The religious tone of the reign was set at the coronation on 20 February 1547, when Cranmer accorded Edward the papal title of ‘Christ’s vicar’ within his dominions, and urged him to emulate the Old Testament King Josiah in ensuring that God was ‘truly worshipped, and idolatry destroyed, the tyranny of the bishops of Rome banished from your subjects, and images removed’. Gone was the careful balancing act which had marked Henry’s final years, with representatives of the ‘new learning’ (Protestantism) invariably shadowed by those of the ‘old learning’ in preaching at court or in royal appointments to ecclesiastical office. Instead the ‘new learning’ was given free rein. The preachers invited to perform before the king at court were the likes of Nicholas Ridley, William Barlow and Hugh Latimer - convinced Protestants to a man.
The clearest possible message was sent out to the clergy, the printers and the general public when England’s premier theologian, Dr Richard Smyth, a firm defender of traditional Catholic doctrines about the Mass, was compelled to make humiliating public recantations of his views in London (15 May) and Oxford. Smyth, the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, was a man of the ‘old learning’, personally selected for the professorship by Henry VIII when he founded it in 1540. In 1546, Smyth had dedicated to Henry his Assertion of the Sacrament of the Altar, a lengthy justification of the Catholic doctrine of the Mass, a subject dear to the late king’s heart. Now, less than a year later, Smyth’s public humiliation was accompanied in London by a bonfire of his books - an open enough warning to the printing trade about the financial risks of publishing the wrong kind of material. At the same time, restraints on the publishing of Protestant literature were relaxed. Modern historians have spoken of Somerset’s policy towards the press as ‘permissive’, but, like most forms of permissiveness, Somerset’s was highly selective. Both Somerset and, later, Northumberland did their best to prevent Catholic literature being published in England or imported from abroad. The humiliation of Richard Smyth, then, although at first sight a mere sidelight on history, in fact sheds a good deal of light on government policy. At the time it was deemed important enough to be mentioned in several chronicles. The young king himself reported it in the political journal in which he recorded some of the outstanding events of his reign. Edward’s own engagement with the Protestant Reformation, at first no doubt largely under the influence of his tutors, was a fact of political life right from the start.
The signals broadcast at and after the coronation did not lie, and religious change was soon under way. In July 1547 Cranmer published his official book of homilies or sermons for use throughout the Church of England. These were uncompromising in their repudiation of the ‘traditional religion’ of the English people, Catholicism, as a mish-mash of ‘papistical superstitions’. Their presentation of evangelical Protestantism was more muted, but the drift was perfectly clear to theologically literate observers, such as Stephen Gardiner. He was wryly sceptical about the value of intensive preaching, observing of the majority of people that ‘when they have heard words spoken in the pulpit they report they were good and very good and wondrous good... but what they were... they cannot tell’. More tellingly, in a series of letters to Cranmer he spelled out remorselessly how the archbishop’s homily on justification contradicted the King’s Book of 1543, and impugned Cranmer’s good faith, daring him to justify his decision to jettison the doctrine to which he had subscribed for the last four years of Henry’s reign.
The Homilies were imposed upon the clergy by a fresh set of royal injunctions for the Church of England issued on 31 July 1547. Based on the injunctions of 1538, these went much further in their efforts to root out traditional Catholic customs. All images were to be removed from churches, and parishioners were to be urged to dispose of their private devotional images as well. The rosary was no longer to be recited. Parish priests were to exhort their flocks not to leave money for Masses for their souls. Parish funds maintained for the support of church worship and decoration were to be diverted to the relief of the poor. All candles were to be extinguished except for a minimal pair on the altar. Parish processions were no longer to be held before high Mass on Sundays and feast days. The use of holy water was to be abandoned. Little wonder that ordinary Christians the length and breadth of the land remembered Edward’s reign, rather than Henry’s, as the time of schism.
