# Church and State under the Tudors/Chapter 6

CHAPTER VI
REIGN OF EDWARD VI
The reign of Edward VI., from January 1547 to June 1553, is a period of great importance, but one also with which it is difficult to deal. Cromwell's system was kept up till the end of his master's life to the full extent of that degree of completeness to which he himself had brought it; but it ceased to move forward from the moment of his own death, or perhaps, more strictly speaking, from the moment when his influence began to decline, and Cromwell's system may be shortly defined as an absolutism in Church and State, established and maintained by the connivance of Parliament. It is almost inconceivable that such a system could have lasted long in any case; though we may see, from its partial resuscitation under Elizabeth, that it was more possible in the sixteenth century than it could have been before or after. Still to us, looking at the matter by the help of that somewhat profitless wisdom which comes to us so readily after the event, it seems obvious enough that a system which admitted the full rights of Parliament, and calculated upon Parliament always lending its support to the King, could hold good only so long as Parliament chose actually to grant that support; and as soon as circumstances should arise to cause some wide divergence between the interests or washes of Parliament and the King's will, the alliance between them would break down, and not improbably ​be changed into a sharp opposition. Not only do we know as a fact that this actually happened less than a century after Henry's death, but we see that it appeared as a serious danger more than once in the reign of Elizabeth, and, what is more to the purpose still, there were various indications of it even in Henry's own lifetime. On two occasions at least—viz., the Præmunire, as it affected the laity, and the Bill of Uses in 1532—the Commons resisted the King successfully, and on several others they showed that they were quite capable of doing so when they had sufficient inducement. Henry himself also on several occasions used the probable opposition of Parliament as a diplomatic weapon, saying that he could not agree to such-and-such a condition, as, if he did, his Parliament would not accept it; a proceeding which, though it might be held to show [[sic|taht}} he had, on the occasion in question, no great reason to fear their opposition, also proves that he was aware that they had it in their power to oppose effectually. These remarks, however, apply only with considerable limitation to the case of ecclesiastical government, inasmuch as there can be little doubt that Henry and Cromwell alike considered that by means of the Act for the Submission of the Clergy and the Act of Supremacy they had stereotyped the power of the Royal prerogative to govern the Church absolutely; and this view continued to be held and acted upon, though with constantly-diminishing success and constantly-increasing difficulty, down to the time of Charles I.
But the circumstances which followed upon Henry's death were such as at once put the strength of Cromwell's system to a severe trial, and that it stood the test even as well as it did, is sufficient evidence how wonderfully great that strength was.
​The King's health had been manifestly declining for a considerable time before his death; his son was a little boy; there was no statesman left of the calibre of Wolsey or of Cromwell. It was therefore impossible but that speculation and intrigue should have been rife as to the hands into which power was likely to fall during the approaching minority. Two parties had existed for years in Henry's Council, between whom his hand had held the balance. It remained to be seen how it would adjust itself when that hand was withdrawn. The Act of Six Articles, and the persecution which followed it, had marked the extreme point of the reaction which had been induced in Henry's mind, partly at least by the Pilgrimage of Grace. As time went on and Henry's health became weaker, the influence of Katherine Parr and of the Seymours seems to have gradually increased; and though he still maintained his enforced religious truce, the King became gradually less severe in his treatment of heretics, and rumours went about of an intended further religious reform. Still, up to within a very few months of Henry's death, it might well have seemed that the reactionary party in the Council had the better chance of success. In the main it consisted of the nobles of 'the old blood,' headed by the Duke of Norfolk and his son Lord Surrey, together with Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and Lord Wriothesley, the Chancellor, who, though himself one of the new nobles, seems to have adhered to the Catholic party. Their opponents consisted mostly of the nobles of 'the new blood '—i.e. the Seymours, Lord Parr, Lord Lisle, Lord Russell, and others: men who had risen from positions of comparative obscurity had been ennobled by Henry himself, and grown rich upon the spoils of the ​monasteries. They had as their great ally Archbishop Cranmer; but though some of them, and Lord Hertford in particular, had shown considerable capacity, their weight in the country was small compared with that of their opponents. Their position as men who had thriven upon the spoils of the Church inclined them naturally to the new order of things; and they were driven still further in the same direction by the fact that the Protestants were the only section of the nation upon whom they could certainly count as supporters. Henry had contrived for some years to keep the peace between these two factions by his own vigorous methods of ruling; but Henry felt that he could not live long, and, in the absence of a man whom he could thoroughly trust, had arranged a council of executors in which the two parties seem to have been carefully balanced, in the hope—it is to be supposed—that they would keep one another in check. All at once however, only about three months before Henry's death, an event occurred which entirely falsified his calculations, and in the end overthrew all his arrangements. Lord Surrey, in many ways the most brilliant and remarkable member of the reactionary party—but, at the same time, the most bitter in his hatred of the new men, and the most unrestrained in his contemptuous expression of it—was accused of having altered his coat of arms, and quartered the royal arms upon it, in a position which could not but suggest a claim on his part to a very near place in the succession to the throne. He was known to have spoken boastfully of his father as being the person most fit to be entrusted with the guardianship of the prince, and to have used vague threats of what the new men should suffer when the King was dead. All these matters, trifling in themselves, ​derived importance from the circumstances of the times— the King's now dangerous illness, and the prince's tender age—and suggested that the Howards were looking forward to a protectorate over the young King which might not impossibly develop into a succession to his throne. Henry's jealousy was aroused, and an investigation followed, ending in the implication of the Duke also, at least to the extent of a guilty knowledge of his son's acts. Mr. Froude tells us that the execution of Lord Surrey has been unanimously treated by historians as a gratuitous murder, but he has himself shown very good reason to doubt the correctness of their verdict; and one is inclined to think that the generally brilliant reputation of Lord Surrey, and his high literary and poetical fame, have conspired with the general belief in the despotic and sanguinary character of Henry's government to induce the historians to undervalue some very damaging evidence against him, notably that of his sister, the Dowager Duchess of Richmond. However this may be, the result of the charge was that Surrey was tried, condemned, and executed, and a bill of attainder passed against the Duke of Norfolk, who was saved only by the King's death. Thus, whether the alleged misdeeds of these two noblemen were real, or whether they owed their fall only to a successful intrigue of the opposite party, the result was the same, for when Henry died the reactionary party was left without its leaders, and the new men were able to reap the advantage thereof.
