- The Reformation began
as a theological dispute, but it quickly morphed into a political, a territorial,
even a military one, and so it seemed obvious for a long time that one way to describe
it is by using maps. Textbooks, online resources
are full of maps like this one, very useful they are too, but for today, I want you to notice an oddity. Normally, we tell students that
there are two main varieties of Protestant Christianity, Lutheranism and Calvinism. The term Calvinist itself is problematic, but let's not go there today. This map, and there are
many others like it, you will see shows
England as something else, and it also applies this
Anglicanism to the year 1555, when England had actually
just been fully reconciled to Rome, and to Catholicism, but again, let's not be picky. In fact, this is one of
the more detailed maps, with several minor variants represented, but if we look at
broader-brush depictions, we see that the same category, Anglican, is one of only four that makes the cut. And the choice of color
on some of these maps for this Anglicanism doesn't suggest that it's
some kind of minor variation, but something genuinely distinct. In this one, the imperial purple of it
almost leaps off the page. And this isn't just a peculiarity of maps produced by English scholars, for the English market. You might think that the Italians wouldn't
have a dog in this fight, in these intra-Protestant
definitional quarrels, and it's true that the
color of England here is more subtly different, but the key plainly
indicates that in 1598, and I want you to remember that date, England is majority Anglican. Even the Russians, who really are spectators in this drama, mark England out as special, and describe its people as Anglicanstva. So let's be clear, this kind of thing is simply wrong. The English Reformation was not, from the beginning, something different from
its European brethren, to use the word Anglican to describe it, at least until we get past the
era of the English Civil War and the Cromwellian republic is just anachronistic, and indeed, actively misleading. Map makers tend to be conservative, but some of them are
catching up with this. To nail my own colors to
the mast, so to speak, my own recently-published
historical atlas of Christianity uses an image like this, in which 16th century
England is in Calvinist blue, slightly mottled with Catholic pink, and there are no Anglicans in sight. Given that that's my view, you might think that this lecture on England's Anglican Reformation is going to be a short one, but in fact, it's the very fact we're
dealing with a phenomenon that can't be neatly depicted on a map that I think makes this interesting. In 1991, an up-and-coming
English Church historian named Diarmaid MacCulloch, who, in the interest of full disclosure, I should say was my
own doctoral supervisor a few years afterwards, in 1991, he published an
article under the teasing title "The Myth of the English Reformation," teasing because the title seems to suggest that the English Reformation was a myth. But the first line makes it plain: "The myth of the English Reformation "is that it didn't happen, "or that it happened by
accident rather than design, "or that it was half-hearted "and sought a middle way "between Catholicism and Protestantism." And this myth, as he points out, isn't an abstract historical proposition, but it is a claim about
the identity and nature of the institution that we
call the Church of England. It's a claim that, from the beginning of
the English Reformation, the established reformed church in England had a distinctively English quality which set it apart from its
continental counterparts, and that those qualities are characterized by moderation, dignity, a desire to find a middle way
between competing extremes, it was, in a word, Anglican. To be clear, this is, indeed, a myth, but like many myths, it has some foundation in fact, and it also has a stubborn persistence which almost conjures
the myth into reality. So how this turned into this in the way we tell the story, that's our subject for today. Some ground clearing first: the word Anglican was not widely used to describe the distinctive Christianity of the Church of England until after the Restoration of 1660, and even slowly then. The first recorded use of the
word with this meaning was in, as our Italian map
coincidentally guessed, 1598, and it was used by, of all people, King James VI of Scots, who, five years later, was going to become king of England. At this point, he was reassuring his suspicious
Presbyterian subjects that, although he did favor bishops
in the Scottish church, that need not mean what he called, "Papisticall or Anglican bishopping." Over the next few decades, most of the recorded uses of the A-word are again by Scots, using it to refer specifically
to England's bishops. The implication is that England's religion is a sort of decaffeinated
version of Catholicism. So this is an outsider's
word for the phenomenon, and it's one that doesn't really catch on. We could compare it to the way another set of
outsiders spoke about the subject, that is English Catholics, who of course wanted to
deny that the religion, by law established in
post-Reformation England truly was that of the Church of England. In 1616, an English Catholic named
Thomas Harrab, an exile, was trying to argue that Protestants were hopelessly
