August 2007

Parish History Episode 76- The King's Conscience

King Henry VIII was fifty years old in 1541. It was not a great age, but he had become well aware that his youth, his energy, and his boyish charm had all deserted him. His style of life had made him grossly overweight, and he found riding, walking, or even standing increasingly difficult. He tried to engage in military exercises with his soldiery, but found that he couldn’t manage it. He tried to go hunting, or even to go riding short distances for pleasure, but found it difficult to keep his balance on horseback, and kept coming off, adding to his physicians’ problems by incurring broken bones and damaged internal organs. He also seems to have contracted, through his indulgent life-style, several serious diseases.

He became aware that his span of life was shortening, and that some time, in the not too distant future, he must be prepared to attempt to make his peace with God. He was also aware that he had quarrelled with the Pope, God’s representative on Earth, that he had broken with God’s Church, and was - according to the Pope’s decree - excommunicate. He was becoming aware that there were problems ahead for his soul, and, in the words of the Paul Robeson song, “he was tired of livin’, and scared of dyin’”.

He was not sure whether or not Thomas Cranmer and the priests who served the Church of England as it now stood, out of communion with Rome, would be able, when his last moments came, to shrive his soul, to steer it towards Paradise. For this reason, he began to withdraw from the programmes of reform that he had begun. For this reason, he seemed to grow ever more zealous in hunting out Lollard, Anabaptist and other “heretics” - men and women who were not satisfied with what they saw as only the first faltering steps towards a True Church - and enthusiastically burned such wretches at the stake. (He also continued to execute Romanists who refused to recognise his headship over the English Church). Fearing Judgment upon his own soul, he had also grown tired of Thomas Cromwell’s programmes of reform, and for that reason, as well as for his dissatisfaction with the Cleves marriage, he had had Cromwell executed. And, for such reasons again, he had withdrawn the privilege, once granted to every man and woman in the Kingdom, to consult the Word of God, as written in the chained Bible, displayed in every parish church.

But, he consoled himself, he was still “Head of the Church”. Parliament had granted him that title, had it not? [And indeed it had. It may have been bribed or intimidated, but nevertheless, when his ministers had proposed that the King should be given the Headship of the Church, it had willingly conceded him that title.] And, as Head of the Church, it might be as well if he modernised somewhat the doctrines taught in the Creeds of the Church. For this reason, he, together with the English bishops and Parliament, introduced the “Six Articles”, so that the English people would at last understand what it was that they believed in.

These Six Articles insisted on all people professing belief in Transubstantiation; in the Lawfulness of administering Communion in only One Kind; the efficacy of Private Masses; the necessity (in all normal circumstances) of Auricular Confession, in order for Absolution to be granted; the impermissibility of Clerical Marriage; and the Indissolubility of religious vows.

Many of these terms are not now in common usage, and so it may be useful to try to explain some of them. For instance, Transubstantiation is the belief that the Consecrated Bread and Wine used in Holy Communion is transformed, literally and fully, into the Body and Blood of Jesus; if Holy Communion is administered to the laity in the form only of Bread, and not of Wine (of Body, and not of Blood), then it is said that the Sacrament is administered in only One Kind; Private Masses are those said primarily for the benefit of one or more individuals (sometimes for a deceased person, in the hope of freeing them from punishment in Purgatory); Auricular Confession is a confession of sins made to a priest, by one individual sinner (not a General Confession, made by a whole congregation), so that his or her particular sins may be absolved (providing the sinner’s repentance is sincere; and, usually, providing some act of Penance is performed).

The first two Articles referred primarily to matters of Belief, while the third and fourth referred to practices long accepted within the Western Church, though now of course condemned by some “hot-gospellers”. But outward observance could be relatively easily enforced in all of them. The fifth and sixth Articles, those referring to Clerical Marriage and to the Indissolubility of religious vows were more of a problem.

