The English reformation was totally unlike the German and Swiss ones whose musical effects we have
yet to consider. It was led from above by the monarch; it was as much a political as a religious
commotion, and it carried a portentous tinge of nationalism. Its origin was a quarrel between King Henry
VIII and Pope Clement VII, who had refused Henry’s request for annulment of his marriage to his first
wife, Katharine of Aragon, for failing to produce a male heir to the throne. (Behind the pope’s ostensibly
ecclesiastical judgment there lurked another political power: Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor,
Katharine’s nephew, whose troops had already sacked Rome once, taking Clement prisoner, and
threatened to do it again.) When Henry divorced Katharine in defiance of the church, the pope
excommunicated him, and the king retaliated in 1534 with the Act of Supremacy, which made the king the
head of the Church of England.
FIG. 16-4 (a) Henry VIII, portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger (1540). (b) Elizabeth I bestriding the map of England, portrait
by Marcus Gheerhaerts (1592).
This act of treason against the church hierarchy polarized English opinion (to put it as mildly as
possible) and had to be enforced by violence. The author of Utopia, Sir Thomas More, who had served
Henry as Lord Chancellor of the realm, was the most notorious victim: he was imprisoned and beheaded
in 1535 for his principled refusal to recognize Henry’s religious authority and was canonized by the
Roman Catholic Church as a martyr on the four hundredth anniversary of his execution. The English
monasteries, loyal to the traditional church, were forcibly dissolved beginning in 1540.
Musical repercussions were inevitable—and decisive. They were not quite immediate, however.
Henry himself was an enthusiastic music lover. He played the organ, lute, and virginals (a small
harpsichord-like instrument), and even composed in a modest way; thirty-four small compositions
attributed to him survive, all but one in a single manuscript. The inventory of his property at his death in
1547 listed a fabulous instrumentarium for the use of his “waits” (household musicians): 56 keyboard
instruments, nineteen bowed strings, 31 plucked strings, and upwards of 240 wind instruments of all
descriptions.^15 He took great pride in the virtuosity of his chapel choir (as we know from the amazed
reaction of an Italian diplomat, quoted in the previous chapter). We have already had occasion to admire
the music that choir performed (see the works of Cornysh, Henry’s own court composer, and Taverner,
quoted in Exx. 13-6 and 15-8). The activities of this choir did not cease when the Church of Rome gave