The Excommunication of Henry VIII

Pope Paul III did not mince his words. In the bull of excommunication promulgated on 17 December 1538, he reviled Henry VIII as a tyrant who had ‘transformed himself into a beast’. This was a king, the pope explained, who ‘daily more and more hardened himself in cruelty and rashness’ and who had now ‘sunk so low in wickedness as to preclude all hope of his restoration’. Paul proclaimed Henry a diseased member of the community of the faithful that needed to be cut off to protect the rest from contagion. Unfit to partake in the sacraments of the Church, Henry was likewise unworthy of the kingdom of England. Invoking at once Rome’s spiritual and temporal power, the pope duly absolved Henry’s subjects from allegiance to him and called on Christian princes to wage a crusade against England and topple the reprobate.

Yet there was a major flaw in this plan. By the time Paul got around to excommunicating and deposing Henry, the English king had already severed his own and his kingdom’s ties to Rome. Papal jurisdiction had been formally nullified by statute several years earlier, with the king named supreme head of England’s Church. The liturgy, too, had been reformed and references to papal authority expunged. The dissolution of the monasteries, and seizure of their riches, was well underway, and Henry had pacified two major rebellions, one in Ireland and the other in the north of England (the so-called Pilgrimage of Grace), as well as celebrating the birth of a son, Edward. The naysayers had been executed for treason, chief among them John Fisher, bishop of Rochester – latterly made cardinal of the Roman Church – and the loyalty of most of the population commandeered through a series of compulsory and strictly enforced oaths. Nor had the king shrunk from symbolic acts of defiance against Rome, such as the desecration of the shrine of Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, prominent 12th-century martyr for the rights of the Church, in September 1538 – the immediate catalyst for Paul’s bull.

What if the papacy had acted sooner? How might things have turned out had the excommunication come at an earlier point? For excommunication, especially when twinned with deposition, was a formidable weapon in Rome’s arsenal against recalcitrant princes. Perhaps the most notable example of a pope compelling the submission of a monarch had been Gregory VII’s treatment of the German king Henry IV. Declared excommunicate and deposed in 1076 for promoting his own candidate for a bishopric in preference to a papal appointee, the king had been given a year to repent or else he would never regain the throne. Henry IV’s abject surrender to Gregory VII at Canossa in 1077 became the stuff of legend. Closer to home, Pope Innocent III’s excommunication of King John in 1209, a year after the imposition of an interdict on England – an ecclesiastical sanction which would deprive all English people of receiving the spiritual benefit of participation in the sacraments – had led to John submitting not once but twice in 1213, and professing himself Rome’s feudal vassal. While the Roman See’s power had subsequently been contested, by the early 16th century the papacy had emerged victorious from a lengthy struggle for superiority against the institution of a general council of bishops that had rumbled on since the Western Schism of the later 14th century. So, although the spread of Luther’s heresy was putting Western Christendom to the test even as the Ottoman menace grew, there remained scope for the papacy to use the coercive means at its disposal to bring its wayward son to book.

This Rome spectacularly failed to do in time and decisively enough. The potency of Paul III’s eventual excommunication of Henry was fatally undermined by the tortuous process through which it finally came to pass. It took eight years, two popes, two printed bulls, and countless admonitions. As a result, rather than bringing Henry and his kingdom back into the fold, the papacy may have actually expedited England’s secession from the Roman Catholic Church.

Threats and briefs

The crisis began with Henry’s ardent desire for a divorce from his wife since 1509, Katherine of Aragon. The marriage had not produced the desired male heir and Henry’s infatuation with Anne Boleyn only made him more impatient. Even so, he had hoped to solve this marital dilemma by working with, rather than against, the papacy. In the spring of 1529 he submitted a case for an annulment for consideration by a special trial presided over by the pope’s legate. Henry was confident that the trial would declare in his favour: Katherine had formerly been the wife of his late older brother Arthur, and therefore, Henry argued, his marriage had violated the scriptural injunction of Leviticus 20:21 prohibiting such unions.

