SLAYING ANTICHRIST
‘Item, We will have …’
THE NEW PRAYER Book was already in use at St Paul’s and in various London parishes at the beginning of Lent 1549, but its nationwide introduction was scheduled for the end of the Easter season, the feast of Pentecost or Whitsunday, falling that year on 9 June.1 Copies were in the meantime successfully distributed, and the new liturgy was performed in place of the Latin mass on Whitsunday even in remote rural parishes.
One of these was Sampford Courtenay, a small village in mid-Devon, on the northern fringes of Dartmoor; the elderly rector there, William Harper, did as he was required. The following day, Harper was met at the church door by a volatile crowd, demanding to know what service he planned to perform. He answered he would say the new service, as he was obliged by law to do. The protestors insisted he should not, arguing – erroneously but sincerely – that Henry VIII’s will forbad innovations in religion until his son came of age. In the end, Harper ‘yielded to their wills, and forthwith revested himself in his old popish attire, and said mass and all such services as in times past accustomed’.2
It was a small start to a national crisis, and a local cataclysm. The Devon JPs hurried to Sampford Courtenay, but lacked the resolve either to appease or intimidate the mob. A minor landowner called William Hilling remonstrated angrily with the protestors, and for his pains was set upon and hacked savagely to pieces. The rioters buried the body in the churchyard, though they aligned it north–south rather than east–west: the fate of a heretic’s corpse. The domino effect seen in 1536 was once again in evidence. In the days following, contingents from numerous surrounding parishes congregated in the market town of Crediton, just north-west of Exeter, the regional capital.
A bad situation was made worse by the actions of Sir Peter Carew, a local landowner hurriedly returning from his wife’s estates in Lincolnshire, either on Somerset’s orders or on his own initiative. When the rebels refused to treat with him, Carew’s troops set light to barns on the outskirts of Crediton, causing panic and a retreat from the town in which several rebels were killed. Carew was a zealous evangelical, the worst choice for a negotiator with anxious traditionalists. Rebel forces regrouped at the nearby village of Clyst St Mary. Here, the trouble started a few days earlier, when another evangelical landowner, Walter Ralegh senior, berated an elderly woman on her way to church for praying on her rosary. On arrival, the woman told an already overwrought congregation that she had been warned ‘except she would leave her beads, and give over holy bread and holy water, the gentlemen would burn them out of their houses and spoil them’. Class hostility rubbed salt into the wounds of religious division.
The authorities’ response was hampered by strategic disagreements, between Carew and the evangelical sheriff of Devon, Peter Courtenay, on the one hand, and less confrontational local gentry on the other, allowing the rebels to encircle Exeter. By early July, trouble had spread to Cornwall, still simmering after the disturbances of the preceding year. Here, the epicentre was Bodmin, site of the pretend religious war of schoolboys, a war now starting to erupt for real. Rebels from numerous parishes, accompanied by their priests, formed camp, and elected as their leader Humphrey Arundell, one of very few local gentlemen to support the movement. Soon, the Cornishmen marched east to join the Devonians for a full-scale siege of Exeter. It commenced with a procession behind a banner of the Five Wounds, with the consecrated host carried – as on the abrogated feast of Corpus Christi just passed – in a traditional pyx.3
The Sampford Courtenay rebels had already sent demands to the Council in London, complaining of taxes, and the innovation (not in fact stipulated by the Prayer Book) that baptisms should take place only on Sundays. Encamped outside Exeter, the joint Devonshire-Cornish host drew up and despatched a definitive list of sixteen articles.4 The document abandoned any conventional pretence that the rebels were modest and loyal petitioners, couching each of its demands in blunt, peremptory terms: ‘Item, we will have …’ The tone reflected a firm belief that the government lacked legitimacy for its programme of religious change; a key demand was to ‘have the laws of our Sovereign Lord King Henry VIII concerning the Six Articles to be in use again’.
Other articles constituted a comprehensive repudiation of the reforms of the preceding two years. The rebels wanted holy bread, holy water, palms and ashes, and ‘images to be set up again in every church’. Priests should pray by names for souls in purgatory, ‘as our forefathers did’. Most of all, the rebels rejected the new liturgy: ‘we will have the mass in Latin, as was before’. Communion for the laity should be in one kind, and then only at Easter; at other times the commoners were content to have the sacrament ‘celebrated by the priest without any man or woman communicating with him’.
The new service was ‘but like a Christmas game’. The back-and-forth dialogue of the vernacular service perhaps reminded them of the festive, semi-religious entertainments performed locally at Yuletide. The early sixteenth-century churchwardens’ accounts of Ashburton contain regular payments to actors from Exeter for ‘playing a Christmas game in the church’.5 On short acquaintance, the solemnity of Cranmer’s English prose clearly failed to make an impression, or to establish itself as an appropriate register for addressing the Almighty. And some rebels could not resist taking a dig at evangelical claims to have made worship accessible and relevant: ‘We the Cornish men (whereof certain of us understand no English) utterly refuse this new English.’
For all their enthusiasm for the Six Articles, and their Gardiner-like stance on religious change during a minority, the rebels were not straightforwardly ‘Henricians’. One article sought to tear up a central plank of King Henry’s reformation: ‘We will have the whole bible, and all books of scripture in English called in again.’ There was pragmatic recognition that the availability of vernacular scripture weighted the scales in favour of the innovators – ‘we be informed that otherwise the clergy shall not of long time confound the heretics’. Nor was it too late to reverse another of Henry VIII’s proud achievements: the dissolution of the monasteries. The rebels wanted to restore a measured and scaled-down monasticism, of which early sixteenth-century humanist reformers might have approved: two places in every county where ‘devout persons’ would pray for the King and commonwealth. That these foundations should be supported by offerings given to church-boxes was a slap in the face for reformers, who instituted the parish poor-box precisely as an alternative to ‘superstitious’ benefactions. Even without such offerings, the new abbeys would be generously endowed. They were to have ‘the half part of the abbey lands and chantry lands, in every man’s possessions, howsoever he came by them’.
This provision showed political naivety about, or perhaps proletarian disregard for, the concerns of the gentry, who were – in contrast to 1536 – severely under-represented in rebel counsels. Landowners paying good money for monastic or chantry lands were extremely loath, whatever their religious inclinations, to relinquish them. An anonymous Devon gentleman, writing in late July, made his feelings plain: ‘No one thing maketh me more angry with these rebels than [this] one article … I would, for every two strokes to be stricken for treason, strike one to keep my lands.’6
The articles contained one resounding silence, on the issue headlining the comparable list produced by the Pilgrims at Pontefract a dozen years before. There was no appeal for the Pope to be restored to headship of the Church. It may be this was a matter of little pressing popular concern, and the omission reflected a gut feeling that Catholicism did not have to be Roman to be orthodox. But it is equally possible the rebel leaders feared their legalistic demand for restoration of the 1546 settlement might be tactically compromised by any overt repudiation of the royal supremacy on which it was based. The rebels did, however, insist ‘the Lord Cardinal Pole’ be offered a free pardon, and summoned from Rome to take his place as first or second among the King’s councillors. It was hard to imagine such a scenario on any basis other than reconciliation with the papacy.
Pope or no pope, the rebel demands were offensive enough. And they were infused with a rhetoric of confrontation and religious conflict that once more homed in on the eucharist – supposed symbol of Christian wholeness – as the principal point of division. The West Countrymen planned sharp remedies for anyone opposed to reserving the consecrated host above the high altar, and worshipping it there: ‘We will have them die like heretics against the holy Catholic faith.’
As the situation spiralled out of control, Somerset remained under the misapprehension it was a small rebellion confined to Sampford Courtenay. He advised the local justices to make concessions, while despatching a paltry force under the command of Lord Russell. The response was inadequate because the Devon stirs were not an isolated occurrence. Disorder was breaking out across southern and midland England, and the Lord Protector was soon adrift on a sea of troubles.
