English Reformation

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The English Reformation was part of a process and movement of thought which led to the breaking away of a number of Christian churches in Europe from communion with Rome. As each of the countries which went through this process did so in a different way, so the process in England was singular. The monarch became head of the English church by what was called the Royal Supremacy and there was established the Church of England. It was to be a different form of establishment from the Lutheran polity either in Scandinavia or in the German-speaking lands as its origins differed also. It began as another chapter in the long running dispute with the Papacy over the latter's claimed jurisdiction over the English people. It was, at the outset, more of a political than a theological dispute.^[1] The break with Rome started in the reign of Henry VIII and is therefore sometimes called the Henrician Reformation.

Contents 1 Background 2 The break with Rome 2.1 Theological Radicalism 2.2 Dissolution of the Monasteries 2.3 Reformation Reversed 3 Edward's Reformation 4 Catholic Restoration 5 The Elizabethan Religious Settlement 6 Notes 7 References 8 See also

[edit] Background

Henry was a studious Catholic, who in 1521 had defended the Papacy from Martin Luther's accusations of heresy in a book he wrote called The Defence of the Seven Sacraments. For this he was awarded the title "Defender of the Faith" (Fidei Defensor) by Pope Leo X.

By the late 1520s, however, Henry wanted to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon. She had not produced a male heir who survived into adulthood and Henry wanted a son so the Tudor dynasty would be secure. Before Henry's father Henry VII attained the throne, England had been marred by civil warfare over rival claims to the English crown and Henry wanted to avoid the uncertainty over the succession likely to be caused by lack of a clear male heir. Catherine's only surviving child was the Princess Mary.

Henry stated that this lack of an heir was because his marriage was "blighted in the eyes of God".^[2] Catherine had been his late brother's wife, and it was therefore against Biblical teachings for Henry to have married her(for exact text see Leviticus XX:21). In 1527 Henry asked Pope Clement VII to annul the marriage, but the Pope refused on legal principle. (According to Canon Law the Pope cannot annul a marriage on the basis of a canonical impediment previously dispensed.) Earlier in that year the Holy Roman Emperor, Catherine's nephew, had sacked Rome and kept the Pope prisoner, so there was little hope of him granting this divorce.

[edit] The break with Rome

Henry therefore called a Parliament in 1529 to deal with the divorce. This Parliament of England lasted for seven years and has subsequently become known as the Reformation Parliament. The Parliament passed many of the Acts which cut England's political ties with Rome; but they were not of themselves a Reformation. Henry was to demonstrate that his argument was with the Pope, not with Catholicism. This had been a long-running argument over centuries. What made the break with Rome permanent was the presence of two factors: first, the efficiency of the Tudor bureaucracy which had finally broken the power of the aristocracy and was able to put in place measures which were difficult to reverse, but also the new theological ideas coming from Europe which had been taken up by a few, very influential magnates.

In 1530 Henry brought praemunire charges against fifteen leading clerics. Praemunire, which forbade obedience to the authority of foreign rulers had been around since the 1392 Statute of Praemunire, but in this case one of the reasons for the use of the statute was that among those charged were some prominent supporters of Catherine of Aragon, obeying Cardinal Wolsey's legatine authority. These included Bishops John Fisher, John Clerk, Nicholas West and Henry Standish and archdeacon of Exeter Adam Travers. The case was never heard, however, as it was postponed and later cancelled. Some historians have suggested Henry wanted to threaten the clergy with charges so they would become more agreeable to his demands for a divorce. Then in December that year the whole clergy were indicted for praemunire.

