THE RELIGION OF HENRY VIII

What is it about?

This article offers an alternative account of Henry VIII's religious development to that advanced by G. W. Bernard. Rather than seeing Henry as a lifelong 'Erasmian' who in the 1530s simply began to implement as policy a set of religious attitudes and preferences which he had long held personally, this article sees a dramatic shift in the king's religious opinions and policies in the mid-1530s. It presents evidence (much of it new) from the first twenty years of Henry's reign to suggest that he was throughout that time in broad and zealous alignment with the traditional religion of the late medieval Roman Catholic Church, and it sets this against the better known story of the course of events of the 1530s before concluding, again with a substantial body of new evidence, that both Henry himself and his publicists interpreted his experience in that decade in terms of a classic religious 'conversion' - the divine 'opening of his eyes' to a truth to which he had hitherto been blind.

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