The protests were the fermented product of a potent blend of religious and economic grievance. In many places, local communities were angry about enclosure – the gentry’s practice of fencing or hedging areas of land to which commoners previously enjoyed access, often converting use of the land from cereals to animal pasturage. Social reformers and government advisors had for decades believed – rightly or wrongly – that the practice encouraged rural depopulation, and raised the price of commodities. As Lord Protector, Somerset professed a concern for the plight of the poor that was not wholly disingenuous. But he also worried that enclosure increased the cost and narrowed the tax-base for furtherance of the Scottish war with which Somerset was above all else obsessed. With much fanfare, enclosure commissions were sent out in 1548 to inquire into the practice, and reverse illegal instances. At the same time there was a new tax on sheep, intended to discourage anti-social conversions from arable to pasture, but – ironically – a cause of popular unhappiness in Devon and Cornwall, where most conversion took place decades earlier, and where even humble farmers (like the parishioners of Morebath) possessed good stocks of sheep.7
There was a troubling instance of agrarian protest in Hertfordshire in the summer of 1548, and enclosure riots broke out again – in Wiltshire, Somerset and around Bristol – in May 1549. At the start of July, a trickle of trouble became a flood, with disorders reported in virtually every county south and east of a line from the Bristol Channel to the Humber: people called it ‘the commotion time’.8
The most serious outbreak was in Norfolk. Villagers around Wymondham, ten miles to the south-west of Norwich, threw down the hedges of the unpopular landowner John Flowerdew and found a leader when Flowerdew’s local rival, Robert Kett, agreed to reverse his own enclosures and present the people’s grievances to higher authority. By 12 July, as many as 20,000 were said to be camped with Kett outside Norwich, and other camps sprang up across East Anglia. In Devon, the municipal authorities managed to keep the insurgents from taking Exeter, but on 22 July Kett’s followers flooded into Norwich, placing England’s second city in rebellious hands.9
The religious complexion of the movements of 1549 mirrored the fragmented and fractious faith of the nation. In Hampshire and Sussex, conspirators planned to march in support of the West Countrymen, behind a banner of the Five Wounds. Things went further in the south Midlands. Somerset informed Russell on 12 July he had been obliged to divert reinforcements under Lord Grey of Wilton, intended to relieve the siege of Exeter, to deal with ‘a stir here in Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, by instigation of sundry priests (keep it to yourself) for these matters of religion’. It was hardly a state secret. Rebel forces entered Oxford, and Peter Martyr was hurried off to London by his friends, leaving his wife and servants to hide themselves from the mob.10
There was another outbreak of religious protest in parishes along the east Yorkshire coast, near Scarborough. Archbishop Holgate’s claim of ‘ten or twelve thousand rebels up’ may be a nervous overestimate, but it was a significant and alarming episode. The spark igniting it was the dissolution of numerous, well-integrated, local chantry foundations, and the rebels planned to join up with those in Devon. They were also reportedly inspired by prophecies ‘that there should no king reign in England; the noblemen and gentlemen to be destroyed, and the realm to be ruled by four governors to be elected and appointed by the commons’.11 Social levelling of this kind was more usually associated with radical than with conservative religion, but these were topsy-turvy days.
Where rebel demands concentrated on agrarian rather than liturgical concerns, their tone tended to be more moderate. Encouraged by the fanfare surrounding Somerset’s enclosure commissions, the commons in Norfolk and elsewhere believed the government would listen seriously to their grievances and take action against local oppressors. The Lord Protector encouraged the perception, writing conciliatory letters to rebel camps in Norfolk, Suffolk, Hampshire, Hertfordshire and Essex.12
Somerset was prepared to treat (even if cynically) with these rebels because he did not believe them to be papists. A distinctly evangelical aura hung around the rhetoric and actions of some south-eastern bands, particularly Kett’s followers in East Anglia, where justice was dispensed under an ‘Oak of Reformation’, and the new Prayer Book was used without protest.
Kett did not command a rustic army of evangelical converts. There were countless old-fashioned Catholics among the contingents marching to the camps behind traditional parish banners.13 But the rhetorical language of the revolt renounced the traditionalism that could only have locked it in inflexible confrontation with the regime. Notions of ‘Commonwealth’ – which in 1536 evoked a vanishing Catholic world of neighbourliness and social order – now took their cue from the demands for social justice heard in the sermons of evangelical preachers, several of them frequenting Kett’s encampment at Mousehold Heath. The articles drawn up by Kett during the occupation of Norwich interspersed pious evangelical aspirations with the demands for economic rights. Priests should be resident in their benefices that parishioners ‘may be instructed with the laws of God’. Clergymen ‘not able to preach and set forth the Word of God’ should be dismissed. Leading evangelicals surely nodded in agreement at this, though they might have paused over the suggested remedy for a non-preaching parson: ‘the parishioners there to choose another’. Social and spiritual hopes converged in a plea for the abolition of residual serfdom lingering on some Norfolk manorial estates: ‘We pray that all bondmen be made free, for God made all free with his precious blood shedding.’14 Consciously or not, the phrase echoed the manifestos of the rebellious German peasants of 1525. That protest too began with optimism and festivity, and ended in bloodshed and despair.
There was no social revolution in 1549; the established order gradually reasserted itself. Offers of pardon persuaded the Yorkshire rebels to disperse, and in other places local authorities proved adept at defusing tensions. In West Sussex, the rebellious commoners went home, apparently contented, after the leading regional landowner, the Earl of Arundel, listened to their grievances, and chided the gentry, at a great feast arranged in the courtyard of Arundel Castle.15 As in 1536, the local presence of a capable magnate was an important inhibiting factor. It was no accident that the severest outbreaks occurred where Henry VIII’s dynastic paranoia had lopped off potentially stabilizing hands. In 1549, both Thomas Howard, the aged Duke of Norfolk, and Edward Courtenay, the young heir to the Marquis of Exeter, were prisoners in the Tower.
In the end, however, the protest movements were not conciliated, but crushed: by government forces under loyalist noble command, and by Somerset’s hired contingents of Italian and German mercenaries. Russell engaged the Devonshire forces in a sharp encounter at Fenny Bridges, east of Exeter, on 28 July, and was shortly afterwards reinforced by Lord Grey, whose troops had bloodily suppressed the risings in Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. On 4 August, Russell routed the rebels in a major encounter at Clyst St Mary, and broke the siege of Exeter. The remainder of the rebel forces regrouped and encamped at Sampford Courtenay. Russell marched west from the city, and on 16 August inflicted a heavy defeat on the now outnumbered Devon–Cornwall force.16
In the meantime, the Earl of Warwick was sent east with a well-equipped force to prise East Anglia from the grip of rebellion. The final week of August witnessed messy skirmishes in the streets of Norwich, as Warwick’s troops struggled to oust Kett’s tenacious followers. With his supply lines cut, Kett – like the Catholic rebels in Yorkshire – reportedly put his trust in ‘feigned prophecies’. There would be a great victory at Dussindale, just outside the city. It was poorly chosen, open ground, which on 27 August enabled Warwick to unleash his cavalry to devastating effect, while the government’s mercenaries made the most of their superior cohesion and firepower. There would be minor disturbances, and mopping up, in various places into the next year and beyond, but the commotion time was over.17
The summer of 1549 was a season of extraordinary violence and blood-letting, giving the lie to suggestions that England’s reformations of religion proceeded in orderly, conformist and peaceful fashion. Contemporary estimates of the number of Kett’s followers slaughtered at Dussindale ranged between 2,000 and 3,500.18 The body count in the West Country was higher still. The eye-witness chronicler of events, John Hooker, did not know how many died on the government side (‘they escaped not scot free’), but was told that 4,000 rebels were killed. Given the one-sided character of a series of fierce encounters, this may well be an underestimate. The campaign included at least one major atrocity. At a tense moment during the battle at Clyst St Mary, Russell ordered that the prisoners, ‘which if they were newly set upon, might be a detriment and a peril unto them’, should all be slaughtered. It is possible as many as 900 were ‘slain like beasts’.19
We do not know how many perished in Lord Grey’s suppression of the Oxfordshire rebellion – the young king’s terse summary was of ‘some slain, some taken, and some hanged’. Nor do we have numbers for those suffering under martial law across the country as a whole. The Venetian ambassador at Rome learned by letters from London in early September ‘that the insurrections have been entirely suppressed, but by means of the slaughter and destruction of 10,000 or 11,000 natives’.20 It seems a reasonable enough estimate. A pro-rata adjustment of numbers, relative to the recent (2013) population of England and Wales, produces a sobering figure of over 206,000 fatalities.
It was a short but bloody civil war, portrayed by many as a conflict between forces of Christ and Antichrist. A London balladeer looked into the rebels’ hearts and found them ‘rooted in the Pope’s laws’; he hailed the Sampford Courtenay victim William Hilling as ‘that martyr truly’. Philip Nichols, himself a Devonian, wrote a detailed refutation of the insurgent articles, laying the blame on ‘sinister persuasions’ of priests, while rebuking the lay rebels who raised tumult for no worthier cause than ‘the filthy suds and dregs of stinking popery’. As in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage, government propagandists harped on the connections between popery and treason. Cranmer, in a draft treatise against the rebels, remarked snappily ‘how an absolute papist varieth from a heretic or a traitor, I know not’.21
Definitions of popery had become decidedly elastic. The sacramental and ceremonial preferences of the rebels, not political allegiance to Rome, made them papists and traitors. Cranmer shortly afterwards denounced Gardiner as an ‘English papist’, one of those that ‘dare not ground their faith concerning transubstantiation upon the Church of Rome’.22
‘Papist’ priests, prominent in the risings, merited exemplary and ritual punishment. In both Oxfordshire and Devon, rebel clergymen were hanged from the spires of churches – a symbolic act that came close to fulfilling Hooper’s fantasy of putting idolaters to death on their own altars. Robert Welsh, a priest who played an active role in directing the siege of Exeter, was suspended and left to die in chains from the steeple of his church just outside the walls of the city. The Devon rebellion began with a priest donning old ‘popish attire’, and so it ended. Welsh was put to death in traditional mass vestments, with ‘a holy water bucket, a sprinkler, a sacring bell, a pair of beads, and other such like popish trash hanged about him’.23
There was no middle ground between Christ and Antichrist. The Council issued Bonner with injunctions demanding he preach a sermon denouncing the rebels, celebrate communion in the new fashion, and affirm the King’s undiminished authority in his minority. Bonner used the Prayer Book dutifully in his cathedral on 18 August, but in his Paul’s Cross sermon on 1 September he said nothing about royal authority, and little about the rebellion. He did seize the opportunity to insist bread after consecration was ‘the very body of Christ that was born of the Virgin Mary’. It was the catalyst for his deprivation.
