Book Review: Getting to know them: Characters of the Reformation

Hilaire Belloc’s 1936 classic has just been reprinted (2017) by Ignatius Press. In “Characters of the Reformation,” Belloc presents short sketches of 23 of the main characters of the Protestant Reformation in England. These were the men and women who had much to do with what Belloc calls the “transformation of England from a Catholic to a Protestant country.”
 
Belloc focuses on what he describes as “the English tragedy” because, he maintains, had England not become largely Protestant, “the Reformation would have failed, and our civilization would have been today one Christian thing.”
 
He comes back to this idea again and again in the book, and it is a two-part argument. First, he believes that England was the lynchpin; had she continued as a Catholic country, the Reformation in Europe would have fallen in on itself.
 
Second, an outcome of the Reformation was the acceptance of nationalism, i.e., that the nation is “sovereign and lay, completely independent of every international control.” Because of this, Belloc argues, today “we have a state of affairs that is of moral anarchy.” Ultimately, he believes this will lead to “the absolutely certain end of our civilization.”
 
Belloc’s ideas in the second part of his argument may have a kind of validity, but he offers no real proof or explanation for his statement that, without England, the Reformation would not have succeeded as it did.
 
Nevertheless, this is the reason that he presents only the characters of the Reformation in England. There is no chapter on Luther or Calvin although they are sometimes referred to briefly. The book focuses on the individuals who were a force for good or for evil, and Belloc’s narratives are intriguing. He presents many not so well-known facts like King Henry VIII, whose life is one of Belloc’s chapters, was “exceedingly intelligent” and was “destined by his father (Henry VII) to become Archbishop of Canterbury.” His older brother Arthur should have become king, but he died while he was engaged to marry Catherine of Aragon.
 
Catherine was highly desirable as a wife for any young prince. She was the daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain whose dynastic rule sponsored Christopher Columbus. Spain was one of the foremost powers in Europe, and Catherine came with a very large dowry.
Belloc explains that in Europe at that time, monarchies “increased their power by making marriages that would bring them either large sums of money or new territories from which further taxes could be gathered.”
 
When Arthur died, Henry VII was extremely reluctant either to return the part of Catherine’s dowry that had already been paid or to forfeit the portion the crown would have received had the marriage taken place, and so he arranged for Catherine of Aragon to become the wife of his second son Henry who eventually became King Henry VIII.
This, of course, was the issue fastened upon by Henry VIII when he sought to have his marriage to Catherine set aside. He claimed that he had illegally married his brother’s widow; Catherine insisted it was an engagement only, never consummated as a marriage.
 
In his desire to cast off Catherine, Belloc maintains that Henry was prodded, even led, by Anne Boleyn, who at the time of her marriage to Henry was already carrying his child, and by Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer. It was Anne who held out for marriage and refused to be Henry’s mistress as was her sister Mary, who bore a child by Henry.
 
Thomas Cromwell, often confused with his nephew Oliver Cromwell, saw opportunities in the splitting apart of the Catholic Church in England. It was he who masterminded the dissolution of the monasteries, an action purported to greatly increase the King’s wealth. However, Belloc explains, “The wealth did not stay in the King’s hands. Cromwell himself made a very large fortune out of the pickings. He gave no less than 13 monastic estates to his nephew (Oliver).”
 
Cromwell was, Belloc says, “the lay head of the country” while Anne Boleyn was “the pivot figure” in the English Reformation, and it was Thomas Cranmer, as Archbishop of Canterbury, who pronounced the divorce of Henry from Catherine, married Henry to Anne, and crowned Anne as Queen of England.
 
Against this backdrop of greed and treachery, Belloc presents the faithful Catherine of Aragon, the martyred Thomas More, and Pope Clement VII. He vilifies Elizabeth I and says that “after the age of 30, she became repulsive.”
 
With all of the characters Belloc presents, he draws a colorful portrait of the heroic virtue, lust for power, and unbridled greed that contributed to the Reformation, the great cultural and philosophical shift that ushered in the era of a Europe divided into Protestant and Catholic.
 
J.E. Helm is a freelance writer for the Sooner Catholic.