The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (19 page)

Luther, monk and theologian, had been wrestling with the deepest metaphysical questions concerning the nature of man’s will and divine grace, of God’s mercy and His justice, and of man’s sin and redemption through Christ. As he sought the answer to the quintessential question for every Christian – ‘what must one do to be saved?’ – between 1514 and 1519 he came gradually to a new understanding. Thinking upon the teaching in St Paul, ‘the righteous shall live by faith’, he had come close to despair. Who could love a God, he asked, who wished to deal with sinners according to justice? For Luther was convinced that the
fallen human race, eternally damned by original sin, could never be free from its dominion. He came to believe that human will, bound and captive to sin, had no capacity to attain righteousness. But he found a ‘wonderful new definition of righteousness’, whereby ‘we are righteous only by the reckoning of a merciful God, through faith in His Word’. Sinners are made righteous – justified – through faith alone, by God’s grace freely given and received in a state of unstriving trust in His mercy. God alone moved man to repentance, Luther believed, and faith itself was a divine work. He rejected any belief that salvation is dependent upon any decision of the human will.

In 1520, in a tract entitled
The Liberty of a Christian
, Luther described simply the nature of the relationship between Christ and the sinner:

For those Catholics who, like Luther, had despaired, doubting that their own striving, their own works, could ever bring their sinful souls to God, these writings brought profound hope and a joyful certainty of salvation. William Roper, a young lawyer at the Inns of Court, assailed by that spiritual doubt which the Church called scrupulosity, was ‘bewitched’ by
The Liberty of a Christian
. But for Roper, and for all others led into the strong light of justifying faith, there were consequences destructive of the whole sacramental and penitential system of the Church. ‘Then thought he that all the ceremonies and sacraments in Christ’s Church were very vain.’

Luther came to believe that sinners cannot expiate their sins. Once he understood that man was justified by faith alone, atonement and satisfaction for sin were irrelevant to his reconciliation with God. ‘Good works’ – including the obligations of prayer, fasting and alms-giving; the veneration of saints and their images; and penances and pardons – which the Church taught could make satisfaction for sin, if performed in a state of grace, were for Luther and his followers unnecessary for salvation, although they were its consequence. For Luther, if the sinner attains faith, he will be saved without the Church; if he does not, the Church can do nothing to help. As Luther developed his new theology, he came gradually to attack not so much the Church’s abuse of its power, but its right to claim any such power in Christian society at all. For him, the reformation of its moral life was far less urgent than a
reformation of doctrine. This central conviction that Christians need not, indeed cannot, do anything to merit salvation, only believe, was the inspiration for those converted to the new faith.

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’ This text, which opens St John’s Gospel, was at the heart of the Reformation. Reading Erasmus’s New Testament, Luther became convinced that the Church had compromised Christ’s teachings. The Church had never denied that all truths necessary to salvation were contained in scripture, but in arbitrating questions of faith, it appealed not to scripture alone, but to tradition as found in the writings and decrees of the Fathers, Doctors and Councils of the Church. For evangelicals – all those who determined to proclaim the Gospel as glad tidings, and to reform religion according to scriptural precept – this appeal to tradition and hierarchy was the blasphemous usurpation of divine by human authority. They asserted that scripture alone, in its literal sense, was sufficient authority, and that scripture was its own interpreter. Evangelical reformers now distinguished between the canonical books of the Hebrew Old Testament, which were authoritative for establishing doctrine, and those which were apocryphal, outside the Hebrew canon. One such apocryphal book was Maccabees, which contained what was held to be scriptural warrant for the doctrines of purgatory and of the efficacy of prayers and Masses for the dead. Now the evangelicals could claim that purgatory was nowhere in scripture, was the Church’s invention, and that, as Henry Brinklow (a London mercer and pampleteer) put it, to pray for souls ‘availeth the dead no more than the pissing of a wren helpeth to cause the sea to flow at an extreme ebb’.

In 1521 Luther stood before the Diet of Worms and recounted his discovery of the Gospel, claiming that he stood with the Prophets, the Evangelists, Apostles and Fathers of the Church. Yet soon he stood against the Church, under the ban of pope and emperor. From Worms Bishop Tunstall wrote warning that Luther’s tract
On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church
(1520) must be kept out of England. In this work Luther attacked the sacramental system of the Church, reducing the seven sacraments to three – baptism, penance and the Eucharist – and repudiating the sacrifice of the Mass. Soon he would deny that penance was a sacrament. Erasmus now pronounced the malady beyond cure. Luther’s works, still in Latin, had reached England by 1519, and were being read by those of influence. In a spectacular ceremony in London on 12 May 1521 the papal anathema was pronounced against
Luther, and the English Church thereby declared its orthodoxy and obedience to the papacy. But on the night after the ceremony an outrage occurred which was ominous: on the papal bull posted on the door of St Paul’s was scribbled a mocking rhyme.

