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English Reformation

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: British History 1500-1750

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   Christianity
   English Reformation
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   Henry VIII
   Thomas Cranmer
   Richard Hooker
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   King Henry VIII of England
   King Henry VIII of England

   The English Reformation refers to the series of events in sixteenth
   century England by which the church in England broke away from the
   authority of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church.

   It was part of a wider process, the European Protestant Reformation, a
   religious and political movement which affected Christianity across the
   whole of Europe during this period. Many factors contributed to the
   ferment: the decline of feudalism and the rise of nationalism, the rise
   of the common law, the invention of the printing press, the
   transmission of new knowledge and ideas not only amongst scholars but
   amongst merchants and artisans also; but the story of why and how the
   different states of Europe adhered to different forms of Protestantism,
   or remained faithful to Rome or allowed different regions within states
   to come to different conclusions (as they did) is specific to each
   state and the causes are not agreed.

   Different opinions have been advanced as to why England adopted a
   Reformed faith, unlike France, for instance. Some have advanced the
   view that there was an inevitability about the triumph of the forces of
   new knowledge and a new sense of autonomy set over-against superstition
   and corruption ,; others that it was a matter of chance: Henry VIII
   died at the wrong time; Mary had no child ; reform did not inevitably
   mean leaving the Roman Communion ; for others it was about the power of
   ideas which required only moderate assistance for people to see old
   certainties as uncertain ; others have written that it was about the
   power of the state over vibrant, flourishing popular religion ; it was
   a 'cultural revolution'. Some, on the contrary, have argued that, for
   most ordinary people there was a continuity across the divide, which
   was as significant as any changes . The recent revival of scholarly
   interest may indicate that the argument is not yet over.

   The English Reformation began as another chapter in the long running
   dispute with the Papacy over the latter's claimed jurisdiction over the
   English people, though ostensibly based on Henry VIII's desire for an
   annulment. It was, at the outset, more of a political than a
   theological dispute, but the reality of political differences between
   Rome and England nonetheless allowed growing theological disputes to
   come to the fore.. The split from Rome made the English monarch head of
   the English church by " Royal Supremacy", thereby establishing the
   Church of England, but the structure and theology of that church was a
   matter of fierce dispute for generations. It led eventually to civil
   war, from which the emergent church polity at the end was that of an
   established church and a number of non-conformist churches whose
   members at first suffered various civil disabilities, which were
   removed only over time. Catholicism emerged from its underground
   existence only in the nineteenth century.

Background

   Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII's first wife
   Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII's first wife

   Henry VIII ascended the English throne in 1509 at the age of 17. He
   made a dynastic marriage with Catherine of Aragon, widow of his brother
   Arthur, in June 1509, just before his coronation on Midsummers Day.
   Unlike his father, who was secretive and conservative, the young Henry
   appeared to be the epitome of chivalry and sociability, seeking out the
   company of young men like himself; an observant Catholic, he heard up
   to five masses a day (apart from in the hunting season!); of 'powerful
   but unoriginal mind', he allowed himself to be influenced by his
   advisors from whom, neither by night or day, was he alone; he was thus
   susceptible to whoever had his ear. Between his young contemporaries
   and the Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, there was thus a state of
   hostility. In 1521 he had defended the Papacy from Martin Luther's
   accusations of heresy in a book he wrote, probably with considerable
   help from his Chancellor Thomas More, entitled The Defence of the Seven
   Sacraments, for which he was awarded the title "Defender of the Faith"
   ( Fidei Defensor) by Pope Leo X, an act which, in the light of what
   followed, appears very strange.
   Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife
   Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife

   In 1522, there arrived at court from years in Europe, Anne Boleyn, as
   maid-of-honour to Queen Catherine, a women of 'charm, style and wit,
   and will and savagery which make her a match for Henry'. By the late
   1520s, Henry wanted to have his marriage to Catherine annulled. She had
   not produced a male heir who survived into adulthood and Henry wanted a
   son to secure the Tudor dynasty. Before Henry's father Henry VII
   ascended the throne, England had been beset by civil warfare over rival
   claims to the English crown and Henry wanted to avoid a similar
   uncertainty over the succession. Catherine's only surviving child was
   Princess Mary.

