1. Write an essay on the English Reformation.
The English Reformation of the sixteenth century, starting with the Acts of the Reformation Parliament under Henry VIII, 1539 onwards, transformed the British realm from a Catholic country to a bastion of Protestantism. Yet it has been argued that if England became a Protestant country, it did so largely at the behest of its rulers and against its better judgement. If this was so, the transformation was indeed profound, for by the last quarter of the sixteenth century England was destined to play a pivotal role in the survival of Calvinist powers on the Continent, as they faced the most profound threat to their survival from a resurgent Catholicism. And by the end of the century England and Scotland were rightly regarded as the cornerstones of Protestant Europe. Nevertheless, the adoption of Protestantism had been, by the standards of the turmoil that had gripped much of Europe in this period, remarkably smooth.
The Reformation in England followed a model much closer to that of Scandinavia than Germany or Switzerland. Although England, like Bohemia, had its own indigenous mediaeval heresy in Lollardy, Luther’s attack on the Roman Catholic Church had initially produced little resonance in England. Luther’s works were imported into England at an early stage, but this may very often have been for the convenience of conservative theologians who brought them to refute them, such as Bishop John Fisher and Sir Thomas More. Under Henry VII (1509 to 1547), Britain was in fact the main ally of Catholic Spain, which controlled the Low Countries essential for Britain’s wool trade. Henry VII was succeeded by his son, the notorious Henry VIII of many wives, a quintessential renaissance ruler, whose political and foreign policy rendered him constantly in need of finances.
Although the English Reformation began with an Act of Henry VIII, its origins lay in various processes that lay outside his control. The people of Britain were, like other Europeans, discontented with their religious life, especially the clerics, who were widely seen as being corrupt and largely absent, collecting office and benefices, and burdening their lives with formalism and rituals; they just didn’t fulfil the English people’s desire for religious satisfaction. Further, the English monarchy had a long struggle with the Church over power over the people. The former had resisted the lather’s attempt to get control over certain jurisdictions, taxation etc. i.e. like everywhere in Europe the secular government of the realm was questioning the power of the Roman Catholic Church over the secular lives of its people.
Within the Church, there were various points of difference from the dominant scholastic world theme. An important figure in this questioning was William Ockham, the originator of ‘nominalism’, which questioned the power of the Church to rule the people, which it said was the secular State’s prerogative. Ockham was followed by Wycliff, who stated that the Church shouldn’t hold property, at a time when the Roman Catholic Church held around one-third of the English estates. Some of his radical followers such as the Lollards of the fifteenth century spread his message among the people of Britain. Humanist cultural influences from Europe also caught the imagination of British intellectual circles, especially individuals such as Colet.
With such precedents, it didn’t take long for the European Reformation to influence England. In the year 1517, Luther published his celebrated ‘Ninety-Five Theses’. In the 1520’s, a group of intellectuals quickly came together, a notable example being the White House Inn circle that carried smuggled literature etc. into England, including William Tyndale who translated the New Testament into English in 1524-25 – an indication of lowering of barriers to more radical religious thought. This circle became the centre of the English Reformation.
The final break with the Roman Catholic Church was triggered by an occurrence in Henry’s personal life. He had been married to Catherine of Aragon, his elder brother’s virgin widow, though a special dispensation from the Pope, a few days before his ascension to the throne. By this time, not only was he getting tired of her, he was also worried about the continuation of his dynasty, since Catherine had only given him a daughter so far. Furthermore, he had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn, one of Catherine’s lady-in-waiting, and conveniently started believing that his first marriage had been a mistake. Henry proceeded to ask his first Chancellor Thomas Wolsey, who wielded considerable influence at Rome, to seek an annulment of his marriage with Catherine. However, various political forces including the sacking of Rome in 1527 by Imperial troops of the Holy Roman Empire, and the fact that Catherine was Emperor Charles V’s aunt, led to a failure of Wolsey’s attempts, who died later in 1630. Subsequently, new people began to direct affairs in Henry VIII’s court, prominent among then being Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell.
