Prof: Right.
 
Well, we'd better get started
because there's quite a lot of
ground to cover today as you
will see from the handouts.
Okay.
 
Well, we all know that Henry
VIII had six queens:
divorced, beheaded,
died, divorced,
beheaded, survived.
 
And that makes good television,
and bad television too,
>
 
and all of those queens are
marked on your handouts in the
appropriate place in bold Q1 to
Q6,
but the real reason that his
reign was so important in
English history is of course
that he initiated the English
reformation,
a momentous change with very
far-reaching consequences.
 
And Henry's interesting marital
career was essentially part of
that larger process,
set in train by the will of a
powerful king.
 
Well, for that reason the
English reformation was once
famously described as being
essentially "an act of
state," its essence being
the transfer of legal authority
over the church in England from
a distant papacy to a very
present English crown.
 
The universal Catholic Church
in England became the Anglican
Church of England.
 
So an act of state,
and an act of state it
certainly was.
 
It was initiated by the crown
and directed from above and
carried through by successive
acts of Parliament.
And yet it was also,
of course, so much more than
that because these acts of state
also inaugurated fundamental
changes in the religious culture
of the nation.
Looking at the whole,
it's certainly possible to
distinguish,
as Christopher Haigh does,
a series of legislative
reformations,
on the one hand,
and to distinguish that from,
on the other hand,
what he terms the Protestant
reformation,
which was a much more gradual
and much more diffuse process of
religious change extending over
generations.
 
And yet the two dimensions of
the reformation,
the legislative and the
Protestant, inevitably went
together.
 
What was once seen as being a
very purposeful process of
change--
carefully directed,
swiftly accomplished--
now tends to be seen as a much
more hesitant and uncertain
business,
but to call the whole thing,
as Christopher Haigh,
does "a series of
blundering steps"
is perhaps to go a wee bit too
far,
because there certainly was
purposeful action and the
reformation process became much
more deliberative over time as
the issues gradually became
clearer and as the religious
alignments to which it gave rise
gradually crystallized.
Christopher Haigh's account of
it all provides us with an
excellent overview,
the details of which take the
narrative up to 1603.
 
But what I want to do in the
lecture today is to emphasize
the contributions of each phase
of development in the crucial
generation from the late 1520s
through to 1558--
the various stages which
contributed to an emerging
religious division--
and I want to try to bring out
the logic of those phases of
development.
All of this can be very
confusing in the details,
but there is a certain logic to
it.
And that means in the first
instance grasping how successive
political situations gave rise
to particular developments which
had consequences for religious
change,
one way or the other,
and then later on in section
discussion we'll explore further
the larger question of the
extent to which these changes
were welcome or unwelcome for
the people at large and the very
gradual process of their
acceptance.
 
So let's look at the first
phase which ran roughly from
1527 to 1531,
which we can call a gathering
crisis.
 
Well, if there was a phase of
blundering about,
as Christopher Haigh puts it,
then it came at the beginning,
and it was occasioned of course
by the fact that the King and
his advisers were facing a
completely unprecedented
situation in 1527.
 
Henry needed a male heir,
as you know.
The future of the Tudor dynasty
and of the political stability
which it had reestablished might
hang on that fact of an
undisputed succession.
 
Henry was thirty-six.
 
His wife, Katherine,
was in her early forties.
No child was now likely.
 
Now, as you know,
Katherine had originally come
to England as the bride of
Henry's older brother,
Arthur, who had shortly died
and she had subsequently married
Henry.
 
Brooding on this,
Henry by 1527 became
preoccupied with a biblical
text,
Leviticus 20:21,
which translates as "if a
man shall take his brother's
wife it is an unclean thing.
He hath uncovered his brother's
nakedness and they shall be
childless."
 
And at the same time,
on a somewhat less principled
note,
Henry's eye had been caught by
a young woman of the court,
Anne Boleyn,
whom he saw as a potential new
queen.
She was in her early twenties,
vivacious, ambitious and
astute, and she was not willing
to be the king's mistress;
she intended to be queen.
 
So Henry needed to get his
existing marriage dissolved.
He needed it to be declared
void from the beginning by the
Pope and to take a new queen,
and it should have been very
easy since popes were usually
willing to cooperate with the
needs of kings in such matters.
 