   Henry claimed that this lack of a male heir was because his marriage
   was "blighted in the eyes of God". Catherine had been his late
   brother's wife, and it was therefore against biblical teachings for
   Henry to have married her ( Leviticus 20:21); a special dispensation
   from Pope Julius II had been needed to allow the wedding in the first
   place. Henry argued that this had been wrong and that his marriage had
   never been valid. In 1527 Henry asked Pope Clement VII to annul the
   marriage, but the Pope refused. According to Canon Law the Pope cannot
   annul a marriage on the basis of a canonical impediment previously
   dispensed. Clement also feared the wrath of Catherine's nephew, Holy
   Roman Emperor Charles V, whose troops earlier that year had sacked Rome
   and briefly taken the Pope prisoner.

The Break with Rome

   The combination of his 'scruple of conscience' and his captivation by
   Anne Boleyn, made his desire to rid himself of his Queen compelling .
   The death of his chancellor Cardinal Wolsey in November 1530 left him
   open to the opposing influences of the supporters of the Queen and
   those who countenanced the abandonment of the Roman allegiance, for
   whom an annulment was but an opportunity. The Parliament summoned in
   1529 to deal with annulment brought together those who wanted reform
   but who disagreed what form it should take; it became known as the
   Reformation Parliament. There were Common lawyers who resented the
   privileges of the clergy to summon laity to their courts; there were
   those who had been influenced by Lutheran evangelicalism and were
   hostile to the theology of Rome: Thomas Cromwell was both. There were
   those, like Foxe and Stokesey, who argued for the Royal Supremacy over
   the English Church. Henry's Chancellor, Thomas More, successor to
   Wolsey, also wanted reform: he wanted new laws against heresy.
   Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex (c. 1485–1540), Henry VIII's chief
   minister 1532–1540.
   Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex (c. 1485–1540), Henry VIII's chief
   minister 1532–1540.

   Cromwell was a lawyer and a Member of Parliament,an evangelical who saw
   how Parliament could be used to advance the Royal Supremacy, which
   Henry wanted, and to further evangelical beliefs and practices which
   both he and his friends wanted. One of his closest friends was Thomas
   Cranmer, soon to be Archbishop.

   In the matter of the annulment, no progress seemed possible: the Pope
   seemed more afraid of Emperor Charles V than of Henry. Anne and
   Cromwell and their allies wished simply to ignore the Pope; but in
   October 1530 a meeting of clergy and lawers advised that Parliament
   could not empower the archbishop to act against the Pope's prohibition.
   Henry thus resolved to bully the priests . Having brought down Cardinal
   Wolsey, his Chancellor, on a charge of praemunire and probably hastened
   his death, he finally resolved to charge the whole English clergy with
   praemunire in order the secure their agreement to his annulment.
   Praemunire, which forbade obedience to the authority of foreign rulers
   had been around since the 1392 Statute of Praemunire, and had been used
   against individuals in the ordinary course of court proceedings. Now
   Henry, having first charged the Queen's supporters, Bishops John
   Fisher, John Clerk, Nicholas West and Henry Standish and archdeacon of
   Exeter Adam Travers, then decided to proceed against the whole clergy .
   Henry claimed £100,000 from the Convocation of Canterbury of the Church
   of England for their pardon, which was granted by the Convocation on 24
   January 1531. The clergy wanted the payment to be spread over five
   years; Henry refused. The Convocation responded by withdrawing their
   payment altogether and demanded Henry fulfil certain guarantees before
   they agreed to give him the money. Henry refused these conditions and
   agreed only to the five-year period of payment and then added five
   articles to the payment which Henry wanted the Convocation to accept.
   These were:
     * That the clergy recognise Henry as the 'sole protector and supreme
       head of the Anglican church and clergy'
     * That the King had spiritual jurisdiction
     * That the privileges of the Church were upheld only if they did not
       detract from the royal prerogative and the laws of the realm
     * That the King pardoned the clergy for violating the statute of
       praemunire, and
     * That the laity were also pardoned.

   In Parliament, bishop John Fisher was Catherine's and the clergy's
   champion; he had inserted into the first article, the phrase 'as far as
   the word of God allows' into the first article. In Convocation ,
   however, Archbishop Warham requested a discussion but was met by a
   stunned silence from the Convocation; then Warham said: 'He who is
   silent seems to consent' to which a clergyman present responded: 'Then
   we are all silent'. The Convocation granted consent to the King's five
   articles and the payment on 8 March 1531. That same year Parliament
   passed the Act of Pardon.

