Did Henry VIII Corrupt the Morals of England?

David Carlin writes for The Catholic Thing considering the connections between manners and morals and the example of leaders in modeling that connection or not:

I suppose I should mention at this point a political leader or two who tended to corrupt his people with his example of bad taste, bad manners, and bad morals. Maybe I could mention Mussolini. Or maybe Huey Long. Or maybe Sardanapalus. Or maybe I should point to somebody closer to home. But I won’t. Instead I choose King Henry VIII.

Now I’ve read books about Henry, the worst tyrant in our Anglo-American history. But the image of Henry in my mind has not been formed by those learned book (sic) so much as by the Charles Laughton portrayal of the king in the wonderful 1930s movie, “The Private Lives of Henry VIII.”

Two things stand out in my mind. (1) Henry’s piggish way of dining: ripping the chicken (or was it duck?) apart, gorging himself on it, then tossing the bones away over his shoulder. (2) His getting rid of multiple wives, especially his casual decapitation of two of them. Very amusing to watch today. (I saw it again only a week or so ago.) But it wasn’t an edifying example to his people.

I think that many would agree that Henry VIII was a tyrant: he certainly abused the system of justice in his country for his own purposes. Thomas Cromwell and he used Bills of Attainder to condemn those against whom there was no proof of treason or even misprision of treason--and Cromwell found that method of Attainder used summarily against him! 

And that's a source of corruption in a nation. But did he corrupt the personal morals of the English people? Although he sought "divorces" from two wives, Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves--which could more accurately be termed decrees of nullity (that no marriage had taken place)--did more English men seek divorces after Henry VIII's example? 

One could even argue that Henry VIII upheld morality in his own tyrannical fashion, punishing Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard for adultery, violations of morality. (Although there are many arguments to be had about their guilt and the methods of inquiry and trial.)

But citing Alexander Korda's 1934 movie The Private Life of Henry VIII as an example of the king's bad manners at the dining table is inaccurate and misleading. As Alison Weir pointed out in her 2001/2008 book Henry VIII: King and Court:

As a rule, Henry did not dine in the great halls of his palaces, and his table manners were highly refined, as was the code of etiquette followed at his court. He was in fact a most fastidious man, and – for his time – unusually obsessed with hygiene. (page 1 of her Introduction)

She dedicates an entire chapter (9) to the "Elegant Manners, Extreme Decorum, and Very Great Politeness" at Henry VIII's Court.

Carlin's use of a movie scene (although I do remember a similar scene of gluttony as a fantastic main course was served to Henry VIII in the Showtime series The Tudors) to establish Henry VIII's bad manners as a key to his bad morals and bad influence on his country damages his case.

William Shakespeare and Robert Southwell

Brad Miner writes at The Catholic Thing about a new TV series, Will:

Would that I were such a booster of our Faith that I might recommend Willunreservedly just for being respectful of Catholicism, but faith here is mostly a veneer, even though it lacquers everything. And although Will goes further than any previous dramatic presentation in emphasizing Shakespeare’s faith, it goes too far. It takes threads of true history and weaves them into an absurd tapestry of fantasy. Of Shakespeare’s Catholicism, scholars have no doubt. Of his devotion or crypto-activism, however, there is little evidence.

So, then, in fair London where we set our scene: In 1592, actor Richard Burbage (Mattias Inwood) will star in Richard III by Shakespeare (Laurie Davidson) but actually be portraying Richard Topcliffe (Ewen Bremmer), Elizabeth I’s Catholic hunter and torturer: a sort of embarrassment of Richards.

Topcliffe’s main obsession is capturing a cousin of Shakespeare, the Jesuit priest/poet Robert Southwell (Max Bennett). Topcliffe, unaware of Shakespeare’s relationship to Southwell, has actually commissioned the play from Will, thinking it will be a paean to Topcliffe himself.

So the series adapts the "Secret Catholic Code in Shakespeare Plays" theory! It is true that Topcliffe was obsessed with Southwell: he seems to have hated him, to have enjoyed torturing him, and to have continued to attack him through Southwell's trial as Father Henry Garnet described it:

“The Chief Justice asked how old he was, seeming to scorn his youth. He answered that he was near about the age of our Saviour, Who lived upon the earth thirty-three years; and he himself was as he thought near about thirty-four years. Hereat Topcliffe seemed to make great acclamation, saying that he compared himself to Christ. Mr. Southwell answered, ‘No he was a humble worm created by Christ.’ ‘Yes,’ said Topcliffe, ‘you are Christ’s fellow.'”

