Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age

by Foss, Michael

  The Acts of Supremacy gave Henry what he needed. Obedience to the sovereign now became a religious duty, and the King felt safer from sedition and rebellion. And when that stroke of policy was done, Henry saw no necessity to go any further towards Protestantism. When he dissolved the monasteries in 1536, he was merely after their property; the dissolution implied no doctrinal change, and there were many good Catholics who wished to see the slack monastic orders rigorously shaken. Henry’s reformation made so few alterations to the ordinary religious practice of the people that it might have passed almost unremarked but for the exceptional wilfulness and bestiality of the King’s own conduct. The squalid affair with Anne Boleyn, which Henry used as the excuse for the break with Rome, was very much resented by the people. ‘The king’s grace’, the mouths of rumour muttered in 1532, ‘is ruled by one common stewed whore, Anne Boleyn, who makes all the spiritualty to be beggared and the temporalty too.’ They called for the King to take back Queen Catherine, and when that silent, dignified lady, after the crowning of Anne, was reduced to princess-dowager and banished to Buckden, the crowd, in defiance of the royal proclamation, lined the way and saluted her respectfully as still the Queen. When Catherine died at Kimbolton, on 7th January 1536, Henry ordered the court to wear yellow and danced all night. ‘God be praised,’ he said, ‘We are now free from all fear of war.’

  The King’s fear of opposition, his rage at being denied, his callous and intemperate character brought in a new age of pain and death. Cranmer and the bishops preached the King’s supremacy from the pulpit, but the lay minister, Thomas Cromwell, was the King’s vicar-general in spiritual matters, and the clergy took their orders from him. With his usual ruthless efficiency he sent spies and informers to sniff out contrary opinions. In April 1535 orders were given for the arrest of those who still recognized the jurisdiction of the Pope. Among the first to be taken in were the monks of Charterhouse in London, and of Sion in Middlesex. At the end of April they were condemned by a special commission under the Duke of Norfolk, and on 4th May six men were led out to execution. An astounded crowd, unused to such barbarity, saw their limbs chopped off, their chests ripped open and the spurting hearts torn out and ground into their faces. Faced with the possibility of such a death, most of the clergy very willingly and meekly followed the royal will. And the execution a month later of John Fisher, the saintly old bishop of Rochester, and of Sir Thomas More, the noblest Englishman of his age, convinced the country that the tyrant would have his way. For the rest of the century, religious argument in England, as on the continent, was carried on against the sombre music of the drum roll on the scaffold.

  The reformation of Henry VIII was more an act of polity than an act of religion; it was a triumph of nationalism. The scriptural text from Corinthians, that ‘the spiritual man judgeth all things; and he himself is judged by no man’, was completely turned about. ‘Lo, I have set thee this day over the nations, and over the kingdoms’, Pope Pius V proudly quoted from Jeremiah when he attempted to depose Elizabeth in 1570. In England his words were as empty as the air, for the Tudors had made the Crown in Parliament the only governor of English life. The reform of church law which Cranmer drew up in the reign of Edward VI declared that it was for the sovereign to decide, in the last resort, what was heresy. The English position was summed up in 1583 by Sir Thomas Smith: ‘Parliament legitimateth bastards, establisheth forms of religion, altereth weights and measures.’ The State was supreme.

  Religious questions are not solved by political acts. From the death of Henry VIII to the time of the religious settlement made by Elizabeth, the belief of Englishmen was confused and changeable. What Henry himself believed may only be guessed. At the bottom of his profound egotism perhaps there lay only a simple belief in the supremacy of his own will. He certainly had not made England Protestant, but his acts of national self interest and his defiance of the Pope agreed with the thinking of the European Reformation, and so were an invitation to Protestantism. Continental Reformers such as Bucer, Peter Martyr and Ochino were attracted to England; their disputations and their command of the Protestant arguments no doubt helped the English Church to become more Protestant under Edward VI. But in the muddled years after Henry the English episcopacy could include men like Bonner and Gardiner, supporters of the Acts of Supremacy but Catholics for all that, and men like Ridley and Hooper, Calvinists in all but name. Many good men, worried in conscience and harried by prying commissions and coercive Acts of Parliament, hardly knew what they were. And for those whose belief was capriciously individual there was always the possibility of martyrdom. Many good men changed their opinions as the theology of the Church swung to Protestantism under Edward VI and severely back to Catholicism under Mary. Mary, who like her grandfather Henry VII had a strong and simple piety, was forced by her father to sign a paper disavowing the Pope, declaring her mother’s marriage incestuous and her own birth illegitimate. Elizabeth, who like her father Henry VIII looked on religion as a mere adjunct of state policy, pretended a devotion to Catholicism as long as her sister reigned.