divided amongst themselves. He reached for a term to
distinguish England's variant, and he came up with Anglianism, and this is how he
explained that neologism, he said, "I call the religion
of England Anglianism "because it, among the rest, "hath no one especial author," so not like Lutheranism or Calvinism, that follow a single heretic, instead it's set forth by
the prince and Parliament. But then Harrab's whole point was to argue that Protestantism was a
kaleidoscope of quarreling variety, and so he wanted to
proliferate subdivisions as much as he could. For whatever reason,
Anglian didn't catch on. Anglican doesn't fare much better, apart from a few Scots. Only during and after the civil war was the word Anglican picked
up south of the border, as we'll see. Before that religion, the distinctive religion of
the pre-war Church of England, was restored in 1660, especially before it
was assaulted in 1640, it's just anachronistic
to refer to Anglicanism, there was no such thing. What there was was a Church of England, the Ecclesia Anglicana, but those terms are problematic too. Before the Reformation, the Church of England was
a geographical expression, the way of referring to a portion of the
Universal Church, Catholic, which happened to be found in one kingdom, it was not a distinctive entity. And it's also an expression that doesn't need to be used very often. The Venerable Bede, my neighbor in Durham, had spoken of the English people as having an ecclesiastical history, but he didn't invoke Ecclesia Anglicana, the term only came into regular use from the 12th century onwards. In later medieval England, substantial uses of the Latin phrase and its English counterpart were commonest in two revealing contexts. The first of those is in Magna Carta, whose first clause, in
all its variant versions, opens with the stirring promise that, "In perpetuum, quod Anglicana
ecclesie libera sit," or, as the English
tradition of 1503 put it, perpetually that the
Church of England be free, with all its rights and liberties. The second place you find
talk of the Church of England is in relation to St. Thomas Becket, who was regularly described as a martyr for the rights and liberties
of the Church of England. One of the best-known accounts of Becket in the Late Middle Ages has him telling King Henry II that, "I am the head of the Church of England, "and am to you, Sir King, "your ghostly father." What distinguishes these two cases, Magna Carta and Becket, is that they are about the Church's relationship with the king, because the king is one of the
few things that, in practice, ties the two provinces of
Canterbury and York together. Most of the time, despite the archbishop of
Canterbury's nebulous title of primate of all England, the two provinces of the English Church ran their own affairs, there is no such institution
in the Late Middle Ages as the Church of England. It was therefore, of necessity, a king, who conjured it into a
more tangible existence. At the same time as Henry
VIII began to revile the pope as merely the bishop of Rome, he and his agents also
began to talk continually of the Church of England. It was a little-noticed
stroke of rhetorical genius. The category was traditional,
it was hard to dispute, but it immediately freighted
religious questions with nationalism and with politics. The pope's denial of
Henry VIII's claims was, on this reading, not a dispute between the
successor of St. Peter and a grasping, tyrannical,
and adulterous layman, it was between a scheming
Italian and an honest Englishman. If faced with such a choice between loyalty to the Church of England or the Church of Rome, what faithful English
subject would even hesitate? Traditionalists arrested
in England during the 1530s might be asked by the king's agents who they believed was the
head of the Church of England. To give any other answer
than the king of England sounded not like the universal
faith, but like treason. Henry VIII's regime was insisting that preachers should
conform to what they called the consent and laudable custom
of the Church of England. How can anyone oppose that cocktail of bland
truisms spiked with heresy? By the time you've pointed out that the Church of England
is a geographical expression, not an entity with the capacity
to consent to anything, your audience are deciding whether you're a hair-splitting
pedant or a traitor. The most famous, maybe the most dangerous of all of Henry VIII's English opponents, the Yorkist prince and
cardinal, Reginald Pole, understood the terms that
had been set for the debate, and embraced them. He claimed boldly that if
a choice had to be made, "Roma est mihi patria," Rome is my country. A commendably straightforward claim, but also a propaganda gift to his enemies. Meanwhile, Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy, the legal cornerstone of his reformation, asserted that he was the supreme head, or at least the supreme head in Earth, a perfunctory nod to the
safely-distant authority of Christ, the supreme head of an entity which was described awkwardly as, "the Church of England
called Anglicana Ecclesia." That awkwardness is a sign that the ink isn't dry on
this new terminology yet. But already, the Church of England was
becoming what it would remain, an institution whose name asserted that it comprised the whole nation, even though it didn't do so then, and never has done since. Was there anything Anglican,
