The Education of a Christian Society

Humanism and the Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands

N. Scott Amos, Andrew Pettegree

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351890892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Throughout the sixteenth century, political and intellectual developments in Britain and The Netherlands were closely intertwined. At different times religious refugees from one or other country found a secure haven across the Channel, and a constant interchange of books, ideas and personnel underscored the affinity of lands which both made a painful progress towards Protestantism during the course of the century. This collection of ten new studies, all by specialists active in the field, explores the full ramifications of these links, from the first intellectual contacts inspired by the growth of Humanism to the planting of established Protestant churches. With contributions from specialists in art history, literary studies and history, the volume also underscores the vitality of new research in this field and points the way to several new departures in the field of Reformation and Renaissance studies.

CHAPTER ONE

Humanism and the Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands

Andrew Pettegree

The emergence of nation states in the early modern period is often a much more accidental process than sometimes appears. The conglomeration of the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands is a case in point, being a somewhat fortuitous amalgamation finally, and somewhat painfully, completed by Charles V in the 1540s, with his military victory over the duke of Guelders. The eventual division into two separate states, a northern independent republic and a southern state under Habsburg rule, has no particular logic but the vagaries of the military campaigns that finally fixed a border uncomfortably separating the bulk of Flanders and Brabant from a conquered (and resolutely Catholic) portion incorporated into the United Provinces. All of this is very familiar to any student of the period; but what is less well known is that the middle years of the sixteenth century almost witnessed the birth of a new state which would have united England and the Netherlands in a permanent, and undoubtedly formidable, cross-channel alliance.

In 1554, when Mary Queen of England declared her wish to marry Philip of Spain, her advisers were anxious above all to prevent England being absorbed into the Spanish Empire as a satellite power. They drove a hard, and what appears in retrospect as a remarkable, bargain. For it was agreed as a condition of the marriage that any child of the union would inherit both England and the Netherlands; the rest of the Empire would pass to Philip’s son by a former marriage, Don Carlos.¹ For the English the possibilities were indeed alluring: a dynastic connection which would incorporate into the English Crown a rich and prosperous land with which England was already, especially through their respective trading communities, closely connected. Such a combination would be a more than adequate compensation for the recent and still painful loss of French possessions, though it would hardly be expected that the French would (or indeed could) accept the emergence of so powerful a competitor without a struggle.

In the event French fears proved misplaced. The marriage of Mary and Philip, so hopefully contracted and deeply desired by the English queen, proved barren. In the absence of issue, the anticipated connection between England and Flanders fell into abeyance, soon to be further sundered by the queen’s death and the ending of the Anglo-Spanish marriage. The Anglo-Netherlandish kingdom thus joined Burgundy and the Habsburg lands of Southern Germany in the short but tantalizing list of early modern dynastic states which failed to be.² But the episode is nevertheless not without interest, for the shrewd negotiations of Mary’s English Council underlined an undoubted truth about English relations with the continent: that now, with the ending of the English medieval empire in France, the Netherlands was the part of the European mainland with which England was most intimately and most vitally connected.

These connections entered into every area of the intellectual and commercial life of the nation, and long pre-dated the Reformation. In the great international marketplace of medieval London, trading visitors from the Netherlands were a familiar sight. And whereas merchants from the Italian city ports and the cities of the German Hansa were the most prominent and richest members of London’s indigenous foreign community, Netherlanders were undoubtedly the most numerous.³ Many were settled in England on a semi-permanent basis, their presence grudgingly accepted in good economic times, though resented at others: when the London apprentices turned on foreign workmen in the notorious ‘Evil May Day’ riot of 1517, it was Flemish artisans who bore the brunt of their resentment.⁴ But the economic connections between the two lands were too intricate and developed to be fundamentally damaged by occasional eruptions of this sort. By the sixteenth century the Netherlands was far and away the most important first destination for English exports, a relationship reinforced by the establishment in Antwerp of the English cloth mart. When, as the result of increasing tension at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, the regent of the Netherlands temporarily suspended English cloth imports, it was a potentially fatal blow to English economic prosperity, and instantly recognized as such by the queen and her Council.⁵

