- Welcome to this series of lectures on England's Reformations
and Their Legacies. It's a subject which is both too easy, and too difficult to talk about. The basic stories that
we learned at school are all too familiar. It's a story that we keep going back to. If it's not a founding
national myth quite then, it is a shared moment of national trauma. Who are the heroes? Who are the villains? Our best literary
recreations of the subject can't agree on that, and
indeed in these cases, they're openly at each others' throats. The subject can still
raise strong passions, given that the principals
have all been dead for well over 400 years. A lot of us feel strongly
about which of these, or other portrayals captures
the spirit of the time best. For me, the most compelling of the films is still this one, from 1969. Genevieve Bujold received
an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Anne Boleyn. She's in her 70s now. A few years ago she was interviewed by a historian I know who,
at the end of the interview, asked her which actress at work today, she would like to see playing Anne Boleyn? And Bujold leaned forward and
with steel in her eyes said, "Nobody, Anne is mine." These are stories that many
of us still feel invested in, which is as much as to say there is, and there can be no such thing
as the English Reformation. A Reformation is a composite event. It's only made visible by
being framed in the right way. It's like a war. That's a label that we put on
to a particular set of events, while we decide that other,
maybe equally violent acts, aren't part of that, or maybe of any war. 16th and 17th century English people knew that they were living through an age of religious upheaval. They did not know that it
was the English Reformation any more than the soldiers
at the Battle of Agincourt knew that they were fighting
in the Hundred Years' War. I'm not, in these lectures, gonna rehearse the main
narrative of events. That story is one whose
scaffolding is high politics, although, as we'll see, that's by no means the
only way to tell the story. In very brief, during the reign of Henry VIII
who was king from 1509 to 47, England broke away from the papacy, and embraced some aspects of
the Protestant Reformation that had been unfolding on the continent since Martin Luther first openly
defied the church in 1517. During the short reign of
Henry's son, Edward VI, from 1547 to 53, England moved in a much more decisively Protestant direction, and briefly it looked
like it would embrace the version of the Reformation put forward by the Swiss radicals. That was promptly reversed
by the Catholic restoration under Queen Mary from 1553 to eight, that was itself overturned by a Protestant restoration
under Queen Elizabeth, whose much longer reign lasted until 1603. And not least because of that longevity, Elizabeth's so-called
religious settlement, it's a questionable label, stuck, and that was Protestant, but
of a more idiosyncratic kind. Versions of it were
maintained by her successors, James I and Charles I, at least until civil war
swept King Charles from power, cost him his head, and pitched
England's religious life into turmoil once again. Now, there is no doubting the importance of these religious upheavals. They permanently changed
England and by extension, the many other countries
on which English culture has made its mark, but what does it mean? How can we best tell the
story, or the stories? There is no single master
narrative of all this turmoil. There can't be. It was played out at every level of an increasingly diverse society, as highly visible political changes, and shifts in public religion shaped, and were shaped by the
lives of millions of people. The way that you choose to tell the story is governed by what
you think is important, and what's trivial, whether there are heroes or villains that you want to celebrate, or to condemn, and by the legacies and the
lessons that you think matter. You choose your frame, and that gives you the
story that you want. So these lectures are not
going to tell the story of the English Reformation. They're going to tell the stories of six English Reformations. Six stories of religious change in 16th and 17th century England. They're parallel, they're overlapping, but each has a somewhat
different chronological frame, cast of characters, and
set of pivotal events, and each one has left a different legacy. I leave it to you to make
the choice between them. Certainly none of them is the whole truth, although, I think I can promise you that they will be more accurate
than some of the versions which have been around in recent years. I promise you that will be
the last film reference. The best I can offer is
to say that these stories are as accurate as the 20 odd
years I've been working on some different aspects that
the subject can make them. What I'm not gonna tell you is which one of them
is closest to my heart, but you're free to guess if you wish. The only prejudice that I'll admit to here is my dislike of the
living forcing our stories too high-handedly onto the dead. They might be dead, but that doesn't mean that
they should dance to our tune. So to the first of our stories, the one that might seem
the most unlikely of all, the story of England's
Catholic Reformation. Christianity first came to the country that we now call England in Roman times. In the 16th century, in
the age of the Reformation, not everyone believed the
legend that Joseph of Arimathea had brought the gospel to
Britannia in the first century, and planted a thorn at Glastonbury, but the equally legendary
tale of how Pope Eleutherius had converted King Lucius of
the Britons to Christianity in the second century
was common knowledge. Moreover, Constantine, the
first Christian Roman emperor, was claimed as an honorary Briton on the basis that he'd
begun his reign in York, but all of this was only prelude. The collapse of Roman rule, and a wave of pagan Anglo-Saxon settlement in the fifth century pushed
Romano-British Christianity to the island's western
fringes, above all to Ireland. The incomers had to be converted afresh. And in the year 597, a far from legendary
missionary named Augustine, sent by the equally real
Pope Gregory the Great, persuaded King Ethelbert of Kent that he and his kingdom
ought to become Christian. Augustine became
England's first archbishop at Canterbury, Ethelbert's capital, and his successors down to the present have sat on his throne in the cathedral that he established there. So 16th century English Christians could look back on nearly 1,000
