WILLIAM SALESBURY, ELIZABETHAN translator of the Prayer Book and New Testament into Welsh, looked back over a childhood spent in Denbighshire and Lancashire, from his adulthood in the middle years of the sixteenth century, not with nostalgia, but with a mixture of revulsion and relief:
And as I was thus tangled, and abominably deceived, and trained and brought up in tender age in the Pope’s holy like religion, before Christ’s second birth here in England, even so were the Jews before his first birth in Judea wondrously deceived, and shamefully seduced.
Salesbury’s is an important testimony, one of several bequeathed to us by Protestant converts from this period. He interpreted the passage of his own life as a journey from enslavement into liberty, from delusion to enlightenment, from a sham (‘holy like’) faith to one that was reliable and authentic: ‘Christ’s true religion here among us’.1
Much of the scholarship produced by previous generations of Reformation historians would probably have been disposed to take Salesbury’s assessment as not just true ‘for him’, but as true, period, and might not have balked unduly at his arresting characterization of the English Reformation as ‘Christ’s second birth’ in the country.2 Even today, some intelligent people, both religious-minded and secular, remain strongly persuaded that at the Reformation a bad form of Christianity was replaced by a good or at least a better one. Others incline to thinking that the opposite may well be true, or at least that a popular form of Christianity was displaced by a less popular one, an assessment which had a good deal more respectable scholarly weight behind it by the end of the twentieth century than it did twenty or thirty years earlier.3
Most historians working today take the understandable view that it is not their business to pronounce on whether the aims and achievements of the Reformation were inherently virtuous, though that has not stopped them from offering a variety of responses to the seemingly perennial question of whether the Reformation should be judged a success or a failure. The teasing out of answers to this conundrum often involves attention to various long-term continuities in English religious culture, and sometimes leads to the paradoxical conclusion that the Reformation succeeded as an agent of social transformation precisely because of how little it actually managed to change, and how slowly it managed to change it.4
The approach taken in this book, however, represents a deliberate revisiting of themes that caught the attention of earlier Reformation historians: conflict, conversion and the ecstatic or agonizing experience of change. Arguably, it doesn’t always pay as much attention as it should to the unremarkable and sometimes almost unmeasurable modulations of alteration and sameness in the rhythms of everyday life.
There certainly were important stabilities and continuities – most obviously, in the fact that the majority of people continued to worship, week on week, in the same church building as their parents and grandparents. The quirky conservatism of Elizabeth I helped to ensure that links to the past of various kinds remained in place there, and many ordinary parishioners undoubtedly valued them. At the very end of the sixteenth century, Elizabeth’s idiosyncratic version of Protestantism received powerful intellectual validation. Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity argued for a positive spiritual value in ceremonies and rituals, and for an unbroken line of succession from the medieval Church to the latter day Church of England. Here, indeed, were the origins of what would later be called ‘Anglicanism’.
Anglicanism typically prizes continuity. Yet the Reformation in England, I am convinced, was nothing if not a volcanic eruption of change, whose seismic impact remains fundamental to an informed understanding of almost all the country’s subsequent social and political developments.
The unresolved issues of a splintered world of faith persisted far beyond the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, and the accession to the English throne of Mary Queen of Scots’ Protestant son, James I. Puritanism, politically quiescent in the 1590s, resuscitated its demands for an onward march of official Reformation, to receive at the Hampton Court Conference a famous put-down from a monarch who thought he understood the implications for royal authority of any prior commitment to the perceived teachings of scripture: ‘no bishop, no king’.
A recurring strain of Roman Catholic radicalism asserted itself in the attempt to blow up both bishops and king in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. English Catholics, increasingly divided among themselves, mostly disapproved of such extreme measures. As the most obviously defeated party in the fall-out from the Reformation, Catholics, the erstwhile repressors of all dissent, were often the most enthusiastic advocates of toleration. The hand of government repression fell less heavily under James I, and his successor Charles I, than it did under Elizabeth (both monarchs had Catholic consorts), but an increasingly deep-rooted English hostility to popery, cultural and xenophobic as much as it was theological, made formal toleration a practical impossibility.