Henry claimed £100,000 from the Convocation of Canterbury of the Church of England for their pardon, which was granted by the Convocation on 24 January 1531. The clergy wanted the payment to be spread over five years, but Henry wanted the payment in full immediately in case of a war. The Convocation refused and withdrew their payment altogether and demanded Henry fulfil certain guarantees before they agreed to give him the money. Henry refused these conditions and agreed only to the five-year period of payment and then added five articles to the payment which Henry wanted the Convocation to accept. These were:

• that the clergy recognise Henry as the 'sole protector and supreme head of the Anglican church and clergy'
• that the King had spiritual jurisdiction
• that the privileges of the Church were upheld only if they did not detract from the royal prerogative and the laws of the realm
• that the King pardoned the clergy for violating the statute of praemunire, and
• that the laity were also pardoned.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham, persuaded Henry to introduce the sentence 'as far as the word of God allows' into the first article. Warham requested a discussion but was met by a stunned silence from the Convocation, then Warham said: 'He who is silent seems to consent' to which a clergyman present responded: 'Then we are all silent'. The Convocation granted consent to the King's five articles and the payment on the 8th March 1531. That same year Parliament passed the Act of Pardon.

In 1532 Parliament passed the anti-clerical Supplication Against the Ordinaries which listed nine grievances against the Church, including abuses of power and Convocation's independent legislative power.

On 15 May the Convocation passed the Submission of the Clergy, which recognised Royal Supremacy over the church and that it could not make canon law without royal licence, i.e. without the permission of the King. (This would subsequently be passed by the Parliament in 1534 and again in 1536.) The day after this the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, resigned. Before this reform the Church and the King's Parliament had been making laws independently of each other.

In 1532 Parliament debated the Act in Conditional Restraint of Annates which proposed that the clergy should pay no more than 5% of their first year's revenue to Rome, and that if the Pope in retaliation refused to grant bulls for the consecration of any prelate nominated by the Crown, then the consecration would go ahead anyway. If the Pope then tried to excommunicate Englishmen, he should not be obeyed and the clergy 'without any scruple of conscience' should continue to administer sacraments. The Bill proved to be controversial in the Upper House and so Henry added a delay clause to ensure it was not enacted until he confirmed it by letters patent. Henry himself had to appear in the House of Lords three times. After prolonged debate in Commons, it was clear that unanimity could not be reached over the Bill, so Henry ordered a division and commanded those who were in favour of his success and the welfare of the realm to one side of the House and those who opposed him and the Bill to the other. A majority was thus obtained.

In the same year Henry appointed Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury, and Cranmer granted Henry a divorce the next year. Henry was now free to marry his lover Anne Boleyn, who was pregnant with Henry's child. Anne gave birth to a daughter, Princess Elizabeth, three months after the marriage. The Pope responded to the marriage by excommunicating both Henry and Cranmer from the Roman Catholic Church.

A member of Henry's Council, Thomas Cromwell, became Henry's chief minister in 1532 and would play a very significant part in the process of the break from Rome. In April 1533, Parliament passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals which was drafted by Cromwell. Apart from outlawing appeals to Rome on ecclesiastical matters, the Act declared that:

Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles, it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one Supreme Head and King having the dignity and royal estate of the Imperial Crown of the same, unto whom a body politic compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and by names of Spirituality and Temporalty, be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience.[3]

The Act therefore declared England an independent country in every respect. Geoffrey Elton has called this Act an "essential ingredient" of the "Tudor revolution" in that it expounded a theory of national sovereignty.^[4]

The Act in Absolute Restraint of Annates which outlawed the payment of all annates to Rome was passed in March 1534. The Act also ordered that if cathedrals refused the King's nomination for bishop, they would be liable to punishment by praemunire.

In the same year Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy which made Henry "supreme head in earth of the Church of England" and disregarded any "usage, custom, foreign laws, foreign authority [or] prescription".^[5] Previously the Pope had been head of the church in England but was now only recognised as the Bishop of Rome; this Act separated the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church.

Also in 1534 the Act of First Fruits and Tenths transferred the taxes on ecclesiastical income from the Pope to the Crown. In the same year Parliament passed the Peter's Pence Act which outlawed the annual payment by landowners of one penny to the Pope. This Act also reiterated that England had "no superior under God, but only your Grace" and that Henry's "imperial crown" had been diminished by "the unreasonable and uncharitable usurpations and exactions" of the Pope.

After the Supremacy Act Parliament passed the Treasons Act 1534 which made it high treason punishable by death to deny Royal Supremacy. In 1536 Parliament passed the Act against the Pope's Authority which removed the last part of papal authority still legal; this was Rome's power in England to decide disputes concerning Scripture.

