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Not Just the Tudors
What did Henry VIII Believe?
00:48:59
The Gruesome Symmetry of the Six Martyrs: Henry VIII's Religious Turmoil
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
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- [02:19]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Let me tell you the story of the Six Martyrs. In July 1543, Catholics Richard Featherstone, Edward Powell and Thomas Abel were executed at Smithfield in London. They'd been in the Tower for several years and were hanged as traitors for having defended the Pope. Their deaths might be seen as symbols of Henry VIII's break from Rome, an assertion of himself as Supreme Head of the Church of England. Yet at exactly the same time, Robert Barnes, William Jerome and Thomas Garrett were burnt at the stake at Smithfield for heresy. All three were Reformed Evangelicals, what we might call Protestants, although we'll learn that isn't quite the right word. Their heresy was that they had preached Christ's death and passion was the sufficient ransom for the sin of all the world.
- [03:45]
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I trust in no good work that.
- [03:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I ever did, but only in the death of Christ. The promise of justification is without condition. At the stake, William Jerome would demand that all Christians put no trust nor confidence in their works, but in the blood of Christ. In other words, they believed that no good works were necessary for salvation. Salvation and being made right with God, which is called justification, was achieved simply by believing that Jesus Christ died for sinners. This was the Protestant doctrine of justification by grace through faith alone. And it was judged to be heresy in Henry VIII's England. So that's three hanged for treason for being too Catholic and three burned for heresy for being too Protestant. At the same time, the French ambassador, Charles de Mariac, commented, surely it was an extraordinary sight to see die on the same day and hour those who belonged to two opposing parties. Historian Christopher Haig has described it as a gruesome symmetry. It immediately raises questions about our very idea of what happened in the English Reformation. That England moved from being a Catholic country to being a Protestant country. The Deaths of the Six Martyrs suggest that England found itself by 1540 as neither. So what did happen in the 1530s and 1540s? What was the nature of Henry VII's Reformation? And how does this relate to the King's own faith? In a previous explainer, Episode I discussed how and why Henry VIII broke from the Roman Catholic Church. Why, in pursuit of his divorce or annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Because they had no surviving male heir and because of his love for Anne Boleyn. But it was framed in terms of a scrupulosity that pricked his conscience. That his inability to get an annulment granted by the Pope led him to seek an alternative way out. Which came from citing biblical texts stating that the union of a man and his brother's wife was contrary to God's law and Henry's sonlessness was a divine punishment for his breaking of that law. And from a body of evidence buttressing a claim that English kings enjoyed spiritual supremacy in their realms which could not be overruled by the Pope's jurisdiction. This made Henry supreme head of the Church in England and meant that the annulment of an English king's marriage could only be decided in England and not Rome. And how, through a series of steps that turned the doctrine of the Royal Supremacy into law, allowing Henry along the way to have his marriage to Catherine Arnauld and marry Anne, which he did. Nevertheless, in reverse order, I also mentioned how an act of Succession required every male subject to swear to the lawfulness of Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn, with a preamble that named the King as Supreme Head of the Church. Thomas More, Bishop John Fisher and three Carthusian monks refused to swear and were consequently executed for treason. None of this had anything to do with the emerging schism in the Church in Europe between those followers of Martin Luther who were coming to be called Protestants, and those who cleaved still to the Roman Catholic Church. In England in the 1530s, Protestant was still only used to refer to German Lutherans. But there were some people, those known as evangelicals, who believed similar things. That the Church needed reforming according to Scripture, who stressed the possibility of an unmediated faith in which priests did not need to offer absolution nor saints to intercede, but one in which the believer could approach God directly in their mother tongue and be made right with God by believing in God's grace offered through Jesus Christ. Anne Boleyn wasn't evangelical. Dr. Lucy Widding explains a bit more about what that means.