   The breaking of the power of Rome proceeded little by little. In 1532,
   Cromwell brought before Parliament the Supplication Against the
   Ordinaries which listed nine grievances against the Church, including
   abuses of power and Convocation's independent legislative power.
   Finally on 10 May the King demanded of Convocation that the Church
   should renounce all authority to make laws, and on 15 May the
   Submission of the Clergy was subscribed , which recognised Royal
   Supremacy over the church so that it could no longer make canon law
   without royal licence, i.e. without the permission of the King; thus
   completely emasculating it as a law-making body. (This would
   subsequently be passed by the Parliament in 1534 and again in 1536.)
   The day after this More resigned as Chancellor, leaving Cromwell as
   Henry's chief minister. (Cromwell never became Chancellor; his power
   came - and was lost - through his informal relations with Henry.)

   Thereafter there followed a series of Acts of Parliament. The Act in
   Conditional Restraint of Annates which proposed that the clergy should
   pay no more than 5% of their first year's revenue (annates) to Rome
   proved at first controversial, and required Henry's presence in the
   House of Lords three times and the browbeating of the Commons. The Act
   in Restraint of Appeals which was drafted by Cromwell, apart from
   outlawing appeals to Rome on ecclesiastical matters, declared that
   'this realm of England is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the
   world, governed by one Supreme Head and King having the dignity and
   royal estate of the Imperial Crown of the same, unto whom a body
   politic compact of all sorts and degrees of people divided in terms and
   by names of Spirituality and Temporalty, be bounden and owe to bear
   next to God a natural and humble obedience'., thus declaring England an
   independent country in every respect. Geoffrey Elton has called this
   Act an "essential ingredient" of the "Tudor revolution" in that it
   expounded a theory of national sovereignty. The Act in Absolute
   Restraint of Annates outlawed all annates to Rome, and also ordered
   that if cathedrals refused the King's nomination for bishop, they would
   be liable to punishment by praemunire. Finally in 1534 the Act of
   Supremacy made Henry "supreme head in earth of the Church of England"
   and disregarded any "usage, custom, foreign laws, foreign authority
   [or] prescription"..
   Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), Henry VIII's Archbishop of Canterbury and
   principal author of the first and second Books of Common Prayer.
   Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), Henry VIII's Archbishop of Canterbury and
   principal author of the first and second Books of Common Prayer.

   Meanwhile, having taken Anne to France on a pre-nuptual honeymoon,
   Henry was married to her in Westminster Abbey in January 1533. This was
   made easier by the death of Archbishop Warham, a stalwart opponent of
   an annulment, after which Henry appointed Thomas Cranmer as his
   successor as Archbishop of Canterbury; Cranmer was prepared to grant
   the annulment of the marriage to Catherine as Henry required. Anne gave
   birth to a daughter, Princess Elizabeth, three months after the
   marriage. The Pope responded to the marriage by excommunicating both
   Henry and Cranmer from the Roman Catholic Church.

   Consequently in the same year the Act of First Fruits and Tenths
   transferred the taxes on ecclesiastical income from the Pope to the
   Crown. The Peter's Pence Act outlawed the annual payment by landowners
   of one penny to the Pope. This Act also reiterated that England had "no
   superior under God, but only your Grace" and that Henry's "imperial
   crown" had been diminished by "the unreasonable and uncharitable
   usurpations and exactions" of the Pope.

   In case any of this should be resisted Parliament passed the Treasons
   Act 1534 which made it high treason punishable by death to deny Royal
   Supremacy. Finally in 1536 Parliament passed the Act against the Pope's
   Authority which removed the last part of papal authority still legal;
   this was Rome's power in England to decide disputes concerning
   Scripture.

Theological radicalism

   This was still not yet a Reformation. That was to come from the
   dissemination of ideas. The king's councillors, his chief minister,
   Thomas Cromwell, his archbishop, Thomas Cranmer were part of a loose
   group of people who had read the works of Martin Luther and had been
   influenced by them. Theological radicalism had always been around. In
   England its major manifestation was Lollardy, a movement deriving from
   the writings of John Wycliffe, the fourteenth century Bible translator,
   which stressed the primacy of Scripture. But, after the execution of
   Sir John Oldcastle, leader of the Lollard rebellion of 1415, they never
   again had access to the levers of power and by the fifteenth century
   were much reduced in numbers and influence. There were still many
   Lollards about, especially in London and the Thames Valley, in Essex
   and Kent, Coventry and Bristol, who would be receptive to the new ideas
   when they came - who looked for a reform in the lifestyle of the
   clergy; who held the Word to be the more necessary sacrament, the
   Eucharist but a memorial - but they were not party to the actions of
   the government. Other ideas, critical of the papal supremacy were held,
   not only by Lollards, but by those who wished to assert the supremacy
   of the secular state as against the church but also by conciliarists
   such as Thomas More. Other Catholic Reformists, like John Colet, Dean
   of St. Paul's, warned that heretics were not nearly so great a danger
   to the faith as the wicked and indolent lives of the clergy.