years of unbroken history, and whether they thanked
the imagined Eleutherius, or the real Gregory, they could and did take pride
in being the first nation to be converted at the hands of a pope. For a country almost at the
furthest edge of Christendom, this connection to the
apostolic See of Rome was a point of pride. A cynic might say it
doesn't cost England much to be ostentatiously papalist because Rome is too far away to make much of a nuisance of itself. Equally, it did mean that England's voice was underrepresented in Rome's councils. There has as yet been only
a single English pope, Adrian IV between 1154 and 59. Although, as we'll see
in the 16th century, there were a couple of near-misses. Still a strong Anglo-papal axis was a recurring fact of medieval life. Duke William of Normandy
legitimized his conquest of England in 1066 by a papal endorsement. King Henry II was made lord of Ireland by the grant of that sole
English pope in 1155. King John, who is the closest
that medieval England comes to having an anti-papal ruler,
had by the end of his reign reversed his position so dramatically that he formerly granted sovereignty over the entire realm to Innocent III. During the great schism of the late 14th, early 15th century, England was stoutly loyal
to the popes in Rome, rejecting the rival claimants in Avignon. In 1485, Pope Innocent VIII gave the new, and precariously crowned King Henry VII a much-needed endorsement by blessing his claims to the throne, and allowing him to marry his cousin, Elizabeth of York. King Henry, who had a
sharp eye for propaganda, had the papal bull printed in English for general circulation. The logic was the same as
it had been for centuries. Kings and popes had much more
to gain by working together than they could ever
win from confrontation. They knew that when the
relationship broke down, the result was a crisis like the one which led to Thomas Becket being murdered, and his king being forced
into a humiliating penance. In a bust up like that
there are no winners. Church and crown didn't
need to love each other, but they did genuinely recognize
each others' legitimacy. Most kings had at least a
streak of genuine piety, and most clergyman at least
a streak of national loyalty. This long history has
helped foster the myth of the Middle Ages as an
undifferentiated Age of Faith, whether that's depicted as an
Eden of Catholic innocence, or as 1,000 years of Babylonian captivity, but, of course, it's not so. Neither in England nor
anywhere else in Europe could Catholic Christendom
flourish for so long by remaining static. The Catholic world's
astonishing durability is a sign of its power to reinvent itself. Throughout the Middle
Ages, established patterns of religious life were challenged
by movements of reform. Some consciously led from Rome, many more bubbling up
as local initiatives, often in the form of new, or
rejuvenated orders of monks, nuns, friars, or canons. The church's hierarchy suppressed, or even persecuted initiatives which posed an unacceptable challenge, but it much preferred
where it could to tolerate, or tame, or co-opt them. They were its engine of renewal. If there's a single pattern to this range of reforming initiatives, it's a cycle in which formality,
laxity, habit, corruption are periodically challenged
by new or revived movements of invigorated discipline and holiness. For example, in the early 13th century Francis of Assisi founded a
new kind of religious order. Not enclosed monks, but itinerant friars
living among the people committed to lives of absolute poverty, deliberately choosing to
depend on the day-to-day gifts that they received from the common people, but as the Franciscans
grew and institutionalized, they settled into less
rigorous patterns of living, made compromises and are
then challenged afresh from within their own ranks by
so-called Observant Movement, which sprang up to oppose this laxity. Henry VII, with his ready eye
for branding opportunities, made himself patron of the English province of the Observants. The number of Observant
Franciscans in England was never very large, but their moral authority was out of all proportion
to their numbers, but this cycle of holiness
and laxity is a spiral, it's not a circle, because with each turn its scope widened from the clerical and
monastic elite at its heart to the population at large. The Franciscans, unlike
the monastic predecessors, set out to live among and
minister to the common people. Many 14th and 15th century innovations abandoned formal religious
orders altogether, allowing laymen and women to live in quasi-monastic communities, sometimes only temporarily rather than as a lifelong vocation. This early 15th century
Flemish altarpiece, typically enough for the
period depicts the Virgin Mary as an ordinary Dutch woman
in a domestic setting. This is now where holiness is to be found, and notice what she's
doing, she's reading. The slow spread of literacy accelerated by the development
of printing with movable type in the mid 15th century symbolized
and facilitated a change in the way lay Christians
related to their church. They're not just the passive consumers of its sacramental services
and the subject of its prayers, they're participating. Books of Hours written so
that lay people could pray as monks did within their everyday lives become a staple of the book trade. The monasteries had once
been a refuge for holiness in a godless world, but now their reservoir of holiness is overflowing into that
world and soaking into it. So when we say that the English Church in the early 16th century
was hungry for reform that was not an unusual,
or an alarming condition. Loyal, earnest churchmen
were painfully aware that the church fell short of its ideals even though compared realistically
both to its own past, and to the rest of Latin Christendom, the English Church is
in pretty good shape. Its bishops are an impressive body of men. In most European countries
the bishops were drawn almost exclusively from the high nobility, and their spiritual
qualifications were, let's say, variable, but the
English and Welsh bishops were a remarkably meritocratic bunch. Most of them men of middling, or even humble birth who'd risen up through England's two
substantial universities. There aren't many great
