Marian Restoration

8 Key excerpts on "Marian Restoration"

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  Reforming Catholicism in the England of Mary Tudor

  The Achievement of Friar Bartolomé Carranza

  • Ronald Truman, John Edwards(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 3 The Marian Restoration and the language of Catholic Reform Lucy Wooding

  The reign of Mary Tudor was once easily classified: reactionary, repressive, misguided, unsuccessful. Nowhere was this description held to be more true than when applied to her religious policy.1 But more recent research, which has brought a very welcome challenge to these views, has left us with a far more complicated task when trying to understand the assumptions, expectations, and motivations behind the religious policy of the Marian Restoration.2 The present chapter will approach this hazardous undertaking through the medium of the religious literature published in the English vernacular during Mary’s reign. It will argue that the language of much of this literature provides an important indication of some of the preoccupations of the reign. There were, of course, variations among the works published between 1553 and 1558, and yet a great many of them used what might be termed the ‘language of Catholic reform’. The suggestion here is that such language had become an established aspect of English Catholic identity by the 1550s, and that it deployed a rhetoric which was firmly rooted in Scripture, open to the Augustinian and Pauline emphases beloved of Catholic as well as Protestant reformers, and fully aware of the need for religious regeneration within the Church.

  It will immediately become clear from comparison with other views expressed in this volume that this interpretation is a contentious one.3 It should perhaps be seen as part of a wider debate concerning the onset of confession-alization in England. For some, Catholic identity is a given, to a large extent an immutable expression of a clearly defined tradition. Discussion of sixteenth-century Catholicism, it could therefore be claimed, has a reasonably unequivocal standard of Catholic orthodoxy against which religious statements of the time can be measured. Conversely, it could also be argued that such an approach is deeply misleading, imposing a false coherence on an age when religious belief and identity were subject to as much change as continuity.4

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  The Age of Reformation

  The Tudor and Stewart Realms 1485-1603

  • Alec Ryrie(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Two restorations

  Mary and Elizabeth, 1553–60

  After Edward VI’s death, no English government would make such a brash attempt to impose religious novelties on its subjects until the 1630s. The religious policies of Edward’s two successors, his half-sisters, were both defined by their attempts to restore previous settlements. Mary (ruled 1553–58) made an energetic and controversial attempt to restore Catholicism to England, an attempt which was cut short by her death. The policy of Elizabeth (ruled 1558–1603) was more cautious but no less relentless and centred on a partial restoration of Edward VI’s Reformation. The contrasts between these two restorations are obvious. Mary was Catholic, Elizabeth Protestant; Mary was forthright, Elizabeth subtle in her violence. Mary’s Church avoided and Elizabeth’s pursued theological debate; Mary’s was closely tied into Continental affairs, affairs which Elizabeth strove to keep at arm’s length. Above all, Mary’s failed and Elizabeth’s succeeded.

  Yet there are parallels too. The attitude of the sovereign was always decisive. These were also England’s first reigning queens since the twelfth century, and they dealt with the problems of female rule in similar ways. Both, too, were their father’s daughters. While neither of them had any wish to restore his policies, they could not shake off his legacy. Nor could either act independently, for England – and England’s religion – was entangled in the wider webs of European diplomacy.

  Mary

  Mary’s reign is the most tantalising and controversial period of the sixteenth century. To her defenders down the centuries, many of them Catholic, the reign has been England’s great lost hope: a chance to turn aside from schism and return to the unity of Christendom, a chance cut short by her untimely and childless death. To her more numerous detractors, who have been predominantly Protestant, the reign has appeared a brutal, backward-looking dead end, a doomed project whose most memorable feature was the execution by burning of some three hundred Protestants. The argument cannot be resolved, since it is not really about what happened but about what would have happened had Mary lived longer. The plain fact that her restoration did

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  Reformation England 1480-1642

