The English Reformation

12 Key excerpts on "The English Reformation"

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  The Palgrave Guide to English Literature and Its Contexts

  1500-2000

  • Peter Widdowson(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  A crucial instance of this was the furore, after the death of Edward VI (1553), around the accession of Henry VIII’s legitimate daughter by Catherine of Aragon, Mary I (Mary Tudor), a Roman Catholic who married Philip II, King of Spain, and whose persecution of English Protestants in an attempt to restore England to the Roman Catholic fold resulted in the sobriquet ‘Bloody Mary’. When she died childless in 1558, her half-sister, Queen Elizabeth I (daughter of Ann Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife), acceded to the throne, but Elizabeth’s failure to marry and produce an heir in her turn led, on her death in 1603, to the end the Tudor line and the start of the Stuart* succession. Â Politics The gradual development of an English national state and identity, distinct from the still largely Catholic mainland Europe. 1.2 THE (ENGLISH) REFORMATION Literally, ‘reformation’ means an act of reforming, amending and improving. Capitalised and preceded by the definite article, ‘The Reformation’ identifies that period and process in the 16th 2 T HE P ALGRAVE G UIDE TO E NGLISH L ITERATURE AND ITS C ONTEXTS , 1500–2000 Century in Europe which saw the doctrine and power of the Roman Catholic Church challenged and in many cases replaced by the various forms of Protestant religion. However, political and economic factors also determined its course and nature: the hostility of rulers and jurists to the temporal encroachments of the Vatican; the growing wealth of the clergy, and the religious and moral laxity of many; the development of printing, which assisted the spread of ideas; and related to this, the humanism of the Renaissance* , which encouraged a new critical and enquiring attitude of mind. The individualism at the heart of Reformation religions, combined with their embattled location in diverse Northern European states, also helped to foster the growth of nationalism and the economic prosperity of the mercantile classes.

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  The Reformations in Britain, 1520–1603

  • Anna French(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1

  Politics

  DOI: 10.4324/9781003182283-2

  The Reformation: Event or Process?

  A view of the British reformations as a set of fundamentally political events has proved surprisingly resilient. From the machinations in marriage of Henry VIII to the vexed status of the Auld Alliance between France and Scotland, the middle years of the sixteenth century were certainly an unusually insecure period politically speaking. In England, acute anxiety still surrounded the right of the Tudors to their throne and centred specifically on Henry VIII’s capacity to produce a male heir. In Scotland, meanwhile, two successive monarchs – first James V (1512–1452) and then his daughter, Mary I (1542–1587) – came to the throne while still infants, contributing to an unusually fractious tumult north of the border.

  This sense of insecurity was fed and was informed by the processes of the British reformations. Certainly the single defining experience of the early modern world was the so-called “confessionalisation”, which split Europe into opposing Christian tribes (76 ): on the one hand, Roman Catholics, who upheld the “old faith” and remained loyal to the Pope and the liturgies of his cardinals, bishops, and priests as well as to ceremony and traditional theology; and on the other hand, the Protestants, who rejected the authority of the Pope, taught simpler forms of worship and prized both the individual’s direct relationship to God and most especially to the Word of God as set down in the Bible. In England and Scotland alike, which would both shift towards the second camp, the most influential Protestant thinker would prove to be not Luther but John Calvin, a Frenchman who was in most ways more radical than his German forebear (1

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  Mediaeval Education and the Reformation

  • John Lawson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The final stage was the reformation of doctrine; deeply influenced by Calvinism, this started under Edward VI and, after the brief Catholic reaction of Mary’s reign, was accomplished in the early years of Elizabeth’s. The Church of England that emerged preserved intact its ancient episcopal organization and legal structure, but had a new liturgy embracing Catholic and Protestant elements, set out in English in the Prayer Book; and a broad compromise theology summarized in the Thirty-nine articles. In 1559 the Queen was made its ‘Supreme Governor’ by the Supremacy Act; and by the Uniformity Act of the same year all her subjects were obliged under penalty to accept its form of worship and none other. During the greater part of Elizabeth’s reign the overriding concern of the central government was to strengthen this new religious establishment, and protect it from dissentient minorities—Catholics on the one hand, and, to a less extent, radical Calvinist nonconformists on the other. 57 The Reformation and education in England The English Reformation was thus a thoroughly revolutionary movement, but one smoothly and peacefully carried out. It affected not only the religious beliefs and practice of English people, but also the constitution, the social life and economic structure of the country, reacting in ways which cannot be defined precisely with other developments that were simultaneously changing society. A fast growing population and consequent inflation were the concomitants of Reformation, and in their effects on education were perhaps in the long run of even greater significance. The decline in the territorial power of the Church was also accompanied by the rise of a new class of landed gentry, many of them with a stake in former monastic and chantry estates, who came to control policy and government as Members of Parliament and justices of the peace