What vitriol! And this exchange on Southwell's torture:

Southwell: I am decayed in memory with long and close imprisonment, and I have been tortured ten times. I had rather have endured ten executions. I speak not this for myself, but for others; that they may not be handled so inhumanely, to drive men to desperation, if it were possible.

Topcliffe: If he were racked, let me die for it.
Southwell: No; but it was as evil a torture, or late device.
Topcliffe: I did but set him against a wall.
Southwell: Thou art a bad man.
Topcliffe: I would blow you all to dust if I could.
Southwell: What, all?
Topcliffe: Ay, all.
Southwell: What, soul and body too?

This blog notes the salutation to the printed edition of Southwell's Saint Peter's Complaint, published on the Continent after the martyr had suffered, "To My Worthy Good Cosen Master W.S." and the conjecture that the W.S. is indeed William Shakespeare. Southwell remonstrates with his good cousin about the abuse of poetry: "Worthy cosen, Poets, by abusing their talent, and making the follies, and faygnings of love the customary subject of their base endeavours, have so discredited this facultie, that a Poet, a Lover and a Lyar, are by many reckoned but three words of one signification."

America magazine also highlights the series and Southwell's prominent role in it, but errs in one statement: "Among the victims of Elizabeth’s Protestant zeal are the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, canonized by Paul VI in 1970." Not all of the Forty Martyrs suffered under Elizabeth I!

Martyrs and Spirituality

From The Catholic Thing, Fr. Bevil Bramwell, OMI, writes about the martyrs and compares and contrasts them to celebrities:

Martyrs represent more than just names or dates on a calendar. As Saint John Paul II explained – take note – in his encyclical On Faith & Reason, not in a merely devotional context:

The martyrs know that they have found the truth about life in the encounter with Jesus Christ, and nothing and no-one could ever take this certainty from them. Neither suffering nor violent death could ever lead them to abandon the truth that they have discovered in the encounter with Christ. This is why to this day the witness of the martyrs continues to arouse such interest, to draw agreement, to win such a hearing and to invite emulation. This is why their word inspires such confidence: from the moment they speak to us of what we perceive deep down as the truth we have sought for so long, the martyrs provide evidence of a love that has no need of lengthy arguments in order to convince. The martyrs stir in us a profound trust because they give voice to what we already feel and they declare what we would like to have the strength to express.

They are the standard for understanding people – all people – who arise in human history, not just on a gut level, but according to the truth that they express, the truth of Jesus Christ, to which we have committed ourselves by baptism.

Now, we all hunger to see genuine humanity played out in front of us. We see it in the lives of the martyrs. They live out something of the deepest truth of Jesus Christ. So, far from being abstractly pious or merely edifying examples, the martyrs really relate to real people in real time.

Please read the rest there. 

I did not post any list of best books read in 2016 earlier this year--it's March already!--but if I had done so, Father Servais Pinckaers' book, The Spirituality of Martyrdom . . .  To the Limits of Love would have topped the list. As I said when I read it:

Pinckaers demonstrates that martyrdom is not merely an event: there's a spirituality that is essential to the Christian life, imitating Jesus in His Passion and Death completely. Even if we are not called to martyrdom--that's a line we often hear in modern Western culture--we are called to that imitation of and identification with Christ.

He begins his discussion with the Beatitudes from the Gospels according to St. Matthew and St. Luke. The eighth Beatitude from Matthew: "Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you" and the fourth Beatitude from Luke: "Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake." Then Pinckaers demonstrates how the early Church and subsequent theologians from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas have applied those Beatitudes to martyrdom. Soul-stirring and amazing!

I'd recommend it for Lenten reading and I might dip back into myself. It is a marvelous and important book!

The Old is New Again: Anti-Catholicism in England and the U.S.A.

Again, I was listening to a podcast from a wonderful interview series on BBC 4, "Beyond Belief": three experts join the host, Ernie Rea, to discuss a religious issue. They do so reasonably, without ad hominem attacks, and with conviction--at the least the episodes I've listened to. They don't talk over each other and there's a good give and take without shouting or anger. On this episode from 2010, Father Marcus Holden, Sister Gemma Simmonds, and Francis Davis discussed the upcoming papal visit and the history of English Catholicism. The three guests agree and disagree, but the latter without much acrimony. Each episode also includes a brief interview offering another perspective, and the choice in this episode was to talk to a Catholic convert. One of the questions for the convert was, you do know that you're out of step with much of current society if you really believe what the Church teaches about marriage and family life? Thus implying that the goal of life is to be in step with current culture; the host also noted that if there is any anti-Catholicism it is because of what Catholics believe about marriage and family life (and of course the sexual abuse crisis).