But it was rendered difficult
by two factors.
First of all,
Katherine was a very strong
personality.
 
Her sense of honor was outraged
by the idea that her marriage
should be dissolved in this way,
and in 1527 as matters began to
reach a head her nephew,
the Emperor Charles V of the
Holy Roman Empire of Germany,
gained control of the Pope,
Clement VII,
in the course of his Italian
wars.
 
Now all Henry really needed was
a delegation of authority from
Rome to settle the matter and in
1628 it looked like he might get
it.
 
In that year a papal
ambassador, Cardinal Campeggio,
was sent to England and he and
Cardinal Thomas Wolsey were
empowered to establish the facts
regarding Henry's marriage,
but in hearings that they
inaugurated in 1529 Queen
Katherine vigorously defended
the validity of her marriage.
She denied that there had been
any sexual consummation to
Prince Arthur,
Henry's older brother.
She embarrassed the King by
publicly declaring that he knew
she had been a virgin when they
married.
She defended her honor and her
marriage.
And then in July 1529 new
victories of the Emperor in
Italy meant the Pope was even
more firmly under his control
and the Pope revoked the case
back to Rome.
So the first phase of the
developing crisis was efforts to
put pressure on the papacy by
threatening the privileges of
the church in England in order
to get the Pope to cooperate.
In September 1529,
Cardinal Wolsey,
who had clearly failed Henry,
was threatened with the legal
charge of praemunire,
which was an offense
established by statutes in the
fourteenth century regarding the
jurisdiction of church and state
within England.
He had allegedly illegally
exercised his powers as the
pope's legate in England.
 
And a couple of months later
Parliament was called and the
members of Parliament were
encouraged by royal counselors
to lay complaints not only
against Cardinal Wolsey but also
against other alleged abuses in
church affairs.
So, at this stage Henry is
blustering,
he was deliberately stoking up
the latent resentment of
clerical privileges amongst
members of Parliament,
but as yet there was no
intention to go further.
Indeed, having set things going
in this manner,
fired his warning shots as it
were,
the King sent Parliament into
recess between December of 1529
and January of 1531,
and in the meantime he
assembled a think tank of
academics and clergy to prepare
his legal case for a divorce.
 
And he began consulting learned
opinion amongst lawyers and
theologians from Europe's
various major universities.
But none of this had the
desired effect and in 1530 the
Pope cited Henry to appear
before him in Rome and forbade
him to remarry until he did so.
 
The King was both frustrated
and furious,
and he found reasons to fail to
comply with the Pope's
requirements in the materials
which were being assembled by
his academic research team.
 
These survive and they're known
as the Collecteana and
they included some crucial
arguments.
One was the argument that
historically the church in
England had exercised
independent provincial rights.
That's to say it had the right
to autonomy in the settlement of
certain internal affairs without
reference to Rome.
The second crucial argument,
which they put forward,
was that within England the
king enjoyed imperial power,
not only over the state but
over the church in matters which
were not of a strictly spiritual
nature.
So Henry, still hoping for a
change in the European political
situation which would lead to
papal cooperation,
used these ideas to put a bit
more pressure on the church.
In 1530, his lawyers indicted
the entire clergy in England for
praemunire,
illegally acquiescing in the
exercise of papal authority.
 
The convocation of the church,
meeting in Canterbury,
resisted and Henry demanded
that they recognize his supreme
headship of the church.
 
And they eventually did so.
 
They recognized his authority
but only "so far as the law
of God allows,"
a saving clause,
and they gave the King a grant
of 120,000 pounds from the
church to try to sweeten his
mood.
So where are we in 1531?
 
The King and the church have
fallen out badly over Henry's
need for a dissolution of his
marriage.
The central issue has been
clarified.
The central issue has become
that of legal jurisdiction of
the papacy over the English
church and therefore its ability
to frustrate his divorce since
the church had authority over
marriage.
 
But there was no question of
any doctrinal challenge to the
Roman Catholic Church,
no challenge in matters of
faith or matters of worship.
 
