Posted on 11/28/2017 5:49:26 PM PST by Coleus
Amid celebrations of the Reformation's 500th anniversary, we should remember the mass persecutions of 16thC England
Martin Luther was a theologian. If you read the Ninety-Five Theses he reputedly tacked up on the door of Wittenbergs Schlosskirche in October 1517, it is clear his interest lay in the nature of sin, repentance, absolution, penance and salvation. Whatever else his wider agenda was or became his initial arguments were presented as scriptural debate on the revealed path to salvation.
The English Reformation, on the other hand, had no basis in theological debate. King Henry VIII despised Luther and all he stood for. Henrys robust defence of the seven sacraments in the Assertio septem sacramentorum of 1521 was the first royal refutation of Luthers ideas, and it did not pull its punches, using phrases like filthy villain and deadly venom. In recognition of its vigour, Pope Leo X granted Henry the title Defender of the Faith, and the book went through multiple reprints.
A decade later, Henrys mind had moved on from the sacraments, and was preoccupied with the politics of the bedchamber and his dynasty. When Pope Clement VII refused to annul Henrys marriage to Katherine of Aragon, Henry concluded that the most effective solution would be to sideline the Holy See.
Once settled on the plan, it all got going in 1533.
In January, Henry bigamously married Anne Boleyn, his pregnant mistress. In March, on Passion Sunday, the relatively unknown Protestant-leaning Thomas Cranmer was consecrated 69th Archbishop of Canterbury. In April, Parliament passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals, cutting off all legal recourse to Rome. And in May, Cranmer pronounced the long-desired annulment of Henrys marriage to Katherine, then presided over Annes coronation.
Henry now had what he wanted. But his new wife had come at a high cost. He had changed the countrys religion to get her, and now he had to implement the new faith nationwide.
What Henry needed were loyal lawyers and theologians to reshape the religion.
In Thomas Cromwell, he found the former. And in Cranmer the latter. Cromwell began enriching himself by pillaging and razing the monasteries. Cranmer legitimised Henrys every move spiritually.
Henry was secure in the knowledge he had ambitious fixers around him, but what about the response of the rest of the country? It quickly became apparent that despite passing the Act of Supremacy in 1534 making himself head of the English Church (Ecclesia Anglicana), legislation alone was not going to be sufficient to ensure the cooperation of the English people. Nor were Cranmers sermons and those of the other new bishops.
With little alternative, Henry resorted to the most basic tool of his power: violence.
Burning people for heresy was an option, but it would raise a few eyebrows. The problem was that Henry largely believed in the same traditional theology that his people did. He had not changed his views from the time of writing the Assertio. This ruled out widespread heresy trials. The solution his circle came up with was more radical.
Treason was originally a common law offence, but put on to a statutory basis by King Edward III in the Treason Act 1351. (It is still in force, although heavily modified, and last used in 1945 against William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw.)
The punishment for high treason was hanging, drawing, and quartering first recorded in 1238 for an educated man-at-arms (armiger literatus) who tried to assassinate King Henry III. Other famous early victims included Dafydd ap Gruffydd in 1283 and William Wallace in 1305. The victim was drawn (dragged) to the place of execution on a hurdle or sledge. There he was hanged (slowly strangled), and while alive his genitals were cut off, his abdomen was sliced open, his bowels were pulled out, and they were burned in front of him. Once dead, he was cut down, beheaded, sliced into quarters, and a section sent to each of the four corners of the kingdom for public display. For a woman, the punishment was burning and quartering.
Henrys first victim was a 28-year-old nun, Elizabeth Barton. She had visions which earned her a following among leading clergymen, and she had even enjoyed an audience with Henry. However, when her prophecies spoke of the wrong Henry was doing by abandoning Katherine and marrying Anne, she crossed a line. Her visions, in fact, suited Cranmer, as condemning her gave him the chance to damage some of her theologically conservative clergy supporters. He and Cromwell obtained her confession to having faked trances, to heresy, and to treason. On April 20, 1534 she was hanged and beheaded at Tyburn along with five of her supporters (two monks, two friars, and a secular priest). Her head was then spiked on London Bridge, making her the only woman in English history to suffer this fate.
As the new religion was promulgated from London, there was deep resentment in the countryside. Particular objection was taken to Cranmers Ten Articles of 1536 (the new churchs canon of beliefs), to Cromwells ransacking of the monasteries, and to his attempts to increase his personal power in the north.
