1532, England | Opening Act of The English Reformation

Preface: Welcome to this quick recap of the history of immigration of US. It's a good time reflect on that now, isn't it?

1517, Martin Luther, Wittenberg's Castle Church

As mentioned previously, on October 31, 1517 — the day before the Feast of All Saints — the 33-year-old Luther posted theses on the door of Wittenberg's Castle Church, which functioned as a kind of community bulletin board for academic and church announcements. The theses were written in Latin and printed by a local printer, John Gruenenberg, using the relatively new print technology that had only reached Germany around 1450. Its actual original title wasn't "the 95 Theses" at all — that's shorthand based on the count. It was titled "Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences." It was framed as an invitation to academic debate among scholars, not a public manifesto. Thesis 43 captures the actual argument plainly: "Christians are to be taught that he who gives to the poor or lends to the needy does a better work than buying pardons."

Luther was born in 1483, the son of a relatively prosperous mining family in Eisleben, in the Holy Roman Empire — not poor, despite the humble image he later cultivated. In 1505, on the way to becoming a lawyer as his father intended, he was caught in a violent thunderstorm and, terrified, vowed on the spot to become a monk if he survived. He kept the vow, entering the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt against his father's furious objections. He was ordained in 1507, and after impressing his superiors, was transferred to the Augustinian house in Wittenberg, where the university — new, founded only in 1502 — had fairly lenient degree requirements that let him move quickly through theological training. On October 21, 1512, Luther was received into the senate of the theological faculty at Wittenberg, taking the chair of theology, a position he'd hold the rest of his career. From 1510 to 1520 he lectured continuously on the Psalms, Hebrews, Romans, and Galatians, with the specific sequence Psalms (1513–15), Romans (1515–16), Galatians (1516–17), Hebrews (1517–18). He wasn't a marginal agitator. He was a credentialed, ordained, tenured professor of theology, deep inside the institution he'd eventually fracture.

As a monk, Luther sought desperately to find acceptance from God, believing — as the Church taught — that salvation required not just grace but the works necessary to earn it. He had no confidence in his own ability to remain in a state of grace, and was terrified of God's wrath, gnawed by uncertainty about whether he could ever earn divine favor. He himself wrote, "I kept the rules of my order so strictly that I can say: if ever a monk went to heaven on account of his monkery, I should get there too" — and it still wasn't enough to quiet his own sense of dread. This wasn't performative anguish; contemporaries and his own letters describe years of genuine spiritual crisis.

Sometime during his lectures on Romans, in what's since become known as his "Tower Experience" (Turmerlebnis), Luther wrestled specifically with Romans 1:17 — "the righteousness of God is revealed" — a phrase he says he had been taught, by every teacher before him, to understand as God's active righteousness: God being righteous, and therefore punishing the unrighteous sinner. He came to a different reading. "I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that through which the just live by a gift of God, namely faith," he later wrote — "Here I felt as if I were entirely born again and had entered paradise itself through gates that had been flung open." Righteousness wasn't a standard he had to meet through effort. It was something God simply gave. This single reinterpretation is the theological engine behind everything that follows — justification by faith alone — and it didn't arrive as a political strategy. It arrived as relief from years of private terror.

In 1515, Pope Leo X commissioned Albert of Brandenburg to sell indulgences across his territories. Albert was deeply in debt — he'd paid a large sum just for the dispensation allowing him to hold three ecclesiastical territories simultaneously — and had borrowed the money from the Fugger banking house in Augsburg. Half the indulgence proceeds went to Albert and the Fuggers to repay that loan; the other half went to Rome, partly to fund the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica. Albert hired an experienced salesman, the Dominican friar Johann Tetzel, to run the actual indulgence campaign near Wittenberg. Indulgences had become deeply commercialized, openly tied to the era's anxiety about death and the afterlife, and Luther vehemently rejected the whole premise, writing "there is no divine authority for preaching that the soul flies out of purgatory immediately the money clinks in the bottom of the chest."

