| Summary: | <p>This thesis offers new perspectives on the intellectual rationales employed to defend Henry VIII’s royal supremacy. It affirms that, far from being explicable merely by reference to the exigencies of politics, the supremacy was shaped by ideas about the nature of temporal authority over the Church, and it demonstrates the importance of securing ideological commitment to the supremacy.</p>
<p>The thesis addresses the intellectual case for the supremacy advanced by the English government, and especially by Thomas Cromwell, in the formative years of the 1530s, and the relationship between ideology and the institutional structures and functioning of the supremacy. The thesis also considers the application of the intellectual case for the supremacy to Ireland, although there the issues of Henry’s supremacy played out over a longer period, and are therefore pursued to the end of Edward VI’s reign.</p>
<p>There are three principal elements to the thesis.</p>
<p>The first concerns the role played by Cromwell in shaping the supremacy. It is argued that he initially promoted a parliamentary supremacy in accordance with his political philosophy, and manifested this by exercising the supremacy through statute. However, when Cromwell, as vicegerent, was endowed with extraordinary ecclesiastical powers, both the way in which the supremacy functioned, and the model of supremacy which he sanctioned in polemic, changed.</p>
<p>The second revises previous scholarly interpretations of Christopher St German’s proposals for the resolution of doctrinal issues by the king-in-Parliament, and argues that, ultimately, he repudiated his own theories.</p>
<p>The third proposes that the intellectual case for the supremacy was compromised in Ireland by political circumstances there and by policy decisions taken by the English government, and argues that a failure to convey an adequate intellectual justification for the supremacy to the people of Ireland is a factor helping to explain the Reformation’s rejection there.</p>
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