Was Henry VIII a Protestant?

The title of this essay might seem like a ridiculous one for a Catholic writer. Surely, Henry VIII was no orthodox Catholic, at least after his break with Rome. No, he was not. I am Catholic, and you wouldn’t be reading this if I thought otherwise. But whether he was a Protestant is a more interesting question than you might think.

The question came to mind recently during a dispute on social media in which the British author Peter Hitchens, an Anglican, insisted that though the Church of England later became Protestant, Henry VIII remained a “devout Roman Catholic” all his life. Hitchens insists that Henry’s divorce was about mere politics, since the only reason Clement VII didn’t grant an annulment to his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was because she was the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, whose armies sacked Rome in 1527.

I’ve always respected Hitchens, who, a few years back—following the murder of a Catholic MP—bullied the London police into altering their policies to allow Catholic priests to administer Last Rites at a crime scene. On the present matter, however, I obviously disagree rather strongly with Mr. Hitchens. Nevertheless, I thought his criticisms deserved a better answer than his Catholic interlocutors provided. Because I do have some knowledge of how academic historians have treated the question of Henry’s beliefs, I thought I might offer my two cents on the matter.

Following the lead of Geoffrey Elton, historians in the 20th century once believed the English Reformation was more of an administrative revolution than a religious one; Elton made Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chief minister, the key figure in all this and portrayed Henry as allowing his minister to drive the destruction of the monasteries, for example. However, the work of David Starkey and others established that Henry VIII controlled the process of “reformation” in England and drove it as long as he lived.

Scholars have also come to recognize that the English Reformation was not merely an administrative change. Henry VIII was deeply interested in theological questions, almost uniquely among Renaissance princes, which is why he penned (or had penned) A Defence of the Seven Sacraments in 1521 to oppose Luther’s attack on them. While many Catholic apologists like to portray Henry as a lustful despot who merely wanted to marry his mistress, most historians agree he was sincerely convinced his marriage to Catherine was invalid since it had not produced a male heir, which he regarded as God’s punishment for violating God’s law.

Popes did grant annulments for bad reasons (i.e., political ones) in the Middle Ages. The Church, from St. Augustine to the medieval scholastics, also clearly taught that marriage was a sacrament in addition to being a human institution, even though it was not dogmatically defined as such until 1563. Henry believed this too, which is why he defended it as a sacrament in 1521.

He abandoned this belief after divorcing Catherine of Aragon, but the point is that he saw it as a theological issue. And even if he hadn’t, Rome most certainly believed it was, which is why Henry commissioned theologians to prepare a scholarly defense of his position. Declaring divorce to be a merely human institution—and that, therefore, Henry’s dispute with Rome was about politics—is anachronistic, since virtually nobody believed politics (if by that you mean political power) was separate from religion in the 16th century.

However, Hitchens is actually on firmer ground when he claims that Henry was not a Protestant after his break with Rome. Naturally, this depends on how you define the term; if you mean, as many Catholics do, that he rejected the pope’s authority over the Church, then yes, he was Protestant in that sense. But there is more to being Protestant than rejecting the pope’s authority.

What is clear is that Henry rejected two crucial elements of what would become the Lutheran and Reformed traditions. He always disliked Luther and rejected sola fide, just as he rejected the belief of Sacramentarians (precursors of Calvin and other Reformed Protestants) that Christ was only spiritually present in the Eucharist. Henry, by contrast, believed in the Real Presence and retained a Latin liturgy as long as he lived. Where the continental Reformers reduced the sacraments to two, baptism and the Eucharist, Henry also retained penance as a sacrament. He rejected the idea of Purgatory but retained prayers for the dead (though it is unclear why). And even though he waged a campaign against “superstitious” images, he did not ban them outright.

One thing people outside of academia don’t understand about the early Reformation is that distinct confessional identities did not form overnight, and there was much confusion well into the middle of the 16th century about what institution one belonged to. The boundaries between what was acceptable and unacceptable for communion were fluid at the time of Henry’s death in 1547 and wouldn’t really solidify into stable confessional identities until the mid-1550s—and not definitively until the 1560s, when all sides began writing their own confessions of faith to make clear what they believed.

For example, the term “Protestant” was coined in 1529, when Luther and his followers made a formal protest to the Diet of Speyer. English reformers called themselves “Evangelicals” and initially used “Protestant” to refer to foreigners with Lutheran beliefs. They only widely adopted the term “Protestant” in the following decades after Henry’s death.

This leads to the question: If you leave the authority of the pope to one side, can what Henry believed post 1533 be labeled as Catholic? Some scholars have tried—most recently George W. Bernard, who has written a book and several articles arguing that Henry was an “Erasmian” Christian before the break with Rome and remained one afterward. The idea is that, like the Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus, Henry was skeptical of much medieval piety (images, relics, pilgrimages, Purgatory) but did not go to the extremes of Luther or, later, Calvin. In this line of thinking, Henry’s belief in the Mass, prayers for the dead, and his retention (however attenuated) of images render his beliefs “Catholic,” at least as late medieval humanists might have understood them.