Through September, a commission headed by Cranmer and Ridley interrogated the bishop of London. With his back to the wall, Bonner recovered his fighting instincts, denouncing his accusers, John Hooper and William Latimer (no relation of the former bishop), as notorious sacramentarians who ‘divided themselves thereby from the unity and integrity of Christ’s Catholic Church’. When Cranmer demanded what Bonner meant by talking of presence in the sacrament, Bonner nimbly turned the question around: ‘What believe you, and how do you believe, my Lord?’ The archbishop was not yet, clearly and unambiguously, ready to say.24
‘The Perseverance of God’s Word’
Somerset loomed tall in autumn 1549, while his enemies – Gardiner, Bonner, the Prayer Book rebels – lay stricken around him. But he was standing on quicksand. Resentments grew among fellow-councillors about the Protector’s imperious style, and his accumulation of grand palaces. He was, they felt, doubly to blame for the terrifying tumult of the summer: by provoking conservative grievance about religious change, and by encouraging anti-landlordism with his irresponsible posturing over enclosure. Defeats to the French around Boulogne added to a gnawing discontent, crystallized by the return of the Earl of Warwick from Norfolk, and an imprudent decision by Somerset to refuse extra rewards to the victorious English and mercenary troops.
When Warwick summoned discontented councillors – Southampton (restored to the Council in early 1549), William Paulet, Richard Rich, the Marquis of Northampton – to meet with him privately, Somerset dramatically and recklessly raised the stakes. Taking Edward to Hampton Court, he issued a proclamation at the start of October, commanding all subjects to attend in arms to protect His Majesty and ‘his most entirely beloved uncle the Lord Protector’ against ‘a most dangerous conspiracy’. Printed broadsheets appealed directly to the commons and talked of oppressions of the poor, as well as plots ‘to plant again the doctrine of the devil and Antichrist of Rome’. Some four thousand commoners answered the call.
This was to court ‘popularity’ – the worst of political crimes in the eyes of the ruling elites; support for Somerset among his peers crumbled away. At the last, Somerset stepped back from plunging the realm into a renewed bout of internecine and class warfare, and surrendered himself to his enemies. On 13 October, the Protectorate was dissolved, and the following day Somerset was sent to the Tower.25
It was a classic coup d’état, and, almost everyone thought, a conservative one. ‘We are greatly apprehensive of a change in religion,’ Hooper confessed to Bullinger. From his cell in the Tower, Gardiner congratulated Warwick on saving the realm from ‘tyrannous government’, and anticipated his imminent release. It was a hope shared by Ambassador Van der Delft, who heard Bonner was also about to be rehabilitated, and noted the hopeful sign that Warwick had forbidden his household to eat meat on Fridays.
Writing to the Emperor on 17 October, Van der Delft remained optimistic. He acknowledged Cranmer still sat at the Council board, but thought this was merely for form’s sake and unlikely to last. There were no moves yet to ‘restore religion’, but this was so as not to upset the people, who were ‘totally infected’ with heresy (the ambassador’s world was London). Other councillors were all good Catholics, save for Warwick himself. But Van der Delft had good hopes of his reformation: he was ‘taking up the old observances day by day’.26
It was all a mirage, a trick with cards. Warwick had no intention of allowing the restoration of the mass, the release of Gardiner and Norfolk, or a regency headed by the Princess Mary. Such moves would ensure his political oblivion. Conservatives, rightly, did not trust him. Yet perhaps the young King could be made to; royal favour was Warwick’s best hope of long-term survival. The fate of the country, at this crucial juncture, hinged on shrewd political investment in the precocious religious enthusiasms of a twelve-year-old boy.
Warwick, working hand-in-glove with Cranmer, acted quickly to save the reformation, and to marginalize the conservatives, whose leaders, Arundel and Southampton, were already plotting against him. On 15 October, a wave of new appointments to the Privy Chamber surrounded the King with a coterie of reliable evangelicals and Warwick supporters. John ab Ulmis – briefed by Richard Cox – was sufficiently reassured to write to Bullinger a few days later, announcing ‘that Antichrist … is again discomfited by the general sentence of all the leading men in England’. There was confirmation in a proclamation of 30 October, denying rumours the mass was to be restored, and declaring that King and Council would continue to do ‘whatsoever may lend to the glory of God and the advancement of his most holy Word’.27
Power on the Privy Council swung further in Warwick’s direction with the appointments, at the end of November, of Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset, and Thomas Goodrich, bishop of Ely – ‘the which’, wrote Richard Scudamore on 5 December to his master, the evangelical courtier Philip Hoby, ‘putteth all honest hearts in good comfort for the good hope that they have of the perseverance of God’s Word’.28
On the day Scudamore wrote, almost 1,000 miles to the south-east, another journey of hope came abruptly to a halt. At the papal conclave in Rome, summoned in November to elect a successor to Paul III, Reginald Pole had the previous day come within a single vote of the required tally. Supporters were suggesting he simply be installed by acclamation; pontifical vestments were made. On 5 December, as the cardinals prepared to recommence voting, Gianpietro Carafa, archbishop of Naples, publicly accused Pole of heresy, waving a paper which detailed Pole’s supposed errors concerning justification. Pole and Carafa had once been allies, sharing a humanist desire to renew the Church. But the defection of Ochino and Vermigli, and Carafa’s experience as an official of the revived Roman Inquisition, had turned him into an obsessive heresy-hunter.
Pole laughed off the accusations, and his support remained high in that day’s vote. But he was still short, and momentum began to slip from his campaign – not until February would the uninspiring Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte emerge as a compromise candidate to take the name Julius III.29 Whether, as pope, Pole might have done anything concrete to further reconciliation with the Protestants is a moot point. But he represented a face of Catholicism that was more conciliatory and theologically open than the one it finally adopted. The non-election of the thoughtful, reformist English cardinal was a pivotal moment for the Catholic Church, and, as events would unfold, for his native England also.
While Pole and Carafa sparred in Rome, the disgraced Somerset became the pivot of English politics. Southampton planned to destroy him, and to implicate Warwick in Somerset’s treason. Warwick struck back, declaring dramatically at a council meeting on 31 December that ‘he that seeketh his blood would have mine also’. With a majority now behind him, Warwick ordered Southampton and Arundel banished from court and Council. Richard Southwell and Sir Thomas Arundel – who hoped to make Mary regent – were removed about the same time. Mary herself was cautious, telling Van der Delft that the conspirators against Somerset were motivated by envy and ambition: ‘no good will come of this move … it may be only the beginning of our misfortunes’.
Warwick was confirmed, not as Lord Protector, but more modestly as the Council’s ‘Lord President’. The final showdown was preceded by a proclamation on Christmas Day, ordering all old service books to be handed in to episcopal officials. Any hopes for the restoration of ceremonies in Latin ‘were but a preferring of ignorance to knowledge and darkness to light’.30 There was to be no going back.
Slowly but surely, Cranmer built up his team. The days of a deeply divided episcopate, the stop-go mechanism bedevilling the progress of reform since the mid-1530s, were coming to an end. Bonner’s formal deprivation in February 1550 cleared the way for the promotion of Nicholas Ridley: at long last, the critical see of London was in safe evangelical hands. At the same time, William Rugge of Norwich, heavily in debt, and compromised over his negotiations with Kett during the rebellion, was persuaded to resign. Thomas Thirlby was transferred to Norwich, and his see of Westminster – one of the few ecclesiastical gains from the dissolution of the monasteries – was subsumed into that of London, giving Ridley a free hand in the capital.
