The Post-Reformation

Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1603-1714

John Spurr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317882619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The 17th century was a dynamic period characterized by huge political and social changes, including the Civil War, the execution of Charles I, the Commonwealth and the Restoration. The Britain of 1714 was recognizably more modern than it was in 1603. At the heart of these changes was religion and the search for an acceptable religious settlement, which stimulated the Pilgrim Fathers to leave to settle America, the Popish plot and the Glorious Revolution in which James II was kicked off the throne.

This book looks at both the private aspects of human beliefs and practices and also institutional religion, investigating the growing competition between rival versions of Christianity and the growing expectation that individuals should be allowed to worship as they saw fit.

CHAPTER 1

England, Ireland and Scotland in 1603

In 1603 James VI, King of Scotland, succeeded Elizabeth I and became King of England and Wales and King of Ireland. Among the tributes, petitions and advice that showered down on the new King were several surveys of the state of religion in his new realms. Some were reports on the education and capabilities of the clergy of the Church of England and others assessed the strength of various religious minorities; some sought to reassure him, others to inspire him to further reform of the church. Unlike these contemporary commentators, historians find it difficult to take a snapshot of religion at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is not simply the usual problem of freezing what is really a dynamic process, it is much more a fundamental question of where to focus the picture. Should one concentrate on the Church of England? But the English church was contested ground from its very inception and it was still very far from being a uniform institution with a single clear message. Should we privilege the well-recorded views of the church’s clergy or would we be better advised to explore the less well-documented attitudes of the laity? What of Roman Catholics and their co-religionists in Scotland and Ireland? Or the Presbyterians in Scotland? Beyond all these considerations, there is a need to explain why religion should occupy the foreground of our picture. So, before introducing some of the arguments surrounding the clergy’s religious outlook and the religion of the laity, let us consider why religion was of such political and social importance in 1603.

Protestant kingdoms

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the three kingdoms of England and Wales, Ireland, and Scotland had been Protestant for several decades. The English and Welsh Reformation began as an act of state in the 1530s when Henry VIII used Parliament to sever all links with the papacy and establish his own position as ‘supreme head’ of the church in his realms. This was rapidly followed by the dissolution of the monasteries and the seizure of their valuable lands. The subsequent sale and distribution of these broad acres among the gentry and aristocracy did much to ensure the commitment of this politically crucial class to the break from Rome. The 1536 Act of Union, which extended the English pattern of shires to Wales, coincided with Henry’s Reformation and presented the Welsh gentry with opportunities in Parliament and in their localities to participate in and profit from enforcing the new religious arrangements.

Whereas England and Wales were effectively one political and religious unit, Ireland was a complex dominion where Henry’s authority and ambitions were limited. Technically only the Lord of Ireland, Henry’s control, especially beyond ‘the Pale’, the area around Dublin, was dependent upon the precarious good will of the great Irish lords. An abortive rebellion by these lords compelled Henry to intervene and in 1536–37 the Irish Parliament passed legislation that mirrored the statutes of the English Reformation. In 1541 Parliament acknowledged Henry as King. The Irish Reformation was, in the words of Alan Ford, ‘an English affair, imposed from England, dependent upon events in England, and led in Ireland by officials and ecclesiastics who were members of the Church of England’.¹ Its impact, moreover, was slight. Whatever might be decided in Dublin made little difference to religious practices in Gaelic Ulster or Connacht.

In England, although the papacy had been repudiated under Henry and the church plundered, theologically little had changed. It was the reign of his son Edward VI that saw the process of Protestant Reformation move up a gear: the 1549 Uniformity Act obliged the population to attend English-language services according to the new Book of Common Prayer, but the decisive turn towards a Swiss-style Reformed Protestantism came with the 1552 Uniformity Act and the revised Prayer Book. Edward’s premature death the following year allowed his Catholic successor Mary to throw the machine into reverse. Hampered by the lukewarm attitude of the papacy and English aristocracy, and by her own temperament – she foolishly created three hundred Protestant martyrs or, as she saw it, dispensed exemplary punishment to three hundred obstinate heretics – Mary did not win England back to Catholicism before her death in 1558. At this point, thirty years of upheaval and suffering had confirmed the zealots of both sides, but resolved nothing. A religious spell had been broken: the unity of the church had been breached; the mass transformed; purgatory denied; the clergy polluted by marriage; the monasteries dissolved; the beauties of the church destroyed by iconoclasts. And yet the world had not stopped turning. God had not intervened. To see all that Catholicism held dear destroyed may have weakened the faith of some Catholics. But it did not necessarily strengthen the faith of Protestants. Too many of the English obeyed the new religion grudgingly, while the reformers concentrated their energies on rooting out the old, on de-Catholicising rather than evangelising the land. It seems likely that many of the English were left with their faith in medieval Christianity, in the saving intercession of the church and the value of good works, shattered, but with little to replace it.

