Henry VIII, King of England

HENRY VIII, King of England. - Second son of Henry VII, b. June 28, 1491, d. Jan. 28, 1547, he became heir to the throne upon the death of his brother Arthur (1502), and king on Apr. 2, 1509, at the age of eighteen. He had received a good education, and showed an inclination for theology, music, poetry, and sports. With a dispensation from Pope Julius II he married the widow of his brother, Catherine, daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon.

Having eliminated almost all of his father's ministers and counselors, in whom he punished with death the popular accusation of rapacity, he entrusted himself to other counselors, and from 1512 to 1529 to Thomas Wolsey. A diplomat of the old school, Wolsey was, in contrast to his sovereign, little open to the new times: he was a stranger to maritime policy, whereas E. was the founder of a royal war navy; he was a stranger to explorations, whereas E. favored them, at least within limits that could not alienate Spain and Portugal. But in other respects he let himself be guided by his minister and followed a policy of continental balance, though not always coherent and straightforward: first against the danger of French predominance, which moreover he also felt on the island itself, given the traditional ties between Scotland and France, he fought France (campaign in Gascony, battle of Guinegate 1513, victory over the Scots at Flodden Field); then, in the conflict between Charles V and Francis I, he leaned toward the latter, but in 1520 he joined the Habsburg, only to leave him when the victory of Pavia (1525) made him too powerful in Italy and over the papacy. On the whole, this policy had not yielded much and would already suffice to explain the waning of the sovereign's trust in his minister. Increasingly despotic by nature and therefore impatient of parliamentary power, the King, before keeping Parliament almost uninterruptedly closed for 14 years, had been able to observe, on various occasions, that that body was inspired by anticlerical resentments and that if needed he could avail himself of it to impose his will on the clergy. But in these years E. was far from attacking the authority of the Roman Church in the doctrinal field and at this time wrote an Assertio septem Sacramentorum contra Martinum Lutherum and earned from Leo X the title of fidei defensor.

What drove him to it was a personal circumstance, in which he believed he saw his reputation and that of England offended; namely the question of his divorce or rather, as he gave it out to be, of the illegitimacy and therefore non-existence of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. On account of the impediments of affinity, healed nonetheless by the dispensation of Julius II, he claimed that the marriage should be considered as never having taken place, and to the refusals of the Pontiff (July 1529) and to Wolsey's inability to overcome them, he chose to give the interpretation that they were not dictated by religious motives, but by political ones, that is, by Clement VII's considerations toward Charles V, the true lord of Italy and protector of his aunt Catherine of Aragon. In the desire to free himself from Catherine there was the will to secure an heir for the monarchy, whereas Catherine had given him only a daughter, Mary, nor had England until then seen the government of a queen. On Nov. 3, 1529 E. brought the controversy before Parliament; and indeed Parliament supported him in all the measures adopted against the clergy, especially the regular clergy: suppression of the religious Orders (ca. 7000 members) and confiscation of their goods, of which only a part was destined for works of culture, while the greater part ended up in the hands of speculators; the obligation to recognize the King as head of the English national Church, only apparently softened by the reservation insofar as the law of Christ allows it; prohibition of teaching canon law; of the cult of relics and images and of indulgences; of pilgrimages, once so numerous and popular, to the tomb of Thomas Becket, now depicted as a rebel; of Latin as the language of worship; introduction of the English Bible. The boldness, the sense of total power grew in E. in the face of the scant resistance of the secular clergy; where there was resistance, it was repressed with trials and capital sentences (Fisher, bishop of Rochester, Sir Thomas More, former chancellor), at times even on the basis of infamous and slanderous accusations (abbot of Glastonbury). There was, however, also some popular resistance in the counties of York and Lincoln, put down in blood, with the cooperation of the southern counties and of the capital London, where the King's anticlerical and anti-Roman policy enjoyed the greatest favor. Both Parliament and the docile secular clergy had no difficulty in sanctioning the king's marriage to his second wife Anne Boleyn, in legitimizing as heir to the throne the daughter of the latter, the future Queen Elizabeth (1534), in approving the act of supremacy which defined as treason the denial of the King's ecclesiastical supremacy. In July 1533 Clement VII excommunicated the one-time fidei defensor. A minister unto himself after Wolsey's disgrace, he grants a certain trust to Thomas Cromwell, but then has him executed in 1540; only Thomas Cranmer, whom he appointed archbishop of Canterbury, retains his trust until death.

But as the years went on, the King, ever more despotic, suspicious, selfish, gloomily cynical, spread death among the persons closest to him: such is the fate of the second and the fifth of his six successive wives (Anne Boleyn, 1536, and Catherine Howard, 1542); the third, Jane Seymour, escapes it, who finally gives him a male heir (Edward VI) and dies a natural death; the fourth, Anne of Cleves, escapes it, whom he repudiates; and the last, Catherine Parr, escapes it, who knows the art of handling that man and above all has the good fortune to see him die before she does. In the same way, as he is tyrannical in his private life, he is intolerant in public life; he, who has nevertheless broken the age-old ties of the English people with the Church of Rome and who in this action found himself in fact cooperating with the Lutherans and with the other Protestant movements, is on the contrary anything but willing to tolerate Protestants in his Kingdom: he persecutes them no less than the Catholics who do not accept the separation from Rome; having remained, as regards dogma and canonical provisions, substantially Catholic (and proof of this is the Six Articles Act, which imposes the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, of Communion under one kind, of the celibacy of priests), he persecutes Protestants as heretics and Catholics faithful to Rome as rebels.

Ernesto Sestán