In God We Now Agree

One of the more unpleasant tussles of historical writing, the story of the English Reformation, itself seems to be passing into history.

Once, on the Catholic side, it was a story of infamy, of Henry VIII’s lust and tyranny, the arrogance of a handful of treacherous “so-called reformers”, the injustice of Henry’s persecuting “bastard child” Elizabeth I taking the throne. (See for example, R.F. Walker, An Outline History of the Catholic Church.)

The Protestants played to their own strengths: the burnings under “Bloody Mary”, Henry’s first and Catholic daughter; the Catholic Spanish Armada attempting invasion to unseat Elizabeth; the Spanish Inquisition.

The Anglo-Catholics, typically, came up with their own compromise version, that of the “two bad men”. These were Philip II of Spain, and Henry’s chief minister from 1533 to 1540, Thomas Cromwell. In fruity clerical jargon, this version was known as “neo-tractarian”, after the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement tracts that revived Anglo-Catholicism.

More intensive, systematic and charitable historical writing in recent decades has shown that the era was, like most great events, one of greys rather than blacks and whites. Books that have pointed to a better tempered, more balanced—and expert—approach in recent times are A.G. Dickens’s The English Reformation, Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation—Europe’s House Divided, written from Anglican, Catholic and neutral standpoints respectively. All three writers are Oxbridge or London academic historians. Not Angels but Anglicans: A History of Christianity in the British Isles (ed. Henry Chadwick), is almost cheery in its nevertheless candid account, as if there was never much of a problem.

Dickens’s book first appeared in 1964, when good systematic as distinct from dramatic or biographical histories of these events were rare, and he says in notes with subsequent editions that a “Niagara” of academic writing followed his pioneering modern effort.

Duffy’s book has recently been republished with a foreword on his differences with Dickens and other critics of the Catholic view, which show them to be relatively minor, to a degree which would probably have shocked old-style clerics on all sides. He has now supplemented it with Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor, which presents a relatively attractive portrait of the Catholic regime under Mary. For Duffy, Mary’s regime was not one of blind reaction, but a competent and careful attempt to restore the old religion, which would have had a better chance of succeeding had Mary lived. He says it was in the forward-looking spirit of the emerging Counter-Reformation, there were many genuine reconversions, and those burned were mostly hard-liners, at a time when burning was still a widely accepted punishment for heretics.

Three new biographies of Mary, all with Mary Tudor as the main title—and all by women—have also appeared, partly assessing her as a woman ruler, arguably England’s first.

Part of the trouble with the whole sorry, if dramatic saga has always been that, unlike that of the Lutheran Reformation on the continent, the story is complicated and drawn out over a hundred years or more, with the English story also substantially different from, though linked to, events in Scotland and Ireland.

In Germany, Lutheran-style Protestantism rapidly became a semi-popular movement in the north and the situation (to simplify decades of strife) lent itself to a north-south division, with heretics having the option to move in either direction. The English Reformation was more driven from the top, but with convoluted interplay with slowly changing clerical and public opinion.

While the Dickens and MacCulloch books deal more with high-level organisation and the “big picture”, Duffy’s is a search for grass-roots sentiment, as the organisational side changed.

The chief differences between Duffy and Dickens are in assessment of public opinion and the quality of the old religion. Duffy’s strength is unprecedentedly comprehensive research showing the English public, especially in the early years, to be overwhelmingly loyal to the old faith. He says Dickens has underestimated the coherence of the old Catholicism and assumed disaffection too readily because of later events. Dickens also concentrated on London, Oxbridge and some other towns, while most people lived in a conservative countryside where little ever changed.

They also differ over the weight to be given to “Lollardy”, the banned pre-Protestant following of the fourteenth-century Oxford church reformer John Wycliff. Dickens sees more continuing influence from this than Duffy, but nevertheless suggests that it was probably a minor contributor to events, occasionally influential rather than crucial. The influence of Martin Luther and other continental radicals and of English Bible translations was greater, despite severe censorship.

The following summary draws—even-handedly I hope—largely on these three books, but also several others, and from a background in writing secular organisational and political history, not religion. It is a subject on which I, like many, had often read bits and pieces over the years but did not properly understand.

