Putting the English Reformation on the map
The Rev’d Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch Kt, DD, FBA
Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church in the University of Oxford and Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford.
His book Reformation: Europe’s House Divided (1490-1700) won the 2004 National Book Critics’ Circle Award and 2004 British Academy Book Prize. In 1996 he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Thomas Cranmer: A Life. A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, was published in September 2009 with a related 6-part television series called A History of Christianity on BBC 4 in 2009 and then on BBC 2 and BBC 4 in 2010. The book won MacGill University’s Cundill Prize. Professor MacCulloch was knighted in the 2012 New Year’s Honours for services to scholarship. While Debretts gives his formal style as ‘Prof Sir’, MacCulloch has expressed the preference that he not be addressed in that manner, and the view that as an ordained deacon, this would also be formally incorrect. He sits on the European Advisory Board of Princeton University Press.
[Synopsis: The paper examines how the international Protestant identity of the English Church came to be in tension with the later assertion of sacramentalist or Catholic values within it. It chronicles how the Reformation in England came to align not with Lutheranism but with Reformed Protestantism, and compares Henry VIII’s reforms with contemporary Reformations in mainland Europe seeking a ‘middle way’. Edward VI’s Church is contrasted with the temperature perceptible in Elizabeth I’s religious Settlement – which nevertheless asserted Protestant values with no concessions to Catholicism. The anomalous role of the cathedrals in England is identified as a major source of the English Church’s later deviation from mainstream European Reformed Protestantism, which itself produced attempts to recreate a Reformed Church in the English north American colonies.]
Putting the English Reformation on the map
I had two agendas in mind in constructing this title. The first is the ongoing task of asserting that England did indeed have a Reformation in the sixteenth century. This might seem superfluous: after all, we have all heard of Henry VIII and his marital troubles, and we have all heard of bloody Mary and good Queen Bess defeating the Spanish Armada with a fine speech and a dose of English bad weather laid on by the Almighty. But the Church of England has over the last two centuries become increasingly adept at covering its tracks and concealing the fact that it springs from a Reformation which was Protestant in tooth and claw. i This labour of obfuscation began with the aim of showing that Anglicans were as good if not better Catholics than the followers of the Pope. It then continued with the perhaps more worthy aim of finding a road back to unity with Rome, in the series of ecumenical discussions which began in 1970, known by the acronym ARCIC (Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission). The participants in these discussions have not been anxious to emphasise difference, and very often they have fallen back on the Anglo-Catholic rewriting of English church history pioneered by John Keble and John Henry Newman in the 1830s, as the Oxford Movement took shape. A good deal of my career has been spent trying to undo the Anglo-Catholic view of history, not because I think that Anglo-Catholics are bad people, but simply because within their ranks over a century and a half, there has been a troupe of historians who have been too clever for their own good. ii
Yet even before the Anglo-Catholics turned their talents to rewriting the English Reformation, something strange had happened to the Protestant Church of the Reformation in England. After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 it became something distinctive, and whatever that was, was in the nineteenth century christened Anglicanism. iii One of the fascinations of practising English church history is to see how this unique Anglican synthesis of Western Christianity evolved, and how it relates to the Reformation which went before it. There are still areas within that map on which there are dragons and unknown territories. It has been one of the exciting experiences of my academic career to see church history become once more a crowded area of exploration, where many young scholars without any confessional axes to grind feel that it is worthwhile to become familiar with the theological jargon and the agonies and ecstasies of early modern religion.
Perhaps after two decades of plugging away at this theme, I might feel (and others might feel still more strongly) that the point has been made, if not done to death. But then my second mapping task becomes important. So often even those who were not inhibited in talking about a Reformation in England took up that peculiar English assumption that England is by definition different and special, and that therefore even if it did have a Reformation, an English Reformation could not have all that much to do with the noises off across the English Channel, let alone whatever noises filtered southwards over the border with Scotland or across the Irish Sea. This attitude is a reflection of that English habit of talking about the rest of Europe as ‘the Continent’, something which the English have even persuaded Americans to do, in a thoroughly illogical way. That will not do. England’s Reformation was remarkably barren of original theologians, at least until the coming of that quietly wayward figure Richard Hooker. The insularity of the English story might be said to begin with Hooker, and not just because of his own cooling attitudes to the Reformations of the rest of Europe. What is remarkable about Hooker was that none of his writings were translated into Latin. In other words, no-one in any other European region could be bothered to read him, so Hooker was left languishing in that baffling and marginal European language, English (which it must be said is particularly baffling when Hooker writes it). iv Otherwise, the flow of ideas in the Reformation seems at least at first sight to be a matter of imports from abroad, with an emphatically unfavourable English balance of payments.
If England had a Reformation, and an emphatically Protestant Reformation, and apparently it borrowed most of its ideas from elsewhere, what sort of Reformation was it? How should we relate it to the Reformations which sprang from Martin Luther’s fury over indulgences in 1517 and Huldrych Zwingli’s championing of Lenten sausage-eating in 1522? Can we apply labels like ‘Lutheran’ or ‘Reformed’ in an English context, and what might they mean here? When I was telling myself the story of the whole European Reformation so that I could write a big fat book on the subject, this issue was always on my mind, and it is that on which I propose to concentrate today – with just a few kicks at the twitching corpse of High Church Anglican history.
We will start our mapping in royal palaces: the Reformations of Kings and Queens both English and overseas. First let us meet Henry VIII. Henry was a king fascinated by theology, because he was convinced that his crown brought him a unique relationship with God. God had put his family on the throne, even though (as Henry knew full well but would never admit) they had a remarkably weak claim by blood to be Kings of England. His father had won the Crown by God’s favour in a battle at Bosworth in 1485. So it mattered what God thought of his actions, and all his life Henry was determined to get this right. His first instinct in the Reformation was that it was a blasphemy against God. He read Martin Luther, another man who felt a one-to-one relationship with God and was passionately determined to get the relationship right. Henry’s reaction to Luther’s encounter with God was, however, wholly negative, and expressed in his ghost-written Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, earning both papal gratitude and a riposte from Luther which was rightly taken as lèse-majesté.