Henry VIII had initially been a staunch defender of the Catholic faith. In 1521 he in fact wrote a book on the sacraments against Luther, which earned for him a golden rose and the coveted title of “defender of the faith” from the Pope. But by the late 1520’s all this came to naught in the face of his personal ambitions. His advisers including Cranmer and Cromwell began to suggest that if the king was supreme in the temporal sphere within his realm, he ought to be supreme in the religious sphere as well. This idea already had important precedents in Europe, including the ideas of Wycliff among others. The king’s court also supported this trend
In 1529, Henry VIII decided he did not need to get permission from the Pope to have his marriage annulled (the idea was probably Cromwell’s). He declared himself head of the English Church (yet to be distinctly defined), forcibly cut the Anglican bishops off from communion with Rome, married Anne Boleyn, and called the Reformation Parliament. The church services, however, remained essentially the same – the mass remained in Latin, there was no sermon or systematic Bible reading, and the people were passive and received communion only at Easter, getting only the consecrated bread. The Reformation Parliament met continuously for seven years, and under Henry’s guidance, pursued a systematic harassment of the Roman Catholic Church in England through a series of legislations. The Act of ‘Supplication of the Commons against the Ordinaries’ was a petition that set out a list of grievances of the common people against the people of the holy orders, such as simony, absenteeism etc. The Act of Submission of the Clergy declared that the clergy was answerable to no one but the king. Another act ensured that all ecclesiastical appointments would now be made by the ‘authorities’ and ‘people’ of England. The Restraint of Annates and Restraint of Payment prohibited the payment of annates and tithes respectively to Rome. In 1531, the Convocation (to become the highest body of the Anglican Church) deemed the monarch the head of the Church of England “as far as the laws of Jesus Christ permits”. The Restraint of Appeal of 1532 declared that no Englishman could appeal to a court outside England’s jurisdiction. In the same year Cranmer was made the Archbishop of Canterbury; this effectively ended clerical celibacy among Anglicans, as Cranmer was twice married. In 1534 Act of Succession stated that everyone must swear allegiance to Henry VIII as the only head of the English church (on earth). [Thomas More, his Prime Minister and author of “Utopia”, and John Fisher, saintly bishop of Rochester, refused to swear to this.] The Acts of Dissolution of 1536 and 1539 deemed monastic life unchristian; the estates of the various monastic orders were taken over by the king, most of which were sold to speculators (and later found their way into capitalist agriculture), thus ensuring the permanent popularity of the English Reformation atleast among some.
Despite all these dramatic changes, however, it is important to take note of Henry’s essential conservative nature and preference in doctrine and religious belief. He had no intentions of changing the essentials of the English Church. The only major perceptible difference was that the English Bible was made a central element of the Church of England – the Great Bible, finally approved by Henry in 1539, was the Tyndale Bible translation (finished by Miles Coverdale) printed by John Rogers in Paris in 1538. With this notable exception, the Church remained largely Catholic. Henry even reaffirmed his faith in the tenets of Catholicism through two works, the Ten Articles in 1536 and the Six Articles in 1539, which reedumberated almost all important aspects of the Roman Catholic Church. All determination of heresy or Catholicism subsequently came to be centred on the Six Articles.
In 1547, Henry VIII was succeeded by his ten-year-old son Edward VI. Edward ruled for the most part of his reign under two guardianships – from 1547 to 1550 under his uncle Edward Seymour (later the Duke of Somerset), and from 1550 to 1553 under the Duke of Northumberland. Both of them were Protestant sympathisers, and under them a Protestant Reformation finally takes place in England. This was aided by influx of many German Protestant reformers into England after the defeat of the Schmalkaldic League in Germany.
The Protestant Reformation began with the repeal of Henry VIII’s ‘Six Articles’, and of all laws against Protestant heresy. In 1549 the Book of Common Prayer was made compulsory for all English churches. This was a compilation by Cranmer of prayers through which the liturgy and the structure of services of the Church were to be controlled. While the structure still adhered closely to Catholic form, the spirit or sympathy was increasingly becoming Calvinist/Lutheran. Thus while ensuring the king’s control, there was a marriage of old and new religions. The Forty-Two Articles or the ‘Confession of Faith’, which replaced the Six Articles, set down the charter for the English Church. Drafted by Cranmer, this document lay emphasis on the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith and two sacraments, denied trans-substantiation (but not ‘real’ presence) and stressed the primacy of the Scriptures. In 1552, the Book of Common Prayer was revised to suit Protestants ¾ there was to be no more “real presence” at the Eucharist, no vestments, no signing of the cross at confirmation, no holy oil, no reserved sacrament, no prayers for the departed.