Luther didn't deny the Pope's existence or even directly attack his authority. He argued only that even the Pope could merely declare a sin God had already forgiven — he could not manufacture forgiveness through his own authority. This sounds restrained, almost respectful — but it quietly removed the Church's claim to actively control salvation. If forgiveness depends on God alone, and faith alone connects a person to that forgiveness, then the entire clerical hierarchy — confession, indulgences, the priesthood's mediating role — loses its theological necessity. Luther wasn't trying to demolish the Church. He was pointing out, almost as an aside, that its core economic and spiritual product didn't actually do what it claimed to do.

Three conditions converged: the printing press, recently established in Germany, let the theses circulate rapidly far beyond Wittenberg; German anger at money flowing out to Rome for projects like St. Peter's Basilica was already simmering; and Albert, the archbishop who'd commissioned the whole indulgence campaign, had the theses checked for heresy and personally forwarded them to Rome in December 1517 — meaning the institution itself escalated a local dispute into an international one. The Pope, used to dealing with reformers and heretics, responded slowly at first, "with great care as is proper." By the time Rome moved decisively, the theses were already everywhere. However, Luther's 95 Theses only really attracted official Church attention once they were published more widely in 1518. Rome's response built slowly, then snapped: by early 1520 Luther had published three major treatises — Freedom of a Christian, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation — which fully worked out the implications of justification by faith far beyond the original indulgences complaint. In June 1520, Pope Leo X issued the bull Exsurge Domine, listing 41 specific errors found in Luther's writings and demanding recantation. Instead of submitting, Luther publicly burned the papal bull, along with a copy of the Code of Canon Law, telling the gathered crowd that the Pope had revealed himself as the Antichrist by condemning the Gospel itself. He was formally excommunicated on January 3, 1521.

Normally this would have ended in execution. The standard procedure was excommunication followed by handover to political authorities for execution — but Frederick the Wise, Luther's own prince in Saxony, insisted he receive a fair hearing first, which is why the case went to the Diet of Worms in 1521 instead of straight to the stake. "Diet" here just means a formal deliberative assembly — from the same root as the German Tag (day), as in Reichstag. It has nothing to do with food. "Worms" is the German city of Worms (pronounced vorms), on the Rhine. So it's "the Assembly at Worms" — convened by the Holy Roman Empire, not a dietary council. The Diet of Worms of 1521 was an imperial diet — a formal deliberative assembly — of the Holy Roman Empire, called by Emperor Charles V and held in the city of Worms. Luther was summoned to the diet to renounce or reaffirm his views in response to the papal bull condemning him.

The hearing took place at the Bishop's palace on April 17–18, 1521. Charles had guaranteed Luther safe passage to attend, which mattered enormously given what had happened to Jan Hus a century earlier — Hus had been promised safe conduct to the Council of Constance in 1415 and was tried and executed anyway. Asked to recant, Luther defended his views and refused. At the end of the diet, Charles issued the Edict of Worms, condemning Luther as "a notorious heretic" and banning anyone in the Empire from spreading his ideas — and, more brutally, it prohibited anyone from giving him food or shelter and called for his arrest. Although the Reformation is usually dated from 1517, this edict is the first formal schism actually tied to it.

Luther was given safe conduct home, but his protector Frederick III of Saxony, fearing for his safety, staged a fake highway ambush and hid him at Wartburg Castle for nearly a year. The edict, meanwhile, mostly didn't stick — rising public support for Luther among the German people and protection from sympathetic princes meant it was never enforced inside Germany itself, though it was briefly enforced against his supporters in the Habsburg Netherlands.

1532, England, Henry's Divorce

Between 1521 and 1534, Henry goes from defending Rome to breaking with it — and the bridge between those two points is almost entirely about Catherine of Aragon, not theology. Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon had produced only one surviving child, Mary. By the late 1520s Henry was convinced he needed a male heir to secure the Tudor line, and he'd become infatuated with Anne Boleyn, who wouldn't become his mistress — she held out for marriage. Henry needed Catherine gone, and he needed it to be a legitimate annulment, not just a separation, so any new marriage and its children would be unimpeachable.