[edit] Theological Radicalism

The king's councillors, his Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, his archbishop, Thomas Cranmer were not merely his loyal ministers; they were also part of a loose group of people who had read the works of Martin Luther and had been influenced by them. The main plank of Luther's thinking, 'justification by faith' alone rather than by good works, threatened the whole basis of the Catholic penitential system with its endowed masses and prayers for the dead as well as its doctrine of purgatory. Pious acts, on this view, cannot secure the grace of God, only faith. Moreover, printing, which had become widespread at the end of the previous century, meant that verncular Bibles could be produced in quantity; William Tyndale's English translation could be and was banned but it was impossible to prevent copies from being smuggled and widely read; the Church could no longer effectively dictate its interpretation. A group in Cambridge, which met at the White Horse tavern, and became known as "Little Germany" soon became influential: its members included Robert Barnes and Hugh Latimer, both eventually to be burned as heretics, and Thomas Cranmer, then a cautious and uncommitted student of Luther's ideas. Cranmer was to visit Germany in 1532 and there secretly to marry, but even those who did not encounter German theologians were influenced by them. Thomas Cromwell, in particular, was thus able to infiltrate protestant church reforms into the process of complying with the Royal will. This, his great project, was later to become his undoing.

[edit] Dissolution of the Monasteries

Main article: Dissolution of the Monasteries

Thus, in 1534, Cromwell initiated a Visitation of the Monasteries ostensibly to examine their character, in fact, to value their assets with a view to expropriation. Suppression of monasteries in order to raise funds was not unknown previously. Cromwell had done the same thing on the instructions of Cardinal Wolsey to raise funds for two proposed colleges at Ipswich and Oxford years before. Now the Visitation allowed for an inventory of what the monasteries possessed and the visiting commissioners claimed to have uncovered sexual immorality and financial impropriety amongst the monks and nuns which became the ostensible justification for their suppression. The Church owned between one-fifth and one-third of the land in all England; Cromwell realised that he could bind the gentry and nobility to Royal Supremacy by selling to them the huge amount of Church lands, and that any reversion back to pre-Royal Supremacy would entail upsetting many of the powerful people in the realm.^[6] For these various reasons the Dissolution of the Monasteries was begun in 1536 with the smaller houses, those valued at less than £200 a year; the revenue was used by Henry to help build coastal defences (see Device Forts) against expected invasion, and all their land was given to the Crown or sold to the aristocracy. Whereas the royal supremacy had raised few eyebrows, the attack on abbeys and priories affected lay people. Mobs attacked those sent to break up monastic buildings; the suppression commissioners were attacked by local people in a number of places. In the North of England there were a series of uprisings by Catholics against the dissolutions in late 1536 and early 1537. In the autumn of 1536 there was a great muster, reckoned to be up to 40,000 in number, at Horncastle in Lincolnshire which was, with difficulty, dispersed by the nervous gentry. They had attempted without success to negotiate with the king by petition. The Pilgrimage of Grace was a more serious matter. Revolt spread through Yorkshire and the rebels gathered at York. Robert Aske, their leader,negotiated the restoration of sixteen of the twenty six northern monasteries, which had actually been dissolved. However, the promises made to them, by the Duke of Norfolk, were ignored on the king's orders; Norfolk was instructed to put the rebellion down. Forty seven of the Lincolnshire rebels were executed and 132 from the northern pilgrimage. Further rebellions took place in Cornwall in early 1537 and in Walsingham in Norfolk which received like treatment.

It took Cromwell four years to complete the process; in 1539 he moved to the dissolution of the larger monasteries which had escaped earlier. Many houses gave up voluntarily, though some sought exemption by payment. When their houses were closed down some monks sought transfer to larger houses; those who were persuaded to leave their orders became, many of them, secular priests. A few, including the Carthusians, refused and were killed to the last man.

