Opposition to Religious Change
Resistance at court
Resistance within the country
Resistance with the clergy
Scale of resistance against religious change:
The Church was in no worse a situation in the 1500s than it had been for at least a century and most ordinary people were not interested in the changes in religious doctrine and what happened to the Church.
Cromwell had made sure that all the charges appeared legal- they were passed by the Act of Parliament so had approval of important, powerful people.
Sir Thomas More
The most high-profile opponent of the royal divorce and the changes of 1534.
More had refused to take an oath accepting that Anne Boleyn's children were made legitimate by the Succession Act of 1534. He was therefore sent to the Tower of London.
More had used passive resistance to signal his opposition but was too famous s a politician and too widely respected to avoid persecution.
Aragonse faction
This consisted of a small group of nobles and courtiers, led by Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter and the northern Lords Darcy and Hussy, who supported Catherine of Aragon.
Catherine's daughter, Mary's exclusion from the succession in 1536 helped to push Darcy and Hussey into supporting the Pilgrimage of Grace (rebellion) and were executed for treason.
Courtenay was arrested and executed in 1539 for association with his cousin, Reginald Pole, who was a descendant of the Yorkist Kings
John Fisher
He had been Bishop of Rochester since 1504 and had never shown interest in promotion of wealth.
He believed Henry's actions against Catherine of Aragon were completely wrong and told Henry this. However, Henry was lenient with Fisher.
This was only until Fisher refused to swear the oath to accept the divorce and was therefore imprisoned in the Tower of London.
The Pope then declared that Fisher had been made a Cardinal so Henry accused Fisher of high treason and he was tried and executed. This gained Fisher's cause support and provided evidence of Henry as a tyrant.
Elizabeth Barton
She had been subject to visions since her teens. She began to have visions focused on the King's marriage and warned about the disastrous consequences of abandoning his wife. She even told this to the King directly and said he would be dead within a month of the divorce.
By 1530, Dr Edward Bocking, a Canterbury monk who had protected Elizabeth, had developed her warnings into a wider campaign against changes in the Church, the influence of humanism and the Boleyn marriage.
She was arrested in September 1533 and was executed in April 1534. She was, along with her mentors, condemned by the Act of Attainder.
Riots in Louth in Lincolnshire due to rumours that the King was going to close their precious churches and this spread to the north.
Monastic Resistance
In 1532-33, the widely respected London monks of the Carthusian refused to accept the divorce.
In 1534, they resisted government pressure to agree to the declaration against the authority of the Pope.
The government forced them to submit, arresting the most reluctant and executing 18 of them.
The King's forces faced 40,000 pilgrims in arms.
Called the Pilgrimage of Grace
Once the process of dissolving the monasteries was underway, the heads of religious houses were given generous pensions and the monks a basic pension. The process by which monasteries were dissolved reduced the chance of large scale opposition.