Reformation to Revolution

Margo Todd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134862436
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Few periods of English history have been so subject to `revisionism' as the Tudors and Stuarts. This volume offers a full introduction to the complex historiographical debates currently raging about politics and religion in early modern England. It * draws together thirteen articles culled from familiar and also less accessible sources * embraces revisionist and counter-revisionist viewpoints * combines controversial works on both politics and religion * covers Tudor as well as early Stuart England * includes helpful glossary, explanatory headnotes and suggestions for further reading. These carefully edited and introduced essays draw on the new evidence of newsletters and ballads and ritual, as well as the more traditional sources, to offer a new and broader understanding of this transformative era of English history.

Part I
REVISING RELIGION

1
THE RECENT HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION

Christopher Haigh

In the 1950s, church historians following the lead of A.G.Dickens began to shift the focus of their research away from the classic documents of the Reformation and the central government’s implementation of the break from Rome. They began looking instead at local records, especially diocesan court registers, to ask how protestantism was received by people in the provinces. Did the new supremacy of the king over the English Church mean that ordinary people also rejected the authority of the pope? Did the new English Bible and the very protestant Articles of Religion of Edward VI’s reign mean that the people of England willingly accepted salvation by faith alone and willingly gave up their former regard for transubstantiation, purgatory, veneration of relics and icons, and masses for the dead? Dickens’s early work on Lollards and protestants in the northern diocese of York led him to conclude that indeed the message of the first generation of protestant reformers was received with open arms in the countryside. People disgruntled with the abuses of the Catholic Church and prepared by the anticlericalist and Bible-centred Lollard heresy readily accepted the gospel of salvation by faith alone, the English Bible and service, and the freedom from clerical domination inherent in the Catholic view of priesthood rather than ministry. Other local historians echoed Dickens’s conclusions; however, as more and more local investigations were done, it became evident that all counties and towns did not have the same experience of early and popular Reformation.

Christopher Haigh’s work on Lancashire pointed in a very different direction from Dickens’s. Haigh found that reception of the Reformation was rather slow and reluctant, that in fact a persistent Catholic traditionalism was more characteristic of Lancashire than eager protestantism, even in the Elizabethan period when Catholic recusancy was actively prosecuted. Since his study of Lancashire, historians like J.J.Scarisbrick in The Reformation and the English People (1984) have joined him in arguing that the pre-Reformation Church was in fact broadly popular, that people gave up the old faith reluctantly and frequently only under duress. In an interesting departure, Robert Whiting’s study of the south-western counties has found that for many people at the point of obediently renouncing Catholicism, irreligion was the preferred option. Protestantism, with its requirements of Bible-reading and sermon attendance, and its ‘culture of discipline’ —a move to replace disorderly traditional festivities with a more austere, ‘godly’ community—was simply not a very attractive alternative. The revisionists do agree, however, that at some point in Elizabeth’s reign the old faith was reduced to a small and actively repressed minority. The debate continues as to precisely when and how this happened.

In the following essay, Haigh summarizes the revisionist position, now fully expanded in his English Reformations (1993). In the last section of this volume, A.G.Dickens will pick up the gauntlet and respond to the challenge of the new view.

* * *

The English Reformation was not a specific event which may be given a precise date; it was a long and complex process. ‘The Reformation’ is a colligatory concept, a historians’ label which relates several lesser changes into an overall movement: it embraces a break from the Roman obedience; an assertion of secular control over the Church; a suppression of Catholic institutions such as monasteries and chantries; a prohibition of Catholic worship; and a protestantization of services, clergy and laity. Though the political decision to introduce each phase of change and the legislative alteration of statutes and canons may be dated easily enough, it is much harder to ascribe responsibility and motive for such measures. Moreover, as the interest of historians has in recent years moved on from such political issues towards the administrative enforcement of new rules and popular acceptance of new ideas, so the identification and explanation of change have become even more difficult: the pace is likely to have varied from area to area, and the criteria by which progress should be measured are far from clear. It is therefore not surprising that there has been much dispute over the causes and chronology of developments in religion, and recent interpretations of the Reformation in England can, with some simplification, be grouped in relation to two matrices. One matrix relates to the motive force behind the progress of Protestantism: at one extreme, it could be suggested that Protestant advance was entirely the result of official coercion, while at the other it could be said that the new religion spread horizontally by conversions among the people. The second matrix relates to the pace of religious change: on the one hand, it could be suggested that Protestantism made real progress at an early date and had become a powerful force by the death of Edward VI, while on the other it could be said that little had been achieved in the first half of the century and the main task of protestantizing the people had to be undertaken in the reign of Elizabeth. These two matrices provide us with four main clusters of interpretations.

First, there are those historians, usually political historians and biographers, who have seen the English Reformation as taking place rapidly as a result of imposition from above. The doyen of this school is, without doubt, G.R.Elton, who has presented the Reformation as one aspect of the great reform programme which was initiated and carried far by Thomas Cromwell^a in the 1530s. The political Reformation saw the ‘nationalization’ of the Church, and a religious Reformation sought to purge the parishes of superstition. These changes were enforced from the centre by deliberate governmental action: the people were persuaded to accept new policies by a carefully orchestrated campaign of preaching and printed propaganda, encouragement to conform was provided by a sharpening of the treason laws, and local dignitaries were instructed to report deviants to Cromwell for investigation. The reformist thrust was, according to Professor Elton, carried very much further under Edward VI, with the imposition of a Protestant liturgy, the destruction of Catholic church furniture, and a preaching campaign to carry the Gospel into the villages: ‘The fact is that by 1553 England was almost certainly nearer to being a Protestant country than to anything else.’¹ This picture of a ‘rapid Reformation from above’ has received powerful support from Peter Clark’s study of Kent: it is clear that Cromwell paid close attention to this strategically important county and built up, by the exercise of patronage, a reformist group among the governing gentry and in the urban oligarchies. Within the Church in Kent, Archbishop Cranmer and the preachers he brought in were crucial to the progress of Protestantism, and reformers took control of the administrative machine. Clark claims that changes in the formulae of wills and the political complexion of town governments show that, under pressure from the archbishop, there was a Protestant breakthrough in the mid-1540s: indeed, by this point the ‘Reformation from above’ had been so successful that ‘Reformation from below’ may have taken over, and Clark has suggested that a swing to Protestantism in the Home Counties forced Henry VIII ‘to commit himself to the Protestant cause’ in 1546–7.²

