John Hooper was a man of firm and inconvenient convictions. Created Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, during the slow purge of the conservative episcopate, he chose – rather than accepting his promotion with gratitude and grace – to argue about the ‘popish’ nature of the enthronement ceremony. He declined to take the established oath or wear the traditional vestments. The Privy Council yielded to his first demand and the oath was reworded. But his objection to the ceremonial cope and mitre was more difficult to accommodate. Eight months of argument followed – most of which Hooper spent in the Fleet prison – before a compromise was reached. Hooper would conform during the enthronement. Thereafter he would wear what he chose in his own cathedral. The dispute established Hooper’s position – alongside Nicholas Ridley, who became Bishop of London after Edmund Bonner was deposed – in the leadership of those Protestant reformers who believed that Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, moved against Rome with too much tolerance and too little haste. It also gave special force to his judgement that the King whom he served was ‘The most faithful and intrepid soldier of Christ’.1
The object of Hooper’s admiration was Edward VI, a sickly boy who inherited Henry VIII’s crown in January 1547 when he was ten years old and was, either by mistake or design, prepared for the throne by tutors of a distinctly Protestant inclination. There is no doubt that the Reformation acquired a new impetus during his six-year reign and that Edward was in sympathy with the increased pace of change. Perhaps he was – as Martin Bucer, the newly appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, claimed – also ‘a youth of such godliness as to be the wonder of the whole world’.2 Edward’s piety is not in doubt. Nor is the assiduity with which it was pursued. He was said to read ten chapters of the Bible every day and he took notes, while listening to sermons, and studied them at the end of the service. There were certainly moments of spontaneous and independent action. Believing that the numerous references to St George were in conflict with Protestant practice, he revised the litany used in the annual service that celebrated the Order of the Garter and, during the dispute over the Gloucester enthronement, he noticed – no doubt to the embarrassment of the new Bishop – a ‘popish’ sentence in the revised oath: ‘So help me God, all saints and evangelists.’ Striking it out with his own hand, Edward asked, ‘What wickedness is here, Hooper? Are these offices ordained in the name of saints or God?’3 But, his many virtues notwithstanding, it is unlikely that a youth of his age could – despite his undoubted ability – have been the new Josiah and could have initiated a purge of idols which justified his admirers comparing him to the iconoclastic eight-year-old King of Judah.
Because of his age and religious inclinations, Edward’s reign was welcomed as a gift from a Protestant deity and greeted with language which was extreme even by the standards of the age. During the coronation service, Archbishop Cranmer told the young King, ‘Your majesty is God’s vice-regent and Christ’s vicar within your own dominions, and to see with your predecessor, Josiah, God truly worshipped and idolatry destroyed, the tyranny of bishops banished from your subjects and images removed.’4
From the age of ten, Edward kept a diary. As well as proof that he was a prodigy, it confirms that he retained the character of a Tudor youth. It records a burning; the acceptance, by the Bishop of Winchester, of the new theology; and the rebuke which he administered to his sister, Mary, for allowing Mass to be celebrated in her apartment: ‘She was called with my Council into a chamber where it was declared how long I had suffered her mass in the hope of her reconciliation but that now, there being no hope which I perceived from her letters, unless I saw amendment I could not bear it. She answered that her soul was God’s and she would not change her faith nor hide her opinion through contrary doing. It was said that I constrained not her faith but willed her as a subject to obey.’5 That little revelation of the tension at Court is not typical of the diary. Far less space is devoted to theology and the organisation of the Church than is occupied by accounts of bull- and bear-baiting and competitions of strength and chivalry arranged between gentlemen of the Court.
What has come to be called ‘the Edwardian Reformation’ was the work of sincere theologians, who recognised a change in the spiritual weather; and of cynical courtiers, who exploited the breach with Rome for their own ends. Cranmer was, as he had been for twenty years, a genuine believer who was ready to change the Church at the fastest speed compatible with the general acquiescence – genuine enthusiasm being out of the question – of the common people. Edward Seymour (Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector after Edward’s accession to the throne) and John Dudley (the Duke of Northumberland, who seized Seymour’s powers in 1550) regarded the rejection of the Pope as a way of enhancing their prestige and consolidating their power. They represented, if they represented anything theological, the peculiarly English form of Protestantism that they had inherited from King Henry: rejection of the Pope’s authority rather than his doctrine. But they regarded the campaign to subdue Rome as far less important than the campaign to subdue the Scots, which was the preoccupation of Edward’s ministers during the boy king’s final years.
The risings against Rome in Scotland were, in themselves, of little consequence to the Pope. But they were a replication of much larger revolts all over Europe, which it had become impossible to ignore. Ever since the excommunication of Martin Luther in 1520, influential figures within the Roman Catholic Church – both traditionalists and reformers – had argued in favour of an Ecumenical Council which would certainly reaffirm, and perhaps in some ways refine, the doctrine of the True Church. Pope Clement VII, fearful that it would result in a renewed attack on established doctrine, had resisted the idea. Paul III, his successor, was daring in his determination to stimulate a debate about the place of the Church in the sixteenth century. He first sponsored the Ratisbon Colloquy, at which Roman Catholics and Protestants had attempted to find common ground on which they could reunite. It collapsed after the expression of fundamental disagreement over every issue they discussed, apart from papal supremacy and justification by faith alone. A head-on collision over the status of the Pope had only been avoided by the unsatisfactory expedient of agreement not to discuss the subject. The still-exiled Cardinal Pole had hoped to agree a compromise on justification – the assertion that neither faith nor good works was its exclusive ingredient. The formula was still being discussed when the Colloquy broke up. The gulf which divided the communions was too wide to bridge.