This is a legal issue at this
point: which brings us to phase
two, the Royal Supremacy.
 
As 1531 advanced,
there was no indication that
the Pope was going to give way
and the political impasse
precipitated the second phase of
development,
the royal supremacy,
and it was masterminded by
Thomas Cromwell between 1532 and
1535.
Now a brief word on Thomas
Cromwell.
He was a man of very humble
origins, the son of a London
cloth worker and tavern keeper.
 
He had had an obscure early
career.
He'd probably served as a
soldier in Germany,
he had worked as a merchant,
and eventually he went into the
law.
 
In the 1520s,
he gradually emerged as a very
skillful man of business in the
household of Cardinal Wolsey,
much trusted by Wolsey for his
astuteness and competence.
And in 1530 when Wolsey fell
such was Cromwell's reputation
that he was taken into the
King's service and by 1530 was
made a member of the council.
 
And it was Cromwell who saw the
way out of the legal impasse
through a carefully planned
program of legislation.
He knew exactly what he was
doing.
Memoranda in his own hand
survive which show the stages of
his planning,
and in 1532 to '34 his strategy
of making Henry's divorce
possible and then legitimizing
these changes was executed stage
by stage through the careful
presentation of the King's
desires to Parliament and
management of Parliament to get
them passed.
First of all,
they put still more pressure on
the church to break any
resistance within England.
Parliament was brought to pass
the Act in Restraint of Annates.
Annates were payments to Rome
which were made when bishops
were appointed.
 
This canceled them,
but the Act was held in
suspension as a threat to papal
finance.
Secondly, the House of Commons
put forward what was called its
Supplication Against the
Ordinaries,
a petition against the exercise
of ecclesiastical jurisdiction
in the church courts in England
and the abuses which allegedly
took place.
 
This was an attack which
provoked the convocation of the
church, its own assembly,
to reject the accusations.
Henry then rounded angrily on
them and demanded their full
submission, and in May 1532 they
caved in.
The convocation submitted and
abandoned its claim to legal
jurisdictional independence.
 
The way was now clear in
England, but there was still no
response from Rome and then fate
lent a hand.
In August 1532,
the Archbishop of Canterbury,
Archbishop Warham,
died.
Henry and Cromwell managed to
secure the appointment and the
confirmation from Rome of Thomas
Cranmer as the new Archbishop of
Canterbury.
 
Now Cranmer was a Cambridge
academic who had taken a great
interest in the early
development of Protestantism in
the 1520s.
 
Henry and Cromwell knew him as
one of the King's think tank and
they knew that he was willing to
do Henry's bidding over the
divorce.
 
With that confidence,
an Archbishop of Canterbury who
would do the King's will,
Anne Boleyn at last gave in to
Henry's importunities.
 
By December 1532 she was known
to be pregnant and in January of
1533 they were secretly married.
 
The King was willing to go
ahead and do that because he was
convinced that his first
marriage would be declared to
have been void.
 
But now with Anne pregnant
things had to move fast.
In April of 1533,
Parliament was brought to pass
the Act in Restraint of Appeals,
a crucial statute.
This declared that England was
an imperial monarchy,
no foreign jurisdiction was
valid within its boundaries,
no appeals against a judicial
decision made in England could
be taken outside the kingdom.
 
And accordingly in May of 1533
Cranmer assembled a court,
annulled Henry's marriage to
Katherine of Aragon.
And in June 1533,
Anne, already secretly married
to the King,
was crowned as queen,
already six months pregnant
with the future Queen Elizabeth
I who was born on the seventh of
September.
And in the same month,
September 1533,
the Pope responded by
excommunicating the King,
casting him out of the church,
but he held the excommunication
in suspension in case Henry
would begin to behave.
But Henry didn't behave.
 
That wasn't his way.
 
>
 
In 1534, Parliament passed the
Succession Act declaring the
validity of the annulment of
Henry's marriage and his
remarriage and fixing the
succession to the crown in the
new line.
 
Oaths were required from all
major office holders to respect
the Act of Succession.
 
An Act for Submission of the
Clergy was passed to legally
enshrine the clergy's submission
and finally the Act of
Supremacy,
which declared Henry VIII to be
the Supreme Head of the Church
of England.
In sum then,
the necessity of securing the
Tudor dynasty had led to England
entering into a state of schism.
Schism.
 