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  Renaissance and Reformation

  • William R. Estep(Author)
  • 1986(Publication Date)
  • Eerdmans

    (Publisher)

  Chapter XIV

  THE REFORMATION COMES TO ENGLAND

  T he Act of Supremacy passed by the English Parliament in 1534 separated the Church of England from Rome and made the king of England the head of the church. Thus Henry VIII (1491–1547), proclaimed “Defender of the Faith” by Pope Leo X for his polemical tract against Luther, became the defector of the faith. Some sympathetic historians have held that the Reformation in England was launched because of the amorous English monarch’s desire to be free from Catherine, his aging spouse. But the truth of the matter is far more complicated than Henry’s marital problems. While there is no denying that Henry VIII became infatuated with Anne Boleyn, a spirited young lady who wanted very much to be Henry’s wife and England’s queen, it is inaccurate to claim that Henry’s adulterous affair caused a reformation of the English church. Such an observation is superficial if not malicious. If it hadn’t been for extenuating circumstances and the support of loyal and capable men such as Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer, Henry’s divorce from Catherine could have provoked a civil war, not a reformation. In the final analysis it produced not The English Reformation but only an opportunity for reform. The shape of the Reformation in England, therefore, was largely the result of a set of circumstances that had come to prevail in the island kingdom.

  REFORMATION BEFORE 1534

  Lollardy, the movement that owed its origin to the work of John Wycliffe, had not completely died out when the Reformation began to take root in English soil. Two distinctive emphases seem to have been basic to the movement from its inception: the authority of Scripture and the priority of preaching. These emphases were also dear to the Reformers; in fact, as A. G. Dickens suggests, “Perhaps the only major doctrine of the sixteenth century Reformers which Wycliffe cannot be said to have anticipated was that of Justification by Faith Alone.”1 The Lollards had much in common with other medieval anticlerical parties. They sowed the seeds of distrust and skepticism that were largely responsible for the anticlericalism of the fifteenth century. They often expressed their ideas crudely, but their meaning was unmistakable. Their list of grievances included the ringing of church bells, relic worship, the use of images in worship, transubstantiation, purgatory, pilgrimages, indulgences (which they viewed as “payment for the forgiveness of sins”),2

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  Henry VIII and the English Reformation

  • David G Newcombe(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  For some, like the radical Protestant bishop of Gloucester, John Hooper (c. 1495–1555), the Church may have lost its purity after the martyrdom of St Polycarp (second century AD); others tended to date the decline of the Church much later, perhaps six hundred or even a thousand years after Christ. What they all had in common was a vision of the purity of the primitive Church and a determination to reestablish its practices and theology as they understood them. As far as they were concerned, the papacy and the Church of Rome had polluted that purity with false and invented doctrines. The Church needed cleansing to return it to purity. Their critique of the Church, therefore, concentrated not only on the abuses that many perceived among the clergy but also included the doctrine of the Church, which they felt had gone seriously astray. For our purposes, then, the term ‘Reformation’ has a very particular meaning. It is applied to those events, religious, social and political, which appear to have occurred in relation to a shift away from the traditional Catholicism of the Church of Rome, its theology, discipline and spirituality, and towards those ideas, innovations and forms of worship which have come to be known as Protestant. But the term ‘Protestant’ itself was not in common usage during the sixteenth century except in very specific circumstances and is a term applied by historians to those of particular religious points of view. 1 What is indisputable is that something happened in sixteenth-century Europe on a grand scale. Part event, part process, it involved an enormous range of disparate elements: social, economic, even technological changes came into play. Beginning with Martin Luther, although with antecedents in the fourteenth century, like Wyclif in England, or in the fifteenth century, like Jan Hus in Bohemia, it swept through Europe like wildfire and touched the lives of most people one way or another