- [07:54]
Dr. Lucy Widding
The relationship with Anne Boleyn was important, but I think part of the reason why he was so attracted to her was because she already represented things that were important to him outside of just affairs of the heart. Henry is constructing himself as a Renaissance prince, and part of that involves erudition, interest in some of the intellectual advances of the day. So he is very interested in humanism. He's proud of knowing Erasmus, one of the greatest humanists of the time. And humanism is a tricky concept to define, of course, but one of the things it involves is, see an interest in the classics, but also an interest in the Bible and in adhering to the true word of the Bible and perhaps questioning some of the existing translations. It's certainly true that Henry patronizes the study of Greek and Hebrew, the two biblical languages. So I think he was always going to be interested in currents of religious reform, and that's already led him to write a book against Luther in 1521. I think he would have been a reformer anyway. But of course, at this point in time, you can be a reformer and Stay a Catholic, this is not a problem. And indeed, again, if you looked at his parents in law, Ferdinand and Isabella had done quite a lot to promote Catholic Reformation. Monastic orders were being reformed, universities were being founded, colleges, and the question of biblical translation was a very sort of hot topic. And so too the education of clerics and the sort of improvement of clerical standards and the promotion of education generally. So all of these things, I think he would have been interested in these. And when Anne Boleyn comes along, obviously she's been raised at the French court, she has a translation of the New Testament into the vernacular, in this case the French vernacular. She is also, I think, excited by some of these ideas of reform and reconstruction. But you can do all of that without having to turn to Protestantism.
- [10:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Now, Henry VIII was devout, that's certain. In his early years, he'd gone on pilgrimage. He heard Mass several times a day. In 1521, he'd written a book, Assertio septum Sacramentorum, the Defence of the Seven Sacraments, which defended the Pope against the attacks of Martin Luther, whom Henry hated. As we've seen, he preferred to think of the end of his marriage to Catherine as a theological question. And he liked to read and write theology. It was what he did as he grieved Jane seymour's death. Historian J.J. scaransbrick, describing Henry's faith, perhaps rather unfairly said, it was a formal, habitual thing, devoid of much interiority. Perhaps it was, though preeminent in the extent to which it permitted both self delusion and self aggrandizement. Now, two of the great debates among historians have been how far Henry's new church reflected evangelical beliefs and what Henry VIII's role was in the creation of that church. Which come down to the same question, really, as we'll see. One set of historians, including people like David Starkey, described the divorce and break from Rome as a politically expedient act to satisfy the King's desire for an heir and every attendant or subsequent act of religious reformation as incidental and unintended by the King. These historians sometimes paint Henry as a king who could be easily manipulated by his close associates, a puppet whose suspicious, fickle and callous personality meant that he could be controlled by the dominant group or faction at court. They attribute bursts of religious reform, for example, in the 1530s, to the influence of evangelicals at court, such as Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer, Henry's Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533, and retreats from reform in the 1540s as subsequent control by those who were conservative. In religion. In this reading, evangelicals at court could tempt and confound the king into religious reform that Henry never intended nor foresaw. A more recent theory has rejected this view of Henry as a vacillating pawn of his ministers and stressed instead the evidence of the King's firm direction of the Reformation. From the very beginning, the Henrysian Reformation was just that, writes George Bernard, a Reformation begotten, nurtured and finally almost smothered in its infancy by its creator, Henry VIII himself. It was Henry's undertaking and not Cromwell's, Bernard suggests, though doubtless the latter left some mark. Henry may have been ruthless, but he was also deliberate and rational, choosing to do what he considered to be in the best interests of his country and church. The impetus of the Reformation was the conscience of the king, and his conscience defined the religious system of a whole kingdom. At first sight, there does seem to be evidence of a burst of religious reform in the late 1530s, followed by steps to limit reform. Is this a result of those, whether evangelicals or conservatives, who had influence over the king? Was it the result of Henry's own erratic, if incoherent, reading of his role as Supreme Head? Or was there beneath it all, a systematic and overarching logic? Let's look at the evidence. In 1536, the 10 articles were published. These were a quickly composed but authoritative statement of doctrine of the new Hemrician Church. And they were based on the Wittenberg Articles, a compromise reached with the Lutheran princes of Germany. Like many of Henry's later proclamations, they show a preoccupation with unity and concord in his kingdom, and they tell us that they were written by Henry himself. They're entitled Articles Devised by the King's.
- [14:03]
Professor Alec Ryrie
Highness Majesty to Stabilize Christian quietness and.
- [14:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Unity among us and to avoid contentious opinions. So what are the points of this doctrinal statement? Well, the first one was that it reduced the number of sacraments to just baptism, Eucharist and penance, not the seven of the Roman Catholic Church. What was a sacrament? Let's listen to Professor Alec Rybery.
