A Brief History of the Tudor Age (11 page)

By the autumn of 1554, Mary was ready to restore Papal supremacy and to begin the burning of Protestants. In preparation for this, Gardiner himself preached at Paul’s Cross on 30 September
1554, in favour of Papal supremacy, though, as head of the government and in charge of foreign policy, he no longer concerned himself normally with religious issues.

Four years later, after nearly three hundred Protestant martyrs had been burned, Mary was dying of cancer, and everyone was waiting for Elizabeth to become Queen. It was well known that
Elizabeth had formerly been a Protestant, though she had gone to Mass and become a Catholic to save her life in Mary’s reign. Both Catholics and Protestants, in England and abroad, were
speculating as to whether she would make England Protestant again when she came to the throne.

They did not have to wait long for the first sign of her intentions. Mary died at 7 a.m. on Thursday 17 November
1558; on the following Sunday, Dr Bill preached at
Paul’s Cross. In Mary’s reign, he had been ejected from his office as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, because he was regarded as a Protestant, though he escaped arrest and was
allowed to live quietly in the country. The fact that the new Queen had chosen him to preach at Paul’s Cross within three days of her accession was very significant. In his sermon, Bill made
a few cautious Protestant remarks. Next week Christopherson, Mary’s Catholic Bishop of Chichester, preached at Paul’s Cross; Elizabeth had chosen him to preach there, but had told him
not to enter into controversy. In his sermon, Christopherson said that Bill had preached heresy on the previous Sunday. Elizabeth ordered that Christopherson should be confined under house arrest
in his palace for having disobeyed her orders to be non-controversial. All the Catholics and the Protestants and the foreign ambassadors interpreted these events correctly. Within six months,
Parliament had passed the necessary legislation to repudiate Papal supremacy and make England once again a Protestant realm.

T
HE GREAT MAJORITY
of Englishmen in the sixteenth century accepted the fact that one of the duties of a king was to decide what religion his subjects
should adopt and issue orders from time to time telling them exactly what they should believe about religion, and exactly how they should worship. If the King told them to worship the wrong
religion, this was something for which he would have to account to God, but the duty of all subjects was to obey the King in religion as in all other matters.

The accepted doctrine was that it was the duty of the subject to obey the King, not only from fear of punishment in this world if he did not, but also because failure to do so would be sinful,
against the law of God, and would lead to eternal damnation. This doctrine was taught assiduously by the Church to the people, particularly under Henry VIII. It was a very convenient doctrine for
all the bishops, noblemen, country gentlemen, mayors and justices of the peace who were expected to enforce the King’s religious policy. When there was a Catholic sovereign, they could
supervise the burning of Protestant martyrs; then, when the King changed his policy, or was succeeded by a new
King who made England Protestant and suppressed the Pope’s
supporters, the mayors and JPs could arrest and torture the Papists, and revert once again to burning Protestants if a Catholic sovereign came to the throne. They could do it with a perfectly clear
conscience, for on each occasion they did their duty to God by obeying the King.

Nearly everyone believed this. Even among the minority of Protestants and Catholics who decided to disobey the King and submit to martyrdom, there was very little criticism of the government
officials who were the King’s instruments in carrying out the persecution. When John Knox, in his books in 1558, reminded his readers that God, in the Old Testament, had not merely punished
Pharaoh himself for persecuting Moses and the children of Israel, but had also drowned Pharaoh’s soldiers in the Red Sea to punish them for their sin in obeying Pharaoh’s wicked orders,
he was putting forward a new and revolutionary doctrine which, even by the end of the Tudor Age, had been accepted by only a small section of the people of England.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the service of the Mass was governed by one of five prayer books. Over most of the country the church service followed the rules of the Sarum Use,
which had been first adopted in the diocese of Salisbury; but in other areas, the York Use, the Lincoln Use, the Hereford Use and the Bangor Use were followed. There were only small differences in
the form of service prescribed in these five Uses; but as religion became more and more regimented under Henry VIII, the King and the authorities decided that even this very small degree of
differentiation and regional independence was dangerous, and in 1543 Henry abolished the other four Uses and ordered that only the Sarum Use should be adopted throughout the realm.