Luther and Henry never laid aside their mutual loathing through their remaining quarter-century of life, particularly since Luther disapproved of Henry’s repudiation of Katherine of Aragon with a good deal more genuine moral fervour than Pope Clement VII. Yet Henry was still the first king in Europe fully to declare against Rome; all those rulers who had previously done so were mere princes or city councils. Not even the newly-minted King Gustav Vasa of Sweden made such a clean break with the Holy See when he set up his untidy alliance with the Reformation from the late 1520s. Inevitably Henry must decide what this break had to do with the Reformations in progress in central Europe. There is much that is puzzling about the decisions which Henry made, and one can easily catalogue the puzzles. v
Henry VIII made his Reformation a complicated matter. His Church has often been called ‘Catholicism without the Pope’ – recent scholars have seen it more as ‘Lutheranism without justification by faith’, for the King never accepted this central doctrine of the Reformation. vi Henry was part both of the old religious world and the new. Throughout the King’s reign, the Latin mass remained in all its splendour, and all his clergy had to remain celibate, as did the monks and nuns whose lives he had ruined. On the other hand Henry ceased to pay much attention to the doctrine of purgatory, he destroyed all monasteries and nunneries in England and Wales (and, where he could, in Ireland), and he was positively proud of closing and destroying all the shrines in England and Wales.
It is worth seeing this mixture in a wider context, in a way that classically Anglican historians were never inclined to do. Several northern European monarchs were not necessarily enthused by Luther and Wittenberg, yet still made their own pick and mix Reformations, sometimes without breaking with Rome. I have already mentioned Gustav Vasa of Sweden, but an equally interesting case is the Elector Joachim II of Brandenburg, who had a Lutheran brother-in-law but also a Catholic father-in-law, the King of Poland. Joachim’s uncle was Luther’s enemy the indulgence-peddling Cardinal Albrecht of Mainz, so it is perhaps not surprising that the Elector had no excessive reverence for the old Church hierarchy. He took it upon himself to enact his own religious settlement for Brandenburg. He specifically declared the settlement to be temporary until there could be a general settlement throughout the Empire. The Elector made no break with Rome, but he confiscated much of the Church’s lands and dissolved monasteries, just as Henry VIII was doing at the same time in England, and with almost as much lack of concern to reinvest his winnings in good causes. vii
Equally interesting were the policies of Duke Johann III of the United Duchies of Jülich-Cleves-Berg. In 1532-3 he enacted a Church Ordinance without consulting his clergy, and yet equally without breaking with Rome. Duke Johann’s son succeeded as Duke Wilhelm V in 1539: he was not only brother-inlaw of Luther’s protector the Elector of Saxony, but more importantly for England, he was Anne of Cleves’s brother. So the English political and religious leadership would be particularly aware of what was going on in Jülich-Cleves at the end of the 1530s, when for instance Henry VIII pushed a new doctrinal statement through Parliament, the Six Articles of 1539. viii Just as in the changes in Cleves, these reaffirmed the traditional liturgical ceremonies of the Church, and yet they did not reverse any of the changes that had so far occurred in England.
Yet equally a keynote of the Cleves changes as embodied in Duke Johann’s 1532/3 Kirchenordnung was that preaching should be based on scripture and the early Fathers and should be free of polemics. This was of course also the constant cliché of the Henrician Reformation. Many will be familiar with its encapsulation in the great pictorial title-page of the Great Bible of 1539, which shows Henry handing down his Bible to his grateful subjects, but historians have neglected an exactly contemporary artefact associated with the King. This was a literal witness to the Anne of Cleves marriage, and also a fascinating witness to the official mood on the eve of that disastrous marital adventure: the ceiling of the chapel of St. James’s Palace, installed at the time of Anne of Cleves’s arrival in 1540. What is noticeable about this emphatic statement of Henry’s religious policy is that the only motif apart from royal emblems and the initials of Anne of Cleves is the repeated motto Verbum Dei – ‘the Word of God’. There is not a trace of any traditional Catholic symbolism. ix
As always, King Henry VIII managed to confuse his subjects about his views on the Bible. In 1543 he forced an Act through Parliament which overlooked King Canute’s lesson to his courtiers and tried to limit bible-reading on the basis of social hierarchy. It is not always remembered that exactly at that time in Scotland, there was very similar legislation about Bible-reading in the Scottish Parliament, but this Scottish legislation was not restrictive but permissive in its effect. An Act of 1543 for the first time allowed lieges, that is landowners, to possess the Bible. x The Scots were thus newly allowed an access to the Bible approximately equivalent to its newly-restricted access in England: a symptom of a regime which for a moment had decided to undermine the old Church in Scotland and come closer to the religious settlement south of the border. What we are seeing alike in Brandenburg, Jülich-Cleves, England and the Scotland of 1543 is a whole series of attempts to find a ‘middle way’ – that phrase which meant so much to King Henry, let alone to others like Archbishop Cranmer who often radically disagreed with him as to precisely what it might mean. xi
Because Henry VIII’s own personal Reformation was not the only Reformation on the map of Henry’s England. There were at least two others. First let us note the Reformation from below, which was also a Reformation before the Reformation: that of Lollardy. Without saying too much about the Lollards, I would reaffirm against some of my colleagues that in terms of the theological future of the Church of England, they mattered a great deal. xii Admittedly Lollardy was never a unified force, and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was certainly not identical with the views of John Wyclif: given the way that it had been so effectively persecuted out of the universities and positions of power, that was hardly surprising. Nevertheless, on the eve of the Reformation, one can assemble an array of core beliefs which were common to most of those who would have thought of themselves (and who were recognised by neighbours and the old Church authorities) as having a distinctive and dissident identity or outlook within English religion: the identity which their detractors labelled Lollardy. xiii Equally, when a definite shape emerged for the Protestant Church of England’s thought in the reign of Elizabeth, it had three major characteristics: a distrust of assertions of the real presence in the eucharist, a deep animus against images and shrines, and a reassertion of the value of law and moral systems within the Reformation structure of salvation. All these three were also characteristic of mainstream early Tudor Lollardy, and all three clashed with Luther’s style of Protestantism. I am not saying anything as silly or as simple as to assert that the English Reformation was home-grown, or nothing but Lollardy writ large. Nevertheless, the Lollard inheritance cannot be ignored when seeing the choices which the English Reformers now made, constrained as they were by the existence of Henry VIII and of competing Reformations on the other side of the North Sea. xiv
There was then yet another English Reformation: the programme sought and put into effect as far as they dared by the group of politicians and senior clergy who had been rallied by Queen Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer. I have labelled them evangelicals in previous writings, and I will not labour the point as to why I think this a better word than Protestant in the conditions of early Tudor England. xv Thanks to Boleyn, Cromwell and Cranmer, there was something of an evangelical establishment in Church and royal Court, with constant if precarious access to power from 1531 right up to the old King’s death. This group started close to the beliefs of Martin Luther, because to begin with, as news of the Reformation filtered into England in the early 1520s, Luther seemed to be the only act in town. There were always anomalies, such as the marked hostility of the English evangelicals to imagery in church: that was apparent already in the 1530s when the evangelicals tortuously smuggled their views on various matters of doctrine into the Church’s official doctrinal statements. They made sure that Henry VIII’s Church renumbered the Ten Commandments in such a way as to stress the command against graven images, something which Luther did not do, any more than did the Pope, but which had been newly revived in Zürich. It is too simple to see this momentous little change simply as a borrowing from the Swiss Reformation. It suggests the tug of a Lollard agenda already at work even on those who were now bishops and politicians. xvi
However, the Lutheranism of these establishment evangelicals remained strong on the vital matter of the eucharist throughout the 1530s. It began weakening after a symbolic moment in 1540 when King Henry burned England’s most prominent and self-conscious Lutheran spokesman, Robert Barnes – Barnes was one of the very few major magisterial Reformers to be executed anywhere in the European Reformation, and in one of history’s great ironies, he was executed by the Pope’s chief enemy in Europe. xvii Now the future of England’s Protestantism turned out to lie not with Wittenberg, but somewhere else. To find out where this future lay and what it turned out to be, we must meet some more European rulers trying to find a middle way.
