Political Identities in Changing Polities

HENRY VIII was, as we know, a bit of an opportunist. In 1521, at a time when Henry had allied England with the Habsburgs against France and also laid claim to the French crown, he wrote a pamphlet criticizing Martin Luther’s doctrines. For his efforts, the pope dubbed Henry “Defender of the Faith.” Churchmen, however, began voicing doubts about that title no later than 1525, when Henry levied a major tax on church property to pay for his wars with Catholic France. As the pope himself delayed sanctioning Henry’s divorce from Catharine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn, Henry sacked his papal legate, Cardinal Wolsey, and, after some maneuvering, declared the English church independent of Rome. The break with the pope brought Henry substantial church revenues. In 1534, Henry rammed through the Act of Supremacy, which made him and his successors heads of an independent English church; he also rendered refusal to take an oath of recognition, a capital crime of high treason. Utopia author, former chancellor, and future saint Thomas More lost his head for just such a refusal. By 1536, with the help of Thomas Cromwell, Henry was having Anne Boleyn executed on a trumped up charge of adultery, beginning dispossession of the monasteries, publishing William Tindale’s translation of the Bible, and putting down major rebellions against his religious innovations. Within three years, nevertheless, he issued the Six Articles, which defined SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer 2003) Political Identities in Changing Polities* CHARLES TILLY *An earlier version of this paper served as keynote address at the conference “Redefining Europe,” New York University, November 30, 2001. A few paragraphs are adapted from Tilly (2002). beliefs and practices greatly resembling those of the Catholic Church except in their substitution of the king for the pope. Through all these gyrations, Henry’s enforcers missed no opportunity to seize church revenues or to raise money from church members. After Henry’s death in 1547, English believers had to follow twists and turns through reigns of a rather more Protestant Edward VI, a quite Catholic Mary, and a warily Protestant Elizabeth I. The sixteenth century dragged ordinary English people through a maze of alternating religious and political identities. Eamon Duffy, in his dense, complex, but ultimately vivid reconstruction of parish life in sixteenth-century Morebath, Devon, has demonstrated how deeply the top-down turmoil stirred by Henry VIII and his successors shook local social relations and practices (Duffy, 2001). Duffy’s chief historical informant, the long-serving vicar Sir Christopher Trychay, did his best to protect his initially Catholic parishioners from the opposite dangers of over-eager reform and dogged resistance. But changing definitions of religious and political affiliation, with their accompanying obligations , impoverished the local church, destroyed the rough equality of household involvement in parish affairs that had characterized the early sixteenth century, and caused recurrent struggles of locals with outsiders who sought to impose or profit from the current realignment. Henry’s 1547 Injunctions, for example, combined an attack on votive lights and sacred images with dissolution of the chantries that had supported memorial masses, the proceeds going to pay for war with Scotland. In sheep-raising Morebath, this reform simultaneously struck at practices that entwined religion with kinship and forced sale of the church sheep, whose wool had provided the major income supporting local devotions. Most of the time Morebath’s people fought their identity battles with weapons of the weak. In 1549, however, they paid the 606 SOCIAL RESEARCH expenses of sending five local men to a rebel camp near Exeter in what came to be known as the Western Rebellion. More or less simultaneously Edward VI’s regime had imposed the Protestant Book of Common Prayer plus new taxes on sheep and cloth to support the expanding wars against France and Scotland. The rebels of 1549 centered their demands on the restoration of religious life as defined toward the end of Henry’s reign: largely Catholic beliefs, practices, and identities within an independent Church of England. The king’s forces, backed by foreign mercenaries , slaughtered the rebels. No commoners were going to decide the content of England’s religious and political identities as...