in the modern sense, about these Henretian beginnings? Modern Anglicans, understandably sensitive to the jibe that their church is
an accidental byproduct of a king's lusts, have generally not wanted to play up their debt to Henry VIII, but it's there. The link isn't so much to the doctrinal and
ceremonial hodge-podge of Henry's church as to the rhetoric that he wove around his
incoherent religious settlement, a rhetoric that many of his
subjects found deeply compelling and remained loyal to
long after his death. Henry VIII was the true begetter of that most Anglican of ideas, the via media, the middle way. He constantly claimed to be
trying to find a moderate path between the extremists who
beset England on every side, calling each other papist and heretic, while he, their divinely-appointed king, was simply trying to unite
them around God's truth. In 1545, barely a year before his death, at the end of an abrasive
parliamentary session, the king addressed both houses
of Parliament in these terms, begging them to be
united in brotherly love, weeping as he made the appeal. According to witnesses, many of the audience wept too. Say what you like about Henry VIII, he understood that monarchy
is largely about theater, and in that sense, if not in any other, he was good at his job. In fact, though, Henry's ill-defined middle way was not what we would,
nowadays, call moderate, and not simply in the sense that anyone can make themselves moderate by choosing the right extremists to position themselves between, but nowadays, we don't
normally expect moderation to be quite so ferocious. If Henry's speech to Parliament in 1545 was one face of this moderation, he'd shown another one five years earlier, on the 30th of June, 1540, when he'd arranged for
three papal loyalists to be hanged, drawn, and
quartered for treason, alongside these three gents, three evangelicals who were
being burned for heresy. That double-edged mass
execution reminds us that moderation is a word
whose meaning has shifted over the centuries. In the Tudor age, it referred to an active process, something done forcefully
by one person to another, it meant something like
discipling or bridling. It's a sense which now survives chiefly in the title moderator, given to certain officials. For another clue to
this kind of moderation, look at the official English Bible, well let's look at a couple of them, first of all this first
ever full English Bible, published in 1535. It's adorned with a splendid title page, whose series of biblical scenes laid out the evangelical
reformist theological message. In pride of place, there, centered in the Sun, is the Hebrew name of God, the closest that Protestants
would allows themselves to get to depicting the indescribable deity. And there, at the bottom, in amongst all these
biblical and divine images, flanked by King David one side
and St. Paul on the other, as if he belongs in their company, is the king of England, with his official seal,
in case you had any doubt. And you might think that
that was jaw-dropping enough, and now look at the first fully-official version, published in 1539. Now the drama is all about the king, and in Holbein's woodcut, this is no longer a generic English king but an unmistakably specific,
potato-faced individual, handing out Verbum Dei, the
Word of God, to his people. And down below, the people gratefully
receive it with cries of, "Vivat rex," and from a couple of
unlearned people in the crowd, "God save the king." And in case you missed it, you're almost supposed to miss it, notice the most
jaw-dropping element of all: there, squeezed in at the top, scarcely able to get a word in edgeways, is Christ himself. This is what Henry VIII meant by the moderate middle way. In the second edition
of this Bible in 1540, the year of that gruesome mass execution, Archbishop Cranmer added
a preface to the Bible that made the point in
slightly more decorous terms. He described two parallel dangers for England's incipient reformation, that foot-dragging papists
would hold it back, and that over-eager zealots
would race too far ahead. Keeping the country together, preferably in lockstep, was his priority. And that same principle informed the "Book of Common Prayer," which is a text suffused
with talk of national unity, of spurring laggards,
bridling enthusiasts. In other words, as you can tell, I'm pretty wary of all
this moderation talk. The person who claims to be moderate is also often the person who is telling you to calm
down and be reasonable at the same time as
they're up to their elbows in your own blood. Henry VIII, and even more, Edward VI's regimes, exuded quiet reasonableness in order to distract attention from the revolutionary change that their commissars were enforcing. But despite my wariness, I do have to admit that all this moderation
was not merely smokescreen. The Reformation was genuinely pregnant with radical possibilities, which Archbishop Cranmer and his allies were determined to abort. Edward VI's regime executed no Catholics for loyalty to the papacy, actual rebels were a different matter, but it did burn two Protestant
radicals for heresy. Virtually all of Edward's
leading propagandists wrote works against Protestant radicalism
of one kind of another. The zealots straining at the leash were sometimes useful