Between these two extreme parties, however, it is hardly necessary to say there were many persons who held different shades of opinion. Many, of whom Gardiner was the type, had entertained no great affection ​for the Pope, and had been willing to embrace Henry's ideal scheme of a Church which should throw off the authority of the Pope, but retain the accepted doctrines of Catholicism with little or no alteration; and many more would have submitted to it for a time, while they turned their eyes to that coming General Council which was the centre of so much hope on the part of good and single-minded men, anxious for the purification of the Church and not for its destruction. But in revolutionary times moderate parties rarely produce much effect. A moderate man may be, and often is, the best-informed, the most rational, the most highly-gifted man of his time, but his very virtues, moral and intellectual alike, tend to disqualify him for the position of a great party leader. For this the requisite is enthusiasm, real or pretended; and for enthusiasm the first condition, in most cases, is either an intellectual incapacity for seeing more than one side of a question, or a moral obliquity which prevents a man from acknowledging another when he does see it. In such times men, even of the coolest tempers and the fairest and clearest judgments, find themselves compelled either to take a side and keep to it, often in defiance of their convictions and their conscience, or else to stand on one side and leave society, including themselves and all that are nearest and dearest to them, to be victimised by leaders less clear-sighted or more unscrupulous than themselves. If they choose the latter, they sink out of sight, and history knows them no more; if the former, we see them gradually losing the clearness of their intellectual vision, and rubbing the bloom off their moral natures, till they sink gradually into something not much better, but only very often less efficient, than the coarser natures who have plunged blindly or unscrupulously ​into party warfare from the beginning of their career. So it was throughout the reigns of Edward VI. and Mary. On both sides moderation was cast away, and a revolution and reaction, each of the most violent kind, took place, creating a religious and political tempest which it took the utmost efforts of Elizabeth and her statesmen to still, and the effects of which continued for a century beyond her time.
During the whole of the sixteenth century and almost over the whole of Europe it may be said that religion—i.e., in fact, the relation of religion to the State—formed one of the most important questions of the day, and was intimately intermixed with both the internal and foreign policy of every State; but just at the period with which we are now dealing it became in England the absolutely paramount question, so that in this and the following reign the history of the Church is almost the history of the State as well. There was no problem, whether of domestic or foreign policy, into which the religious question did not enter, and in most cases as its most important element.
It needs not here to repeat the full account, which may be better read elsewhere, of how adroitly Lord Hertford, assisted by the most subtle statesman of the time. Sir William Paget, made use of Henry's will to defeat its own objects, overset the balance between the two parties, which Henry had been at so much pains to adjust, and finally emerged from the turmoil, which he had himself created, in the character of Duke of Somerset, governor of the young King's person and Lord Protector of the kingdom. Somerset was, it seems likely, sincerely attached to the reformed opinions; but even had he not been so, he had no choice but to ​fall back upon the reforming party. This was pretty clearly shown after his fall by the fact that his successor, Lord Warwick, did the same, though at his death he showed that such belief as he really had, attached itself to the old religion.
The later years of Henry's reign, after the fall of Cromwell, may well have appeared to his contemporaries, to whichever party they belonged, to be years of steady reaction in the direction of the old faith; but there are many indications that the reaction was but skin deep. Apparently the system had been a hard-and-fast maintenance of Henry's ideal Church—Catholicism, with a substitution of himself for the Pope, and accompanied by a tightening-up of the bonds of orthodoxy by the substitution of the Six Articles for the more liberal Ten, and a sharpening of the persecution of Protestants. But all this time, as we have seen, Papists so called (that is, the genuine adherents of the old religion) had been persecuted too—not, it is true, as heretics, but as traitors; and other changes were made, such as the omission of the Pope's name in the service books, the order for the revision of these books and the omission therefrom of all superstitious and legendary matter, and for the public reading of the Bible in churches, the publication of the King's book, &c.
Thus the reaction, though it existed, was of a kind calculated rather to exacerbate both parties than to satisfy either. Both parties were held in check, but, while neither was permitted to reap a substantial victory, neither was effectually discouraged.
