by Simon Schama
In the 1950s, when I began to learn something about the mysteriously bitter wars of the Gentiles, there was no question of the inevitability, nor indeed of the rightness, of the Reformation. It seemed one of the fundamental building blocks of the English nation state, as self-evidently necessary as the development of parliamentary statute law with which it was evidently linked. If the Reformation had been regrettably brutal in execution, this was just a matter of putting an obsolete institution out of its misery. But a visit to a church like St Mary’s in Fairford, Gloucestershire, would have swiftly put paid to those jejune assumptions. Right on the eve of the Reformation, when the Church was supposed to be in a state of lethargic stagnation, St Mary’s was, in fact, at the height of its busy piety. The church had had a long tradition as a specially favoured place, patronized by Warwick the ‘Kingmaker’ and the Yorkists before ending up in the hands of the victor of Bosworth, Henry Tudor. Always happy to see someone else’s money being spent, Henry VII leased the church to one of the richest cloth manufacturers in the country, John Tame, who responded by funding the building of a handsome new tower over the crossing. Bishop Richard Foxe was then brought into the planning of the decoration of St Mary’s, completing a three-way partnership between money, monarchy and the priesthood. The results can be seen in some of the most spectacular stained-glass windows in Britain. The undeniable splendour of the project may even have prised loose some funds from Henry’s own treasury, and in return he and the rest of the righteous royals are featured in transparently obvious disguises: Queen Elizabeth as the Queen of Sheba; Arthur, Prince of Wales, as one of the Magi; his older sister, Margaret, as the presenter of doves, and his younger sister, Mary, as one of the Marys. Henry VII himself appears, crowned and haloed, yet another reincarnation of the perennially venerated Edward the Confessor. There was, in fact, just one member of the family conspicuously missing, and that was Arthur’s younger brother Henry, who would, as king, without even meaning it, begin the process that would doom windows like this to the evangelical hammer. But as those windows were being stained and set within their lead armatures, an impending clash between Crown and Church seemed utterly inconceivable.
From the start, Henry VII’s mind was very much on his heavenly, as well as his earthly reward. Acutely conscious of the tenuousness of his claim to the throne (as a descendant of an illegitimate line of the Lancastrians), Henry needed to invoke the support of the Church to sanctify his title and to demonize the posthumous reputation of Richard III. The new king knew very well that a number of the bishops, in particular John Morton, Bishop of Ely, had suffered personally for refusing to rally to Richard, and so Henry lost no time at all in offering himself as a committed patron of the Church.
His models were the genuinely pious Lancastrians: Henry V, who had built a lavish chantry shrine in Westminster Abbey and had attacked the Benedictines in 1421 for their worldliness, and his son, the saintly fool Henry VI. Henry Tudor made sure that he sustained Henry VI’s great foundations at Eton and Cambridge and was liberality itself when it came to the most spectacular project of all: another great royal shrine in Westminster Abbey, a chapel the likes of which had never been seen before in an English church, a marvel of Renaissance carving and gilt decoration. The shrine was originally meant to house the remains of Henry VI, but when it became apparent that he was not to be moved from Windsor, the king decided instead to make it the mausoleum – with tombs designed by the Italian sculptor Pietro Torrigiano – of the founding trinity of the Tudors: himself, his queen Elizabeth, and his mother, the formidable Lady Margaret Beaufort.
Lady Margaret, the Duchess of Richmond, personified the high end of the Tudors’ ostentatious zeal for the welfare of the Catholic Church. But this did not imply complacency. Lady Margaret put her prestige and power at court behind those who, like John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s, thought of themselves as reformers, not with an aim of weakening the Church but of strengthening it. The aims of reform were exactly those that had been voiced for generations, not least by Henry V: fewer and more austere monasteries and convents, and more schools and colleges – like my own Cambridge college, Christ’s, for example, established by Fisher and Lady Margaret on the foundations of ‘God’s House’ to produce schoolmasters. Colet in particular felt it necessary to lead the charge against a whole litany of evils, including absentee clergy and the excessive deference shown by priests to lay patrons. But the reformers’ pessimism was, in fact, largely groundless. Repeated visitations to the dioceses revealed a picture not of a venal, absconding and irresponsible clergy but of something very nearly its opposite. Of 500 livings in the diocese of Canterbury, for example, only twenty-six parish priests were recorded as at all absent and then mostly on administrative business. No doubt the record of the Church was not spotless, but it was hardly the sink of indolence and ignorance the critics supposed.