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  Reformation Divided

  Catholics, Protestants and the Conversion of England

  • Eamon Duffy(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Continuum

    (Publisher)

  It was a superiority thought to have been Introduction Divided Reformations 2 reformation divided demonstrated, among other ways, by the rapidity with which the old religion collapsed before them. Hence older anglophone histories of the reformation commonly started with a brief résumé of the late medieval background, designed to demonstrate the dysfunctional character of late medi-eval Christianity, with the bulk of the narrative focused on the spread of Protestantism in the 50 years or so after 1517.The textbook which dominated the study of The English Reformation in schools and universities for two generations from 1965 suggested that the reformation was all over, bar the shouting, by 1559. 2 And though it was recognised that the Catholic Church had itself engaged in an internal process of reform in the course of the sixteenth century, this reform, with various qualifications, was understood primarily as a response to the Protestant challenge, and hence more often than not designated the ‘counter-reformation’. 3 Few of these assumptions have worn well. We are far more aware now of the richness, resilience and social embedding of the late medi-eval religion so often caricatured or ignored in the older narratives. We are correspondingly more alert to the protracted and difficult labour involved in what Patrick Collinson called the ‘birthpangs’ of reformation, Catholic or Protestant. 4 The comparatively recent realisations that ‘reformation’ was not a confessional monopoly, but a fundamental aspect of the transformations of Catholic as well as Protestant communities in the sixteenth and following centuries, and that such transformations involve complexity and difference, and take a long time, are reflected in two of the best recent textbooks on early modern religion.

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  Ireland's History

  Prehistory to the Present

  • Kenneth L. Campbell(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Yet, Irish historians have tended until recently to give short shrift to the Reformation as if Ireland had remained largely untouched by it. 16 As previously mentioned, Henry VIII very much intended for the religious changes implemented in England to 14 Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (eds), (1964), Tudor Royal Proclamations: Volume I: The Early Tudors (1485–1553) . New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p. 293. 15 Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (eds), (1969), Tudor Royal Proclamations: Volume II: The Later Tudors (1553–1587) . New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p. 314. 16 That this has begun to change is reflected in books such as those by W. Ian P. Hazlett (2003), The Reformation in Britain and Ireland: An Introduction , London. T&T Clark and Felicity Heal (2003), The Reformation in Britain and Ireland . New York: Oxford University Press. Hazlett observed that general surveys of the Reformation period tend to ignore Ireland; my research has confirmed that this has not changed since the date of the publication of his book. IRELAND AND THE REFORMATION 101 pertain to the rest of his dominions, including Wales and Ireland. The desire to unify their kingdoms politically and religiously would prove an important but elusive goal for the Tudor and Stewart dynasties of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Beginning with the Reformation Parliament of the 1530s, there was always an assumption that its legislation applied throughout the lands controlled by the English king. The financial resources at the king’s disposal constituted the material background to this assumption as it applied to Wales and Ireland. When Silken Thomas rebelled in 1534, he offered both the Catholic Emperor Charles V and the pope lordship over Ireland as possible replacements for the king, who was now regarded as a heretic. There was a precedent for this, as King John had accepted Ireland as a fief from Pope Innocent III in the early thirteenth century.

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  The Making of the British Isles

  The State of Britain and Ireland, 1450-1660

  • Steven G. Ellis, Christopher Maginn(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 Yet these movements were firmly under the church's control. The onset of the Reformation raised a series of new ques- [123] tions. Princes could not avoid taking a stand on matters of religion, and generally it was their preferences which determined whether the territories they ruled remained Catholic or became Protestant. The two British monarchies eventually opted for Protestant settlements, with the further result that Protestantism became an important element in both English and Scottish identities, and eventually in senses of Britishness. Nonetheless, this was a hard-fought issue, both because individual monarchs had different preferences in regard to religious change, but also because their choices were contested by many of their subjects, so giving rise to the problem of religious minorities.