The greater part of the year 1547 was occupied, first by the settlement of the Protector's government ​and the showering of honours and emoluments upon himself and his partisans, and then by the war with Scotland, culminating in the very complete but very unprofitable victory of Pinkie Cleugh. This victory, however, though it rendered the realisation of Henry's great object of uniting the two countries by means of a marriage between Edward and Mary more unlikely than before, yet served the purpose of increasing for the moment the popularity and reputation of Somerset. But, in the midst of these occupations, the Protector found time to proceed with certain other measures, which must have given the Catholics some foresight of what was in store for them. Thus, the bishops were compelled to take out commissions for the execution of their episcopal office, which proceeded upon the distinct assumption that all ecclesiastical, as well as all civil authority was derived from the Crown, This, it is true was no new thing, having been carried out nine years before by the late King—at least, in individual instances—and was a strictly logical result of the terms of the Act of Supremacy: now, however, it was to be made the regular condition of the episcopal jurisdiction, and the first to accept the new condition was Cranmer himself the successor of Augustine and of Becket. Injunctions were issued for the purification of churches, thou oh the curate and churchwardens of St. Martin's in London were compelled to restore the crucifix which they had removed from their church without le^al warrant. A book of Homilies was issued, and a royal visitation announced, and the bishops temporarily suspended from their functions. Bonner and Gardiner alone attempted resistance; but Bonner and Gardiner in consequence, went to the Fleet, where, in the coarse of a week, the former gave up his opposition, while ​Gardiner, persisting in his, presently exchanged the Fleet for the Tower.
On Somerset's return from Scotland, Parliament met, and the measures of this Parliament were not a little remarkable. In them we see the first sign of the failure of Cromwell's scheme of absolutism. The very first Act was one against such as should irreverently speak against the Sacrament of the Altar; but while it was thus directed against the profane and indecent proceedings of the extreme Protestant sectaries, its final clause enacted for the first time that the cup should be administered to the laity, a resolution in favour of which was passed through Convocation during the progress of the bill through the House of Lords. The second was an Act for the election of bishops, which did away with the remaining phantom of capitular election, and directed that they should be nominated immediately by the King. But another Act (1 Ed. VI. c. 12) made even these somewhat strong measures appear moderate. It proceeded to sweep away at once not only the old Plantagenet and Lancastrian anti-Lollard Acts, 5 Ric. II. c. 6, and 2 Hen. V. c. 7, but also several very important Acts of the last reign, viz. 25 Hen. VIII. c. 14, for the punishment of heretics; 31 Hen. VIII. c. 14, the Act of Six Articles; 34 and 35 Hen. VIII. c. 1, the Act for the Advancement of True Religion, otherwise called the Act for Abolishing Erroneous Books; and, above all, 31 Hen, VIII. c. 8, the Act of Proclamations. It would be difficult indeed to believe that a mere desire of conciliating the Protestant party would have induced the Protector to repeal this statute if we are to accept Burnet's ​statement that upon it were grounded the great changes in rehgion made during the minority of Edward VI. It appears a more rational supposition that these changes, so far as they were made without the concurrence of Parliament, rested rather upon the Act of Supremacy which was interpreted to place the government of the Church in the hands of the sovereign personally rather than in those of Parliament, However, the changes made by this extensive repealing Act were in any case very considerable, and were all, especially the last-mentioned, in the direction of mitigating the system of absolute personal government which Cromwell had established, but were all at the same time calculated to re-awaken the religious strife which Henry's iron hand had so long forcibly restrained. But while so much was done in the direction of relaxation of the laws existing against the new opinions, there was one point in which this Act tightened the grasp of the law to the detriment of the old: section 6 made it high treason to impugn the supremacy of the King. The one remaining ecclesiastical Act of the year was a renewal of 37 Hen. VIII. c. 4, the Act giving colleges and chantries to the King. Another Act, though only affecting ecclesiastical in common with all other legislation, was 1 Ed. VI. c. 11, which altered a provision made in the last reign to the effect that the young King, on attaining the age of twenty-four years, should be at liberty, by his letters patent, to annul any laws enacted during his minority as if they had never been. The new Act limited this power to annulling such enactments for the future only, but not so as to render void the acts done under them in the interval between the time of their passing and the King's majority.
​The Convocation contemporary with this Parliament, besides agreeing to the resolution above mentioned, presented several petitions of more or less importance, viz. (1) for the reformation of the canon law according to the Acts framed under the late King; (2) that the inferior clergy might sit in the House of Commons, which they affirmed to have been the ancient custom of the nation, or else that no Acts concerning religion might pass without the sight and assent of the clergy; (3) that the work of the bishops and others appointed in the late King's time to alter the services of the Church 'might be brought to its full perfection' (Burnet), or (a somewhat different thing) 'might be produced and laid before the Lower House' (Lathbury); and another (4) regarding the maintenance of the clergy during the first year of their incumbency, in which they were charged with firstfruits. To this they added a desire to know whether they might safely speak their minds about religion without the danger of any law; a request which shows how vivid was their remembrance of the Præmunire. They also carried a vote in favour of removing all restrictions on the marriage of the clergy by a majority of fifty-three to twenty-two.