- [14:29]
Professor Alec Ryrie
A sacrament, in the classic definition, is a visible sign of an invisible grace. So it's a physical outward activity that is understood to have been divinely ordained or mandated, and which comes with the promise that when it is performed appropriately, that God will bestow grace on those for whom or by whom it's being performed. The word is applied quite loosely in the early years of Christianity to a whole range of physical activity that's part of worship can have that term applied. To it, such as the washing of feet by the penitent on Maundy Thursday, that sort of thing by clergy. But by the High Middle Ages, this list has been formalised into seven sacraments, which are themselves divided into three major sacraments, which are the ones that are seen as normally necessary for salvation for every individual and minority. Sacraments, such as ordination or matrimony, which there's no obligation for an individual to go through. The three major sacraments, which are the ones worth thinking about, are baptism and penance and the Eucharist. The Eucharist, the Mass, Holy Communion, the Lord's Supper. Number of different names for the same rite, and none of those names are uncontested. Baptism, in some ways, is the most fundamental, because in standard Catholic theology, baptism is absolutely necessary for salvation. So arguably, that's the most important. Baptism is understood to wipe away that stain of original sin. So the guilt of inherited sin that you get simply by being human, by being descended from Adam and Eve, that stain can be wiped away by baptism, which is why the assumption is that an infant who dies after being baptized, but before being old enough to be culpable of sin in their own right, will be saved, which, during an era of such high infant mortality, is a very significant point. It's one of the reasons why babies are baptized as soon as possible after birth, or even in the case of a child, whose life is despaired of and sometimes baptized even before they're fully born. But baptism only wipes out the stain of sins that you have committed up to the point of being baptized, those that you've inherited, or, if you're baptized later in life, those that you've committed up to that point. So that's great. But unless you're baptized on your deathbed, it doesn't help you with the sins that you are continuing to commit. And so the standard approach for that is what Jerome calls the second plank of our salvation, to rescue us from the shipwreck of our souls, which is the sacrament of penance, of formally confessing your sins to a priest, being allocated penance to perform penitential acts to free yourself of the stain of sin, and then to receive formal absolution from the priest who's empowered to declare you free of the guilt and of the penalty of sin.
- [17:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
The 10 articles, therefore, kept the three major sacraments, but dispensed with the minor. A second point of this doctrinal statement was that Christ's body and blood were. Were present in the Eucharist. The Roman Catholic understanding of the Mass was that the bread and wine mystically became Christ's body and bloody, was changed in substance. This was known in theological terms as transubstantiation. Luther had reached a slightly different position, that they remained bread and wine and also were Christ's body and blood. This is a doctrine known as real presence, later called consubstantiation. But there was another position held by the sacramentarians and later by the Protestants, which was that the Eucharist, which means thanksgiving or communion, was simply a way of remembering what Christ had done, a memorial, that he wasn't really present in the bread and wine which remained bread and wine. The 10 articles didn't use the word transubstantiation, but they expressed a doctrine that was something like that of the Roman Catholic Church, perhaps somewhere between that of the Roman Catholic Church and Luther. Christ's body and blood were present in the Eucharist. The other major doctrinal points of the 10 articles were that confession and absolution by priests was necessary, that justification, being made right with God, came through the merits of Christ's passion attained by contrition and faith joined with charity, and that the use of images and prayers to saints were permitted, though not in excess. To understand this, let's ask Professor Alec Ryrie to remind us of what Protestants and Catholics believed about how one could be justified, how one could be made right with God or saved.
- [19:23]
Professor Alec Ryrie
So it is an absolutely standard orthodoxy throughout the later part of the Middle Ages and through the Reformation on all sides, that fundamentally, if Christians are to be saved, they're to be saved by faith, by the action of Christ, that by faith, God's grace is what underpins it. So you'll sometimes hear it said that the dispute in the Reformation is between salvation by faith versus salvation by works. That's not the case. Nobody believes in salvation by works. What's distinctive about the view that Martin Luther ends up taking, which becomes unexpectedly but very persuasive to an awful lot of people, is he is arguing, no, you are saved by faith and by grace alone. It's not the emphasis and the importance of faith and grace, everyone believes in that, but the exclusion of any kind of cooperative human activity as a part of it. The classic structure of late medieval Catholic theology sees God's grace, Christ's sacrifice, as fundamental, and the faith that we place in it as fundamental, but salvation also, including an element of human cooperation, at the very least of willingness to receive that gift. So there's a degree of human agency still left in it, the Protestants come to argue, that is Unacceptable, and know that salvation by faith must mean salvation by faith alone.
