- So welcome to the last
of this series of lectures on England's Reformations
and their Legacies. In this series I've
told a set of distinct, but I hope reasonably coherent stories about the religious changes that convulsed 16th century England and it's aftershocks
were felt for centuries. But this final story is
not so straightforward. Many of my protagonists today wouldn't have recognized
each other as brethren. The connections that I'll
be drawing between them are often speculative at best, and at the time and indeed
since they've all too often looked merely like the assorted
debris of the reformation, pieces that were flung out because they didn't or
wouldn't fit fringe extremists and irrelevant curiosities. My task this evening is
to try to persuade you that this cast of misfits and
cranks adds up to a story. I want to persuade you in fact that England had
a radical reformation. For most of the last 500 years
we've not seen it that way. The radical reformation is a term that historians began using
in earnest in the 1960s, another historian of that period talked I think revealingly about the left wing of the reformation. And they were talking above
all about a series of movements that emerged in Europe in the 1520s, hard on the heels of
Martin Luther's quarrel with the papacy. Because from the very
start Luther was beset by over enthusiastic allies who wanted to take his
ideas further than he did, or to turn them in subtly or
sharply different directions. And he was quickly denouncing
these people as fanatics whose foolish zeal and depravity had led them headlong into dangerous era. And these fanatics came to be associated with two things above all, one theological innovation
and one political starts. The theological innovation is the view that only adults who
choose to make a profession of Christian faith should be baptized rather than all infants being baptized very soon after their birth. The first adult baptisms that we know of took place in Zurich in 1525. This lady is not actually being baptized, she is about to be executed by drowning for the crime of being
baptized as an adult. And if that seems to you
like an overreaction, well, yes but this was a more provocative and consequential matter than it might seem to
modern ears for two reasons. First of all, it means that a
church can't be a universal, all embracing community like
the medieval Catholic Church or the post reformation Church
of England aspired to be, churches into which the whole
nation is born by default because the church that
practices adult baptism is one that requires a
positive choice to join it, and must therefore exclude a portion, probably a large majority of the people. And in a world where it's
assumed that religious unity is the underpinning of
social and political harmony, a movement whose very
basis means that it divides is genuinely frightening. And secondly this decision
to reject infant baptism opens a Pandora's box of
other alarming possibilities. The simplest reason to
reject infant baptism is that the Bible never
mentions the practice. But ancient Christian communities certainly were baptizing
infants from very early on as early as the second
century of the modern era. So if you reject infant baptism as an era then you're also committed to saying that the early Christian church went badly astray very quickly. And that presumably means that
all the other major decisions the early church made
are up for grabs as well. What becomes of the
doctrine of the Trinity or the great disputes over
the nature of Jesus Christ. Even the question of what
counts as part of the Bible, part of the canon of scripture itself. These are fundamental questions about the essence of Christianity. Luther and the other respectable reformers badly want not to reopen them. So denying infant baptism is about more than just a splash of water. This is the theological
equivalent of dowsing a church with petrol and sauntering
around flicking matches. And as I said, alongside
the theological threat there's a political one. Those first adult baptisms in Zurich took place in the middle of
a vast peasant rebellion, the largest mass rising
in European history before the French Revolution,
the so-called Peasants' War of 1524 to five in
which longstanding local and secular grievances
were given new force by the revolutionary
implications of Luther's ideas and the reckless apocalyptic
radicalism of preachers who chose to press those
implications much further in the direction of social
and political change than Luther himself was ever
willing to (indistinct). The rebellious peasants
were eventually defeated. There are a series of
battlefield massacres, but there's worse to come. In 1534 a set of prophecies
led to a number of radicals converging on the Western
German city of Muenster declaring an apocalyptic kingdom there trying to create a perfect
new community of goods, polygamy, very violently
enforced conformity. Eventually the besieging
armies bring the experiment to a bloody end. Muenster becomes a
byword for the radicals. It's the 9/11 of its age, a dreadful warning destined
always to be overheated. And the radicals come to
be called Anabaptists, literally rebaptized us because they insisted on taking people who'd been properly baptized
as infants and doing it again, even though all Christians agree that the sacrament of baptism is a once in a lifetime
unrepeatable event. Now, of course the radicals didn't believe that dunking a baby in
water is real baptism. So calling them Anabaptists
is saying that they're wrong. It's a term of abuse. But that's what happens to
feared and hated minorities. They were ferociously persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike. They were reduced to isolated communes and their few descendants
eventually found refuge in North America. In particular, they hardly
set foot on English soil. In the wake of the Munster catastrophe, there were scares about Dutch Anabaptists crossing the water to England. Henry VIII regarded the
prospect with genuine horror and his evangelical chief
minister, Thomas Cromwell, was absolutely at one with him on this, as many as two dozen
Netherlands were rounded up and executed on the charge
of Anabaptism in England under Henry VIII. No one spoke up to defend them and they have been almost forgotten. You will find no mention