Fears that Charles I, and his bench of anti-Calvinist, iure divino bishops, were seeking to lead England back towards subjection to Rome were a major factor in the breakdown of political trust that culminated in the outbreak of war between Charles and Parliament in August 1642. It is too simplistic to say without qualification that the British Civil Wars were wars of religion, but many of the participants undoubtedly believed they were fighting in God’s cause, and addressing themselves to the unfinished business of the sixteenth century.
On the eve of the conflagration, John Milton, poet and religious visionary, published a pamphlet entitled Of Reformation touching Church-Discipline in England, and the Causes that hitherto have Hindered it. Milton looked back over the events of the sixteenth century with an unforgiving eye. Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley, the episcopal martyrs of Mary’s reign, were nothing but ‘halting and time-serving prelates’, men who suffered themselves ‘to countenance with their prostituted gravities every politic fetch [stratagem] that was then on foot, as oft as the potent statists pleased to employ them’.5
Milton’s Puritanism embodied in a distilled form the anti-episcopal, anti-monarchical instincts of radical Elizabethan presbyterianism. And parliamentary victory over the King in the Civil War permitted at long last the implementation of a sweeping Puritan agenda for reform of the rituals and structures of the Protestant Church of England. Yet this too was a pyrrhic victory, as both the ideal and reality of Puritan-style uniformity collapsed in the 1650s, in quarrels between presbyterians, who wanted to maintain the structure of a national Church, and Congregationalists and Independents, for whom the autonomy of local communities of believers came first. At the same time, the willingness of ordinary people, whatever their level of formal education, to assert the rights of religious conscience and interpret scripture according to their own lights, was dramatically affirmed in a carnivalesque procession of new sects: Baptists, Quakers, Ranters, Seekers, Diggers, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchists and others. The Catholic polemicists of the 1520s and ’30s would have been dismayed, but not surprised, to see all their dire predictions about the fissiparous character of heresy confirmed.
The alternative, conformist face of English Protestantism reasserted itself with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, but uniformity was a long lost cause. Puritans finally departed from a Church of England that can now properly be called ‘Anglican’, to populate a variety of Dissenting, Nonconformist Protestant Churches (as some had already done in the American colonies). Formal toleration for Dissenters would follow in 1689, after a short interlude during which King James II showed himself no more adept than his great-grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, at playing the part of Catholic ruler in a politically Protestant nation.
James’s overthrow in 1688 was an emphatic vindication of the contested Reformation principle that the rights of true religion trumped the claims of dynastic inheritance, and of monarchs claiming to rule by divine mandate; it also showed the nation was not ready, yet, to allow religion to become a purely private business, rather than a matter of policy and state.
That happened, slowly. Penal laws, excluding Catholics from public life, began to be lifted in the 1770s; Catholics were allowed to vote for, and sit as, Members of Parliament in 1829, and (along with other nonconformists) to take up Oxford and Cambridge fellowships in 1871. In 1974, the law was changed to clarify that Roman Catholics were once again permitted to hold Wolsey and More’s office of Lord Chancellor, and in 2013 changed again to allow a (hypothetical) Catholic to marry the heir to the throne. The position of British monarch remains, however, the preserve of a Protestant; its holder still Supreme Governor of the Church of England.
In the United Kingdom, the unravelling of the Reformation legacy has been a leisurely but inexorable process. Other than in isolated pockets, sectarian hatreds are in mainland Britain a thing of the past, and ecumenical relations between the Churches have become warmer as the commitment to Christianity of the nation as a whole has emphatically cooled and waned. For much of the population today, if they have heard of it at all, the Reformation probably evokes feelings similar to how Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain regarded the 1938 crisis in Czechoslovakia: ‘a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing’.