  In 1553, with the coronation of Mary, a true religious fervour intruded itself into the English confusion of religion with politics. The Queen was a Catholic and wished her realm to become Catholic once more. At first she was not intolerant; she asked her subjects to live together ‘in quiet sort and Christian charity’ avoiding the ‘new found devilish terms of papist and heretic’. But her Catholic enthusiasm had appalling consequences. In the name of religion she seemed about to undo the independent national state which her father had so carefully created. Her chief adviser was the Emperor Charles V, and under his influence and from her own desire she made the calamitous decision to marry the detested foreigner, Philip II of Spain, despite the urgent appeal of Parliament that she should marry an Englishman. She had, after all, been treated extremely badly by the English, and supported her injured Spanish mother against her brutal English father, boasting, so the Venetian ambassador said, of her Spanish descent. At the thought of a Spanish king and a hated pope taking away the English liberties, Parliament and the country became thoroughly alarmed. Though she was warned by Wyatt’s rebellion in 1554, Mary pressed forward the restoration of Catholicism. With an acquiescent Parliament, packed with her supporters, behind her, and encouraged by the grim orthodoxy of Philip, who firmly believed in the execution of heretics, Mary began the religious policy which sent nearly three hundred Protestants to their deaths in the four years of her reign, a catalogue of executions which Foxe’s Book of Martyrs has never allowed English people to forget. She was the only Tudor who persecuted for faith and not for treason. It is a mark of her misunderstanding of her country and her people, that she should consider acts against the State hardly important and acts against belief as worthy of death, while her subjects thought differences of religion of no account, but acts against the State to be the ultimate sin. Mary caused one final blow to national pride. At the end of her reign England lost Calais, the last of her continental possessions, and the Queen was powerless to recapture it. When Mary died in November 1558 ‘all the churches in London did ring, and at night men did make bonfires and set tables in the street, and did eat and drink, and made merry for the new queen’.

  In 1554, the year made ominous for Protestants by the marriage of Mary with Philip, Richard Hooker was born at Heavitree, Exeter. His parents were poor, sober citizens whose Reformed faith had been put to trial and strengthened by the old beliefs, as much conservative as Catholic, of the West. In the western rising of 1549 against Edward’s Act of Uniformity and his new prayer book, the Catholic rebels of north Devon had besieged Exeter for five weeks. And the start of Mary’s reign promised more afflictions for western Protestants. So the household of the Hookers was full of earnest devotion. The Bible was ever at hand, either in Tyndale’s translation or in the impressive large folio of the Great Bible, first issued in 1539 to satisfy the need for the Scriptures in English and soon the favourite reading of the people. Its sonorous lan
guage was not only incorporated into the Book of Common Prayer for use in every church, but also found its way into the ordinary speech and greatly enriched the prose of the age. Young Richard flourished in this devout air; for though he was a country lad in looks, his gentle biographer Izaak Walton described him as ‘sanguine, with a mixture of choler’; he was a natural student and wise beyond his years: ‘his motion was slow even in his youth, and so was his speech, never expressing an earnestness in either of them, but an humble gravity suitable to the aged.’

  To his masters he was ‘a little wonder’ and lapped up knowledge like a hungry kitten at a bowl of milk. His parents had no means to continue his education and had intended him to become an apprentice. But when it was seen how well the child did, a prosperous uncle, John Hooker, came to his aid, paid for the continuation of his schooling and then, in the first years of Elizabeth’s reign, brought the boy to the attention of John Jewel, the bishop of Salisbury. Jewel was a strong Protestant who had fled from England during Mary’s reign. He was impressed by the gravity and the learning of the lad and perhaps saw him as a hopeful recruit to the Anglican ministry. In 1567, through the influence of the bishop, Hooker entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