- [20:56]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
For Protestants, salvation was by faith alone, but Henry's was not. This. In other words, the 10 articles, as the doctrinal statement of a Reformation Church, actually set out a fairly conservative program where salvation depended on good works as much as faith, a tenet that Henry held until his death. Yet reducing the number of sacraments from seven to three downgraded in one fell swoop, the sacraments which boosted clerical power and status, confirmation, extreme unction, priestly ordination and marriage were out. Reducing the power of the clergy, Henry boosted his own sacred status as Supreme Head. What other evidence do we have? In 1535, Henry had appointed Thomas Cromwell as Vicar General and Vicegerent of Spirituals, giving him effective exercise of the newly established Royal Supremacy on Henry's behalf. In 1535-36, Cromwell carried out a survey of the monastic houses, the Vala Ecclesiasticus, the Worth of the Church, which assessed the value of each institution, and a Royal visitation of those monastic houses, the Compendium Compaturum, which sought to identify vice and laxity, namely the practice of superstitions like relics and sexual activity among the monks. We shouldn't be surprised that they found what they were looking for. What followed was the gradual dissolution of all the monasteries, starting in 1536 with the lesser Monasteries, those with an income of less than £200, and by 1538, gathering steam until it had become nothing less than a determined destruction of monasticism. Over 800 religious houses were dissolved between 1536 and 1540 and the monks and nuns within them were unceremoniously dumped back into the community, while the lands and income of the foundations were absorbed by the Crown or parcelled out to the nobility as the Crown saw fit. This was a decisive and dramatic change. Across the country, people had witnessed the dissolution and destruction of the monasteries and it altered the religious landscape of England permanently. Somewhere between a third and a fifth of all the lands of England went into the King's possession and were sold by him through the Court of Augmentations. The greatest land redistribution since the Norman Conquest. The largest windfall of cash for the Crown in English history. So why the monasteries? Here's Matthew Lyons on the reason for their dissolution.
- [23:25]
Matthew Lyons
I think money is the go to answer, because there was so much money, although Henry blew it really. Nevertheless, for a few years it transformed finances of the Crown. I think also there's issues around power and also from Henry's point of view, fear, I think, because obviously the Oath of Supremacy is Something that's very important to him for all sorts of reasons. 1534, 1535. I mean, that's why they went to such efforts to get Thomas More and Bishop Fisher to agree. And it's why a number of Carthusians in London did ultimately die, because they refused to take it. But Cromwell personally visited the Carthusians to try and persuade them. And it was very important to have that buy in from institutions that have a lot of status collectively, have a lot of impact in terms of the community. Henry wasn't wrong necessarily to be concerned about opposition from the monastic orders. One of the issues is also the orders who seemed to oppose Henry in his activities were the ones that everyone regarded as the most morally upright. So that, I think was a concern for Henry.
- [24:30]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I'm sort of digging into a much bigger question for those who haven't spent their lives reading about the 1530s. There is a debate, would be a mild word for it, between historians about those who feel that Henry VIII is driving things through when it comes to the Reformation and those who feel that Thomas Cromwell was the real originator of the Reformation. Cromwell's men are obviously those who are doing this work. But do you see it originating as an idea for, from Henry that Cromwell is carrying out, or do you feel Cromwell has more of a role in initiating this?
- [25:04]
Matthew Lyons
The valour Ecclesiasticus and the Visitations, we can see that they lead to the dissolution, but in a sense Henry had just taken control of the Church. So he had this huge perfect society to govern and they needed processes. And those processes, if you take financial and administrative say, those could be perfectly normal things to do, having taken charge of the monasteries. And I think you can certainly see Cromwell's hand in those administrative processes. Clearly there is a theological drive from Cromwell, but you can also certainly see like Henry's hand in the mix through like the early stages of the Visitation, when Cromwell's might have just started. Richard Leighton gets called back to court. Cromwell calls him back to court because Henry wants to formalize the injunctions against the monsters. He's ensured that they're being strict enough with them. And later on, when they start looking more closely at sexual impropriety, that follows on from meeting with Cromwell the King. Cromwell's agents at Winchester. Henry's fingerprints are all over it. Even if he isn't necessarily driving towards a goal of dissolution, it's certain that.
