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The Protestant Reformation in England took place on the background of the Tudor Monarchy, 1485 - 1603. Unlike on the Continent where religious reform was the result of spiritual forces challenging the authority of the Church, the Reformation in England was largely political. The Tudors came to the throne in 1485 when Henry Tudor defeated the Yorkist king, Richard III, in the last battle of the Wars of the Roses.
The Tudor monarchs were vivid personalities: colorful and tragic, calculating and charismatic, head-strong and pious. Above all, they were political and dedicated to the well-being of both their monarchy and kingdom. They were:
Henry VII 1485 - 1509
Henry VIII 1509 - 1547
Edward VI 1547 - 1553
Mary I 1553 - 1558
Elizabeth I 1558 - 1603
As monarchs, the Tudors' general policy was two-fold: to make the monarchy fully sovereign and powerful and to make England a major European power. To achieve royal sovereignty they would endeavor when possible to rule without calling Parliament into session. But, at the same time, they would rule in cooperation with Parliament when necessary or when it was to their political advantage to do so. They would work closely with the leaders of Parliament, flatter Parliament, and make Parliament feel itself to be an active part of the royal government. This sense of "partnership" between crown and Parliament would serve the Tudors greatly and was no better illustrated than in the separation of England from the Roman Catholic Church.
The Reformation in England began during the reign of King Henry VIII and was the result of the king's seeking an end to his marriage. Eighteen-year old Prince Henry succeeded to the throne on his father's death in 1509. He had been married to Princess Catherine of Aragon (the daughter of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain), the widow of his older brother Arthur. Arthur and Catherine had been married as children as part of a treaty arrangement with Spain, and Henry VII, not wanting to lose the sizeable dowry that came with her, secured her marriage to Prince Henry after Arthur's untimely death in 1502.
Anxious for a male heir to succeed him to the throne, Henry became increasingly concerned that his marriage with Catherine might not produce a son. The couple had a daughter, Mary (born 1516), but there was no precedent for a woman to succeed to the throne and her future marriage would put England under the sovereignty of her husband, most likely a foreign prince. Convinced that because of Catherine's advancing age there would be no male heir, Henry, in 1527, appealed to Pope Clement VII for an annulment of his marriage so that he could remarry.
Popes had granted kings annulments for similar reasons in the past, and Henry anticipated no problem with his request. He was considered a good Catholic monarch and had, in fact, been awarded by a previous pope the title "Defender of the Faith" for a book he had written condemning Luther and the growing Protestant heresy. Pope Clement, however, refused to annul the marriage. Catherine did not want the marriage to end, and the pope was then virtually the prisoner of her powerful nephew, the Habsburg Emperor Charles V (who was also the King of Spain). Frustrated and angry, Henry resolved to secure a divorce without the pope's approval. Over the next several years Henry continued negotiations with both Rome and Spain. He hoped that an accommodation might be reached with the papacy that would cause the Church to reconsider its position and grant an annulment. Likewise, he did not want to alienate further the powerful Spanish king. Sensing that these efforts might prove futile, he also took steps to separate England from the Catholic Church.
Summoning Parliament, Henry began the process of removing himself and his nation from the spiritual supremacy of the pope. Believing that a king was never stronger than when united with representatives of his kingdom, Henry appealed to Parliament's sense of national identity and to its collective pocketbook. The House of Commons, representing the landed gentry and merchant interests of the English upper class, resented the great amounts of English wealth collected by the Church and coveted the extensive lands held by the Church in England. The idea of papal sovereignty over their king and the prospect of a future foreign king was likewise repugnant to them. In 1533 Parliament approved a law (the Act in Restraint of Appeals) affirming the supremacy of royal courts and denying Catherine the right to appeal her case to a papal court. In the same year Henry secretly married Anne Boleyn, a young woman (formerly in service to Queen Catherine) to whom he had become attracted.
In 1533 Henry appointed Thomas Cranmer as the Archbishop of Canterbury, who at the head of an English church court declared the king's marriage to Catherine null and void. Anne Boleyn became queen. Having secured the divorce he sought, Henry now had to legalize his actions. To do so he again turned to Parliament. He began by securing Parliament's consent to an Act of Succession (1534) requiring all subjects to swear to the legitimacy of Henry's heirs of Queen Anne.
