The Royal Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church

Claire Cross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032011370
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000393613
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1969 this book considers the theoretical extent of the royal supremacy in the Elizabethan church and examines how far this supremacy was effective in practice. The first part considers the reactions of Catholics and of moderate and more enthusiastic Protestants, both clerical and lay, to a lay head of the English church and the second part investigates the limits of the queen's authority. The documents, which range from the formal Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity to the letters of individual gentlemen who were guiding their local congregations, reflect the discrepancy between theory and practice. No previous book of this nature tried to determine the limits of Queen Elizabeth I's powers in the localities in quite this way.

INTRODUCTION

Introductory

‘The prince alone is the person in the world to whom God hath committed the seat of justice, and they only to execute the duty of it to whom it is committed, at whose hands God will require it.… The minister is appointed for another defence where horsemen and chariots will do no good. They may hinder the minister and make him forget his duty, they cannot profit him in his office and function. He must frame die heart, upon which you cannot yet set a crown; and edify the soul, which flesh and blood cannot hurt.’¹

¹ Edward Dering to William Lord Burghley, November 3, 1573. Quoted in P. Collinson, A Mirror of Elizabethan Puritanism: the Life and Letters of ‘Godly Master Dering’, 1964, p. 25.

‘Her highness’ pleasure is that from henceforth no bills concerning religion shall be preferred or received into this House, unless the same should be first considered or liked by the clergy.²

² May 22, 1572. Commons Journals, II, p. 97.

‘Surely this was a doleful message, for it was as much as to say, “Sirs, ye shall not deal in God’s causes; no, ye shall in no wise seek to advance his glory…

‘I do surely think, before God I speak it, that the bishops were the cause of that doleful message; and I will show you what moveth me so to think. I was, amongst others, the last Parliament sent unto the bishop of Canterbury, for the articles of religion that then passed this House. He asked us why we did put out of the book the articles for the homelies, consecrating of bishops and such like. “Surely, sir,” said I, “because we were so occupied in other matters that we had no time to examine them how they agreed with the word of God.” “What,” said he, “surely you mistook the matter, you will refer yourselves wholly to us therein?” “No, by the faith I bear to God,” said I, “we will pass nothing before we understand what it is, for that were but to make you popes; make you popes who list,” said I, “for we will make you none…”¹

¹ Speech by Peter Wentworth, February 8, 1576. S. D’Ewes, A complete journal… of the House of Lords and House of Commons throughout the whole reign of Queen Elizabeth, 1693, pp. 238, 239–240.

These two extracts, the first from a letter by the famous Protestant preacher, Edward Dering, the second part of a speech by the equally famous parliamentarian, Peter Wentworth, epitomize the double dilemma the monarch faced in exercising the royal supremacy within the Elizabethan church. On the one hand the queen encountered the theoretical predicament of the lay headship. Both Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastics in differing degrees objected to a lay person wielding authority over the church, for they argued that a minister owed primary allegiance not to his earthly sovereign but to God. This constituted a largely clerical problem. On the other hand, the monarch had to solve a practical problem. From the beginning of the reign royal apologists devised a simple division of labour. They maintained that the queen could quite properly rule over the church in jurisdictional matters; doctrine she would leave to be determined by the clergy: but die complexities of Tudor politics did not allow a monarch’s actions to fit into these neat categories. Elizabeth almost immediately after her accession came under attack on two fronts, from clerics of very different beliefs concerned for the autonomy of the church, and from laymen eager for a voice in deciding upon church policy. A lay head, she yet tried to restrain lay intervention in the government of the church. She held that the royal supremacy meant royal rule of the church through the clergy, and to a certain extent sustained this interpretation until her death; but she could not prevent zealous laymen from asking why, if a layman could be the head of the church, laymen in general could not participate in its government. Increasingly as time went on radical clergy supported the laity’s claim and in practice Elizabeth found herself powerless to control laymen who took the reform of their local churches into their own hands, although she did stop a further national reform of the church by Parliament. The documents in this book have been chosen to illustrate this twofold problem; firsdy to demonstrate the theoretical difficulties which arose when a layman claimed to be supreme over the church, and secondly to show some of the practical difficulties met by the queen when she attempted to exercise this royal supremacy.

1
The Royal Supremacy in Theory

I. PROLOGUE

THOSE who supported or attacked the idea of the royal supremacy in 1558 had experienced a generation of rapid change and were by no means theorizing in a void. Henry VIII had been the innovator;¹ Edward VI, having inherited the sovereignty over the church asserted by his father, used it to establish a fully Protestant church in England; Mary had renounced these powers and recognized anew the authority of the pope. Obviously Catholics hoped that Elizabeth might be persuaded to follow her sister’s example and keep England within Catholic Christendom. It is less often realized that a body of articulate Protestants disliked the ecclesiastical experiments of Henry VIII almost as much as did the Catholics. Anthony Gilby, who had gone into exile soon after Mary’s accession, and had eventually migrated with John Knox to set up an English Calvinist church in Geneva, in 1558 attacked Henry VIII with surprising virulence (Doc. 2). He did not see Henry as the defender of the faith but as a wild boar destroying the Lord’s vineyard, preventing his true ministers from fulfilling their labours, killing his saints. Henry had indeed cast out the pope, but then had made himself a lay pope in his place. Not even the government of Edward VI had allowed a thorough Protestant reformation; the king’s servants had permitted the plundering of the church to continue, they had censored the free preaching of the gospel and failed to establish Protestant discipline. Protestants of Gilby’s type hoped for a monarch who would finally pull down the pope’s usurped supremacy and then abdicate from the ecclesiastical sphere completely, giving all power to the godly ministers.