  Even though the Tudor and Stewart monarchies both eventually accepted and enforced broadly Calvinist forms of Protestantism within their territories, there were considerable differences in the methods by which these, in many respects, very similar religious settlements were achieved. For one thing, the onset of the Tudor Reformation occurred almost 30 years before its Scottish equivalent, and central to its origins were Tudor dynastic needs. But for Henry VIII's desire for a son and heir, it is doubtful whether this ‘defender of the faith’ and leading critic of Martin Luther would have broken with Rome, particularly since for almost 20 years Henry's diplomatic ambitions had usually accorded with those of the papacy. Thereafter, for the rest of Henry VIII's reign, the royal supremacy constituted one of the few fundamental departures from late medieval Christianity. And even with the introduction under Edward VI and Elizabeth I of a Protestant religious settlement along continental European lines, the supremacy remained one of the most distinctive features of what later came to be called Anglicanism.

  The Henrician Reformation

  In the first phase of the Tudor Reformation, to the accession of Queen Elizabeth, the emphasis was firmly fixed on change at the centre, the statutory enactment of religious change. This phase of state-sponsored reform reflected overwhelmingly the power of the Tudor state but it also saw a vast extension of this power over the lives of ordinary subjects. Accordingly, the first part of this chapter offers a sketch of the nature of these changes. Broadly, the religious settlement under Henry VIII remained much closer to traditional pre-Reformation Christianity than to the practices of the leading continental reformers. The initial steps towards Tudor reform were geared chiefly to bringing the church in England more securely under royal control for the purpose of securing the royal divorce.

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  A History of the British Isles

  Prehistory to the Present

  • Kenneth L. Campbell(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  RELIGION, WARFARE, AND DYNASTIC POLITICS 119 advocates of the Protestant faith. As in the Scottish Highlands, Protestantism flourished in Wales despite a predominantly oral culture and a delay in getting the Bible translated into the language of the people. Part of the appeal of the Reformation for lay Christians elsewhere was the encouragement it provided for them to read the Bible for themselves, thus providing encouragement to a rise in literacy. The Welsh did not need to wait as long for their own translation, however, thanks to the commitment of Welsh reformers to the enterprise. The Reformation also had the effect of creating a stronger sense of unity between English and Welsh Catholics, who were well represented at the English College in Rome in the 1570s. Welshmen such as Owen Lewis and Morys Clynnog reinforced this notion by referring to the College as the ‘Seminarium Britannicum’. 15 The Reformations in the British Isles in European context The Reformations that occurred in the British Isles took place from the beginning within a larger European context and every stage of religious change that took place there in the sixteenth century had serious international ramifications. Pope Clement VII hesitated to rule on Henry VIII’s request for a divorce from Katherine of Aragon mainly because her nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, happened to invade Rome in 1527 and the pope had no wish to anger him further. Wolsey pleaded with both for time to change the other’s mind, but neither relented in time to prevent his downfall. When the pope asked Henry to intervene with the emperor on his behalf, appealing to Henry’s title of ‘Defender of the Faith’, which Pope Leo X had bestowed upon him for writing a Defense of the Seven Sacraments in opposition to Luther in 1521, Henry shot back saying that ‘if the Roman pope had fought in the cause of religion and not temporal power, I should have considered that to be my course of action’.

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  The Reformation Era

  • Robert D. Linder(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  1588. Thwarting the goals of a growing number of concerned Chris- tians on the religious left, however, proved more difficult. This group, dubbed ‘‘Puritans’’ sometime in the 1560s, wanted a more comprehensive reformation. While Elizabeth lived, she managed to contain their restless quest for a more clearly Protestant Church, mostly through her personal charm and guile. However, when she disappeared from the scene, ‘‘all heaven broke loose.’’ Order Challenged: The Puritans Seek a ‘‘Further Reformation’’ Many historians believe that the real English Reformation was played out in the century following Elizabeth’s ascent to the throne. 12 This entailed the Puritan attempt to accomplish what they called ‘‘a further reformation,’’ a quest that began immediately fol- lowing the return of the Marian Exiles from their Continental places of refuge in the years after 1558. 13 Who were the Puritans and what was Puritanism? Historians have long struggled, with only limited success, to define these terms with precision. The word ‘‘Puritan’’ originated as a term of deroga- tion used by their enemies. The early Puritans referred to themselves simply as ‘‘the godly,’’ a clue concerning why they were unpopular in some quarters. In any case, Puritans shared some things in common, such as their Calvinist theology, but even that was gradually modi- fied to fit the English context. All shared a concern to make the Eng- lish Church ‘‘more Protestant.’’ Almost all Puritans wanted a more completely reformed national Church that included a clergy that had experienced a spiritual conversion in a personal manner. They also wanted a national culture based on the Bible that included dedicat- ing Sunday to worship and rest, and a growth in educational provi- sions so that everybody could read the Bible and other godly books for themselves. They also advocated a system of social welfare for the poor.