Elton and Clark are in a well-established tradition of English Reformation historiography, and a picture of officially inspired and imposed reform is presented by several of the older and briefer textbooks. They have, however, added to earlier descriptions of statutes and injunctions studies of the enforcement machinery in action and of the changing political structure of a well-governed area. But one may have doubts on the wider applicability of such an interpretation of the Reformation. Elton has shown how Cromwell’s reform programme came to be accepted at the political centre, and how Cromwell attempted to impose his policies on the localities: he has not, however, shown that reform was, to any significant degree, accepted in the provinces, and a growing number of local studies suggest that there was little progress. ‘Reformation from above’ depended for its effectiveness upon the co-operation of the justices of the peace and diocesan administrators, who seem to have been unsatisfactory proponents of reform. Even in the early part of the reign of Elizabeth there remained a strong conservative element on the commissions of the peace, and to avoid crippling county government the commissions could be remodelled only slowly,³ while the social influence of bishops was weakened by expropriation and lesser diocesan officials were a distinctly conservative group.⁴ It is true that in Peter Clark’s Kent both secular justices and ecclesiastical administrators co-operated with the reforming regime, but the county was a far from typical area: Kent was close to London, so the gentry were embroiled in the web of Court politics; it was a maritime county, so the continental Protestant influence was strong; and at its head was an activist reforming archbishop who patronized Protestants and harassed conservatives. Elsewhere, in circumstances less favourable to the Reformation, local government proved a block rather than a spur to religious change.⁵

The most influential of the historians who have detected a ‘rapid Reformation from below’ in early Tudor England is A.G.Dickens, though his general view has been supported by, for example, Claire Cross.⁶ Professor Dickens has stressed the religious rather than the political roots of the English Reformation, and has sought to demonstrate that links between an expanding late Lollardy and early Protestantism led to swift Protestant advance at the popular level. The seedbed of Protestantism had been prepared by Bible-reading Lollard conventicles and by itinerant Lollard evangelists, and the interaction between native Lollardy and new Protestantism was symbolized by the exchange of Wycliffe texts for Tyndale New Testaments arranged by Robert Barnes.⁷ The higher clergy of the Catholic Church were too involved in politics and the lower clergy were too poor and uneducated to meet the rising lay demand for a more personal involvement in religion or to combat the dynamic force of a Bible-based evangelical Protestantism: Reformation was easy and it was fast. Although legislative changes created a climate in which reform could triumph, the Dickens Reformation is one of conversion rather than coercion, with Protestantism spreading in the localities by the uncoordinated efforts of radical clergy, itinerant clothworkers and Bible-reading anticlerical gentry. This analysis is, in part, based upon Dickens’s own pioneering study of the progress of religious change at the popular level in Yorkshire, and his general conclusions have gained support from other local studies of areas where Lollardy had made progress and where early Protestant clergy were active: it seems that there was a ‘rapid Reformation from below’ in Essex, Bristol and the textile villages of Gloucestershire. ⁸ It could, however, be argued that, in concentrating their attentions upon the atypical heretics whose cases reached the pages of Foxe, Strype, episcopal registers and court act books, historians of this school are in danger of losing perspective on the pace of religious change. Of course there were Protestant heretics in the 1520s, and there were more in the 1530s, but they formed a very small minority whose real significance has been exaggerated because their own rejection of Catholicism was, much later and for accidental political reasons, to triumph nationally.

Acceptance of an overall interpretation of the English Reformation which presents it as rapid and essentially popular depends upon two assumptions which are being increasingly questioned by recent scholarships. First, we must assume that the institutions, personnel and beliefs of the English Catholic Church did not command the respect and commitment of the people, who were therefore open to the influence of new and heterodox ideas. But as Reformation historians have moved from the study of the Church through the printed propaganda of its anticlerical critics to the study of the Church through the records of its work, a picture of a moribund, dispirited and repressive institution which failed to meet the needs of its people becomes more and more difficult to sustain. We now know that the parish clergy were not negligent, immoral and inadequately educated clerics embroiled in regular conflicts with their parishioners over tithes and mortuaries: if their standards of spirituality and academic achievement would not satisfy the late-twentieth-century mind, they seem to have satisfied Tudor villagers, who complained remarkably infrequently about their priests.⁹ Though the early Tudor bishops have been dismissed as lordly prelates rather than spiritual pastors, we know now that in the dioceses of Chichester, Ely, Lincoln, Norwich and Winchester, and probably elsewhere, colleagues of Thomas Wolsey were attempting to overhaul diocesan administration, improve clerical standards and exert pastoral discipline over the laity.¹⁰ Our assessment of the ecclesiastical courts and response to them is no longer based upon the 1532 ‘Commons Supplication against the Ordinaries’, an ex parte po...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• EDITOR’S PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: REVISING RELIGION
• PART II: REVISING POLITICS
• PART III: RESPONDING TO REVISIONISM
• GLOSSARY
• SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING