10

JOSIAH

After Henry

IT TOOK JUST over a week for the news to spread nationwide. Thomas Butler, vicar of the small borough of Much Wenlock in Shropshire, wrote in the parish register that on 5 February 1547 ‘word and knowledge came thither … our Sovereign Lord King Henry VIII was departed out of this transitory life’ – adding, ‘whose soul God Almighty pardon’. The prayer was a conventional Catholic piety, but perhaps Butler did believe Henry had things for which to atone. For centuries, religious and economic life in Much Wenlock revolved around the Cluniac priory of St Milburga. In January 1540 the house was summarily dissolved. Butler’s warm feeling for the dispersed community comes out in his careful recording, over many years, of the fates and fortunes of monks and servants ‘sometime of the priory of St Milburga’.

Neither here, nor anywhere in England, was there open rejoicing at the death of the old king. In London, the news reportedly caused ‘great lamentation and weeping’, and across the country parishes rang their bells and arranged requiems on an unprecedented scale.1 The grief was genuine, but there was also shock and disbelief, and anxious uncertainty about what followed now.

Within a couple of weeks, greater Christendom caught up with Much Wenlock. Richard Hilles, evangelical merchant, wrote from Strassburg on 25 February to pass the news to Bullinger, and to reassure him that the Earl of Hertford, the most powerful man in the new government, was ‘a great enemy to the Pope of Rome’. At the same moment, Reginald Pole was writing to the Pope, pointing to a renewed opportunity to restore England to the Church, and applauding Paul III’s decision to appoint new legates to France, Scotland and the Empire. Henry’s death reset the clocks, instituting rival schedules of hope and ambition.

In Bologna, the news made the expatriate Welshman William Thomas the centre of attention at a dinner party in a rich merchant’s house. One of his hosts wondered what on earth Thomas might find to say in Henry’s favour, ‘since he hath been known, and noted all over, to be the greatest tyrant that ever was in England’. The evangelical Thomas – once assured he might speak freely – found a great deal positive to say. But in the end he conceded that Henry ‘did see but with one eye’. His son and heir, Thomas trusted, ‘shall with no less perfection reform the true Church of Christ, not permitted by his said father to be finished, than as Solomon did the true Temple of Jerusalem, not granted to David in the time of his life’.2

The weight of evangelical expectation resting on the shoulders of the young king was doubtless made plain to him at his coronation on 20 February. A much-quoted address on the occasion by Archbishop Cranmer – in which he hailed the nine-year-old Edward as ‘a second Josiah’, the King of Judah who succeeded his father at the age of eight, and as a young adult destroyed altars and images erected to the worship of Baal – is, sadly, a clever late seventeenth-century forgery. But comparisons between Edward and Josiah were commonplace in evangelical sermons.³

Better documented are the revels and masks performed at the coronation, which involved the outlay of substantial sums to drapers, haberdashers and painters for ‘grey kersey for friars’, ‘silk lace and taffeta for cardinals’ hats’, ‘caps of crimson and black satin for priests’, ‘crowns and cross for the Pope’.⁴ The vanquishing of popery was boisterously acted out at court, and would soon, more soberly, be attempted across the country.

That objective required firm hands on the levers of power. The sixteen-strong regency council appointed by Henry – divided between evangelicals, conservatives, pragmatists and enigmas – seemed set to oversee a continuation of the see-saw politics of Henry’s last years. But even before the coronation, the balance had swung. In a move probably orchestrated by Paget, the councillors abandoned collective decision-making and elected Seymour as Lord Protector, to enjoy quasi-regal powers until the King turned eighteen. Their reward was a distribution of lands and titles Henry’s will supposedly forgot to specify: William Parr became Marquis of Northampton; Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton; John Dudley, Earl of Warwick; Seymour himself, Duke of Somerset. Regency was the usual remedy for a royal minority, and a probably more sensible one than the committee government envisaged by Henry. Somerset, the new king’s closest male relative, was the obvious choice for the role.

The new Duke of Somerset seemed neither a polished politician nor a single-minded gospeller. He was first and foremost a soldier, grimly determined to pursue to its conclusion the Scottish war, producing renewed conflict with France. But if fellow-councillors believed the rudder of the ship of state had passed into a safe pair of hands, willing to keep politics and religion on an even keel, they had misjudged their man. A fortnight after the coronation, Southampton was accused of abusing his office, dismissed as Lord Chancellor and removed from the Council.5 His likely real offence was opposition to the protectorate. With Gardiner excluded, and Norfolk reprieved from execution but remaining in the Tower, conservative influence was fatally weakened.

The visage of the new regime was reflected in its choice of Lenten preachers. On Ash Wednesday, 23 February, Cranmer’s protégé Nicholas Ridley preached at court, denouncing images and holy water. William Barlow, bishop of St David’s, preached shortly afterwards in similar vein, to the consternation of Gardiner. He wrote to Somerset protesting it was ‘a time rather to repair that [which] needeth repair, than to make any new buildings’. Still more disturbing was an outbreak of ritual iconoclasm in Portsmouth, in Gardiner’s own diocese. The perpetrators pulled down an image of St John and disfigured a crucifix, piercing its side and boring out an eye. In London, too, reformers pre-empted policy. Even before the King was crowned, the curate and churchwardens of St Martin’s, Ironmonger Lane, remodelled their church, taking down the images and substituting for them scriptural sentences: ‘Thou shalt make no graven images, lest thou worship them.’ The rood was replaced with a painting of the royal arms.

This was too much, too quickly. The Privy Council ordered the rood at least to go back up, and gave the wardens ‘a grave admonition’. Henry’s settlement, including the Six Articles, remained in force. On 13 April, Bonner secured a renewed commission to inquire into breaches of the Six Articles, and a handful of sacramentarians were harassed that spring in London and Norwich.⁶

Cranmer and his allies had reasons to be circumspect. One was the Holy Roman Emperor, seriously concerned at the turn of events in England, and looking out for the welfare of his cousin, the Princess Mary. It was an arithmetical rule of English foreign policy that the Emperor must not be added to the column of enemies at a time of conflict with France. On 24 April, Charles’s army smashed the forces of the Lutheran Schmalkaldic League at Mühlberg, outside Leipzig. For the first time in two decades, he was in a position to enforce his will in Germany, and made plans to bring the Protestants into line.

Internal as well as external opposition was a force to be reckoned with, and a reason for proceeding with caution. Cranmer confided to his secretary Ralph Morice that ‘we are now in doubt how men will take the change or alteration of abuses in the Church’. He added ruefully, with a touch of surely misplaced nostalgia, that reformation was an easier matter in the previous reign, for ‘if the King’s father had set forth anything for the reformation of abuses, who was he that durst gainsay it?’ On 24 May, the government issued a reassuring proclamation, condemning false rumours of impending ‘innovations and changes in religion’.⁷

That was a piece of misdirection and misinformation of which Cromwell might have been proud. Despite Cranmer’s ruminations on Henry’s bluff indefatigability, the old King was usually alert to the dangers of popular opposition, and he tacked instinctively to the centre when he perceived the need to conciliate the Emperor. In similar circumstances, and lacking the legitimacy of adult monarchical rule, the new government might be expected to do the same. In fact, it was drawing breath before embarking on a programme of daring and dizzying change.

Visitation

The signs were there. Nine days before the proclamation, Richard Smyth, Oxford Regius Professor of Divinity, was publically humiliated. A stalwart of the conservative surge of 1546, Smyth kept up the momentum early in 1547 by publishing a treatise maintaining that the authority of apostolic tradition was equal to that of scripture. He was forced to renounce such ‘unwritten verities’, as well as his eucharistic beliefs, from the pulpit of Paul’s Cross. Smyth’s ally, the theologian William Peryn, preached in favour of images, but he too was made to recant. Peryn had once before been an exile at Louvain, and he returned there in the early summer.

