The Debate on the English Reformation

Rosemary O'Day

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135835323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 2003. The Debate on the English Reformation combines a discussion of the successive historical approaches to the English Reformation from 1525 to the present with a critical review of recent debates in the area, offering a major contribution to modern political, social and religious historiography as well as to Reformation studies.

Chapter 1

Contemporary historiography of the English Reformation, 1525–70

On the face of it, it might seem that the Reformation of its nature rejected history. And so in a sense it did, or at least the force of recent precedent. After all, the new religion involved a break with that recent past – a denial of tradition as an authority for religious dogma, practice and doctrine; a denial of papal authority. But it is no less true that the English Reformation used history – an interpetation of the past – to justify its existence, its goals and its actions. It created its own historiography.¹

In examining the way in which history was used by the reformers it is important to distinguish between the attitudes of the ‘religious’ reformers (those who saw the Reformation as the fulfilment of the church’s need for renewal) and the ‘official’ reformers (those who saw the Reformation as serving the needs of the monarchy or, at least, the English body politic). This distinction is far from easy to make: the body politic was part of Christendom and, no matter what the perspective of the reformer, a major issue was the relationship between the two. Reformers as a group looked to the past to justify the act of re-formation. But their interpretation of that past varied sufficiently for us to admit that there was no single Reformation use of history. Reformers, after all, used the past to score differing debating points. The manner in which their varied interpretations informed their action and vice versa is of supreme interest to the historian. In large part the task before the modern commentator is that of discovering an individual’s position with respect to the relationship between church and state.

The reformers had been reared in a tradition of historical literature which influenced them considerably. Their understanding of the process of history governed their interpretation of what had happened in Reformation England and what was about to happen. With what sort of history were educated Tudor men and women acquainted? The influence of the Italian humanist historians – Valla and Biondo – was certainly felt. There was some awareness of historical change, of the changing historical context of events. However, the emphasis upon biography found in Bruni and Polydore Vergil had a far more telling impact. English thinkers, whatever their position on relations between church and state, saw historical developments as the result of dynastic and personal activity. The prince was his people. Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and York (1548) is a good example of native writing which assumed that dynamic monarchs caused change. Shakespeare’s history plays and his tragedies also provide good examples of this attitude. The inclination of contemporaries to dramatize their history – to put it on the stage – accentuated this tendency to display characters as more acting than acted upon. Contemporary literature also illustrates the nationalistic framework of English historical writing of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Reformation writers were concerned to use history in support of their own cause. They, too, adopted a nationalistic and, often, a biographical approach. The obsession of lay historians with fifteenth-century history was transferred to a religious context. Monarchs, religious teachers and individuals of learning and pious life were portrayed as the moving forces of the English Reformation. The social, economic and geographic underpinnings went unrecognized.

Above all, the reformers urged that theirs was the historically accurate Christianity. William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536), pupil of John Colet, stood in the tradition of humanist textual criticism exemplified by Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus and Luther. His New Testament aimed to display a pure original text without accretions. In 1523 he spoke of his motivation:

I perceived … how that it was impossible to establish the lay-people in any truth except the scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue, that they might see the pro cess, order, and meaning of the text. For else, whatsoever truth is taught them, these enemies of all truth quench it again, partly with the smoke of their bottomless pit, that is, with apparent reasons of sophistry and traditions of their own making, founded without ground of scripture; and partly in juggling with the text, expounding it in such sense as is im possible to gather of the text, if thou see the process, order and meaning thereof. … This thing only moved me to translate the new testament.

(Walter 1848, xx)

Other Protestants shared his conviction that the Scriptures contained the key to the primitive church. Tyndale translated the Scriptures; some selected other means to prove the historical pedigree of reformed Christianity. The anonymous author of the preface to the Gospels in Anglo-Saxon urged: ‘The religion presently taught and professed in the Church at thys present, is no new reformation of thinges laterly begonne, which were not before but rather a reduction of the Church to the pristine state of olde conformitie’ (The Gospels of the Fower Evangelistes, 1571, sig. 92 r). Humanist scholarship, with its rigorous emphasis upon precise translation, became the handmaiden of early English Protestant argument.

In this chapter we shall examine the most important Protestant interpretations of the Reformation and its history penned in the sixteenth century, culminating with the works of John Foxe. Such an exercise is important not simply because the interpretations offered are intrinsically interesting, nor even because we should be aware of contemporaries’ views of the Reformation in their midst, but also because the Protestant view of Reformation history which was produced provided, in large measure, the para-meters of the debate about the English Reformation from that day to this.

