England Breaks with Rome

The Act in Restraint of Appeals enacted that suits about wills, marriage and divorce, and tithes should be finally decided within the king’s jurisdiction “and not elsewhere”, and no longer carried on appeal to Rome. Its preamble declares that “this realm of England is an empire”, governed by one supreme head and king (Statutes of the Realm, 24 Hen. VIII c. 12). Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, wrote that in May 1533 he held a court at Dunstable on the marriage of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon, that Katherine refused to appear because her cause was before the pope, and that he gave sentence that the pope had no power to license such a marriage. He then crowned Anne Boleyn at Westminster, and adds that she was already married to the king and with child (Cranmer, Letters, letter 14, to Nicholas Hawkyns, 17 June 1533).

Further Acts followed. One recited the clergy’s promise to make no new canons without the king’s assent and laid penalties on any who broke it (Statutes of the Realm, 25 Hen. VIII c. 19). Another gave the archbishop of Canterbury the power to grant the licences and dispensations that had been sought at Rome (Statutes of the Realm, 25 Hen. VIII c. 21, s. 3). In the session that opened on 3 November 1534, Parliament enacted that the king and his successors “shall be taken, accepted, and reputed the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England”, with power to visit, correct and reform all errors, heresies and abuses (Statutes of the Realm, 26 Hen. VIII c. 1). A companion Act made it high treason, from 1 February following, maliciously to wish or attempt by words or writing to deprive the king of the dignity, title or name of his royal estate (Statutes of the Realm, 26 Hen. VIII c. 13).

John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, and Thomas More had refused the oath to the succession that Parliament required, and both were attainted of misprision of treason (Statutes of the Realm, 26 Hen. VIII c. 22 and c. 23). William Roper, More’s son-in-law, tells how More was called to Lambeth before the archbishop, the lord chancellor and the king’s secretary, Thomas Cromwell, and was sent to the Tower (Roper, Life of More the oath at Lambeth). A London chronicler of the time records that Fisher was condemned on 17 June 1535 for denying the king to be supreme head of the Church of England and beheaded on Tower Hill on 22 June, and that More was condemned on 1 July and beheaded on 6 July for the same cause (Wriothesley, Chronicle vol. 1, pp. 28–29). Roper, who was not present and follows those who were, reports that More after the verdict called the Act repugnant to the laws of God and his church, whose supreme government, he said, belongs by right to the see of Rome and may not be taken by any temporal prince (Roper, Life of More the arraignment).

The Act of Supremacy defines no doctrine; it gives the king power to reform “errors, heresies, and abuses” (Statutes of the Realm, 26 Hen. VIII c. 1). An Act of 1539 names Cromwell as the king’s vicegerent for the exercise of that office in church causes (Statutes of the Realm, 31 Hen. VIII c. 10). What was done with the power under Henry’s son is told in the Book of Common Prayer.