In the same vein, David Carlin writes for The Catholic Thing about "The Old Charge Resurfaces: Catholics Are Un-American", noting that for some, the only good Catholic is a bad Catholic, especially if he or she is a politician or public figure:

In other words, political liberals have no objection to Catholic politicians if the Catholic politicians in question deviate from the Catholic faith in a politically liberal direction. Their membership in the Catholic Church can be overlooked as long as the Catholic politicians are supporters of such splendid liberal causes as abortion rights and same-sex marriage and gender-neutral bathrooms. Thus former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is okay, and so is Vice President Joe Biden.

In fact they are more than just okay. They are positively desirable from a liberal point of view. For by approving of Pelosi, Biden, and their ilk, liberals are able to deny the charge that they are anti-Catholic. They are tolerant. And pluralistic. And open-minded.

But let a genuine Catholic come along (Rick Santorum is a prime recent instance), and liberals show their true colors. The thing they despise about such politicians is that they actually believe in the doctrines, in particular the moral doctrines, of the Catholic Church. They believe that abortion is homicide; that homosexual behavior is unnatural; that same-sex marriage is absurd; and that sex outside of marriage is wrong.

Therefore they are not merely in error, but are despicable from the liberal/progressive point of view, for these Catholic beliefs contradict fundamental articles of the liberal faith. But what political liberals despise is not so much the individual politicians as the religion they represent. In the final accounting, they despise that obnoxious thing, Catholicism.

According to the liberal definition of Americanism, Catholics – that is, Catholics who actually believe in their religion – are not, and cannot be, good Americans. This used to be a charge made openly, but is now made in more indirect fashion. For to be a good American, in the current liberal dispensation, you have to be a believer in moral relativism and sexual freedom.

When Anti-Catholicism was based upon religious beliefs, Protestants objected to Catholic worship, the sacraments, and doctrine--and the fear of disloyalty reinforced by the legacy of the Gunpowder Plot. David Carlin also discusses the history of anti-Catholicism in England and then in the British Colonies and the United States of America in his article. Thus, he concludes: "The old Protestant consensus is gone, and with it the old reflexive anti-Catholicism. But once again, after a lapse of less than a century, and now on shifting grounds, Catholicism is charged with being an un-American religion."

Illustration: one of Thomas Nast's anti-Catholic cartoons, attacking Catholic influence in education. Please note that Nast had been baptized Catholic!

Chesterton and Newman on English Catholic Literature

Our Wichita chapter of the American Chesterton Society will meet next week at Eighth Day Books to conclude our discussion of The Thing: Why I am a Catholic, reading the last three essays. The first of those three is titled "If They Had Believed" (Chapter 33) and Chesterton brings up John Henry Newman's summing up of English Literature:

ONE of the things our enemies do not know is the real case for their own side. It is always for me a great matter of pride that the proudest, the most genuine and the most unanswerable boast, that the Protestants of England could ever make, was made for them by a Catholic. Very few of the Protestants, of his time at any rate, would have had the historical enlargement or enlightenment to make it. For it was said by Newman, when that great master of English was surveying the glorious triumphs of our tongue from Bacon and Milton, to Swift and Burke, and he reminded us firmly that, though we convert England to the true faith a thousand times over, "English literature will always HAVE BEEN Protestant." 

That generous piece of candour might well be represented as even too generous; but I think it is very wise for us to be too generous. It is not entirely, or at least not exclusively true. The name of Chaucer is alone enough to show that English literature was English a long time before it was Protestant. Even a Protestant, if he were also English, could ask for nobody more entirely English than Chaucer. He was, in the essential national temper, very much more English than Milton. As a matter of fact, the argument is no stronger for Chaucer than it is for Shakespeare. But in the case of Shakespeare the argument is long and complicated, as conducted by partisans; though sufficiently simple and direct for people with a sense of reality. I believe that recent discoveries, as recorded in a book by a French lady, have very strongly confirmed the theory that Shakespeare died a Catholic. But I need no books and no discoveries to prove to me that he had lived a Catholic, or more probably, like the rest of us, tried unsuccessfully to live a Catholic; that he thought like a Catholic and felt like a Catholic and saw every question as a Catholic sees it. The proofs of this would be matter for a separate essay; if indeed so practical an impression can be proved at all. It is quite self-evident to me that he was a certain real and recognisable Renaissance type of Catholic; like Cervantes; like Ronsard. But if I were asked offhand for a short explanation, I could only say that I know he was a Catholic from the passages which are now used to prove he was an agnostic.

