November 2007

Parish History Episode 79 - England Divided

At last, at the beginning of 1547, King Henry was dead. Despite all his marriages, made with a view to safeguarding the Succession to the Throne, he left but one legitimate son, Edward, the lad whose birth had cost Jane Seymour her life. He also left instructions in his will for a large Council of Regency to advise and control the new tenyear- old king until he should come of age. Thanks to the way that Henry’s last queen, Catherine Parr, had packed it, it was largely a council of men inclined to the new, Protestant, doctrines, which had become prominent in Germany.

The composition of the Council was, however, academic. Within three days, one of its members, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, the brother of the late Queen Jane, and therefore the uncle of the new King, had engineered a palace putsch which made him President of the Council, which he could summon or not, more or less at his pleasure, and he took the title of Lord Protector. He took care to appease most of the other prominent lords in the Kingdom by distributing to them those abbeys which King Henry had not already given away, and also by persuading King Edward to be generous in distributing new titles. Seymour himself gave up the style “Earl of Hertford”, awarded him by his brother-in-law, the late King, and accepted the style “Duke of Somerset” from his nephew, the new King.

Contemporary opinion does not seem to have been greatly disturbed by this almost immediate overturning of King Henry’s will. Everywhere, people recalled how the quarrels between the regents appointed for the infant King Henry VI, a century before, had led on to the Wars of the Roses. They did not seem to recall that “Lord Protector” was the title used by Richard III in 1483 when he assumed the Regency on behalf of his nephew Edward V - until that young king disappeared in the tower, and Uncle Richard made himself king.

So, Edward Seymour now ruled England. But England was a country which was becoming bitterly divided against itself.

Old King Henry had begun the assault on the Church, had robbed it and ravished it, and had undermined its authority in the eyes of his subjects. He had, as he grew older and wiser, begun to understand the value of religion as a social cement for the land, but even such a mighty prince as he was unable to put the Church back on the pedestal that it had once occupied.

To outward appearances, the leadership of the Church (under the King!) seemed to be in the hands of a compliant bench of bishops. But some of them, like Archbishop Cranmer, were anxious to push on with liturgical change, while others, like Bonner of London and Gardiner of Winchester, were anxious only to restore unity with Rome.

Seymour inclined towards the views of Cranmer, and spoke of the need for Reform, and so did most members of the Council of Regency (though that body was of little importance now). So also, thanks to his tutoring by scholars selected by his stepmother Katherine Parr, did young King Edward.

Quite a clamour for Reform surrounded the person of the King, but it was not only the Reform of the Church that was being demanded. The price of bread was rising rapidly, as mentioned in last month’s article, and the conditions of the people were steadily worsening. Conservatives of course blamed the situation on the Dissolution of the Monasteries, while radicals called attention to the economic arrangements which seem to have prevailed in the primitive Church (ACTS 24:5), and suggested that some form of communal living should be an element in a Reformed Church.

Most members of the richer classes were able to stop their ears to the pleas of the poor, but there were some eminent churchmen - notably Hugh Latimer, the former Bishop of Worcester (dismissed in Henry VIII’s time) - who called themselves “Commonwealth men”, and preached against Enclosures of Land and the growing destitution of the rural poor. More surprisingly, one very senior layman, the Lord Protector, Edward Seymour, was also inclined to lend a sympathetic ear.

Seymour was even more sympathetic to the demands for the Reform of the Church, which were beginning to become strident. During his first months in office, he arranged for the repeal of the Act enforcing the Six Articles, and then repealed a whole class of statutes, enacted from the time of Henry IV to that of Henry VIII, which had been used to suppress heresy: now, once again, dissent became a legal possibility. Another Act of Parliament legalised clerical marriage, and ordered bishops to enquire how many parish priests wished to marry. Within a few weeks, about a quarter of the English clergy had taken advantage of the new legislation and were living in wedlock. There were some romances as priests, young or old, proposed marriage to female parishioners whom they had long admired; more common were the cases where a priest read the banns of marriage between himself and a woman who had, as everyone in the parish knew, long been his common-law wife. There were also those who had married, sometimes openly sometimes clandestinely, back in the 1530’s, but who had since then found it prudent to keep their wives in the background. Archbishop Cranmer himself was in that category. He could now write to Germany, and invite Margaret, his wife, to return.

All these Acts relaxed the dogma·s of the Church, and they had the effect both of reducing the veneration in which she was held, and of making it safer to criticise her. Further Acts of Parliament increased confusion by ordering the whitewashing of all murals in churches, and the removal of all “objects of superstition, like to be abused”. That was a vague form of words, which simply invited vandalism. But then later Acts ordered that everything must be done “in a seemly way”, and tried to regulate iconoclastic fervour.

This summary of the changes which occurred in the first year of the new King’s reign might suggest that Seymour and Cranmer were riding a wave of popular indignation against the old Church and all her practices, and that Parliament had had to introduce special measures to prevent the process going too far.

There are those, however, who argue that, though there might have been some genuine enthusiasm for some of these changes, among some intellectuals who had been influenced by new ideas from Germany, the support for the idea of stripping the churches of “objects of superstition” came largely from those who hoped to benefit by their despoliation.

