Fear God, Honor the King

Magisterial Power and the Church in the Reformation, circa 1470–1600

Andrew Allan Chibi

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725256651
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

From a medieval perspective, God had provided a church to shepherd believers toward salvation. It had a divine mission, a sacred history, a hierarchy of officers, and the intellectual support of respected thinkers. It provided a means for believers to interact with God. Believers also had to interact with neighbors, strangers, and their rulers. Fear God, Honor the King considers that sometimes surprisingly problematic issue. What is the correct relationship between the church, believers, and the ruling magisterial authority (whether alderman, mayors, or kings)? The thinkers of the Reformation era produced many answers. They explained in a variety of ways how the church related to, or fit in with, or was separate from, or was controlled by the temporal government of the realm, and they set into motion what became the determinant factors--social, political, economic, and philosophical--underpinning modern Western societies' determination to keep the church and the state in well-defined autonomous cubicles. The Reformers' rival ideas ushered in new philosophies (such as conciliarism and localism) as well as directly conflicting doctrines (such as Luther's two kingdoms or Bucer's co-terminus). This book examines, compares, and explains these new theories using the voices of the Reformers' themselves.

5

Civil Authority and the Church
in Tudor England

Reformation in early modern England was a uniquely top-down movement; a politically influenced imposition on the realm which served dynastic agenda rather than spiritual need. There was interest in religious change independent of the crown, but change was controlled and regulation by the changing dynastic needs of the monarch. Henry VIII, for example, officially turned away from Rome for political expediency. Radicals in the 1520s, to whom the king had turned for support, saw Luther as a viable religious influence (perhaps because of certain doctrinal similarities with the native English Lollardy), but by the mid-1530s his pre-eminence had given way to Bullinger and the international commonwealth of letters centred at Zürich. The Swiss reformers were read by such highly placed men as Cranmer, Hooper and Grindal, relations were encouraged by Bullinger dedicated books to Henry VIII and Edward VI, and English support was further cultivated through the works of such gifted writers as Tyndale and the immigration of such notables as Bucer, Martyr and Laski (all personal friends of Bullinger’s and of Calvin’s). True, given more time Mary Tudor may well have subsumed Protestant doctrine under a humanist influenced Catholicism then in development in European circles, but that was not to be. Her religious policies drove the cream of English theologians and polemicists into Swiss arms, which allowed Elizabeth to reap benefits in the development of an essentially Reformed settlement. By the end of the Tudor century, however, Bullinger’s non-resistance to civil magistrates had given ground to Calvin’s and Beza’s limited resistance theory (Knox acting as an agent). While the last Tudor lived, however, the royal ecclesiastical supremacy which she inherited from her father and half-brother brooked no resistance and men like Richard Hooker tried to formulate doctrine which could accommodate both Puritanism (i.e., Geneva-centric Protestantism) and Anglicanism.

§

When we discuss issues of civil polity and ecclesiastical governance in England in the early modern period it is inevitable that we turn in the first instance to the royal supremacy as it developed in and beyond the 1530s—what led to it and what it meant? The answers to these questions are very much the same as developed in Saxony, Zürich and Strasbourg. As elsewhere, in England by the mid-1530s, ecclesiastical authority had been transferred from the pope to the chief magistrate (in this case Henry VIII) who was recognized by both parliament (a political body approximating Beza’s mid-level magistracy) and convocation (which could be thought of as a consistory) as supreme head of the church in England and the source of all spiritual and temporal jurisdictions (much like Luther’s emperor figure between God and man). The king had taken into his hands control of the institutional apparatus of the church, its judicial and financial offices, supervision, and the determination of correct doctrine very much as ruling magistrates had elsewhere. In Protestant eyes, however, the king and his subordinate magistrates had only taken the process half-way. A vernacular Bible had been approved, presented, and then denied once again to the vast majority of the people; doctrine was at best only half reformed; the king and his subordinate magistrates were (all too often) less than godly role-models. The opportunity to steer a better course was provided by God when Henry was succeeded by a boy. Protestant thinkers saw a chance to influence full reform: godliness could be ingrained into Edward in anticipation of the day when he would come into his own; the subordinate magistrates would be encouraged to act as their scriptural counterparts had acted, that is, with the focus on the creation of the Christian commonwealth; the English, as the people of the covenant, would finally come into their own. Much of this failed and Mary added insult to injury by returning the realm to papal obedience and inflicting a foreign king upon it, leaving Elizabeth finally to pick up the pieces amidst competing and much more radical alternatives.