One of the most important is Archbishop Hermann von Wied of Cologne; after gradually moving from Roman obedience, he tried to create an autonomous Protestant Church in the lower Rhineland, but he was evicted by Charles V in 1546 after vigorous opposition to his plans from the canons of his own cathedral. Von Wied has often been casually characterised in English-speaking historiography as a Lutheran in his later years, but he did not at all conform to Lutheran doctrinal tramlines (particularly on the matter of images), and he became an inspiration for theologians who equally kept outside the Lutheran fold. One of them was his fellow-Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, who seems to have kept in touch with the former Archbishop even in von Wied’s years of retirement in the 1550s. xviii Von Wied’s proposals to reform the liturgy were highly influential on the construction of the Book of Common Prayer. He represented one possible future direction for the European Reformation, snuffed out on the mainland by the Holy Roman Emperor’s action against him.
Besides von Wied, there is the story of the little imperial territory of East Friesland. This tiny corner of Europe has a disproportionate significance for the course of northern European Reformations in many ways, not least for the early Reformation in England. When its ruler Count Enno II died in 1540, he left his widow Anna von Oldenburg with three young sons. Countess Anna was a resourceful and cultured woman: she brushed aside opposition and assumed regency power on behalf of her children, planning to build them a secure and wellgoverned inheritance in East Friesland which might form the basis of greater things for the dynasty. It was not her fault that none of her sons proved her equal in capability or strategic vision. In politics she sought out alliances with rulers who like herself wanted to keep out of religious or diplomatic entanglements. xix
In her own domestic religious policy, Countess Anna likewise sought to avoid total identification with either Lutherans or papalist Catholics, just as Henry VIII generally did after his break with Rome. When she began her efforts in East Friesland, she chose as principal pastor in her little port-capital at Emden an exotic and cosmopolitan figure from the Polish noble caste, Jan Łaski (usually known in his international travels as Johannes à Lasco by non-Polish Latin-speakers trying to get their tongues around Polish pronunciation). Łaski was a humanist scholar, friend and benefactor of Erasmus. When he broke with the old Church in the late 1530s, he remained an admirer of Archbishop von Wied of Cologne. Łaski was also in friendly contact with Swiss Reformers, and he had views on the eucharist diametrically opposed to Luther – the sort of views which Cranmer was about to develop for himself in England. The remarkable career of this cosmopolitan Pole is a symbol of how effortlessly the non-Lutheran Reformation crossed cultural and linguistic boundaries. It is arguable that by the end of his life in 1560, he had become more influential in the geographical spread of Reformed Protestantism than John Calvin. The two men were in any case never soul-mates. xx
But how might we label the theology which Łaski represented? In the 1540s it is anachronistic to call this movement Reformed Protestantism, though that is what it became. What we are seeing in these beginnings is the conscious creation (in a variety of different contexts and shapes) of what might perhaps too topically be termed a ‘third way’, avoiding Wittenberg and Rome. In doing so, enthusiasts for a ‘third way’ were naturally drawn to various other great reforming centres, which in the 1540s meant Zürich, Basel and Strassburg. And it was this triangle which chiefly influenced what happened next in England, the decisive moment in shaping the actual structures of the English Reformation. No longer was Wittenberg the chief inspiration for England’s evangelical religious changes.
In 1547 Henry’s Reformation was swept away when his little son Edward inherited the throne. Little legacy of that first Henrician Reformation remains in the Church of England with three very considerable exceptions: the break with Rome, the royal supremacy and the cathedrals which he had either preserved, refounded or founded for the first time (a matter to which we will return). Edward was the figure-head for the evangelical-minded clique of politicians both lay and clerical, including the now veteran evangelical Archbishop Cranmer as a prominent member. This clique, now freed from the murderously watchful eye of the old King, immediately began accelerating religious changes.
All this was against the background of the subtle shift in theological stance among the English evangelical leadership which we have begun exploring. To recapitulate: in general in Henry VIII’s time they had been broadly Lutheran in sympathy, mostly for instance continuing to accept the real presence in the Eucharist (one has to point out that this made their relations with the King a good deal less dangerous than otherwise might have been the case). Around the time of the old King’s death in 1547, Archbishop Cranmer became convinced that Luther was wrong in affirming eucharistic real presence. One might cynically call this a convenient moment to change his convictions, but we should never underestimate the psychological effect of suddenly being released from the hypnotic power of Henry’s extraordinary personality.
The King’s death came at a crucial moment in another way: a military and political disaster for central European Protestants. In 1547 the Emperor Charles V defeated leading Protestant German princes in the Schmalkaldic Wars. England was suddenly poised to act as a refuge for prominent European Protestants, but not Lutherans, who generally either accepted the compromise imposed by the Emperor or stayed and fought it (and each other) from comparatively safe refuges like Magdeburg. Accordingly from late 1547 Cranmer welcomed to England many overseas reformers displaced by the Catholic victories. The refugees whom he found most congenial were now non-Lutherans; indeed some of the most important were from the then vanishing Reformation of Italy, which was for the most part now finding refuge in non-Lutheran strongholds, especially Zürich and Strassburg. Two of the refugees, the great Italian preacher Peter Martyr Vermigli and some time later the leader of the Strassburg Reformation Martin Bucer, were given the leading professorial chairs in Oxford and Cambridge respectively. In their wake came hundreds of lesser asylum-seekers.
