478

Spirit of the English Reformation

[1547

were Zwinglians; and even among the Lutherans many soon inclined towards the doctrine of the Swiss Reformers. Of the humbler immigrants who came to teach or to trade, not a few were Anabaptists, Socinians, and heretics of every hue; and England became, in the words of one horrified politician, the harbour for all infidelity.

The clamour raised by the advent of this foreign legion has somewhat obscured the comparative insignificance of its influence on the development of the English Church. The continental Reformers came too late to affect the moderate changes introduced during Somerset's protectorate, and even the Second Prayer-book of Edward VI owed less to their persuasions than has often been supposed. England never became Lutheran, Zwinglian, or Calvinistic; and she would have resented dictation from Wittenberg, Zurich, or Geneva as keenly as she did from Rome, had the authority of Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin ever attained the proportions of that of the Roman Pontiff. Each indeed had his adherents in England, but their influence was never more than sectional, and failed to turn the course of the English Reformation into any foreign channel. In so far as the English Reformers sought spiritual inspiration from other than primitive sources, there can be no doubt that, difficult as it would be to adduce documentary evidence for the statement, they, consciously or unconsciously, derived this inspiration from Wiclif. Like them, he appealed to the State to remedy abuses in the Church, attacked ecclesiastical endowments, and gradually receded from the Catholic doctrine of the Mass. The Reformation in England was divergent in origin, method, and aim from all the phases of the movement abroad; it left the English Church without a counterpart in Europe, so insular in character that no subsequent attempt at union with any foreign Church has ever come within measurable distance of success. It was in its main aspect practical and not doctrinal; it concerned itself less with dogma than with conduct, and its favourite author was Erasmus, not because he preached any distinctive theology, but because he lashed the evil practices of the Church. Englishmen are little subject to the bondage of logic or abstract ideas, and they began their Reformation, not with the enunciation of any new truth, but with an attack upon the clerical exaction of excessive probate dues. No dogma played in England the part that Predestination or Justification by Faith played in Europe. There arose a master of prophetic invective in Latimer and a master of liturgies in Cranmer, but no one meet to be compared with the great religious thinkers of the world. Hence the influence of English Reformers on foreign Churches was even less than that of foreign divines in England. Anglicans never sought to proselytise other Christian Churches, nor England to wage other than defensive wars of religion; in Ireland and Scotland, which appear to afford exceptions, the religious motive was always subordinate to a political end.

The Reformation in England was mainly a domestic affair, a national

1547]

Its character under Edward VI

479

protest against national grievances rather than part of a cosmopolitan movement towards doctrinal change. It originated in political exigencies, local and not universal in import; and was the work of Kings and statesmen, whose minds were absorbed in national problems, rather than of divines whose faces were set towards the purification of the universal Church. It was an ecclesiastical counterpart of the growth of nationalities at the expense of the medieval ideal of the unity of the civilised world. Its effect was to make the Church in England the Church of England, a national Church, recognising as its head the English King, using in its services the English tongue, limited in its jurisdiction to the English Courts, and fenced about with a uniformity imposed by the English legislature. This nationalisation of the Church had one other effect: it brought to a sudden end the medieval struggle between Church and State. The Church had only been enabled to wage that conflict on equal terms by the support it received as an integral part of the visible Church on earth; and when that support was withdrawn it sank at once into a position of dependence upon the State. From the time of the submission of the clergy to Henry VIII there has been no instance of the English Church successfully challenging the supreme authority of the State.

It was mainly on these lines, laid down by Henry VIII, that the Reformation continued under Edward VI. The papal jurisdiction was no more; the use of English had been partially introduced into the services of the Church; the Scriptures had been translated; steps had been taken in the direction of uniformity, doctrinal and liturgical; and something had been done to remove medieval accretions, such as the worship of images, and to restore religion to what Reformers considered its primitive purity. That Henry intended his so-called "settlement to be final is an assumption at variance with some of the evidence; for he had entrusted his son's education exclusively to men of the New Learning, he had given the same party an overwhelming preponderance in the Council of Regency, and according to Cranmer he was bent in the last few months of his life upon a scheme for pulling down roods, suppressing the ringing of bells and turning the Mass into a Communion. Cranmer himself had for some years been engaged upon a reform of the Church services which developed into the First Book of Common Prayer, and the real break in religious policy came, not at the accession of Edward VI, but after the fall of Somerset and the expulsion of the Catholics from the Council. The statute procured by Henry VIII from Parliament, which enabled his son, on coming of age, to annul all Acts passed during his minority, was probably due to an overweening sense of the importance of the kingly office; but, although it was repealed in Edward's first year, it inevitably strengthened the natural doubts of the competence of the Council to exercise an ecclesiastical supremacy vested in the King. No government, however, could afford to countenance

