Reformation

Reformation. Although ‘reform’ means many things, ‘the Reformation’ always denotes the 16th-cent. division of Latin Christendom into protestant and catholic. protestantism rejected the catholic belief that salvation comes through grace received in the sacraments and other rites of the traditional church; it restricted the church's role to one of proclaiming the unmerited gift of divine forgiveness. The Church of England, established by statute in 1559, was unambiguously protestant. However, hindsight, and the diversity of later Anglicanism, has led many to argue that the Church of England stands somehow midway between catholic and reformed traditions.

1. Before the Reformation

The church in England c.1500 was devoutly catholic and loyally papalist. Many parish churches were extravagantly rebuilt, and lavished with vessels and ornaments which foreign visitors thought worthy of a cathedral. Kings and popes usually got on well: royal orators and cardinals-protector handled the nation's business at the curia, and royal nominees were accepted for major church posts. The ‘English heresy’, lollardy, always threatened the church more in theory than practice: while it called for disendowment of the hierarchy, it had little effect on church wealth, privileges, or even attendance.

2. The early English reformers

The fame of the German Reformation leader Martin Luther (1483–1546) caught the imagination of some English followers in the 1520s. Churchmen including Thomas Bilney (c.1495–1531), Robert Barnes (d. 1540), and the Bible translator and controversialist William Tyndale (c.1494–1536) reinterpreted the Reformation message. However, their support was confined to young university students and those with foreign connections. They posed no threat, though Thomas Wolsey burned heretic books publicly, and Thomas More wrote against Tyndale.

3. The royal marriage and the ‘humanist’ phase

Henry VIII's failure to secure papal annulment of his first marriage led to the break with the papacy during 1532–6. This policy required theoretical justification if the king was to carry such a profoundly catholic nation into schism. Thomas Cromwell recruited a number of young humanist writers, whose propaganda pieces criticized both the papacy and some aspects of the old cults, such as papal indulgences. The Ten Articles of 1536 and the two sets of Injunctions of 1536 and 1538, together with the ‘Bishops’ Book' of 1537, sought to strip away many of the festivals, relic-cults, shrines, and even parts of the service for the dead. Nevertheless, these moves were not avowedly ‘protestant’: Henry VIII detested Luther and loathed the Swiss heresies against the presence of Christ in the sacrament. Though Thomas Cromwell's commissioners who toured the doomed monasteries in 1535–6 mocked spurious relics and hunted dissolute monks, the ensuing abolition of the monastic order had no declared religious rationale. During 1539–43 conservative tendencies stopped the embryonic protestantism of Henrician England in its tracks: certain catholic beliefs and practices were reaffirmed, ‘sacramentarian’ heretics burned, and Bible-reading restricted by statute. Nevertheless, Henry never ceased to trust his reform-minded archbishop Thomas Cranmer, and even suggested to a bemused ambassador in 1546 that he and the French king might together abolish the mass.

4. Public protestantism under Edward VI

All ambiguity was swept away in the next reign. Revision of the mass-book began almost at once, leading in 1549 to the publication of Cranmer's first, very cautious, Book of Common Prayer. Meanwhile royal commissioners ruthlessly stripped parish churches of most of the ornaments and furniture associated with the old cult. Distinguished continental reformers such as Martin Bucer and Pier Martire Vermigli settled in the universities and influenced further changes in worship. In 1552 a revision of the Prayer Book simplified the apparatus of worship to the barest protestant essentials, and its abusive anti-papal rhetoric left no room for doubt. The Forty-Two Articles of Doctrine in 1553 set out reformed beliefs.

5. Catholicism restored, 1553–1558

Mary I inherited religious legislation, in her eyes ultra vires and void, which took some eighteen months to reverse. Nevertheless, priests and laity restored the mass at the mere breath of royal suggestion. In 1554 most ‘scandalously’ married priests accepted their humiliation and went back to saying mass. Once owners of monastic lands were assured of their titles, papal authority was received back with some enthusiasm. Protestantism remained confined to cells mostly in southern and eastern England. The impact of the campaign which burned c.280 heretics between 1555 and 1558 was greater in hindsight (helped by Foxe's martyrology) than at the time. Many counties saw no burnings or only a few; latterly they took place in London at dawn, attended only by groups of demonstrators from the clandestine congregation.

6. A precarious settlement, 1558–1563

Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn and legatee of the schism, found the catholic hierarchy much more stubborn than in 1531–3. Re-establishment of the royal supremacy and abolition of the mass required an almost clean sweep of the episcopate, and careful management of Parliament, which wrecked the proposals several times. It is now generally accepted that catholic resistance was the chief reason for the delay, caution, and occasional ambiguity of the Elizabethan church settlement. The anti-papal abuse of the 1552 Prayer Book was excised from the 1559 version; ineffectual efforts were made to restore some vestments and restrain priestly marriage. Even the Thirty-Nine Articles approved by convocation in 1563 were altered by the queen herself, probably to placate conservatives.

7. The making of a protestant people

The new bishops chosen by Elizabeth from leading reformed clergy in 1559, and most protestant zealots, assumed that the concessions made to tradition were temporary sops, to be discarded once the regime was secure. To their increasing horror and bewilderment, they found that the queen obstinately refused to strip away the veneer of ritual, and tried to stick it back where it was removed illegally. She feared that combative, doctrinaire protestant preaching still risked alienating parts of the kingdom and sparking a religious war: the restoration of the mass during the northern earls' revolt of 1569, and her excommunication by the pope in 1570, lent these fears substance. In the ‘puritan’ controversies of the 1570s Elizabeth found and nurtured a faction of clerics led by John Whitgift (archbishop of Canterbury 1583–1604) which believed with equal zeal in protestant dogma, episcopal church government, and traditionalist ceremonial. So was the peculiar hybrid ‘Anglican’ church, founded both on Foxe's Martyrs and on Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, brought to birth by the end of the 16th cent.

Euan Cameron

Bibliography

Cameron, E. , The European Reformation (Oxford, 1991);
Cowan, I. B. , The Scottish Reformation: Church and Society in Sixteenth-Century Scotland (New York, 1982);
Dickens, A. G. , The English Reformation (1964);
Donaldson, G. , The Scottish Reformation (Cambridge, 1960);
Haigh, C. (ed.), The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge, 1987);
Sheils, W. J. , The English Reformation, 1530–1570 (1989).