I realize that anyone who might read these notes finished with Wolf Hall weeks ago.  My problem is that I did not get to the episodes when they first aired and then, having finally gotten through episodes three and four, I wanted to read Geoffrey Elton’s history of this period and a Cromwell biography by Tracy Borman before commenting further.  All of this has taken time and I realize that readers are on to other things.  I apologize and offer this late commentary for what it may be worth.  I’ll send something on the final two episodes in less time than it took to pull this comment together.

After watching the first couple of episodes of Wolf Hall, it occurred to me that I had never read Luther’s 95 theses, which he is said to have nailed to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral, thereby starting the Protestant Reformation.  So I read them.  They are hard to get through unless you are a theologian.  They are strictly business.  He is not concerned with who should marry whom or who is rightfully king or queen.  The whole focus is on religious thought and practice, with a particular emphasis on his disapproval of the sale of indulgences, the purchase of loved ones out of purgatory, and the like.

When the English came to their break with Rome, it wasn’t about something as inflexible as the principles related to actual religious practice or belief, and here is another example of Cromwell’s genius.  Possibly for Henry the biggest part of the story was about whether the King gets to satisfy his desire with a woman who would not part with her virtue without a solemn promise of marriage.  Cromwell’s solution was to find a way to get Henry what he wanted, to use legal process to do so, and to put the process on a ground broad enough to support the religious and political reform that Cromwell had in mind.  If Catherine had died a few years earlier than she did, there never would have been an issue to resolve.  In fact, in the novel Wolf Hall, Cromwell says that if these events were happening in Italy, Catherine would be dead and there would be no questions asked.  But in England, the whole matter was treated as a question of law.

The thing had to be done according to law, but it didn’t have to be done in a way that expanded the role of Parliament to the extent that it did.  Henry might well have been satisfied with a parliamentary declaration of divorce (annulment if you insist on the technically correct term).  Cromwell thought the matter should be resolved on broader principles than the king’s domestic arrangements and set about drafting, passing, and implementing a series of statutes that had the effect of removing England from Rome’s orbit while maintaining the old religion more or less as it was.  He effected a political revolution in the midst of a religious dispute without making major changes in day to day religious practices.  The English spent the rest of Henry’s reign and that of each of his three children working out a solution that left the majority satisfied, or at least less dissatisfied than they would have been with any alternative arrangement.  There were times when the English church was essentially a popeless Catholicism, times when it was nearly puritan, but most of the time it was mildly but not dogmatically Protestant.  All of this was worked out as part of the broader political contest between crown and Parliament and the wider world of foreign affairs.

Geoffrey Elton makes the point that the English Reformation cannot be explained solely as the manipulation of law in order to marry Henry to Anne Boleyn.  He emphasizes the relative ease with which the reforms were put through and suggests that the overwhelming weight of national opinion was on the side of reform.  It is estimated that the Catholic Church took more money out of England than out of any other country in Europe.  It was so believed at the time.  Monks and other members of the clergy were objects of ridicule because their opulent lifestyles were inconsistent with their vows of poverty, and in some cases, chastity.  Local gentry wanted to get their hands on the wealth and the productive lands held by the Church, which amounted to something between a fifth and a third of the nation’s assets.  Henry wanted that wealth for the central government.  There was no great opposition in Parliament.  This mass of potential needed only leadership and Thomas Cromwell arose from relative obscurity to provide it.

According to Elton, Cromwell was a master legislator.  He was the first English political leader to use Parliament’s power to enact law in order to forge a constitutional structure in which power was effectively shared between crown and Parliament.  He knew where he wanted to go and drafted and then passed legislation that took the country to the desired destination in steps each of which was significant, but none of which was in itself comprehensive.  For example, there was at the time a fee called an “annate” that the pope charged bishops when they first took office.  The bishop had to pay one-third of his first year’s income to Rome.  In 1532, Cromwell put through Parliament a statute prohibiting these payments, but added to the statute the proviso that the ban would not take effect until the king took the formal step of implementing it.  That gave Henry, who still had hope that the pope would agree to the divorce, significant leverage to use in his negotiations with Rome.  He could use the “Don’t make me do it” device to move the pope in Henry’s direction.  As it turned out, the pressure did not work and further legislation was required.

The legislation that capped this effort, the “Act of Appeals,” forbade any English suitor from taking an appeal to Rome.  That meant that when Henry’s divorce came before an English ecclesiastical court (as it would through the earlier Act of Supremacy), the decision could not be overturned by an appeal to the pope or any other authority.  The divorce was going to go through, but even more significant were the broad grounds on which the authority was exercised.  This legislation was not just about one marriage but about the way England would be governed.  The appeals statute begins with a preamble:  “[T]his realm of England is an empire . . . governed by one Supreme Head and King.”  England had declared itself a fully independent actor, prepared to follow its own course as an independent sovereignty, not subject to any other authority.  According to Elton, the truly significant feature of this series of statutes was their constitutional nature.  England would for the future be governed by a “king in parliament”.  England was governed from that point on by the combined power of crown, lords, and commons.  The three elements battled over how that power was to be shared for centuries to come.  In the next century, two kings would be removed.  Over time, the power of Parliament increased and that of the crown diminished, but the structure within which those debates and those struggles for power took place was laid down in the 1530s by Thomas Cromwell.

The legislative program effected a revolution.  Elton attributes the modern view that this was a period of significant conflict – a view he demonstrates to be wrong – to the notoriety of the very small number of persons who objected:

The English Reformation under Henry VIII produced, one might say, no victims and only martyrs.  Since among these martyrs there were also some of the most attractive personalities of the day, much attention has always been given to the opposition and its downfall, but the most impressive thing about it is its exiguous size.  After the careful repression of the bishops and the Church in 1531-2, only the adherents of the so-called Nun of Kent (including Bishop Fisher), Sir Thomas More, and a few monks felt strongly enough to call into action the treason legislation passed to protect the revolution.