480

The Protector's conservatism

[1547

such a suicidal theory; and the Council had constitutional right on its side when it insisted that the authority of the King, whether in ecclesiastical or civil matters, was the same whatever his age might be, and refused to consider the minority as a bar to further prosecution of the Reformation.

No doubt, they were led in the same direction, some by conviction and some by the desire, as Sir William Petre expressed it, "to fish again in the tempestuous seas of this world for gain and wicked mammon." But there was also popular pressure behind them. Zeal and energy, if not numbers, were on the side of religious change, and the Council found it necessary to restrain rather than stimulate the ardour of the Reformers. One of its first acts was to bind over the wardens and curate of St Martin's, Ironmonger Lane, to restore images which they had "contrary to the King's doctrine and order " removed from their church. Six months later the Council was only prevented from directing a general replacement of images illegally destroyed by a fear of the controversy such a step would arouse; and it had no hesitation in punishing the destroyers. In November, 1547, it sought by Proclamation to stay the rough treatment which priests suffered at the hands of London servingmen and apprentices, and sent round commissioners to take an inventory of church goods in order to prevent the extensive embezzlement practised by local magnates. Early in the following year Proclamations were issued denouncing unauthorised innovations, silencing preachers who urged them, and prohibiting flesh-eating in Lent. In April, 1548, the ecclesiastical authorities were straitly charged to take legal proceedings against those who, encouraged by the lax views prevalent on marriage, were guilty of such "insolent and unlawful acts "as putting away one wife and marrying another. The Marquis of Northampton was himself summoned before the Council and summarily ordered to separate from the lady he called his second wife. Similarly the first Statute of the reign was directed not against the Catholics, but against reckless Reformers; it sought to restrain all who impugned or spoke unreverently of the Sacrament of the altar; the right of the clergy to tithe was reaffirmed, and the Canon Law as to precontracts and sanctuary, abolished by Henry VIII, was restored. It was no wonder that the clergy thought the moment opportune for the recovery of their position as an Estate of the realm, and petitioned that ecclesiastical laws should be submitted to their approval, or that they should be readmitted to their lost representation in the House of Commons.

These measures illustrate alike the practical conservatism of Somerset's government and the impracticability of the theoretical toleration to which he inclined. His dislike of coercion occasionally got the better of his regard for his own proclamations, as when he released Thomas Hancock from his sureties taken for unlicensed preaching. But he soon realised that the government could not abdicate its ecclesiastical functions, least

1547]

The attitude of Cranmer and the Church

481

of all in the early days of the Royal Supremacy, when the Bishops and Cranmer especially looked to the State for guidance. Personally he leaned to the New Learning, and, like most Englishmen, he was Erastian in his view of the relations between Church and State and somewhat prejudiced against sacerdotalism. Yet, in spite of the fact that after his death he was regarded as a martyr by the French Reformed Church, he cannot any more than the English Reformation be labelled Lutheran, Zwinglian, or Calvinist; and, when he found it incumbent upon him to take some line in ecclesiastical politics, he chose one of comparative moderation and probably the line of least resistance. The Royal Supremacy was perhaps somewhat nakedly asserted when, at the commencement of the reign, Bishops renewed their commissions to exercise spiritual jurisdiction, and when in the first session of Parliament the form of episcopal election was exchanged for direct nomination by royal letters patent. But the former practice had been enforced, and the latter suggested, in the reign of Henry VIII, and Somerset secured a great deal more episcopal co-operation than did either Northumberland or Elizabeth. Convocation demanded, unanimously in one case and by a large majority in the other, the administration of the Sacrament in both kinds and liberty for the clergy to marry; and a majority of the Bishops in the House of Lords voted for all the ecclesiastical bills passed during his protectorate. Only Gardiner and Bonner offered any resistance to the Visitation of 1547; and it must be concluded, either that Somerset's religious changes accorded with the preponderant clerical opinion, or that clerical subservience surpassed the compliance of laymen.

