it would have been enough merely to reign.

He would put monarchic theory into practice; would give the words Rex Imperator a meaning never dreamt of even by the emperors of Rome, if he possibly could. Henry was eager, too, to conquer- to emulate the glorious victories of the Black Prince and Henry V, to quest after the Golden Fleece that was the French Crown. Repeatedly the efforts of Henry’s more constructive councillors were bedevilled, and overthrown, by the king’s militaristic dreams, and by costly Continental ventures that wasted men, money, and equipment.

Evaluation is always a matter of emphasis, but on the twin issues of monarchic theory and lust for conquest, there is everything to be said for the view that Henry VIII’s policy was consistent throughout his reign; that Henry was himself directing that policy; and that his ministers and officials were allowed - freedom of action only within accepted limits, and when the king was too busy to take a personal interest in state affairs. 1. Social background of the age

The matter is debatable, but there is much to be said for the view that England was economically healthier, more expensive, and more optimistic under the Tudors than at any time since the Roman occupation of Britain. Certainly, the contrast with the fifteenth century was dramatic. In the hundred or so years before Henry VII became king of England in 1485, England had been under populated, underdeveloped, and inward-looking compared with other Western countries, notably France. Her recovery after the ravages of the Black Death had been slow – slower than in France, Germany, Switzerland, and some Italian cities.

The process of economic recovery in pre-industrial societies was basically one of recovery of population, and figures will be useful. On the eve of the Black Death (1348), the population of England and Wales was between 4 and 5 millions; by 1377, successive plaques bad reduced it to 2. 5 millions. Yet the figure for England (without Wales) was still no higher than 2. 26 millions in 1525, and it is transparently clear that the striking feature of England demographic history between the Black Death and the reign of Henry VIII is the stagnancy of population which persisted until the 1520s.

However, the growth of population rapidly accelerated after 1525: Between 1525 and 1541 the population of England grew extremely fast, an impressive burst of expansion after long inertia. This rate of growth slackened off somewhat after 1541, but the Tudor population continued to increase steadily and inexorably, with a temporary reversal only in the late 1550s, to reach 4. 10 millions in 1601. In addition, the population of Wales grew from about 210,000 in 1500 to 380,000 by 1603.

While England reaped the fruits of the recovery of population in the sixteenth century, however, serious problems of adjustment were encountered. The impact of a sudden crescendo in demand, and pressure on available resources of food and clothing, within a society that was still overwhelmingly agrarian, was to be as painful as it was, ultimately, beneficial. The morale of countless ordinary Englishman was to be wrecked irrevocably, and ruthlessly, by problems that were too massive to be ameliorated either by governments or by traditional, ecclesiastical philanthropy.

Inflation, speculation in land, enclosures, unemployment, vagrancy, poverty, and urban squalor were the most pernicious evils of Tudor England, and these were the wider symptoms of population growth and agricultural commercialization. In the fifteenth century farm rents had been discounted, because tenants were so elusive; lords had abandoned direct exploitation of their demesnes, which were leased to tenants on favourable terms. Rents had been low, too, on peasants’ customary holdings; labour services had been commuted, and servile villeinage had virtually disappeared from the face of the English landscape by 1485.

At the same time, money wages had risen to reflect the contraction of the wage-labour force after 1348, and food prices had fallen in reply to reduced market demand. But rising demand after 1500 burst the bubble of artificial prosperity born of stagnant population. Land hunger led to soaring rents. Tenants of farms and copyholders were evicted by business-minded landlords. Several adjacent farms would be conjoined, and amalgamated for profit, by outside investors at the expense of sitting tenants. Marginal land would be converted to pasture for more profitable sheep-rearing.

Commons were enclosed, and waste land reclaimed, by landlords or squatters, with consequent extinction of common grazing rights. The literary opinion that the active Tudor land market nurtured a new entrepreneurial class of greedy capitalists grinding the faces of the poor is an exaggeration. Yet it is fair to say that not all landowners, claimants, and squatters were entirely scrupulous in their attitude; certainly a vigorous market arose among dealers in defective titles to land, with resulting harassment of many legitimate occupiers. The greatest distress sprang, nevertheless, from inflation and unemployment.

High agricultural prices gave farmers strong incentives to produce crops for sale in the dearest markets in nearby towns, rather than for the satisfaction of rural subsistence. Rising population, especially urban population, put intense strain on the markets themselves: demand for food often outstripped supply, notably in years of poor harvests due to epidemics or bad weather. In cash terms, agricultural prices began to rise faster than industrial prices from the beginning of the reign of Henry the VIII, a rise which accelerated as the sixteenth century progressed.

Yet in real terms, the price rise was even more volatile than it appeared to be, since population growth ensured that labour was plentiful and cheap, and wages low. The size of the work-force in Tudor England increasingly exceeded available employment opportunities; average wages and living standards declined accordingly. Men (and women) were prepared to do a day’s work for little more than board wages; able-bodied persons, many of whom were peasants displaced by rising rents or the enclosure of commons, drifted in waves to the towns in quest of work.

The best price index hitherto constructed covers the period 1264-1954, and its base period is most usefully 1451-75 – the end of the fifteenth-century era of stable prices. From the index, we may read the fortunes of the wage-earning consumers of Tudor England, because the calculations are based on the fluctuating costs of composite units of the essential foodstuffs and manufactured goods, such as textiles, that made up an average family shopping basket in southern England at different times.

Two indexes are, in fact, available: first the annual price index of the composite basket of consumables; secondly the index of the basket expressed as the equivalent of the annual wage rates of building craftsmen in southern England. No one supposes that building workers were typical of the English labour force in the sixteenth century, or at any other time. But the indexes serve as a rough guide to the appalling reality of the rising household expenses of the majority of Englishmen in the Tudor period. t is clear that in the century after Henry VIII’s accession, the average prices of essential consumables rose by some 488 per cent. The price index stood at the 100 or so level until 1513, when it rose to 120. A gradual rise to 169 had occurred by 1530, and a further crescendo to 231 was attained by 1547, the year of Henry VIII’s death. In 1555 the index reached 270; two years later, it hit a staggering peak of 409, though this was partly due to the delayed effects of the currency debasements practiced by Henry VIII and Edward VI.

