Whatever the sources of Henry’s claims concerning the extent of his
sovereignty over the English Church; however much of a debt for some
of his views he owed to the pretensions of the French monarch; and
while based, as Elton has pointed out, on the bold, if not revolutionary
assertion, that the realm of England was an empire,^46 his aspirations
enjoyed the added benefit of the religious propaganda flowing from
Thomas Cromwell’s circle of association following the formal split with
Rome. The crucial matter here is not merely the endorsement of the royal
supremacy, but the theology and rhetoric adopted to uphold it, which
seems largely and ironically drawn from none other than Luther; and
further ironically mediated by another of Henry VIII’s theological
nemeses, William Tyndale.^47 Luther had maintained, and Tyndale in his
The Obedience of a Christian Manfollowed him in this, that the duties
owed princes were religious obligations arising out of the duties enjoined
by the fifth commandment, to ‘honour thy father and thy mother’.^48
Though still giving obligation to parents its place, medieval exegesis had
also made ‘father and mother’ into a religious obedience of a monastic
quality.^49 To this the scholastics added, though with little emphasis or
comment, the duty one owes to a prince as to a parent. Luther inverted
JEWEL TILL 1558 17
(^46) ‘Where by diverse sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly
declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted
in the world, governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate
of the imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and
degrees of people divided in terms and by names of spirituality and temporality ... {the
king} being also institute and furnished by the goodness and sufferance of Almighty God
with plenary, whole and entire power, preeminence, authority, prerogative and jurisdiction,
etc.’ An Act in restraint of appeals, Elton, Tudor Constitution, p. 344.
(^47) Richard Rex, ‘The Crisis of Obedience: God’s Word and Henry’s Reformation’, The
Historical Journal, 39, 4, (1996), pp. 863–94. Rex contends that Luther’s and Tyndale’s
obedience doctrines were not the basis of the shift in English political vocabulary, but that
the shift in policy demanded a new politico-theological idiom, and Protestant
controversialists associated with Cromwell were quick to appropriate Luther and Tyndale
to this end. Rex writes responding to the contrary view of Stephen Haas that Tyndale had
an ‘immediate impact ... upon the political theology of the Henrician regime (p. 864)’. See
Haas ‘Henry VIII’s Glasse of Truthe,’ History, LXIV (1979), pp. 353–62; ‘the Disputatio
inter clericum et militem: was Berthelet’s 1531 edition the first Henrician polemic of
Thomas Cromwell?’, Moreana, XIV, 55 (1977), 65–72; and ‘Martin Luther’s “divine
right” kingship and the royal supremacy: two tracts from the 1531 parliament and
convocation of the clergy’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, pp. XXXI (1980), pp. 317–25.
(^48) Both Tyndale and Luther would refer to this as the fourth commandment, following
medieval usage. Protestantism eventually took what Catholics had included in the first
commandment, the prohibition on making any likeness of the deity, and separated it into
a commandment on its own, then combining the Catholic ninth and tenth commandments.
Both are conventions, for while Deuteronomy 4:13 and 10:4 speak of the ten words, they
do not delineate how they are arranged.
(^49) Rex, ‘Crisis’, pp. 867–71.