Although Henry VIII withdrew the Church of England from obedience to the papacy he continued to reject most Protestant theology. Some of his advisers, most notably Thomas Cromwell, were committed Protestants; and the king allowed his son and heir, Edward VI, to be raised as a Protestant. But even after several years of rapid (and mostly Protestant) change in the English Church, Henry reasserted a set of traditional Catholic doctrines in the Six Articles of 1539. These would remain binding on the Church of England until the king's death in 1547.
Irst, that in the most blessed sacrament of the altar, by the strength and efficacy of Christ's mighty word, it being spoken by the priest, is present really, under the form of bread and wine, the natural body and blood of our Savior Jesus Christ, conceived of the Virgin Mary, and that after the consecration there remains no substance of bread or wine, nor any other substance but the substance of Christ, God and man;
Secondly, that communion in both kinds is not necessary for salvation, by the law of God, to all persons, and that it is to be believed and not doubted. . . that in the flesh, under the form of bread, is the very blood, and with the blood, under the form of wine, is the very flesh, as well apart as though they were both together;
Thirdly, that priests, after the order of priesthood received as afore, may not marry by the law of God;
Fourthly, that vows of chastity or widowhood by man or woman made to God advisedly ought to be observed by the law of God. . . .
Fifthly, that it is right and necessary that private masses be continued and admitted in this the king's English Church and congregation. . . whereby good Christian people. . . do receive both godly and goodly consolations and benefits; and it is agreeable also to God's law;
Sixthly, that oral, private confession is expedient and necessary to be retained
And continued, used and frequented in the church of God.
Source: Statutes of the Realm, vol. 3 (London: 1810-28), p. 739 (modernized).
Questions for Analysis
1. Three of these six articles focus on the sacrament of the Eucharist (the Mass). Given what you have learned in this chapter, why would Henry have been so concerned about this sacrament? What does this reveal about his values and those of his contemporaries?
2. Given Henry's insistence on these articles, why might he have allowed his son to be raised a Protestant? What does this suggest about the political situation in England?
Redirected all papal revenues from England into the king’s hands, prohibited appeals to the papal court, and formally declared “the King’s highness to be Supreme Head of the Church of England.” In 1536, Henry executed his former tutor and chancellor Sir Thomas More (see Chapter 12) for his refusal to endorse this declaration of supremacy, and took the first steps toward dissolving England’s many monasteries. By the end of 1539, the monasteries and convents were gone and their lands and wealth confiscated by the king, who distributed them to his supporters.
These measures, largely masterminded and engineered by Henry’s Protestant adviser, Thomas Cromwell (c. 14851540), broke the bonds that linked the English Church to Rome. But they did not make England a Protestant country.
Although certain traditional practices (such as pilgrimages and the veneration of relics) were prohibited, the English Church remained overwhelmingly Catholic in organization, doctrine, ritual, and language. The Six Articles promulgated by Parliament in 1539 at Henry Vlll’s behest left no room for doubt as to official orthodoxy: oral confession to priests, masses for the dead, and clerical celibacy were all confirmed; the Latin Mass continued; and Catholic Eucharistic doctrine was not only confirmed but its denial made punishable by death. To most English people, only the disappearance of the monasteries and the king’s own continuing matrimonial adventures (he married six wives in all) were evidence that their Church was no longer in communion with Rome.
For truly committed Protestants, and especially those who had visited Calvin’s Geneva, the changes Henry VIII enforced on the English Church did not go nearly far enough. In 1547, the accession of the nine-year-old king Edward VI (Henry’s son by his third wife, Jane Seymour) gave them the opportunity to finish the task of reform. Encouraged by the apparent sympathies of the young king, Edward’s government moved quickly to reform the doctrine and ceremonies of the English Church. Priests were permitted to marry; English services replaced Latin ones; the veneration of images was discouraged, and the images themselves were defaced or destroyed; prayers for the dead were declared useless, and endowments for such prayers were confiscated; and new articles of belief were drawn up, repudiating all sacraments except baptism and communion and affirming the Protestant creed of justification by faith alone. Most important, The Book of Common Prayer, authored by Archbishop Cranmer and considered one of the great landmarks of English literature, was published to define precisely how the new English-language services of the church were to be conducted. Much remained unsettled with respect to both doctrine and worship; but by 1553, when the youthful Edward died, the English Church appeared to have become a distinctly Protestant institution.