of them in Hilary Mantel's, otherwise wonderful account
of Cromwell's life and work. So the English Anabaptist movement that could have been was
strangled in the cradle, and England could claim
with a straight face that it simply didn't have
a radical reformation. A few eccentrics maybe, but England's reformation was orderly. It was gentile and it was dignified, a world apart from the
fanatics and revolutionaries who beset are always over
excitable European neighbors. But the eccentrics
weren't as few in numbers as you might think and they were more than
a scattering of misfits. If we joined some of the
dots, a large picture emerges. To see that picture we need to
adjust our frame in two ways. First of all, to recognize that there is more to the radical reformation than just this issue of adult baptism. Maybe the single most famous preacher of the radical reformation in Germany, the revolutionary Thomas Müntzer, who as this statue shows
was much celebrated by the communist regime in East Germany. Müntzer was never directly
associated with adult baptism, and that's indicative of the
breadth of this movement. And we also need to
recognize that the boundary between the radical and the
respectable reformations was never as clear or as watertight as those respectable
establishment want you to think. The radicals want another
species or some alien import easily isolated and eradicated. The seeds of radicalism was scattered throughout what Archbishop Cranmer call to this world of reformation. Those seeds might remain
dormant for decades, but they could spring into life as soon as the conditions were right. For the first of the dots that I'm going to try to connect for you, we need to look back beyond
the conventional beginning of the story, back to
the so-called Lollards, a loose movement of
religious dissent endemic in parts of 15th and early
16th century England, deriving ultimately from
the unorthodox 14th century Oxford theologian, John Wycliffe. Now the importance of the Lollards is often been exaggerated,
whether by their contemporaries who were sometimes
hypersensitive about heresy or by later Protestants eager to confect a medieval lineage for themselves. So joining the dots here is
an old and a dubious game. It is very tempting to
discern Lollards involvement in for example, the great
peasants revolt of 1381, one of whose leaders, the
renegade Priest John Ball famously preached that from the beginning, all men by nature were created alike and the divisions of wealth and status were but a yoke of
bondage to be thrown off. Was he a Lollard? Well, maybe. But regardless, he didn't leave
much of a legacy behind him. After a brief flowering in the
late 14, early 15th century the Lollards were firmly
discredited, suppressed, driven to the margins. And yet some of them hung on grimly for another century or so until the reformation era itself. These people preached neither
John Ball's revolution nor John Wyclif sophisticated
idealistic critique of Orthodox religion. There are persistent presence
in some English towns, London, Bristol, Coventry and in some rural regions,
Buckinghamshire, Essex, Kent, Oxfordshire, but
they're not advancing. They seem to have had only one
unvarying positive doctrine, the conviction that their English Bibles should be freely available. Beyond that their beliefs
are a series of denials. They generally rejected
any notion that a person or a place or an object could be sacred. And so they despised priests
as oppressive hypocrites. They ridiculed sacraments, sometimes all sacraments as meaningless. They reviled images and rights and relics. Sometimes even church buildings as mere monuments to superstition. And they're quite ready to deride traditional Christian doctrines that are linked to those monuments. For example, Wycliffe had criticized the doctrine of transubstantiation, the miracle by which
Christ's body and blood are made physically
present during the mass. And he'd done so in subtle
philosophical terms. Later Lollards they claim
Wycliffe as their inspiration, but they don't use
sophisticated philosophy, they use vicious mockery in an age which reveres the Virgin Mary. They deride her with
sometimes crude innuendos. Some of this talk seems
to imply deep questions about theological issues, such as the nature of
Jesus Christ's humanity, but the Lollards aren't trying to raise profound theological issues, they're kicking against the priests. This century long discontented rumble doesn't pose a serious
threat to the church. The numbers of Lollards
are impossible to estimate but there's not many of them,
not even in their strongholds. Most of them carried on
attending their parish churches, pulling faces during Mass,
keeping a stony silence while their neighbors prayed, and then jeering at priest craft in the ale-house afterwards. They met discretely in each other's homes to read and pray and argue. They had no churches. They had no ministers. They had no structures
apart from informal networks to circulate their
forbidden hand copied books. They've got no more than
a handful of sympathizers amongst the gentry and the clergy. The law was enforced against them, every so often a bishop would
lead an antiheresy drive for a few months, often as
a means of demonstrating to his Orthodox flock
that he means business. And these purges would usually consist of rounding up the usual suspects. Most of whom will be induced
to recount their arrows with only a handful being
like this unfortunate fellow in the barrel, persistent or
unlucky enough to be executed. From the perspective of the hierarchy, Lollardy is like a persistent
infestation of fleas. It's a nuisance that stubbornly
defies extermination. It is not a mortal danger. Now English Protestants of later centuries often claim the Lollards
as the ancestors Wycliffe has been called the Morning
Star of the Reformation. But in fact the lollards
don't seem to have done an awful lot to prepare the way, not many of the first leaders
of the English reformation had any visible debt to the Lollards. The evangelicals core message, those first reformers message
is overwhelmingly about faith, the nature of salvation, and that derives entirely
from Martin Luther owes nothing to the Lollards, but the Lollards do recognize
