THE DOCTRINE OF THE STATE CHURCH
The Thirty-Nine Articles were not just the defining statement on what constituted the doctrine of the Church of England; they became part of the test of who could play an active part in public life. Between 1672 and 1828, anyone wishing to hold civil office in England, Wales or Ireland had to adhere to them. In most cases, a refusal to subscribe excluded from office not just Catholics but also Nonconformists – those Protestants who were not Anglicans.
Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, 1533–55.
Like the Book of Common Prayer, the Articles were largely the work of Thomas Cranmer, who served both Henry VIII and Edward VI as archbishop of Canterbury. Under Henry VIII, the Church of England, although separated from Rome, remained Catholic in doctrine. This was made clear by the Six Articles of 1539. It was the succession of Edward VI that allowed Protestant sympathizers to move more firmly into positions where they could change matters. Cranmer was engaged to draw up Forty-Two Articles that would reposition the Church accordingly.
In 1553, Edward died before the new statement could be enforced. The succession of his Catholic half-sister, Mary, brought the reforms to an abrupt halt. The queen restored Church doctrine to where it had been before her father’s break with Rome, and Cranmer, along with many of the other leading reforming theologians, was burned at the stake in Mary’s campaign against ‘heresy’.
With the accession of Elizabeth I, a Protestant again sat on the throne. The 1559 Act of Supremacy restored the monarch to the position of head of the Church of England, with the title ‘supreme governor’, but the doctrinal nature of her state Church remained to be determined. For political as well as personal reasons, Elizabeth wanted a compromise solution. She thought it important that the Church’s practices should be generally familiar to covert Catholics while making sufficient acknowledgement of Protestant teaching to avoid creating an irretrievable rupture with Puritan adherents of the Geneva theologian John Calvin.
1558 Elizabeth succeeds her half-sister, Mary I.
1560 The Treaty of Edinburgh is signed between Scotland, England and France.
1568 Elizabeth puts her Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, under house arrest.
1569 The Rising in the North by Catholics attempts to supplant Elizabeth with Mary.
1577–80 Francis Drake becomes the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe.
1584 Sir Walter Raleigh establishes the English colony of Virginia in North America.
1586 The Babington plot to supplant Elizabeth with Mary is uncovered.
1587 Mary, Queen of Scots, is executed; Drake destroys a Spanish fleet at Cadiz.
1588 The Spanish Armada is defeated.
1597 A storm scatters the second Spanish Armada attempt.
1597–1601 Rebellion occurs in Ireland.
1601 The Earl of Essex stages an abortive rebellion.
1603 Elizabeth I dies and is succeeded by Mary, Queen of Scots’ son, James VI of Scotland.
Producing this delicate balancing act was entrusted to Elizabeth’s archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker. A great scholar and archivist of historic documents, Parker nonetheless wanted to remain largely faithful to Thomas Cranmer’s proposed Forty-Two Articles of 1553. In this he was successful, for the statement of doctrine approved by the Church Convocation in 1563 was little more than a minor revision of Cranmer’s work.
The Convocation approved the Thirty-Nine Articles, thus upholding the central Protestant contention of justification by faith rather than merely through good works. Purgatory, the adoration of saints and the use of pardons were dismissed as Rome’s inventions. No less contentiously, Article 17 affirmed support for the Calvinist belief in predestination – the premiss that God had secretly predetermined who would receive salvation and who damnation.
The greatest difference between the Thirty-Nine Articles adopted by Elizabeth I and Cranmer’s original Forty-Two Articles for Edward VI concerned transubstantiation. The Catholic belief was reaffirmed that the sacrament of Eucharist converted bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood. Nonetheless, Elizabeth still remained particularly apprehensive about needlessly offending her Catholic subjects. This fear motivated her rejection of Article 29, thereby reducing the total number of articles to thirty-eight.
Such appeasement proved short-lived, however, because in 1570 Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth and called on English Catholics to rise up and overthrow her. The pope’s pronouncement, an incitement to treason in the cause of Roman Catholic orthodoxy, was to have disastrous consequences for England’s Catholics. The backlash was not long delayed. In 1571, Article 29 was reinserted, denying in the Eucharist the substance of the body and blood of Christ to ‘the wicked and such as be void of lively faith’. All Thirty-Nine Articles were given statutory authority by Parliament in 1571, making adherence from the clergy a legal requirement.
Article XXXVII: Of the Civil Magistrates
The Queen’s Majesty hath the chief power in this realm of England and other her dominions, unto whom the chief government of all estates of this realm, whether they be ecclesiastical or civil, in all causes doth appertain, and is not nor ought to be subject to any foreign jurisdiction.
Where we attribute to the Queen’s Majesty the chief government, by which titles we understand the minds of some slanderous folks to be offended, we give not to our princes the ministering either of God’s word or of sacraments, the which thing the Injunctions also lately set forth by Elizabeth our Queen doth most plainly testify: but only that prerogative which we see to have been given always to all godly princes in Holy Scriptures by God himself, that is, that they should rule all estates and degrees committed to their charge by God, whether they be temporal, and restrain with the civil sword the stubborn and evil-doers.
The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England.
The laws of the realm may punish Christian men with death for heinous and grievous offences.
It is lawful for Christian men at the commandment of the Magistrate to wear weapons and serve in the wars.
In Scotland, Protestant doctrine was enforced by a different route, being imposed upon a sovereign who remained Catholic. From 1557, Protestant nobles were in armed conflict with their nation’s French regent, Mary of Guise (governing on behalf of the young Mary, Queen of Scots, who remained in France). Upon the regent’s death in 1560, the Scottish Parliament was convened. It declared void Rome’s jurisdiction over Scotland and banned the Catholic Mass. In its place, it drew up an equivalent version of the Thirty-Nine Articles, known as the Confession of Faith. Laying out the new state theology, it was heavily influenced by John Knox, an adherent of John Calvin. Thus the doctrine of the Church of Scotland became Presbyterian rather than Episcopalian.