The year 1549 is famous, amongst other things, as the year which saw the authoritative issue of the first English Book of Common Prayer. Of the significance of this act Mr. Green gives the following striking and accurate account: 'The old tongue of the Church was now to be disused in public worship. The universal use of Latin had marked the catholic and European ​character of the old religion; the use of English marked the strictly national and local character of the new system. In the spring of 1548 a new Communion service, in English, took the place of the Mass: an English Book of Common Prayer—the Liturgy which, with slight alterations, is still used in the Church of England—soon replaced the Missal and Breviary, from which its contents are mainly drawn. The name Common Prayer which was given to the new liturgy marked its real import. The theory of worship which prevailed through mediæval Christendom—the belief that the worshipper assisted only at rites wrought for him by priestly hands, at a sacrifice wrought through priestly intervention, at the offering of prayer and praise by priestly lips—was now set at naught. The laity, it has been picturesquely said, were called up into the chancel. The act of devotion became a common prayer of the whole body of worshippers. The Mass became a Communion of the whole Christian fellowship. The priest was no longer the offerer of a mysterious sacrifice, the mediator between God and the worshipper: he was set on a level with the rest of the Church, and brought down to be the simple mouthpiece of the congregation.'
The authority of this First Book of Edward VI. is in all points complete. It had the sanction of Convocation as well as that of Parliament and King, although, as we have seen before and shall have to see again, the first of these was, in a vast number of instances, both before and after, held quite unnecessary, and the second not much less so.
It would be out of place to enter here into a discussion as to the theological peculiarities of this book, and its difference from those which followed it in 1552, ​and again in the reigns of Elizabeth and Charles II.; but it is worthy of notice that, as to the intention of those who compiled and issued it, two quite different theories are held by two differing sections of the modern High Church party. Until recently, the prevailing view has been that the Prayer Book of 1549 was perfection—that its compilers fully meant it to be final—but that before its successor was published, the Reformation had, so to speak, fallen into bad hands, and that the second Book, consequently, was in direct contradiction to the first, and was all that was uncatholic and bad; that the changes introduced under Elizabeth and Charles II., though not all that could be wished, were still mostly in the right direction, and served to restore the Prayer Book of the Anglican Church to something like a respectable standard of Catholicity. Of late years, however, a more extreme, but, at the same time, a more logical and accurately historical, section of the party, represented by Mr, Pocock, have maintained that there was in Edward's Council 'an avowed intention, from the very first, to proceed further and further, though the alterations were gradually introduced, for fear of shocking the prejudices of those who adhered to the older forms of religion'; and, again, that Edward's first Book 'was never meant to be final, and that the Council, with the Protector at their head, went as far as they dared at the time, leaving future changes to take their chance as occasions for making them might arise.' Now, when we consider that the principal movers and the principal agents were the same throughout, we can hardly doubt that the latter is the real account of the ​matter. It is probably true that the Duke of Somerset was, to some extent at least, sincere in his reforms, and that his successor was not so; but Northumberland had little choice, if he meant to prosecute his ambitious schemes, but to throw himself upon the support of the Protestant party, and the Protestant party was running constantly into greater extremes: added to which a man who is not really himself by conviction a member of the party with which he acts, or which he aspires to lead, is certain to ally himself with its extreme wing. Thus the substitution of Northumberland for Somerset rather urged on than retarded the changes made. The moving powers among those actually engaged in the work were in both cases Cranmer and Ridley. Cranmer was a man always, in a greater or less degree, under the influence of those about him; and we know that under that of Ridley, and of the foreign Protestants, his opinions progressed rapidly during the later years of his life, in the direction of more and more extreme Protestantism. When, upon the occasion of his second trial at Oxford, Dr. Martin said to him, 'Then from a Lutheran you became a Zwinglian, and for the same heresy you did help to burn Lambert the Sacramentary,' &c., he did not deny it, but merely answered, 'I grant that I did then believe otherwise than I do now, and so I did until my lord of London (Ridley) did confer with me,' &c. ​So that there can be little room for doubt that to the extent just indicated Mr. Pocock is probably right. At the same time, it must be observed that in the charges of insincerity which he is constantly hurling at Cranmer and his abettors, he appears to make no account of the rapid growth and development of views and opinions which always takes place during periods of great and sudden change. At such times, when a man has once chosen his side or his party, his opinions, which have vacillated before, will often progress even to extremes in a very short time, and harden and stiffen in them. No better instance of this kind of development in the time with which we are now dealing can be found than that of Gardiner himself. When Gardiner exchanged the service of Wolsey for that of his master, and for some years after, he appeared to be as facile a tool in the hands of Henry VIII. as any other of his ministers or courtiers. When he was ambassador to the Pope, it is probable that what he saw in Rome had the same effect on his mind as it had on those of others, and he was ready to go all lengths with the King. After his return, his early impressions became gradually less intense, the evil side of the Reformation presented itself with more and more insistance to his mind, and he became gradually more and more conservative in his tone. Nevertheless, so long as Henry lived, Gardiner supported and defended all or most of his ecclesiastical measures, and remained in the main subservient to his will. On Edward's accession, he first openly attempted to stem the tide of change, assuming—probably for the purpose of gaining time—the indefensible position, that he had been willing to yield to the supremacy of the late King, and would be equally willing to do so to the new one, but protesting against the exercise of that supremacy by the ​council of regency during the minority; and finally we shall see him, in the following reign, throwing himself heartily into the reaction, flinging reform to the winds, and taking the lead in the submission to that very papal supremacy, which he had aided and abetted Henry in subverting and trampling on.
