Hi
From the Vatican’s perspective which ecclesiastical laws did Henry VIII break when he broke with the Catholic Church and established the Church of England. I’m specifically looking for ecclesiastical laws in Latin pertaining to the primacy of the Pope and any infractions in denying the Pope primacy and the power to forbid a sovereign from establishing a church?
I look forward to your feedback.
Essentially, Henry’s offence was denying the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome in English church affairs.
Henry, as we all know, wished to annul his marriage of Katherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn, because (a) he had the hots for her, and she wouldn’t put out unless he married her, and (b) if married, she might produce a legitimate male heir, which he desperately wanted.
The canonical basis for seeking an annulment was that Catherine had previously been married to Henry’s older brother Arthur, who died. Catholic canon law forbade a man to marry his sister-in-law. Henry had obtained a dispensation from Rome allowing him to marry Catherine . This dispensation had been given on the basis that the marriage between Catherine and Arthur had never been consummated. (The marriage only lasted a few months; Arthur was 14 when he married and 15 when he died. So Catherine’s testimony that it was not consummated was plausible.)
There were a couple of bases for challenging the validity of Henry’s marriage. First, a pope had no power to dispense from the rule against marrying one’s sister-in-law. (A popular argument with the Protestants, that one.) Secondly, the dispensation was invalid because it had been granted on false pretences; the Arthur-Catherine marriage had been consummated.
Through the usual combination of threats, blandishments and the judicious distribution of patronage, Henry could arrange matters so that any English church court would find in his favour on one or both of these grounds. However such a judgment would inevitably be overturned, if appealed to Rome. Catherine’s nephew, the Emperor Charles V, was influential in Roman church circles.
So Henry got Parliament to pass the Statute in Restraint of Appeals in f1532, forbidding appeals from any English court to the Bishop of Rome.
In January 1533, Henry married Anne, acting on the basis that his marriage to Catherine had been void all along. In May 1533 an English church court ruled that the marriage to Catherine had indeed been void, and the marriage to Anne was valid.
The following year, in 1534, Henry got Parliament to pass the Act of Supremacy, declaring that the monarch was “the only supreme head on Earth of the Church of England”, and effectively stripping the Pope not just of any function in relation to appeals from English church courts, but from any function at all in relation to the English church.
That led to Rome drawing up a decree of excommunication against Henry, though they didn’t make it public at the time because they still hoped to negotiate some kind of compromise or reconciliation.
That never happened. Henry went on to imprison and then execute churchmen and public officialsl who refused to affirm his role as head of the English church. (The Treasons Act 1534 made it high treason to deny the royal supremacy.) He also embarked on a wholesale dissolution of monasteries in England, seizing their land and incomes for the crown.
The final straw was a relatively minor one; Henry had the shrine of St. Thomas Beckett in Canterbury violated, the saints relics destroyed, and the property gifted to the shrine seized. Thomas had been martyered for his opposition to a previous king of England; Henry didn’t like the idea of anyone being venerated for opposing the king.
It was that incident which led to the decision to publish, and bring into effect, the excommunication of Henry VIII.
In terms of documents, on the English side you have the statutes mentioned above. On the Roman side I think the principal document of interest would be the bull of excommunication of Henry VIII, since that will list the rules he has broken and the way he has broken them. But I don’t know if the text of that bull is online.
Thanks UDS. A few questions for you:
- Did the RC Church grant annulments/divorce based solely on the non-issuance of a male heir?
2.How did the Church did the Church distinguish between grounds for an annulment and grounds for divorce. I’m well aware that kings often sought annulments if their wives didn’t produce male heirs.
- In theory no. In practice, for Kings, yes.
- Divorce was IIRC at the time forbidden under canon law. An annulment was a declaration that the marriage had never been valid in the first place, with royalty, a polite fiction to enable a dissolution of an now undesirable marriage, while maintaining the whole no divorce rule.
I would like to repeat what I said in an earlier thread.
[QUOTE=Moi]
Clement VII was in a right pickle.
It was the start of the Reformation.
Queen Katherine was the aunt of Charles V, the most powerful non Ottoman man in the world.
Henry was the King of a large and important country.
Anyway he ruled, he was properly fucked. His solution was to delay as long as possible, hoping that one or the other party would drop dead. His prayers were not answered.
[/QUOTE]
To sum up. The legal and practical precedents were well established. The issue was ultimately political.
Still is. Divorce is a civil procedure, not a canonical one.
No. That might be someone’s reason for seeking one, but it wouldn’t be grounds for granting one. You’d have to come up with some other grounds.
The terms “divorce” and “annulment” were used loosely; there wasn’t the sharp distinction that lawyers and canonists make today. At the time, I think pretty well all (Western?) Christians were agreed that there was no power to dissolve a valid, sacramental marriage, but there was dispute over (a) on what grounds you could legitimately take a view that there had never been a valid sacramental marriage to begin with, and (b) who had the standing or jurisdiction to made such a decision. (The church? The civil magistrates? The couple themselves?)
It didn’t help matters that there was much less emphasis at that time on a marriage ceremony, and there was little or nothing in the way of marriage registration. What constituted a valid marriage was the free exchange, between a couple both of whom had the capacity to marry and were free to marry, and who were not within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity, of mutual promises of love and affection, followed by the consummation of that marriage. A church ceremony was common, but not necessary. Witnesses were desirable, but not essential. So if, years later, unhappy differences arose and an investigation was made, the investigation would focus on things like - did both parties act freely, or was one coerced? Were they both free to marry, or was one perhaps pledged to someone else? And in the absence of registration, witnesses, etc, you’d be largely reliant on the testimony of the couple and inferences drawn from the circumstances of the case.