He was preceded to Louvain, in April 1547, by a London rector, John Foxe – not the martyrologist, but a one-time monk of the London Charterhouse. With the assistance of two fellow former Carthusians, Thomas Munday and Thurston Hickman, Foxe planned to take with him the left arm of their martyred prior, John Houghton, which he had kept hidden in the altar of his church of St Mary Magdalene, Old Fish Street. The scheme was discovered and the relic seized. John Hooper, still in exile at Zürich, heard the story, and expressed the gruesome hope that those responsible be ‘put to death in the church upon the same altar where this relic was hid’ – an act of such blood-shedding would be a blessing of the building, not a desecration of it. Hickman and Munday were sentenced to death as traitors, but were pardoned early the following year – a significant indication that the new regime was reluctant to make martyrs of recalcitrant Catholics.8 One such recalcitrant, in despair at the turn of events, made a martyr of himself. In May 1547, Richard Langryche, archdeacon of Cleveland in Yorkshire, and a closet papalist close to the exiles of Pole’s circle, drowned himself by leaping into the Thames from the cloister of St Magnus the Martyr, by London Bridge.⁹ Perhaps he sensed what was coming next.

There was to be a new royal visitation, picking up where Cromwell left matters in 1538. Plans for it were unveiled in May, but injunctions were not issued until July, and the visitors only set off in August. The delay was due to making ready a key instrument of reform: a Book of Homilies, which all parishes were to acquire, and from which all clergy were to read to their people, Sunday by Sunday.

There were twelve homilies in the collection, some on uncontroversial subjects, such as the wickedness of swearing and perjury. The homily ‘against contention and brawling’ plucked on a familiar string – uncharitable quarrelling about religion, ‘upon the alebenches or other places’. It sought to shame listeners into modesty of word and demeanour. St Paul detested to hear among the Corinthians, ‘I hold of Paul, I of Cephas, and I of Apollo’. What would he think if he could hear the words of contention ‘which be now almost in every man’s mouth’: ‘he is a Pharisee, he is a new-broached brother, he is a good Catholic father, he is a papist, he is a heretic’? The mystical body of Christ, once a garment without seam, was rent and torn.

It sounded like a Catholic lament, or typical Henrician hand-wringing. But there was a twist. Charity and silence were not always the appropriate responses; at times it was necessary ‘to answer a fool according to his foolishness’. Christ’s own example licensed righteous rebuke and godly zeal. The homily contained a revealing (and chilling) illustration from the Old Testament: Moses in his anger broke the tablets of the law ‘when he saw the Israelites dancing about a [golden] calf, and caused to be killed 23,000 of his own people’. The author of this sanguinary sermon was perhaps Latimer; the opening salutation to ‘good Christian people’ is characteristic of his preaching style.10

Suffering fools was certainly no characteristic of the Homilies as a whole. The homily ‘Of Good Works’ culminated in a sarcastic litany of the ‘false doctrine, superstition, idolatry, hypocrisy’ that hindered the progress of God’s Word: relics, images, shrines, monasteries, rosary beads, holy water, bells, palms, candles, fraternities, purgatory and a host of ‘papistical superstitions’. Such practices were ‘by Antichrist invented’.

The homily was framed as an epitaph for a vanquished world of delusions: these were things used ‘of late days … among us’. This was disingenuous; monasticism was certainly banished, but several other items on the list (the use of Palm Sunday palms, for example) were still in the required ceremonial repertoire of the Church at the time the Injunctions were issued. Underlying the mockery was a gnawing anxiety, expressed as a piece of homespun anthropology: ‘Such hath been the corrupt inclination of man, ever superstitiously given to make new honouring of God [out] of his own head.’

There was a remedy. The homily on good works was paired with another, ‘Of the true, lively and Christian faith’. Cranmer wrote both, along with a third, crucial, homily on salvation. The archbishop was at pains to reiterate that faith was not the alternative to good works, but their grounding and source. And he returned to the nuanced qualification made in response to the King’s Book in 1543, that a true saving faith must be accompanied by other virtues, such as repentance. But there was no equivocation: ‘we be justified by faith only, freely, and without works’.11 Luther’s central theological insight, the animating impulse of the evangelical movement, was – without discussion by committee, Act of Parliament, or formula agreed in Convocation – now placed at the centre of the teaching mission of the English Church.

The Homilies praised Henry for promoting God’s Word, and abolishing superstition, but they directly repudiated the teaching of the King’s Book on the most foundational point of disputed theology. It was the ground on which Stephen Gardiner, colossus of Henrician conservatism, chose to make his stand. Gardiner bombarded Cranmer and Somerset with letters, questioning the legality of bypassing bishops and Convocation, and emphasizing the risks of confusing laypeople, and of discrediting the clergy, by requiring priests ‘to rehearse an homily made by another’. Poorly delivered preaching was worse than no preaching at all. Gardiner knew of a parish in Cambridge: ‘when the vicar goeth into the pulpit … the multitude of the parish goeth straight out of the church home to drink’.

Along with the tactical manoeuvres and special pleading, there was a more fundamental objection to the Homilies, and to the entire scheme of reform Gardiner knew Cranmer and Somerset were preparing to unleash. It was neither sensible nor right to change Henry VIII’s settlement while his son was a minor. The Council should ‘deliver this realm to the King at 18 years of age, as the King his father, whose soul God assoil, left it’. It was a shrewd blow at the weakest point in the armour of the new regime. Minorities, as England’s experience in the fifteenth century painfully recalled, were often times of crisis and instability: why rock the boat? Josiah was the exemplar of youthful godliness, but minds might easily turn to another Old Testament text, a poignant warning in the book of Ecclesiastes: ‘woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child’. With his lawyer’s sense for a good, counter-intuitive argument, Gardiner suggested that further reforms in England would actually be pleasing to Rome, reinforcing the Pope’s argument ‘that where his authority is abolished, there, at every change of governors, shall be change in religion’.¹²

Gardiner’s forensic brilliance could not, however, conceal a fundamental weakness in his argument. The conservatives’ watchwords were tradition, obedience and authority. But through the preceding reign it was obedience to royal authority, and acceptance of the crown’s right to prescribe ceremonies and traditions, which underpinned their public positions. For the royal supremacy to turn unequivocally against them was a disaster. If Catholicism without the Pope was now Catholicism without pope or king, it was hard to see where it had left to go, other than homewards to Rome. Professions of loyalty to Henry of blessed memory, to the King’s Book and Six Articles, had some popular appeal. But it was a strategy without an obvious future.

For signs were starting to emerge, in his homework and Latin exercise books, that young Edward had inhaled deeply the atmosphere of evangelical humanism generated by his tutors and his step-mother, Catherine Parr. What Edward might do on reaching his majority should have filled Catholics with trepidation, not optimism.13 The hope – unspoken, unspeakable – was that the King might fall into the hands of better guardians, able to temper his youthful enthusiasms. Somerset was not, in fact, Edward’s closest blood relative. The King’s half-sister, Mary, was now a resolute woman of thirty-one, and, to some, the ideal candidate for regent.