The stop in Anglo-Netherlandish trade lasted no more than a year. It ended partly because the English refused to back down and found themselves an alternative continental mart at Emden – barely satisfactory, but enough to alarm the Antwerp city fathers into contemplating economic life without the English merchant community. For this would have been economically disastrous. In a metropolis as cosmopolitan as Antwerp the English community was not the largest foreign contingent, but a stable and valued cornerstone of the local economy nevertheless. Undertaken to bring the English economy to its knees, in the short term the stop in trade probably did more damage to the Netherlands, with many thousands of workers in the textile industries, who depended on English broadcloths for their dyeing and finishing, thrown out of work.⁶ In truth, the ending of the quarrel was greeted with great relief on both sides of the Channel.

Thus before and throughout the sixteenth century, the cultural and economic lives of England and the Netherlands were closely and intricately connected. The onset of the international intellectual movement known as humanism and the dawning of the Reformation would both draw upon and reinforce these associations. But for all that, the relationship between England and the Netherlands was by no means one between equals. Intellectually and in artistic terms England lived very much in the shadow of the more sophisticated continental society. London was a great trading city, but it was England’s only town of any size, whereas Flanders and Brabant were home to a teeming culture of independently minded and culturally sophisticated cities: the great northern metropolis of Brabant, Antwerp, vying in importance with the busy, and latterly exceptionally prosperous cloth towns of Flanders, Bruges, Ghent and Ypres. The enormous wealth generated by the cloth trade in the fifteenth century was reflected in the development of an artistic tradition which in vigour and sophistication rivalled that of Italy.⁷ In the sixteenth century the towns of Holland would emerge as a third circle of wealth and influence.⁸

The advanced societies of these Netherlandish cities were reflected in a highly developed cultural life. In the early part of the sixteenth century England had more universities – two, Oxford and Cambridge, to the solitary centre of Louvain⁹ – but nothing to rival the famous Netherlandish Latin schools, the most prominent feature of a justly famous educational culture. Antwerp alone in the sixteenth century had over two hundred schools, which between them nurtured a culture of literacy which made the Netherlands one of the most lettered societies in Europe. Even comparatively small, remote places like Kampen and Deventer boasted illustrious educational institutions, the latter the famous school sponsored by the Brethren of the Common Life that educated Erasmus. Supporting this vigorous schools culture was a robust and highly dispersed printing industry, again with its centre at Antwerp, which with Paris was one of the two great printing cities of Northern Europe.¹⁰ English printing, in contrast almost entirely confined to London, was far less developed than that of the Netherlands, from where it in any case drew many of its skilled workmen and necessary specialized equipment.¹¹ Even so, English readers continued to depend heavily on imported books, a situation which, particularly with more specialized or scholarly editions, continued for most of the century.¹²

The relative backwardness of English letters is seldom commented on in the literature, partly perhaps because of a strongly insular tradition in English scholarship which has meant that a great deal of writing on, for instance, the English Reformation has been written without much reference to continental connections or influences.¹³ It helped also that the Reformation controversies threw up figures of genuine international stature, such as John Fisher and Thomas More, and that the somewhat fortuitous presence of the great Erasmus acted as an effective cover for some of the more glaring deficiencies of English intellectual life.¹⁴ In Erasmus, English scholars had a significant trophy that had, after all, eluded some of the most glittering of Europe’s Renaissance courts.¹⁵ His years in Cambridge, although neither particularly happy nor productive, do act as an appropriate symbolic reminder of the interconnectedness of events in the two countries throughout the Reformation century. For the committed minority who put their faith before their safety in both England and the Netherlands, the familiar haunts across the Channel would be the first port of call through many twists and turns of religious policy. It was to Antwerp that William Tyndale would repair to escape his enemies in the English court, and where he published his greatest work of sustained polemic, The Obedience of a Christian Man.¹⁶ In the years that followed Tyndale’s arrival Antwerp made itself the centre of English-language evangelical printing, largely through the efforts of the coyly disguised ‘Hans Luft of Marburg’, in reality the Antwerp printer J. Hoochstraten.¹⁷ Even when Tyndale was arrested and executed in the Netherlands, Antwerp printers continued to publish works in English for the small groups of English Protestant readers, to the largely impotent fury of the English church authorities.¹⁸