In 1534 Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy declaring the monarch to be "Protector and Only Supreme Head of the Church and Clergy of England." The Act required all subjects to swear an oath of supremacy recognizing the headship of Henry and his heirs over the Church in England. The Act of Supremacy marked the end of the pope's authority over the English Church. With the monarch as the Head of the Church, church and state were one in England. To oppose the monarch in religious matters was treason. Among those who refused to take the oath of supremacy was the noted English humanist, Thomas More.
Trained as a lawyer and historian, More (1478 - 1535) was a close friend of King Henry and served in Henry's government. Deeply committed in his faith to the Church, More shared his friend Erasmus' discomfort with corruption in the Church. His most famous book, Utopia (1516), describing an imaginary perfect society, was intended to call attention to the abuses in his own society. Raised to the position of Chancellor, the highest-ranking officer of the royal government, More became increasingly disturbed by Henry's efforts to separate England from the supremacy of the pope. Choosing loyalty to the Church over loyalty to the king, More was arrested for treason and executed. In 1935 the Catholic Church proclaimed him a saint.
Queen Anne gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1533. When a son was born dead in 1536, Henry, alarmed, sought a speedy end to the marriage. Accused of adultery, the unfortunate Anne was arrested and executed, never to know that her daughter would become the most famous and powerful of all English monarchs. Henry married Jane Seymour, and a son, Edward, was born in 1537. Queen Jane died in childbirth. Henry lost his queen but had his heir. He would marry three more times before his death. There would be no other children.
(For a list of Henry's other wives, see the end of this reading.)
In 1536 Henry ordered the dissolution of all the Catholic monasteries in England. The lands held by the monasteries (one-tenth of the land in England) were divided and sold. Those who bought the lands were largely of the nobility and landed gentry and consequently became more fully committed to Henry's break from Rome. A return to papal authority could mean the loss of the lands and therefore was to be avoided. A Catholic rebellion, encouraged by Pope Paul III, was weak in its organization and leadership and was easily suppressed.
Henry's Church of England essentially remained Catholic in its teaching and doctrine. The Bible was translated into English, but the basic beliefs of the Catholic faith remained in place. Henry reaffirmed the doctrine of transubstantiation as the basis of the mass and gave conservative interpretation to other practices of Catholic faith. Nonetheless, the break with Rome had opened England to the new Protestant thinking and, despite the opposition of the aging king, a small but growing Protestant element developed in circles close to the crown.
With the death of Henry in 1547, the crown passed to his ten-year old son, Edward VI. Weak and sickly, young Edward came easily under the influence of those who would advise him. Counseled first by his mother's relatives and then by the Duke of Northumberland and Archbishop Cranmer, Edward tolerated further religious reform, and the Church of England became more Protestant in its doctrine. Cranmer edited a new Book of Common Prayer to serve as the basic liturgical framework for the church. Purposely ambiguous in its wording, the prayer book sought to appeal to a wide range of religious opinion and thus prevent division of the population into hostile camps. By the end of Edward's reign, however, the Protestant influence in the church was becoming more pronounced.
The sixteen-year old Edward died of tuberculosis in 1553. With no male heirs to succeed him, the crown passed to his oldest half-sister, Mary. Mary’s succession was briefly marred by an unsuccessful attempt by the Duke of Northumberland to put his daughter-in-law Jane Grey on the throne. As the daughter of Henry and Catherine, Mary had been raised as a devout Catholic by her mother. She had been appalled and outraged by her father's treatment of her mother and break with Rome. She had become increasingly alarmed by the growing Protestant heresy and vowed to return England to its proper place in what she believed to be God's true Church.
Realizing that she could not restore England to Catholicism without the support of Parliament, Mary initially pursued a policy of moderation rather than harsh reaction. She promised to guarantee the possession of the former church lands to their present holders. She encouraged leading Protestant scholars and theologians to leave England. (Many took exile in Geneva, then under the leadership of John Calvin.) Parliament responded by passing laws repealing all acts relating to religion made during the reign of Edward VI.