In March, liturgical innovations prised out another conservative bishop. One glaring omission from the Prayer Book was any form of service for ordaining clergy. A new Ordinal corrected that, with input from Martin Bucer. The book was traditional to the extent it preserved a distinction between bishops and priests, and maintained the laying on of hands. But in other respects it rang a death-knell for medieval priesthood: no investiture in stole and chasuble, no reference to receiving power to offer the body of Christ. Instead, candidates obtained ‘authority to preach the Word of God, and to minister the holy sacraments’. Heath of Worcester refused to accept the Ordinal, and was committed to the Fleet.31
‘It is openly spoken,’ Scudamore wrote to Hoby on 23 February, ‘there shall be more quondam bishops in England shortly.’ Also on the government’s list was John Veysey, aged bishop of Exeter. His successor was selected, and ready on the ground – Miles Coverdale, the veteran evangelical activist, who had gone to Germany in the wake of the Six Articles and returned in 1548. Coverdale accompanied Russell’s expeditionary force, preaching to the army on the eve of the Clyst St Mary massacre. He remained in the West Country in the summer of 1550, though it was another year before Veysey could finally be persuaded to step down. Tunstall of Durham was another marked man: he lost his position on the Privy Council in February 1550, and was under house arrest by the summer.32
Gardiner too remain caged, but not tamed, employing his enforced leisure to write defences of transubstantiation – against Peter Martyr, and against Cranmer himself. In June 1550, renewed efforts were made to secure his conformity, in which Somerset, now restored to the Council, played a leading role. He visited Gardiner in prison, and secured from him a surprisingly warm verdict on the Prayer Book: ‘Touching the truth of the very presence of Christ’s most precious body and blood in the sacrament, there was as much spoken in that book as might be desired.’ Warwick was unconvinced of the wisdom of letting Wily Winchester loose: he insisted on a penitential acknowledgement of guilt, which the bishop was unprepared to make.33
Gardiner’s endorsement of Cranmer’s Prayer Book – part mischief-making, part tactic to win his freedom – confirmed the fears of people like Bucer, who thought the liturgy made too many concessions to the past and lent itself to popish misconstrual. There was considerable evidence at this time of conservative clergy making the new service as much as possible like the old: chanting the liturgy, ringing sacring bells, persisting with the elevation, placing candles on the altar. Cranmer issued draft visitation articles in 1549 commanding that no one ‘counterfeit the popish mass’. His own words were coming back to bite him. Cranmer’s official response to the western rebels condescendingly explained that what ‘seemeth to you a new service … indeed is none other than the old: the self-same words in English which were in Latin, saving a few things taken out’.
John Bale encountered an example of a clerical counterfeiter in a church in Hampshire, an ‘ape of Antichrist’ who ‘turned and tossed, lurked and louted [bowed], snored and smirked, gaped and gasped, kneeled and knocked, looked and licked, with both his thumbs at his ears, and other tricks more, that he made me twenty times to remember Will Somer’ (Henry VIII’s famous court jester). Yet it was no laughing matter if, as reported from the Welsh border counties, people ‘refuse their own parish, and frequent and haunt other, where the communion is more like a mass’.34
A mass needed an altar, the structure topped by a stone slab at which sacrifice was performed. It was to the liturgical hardware of the churches that attention turned in the spring of 1550. Ridley, new bishop of London, set the pace. In May he commanded all altars in his diocese to be replaced with wooden ‘communion tables’. Not for the first time, evangelical activists, clerical and lay, ran ahead of official policy: at least twenty London parishes removed their altars in 1549–50 prior to Ridley’s order. The pattern replicates nationwide for about a fifth of the parishes for which churchwardens’ accounts survive.35 Almost nowhere can this have been a consensual, unanimously welcomed decision.
Other bishops followed suit: in November, the Privy Council noted ‘altars within the more part of the churches of this our realm already upon good and godly authority taken down’. To avoid ‘variance and contention’, the Council ordered the remainder should be taken away – a re-run of the strategy used to sweep images from the churches in 1548. The directive flushed out another episcopal quarry: George Day of Chichester refused to implement it, was imprisoned in the Fleet, and deprived the following year.
Day was unpersuaded by Ridley’s list of ‘reasons why the Lord’s board should be rather after the form of a table, than of an altar’. It was, argued Ridley, a question of fitness for purpose: ‘The use of an altar is to make sacrifice upon it; the use of a table is to serve for men to eat upon.’ Christ instituted the sacrament at a table, and if the Prayer Book mentioned altars (which it did), then it spoke ‘indifferently’, not meaning to specify exact forms the Lord’s board should take. A key reason for making the change was educational: ‘The form of a table shall move the simple from the superstitious opinions of the popish mass, unto the right use of the Lord’s Supper.’36
Ritual and material change as a form of catechism for the uneducated made perfect sense to evangelicals. Preaching at court through Lent in 1550, John Hooper argued that ‘as long as the altars remain, both the ignorant people, and the ignorant and evil-persuaded priest, will dream always of sacrifice’. On the back of his stirring sermons, King and Council offered Hooper the see of Gloucester, vacated by the death of a laid-back former monk, John Wakeman, in December 1549.37
Rochets and Strangers
There was a hitch. Hooper at first declined the offer, and his Lent sermons contained clues as to why. There were things in the Ordinal ‘whereat I did not a little wonder’: mention of saints in the stipulated form of the Oath of Supremacy, and a requirement for bishops to be consecrated in vestments – ‘rather the habit and vesture of Aaron and the gentiles, than of the ministers of Christ’.38
It was the start of a tense and tetchy stand-off: the bishop-elect (who was prepared to accept nomination, upon conditions) versus Cranmer and Ridley. It was also an object lesson in the vagaries of royal supremacy in the hands of a child-king. On 5 August, Cranmer received a royal dispensation to consecrate Hooper with omission of ‘certain rites and ceremonies offensive to his conscience’, and Hooper was confirmed in possession of the bishopric. As he prepared to swear his oath, Edward – so ab Ulmis informed Bullinger – ‘chanced to notice that the saints were mentioned’. There was likely little of chance about it: Edward had been got to, his youthful godly conscience pricked. ‘What wickedness is here, Hooper?’ The new bishop declared his opinion about it, and the King called for a pen, scratching out the old-style petition to be helped keep the oath by ‘all saints and the holy Evangelist’.
This was supreme headship with a vengeance. But Cranmer still stalled over full consecration unless Hooper was prepared to wear the stipulated garb of black chimere (an open, sleeveless gown) over full-length white rochet. Ridley worked hard to persuade councillors that Hooper’s intransigence was dangerously seditious, and even Bucer and Vermigli, no fans of old-fashioned ceremony, sought to convince him he was taking a stand over the wrong issue. Hooper backed down, and was formally consecrated in March 1551 – after a short but sobering spell in the Fleet.
Hooper descended on his diocese like an avenging angel of the Lord, issuing visitation articles to smoke papists from their holes, and identifying those among his clergy – unsurprisingly, a large percentage – insufficiently familiar with scripture in English. Nicholas Heath’s formal deprivation in October 1551 led to the conjoining of Worcester and Gloucester dioceses. On his first appearance in the new episcopal seat, Hooper was a perplexing creature to the chronicler John Steynor: ‘Bishop Hooper came to Worcester with his wife and daughter. He had a long beard, and in all his time were no children confirmed.’39 He was, on every count, the antithesis of a traditional Catholic bishop.
The squabble with Cranmer and Ridley over rochet and chimere was more than a storm in an episcopal teacup. It went to the heart of whether the Church could designate ceremonies as ‘indifferent’ (neither necessary for salvation nor prohibited by the Word of God), and require everyone to observe them. Vestments themselves – to which Cranmer was neither aesthetically nor theologically wedded – were not really the issue. It was a matter of authority, and of willingness to temper idealism with pragmatism – something Cranmer had shown in his drafting of the Prayer Book, and had learned during a long apprenticeship as the disposable conscience of an unpredictable king. It was harder to stomach for those, like Hooper, who chose to flee rather than temporize during the dark days of the 1540s, and whose natural instincts were to cleave closely to the Word of God against the mandates of popish and tyrannical bishops.
Hooper was not without supporters: his stance was vocally backed by Jan Laski, superintendent of the ‘Strangers’ Church’. This home from home for Protestant migrants and refugees was confirmed by royal charter in July 1550. There were two congregations: one of Dutch (or German) people worshipping at the former Austin Friars; one of French-speakers at St Anthony’s chapel in Threadneedle Street. The Stranger congregations were an anomaly in a realm whose official pronouncements invariably trumpeted the virtues of ‘uniformity’. The charter granted them freedom to ‘exercise their own rites and ceremonies, and their own peculiar ecclesiastical discipline, notwithstanding that they do not conform with the rites and ceremonies used in our kingdom’.