On October 1, 1536, people gathered at Louth in Lincolnshire. Others joined and, before they knew it, thousands had occupied Lincoln demanding an end to the changes. Henry countered with threats of military reprisals, and the uprising melted away.
In the aftermath, Nicholas Melton (Captain Cobbler), the vicar of St Jamess in Louth where the uprising began, and its other leading figures, were duly hanged, drawn and quartered.
Further north, 40,000 people from Yorkshire, Durham, Northumberland, and Lancashire took York, demanding a return to the old ways. This was the famous Pilgrimage of Grace. After securing the surrender of 300 men guarding the royal castle at Pontefract, the pilgrims were led by royal representatives to believe their requests had been met. They stood down, and then the reprisals began. Some 220 to 250 were executed, including the leaders: Robert Aske and Baron Darcy of Templehurst, as well as Sir Francis Bigod, who led a simultaneous uprising in Cumberland and Westmorland.
Wriothesleys Chronicle confirmed that hanging, drawing, and quartering was performed in more or less the traditional way at this time. One terse description reads that the victim was, hanged, membred, bowelled, headed, and quartered.
One of the most shocking executions was that of Margaret Pole, the 67-year-old Countess of Salisbury, who was beheaded without trial in 1541 because Henry was furious with her son, Cardinal Reginald Pole, who had slipped abroad.
Not all were executed for treason. A limited number of heresy trials were brought. In the case of John Forest, a senior member of the Franciscan community at Greenwich, Cromwell and Cranmer accused him of identifying the church in the creed with the Church of Rome. When he persisted in this belief, he was burned at Smithfield in the presence of Cromwell, Cranmer and Latimer.
Henry was followed on the throne by three of his children: Edward VI (154753, son of Jane Seymour), Mary I (15538, daughter of Katherine of Aragon) and Elizabeth I (15581603, daughter of Anne Boleyn).
At Whitsun 1549, when Edward had been on the throne two years, Cranmer introduced the first compulsory Anglican compendium of liturgy: the Book of Common Prayer, and it led to riots in the West Country. There was a specific complaint against the imposition of a text in English, as Catholic spiritual and devotional literature in Cornish was well established.
Edward sent in loyal retainers, bolstered by German and Italian mercenaries. At Clyst Heath the troops of John Russell, Earl of Bedford, bound, gagged and slit the throats of 900. By the time the uprising was suppressed, an estimated 5,500 West Country people lay dead.
Heresy trials continued to be useful against Catholics and the wrong sort of Protestants. On May 2, 1550, Cranmer was involved in the burning at Smithfield of Joan Bocher, an Anabaptist from Kent. The following year, Cranmer, Ridley, and Coverdale all tried George van Parris, a member of the Strangers Church, resulting in him being burned at Smithfield on April 25.
After Edward came Mary and a Catholic restoration. According to Foxes Book of Martyrs, her administration executed 289 Protestants for heresy.
When Elizabeth came to the throne, she passed the 1559 Act of Supremacy to restore the English church. But there were still plenty who were anguished by the changes.
In 1569, the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland mobilised the Northern Uprising in support of Mary, Queen of Scots, but it was soon crushed, with 450 of its participants executed.
In response, on February 25, 1570, Pope Pius V issued the bull Regnans in excelsis excommunicating Elizabeth, and threatening an anathema on all who obeyed her. A harsh anti-Catholic crackdown in England followed, and to ease the persecution Pope Gregory XIII softened the bull in 1580 by permitting provisional obedience until present circumstances changed. But the damage was done.
Elizabeth unleashed a mass persecution. By 1585 tensions were so high that any priest ordained after 1559 found on English soil was automatically guilty of treason, as was anyone who sheltered him.
Despite the harsh penalties, the priests still came. Perhaps nothing sums up the missionary spirit better than Campions Brag, delivered as a defence before his execution at Tyburn in 1581:
Be it known to you that we have made a league cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God, it cannot be withstood.
The Anglican cleric William Harrison said that Henry VIII executed 72,000 great thieves, petty thieves and rogues. It is not now possible to know whether these numbers are accurate, or whether they include those who opposed the new Tudor church.
Although accounts of Reformation violence have traditionally focused on Bloody Marys victims gorily catalogued in Foxes polemical Book of Martyrs the reality was not nearly so one dimensional. Henry, Edward, and Elizabeths policies demonstrate that the entire family imposed its religious will on the country by force, top down, and with the complicity and assistance of their religious and judicial establishment.