Henry argued his marriage to Catherine had been invalid from the start, because she was his brother Arthur's widow, and Leviticus condemns marrying a brother's wife. (Catherine maintained her marriage to Arthur was never consummated, which was the whole basis for the original papal dispensation that let her marry Henry in the first place.) Henry pushed Pope Clement VII for an annulment on these grounds. Catherine was the aunt of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who at that point effectively controlled Rome militarily (his troops had sacked the city in 1527). Clement VII was not going to humiliate Charles's aunt to satisfy Henry. The annulment request got stalled for years through legates, hearings, and delay. Cardinal Wolsey, who'd been Henry's chief minister and had failed to deliver the annulment, was dismissed in 1529 and died in 1530. Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer became the architects of the actual break — Cromwell on the legal/parliamentary machinery, Cranmer (made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533) on providing the theological cover.

Rather than waiting on Rome, Parliament started cutting the legal ties: the Submission of the Clergy (1532), the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533, which declared England an empire unto itself and barred appeals to Rome — this is where the sovereignty argument gets codified), and then Henry secretly married Anne Boleyn in early 1533. Cranmer declared the Catherine marriage void and the Anne marriage valid later that year. The Pope excommunicated Henry. Parliament responded with the Act of Supremacy in 1534, formally making Henry the head of the Church of England.

Submission of the Clergy (1532) was the moment the English clergy formally agreed they would no longer make church law without the king's approval. Convocation (the clergy's governing assembly) had always had the power to legislate on canon law independently. Under pressure from Henry — applied through Cromwell and through threats like the Statute of Praemunire (an old law that could be used to prosecute clergy for recognizing papal authority over royal authority) — Convocation submitted: they agreed no new canon law could be made without royal consent, and existing canon law would be reviewed by a royal commission. It broke the Church in England's independent law-making power before the public break with Rome even happened. Thomas More resigned as Lord Chancellor the day after this submission — he saw exactly what it meant.

Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) is the legal masterstroke, usually credited to Cromwell. The Act simply made appeals to Rome illegal — all such matters would now be settled finally within England, in English ecclesiastical courts, with the Archbishop of Canterbury as the final authority. It declared England an "empire," meaning a self-contained sovereign realm where the king's authority over both temporal and spiritual matters was complete and answerable to no outside power. That's the sovereignty doctrine made explicit and codified into statute — not just "the Pope is wrong about this annulment" but "no foreign authority has jurisdiction here at all." Once this passed, Catherine had nowhere left to appeal, and the annulment Cranmer would issue later that year was legally final the moment it was made. Anne was pregnant (with the child who would become Elizabeth I), so Henry needed the marriage to have happened, and to be retroactively legitimate, before the birth. He married her secretly around January 1533, before Cranmer had even formally ruled the Catherine marriage void — that ruling came in May 1533, after the fact, to clean it up legally.

Submission of the Clergy, the Act in Restraint of Appeals, the marriage, the eventual Act of Supremacy in 1534 — all of it answers one question: who has final authority over the church in England? Henry's answer was himself, not the Pope. That's a jurisdictional revolution, not a theological one. He kept almost everything Catholic in structure — bishops, hierarchy, ritual, the sacraments. A Mass with Henry's name where the Pope's used to be is still recognizably Catholic. The actual theological turn — justification by faith, an English liturgy, married clergy, the doctrine Luther had been working out since his Tower Experience — doesn't arrive in England until his son Edward VI's reign in the late 1540s, under Cranmer, the same man Henry had made Archbishop to clean up his marriage. Henry built the box. He didn't put Protestant theology inside it. That came after, and it came from people who took the opening he created far further than he ever intended. 🌻