Assessment of the period has to bear in mind critical environmental factors which differentiated “modern” from medieval Europe. The invention in the late fifteenth century of printing facilitated—if at first illegally—production of the Bible in vernacular translations. Spain, along with its Hapsburg-Austria wing to the north, rose as an aspiring superpower after “Columbus crossed the blue” in 1492 and enabled colonisation of the Americas.

There also seems to have been an element of “mill-enarianism”. A fear of “end days” or some other cataclysm coming with the half-millennium at 1500 drove a heightened, sometimes morbid religious feeling,

Henry VIII succeeded his father to the English throne in 1509, aged eighteen. Henry VII had got there the hard way in 1485, after the “Wars of the Roses” which divided England for much of the fifteenth century. The Tudors were ardent centralisers, keen on severe royal authority. A nation with memories of the horror of decades of civil war generally supported this tough love. Strong discipline in the church, the biggest national institution by far, was part of it. It was no time for the niceties of individual freedom. A medieval horror prevailed of “heresy”, as the vilest crime against heaven and the public order.

Henry VII’s son Arthur, named for the legendary British king to emphasise the Tudors’ Welsh origins, was crown prince. Henry pulled off a coup in marrying Arthur to Catherine of Aragon, cousin of the Emperor Charles V, hereditary Hapbsurg Emperor of the Germans and also King of Spain. Charles, who was leading the beginnings of the vast colonial enterprise in the Americas, was probably the most powerful and important man in the world.

But in 1509 a mysterious providence intervened and young Arthur died, and Henry became heir. Not one to let his prize slip, the King successfully sought a papal dispensation to exempt Henry from the traditional ban on men marrying the widow of a deceased brother. At eighteen, the future Henry VIII was married to Catherine, six years his senior.

Young Henry famously did not find the somewhat plain and stolid older woman very attractive but, worse, she was a poor breeder and bore only a surviving daughter. Henry wanted a son to continue the line and began to suspect that lack of one was God’s punishment for marrying the widow of his brother. If the Pope’s dispensation had not worked there, then he was entitled to another one to annul the marriage. He had fallen for Anne Boleyn, a lovely, wily young maid at court. The Pope stalled and Henry suspected the pressure of his Hapsburg in-laws, who wanted to maintain the English alliance against the French through Catherine.

To Henry’s rescue came the small but growing band of senior English clergy and bureaucrats influenced by the ideas of Martin Luther, which had been winning huge support in Germany since 1517, and by enthusiasm for the English-language Bible, until then banned. They saw the opportunity and persuaded Henry with much supporting argument that the Pope was not necessary to a well-run church. If the King became head of the English church, they advised, they could justify a divorce—more correctly an annulment—of the incorrect marriage to Catherine.

Parliament then legislated between 1533 and 1536 to make Henry the supreme head of the Church of England. He married Anne Boleyn and in 1533 she gave birth to the future Elizabeth I. (But Anne too did not bear a son. Henry later had her executed for suspected adultery and four more wives followed, only one of whom bore a son, the future, short-lived Edward VI.)

The split from Rome was one of history’s great turnabouts. Henry, intelligent but paranoid, was temperamentally a conservative who had not so long before won the “Defender of the Faith” accolade from the Pope for his (possibly ghost-written) lucid treatises against Lutheranism—and strict suppression of its literature, including the newly translated English Bible. Sympathisers with Luther or other new-fangled cults from the continent had to keep their heads down, or risk losing them.

How much of the change can be attributed to the King’s “lust” and character faults, how much to the theological problems of his marriage, how much to power politics and how much to times a-changing is hard to know. It is a path modern historians generally find it fruitless to follow.

The huge land holdings accumulated by monasteries and senior clergy was an issue throughout the century, inspiring much resentment as well as no doubt acquisitive instincts, but its precise role has been hard to pinpoint.

The “Henrician” reformation did not mean too much at the parish level. The Pope was a distant, foreign, rather political figure and there had been several disruptions of the papacy in recent centuries. Governments had long had some influence over the church, including appointments of bishops. Henry formed a paranoid hatred of “the bishop of Rome” but otherwise remained a Catholic at heart. He allowed his new-found Lutheran-leaning allies some latitude, but like any good manager balanced them against more conservative churchmen.

Duffy’s book is largely an account, drawn from a huge range of sources, of the generally popular old religion at the local level and how the changes under successive regimes affected it. He sees the ritual and general character of the old church as “lush”. Others see, for example, “clutter”, with ritual, devotions, disciplines, cults, saints, relics, pictures, statues, traditions and much more accumulated over centuries. It had been relatively easy to add all this over 1500 years. Taking any of it away was another story.