these new evangelicals as their brethren. They listen to their preachers,
they buy their books. And by the middle of the
16th century, at the latest, Lollardy has just vanished into this growing Protestant movement whose critique of traditional religion is much suppler and more coherent, and whose leaders unlike most Lollards are ready to seal their
faith with their blood. But the Lollards still
have a part to play. In that first fragile years
of the English reformation, those Lollard networks
provide a ready-made audience and their vectors for the
transmission of forbidden books. More significantly English evangelicals who are painfully aware
that their movement looks like a heretical innovation, not an ancient Christian
truth are keen to seize any form of historical
legitimacy they can, and claiming that Lollard
heritage is an obvious gambit. Lollards had never made
use of the printing press, but from the late 1520s onwards, evangelicals are publishing
old Lollard texts like this one as proof that they had
a tradition behind them. And that effort continues long after the last people that we can claim they identify as Lollards
vanished from the record. The English reformation is great, historian John Foxe is an
early enthusiast for Lollardy and his research assembled a
good deal of what we now know about the movement. For him the Lollards are a part of a thin, but unbroken thread of
faithful English Christianity running through the dark
centuries of people tyranny. How far anyone was ever really
persuaded by these arguments, we might doubt. But valorizing the Lollards and claiming their heritage
as your own has consequences. Lollards and mainstream English
Protestants agreed on a lot, the centrality of the Bible, the critique of the church and its rights, but not on everything. Lollardy's absolute rejection of any kind of material holiness is much closer to the sharp-edged reformed Calvinist Protestantism that becomes dominant in
England from the mid 1540s then to the milder more Lutheran
evangelicals of the '30s, and the lower networks may
have helped English formers to make that jump. But many Lollards also held views which went beyond respectable
Protestantism of any kind. So let's park them
grumbling on the sidelines for a few minutes and look at some of the radical
current starting to surface within the English reformation itself, which as we're going to see pick up on some of those Lollards themes. I think you can group
those radical currents, the ones that emerge in the century, following Henry VIII break
with Rome into three streams: a perfectionist-mystical stream, a separatist one and a utopian one. And I want to look at
each of those in turn. Perfectionist-mystical radicalism first surfaces properly
in the reign of Edward VI in the mid 16th century when the new Protestant establishment is coalescing around a
new hard-edged orthodoxy. This is the doctrine of predestination, which holds that some of us are eternally predestined to
heaven, others of us to hell, and all of us are powerless to affect that decree in any way. This is a doctrine which has
always struck some people as intuitively repugnant. A small movement of so-called Freewillers, evangelicals who asserted
that God lets them choose their own eternal fate sprung up in parts of
rural Kent and elsewhere. During the years of prosecution under Queen Mary in the 1550s, the regime actively uses the division between these Freewillers
and the predestinarians to stir up trouble
amongst the Protestants, deliberately putting
rivals and prison together, delaying the executions of
people whom they have identified as particularly divisive. But even with this discrete assistance, the Freewillers couldn't
compete with the predestinarians whose networks and academic credibility and charismatic leaders put them ahead. So the Freewillers are out
maneuvered and discredited. And by 1558 their
movement has disappeared, just another dot. But if they vanished their ideas didn't. In the 1560s, a Dutch mystical movement who also rejected predestination began to win English adherence. This movement called
themselves the Family of Love. I mean, to modernize they
don't really live up to that wonderfully sinister name, but at the time they
certainly provoked real fear, these Familists, as they came to be known weren't interested in
adult versus child baptism. They are like the Lollards, they conformed outwardly
to establish churches, but they're spiritualists. They treat Orthodox Christian
doctrine as an allegory for their own mystical quest, whose purpose isn't salvation
in the normal Christian sense, but in a union with Christ, what they called being guarded with God. Unlike the Freewillers of the 1550s, they followed the
rejection of predestination through to its full implications. If they're free to choose their own path, surely that must mean that they're free to choose moral perfection against the standard Christian
view of original sin. Maybe if they're empowered
by the Holy Spirit they could transcend the
lumpen business of earthly right and wrong altogether. They could ascend from the darkness of law to the light of grace. There's a wave of panic about Familists in the years around 1580 and the sect slowly fades
from view after that, but again, their ideas persist. In the 1590s we find English
radicals questioning baptism, not advocating adult baptism, but arguing that Catholic
baptism was irredeemably corrupt that therefore true Christian baptism had completely vanished from the world during the
long centuries of popery. And therefore that Christians must
abandon baptism completely or indeed any kind of
church until God sees fit to send new profits, to renew His people. The last two English people
ever to be burned for heresy in 1612 held views of this kind. One of them believed that he himself was the new John the Baptist. Now these are extreme
and eccentric positions, but a broader and more
troubling variant of familyism would soon emerge. A renowned London preacher
named John Everard discovered this spiritualist
tradition during the 1620s and immersed himself in
medieval mystical writings. He came to believe that
the Bible was symbolical and figurative, a dead letter,