On the accession of Elizabeth I, in I5 58, the index had recovered to a median of 230. It climbed again thereafter, though more steadily: 300 in 1570, 342 in 1580, and 396 in 1590. But the later ISQOS witnessed exceptionally meagre harvests, together with regional epidemics and famine: the index read 515 in 1595, 685 in 1598, and only settled back to 459 in 1600. The index expressed as the equivalent of the building craftsman’s wages gives an equally sober impression of the vicissitudes of Tudor domestic life.

An abrupt decline in the purchasing power of wages occurred between 1510 and 1530, the commodity equivalent falling by some 40 per cent in twenty years. The index fell again in the 1550s, but recovered in the next decade to a position equivalent to two-thirds of its value in 1510. It then remained more or less stable until the 1590s, when it collapsed to 39 in 1595, and to a catastrophic nadir of 29 in 1597. On the queen’s death in 1603 it had recovered to a figure of 45—which meant that real wages had dropped by 57 per cent since 1500. These various data establish the most fundamental truth about the age of the Tudors.

When the percentage change of English population in the sixteenth century is plotted against that of the index of purchasing power of a building craftsman’s wages over the same period, it is immediately plain that the two lines of development and commensure (see graph). Living standards declined as the population rose; recovery began as population growth abated and collapsed between 1556 and I560. Standards then steadily dropped again, until previous proportions were overthrown by the localized famines of 1585-8 and 1595-8—though the cumulative increase in the size of the wage-labour force since 1570 must also have had distorting effects.

In other words, population trends, rather than government policies, capitalist entrepreneurs, European imports of American silver, the more rapid circulation of money, or even currency debasements, were the key factor in determining the fortunes of the British Isles in the sixteenth century. English government expenditure on warfare, heavy borrowing, and debasements unquestionably exacerbated inflation and unemployment. But the basic facts of Tudor life were linked to population growth. In view of this fundamental truth, the greatest triumph of Tudor England was its ability to feed itself.

A major national subsistence crisis was avoided. Malthus, who wrote his historic Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, listed positive and preventive checks as the traditional means by which population was kept in balance with available resources of food. Positive ones involved heavy mortality and abrupt reversal of population growth. Fertility in England indeed declined in the later 1550s, and again between 1566 and 1571. A higher proportion of the population than hitherto did not marry in the reign of Elizabeth I.

Poor harvests resulted in localized starvation, and higher mortality, in 1481-3, 1519—21, 1527-8, 1544-5, 1549-51, 1555-8, 1585-8, and 1595-8. Yet devastating as these years of dearth were for the affected localities, especially for the towns of the 1590s, the positive check of mass mortality on a national scale was absent from Tudor England, with the possible exception of the crisis of 1555—8. On top of its other difficulties, Mary’s government after 1555 faced the most serious mortality crisis since the fourteenth century: the population of England quickly dropped by about 200,000.

Even so, it is not proved that this was a ‘national’ crisis in terms of its geographical range, and population growth was only temporarily interrupted. In fact, the chronology, intensity, and geographical extent of famine in the sixteenth century were such as to suggest that starvation crises in England were abating, rather than worsening, over time. Bubonic plagues were likewise confined to the insanitary towns after the middle 1 of the century, and took fewer victims in proportion to the expansion of population.

The inescapable conclusion is that, despite the vicissitudes of the price index the harsh consequences for individuals of changed patterns of agriculture, and the proliferation of vagabondage, an optimistic view of the age of the Tudors has sufficiently firm foundations. The sixteenth century witnessed the birth of Britain’s pre—industrial political economy—an evolving accommodation between population and resources, economics and politics, ambition and rationality. England abandoned the disaster-oriented framework of the Middle Ages for the new dawn of low-pressure equilibrium.

Progress had its price, unalterably paid by the weak, invariably banked by the strong. Yet the tyranny of the price index was not ubiquitous. Wage rates for agricultural workers fell by less than for building workers, and some privileged groups of wage-earners such as the Mendip miners may have enjoyed a small rise in real income. Landowners, commercialized farmers, and property investors were the most obvious beneficiaries of a system that guaranteed fixed expenses and enhanced selling prices—it was in the Tudor period that the nobility, gentry, and mercantile classes alike came to appreciate fully the enduring qualities of land.

But many wage-labouring families were not wholly dependent upon their wages for subsistence. Multiple occupations, domestic self-employment, and cottage industries flourished, especially in the countryside; town-dwellers grew vegetables, kept animals, and brewed beer, except in the confines of London. Wage-labourers employed by great households received meat and drink in addition to cash income, although this customary practice was on the wane by the 1590s.

Finally, it is not clear that vagabondage or urban population outside London expanded at a rate faster than was commensurate with the prevailing rise of national population. It used to be argued that the English urban population climbed from 6. 2. per cent of the national total in 1 520 to 8. 4 per cent by the end of the century. However, London’s spectacular growth alone explains this apparent over-population: the leading provincial towns, Norwich, Bristol, Coventry, and York, grew slightly or remained stable in absolute terms—and must thus have been inhabited by a reduced share of population in proportional terms. . Henry VIII Henry VII’s death in 1509 was greeted with feasting, dancing, universal rejoicing—for no one who survived until 1547 could have thought, with hindsight, that it was the accession of Henry VIII that inspired the nation’s confidence. Henry VIII succeeded, at barely eighteen years of age, because his elder brother, Arthur, had died in 1502. Under pressure from his councillors, essentially his father’s executors, Henry began his ‘triumphant’ reign by marrying his late brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon—a union that was to have momentous, not to say revolutionary, consequences.

He continued by executing Empson and Dudley, who were now thrown to the wolves in ritual expiation of their former employer’s financial prudence. Needless to say, these executions were a calculated ploy to enable the new regime to profit from the stability won by Henry VII without incurring any of its attendant stigmas—no one complained that Henry VIII’s government omitted to cancel the last batch of outstanding bonds until well into the 1520s.