All clergy serving in the Western Church had been required to take vows of celibacy, ever since the Hildebrandine Reformation in the Eleventh Century (since the Norman Conquest, as far as England was concerned). Not all priests had been true to their vows, and many had lived more or less openly with female companions, but there had been no formal marriages, and such women were not regarded as wives. But recently, in the lands where the Hussite and Lutheran Reformations had taken root (Bohemia, parts of Germany, and the Scandinavian Kingdoms), priests had been allowed to marry, and many had taken advantage of the relaxation of clerical discipline, and had done so. No law in England had expressly absolved priests from their vows of celibacy, but many clergymen, from the Archbishop of Canterbury (Thomas Cranmer) downwards, had, during the last few years, formally if not legally, gone through a form of marriage service with some chosen companion, and were now living with her, more or less openly, as man and wife: well, usually not all that openly - for instance, Cranmer did not openly acknowledge either his first wife, Joan (she died in childbirth - many women did, in those days), or his second companion, Margaret, as his wife, but pretended that they were his maidservants. When company was expected, they retired to the kitchen, and were not seen again by the visitors until the moment of departure, when Joan or Margaret re·appeared, carrying the visitors’ cloaks and spurs.

But nevertheless Joan and Margaret had both been formally, and perhaps legally, married to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, in open church, according to the correct form, the Archbishop’s chaplain conducting the ceremony. Now such marriages were expressly said to be unlawful: and they applied to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of priests, throughout England and Wales. Many priests simply abandoned their vocations, and applied for laicisation; others were forced out of office; most of them probably simply continued to enjoy a clandestine relationship with their partner.

Mrs. Margaret Cranmer spared her husband the necessity of taking any of these steps. She simply emigrated, to Germany. The marriage that had never been openly acknowledged came, for the time being at least, to an end.

The Six Articles had, by royal decree, abolished clerical marriage. The implementation of the decree had caused many personal problems and private tragedies. But yet the Church might have settled down under the new dispensation (or, rather, the old dispensation restored). After all, this untidy situation, with priests’ wives pretending to be servants, was how it had been for centuries. But the last of the Six Articles was not so much unworkable, but rather - so it seemed to the people of England - ridiculous.

This Sixth Article had decreed that vows taken on entering Religious Orders - that is the vows made when a man or a woman became a monk, a friar, a canon regular, or a nun - were permanent and indissoluble: vows of poverty, obedience, celibacy and stability. That had, of course, been the case for a thousand years and more. But asking people to believe that now, when thousands of pensioned-off monks, and nuns endowed with unexpected dowries, were wandering across the countryside, looking for employment as parish priests (or looking for husbands) seemed ridiculous. Because people laughed at this last Article, it was easier to mock all of them. If the Six Articles caused problems for the consciences of ordinary people all over the country, they no doubt were even more of a problem for the clergy; and still more, perhaps, for young ordinands, preparing for a life serving the Church. One such young man was Bernard Gilpin, preparing at Oxford to enter the priest·hood. We will take up his story in next month’s article

So people were having trouble accepting the Six Articles. But the King - now, so he said, the Head of the Church - expected his people to hear and to obey. Perhaps he hoped that the schism would soon end.

All over Western Europe, people were hoping for that. A century or so before, there had been schism within the Western Church, with rival popes at Rome and Avignon. During the course of the Fifteenth Century, a series of Ecumenical Councils had managed to resolve all the points at issue, and to restore the unity of the Western Church. Why not repeat that experience now?, men asked. Summon a Council!, they cried. End all this nonsense!

Both the Roman and Lutheran leaders dallied and procrastinated, but the German Kaiser, Karl V, leant upon them, and eventually a Council of sorts did assemble, in the winter of 1540-1, under the Kaiser’s presidency, at Regensburg, on the Danube, in Bavaria. A man called Philip Melanchthon led the Lutheran delegation (Martin Luther was by now growing old, and not very active), while two cardinals, Contarini and Caraffa, led the Roman delegation. The Church of England was not invited, but King Henry thought it should be, and he sent Bishop Gardiner of Winchester to Regensburg, to try and offer support to one side or the other, in return for recognition of the legitimacy of the English Church.