It is, however, by no means necessary to believe, with the modern partisan historians, that the leaders, either on the one side or on the other, were the thorough-paced knaves and scoundrels which these writers represent them. When a great cause is in dispute among men, it is seldom or never true that all the right is on one side and all the wrong on the other, and still less that all the good men are on one side and all the bad men on the other. In the tangled web of human affairs, no man but a complete fanatic, or an entirely selfish and unscrupulous person, can ever act from a single motive, and the man who professes to do so is mostly one so ignorant of his own nature, and so blind to his own faults, that he entirely overlooks the real springs of his actions. If we could suppose a person quite free from selfishness, prejudice, and all other human errors and weaknesses, even such a man could hardly act in a complicated case from a single motive, and, if he did, would probably produce an effect totally different from that at which he aimed, because the very faults from which he was himself free, were still present both in those with whom and those against whom he was acting-. In practice, however, every man enters on his career biassed in one direction or another by the influences of birth, family, friendship), education, interest, association, sentiment, or inclined to take one side rather than another by the mere intellectual constitution of his mind; and even these several motives act mostly not ​alone but in combinations of the most various description—one or more in one direction being modified or overcome by the combined influence of others acting against them. Moreover, when a man has once chosen his party and taken his side, his convictions, as we see constantly in the example of a modern party politician, are very apt to deepen and harden with the effect of time and exercise. He becomes surrounded by a partisan atmosphere. He reads the publications of his own party, and listens to their conversation and their speeches; and when he hears a speech on the other side, he looks upon it as the mere one-sided harangue of a professional advocate, and fixes his own attention mainly on what there is to be said against it. Thus, after a time, he begins to act as if he believed, and sometimes even really to believe also, that his own party has an absolute monopoly of truth and right, and at last, if, as in the case before us, the contention concerns religion, that his own party are the servants of God, and their adversaries, therefore, the ministers of Satan. That party organisation tends to foster knavery may be admitted without qualification; but it does not necessarily follow that every party leader is therefore a conscious and deliberate knave.
The remaining principal transactions of the year 1549 are almost all of them connected directly not only with the change of religion, but also with the relations of Church and State. Thus the rebellions in Yorkshire and Devonshire were in some measure due to the unpopularity of the religious changes, though that in Norfolk appears to have been more of what we should call a socialistic character. But in all three cases alike they were considered as so many offences against the State, and were met and put down as such; and although, no ​doubt, the religious changes had something to do with these revolts, it is probable that the general misgovernment of the time, the shameless greediness of the courtiers, the financial distress, and the depreciation of the coinage had at least as much, probably a good deal more. But the contentions about the Princess Mary's mass, the execution of Joan Bocher, and the deprivation of Bonner, were all of them directly ecclesiastical transactions.
The close of this year, however, was distinguished by an event of a peculiar and very significant character. In the King's council, no less than in the nation at large, it had become recognised that Somerset's administration was a failure. Abroad and at home it had been equally unsuccessful, and the knot of unscrupulous new nobles who had at first accepted him as their leader, finding that he was unequal to the post, at last compelled him to resign it. Somerset, in fact, had ruled as chief of a faction of rapacious upstarts, who had cared throughout more for their own gain than for the good of the country. They had absorbed the Church lands, and enclosed the commons, and raised the rents, and ruined the tenants. When the revolts took place, they were thoroughly alarmed; but, being many of them men of great energy and courage, they took what means lay ready to their hands, used their own resources freely, and risked their own lives, and thus at last put down the revolts. Thus it was that the same faction remained at the head of affairs; but Somerset fell, and Warwick (better known as the Duke of Northumberland), the most successful of the leaders against the. rebels, became his successor, and thus it was also that Warwick, though any religion which he had appears to have been of the older sort, came into power on the implied condition ​that he still maintained the ascendency of the Protestant faction. How completely the general condition of affairs was, in these respects, unchanged, is shown by the two ecclesiastical Acts of the session which commenced in November—one (3 and 4 Edw. VI. c. 10) for the abolition of images, and ancient service books, and the other (3 and 4 Edw. VI. c. 11) a renewal of the old Act of Henry VIII., for the appointment by the King of two-and-thirty persons to revise the ecclesiastical laws—and also by the fact that Bonner's and Gardiner's petitions for a rehearing of their cause were either unnoticed or rejected.
Almost with the beginning of the year 1550 appeared the first form for the ordination of bishops, priests, and deacons. This had been arranged for by an Act passed in the session just referred to.
It was drawn up by the same committee of twelve—six bishops and six other divines—as had composed the first liturgy, and it is remarkable, as a sign of the times, that Heath, Bishop of Worcester (afterwards Chancellor and Archbishop of York under Mary), who was one of them, was sent to the Fleet for declining to agree with his colleagues in accepting it. The committee was appointed by council, and the use of the form which they should draw up was provided for, as we have seen, in advance by Act of Parliament; but whether the form itself was ever accepted by, or even submitted to, Convocation does not appear to be equally clear. In the early part of this year, also, the bishopric of Westminster, first instituted by Henry VIII., was dissolved, and Ridley was translated from Rochester to London, to fill the place of the deprived Bonner. The year was, ​in fact, full of religious disputes and controversies. In the course of it occurred the famous quarrel about vestments, consequent on the promotion of Hooper to a bishopric, in which Cranmer's foreign protégés, Bucer and Peter Martyr, appear to have shown a degree of moderation and good sense which contrast favourably with the hair-splitting fanaticism of Hooper himself and many other divines.
