Overview

The death of Henry VIII left his nine-year-old son as titular king, and gave the archbishop of Canterbury a freedom to shape the church which his predecessors had not known since the minority of Henry VI. That freedom made the reformation of the Church of England (in something more than a formal sense) possible, but the effect on convocation was not what one might have expected. The days when the lower house was full of radicals demanding extensive reforms were long gone; such elements had been rooted out in the purges of Lollardy in the fifteenth century, and although it was still customary for the clergy to submit their grievances along with the grant of the subsidy, the nature of these complaints shows quite clearly that they were more concerned with their own privileges than with the spiritual reform of the church. Structurally, the convocations had become the bastion of the clerical establishment, and were heavily weighted in favour of cathedral chapters and archdeacons. Such radicals as there were could be found in the universities and among the ex-friars, but neither of these groups had ever been represented in convocation, which continued to be dominated by clergy trained in canon law.

The result was a numbing conservatism which would have scuppered Archbishop Cranmer's reforms if it had been given the chance. The archbishop knew this of course, and did his best to circumvent the convocations altogether. All the important legislation of Edward VI’ s reign went through parliament, where there was a broadly sympathetic constituency in the house of commons (at least) and a fairly compliant upper house - as long as its interests were left untouched. Thus it was that the two prayer books and the aborted Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum were steered through the secular legislature, without any reference to the church's own assemblies, and it seems probable that both the catechism and the forty-two articles of religion were composed and submitted for the royal assent without convocation's participation.

This situation led some of the clergy to plead for a reintegration of the convocations into parliament itself, as had been the case before 1340, but this solution was hardly practical and was rejected. The overall result is that the convocation records of these years contain little more than a series of prorogations, especially once reform really got underway in 1549.