Chapter 12 Flashcards
Influence of Renaissance ideas during Henry VIII’s reign compared to his father’s
Renaissance ideas in intellectual life and culture had made a tentative appearance in England during the reign of Henry VII. However, it was during the reign of Henry VIII that Renaissance ideas began to flourish at least among some of the elite groups within English society. To some extent this can be attributed to the king himself. He certainly encouraged thinkers such as More and Erasmus and some of his cultural patronage, particularly the commissioning of the effigies on his parents’ tomb, showed the influence of fashionable artistic trends which had arrived in England from Italy.
Work of Colet in education
The most significant humanist voice in English education was John Colet.
In his refoundation of St Paul’s School, London, Colet showed his initiative in two respects. Firstly, he appointed as the school’s governors members drawn from a city guild rather than choosing clergymen. Secondly, the school’s statutes laid down a curriculum, including some works by Erasmus, and teaching methods derived from humanist principles. Colet reinforced the type of school he envisaged by appointing as head, William Lily, a humanist.
Influence of Platonism
Schools like St Paul’s and Magdalen College School in Oxford were at the forefront of educational reform, and firmly adopted Platonist educational principles, teaching many boys who would later become prominent in the religion and politics of Tudor England. Their influence steadily grew.
Similar concepts influenced the foundation of Corpus Christi and Cardinal colleges in Oxford and St John’s College in Cambridge.
Work of Wolsey in education
No less a figure than Cardinal Wolsey, much praised by Erasmus, gave his personal commitment to educational improvement by founding his college and also a school in his home town of Ipswich, as well as endowing a professorship in Greek at Oxford. By the end of Henry VIlI’s reign, humanist influences had gained a lasting hold on university curricula.
Influence of Erasmus
Erasmus visited England four times; his most important visit was that from 1509 to 1514 when he was appointed to a professorship at Cambridge University and was also a well-known figure in and around Henry VIII’s court. In 1516 he published a Greek New Testament complete with a new Latin translation.
Erasmus was received with enthusiasm in English intellectual circles. He was a friend of Fisher and More and he had some influence on a younger generation of English humanists. More demonstrated his support for Erasmus in 1518 when controversy over the Greek New Testament at Oxford University had led some dons to condemn the study of Greek.
It is important, however, not to exaggerate the importance of Erasmian humanism. Its scope was quite limited and much of the change that took place stemmed from the influence of new religious thinking rather than simply scholarly Renaissance humanism.
What was Platonism?
Platonism refers to the ideas of the Greek philosopher Plato. Interest in Plato’s ideas had been revived in fifteenth-century Florence and had then spread round much of Europe. Plato held that the main function of education was to produce philosopher kings: what this meant in practice was that pupils should have the ideal of public service instilled into them.
What was Erasmianism?
the body of ideas
associated with Erasmus and his followers
Who were the Oxford reformers?
men such as
Grocyn, Linacre and Colet who were amongst the first English scholars to adopt humanist ideas and approaches
Why did Renaissance ideas grow in influence under Henry VIII? (4)
•knowledge of classical learning increased amongst the elite groups in society
• a growing number of schools became influenced by humanist approaches to education
• Henry VIII saw himself as a promoter of new ideas and of humanism
•the Crown needed well-educated diplomats who could communicate with their counterparts in other countries in a fashionably elegant style.
The most important English humanist writer was Thomas More, who combined his intellectual interests with his work as a lawyer and statesman. A number of other writers also demonstrated humanist influences, for example, Thomas upset and Thomas Starkey.
Influence of Renaissance ideas on architecture
Renaissance ideas also had an increasing influence on visual culture.
Henry VIII commissioned the Italian sculptor Pietro Torrigiano to produce the tombs of his parents and of his grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. Both tombs were produced in the Renaissance style and are situated in the Lady Chapel of Westminster which Henry VII had commisioned. The contrate h fteenths cerat. The lady Chapel is one Ofthe finest examples of late fifteenth-century perpendicular Gothic ichitecture; the tombs are influenced by the classical concerns of the Renaissance. Another example of Renaissance style within a famous perpendicular setting is the rood screen erected in the early 15305 in he chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. It celebrates the marriage of Henry VIlI and Anne Boleyn. However, it should not be assumed that Renaissance influences predominated during the reign. Richard Marks has argued that Gothic remained the predominant cultural form.
Influence of Renaissance ideas on painting
The same is true of painting. The dominant painters at Henry VIlI’s court were from the northern Renaissance, which owed far more to Gothic influences than it did to the Italian Renaissance. The best-known painter at the court was the German Hans Holbein, though the best paid was the Fleming Lucas Horenbout. Much more esteemed at the time than paintings were tapestries, most of which were Flemish in origin and often displayed chivalric themes from medieval culture.
Evidence Henry was more conservative in his cultural tastes than Wolsey
It is also evident that Henry was more conservative in his building tastes than was Cardinal Wolsey. Little remains of the massive building programme, for example Nonsuch Palace, which Henry instituted, but surviving evidence does show a continuing taste for the Gothic, whereas Wolsey’s palace at Hampton Court clearly exhibited more classical influence. Henry was also a generous patron of music and musicians and was himself an amateur composer of some skill. Cardinal Wolsey too was noted as a musical patron. Again, however, the most distinctive influence, certainly on the church music heard in the Chapel Royal and in cathedrals, was Flemish.