The task of spreading the new faith was undertaken during the long reign of Elizabeth I. Provocatively, Collinson has claimed that ‘the Reformation was something which happened in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. Before that everything was preparative, embryonic. Protestantism was present, but as a kind of subculture, like Catholicism later.’² The Elizabethan Act of Uniformity and Prayer Book of 1559 were designed with an eye to reconciliation. Earlier versions of the liturgy were conflated and theological issues were left vaguely defined, rather as they were in the Thirty-nine Articles of 1563, the Church of England’s basic doctrinal statement. Putting this Elizabethan ‘settlement’ into effect, ironing out problems and accommodating different interests, was a slow business. It was not until late in Elizabeth’s reign that the English church had an effective Protestant preaching clergy and the bishops could be sure of commanding respect. Even then there was, under the umbrella of the official church, a diversity of religious practice and belief across the parishes. Equally importantly, there were groups of disaffected Protestants and Roman Catholics who remained a thorn in the church’s flesh.

Those who were convinced that the Elizabethan church could and should go faster in evangelising the nation have usually been dubbed ‘puritans’. Although, as we shall see, there were to be many different ‘puritanisms’, the Elizabethan puritans were principally those clergy and their supporters who formed the vanguard of official efforts to spread Protestantism. While they applauded much in the Church of England, it remained, in their eyes, ‘but halfly reformed’, especially in the areas of worship and church government. Worship according to the 1559 Prayer Book offended puritans because it was redolent of popery and trespassed on the consciences of both ministers and their flocks. Even a stalwart of the Elizabethan church like John Foxe felt compelled to point out that the Word of God is the final arbiter of divine worship and ‘it is certain that there are several matters in this book which seem too little exactly to correspond to complete reformation of the Church, and which perhaps might be radically changed for the better’. Others were less polite: it is ‘an unperfect book, culled and picked out of that popish dunghill, the mass-book full of all abominations’. Calls for reform of the church’s government sprang from disillusionment with the current crop of bishops and from comparisons drawn with Scotland and Geneva where ‘discipline’ had been imposed within a Presbyterian system. The Presbyterians’ case was strengthened by scholars who could find no warrant in scripture for church government by bishops, but much to support a Presbyterian system of congregations governed by pastors and elders, each sending representatives to district assemblies (or classes) and those in turn contributing to provincial or national meetings (synods). For all their pamphleteering and parliamentary lobbying, Elizabethan Presbyterians had no success in revising the constitution of the episcopal Church of England. Even the Presbyterian experiments in English counties in the 1570s and 1580s were more a way for the clergy to compare notes and encourage one another than a means of enforcing discipline on the laity. Yet in the 1590s Archbishop Whitgift became convinced of the danger posed by the Presbyterians. Presbyterian satirical pamphlets had exposed the bishops and the church to popular ridicule. A small number of separatists who had denied the power of the prince in religion turned out to have connections among the Presbyterians. In reaction, puritan leaders were dragged before the courts and intimidated into silence. Their movement had been driven underground, but their cause had not been defeated.

The Post-Reformation Roman Catholic community adapted uneasily to conditions under Elizabeth I. In the 1560s the signs were all of compromise on both sides. The authorities exhibited a degree of leniency or even unofficial tolerance of traditional religious practices – especially in those areas, such as Lancashire or Durham, where visitations were less thorough – and many priests continued to say mass for semi-secret Catholic congregations. By the same token, many Catholics appear to have attended parish church, but to have abstained from receiving the communion, simply to escape the twelve-pence fine for non-attendance stipulated by the Uniformity Act. Within a few years, things went sour. A succession of Catholic plots and risings in favour of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the pope’s declaration that Elizabeth was excommunicate and deposed, provoked the regime. Fines of £20 per month could now be imposed on those who stayed away from the parish church. Conversion to Roman Catholicism was equated with treason and priests could be punished simply for saying mass. In the 1570s missionary priests began to infiltrate England and Wales, followed in the 1580s by Jesuits. These were English Catholics who had fled to seminaries in Rome or Flanders to receive training and ordination. Identified with the Counter-Reformation, these missionaries saw the Catholic reconquest of England, both spiritually and militarily, as their ultimate goal. In 1588 they called, without success, for English Catholics to rise up in support of the Armada.