Encouraged by the emergence of progressive cardinals, Pope Paul III tried again to redefine the Church’s place and role in the world. He convened an Ecumenical Council. It first met at Trento on December 13th 1545 and was not officially dissolved until December 4th 1563. In all it held twenty-five sessions during ‘periods of deliberation’: 1545–7, 1551–2, 1562–3. Because of wars and revolutions, it was forced to move from Trento to Bologna, but it retained its name and purpose. The Council of Trent was set the task of agreeing a united response to the challenge of the Reformation – which, by conviction as well as necessity, it began by condemning outright as ‘heretical’.
The Council’s eventual conclusions confirmed traditional doctrine. The Latin Vulgate of St Jerome remained the one true text, and vernacular versions of the scriptures were declared unlawful. A possible compromise on the doctrine of justification was not even discussed. Instead there was the simple rejection of the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone. The doctrines of purgatory, the intercession of the Virgin Mary, the invocation of saints and the veneration of holy relics were all reasserted. Christ was said to be ‘really, truly and substantially present’ during celebrations of the Eucharist – a definition which gave rise to the terms ‘real presence’ and ‘transubstantiation’. Although the Council was unyielding on doctrine, it was admirably flexible on those aspects of the Church’s conduct and administration which had contributed to Protestant rejections of Rome. Indulgences were still to be sought and given, but they were not to be bought and sold. Bishops were to reside in their diocese and would, therefore, be unable to accept pluralities. Convents were to observe strict rules of moral conduct and those that refused to do so were to be closed. Programmes of education were to be put in place in order to guarantee a more knowledgeable and responsive priesthood.
The first session reached its conclusion just as Edward VI came to the throne. Although it dealt with the scandal of absentee bishops, most of its time was devoted to the reassertion of dogma, so its conclusions were sufficiently unbending to enable the English enemies of Rome to warn the young King Edward that compromise with, and tolerance of, the Trent conclusions would be both sinful and unsafe. ‘We are,’ the bishops asserted, ‘desirous of setting forth in all churches the true doctrine of God and have no wish to adapt it to all tastes or deal in ambiguities.’ The certainty was magnificent. The Protestant extremists, who had been held back by King Henry’s equivocation over everything except papal supremacy, realised that their hour had come.
John Hooper – admittedly a prejudiced witness – concluded that Henry VIII had ‘destroyed the Pope but not popery’. Although the monasteries had been ‘pulled down’ and the ‘possessions of monks and nuns … transferred to his exchequer … the invocation of saints, auricular confessions, superstitious abstinence from meats and belief in purgatory, were never before held by the people in greater esteem than at the present moment’.6 Hooper was not alone in wanting to quicken the pace of reform. After Henry’s death, Cranmer – who had found the old king an inconstant ally in life – paid tribute to him as indispensable to the Reformation. But, in private, he regretted that during his last years Henry had been more inclined to row back than to press forward. Edward’s succession seemed to sound the call at least to cautious advance. The new King had confirmed in office and favour the men who had supported his father during Henry’s dying days. ‘In consideration of faithful, diligent and painefull service’, the ‘severall rewards and advancements[s]’ which they had received from ‘the most excellent and mighty Pryncce … late Kynge of this our realm’ were renewed.7 But it was to be a continuity of men, not measures. King Edward wanted, or was persuaded to support, changes in the Church which his father would never have tolerated.
While Somerset was in Scotland – inflicting a defeat on the Old Enemy, which should have boosted both his popularity and his self-confidence – Thomas Cranmer and Nicholas Ridley preached sermons before King Edward. Cranmer believed in steady change that attempted to accommodate popular feeling. Ridley’s idea of progress was far less measured. But they both chose to denounce the iniquity of erecting and worshipping images – the Protestant description of church statues and paintings – irrespective of whether they were objects of veneration or merely decoration. There followed a period of unofficial iconoclasm. It was less a demonstration of the two bishops’ influence than proof that they realised the direction in which their followers were determined to be led.
Images were smashed in Southampton, Hull and St Neots. In Portsmouth the rood screen was ‘contemptuously pulld down and spitefully handled’.8 Undergraduates from Magdalen College, Oxford, toured the university city, burning or breaking every religious artefact they could find. At St Neots, a riotous assembly successfully demanded the restoration of the images. The Privy Council, more sympathetic to Protestantism than in King Henry’s day, decided that discretion required them to support the iconoclasts. When the image-breakers who had desecrated the church of St Martin Pomeroy were brought before them, the unavoidable conviction was followed by dismissal with a caution.
Cranmer seized the moment to make the sort of cautious progress which was the central feature of his strategy for ensuring that the Reformation endured. In July 1547, he issued a series of royal injunctions. They were intended to clarify Church policy on the still-contentious subject of idolatry. Injunction Two forbade ‘wandering to pilgrimage’, kissing relics and ‘other such-like superstition’. Injunction Three required the clergy to destroy all images which encouraged the abuse of worship and prayers for intercession. Injunction Twenty-Eight went further than Injunction Three and required the removal of all artefacts which it described as ‘monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimage and superstition’. When parishes complained that the apparent contradiction had become an excuse for inaction, they were told that the two conflicting injunctions could be reconciled if it was assumed that Injunction Twenty-Eight called for destruction only when idols, pictures and relics were used for disreputable purposes. The Injunctions on parish processions (forbidden), altar candles (limited in number) and bell-ringing (to be ‘utterly forborne’ during services) were clear enough, though it is doubtful if they achieved their claimed objective of eliminating ‘all contention and strife’.9 They did, however, succeed in making church services – and in consequence religion itself – more drab than it had been in the high days of Roman Catholicism. The Edwardian Reformation took the colour out of worship and painted it grey.