By the time Edward VI was succeeded by Mary in 1553, a large number of the nobility (like other sections) had become Protestant. Hence they vigorously opposed the accession of Mary, a staunch Catholic, and later wife of the even more militantly Catholic Phillip II of Spain. However, their attempts to crown Lady Jane Grey were thwarted by London influential circles. Under Mary, the Edwardian laws of the English Reformation were repealed, and England was returned to official Catholicism. A large number of Protestant leaders were imprisoned and killed. Some fled to Geneva, Germany, and later came to be known as the Marian exiles. An estimated 300 (‘important’) persons were burned at the stake for heresy, including such figures as Coverdale and Cranmer.
An agreement on major religious issues was finally somewhat achieved in the reign of Mary’s successor and half-sister, the great Queen Elizabeth I. The two key figures behind her religious ‘compact’ were William Cecil and Francis Walsingham. The compact combined a broad Protestant doctrine with largely Catholic rituals and an episcopal system, which was to be under the monarch’s firm control. Elizabeth and her court were convinced that extremes of either side – militant Catholicism or radical Puritan Protestantism – were to be avoided; there was to be no place for those who disagreed. Despite this, the monarchy had to content with religious zealots of both sides. At the time of Elizabeth’s accession in 1558, the Catholics were in a majority and held important positions in government. The Jesuits, who were the most militant of the Roman Catholic orders, were even involved in many plots to overthrow Elizabeth, which were supported by a Spanish court angry at her rejection of Phillip’s marriage proposal.
There was also trouble with the Puritans, who wanted to purify the Anglican Church of all vestiges of popery, and suggested a replacement of the Episcopal system by a Presbyterian one. Evangelicals took refuge in brotherhoods and congregations that became increasingly detached from the mainstream church. The frustration of reform measures in the Parliaments of 1571 and 1572 led some into formal separation. In the latter years of Elizabeth’s reign Puritanism gave way to sectarian non-conformity, and eventually into outright confrontation with the established church.
However, the trouble with the Catholics remained more serious, as it got entangled in European international affairs. In 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth for heresy; this was meant to encourage and sanctify any invasion or intrigue against her. Much of the intrigue against Elizabeth came to centre around the very Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, who after being forced to abdicate her rule in (by then) largely Presbyterian Scotland, had fled to England in the third quarter of the sixteenth century. However, in 1587 Mary was finally executed, and the resultant invasion of Catholic Spain under Phillip II in 1588 was defeated by the British navy with Dutch support.
Although Elizabeth dealt strictly with the Catholics, to her and her court’s credit fewer people were executed for heresy in her entire long reign of 45 years than in Mary’s short reign of 5 years. Most people were accepted into the English Church. In 1559, the Act of Supremacy was passed, in which Elizabeth repealed the Marian Laws of Religion, and stressed that she was the Supreme Governor in both temporal and religious matters. In 1562-63, the Act of Uniformity prescribed for the English Church a revised version of Cranmer’s second ‘Book of Common Prayer’. In 1563, a convocation of the Church of England drafted the Thirty-Nine Articles as a doctrinal statement; they became the Charter of the Anglican Church. The later 1592-93 Act of Conventicle of the Parliament made Anglicanism the state religion, and forced all Englishmen to accept it and the Elizabethan religious compact, or else face exile or death.
It was well into the last two decades of Elizabeth’s reign before it could be said with any confidence that Protestantism was the majority religion in England. But by the time her long reign ended in 1603, the English people had come to esteem their Anglican Church of England. The new faith had become so deeply ingrained that in the seventeenth century England would defend her religious affinity (as would Scotland) with a passion that verged on bigotry. The trials of the last three decades of the sixteenth century had in a very real sense secured England’s Protestant identity. Through a generation of conflict in which the enemy had been foreign, Catholic and dangerous, the English people had come to identify their Church and Protestantism, as a cornerstone of their identity.
The Catholic festival year, for instance, had been gradually superseded by a calendar of new, largely unofficial and profoundly Protestant patriotic festivals. In 1605 they would be joined by 5 November, the date of the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot; proof, if proof were needed, that Catholicism was still considered perfidious, deadly and deeply un-English. The celebration of Guy Fawkes’ day with bonfires and fireworks till today, is a reminder of how fresh these Reformation controversies remained in the consciousness of the people for many centuries.