They had rejected the
jurisdictional authority of
Rome,
they had asserted the royal
supremacy over the church,
and in 1534 to '5 this was
backed up with a flurry of
executions of individuals who
dared to defend the Aragon
marriage and the authority of
the pope,
and those who were executed
included John Fisher,
the reforming Bishop of
Rochester who could not tolerate
this,
and most famously Thomas More,
the former Lord Chancellor,
former good servant of the
King, who also could not stomach
this and died for it.
 
So we now enter a third phase,
the Henrician Reformation.
Now on the face of it,
the royal supremacy over the
church had nothing whatever to
do with religious reformation.
It was a rejection for reasons
of state of the supposedly
usurped legal jurisdictional
powers of the Bishop of Rome,
but it had nothing to do with
Protestantism and it was not
intended to inaugurate reform in
matters of faith or worship.
But of course it did.
 
It took place in a context of
the reformation in Europe.
It aligned England against
Rome, if not necessarily with
the Protestant princes of
Germany, or the Protestant
cantons of Switzerland.
 
It gave an initial foothold to
that minority who favored some
measure of religious reform,
and there were already people
around the King who were
prepared to use that opportunity
purposefully,
though necessarily with extreme
caution.
 
Thomas Cromwell certainly
favored reform.
Queen Anne favored reform.
 
She received Protestant books
which were secretly brought to
her by London merchants and read
them with interest.
Thomas Cranmer favored reform,
as he had done for some years.
On the other hand,
most of the bishops and most of
the nobility were willing to go
only so far with Henry.
They would accept the royal
supremacy for the good of the
kingdom,
for the good of the succession,
but they hoped that it would
all end ultimately in a
reconciliation with Rome.
 
So they would go along for the
time being.
The key figure in all of this
of course was Henry then
himself, and once he had the
royal supremacy Henry found that
he rather liked it.
 
>
 
He was happy to adopt the
position of a moderate reformer
of abuses and over time he
increasingly came to believe in
his own propaganda.
 
He saw himself as a Solomon,
as a Josiah who had promulgated
God's law and purged the land of
abuses and idolatry.
And at the same time the King
was notoriously susceptible to
influence and if those who held
his trust were able to steer
things in the direction that
they favored,
then the King might back them
if they were cautious,
though they were always well
advised to proceed with extreme
caution in order to retain the
King's confidence.
He was willing to be influenced
but he could react fiercely if
he thought he was being abused.
 
Well, in the mid to late 1530s
Thomas Cromwell and Thomas
Cranmer certainly had the King's
trust.
They had served him very well
as Archbishop of Canterbury in
Cranmer's case or in Cromwell's
case as Vicegerent in
Spirituals,
the office of administering the
church on behalf of the King.
 
And they did a great deal to
mold developments.
In 1536, they issued ten
articles of faith and a set of
injunctions for the practice of
worship in the church which
moved very,
very cautiously in a reformist
direction.
 
In 1536, Thomas Cromwell
organized a visitation,
an inspection,
of the monasteries which was
deliberately intended to find
abuses and which led,
later in 1536,
to the dissolution of all
religious houses worth less than
200 pounds a year,
the smaller monasteries.
 
It was not presented as an
attack on monasticism in
principle but as an attack upon
abuses.
It was a severe shock and it
was one of the issues which
provoked in 1536 rebellion in
the north of England.
That rebellion,
which we'll deal with on
another occasion,
was suppressed in 1537 and in
the aftermath of that
suppression the larger
monasteries were gradually
cajoled and encouraged and
bullied into surrendering freely
their possessions to the crown.
By 1540, every monastery and
nunnery in the kingdom had gone.
In 1537, Cromwell and Cranmer
engineered the issue of the
Bishop's Book,
a set of homilies which again
moved cautiously towards
Protestant definitions of faith.
In 1538, the great shrines,
the great centers of pilgrimage
at Canterbury and Durham and
elsewhere were dissolved,
their riches seized by the
crown, broken up on the grounds
that they had been idolatrously
abused.
And in 1538 the Bible was
issued in English;
the Great Bible,
a translation into English
which was actually based upon
the translations of the Bible by
William Tyndale and Miles
Coverdale,
both of whom were Protestants.
 
