Chris Bambery looks at the politics behind the clashes of Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII shown in the television series The Mirror and the Light

The current TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, the third of her trilogy of novels looking at the life of Thomas Cromwell, longtime senior minister to Henry VIII, takes us back to the England of the Reformation, a turbulent and fascinating time. Change was in the air. New ideas were spreading, not least regarding religion and the dominance of Roman Catholicism.

Earlier, at the height of feudalism, the Catholic Church had a virtual monopoly on knowledge. It was also the key ideological prop of the feudal order. By the early sixteenth century, things had changed. Serfdom had long ended. More merchants, lawyers and artisans could read and write, and books could be printed for widespread circulation.

In the fourteenth century, a priest, John Wycliffe, translated the Bible into English. After he died, the Catholic Church declared him a heretic, dug up his corpse and burned it. But he helped spawn the Lollards, a proto-Protestant grouping who denied the sacrament, confession, baptism and clerical celibacy, attacked the wealth and trappings of the Catholic Church and argued clerics should not be involved in affairs of the state. Accordingly, they were suppressed, and, if discovered by the authorities, forced to abjure their beliefs or be burnt at the stake.

In 1527, a German monk, Martin Luther, attacked the Church’s sale of indulgences, an absolution for sin supposedly giving holy forgiveness. Luther insisted that forgiveness could only be for God to grant and these assurances, bought for money, were false. He followed this up by attacking Rome’s obscene wealth and so Rome excommunicated him. Luther translated the Bible into German and started the Reformation, which would form the breakaway groups of various Protestant churches.

The politics of royal divorce

What everyone knows about King Henry VIII, King of England from 1509 to 1547 was that he had six wives. His first wife, Catherine of Aragon, had born him a daughter, the future Queen Mary, but Henry wanted a son, not simply because of sexism but because a male heir was more likely to ensure a peaceful succession. He was also infatuated with one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting, Ann Boleyn, who would not give into his sexual demands unless they were married.

Henry petitioned the Pope in Rome for divorce. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry’s Lord Chancellor and the most senior church figure in England, was told to ensure it was granted.

Despite the supposed sanctity of marriage, Pope Clement VII had granted divorces to a number of monarchs desirous, like of Henry, of making a new marriage to secure a male heir; to Henry IV of Castile for instance. He had also granted Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret Tudor, widowed Queen of Scotland, two divorces.

But Henry picked a bad time. In 1527, the Pope, France and several Italian city states had gone to war with the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who was also king of Spain and its empire. The imperial forces defeated its enemies, but its army was unpaid and restless. To prevent mutiny and to secure the means to pay them, Charles marched on Rome, took the city and sacked it bloodily. The Pope skulked in the Castel Sant’Angelo, but he was effectively under the control of Charles V.

Catherine of Aragon was Charles’s aunt. Clement could not anger him further so, eventually, in 1533, he refused to grant Henry a divorce. Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, dissolved the marriage. Henry now developed the principle of royal supremacy over the Church in England, and, accordingly, subordinated ecclesiastical jurisdiction to the civil authority. 

This is the subject matter of Wolf Hall, the first in the trilogy, in which Thomas Cromwell leaves Wolseley’s service after the Cardinal was sacked. Sent to be Bishop of York he died on route to London to face a treason charge.

As in real life, Cromwell was a self-made man from an extremely poor and brutal childhood in Putney, on the Thames outside London, who had made his way to Italy, where he fought as a mercenary, before entering the household of the Frescobaldi family of Florentine bankers. Later, he worked as a cloth merchant in the Low Countries, where he was familiar with the  English Merchant Adventurers, allowing him to develop useful contacts. He spoke and read French and Tuscan, and knew Latin and some ancient Greek.

So, when Cromwell returned to England, he had lived in the two most advanced centres of Europe both economically, and in learning and ideas, Florence and Antwerp. He was very much aware of the new religious ideas of Martin Luther and others involved in the Reformation. Antwerp was home to many English exiles fleeing persecution from the then staunchly Catholic Henry VIII.

Reformation from above

Cromwell was taken up by Henry, becoming his most trusted advisor and Lord Privy Seal. At the time of the break with Rome, Cromwell’s mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, was determined to bring  England closer into European affairs to enhance its power, Cromwell saw the schism with Rome as a means to forge an alliance with Germany and Scandinavia that would reconfigure the whole power structure of Europe.

But Cromwell theologically was also far more inclined to the new Protestantism than Henry. Cromwell’s ‘cause’, as he calls it, was to publish a translation of the Bible so that all in England could see what is not in it: popes, monks, and counterfeit relics used by priests to fleece the poor.

But in this he was ahead of Henry. So, let us look at the Reformation under Henry VIII. The Ten Articles, enacted in 1536, the first set of doctrinal regulations to be established by the English clergy under King Henry VIII, were designed as a compromise between traditional Catholic doctrine and new Protestant ideas.

Henry wished to maintain a middle ground between the two. So, the Ten Articles affirmed the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, according to Catholic belief, but also endorsed the idea of justification by faith alone, a key principle of the new Protestantism. Yet for many of the King’s advisers, these were too Protestant and that led to the introduction of the Six Articles in 1539. These were more conservative and Catholic in nature. They reaffirmed doctrines such as transubstantiation, the practice of private masses, and clerical celibacy, which reversed some of the more Protestant-inclined parts of the Ten Articles. The Six Articles marked a significant shift back towards Catholic doctrine, reflecting the King’s changing religious and political priorities.