Gardiner’s protests notwithstanding, the visitation got under way at the end of August. The injunctions were a version of those of 1538, with significant additions and modifications. Churches were to set up a box for offerings to the poor, an alternative repository for monies previously bestowed upon ‘blind devotions’. In addition to the bible, all parishes were to purchase a copy of Erasmus’s gospel Paraphrases, an English translation of which was begun at the end of the last reign under the supervision of Catherine Parr, to which the Princess Mary was persuaded to contribute. The final product was a less ecumenical exercise than this pedigree suggested. Its evangelical editor, Nicholas Udall, declared in the Preface that the papacy had ‘infected the clear fountain of God’s Word with the suds of human traditions’, co-opting Erasmus as a supporter of the break with Rome.¹⁴

A range of devotional activities was further regulated and restricted. Recitation of the rosary was now condemned, and parish processions – an important focus of local ritual and ceremonial life – were forbidden. Thomas Foster of Louth’s 1536 prediction that people would be prevented from following the cross turned out to be prescient. A new injunction based itself on the order Henry produced on his return from Hull in 1541, angered at the survival of northern superstitions. The material clutter of pilgrimage – ‘shrines, covering of shrines, all tables, candlesticks, trindles or rolls of wax, pictures, paintings, and all other monuments of feigned miracles’ – was to be destroyed, ‘so that there remain no memory of the same’. Obliteration was to include wall-paintings and stained-glass windows, and curates must exhort parishioners ‘to do the like within their several houses’.

The Injunctions did not prohibit images, though the concession of 1538 that they served as ‘books of unlearned men’ was dropped in favour of a grudging statement that they served no other purpose than as ‘a remembrance, whereby men may be admonished of the holy lives and conversation of them that the said images do represent.’ No candles were to burn in front of them – not even before the crucifix on the rood loft, where many parishes relocated their votive lights after the restrictions of 1538. The Injunctions further specified not just removal, but destruction of ‘abused’ images, and added censing (perfuming with incense) to the list of what constituted abuse.¹⁵

There was the potential for both lenient and rigorist interpretation of what the Injunctions said about images. The selection of visitors ensured the latter would prevail. Six sets of commissioners toured the country in circuits. Almost without exception, they were convinced evangelical reformers, men such as Nicholas Ridley, Richard Morison, Dean Simon Heynes of Exeter and Christopher Nevinson, a veteran of the Henrician culture wars in Cranmer’s diocese of Canterbury. There were survivors – like George Constantine – of the earliest days of the evangelical movement, but also a few who burned with the zeal of recent converts. John Old, registrar to the commissioners of the midland circuit, recalled in 1556 how it had been ten or eleven years since his ‘first entry into the gospel’, and his emergence out of ‘the damnable darkness of Antichrist’s iniquity’.16

Armed with powers to supplement the Injunctions with ones of their own, the visitors oversaw a transformation of England’s churches. In parish after parish, they ordered images removed and walls limewashed. The sometimes surprisingly large sums incurred were recorded in parish accounts: at Tilney in Norfolk the wardens paid 35 shillings ‘for whiting of the church and stopping of the holes’ – the niches where statues stood. The process was particularly thorough in London, where, the chronicler Charles Wriothesley neutrally recorded, ‘All images in every parish church … were pulled down and broken by the commandment of the said visitors.’

No distinction was made between images of saints and carved figures of Christ. The great roods – visual centrepiece of every church, and material embodiment of Catholicism’s incarnational theology – started to come down. At St Paul’s in London, the labourers were careless: the rood fell crashing from its mounting and two of their number were killed. ‘The papish priests said it was the will of God for pulling down of the said idols,’ Wriothesley’s chronicle derisively noted. The imperial ambassador, Francis Van der Delft, noticed how destruction of roods went beyond the letter of the Injunctions, and protested to Somerset. The Lord Protector replied they would indeed have remained, were it not for ‘the superstitious simplicity of the people, who constantly continued still to come and offer out of their poverty both wheat and bread’ – all pocketed by avaricious priests. Somerset, his forces now heavily engaged in Scotland, blandly reassured the ambassador no further innovations were in the offing.¹⁷

The nationwide iconoclasm of autumn 1547 was no mere bureaucratic enforcement of regulations: it was a festival of destruction, a performance of gleeful triumph of the new ways over the old. As in 1538, there were moments of drama and revelation. Bishop Barlow preached at Paul’s Cross on 27 November, taking with him into the pulpit an image of the Resurrection of Christ. This was ‘made with vices’, allowing a puppet Jesus to emerge from the sepulchre and bless onlookers with his hand. It was scarcely fraud of the kind John Hilsey alleged about the Rood of Boxley from the same pulpit a decade before, but that no longer mattered. Barlow preached against ‘the great abomination of idolatry in images’, showing as a further exhibit an image of Our Lady the clergy of St Paul’s tried to hide from the visitors. After the sermon, the ‘idols’ were handed to the apprentice boys in the crowd and smashed to pieces.

Provincial towns staged their own spectaculars. At Shrewsbury, images of Our Lady, Mary Magdalene and St Chadd were gathered from the churches, and burned in the marketplace. A few miles to the south-east, at Thomas Butler’s Much Wenlock, another bonfire was lit on 7 November: the bones of St Milburga were consumed along with four images from neighbouring parish churches. Milburga was the most indigenous of saints, an Anglo-Saxon princess and founding abbess of Wenlock’s first religious house. To record the event, Butler switched from his accustomed English into Latin, a linguistic indication of distress at this violation of local pieties.18

Butler’s pain was widely shared, but there was little that isolated traditionalists could attempt in the face of a well-orchestrated campaign with the force of law behind it. Even bishops could do little to resist or obstruct the visitors. Bonner tried, protesting he would only observe the Injunctions ‘if they be not contrary to God’s law and the statutes and ordinances of this Church’. He spent nearly a fortnight in the Fleet Prison before arriving at ‘better consideration of my duty of obedience’. But Gardiner, the high priest of ‘true obedience’, had found his sticking point. He was sent to the Fleet on 25 September, and remained there for the rest of the year.¹⁹

Supporters of iconoclasm were a minority of the population, but more visible than its opponents, and sometimes willing to run ahead of the law. In Norwich, a band of ‘curates and other idle persons’ went through the city churches pulling down and taking away images. The city authorities rather impotently ordered they should ‘surcease of such unlawful doings’. London, too, witnessed unofficial iconoclasm. The Privy Council at first determined on punishment for those taking down statues without authority, and for such images to be restored. But by 26 September it reached the conclusion that this ‘might engender confusion among the people whether they were abused or no’.²⁰ A pattern was starting to emerge. The government would allow the pace to be set by pressure from below, and under guise of seeking to restrain it, edge the process decisively forwards.

Services for the Living and Dead

Through the noise and activity of the summer and autumn, there was resounding silence – at least on the official side – about one imperative issue. The Homilies had nothing to say about the nature of the eucharist. Evangelicals were vocal, in pulpit and print, about the iniquities of the mass, but it remained the official act of worship. Moreover, the Six Articles were technically still in force, and anyone questioning the real, physical presence of Christ in the eucharist committed, in theory, a heinous, capital offence.

The remedy lay in a Parliament. It assembled, finally, on 4 November 1547, and within a week a bill entered the Lords for comprehensive abolition of all new felonies created in the reign of Henry VIII. These were, the act’s preamble confidently proclaimed, less tempestuous times, not requiring such severe restraints. Heresy and treason legislation was repealed, though the new act retained some provision for treason by words only.21 Crucially, the Six Articles were gone; respect for the mass was no longer ring-fenced by law.

