A Reformation from Above: The Top Down Henrician Reformation

Henry VIII receiving the 'Great Bible'.

 

A Reformation from Above

Since A.G. Dickens’s The English Reformation was published in 1964, the Henrician Reformation has experienced something of a scholarly revival. Historians have lined up over the last thirty years to weigh in on the political and religious nature of the reformation in England and also argue whether it was a top down or bottom up reformation. Dickens suggested, through his ground breaking research, that there was in existence long term religious discontent in England when Henry VIII took the throne in 1509 and that anticlericalism and Protestantism was swelling across all of England.[1] This essay argues that the Henrician Reformation was neither a bottom up nor a rapid top down reformation but rather a slow, fragile reformation enforced from those in power. Through the use of primary sources this essay will argue that while there was anticlericalism in England the majority of people were still deeply Catholic and the reformation was not driven from below. The essay will then examine the court and council of the king and argue that whenever there was an overwhelming number of evangelicals or conservatives in court the reformation favoured that side. Finally, I will examine the enforcement of reforms and argue that the Henrician Reformation was not inevitable and that court factions brought about political and religious change in England.   

In May 1531 Thomas Cromwell wrote an urgent letter to an English merchant instructing him to sever ties with the protestant, William Tyndale. Cromwell and evangelicals had persuaded the king to receive Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament but after reading through the text, and Tyndale’s views on reform, the king was enraged. Cromwell writes to the merchant Stephen Vaughan,

“The king’s highness... has commanded me to advertise you that his pleasure is that you should desert and leave any further to persuade or attempt the said Tyndale to come into this realm, alleging that he, perceiving the malicious, perverse, uncharitable and indurate mind of the said Tyndale, is in manner without hope of reconciliation in him and is very joyous to have his realm destitute of such a person.”[2]

This excerpt demonstrates both the king’s conservative nature regarding religious reform and how influential the court would be in forcing religious reform and conformity.

It was a European tradition to use bishops in government, yet no other state used bishops “as did England, a country which at this point, despite its powerful monarchy and ancient nobility, could well be considered as priest-ridden”[3]. The power bishops possessed placed the Church in a powerful position and gave it the ability to aggressively repel attacks from heretical groups such as the Lollards. Lollards called for religious reforms to biblical teaching and the removal of ecclesiastical intercession between God and man. Lollards may have been feared by the Church, as the heretical group sought to undermine the Church’s position, but statistics show that there were only three cases of Lollard persecution recorded in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. [4] This shows that while there were anticlerical groups within England they were a minority - and they were not growing in the early years of Henry’s reign. 
There was however anticlerical sentiment amongst Christian humanists, as seen in Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1509). Erasmus’s text criticises the Medieval Latin Church for being immoral, and the clergy for acting ungodly and possessing unbiblical beliefs. This then influenced English protestant propaganda with men such as Tyndale writing the Supplication of the Beggars. From texts such as these, stories spread of wealthy and gluttonous monks, dishonest and money grabbing priests and ungodly Church leaders who openly practiced simony and sodomy. However, G.R. Elton and Christopher Haigh have both shown research which demonstrates that many of these charges against the Church were false. Elton for example writes, that “neither simony nor sodomy were as prevalent as the legend supposed, and the quality of the parish clergy, measured by the number who held university degrees, was in fact improving from the later fifteen century onwards”[5]. 
Abuses of the clergy were also not a prominent issue for lay people until the protestant propaganda pamphlet campaigns were started by Thomas Cromwell - after he secured more power within the council in 1531. For example, records in the conservative county of Lancashire show no law suits against clergy filed before 1530, yet between 1530 and 1547 there were thirteen law suits filed.[6] This is in part due to the influence protestant propaganda had on the people. Yet the complexity of anticlericalism is vast, and continuing research shows that what Dickens perceived as an overwhelming support for the protestant cause from below was exaggerated and even in part unfounded. Much of the anticlerical argument also forms on the thought that because anticlericalism was sweeping across Western Europe therefore the Church in England must have been perceived in the same light.