So, during Henry’s reign, the Church of England remained in practice Catholic; the key difference with the Church of Rome being that royal authority replaced that of the Pope. Through the Ten Articles and the Six Articles, the major points of Catholic dogma were retained in the Church of England.

All of this reflected the shifting religious and political battlelines in Europe, where Henry saw France as the key enemy and the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, Charles V, as a desirable ally. In Germany, in particular, the centre of that Empire, the balance between which of its many states identified as Lutheran or Catholic was fluid.

Radical and conservative Reformations

Henry sought to secure the loyalty of the nobility by granting them something they had long coveted. He dissolved the religious houses, placed the lands and buildings under royal ownership and then sold them off, in the main to the gentry landowners.

Henry was also looking with concern at Germany where the Reformation had unleashed class war. The German Peasant’s Revolt of 1524-1525 arose from the depths of society, representing a challenge to the entire feudal order, claiming Luther’s inspiration. The manifesto of the revolt, the Memmingen Charter, demanded an end to feudal dues, to encroachments on common land, to arbitrary justice, and to serfdom.

Going much further than Luther, the radical Protestant leader Thomas Müntzer declared:

‘Our sovereigns and rulers are at the bottom of all usury, thievery, and robbery … They oppress the poor husbandmen and craftsmen.’ However, Luther and the mainstream Protestant leaders denounced this popular revolt and preached obedience to the feudal elites, declaring: ‘Better the death of all peasants than of princes and magistrates.’ Luther’s tract Against the Murdering, Thieving Hordes of the Peasants, encouraged feudal lords to kill peasant rebels ‘just as one must kill a mad dog.’

Henry wanted the books carrying radical ideas banned and destroyed, but was suspicious that Cromwell himself was familiar with them. He was in contact with reformers in Zürich, who were far more radical than Luther, and even he was too radical for Henry.

It was Cromwell who oversaw the marriage with Anne Boleyn, then her divorce and execution, so Henry could marry Jane Seymour. In The Mirror and the Light, Anne’s execution haunts him. From 1536 to 1540, Cromwell was at the peak of his career. The king made him a baron and appointed him the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, an office that gave him even more access to the King. He was also the King’s master secretary and vicegerent, a powerful new position in the English Church. Cromwell had authority over church doctrine and religious policy. He appointed his own officials to oversee church affairs, including the archbishops of Canterbury and York.

In The Mirror and the Light, Jane Seymour notes: ‘It is a thing never seen before. Lord Cromwell is the government, and the church as well.’ But Cromwell also represented new, enlightened ideas.

Transitional times

In Wolf Hall, the profligate Harry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, informs Cromwell that he, Percy, is immune from financial ruin and loss of title by ‘ancient rights’, and because ‘bankers have no armies’. Cromwell muses: ‘How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks … Not from castle walls, but from countinghouses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.’

When Jane Seymour dies, Cromwell is charged with finding Henry a new bride, but Henry is physically decaying; it will not be an easy task. Cromwell is determined to find a Protestant bride and fixes on Ann of Cleves. She was not to Henry’s taste and his anger with Cromwell opens doors to Cromwell’s many enemies among the nobility, but also among the wider population who blame him for heavier taxes.

A large rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace, breaks out in the north seeking a return to Catholicism and targeting Cromwell. The Mirror and the Light sees Cromwell realising the depth of the public’s hatred makes him vulnerable. Is he out of favour with the king? Will his friends remain loyal? Above all, does the king realise Cromwell’s commitment to the new evangelicalism (i.e., Protestantism)?

Expressing his worry that Henry might return to Rome, he tells a supposedly trustworthy female friend: ‘Even if Henry does turn, I will not turn. I am not too old to take a sword in my hand.’ Those words get back to Henry and seal Cromwell’s fate. He would be arrested and charged with treason, heresy, corruption, and plotting to marry the Princess Mary. In The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell tutors Mary in ways to avoid her father’s ire but she was a devout Catholic; he could never have countenanced marrying her and she could never have countenanced marrying a commoner.

In some ways, Cromwell was a man before his time. Henry’s Reformation did not look beyond the maintenance of the royal supremacy and liturgical uniformity. It was a top-down affair compared to Germany, the Low Countries and, later, Scotland.

England under Henry VIII was far less developed than it would be under his daughter Elizabeth and her successors James VI/I and Charles I. The ‘middling sort’, who would be the driving force of the English Revolution, existed, but were largely confined to London and the South East. New forms of commercial agriculture existed there, but on a relatively small scale. Commercial trade too was on a much smaller scale, restricted to Europe. Because Cromwell was a man before his time, his enemies were numerous.

When, in 1559, Elizabeth I ascended the throne of England, the subsequent Elizabethan settlement confirmed the break with Rome. Royal supremacy was restored over the spiritual jurisdiction by the Act of Supremacy of 1559. The Elizabethan English-language Book of Common Prayer and a new set of Thirty-nine Articles established a middle way for the doctrine and ritual of the Church of England.

The Tudor revolution bequeathed a Church of England, a strange breast, which was distanced from Lutheranism and retained much of the old. It retained a semi-Catholic wing and that would be a source of big trouble in the reign of Charles I who wanted to exercise his control over Church affairs in both England and Scotland, something his father, James VI/I, ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’, knew well enough of which to stay clear.