In 1550 came a significant step: the official foundation of a London ‘Stranger Church’ intended to embrace all those various refugees, whatever their cultural or linguistic background. Its Superintendent – in effect, its Bishop – was none other than Jan Łaski, who had likewise eventually been forced out of East Friesland in the wake of the Interim. The English government was anxious to use his leadership skills to curb religious radicalism among the refugees, so they gave him a handsome salary and one of the largest churches in the city, Austin Friars. Łaski administered his congregation to show how England might gain a pure Reformed Church (this was clearly the intention of several leading English politicians). xxi So Edward’s Reformation was marked both by its awareness of being part of international Protestantism, and by its now open move towards the Churches which were consciously not Lutheran – the Churches which would soon come to be called Reformed. The English break with Lutheranism was destined to be permanent. At the very end of Edward’s reign, the English government tried to entice Philipp Melanchthon from Wittenberg to succeed Martin Bucer as Regius Professor at Cambridge. Indeed they got to the point where they sent him his travel expenses and had set a date for him to arrive, in late June 1553 – but the young King’s death intervened, and Melanchthon had enough warning that he could quietly drop the whole idea (what happened to the English money is not clear). But it is unlikely that Melanchthon would have brought a Lutheran future with him to England. It is more probable that Cambridge would have proved the escape-route from hard-line Lutheranism which he sought for much of his career, and that he would have found a new home in Reformed Protestantism. xxii
Before this melancholy coda, the short reign of Edward VI had created many of the institutions of the Church of England which survive to the present day. Cranmer transformed the liturgy by masterminding two successive versions of a Prayer Book in English, the first in 1549. He was generally cautious in orchestrating the pace of change, and his caution was justified when a major rebellion in western England in summer 1549 specifically targeted the religious revolution, specifically his first Prayer Book. Not just Catholics objected to the book: no-one liked it. It was too full of traditional survivals for Protestants, and it was probably only ever intended to be a stopgap until Cranmer thought it safe to produce something more radical. xxiii In dialogue with Peter Martyr and Martin Bucer, Cranmer produced a second Prayer Book in 1552 far more radical than 1549; the theology of the Eucharist which its liturgy expressed was close to a major agreement on the eucharist which Zürich had just agreed in 1549 with John Calvin of Geneva, the Consensus Tigurinus. The creation of the Consensus was a crucial moment in the European Reformation. It provided a rallying-point for non- Lutherans and also a point of attack for hardline Lutherans such as Joachim Westphal of Hamburg, thus making permanent the division between the Lutherans and the Reformed. When England aligned with the Consensus Tigurinus, it was clear that the English evangelical establishment was by now fully ready openly to reject consciously Lutheran stances in theology.
Cranmer also presided over the formulation of a statement of doctrine (the forty-two Articles) and the drafting of a complete revision of canon law. This revision was a remarkable witness to Cranmer’s vision of England as leader of Reformation throughout Europe: Peter Martyr and Łaski were both active members of the working-party which drafted the law reform – even though Łaski had often vocally disapproved of the slow pace at which England was implementing religious change. With this combination of authors, it is not surprising that the draft scheme of canon law was vocally hostile to Lutheran belief on the eucharist as well as to Roman Catholicism and to radical sectaries like Anabaptists. xxiv
The canon law reform is admittedly one of the great might-have-beens of English history. It was defeated in Parliament out of sheer spite, because the secular politicians in the regime had badly fallen out with leading Protestant clergy, who accused them of plundering the Church not for the sake of the Reformation but for themselves. So in spring 1553, the Duke of Northumberland blocked a procedural motion which would have extended the life of the law reform commission and would therefore have allowed its work to be considered for Parliamentary enactment. xxv As a result, the carefully-drafted scheme fell into oblivion – Elizabeth I never revived it when she restored Protestantism. In one of the great untidinesses of the Reformation, the Protestant Church courts of England went on using the Pope’s canon law. There was an effort to tidy it up fifty years later to remove its worst Popish features, but the next great effort did not come until the time of Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher in the 1950s. And crucially, the lost legislation had provided for the introduction of procedures for divorce. Because those provisions fell, the Church of England was left as the only Protestant Church in Europe not to make any provision for divorce – for no more elevated theological reasons than a politician’s malice and Elizabethan inertia. This was the first respect in which the English Reformation diverged from the European-wide norm.
Let us lay aside the interval of Mary’s reign, despite the major significance which historians now realise that it had for the Counter-Reformation throughout Europe. xxvi We only need to note that Mary made her own vital contribution to the Protestant Reformation by restoring the heresy laws, and burning Cranmer and his various colleagues. That bitter experience became a central part of English consciousness in succeeding Protestant centuries. It tied Protestant England into an active and deeply-felt anti-Catholicism which was the particular forte of Reformed Protestant Christians. If anything was the glue which fixed the kingdom into a Reformed Protestant rather than a Lutheran mould, this was it.
Those later centuries proved to be Protestant because Mary’s greatest contribution to the English Reformation was to die after only five years. Yet never again did the kingdom of England play the captaining role which Cranmer had planned for it among the Reformed Churches, and that was thanks to the next Queen on the throne, Mary’s younger half-sister Elizabeth. Indeed it is worth noting that the shape of the English Reformation was unique in Europe, because it owed so much to two women, Henry VIII’s Queen Anne Boleyn and her daughter Queen Elizabeth. Mischievously, one might say it owed a good deal to a third, Queen Mary I, as well.
The young queen Elizabeth was marked out in 1558 as a Protestant, not least because she was her mother’s daughter. She faced a formidable array of Catholic power in Europe, and she must make careful choices about how to structure the religion of her traumatised and rudderless kingdoms of England and Ireland. She did so in a settlement steered through her Parliament in 1559, which has formed the basis of the Church of England (and therefore of worldwide Anglicanism) to the present day. It has been the subject of much argument, which is of course an argument about the nature of Anglicanism. In much traditional historical writing about English religion, the emphasis has been on the religious compromises which Elizabeth made in this 1559 religious settlement. It would be more sensible to note how little compromise the Queen made in swiftly and decisively setting up an unmistakeably Protestant regime in Westminster.