The Church in England was not only viewed differently through the eyes of the English people, compared to the Church in Western Europe, but it also had a stronghold in the rural land workers of the realm. This stronghold was then put to the test when religious houses, making less than two hundred pounds a year, were shut down after Cromwell’s Dissolution Act was passed in parliament in 1536. In the months following some 7,000 monks, nuns and clergy members were dispelled and 550 religious houses were dissolved.[7] Following the news of the closures up to 20,000 men rose up in northern counties and marched south in protest. One ‘pilgrim ballad’, written at the time of the protests, sang of the “faithful people of the Boreal region... going to stop the Southern heretics”[8]. This devotion to the Church and desire to protest at the cost of their own livelihoods on the land was due to the Church’s presence in the townships and villages of rural England.

Historians who support the bottom up theory have written that these rural people of England, who lived in an oppressive feudal system, would instantly take up the Lutheran and protestant beliefs of justification by faith alone in Christ and the priesthood of all believers[9] - but this was not the case. Rural workers were for the most part illiterate and Protestantism preached the importance of each believer reading the bible. Thomas Cranmer, upon being appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533, gave ministers bibles and instructed them to teach by the Word alone and encourage believers to read the scriptures themselves for full understanding.[10] However, figures show that seventy per cent of men and ninety per cent of women were illiterate at the time in England.[11] The area where literacy was improving was in large townships, especially London. Towns and cities were also the places where Protestantism saw significant success during Henry’s reign and where the evangelical court faction found its base. The majority of people in the north however were illiterate and entrenched in what men such as Cromwell called superstition. The people practiced superstitious rituals which would draw them to the Church. Rituals had been performed for centuries by the Church and clergy would sell icons and relics, and pray for the protection of fields and crops. In response to the Church’s blessings the people revered and adored religious houses. It would take generations for Protestantism to grow in these areas, and in 1640 there were still letters being written which show the struggles Church of England ministers had in north. For example, Minister John Shaw of Furness wrote in 1640 of how, “exceedingly ignorant and blind to religion”[12] the people of Furness were. Shaw also wrote of an elderly man who said, “I think I heard of that man you spake of once in a play at Kendal called Corpus Christi play, where there was a man on a tree and blood ran down”[13]. It is therefore an error to underestimate the place the Latin Church had in the people’s lives and to think that English people in the lower classes rushed to reform because of the oppressive feudal system.

What also needs to be brought under review is whether towns and cities in the south were actually experiencing an overwhelming bottom up reformation. For example, Star Chamber court letters show a conservative London priest, who wrote in 1536, “I will pray for the pope as the chief head of Christ’s Church, and so I will advise all men to do secretly. But we may say nothing openly, for the knaves hath our heads under the girdle”[14]. And more top down pressure was issued as Archbishop Cranmer wrote to the king repeatedly in 1536 reporting that he and bishops had been trying to “persuade your people of the bishop of Rome’s... false and unjust usurpation and that your grace, of very right and by God’s law, is the supreme head of this Church of England”[15]. Cranmer also reported that important towns around London (such as Winchester, Kent and Canterbury) were under watch and that sermons were being reviewed by trusted clergymen.[16] To further this Cromwell would also produce propaganda sermons which ministers were issued to preach.[17] This does not produce the view that the majority of people were calling for religious reform but rather that decisions made by the king, council and parliament influenced religious changes which were to be enforced upon the people.

When it came to Henry VIII’s court and council what mattered most was “the company he kept”[18]. Henry was a product of his time, he was taught the new studia humanitatis[19] and as a result appreciated and valued in his court those characteristics and qualities which the new learning emphasised. Where Henry VII created a court full of conservative and scholastic gentry, his son took in men who possessed artistic ability and physical prowess, as well as humanist lawyers and learned men of the lower classes. Yet while this was the image the young king wanted, those men closest to the king were of the conservative gentry who had held power for generations and were loyal to Latin Church. These men influenced the king’s theological beliefs which were demonstrated in 1521 when Henry wrote the Assertio Septem Sacramentorum adversus Martinum Lutherum. Urged on by bishops and Christian humanists, Henry wrote the text in response to Luther’s The Babylonish Captivity of the Church. The king affirmed the sacraments, the role of the Pontiff of Rome and the place of the Church in Christendom. For this Henry would be rewarded with the title of Fidei Defensor (‘Defender of the Faith’) by Pope Leo X in 1521.[20] However despite this reward, the king’s desires would change dramatically in 1527 when he first vocalised his desire to divorce the Queen.

