Henry 8th

chughes

Apologies if this has been discussed already but I looked back over some of the threads and I couldn't see anything like it.

I was wondering if Henry 8th had a successful and happy first marriage and had fathered a number of sons who outlived him, would England have become a Protestant state?

Given England's then antipathy towards many things Continental and that fact that Protestantism originated there, would England have embraced Protestantism or would it have remained a Roman Catholic country?

My guess that it would still have become Protestant but at a much later time than it actually did, maybe during the 19th century.

Anyone any thoughts on this?

Milk & Honey

chughes wrote: »

Apologies if this has been discussed already but I looked back over some of the threads and I couldn't see anything like it.

I was wondering if Henry 8th had a successful and happy first marriage and had fathered a number of sons who outlived him, would England have become a Protestant state?

Given England's then antipathy towards many things Continental and that fact that Protestantism originated there, would England have embraced Protestantism or would it have remained a Roman Catholic country?

My guess that it would still have become Protestant but at a much later time than it actually did, maybe during the 19th century.

Anyone any thoughts on this?

The architect of the break with Rome was Thomas Cromwell. The reason was financial. England needed the money. A lot which was being spent on war with France. Cromwell did not want to continue sending money to Rome. A multitude of sons would not have changed that. Neither would the happiness of the marriage.

Peregrinus

Fascinating question!

I don’t think England would have broken with Rome under Henry VIII if he and Katherine of Aragon had has sons who lived. I take Milk & Honey’s point about Henry’s need for the church’s money, but the – ahem – reorganisation of the monasteries and religious houses was well under way under Wolsey with, I won’t say Rome’s cheerful blessing, but certainly Rome’s grudging assent. There’s no reason why it couldn’t have continued. It’s worth remembering that other European countries succeeded in nationalising church assets without having the national church break with Rome.

What caused Wolsey’s downfall was his failure to secure a Roman divorce for the king. Had that not been an issue, Wolsey would not have fallen and Cromwell would very likely never have come to power.

Henry expended an enormous amount of political capital, both at home and abroad, in breaking with Rome, and he did so only because of his concerns about the succession. Without that concern, I do not see him breaking with Rome.

If Henry is survived by his sons with Katherine of Aragon, the Elizabeth never comes to the throne – indeed, Elizabeth is never born – and the Tudor dynasty does not die out in 1603. England and Scotland do not come under a common king, and quite possibly they are never united.

After Henry’s death England probably stays close to Spain – it has a half-Spanish king, after all, and Spain is a useful counterweight to France, which is historically close to Scotland (and has an all-but-French queen). The power balance is Europe is shifted from what we know.

Without the religious issue to complicate it, England’s colonisation of Ireland is possibly successful.

I don’t see England becoming Protestant in the nineteenth century, as chughes suggests. After the turmoil of the reformation and the wars of religion settles down in the mid-seventeenth century, no European country switches from Catholicism to Protestantism or vice versa. I can’t conceive of a scenario in which England would do this in the nineteenth century.

In this scenario the only possibility for a Protestant England, I think, is a son or grandson of Henry who is personally sympathetic to Protestantism, encourages it and eventually leads his country to accept it. But this would have been very politically costly for him (as it was for Henry) and if it hadn’t been achieved by the early seventeenth century I doubt that it could have happened later. From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, a fairly clear pattern emerges across Europe; if the king is of one religion and his people are of another, the king has to change his religion or lose his throne. The people never lose this battle.

Snickers Man

First thing: Henry VIII was never a Protestant; he was a pope.

He broke from Rome but only to replace himself as head of the church in his domain in place of the pope. He didn't change a word of liturgy or a single article of faith. The English church kept its hierarchy with its bishops and Cardinals and the liturgy in Latin throughout Henry's reign.

His break was mainly for political reasons. He needed an heir, primarily, and the Church refused him the means to sire one legitimately. So he broke with Rome.

It wasn't until the succession of his son Edward VI that the book of Common Prayer with its liturgy in English and its more "Protestant" outlook came to be used. This was largely caused by forces outside the monarchy. The notion of protestantism as an individualist faith where man spoke directly to God without need of intercession from Saints or a church hierarchy had been growing throughout Europe, encouraged by greater literacy, the advent of mass-produced printed books and an economy developing beyond the feudal relationship of land owners to serfs.

Furthermore, King Edward VI came to the throne at the age of nine and was dead at 15 so however precocious a young brat he might have been, he was unlikely to have been the instigator behind these changes. There were other more senior hands at work guiding him down this path.

The Anglican Church remains, among its most traditional members, very close in style to the church of Rome. In other words, not very Protestant at all. More than 100 years after Henry VIII a more complete Protestant revolution took place in Britain with the more extreme Puritans doing away with the "Popish" regime of Charles I and his Catholic wife.

Anglican he may have been but Charles was very big on things like his divine right to rule and royal perogative which didn't sit well with the more free thinking and democratic Puritans.

I think the Puritans would have sprung up and directed England down a more Protestant path regardless of whether or not Henry VIII needed to break with Rome.

Peregrinus

I dunno about the last bit. Puritanism in England was a genuine bottom-up movement, not one imposed by the authorities, but (a) it grew out an existing state-supported Protestant established church and (b) it fed to some extent off a cultural fear and hatred of Catholicism, which arose out of experiences under Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I and the conflict with Spain. In this alternative history we have none of those factors, and without them I’m not at all sure that Puritanism in England would have been as strong. It would certainly have been stomped on much earlier, and much harder, by the authorities, and the Puritans in England could easily have gone the way of the Huguenots in France or the Waldensians in Italy - persecuted until they become small enough to present no threat, and tolerated thereafter.

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any European country which became Protestant without the monarch or the civil authorities embracing Protestantism and supporting it, and if this didn’t happen by the first half of the seventeenth century then it didn’t happen at all. So in this alternative history the only way I see this happening is if a son or grandson of Henry VIII had been drawn to Protestantism - which, of course, is not impossible.