The history of English Catholicism is controversial. One account is that English Catholicism was dwindling into insignificance before it was rescued by the arrival of the missionaries who constructed an underground church that was deeply influenced by Tridentine practices and ideals. The missionaries, however, have been criticised for sticking rather too closely to the existing Catholic communities and failing to take their message to potential new converts. The scholarly controversy about the degree of change and continuity within Catholicism is now looking rather tired and in danger of oversimplifying the nature of the community. Some of this debate is simply a matter of perspective. Too much concentration on a certain kind of source, especially for the last decades of the sixteenth century when both Elizabeth and the Jesuits were prepared to fight fire with fire, leads to an excessively confrontational view of Catholic–conformist relations. Questier, for example, has urged us to view the 1580s and early 1590s as an anomaly in the general pattern, ‘a Catholic “puritan” experiment with separatism, an experiment in which the language of evangelical fervour, mission, blood, suffering and, above all, martyrdom had, for a short time, coincided with, perhaps been assisted by, the war with Spain’.³ The more normal pattern prevailing in the sixteenth and certainly in the seventeenth century is of a variety of possible Catholic positions, some hardline or evasive, but others flexible, politically astute, and open to compromise. It may be possible to relate this diversity to the quarrel between Jesuits and the ‘Appellants’ or secular clergy over the structure of the Catholic church in England. The former regarded England as a missionary field and therefore suited to rule by the regular clergy directly answerable to Rome, while the latter recommended a diocesan structure – however clandestine and limited in effect – and government by bishops. In the political context of the later 1590s, these represent different views of how the Catholic community and church might adapt themselves to life under a Protestant monarch, especially if such a monarch was prepared to concede toleration to Catholics. Many in the Appellant camp saw themselves as both good Catholics and good subjects of the Queen. They talked of taking oaths of loyalty and were courted by Bishop Bancroft and other Protestant leaders. They entertained high hopes that James VI of Scotland, son of a Catholic martyr, might succeed to the English throne. In the minds of the secular clergy and Catholic aristocracy, English Catholicism was far from doomed to slow extinction.

Thanks to recent research, it is becoming apparent that the Catholic community enjoyed a broad social base, embracing humble folk as well as the traditional Catholic gentry and aristocracy, and including new converts just as much as those brought up within the old faith. Conventionally, Catholics have been allotted to the arcane categories of the ‘recusant’ and the ‘church papist’. ‘Recusancy’ or a refusal to attend parish church was a criminal offence and so the extent of prosecution and conviction can be mapped fairly accurately from the records. ‘Church papists’, those who went to the parish church while remaining loyal Catholics in private, represent a less clearly defined group. While both categories were real enough, it may be that individuals moved between the two more easily than historians have realised and that neither category was a permanent definition of a Catholic’s stance.⁴ Calls by Questier and Lake for the ‘reintegration of the political history of English Catholics into the mainstream narrative’ remind us not to dismiss the political viability of Roman Catholicism too early.⁵ In a personal monarchy, the preferences of the ruler and the complexion of the court can be highly significant – as Britons would discover before the seventeenth century was out.

*

The Scottish Reformation took place in 1560 just as Elizabeth was consolidating her religious settlement in England. The two processes were rather different, however. In Scotland, a group of nobles, inspired by John Knox the Calvinist preacher, aided by English troops, and allied to secret Protestant congregations, rebelled against Mary of Guise, the French Catholic Regent. Once a peace had been achieved, the single-chambered Scottish Parliament enacted a sweeping Reformation: papal authority was renounced; a Calvinist Confession of Faith was instituted; and work began on a scheme of church government known as the Book of Discipline. The English ambassador reported that the Scots are ‘so deeply persuaded in the matter of religion, as nothing can persuade them that may appear to hinder it’.⁶ The resulting Kirk or church differed markedly from its sister church south of the border. The Kirk was Calvinist, Presbyterian and free of royal control. The parish ministry was based on the four offices of preacher, deacon, doctor and elder; each parish congregation exercised ‘discipline’ over its members; ministers and lay elders cooperated in running the weekly courts or Kirk sessions and in serving on the district committees (the presbyteries and synods); congregations sent representatives to the General Assembly of the Kirk which therefore had a strong lay presence. There were no bishops in the Kirk and no royal governor over it. The ministers maintained the principle of a separation of authorities between the ‘two kingdoms’ of church and state, although this did not prevent the Kirk offering its advice where relevant to the pursuit of godliness. Congregations enjoyed freedom within limits to organise their own worship and adopted the plain style of worship to be seen in European Calvinist churches.

There is no denying the popularity of the Scottish Reformation. Within a generation at the most, the Scottish Lowlands had been purged of Catholicism and its profane and superstitious ways: indeed, a ‘cultural revolution’ had been achieved, and the foundations laid for the abstemious, morally repressive, sermon-centred, and dour Calvinist religion which was to characterise Scotland for several centuries. Strict in morality, censorious in punishing the sinner – every Kirk had a stool of repentance – devoted to keeping the whole of the Sabbath day for the works of religion, Bible-reading and sermon-noting, suspicious of images and gaiety, in thrall to the minister, self-righteous – it is perhaps too easy to caricature this form of Protestantism. It was a religion that moved people: it spawned spiritual ‘revivals’, brought people together in large numbers for open-air worship and prayer meetings, and lent itself to apocalypticism. Todd has recently attributed its success to two related factors: one is the local basis upon which Protestantism took root and the other is its willingness to absorb and adapt traditional Scottish ways. Working from the Kirk sessions records, she is able to show how theology could be tempered in practice by ministers and elders who knew those standing before them, who appreciated their moral, spiritual and practical frailties.⁷

The Calvinist Kirk dominated the Scots-speaking Lowlands and the North-East, towards Moray, Banff and Aberdeen, but Calvinism also made inroads into the Ga...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editor's preface
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: the Post-Reformation
• Chapter 1 England, Ireland and Scotland in 1603
• Part One: Religion and politics
• Introduction
• Notes
• Part Two: Religion and society
• Introduction
• Select bibliography
• Index