   The impact of Luther's thinking was of a different order. The main
   plank of his thinking, 'justification by faith' alone rather than by
   good works, threatened the whole basis of the Catholic penitential
   system with its endowed masses and prayers for the dead as well as its
   doctrine of purgatory. Neither pious acts, nor prayers nor masses, on
   this view, can secure the grace of God; only faith. Moreover, printing,
   which had become widespread at the end of the previous century, meant
   that vernacular Bibles could be produced in quantity; a further English
   translation, by William Tyndale was banned but it was impossible to
   prevent copies from being smuggled and widely read; the Church could no
   longer effectively dictate its interpretation. A group in Cambridge,
   which met at the White Horse tavern, and became known as " Little
   Germany" soon became influential: its members included Robert Barnes
   and Hugh Latimer, both eventually to be burned as heretics, and Thomas
   Cranmer, then a cautious and uncommitted student of Luther's ideas.
   Cranmer was to visit Germany in 1532 and there secretly to marry, but
   even those who did not encounter German theologians were influenced by
   them. Cromwell, in particular, was thus able to infiltrate Protestant
   church reforms into the process of complying with the Royal will.

   Cromwell's programme, assisted by Anne Boleyn's influence over
   episcopal appointments,was not merely against the clergy and the power
   of Rome. He persuaded Henry that safety from political alliances that
   Rome might attempt to bring together lay in negotiations with the
   German Lutheran princes. There seemed to be a possibility that Charles
   V, the Holy Roman Emperor might act to avenge his rejected aunt (Queen
   Catherine) and enforce the Pope's excommunication. It never came to
   anything but it brought to England Lutheran ideas: three sacraments,
   baptism, eucharist and penance, which Henry was prepared to countenance
   in order to keep open the possibility of an alliance. More noticeable,
   and objectionable to many, were the Injunctions, first of 1536 and then
   1538. The programme began with the abolition of many feastdays, 'the
   occasion of vice and idleness', which, particularly at harvest time had
   an immediate effect on village life. The offerings to images were
   discouraged, as were pilgrimages - these injunctions took place while
   monasteries were being dissolved - in some places images were burned on
   the grounds that they were objects of superstitious devotion, candles
   lit before images were prohibited, English Bibles were to be bought.
   Thus did the Reformation begin to affect the towns and villages of
   England and, on the whole, they did not like it .

Dissolution of the Monasteries

   In 1534, Cromwell initiated a Visitation of the Monasteries ostensibly
   to examine their character, in fact, to value their assets with a view
   to expropriation. Suppression of monasteries in order to raise funds
   was not unknown previously. Cromwell had done the same thing on the
   instructions of Cardinal Wolsey to raise funds for two proposed
   colleges at Ipswich and Oxford years before. Now the Visitation allowed
   for an inventory of what the monasteries possessed and the visiting
   commissioners claimed to have uncovered sexual immorality and financial
   impropriety amongst the monks and nuns which became the ostensible
   justification for their suppression. The Church owned between one-fifth
   and one-third of the land in all England; Cromwell realised that he
   could bind the gentry and nobility to Royal Supremacy by selling to
   them the huge amount of Church lands, and that any reversion back to
   pre-Royal Supremacy would entail upsetting many of the powerful people
   in the realm. For these various reasons the Dissolution of the
   Monasteries was begun in 1536 with the smaller houses, those valued at
   less than £200 a year; the revenue was used by Henry to help build
   coastal defences (see Device Forts) against expected invasion, and all
   their land was given to the Crown or sold to the aristocracy. Whereas
   the royal supremacy had raised few eyebrows, the attack on abbeys and
   priories affected lay people. Mobs attacked those sent to break up
   monastic buildings; the suppression commissioners were attacked by
   local people in a number of places. In the North of England there were
   a series of uprisings by Catholics against the dissolutions in late
   1536 and early 1537. In the autumn of 1536 there was a great muster,
   reckoned to be up to 40,000 in number, at Horncastle in Lincolnshire
   which was, with difficulty, dispersed by the nervous gentry. They had
   attempted without success to negotiate with the king by petition. The
   Pilgrimage of Grace was a more serious matter. Revolt spread through
   Yorkshire and the rebels gathered at York. Robert Aske, their leader,
   negotiated the restoration of sixteen of the twenty six northern
   monasteries, which had actually been dissolved. However, the promises
   made to them, by the Duke of Norfolk, were ignored on the king's
   orders; Norfolk was instructed to put the rebellion down. Forty seven
   of the Lincolnshire rebels were executed and 132 from the northern
   pilgrimage . Further rebellions took place in Cornwall in early 1537
   and in Walsingham in Norfolk which received like treatment.

