Mid-Tudor turmoil

The immediate impact of the Henrician regime on political ideas and political discourse engaged in by lawyers was less than clear-cut. Lawyers were sometimes bullied by Henry VIII, but the more important point is that legal institutions, including the inns of court, survived largely unscathed, and on some important secular issues, such as uses and wills, the profession contributed to political compromise. Henry VIII may personally have believed that the king ruled under God rather than under the law, and, as we have seen, some legal rhetoric communicated to the public appears to have endorsed such a view. Nevertheless, there is considerable truth in the contention that Henrician political thought contained unresolved tensions between ascending and descending theories of where ultimate political authority lay, and there was much that blurred the distinctions. The break from Rome, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the subsequent changes in the church were all carried out through parliament. Indeed, in the 1540s Henry even went so far as to encourage parliament to pass a statute that enabled him to determine the succession to the throne by will so that he could ensure that his son Edward would succeed in preference to his eldest surviving child, Mary, daughter of Catherine of Aragon.

Despite all of his efforts, however, Henry was ultimately unable to completely resolve the problem that had launched his ‘empire’ in the first place, the succession to the throne.