theologians amongst them, although, there are some like John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, the most internationally
celebrated theologian which 16th century England produced, but many of them are able
lawyers and administrators equal to the task of managing
their vast institution, and furthering and
strengthening its discipline. England's parish clergy as well were unusually well-educated, and well-disciplined
by European standards. To take one simple, easy-to-measure
disciplinary question, Catholic priests were and are, of course, supposed to be celibate. In many regions this
rule was widely flouted. In parts of Switzerland
attempts to enforce celibacy by levying fines on misbehaving priests had evolved into a system whereby, in effect, priests
paid an annual fee to the bishop to be allowed to have a common-law wife, and the bishop's finances depended on the regular flow of such fees. In most of England, by contrast, the law was genuinely enforced. Maybe most importantly of
all, England's lay people, or many of them, were hungry to be brought
deeper into the church's life. They wanted the spiral to
widen out to include them. The plainest sign of success in England was that a dissident movement offering more radical lay empowerment, the diffuse sect known as the Lollards never won any kind of mass following after its brief flowering
in the late 14th century. We'll come back to them in the
final lecture of this series, but as historians we can
look with realistic eyes at the late medieval English Church, and we can say fair is
fair, it's in decent shape, but for the church's
most ambitious leaders, and for the most zealous
and earnest lay people, good enough was not good enough. Modest success only underlined how much more there was to be done. There's been a lot of talk
about anticlericalism, hatred and contempt for
priests in the Middle Ages. It's certainly a widespread phenomenon. Corrupt priests were the butt of jokes from Sicily to the Shetlands, but that doesn't mean that the
jokers rejected the church. Everybody nowadays jokes
about corrupt politicians, but that doesn't mean that you reject representative
democracy not necessarily. It's useful to break
anticlericalism down into two distinct variants. One is antisacerdotalism, the scornful rejection of
the priesthood as a body, irredeemably corrupt, grounded on self-serving
theological error. This is the view of
disgusted non-participants, and of revolutionaries. It was, of course, gonna become
one of the driving forces of the Protestant Reformation, but is not terribly widespread,
especially in England. And even within that camp there's more non-participation
than there is revolution. The other variety is hyperclericalism. This is the conviction that the priesthood is a high and holy vocation, that priests hold and transmit
an awesome responsibility. And if you start with
that idealistic view, and then measure actual
priests against it, the only response is going
to be disappointment, and indeed anger. We as historians can look at
the late medieval priesthood and say, well, the glass is half full, even nine-tenths full, but
for the hyperclericalists, no degree of falling short was acceptable. They didn't want to overthrow the church. They wanted to perfect it,
to make it what it should be. And this made them into its
most unstinting, loving critics. So, the most damning assessments
of the late medieval church come from churchmen, from insiders. They've spent so long gazing at the stars that wherever they are
seems like a gutter, and their determination to
pursue their glorious vision isn't a sign of the church's
weakness, but of its strength. By the early 16th century
these restless ambitions have begun to merge with
a new movement for reform that's sweeping Christendom, and we've put down particularly
deep roots in England. Christian humanism, as historians call it, is the latest turn of that
medieval spiral of reform. It drew on the movement
of scholarly renewal that we call the Renaissance,
that is, in very brief a movement in 14th and 15th century Italy to rediscover the literary
and artistic heritage of the Greek and Roman world, to measure their own culture
against that ancient heritage, and inevitably to find it wanting. It's a more or less secular
movement in its beginning hence this term humanism, which doesn't mean secular
atheism in the modern sense, but rather the study of the humanities, which they contrast it
to the study of divinity, the queen of the sciences, but the same method to
recover the lost past, to weigh it in the balance
against the presence, and then to act accordingly, that's all too easy to apply
to the life of the church too. Famously, the most important prophet of this Christian humanism was the Dutch monk, Desiderius Erasmus, a sharp-tongued,
peripatetic, penny-pinching, brilliantly entrepreneurial scholar, who could switch on a
dime from scabrous satire into soaring spiritual vision. Erasmus spent several years in England, and inspired a generation
of English scholars. Partly thanks to him, his closest English friend, Thomas More, won a continent-wide
reputation in his own right. Fittingly enough, More was
a layman, not a priest, and his teasing vision of an
ideal society in his book, "Utopia" from 1516, summed up the Christian humanists' dreams. In this imagined land, the actual priests are
very few and very holy, but the entire population lives in such simplicity and purity that the island of Utopia in effect amounts to a giant monastery. They despise wealth. They live in common. They prize learning, justice and charity over rites and superstitions. Utopia is a place where
the spiral of reform has reached its outer
limit, it includes everyone. And the book's opening chapter
makes explicit the contrast with More's home island, where the rich and powerful
claimed to be Christians, but had forgotten peace, mercy
and the needs of the poor. Now this is a satire,
but Christian humanists do more than offer counsels of perfection from the sidelines. More discusses in this book whether it's better to
preserve your innocence by steering clear of power politics, or to get your hands dirty in the hope of doing something good, which is not a theoretical discussion. He himself reluctantly
entered Henry VIII's service, and ended paying dearly for it. Another much more compromised, but much more powerful reformer was already pushing this agenda forward. I'm thinking of
Cardinal-Archbishop Thomas Wolsey, the butcher's son from Ipswich, whose career embodies the