   It took Cromwell four years to complete the process; in 1539 he moved
   to the dissolution of the larger monasteries which had escaped earlier.
   Many houses gave up voluntarily, though some sought exemption by
   payment. When their houses were closed down some monks sought transfer
   to larger houses; those who were persuaded to leave their orders
   became, many of them, secular priests. A few, including the
   Carthusians, refused and were killed to the last man.

Reformation reversed

   The abolition of papal authority made way not for orderly change but
   for dissension and violence; reckless acts of iconoclasm, wanton
   destruction, disputes within communities which led to violence, and
   radical challenge to all forms of faith were daily reported to
   Cromwell, something which he tried to hide from the King . Once Henry
   knew what was afoot, he acted. Thus at the end of 1538, a proclamation
   was issued, among other things, forbidding free discussion of the
   Sacrament and forbidding clerical marriage, on pain of death. Henry
   personally presided at the trial of John Lambert in November 1538 for
   denying the real presence; at the same time, he shared in the drafting
   of a proclamation giving Anabaptists and sacramentaries ten days to get
   out of the country. In 1539 Parliament passed the Six Articles
   reaffirming Catholic practices such as transubstantiation, clerical
   celibacy and the importance of confession to a priest and prescribed
   penalties if anyone denied them. On June 28, 1540 Cromwell, his long
   time advisor and loyal servant, was executed. Different reasons were
   advanced: that Cromwell would not enforce the Act of Six Articles, that
   he had supported Barnes, Latimer and other heretics, and that he was
   responsible for Henry's marriage to Anne of Cleves, his fourth wife.
   Many other arrests under the Act followed. Cranmer, it is said, lay
   low.

   In the same year Henry began his attack upon the free availability of
   the Bible. Previously,in 1536 Cromwell had instructed each parish to
   acquire 'one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English'
   by Easter 1539. This instruction has been largely ignored so a new
   version the Great Bible largely William Tyndale's English translation
   of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures was authorised in August 1537. But
   by 1539 Henry announced his desire to have it 'corrected' (which
   Cranmer skilfully referred to the universities to undertake). Many
   parishes were, in any case, reluctant to set up English bibles; now the
   mood of conservatism, which expressed itself in the fear that Bible
   reading led to heresy, allowed those which had been put in place to be
   removed. By the Act for the Advancement of True Religion 1543, Henry
   restricted the reading of Bible to men and women of noble birth. He
   expressed his fears to Parliament in 1545 that 'the Word of God, is
   disputed, rhymed, sung and jangled in every ale-house and tavern,
   contrary to the true meaning and doctrine of the same'

   By 1546 the conservatives, the Duke of Norfolk, Wriothesly, Gardiner
   and Tunstall were in the ascendency and were, by the king's will, to be
   members of the regency council, on his death. But by the time he died
   in 1547, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, brother of Jane Seymour,
   Henry's third wife, (and therefore uncle to the future Edward VI)
   managed, by a number of alliances with influential Protestants such as
   Lisle , to gain control over the Privy Council and persuaded Henry to
   change his will and to replace them by his supporters.

Edward's Reformation

   King Edward VI of England, in whose reign the reform of the Anglican
   Church moved in a more Protestant direction.
   King Edward VI of England, in whose reign the reform of the Anglican
   Church moved in a more Protestant direction.