Yet Henry VIII had started as he meant to go on; something of the king’s natural cruelty, and inherent assumption that clean breaks with the past could solve deep—rooted problems, was already evident. 2. 1 Henry VIII’s character Henry VIII’s character was certainly fascinating, threatening, and intensely morbid, as Holbein’s great portrait illustrates to perfection.

The king’s egoism, self-righteousness, and unlimited capacity to brood over suspected wrongs, or petty slights, sprang from the fatal combination of a relatively able but distinctly second—rate mind and a pronounced inferiority complex that derived from Henry VII’s treatment of his second son. For the first of the Tudors had found his younger son unsatisfactory; on Arthur’s death, Henry had been given no functions beyond the title of Prince of Wales—a signal of unmistakable mistrust. As a result, Henry VIII had resolved to rule, even where, as in the case of the Church, it would have been enough merely to reign.

He would put monarchic theory into practice; would give the words Rex Imperator a meaning never dreamt of even by the emperors of Rome, if he possibly could. Henry was eager, too, to conquer- to emulate the glorious victories of the Black Prince and Henry V, to quest after the Golden Fleece that was the French Crown. Repeatedly the efforts of Henry’s more constructive councillors were bedevilled, and overthrown, by the king’s militaristic dreams, and by costly Continental ventures that wasted men, money, and equipment.

Evaluation is always a matter of emphasis, but on the twin issues of monarchic theory and lust for conquest, there is everything to be said for the view that Henry VIII’s policy was consistent throughout his reign; that Henry was himself directing that policy; and that his ministers and officials were allowed - freedom of action only within accepted limits, and when the king was too busy to take a personal interest in state affairs. 2. 2 Cardinal Wolsey Cardinal Wolsey was Henry VIII’s first minister, and the fourteen years of that proud but efficient ascendancy (15 15-29) saw the king in a comparatively —restrained mood.

Henry, unlike his father, found writing ‘both tedious and painful’; he preferred hunting, dancing, dallying, and playing the lute. In his more civilized moments, Henry studied theology and astronomy; he would wake up Sir Thomas More in the middle of the night in order that they might gaze at the ‘stars from the roof of a royal palace. He wrote songs, and the words of one form an epitome of Henry’s youthful sentiments. Pastime with good company I love and shall until I die. Grudge who lust, but none deny; So God be pleased, thus live will I; For my pastance,

Hunt, sing and dance; My heart is set All goodly sport For my comfort: Who shall me let? Yet Henry himself set the tempo; his pastimes were only pursued while he was satisfied with Wolsey. Appointed Lord Chancellor and Chief Councillor on Christmas eve 1515, Wolsey used the Council and Star Chamber as instruments of ministerial power in much the way that Henry VII had used them as vehicles of royal power—though Wolsey happily pursued uniform and equitable ideals of justice in Star Chamber in place of Henry VII’s selective justice linked to fiscal advantage.

But Wolsey’s greatest asset was the unique position he obtained with regard to the English Church. Between them, Henry and Wolsey bludgeoned the pope into granting Wolsey the rank of legate a latere for life, which meant that he became the superior ecclesiastical authority in England, and could convoke legatine synods.

Using these powers, Wolsey contrived to subject the entire English Church and clergy to a massive dose of Tudor government and taxation, and it looks as if an uneasy modus vivendi prevailed behind the scenes in which Henry agreed that the English Church was, for the moment, best controlled by a churchman who was a royal servant, and the clergy accepted that it was better to be obedient to an ecclesiastical rather than a secular tyrant—for it is unquestionably true that Wolsey protected the Church from the worst excesses of lay opinion while in office. . 3 Henry VIII & Christianity The trouble was that, with stability restored, and the Tudor dynasty apparently secure, England had started to become vulnerable to a mounting release of forces, many of which were old ones suppressed beneath the surface for years, and others which sprang from the new European mood of reform and self—criticism. Anti - was the most volcanic of the smoldering emotions that pervaded the English laity; an ancient ‘disease’, it had been endemic in British society since Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.

By the sixteenth century, English anti-clericalism centered on three major areas of lay resentment: first, opposition to such ecclesiastical abuses as clerical fiscalism, absenteeism, pluralism, maladministration, and concubinage; secondly, the excessive numbers of clergy, as it appeared to the laity—monks, friars, and secular priests seemed to outnumber the laity, and form a caste of unproductive consumers, which was untrue but reflected lay xenophobia; and thirdly, opposition to the jurisdiction of the bishops and Church courts, especially in cases of heresy.

It was pointed out by prominent writers, notably the grave and learned Christopher St. German (1460-1541), that the Church’s procedure in cases of suspected heresy permitted secret accusations, hearsay evidence, and denied accused persons the benefit of purgation by oath helpers or trial by jury, which was a Roman procedure contrary to the principles of native English common law—a clerical plot to deprive Englishmen of their natural, legal rights. Such ideas were manifestly explosive; for they incited intellectual affray between clergy and common lawyers. a) Popular religious idealism

Popular religious idealism was another major problem faced by the English ecclesiastical authorities. Late medieval religion was sacramental, institutional and ritualistic; for ordinary people it seemed excessively dominated by ‘objective` Church ritual and obligation, as opposed to ‘subjective’ religious experience based on Bible reading at home. The educated classes, who were the nobility clergy, and rich merchants, knew that traditional Catholic piety and meditation did not lack for subjectivity and individual introspection, but few non-literate persons had the mental discipline needed to meditate with any degree of fulfillment.

For ordinary people, personal religion had to be founded on texts of Scripture and Bible stories (preferably illustrated ones), but vernacular Bibles were illegal in England—the Church authorities believed that the availability of an English Bible, even an authorized version, would ferment heresy by permitting Englishmen to form their own opinions. Sir Thomas More, who was Wolsey’s successor as Lord Chancellor, was the premier lay opponent of the commissioning of an English Bible, and ally of the bishops.

