THIS BOOK INVITES readers to take a new look at one of the best-known and most widely discussed epochs of English history: the Reformation of the sixteenth century. It does so by retelling the story of what happened to English people, of all sorts and conditions, in the course of a long and traumatic national quarrel about the correct ways to worship God. As far as possible, my book proceeds in chronological sequence, and without much if any direct reference to the numerous academic debates and controversies in which the study of the Reformation abounds. (Should readers wish to consult them, the endnotes reveal the extent of my debts to other scholars in the field.) But threaded through my narrative is a series of fresh arguments about what sort of process the English Reformation was, and about why it mattered then and continues to matter now. It may be helpful at the outset to state what some of these arguments are.
In the first place, it is an unapologetic assumption of what follows that the conflicts of the Reformation were indeed principally about religion; that questions of faith were not merely a convenient covering for more fundamental or ‘real’ concerns about political power, social domination or economic assets. That said, it would be absurd to assert that the Reformation was ‘just’ about religion, for to do so would be to imply that religion was a disconnected phenomenon, separable from the other spheres of value and meaning in which sixteenth-century people lived their lives.
On the contrary, ‘religion’ was woven inextricably into the fabric of virtually all the other artificial abstractions from the messy interplay of collective human existence: society, politics, culture, gender, art, literature, economy. That religious symbolism or argument sometimes patently served what we might regard as political or economic ends should be regarded as demonstrating the depth of religion’s importance, rather than exposing its precarious shallowness.
It is for these reasons that the refashioning, the ‘Reformation’, of religion was a matter of such significance, for it inevitably had profound effects across the entire spectrum of organized social activity and lived human experience. At the same time, one of the key contentions of this book is that over the course of the Reformation, and as a result of the pressures it produced on people, the meaning of ‘religion’ itself began fundamentally and permanently to change. This was not so much because one variant of Christian faith (Catholicism) was largely replaced by another (Protestantism), as because ways and habits of ‘doing’ religion themselves underwent transformative, irreversible changes in a crucible of political calculation and of individual initiative and response.
Almost the most unhelpful thing that can be said about the English Reformation is that it was an ‘Act of State’, simply imposed upon the nation by its successive governments. In one sense, this traditional assessment has merits. The lasting changes of the period would not have taken the forms that they did without sustained assertions of state power, assertions that gave a legal and coercive basis to far-reaching changes in doctrine, worship and governance in the English Church. Without the precise circumstances of Henry VIII’s marriage and divorce, events would have taken a very different turn, and – as in most other parts of Europe – the overall direction and broad outcomes of religious change were at each stage usually the ones the regime of the day wanted to see.
And yet, I will argue, virtually from the start, the imposition of the Reformation was the pyrrhic victory of the English state. It was achieved at the cost of eroding the government’s power to command, and of empowering ordinary English people to think and reflect – and sometimes to refuse and resist. Not the least among the ironies of the process was that, in raising the monarch to an unprecedentedly elevated official status – supreme head, under Christ, of the Church within England – the Reformation fatally undermined the monarchy’s majesty and mystique among significant numbers of its subjects.
The one objective that, whatever their complexion, all Tudor governments shared was that there should be national ‘uniformity’ in matters of religious belief and practice. Edwin Sandys, Protestant bishop of London, spoke for the political assumptions of the age when he declared to Members of Parliament assembled in Westminster Abbey in 1571 that ‘this liberty, that men may openly profess diversity of religion, must needs be dangerous to the commonwealth … Let conformity and unity in religion be provided for; and it shall be a wall of defence unto this realm.’1
As I demonstrate in the first part of this book, absolute uniformity in these matters had never, in fact, existed. Nonetheless, a broad and flexible consensus around most core matters of faith obtained in the late medieval period. It blew apart in the sixteenth century, and was never subsequently repaired. Increasingly, pluralism and division, rather than underlying unity, were the defining characteristics of English religious life: a development that in itself helped to transform the very nature of religion, and the role it occupied within society.