When Somerset and Cranmer introduced Protestantism in the reign of Edward VI, the Sarum Use was replaced by the Book of Common Prayer of 1549, which prescribed in every detail the service to be
used in ‘the Supper of the Lord and the Holy Communion, commonly called the Mass’, reducing the number
of times when the priest crossed himself from twenty-seven to
two, and abolishing the elevation of the Host. Three years later, the Second Book of Common Prayer of 1552 expressed the more radical and Protestant doctrines which had in the meantime been
accepted by the government. Under Mary, the Book of Common Prayer was abolished, and the Sarum Use restored; but within a year of Elizabeth’s accession, the Third Book of Common Prayer had
been issued. It was less radical than the 1552 Book.

A small minority of the people did not believe that the subject must always accept the King’s religious doctrines, and thought that the duty to obey the King was qualified by the
overriding duty to obey God. The King should be obeyed except when he ordered the subject to offend against the law of God; in that case, it was the subject’s duty to refuse to obey the King,
and to offer himself for martyrdom.

By 1525 the numbers and activity of the Protestants in England had increased, after the country felt the repercussions of Luther’s defiance of the Papal authority in Germany and the
popular fervour which it produced there; but the Protestants continued to be a small minority of the people. They were strongest in south-east England – in Norfolk, Essex and Sussex, and
particularly in Kent and London. There were hardly any in the west and the north. Of the 280 Protestant martyrs who were burned in Mary’s reign, only one was burned north of the Trent (in
Chester); one was burned in the diocese of Exeter (in the city); and three in Wales (Cardiff, Carmarthen and Haverfordwest); while 48 were burned in London (including Westminster and Southwark), 47
in Kent, 43 in Essex, 23 in Sussex, 18 in Suffolk and 14 in Norfolk.

Even at the time of Elizabeth I’s accession in 1558, after thirty years of religious turmoil and persecution, the majority of the English people were Catholics; but the situation changed
after forty years of official Protestant propaganda during her reign. Devon and Cornwall had been staunchly Catholic at the time of the rebellion there against the introduction of the Protestant
Book of Common Prayer in 1549; but these counties provided
most of Elizabeth I’s sailors who fought so valiantly for the Protestant cause against Philip of Spain and his
Armada.

The Protestants and their martyrs came from every social class and age group, but chiefly from the young artisans of south-east England and from the intellectuals, especially from the divinity
students of Cambridge University. Protestant doctrines became increasingly attractive to the younger generation; at the height of the persecution in Mary’s reign, the Venetian ambassador
reported that hardly anyone under thirty-five was a Catholic at heart.

The Protestants attached great importance to reading the Bible, appealing from the authority of the Church to the authority of the Word of God. The Protestant William Tyndale, who in 1525
translated the Bible into English, stated that his aim was to make every ploughboy as knowledgeable in Scripture as the most learned clerk; but to the Catholic Church this was encouraging the
common people to question the doctrines of the Church, to argue about theology, to rebel against their superiors, and was seditious. A royal proclamation of 1530 made it a criminal offence to
possess or read the English Bible, and every copy was to be publicly burned; but those who were found with the English Bible risked more than this, for it was often held to be sufficient proof of
heresy to send them to the stake.

Tyndale and his supporters printed an English translation of the Bible illegally in the Netherlands and smuggled copies into England hidden under bales of straw. Several of the Protestants who
secretly distributed them were caught and burned. Thomas Hitton had bad luck. He was walking through the fields near Gravesend on his way to take ship for the Netherlands after a successful mission
in England when he was stopped by some local people who suspected him of stealing some clothes. When they searched him, they did not find the clothes, but they found copies of the English Bible. He
was burned at Maidstone in 1530 at the instigation of Sir Thomas More, who described him as ‘the Devil’s stinking martyr’.

In 1537 Cromwell and Cranmer persuaded Henry VIII to
permit the publication of an English translation of the Bible; but after the fall of Cromwell and the Catholic reaction
in 1540, new measures were taken against the English Bible. An Act of 1543 made it an offence for anyone to read it aloud to another person, and for anyone under the rank of a gentleman to read it
privately to himself.