He declared, in his notorious proclamation of 22 June 1530, that ‘it is not necessary the said Scripture to be in the English tongue and in the hands of the common people, but that the distribution of the said Scripture, and the permitting or denying thereof, dependant only upon the discretion of the superiors, as they shall think it convenient’. More pursued a policy of strict censorship: no books in English printed outside the realm on any subject whatsoever were to be imported; he forbade the printing of Scriptural or religious books in

England, too, unless approved in advance by a bishop. It was a case of one law for the rich and educated, who could read the Scriptures in Latin texts and commentaries, and another for the poor, who depended on oral instruction from semi-literate artisans and travelling preachers. But More and the bishops were swimming against the tide. The invention of printing had revolutionized the transmission of new ideas across Western Europe, including Protestant ideas. Heretical books and Bibles poured from the presses of English exiles abroad, notably that of William Tyndale at Antwerp.

The demand for vernacular Scriptures was persistent, insistent, and widespread; even Henry VIII was enlightened enough to wish to assent to it, and publication an English Bible in Miles Coverdale’s translation was first achieved in 1536, a year after More’s death. b) Christian Humanism and the influence of Greek learning Of the forces springing from the new European mood of reform and self-criticism, Christian Humanism and the influence of Greek learning came first.

The humanists, of whom the greatest was Erasmus of Rotterdam (1467-1536), rejected scholasticism and elaborate ritualism in favor of wit and simple biblical piety, or philosophia Christi, which was founded on primary textual scholarship, and in particular study of the Greek New Testament. Erasmus read voraciously, wrote prodigiously, and travelled extensively; he made three visits to England, and it was in Cambridge in 1511-14 that he worked upon the Greek text of his own edition of the New Testament, and revised his Latin version that improved significantly on the standard Vulgate text.

But the renaissance of Greek learning owed as much to a native Englishman, John Colet, the gloomy dean of St. Paul’s and founder of its school. Colet, who was also young Thomas More’s spiritual director, had been to Italy, where he had encountered the Neo-Platonist philosophy of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. He had mastered Greek grammar and literature, which he then helped to foster at Oxford and at his school, and the fruits of his philosophical and literary knowledge were applied to Bible study—especially to the works of St. Paul. The result was a method of Scriptural exegesis that broke new ground.

Colet emphasized the unity of divine truth, a literal approach to texts, concern for historical context, and belief in a personal and redemptive Christ. These were exciting ideas, and they inspired both Erasmus and the younger generation of English humanists. The clarion call of humanist reform was sounded in 1503, when Erasmus published A Handbook of a Christian Knight, a compendium, or guide, for spiritual life. (Parvulorum Institutio, 1512-13) This book encapsulated the humanism, evangelism, and laicism that its author had imbibed from Colet, and made Europe uncomfortably aware that the existing priorities of the Church would not do.

Erasmus added reforming impetus to traditional lay piety, and his pungent criticisms of the scholastic theologians, of empty ritual, ecclesiastical abuses, and even the mores of the Papacy, were as stimulating as they were embarrassing. For Erasmus, whose classic satire was Praise of Folly (1514), highlighted his reforming posture by means of his immortal wit, combining the serious, the humorous, and the artistic in peerless texture, and delighting everyone except the senior Church authorities.

Wit is an essential literary commodity, and Erasmus drew on his as from a bottomless purse—which was just as well, for it was his sole pecuniary endowment. His effervescent humor flowed quite naturally. Works of piety, that might otherwise have been mere pebbles thrown into the European pond, thus generated ripples that increasingly had the force of tidal waves. The best English exponent of humanist satire in the wake of Praise of Folly was Thomas More, whose Utopia, first published at Louvain in 1516, described imaginary and idealized society of pagans living on a remote island in accordance with principles of natural virtue.

By implicitly comparing the benign social customs and enlightened religious attitudes of the ignorant Utopians with the inferior standards, in practice, of (allegedly) Christian Europeans, More produced a strident indictment of the latter, based purely on deafening silence—a splendid, if perplexing, achievement of the sort More perennially favored. But to the distress of Erasmus, More abandoned reform for repression and extermination of heresy during his thousand days as Lord Chancellor, and has gone down to history , save in the writings of his a apologists as persecutor rather than a prophet.

However, his terrible end in 1535 as a victim of Henry VIII’s vengeance, and his willingness to suffer torment for the truth he had discovered in the (then controversial) dogma of papal primacy, perpetually guarantee that his steadfastness was not a delusion; when the axe fell, Utopia’s author earned his place among the few who have enlarged the hori2ons of the human spirit. In fairness to More, the Brave New World of Utopia had been crudely shattered by Luther’s debut upon the European stage in1517. For the Christian Humanists, to their sorrow, had unintentionally, but irreversibly, prepared the way for the spread of Protestantism.

In England, the impact of Lutheranism far exceeded the relatively small number of converts, and the rise of the “new learning”, as it was called, became the most potent of the- forces released in the 1520s and 1530s. Luther’s ideas and numerous books rapidly penetrated the universities, especially Cambridge, the City of London, the Inns of Court, and even reached Henry VIII s Household through the intervention of Anne Boleyn and her circle. At Cambridge, the young scholars influenced included Thomas Cranmer and Matthew Parker, both of whom later became Archbishops of Canterbury.

Wolsey naturally made resolute efforts as legate to stamp out the spread of Protestantism, but without obvious success. His critics blamed his reluctance to burn men for heresy as the cause of his failure—for Wolsey would burn books and imprison men, but shared the humane horror of Erasmus at the thought of himself committing bodies to the flames. However the true reason for Luther’s appeal was that he had given coherent doctrinal expression to the religious subjectivity of individuals, and to their distrust of Rome and papal monarchy.

In addition his view of the ministry mirrored the instincts of the anticlerical laity, and his answer to concubinage was the global solution of clerical marriage. 2. 4 Henrician Reformation a) Henry VIII’s first divorce Into this religious maelstrom dropped Henry VIII's first divorce. Although Catherine of Aragon had borne five children, only the Princess Mary (b. 1516) had survived, and the king demanded the security of a male heir to protect the fortunes of the Tudor dynasty.