Certainly self-interest was an important factor in the English Reformation. There was wide support amongst those wealthy landowners who had managed to lay their hands on an abbey or two. The Act legalising clerical marriage had also given a quarter of the English clergy a vested interest in not returning to the Roman obedience.

Probably there was little support for the ideals of the Reformation in a parish such as ours, remote from the metropolis. Most men and women probably saw their gross, earthly life redeemed to some extent by the beautiful and, as far as they were aware, age-old ceremonies and rituals of their parish church. William Franklin was far away, an absentee rector, and his curate (whose name we do not know) was for them the intermediary between Heaven and Houghton, the priest who ensured that their souls would one day pass from here to there. If he had now wed the woman who was, as every·one knew, his mistress, the people probably liked him the better for it.

But in other communities, more in tune with the new ideas sweeping Europe, many people were re·acting violently against the Church. In London, Bristol or Norwich, in the old Lollard communities in the Chiltern Hills, and in many prosperous weaving villages of East Anglia and the Midlands, the Acts of Parliament ordering that everything be done seemly and in order, when stripping the churches of “objects of superstition”, were little heeded. The “wool churches” which had been built up with such love by generations of clothiers were now being stripped of their ornamentation by the sons and daughters of their benefactors.

The chantries, such as that at Houghton, and the hospitals (a word which then referred primarily to places of residence for the agèd poor, not to institutions for the healing of the sick) were also swept away at this time. But while in King Henry’s time the dissolution of the monasteries had been accompanied by the hypocritical pretence that it was a punishment for the inmates’ immorality and laxity, the dissolutions of King Edward’s reign were unambiguously justified by the belief that the services of a chantry priest were of no value whatever in the redemption of sinful humanity.

There was also a difference in the disposal of the confiscated property. While most of the wealth went in theory into the coffers of the government, but in practice much of it into the purses of the rich and influential, and, as might be expected, Seymour’s purse proved especially hospitable to the confiscated silver and gold, some of it at least was used partly as the original donors had possibly intended. The rôle of the chantries in providing education was recognised, and the numerous grammar schools named after King Edward VI, to be found in many towns of England and Wales, were built with money taken from the suppressed chantry guilds. Some alms·houses were also built for the deserving poor, out of the funds of the suppressed hospitals, and even some reformatory-type prisons for the delinquent young, such as “Bridewell” in London.

There was of course self-interest, as well as support for education and poor relief, on the part of Seymour and others, involved in the sequestration of the funds of the chantries and hospitals. But it is surprising to find Seymour, along with bishops such as Latimer, taking an interest in the demands of the peasants for a stop to be made to the practice of enclosing land (former arable land) for sheep rearing. The agitators claimed that, where formerly a prosperous village had stood, now the land supported only one shepherd and his dog.

The Lord Protector prevailed on Parliament to pass legislation restricting the spread of enclosures. It became necessary for parliament to approve every separate scheme of enclosure in every parish of the Kingdom, before it could go ahead. A Parliament composed primarily of landowners passed most such Acts of Enclosure, but such delays made the process a lot more expensive (in legal fees), and the spread of enclosures was slowed. (This requirement did not apparently apply to County Durham. Although the Bishop had been stripped of much of his special, princely, status, Durham was still unrepresented in the English Parliament, and it seems that it was the Bishop’s Chancery Court which controlled enclosure within the Palatinate.)

Seymour may have won some popularity with the peasantry by such measures, but he thereby alienated the support of the landed nobility and gentry throughout the Kingdom, and risked the withdrawal of their support. Presumably he understood that he ran political risks through his opposition to enclosures, and, like Latimer, he presumably believed in social justice. In the same way, he risked the loss of stability in the state through repealing all the laws by means of which the Lancastrian and Tudor Henries had suppressed heresy in England. Presumably he really did believe in freedom of conscience.

But Seymour was no saint. He was not even an honest man. He had happily joined in the orgy of robbery which had attended the downfall of the English monasteries, and he had amassed for himself more than his fair share of loot. With an eye for property speculation, he had gone particularly for urban friaries in London and Westminster. He had demolished some convents he took over along the Strand, and on their site he built himself a palace. Now government buildings, it is still known by his ducal title - Somerset House.

There were of course mixed motives everywhere. While Seymour and the rich were engrossing their fortunes at the expense of the chantries, mobs of the poorer sort of citizens were attacking the churches, desecrating images and smashing stainedglass windows. Some were also helping themselves to liturgical vessels made of precious metals. We tend to see such iconoclasts either as crafty thieves or as dumb barbarians. Many of them were indeed no more than that. But we should realise that, in the minds of many of them, there was the belief that the frontals and the riddels and the baldachins that they tore down, and the statues and the candle-holders that they destroyed, and all the rest of what they saw as frivolities, somehow hid the Living God from them, and that, when all this “trumpery”, denounced by the Hebrew prophets of old, as had now been revealed to them by the chained Bible at the back of the church, was destroyed, then the True God would once again show Himself to His people.

Dick Toy

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