   When Henry died in 1547 his nine year old son, Edward VI, inherited the
   throne. Edward himself was precocious child, who had been brought up as
   a Protestant, but was of little account politically. The Lord Protector
   was Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford who was also Edward's uncle and
   who proposed to forward Protestant ideas. He was commissionered as
   virtual regent with near sovereign powers. Hertford, now Duke of
   Somerset, proceeded at first hesitantly, partly because his powers were
   not unchallenged. When he acted it was because he saw the political
   advantage. The 1547 Injunctions against images were a more tightly
   drawn version of those of 1538 but they were much more fiercely
   enforced, at first informally, and then, by instruction. All images in
   churches were to be dismantled; stained glass, shrines, statues were
   defaced or destroyed; roods and often their lofts and screens were cut
   down, bells taken down vestments were prohibited and either burned or
   sold; church plate was to be melted down or sold and the requirement of
   the clergy to be celibate was lifted. Chantries, means by which the
   saying of masses for the dead were endowed, were abolished completely,
   and in 1549 Cranmer introduced a Book of Common Prayer in English. In
   1550, stone altars were exchanged for wooden communion tables, a very
   public break with the past, changing the look and focus of church
   interiors as it did. Less visible but influential was the new ordinal
   which provided for Protestant pastors rather than Catholic priests. In
   1551, the episcopate was remodelled by the appointment of Protestants
   to the bench. This removed the obstacle to change which was the refusal
   of some bishops to enforce the regulations. Henceforth, the Reformation
   proceeded apace. In 1552 the prayer book, which Bishop Stephen Gardiner
   had approved from his prison cell, conservative though he was, was
   replaced by a second much more radical prayer book which altered the
   shape of the service, so as to remove any sense of sacrifice. Edward's
   Parliament also repealed his father's Six Articles.

   The enforcement of these new rules did not take place without a fight.
   There were rebellions in East Anglia and in Devon and Cornwall over the
   Prayer Book to which many parishes sent their young men; they were
   brutally put down. And apart from these more spectacular pieces of
   resistance, in some places chantry priests continued to say prayers and
   landowners to pay them to do so; opposition to the removal of images
   was widespread. (So much so that when during the Commonwealth, William
   Dowsing (1596-1679) was commissioned to the task of image breaking in
   Suffolk, his task, as he records it, was enormous.) In Kent and the
   south east, compliance was most willing and for many, the sale of
   vestments and plate was an opportunity to make money (but it was also
   true that in London and Kent Reformation ideas had permeated more
   deeply into popular thinking). The effect of the resistance was to
   topple Hertford, now Duke of Somerset, as Lord Protector so that in
   1549 it was feared by some that the Reformation would cease. The prayer
   book was the tipping point. But Lisle, now made Earl of Warwick, was
   made Lord President of the Privy Council and, ever the opportunist (he
   was to die a public Catholic), saw the further implementation of the
   reforming policy as a means of defeating his rivals .

   Outwardly, the destruction and removals for sale had changed the church
   forever. In fact, many churches had concealed their vestments and their
   silver, had buried their stone altars and there were many disputes
   between the government and parishes over church property. Thus, when
   Edward died in July 1553 and the Duke of Northumberland attempted to
   have the Protestant Lady Jane Grey made Queen, the unpopularity of the
   confiscations gave Mary the opportunity to have herself proclaimed
   Queen, first in Suffolk, and then in London to the acclamation of the
   crowds.

Catholic Restoration

   Queen Mary I of England restored the English allegiance to Rome.
   Queen Mary I of England restored the English allegiance to Rome.

   From 1553, under the reign of Henry's Roman Catholic daughter, Mary I,
   the Reformation legislation was repealed and Mary sought to achieve the
   reunion with Rome. Her first Act of Parliament was to retroactively
   validate Henry's marriage to her mother and so legitimise her claim to
   the throne. Achieving her objective was however, not straightforward.
   The Pope was only prepared to accept reunion when church property
   disputes had been settled, which, in practice, meant allowing those who
   had bought former church property to keep it. 'Only when when English
   landowners has secured their claims did Julius III's representative
   arrive in November 1554 to reconcile the realm'. Thus did Cardinal Pole
   arrive to become Archbishop of Canterbury in Cranmer's place. Mary
   could have had Cranmer, imprisoned as he was, tried and executed for
   treason - he had supported the claims of Lady Jane Grey - but she had
   resolved to have him tried for heresy. His recantations of his
   Protestantism would have been a major coup for her. Unhappily for her,
   he unexpectedly withdrew his recantations at the last minute as he was
   to be burned at the stake, thus ruining her government's propaganda
   victory.

   If Mary was to secure England for Catholicism, she needed an heir. On
   the advice of the Holy Roman Emperor she married his son, Phillip II of
   Spain; she needed to prevent her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth from
   inheriting the Crown and thus returning England to Protestantism. There
   was opposition, and even a rebellion in Kent; even though it was
   provided that he would never inherit the kingdom if there was no heir,
   received no estates and had no coronation. He was there to provide an
   heir. But she never became pregnant; her apparent pregnancy was, in
   fact, the beginnings of stomach cancer. Ironically, another blow fell.
   Pope Julius died and his successor, Paul IV declared war on Philip and
   recalled Pole to Rome to have him tried as a heretic. Mary refused to
   let him go. The support which she might have expected from a grateful
   papacy was thus denied her.

