The Reformation in England and Scotland

Henry VIII and the separation from Rome

In the meantime the Reformation had taken hold in England. The beginning there was political rather than religious, a quarrel between the king and the pope of the sort that had occurred in the Middle Ages without resulting in a permanent schism and might not have in this instance save for the overall European situation. The dispute had its root in the assumption that the king was a national stallion expected to provide an heir to the throne. England did not have the Salic law, which in France forbade female succession, but England had just emerged from a prolonged civil war, the Wars of the Roses, and the new dynasty needed a male heir to maintain its hold on the throne and to prevent the resumption of civil war. Catherine of Aragon, the queen of Henry VIII, had borne him numerous children of whom only one survived, the princess Mary, and more were not to be expected. The ordinary procedure in such a case was to discover some flaw in the marriage that would allow an annulment or a divorce. In this instance the flaw was not difficult to find, because Catherine had been married to Henry’s brother Arthur, and canon law, following the prohibition in the book of Leviticus (20:21), forbade the marriage of a man with his deceased brother’s widow. At the time of the marriage the pope, Julius II, had given a dispensation to cover this infraction of the rule. The question now was whether the pope had the authority to dispense from the divine law. Catherine said there had been no need for a dispensation because her marriage to Arthur had not been consummated and there had been no impediment to her marriage to Henry. The knot would have been cut by some casuistry had Catherine not been the aunt of Emperor Charles V, who was not prepared to see her cast aside in favour of another wife. Clement VII, wishing neither to provoke the emperor nor to alienate the king, dallied so long that Henry took the matter into his own hands, repudiated papal authority, and in 1534 set up the independent Church of England, with the king as the supreme head. The spiritual head was the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who married Henry to Anne Boleyn. She bore the princess Elizabeth, and still another wife, Jane Seymour, bore the future Edward VI.

Henry’s basic concern was political, but the alterations in the structure of the church gave scope for a reformation that was religious in character. Part of the impulse came from the survivals of Lollardy, part from the Lutheran movement on the Continent, and even more from the Christian humanism represented by Erasmus. Although Henry retained much Catholic doctrine, especially transubstantiation, and ecclesiastical organization, he did introduce important changes, including the suppression of the monasteries, the introduction of the Bible in the vernacular in the parish churches, and permission to the clergy to marry, though this last reform was later revoked. The resistance to Henry’s program was not formidable, and the executions resulting were not numerous. Henry was impartial in burning some Lutherans who would not submit to his later reactionary legislation and toward some Catholics who would not accept the royal supremacy over the church, notably John Fisher and Thomas More.

On his ascent to the throne in 1547, young Edward VI was hailed as England’s Josiah, the young 7th-century-bce king of Judah who enforced the Deuteronomic reform. Edward, it was held, would rid the land of idolatry so that England might be blessed. Protestantism advanced rapidly during his reign through the systematic reformation of doctrine, worship, and discipline—the three external marks of the true church. A reformed confession of faith and a prayer book were adopted, but the reformation of the ecclesiastical laws that would have defined the basis of discipline was blocked by the nobility in Parliament.

The death of Edward and England’s return to Roman Catholicism in 1553 under Queen Mary was interpreted by Protestants as God’s judgment that England had not taken the Reformation seriously enough. Many, including Cranmer, died as martyrs to the Protestant cause, and others fled to the European continent. Those in exile experimented with more radical forms of worship and discipline, and published material justifying rebellion against an idolatrous ruler. Exiles also produced two large volumes of incalculable consequence for English religious thought, John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, popularly known as The Book of Martyrs, and the Geneva Bible. The most popular books in England for many years after their publication, they provided a view of the country as an elect nation chosen by God to bring the power of the Antichrist (understood to be the pope) to an end.

Elizabeth I, assumed the throne in 1558 and was hailed as the glorious Deborah (a 12th-century-bce Israelite leader), the “restorer of Israel.” She did not, however, restore it far enough for some English Protestants, particularly the Puritans. Indeed, she distrusted the challenge to authority and feared the disorder that either extreme evangelical zeal or extreme Catholic zeal could cause. Two statutes promulgated in her first year—the Act of Supremacy, stating that the queen was “supreme governor” of the Church of England, and the Act of Uniformity, ensuring that English worship should follow The Book of Common Prayer—defined the nature of the English religious establishment. In 1571 the Convocation of Canterbury, one of the church’s two primary legislative bodies (along with the Convocation of York), defined standard doctrine in the Thirty-nine Articles, but attempts to reform the prayer book further and to produce a reformed discipline failed. Defeated in the convocation, the reformers came to rely more on Parliament, where they could always depend on strong support.