  • Peter Marshall(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  xxii. 108 Reformation England 1480–1642 thwarted ambition. Pole ‘had big plans for the restoration of the monasteries’, and to assist the project he tried to bring over advisors from the reformed Italian Benedictine congregation of Monte Cassino (of which he was cardinal protector) – a marked contrast to his response to the offer of Jesuit help. 56 In other areas, however, it has been claimed that discrepancies between the Catholicisms of the 1550s and the 1520s resulted from the deliberate implementa-tion of new priorities, not the frustration of old ones. Marian parish churches typically had only their high altar, and perhaps one other, where a generation earlier they had housed numerous side-altars; their images were often limited to the rood (with accompanying figures of Mary and John), and of patronal saint; worship was confined to the regular parish mass recited by the vicar, in place of the profusion of chantry and guild masses once intoned by a plethora of privately engaged chaplains. But all of this could be regarded as in line with official prefer-ence for greater parochial uniformity, and a more Christ-centred style of devo-tion. Duffy notes that in Kent Archdeacon Harpsfield invariably stipulated that the passion of Christ should be the image displayed on altar hangings and the pax (a plate kissed as a sign of peace during mass). 57 Such reflections strengthen the case for Marian England anticipating the developments of the later continen-tal Counter-Reformation, in which the suppression of local cults, more centrally directed patterns of piety, and the subjection of lay fraternities to greater clerical control were all to be marked elements. There may be a temptation here to make too great a virtue out of necessity. The leaders of the Marian ‘Counter-Reformation’ were clearly not, like some later Italian or Spanish bishops, faced with the problem of taming and channelling an over-exuberant popular piety.

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  Godly Kingship in Restoration England

  The Politics of The Royal Supremacy, 1660–1688

  • Jacqueline Rose(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  381. The Restoration, the Reformation, and the royal supremacy 4 for their claims. Studying the politics of supremacy helps dissect the com- plexities of attitudes to monarchy, Anglican and Dissenting ideologies, and the interweaving of political, ecclesiological, and legal languages in Restoration England. It also raises awareness of just how ambiguous, varied, and muddled Tudor imperium was. This book shows how the royal supremacies of Restoration England were multivalent and creative developments of Henry VIII’s legacy in the circumstances of later Stuart kingship. reformatIon and restor atIon: contexts for supremacy Restoration religious debates took place in two contexts. One was the con- tinuance of the legal and mental worlds of pre-Civil War England. The other was a novel set of experiences and royal policies. The interaction between the two provides the framework for this study. Restoration mon- archs enjoyed the ecclesiastical prerogatives of their Tudor predecessors, but they put those powers to very different uses. As Chapter 1 of this study shows, Restoration kings inherited a panoply of ecclesiastical powers from the Tudor Reformations. The royal suprem- acy founded by Henry VIII in the 1530s meant monarchical control of church law and the Church’s legislative body, convocation. The Act of Submission of the Clergy (1534) decreed that convocation needed a royal licence to meet, separate permission to debate new canons, and ratifica- tion of these before they became legally binding. Henry VIII finally elim- inated papal claims to appoint English bishops; instead he told cathedral chapters whom to elect, although episcopal succession was maintained by the need for other bishops (nominated by the king) to consecrate the royal candidate.

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  Anglican Enlightenment

  Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and its Empire, 1648–1715

  • William J. Bulman(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  part iv Politics chapter 7 Restoration Enlightened Anglicans were haunted by memories of how in their nation, and in so many others, religious zeal and decay had led again and again to civil chaos and tyranny. Their hopes for the future of Christ’s church and their fears about what threatened it were shaped by these stories. No longer confident of the abiding support of a state that had abandoned them, persecuted them, and daily threatened to forsake them again, they took comfort in the civil and spiritual benefits of a style of ministry and worship that could prosper without the aid of the magistrate’s sword. They prized diligent catechizing, measured preaching, restrained polemic, embodied worship, a creed of virtue, and a clericalism that pretended to humility. Yet they could never wholly agree on exactly what the English Revolution meant for the fine-tuning of their pastoral agenda. Their commitments and their uncertainties conspired to determine their central role in the political struggles of post-bellum England. The fact that Restoration-era politics were driven forward by religious energies does not imply that this period is best understood as either the final stage of England’s Reformation or the recurrence of an early Stuart nightmare. 1 As its more secularist interpreters have often insisted, super- ficial continuities should never be allowed to obscure the unprecedented ideological and practical conditions of political engagement in the reign of Charles II. 2 The novelties of mid century – material destruction, social dis- location, sectarian proliferation, learned irreligion, common politics, and 1 Contrast Scott, Algernon Sidney; Scott, England’s troubles; De Krey, ‘Between revolutions’; De Krey, London and the Restoration; Knights, Politics and opinion; Goldie, Roger Morrice, 150; Rose, Godly kingship; Tyacke (ed), England’s long Reformation.

