LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

MAAS: BARNES AND EARLY ENGLISH LUTHERANISM 79
to leave Barnes in Wittenberg and briefly return to England and refocus on
the broader picture.
If one thing most people know about Henry VIII is that he severed his
nation from the Roman church, the other bit of information almost everyone
knows is that he entered into a number of famously troublesome marriages.
And the ecclesiastical turmoil was not at all unrelated to the marital
difficulties. Once again shamefully oversimplifying, some of the more
important details are these. Henry’s first wife was Catherine of Aragon.
Among other problems he found with her, Catherine had not given Henry a
son, and therefore had provided no undisputed heir to the throne of England.
Disputed heirs—whether illegitimate or female—everyone knew could lead
to bloody civil war. And England had had enough of that recently. If
Catherine could give birth to no heir, Henry would have to remarry a wife
who could. This would have been rather uncomplicated if not for two facts.
The first is that to remarry meant having to annul his marriage to Catherine,
and this necessitated papal permission. The second is that Catherine was
connected to important and influential people, the sort of people who did not
take kindly to the prospect of her being cast aside. The most important and
influential of these people was her nephew Charles, who just happened to be
Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. The problem here is that the Pope, who
needed imperial support to thwart the growth of Protestantism in the empire,
would not be persuaded to grant an annulment that might open a rift between
himself and the Emperor. Henry would have to turn elsewhere to find
legitimization for what he was determined to do in any case. If the papacy
was not co-operative, perhaps those who rejected the papacy would be. And
so he began to solicit opinions from prominent Protestant theologians, one of
whom was the man he had so violently opposed ten years earlier: Martin
Luther. But this was no straightforward matter either. England had no
official ties with Germany and no resident ambassadors at the Saxon court.
What she did have, Henry found out, was an Englishman, and a doctor of
theology at that, who was living in Wittenberg and on friendly terms with
both Luther and the German princes.
In 1531 an English messenger arrived in Germany to seek out Robert
Barnes and to persuade Barnes to solicit Luther’s opinion (and, of course, to
influence it) on Henry’s right to annul one marriage and enter another. 15
Though he was unable—even over the course of the next five years—to
convince Luther himself to adopt Henry’s views on marriage, Barnes did
have friends on the continent who were more agreeable, and the Protestant
cities of Hamburg and Lübeck were soon persuaded by the King’s reasoning.
15 C. S. Anderson, “The Person and Position of Dr. Robert Barnes, 1495-1540”
(Unpublished Th.D. Thesis, Union Theological Seminary, 1962), 53; E. Doernberg, Henry
VIII and Luther: An Account of their Personal Relations (London, 1961), 85.