The promulgation of the Injunctions was followed, in June 1553, by the publication of Forty-Two Articles of Faith – again the work of Thomas Cranmer. The assiduous Archbishop had also prepared Forty-Four Articles for Uniformity of Rites. They were never issued. The Forty-Two Articles confirmed the political settlement. Article Thirty-Six asserted that the King of England was ‘the Supreme head on earth, next under Christ, of the Church of England and Ireland’. It also confirmed that the Pope was no more than the Bishop of Rome. There was a point at which canon and temporal law overlapped. Obedience to the civil power had always been an implied requirement of the Reformation. The Forty-Two Articles were explicit: ‘The Civil Magistrate is ordained and allowed of God. Wherefor we must obey him not only for fear of punishment but for conscience sake.’ As well as suppressing endowed prayers (a blow struck against the chantries), the Forty-Two Articles authorised communicants to take both bread and wine. The assault on images was legally sanctioned the following year by relating the Injunction to an edict of 1538. Thomas Cromwell continued to influence the Reformation from the grave.
The zealots were not satisfied. Legitimising the destruction of images was not enough. They wanted the law to require it. So did the London Commissioners who, under the terms of the Cromwell legislation, had been given the task of ensuring the conformity of priests and churches. Somerset chose to support what he judged to be the increasingly influential Protestant iconoclasts. So he issued an edict requiring all images to be removed immediately from London churches. In November 1547, the Commissioners supervised the removal of St Paul’s rood screen and what remained of the cathedral’s statues. In 1548 the edict was extended to the whole of England. It was received with different degrees of acceptance and defiance from parish to parish. More often than not it was obeyed, although some churches hid away the venerated statues in the hope that they would be restored in more pious days to come. Others smashed and burned with such enthusiasm that a restraining order had to be issued, stipulating that the destruction ‘shall not extend to any image … of any king’.10 Even in the parishes which were totally ‘cleansed’, the militant Protestants were neither grateful nor satiated. They simply focused their attention on the next objective in the path of their reforming zeal.
Despite having acquired the evangelical views which suited the mood of the time, Somerset, the Lord Protector, was too busy fighting the Scots and fighting off his enemies at Court to spend much time or effort on strengthening or extending the Reformation. The changes for which he deserves praise or blame were driven by necessity rather than conviction. The final destruction of the chantries (endowments to finance priests saying prayers for the founder’s soul) was entirely consistent with the Protestant rejection of indeterminate purgatory. But, although it was not mentioned in the preamble, the Chantries Act of 1547 was the result of penury rather than principle. Somerset had run out of money to finance the war in Scotland. In the bill’s ‘long title’ its purpose was described as the suppression of ‘vain opinions of purgatory and masses’ and the diversion of assets, released by the closures, to such ‘good and godly uses as erecting grammar schools to educate youth in virtue and godliness’. There was to be a special emphasis on ‘better provision for the poor and needy’.11
A previous Chantries Act, two years earlier, had only been passed after fierce opposition in the House of Commons and the conflicting explanations that King Henry was in urgent need of money and that he proposed to embark on a programme of reform rather than of wholesale closures. The Act of 1547 authorised seizure without any explanation about its necessity and was, in consequence, initially rejected by the Commons. The addition of the undertaking to create new grammar schools, subsequently included in the preamble but not in the body of the bill, helped to ease a second version through Parliament. So did the promise of pensions to deposed priests. The priests were paid, but the schools were never founded. The £610,000 raised from the sale of chantry property and land went straight into Somerset’s war chest. Schools which had been financed by chantry bequests were forced to close. So – its preamble notwithstanding – the Chantries Act destroyed more schools than it created. Most of them were reopened during the following decades’ enthusiasm for education, which saw the number of grammar schools in England rise from 217 to 271. Many of the King Edward schools remain. But they are the enduring achievement of individual benevolence, neither a by-product of the Reformation nor a memorial to the benevolence of the boy king.
Commissioners – as always, since the reign of Henry VIII – were the instrument of what they understood to be the government’s real, if unstated, policy. They set out to expropriate 4,000 chantries and an unknown number of associated memorials and foundations. The extent of their success is uncertain and, like the strength of opposition to their intentions, differed from parish to parish. There was open rebellion in Lancashire and the West Country where a mob, estimated to number 3,000, murdered the official who was charged with both tearing down images and dissolving the chantry. But – as at almost every stage of the Reformation – the opposition to what amounted to a religious revolution was strangely muted. Only the Pilgrimage of Grace had threatened to halt the Protestant tide. More, in London, and Pole, in Rome, had been right to argue that the Catholic Church in England, without reform, would slide into slow decline.
During the years between the passing of the two Chantry Acts, the pace of reform quickened. In 1549, yet another of Cranmer’s injunctions permitted priests to marry. Heresy laws were repealed and burnings ended – though, as always, exceptions were made for Anabaptists, an umbrella term of abuse which was applied to all manner of radical Protestants who were stigmatised as threats to stable government and executed under the provisions of the civil law. All restrictions on Bible-reading were abolished and – as a contribution to understanding the new faith – Thomas Cranmer published the Book of Homilies on which he had been working for five years. The homilies dealt with twelve subjects, ranging from ‘universal usefulness’ to ‘whoredom and uncleanliness’. Belief in the intercession by saints was brushed aside as a Roman heresy. The book strongly recommended that the habit of concluding wills with the hope that ‘the Blessed Mary and all the Saints’ would pray for the soul of the departed be replaced by the assurance that the author ‘trusted only in the merits of Christ the Saviour’.12 As always with Cranmer, the Homilies drew a clear theological distinction between his reasonable Reformation and the wild revolution of the dangerous continentals. ‘Antinomianism’– justification by faith alone – was explicitly rejected.
Far away in Edinburgh, the emergence of the Lords of Congregation – firmly in control of Scotland’s destiny, though not of Mary Stuart – removed all restrictions from the printing, sale and circulation of English translations of the Bible and made it an offence, punishable by death, to prevent or deter the vernacular texts being read. Scotland had become an increasingly Protestant country with a staunchly Catholic queen. In England, the King himself decided that respect for his father’s memory no longer required him to endorse Henry’s drift back to popish practices.
