Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (23 page)

CHAPTER THREE

Reformations and Counter-Reformations, 1536–1558

In the mid-1530s Henry VIII declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England and claimed much of its wealth. This does not mean that he was a Protestant. In fact, while his religious statements and policies were often ambiguous, on balance they indicate that Henry considered himself to have been a good Catholic to the end of his days – albeit one who denied the authority of the pope. A religious conservative, he wanted to retain most of the structure and ritual of the old medieval Church, but with himself as its head. His court contained many fellow conservatives, including powerful families such as the Howards and Bishops Gardiner and Tunstall, who encouraged him in this stance.

But as the Catholic polemicist Nicholas Harpsfield (1519–75) wrote, the king was “like to one that would throw down a man headlong from the top of a high tower and bid him stay when he was half way down.”
¹
That is, once Henry denied papal authority over English religious life, he inevitably, if inadvertently, opened the door to questioning other Church teachings. Another set at court, including Cromwell, Cranmer, and the circle around Queen Anne, encouraged such questioning, promoted Protestant ideas and practices, and pushed the king toward Reformation. During Henry’s last decade, these two factions vied for his ear, mind, and soul. To possess them was to hold the key to every church door in England, in this reign and the next.

Henry’s apparent vacillation between Catholic and Protestant involved more than his conscience or court politics. It was also wrapped up with his marital situation, the European balance of power, and the limits of what his people would accept. Under his successors, this conflict would also be affected by mid-sixteenth-century social and economic tensions. In short, throughout the period covered by this chapter, the religious debate was influenced by a complex calculus of political, economic, social, and cultural factors as much as by the personal convictions and relationships of the sovereign.

Catholic or Protestant?

What were the fundamental differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants in the middle of the sixteenth century? The date is important, because what separated Catholic from Protestant then was not quite the same as what separates them today.
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As a result, modern adherents of these faiths may not always recognize their own beliefs in the following descriptions. In fact, late medieval Roman Catholicism allowed for some latitude in belief and practice, while Protestantism was not, nor ever has been, a single, organized faith but was, rather, a movement embracing a variety of confessions. So the following table and discussion necessarily oversimplify. That is, they present ideal types or archetypes of what early modern Catholics and Protestants actually believed and did. It is important to remember that, in practice, each tradition was a “big tent,” often more ambiguous, more nuanced, more diverse, and less united than is possible to explain here. Nevertheless, we would maintain that the battle lines between these two forms of Christianity were drawn, in sixteenth-century England at any rate, more or less as follows:

For the purposes of this discussion, the fundamental difference between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism lies in where each finds religious truth, that is, God’s wish and will for good Christians. For Catholics, God’s will was to be found, first, in the Bible. But the Bible is a complicated document, written in ancient languages obscure to English men and women, such as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, obscure to some readers even in translation, and seemingly contradictory in places. In any case, for most of the Middle Ages, few Europeans could read. Books of any kind, including Bibles, were rare and expensive because, prior to the invention of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century, they had to be copied out by hand. Therefore, the Roman Catholic Church reserved to itself the right and responsibility to interpret the Bible for the faithful. Holy Scripture was to be studied and expounded by religious professionals: the pope, bishops, and priests of the Church who were thought to have a special mandate from God to do so. In theory, priests studied Scripture and Church doctrine rigorously in Church-run schools and universities. At their ordination they became consecrated, even semi-sacred beings. Such an important and complicated work as the Bible was to be reserved to their stewardship and kept out of the unschooled hands of amateurs – that is, the laity. Therefore, the Church kept the Bible in Latin and refused to allow the dissemination of vernacular translations, at least in England.

Moreover, the Roman Catholic Church argued that the Bible was not the only source of God’s truth; it was also to be found in the traditions and decisions of the Church itself, which elaborated upon and extrapolated from Scripture. That is, if God’s Church had held a belief or performed a ritual for the past thousand years, it obviously accorded with God’s will, whether it appeared in Scripture or not. In addition, the Church hierarchy (i.e., the pope, sometimes but not always in conjunction with Church councils made up of cardinals and bishops) frequently made decisions about religious doctrine or practices. According to the Catholic Church, these pronouncements, too, represented God’s will. Roman Catholics believed (as they still do) that this hierarchy could be traced in an unbroken line back to St. Peter, whom they believe(d) to have been chosen by Jesus Christ to be the first pope. The Church took literally and seriously Jesus’s injunction to St. Peter:

thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven. (Matthew 16: 18–19, Douai-Rheims translation)

Church leaders tended to interpret this passage to mean that the laity were to obey them without question.

The earliest Protestant reformers, beginning with Martin Luther, rejected this extensive mandate for the Church hierarchy. As a young priest, Luther had journeyed to Rome and been appalled at the materialism and corruption which he had witnessed among high-ranking churchmen. He also found himself at odds with positions and practices sanctioned by the Church hierarchy but nowhere to be found in Scripture (for example, the practice of granting indulgences, explained below). He and most subsequent Protestant reformers came to the conclusion that only the Word (that is, the Bible and its painstaking elaboration in sermons and liturgy) could be trusted to reveal God’s truth. Beliefs and practices not found in Scripture were not divinely authorized. From this radical but supremely simple position flowed most of the Protestant critique of Catholicism. First, it implied that the Bible should be translated, printed, and put into every Christian’s hands, not locked away in the Church’s safe-keeping. Growing literacy among Europeans and the advent of the printing press now made this possible. Second, it implied that there was no need for a hierarchy of semi-divine priests to interpret God’s will. It was all right there in Scripture. Indeed, given the Bible’s failure to mention popes or cardinals, or to define bishops, the Catholic hierarchy had no basis in God’s will at all. While Luther envisioned congregations led by ordained ministers, he no longer saw ordination as creating semi-sacred beings. A truly reformed and scriptural Church implied a “priesthood of all believers”; indeed, for a few reformers, congregants would, in effect, be their own priests. Finally, since the Church hierarchy was obviously unscriptural and corrupt, the only hope for reform lay with righteous secular authorities, like the German Protestant princes or even, as English reformers urged, Henry VIII.