The reading of the English Bible was permitted under Edward VI, and after being forbidden under Mary, was again allowed and encouraged by Elizabeth. By this time, many Englishmen and women were
reading the English translation of the Bible which John Knox and his colleagues had written, and which was published in Geneva in 1560. It contained footnotes, which were as long as the text of the
Bible itself, which were printed at the top and bottom and the sides of every page, in which Knox’s revolutionary interpretation of Scripture was set forth.

The Protestants challenged the dogmas of the Catholic Church on many issues, and in every case the Protestant doctrine had the effect of weakening the position of the priest and minimizing his
part in the relationship between the individual layman and God. But in England throughout the whole of the Tudor Age the main issue between the Catholics and the Protestants was belief in
transubstantiation and the Real Presence of Christ in the sacramental bread and wine after they had been consecrated by the priest at Mass. Nearly all the Protestants who were burned were condemned
for denying the Real Presence, even if they were sometimes also accused of other heresies.

The arguments between the theologians in the sixteenth century about the Real Presence can only be understood by someone who has been educated in the principles of Aristotle’s philosophy,
which distinguished between the true reality of an object and its ‘accidents’, such as its shape, its smell, its appearance, and so on. It seems extraordinary to us today that people
could condemn their opponents to be burned, and be prepared to suffer death in the fire, because of their differing views about this question. Even if the Protestant divines, who understood the
theological arguments involved, were prepared to die for their
beliefs, how could it happen that uneducated labourers felt so strongly about this? But in the Tudor Age, religion
was the arena in which the revolutionary youth and the conservative Establishment fought out the political and psychological struggle between them which takes place in every century in one form or
other. The young artisan might not understand Aristotelian philosophy; but once he had been told that there were learned divines who taught that the consecrated Host, which officialdom ordered him
to venerate as the Body of Christ, was in fact only a piece of bread, and that it was idolatry to worship it, he was eager to defy authority by desecrating the Host, with a complete disregard both
of the religious feelings of the majority of his neighbours and of the terrible punishments which would be inflicted on him for his conduct.

When a suspect was accused of heresy, he was arrested and brought before the court of his diocesan bishop, where he was tried and examined, either by the bishop himself or by the bishop’s
Ordinary – a judicial officer who was a skilled canon lawyer. After Henry VIII repudiated Papal supremacy, the bishops’ jurisdiction in heresy cases was abolished; but as Henry was
determined to suppress any Protestants who advocated doctrines which he had not yet authorized, he appointed commissioners to try cases of suspected heresy. The defendants would normally be tried
by a number of commissioners, some of whom were bishops and divines, and others lawyers who were laymen.

In the last years of Henry’s reign, most heresy trials took place in London and Westminster. Under Edward VI, the Protestant government in general discontinued the practice of burning
heretics; but two Protestant extremists who denied the doctrine of the Trinity were burned in London after being tried by commissioners. In Mary’s reign, the bishops’ jurisdiction to
try cases of heresy was restored, and heresy trials took place all over south-east England. Four Protestant extremists, who were denounced as Arians or Anabaptists, were burned in the reign of
Elizabeth I.

When an ignorant, uneducated labourer was accused of heresy, he usually merely asserted his beliefs and stated that he would not recant because he knew that his doctrine was
God’s truth. His judges pointed out to him that he was uneducated and unlearned, and that it was presumptuous of him to challenge the doctrines which learned divines had shown were the true
doctrines of the Church. But when the suspected heretic was himself a learned doctor of divinity, he and the judges engaged in lengthy arguments about the nature of Christ’s Presence in the
bread and wine, exchanging quotations from Scripture and from the works of Chrysostom, Origen and other early fathers of the third and fourth centuries. The judge would accuse the earned heretic,
not of presumption in challenging the opinions of men more learned than himself, but of prostituting the great gifts of intelligence and learning with which God had endowed him, by using them to
argue against, and not in favour of, the doctrine of Christ’s Church.