- [26:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Their great wealth made them an obvious target for a revenue hungry king. Even by targeting the lesser monasteries, the crown stood likely to receive a massive injection of Cash and the transfer of resources was hardly disguised. Henry redeployed the church windows of Royally Abbey outside Oxford to light his bowling abbey at Hampton Court. But the monasteries were also suspected of treasonous tendencies and were tainted by their allegiance to a foreign ruler, the Pope. Perhaps, though, there were also reasons to believe that there was some measure of religious reform intended, whether by Cromwell or by Henry himself. By their dissolution, the monasteries existed primarily to pray for the souls of the dead in purgatory. Purgatory, one of the three pillars of medieval Catholicism, was a place of purging, a place to pay off one's debts. The idea was that one could confess one's sin to a priest and be forgiven. But there remained a debt to be paid through the performance of penances or worked off in purgatory. It was an optimistic, hopeful time, limited and purposeful belief. One could affect the afterlife now, both one's own and that of one's loved ones, speeding up their time in purgatory by praying for them after their deaths. But over the years after 1536, the Crown issued a series of official statements that cast doubt on a range of traditional doctrines and practices, including purgatory and prayer for the souls of the dead. The dissolution of the monasteries meant the elimination of the powerhouses of traditional religion in England. These official statements were put out in royal injunctions and proclamations. This is Dr. John Cooper.
- [27:44]
E Trade
The obvious thing you notice about this proclamation when you look at it is it comes with a thumping great representation of the royal arms up in the top left hand corner. It is a simplified version of the royal arms. So this is clearly intended to be a popular image of royal power. And then the text is printed and it's comparatively easy to read. And it also comes with kind of an acclamation or almost a shout at the end, in huge typeface. God save the King. We can tell immediately from that that whoever read out this proclamation for the abolishing of the power of the Pope, and we know that these proclamations were read out in pubs and in churches and in market crosses for people to hear in the 1530s. We know that whoever read that out would have ended with a God save the King. And there would have been an absolute expectation that everybody would have shouted God save the King and thrown their caps in the air if they had a cap. It's widely rumored that wherever people assemble in the 1530s, that Cromwell had agents in the crowd and those agents were watching for dissenters. They were watching for people who sneered or didn't throw their caps in the air or didn't enthusiastically shout out God Save the King. Now we tend to associate the origins of an English secret service with the Elizabethan period, with Francis Walsingham. In fact, I wrote a book on that very subject. But actually it's a reminder that these sorts of agents were in operation, I think in crowds in the 1530s to police dissent. There were a lot of people who weren't happy with the abolishing of the power of the Pope. There were a lot of people who weren't happy with the dissolution of the monasteries. And so this document, really, it's an act of enforcement of that. And it would have been met with a whole variety of responses, I think, from excitement and patriotism through to grudging acceptance and out and out fear. And so looking at the original document like this, one can almost recover that set of the varied responses of Tudor crowds to the Reformation Foreign.
- [30:03]
Dr. Lucy Widding
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
These proclamations, probably authored by Cromwell, included restricting the use of images and the veneration of saints and commanding the destruction of shrines and an end to the practice of pilgrimage. This meant that parish churches found their church furniture changed or destroyed. Shrines and roods were removed with long lasting consequences. In February 1538, the rood of grace from Boxley Abbey was hawked around Kent and shown with great mirth and merriment to the court at Whitehall, finally destroyed at St Paul's Cross, where John Hilsey, Bishop of Rochester, preached against idolatry. Also in 1538, Henry VIII took pleasure in the destruction of the shrine of Thomas Becket, a martyr to papal interest and clerical autonomy. Shrines and images were all seen as idolatrous, and in an idea that we'll explore more in a bit, Henry seems to have come to see himself in the model of an Old Testament king like David or Josiah, with responsibility before God for purifying worship and purging idols. In the King's Book of 1543, a statement of Doctrine, the Introduction has the comment that by the help of God and His Word, the king had travailed to purge and cleanse the realm. It's surely with this end in mind that May 1538 saw the one and only burning of a Catholic, Catherine of Aragon's former confessor Friar Forrest, at the stake as a heretic. Catholic executions were usually for treason. Burning heretics was thought to cleanse society from the disorder and pollution of the heretics sin. Also crucially, in these years Cromwell oversaw the production and distribution of an English Bible only seven years after the Royal Proclamation of 1530 had made it a criminal offence to possess or read an English Bible. In August 1537 Cromwell licensed a Bible printed under the name of Thomas Matthew, which some historians think may have been the work of Tyndale himself. Although he'd been martyred the previous year and commissioned a new version to be produced by Myles Coverdale. This was the great Bible, with its magnificent frontispiece which shows Henry in the full regalia of a sacred king and under a rather squashed God, munificently handing out the word of God to the people. In September 1538, the order was given for English Bibles to be put in every parish church in the land and extracts from the New Testament to be read out to people during all services