At the start of December there were more words of reassurance for an anxious imperial ambassador: Somerset pointed out that the King attended mass at the opening of Parliament, and continued to have celebrations of it at court. Van der Delft was unconvinced; he had heard that mass was no longer said in the Protector’s own house, in the Earl of Warwick’s (Dudley’s) or in Catherine Parr’s. Though mass continued to be performed in the churches, common people ‘are beginning to sing psalms in their own language’. Such adaptations on the ground were not unwelcome to the evangelical leadership. At the mass that opened the Parliament, Nicholas Ridley preached, and the main parts – Gloria, Creed, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei – were all sung in English.²²

Further ambiguous signals appeared in an Act of Parliament, passed on 10 December and reinforced by proclamation a fortnight later. The act presented itself as a measure against ‘revilers of the sacrament’, designed to rein in aggressive evangelical polemicists. There were threats of fines and imprisonment for people who ‘marvellously abused’ the eucharist with unseemly words in ‘sermons, preachings, readings, lectures, communications, arguments, talks, rhymes, songs, plays, or jests’.

It was not like the defence of the sacrament undertaken by Gardiner, Peryn and Smyth in 1546. The proclamation optimistically declared scripture to contain completely clear and sufficient guidance to the nature of the eucharist. The bread was ‘the communion or partaking of the body of Our Lord’ – a firm statement of ‘presence’, which also employed the conservatives’ favoured form of supplicatory address to God. But any further conjecture was arrogant and unedifying. In picking as examples of unhelpful speculation whether Christ was present ‘by substance only, or else but in a figure and manner of speaking’, the proclamation even-handedly rebuked sacramentarians and transubstantiationists. The high-minded tone provided useful cover for the fact that evangelicals themselves, in England as across Europe, were divided over eucharistic doctrine. The dogmatic militancy of the radicals was an embarrassment and irritation to evangelical intellectuals hoping to build a broad consensus. People who insisted on asking ‘how He was there present’, an exasperated Nicholas Ridley declared in a Paul’s Cross sermon that November, were ‘worse than dogs and hogs’.²³

The real meat of the act was slipped in as an apparent afterthought. To be more agreeable to the first institution of the eucharist, and to the practice of the Church for 500 years after Christ, communicants should receive under both kinds, wine as well as bread. Demands for ‘the cup’ were the central concern for Hussite heretics in the fifteenth century, and the clerical monopoly of communion wine was, from the 1520s onwards, a staple of evangelical attacks on traditional priesthood.

The issue, in itself, was of relatively little theological weight: few if any believed Christ was only present cumulatively in bread and wine, like a picture across interlocking pieces of a jigsaw. Yet communion in two kinds was totemic of the differences between opponents and defenders of the old order, which is why Bishops Bonner, Rugge of Norwich, Day of Chichester, Skip of Hereford and Heath of Worcester all voted against the measure in the Lords. A petition to introduce it had already come from the lower clergy in Convocation, along with calls to legalize clerical marriage. In years past, the Lower House of Convocation had been a bastion of religious conservatism. It is more likely that the royal visitors had helped to ensure the return of pliant representatives than that the clergy as a whole were swinging decisively in favour of reform.24

One significant measure remained to be dealt with before Parliament dispersed for its Christmas recess. A bill ‘for chantries’ was introduced into the Lords on 6 December, and passed on Christmas Eve. The blow had been a long time falling. Henry VIII’s Chantries Act of 1545 set a precedent for dissolution, and in the meantime the doctrine of purgatory had been further undermined: in the Homilies, and in a new form of bidding prayers stipulated by the Injunctions. Prayer for the dead was refocused, away from their current condition and towards a future state of felicity: ‘that they with us, and we with them at the day of judgement, may rest both body and soul, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the Kingdom of Heaven’.

The justification given for seizing the endowments of intercession, from elaborate chantries and colleges, through parish guilds and fraternities, down to anniversary observances, and simple obit lamps, was – in contrast to the Henrician act – unapologetically religious. Ignorance of the meaning of salvation through the death of Christ had been promoted by ‘devising and phantasing vain opinions of purgatory and masses satisfactory, to be done for them which be departed’.

After this unequivocal statement, the act itself was long and convoluted, offering reassurances to various institutions, interests and private individuals. Corporations and craft guilds were to lose only those revenues devoted to ‘superstitious’ purposes; the soon-to-be-appointed chantry commissioners were granted powers to re-endow grammar schools and preaching stipends supported out of chantry funds; and where populous parishes were threatened with the loss of vital clerical manpower, they could assign revenues ‘towards the sufficient finding and maintenance of one or more priests’.

The Chantries Act was emblazoned with the idealism of the evangelical reformers. It began with a promise that suppressing the blindness and ignorance of prayer for the dead would allow King and Council to convert wasted resources to ‘good and godly uses’: schools, universities, ‘better provision for the poor and needy’.25

It sounded all too familiar. Promises of lavish investment in social and religious causes echoed around the last large-scale government seizure of church assets. But very little monastic wealth was returned to the localities. Financial pressures on government had in the meantime increased. To the ongoing expense of maintaining Henry VIII’s meagre conquests in France, Somerset added the costs of a major offensive in Scotland. It had ambitious geo-political objectives: nothing less than the creation of an Anglo-Scots, ‘British’ polity through a union between King Edward and the young Mary, Queen of Scots, a marriage to which the Scots had agreed, back in 1543, but subsequently reneged.

The war began spectacularly well. On 10 September, the English were victorious at the battle of Pinkie – a slaughter of Scotsmen greater even than at Flodden in 1513. But the government in Scotland refused to capitulate, and sought aid from the French; the English campaign increasingly lost momentum and direction. Somerset’s policy of consolidating English gains through establishment of numerous permanent garrisons was hugely, ruinously, expensive.²⁶

Good reasons to suspect, then, that chantry revenues were destined not for preachers’ stipends but for soldiers’ victuals. There seems little other way to account for the extraordinary fact that on 15 December, at the fourth reading of the bill in the House of Lords, Cranmer joined with Bonner, Tunstall and other conservative bishops in voting against the measure. He was evidently sufficiently reassured to support its final passage nine days later. But, at the close of an extraordinary year of liberating, revolutionary change, it was a small but revealing portent of troubles ahead.²⁷

The Time of Schism

The second year of Edward VI was a terminus and a tipping-point. Shortly after the King’s death, the churchwardens of Stanford-in-the-Vale, Berkshire, would look back and identify the early part of 1548, not 1534, as ‘the time of schism, when this realm was divided from the Catholic Church’.²⁸

In the depths of winter, a brisk pace was being set. On 18 January, the Council abolished ashes for Ash Wednesday, palms on Palm Sunday and – most poignantly – candles on the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin (Candlemas), then only a fortnight away. The clean-sweep of ‘sacramentals’ was completed shortly afterwards when Cranmer wrote to the bishops ordering them to enforce bans on holy bread, holy water and creeping to the cross on Good Friday – the measure Cranmer nearly persuaded Henry to agree to in January 1546. It was all carried out under a cloak of restraint and moderation: a proclamation of 6 February forbad preachers or laypeople from persuading people against ‘the old accustomed rites and ceremonies’, or bringing in innovations of their own. But written instructions appended to episcopal copies of the proclamation made clear that the restrictions did not apply to any changes Cranmer had already ordered, or might do hereafter.29

A momentous order was already being prepared. Images were removed from London churches before the end of the preceding year, but in other places, reformers and conservatives argued ferociously over whether particular statues had been ‘abused’ in the sense intended by the Injunctions. In a Paul’s Cross sermon of 18 January, Hugh Latimer fulminated against the persuasions of ‘blanchers’ – white-washers – who insinuated that abuse of images was a small matter, easily reformed. These people urged caution, warning that ‘the people will not bear sudden alterations; an insurrection may be made’. No doubt blanchers once whispered in the ear of godly King Hezekiah. But he nonetheless ‘cast out all images; he destroyed all idolatry’.

On 21 February, the Council decided Edward should be Hezekiah. Cranmer, who undoubtedly approved the order, was told to implement a complete removal of images as the only way to avoid ‘strife and contention’ happening in ‘almost every place’. Once again, a radical leap of reform represented itself as a steady step for unity and quietness, and the emphasis was now on removal, rather than destruction. But there was a whiff of old Lollardy around the councillors’ declared concern that ‘the lively images of Christ should not contend for [argue over] the dead images’.