In 1554 Parliament repealed the Act of Supremacy and appealed to Pope Julius III for spiritual reunion with Rome. With the restoration of the old heresy laws, Mary ordered the arrest of those leading Protestants still in England. In the resulting persecution some three hundred reformers, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer among them, were executed by burning at the stake. These "Smithfield Fires" only served to strengthen reformist opposition by providing the Protestants with martyrs. The executions earned Mary the epithet, "Bloody Mary." A wave of popular revulsion swept through England, and the restoration to Catholicism slowed to a stop.
Concerned for the succession and hoping to preserve the restoration to Catholicism, Mary sought marriage to Prince Philip, the Hapsburg heir to Spain. Mary did not want the crown to pass to her half-sister Elizabeth who was known to be sympathetic to the reformers. Philip, young, handsome, and a powerful champion of the Catholic Church was highly attractive to Mary. The thirty-eight year old Mary was not, however, appealing to Philip. But, out of duty to his father, Charles V, who saw value in a Hapsburg-Tudor marriage, Philip agreed to wed the English queen.
Mary and Philip were married by proxy in 1554 according to the terms of a marriage treaty negotiated by Parliament whereby the independence of England was guaranteed. In the four years of their marriage, Philip visited Mary for only a few months. Desperately wanting a child, Mary became increasingly despondent as Philip purposely avoided being with her. Philip became King of Spain in 1556, and their relationship was reduced to pathetic letters from Mary attesting to her love for him. Philip did not reply.
The disappointment of her personal life coupled with the growing hostility of her people (the Spanish alliance was very unpopular), caused Mary to become more and more isolated. When England joined Spain in a costly war with France that caused the loss of the city of Calais, England's only continental possession, Mary's tragedy was complete. Severely depressed, she died in 1558. Modern medical historians attribute Mary’s death to ovarian cancer.
The crown now passed to twenty-five year old Elizabeth, Mary's half-sister by the marriage of Henry to Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth was all that Mary was not. She was beautiful, vivacious, learned, and relatively open-minded. Above all, she was dedicated to the well-being of her kingdom and was determined to avoid having England fall under any foreign influence, including the pope. Likewise, she was determined to resolve the religious issue and avoid the kind of religious civil war that had devastated the German states and was threatening France.
The Edwardian reformation and Mary's attempt to restore Catholicism had caused a potentially very serious division among the English people. Conservative Catholics wanted the restoration to continue. The Protestants, many of whom were now of the more extreme Calvinist position, wanted to continue to reform the church. As did her father and sister, Elizabeth would work with Parliament.
In 1559 Parliament passed a new Act of Supremacy making the queen the "Supreme Governor" of the Anglican Church, as the Church of England had come to be called. A new Book of Common Prayer was approved and an Act of Uniformity was passed requiring all English people to accept the liturgy and doctrine of the Anglican Church. Thus, the Anglican Church became the established Church of England - the national and only legal form of spiritual expression. Roman Catholicism and all other forms of Christian expression – including the various forms of Protestantism – became illegal.
In 1563 Parliament approved the Thirty-Nine Articles, the basic statement of Anglican doctrine. Together, the Thirty-Nine Articles and the prayer book show the Anglican Church to be a moderate "middle way" between the spiritual extremes of Catholicism and Protestantism.
Because the Anglican Church recognized the monarch as its head rather than the pope and because of its position on the sacraments and liturgy, it was a Protestant church. Like the Catholic Church it retained an "episcopal" structure - a hierarchy of archbishops, bishops, and priests in a province, diocese, and parish administrative system. As in the Catholic Church, Anglican ritual and services were elaborately ceremonial. As in Protestant churches, the liturgical language of the Anglican Church was English, and Anglican clergy were permitted to marry. According to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith, baptism and communion were the only sacraments with spiritual validity, and faith and adherence to church doctrine were essential for salvation.
In order to appeal to the widest range of people as possible the Anglican Church was intentionally ambiguous in its doctrine and liturgy. By wording its doctrine and liturgy in such a way so as to have several possible interpretations, the Anglican Church sought to appeal to both Catholics and Calvinists. One could interpret the communion bread and wine as being either the actual body and blood of Christ (the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation) or symbolic of the body and blood of Christ (the general Protestant doctrine). Thus, it was hoped that both Catholic and Calvinist could accept the Anglican Church as a valid form of spiritual expression without jeopardizing one's chances for salvation.