The new Queen proved expert at making soothing noises to ambassadors from dangerous Catholic foreign powers, but few people could be deceived about the nature of her programme. There was no question of offering the Settlement for the inspection or approval of the overwhelmingly Catholic clerical assemblies, the Convocations of Canterbury and York. Its enactment in parliamentary legislation faced stiff opposition from the Catholic majority in the House of Lords. This meant a delay in implementing it until April 1559, when two Catholic bishops were arrested on trumped-up charges, and the loss of their parliamentary votes resulted in a tiny majority for the government’s bills in the Lords. It could be said that the 1559 Settlement was based on ruthless politicking and a complete disregard for the opinions of the senior clergy who were then in post. Revolutions usually cut corners, and this was a revolution, however much it was finessed. xxvii
The shape of the resulting parliamentary settlement was in fact a snapshot of King Edward VI’s Church as it had been in doctrine and liturgy in autumn 1552. xxviii That meant bringing back the 1552 Prayer Book, not the 1549 Book, which enjoyed virtually no support from anyone, and which not even the Queen attempted to revive. xxix The 1559 legislation made a number of small modifications in the 1552 Book and associated liturgical provisions, centring on liturgical dress and the eucharist. Traditionally in Anglican history, these were called concessions to Catholics. That is absurd. How would these little verbal and visual adjustments mollify Catholic-minded clergy and laity, whom the Settlement simultaneously deprived of the Latin Mass, monasteries, chantries, shrines, gilds and a compulsorily celibate priesthood? Clearly they did have a purpose and significance: the alterations were probably aimed at conciliating Lutheran Protestants either at home or abroad. At home, Elizabeth had no way of knowing the theological temperature of her Protestant subjects in 1559, while over the North Sea, the Lutheran rulers of northern Europe were watching anxiously to see whether the new English regime would be as offensively Reformed as had been the government of Edward VI. xxx It was worthwhile for Elizabeth’s government to throw the Lutherans a few theological scraps, and the change also chimed with the Queen’s personal inclination to Lutheran views on eucharistic presence.
Nevertheless, the new Church of England was different in tone and style from the Edwardian Church. Edward’s regime had wanted to lead militant international Protestantism in a forward-moving revolution. Many Edwardian leaders had gone into exile under Mary to parts of Europe where they saw such militant change in action, and they expected to carry on the good work now that God had given them the chance to come home. Elizabeth begged to differ. She took particular exception to returning exiles associated with Geneva: she excluded them from high office in the new church, because she was furious with the Scots Edwardian activist and Genevan enthusiast John Knox – he had written the famously-titled First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, claiming that it was unnatural (monstrous) for a woman to rule. Knox had intended it against Elizabeth’s predecessor Mary, then found that unfortunately the arguments applied to her as well. xxxi
Elizabeth’s own brand of Protestantism was peculiarly conservative. And in one respect, the new Queen gathered around her like-minded people as she planned the religious future. Neither she nor any of her leading advisors (including her new Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker and her first nominee for Archbishop of York, William May) had gone abroad under Mary. They had conformed outwardly to the traditional Catholic Church: in other words, they were what John Calvin sneeringly called ‘Nicodemites’ – like the cowardly Nicodemus, who only came to Jesus Christ under cover of darkness. Elizabeth and her advisors knew the specialised heroism of making choices about concealing opinions and compromising in dangerous times, rather than the luxury of proclaiming their convictions in unsullied purity. No other Protestant Church in Europe had such a beginning. It meant that the Queen had a sympathy for traditionalist Catholics whose religious convictions she detested, but who kept similarly quiet in her own Church – towards the end of her reign, Sir Nicholas Bacon’s lawyer and philosopher-son Francis said admiringly that she did not seek to make windows into men’s hearts. xxxii
Elizabeth was a subtle and reflective woman who had learnt about politics the hard way. She showed no enthusiasm for high-temperature religion, despite the private depth and quiet intensity of her own devotional life. Many of her Protestant subjects, including many of her bishops, found this extremely frustrating, particularly when it became clear in the 1560s that she would permit no change in the 1559 Settlement. There were idiosyncratic features of this Settlement which were randomly preserved in her fossilisation of the Edwardian Church. Notable were the traditionally-shaped threefold ministry of bishop, priest and deacon, together with the preservation of the devotional life and endowments of cathedrals. Neither at the time bore much ideological freight.
As far as the threefold ministry was concerned, Archbishop Cranmer had preserved separate ordination services for the three orders of ministry in constructing his Ordinal of 1550, despite advice to the contrary from his friend Martin Bucer, but it is difficult to discern in Cranmer any sense of apostolic succession of the ministry or any idea that ministers of God’s word and sacraments differed materially from other servants of the Tudor monarchy. xxxiii On 17 December 1559, Matthew Parker was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury by four colleagues in episcopal orders: William Barlow, John Scory, Miles Coverdale and John Hodgkin. These bishops represented a certain spectrum of Protestant theological perspectives, indicated by the interesting variety of clerical garments which they chose to don at various moments of the ceremony, but it is unlikely that anyone regarded any of the quartet as more significant than another: the common factor was that they had all been bishops in the reign of King Edward VI.
Victorian Anglo-Catholics became very excited by the fact that back in 1536, Barlow had been consecrated under the pre-Reformation Catholic Ordinal, albeit after the Roman schism, and they devoted an inordinate amount of ink to investigating this, because of a frustrating lack of exact documentary corroboration of the original consecration (which certainly had taken place). It is likely that Barlow would have told them not to bother: it was not a matter which he would have regarded as of any importance in 1559. His ministry was validated by its discreet witness to evangelical reform under Henry VIII and its more ample exercise under Edward VI. Neither did anyone else make an issue of Barlow’s consecration at the time, despite the bitter controversies between Catholics and Protestants which were already raging around Parker’s consecration from the later years of Elizabeth I. xxxiv The notion of apostolic succession dependent on a line of bishops was not something which appealed to early Elizabethan bishops, although by the early seventeenth century, the situation was changing, as we will see.
The other fossils from Edward’s interrupted Reformation, the cathedrals, were particularly important in the unexpected developments of the English Church in subsequent generations. Cathedrals were a hangover from King Henry’s Reformation which had no parallel anywhere else in Protestant Europe. Not even the more conservative Lutherans preserved the whole panoply of cathedral deans and chapters, minor canons, organs and choristers and the rest of the life of the cathedral close as did the English. Most northern European Protestant cathedrals survived (where they survived at all) simply as big churches, sometimes retaining a rather vestigial chapter of canons in Lutheran territories. Why the English cathedrals were not dissolved like the monasteries is not clear, but it has a lot to do with the personal preferences of Queen Elizabeth. In any case, dissolved they were not, and that made the Church of England unique in the European Reformation. Within their walls, they made of Cranmer’s Prayer Book something which he had not intended: it became the basis for a regular (ideally, daily) presentation of a liturgy in musical and ceremonial form.