A particular problem was the man-made doctrine of Purgatory, the belief in an intermediate stage between Heaven and Hell, in which moderately sinful souls were “purged” by torments before going to heaven. Medievals believed the clergy could shorten time in Purgatory by “intercession” with appropriate prayer and masses, which relatives and the friends could purchase with donations, especially for church buildings. Especially in Germany, reformers believed this practice to be a huge corruption. Duffy acknowledges that Purgatory “loomed large in lay awareness and provided the rationale underlying the immense elaboration of the late medieval cult of intercession for the dead”.

Henry VIII’s reformers set out to simplify things, to get rid of what they saw as “abuses” and “superstition”. They chipped away at the cults of the Virgin Mary and some saints, at the notion that influence, especially if bought, could buy the dead less time in Purgatory. They introduced at the margins more English in place of Latin. They took literally the commandment against worshipping graven images and began the attack on holy pictures and statues, if they could scent an element of worship there. Extremists wanted clerical marriage. In general, the reformers wanted less clericalism and display, more English text and individual responsibility, more strong preaching.

Henry had previously suppressed early versions of the English Bible, but now allowed them, if read “modestly”. He and other leaders for a long time to come feared “ale house” discussion and interpretation of the Bible—which almost any cleric today would give his or her shirt for.

These first changes, described by Duffy in detail, were, the Papacy apart, more in the spirit of Vatican II (and of Wycliff 150 years earlier) than of Calvin or Wesley. Duffy demonstrates that they had limited support from a public immersed in, and largely contented with, the old ways. However, there was a generally balancing public support for the kingly will.

Henry and the reformers knew they had to go carefully to avoid a violent public reaction and fought off rebellion in the “Pilgrimage of Grace” centred on the north, of which the monastic dissolution was the biggest component. It is clear from Duffy and to a lesser extent Dickens that such limited support as there was for reform was mainly in London and the south-east. Lutheranism had attracted interest in the ports there, at first with smuggled literature, and this merged into the remnants of Lollardy inland.

Duffy, his hands full with country churches, avoids the contemporary and related—but spectacular and well recorded—dissolution of the monasteries, around which there is a profusion of for-and-against arguments. He also does not comment on the role of parliament, which supported Henry throughout. The parliament had been little used until this time, largely complied with the royal wish and contained many “placemen”—those with offices of profit under the Crown. Dickens, however, sees there also an element of anti-clericalism—more than Protestantism—based on monastic and upper clergy wealth and various abuses, especially in London. Earlier Catholic writers put much down to parliamentary greed to buy cheaply the confiscated monastery wealth. However, the breach with Rome came well before the attack on the monks, and Ireland remained staunchly Catholic after a more limited monastic carve-up.

Historians usually make the additional point that while sixteenth-century parliaments were fairly compliant, with more frequent meetings they began to feel their oats, leading in the next century to struggles between monarch and parliament, civil war and eventual parliamentary government.

Henry’s chief reformers—holy or sinister according to outlook—were Thomas Cranmer, who Henry made Archbishop of Canterbury, Hugh Latimer, fiery preacher in the conservative west country, and Nicholas Ridley, Cambridge priest and academic. Henry’s minister and chief aid, Thomas Cromwell (a distant kinsman of Oliver) was a layman (some would say hatchet man), more the “efficiency expert” type and architect of the monastic dissolution.

Henry died of tuberculosis in 1546. His heir, Edward VI, was only nine, allegedly precociously intelligent, possibly sickly, and ardently pro-Protestant owing to carefully chosen teachers. He was to live only to fifteen, but the “boy king’s” short reign saw a rapid increase in Protestantising change, including clerical marriage and, biggest of all, the introduction in 1549 of the Book of Common Prayer, which in modified form underpins the Anglican church to this day. Cranmer master-minded and partly wrote it.

This attack on the traditional Latin horrified conservatives but some found—as they still do—some compatibility with the displaced Latin Mass (then less formalised than it became). About the same time, Edward’s regime ordered much other stripping of tradition, including plain wooden communion tables replacing altars.

