Henry VIII and

the First Totalitarian State

Part 1— The Beginnings of English Political Thought

While continental thinkers groped their way through the troubles of the Reformation toward the idea of an autonomous, secularized polity, England entered the age of Reformation with a polity that was autonomous and centralized enough to reform the church by transforming it into an adjunct of the secularized commonwealth.

In the wake of the Norman Conquest, and aided by geographical isolation, there had grown a national society, politically articulated and represented in Lords and Commons, institutionally unified through royal administration, courts, and common law. By the time of the Tudors, England had become "in fact," that is, in sen­timent and institutions, a closed national polity ready to crown this development by the idea of its autonomous existence when the emergency should arise.

The pathos of this polity found its illuminating expression when Henry VIII addressed his Parliament in George Ferrers's case (1543):

We be informed by our Judges that we at no time stand so highly in our estate royal as in the time of Parliament, wherein we as head and you as members are conjoined and knit together into one body politic, so as whatsoever offence or injury (during that time) is offered to the meanest member of the House is to be judged as done against our person and the whole Court of Parliament.

The well-knit body politic of king and Par­liament is the unquestioned governing authority of England: the king being enhanced in his royal estate when he participates in the representation of the realm, the Parliament participating in the privileges of majesty when it functions as the king's high court.

The unquestioned existence of the polity and its institutions must be presupposed as a fundamental fact when we approach the evolution of English politics in the age of Reformation. It is the key to understanding otherwise baffling ideas and attitudes.

When we reflect, for instance, on the crazy sequence of Henrician almost Catholic supremacy, Edwardian Lutheran reformism, Marian Cath­olic reaction, and Elizabethan settlement, all within a generation, we begin to wonder what sort of people these English are who switch dogmas every ten years along with their kings, and who do not respond to the secularization of their church for scandalous reasons with a major civil war and the ejection of the dynasty.