which could not be compared to what he called the inward word, the law of God written in our hearts. A scattering of other zealots
were becoming disenchanted with the English church
as Calvinist consensus and what they saw as its outward moralism. Establishment doctrines
might be intellectually neat, but they didn't seem adequate to describe the inward
experience of assurance, of grace and free forgiveness
that these folks had found. So when that Calvinist
consensus is broken up by the counter revolution
led by King Charles I in the 1630s, the spiritualists are ready. Soon London's underground
radical scene is teaming with tiny splinter groups
embracing spiritual union with Christ downplaying any
talk of sin or judgment, even abandoning relics
like conventional prayer or faith in bodily resurrection. This might all seem alarmingly unorthodox, but what made it dangerous
is that it arose so naturally from mainstream Protestant religion. The mystical texts which Everard
was so enthusiastic about were also favorites of Martin Luther's. The notion of grace transcending law is one of Luther's signature doctrines. Talk about free forgiveness, longing for inner assurance, worries about the corruption
of inherited Catholic rights wanting to rise above the carnal
and embrace the spiritual. And this is all vanilla Protestantism. Mystics and perfectionist
aren't a different species from their Orthodox neighbors, they are a variant easily
similar enough to interbreed, that's what makes them so frightening. And the same is true of my
second strand, the separatists. I've talked before in this series about how the notion of the Church of England, a single universal church
embracing the whole nation matters deeply to the English
reformers sense of themselves. Most of the so-called Puritans who yearned for further reformation nevertheless remained deeply committed to that unified national project. This often involves painful negotiations with their consciences, a recurrent story during the
late 16th, early 17th centuries is of the Puritan minister who tries to hold down a
church position of some kind, then refuses to conform on some point that his conscience can't swallow. It might be vestments. It might be the use of the sign
of the cross during baptism or kneeling to receive communion, there are plenty of
tripwires, whatever it is. This man is eventually forced to choose between giving way or
being deprived of office. Many such people resigned themselves to a miserable half-life, maybe working as private tutors, still attending the worship of a church that they held to be dangerously corrupt. Such people thought of themselves rightly as faithful members of
the Church of England, but then they were also something else. They belonged to a brotherhood
of the self-styled godly. They sat in the pews alongside
their carnal neighbors. They didn't pull faces. They didn't chill in ale-houses, but the heart of their
religion was somewhere else. In the sermons and lectures they traveled to outside
their home parishes. In the informal gatherings
with sympathetic ministers where they delved deeper
into mysteries of the faith, or in godly conference with
one another in private houses. Like the Lollards before them, they're a church within a
church and not much love is lost between them and their
conformist neighbors. That final step into
(indistinct) is momentous, but it's also natural. If the Puritans are
slow to take that step, it's partly because the
government takes a very dim view of open separatism. The only foolproof way
for an English Protestant to leave the Church of
England was to leave England. During the 1570s and '80s, the substantial expatriate
communities of English merchants in the Netherlands become hosts
to separatist congregations modeling what a reformed
English church might be. Now most of these
communities are Presbyterian. They still wanted an all
embracing national church, just a different one free from bishops and all the other popish compromises. There are plenty of
Presbyterians in England too. Most of them unhappily remaining
within the national church. Some of them eventually
taking the dangerous step of forming clandestine
communities of their own, but a few go further. England's early separatists
became known as Brownists. Although Robert Browne, who tried briefly to found a separatist
congregation in Norwich in 1581 and then a more enduring
venture in the Netherlands later in the same year, Browne had actually returned to the bosom of the
Church of England by 1585. This is the rather
awkward memorial to him, awkward because it's in the
grounds of the Anglican Church where he served for many years
as its conformist minister. Brownists, or Independents,
or Congregationalists didn't want to be a
universal church at all. More modestly or dangerously, they simply wanted to form
godly communities of their own. Recognizing that the faithful
would only ever be a remnant in a world filled with reprobates. So they're implicitly
abandoning the whole notion of a unified Christian society. Now these little
communities hung on in exile and the Dutch are welcoming enough, but it's hard to see what
their future might be. They feared that they would
eventually lose our language and our name of English. And then in the 1610s, a
new possibility appeared. England was after several false starts beginning to establish colonies on the North American mainland. English government being what it is, the project was being done on the cheap. Settlers who funded their own colonies could buy themselves a
remarkable amount of freedom including in religion. The English Congregationalists in Leiden began negotiating just such
a deal with King James I. When the Mayflower eventually
sailed from Plymouth in 16th, this isn't the real thing obviously, it's the reproduction built in the 1950s whose builders claim that
it is probably quite similar to the original. Anyway, half of the 100 passengers on that original Mayflower
were former Dutch exiles. An American colony answered
the Congregationalists dilemma, how could they be faithful
both to their consciences and to their nation if the only solution
involved crossing an ocean and settling in an environment so hostile that it killed fully half of the settlers in their first winter? Well, so be it, the name