outriders for the regime, but those who ventured too far ahead were liable to be brought
back firmly into line. John Hooper, who spent the
early 1540s in exile in Zurich, became one of the Edwardian Reformation's most forceful defenders, was given the strategic twin bishoprics of Worcester and Gloucester, but when he was due to be
consecrated as a bishop, he refused to wear the
traditional vestments, he saw them as popish rags, redolent of superstition, and he was thrown into prison by the regime that had just
appointed him as bishop, until he reluctantly agreed to conform. Hooper would later be burned
as a heretic by Queen Mary, and his Victorian evangelical admirers erected a statue to him in the grounds of his old
cathedral at Gloucester, a statue in which, rather unfortunately, he's dressed in the
vestments that he so loathed. The point of this spate over vestments wasn't that Edward VI,
or Archbishop Cranmer, or those at the heart of the regime placed any particular value
in vestments themselves, what they valued was discipline and unity, and they were wary of the idealists who listened to their
individual consciences above the collective voice
of the English Church. To some extent, that's just pragmatism, but there's a more principled
side to the story too. By the mid-16th century, Europe is well on the way to this point, to being polarized into sharply-defined
Protestant and Catholic camps, but the process wasn't yet complete, and plenty of earnest and
conscientious Christians deeply regretted it. Many still hoped to find
a genuine middle way, to assimilate Luther and
his evangelical followers into Catholic Christendom, like so many reformers had
been assimilated before. The theological hero of
these efforts at compromise, was Martin Bucer, a Protestant reformer from Strasbourg, John Calvin's mentor, but also the great conciliator, the great believer in the power of dialog. It never worked, but it came close, Reginald Pole was very interested. In the 1540s, the Prince-Archbishop of
Colone, Hermann von Wied, became a hero for these
idealistic centrists. He drew on Bucer, and
other irenic Protestants in a doomed attempt to walk the knife edge of
evangelical Catholic reform, in what was a strategically
pivotal diocese. But he's not alone, in the early 1550s, John Hamilton, the
Archbishop of St. Andrews, drew on von Wied, and some
of these other efforts to attempt a Catholic reformation
of this kind in Scotland, there were parallel efforts in Sweden, in Hungary, even in France. Archbishop Cranmer, in England, is very drawn by this kind of thinking. He admires von Wied, and in one of his greatest
theological coups, Cranmer managers to persuade
Martin Bucer himself to come to England and take up a professorship in Cambridge after war had forced him into exile. In the event, the climate in the Fens
ruined Bucer's health, and he died after less
than two years in England, but it was a kindly thought. And the notion that England's reformation might be muted and inclusive in its nature doesn't die with him. Under Edward VI, there were cautious
voices talking of return, not to Rome, but to what loyal
nostalgia had come to see as the moderate reformation of Henry VIII. People who had swallowed the
old king's anti-papalism, and his fastidious
dislike of superstition, but didn't want to embrace the full-throated Protestant
reformation of his son. You may remember, in the
second lecture of this series, meeting the Kentish
schoolmaster John Proctor, who coined the word defamation, and openly opposed
Edward VI's reformation. But he also opposed what he called the pope's
false-forged power, he deplored how England had, in former generations, been trained in worshiping
stocks and stones, he celebrated the advent
of the English Bible, that comfortable treasure
of God's sweet Word. Or again, the distinguished Cambridge
theologian John Redman, who lambasted popish superstitions, but also saw Edward VI's reformers as worse than pagans and infidels. Henry VIII's reformation might have been doctrinally incoherent, but at least his subjects
found it appealing. Under Edward VI, these latter-day Henretians
were a curiosity. Whether they were a significant voice under Mary I's Catholic
restoration is less clear. They accepted reconciliation with Rome, but in some cases, apparently, with a pang of regret that the moderate
reformation they'd dreamt of was now impossible, or at least they thought it was. It's in 1558-9 that the moment arrives for
these reluctant reformers, because now they had a queen
who was, at least partly, on their side. Elizabeth I was a Protestant, but of a distinct and
rather old-fashioned kind. Idiosyncrasies on her father's scale were impossible by this time, the religious battle lines had
been much too sharply drawn, but she did her best. It was unusual for a Protestant queen to dislike married clergy, to cherish choral music, and to keep a crucifix
in her private chapel. Her adamantine refusal
to allow further changes to her religious settlement after 1558-9 was a political decision, she was painfully conscious of the risks of alienating her more
conservative subjects. She was equally aware that her Puritan subjects
would take a mile if they were given an inch, and the more she was
pressed to give ground, the less inclined she was to do so. But it's also a matter of personal taste: a dignified, ceremonial