So the prodigious Edward initiated the repeal of the Act of Six Articles. Political action was accompanied by intellectual speculation. He wrote a commentary on the work of Bernardino Ochino – an Italian refugee living in England – in which he digressed from academic analysis to call the Pope ‘a true son of the devil, a bad man, an Antichrist and abominable tyrant’.13 He had also excoriated those items of English law which required the observance of popish practices. ‘In my father’s day, when [the Pope’s] name was struck out of books, he stopped the mouths of Christians with six articles like six fists’.14
Despite his iron will and steely determination, Thomas Cranmer still chose to approach his objective in stages. In 1548 he drafted a new Order of Communion. It provided for English prayers and exhortations to be included in a still-Latin Mass. St Paul’s and some other London churches followed that lead by holding whole services in English, in the belief that the ground was being prepared for the introduction of a vernacular liturgy. So – happy to be led in the direction of his choice – Cranmer began to compose a whole new English form of service. A committee of bishops, packed with Protestant sympathisers, approved the draft.
The Act of Uniformity – which abolished Latin services and replaced them with an English order of service set out in the Book of Common Prayer – came into force on Sunday June 9th 1549. Eight bishops and three peers of the realm had opposed the bill’s passage, but in the House of Commons there had been virtually no objection. Princess Mary had made a last desperate and doomed attempt to save the Mass. Her plea that the form of service should remain untouched until Edward reached his majority was rejected out of hand. Contrary to the evidence of her brother’s diary, she insisted that she had been given licence to worship as she chose in her own apartment and blamed on the King’s advisers the demand that she support the new orthodoxy. Then she made a solemn promise: ‘Have patience till I have more years. Then I will remedy all.’15
Cranmer had tried to find a compromise which accommodated the wide spectrum of views, even within the Church of England, on the nature of the Eucharist. It was not an easy task. He needed to satisfy sympathisers with the Roman Catholic view of complete transubstantiation, Lutherans who believed that there was a ‘real presence’ after the consecration of the bread and wine, and the followers of Huldrych Zwingli who believed the whole Communion service to be no more than a metaphor. The result pleased virtually nobody. One exception was Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, who thought that he could revive the technique which had enabled him to survive – whatever the creed of the King – and earned him the sobriquet ‘Wily Winchester’. Although he accepted the new Prayer Book, he did so with the proviso that it was not ‘what I would have made myself’.16
Gardiner’s endorsement alienated Protestants, without reconciling Catholics. Discontent was general and grew large and serious enough in Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Cornwall, Devon, Hampshire and Yorkshire for the consequent disturbances to be called riots. One passage of the revised scriptures caused particular offence. The new Prayer Book required ‘The Supper of the Lord and Holy Communion, commonly called the Mass’ to be celebrated in English. Elevation of the bread and wine was forbidden as Communion was a sacrament in which the congregation was to share. The logical extension of those new edicts was the removal of altars – the presence of which confirmed worship of the sacraments upon them and the notion that the Eucharist was a repetition of Christ’s sacrifice. They were to be replaced by the altogether more prosaic Communion tables. The process began in London where Nicholas Ridley – never a man to spare feelings – said that his intention was to ‘move from the simple superstitions of the popish mass to the right use of the Lord’s Supper’.17 His decision was so unpopular that St Paul’s altars had to be dismantled and removed at dead of night to prevent an uprising. Ridley was undeterred. He extended the instruction to the rest of his diocese.
During the debate that preceded the Act of Uniformity’s passage through the House of Lords, Bishop Tunstall of Durham had rightly described it, and the service that it endorsed, as implying the denial of transubstantiation. Cranmer had responded by asserting his belief in the ‘spiritual presence’ – a phrase open to several interpretations. That helped to convince Protestant opinion that Cranmer had paid too high a price for what he hoped would be Roman Catholic acquiescence. Roman Catholics, on the other hand, shared Bishop Tunstall’s view that the way was being prepared for the outright denial of transubstantiation. Amid the doubts and denials, contradictions and confusion, the Reformation moved irresistibly on.
The introduction of the new Prayer Book was hotly opposed in parish after parish. Sometimes the priest simply ignored the royal injunction and said Mass in Latin. Sometimes a priest who had – either willingly or reluctantly – accepted the edict was forced by a rebellious congregation to return to the Roman liturgy. More often priests and people combined to make the new services sound as like the old Mass as possible. Frequently, English prayers were chanted as if they were Latin. The West Country was particularly wedded to old ways and the Latin Bible, which men in Cornwall said they must retain because they could not speak English. At Bodmin, churchgoers chanted, ‘Kill the gentlemen and we will have the Six Articles up again and ceremonies as there were in King Henry’s time.’18 In Exeter the mood was even more aggressive. ‘Come out those heretics and two-penny book men! Where are they? By God’s wounds and blood we will not be pinned to serve their turn … We will have the mass in Latin as before.’19
The Prayer Book riots coincided with – and were, perhaps, encouraged by – economic hard times. Opponents of Somerset, who had long been plotting to depose him, attributed the discontent to the cost of his Scottish war. Somerset himself blamed (or pretended to blame) the sporadic uprisings on the wilful failure of the priesthood to explain the purpose and necessity of change. ‘We believe your complaints about the blindness and unwillingness of your curates to set forth our proceedings and think that much of the dangerous stir comes from them.’20 Two uprisings were too substantial to be put down by the local gentry. In Devon the revolt was so extensive that troops had to be diverted from reinforcing the campaign against the Scots and, together with mercenaries, deployed to defeat the insurgents in pitched battle. In some parts of England, Catholics rioted in defence of the Mass and Protestants rioted in protest at Catholic attempts to keep it. Kett’s Rebellion – second only in size and success to the Pilgrimage of Grace – was largely a response to poverty and deprivation. But many of the Norfolk rebels added religious upheaval – the constant imposition of new rituals and regulations – to their list of grievances.