The blanket ban on church imagery was a visual and aesthetic as well as a devotional revolution. For all of the downbeat manner of its introduction, evangelicals recognized a moment of glorious triumph. John ab Ulmis, a German refugee in Oxford, wrote excitedly to Bullinger that images were ‘extirpated root and branch in every part of England’. There was more: ‘the mass, that darling of the papists, is shaken’.³⁰

The declaration against ‘irreverent speaking’ about the sacrament proved a dead letter. Early Edwardian London experienced both an implosion of images, and an explosion of expository texts. It was fuelled by the removal of Henrician censorship, the patronage of evangelical presses by Somerset, Cranmer and other leading figures, and by the relocation to London of experienced continental printers, such as Steven Mierdman, a refugee from Charles V’s crackdown on evangelicals in Antwerp. In the early 1540s the London presses produced around 100 editions per year; in 1547 that figure shot up to 192, and in 1548 to 268. ‘What a number of books there be abroad, in every man’s hand,’ marvelled the evangelical writer Philip Nichols. The overwhelming majority were religious, and jostling alongside the more sombre bibles and catechisms were dozens of short, racy pamphlets attacking the Catholic clergy and the mass.

The titles of items published in 1548 speak for themselves: The Indictment against Mother Mass; The Upcheering of the Popish Mass; A Brief Recantation of Mistress Missa. The consecrated host was ‘Round Robin’, ‘Jack of the box’. The authors were zealots, but not necessarily outsiders. The mock trial conducted in an Examination of the Mass was the brainchild of William Turner, a returning exile employed as a chaplain in Somerset’s household.

For Catholics, to whom these were sacred mysteries, it all constituted an ordeal of derision and ridicule they could do little but endure. Miles Huggarde, an enterprising London hosier, composed An Aunswer to the Ballad called the Abuse of ye Blessed Sacrament, replying to the mockers in their own vein. Publication was suppressed, and Huggarde hauled before the Privy Council.31

There were serious theological critiques of the mass too – many of them in a rash of translations of the works of European divines; no fewer than thirty-seven of these appeared in 1548.³² But it was not a time for reasoned, reflective argument, and nor did it matter that attacks on the mass were often radically incoherent, portraying it simultaneously as a ridiculous piece of empty pageantry, and a dangerous sink of Satanic infection. A growing body of evangelical believers – like the Lollards now in part subsumed into their ranks – measured themselves by their opposition to the mass. It was a backhanded tribute to the success of Catholic authorities, Roman and Henrician alike, in making eucharistic belief the touchstone of theological orthodoxy.

The wounds of a divided nation were most acutely apparent in London, but everywhere in England disunity was recognized as the new reality. In the early part of 1548, an incident took place at the free school in Bodmin, in the heart of Cornwall – undoubtedly comic, but ominously revealing of the world in which schoolchildren were growing up:

The scholars, who used customably to divide themselves for better exploiting their pastimes, grew therethrough into two factions, the one whereof they called the old religion, the other the new. This once begun, was prosecuted among them in all exercises, and now and then handled with some eagerness and roughness … At last, one of the boys converted the spill of an old candlestick into a gun, charged it with powder and stone, and (through mischance or ungraciousness) therewith killed a calf. Whereupon, the owner complained, the master whipped, and the division ended.³³

It seems highly unlikely that half the boys in Bodmin School were the sons of evangelical converts. But the selection of gang-names suggests that even children in the far corners of the land understood how the divide between reformers and conservatives was the political fact of the day. Religious allegiance, in play as in life, was becoming a matter of choice, of group solidarity, and occasionally – as the unfortunate cow discovered – of unpredictable violence.

Halfway between London and Bodmin, in the Dorset coastal town of Poole, the arrival of Thomas Hancock, a zealous evangelical curate, exacerbated tensions in an already divided community. Hancock’s preaching against the mass provoked a walkout from church. ‘Come from him, good people,’ cried Thomas White, merchant and former mayor, ‘he came from the devil and teacheth unto you devilish doctrine!’ Hancock also had his supporters. They were, he later recalled, ‘the first that in that part of England were called Protestants’. This nickname for German Lutherans was starting to be mockingly applied to evangelicals by their opponents; in time, they would adopt it for themselves.34

In London, the government believed it could control and use the pressure. But a proclamation of late 1547, condemning youths, servants and apprentices who behaved belligerently towards priests – ‘reviling, tossing of them, taking violently their caps and tippets [ceremonial scarves] from them’ – points to a current of religiously aggressive disorder it was difficult to turn on and off at will.³⁵

On 8 March 1548 the mass, the great floating fortress of orthodoxy and tradition, moved at last on its moorings. A new ‘Order for the Communion’, enforced by proclamation, made an insertion into the liturgy, clarifying the arrangements for communion under both kinds. It was notable on at least two grounds. Firstly, it was in English: prayer and exhortation in the vernacular would now interrupt the flow of murmured Latin at a critical point in the celebration. Secondly, it contained a remarkable and unheralded innovation. As people prepared themselves for communion, the priest was to urge

such as shall be satisfied with a general confession [a text for this was provided], not to be offended with them that do use, to their further satisfying, the auricular and secret confession to the priest; nor those also which think needful or convenient for the quietness of their own consciences particularly to open their sins to the priest, to be offended with them that are satisfied with their humble confession to God, and the general confession to the Church.

In other words, confession to a priest – a key requirement of the Six Articles, and an obligation on all laypeople since the thirteenth century – was declared entirely optional. The implications were profound, and perhaps not entirely grasped at the time. The hold of the clergy on the consciences and compliance of laypeople was significantly weakened. Offered an opportunity to evade an onerous and often embarrassing annual duty, it is likely that a majority of laypeople, and not just convinced evangelicals, ceased confessing their sins to their curate.

The Order was not designed as a theological statement, but alert listeners heard that when Christians received the sacrament with a penitent heart, ‘we spiritually eat the flesh of Christ’. If Christ was received ‘spiritually’, was he also there physically or ‘really’?

At Easter that year, parishioners were offered opposing explanations. It was a time, complained a conservative chronicler, of ‘much preaching throughout all England against the sacrament of the altar’. At St Paul’s, the former friar John Cardmaker told people that ‘it was but bread and wine’. In all London, only one preacher apparently stood against the innovators: William Leighton, canon of St Paul’s, whose Sunday sermons caused ‘much controversy and much business’. Yet in Cranmer’s diocese of Canterbury several clergymen introduced the new Order with stout declarations that after consecration ‘there remaineth no material bread’.

On Easter Sunday, at Womenswold, on the road between Canterbury and Dover, the vicar said two masses. The first was attended by thirty parishioners who had made Lenten confession: he administered the sacrament to them in bread only, and omitted the exhortations from the Order of Communion. There was one Church of England for the nation, but an institutionalized schism in the village of Womenswold. Some parishioners were comforted, others alarmed, by a promise in the proclamation of 8 March of further ‘travail for the reformation and setting forth of such godly orders as may be most to … the advancement of true religion’.36

It is sometimes supposed that in 1547–8 the Edwardian regime was finding its feet; that changes were relatively minor, that real reformation was still to come. It did not feel like that to people in the localities, seeing ceremonies they had known their whole lives brought to an abrupt, inexplicable end. John Steynor, a merchant writing a chronicle of events in Worcester, injected notes of dismay and disbelief into his 1548 entry:

[O]n Candlemas day was no candles hallowed nor borne. On Ash Wednesday was no ashes hallowed. 25 March was Palm Sunday, and the Annunciation of Our Lady, and then was no palms hallowed, nor cross borne, as in former times. On Good Friday was no creeping to the cross.