form of Protestantism, which liturgically
celebrated the nation's unity rather than preaching about the storm of discordant opinions, that was what she liked. And because she was queen, she could, and did impose
that taste on the nation. Most of her subjects
conformed to this settlement, some contentedly, some chafing at it in some way or other, but a few began to be
positive enthusiasts for it. This emerging movement, the first beginnings of what would eventually
become Anglicanism, had three strands. First, there's a ritual,
devotional, and aesthetic strand, which has a sometimes playful,
sometimes daring tendency to draw on the ceremonial
resources of medieval Catholicism. The Puritans were wary of
embracing any rites or practices that were reminiscent of the old ways, even if there was nothing
inherently offensive about them. But these ceremonialists, a group whom one historian
calls avant-garde conformists, they were instead eager
to rescue and repurpose as much of their Catholic
heritage as they could, and if upsetting the Puritans wasn't exactly the point of this effort, it was certainly an added bonus. This ceremonial strand of our movement was rooted not in England's
thousands of parish churches, where the Protestant Reformation had generally established itself, where organs had been dismantled, and choirs disbanded,
and walls whitewashed, instead, this ceremonialism
was incubated in cathedrals, and a handful of other unusual churches, places which, by some quirk
of their funding or patronage, had held on to some of the
old furnishings and patterns. Above all, that meant the weirdest church in England, Westminster Abbey, which was not an abbey anymore, but very appropriately a royal peculiar, essentially a cathedral with no bishop, a church with no parish, a free-floating ecclesiastical entity answerable only to the Crown. Westminster, and other places, served as reservoirs in which this textured, arch, ceremonial
form of Protestantism could persist even as it was drained out of most of the rest of England. These were places where
choral music flourished, and if that music was written by crypto-Catholics like Thomas Tallis, or open Catholics like William Byrd, well so what? Then queen's insistence on the legitimacy of these practices, her stout defense of the prayer book
ceremonial in particular, gave courage to those who cherished them. By the end of the century, a new generation of preachers, many of whom had come up through Westminster or the Chapel Royal, were defending these practices
not just as legitimate, but as pious, enriching, edifying, certainly more so than the
austerity of Calvinism, in which, in their caricature of it, public worship consisted of little more than interminable preaching. The prince amongst these
clerics was Lancelot Andrewes, the dean of Westminster from 1601, later bishop of Winchester. For all of the disdain
for too much preaching, Andrewes was, by all accounts, one of the finest preachers
of his generation, he had a gift for finding rich layers
of spiritual nourishment in traditional practice. So that's one strand. A second centered on the perennially-explosive issues
of jurisdiction and polity. Puritans had never liked bishops, and not only on account of the vestments that Hooper disliked, and that Andrewes is
proudly sporting here, the whole office of bishop
smells, to Puritans, of popish lordliness rather than Christ-like humility, and their repeated experience of Elizabethan bishops
cracking down on them does not soften their views. By the 1570s, the Puritans' hope that bishops might evolve into
something more acceptable, they might be rebranded
as superintendents, that's given way to blunt demands that the entire office
needs to be swept away. In its place, Puritans want a more conciliary structure. The Scottish Church beings
doing this in the early 1580s, replacing bishops with
elected synods of ministers called presbyteries, and for many English Puritans, this becomes the great
ideal to be cherished. In response to that, the establishment's defense
of the status quo hardens. To begin with, the regime simply argues that episcopacy, government by bishops, is legitimate in God's eyes, but that feels like a feeble position, and soon they begin to
advance positive arguments in its favor. And some even begin to argue, like Richard Bancroft, a future archbishop of Canterbury himself, did in 1589, that episcopacy isn't merely the best structure of Church government, but it's actually mandated by God's law. Christians not governed by bishops, in other words most of
the Protestant world, on this view, are missing a vital part of
God's will for his church. In later centuries, this was going to become
an Anglican orthodoxy, but for now it's an outlier. Richard Hooker, who is the most enduringly
influential thinker in this tradition, had a more modest view of the question. Hooker spent the decade
before his death in 1600 writing his vast "Laws of
Ecclesiastical Polity." It's the closest thing
that Anglicanism now has to a theological foundation text, and it's characteristic of
what Anglicanism would become that this is not, as its title suggests, a book of systematic theology, it's one of law, and of structure. Amongst many other things, Hooker argued that episcopacy
was the best possible system of Church government, but not the only legitimate one, he's not willing to anathematize his bishop-less brethren elsewhere in the Protestant world, although he's certainly
