This.
Politics and religion were totally intertwined, or even parts of the same process. They were impossible to separate at that time, or for another couple of centuries.
Good point. All our modern concepts of different religious denominations didn’t exist then. We’re talking about a period only 15-30 years after Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door in 1517. And the Reformation took several years to get rolling.
When we talk about Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, etc. this is from modern hindsight. Everything was in a state of great flux at that time. There was intense religious debate, changing by the month, and many different views. We can’t retrospectively put their religious beliefs into boxes. It wasn’t clear to anybody at the time where they were going to end up.
The term ‘Protestant’ first appeared in Germany in 1539, and only started being used in English in the modern sense a few years after Henry’s time.
Henry’s views changed considerably over time. He went through an arc from being a strong reformer, very far from standard Church beliefs, and Erasmus’ proposed reforms –
- eliminating the monastic life
- allowing English Bibles in Churches
- allowing marriage of priests
- destroying shrines and discouraging worship of saints
- making confession optional
- denouncing the concept of purgatory and praying for souls there
… and then swinging back from that far closer to standard beliefs, in the 1540s up to the last years of his life. But by then the changes were irreversible, regardless of his personal beliefs.
In the post that started this whole discussion, I put Henry’s ‘conversion’ in quotes.
From the paper I cited:
There is a danger, however, in seeking to read consistency into Henry’s religious history. Henry himself would certainly not have recognized as valid any account of his religious history that flattened out the watershed of the 1530s, which he described in terms of a personal conversion experience. Nothing would have been more surprising to him or his contemporaries than the suggestion of a fundamental and lifelong consistency in his religious views.
Richard Morison, one of the loudest official voices of the 1530s, made this plain early in 1539 in his Invective ayenste the great and detestable vice, treason, published at one of the most delicate junctures in the 1530s as a response to the ‘Exeter conspiracy’: ‘Of all the miracles and wonders of our time, I take the change of our soueraygne lordes opinion on matters concerninge Religion, to be euen the gretest.’ …
Nor should the description of this change as a ‘miracle’ be thought casual, for it ascribes Henry’s change of opinion to an intervention of divine grace. After the king’s death, another English reformer, William Thomas, observed rather more brusquely that ‘the King himself, till God opened his eyes, was as blind and obstinate as the rest’. As we shall see, there is a good deal of evidence to support the view that it was not only Henry’s religious policies but also his religious beliefs that changed in the 1530s.