on Sundays and holy days. This commitment to vernacular Scripture was the manifestation of a keenly evangelical doctrine. It also was, though the logical doctrinal principle behind Henry's divorce. Scripture was necessarily superior to papal or canon law, and how were people to know what to do if they were not told? This reform, especially the dissolution of the monasteries, had consequences. Late 1536 saw a great rebellion against the Crown across the north of England. The Pilgrimage of Grace was a series of linked rebellions in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Some 40 to 50,000 rebels, principally a reaction to the Crown's interference with the fabric of local religious culture and to the closure of monasteries. The rebel banner was tellingly the Five Wounds of Christ. And the rebel demands were outlined in a document called the Pontefraction articles. Of these 24 articles, nine dealt with religious grievances and these headed up the document. They included demands for the suppression of heresies, the punishment of heretics, the restitution of the Pope's spiritual authority, the re establishment of the monasteries and observant friars and the restoration of the liberties of the Church. The demand to have the Supreme Head of the Church touching curae animarium to be reserved unto the See of Rome as before it was accustomed to be. That is, rejecting Henry's role as supreme head responsible for the care of souls, was particularly inflammatory. Up until now, everything we've heard about is reform. Perhaps partly in response to this, or as a result of conservative influence at court. The years after 1538 saw some significant limits put on reform and some historians argue that at this juncture, the Hemrician Reformation entered a period of reaction. In November 1538, when a man called John Lambert refused to believe that the bread and the wine were anything other than symbols of Christ's body and blood. The King, dressed in white, the colour of theological purity, personally presided over his trial at Hampton Court and condemned him to Bern as a heretic. The trial and Lambert's death were a way for Henry to delineate the boundaries of his reformation. And one of the key issues was upholding this very Catholic definition of the Eucharist. Here's Lucy Wooding again.
- [37:00]
Dr. Lucy Widding
He is always a very staunch defender of the Mass and in particular the Eucharistic doctrine at the heart of the Mass. Anyone questioning whether the bread and wine and the Eucharist become the flesh and blood of Christ, he has no time for that at all. That is always heresy in his eyes.
- [37:19]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Which leads to that extraordinary moment where he's presiding over the trial of John.
- [37:23]
Dr. Lucy Widding
Lambert in white as the epitome of pure justice. Yes, a slightly worrying piece of play acting, really. He seems to have taken the Royal Supremacy way, way too seriously. When people start thinking that they are in fact the mouthpiece of God, it's.
- [37:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Often problem.
- [37:50]
Dr. John Cooper
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- [38:21]
BetterHelp
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- [39:01]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
In 1539, Parliament passed the act of the Six Articles, An act, quote, abolishing diversity in opinions. This act affirmed six points. The real presence of Christ in the bread and wine, that communion of both kinds, that is both bread and wine, was not necessary for the laity, that priests were not to marry, that vows of chastity and widowhood were to be kept, that private masses were to continue, that conceded they were not necessary, and that auricular confession, that is Confession to a priest out loud, was necessary. Fearsome penalties were promised for those denying the articles. Evangelicals called it the whip with six strings. Some historians argue that with the act of Six Articles, the Reformation came to a grinding halt. But how much of a step backwards was this act? The key is that the Articles did not roll back any of the reforms of the 1530s and avoided mention of the primary fault lines between Protestants and Catholics at the time. Purgatory images, prayers to saints, the authority of the Bible, predestination and justification by grace, truth, faith. In addition, the affirmation of the real presence of Christ in the body and blood was at the time still widely accepted in evangelical circles. Even someone like Cranmer, who would later change his position. In other words, John Lambert was more radical than most mainstream evangelicals in England in the late 1530s. But still the clauses on the mass and clerical marriage were a serious blow to the evangelical cause, and the Six Articles dashed hopes for further change. The purpose of the Articles was to proclaim Hemretian orthodoxy at that moment and to signal that some areas were off limits for Henry's Reformation. Evangelicals must have been hoping for further Reformation on these points. Cramer himself had secretly married the niece of the reformer Andreas Osiander when on a diplomatic mission to Nuremberg in 1532 and had to keep her hidden. And obedience to the dictates of the Hemrician Church had tragic domestic consequences for some. In 1539, Cromwell received a letter from John Foster, a priest hoping for a place at court who had rashly married, and wrote that in the light of the Six Articles prohibition on clerical marriage, he had sent his wife away three score miles from me. Perhaps the greatest blow to continuing Reformation was, however, the loss of Thomas Cromwell, whom some historians think to have been the real architect of reform. In July 1540, on the day that Henry married Catherine Howard, Henry's first minister himself was executed. There are various possible reasons why the official explanation was that Cromwell had left the mean, indifferent, true and virtuous way. Some historians have suggested Henry realised that Cromwell was supporting too wide a range of reform causes, and the 1540 Commission, which investigated heresy in Calais, had hinted that Cromwell would not enforce the Six Articles. Above