for their settlements tells you everything. New England, it remained tiny and
marginal during the 1620s, but under Charles I, a
new and much larger wave of English Puritans were pushed
into separatism and exile. A thousand more Congregationalist pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts in 1630, by 1640 some 20,000 had made the crossing. And they would do more than anyone else to set the religious tone
of British North America and of the United States
as it eventually emerge. That is fiercely determined
in their own piety, conscious of their unique calling, fully aware that there a
minority in a plural society and a godless world preferring to pursue their own perfection rather than wait for others to join them. Now, theologically, these separatists were or tried to be fairly
Orthodox Protestants, but once you've abandoned
a national church, the line becomes hard to hold. A great many questions which
Protestants had generally given sort of blandly traditional
answers to are being reopened. Should heresy and blasphemy
be treated as crimes? Should Christians accept that warfare could sometimes be just? Could Christians legitimately swear oaths, despite the Bible apparently
forbidding the practice? Anyone who's committed to an
all embracing Christian society with a single national church is more or less compelled to answer yes to all of the questions, but once you've abandoned that commitment then morally enticing but
politically impractical ideas like toleration or
passivism start to back. Once you've freed of the
crushing responsibility to create rules that a whole society might be able to follow, the separatists could start
to explore new possibilities. Many of them possibilities that the Lollards had
explored before them. Even that incendiary question
of infant versus adult baptism starts to rear its head. Remember the primary reason
for opposing adult baptism was that it makes maintaining
a universal church impossible, but the Congregationalists
had already abandoned that. So if they've got scruples
about infant baptism why not indulge them? So my first two streams,
separatists, radicalism and perfectionist-mystical
blend into each other. In the mid 1630s, the
colony at Massachusetts endured a bitter split between a conventionally
Calvinist majority and a fringe of dissidents
led by this woman, the pious well-educated
midwife, Anne Hutchinson. She felt that rigid legalism was cramping the gospel's true spirit, just as badly in the new
world that had it home. She and her spiritualist followers were eventually thrown out, but they're welcomed into
the neighboring colony of Rhode Island by Roger Williams, who had himself been expelled
from Massachusetts in 1636 and was now advocating adult baptism. And in this deservedly famous tract absolute religious toleration. Denouncing radicalism was the easy part, preventing it from spreading
is a different matter. And the same is true of the third strand of
radicalism, utopianism. The persistent hunch
that Christian society could and should be remade
in the light of the gospel. Already in Henry VIII reign, a few idealists had wondered about using his royal supremacy to
implement sweeping change. If you're Thomas Cromwell,
that means a relatively modest and pragmatic set of reforms
about fusing church and state more closely together. If you are Cromwell's excitable protege and informant Clement Armstrong, that means a wildly implausible scheme which envisages a comprehensive
system of moral surveillance covering every household in England using the king's new
found spiritual authority to impose systematic
godliness on his subjects. This is a world of reformation and plenty of people in it are
well aware of the old saying that you should never
let a crisis go to waste. As the shine begins to come off, the reformers alliance with Henry VIII, more of them begin to dream of projects to build a just Commonwealth. And at the center of most
of those concerns is money. The reformation like most revolutions makes a few individuals very rich, acquiring church goods, lands and incomes, which the common people
had once naively imagined belonged in some sense to them, and it rankled. When the monasteries were dissolved almost all of the
proceeds were swallowed up by Henry VIII wars and by his courtiers. And that was not how the
dissolution had been sold to the country. There had been promises that
the wealth of the monasteries would be used to build
roads, to indoubt hospitals, to found schools, even to
establish new universities. The Lollards had been arguing
for more than a century that Oxford and Cambridge is stranglehold on higher education needed to be broken. Lollard sympathizers had once introduced a bill into parliament to
establish 15 new universities. Now evangelical preachers and pamphleteers started to put forward
schemes of their own. These Commonwealth men
as they came to be called are not an organized party, they're a mood of rumbling discontent. Some offered modest proposals focusing on specific laws or grievances like the enclosure of common land. Others are more sweeping, they want wholesale
redistribution of church goods, abolition of the House of Lords. Two things hold these
disparate projects together. A mood of idealistic moral urgency and a sustained hostility
to the clergy as a cost. From the bishops, the forked
caps as they call them, through the purgatory
horse-leeches, the monks, to the dumb dogs that is
the ordinary parish priests, never opening their mouths
to preach the gospel merely drowning in their
own swinish filthiness. When Henry VIII dies
and an unapologetically Protestant regime takes
power under Edward VI, the Commonwealth men have their moment. They're openly encouraged
by the new government. Many of their themes are
picked up by leading preachers like the former Bishop Hugh Latimer, preachers who role a moral critique of their society and its elite into a critique of the
church and its corruption. A couple of years of this kind of populist Protestant politics. And in the summer of disturbances, the so-called camping time
that spreads across England in the summer of 1549. Not exactly England's answer
to the Peasants' War in Germany not least because almost everywhere it ends without bloodshed, but the parallels are there. The key difference is