It was clear by 1527 that Catherine was past the age of childbearing; meanwhile Henry coveted Anne Boleyn, who would not comply without the assurance of marriage. Yet royal annulments were not infrequent, and all might have been resolved without drama, or even unremarked, had not Henry VIII himself been a proficient, if mendacious, theologian. The chief obstacle was that Henry, who feared international humiliation, insisted that his divorce should be granted by a competent authority in England-this way he could de rive his wife of her legal rights, and bully his Episcopal judges.

But his marriage had been founded on Pope Julius II’s dispensation, necessarily obtained by Henry VIII to enable the young Henry VIII to marry his brother’s widow in the first place, and hence the matter pertained to Rome. In order to have his case decided without reference to Rome, in face of the Papacy’s unwillingness to concede the matter, Henry had to prove against the reigning pope, Clement VII that his predecessor’s dispensation was invalid — then the marriage would automatically terminate, on the grounds that it had never legally existed.

Henry would be a bachelor again. However, this strategy took the king away from matrimonial law into the quite remote and hypersensitive realm of papal power. If Julius II’s dispensation was invalid, it must be because the successors of St. Peter had no power to devise such instruments, and the popes were thus no better than other human legislators who had exceeded their authority. Henry was a good enough theologian and canon lawyer to know that there was a minority opinion in Western Christendom to precisely this effect.

He was enough of an egotist, too, to fall captive to his own powers of persuasion—soon he believed that papal primacy was unquestionably a sham, a ploy of human invention to deprive kings and emperors of their legitimate inheritances. Henry looked back to the golden days of the British imperial past, to the time of the Emperor Constantine and of King Lucius I. In fact, Lucius I had never existed- he was a myth, a figment of pre-Conquest imagination.

But Henry’s British ‘sources’ showed that this Lucius was a great ruler, the first Christian king of Britain, who had endowed the British Church with all its liberties and possessions, and then written to Pope Eleutherius asking him to transmit the Roman laws. However, the pope’s reply explained that Lucius did not need any Roman law, because he already had the lex Britunniue (whatever that was) under which he ruled both regnum and sacerdotium: For you be God’s vicar in your kingdom, as the psalmist says, ‘Give the king thy judgments, O God, and thy righteousness to the king’s son’ (Ps. xxii: 1) . . . A king hath his name of ruling, and not of having a realm. You shall be a king, while you rule well; but if you do otherwise, the name of a king shall not remain with you . . . God grant you so to rule the realm of Britain, that you may reign with him forever, whose vicar you be in the realm. Vicarius Dei-vicar of Christ. Henry’s divorce had led him, incredibly, to believe in his royal supremacy over the English Church. b) Supreme head of the Ecclesia Anglicana With the advent of the divorce crisis, Henry took personal charge of his policy and government.

He ousted Wolsey, who was hopelessly compromised in the new scheme of things, since his legatine power came directly from Rome. He named Sir Thomas More to the chancellorship, but this move backfired owing to More’s scrupulous reluctance to involve himself in Henry’s proceedings. He summoned Parliament, which for the first time in English history worked with the king as an omnicompetent legislative assembly, if hesitatingly so. Henry and Parliament finally threw off England’s allegiance to Rome in an unsurpassed burst of revolutionary statute-making: the Act of Annates (1532. , the Act of Appeals (1533), the Act of Supremacy (1534), the First Act of Succession (1534) the Treasons Act (1534), and the Act against the Pope’s Authority (1536). The Act of Appeals proclaimed Henry VIII’s new imperial status-all English jurisdiction, both secular and religious, now sprang from the king-and abolished the pope’s right to decide English ecclesiastical cases. The Act of Supremacy declared that the king of England was supreme head of the Ecclesia Anglicana, or Church of England—not the pope. The Act of Succession was the first of a series of Tudor instruments used to settle the order of succession to the hrone, a measure which even Thomas More agreed was in itself unremarkable, save that this statute was prefaced by a preamble denouncing papal jurisdiction as a ‘usurpation’ of Henry’s imperial power. More, together with Bishop Fisher of Rochester, and the London Carthusians, the most rigorous and honorable custodians of papal primacy and the legitimacy of the Aragonese marriage, were tried for ‘denying’ Henry’s supremacy under the terms of the Treasons Act. These terms inter alia made it high treason maliciously to de rive either king or queen of ‘the dignity, title, or name of their royal estates’—that is to deny Henry’s royal supremacy.

The victims of the act, who were in reality martyrs to Henry’s vindictive egoism, were cruelly executed in the summer of 1535. A year later the Reformation legislation was completed by the Act against the Pope’s Authority, which removed the last vestiges of papal power in England, including the pope’s ‘pastoral’ right as a teacher to decide disputed points of Scripture. Henry VIII now controlled the English Church as its supreme head in both temporal and doctrinal matters; his ecclesiastical status was that of a lay metropolitan archbishop who denied the validity of external, papal authority within his territories.

He was not a riest, and had no sacerdotal or sacramental functions—the king had tried briefly to claim these but had been rebuffed by an outraged episcopate. Yet Henry was not a Protestant, either. Until his death in 1547, Henry VIII believed in Catholicism without the pope—a curious but typically Henrician application of logic to the facts of so—called British ‘history’ as exemplified by King Lucius I. As a lay archbishop, Henry could make ecclesiastical laws and define doctrines almost as he pleased—provided he did not overthrow the articles of faith.

In fact, this gave him a wider latitude than might be thought, because the bishops could not agree what the articles of faith were, beyond the fundamentals of God’s existence, Christ’s divinity, the Trinity, and some of the sacraments. The Greek scholarship of the Christian Humanists had weakened the structure of traditional, medieval Christian doctrine by questioning texts and rejecting scholasticism: a mood of uncertainty prevailed. Before 1529, then, Henry had ruled his clergy through Wolsey; after 1534 he did so personally, and through his new chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, whom Henry soon appointed his (lay) vicegerent in spirituals.