That was not officially
admitted but it was a fact.
These were the only
translations ready to hand and
they needed to produce the Bible
quickly.
The Great Bible,
then, was issued and on the
frontispiece,
the magnificent frontispiece of
the Bible,
shows Henry sitting in majesty
handing down the word of God to
his grateful people.
There was not much doubt that
by 1539 things had gone a lot
farther than anyone anticipated
and that elements of reformed
doctrine were being gradually
smuggled into Henry's church.
But in that year the King
called a halt.
The situation had changed again.
 
Another of the events of 1536,
to go back a few years,
was the fall of Anne Boleyn.
 
After her marriage to the King
and the promising start of the
birth of Princess Elizabeth,
no male heir had been born.
Anne had suffered a series of
miscarriages.
She was in a state of acute
nervous anxiety,
understandably.
 
Eventually, she was suspected.
 
Word was brought to the kKng
planting suspicions that she had
committed adultery in her
desperation to have a child.
Other accusations were brought
against her.
The Queen was arrested and
executed, and shortly thereafter
Henry married Jane Seymour,
another lady of the court.
The death shortly after that of
Queen Katherine meant that the
marriage to Jane Seymour was now
of undoubted legitimacy--
both of Henry's earlier queens
were dead--
and in 1537 she gave birth,
at last,
to a male heir, Prince Edward.
 
Jane herself died in childbed.
 
So the King had his son.
 
That could have cleared the way
for reconciliation with Rome and
his more conservative counselors
hoped that it would do so
quickly,
but here again Henry's
personality proved vital.
 
By now Henry sincerely believed
in his role as Supreme Head of
the Church of England.
 
The question at issue was how
he would exercise his power.
His conservative counselors
persuaded him of the dangers of
the growth of radical
Protestantism in the country.
They pointed out that
Anabaptists had been discovered
in London, that there were
so-called 'Sacramentarians' at
large.
 
These were people who followed
the Swiss reformation's teaching
on the nature of Holy Communion.
 
In 1539, Henry was persuaded to
endorse the Act of Six Articles
which returned England to
unambiguous Catholic doctrinal
orthodoxy in matters of faith.
 
And in 1540 Thomas Cromwell,
having been accused by his
enemies of secretly encouraging
heresy, was arrested and swiftly
executed.
 
His real crime was in fact the
fiasco of having arranged the
King's fourth marriage,
his marriage to the German
princess Anne of Cleves,
which brought Henry into
alignment with the Lutheran
princes of Germany.
Henry, deceived by a flattering
portrait, was horrified when
Anne of Cleves arrived.
 
He described her as a
"Flemish mare."
He refused to consummate the
marriage and it was swiftly
dissolved.
 
This was a lucky break for Anne
of Cleves who retired to estates
in eastern England where she
happily lived out the rest of
her life,
so she came out of this quite
well >
 
all things considered.
 
Thomas Cromwell lost his head.
 
Now this phase of events is
often portrayed as a return to
full Catholic orthodoxy
accompanied by a reinvigoration
of traditional worship in the
parishes.
But I think again that goes too
far.
What was ruling in the late
years of Henry was not full
Catholic orthodoxy.
 
It was really Henry's own
peculiarly idiosyncratic
conscience and desires in
matters of religion.
Henry would certainly burn the
occasional radical Protestant if
one was caught,
but he also executed the
occasional Catholic for opposing
the royal supremacy.
On one occasion he made a
demonstration by having several
of each executed on the same
day.
You can say what you like about
Henry, not a nice man,
a persecutor,
but he was an equal opportunity
persecutor.
 
>
 
Henry was listening to some of
the conservative voices in the
council,
especially Bishop Gardiner of
Winchester and the conservative
faction which circulated around
Thomas Howard,
the Earl of Norfolk.
He came under their influence
quite heavily in 1540 when
Norfolk brought to his attention
his young niece,
Katherine Howard,
who became Henry's new bride,
his fifth wife,
pushed into his bed at the age
of eighteen by her uncle in the
hope of assuring greater
influence for his faction.
 