This development took place, I will argue, not just despite, but to a considerable extent because of, government strategies and policies. Some shared assumptions of faith were already breaking down in the 1520s, but Henry VIII opened a Pandora’s box of plurality, licensing ‘evangelical’ reformers to make their frequently persuasive but invariably divisive case in front of the English public. At the same time, the King’s fitful and erratic attempts to rein in the reformers and promote his own idiosyncratic versions of traditional Christianity fuelled intense rivalries within the Church, emboldening idealists of varying kinds to pursue and promote their own agendas for change.
In these circumstances, even the mechanisms for imposing uniformity often had the effect of advertising alternative possibilities. A turn to the propaganda potential of the printing press – the core and consistent strategy of political regimes across the century – made appeals to, and to a considerable extent called into being, the volatile phenomenon of public ‘opinion’. Yet all attempts to persuade through force of argument implicitly concede the possibility of failure; they recognize the existence of different ways of looking at the world. Even direct efforts to control and constrain the consciences of subjects, through – for example – an insistence on the swearing of solemn oaths or the making of formal public declarations of assent, could in practice serve to galvanize resistance, and provide rallying calls for opposition.
The most coercive of all government policies in the sixteenth century – the putting to death of dissidents – was only ever partially successful as an instrument of enforced uniformity. The fate of heretics and traitors was an object lesson in the consequences of nonconformity. But the meaning of those deaths could never be entirely controlled by the oppressors, and events seen by some as legitimate judicial punishments were inevitably interpreted by others as divinely sanctioned martyrdoms. Martyrs were by definition unusual and exceptional Christians, but their symbolic importance for the creation and strengthening of new religious identities is difficult to overstate. The English Reformation was, as we shall see, unusually and bloodily prolific in its creation of martyrs, through successive decades, and across the entire spectrum of religious belief.
There were many other places in Europe where official religion changed, and changed more than once, over the course of the sixteenth century. But among the major west European powers England was unique in its sequence of dramatic swings of official policy, taking place over the course of a relatively short span of years. It is often suggested that the main effect of these oscillations was to bewilder and confuse people, or at least to encourage in them an attitude of quiet, wait-and-see conformity, and of widespread indifference – except among a noisy minority – to the obscure obsessions of their governors and betters.
It will be a central argument of this book that the opposite of this is very likely to be true; that a constantly changing diet of religious proclamations, injunctions, articles, catechisms, liturgies, homilies, iconoclastic spectacles and rearrangements of church interiors had the cumulative effect, to a hitherto unprecedented degree, of informing and educating English people about contested religious and doctrinal issues. No doubt there were some who let it all wash over them. But there is a great deal of evidence, from all levels of society, for people thinking very seriously about questions of faith and salvation, and being prepared to discuss them with others: in their homes, on the road, after church services and sermons, in alehouses, marketplaces and shops.
There is also good reason for scepticism about another often-repeated judgement on the unfolding of the English Reformation: that the overwhelming popular response to it was one of acquiescence, compliance and obedience, and that a surprising absence of protest and resistance is one of its abiding mysteries. This is often accompanied by assertions that the progress of reformation in England was, by and large, an orderly and peaceful affair.
It is true that England avoided – in the sixteenth century at least – any outbreak of full-scale religious civil war, such as that which afflicted France from the 1560s onwards. Yet the Reformation’s progress in England was at nearly every stage lubricated by copious effusions of blood, and – as we shall see – in every decade between the 1530s and the 1570s, some of that blood was spilled in skirmishes and battles between armed forces in the field. Resistance to reformation – in any of its variant guises – only looks ‘limited’ if we actually expect riot and rebellion to be the default response of political subordinates to the reception of unpopular orders: a profoundly unrealistic scenario in any of the strongly hierarchical societies of sixteenth-century Europe.
As it was, each of a succession of political crises and breakdowns of order in England, several of which had potential for developing into larger conflagrations, had a discernibly religious complexion, if not a fundamentally religious character. In the sixteenth century, England’s wars of religion remained – largely – metaphorical ones. But this was never something that could be taken for granted, and it needs to be explained by detailed attention to the interplay of events, rather than by vague appeals to overarching social structures, or any putative national disposition towards moderation and compromise.