By all accounts Katherine of Aragon had been a popular Queen, yet after being persuaded by reformers in court to review the Levitical law, which they stressed could not be overruled by even the pope, Henry was convinced that he would not solve the issue of succession until he rid himself of his brother’s wife.[21]  Evangelicals and Catholic churchmen, who sought internal reform, began advising the king on his ‘great matter’. For a man such as chancellor Wosley, his motive in securing the king’s desired divorce with the pope’s blessing was so he could secure his own position and silence those who were rallying against his reforms to education. Evangelicals such as Cromwell, Thomas Boleyn, Edward Foxe and Thomas Cranmer sought to advise the king on his desired divorce in an attempt to break up the conservative majority in the king’s council. This would prove to be a masterstroke on the part of the evangelical faction, for while they were able to adapt to the wishes of the king, the conservative faction within Henry’s council had no firm plan.[22] What proved to also play into the evangelical’s favour was the king’s growing affection for Thomas Boleyn’s daughter.

By 1530 the court and council of the king was under construction. Chancellor Wosley, having failed to secure the annulment of the king’s marriage, was removed from his position and done away with.[23] Cromwell and the successful diplomat Thomas Boleyn then became the king’s preferred choice in legal and diplomatic matters (such as the divorce). Yet it was actually in the promotion of Thomas More to the vacant position of chancellor which would prove to be a move which allowed the evangelicals to increase their favour with the king. When More took the position of chancellor he believed he was to “promote the cause of humanist reform while safeguarding the liberties of the clergy and the doctrine of the Church”[24]. More was therefore quick to align himself with Queen Katherine, much to the king’s anger, and against what he called the “blasphemous and pestiferous English books, printed in other regions and sent into this realm, to the intent as well to pervert and withdraw the people from the Catholic and true faith of Christ”[25]. The revived persecution of heretics was seen in More’s execution of six suspected protestants during his chancellorship.[26] Yet More would not be given enough time to finish his safeguarding of the Latin Church in England, as in 1531 Thomas Cromwell was admitted to the council of the king and given complete control over the king’s legal matters. 
Cromwell acted swiftly and secured safe passage for Robert Barnes to visit London so that he could discuss with the king the free use of the vernacular bible and the Lutheran belief of justification by faith alone. Barnes’s bold attempt to sway the king initially paid off as he was offered a place in court. However conservatives questioned the king’s actions, yet while Barnes was soon sent from court due to conservative pressure, it became clear that the future of England was turning to the evangelicals, who in the two years would begin reforming England from above.

In 1533 the king moved for decisive action to be taken in finalising his divorce. In choosing to do so the king entrusted Cromwell to examine courtiers and clergy, giving the evangelical the power to take action against those who stood against the imminent divorce. In a letter to the king, Cromwell highlights several figures who he assumes are against the divorce. Cromwell writes about how he found “one of them a very seditious person and so committed them unto ward, where they now do remain, til your gracious pleasure known”[27]. Not content to leave matters here, Cromwell then boldly adds, “it is undoubted that they have intended and would confess some great matter, if they might be examined as they ought to be, that is to say by pains”[28]. This power and trust the king placed in Cromwell was due to the success the shrewd lawyer was having in carving out a lawful way in which Henry could divorce his wife and marry the protestant, Anne Boleyn. Cromwell and other reformers had moved from citing Levitical law, which they had argued nullified the king’s marriage, to argue that sole power of the English realm, and therein the Church of England, belonged to the divinely appointed monarch. 
The masterstroke then came through the nationalisation of the Church and the removal of the papacy in deciding matters. This of course meant Henry would be excommunicated but it also meant Cromwell and the reformers only had to persuade an English court and clergy to accept the revolutionary measures. As soon as the changes were confirmed the new evangelical council of the king made it law for all subjects working in the king’s council and clergy to sign the Act of Supremacy, failure to do so would result in death. The Act of Supremacy states officially, for the first time in writing, that,

“The King’s Majesty justly and rightfully is and oweth to be the supreme head of the Church of England, and so is recognized by the clergy of this realm in their convocations, yet nevertheless for corroboration and confirmation thereof, and for increase of virtue in Christ’s religion and within this realm of England, and to repress and extirp all errors, heresies and other enormities and abuses therefore used in the same; be it enacted by authority of this present Parliament, that the King our sovereign lord, his heirs and successors, Kings of this realm, shall be taken, accepted, and reputed the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England, called Anglicana Ecclesia.”[29]

