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‘The consent of the body of the whole realme’: Edward Hall’s parliamentary history

Modern scholars have often presented Henry VIII and his chief ministers as the prime movers behind the reform of religion in 1530s England. Edward Hall, a Protestant-minded MP in the Reformation parliament, sharply contested this view in his chronicle, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrious Families of Lancaster and York (1548). Hall presented not the king, but parliamentarians in general and the burgesses of the House of Commons in particular as the true driving forces behind statutory ecclesiastical reform. Insisting upon a pre-existing widespread zeal for reform among his fellow MPs and suppressing almost all sense of the strong support for the clergy expressed by the Commons’ more conservative members, Hall made the Henrician Reformation above all parliament’s Reformation. Hall’s Chronicle therefore broadens our appreciation of the significance of history in the thinking of England’s first generation of reformers.