In this year also occurred the authoritative establishment by the King of John a Lasco's congregation of Germans (Netherlanders?) and others in London, the first legalisation of any body of Nonconformists in England. Of these curious and utterly anomalous bodies we shall have occasion to hear more in the reign of Elizabeth. Following upon this, in the autumn, appeared Bishop Ridley's injunctions for the removal of altars in his diocese, prohibiting also certain motions and ceremonies used in the time of the Holy Communion as 'counterfeiting the popish mass,' which appear to have been further enforced by the Privy Council.
The transactions of the year 1551 showed plainly how little improvement was to result from the substitution of Warwick for Somerset as the leader of the gang of adventurers who misgoverned in the name of the King. Gardiner, Heath, and Day were deprived of their sees, on the ground of their unwillingness to carry out the reforms of the council, and to fill the place of the first, ​Ponet was translated from Rochester and Scory put in his place, while the other two sees were left vacant for the time. Every change was attended by the robbery or fraudulent exchange of some of the possessions of the see, most of which were lavished upon the courtiers, and friends of the successful faction; and all this deliberate malversation of what was treated as the property of the State, took place at a time when the King's debts were large and increasing, when the coinage was deliberately debased, and when the nation at large, and the poor in particular, were suffering from scarcity, from the sweating sickness, and from the general rise in rents which followed upon the transference of the Church lands to lay landlords, mostly belonging to the class of 'nouveaux inches.' Before we acquiesce altogether in the currently received view that the risings in this reign were due to the attachment of the people to their old religion, and the unpopularity of the reform, we ought in fairness to remember that the rapacity of the upper classes, the financial errors of the government, and the general distress and misery of the people, were such as have rarely been equalled in England; and there can be little doubt that much of the unpopularity of the religious measures of the time was due to the fact that they appeared to proceed from the same hands as did all its other evils. It is certain that papal supremacy was never popular in England, and it is also certain that in Henry VIII.'s time the priesthood was in no better odour with the people than the Pope, and that Henry carried popular opinion with him in his measures against both; and it seems unlikely that any very great feeling would have been aroused in favour of either, had Edward's counsellors moved on with any degree of mildness or moderation, or had they not shown, in their general government, an ​entire absence of regard for either religion, justice, or even common humanity. It seems to have been assumed by historians that because the religious question appeared on the face of the Articles presented by the rebels in Devonshire, therefore the rebellion arose mainly, if not solely, from dissatisfaction with the King's reforms; but it should not be forgotten that the priests were in general the persons who would draw up such documents, being, in fact, almost the only persons of any education to be found in the country districts, and that the priests were of all men, in the nature of things, those most disaffected to religious reforms. It is therefore probable that, although these had a considerable share in the production of the revolts, they had a far less one than they have been generally credited with.
Of the domestic occurrences of the year 1551, besides the squabbles over the Princess Mary's mass, and the execution of the Duke of Somerset, the principal were the preparation of the Forty-two Articles, and the revision of the Book of Common Prayer, neither of which was, however, published till the following year. The two former, if they affected the Church at all, did so only indirectly, and need not occupy us here; but the others were two of the most important events in the history of the English Church.
There has been a vast amount of controversy as to the exact authorship of the Forty-two Articles, which appears hardly necessary, since Cranmer distinctly took it upon himself, when answering Dr. Martin at his second trial at Oxford. They were the earlier form of the existing Thirty-nine Articles, from which they differ but little. It is of more immediate consequence to us to determine, if possible, the exact authority by ​which they were imposed, but this it is far from easy to do. Strype states distinctly, quoting the Warrant Book as his authority, that they were 'agreed upon by the bishops and other learned men in the synod at London, in the year of our Lord 1552, and many other authorities follow on the same side; and, on the whole, it seems probable that it was the case. With respect to the Prayer Book of 1552 there is greater doubt. The Act of Parliament by which it was authorised was passed early in the year 1552, and is called 5 and 6 Ed. VI. c. 1. It does not seem by any means clear that it ever was formally submitted to Convocation. It was drawn up by a committee of bishops and other divines appointed by the King—i.e. by the Council—but Cranmer himself was its principal author.
The comparison of the second Book of Edward VI. with the first, as well as the consideration of the Articles and of all the facts that have come to light concerning their history, seems to point to the theory of Mr. Pocock—at least, with a slight modification—as that which best accords with them. For while the doctrine has visibly progressed in a direction towards a Swiss rather than a German form of Protestantism, the persons responsible for the authorship of the two books are mainly the same; and as the distance of time is very short, it affords an excuse for suspecting that they may have intended to proceed to still greater extremes. At the same time, as already noticed, the opinions of Cranmer, and probably also of many of his coadjutors, ​were changing rapidly, and the two books may therefore represent their sincere convictions at the time of publication. In any case, the differences are well worthy of notice, especially in their relation to the course taken on the resumption of the work of reformation in Elizabeth's reign.
Two other compilations of some importance call for notice in this place, viz. the book of Homilies and the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, though the latter never acquired a legal sanction.