Nevertheless,
although Henry was increasingly
under the influence of
conservative figures,
he never lost his trust in
Thomas Cranmer and indeed he
shielded Cranmer from enemies
who would have loved to bring
about his fall.
 
And after the discovery of
Katherine Howard's actual
adultery in 1542 and her
execution,
the King was much less
influenced by his more
conservative advisers.
 
Certainly, the gradual drift of
the 1530s in the direction of
some kind of neo-Lutheran reform
of doctrine had halted,
but England's religion under
Henry in his later years was not
full orthodoxy.
 
Parish religion was not as it
had been.
The cult of the saints and the
shrines and the relics had been
greatly reduced.
 
The cult of purgatory was gone.
 
The monasteries were gone.
 
And on the more positive side a
new vernacular religious culture
using the English Bible and
English service books had come
into being.
 
And if really,
truly doctrinally Protestant
people were still very much a
minority they were a growing
minority and to some extent a
powerful minority.
They included some very
powerful people whose potential
influence was out of all
proportion to their numbers.
Cranmer was still the
archbishop and he favored and
helped reformers in the
universities and in the church.
In 1543, Henry's last queen,
Queen Catherine Parr,
who was as much his nurse as
his queen,
came into a position of
authority and she again showed
great sympathy towards reform.
 
The so-called Seymour Circle at
court,
those gathered around Edward
and Thomas Seymour,
the brothers of Henry's dead
queen,
Jane Seymour,
and the uncles of young Prince
Edward,
also favored Protestantism--and
above all,
perhaps, in their direct
influence,
the tutors who were appointed
to the young Prince Edward and
to his sister,
Princess Elizabeth,
appointed by Archbishop
Cranmer,
were all closet Protestants.
So all of this was the legacy
of the Henrician reformation.
It had not been a truly
Protestant reformation but I
think it marked a far more
significant break with tradition
than is sometimes recognized.
 
Okay.
 
Let's move on now to a fourth
phase, the Edwardian
reformation.
 
Henry VIII at last died in
January 1547,
aged only fifty-six though he'd
been in a state of some
decrepitude for years.
 
And the new king,
King Edward,
was only nine and a half years
old and that of course is
another of those contingencies
that helped to shape the history
of the reformation.
 
Edward's uncle,
Edward Seymour,
led a group of reform-minded
men in taking control at the
center of power.
 
Seymour was appointed protector
of the young prince and Duke of
Somerset.
 
Now as Duke of Somerset and
protector,
Seymour and his friends' prime
interest was advancing their own
power and influence,
but there's little doubt that
he was also of sincere
Protestant views and in that
context Archbishop Cranmer was
able to exercise far more
influence than he had since
1539.
The changes in religion which
were brought about in the next
two and a half years suggest a
very high degree of commitment
of these men at the center.
 
They may not have known in 1547
just how far they were going to
go,
but they certainly intended to
go further than Henry VIII had
and they acted swiftly once they
had the power.
 
In 1547, Parliament was
persuaded to repeal the heresy
laws and the Six Articles;
no more burning of Protestants.
They issued reformist
injunctions for the removal of
images and the obliteration of
religious paintings by
whitewashing them in the
churches.
That's when those paintings I
described to you in Saint
Agatha's Easby were whitewashed,
only to be discovered again 400
years later.
 
A book of homilies was issued,
official sermons of broadly
Lutheran sympathy in their
doctrine.
Religious guilds and
confraternities were suppressed
and their goods were confiscated
by the crown.
In 1548, communion was allowed
in 'both kinds';
that is, both bread and wine
were administered to the laity
in the Protestant style.
 
And in 1549 Cranmer issued a
prayer book, and an act of
uniformity to insist upon its
use, which was at least half
Protestant in doctrine.
 
That prayer book brought brief
rebellion in the west of
England,
the so-called Prayer Book
Rebellion,
which centered in the counties
of the southwest and led briefly
to the siege of Exeter before a
royal army arrived to disperse
the rebels and to follow their
dispersal with the savage
repression of this resistance.
Something like 4,000 rebels
were either killed or executed
immediately after the rebellion.
 