Other than in the cathedrals, this choral exploitation of the Prayer Book was practised very rarely in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. It was to be found in Westminster Abbey and in Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel Royal (plus the little brother of the Chapel Royal at Ludlow, headquarters of the Council in the Marches of Wales). xxxv Otherwise only a minority of Oxbridge college chapels adopted this tradition, perhaps accompanied (and probably in vestigial form during Elizabeth’s reign) by a small clutch of churches which had come through the Reformation still collegiate, through one or other accident of history. The parish churches of England, all nine thousand of them, would hear very little music at all, beyond the enormously popular congregationally-sung metrical psalms created in the mid- Tudor period by a variety of hands: these were part of the great outpouring of metrical psalmody which was the common property of the European-wide Reformed Protestant family. That remained the case down to the late seventeenth century, and then the replacement psalmody collection of 1696 popularly known as ‘Tate and Brady’ only marginally extended the parochial musical repertoire, until the coming of Methodism set new standards of popular hymnody for its mother Church in the eighteenth century. xxxvi
The cathedrals, those great and glorious churches, with their choral foundations, pipe-organs and large staff of clergy, were an ideological subversion of the Church of England as re-established in 1559. Otherwise it was Reformed Protestant in sympathy. If it was Catholic, it was Catholic in the same sense that John Calvin was Catholic, and up to the mid-seventeenth century it thought of itself as a part (although a slightly peculiar part) of the international Reformed Protestant family of churches, alongside the Netherlands, Geneva, the Rhineland, Scotland or Transylvania. It had long left Lutheranism behind. Lutherans had not helped their cause by some egregious examples of harassment of Protestant exiles from England in Mary’s reign. For example, marked inhospitality had been shown in Scandinavia to Jan Łaski’s Stranger Church exiles, and the little English exile congregation suffered expulsion from the town of Wesel in 1556 because of their Reformed eucharistic beliefs: in the latter case, Switzerland offered the twiceexiled English from Wesel a safe refuge at Aarau, thanks to the good offices of the government of Bern. The Elizabethan episcopal hierarchy, so many of whom had themselves been Marian exiles, would not forget that Lutheran inhospitality. xxxvii
Back in the 1970s and 1980s historians spent a lot of time arguing about whether there was a ‘Calvinist consensus’ in the Elizabethan Church. xxxviii That was a necessary debate which produced much fruitful thinking, but it was the wrong question to ask. John Calvin had virtually no effect on the Church of Edward VI: in no sense had it been Calvinist, although that description is still sometimes misleadingly found in textbooks. Cranmer, Łaski, Bullinger, Bucer and Martyr were the great names of that Edwardian Church, and Calvin’s hour had not yet come; he was not well-informed about affairs in England. xxxix By 1558, however, times had changed. What about Elizabeth’s Church of England? It was certainly a Reformed Protestant Church, and certainly also, Calvin emerged on the English scene as important.
But we have to remember that Calvin never became a Reformed Pope. The effect of his example and his writings was greatest in those Churches created during the popular upheavals of the 1560s – Scotland, France, the Netherlands – also in the attempted Reformations by certain princes and civic corporations in Germany’s ‘Second Reformation’ later in the century and into the seventeenth century. Even in such settings, the other great non-Lutheran Reformers were read and honoured, and their thought was influential. Everywhere there was nuance and eclecticism: a spectrum. Just as in England, everywhere in Europe, Heinrich Bullinger, Peter Martyr, Jan Łaski and also Luther’s former colleague Philip Melanchthon had as much shaping effect as Calvin. What emerges from detailed scrutiny of the Elizabethan Church of England is a Church on this European-wide spectrum of Reformed Protestantism, with a tendency to sympathise with Zürich rather than with Geneva – where Bullinger’s Decades were made compulsory reading for the less-educated clergy of the Province of Canterbury by Archbishop Whitgift, and where the sort of sacramental theology espoused in Geneva was regarded as rather over-sacramentalist by the majority of English divines. xl
Then around 1600, some English theologians, such as Richard Hooker, or his friend and admirer, Lancelot Andrewes, began questioning various aspects of the theological package which I have described. Hooker remained very individual in what he chose to criticise or defend, and it was Andrewes who was the chief shaper of the theological sea-change which now began taking shape in the English Church. Andrewes and his associates felt distressed by the Reformed assertion of predestination, and they listened sympathetically to the objections to it which were being vigorously voiced by self-consciously Lutheran theologians in Germany and Scandinavia. xli As they formulated a new approach to the problem of grace and salvation, they began feeling that there must be more to God’s sacramental gift of eucharist than the carefully balanced formulations of the Reformed theologians in the Consensus Tigurinus, and so they began to look again at how to describe the nature of eucharistic presence. Often in parallel with their new thoughts on predestination, they initially took their cue from Lutheran writers on the real presence, though this explicit interest in Lutheranism gradually lessened among them and their successors: the name of Luther was too much part of the Reformation. xlii Unlike Luther, these English ‘revisionists’ began valuing bishops to the extent that they asserted episcopal government as the only divinelyapproved form of church government. They even valued cathedrals and their elaborate devotional life. xliii
All these ideas came together in what one might call a second revolutionary theology. This was a theology increasingly important to one party within the Church of England: those who have been variously labelled Arminians, Laudians, ‘avant-garde conformists’, call them what you will. In the early seventeenth century, that party, a sacramentalist, hierarchically-minded party, gradually gained power in the Church, thanks in particular to some nimble political footwork on the part of Lancelot Andrewes, and a subsequent alliance with King Charles I. xliv The party eventually included the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, William Laud and Richard Neile. In the seventeenth century, few of them were prepared to reject the word Protestant – that would be the achievement of the later Non-Jurors and the Oxford Movement – but the more mischievous of them were certainly prepared to borrow a Roman Catholic joke and call the Reformation a ‘Deformation’. xlv In terms of the wider Reformation, they came to see their Church of England as more and more separate from the general story of the Reformations through the rest of the European continent, and so they anticipated the younger Pitt in deciding that it was time to roll up the map of Europe as far as English religion was concerned. Most telling was the campaign of conformity which Archbishop Laud waged in the 1630s against the Stranger Churches – those same churches which under Jan Łaski had once been a template for a future Church of England. xlvi
The immediate result was that many central theologians of the Reformed Protestant English tradition became increasingly unhappy and angry. The same anger motivated many during the 1630s to flee across the Atlantic, to form a true Church of England in New England. xlvii One might argue that the subsequent history of the Church of England in the old country is an unpredictable deviation from this story – that the real story of the English Reformation was to be told in New England, and not in Lambeth Palace. That is one reason why in order to understand the dynamic of the English Reformation, it is so important to keep an eye on a still wider map: the patterns which English people created when they travelled across the Atlantic. Even in southern American colonies like Virginia, the version of the episcopal Church of England which southern colonists had established by the end of the seventeenth century was not quite that which was to be found in the Old Country. xlviii
The Church of England has never decisively settled the question of who owns its history, and therefore of what its colour might be on the world map of Christianity. Within it remain two worlds: one, the sacramental world of theologians like Lancelot Andrewes, William Laud, the world that still values real presence, bishops, and beauty, and the other, the world of the Elizabethan Reformation, which rejects shrines and images, which rejects real presence, which values law and moral regulation based on both Old and New Testament precept. These two worlds contend for mastery within English tradition, and they have created that fascinating dialogue about the sacred which the world calls Anglicanism. Long may the fight continue. It will be better for the sanity of the Anglican tradition if neither side manages to win.