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  The Reformation for Armchair Theologians

  • Glenn S. Sunshine(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Westminster John Knox Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER ELEVEN The Reformation in England and Scotland

  Like so much else in British history, the English and Scottish Reformations interacted with events on the Continent but really developed with an internal logic all their own. To understand the way the Reformation played out, we need to start with late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth-century dynastic politics.

  Spain and England

  During the late fifteenth century, the territory that would become Spain was divided up into a number of territories. The two most important were Aragon, led by its king Ferdinand, and Castile, led by its queen Isabella. Each of these kingdoms owned other territories outside of Iberia, but for our purposes in this chapter that is not terribly important. Ferdinand and Isabella decided to marry and to pass down a united kingdom to their heir. This happened to be their grandson, Charles I/V Habsburg, whom we discussed earlier. In addition to Joan the Mad, Charles’s mother, Ferdinand and Isabella had another daughter, Catherine of Aragon.

  With the end of the Wars of the Roses, Henry VII Tudor came to the throne of England. Spain was emerging as a great power and rival on the continent to France. Since England and France also had a longstanding rivalry, it made sense for England to set up an alliance with Spain. So, following the normal diplomatic procedures of the day, they arranged a marriage between Catherine of Aragon and Arthur, Henry VII’s oldest son. Arthur, however, died shortly after the marriage. This left England and Spain in a bit of a bind; all the reasons for having the marriage were still in place, but it was illegal for Henry VII’s second son, also named Henry, to marry Catherine since she was his brother’s widow. Catherine, however, swore that the marriage had never been consummated, so that gave Henry VII a loophole, though canon law still said the marriage to Arthur was binding. But being king gives you clout in high places, and so the pope gave Henry special dispensation to marry Catherine. Meanwhile, Henry VII died, leaving Henry VIII on the English throne.

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  The Reformation in Germany

  • C. Scott Dixon(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Even the pious fascination with the cult of saints and the intensification of devotion to Mary gravitated around these themes (grace, clemency, Passion, forgiveness) – with the final goal, if by way of advocacy, being a closer relationship with Christ. It did not yet result in a complete transformation of the faith, for medieval Catholicism was always firmly rooted in the cycle of salvation and obedience to the law; but by the fifteenth century there were clear signs that the faithful were striving to reduce religion to its essence. The legacy of this was twofold: ‘an intense concentration on regularization, obedience to the law, the quest for virtue, and the sanctification of one’s life on the one side; on the other, an increasingly focused emphasis on mercy, intercession, and grace that sought to relieve the burden of the conscience, and to fortify the soul’ (Hamm, 1999b, p. 353). 44 Religious Culture and the Reformation When the Reformation movement emerged in the early decades of the sixteenth century it was guided by a similar spirit, and it was in large part inspired by the same questions that had animated the religious imagination of the late medieval period. The same concerns were at the heart of the inquiry. What were the essentials of the Christian faith? What was the path to sal-vation? How can the believer find a gracious God? This last question preyed on the mind of Martin Luther, and it was his attempt to answer it that gave rise to the Reformation in Germany. Of course, other figures contributed to the movement as well, and there is no doubt that reformers of the stature of Huldrych Zwingli and Jean Calvin (to name but two of the most prominent) were religious thinkers of profound originality. But it remains true to say that Reformation theology ultimately finds its origins in the thought of Martin Luther (Brecht, 1993, pp. 99–117).

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