[edit] Reformation Reversed

Henry's desire for a Political Reformation but not a Protestant Reformation was demonstrated both in his attitude towards 'heretics' and by his legislation. He personally presided at the trial of John Lambert in November 1538 for denying the real presence; at the same time, he shared in the drafting of a proclamation giving Anabaptists and sacramentaries ten days to get out of the country. In 1539 Parliament passed the Six Articles reaffirming Catholic practices such as transubstantiation, clerical celibacy and the importance of confession to a priest and prescribed penalties if anyone denied them. On June 28th. 1540 Cromwell, his long time advisor and loyal servant, was executed. Different reasons were advanced: that Cromwell would not enforce the Act of Six Articles, that he had supported Barnes, Latimer and other heretics, and that he was responsible for the marriage of the now disgraced Ann Boleyn. Many other arrests under the Act followed.

In the same year Henry had authorised the publication of the Great Bible in English. This Bible was largely made through the use of William Tyndale's English translation of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures; Tyndale, however, had been burnt at the stake in Belgium just three years before with Henry's approval. Many parishes were reluctant to set up English bibles; the mood of conservatism allowed those which had been put in place to be removed. By the Act for the Advancement of True Religion 1543, Henry restricted the reading of Bible to noblemen and women. In 1545 he said to Parliament:

...although you be permitted to read Holy Scripture and to have the Word of God in your mother-tongue, you must understand that it is licensed you so to do only to inform your own conscience and to instruct your children and family...I am very sorry to know and hear how unreverently that most precious jewel, the Word of God, is disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every ale-house and tavern, contrary to the true meaning and doctrine of the same.[1]

By 1548 the conservatives, the Duke of Norfolk, Wriothesly, Gardiner and Tunstall were in the ascendency and were, by the king's will, to be members of the regency council, on his death. But by the time he died in 1547, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, brother of Jane Seymour, Henry's third wife, (and therefore uncle to the future Edward VI) managed, by a number of alliances with influential Protestants such as Lisle, to gain control over the Privy Council and persuaded Henry to change his will and to replace them by his supporters.

[edit] Edward's Reformation

When Henry died in 1547 his nine year old son, Edward VI, inherited the throne. Edward himself was precocious child, who had been brought up as a Protestant, but was of little account politically. The Lord Protector was Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford who was also Edward's uncle and who proposed to forward protestant ideas. He was commissionered as virtual regent with near sovereign powers. Hertford, now Duke of Somerset, proceeded at first hesitantly, partly because his powers were not unchallenged. When he acted it was because he saw the political advantage. The 1547 Injunctions against images were a more tightly drawn version of those of 1538 but they were much more fiercely enforced, at first informally, and then, by instruction. All images in churches were to be dismantled; stained glass, shrines, statues and other Catholic practices were done away with and the requirement of the clergy to be celibate was lifted. Chantries, means by which the saying of masses for the dead were endowed, were abolished completely, and in 1549 Cranmer introduced the English Book of Common Prayer. In 1550, stone altars were exchanged for wooden communion tables, a very public break with the past, changing the look and focus of church interiors as it did. Less visible but influential was the new ordinal which provided for Protestant pastors rather than Catholic priests. In 1551, the episcopate was remodelled by the appointment of Protestants to the bench. This removed the obstacle to change which was the refusal of some bishops to enforce the regulations. Henceforth, the Reformation proceeded apace. In 1552 the prayer book, which Bishop Stephen Gardiner had approved from his prison cell, conservative though he was, was replaced by a second much more radical prayer book which altered the shape of the service, so as to remove any sense of sacrifice. Edward's Parliament also repealed his father's Six Articles.

The enforcement of these new rules did not take place without a fight. There were rebellions in East Anglia and in Devon and Cornwall over the Prayer Book to which many parishes sent their young men; they were brutally put down. And apart from these more spectacular pieces of resistance, in some places chantry priests continued to say prayers and landowners to pay them to do so; opposition to the removal of images was widespread. (So much so that when during the Commonwealth, William Dowsing was commissioned to the task of image breaking in Suffolk, his task, as he records it, was enormous.) In Kent and the south east, compliance was most willing and for many, the sale of vestments and plate was an opportunity to make money. The effect of the resistance was to topple Hertford, now Duke of Somerset, as Lord Protector so that in 1549 it was feared by some that the Reformation would cease. The prayer book was the tipping point. But Lisle, now made Earl of Warwick, was made Lord President of the the Privy Council and, ever the opportunist (he was to die a Catholic), saw the further implementation of the reforming policy as a means of defeating his rivals.