Kett – a forty-seven-year-old tanner and farmer whose temperament was not altogether suited to the role of rebel leader – was motivated by moral outrage. Norwich, the second city of England, was home to the nation’s largest concentration of the homeless, unemployed and destitute. Although Kett claimed that his rebellion was also mounted in the name of the true faith, his supporters’ chief grievance was economic. And many of them were not sure what the true faith was. Kett issued orders to his followers and dispensed justice from the shade of what he called the Tree of Reformation and demanded that ‘priests and vicars that be not able to preach and set forth the word of God to his parishioner, may be thereby put from his benefice and the parishioners there to choose another, or else the patron lord of the town’.21 His complaints against the local priesthood were amply justified. When, in 1551, John Hooper made a general visitation in Norfolk, he found that, of the 311 priests examined, 170 could not recite the Commandments and ten could not repeat the Lord’s Prayer.22
In the second week of July 1549, 16,000 men, under Kett’s leadership, assembled on Mousehold Heath in Norfolk. Edward’s tutor denounced them in a poem called ‘The Hurt of Sedition’ and the Archbishop of Canterbury advised ‘if they will be true gospellers, let them be obedient, meek and patient in adversity and long suffering and in no way rebel against the laws and magistrates’.23 The Duke of Northumberland reacted with the more practical approach of a soldier. The first foray resulted in the rout of the token force, which he had thought was enough to restore the King’s Peace. Then his army of hardened soldiers mounted a full assault and 2,500 rebels were slaughtered. Several hundred more, including Kett, were executed. At Court, Sir William Paget, the King’s secretary, identified the malaise that had caused the rebellion and was affecting all England. ‘Society is maintained by religion and laws: you have neither. The old religion is forbidden and the new not generally implanted.’24 The Reformation – having been imposed from above – had left the generality of men and women bewildered about Church, faith and virtue. And it had destroyed the often-corrupt institutions which governed their lives.
In Rome, the Catholic Church was going through one of its periodic upheavals – crises which never quite turned into catastrophes, because a thousand years of spiritual certainty had made it able to survive the strains that would have destroyed a less deeply rooted institution. Pope Paul III died on November 10th 1549. The progress of the conclave, which met to elect his successor, should have been kept secret. Each day’s deliberations became public within hours of the session closing. Partly because of the fear of contagion in an overcrowded Vatican and partly because of their wish to maintain their luxurious lifestyles, the cardinals spent much of their time in the city. They gossiped and, acting on their information, bookmakers quoted odds on the election of the rival candidates. It was assumed that the election would reflect the power struggle between France and Spain. As a result, Pole was the early favourite. He had – or seemed to have – the support of the Emperor who, being King of Spain, was naturally sympathetic to a man who had, so bravely, defended Catherine of Aragon. But a substantial number of cardinals were bitterly opposed to the election of a ‘reformer’, particularly one who wished to reform their conduct as well as their Church.
In the absence of the French cardinals, delayed en route, the successful candidate needed twenty-eight votes – two-thirds of the total cast. The first ballot was held on December 3rd. Pole received twenty-one votes. The second ballot was held on the next day. Pole’s vote rose to twenty-four. The cardinals from the Empire proposed to elect him by acclamation – an offer which he refused. However, Pole had received enough promises of support to make his election, on the third ballot, seem certain. The promises were not kept. Pole’s vote only increased to twenty-five. The announcement of the result coincided with receipt of the news that the French cardinals’ ship had reached Corsica. The conclave was suspended to await their arrival. Pole’s prospect of election – and of becoming the first English Pope since Nicholas Breakspear in the mid-twelfth century – disappeared. Cardinal del Monte, a compromise candidate, was elected Pope Julius III. From then on, Pole rarely attended the Curia. He resigned the governorship of Patrimonium Petri (the Vatican’s property in Rome) and eventually entered, as a guest rather than a brother, the Benedictine monastery on the shore of Lake Garda. Pious Catholics came to believe that Providence had saved him for England.
In October 1549 the Duke of Somerset was replaced as the King’s favourite, confidant and effective chief minister by the Earl of Southampton. He did not last long. In 1550 John Dudley, Earl of Warwick was appointed Lord President of the Council. The Duke of Northumberland, as he soon became, obtained his high place by allying himself with the religious conservatives at Court and on the Council, but it soon became clear that, if he was to maintain his place at the King’s right hand, he would have to change sides and become the Protestants’ champion. King Edward was complaining that the clergy, papist at heart, were ignoring the changes that he had caused to be made to the liturgy and ceremonial of the Church of England. He was right, but help was at hand. John Knox was on his way south.
By the time of Knox’s arrival in England, Somerset had become Lord Protector and, in partnership with Cranmer, was modulating the speed at which the Reformation took hold. They were responding to the fear – felt by an increasing number of moderate Protestants – that the whole movement would be taken over by extremists who were as much the enemies of the state as of the Roman Catholic Church. Gardiner, who had opposed Cranmer’s policy on the principle that ‘once the door is open, you cannot withstand the attack of those bursting in’,25 had been deposed and imprisoned as an enemy of reform. But Cranmer was in such sympathy with his view that, for some time, he required licensed clergy – rather than preaching sermons of their own invention – to read to their congregations from his Homilies. It was not an outbreak of Catholicism that Cranmer feared. Freed from Roman discipline, the Church of England had spawned cults which orthodox Protestants barely recognised as Christian.