The instinct of obedience was hard-wired into late medieval and sixteenth-century English people, but the Reformation stretched and strained that instinct to breaking point and beyond. It was an inherited assumption of the age that all political authority was ordained by God, yet the unavoidable fact of religious division in itself demonstrated that not all expressions of that authority were approved of by God. A growing and alarming realization on the part of many subjects that their monarch was acting contrary to God’s will – as revealed in scripture, or by the inherited traditions of the Christian faith – impelled a few determined souls to develop justifications for non-obedience, for resistance, and even for the overthrow and replacement of an ungodly ruler. More common, however, was a widespread and novel experience of disconnect, of uncomfortable consciousness that the version of Christian truth approved and promoted by the highest authorities in the land was not one the individual could necessarily recognize or share.
The implications of this were multiple and profound. In England, from the reign of Henry VIII onwards, parallel processes were underway of what is sometimes called ‘confessionalization’.2 This refers to the growing perception on the part of individuals that they were possessed of a distinctive identity of faith, shared with other committed adherents, at home and often abroad. These processes took place alongside, but not necessarily in tandem with, official programmes of religious renewal and reform. Sometimes, as with evangelicals in the reigns of Henry and Edward VI, the patterns of identity-formation sought to outrun the pace of officially sanctioned change. Other paths of confessionalization diverged dramatically from approved routes. This, other than in the reign of Mary I, was the case of Catholics – many of whom, as we shall see, can begin meaningfully to be called Roman Catholics only as a result of choices imposed upon them in the maelstrom of Reformation politics. A still more dramatic path of divergence was taken by the various radical, experimentalist Christians derisively labelled by contemporaries as ‘anabaptists’: men and women whose conscientious views were consistently rejected, and whose persons were periodically persecuted, by state-sanctioned authority. In the reign of Elizabeth I, explored in the final part of the book, a key theme is the growth spurt, from earlier embryonic development, of a godly, ‘Puritan’ identity, whose bearers perceived a duty to take over the primary responsibility for reformation from a delinquent and ineffective state.
Growing divisions within and between communities in themselves underlined and accelerated the process of fragmentation: the awareness of being a Catholic by virtue of not being a Protestant (and vice versa) lent new and sharper edges to the social importance of belief – whether or not this trend was always accompanied by greater intellectual understanding of the actual content of disputed doctrines.
Another of the themes of this book is the way in which language itself became increasingly critical to the dynamics of disunity. The devising of insulting labels and names for opponents was a blatant polemical strategy, but its effect, not always foreseen, was often to shore up identity and solidarity – both of the name-callers and of the people being named. Repeated, forlorn pleas from the authorities for English men and women not to asperse each other with the titles of ‘papist’, ‘heretic’ or ‘Puritan’ are a backhanded tribute to the effectiveness of hostile labelling in policing the boundaries of religious differentiation. In the sixteenth century, competing forms of Christian faith were on their way to becoming, in the literal meaning of the word, denominations.
Just as significant was a puzzling and paradoxical fact: the pluralization of English religion took place in a context of consistent official intolerance of any form of dissent. There was, more or less, only ever one approved pattern of religious worship and practice at any one time in England in the sixteenth century, with threats of significant legal penalties for anyone refusing outwardly to take part. Since relatively few people, even among the seriously devout, had either the stomach for martyrdom or the stamina for exile, one result was the growth of a pervasive culture of dissembling and concealment, against which clerical leaders on all sides indignantly railed, but which they could do little to prevent.
Outward conformity is sometimes regarded as an unheroically banal pattern of behaviour. In fact, it could represent a complex and sophisticated adaptation of conscience to conditions. It also served to compartmentalize religion, and the questions of authenticity and duty that went with it, in new and creative ways. When, for example, Elizabethan Catholics declared a loyal willingness to obey the Queen in all ‘civil’ matters, they were drawing a distinction between things that scarcely existed as separate spheres before, and which would have made little sense to their medieval forebears. Here was the germ of a familiar modern idea: religion as a purely private matter, divorced from the necessary terms of participation in wider public life.