The reformers spent a lot of time holding their noses at what they considered to be the cheapening of belief and practice by popular superstition. Their hero, Erasmus of Rotterdam, for instance, visited one of the two most famous miracle-working shrines, Our Lady of Walsingham in Norfolk (the other was Becket’s shrine at Canterbury), expressly to jeer at the credulous, getting a rise out of the pilgrims who worshipped the sacred milk of the Virgin or believed the founding legend of the place, which had the chapel transported by direct flight from the Holy Land to East Anglia. It’s true that Walsingham was a mixture of hucksterism and holiness, the sort of place one might expect to find in Naples rather than Norfolk. But Erasmus’s view was that of the scholarly critic, safely expressed in Latin and not necessarily endorsed by his aristocratic and royal patrons. For the Henrys were regular and earnest pilgrims to Walsingham. Henry VII went at least three times in his reign, and in 1511 Henry VIII walked there as a barefoot penitent, offering the Lady a ruby necklace in thanks for the birth of his son. Prince Henry died within weeks, but the King’s Candle (thanks to the 48 shillings and 8 pence he supplied) continued to burn for many years to come.
Catholic England was, certainly, a peculiar world, with the Walsingham pilgrims co-existing alongside the sceptical Erasmus and his sober friends Fisher, Colet and More; the urge for renewal and reform beside a deep attachment to the venerable, the hallowed and, occasionally, the fraudulent. But all these apparent inconsistencies could be accommodated within the capacious skirts of the Catholic Mother Church.
Holy Trinity Church at Long Melford, Suffolk, for instance, is an extraordinary example of both spectacle and sophistication. Built as a hymn of glory to the county’s wool trade, massively outsized, no expense spared, it’s an example of what happened when money, lots of it, was sunk into piety. When that investment was made, so the gentry and merchants of Long Melford calculated, what they would be getting in return was a secure reservation on the trip to paradise. And in its prime, early in the sixteenth century, Long Melford was just that: the closest one could get to a vision of heaven and still be in Suffolk. Only fragments of that vision survive, but thanks to an account left by Roger Martyn, a lawyer and churchwarden at Long Melford during the reign of Queen Mary, we know what Holy Trinity Church was really like in its glory days, just before the Reformation struck. Writing in the very different time of Queen Elizabeth and dismayed by the monochrome thing called the Church of England, Martyn, with a palpable mixture of pride and regret, set out to inform future generations what they would be missing. ‘The state of Melford Church and Our Lady’s chapel at the east end as I . . . did know it: at the back of the high altar there was a goodly mount carved very artificially with the story of Christ’s passion all being fair gilt and lively and beautifully set forth.’ Martyn wrote of a roof painted like the vault of heaven with gold stars; gilt horsemen watching a golden Christ raised behind the altar, normally concealed but on feast-days opened to dazzle the eyes of the flock; brilliantly painted tabernacles with images of Jesus and the Virgin; a rood loft that was a virtual miniature church high in the air and
painted with images of the twelve apostles; the entire building crammed with statues, carvings and relics, all glowing with candlelight reflecting off silver and gold chalices.
Martyn’s church, though, was more than just a building. He describes processions and festivals, ceremonies and rituals, which made Holy Trinity not only a centre of spiritual illumination but also (although it seems sacrilegious to say so) entertainment and spectacle.
Upon Palm Sunday the Blessed Sacrament was carried in procession about the churchyard under a fair canopy borne by four yeomen . . . at which point a boy did sing standing upon a turret, Ecce Rex Tuus Venit, Behold thy King Cometh . . . and then all did kneel down and then rising up went and met the Sacrament and went singing together into the church and coming near the porch a boy did cast among the other boys, flowers and cakes.