Like heck there wasn’t. Many people today can’t explain the difference between manslaughter and murder either, or between gamma radiation and X-rays; doesn’t mean that there isn’t one or that those terms won’t be explained except to the loftiest of scholars, it does mean that many people who’ve actually heard the explanation weren’t paying that much attention.
Writings of the day, including from the participants in the Henry VIII saga, routinely used the term “divorce” to describe what Henry was seeking, when, as indicated, the “proper” term would be “annulment”. This is the point UDS is making, I believe. In modern terms, “divorce” has a very precise meaning, one not ascribed to what we call an “annulment.” In the day, the word “divorce” was used more liberally. But, yes, the underlying legal issue was clear.
Did the confiscation of Church property not break ecclesiastical laws? … My understanding is that this process was well underway when the whole divorce/annulment issue came up … and what Lutheranism thought of Rich Clergy/Poor Peasants …
I’m just curious; I assume this statute has been repealed? (Not the royal supremacy; just the grounds for treason).
nm.
Who has authority in present day Catholicism to argue Canon law?
Is it ok to consider the same query here, but stick to Henry VIII and his proceedings? This thread is good especially if chapter and verse of Law is being cited. I’d like to learn about the whole “trial of the century” for realz.
[ FTR, I’m proud of myself for setting up a different thread for an honest-to-God hijack I posted which had both eras in the query. ]
So that’s the core of it. The Church, rather than listening to their claimed direct connection to God, was just a powerful group of squabbling apes like any other. I wonder how modern day practicing Catholics view it. A just organization - one that aspires to listen to an actual supernatural deity - would make the same decision based on the facts of a case rather than who Catherine was…
I think they thought that he liked women far too much.
(Then again, I’d consider the source.)
Joking aside, that wasn’t what this was about. I would assume the King could quietly engage in relations with lots of attractive peasant women he might have around the castle. One would reasonably assume that most Kings did this. But any children they had wouldn’t be legitimate, and thus there would be no King Henry IX.
And Henry had such a son - Henry FitzRoy - with his mistress Elizabeth Blount. Henry could have legitimized the child, which would have made the boy the heir and, eventually, Henry IX. However, there was already opposition to Henry VIII’s rule thanks to Henry VII’s acquisition of the position by conquest. That opposition combined with FitzRoy’s illegitimate birth would have made his hold on the monarchy tenuous at best. Thus, Henry VIII desperately needed a biological son whose legitimacy was legally and religiously unquestionable.
Read the part you quoted again. Henry suborned the leaders of the English Church - a group which is today’s Anglican Church, and not part of the Roman Catholic Church.
Henry did not control the whole thing, but the English monarchy was unusually powerful in his time, and he was able to pull the strings on almost all the key figures within England one way or another. Quite a few, inside or outside the religious hierarchy, opposed Henry and ended up dead on trumped-up treason charges. Eventually, Henry would obliterate every group capable of opposing him, although in the process he arguably sowed the seeds that would eventually turned the monarchy into the puppet of Parliament.
The RCC had already been as flexible as they could go regarding his marriages, but it’s true that Henry might have gotten his way if he hadn’t been kicking to the curb a close relative of the Holy Roman Emperor as well as his wife.
I am under the impression that when the Pope annulled the marriage of Catherine to Aragon to Prince Arthur, it specifically said it did not matter if it was consummated or not. Although years later there was lots of different testimony about whether it was.
I don't think Henry ever re-legitimized Mary or Elizabeth when he made out his will naming his successors, as the Third Succession Act gave him the right to do so. As I understand it, he named his son Edward and his heirs (contrary to popular belief, Edward was a healthy child until a teenager when various diseases, possibly measles and tuberculosis, killed him), the heirs of his present wife Catherine Parr, the heirs of any future wife (55, grossly fat, painful leg ulcer Henry was thinking ahead), Mary and her heirs, Elizabeth and her heirs, the heirs of Frances Brandon (daughter of Henry's younger sister Mary) and after that, the next rightful heir. Why Henry left out the heirs of his older sister Margaret is unknown. Possibly because Mary of Guise didn't agree to have her daughter Mary Queen of Scots get married to Edward and Henry at one time imprisoned Margaret Douglas,(daughter of Margaret and her second husband) for an unauthorized romance with a member of the Howard family. As far as Frances Brandon not being named, writers like Suzanne Lipscomb feel Henry didn't think too highly of her husband Henry Grey (he wasn't named as one of the 16 members of the Regency council should the next ruler be a minor).
I don't think anyone can say if Henry Fitzroy would have been named as an heir if he lived. Marriages and legitimate children existed to provide a stable line of succession. Of course the whole Tudor line was dubious, going back to John of Gaunt having children (The Beauforts) with his mistress Katherine Swynford although he later married her and the line was legitimized but left out of succession by Henry IV.Thanks UDS. Just for clarification, is there a difference in meaning between “dispense with” and “dispense from”. I haven’t come across the latter very often. I thought perhaps it has a special legal meaning. Here it is in Wikipedia
“Since laws aimed at the good of the entire community may not be suitable for certain cases or persons, the legislator has the right (sometimes even the duty) to dispense from[note 1] the law.[1]”
Yes, it was repealed as part of the Treason Act 1547, which mostly rolled the clock back to the Treason Act 1351, which is still in force in modified form.