Outwardly, the destruction and removals for sale had changed the church forever. In fact, many churches had concealed their vestments and their silver, had buried their stone altars and there were many disputes between the government and parishes over church property. Thus, when Edward died in July 1553 and the Duke of Northumberland attempted to have the Protestant Lady Jane Grey made Queen, the unpopularity of the confiscations gave Mary the opportunity to have herself proclaimed Queen, first in Suffolk, and then in London to the acclamation of the crowds.

[edit] Catholic Restoration

From 1553, under the reign of Henry's Roman Catholic daughter, Mary I, the Reformation legislation was repealed and Mary sought to achieve the reunion with Rome. Her first Act of Parliament was to retroactively validate Henry's marriage to her mother and so legitimise her claim to the throne. Achieving her objective was however, not straightforward. The Pope was only prepared to accept reunion when church property disputes had been settled, which, in practice, meant allowing those who had bought former church property were able to keep it. 'Only when when English landowners has secured their claims did Julius III's representative arrive in November 1554 to reconcile the realm'(McCulloch p. 281). Thus did Cardinal Pole arrive to become Archbishop of Canterbury. Mary could have had Cranmer, imprisoned as he was, tried and executed for treason - he had supported the claims of Lady Jane Grey, but she had resolved to have him tried for heresy. His recantations of his Protestantism would have been a major coup for her. Unhappily, he unexpectedly withdrew his recantations at the last minute as he was to be burned at the stake, thus ruining her government's propaganda victory.

If Mary was to secure England for Catholicism, she needed an heir. On the advice of the Holy Roman Emperor she married his son, Phillip II of Spain; she needed to prevent her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth from inheriting the Crown and thus returning England to Protestantism. There was opposition, and even a rebellion in Kent; even though it was provided that he would never inherit the kingdom if there was no heir, received no estates and had no coronation. He was there to provide an heir. But she never became pregnant; her apparent pregnancy was, in fact, the beginnings of stomach cancer. Ironically,another blow fell. Pope Julius died and his successor, Paul IV declared war on Philip and recalled Pole to Rome to have him tried as a heretic. Mary refused to let him go. The support which she might have expected from a grateful papacy was thus denied her.

After 1555, the initial reconciling tone of the regime began to harden. The medieval heresy laws were restored. The so-called Marian Persecutions of Protestants ensued and 283 Protestants were burnt at the stake for heresy. This resulted in the Queen becoming known as 'Bloody Mary', due to the influence of John Foxe,one of the Protestants who fled Marian England. Foxe's Book of Martyrs recorded the executions in detail such that it became Mary's epitaph; Convocation subsequently ordered that it should be in every cathedral in the land. In fact, while those who were executed after the revolts of 1536, and the St. David's Down rebellion of 1549, and the unknown number of monks who died for refusing to submit, may not have been tried for heresy, they certainly exceeded that number by some amount. Foxe's work represents the triumph of propaganda over history. Even so, the heroism of some of the martyrs was an example to those who witnessed them, so that in some places it was the burnings that set people against the regime.

There was a slow consolidation in Catholic strength in her latter years. Bishop Bonner of London produced a catechism and a collection of homilies; the printing press was widely put into use in the production of primars and other devotional materials; recruitment to the English clergy began to rise after almost a decade; repairs to churches long neglected were put in hand. In the parishes 'restoration and repair continued, new bells were bought, and churches ales produced their bucolic profits' (Haigh). Commissioners visited to ensure that altars were restored, roods rebuilt and vestments and plate purchased. Moreover, Pole was determined to do more than remake the past. His insistence was on scripture, teaching and education and on improving the moral standards of the clergy. It is difficult to determine how far catholic devotion with its belief in the saints and in purgatory had been broken; certainties, especially those which drew upon men's purses, had been shaken - benefactions to the church did not return significantly; trust in clergy who had been prepared to change their minds and were now willing to leave their new wives - as they were required to do - was bound to have weakened. Few monasteries were reinstated; nor were chantries and gilds in any number. What was needed was time. Thus, such was the mood that Protestants secretly ministering to underground congregations, such as Thomas Bentham, were planning for a long haul, a ministry of survival. Mary's death in December 1558, childless and without her having made provision for a Catholic to succeed her, was what undid that consolidation.

