The clergy of England, Henry VIII complained to Parliament in May 1532, were only half his subjects. At their consecration, they swore an oath to the Pope. They also swore an oath to the king. In the event of conflict between the two, Henry wanted Parliament to consider which oath they would choose. He already knew the answer.
The speech was recorded by the chronicler Edward Hall, and it captures Henry’s approach to the problem with characteristic precision. He had not come to Parliament to ask. He had come to explain what was about to happen. A month earlier, on 10 May, Edward Foxe - the Bishop of Hereford and one of Henry’s most reliable fixers - had presented the Convocation of Canterbury with three articles the King wanted ratified. The articles were direct: the church would renounce its authority to make canon law without royal licence; all existing canons would be reviewed by a committee half drawn from Parliament and half from the clergy, which would void any it found objectionable; and the remaining canons would survive only with the King’s consent. The church’s legislative independence, in other words, was to end.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, was eighty-one years old and had spent his career navigating exactly the sort of collision between papal and royal authority that was now arriving at full speed. He tried to compromise. The Convocation proposed that it would seek royal consent for new canons, but subject to a limitation: the arrangement would hold only “during the King’s natural life.” This was not the unconditional surrender Henry had demanded. He rejected it.
On 15 May, Warham gathered the Convocation for what turned out to be its last session on the matter. He informed the clergy of the King’s decision. Then, shortly afterwards, the Duke of Norfolk, the Marquess of Exeter, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Wiltshire, and William Sandys arrived in person to make the point physical. They demanded compliance without amendment. After about an hour they left. The inferior clergy voted: eighteen against renouncing legislative authority, nineteen against the proposed canons committee. Then, following Warham’s advice that the nobles might return at any moment, the inferior clergy dispersed. The upper house voted and passed the articles, with the Bishops of Lincoln, St Asaph, and London in favour, and the Bishop of Bath and Wells opposed.
The historian Michael Kelly, noting how few members were present for the critical vote, described the Submission as enacted by a “rump Convocation.” The numbers bear him out. What was presented as the English church accepting a new constitutional arrangement was, in practice, a handful of men in a room agreeing to something most of the institution had not been given a proper opportunity to refuse.
On 16 May, representatives of the clergy and bishops signed the document that became known as the Submission of the Clergy. On the same day, Thomas More resigned as Lord Chancellor, citing ill health. He had held the office since 1529 and used his time there primarily to prosecute heretics while trying, with diminishing success, to avoid being drawn into Henry’s campaign against Rome. The Submission was the line he would not cross. He had understood what the three articles meant: a church that could not legislate for itself without royal permission was not, in any meaningful sense, an independent institution. The question of whether it answered to Rome or to London was, from that perspective, almost secondary. It no longer answered to itself.
What followed was logical and fast. Parliament confirmed the Submission in 1534 with the Act for the Submission of the Clergy, and the same year passed the Act of Supremacy, which made Henry the Supreme Head of the Church of England in law as he had been in practice for the previous two years. More and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, refused to swear the required oaths and were executed in 1535. The papacy had been legislated out of England. The church that remained was an institution of the English state.
The money followed. The Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535 - a survey of all ecclesiastical properties commissioned by Thomas Cromwell - found that England’s monasteries held annual revenues of roughly £160,000, a sizeable fraction of crown income at the time. The dissolution proceeded in stages: the smaller houses with annual incomes under £200 went in 1536; the larger ones by 1540. Around 800 religious houses were suppressed in total. Their lands, which amounted to perhaps a quarter of all English cultivated land, passed to the crown and much of it was promptly sold to the gentry and nobility at prices that created a new class of landowners with a direct financial interest in ensuring the Reformation was never reversed. Henry used the immediate proceeds to fund his French wars. The structural effect - a landed class with Protestant property titles - lasted considerably longer.
Henry VIII had complained in May 1532 that the clergy were only half his subjects. The three articles he had Foxe deliver to the Convocation were his remedy. By the time the dust settled in 1540, the clergy were entirely his subjects, their institutional independence surrendered, their overseas allegiance severed, and their accumulated property absorbed. The half of them that had answered to Rome was now, like the other half, answering to Whitehall. The oaths had been reduced to one.