Henry VIII

After Tyndale prayed, Lord, open the King of England's eyes. Two years later, the King decreed, you shall discourage no man from the reading or hearing of the Bible, but shall expressly provoke, stir, and exhort every person to read the same as that which is the very lively Word of God. And so it was, remarkably, that the King decreed that English Bibles would be placed in every church.

Hi, I'm Nathan W Bingham, and thank you for joining us today on Renewing Your Mind. Proverbs 21 tells us that the Lord turns the King's heart wherever he wills. You may have heard of King Henry VIII and his six wives. How did the Lord use the messiness of King Henry's reign to fuel reformation in England?

Here's Dr Michael Reeves. Well, to understand the reformation in England, one thing you really need in peace is you need to know about the King of England, Henry VIII. And his dates, and dates I want to be a bit flexible on.

If you find dates an encumbrance, don't worry about them. You'll get a flow of the story anyway, but if they're helpful, his dates as King were he reigned from 1509 to 1547. And what a reign. Henry VIII, his story is an extraordinary one, and there are many complicated twists and turns.

So it gets a little complex at this point. And it's been televised so many times because his reign really was like a soap opera. Henry was an autocratic ruler with a fearsome, often lethal temper and energy like a coiled spring, and not much more predictability. Henry was also deeply religious. He would serve the priest at mass himself. Personally, he went to three masses a day.

And for his adamant support of the Pope, he was awarded the Golden Rose, the highest award that the Pope could confer. And so it's unsurprising that when he first heard of Luther, he opposed him. And with the help of a few willing ghostwriters, in 1521, he wrote a polemic against Luther called A Defence of the Seven Sacraments. Protestants, Lutherans were beginning to talk of two, baptism and communion. And Henry, like a traditional Catholic, was wanting to say, no, there are five more sacraments, confirmation, penance, marriage, ordination, and last rites. And these were all means of God's grace in the Roman Catholic system. And this Defence of the Seven Sacraments, Henry dedicated to the Pope.

And for this, the Pope awarded him what would become a most ironic title, Defender of the Faith. And thus, Henry was hardly a bright hope for the Reformation. Then he hit trouble with his marriage. Aged 17, Henry had rather reluctantly got married to his elder brother, now dead elder brother's widow, Catherine of Aragon. And after a few years and numerous miscarriages, babies dying soon after birth, it became clear to Henry, Catherine was incapable of delivering a son. Now, she'd borne him a daughter, Mary, in 1516, but Henry wasn't after a family. He was after an heir, a male heir. England had just gone through a civil war, the Wars of the Roses, and Henry needed a successor to ensure there was no new civil war, no new doubts about who was truly king.

He needed a son. Now, the obvious solution to someone in Henry's situation was to get another wife, one who could deliver a son. And the usual form, this was usual form, for men in Henry's situation was to find a fault with the marriage that you're in, to get it declared illegal, and then get it annulled. Henry didn't have to look hard to find a reason to get it annulled, because Leviticus 20, verse 21 says, if a man marries his brother's wife, it is an act of impurity. He will be childless. And Henry considered he was childless.

Mary didn't count. And so this seemed to him to be proof that his marriage was illicit. Now, the reason Henry knew that verse was because that had been the very verse that had been a problem when he first got married to Catherine of Aragon. But back then, the pope, Pope Julius II, had very kindly removed the scriptural prohibition with a special papal dispensation. Henry needed to get the new pope, that pope had died, the new pope, Clement VII, to undo the previous pope's dispensation. Feel the complexity building? Yes, it does get a little complex around here.

But here you see an issue. The first, Pope Julius II, clearly believed that he as pope could nullify a scriptural command. The question now was, well, you can nullify God's word, but can a pope nullify a previous pope's word? Now, usually the cogs of church law could be oiled to accommodate a powerful king like Henry. The problem was Catherine, Queen Catherine herself, because she insisted her first marriage had never been consummated, meaning that her marriage to Henry was straightforwardly legal.

That original papal dispensation hadn't been necessary. Her marriage to Henry was straightforwardly legitimate. Catherine's claiming it's very simple.

Their marriage is legal. Henry is saying, no, it's not. And Henry was not a man easily stopped. In fact, quite the opposite, when his eye fell upon the fascinating and nubile young Anne Boleyn, he became relentless in his bid to switch Catherine for her, a young lady who should be able to provide him with a son. So he tried diplomatic pressure on the pope.

That didn't work. He tried squeezing the English clergy in the hope that the pope would crack and give in to his demands. Then at that time, he set about his army of scholars with this task. He wanted his scholars to prove that he was right, and second, that the pope had no right to stop him.