Between 1525 and 1535 a number of English reformers were living in exile in Europe, unwelcome in Henrician England. Some of their works espoused a rather simple view of history. The writers – Simon Fish, Jerome Barlow and William Roye – took over, lock, stock and barrel, the doctrine of the English Lollards and, with it, their view of the iniquities of the fifteenth-century church. This was more than mere late Lollard propaganda. It was an attempt, and a successful one, to give the English Reformation a history – and a national one at that. Their interpretation of the past was Wyclifite: the wealth and power of the church on earth was but recently acquired and a fundamental denial of the essence of the primitive church, which had set no store on pomp and had maintained simple and pure doctrines based upon scripture alone. Wyclif had called for a return to the ways of the young, pristine and primitive church. Later Lollard congregations had continued this plea. The early Protestants made this argument part of the English Reformation tradition. This history was later presented to the nation by John Foxe in a much more detailed form, but it was there, in essence, in the writings of Frith, Roye, Barlow and, above all, Tyndale.

The Antwerp writers believed that there had once existed a golden age which had been subverted by the clergy. They added little, if anything, to the complaints of the Lollards against the clerical estate. Their view of the ‘golden age’ of England was no more subtle than their explanation of how it had been brought down:

First when Englonde was in his floures

ordered by the temporal governoures

knowenge no spiritual iurisdiction

Then was ther in eche state and degree

Haboundance and plentuous prosperite

Peaceable welthe without affliction.

Noblenes of blood was had in price

Vertuousnes avaunced, hated was vyce,

Princes obeyed with due reverence.

(Arber 1868, VIII, 138)

All this had been destroyed when the Crown of England fell under clerical influence. William Tyndale, in his Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), outlines the simple but long-drawn-out contest between the clergy and the Crown. King John, for example, is shown in dispute with the papal legate; Henry V is portrayed not as a national hero but as a monarch under the thumb of the clergy, who spills English blood in France to preserve clerical liberties. The church which held England’s kings in its thrall was, moreover, heretical; it kept the Scriptures from the people in an effort to exalt itself.

So these early Antwerp Protestants cast the English monarch as the dupe of the clergy and, potentially, as the saviour of the church. In A Supplicacyon for the Beggars (1529) Simon Fish described the excesses of the clergy and showed them to be seditious. He prescribed a political remedy – a medicine to be administered by the Crown. In his chapter on Antichrist, William Tyndale made a similar appeal to Christian kings to save the church from the clergy. But by this time Tyndale was aware that kings might not view the Reformation in the same light – Henry VIII had refused to provide the people with the vernacular Scriptures. Tyndale sighed: reform would be possible ‘if they [kings] were Christians, which is seldom seen, and is a hard thing verily, though not impossible’ (Walter 1848, 239–40).

William Tyndale was, in fact, coming to appreciate that the Lollard interpretation of recent religious catastrophe as a result of clerical conflict with and triumph over English monarchs was a gross and unfortunate oversimplification. Here he owed much of his sophistication and awareness to his readings of Luther and Erasmus. Tyndale’s The Practyse of Prelates of 1530 (Walter 1848) drew upon Erasmus’s Julius Exclusus for its view of the Pope deliberately playing off princes one against the other. Kings were often not in opposition to the clergy – more often than not they were the willing dupes of the popes and bishops. When Tyndale edited the Examinacion of the Lollard John Oldcastle, he cast Henry IV as the villain of the trial, acting with Antichrist (the clergy) against Christ’s true disciples (the Lollard knights). The translator’s interpretation of what happened as a result of this oppression was more simplistic. The activities of Antichrist were repaid by the active vengeance of God – civil wars, social disorder, plague. Jonah’s dire warnings applied to England in 1531 as well as to Israel (Walter 1848, 458–9).

William Tyndale set the whole of the Henrician “official” reformation against this scenario of a king duped by and acting with the clergy to oppress the followers of Christ. The reformers were sceptical of Henry’s intent when he did act to ‘reform’ the church. If he oppressed the adherents of the new religion, the sword of God would, in consequence, be turned against him and his government. The patterns of history repeated themselves. Henry – the oppressor – could not escape the wrath of God. For Tyndale, the study of history had demonstrated that kings could not reform the church. Instead, the church’s hopes for renewal lay with individual Christians and their determination to divert her paths back to those of righteousness. In Tyndale we have an early example of the reluctance of Protestant historians to accept the ‘official’ reformation instigated by Henry VIII and his successors as a religious reformation at all. For Tyndale, the blood of the martyrs was indeed the seed of the church. Without it, no Reformation flowers would bloom.

