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This chapter examines John Heywood’s comic interlude, The Play of the Wether, in the light of the events of 1532-3. It shows how the mischievous representation of Jupiter, king of the gods, plays mockingly with ideas and rhetorical modes associated with Henry VIII’s royal supremacy, and dangerously addresses political themes such as Henry’s clandestine marriage to Anne Boleyn in an attempt to mock the king’s pretensions and win him back to wisdom and moderation. It suggests that the play marks both the most extreme example and one of the last workable instances of the use of a literary form as a piece of harsh ‘good counsel’ performed before the king in an attempt to shame him back to virtue.

The introduction outlines the overall historical context of the book, with special attention begin given to the tensions associated with the transfer of power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and describes the methodology used to analyse the content of plays whose texts have been lost but for which other documentary evidence survives.

This chapter examines the nature and extent of royal supremacy during the reign of Henry VIII. If Henry's supremacy was innate and divinely ordained, the question that arises is why it required an act of Parliament. The King's own view was that Parliament merely expressed the nation's assent, but Thomas Cromwell may have thought differently. The legal theorist Christopher St German, an inspiration for the parliamentary assault against the clergy in 1531–1532, certainly believed that royal supremacy rested in the King in Parliament. The chapter considers the rise of a new religious phenomenon — dissident, oppositional Roman Catholicism — and issues regarding the King's divorce and supremacy before discussing visitation, which was intended for both symbolic performance and practical enforcement of the royal supremacy. It also looks at the death of Catherine of Aragon and the first formal statement of doctrine for the independent Church of England, known as Ten Articles.

This chapter identifies an apocalyptic show described in diplomatic correspondence of 1535 as the London Midsummer Watch, which that year was staged with some practical assistance from the court. The show's content, and the theatre of the king's presence to watch the performance, made an assertion of the Royal Supremacy timed to follow immediately upon the execution of one of its prominent opponents, John Fisher. The use of drama for propagandist purposes in the 1530s is considered more broadly as part of an analysis of who might have been responsible for this particular one; the likeliest of the three suspects seems to be King Henry VIII himself.

This chapter examines the political and cultural implications of William Thynne’s 1530 edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Focusing on the preface, actually ‘ghost-written’ by Sir Bryan Tuke, it argues for the contemporary significances of the text’s discussions of Chaucer’s work, of the significance of the English language, and of English history and identity in the early years of Henry VIII’s break with Rome.

Henry VIII and Thomas Cranmer drew upon a standing tradition of claims regarding royal, priestly, and popular authority in order to undermine papal influence in England during the years of the Reformation Parliament. They appropriated traditional ideas in such a way as to exalt simultaneously the public authority of both Henry and his immediate successor, Edward VI, in the governance of the church. Among these were the coronation rites, appeals to conscience, and the king as the ‘vicar of God’. While spiritualia were traditionally assigned to the clergy and temporalia to the king, Henry challenged that division in order to preserve obedience to the monarchy. Sacerdotal kingship was enhanced through granting the king a cure of souls as well as the power of royal ordination. Cranmer only rarely limited the royal supremacy, primarily regarding the king’s prerogative to define doctrine.

This chapter explores how the physician and ex-Carthusian monk Borde (or Boorde) used his letters and printed works in the immediate aftermath of the first wave of the English Reformation to fashion a persona which was unthreateningly loyal to the royal supremacy. Particular attention is paid to his travel writing, which he uses to praise all things English and denigrate other nations (especially England's neighbours, Ireland, Scotland and Wales); to Borde's often extravagantly Latinate linguistic style and his promotion of the rich variety of the English language; and to Borde's medical works, in which he promotes both the idea of an English body, suited to a particular diet, and an image of himself as determinedly un-Carthusian (with a fondness for red meat and alcohol). The final part of the chapter traces evidence of Borde's traditional religious outlook in his writings and his eventual exposure as an adherent to the old faith.

Modern historians have long recognised that conceptions of the ‘ancient’ history of both parliament and the Protestant Church were vital to the political, legal and religious argument of the period, but the relationship between these two types of historical thinking has rarely been established. This article contends that the need to establish a pre-Reformation history of the Royal Supremacy, so as to counter Catholic challenges of religious innovation, required Elizabethans to create related myths of kings-in-parliament through the ages, exercising jurisdiction over the national Church. It was therefore under Elizabeth that the antiquity of parliament, its centrality to an ‘ancient constitution’, was first asserted by Elizabethan divines to validate the parliamentary framework of the English Protestant Church. It is argued that historical argument about parliament’s origins and evolution derived from the polemical battles fought by various religious interest groups on both sides of the confessional divide who defended, criticised or denounced the type of Church established in 1559. The history of parliament, then, first emerged in the war of ideas waged around the Royal Supremacy.