It was only in March 1534 that the trial, which had been advoked to Rome in July 1529, resolved that Katherine and Henry’s marriage was, in fact, legitimate. In the meantime Pope Clement VII, aware of Henry’s impatience to wed Anne Boleyn, had tried to prevent the English king from taking matters into his own hands. The pope sent a public letter, or ‘brief’, to Henry in March 1530 ordering him to treat Katherine ‘with marital affection in all things’ until the legatine trial had concluded. If Henry did not, Clement warned, he would incur the penalty of excommunication and his realm would suffer the pains of an interdict.

Henry had ceased treating Katherine with ‘marital affection’ by the end of 1531. The queen’s supporters were only too eager to point this out: in October the imperial ambassador to England suggested to Katherine’s nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, that, since Henry was now ‘almost entirely divorced from the Queen, and cuts himself off from all conversation with her’, he had violated the terms of the pope’s letter and should be publicly declared an excommunicate. Such public declaration was indispensable for the measure to come into full effect. But Clement continued to procrastinate. Rather than announce excommunication he instead sent a series of further admonitory briefs to Henry over the following years, which simply reiterated the threat, sounding less and less convincing with each successive missive. Only in July 1533, after Henry had ordered his new archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, to pronounce his marriage to Katherine invalid and crowned Anne Boleyn queen, did Clement finally bestir himself. He issued a definitive sentence of excommunication, confirming that all the censures threatened thus far would now come to pass. And yet, the pope still gave Henry an out, granting him a grace period of two months before the excommunication would formally come into effect – ostensibly to give Henry time to atone and return to Katherine. This period of grace was subsequently extended, then extended again, until the matter appears to have fallen off the papal agenda altogether as Clement grew ill and died in September 1534.

Henry’s excommunication thus remained ipso facto suspended. Yet the threat that the pope would act – a threat now looming for more than three years – had already caused serious repercussions in England. Some of Henry’s subjects had become increasingly restive. In early 1533 MPs expressed their concerns that excommunication might provoke civil war, or at least disrupt the lucrative wool trade. Such concerns were shared by merchants, who lobbied Henry in December 1533 for assurances that they would not be ‘molested’ in their dealings with Europe. Despite such fears, the regime had set about reshaping England’s relationship with Rome: since 1532 a slew of increasingly uncompromising statutes had begun undermining papal authority until, in November 1534, Henry, not the pope, was confirmed as supreme head of the English Church. Anyone daring to dissent was set to incur charges of treason; oaths requiring acceptance of the new religious settlement were imposed on all adult males; and worship purged of all mentions of the pope and papal authority. Simultaneously, a propaganda campaign involving preaching, pamphlets, and prints sought to win the population’s hearts and minds.

Round two

It was this new anti-papal crusade, rather than the original matter of Henry’s marital affairs, which revived the case for excommunication in Rome. The ultimate provocation came with Henry’s beheading of Cardinal Fisher in June 1535. At long last, it seemed, the papacy was poised to take action. Before the year was out the new pope, Paul III, prepared a bull of excommunication – a formal document bearing the papal seal. This bull was far more radical than the earlier sentence of 1533. First, there was its unprecedented length: it was close to 4,000 words. Second, Henry was not the only target; the bull was also aimed at the king’s unnamed aiders and abettors – Cromwell, Cranmer, and all others working to subvert Rome’s primacy. Third, Paul not only excommunicated but deposed Henry, melding Rome’s spiritual and temporal jurisdictions. And last, the original grounds for excommunication – the king’s marriage to Anne – became something of a side-show to Henry’s seizure of the headship of the Church and his brutal hounding of clerical opponents, notably Fisher.

Fierce in its provisions and blunt in its condemnation, the bull was nonetheless rhetorically unstable. It opened with a grandiose assertion of the pope’s secular power as ‘the chief over all the kings of the universe, and all peoples obtaining dominion’, something that would scarcely endear the pontiff to Charles V or Francis I, king of France, who were already concerned about papal overreach. But, despite such assertions, Paul was anxious to vindicate and explain away Rome’s chronic vacillation in the face of Henry’s ever greater impudence. Veering uneasily between self-assured and self-exculpatory, his tone betrayed the disputes and competing interests that had so far frustrated public proscription of England’s contumacious prince. The urge to punish Henry remained in tension with sheer disbelief at the depths of his depravity and an inclination to grant him yet another chance for amendment. Once the bull had been promulgated he would have 90 days to repent before it came into effect.