Overall how influential were Renaissance ideas?
What is evident across the cultural range was that while Italian Renaissance influences were becoming more fashionable, England’s main cultural links reflected the close commercial ties which existed between England and the Low Countries.
Overall reform of Church 1532-1540
Between 1532 and 1540 Henry VIII, assisted by Thomas Cromwell and Archbishop Cranmer, withdrew the English Church from the jurisdiction of the papacy, established the king as supreme head of the Church, dissolved the monasteries and began to alter the Church’s doctrine and practices. This was a hugely significant process which could not have been foreseen in the earlier years of Henry’s reign, when the Church appeared broadly popular and effective, albeit with weaknesses.
List of areas of weakness of the Church
-Corruption
-Anticlericalism
-Decline of monasticism
Info about Church corruption
A range of offences involving corruption was associated with the Church.
These included pluralism (receiving the profits of more than one post), simony (the purchase of Church office) and non-residence (receiving the profits of a post but not being present to perform the duties associated with it). The best example of a corrupt clergyman was Cardinal Wolsey, but many other dergymen were guilty, especially as the Crown used Church ofices as a way of rewarding those of its officials who were clergymen.
Info about anticlericalism
Anticlericalism, or opposition to the political and social importance of the clergy, has often been cited as a weakness of the Church. Some common lawyers objected to the influence of canon law, the law of the Church, and there were objections to the legal privileges of the clergy. There were certainly some instances of clerical misconduct which did cause considerable criticism. The worst example concerned the death of Richard Hunne.
The Crown itself was perfectly capable of stirring up anticlerical passions. It is in this context that the much-quoted 1529 attack on the clergy, Simon Fish’s Supplication of the Beggars, should be seen. There were occasional disputes over tithes and other causes of concern. However, these were relatively rare, and this has led Christopher Haigh to conclude that anticlericalism was less a cause but rather more a consequence of the Reformation.
What happened in the case of Richard Hunne?
The murder of Richard Hunne, 1514:
Hunne, a London merchant, was found dead in his cell in the Bishop of London’s prison. He had apparently hanged himself, but it was evident to the coroner’s jury that Hunne could not have killed himself, that he had therefore been murdered and that there had been a clumsy attempt to cover up the murder by dressing it up as a suicide. (Almost certainly what had happened was that an attempt at torture had gone dreadfully wrong and the torturers panicked.) The case was disastrous in the short term for the reputation of the Church, but the time which had elapsed between the case and the start of the break with Rome suggests that by then it was much less likely to have been at the forefront of the minds of critics of the Church.
What was ‘The Supplication of the Beggars’?
The Supplication of the Beggars, written by Simon Fish who was an early English Protestant convert, was dedicated to Henry VIII. It was a vicious and powerful attack on many aspects of the Catholic Church, which was portrayed in exaggerated terms as being greedy, corrupt and treacherous.
Argument that monasticism was declining
It has been argued that the operation of the religious houses was open to criticism. Precedents for dissolving the monasteries already existed by the 1530s. Wolsey secured the dissolution of around twenty houses in the 1520s to fund the establishment of Cardinal College, Oxford. Some historians have suggested that monasticism was a relic of a bygone age and had lost its sense of direction; and that the larger monasteries had become, in effect, substantial businesses with huge resources in terms of land and buildings. The ease and speed with which the monasteries were dissolved is held to lend support to this argument.
Argument not all monasticism was declining
On the other hand, some orders, such as the Observant Franciscans and Bridgettines, were clearly flourishing right up to the final days of the dissolution.
Evidence of early English Protestantism
There is little evidence of a substantial movement towards Protestantism in the years following Martin Luther’s attack on the Catholic Church which started in 1517. Certainly some Lollard beliefs survived, and there is evidence of the influence of the German reformers in London and the east-coast ports in the 1520s. At an intellectual level there was a nucleus of future reformers based in Cambridge in the 1520s who met for religious discussions at the White Horse.
The leading figure in this group was Robert Barnes, who had been converted to Protestantism by Thomas Bilney. (Both would be burned as heretics later in Henry VIII’s reign.) The most influential member of this group proved to be the future Archbishop Cranmer. Otherwise, evidence for committed evangelism is fairly thin.
Evidence humanism had influence on royal policy
James McConica argued that the years from 1529 showed a group of humanists with shared ideals based on the ideas of Erasmus helping to shape royal policy. The evidence for this argument seems rather slender, given that the two most influential humanists in royal circles, Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher, paid with their lives for their opposition to the religious changes. Some of the reformers certainly did have humanist connections.
These included Archbishop Cranmer.
There is some evidence that a humanist approach to reform persisted during the final years of Henry VIlI’s reign. Cranmer continued to enjoy the king’s favour, even when he was being subject to attack by enemies such as the Duke of Norfolk. The king turned to the humanists John Cheke to be the tutor to his son and heir, Edward, and Roger Ascham to be the tutor to Princess Elizabeth. There was a humanist circle around the king’s last wife, Katherine Parr. She herself had had a humanist education, unusual enough for a woman of her generation, and was a generous patron of the arts and literature.
Evidence humanists not making royal policy
However, not all reformers were humanists - and many humanists either were not reformers at all, or, like Bishops Gardiner and Tunstall, went along with reforms in which they did not believe in order to maintain their lives and positions.