Historians generally agree that the “Edwardine” reformation went too far too fast and alienated public sentiment. The speed was partly due to concern over how long the zealous lad’s reign would last, and partly by in-fighting at court.

Mary, daughter of Henry and Catherine of Aragon, ruled from Edward’s death in 1553 until she died of cancer, only forty-two, in 1558; she brought the “Catholic reaction” Edward’s team feared. At first she moved carefully in restoring the Catholicism she had learned at her mother’s knee. She brought in from the cold (sometimes the tower) conservative clerical advisers, but involved parliament and tried to incorporate some of Henry’s changes. However, clergy who had married under Edward had to separate from their wives; married ex-monks were burned at the stake without the final presence of their families.

Language was a problem. The English Bible and the Book of Common Prayer were starting to change public sensibility, and Mary allowed more English-language material, primers and the like, than in the medieval church. The more conservative, Catholic side would not accept the prayer book or prevailing Bible translations, but began their own Bible translation, later completed in exile at Douai near the French-Belgian border.

Mary’s team made some concessions to “Henrician” simplifications and also adopted modifications in line with the Counter-Reformation then beginning in Europe. Duffy, who produces more extensive evidence than others, says all this was much more successful and well received—though not by everybody—than Protestant historians have allowed. Public sympathy in London and Kent was more divided than elsewhere.

In what was on the face of it a brilliant dynastic match, in 1554 Mary married her cousin, Philip II of Spain. As with Henry and her mother, Philip did not find her attractive, especially after she proved infertile. He did not spend much time in England, but left a legacy in a number of Spanish advisers, who Dickens found unpopular in London for their pride and general foreignness, further souring opinion there against Catholicism.

It is an open question how far the Spanish connection was an unhelpful influence on Mary, how much was embitterment over her spurned mother, loyalty to the Hapsburgs or simple, if rigid, loyalty to her religion. The modern tendency is to lessen the role of Spain.

Duffy and MacCulloch agree on approximately 300 burnings at the stake for heresy under Mary: “England had never experienced the hounding down of so many religious deviants over so wide an area in such a short period,” Duffy says. “However eagerly the burnings were greeted or initiated in some communities, it is hard to believe that they were not often in the end self-defeating.”

Burning heretics at the stake had been on the wane in England. Mary greatly increased the rate. Due to inexperience, a number of burnings were botched; some agonisingly drawn-out deaths were caused by the use of green or wet wood.

Mary also chose many prominent victims. It was one thing for Henry to burn a lower middle-class Baptist or two suspected of threatening the peace—a further heresy creeping in from the continent—but another to burn Cranmer in the main square of Oxford. Cranmer at first recanted of his heresy in writing, but then dramatically thrust the offending hand into the devouring flames.

Whatever the immediate reactions, burning at the stake greatly strengthened anti-Catholic sentiment over time. John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, naming the victims and circumstances, was influential for aeons.

Circumstances changed rapidly when Mary’s charismatic half-sister Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, succeeded her to the throne in 1558 and ruled until 1603. The Reformation era hardened on both sides, with the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the sweep through much of Europe of a second reformation, ultra-Protestant, often referred to as Calvinism, or in England Puritanism.

Parliament had become less compliant too. Mary met resistance, though she overcame it, in getting tougher heresy legislation through. Elizabeth’s personal preference was thought to be for her father’s “the Mass without the Pope” formula, but including the Cranmer prayer book and English Bible.

The parliament of 1559–60 which Elizabeth called to “settle” religion has been much studied, mainly since 1945, but records are inadequate and as with most political stories interpretations vary. The pro-royal forces, anti-clericals, moderate Protestants and Puritans combined had a majority in the House of Commons, but the Lords were more evenly divided. Catholic sentiment prevailed among the general population, especially in the countryside. Elizabeth took the conciliatory title of “supreme governor” of the church, not her father’s “supreme head”. The Vatican would not accept her. However, all but 200 of the 9000 clergy under Mary accepted the changes (and kept their jobs). Clerical marriage was allowed for those who had married under Edward, and gradually extended.

Greed may well have been a factor, as some Catholic writers have alleged, as the changes brought large areas of bishops’ land onto the market, but it is hard to see it as other than one of a swirl of issues by 1560.