This chapter focuses on the concerns raised in James's parliaments in the realm of ideas. It explores the issues of Divine Right, the Royal Supremacy, and notions of absolutism in England; but argues that the most divisive concern in this area of issues was the fear that James did not understand the primacy of Common Law in England and was prepared to ride roughshod over the powers of the judges. However, it also highlights the role of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere in soothing and managing these differences.

This chapter focuses on the accession and coronation of Elizabeth I as queen of England in 1558. The reign of Elizabeth began with a declaration that nothing had changed. On the morning of Mary's death, a proclamation announcing the Queen's succession was read at Westminster, and at the Great Cross at Cheapside, and despatched to sheriffs in every county. It commanded Elizabeth's new subjects not to attempt ‘breach, alteration, or change of any order or usage presently established within this our realm’. The chapter first examines the evangelicals' response to the accession of Elizabeth before discussing some of the measures introduced by Parliament, including a bill to restore royal supremacy, and the nationwide royal visitation. It also considers some of Elizabeth's initiatives, particularly the Royal Injunctions which completed the alteration of religion.

The royal supremacy is a defining feature of the Church of England. In place since Henry VIII’s break from Rome, supremacy has provided the ‘official’ interpretation of godly magistracy, i.e. the monarch working in partnership with their bishops. But this was far from the only way of conceiving of godly magistracy in Anglicanism’s first centuries. Exploring different interpretations of godliness, identifying various individuals who could be deemed magistrates, and showing the proximity of godly governors to ungodly tyrants, this chapter argues that the fluidity of godly magistracy reflected the uncertain identity of the Church of England between 1530 and 1662.

The turn of the seventeenth century saw a growing interest in political history and a rising appreciation of its propagandist value. Chapter 11 examines Herbert’s acceptance of a commission from the duke of Buckingham to produce an apologia for his disastrous military command when waging war against France in The Expedition to the Isle of Rhé, and from Charles I to write a history of his controversial Tudor predecessor in The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth. It explores the purpose, key arguments, and historical and intellectual context of the two works and compares the different approaches Herbert adopts to defend Buckingham and Henry VIII while preserving his integrity and objectivity as a historian. It highlights his careful and ground-breaking historical methodology based upon critical evaluation of a wide range of primary and secondary sources; his extensive coverage of people, policy, and events; and his use of the Life and Raigne to discreetly influence royal and public opinion and to publicize his irenic solution to religious division and conflict. It suggests that Herbert became a historian by invitation rather than design but that his detailed, wide-ranging, and authoritative account of Henry VIII’s kingship has informed and influenced studies of the reign over succeeding centuries and that he merits acknowledgement alongside William Camden for transforming the writing of British political history.

This chapter discusses Victoria’s deeply fractious relationship with the Church of England. She came to the throne determined not just to maintain but also to reform the Church by promoting the liberal clergy who could make it a more charitable and representative institution. Resistance to the royal promotion of liberalism from Tractarians and Ritualists who loathed Protestantism and Erastianism—state meddling in spiritual matters—made her increasingly aggressive in her determination to broaden the Church, as she pressed for legislation to stamp out liturgical experiments which hinted at a hankering after the spiritual authority of the Church of Rome. Victoria’s feeling that she could defend the Church by making it more representative of the Protestant nation not only set her against high church people, but blinded her to the principled objections that many Protestant Dissenters nursed to its establishment. Her alarmed response to their talk of disestablishment, especially in Wales, further narrowed Victoria’s understanding of liberalism.

This chapter discusses developments in the publishing trade durinig the year 1535. During this period, book trade was adjusting to several changes that affected what material could legally be produced, sold, and read in England, and by whom. Among them was a 1534 Act of Parliament that introduced new limitations on the sales of continental imprints in England. Yet perhaps the most profound developments were Henry VIII's rejection of papal authority and the introduction of the Royal Supremacy in 1534, which led to the printing of many government polemics and numerous more opportunistic imprints. June 1535 saw the order that the name of the pope be “utterly abolished, eradicated, and erased out” from all books used in churches, “and his name and memory to be nevermore (except to his contumely and reproach) remembered, but perpetually suppressed and obscured”.