The church at Long Melford was the heart of a wraparound world which spilled over from the church porch into the streets along time-honoured processional routes towards the little halls – the ancestors of village halls – which were the assembly places of religious guilds and confraternities. Their spending power had made them an essential element of the social fabric of Catholic England. Part club, part miniature welfare state, they paid for local schools and almshouses, cared for the sick and paid for the burials of their poorer members. They hired extra priests to say masses for the dead, kept stores of candles, ordered vestments and altar cloths to dignify births, marriages and deaths, and bought silver shoes for the feet of the crucified Christ on the great rood that dominated the church, hanging between the nave and the chancel.
There was no hard-and-fast border between the secular and the spiritual here, no embarrassment about calling on the saints to do you a good turn when you needed one. You might invoke one saint from the plough gallery to ensure a good harvest or summon the help of St Catherine of Alexandria (who had erupted from a dragon’s belly) to guard over a childbirth. If you couldn’t quite remember which saint it was you needed for a particular job and on which day to call him, you could consult the perennial bestseller and vade-mecum of early Tudor England, The Kalender of Shepherdes, part farmer’s almanac, part horoscope, part prayer book. The wider Church, then, was school and theatre, moral tutor and local government and, not least, magic and medicine.
None of this, however, would have made sense without The Management: the clergy, the guardians of the mystery at the heart of traditional Catholic belief – the redeeming sacrifice of the Saviour. Every time the priest held the Host (the communion wafer) high at mass that mystery became overwhelmingly real and the flock would have felt Christ crucified physically present in flesh and blood among them. On weekdays in a big church like Long Melford several masses could be celebrated simultaneously at side altars, long since gone. The timing of those ‘low masses’ was carefully choreographed so that the ‘sacrings’ (the highly charged moment when the Host was raised) did not overlap. As that moment approached, members of the congregation would rush from altar to altar in a state of fervent excitement, calling out to the priest to ‘hold up, hold up’. And no wonder, for to see the Host was to see your own salvation.
So the priest, then, was the indispensable man, and there was no getting to heaven but through his hands. Only the priest’s hands could touch the bread and wine and consecrate them, changing them through the sacrament into the flesh and blood of Christ. Only the priest’s hands could make the sign of the cross giving absolution from sins. These were the hands that gave meaning to ‘good works’, whether that meant buying wax or founding a college. They made the difference between salvation and perdition.
But it was precisely this claim, devolved from St Peter, that priests were necessary for salvation, that the apostles of the new Christianity – the Christianity of the word, not of spectacle – found so offensive, even blasphemous. Following Martin Luther, they attacked the received wisdom that only the priest could consecrate the Host as an unlawful usurpation, and they launched that attack with startling vehemence. How could a priest have the power to undo what God had already decided? The decision on the fate of a poor sinner was the Lord’s alone, and the notion that masses, chantries, pilgrimages and penances could do anything about it was the height of sacrilegious presumption. All the good works and alms-giving in the world would cut no ice with the Almighty if in his infinite mercy he decided to save the most miserable transgressor. All that was asked, as St Paul had insisted, was that the sinner surrender himself to the inscrutable but infinitely compassionate grace of God. Faith in that mercy, faith in the Bible and faith that the sacrifice of Jesus had been sufficient (without the intercession of the saints) were enough. Solus fides. Faith alone.