The tendency was reinforced by the messy realities of life in religiously mixed communities. The divisions of England provoked real hatreds of the ‘other’, in abstract and sometimes in viscerally embodied forms. As a result of the Reformation, English society became an uneasy aggregate of true and false Christians, of ‘heretics’ and ‘believers’ – people who knew they were in the right by their ability to point out those who were in the wrong. But neighbours of different faiths remained neighbours still, and much of the time they had to find ways of making do and muddling along – like the inn-keeper in later Elizabethan Norfolk who scolded customers for letting an argument about the mass and religious images get out of hand: ‘he must be for all companies, and all men’s money’.3
Before the Reformation, ‘religion’ meant primarily an attitude of devoted living in the service of God, one that encompassed public duty and private piety in ways difficult to prise apart. Something of that aura continued to adhere to the concept throughout the period covered by this book, and indeed beyond it. But ‘religion’ emerged from the convulsions of the sixteenth century in a state of fragmented, almost schizophrenic reinvention. On the one hand, it now represented the sectarian ideology of self-selecting membership groups – the ‘true religion’, the ‘Catholic religion’ – arming those groups with a new confidence to resist what might once have seemed the incontestable demands of legitimate authority. On the other, it had the potential to manifest itself as a matter of inner conscience, private and protected, a subjective abstraction – ‘my religion’, or even just ‘religion’. Emphasis on the former implied an impulse to seek total Reformation, total victory; on the latter, a willingness to consider the suspension of outward hostilities in the pursuit of social peace. In failing to resolve which of these imperatives would prevail, the Reformation proved to be a highly creative, as well as profoundly destabilizing, force for societal change.
The structure of this book – as well as seeking to provide the framework for telling an engaging and compelling story – aims to map a series of broad stages in the unfolding of these transformations. The four chapters comprising Part I, ‘Reformations before Reformation’, collectively portray late medieval English religion as the basis of a principled and intelligible world-view, but also as remarkably dynamic and diverse; they attempt to explain why English society around the turn of the sixteenth century was often convinced of the necessity for ‘reformation’, but unable to find agreed strategies for implementing it.
The intention in these thematic chapters, viewing the period c. 1480–1525 from a variety of angles, is not to offer systematic analysis of the ‘causes’ of the English Reformation – I have no wish to assert the inevitability of developments that in reality were often unpredictable and usually avoidable. But neither is the aim here to portray an innocent and untroubled ‘pre-Reformation’ world. The Reformation, it is vital to recognize, was neither a detached and unheralded post-medieval arrival, nor simply a reaction against the religious culture of the Middle Ages. It was itself a flowering of late medieval developments, seeded and germinated in the political, cultural and religious soil of the decades around 1500. My account of patterns in devotional life, of the aspirations and deficiencies of the institutional Church, of the relationship between that Church and secular authority, and of the temptations of religious dissidence, is designed to make later developments seem, if not predictable, then at least explicable.
Part II, ‘Separations’, shifts the tempo of the book into a forward-flowing, if not always rigidly strict, chronological narrative of events. It describes the emergence of the bitter divisions within English Christianity following from two, seemingly unconnected, developments of the 1520s: the reverberations from Martin Luther’s protest against papal authority, and the frustrated desire of Henry VIII to secure an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The early and remarkable convergence between these processes, I argue, explains much about the dynamic character, and the instability and incoherence, of the so-called ‘Henrician Reformation’.
The fitful emergence, after the fluidity and confusion of the early Reformation years, of more confident and enduring patterns of religious identity and solidarity is the predominant theme of Part III, ‘New Christianities’. These identities were already emerging in the later years of Henry VIII, and continued to solidify through the short but eventful reigns of Edward VI and Mary I, when rival visions of Reformation, political and religious, convulsed the conscience of the nation, and impacted heavily on communities throughout the realm.
My final section, Part IV, ‘Unattainable Prizes’, coincides with the reign of Elizabeth I. It is a mixed story of triumphs and defeat. These chapters describe how Protestantism established a powerful political hegemony in England, and began to put down roots in the localities; and how Catholicism, only recently the establishment faith, surmounted threats to its very survival in order to reinvent itself as a vibrant vehicle of dissident expression. At the same time, they chart several parallel odysseys of disillusionment; I explain why it was that none of the idealistic programmes of Reformation proclaimed in the later sixteenth century – not even Elizabeth I’s own – were ultimately able to triumph.