The injunctions themselves were rigorously implemented over the autumn and winter of 1547-48 by a team of royal ‘visitors’ or commissioners who personally supervised the transformation of parish churches throughout the land. In vain did a few Catholics protest. Edward Bonner, Bishop of London, found himself imprisoned for his pains. Stephen Gardiner fought a desperate rearguard action from his diocese of Winchester. He made a nice point in the summer of 1547, forcefully reminding Somerset that the Homilies and Injunctions were strictly illegal under the Act for the Advancement of True Religion which Henry VIII had passed in 1543. Taking his stand on this legislation, Gardiner refused to accept the royal injunctions, but his protests to the Privy Council resulted only in his own committal to the Fleet prison, and the distinction in due course of a mention in the king’s political journal. Cranmer and Somerset carried on regardless, taking care to repeal Henry’s legislation that autumn in the first Parliament of the reign.
It was the almost immediate introduction of disturbing religious changes at a time when Edward himself was barely ten years old that brought on the second political crisis of the reign, a public controversy over the nature and exercise of kingship during a royal minority. Royal minorities were not unprecedented. There was a tacit
Consensus in such situations that the government pursued an uncontentious policy until the king was of age to take decisions for himself. ‘Steady as she goes’ was the motto. Somerset’s determined furtherance of the Protestant Reformation breached that consensus. The constitutional mythology of monarchy was of course that kingship was continuous: ‘The king is dead, long live the king!’ Every judicial and executive function of the government continued to be carried out in the name of the king. But when the king was an immature young boy, this indispensable legal fiction was all too obviously fictitious. Hence the need to avoid straining credulity, and perhaps even loyalty, by undertaking in his name divisive and contentious policies. It was not long before Catholics, aggrieved at the dismantling of their religion, began to complain that a faction was pursuing its own ends in the name of a king who was too young to be giving their policies a real and informed consent. They did not have to look far for arguments with which to challenge their opponents. ‘Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child’, they quoted from their opponents’ favourite book, the Bible (Eccles. io:i6). Moreover, they had constitutional grounds for complaint. Henry VIII, again, had foreseen the kind of dangers which might arise were he to be succeeded by a child. He had provided against it with an Act of Parliament in 1536 which empowered his successor to repeal by a merely executive act (‘letters patent’ under the Great Seal) any Act of Parliament passed during his minority. Somerset dealt with this in due course by having the act repealed, which would have created a pretty conundrum for the judges if Edward had lived long enough to wish to take advantage of the original act.
In response to this widely shared view, Somerset and his government fell back upon the politically implausible but constitutionally impeccable thesis that royal power was royal power, irrespective of the psychological or medical condition of the monarch. If a law or writ or injunction was made or issued in the king’s name, it was enforceable in the appropriate court and it was morally binding under the presumption of that obedience which all loving subjects owed their prince - a presumption which, since 1535, had been elevated to the level of a paramount divine obligation. They proceeded to enforce their interpretation with all the means at their disposal. Stephen Gardiner, who had taken every opportunity of harassing Somerset, was required to show his bona fides. He was to preach on Friday 29 June 1548 from the prestigious pulpit set up in the gardens of the palace of Whitehall in the latter years of the previous reign. A few days before the sermon, William Cecil arrived with a message from Somerset advising him that it would be sensible to include a few words on the subject of the reality of the royal authority of the boy king. Gardiner upheld Edward’s authority, but did not speak of the question of age, and his affirmations of the Mass and of clerical celibacy were taken by Somerset as mere provocation. He was arrested later that day and taken to the Tower. The following year, one of the most outspoken of the conservative bishops, Edmund Bonner of London, was summoned before the council and ordered to preach an appropriate sermon at Paul’s Cross on i September 1549. Like Gardiner before him, Bonner spoke strongly in favour of traditional doctrine; like Gardiner before him,
He ignored the hint that he should speak specifically to the question of the authority of a boy king; and like Gardiner before him he was duly imprisoned - though in the Marshalsea rather than in the Tower.