After this Act of Supremacy was published, Cromwell and Archbishop Cranmer possessed the power to enforce the reforms which they, and the evangelical faction, saw fit. The king would be remarried in 1533, chancellor More would be executed in 1534, and both Cromwell and Cranmer had the complete trust of the king. Cromwell explains this to Cranmer in 1534, writing that, “in every manner of ways, the king’s highness has special trust and expectation in your grace’s approved wisdom and dexterity”[30]. 
Cromwell and Cranmer then began issuing to the clergy across England new laws which they passed through the king, the new "head" of the English Church. Cromwell writes to the clergy, in 1536, that all “shall declare at the least wise once every quarter of a year in their sermons how the Bishop of Rome’s usurped power and jurisdiction having no establishment or ground by the law of God was of most just causes taken away and abolished, and that therefore they owe unto him no manner of obedience or subjection”[31]. This would be part of the evangelical’s propaganda plan in enforcing reform and attempting to create uniformity in the realm.[32] 
Cromwell also began spreading educational reforms which would battle illiteracy and spread the new faith. He writes that children shall be taught the “pater noster, the articles of the faith, and the ten commandments in their mother tongue. And the same so taught shall cause the said youth often to repeat and understand”[33]. This was critical for if the evangelicals wanted generational change they would have to teach the people to read the bible which would be translated and distributed to Churches around the realm in 1539-40. Yet Cromwell also stressed education for it was his “intent that all superstition and hypocrisy crept into diverse men’s hearts may vanish”[34] - thus rendering the Latin Church powerless. 
Following these new commands the Ten Articles of 1536 were then passed and published. Then, in 1538, Cromwell wrote to the clergy, again reemphasising the laws and expectations - that the English people would become loyal to the Church of England.  Cromwell also put an emphasis on bible reading, stating to the clergy, “you shall discourage no man privily or apertly from the reading or hearing of the said bible, but shall expressly provoke, steer and exhort to every person to read the same as that which is the very lively word of God that every Christian person is bound to embrace, believe and follow, if they looked to be saved”[35]. 
Cromwell further demonstrates this top down pressure on the clergy by making it law to “recite to your parishioners twice of thrice together or oftener, if need require, one particle or sentence of the pater noster or creed in English, to the intent they may learn the same by heart”[36]. Yet it was not until Cromwell enforced licensed preaching that the top down reforms saw significant success in 1538-1540. Cromwell writes that clergy “shall admit no man to preach within any of the benefices or cures... [unless] sufficiently licensed by the king’s highness or his grace’s authority by the archbishop of Canterbury”[37]. Archbishop Cranmer also took to persuasion, as seen in letters he wrote to leading clergy members across the realm and Europe. For example, Cranmer wrote in one such letter,

“Wherefore, if you will listen to me, I exhort and advise you, yea, I beg, beseech, and implore and adjure you in the bowels of Jesus Christ, to agree and unite in a Christian concord, to exert your whole strength in establishing it, and at length to afford to the Churches the peace of God which passeth all understanding, so that we may, with united strength, extend as widely as possible one sound, pure, evangelical doctrine.”[38]

These reforming years however would not last after 1539 as conservative court members moved to slow the reformation which Cromwell, Cranmer and evangelicals had started.

Despite these protestant laws, which were being passed into effect, the conservative faction would respond after Cromwell failed to marry the king to a protestant noble from Lutheran Germany in 1540.[39] The conservative faction in court had been setback when Cromwell, Cranmer and evangelicals brought about these protestant reforms and laws, yet two issues remained for the evangelicals in 1539. The first was the unpopular move in shutting down religious houses across England, for while the Suppression Acts of 1536 and 1539 were in the king’s name, it was known to all in court that the real authorship and creator was in fact Cromwell. The king kept Cromwell close after the protests of the Suppression Acts yet it was known that the king blamed his advisor for the negative fallout. The marriage of the king to the gentry conservative Howard family in 1540 had also given the conservatives more power in court. This renewal of conservative power would ultimately be seen in Henry’s Act of Six Articles (1539).