meritocratic possibilities of the English Church. Wolsey's administrative omnicompetence made him the effective ruler of England on Henry VIII's behalf
from about 1514 until 1529. And he's been remembered more
for ambition and corruption than for reform and idealism, but this is the man who
turned a narcissistic, warmongering king's
diplomatic difficulties into a hard-nosed scheme for
universal, perpetual peace between the European powers, with England and the papacy
acting as guarantors. Nothing like the Treaty of London in 1518 had ever been attempted before. The failure of this impossible project, this sort of first draft
of the League of Nations, is hardly surprising. What's astonishing is that Wolsey secured broad international agreement to it. And for a few mirage-like
months it seemed to be working. In this context, his own
perfectly realistic ambitions to be elected pope looked less ignoble. In the end, England was too weak a power, and Henry VIII too capricious
a king for Wolsey to use them to leverage humanist
dreams into existence, but there was nothing
to stop his ambition, and idealism and cunning from
reshaping his own country. If England's Catholic
Reformation had a start date, it was 1518 when Wolsey
was made a papal legate with sweeping powers to
reshape the English Church. This is almost the first
time that the English Church, divided as it was
between the two provinces of Canterbury and York had been
treated as a single entity. The flagship project that will be launched with these new powers was a
sign of what might be to come. A huge amount of the English
Church's considerable wealth was tied up in monastic houses, communities whose cloistered
piety was, of course, laudable, but was several turns of
the spiral behind the times, and not all of the monks fully lived up to their orders' ideals. Wolsey used his new powers
to close down a swathe of problematic or inconvenient houses, redirecting the funds to a much more fashionably
pious purpose, education. A splendid new school in
his hometown of Ipswich would feed into a splendid new college at his old university of Oxford. You can see the college
behind him in the portrait, but that was only the first wave. Wolsey was laying plans
for a much wider reshaping of the monastic estate to
rebuild the English Church into a Christian humanist powerhouse, its resources serving the
people rather than itself, placing England at the forefront of the budding renewal of
the whole Catholic world. His project manager for
this tricky enterprise was another compromised Catholic reformer. What made Thomas Cromwell stand out from London's crowd of
ambitious jobbing lawyers was his years spent in Italy
as a soldier, merchant, and all-purpose man on the make. As Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography of a couple of years ago shows us, Cromwell's Italian
contacts made him the man to find the sculptors and the artists whom Wolsey wanted to employ. These are some of the statues that he commissioned for
Wolsey's tomb are now in the V&A, but Cromwell had picked up more in Italy than an ear for languages,
and an eye for marble. Like many Northern
Europeans who visited Rome at the height of the Renaissance papacy, he left with a hunch that the
pope was part of the problem, not part of the solution, and that the cutting edge
of the spiral of reform was now a long way from the old center. It also gave Cromwell a very Italian sense of what reform might mean. England's Catholic Reformation,
that beckoning mirage, would have been a version
of the Italian Reformation. The Italian Reformation is a story that's now so thoroughly forgotten that the phrase sounds
like a contradiction, but during the 1520s and 1530s it seemed like a real possibility. Much of the structure
of the church in Italy was genuinely corrupt or dysfunctional, and so reformers worked around it, creating new orders and fraternities, exploring patterns of simplified piety. In Germany, when a dispute
about the doctrine of salvation triggered by a friar called Martin Luther flared up in 1517 to 18, it quickly turned into a slanging-match in which all the talk was of
obedience, submission, heresy, but in Italy, idealistic, loyal churchmen, the people who called
themselves the Spirituali preferred to avoid that
kind of confrontation. They were keen to do with Luther what had been done with so
many other disruptive reformers over the centuries, to absorb, co-opt,
house-train his insights, views which pushed Catholic orthodoxy in a particular direction, but which didn't yet contradict it. Now, to be sure, the Reformation that Italy's Spirituali
championed didn't come to pass. They spent a couple of decades trying to forge creative compromises, until they found that
in their polarized age that only won them
suspicion from both sides, and, eventually, after the
failure of a last attempt at a constructive religious peace in 1541, they were forced to choose sides, or to retire into obscurity, but we can easily imagine that, if Tudor marriage politics
hadn't intervened, the Reformation of the Spirituali is the kind of Reformation
that England would have had. Such an England would
have proudly held on to its thousand-year tradition
of loyal papalism, but the result wouldn't have been an extension of the medieval
church, frozen in time. In this alternative history,
England's monasteries wouldn't have been
suppressed systematically the way they were in the 1530s, but nor would they have sailed on into the modern era untouched. Eager Catholic reformers, keen to build a nation
of earnest believers, wary of formalism and superstition, would have continued where
Wolsey and Cromwell had begun, systematically redirecting the
monasteries' enormous wealth to more fashionable
purposes like education, missionary work, the relief of the poor. England's two heavyweight
energetic universities, especially Erasmus' Cambridge, which is by far the more
daring of the two at this date would have incubated scholarly innovations that would have turned the radical insights of
the Christian humanists into practical programs for reform. The long-delayed publication
of a Bible in English, which even as fiercely loyal
a Catholic as Thomas More recognized was both inevitable and right, would have followed before much longer. And it's not all just
a matter of doctrines. In a century of rapid economic change, populations are rising, wages are falling, landowners are driving