[edit] The Elizabethan Religious Settlement

When Mary died childless in 1558 Elizabeth I inherited the throne. She was a Protestant, though an undogmatic one. She thus proceeded slowly (and with some difficulty) in the re-establishment of her half-brother's inheritance. Parliament passed an Act of Supremacy 1559 which validated ten Acts that Mary had repealed and conferred on Elizabeth the title Supreme Governor of the Church of England without difficulty. However, the Act of Uniformity 1559 which forced people to attend Sunday service in an Anglican church, at which a slightly revised version of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer was to be used, was passed by only three votes. The Rising of the North emerged as the last Tudor rebellion against these changes.

The determination to prevent any further restoration was evidenced by the more thoroughgoing destruction of roods, vestments, stone altars, dooms, statues etc., but what achieved more than anything else was the length of Elizabeth's reign. By the time of her death there had emerged a party, perfectly hostile to the growing Puritanism party, but not adherent to Rome. It preferred the Book of Common Prayer (which had been slightly revised to removed some of the offence to Catholics). There were of course, still many Catholics, and the Mass was still celebrated in many places alongside the new service. But after the excommunication of Elizabeth by Pope Pius V in 1570, the choice between treason and excommunication was easily made by most English people who chose the latter. Catholicism came to be seen as unEnglish. Some priests were protected by the owners of great houses but less and less readily, as persecution increased. Meanwhile Puritanism grew in strength: the 39 Articles had been reinstated; the mass was proscribed; pressure gradually began to build up for the so-called completion of the reforming process: the prayer book and the episcopacy were both alike their targets. In the early 1590s, those who wished to abolish bishops suffered a setback due to the actions of Archbishop Whitgift, but the movement was to grow again after Elizabeth's death in 1603, during the reign of the Stuart kings, James I and Charles I, leading ultimately to the English Civil War.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Cf. "The Reformation must not be confused with the changes introduced into the Church of England during the 'Reformation Parliament' of 1529-36, which were of a political rather than a religious nature, designed to unite the secular and religious sources of authority within a single sovereign power: the Anglican Church did not until later make any substantial change in doctrine". Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought (Macmillan, 1996), p. 470.
2. ^ Roderick Phillips, Untying the Knot: A Short History of Divorce (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 20.
3. ^ G. R. Elton, The Tudor Constitution: Second Edition (Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 353.
4. ^ G. R. Elton, England Under the Tudors (Routledge, 1991), p. 160.
5. ^ Elton, Tudor Constitution, pp. 364-5.
6. ^ Elton, England under the Tudors, p. 142.

[edit] References

• Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (Yale, 1992).
• G. R. Elton, England Under the Tudors: Third Edition (Routledge, 1991).
• G. R. Elton, The Tudor Constitution: Second Edition (Cambridge University Press, 1982).
• Christopher Haigh, English Reformations (Oxford, 1993).
• Stanford Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament, 1529 - 1536 (Cambridge University Press, 1970).
• Roderick Phillips, Untying the Knot: A Short History of Divorce (Cambridge University Press, 1991).
• Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought (Macmillan, 1996)
• ed. Patrick Collinson and John Craig The Reformation in English Towns 1500-1640 (McMillan 1998)
• Susan Brigden New Worlds, Lost Worlds (Allen Lane 2000)
• Diarmaid McCulloch Reformation |(Allen Lane 2003)

[edit] See also

• Timeline of the Protestant Reformation in England
• Protestant Reformation
• Glorious Revolution
• Act of Settlement 1701