A second, crucial element of the Protestant critique of Catholicism concerns the path to salvation. Catholics had long believed that salvation was achieved through two mutually supportive means. First, one had to believe: in God, in the divinity and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and in his Church. But belief was not enough. The faithful had also to engage in certain rituals, called sacraments, which could only be performed by ordained priests. Three of the seven sacraments (baptism, penance, anointing of the sick) led directly to the forgiveness of sins and all (including the remaining four: eucharist, confirmation, matrimony, and holy orders) endowed the soul with grace. Grace, earned by human beings in this life, was thought to be necessary to achieve salvation in the next. Moreover, the performance of good works, such as giving charity to the poor, contributing to the Church, and living a good life generally, would also increase one’s store of grace and, by pleasing God, contribute to one’s salvation. Specifically, good works were thought to reduce the amount of time one’s soul would have to spend in Purgatory, an interim place of posthumous punishment for those insufficiently good for Heaven and insufficiently evil for Hell. Needless to say, good Catholics wanted to spend as little time there after their deaths as possible. Here, too, Christ’s promise that what was bound “on earth” was bound “in heaven” was significant to Catholics. In the Middle Ages, the Church began to grant indulgences, which forgave specified amounts of purgatorial time in reward for particular good works. Such and such a good work would result in an indulgence which took off so many years of one’s posthumous punishment. A good work might include a pilgrimage to a holy place, the performance of a set of devotions, or an act of charity or financial generosity to the Church.

To Luther, this amounted to trying to buy one’s way into Heaven. Indeed, tortured by his own sense of sin, Luther concluded that human beings were, on the whole, so sinful and so far removed from God’s perfection that no number of “good works” could possibly purchase His forgiveness. The idea that humans could do anything to force God’s hand in this, or any matter, was abhorrent to him. Rather, Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was the only salvation for the human race; individual humans’ efforts were superfluous, if not outright blasphemous. Therefore, the Church had no power to grant indulgences, or even to claim to forgive sins and dispense grace through the sacraments. No human institution could do this. Good works, while certainly praiseworthy and clear
indications
of God’s grace, could not
produce
it. They were ultimately irrelevant to the soul’s salvation. Rather, God would make up his own mind about the fate of each soul without human interference. Faith in Him and faith alone led to redemption. From this, it followed that the whole apparatus of priests, processions, blessings, holy water, and images was, at best, useless and, at worst, idolatrous and sacrilegious. It obscured the simple truth that all one had to do – all one could do – to achieve salvation was to open one’s heart to God, read Scripture, and pray.

One group of continental Protestant reformers led by John Calvin (1509–64) took the idea of the inefficacy of human agency even farther. They argued that, since God knows and wills all things, God knows and wills the future. Therefore, God long ago determined the fate of every individual soul. Therefore, every person’s salvation is predestined and irreversible, since there can be no arguing with God. This idea would lead to much debate in Protestant circles over the finality of this determination, and much soul-searching on the part of
Calvinist
Protestants hoping to figure out whether they were saved (of the elect) or damned (of the reprobate).

It should be obvious from this discussion why Catholicism, with its emphasis on hierarchy, ritual, and obedience, should have appealed to Henry VIII and much of the ruling elite. It should also be obvious why Protestantism, with its European origins and its emphasis on literacy, should have struck root in England among continental travelers, merchants, lawyers, and other literate professionals, usually based in port cities.

Marriage, Succession, and Foreign Policy

In the mid-1530s, the intersecting Protestant-leaning circles associated with Thomas Cromwell, Archbishop Cranmer, and Queen Anne and the Boleyn family were ascendant at court. Not surprisingly, given the Boleyns’ French connections and Catherine of Aragon’s Spanish blood, this group also favored a pro-French, anti-Spanish/Imperial foreign policy. But as early as 1535–6, at the very outset of their ascendancy, the Cromwell–Boleyn–Protestant coalition began to fall apart. First, the French proved to be no more reliable as allies than the emperor had been, leading Cromwell to reopen negotiations with Charles V. Second, Anne’s haughty manner, outspoken promotion of religious reform, and general tactlessness added to her many enemies at court. These came to include Cromwell, whom she attacked for not devoting confiscated Church property to charitable uses; and, eventually, Henry himself, whom she lectured on religion to his face and ridiculed behind his back. But none of this would have mattered if she had borne him a son and heir. In January 1536 she miscarried at 14 weeks of a deformed little boy. Given the theological significance contemporaries attributed to such obstetrical disasters, it must have seemed to the king that this marriage, too, was cursed. In any case, he had already begun to stray. During the winter of Anne’s pregnancy he became infatuated with Jane Seymour (1508/9–37), one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. In fact, she had been put forward by the Aragonese faction, the group of courtiers associated with the former queen, for precisely this purpose.