WI: English Parliament refuses to pass Henry VIII's religious reforms?

Fabius Maximus

One of the problems facing the Huguenot faction in the French Wars of Religion was that the Parliament of Paris was adamantly opposed to the idea of having a Protestant on the throne, meaning that, whilst he might win various victories, Henry IV wasn't able to gain control of the kingdom as a whole until he abjured his Protestant faith. This contrasts with the English Parliament during the same century, which basically went along with whatever the reigning monarch demanded in matters of religion.

Now, I know that the Parliament of Paris and the Parliament of England were different institutions with different roles and didn't really have anything in common other than the name, but I've still been wondering: what if the English Parliament took a similarly hard line against the prospect of Protestant rule? Maybe the POD can be that Protestantism doesn't spread as far among the nobility and gentry, and/or that Princess Mary is more personally popular, meaning that there's more resistance to the idea of the King divorcing his wife to sire a new heir. What would the likely outcome be? Would Henry be forced to back down, would he manage to impose his will in spite of Parliament's wishes, or would we see an English Civil War a hundred years ahead of schedule? And what would the effects be in terms of the relative power of King vs. Parliament?
 
BELFAST

BELFAST

I think it would be a civil war.
You could argue that under Henry VIII that what happened was a takeover of church land and Henry becoming head of the church rather than the church of England becoming a reform Protestant faith.
His son Edward was another matter.
 

Fabius Maximus

BELFAST said:
You could argue that under Henry VIII that what happened was a takeover of church land and Henry becoming head of the church rather than the church of England becoming a reform Protestant faith.
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Changes like suppressing monasteries, ending the veneration of saints' relics, and ending prayers for the dead, were all done under Henry's reign, and were very much Protestant rather than Catholic or even Eastern Orthodox ideas. Henry's Church was more High-Church than the more hard-core Reformers might have liked, but it was still a Protestant Church.
 
BELFAST

BELFAST

Fabius Maximus said:
Changes like suppressing monasteries, ending the veneration of saints' relics, and ending prayers for the dead, were all done under Henry's reign, and were very much Protestant rather than Catholic or even Eastern Orthodox ideas. Henry's Church was more High-Church than the more hard-core Reformers might have liked, but it was still a Protestant Church.
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Suppressing monasteries was about taking their land. 1/3 of the arable land in Britain was owned by monasteries,
Still, the big motivation was land and resources rather than religion.
even today the church of England is more of a social and political organisation.
 

Fabius Maximus

BELFAST said:
Suppressing monasteries was about taking their land. 1/3 of the arable land in Britain was owned by monasteries,
Still, the big motivation was land and resources rather than religion.
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Land and resources were certainly incentives, but the English monasteries had been wealthy for many centuries. If it was really all about the money, there's no reason for the dissolution to happen when it did, rather than earlier in Henry's reign, or even under a previous monarch.

Plus, Henry could have got his hands on the monasteries' wealth without destroying them. The French Church had to make an annual "gift" (really a tax) to the Crown, and there's no reason Henry couldn't force the English Church to do something similar. IOTL he ended up selling off most of the monastic lands anyway, so it's not like the long-term financial position of the Crown would be impaired.
 
BELFAST

BELFAST

Fabius Maximus said:
Land and resources were certainly incentives, but the English monasteries had been wealthy for many centuries. If it was really all about the money, there's no reason for the dissolution to happen when it did, rather than earlier in Henry's reign, or even under a previous monarch.

Plus, Henry could have got his hands on the monasteries' wealth without destroying them. The French Church had to make an annual "gift" (really a tax) to the Crown, and there's no reason Henry couldn't force the English Church to do something similar. IOTL he ended up selling off most of the monastic lands anyway, so it's not like the long-term financial position of the Crown would be impaired.
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Land taken from the monasteries was sold to lords and earls etc and other nobles who used the buildings of the monasteries as stone quarries to build their great homes.
This gave Henry a loyal support base among the lords.
 
