Religious Identities in Henry VIII's England

Peter Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754653905
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317066934
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Henry VIII's decision to declare himself supreme head of the church in England, and thereby set himself in opposition to the authority of the papacy, had momentous consequences for the country and his subjects. At a stroke people were forced to reconsider assumptions about their identity and loyalties, in rapidly shifting political and theological circumstances. Whilst many studies have investigated Catholic and Protestant identities during the reigns of Elizabeth and Mary, much less is understood about the processes of religious identity-formation during Henry's reign.

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction: Identifying Religion in Henry VIII’s England

One of Henry VIII’s greatest achievements was to abolish the practice of religion in England and Wales (he was rather less successful in his other kingdom of Ireland). Put like that, the statement needs some qualification. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the term ‘religion’ was almost invariably used to refer to the particular Christian vocation pursued by monks, friars and nuns in the hundreds of ‘religious houses’ scattered across the English landscape. ‘Ware thou never in religion?’ a character is asked in a 1528 satire by the former Observant Franciscan turned evangelical activist, Jerome Barlow: ‘yes, so God helpe me … a dosen yeres continually’.¹ In dissolving the monasteries, Henry erased the most conspicuous of spiritual identities his subjects might fashion for themselves, as a Dominican friar, Premonstratensian canon, or Benedictine nun. Diversity was reduced to the simple binary of clergy and laity, exemplified in the famous Holbein frontispiece attached to the ‘Great Bible’ of 1539.² Yet if we allow the sense of religion in its approximate modern form – a set of understandings, and related practices, about how humans should respond to the perceived expectations of a creator God – then it is beyond question that the last two decades of Henry’s reign were a period of extraordinary and creative upheaval, when numerous old certainties were destabilised and a range of repositionings became possible, desirable, or unavoidable. In these years a political revolution of unprecedented magnitude (the creation of a royal supremacy over the Church) intersected in both predictable and unpredictable ways with a variety of movements for the renewal of Christian faith and practice. No one living through them could fail to be aware that there was, in Christopher Haigh’s seductively unpretentious formula, reformation ‘from above’ and ‘from below’, or hope to escape from the consequences of their intertwining.³

Despite its undoubted importance, Henry VIII’s reign has come to assume the status of a ‘problem period’ in ecclesiastical and religious history. His reformation is perplexing because it does not clearly admit any of the labels which would later be used to identify religious positions in the sixteenth century. It was not Lutheran, Calvinist, or any other recognisable variant of ‘Protestant’; nor was it self-evidently ‘Anglican’. Though Henry VIII invented the idea of an independent Ecclesia Anglicana, and created the unique relationship with the crown which still essentially defines its legal position today, he has usually occupied a distinctly ambiguous position in the foundations myths of the later Church of England. Historically, many Anglican commentators have felt more comfortable situating the origins of their tradition in Elizabeth’s Settlement of Religion of 1559, with its establishment of a supposedly distinctive Anglican synthesis, a putative ‘via media’ between the excesses of Geneva and Rome. For Anglicans of an Anglo-Catholic bent, this starting-point also had the advantage of passing over in silence the zealous iconoclasm and full-blooded Protestant theology of Edward VI’s reign.⁴ The modern heirs of that full-blooded Protestantism have had fewer problems finding sources of empathy in the period: Henry’s reign after all produced William Tyndale and the first printed vernacular Bible. But Henry himself was clearly no Protestant role model, and heroes and villains were easier to make out among the fires of Bloody Mary’s reign. English Roman Catholic historiography, meanwhile, though happy enough to castigate Henry for his repudiation of the papacy and destruction of the monasteries, experienced some embarrassment at the paucity of martyrs his egregious actions had inspired, and undoubtedly felt more at ease with the heroic recusancy of the Elizabethan age.

If the Henrician period posed problems of positioning for some older confessional history, neither does it fit comfortably into the favoured conceptual models of some more recent historians. One of the most influential current approaches to officially sanctioned religious change in the sixteenth century is the concept of ‘confessionalisation’. As pioneered by the German historians Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard, confessionalisation denotes the process by which early modern rulers, Catholic and Protestant alike, struck up partnerships with the favoured Church in their territories to promote a religious uniformity which was increasingly expressed in unambiguously doctrinal terms. Adopting and enforcing formal ‘confessions’ (definitive statements of doctrine and belief), states sponsored the creation of mutually exclusive communities of belief in a Europe where international conflict took on an ever more overtly religious hue. Internally, the clergy acted as agents of the state in the promotion of social discipline, and at the same time they willingly colluded in the sacralisation of state power (assisting the development of what is known by loose short-hand as absolutism). All of this contributed to processes of nation-building and to the creation of national identity in something like its modern form.⁵

A number of the policies and aspirations of Henry VIII would seem to fit the description here, but developments in England before 1547 are usually excluded from the equation as confused and premature.⁶ Although the Lutheran Confession of Augsburg (1530) was already in place at the time Henry began breaking ties with the traditions of medieval Catholicism, the great period of confessional doctrinal definition was just getting under way at the time of his death.⁷ Between 1545 and 1563, the canons of the Council of Trent began the process of turning late medieval Catholic Christianity into early modern Roman Catholicism. Meanwhile Reformed Protestantism expressed its priorities in the agreed statement between Geneva and Zürich of May 1549, the Consensus Tigurinus, and in the Helvetic Confession of 1566. Lutheran orthodoxy was codified in the 1580 Book of Concord. ‘Confessionalisation’, it is therefore usually assumed, is a process only properly under way after c. 1550, and the increasingly distinct religious identities it created were simply not available before then in any developed form. As Diarmaid MacCulloch has observed, it was only in the second half of the sixteenth century that across Europe ‘ordinary people were beginning to own the religious labels that the officially agreed confessions and the decisions of Councils were creating: they found that they were Protestant, Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed’.⁸ In this context, Henry’s curious Reformation looks distinctly like the product of a pre-confessional age.

