Thomas Cranmer and Joseph of Arimathea Henry VIII, the Reign. Part 24

Henry VIII, the Reign

Part Twenty - Four

Thomas Cranmer and Joseph of Arimathea and Avalon

Henry VIII, the Reign

Part 24

Thomas Cranmer and Joseph of Arimathea and Avalon

Emergence of Thomas Cranmer – Christianity Was English before It Was Roman – Henry Head of the English Church – the Pope Has No Authority Here – First Reformation Parliament

From the Nottinghamshire Shadows of Southwell Minster

Thomas Cranmer

In the wake of the debacle at Blackfriars, a reassessment of the king’s Great Matter was required. Thus, during the first week of August 1529, Thomas Cranmer, a man from the Nottinghamshire shadows of Southwell Minster and Newark Castle, emerged. The future Archbishop of Canterbury, ostensibly to avoid the plague at Cambridge, was lodged at Waltham Holy Cross in Essex, where the newly appointed Principal Secretary and Bishop of Winchester to be, Stephen Gardiner, and the next Bishop of Hereford, Edward Foxe, had arranged to meet him.

Their purpose was to find a new innovative resolution to Henry’s marriage problems. Cranmer suggested seeking the advice of the leading universities of Christendom regarding the legal aspects of the divorce.

It is somewhat ironic that this meeting, which began the Reformation in England, took place at Waltham, because later, in 1540, Waltham Abbey was the very last of over eight hundred monastic houses to be closed.

Edward Foxe, a man, born in Dursley, Gloucestershire, the son of William, of a well-known Shropshire gentry family and his wife, Joanna, was the first of the Brittonic - English (see part 29) to re-emerge from the latency of the previous century.

Foxe claimed that he could establish that the pope held no authority in England and moreover had never at any time in history had any jurisdiction in that realm. Principal Secretary Gardiner and Fox reported back to Henry, and the king liked both ideas.

Cranmer left on his travels to the universities of Christendom.

The Church in England Belonged to the Kings of England

Edward I's laws were used against Wolsey

Foxe meanwhile set about his attempt to prove that Joseph of Arimathea had brought Christianity to the British Isles immediately after the death of Christ, and then that hundreds of years later Emperor Constantine had exported the British creed to Rome, from whence, Foxe claimed, it had been corrupted. Christianity was a religion that had been nurtured in the British Isles and taken to Rome only centuries later. Foxe had shown that here at Waltham was the very cross that Joseph had brought to England from Calvary. Henry was told that the cross had been discovered by Tovi the Dane on St Michael’s Hill at Montacute in Somerset - found in Avalon its self - and brought to Waltham by him in 1035.

Thus, the church in England belonged to the kings of England. This was Henry’s church: he was the head of it, not the pope. If King Henry VIII of England wanted a divorce, then it was within his own power to arrange it, without the intercession of the Bishop of Rome.

Elsewhere in Christendom, following the Second Diet of Speyer and the Protestation there, many of the German states were preparing a military defence against papal and Habsburg interference in their affairs. It was against that background that anti-clerical laws from previous centuries were revived in England. The praemunire, a law introduced in the reign of Richard II, was based on earlier legislation from the days of Edward I (the Statute of Provisors of 1306). It prohibited the assertion or maintenance of papal jurisdiction or of Imperial, foreign or any other alien jurisdiction or claim of supremacy in England against the supremacy of the monarch. Wolsey was certainly guilty of that and was dismissed as Chancellor.

The First Session of the Reformation Parliament

The first session of Parliament started on 3 November 1529 and sat at Westminster. Sir Thomas More, the king’s Chancellor, says the chronicler Edward Hall, was standing at the right hand of the king, from where he made that infamous but eloquent oration calling Wolsey a castrated ram. Indeed, one of the reasons for which Parliament was called was probably to harangue Wolsey further and then have him attained and executed. Lord Darcy made public his list of complaints against the cardinal.

Anne Boleyn in the meantime had drawn a promise from Henry that he would not give Wolsey a hearing. She was convinced that the king would succumb to Wolsey’s self-pity and allow him back into the government. The country at large was eager to rid itself of Wolsey. However, the king was nervous about doing so, as he had never made a decision without the cardinal.

Wolsey, indeed, had pleaded with the French ambassador, Jean du Bellay, to implore Francis and his mother Louise to intercede with the king on his behalf, but he begged ‘above everything’ that they would not mention his actions in which he had purposely undermined Charles Brandon’s plan to take Paris during the invasion of France in 1523.

In any event, he escaped ‘the gates of hell’ that had been expected to open up for him, and for the time being, was sent to his archbishopric in York, but it was a short-lived stay.