all, it was probably that Henry felt that Cromwell had got him into a mess in terms of diplomacy, marriage, the disastrous marriage to Anne of Cleves, politics and theology, and failed to get him out of it. One historian, Miles F Shaw, concluded that Henry's psychology is instructive. In all but seven years of his reign, Henry relied on one single trusted person of power and influence, who each in turn took an equally disproportionate amount of blame and came to ruin. The idolization of These people, Catherine, Wolsey, Anne and Cromwell meant a proclivity to disappointment when they failed to live up to perfection. Shaw says that Henry's vindictiveness towards them can be explained by the transformation of his shame and humiliation at failure into rage at the person he blamed for the failure. This must explain Henry's lack of pity. Despite Cromwell's ardent and impassioned letters of petition under arrest from the Tower, Cromwell wrote to if it were in my power to make you live forever, God knows I would or to make you so rich that you should enrich all men, or so powerful that all the world should obey you, for you, Majesty has been most bountiful to me and more like a father than a master. At the bottom of his letter, his appeal to Henry was I cry for mercy, Mercy, Mercy. None was forthcoming. After Cromwell's death, two further innovations hampered reform. The King's Book, that was its nickname, its original title, was a necessary doctrine and erudition for any Christian man, Set further by the King's Majesty and so on, was published in May 1543. It reworked a statement of doctrine known as the Bishop's Book, a new, authoritative statement of doctrine composed by Henry's bishops chiefly, the King's Book rejected the bishop's evangelical conviction that men could be saved by grace through faith alone, and not by works. An example of Henry's emendations to the text of the Bishop's Book illustrates this perfectly. This is what the Bishop's book the penitent must conceive certain hope and faith, that God will forgive him his sins and repute him justified, and of the number of his elect children, not for the worthiness of any merit or work done by the penitent, but for the only merits of the blood and passion of our Saviour Christ. Henry changed this. The penitent must conceive certain hope and faith, that God will forgive him his sins and repute him justified, and of the number of his elect children, not only for the worthiness of any merit or work done by the penitent, but chiefly for the only merits of the blood and passion of our Saviour Christ. By adding only and chiefly, Henry reversed the meaning to return to Professor Alec Ryrie. The distinction between Catholics and Protestants on this was a fine one. Luther's position on justification was to separate.
- [45:26]
Professor Alec Ryrie
These two things, justification and sanctification, from each other. So he says, justification is a simple decree from God, who says, I am going to decide by my own initiative, by virtue of my sacrifice, by virtue of Christ's sacrifice that this person, this human being, this sinner, is to be regarded as just. It's a decree. In a sense, it's false because the person is not at that point just. It is simply that God is stating his willingness to see the human being in that way, not because of their own virtues, they don't have any, but because of Christ's. It is in that sense a gift. And a gift in the purest sense, an entirely undeserved gift, given wholly of God's initiative. And crucially, a gift which the recipient does not even have to do anything to receive. It's received by faith, but the faith itself is the first gift through which it's received. So at that point, you as the sinner, are what Luther calls simul justus et piccato. You are simultaneously justified and a sinner. You are both things at once. You're justified in the eyes of God. But in reality, although both things are real, you are also still a sinner. And sanctification then for him becomes the slow lifelong process by which that contradiction is resolved, which again is something that's incomplete at death. So moral effort is hugely important. Good works are hugely important in the Lutheran scheme. But you are not saved by your moral effort. Rather, you carry out moral effort because you have been saved, because God has made this decree. You are then filled with gratitude, but also shame because you recognize how the reality of your life falls short of the righteousness with which you've been clothed. And so you work. And you are also given the grace to work to bring yourself to that level. So good works continue to be hugely important. Your agency is important. In some ways, your agency only becomes possible at this point because up till then you were enslaved to sin. You couldn't do good works no matter how hard you try, because there would always be contaminated with your sinful intentions in one way or another. Apart from anything else, you might be thinking, oh, if I do these good works, maybe I'll persuade God to save me. And so you're not doing good works at all, as Luther would say. You're simply trying to bargain with God. I think the point in its own terms is a very powerful one, that good works done in order to save yourself are not truly good works. That's simply enlightened self interest, that truly good works are ones that are done in gratitude for your salvation, in the sense that you, as he would say, you don't obey your parents in order to make them love you. You obey your parents because you love them. That you actually want to do so. It's only then that your obedience becomes real rather than grudging. So that's the way that Luther finds his way through this. But it's important to say that for a lot of others, including maybe most importantly, Luther's great debating partner and antagonist Erasmus, the final steps he takes there to separate sanctification from justification, to separate the process of actually performing good works from the process of being saved. This is appalling. He thinks this is a license to moral anarchy, that you're effectively saying to people, no, you can be saved regardless of how you behave, which is not what Luther's saying, but you can see the point.