Somerset had attacked the extremists in the name of the state Church. The pronouncement that ‘it is the part of the Godly man not to think himself wiser than the King’s Majesty and his Council but patiently to expect and conform’26 at least implied that the temporal authority was also the arbiter in spiritual disputes. What he believed to be a statement of moderation was about to be challenged by a man from the wilder shores of Scottish Protestantism. John Knox had no hesitation in contesting the judgement of kings and princes, if it was in conflict with his simultaneously rigid and idiosyncratic conscience. The Church of England had made Knox a grant of £5 and promised him employment as a preacher. He was to repay the patronage by denouncing as heresy a feature of the Protestant service which Cranmer and the bishops had regarded as too inconsequential to warrant reform.
Initially Knox was sent to Berwick-on-Tweed, a border town in the diocese of Durham with a garrison of ill-disciplined soldiers. There were three possible reasons for his appointment. The Privy Council may have wanted to keep him well clear of London or it may have thought that a preacher who carried a two-handed sword would not be intimidated by a rough congregation. The most cynical explanation was that Knox was appointed to the Durham diocese in order to be a thorn in the side of Cuthbert Tunstall, a brave enemy of the Reformation, who remained Bishop – although imprisoned – until 1552. For three years, the House of Commons – backed by Cranmer, a usually honest and often dispassionate zealot – had rejected the bill that proposed to deprive him of his see. Tunstall had kept his bishopric but lost his influence. The Reformation was moving on and the views of Knox, a man who was once thought to be an extremist, were swirling along in the mainstream of Protestant theology. As a result, Knox was able to exploit to the advantage of his notoriety an issue which, while a matter of principle to devout Protestants, was little more than an appendage to changes in doctrine and liturgy that had been going on for years.
In 1548, when Cranmer published The Order of Communion, the notion of the Real Presence had been orthodox doctrine, even though there were a variety of explanations about what the term actually meant. A year later in Oxford, Peter Martyr Vermigli defended Zwingli’s rejection of the whole notion and, in Cambridge, Martin Bucer taught that the ‘presence’ was purely symbolic. The shift in academic opinion – significantly under the influence of scholar refugees – proved remarkably influential. The Council forbade the teaching of out-and-out transubstantiation and arranged a disputation between two dissidents, who had been released from prison for the occasion and were advocates of what had become the new orthodoxy. The sceptics won. The scene had been set for the construction of yet another Prayer Book. The new text would be designed to set out an order for the Communion service that was indisputably free from all taint of ‘Popery’.
Cranmer’s first Book of Common Prayer had been published simultaneously with the passage, by the House of Lords, of the Act of Uniformity and was first used on the Whit Sunday that followed the Act becoming law in January 1549. It reflected the decision to abolish the Latin Mass. But parts of the Sarum, York and Hereford litanies of rites were retained. So the changes in observances were not as radical as the changes in the language. The text was written in the hope of reconciling some Roman Catholics to the new order. Like many attempts at compromise, it pleased neither of the competing factions.
The second Book of Common Prayer, published in 1552, was much more acceptable to most Protestant ultras. The text, which again emerged from Cranmer’s deliberations, reflected the Forty-Two Articles. It contained far more of a Protestant liturgy. Cranmer was creating a coherent Protestant theology which was designed to separate the Church in England from Anabaptists as well as Roman Catholics. So the heresy of adult and limited baptism was condemned as roundly as the doctrines of transubstantiation, purgatory, the intercession by saints and justification by faith alone. The ceremonies – baptism, confirmation and burial – were rewritten. Ordinary bread (not the mystical wafer) was to be given to communicants. The new Prayer Book was first to be used on All Saints’ Day – November 1st – 1552 and the Forty-Two Articles were incorporated into English law, in the same year, by the Second Act of Uniformity.
Neither the existence of a new Prayer Book nor the incorporation of the Forty-Two Articles meant much to the mostly illiterate laity. But one clause in the Second Act of Uniformity had an immediate and intimate effect on their lives. It obliged them to attend a Church of England service on every Sunday of the year. Although Rome had been formally excluded from all influence over English affairs – civil as well as spiritual – the Protestant ultras were not satisfied. Ultras never are. They made an issue out of the importance of kneeling: whether or not it was allowed and what it signified. Knox was just the man to transform a disagreement over posture into an issue of absolute principle.
John Knox became the most vocal and violent opponent of kneeling. But he was not alone in his intransigence. It was during the early months of his Berwick ministry that John Hooper’s refusal to wear vestments at his consecration had established him as the spokesman for the Protestants who would tolerate no compromise with the Pope and Rome. Hooper’s show of independent zeal drew renewed attention to a Lenten sermon which he had preached before the King in March 1550. His denunciation of altars and vestments was no more than what had become conventional Protestant thinking. But he also argued that kneeling was an act of adoration and, in consequence, implied the Real Presence. Kneeling must be prohibited.
It was not Knox’s style to philosophise about the nature of the Communion or any other service and he rarely troubled to consult academic authorities on the scriptures. He was guided by instinct – which he believed to be divinely inspired. Nor was it his way openly to challenge authority and thereby risk imprisonment and the consequent silence of a voice which spoke the word of God. But the Book of Common Prayer – as authorised by the 1549 Act of Uniformity – was silent on the subject of communicants’ posture. And that was the law until the second Uniformity Act was passed in 1552. So Knox’s congregation could follow the Hooper prescription and remain seated during prayers without breaking the law.
Neither Hooper’s theorising nor Knox’s direct action had convinced Cranmer that a prohibition on kneeling should be included in the new Prayer Book. It seems unlikely that he regarded the matter as a question of principle. Perhaps, having gone through a long process of consultation and revision, he was simply unwilling to disturb the careful balance of his proposals. The Prayer Book was to go ahead unchanged. And so it might well have done, had not the Council of the North – exercising, north of the Trent, the power of the Privy Council – called Knox before it to explain his conduct. They interpreted the old Act of Uniformity differently. The Prayer Book, which it authorised, accommodated the idea of a Real Presence. The new Prayer Book had yet to replace it. According to the Council of the North (much under Tunstall’s influence), refusing to kneel whilst taking Communion was sacrilege. Knox, by encouraging such behaviour, was guilty of heresy.
