Britain's Reformations

Reformations, plural

Peter Marshall, editor of the Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation, is a leading historian of the English Reformation. His chapter is titled "Britain's Reformations," plural [check]. That reflects a major shift in scholarship. Older accounts told a story of a Protestant nation throwing off a corrupt church. Recent historians such as Eamon Duffy, Christopher Haigh and Marshall himself show that traditional Catholicism was popular and that the Reformation was imposed from above in stages. It took generations to win over ordinary people, and in Ireland it largely failed.

Before Henry: Lollards and Tyndale

England already had a homegrown dissent, the Lollards, followers of John Wyclif (see The Late Medieval Crisis). In the 1520s Luther's books were smuggled in and discussed by scholars at Cambridge. The most important early English Protestant was William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536). He vowed that he would make a plowboy know more of Scripture than the clergy did. Unable to get permission to translate the Bible in England, he went to Germany. In 1526 he printed the first English New Testament translated from Greek. Copies were smuggled into England in bales of cloth and burned by the bishops. Betrayed, Tyndale was strangled and burned near Brussels in 1536, reportedly praying, "Lord, open the king of England's eyes." Much of his wording survives in the King James Bible.

Henry VIII's "Great Matter"

King Henry VIII (reigned 1509–1547) began as a strong Catholic. He wrote a book against Luther, and the pope rewarded him with the title "Defender of the Faith," which British monarchs still use. But Henry desperately needed a male heir. His wife, Catherine of Aragon, had borne only one surviving child, a daughter, Mary. Henry had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn. He convinced himself that his marriage was cursed because Catherine had been his brother's widow (Leviticus 20:21), and he asked the pope for an annulment.

Normally popes were flexible with kings. But Catherine's nephew was the emperor Charles V, whose troops controlled Rome. The pope stalled for years. Henry's patience ran out. Guided by his minister Thomas Cromwell and his new archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, Henry cut England's ties to Rome through a series of laws. The Act of Supremacy (1534) declared the king "Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England." Cranmer annulled Henry's marriage and crowned Anne.

Those who refused to accept the king's supremacy died. The former Lord Chancellor Thomas More, author of Utopia, and Bishop John Fisher were beheaded in 1535. More said on the scaffold that he died "the king's good servant, but God's first." Carthusian monks were hanged in their habits.

Henry's half-reformation

Henry was no Protestant. He kept the Mass, clerical celibacy and most Catholic doctrine. He burned Protestants who denied transubstantiation, and he executed Catholics who denied his supremacy, sometimes on the same day. But under Cromwell's direction:

• the monasteries were dissolved (1536–1540). About 800 religious houses were closed, and their vast lands were sold to nobles and gentry, giving them a lasting stake in the break with Rome. A northern rebellion in their defense, the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536), was crushed;
• shrines were destroyed, including Becket's at Canterbury;
• an official English Great Bible (1539), largely based on Tyndale's work, was placed in every parish church.

Henry married six times, divorcing two wives and beheading two, including Anne Boleyn. His only son, Edward, was born to his third wife, Jane Seymour.

England's religion changed with each monarch

Edward VI: the Protestant revolution

When Henry died in 1547, his nine-year-old son Edward VI became king. The boy and his advisers were committed Protestants. Now Cranmer could carry out a real Reformation:

• In 1549 he produced the first Book of Common Prayer, a complete English liturgy for the whole year in beautiful, rhythmic prose. A more clearly Protestant version followed in 1552.
• Images were removed, altars replaced with communion tables, and walls whitewashed.
• Priests were allowed to marry.
• The Forty-Two Articles (1553) set out a Reformed theology.

Not everyone welcomed this. In 1549 Cornish and Devon rebels rose against the new English Prayer Book, saying it was "like a Christmas game." They were brutally suppressed.

Mary I: Catholic restoration

Edward died at fifteen in 1553. His Catholic half-sister Mary I, daughter of Catherine of Aragon, took the throne with strong popular support. She restored papal authority and the Mass, and she married her cousin Philip II of Spain. Many people welcomed the return of the old religion. Altars and images reappeared.

But Mary also revived the heresy laws. Between 1555 and 1558 about 280 Protestants were burned, including bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley at Oxford. As the flames rose, Latimer reportedly said, "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." Cranmer, after signing several recantations under pressure, finally renounced them at his execution in 1556. He thrust into the fire first the hand that had signed them.

The burnings earned Mary the name "Bloody Mary." John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563), better known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, told their stories and became, after the Bible, perhaps the most influential book in English Protestant culture. It helped shape a lasting English identity as a Protestant nation threatened by Catholic powers.

Elizabeth I: the "Settlement"

Mary died childless in 1558. Her half-sister Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn's daughter, became queen and reigned for 45 years. With her chief minister William Cecil, she established the Elizabethan Settlement (1559):

• Elizabeth became "Supreme Governor" (not "Head") of the church.
• The Book of Common Prayer was restored, with wording on the Lord's Supper that both Lutherans and Reformed could accept.
• The Thirty-Nine Articles (1563/1571) gave a broadly Reformed theology.
• Bishops, cathedrals, vestments and much traditional ceremony were kept.

The result was a church Protestant in doctrine but Catholic-looking in structure and worship. Later Anglicans called it the via media, the "middle way." Elizabeth said she did not want to make "windows into men's souls." She asked for outward conformity, though attending church was legally required, and Catholics who refused paid heavy fines.

The Settlement satisfied neither extreme. Catholics faced growing pressure, especially after Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570 and released her subjects from obedience. Catholic priests trained abroad were smuggled into England, and about 130 were executed as traitors, including the Jesuit Edmund Campion. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 seemed to many English people proof that God was Protestant. Meanwhile, Puritans wanted to "purify" the church of its remaining "popish" ceremonies and bishops (see Puritans, Baptists and Quakers).

Scotland: a Presbyterian revolution

Scotland's Reformation was quite different: faster, more radical and more Calvinist. Its leader was John Knox (c. 1514–1572), a fiery former priest who had been captured by the French and served as a galley slave, then worked in Edward's England and in Calvin's Geneva. He wrote a notorious pamphlet, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), against female rulers. Its timing was poor, since Elizabeth came to the throne months later.

In 1559–1560, with English help, Protestant nobles (the "Lords of the Congregation") overthrew the French-backed Catholic regency. In 1560 the Scottish Parliament abolished papal authority and the Mass and adopted the Scots Confession. The First Book of Discipline proposed a school in every parish. The Church of Scotland (the "Kirk") developed a Presbyterian system, governed not by bishops but by elders and ministers in a ladder of church courts, from local kirk sessions up to the General Assembly.

The young Catholic queen, Mary, Queen of Scots, returned from France in 1561 and clashed with Knox. After a series of scandals she was forced to abdicate in 1567, fled to England, and after nineteen years of imprisonment was executed by Elizabeth in 1587. Her son, James VI of Scotland, became James I of England in 1603. In 1611 he sponsored the Authorized ("King James") Version of the Bible.

Wales and Ireland

In Wales, the Reformation eventually succeeded partly because the Bible was translated into Welsh (1588), which helped preserve the Welsh language. In Ireland, the Reformation was imposed by an English government seen as a foreign colonizer. The great majority of the Irish remained Catholic, and religion became fused with national identity, with long and tragic consequences.