A former aide of Wolsey, Cromwell had risen to executive power as a client of the Boleyn interest, and had taken command of the machinery of government, especially the management of Parliament, in January 1532. By combining the offices of Lord Privy Seal and vicegerent, Cromwell succeeded Wolsey as the architect of Tudor policy under Henry, until his own fall in july 1540—but with one striking difference. As vicegerent he was entirely subordinate to Henry; Wolsey, as legate, had been subordinate only as an Englishman.

Yet the accomplishment of Henry’s dream to give the words Rex Imperator literal meaning raises a key historical question. Exactly why did the English bishops and abbots, the aristocracy of the spirit who held a weight of votes in the House of Lords, permit the Henrician Reformation to occur? The answer is partly that Henry coerced his clerical opponents into submission by threats and punitive taxation; but some bishops actually supported the king, albeit sadly, and a vital truth lies behind this capitulation.

Those clerics who were politically alert saw that it was preferable to be controlled by the Tudor monarchs personally, with whom they could bargain and haggle, than to be offered as a sacrifice instead to the anticlerical laity in the House of Commons, which was the true alternative to compliance. For as early as 1532, it was on the cards that the Tudor supremacy would be a parliamentary supremacy, not a purely royal one, and only the despotic king’s dislike of representative assemblies ensured that Parliament’s contribution was cut back to the mechanical, though still revolutionary, task of enacting the requisite legislation.

It was plain to all but the most ultramontane papalists on the Episcopal bench that a parliamentary supremacy would have exposed the clergy directly to the pent—up emotional fury and hatred of the anticlerical laity and common lawyers. The laity, furthermore, were fortified for the attack by the humanists’ debunking of ritualism and superstition. In short, royal supremacy was the better of two evils: the clergy would not have to counter the approaching anticlerical backlash without the necessary filter of royal mediation. c) The dissolution of the religious houses

Henry VIII’s supremacy did save the bishops from the worst excesses of lay anticlericalism, and the king’s doctrinal conservatism prevented an explosion of Protestantism during his reign. However, nothing could save the monasteries. Apart from anticlericalism, three quite invincible forces merged after 1535 to dictate the dissolution of the religious houses. First, the monastic communities almost parent institutions outside England and Wales—this was juridically unacceptable after the Acts of Appeals and Supremacy. Secondly, Henry VIII was bankrupt. He needed to annex the monastic estates in order to restore the Crown’s finances.

Thirdly, Henry had to buy the allegiance of the political nation away from Rome and in support of his Reformation by massive injections of new patronage—he must appease the lay nobility and gentry with a share of the spoils. Thus Thomas Cromwell’s first task as vicegerent was to conduct an ecclesiastical census under Henry’s commission, the first major tax record since Domesday Book, to evaluate the condition and wealth of the English Church. Cromwell’s questionnaire was a model of precision. Was divine service observed? Who were the benefactors? What lands did the houses possess? What rents? and so on. The survey was completed in six months, and Cromwell’s genius for administration was shown by the fact that Valor Ecclesiasticus, as it is known, served both as a record of the value of the monastic assets, and as a report on individual clerical incomes for taxation purposes. The lesser monasteries were dissolved in 1536; the greater houses followed two years later. The process was interrupted by a formidable northern rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace, which was brutally crushed by use of martial law, exemplary public hangings, and a wholesale breaking of Henry’s promises to the ‘pilgrims’.

But the work of plunder was quickly completed. A total of 56o monastic institutions had been suppressed by November 1539, and lands valued at ? 132,000 per annum immediately accrued to the Court of Augmentations of the King’s Revenue, the new department of state set up by Cromwell to cope with the transfer of resources. Henry’s coffers next received ? I5,000 or so from the sale of gold and silver plate, lead, and other precious items; finally, the monasteries had possessed the right of presentation to about two-fifths of the parochial benefices in England and Wales, and these rights were also added to the Crown’s patronage.

The long-term effects of the dissolution have often been debated by historians, and may conveniently be divided into those which were planned, and those not. Within the former category, Henry VIII eliminated the last fortresses of potential resistance to his royal supremacy. He founded six new dioceses upon the remains of former monastic buildings and endowments—Peterborough, Gloucester, Oxford, Chester, Bristol, and Westminster, the last-named being abandoned in 1550. The king then reorganized the ex-monastic cathedrals as Cathedrals of the New Foundation, with revised staffs and statutes.

Above all, though, the Crown’s regular income was seemingly doubled-but for how long? The bitter irony of the dissolution was that Henry VIII’s colossal military expenditure in the 1540s, together with the laity’s demand for a share of the booty, politically irresistible as that was, would so drastically erode the financial gains as to cancel out the benefits of the entire process. Sales of the confiscated lands began even before the suppression of the greater houses was completed, and by 1547 almost two thirds of the former monastic property had been alienated.

Further grants by Edward VI and Queen Mary brought this figure to over three—quarters by 1558. The remaining lands were sold by Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts. It is true that the lands were not given away: out of 1,593 grants in Henry VIII’s reign, only 69 were gifts or partly so; the bulk of grants (95. 6 per cent) represented lands sold at prices based on fresh valuations. But the proceeds of sales were not invested - quite the opposite under Henry VIII. In any case, land was the best investment.

The impact of sales upon the non-parliamentary income of the Crown was thus obvious, and there is everything to be said for the view that it was Henry VIII’s constant dissipation of the monarchy’s resources that made it difficult for his successors to govern England. Of the unplanned effects of the dissolution, the wholesale destruction of fine Gothic buildings, melting down of medieval metalwork and jewellery, and sacking of libraries were the most extensive acts of licensed vandalism perpetrated in the whole of British history.