At different times during the following decades England was able to return the compliment for evangelical Netherlanders no longer safe in their homeland. After his compromising involvement in the attempted Anabaptist insurrection in Amsterdam in 1535, the Dutch scholar Gualterus Delenus not only found a safe haven in England, but employment in the king’s library.¹⁹ By the middle years of the century, in the more tolerant reign of Edward VI, Netherlandish religious refugees were so numerous that they formed the mainstay of the refugee church established under the superintendency of the Polish reformer, John à Lasco. But the awareness of the utility of a place of refuge conveniently close to home was not confined to supporters of the new evangelical doctrines. In the reign of Elizabeth English Catholic exiles would make the Southern Netherlands the centre of their proselytizing activity, the vigorous activity of their printing presses established at Douai and St Omer demonstrating that Protestants had no monopoly on effective printed propaganda.²⁰

The vitality and convenience of these cross-channel connections would also be remembered with the emergence in the later part of the sixteenth century of dissident evangelical groups who rejected the emerging Protestant settlements in the two countries. The most distinctive (and still mysterious) of these fringe groups was the ‘Family of Love’, a shadowy grouping of mostly educated laymen which drew followers from the urban intellectual and mercantile élites of both countries.²¹ When, in the following decades, criticism of the Elizabethan Settlement moved from Puritanism to Separatism, the most radical and outspoken of those who refused conformity naturally looked to the Netherlands for a refuge; there they founded their own churches, and, more provocatively, ran their own printing presses.²² And when in 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers set off for the New World, it was from the English Separatist Church of Leiden that the core of the Mayflower’s pioneers were drawn.

These connections, reinforced by the major movement of peoples brought about by Reformation persecutions, could not fail to have their influence on the intellectual and cultural lives of the two respective countries. The essays that make up this collection all explore in their different ways the ramifications of this extraordinarily varied and many-sided movement: a movement which was crucially both a movement of ideas and a movement of peoples. That such social and cultural fluidity was a prerequisite for the growth of the international evangelical movement of the sixteenth century has long been recognized: Wolsey and Sir Thomas More knew what they were doing when they targeted the Hansa headquarters in London as a dangerous conduit of heretical influence.²³ But one must not ignore the extent to which conservative minds also drew strength from the circulation of ideas among the international intellectual community. Several essays in this volume draw attention to the intellectual vigour and sophistication of the conservative response to the call for change, whether this be the subtly coded dialogues and dramas of Sir Thomas Elyot and his circle, or the robust Catholic loyalism of most members of the English humanist community.²⁴ In a time of confusion and uncertain political leadership, not everything was as straightforward as it would subsequently appear. It is worth reminding oneself that the original patrons of Hans Holbein, artist of the English Reformation, were the conservative circle around Sir Thomas More. In switching his allegiance from More to Cromwell at the time of the Lord Chancellor’s fall from favour, Holbein merely showed the intellectual flexibility which was a prerequisite for survival at the English court.²⁵

These confusions and ambiguities are neatly epitomized in the career and conduct of Desiderius Erasmus, the quintessential Anglo-Dutch intellectual traveller. Erasmus came to England at the in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and maps
• Notes on contributors
• Abbreviations
• 1 Humanism and the Reformation in Britain and the Netherlands
• 2 The role of English humanists in the Reformation up to 1559
• 3 From institutio to educatio: the origin of political education in the Habsburg Netherlands
• 4 The piety of Henry VIII
• 5 Dialogue, resistance and accommodation: conservative literary responses to the Henrician Reformation
• 6 The exile literature of the early Reformation: ‘Obedience to God and the King’
• 7 Religious propaganda in sixteenth-century Netherlandish prints and drawings
• 8 Reformation, Counter-Reformation and literary propaganda in the Low Countries in the sixteenth century: the case of Brother Cornelis
• 9 The dynamics of Reformed militancy in the Low Countries: the Wonderyear
• 10 Clan, kin and Kirk: the Campbells and the Scottish Reformation
• 11 The intellectual and cultural context of the Reformation in the Northern Netherlands
• Index