The responsibility for these changes cannot be apportioned with any exactness. Probably Gardiner was not far from the mark, when he implied that Cranmer and not the Protector was the innovating spirit; and the comparative caution with which the Reformers at first proceeded was as much due to Somerset's restraining influence as the violence of their later course was to the simulated zeal of Warwick. Cranmer's influence with the Council was greater than it had been with Henry VIII; to him it was left to work out the details of the movement, and the first step taken in the new reign was the Archbishop's issue of the Book of Homilies for which he had failed to obtain the sanction of King and Convocation five years before. Their main features were a comparative neglect of the Sacraments and the exclusion of charity as a means of salvation. Gardiner attacked the Book on these grounds; and, possibly out of deference to his protest, the saving power of charity was affirmed in the Council's injunctions to the royal visitors a few months later.

The Homilies were followed by Nicholas Udall's edition of the Paraphrase of Erasmus that had been prepared under Henry VIII, and was now intended, partly no doubt as a solvent of old ideas, but partly as a corrective of the extreme Protestant versions of Tyndall and Coverdale, which, now that Henry's prohibition was relaxed, recovered

C. M. H. II.

31

482

First religious reforms

[1547-9 their vogue. The substitution of English for Latin in the services of the Church was gradually carried out in the Chapel Royal as an example to the rest of the kingdom. Compline was sung in English on Easter Monday, 1547; the sermon was preached, and the Te Deum sung, in English on September 18 to celebrate Pinkie; and at the opening of Parliament on November 4, the Gloria in Excelsis, the Creed, and the Agnus were all sung in English. Simultaneously, Sternhold, a gentleman of the Court, was composing his metrical version of the Psalms in English, which was designed to supplant the "lewd" ballads of the people and in fact eventually made " psalm-singing" a characteristic of advanced ecclesiastical Reformers.

The general Visitation in the summer and autumn of 1547 was mainly concerned with reforming practical abuses, with attempts to compel the wider use of English in services, the removal of images that were abused, and a full recognition of the Supremacy of the boy-King. In November and December Convocation recommended the administration of the Sacrament in both kinds, and liberty for priests to marry; but the latter change did not receive parliamentary sanction until the following year. The bill against "unreverent" speaking of the Sacrament was, by skilful parliamentary strategy which seems to have been due to Somerset, combined with one for its administration in both kinds, the motive being obviously to induce Catholics to vote for it for the sake of the first part, and Reformers for the sake of the second. The Chantries Bill was in the main a renewal of the Act of 1545; but its object was now declared to be the endowment of education, and not the defence of the realm; and the reason alleged for suppression was the encouragement that chantries gave to superstition and not their appropriation by private persons. Such opposition as this bill encountered was due less to theological objections than to the reluctance of corporations to surrender any part of their revenues; and Gardiner subsequently expressed his concurrence in the measure. Its effect on gilds was to convert such of their revenues as had previously been devoted to obits and masses into a rent paid to the Crown; but a bill, which was introduced a year later and passed the House of Commons, to carry out the intentions of founding schools alleged in the Chantries Act, disappeared after its first reading in the House of Lords on February 18, 1549.

Immediately after the prorogation in January, 1548, questions were addressed to the Bishops as to the best form of Communion service; the answers varied, some being in favour of the exclusive use of English, some of the exclusive use of Latin. The form actually adopted approaches most nearly to Tunstall's recommendation, a compromise whereby Latin was retained for the essential part of the Mass, while certain prayers in English were adopted. This new Order for Communion was issued in March, 1548, a Proclamation ordering its use after Easter was prefixed, and in a rubric all "varying of any rite or ceremony in the Mass

was