willing to tell him that his church was better
ordered than theirs. For Hooker, unlike many
of his later admirers, he's still operating within a self-consciously
reformed Protestant framework. He's not exactly a Calvinist, his extravagant compliments for Calvin are laced with some not
very well hidden barbs, but he's very much an admirer of the Reformed Church of Zurich. He insisted that Elizabeth's church stood squarely within that tradition, a tradition that the Puritans were wrongly claiming for themselves. He's Protestant, he's hierarchical, and he's proud of it. The third strand of this proto-Anglicanism is more explicitly theological, and here we need to talk about reformed Protestantism's
great doctrinal shibboleth, Calvinist predestination. As I mentioned in the last lecture, predestination, the doctrine
that all human beings have our eternal fate, salvation or damnation, heaven or hell, decided irrevocably for us
before the creation of the world, that doctrine is, more or less, the doctrinal consensus
of the English Church in the decades around 1600, but the consensus is never universal, and it's never stable. That doctrine was much more appealing to 16th and 17th century Christians than it instinctively
seems to us in our own age, incorrigible egotists and
individualists that we are, but it's never been universally popular. Plenty of those who
supported predestination disagreed over its finer points, and those disagreements kept
the issue bubbling away. Theologians like William Perkins, the first English Protestant writer to find a truly international readership, devoted enormous effort to
resolving the pastoral problems that the doctrine of
predestination caused. But no matter how subtle and
humane Perkins' efforts were, they themselves testify
to a persistent problem. In every country where Calvinist predestination
became an orthodoxy, it also provoked opposition
from within the Calvinist fold. England was, in this respect at least, at one with its sister reformed churches. What brought English
anti-predestinarians out into the open, ironically enough, was the Synod of Dordt, the international
Calvinist synod of 1618-19, in which the English fully participated, and which, with the full support of the English participants, reaffirmed a stiff
doctrine of predestination, and stamped down a Dutch
anti-predestinarian movement. It should have been a
moment of Calvinist triumph; instead, the publicity
that it gave to the dispute awakened English predestinarians, as one of them put it, from a dead sleep, and it made the synod's
hard-line doctrines look like a contentious, and indeed a foreign partisan position, rather than a settled orthodoxy. Predestination had always felt
ethically counterintuitive, for all the formidable
theological rationale behind it, and that feeling now became the glue which brought Lancelot
Andrewes' ceremonialism and Richard Hooker's
episcopalianism together into a newly-energized movement to celebrate the distinctive heritage of the Church of England. The fiercest partisan
of the new unorthodoxy was the future bishop Richard Montagu, who, in an anti=predestinarian
tract from 1624 did something that no English Protestant had dared to de before, he used the notion of the
English Church as moderate to position itself halfway
between Geneva and Rome. To most of his contemporaries, that was as shocking as
claiming to position yourself halfway between good and evil. And the shock is part of the point, these folks are like modern
cultural conservatives, mischievously tweaking the nose of the politically-correct establishment in the hope of the priceless
endorsement of being canceled. These proto-Anglicans are the masters of plausible deniability and of dog-whistle politics, never quite saying out loud what the Puritans were
sure they really meant, enjoying nothing more than making their opponents'
earnest seriousness look humorless, choosing their challenges
and their innovations so as to split and to
wrong-foot the opposition, challenges such as, when was the Church of England founded? Staunch Protestants like
John Foxe, the martyrologist, were queasy about asserting any continuity between their church
and the medieval Church. They believed that the
pre-reformation Church was a synagogue of Satan, and that the flame of true
Christianity in that era had been kept alive by a motley band of persecuted
heretics and dissidents. But it's a tricky argument to make, and even if you manage to trace an unbroken chain
of medieval heretics, you're left claiming some
pretty iffy characters as part of the true church, and also excluding some
otherwise bona fide saints simply because of their loyalty to Rome. Even if that could be done, there's a more serious problem, which is the evident
institutional continuity between the pre and
post-Reformation churches. The Church of England's
finances, it's structures, it's laws, even its buildings had been updated piecemeal and partially, they weren't dismantled and refounded. The English Reformation
is never a revolution, there is no year zero. Queen Elizabeth's first
archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, a staunch Protestant but one of the queen's own stamp, celebrated the fact that he was the 70th holder of his office, not the pioneer of a newly-founded church. And if the church's own institutions couldn't let go of their medieval