The Homilies appear to have been begun before the death of Henry VIII. Cranmer was what we should now call the responsible editor, but the authors were various, and were men of the most diverse position and character. Thus those on salvation and faith and good works are attributed to Cranmer himself; that against brawling to Latimer; that against adultery to Becon; while that on charity has been assigned, of all men in the world, to Bishop Bonner. The Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, was intended to be the final outcome of the often repeated Acts of Henry and Edward, whereby the canon law was to be revised, codified, and re-enacted. This also was due to Cranmer, assisted by a committee of divines and lawyers; but its confirmation was prevented by the death of Edward, and it has never obtained any legal authority.
Edward's reign was now at an end. It needs not here to repeat the often-told tale of how the poor young king faded away, as his uncle and his half-brother had done before him; of how Northumberland gradually increased his power and influence, drew most of the Council, willingly or otherwise, into his conspiracy, and, working on Edward's fanaticism, at last persuaded him to attempt to set aside his father's will, to deprive ​his half-sisters of their inheritance, and to endeavour to set up Lady Jane Dudley as his successor on the throne. All this may be read elsewhere in greater or less detail. The one point in it which interests us here is the conduct of Cranmer. Cranmer had floated on the full tide of prosperity during Edward's reign. On the whole, his conduct had been good. He may have been somewhat inclined to harshness in his treatment of Gardiner and Bonner, but his chastisements had been but with whips as compared with the scorpions which they themselves dealt out to their opponents both before and after. But at the last moment a real trial came upon him, and then he showed, as he did all his life, a want of that element of hardness, that backbone as it is sometimes called, which is an indispensable constituent in a really great man in troublous times. Northumberland, as we have seen, had all but completed his scheme by gaining over the young King himself, as well as the most important members of his Council. The King himself, in his zeal for what he called 'the religion,' became impatient for the completion of the arrangement which he had made for its maintenance. He was manifestly dying, and after having by his own personal urgency almost compelled the' judges, in spite of their remonstrances, to draw up the letters patent, he turned to the Archbishop, whose name was still wanting, and expressed his hope that he alone would not 'be more repugnant to his will than all the rest of the Council.'
Cranmer's case was a hard one, that is undeniable. Edward was his sovereign, and that in an age when to be a king was to be a demigod: he was also as dear to him as his own son. He had answered for him at the font in his infancy, and had been his father's favoured ​counsellor in his childhood, and his own guardian and adviser in his youth; and now Edward lay a-dying, and this was his last request to him, and was made in the interest of that very form of religion which Cranmer himself had done more than any living man to establish. It was a case in which even a strong man might have yielded, and Cranmer was not a strong man: in which a hard man might have been softened, and Cranmer was not a hard man. He did wrong, no doubt, but surely not without excuse or from base motives.
It is argued by some that Cranmer's reluctance was a mere pretence—that as he, of all men, had most to lose by the accession of Mary, so he went heartily with the Duke of Northumberland, and with the extreme section of the Protestants, who were his only real adherents. But it must be remembered that he was on the worst of terms with Northumberland himself, who, as he said in his letter to Mary afterwards, had sought his destruction; that if he meant to join him from the beginning, he had no reason to spoil the act by hesitation and pretended unwillingness; that he had been a lawyer and a statesman before he became a reformer, and therefore, like many other statesmen of the time, had probably no great confidence in the hasty and ill-contrived scheme of Northumberland; and must at least have known that, unless it succeeded, to join it was to throw away his last chance of safety, whereas to take active measures against it would have been the most obvious means of averting Mary's anger from himself. It was simply another, and this time a fatal instance of that inherent weakness of character, which had made Cranmer so often unable to withstand his sovereign, even when the choice lay between his sovereign and his own conscience, his better judgment, and his peace of mind.
​If now, in conclusion, we come to sum up the difference in the position of the Church at the end of this reign from what it was at the beginning, we shall find it greater in some respects, less in others, than seems to be generally believed. The reign of Edward VI. seems to be generally looked upon as the time when the great revolution took place in the Church of England—as pre-eminently the era of the Reformation; but if we examine the statute book we find no Acts in this reign which affect the fundamental relations of Church and State in any way at all comparable to the Act of Supremacy and the Act for the Submission of the Clergy in the previous reign. There are several Acts already noticed above, such as the two Acts of Uniformity and others, of great importance to the Church; but they are all of a quite different class from the great Acts just mentioned, and, in fact, grew out of them. They are Acts dealing with the constitution and management of the Church, and are the legitimate and natural results of that transfer of the government of the Church from the Pope and the clergy to the sovereign, which those two great Acts had effected. In fact, the Parliament of Edward VI. was far more remarkable for what it refused to do than for what it did. In 1552 it (and in this case 'it' means the House of Commons) rejected a Heresy Bill, it rejected the attainder of Bishop Tunstall, and it completely remodelled a Treason Bill. These were all Northumberland's measures, and he consequently dissolved the Parliament (April 15). But early in the following year he was compelled to summon another, and this, though carefully and unscrupulously packed, refused to pass a bill against ecclesiastical impropriation, and another which would have renewed the system of monopolies abolished in the twelfth