|
| |
Henry VIII: Defender of the Faith
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Retha M. Warnicke |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Look at the small print on any current English coin and among the sovereign's titles you will see the letters "F.D." The initials stand for Fidei Defensor, or Defender of the Faith. This papal title was granted to King Henry VIII for his defence of Catholicism against Martin Luther. That Henry's later break with Rome was based on political rather than spiritual differences may account for the continued use of this title over the centuries. Historian Retha M. Warnicke explains the background to the granting of the title. |
 hortly after he had succeeded to the throne in 1509, King Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon and shared the triumph of his coronation day with her, but within two years of these festivities, the royal couple's initial optimism about their ability to have surviving children had begun to wane.  In February 1511, their second child and first son died when he was only a few weeks old. Several more deliveries, including two boys, were to follow before the queen gave birth to a surviving child, a girl in February 1516. At the birth of this daughter, the namesake of her paternal aunt, Mary, the French queen, Henry told the Venetian ambassador that he and his consort were both still young and that "if it was a daughter this time, by the grace of God the sons will follow" (S. Giustinian, Four years at the Court of Henry VIII, trans. R. Brown, 1854, vol. I, pp. 181-2). |
The necessity of a male heir
About two years later, in the summer of 1518, Henry left further evidence of how much he needed and desired a male heir. Straying from his usual practice of avoiding the chore of handwriting, he sent a letter in an excited but cautious vein to Wolsey, telling him of Catherine's just-confirmed pregnancy. The king anxiously awaited the outcome of this lying-in, an expectation that took on more than usual significance that year, if that was possible, since in October, as part of the universal peace negotiated by Wolsey, Henry agreed to betroth his two-year-old Mary to the dauphin. Without a male heir, this marriage of the princess, had it taken place, could have led to French annexation of England, a fear talked about and alluded to in the Venetian ambassador's remark that had Catherine's delivery of a stillborn girl in November 1518 occurred earlier, "the conclusion of the betrothal ... might not have come to pass" (S. Giustinian, Four years at the Court of Henry VIII, vol. I, pp. 237, 240). |
Crucial to any treatment of the succession issue is the recognition that early modern Christians did not regard childbirth purely from a natural or biological point of view. Most people believed that God interfered with nature to pass the sins of parents onto their children or to punish would-be parents by closing up women's wombs altogether. Christians of all stripes accepted this view of human generation, for even Martin Luther claimed that the birth of deformed children was a divine omen, a prediction of momentous political events. In a world that possessed only primitive ideas about science and medicine, God was thought to inflict disease and natural disasters upon individuals and society as punishments for their transgressions, although it was sometimes believed that he was usurped in this causal structure by Satan, whose clergy, the witches, were reputed to be able both to cure and to injure their patients and victims. |
Henry's assertion that "by the grace of God, the sons will follow," ought to be interpreted in a literal sense. The king did not invent the connection between divine favor and successful childbirth; it was a pervasive view among literal-minded Christians and non-Christians in his society, and without evidence to the contrary, it must be assumed that he seriously shared those beliefs. From early in his reign, he sought to appease God in part to ensure the birth of surviving sons and the future of his lineage. Although he spent many hours in the chase and in revelry, he was careful to allot an appropriate amount of time to God. On days when he was in the saddle from dawn to dusk, wearing out eight or ten horses, he heard mass three times, on other days five times. Every evening he joined his consort for vespers and compline; the two of them also went on pilgrimages. |
There is evidence that his close attention to religious matters was related to the succession crisis. In a letter to Pope Leo X of August 1519, for example, when Henry offered to go on a crusade he promised: "If our longed-for heir shall have been granted before the expedition sets out to do battle with the Infidel, we will lead our force in person." This offer, made again in December, may have fortified Wolsey's attempt to win Leo's approval for an extension of his authority as legate a latere, but it is also an example of how Henry associated the quality of his Christian leadership with the birth of a surviving male heir. A compelling anecdote about him, though apocryphal, is consistent with this view of his personality. It tells of a heavily built man in a penitent's smock who at dusk was making his way on his knees to a shrine, praying for the survival of his infant son. |
An acceptance of Henry's genuine religious belief, although it was often expressed in the rote and conventional method of the medieval Church, is essential to an understanding of the events that carried England into the Reformation. The king's deep religious commitment and theological interests explain and underline his attitudes toward papal power and toward the Holy Roman Empire that can be discovered even in documents written out or corrected by his own hand. His unremitting determination to free himself from his first wife, despite the lack of support he found in both Vienna and Rome, must be examined in association with his attitudes toward the Church and its teachings on marriage and childbirth. Only by viewing the king's passion for Anne Boleyn against the backdrop of his deeply felt religious and social impulses can the story of his love for her be fully understood. |
Religious treatises
It surely was not a coincidence that in 1518, when Catherine became pregnant with what seems to have been her last conception, her husband began to write a response to Martin Luther's attack on indulgences that had appeared the previous year. By June he had finished the manuscript and was pleased enough with it to share it with Wolsey. Three years later, shortly after Catherine and he had gone on separate retreats during Lent to fulfill a vow, Henry began to respond to Luther's recent work, De Captivitate Babylonica. The king seems to have "rescued" from "oblivion" his earlier manuscript and to have used it as the first two chapters to this new work, published that summer under the title of Assertio Septem Sacramentorum. Despite its defects, the book, according to J. J. Scarisbrick (Henry VIII, 1968, pp. 110-13), "was one of the most successful pieces of Catholic polemics produced by the first generation of anti-Protestant writers." Skillfully written, it revealed that Henry's views verged on heresy, for he had a "semi- or crypto" Pelagian view of faith, placing an inordinate amount of emphasis on human merit in salvation. Two significant facts about his book in terms of the later attempts to divorce Catherine are these: it demonstrated "a telling use of the Old Testament" and it became a "best-seller," establishing the king, whatever were the opinions of the pope and his clergy, as a published expert on theology and the Roman primacy. In fact, it went through some twenty editions in the sixteenth century, and as early as 1522 had appeared in two different German translations. |
The motives behind the writing of the Assertio have not been fully established. Henry, himself, was to credit Wolsey with suggesting the project; perhaps the Cardinal had anticipated, and rightly as it turned out, that if the king were to write in defence of the papacy, Leo would be moved to bestow upon him the Christian title that Henry had been seeking for some time. In October 1521, the reluctant pope did please the king greatly by naming him Defender of the Faith. |
Conclusion
The book served to highlight Henry's support for the Universal Church at a time when he had been searching for the answer to the question of why God had not permitted his infant sons to live. The king surely viewed his winning of the papal title as yet another piece of evidence in the case he was building to prove in his own mind at least that God had not visited the royal nursery with dead male children as a punishment for his sins. A "crypto" Pelagian, he may also have been struggling to achieve a favored position with God in order to merit a divine blessing in the form of the birth of a surviving son. |
|
| |