For Hooper, and other evangelicals in a hurry, the Stranger Churches were a beacon and a model, pointing the sluggish English Church in the liturgical and disciplinary direction of Zürich. Ridley was suspicious of them, fearing his control over the spiritual life of his diocese might be undermined. Their independent existence was tolerated because they were considered the antidote to a greater evil threatening the body politic: the poison of anabaptist heresy. For twenty years, foreign immigration had been the channel into England of exotic heresies that horrified conservatives and evangelicals in equal measure. Such radicals, it was felt, would be easier to spot in well-ordered congregations of their own people, and less likely to infect the community at large. Edward VI wrote in his Chronicle that the Germans were given the Austin Friars ‘for avoiding of all sects of anabaptists and suchlike’.40
‘Anabaptism’ was again at the forefront of minds in the early summer of 1550. On 2 May, after a year in Newgate, Joan Bocher was burned at the stake at Smithfield. The cream of evangelical talent exerted itself to persuade her to recant: Bishops Ridley and Goodrich, the eminent preachers Thomas Lever and Roger Hutchinson. But Joan was unshakeable in her conviction that Christ sprang only from the spiritual, not from the corporal seed of the Virgin. At her execution she harangued the appointed preacher, John Scory, as a liar.41
It was a moment of sombre resolution, and the loss of a kind of innocence. An ocean of blood had been spilled since Edward came to the throne, but now, for the first time, evangelicals by themselves inflicted the horrific punishment for heresy on one of their own – a woman who, a plausible later tradition maintained, had helped smuggle Tyndale’s New Testament into England. Cranmer and Ridley persuaded the King of the burning’s necessity, and there was little sense in the wider evangelical community of a tragic misstep. The Christian’s first duty was to maintain the truth, not the liberty to be in error. Latimer dismissed Bocher as a ‘foolish woman’, and a versified account by the publisher Edmund Becke denounced without compunction ‘the wayward Virago that would not repent / The devil’s eldest daughter, which lately was brent’.42
The Stranger Church proved its worth as a theological drag-net when it snagged a Flemish surgeon named George van Parris, a proponent of the ‘Arian’ heresy denying Christ’s divinity. Van Parris’s excommunication from the Dutch congregation precipitated his trial before a new heresy commission in early 1551. He was burned at Smithfield on 24 April, having, like Bocher, proved immune to all persuasion. The commissions uncovered home-grown radicals too, with probable deep roots in the villages and market towns of south-east England. There were secret conventicles of anabaptists at Faversham in Kent and at Bocking in Essex – ‘an assembly being of sixty persons or more’. The conventiclers here were ‘freewillers’: their leaders, Henry Hart and Thomas Cole, taught that ‘the doctrine of predestination was meeter for devils than for Christian men’. It was also a common saying among them that ‘all errors were brought in by learned men’.43 If these were clusters of mutating Lollards, then the authorities were right to be worried about them. An inheritance of sturdy anticlericalism, and an instinctive suspicion of complex, counter-intuitive doctrines, would prove as inhospitable to the new Protestant preachers as to the popish priests they supplanted.
For evangelicals, radical and Romanist were reflections of each other: both distorted the Word of God in the mirror of their own perverse imaginations. In a 1551 letter to John Cheke, Ridley praised a chaplain for his tirelessness in ‘detecting and confuting of the anabaptists and papists in Essex’. A significant blow against ‘papistry’ was struck when Gardiner was brought to trial in December 1550, and in February 1551 formally deprived of his bishopric. His attempts to thwart exercise of the royal supremacy, while upholding the principle of royal supremacy, all finally came to naught. Cranmer mocked him as an oddity, an anomaly, stranded ‘after the fall of the papistical doctrine, as sometimes an old post standeth when the building is overthrown’.44
Cranmer’s ally, John Ponet, was soon installed as bishop of Winchester, though there was a more than momentary embarrassment when it transpired that Ponet had married a woman who was already the wife of a Nottingham butcher. Archbishop Robert Holgate of York fought off a lawsuit from a man claiming a pre-contract with his wife, after he married in January 1550 at the age of sixty-eight. Robert Parkyn sneered at his archbishop’s ‘lewd example’.45 The legalization of clerical marriage was supposed to bring an end to scandal, but the idealism of Edwardian reformers bumped inevitably against the messy realities of human existence.
Gardiner, an old rotting post, was not the Catholic giving reformers the most cause for concern. Nor was it one of the exiles at Louvain and Paris – among them, many of the family and friends of Thomas More – sending letters of comfort to sympathizers in England and seeking to smuggle into the country Richard Smyth’s books against Cranmer and Peter Martyr. The royal tutor, Roger Ascham, sneered at those who, ‘to see a mass freely in Flanders, are content to forsake, like slaves, their country’.46
The greatest danger lay closest to home. In August 1550, a preacher at Paul’s Cross railed against ‘a great woman within the realm, that was a great supporter and maintainer of popery and superstition, and prayed that she might forsake her opinions’.47 He did not name her, but everyone knew whom he meant.
In her father’s reign, Princess Mary buckled and recognized the royal supremacy. In her brother’s, with the mass under attack, she was determined not to repeat her apostasy. Her household, where the old service was ostentatiously performed, was a magnet for disaffected traditionalists. At first, anxious not to antagonize Charles V, Somerset and the Council informally extended her a licence to hear mass discreetly.48 But the imperative to conciliate the Emperor was diminished after Warwick unheroically but sensibly brought to an end the ruinously expensive war with Scotland and France, returning Boulogne in a treaty of March 1550. Another, more immediate, factor was the growing exasperation of the young king that his big sister was defying him.
In April 1550, fearing her concession to hear mass was about to be withdrawn, Mary told Van der Delft she wished to flee to the Netherlands. Despite reservations, the ambassador set plans in motion. At the end of June, two imperial warships anchored off the coast at Maldon in Essex. In an agony of indecision, and swayed by the advice of the head of her household, Robert Rochester, that she would be throwing away her right to the throne, Mary got cold feet, and the ships sailed without her. Events would prove the wisdom of Rochester’s counsel.49
Eleven months later, in March 1551, Mary was summoned to court, to be harangued by councillors and by her brother, who ‘willed her as a subject to obey’ and cease hearing mass. The princess got rather the better of the encounter. When Edward said he didn’t know anything about earlier threats and warnings, as he had only taken an active role in public affairs during the past year, Mary rejoined that, ‘in that case, he had not drawn up the ordinances on the new religion’. She professed her willingness to die rather than give up the old religion. The King – not bereft of fraternal feeling – said ‘he wished for no such sacrifice’.
Matters were left unresolved. A few days later, various gentlemen, including the courtier Sir Anthony Browne, were locked up for attending Mary’s mass, but with the Emperor threatening war, Cranmer and Ridley tried to persuade a reluctant Edward that while permitting sin was itself sinful, ‘to suffer and wink at it for a time might be borne’. Pressure intensified in August 1551: Mary’s private mass was prohibited and her household servants were arrested and imprisoned. But the princess defiantly told visiting councillors that she would obey the King’s orders in religion only when he ‘shall come to such years that he may be able to judge these things himself’.50
Conservative opinion was not, then, entirely cowed or leaderless, five years into the reign of King Josiah. When Mary arrived in London for the March meeting, fifty knights and gentlemen rode before her, and another eighty gentleman and ladies followed after. Each ostentatiously wore at their belt ‘a pair of beads’. The rosary, once a ubiquitous and unremarkable devotional object, had become a piece of daring contraband, and a material symbol of dissident confessional identity. Later that summer, as the dreadful epidemic known as ‘the Sweat’ swept through London, Margaret Harbotell of St Martins Ludgate harangued her evangelical curate, Nicholas Bartram, in a reversed-roles replay of the encounter that had precipitated the trouble at Clyst St Mary two years earlier. God plagued his people, she said, because Protestants ‘would not suffer them to pray upon their beads’. Angrily, she shook her rosary in Bartram’s face. John Hooper was no less convinced that the Sweat was ‘a remarkable token of divine vengeance’. Yet his God was angered, not by the eradication of popish trappings, but by licence for some of them to remain.51
In the early part of 1551, the reformers took stock, recognized the strength of conservative resistance, and determined to press ahead. They did so with the encouragement of their foreign friends. In January, John Calvin wrote solemnly to Edward VI, urging him to continue ‘what you have so well and happily begun’, and reminded him of ‘manifest abuses’ remaining in the English Church. Of more practical value was the set of detailed Censura (criticisms) of the 1549 Prayer Book, completed by Martin Bucer a few weeks before his death on 28 February. Also published in 1551 was Bucer’s De Regno Christi (Of the Kingdom of Christ), a manual for the creation of a truly Christian society, composed as a New Year’s gift for Edward VI. It emphasized education, poor relief, the regulation of trade, industry and agriculture – all achievable through exercise of godly discipline. Bucer frankly recognized, though, that not all could be converted: in the field of the Lord, kings were empowered to cut down ‘useless trees, briars and thorns’.52
Bucer’s vision was of secular and ecclesiastical authority working seamlessly to build the Kingdom of Christ, but he was equally concerned that church property should remain in ecclesiastical hands. It was a pious hope. In March 1551, the Privy Council mandated commissions to go out to confiscate all remaining church plate, ‘as the King’s Majesty had need presently of a mass of money’. Just before this, orders were issued for the purging of ‘superstitious books’ from the royal library at Westminster. Ideological purity partnered with financial necessity: gold and silver stripped from the bindings were earmarked for Sir Anthony Aucher, the official responsible for provisioning the garrison at Calais.53
Leading lay evangelicals were at one neither with the preachers nor with each other. Through the spring and summer of 1551 Somerset intrigued for a restoration of his position. There were rumours the duke was plotting with the Catholic earls of Shrewsbury and Derby, to free Gardiner and reverse the religious changes. He was noticeably, even suspiciously, reticent in efforts to compel Mary to conform to the Prayer Book.