So, after the events of Episode Four, we won’t have Thomas More to kick around.  I still have to ask the question that I started to ask last time:  Was More’s position anything more than institutional loyalty?  He could not abide a situation in which the king replaced the pope as head of the Church, but was this a matter of principle beyond his loyalty to the institution?  Remember, please, that at the beginning of the break with Rome, the position of the English government was that England was still a Catholic country, fully adherent to the faith.  It simply refused to recognize that the Bishop of Rome (as they referred to the Pope) had any special authority.  Rather, because England was an “Empire” – that is, a fully mature political actor, free from the influence of any other power on earth – it looked naturally to its own head, its king, to lead its church.

Speaking as someone outside the debate between the religious partisans, I suggest that the big decision is whether the relationship between the worshiper and the holy text or the worshiper and the religious ceremony is to be mediated by a priest or other official appointed for the purpose or whether it is to be a direct relationship between the worshiper and God.  Do you read the sacred texts in your own language, or do you have them read to you in a foreign language by an intermediary?

If you take the position, which More did and which Henry also did, that you can’t have a Christian religion without priests, is it all that important what the hierarchy looks like beyond the particular person that the individual worshiper faces?  Consider the equally important (to me, more important) case of food.  I made the decision long ago, as did 98% of my fellow citizens, that my connection to the food I eat would be intermediated by third parties who raise the raw product, prepare it for market, deliver it to wholesalers, then to retailers, and finally to me.  I know that some people live on farms, raise their own food, process it themselves, and consume their own produce.  I am not of them.  Before I can consent to have my food needs met by my purveyor of choice, must I know how the purveyor is organized, who stands at the head of the organization, how the various officials are appointed, what their beliefs may be on a variety of subjects, what contractual obligations they have undertaken in connection with the vast enterprise that has the objective of delivering food to a hungry public?

Why, then, if I have decided that my religious experience is to be managed by a priest, must I further enquire into the hierarchy of which he or she is a part, how the priest’s superiors are appointed, who stands at the head of the organization, how that person was selected, and so on?  I do wish to read the labels, to know what is in the food.  That is the equivalent of the particular religious doctrine to which a worshipper subscribes.  But do I have a need to know how the regional sales manager is selected, or how the bishops and archbishops relate to their head or governor?  It seems particularly officious for the person, like Thomas More, who has decided that his or her religious experience is to be intermediated to take such an active role in evaluating the hierarchy that stands above the intermediary.  Really, what concern is it of the retail food customer or the individual worshiper as to the nature of the organization that stands out of sight of the immediate transaction of interest to purveyor or priest on the one hand and customer or worshiper on the other?

I realize that the analogy may be offensive to some, but consider:  Is it so offensive that you would suffer the torments of imprisonment and beheading (which, remember, was a mercy when compared to drawing and quartering) when you could just shrug your shoulders, read from the prayer book, and keep your own counsel in your own mind?

Elton makes a strong case that Henry went to the extreme step of demanding an oath of loyalty only because the “Nun of Kent” – she is the white-habited young woman named Elizabeth Barton who appears in the TV show — tells Henry his reign will end in a few months if he marries Anne.  She had been making similar statements around Kent, egged on by Henry’s opponents, and Henry and Cromwell both knew she had to be stopped.  They chose the oath on succession to force their opponents out into the open.  The oath required the affiant to swear that the children of Henry and Anne were the lawful heirs to the throne and that the first marriage to Catherine was invalid.  Interestingly, More had no trouble with the first part, on the basis that Parliament could lawfully decide the succession to the throne.  He would not accept the second part because that required him to deny the pope’s supremacy in matters of canon law.

It appears that events leading to More’s execution unfolded along the lines depicted in the show.  The Nun of Kent had to die because her prophecies were creating trouble.  Once the process began of gathering up people who insisted that the first marriage was valid, it developed a life of its own.  Everyone known to be doubtful on the issue had to be tested, and More could not be allowed to stand as an exception.  Add to that the fact that Henry’s enormous temper had been ignited by the stubborn refusal of More, whom Henry had once befriended, to throw Catherine overboard and More was doomed.

Until I read Tracy Borman’s biography of Cromwell, I thought it had been universally agreed that More’s conviction was obtained by the perjured testimony of the Solicitor General Richard Rich.  Borman does not characterize Rich’s testimony as perjury, although she says that he was unscrupulous, which is something that I think even his mother would have agreed with.

There is a slight difference between the novel and the TV show over how the perjury was worked.  In the TV show, Cromwell is at his wits’ end trying to get More to say something treasonous.  He is out of options.  He has had all of More’s books and papers removed by Richard Riche (Hillary spells it with the extra “e”).  He sends Riche back in to see More one last time, figuring that More will be bored enough that he will engage with Riche and that will produce the fatal report.  In the novel, Riche comes back from removing the books and offers his report on More’s conversation without being asked to do so.  It’s a small difference, but the Cromwell of the TV show is more manipulative, more conniving than the man in the novel.  The man in the novel works with the material provided to him, while the man on the screen sends out for a delivery.

In both mediums, it is clear that Cromwell knows the testimony is perjured but his only purpose is to make sure that Riche will stand by it, will make his statement under oath without flinching.  Cromwell did not solicit the Solicitor, but he did not hesitate to use testimony he had every reason to believe was an invention.  The irregularity of the proceedings and the predetermined outcome helped to punch More’s ticket to sainthood and did their bit to sully Cromwell’s reputation.

It is June 23 and I still have not gotten to episodes five and six, but I will soon.