The prophets of this new faith called themselves evangelicals, from the Greek word for scripture, evangelion. Their aim was to replace the monopoly of wisdom claimed by the Church of Rome with the gospel truth available in their own tongue. Once in possession of this indisputable truth, the need for the clergy as instructors, guardians and busybodies would go away. The flock would, henceforth, be self-shepherded. There would be a priesthood of all the faithful. The demotion of the priesthood from gatekeepers of salvation to spiritual counsellors suddenly made their special legal status moot. If they were, after all, just men, why did they need their own courts, their own taxes, their own government? Chantries now seemed a nice little racket. Perhaps purgatory itself was part of the scam? If all the money left for chantries worked as it was supposed to, said one sceptic, purgatory must be empty, no matter how congested it might once have been at peak hours of admission. In the 1520s it is possible to hear these kinds of things being said in England. William Bankes of Loughborough (who was on trial in 1527 for fathering two children by his own niece) had the effrontery to tell a Church court ordering a penance: ‘I will not do penance for you nor shall ye be my judge for I intend to go to a superior judge.’ Some, like the London merchant tailor Richard Hunne, had gone much further, refusing to pay the ‘mortuary’ due to the Church on the burial of his infant child in 1514. Instead of submitting to the Church court, Hunne had the cheek to counter-sue in the king’s court under the statute of Praemunire, which covered infringements of royal prerogatives by the Church. Hunne was arrested by the Bishop of London’s men, who ransacked his house for heretical literature. Two days after his imprisonment he was found hanged in his cell. Shockingly, the coroner balked at bringing in the convenient verdict of suicide and found instead that Hunne had been strangled. Unrepentant, the Church still branded the dead man a heretic and had his corpse burned. The case provoked a tremendous hue and cry in parliament (especially in the Commons, where a number of lawyers sat), and for the first time, almost since the reign of Henry II, Church courts were beginning to be thought of as infringing the equity of the common law.
Anti-clericalism was nothing new, of course. In time gone by the Church could simply have brushed off occasional scandals like the Hunne affair. But the panicky search for incriminating materials in his house suggests that they knew they were up against something infinitely more dangerous than one man’s obstreperousness, and that something was the printing press.
The printed vernacular Bible had the potential to turn the ‘priesthood of all believers’ from a heretical fantasy into a true religion. English Bibles had been around since the days of Wyclif and the Lollards in the late fourteenth century, but they had been circulated in the form of manuscripts, which were hard to find and relatively expensive. A printed Bible, on the other hand, could be made much more widely available and for but a few shillings. The man who devoted his life to seeing it off the presses was William Tyndale. He is an immediately recognizable historical type – austere, unswerving, a little fanatical, but tireless in the pursuit of his mission, which was easily stated: ‘It was not possible to establish the lay people in any truth except [that] the scriptures were so plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue.’ Like all revolutionaries, Tyndale was an astute tactician. When the Bishop of London refused him funds to
print an English Bible, he secured money from a rich merchant sympathizer who sent him abroad to get the job done. In 1526 3000 copies of Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament were eventually printed in the German city of Worms. When the format was reduced from quarto to octavo and the price to four shillings, they became portable enough to be smuggled into England through the Lutheran-Lollard underground that flourished especially in port cities, which had regular contacts with Protestant northern Europe. Sailors from Hull, who had visited Bremen and had been astonished by a place where priests married, brought back the Bibles hidden in casks of wax or grain.
Nervously aware of the clandestine import trade in Tyndale Bibles, the guardians of orthodoxy resolved to root out the ‘most pestiferous and pernicious poison’, no matter how ugly the means needed to do it. The most zealous enforcers were not from the most reactionary wing of the Catholic Church at all, but were men whom we usually and wrongly think of as liberal, martyrs for the freedom of conscience: Thomas More and John Fisher. Both reserved for themselves and men like them the luxury of debating niceties of scripture, but in the prospect of ‘each one man to be a church alone’ they saw the collapse of all theological authority: a time when every man or woman, no matter how ignorant, would be presumptuous enough to judge doctrine for themselves. The ranks of the horrified included Henry VIII, who in 1521 had allowed a treatise attacking Lutheranism as an abominable heresy to be published under his name. His most trusted servant, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, was likewise eager to muffle what Tyndale had called ‘the noise of the new Bible’ before it became a cacophonous din. And he went about it with systematic determination, infiltrating cells of Bible readers and staging show trials at St Paul’s, where the monsters were forced to recant, carry faggots for the fire and kneel in abject supplication as their writings were fed to the flames. They were solemnly warned that should they be tempted to stray from the straight and narrow (as some inevitably did) it would be their bodies, as well as their books, that would be the next to burn.