Foxe completely rewrote his conclusion of Henry VIII's reign between his 1563 and 1570 editions. (Interestingly, Foxe said nothing about the death of the king, nor did he offer final thoughts on his reign, in the Rerum). In 1563, Foxe began with thoughts on the futility of persecution and then procceeded to remark on the importance of good councillors to guide a monarch. He claimed that Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell, Archbishop Cranmer, Sir Anthony Denny (the Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber) and Dr. William Butts, Henry's physician, were able to often guide Henry into serving the True Church. (Although only Cromwell and Cranmer could qualify as royal councillors in the strictest sense of the word, most scholars are agreed in seeing Anne Boleyn, Butts and Denny as both staunch evangelicals and individuals with considerable personal access to Henry which these used to further evangelical causes). Foxe then bewailed the increasing loss of influence that these good councillors had on Henry, and opined that Henry, goaded on by his bishops, would have continued persecuting the True Church, had his reign not been cut short by his death (1563, pp. 681-2). Foxe then described how the persecutions of Henry VIII's reign led many prominent evangelicals to recant, even though they later served God and even, in some cases, suffered martyrdom.

In 1570, Foxe dropped all of this material. There were three basic reasons for this. The first is that Foxe had acquired important new information about the death of Henry VIII and the monarch's attitudes toward religion in general, and Stephen Gardiner in particular, at the time of his death. Even a cursory glance through this material indicates that - unless Foxe invented these anecdotes - the source for this was Cranmer. Since we know that Ralph Morrice, Cranmer's secretary supplied Foxe with material for the 1570 edition, it would seem reasonable to infer that he was Foxe's source for these narratives as well. Moreover, Morrice is cited by Foxe as his informant (Morrice having heard Sir Anthony Denny relate it to Cranmer) for the famous anecdote of Henry declaring that he eliminated Stephen Gardiner from the list of executors to his will, because the king believed that the other executors would not be able to control Gardiner as he had done.

But Foxe also eliminated the previous account because his views on Elizabeth I had changed and this affected his treatment of Henry. As Foxe grew impatient with the failure of Elizabeth to reform the English Church, he omitted his strictures on the need for good counsel and also the relatively benign portrait of Henry with which he had closed Book 8 in his first edition (in the 1563 edition, Foxe claims that only death prevented Henry from launching a more severe persecution of evangelicals. In the 1570 edition, he dropped this material and replaced it with an account of how Henry VIII was on the brink of sweeping evangelical reforms when he died.). This was replaced by an account which was much more critical of Henry for failing to complete the Reformation he had begun and which also implicitly suggested that it was Elizabeth's duty to finish the final uprooting of Catholicism begun by her father and brother.

Thomas S. Freeman

I.e., 26 December.

Sir Anthony Denny was the Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and thus in charge of the attendants who waited on the king.

Henry VIII died on 28 January 1547.

In other words this incident took place around the time of Germain Gardiner's arrest in 1544. Germain Gardiner and John Lark were executed for alledgedly conspiring with Reginold Pole, whilst in reality, their executions were part of the factional struggles at Court in 1543-44. John Heywood (More's brother-in-law) was condemned with them but he was later reprieved when he recanted on the way to the scaffold. The episode, as described, is clearly exaggerated, but it is plausible that Gardiner may well have been in disfavour with Henry, and to have had to make his peace with the king, in the aftermath of the Prebendaries' Plot and Germain Gardiner's downfall.

More precisely, Gardiner's position was that the religious legislation of Henry VIII was valid, as Henry was legitimately the Supreme Head of the English Church. However, the religious legislation of the Edwardian Church was invalid, as Edward VI, was a minor and thus not legitimately the Supreme Head of the English Church.

Historians have questioned the degree to which Henry's religious policies were shifting in the closing months of his reign. For a discussion of this point and the argument that they were indeed moving in a direction favourable to the evangelicals see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer (New Haven, CT, 1996), pp. 356-60.

As Glyn Redworth has observed, Gardiner remained in favour with Henry well in the autumn of 1546. What led to Gardiner's exclusion from the executors of Henry's will was that the bishop with admirable courage and a deplorable sense of timing declined , at the November, to agree to an exchange of episcopal properties with Crown lands. (In theory, these exchanges were equal, in practice they always favoured the Crown). Henry was irate and Gardiner was in disfavour at the crucial time when Henry died. (See Glyn Redworth, In Defence of the Church Catholic: The Life of Stephen Gardiner [Oxford, 1990], pp. 237-40 and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer [New Haven, CT, 1996], p. 359).

I.e., an irritant or vexation.