that the English peasants who gathered themselves into encampments broke down the fences
that had been erected and closing common land
sent demands for redress, generally believed that
the government sympathized with their concerns and then may have been right to a degree. Lord protector Somerset
sent them soothing letters and some of the regimes leading preachers came to address the encampments. One reason that the
government's conciliatory is that it's painfully aware that it just doesn't have the resources to suppress risings on this scale. Soothing noises are all they've got. Protector Somerset's horrified
colleagues in government depose him in a palace
coup later in the year, and that's the end of dangerous populism from the Protestant regimes. All that is left is an
enduring popular memory of the good duke and a sense that the radical preachers are on the side of the people. Under Queen Elizabeth
utopian talk of this kind is not encouraged, but suppressing it
doesn't make it go away. Sometimes it gets blurted out which usually costs somebody
their career or their head. Sometimes it's hidden
inside coded critiques. This tract may look like a coded critique, but if you read at the bottom where it's claimed to be printed overseas within two furlongs of a bouncing priest, you'll see that it's
not very coded at all. In fact, it's printed on a
clandestine press in England and its printers led
the regime of Mary Chase before eventually being closed down. These sorts of themes
are naturally picked up by our other two groups of radicals, the spiritualists and the separatists. The regime tries to suppress utopian anger against priests and their ways by insisting that the new
ministers of the Church of England are quite unlike the popish
priests of previous generations. They're set apart, not
by sacramental ordination or tonsure or the mumbling of Latin, but by godliness, by
learning and by orthodoxy. And so to the argument
went to these ministers, truly deserved the reverence and obedience which their popish predecessors
had falsely claimed. You didn't need to be especially radical to be suspicious of that bait and switch. Merely to notice that not all of the new Protestant ministers were everything that they
were cracked up to be. Before long, radicals
are starting to question the entire notion that a minister needs university education,
a notion which once again supports that stranglehold
of the two universities. Surely, they asked,
it's better to be filled with the Holy Spirit than
with human knowledge. Maybe knowledge which
puffs the educated up with delusions of grandeur is actually an obstacle to true godliness. Maybe true Christians should go back to Martin Luther's
doctrine of the priesthood of all believers and reject the idea of a separate ministerial cost completely. Now these different
contradictory radical voices, my three streams, don't constitute a single uniform radical reformation, but they're not disconnected either. They're tied together,
both ends of our period. At the start in the sense
that all of these radicals stood in succession to the Lollards. I'm not claiming that a living tradition of Lollard radicalism endured
throughout our period, although that is possible. There are certainly intriguing
signs that the same villages, even the same families that
provided Lollard suspects in the 15th century were still hotspots of radicalism in the 17th. And if we can't quite see how
that tradition was transmitted that's no reason to deny its existence. More substantially, the way
that the Protestant mainstream celebrated and memorialized these Lollards kept their radical heritage alive. The Protestant historian John Foxe carefully recorded how Lollards had formed separatist conventionals, had argued passionately
for justice for the poor, had rejected the use of oath, had deplored any kind
of established ministry, and in some cases had embraced pacifism. Foxe doesn't actually endorse these views, but he doesn't condemn them
or edit them out either. And it's no coincidence that Foxe himself held some disturbingly radical views. In particular, his conviction, which was highly unusual for the time that executing people for
their religious convictions no matter what those
convictions might be was wrong. For a century or more radicals
eagerly cited the Lollards whom Foxe recorded as precedents
for their own convictions. Still let's not get
this out of proportion. All of the dots that I've been
connecting are still dots, a few scattered voices
and short-lived movements. What draws them together is what happens at the end of our period. The extraordinary breakdown of the 1640s when all of these streams flow together. From the moment when Charles
I is forced by military defeat to summon a parliament in 1640 up to the point when his son was restored to his vacant throne in 1660. For those 20 years, England
never has a government that is both willing and able to enforce a uniform religious
settlement onto the country. And so a century's worth
of subterranean radicalism surges into the open. Congregationalist churches spring up as newly liberated Puritans get tired of waiting for national reformation and decide to force the pace. The civil war of 1642 to
six sharpens the mood, middle ways vanish amidst the killing. From 1645 onwards, the
reorganized parliamentary army becomes a vast armed seminary
for apocalyptic radicalism. Once the war is over, it's that army which finds itself at the center of political power. To the horror of most of the nation, the radicals are on the march
and no one can stop them. The most obvious consequence of this is the emergence of a
sway of new movements. Some of which would become
enduring denominations. This is when the Baptists
who are now, of course, one of the largest global
Christian families were born. The question of adult baptism came back with avengeance. A minority of Congregationalists were questioning infant baptism, meanwhile by quite different route some perfectionist-mystical sects were also coming to define themselves by the practice of adult baptism. These two different baptistic communities are deeply suspicious of each other, but shared practice and they shared hatred of almost everybody else