However, this brief moment of papal decisiveness was followed by more inaction. The bull of excommunication, despite being printed, was never promulgated. Some hoped that Henry might seek reconciliation with Rome, especially following the deaths of both wives – Katherine’s of natural causes in January and Anne’s by the executioner’s sword in May 1536. But the king showed no signs of slowing down in his religious innovations: he had begun dissolving and expropriating the monasteries in 1535 and he worked (albeit intermittently) to forge entente with the Holy Roman Empire’s Lutheran princes and cities, the Schmalkaldic League.

It was only the robbery of the shrine of Thomas of Canterbury, a saint venerated across Europe, in September 1538, coupled with the (possibly apocryphal) report that Henry had exhumed and burnt the saint’s bones, that saw an end to the eight-year-long saga. In December 1538 Henry was at long last excommunicated in a new bull. This bull encased the old one, almost like a relic, within an up-to-date frame consisting of a preamble and postscript, both rife with violent medical metaphors and far more insulting towards Henry than any prior papal missive. The preamble recounted the circumstances leading up to the creation of the 1535 bull, notably the devastation of the English Church and judicial murder of Fisher. The postscript explained why, rather than issuing it, Paul had instead given in to the counsel – or blandishments – of unnamed Christian princes and repeatedly extended mercy to the royal recidivist. Now, though, the wait for retribution was finally over – Henry’s ‘new crimes’ had made sure of that. Should he and his accomplices remain obdurate, the pope demanded that Christian rulers invade England and oust the heretical regime, a timely call to arms given the recent diplomatic rapprochement between France and the Holy Roman Empire. Aware that publishing and disseminating the bull would be difficult, the pope decreed that limited circulation and pared down ceremonies would suffice. Overall, the 1538 bull was yet more rhetorically uneven than its 1535 predecessor. For all the bravado and vituperation, it read like a chronicle of papal incompetence and failure.

Dither and delay

How are we to explain the papacy’s continued vacillation on the matter? The delay was not entirely unprecedented. Excommunication was intended to be medicinal rather than punitive – a vehicle for bringing the recalcitrant back into the fold. For that reason, it was not unusual for the papacy to give multiple warnings. The threat alone, it was hoped, would be enough.

But in the case of Henry VIII this principle was stretched well beyond breaking point. Henry had shown absolutely no signs of contrition. On the contrary, he had become increasingly brazen, not only in marrying Anne Boleyn, but also in undermining and ultimately overthrowing papal power. It seems more likely, then, that the papacy’s delay in declaring Henry’s excommunication was rooted in more worldly considerations. European politics in this period was dominated by the two early modern superpowers of Spain and France, which were either at war, or teetering on the edge of it, for most of the 1530s. While its spiritual authority to excommunicate whoever it chose was supreme, the papacy relied upon the co-operation of temporal rulers to disseminate its bulls, and to effect any trade embargoes or depositions it sought to impose. Throughout the 1530s neither Charles nor Francis could be counted on in this respect. Charles was eager, in theory, to punish the king who had treated his aunt, Katherine of Aragon, so disgracefully. However, he was wary of disrupting lucrative trade with England, and fearful of provoking war with Henry at a time when he was already preoccupied with bellicose Lutheran princes in Germany and the threat of Ottoman aggression to the east. Francis I, for his part, straddled the line between wanting to be seen as a loyal son of Rome, while also entertaining the hope of a military alliance with England to recover the Duchy of Milan from Charles V in Italy. As a result, both sides blew hot and cold in their support of the excommunication throughout the 1530s.

It may well be, therefore, that the papacy was reluctant to go through with excommunicating Henry until it could be sure of the support of France and Spain in helping execute it. But such a moment never arrived. Even in 1538 when Paul did, finally, take the plunge and promulgate the bull of excommunication, Francis and Charles both failed to follow through on the bull’s threats of embargo and invasion. All of which raises the question: would the papacy have been better off acting decisively earlier on, even if it meant acting alone?