The account in this book comes to a close in the years around 1590, near the beginning of Elizabeth’s last decade. There is no obvious point at which the English Reformation ‘ends’, and no one alive at the time thought officially to declare one. Some historians will probably think my Reformation (if not my book itself) is a little on the short side. They will point out that the consequences of England’s momentous break with Catholic Christendom were still working themselves out, in politics, religion and the experiences of daily life, far beyond 1600. While this is perfectly true, it is also the case that a number of crucial questions had been settled, or shown themselves incapable of being settled, before the sixteenth century drew to a close. A broad-based Protestantism was established as the majority faith of the nation. But thickets of Roman Catholicism, and other, still more exotic, plants, were ineradicably rooted across the religious landscape of England. A plurality of religious attitudes and identities, in bristling array, had assumed their recognizable forms; and, by the early 1590s, the purest proponents of Protestant Reformation had staked their claim, and shot their bolt.
Readers will notice there are a lot of names in this book. Some – like Henry VIII, Thomas More, Hugh Latimer or Elizabeth I – appear repeatedly; others, less well known, on only one or two occasions. I hope this will bolster a key argument of the unfolding story: that ‘the Reformation’ was not a mysterious, faceless force, obtruding upon individuals and their communities from somewhere beyond their reckoning. Rather, it was a transformative historical moment enacted by the calculations and decisions, sometimes heroic and sometimes shameful, of innumerable men and women, both great and small, at the centres of high policy-making, and in myriad localities where ordinary people lived.
It was not all about making choices. Compulsion and coercion feature prominently in the narrative that follows, and for many people, much of the time, the sensible choice was to keep their heads down and do as they were told. Nonetheless, over the course of the sixteenth century, and for the first time in securely documented history, everyone in England became acutely aware that the most important questions of human existence were capable of demanding divergent – indeed, mutually incompatible – answers. That fundamentally new dynamic had a momentous impact, on existing patterns of collective allegiance and on conceptions of individual identity: it redefined people’s relationships to both ‘vertical’ structures of authority and ‘horizontal’ bonds of community. In a world of plural possibility, even quiet adherence to the status quo was now an act of meaningful affirmation. The English Reformation, and with it the future course of the nation’s history, was made by a great multitude of heretics and believers.
1 A fifteenth-century carved oak sculpture of the crucified Christ, originating in Sussex and now in a private collection. It probably formed, along with statues of the Virgin Mary and St John, part of the rood grouping in a parish church. Placed above the screen that divided the chancel from the nave (the lay people’s part of the church), roods drew the eye of worshippers and placed before them a powerful image of the sufferings of Jesus that had made their salvation possible.
2 The parish church of St James, in the Lincolnshire market town of Louth. The magnificent spire, placed on top of a pre-existing tower in 1501–15, was the result of energetic fundraising by parishioners and guilds, and a potent symbol of local pride and identity. In 1536, twenty-one years after a parish celebration to mark the completion of the spire, townspeople took up arms to protect their community and its traditions against the policies of Henry VIII and Cromwell.
3 A woodcut illustration of a priest elevating the host, from a French guide to the art of good living and good dying, translated into English in 1503. The elevation followed the priest at the altar’s repetition of Christ’s words, ‘Hoc est enim corpus meum’ (For this is my body), and signified that the miracle of transubstantiation had truly taken place. Onlookers worshipped their God as if he were made present among them, but later Protestants considered the action to be appalling ‘idolatry’.
4 An early printing press in operation, from a French woodcut print c. 1520. The technology of printing with moveable type was introduced in England in the 1470s by the enterprising merchant William Caxton. Much of the output of the English presses in the ensuing decades was of Catholic devotional works of a traditional kind, but the growing availability of print was something that might have encouraged the active spiritual life of literate lay people to develop in unorthodox directions.
5 Henry VII in Star Chamber receives archbishop of Canterbury William Warham, bishop of Winchester Richard Fox, and abbot of Westminster John Islip, in a detail from an indenture linked to the King’s foundation of a chantry and almshouses at Westminster. The image graphically expresses the subservient position of pre-Reformation bishops appointed by the crown, although, in fact, Warham would in time prove himself a doughty defender of the ‘liberties’ of the English Church.
6 An imaginative depiction, from John Foxe’s 1563 Acts and Monuments, of the death – in the bishop of London’s custody in 1514 – of the London merchant Richard Hunne. Episcopal officers, including the disreputable summoner Charles Joseph, exit the cell, having rigged the death to look like a suicide. The facts of the matter remain to this day in contention, but it was widely believed in London that Hunne was accused of heresy for taking legal action against a priest, and was then done to death by culprits who could claim ‘benefit of clergy’.