§

Henry VIII and the Establishment of
the Royal Ecclesiastical Supremacy

Ostensibly, the changes of the 1530s were superficial; it was a small shift in a long-term arrangement which saw the royal will almost always met by the pope in a beneficial partnership almost unique in European politics.369 The king very much determined the nature of clerical leadership in England as there was a well-worn path to the top of the church and, while the clergy had the de iure right to gather in convocation to discuss ecclesiastical government and legislation at any time they wished, for whatever purpose they wished, they de facto met only if and when the king summoned them to do so (exactly as did their lay counterparts in parliament).370 It would be a mistake to claim that England had never faced such church v. state tensions as existed elsewhere in Europe. The revolt of the barons, Magna Charta, the assassination of Thomas Becket, the statutes of Praemunire and Provisors (in the fourteenth century) sat atop those events which otherwise influenced a denigration of papal authority across Christendom. From the start of the Tudor period (1485) no papal canon which conflicted with existing English law was recognized but, at the same time, most governmental and diplomatic positions were filled by senior church officials. The dynamics of the relationship between the two polities was crystal clear: “By the ordinance and sufferance of God, we are king of England, and kings of England in time past have never had any superior but God only.”371

This, the most famous expression of Henry VIII’s thinking on royal sovereignty, was augmented by the royal attitude during the English occupation of the French city of Tournai. Henry made several claims of exclusive authority, going so far as to isolate the clergy from French ecclesiastical patronage networks. “We having the supreme power as lord and king in the regalie of Tournai without recognition of any superior owe of right to have the homage fealty and oath of fidelity as well of the said pretended bishop by reason of his temporalities which he holdeth of us as of other within the precincts of the same territory.”372 Henry VIII recognised no superior authority in any of his territories. Indeed, a clerical dispute over testamentary jurisdiction between Bishop Richard Fox (Winchester) and Archbishop William Warham (Canterbury) in 1510 set another precedent for future action.

In southern convocation (the assembling of the province of Canterbury) the senior clergy failed to resolve an issue. Fox and Warham built up alliances and appointed proctors at Rome (to argue their cases)373 but, in March 1512 the pope authorised the king to settle the matter in England, wanting it resolved on the scene. Henry, more than willing, wasted no time assigning the matter to “certayne of our counsel.”374 While the pope sought only convenience, this set a precedent for the king’s power to judge the clergy on so-called spiritual issues. The precedent was subsequently re-enforced as a result of the Kidderminster/Standish dispute (the context of the first royal quote).

Henry VIII expected to be obeyed by his subjects, whether lay or clerical, foreign or domestic, an expectation based on precedent—a legal position. In the late 1520s, however, the pre-existing tensions between the two polities, as elsewhere, needed only an additional spark to blow up into something far greater; in England the issue of the royal marriage crisis provided it. A dynastic existential predicament was made worse by the papacy’s unhelpfully (and entirely beyond his control) entrenched position. As he could offer no immediate solutions, the king’s own scholars and political councillors forged a new path, establishing new boundaries for papal and regal authority which, ultimately, excluded the papacy. The process was a simple one but the ramifications were far-reaching.

§

The Abrogation of Papal Authority, c. 1529–1534

Henry VIII’s divorce campaign is so familiar to modern audiences that only the political, diplomatic or theological minutiae are not commonly known. The Tudor...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Luther and “Two Governments” Doctrine
• Zwingli, Civil Authority, and the Church to 1536
• Civil Authority and the Sectarians
• Secular Authority in the Works of the Second-Generation Reformers
• Civil Authority and the Church in Tudor England
• Royal Ecclesiastical Authority in Catholic Europe
• Bibliography