One sensible approach to the religious policies of Henry’s reign, therefore, and consequentially to the religious identities of Henry’s subjects, is to emphasise the extent to which the religious situation of the time was fluid and indeterminate: ‘boundaries were unclear, where they existed at all, and identities were nascent and contested’.⁹ As a corrective to the back-projection of some old-fashioned confessional historiographies, anxious to claim an unproblematic continuity with various founding fathers, this is certainly salutary. It is also true that, particularly in the 1530s, orderly credal groupings had not taken final shape, and that across the spectrum of religious opinion, people did not always hold the views, or precisely delineate the positions, that polemicists on all sides would later demand of them. But this does not mean that the religious outlook of people in Henry VIII’s England was by definition ambiguous, embryonic or unformed – a confusing side-track, or at best a mere overture or prologue to the main event. Disorientation may well be the response of religious historians lacking the appropriate conceptual and linguistic tools to bring into focus the priorities and perceptions of their subjects, rather than the felt experience of those subjects themselves. A theme present in one form or another in all of the chapters in this volume is a strong, at times obsessive, contemporary concern with truth, authenticity and candour in matters of religion, one that was manifested both by the leaders of the regime and by a range of individual believers. For contemporaries, there were compelling imperatives to ascertain whether contested doctrines were true, or a damnable falsehood; whether claims to sacred knowledge and power could be verified, or were fraudulent deceits; whether subjects could safely be judged by their words and outward actions, or were secret dissimulators. There was also the impulse, felt by many and acted out by some, to be true to oneself, to behave consistently and honourably even in spite of external pressures to submit and conform.

The growing concern, in both official and unofficial circles, to distinguish the true from the false in religion reflects the extent to which the changes of the 1530s brought with them an explicit and irreversible politicisation of the world of faith. It would, of course, be naïve to posit a time when religious affiliation or devotional preference could be entirely devoid of political meaning, but Henry’s break with Rome and the creation of his royal supremacy over the Church left absolutely no room for a privatised sphere of apolitical piety. For mighty and humble alike, behaviour in religious observance became a matter of obedience or disobedience, of acquiescence or subversion, of attempts to advance (or accelerate) the official agenda, to inhibit or redirect it. Attempting to identify and declare what the official agenda actually was, was also of course a supremely political activity.

The first part of this book examines the ways these pressures were negotiated by the first generation of English ‘evangelicals’. The selection of this descriptive label, rather than the more familiar ‘Protestants’, is now becoming normative in historical writing on the period.¹⁰ Reformers in Henrician England did not call themselves Protestants: when the term was used at all, it was with reference to events in Germany, a rough synonym for ‘Lutheran’ in its political sense. Luther’s own theological and spiritual odyssey was of immense significance for developments in England, as across western Europe, but English evangelicals of the 1520s and 30s were not straightforwardly ‘Lutherans’ (a term of disapprobation which no one willingly appropriated for themselves), or not all of them were. Some reformers (principally Robert Barnes and William Tyndale) had spent time in Wittenberg, and their writings acted as vehicles, though not passive or unduly reverential ones, for the dissemination of Luther’s ideas. But among their leading associates, figures like John Frith and George Joye were already more drawn to the ideas of Swiss reformers such as Oecolampadius of Basel.¹¹ As a generic category, ‘evangelical’ usefully circumvents the theological canons and denominational associations of ‘Protestant’, though in order to justify its application it needs to function as a way of focusing rather than evading questions about the priorities and identities of this group. As they emerged in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, Protestants were people with a group-narrative, a history they had had time to experience or invent.¹² The evangelicals of the early years, almost by definition, were not. They were, in fact, late medieval Catholics, albeit ones who had become deeply unhappy with important aspects of medieval Catholic theology and devotion. Increasingly, historians are inclined to locate the origins of that unhappiness within the mainstream of medieval Catholicism itself, rather than to trace it back to a supposedly independent source, such as ‘Lollardy’ or ‘humanism’. In the case of the latter, as Richard Rex has forcefully argued, humanism in many ways was the intellectual mainstream of pre-Reformation Catholicism, and it is therefore unsurprising that a number of early reformers had humanist backgrounds, just as their leading Catholic opponents did. If humanism gave birth to the Reformation, it was midwif...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Notes
• 1 Introduction: Identifying Religion in Henry VIII’s England
• Part One Evangelical Directions: Travelling From and To
• Part Two Henrician Reforms: Seen From Inside and Out
• Part Three Catholic Positions: With and Without the Pope
• Appendix: List of Henrician Catholic Exiles
• Select Bibliography
• Index