The problem with this idea, as the Cambridge historian Richard Rex has pointed out, is that Erasmus, while he wanted to reform Catholic devotion more toward the Bible and was certainly skeptical of much medieval piety, rejected the outright iconoclasm of the Reformation and disliked war, the execution of heretics, and dogmatic conflicts, all of which Henry indulged in liberally. For my part, I simply don’t believe the category is helpful for distinguishing between Catholics and Protestants, since humanism influenced too many people in late medieval Europe for it to be a meaningful way of distinguishing between the two.

Besides Erasmus, plenty of people who were sympathetic to the Reformation never rejected Rome. Marguerite de Navarre, the sister of the French King Francis I, was a patron of several humanist scholars who became founders of the Reformed churches in France; but she never joined them, remaining in communion with Rome. Conversely, virtually all of the reformers were influenced by humanism and could be said to be “Erasmians,” such as Philipp Melanchthon, Luther’s younger colleague. In other words, Henry could be an “Erasmian” without being a Catholic.

The one thing Henry’s Reformation did have in common with continental Reforms was that they both rid society of monasticism. It is true that kings and even Cardinal Wolsey had ordered the closing of monasteries deemed superfluous, but they had not attempted the wholesale destruction of monasticism. One could note that monasteries were under the direct jurisdiction of the papacy, and therefore their destruction was “political” in nature; but the people who most encouraged Henry to do away with monasticism—such as Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer, and Hugh Latimer—were those with genuinely “Protestant” inclinations, though that would not become totally clear until after Henry was gone.

Though Henry may not have enunciated this as a principle, he justified destroying monasticism as a relic of “popish” superstition. It is difficult to see how one can qualify as a Catholic while rejecting religious life altogether. It is notable that the Vatican did not excommunicate Henry until 1538, after his attack on the monasteries began in 1536.

Richard Rex is probably correct in insisting that Henry’s beliefs were unique. There is no parallel in any other Reformation settlement for the Royal Supremacy as Henry conceived of it. While most of the English Reformers he enlisted to aid him in his throwing off the “Roman yoke” were perfectly willing to have the magistrate help rid them of “popery,” they most certainly did not want the magistrate to have control over the Church, certainly not in the way Henry envisaged.

Henry’s beliefs in the divinity of monarchy went beyond mere Erastianism; he seemed to think he, and perhaps kings in general, had a sort of charism of special, theological insight. Rex says Henry used the language that Evangelicals used to describe their own conversions to sola fide and sola scriptura to describe his own “conversion” to the royal supremacy. He even tried to “evangelize” other monarchs, encouraging the Habsburg Emperor Charles V and Francis I to throw off “popery” but to no avail.

Henry’s might best be described as a unique kind of late medieval heresy. One could perhaps call them a form of Catholic heterodoxy, if you want to rescue him from the charge of heresy. But there is no neutral historical evidence that is capable of deciding this issue. It comes down to what you believe theologically, even in academic discussions of Henry’s faith. If you hadn’t guessed, Bernard is an Anglican and Rex is a Roman Catholic, and both of their positions reflect their theological commitments.

I suspect people like Bernard and Hitchens want to clear Henry’s Reformation of the charge of radicalism, of being a revolutionary break with the past. Obviously, I disagree and believe it represented a radical attack on the Christian Church in England. But even if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t make much difference. Henry’s actions made it possible for more thoroughly “Protestant” radicals to gain power after his death, and they could not have done so without his initial break with Rome.

Moving away from Rome but stopping short of Wittenberg or Geneva was never likely to succeed, since “moderate” reforms tend to create a momentum that morphs pretty quickly into revolution. As one Catholic critic of Henry wrote during the reign of Mary, Henry was “like one that would throw down a man headlong from the top of a high tower and bid him stay when he was half-way down.”

Nevertheless, the case of Henry VIII demonstrates the uncomfortable fact that sometimes recognizing who is in communion with the Church and who is not can be trickier than you think. It does no harm to the Church to point out that its leaders have sometimes abused its authority. Disciplinary matters such as excommunications are not subject to infallibility, and there are too many examples in history of popes and bishops abusing the power of the keys to believe otherwise. This doesn’t mean that every disciplinary act of every bishop or pope is inherently questionable, only that these always involve a certain element of prudential judgment.

I point this out because many Catholics today seem to equate “Protestantism” solely with rejection of the Church’s authority, especially papal authority. Even more dubiously, they seem to equate any act of disobedience with rejection of the Church’s authority. But not all disobedience to authority constitutes a rejection of that authority, and mere disobedience alone is not enough to put you definitively outside the Church.

It is true that obedience to the hierarchy is essential for communion because the Church is not just a body of doctrines, as Protestants understand it, an “invisible” church reducible merely to true faith. It is also a sacramental, mystical body, which has a hierarchy whose authority we can recognize and are bound to obey.

But obedience is not the highest virtue nor disobedience the only sin, and mere adherence to the hierarchy without believing all the Church has definitively taught will not suffice for communion either. Sola obedientia is no remedy for sola fide. When someone denies one of those definitive truths and rejects the authority Christ instituted to protect them, then we are on much safer ground in saying that person is outside of communion. This is precisely what Henry VIII was guilty of. And it is why though he may not have qualified as a “Protestant,” he was no “devout Roman Catholic” either.