Yet the Reformation, whether we choose to recognize it or not, is a foundational fact of modern England and Britain, as also, at a remove, of America and other places around the globe where British people have settled over the centuries. The inheritance represents much more than a nostalgic lost legacy of medieval works of art, and a surviving one of monastic ruins, now places of secular pilgrimage, scattered like beads across the rural landscape of England and Wales. Nor, conversely, should it be seen solely as a tradition of towering works of Protestant literature – Milton, Bunyan, the English bible itself – or of the attainments of great thinkers, like Isaac Newton, who stood squarely, if heretically, in the Reformation, anti-Catholic lineage.
The real significance of the English Reformation, I would suggest, lies not in the achievement, but in the struggle itself. Though never anything like an exercise in proto-democracy, the Reformation was nonetheless, from first to last, a vocal, vibrant national conversation, about issues of uttermost importance, and one from which few voices were ever entirely excluded.
Victories were regularly declared, but never completely secured. Within Christianity itself, the possibility of alternatives has over the centuries encouraged believers of all sorts to become more thoughtful about the theory and practice of their faith, and to preserve and value the traditions that best maintain it, while quietly discarding others. It has also allowed for possibilities of choice and change, including, but not requiring, the complete rejection of Christian belief. England is now a fairly secular place, but the challenge of living successfully with difference, religious and otherwise, remains a very real one as we approach the third decade of the twenty-first century.
To modern people who are familiar with it, believers and non-believers alike, the era of the Reformation may not seem like much of a recommendation for the religion of Jesus, the messenger of peace and forgiveness. A streak of violence in thought, word and action; a rigid intolerance of dissent; an unappealing zealotry in belief and practice: these can all too easily come across as the dominant notes and accents of the age.
Forays into the past in search of people sharing the modern (very modern) western values of tolerance and inclusivity are usually doomed to end in disappointment or delusion. Efforts to identify, and to reward or castigate, historical heroes and villains are always likely to reveal more about our contemporary beliefs and preoccupations than about those of the society being ransacked for moral edification. Yet the people of the sixteenth century were no less complex, or conflicted, than we are in the twenty-first. Even at times of the most deafening discord and division, the quiet Christian impulse to control and conquer hatred might make itself heard.
At his trial in 1535, after sentence was pronounced against him, Thomas More was asked by his judges if he had anything further he wanted to say. More’s mind turned to scripture, to the Acts of the Apostles, and he reflected on how Paul, then a Pharisee, had approved the stoning to death of the disciple Stephen, ‘and yet be they now both twain holy saints’. In the same way, More hoped that he, and the judges who condemned him, ‘may yet hereafter in heaven all merrily meet together, to our everlasting salvation’.
Three years earlier, the lawyer James Bainham burned at the stake at Smithfield, after being convicted as a heretic through the efforts of Lord Chancellor More. As the fire took hold, Bainham uttered ‘God forgive thee’ to the man setting it, and added ‘the Lord forgive Sir Thomas More’. Jesus himself, from the cross, prayed that his Father would forgive his persecutors, as ‘they know not what they do’. In their determination to follow the pattern of Christ, several of the martyrs of Mary’s reign made the prayer their own. Elizabeth Folkes, a Colchester maidservant, barely twenty years old, fell to her knees after her condemnation in 1557: ‘Lord, if it be thy will, forgive them that this have done against me.’ One of her judges, the archdeacon of Middlesex, William Chedsey, wept as the sentence against her was read, ‘that the tears trickled down his cheeks’.
In London in July 1580, on the eve of his departure on the mission that would lead within a year to arrest, and then to torture and death, Edmund Campion signed off his ‘Letter to the Council’ with a declaration of how he intended to react if all his offers and arguments were ignored, and his entreaties responded to with rejection and ‘rigour’:6
I have no more to say but to recommend your case and mine to Almighty God, the searcher of hearts. Who, send us of his grace, and set us at accord before the Day of Payment, to the end at the last we may be friends in Heaven, where all injuries shall be forgotten.