Warwick took his time, but on 16 October, a few days after his creation as Duke of Northumberland, he struck. Somerset was arrested, charged with treason and sent to the Tower. At the trial in December, Northumberland was unable to get treason charges to stick, but Somerset was convicted of felony for convoking unlawful assemblies. Northumberland’s grip on government tightened on 21 December with the enforced resignation as Lord Chancellor of Richard Rich, a man suspected of involvement in Somerset’s schemes. Rich drifted with the winds of self-advancement, but at heart (if he had a heart) he was a religious conservative. Only a year earlier, a reformer had dedicated a book to him, in grateful recognition of his role in suppressing ‘vain ceremonies … that heretofore ye have been thought to favour, uphold and maintain’. His replacement was the evangelical bishop Thomas Goodrich of Ely, the first churchman since Wolsey to hold the office.
If Somerset did flirt with the conservatives, it was a tactical romance and not an affair of the heart. Prior to his execution on 22 January 1552, the duke busied himself reading the bible and composing meditations, and from the block he urged onlookers to hold fast in the faith that, when in authority, ‘I always diligently set forth and furthered to my power’. It is impossible to guess at the emotional hinterland of a clipped entry in his royal nephew’s chronicle: ‘The duke of Somerset had his head cut off upon Tower Hill between eight and nine o’clock in the morning.’54
Somerset remained until the last alarmingly popular; many blamed Northumberland for cruelly pursuing him to his death. The Lord President exerted himself to retain the support of the reforming bishops. He encouraged, for example, a scheme dear to Cranmer’s heart: a thoroughgoing reform of canon law, infused by the spirit of Bucer’s De Regno. In October 1551, the Council authorized a committee composed in equal parts of bishops, divines, civil lawyers and common lawyers to begin working on a draft.
There was progress too with another project smiled on by the ghost of Bucer. A revised communion service was heralded, as in 1549, by disputations on the eucharist. In November 1551 a pair of debates took place in the London houses of William Cecil and Richard Morison. These godly laymen, and a third, John Cheke, joined a trio of rising clerical stars – Edmund Grindal, Robert Horne and David Whitehead – to argue for a figurative understanding of ‘this is my body’. Their lead opponent was a learned former monk of Evesham, John Feckenham, who was arrested by Lord Grey during the suppression of the Oxfordshire Rising. Remarkably, Feckenham’s temporary release from the Tower was extended after the debates, to allow him to travel to his native Worcestershire, and debate there with John Hooper.
Truth would prevail, if it could be openly declared. The evangelical leadership’s faith in this dictum was manifested in its sponsorship of star-quality itinerant preaching. In December 1551, Grindal was one of six preachers appointed, with generous annual stipends of £40, as royal ‘chaplains ordinary’. There were to be two constantly in attendance upon the King, while the others were, as Edward noted, ‘always absent in preaching’. Lancashire and Wales, notoriously dark corners of the land, were priority areas. Another name was added: that of John Knox, currently preaching to a mixed congregation of locals and fellow Scots exiles in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Lincolnshire, that nursery of popish rebellion, benefited from the folksy oratory of Hugh Latimer, who withdrew from the court in 1550, and preached at Grimsthorpe and elsewhere as a client of Catherine Willoughby, widowed Duchess of Suffolk, and a formidably learned and zealous patron of evangelical religion.55
Parliament reassembled, after a break of almost two years, on 23 January 1552, a day after Somerset’s beheading. One of the first items of business was a new Treason Act, restoring much of the scope of the Henrician legislation, in particular the penalties for calling the King ‘heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or usurper’. It was a symptom of the political chill following the 1549 risings, and of a fear of unrest in the counties, where ‘Lords Lieutenant’ loyal to Northumberland were being invested with unprecedented powers to suppress disorder. Another symptom was the return of censorship, after the carnival of print and opinion in Edward’s first years. A proclamation of April 1551 banned publishing works in English, or performing plays or interludes, without written permission from six privy councillors.56
The crucial measure, passed in April, was a second Act of Uniformity, authorizing for worship a revised form of the Prayer Book, which Cranmer and others had been working on through the winter. As in 1549, three lay lords – Derby, Stourton, Windsor – voted against, but only two dissident bishops – Thirlby and Aldridge – now kept them company.
‘A great number of people,’ the act complained, ‘abstain and refuse to come to their parish churches and other places where common prayer, administration of the sacraments, and preaching of the Word of God is used.’ It was a charge echoed in the visitation articles of assorted bishops, and one supported by the evidence of church courts, which show marked rises in presentments for non-attendance after 1549.57 Perhaps an age-old problem of patchy attendance was simply being policed with greater thoroughness. But bishops believed people were absenting themselves out of perversity not laziness. Ridley demanded to know ‘whether there be any that privately in their private houses have their masses, contrary to the form and order of the Book of Communion?’
This was a new dimension to the religious divisions of England. For nearly a generation, argument had raged about what the worshipping community should do together in church. To some, it now seemed they should not worship together at all. The act ordered attendance at services on Sundays and holy days, ‘upon pain of punishment by the censures of the Church’. The Church had always applied censures to enforce presence at worship, but statutory insistence on it was nonetheless a departure, a significant enhancement of the role of the state in regulating religious life. Revealingly, the measure was tabled in the Lords as a bill ‘for the appointing of an order to come to divine service’.58
Divine service had taken large steps in the direction Calvin, Bullinger and Vermigli – as well as home-grown zealots like Hooper – were urging the Church to take. Cranmer’s hand did not need to be forced, though; the second Prayer Book reflected his mature theology, and followed a major development in the wider evangelical movement. In the summer of 1549, Bullinger and Calvin hammered out the Consensus Tigurinus (‘Agreement of Zürich’), first printed in March 1551. The formula combined Zwingli’s insistence that the sacrament of the eucharist was a sign or seal, with Calvin’s intuition of spiritual benefits for individual communicants. The eucharist was an instrument of divine grace – but only for the elect.59 Luther, who died in February 1546, would have been horrified.
The new liturgy also reflected Cranmer’s developing sense of the concessions needed to keep people on board: fewer than in 1549. The Lord’s Supper was no longer, it seemed, ‘commonly called the mass’. ‘Altars’ disappeared from the liturgy as they had from churches. The Prayer Book ordered the ‘Table’ to stand in the body of the church, or in the chancel (rather than in the altar’s old position at the east end), and the priest to preside from a position on its long north side.
The point behind this topography of fixtures was to replace the symbolism of sacrifice with that of a minister and congregation gathered around the meal table. Distinctive ministerial garb was not abolished, but it was considerably simplified: for saying communion, the minister ‘shall use neither alb, vestment, nor cope, but … a surplice only’. Bishops ‘shall have and wear a rochet’ – whether Hooper liked it or not. An instruction to begin each communion service with a recital of the Ten Commandments, perhaps borrowed from the practice of the Stranger Churches, undoubtedly appealed to him more.
The theology underpinning the communion was nowhere explicitly spelled out in the Prayer Book, but there were multiple clues. Ordinary fine white bread, rather than unleavened wafers, was to be used, ‘to take away the superstition which any person hath, or might have’. The words spoken by the minister on delivering communion now omitted the primordial phrase, ‘the body of Christ’. Instead, people were told: ‘Take and eat this, in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving.’ ‘Presence’ was, at best, spiritual, and limited to the subjective experience of the communicant. That was certainly the implication of a homely and frugal directive: ‘if any of the bread or wine remain, the curate shall have it to his own use’. The object the south-western rebels wanted to see reserved above the high altar, and devoutly worshipped there, was reduced to the status of a supper-time snack.60
Across a range of life-cycle rituals, the new Prayer Book emphasized the importance of faith, and sought to minimize the risk of people placing trust in ritual actions or material objects. Anointing was removed from ordination, visitation of the sick and baptism. The baptismal ceremony did away with the white chrisom robe, though in a rare concession to tradition – or perhaps as an assertion of the Trinity against anabaptist heretics – it retained making the sign of the cross on the child’s forehead. There was provision for communion of the sick, but only if an impromptu congregation could be found to communicate alongside the sick person in their house, where the minister should perform the entire rite. He must not bring consecrated bread from an earlier communion in church, as permitted in 1549 – there could be no suggestion of holiness residing in an object as it was carried from place to place.