Then Chesterton poses an intriguing question: What "If They Had Believed" in Catholicism?:

But that is another and much more subtle question, which is not the question I proposed to myself in starting this essay. In starting it, I proposed to grant the whole sound and solid truth of Newman's admission; that there has indeed arisen out of the disunion of Europe a great and glorious English Protestant literature; and to make some further speculations upon the point. And I think that nothing could make clearer to the modern English, the one supreme thing that they don't know (which is what our religion really is and why we think it real) than to put this rather interesting historical question. What difference would it have made to the great masters of English literature, if they had been Catholics?

He discusses a few examples, Bunyan, Milton, the Romantics, and then comes back to Milton and even Sir Walter Scott:

I take it that the imaginative magnificence of Milton's epic, in such matters as the War in Heaven, would have been much more convincing, if it had been modelled more on the profound mediaeval mysteries about the nature of angels and archangels, and less on the merely fanciful Greek myths about giants and gods. PARADISE LOST is an immortal poem; but it has just failed to be an immortal religious poem. Those are most happy in reading Milton who can read him as they would read Hesiod. It is doubtful whether those seeking spiritual satisfaction now read him even as naturally as they would read Crashaw. I suppose nobody will dispute that the pageantry of Scott might have taken on a tenfold splendour if he could have understood the emblems of an everlasting faith as sympathetically as he did the emblems of a dead feudalism. For him it was the habit that made the monk; but the habit would have been quite as picturesque if there had been a real monk inside it; let alone a real mind inside the monk, like the mind of St. Dominic or St. Hugh of Lincoln. "English literature will always have been Protestant"; but it might have been Catholic; without ceasing to be English literature, and perhaps succeeding in producing a deeper literature and a happier England.

Coincidentally, Father C. John McCloskey provides more insight into Newman's appreciation of Catholic Literature in The Catholic Thing (get it: Chesterton's The Thing, Father McCloskey in The Catholic Thing--too perfect for coincidence!) and its influences:

Blessed John Henry Newman gave a classic justification for paying attention to such works. In his lectures to the students at the Catholic university that he founded in Dublin in the mid-1800s (later published as The Idea of the University), he discusses the meaning and purpose of Catholic literature. And he draws very interesting distinctions – and lessons from them:

When a “Catholic Literature in the English tongue” is spoken of as a desideratum, no reasonable person will mean by “Catholic works” much more than the “works of Catholics.” The phrase does not mean a religious literature. “Religious Literature” indeed would mean much more than “the Literature of religious men;” it means over and above this, that the subject-matter of the Literature is religious; but by “Catholic Literature” is not to be understood a literature which treats exclusively or primarily of Catholic matters, of Catholic doctrine, controversy, history, persons, or politics; but it includes all subjects of literature whatever, treated as a Catholic would treat them, and as he only can treat them.

Newman was clearly trying to stake out a particular kind of writing that would not be the usual apologetics or spiritual works or theology. In his day, he could assume most people would understand what he was getting at: “Why it is important to have them treated by Catholics hardly need be explained here. . . .For it is evident that, if by a Catholic Literature were meant nothing more or less than a religious literature, its writers would be mainly ecclesiastics; just as writers on Law are mainly lawyers, and writers on Medicine are mainly physicians or surgeons.”

The point has a bearing far beyond what might apply in professional groups or academic disciplines: “if this be so, a Catholic Literature is no object special to a University, unless a University is to be considered identical with a Seminary or a Theological School.”

For Newman, the importance of literature stems from our very nature and God-given powers as human beings, especially language:

if by means of words the secrets of the heart are brought to light, pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief is carried off, sympathy conveyed, counsel imparted, experience recorded, and wisdom perpetuated,—if by great authors the many are drawn up into unity, national character is fixed, a people speaks, the past and the future, the East and the West are brought into communication with each other,—if such men are, in a word, the spokesmen and prophets of the human family,—it will not answer to make light of Literature or to neglect its study; rather we may be sure that, in proportion as we master it in whatever language, and imbibe its spirit, we shall ourselves become in our own measure the ministers of like benefits to others, be they many or few, be they in the obscurer or the more distinguished walks of life,—who are united to us by social ties, and are within the sphere of our personal influence.

Here is the source for Newman's comments on Catholic Literature.

I think I will bring Father McCloskey's article to our meeting next Friday, November 21, at 6:30 p.m., gathering around the table on the second floor of Eighth Day Books--along with the Maple Bacon and Pumpkin Spice cookies I'm going to bake! If you are in Wichita, drop by and join the group! There will certainly be other refreshments and libations!