their tenants off the land, and into destitution, a reforming Catholic Church would have pushed back
against this new economy, and its consequences. It probably wouldn't have
pushed back very effectively. Deep economic changes
are difficult to stop with moralizing denunciations, but it would certainly have burnished its own moral authority in the process. The way things turned out, defending the Commonwealth
against depredations like the enclosure of land, and the blocking of rivers with fish-weirs became a Protestant cause
in the 1540s and 1550s, but there's no doctrinal
reason it should have been so. Reforming Catholic bishops
found this moral case just as compelling as the Protestants did. Now you were promised a history lecture, and I've just served you up a steaming plate full of imagination, but I do think there are reasons to take this fantasy seriously. One of those reasons
is named Reginald Pole. Pole was a man to conjure with, a young cousin of Henry VIII, whose family had a dangerously
strong claim to the throne in their own right. His decision to spend the
early 1530s studying in Italy was political as well as academic. He did not approve of the
king's marital adventures. In 1536 he broke a long
and ominous silence to denounce them in strident terms. Henry VIII's propagandists
called him a traitor, and he replied, Rome is my country. In response Henry tried
to have him assassinated, and judicially murdered
most of his family, including his aged mother
for the unpardonable crime of having Pole blood in their veins. Pope Paul III made matters
worse by making Pole a cardinal. He became the English
government's favorite bogeyman, an icon of treachery, but his Catholicism was
reforming as well as unstinting. Rome was his country, but so was Italy. He became intimately
involved with the Spirituali, especially as some of
them found cautious favor at the papal court. He was fully supportive
of one of the great might-have-been projects
of the Reformation Era, the summit conference at the
German city of Regensburg between leading Catholic
and Protestant theologians, which successfully thrashed
out an agreed formula for understanding the
doctrine of salvation, the issue which had sparked the Protestant schism to begin with, and then agonizingly the summit foundered on the authority of the pope
and the nature of the mass. Pole was one of those who jumped towards Rome
and Catholic orthodoxy when the middle ground
gave way underneath him, so much so that Pope Paul III made him one of the three legates who were to preside over
the planned General Council of the Catholic Church, which assembled at the northern Italian
city of Trent in 1545, but if Pole's loyalties
were never in question, nor did he forget his old ideals. At the Council of Trent
he lost the argument. His Lutheran-inflected views
of salvation were rejected in favor of a more robustly
traditional formulation, but Pole and the surviving Spirituali weren't out of the game yet. When Paul III died in 1549, Pole was the early
favorite to succeed him. In one early tally, the conclave
came within a single vote of the two-thirds majority, which would have elected
the second English pope. It's another tantalizing might-have-been. A young, idealistic,
energetically reforming pontiff, determined both to hold the center, and also to widen the circle
in an effort to bring home as many of the sundered
Protestant brethren as possible. In the event, Pole's candidacy failed partly because he himself
didn't want to press the case, that idealism again. He was happy instead to agree
on a compromise candidate. His candidacy also failed because one of his former
brethren amongst the Spirituali, Cardinal Carafa, accused him of straying from
an innocent wish for reunion into a dalliance with heresy. Now this would be simply the tale of one eccentric expatriate's near-misses if not for the second reason to imagine England's Catholic Reformation, the greatest might-have-been of them all. In 1553, England's young
Protestant King Edward VI, who we'll meet properly
in later lectures, died, and his inept attempts to
rig the succession failed. The throne fell to his eldest sister Mary, a committed Catholic whose firm
intention from the beginning was to end her native
land's 20-year nightmare of schism and heresy, and to return it to its historic role as a bastion of the Church of Rome. And to that end, she and Pope
Julius III immediately agreed that the obvious person to negotiate this Catholic restoration, and then to serve as
archbishop of Canterbury, was none other than Reginald Pole. As it turned out, this Catholic
restoration was short-lived. On the 17th of November 1558, Queen Mary and Cardinal Pole both died of quite different diseases
within hours of each other. And the new Queen Elizabeth led the country back into schism, but as historians have dug into this brief episode in recent years, it's become unmistakable
that the Catholicism of Mary's reign was neither
doomed nor a medieval throwback. It was a taste of what
England's Catholic Reformation might have been. One key to this is that
it was a coalition. It brought a few exiled
idealists like Pole, together with the majority
of English churchmen who'd gone reluctantly along
with Henry VIII's desires. These two parties didn't
entirely trust each other, and had somewhat different agendas, but at least for as
long as they both lived, the result was a creative
and constructive tension rather than a damaging rivalry. So the queen restored a few
of the dissolved monasteries, but on nothing like the
huge scale that some of her Protestant subjects had
expected and feared. And most of those refoundations, especially her flagship
refoundation at Westminster Abbey, the only one of the restored monasteries that's given a substantial endowment, they're not mere revivals. They're a blueprint for new,
slimmed-down monastic estate that would be at the rest
of the nation's service. England had not taken
the route to this point that Wolsey had imagined, but the destination is not that different. It shows that the energies of
this new regime are focused not on a handful of elite institutions, but on the church's
coalface in the parishes. England's parish churches
had, in their eyes, been devastated by the
reforms and asset stripping under Henry VIII and Edward VI. Now the population were
instructed to rebuild, and remarkably, despite the
fact that successive regimes had plundered their pious donations, they dug into their