And it was this tactic that came up trumps, because his scholars surpassed themselves. They reminded Henry of an old legend that kings of England had loved for a long time. That, apparently, and assuredly, they told him, Joseph of Arimathea, possibly with Jesus himself, had planted the first church in England at Glastonbury. And so while the church in Rome had been planted by a disciple, Peter, the first church had been planted before that in England, perhaps by Jesus himself, meaning that while all other countries should submit to Rome, England preceded Rome and was thus independent of Rome, the church therefore not being dependent on the pope but on the king, conveniently. So from 1532, a number of laws began to be passed to bring practices in line with this reality, making the church in England increasingly independent of the pope and dependent on the king. The next year, Henry managed to find himself an archbishop of Canterbury who was willing to marry him or willing to validate Henry's marriage to Anne, which he'd secretly gone through with the year before.

And the following year, 1534, Henry got what he'd been after. In 1534, a parliamentary act declared, the act of supremacy this was, declared Henry was supreme head of the church in England, a magnificent office previously occupied by the pope. Now, you could think this departure from Rome and the fact that anyone who was loyal to Rome still in England was persecuted now, you could think this is a Protestant reformation.

But while it was a break with Rome, it was not a Protestant reformation. Ever since Henry had written his defense of the seven sacraments, he and Luther had kept up a bitter war of open letters against each other. And to seal King Henry's hatred of Luther, Luther had opposed his marriage to Anne.

Henry was never going to have time for Luther or Lutheranism. Instead, the king made it quite clear he would not be departing from any traditional Catholic doctrine. It was simply that he was refusing to acknowledge the pope's supremacy in England. But having once used the Bible to argue the case for the annulment of his marriage against the pope, it was now hard to resist the claim that the Bible was a higher authority than the pope. And those who'd been prepared to help Henry in his break with Rome were often evangelical in their convictions. Sir Thomas Cranmer, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, he had to be recalled from Germany. He'd been in Lutheran territory. And a sign of his budding evangelicalism was he'd got married while he was there. This was illegal for a priest in England. And a sign of the strength of his conviction, he kept his wife when recalled to England to be Archbishop.

And it was said, because he had to keep this secret, that he had a special chest made for Mrs. Cranmer with air holes in it so that she could accompany him on her travels. And some have seen her as a minor martyr of the Reformation for all those times she's packed upside down. Another key figure of evangelicalism in England at the time was the king's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell. Sir Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cromwell, the chief minister, not to be confused with Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England a century later. Now, Thomas Cromwell was effectively given all the power over the church that the pope had previously had, under the king, of course. And then there was Queen Anne herself, who distributed large quantities of evangelical literature, even introducing her husband to some of it. And while Anne was queen, a number of the old Catholic bishops died out, and with her command of the king's ear, a number of evangelicals were appointed to key bishoprics. And so with Thomas Cranmer, Thomas Cromwell, Queen Anne in place, Henry's changes weren't a Protestant Reformation themselves, but there were these well-placed evangelicals ready to use them for evangelical ends.

The trouble was, as both evangelicals and Catholics found out, the king's favour, and thus all influence, could be removed with terrifying suddenness. When Anne married the king, she found herself pregnant really quite quickly, and thus she enjoyed a lovely honeymoon time in the king's goodwill. Then it was found out, when she delivered the baby, she'd given birth to a girl, Elizabeth. Henry could not have been more horrified, for he was thinking, what had it all been for?

What had all his battles with pope and church been for, and he's got another girl? Upon hearing the news, Henry is said to have galloped from Greenwich and Anne down to rural Wiltshire, there to drown his sorrows with an old courtier, Sir John Seymour, who had an attractive daughter called Jane. And the Seymour family were very happy to fuel rumours about Anne, who was now starting to fall from Henry's favour, and her fall started gathering speed, because she was pregnant again, but then she miscarried a boy.

The worst thing she could have done. It began to be whispered she was having numerous affairs, she was dabbling in witchcraft, that she was plotting to poison various members of the royal family. It was all absolutely absurd, but quite enough for Henry. Anne, incapable of bearing a boy, was arrested, found guilty of treason and beheaded. The next day, Henry was betrothed to Jane Seymour, and ten days later, they were married.

He wasn't that distraught, clearly. Now, Jane wasn't queen for long, but for this reason, she died from complications in childbirth. But Henry would always look back on Jane Seymour, Queen Jane, his third wife, as the only wife he truly loved, because she bore him the longed-for son and heir, Edward. Now, it had all added up to being an expensive few years for Henry, and his empty treasury was showing the strain. And so, Henry began looking at all those monasteries scattered around England, and there were a lot of them, hundreds of them, the combined rents of them, totting up to something really worth having.

And many of them were falling into ruins and only sustained by gross irregularities, and so egged on by Thomas Cromwell. Henry began the process of dissolving these monasteries. Now, this was quite a popular move, because there was widespread irritation at the privileges of the clergy, and the wealthy were very happy to buy up all this nice monastic land at knock-down prices. And many of the monks and nuns seemed relieved.