The clergy naturally suffered an immediate decline in morale. The number of candidates for ordination dropped sharply; there was little real conviction that Henry VIII’s Reformation had anything to do with spiritual life, or with God. The disappearance of the abbots from the House of Lords meant that the ecclesiastical vote had withered away to a minority, leaving the laity ascendant in both Houses. With the sale of ex-monastic lands usually went the rights of parochial presentation attached to them, so that local laity btained a considerable monopoly of ecclesiastical patronage, setting the pattern for the next three centuries. The nobility and gentry, especially moderate—sized gentry’ families, were the ultimate beneficiaries of the Crown’s land sales. The distribution of national wealth shifted between 1535 and 1558 overwhelmingly in favor of Crown and laity, as against the Church, and appreciably in favor of the nobility and gentry, as against the Crown. Very few new or substantially enlarged private estates were built up solely out of ex—monastic lands by 1558.

But if Norfolk is a typical county, the changing pattern of wealth distribution at Elizabeth’s accession was that 4. 8 per cent of the county’s manors were possessed by the Crown, 6. 5 per cent were Episcopal or other ecclesiastical manors, II. 4 per cent were owned by East Anglican territorial magnates, and 75. 4 per cent had been acquired by the gentry. In 1535, 2. 7 per cent of manors had been held by the Crown, 17. 2 per cent had been owned by the monasteries, 9. 4 per cent were in the hands of magnates, and 64 per cent belonged to gentry’ families.

Without Henry VIII’s preparatory break with Rome, there could not have been Protestant reform in Edward VI’s reign——thus evaluation can become a question of religious opinion, rather than historical judgment. However, it is hard not to regard Henry as a despoiler; he was scarcely a creator. Thomas Cromwell did his utmost, often behind the king’s back, to endow his contemporaries with Erasmian, and enlightened idealism: the Elizabethan via media owed much to the eirenic side of Cromwell’s complex character.

But Cromwell’s reward was the block—ira principis mors est. He was cast aside by his suspicious employer, and fell victim to the hatred of his enemies. And without Wolsey or Cromwell to restrain him, Henry could do still more harm. He resolved to embark on French and Scottish wars, triggering a slow-burning fuse that was extinguished only by the execution of Mary Stuart in February 1587. Yet if Henry turned to war and foreign policy in the final years of his reign, it was because he felt secure at last.

Cromwell had provided the enforcement machinery necessary to protect the supreme head from spontaneous internal opposition; Jane Seymour had brought forth the male heir to the Tudor throne; Henry was excited about his marriage to Catherine Howard, and was happily cured of theology. 2. 5 The matrimonial adventures of Henry VIII The matrimonial adventures of Henry are too familiar to recount again in detail, but an outline may conveniently be given. Anne Boleyn was already pregnant when the king married her, and the future Elizabeth I was born on 7 September 1533.

Henry was bitterly disappointed that she was not the expected son, blaming Anne and God—in that order. Anne had turned out to be a precocious flirt, who meddled fatally in politics: she was ousted and executed in a coup of May 1536. Henry immediately chose the homely Jane Seymour, whose triumph in producing the baby Prince Edward was Pyrrhic, for she died of Tudor surgery twelve days later. Her successor was Anne of Cleves, whom Henry married in January 1540 to win European allies. But this gentle creature, which Henry rudely called ‘the Flemish mare’, did not suit; divorce was thus easy, as the union was never consummated.

Catherine Howard came next. A high-spirited mind, she had been a maid of honour to Anne of Cleves—entirely inappropriately—and became Henry’s fifth queen in July 1540 as the key to the coup that destroyed Cromwell. She was executed in February 1542 for adultery. Finally, Henry took the amiable Catherine Parr to wife in July 1543. Twice widowed, Catherine was a cultivated Erasmian, under whose benign influence the royal children lived under one roof, and were spared the more malign components of Henry’s paternal indulgence. 2. 6 An extension of English hegemony

Henry VIII’s plans for war which were conceived after his marriage to Catherine Howard, and which hardened when he learned of her infidelity, resurrected youthful dreams of French conquests. Wolsey had monitored the king’s futile early campaigns of 1 511-16, and brilliantly transformed Henry’s military failures into the diplomatic prize of the treaty of London (1518). At the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520, Henry had feted Francis I of France in a Renaissance extravaganza that was hailed as the eighth wonder of the world, for Francis was the king whom Henry loved to hate.

More wasteful campaigns in 1522 and 1523 were curtailed by England’s financial exhaustion—then Henry’s policy fell into labyrinthine confusion. England was at war with France; then in alliance with France. In the end, Henry was perhaps grateful for the European peace which prevailed from 1529 to 1536, and even more relieved by the resumed rivalry that kept Habsburg and Valois mutually engaged until the reverberations of the Pilgrimage of Grace had died away. By 1541 Henry was moving towards a renewed amity with Spain against France, but he was prudent enough to hesitate.

Tudor security required that before England went to war with France, no doors should be open to the enemy within Britain itself. This meant an extension of English hegemony within the British Isles—Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. Accordingly Henry undertook, or continued, the wider task of English colonization that was ultimately completed by the Act of Union with Scotland (1707). a) The Union of England and Wales The Union of England and Wales had been presaged by Cromwell’s reforming ambition and was legally accomplished by Parliament in 1536 and 1543.

The marcher lordships were shired, English laws and county administration were extended to Wales, and the shires and county boroughs were required to send twenty-four MPs to Parliament at Westminster. In addition, a refurbished Council of Wales, and new Courts of Great Sessions, were set up to administer the region’s defenses and judicial system. Wales was made subject to the full operation of royal writs, and to English principles of land tenure. The Act of 1543 dictated that Welsh customs of tenure and inheritance were to be phased out and that English rules were to succeed them.

Welsh customs persisted in remote areas until the seventeenth century and beyond, but English customs soon predominated. English language became the fashionable tongue, and Welsh native arts went into decline. Englishmen have regarded the Union as the dawn of a civilizing process that ended with the abolition of the Council of Wales in 1689 and of the Great Sessions in 1830. Welshmen, by contrast, view Henry VIII’s Acts as a crude annexation, which technically they were—for they were not in the nature of a treaty between negotiating parties as was the case with Scotland in 1707.