The litany of absences was echoed by Robert Parkyn, curate of Adwick-le-Street in Yorkshire:

[I]n the beginning of Lent, all such suffrages as pertained to the sanctifying of ashes was omitted and left undone, and no ashes given to any persons. In the same Lent, all images, pictures, tables, crucifixes, tabernacles, was utterly abolished, and taken away forth of churches within this realm …³⁷

Unwelcome though the orders may have been, for the most part parishes complied with them. Churchwardens’ accounts from across the country in 1548 document the removal of images, the white-washing of walls and re-glazing of windows – though later discoveries of images hidden in roofs and under flooring, or buried in gardens, prove that orders to destroy them were not always obeyed.

Communities scarcely had time to react to the visitation before another set of officials was upon them. Chantry commissioners began compiling their surveys in February 1548, and were soon supervising the suppression of obits, lights and parish guilds, and arranging sales of ex-chantry lands. In most places, the commissioners were conscientious about re-endowing schools and hospitals funded from chantry income, though promises in the Chantries Act of lavish establishment for new charitable institutions proved every bit as hollow as Cranmer suspected they would be.

The dissolution was not an unmitigated disaster for education and charitable welfare, but there were losses of schools and almshouses in communities not organized enough to petition relentlessly for their retention. Most of all, there was a loss of clerical manpower. Chantry priests, like monks, were to be compensated with pensions. But with the collapse of guilds, and the outlawing of intercessory prayer, there were few remaining prospects for employment within the Church. Parishes benefiting pastorally from the contribution of chantry and fraternity priests were thrown back on the resources of their incumbent, and the odd curate or assistant. As the job market contracted, the numbers coming forward for ordination shrank: patrons would soon struggle to fill vacancies with properly qualified candidates.38

The local disruption experienced in 1547–8 is hard to overstate. The phrase would have meant nothing to them, but for many English people this was the moment the Middle Ages came to an end. In the little moorland parish of Morebath in Devon, the financial and devotional life of the church had long been intertwined in complex arrangements involving votive lights in front of images. These were maintained by various ‘stores’ – funds with their own officials, some functioning in the manner of guilds, which sustained the social and festive life of the parish. The main source of income was the sale of wool from church sheep distributed among the flocks of local farmers. The system was already under pressure in Henry’s reign, but in 1547–8 it fell apart: the royal visitation forced the sale of the sheep, and, along with a cornerstone of its collective devotional life, the finances of the parish simply collapsed.

In the more substantial Devon community of Ashburton, the St Lawrence Guild doubled as the town’s municipal authority, controlling the market and the local hospital. Its dissolution, with that of other intercessory institutions, left only a single priest in a parish church once served by seven. One of the commissioners’ servants was set on by a mob in the market square, but the hospital’s suppression went ahead.³⁹

If social bonds among the living were strained by the reforms, those between the living and the dead fractured in more profound and impenetrable ways. Even through the tumult of the Henrician years, people continued to call the departed to mind in a variety of performative ways: obits, anniversaries, intercessory masses, recitation of parish bede rolls. On 1 November 1547, Thomas Hancock felt the wrath of his parishioners in Poole when he ordered his curate to ignore a request to say Dirige for all Christian souls: they ‘as it were with one mouth [did] call me knave’.

It all came abruptly to an end in 1548. ‘Superstitious’ prayer for the dead was policed closely by the royal visitors, who used their supplementary injunctions to prohibit the ringing of knells at funerals, or at Halloween. After the Chantries Act, endowed prayer for the dead was effectively illegal; its virtually complete disappearance from wills after that point should occasion little surprise.

It is harder to account for the apparent indifference to monuments of the dead, which is suggested by parish accounts recording the sale of memorial brasses ripped from church floors. The churchwardens of St Andrew Holborn, London, sold a hundredweight of the stuff in 1547 for 36s., and more the following year. It was a similar story at St Thomas’s, Salisbury: 36s. in 1547–8 for ‘brass which was upon graves and tombs’. Long Melford, Suffolk, got rid of three hundredweight of brasses in 1548, and St Martin’s, Leicester, nine hundredweight.40 It seems an extraordinary, and extraordinarily sudden, repudiation of the cult of memory animating these communities for a hundredweight of years.

Yet, with exceptions, particularly in London, it seems less likely that communities were swept up in enthusiasm for change than that they feared more change was in the offing. Pre-emptive sales of parish assets reflected worries about imminent confiscation. Such concerns, as in 1536, were understandable. In addition to lists of church goods drawn up by the chantry commissioners, the Privy Council ordered bishops in 1547 to supply inventories of parochial plate and vestments – ostensibly to prevent embezzlement and secure assets for the use of the parish. An insensitive mishandling of the commission by William Body, archdeacon of Cornwall, provoked a ‘tumultuous assembly’ at Penwith in December 1547. Rather than, as he was supposed to, meet with churchwardens separately, Body summoned representatives from parishes to a single meeting, and gave them the impression that ‘confiscation should have ensued to the King’s majesty’s behalf’. Local gentry were able to calm the situation, and Body was imprisoned for a week ‘to appease the people’s demonstration’.⁴¹

Body – a layman, and former agent of Cromwell, who in 1537 leased the archdeaconry for profit from Wolsey’s bastard son, Thomas Winter – did not learn his lesson. On 5 April 1548, he was in West Cornwall, at Helston, a market town at the northern end of the Lizard Peninsula, enforcing orders for the removal of images in his usual bombastic style. Stirred up by Martin Geoffrey, a priest from nearby St Keverne, a crowd from half a dozen surrounding parishes congregated in the town. They stormed the house where Body was lodging, dragged him out and killed him. John Reseygh of Helston then made a proclamation in the market square

that they would have all such laws as was made by the late King Henry the 8th, and none other, until the King’s Majesty that now is, accomplish the age of 24 years, and that whoso would defend Body, or follow such new fashions as he did, they would punish him likewise.

This was Gardiner’s position, and constituted alarming evidence of conservatives rallying around the Six Articles. Within days there were said to be 5,000 people gathered in Helston. In the event, local gentry were able to raise forces and suppress the disorder without major bloodshed. Most participants were pardoned, but leniency had limits: Geoffrey was sent to London for a traitor’s death, and perhaps a dozen ringleaders were executed in Cornwall.42

‘Unlearned and indiscreet preachers and other priests’, complained a proclamation of 24 April, ‘as well in confession as otherwise’, incited subjects to ‘insurrection and rebellion’; others were sowing false rumours of new taxes. It all sounded alarmingly reminiscent of 1536. But the government had no intention of slowing down or rolling back its policy. The immediate remedy was to ban preaching by clergymen possessing no licence from the King, the Lord Protector, or archbishop of Canterbury. Around eighty priests were formally licensed at this time, virtually all reliable evangelicals. The list included stalwarts such as Latimer and Rowland Taylor, but also firebrands like Cardmaker, Turner and ‘John Knox, Scot’.⁴³ Parishes not blessed with visits from these luminaries had to make do with the Homilies.