Mary Tudor and the Restoration of Catholicism
Edward’s successor, however, was his pious and much older half sister Mary (r. 1553-58), granddaughter of “the most Catholic monarchs” of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella (see Chapter 11). Mary speedily reversed her half brother’s religious policies, restoring the Latin Mass and requiring married priests to give up their wives. She even prevailed on Parliament to vote a return to papal allegiance. Hundreds of Protestant leaders fled abroad, many to Geneva; others, including Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, were burned at the stake for refusing to abjure their Protestantism. News of the martyrdoms spread like wildfire through Protestant Europe. In England, however, Mary’s policies sparked relatively little resistance. After two decades of religious upheaval, most English men and women were probably
QUEEN MARY AND QUEEN ELIZABETH. The two daughters of Henry VIII were the first two queens regnant of England: the first women to rule in their own right. Despite the similar challenges they faced, they had strikingly different fates and have been treated very differently in popular histories. ¦ How do these two portraits suggest differences in their personalities and their self-representation as rulers?
Hoping that Mary’s reign would bring some stability to their lives.
This, however, Mary could not do. The executions she ordered were insufficient to wipe out religious resistance— instead, Protestant propaganda about “Bloody Mary” caused widespread unease, even among those who welcomed the return of traditional religious forms. Nor could Mary do anything to restore monasticism: too many leading families had profited from Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries for this to be reversed. Mary’s marriage to her cousin Philip, Charles V’s son and heir to the Spanish throne, was another miscalculation. Although the marriage treaty stipulated that Philip could not succeed her in the event of her death, her English subjects never trusted him. When the queen allowed herself to be drawn by Philip into a war with France on Spain’s behalf—in which England lost Calais, its last foothold on the European continent—many people became highly disaffected. Ultimately, however, what doomed Mary’s policies was simply the accident of biology: Mary was unable to conceive an heir. When she died after only five years of rule, her throne passed to her Protestant sister, Elizabeth.
The daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth (r. 1558-1603) was predisposed in favor of Protestantism by the circumstances of her parents’ marriage as well as by her upbringing. But Elizabeth was no zealot and wisely recognized that supporting radical Protestantism in England might provoke bitter sectarian strife. Accordingly, she presided over what is often known as “the Elizabethan settlement.” By a new Act of Supremacy (1559), Elizabeth repealed Mary’s Catholic legislation, prohibiting foreign religious powers (i. e., the pope) from exercising any authority within England and declaring herself “supreme governor” of the English church—a more Protestant title than Henry VIII’s “supreme head,” since most Protestants believed that Christ alone was the head of the Church. She also adopted many of the Protestant liturgical reforms instituted by her half-brother, Edward, including Cranmer’s revised version of The Book of Common Prayer. But she retained vestiges of Catholic practice, too, including bishops, church courts, and vestments for the clergy On most doctrinal matters, including predestination and free will, Elizabeth’s Thirty-nine Articles of Faith (approved in 1562) struck a decidedly Protestant, even Calvinist, tone. But the prayer book was more moderate and, on the critical issue of the Eucharist, deliberately ambiguous. By combining Catholic and Protestant interpretations (“This is my body. . . Do this in remembrance of me”) into a single declaration, the prayer book permitted an enormous latitude for competing interpretations of the service by priests and parishioners alike.
Yet religious tensions persisted in Elizabethan England, not only between Protestants and Catholics but also between moderate and more extreme Protestants. The queen’s artful fudging of these competing Christianities was by no means a recipe for success. Rather, what preserved “the Elizabethan settlement” and ultimately made England a Protestant country was the extraordinary length of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, combined with the fact that for much of that time Protestant England was at war with Catholic Spain. Under Elizabeth, Protestantism and English nationalism gradually fused together into a potent conviction that God himself had chosen England for greatness. After 1588, when English naval forces won an improbable victory over a Spanish Armada (see Chapter 14), Protestantism and Englishness became nearly indistinguishable to most of Queen Elizabeth’s subjects. Laws against Catholic practices became increasingly severe, and although an English Catholic tradition did survive, its adherents were a persecuted minority Significant, too, was the situation in Ireland, where the vast majority of the population remained Catholic despite the government’s efforts to impose Protestantism on them. As a result, Irishness would be as firmly identified with Catholicism as was Englishness with Protestantism; but it was the Protestants who were in power in both countries.
THE REBIRTH OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
So far, our emphasis on the spread of Protestantism has cast the spotlight on dissident reformers such as Luther and Calvin. But there was also a powerful internal reform movement within the Church in these same decades, which resulted in the birth (or rebirth) of a Catholic (“universal”) faith. For some, this movement is the “Catholic Reformation”; for others, it is the “Counter-Reformation.” Those who prefer the former term emphasize that the Church was continuing significant reforming movements that can be traced back to the eleventh century (see Chapter 8) and which gained new momentum in the wake of the Great Schism (see Chapter 11). Others insist that most Catholic reformers of this period were reactionary, inspired primarily by the urgent need to resist Protestantism and to strengthen the power of the Roman Church in opposition to it.
World History