Knox was not a man to accommodate his critics – unless they were likely, and able, to burn him. His speech to the Council of the North lived up to the title it was given when it was published as a pamphlet, A Vindication of the Doctrine that the Sacrifice of the Mass is Idolatry. Knox’s argument owed nothing to learned texts or scholarly conclusions. It was no more than the rough and raw assertion that ‘the mass’ – he never referred to the sacraments or the doctrine of transubstantiation – was intrinsically ungodly:
If in your mass ye offer Jesus Christ for sin, then necessarily in your mass ye needs to kill Jesus Christ … And so Papists, if ye offer Christ as sacrifice fir sin ye slay His blood and thus newly slay Him … Ye have deceived the people, causing them to believe that ye offered Jesus Christ as sacrifice for sin; which is frivole and false for Jesus Christ may not be offered because he did not die.27
Knox was arrested, but released, without charge. For the moment he abandoned the argument that kneeling was the affirmation of the belief that Christ was sacrificed again at every Mass. But there is no doubt that he intended to return to it, since it symbolised the mysteries which were essential to Catholicism but which were treated with growing scepticism, perhaps even contempt, by the increasing – though probably still minority – Protestant population.
Knox was ideally suited to become a hero of the essentially coarse Edwardian Reformation. There was never anything original in his arguments. It was the force with which they were employed that caught the Protestant imagination. Passion, not intellect, had made Knox the most famous preacher in Scotland, where the Reformation – its natural leaders having died in the English war – depended on the faith and wisdom of the humble and meek. A German Protestant refugee, normally resident in England but taken on a visit to Scotland, wrote home that he could ‘see little else than cruelty and ignorance’; ‘as for the common people, however, it is generally thought that more of them are rightly persuaded to the true religion than here in England’.28 He was speaking of a nation which, as late as July 1550, had confirmed its reputation for cruelty and ignorance by condemning a man to death for reading the Bible and burning him in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket. It was the same brutal spirit, but another faith, which Knox took to the Durham diocese.
In the north of England the progress of the Reformation was slower than in the south and had to be hurried along. The Duke of Northumberland – having convinced a lay tribunal to convict Cuthbert Tunstall of offences which the House of Commons had found not proven – proposed to replace him with Nicholas Ridley and expropriate most of the See of Durham’s land for himself and the crown. In August, he made a visit to the north-east and attended several services at which John Knox preached. Knox had become the most famous preacher in England.
A forceful style and uncompromising opinions – combined with his distaste for ‘frivole’ – had made him the standard-bearer of the Protestant extremists, who even regarded Hooper (who, in the end, had worn vestments at his consecration) as willing to tolerate the heresies of Rome. Association with Knox would, Northumberland believed, encourage support from the ultras and protect him from the moderates who had surrounded the Duke of Somerset and still hoped to avenge his deposition and death. When, in August 1552, Northumberland returned to London, Knox travelled with him, carrying an invitation to preach at Court before the King.
Although the politics of the Reformation required the Church to support the authority of the state, the Church was expected to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s. So when Cranmer tried to resurrect Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum – with the undoubted intention of recovering some of the power the Church had lost – Northumberland left him in no doubt that the Reformation had not just diminished the Church of Rome. It had made every Church subservient to civil power. ‘You bishops look to it at your peril that the like happen not again or you and your preachers shall suffer for it together.’29 It was another example of the problem caused by the leaders of the Reformation disagreeing about its objects and the speed of its progress. Those problems were exacerbated – not reduced, as Cranmer hoped – by the constant changes in dogma and liturgy. Gradualism was not always taken to be a mark of moderation. And there was always something new about which to complain. And Protestants, by their nature, were inclined to protest.
Knox first preached at Court in September, about six weeks before the second Act of Uniformity was to come into force and, with it, the revised Prayer Book. The theme of his sermon was, as expected, the iniquity of a statute that authorised an Order of Service which endorsed the heresy that, during Communion, Christ was sacrificed again. That, he argued, was the significance and symbolism of requirement that the congregation kneel before they accepted the bread. The King, sympathetic to the idea that the Reformation was losing momentum, took up the cause and the Court followed his lead. Knox became fashionable. The Imperial Ambassador reported that Northumberland ‘hath brought forth a new Scottish apostle who has already begun to pick holes in the new and universal reformation’.30
Northumberland, recognising the mood of the moment, grasped the opportunity to diminish Cranmer’s influence. At his suggestion, the Privy Council wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury asking for his opinion on the significance of kneeling. He replied that it was no more than a gesture of respect. The Privy Council deliberated and decided that although Cranmer was right, simple people would believe kneeling to be a sign of adoration. So – five days before the new Prayer Book was to be in general circulation – they decreed that it must include the explanation of kneeling’s insignificance. The paragraph which sought to achieve that end was known to Catholics – overt and covert – as the ‘black rubric’.
Cranmer had won the theological argument and prevailed over Hooper and the extremists, leaving Knox to decide which conscientious route to follow: obedience to the law (as expected of the godly man) or rejection of every vestige of ‘Popery’. His decision was conveyed to his Berwick parishioners in a long letter which began with his account of his willingness to die rather than yield to Rome. It ended with an explanation of why he proposed to make an exception to that general principle, in the case of kneeling. ‘Remembering always, beloved brethren, that due obedience be given to magistrates, rulers and princes, without tumult, grudge or sedition … Except in chief points of religion.’31 Knox must have known that, as well as endorsing Cranmer’s insistence that the ‘godly man’ must respect the civil law, he was diminishing the importance of the campaign against kneeling, which he had carried with such apparent conviction. However, his temporising did nothing to diminish his popularity among those Protestants who had grown tired of Cranmer’s cautious advance and the politicians who found it expedient to support them.