7 The Cambridge scholar Thomas Bilney preaching in Ipswich in 1527 and incurring the wrath of local friars, from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Bilney’s vehement attacks on pilgrimage and on veneration of images of saints had affinities with the teachings of the Lollards, some of whom attended his sermons. But early evangelical converts like Bilney attracted a substantial audience, in part because of their status as apparently reputable members of the Catholic establishment.
8 The fate of the London Carthusians, from a series of paintings made in the early seventeenth century by the Italian artist Vicente Carducho for the monastery of El Paular, near Madrid. Six Carthusian monks, including John Houghton, prior of the London Charterhouse, were executed in the early summer of 1535 for refusing the Oath of Supremacy. The ten depicted here starved slowly to death in Newgate. The Carthusians were the acknowledged elite of English monasticism; Henry VIII’s treatment of them shocked opinion across Europe.
9 The title page for Derbyshire from the document known as the Valor Ecclesiasticus, a comprehensive survey of the income of the English Church, undertaken in 1535. The depiction of Henry in the illuminated capital letter here, surrounded by his lay councillors, is intended to underscore the King’s new-found authority as Supreme Head of the Church whose wealth is being scrutinized.
10 Pontefract Castle, West Yorkshire, an eighteenth-century drawing by Thomas Pennant. The royal castle found itself at the centre of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, when its custodian Thomas, Lord Darcy, surrendered the place to rebel forces and immediately assumed a key role in the leadership of the movement. The Pontefract Articles, drawn up here in December 1536, were a comprehensive indictment of Henry’s policies since breaking with the Pope, whom the rebels wished to see restored as Head of the Church, ‘touching cure animarum’ (the care of souls).
11 The frontispiece to the 1539 Great Bible, printed by Richard Grafton, is a visual representation of how Henry VIII wished his Reformation to be seen: an icon of order, hierarchy and obedience. The King, seated in majesty under the protecting arms of Christ, graciously distributes the Word of God to leading lay and clerical councillors, and it is then handed down to respectable subjects by bishops and magistrates. In the lower pane, scripture is preached to common folk, who respond with grateful cries of ‘Vivat Rex!’ (Long live the King). Positioned opposite each other, a pulpit and a gaol represent the conjoining of powerful temporal and spiritual authority in the King’s hands.
12 The Cluniac Priory of St Milburga, at Much Wenlock in Shropshire, was suppressed in January 1540, during the final stages of the Dissolution of the Monasteries – one of more than 800 religious houses seized by the crown, stripped of assets and left in a ruinous state. Its significance to the people of the little borough is suggested by careful records made in the parish register by the vicar Thomas Butler, documenting what became of former monks and servants of the priory.
13 The burning at Smithfield on 16 July 1546 of the gentlewoman Anne Askew, along with the courtier John Lasssells, the former Observant friar John Hemsley and the tailor John Hadlam – a social cross-section of the evangelical movement in London. Askew’s courageous silence under torture thwarted a conservative plot to bring down high-ranking reformers at the court, including even the Queen, Catherine Parr. This woodcut in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments was reused from Robert Crowley’s The confutation of .xiii. articles, wherunto N. Shaxton…subscribed (1548). Nicholas Shaxton, formerly a prominent evangelical, abjured in 1546, and is shown here preaching at the burning. The lightning bolt emerging from the cloud represents the thunder-clap recorded by evangelical chroniclers of the event: a vindication by God of Askew’s status as a true martyr.
14 The Book of Common Prayer, 1549, replaced a profusion of Catholic liturgical books with a single volume containing English-language texts for church services and ceremonies. Its communion service, supplanting the Latin mass, was a shocking innovation to traditionalists and triggered a major rebellion in the south west of England. But zealous evangelicals, especially some of the foreign reformers invited to England by Thomas Cranmer, considered the Prayer Book too mired in the popish past, and pressed for its swift revision.