pockets and built again. A comprehensive study of all the surviving parish account-books from the reign has demonstrated almost
universal compliance with the minimum level of repair
which the regime required, and in many cases much more. There was still by the time the queen died an enormous amount remaining to be done. Rebuilding takes much longer, and costs much more than destruction. In the asymmetric warfare
between Catholic and Protestant, which was fought out in church buildings across the continent, the Catholics, whose worship
needed physical furnishings, and paraphernalia were at
a systematic disadvantage, but the scale of the effort
in England in the 1550s bodes well for the church's
ability to regenerate itself. The pious ingenuity of
some of the shortcuts that were employed, so painted canvases instead of carved crucifixes, or gravestones cannibalized to make altars testify to the earnest impatience of England's Catholic majority
to put the past behind them, but buildings and furnishings
were only a means to an end. The real purpose of Mary's
Catholic Reformation was the rebuilding of the
faith, and in this case, the effort was not to turn back the clock, but to harness and redirect
some of the changes that her father's and
brother's regimes had made. In the front rank of this
effort was Edmund Bonner, the bishop of London. This is the closest we have to a contemporary portrait of him. It's a bit problematic. It may look as if he's doing some sort of charming rustic dance. He's, in fact, whipping a prisoner. This is a hostile caricature, but it was made during his lifetime. And he is said to have commented
angrily that he didn't know how they'd got such a
good likeness of him. So it will have to do, anyway, Bonner was a tough-minded,
energetic administrator. In the 1530s, he'd been a
protege of Thomas Cromwell's, but his increasingly plain
religious conservatism led to his deprivation in 1549. Restored by Mary in 1553, he
set about re-Catholicizing a city that was a hotbed of heresy. In 1554 Bonner began a full-scale
visitation of his diocese, a process which lasted a full year, and involved preaching and
careful inquiry after heresy, and laxity in every parish. In preparation for Easter 1555, he ordered every person
individually to confess their sins, and be absolved for participating
in the 20-year schism, and accompanying heresies,
and that included every individual being
specifically quizzed on their faith in the
mass, and in the pope. When the visitation
finally concluded, Bonner, who'd always been
something of a techno geek as far as the new technology
of print was concerned, great enthusiast for using it, rounded it off by publishing a book, which all the clergy and the
diocese were required to use. This book, "A Profitable
and Necessary Doctrine" was a summary of the Christian faith, which drew on a similar formulary published under Henry VIII's
authority a decade earlier. It also contained a set
of pro-forma sermons that drew heavily on a similar set issued by Edward VI's government, of course, adapted to bring them into line with Catholic orthodoxy. This is exactly the sort
of creative assimilation of the best reformist thought that the Italian Spirituali
would have recognized. Over 10,000 copies of
this book are printed, enough in theory for every
parish in England to own one. Bonner's project provides important clues to the regime's strategy. Printed books were a
part of that strategy, but only in a supporting role. The heart, again, was the parish church, and the priest within it. Mary's government had to work
with the priests that it had, not the ones that might
have ideally liked to have, but she does what she
could to purge the clergy of the most serious troublemakers. And for this she used that old shibboleth of a well-disciplined
church, priestly celibacy. Back in 1549, Edward VI's government had allowed priests to marry in line with its Protestant principles, and a minority of them
about a sixth had done so. These were now summarily dismissed. Those who abandoned their
wives and came crawling back were permitted to seek
priestly employment elsewhere. It's the most sweeping
clerical purge carried out by any English government
in the 16th century. It's the priests who
were the target audience for Bonner's books. The primary means by
which Pole and his allies wanted to rebuild English Catholicism wasn't the book, but the sermon. The common assertion that
Pole was wary of preaching is quite mistaken. So too is the claim that
he banned the Jesuits, the up-and-coming vanguard
of Catholic reform, from sending a mission to England. He just wanted to coordinate
their efforts with his own. All in all, it was a
pretty shrewd approach. Books are inherently
discursive disputatious, a cacophony of voices competing for the book buyer's loyalty. Whereas, the sermon as a medium
is inherently authoritative, a single voice speaking for the church, six feet above contradiction. It allowed Catholic doctrine to be taught without issuing an invitation
for it to be discussed. Pole wanted to avoid
getting into public debates with his Protestant critics, on the old principle that wrestling in mud taints the winners and the losers alike, which is a hint for all that I've been rather sunny about it, England's Catholic Reformation
always and of necessity had another face to it. Orthodoxy's boundaries might be inclusive, and generous, and
progressive and imaginative, but in the end, there did
have to be boundaries, and the needs to enforce them
had explicitly been a part of the Catholic Reformation
from the beginning. England's greatest Christian
humanist, Thomas More, was also its most pitiless
hammer of heretics. As lord chancellor, head of
the kingdom's secular courts, More worked with rare energy along with like-minded bishops
to arrest suspected heretics, and to roll up their networks. He was involved in half a dozen burnings, although there isn't
any evidence to support the persistent rumors that
he had prisoners tortured. To modern eyes it is hard to reconcile Thomas More, the principled reformer, with Thomas More, the
merciless persecutor, and Robert Bolt and Hilary Mantel each chose to emphasize
one of those two facets almost to the exclusion of the other, but More himself did not
see the contradiction. Reform and repression
depend on one another. The more gently the Catholic
reform has tended their sheep, the more freely they let them roam, the more fiercely they needed