The fractures and wounds caused by this interminable religious violence not only marred their reigns, but also spilled over into the following centuries, leading to the Civil War, the regicide of Charles I, the Revolution of 1688 and the Jacobite uprisings. Although Henry must have gone to his grave with little concept of what was to follow, the blood price for his dynastic ambitions was still being paid by the British people more than 200 years later.
Dominic Selwood is a historian, author and barrister. Visit dominicselwood.com
Elizabeth I had her own problems.
Come on get real. People werent PC back then. Catholics and Protestants alike. Plenty of bloody horrors to go around.
I’ve heard that even Phillip II, a Catholic absolutist if there ever was one, told Mary that burning hundreds of average and lower class people for heresy would backfire on her. She didn’t listen
And again, a disconnect from the facts appears.
It was for Henry purely political.
Not a matter of reformation at all for the matter was not one of questioning the propriety of Roman popes vs the local authority of Bishops which was the governance of the early Church.
It was, again, what Henry wanted as King and he got what he wanted because he was the King (enter a Mel Brook’s comedy one-liner: it’s good to be the king!).
As for explaining the subsequent looting, well, the looting itself explains the looting. Henry did a lot of things, including building a very expensive navy plus living in high style ... those things weren’t gonna pay for themselves, were they?
That too is political and has nothing to do with theology ... aside from Henry acting very much like an unconverted man that is. Henry’s England and Henry’s power are about as theological as I sometimes think he ever got.
As for what Edward did later, well, THAT is distinct from his father. Maybe he did take some tentative steps in theological directions ... but what has that to do with Henry who was not alive to cause them?
Again, the CoE began for reasons entirely besides “reformation” of any sort. There was reformation in England (etc), but it often had the CoE as it’s opponent little different than how similar efforts had opposition from Rome elsewhere.
Going further than just the start of the CoE, or the actual Reformation for that matter, and touch on something that has also come up in this thread ... for the practical consequences of these earlier doings, I’ve occasionally pointed out how important where you were in Europe turned out to be for the influence these things ended up having over your life.
In the largely Catholic south the struggle was for the monarchs and civil authority to have Independence from Rome. This essentially led to the virulent secularism of our age as the separation from the Church itself became more and more militant.
We might call this branch of things the State seeking to be free from the church.
I believe it is absolutely accurate to say of political secularism that whatever freedom of conscience the people may enjoy at the moment it is ONLY to the extent that some things are still held to not be political. Ultimately political secularism holds EVERYTHING to be political and so there is ultimately no room for faith.
(Aside: This is a mirror image of Sharia Law where ultimately EVERYTHING is Sharia and there is no room for politics or law apart from Sharia ... so in Europe we see ardent secularist who reject the Gospel importing Islam ... if that’s not evidence of a strong delusion I don’t know what is....)
In the actual Reformation bits of the north the kings were, in theory, just another parishioner one day a week (granted in a VERY nice private box) but was the King the rest of the week (and it’s good to be the king) ... the upshot was that being a good subject and being a good pew warmer were often confused, resulting in what might be termed religious nationalism where “good people” were the proper sorts who had the proper associations and proper patriotisms.
These were frequently seen as intertwined being the idea I’m trying to convey.
(Also, later after the French Revolution, the secularist of the Protestant north did some serious catching up with their southern brethren ... but even then they were often not AS virulent until they caught neo-pagan racist mysticism for a number of decades. Said NPRM being an entirely unchristian and opposed to Christ and His Gospel.)
Then there was England, where the struggle was often for the faith to have freedom from the Crown. It was from this that ideas of the freedom of the Church (which is to say: the body of believers) from the state developed.
I would point out that simply as a matter of reason, of logic, that two estates which coexist, which vie for the ultimate loyalty of the people CANNOT be mutually separate as if they did not coexist or compete for the ultimate loyalties of the people.
“Separation of Church AND State” is an absurdity.
When a modern secularist speaks of this they ONLY EVER mean the separation of the State from the church. The State is owed the principal loyalty of the people. The State also has claim for suitable police powers to protect itself from being unduly influenced by private matters like faith ... LBJ’s tax exemption restriction shenanigans are EXACTLY the government asserting police powers of this sort. Naturally, other States have been even more severe: with few equaling the French in dechristianization.