The Six Articles reinstituted prior Latin Church laws, such as the belief of transubstantiation. The new law stated that “under the form of bread and wine, the natural body and blood of our Savior Jesus Christ, conceived of the Virgin Mary; and that after the consecration there remainth no substance of bread and wine, nor any other substance, but the substance of Christ, God, and man”[40]. The Six Articles also reversed the marriages of clergy and reinstituted traditional services, forcing some protestant bishops and ministers to resign from their positions. Perhaps the most devastating clause of the new Article though was the punishment of “execution”, and the “forfeiting of... all... honors, manors, castles, lands, tenancies, rent, revisions, services, possessions... and goods”[41], guilty men would pay. Conservatives would charge Cromwell with treason in 1539, and manage to forgo a trial after securing the king’s acceptance of Cromwell’s supposed crimes. Cromwell wrote of his innocence, yet the king refused Cromwell’s plea and had the minister beheaded. The reformation then officially came to a halt in 1543, when conservatives ceased the spread of the Great Bible and the seizure of protestant texts. The reformation, which had been started from the top, had now been slowed from the top, and would have to wait until Henry’s son took the throne to be re-established in 1547.

The English Reformation was not a replication of the European Reformation but a unique, slow and fragile reformation which would not be completed until the end of the Tudors reign in 1603. The Henrician Reformation was a top down reformation led by the evangelical court faction which formed after Henry VIII took the throne in 1509. Due to the popular support of the people for the Latin Church, the reformation following whichever faction ruled the court, and the Catholic resurgence which halted the reformation, this essay has demonstrated that the Henrician Reformation was not inevitable but instead was engineered and slowly enacted from within the court of the king. As sources continue to be unearthed, and with more importance being placed on lower class sources, historians will continue well into the twenty first century to debate the origins and reasons for the Henrician Reformation.

Bibliography

Block, Joseph S. Faction Politics and the English Reformation: 1520-1540. New York: The Boydell Press, 1993.

Bowker, Margaret. The Henrician Reformation: The Diocese of Lincoln under John Longland: 1521-1547. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Cranmer, Thomas. Cranmer’s Selected Writings. Edited by Carl S. Meyer. London: S.P.C.K, 1961.

Cromwell, Thomas. Thomas Cromwell on Church and Commonwealth: Selected Letters, 1523-1540. Edited by Arthur J. Slavin. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969.

Dickens, A.G. The English Reformation. Second Edition. London: BT Batsford, 1989.

Elton, G.R. England under the Tudors. London: Muethen & Co, 1965.

Elton, G.R. Reform and Reformation: England 1509-1558. London: Edward Arnold, 1977.

Elton, G.R. Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the age of Thomas Cromwell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.

Eyre, Adam, John Shawe, James Fretwell, John Hobson, Heneage Dering, Johnathan, Priesteley, Nathaniel Priestley, Sir Walter Calverley. Diaries and Autobiographies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Vol 77. Edited by Charles Jackson and Samuel Margerison. London: Andrews & co., 1877.

Foxe, John. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Edited by W. Grinton Berry. Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing, 1998. 

Haigh, Christopher. English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Haigh, Christopher. The English Reformation Revised. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1990.

Houlbrooke, Ralph. Church Courts and the People During the English Reformation: 1520-1570. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Janz, Denis R. A Reformation Reader. Second Edition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008.

Marius, Richard. Thomas More. London: J.M. Dent & Son, 1984.

More, Thomas. The Essential Thomas More. Edited and translated by James J. Green and John P. Dolan. New York: Montor-Omega Books, 1967.

Powicke, F.M. The Reformation in England. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Scarisbrick, J.J. The Reformation and the English People. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.

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[1] Dickens further defends his argument in the second edition of The English Reformation (1989) which is the edition referred to in this essay.

[2] Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cromwell on Church and Commonwealth: Selected Letters, 1523-1540, ed. Arthur J. Slavin (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), 151.

[3] G.R. Elton, Reform and Reformation: England 1509-1558 (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 12.

[4] A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation (London: BT Batsford, 1989), 54.

[5] Elton, Reform and Reformation, 9-10; G.R. Elton, Police and Policy: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 171-185; Christopher Haigh, The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1990), 20-23. 