A sermon of a different sort was preached at court on 29 June, St Peter’s day. Stephen Gardiner had been released from prison in February, after giving grudging and qualified assent to a statement on justification. Back in his diocese, he continued to obstruct evangelical preaching, and was summoned again in front of the Council in May, and ordered to make a declaration of ‘the King’s Majesty’s authority in his young years to be as great as if His Highness were of many more’. A couple of days before giving the sermon – of which he refused to allow the Council an advance copy – Gardiner was visited by William Cecil, Somerset’s secretary. He told Gardiner that, in order to avoid trouble, he should not speak of ‘doubtful matters’ concerning the sacrament or the mass. Pressed to say what he meant, Cecil spelled it out: ‘transubstantiation’. Condescendingly, Gardiner told the accomplished Cambridge humanist ‘he wist not what transubstantiation meant’. Picking his words with lawyerly care, the bishop said he intended to speak on ‘the very presence’ of Christ’s body and blood, ‘which is the Catholic faith, and no doubtful matter, nor yet in controversy’.

Gardiner’s sermon was preached before the King and a large crowd in a royal garden at Whitehall. It was a masterly exercise in crossing the line while seeming obediently to toe it. He defended the repudiation of the Pope, and the dissolution of the monasteries, though – like the old king – he believed clerical vows of chastity should be maintained. Gardiner recognized the authorities’ right to remove otherwise godly things if there was evidence of abuse of them – as with images, ceremonies and chantries. He even accepted communion in two kinds, as likely to increase lay devotion to the eucharist. But Gardiner’s qualified endorsement of the regime’s religious policies based itself on what he knew to be a false premise: that it was committed to the defence and retention of the mass, which the bishop unapologetically termed ‘a sacrifice ordained to make us the more strong in the faith and remembrance of Christ’s passion’. The sermon was a subtle, but barely coded, restatement of Gardiner’s view that the government was entitled to do no more than perfect the religious reformation of Henry VIII. A day after preaching it, Gardiner was sent to the Tower, to remain there, a querulous semi-martyr, for the remainder of the reign.44

Common Prayer

Gardiner’s assertion that the Church’s eucharistic doctrine in 1548 was exactly what it was in 1546 increased the momentum for a declaration that it wasn’t. For Cranmer, it was a matter of moving in step with European evangelical opinion – no easy matter, given how fractured that opinion was. But leading foreign divines were on hand to advise, as England offered itself as a haven from imperial oppression. In the wake of his military victory, Charles V imposed in June 1548 the Interim of Augsburg, restoring Catholic ceremonies and doctrines to Protestant German territories. Already in 1547, Peter Martyr Vermigli and Bernadino Ochino arrived in England: eminent Italians who five years earlier had abandoned the reformist Catholicism of Cardinal Pole’s circle, with its interest in justification by faith, for full-blooded German evangelicalism. Jan Laski, a Polish exile heading the reformed Church at Emden in the Netherlands, came in October 1548; Martin Bucer of Strassburg – a prize catch – followed early the next year. Cranmer actively solicited such theological immigration. In the summer of 1548 he became enthused by a suggestion of Philip Melanchthon for an international evangelical assembly to outshine the papist proceedings at Trent: a Council of Canterbury, Westminster or Cambridge.

If such a council had convened, it would have struggled to produce a eucharistic decree acceptable to all shades of evangelical outlook. By the late summer of 1548, word was out that influential opinion in England was turning decisively against the real presence. Bartholomew Traheron, an assertively sacramentarian MP, and a former exile in Zürich and Geneva, wrote triumphantly to Bullinger in September 1548: ‘Latimer has come over to our opinion respecting the true doctrine of the eucharist, together with the archbishop of Canterbury and the other bishops, who heretofore seemed to be Lutherans.’45

New doctrine demanded a new liturgy. Drafting began with a meeting in September 1548 at the former abbey of Chertsey. The conference produced an accompanying commentary, apparently satisfying the conservative clergymen taking part, such as Bishops Day, Skip and Thirlby, and Dr John Redman of Cambridge. But when it was presented to the House of Lords in December, traditionalists angrily noted that the sections defending adoration of the elements, and the place of oblation (sacrifice) in the prayer of consecration were conspicuously omitted.

Significantly, the prelude to the introduction of the new liturgy was a debate, not in Convocation, but in the Lords: laymen participated on equal terms with bishops, addressing the question laid in front of them by Protector Somerset: ‘whether bread be in the sacrament after the consecration or not’. The exchanges, over four days of debate, were fractious and angry, as it became clear to conservative bishops like Tunstall and Heath that Cranmer, his collaborator Ridley of Rochester, and their lay allies Somerset and Warwick, were determined to take the Church in new directions. The conservative-minded lay peers seem to have kept a low profile.

Cranmer and Ridley particularly highlighted the problem of the manducatio impiorum – the eating by the impious. Their insistence that unworthy recipients of communion did not receive Christ’s body in the same manner as godly ones did was a decisive step away, not just from transubstantiation, but from any notion of an objective real presence of Christ. It placed them firmly on the side of ‘the Reformed’ – the churches of Switzerland and south-west Germany – rather than the Lutherans, for whom the manducatio impiorum was a strict test of correct eucharistic doctrine.⁴⁶

Although the Lords’ debate produced little beyond evidence of irreconcilable splits in the episcopate, it was immediately followed by the introduction of legislation for a new Book of Common Prayer. An Act for ‘Uniformity of Service and Administration of the Sacraments’ passed on 15 January 1549. Bonner, Tunstall, Day, Heath, Rugge, Skip, Thirlby and Aldridge of Carlisle all predictably voted against. So did three lay lords: the Earl of Derby, Lord Dacre and Lord Windsor. A few weeks later, Lords Morley and Wharton joined Dacre and Windsor in voting against the act legalizing the marriage of priests. The statute was a belated catch-up with Convocation’s decision of 1547, and a thumb in the eye for Gardiner and other traditionalists who regarded clerical marriage as an aberration and an abomination.⁴⁷

The Act of Uniformity did not bill itself as a manifesto for revolutionary change. Its declared objective was a ‘uniform, quiet and godly order’ throughout the realm, through substituting a single manner of prayer and sacraments for a supposed jumble of existing liturgies: ‘the Use of Sarum, of York, of Bangor, and of Lincoln’.48 The Book of Common Prayer certainly simplified things for the clergy, compressing into one handy volume the forms of service that previously required recourse to various manuals and handbooks.

The services themselves were in some cases relatively little altered. Baptism retained a strongly sacramental character, adorned with rituals and objects that radical evangelicals found uncongenial: hallowing of water in the font, promises made by godparents, signing of the child’s forehead with the cross, and wrapping it in a white chrisom cloth. Public baptism in church was the norm, but there was a form for use in people’s homes, ‘in time of necessity’.

The confirmation ritual followed the Sarum rite closely, as did the marriage ceremony – though the wife’s traditional promise to be ‘bonner and buxom in bed and at the board’ was dropped: buxom, originally signifying obedient, had started to mean cheerful by the sixteenth century, and perhaps sounded indecorous. Marriage, traditionally regarded by churchmen principally as a means for producing children and avoiding fornication, was announced to be ‘for the mutual society, help and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other’ – an echo of the more positive appraisal of companionship in matrimony characteristic of evangelical writings like Heinrich Bullinger’s Der Christlich Eestand (The Christian State of Matrimony, 1540), a text produced in more translated editions than any other continental evangelical work in the reigns of Henry and Edward. The rite for visitation of the sick retained a (simplified) form of unction, ‘if the sick person desire to be anointed’, as well as optional confession and communion at the sickbed.⁴⁹

More fundamentally, the Prayer Book maintained a configuration of worship that was both cyclical and seasonal: a daily pattern of matins (morning prayer), mass and evensong, along with a calendar of feasts and festivals, and a menu of short prayers (‘collects’), epistles and gospels appropriate to the day. In the heading provided for the eucharistic service there was an overt – perhaps even cynical – effort to signal continuity with the past: ‘the Supper of the Lord, and the Holy Communion, commonly called the Mass’.