The new liturgy also addressed a recurrent concern of the earlier book’s critics, by eliminating from the burial service any suggestion of prayer for the dead. ‘No dirges or other devout prayers to be sung or said for such as was departed this transitory world’ was Robert Parkyn’s sullen summary. His chronicle contained a detailed, intelligent and caustic examination of the new liturgy, with no doubt what lay behind it: ‘All this was done and brought to pass only to subdue the most blessed sacrament of Christ’s body and blood.’61
It would be some months before Parkyn was expected to perform the new service in his parish in Yorkshire. Implementation was delayed till November 1552 while progress continued on the revision of canon law, and on another ambitious project – the production of a definitive set of articles of faith, to lay the ghost of the King’s Book, and set forth the belief of the reformed English Church as emphatically as the 1530 Augsburg Confession did for German Lutherans.
Ideally, the statement would follow rather than precede an event Cranmer still hoped to see: a grand evangelical council to rival and confound the papist proceedings at Trent. In March 1552, Cranmer wrote ecumenically to Europe’s three greatest anti-Roman theologians – Bullinger, Calvin and Melanchthon – inviting them to take part. Calvin warmly applauded the initiative, at a time when ‘hireling dogs of the Pope are barking unceasingly’. But he excused his personal attendance on the implausible grounds of ‘want of ability’. Bullinger and Melanchthon were still more evasive: the self-inflicted wounds of the European Reform were not to be bound and healed in England.62
Nonetheless, by the summer of 1552, there were grounds for Cranmer and other evangelical leaders to feel satisfaction: churches had been cleansed of their idolatry; papist opposition confronted and faced down. Theological opinion often held there were three signs or marks of a true Church: pure worship, correct doctrine and godly discipline. With the revision of the Prayer Book, the English Church was close to mission accomplished on the first count; the articles and new code of canon law would make it three for three. It was not to happen, and, for once, the papists could not be blamed.
Carnal Gospelling
It was, fundamentally, a question of trust. Cranmer, Ridley and other reformers did not believe the Duke of Northumberland had the best interests of the Gospel at heart, and their suspicion gnawed at the evangelical movement from within. The problem did not come out of the blue. From the dissolution of the monasteries onwards, preachers worried that dismantling of the old order was not leading to construction of the new, and a sinister figure increasingly haunted their rhetoric: the ‘carnal gospeller’, who mouthed slogans of reform with the motives of material gain.63
Renewed orders for confiscation of church plate, and the issuing of a new commission for sale of chantry lands, brought matters to a head in April–May 1552. Cranmer’s secretary Ralph Morice remembered his master offering ‘to combat with the Duke of Northumberland’. The envisaged combat was (presumably) intellectual not physical, but it was a mark of Cranmer’s discomfort that he found himself using the argument of religious conservatives, pleading for ‘the staying of the chantries until his highness had come to lawful age’. Ridley later recalled himself and Cranmer being ‘in high displeasure’ with the duke for criticizing ‘spoil of the church goods’.
Just before this, in March 1552, Cranmer voted in the Lords against a failed attempt by Northumberland to remove Tunstall from his diocese of Durham by act of attainder. Very likely, the archbishop had an inkling of what Northumberland was planning. It was revealed in a letter to Cecil in October, when Tunstall was finally deprived by royal commission. The scheme was to carve the great episcopal palatinate into two new dioceses, of Durham and Newcastle, on shoestring budgets, and to transfer to the crown Durham Castle, a variety of episcopal residences and lands worth £2,000 a year.64
Northumberland’s response to such scolding was to court the bishops’ critics. He backed Jan Laski against Cranmer in a squabble about who should be granted the licence to print a French translation of the Prayer Book for use in the Channel Islands. He also brought south as his chaplain John Knox, the firebrand Scot, whose preaching had impressed Northumberland on a 1551 visit to the north. In his letter to Cecil, Northumberland identified Knox as a suitable candidate for the vacant bishopric of Rochester: he would be ‘a whetstone to quicken and sharpen the bishop of Canterbury, whereof he hath need’.65
Knox demonstrated his ability to generate sparks in a first sermon in front of King and court in late September 1552. He ‘inveighed with great freedom against kneeling at the Lord’s Supper’. The result was a message sent from the Privy Council to the printer Richard Grafton, ordering him to stop production and distribution of the new Prayer Book ‘until certain faults therein be corrected’.66
The issue was a rematch of the vestments controversy of the preceding year, with Laski once again taking the side of godly rebels against the evangelical episcopal establishment. For Knox, and other purists, kneeling to receive communion implied worship of the eucharistic elements. Hooper denounced the practice of kneeling in his 1550 Lent sermons as an invitation to ‘grievous and damnable idolatry’ and hoped the lay authorities would insist on reception standing or seated; his preference was for the latter. For Ridley and Cranmer, it was another instance of an ‘indifferent’ matter. Scripture supplied no definitive instructions, and it was up to the Church to prescribe whatever was conducive to uniformity, decency and order.
Furious at being undermined and outflanked, Cranmer wrote to the Council on 7 October, emphasizing how he and ‘the best learned within this realm’ had already weighed the issue, and how Parliament had approved the book they produced. He trusted the councillors would not be swayed by ‘glorious and unquiet spirits, which can like nothing but that is after their own fancy’. Even were the Prayer Book to be revised and reissued every year, ‘yet should it not lack faults in their opinion’. Cranmer moved swiftly to a damning conclusion. The critics condemned kneeling because it was not commanded in scripture, and whatever was not commanded was unlawful. Yet this was ‘the chief foundation of the error of the anabaptists … a subversion of all order in religion as in common policy’. It was a shrewd jab, at a moment when Cranmer was about to be named to a new heresy commission looking into the extent of anabaptism in Kent.
In the face of this tirade, and needing Cranmer’s support to complete the deprivation of Bishop Tunstall, Northumberland backed down – up to a point. On 22 October the Privy Council issued on its own authority a declaration on kneeling at the communion, to be added to the Prayer Book. The last-minute character of the decision meant that early copies had the statement inserted between the leaves: a ‘black rubric’ not using the red ink with which liturgical instructions were conventionally printed. Kneeling would continue, though the rubric made clear that it did not imply adoration, that there was no change to the ‘natural substances’ of bread and wine, and that its sole purpose was to avoid ‘profanation and disorder’.
The rubric added little, as theological explication, to what was already apparent from a careful reading of the Prayer Book. And in truth there was nothing in it to which Cranmer or Ridley could readily take exception. But the episode, and the manner of its resolution, illustrated the tetchiness in relations between leading figures of Church and state, and the willingness of councillors to act in religious matters on their own authority.67
The recriminations continued. In Lent 1553, a formidable array of preachers, at court and elsewhere, took turns to fulminate against ‘covetousness’ and ‘ambition’ in high places. They included Latimer, John Bradford, Grindal, Lever and – biting the hand until recently feeding him – Knox. Northumberland was frequently ill that winter, and so, ominously, was the King. In February, he caught a bad cold, and did not seem able to shake it off. In late April, the imperial ambassador, Van der Delft’s replacement Jean Scheyve, reported that Edward was getting weaker and coughing up blood and bile: ‘his doctors and physicians are perplexed and do not know what to make of it’.68
Edward played a reduced role at the ceremonies to mark the opening of a new Parliament on 1 March 1553. The main business, as usual, was the grant of a subsidy, for, despite sales of church goods, royal finances remained calamitous. There was also a major ecclesiastical matter: a bill to enact the proposed overhaul of canon law, now packaged in a substantial document known as the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum (Reform of the Ecclesiastical Laws).
