A King Who Threw His Weight Around

A King Who Threw His Weight Around

Have you ever noticed how God sometimes uses unlikely characters to play important roles in executing his plan?

A CASE in point is the four-hundred-pound founder of the Episcopal Church.

He was born on June 28, 1491, the second son of King Henry VII of England. Named after his father, young Henry was trained for a career in the church with a classical education since as second son he was not born to be king. However, when his older brother, Arthur, died in 1502, young Henry became the heir apparent to the throne.

Henry was just seventeen when his father died and he began to reign as King Henry VIII. Honoring his father’s dying request, he married his brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, thus maintaining the alliance between England and Spain. Two weeks after their wedding in 1509, they were crowned king and queen of England. Henry turned over the management of his realm to his ministers, in particular to Thomas Wolsey, his chaplain. In 1515 Wolsey was made a cardinal by the pope and lord chancellor by Henry.

In the early years of his reign, Henry was concerned with two issues: the spreading Reformation and his inability to sire a male heir. In ecclesiastical matters, Henry VIII was a strong supporter of the pope against the Reformation. In 1521 he coauthored a book, Defense of the Seven Sacraments, which became a best-seller throughout Europe.

As Henry VIII grew older and larger, his preoccupation with his lack of a male heir grew. Catherine of Aragon bore him six children, but only one, Mary Tudor, survived infancy. To Henry, it was unthinkable that a girl would succeed him. This became especially frustrating for him in 1519 when his mistress Elizabeth Blount bore him a son who was ineligible to succeed him because of his illegitimacy. When Catherine turned forty in 1526, it was obvious to Henry that she would never bear him a son.

By 1527 Henry was “head over heels” in love with twenty-year-old Anne Boleyn, the younger sister of an earlier mistress. Cardinal Wolsey tried to arrange a divorce from Catherine through the pope, but the issue dragged on for years. Finally, Henry defiantly took things into his own hands and in a direct challenge to the pope’s authority, made himself head of the Church of England. He felt it was the only way he could ever get a divorce from Catherine. Henry named Thomas Cranmer, who had been influenced by Lutheranism, archbishop of Canterbury, and Cranmer reciprocated by granting Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Henry secretly married Anne Boleyn, the second of his six wives, before his divorce was final.

More important for the future, Henry enacted a series of laws that permanently separated the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. Today the Church of England is known in the United States as the Episcopal Church and elsewhere as the Anglican Church.

Henry himself may never have subscribed to any Protestant doctrines and his motives may have been self-serving, yet God used him to begin the Reformation in England. God uses whom he chooses to achieve his purposes.

Reflection

What person or experience has God used in your life in unexpected ways? Did his choice puzzle you? King Henry VIII may have had selfish reasons for forming the Anglican Church, but God used him for his purposes anyway. The wonder of God’s sovereignty is that we don’t have to understand why he does what he does. It is enough to know that it is all part of his greater plan for our good and his glory.

We know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.

Romans 8:28