In fact, Welsh civilization was already advanced in the sixteenth century, and flourished despite the Acts. Sir John Prise, ia relation of Thomas Cromwell, defended Welsh history against the skepticism of Polydore Vergil; Humphrey Llwyd of Denbigh supported him with geographical learning—and there were others. John Owen of Plas Du, Llanarmon, and New College, Oxford, enjoyed a higher literary reputation abroad during his lifetime than did William Shakespeare, his contemporary. He wrote 1,500 Latin epigrams in the style of Martial.

Welsh grammars were compiled to perpetuate the native tongue—by Sion Dafydd Rhys (1592. ), who wrote in Latin in order to reach the widest European audience, and by john Davies of Mallwyd (1621), who publicly justified the utility of Welsh studies. b) Tudor Irish policy Tudor Irish policy had begun with Henry VII’s decision that all laws made in England were automatically to apply to Ireland, and that the Irish Parliament could only legislate with the king of England’s prior consent.

English territorial influence, in reality, did not extend much beyond the Pale—the area around Dublin—and the Irish chiefs held the balance of power. Henry VIII ruled mainly through the chiefs before the Reformation, but was obliged to protect England in the 1530s from a possible papal counter—attack launched from Ireland. Lord Leonard Grey was named deputy of Ireland by Cromwell, but his coercive actions proved counter-productive. He was replaced by Sir Anthony St. Leger, who made a fresh start. St.

Leger reshaped the Irish policy of the Tudors, and his basic philosophy persisted until 1783. Instead of consolidation and coercion, he proposed friend-ship and conciliation, but the essence of the plan was to create a subordinate national superstructure for Ireland by translating Henry VIII’s lordship into kingship. The kings of England were dominus Hiberniae, not rex. But St. Leger persuaded Henry to assume the Crown—that would overthrow papal claims to feudal overlordship, and subordinate the chiefs to royal authority. Henry assented, and was proclaimed king in June 1541.

His understanding was probably that kingship would enhance his security within the British Isles. Moreover, if the idea was to form a framework for peaceful, constitutional relations between the Crown and the Irish nation, that was laudable and altruistic. Yet it was also visionary and impractical. The Irish revenues were insufficient to maintain royal status—a separate Council, Star Chamber, Chancery, and Parliament in Dublin, operating independently of, but subject to controls from, the English Parliament and Privy Council.

Above all, kingship committed England to a possible full-scale conquest of Ireland in the future, should the chiefs rebel, or should the Irish Reformation, begun by Cromwell, fail. As it turned out, ‘conciliation’ by benevolent kingship was probably worse than external ‘consolidation’ and ‘coercion’, since Tudor attitudes to conquest in Ireland were based on experiences in the New World, something the disillusioned Edmund Spenser, who lived in Ireland, pointed out in Elizabeth’s reign. The harsh vicissitudes of Irish history, especially in the seventeenth century, were hardly attributable to Henry VIII and St.

Leger. However, the new policy of the Tudors perpetuated the disadvantages both of subordination and of autonomy. In the wake of Irish pressure and the revolt of the American Colonies, the British Parliament abandoned its controls over Ireland in 1783. The Act of Union of 1801 reversed this change in favour of direct rule from Westminster, after which Irish history owed nothing to the Tudors. c) The need to control Scotland Yet the linchpin of Tudor security was the need to control Scotland.

James IV (1488-1513) had renewed the Auld Alliance with France in 1492 and further provoked Henry VII by offering support for Perkin Warbeck. But the first of the Tudors declined to be distracted by Scottish sabre-rattling, and forged a treaty of Perpetual Peace with Scotland in 1501, followed a year later by the marriage of his daughter, Margaret, to King James. However, James tried to break the treaty shortly after Henry VIII’s accession; Henry was on campaign in France, but sent the earl of Surrey northwards, and Surrey decimated the Scots at Flodden on 9 September 1513.

The elite of Scotland—the king, three bishops, eleven earls, fifteen lords, and some 10,000 men—were slain in an attack that was the delayed acme of medieval aggression begun by Edward I and III. The new Scottish king, James V, was an infant, and the English interest was symbolized for the next twenty years or so by the person of his mother, Henry VIII’s own sister. But Scottish panic after Flodden had, if anything, confirmed the nation’s ties with France, epitomized by the regency of john duke of Albany, who represented the French cause but nevertheless kept Scotland at peace with England for the moment.

The French threat became overt when the mature James V visited France in 1536, and married in quick succession Madeleine, daughter of Francis I, and on her death Mary of Guise. In 1541 James agreed to meet Henry VIII at York, but committed the supreme offence of failing to turn up. By this time, Scotland was indeed a danger to Henry VIII, as its government was dominated by the French faction led by Cardinal Beaton, who symbolized both the Auld Alliance and the threat of papal counter-attack. In October 1542 the duke of Norfolk invaded Scotland, at first achieving little.

It was the Scottish counterstroke that proved to be a worse disaster even than Flodden. On 25 November 1542, 3,000 English triumphed over 10,000 Scots at Solway Moss—and the news of the disgrace killed James V within a month. Scotland was left hostage to the fortune of Mary Stuart, a baby born only six days before James’s death. For England, it seemed to be the answer to a prayer. Henry VIII and Protector Somerset, who governed England during the early years of Edward VI’s minority, none the less turned advantage into danger.

Twin policies were espoused by which war with France was balanced by intervention in Scotland designed to secure England’s back door. In 1543 Henry used the prisoners taken at Solway Moss as the nucleus of an English party in Scotland; he engineered Beaton’s overthrow, and forced on the Scots the treaty of Greenwich, which projected union of the Crowns in form of marriage between Prince Edward and Mary Stuart. At the end of the same year, Henry allied with Spain against France, planning a combined invasion for the following spring.

But the invasion, predictably, was not concerted. Henry was deluded by his capture of Boulogne; the emperor made a separate peace with France at Crepi, leaving England’s flank exposed. At astronomical cost the war continued

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