the act allowing the king to choose his heir

The act allowing the king to choose his heir makes succession a matter of royal selection rather than an inheritance whose outcome is secure. Introduced by Thomas Cromwell to Parliament, it gives Henry VIII the power to nominate his own successor, leaving Princess Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I, and Henry Fitzroy exposed to a choice whose consequences reach beyond the royal family.

Background: Authority over Church and succession

The act emerges amid a wider struggle over who has authority to define the kingdom’s lawful order. Henry VIII has declared that the Pope has no governing authority in England and that the king himself will rule the Church. When Montague reports that the Church has surrendered and that Thomas More has resigned as Lord Chancellor, Princess Mary Tudor recognizes the breadth of the change: her father has claimed not only the Church’s wealth but also its laws and courts. The succession measure extends this concentration of authority into the question of who may inherit the crown.

The conflict had already taken a legal form in the 1534 oath of succession, which Thomas Cromwell administers to the assembled peers at Westminster Palace. The Pope has ruled that the marriage of Katherine of Aragon and Henry VIII is valid, while Henry asserts that it is not and declares Anne Boleyn queen and Elizabeth a princess. The narrator sees the resulting clash as one in which the king’s declaration is made to determine reality in England. Thomas More refuses to sign the oath as written, despite the king’s earlier promise not to test their friendship on the matter. The later act places succession within this same contest over royal power, religious authority, and personal conscience.

Provisions and parliamentary introduction

Cromwell brings the act before both houses of Parliament. Its central provision is that the king shall nominate his own heir, choosing from Queen Jane Seymour’s children or, as the text pointedly allows, from the children of any subsequent wife. The measure therefore does not name a successor in itself; it gives Henry the authority to make that choice later.

That flexibility unsettles the royal household’s existing claims. Montague explains that Mary has been denied her position and Elizabeth has lost her title, while the king’s acknowledged son Henry Fitzroy is also among the possible heirs. In the family’s account, all three children have been made vulnerable to the king’s decisions about legitimacy and succession. The act leaves the question open at precisely the point when each candidate’s status is already contested.

The suspected choice of Henry Fitzroy

Although the act does not specify whom Henry will choose, Geoffrey reads the king’s recent public gestures as evidence that Fitzroy is being prepared for prominence. At the opening of Parliament, Fitzroy walks before Henry carrying the king’s cap; he has also received part of Henry Norris’s lands and offices, and the king plans to establish him at Baynard’s Castle with his wife, Mary Howard. Geoffrey treats these visible signs as a signal that Fitzroy is the likely choice.

The location adds dynastic resonance for the narrator: Baynard’s Castle was where Henry Tudor stayed when he first came to London, before his coronation as Henry VII and his move to Westminster. Geoffrey’s interpretation is not a formal announcement, but the act gives such signs added weight. In the family’s view, Mary has only recently been released from confinement, Elizabeth is still a weak infant, and Fitzroy alone has a castle, lands, and a place in the heart of London. The distinction makes the king’s still-unspoken decision appear to be taking shape in public.

Consequences and significance

For Margaret Pole and her sons, the measure turns a constitutional change into an immediate family danger. Montague argues that Mary and the queen must be defended, and proposes using his journey to Calais to send Geoffrey onward with information for Reginald Pole, the Pope, and the King of Spain. He believes papal intervention might force Henry to restore Katherine. The act’s power to let Henry choose an heir intensifies the urgency of this plan: the family fears that Mary’s exclusion may become permanent and that Fitzroy may be advanced in her place.

The measure also exposes the double character of kinship in the novel. The Plantagenet network, bound together by blood and marriage, is a source of shared loyalty and political capacity; the same intermarriage can look, under suspicion, like a faction or conspiracy. Montague invokes the white rose and calls the Plantagenets the natural rulers of England, even as he insists that Henry is their cousin and should be brought back to his own inheritance. Against that hereditary claim, the act asserts the king’s power to select. Its significance lies not only in who might inherit, but in the way royal authority is made to arbitrate the very rules by which inheritance is understood.