A Brief History of the Tudor Age

by Ridley, Jasper

  The reputation of the priests was as low as the reputation of the monks. It had been a law of the Church for four hundred years that priests were not allowed to marry; but many of the parish priests lived more or less openly with a concubine, and this was winked at by the Church authorities. The priests spent a great deal of time dealing with non-religious business. They were indeed usually called ‘the secular clergy’ to distinguish them from ‘the religious’, the monks and nuns; and the word ‘religion’ was often used to refer exclusively to monasteries.

  The Church offered a promising career to intelligent and ambitious young men. In 1500, as at most other times in human history, influence and family connections helped a man’s career. Some critics were dissatisfied that so many of the important positions in the Church, like so many of the headships of the wealthiest abbeys and nunneries, were in the hands of the sons and daughters of noblemen; but at the beginning of the Tudor Age it was still possible, as it had been during earlier centuries, for men of the lowest social origin to rise to positions of power in the Church, and through the Church to the highest rank in the State and in society.

  But no ambitious young man who hoped to rise to these heights through the Church became an ordinary parish priest. He began by going from school to one of the two universities, Oxford or Cambridge, usually at the age of fourteen. There he studied divinity and the canon law of the Church. After taking his degree as a Bachelor of Divinity or Doctor of Divinity, he would try to obtain an introduction to some bishop or nobleman who would appoint him to be his chaplain or secretary. If he made a good impression, the nobleman or bishop would appoint him as rector or vicar in some parish which they controlled; but he would not be expected to reside in his parish, or ever to visit it. He would be given a dispensation not to reside there and would sometimes be given another dispensation allowing him to be appointed as the parish priest in two or more parishes at the same time, with leave to absent himself from both. This made it possible for him to live on the revenues of his benefices while carrying on his duties as secretary in the household of the nobleman or bishop; and the duties of the priest of the parish were undertaken by a curate to whom he paid a small annuity to do the work.

  If the young priest was successful and lucky, he would soon move on from the household of the bishop or nobleman to the King’s service. He might then be appointed an archdeacon, or given some more benefices, again with a dispensation to be absent, as he performed more and more important duties in the King’s government. In due course, if he made his way to the top, he would be appointed a bishop, almost always before he reached the age of forty. This meant that he was one of the hundred most important persons in the State, as well as one of the leaders of the Church. He might become a member of the King’s Privy Council, which was the supreme governing body in the realm under the King, and in many ways the equivalent of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet today. He would often be sent as an ambassador to a foreign sovereign, and perhaps ordered to stay there for some years as resident ambassador at the foreign court, accompanying the King to whom he was accredited on his journeys through his realm. From now on, his chief anxiety was that he would suddenly fall from favour, and would be imprisoned or executed as a traitor.

  Just as a priest could obtain a dispensation to hold several benefices, so a bishop could be permitted to hold several bishoprics simultaneously with leave of absence from all of them. Cardinal Wolsey was at the same time Archbishop of York and Bishop of Durham, without ever visiting either diocese, as well as Abbot of St Albans, Lord Chancellor of England, and Papal Legate. Later he was Archbishop of York and Bishop of Winchester while also obtaining the revenues of the bishoprics of Durham and of Badajoz in Spain, as well as several other Spanish benefices. At the end of the fifteenth century, it became the custom that two bishops, one of whom was usually the Bishop of Worcester, should be two Italian cardinals who lived in Rome and represented English interests at the Papal court. They never visited their English dioceses, but were expected, in return for receiving their revenues, to use their influence in Rome to persuade the Pope to grant the King of England the favours and dispensations for which he asked, and to pursue a pro-English and anti-French foreign policy.

  Very few bishops had ever carried out the duties of a parish priest. Very few of them celebrated Mass or officiated as a priest, except sometimes on great state occasions, though they attended Mass every day with their chaplain as the celebrant. Before 1530, it was unusual for a bishop to preach a sermon, for until then, sermons played a very small part in the church services. But after Henry VIII repudiated the Papal authority and introduced some of the religious changes which the Protestant reformers advocated, sermons were used as a means of government propaganda. The bishops spent nearly all their time in carrying out administrative, diplomatic and judicial duties.