to fight against the wolves who threatened to tear
them from the true faith. More's purge ended when he was
forced out of office in 1532, but as we'll see, trials
and executions for heresy would continue apace
through Henry VIII's reign. And when Mary restored Catholicism, she also restored the old
persecutory apparatus. The scale of the burnings
during her reign, 298 known executions,
plus 20 deaths in prison had no precedent in
England and few in Europe, although, we have to admit that by modern standards of mass killing this looks positively amateurish. In an important sense, it was unintended. Mary and her bishops expected that most of those charged
with heresy would give way, and recant their beliefs
to save their lives, as had usually been the case in the past. The new mettle of these
Protestants surprised everyone, including themselves, but when the regime's bluff was called, it chose to follow through, which it did not need to have done. The result was a four-year purge that began with the
most prominent bishops, like the bishop of Gloucester
here, and other preachers, and then spread out to entire clandestine
Protestant congregations. It's not simply an English phenomenon. Persecution of Protestantism
was simultaneously ramping up in France, the Netherlands, elsewhere. And in 1555, two years
into Mary's restoration, Cardinal Pole's old colleague
and rival, Cardinal Carafa, was elected Pope Paul IV. His reformism had now taken a grim turn. Having purged Rome of infidels by creating the city's
first ghetto for Jews, he now set out to purge
Catholic Christendom of error. In 1559 he would promulgate
the first modern index of prohibited books, but before that he renewed
his feud with Cardinal Pole, who he was now convinced
was a crypto-Protestant. Farcically, by 1558 the
most serious opponent of Pole's mission to
rebuild English Catholicism was the pope, who was refusing to allow any English
bishops to be appointed, and had begun inquisitorial proceedings against Pole himself. To modern eyes all this
repression looks like a betrayal of the energetic creativity
of Catholic reform, just as Thomas More's
humane sophistication seems to sit ill with his
merciless pursuit of heresy. That wasn't how it seemed at the time. Drawing ever more Christians into the church's widening
circle of holiness was one thing, standing by while a handful of heretics tried to pull the whole
structure down was another. And we should note it worked,
or it might have worked. More's campaign was well on the way to throttling English Protestantism
when it was interrupted. We can imagine that had
he had another few years the English Protestant movement would have died in its cradle. In Mary's reign, the Protestant leaders were
either arrested and executed, or forced into exile. And the process of breaking up their wider networks of
support was well underway. The Italian Spirituali had been suppressed by Cardinal Carafa in much the same way, when he'd revived the
Inquisition in Italy in 1542. And in Spain, the inquisition
there had put a stop to the Protestant Reformation
before it had even begun. So England could have had
a Catholic Reformation. It nearly did more than once. In many ways it might
have been a fine thing, far richer, perhaps more creative, almost certainly less bloody
than what actually happened, but there would certainly
have been a price. Thank you. - That was absolutely
fascinating and tremendous. One of the incredible what-ifs of history, and you've generated not surprisingly, quite a few questions and remarks, and quite of interest about Reginald Pole. And one of the questions I've got here, which is someone who
wants a little bit more is could you just say a little bit more about Henry VIII's attempt
to assassinate Reginald Pole? The question I hadn't
heard about this before. - That makes it sound
slightly more dramatic than it might have been. It's not that we have a
Day of the Jackal moment when he ducks to avoid the
bullet at the right moment. Henry repeatedly urges that
there should be attempts to have him murdered. He puts a price on his head, and wants people to get close to him. Pole is well aware of
the danger that he is in, and keeps trusted people around him. There are attempts by some
of Henry's diplomats in Italy to make it happen. They never get very close,
but it's a serious project. And it's certainly the case
that any kind of direct contact with Pole and his circle in exile is presumptive evidence of treason as far as Henry VIII is concerned, which, of course, is one of
the things that makes it harder for any potential assassins
to get close to his circle. - Very good, very interesting. Now there's a bit more Pole
questioning going on here from our audience. What would have happened
to the Catholic Reformation if Pole and Mary had survived, especially considering the
pope's hostility to Pole, and the unpopularity of
Spanish influence in England? - Very good question. Of course, the simple
answer is we don't know. So because it's counterfactual,
we get to make it up. Pole's difficulty with the papacy, Pole and Mary's
difficulties with the papacy are really quite serious by 1558. However, they die with
Paul IV himself in 1560. So let's assume that that part
of the history carries on, and things would likely have settled down after another year, or so of acute crisis. The relationship with Spain is a problem. The point when that
really could have brought Mary's reign down is
when the Spanish marriage is first proposed in 1554 when there's a local, but really quite serious
rebellion in Kent. And there's a moment when it looks like the city of London might be taken. That's defeated, and one of the things that takes the heat out of that issue is that Mary's government resolves, it really plays a diplomatic blinder in terms of the marriage
negotiations with Spain such that if Mary and her Spanish husband,
Philip, had had children then that child would not
have become king of Spain, the heir to a huge empire that would have been based in Madrid, but would instead have
inherited the English and Dutch, the English and Netherlandish territories. And so become king of a very substantial cross-channel empire whose
natural center of gravity would have been London. This is an astonishingly
good deal for the English to have negotiated. Of course, the real problem, which is underpinning Mary's reign is that she doesn't have children. And so the question of the succession of finding a Catholic succession that dogs every Tudor regime
