In 1521, the pope excommunicated Martin Luther and gave the English king Henry VIII the title “Defender of the Faith” for publishing a tract debunking Luther. While Luther’s invective has been a source of much study and laughter for centuries, Henry was no slouch. He called Luther an inferorum lupus or a wolf of hell and a diaboli membrum or devil’s member.
Things were different a decade later. Henry was breaking with Rome on two fronts, sex and money.
First, upon Rome’s continuing refusal to annul his marriage to Catherine. A curious aside to this was old enemy Martin Luther’s advice to Henry that bigamy might be better than divorce:
Should the Queen be unable to prevent the divorce, she must accept the great evil and most insulting injustice as a cross, but not in any way acquiesce in it or consent to it. Better were it for her to allow the King to wed another Queen, after the example of the Patriarchs, who, in the ages previous to the law, had many wives; but she must not consent to being excluded from her conjugal rights or to forfeiting the title of Queen of England.
Second, the lure of the land… Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries is said to have brought between a quarter and a third of England’s land to the king.
On 17 December 1538, a later pope issued a bull of excommunication. The text is telling:
Bull against Hen. VIII., renewing the execution of the bull of 30 Aug. 1535, which had been suspended in hope of his amendment, as he has since gone to still further excesses, having dug up and burned the bones of St. Thomas of Canterbury and scattered the ashes to the winds, (after calling the saint to judgment, condemning him as contumacious, and proclaiming him a traitor), and spoiled his shrine. He has also spoiled St. Augustine’s monastery in the same city, driven out the monks and put in deer in their place.
The reference to the earlier bull concerned Catherine, but that was a dead issue in every sense with replacement wife Anne Boleyn herself beheaded. More interesting is the undoing of tradition. Canterbury was the heart of the church and Henry in literally trashing the memories of its most famous archbishop and of its first archbishop was the straw that broke the deer’s back.
The first of Henry’s ancestors to convert to Christianity was probably William Longsword, the second duke of Normandy. He was also the first to be excommunicated, an excommunication also involving land. Longsword was killed by the followers of the landholder three years later, on 17 December 942.