15 This woodcut from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments shows Hugh Latimer delivering a sermon to a large crowd from the pulpit set up in the ‘privy garden’ of the Palace of Westminster. The godly young king, Edward VI, listens intently from the window of the council chamber. Preaching was the compelling vocation of Edwardian reformers, and Latimer devoted himself to it, rather than returning to the ranks of the episcopate after 1547. The ability of preachers with access to the King to influence policy was demonstrated in 1552, when criticism of the newly revised Prayer Book in a court sermon by John Knox instigated a sharp row about the meaning of kneeling to receive communion.
16 Thomas Cranmer, the deprived archbishop of Canterbury, was scheduled to read a recantation of his heretical errors on 20 March 1556 in the University Church of St Mary, Oxford, after a sermon by the Provost of Eton, Dr Henry Cole. Queen Mary’s implacable determination that Cranmer should die, despite a series of abject recantations, helped produce an unexpected recovery of nerve. The image from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments shows angry Catholic clergy pulling Cranmer from the platform after he had denounced the Pope as Antichrist. At the place of burning, Cranmer thrust into the fire his right hand, with which he had signed his earlier abjurations.
17 Cardinal Reginald Pole; a portrait c. 1545 by the Venetian artist Sebastiano del Piombo. A fierce critic of Henry VIII’s break with Rome, Pole spent two decades in European exile, before returning to England as papal legate in 1554 to oversee reunion with Rome and replace Cranmer as archbishop of Canterbury. His reforming energies placed Mary I’s England at the forefront of the emergent Counter-Reformation, but his understanding of justification led Pope Paul IV to regard him as a heretic, even as Pole was presiding over an intense prosecution of heretics in England. Full beards of the kind sported here were associated with evangelical clergy in England, yet popes and cardinals in Italy had developed the habit of wearing them. Pole himself missed becoming pope by a whisker in 1549.
18 ‘A Show of the Protestants’ Pedigree’, from a 1565 English translation by the exile Thomas Stapleton of a work by the German Catholic theologian (and convert from Protestantism) Friedrich Staphylus. The striking image of a tree of heresy, with multiple leaves and branches, was designed to put across the long-standing Catholic idea that heresy was at once infinitely fractious and a single impulse of error. Here, all the heresies of the age are traced to Luther, ‘father of all the sects of Protestants’, whose ‘pretensed wedlock’ with the ex-nun Katharina von Bora is made into the centrepiece of the design. Protestants would have found particularly offensive the idea that miscellaneous groups of radicals and anabaptists, itemized in the branch on the left, were their close theological cousins.
19 Pope Pius V hands to an emissary the bull of 1570 excommunicating Elizabeth I, while forces of foreign invasion muster in the background, from George Carleton, A Thankfull Remembrance of Gods Mercy (London, 1630). The papal excommunication, and the Rising of the Northern Earls that immediately preceded it, intensified religious tensions in England and blurred the distinctions between spiritual and political dissidence. Henceforth, all Catholics were vulnerable to accusations of being traitors to the crown.
20 Elizabeth I sits enthroned in the House of Lords at the opening of Parliament, from a seventeenth-century edition of parliamentary proceedings. Elizabeth’s relationships with successive Parliaments in her reign were frequently testy. Zealous Protestants, sometimes with the support of royal councillors, sought to use Parliament as a vehicle for advancing reform, but the Queen consistently took the line that religious matters were her prerogative, and MPs should not meddle with them.
21 A communion cup made in the 1570s or ’80s for the parish of Dry Drayton in Cambridgeshire, during the incumbency of the godly rector Richard Greenham. Protestant communion services, unlike pre-Reformation Catholic ones, involved the laity receiving the sacrament ‘in two kinds’, wine as well as bread, and large cups were required in place of the smaller chalices used for mass. The proliferation and survival of these simple but stately objects provides material evidence of the transformation of religious culture at parish level.
22 An engraving of the Jesuit Edmund Campion, the frontispiece to an edition of his Decem rationes (Ten Reasons), published in Antwerp in 1631. The mild and scholarly Campion was hailed throughout Catholic Europe as a martyr following his execution in 1581, and is here depicted with a cord around his neck and a disembowelling knife at his chest – emblems of the gruesome fate playing out in the background. Negative reactions to the death of Campion, and other missionary priests, impelled the Elizabethan regime’s propagandists, including William Cecil, to embark on a literary campaign of self-justification.