  The result of this system was that the bishops and other nationally prominent churchmen were usually canon lawyers, or ‘canonists’. They were often also ‘civilians’ – experts in the civil law, or Roman law, which prevailed in continental Europe and was used in negotiating international treaties, though the English common law, which was applied in the ordinary courts in England, was administered by the common lawyers in the four Inns of Court in London. The domination of the canon lawyers is very evident if we study the reports of the arguments about religious doctrine in the heresy trials, at synods of the clergy, and in the books in which the Catholics and the Protestants, the conservatives and the reformers, put forth their conflicting views. The participants were of course learned in divinity, but their method of argument and of thought was completely legalistic, based on precedents and interpretations of biblical texts and on the ‘patristic’ writings of the early fathers of the Church, who lived in the first four centuries after Christ.

  The Protestants, who believed in the necessity of Bible-reading and who relied on the authority of the Bible against the authority of the Church, criticized this domination of the canonists, and believed that a bishop should be first of all a pastor, and a student of the Bible and theology, rather than of the canon law. This was why Thomas Cranmer made his famous proposal, which first brought him to the attention of Henry VIII, that the universities should be consulted about the King’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. The history books nearly always record merely that Cranmer advised that the universities should be asked to give their opinion about the divorce. But according to Cranmer’s secretary, Ralph Morice – from whom the martyrologist John Foxe heard about the incident and who is the only original source for all we know about it – Cranmer’s suggestion was that the King should consult the theologians instead of the canonists, and approach the theological faculty in the universities rather than the canonists, in and out of the universities, who had been consulted hitherto. But despite the Protestants’ emphasis on the importance of divinity as opposed to the canon law, their foremost champions, like Nicholas Ridley and Cranmer himself, continued until the 1550s to argue like canonists in their theological disputes with the Catholics.

  Preaching became more common, and played a very important part in the religious and political struggles, after Henry VIII repudiated Papal supremacy in 1533. It had always been the law that no one was allowed to preach without a licence, because the authorities remembered how the revolutionary priest, John Ball, preaching on village greens and before parish churches throughout Kent, had incited the peasants to rise in a formidable revolt in 1381; and unauthorized sermons by unorthodox preachers were obviously a source of danger to an authoritarian government. A number of rebellious spirits defied the law and preached illegally. One of the most incorrigible was John Harridaunce, a bricklayer who lived on the eastern outskirts of London at Whitechapel. He used to climb on to a tub in his garden and preach to the passers-by who were walking along the road, and they often stopped to listen to him. He was summoned before the Archbishop of Canterbury on more than one occasion and detained for some weeks in prison for his offence.

 
; After the break with Rome, the controls on preaching were tightened, for several priests who held preaching licences from their bishops were opposed to the King’s policy, and ventured to criticize it by subtle means in their sermons. On the other side, the Protestants, who were eager to press further ahead with the Reformation than Henry VIII wished to go, obtained preaching licences from those bishops who were sympathetic to Protestantism, and preached sermons which the Catholics denounced as heresy. So in 1534 Henry issued an order rescinding all preaching licences and forbidding anyone to preach without a new licence; and precise instructions were issued as to what they were permitted to say in their sermons.

  The most important sermons in England were those at Paul’s Cross in London. The famous cross was a pulpit which stood in the churchyard of St Paul’s on the north-east side of the cathedral. The pulpit was covered, but was open at the sides, and the congregation had to stand in the open air, which they did every Sunday morning in all weathers throughout the year. Usually several thousand people assembled to hear the sermon.