Many of them now married each other. Others were content with being pensioned off nicely or becoming parish clergy, local pastors. Now, that move to dissolve the monasteries might have been intended as nothing more than a royal smash-and-grab by Henry. But the effect was, now that the wealthy had bought up monastic land, there was no going back, because the ruling classes were now committed to Henry's reformation.

They weren't going to give back that land. There weren't going to be monasteries again, and that meant effectively weed-killering the seedbeds of Catholicism in England. And at the same time, Henry was beginning to enjoy his role as the liberator of the English church from the popes. Romesh abuses, pilgrimages, relics, images of saints that made money for the church, they were slated for destruction, or worse, laughter. So when the Abbey of Boxley in Kent was shut down, the revered Rude of Boxley, a famous crucifix that would jiggle excitedly when anyone made a generous donation to the Abbey, this was uncovered to be its miraculous movements, attributable not to God, but to levers, wires, and a concealed monk. It was sent to London, where it was greeted with howls of laughter, sharp axes, and large bonfire. And so you see where weed-killer is being poured out on old Catholicism.

People are beginning to laugh at it. Very powerful movement. And at the same time, fertilizer was being poured out on the thirsty, young evangelical movement. And so two years after Tyndale prayed, Lord opened the King of England's eyes. Two years later, the King decreed, you shall discourage no man from the reading or hearing of the Bible, but shall expressly provoke, stir, and exhort every person to read the same as that which is the very lively word of God. It was decreed that an English Bible be placed in every church. Now, traditional Catholics were shocked by this. What had so recently been an offense to merit, burning at the stake was now encouraged behavior.

But on the whole, the law was received with red-hot enthusiasm. Six Bibles in English were placed in St. Paul's Cathedral in London. And crowds flocked round these Bibles and flocked round those who were able to read and able to read loudly enough to shout out above the crowds. And priests began to complain of how even during the sermon, lay people were shouting out the Bible, and people were listening to the Bible being read rather than the sermon. Private Bible reading became much more widespread as a feature of ordinary life. Even the illiterate learned to read just so that they could hear the very lively word of God.

And once that happened, it was really very hard to go back. Now, butchers and bakers were reading the Bible. They were coming to new convictions. They were even daring to disagree with the clergy over it.

With Bible in hand, ordinary people were demanding to know where their priest got his ideas from. But Henry's reign was not a smooth and even transition from Catholicism to Protestantism. Henry could go through theological moods like he went through wives. After Jane Seymour's death, Thomas Cromwell tried to set him up with a Lutheran Princess Anne of Cleves when Henry finally met her. He was so repulsed by her physically. He called her that Flanders mare, and he refused to consummate the marriage, and it was annulled very quickly.

And Cromwell paid for that fiasco with his head. Then after Lutheran Anne, the Catholic Howard family put forward Catherine as their brightest young star. This turned out to be a disaster of a marriage. They got married, but young Catherine wasn't satisfied with a husband who was obese and over 30 years older than her and pustulous. And she was discovered having an affair, a monumentally stupid thing to do with a king like this.

And with lightning speed, she followed Anne Boleyn to the execution block in the Tower of London. So from Luther and Anne of Cleves through Catholic Catherine Howard, finally Henry turned to the reform-minded Catherine Parr, who, when Henry died, must have been one of those wives relieved to outlive her husband. So you see, Henry, just as he went through Catholic and Protestant wives, he both legislated for and against Protestantism and for and against Catholicism. Now, the events of July 30, 1540 make clear Henry's otherwise rather confusing views. On that day, six men were executed. Three Catholics were hanged for the treason of denying Henry's supremacy over the Church in England.

Three evangelicals were also burned for heresy. It was a brutal demonstration of what Henry wanted. He did not want England to become Protestant, but nor did he want England to be Roman Catholic. Henry wanted an English Catholicism stripped of all Roman ties, Roman corruptions. Henry's problem was, having once allowed the Bible to critique the Pope and Church practice, having allowed the Bible to be read by ordinary people, even for a few short years, it was almost impossible to stop where he stopped.

Completely unintentionally, Henry had unleashed a whirlwind, and it could only be restrained for so long. . Seeing the Lord's sovereign hand over history is a great encouragement and stabilizer for Christians today, isn't it? A reminder that no matter what we face, whether in government or society, the Lord is in control, and Jesus is building his Church, which is why I believe Dr. Reeve's series can be so helpful for Christians, especially today. This series is 12 messages in full, and it will give you the opportunity to study some of these great moments in Church history, and also remind you why it's so important that we learn our family history. You can give your gift today at renewingyourmind.org or by calling us at 800 435 4343.

These 12 messages are across two DVDs, but not only will we send that to you, we'll give you digital access to both the messages and the digital study guide. So give your gift today at renewingyourmind.org. . As Michael Reeve said today, fertilizer was being poured out on Evangelicalism and Protestantism, even after King Henry's death. That is until the reign of Queen Mary. Tomorrow, learn why she's now known as Bloody Mary, here on Renewing Your Mind. . .