privileges and pedigrees, that's doubly true for the families of Welsh
adventurers and Scottish princes, who had declared themselves to be the Church of England's
supreme heads and governors. Monarchy is, by its very nature, deeply and unavoidably invested in the notion of unbroken,
centuries-long precedent. If all of those kings and queens had been mere dupes or
co-conspirators of Antichrist, then what becomes of the ancient majesty of the English Crown? Better by far to think
that the medieval Church was a true Christian church that had stumbled into error, but which merely needed to
be reformed, not overthrown, in which case, surely, parts of its heritage should
be reclaimed and celebrated. Why should Rome have all the best tunes? Which is to say, it's no surprise that this whole ceremonialist
pattern of thinking is particularly appealing
to kings and queens, and their most ardent supporters. The ceremonial revival was predominantly a movement
by clergymen, for clergymen, we've been looking at a
lot of glowering portraits of men in frocks, but it did win over some
prominent laypeople. By far, the most important of them was James VI and I's surviving son, who, in 1625, became King Charles I. James had been intrigued
by the ceremonialists, he'd made Lancelot Andrewes a bishop, but he was canny enough to keep the parties
balanced in his church, and no one was able to take
his support for granted. Charles was entranced
by the ceremonialists, and untroubled by notions
of political pragmatism. He became a true believer, and he packed the ceremonialists steadily onto the bishop's bench. In particular, he made the combative, committed
ceremonialist William Laud bishop of London, and then, from 1633,
archbishop of Canterbury, and historians call the
1630s the era of Laudianism. What that meant depended on who you were. For Laud's allies, this was a flowering of theological and liturgical creativity after the arid years
of Calvinist dominance. Rich spiritual explorations
within traditionalism were being undertaken by figures
as diverse as John Cosin, the future bishop of Durham, George Herbert, the
priest-poet of Wiltshire, Nicholas Ferrar, the foundation
of a religious community at Little Gidding, in Cambridgeshire, which had a tang of monasticism about it. The legacy of these
so-called Caroline Divines has been treasured
within Anglicanism since, and rightly so. The other side of Laud's revolution is not so widely celebrated now. He demanded and enforced strict continuity to his new ritual norms. In particular, he overruled
the common pattern whereby communion tables were brought down into
the nave for communion, so that people might gather
around the Lord's table to share the Lord's supper. Laud insisted that they
should instead be returned to the east end of church buildings, like Catholic altars, and set about with rails, cutting them off from the people, as in this surviving
example from the 1630s, from Merton, in Norfolk. This sort of pattern is common in Anglican
churches worldwide nowadays, but in its time, placing tables altar-wise, as they said, felt as if the Reformation
itself was being undone. It's a deeply divisive symbol, railing altars like this. To its opponents, it's a symbol of clerical
exclusivity and superiority, it's a turn towards superstition, which again shuts the common people out of what had briefly looked like
it might become their church. Plenty of ministers, as well as laypeople, bridled at the new rules, dragged their feet or
actively opposed them. But neither Laud nor the
king would brook resistance. The Laudian persecution of the 1630s shouldn't be overdone. If you were an anti-Laudian, your career was in danger, not your life, although there were imprisonments, and in one notorious case in 1637, three outspoken critics of the changes had their ears cut off. Even so, if this is moderation, this is a moderation of Henry VIII's kind, not the modern sort, and it might well have succeeded. A great many of the English
disliked these innovations, but others supported them, there was a decades-long
habit of obedience, the resources of both soft and hard power standing behind the English
Church were formidable, but Scotland, that's another matter. Charles' northern kingdom
was, in principle, a completely separate realm which just happens to share a king with its southern neighbor, and Scotland was home both to a much more
purist Calvinist church, and to a much less tame political culture. Charles' father, James VI and I had had enough experience in
the rodeo of Scottish politics to have some sense of when
a king can push his luck and when he should simply try to hang on; Charles, who never lost
his Scottish accent, nevertheless, like many long-term expats, never understood his native country as well as he thought he did, and in any case, shrewdly picking his battles
was just not in his nature. Tidiness and good order were, and in this case, that meant imposing a version of the Church
of England structures, its bishops, even its
"Book of Common Prayer," onto Scotland. He pointedly ignored
warnings and ominous rumbles about the consequence of this until the prayer book service was actually attempted