The Reformatio was a blueprint for a meticulously reformed Church of England: the next and necessary step, after the demanding work of cleansing and destruction, towards building a new Christian society. It was not a blueprint for revolution, and aimed to reform rather than abolish the canon law system, keeping, for example, the three-fold ministry of bishops, priests and deacons. Unsurprisingly, it endorsed wholeheartedly the royal supremacy. But the document gave overtly reformed interpretations to all the remaining structures of a once-popish Church. The office of deacon was redefined, as in Calvin’s Geneva, to concern itself with social welfare and support of the poor; churchwardens were to concentrate on policing morals and behaviour in the parish, rather than organizing church ales. Discipline was the recurrent theme, with detailed instructions on how preachers should supervise and regulate their flocks, and demands for strict social exclusion of excommunicates. New punishments included banishment or perpetual imprisonment for adultery and blasphemy. In line with the practice of European reformed Churches, provisions for absolute divorce in cases of adultery were introduced. There was even a canon demanding that mothers breastfeed their own children, and not avoid ‘the honest and natural burdens of child-rearing’.69
The bill failed. Its proposals – at once utopian, compassionate and coercive – belong on the long list of might-have-beens of the English Reformation. Cranmer introduced the measure in the House of Lords, but Northumberland spoke immediately and decisively against it. This, in the imperial ambassador’s account, was an act of revenge for the recent wave of sermons criticizing government policy. Yet it is also likely that Northumberland reacted against the strong strain of clericalism in the Reformatio Legum, and its potential for emboldening the Church to assert greater independence from the state.70
As discipline hit the rocks in the spring of 1553, worship and doctrine remained on a steadier course. An officially authorized primer was printed in March – a book of private prayer to complement the Book of Common Prayer, whose structure of morning and evening services it adapted for home devotional use. Virtually all traces of the traditional Catholic primers were eliminated, including the Dirige, and psalms and prayers of the passion. The book contained numerous prayers for sundry occasions, many of them the work of Cranmer’s chaplain, Thomas Becon. Ideals of a well-ordered commonwealth, in which people knew both their place and their obligations towards others, were reflected in special petitions for landlords, merchants, lawyers, labourers, parents and children. But there was also doctrinal red meat. In a prayer ‘For the glory of heaven’, the reader entreated God to ‘make me … of that number whom thou from everlasting hast predestined to be saved … Pluck me out of the company of the stinking goats, which shall stand on thy left side and be damned.’
‘Make me’ here probably meant, ‘Allow me to believe that I am’ – for God’s mind could not be swayed or changed on the question of whom, before the beginning of time, he chose to live with him in eternity. The seeping expansion of the doctrine of predestination was a significant development of the mid-Tudor years. For believers, it gave greater depth and meaning to the perplexing divisions of England, and appreciable reassurance that being in the minority did not mean being in the wrong. The struggles, travails and contradictions experienced by the godly in this life were but echoes of another, elemental and invisible contest between the forces of light and darkness, elect and non-elect, Christ and Antichrist – the contest described in the biblical Book of Revelation and in Bale’s Image of Both Churches, of which three editions appeared under Edward. The ultimate outcome of the contest was assured:
The people of all manner of regions, which are predestined of God to be saved, shall walk in the clearness of the light … Neither shall they care for Mary nor John, roods nor relics, beads nor holy water, masses nor merits. For so shall He shine upon them, and His glory appear in them, that the clouds of Antichrist and his false prophets shall take no place.
‘Antichrist is not yet slain’, warned the official catechism that followed the primer in May 1553, but there was little doubt that his days were numbered.71
The catechism was issued jointly with a set of articles, forty-two in number, and described on their title-page as ‘agreed upon by the bishops and other learned and godly men in the last Convocation’. This was misleading, a potential hostage to fortune, and added to the title page by fellow-councillors without Cranmer’s knowledge. The articles were not formally discussed or adopted by Convocation, whose already weakened state as a decision-making body was eroded further in Edward’s reign. Religious conservatives there would undoubtedly have put up a fight. Nor were the articles (unlike the Prayer Book) endorsed by parliamentary vote. They were drafted by Cranmer and a small circle of evangelical allies, and issued on royal authority alone. It was not the validation from a pan-European, anti-Roman General Council that Cranmer had hoped for. Such a pedigree would not in any case have conciliated conservatives. When, at the end of May, Cranmer and other bishops began to demand subscription from clergy, there were, in London at least, ‘divers that denied many of the articles’.72
The articles themselves consolidated rather than accelerated the evangelical agenda. They avoided the recent hot-button issues of clerical vestments and kneeling at the communion, though the voice of exasperated episcopal authority was clearly audible in Article 33, maintaining that Christian customs could vary between times and places, and denouncing ‘whosoever, through his private judgement, willingly and purposely doth openly break the traditions and ceremonies of the Church which be not repugnant to the Word of God’. There was predictable condemnation of papal authority, of compulsory clerical celibacy, purgatory, images, saints and transubstantiation, along with an equally emphatic rejection of a variety of anabaptist errors, such as the holding of goods in common, and the unlawfulness of oath-taking. There were declared to be but two sacraments, baptism and the eucharist, both ‘effectual signs of grace’, confirming and strengthening faith in Christ. Article 29, on the Lord’s Supper, maintained the position of the Prayer Book (which Article 35 endorsed as ‘godly, and in no point repugnant to the wholesome doctrine of the Gospel’) in its denial of ‘real and bodily presence’, combining this with a degree of studied vagueness about what, if any, sort of presence there might actually be.
On predestination, the articles unambiguously asserted God’s choice of the elect ‘before the foundations of the world were laid’, stressing how his ‘sons by adoption’ would ‘walk religiously in good works’ – effect following cause. There was some skirting around the full implications, however. Calvin devoted several chapters of his Institutes of the Christian Religion to demonstrating ‘the eternal election, by which God has predestined some to salvation, and others to destruction’. By contrast, Article 17 spoke only of ‘predestination to life’.
Predestination was an idea ‘full of sweet, pleasant and unspeakable comfort to godly persons’. For ‘curious and carnal persons’, there was a danger that ‘to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God’s predestination’ might lead to immorality or despair. The article did not say that preachers should be careful how, and how often, they treated this topic (a topic notably absent from the Homilies). But that was surely the implication, particularly since God’s actual judgements ‘are unknown to us’. The true, invisible Church comprised the elect only, but the rag-bag people of the visible, earthly Church still had to be managed, ordered, persuaded and cajoled into goodness.
On one point, entirely foreign to the theology of Calvin, the articles were unequivocal. ‘The King of England is supreme head in earth, next under Christ, of the Church of England and Ireland.’73 That was the legal basis for six years of exhilarating religious change, and also, to a remarkable extent, their emotional heart. Under Henry, the supremacy had often seemed no more than an instrument of convenience, and a frequently unreliable one. But evangelicals across the spectrum of temperament and opinion recognized in their young Josiah an instrument of divine providence; the mortal enemy of the Pope, and leader of the earthly struggle against Antichrist.74 The mantle of godly royal authority enabled reformers to regard previously popish institutions as redeemed, or at least redeemable, and explains why unlikely figures, such as Hooper, were willing to serve as bishops. Even John Bale accepted promotion to the episcopate, setting off in late 1552 to serve for a few unhappy months as bishop of Ossory in the south-east of Ireland. Bale’s fertile historical imagination allowed him to see King John, as well as Henry VIII, as heroic champions of Christ against Antichrist. To view Edward VI in the same light required a great deal less theological squinting.75
In an increasingly polarized religious world, this, ironically, was common ground between evangelicals and Catholics – some Catholics. Royal supremacy itself, it could be argued, was not the wellspring of heresy and division; a true exercise of the supremacy had been hindered and hijacked during the minority. That was the view of Gardiner, of rebels demanding the return of the Six Articles, and of others like John Proctor, a former fellow of All Souls, Oxford. At the end of 1549, just before the tightening of censorship, Proctor published an ostensibly anti-anabaptist work, sorely lamenting the ‘hurly burly of Christ’s religion’. He blamed irresponsible preachers and unrestrained reading of scripture for creating an England where ‘every man, every woman, pretendeth to be a gospeller’. Proctor’s good old days were recent ones – those of ‘noble Henry, king of kings’, who justly got rid of popes and superstition, but whose legacy of orthodoxy and order was now coming grievously apart.76
As an adult Edward would renounce the heretics and restore Henry’s legacy: that was the hope, spoken or unspoken, of conservatives. A version was even shared by some Catholics who felt little nostalgia for the reign of Henry. In late 1552 or early 1553, Reginald Pole composed a letter, in the form of a preface for a new edition of his De Unitate, to a monarch now ‘approaching adolescence’. Edward turned fifteen in October 1552, and was receiving regular instruction from William Thomas – former traveller in Italy, and now clerk of the Privy Council – on policy matters and drafting of state papers. In his letter, Pole said he had heard good reports of the King, and offered him counsel so that he would not repeat the mistakes of his father.77
If the letter was ever sent, there is no evidence of a reply. The young king had every intention of avoiding the mistakes of Henry VIII, though not in the way Pole meant. Edward was beyond doubt the rightful son and heir, but in 1544, on the eve of his departure to campaign in France, Henry used an Act of Parliament simply to announce the line of succession. If Edward died without lawful heirs, then the throne was to pass first to Mary and her progeny, then to Elizabeth and hers – even though both women remained, technically, bastards.
In the spring of 1553, painfully sick, and starting to despair of recovery, Edward came to a courageous and fateful decision. He would rise up to exercise his God-given supremacy, undo his father’s imperious will, and rescue the realm from Antichrist.