year of Henry VII. ​These proceedings show plainly the breakdown of Cromwell's system of absolutism. We have here come a very long way from the Parliament of Henry VIII., ready in almost every case to register the 'King's will,' and give the sanction of law to his every caprice. It is in the executive rather than in the legislative acts of the reign that we find the true justification of its character as a revolutionary era. Henry VIII., as we have seen, while he had completely revolutionised the relation of Church and State, had made but little change in the condition of the churches or in the character of the ritual. He had abolished some images, which had already become scandalous, and had done away with the shrines of a few saints, whose wealth had almost become a byword, and the pilgrimages to which had already given rise to notorious abuses; but in the main he had left the churches and their services very much as they were. The altars stood as of old, the priests wore their gorgeous vestments and offered their masses as before, the choirs chanted, the organs rolled, the incense arose in clouds above the bowed heads of the worshippers, exactly as old men remembered it in their youth, and as they supposed their fathers had seen it before them. The transition from all this to the second Prayer Book of Edward VI., with the altar pulled down and replaced by a plain table in the middle of the church—an o3sterboard, as the men of the old faith called it in derision—with all the images and shrines removed, the priest changed into a minister in a simple white surplice—sometimes without even that, and mostly murmuring at being compelled to wear it—was as great as that which we should see if we walked out of St. Paul's into the nearest Primitive Methodist meeting-house—nay, it was even greater. The doctrinal changes, though far greater ​in fact, were not greater in principle; for, although the changes from the doctrines hitherto held by the whole Western Church were more thorough and more intimate under Edward than under his father; though the standard of the Forty-two Articles was very different from that of the Six or even of the Ten; yet the severance from Rome had been as complete under Henry as it ever became afterwards, and the severance from Rome was in itself a revolution in doctrine. But where doctrine appeals to one man, ritual affects a thousand; and though the masses may now and then take up a cry for or against a particular doctrine, they have mostly been awakened to its existence by a change in the outward ritual which expresses it. Thus, though Henry's changes had been, as regards doctrine, not inconsiderable, and, as regards polity and the general relation of the Church to the State, incomparably greater than those inaugurated under Edward, they had given far less offence, and stirred up infinitely less enmity, because they had in the main let alone those external observances by which only the mass of mankind are sensibly affected. Even had Henry's life been prolonged, it is difficult to conceive that his system could have been maintained for many years in the then existing condition of Europe. The civilised world was still in all the ferment into which the revival of learning and the invention of printing had plunged it. Protestantism had sprung up into a formidable power, and the air was full of it: it followed the new learning and the newly awakened spirit of inquiry into every country of Europe, and under such circumstances it was impossible to separate a single country from the old unity of the Western Church without giving Protestantism a vast advantage in it. If any existing consideration could ​justify the breach of the unity, and the consequent revolt against the unique authority of the one universal Church, much more could similar considerations justify an assault upon some of those practical abuses which the best and noblest of her sons could not deny to exist within her, and which they had endured only because her own authority alone stood high enough to initiate a reform. The breach once made was as the let ting-out of water, and Henry it was who made it; and though his authority and determination proved sufficient to limit it for the moment, yet even his powers of repression would, in all likelihood, have failed had they been tried much longer,
* ↑ Froude, vol. iv. pp. 510-23.
* ↑ Green, Hist. vol. ii. pp. 220-4 and Froude, Hist. vol. v. ch. i.
* ↑ Green, vol. ii. p. 217 et seq.
* ↑ Feb. 21, 1543. Stubbs, Appendix iv. pp. 131 2.
* ↑ Eccl. Courts Com. Rep. Hist. App. v. pp. 142-3 (Dr. Stubbs).
* ↑ Burnet, vol. i. p. 423 (263).
* ↑ Burnet, vol. ii. p. 94 (41).
* ↑ Burnet, vol. ii. p. 103 (47); also Lathbury, Hist. of Convocation, pp. 134-5.
* ↑ Lathbury, op. cit. p. 135.
* ↑ The Principles of the Reformation Shown to he in Contradiction to the Book of Common Prayer, by Nicholas Pocock, M.A. (B. M. Pickering, 1875), pp. 12 and 19. See also Appendix, Note IV.
* ↑ Edward himself had inherited no small portion of his father's determination and self-assertion, and although it seems absurd to attribute any considerable influence to a mere boy, as he was, yet it is to be remembered that he was an absolute monarch in the making, that his intelligence was very precocious, that he was fanatically Protestant as far as he was able to be anything, and that he was surrounded by influences which made him even more so. His nearest relative, Somerset, was the head of the Protestant party, and his domestic tutors and governors, Aylmer and Cheke, belonged to the same faction.
* ↑ Foxe (Edit. 1641), vol. iii. p. 656.
* ↑ Strype, Mem. II. i. 290.
* ↑ Burnet, ii. 251.
* ↑ At least, it is not mentioned either by Strype, Burnet, or Lathbury.
* ↑ Strype, II. i. 350.
* ↑ See the King's letters patent in Burnet, vol. v. p. 305, where an especial command is addressed to all sorts of authorities, archbishops and bishops, among others, that this congregation is to be permitted to use and enjoy its own rites and ceremonies and ecclesiastical discipline, 'non obstante quod non couveniant cum ritibus et ceremoniis in regno nostro usitatis.'
* ↑ Burnet, vol. v. p. 309, and Strype, Mem. II. i. 355.
* ↑ Foxe, vol. iii. p. 657.
* ↑ E.g. Lathbury, quoting Wilkins and Heylin, Bishop Harold Browne, who cites the authority of Cardwell, &c. On the other hand Canon Dixon, Hist. of the Church of England, vol. iii. pp. 513-14, perhaps turns the balance once more in the opposite direction. The practice, however, of the times tended so greatly to the exaltation of the royal supremacy, that the authority of Convocation was gradually becoming of little account.