   After 1555, the initial reconciling tone of the regime began to harden.
   The medieval heresy laws were restored. The so-called Marian
   Persecutions of Protestants ensued and 283 Protestants were burnt at
   the stake for heresy. This resulted in the Queen becoming known as '
   Bloody Mary', due to the influence of John Foxe, one of the Protestants
   who fled Marian England. Foxe's Book of Martyrs recorded the executions
   in such detail that it became Mary's epitaph; Convocation subsequently
   ordered that it should be placed in every cathedral in the land. In
   fact, while those who were executed after the revolts of 1536, and the
   St. David's Down rebellion of 1549, and the unknown number of monks who
   died for refusing to submit, may not have been tried for heresy, they
   certainly exceeded that number by some amount. Even so, the heroism of
   some of the martyrs was an example to those who witnessed them, so that
   in some places it was the burnings that set people against the regime

   There was a slow consolidation in Catholic strength in her latter
   years. The reconciled Catholic, Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London,
   produced a catechism and a collection of homilies; the printing press
   was widely put into use in the production of primers and other
   devotional materials; recruitment to the English clergy began to rise
   after almost a decade; repairs to churches long neglected were put in
   hand. In the parishes 'restoration and repair continued, new bells were
   bought, and churches' ales produced their bucolic profits' .
   Commissioners visited to ensure that altars were restored, roods
   rebuilt and vestments and plate purchased. Moreover, Pole was
   determined to do more than remake the past. His insistence was on
   scripture, teaching and education and on improving the moral standards
   of the clergy. It is difficult to determine how far Catholic devotion,
   with its belief in the saints and in purgatory, had even been broken;
   certainties, especially those which drew upon men's purses, had been
   shaken - benefactions to the church did not return significantly; trust
   in clergy who had been prepared to change their minds and were now
   willing to leave their new wives - as they were required to do - was
   bound to have weakened. Few monasteries were reinstated; nor were
   chantries and gilds in any number. What was needed was time. Thus, such
   was the mood that Protestants secretly ministering to underground
   congregations, such as Thomas Bentham, were planning for a long haul, a
   ministry of survival. Mary's death in December 1558, childless and
   without her having made provision for a Catholic to succeed her, undid
   that consolidation.

The Elizabethan Settlement

   When Mary died childless in 1558 Elizabeth I inherited the throne. She
   was a Protestant, though an undogmatic one. She thus proceeded slowly
   (and with some difficulty) in the re-establishment of her
   half-brother's inheritance. Parliament passed an Act of Supremacy 1559
   which validated ten Acts that Mary had repealed and conferred on
   Elizabeth the title Supreme Governor of the Church of England without
   difficulty. However, the Act of Uniformity 1559 which forced people to
   attend Sunday service in an Anglican church, at which a slightly
   revised version of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer was to be used, was
   passed by only three votes.

   The determination to prevent any further restoration was evidenced by
   the more thoroughgoing destruction of roods, vestments, stone altars,
   dooms, statues etc., but what succeeded more than anything else was the
   sheer length of Elizabeth's reign; while Mary had been able to impose
   her programme for a mere five years, Elizabeth had more than forty.

   Not that it was a process of mere consolidation. On the one hand her
   reign saw the emergence of Puritanism. Elizabethan Puritanism
   encompassed those Protestants who, whilst they agreed that there should
   be one national church, felt that the church had been but partially
   reformed. Puritanism ranged from hostility to the content of the Prayer
   Book and "popish" ceremony to a desire for church governance to be
   radically reformed. Edmund Grindal, one of the Marian exiles, was made
   Archbishop of Canterbury in 1575 and chose to oppose even the Queen in
   his desire to forward the Puritans' agenda. 'Bear with me, I beseech
   you Madam, if I choose rather to offend your earthly majesty than to
   offend the heavenly majesty of God', he ended a 6,000 word reproach to
   her. He was placed under house arrest for his trouble and though he was
   not deprived, his death, blind and in bad health in 1583 put an end to
   the hopes of his supporters. His successor, Archbishop Whitgift more
   reflected the Queen's determination to discipline those who were
   unprepared to accept her settlement. A conformist, he imposed a degree
   of obedience on the clergy which apparently alarmed even the Queen's
   ministers, such as Lord Burghley. The Puritan cause was not helped even
   by its friends. The pseudonymous ' Martin Marprelate' tracts, which
   attacked conformist clergy with in a libellous humorous tone, outraged
   senior Puritan clergy and set the government on an unsuccessful attempt
   to run the writer to earth. Incidentally, the defeat of the Armada in
   1588 made it more difficult for Puritans to resist the conclusion that
   since God 'blew with his wind and they were scattered' he could not be
   too offended by the religious establishment in the land