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Fabius Maximus

BELFAST said:
Land taken from the monasteries was sold to lords and earls etc and other nobles who used the buildings of the monasteries as stone quarries to build their great homes.
This gave Henry a loyal support base among the lords.
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So why didn't he, or another English king, do so earlier? And why didn't Catholic monarchs on the Continent do likewise? Why was it only Protestant countries that engaged in wholesale confiscation of monastic lands?
 

Aphrodite

Banned
Fabius Maximus said:
So why didn't he, or another English king, do so earlier? And why didn't Catholic monarchs on the Continent do likewise? Why was it only Protestant countries that engaged in wholesale confiscation of monastic lands?
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The Russian Tsars did but the Orthodox Church acknowledged his power to do so and the matter was accepted.

The Church played an important role in Medieval society running many charitable institutions like orphanages, hospitals and schools.

Henry wanted to break the power of the Church more than reward his friends. He also suppressed the guilds.

If I remember right, during Henry's reign a felony conviction still meant forfeiture of all property. The many executions would lead to a steady supply of estates to reward friends.

Not sure why anyone would think the primary purpose would be to reward friends though.
 

Fabius Maximus

BELFAST said:
They did not need to.
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Sure they did. Plenty of English monarchs had been strapped for cash in the past. And plenty of contemporary Catholic monarchs were short of money, too -- Spain went bankrupt something like four times during Philip II's reign. Reducing the dissolution of the monasteries to a simple cash grab is both a failure of the imagination (people are motivated by more than just economic considerations) and leaves several important questions (such as why it happened then and not earlier, and why it and similar things happened in some countries and not others) unexplained.
 

Fabius Maximus

Also worth pointing out that contemporaries saw Henry's England as being in the Protestant camp rather than the Catholic, so the idea that Henry was a Protestant isn't just some anachronistic conception applied with the benefit of hindsight.
 
BELFAST

BELFAST

Fabius Maximus said:
Also worth pointing out that contemporaries saw Henry's England as being in the Protestant camp rather than the Catholic, so the idea that Henry was a Protestant isn't just some anachronistic conception applied with the benefit of hindsight.
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Protestantism and Catholicism were not just about religion it was also political too.
The Pope was not a neutral party in politics.
 

Fabius Maximus

BELFAST said:
Protestantism and Catholicism were not just about religion it was also political too.
The Pope was not a neutral party in politics.
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No-one said that politics wasn't involved at all. But the idea that the dissolution of the monasteries had nothing to do with Protestantism is simply unsupportable.
 
Metempsychosis

Metempsychosis

BELFAST said:
Protestantism and Catholicism were not just about religion it was also political too.
The Pope was not a neutral party in politics.
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I mean, that's obvious. If you're against the Pope in Western Christendom, you're Protestant, regardless of whether you're Anabaptist or Lutheran, Calvinist or Unitarian or Anglican. And dissolving the monasteries definitely seems like something someone against the Pope would do.
 
Metempsychosis

Metempsychosis

Hm. Is there a possibility of Edward VI being raised Catholic by a Catholic parliament in this scenario? IIRC, his mother Jane Seymour was actually Catholic.
 

Fabius Maximus

Metempsychosis said:
Hm. Is there a possibility of Edward VI being raised Catholic by a Catholic parliament in this scenario? IIRC, his mother Jane Seymour was actually Catholic.
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TBH Edward himself would probably be butterflied away. If we have an alt-Edward, though, I think his religious upbringing would depend on how the original Great Matter/Reformation went:

- Henry manages to impose his will on Parliament, divorces Catherine, and marries Anne and, later, Jane. Edward is, if anything, raised to be even more Protestant than IOTL, given that the King will probably be quite annoyed at the Catholic/Conservative party for trying to thwart him.

- Henry is forced to back down, Catherine dies, and Henry remarries to Jane. If Parliament flexed its muscles enough to block Henry's moves towards Protestantism, I can't imagine it would be happy with the idea of the heir to the throne being raised Protestant, so Edward is raised as a good Catholic.
 
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