5. The Reformation in England
In England there had been various attempts at reform. In the 14th century John Wyclif was the first to urge the transaltion of the Bible into English but was opposed by the authorities. His followers, called Lollards, were persecuted but they kept alive the hope of reform. It was not until the time of Henry VIII that the opportunity came for reform to begin.
5.1 The Church in England under King Henry VIII
Henry VIII became king of England in 1509. In 1502 his older brother, Arthur, had died. Their father Henry VII decided that Henry should marry Arthur’s widow, Catherine of Aragon. Henry and others thought this was prohibited by Leviticus 18 and 20. But the Pope gave permission and they were married after Henry VIII became king. By 1514 he had produced no child, and he asked the Pope for an annulment. Mary was born in 1516. But by the mid 1520s he still had no son. He began to think God was judging him.
Henry began to look for a way to end his marriage to Catherine. (He was already in love with Anne Boleyn.) He employed teams of scholars to find good biblical reasons why his marriage to Catherine should be ended. One of these scholars was Thomas Cranmer, a graduate of Cambridge University. From 1527 Thomas visited Universities in Europe and some of the European reformers to seek their help.
The Pope refused to annul the marriage.
One of the ideas the scholars had was that the King should be the supreme head of the Church in England and not the Pope. Before this time Henry had been loyal to the church of Rome. In 1521 he had published an essay against Luther about the Seven Sacraments. Because of this the Pope gave him the title “Defender of the Faith”.
In 1533 Thomas Cranmer was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. That same year Parliament passed an Act (The Act in Restraint of Appeals) that prevented English people from appealing to the Pope for a legal or church decision. This was partly meant to stop Catherine of Aragon appealing against her divorce. In May the marriage was annulled by Archbishop Cranmer. The King had already married Anne Boleyn who was pregnant at the time. She was crowned Queen at the end of May.
In 1534 Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy which declared that the King was the supreme head of the Church of England.
From then on the King and the Archbishop began to reform the church. For the next seven years they were helped by Thomas Cromwell, who became the most powerful man in the kingdom after the King. The King did not want too much theological reform and always tried to balance the evangelical and traditionalist forces.
The main reforms during Henry’s reign were:
Service in English. In 1544 the Litany was the first service to use English. Before that all services were in Latin, which most people didn’t understand. Later all the other services also used English.
Bible in English. In 1537 the government ordered that there should be a Latin Bible and an English Bible in every parish church. In 1539 the Great Bible was published in English. It was probably edited by Miles Coverdale and based on earlier translations including that of William Tyndale.
Removal of images. Orders were given in Henry’s time for the destruction of all images and shrines in churches. This was connected to a new way of numbering the 10 commandments. Before the Reformation the commandment about images was part of the first commandment and was not considered very important. Now it was seen as a commandment on its own.
Monasteries. In the mid 1530s the monasteries were closed and their property was taken by the government.
Theological. The main theological change concerned justification by faith. Unfortunately Henry did not follow Cranmer and the other reformers. He thought that the idea of faith alone undermined morality. He thought it removed the value of good works and so endangered the peace of the kingdom.
Communion. The other big theological debate was about the Mass. The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation taught that during the Mass the substance of the bread and wine was changed into the actual flesh and blood of Christ. During Henry’s reign Cranmer said this was not so. He was opposed to the idea that Christ was sacrificed again each time there was a mass. He was also against the idea that these sacrifices could help people who had died. Instead Cranmer believed in the real presence of Christ in the Communion, a view similar to Luther’s. (He meant that the body and blood of Christ was truly present in the Lord’s Supper but that the bread and wine were not changed). Later he changed his mind again and taught that Christ’s body is in heaven and that Christ is received and eaten only in the heart by faith.
Henry died in 1547.
5.2 The Church of England under King Edward VI
Edward became King when he was nine years old. He was the son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, Henry’s third wife. Jane died two weeks after Edward was born. The government was controlled by a Council, headed by Jane’s brother Edward, who ruled for the young King. King Edward died of tuberculosis when he was 16 years old in 1553. The King and the Council tried to stop Henry VIII’s daughter Mary from becoming Queen, so they decided that Lady Jane Grey (the daughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary) would be the next Queen. But Mary had more support. Jane was Queen for only nine days and was executed a few months later at the age of 17.
Edward was a Protestant king and under his rule Cranmer and others were able to continue the reform of the English Church.
The major development in this time was the appearance of a fully English Prayer Book. The First Prayer Book of 1549 removed many of the bad parts of the old services. It brought together all the services in one book. This Prayer Book was authorised for use in every church, so that throughout England every parish had the same services.
In 1550 the King ordered the removal of all the stone altars in English churches. They were replaced by wooden tables (because the Reformers said that the Communion was a supper not a sacrifice).
The Prayer Book of 1552 included many more reforms. The Holy Communion service was changed to represent a more reformed liturgy. Cranmer wanted to avoid ideas about the real presence of Christ in the sacrament. The words of administration no longer said that the bread and wine should “preserve their bodies and souls to eternal life”. Rather they were to “take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for you and feed on him in your heart by faith with thanksgiving.”
The 1552 Prayer Book also brought to an end the practice of praying for the dead. This also brought to an end any idea of having Masses for the dead.
For many years Cranmer and others had been preparing a statement of faith. This took the form of 42 Articles which stated the main ideas that the Church of England believed. They were issued at the end of Edward’s reign and later became the basis for the 39 Articles.