from Henry VIII onward is still hanging over her, and if she survived
that particular illness that problem would not have gone away. There are solutions to that problem though that were potential Catholic candidates that could have been found, but it might have been difficult to do it while Elizabeth Tudor kept
her head on her shoulders. There's another variant of that question, which is what would have happened if when Mary died Pole had not, and the new Queen Elizabeth
had found herself inheriting a royal prince and cardinal
as archbishop of Canterbury, who might have proved
rather trickier to deal with than some of the internal
opposition she did face, but that's a different problem. - That was a very intriguing prospect. And I think we have got
time to ask another question which is related directly to that, which is a very straightforward question, which someone has asked, which
is, was Elizabeth tolerant? - I think the short answer to that is no, but she was cautious, and wary of what she could get away with. Elizabeth is very well
aware to begin with, and possibly almost excessively aware that her regime is walking on eggshells that unlike Mary's restoration, hers is met with a
considerable degree of unease, and suspicion, although,
also, with great enthusiasm by a relatively small minority. And so her attempt to bring
in a new Protestant settlement to make it stick is done
slowly and carefully. And she spends the first 10 years, or so, soothing her country into it. She imposes a fairly clear set of rules in the new legislation and injunctions that are passed in the
spring and summer of 1559, but she enforces it with
quite a light touch. The famous claim that she didn't want to make
windows into men's souls is not her line, that's Francis Bacon's
characterization of her policy. And it's fair enough, but that's not because
she had some great belief in freedom of conscience. It's that you don't want to
look into your subject's souls because you're afraid
of what you might find. And it makes more sense to let them have their own space and wait. Her great hope, and I
think it's vindicated by the way events turn out
is that time is on her side, and that if she can impose some semblance of a Protestant Reformation
on to her country, and hold it in place for long enough then eventually the plaster will set, and generational change will mean that the Catholic generation
will peacefully die out, and a Protestant country will
grow up almost by default. Of course, for many of
her Protestant subjects this softly-softly approach is a symbol of everything
that's wrong with what they see as but half a Reformation. - Yeah, very, very interesting. The last question I've got is
a question whether you could expand a little bit on the
theology of the Spirituali, and how they disagreed, or agreed with the prevailing orthodoxy? - That's tricky because they're not a group who have a program, or a clearly defined
orthodoxy to sign up to. And a lot of it is simply a garden-variety Christian humanism. They're wanting to pick up on
many of the sorts of themes that Erasmus was interested in of moving away from
ceremonial and ostentation towards emphasis on the inner
life and pious simplicity, but the difference, and the particular debt
that they have to Luther is an interest in a softened
version of his theology of justification by faith alone. They are not interested. They're very much not interested in the strong predestinarian
versions of this, which Luther himself very much holds, and Calvin famously doubles down on, but the notion that it should be possible for the Christian life to be one governed by inward piety and repentance rather than outward acts of penance is one that they find very appealing. And Pole is one of a great many
who think that it's possible to take that sort of
spiritualizing insight from what had become in their eyes a rather formalized structure
of piety, and to apply it while remaining within the
framework of Catholic orthodoxy. This is what he argues for
at the Council of Trent. It's an argument that he loses. And it's partly because
he loses that argument that Cardinal Carafa
is able to pursue him, and make at least a prima facie plausible
charge of heresy against him. - We've got two minutes. I'm gonna very cheekily ask
you a question of my own because I think it's quite an
important one which is that if it wasn't for Henry
VIII's marital problems, and if Wolsey and Cromwell had pursued the Catholic Reformation that you suggest that they
might be interested in, do you think Henry VIII would have been interested
and supported them? - Yes, I think he would, if only because ostentatious piety, and grand gestures are
very much his thing. I mean, this is a king,
whatever else you think of him in my opinion is not high, who was tremendously good at the theater, and the showmanship of royalty. He was also genuinely
taken by some of the ideas of the Christian humanists. He liked surrounding
himself with the best, and most fashionable scholars, and had a modest taste for that
sort of scholarship himself, enjoyed dabbling in it, and being flattered for the
quality of his attempts. And if you look at, for example, one of the great pet projects
of the very end of his life when having dissolved
all these monasteries, which he does so with the
rhetoric of claiming to use it for reforming purposes. In fact, it's almost
all plowed into fighting an entirely futile war with France, but in the last year of his life when there's a brief
possibility that he might seize all the assets of the
universities as well, and pour them down the
same bottomless pit, he instead reverses, and decides to use a
chunk of monastic wealth to found two huge new colleges, Trinity College at Cambridge,
and Christ Church in Oxford on the ruins of Wolsey's old foundation. And that sort of ostentatious creation of pious novelties was the sort of thing that he could very much have
thrown his weight behind. Whether the patient interest
in the work parish level would have appealed to
him, I think we can doubt, but he wouldn't have
minded if somebody else wanted to get on with that in his name. - Fascinating, absolutely fascinating. Well, what a great lecture,
what a great evening. And you're coming back to
give your second lecture on the 2nd of December,
England's Unwanted Reformation. - The very one. - We look forward to it
very much, thank you. - Thank you.