The Puritans, including some who had returned from exile under Mary in Geneva and elsewhere abroad, helped mould a compromise formula in the Act of Uniformity which—unintentionally—founded the Anglican Church, much as we still know it. Duffy finds much continuing Catholic spirit in the parishes in the 1560s, with reluctance to give up its forms under official pressure. By the 1570s, however—when his study ends—“the traditional religion, slowly, falteringly, much reduced in scope, depth and coherence … reformed itself around the rituals and words of the Prayer Book”.

With a new generation of Puritan clergy, especially coming from Cambridge, the prayer book and ritual side gradually became the conservative “high church”. Puritan zealotry often became divisive at the parish level. In 1570 the crusading, hardline Counter-Reformation Pope, Pius V, excommunicated Elizabeth, “the pretended Queen of England the servant of wickedness”, absolving her subjects of any duty of loyalty. Several conspiracies and an assassination attempt followed.

In 1588 Philip of Spain, now quite personal in his intolerance for Elizabeth, launched the ill-fated Spanish Armada to dethrone her. This added more chapters to the “black legend”, though in conservative Catholic eyes it was an act of intended liberation from religious tyranny. MacCulloch says the Vatican later came to regard the handling of Elizabeth as possibly its greatest blunder, which even influenced it against denouncing Hitler. It is an open question whether this over-reach, if it was, stemmed from its association with superpower Spain.

Elizabeth prohibited the public practice of explicit Catholicism and about 200 Catholics, mostly priests, were executed, including the charismatic Jesuit Edmund Campion in 1587. The regime’s objection was not so much to Catholic tendencies at the parish level, which were largely tolerated, as with new Counter-Reformation Catholicism originating with the English mission at Douai. This sought to create a church initially independent and in competition with the established one, but intended to supplant it.

Posterity should not be too harsh about all this. In one of the most dramatic periods in history, a vast tangle of complications tortured the atmosphere: of rivalry and intrigue between nations and powerful personalities, as well as passionately held creeds and secular interests. Cold to hot war over Spanish power involved several countries for diverse, not just religious, reasons. The war became intermittently hotter for fifteen years after 1585 and could have turned to civil war.

Not only Rome wanted to set up a competing body. A new breed of Puritan “separatists” wanted either to break altogether from the established church or to drastically reorganise it. Presbyterians, another part of the broadening Puritan movement, horrified authority by wanting to replace bishops with elected “presbyteries”, or committees of clergy and laymen. Though they initiated a broad and successful popular revolt in Scotland and the Netherlands, they never attained that strength in England and a number of them were executed, exiled or imprisoned along with other extreme Puritans.

The new century brought a gradual realisation in England that “dissenting” churches, Catholic or Protest-ant, could be tolerated without destabilising the system. Heresy became merely an in-house church problem.

Elizabeth died in 1603, Philip II in 1598. The Spanish economy soured and Spanish superpower tendencies evaporated. Elizabeth’s Scottish cousin and successor, James I, at first tried to repair relations with Catholicism. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when Catholic militants led by Guy Fawkes tried to blow up king and parliament, led to a new round of oppression of Catholics and declining public sympathy for Catholicism. Many prominent Catholics gave up, unwilling to oppose another monarch.

Toleration gradually returned for a separated Catholic Church. Its strength lay among the gentry of the north-west, as against Puritan strength and in time dissent in the towns and the south-east. Both Roman Catholicism and the Anglican High Church side, however, became identified with the “divine right” aspirations of the Stuart monarchs, Puritanism with the parliamentary side.

The Stuart Pretender James III was endorsed by the Vatican, became suspect as a base for sedition and lived until 1766. This and then the American and French revolutions added further complications to a picture which was starting to get beyond easy human understanding.

References:

English Reformation, by A.G. Dickens.

The Stripping of the Altars, Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580, by Eamon Duffy.

Not Angels but Anglicans: A History of Christianity in the British Isles, Henry Chadwick ed.

Reformation, Europe’s House Divided, by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

An Outline History of the Catholic Church, by R.F. Walker.

A Shorter History of the Catholic Church, J. Derek Holmes et al.

And four books published this year:

Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Tudor, by Eamon Duffy.

Mary Tudor, by Judith M. Richards.

Mary Tudor, England’s First Queen, by Anna Whitelock.

Mary Tudor, the First Queen, by Linda Porter.

Robert Murray is a frequent contributor to Quadrant on history. Philippa Martyr reviewed Eamon Duffy’s Fires of Faith in the October issue.