Diarmaid MacCulloch
July 2004
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series 15 (2005), 75-96: the Prothero Lecture for 2004.
i One can sample mature Anglo-Catholic distortions and obfuscations throughout the entries relating to the English Reformation in the first edition of an otherwise excellent reference work, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F.L. Cross (Oxford, 1957). This is emphatically not the case in the Dictionary’s present incarnation, edited by Dr. E.A. Livingstone (3rd edition, Oxford, 1997, and subsequent revisions). An up-to-date compendium of ‘in-house’ Anglican historiographical attitudes in scholarly form is embodied in Paul Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church: theological resources in historical perspective (rev. edn., 2002).
ii P. Nockles, ‘Survivals or new arrivals? The Oxford Movement and the nineteenth-century historical construction of Anglicanism’, in Anglicanism and the Western Christian tradition, ed. S. Platten (2003), 144-91. I also discuss this further in my ‘Judging the English Reformation: Biographical perceptions of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’, Proceedings of the Anglo-Spanish Conferences, Valencia (forthcoming).
iii For discussion of the fugitive use of the term ‘Anglicanism’ before the nineteenth century, and its possible origins in the mouth of King James VI of Scotland, see The Short Oxford History of the British Isles: the sixteenth century, ed. Patrick Collinson (2002), 110-11.
iv On Hooker’s later impact in England, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Richard Hooker’s reputation’, English Historical Review CXVII (2002), 773-812.
v For further discussion, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Henry VIII and the reform of the Church’, in The Reign of Henry VIII: politics, policy and piety, ed. Diarmaid MacCulloch (1995), 159-80.
vi This is a formulation invented by Peter Marshall: cf. A. Ryrie, ‘The strange death of Lutheran England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History [hereafter J.Eccl.H.] LIII (2002), 64-92, at 67.
vii J. Estes, ‘Melanchthon’s confrontation with the “Erasmian” via media in politics: the De officio principum of 1539’, in Dona Melanchthoniana, ed. J. Loehr (2001) [hereafter Estes, ‘Melanchthon’s confrontation’], 83-101, at 93-5.
viii Estes, ‘Melanchthon’s confrontation’, at 96-7.
ix T. String, ‘A neglected Henrician decorative ceiling’, Antiquaries Journal LXXVI (1996), 139-52, at 144-5. For an illustration of the Great Bible and discussion, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: a Life (London and New Haven, 1996) [hereafter MacCulloch, Cranmer], 238-40.
x Gordon Donaldson, The Scottish Reformation (Cambridge, 1969), 30.
xi For useful discussion, see George Bernard, “The making of religious policy, 1533-1546: Henry VIII and the search for the middle way”, Historical Journal XLI (1998), 321-51.
xii See a very different argument throughout Richard Rex, The Lollards (Basingstoke, 2002), esp. Ch. 5 and Conclusion.
xiii Amid the great mass of literature on Lollardy, see especially Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: images and literacy in late medieval religion (1984), A. Hudson, Lollards and their books (1985), A. Hope, ‘Lollardy: the stone the builders rejected?’, in Protestantism and the national Church in 16th century England, eds. P. Lake and M. Dowling (1988), 1-35. There is still much to discover about the theology of post-Wyclifite Lollard groups; in particular, we await the completed research of Patrick Hornbeck on this subject.
xiv I develop these ideas at greater length in Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England 1547-1603 (revised edn., Basingstoke 2000) [hereafter MacCulloch, Later Reformation], 55-65.
xv See e.g. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (1999) [hereafter MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant], 2, 4.
xvi MacCulloch, Cranmer, 192.
xvii For a masterly recent treatment of the 1540s, see A. Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII: evangelicals in the early English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003).
xviii MacCulloch, Cranmer, 393-4, and other index refs. s.v. von Wied, Hermann. See also J.K. Cameron, ‘The Cologne Reformation and the Church of Scotland’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History XXX (1979), 39-64, and R.W. Scribner, ‘Why was there no Reformation at Cologne?’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research XLIX (1976), 217-41.
xix H.E. Jannsen, Gräfin Anna von Ostfriesland: eine hochadelige Frau der späten Reformationszeit (1540/42-1575) (Munich, 1988).
xx Andrew Pettegree, Marian Protestantism: six studies (Aldershot, 1996) [hereafter Pettegree, Marian Protestantism), 80-84. The best overall treatment of Łaski is to be found in Johannes à Lasco: Polnischer Baron, Humanist und europäischer Reformator, ed. Christoph Strohm (2000), particularly, on his eucharistic views, C. Zwierlein, ‘Der reformierte Erasmianer a Lasco und die Herausbildung seiner Abendmahlslehre 1544- 1552’, ibid., 35-100.
xxi Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in sixteenth century London (Oxford, 1986), Chs. 2-4.
xxii MacCulloch, Cranmer, 538-40.
xxiii MacCulloch, Cranmer, 461-2, 504-8.
xxiv See especially the Reformatio’s section on heresy in Tudor Church Reform: the Henrician Canons of 1535 and the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, ed. Gerald Bray (Church of England Record Society VIII, 2000), 186-213.
xxv On this, see MacCulloch, Cranmer, 531-35, and on the precise circumstances and nature of the defeat, J.F. Jackson, ‘The Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum: politics, society and belief in mid-Tudor England’ (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 2003), 222-24.
xxvi Two of the most important recent contributions to opening up this field have been Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: traditional religion in England 1400-1580 (New Haven and London, 1992), 524-63, and T.F. Mayer, Cardinal Pole: priest and prophet (Cambridge, 2000), 203-301.
xxvii The construction of the Settlement is described in detail (including a thorough-going and effective demolition of Sir John Neale’s reconstruction of events in 1558-9) in N.L Jones, Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion, 1559 (1982).
xxviii MacCulloch, Cranmer, 620-1.
xxix Pace arguments to the contrary in Roger Bowers, ‘The Chapel Royal, the First Edwardian Prayer Book, and Elizabeth’s settlement of religion, 1559’, Historical Journal XLIII (2000), 317-44. The centre of his case is the assertion that some particularly sumptuous musical settings of the 1549 liturgy could not possibly have been written in 1549-52, and must post-date musical innovations in the Catholic restoration of Queen Mary. This a priori assumption is rather undermined by the fact that one of Bowers’s examples, a ‘Second Service’ by John Sheppard, is most unlikely to have been written for Elizabeth, since Sheppard made his will a fortnight after Elizabeth’s accession and died a fortnight later (Bowers has mistaken his date of death). Sheppard probably had other concerns in his dying weeks than providing music for the Chapel Royal. If Sheppard’s elaborate music can thus be reassigned to the period 1549-52, there is no reason why any of the other supposed 1559 settings of the 1549 texts should not be likewise, and no reason to assign any of them to 1559.