It looked as if the Council of Regensburg would be a long and disputatious affair. People settled down to wait, expecting to hear of years of dissension over trivial points of theology. But then, to everybody’s surprise, and to the annoyance of both Luther and Pope Paul III, the assembled divines started agreeing with each other.

Melanchthon, it appeared, had no objection to acknowledging the Papal Supremacy. He only wanted the Romans to accept the permissibility of the doctrine of Justification by Faith Alone. The Roman cardinals were even more generous. They accepted that Luther’s doctrine was Biblical, and to be found in the Epistles of Paul. They pointed out however that the common people would not understand it, and that it was desirable to maintain the traditional penitential and eucharistic disciplines of the Catholic Church, as that was what people wanted. But such matters as permitting the laity to take Communion in Both Kinds had been conceded to the Czechs a hundred years ago, so why not now to the Germans ? Like vernacular Bibles and clerical marriage, these were matters for local Churches to decide, and such practices had long been known among the Greeks and others. To the surprise of the Lutherans, Contarini accepted almost all their demands with a wave of his hand. If, he conceded, the Germans were as ignorant of Latin as the Czechs, let them have their own form of Mass, in their own language!

By this time alarm bells were ringing in both Wittenberg and Rome. Both Luther and Pope Paul began to realise that if these fools went on talking, the whole crisis must end in a shameful compromise. Luther disowned Melanchthon, and Contarini and Caraffa were both recalled to Rome, the former to die in disgrace the following year, while Caraffa went on to reform the Roman Inquisition. He turned it into an organ as efficient and as zealous for the extirpation of heresy as was the Spanish Inquisition.

Bishop Gardiner, who had felt himself ignored and humiliated by the main participants in the proceedings at Regensburg, gave a bad report to the King on his return, and Henry began to persecute dissent more viciously. He felt angry with himself, and with every·one else. His health continued to deteriorate, and he had more riding accidents. He listened more to the conservative voices of men like Bishop Gardiner and Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, the man who had suppressed the Pilgrimage of Grace. Despite his vicious persecution of the rebel “Pilgrims”, Howard was a man totally out of sympathy with modern trends in England. “Twas merry in England before the New Learning came in”, he liked to say - “New Learning, New Religion, new hops in new beer!” (The taste of beer was changing then, as well as tastes in religion - hops were now being added to the brew.)

The Duke and the Bishop decided that the King needed a new wife. Remembering the disaster of the Cleves marriage, they decided to recommend to His Majesty a very different type of woman to Anne. As a candidate, they put forward Catherine Howard, the niece of the Duke, a pretty young woman. Thomas Howard was able to assure the King that his niece was totally unlike Anne of Cleves. She had no booklearning, he claimed, she was simply interested in “girlish” things - clothes, dancing, flirting, those sorts of interests.

The King proposed, and at the end of 1541 the marriage took place. Unfortunately, the Duke’s summary of his niece’s interests proved to be correct. The silly girl continued to be interested in flirting even after her marriage. The King was informed, and, after a few months’ marriage, Queen Catherine, together with some men with whom she had trifled, went, under condemnation, to the Tower, and were duly beheaded.

The Duke’s plan had failed, and he himself was now out of favour with the King. Henry was now more sullen and morose than ever. His health continued to deteriorate, and he felt humiliated that Catherine had seemed to be interested in other, younger men, rather than her true husband. His fifth marriage had proved tragically short, and he was angry with the whole world. In fact, all his marriages had been tragically short, and he could not understand why.

He continued to sign death warrants. More and more people who stepped out of line on religious matters, were being condemned, and the executions, both of Romanists and of “hotgospellers”, continued.

Dick Toy

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