Had the papacy acted on its threats more promptly, would Henry have thought twice before proceeding with his reformation of the English Church? If the hammer had fallen as early as 1531, when the king banished his wife from court, would Henry have been cowed? Or, if it had come in 1533, when he married Anne, would he have stepped back from the breach? Did the first, and then second, pope’s tardiness in disciplining Henry embolden him to proceed with ever more radical reforms? Did the papacy squander the opportunity to change the course of English history?

Some contemporaries certainly thought so. One of Henry’s most vocal religious opponents, the English nobleman and cardinal Reginald Pole, was a key figure pushing for the king’s excommunication throughout the 1530s. Writing to an Italian friend in March 1536, Pole explained pithily: ‘If [Henry] had been shut out from the Church when this matter was first begun at Rome, he would still be in the Church.’ Perhaps this was simply wishful thinking. However, a speedy excommunication in the early 1530s would certainly have increased pressure on Henry to conform to the papacy’s demands. One of the principal reasons cited by historians for why Henry did not encounter more domestic opposition to his religious changes is that many English people were confused as to whether the king’s piecemeal alterations to the religious landscape represented a departure from the Catholic faith. Swift papal affirmation that they did might therefore have inspired more popular opposition. Even the rumour that Henry was about to be excommunicated seems to have been enough for some: in September 1533 one Sussex priest, William Inold, instructed the people of Rye that, should an excommunication be promulgated, their duty was to the pope, not the king. Had the excommunication been issued in advance of the Pilgrimage of Grace – the more than 40,000-strong rebellion against the king and his religious changes that engulfed the north of England in late 1536 – might the rebellion have grown strong enough to force Henry to change course? Rising against one’s prince was a capital sin. The rebels understood they were hazarding their immortal souls. Would more of the Catholic nobility (who could have provided the leadership the rebels sorely needed) have felt confident joining them had they been sure the pope was on their side? Might the Pilgrimage of Grace, the gravest of all Tudor rebellions, have succeeded had Henry been officially censured and deposed by God’s vicegerent on earth?

Missed opportunities

By the time the excommunication was at last promulgated in December 1538 it was too little, too late. By this point, Henry’s newfound religious authority was secure: he had brutally quashed the Pilgrimage of Grace and compelled potential opponents, notably his bishops, to swear oaths of loyalty to him as the new supreme head of the English Church. The heightened possibility of foreign invasion as a result of the excommunication certainly worried Henry: in 1539 he had his propagandists produce numerous printed tracts and sermons decrying the warmongering of the ‘wycked tyraunte of Rome’, while simultaneously improving England’s defences. This fear of invasion may even have led Henry to temper some of his religious policies: historians often refer to the years 1538-47 as the ‘conservative phase’ of Henry’s reformation – a period during which he slowed the pace of religious change, and even began rolling it back in some areas. In 1539, for instance, the Act of Six Articles, later castigated by Protestants as ‘the whip with six strings’, vigorously reaffirmed the traditionalist line on a range of key doctrinal issues, including transubstantiation (though the word itself was omitted) and the necessity of clerical celibacy. However, there could be no rolling back of the royal supremacy itself: England’s break with Rome was by now too well entrenched, and Henry liked his expanded authority too much.

It is difficult, therefore, not to see the repeated delays in issuing Henry’s excommunication as a missed opportunity for the papacy. But was it even more than that? Did the recurrent act of threatening excommunication, but drawing back from executing it, actually have a radicalising effect on the English king, pushing him to go further, and faster, than he might otherwise have done? There is a case to be made that Henry’s efforts to expunge every trace of papal authority from England were supercharged by his fear that the pope was planning to use that same authority to turn the English people against him. By denuding the pope of his power and portraying him not as a pious, spiritual shepherd, but as an avaricious and power-hungry prince, Henry diminished the pope’s sway over his people and thereby robbed excommunication of much of its potential sting. In repeatedly threatening to call on European princes to take up their arms against Henry, the pope only helped prove the king’s arguments for him. England’s break with Rome was certainly fuelled by Henry’s lust, his avarice, and his egotism. But the papacy’s (in)action helped fan the flames.

Paulina Kewes is Professor of English Literature at Jesus College, Oxford. Frederick Smith is Career Development Fellow in Early Modern History at Lincoln College, Oxford.