  The King and the Privy Council chose the preacher who was to preach at Paul’s Cross, and the choice of preacher was often seen, rightly, as an indication of the King’s religious policy. When, in the 1530s, a Protestant reformer who had hitherto been out of favour, or had even been persecuted as a heretic, was suddenly chosen to preach at Paul’s Cross it was seen as a sign that Henry VIII had decided to introduce Protestant innovations into the Church of England; when a conservative Catholic preacher was selected, this indicated that the King was reverting to a more Catholic policy.

  It was unusual for a bishop to preach at Paul’s Cross. The preachers were usually prominent churchmen just a little below episcopal rank. But in May 1521 John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, preached against Luther at Paul’s Cross, when Luther’s books were publicly burned. In February 1536, when Henry VIII decided to launch a great propaganda campaign against Papal supremacy, he ordered a bishop to preach at Paul’s Cross on seven successive Sundays. Cranmer preached on the Sunday after Candlemas; next week the Bishop of Rochester preached; on the third Sunday, the Bishop of London; on the fourth Sunday, the Bishop of Durham; on the fifth, the Bishop of Salisbury; on the sixth, the Bishop of Worcester (Latimer); and on the seventh, the Bishop of Bangor.

  The political significance of the sermons at Paul’s Cross aroused much comment in Lent 1540. Robert Barnes, the Prior of the great Barnwell Priory in Cambridge, had become a Lutheran and had been accused of heresy in 1525; he only escaped being burned because he recanted his Lutheran doctrines in a sermon at Paul’s Cross. After the repudiation of Papal supremacy, he came into Henry VIII’s favour, and was employed on important diplomatic missions, as well as serving on many commissions dealing with ecclesiastical affairs. But in 1539 Henry switched his religious policy, and ordered Parliament to pass the Act of the Six Articles, which initiated a persecution of Protestants. Thomas Cromwell, the Lord Privy Seal, was sympathetic to Protestantism and, while officially supporting the King’s anti-Protestant policy, he still hoped to persuade Henry to abandon it; while Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, who was the leader of the conservative and Catholic faction in the King’s Council, was encouraging the King to suppress the Protestants.

  In March 1540, Gardiner was appointed to preach the sermon at Paul’s Cross on the first Sunday in Lent. He criticized some Protestant doctrines as heretical. A fortnight later, Barnes preached at Paul’s Cross and attacked Gardiner’s sermon. This was an unprecedented situation – one officially appointed preacher at Paul’s Cross criticizing the sermon of another officially appointed preacher. It obviously could not continue, and could have occurred only because a power struggle was going on within the Council. The King ordered Barnes to preach again and recant his criticisms of Gardiner, and Barnes did so. All the observers rightly concluded that Gardiner had won an important political victory over Cromwell. A few months later, Cromwell was arrested as a traitor and executed, and Barnes was burned as a heretic.

  But Gardiner was in a difficult position in the reign of Edward VI, when Somerset and Cranmer were making England a Protestant state. He had always enforced absolute obedience to the King’s religious policy; but he was strongly opposed to the Protestant innovations of Somerset and Cranmer. He therefore wrote to Somerset and the Council, arguing that the supreme power over the Church held by an adult King should not be exercised by a regent during the infancy of an infant King, and that Somerset and Cranmer should not introduce any religious changes until Edward reached the age when he could rule himself. Gardiner was arrested and sent to the Fleet prison, and afterwards to the Tower, where he remained for more than five years until Edward VI’s death and Mary’s accession to the throne. He was also deprived of his bishopric of Winchester.

  Bonner, the Bishop of London, had been an active persecutor of Protestants in the last years of Henry VIII’s reign. After Edward VI became King, he adopted the same position as Gardiner, and argued that a Lord Protector should not alter religion during the King’s infancy. Somerset and the Council thereupon ordered Bonner to preach a sermon at Paul’s Cross in which he was to tell the people that the power of an infant King, acting through his Lord Protector, was as absolute in religion and in political matters as the power of an adult King ruling in person. Bonner preached the sermon as required, but managed to evade the issue of the powers of an infant King. Somerset and the Council saw this as an act of defiance of the royal authority. Bonner was deprived of his bishopric of London and imprisoned in the Marshalsea by order of the Council: he remained a prisoner there until Mary became Queen.

