Catholic Church

The Catholic Church stands at the center of the novel’s struggle over who may govern England’s religious life: the Pope and church courts, or the king acting through Parliament and the laws of the realm. Its institutions and wealth are targets of reform, but its claims also supply the principles by which Katherine of Aragon and Thomas More resist the king’s settlement. The conflict is not simply between belief and unbelief; it is a contest among overlapping legal authorities, each claiming the power to define marriage, succession, and the limits of government.

Institutions, Property, and Reform

The Church’s material institutions become an early test of the conflict. Cardinal Wolsey proposes to combine about thirty small, poorly managed monastic foundations with larger ones and redirect their revenues to the colleges he is founding at Oxford and Ipswich. He presents the scheme as a means of supporting education and insists that monks need not be turned out without provision: relocation, pensions, compensation, and negotiation are possible. His opponents, as Thomas Cromwell puts it, want the proceeds for themselves. The dispute thus links reform of religious foundations to the question of who controls church property and who benefits when it is redistributed.

The Church is also a body of clergy subject to political pressure. In the spring of 1532, Parliament considers measures that would restrain payments to Rome and challenge the jurisdiction of church courts. Cromwell works through the petition against those courts, while Stephen Gardiner leads resistance among the prelates. The crown’s argument is that clergy cannot owe obedience to the Pope while also claiming exemption from the king’s authority. The dispute makes church jurisdiction a practical constitutional question: whether ecclesiastical courts may exercise power independently within England, and whether the clergy are subjects of the king.

Marriage and Competing Authorities

The king’s attempt to end his marriage to Katherine exposes the Church’s authority over marriage and the status of children. Wolsey looks for precedents that might support Henry, including other royal marriages set aside, but recognizes the contrary principle: the Church is not supposed to dissolve established marriages or bastardize children. He wonders whether a defective dispensation might be repaired with a new one, while the king’s advisers explore how to secure a judgment without waiting on events in Italy or on the Pope’s freedom to act.

Katherine resists being treated as a problem for the king’s government to settle. She insists that she remains queen and appeals to the Church and the Pope as the proper authorities over her case. When Cromwell visits her at Ampthill, she refuses to attend the court at Dunstable, does not recognize its jurisdiction, and maintains that her case is before Rome. Her position rests on the claim that the king cannot simply replace the spiritual authority of the Church with a court established in England. The disagreement over her marriage therefore determines not only her own standing but also the legitimacy of Mary and the succession.

Royal Supremacy and the Law of the Realm

The argument against papal authority is developed through the political thought of Marsiglio of Padua. In 1534, Cromwell presents Henry with propositions denying that Christ gave the Pope or priests the right to rule, make laws, or levy taxes. In this account, clergy remain subjects, while government belongs to secular rulers. A king’s authority, Cromwell argues, derives through a legislative body acting for the people; Parliament can therefore define the king’s jurisdiction and determine matters such as marriage and legitimacy.

This theory makes Parliament an instrument for transferring authority from the Church to the crown. The king’s supremacy is framed as a legal position supported by precedent and parliamentary action, rather than as a purely personal seizure of power. The formula that the king is head of the Church “as far as the law of Christ allows” becomes a focus of dispute: Cromwell presents it as carefully qualified, while Mary asks whether what is defined may later be redefined. Her question reveals the instability beneath the legal settlement. A boundary written into law can also become a means of extending royal power.

The Church’s claim to spiritual jurisdiction remains the decisive counterargument. When Richard Riche recounts his conversation with More, More distinguishes Parliament’s power over temporal matters from its inability to exercise spiritual jurisdiction, which he regards as outside the realm. For Cromwell, such a distinction threatens the king’s title; for More, it marks a limit that political enactment cannot cross. Their disagreement shows how the same parliamentary act can be understood either as a valid exercise of the realm’s authority or as an intrusion into a jurisdiction belonging to the Church.

Separation, Conscience, and Consequence

Katherine gives the dispute its starkest religious formulation when she warns that there is no salvation outside the Church and that even kings are answerable to judgment. Cromwell urges her to yield for the present and preserve the possibility of reconciliation, but she will not recognize the king’s settlement as a substitute for the authority she believes governs the case. Her refusal makes visible the personal cost of a political reordering: she is pressed to accept a diminished status in exchange for an estate and honors, while insisting that legal convenience cannot resolve a spiritual claim.

More’s position carries the conflict into the realm of conscience and treason. Riche reports that More accepts Parliament’s ability to make him king in a hypothetical case, yet rejects its ability to declare God not to be God or to decide spiritual jurisdiction. Cromwell interprets More’s view as a denial of Parliament’s capacity and thus a denial of the king’s title, while recognizing that the exchange may be difficult to prove as malicious. The Church is therefore more than the institution being displaced: its account of spiritual authority provides the standard against which the legality of royal action is judged. As royal supremacy advances, the unresolved question is whether the realm can make its law sovereign over matters that its opponents believe belong to God and the Church.