For most Englishmen this "Elizabethan settlement" worked and the Anglican Church was accepted. Of course, there were extremist Catholics who were unable to compromise their faith and refused to accept the Anglican settlement seeing it as Protestant heresy. In 1569 a Catholic rebellion led by the Duke of Norfolk in northern England was suppressed, and some 800 rebels were ordered executed. In 1570 the Pope excommunicated Elizabeth from the Catholic Church (to which she never considered herself belonging) and absolved all English Catholics from allegiance to her. Throughout the rest of her reign, there was no serious outbreak of Catholic resistance to the Queen.
On the other end of the spiritual spectrum were those extremist Protestants, largely Calvinists, who saw the Anglican Church as too Catholic. The opponents of the Church, both Catholic and Protestant, were a small minority of the population. In time, however, there would develop a Calvinist element within the Anglican Church that would seek to "purify" it of its "Roman" influences. Taking their inspiration from the theocratic model state set up by Calvin in Geneva, the Puritans sought to remove from English life all "diversions" by which the devil or the pope tempted goodly people into sinful lives. Consequently, they condemned all forms of entertainment and amusements (e.g., theater, gambling, dancing, music, festive celebration of holidays) that the English so much enjoyed. While for Elizabeth more of a nuisance than a threat, the Puritans would in the next century become a significant factor in both the religious and political life of England.
While the reign of Elizabeth I is one of great significance in other areas of English life, the religious settlement is perhaps most important. England would avoid the disaster of religious civil war and be able to concentrate its energies in economic, social, and cultural areas to emerge as one of the major powers of Europe.
The Protestant Reformation in England was the indirect result of the ambitions of the Tudor monarchs to preserve their monarchy and enhance its authority. It began when Henry VIII wanted to secure the succession in a male line and broke with Rome over the issue of a royal divorce. Henry's break with Rome opened the door to Protestant influences which became stronger during the reign of his son, Edward. Reacting to the injustice done her mother, Queen Mary attempted to restore her kingdom to the Catholic faith. When it became obvious that religious differences might divide and destroy the nation, Queen Elizabeth successfully sought an Anglican "middle way" resulting in a national church over which the monarch was the head. The concerns of spiritual truth which initiated the Reformation on the Continent had little relationship to the Reformation in England.
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Henry VIII’s other wives: following the death of Queen Jane in 1537, Henry would marry three more times.
4) Anne of Cleves Cleves was a small German - Lutheran - state. Henry was angry with Emperor Charles V and the marriage brought England into an alliance with some Protestant German states. The marriage (1540) was purely political and ended in divorce several months later. Anne was not physically appealing to Henry.
5) Catherine Howard Young and beautiful, Catherine was of a Catholic family (Henry was again on good terms with Charles V). Evidence surfaced, however, that she had been too promiscuous in her premarital relationships with earlier suitors and alleged that she had committed adultery when married to the King. Found guilty of the charges, she was beheaded in 1542.
6) Catherine Parr (married, 1543) Twice widowed, Catherine was a woman of culture and sensitive to the needs of her ailing new husband. He found comfort with her and she remained queen until his death in 1547.
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The images in this section are from Wikipedia sources on the respective Tudor monarchs.
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Sources for the English Reformation
Brinton, Crane et al. A History of Civilization. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961.
Durant, Will. The Reformation. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957.
Knapton, Earnest. Europe, 1450 – 1815. New York: Scribners, 1958.
Merriman, John. A History of Modern Europe. New York: Norton, 1996.
Palmer, Robert R. et al. A History of the Modern World. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002.
Simon, Edith. Great Ages of Man: The Reformation. New York: Time-Life Books, 1966.
Smith, Lacey Baldwin. This Realm of England. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1971.
Spielvogel, Jackson J. Western Civilization. Minneapolis: West, 1997.
Weir, Alison. The Life of Elizabeth I. New York,: Ballantine Books, 2008.
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