The, not Our, Lord. Cranmer, the principal author and compiler of the new liturgy, went only so far to accommodate conservative sensibilities. The new communion service was no mass of a kind English people were used to. Like the rest of the book, it was now entirely in English, the first and most fundamental fact about it noted by local chroniclers like Parkyn and Steynor.

Parkyn also noted, disbelievingly, that communion was to take place ‘without any elevation’.⁵⁰ The elevation of the host was the focal, sacral moment of the medieval Latin liturgy. But it implied a change after consecration, and invited adoration – making it unacceptable to Cranmer on both counts. The great medieval prayer of consecration, or canon, explicitly identified the priest’s action at the altar with the sacrifice of Christ. Cranmer’s translation broke the connection. The ‘oblation once offered’ by Christ on the cross was not the same as the Church’s offering of thanksgiving: Gardiner was answered.

Not all laypeople understood intricate points of sacramental theology. But they noticed other omissions: no kissing of the pax, no distribution of holy bread at the conclusion of mass. And, at first at least, no music – for settings of the English texts were not available to parish and cathedral choirs. There was further frugal pruning of the calendar: only the major biblical saints kept their days, and feasts of the Virgin were reduced to two, the Purification (minus candles) and the Annunciation. The Assumption was gone, along with the other great festival of summertime, Corpus Christi.

For all this, the new liturgy did not look, or feel, like the services of worship that replaced the mass in Strassburg, Zürich or Geneva. The priest still wore traditional vestments (though for communion, the cloak-like cope was recommended, rather than the poncho-like chasuble), candles were placed upon the altar, and there was a hint at least of prayer for the dead in the communion service’s petition to grant mercy to ‘thy servants which are departed’, and – an echo of the requiem mass – in provision for ‘celebration of the holy communion when there is a burial of the dead’.51

Potential critics were reassured that these were temporary concessions. Francisco Enzinas – known by his humanist name, Dryander – was a Spanish evangelical who fled to England from Strassburg in July 1548. In 1549 he observed that ‘some puerilities have been still suffered to remain, lest the people be offended by too great an innovation’. The book spoke ‘very obscurely’ about the Lord’s Supper. Yet it was a time to accentuate the positive. Dryander informed Bullinger on 25 March that ‘the mass is abolished, and liberty of marriage allowed to the clergy; which two I consider to be the principal heads of the entire reformation’. Other, trifling matters ‘may shortly be amended’.

Dryander’s patron, Martin Bucer, arrived in England in April, along with the Hebrew scholar Paul Fagius. Bucer wrote home to say that the cause of religion in England was ‘pretty near what could be wished’. There were faults with the new liturgy, but he had assurances ‘they are only to be retained for a time, lest the people, not having yet learned Christ, should be deterred by too extensive innovations from embracing his religion’.⁵² ‘Moderation’ was a strategy, not an intrinsic virtue.

The conciliatory face of the regime was in any case visible only from certain angles. It was not turned towards the radicals, whose numbers were feared to be growing with the influx of refugees, and whose exotic heresies alarmed and embarrassed respectable evangelical opinion. On 12 April a commission was established to seek out anabaptists: it comprised leading councillors and six bishops, Cranmer and Ridley serving alongside the conservatives Heath and Day. Several radicals were made to abjure and bear faggots at Paul’s Cross in April and May for saying a regenerate man was incapable of sin; that there was no Trinity; that baptism of infants was unprofitable. Only one refused to recant: Joan Bocher, a Kentish woman tenaciously holding to the belief that Christ’s flesh was a celestial distillation, not gifted from his earthly mother. The doctrine was most likely learned from Netherlandish immigrants, though it chimed with older Lollard brags that the Virgin was a mere ‘saffron bag’.

Bocher was convicted of heresy, and the authorities reflected on what to do with her. The radicalism problem remained. The zealous clerical exile John Hooper returned to England from Zürich at the start of May 1549, and joined the preaching rota at St Paul’s. Soon he complained to Bullinger that anabaptists flocked to his lectures, and harangued him with wayward opinions about the incarnation and spiritual regeneration. ‘Alas, not only are those heresies reviving among us which were formerly dead and buried, but new ones are springing up every day!’53

Zero-tolerance for the new heresies of the anabaptists was matched by antagonism towards the old errors of the Catholic bishops, who could scarcely plead ignorance as their excuse for reluctance to embrace the truth. In a sermon preached before the King at the conclusion of Parliament on 15 March, Latimer lambasted prelates who failed to enforce the Injunctions, or prevent their clergy from mangling the homilies: ‘I require it in God’s behalf, make them quondams [former bishops], all the pack of them!’ Someone was asked how he liked the sermon: ‘a seditious fellow’ was the testy response. Latimer got to hear of it, and gloried in the insult. Preaching again before the King on 22 March, he noted that Christ himself was a creator of dissension. Opposition, division, ‘gain-saying’: all these were signs that a preacher was doing something right. ‘In the popish mass-time there was no gainsaying; all things seemed to be in peace, in concord, in a quiet agreement.’⁵⁴ Disputatiousness was next to godliness.

In May 1549, the fight was taken to the heartland of disputatious conservative clericalism: the universities. New commissions were issued for royal visitations. The visitors were to a man evangelicals, and virtually all Cambridge products: Oxford, where Peter Martyr Vermigli was installed as Regius Professor of Divinity, was perceived as the more recalcitrant of the two institutions. The visitors came armed with statutes and injunctions designed to eliminate papistry, and in both universities they supervised debates on the eucharist, with the aim of demonstrating the triumph of the new thinking over the old.

In Oxford, the intention was that Richard Smyth would dispute with Vermigli, but before the visitors could arrive, Smyth decided to flee, via Scotland, back to Louvain. The defence of transubstantiation was left to a conservative B-team: William Tresham, William Chedsey and Morgan Philipps. The debate, ending on 1 June, was formally inconclusive, though in summing up, Richard Cox, Edward’s tutor and, since 1547, chancellor of the university, left little doubt as to the award of laurels. He thanked ‘Peter, who is worthily called Peter for the firmness of his stance … and worthily called Martyr for the countless witnesses to the truth’. Vermigli’s account of the proceedings was the one published.55

Two years of relentless evangelical advocacy created a wearied sense among traditionalists of being impotent, marginal, silenced. Around this time, an anonymous author penned a ‘ballad of Little John Nobody’. The narrator of the verses comes across a despondent figure sitting by himself, a man needing little encouragement to condemn bitterly all ‘the fashion of these new fellows’. But pressed as to what should be done, he has no answer. Each stanza ends with a poignant refrain: ‘he said he was little John Nobody, that durst not speak’.⁵⁶

One English Catholic did dare to speak. In early May, Cardinal Pole despatched emissaries to Somerset with letters that were part fatherly remonstrance, part cautious offer of reconciliation. The Protector, suggested Pole, should consider history’s lessons about the dangers of a child king, and the insecurity caused by a divided episcopate. Truth and unity might return through learned debate, which Pole magnanimously offered to chair on the neutral ground of Flanders.

Somerset’s reply, on 4 June, was imperiously dismissive. Pole must come home and sue for pardon, rather than write as if he were some foreign prince. All his fears were misplaced. Edward, with the advice of his faithful councillors, was ruling peerlessly. There was no dissent among the bishops, who had freely arrived at agreement, followed by debate and consent in Parliament. The outcome was ‘a form and rite of service’ – Somerset thoughtfully enclosed a copy of the Prayer Book along with the letter – established by statute, and set forth ‘to so great a quiet as ever was in England, and as gladly received of all parts’.⁵⁷ It was an unfortunately timed boast. For even as Somerset’s missive was being sealed and sent, the quiet of England was descending into raucous tumult, and thousands of little John Nobodies, in every part of the realm, rose and demanded their say.