The Excommunication of Henry VIII

Pope Paul III did not mince his words. In the bull of excommunication promulgated on 17 December 1538, he reviled Henry VIII as a tyrant who had ‘transformed himself into a beast’. This was a king, the pope explained, who ‘daily more and more hardened himself in cruelty and rashness’ and who had now ‘sunk so low in wickedness as to preclude all hope of his restoration’. Paul proclaimed Henry a diseased member of the community of the faithful that needed to be cut off to protect the rest from contagion. Unfit to partake in the sacraments of the Church, Henry was likewise unworthy of the kingdom of England. Invoking at once Rome’s spiritual and temporal power, the pope duly absolved Henry’s subjects from allegiance to him and called on Christian princes to wage a crusade against England and topple the reprobate.

Yet there was a major flaw in this plan. By the time Paul got around to excommunicating and deposing Henry, the English king had already severed his own and his kingdom’s ties to Rome. Papal jurisdiction had been formally nullified by statute several years earlier, with the king named supreme head of England’s Church. The liturgy, too, had been reformed and references to papal authority expunged. The dissolution of the monasteries, and seizure of their riches, was well underway, and Henry had pacified two major rebellions, one in Ireland and the other in the north of England (the so-called Pilgrimage of Grace), as well as celebrating the birth of a son, Edward. The naysayers had been executed for treason, chief among them John Fisher, bishop of Rochester – latterly made cardinal of the Roman Church – and the loyalty of most of the population commandeered through a series of compulsory and strictly enforced oaths. Nor had the king shrunk from symbolic acts of defiance against Rome, such as the desecration of the shrine of Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, prominent 12th-century martyr for the rights of the Church, in September 1538 – the immediate catalyst for Paul’s bull.

What if the papacy had acted sooner? How might things have turned out had the excommunication come at an earlier point? For excommunication, especially when twinned with deposition, was a formidable weapon in Rome’s arsenal against recalcitrant princes. Perhaps the most notable example of a pope compelling the submission of a monarch had been Gregory VII’s treatment of the German king Henry IV. Declared excommunicate and deposed in 1076 for promoting his own candidate for a bishopric in preference to a papal appointee, the king had been given a year to repent or else he would never regain the throne. Henry IV’s abject surrender to Gregory VII at Canossa in 1077 became the stuff of legend. Closer to home, Pope Innocent III’s excommunication of King John in 1209, a year after the imposition of an interdict on England – an ecclesiastical sanction which would deprive all English people of receiving the spiritual benefit of participation in the sacraments – had led to John submitting not once but twice in 1213, and professing himself Rome’s feudal vassal. While the Roman See’s power had subsequently been contested, by the early 16th century the papacy had emerged victorious from a lengthy struggle for superiority against the institution of a general council of bishops that had rumbled on since the Western Schism of the later 14th century. So, although the spread of Luther’s heresy was putting Western Christendom to the test even as the Ottoman menace grew, there remained scope for the papacy to use the coercive means at its disposal to bring its wayward son to book.

This Rome spectacularly failed to do in time and decisively enough. The potency of Paul III’s eventual excommunication of Henry was fatally undermined by the tortuous process through which it finally came to pass. It took eight years, two popes, two printed bulls, and countless admonitions. As a result, rather than bringing Henry and his kingdom back into the fold, the papacy may have actually expedited England’s secession from the Roman Catholic Church.