in Edinburgh in 1637, with famously this result: Scotland erupted into open revolt, and that set in motion a chain of events which later saw Ireland rising in revolt, England descending into the civil war, the victorious parliamentarians
abolishing bishops and banning the "Book of Common Prayer" on both sides of the border, and ultimately, of course, to the parliamentary army putting the Church of England's
supreme governor on trial and cutting off his head. This catastrophe was, in fact, the making of Anglicanism. The civil war had, in
the nature of things, forced people to choose sides, and those who stood by the king needed to clarify what the
religion they were defending was. They began to reach for that half century-old Scots coinage, dating back to King Charles' father, now revived by the king himself. Charles was, he declared, fighting for this most holy
religion of the Anglican Church. One of the reasons why Charles, having been almost
entirely political isolated at the end of 1640, was able to muster enough
support to fight a civil war only 18 months later was that a great many English
people shared this view. They may not have identified with Archbishop Laud's
full slate of changes, but they did value the
"Book of Common Prayer" that Puritans so reviled. That book was banned
by Parliament in 1645, near the end of the war, but that law, like others
from this chaotic period, is scarcely enforced. The bishops were deprived of office, and those who were seen as a political threat to the new regime were hunted down or driven aborad. Laud himself was beheaded. But the parliamentary
and republican regimes of the 1640s and '50s are remarkably relaxed about bishops who chose
to stay out of politics. Some of them remained
in England, and at large throughout the 1640s and '50s, operating more or less freely, and ordaining enormous numbers of priests. Make no mistake, this era of disestablishment
was certainly hard for these traditionalist,
prayer-book Protestants, their sufferings, their
deprivations were real, but the period did give them two gifts. First of all, freedom, no longer subject to suspicious
episcopal discipline, and to the straitjacket
of national common prayer, they could indulge their playfulness and tendency to liturgical experiment like never before. Jeremy Taylor was a
protege of Archbishop Laud, a chaplain to Charles I, but the experience of defeat converted him to the cause
of religious toleration, and his devotional works like this became hugely influential, drawing on the liturgy and
the deeper Catholic tradition, while remaining firmly
within the Protestant camp. And alongside the freedom
that came from being cast out came the gift of identity. Up until then, this kind of religion didn't have a name, it hadn't needed it. Historians have coined various
awkward terms to describe it, but the point is that people at the time
didn't really want one, it's just the religion of those who conformed
to the Church of England. But now that the established church has been taken over by
Presbyterians and radicals, these folks are forced to
work out who they really are, and some of them begin
to use the word Anglican, and not just because of its royalist and nationalist pedigree, it's a route into the kind of piety that Jeremy Taylor is
signaling in this book. Notice the way his title page
claims that his prayers are, "according to the manner
of the ancient Church." Anglican conjures up images of the original, the ancient
church of the Anglo-Saxons, before popes started
making over-weaning claims and imposing hair-splitting
doctrinal tests. This is a way of answering one of the most unsettling
Roman Catholic arguments against the Reformation, the charge of innovation, the question, where was
your church before Luther? To claim to be defending what the royalist preacher
Henry Hammond called, "This Anglican, or rather
ancient British Church," a church which didn't need to look to Rome for its foundation, but could claim ancient
dignity in its own right, this is a very appealing maneuver. So the seeds of this Anglicanism have been sown in the English Reformation from the beginning, and they had germinated periodically through the 16th and early 17th century, but always in the shade of larger and better-established growths. It's the ceremonialist
revival of the 1620s and '30s, immediately followed by the
years of exclusion and exile in the 1640s and '50s, that's what brings it out into the open. And in that sense, we need to recognize that
Anglicans are like Quakers, or Baptists, or
Presbyterians, or many others, they are simply one of the sects to emerge out of the religious crucible of the English Civil
War and its aftermath. And likely, that's what
they'd have remained, one sect amongst many, if it hadn't been for the
bizarre ending of this tale, which is that, quite suddenly, and very unexpectedly, between 1658 and 1660, England's republican government collapsed, and finally, the exiled King
Charles II was restored. And that king then reestablished an entity which still called itself
the Church of England, but it wasn't. It wasn't a unifying national church, a middle way holding the
whole nation together with muscular moderation, it was instead a denomination, it was the Anglican Church in something like the
modern sense of the word. And that, despite, maybe even because of its belief that it could trace an unbroken history back to Augustine of
Canterbury in the 6th century, that was something new.