  During the nine-day reign of Jane Grey, when Mary was assembling her forces at Framlingham, the Council ordered Nicholas Ridley, the Bishop of London, to preach a sermon at Paul’s Cross, telling the people that Jane was the lawful Queen and that Mary was a bastard. But there was great sympathy for Mary, even in London, which was the main centre of Protestantism. Ridley was heckled and shouted down, and the uproar was so great that he had to abandon his sermon. This demonstration of support for Mary encouraged her partisans, and was one of the reasons why, three days later, the majority of the Lords of the Privy Council went over to her side and proclaimed her as Queen in London, to the great joy of the people.

  Mary immediately took steps to restore the Catholic doctrines to the Church of England as a preliminary step to restoring Papal supremacy. She released Gardiner from the Tower and Bonner from the Marshalsea, and restored them as Bishops of Winchester and London; and she appointed Gardiner to be Lord Chancellor. Ten days after she entered London in triumph, Bonner’s chaplain, Dr Bourn, preached at Paul’s Cross. When he criticized Protestant doctrines, some Protestants in the audience interrupted and heckled him, and one of them threw a dagger at him, which missed him. Two prominent Protestant divines, Rogers and Bradford, who were in the audience, succeeded in quieting the Protestants, and escorted Bourn to a place of safety; but the incident was used as an excuse by the Queen to begin arresting leading Protestants throughout England, including Rogers and Bradford. When they pointed out that they had saved Bourn, they were told that the fact that they had been able to appease the Protestants in the crowd showed that they were their leaders, and had secretly incited the riot against Bourn.

  By the autumn of 1554, Mary was ready to restore Papal supremacy and to begin the burning of Protestants. In preparation for this, Gardiner himself preached at Paul’s Cross on 30 September 1554, in favour of Papal supremacy, though, as head of the government and in charge of foreign policy, he no longer concerned himself normally with religious issues.

  Four years later, after nearly three hundred Protestant martyrs had been burned, Mary was dying of cancer, and everyone was waiting for Elizabeth to become Queen. It was well known that Elizabeth had formerly been a Protestant, though she had gone to Mass and become a Catholic to save her life in Mary’s reign. Both Catholics and Protestants, in England and abroad, were speculating as to whether she would make
England Protestant again when she came to the throne.

  They did not have to wait long for the first sign of her intentions. Mary died at 7 a.m. on Thursday 17 November 1558; on the following Sunday, Dr Bill preached at Paul’s Cross. In Mary’s reign, he had been ejected from his office as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, because he was regarded as a Protestant, though he escaped arrest and was allowed to live quietly in the country. The fact that the new Queen had chosen him to preach at Paul’s Cross within three days of her accession was very significant. In his sermon, Bill made a few cautious Protestant remarks. Next week Christopherson, Mary’s Catholic Bishop of Chichester, preached at Paul’s Cross; Elizabeth had chosen him to preach there, but had told him not to enter into controversy. In his sermon, Christopherson said that Bill had preached heresy on the previous Sunday. Elizabeth ordered that Christopherson should be confined under house arrest in his palace for having disobeyed her orders to be non-controversial. All the Catholics and the Protestants and the foreign ambassadors interpreted these events correctly. Within six months, Parliament had passed the necessary legislation to repudiate Papal supremacy and make England once again a Protestant realm.

  5

  HERETICS AND TRAITORS

  THE GREAT MAJORITY of Englishmen in the sixteenth century accepted the fact that one of the duties of a king was to decide what religion his subjects should adopt and issue orders from time to time telling them exactly what they should believe about religion, and exactly how they should worship. If the King told them to worship the wrong religion, this was something for which he would have to account to God, but the duty of all subjects was to obey the King in religion as in all other matters.