   On the other side there were of course, still huge numbers of
   Catholics, some of whom conformed, bending with the times, hoping that
   there would be a fresh reverse; vestments were still hidden, golden
   candlesticks bequeathed, chalices kept. The Mass was still celebrated
   in some places alongside the new Communion service. It was, of course
   more difficult than hitherto. Elizabeth's changes were more wholesale
   than those of her half-brother and all but one of the bishops lost
   their posts, a hundred fellows of Oxford colleges were deprived; many
   dignitaries resigned rather than take the oath. Others, both priests
   and laity, lived a double life, apparently conforming, but avoiding
   taking the oath of conformity. It was only as time passed that
   recusancy, refusal to attend Protestant services, became more common.
   The Jesuits and seminary priests, trained in Douai and Rome to make
   good the losses of English priests, encouraged this. By the 1570s an
   underground church was growing fast, as the Church of England became
   more Protestant and less bearable for Catholics. Catholics were still a
   sizeable minority. Only one public attempt to restore the old religion
   took place, the revolt of the northern earls, the Rising of the North
   in 1569. It was a botched attempt: in spite of tumultuous crowds who
   greeted them in Durham, the rebellion did not spread, the assistance
   they sought was not forthcoming, their communication with allies at
   Court were poor; they came nowhere near to setting free Mary Stuart
   from her imprisonment in Tutbury, whose presence might have rallied
   support. The papacy's refusal to countenance occasional attendance at
   Protestant Services and the excommunication of Elizabeth by Pope Pius V
   in 1570, presented the choice to Catholics more starkly, and the
   arrival of the seminary priests, while it was a lifeline to many
   Catholics, brought further trouble. Elizabeth's ministers took steps to
   stem the tide: fines for refusal to attend church were raised from 12d.
   per service to £20 a month, fifty times an artisan's wage; it was now
   treason to be absolved from schism and reconciled to Rome; the
   execution of priests began - the first in 1577, four in 1581, eleven in
   1582, two in 1583, six in 1584. It became treasonable for a Catholic
   priest ordained abroad to enter the country. The choice lay between
   treason and damnation.

   There is, of course always some distance between legislation and its
   enforcement. The governmental attacks on recusancy were mostly upon the
   gentry. Few recusants were actually fined, often at reduced rates; the
   persecution eased; priests came to recognise that they should not
   refuse communion to occasional conformists. The persecutions did not
   extinguish the faith, but they tested it sorely. The huge number of
   Catholics in East Anglia and the north in the 1560s disappeared into
   the general population in part because recusant priests largely served
   the great Catholic houses, who alone could hide them. Without the mass
   and pastoral care, yeomen, artisans and husbandmen fell into
   conformism. Catholicism, supported by foreign priests, came to be seen
   as un-English.

Legacy

   By the time of Elizabeth's death there had also emerged a third party,
   perfectly hostile to Puritans, but not adherent to Rome. It preferred
   the revised Book of Common Prayer of 1559, from which had been removed
   some of the matters offensive to Catholics. The recusants had been
   removed from the centre of the stage. A new dispute was between the
   Puritans, who wished to see an end of the prayer book and episcopacy
   and this third party, the considerable body of people who looked kindly
   on the Elizabethan Settlement, who rejected 'prophesyings', whose
   spirituality had been nourished by the Prayer Book and who preferred
   the governance of bishops. It was between these two groups that, after
   Elizabeth's death in 1603, a new, more savage episode of the
   Reformation was in the process of gestation. During the reigns of the
   Stuart kings, James I and Charles I, the battle lines were to become
   more defined, leading ultimately to the English Civil War, the first on
   English soil to engulf parts of the civilian population. The war was
   only partly about religion, but the abolition of prayer book and
   episcopacy by a Puritan Parliament was an element in the causes of the
   conflict. As Diarmaid MacCulloch has noted, the legacy of these
   tumultuous events can be recognised, throughout the Commonwealth
   (1649-1660) and the Restoration which followed it and beyond. This
   third party was to become the core of the restored Church of England,
   but at the price for further division. At the Restoration in 1660
   Anglicans, as they came to be called, were to be but part of the
   religious scene, which was to include various kinds of Non-Conformity,
   among which would eventually be numbered Roman Catholicism.
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