On the day after the Privy Council decided to publish the ‘black rubric’, Northumberland had written to William Cecil, the Secretary of State, ‘I would to God it might please the King’s Majesty to appoint Mr Knox to the office of Rochester Bishopric.’32 And he was admirably frank about the reasons for his recommendation. Knox would be ‘a whetstone to sharp the Bishop of Canterbury whereof he hath need’. Cecil agreed. So did King Edward. The offer of Rochester was made – and refused. Knox’s reputation had survived the kneeling apostasy. It would have been totally destroyed by a decision to join the English episcopacy. He chose the power that comes from the support of the people rather than from the patronage of princes.
That Knox was held in especial esteem by King Edward is not in doubt, but the offer of Rochester was part of a general policy of appointing bishops who were sympathetic to the King’s aims – if necessary, by the arbitrary dismissal of Catholic-inclined incumbents. Edmund Bonner had been deprived of the See of London as early as 1549 and replaced by Nicholas Ridley. Stephen Gardiner – already a prisoner in the Tower of London – was replaced as Bishop of Winchester in February 1551 by John Ponet, the author of In Defence of Married Priests. In the same year, John Voysey was forced to resign Exeter in favour of Miles Coverdale; George Day of Chichester was succeeded by John Scory; and John Hooper became Bishop of Gloucester as well as Worcester, after the dismissal of Nicholas Heath. In 1552, a sufficiently corrupt lay commission was eventually assembled and Cuthbert Tunstall – already in prison and spending his time writing a book on transubstantiation – was deprived of the See of Durham.
It was easier to change the prelates than to convert the people. After years of suppression and the several forms of bogus conversions that they spawned, the true size of the Catholic population was difficult even to estimate. But Protestant laymen certainly remained a minority in England. John Hooper conceded that ‘the people, that many headed monster is still wincing, partly through ignorance and partly fascinated by the inveiglements of the bishops and malice and impiety of the mass priests’.33 The malice and impiety of the Mass priests was only one of the factors which held back the march of the Reformation. Men and women were alienated from the new faith by the combination of ignorance of, and sympathy with, the Roman faith which was displayed by Protestant clergy. And there was a problem with a shortage of preachers who were willing and able to instruct the people in the new practices – and even less the new beliefs – of the Reformation. Peter Martyr wrote that although there were plenty of preachers in London, ‘throughout the kingdom there are very few’.34 In Lincolnshire, for a whole year – after the death of Bishop John Longland, who had attempted to license only good Catholics – there were no sermons preached in ten of the sixty-one county’s parishes, and in Buckinghamshire none in twenty-five out of forty-nine. Hugh Latimer despaired. ‘How shall they hear without a preacher?’35 The problem was not only a shortage of preachers. Catholicism was beautiful in its simplicity. Protestantism – with all it provisos, exceptions and constant adjustments – was a difficult religion for the common people to understand and accept.
Protestantism still had to be imposed from above on a people who had to be convinced that change was necessary, as well as taught what the necessary changes were. Robbed of the authority which came from an infallible Pope, Protestantism lacked the certainty of dogma and liturgy that made it easy for simple people to accept and understand what seemed to be eternal truths. Then as now, there were arguments within the Protestant community and each communion held its exclusive view with uncompromising passion. In 1550, George van Parris, a Dutch physician living in London, was burned for denying Christ’s divinity. A year earlier, Joan Bocher, the wife of a tailor, had suffered the same fate for denying His humanity.36 Mrs Bocher was a woman of spirit. Before her execution several attempts were made to persuade her to recant and be saved from the fires of hell and Smithfield. She had rebutted her inquisitors’ arguments, item by item. She had dealt particularly severely with the Protestant change of belief about Communion. ‘It was not so long ago,’ she told Cranmer ‘that you burned Anne Ayscough for a piece of bread, yet came yourself to believe the doctrine for which you burned her.’37 It is easy to understand why people who had been brought up on certainty found it hard to accept the variable tenets of an evolving Reformation. Some of them never did. In 1553, the rector of Radnage in Buckinghamshire told his parishioners ‘to keep a good portion of their church plate, saying that the time would come that they should have need of it and the old ceremonies be restored to the church again’.38 He did not have long to wait.
King Edward VI died on July 6th 1553. According to rumours spread by enemies of his sister, Mary, he had been poisoned by Papists. In fact, after sixteen sickly years, he died of tuberculosis. He had reigned, in name alone, for barely six years. His death was not unexpected. Indeed John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland, Great Master of the Household and Lord Great Chamberlain, had prepared for it with meticulous care. The enfeebled King had been persuaded to nominate, as his successor, Lady Jane Grey – his seventeen-year-old cousin – who, thanks to the distinction of being Henry VIII’s great-niece, occupied a remote place in the table of precedence. Lady Jane was Northumberland’s daughter-in-law and it was taken for granted that, once crowned, she would yield all power and authority to her husband. The claim, which the conspirators imagined would have irresistible appeal to the common people, was that only Queen Jane could save England from the succession of Mary Tudor, re-enslavement by Rome and the cruel tyranny of a Catholic monarch. A document – excluding both the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth from the succession – was secretly drawn up and signed by, among other dignitaries, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. It was his last, and most desperate, effort to preserve and extend the Reformation to which he had dedicated – and for which he would soon sacrifice – his life.
The plan to usurp the throne failed for many reasons. The people were not as afraid of Rome as the nobles who governed them imagined. And much of the population was content to observe whichever religious practices could be followed without fear of prosecution. But there were also more noble reasons for the failure of the plot. A minority of the people possessed an enduring faith that could be suppressed but not eliminated. Catholicism could be outlawed and Catholics penalised, but the belief was too strong to be destroyed.