¹ For a detailed discussion of Henry VIII’s view of the royal supremacy see J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII, 1968.

Catholics felt as strongly as the more radical Protestants that the royal claims to headship over the church bordered upon the sacrilegious. By 1558 educated Catholics recognized, as with some exceptions they had not recognized during Henry VÍIJ’s reign, that a lay headship constituted the first move in the admission of heresy into England. They remained faithful to their belief that the church should be ruled by Christ and his vicar, St Peter, and by the bishops of Rome, the successors of St Peter. A lay ruler who attempted to exercise jurisdiction reserved for the clergy alone plainly transgressed the divine law and this power, wrongfully obtained, could have no shred of legality. Bishop Scot, speaking in the first Parliament of Elizabeth when Catholic prelates could still take their seats in the Lords, put the case for the conservatives (Doc. 4). A wiser man than Gilby, he did not comment directly on the extent of royal authority, but he did not hide his opinion that Parliament, a body composed largely of laymen, had no powers to legislate in matters concerning religion. The truths of religion never changed and must be passed down entire from one generation to another; but, he argued, one Parliament could undo the acts of its predecessor, and he therefore concluded that parliamentary intervention in matters of religion automatically brought an end to Catholic certainty. However great were the divisions between them, Catholic and radical Protestant theologians at least united in upholding the exclusive rule of the clergy in the church.

Catholics and some Protestants also held in common a further objection to Elizabeth’s assuming the royal supremacy over the church in the same form as her father had exercised it. Since Catholic theologians could not accept that a layman could rightfully have jurisdiction over the church, for a laywoman to pretend to have such a power seemed a mere absurdity. That a woman might attempt to become the head of a Protestant church caused some zealous Protestants equal disquiet. While Mary Tudor was still alive John Knox wrote that both divine and natural law prohibited a woman from bearing civil rule over men: he refused even to contemplate that God would allow a woman any authority within the church (Doc. 1). As long as Protestants in England and Scotland suffered under the government of Catholic women, Mary Tudor and Mary of Guise, such an assertion may have proved acceptable to the godly, but the accession of Elizabeth entirely altered the situation; now it was upon a woman that English Protestants pinned their hopes. Knox’s apparently unshakable arguments required urgent refutation, and while still in exile John Aylmer, the former tutor of Lady Jane Grey, wrote in Elizabeth’s defence (Doc. 3). God, he believed, could work through the weakest of his creatures, even through a woman. If he sent the English a woman to rule over them, they must in obedience submit to his will. In order to counter the zeal of the Protestant radicals he found it necessary to return to the medieval concept of the two spheres. Divines had exceeded their office and had confusingly mingled the ecclesiastical and civil; they ought now to forbear from meddling in the secular world. Yet this was a far from conclusive argument since it could equally well be employed against the pretensions of lay rulers in regard to the church. Aylmer had also to consider the even more daunting problem of justifying the rule of a woman in the church for which English history provided no precedent at all. He replied by dividing ecclesiastical government into two parts, spiritual ministry and formal jurisdiction. The New Testament, he agreed, clearly excluded women from the spiritual ministry but he proceeded to argue that in exceptional cases a woman could act as an overseer in the church. This subsequendy became the standard Protestant defence of Elizabeth’s position throughout the reign.

In the weeks before Parliament defined the royal supremacy which the queen should exercise, the objections of her fellow monarchs to the Henrician form of supremacy may well have counted far more with Elizabeth than the opinions of divines, whether Catholic or Protestant. Philip II wasted no time theorizing on the extent of kingly authority; instead he told Elizabeth, when it appeared that she had resolved to imitate her father, that he alone could control the papacy. If she denied the pope’s power in England, then he would withdraw his restraining influence, and the pope would at once declare the queen illegitimate and release her subjects from their allegiance (Doc. 5). While in his own dominions Philip had not hesitated to withstand papal injunctions, by not fearing to resurrect the ancient spectre of the pope’s power to depose secular rulers, he brought into the open the final argument against the royal supremacy which Catholics in England had not yet dared publicly to discuss. By early in 1559, with this intervention from Spain, most of the chief theoretical objections to the idea of the royal supremacy and the counter arguments in its support had emerged in embryo to be elaborated in infinite detail as the reign progressed.

II. THE ACTS OF SUPREMACY AND UNIFORMITY

One of the main functions of the first Parliament of Elizabeth which assembled on January 25, 1559, was to re-establish formally the queen’s authority over the English church. Professor Neale has suggested that the government intended that this Parliament should merely assert the queen’s supremacy; an act to redefine Protestantism in England could more conveniently and appropriately await a later Parliament by which time the Marian Catholic bishops would have been displaced and Convocation have been able to take a full part in the discussion of doctrine. The government aimed at achieving a policy of reformation by gradual stages in order to lessen the chance of disturbances in the country and, even more vital, give as little offence as possible to the Catholic powers on the continent. In their very different ways both the House of Lords and the House of Commons from the beginning set out to frustrate the government’s wishes. The lords spiritual to a man refused to consider recognizing Elizabeth as supreme head of the church. If the queen and her advisers had hoped, and there is evidence that they had, that with judicious handling the Marian bishops would behave as the Henrician bishops had done and remain loyal to the queen rather than to the pope, they miscalculated gravely. The Commons, on the other hand, contained a vociferous and powerful group of active Protestants some of whom had actually been exiles; of these, many associated themselves closely with the exile clergy. These men would be content with nothing less than an immediate and permanent setdement of Protestantism in England. Early in the Parliament they made their influence felt by raising the question whether the Parliament was a legally valid one since the writs of summons had ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• General Introduction
• Author’s Note
• Contents
• Introduction
• Documents
• Bibliography
• Index to Introduction