- [49:36]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And in the King's Book, Henry sided with Erasmus here. He believed that good works could not be separated from the process of being saved. His conviction was that salvation, justification, being made right with God, was only possible by both belief and good works, or, as he called it, charity. Rejecting the potentially anarchic Lutheran dogma of justification by grace through faith alone, the King's Book also fudged the issue of prayers for the dead, an issue that Henry never seems to have resolved satisfactorily for himself. It conceded that prayer for the dead was praiseworthy and beneficial, but denied that one can pray for a specific dead person or know how prayers could assist the dead. Though this reservation did not stop Henry leaving the vast sum for prayers to be said for his own soul in his will, as we'll see. Finally, in 1543, Parliament issued the act for the Advancement of True Religion. This act was primarily a proclamation against heretical books, as it stated, somewhat despairingly, that the number of heretical books had increased to an infinite number and unknown diversities of titles and names. It imposed a hefty fine for the possession of heretical books and as a result, the printing of evangelical books virtually ceased. But crucially, it also restricted access to the English Bible to nobles, gentry and merchants, barring all women, artificers, apprentices, journeymen, serving men under the influence of yeomen, husbandmen and labourers from reading the Bible. In other words, women and any man of a lowlier status than a merchant or a member of gentry. This restriction suggests that the pace of reform handing out the Bible to the masses, was now perceived as over hasty and steps were made to revoke this freedom. The picture we've built up is of steps towards limited reform. Up until 1538, the 10 articles, restricting the number of sacraments to three and reducing clerical power, the dissolution of the monasteries, clampdowns on superstitious practices such as the use of images, shrines, the veneration of saints and pilgrimages and the publication of a Bible in English after 1538, we've drawn a sketch of a period of reaction and steps away from reform. The burning of heretics. The six Articles affirming the real presence in the Eucharist and denying clerical marriage. The death of Cromwell, portrayed by some as the architect of the Reformation, perhaps of being too reformist. The King's Book, which proclaimed that the English Church would not subscribe to the doctrine of justification by grace through faith alone and this restriction on Bible reading. So what was going on here? One set of historians have suggested that this was the result of evangelical influence driving reform and conservative influence driving retreat. In other words, faction. And that it's hard to see coherence or an overarching plan in these events. But there are caveats. The simple time frame of reform and counter reform is muddied by a few awkward little events. 1538 is a particularly difficult year to classify. For example, the very proclamation of November 1538 that finally outlawed the Becket cult and shrine in Canterbury also regulated the import of English books and Bibles and defended traditional ceremonies such as creeping up to the cross on Good Friday. For all the King's doubts about permitting the ordinary laity to debate the Scriptures. A year after Cromwell's existence execution, Henry reinforced the order to have the English Bible in parish churches with the threat of fines. And in 1544, a year after the act for the Advancement of True Religion, a statute moderated the punishments for denying the Six Articles. And a new English litany omitting veneration of the saints and prayer for the dead was published and required to be used from June 1544. Unfortunately for our schemer, reform and counter reform seem at times to have been quite muddled together. We need to consider again Henry VIII's role in all of this. We'll ponder how much Henry VIII's faith drove religious change. How much was the English Reformation the product of the conscience of the King? And by the time Henry died in 1547, had he altered his outlook? What was his deathbed faith? And we'll return finally to the deaths of the six martyrs and how they can be seen as the perfect metaphor for the Reformation under Henry. Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors From History. Hit your old or broken phone can let you down when you need it most. But at Verizon. 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- [55:08]
BetterHelp
This podcast and the following message is brought to you by E Trade for Morgan Stanley With E Trade you can dive into the market with easy to use tools, $0 commissions and a wide range of investments. And now there's even more to love. Get access to industry leading research and insights from Morgan Stanley to help guide your decisions. Open an account and get up to $1,000 or more with a qualifying deposit. Get started today@etrade.com terms and other fees apply. Investing Involves Risks Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC Member SIPIC etrade is a business of Morgan Stanley.