[6] Haigh, The English Reformation Revised, 72.

[7] F.M. Powicke, The Reformation in England (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 24.

[8] Haigh, The English Reformation Revised, 97.

[9] See, Dickens, The English Reformation, 80-81; John Foxe, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, ed. W. Grinton Berry (Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing, 1998), 144-146.

[10] Thomas Cranmer, “Homily of Faith or a Short Declaration of the True, Lively, and Christian Faith,” in Cranmer’s Selected Texts, ed. Carl S. Meyer (London: S.P.C.K., 1961), 27. 

[11] Haigh, The English Reformation Revised, 213.

[12] Adam Eyre et al., Yorkshire Diaries and Autobiographies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Vol 77, ed. Charles Jackson and Samuel Margerison (London: Andrews & co., 1877), 137.

[13] Adam Eyre et al., Yorkshire Diaries and Autobiographies, 137.

[14] Haigh, The English Reformation Revised, 12.

[15] Thomas Cranmer, “To King Henry VIII,” in Cranmer’s Selected Writings, 82.

[16] Cranmer, “To King Henry VIII,” in Cranmer’s Selected Writings, 81-85

[17] See G.R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 171-185.

[18] Elton, Reform and Reformation, 27.

[19] Derived from Cicero’s Pro Archaia, ‘Studia Humanitatis’ was the new liberal arts education which began in Italian city states in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

[20] Bottom up historians have debated that attaining this title was the motive of Henry, as it was known that the English King was jealous of Louis XII’s title of ‘The Most Christian King’. Top down historians state that Henry replied to Luther due to his conservative theological beliefs and that this was proven when the king continued his attack on Luther and issued Thomas More to write texts such as Responsio ad Lutherum in 1523. See Thomas More, “An Answer to Martin Luther,” in The Essential Thomas More, ed. and trans. James J. Greene and John P. Dolan (New York: Montor-Omega Books, 1967), 109-119.

[21] Leviticus 20:21 was the passage of scripture which reformers argued negated Henry’s marriage.

[22] See Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tutors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 105-107; G.R. Elton, England Under the Tudors (London: Muethen & Co, 1965), 98-102.

[23] Before Wosley was sacked he commended Cromwell to the king and called Cromwell, “my only refuge and aid”. See Elton, Reformation and Reform, 112.

[24] Joseph S. Block, Factional Politics and the English Reformation: 1520-1540 (New York: The Boydell Press, 1993), 34.

[25] Block, Factional Politics and the English Reformation, 35.

[26] For detailed information on the interrogations, arrests, trials and executions of protestants under More see, Richard Marius, Thomas More (London: J.M. Dent & Son, 1984), 405-406.

[27] Cromwell, “To Henry VIII,” in Thomas Cromwell on Church and Commonwealth, 32.

[28] Cromwell, “To Henry VIII,” in Thomas Cromwell on Church and Commonwealth, 33.

[29] Henry VIII, “Act of Supremacy,” in A Reformation Reader, ed. Denis R. Janz (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 332.

[30] Cromwell, “To Archbishop Cranmer,” in Thomas Cromwell on Church and Commonwealth, 43.

[31] Cromwell, “To The English Clergy,” in Thomas Cromwell on Church and Commonwealth, 155.

[32] See, Elton, Policy and Police, 179-182.  

[33] Cromwell, “To The English Clergy,” in Thomas Cromwell on Church and Commonwealth, 155.

[34] Cromwell, “To The English Clergy,” in Thomas Cromwell on Church and Commonwealth, 157

[35] Cromwell, “To The Clergy of England,” in Thomas Cromwell on Church and Commonwealth, 171.

[36] Cromwell, “To The Clergy of England,” in Thomas Cromwell on Church and Commonwealth, 171.

[37] Cromwell, “To The Clergy of England,” in Thomas Cromwell on Church and Commonwealth, 173.

[38] Cranmer, “To Joachim Vadian,” in Cranmer’s Selected Writings, 72.

[39] The marriage of Henry VIII to Anne of Cleves was immediately annulled as the relationship was never consummated.

[40] Henry VIII, “Act of Six Articles,” in A Reformation Reader, 334.

[41] Henry VIII, “Act of Six Articles,” in A Reformation Reader, 335.