  Jewel died in 1571, and with the loss of his patron Hooker feared for the future. But his quality had been noted; the head of his college assured him that his place was secure, and Sandys, the bishop of London, having heard of his excellence from Jewel, appointed young Hooker as tutor to his son Edwin. The peaceful rotation of the academic year at Oxford absorbed Hooker. Younger students gathered round him, in particular Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer, the influential friends of his life. At nineteen be became a scholar of Corpus Christi, and at twenty-three a fellow. Oxford and Cambridge had always been the great breeding ground for churchmen, and Hooker, doubtless as his patrons intended, moved easily from the study of the classics and languages to the study of religion, applying a rational, lucid and temperate mind to the problems of faith: ‘the Scripture’, he said, ‘was not writ to beget disputations and pride, and opposition to government; but charity and humility, moderation, obedience to authority, and peace to mankind.’ In 1580 he took orders and became a modest, obedient member of the Anglican priesthood.

  Hooker was not a contentious or a proud man. At the age of twenty-six he had done well enough; the obscure rewards of university life, surrounded by books and pupils, would have suited his small ambition. The first sign that he was to be drawn out of the university quietness came in 1581 when he was appointed to preach at St Paul’s Gross in London. To preach this sermon, in the open air before a large, critical audience, was a considerable honour for a young man. The Elizabethan public came to the sermon to be entertained as well as instructed and expected both keen argument and a lively performance. Such preachers as ‘silver-tongued Smith’ at St Clement Danes and Clappam of Foster Lane with his ‘sour look, but a good spirit, bold, and sometimes bluntly witty’, or Egerton at Blackfriars with his great congregation ‘specially of women’, were popular London figures. Resounding sermons had made reputations. Jewel, Hooker’s first patron, had a famous success at St Paul’s Cross in 1560. The appointment of Hooker indicated that the eye of the church hierarchy was upon him. When he came down from Oxford for the sermon he lodged at the house of John Churchman in Watling Street and there met the family which was to become so important in his life, providing him with his future wife and the home in which to begin his great labour.

  With the mark of favour upon him Hooker returned to Oxford while his friends, chief among whom were the Sandys, father and son, looked for his preferment. Church affairs move at a leisurely pace; in December 1584 Hooker was given the benefice of Drayton Beauchamp, near Aylesbury, but this was only a temporary appointment before he took up the Mastership of the Temple in February 1585. It is likely that Hooker was an absentee vicar of Drayton Beauchamp. The practice was a common abuse of the time. ‘What do you patrons?’ Latimer had complained as early as 1550. ‘Sell your benefices, or give them to your servants for their service, for keeping of hounds or hawks, for making of your gardens.’ Hooker’s friend and pupil Edwin Sandys was absentee prebend of Wetwang in Yorkshire for twenty years while he was a lawyer at the Middle Temple and then M.P. for Plympton in Devon. Hooker himself defended the practice on the grounds that servants of the Church who were scholars or writers could not continue their work without an income, which they would not have without a benefice. And this was exactly the kind of church service which the authorities had marked out for Richard Hooker. He was to become a controversialist for the Anglican Church.

  When Elizabeth came to the throne her first concern was to restore the absolute authority of the Tudor State which Mary’s Catholicism had lessened to some degree. She herself was naturally a Protestant; to be otherwise would have been an admission of illegitimacy. But though she made a certain show of religion, suiting her action to the company, most observers thought her either sceptical or indifferent. At the end of her reign one of her countrymen boldly declared that she was ‘an atheist and a maintainer of atheism’. The most unfanatical and cautious of women, she was not intolerant, and the religious changes she made were done steadily and slowly. Her instinct was to take the middle course. ‘There are three notable differences of religion in the land, the two extremes whereof are the Papist, and the Puritan, and the religious Protestant obtaining the mean.’