slowly forces them together and they uneasily come to profess a shared identity as Baptists. That name is probably given to them by the other truly
significant enduring sect to emerge during these years, the Quakers who took
all the radical themes that we'd been tracking
to their logical endpoint. They spiritualized most
conventional Christian doctrine. They abandoned any conventionally structured church ministry, sacraments. They taught a radical
doctrine of human equality. They professed pacifism,
although not quite as steadily as they liked to remember in later years. They swept aside all religion in favor of the light of Christ, which they found dwelling inside everyone. From a standing start in the late 1640s, by 1660 there are tens
of thousands of Quakers. And the zealous idealism
is already starting to spread across the world. But for each denomination that endured, there were dozens of
movements that flared up and died away or were subsumed
into the wider culture. These are the years that
produced the first ever campaign for representative democracy,
the so-called Levellers, or an agrarian commune
trying to create a world of total equality virtue
and reason by sharing labor and the polishing private
property, the Diggers, or a mystical movement of self-denial abandoning any kind of religious practice while waiting for a new
dispensation from God, the Seekers, or a revolutionary utopian sect hoping to inaugurate an
apocalyptic kingdom of the saints the Fifth Monarchists, and
a great many other groups real or imagined dedicated
to particular profits, or to restoring Judaism, or to nudism, or to moral perfectionism, or transcending morality altogether. And collectively their legacy,
and this is the real legacy of England's radical reformation is irreducible pluralism. Religious toleration of some kind has been an inescapable fact
of English life ever since, whether as a point of principle, or as a grudging concession to reality. Like it or not, England's
religious identity was fractured beyond repair. And that is where we still are. Let me finish with two specific legacies of the 1640 to '60 period that
underlying the general point. First of all the Jews. England's long established
Jewish population had been expelled by royal order in 1291. And for nearly four centuries, the practice of Judaism
in England was illegal. The fact that to be English was by definition to be Christian is what made the creation of
the Church of England possible. By the mid 17th century, the prospering Jewish mercantile community in the Netherlands was
creating a commercial incentive to lift the ban. But the actual decision is
made by Oliver Cromwell, England's lord protector from 1653 to '58, a Congregationalist
whose personal commitment to toleration was partial, certainly doesn't extend to Catholics, but was also real. Like many other radicals, Cromwell believed that
Christ's second coming would be proceeded by the mass conversion of the Jews to Christianity. Maybe readmitting the Jews
to England as he did in 1656 in response to this petition
would help to precipitate that while it hasn't worked out that way. But it has meant that ever since England has been not just
a multi-denominational, but also a multi-faith country. A second legacy, again touches on Judaism. And on the close ties between the radical
Protestant groups in England and the Netherlands. Adam Boreel, the most important leader of the Dutch rationalist
group known as the Collegiants was an Anglophile. He'd spent a crucial
formative period in the 1630s amongst radical groups in England. In the 1650s English
Quakers paid a return visit. They sent missionaries to Amsterdam and opened channels to the Collegiants. In particular these Quaker missionaries befriended this young Dutch Jew, whom the Collegiants had taken in after he'd been expelled
from his synagogue. This man translated a
Quaker track into Hebrew in the hope of converting Jews to Quakers. The Quakers wrote that he was
very friendly to their cause and his own later writings
show significant signs of debts to Quaker criticisms of the Bible and of conventional Christianity. His name was Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza is justly famous as the philosophical founding father of modern atheism and rationalism, but his debt to the radical
Christian traditions represented by the collegians
and the Quakers is profound. His ethical vision doesn't so much reject traditional Judaism and
Christianity as transcend them. And in doing so he is true to that radical reformation tradition represented by his friends. He's a reminder of a truth that applies not just throughout the
English speaking world, but even beyond it, which is that all of us
believer or unbeliever alike and whether we like it or
not are children of one, or other of the English
reformations, thank you. - Thanks so much Professor Ryrie. And the first question before
we get into the questions about this lecture today is, what's your next lecture
series going to be about? - Oh yes, indeed, thank you for asking. I've got another series of
six lectures coming next year which are on the early global
spread of Protestantism. So we'll be starting by
looking at the problem of how that happened and
then moving around the world looking at the Americas, at
the Middle East, at Asia, at the involvement in the slave trade, and then finishing by thinking about the encounter between
missionaries and empire. - Thanks very much. Now turning to your lecture today, I'm going to start with a
question from Peter Boyle, he says I was taught as a child that the Bible did support infant baptism because it says that whole
families were baptized and whole families presumably
included some infant children. - That is the argument
that has often been made in defense of it. And it remains a hotly contested point. So I don't want to walk too
much into the minefield. I think what's fair to say is that yes, there are references to households. I think it's households rather
than families being baptized. It's reasonable to guess
that that includes infants but it's not a cast iron case. And it's certainly true
that all of the baptisms that are specifically
described in the New Testament are of adults or at least of
people who are in a position to make a conscious decision of their own. So one can argue that