Somerset has been praised in fulsome terms for his religious toleration on the grounds that he dismantled much of the Henrician machinery of censorship and repression. This judgement could hardly be farther from the truth. His chief purpose was to pave the way for religious changes which would otherwise have been unlawful. Proclamations against contentious and divisive preaching may have seemed even-handed, but it soon became clear that it was Catholic preaching that was contentious and divisive, while Protestant preaching (except at the radical extreme) was by definition moderate and conciliatory. The repeal of the draconian heresy and treason laws of the previous reign left the prerogative powers of the Crown untouched and was far from evenhanded in its effects. It was still treason to deny the royal supremacy, but denying transubstantiation was no longer a death-penalty offence. And if it was found necessary to prosecute extreme religious deviance, it could still be done: the radical Anabaptist Joan Boucher was burned in May 1550. The only repression that ceased was the repression of evangelical views. The ordinary powers of the Church and the Crown were more than adequate to silence the voice of religious conservatism.
English religion was already very different in 1548 from what it had been when Edward ascended the throne, but more was to come. As long as the chief religious service was the Latin Mass and as long as it was celebrated by a caste of priests set apart from ordinary men by celibate life and sacramental anointing, then the heart of Catholicism was still beating even if the body was horribly mutilated. But 1548 saw Cranmer issue an English form of words for the rite of communion in the Mass, while liturgical ceremonies such as ashes (for Ash Wednesday), palms (for Palm Sunday) and the veneration of the cross were abrogated. Over the winter of 1548-49, Cranmer finished his draft of a complete English form of worship, the Book of Common Prayer, which was formally imposed by the Act of Uniformity (January 1549), with effect from Whit Sunday, 9 June 1549. In the interim, another statute was passed allowing priests to marry - to the horror and disgust of many of their parishioners.
The air of inevitability with which the eventual success of the English Reformation has retrospectively invested its earlier stages has blinded posterity to the magnitude of what was done in the summer of 1549. It was not so much a matter of the doctrinal implications of the change, although we should not underestimate the significance of abandoning the Latin Mass, the liturgy of Europe for a millennium and of England for its entire history thus far, in favour of an entirely new English service with a very different underlying theology. It is more the sheer practical and technical aspects of the operation. Nothing like it had ever been envisaged, let alone attempted, in the entire history of Christianity. Medieval liturgical change, transmitted by manuscript, took place gradually, spreading by hand from one copy to another. Thus the feast of Corpus Christi spread throughout the Catholic Church
In the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and not overnight. In a world in which a rapid copy of a substantial text took weeks, and a fine, lovingly crafted copy took months, liturgical change could not be other than slow and piecemeal. Moreover, because of the vast areas covered by the Catholic Church, and its long duration in the world (the papacy had a longer continuous historical pedigree than any other political institution in western Europe), medieval liturgy was typified by regional and local variations.
It was only the invention of print that made Cranmer’s unprecedented enterprise conceivable and feasible. Not even the Protestant reformations on the Continent had attempted anything on such a gigantic scale. Lutheran liturgies were often little different from their Catholic predecessors, while Zwinglian and Calvinist liturgies had thus far been imposed only upon a local basis, within a city and its hinterland. Yet, thanks to print, it was possible for a brand new religious service to be celebrated in the 8,000 or so churches of England on one and the same Sunday in accordance with a government decree for which there was little, if any, popular support. The mere success of this measure is a tribute to the capacity of Tudor administration.
The introduction of the new liturgy in the summer of 1549 marked a total break with the past. Cranmer’s elimination of all mention of sacrifice from his English liturgy was perhaps the most drastic theological move (although his own views on the ‘real presence’ of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine of the eucharist were already somewhat shaky, the first Book of Common Prayer gave no indication of any change here). But, as Eamon Duffy has observed, the real religious impact was the shattering of the everyday liturgical experience of men and women. The shift from Latin to English made almost all church music redundant at a stroke. King’s College, Cambridge, with the king’s zealously Protestant tutor, John Cheke (by this time Sir John Cheke) at its head as Provost, actually disbanded its choir within a year or so, as it was no longer needed. The vast majority of feast days were no longer to be celebrated. Masses were no longer provided for special devotions or intentions. The central moment of the medieval Mass, the elevation of the consecrated body and blood of Christ for veneration by the congregation, was abolished. The symbol of peace and harmony, the ‘pax’, was no longer to be passed around among the congregation. No more than one Mass was to be celebrated per day in any particular church, and then only at the high altar: the chapels and side-altars of the medieval parish church, the focus of so much communal and family pride and investment in the preceding centuries, were rendered immediately obsolete.
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