  But theological questions were of little importance to Elizabeth. Her chief aim was to follow the path found out by her father and make the English Church solely responsible for its own faith, ritual and organization. A national Church was but a part of the commonwealth, and the only legislator for the commonwealth was the Crown acting through Parliament. Parliament became the only true interpreter of the Scriptures and the religious duty of the subject was to obey or be convicted of treason. The faith which Queen and Parliament ordained for the people in 1559 was rather more Protestant than the settlement of Henry VIII. The Mass was called a ‘blasphemous fable and dangerous deceit’; transubstantiation, which Henry’s Parliament of 1539 had defended even unto the death penalty, was ‘repugnant to the plain words of Scripture’; and purgatory and the cult of the saints were now ‘fond things, vainly invented’. Elizabeth’s Act of Supremacy asserted the jurisdiction of the Crown in spiritual matters and put the Bishop of Rome firmly in his place as ‘bishop of that one see and diocese and never yet well able to govern the same’. The same Act reminded the clergy that they ought, ‘specially and before others’, to be obedient to their sovereign. The English hierarchy learnt the lesson well. ‘For this is our doctrine’, declared Bishop Jewel, ‘that every soul of what calling soever he be—be he monk, be he preacher, be he prophet, be he apostle—ought to be subject to Kings and magistrates.’ And Aylmer, Bishop of London, wrote to Sir Christopher Hatton that ‘I trust not of God but of my sovereign which is God’s lieutenant and so another God unto me’. With this submission, Elizabeth was content.

  Queen and Parliament were satisfied, but fervent men were not. Elizabeth’s settlement was so obviously a part of social policy, to secure the power of the monarchy and to prevent unrest, that no man possessed by true religious enthusiasm could be satisfied with it. At Mary’s death the Catholic opposition diminished. Many Catholics went abroad and those who remained at home were caught between their loyalty to the Queen, which as patriotic Englishmen they felt most strongly, and their loyalty to the Pope who in 1570 excommunicated Elizabeth and released her subjects from their allegiance. The hapless Edmund Campion, a Jesuit missioner executed for treason in 1581, cried from the scaffold that ‘your queen is my queen’. It gradually appeared to Englishmen that Catholicism was not so much a religion as a treasonable activity intent on deposing the Queen and setting up in her stead a sinister continental tyranny.

  The greatest challege to Elizabeth’s settlement came not from the discomforted Catholics, but from those on the left wing of the Reformation—Anabaptists, Calvinists and the lik
e—generally known in England under the collective title of ‘Puritans’, a group angrily divided among themselves but united in thinking that Elizabeth’s faith was too secular and not radically different from Catholicism. John Knox had spurned the settlement of 1559, and had denounced Cecil’s ‘carnal wisdom and worldly policy’. The thoroughgoing doctrine of Knox was equally repugnant to Elizabeth’s accommodating bishops who supported the authority of the Crown. ‘God save us’, wrote Archbishop Parker, ‘from such a visitation as Knox has attempted in Scotland; the people to be the orderers of things!’ The Puritans retorted by rejecting the episcopacy itself as unlicensed by Scripture and as actually anti-Christian. From there they went on to attack most of the outward signs of worship, the ritual of the service, the dress of the clergy, the fast-days and holidays, the use of choirs and organs—all these were marks of idolatry. They condemned as ‘things stained with superstition’, Hooker wrote, ‘our prayers, our sacraments, our times and places of public meeting together for the worship and service of God, our marriages, our burials, our functions, elections and ordinations ecclesiastical, almost whatever we do in the exercise of our religion according to laws for that purpose established’. Most worrying of all to Elizabeth and the supporters of her settlement, the Puritans, like the Catholics, denied the royal supremacy. Though they claimed to be loyal subjects, they could not understand how laws devised in Parliament should make them go against their clear reading of the Bible.

  The English Church was a child of the Reformation and so there were many among the English clergy who held Puritan or non-conformist views. Archbishop Grindal was easy on nonconforming ministers so that his successor, Whitgift, complained to Lord Burghley that the bishops, instead of turning them out, ‘offend rather, the most of them, on the contrary part’. Puritans were also well entrenched in the universities, particularly at Cambridge where Cartwright and Travers stirred up the people to establish a blessed church republic such as Calvin had built in Geneva and Knox in Scotland. Two Puritan Admonitions in 1571 called the attention of Parliament to the faults of the church system which Parliament itself had devised in 1559. Soon Puritan opinions had infiltrated even into Parliament and the attack on the bishops was delivered from the floor of the House. The royal supremacy, the whole edifice of the English Church, was shaken. ‘To which end’, wrote pious Izaak Walton in his life of Hooker, ‘there were many that wandered up and down and were active in sowing discontents and seditions, by venomous and secret murmurings, and a dispersion of scurrilous pamphlets against the Church and State; but especially against the Bishops; by which means, together with venomous and indiscreet sermons, the common people become so fanatic, as to believe the Bishops to be Anti-Christ, and the only obstructers of God’s discipline!’