either way, but I think the, I, myself I'm Anglican and my
sons were baptized as infants. So I guess I've chosen my side. Yeah, the Baptists have
at least got a point. - Okay, thank you. Is it true that the
first colony in America to give legal protection
to religious liberation was Maryland founded by the
Catholic Lord Baltimore? - It's certainly true that Marylanders write that into their constitution. And so it's a proud
claim that Maryland makes and it's not wrong. If we had a representative
of Rhode Island here I think they would want
to advance the claim for the priority of that colony. And again, this is a fight that I don't want to
get into the middle of. I think that the strict
priority between the two may be less important than the different approaches
that the two sides are taking. From Maryland the wish to create a space which is safe for Catholicism and therefore by extension for others pushes them in this one direction. The Rhode Islanders who
are trying to create a refuge for radicalism, which is not a very
Catholic friendly place, but is open to different kinds of people around the fringes of
the Christian community takes them in a different direction. And there's indeed
something else happening again in Pennsylvania. - Thank you, would it be fair to say that the wave of Lollard
ideas you've described washed up in the Putney Debates? - That's a real stretch. The Putney Debates is there's moments in the wake of English Civil War when it, only relatively recently discovered, it's forgotten for a couple of centuries when the Levellers in the new model army are putting forward the case for something which to our modernized looked very much like representative democracy and universal male suffrage. There are at best echoes
of some Lollard themes, but it requires some
pretty careful examination from the eye of faith to
draw a direct link there. I'd love to believe that that were so, but I'm not aware of any
evidence making the direct link. - Another question here
about French Huguenots, what was the place of the French Huguenots who fled Catholic France and England, among other places beginning
in the mid 16th century, where do they fit within the radical and reforming Protestant groups
in England in this period? - That's a really good
question and there's several, I don't want to spend
too long talking about it because there's potentially a lot to say. In the earliest years of the reformation, so in the mid 16th century, the presence of this
relatively small number of both French and Dutch refugees, they're really important
in helping to seed the English reformation, but much more within the kind of reformed Calvinist mainstream. Certainly the French, the Dutch
slightly more eclectic group tend predominantly to
come within that group. And indeed thereafter as the Huguenots establish this sort of tenuous
legal position in France after the end of the wars
of religion in the 1590s become pretty tightly defined within that Calvinist orthodoxy. So they're not really pushing
into these radical themes, but then there's a big
wave of Hugueno immigration into England in the 1680s and '90s after the toleration for Huguenots France is revoked by Louis XIV in 1685, produces I think proportionately the largest wave of immigrants that England has ever received. And lots of these people show up and are integrating themselves into the lives of the English church. Most of them are in theological terms entirely Orthodox Calvinists and are at least willing
to fit into the existing mainstream denominations,
the Church of England, or the mainstream
dissenting denominations, but there are more radical
voices amongst them. I mean, the most famous of
those would be the group known as the French Prophets, who in the wake of the
Camisards' rebellion in the early 18th century in 1706, 1707 are talking up apocalyptic
prophecies which, they stir up a short-lived,
but genuine excitement. The bishop of Worcester is on their side as if that's a sign of reaching to the heart of the English establishment. So the contribution that Huguenots make to this story at various stages is very, very considerable, but it pushes in several
different directions. - I've got one final question, what is the reason for
Unitarianism survival in the midst of such a
profusion of beliefs? - Unitarianism I should
probably have mentioned is perhaps one of the natural consequences of this sort of radical proliferation. This is the umbrella term for a series of different Christian, or Christian derived movements, which question traditional
Christian Trinitarian theology, and which usually involves denying the divinity of Jesus Christ. And that has fairly
significant knock on effects for other aspects of Christianity. Is there in the radical mix
during the mid 17th century, anti-Trinitarianism as
it would be called then, is one of the themes that's emerging for all the toleration of
the mid 17th century regimes, that is something they don't like. And anti-Trinitarians do find themselves subject to a degree of persecution. One of the things that
makes the anti-Trinitarian or Unitarian story different
from some of these others is the way that it feeds
into the enlightenment and early dayism and rationalism, as that begins to burgeon
from the late 17th and into the 18th century. It seems that intellectual mood like a very sort of rationalist
form of Christianity. And you can see some folks who are picking up on Spinoza's ideas, being very drawn towards that
kind of a way of thinking. So I don't want to
suggest that Unitarianism is simply a staging post
on the way to atheism as has sometimes been said, it's clearly a tradition
with its own authenticity and genuine spirituality, but it is the case that
for a number of people, it does serve that purpose. And it's certainly seen by its enemies as serving that purpose. So it becomes woven into the
story in that kind of a way. - Thank you so much, Professor Ryrie for fascinating lecture. Thank you all for coming, we hope you enjoyed the lecture and we'll be sending you a link
to the video and transcript in a couple of days time. And please do sign up to our newsletter to hear about the next series which we were sure is going to
be fascinating too, thank you. - Thank you.