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  Reformation Unbound

  Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–1590

  • Karl Gunther(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  chapter 4 Reformation without tarrying Mary’s accession forced English Protestants not only to make difficult choices regarding conformity but also to reassess their views regarding royal authority and the role of the monarch in establishing true religion. As Mary reversed the English Reformation by returning England to papal authority, restoring the Mass, and imprisoning and burning “the godly,” English Protestants had to face more squarely than ever before what the biblical injunction to “obey God before man” actually meant in practice. Some of the Marian exiles famously began to demand active resistance to the Marian regime, arguing that those who “supported Mary’s tyrannous regime, whether actively or passively, rendered themselves partners in her guilt.” 1 John Ponet, John Knox, and Christopher Goodman argued that open resistance to royal actions and even regicide were necessary responses to the Antichristian rule of Mary Tudor in England and Mary Stuart in Scotland. 2 The development of resistance theory, however, was only the most controversial and spectacular way in which the hotter sort of Marian Protestants were redefining their relationship to political authority. Even 1 Joy Shakespeare, “Plague and Punishment,” in Lake and Dowling (eds.), Protestantism and the National Church, 117. 2 John Ponet, A Shorte Treatise of politike power (Strassburg, 1556; STC 20178); Knox, On Rebellion; Christopher Goodman, How Superior Power Oght to be Obeyd (Geneva, 1558; STC 12020). Also see Martin Luther, A faythful admonycion (Strassburg, 1554; STC 16980); Luther, A faithful admonition (London, 1554; STC 16981). There is a vast literature on the Marian resistance theorists, but see especially Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol.

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  Tudor and Stuart Britain

  1485-1714

  • Roger Lockyer, Peter Gaunt(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Married priests were not necessarily Protestant but they were certainly more numerous in Protestant areas. In London during Mary’s reign there was an underground Protestant Church with a total membership of around 200, which varied its place of meeting in order to avoid detection. It kept in close touch with the exiles and also with the reformed Churches on the Continent and it had links with another underground congregation at Colchester. This type of active defiance of the Marian regime required great courage and was relatively rare. Passive resistance, however, appears to have been widespread and took the form of refusing to build altars or attend Mass. The surviving evidence about popular attitudes towards Mary’s religious policies probably gives a distorted picture, for where the restoration of Catholic worship was accepted without difficulty there was nothing to report and therefore no record for posterity. In many places the opening months of Mary’s reign saw the Mass celebrated once again, with the appropriate ritual, even before this was made compulsory by the First Act of Repeal, passed in December. About a fifth of all churches benefited from the vol-untary restoration of articles sold in Edward’s reign, and where essential equipment was missing parishes often raised considerable funds to provide replacements. The first year of the reign saw high altars set up and vestments, books and crosses purchased. In 1554 this activity extended to the provision of side altars, plate, candlesticks and banners. Where funds were available, 1555–56 marked the reinstatement of roods, rood lofts and images, and increasing attention was given to the repair and maintenance of churches’ fabric. The general picture is of a Catholic North and West, including some places where the old faith had never died out, and a Protestant South-East. Within this broad framework there was, however, considerable variation.

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  Union and Revolution

  Scotland and Beyond, 1625-1745

  • Laura Stewart, Janay Nugent(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  2 Restoration and Revolution REVISING THE RESTORATION The popular English view of the Restoration is of an exciting, upbeat era, welcomed by people fed up of puritan killjoys and presided over by a sensuously ‘merry’ monarch. Christmas, ale- houses, theatres and sex were restored along with Charles II to their rightful place in English culture. There was, of course, a darker side to Restoration England, but the later seventeenth century can be regarded as a period of dynamic political, cultural and intellectual activity. There was rather less to be merry about in Restoration Scotland. This is a period that has traditionally been characterised in terms of fundamental religious divisions, and the violence and social instability they engendered. An older historiography depicted a weak administration in Edinburgh, populated by men who were too busy lining their own pockets, drinking, and fighting with one another for the crumbs of patronage cast from tables at Court to concern themselves with fixing the country’s manifold ills. Scotland’s infrequent parlia- ments were easily controlled by Crown managers and did little to stimulate the development of ‘public opinion’. Meanwhile, a rumbustious English parliament, meeting almost every year to 1681, enabled criticism of Crown policy to develop coherence and gave the presses plenty of material to supplement the usual fare of Court scandals, popish conspiracy theories and freak weather events. Although more recent work shows that Scottish politics and 54 union and revolution culture were livelier in the Restoration era than some of the gloomier literature suggests, it cannot be gainsaid that Scotland faced a myriad of seemingly intractable problems. Certainly, the fears and hatreds unleashed by the civil wars cast a long shadow over English and especially Irish politics, not least for those whose ideals would be dashed by the policies Charles pursued as an active reigning monarch.

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