In the years following 1521 Lutheranism seemed to present little threat in England. Secular and ecclesiastical authorities rallied in force to the defence of orthodoxy. In July 1521 a defence of the sacraments was published:
Assertio Septem Sacramentorum
. ‘It is well known for mine, and I for mine avow it,’ Henry VIII told Luther. Henry did write it, or part of it, with the help of a committee of theologians, and a grateful Pope gave the King the title Defender of the Faith. The work gave the clearest sign of Henry’s keen theological interest, and of his determination to lead the English Church; but it was also a sign of the capricious lead he would give, for later he disowned the work, and blamed others for making him write what he had so proudly claimed. Thomas More and Bishop Fisher were commissioned by royal command to write against Luther: Fisher wrote a measured and theologically brilliant confutation; More a vituperative onslaught. In his
Responsio ad Lutherum
(1524) More – under the pseudonym Guillelmus Rosseus – parodied Luther’s evangelical certainty and spiritual pride:

True faith was, for evangelicals, an absolute assurance of their acceptability to God. Thomas More, who had witnessed this evangelical certainty when his son-in-law William Roper became one of the first converts to the new faith in England, took Roper as his model for the messenger in the
Dialogue concerning Heresies
(1529). Not content to whisper Luther’s teachings in ‘hugger mugger’, Roper and his fellows must evangelize them. Those in spiritual bondage must be brought the liberating message; the Word, hidden from the faithful for a thousand years, must go forth by whatever means and whatever the risk. (I shall refer to the first generation of English reformers as evangelicals; not
‘Protestants’, because this was a term invented in a foreign country to describe a particular protest, at Speyer in 1529; nor ‘Lutherans’, because this suggests a precise confession, and Luther’s ideas were soon transmuted in English circumstances. Only reformers of later generations will be called ‘Protestant’.) The ‘evangelical brethren’ or ‘Christian brethren’, as they called themselves – ‘newfangled’, ‘new-broached brethren’, as their enemies called them – were fired and organized to proselytize. Preaching was the way the people would hear the Gospel and, though the risk was acute, they preached urgently and often. The Renaissance art of eloquence would be deployed by evangelicals. Thomas Arthur, ‘preaching the true Gospel of Christ’ in London in 1527, tearfully made this plea:

Thomas More warned good Catholics, complacent in their ancient faith, that the new heretics were few but formidable; as different from them as fire from frost. For him, this was an evangelical conspiracy, and it was true that a few prime movers led a revolutionary movement.

Among whom did the evangelicals make converts to their cause? Who would read the books which the brethren ran such risks to distribute? Luther’s ideas spread first among his compatriots, the German merchants, and beyond them to their associates in the English merchant communities, especially in London. Lutheran works were not translated into English until later, but they were read in Latin by the educated. Heretical movements often began with
trahison des clercs
, and so it was in England. The staunchest opponents of the new theology were scholars in the universities, at Oxford and especially at Cambridge, but so also were the most fervent converts. Bishop Longland feared ‘the corruption of youth’ at Cardinal College, Oxford. Some of the establishment were won over also. The Master of Queens’ College, Cambridge, Dr Forman, was the mastermind behind a contraband book trade between London and Oxford, and avowed the quintessential evangelical belief ‘that all our salvation came of faith… And that if our good works should be the cause of our salvation then, as St Paul saith, Christ died for nought’. Hugh Latimer, who had at first combated the ‘new sect’ and the ‘new learning’, and wrote a dissertation against Luther’s fellow evangelical
Philipp Melanchthon, was converted at Cambridge by Thomas Bilney, who had himself been won to the new theology by reading St Paul in Erasmus’s translation.

But Bilney also held more traditional dissenting views. When a Lollard went to hear Bilney preach at Ipswich – that pilgrimages were folly, that prayers should be addressed to God alone, that prayers to saints impugned the sovereignty of Christ, that St Mary Magdalene was a whore – he heard nothing that he had not heard already in his Lollard conventicles. Among the first enthusiasts for the new heresy were the adherents of an older one, the Lollards. The ‘known men’ and the ‘brethren’ had much in common. Both held that Scripture enshrined all religious truth, and that to every layman belonged the right to find that truth. They believed that from the freedom to read the Word followed another: the liberation from priestly authority. When the Lollard Thomas Man asserted that all holy men of his sect were priests he anticipated the Lutheran doctrine of the priesthood of all believers; a personal faith, in which ‘every layman is priest’. Pardons, confession, penance, ‘purgatory pinfold’ – the whole penitential system whereby the clergy held the laity in thrall – could be discarded.

Why abandon an old faith and an old obedience for a new and persecuted doctrine? There were many individual rebellions against the Church and its doctrine; each conversion was private, made in conscience, for reasons now, and perhaps then, unknown to others. But for the Catholic opponents of the ‘new learning’ the reasons were clear: evangelicals looked for liberty; not only Luther’s Christian liberty, but licence – ‘carnal’, ‘parasite’ liberty. Catholic writers – of whom More was the most indefatigable – saw the evangelical offer of the certainty of grace, the conviction that the will was bound, as leading people to deny their own responsibility for doing good and avoiding evil. For, as More wrote later in his
Supplication for Souls
(1529), if the passion of Christ sufficed for remission of sin without any ‘recompense’ or ‘pain’ on the part of the sinner, then this was encouragement to ‘bold courage to sin’. He caricatured the evangelical belief: however sinful, all they had to do was ‘cry Him mercy’, as a woman would as she stepped on another’s train.

Soon those who had adopted a purer form of Lutheranism would be yesterday’s men. On the great metaphysical question of the Real Presence in the Eucharist – the central issue in Reformation debates – it would not be the moderate Lutheran position that prevailed. Luther taught
that in the Eucharist, after the consecration, the substances both of the Body and Blood of Christ and of the bread and wine co-exist in union with each other: this is consubstantiation. More radical teachings on the Mass, stemming from Strasbourg and Switzerland, and closer to the memorialist, materialist beliefs of the Lollards, were soon spreading. The ‘Christian brethren’, an advance guard among evangelicals, held the sacramentarian belief that the ‘sacrament of the altar after the consecration was neither body nor blood’, but remained bread and wine as before. This was the deepest heresy, and one which very few had yet adopted, despite Thomas More’s fears. But when More charged William Tyndale with being more radical than Luther concerning confession, purgatory, prayers to saints and honour to images, he was right.