But for the Founding Fathers of THIS nation it was the separation of the Church from the state, of holding the state powerless to how or why the People might attempt to regulate and control it. That is to say: the consciences of the People is to be free to decide where their loyalties lay and the state has no basis for demanding police powers to use to protect itself against the People.
Our Founding Fathers knew of and largely rejected the secularism later enacted by the French but which had been bubbling up for years.
Naturally, faith and conscience mattering more than the power of the state is anathema to modern secularist (aside from how they may use it, transitionally, to gain power or destabilize things in society that resist them) and they’ll argue any perversion for us to be, basically, more like the French Revolution. They are even at this time tentatively moving towards a round of dechristianization ... if they think they can get away with it (they need to get our guns first, as well as get us to accept political correctness, among other things, so we cannot and will not resist).
(Aside: when, after the French Revolution, American clowns went around loudly parroting French slogans and attitudes as if they were laudable we’d have been better off to this day if they had been whipped by their fellow Citizens rather than be tolerated!)
Elizabeth and Mary weren’t nice people. To be understating the facts. Elizabeth seems to have been downright unpleasant on the being affable end of things to boot.
Frankly, few of the royals have been worth a damn when it came to THEIR power and THEIR prestige. Ask the Chinese about Victoria on that front. And that’s even discounting that for every Alfred the Great (a rare bright spot) there are a dozen or more of Leonard the Lames.
But what else is new? Of all the kings of Israel, then Judah and Israel, the number that did good before The Lord was appallingly low.
Mary got her head chopped off.
“It was for Henry purely political.”
No. People make an anachronistic mistake in lumping together dynastic and family issues, politics, matters about church governance, seizure of property, Henry’s lack of heirs, etc. as being “purely political”.
That’s how communists make everything about “power’ or “economics”.
It just isn’t.
“As for explaining the subsequent looting, well, the looting itself explains the looting. Henry did a lot of things, including building a very expensive navy plus living in high style ... those things werent gonna pay for themselves, were they?”
The “looting” was not really about paying for his navy or even living in high style. It was about creating a new landed aristocracy with the people he gave the land to.
“As for what Edward did later, well, THAT is distinct from his father.”
Yes, he was - but he was not a “Presbyterian”. No such thing existed yet. Only at the very time Edward was becoming king did John Knox embrace the Reformation.
“There was reformation in England (etc), but it often had the CoE as its opponent little different than how similar efforts had opposition from Rome elsewhere.”
Often is not always. And until the Presbyterians/Puritans became players there were Reformed members of the newly created CoE sect who battled more traditional minded members and Lutheran inspired members. You’re proving what I said to be correct.
The rest of your post had nothing to do with what we were discussing.
You are mistaking which sense of politics I’m employing. There is more than just the communist sense. More than just the sense employed within the French Revolution.
Heirs and property were once what constituted politics. Not of elections and debates but of kingdom against kingdom,
“You are mistaking which sense of politics Im employing.”
No, actually I’m not.
I personally enjoy having Catholics go nuts in such obvious ways.
Free Republic is loaded with tons of Catholic Caucus threads, so when they post such articles, the non-Catholics can respond.
I suspect of the posters would like to do some reforming of their own against other commenters : )
Lisa has created Lutherans
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy_4RKqH728
“its founding doctrine was convenience and expediency.”
You gloss over quite a bit. Henry was no more or less corrupt that the Pope. The Pope openly favored Spain and wished (supported) England’s overthrow and did his best to make it happen. The Pope lost. Henry set up the COE out of the same mold as the Catholic Church of the time....with the political and religious center under his control.
Go ahead and hate on Henry, but his action broke the back of the Pope as “king of the world” and ushered in the era of the nation state, and that brought eventual prosperity.
Catholic historic apologists point to the tyranny, corruption and moral failings of Henry “defender of the faith” only after he put England before Rome.
Had he not done that, Henry was OK to Catholics Bureaucracy.
Your lack of truth about the stunning moral and political corruption of the Catholic Church of the time is amusing.
You need to do more than point at Henrys many moral and tyrannical failures to find the hard truth that 16th century Catholicism was equal to Henrys moral corruption and tyranny.
"...all Christians, no matter their tradition nor even the strength of their faith, should be locked arm in arm against the forces who wish to destroy their shared heritage...
This is not hard to understand. It is important.
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