For Tyndale, in exile, to declare the true reformation to be one from below was simple, to deny the validity of Henry’s official reformation bold. But for those reformers who remained in England, and especially for those in Henry’s service, the expression of such sentiments would have been nothing short of foolhardy. The issue of authority in the religious reformation presented a thorny problem for reformers in England from the Reformation Parliament onwards. The struggle to reconcile the duty of obedience to the monarch and obedience to God was the central preoccupation of many.

When thrust out from the state, religious writers were released – albeit temporarily – from the predicament. In a position of opposition to the state, William Tyndale was able to shake off the shackles of royal policy and interpret the origins and development of the English Reformation as he saw them – although at his peril, as it transpired. For Robert Barnes, taken into the king’s service in 1531, the predicament was a pressing one. How did he solve it? The essence of his argument was the traditional view that the temporal and spiritual powers had entirely separate jurisdiction. In the past, the clergy had constantly overstepped their rightful jurisdiction. His Supplication unto the Most Gracyous Prynce Henry VIII in 1534 protested that the clergy, by violating this distinction and meddling in temporal matters, had always constituted a subversive element. Barnes then demonstrated in Vitae Romanorum Pontificum (1536) that the very decline of the Church of Rome was due in large part to the papacy’s usurpation of temporal powers. But did all this mean that a monarch could or should rule the church? Not at all. The king’s jurisdiction was also strictly limited. He might defend the faith – by banishing the clerical estate to its own sphere. But the form of religion must be settled by the clergy. The king might protect the church but he should not rule it. Barnes’s conception of the role of the monarchy in church government was not, therefore, identical to that which Henry VIII held. The Protestant reformers were unprepared to replace one non-scriptural source of authority – the papacy – with another – the monarchy. As Tyndale put it trenchantly:

As God maketh the King head over his realm, even so giveth he him commandment to execute the laws upon all men indifferently. For the law is God’s, and not the King’s. The King is but a servant, to execute the law of God, and not to rule after his own imagination.

(Walter 1848, 334)

The sole authority for the doctrine and worship of the church must be Scripture (Cross 1977).

Barnes, like Tyndale, was prepared to concede that a godly prince might open the way for the reintroduction of the true religion to England. Further than this he could not go. For Henry and Thomas Cromwell, this in itself was an important concession at the time when Henry was making his first stand against the might of Rome and seeking shelter in any harbour. But Henry himself, doctrinally a Catholic and sharing little with the early Protestants other than a dislike of the power of Rome, was unlikely to remain content for long with such limited approbation. No doubt he hoped that English reformers would be won round, like Melancthon in Saxony, to acceptance of the visible church, as regulated by the temporal ruler, as the guardian of Christian truth. This hope was not fulfilled in his lifetime.

As it happened, it was chiefly Catholics like himself who provided Henry with the case that he required to bolster the royal supremacy. For Henry had no wish to replace the authority of a foreign pope with that of native Protestant churchmen. Who was it who rid him of these turbulent priests? Thomas Cromwell, Bishop Stephen Gardiner of Winchester and Edward Foxe, later Bishop of Hereford. All these men were involved in a campaign to use historical precedent to support Henry’s claim to supremacy in the church. Henry and his advisers gradually became aware that the question of the divorce could not, as matters stood, be settled without papal approval. When this was not forthcoming, it became necessary to deny papal jurisdiction. The people of England, and specifically Parliament, were very ready to attack clerical privileges, but the papacy itself, which in fact impinged little upon the daily lives of Englishmen, was potentially a different matter. Such an attack involved an onslaught not upon abuses but upon accepted authority. Henry, with his lay and clerical advisers, became involved in a propaganda campaign on several fronts to make such an attack seem both acceptable and desirable to England’s ruling elite. On the one hand this magnified the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Contemporary historiography of the English Reformation, 1525–70
• Chapter 2 Interpretations of the Reformation from Fuller to Strype
• Chapter 3 Historians and contemporary politics: 1780–1850
• Chapter 4 The Church of England in crisis: the Reformation heritage
• Chapter 5 The Tudor revolution in religion: the twentieth-century debate
• Chapter 6 The Reformation and the people
• Chapter 7 The church: how it changed
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index