xxx The atmosphere is well-captured in the letters of the period 1559-61 between Zürich reformers and leading English returned exiles, printed in two paginations in Latin and English translation, The Zürich Letters …, ed. H. Robinson (2 vols., Parker Society, 1842, 1845), passim. See also Diarmaid MacCulloch, ‘Peter Martyr Vermigli and Thomas Cranmer’, in Peter Martyr Vermigli: Humanism, Republicanism, Reformation, eds. E. Campi et al. (2002), 173-201, at 199-200. For an interesting argument from an unexpected quarter that the eucharistic adjustments may perfectly plausibly be seen as an effort to update the liturgy to developments in Reformed Protestant thinking, see C.S. Carter, ‘The Anglican ‘Via Media’: a study in the Elizabethan Religious Settlement’, Church Quarterly Review XCVII (1924), 233-54.
xxxi The full extent of the Queen’s fury has now been revealed in Pettegree, Marian Protestantism, 144-8, 197-9.
xxxii This remark so often misquoted and so often attributed to Elizabeth herself is to be found in The Works of Francis Bacon, eds. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (14 vols, 1857-1874): Lord Bacon’s Letters and Life, I, 178. It occurs in Bacon’s ‘Observations on a Libel’ of 1592, but is also to be found word for word with its surrounding material in a letter of Francis Walsingham to M. de Critoy, written between 1589 and Walsingham’s death in 1590: ibid., 98. Spedding is almost certainly correct in postulating that Bacon had ghost-written this letter of Walsingham’s.
xxxiii See MacCulloch, Cranmer, 278-9, 460-1.
xxxiv For an interesting late seventeenth-century discussion of the consecration, innocent of later High Church preoccupations, but clearly setting out the pre-Oxford Movement issues in controversy with Roman Catholics about Parker’s consecration, see J. Strype, The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker … (3 vols., Oxford, 1821), I, 112-22. On the Barlow controversy, see A.S. Barnes, Bishop Barlow and Anglican Orders: a study of the original documents (1922).
xxxv On Westminster Abbey, see particularly J.F. Merritt, ‘The cradle of Laudianism? Westminster Abbey, 1558-1630’, J.Eccl.H. LII (2001), 623-46 and various essays in Westminster Abbey Reformed 1540-1640, eds. C.S. Knighton and R. Mortimer (2003), 38-74. I have gone so far as to argue for a ‘Westminster Movement’, on the analogy of the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement: MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, 210-13.
xxxvi The foundational work on the divergence between cathedral and parish church music is N. Temperley, Music in the English Parish Church (2 vols. Cambridge, 1980), and very important also is R.A. Leaver, ‘Goostly psalmes and spirituall songes’: English and Dutch Metrical Psalms from Coverdale to Utenhove, 1536-1566 (Cambridge, 1991). On the wider European phenomenon of psalmody, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700 (2003), 146, 307-8, 326, 352, 460, 511, 536, 588, 590-1.
xxxvii On Łaski’s troubles in Scandinavia in 1553, see O.P. Grell, ‘Exile and tolerance’, in Tolerance and intolerance in the European Reformation, eds. O. Grell and B. Scribner (1996), 164-81. On Wesel and Aarau, Original Letters relative to the English Reformation …, ed. H. Robinson (2 vols. in single pagination, Parker Society., 1846-7), I, 160-68.
xxxviii P. Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church 1570-1635’, Past and Present CXIV (Feb. 1987), 32-76: another useful perspective on that debate is provided by Nicholas Tyacke, ‘The ambiguities of early-modern English Protestantism’, Historical Journal XXXIV (1991), 743-54. For a contrasting perspective, see Peter White, Predestination, policy and polemic: conflict and consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War (Cambridge, 1992), usefully reviewed by P. Lake, ‘Predestinarian propositions’, J.Eccl.H. XLVI (1995), 110-23. For a statesmanlike afterview, S.F. Hughes, ‘‘The Problem of ‘Calvinism’’: English theologies of predestination c. 1580- 1630’, in Belief and practice in Reformation England, eds. S. Wabuda and C. Litzenberger (1998), 229-49.
xxxix MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, 173-4, 176.
xl For Samuel Ward of Sidney Sussex’s opinion to this effect, see B.D. Spinks, Two faces of Elizabethan Anglican Theology: sacraments and salvation in the thought of William Perkins and Richard Hooker (Lanham, 1999), 164.
xli On this, see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: the rise of English Arminianism (Oxford, 1987), especially 20, 39, 59.
xlii I am very grateful to Dr Peter McCullough for drawing my attention to Lancelot Andrewes’s use of Martin Chemnitz’s Examinis Concilii Tridentini (Frankfurt, 1574), which McCullough notes in particular in relation to Andrewes’s sermon on Isaiah 6.6-7, preached on 1 October 1598 and published in L. Andrewes, Αποσπασμάτια Sacra (1657), 515-22. Andrewes is clearly also silently drawing on Luther’s analogy of eucharistic presence as like heat in red-hot iron in this sermon. We await Dr McCullough’s biography of Andrewes and his edition of Andrewes’s sermons. For Luther’s uneasy place in English Reformation polemic and self-defence, see R.H. Fritze, ‘Root or link? Luther’s position in the historical debate over the legitimacy of the Church of England, 1558-1625’, J.Eccl.H. XXXVII (1986), 288-302.
xliii For more extended discussion, see MacCulloch, Later Reformation, Ch. 6.
xliv On Andrewes’s successful operation to gain control of the Chapel Royal of Charles as Prince of Wales and hence of the theological future of the court, see Peter McCullough, Sermons at Court: politics and religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean preaching (Cambridge, 1997), 194-209.
xlv MacCulloch, Tudor Church Militant, 173.
xlvi Anne Oakley, ‘Archbishop Laud and the Walloons in Canterbury’, in Crown and Mitre: religion and society in Northern Europe, eds. W.M. Jacob and N. Yates (1993), 33-44.
xlvii See F.J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s forgotten founding father (Oxford, 2003).
xlviii For a subtle and sensitive overview of English religion in the American colonies, see P. Bonomi, Under the cope of heaven: religion, society and politics in Colonial America (Oxford, 1986). On the continuing links between Old and New England, F.J. Bremer, Congregational communion: clerical friendship in the Anglo-American puritan community, 1610-1692 (Boston, 1994).