As a result,
though, Somerset's dominance in
the council was shaken and he
was replaced as a central figure
by John Dudley,
the Duke of Northumberland.
That change at the center,
however, did not lead to any
change in religious policy.
 
In fact, Dudley backed
additional innovations in order
to keep the support of
Archbishop Cranmer and indeed
the favor of the young King
himself.
Edward by this time had emerged
as a youth of pronouncedly
evangelical Protestant beliefs
and inclinations,
verging indeed on bigotry.
 
He was often described as the
'young Josiah',
a biblical figure,
the young king who would bring
true reform and cleansing of the
church.
In particular,
in 1552 a further prayer book
was issued,
a revised prayer book,
this one decisively and openly
Protestant,
and it was backed in 1553 by an
emphatically Protestant
statement of faith,
the Forty-two Articles.
So, okay, let's take stock.
 
The Church of England under
Henry VIII was a peculiarly
personal blend of doctrinal
orthodoxy with elements of
reform in worship and practice.
 
But a true Protestant minority
had emerged especially in London
and the southeast and among
certain powerful members of the
social elite,
and under the boy king Edward
VI and his two regents true
Protestant reform moved ahead
rapidly over six years.
 
By 1553, the Church of England
was clearly Protestant in
doctrine and in forms of
worship,
centered on the English Bible
and on the Prayer Book and the
nation had become deeply divided
in matters of faith.
And that leads us to the fifth
phase of this process,
the Marian Reaction.
 
Edward VI, the boy king,
died of pulmonary tuberculosis
only a month after the issue of
the Protestant Forty-two
Articles of Religion and the
wheel turned again.
Desperate to avoid loss of
power, the Duke of
Northumberland proclaimed as
queen Lady Jane Grey,
the nearest Protestant
successor who could be named
except Princess Elizabeth,
who was left out because she
was still stigmatized as
illegitimate.
Henry VIII's daughter,
Mary, who at this time was
living in seclusion in East
Anglia, was not willing to
accept this.
 
As the daughter of King Henry
and of Katherine of Aragon,
she raised support amongst the
gentry of East Anglia,
formed an army and began to
move towards London.
The Duke of Northumberland lost
his nerve.
He disbanded his troops,
capitulated and gave himself
up.
 
So after the turmoil of the
previous twenty-five years Mary
had become queen after all.
 
The thing Henry had sought so
hard to avoid had happened.
Now how far Mary's success in
being able to raise troops and
finding widespread support for
her accession to the crown,
how far it was a result of the
fact of her Tudor blood and that
she clearly was the direct heir,
or how far it depended upon the
appeal of the fact that she was
known to be deeply loyal to the
old religion,
that's an open question.
But a deeply loyal Catholic she
certainly was.
Her young life had been
blighted by the dissolution of
her mother's marriage and the
King's subsequent actions.
She clung, as part of her very
identity you could say,
to the old religion and her
subsequent policies bear the
stamp of that.
 
And they also reveal just how
divided the nation had become by
this stage.
 
Late in 1553,
soon after her accession,
Parliament was persuaded to
repeal Edward's Act of
Uniformity which had enforced
uniform Protestant worship in
the nation.
 
Interestingly though,
eighty members of Parliament
were brave enough to oppose that
action.
Early in 1554, Mary married.
 
She married Prince Philip of
Spain,
the future King Philip II,
and that marriage was accepted
by Parliament,
though with great reluctance
and only after the suppression
of a brief flurry of rebellion
in Kent where Sir Thomas Wyatt
led a small army to try to seize
London and prevent the Spanish
marriage.
The citizens of London shut the
gates against him and he was
defeated and executed.
 
Then, in the fall of 1554,
full papal jurisdiction was
restored in England.
 
Cardinal Reginald Pole,
the great English churchman who
had been living in exile in
Italy,
arrived to absolve the realm
from its schism and was
appointed Archbishop of
Canterbury,
but interestingly he was
only--the absolution of England
from schism--
was only accepted after the
Pope had agreed that monastery
land would remain with those who
had been granted it or who had
purchased it under Henry VIII.
That would not be restored to
the church.
England then was part of the
Catholic fold again,
though on terms.
 