5.3 The Church of England under Queen Mary
Mary was the daughter of Henry VIII by Catherine of Aragon. Catherine was Henry’s first wife and the person at the centre of the break with Rome. Mary was a strong supporter of the authority of the Pope, and quickly began to restore the old religion and its practices to England. Some of the leading reformers were executed, including Bishops Ridley and Latimer, in 1554. They were two of the outspoken leaders of the reformation under Edward VI. Cranmer was burnt at the stake in March 1556. Nearly 300 others were executed in her five year reign.
The mass in Latin was restored and stone altars were built again. Mary replaced the reformed bishops with others who were loyal to the Pope. She reinstated celibacy for the clergy (Parliament had made clergy marriages possible in 1549). She was married to Philip II of Spain but did not have a child. She died in 1558.
5.4 The Church of England under Queen Elizabeth I
Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. She became Queen when she was 25 years old. She was very well educated and pious, and read the New Testament in Greek every day.
Elizabeth restored the reforms established by Edward VI. In 1559 she published a new Prayer Book which was more or less the same as that of 1552 with only small changes. She decided that the Church of England would be a reformed church, but she made sure that it developed in a way that was different to the Lutheran and Reformed churches. She kept the three ordained orders of ministry, ie bishop, priest and deacon. These decisions are known as the “1559 Settlement”, or the “Elizabethan Settlement”.
Those loyal to the Roman Catholic Church no longer used Latin or the Mass, the monasteries and other religious organisations were closed. Mary had made laws that the clergy should be celibate. Elizabeth again allowed clergy to marry.
In 1563 the 42 Articles were issued as the 39 Articles (see Anglican Beliefs).
In 1570 there were political troubles connected with Catholic sympathisers. These were put down but after this there was no strong move in the other direction towards the Reformed churches. This disappointed many of the Protestants who believed that there was much more to do to finish the reformation of the church.
A group developed who wanted to continue to reform the church. Some wanted to change the episcopal form of government for a Presbyterian form (rule by elders). They disliked too much liturgy and thought that there should be more preaching. They called themselves the “godly” but others called them Puritans. But Elizabeth resisted all deviation from her 1559 Settlement.
Towards the end of her reign Richard Hooker developed arguments to support the Elizabethan settlement. The first part of his “Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity” was published in 1593. His arguments followed a middle way between the Puritans and the Catholics. He put a new emphasis on the sacraments instead of preaching.
Some Puritans said the New Testament taught that the church should be governed in a Presbyterian way. The Archbishop of Canterbury at the time (Whitgift) said that bishops were appropriate for England but were not the only way a church could be led. Lancelot Andrewes and others began to teach that it was God’s intention that bishops were a necessary part of church structure. No other reformed church has said that bishops were essential to the church.
In the 1590’s under the influence of Hooker and Andrewes the idea developed that the reformation had happened somewhere else and not in England. They claimed that Protestant ideas in the Church of England’s Prayer Book were due to foreign interference. This new group wanted to emphasise the idea that the Church of England was conforming to the old church but with some changes. It tried to play down the significance of the reformation in England. These ideas became very influential in later times.
Elizabeth also encouraged the musical and devotional life of the Cathedrals. This allowed a liturgical grandeur to develop which helped the new group to claim a continuity with the pre-reformation church (even though they used Cranmer’s reformed Prayer Book).
5.5 The Church of England under King James I
In 1603 James VI of Scotland became James I of England and ruled over both kingdoms. The Church of Scotland was very reformed. The English Puritans hoped for change when James became King. He called a conference at Hampton Court in 1604 but almost none of the Puritans’ requests was granted except for a new Bible. The Authorised Version of the Bible (also known as the King James version) was published in 1611.
One group that grew in influence during James’ reign was later named Arminians. These were not related to the followers of the Dutchman Arminius. They were an English group that wanted more ceremonial worship, more use of the sacraments, and had a high view of the calling of ordination.
James kept a balance between this group and the Puritan and reformed groups. Overall he affirmed reformed theology.
5.6 The Church of England under King Charles I
Charles I became King in 1625. Together with William Laud, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, Charles tried to restore some of the pre-reformation practices but within the structure of the Church of England. He said that the Communion Table should be regarded as an altar and that people had to kneel to receive Holy Communion. He tried to restrain reformed preaching. In 1637 he tried to impose an English Prayer Book on Scotland. This Prayer Book allowed people to think that the real presence of Christ was in the Holy Communion.
Not everyone was happy with Charles’ policies. In fact there was strong opposition. In 1640 a hostile parliament was elected. Laud was sent to the Tower of London and was executed in 1644.
In 1642 civil war broke out in Ireland and spread to England and Scotland. Parliament debated a new form for the Church of England. Some wanted to replace bishops with a Presbyterian form of government. In 1643 Parliament called a synod to reform the Church of England. It met at Westminster and is known as the Westminster Assembly. It produced the Westminster Confession in 1646. This was a reformed and Calvinist document and has had an important place in the Church of Scotland.
In 1646 the King was defeated in wars between his supporters and Parliament. He was executed in 1649.
5.7 The Commonwealth
Oliver Cromwell was one of the leading Generals in the army. He became the ruler of England and called himself “Lord Protector”. In his time Puritan and Presbyterian forms of church life developed.
He was a good soldier but a poor politician and had to rule with the help of the army which the people hated. His attempts to rule Ireland and Scotland were strongly resisted.
He died in 1658. No one was able to maintain his strong leadership and two years later the army decided to restore the old monarchy. They brought back the exiled King Charles II who was restored to the throne in 1660.