The First Act of Succession is presented as a bill to secure the inheritance of Anne Boleyn’s children while asserting that succession in England is a matter for the king and Parliament, not Rome. Its provisions make the uncertain future of Anne’s pregnancy a public legal problem: the draft sets out an order of heirs, removes Mary Tudor from the line, and is to be confirmed by an oath demanded throughout the realm. In Thomas Cromwell’s hands, succession becomes not only a dynastic arrangement but a claim about who has authority to make law and whose words can bind the country.

Background and Political Setting

The bill emerges from a wider struggle over the Church’s jurisdiction and the king’s authority. In 1531, when Katherine of Aragon challenges Cromwell’s legislation, she recalls that Henry’s government has charged the clergy under Praemunire and demanded a payment exceeding one hundred thousand pounds. The dispute over the succession therefore follows a series of measures that have already brought royal and parliamentary power into conflict with church authority.

By spring 1532, Parliament is considering legislation to reduce payments to Rome and to make Henry’s supremacy in the English Church more than a declaration. Cromwell works through the Commons’ petition against church courts with Rafe Sadler and Thomas Wriothesley, while Stephen Gardiner leads resistance among the prelates. These earlier contests establish the institutional setting for the succession bill: the question is not simply which child inherits, but whether a domestic parliament can settle a matter that opponents might reserve to Rome.

The bill’s dynastic urgency rests on the history of Henry and Katherine’s children. Thomas Wolsey remembers the New Year’s prince who lived for fifty-two days; another son died within an hour, Mary survived, and other pregnancies ended in miscarriage or the death of an infant. Against that history, a succession tied to Anne’s expected child cannot be treated as a settled certainty. The law must anticipate both the birth of a son and the possibility that Anne may die without delivering one.

The Draft and Its Heirs

In a private council meeting, Henry, Anne, Gardiner, and Cromwell review the proposed legislation. The draft repeatedly calls Anne Henry’s beloved wife, but it also provides for her death. Anne reacts angrily when the bill contemplates that Henry might marry again if she dies before bearing a child. Cromwell explains that Parliament must provide for such a contingency, while Gardiner defends it as customary provision rather than a personal judgment on the queen.

The proposed order of inheritance gives priority to a son lawfully born to Anne and Henry. Anne objects that this language leaves her daughter’s position uncertain and asks what becomes of the child’s claim. Henry and Cromwell explain that the daughter remains a princess, and that if the king has no son born in lawful matrimony, she would inherit. Mary Tudor, however, is excluded from the succession. Cromwell argues that the bill need not expressly label Mary illegitimate: her removal from the line makes the intended inference clear, while the law’s wording is kept impersonal and spare.

That impersonality does not make the measure politically neutral. Anne hears the possibility of her own death and the potential replacement of her child in the same draft that establishes her children’s claims. The bill translates uncertain events—death, childbirth, and the birth of a male heir—into clauses that can govern the crown. Its language is deliberately framed as general law, even as its consequences are concentrated on particular members of the royal family.

Parliament, Rome, and the Oath

Cromwell proposes that the succession settlement be sealed by an oath as well as passed by Parliament. He argues that opponents may claim Parliament was misled or bought, or deny that it can legislate on matters supposedly belonging to another jurisdiction. In his view, Rome has no legitimate voice in England. The oath would therefore do more than affirm an heir: it would ask the country to endorse Parliament’s competence to determine the succession.

The plan reaches beyond the council and the political elite. Cromwell says he will have the oath taken by whoever is needed to make the succession secure and unite the kingdom behind it. He invokes the king’s officers and justices of the peace, and insists that a Christian’s oath is not valuable only when sworn by a bishop. Against Gardiner’s skepticism about how many ordinary people could be made to swear, Cromwell points to the poor and dispossessed and insists that England can be different. The argument links national allegiance to a wider picture of a country whose ploughmen may learn to read and whose people need not be excluded from political and religious life.

The debate also exposes the political divisions surrounding enforcement. Gardiner derides the idea of sending agents through the country to collect oaths from common people, while Anne supports new bishops and names Hugh Latimer and Rowland Lee. The king says the bishops will take the oath and hopes they will comply. Cromwell, in turn, places the council lords under obligation to make the plan work. The proposed settlement depends not only on a statute’s wording but on officials, local justice, and public professions of loyalty.

Law as an Instrument of Rule

Cromwell’s account of the bill reflects his broader view of legislation as language meant to alter conditions in the world. He thinks of laws as words tested for their utmost power: they must be believed, and their penalties must be enforceable across regions and social ranks. The oath accordingly reaches from the council chamber to burghs and villages, from the Scottish borders and Welsh marches to Cornwall, Sussex, and Kent. Its reach is administrative as well as symbolic.

That project is connected to the argument Cromwell makes to Henry from the propositions of Marsiglio of Padua. Christ, he explains, did not make the Pope a ruler empowered to tax or legislate; priests remain subjects, while the prince governs the bodies of his citizens and determines matters including marriage and legitimacy. The prince’s authority, in Cromwell’s account, is exercised through a legislative body representing the people. The succession bill gives that theory a practical form: Parliament defines the heirs, and an oath asks subjects to acknowledge its settlement.

The bill’s reach nevertheless encounters a limit in Cromwell’s own imagination. As he considers the commissioners’ passage through the country, he asks who will swear the beings and dead that belong to its older, less visible landscape: spirits associated with hedges, hollow trees, holy wells, and unconsecrated ground. The image turns a program of national enumeration into a recognition that no oath-taking apparatus can fully encompass the country’s inhabitants or memories. The act is presented as a forceful bid to make succession and allegiance legible in law, but not as proof that every source of belonging can be commanded by it.

Narrative Significance

The succession bill gathers the book’s political and personal stakes into one document. It is prompted by the precariousness of royal childbearing, yet it also tests whether Parliament can displace Rome as the authority that determines legitimacy and inheritance. Its clauses manage anticipated deaths and births; its oath turns legal settlement into a public act of allegiance.

The episode’s central tension lies between the bill’s impersonal form and its intimate consequences. Anne reads the provisions as statements about her own possible death and her children’s future, while Cromwell treats them as necessary contingencies in a durable law. The order of heirs is thus at once a family arrangement, an assertion of royal power, and a demand that people across England affirm who may rule after Henry. By tying all three together, the proposed act makes succession a measure of the new political order—and of the limits of its reach.