Many Protestant ministers in
the church were deprived of
their livings and many of them
went into exile abroad.
The universities of Oxford and
Cambridge were also purged.
Some members of Cambridge
colleges and some members of
Oxford colleges went into exile
abroad.
Something like 800 ministers or
laymen and their families of
pronouncedly Protestant belief
also went into exile.
From December 1554,
those who remained in England
faced the penalties of a revival
of the Heresy Act,
punishing heresy with death,
and the burnings began.
Between 1555 and 1558,
over 300 people were burned at
the stake.
 
Some of them were amongst the
most notable figures of the
Henrician and Edwardian church.
 
Bishops Latimer and Ridley,
two leading Protestants,
were burned at Oxford in 1555.
 
Latimer--they were burned
facing each other in the
marketplace at Oxford--
Latimer famously calling out to
Ridley as the flames came up,
"be brave, Master Ridley.
Play the man."
 
Archbishop Cranmer was also
burned at Oxford in 1556.
He had temporally recanted his
Protestantism from his fear of
death but then went back on his
recantation,
declared openly his commitment
to the new religion and was
burned in 1556,
holding out into the flames the
hand with which he had signed
his recantation.
"This hand hath
offended,"
he said.
 
Most of the people who were
burned, however,
were not the great leaders of
the church but humble people,
most of them from London and
the southeast.
In fact, almost half the
burnings took place in London,
in the city of Colchester and
in Canterbury.
The southeast was the focus of
Protestant strength.
They were usually laypeople.
 
Only a tenth of them were
clergymen.
They were often young.
 
Most of them were under thirty
and a very high proportion of
those executed were around
twenty years old.
These were people who had never
really known the old religion
and who had grown up in the new
and proved prepared to die for
it.
 
Well, the effects of this
holocaust of Protestant
resistance are debatable.
 
Certainly Mary,
her bishops and her advisers
had simply never expected the
resistance to be so widespread
or so prolonged.
 
But the fact that Mary
persisted in her policy to the
end really does her no honor.
 
If she had no reason to love
her father's memory,
it's clear at least that she
shared his implacability with
those who opposed her,
and by doing so the persecution
helped to cement England's
religious divisions and
associated the old religion with
a level of persecution that was
wholly unprecedented.
 
There had never been religious
persecution of this intensity,
and indeed it was intense not
only by English standards but by
the standards of continental
Europe at the time.
Well, what might have happened
given more time we'll never
know, because Mary died in
November 1558 aged only
forty-two.
 
Christopher Haigh suggests,
as have a number of other
recent historians,
that her reign appears to be an
aberration only in hindsight.
 
He thinks she might have
succeeded had she been given
time.
 
Protestant resistance would
have lessened,
the old religion would have
become reestablished fully and
normalized,
and perhaps that may well be
the case.
 
But there's also a sense in
which one could say her reign
was regarded by at least some as
a temporary interlude even
before her death.
 
Mary was thirty-seven when she
came to the throne,
thirty-eight when she married a
Spanish prince who was usually
absent from her,
abroad seeing to the affairs of
his other possessions.
 
She was childless despite a
couple of phantom pregnancies
which gave her hope.
 
She had little prospect of
bearing an heir,
despite her desperate hopes
both for herself and for her
faith.
 
For Mary all this was
undoubtedly a personal tragedy
and it's been suggested that she
died in a state of profound
depression in her last months.
 
Both those who supported her
and those who opposed her knew
that in the background was
another claimant to the throne,
Princess Elizabeth,
and that her accession to the
throne would almost certainly
bring about another alteration
in religion.
 
To some degree it could be
anticipated well in advance.
What they didn't know,
though, was that this time,
after the twists and turns of
the generation between 1527 and
1558, it would last.
 
And it would last partly
because of the nature of the
religious settlement which
Elizabeth introduced,
partly because of the way in
which she was able to defend it,
and partly for another very
simple contingent reason.
When Elizabeth was proclaimed
queen on the death of her sister
on November the 17th,
1558, she was only twenty-five
years old and she lived to be
seventy--
and more of that next week.
 
 
 
